The Balliols

By

ALEC WAUGH

“To build a sanctuary you must destroy a sanctuary”

Contents

BOOK I

THE BALLIOLS

BOOK II

LUCY

BOOK III

RUTH

BOOK IV

HUGH

BOOK V

FRANCIS AND HUGH

EPILOGUE

HELEN

Book I

The Balliols

The Balliols

I

I had not meant this to be a novel.

A few weeks ago I became thirty-five, and though it is absurd, patently, to say on any one morning “I have now lived half my life,” it is impossible not to regard one’s thirty-fifth birthday as a landmark; as an excuse for stocktaking; for looking back and looking forward; for comparing the world as one found it with the world as it has become.

On the surface it is a very different world. At the beginning of the century not only were there no aeroplanes in the sky but there were no motor-cars upon the streets. There were no tubes. Londoners travelled smokily by the underground or slowly in horse-drawn buses. Rooms were more often lit by lamps than gas jets. The telephone, except in offices, was an unusual luxury. The gramophone was a nursery nuisance. The radio-set had not been prophesied, even in the scientific romances of Mr. H. G. Wells.

The immaterial differences are even greater.

Divorce carried a social stigma. Bridegrooms demanded inexperience. Women could not plead in court nor sit in Parliament. Ireland was under British rule. France was the only European republic. Communism was the creed of a few unwashed malcontents and an abstract subject of dispute among intellectuals in Chelsea. Catholicism was the hereditary handicap with which the worldly ambitions of certain families were burdened. Income tax was at a shilling.

Mrs. C. S. Peel in that classic of social history, “A Wonderful Hundred Years,” has recorded the windings of the stream of change across the ample landscape of nineteenth-century England. To-day that stream has become a torrent. The war telescoped events: achieving in five years changes for which a normal process of effect and cause would have required fifty; so that we who have lived through that period are only conscious of the speed and distance we have travelled at some such arbitrarily selected date as an uncle’s death, a nephew’s birth, a coming-of-age dance, a sister’s wedding; when we reverse the panorama and, looking back to 1900, exclaim, “At this rate where on earth shall we find ourselves in 1960?”

It was in such a mood, pausing at the half-way house of thirty-five, that I decided to draw up a survey of the period—not in the manner of a list (1906, the first taxi. 1910, Bleriot flies the Channel. 1913, the Hobble Skirt. 1918, Votes for Women. Not that. Other people have done that)—but a record of the way in which, in the midst of external change, men and women lived their ordinary lives; of how they thought, dreamed, acted, while history was happening about them.

That is the book that I had planned to write, that I began to write: the kind of book which is catalogued in public libraries under the amiably misleading label of “Belles-Lettres.” But the storyteller is interested not in groups, but individuals. His instinct is to avoid generalizations, to take an instance that seems typical, to say of it, “That is how this one man, this one woman lived at such a time. Study their lives and you can guess at what the world was like.”

But as I began my search for those typical, concrete examples, I found myself more and more turning to one family, of whose fortunes I have been occasionally the sharer and consistently the spectator. So that when I wanted to write of the family businesses that in 1910, seemed unassailable but are now struggling to declare dividends, it was of Edward Balliol’s directorate of Peel & Hardy’s that I thought first; when I wanted to write of the suffrage movement; of the pre-war débutante now a matron; of the unemployed ex-officer; of the young men, too young to serve in the war, who were brought up in the shadow of the war, who are as much a part of the war generation as their brothers; of the post-war girl, rudderless, on the tide of freedom; it was of Lucy, Ruth, Hugh, Francis and Helen Balliol that I first thought. So typical indeed is the Balliol family of upper middle-class life in London during the last thirty years that I had not written many pages of my book before I knew that I was on the wrong track, that if I wanted to tell the story of the last thirty years in terms of individuals, I had better tear up what I had written, start again, and tell the story of the Balliols.

II

The Balliols entered my world in the spring of 1907; when my father decided to leave the West London street where I was born, and build a house on the northern heights of Hampstead, on the edge of the new Heath extension.

At that time such a move was an adventure. For centuries the fields had run green to Hendon. Against the red-brick, stucco-crested tide of expanding London the high wind-swept hill of Hampstead had stood like a breakwater, protecting with its gorse and heather the narrow valley between itself and Highgate, diverting the streams of asphalt towards St. John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage, so that late into Edwardian days the Brent moved placidly between flower-fringed banks, the gibbet elm brooded over the deep-cut lane that Pitt had watched beside in his last dark days and a sign-post beside a pond marked the junction of the old Finchley Bridle Path with the Great North Road down which Dick Turpin had cantered to meet death: North End called itself a village.

So slowly indeed had the encircling sea trickled northwards towards Child’s Hill, swelling eastwards up the hill to Frognal, that the estate agent who persuaded my father into the purchase of a half-acre field below the Bull and Bush was able to convince him that the North End Road would remain bounded by fields in perpetuity. Out of the hill a few hundred yards below us would emerge during that summer the extension of the Hampstead Tube. Who would want to build a house whose foundations every few minutes would quiver to the roar of trains?

It sounded a reasonable contention. And it was with a feeling of some outrage that we watched during the autumn and the spring a mushroom growth of two-storied villas scamper to the hill’s very foot; to be welcomed there by such an efflorescence of shops that the tube officials decided to run every other train straight through to Golders Green instead of, as had been their first intention, stopping three in every four at Hampstead.

It was with considerable irritation that my father watched the village atmosphere of North End engulfed by this suburban tide; but it was with the most reverential awe that I, a boy of nine, watched the slow, majestic growth across the road, of a house fully twice the size of ours. From the morning that the first sod of the first trench was dug I watched with an avid curiosity. I had paced out the foundations of our own house: I had listened to my parents’ discussions of measurements and heights. I knew that the extra yard of length that looks so negligible when a house lies, marked out by trenches in an open field, makes an immeasurable difference when that space is enclosed by walls. From the first pacing-out of the intruder I returned home, hot-cheeked with excitement.

“It’s going to be huge,” I said. “There’s a room running the whole length. It’s thirty-five feet long and twenty wide. Then across the passage there’s another, only it’s smaller: twenty feet long; and beyond that it’s built out a lot. Perhaps the kitchen. The hall’s as big as our dining-room. Isn’t it funny, though there aren’t going to be any bay windows; just flat. I do wonder who’s going to live there. I wonder what the garden’ll be like. It might be big enough for cricket. I wonder if they’re nice.”

That curiosity persisted.

Just once it happens to almost everyone to know another family or group of persons so well that one sees their story as a consecutive piece of narrative. One has talked of them, one has heard them discussed so often that one forgets when or where one learnt this or that particular incident; how this or that gap in one’s knowledge was filled in; in the same way that one cannot tell how a jigsaw puzzle was put together. One sees it at the end complete. One remembers certain motifs and passages that were difficult. In consequence the narrator of such a story is not forced to protrude himself except where he shared the action. He is absolved from the responsibility that ordinarily rests upon a narrator telling his story in the first person, of explaining how he knew what happened on occasions when he was not present; or what certain characters felt at certain crises. To explain such things in such a story would be as unnecessary and as tiresome as to footnote in a history book the authority for such statements as Magna Charta, 1215.

Edward Balliol, when I met him first, was on the brink of forty. I thought of him, that is to say, as an old man. He seems no older now. But I cannot imagine that in 1907 he can have appeared even to his contemporaries and seniors as anything but advancedly middle-aged. It is not that he was grey-haired or bald or fat. On the contrary, his figure was slim and tall and straight; while his hair was of that yellow flaxen lightness that conceals the white streaking round the ears. It was his manner, not his appearance, that was elderly. He had a slow, precise, slightly mannered way of speaking more fitted to a highly-placed official in the treasury than to a wine merchant. He had constant resort to inverted commas; to such explanatory parentheses as, in the description of an umbrella, “that article which the contemporary slang of my youth misnamed a ‘gamp’.” He also brought to each subject under discussion an equal measure of concern, suggesting that he was not personally involved. You could not imagine him being excited. He had none of the boyishness that many men retain to their last day. At the same time, because he was interested in nearly everything, he was an interesting companion. The feeling he always gave that in the last analysis he did not care two-pence either way prevented him from ever making a close friendship. But his capacity to be interested ensured for him a large and affectionate acquaintance. To a schoolboy such as myself he had the great appeal of being able to discuss my interests without patronizing them. He definitely did want to know what I had been doing.

Jane Balliol on the other hand does not even now seem an old woman. Though she walks with a stoop, slowly, though her hair is white, there is still, in her slight stammer, in her vagueness, in the occasional look of bewilderment that comes into her grey-blue eyes, not girlishness—that would be tiresome—but a capacity to be surprised; a suggestion that she has not yet completely focused a world that is new and strange to her. Married at seventeen, she stepped straight from the schoolroom into the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. She had no girlhood. It is possibly this suggestion of a search for something lost long ago that keeps her young.

Not even when I was a child did I think of her as old. I did not realize then, as I do now, that she was beautiful.

Occasionally there is a potential, a dramatic look in a person’s face; so that you feel as you discuss with him some matter of impersonal interest that he is not there at all, that his real life is somewhere else, yet at the same time he seems more alive than the people whose entire attention is fixed on the matter you discuss. “Something’s happening to that man,” you think. Occasionally it is like that. But very much more often you get no inkling that the man with whom you play a round of golf or argue about international tariffs in your club over a glass of sherry is the victim of an emotional typhoon. When later he gives you a hint of the kind of experience through which at that time he was passing, you recall with surprise the calm he then displayed. He had given no suggestion that that round of golf, that glass of sherry, was the half-hour of calm at the typhoon’s core. During the summer of 1907 I had no idea that the impressive couple who came evening after evening to watch the walis of their new home rise within the scaffolding were passing through a crisis.

For that matter nothing could have surprised them more than the warning that such a crisis was imminent on that first April afternoon when they walked up the hill from Hendon towards the first pile of cement and mortar, the first rough trench, the first poles of scaffolding that had scared the hill’s green flank.

It was a warm day with the sky blue and the sun only intermittently obscured by clouds. The estate agent’s clerk who stood watching the Balliols’ slow ascent of the steep hill had bicycled three miles from his firm’s office. He was tired and he was hot. A film of dust clotted his boots, under the clipped trousers. Drops of sweat glistened between the pimples on his forehead.

He was a young man, in the early twenties, with pretensions to dandiness. A bowler hat was tilted jauntily upon his head. A carefully greased lock of hair curled beneath its brim. He wore a high “choker” collar and a gilt pin set sideways in a stiff silk tie. He had a perky, not unlikeable confidence. He was pleased with himself. He had begun where his parents had left off. He represented progress. Just as the stack of bricks in the roadway represented progress. He was proud of both.

He tilted his hat backwards and patted at his forehead with a bandana handkerchief; his thoughts busied upon the Balliols.

It was after four. They were going to have tea in Golders Hill, he shouldn’t wonder; seated on the terrace looking out over the lawn. New bread, fresh butter, water cress, meringues. As a kid he had watched people, seated up there. How he had envied them; how he had wondered when the day would come for him to join them! It hadn’t, yet. But it would do. There would come a time when he’d be able to afford things like that. A time when he’d be like this couple here; in a position to buy a house.

He wondered if they were considering such a purchase. Their saunter had dwindled into a dawdle. They had stopped and were looking at the pile of bricks and mortar, the scaffolding, the barrels, the high-heaped clay.

They looked prosperous. The man’s clothes made an enviably “band-box” effect. He carried himself with the assured manner of those who have to work but not to fight for livelihood. His manner fitted comfortably, like his clothes.

The woman was of the kind that may have had to consider pounds but never shillings. He placed her at thirty-two. But she might be more. You could not tell with women of that kind; who could afford nice things, who had not to depend upon their youth to look attractive. She was slim and graceful, her movements supple. Her colouring was fresh, but that might be because she could afford to keep it so. She could afford creams and special kinds of soap. There were women in society who actually made up their faces, he’d been told; put powder on, and rouge, blacked their eyelashes. He hadn’t believed it. Decent women wouldn’t, surely. Certainly not women of this kind. All the same, as he had said to Alf Turner, “There can’t be smoke without fire, if you get me.” Those women did certainly know how to make themselves look young.

Yes: they were the kind of people who might want a house out here.

He moved across to them.

“It’s worth looking at,” he said. “The first house to go up on this hill. It won’t be the last. You wait. All this business of bricks and mortar doesn’t mean just a few more houses, but a different sort of house. This isn’t going to be a row of houses; not just another London street. It’s going to be like a village. Garden Suburbs their name for it. Half town, half country, if you get me. Every family with a garden of their own that they can sit about in; arranging it the way they like; crazy pavement and all that. Not those miserable little strips you see up West, with a square in the centre that anyone can use. Every one on their own here; private, if you get me. Ten years ago it wouldn’t ‘ave been possible. Land in London cost too much. People had to live within three miles of their work. Not now, though, thanks to these tube railways. By June they’re going to have one out to here. You wait and see the difference it’ll make. A portent, that’s what it is, a portent.”

He repeated the word as though to satisfy himself that he was using correctly a word that he had very recently added to his vocabulary. He then proceeded to develop his thesis. People were not going to go on living in hot, narrow, noisy streets when they could get away into clean and quiet air. Town might be all very well for people who wanted to be in the very centre of things and could afford houses in the country that they could go down to for week-ends. It might be all right for them. But for the others, who couldn’t afford week-end cottages and country houses, there was only one sane alternative.

“Just think of the difference for a man to have something to look forward to during the day, something to come back to at the end of it. Greenhouse and a potting-shed. A lawn to mow, good exercise; something to show for it, if you get me. Flowers coming up; being able to say ‘These parsnips are from our garden’; pointing to a bowl of flowers, ‘Yes, our roses haven’t done so badly this year’; having a place where children can tumble about in old clothes. That’s a life worth living.”

He spoke breathlessly, with an enthusiasm that was in part vicarious—his salesman’s capacity to reproduce the pictures and phraseology of a prospector—but was in large part personal, lit by his own memories of childhood; the drab gentility of the ‘nineties; the prim starched Sundays; the long winter evenings, with father coming back at seven; the long winter week-ends with father blocking out the fire; the afternoon walks through monotonous hard streets; the drear holidays when he had longed for the next term to start. The occasional treats to which days had been counted on a calendar, which had invariably ended in headaches, exhaustion, frayed nerves, ill-humour. The next generation would be spared all that. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. Whatever the past might have been, the future was rich and full.

“London will be a different place within ten years. A transformation, that’s what it’ll be, a transformation. You wait!”

He made the assertion with a confidence that was aggressive, but untruculent. He paused; the spokesman of the spirit of new things, wondering what effect his harangue had made. He was not really empowered to negotiate at all. He was just a clerk drawing his thirty-bob a week, who had been sent out as any clerk might be, with a message to a foreman. But he wasn’t going to stay a clerk all his life. It was by such an incident as this that people stopped being clerks. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Forced their employers to take notice of them, to recognize them as being out of the rut, worthy of promotion. It was a moment such as this that warranted the cards he had had printed at the cost of a month’s cigarettes and beer.

He drew a small envelope from his pocket, extracted from it a card in the corner of which was written the name and address of the agency for which he worked. With what he took to be a flourish he presented it.

“I don’t know if you’re thinking of buying a property here, but if you ever do, well, it wouldn’t do any harm to be in touch with someone in the know; personal equation, if you get me.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“And if… well, if you cared to let me have your card, I could send you along any prospectus that I thought might interest you.”

Balliol hesitated; then with a smile drew a card case from his waistcoat pocket, and in his turn took a card from it and handed it across. The young man read it: the name, Mr. Edward Balliol, the club in the left-hand corner, the Oxford and Cambridge, the address at the other side, 22 Easton Square. As he had thought, the kind of address his firm wanted on its books.

“And that,” said Balliol, as he and Jane walked on out of earshot, “is the kind of young man for whom I prophesy a quite early and a quite pronounced success. I can picture him in twenty-five years converted into a portly, pompous committee man with a son entered for one of our lesser public schools; a son of whom he will be immensely proud and secretly afraid, whose bills he will settle half a dozen times and who, each time that he accepts a cheque, will contrive to give the impression that he is conferring instead of receiving a favour; who will marry for worldly reasons and whose progeny will arrive in the bankruptcy, by way of the divorce courts. Which is what, my dear, we call progress nowadays.”

Jane made no reply. The long walk had begun to tire her. Her steps were not dragging, her breath was not hurried, her movements had the same smooth rhythm that had attracted the young man’s appreciative eye as she began the heightening climb. It had rather the gliding grace of a liner as it swings into harboured water, its engines faintly purring.

Her husband continued his dissertation. “And it is to compete with such a one that we of the upper middle classes are at this moment training our sons at Marlborough, Cheltenham and Fernhurst. It is like training a terrier to be pitted against a wolf. There is our own Hugh at the end of his second year at Fernhurst. His competitive eye has already sorted out his rivals. He has marked the chief obstacle to his captaincy of the eleven, his most redoubtable opponent in the classroom. He fancies, as far as he has concerned himself with the problem, which is I expect to no large extent, that all through the life for which this education is supposed to train him, he will find the graph of his ambition defined by such simple landmarks. He would be astonished were he to be informed that he will find himself in competition fifteen years from now with someone whose existence at this moment he would not deign to recognize: an alert product of the council schools, attending night-classes at the end of eight hours’ manual labour in a factory.”

As always, Balliol talked as though the subject under discussion, in this case his son’s education, was not a problem personal to himself, but one aspect of the general, social and economic problem of the hour.

He continued on the same blandly impersonal note.

“The trouble about such a competitor is this: Only one in ten thousand out of what our parents would have called the lower orders is born with sufficient ambition and capacity to enter the lists of such a competition. That one out of ten thousand has, in consequence, so many preliminary obstacles to face, that in passing them he acquires a momentum. He has started from so much farther back that he arrives at the starting post at a pace which within a few yards carries him right ahead of his opponents. He has, in fact, a flying start. In my day, when the masses were uneducated, we were spared such redoubtable opposition. I am convinced that Hugh has no conception of how different life is going to be for him. And I am extremely doubtful whether those who have been set in authority over him have recognized it, either.”

Said Jane, “I think it’ll be warm enough to have tea out on the terrace.”

They had reached the brief plateau, before Pitt House, where the hill pauses before starting its final climb to the Spaniards Road. Three youths on bicycles went by abreast. Their machines were not free wheel. They had spread out their feet sideways, so that their pedals could revolve; their caps were pulled tight to their foreheads, back to front, the peaks low upon their shoulders. They screamed excitedly to one another as they reached the top of the steepest hill within a five-mile radius of Piccadilly.

As their machines rushed past, a motor-car with high scarlet bonnet, snorted, rattled, wheezed its way over the crest. It reached the plateau; it checked as though it were pausing to take breath; it groaned; it grunted; there was a grinding screech of tortured metal as the goggled motorist changed gears. Then with an abrupt jerk forward and a series of slight explosions the machine proceeded on its ascent.

Balliol shook his head.

“Dangerous things. They’ve spoilt the road for bicycling. I should not care to take a machine out now. I am very glad that what the press now call the cycling era coincided with my own enjoyment of violent exercise.”

The era had framed their courtship. During their decorous Victorian engagement when it was considered improper for women to ride in hansoms, and evening excursions had demanded chaperons, they had ridden out in parties of four or six; he in a knickerbocker suit and belted jacket; she with a high-necked white blouse and straw hat perched forward on her head; scouring northern lanes through long autumn afternoons; looking down from Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead on to the glitter of London’s roofs and spires; taking their tea in cottage gardens.

As they turned through the park gates he passed his arm under hers.

“It must be over five years since we came out here,” she said.

They had abandoned such excursions very early in their marriage. Their first child, Lucy, had been born within a year, and during Jane’s weeks of indisposition a friend had presented Balliol with a book in which the cycling enthusiast might enter his runs, the distances and times, the average of miles per hour. Within a very short time the fever of figures had bitten Balliol. He was always out to beat his own record. When Jane once again took the road it was to find that the care-free spirit had departed. Her husband no longer cycled for the pleasure of open air and open country; for exercise and the sense of speed; the freedom of being away from bricks and pavements. He cycled with one eye on the clock, the other on the cyclometer. He kept saying, “Now, do you think we could reach Shenley within twenty-three and a half minutes?” He grew resentful of wayside rests at the end of a long pull up a hill. He kept taking out his little book, writing figures, comparing figures. At the end of a day, instead of talking lazily before a fire, he would draw up charts by means of which he would invariably discover that there was some record or other that he had broken, even if it was no more than the speed record for the first twelve minutes after tea.

In such bicycling Jane could take no pleasure. When she found she was again pregnant, fully a year before she had really wanted, she had consoled herself with the thought that anyhow she would not need to bicycle for another year. Perhaps during that time she would have been able to devise an excuse for avoiding their weekend excursions.

She was spared that necessity, however. Before she was again fit the bicycle and the record book had been superseded. From a September holiday at Deal, Balliol returned with the announcement that he had taken up golf. That was not strictly true. Golf had taken him up. He argued that golf combined such pleasures as bicycling, fresh air, open country, pleasant companionship with professional advantages; that a great deal of business could be done “at what I believe the younger members call the nineteenth hole.” But neither was that argument strictly valid. Golf had captured him and the extent of his submission would have been no less complete had the list of his firm’s clients provided him with not a single partner or opponent to excuse the abandonment of an office desk at noon.

On returning from an afternoon of golf he would discuss scores over bogey, stymies and shanked approach shots with a minute elaboration of detail and theory. His handicap remained rooted in the lower teens, but a comparative study of his recent performances always convinced him that he was playing at least two strokes better than he had in the preceding month. And he invariably completed half an hour’s putting practice on the drawing-room carpet with the comforting pronouncement that he would be in single figures within a year.

Golf was the one subject that he did not discuss impersonally.

It was only indeed to the failure of a golfing partner that the present expedition was due. A telegram had arrived shortly before eleven. “Returning lunch. Will go walk country afternoon. Edward.”

Which was very typical of Balliol. It never occurred to him that what he wanted, his family would not too. Jane was convinced that he had refused to install a telephone simply so that he might send such messages.

He described the telephone, which he had only had installed at his office with considerable reluctance, as an extravagance and a nuisance. Actually, from the financial point of view it would have represented a considerable economy in telegrams, of which he rarely sent less than a dozen every week. While the nuisance, as far as he was concerned, would consist in the opening that it would afford his friends to alter the plans that he had made by telegram and letter. If they could have reached him by the telephone they would have rung up to question his decisions; and suggest alternatives. As it was, they shrugged their shoulders, thinking, “It’s a nuisance, but it’s less trouble to do it the way he says.”

In an unobtrusive way Edward Balliol was an extremely selfish man. He got his own way without appearing to force it upon other people, without apparently knowing that he was doing so. Jane was well aware of this trait in him. She smiled at it, knowing it was simple to deal with selfish people who knew their own minds and made up yours for you.

She had made other plans, as it happened, for that afternoon. She was going to have taken Francis, her second and five-year-old son, to sail his boat on the Serpentine. But Francis would be just as happy really with his nurse. And it was a long time since she had done anything alone with Edward. A long time, when it came to that, since she had really talked to him.

That was one of the strange things of marriage. You could see so little of a husband. You were never allowed to be alone. He returned from his office at the day’s end. He told you in brief outline what had happened during the day, whom he had seen, what he had been told; which in Edward meant a précis of the main contents of the evening papers. It would then be time for him to take his bath. Most evenings they would either have friends to dinner, or be going out. From their first guest’s arrival or the servant’s announcing of their names they would not see each other till the final farewells had been exchanged. Husbands and wives were not allowed to sit together; to be near each other; to join in the same conversation. At the end of the evening they had barely enough energy for the exchange of a few tired comments. Next morning there was the hurried rush of a busy man starting for his office.

“One sees less of one’s husband during twenty years of marriage than one does during the twenty weeks of an engagement,” she had once remarked to Stella Balliol.

The retort had been the kind of thing that she was accustomed to expect from her husband’s sister.

“That’s the only reason why marriage lasts. If wives and husbands saw as much of each other as they think they are going to when they get engaged, the divorce courts would be as crowded as the police courts.” Which was what one would expect of Stella. She could be trusted to take the unconventional view on any subject.

All the same, this little trip, the train journey to Hendon, the walk through the fields to Golders Hill, trivial though it might be, was the most intimate afternoon they had had for months.

And here they were now, seated on the terrace; a large tea, of watercress, meringues, strawberry jam, new-cut bread and butter set before them, with the breeze, after the long walk, cool upon her cheeks, the sky a luminous pale blue, the lawns green and dappled in the April sunlight sparkling towards the pond; with children tumbling over each other in the grass, their nurses, in prim blue uniforms, starched linen and white caps, seated on the wooden benches, slowly rocking at their prams with one eye upon their charges, the other upon the blurred print of a novelette, conducting at the same time an animated exchange of confidences, opinions and impressions with colleagues at their side; with tethered dogs, apparently asleep, waiting with cocked ear for the moving signal that would mean freedom and the sandy stretches of the heath.

“It’s just as it used to be,” he said.

She knew what he meant by that; just as it had been eighteen years ago, in their days of courtship, when they had escaped from chaperons. And a little sob rose in her throat, because it was the same and yet not the same; because there was the sunlight and the grass; the blue sky, the nurses, the dogs, the tumbling children; and in her heart the sense of spring and poetry.

There was all that here. But the elegant young man whose Bohemian attire had made him conspicuous but had charmed her, since it seemed right on him, had exchanged that loose elegance of dress for a modish dapperness; because a drawled voice that had said such absurd fond things as “How wise of you to wear eyes that match an April sunlight;” that had indulged in elaborately subtle sophistries over trifles, developing world philosophies from the cut of a waiter’s waistcoat, was no longer self-consciously but unconsciously affected. A pose had become a manner. With the direction of its wit altered, so that he spoke facetiously about what mattered, instead of seriously about what did not matter. The lavish tea that was spread before them was no longer a gesture to placate a waiter. “Let’s order a great deal so that we can sit here a great while. I couldn’t think of food when I am with you,” he used to say. But the high-piled plates were now very sturdily employed in the assuagement of a hearty appetite; while she herself, though her heart was light, stung with the sense of vanished winter and budding life, was no longer the reflection of a young man’s mood; was no longer to that young man as is a garden to the sun; bright and gay and coloured, when the sky is cloudless; lifeless and toneless when its light is hidden. Indeed, she was not thinking of that man, at all, but was wondering about the evening’s dinner party; was thinking of the low bowl of flowers, the clustered primroses and pansies that she would set in the centre of the table; of how the high-tapered candles would be reflected on the polished walnut; of the large bowl of tulips that she had set in the window to catch the eye of the guests as they arrived, so that they would feel, in spite of the dimming light and greying sky above the house tops, that spring had indeed returned. Of that she thought, and in particular of the frock with the long folds of turquoise blue that she would be wearing that night for the first time, that she was still half afraid would look too young for her.

And she felt sad suddenly on this April day because things were the same and yet not the same; since the world had the same look but the eyes and the heart were changed.

“I think I shall put Mr. Rickman on my left,” she said.

III

It was six o’clock when she returned to the large Bayswater house in the oblong rectangle of houses that in residential London is called a Square. She had lived in this house for sixteen years, since within a few months of the birth of her first child, Lucy, she had realized that she was again to become a mother. The face of London had changed greatly during those sixteen years, but no sign of that change had disturbed the formal quiet of the Square from which not only bagpipes, monkey-men and barrel organs, but all symbols of the new age, were rigorously excluded. The basemented, three-storied row of houses with their flight of seven white steps leading to a heavy portico, their flat stucco fronts, bright with sun-blinds and flower boxes, had faced steadily for fifty years the long strip of railinged garden whose branches for a few moments in early May were brightly emerald. A few yards away the crowded thoroughfare of the Edgware Road had reflected hour by hour along its jostled pavements, in its packed shop windows, on its high-flared hoardings, the rapid advance of the twentieth century. But over Easton Square a Victorian calm still brooded.

As her husband pushed open the front door, Jane hesitated on its threshold, as though something had occurred to her; but after a pause that was momentary she passed on in silence.

From the top of the house came the sound of a slammed door, a girl’s voice shouting, “Yes, it’s they,” and the door slammed. There was a clatter of footsteps on stairs, a girl of thirteen, bright-eyed, her cheeks flushed, was flinging herself into Jane’s arms. “Mummie darling, how late you are.”

A moment later a tall girl, thin and unformed at a girl’s awkward age, was self-consciously welcoming her father.

“Mummie,” Ruth was saying. “You are going to let us watch you arrange the flowers? You promised, didn’t you?”

Schoolroom tea was not till half-past six. To watch their mother arrange flowers had been always one of the children’s treats.

“Come along,” she said.

The two girls sat at the table, their elbows rested on it, while Jane filled the long oblong dish with primroses and pansies. As always, Ruth was the most talkative. At thirteen years old she was still a child, with the eager, un-selfconsciousness of a child; with the slim prettiness of a Baumer drawing. She was alert, vivid, like quicksilver. Lucy, in her sixteenth year, on the other hand, was awakened, self-conscious. She was scraggy; her movements were abrupt. She always seemed to be wondering where to put her hands; usually they were fiddling with her collar, or at her belt. She was dark, with a pale skin. There was normally a slightly sullen look upon her face. Until you looked into her eyes you did not realize that she might become a very lovely woman. Then you saw more than that. Her eyes were of a brown that was very near to black. They were large and long-lashed. They were not only beautiful, they were brave. You knew that she was capable of deep feeling, of devotion, of selflessness. You would think that. Then she would look away. You would see only her sullen profile. You would think, “Whatever she may be in two years’ time, I know what she is now: a bad-tempered, not very pretty girl.”

It was Ruth who received notice from the Balliols’ friends. It was she who made the advances, who made friendship easy. Leaning forward across the table, she asked question after question about the evening’s party.

“Tell me all about it. How many will there be? Eight in all, that’s counting yourselves. And who’ll they be? Aunt Stella. She’s always here. I can’t think why you ask her. I know Lucy thinks she’s marvellous. But I think she’s dull. Too serious. And who else? Mr. Rickman. Who’s he? A friend of Daddy’s. He’s old, then. What? No, quite young? About twenty-five? Is he good-looking? You’ve never met him? How funny, asking someone that you’ve never met. Yes, I daresay, even if he is a friend of Daddy’s. And who else? The Shirleys. Oh, but I think she’s irritating. He’s all right. I like him. But she’s so la-di-da; sounds so kind and good, and really isn’t that at all. Mummie, I think it’s going to be an awful party. What’ll you do afterwards? Sit about and talk?”

“Darling, what else could we do?”

“So many things. You could dance, you could go out somewhere. There must be places somewhere in London where people can enjoy themselves.”

“We shall enjoy ourselves, in our way.”

“But, Mummie, in what way? I shall never give that sort of party when I’m grown up.”

Lucy had taken no part in the conversation. She had let her sister babble on. Now that Ruth’s curiosity was in part assuaged, she interrupted.

“Shall I have a chance of seeing Aunt Stella to-night?”

“Darling, I don’t see when.”

“Couldn’t she come up and see me before dinner?”

“There won’t be time. She’ll arrive just before dinner’s served. It would upset things.”

“Then couldn’t she come up afterwards, when Daddy and the men are sitting downstairs in the dining-room?”

“It’s rather difficult, that kind of thing breaks up the conversation. Besides, there’s the coffee.”

“Couldn’t she have the coffee with me? Mother darling, please, couldn’t she? I haven’t seen Aunt Stella for so long.”

“I can’t see why you should want to see her,” Ruth interrupted. “I don’t find her any fun.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re too young. Please, mother, you will try, won’t you?”

“I’ll try. But I can’t promise.”

“You’ll promise to tell her that I asked?”

“I’ll promise. And now you must run along, both of you. I’ve got a great deal to do and I’ve got to say good night to Francis.”

Francis was already tucked up. He was the youngest by many years and had been actually born within the century. Jane had never thought she would have a baby after Ruth. Three were plenty. Francis coming after an interval of seven years touched feelings that she had thought never to know again. As a result he meant more to her than her other children. Yet with him she had the feeling she had with none of her other children that she loved him more than he loved her. He was a reserved child; not sullen as Lucy was, but secretive, as though he were harbouring grievances. Edward just shrugged his shoulders. “If I were the kind of man to let myself be worried, I should be worried about that boy. He’ll be what the advocates of Montessori methods call ‘an interesting case’:” which to a mother was not consoling.

Francis was still awake when she came into the nursery. Curled up in the corner of his bed, he was watching the lamplight from the street below flicker on the ceiling. He turned his head as the door opened, but he did not, as Hugh would have done at his age, jump up on his knees, with his arms stretched wide to fling about her neck. He just lifted himself upon his elbow.

She came across and sat beside him on the bed.

“Did you have a nice day, darling?”

“Yes, I took my boat out.”

“You missed mummy, though, a bit?”

“Of course I did. Nurse isn’t really interested in my boat.”

“Were there lots of other boats there?”

“Lots and lots. And ever so many other boys. And…” he paused, looking down and away from her, “… when shall I go to school, Mummie?”

“Darling, I don’t know. Not just yet.”

“I’d like to go to school.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got no friends. Other boys have friends. I haven’t. They’ve got brothers and sisters of their own age, I haven’t.”

“Well, darling, you’re not six yet, you know.”

“How soon do boys go to school?”

“Not till they are seven, at the earliest.”

“I wish I were seven.”

“You’ll be seven soon enough. I must tuck you up now. Mother’s got to go and dress.”

“He doesn’t really love me,” she thought, “not really.”

On her way down the passage she passed Edward. To a house containing eight bedrooms only two bathrooms were allotted. He looked inappropriately youthful in a silk, claret-coloured dressing-gown.

“Preparing for the last charge of a forlorn hope,” he said.

IV

The reference to a forlorn hope explained the nature of six out of the last nine dinner parties that the Balliols had given. Edward was trying to find a husband for his sister Stella. For a long time she had been a problem. She was rapidly becoming a situation. She was within a few months of thirty, and though Balliol readily agreed that the time had passed when a woman who was not married by twenty-three never would be married, and an unmarried woman was an unwanted parasite, in Stella’s particular case he did feel not only that in marriage lay her one salvation, but that unless she was married shortly she was destined for a regretably dramatic spinster-hood. He had come to this conclusion when she had expressed the opinion that if women really meant to get the vote they had better do something drastic.

“What do you mean by something drastic?”

“You’ll see that soon enough,” had been her answer.

“And that means,” he had told Jane afterwards, “that before we know where we are, she’ll be waving banners in Whitehall.”

From the start Stella had been a problem. At a time when most girls in the country were content to fill the period probationary to marriage with tennis racquets, croquet mallets, water-colours, crochet hooks, pianos and the novels of Marie Corelli, Stella had insisted first on a University education and a degree, then, as the prelude to a career, the independence of a latch-key and a chequebook.

That in itself might have not been too ominous. A number of girls were demanding such rights in the days of Ann Veronica. But whereas the majority of fathers knew that such campaigns and the consequent arguments in favour of careers were merely feminine excuses for cultivating masculine acquaintanceship with greater freedom, old Mr. Balliol had never in Stella’s case been able to console himself with that belief. She had demanded her right to an un-chaperoned life in London, simply so that she might exercise that privilege of which women in a lower walk of life were most anxious to be relieved; the right of earning her own living.

“She’ll get tired of it soon,” Edward Balliol had prophesied; “within four years, she’ll be marrying as other women have married, for a home.”

But four years had passed and six and seven, and Stella had shown no signs of dissatisfaction with her life. On the contrary, she appeared to derive an increasing satisfaction, not only from the work itself—she was now in charge of thirty stenographers in the Morrison Teach-Yourself-By-Post Institute—but from the position that that work gave her. She had attached herself to various phases of the woman’s movement. She sat on committees. She addressed meetings. In private she expressed her opinions not as though she were saying, “I, Stella Balliol, believe this,” but as though she were the spokesman of a group. She said We more often than I. Behind her trim, neat sentences you seemed to hear the steady rhythm of a march.

It was when this interest in the future of women generally began to declare itself in favour of a direct championing of women’s rights, that her brother felt it was high time she married.

“We must find her a husband,” he told Jane.

Jane was dubious.

“Will that be easy?”

On that point Balliol himself had been none too confident. He had tried by arguing with his wife to reassure himself.

“She’s not old.”

“I know.”

“She’s not bad-looking.”

“No.”

“She’s good company.”

“Yes.”

“She’ll have a certain amount of money when our father dies.”

“I know, but all the same.…”

Jane paused. It was difficult to define the exact nature of the obstacle. Clearly though one was aware of it. Stella was amusing, capable, and quite nice-looking. She was honourable and loyal. She would have a reasonable amount of money. She was the kind of woman of whom it would be possible to say, “She’d make the right man an admirable wife.” Yet her brisk manner, her self-confidence, her readiness to meet men on equal ground prevented you from thinking of her in terms of courtship. It was possible to picture her as a wife; but not as a fiancée.

The various unmarried men that Balliol invited from time to time to dinner parties at which she had been present found her conversation easy and entertaining. When the women had left the room they would invariably, before opening a masculine topic, make some such remark as “By Jove, that sister of yours is an interesting girl,” going on to some such generalization as “We’ll have to be pretty careful or girls like that will be taking our jobs away from us. They’ll be ruling offices as well as roosts.”

These professions of admiration were not, however, followed by the desire for any increased acquaintance with their inspirer.

It was when Balliol was practically at the end of his eligible acquaintance—of bachelors that was to say between thirty-five and fifty with worldly prospects or achievement—that Jane had suggested the possibility of a younger man falling in love with Stella.

“You know what they say about the attraction of opposites. There are a great many weak, diffident men who want someone that they can rely upon, who expect their wives to take their mother’s place. Very likely Stella herself wants someone she can look after, instead of someone who’ll look after her; a thing she can do very well for herself.”

It was to this suggestion that Roy Rickman owed his invitation.

“I’ll ask him, but it’s a long forlorn hope,” was Balliol’s comment.

It did not seem even that to him when Stella made her entrance at exactly twenty-nine minutes past seven; alert, animated, informative, taking the centre of the floor with her first remark.

“Have any of you seen the Peace cartoon in Punch?”

Punch had come out that evening and they had all seen it. At the head of a long flight of steps stood a house with its gate opened, headed “Disarmament.” On the steps were figures representing the various nations: Russia, England, Italy, France, Austria, Germany. Each figure armed to the teeth was pointing its neighbour to the door. “After you, please,” the caption ran.

“It’s so typical,” she said. “Punch confirms people in their prejudices. In a cartoon like that they see their own reflection in the glass. They dismiss the matter from their minds. They say ‘Of course disarmament is absurd. No one’s going to take the first step.’ That’s why we never get anywhere.”

An animated argument began at once. Disarmament was a subject on which they all held opinions that they were anxious to express. Stella acted as a kind of chairman. A discussion continued with such zest that the announcement of dinner was not the relieved ending of the mauvais quart d’heure, but the annoying interruption of an interesting talk.

It was all very like Stella, Balliol thought, as he shepherded his guests into the dining-room. The particular kind of impression that she made on men was typified by her opening an argument with the one cartoon in Punch that precluded any kind of personal discussion; no reference to “you and I” was possible: there could be no alternative to a weighing of abstract points of view. In consequence his guests would think of her afterwards not as someone who was something, but as someone who held certain views.

That was the whole trouble about Stella. She wasn’t negative. Far from it, she was a personality, the most definite personality in the room. But she produced an impersonal impression. He looked at her as she took her seat beside young Rickman. Yes, that was what was wrong with her. She was handsome, with her firm, clear-cut features, her clear skin, her bright hazel eyes, her brown hair puffed forward high upon her forehead. Her dress was fashionably cut. There was nothing frumpish about her. At the same time he could not imagine a man wanting to make love to her. He strained his ears to hear what they were saying. As he might have suspected. Campbell Bannerman. Land values. Irish policy.

Two places away from her on the other side Jane Balliol was watching the effect that Stella was making on Roy Rickman. It was not going to be a success. She had been certain of that from the first sight of Rickman. He wasn’t the kind of young man to fall in love with somebody like Stella. He was handsome, broad-shouldered, athletic-looking; his hair was a lightish brown with a hint of red in it. It was longish, swept back and parted at the side. There was the break of a wave in its sleek expanse, that under the light gave it a burnished look. His manner was easy, open, rather confidential. His voice was deep. He was laughing half the time. It was a loud boyish laugh. It was almost a punctuation mark, so frequently did it round off his sentences. When he listened, it was intently, watchfully; with an encouraging smile, as though he were saying, “Yes, yes, how right you are. I’ve never seen it in quite that way before.” He must be good with men, she thought. I can understand that he’s good in business. What was it that Edward said he was? “What they now call a representative and in our fathers’ day would have called a tout.” He gets his friends to buy motor-cars and wine and insure their lives. I wonder if he likes doing that kind of thing. A young man has to take what he can get nowadays. But having to make use of one’s friends in that way. He looks too nice for that. I hope he’s enjoying himself now. It’s a good dinner. I wish Violet wasn’t so slow passing the side dishes. Mrs. Shirley’s practically finished her fish, and the sauce hasn’t reached her yet. I think she might have waited. Ruth’s right about her. She is la-di-da. I hope she and Stella don’t start quarrelling afterwards.

“Yes, Mr. Shirley, I quite agree with you. George Alexander is too well dressed.”

Really, but Mr. Shirley’s very tiresome. I can’t think why we asked them; because he plays golf with Edward; which means that he buys port from Edward. But I don’t see why on that account I should have to be bored by his company and made uncomfortable by his wife’s. I don’t see why men can’t keep their business lives and their home lives separate. They ought to be able to. What else are offices for? They say that business friends get offended when you don’t invite them to your homes. Well, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be offended. If you’re useful to them in business they won’t cut off a nose to spite a face. I think it’s silly.

“Of course, Mr. Shirley, there is this to be said, that if you give people what they want, if you put them in a good temper, that’s to say, you stand more chance of getting what you want out of them.”

Oh, but I’m so bored. There’s the entrée. I do hope Martha hasn’t forgotten the cayenne pepper with the sweetbread. Well, that’s half the meal. Now I can start talking on the other side. I wonder what Mr. Rickman will be like.

She extricated herself from the conversation in the gradual monosyllabic manner that coincides with the removal of the fish plates. There was silence round the table that Edward, observing, broke up with an essay at general conversation, that in its turn subsided into the even flow of duologues, as each man turned towards his left.

Thought Jane, I shall know what he’s like now. I wonder how he’ll start the conversation. It’s always amusing to see what a man says first. Though it’s always the same thing, really. If you know him already it’s, “Have you seen anything of the Jacksons lately?” If you don’t know him, “Have you seen Tree’s new show?” Perhaps he’ll be different.

He was: surprisingly different.

He turned and looked at her, then smiled. It was the kind of smile with which you welcome an old friend in a crowded room; of whose presence you have been for a long time aware, but from whom you have been kept apart. You edge your way towards each other; your eyes meet across a sea of shoulders; you think, ‘in another minute, in two minutes at the outside’; and when you meet at last it is with a feeling both of relief and of excited anticipation. There was all that in the smile with which Roy Rickman turned to her.

One would think that he’s been waiting all the evening for a chance to talk to me. Perhaps he has.

Stella Balliol not only had no use for small talk, but possessed none. She not only did not want to discuss personalities, the theatre, servants, holiday resorts, income tax, except in their larger sense of a social and economic problem, but could not. In consequence, since she liked talking and since talk invariably centred round her, small talk was impossible in her company. Even when she was alone with other women.

Almost before the women had settled round their coffee, before anyone had had a chance of asking anyone whether they had seen anything recently of so-and-so, she set the ball moving with a sound, energetic kick.

“It’s quite clear that Campbell Bannerman doesn’t intend to do anything about giving us the vote. He’s going to prevaricate just as the Conservatives did. It just shows how short-sighted our leaders were to believe that they only had to wait for a Liberal government. They ought to have remembered Gladstone.”

Jane gave a sigh. She might have known what to expect. A suffragist debate. The most that she could hope for was a moderately calm passage. There were four of them in all. On herself she could rely. She never cared enough about the things people argued over to disagree violently with them. The things she did care about were never topics of discussion. Neither was Mrs. Fury likely to become embroiled. She was one of those women whose conversation is in the main interrogatory, who interject an occasional “Yes, I suppose that is so, really,” in the tone of voice that makes it clear that they actually believe the exact opposite, and on their way back tell their husbands that “that Balliol girl talked the most foolish nonsense.” She was less certain of Mrs. Shirley. Ruth’s criticism of her was very apt. She was one of those cool, long-necked women, whom you associate with a riding habit. She dropped her “g’s.” She had a slow, high-pitched voice. Her treatment of her friends was that of the lady of the manor towards the committee of a flower show. With alarm Jane watched Mrs. Shirley deploy her troops for action. Her preliminaries were gentle. She began by asking a number of questions, in the manner of the county lady who is anxious to discover the exact opinion of the committee so that she shall be enabled to say at the end, “Well, now, I think I have heard how you all feel about this matter. What I propose to do is this——”

To anyone unfamiliar with her tactics she would have appeared an ally rather than an opponent.

She began by meeting Stella on her own ground.

“I am quite sure,” she said, “that very few of us realize the slavery in which women lived. I think I’m right in saying that a hundred years ago a married woman had no legal existence. She was her husband’s wife. At marriage her money became her husband’s. Any money she might earn, though she had scarcely any way of earning it, became her husband’s. She had no private or public rights. She could not sue in court. No professions were open to her. She had no right to her own children, no matter how her husband might behave.”

Then by a series of friendly, if condescending, questions she led Stella to a recapitulation of the various details of that campaign. Caroline Norton and her Infants’ Custody Act. Florence Nightingale and her School for Nurses. The rapid acquisition of fresh privileges; the right to a university career; the right to enter the professions of the law and medicine; the Married Women’s Property Act; the commencement and development of the suffrage movement.

Mrs. Shirley listened, commenting, interrogating, with what seemed the friendliest concern. Only Jane realized that that concern was the steady baiting of a hook; like the cross-examination where a witness is led step by step into a fatal, unguarded admission.

Jane fidgeted nervously, wondering how she could change the subject before a danger point was reached; glancing at the clock; wondering how soon the men could be expected to leave the dining-room; realizing that it was only twenty minutes since they had been left; knowing that they would be at the least another ten minutes yet.

In her smooth, suave voice Mrs. Shirley continued her interrogation.

“In all these things: property, education, facilities to enter the professions, the tendency has been to place women on an equality with men.”

“Yes.”

“Now will you continue this grantin’ of the vote to women to its logical conclusion? If women are allowed to vote, it will be difficult to prevent them from electing their own representatives. Would you be in favour of women going into Parliament?”

Stella hesitated. It was a point on which suffragists were usually reluctant to commit themselves. They did not want to advance too fast. Actual representation in Parliament was not part of their declared policy. But in private there seemed no reason for conceding what every suffragist agreed to be her right.

“Certainly. I see no reason why women should not be represented in the government of a country that they support by taxation.”

“You would have, that is to say, complete equality between men and women as regards legislation?”

“Yes.”

“You would admit, though, that in certain fields women cannot compete on terms of equality with men. The services, for instance. You could hardly have women as Admirals and Generals. Certainly not as private soldiers and able-bodied seamen.”

“Naturally not.”

“Then don’t you think men would be entitled to argue that they have a right to govern the country they protect?”

“Women could reply that as mothers they produce the armies and the navies.”

“At the same time you would admit that there is a point at which it ceases to be desirable or even possible for women to compete on terms of equality with men?”

“Certainly.”

“Then you do recognize that the opposition to the suffrage movement not only on the part of men but on the part of a great many women also, is based on their belief that that point has been already reached. You can hardly expect a great many people not to be impressed by the opinion of a woman like Mrs. Humphry Ward, who has been extremely active in the movement for women’s education that—I remember memorizing her phrase—”the emancipatin’ process has now reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women.”’

Stella flushed. Like every other suffragist she had had to answer many times that attack directed against the movement by those whom it had thought its most staunch supporters. That manifesto in the Nineteenth Century signed by a number of well-known feminists was still, after eighteen years, a most powerful weapon in the hands of the opposition.

“The rebel is always reactionary to an immediate successor.”

Mrs. Shirley smiled. It was an extremely charming smile. It was the look that came into her face at Bridge when she produced an unexpected card. Jane knew that smile, and knew what it portended. Mrs. Shirley was preparing to join action. If only the men would hurry. Jane strained her ears. She fancied that she heard the sound of a shutting door; but she could not be certain. Was that, or was that not, the sound of voices in the hall?

“It may be as you contend,” said Mrs. Shirley. “But what I, and a great many women like myself, feel is this: there are admittedly these fields where men and women cannot compete. We consider that politics is one of them. Women have not the time. Women, that is to say, like myself, who live the life for which nature designed us—as wives and mothers. I think it very admirable that women should be properly educated; it makes them better wives and mothers. I think it admirable that they should own property; it allows them a voice in the education of their children. The enterin’ of women into business and into the learned professions is also admirable. There will always be a number of women who for various reasons will not be mothers and will not marry. If they have inherited no money, they will want to lead useful and profitable lives. They have a right to make the best use possible of their talents. At the same time, such women are and always will be in a minority. Women with homes and children cannot give the undivided attention to a career that men can. That is outside their province. And it is for that reason that they resent and oppose the attempt of the minority to drive them into that for which they have not sufficient time—I mean politics. They feel that they would be represented in Parliament by members of a minority; so that the woman’s point of view would be presented by women who were unrepresentative; who did not really understand how the majority of women feel. It is for this reason that the average woman who knows that she will never have the time herself for politics would prefer to be represented by her father, husband, brothers or sons: she feels that they understand her better than a woman out of a minority.”

She paused: her voice was sugar soft. But there was no doubt of her words’ implication. “You feel like this because you are an exception, a freak. You are not one of us; you have no right to speak for us. You are the mouthpiece of a very small minority.”

“And that’s why,” Mrs. Shirley was continuing, “I don’t really believe that this movement will come to anything. It will only be supported by a few. My daughter now, aged fifteen, is tremendously enthusiastic. She wants to join—now what is it she wants to join? You could tell me probably, Miss Balliol—the organization for young suffragists.”

“The Drummers’ Union.”

“Exactly. The Drummers’ Union. My husband is very much against it. He says we are layin’ up trouble for ourselves, lettin’ her get ideas of that kind in her head. But I say, ‘What does it matter? Before very long she’ll have met some very ordinary young man or other whom she’ll think is like no one that’s ever lived and by the time she’s stopped thinkin’ that, she’ll have far too many responsibilities to worry about suffrage movements.’“

It was said so lightly, that it evoked a benign smile from Mrs. Fury. But there was no doubt of what had been implied. “you only think like that because no man has ever thought it worth his while to make you feel differently.”

Stella did not miss the implication. She lifted herself forward in her chair. Her sister-in-law was to be spared her retort, however.

As the defenders of Lucknow welcomed their relief, Jane heard the sound of masculine voices outside the door. She shut her eyes in thankfulness. There could be a respite now. She turned brightly to her rescuers.

“We are discussing,” she announced with brisk decisiveness, “whether there is time in one lifetime for both love and a career. Mr. Rickman, I know you must have a great many ideas on that subject. Come over here and tell me what you think.”

Within two minutes general conversation had been abandoned for a group of duologues.

At last the evening came to an end. Mrs. Shirley, as was appropriate, making the first move. Stella, as was a sister’s right, staying a little after the last guest had gone. She had had a letter from her father by that evening’s post. He had mentioned a cold. She was worried about him.

“I heard from him three days ago,” said Balliol. “He seemed to be perfectly well then.”

“He’s over seventy. April’s a treacherous month.”

“Our grandfather lived till he was eighty. Our father’s sturdier that he ever was.”

“Perhaps.… Well, it’s been a delightful evening, but then your parties always are. Give my love to the nieces and nephews.”

“Ah, that reminds me. I had so many messages for you from Lucy. She made me promise to ask you to go up and see her.”

“The darling. But it’s too late now, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, much.”

“Tell her I’ll take her to a matinée one day.”

“And lunch here first.”

“That would be lovely. We must fix that up. Ask her what she’d like to see.”

With his hand on his wife’s shoulder, Edward Balliol watched his sister walk with a firm resolute stride towards Marylebone Station.

Balliol shook his head.

“I don’t think we can boast of having found a husband for Stella in Roy Rickman. They seemed to be making very heavy weather of it during dinner.”

Jane smiled.

“I can’t imagine Mr. Rickman falling in love with anyone like Stella.”

“So there’s another name to be wiped off our list.”

“If you look on him simply as a suitor for Stella.”

“That’s why we asked him.”

“I know.… All the same.…” She hesitated, flushing slightly. “I thought he was rather amusing; gay and talkative. The kind of person who makes a party go. He might be worth remembering, to fill a gap sometimes. If you like him, that’s to say.”

“Oh, I like him. I shouldn’t have asked him otherwise.”

“I didn’t mean that. Amusing, I meant to say. Among you other men, did he talk well? What did you talk about down here? You stayed a long time.”

“Did we? Yes, I suppose we did. We were talking golf. And when one once gets on to that.…”

They laughed. They had made frequent play with the stale jokes about “the golf widow,” and the fishing bore swopping reminiscences with a golf bore.

“I shouldn’t think Mr. Rickman would have much to say on that.”

“As a matter of fact, he started it. With a very good story, too. It may be a chestnut. But it was new to all of us. You’ll see the point of it. It’s your honour. It’s a short hole. You hole out in one. What’s the correct thing to say to your opponent? Only one thing. ‘You’ve got that for a half.’ Pretty good, that. Yes, he’s a nice fellow; nicer than I thought. Yes, we must have him here again. He helps to make things go. It was a nice party. All your parties are.”

He put his arm round her shoulder, fondling it, smiling down at her. This was for him the happiest moment of the day: the moment when they were left alone at a party’s end. The few minutes’ talk in which they compared the various guests; how this one had reacted on this other, rounded off the day. It gave everything a direction and significance.

He led her back into the drawing-room, pausing by a side table to mix himself a drink. He watched her as she walked slowly over to the fire-place, placing one foot upon the fender, leaning one arm along the mantelpiece, resting her cheek in its soft hollow. How graceful she was, still; like a flower. He was a lucky fellow to have a wife like that.

She turned slowly round.

“Edward,” she said. “I don’t want to live here any more.”

He was so astonished that he could make no answer.

“I’ve lived here for sixteen years. I want to go and live where there’s fresh air and open country. I want a garden. You can’t make a real home for children in a London house. I want to go right away from this. As soon as possible.”

He came across to her. He put his arm about her shoulder. He made it a rule always to agree with people straightaway; to show willingness. Then afterwards, if need be, to make difficulties, or rather so present the problem that the other person should see the difficulties before he himself had mentioned them. He followed that rule now.

“Of course, my dear. I had no idea you were tired of this house. I’ll make inquiries straightaway.”

“I’m serious about this, Edward.”

“Of course you are.”

He had no intention of leaving a house that was suitable to his tastes and needs. He did not believe that Jane had the slightest real wish to leave it. But he did not mean to cross a feminine mood at this hour of night. He began to discuss, as though it were eminently practical, the suggestion that they should leave their house and build a new house on the fringe of Hampstead. She listened attentively, her eyes on his, her lips following his words; then suddenly the familiar abstracted, preoccupied look came into her face.

“He ought to marry someone younger than himself; but someone with a good deal of character. I’ve a feeling that he may be weak,” she said.

“Who on earth are you talking about?”

“Mr. Rickman, who else should I be? And I think she ought to have a certain amount of money. I’ve a feeling that if he hadn’t money, he might get unscrupulous. He’ll find money harder to earn as he gets older.”

As Balliol came upstairs he noticed a line of light below the door of Lucy’s bedroom. He hesitated. It was nearly twelve. He wondered if there was anything wrong. He tapped on the door. There was an eager “Come in.” Then, as he pushed open the door, a disappointed “Oh!” Lucy was sitting up in bed. He had time to see the excitement on her face before the sullen pout returned. A book lay open on the coverlet.

“My dear child, what are you doing: reading at this time of night?”

“I was waiting for Aunt Stella.”

“But she’s gone half an hour ago.”

“Mother promised to ask if she couldn’t take her coffee here with me.”

“You can’t break up a party in that way.”

“Mother promised.”

“And she kept her promise. She’s arranged for Aunt Stella to come to lunch here and then take you to a matinée.”

“Oh! When?”

“Quite soon!”

“You mean they didn’t fix any actual day?”

“No; they were going to write and arrange it in a day or two.”

“I see.”

The excitement that had leapt back into her face at the prospect of being taken to a theatre, disappeared on learning that no definite date had been arranged.

“What’s the matter with her?” Balliol thought. “Is it just girlhood; that half-way house between the child and woman?”

He remembered his own adolescence; how uncertain, inquisitive a time it was. One was both self-important and self-conscious. If that was all it was, there wasn’t anything one could do to help. One had to watch and wait. Adolescence was a malady that cured itself. And if it was more than that? He shrugged his shoulders. You didn’t help young people by probing into their troubles. You had to wait till they came to you with them. If they ever did.

He stooped and kissed his daughter’s forehead.

“I’ll remind your mother about it in the morning. We’ll try and arrange it for the week-end after this.”

In her small club bedroom Stella Balliol sat, twirling between her fingers the letter she had found waiting her on her return. It was on Reform Club stationery.

“DEAR STELLA,

“For weeks now, as I suspect that you have guessed, I have been trying to say this to you. Somehow the right moment has not come. And anyhow, since it is something that you will want to think over alone, perhaps it is better that I should ask through a letter if you will become my wife.

“We have known each other now for seven years. We cannot have many secrets from one another. At least, I do not suspect that I have a great many from you. You know what my life is: what I am planning to make it: what I hope to make it: what I am confident that, with you to help, I shall make it. I hope that you know, too, how deep is the regard I bear for you. I will make you a good husband.”

For signature there was the one name “ALAN.”

The letter came as no particular surprise to her. For a long time she had suspected that Alan Cheyne was meditating a proposal. All the same, its arrival on this particular evening was appropriately opportune. It soothed the smart of Mrs. Shirley’s implied taunt. “I should like to be able to show her this.” Just as she would enjoy the surprise that the announcement of her engagement in The Times would cause to all those many friends who had said of her, “Stella Balliol, oh yes, one of the very best, of course. But not a man’s woman, if you follow me.” That alone was an inducement to say “Yes.” It would be a vindication of herself. The word spinster no longer had the sinister implications that it had held for the Victorians. But there was a freemasonry of married women from which she was increasingly conscious of her exclusion, now that her first youth was passed. Her views were disparaged because she was not a member of that lodge. As a married woman she would stand on a far firmer platform. She would be protected from the sneer; “You only feel that way because you can’t get a husband.” She would also, being relieved from the necessity of earning her own living, have infinitely more time and energy to devote to her campaign. Marriage held many advantages for her.

They were material advantages. The problem was one to be judged by the head rather than the heart. As it was from the head rather than the heart that the proposal came. They had known each other, she and Alan, for seven years. He was a man in the Foreign Office, some eight years older than herself. Their friendship had been built up slowly out of shared tastes and interests. They lent each other books; they went to lectures; they were members of a debating society; they saw eye to eye on a great many points. Since they agreed on ultimate essentials, their arguments on points that they held at issue were stimulating. She rarely read or heard anything that interested her without thinking, “I wonder what Alan will make of that.” They had corresponded at length, even though they were meeting two or three times a week. Their friendship had grown closer, year by year, month by month. He was the most important person in her life; as she was, she presumed, in his. It was not surprising that when in the middle thirties he should feel the need for marriage, for the background of a hostess and a home, he should turn to her as the companion and associate he needed. For a long time now she had known that he was playing with the idea. He had sounded her as to her views on marriage. She had known that sooner or later he would propose. She had known, too, that it was in some such way that he would do it.

She re-read the letter carefully. Yes, that was how she had known it must be. Whether it had come as a letter, or as a set speech. The neat, precise statement of a case. That was how it was bound to have come, between them. As a climax, as a corollary to their friendship, their mental friendship. It could have come in no other way. And yet.…

Rising to her feet, she walked over to the window and leant her arms on the high sill. At the back of her was the small bed-sitting-room; with its narrow iron bedstead, its bare wash-hand stand; the chest of drawers from which a leaf for writing could be drawn, that supported her one three-shelved bookcase; the hard chair; the one wicker chair; the linoleumed floor; the one neutral-coloured rug; the Medici reproduction of Rembrandt’s warrior; the framed photograph of her rather; the narrow room and all it symbolized. And in front of her was the vast sea of London’s roofs and chimney-stacks; its spires; its lighted windows; the dull murmur of it; the red flush it cast upwards to the clouds. London and all it symbolized. She stood, staring.

When at last she turned away there was a film before her eyes, so that the familiar view was blurred. She drew her fore-arm sharply across her eyes. “Now then, don’t behave like a school-girl just because.…”

She paused. Because what? Because there was nothing in this letter that could truthfully be held to contradict Mrs. Shirley’s taunt? It was a proposal, yes. Her first proposal. But not the kind of proposal that as a young girl she had dreamed of. Alan did not feel about her in that way. No one had ever felt about her in that way. Probably no one ever would. And yet deep in her heart she knew that this was the one feeling she wanted to inspire; the one feeling to which she wanted to respond. All this sharing of interests, exchanging of books, going to debates, comparing views; friendship might come that way, did come that way. But.…

What was it that she had dreamed of as a girl? For what was it that when she was honest with herself she knew herself to be lonely still, hungry for in her profoundest instincts? That recognition in the presence of another person, unaccountably, irrefutably, of oneness. A knowledge that could make you say “You’re mine. I’m yours. Let the world slip.” The one person to whom you did not need to explain yourself, who understood without explanation, who restored your faith through his belief in you, whom you could rely on and who needed you, who gave a purpose to each thing you did, who completed you. Was she never to know that feeling, was she never to meet that person? Because she was no longer young; because she was not the fluffy doll men seemed to want, because she needed knowing, was not on the surface? Surely somewhere, she thought, there must be that person waiting, who needs me as I need him. No one is born without a mate. Will I never meet that person? Will it be too late? He must be somewhere, waiting for me, as I am for him.

She laid her head back on her arms. He must be somewhere, she told herself. He must be, somewhere.

V

Stella’s department of the Morrison Teach-Yourself-By-Post Institute was devoted to the card-indexing of circulars and pamphlets. The activities of the firm were considerable. It was necessary that particulars of each new enterprise should reach the particular audience to whom it was addressed. Elaborate lists had been compiled of societies, libraries, institutions, specialists. If a journal on stamp collecting, a supplement on blue porcelain, a dictionary of classical references or a magazine for motor-car mechanics was projected, the hundred, thousand, or ten thousand addresses at which this particular information would be of interest were supplied by copious card-indexes. A considerable section of the company’s morning post consisted of the post cards which were inserted in each of the company’s publications, and on which specialists were invited to indicate the nature of their hobbies.

The preparation and employment of these lists occupied the full time of thirty women. They worked in a single room. Desks flanked with drawers contained the particular card-indexes that lay under their province. Typewriters, on account of their noise and expense, were not allotted them. A high standard of caligraphy was demanded. The system was elaborate, but simple. When Stella, who directed their activities from a small glass-doored office, was told, “We are issuing a special yachting supplement with the Amateur Sportsman, fifteen thousand circulars must be dispatched by the 15th of next month,” she would be able to prepare and supervise the addressing of the necessary envelopes as simply as a mechanic sets a machine in motion, by pressing a button or pulling down a lever. Which was how, in point of fact, the authorities regarded the thirty women who from nine till half-past five for a weekly salary of thirty shillings sat hunched over their envelopes and wrappers.

Stella took her immediate orders from a small, tubby, white-haired, high-foreheaded little man who concealed beneath an air of Pickwickian benevolence a crafty, malicious nature. His name was Beccles. His cheeks were pink and full. A constant smile punctuated his talk with chuckles. His eyes twinkled. He would lean forward on his elbows, revolving between his short, plump, well-kept hands a pencil that he never appeared to use, so uniform was its length. Your first impression of him was, “What a jolly little man.” He prided himself on this impression. “My face is my fortune,” he would say. “I can’t tell you how useful it is to look something quite different from what you are. People think I am easy-going, tolerant, unsuspecting. Consequently, they relax, slacken off, take things easily. Then, when the time comes, I pounce.”

Stella disliked him cordially. She hoped that she concealed her dislike beneath a brisk office manner. But she had no means of knowing whether she was successful. On the whole she was inclined to believe that Beccles did not really care whether she liked or disliked him; that he respected and prized her capability, and left it there.

She could never, all the same, be quite certain that he was not awaiting a right moment for his pounce. She never heard without a slight qualm the thin piping voice of his secretary. “Mr. Beccles would be very much obliged, Miss Balliol, if you would come up and see him at your convenience.” The words “at your convenience” were always added. She would have liked to take him at his word and keep him waiting half a day. As it was she had the greatest difficulty in restraining her impulse to jump up from her desk there and then, and scamper down the passage. She usually delayed her visit twenty minutes.

On the morning following her brother’s dinner-party the scream of the buzzer at her side—telephones were the privilege of masculine departmental heads—informed her that Mr. Beccles had a matter he would like to discuss with her “at her convenience.” Stella looked at her clock: twelve minutes past ten. At half-past, precisely, she left her desk.

Mr. Beccles did not rise from his chair.

“Good morning, Miss Balliol, good morning. I hope I have not taken you away from anything too pressing. The better the day, the better the deed, you know.” And he chuckled heartily, as though he had said something rather clever. Stella had always wondered whether his frequent and usually inapposite use of proverbs was a nervous habit or a facet in his façade of open and not over-intelligent geniality.

“I trust that all the young ladies under your care are behaving.”

“I trust so, Mr. Beccles.”

“I trust so, too. I rely on you there; completely. Nobody understands a woman like a woman. I always accept your judgment, implicitly, implicitly.” His smile broadened; the pencil within his short fingers revolved in a series of steady jerks. I wish he’d come to the point, thought Stella.

“Now, let me see, what was it I was going to ask you? Ah, of course, the prospectus of that Collectors’ Handbook of Roman Pottery. Now, I’m right, aren’t I, in thinking that those prospectuses have gone out?”

“Yes, they went out last week.”

“Can you remember the exact day?”

Stella always brought her schedule book to her interviews with Mr. Beccles. But this was an entry that she had no need to verify. She remembered particularly the rush to get those prospectuses off by the last post on Thursday evening, before the Easter holiday began.

“Thursday evening?” he said. “As I thought. There is no post on Good Friday. But on the Saturday there is. Those prospectuses, therefore, should have been delivered at their respective destinations by the first post on Saturday.”

“I imagine so.”

“I, too, had imagined that. And as I was spending the Easter holiday with a friend whose name is, I know, on our list of amateurs of pottery, I was curious to see what effect that prospectus would have on him. He would not know that I was in part responsible for the book. He would not be familiar with the various subsidiary branches of our company. I should get, that is to say, an impartial view of his attitude towards our circulars. Such a view would be interesting, don’t you feel?”

He paused, with a benignant beam. She agreed that it would be extremely interesting.

“Exactly. One needs disinterested criticism. If one might put it so. I can assure you, Miss Balliol, that I came down to breakfast hungrier for the post than for my egg and bacon. How will he treat this prospectus, I asked myself. Will he fling it into the wastepaper-basket unread? Will he glance through it carelessly, then throw it down? Will he study it carefully, knit his brows, say ‘I’d like a good modern book on Roman pottery, but somehow this doesn’t seem quite the book I want’? Or would he, after a few moments, declare that this is the very book he’s been waiting for for months?”

He paused dramatically. “You see the importance of this, Miss Balliol?”

“Certainly.”

“If he flings the circular away, unread, I say to myself, ‘People don’t read circulars. We waste money on them.’ If he flings it away after a casual glance I think ‘Yes, he looks at circulars, but this didn’t hold his attention. We don’t get up our circulars attractively.’ If, after reflection, he puts it away, I think ‘Perhaps it’s the book’s fault. Perhaps our editorial staff’s at fault.’ But if on the other hand he decides to buy the book well then, I know our editorial staff, our copyrighters, our publicity experts are justified. Of each one of them I say Palmam qui meruit ferat.”

His face shone with the excitement that such a discovery would be expected to waken in a loyal and enthusiastic employee.

“That is what I looked for; but what, what, Miss Balliol, do you think I found?”

He paused dramatically.

“What did I find, Miss Balliol? The very last thing that I had thought to find. There was no prospectus of our book on Roman pottery on my friend’s breakfast table.”

Another pause. He was preparing for his pounce. But his face could not have borne an expression of more benevolent bewilderment.

With that expression unchanged, he pounced.

“Miss Balliol,” he snapped, “I want the name of the girl who was responsible for sending that prospectus to Mr. Guy Porterling, Osse Court, Osshamptom.”

It did not take Stella three minutes to find out who was responsible for the undelivered prospectus. The alphabetical arrangement of the card-indexes made it a simple matter. She glanced down two parallel columns, checked two entries, then walked between the rows of huddled figures and touched on the shoulder a young, recently joined member of the staff.

“Miss Webster, may I speak to you in my room a moment?”

Miss Webster was one of those pale-haired girls who only look pretty when they are well. After the sunshine and open air of the Easter holiday she was vivid, flushed, brightened. Within a week, as likely as not, she would have grown pale and peaked: no glow in her eyes, no colour in her face. She was the kind of girl who ought never to live in cities.

“You remember that rush we had on Thursday evening to get off those Pottery prospectuses?”

“Yes.”

“You did the ‘P’s,’ didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t, I know, be expected to remember the hundred envelopes that you addressed. But if you look in your index you will find the name Porterling. He never received a prospectus.”

As Stella explained how this fact had been discovered, a sulky look came into Miss Webster’s face. For a moment it seemed as though she were going to make some denial, some truculent defence. Then she looked up at Stella. Their eyes met. Her defiance dropped. A look came into her face that seemed to say, “Oh, very well then. I can’t fight with you. You’re not the kind one makes excuses to.” She waited till Stella had finished, then said simply:

“I was feeling like death on Thursday. You know how it is every now and then. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t suppose that was the only mistake I made. Is old Beccles sick?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try and put it right.”

“That’s decent of you.”

Stella found Beccles as bland as she had expected.

“Well, and have you found the little miscreant?”

“It was Miss Webster.”

“Ah!” His forehead puckered in a frown and his eyes closed as he recreated the picture of Miss Webster. “Yes, I remember. A slight, pale girl. She hasn’t been with us long.”

“Three months.”

“Has her work otherwise been satisfactory?”

“Completely.”

“Um, I see.…” He leant back in his chair, the pencil held before his eyes as though he were focussing some object in the foreground. His smile and manner were urbane, lit by the furtive knowledge that he had it in his power to hurt.

“It’s no use my pretending that I don’t take a serious view of this,” he said. “You may say it’s a small thing. But there’s no smoke without fire. If we find a mistake is made on the one point that we can check, we must assume that there are mistakes on the many points we cannot check. We cannot afford mistakes, Miss Balliol.”

As she had walked down the corridor to Beccles’ office, Stella had prepared the conventionally sympathetic defence. Miss Webster was an extremely good worker. She had had an extremely bad headache on Thursday evening. She should have left the office. She had only remained because of the necessity of getting off the prospectuses for Easter. The mistake was one that in the circumstances should be overlooked.

That was how she had planned to plead. But Beccles’ malicious smugness antagonized her. She was not going to advance that woman’s plea to a man who would go home with a sneer on his lips and remark how impossible women were in offices, how they made mistakes that a man would be sacked at once for, and expected to be forgiven, when they advanced the woman’s excuse of a sick headache. A man like Beccles would only sneer, would not realize how valid an excuse that was; how there were days when no woman was fit to work; when she went to her office, her head splitting, everything out of mental focus.

She adopted a different defence.

“We have proof that the mistake has been made,” she said; “but none that Miss Webster made it. It was the Thursday before Good Friday. The posts were heavy. If we knew that two or three mistakes had been made in envelopes addressed by Miss Webster then we should be fairly sure that the fault was hers. But there is only this one letter. There is no reason to be certain that the mistake was made by her rather than anybody else.”

“By whom else could it have been made?”

“By the office boy who takes the letters to the post office.”

“That is most unlikely, since these letters are collected outside each room in one large mail bag.”

“The mistake might have been made in the post office.”

“The post office does not make mistakes.”

“Yet I remember your saying in your speech at the last annual meeting that one of the reasons why socialism would never succeed in this country was the proof which government departments had given of their inferiority, in matters of detail, to concerns that are directed by private enterprise. The post office is State-run.”

He smiled as she produced this argument; chuckling as though he had enjoyed a good joke thoroughly.

“Very cleverly argued. Caught at my own game. The pitcher that goes too often to the water. Explain, though, to Miss Webster that the fewer of these mistakes we have, the better.”

Stella found Miss Webster waiting with an anxious expression on her face. Poor kid, I suppose this really matters to her. “It’s all right,” she said. “But another time, when you’re feeling like that, let me know. I’m a woman. I understand these things.”

The drawn face from which the anxiety was swiftly banished had a look of trust, gratitude and reliance. “They do need me, these girls. They do feel that I’m their friend.”

Stella was allowed three-quarters of an hour for her lunch. It was a barren meal, taken either at a Lyons’, an A.B.C. or at Eustace Miles’s. It cost her between eightpence and a shilling, and consisted of tea or coffee, a poached egg on toast, stewed figs or baked apple. Her sole variety was supplied by the company she chose for it. As far as possible she contrived to escape for that three-quarters of an hour from the office atmosphere.

Her companion this morning was a tall, angular woman in the middle forties, whose sharp fleshless features and thin bony frame seemed to have been devised by nature to satirize the feminine fashion of the hour. The high whale-boned neck, with the sleeves fitting flatly in the shoulders, made her look like an encased mummie; while the high-crowned hat, precariously sustained by vast pins on a high perch of puffed and padded hair achieved a startingly Jack-in-the-box effect.

Stella had known her for five years without discovering her Christian name. She signed her name as a man would, with initials, A. E. Draft. She was an active member of the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

She entered the A.B.C., looked round for Stella, detected her in a single glance, strode across the room with the brush-braid of her skirt dusting her shoes, planked down a pile of books and papers, and leaning across the table announced in a sharp, clear voice, as though she had come to talk and not to eat, that she had just come from an extremely important committee meeting.

“Trouble’s brewing. There are two parties. There are those who believe you can get what you want by quiet perseverance, who think the Mud March the most daring step ever undertaken by a woman. There are the others, the Pankhurst, Pethick Lawrence faction, who say that the Mud March is a first step; that since women have been outlawed by law they must behave as outlaws. Before the year’s through, there will be trouble. You watch.”

Her eyes gleamed balefully. She was the kind of woman that men had in mind when they said that the women who wanted votes were not really women.

A waitress came clattering up. “Orders, please.”

Miss Draft snapped out her order as though she were a post office girl decoding a telegram. “Pot of tea. Poached egg twice. Mashed potatoes. Meringue. Roll, Butter, Honey.”

“Within a year,” she went on, “we shall have to decide whether we are in the vanguard or just camp followers. There’ll be a clear-cut issue.… War, ruthless war, militant methods. You see how it will be. We shall be laughed at in the streets, in the Press, by our friends, our families, by our employers, by most other women; by all those women who rely on men, who have to keep in with men, who can’t afford to offend their fathers, their husbands, their employers.”

Which was how most women found themselves, Stella thought. Just as most men had dependants, whose interests they could not ignore, so were most women under obligations of some kind to some man. It was only the very few who could behave as if they were alone; which was what Mrs. Shirley had meant when she had described Suffragettes as a minority.

“We shall have to sacrifice ourselves,” said Miss Draft. “The Cause demands it. Nothing but the Cause has any claim on us.”

Which is all right for you, thought Stella. You’ve independent means. But how would I stand, dependent on my job, that I daren’t lose, or a husband that I must consider?

The waitress arrived with the dishes piled wide upon her tray. Though Miss Draft appeared to ignore and to despise food, she had ordered three times as much to eat as Stella had; and though she continued to talk as though the successive mouthfuls were no more than the punctuation marks of conversation, she swept up the last yellow fleck of egg with the soft centre of her roll, and continued to re-fill the teapot with hot water till its dark-brown faded to a drizzled ochre.

“There is only one woman who can lead us,” she asserted. “The woman who will lead us anywhere.”

Which was what Stella herself believed. The time for parleying was at an end. It was no good sending deputations to astute politicians, who understood every move of party tactics, who knew how to appear to promise without actual self-commitment. The time had come for drastic measures. Campbell Bannerman had exhorted them to exercise “the virtue of patience”; he had also told them to go on pestering. It was time to take him at his word.

The recent sight of three thousand women marching from Hyde Park Corner to Caxton Hall with banners and bands, their long skirts trailing on the ground on a day of relentless rain had been hailed as an unprecedented demonstration. The public had been outraged at the idea of ladies appearing like that, in public. The “Mud March“ had been regarded as the flaunting of every popular conception of womanly qualities; of all that the Victorians had revered: modesty, delicacy, sensibility. The Mud March had been a gesture, a terrific gesture. But it was useless to regard it as a final gesture. It was only the beginning. That Stella knew. At the same time, the issue for the majority of women was not nearly so simple as Miss Draft fancied.

“You do realize, don’t you, that the majority will have to be spectators?”

“I don’t see that at all.”

“Married women can’t rush about the country heckling ministers.”

Miss Draft sniffed impatiently.

“Why ever not?”

“They’ve got their homes to consider; their children probably.”

“You’re talking like Lord Curzon.”

“I’m talking common sense.”

“It sounds common sense to-day. It won’t to-morrow. You’re saying that a woman becomes a slave the moment that she marries; that she becomes a housekeeper and a mother; that she must have no life of her own. A hundred years—fifty years—ago, men thought that married women had no right to property. We’ve disproved that. We’ve proved that a woman has a right to a career; we’ll soon prove that she retains her independence when she marries; just as a man does.”

There was a hard resolute look on her face.

And it’s true enough, thought Stella. In theory she’s right. Women should be independent in marriage, just as men are. But at the same time people like Miss Draft were wrong because they would not argue from the particular to the general. They took general theories, not human nature, as their basis. They would try to fit people into plans. Their second mistake was a corollary to their first. Miss Draft had never realized that women as a whole did not think of themselves as slaves. They did not regard marriage as a prison house and the state of marriage as a long battle for personal liberty. They did not think of their husbands as tyrants and oppressors, but as associates and friends. Though women from the political aspect were treated with tyranny and injustice, as private individuals they were treated with chivalry, kindness, consideration.

Miss Draft made these mistakes because she was, as Mrs. Shirley had argued the night before, a woman who was not a woman. She had made herself the mouthpiece of women’s wrongs without understanding what women thought and felt.

On her way to lunch Stella had thought of telling Miss Draft about Alan Cheyne’s proposal. But she realized now the futility of that. Miss Draft was incapable of appreciating the various implications of the problem.

For Stella knew that there were those implications. She was not a cheat. She would not accept the advantages of marriage without making her payment in return. If you took a man’s name and his position you were not justified in behaving in a way that would bring your husband into ridicule. However Miss Draft might argue, Stella did not believe that a woman had the right to follow in public a course of action of which her husband disapproved, and expect to remain under her husband’s roof. And Alan was in the Foreign Office.

That afternoon her attention was only intermittently focused on her work. She was too involved with the first really personal problem she had had to face. She looked through the glass partition of her cubicle at the thirty girls who were working under her. They were the kind of girls that you would expect to find in such a place. Four-fifths of them had come without any ambition, because they wanted to get away from home, because they wanted to earn the few shillings that would make them independent of their parents’ authority. They were there definitely to mark time till they were married. Most of them would marry. Those who did not would join the remaining fifth; the minority who for one reason or another would never marry; the girls who were kept in attendance on mothers till their prettiness had passed; the girls who had come to London with visions of careers, who had imagined that because women had been conceded the right to work, they possessed the capacity to work profitably: the orphans, the deserted wives, the widows, who depended for their existence on their weekly envelope.

Looking over the group of thirty women, it seemed to Stella that the only ones who were definitely better off, who were definitely happier because of their permission to work, were those of the minority, that fifth, who were now spared the ignominy of dependence. It was for their sakes that the long battle for women’s rights had been waged through the nineteenth century. The others would have always been able to manage. They belonged to that vast brigade for whom the word “so-so” describes the life and outlook; who possess the capacity to adapt themselves to an environment; who, like animals, assume the particular kind of protective colouring that their defence demands; who contrive to fulfil themselves, no matter what the opposition, because they are for the most part unconscious of that opposition. They muddle through.

Looking at them as they sat there, bent over their desks, she wondered whether the long battle were worth while, if it only gave privileges to those who did not care whether they had them; and to women who were hardly worth them. Did it really matter much what happened to sour, ineffectual spinsters? Were they really any better off now in city offices than they had been in medieval days in convents? Particularly when it was by women like Miss Draft that the fight for those privileges was waged. It would be very drear to spend an entire life with people like Miss Draft. It would be very nice to be able to answer Mrs. Shirley’s captions with orange blossom and white satin; to advance heretical views from the pedestal of conformity.

VI

A few mornings later Jane was woken by a series of heavy thumps. They seemed to be coming from the street. She sat up, puzzled and alarmed. She struck a match. It was a quarter to four. The knocking continued, the thumps growing heavier and more frequent. She jogged her husband’s elbow.

“Edward, there’s someone at the front door, I think.”

He stirred, grunted, sat up in bed.

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to four.”

“Who could it be at this hour?”

They sat up, listening. The thumps continued.

“Why doesn’t one of the servants go down?”

“They’re frightened, I suppose.”

They waited. The volume of the blows increased.

“Darling, do go down. I don’t want Francis woken.”

“I suppose I’d better.”

“Come up at once and let me know.”

“Very well.”

He was slow, however, in returning. She heard the sound of a conversation in the hall. Then the closing and locking of the door. She waited for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs but instead she heard the creak of a turned handle. He had gone into his study. She listened, waiting for him to come, wondering what could be the matter, yielding to drowsiness. She was half-asleep when she heard his footsteps in the room again.

“It’s bad news. My father’s dying.”

“Oh, my dear!”

“That was a telegram. It came by special messenger. That’s what comes of not having a telephone.”

“What did it say?”

“The least possible. ‘Your father dangerously ill. Come at once. Stella told.’ It was signed Carter. That’s the doctor there. I’ve looked up the trains. The first one that’s any use leaves Waterloo at 9. It’s at Exeter soon after twelve. I suppose Stella will be on it.”

“Darling, come back to bed.”

He lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head.

“He’s nearly eighty. He’s been lonely. I don’t suppose he’s sorry. You remember what Stella said. It was likely to come with any change of weather. But now that it’s come.…”

It was too dark for her to see his face. But she knew the expression that it would wear: rapt, engrossed, unaware of her presence; talking to himself out loud. She had seen that expression sometimes when they were alone and their conversation had become a monologue. She had the feeling at such moments of being married to a stranger; to someone who had shared his life with her but not his thoughts. She felt lonely lying there beside him in the dark, unnoticed and unneeded, while two hundred miles away in an old manor house in the fold of the Devon hills an old man who had been kind to her lay dying.

Balliol arrived at the station early. He felt certain that Stella would take a third-class ticket and he was not prepared to take a three-and-a-half-hour train journey in discomfort. He reserved two corner seats, took two tickets, and stood at the entrance to the booking-office. He expected that she would arrive seven minutes before the train was due to start. He also expected that she would arrive without any of the fuss that one associates with women on station platforms; none of the “have-I-got-the-time?” flutter.

It was as he had expected. At eight minutes to nine she came into the booking-office with a quick, unhurried step, in a dark grey coat and skirt that was both countryish and neat. She had a knack of looking right. Her welcome of him combined appropriately a sisterly pleasure at seeing him, with the right regard for the occasion. There were times when it was a great relief to have Stella exactly as she was.

On their way to the platform she indulged in none of the overemphasized chatter that might have been expected. The remarks she made were few and short.

“I suppose there isn’t much hope. I was worried about that cold. Have you heard anything?”

“Nothing for ten days. He was all right then.”

“Temple will have brought the trap to meet us. He’ll tell us what we are to expect.”

She was practical and undemonstrative. But her emotions were touched, he knew that. She had always been her father’s favourite.

To his relief but not to his surprise he saw that she had no intention of making conversation on the journey down.

She had brought a pile of papers. A solid volume with a green library shield upon its solid binding awaited the perusal of such lighter reading as The Times, Tribune, the Daily News. She settled herself in her corner and began to turn the pages of The Times with the concentrated efficiency of those who know not only the page but the precise column in which they will find the particular piece of news with which they are concerned.

At the station they found waiting for them the old coachman who, as a brisk young stripling, had driven Edward Balliol to school, to Oxford, afterwards to London. He was portly now, his red cheeks, flecked with stubble, hanging loose over his wide-winged collar. He wore a high square-shaped bowler. He raised his whip in salute, while the small boy who had jumped from the box helped to lift the Gladstone bags into the trap.

“Good day, Miss Stella. Good day, Master Edward.”

“How’s my father?”

“‘E’s bad, Master Edward. ‘E’s bad, that’s certain. Come along, Sarah.” His whip flicked round the mare’s withers.

They drove in silence for the five-mile journey along high-hedged lanes that Edward had made so often in the past and now would seldom make again.

In the large four-poster bed in which he had been born, old Balliol lay looking with undimmed eyes through the half open window towards the curving hills which had been through so many years the first object on which his waking eyes had rested. He was dying, and he knew it. Each breath he took so shook his frame that the high canopy of the bed trembled. The effort of breathing grew heavier every hour. His heart grew less and less equal to the strain. He would lie panting softly for a few moments, then the need for air would key him to the big effort that would leave him limp, gasping, his fingers plucking at the bed-clothes. For a day and a half he had scarcely spoken.

With a satiric eye he watched the doctor’s movements. They were old cronies. The doctor had an odd nervous chuckle. The worse his patient was, the louder that chuckle grew; approaching nearer and nearer to a laugh, but never quite arriving.

“I’ll always know that I’m on my death-bed when I hear you laugh out loud,” Balliol had been used to say. Doctor Carter knew very well of what the old man was thinking as he lay there watching him, that quiet twinkle in his eye. “Come on, laugh! Now’s the time for it,” the twinkle said. They had known each other long enough to be able to guess at one another’s thoughts. Though the words he spoke to his old friend were comforting and cheerful, both knew the truth. They would not have referred to it any more than they would have referred to any of such other facts of life as were not discussed in the polite company of their day.

Old Balliol knew that he was dying, and he resented it. He was surprised that he should resent it. For many years now he had had no particular zest for living. A widower for a dozen years, he had been lonely. He had nothing to look forward to. One day, one month, one year had been very like another. But now that the time had come, he felt the same resentment that he had as a schoolboy at the end of the holidays. He was glad to be going back. He was rather bored with home. Yet he resented the idea of things going on without him.

Lying now, propped up among his pillows, he was resentful because he would never see in their full summer livery the greening hedges and the blossoming witch-elm, the budding chestnuts; because the apricots would swell and redden on the walls beside the greenhouse; because the Dutch garden would be gay with tulips; stocks would be bright along the bowling-green; because in a few days there would be the sound of the mower on the tennis-court; in the evening boys would be practising cricket on the green; yokels would sit at the trestled tables before the Plough with their mugs of cider. Just as it always had been, and he not there to see it. It would go on, as it always had, though he was a part of it no longer.

“Hasn’t Stella come yet?” he asked.

“They should be here any moment now.”

“I want to see the boy first.”

But when the sound of wheels on the gravel drive announced the arrival of the carriage, when Edward was in the room beside him, his hand lying between his son’s, he did not feel that he had much to say. He was glad to have his son sitting there. But all that they had to say to one another had been said long ago. Their differences of opinion, their confidences were in the past. He had a hatred of dramatics. Talking was a big effort. They sat in silence.

“I’m worried about Stella,” he said at length.

“I don’t think you need be. She’s happy. She’s doing very well at the job of hers.”

“I wish she’d marry.”

“Jane and I are asking a number of young men to meet her.”

The old man made no reply. The effort of those few words had exhausted him.

“Would you like to see Stella now?”

The old man nodded.

All that day he lingered on, growing weaker and weaker as the warmth of the spring day lessened. The nurse that had been sent for arrived, shortly after tea. She was stern, angular, competent. Balliol disliked the business-like way in which she set her things out on the table at his side. She must have seen so many people die. She had probably made up her mind already how long his father would live; had looked up trains, planning her departure.

Most of the afternoon Stella sat in the sick room, not talking, holding her father’s hand; while Balliol sat reading downstairs, or pacing slowly the garden paths.

Had he been a sentimentalist he would have re-lived his boyhood through that afternoon, reviving memories, seeking the locality of this and that association; saying to himself, for forty years this has been my home. For a hundred and fifty my family have lived here. In a few weeks strangers will be busy with their renovations.

But Balliol was without that kind of sentiment. Instead, as the late April afternoon died slowly, he pondered in his own impersonal way the fortunes of a family such as his; seeing it as he always saw such problems as part of a general pattern.

In the far Georgian days when this house was built, it had been the lot of a county gentleman to die under the roof where he was born. He inherited the home and the responsibilities that a grandfather had handed to his father. His education was a matter of discipline: a whipping into shape. The sprinkling of conversation with a classical tag or two was considered an accomplishment comparable with the water colours and piano scales of Victorian débutantes; a man’s job was to look after his land and his tenants, pay his tithes and take his place in the family pew on Sundays.

It was for such a life that he himself had been prepared, and practically the only quarrel he had ever had with his father was the result of his decision to lead a London life. To old Balliol it had seemed a terrible thing that his son should renounce the responsibilities that four generations of Balliols had held in trust; that his son should go into trade, even though a good palate was a gentleman’s possession.

It had taken much argument and a long array of figures to convince him that an estate such as theirs could no longer maintain a family in comfort. It was all very well for the farmer whose needs were moderate. But an estate of four times the size was needed for the support of an establishment such as the earlier Balliols had maintained.

“And it’s not as though it were going to stop here,” Edward Balliol had continued. “Money buys half as much as it used. I read an article the other day prophesying that by the middle of the next century we should be paying as much as a shilling in the pound in income tax.”

That was how he had argued in the ‘eighties. Events had proved him right. He had been justified. No one could have foreseen the Boer War. And the exceptional conditions that had sent the income tax to fourteen pence. It had come down, of course. It would come down still further. But no one could tell what might not have happened by the middle of the century. This at least was clear. The property was no longer capable of supporting that old ample way of living. Field after field had been sold to repair deficits in the budget. There was not much left now except the house. The farm buildings had been rented; the rents that came from them barely supported their own upkeep. The place had lasted his father’s time, but it would never have lasted his.

It would now either be engulfed by a larger estate or bought up by a young farmer with ambition but modest demands of life. There was no room in the country any longer for people like himself, living upon their land. The land could not support their way of life. One had to expand or go under. To become a big landowner, or earn a living in a city and regard one’s house in the country as a week-end cottage. This house was one of a hundred others right through the country. So he argued with himself as the day wore on to evening.

Once or twice he went up to his father’s room. He could see little change. Each breath was laboured; the exhaustion following each breath was complete. If the effort seemed less, it was only because the strength had lessened, so that the trembling of the canopy about the bed was slighter. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could stay for. He believed that his father would live through the day. His father had told him once that he always woke up at four in the morning and pulled on another blanket. At four o’clock the body’s vitality was lowest. “It will be at four o’clock that I shall die,” he had said.

Dinner was a silent meal. Little attempt was made at conversation. The Balliols had always kept a good table. The momentum of long training that keeps a driven object in its line for some time after the driving force is spent, prepared a meal comparable with any other Balliol remembered. The claret was of the right temperature. But the eyes of the maid who served the meal were red. “Yet she’s only known him for three years.”

“Did he talk to you much?” said Balliol, when they were alone over the coffee in the drawing-room.

Stella shook her head.

“Hardly a word. He just wanted me beside him.”

“You were always his favourite.”

A twinge of jealousy that he had fancied dead made his voice sound sharp. Stella had always been his father’s favourite. He had always resented it. Why should she have been? She hadn’t been a particularly good daughter. She’d done the things she’d wanted; gone her own way; made her home in London instead of here with him. Why should he have set such high stock by her? With his thoughts centred on her, even now when he had grandchildren growing up.

Stella noticed the slight asperity in his voice, but let it pass.

“Things are going to be very different now,” she said.

So she had realized, then.

“It’ll mean an independent income for you.”

“I didn’t mean that.…”

“What did you mean?”

“In other ways. It’s…” she hesitated. “It’s a responsibility to have someone to whom you matter as much as I did to him; who was really affected by what I did. There won’t be anybody like that again.”

“Will that make much difference?”

She nodded.

“There are a great many things I didn’t do, because I knew they’d hurt him. I’d feel free to do them now. I would be hurting no one. I’ve only myself to consider.”

Her brother stared at her in amazement. He could not think what she was talking about. He couldn’t see Stella flinging her bonnet over windmills.

VII

Roy Rickman, as befitted a young man with his way to make, was extremely punctilious in the fulfilment of his social obligations. He had none of the casualness of manners that marked so many of his contemporaries. Within a fortnight of the receipt of hospitality, he had paid the call that was the acknowledgment of his indebtedness. Ten days after he had dined at the Balliols he presented himself at their front door at four o’clock in the afternoon, in his social uniform of silk hat and morning coat. Usually he considered the leaving of cards an ample tribute to a dinner party, but the memory of Mrs. Balliol’s friendliness caused him, to his own surprise, to ask the maid if Mrs. Balliol was at home. To his surprise also he was relieved to find she was.

He handed his hat, gloves and umbrella to the maid.

“Six years ago I’d have had no umbrella. I’d have been wearing a frock coat and I’d have carried my hat and gloves into the drawing-room. Thank heavens, that piece of formality is over.”

Jane Balliol was at the window, arranging a bowl of flowers. She turned as the door opened. Her back was towards the light, so that he could not see her features, but there was a little gasp in her voice.

“You! Oh, but how nice of you.”

Her welcome warmed him. She really was glad to see him.

“I was just going to have tea. You’ll join me, won’t you?”

They sat down side by side on the narrow, straight-backed chesterfield. They began to talk easily, without effort, as though they were old friends. He had a comfortable easy sense of relaxation, of being able to say what he thought, naturally; knowing that he would be understood; not having to worry about the impression he was making; not being outside himself.

The tea arrived and with it an increased sense of intimacy; a cosy sense of letting the conversation drift; knowing that each topic would lead to another topic; that they would never run short of things to say.

She asked him about the guests at her dinner party; what impression each had made on him.

“What did you think of my sister-in-law?”

“The one who talked so much?”

“Yes.”

“She seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what she thought.”

“Did you think her attractive?”

“Well… I mean.…”

Jane smiled. She shouldn’t, she supposed, be talking in this way about her husband’s sister to so young a man. And one that she scarcely knew. But it seemed so easy.

“She’s not the kind of girl you’d fall in love with?”

“Good heavens, no!”

His astonishment was so considerable that she laughed outright.

“Have you ever been in love?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Were you very much in love with her?”

“I thought I was.”

“That’s really the same thing, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Tell me about it.”

Roy hesitated.

It was the kind of opening that he was adroit at creating and exploiting. Gallantry was not at the moment in his mind, but he was one of those men for whom every conversation is a form of courtship. He was by no means inexperienced and he knew how effectively a woman can be wooed by a description of some previous romance. She sees herself in the position of the woman; she sees her courtier as a lover. “I should like to be thought of in that way,” she thinks. “I should like things to happen that way to me.”

The nature of the story depends upon the audience. The story that would thrill a girl would not impress a mature and worldly woman. Mrs. Balliol was a woman in the middle thirties, with three (or was it four?) children. He wasn’t sure. Yet even so he did not feel that he could tell to her the kind of story that would suggest passion, intrigue, despair, stolen moments, “the little grace of an hour.” There was something untouched, unawoken, an untarnished quality of spirit, about the steady intent look of her grey-blue eyes. He did not feel that she was the right audience for a sophisticated story. At the same time, she would not be interested in a young girl’s story. By way of compromise he told her a young story in an adult way.

“It’ll sound very foolish, I’m afraid. There’s so little of it to tell. It’s one of those things that come to nothing; like a bud that comes too early or too late.

“It was six years ago. I was in Geneva. I had gone there during a long vac. to polish up my French. I was staying at one of those pensions where it is supposed that nothing but French is ever spoken, and where in point of fact you find some other Englishmen and speak nothing but English the whole time. That’s what would have happened to me, if she’d not been there. She was French; she was not eighteen. I was surprised at her being there till I discovered that the patronne was a cousin. She could not have been more ruthlessly chaperoned. I was never alone with her. There were always four other people in the room. We never said an intimate thing to one another. But you know how it is when you’re young: how by looking at one another, by reading a newspaper together, by agreeing that you like to eat strawberries and cream, with the fruit, the cream, the sugar separate, not all mushed up, you build up—well, I don’t know what you build up, but you fall in love.

“I don’t know what she felt about me. I know what I felt about her. It was bound up with romanticism, chivalry. I used to picture situations when I’d die for her, when I’d achieve wild acts of valour for her. You can guess the kind of things. I would devote my whole life to her service. When she left the pension and went back to Paris, I thought I should die, I was so miserable. And there was nothing to show for it. I hadn’t a note from her, not a photograph, not a lock of hair. She’d nothing of mine, either. Nothing to remember me by. I was afraid that she’d forget me, before I could prove to her that I was worthy of her. It might take so long. She was so beautiful. She would be so far away, so many men during that time would wish to marry her. ‘I must make her a present,’ I told myself.

“I had no money, nothing. My parents were wise about that. They knew if I had money I should spend it. They arranged to pay all my pension expenses direct. Even my pocket money: I had nothing except a few sous. The only thing of any value that I had was my return ticket, a first-class one. They had been generous there. ‘Well, I can pawn this,’ I thought.

“I didn’t get much for it. I forget how much or how little. But I know that there wasn’t a great deal left over when I had bought the fourth-class ticket that was to take its place. A few hundred francs, not more. I spent every sou of them on a small gold brooch. It was probably a tawdry, trumpery little thing. Probably it wasn’t really gold at all; just gilt. But it cost me all I had. I thought it exquisite.”

He paused, looking at her interrogatively, to see how the history was affecting her. Her face wore an intent expression that encouraged him to change slightly the tempo of the story; making it, since she took it seriously, less ironic than he had intended.

“I counted the hours after I had sent it. I made the most exhaustive inquiries at the post office to know how soon I could expect an answer. So much depended on the reply. Would she send me a short little note of thanks or a real letter? If it were to be a real letter then she would probably take a day or two to write it. On the first morning when I could hope for a reply, though I was so excited that I awoke with daylight, though I listened for the postman’s knock for a full half-hour before there was any possibility of his arriving, I almost hoped that there would be no letter with a French postmark beside my plate at the breakfast table. When I saw a pile of letters waiting there, my heart sank. All those letters could not be from friends. I ran them over quickly with my fingers. I gave a sigh of thankfulness. They had English stamps on them; every one.

“There was a second post, late in the afternoon. I did not expect to hear by it. If she was going to wait, it would not be for a few hours, not for a day. She would need a whole night to think over her reply. I did not associate with her the small package that arrived by registered mail that the femme de chambre brought in high excitement, with the explanation that she had herself signed for it.

“Then I saw the French stamp mark. I did not dare to open it. Was this package of good or evil omen? I had not expected her to send me anything. She might have thought the exchange of gifts was the equivalent of an exchange of vows. Or she might have thought ‘He’s sent me something, what a nuisance! I suppose I must send him something, too.’ The present might have meant either of those two things. I tore open the envelope that was bound round a smaller enclosed packet, with what novelists describe as mingled feelings.

“It was in a handwriting that was unfamiliar; that was not hers, round and flourished; it was masculine and methodical. I turned quickly to the signature. It was her father’s. I stared at it. My courage waned. Then, with slow fingers, I turned back to the first page. It was very brief. His daughter, he said, had shown him the present that I had sent her. He was returning it herewith. In England very probably things were different. But in France ‘it was not convenable for young ladies to receive presents from young gentlemen.’

“I re-read the letter, then I opened the packet. There it lay: the trinket I had chosen with such care and thought, that I had wrapped up so carefully, that I had pictured lying against her heart. It had symbolized our romance. Its return symbolized its death. I felt that I wanted to die. I pushed the brooch into my pocket. I walked out of the house. Dinner would be ready in twenty minutes, but I had no appetite.

“Our pension was near the lake. It was one of those summer evenings when everything is calm and the air warm. The lake really did look a mirror, with the hills reflected in it, and the roofs of houses. No one was within sight. I took the brooch from my pocket. It lay in the palm of my hand. I stared at it. It was the symbol of my unhappiness. Tears came into my eyes. I clenched my fist over it. ‘If she can’t have it, then no one shall.’ I swung my arm back. I flung it from me. The sun caught it as it curved, turning towards the water, gilding it with fire. There was a splash, a ripple. Then the lake was a mirror once again. I stood staring at its smooth surface. ‘Love’s drowned,’ I thought.”

It was a story that he had told many times, and always with considerable success. But never in quite that way. He had told it cynically with a shrugged shoulder, an attitude of “How ridiculous one can be at twenty.” Now, however, with this intent blue-grey gaze fixed on him, he told the story simply, sentimentally.

He paused, waiting with the raconteur’s sense of an audience, for the comment which would give him the clue to what his own next remark should be. It was a very simple comment.

“That’s rather beautiful,” she said. There was a tender interest in her eyes.

Rather beautiful. No one had ever thought it that before. Yet perhaps that was what it was, since the mood in which he had flung the jewel into the lake had been poetic; had not been a piece of rhodomontade; had been an act of self-expression.

He was so touched that he did something by which he was himself surprised.

He fumbled in his breast pocket; he produced a wad of letters and sheets of paper, glanced through it, extracted a sheet, handed it to her with a blush.

“It’s a thing I wrote the other evening: a sonnet. It’s nothing, I mean. I dashed it off. When I got back after your party. I don’t know if you’ll think it silly. I thought I’d show it you. It’s… well, I mean, because of you.”

He was blushing fiercely. It was not true that he had dashed it off; or that he had even begun to write it on the evening of the party. It was the result of a fortnight’s burnishing. The blush was not, however, inspired by the untruth, but by a very genuine shyness about his verses. He was always writing poetry; always sonnets. But he would have died sooner than confess it to his friends.

“Of course, I know it isn’t anything. I just.…”

She interrupted him.

“Please,” she said.

The handwriting was small, but very clear. The handwriting of a man who has learnt Greek. She read the lines, without focusing their meaning. It was not what his poem said, but that a poem was written. No one had ever written a poem to her before.

The telegram announcing her father-in-law’s death reached Jane Balliol at lunch-time on the following day. The funeral, it said, would be on the Monday. There was no need for her to come down. He himself would be returning late that afternoon. He would be home by dinner-time.

He entered the house as calmly as though he were returning from a week-end visit of a business nature. He discussed the plans for the disposal of his father’s property as though it belonged to someone else.

“It should realize about ten thousand pounds. That’ll make a big difference to Stella. If she invests her share wisely it’ll bring her in very nearly three hundred a year. She’ll be independent now.”

His wife’s eyes had remained fixed on him while he talked, in a look of the most fixed attention. It was her habit to look straight at the person who was addressing her, as though she were absorbing every word. But whenever a pause came in the talk, she would open so completely different a subject that her husband never knew whether she had been listening to one word that he had been saying.

She waited till he had finished talking; then, as though the last word had been said on that topic, “You remember that young man who came to dinner with us when Stella came? He called on Friday. I’ve asked him to dine with us to-morrow.”

VIII

Stella Balliol sat before the mirror, arranging the pad over which her back-drawn hair was puffed forward on to her forehead, above a short curled fringe. She was to dine that night with Alan Cheyne. On the evening’s course would depend her answer to his proposal. “In four hours I may be an engaged girl.” In four hours Alan might be preparing The Times announcement that would vindicate her in the eyes of women like Mrs. Shirley. He might be. But she did not know. She was undecided. It would depend on the way things happened during the next three hours. She had answered Alan’s letter with the briefest of notes:

“DEAR ALAN,

“I was touched by your letter, naturally. Could we not dine together one day next week? Monday would be the best for me.”

She did not tell him about her father’s death. She did not use the excuse for delay it would have given her. It would have been an excuse, she knew that. And she had no use for excuses, for the avoidance of straight issues. Her father’s death did not affect her as regarded Alan. It did, as regarded Beccles, financially. With an independent income, she could face a row with him; which she had never been able to before. Emotionally, too, there was a difference. There was no one in the world now she mattered to. If she chose to throw herself into the militant suffrage movement, she would be hurting nobody except herself.

When she had considered Alan Cheyne’s proposal from the purely utilitarian point of view, and it was hard to consider such a proposal in any other light, she had thought of it not in the light of finance, as many girls would have done; as an opportunity to give up work that worried her; but as a platform from which she could deliver unconventional opinions. The only emotional pull that the proposal had made was in point of fact in relation to her father—the knowledge that her marriage would have made him happy. But that consideration would not have decided her. She would have refrained from doing things she wanted to do because the doing of them could cause her father pain; but she would not do things she did not want, to please him. She would have despised herself if she had made her father’s death an excuse for indecision.

Her fingers trembled as they smoothed her hair over the pad. She was excited. It would be absurd for her to pretend that she was not excited. It was not only the first proposal of her life, but it was likely to be her last. On her reply depended her whole life’s future. Yet her excitement was not that of a girl standing on the threshold of enchantment, but of a man on the eve of a business interview that might mean promotion.

It was not in that mood that she had pictured herself at such a moment.

She closed her eyes. How was it that she would have pictured it? How, if this was to be a romantic, not a practical decision, would she arrange the setting? How did the outline run? She could not see distinctly the features of the young man who had proposed by letter. He would be young; as young as herself, or younger. He would be in love with her; very much in love with her; timid in the expression of his love. He would look at her with wide eyes. He would begin to speak, and be afraid to speak. She would glow happily. Ordinarily he was effective and talkative. But now through love for her he was silent, stammering. It would amuse her for a little to keep him in suspense; to make bright conversation, giving the impression that she was really interested in the issues raised by a leader in that morning’s Times. Then she would relent. She would pause, she would meet his glance, her eyes would soften. “It’s all right. Don’t worry, silly, it’s going to be ‘yes’.” And the whole expression of his face would change; like a garden when the sun comes behind a cloud and shines on it. In his face there would be nothing but happiness, excitement, relief, love for her. It was in that way she had pictured it.

With a blink, a shake of the shoulders, she opened her eyes, saw her reflection in the glass.

“Don’t be a fool. That isn’t the way it is. That isn’t the way it’s going to be. You’ve not been proposed to by a young man who’s tongue-tied with adoration. You’ve been proposed to by Alan Cheyne, who’s got as much red blood in him as a grey mullet; who will spend his wedding-night discussing indented labour in the New Hebrides. Don’t be a fool. Pull yourself together.”

Her prophecy proved unsurprisingly correct. Alan called for her, as she had expected, exactly one minute after he had announced his intention of arriving. His attire was pedantically correct, even to the mathematically exact knot of his shoe-laces. His clothes had, however, the same featureless expression as his face. There was nothing about him by which a stranger would be likely to remember him. In a way he reminded her of her brother: a drained version of her brother. He had the slow voice, the precise articulation, the impersonal address; without the fresh colouring, the vitality, the mental agility of Edward. During the weeks while their acquaintance was ripening into friendship this was the reason she had given herself for liking him. Even now she was not sure that her feelings for him were not mainly sisterly. She was never thrilled by his company, but she enjoyed it.

Just as she found herself enjoying now, in a jolly, impersonal kind of way, even though she was in mourning, the fun of dressing up, the drive in the hansom through the thronged, brightly lighted streets, the glitter of a restaurant; the ritual of the head waiter’s oriental deference; the second waiter’s bowing of them to their table; the presentation of the large embossed menu-card; the deliberation as to their choice of dishes; and Alan was a good person to be taken out by. He neither handed you a large menu and left you in embarrassed contemplation of it; nor again did he take all the initiative out of your hand, by saying “We’ll have this, and this, and this.” He combined the two. He made a précis of that vast list. In each course he offered you a couple of choices, or three choices, say; so that you were only left with the pleasant part of the selection. She always enjoyed being taken out by Alan.

She enjoyed, too, the freedom of their discussions. He had a fresh, informed mind. They could follow each other’s allusions. They would talk in shorthand. She could never imagine herself being bored by Alan. Yet marriage… and what marriage stood for.… She could not picture Alan making love to her.

She looked closely, inquiringly at him, as he developed the theory that after the next general election the labour party, though small, might, by holding the balance of power, become the key to the political situation. What women had there been in his life, she wondered. He was thirty-five. Had he ever been in love? Had he ever had an intrigue: a real intrigue? Did that side of life mean anything to him? One was always told that men were “like that.” But they needn’t be. There were men, as there were women, who were congenitally cold, to whom there was no question of inhibited impulses, who were incapable of warmth. Very likely Alan was like that. He had proposed to her because he had reached the marrying age; perhaps because he wanted children; but more probably because he needed the background of a home and hostess.

“And I’m the kind of woman he thinks would make him a good wife. And I would, if I were only that part of me he sees. If I were content to argue, to talk, to do nothing. But if I were to join Miss Draft, if I were to throw my whole self into this movement, would I be the kind of wife he’d need? Probably not. If I’m not going to be the kind of wife he needs I’ve no right to say ‘yes.’ I’d be a cheat. I’d be taking and not giving. That’s the kind of thing Miss Draft can’t see. But it’s true. You’ve got to keep to your bargain. If a man marries you, expecting a specific thing, it’s your duty as a wife to try and give it him. Otherwise you cheat.”

There are certain passages in life when a person sees as under a hard white light, the course his life must follow; recognizes the limitations imposed on him by heredity, environment, education; knowing what things are outside his scope; when he almost foresees the future. Such a passage may be of an instant’s length; or a year’s slow growth. During the few seconds while Alan Cheyne was explaining his views on the composition of the next parliament Stella saw in one glance, as one sees set up on a printed page, a detailed array of arguments. She and Alan might think alike. But they didn’t feel alike. And marriage was a question of feeling, not of thinking. If she could take the same impersonal interest in affairs that Alan did, then they could be happy. For if you took an impersonal interest in affairs, you never felt any urge to get things done. You stood aside, a spectator, watching the current of events. As her brother had. That had been enough for him. But for her it was not enough. And because it was not enough sooner or later she knew well she would take up a line of action opposed diametrically to Alan’s picture of the behaviour proper to his wife. Stella did not hold Miss Draft’s opinions on a married woman’s right to her own career. You owed loyalty of that kind if of no other to the husband whose name you bore, and whose means supported you.

There was no chance of her making Alan Cheyne his kind of wife.

There he was, setting out his belief in Ramsay Macdonald’s future. “He always plays for safety. He’s not like Keir Hardie. He looks dangerous, but he isn’t really. He goes no further than he knows is safe.” In another moment or so, feeling that he had spoken enough, he would invite her opinion. He would listen carefully to what she said, amplifying it, interpolating comments, building up her ideas for her, stimulating her imagination so that she saw her own arguments in a clearer, better light; so that she could be able to follow her arguments a step further than she had of herself been able. And it would go on like that till they had reached the coffee stage; just as business men did, when they wanted to put a deal through. Then in the same tone of voice that he had said, “I wonder if you read that third note of Massingham’s in this week’s Nation?” he would ask: “You got my letter, Stella?”

And she couldn’t, she could not, wait for that. She could not sit under the shadow of that certain prospect. It had to be settled, to be got over, done with.…

She interrupted him in the middle of a sentence.

“I’m sorry, Alan. But I’ve got to tell you. About your letter. It wouldn’t work. I know it. I don’t want to discuss it. I was proud and touched. I’ll never forget it. But it wouldn’t work. I don’t want you to mention it again. Never refer to it in any way. I think I missed your last point about Keir Hardie. What, exactly, did you mean when you said.…”

Through the remainder of the evening she kept the flow of talk bright and friendly. She even managed to enjoy herself. But it was wearily that she climbed the stairs to her bedroom at the evening’s end. She sat before her mirror and leant forward, her elbows rested on the table, her chin supported on her hands; staring at her reflection; remembering in what spirit she had sat there four hours earlier. “That’s that.”

She had done more in that interval than refuse a man. She had accepted a destiny. She had turned her back on personal happiness; or rather, on what for most women constituted personal happiness: a husband, a home, children; the things that with a part of herself she intensely needed. She wasn’t a fish, like Alan. She was capable of passion. She knew that. She needed to love and to be loved. Looking at her reflection in the mirror she knew beyond cavilling that happiness of that kind would pass her by. She wasn’t the type that men fell in love with; not in the way she wanted to be loved. Somewhere beneath the sun there must exist the mate for whose nature her own was destined; but she would never meet him. Or if she did, it would be too late. She would have so arranged her life that it would have no place for him. You couldn’t just sit and wait on the off-chance of the one person turning up. You had to take up what lay to hand.

“I’ve got to go forward now.”

On the following morning, during her luncheon hour she called at the offices of the W.S.M. It was the first time she had been there. Miss Draft was seated in the front office. She looked up quickly as Stella came towards her. Her face wore an expression of, “I’m really very busy. You shouldn’t bother me with personal things at a time like this.” There was a telephone at her side. Three large books of reference, a calendar, a clock were set along the back of the desk. One of the drawers was drawn half out, revealing a card index. The front of the desk was covered with little piles of correspondence. The current issue of The Times was neatly folded beside the blotter. Miss Draft looked like one of the fixtures at her desk.

“Well?” Her voice was abrupt, with a “No social chatter here, please” note about it.

“I want to know if I can be of any use here?”

“How do you mean—of any use? We’ve no room for anybody extra in this office.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. I meant work outside.”

“You mean active work?”

“Yes.”

“Militant?”

“Yes.”

Miss Draft eyed her cautiously; with a self-questioning suspicion.

“It won’t be all jam and honey. It won’t be what you’re accustomed to. Do you realize what you are letting yourself in for?”

Stella smiled to herself, at Miss Draft’s picture of her life of jam and honey: that small club-sitting-room; long hours in the Teach-Yourself-by-Post Institute.

“I know what I’m in for,” she replied.

“It’s not just that you’ll be shocking your friends. There is danger; real danger, you understand?”

“I’m prepared for that.”

“Very well. How much time can you give to the Cause?”

“As much as I’m needed.”

“What about your work?”

“I’m going to give that up.”

“Oh.…” Miss Draft opened her mouth wide, in surprise; paused; then a flush came into her cheeks; the first flush that Stella had ever seen there. She rose to her feet, took Stella’s hand between both of hers, pressed it firmly. “I’m proud of you. I did not know you had it in you. I thought you wanted to play at being a suffragist. There are so many of your class who do. We hate that. It’s a game to them. It’s real to us. They lose interest in it the moment they find it is real. But you, you are fine.”

Her eyes shone with an enthusiasm that was not ridiculous; that was saved from being ridiculous by the alacrity with which she reverted to her brisk, competent officialdom.

“Let me see. Do you feel ready to begin at once? There is a meeting at the Colingdale Town Hall. Asquith’s speaking. They have had special cards printed, so as to keep us out. But we’ve got hold of the cards; got some of our own printed to look just the same. Twenty-four of us are going. Separately, of course. We shall sit in different parts of the house. When question time begins we’ll start one by one getting up and asking questions. He won’t answer, of course. He never does. Then we stand on our chairs simultaneously and shout ‘Votes for Women!’ We’ll be flung out. But we’ll have ruined the meeting. Would you like to come?”

For answer Stella stretched her hand out for the ticket.

Immediately on her return to her office, she sent a message to Mr. Beccles’ secretary, to ask if she might see him. Within a few minutes a reply had come. Would she follow the messenger at once?

It was the first time she had seen Mr. Beccles since her return from her father’s funeral. He greeted her with an air of serious, rather patronizing sympathy.

“So you’re back, Miss Balliol? Well, well. I know how you must be feeling. I remember when my own father died. Twenty years ago it is now. Life’s never quite the same afterwards. Still, one has to go on, make the best of things. It’s hard at first. Perhaps that’s what you’ve come to me about. I’d been thinking about it myself. A change of scene, perhaps. Half of your holiday; or indeed, your whole holiday, if you should wish it. It can be arranged quite easily.”

“I haven’t come about that, Mr. Beccles. I’ve come to resign my position here.”

“What?”

The dismay on his face was extremely flattering to Stella’s self-esteem. So he has valued me. He’ll miss me here. He hasn’t liked me. He’s distrusted me. But he’s known I was a good worker.

His astonishment was short-lived. He was too good a tactician to allow her to see more than a flash of his discomposure. He leant forward across the table, revolving a pen between his fingers in his most confidential manner.

“This is a surprise to me. And not by any means a pleasant one. You won’t need my assurance on that point. But surely we can find some way of avoiding it. I imagine that you may find at such a time a number of things to do; in connection with your father’s death. Your instinct perhaps is to say, ‘I must have six months clear. Then I’ll find something else.’ A very natural instinct, Miss Balliol. But, seriously, I think you would be unwise to follow it. After all, capable though you are, there are a great many competent young women looking for a very small number of well-paid posts.”

He smiled with a knowing facetiousness. Stella knew what was in his mind. He was trying to recover from the high impression of her value that his first astonishment had given her.

“It isn’t that.”

“No? Then perhaps you were thinking of applying for some post somewhere else; or indeed, have already been offered some post by another house. Very likely a better offer. I know that such salaries are being paid nowadays. At the same time, the bird in the hand, you know. It’s no good taking a well-salaried post, if the organization is unsound and the salary is going to stop within a week or so. There’s no point in that, Miss Balliol, is there?” His face assumed an exceedingly avuncular expression. “At the same time,” he added, his face brightening to an “every cloud has a silver lining” look, “I don’t really see why with a little persuasion the directors shouldn’t be coaxed into raising your salary a little.”

Stella had watched his gambit with amusement.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Beccles. It isn’t that. I’ve decided to give up office work altogether.”

“So?” The pouncing look came into his eyes. “So that’s it, is it? I might have suspected—how stupid of me, a legacy, the need for office work removed.”

“More or less.”

“Ah, well.…” Mr. Beccles sat back in his chair. His most benevolent expression on his face, but a spirit of genuine spite beneath his friendliness. He’s never liked me. He’s resented my independence! His next remark proved to her that she had guessed right.

“So that’s the explanation, is it? Well, we shall be sorry to lose you; very, very sorry. We always appreciated the way you worked for us. At the same time, I can’t pretend that I don’t think you’re wise. It’s all very well to talk of women working on equal terms with men. No one’s more pleased than I to see women support themselves. But only when they need; only when they absolutely need, Miss Balliol. You’ll never persuade me that an office desk is the real place for a woman.”

She made no reply. Her blood boiled angrily. As he had known it would. That’s what he thinks of me; of my high-vaunted independence. Just a façade; to convince myself and my world that I was acting of choice, not of necessity. As soon as I had a chance of flinging up the job I’ve taken it. Proving that women were at heart what he had always maintained they were: cats who wanted to sit in front of a warm fire; who, whatever they might argue, only really wanted one thing: a man who will support them. If not a husband, then a father. Well, he can think it, if he chooses.

She left his room, fretting with irritation. Men: they all thought the same things about one. It was so hard to answer them, since ninety per cent, of women were like that; since they’d been trained to be like that; since they’d acquired through generations the characteristics of the sea anemone: beautiful and useless. But lots of them weren’t like that. The rest of them were not going to be like that. Men—they’d show them.…

It was in a heightened state of excitement and rebellion that she presented her card that evening at the doorway of the Colingdale Town Hall. There was a large crowd streaming towards the door. It was a masculine audience, for the most part. Each person held his card for the doorkeeper to examine. As Stella passed into the hall, an argument was in progress.

“But I tell you I was sent a card. I’ve lost it,” a man was insisting angrily.

“And I’m telling you that no one can get in without a card.”

“But I had a card.”

“There’s no proof of that.”

“Proof to hell! You’ll get the proof of that when I vote Tory at the next election.”

At that point a policeman intervened.

“Come along now, come along. We can’t have any of this nonsense here.”

Stella chuckled to herself. She liked to think that a man who had a perfect right to be there should be refused admittance, while she who had no right at all should be walking quickly to a seat.

She arrived five minutes before the meeting was due to start. The hall was already three quarters full. She found a seat, however, in the centre. She looked round her with a slow, searching glance. Somewhere in this audience were the twenty-three other rebels. She wondered which they were. The rows of faces had the uniform expression of a crowd. There was nothing to distinguish any one from any other. Some were older, some prettier, some better dressed. But there was no look of individuality. The people with that look were being officious at the doorway or were waiting in the dressing-room for the signal to begin the meeting. On her right was a callow, pimply-faced youth; ill-dressed and earnest-looking: the kind of young man who went to night schools to improve himself. On her left was a middle-aged, prosperous-looking member of the lower middle classes. He was fat and there was a strain on the buttons of his waistcoat. A large gold watch-chain hung with insignia was looped across his stomach. What would they think if they were told that they were sitting next a suffragist?”

She waited impatiently through the preliminaries. The chairman, leading the way up the stairs, then standing aside so that their distinguished visitor could take precedence upon the platform; the thin file of local dignitaries, some in dark lounge suits, two or three in full evening dress; the applause of the audience; the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s bow; the hesitation round the chairs; the little jokes and the self-conscious laughs; the seating, then the chairman leaning forward across the table, his whispered consultation with the Chancellor; then two loud taps upon the table, a slow rising to his feet, a clearing of his throat; then the first sentence of his introduction. “I consider it, ladies and gentlemen, no mean honour that I should sit here on such an evening as your chairman.…”

It was a bromidic speech. It lasted for ten minutes. It did exactly what such a speech should not do. It left the audience limp and listless; in a mood of “Well, we’ll give this fellow one chance. If he doesn’t get our attention within three minutes, we’ll go to sleep.”

Asquith rose to his feet. He bent his head forward in acknowledgment of the applause. His large-featured, florid face, crowned with its helmet of grey hair, possessed a dignity that put him, before he had spoken a single word, in a different class from the other men upon the platform. He paused, leaning forward, his hands upon the table. It was a dramatic pause. At last you felt that something worth listening to was to be said. Then he began to speak in slow, quiet sentences that gave the impression that a liner does when it draws slowly from a harbour: a gradual gathering of strength. That impression remained right through his speech. You always felt that he was capable of greater speed and greater strength; that he had something held in reserve; even when the pace quickened, when his voice was raised.

It was the first time that Stella had heard him speak. She had regarded him for many months now as the arch-enemy. The Liberal party that had betrayed the woman’s party under Gladstone had again betrayed the women under Campbell Bannerman. Asquith was the premier’s adjutant. He was more to blame than C.B. But as she listened, she forgot he was the enemy. She surrendered to the power of his personality. Her eyes fixed upon his face, she found herself following his sentences, so that her lips were actually forming the words he used. She had listened in her time to a great deal of forceful argument; much of it from powerful speakers, lit by passion. But she had never before listened to a speech that carried so much weight. She felt that each argument was based on knowledge: knowledge of the past, knowledge of men’s minds. Each least opinion seemed the result of a considered judgment, a weighing of all the evidence. There was no guesswork. Absorbed in the conduct of the argument, she forgot the reason for her presence there.

She did not remember it till the speech was over; till Asquith in a burst of applause had taken his seat, with the chairman leaning across the table, whispering. Then she realized. Her cheeks flamed hotly. That’s how it was, of course. That’s how it always was. Man with his inherited capacity to impress woman! She had been sitting like any schoolgirl, lapping up arguments just because they bore the stamp of masculine assurance. No wonder men like Beccles were contemptuous of her. Women like herself gave them the right to be. Her anger was as great as her previous absorption had been. She had not only the enemy in others to fight but the enemy in herself.

Her fists clenched tightly as the chairman rose for his brief bromidic testimony. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, though our distinguished guest has only a short time further at our disposal, he will be very pleased to answer any questions.” “To try to answer any questions,” Mr. Asquith corrected him.

There was a ripple of laughter that heightened Stella’s irritation. Yes, that was the way they got their effects; with that power of theirs to turn the laugh against their opponents; never answering questions, avoiding them, making it look as though they had been answered; because they had made an audience giggle. Men… they’d show them.…

There was the second or two of hesitation that always follows when questions are invited; when everyone is shy of being the first to speak; when everyone is waiting for a lead; when there is a self-conscious nudging of elbows; a whispered “Yes, go on, Bill. You ask him.” That ends with someone getting up and saying, “Well, just to start the ball rolling…” and asking some very absurd question that places the chief speaker in an immediately strong position.

That is what ordinarily happens. In another second on this occasion it would have happened. But from the centre of the room a voice called out, not in the diffident, self-apologetic manner of a first questioner, but with a peremptory sergeant-major’s voice, like an order on parade.

“When is the government going to keep its promise to women?”

There was a hush: then a ripple of laughter. One or two whispers: “Suffragists.” “Where?” “What is it?” “That’s her, with the purple hat.” Asquith rose to his feet. There was a bland smile upon his face.

“I can assure you that the question of Woman’s Suffrage is occupying a great deal of my colleagues’ time.”

He underlined “a great deal.” There was a roar of laughter. It was the kind of reply that maddened Stella. She jumped up.

“That question has not been answered.”

Mr. Asquith turned towards her slowly.

“My impression was.…”

He was interrupted by a loud-yelled “Votes for Women!” just below the platform. From the audience came a murmur of disapproval. There was an angrily loud “Shut up!” The sense of opposition stimulated Stella. She jumped to her seat. “I demand an answer. Taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Within a minute the orderly meeting had become a pandemonium. Women were crying “Votes for Women!” There were shouts of “Throw them out! “Policemen were hurrying down the gangways. The chair on which Stella stood was pulled from beneath her, throwing her forward so that she barked her shin against the chair in front. The pain made her lose her temper. She tried to pull back the chair which the man from behind had taken. He resisted. He was stronger than she was. Suddenly she changed her tactics. She pushed instead of pulling. He went over backwards, loosening his hold upon the chair. She dragged it from him. He ducked. “Now, now,” he said, and catching her arm, twisted her wrist behind her. He was rough and hurt her. She lashed backwards with her foot. The high heel caught him on the ankle. He gave her wrist a twist that made her cry. “Hi, bobbie, I give this girl in charge.” A large policeman pushed his way through the chairs towards her. She ducked, struggled; an elbow caught her a fierce blow on the cheekbone. She kicked at the policeman’s shins. But his hands were strong; his fingers gripped her tightly by the arm and neck. He pushed her towards the gangway. Once there, she found herself submitting meekly to his force.

“You’re going to spend the night in gaol,” he told her grimly.

Next morning she was brought before the magistrate. During the long night in the small hard cell, she had phrased and rephrased the defence that she would make. She would not be allowed to speak long. She would have to say only what was essential. Every point must tell. That was how she had argued during the long night, when she had paced, with the fever of hysteria still on her, backwards and forwards, up and down. But towards morning, exhausted in mind and body, resting on the narrow bed, she had grown drowsy and slipped into sleep. She had woken stiff and cold; her body bruised and aching, her anger subsided, the courage ebbed from her. In the small tarnished mirror a draggled reflection stared back at her. Her hair was tousled, her cheeks pale. There was a dark swelling beneath her eyes. “I look a sight.” She felt one, too. This must be what men felt like when they talked about the morning after. She recalled detail by detail the hectic passages of the night before. She could not believe that it had ever happened. She recalled phrase by phrase the speech with which she was to make her defence in court that morning. Her heart sank at the prospect. “I’ll never manage it,” she thought. It was not courage she lacked, but strength. One began a thing when one was in the mood; when one’s blood was hot. One could do anything then. But when one’s blood was cold, when one was tired, when one’s head ached and one’s body ached, in the cold grey morning light.… It was different then. “I’ve got to put a bold face on it.”

She had pictured the scene in court as an extension of the scene in the hall; in terms of high dramatics. But it was in actual fact as different as her own mood was different. She could not associate the free fight, the brutality, the anger, the abuse of the previous evening with the mild, tired, bald-headed gentleman seated at a desk. Nor did the very correct, very respectful constable in the witness-box seem the same person whose fingers had bruised her neck and arms. She listened to the evidence as though she were hearing an impersonal story that did not concern herself. It sounded so matter of fact.

“I observed the accused, your Honour, struggling with two members of the audience. I took her by the arms. She resisted me. I had to use considerable force to eject her from the hall.”

“In what condition would you say she was?”

“Extremely excitable, your Honour.”

“Would you say she was under the influence of alcohol?”

“Oh no, your Honour.”

The evidence only lasted a few minutes. The half-dozen people in the gallery listened to it with listless, apathetic expressions on their faces. The case, clearly, did not interest them. Stella did not see how, from the evidence, it could be expected to interest anyone. It was a singularly unstimulating atmosphere for heroics.

The magistrate turned to her.

“Do you wish to cross-examine the constable?”

“No.”

“You admit the substantial truth of his evidence?”

“Yes.”

“That amounts to a plea of guilty.”

“I suppose so.”

“It does. Now, let me see,” he shuffled among some papers.

Now’s the time for my speech. I must pull myself together. I mustn’t stammer. I mustn’t stumble. I’ll just say what I’ve got to say without frills; straightforwardly. I’ll tell him that I’m proud of what I’ve done; that he can put me into prison if he likes. But that won’t stop me; nor will it stop any other woman who’s worth anything. I’m not going to be hysterical or excitable. I’ll just tell them the truth: simply.

But in police courts, no more than in drawing-rooms, does one’s imaginary conversation get the setting of an actual stage.

There was a kindly look on the magistrate’s face as he began his cross-examination.

“Let me see: your name is Stella Balliol. You are twenty-nine years old. You are employed by the Teach-Yourself-By-Post Institute. What salary do you receive? Four pounds. Then you must be in a position of some responsibility?”

“I am in charge of a department.”

“How many girls have you under you?”

“Thirty.”

“Really.…” He hesitated.

He’s going to start lecturing me. Now’s my chance. But instead he continued his examination. He asked her where her parents lived. She had no parents, she told him, but she had been born in Devonshire. He asked her where. Near Chagford. Really, a lovely country. She was an orphan, then. For long? Her mother had died twelve years ago. And her father.…”

“My father died last week.”

For the first time there was a sign of interest in the court. There was a shuffle; a lot of whispering in the gallery; a shout of “Silence!” from the usher. The reporters looked up from their pads. The magistrate sat back in his chair.

“Your father died last week. Well.…” He paused. “In that case I shall dismiss this case with costs. I hope and trust, Miss Balliol, that neither I nor any Justice of the Peace will see you in such a place again. Next case.”

Before Stella had realized what was happening, she had been ushered out of the box; the clerk of the court had collected ten shillings from her, and the constable, who had handled her on the previous evening so roughly, was showing considerable help and solicitude in leading her to the street and pointing out the quickest way to her office.

It is surprising what things attract notice in a newspaper. A new novel may be reviewed at half-column length in a dozen papers but only those of the novelist’s friends to whom he has sent copies will be aware of the book’s existence. But the bare mention of a name in any disreputable connection is certain of a wide and instantaneous circulation. In only one paper was there any mention of the disturbance at Colingdale: a paragraph at the very foot of a column on the back page stated that as a result of the disturbance Miss Stella Balliol had been taken into custody. Yet before Stella had been inside the office half a minute she realized that every person in the place knew that she had spent the night in gaol; realized it from the furtive awed look that the porter gave her; from the nudged whispers at the reception desk; from the sudden silence followed by the swiftly turned and lifted heads in the large room where her subordinates were bent over their desks. They had been talking about her; they were looking at her with the mingled interest and scorn that is reserved for those who make public exhibitions of themselves.

Stella felt very tired as she seated herself at her desk. Yes; they knew all right. They had noted her bruised face. They were gleefully asking each other what would happen to the head of a department who arrived three hours late with an excuse of that kind. And it was for women like these that she had been spending the night in gaol; that she had been humiliated and hurt. It was for women like these that she had declined Alan Cheyne’s offer. She laughed at herself. What a cause to champion. They didn’t want to be fought for. They didn’t want a vote. They didn’t want independence; they were quite happy sitting there, waiting for some man to come along. They were glad they had work, because it gave them an excuse for a latch-key; a flouting of parental discipline. They didn’t want more than that. They no more wanted to be free than the negro slaves in the West Indies, who did not know what to do with their freedom when they were given it. What was the point in working for such people, sacrificing oneself for them? One got no thanks from them for it.

There was a tap at the door. A messenger boy presented himself.

“Mr. Beccles says will you please go to him; at once.”

There was a pointed change in the manner of the message. There was no question now of her going when she was ready: at her convenience. It was “at once.” And there was an insolence in the boy’s manner; as though he knew that she was in trouble; as though he recognized from the change in the manner of the message that she no longer held the position in her employer’s confidence that she had held yesterday; that her favour was no longer of the same importance.

In Mr. Beccles’ reception of her there was no change. He was as urbane as ever. Which he would be, of course. He was too clever to be anything else. He knew how to time his pounces. But she knew that he had noted with one glance how the pallor of her cheeks was heightened by the darkening bruise under her eye.

“I’m so sorry to have to trouble you in this way,” he said. “But there is a little matter that I think ought to be cleared up. I don’t know if you have seen—probably you have not—a paragraph in to-day’s Daily Tribune?”

“I don’t take in the Tribune.”

“Neither do I, ordinarily. To-day I had my attention called to it. It refers to a deplorable incident at a political meeting at—where was it? let me see—oh yes, at Colingdale, in which a woman with the same name as yourself was taken into custody. Now, I don’t know if any of the members of our staff will have seen this paragraph. They may not have. But you know how rumours start. You can guess how serious it would be for office discipline if there were any idea that the head of a department had been mixed up in an incident of this kind. So I wanted to consult you as to the steps that it would be most advisable for us to take, to prevent any suspicion that it is to you that this paragraph refers.”

He smiled in a spirit of suave confederacy. She loathed that suaveness. He was waiting for his pounce. How disappointed he would be if he were deprived of the opportunity. How well he played a winning hand; with all his defences planned, in case the cards did not fall the way he wanted.

“I’m afraid there would be no point in that,” she said.

“Why not, Miss Balliol?”

“Because it is to me that that paragraph refers.”

“Really!”

He sat back in his chair, looking at her with assumed astonishment. Then he picked up an envelope from his desk and handed it to her. “In that case, Miss Balliol, I have no option but to approve the Managing Director’s suggestion that you should leave this office immediately. Instead of, as you suggested, a month from now. You will find a month’s salary in that envelope. I am sorry, Miss Balliol, that our long association should end in this way.”

He had the skill not to overplay his hand. How he hates me; how he’s longed for an opportunity such as this. As she walked through the crowded room to her own small office, she looked in a different spirit at the group of furtive, whispering girls. She saw them not so much as the people she was fighting for, but as the raw levies that one day would fight for her; against men like Beccles. It was with such material as this that she would fight him. It was not only men who had to be fought, but women who had to be roused. Her hatred for Beccles gave her the courage to go into the battle hopefully.

That evening Stella read across two columns of her evening paper the headline “Suffragette arrested within a week of father’s death.” There was a photograph of herself as she left the court; a cunning brush had embellished her black eye. The evidence was given in full. On the morning papers the story was relegated to a side column stature. The wording of the headline remained, however, and the photograph. It enlivened every breakfast-table in the country.

IX

In the School House reading-room at Fernhurst some twenty boys were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the morning papers. They had only ten minutes before chapel in which to memorize the chief facts of the previous day’s cricket. The moment the papers were flung upon the table they pounced at them, turning the pages quickly till they reached the one page that mattered. For the next ten minutes there would be no other comments than: “I say, Wass is in form again. Five wickets again to-day.” “What are Kent doing?” “Did Hayward have any luck?” “Oh, Lord, poor old Somerset in the soup again.” That was how ordinarily it would have been. There would have been no comment had the Houses of Parliament been destroyed. For no one would have seen the page on which the disaster was recorded. But that same human capacity for detecting the most unobtrusive scandal that on the previous day had made Stella’s entrance into the workroom the signal for a sudden silence, made a simultaneous cry go up from half a dozen papers. “My word, look at this about Balliol’s aunt!” “I say, Balliol, have you seen this?” “No wonder Balliol’s such a tiger in the grovel.” “Looks as though the policeman had given her a black eye, all right.”

Hugh Balliol was at that time fifteen-and-a-half years old. To an urchin like myself on the brink of his first term at a preparatory school, he seemed a very grown-up and worldly person. I looked with wondering eyes at his ties and socks; at the thick long sweep of hair, parted at the side and swept back in a sleek, shining curve. He was the kind of person that I longed to be; but at Fernhurst, in the School House reading-room in the presence of prefects who were men in all but name, he was a nervous, insignificant youth, quite unprepared for the rush of interest that was taken in him, as he peered at the paper over his seniors’ shoulders and beneath their arms, hoping by his very smallness to escape notice, since it was “cheek” for a second year boy to read the papers till his seniors had finished with them.

Throughout the morning he was pursued by such taunts as “What, aren’t you with your aunt in Holloway?” His form master asked him to explain the difference between a suffragette and a suffragist. His science master nicknamed him “the Belligerent Balliol.”

He was self-conscious, angry, embarrassed; yet at the same time rather flattered.

His father was coming down that day to visit him. It was early in the term for such a visit. But details in connection with the winding-up of the estate in Devonshire had recalled Balliol to the West. The subject of “the family disgrace” was brought up on Hugh’s part with a warmth of indignation.

“Look here, father. You’ve seen in the paper about Aunt Stella?”

“I have.”

“It’s a bit thick, surely?”

“I think it’s very thick.”

“Couldn’t anything be done about it?”

“Your aunt is a self-willed woman.”

“But it makes everything so difficult for me here. Everyone’s been making fun of me about it. Don’t you think if she had that explained to her it would make a difference?”

“I’m very much afraid I doubt it.”

“Oh!”

Balliol chuckled on his way back to London over the astonishment that had puckered Hugh’s forehead on being told that his aunt was unlikely to abandon a course of conduct that might be thought to interfere with her nephew’s interests. He could imagine Stella’s surprise were he to say to her, “Stella, I’m afraid you will have to be more circumspect. Hugh’s schoolfellows are making fun of him because you’ve been arrested.” He had a very good mind to tell her. She had a sense of humour. She would see the amusing side of it. It was all very much like Hugh. His affection for Hugh was within its limits considerable. He was interested in him, was fond of him, was anxious to do the best he could for him, was concerned to give him the best chance possible. At the same time, he did not have that personal feeling that he had expected to have for an eldest son; the bearer of his name, his heir, the prolongation of himself; in whom he would renew his own ambitions. That was how he had expected to feel about a son. But somehow he hadn’t. Perhaps it was because his daughter had been born first; because Lucy had been the recipient of those first feelings of tenderness towards something that was appealing; small; that stood in need of protection. It was in Lucy’s company he got that sense of added life that twenty years back his wife had given him. With his other children he accepted their various problems as they came along. With Lucy he found himself trying to devise ways of helping her, making life varied and amusing for her. He was fond of them all, but he had to exert considerable skill to conceal his preference from his other children. He fancied he succeeded.

He did not believe that Hugh, now seated at the long day-room table over his evening prep, would feel that his father had any real interest in the world outside his schoolboy son. Over lunch, at which Hugh had consumed two helpings of each of the four courses that had been served; during the stroll round the cricket field while a second eleven match followed a desultory course upon the Upper; over the tea at which Hugh had consumed a plate of bananas and cream, two sausages, three éclairs, two lemon squashes in each of which a sixpenny ice cream had been immersed—they had talked of nothing but Hugh’s interests, Hugh’s future, Hugh’s present. All three were healthily satisfactory objects for parental contemplation. The things that the boy wanted were straightforward things; the kinds of thing that life did give you if you went for them in a straightforward way. He wanted an amusing, healthy, useful life; with a certain amount of excitement. At the moment, his idea was to get a Rugger blue at Oxford and return to Fernhurst as a master; which was the kind of ambition that you would expect of a boy of fifteen who could not see over the walls of his cloistered world; whose ambitions were focused within those limits. It was unlikely that Hugh would get a blue at Oxford. It was more unlikely that he would want to return to Fernhurst as a master. He would have wider ambitions then. But the kind of life he wanted would probably be the same: something out-of-door, practical, administrative. The Egyptian Civil, possibly. He wouldn’t be up to the standard of the Indian.

He had discussed Hugh with the headmaster that afternoon. “A really sound fellow,” the Chief had said. “The kind of person for whom, when all is said and done, this system is devised. He’s not going to be particularly brilliant. He’ll get into the sixth in his last year. He’ll probably never get his firsts at any game, but he’ll be the kind of man who will be the deciding factor in a house match. He’ll be the kind of prefect on whom any house-master will be able to rely. He won’t make any particular mark at Oxford; he’ll get a third; or if he works particularly hard, a second. But I doubt if he will work very hard, and in consequence he’ll very likely get more out of Oxford than those who do. He’ll make useful friends, and good friends. He’ll get a panoramic sense of a generation going out into the world. He’ll get into debt, but not outrageously. There’ll be wild parties, and I expect you’ll feel worried now and again about how he’s going to turn out. But there’ll be nothing to worry about, really. He won’t do anything that’ll be a handicap to him later on. He’ll become one of those people who carry on the world’s work usefully; who are never in the limelight, but in their own sphere are indispensable.”

Which was Balliol’s own view of his son. He was glad that Hugh was like that. He was not one of those who want their children to be exceptional. He was himself lazily unambitious, believing that such as he are on the whole happier than those who are restless with a sense of mission; who make life uncomfortable for themselves, and for those with whom they are brought in contact. He did not regard his children as the achievers of exploits that would further him in the world’s esteem. He wanted them to be happy. He planned their education with that in view; so that they should enter life equipped to make the most of their opportunities.

He returned home happy and content with his day’s visit.

He reached his home shortly before ten. There was no light under the drawing-room door. I suppose Jane’s gone to bed. It was early, but she was alone. She might have got bored. She might have gone upstairs to read. He walked into the drawing-room and turned the electric-light switch. From the window-seat there came a gasp, the sound of a dropped paper. In startled silhouette against the darkened window Jane rose to face him. She stood blinking at the light; her mouth fell open. The look on her face was so strange and startled that it alarmed him.

“What on earth’s the matter?”

“Nothing: why should there be?”

“You look so strange.”

“Do I?”

Her voice was always slow. She gave the impression now of waking out of a dream, as though she had not returned yet to reality.

“What were you doing?”

“Reading.”

“But it was dark.”

“It had only just got dark. I’d come here to get more light; then the light failed. I stopped reading. I looked out on to the square. It was so lovely. I sat on.”

She spoke as though she were describing the experiences of a trance. He looked questioningly at her. She was a vague, inattentive, abstracted woman. But this mood was new to her. He hesitated; then changed the subject.

“Hugh was looking very well. I had a very satisfactory talk about him with Kennedy.”

He told her about his visit; about Hugh; about Kennedy’s account of him. But she seemed scarcely to be listening. What on earth can be the matter, Balliol thought.

Again he changed the subject.

“I’ve been going into the particulars of my father’s estate. There’ll be rather more coming to us than I had expected. I think we might take a longer holiday than we had intended. We might go to Norway.”

“I should like that.”

“I’ll see Cook’s to-morrow.”

“Yes, do that.”

He looked at her in amazement. More than once she had said how much she would like to go to Norway. He had fancied on his journey back that she would welcome the suggestion avidly. What on earth was the matter with her?

“What have you been doing while I’ve been away?” he asked.

“Nothing in particular. I took Lucy to the theatre yesterday.”

“What did you see?”

“Prunella. It was rather lovely.”

“And to-day?”

“Roy called this afternoon.”

“Roy?”

“Roy Rickman. We went for a walk in the park. There was such an absurd robin. We sat watching him for half an hour.”

Her voice had resumed its dreamlike tone. She had turned away. It can’t be that, he thought, it can’t conceivably be that.

Later, in the pillowed darkness, he drew her close into his arms. For a little she lay there, listless and inert. Then she pulled away. “I’m tired. I’m sorry. My head aches rather.”

A headache. That feminine excuse. The migraine that French novelists wrote about. So it was that, then.

Balliol neither looked nor was a man of action. His inclination was to survey a subject rather than settle it; to examine its various implications; to consider its potentialities; rather than visualize an ultimate objective and plan the course by which that objective can best be reached. He was interested in an outcome; not concerned by it. He had the inquisitive curiosity of the spectator. On such rare occasions, however, as he saw beyond doubting that his own interests were involved, he was capable of direct and forceful action. Whatever Jane might have felt or be in danger of feeling, he was going to prevent the development of a situation that might make Lucy’s position less easy, happy and assured. He wasted no time on this particular occasion.

The first letter he dictated on the following morning was to the estate agent whose card he carried in his pocket-book.

“DEAR SIR, [he wrote]

“You may remember that about six weeks ago we had some discussion in the North End Road, opposite one of your new houses. I am prepared to consider the possibility of building a house in that neighbourhood. Perhaps, therefore, you will be so good as to call on me with particulars and plans.”

“She may not be interested in the idea of a house now. But at heart she is. She’ll soon get excited in it again. It will give her something to think about.”

As soon as he had finished the dictation of his morning’s correspondence, he asked his secretary to get Mr. Roy Rickman for him on the telephone. “You may take some time getting him,” he added. “He’s a young man with no fixed hours or address.”

It was, indeed, a full two hours before his secretary’s voice on the extension told him that Mr. Roy Rickman was at the other end.

“Mr. Roy Rickman here now, Mr. Balliol.” Then a moment later Rickman’s voice came through. “Yes, this is Rickman. Is that you, Mr. Balliol?”

His voice, Balliol thought, had a nervous, anxious note.

“I wonder if you could spare me half an hour of your time?” he asked.

“Of course I could.”

“Could you come round some time this afternoon?”

“Any time that’s convenient.”

“Shall we say half-past three?”

“Right.”

The young man’s voice was eager: over-eager, in Balliol’s opinion. Or was that fancy? He wished he could have seen his face. Not that it really mattered what his manner was. Whatever might exist between himself and Jane was in its infancy… All the same… he would like to have known.

Certainly his manner betrayed nothing but the heartiest self-confidence as he came with a jaunty stride into Balliol’s office. Balliol gave him a quick searching look. Yes: he was a handsome fellow; with something gay and irresponsible about him; something not yet tamed by life; a faunlike quality. He would appeal to the side of a woman’s nature that remained young and childlike, in spite of the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. He might touch a side in Jane that he himself had touched once during their engagement; but now touched no longer. It was a small part of Jane: an Achilles heel. But he would need to be careful. Perhaps he had recognized the danger-point before either Jane or Rickman had.

From Rickman’s manner he felt pretty sure that the boy had not recognized it. Rickman was too young for such accomplished acting. There was clearly no suspicion in his mind that Balliol could wish to see him for any but a friendly reason. That makes it easier, Balliol thought. He passed a box of cigarettes across the table.

“Sit down,” he said. “Now, before I say anything to you, I want you to realize that this is an entirely informal talk; that I’ve not discussed this with any of my colleagues, that is to say. Before I do, I want to sound your feelings; to know how we stand to one another. The point is this: I’ve been very satisfied with the amount of business that you have brought our way; in particular in the fact that the clients you have brought us have remained our clients. That shows you have known how to recommend us to the people who are right for us. You don’t waste our time or theirs. That’s what we need. Now, you work, I am aware, for a great many different firms. It may be that you find that system satisfactory. I can see its advantages for a young man. It gives freedom and mobility. But it has disadvantages. If ever there’s a slump it’s the outside man, the freelance, who suffers. I was wondering whether you wouldn’t prefer to attach your interests permanently to one firm.”

He paused, looking inquiringly at Rickman.

The answer came without hesitation.

“It depends on the kind of attachment. I don’t want to sit in an office all my life.”

“I’m not suggesting that you should. As a matter of fact, you are far more useful outside an office than inside one. I’m suggesting that you should work as an outside representative, but for one firm only.”

“Would that pay any one firm?”

“Isn’t that the firm’s look-out?”

Rickman smiled; his wide, boyish grin.

“I meant to say, would any one firm pay me as much for the whole of my time, as a number of firms pay me for bits of it? After all, I’ve only a certain number of friends that I can induce to buy wine; but I can persuade the same friends to buy motor-cars, to insure their lives.”

“I was suggesting that you should enlarge your acquaintance.”

“That’s a slow business.”

“Not if you travel. Let me make myself clear. I was going to suggest that you should travel through the Colonies and the Far East; through English dependencies, at our expense and as our representative. I believe it would be a paying move; though I have, of course, still to convince my colleagues on that point. We have, naturally, representatives abroad, but they work for a number of firms; nor are they, in my opinion, the right type of person. They are of the commercial traveller class. They would interview the steward of a club, not the secretary. That’s not the kind we want nowadays. I want someone who’ll meet people on their own ground. I have been looking for someone like that for a long time. I think you are the man. Would it appeal to you? It would mean a great deal of travel.”

“I should enjoy that.”

“You’d have to be away for long periods.”

“How long?”

“How can I say? A year; eighteen months; two years?”

“I could stand that. When would you be wanting me to start?”

“Right now.”

“That makes good hearing.”

His eyes were bright with a gleam of adventure in them. Balliol felt reassured. Rickman might be in love with Jane; but he was more in love with life, ready to welcome excitement in whatever form it came. That was his danger but also his safeguard. He wasn’t the kind of person to put love first.

“I’ll see what I can do for you,” he said.

On the agenda for that afternoon’s board meeting he placed a memorandum: “Travellers.”

X

The directorate of Peel & Hardy, wine merchants, of Angel Street, St. James’, was composed, like many other firms, of a number of gentlemen who knew little of the business, but fancied they were responsible for its fortunes and actually did intermittently control it; whose presence on the board was due to odd legacies of shares; to occasional outbursts on the part of shareholders; to the belief, usually mistaken, that young blood was needed. Two only of their number were actually members of the staff: the joint managing directors, Balliol and his junior Prentice. Over the deliberations of these gentlemen presided, a venerable figurehead, the fifth Viscount Huntercoombe. He was a campaigner of sixty autumns. He knew nothing about the business and knew that he knew nothing. He was there to lend respectability to the firm’s transactions and for that loan he drew ample fees as chairman. He introduced, he considered, the human touch. He was a judge of men. Most problems turned, he maintained, on character. He judged a balance-sheet by the handshake of its managing director.

He was tall, with grey hair; his long thick nose was lined with purpling veins; a full loose mouth, because of adenoids, hung slightly open; a moustache drooped over his upper lip and was stained with tobacco smoke. His attire was slovenly; his waistcoat invariably spotted; a down of scurf on his coat collar. His manner of speech was slow and indistinct. In spite, however, of these obvious handicaps, he was a dignified and impressive personage. His comments carried weight. He never qualified his opinions with the words “I think” or “My impression is.” His opinions had in consequence the appearance of facts, against which his colleagues hesitated to place their mere conjectures. He very rarely exercised his power. A man who is continually expressing his views dogmatically wakes opposition. But the man who rarely delivers a pronouncement achieves a surprise attack, on such occasions as he does. No sentries are posted. In the absence of prepared defence he is left master of the field.

But for the most part towards the deliberations of Peel & Hardy’s directorate he assumed a judicial attitude. He was content to propound problems. He would say, “On the agenda we have a suggestion by Mr. Balliol on the question of overhead expenses. Mr. Balliol will explain his scheme.” He would listen with an appearance of attention. He would invite the opinion of another director as soon as Balliol had finished; he would invite the opinion of each director in turn. He would never allow a meeting to disintegrate into discussion across the table. It had to follow the ritual of debate; with all remarks directed to the chairman. He recognized the point in a debate when further discussion had become unprofitable; when his colleagues were repeating themselves, in an attempt to explain themselves. “What I was really saying actually was this…” The moment that point was reached, the chairman put the motion to the meeting. He set out the chief points that had been made without throwing his weight either way; but his grouping of the argument left the issue clear. Though he could not have answered the simplest questions about the finances of the business, about its scope, about its detail, he was very definitely the head of the firm. Without appearing to guide, he guided.

His presence as chairman can be attributed to that process of readjustment that during the Edwardian regime was described as the invisible revolution: the same process to which, for that matter, the firm itself and innumerable other prosperous City houses owed if not their existence, at any rate the nature of their survival.

A hundred and forty years ago Messrs. Peel & Hardy, wine merchants, of Angel Street, St. James’, had been a small shop in Market Street, Soho, over which Mr. Peel had lived with a family of seven children. The industry of Mr. Peel, the capital of his son’s father-in-law, the material ambitions of his son, the social ambition, of his grandson, the spendthrift prodigality of his great-grandsons had led each in their turn to the growth of the business, the purchase of new premises, the mortgaging of the firm’s resources till finally a number of angry creditors had taken the firm into their own custody. The creditors’ ignorance of the wine trade, their inability to agree among themselves, had provided a shrewd solicitor with an opportunity to acquire the control of the business at a sum that was less than nominal. The name of Peel & Hardy still carried weight, the presence of a fifth viscount at the board room increased it. Balliol had been recommended to take a block of shares. A meeting of indignant shareholders had given him a joint directorship.

The business that came into the hands of the present board and the shareholders that they represented for a tenth of its real value was made in a short time to pay steady dividends. Its average balance-sheet declared a profit often per cent. As the majority of the shareholders had purchased their shares for an exceedingly small sum, they received a yearly interest of sixty to seventy per cent, upon their outlay. So contented were the shareholders with the management of the firm’s activities that the annual shareholders’ meeting had been for fifteen years the barest of formalities. None of the shareholders bothered to attend. Lord Huntercoombe delivered an elaborate, carefully-phrased speech; he called on Mr. Balliol to make his report and Mr. Prentice to make his secondary report. The balance-sheet was passed, a director retired in rotation and offered himself for re-election; a shorthand-typist transcribed the speeches; but the speeches were made to empty chairs. The motions were proposed and seconded by clerks qualified by complimentary shares to take their places in the meeting. It tickled Balliol’s sense of the ironic that the business should be supported by the capital of people none of whom the directors had ever seen; that the rewards of his work went to strangers; that he had no idea who his employers really were. He had read down the list of their names. It had conveyed nothing to him. Shares had been come by at odd times, as the result of the various transactions of the last indigent Peel; shares had been left casually in wills; had exchanged hands as bets; been bartered; been lost; been assigned and re-assigned. Their present owners had no personal feeling of contact with the business that so little ago had been a wine shop in a side street in an unfashionable part of London.

“I really would like to see them all in a body, once,” Balliol had remarked.

“It’ll be a bad day when you do,” Prentice had retorted.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Shareholders, like most other people, keep quiet when they are grateful. It’s only when they’ve got a grievance that you hear from them. A couple of bad balance-sheets and we’d be certain of a good audience for our annual orations.”

Which was the kind of remark that Balliol had come to expect from Prentice. Prentice was one of those men whose opinions on life, whose attitude to life, whose general attack on life, is in direct opposition to his temperament. In politics Prentice was a Fabian. He believed in democracy; he believed in the future. He believed in a Wellsian machine age; when men and women would work, without the incentive of competition, to establish the ideal state. The various proposals that he brought before the board were invariably of a democratic tendency, built on a belief in a democratic future. He would say, “In ten years’ time a different class of person will be drinking wine. Palates will be different. He will be less educated. We must consider that.”

In spite, however, of his belief in the future, he was extremely cynical. He invariably attributed the lowest personal motive to any suggestion that might come from one of the departmental managers. He was a tall, thin, bald-headed man, with a slightly blue chin and closely-pursed lips. He never laughed. Occasionally, when confronted with a particularly blatant example of commercial malpractice, he would smile wryly. He was the last person in whom you could imagine yourself confiding. He intensely disliked his fellow mortals. Though he was married, he spent most of his time in the United Universities Club. Privacy was respected there, he said.

In spite of, perhaps because of, his manifest unamiability, Balliol cherished for him an affection that he was extremely careful to conceal. He was convinced that there was nothing Prentice would have more disliked than the feeling that he was liked. Their relations were on the whole extremely cordial. They rarely met except in the board-room, where they discussed plans for the firm’s future through the medium of the chairman. They never resorted to those informal conferences at which usually the business of a board meeting is decided before the directors meet. That Prentice would have considered, not dishonourable—he did not hold personal and commercial honesty to be the same commodities—but the statement of an alliance between himself and Balliol. Than such a tie there was little he would have disliked more. Consequently, when Balliol said to Rickman, “Nothing is, of course, decided till I’ve seen my board,” he was not playing a Spenlow-Jorkins gambit. He had no means of guessing how Prentice would receive his suggestion. Opposition from Prentice would be extremely difficult to combat. He was prepared, however, to press his point.

There were two points on the agenda besides his own. There was ‘Frank Walker’s Wages.’ And ‘Cigar Department.’ The latter was a proposal from Prentice. The chairman took the question of Walker’s wages.

“Frank Walker’s Wages,” he read out. Then lifted his eyes, looking down the table as though he were saying, “Now, who is going to tell me about Frank Walker’s Wages?”

The secretary spoke.

“Walker has applied to me for a rise. He is receiving thirty shillings a week. He has been in the company’s employ three years. He is a packer. He has had no rise since he has been with us.”

“I see. And what would the average wage of a packer be?”

“From twenty-five shillings to two pounds.”

“And he has been with us three years. How old is he?”

“About twenty-eight.”

“It seems reasonable that he should be raised; if his work is satisfactory, that’s to say. Do you know anything about him, Mr. Prentice?”

Prentice shook his head. He knew him by name. He knew him by sight. But he had never been made aware of his individual existence. Balliol was in the same position. He was conscious of a face and a name. That, and no more than that.

“In that case we had better see what the head of his department has to say.”

There was silence while Walker’s immediate chief was summoned. A short, stocky man, with a nervous manner, a choker collar, a curl low-plastered on his forehead, he shifted uneasily on his feet.

The chairman greeted him as though he were the guest of the evening.

“Ah yes, Mortimer. Now, we want to ask your opinion about Walker. Frank Walker. As perhaps you know, he has applied for a rise of salary.”

“Yes, milord.”

“You would say, Mortimer, that thirty-five shillings a week was not an excessive sum for a packer: a man of twenty-eight who has been with us for three years?”

“No, milord.”

“Then that is the sum by which you would recommend us to raise Walker’s wages?”

“Well, yes. Yes, I suppose that… well, milord, if you were—that’s to say, going to raise his wage.…”

“Now, what are we to take that to mean?”

“Nothing, milord. I mean.…”

“Come, come now, Mortimer. You must mean something.”

The chairman’s voice had neither sharpened nor quickened; but it had grown firm. Mortimer, his eyes on the ground, shifted his feet uncomfortably. His forehead had flushed to a damp crimson.

“Have you anything against Walker?”

For a moment further Mortimer hesitated; then suddenly he looked up and blurted out all in a rush: “I’m sorry, milord and gentlemen. It’s no business of mine, I know, but Walker’s the most difficult man a boss ever had to deal with. It’s not that he’s lazy, though he’s that; or that he’s clumsy or incompetent, though he’s that too, in a way. It’s his manner. There’s a sneering, supercilious smile on his face the ‘ole of the time. I just don’t know how to take ’im.”

He paused, hot and breathless. “I’m sorry, milord…” he started.

But the chairman cut him short.

“You’ve told us exactly what we needed to know. Thank you very much. You have given us the material on which to base our decision.”

As soon as the door had closed behind Mortimer, Lord Huntercoombe turned to the secretary.

“Would you be inclined to endorse Mortimer’s opinion?”

“I can’t say that I’ve found him very satisfactory.”

“Then it would seem that the question is not so much whether we should raise Walker’s salary, as to whether we should retain him on our staff.”

There was a slight laugh at that.

“At one moment,” said Balliol, “we are deciding to raise a man’s wages; the next, to sack him.”

“It only shows the incompetent are wise to remain inconspicuous,” was Prentice’s comment. “If the fellow had only kept quiet, no one would have heard of him and, as far as he was concerned, all would have been well.”

But the chairman was not going to allow the meeting to drift into the discussion of an impersonal subject.

“The point, gentlemen, is this: are we to dismiss Walker here and now, or are we to have him up and give him the warning that apparently he deserves most richly?”

The motion was so put that the chairman was able to state his opinion without appearing to. As he phrased it the administration of a reproof from the board was a higher punishment than dismissal.

“Then it is agreed that we see Walker. Very good. Send for Walker.”

A couple of minutes later there entered into the room a bright-eyed, red-haired young scamp; with a confident manner and an open grin. He was not in the least nervous. It was abundantly clear what Mortimer had meant by his “supercilious sneering smile.” It was what his feminine acquaintance described as a “naughty twinkle.” He was the kind of person who knew how to make a superior look a fool.

The chairman considered him ruminatively.

“Walker,” he said at length, “you have asked for your salary to be raised. You are receiving thirty shillings a week. You are not worth thirty shillings a week. You are idle, clumsy, and impertinent. You represent thirty shillings amount of nuisance. I propose, therefore, to raise your wages to two pounds. Unless you manage to prove yourself to be worth forty shillings a week during the next two months, you will be dismissed instantly. You may go.”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” said the chairman turning to his colleagues as the door closed behind the reproved packer. “I couldn’t help it. There was something about the look of that man I liked.”

The incident put the board in a cheerful temper. They turned to the next subject on the agenda. It was the question of the cigar department.

“This, I believe, concerns Mr. Prentice. Mr. Prentice?”

In a calm, cold voice Prentice laid out his thesis. As the board was no doubt aware, they in company with other wine merchants, kept a stock of cigars and cigarettes. It was quite a side line but certain conservative customers made a point of ordering brandy, liqueurs and cigars at the same time. How long they would continue to do that, he was doubtful; in fact, very doubtful. He foresaw a time when that side line would cease to be a line at all. In his opinion that would be a pity. They had their foot, or rather their toe, over the threshold of the tobacco trade. It was a question of advancing or retreating. His idea was to advance that toe; to make the cigar department gradually, tentatively, watching results, separate and independent. He foresaw a time when it would be the general, rather than the exceptional thing for a woman to smoke cigarettes. That would mean that man would smoke more in women’s presence. He foresaw a great future for the cigarette and for the cheap cigar. He would like to use the tobacco department not as an embellishment for their brandy sales, but as a lure to the main wine business.

“I would like to see one of our windows set with tobacco jars; with cabinets of cigars; with pipes, with cigarettes; to be, in fact, a shop.”

“And how do you propose setting about this?”

“I am proposing, with the board’s approval, that we should take on to our staff a young man who has worked in a tobacco shop, who understands tobacco, who will organize tobacco as a separate department.”

There was a silence while the various directors considered the problem. A great deal depended, Balliol knew, on the attitude that he himself adopted. He could not say it was a scheme that he particularly liked. He believed in specialization; he did not like the idea of a firm being split up among departmental managers. At the same time, he did not see that the scheme could do any particular harm. If it failed, it would have wasted a certain amount of Prentice’s time, but very little of the firm’s capital. It would not require any particular outlay, beyond the addition of a name to the salary list. At the same time, on any ordinary occasion he would have opposed, though not very heartily, Prentice’s suggestion.

To-day, however, he had a scheme of his own that he wished to press. And though he knew that Prentice was not the kind of man to oppose another’s scheme merely because he had been himself opposed, the fact that he had been supported by a man who had a scheme of his own to put forward would give him material for cynical deliberation. He would smile that wry smile. “We are all venal,” he would think. “Balliol scratches my back so that I may scratch his in return. What creatures we are. Well, we’ll play his game.” Prentice would never have attempted such a plan himself, but it pleased him to think that others did. He would be glad of the opportunity to say, “We do evil that good may come. In order to get my own sound scheme through, I have to further another’s shoddy one. That’s the price honest men have to pay in a world like this.” Balliol was quite certain that by supporting Prentice’s scheme, he could insure the success of his own. As, in reply to the chairman’s question, he stated his reasons for approving of Prentice’s motion, he was conscious of Prentice’s wry smile. That wry smile returned twenty minutes later as Prentice in his turn expressed his approval of Rickman’s trial.

“We seem to be adding very considerably to our expenses,” one of the directors remarked. “We have raised a packer’s salary and made two additions to our staff in the course of one afternoon.”

“It is lucky that we are in a position to be able to afford it,” said the chairman.

Which, in a different sense, was Balliol’s own opinion as he walked from his office towards the bus stop at Piccadilly. Most problems in his opinion resolved themselves into mercenary equations. You could buy your way out of anything. Since his firm was flourishing he had been able to get young Rickman sent abroad. He would be able to get this house started so that Jane would have something to think about. If he had not been able to get Rickman out of the way or to afford a house, he might have found himself in a confoundedly difficult position, with Lucy’s future hampered by a domestic scandal at the very moment when it was essential for her to make an effective entrance on an adult stage. It might all have been extremely difficult. As it was, all would be plain sailing now. With a jaunty step he climbed the steps of the bus, seating himself on a front seat, so that he could watch the horses.

I wonder what Jane’ll say. He shrugged his shoulders. She had not had the time to realize what she felt about young Rickman. She would probably be glad that he had this chance of self-advancement.

On one point he was resolved: he was not going to let Jane feel that he suspected anything; that it was on Rickman’s account that he had yielded to her whim and bought a house; that it was on her account that he had offered Rickman the job that would take him out of her life for years. When he returned to his home that evening he made his announcements in the most casually off-hand manner.

“As a result of to-day’s work two people are going to have very nice surprises,” he informed her.

She fixed her vague, bland look on him; waiting for an explanation.

“In the first place I’ve decided to build a house in Hampstead. In the second I’ve fixed up young Rickman with a first-class job.”

From the flush in her cheeks he knew which piece of news interested her the most.

“What have you arranged for Roy?”

“I’m making him our chief foreign representative.”

“Does that mean he’ll have to travel?”

“He’ll be in the Far East most of the time.”

“In the Far East… then, that’ll mean——” She paused; a pensive, abstracted expression on her features. “Oh, but that’s splendid, that’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. I think it’s fine for him. And it’s lovely about the house. I’m so excited. We’ll have Liberty curtains in the drawing-room and a Morris wallpaper, and no pictures. Yes, and we’ll have a four-poster bed. No, we won’t. We’ll have a very low, wide bed, with a canopy above, and curtains, silk curtains; blue. We’ll have an amusing nursery, with the ceiling blue, like the sky, and with stars all over it. It will be fun. I shall enjoy myself. I am glad. It’s the best thing that could have happened for him.”

XI

The next weeks were busy ones for Edward Balliol. At the office there was much detail to be settled. The enlargement of the tobacco department was proving a larger problem than he had fancied. The new man, Smollett, was a far more independent person than he had imagined: not by any means the shop assistant. Roy Rickman’s itinerary demanded supervision. At home there was the excitement of house-building; the discussion of plans with architects and surveyors. There were decorators’ estimates; all the legal flummery of unencumbered conveyancing. Each day brought some fresh problem. There were frequent interviews; frequent visits to the Heath to examine the new site. Night after night Jane would spread a pile of patterns in front of her on the table. As the days passed what had been started as a distraction for Jane became for him an engrossing object. This house would be the first thing in his life to be his very own. Up to now he had shared his possessions with other people. There had been his home, the house that his grandfathers had handed on to him. There had been the bachelor rooms in London, rented like a school study on a yearly lease. There had been his London house, taken first of all on a seven years’ lease and renewed year by year so that now he found himself able to be rid of it with three months’ notice. He had always lived in other people’s atmospheres. “We have gone back to Nomad life,” he used to say. “We travel from flat to flat with our luggage in vans. We pitch our tents and then move on.” That was how it had always been before. It was different now. He was not inheriting a tradition. He was creating one. He was building out of his own taste in the manner of his time. This house would be his own; was something to which people could look two centuries hence; of which they could say: “This was the way in which at the beginning of the twentieth century a man of education and some means chose to live.” He would have set a stamp, he would have expressed his own individuality in the idiom of his day. He was starting a tradition, founding a family and a line. Such a feeling as came to innumerable other Londoners while village after village became a suburb; while the tide of Greater London swept outwards through Essex, Kent and Surrey.

His house absorbed him. Once or twice Roy came to dinner; once or twice Roy joined them in expeditions to look over the new house. Now and again, when he was at his office, Roy came to tea, or to take Jane walks or to a matinée. He did not worry. There was a date marked upon a calendar. That was proof of safety. Nothing that mattered could happen before then. Nothing could happen after it. He was content to let the situation slide.

He felt no jealousy. His was not a jealous nature. And besides, it was with a feeling of some complacence that he viewed his handling of the situation. If he felt any personal emotion it was a kind of pity; born out of the memory of himself as an undergraduate, when he had sat through long hours of unavowed adoration at the feet of a woman in the middle thirties. She was married, the mother of children, just as Jane was. The husband had been a hard-riding, hard-drinking, wind-bitten country squire—noisy, hearty, red-faced. The hail-fellow-well-met type; whose fist is as ready to shake another man’s as black his eye. He had treated Balliol as a child; hospitable and welcoming with him. “Well, young man, tell me what they’re saying at Oxford about this new fast bowler.” Balliol had respected him; had liked him; but had wondered what his wife could see in him. She was so delicate, so bird-like; her husband was so rough. Through a long summer he had sat at her feet; then the long vac. had ended. He had written verses to her during the misty autumn. But when he came back at Christmas everything seemed different. They had met once or twice; at dances, at dinner parties; but it had not been the same, indoors, with the bright lights, the noise, the music. The moments of easy intimacy never returned. He had been very Byronic about it all; had written a long ode about tombs and graveyards; on the whole, had rather relished his melancholy. Later he had been inclined to laugh at it; the folly of youth. But now, over a greater distance, he remembered what he had truly felt; that whatever might have happened afterwards, that summer had been a lovely idyll.

Were Jane and Roy living through such an idyll now? They might well be. Sometimes he was conscious of an atmosphere between them rather like that of twilight; a kind of luminous hush. On one afternoon in particular, when they had driven out together, the three of them, to look at the new house, now rising through the scaffolding to its second story. There had not been a great deal to see. It was a Saturday; the workmen were away. It was hot, and he felt sleepy. “Let’s go up to the Park,” he said.

They had arranged their chairs in the shadow of a tree. He had sat on the outside. Jane had turned away from him towards Roy. The murmur of their talk, mingling with the innumerable soft sounds of a summer day, had a soothing effect. He leant his head back against the woodwork of the chair; the sunlight was warm upon his face. He tilted his straw hat forward to shade his eyes. His eyelids grew heavy.

When he awoke there was no murmur of talk beside him. He turned his head. The two chairs were empty. A glance at his watch told him that he had been asleep for half an hour. I must have snored and driven them away. But he knew very well it was not that.

Their last afternoon together, after all. They were probably walking in the rose garden. It was at its loveliest now. How often, during the torrid tropic months, Rickman’s memory would revisit it. What were they talking of? Of themselves? He doubted it. You could dispense with self-analysis when you were in love; in their way, anyhow. They were probably talking of the children, of the weather, of a new book, a new play, the political issues. Anyone overhearing them would fancy that they were making conversation. They wouldn’t be. Beneath that façade of words their thoughts would hold communication. He remembered all that vaguely, as one recalls a landscape that one has known a long time ago. It was very long since he had been in love. He could recall the “When and Where,” but not the “How and What”; the way he had felt, not the actual feeling. He could not even remember if it was happiness or sadness they were sharing. There were certain moods that he had heard described as “happy-sad.” He did not know whether he should be sorry for them, or envious.

Then he saw them. Coming across the lawn towards him. They were not talking. She was looking down, trailing her parasol. There was a look on her face that he had not seen for fifteen years.

They were sorry for one another. But he envied them.

Book II

Lucy

I

The Balliols’ house was practically finished when I left home in September for my first term at a preparatory school. The roof was up; the scaffolding was down; the heaps of cement and mortar had been cleared away; a gravel path ran up to the front door; the garden was a brown flat stretch but certain lifted mounds of earth indicated the projected pattern of flower-bed and lawn. Instead of the wooden fencing along which small boys ran their sticks with a hideous clatter, a low wall with iron chain-linked palings faced the road. Most suburban houses of the period were gable-roofed, rough-cast, bow-windowed; but Balliol had followed a Queen Anne model. It was a two-storied, low-roofed house: very red and white; with four tall rectangular windows on each side of the high white portico. It was a very impressive residence; but its uncurtained windows gave it a staring, carcase-like appearance. It was not yet alive. I was very curious to see what it would be like by Christmas.

My letters home during that Christmas term were interspersed with questions about the house; most of the letters that I received from my parents contained some reference to it. It was to be called Ilex: a name that appealed to me but puzzled me; till I had it explained that Ilex was the Latin for Holm Oak. I thought it an elaborate and rather silly pun. But I feel now that its obscure playing on surburban nomenclature was very typical of Balliol; like his conversational use of inverted commas—”as the inhabitants of Hampstead would christen it.”

The word “ILEX” was set on the front gate early in October. Before the November rains had turned the unseeded lawn into a morass, a row of vans had blocked the south side of the North End Road. For half a week a team of white-overalled workmen had staggered beneath beds, tables, chairs, pictures, carpets. During the holidays there was to be a house-warming, I was told; with a children’s party on New Year’s Eve.

For several reasons that party has stood out very clearly in my memory. It was the first time that I had seen from the inside the house that had employed so much of my curiosity. It was the first time that I had seen the Balliols as a family; instead of as isolated units, come from Easton Square to inspect the progress of the house. And since I had sprained my ankle and was unable to dance, I was a spectator through the whole proceedings.

There were a hundred children there in all. There were Hugh’s friends and there were Francis’s; they were of all ages from sixteen to six. It was the kind of party that was given for children in those days. There was dancing, there was a conjuror, there were competitions, there was a Santa Claus. No child was allowed to win more than one prize; there were so many prizes that it was difficult for any child to avoid winning something. The party wandered over two floors, and through three rooms. There was the large downstairs room, which ran the entire length of the house, and whose measurements I had so excitedly stepped out in the preceding spring. It was a high, half-panelled room; a large imitation Adam fireplace in the centre; on either side of the fireplace bookshelves ran to the ceiling; an oval portrait of an eighteenth-century ancestor hung above the mantelpiece. On the opposite walls were four further portraits, in dull gold frames: dark, sombre pictures of young bare-shouldered women with ringlets hanging low upon their necks. From the ceiling hung two vast cut-glass candelabra. At the far end of the room were French windows, opening on to a balconied veranda. Red damask curtains fell from the ceiling in heaving glittering folds. Under the windows that faced the road was a low window seat.

It was here that, for my ankle’s sake, I rested during the little time that I was in this room. The older children were here for the most part. It was the ballroom. Carpets had been swept away; along the mantelpiece a row of programmes dangled their pencils on green and scarlet tassels. There was a variety of dances. There were polkas, valses, lancers, Highland schottisches, the barn dance, with Sir Roger de Coverley last upon the list.

Lucy was in supervision of this room. She had invited none of her friends, and insisted on being classed as a grown-up. She had lengthened her skirt, and had tried to persuade her mother to let her put her hair up. This had not been permitted. She had, however, been allowed to put pads above her forehead, and the puffed appearance that they gave her, separated her far more than a “bun” would have done from the dapper young preparatory-school men in Eton jackets and white waistcoats, their hair carefully brushed back off damp foreheads, who revolved clumsily, boisterously, stiffly, as their spirit moved them, round the uncouthly plump maidens whose ribboned pigtails flapped against wide silk sashes. As Lucy looked after the children who were without partners, and checked those who were dancing too obstreperously, her face wore a serious graciousness that set her apart from the carefree revel she directed.

On the right of the hall opposite the large dancing-room, was the dining-room, where the tea was spread. For children between six and ten the tea is the chief incident in a party. Intense curiosity was felt as to the exact nature of the preparations that we could hear proceeding behind the door. Would there, or would there not be ices? It was winter, but even in the winter one had ices sometimes. There was much whispering and mutual daring among the brighter of the younger spirits. “I dare you to go down there and look!” “Fains I going to see!” One child did have the temerity to open the door, but Lucy from the ballroom had observed him. “No, Johnnie, that’s the tea-room. We’ll be going in there afterwards. I expect you’re looking for the nursery: that’s upstairs.”

He wasn’t. But he went.

The rooms to which he was consigned were Francis’s nursery, and the girls’ room: a smallish boudoir kind of place where Ruth and Lucy kept their books and photographs; where they read, wrote their letters, prepared their homework, exchanged confidences. It had a cosy air; with its two large arm-chairs, its chesterfield, the patchwork screen on which in childhood they had plastered the odd assortment of pictures, newspaper headlines, photographs of soldiers, actors, royalties that represented their varying and maturing tastes; the high bookshelves in which such early favourites as the story of Brer Rabbit, the Violet Fairy Book, the Child’s History of England, were jumbled side by side with school primers, French and German readers and the novels of Florence Barclay. It was a time when embellished quotation, when scriptural and poetic admonitions were fashionable. Over the mantelpiece on a tall gilt-edged card was engraved the passage that on a distant, long to be remembered day I was to read inscribed on the statue to Stevenson in San Francisco:

“To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little more than he spends, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered, to have a few friends, but these without capitulation, above all, in the same conditions, to keep friends with himself, here is a task for all a man has of fortitude and delicacy. In his own life a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it, gladly, when it shall arrive. He is on duty here, he knows not how or why, and does not need to know, he knows not for what hire and must not ask—somehow or other though he does not know what goodness is, he must be good; somehow or other though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.”

It was an intimate kind of room, in mauve and grey, the carpet fawn-coloured; the kind of room to which you could imagine yourself retiring when you were sad or tired; when you wished to be alone with happy thoughts.

It filled, in the atmosphere of the party, the same function that it filled in the life of the house. It was the place that you went to when you needed to recover your energy; where parents and elder sisters took the small children who were dissolved in tears. There were a few casual refreshments on the desk: a jug of lemonade, a bowl of fruit. Part of the competition which consisted in a search for clues was set there.

Each guest on his arrival was given a card that stated the name of some object hidden, yet at the same time placed in full view, whose discovery did not entail the moving of crockery or picture frames. On the pink binding of the Red Fairy Book a penny stamp was stuck. A sheet of paper was wrapped round a candle. A halfpenny lay on the mantelpiece under the wooden pedestal of a clock. Those who were seriously competing were to be seen slowly and pensively examining walls, shelves, picture-frames and mantelpiece. But just as the main party for the elder children was concentrated in the one long living-room, so for the younger ones the nursery was the core.

To me the nursery was like something out of a book. It was the first modern nursery that I had seen. It had a ceiling blue-papered like the sky, with large silver stars and a vast crescent moon. The wallpaper was a figured fairy-tale, across which passed in fantastic cavalcade King Arthur, Little Red Riding Hood, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Simple Simon, Bluebeard, goblins, fairies, hags on sticks. The furniture was of unpolished, unvarnished oak. There were large cupboards, the doors decorated like illustrations. The floor was covered with a plain cork linoleum. It seemed the perfect playground. It was here that Jane Balliol arranged a series of children’s games:—Blind Man’s Buff, Hunt the Slipper, Oranges and Lemons; while one or two of the parents from the long cushioned window-seat watched their charges with a justifiable apprehension.

In these games Francis himself, though he was actually the host of the nursery, took no part whatever. He went away into a corner with three other little boys, set out the railway system that had been his father’s Christmas present, with its innumerable accessories of signals, points, tunnels, station, porters, luggage, passengers, and played trains the entire afternoon. He had an engine that ran by steam. Since this involved the flame of methylated spirit and boiling water, he was undisturbed by the smaller, admiring infants. Nurses and mothers shooed them away. “No, no, darling, that’s not safe. Come and play Blind Man’s Buff. Marjorie’s He” Once or twice Jane tried to induce Francis to join the party.

“Darling boy, you can play trains any time.”

“I like to play trains all the time,” he answered; and continued his game just as though there were no party, as though his three special cronies had come to spend the afternoon with him.

He resented the interruption the conjuror necessitated. He wanted to go on playing trains.

“I’ll only need that corner of the room.”

But his father was firm.

“There’ll be little enough spare room as it is. Clear away the rails and see that your friends have a good place to watch from.”

Balliol was probably sorry afterwards that he had not allowed Francis to behave as he had wished. The conjuror was not particularly swift-fingered, his skill as a ventriloquist was slight. But he would have been more effective had not Francis from the front row explained how he did each trick, and called attention to the vibrations of his larynx while he conducted a duologue with a doll. He did his best, poor fellow, but he grew more and more conscious of the small, keen-eyed, sailor-suited boy who leant forward, his chin rested on his fist, waiting watchfully to announce “That card came from his hip pocket,” and then, having detected the trick, to sit back as though the remainder of the proceedings did not interest him; to resume his watchful pose the instant that a new trick was started.

I have a very clear memory of Francis as he was at that first party: a characteristic picture, too. Right through childhood, through school-days, now in manhood, he has remained the child who has wanted to play trains by himself instead of joining the general party; who has done what he has been told, not with an ill grace, but, as it were, with the framing of a mental reservation, as though he were saying, “I’ll do what they want, but I’ll do it in my own way.” He has reserved the right to criticize a party that he never wished to join.

My pictures of Hugh and Ruth are no less clear. In its way my first picture of Ruth is as characteristic as my first sight of Francis. It was a dramatic incident, as Ruth was herself dramatic. In keeping with the tenets of Greek drama, it happened “off.”

Guests as soon as they arrived were taken straight through the hall, the boys into Balliol’s study, the girls past the door that divided the kitchen premises from the living part and led by a back stairs to the bedroom immediately above Balliol’s study that Lucy and Ruth shared.

I was tidying my hair when I heard a splintering sound above me and saw reflected in the mirror a crack in the white surface of the ceiling. The crack lengthened and widened. I turned round to see a shower of plaster and the toes of a stockinged foot. There was a gasp, a cry of “Ruth, what are you doing!” A giggle; the exclamation of “Oh, heavens!” Then the explanation. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see how strong it really was.”

There was a loose board, apparently, in the floor above. Ruth had taken it up to show her friends. The sight of the laths and plaster underneath had tempted her to try their strength. It was a characteristic episode; because Ruth was the kind of person who chose the wrong moments for her experiments; because whereas a great many women toe dangerous ground to see just how much weight it will stand, Ruth was one of the very few who want to know just how much it won’t stand: who say not, “I wonder how much of my weight I can put on this and not go through,” but “I wonder how much weight this would need before I do go through.”

I looked for her with curiosity when I limped through into the drawing-room. She was what from the sound of her voice I had expected: bright, brave-eyed, eager; with a reckless look and a sense of hardness that was prepared to accept the consequences of recklessness.

I was interested by my first real sight of Lucy, Ruth and Francis, but it was by Hugh that I was impressed. In my eyes he was a very glorious creature. I was at the start of my first year at a preparatory school. He was a third yearer at a public school. He lived in a world remote from mine to which one day I should attain. The awe I felt for him was untouched by envy. What a man he looked! He wore, it is true, a wide Eton collar, but instead of an Eton suit he wore a silk-faced coat, cut low like a dinner jacket. His waistcoat was held by three buttons at the waist. It was cut in a semicircle, showing a wide triple-studded expanse of shirt-front. He wore a white bow tie; little and neat and tightly waisted, his trousers were black and braided. It was his clothes and manner that I watched. If anyone had asked me what he was like, the only personal feature that I should have been in a position to describe would have been his hair; and that, after all, was a sartorial effect. Parted at the side, heavily brilliantined, it lay back from his forehead in a sleek, thick curve. I contrasted it with the tufted brush at the back of my own crown that no amount of water could flatten.

My eyes followed him, awed and fascinated. Perhaps he became conscious of this tribute; perhaps he became aware of me because, owing to my sprained ankle, my appearances were static. I was usually, that is to say, in the same place for prolonged periods. “There’s a chap without much to do,” he must have thought. At any rate at the end of the party when the conjuror’s performance was at an end, when dancing had been resumed downstairs and Blind Man’s Buff upstairs, it was me that he entrusted with a mission.

I saw him looking at me as though he were trying to make his mind up about something. I felt worried. Was I doing anything wrong, I wondered? At last he came across.

“Look here, would you like to be a sport?”

I flushed proudly. “Rather!”

“Well, do you see that girl over there with the green sash: the pretty one? Right! I’m dancing the next dance with her. Now, do you see that big vase in the hall? Well, above that, right in the corner of the wall, there’s an electric light switch that turns the lights out through the whole house. You watch me when I dance. When you see me stop dancing and go out and sit on the stairs, I want you to go out into the hall, and turn that switch off. Do you understand?”

“Rather!”

“You won’t sneak?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll give you sixpence, if you’ll do it.”

I was on the point of saying that I would do it just to please him, but when one is nine, sixpence is a large sum.

“All right.”

I felt very proud, very excited. The music began again. Hugh walked over to the girl with the green sash. She must have been about his age. Her chin was on a level with his shoulder. They danced with a smooth, easy rhythm. He whispered to her as they danced. The music stopped. There was clapping; a pause. Then the music began again. He said something to her. She looked up, hesitated, then nodded. They walked out of the drawing-room towards the staircase. It was my moment.

I was fearfully afraid. I had to climb on a chair. The vase was tall and perched insecurely on a hat cupboard. I could not think how I should explain my presence there if I were seen and questioned. For a moment I pretended to examine the vase while I gauged the exact distance of the switch. “I’ll put out my hand, then pull. It’ll be dark. I’ve got to get away quickly, but not so quickly that I’ll knock the vase over getting down. Then I must bolt as far away as possible. I’ll count ten to myself, then pull. One, two, three…” But I was too nervous, too impatient to count till ten. At seven I put up my hand and pulled.

I had never before, and I am not sure that I have ever since, achieved so complete and general a sensation. There was darkness where there had been light; silence where there had been sound and music. Then a moment later, where there had been order, an outbreak of pandemonium. Everyone seemed to be shouting; and for different things. An infant somewhere began to cry. Matches were struck and flickered feebly. There were calls for candles, a reactionary growl complained that you didn’t have troubles of this kind in the days of lamps. Mothers were calling out to unseen charges. “Now, don’t move, Christopher. Keep quite quiet.” For a full minute it went on like that, while I crept farther and farther from the scene of my misdeed. For a full minute. Then I heard Hugh’s voice: cheerful and self-confident. “I wonder if some silly ass has turned the light off at the main switch?” In another minute there was a blaze of light and a lot of laughter. “You’re a real sport,” Hugh was whispering. “I’ve made it a shilling instead of sixpence.” I looked towards the girl in the green sash. She was smiling, flushed, happy. I did not know which of them I envied more.

One other memory is linked up with that first party at Ilex. I had returned from my first term at school with a rough but inquisitive knowledge of the facts of life. Looking at Jane Balliol I could not help wondering whether there was not some connection between her changed appearance and the information that had been whispered into my ear at school. I had never seen a woman in that condition; but that surely was how a woman would look if she were to be in that condition.

The party was ended by half-past seven. By ten o’clock Edward Balliol was seated, with the house quiet, in the small room that his wife used as her boudoir. The children had gone to bed at nine. Jane had followed them half an hour later. Himself, he was resolved to see the New Year in. The porters at Golders Green Tube Station were going to let off every syren they possessed. He was not going to bed, he said, to be woken within half an hour of going to sleep. That was the excuse he gave. But actually he enjoyed a calm, reflective, solitary hour at the year’s end.

In the rush of preparing for the party he had had little time that morning to read more than the headlines and the principal leader of his paper. He settled down now to read The Times’ review of the year that in a couple of hours would be ended.

“It is a long time,” the article began, “since the world has experienced so uneventful a year as that which closes to-day.” The main episodes of the year were marshalled in review. There had been a financial crisis in America. There had been an imperial conference of Premiers. There had been that Peace Conference at the Hague, which had come to nothing. A very foolish affair, he had considered it—as though there could be such a thing as disarmament. There was a dangerous agitation in India—there always was. The Vatican had issued an Encyclical attacking “Modernism.” Asquith had reduced income tax from a shilling to ninepence. Some people imagined he ought to have done something instead about Old Age pensions—as though the taxed classes only existed for the benefit of the poor. But on the whole it had been an uneventful year—from the public point of view, that was to say. To him it had been, on the contrary, one of the most eventful years of his life. That was the odd thing about history. The periods that might be dramatic for a nation, for the individual might be placid. People might wish they had been alive at the time of the Armada, whereas if they had, they might have been supremely bored. Nobody, reading in fifty years’ time The Times’ review of 1907 would say “I’d like to have been living then”; yet Balliol knew very well that for him the year now ending was very much more dramatic than the years that were land-marked with Sedan, Majuba Hill, Mafeking and the accession of King Edward.

He would have laughed if anyone had told him twelve months back that he would find himself at the year’s end in a house that he had built himself on the edge of Hampstead: that within a few weeks he would be for the fifth time a father. He would not have believed it. But it was not so much the actual changes as the incidents that had led to them, and the incidents that had risen out of them, that had made, because of these two main changes, the year that was just ending so dramatic. There had been his father’s death that had made the purchase of such a property possible. There had been that business with young Rickman that had made it desirable. Had not the emotional state of mind that young Rickman created in Jane produced for himself and her a period of separation with a subsequent almost honeymoon reconciliation, there would have been no need in this new home to make one room so definitely a nursery.

There were other consequences. There was the liberation that her father’s death had brought to Stella. She was now free, financially and emotionally. And heaven knew to what ultimate use she might not put that freedom. Every Sunday she addressed meetings from a cart on the White Stone Pond. She had been in prison once. She was likely to be again. The militants thought very highly of her, he had been assured.

There was that consequence; there were others. In particular the enlargement of Peel & Hardy’s tobacco side. That enlargement would never have been approved unless he had backed Prentice, so that he might himself be backed in the matter of Rickman’s appointment. The innovation had led to consequences so considerable that had Balliol not had his own axe to grind, he would assuredly have asked for a more detailed account. It had led to the introduction into the business of a young man from whom he most certainly suspected trouble in the future. Smollett was one of those people who combine alarmingly a number of contradictory characteristics. He was alert, but cautious; he was bumptious but obsequious; he was well-read but ignorant; he was young but he had experience. He was anxious to learn but ready to teach. He was twenty-three years old. He was pale, tall, pimply; with hunched shoulders from which his head emerged like that of some bird of prey. He was extremely ambitious and clearly regarded his present position as a stepping-stone. Balliol wondered whether he regarded his present position as a stepping-stone to promotion in the firm of Peel & Hardy, or to a superior position in some other firm. If his ambition was directed towards Peel & Hardy, Balliol likened the situation to that of the Frankenstein Saga. Prentice had contrived his own destruction.

Such troubles lay, however, in a very distant future. The present and the immediate future were lit with a comfortable sunlight. Seated in the first house that he had ever really owned, he felt a security that was new to him. Everything seemed soundly based. That very uneventfulness to which The Times’ article referred was the proof and promise of security. His business was sound and long-established; he had the friends and the kind of life he needed. His home life was placid and familiar. He had suspected from the start that he would have difficulties with Jane some day. He had been prepared, had known how to handle it. It was in the past now. Jane would be unlikely to trouble him that way again.

He felt confident about his children.

Ruth and Hugh were of the kind for whom life always did, more or less, go well. They met it in the right spirit. They put it to their own uses. They were easy, cheerful, with a zest for living. Ruth was the kind of girl who might break off two engagements, but would make an extraordinarily successful marriage. Hugh was not the type who would ever be news value to a paragraphist. But he would fill effectively the place that was awaiting him on the Board of Peel & Hardy. He was a man’s man. He would have enough impersonal interests to find life full and varied. Balliol did not worry about Ruth or Hugh.

He did not worry about Francis and Lucy, for that matter. Francis was difficult, he recognized that: a secretive, moody boy. His mother had spoilt him; that was what was really wrong with him. Francis thought he was entitled to the whole world. He’d settle down, alter his views, when he went to school, met other boys of his own age, realized that he was a cog in a machine, not the whole machine. His mother worried about him. There would be time enough for worry when he was faced with actual issues.

Lucy was in the same position from that point of view. She was difficult and moody. He had probably spoilt her, just as Francis had been spoilt by Jane. But girlhood wasn’t the carefree easy time that poets pictured it. A young girl’s mind was in part a miasma of unhealthy impulses and intimations, in part a selfless idealistic yearning for perfection. A young girl had secrets that she could not share. A parent could only wait and watch.

So he mused, sitting there before the fire.

From the hill’s foot came the sudden screech of syrens. The New Year had started. 1908. The year of his child’s birth; a child who would come of age in 1929; when he himself, as likely as not, would not be here to toast its health: a child whose own children would see the century out; who might see it out himself: ninety-two. The elixir of youth was a medieval dream. But doctors knew nowadays how to keep a sluggard blood alert. When he and Jane had been dead for forty years, there would be someone sitting in this room, looking back to 1908; thinking, “That’s when all this began.”

What manner of change in men’s mind, in the surface of men’s lives, would not that man have seen. How astonished he would have been as a child had the motor-car been prophesied. Since the dawn of history men had longed to fly. It was possible that before the child born in this year had come to middle age men actually would have mastered that last obstacle. His grand-children might see the day when people travelled by air as light-heartedly as they travelled now by train. It was not impossible. No one could tell what changes science might fifty years from now achieve. He could picture Hugh and Francis reading at the year’s end a review of the year’s achievements; the discovery of this; the remedy of that; remedies and discoveries that would be expected to revolutionize that whole structure of man’s thought and attitude. And yet for Hugh and Francis, as individuals, that future year of such high and manifold achievement might appear in retrospect as this uneventful year appeared to him in terms of those permanent, personal problems that had not altered since the flood and whose outcome made life full or sad, petty or happy, for the individual.

II

In the middle of April, a year to a day, very nearly, since Edward and Jane Balliol had walked slowly up the North End Road, Helen Balliol was born.

Francis was the only one of the family in the house. Hugh was staying with a school friend. Ruth and Lucy had joined a pension in Wimereux, where they were presumed to be learning French. Francis felt very lost and lonely in the large, empty house. He was not noticed. He was not wanted. His mother could not see him. His nurse left him to eat his meals alone. He was told that he could not have any of his friends to visit him; that he must be quiet and keep out of the way. There was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do. There seemed a great deal of activity from which he was excluded. There were arrivals and departures. A strange nurse appearing; and his father returning home at half-past four.

During the night he heard doors opening and shutting; the sounds of footsteps in passages. When the nurse came to call him in the morning, it was with the announcement that “a dear little sister had arrived during the night.”

“When can I see it?”

“Later on.”

He was not taken to see it till ten o’clock. It looked very much like any other baby. His mother was pale, and tired. She smiled. He wanted to tell her how lonely he had been, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. But she did not want to listen. He could see that.

“You must go now, Master Francis,” the nurse said.

The house was as empty as it had been yesterday. There was no one to take any notice of him. He would have liked to have sat down and cried. But that would be girlish and contemptible. In silence he took a silent revenge on the family’s neglect. From his parents’ bathroom he went to the schoolroom bathroom, downstairs to the hall lavatory. Then by the way of the back door into the scullery. At each stage he turned full on every available tap, having first inserted every available stopper. He closed door after door to shut away the sound of running water, then, vindicated in his own esteem, he waited in the arboured extremity of the garden for the hand of retribution to descend.

The immediate outcome of this exploit was for Francis deservedly such as he had anticipated. It had, however, another and more lasting outcome. It decided Balliol that the time had come for his younger son to be sent to school. He would clearly be a nuisance now that Jane would only be able to devote less of her attention to him.

“But not a boarding-school,” she had pleaded.

Hugh had not been sent to a preparatory school at the age of eight.

“Francis is too young to be sent away,” she argued. “Could he go to that nice school, where the boys wear blue caps with yellow eagles? Between the White Stone Pond and Golders Hill. They always look very nicely mannered.”

“I’m told that they are taught singularly little.”

“Does that matter very much so early?”

“That is a point on which my mind is still undecided.”

He was not at all sure that it was not a mistake to train preparatory schoolboys to a scholarship pitch: that it was not wiser to let them take their first years quietly as a runner took the first lap of a long race. Preparatory schoolmasters for purposes of self-advertisement worked to make scholars of their pet pupils. But the boy’s career ended for the preparatory schoolmaster at the point where for the boy it was only just beginning. It might be interesting to try with Francis the experiment of an easy start. At any rate for a year or so.

“We will send him there next term,” he said.

Francis was overjoyed at the news. On the first morning of the summer term he roused the household at the hour of six by chanting like a bacchanal down the corridors:

I’m going to school to-day, I’m going to school to-day,

Oh, what bliss, oh what joy, I’m going to school to-day!

III

The flood of progress that had delayed for so long its descent upon the western slopes of Hampstead burst now over the crest of the hill in relentless, perceptible cascades. Not only did a steady stream of houses from North End village and Child’s Hill demand an appropriate allotment of shops at the hill’s foot, but from the north-east towards Finchley the roads and houses of the Garden Suburb enclosed Golders Green within a rough-cast barrier. Within two years no one walking on an April afternoon from Hendon to Golders Hill would imagine himself to be taking a country stroll. Balliol no longer talked of living in the country, nor was he for much longer to be allowed to describe himself as a resident of Hampstead. His vote lay in Hendon; his postal address was changed from Hampstead, N.W.3. to Golders Green, N.W.11. A change that considerably disturbed Balliol’s staff. A parlourmaid actually gave notice because she did not like telling her friends she lived in Golders Green. Though in the end she was persuaded to remain.

“I should not let that worry you,” he said.

“You can have your letters addressed to you at North End Road, Hampstead, N.W. And they will still arrive. If, when you write to your friends, you take the precaution of posting your letters in the pillar-box opposite the Hare and Hounds, they will be honoured by a N.W. 3 postmark. It is only if you descend this hill, to the Well-garth Road pillar-box, that they will be disfigured by a N.W. 11 postmark.”

“Well, in that case, sir.…”

For Balliol himself the pleasure of a garden amply compensated for the loss of caste that was implied in a servant’s eyes by a move from Bayswater to Golders Green. His garden was a great delight to him. Brought up in the atmosphere of an old garden, he had believed a gardener’s experienced assertion that calceolarias never would do in this soil; that delphiniums only looked really right in a southern border; that the tulips needed the particular kind of morning sun that could be got on the east lawn. Every experiment had been made; everything was known, there was nothing new to try. But here a garden was an adventure. You watched it grow. You had no idea how this plant and that would flower. Each plant had its own particular association. This rose bush had been given to them by that friend; those poppies they had brought back with them from a week-end in Sussex. The stocks were from their old Wessex garden. He had watched each flower come up for the first time. He had seen the blades of grass come slowly through the new-churned earth. He had seen the brown flat stretches become lawns. To his own surprise he found himself working in the garden: mowing the lawn, weeding the borders, trimming the privet hedge.

They were in many ways the happiest of Balliol’s life; while Jane was absorbed in her new child; while his business ran on its own steam; while Hugh worked his way up to the Sixth at Fernhurst, was at the V table and would be a house prefect in the following autumn; while Ruth was earning the kind of unflattering report from schoolmistresses that make parents feel they haven’t much to worry over; while Francis, with his sailor-suit abandoned for a satchel and blue cap, set out each morning for the day-school above the Bull and Bush.

Lucy alone provided him with any real cause for worry. And that was worry of a kind that he did not consider likely to prove long-lived. It would end, in his opinion, the moment she met a man who was able to attract her. Balliol was convinced, like the majority of conservative-minded Englishmen, that those women only were suffragettes who could not find a man to marry them. And Lucy was at the moment an extremely militant-minded suffragette.

During the two years since Stella Balliol had been arrested at the Colingdale Town Hall, the suffrage movement had spread rapid fire through political and social England. “Votes for Women” was no longer, like socialism, an academic subject for abstract argument. It was an issue. The suffragette movement was a force. The break between the moderate and the militants had grown complete, the militants were waging relentless war. They heckled Ministers at elections; they canvassed against Liberal candidates; they scrawled “Votes for Women” on pavements, walls, shutters; they broke windows; they dog-whipped policemen. No public function was immune from their interruptions. They were abused, imprisoned, derided. They were told that they were putting back the Cause of Women’s Rights by a hundred years; by illegal acts they had proved women to be unfit for franchise. They were told that they were unsexed. The music-halls made rich fun of them.

“Put me upon an island where the girls are few,

Put me among the most ferocious lions in the Zoo

Put me upon a treadmill and I’ll never fret,

But for heaven’s sake don’t put me near a suffragette!”

Every Sunday morning a cart, hung with green, white and purple ribbons was drawn up beside the White Stone Pond. From this uncertain platform week after week were delivered arguments about equality that sounded as fantastic to the average Englishman as the arguments of Wilberforce against the Slave Trade had sounded a hundred, years earlier to West Indian planters. “How absurd,” the planters scoffed, “to talk of a negro’s rights! Negroes had been born slaves; they must live as slaves; they must die as slaves; they and their children in perpetuity.” In just that way the men of Edward Balliol’s generation argued about the Rights of Women. What nonsense to talk of women with a vote: women in parliament: women sitting on juries, pleading in court, directing companies. At many of their public meetings suffragettes were welcomed with over-ripe tomatoes and rotten eggs. At Hampstead on a Sunday morning a decorous regard for the Sabbath was preserved. There was heckling in plenty, but it was good-natured if persistent. Its persistence, however, made little effect on the validity of the speaker’s arguments. There was an answer for every question.

Occasionally Stella Balliol would speak. She was now one of the dozen most prominent suffragettes. If a caricaturist were to select any one person to typify the militant movement, he was as likely to select Stella Balliol for his purpose as Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton or Sylvia Pankhurst. Rather more likely; since the extreme and fashionable neatness of her appearance lent itself to caricature. She was always particular about her clothes.

“I may be a suffragette, but I’m not going to look a frump.”

She once seriously advanced the theory that suffragettes should wear a uniform. “It is the only way to make half of us reasonable. Do look at Miss Draft’s hat!”

But in spite of the fashionable nature of her attire, there was no foppish femininity about Stella Balliol. Some speakers had a wooing, conciliatory method of addressing their audiences. But Stella marshalled her facts and arguments in a clear, straightforward way, her address lit now and again by irony; at times by oratory. She was not afraid of the purple or the bitter passage.

Lucy accompanied her when she spoke at Hampstead. For a year now, Lucy had been an energetic worker. She had not yet taken any very active part in the militant campaign. She was considered too young for that. She did clerical work. She joined in processions. She organized bazaars, distributed pamphlets. Occasionally she made short introductory speeches. She had a good platform manner. An audience liked her, she was so young and earnest. She was not pretty, but she was so nearly beautiful that you felt that great happiness or great sadness would make a beauty of her. She was patently sincere. She would stand at the edge of the cart, her hands rested on the side, her forehead slightly furrowed. She would speak rather haltingly, not as though she were uncertain of her words, but as though she were trying to convince herself at the same time as her audience, as though she were saying: “Now, these are the facts. It must follow, mustn’t it, from them, that we have to think this way? “It was a manner that in a long speech would be monotonous but was extremely effective as an interlude between two speeches of more forceful oratory. Very often she proved more convincing than her more competent colleagues; in the same way that at a theatre one very often takes away a clearer picture of a minor than of a major part; although had the minor part been given further scope, one would have found it tiresome. It was Stella’s private opinion that Lucy was of greater value to the cause now than she would be later, when she was promoted to more responsible tasks. “But perhaps we shall have the vote by then.” She did not visualize the alternative by which Edward Balliol was consoled, that long before that time Lucy would have lost all interest in the movement. It was his chief consolation.

As he stood among the crowd at the White Stone Pond on a chill Sunday morning in the spring of 1911 he reflected that unless he had that consolation he would be desperately worried. With controlled, but vivid power his sister was justifying the tactics of the militants.

“You say that we should be patient, that we should wait. But we have waited, we have been patient. We accepted the Liberals’ promise that our rights would be considered when they came into power. They were not considered. We realized that we should be ignored as long as we let ourselves be ignored. Yet we have always been ready to arbitrate. We have been reasonable even in battle. We called a truce of six months last year because the Government promised they would grant our rights. They did not grant our rights. The truce is over. A battle has begun that will not cease, till the claims of justice are allowed.”

At her side sat Lucy with an eager and responsive expression. Her lips were moving; what our journalists would call “drinking in her words,” he thought. If only this absurd craze of hers would end. She was twenty-one now. Sooner or later she was bound to meet some man who would stop all this nonsense. Young girls invariably had a craze of some sort. They became religious; or they went in for art; or they wanted to educate the poor. Unless they were of the snob kind that wanted “to get into Society,” or were the athletic county kind that in the old colonel’s phrases “worked out that rubbish” on the hunting-field. There was the schoolroom, then there was an interval to be filled before a woman’s real life began: her life as a wife, a hostess, a mother. Till that real life began, a girl had to focus her emotion somewhere. The moment her real life started, she put away her easels, her shrine, her social tracts. In a few years’ time Lucy would be looking back on all this, laughing at it. But in the meantime it was very definitely a problem.

Whenever Stella addressed a meeting on the Heath, she lunched afterwards at Ilex. The placid, comfortable atmosphere of her brother’s dining-room provided a pleasantly ironic contrast to the tub that a few moments before she had been thumping.

“I wonder if those toughs who heckle me realize that I’m quite a normal human being off the platform.”

Ordinarily no reference was made to Stella’s public life; in much the same way that her brother never discussed his business in his home. The view was held that careers were not quite good form and that you discussed friends, families and all such sections of the newspaper as did not personally concern you. On this afternoon, however, when they were alone together, after lunch, Balliol did bring up the question.

“I suppose there is no doubt that you’ve embarked on what we used to call in the nursery ‘War to death’?”

“More or less.”

“You can scarcely expect a parent not to feel rather alarmed when his daughter is called on active service.”

“It’s scarcely as serious as that.”

“No, but.…” He paused. Then, abandoning his habitual flippancy: “You must have a great many members of your movement who are not actual militants; who don’t, I mean to say, take part in any of your more spectacular demonstrations; in whom you have some equivalent for the Army Service Corps. You’re not all fighting forces?”

“Of course. There are a great many women who’re too old, some have dependents that would make it impossible for them to get into trouble.”

“How far is it a matter of choice with them?”

“To a large extent. But all our demonstrations are organized centrally. Nothing militant is done without our sanction. We allow no hooliganism. Everything is planned.”

“Then it would be quite possible for you to prevent anybody, whom for various reasons you did not consider fitted for that kind of exploit, from militant activities?”

“Perfectly.”

“In that case, I should be very grateful if you could see that Lucy’s share was of a routine nature.”

He flushed slightly as he spoke. He was not in the habit of asking favours. He gave or took. He did not ordinarily give the impression of caring enough to be bothered to ask for what he was not strong enough to take. Stella was surprised. Also a little touched. It humanized her brother. He had put the request in the one way that could have influenced her against her judgment.

“I suppose I could, for a time, at any rate. It’ll be difficult later on. These young people are very keen. They encourage one another. They feel out of it.”

“But there’s no need to encourage her yourself.”

“None at all.”

“As long as you can, then, keep her out of it.”

“I’ll try.”

But Stella knew that it would not be easy. The suffragettes who had not been arrested, who had not been in prison, who at least had not taken part in some exploit that if detected would have resulted in prison, felt out of things, when the others were describing their experiences. They felt themselves to be non-combatants. The hunger strikers were the heroines of the movement. They formed a kind of aristocracy. To have been in prison was like joining an exclusive club of which every suffragette was a potential candidate. Stella knew how anxious her niece must be to join. She would have difficulties with her, she knew that.

A few days later, at the end of the morning’s dictation, Lucy did not, as usual, gather up her pad, pencils and the pile of correspondence to which she had taken the replies. She stood at the side of Stella’s desk, hesitating.

“Well, what is it?” Stella asked.

“There’s something that I want to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“It’s about my work. I want to do more than I’m doing.”

“You’re working long hours here. I could, of course, find you evening work. A lot of our women aren’t here till after six. But it might be more than you ought to undertake.”

“I didn’t mean more work in that way. I meant a different kind of work. I don’t want to spend my whole time in an office. I want to be out, doing things.”

“You’re more valuable where you are.”

“Oh, but I’m not. Anyone could do this work. Any old woman could. There are things I could do that no old woman could. I’m young. I’m strong. I want to do active work—militant work.”

It was the plea that Stella had expected; she knew how useless it would be to make the excuse that Lucy was too young. Lucy would quote examples in plenty of girls no older than herself who had taken their share in the actual fighting. That argument would carry little weight with Lucy. Stella resorted to that first simile of her brother’s; the Army Service Corps.

“I’m sorry, Lucy, I know how you feel. But there are certain works that are not spectacular but are essential. In a battle, for instance, the actual fighting troops are dependent upon their supplies; upon a smooth running organization. Battles are won just as much by the people who never fight as by those who do. The W.S.M. is like an army. I am one of its generals, it’s more important that I should have an adjutant whom I can trust, whom I can rely on, who will see my orders carried out, than that there should be seven rather than six militants waving flags at an Asquith meeting.”

Lucy looked at her, pensively, dubiously.

“You really mean that: that my being your secretary is as important as all that?”

“Of course it is. I can’t tell you how much trouble you save me; how everything is made easier for me by my knowing that there’s you to look after things.”

“Oh well, in that case, then…” she hesitated: then quickly and quietly gathered up her papers and left the room. There had been a thoughtful, enquiring, self-questioning expression on her face that puzzled Stella. “That’s an odd child,” she thought.

Lucy rarely discussed with her parents and never with her father the extent of her association with the W.S.M. There was a tacit agreement to leave it undiscussed, to accept the pleasant fiction that she was her aunt’s secretary, to ignore the unpleasant nature of her aunt’s occupation. For that matter, she very rarely did discuss anything serious with her father. He had a way of taking any statement that she was worried as a criticism of himself: as though it were his fault that she was not completely and ecstatically happy. So worried, indeed, did he become about any worry of hers, that she soon realized that he became more worried about it than she was herself, and that instead of his consoling her, she found herself saying to him: “But, Daddy darling, there’s nothing to worry about, truly there isn’t. I’m really quite all right.”

With her mother it was different. She thought of her mother less as a mother than an elder sister, with whom she could discuss herself impersonally; who was fond of her, and interested in her, but was not going to spend sleepless nights on her account. In consequence she confided far more in her mother than in her father.

It was to her that she brought the account of her interview with Stella.

“I had so wanted to do something real. It’s not exciting, sitting in a room being dictated to, typing, answering telephones; particularly when all those letters and telephone calls are about exciting things. I feel out of it.”

“You’re very young for that kind of work.”

“I’m older than Annie Martin and Peggy Wilbur, oh, and lots of others.”

“Yes, but you’ve been brought up in a rather easier way. They can stand hard treatment at an earlier age than you could.”

“So you think that is the reason?”

The “is” was stressed. It was said quickly, so that Jane suspected that she had made some admission; had given herself away somehow. She was immediately on her guard.

“What reason did your Aunt Stella give?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She talked about my being more use as a secretary.”

“So you are, of course. You’re an educated and intelligent girl. Most of these girls couldn’t spell a letter, much less compose one. I can imagine that your Aunt Stella would find herself in an extremely difficult position if you got into any kind of trouble. I know your father always says that his secretary knows more about the business than he does himself. I can quite understand why your Aunt doesn’t want you to do anything that would lose you.”

“Oh yes, I see that.”

But Lucy had scarcely listened to her mother’s argument. So she was right, then, and that was why Aunt Stella hadn’t wanted her to do real work. They didn’t trust her. They thought she was too weak, too delicate; that she’d been trained in a soft school. All that about being more useful as a secretary was talk. Was an excuse. She’d thought so herself, only Aunt Stella had sounded so convincing. She herself had been so anxious to be convinced. She had so wanted to be of real value. But she hadn’t been convinced; not entirely; and then when she had told her mother, of course to her, too, the obvious explanation came. Then when she heard what kind of excuse Aunt Stella had made, she embellished it, sugaring the pill, since it was clear that the swallowing was proving difficult.

It wasn’t fair. Why should they think her weak, just because she had been brought up in healthy, comfortable surroundings? She ought to be stronger, not weaker, than girls out of poor homes. If she wasn’t, then what was the point of this talk about hygiene and sanitation? Didn’t it make children stronger. They might think what they liked; they might argue how they liked; they might think her weak, but she wasn’t a fool. They couldn’t hoodwink her. They might think her weak, but she wasn’t: she’d be able to show them.

She was going to make quite certain first, however, that the reason for her aunt’s refusal was the one that she suspected.

On the following afternoon, she approached the subject with Miss Draft, obliquely.

Miss Draft worked in the same building as Stella Balliol. She had not been advanced in the Movement as rapidly as she had hoped. The leaders, who were not remarkable for a sense of humour, had had a sufficient sense of the ridiculous to recognize that Miss Draft’s presence on the platform would confirm the audience in its belief that the suffrage forces were largely recruited from the women whom no man would marry. Miss Draft had been kept in the background. She was nevertheless a figure of considerable importance. She was forceful in debate. In the committee room among other women she frequently over-ruled an opposition that had been at the start unanimous. She was sharp, hard, ruthless. By sheer persistence she got her way. A great many of the women were afraid of her. Lucy, however, had never been able to think of her otherwise than as a joke. She was never certain whether Miss Draft liked her or not for her independence. On the whole she was inclined to think she didn’t.

Lucy adopted towards her the convivially flippant manner that a schoolboy uses to the master he proposes to rag.

“I don’t suppose you consider me an indispensable factor of your organization?” she began.

Miss Draft sniffed.

“No one’s indispensable. You do your work all right, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not what I mean. If I were to fall ill, would the entire office be disorganized?”

“Of course it wouldn’t.”

“Satisfactory secretaries flower from every bush?”

“There are a great many competent young women seeking secretarial employment.”

“You’d find it easy to replace me?”

“Quite.”

“Easier than to find a dozen volunteers to set fire to Westminster?”

“If you are making fun of Jane Carland’s unsuccessful attempt to set fire to that hayrick.…”

“I am not. I was merely offering my services for the next practical demonstration.”

Miss Draft blinked at her. She was surprised, frankly, at the girl’s request. She had not pictured Lucy as a militant. She thought of her as, to begin with, she had thought of Stella: as one of those girls who played at being suffragettes, like the fashionable women who organized bazaars, and charity matinées, under the pretence that they were helping a hospital instead of amusing themselves. She had, indeed, rather resented Lucy’s position as Stella’s secretary. A gross case of nepotism, in her opinion. She was not quite certain that Lucy was sincere in her request. She hesitated.

“Do you think I’m too young?”

“Of course you’re not.”

“Do you think I’m a pampered puppy who can’t stand rough treatment?”

Miss Draft looked her up and down.

“I take it you’re the kind that thinks nothing of four sets of tennis. Oh, no. You’re strong enough.”

“Then whose hayricks shall I set alight?”

Every “Outrage” was the result of a carefully departmentalized arrangement, for which Miss Draft was in the main responsible. The militants of the W.S.M. came to her for orders. Secrecy of a high order was maintained. The less known the better. Even the leaders themselves did not know the exact details of each manœuvre. Lucy could not have sought a safer confidante. She repeated her request.

“Well, what have you got for me to do?”

Miss Draft gave her instructions in the impatient way that the dispenser of charity hands alms to a beggar.

“To-morrow evening, when your work’s finished, you can take a bus to Charing Cross Station. You will cross the road. There is a post office exactly opposite. At six o’clock precisely you will smash the window, and shout “Votes for Women!” I have arranged for the windows of a dozen post offices to be broken simultaneously in various parts of London. It will be headline news next day. That is what we want; the kind of militant action that attracts the Press. Isolated action is useless. It is overlooked. A paragraph in a corner of a column. We want something that people have got to discuss over their breakfast tables when they open their daily papers. I can rely upon you.”

That night when the house was silent, when the boards above her head had yielded their last creak, Lucy tiptoed silently down the stairs. A week earlier Francis had presented himself in the drawing-room covered with coal dust and eager with the news that he had discovered a new game. There was a pick-axe in the coal cellar. He had begun the tunnelling of a secret passage to the Bull and Bush. It seemed to Lucy that the pick-axe was admirably suited for the destruction of the Charing Cross post office window.

It proved to be. It was eighteen inches long; its head was a foot long. It was sharp, it was heavy; its own weight, without any effort of hers could be relied upon to destroy any normal window. It would fit conveniently into the small attaché case that she took down with her every morning. The first step was taken.

She woke to the sense of an occasion; a breathless eventfulness in the air: a premonition that the drama of a day had already started; that she was not beginning the day fresh; that something that had happened overnight had left its legacy.

She lay back upon her pillow staring at the ceiling, uncertain if she were waking to trouble or to pleasure. She was excited. But she was troubled. It was not that she was frightened, but that she was lonely. She wished that there were somebody she could confide in: someone to share the exploit with. It was not going to be easy; going there, alone.

She was more excited than she was lonely. At breakfast she looked round the table; at Francis bolting his food so as to get a last five minutes at the repetition he had imperfectly mastered the night before: at her father methodically folding The Times as he took the first cursory impression of the day’s events that he would supplement during the half hour’s journey in the tube: at her mother cutting her toast into long slim fingers, glancing now and again at the pile of letters that she always left unopened by her side till the rest of the family had gone—her post was her day’s chief interest; she hated waiting for it, but she would have hated even more to have her reading of it disturbed. What, thought Lucy, would they say if they were to be told the truth? If she were to say, “At six o’clock this evening I am going to break the window of the Charing Cross post office.” She wondered when she would next sit at this table.

It was with a similar feeling that she presented herself with her pad and pencil at Stella’s desk. You think I’m weak, that I can’t stand what these others can. You’ll be surprised when you read your paper to-morrow morning.

More than anything she looked forward to the welcome that she would receive when she came out of prison. She would be justified at last. Stella would recognize her as an equal: would be proud of her. Because she knew me when I was a child, she thinks that I’m one still. She won’t realize that I’m grown up.

She was proud to think how proud her aunt would be of her.

It was, however, an extremely timid girl who stood eight hours later at the corner of the Strand opposite the Charing Cross Hotel. It was five minutes to six. She had promised Miss Draft that she would wait till the first stroke of the clock. Miss Draft’s journalistic sense appreciated the news value of thirteen post office windows smashing simultaneously. Lucy had read about minutes that seemed like hours. She knew now what novelists meant. She glanced towards the church clock opposite: four minutes. A man who was passing took a long steady look at her, he checked his stride, hesitated, looked round over his shoulder, turned. He’s coming to speak to me. What’ll I do? I couldn’t give him in charge. In five minutes I’m going to be in charge myself. Do I look that kind of girl? I suppose any girl who stands about at street corners looks that kind of girl. Do I look conspicuous? Perhaps I do. I’d better move. I’ve got to get out of his way. I’ll walk up Adelaide Street. It should take me a minute to reach the top. That’ll be two minutes before I’m back. If I dawdle I could make it three. Then it’ll be the time.

As she turned back from the corner of Chandos Street, it was like the slow climb of the ladder to the highest diving platform on a cold day. In the same way that the swimmer, his toes working for their grip upon the matting, looks down on the steely inhospitable water into which in another second he must plunge, so Lucy saw at the end of the quiet little side street the thronged pavements of the Strand; the buses clattering by; the hansoms and the four-wheelers; an occasional taxi; all that stir of people; each one intent upon his own business; not one aware of her; not one noticing her. Yet in another minute that stir would have been stopped; every wandering attention would have been focussed upon her. A hundred people who at this instant would not have bothered to think twice about her would be saying as they opened their morning papers: “Do you see this about the girl smashing the window at Charing Cross? I was there when that happened.” Actresses must feel like this, when they stand shivering in the wings on their first night. I’ve got everything, haven’t I? I must be careful to open my attaché case the right way. It would be awful if I opened it the wrong way up, and the axe fell out. It would be very easy. I must hold it against my side, with the fastening towards me. She lifted it up, tucking it under her arm in preparation, half practising how she would press back the catch and lift the lid with her left hand, while she kept her right hand free to pull out the axe. So busy was she over her rehearsal that she lost count of time. When the church clock began to strike she was twenty yards away from the turning of the Strand.

Heavens, I must hurry! She quickened her pace; half-opened her bag; felt for the handle of the axe; swung into the Strand; pulled out the axe; dropped her case; rushed up to the post office, swung back the axe above her head, with the clock striking its last peal, shouted “Votes for Women!” Crashed the axe into the pane.

There was a clatter of glass. Jubilantly she swung round to face the street. “Votes for Women!” she shouted with the full power of her lungs.

Picturing the scene in her imagination she had fancied that the window once broken all would be easy going; she would have made her start: that the rest of the caste would carry on the scene. She was quite unprepared for the blank silence that followed. The English never interfere if they can help it. At the sound of the crash a full twenty people wheeled round in their stride to ascertain the cause of the disturbance. When one person stops to look, another twenty will stop to see what he is looking at. In thirty seconds a large crowd had gathered, but not one of them did more than stare; it was not their window. A couple of men nudged each other. “Suffragettes,” they whispered, then laughed. But the remainder stared up at her with a blank, stupid, but interested look upon their faces. Most of their mouths were agape. Lucy looked desperately about her. Was no one going to do anything? Did the second as well as the first move lie with her? The pick-axe was still in her hand. Desperate and wrought up, she waved it above her head and, turning, crashed it into the second pane. “Votes for Women!” she yelled again.

This second assault did slightly galvanize the crowd. A voice was raised in protest. “Look, you can’t go on like this!” But no one thought of making any active protest. Have I got to go on breaking windows for ever? Unless something happens, I shall have to. Never had she welcomed any sound so much as the sudden bulky interruption of a policeman. “Now, what’s all this about?” She was so relieved to see him that she entirely forgot that it was part of a suffragette’s duty to resist capture.

The news of Lucy’s arrest was telephoned through to Stella from the Police Station. As Edward Balliol still refused to have a telephone in his house, there was no means of getting the news through to Ilex. “I suppose I shall have to go out and see them,” Stella thought.

She first rang up Miss Draft to get the exact details of the business.

“Oh, yes,” Miss Draft told her. “Your niece was one of thirteen girls who broke post office windows simultaneously at six this evening.”

“I never knew my niece was militant to that extent.”

“I prefer to keep the names of my girls secret.”

“Of course; you’re very right. Were all these windows broken in the same district?”

“Within a mile of one another.”

“Then they’ll be brought before the same magistrate. It’ll be quite clear it was a conspiracy. They’ll all get the same punishment. Who else was with them? Anyone that’s been in prison before?”

“No.”

“That means a stiffer sentence. The magistrate can’t pretend that they’ve been influenced by a leader. He can’t make a scapegoat of anyone. I suppose it’ll be a month; at least.”

And now for Edward.

It was not a meeting to which she in the least looked forward. It was less than a fortnight since she had promised to keep Lucy out of militant demonstrations. He would never believe that she had kept her promise. He exaggerated her influence over Lucy. He might even believe that she had encouraged Lucy. He would not believe that Lucy cared enough for the Cause to sacrifice her safety for it: that she regarded as soldiers regard a non-combatant, the woman who did not take her full share in the struggle.

She glanced at her watch. It was after eight. What an infernal nuisance Edward not being on the telephone. He would be worrying because Lucy was not back. At any rate, I shall get some welcome for telling him that she’s not in danger.

The journey to Ilex was much quicker than it had been when Balliol first built his house. In those days there were so few houses at Golders Green that only one train in every three went through. You had to take your choice of waiting or walking over the Heath from Hampstead. That was over now. They were talking about extending the Tube to Hendon. The row of shops at the cross roads was stretching towards the Brent. It was into a bright blaze of light that Stella stepped at the foot of the Tube steps, and in place of the muddy lane separating the Broadway from the open country across which Bill Sykes had taken his last walk, there was a fine pavement lined by villas, with neatly tended gardens, and well-stocked flower beds. It did not look the same place.

The Balliols dined at seven-thirty. They had left the dining-room by the time Stella arrived. She could tell they had been fretting from the eager, “Yes, yes?” with which Edward received her announcement that she had come to him about Lucy.

“It’s all right. You needn’t worry. She’s quite well. But there’s been a demonstration this evening. They’ve arrested her.”

His worried expression yielded to relief; then became worried again. He had risen to his feet at Stella’s entrance and was standing with his back to the large, high-banked fire. He was wearing a velvet smoking-coat, over a stiff-cuffed, stiff-collared evening shirt. The sartorial mixture of formality and comfort typified what should have been the atmosphere of the room and moment: ease, security, the freedom to relax; with a regard for appearance, for the necessity of uniform. You felt that trouble had no right to disturb this placid confidence.

“What’s happened: is it serious? Where is she? Is there anything we can do? Can’t we bail her out? She’d better be represented in the court to-morrow. Let me see now, who had I better get in touch with?”

He asked question after question, rapidly, without any of his customary impersonality. He’s really worried, Stella thought. And for Lucy’s sake, not his own. He’s not thinking, as so many parents in his position would. “This is going to look bad for us. What are people going to say to us and about us? How shall we explain it away?”

She remembered how Beccles had behaved to her: all that talk about the firm’s dignity and honour. Most parents would talk that way in a position of this kind; family honour, family name. Which would be selfishness, would show that they thought only about themselves; that they regarded their children as embellishments of their own prestige. Her brother wasn’t like that. He really cared about Lucy. It was about her that he was worrying, not about himself. And because it was not about himself but about Lucy that he was worrying, she gave him the advice that she knew Lucy would wish for.

“We’ll go down to the court to-morrow. But it would be better for you to do nothing; let Lucy take her place with the others. Most of them are poor. They can’t afford expensive counsel. They’d resent it if one of them took privileges they couldn’t. Or anyhow, Lucy would feel they were resenting it. She’d much prefer to be left alone.”

Balliol nodded his head.

“I expect you’re right. You know how these girls feel. But I do beg of you to prevent anything like this happening again.”

“You needn’t worry about that. She’ll feel she’s done enough when she’s been in prison. That’s what they all want: to be able to say they’ve been.”

“Let’s hope so.”

They went down next morning to the Police Court. As Miss Draft had prophesied, the halfpenny Press had splashed the news of the fresh outrage over their front page headlines. The steps and passages of the court were crowded. Extra policemen had been summoned to see that there was no further disturbance. Half of the clamouring women were suffragettes. They were shouting, they were demanding their rights, they were claiming to be witnesses. It was clear to Balliol that he stood little chance of getting inside the court. To Stella for whom such a spectacle was no new experience it was clear that the magistrate would decide that the quickest way of dispersing the crowd was the speedy sentencing of the offenders. Her prophecy was correct. Long before she had managed to elbow a way to the entrance a voice had shouted:

“You might just as well go home. You can’t do any good here. Your friends have been sent to the cells.”

Balliol turned to Stella.

“Do you think that’s true?”

“Probably.”

“Can we do any good by staying?”

“I don’t see that we can.”

“They wouldn’t let us see her, would they?”

“No.”

They turned away. The brief spectacle of the Police Court, the crowds, the pushing women, the hostility of the police, had shown him life from another angle. Until now he had seen the Law upon his side. He supported the Law out of his Income Tax. A policeman was his servant: to protect him. But here was a world where the Law was an opponent, where the police were on the offensive, not the defensive. And it was of that world that his daughter was a part. What she would have to endure during the next month simply did not bear thinking of.

IV

Of what she would have to endure he had small idea. Few persons in his position had. He had not been inside a prison. He had never read an account of one. He was inclined to believe that prisoners were pampered; that the majority were better off in gaol than they were out; they were fed and clothed; they were warm, they had a roof above their heads. Though Lucy had listened to the recitals of other prisoners, she had a very similar picture to her father’s. She knew that she would wear rough clothes, wash in cold water, sleep on hard boards, be woken early to long hours. For that she was prepared.

In respect of actual detail she was not surprised. She was not surprised at being locked for hours into an airless, lightless cubicle, while wardress after wardress took particulars of her age, religion, occupation, sentences; at being herded with loosened bodice, one of a long file like so many animals before a doctor who did not even bother to place his ear to the stethoscope that he rested on her chest. She had expected to be hustled into a large room, made to undress four at a time before the other prisoners; to be harried bare-footed down stone cold corridors to the bathroom; to dress, under the wardress’ bullying command of “Hurry up there, hurry up!”, into the prison uniform; its black and red ringed stockings; its vast petticoats; the red striped cotton drawers, the third-class chocolate-brown broad arrow jackets; the white cap like a Dutch bonnet, the heavy-soled stiff-leathered shoes; had expected at the end of it all to be housed in a small oblong cell, stone-floored, with a small barred window near the ceiling, a flickering gas jet, two small shelves, one of which was called the table, the other a receptacle for the wooden bowl and spoon of prison fare; the yellow cake of soap, the minute comb and brush, the prayer and rule cards. She had expected the plank bed to look like that.

Had she written out in detail all that had happened, she would not have found matter for surprise in any one single detail. It was for the manner in which things happened that she was unprepared. She had not expected to feel humiliated by the way in which the wardresses ordered her about; in which she had been shoved and bullied from one place to another. She had been treated as something verminous, outside the pale. It was not so much that she had been actually hurt, as that she had been made to feel that she was of a lower order of creation: that she had put herself outside the range of manners and courtliness.

It was a relief to be alone at last.

She was tired, desperately tired: but she did not expect to sleep. It was not simply the hardness of the bed, or the shortness of the sheets and blankets. At her age when she was tired she could sleep upon bare stone. But though she was worn out physically, mentally she was alert and wrought up; thinking of the battle that was going to start on the next day. For it was going to be a battle. During the hours of waiting in cold corridors she had sworn with the other twelve that their rebellion was not going to end with the smashing of a window: that they were going upon hunger strike: that they would force the authorities to release them before their month was up. “We’ll have our next meal in freedom,” they had vowed. They would have that meal together. They would form a Club; the Thirteen Club; once a month they would meet for lunch in memory of that first meal in freedom.

Next morning when the pint measure was filled with its thin oatmeal and water gruel, she pushed it away into a corner. It looked such an unappetizing dish that she felt even if she were not on hunger strike she would not have touched it. If only all the food were going to be like that, perhaps the strike might not be so difficult.

Long before twelve o’clock came, however, she knew she had been deceived. It was a bitterly cold morning. For the first two hours, while she had cleaned her cell, made the bed, scrubbed the floor, she had managed to keep herself reasonably warm. But she had shivered as she had stood through the Chapel Parade inspection, under the constant fire of the wardress’ criticism in the Chapel draughts which seemed to blow from every corner. Afterwards, back in her bleak cell, sewing, it had been even worse. She was cold; she was weak. When the midday clatter of tins began, she looked enviously at the pint of gruel, the plate of pocket potatoes. It needed considerable courage to pour the food away into the slop pail.

All through the long afternoon she thought of that wasted meal. Three hours of sewing, then the short trip to fetch the next day’s supplies; another two hours of sewing; another pint of gruel, another slice of bread to be flung away. Then three hours of rest before the lights went out. Those last three hours were the worst. It was too dark to read the small print of the Bible which was the only literature available. She sat shivering, her body aching for food. She thought back over the last meals that she had eaten, that last lunch at the A.B.C. She had ordered a poached egg, a cup of chocolate and a macaroon. A long menu had been on the table. She had ten shillings’ worth of silver. She could have ordered lamb cutlets, or roast chicken, or mixed grill; sausages and mashed potatoes. Her mouth watered at the thought. It seemed incredible that with all that variety at her disposal she should have ordered one poached egg. I won’t be as silly as that when I get out. First of all I’ll have a plate of tomato soup. That’ll make me feel nice and warm. Then I’ll have a grilled sole, with some butter sauce. After that I’ll have a chicken patty, with mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts. I’ll finish up with a Pêche Melba; or perhaps a tart. What fruit will be in then? Too early for raspberries. Apples, I suppose. Perhaps I won’t have chicken patty. I’ll have creamed chicken. How I shall love it! How soon will I be able to have it? I wonder when they’ll let me out? They kept Jane Carter in ten days, but then she was very strong. They wouldn’t keep me more than eight. Surely they wouldn’t? I’m told they try and make you eat, that they force food on you. But they wouldn’t do that; not to me, surely they wouldn’t? They couldn’t, could they? No, of course, they couldn’t.

In a week, at the latest in ten days, they’d let her go, she and the rest of the Thirteen Club would have their first monthly lunch. They’d go round to the W.S.M. offices, they’d be weak, ill, tired. They wouldn’t make a sensational appearance in the Ballroom, but there’d be a new look for her in Aunt Stella’s eyes. There’d be approval, and respect; a recognition of equality.

Aunt Stella would be able to take her into her confidence now; would cease to look on her as the niece for whom she had found employment, just because she was niece; would accept her as a friend; would discuss her plans with her; would say, “I’m thinking of doing this: now does it strike you…? “A friend to whom she could take her own problems, on whom she could rely for sympathy and guidance. It would be wonderful to have Aunt Stella as a friend. She would be proud of her friendship, a friendship that she had earned.

Thus she kept up her spirit during the long three hours, before the knock came on the door; the shouted “Are you all right?”, the flap pulled back; the eye of vigilance peered through the narrow slit.

But it was less easy, later, when the light was out; when she lay cold, stiff, hungry, on the hard knobbly mattress, trying to tuck her legs under her so that the sheet could be wrapped under her toes. Her eyelids ached for sleep, but the cold and stiffness of her body kept waking her when she dozed off. She always woke colder and stiffer.

“And this is only the first day. How in heaven’s name am I going to manage another nine?”

She slept scarcely three hours through the night. She waited, prayerfully, for the barred slit of the window to lighten. It would be better when the day had once begun. There would be the scrubbing of the floor to warm her. When the clanging of bells and the tramp of feet roused her to the day’s work she flung back the blankets, as eagerly as she would in midsummer on a seaside-holiday, with the day stretching ahead of her, prodigal of entertainment.

But when she jumped to her feet her knees were so weak, her head so dizzy, that she staggered. But for the narrowness of the room she would have fallen. She rested her forehead against the wall and leant there breathing slowly, wondering whence she would draw the strength and courage to face the long hours of work and waiting.

By the time she had finished the scrubbing and tidying of the room, she was warm, but so weak that a wolfish hunger assailed her at the sight of the bowl of thin, weak gruel. The pouring of it away with the slops demanded more courage than she had ever been called upon to exercise.

“Well, that’s that,” she thought, as she heard it splash at the bottom of the pail.

She sat upon her bed. Eight-thirty. At Ilex the long breakfast table would be spread. On the revolving centre there would be toast, butter, a new cottage loaf with brown, crisp crusts. There would be marmalade and honey, some kind of jam. On the sideboard would be a teapot and a coffee jug. There would be an aluminium stand, two little methylated flames would be flickering under covered dishes. Under the covers would be eggs, sausages, a haddock, kidneys. A fire would be burning brightly. There would be soft seats to the high-backed chairs. Through the open windows would come the sound of birds and the scent of spring.

All that day, whether she was lined up for Chapel, whether she was listening to the Chaplain’s address, whether she was sewing in her cell, her imagination presented her picture after picture of the life that three days ago had been still hers. She did not think; construct arguments; carry on a conversation with herself, explain herself to herself in words. Before her sleep-wearied eyes a succession of pictures passed.

A midsummer day; she was lying in a punt on cushions, in a light cotton frock; a bag of cherries was at her side.

It was winter: dinner was just over; the women had left the men; she was settling herself in a deep armchair before the fire; her hostess was beginning to make the coffee.

Her father was taking her to lunch; it had been a cold autumn day; she had been glad to escape from the windswept Strand into the bright shelter of the Savoy; on all sides of her were well-dressed men and women; there was a buzz of talk; of laughter; people were smiling at one another; there was a vase of red carnations on the table. Her father had handed her a long embossed menu. “I’ll choose. We’ll have some cold grouse and Japanese salad later on. An omelette of some kind would be the best thing to start with.”

She had been for a long country walk in Devonshire; she and another girl; it had been a warm day for March; they were red-cheeked and tired; they had stopped at a farm that advertised “Cream Teas”; a trimly-aproned woman spread the table; splits, strawberry jam; a cottage loaf; a great bowl of thick, clotted cream; rock cakes, brown and turreted.

She had come in from an afternoon of shopping; she had flung her parcels on the bed. She had hurried down the passage to the bathroom; she had turned on the taps; quickly she had pulled off her clothes; soon she would be lying back relaxed in that cleansing warmth.

Pictures of food and warmth and comfort; where people were happy and at ease. All day long the procession passed before her eyes.

Every third day the prisoners were allowed half-an-hour’s exercise. It was one of those March days that surprise you with a sense of summer. The sky was blue; soft, dove-coloured clouds drifted across it over the harsh outline of the tall, forbidding buildings that shut in the prison square. Those same clouds were floating over the heads of happy people. Lucy had slept little better than on the previous night. There was no elasticity in her knees and ankles. They were like stones, she walked stiffly from the hips. The person four feet in front of her whispered over her shoulder the one word “Resolute!” It was the pass-word that the Thirteen had agreed upon. Both as a vow and a consolation; a saying: “Yes, I’m hunger striking. Be resolute. I know you are, too.” “Resolute,” whispered Lucy over her shoulder.

The knowledge that she was entitled to use the password braced her lagging spirits. She had held to her fort, so far. She closed her eyes. She pictured a time when the need to say “Resolute” had passed; when she would be walking into the W.S.M. office; when Aunt Stella would be looking at her with that new look in her eyes: a new tenderness, a new respect. Her heart-beat quickened; but the picture blurred. The dizziness in her head grew louder; her legs weakened, seemed to be going sideways under her; collapsing like a pack of cards. The buzzing became a roar of an express train. She was falling under it: falling, falling. She gave a cry, she fell.

A harsh voice sounded in her ears. “Is this another of these absurd strikers?” She forced her eyelids open. A man’s face, moustached, red-cheeked, with little bright, dark eyes, was bending over her. A wardress was at her side. The hard mattress was beneath her. She was very cold, very stiff, very weak. She closed her eyes again.

“How many of these fanatics are there here?” The harsh voice was asking. “Thirteen? What a suitable number. They’re probably all behaving in the same way. We shall have the whole lot of them on our hands in a few days. Watch them carefully. See if they’re eating. If they’re not eating, tell me. We’ll have them really ill if we’re not careful. There’s nothing wrong with them at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with this girl. Fetch her some fruit, Brand’s Essence, chicken, some decent coffee.”

Lucy lay still and silent, with her eyes half-closed, summoning back her senses, trying to summon back her strength. What was it they were going to do? Force food on her? She had heard of that: she had read of that. But she hadn’t believed that it could happen, not really; not to her. What was it that they would do? You couldn’t make a person eat. She’d tried to feed a puppy with medicine. It had taken three people to do it. And that had only been a teaspoonful. What was it that they were going to do to her?

She waited, limp and relaxed on the hard plank. There was the sound of footsteps in the passage. Two wardresses came in, they were carrying a plate of fruit, a plate of chicken with a slice of ham on it. Fragrant steam came from the lid of a coffee-pot.

“Come along, my dear. We’ve ordered you an especially nice dinner, to make you well again.”

The sight of the good appetizing food, the smell of the rich coffee was like the realization of one of her dream pictures. She half sat up. Half started to stretch over the table.

Then she remembered: this was not a dream. This was reality. They were tempting her; trying to make her think she was out of prison. But she wasn’t. This was just a trick. She turned over to the wall.

The two wardresses exchanged a glance.

“Very well, my dear, if you don’t feel well enough now, you will, probably, later on. We’ll come back. See you about tea-time. Get a good rest now, won’t you?”

It was much harder when she was alone. When the wardresses were there, she had their opposition to fight against. But now she was her own opponent. There was no one but herself to spy against her weakness. She could have sipped the coffee. No one need have known. There was a small fleck of chicken. She could have taken that; no one would have noticed. But she mustn’t, she must keep her vow. Resolute. She turned her face towards the wall. She shut her eyes. Had there ever really been a time when she had been happy and warm? Among people who cared for her? Had she ever been able to believe in the world as a friendly place? Was that world waiting for her outside this place: her family, her friends, Aunt Stella? Would they make it up to her for all this when it was over? Would that new look really come into Aunt Stella’s eyes?

The tears surged into her eyes; trembled on her eyelashes, fell in long trickles along her cheeks. She began to sob with slow, heavy, helpless gasps. The effort weakened her. Her tiredness overcame the chilled numbness of her body. She fell asleep.

She was woken by the sound of voices. The wardresses had come back into the room. They were looking at the untouched food, commenting on it. “We’ll have to fetch the doctor.”

In five minutes they were back. They had brought four others with them. Before Lucy realized what was happening to her, she had been turned over on her back. Her ankles, her wrists, held. Her head forced back.

“So my patient’s ready, is she?” the loud, hearty voice of the doctor was saying.

He had brought an assistant with him. They were dressed in white coats, as for an operation. They were wearing rubber gloves. From the table came the tinkle of instruments. What were they going to do? What were they going to do?

The doctor leant over her. He was tall. He was handsome, ruddy-complexioned, bright-eyed; an insolent, frank expression. The kind of man who would get elected to a club committee; who played games well; who drank his share without going beyond the limit; who liked a joke; and a good evening. A man’s man, in fact. The kind of man who would be successful with a certain kind of woman; who would get his rebuffs but would succeed through insolence and dash; who relished opposition. He was the kind of man by whom Lucy would have most hated to be made love to; at whose touch she would have felt real revulsion. For which very reason she was attracting him. There was a gloating, brutal look on his face as he looked down at her; the kind of look that must come into his face when he was on the brink of a long-delayed success. “He’s going to enjoy this,” thought Lucy. She shut her eyes.

She scarcely knew what happened. She was too weak to fight. Her wrists and ankles were firmly held. A pillow had been pressed across her stomach. She tried to turn away her head, but a hand forced it back. She tried to close her lips, but indiarubber-covered fingers forced them apart. She clenched her teeth but a steel instrument was forced between a gap in them. A screw was turned, her jaws were forced open and held there by the metal gag. There was the intolerable suffocating sensation of a tube being forced down her throat. She wanted to be sick, but could not. Food was being forced into her stomach. It was warm, it comforted her. She ceased to struggle. She lay limp. The tube was withdrawn. The steel gag loosened. Her ankles and her wrists were free again.

“The same dose to be repeated twice a day till you stop being a silly girl,” the doctor said.

She pulled away, her face turned against the wall. Her mouth and gums were bleeding, her back was bruised. But it was less the physical pain than the sense of personal degradation that she should have been handled in such a way, by such a man, that made her burst into hysterical, uncontrolled sobbing.

Every morning and every evening it went on like that. There was no pretence now of offering her dainties. She was served with the usual pint of gruel. A wardress watched her. If the food was not eaten the doctor was promptly summoned. He entered in the same hearty, truculently masculine manner. There was the same confident, brutal, gloating expression on his face. He knew, through his experience of women, how she loathed being handled by him. Her revulsion heightened his relish. Each morning she dreaded his visit more. Sometimes she would make no resistance; merely lie supine, apparently indifferent. At other times she would kick and struggle, trying to make it more difficult for him, hurting herself the more. Now and again she would assume a limp quiescence, so that she should take the doctors and the wardresses off their guard with a sudden twist of the head or body.

When the doctors left her, she would lie limp and bruised, her face turned stubbornly to the wall. But in spite of the bruises on her body, of the scratches on her mouth, she realized with a sick foreboding that the food was having its effect on her; that she no longer felt weak and cold as she had on those first two days. She slept at nights. In the prison square she walked with an elastic tread. There was no use in her pretending to deny that she was now fit physically to endure her month of prison; that the authorities would not have any need to discharge her on that account. The knowledge frightened her. For though the food had strengthened her, the mental misery, the sense of personal shame and degradation that the forcible feeding woke in her grew daily stronger. And there was a time coming very shortly now, when she would be incapable of resisting that particular kind of misery.

For two days every month she was and knew herself to be an unbalanced person. She was aware of it, and took account of it. She avoided strain as far as possible, she postponed every important decision; she said to herself: “For forty-eight hours you are not yourself. Decide nothing, postpone everything, wait.” Her mother had told her not to worry; that some girls were like that; others weren’t. That it meant nothing, that it did not matter, that as soon as she married and had children that particular kind of strain would cease. “Till then don’t let yourself be worried at that time.” And that’s what she had imagined too, then; when she was with friends. But here.…

The realization of this fresh and unlooked-for trial filled her with panic. She would never in that mood be able to face the ordeal. She would never be able to, never, never! How soon was it now? Three days: two days: to-morrow, possibly. At the most it could not be more than four. In panic she kept count of the passing hours; fulfilled the prison routine, the scrubbing, the slops, the inspection, the Chapel Parade, the sewing; accepted the feeding almost as a matter of course, since the real test was still to come. She was helpless, hopeless, defeat was inevitable. There was no chance of a release now. She would have to yield.

When the fatal morning came, when she woke with a sick headache and drear, searing pain, she did her best to gather her strength together. To be brave, to make the last fight. But in her imagination she had faced and accepted defeat so often, that when the wardresses pinioned her on the bed, when she saw grinning above her the loathed and mocking face, she broke down.

“Give me food. It’s all right, I’ll eat.”

With an arm flung across her eyes, she shut out from her vision the smile of triumph on that gloating face; such a smile of triumph as he must show when a long-sought conquest dropped her last defence.

Two days later, recovered now, strengthened, despising her weakness, wondering how she could have been so childish, she joined the exercise file upon the prison square. She was sick with shame. She would have no right now to repeat the password “Resolute.” To her surprise, however, none of the other twelve was there.

Later she asked a wardress the explanation. Had they been moved to another prison?

Moved into another place altogether, she was told. Been set free, they had been. There had been such a fuss in the paper, so many questions asked in the House about treatment of prisoners, that all suffragettes on hunger strike had been released.

“When had they gone?” she asked.

“Yesterday morning.”

Yesterday morning! If she had only hung on for another day she would have been released.

“Were they all released?”

“Every blinking one of them.”

Every one of them. She was the only one of the thirteen to fail.

V

The release of the twelve hunger strikers had been the occasion for a considerable demonstration outside the prison. When Lucy was released a fortnight later there was only her father waiting for her in the courtyard. He welcomed her as he had done on her return from school. He took her coat for her, slipped his arm through hers, pressed it affectionately; as he walked her towards the cab rank he talked of their immediate plans. “We’ve quite a number of amusing things arranged.” And just as on her return from school he had said: “After that long journey, I’m sure you’d like a cup of coffee,” so now he said, “You must be hungry. I’ll stop the taxi at the first reasonable eating house.” Now, as then, she was touched by the affectionate hand clasp, grateful for the warming food. It was just as it had been then; only then she had been happy and excited; not only thrilled at the prospect of a holiday, but proud with the knowledge that that holiday had been earned. She had no feeling of pride now. She had done nothing to be proud of. She had failed. She had proved herself a coward. She was slinking home, beaten. There was no triumph about her return.

Her father made no reference to her stay in prison. He wouldn’t. He never asked questions; never probed. If a confidence were brought to him, he was sympathetic; he would take infinite trouble to smooth out those difficulties on which advice had been invited. But he never interfered. She was grateful to him for that. “He’s a darling, one couldn’t have a better father. I wonder what he makes of it.” Not that she really cared. This was a part of her life that was apart from him: that he had never shared with her; in which he was not really interested; whose importance to her he had never accurately assessed; that he regarded as an interlude, as a fancy to be humoured, to be endured with patience. She did not worry about what he thought. She was anxious to make him happy; to spare him pain. She was sorry if she had made him unhappy. But it was Aunt Stella’s opinion that really mattered. To Aunt Stella her exploit would have a personal significance. Would Aunt Stella be ashamed of her? Would Aunt Stella be able to understand her weakness? “I’m not going to make excuses. I’m not going to explain myself. If she can’t guess the way it was, well there it is, I’ll have to find some other way of proving to her that I’m not a coward; that I can be trusted.” For on that point she was resolved. If she had lost or forfeited her Aunt’s belief in her, she would win it back. She would have another chance.

So she mused as she sat over her breakfast at an A.B.C. The marbled, unclothed table, the thick cups, the simple fare were luxuries to her after her month of prison. It was of such a moment that she had dreamed during the hours of her hunger strike. But there was no relish to them now. She was still on trial. Till she had seen that first expression in Aunt Stella’s face she would not know in what manner she was judged. She would be able to enjoy nothing till she knew.

At her side her father maintained a casual flow of talk; but his eyes were watching her; noting not only those things which he had expected—the worn, thin look of the cheeks, the dark hollows under the eyes, the untended finger nails, the roughened fingers—but things he had not looked for: a languid indifference of manner, a complete absence of any excitement at being free, no looking forward to pleasures of which she had been deprived. She seemed as though the vitality had been beaten out of her. Is this what prison does to people?

That afternoon he rang up Stella from his office.

“Look here, I’ve seen Lucy. I’m very worried about her.”

“What’s the matter?”

“She’s lifeless, listless, uninterested.”

“That’s what people often are by the time that the prison authorities have done with them.”

“That’s as it may be. I want you to promise me that she shan’t go there again.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s what you said the last time.”

“I didn’t know she’d go behind my back and against my orders.”

“Then will you see this time there are no people behind your back that she can get at?”

“Oh, very well.”

Stella walked angrily out of her office into Miss Draft’s room. People like her brother seemed to imagine that she had nothing to do but dry-nurse their daughters, sisters, wives. The number of people who rang her up, or wrote to her, or called to ask whether the particular person in whom they were interested, could not have this, that or the other concession arranged for them. Lucy was her parents’ concern, not hers. Still, since the promise had been given.…

“It’s about my niece,” she told Miss Draft. “She’s had a bad time in prison. She’s not strong enough to take on that kind of work. Not yet, anyhow. She’s been brought up soft. She can’t stand it. I want you to see that she’s not sent on anything that’s likely to get her put to prison. And see that Miss Wigmore and Mrs. Tyler are warned as well.”

That’s that, she thought, as she went back to the large pile of work whose dimensions were increasing daily.

On the following morning, Stella arrived to find her niece already waiting in the front office.

She was surprised.

“I hadn’t expected to see you here.”

“I wanted to start work again straight away.”

“That’s fine, now let me see…” Stella hesitated. She was uncertain how best to employ Lucy for the moment. When Lucy had been sent to prison, she had had to find another secretary. The girl she had found was more experienced than Lucy; she was quick, silent, unobtrusive. There was an impersonal atmosphere about her that Stella liked. She felt that she was speaking her thoughts into a machine. On the other hand, she had been always conscious of Lucy as a real person, with whom a relationship had to be established and maintained. She could not, with Lucy as her secretary, walk into her office, pick up her papers and start her work, as though nothing but her work existed for her. Fond though she was of Lucy, she found it easier to work with her new secretary. She had, indeed, welcomed the change. As Beccles would have said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good. She had no intention of getting rid of her new secretary. She had not expected to be presented with Lucy’s problem quite so early.

She hesitated.

“I think that’s very fine of you, to want to come back so soon. I’ve had to get another girl to take your place; temporarily, of course; but in the meantime there are one or two things we’re working on that can’t be very well disturbed, so I think the best thing would be for you to help Miss Draft. She’s always telling me she’s got more than she can handle. Aren’t you, Miss Draft? Well, here’s Lucy to take some of it off your shoulders.”

With a preoccupied smile she passed into her own room.

As the door closed behind her, Lucy shut her eyes.

No longer to be Aunt Stella’s secretary. She had expected many different kinds of welcome, but never this. Instead of earning respect, she had forfeited such confidence as had been hers before. How eagerly she had said good-bye to this room five weeks ago. She had pictured the proud, triumphant welcome of her return. The admiring look in her aunt’s eyes, that accepted her friendship and co-operation on equal terms. It was the thought of that look that in prison had reconciled her to the pain and ignominies of the hunger strike; and later, after she had given way, had accepted the food which symbolized surrender, it had been the thought, the hope, the belief that her aunt would understand that had lessened the shame of failure. Whatever the other twelve might think, whatever Miss Draft and her parents might think of her, there would be one person who would understand. It might be that her failure might be a closer link than a spectacular success. They would share something that no one else could share; the other way, her aunt would have been one spectator out of many. That’s what she had thought. That’s how she had argued. And this was what had happened. To be exiled from confidence, and faith; to have less even than she had had before; to be Miss Draft’s assistant.

“Now, there’s something here that I’d like you to do for me, Miss Balliol,” a firm, precise voice was saying at her side.

Lucy opened her eyes, blinked, pulled herself together. She must get started on her next duties. She was not going to sulk. She would show Miss Draft what she was worth. As she seated herself before her typewriter, she was dramatizing the moment when Miss Draft would remark to Aunt Stella: “I can’t tell you how satisfied I am with Lucy Balliol.…”

Half way through the morning the door was flung exuberantly open, and Annie Martin bounded into the room. She had been the ringleader of the Thirteen Club. She was red-cheeked, untidy; her hair loose under her hat, her eyes bright. She stopped at the sight of Lucy, in obvious embarrassment.

“What, you, Miss Balliol? I’d no idea you were out.”

“I came out yesterday.”

“So the time’s passed as soon as that, really? Not that it’s seemed so short to you, I suppose. Doesn’t the time drag when one’s in there? Out here it’s simply flown. It’s been such fun, you can’t think what a reception we had. I do wish you had been with us. I asked for you everywhere. I thought there must be some mistake. But no, they said. You were sitting up and taking nourishment. I was disappointed. We’re going to have our first real meeting of the Thirteen Club next week. That’s what I’ve come to see your aunt about. We want her to preside. We’ve co-opted another girl who did the hunger strike the week before. We felt we had to keep up the name that we first thought of. I think you ought to be an honorary member. Couldn’t you come along? It’s going to be on Thursday.”

Lucy shook her head.

“I’m very sorry. I’ve got to be a good daughter that day.”

“Have you? I am sorry. So will the others be, I know. Never mind. You must come along some other time. We mustn’t lose sight of one another. Is your aunt in there? She is? Splendid! Then I’ll go straight in.”

And that’s what I ought to have been doing, Lucy thought; coming to ask Aunt Stella if she wouldn’t preside for us.

She visualized the scene: seeing her thoughts in pictures, not in words. The twelve other girls discussing the arrangements for their first real meeting of the Thirteen Club in some A.B.C. or other over their working girl’s lunch of coffee, poached egg and macaroon. One of them saying, “I do wish we could get Stella Balliol.” Clara Martin saying, “Well, there’s only one person here who stands any chance of persuading her” Herself, flushing with pride at this general recognition of her closeness to their leader, saying, “Well, I’ll do my best.” Picturing herself later in the day, coming into Stella’s room, knocking at the door, knowing that she would be welcomed, Stella looking up with the friendly smile that had become habitual now that she was proved worthy of it. “Well, what is it?” “It’s about the Thirteen Club we’ve formed. I told you about it. The thirteen of us who hunger struck together. We’re having our first real meeting next week. We do so want you to come. Will you? Please!” “If you want me to…” The smile deepening.

Yes, that’s how it should have been.

But it wasn’t. Because she’d not been strong enough; because fate hadn’t let her. She had missed her chance. She would have to wait till she was well again and strong. Then she would prove to Stella what she was worth. I must get strong again as quickly as I can.

Her resolve to get well again took a shape that was extremely congenial to her family. She displayed at table a heartiness of appetite that astonished Hugh. She showed a readiness for exercise that took the form of accompanying her father round the Hampstead golf course on Saturday afternoons. She escorted Francis to the Zoo on Sunday mornings. She accepted week-end invitations in the country that involved ten-mile walks over the downs before lunch, and a four-mile stroll between tea and dinner. Colour came into her cheeks, her eyes brightened, her shoulders grew full, she became, suddenly, without anyone quite realizing it, an extremely lovely girl.

“She doesn’t seem to be the same person that she was six weeks ago,” was her father’s comment. Her mother nodded. He made frequent and gratified references to her health and appearance, but in spite of that he was a little worried. There was a reserve about Lucy that was new. One associated a brooding mood with dark corners, armchairs, pale cheeks, a sullen expression, a listless air. In Lucy’s behaviour and appearance there were no such symptoms. Yet it was clear to him that she was brooding over secrets that she would share with no one.

She gave no sign that there were such secrets. Indeed, as she set out from her home on the morning when she had decided to test her resolve finally, anyone passing her would have thought: “There’s a typical example of the healthy young English girl. Why aren’t there more like her?”

It was with extreme self-confidence that Lucy made her request to her immediate employer.

“Miss Draft, it’s time you gave me another militant piece of work.”

She knew exactly the kind of work she wanted. She didn’t want just to be arrested and sent to prison. As a gesture. Then as a further gesture to attempt a hunger strike. She was not equal to that; she knew it now. Her courage must be tested not by her powers of resistance against doctors and wardresses, but by a single feat of skill and daring. Whereas she could carry through, she was certain, one spectacular and effective act, her nerves would be broken by a long strain. It was the contrast between the stamina required by a runner in a cross-country race and the pace and dash required of him in a sprint. She began to explain what she had in mind, when Miss Draft cut her short.

“I’m sorry, but everyone in this office is working under the direct orders of your aunt. I can’t arrange anything for the members of the staff without her direct permission.”

“You were able to, the last time.”

“That was different. It was because of that last time, as a matter of fact, that this regulation was made. We can’t have routine work upset. I can’t do anything without your aunt’s permission.”

“I suppose she’ll give it me.”

“I dare say.”

“It’s not, I mean, as though I were doing something here that anyone else couldn’t do; that anyone else couldn’t pick up at a moment’s notice?”

“N—no.”

“If my aunt were to refer the matter back to you, I mean, if she were to ask if you could spare me, you’d say you could, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, oh yes, I suppose I should.”

Stella was busy over a pile of papers when Lucy came into her room. She looked up with a quick, preoccupied frown.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I want to do something militant. Miss Draft says she can’t arrange anything for me without your permission.”

“Miss Draft’s quite right. We can’t have our office routine upset.”

“But Miss Draft says it won’t make any difference if I go; that she can easily get someone to take my place.”

“No doubt she could. But that new person would have to be taught her work. That would mean that for two or three days things would not be working smoothly.”

“But if Miss Draft says.…”

“It doesn’t matter what Miss Draft says or thinks. She takes her instructions from me.”

“Do you mean to say that you won’t let me?”

“I certainly do.”

“But.…”

“I can’t discuss it.”

Stella spoke in a stern voice that made it very clear that her mind was made up, that she was not going to reconsider her decision. She picked up her pile of papers and resumed her study of them. Lucy hesitated; then left the room. As the door closed behind her, Stella shook her head. It was a nuisance having relatives to work for one. You never could get those straightforward, clearly defined relationships on which the success of an undertaking ultimately depended. Lucy was a nice child, but she was a nuisance about the place.

At her typewriter by Miss Draft’s side Lucy tapped out the addresses of the innumerable recipients of the Movement’s latest manifesto. She did the work conscientiously, carefully, but without pleasure. When she had worked for Stella, she had taken delight and pride in doing the most trivial things as well as possible; so as to help Stella, to make things easier for Stella. Even though Stella did not notice. But for Miss Draft she was a machine. Steadily, through the long morning, she typed out the long list of addresses; now and again answering the telephone; now and again satisfying the demands of callers for whom Stella would not have time. Towards one o’clock, the number of calls and visitors had lessened. Stella had gone out to lunch. Lucy was alone with Miss Draft. There was no sound but the scratch of Miss Draft’s pen and the tapping of Lucy’s fingers on the keyboard. The time had come for her to ask the question that all the morning had perplexed her.

“Miss Draft, my aunt won’t let me do anything militant. Do you think that’s really because she doesn’t want the routine of the office disturbed or because she doesn’t think I’m fit to do that kind of thing?”

The question disturbed Miss Draft in the phrasing of a particularly difficult paragraph. She looked up impatiently. She resented the interruption. She did not like Lucy particularly. One of these girls with rich parents, who played at work; who would marry a rich man, and lead one of those futile, leisurely lives whose doings she saw chronicled in the illustrated papers. People like Lucy Balliol should keep quiet; not interrupt people like herself to whom this room was not a pastime but the background of an entire life. She was in no mood for a pacific, conciliatory, or indeed tactful, answer.

“A bit of both,” she answered.

“You mean because I didn’t go through with the hunger strike?”

But Miss Draft was in no mood for discussion. She had things to get on with, if this young chit hadn’t.

“I don’t know what she had in mind. She told me that you were brought up soft. That’s all I know about it.” And she returned her attention to the sheet of foolscap across which the testing paragraph presented itself as a labyrinth of erasions, brackets and insertions.

Lucy rested her wrists against the keyboard. So that was it, then. Stella had lost faith in her; lost interest in her; thought she was good for nothing; because she had been brought up soft. That was what Stella thought. After all that she had faced: all the ignominy, the nausea, the actual pain. No account taken of all that; no allowance made; no chance given to her to retrieve that past. But I must. She mustn’t be allowed to think that of me. I must show her what I really am. She must believe in me. If other people look down on me, I don’t care. They don’t matter. They’re different. But she.… I’ve got to show her. What am I to do? I could leave here altogether. There are at least three different parties. I could get into touch with some of the other leaders. They would give me my chance. But that wouldn’t do. I would be separated from Stella. I couldn’t bear that. There is no point in what is not done for Stella. I must be near her, so that I can see her, so that she can know what I’m doing. But I can’t stay here, typing envelopes for Miss Draft; being ignored; not trusted; while other people are sharing her thoughts, her confidences. I can’t accept my failure, sit down under it, let myself be written down as a failure. I’ve got to show them. I’ll have to do it on my own; if they won’t help me. It’s against the regulations, I know that. But I can’t help it. There’s nothing else for me to do.

VI

Three days later, half-way through the morning’s Work, Lucy stopped in the middle of the typing, got up from her chair, walked with a stagger towards the window, flung up the sash and leant forward, her arms rested on the sill. A gust of air blew into the room, scattering the papers on Miss Draft’s desk.

She looked up quickly, with customary impatience.

“What’s all this?”

“I’m sorry. I felt faint suddenly.”

“Oh!”

Lucy stood, huddled in the window, while the cool wind beat upon Miss Draft’s book. Miss Draft shivered. Her own discomfort made her susceptible to Lucy’s condition.

“Is there anything really the matter with you?”

“No, no. I’ll be all right in a second.”

But it was a good two minutes before the window was lowered and Lucy returned unsteadily to her seat. The tapping of the keyboard was resumed; not, however, with its usual steady rhythm. There were pauses, and sudden spurts, as when a beginner hunts for a lost letter and then rushes at a word she knows. The unevenness worried Miss Draft. She found herself continually glancing over her shoulder at Lucy.

“Are you really all right?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

But a little later, after a particularly spasmodic burst of typing, Lucy dropped her wrists upon the keys.

“Do you mind if I open the window? It feels awfully stuffy in here.”

To Miss Draft it had seemed anything but stuffy; a nice reasonable temperature for May. With the windows open and a breeze blowing down her neck and fluttering her papers, it was a January atmosphere. If the girl thought this was a proper temperature, then there was very clearly something wrong with her. The sooner she was out of the room and the windows shut, the better.

“You’d better go home,” she said. “You aren’t fit. I can see that. You’ll only knock yourself up if you stay here. Then you’ll be away for a week instead of an afternoon. Now, don’t argue. I can manage here all right. Ring up if you are not fit to-morrow.”

Obediently Lucy packed her things together. The success of her little ruse pleased her. She had wanted to be given leave, instead of having had to ask for it. It looked less like a running away.

“Good-bye, Miss Draft.”

She took a last look round the room. When will I see you again?.… If I ever see you again, she added.

It was a late spring day; one of those May mornings when London suddenly realizes that winter is past, that summer is at hand. The sky is of a hyacinth blue with that faint haze that tells you that over the Surrey hills the sun is beating with a summer radiance. The plane trees in the square are flecked with emerald; the window boxes are bright with the dull gold and yellow of wallflowers and marigolds. The air is warm; there is no need for wraps and overcoats and scarves. No need to keep the blood moving quickly with a hurried step. Young women saunter slowly in light frocks, so that the pavements are bright with live flowers like a succession of herbaceous borders. The long cavalcade of summer has begun. The Londoner, wearied of the frosts and fogs of February, sees a sudden prospect of windless afternoons, flannels and parasols, wide, floppy hats, the ping of tennis balls, strawberries and cream, cool bathing pools, rocks and yellow sand; punts drifted into shaded backwaters; a gramophone and fingers trailing in the stream.

“I’ll take a bus,” thought Lucy.

She climbed to the top deck. “Young ladies don’t go on the tops of buses,” her nurse had told her. “Make the most of it while you can enjoy it.” But that was ten years ago. Things were different now. Young ladies did go on the tops of buses. Or plenty did. And anyhow, even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t matter now. She went to the front seat. She had always refused to go to the front seat in the days of horse-buses. Ruth had been so annoyed. “Don’t be silly. You see much better here.” “I daresay, but I don’t like seeing the driver whip the horses.” She had hated, too, the sight of the horses’ straining flanks; of the effort with which they started on an incline; their hooves slipping on the tarred roadway. She had been terrified lest one of them should fall. But Ruth had been right. You did see very, very much better from the front. It was nice that there were so few horse-buses now.

In ten years’ time there probably wouldn’t be one left. How few hansoms there were nowadays. London would be quite a different place in the nineteen twenties. Pressed tight into her corner seat, she leant over the side, looking down, watching the panorama of the streets, as though she were to fix upon the retina of her mind’s memory, sights that would not be here for her to see in 1920. Yet she remarked, not the things which would be caught away upon the stream of change, but sights that in a different form had been familiar to the Londoner of the ‘nineties and would to his grandson in the ‘fifties.

At the corner of Ayr Street and Piccadilly a newspaper placard of the Star was announcing Captain Coe’s final wire. The kind of man that was described in Punch cartoons as a seedy-looking individual was standing in the middle of the pavement, jostled from both sides, the paper spread open wide, his eyes fixed eagerly on the stop press column.

A girl was standing in the entrance of the Burlington Arcade. Under a wide-brimmed, claret-coloured hat, she was peering anxiously at the passers-by. She had a sullen, sallow look. Then suddenly her face lit up. She was pretty and gay and laughing. Her hand had been taken, tucked under a long lean arm. With her quick, short steps she was trying to keep pace with a long slow stride. She was looking up, chattering, laughing as she talked.

In a bow window on the north side of Piccadilly a very old man was peering through spectacles at the leader column of The Times. His hands and his head were shaking. Over a high, white collar the loose skin of his neck hung in thin, creased folds. There was a small table at his side; a half empty glass of sherry stood upon it.

How clearly I see it all; just as though I were seeing it for the first time. All the way westwards, past the bow windows of Piccadilly, up the rise of Constitution Hill, past the bright, brief greenery of the Park, past the shops of Knightsbridge, she had the same sense of seeing things with a distinctness never before granted her. As the bus rattled into Kensington the clocks were striking twelve. In another quarter of an hour she would be at Earl’s Court. The Wild West show was about five minutes’ walk from the entrance of the Exhibition. The first performance was at twelve. It lasted about half an hour. That would give her just time to see the end. It was the end she wanted to see. She remembered it pretty well. It was only a fortnight since she had taken Francis; as a good-bye treat before the end of holidays. But she had taken no particular notice; she knew it in general outline but not in detail. It was the detail that she needed to know. There must be no mistake; this time.

She reached Earl’s Court, as she had expected, at a little after the quarter past. It was a week-day; but the fine weather had lured many Londoners to the Exhibition. There was a steady thread growing along the sidewalks. The flying boats were circling above the lake. Every three or four minutes a boat-load of screaming girls was propelled down the watershoot. Over the tracks of the scenic railway cars shot and dived and rose. Rifles cracked, Aunt Sallies were detoothed, targets were wedged with darts. Children tugging at their mothers’ arms shouted, ‘Oh, look. We must see that!” Canoes glided into the dark mysteries of the river caves. Young men standing in the swing-boats, the cords discarded, were vieing with each other to somersault the bar. The helter-skelter was doing a busy trade. Lucy noted, without pausing to note, the changing scene. She knew what she had to do. She remembered where she had to go.

The Wild West show was the chief attraction of the Exhibition. It was a display of riding, chiefly, for which a number of cowboys had been transported from California. To give greater point to the display, a piece of obvious two-reel film narrative had been introduced, with cattle thieves, Red Indians, and a lone squatter defending himself in a wooden hut. There was a good deal of shooting, shouting, and lassooing. Lucy arrived when the climax was a few minutes distant. Indians were circling round the hut, firing at it; and being fired at. Occasionally one of them would give a cry, throw his arms above his head and achieve a spectacular backward somersault on to the sawdust. At each somersault there was a cry of delight from the children over the death of a foe, and a burst of applause from the grown-ups in tribute to a fine feat of horsemanship. The amphitheatre was large, but it was at least half full. In the afternoon it would be more crowded still. I was right, I couldn’t have chosen a better place. And in a minute or two, that’ll be the right time for it.

She watched the performance as though she Were taking part in a dress rehearsal. She had planned where she would sit: right down there in the front, a little to the left of the orchestra. There was a wooden ring running round the amphitheatre. That would be a help to her. She visualized exactly how she would do what she had to. Now, in a moment or two from now.

The cheering as each Indian fell became less boisterous. The audience had begun to tire of this particular effect. It was the signal for the entrance of the rescuers. There was a roar from the back; a volley of rifle shots; with the sawdust flying, the cowboys came galloping to save the squatter. They charged straight up to the orchestra; then wheeling, dividing into two lines, rounded up the Indians. Yes, that was her moment. She rose to her feet. There was no need for her to stay any longer. The next performance was at two. At twenty-five past two, that was to say.

She felt hungry. I’ll go and lunch.

Ordinarily Lucy lunched in an A.B.C. or a Lyons’. A shilling settled the account. But it was in front of a pleasant-looking café restaurant advertising half-crown table d’hôte lunches that she checked her step. The menu was fixed on a brass-rimmed board. It announced a wide choice, varying between truite au bleu and Zabaglione. A waiter came up, deferentially inquisitive. Yes, yes. I want a table.

A large tray of hors d’œuvre was wheeled before her. I’ll have that and that and that. She was alarmed when she saw how high-piled her plate was. Yet I do feel hungry. I’ve read that when one’s excited one can’t eat; that professional motorists will lose three pounds on the morning of a race. I don’t feel in the least like that. How good this Russian salad is. I wonder what that old man in the club window is doing now? Standing in front of the fireplace, his hands in his trousers pockets, the coat flap forward, as though he were warming himself; though there’s no fire in the grate; laying down the law. What a good time old men do have. No one takes any notice of what an old woman thinks. She’s told to sit in a corner and get on with her knitting. I wonder whether the man who bought the paper backed a horse? He must have. He’s sitting in a pub somewhere, waiting for the result. He was so shabby. It’s funny how people like that always have enough money to back horses and buy drinks. I suppose that girl’s sitting in the Park somewhere with her young man. Perhaps they’ve gone into the country. How happy she looked: transfigured. I wonder if I shall ever feel like that? I suppose I shall. Everyone does, some time. I never have. They say girls spend their whole time falling in and out of love. I haven’t. I shouldn’t be surprised if Ruth did. Boys like her. They always have. From the very start, at our children’s parties. They’ve never noticed me. Hugh’s always been her friend more than mine. Stella will have left for lunch by now. How surprised she would be if she could know where I was; what I was planning. She thinks I’m a coward. Or at least: she’s made up her mind I am. She probably never thinks about me at all. It’ll be a surprise to her.

The picture was clear before her. Stella in her room that afternoon; letters to be dictated; letters to be signed. Reports to be drawn up, interviews, conferences; the minutes passing. Just like any other day. Then suddenly the news arriving. Miss Draft dashing into her room, not bothering to knock. “Miss Balliol, have you heard? Your niece.…” Lucy’s lips parted in a smile. Stella would realize then.

It was close on two before Lucy had finished lunch. There was only just time to make her final preparations. These did not take long: a few minutes in the cloakroom, the attaché case a little lighter in her hand, a coat that on this warm day was uncomfortably heavy on her shoulders.

The Wild West show was only a minute off. The attendant at the door recognized her. “Back already?” “I missed some of it this morning.” “Wish there was more like you.” There were a good many, however, who wanted to see the show through once. It was half as full again as it had been that morning. But there was still a seat on the ground row to the left of the orchestra. It was not one of the best places to see from, after all. She put her attaché case underneath the seat. The clasp was open. It would be very easy to fling back the lid when the moment came. She worked her arms out of the sleeves, holding her coat loosely round her. It was only a question of waiting now. The cattle thief episode was nearly finished. Another minute and the squatter would have retired to his hut; then there would be the Indians, the circling charge, the firing, the spectacular somersaults, the lessening cheers, the rescue, then her moment.

A succession of pictures passed before her eyes. Stella returning from her lunch; the letters to be signed; the letters to be dictated. An old man standing before a fire laying down the law. A grubby, ill-dressed figure leaning across a bar. “I tell you he’s a dead cert.” A country lane, lovers walking hand in hand, the girl stopping, “Darling, I must pick that.” Miss Draft bursting into Stella’s room. “Miss Balliol, your niece.…” The pictures flickered, the minutes passed. The Indians were circling now, the applause was lessening. Lucy, feeling for the case below, flung back the lid, felt her fingers clasp on a linen tape. Half-bending, she looked up, her coat clasped at the throat by the other hand.

From the back of the stage came shouting and a volley of shots. The plod of hooves in sawdust. The waved lassoo. “Now,” She had left it as long as possible so as not to have time to think. She pulled the linen tape from the attaché case; waving a banner, green and white and purple, she flung off her coat. The green, white and purple tricolour was crossed upon her breast. She leapt to her feet, sprang upon the wooden ring, yelled “Votes for Women!” A dozen horses were charging full towards her. At last, for the first time, she realized the incredible danger of her act. She hesitated. But it was too late. She was more frightened now of going back than going forward. She shut her eyes.… Stella sitting at her desk, letters to be dictated, letters to sign… waving her flag, she shouted “Votes for Women!”.… Miss Draft breaking into Stella’s room.… She jumped. The sawdust gave under her feet. She fell.… Miss Balliol, your niece.… The crash of innumerable hammers on her head.… Stella stretching out her hand.… The hammers louder now.… A smile… Silence.…

VII

It was Miss Draft who first received the news. A reporter rang her up. He wanted details. The telephone conversation took considerably longer than it need have done because while he was trying to get information out of Miss Draft, she was trying to get information out of him.

Said Miss Draft: “What do you say? She’s badly injured? How? Where? When?”

Said the reporter: “Earl’s Court. Her father, you say, is Edward Balliol, the wine merchant. There are two other Balliols in the ‘phone book.”

“Yes. But how badly hurt is she? Where is she?”

“Which Edward Balliol’s daughter do you say she is?”

In the end the reporter had learnt that Lucy was the daughter of Edward Balliol, the wine merchant; that she had been in prison once for window-breaking; that while the W.S.M. regarded her as a valuable associate, she was not in any sense an official; that the Movement could not in any way hold itself responsible for her action; that it was without their sanction or approval; that it was a “glorious gesture” but that the Movement would never ask its members to run so desperate a risk. That the reporter learnt. In return, Miss Draft was informed that Lucy Balliol was dangerously ill; that she was unconscious; that she was in St. James’ Hospital.

Without bothering to knock upon the door, Miss Draft burst into Stella’s room. In quick sentences that lost something of their precision through her excitement, she told the story.

“They don’t say how ill she is: dangerously, and unconscious, that is all. If she dies, we must arrange a funeral procession. The first martyr to the Cause. She died that Women might be Free. What a slogan, what publicity! If that does not move people, nothing will. It’ll touch their hearts: a long white procession, banners, music, classic.”

But Stella was scarcely listening. She was busy gathering up her papers, putting her desk straight. “I’m going down to the hospital,” she said.

Difficulties were made when she asked after Lucy Balliol. There had been a stream of journalists, suffragettes, inquisitive well-wishers to harass the hospital authorities. Even when she explained that she was the patient’s aunt, the difficulties were not removed. “Perhaps the girl’s father is here?“ she was at last desperately driven to demand. Not till her brother had actually identified her was she allowed to pass through into the waiting-room.

There were half-a-dozen or so other people standing and sitting in the bare, melancholy room. There were two chairs before a table. Two men in the corner nudged each other and whispered. The story of Lucy Balliol was already common gossip.

Stella looked enquiringly at her brother. He looked tired. She realized for the first time that he was in the middle forties; he was no longer young.

“Jane doesn’t know yet,” he said. “She’s out playing bridge somewhere. No one seemed to know for certain where. I’ve not bothered to find her. Let her be happy while she could, I thought.”

He said it with an attempt at the old lightness, with the shadow of a smile. He’s shy of being serious, Stella thought. He won’t give himself away.

She asked him how Lucy was. He shrugged his shoulders. “She may live. She may not. You can’t tell. Doctors like to make a case seem as bad as possible. Then their patient talks of a marvellous recovery if he pulls through. She’s conscious: just. Enough to know she’s in pain; not enough to recognize me.

Stella made no reference to the actual accident; how or why it could have happened. This was not the time for recriminations or for explanations. Nor was her brother the person to make accusations at such an hour. But of course he thinks I’m to blame. Naturally. I should, in his place. He’s angry and he’s resentful. He’s probably jealous. Because his daughter puts a cause in front of him. Because the Movement’s got more influence with her than he has. Well, I can’t help that. A great many young women feel that way.

All the same Stella was astounded at Lucy’s conduct. What could have made her do it?

They sat in silence; just as four years earlier they had sat in silence during the long train journey to the West of England to a dying father. Now, as then, it was Stella who broke its embarrassment by taking up a newspaper. And now, as then, when a nurse came into the waiting-room, it was to Stella not to Balliol that she spoke.

“She’s asking for somebody called Stella. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”

She looked at Balliol. They both remembered that earlier scene of which this was the repetition, once again there came the resentful look into Balliol’s eyes. “You and not me,” it said. “First my father. Then Lucy. And why? I’d been a good son. I’ve been a good father. After all I’ve done…” The look passed in an instant. “Go along,” he said.

She was led down a long corridor into a long, white ward, lined with beds. Three quarters of the way down the ward was an arrangement of screens.

“She’s there.”

It was only seven hours since Stella had wished Lucy a casual good morning, as she had passed through to her own room. She had taken no more notice of her on this than on any other morning. And it may have been my last chance of seeing her, as she was.

The first sight was not the shock that Stella had expected. The head was covered with bandages, but the actual face: mouth, eyes, nose and cheeks, had not been touched. She was still Lucy as she lay there: pale, weary, her lips drawn tight by pain. At the sight of Stella, a happy look came into her eyes. She tried to move, but the attempt brought back the thin-lipped look of pain. She made a sound.

“She’s trying to say something,” the nurse said.

Stella bent down her head, so that her ear was close to Lucy’s lips; close enough to hear the whispered, “Hand.”

With Stella’s hand in hers, a look of peace came into Lucy’s face. She closed her eyes, the lips parted slightly. She breathed quietly. Her fingers were at first tight against Stella’s palm; gradually the tightness lessened. “I think she’s asleep.” The nurse bent over, nodded her head. Stella looked at her interrogatively.

“Yes,” the nurse nodded, “you can go now. She should have a quiet night. It may make a difference.”

The story of Lucy’s exploit was splashed in double column headlines across the morning papers. There were photographs of Lucy and her parents. There was an interview with Miss Draft. There was a leader on the suffragette movement, taking Lucy as its text. “Whatever one may feel about her wisdom, or rather the wisdom of her advisers, there can be no questioning the heroic courage of this girl or the depth of her devotion to the Cause.”

Jane read through the account in silence, then flung the paper on the table.

“They treat it as though it were a public show. They don’t realize what it is to us.”

Balliol made no comment. He had no idea, in point of fact, how much or how little this tragedy meant to her; or in what way it touched her. He had been told that tragedies of this kind brought married people close to one another. Very often they only showed how far husband and wife had drifted away from one another. He and Jane got on very well together; they never quarrelled; they discussed amicably the various problems that their joint life presented. They enjoyed each other’s company. But the technique of teasing flippancy with which in earlier days he had half cloaked and half conveyed his very real devotion to her, had now become a fixed mould incapable of expressing real emotion. They could no longer speak seriously. They were strangers to one another.

In her office Miss Draft was busily marshalling the maximum publicity. With the aid of the Encyclopaedia Britannica she had contributed to the Press a host of paragraphs and leaderettes, drawing parallel instances of other women who had risked their lives for the sake of a cause. She was in constant touch with the hospital. If the worst were to happen, she would not be unprepared. She had drawn up long lists showing the contributions in funds and followers each Branch was to make to the funeral procession.

“It’ll be disappointing for you, won’t it, if all those preparations are wasted?” was Stella’s comment.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“If they are not needed.”

“One’s got to be prepared for the worst, hasn’t one?”

“Of course, of course.”

Miss Draft looked suspiciously at Stella. She did not know whether or not she were being laughed at. She sniffed; then returned her attention to the Encyclopædia’s biographical note on Charlotte Corday.

Through the next three days the outcome of Lucy’s struggle remained uncertain. Half the time she was unconscious. For hours on end she would murmur and toss deliriously. There was no consecutive thread of thought discernible behind her mutterings. Certain names were repeated: her parents, Ruth’s, Stella’s, the girls who had been in prison with her. It was Stella’s name that was most frequently on her lips.

“It’s you that she’s really worrying over,” the doctor informed Stella.

The news astonished Stella. She had seen so little of her niece. She had been her employer. But they had not been brought into particularly close contact. She had had no opportunities of being tyrannical or unjust. Anyhow, it could not be enmity that Lucy was cherishing. Otherwise she would not on that first night have relapsed so quickly into that easy sleep.

“I don’t begin to understand it,” she told the doctor. Then, after a pause: “Does my brother know that it’s me she’s asked for?”

“He knows she’s spoken of you, but not more than that.”

“You’d better leave it, then, at that.”

If the worst were to happen, Edward would want to think that his daughter’s last thoughts had been of him.

For three days and four nights the fight continued. It was on the fourth morning that the long sleep that promised ultimate recovery supervened. Even so it was a slow, gradual recovery of strength. It was not for another week that Lucy was allowed to see visitors for more than a few minutes, and in the presence of a nurse. When at last she was allowed to see Stella alone, it was a pale thin face that looked up, from the helmet of bandages.

All the same, there was a light, a glow in her eyes that Stella had never seen before. She’s beautiful, not pretty—beautiful. I’d never realized it before. There was a proud smile on her lips, with the suggestion, Stella could not exactly say how or why, that the glow and the pride were alike suffused with tenderness.

Lucy patted the chair beside her, then, curling over on her pillow, looked up at Stella.

“You’re not angry with me any longer?”

“Angry with you?”

“You don’t think I’m a coward any longer: that I’m not worth anything, because I’ve been brought up soft: that I can’t be trusted?”

“My dear child, what are you talking about?”

Lucy did not notice the astonished note in Stella’s voice or her expression of complete incomprehension. She was conscious of nothing but the relief of being able at last to pour out the thoughts, feelings, aspirations, fear, that she had kept locked within her breast. She was vindicated. She could now speak freely. The words poured forth in an eager, unheeding torrent.

“You understand, now, don’t you? I couldn’t be a coward, could I, or I wouldn’t have done that? It was just that they broke down my nerve the other time: in prison. They wore down my strength and patience; I wasn’t well. I could have stood it, if I’d not been sick. But that, on the top of everything. It was too much. Then when I came back and you wouldn’t let me be your secretary, when you didn’t seem to care whether I was there or not, when I saw that you’d never really seen how hard I was working for you—I never took the same trouble for Miss Draft.… I thought at first that you’d be proud of me, that you’d let me be your friend, take me into your confidence. I thought you’d understand. Even if the others didn’t. I used to picture when I was in prison the way you’d welcome me when I came out.…

“Then, when I did come out, it wasn’t like that at all. I had to sit in that outer office with Miss Draft, and I thought: ‘So she doesn’t understand. Then I’ve got to prove it to her!’ But you wouldn’t give me a chance of proving it. You said you wanted me in the office. But that wasn’t the reason. You didn’t trust me. You thought I wasn’t any good. So I had to show you. It was against all the rules. But you’ve forgiven me, haven’t you?”

“There was nothing to forgive.”

“And I have shown you, haven’t I? You know now that I’m not a coward? I could not bear to have you thinking that of me.

“You mean that you did that, simply to prove you weren’t a coward?”

“To prove to you,” Lucy corrected her.

“To me?”

Lucy laughed happily. “Do you think I should have bothered to be a suffragette if it hadn’t been for you? It’s just because you’re there. If you believe in it, then I believe in it. Oh, you wouldn’t understand. But you’ve been a hero to me, so long; ever since I was a child. You wouldn’t have noticed. Why should you? I was just a kid. I thought you marvellous. Everything about you was marvellous: your clothes, the way you walked, the way you came into a room; the way you made people listen to you; oh, everything… I wanted you to notice me. I wanted to mean something to you. That’s why I became a suffragette: so that there would be something for me to share with you.”

She spoke quickly, eagerly; with the flushed, emotional excitement of the invalid. Stella felt the colour rising to her cheeks. No one had ever spoken to her like this, felt for her like this. Except her father there had never been anyone personal in her life, to believe in her and by that belief make her capable of what would be otherwise outside her scope; to look up to her; for her to share things with, so that life would not be lonely any longer; someone who needed her, whom she needed. There had never been anyone in her life like that.

“And you trust me now, don’t you?” the eager voice was saying. “You’ll take me into your confidence. You’ll let me work with you? I could help you in so many ways. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help you. It would be so marvellous!”

It would be another life, thought Stella, to have someone who mattered to you, to whom you mattered; round whom you planned things; who relied on you and on whom you relied; someone that you could be yourself with; with whom you could relax, speak your true mind to, knowing that you would not be misunderstood. To be open instead of cautious; expansive, not reserved. Your life could only be full, if another fulfilled it for you.

“You trust me now, don’t you?” Lucy whispered.

“My precious one.…”

Leaning forward, Stella gathered up the thin, small body and held it close, close, against the breast upon which since her father’s death no head had lain. If I try to speak, I’ll cry. It’s so long since I’ve felt anything. She rested her cheek for a moment against the girl’s soft hair, then gently laid her back upon the pillow.

“I must go now,” she whispered.

At the door Stella paused, looking back.

In the girl’s eyes was a mingled look of pride, happiness, humility, tenderness, adoration. She raised her fingers to her lips, kissed them, fluttered them towards the lean-faced, grey-haired, strong-chinned woman.

It was four years since Stella’s life had presented her with a personal problem, since she had stood at the window in a small bed-sitting-room looking out over the vast sea of London’s roofs and chimney stacks; its spires, its lighted windows, its dull murmur; its red flush cast upwards to the clouds; London and all it symbolized; wondering whether to accept Alan Cheyne’s proposal.

A great deal of change, a great deal of drama had come her way during those four years. Then she had been an obscure woman; now she was one of the leaders of the Movement. She had been poor; now she had an independent income. Thirty girls had been under her control. Now thirty thousand owed her their allegiance. Her name was familiar enough for Punch quotation. Yet the actual setting of her existence had not altered. She was in the same small room with its narrow iron bedstead; its bare wash-hand stand; the chest of drawers from which a leaf for writing could be drawn; that was her desk; the one wicker chair, the linoleum-covered floor; her library, her wardrobe; the curtained corner where her half-dozen dresses hung; the one hard chair; the one neutral-coloured rug; the framed photograph of her father. A Picasso had supplanted the Medici reproduction of Rembrandt’s warrior, but there was no other change. She had not considered herself justified in spending money on herself. Beyond bare essentials everything must be given to the Cause.

And just as the external change was negligible, so in its essentials was the problem that was set to her unchanged. Now, as then, personal happiness was contrasted with an impersonal sense of duty. And now, as then, the scale was lifting steadily against her. She knew how much easier, how much happier, how much fuller life would be for her, if Lucy were to be her lieutenant. She had never deluded herself. She had faced the looking-glass. She was not a fish: warm blood ran through her veins. She knew what she had missed, and in what measure. She knew her loneliness.

It was indeed the honesty of that self-knowledge that was now weighing down the scales. She knew, by her own loneliness, how fiercely, how jealously, she would fight against its return. Nothing was more ruthless, acquisitive, possessive, jealous than the domination that women could exert over their juniors. How many girls had not been ruined by the selfishness of their mothers? That’s how I might behave. Lucy would become indispensable to me. I should be afraid of losing her. I should be suspicious. I should try to absorb her. I should try and keep away from her the men who would take her from me. I should ruin her life; thwart her instincts; spoil her chance of a natural happiness. I might suffice her now; but I couldn’t in five years’ time. Heaven knows what I might become, how I might treat her when the time came for her to go. It might not be that way, of course. But it might be. The risk’s too great, just because the temptation is so great. If I let her absorb herself in me, if I cajoled this need in me to be admired, to be looked up to, I might find myself in toils with which in my turn I should try and bind her. The risk’s too great. I must let her go.

Next day she called upon her brother. His manner was as affable as always. But she could tell that she was not welcome; that the old jealousy started by her father’s preference for her had been reborn by his daughter’s attachment, and the accident for which he considered her responsible. His reception of her irritated her; for the very reason that he would never recognize how much he should owe to an interference that he would consider a presumption. She went straight to the point, bluntly, in the manner of a man.

“You’ll think what I’m going to say an impertinence. I’m sorry. I can’t help that. It’s about Lucy. You’ll say it’s nothing to do with me. But I see a good many of the young women of to-day. I know how this business takes them. I know what it means to them. It’s not altogether what you think it is. It’s bound up with a lot of other things. And when it takes them badly, it can be dangerous. If they’re going to lead anything but exceptional lives afterwards, which Lucy isn’t. In five years’ time she’ll be like anybody else: married, with children. That’s to say, if she gets out of this right now. If she doesn’t, I won’t answer for the consequences. This business gets certain girls in the same way that religion got girls eighty years ago. They’re in the equivalent of convents before they know where they are. If you’re wise, you’ll get her right out of here, as soon as possible, and as far away. By the time she’s back, she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

Balliol’s pale face seemed to grow paler, and thinner, as she spoke; as though he were contracting it like a concertina, in irritation. He waited quietly till she had finished.

“Without taking the situation quite as seriously as you do, I had in my own mind decided to take very much the action that you suggest. Less, perhaps, for Lucy’s mental, than for her physical, health. As a very old friend of mine who is a lawyer in Penang has frequently invited any member of my family to visit him, and as his wife is going out to join him in a few weeks, it had occurred to me that I might, as the cliché has it, ‘avail myself of the twin opportunities’ and send Lucy out on the same ship with her.” He spoke in his most precise, punctilious tone of voice.

You don’t like my saying that, thought Stella, you are angry and you resent my interference. But you are grateful all the same that I’m thinking the same way that you yourself are. And you’re wise to make it as far off as the Malay States.

And that’s that, thought Stella, as she walked out into the summered street. It was a hot, sunny day, but she walked with a swift, firm stride. She was in a hurry to get back to her office. There was a great deal of work to be attended to. She had been away a good deal these last few days. She felt the need for action. Work was both a drug and stimulant. As long as you worked hard enough, you could forget that you were lonely. If you drove your brain hard, you could forget that your heart was aching. If there was something to be settled in the immediate future, you could be spared that looking into a far future that bred despair. There were certain people selected by life to do life’s work, who could achieve their function best by the refusal, the denial of what constituted happiness for the vast majority of mankind. Natural celibates who were fulfilled, not foiled, by that denial. For a long time she had recognized that it was with such that her lot lay. There were weak moments, when the heart ached for a personal happiness. Such moments were weakness. They must be kept down.

She found Miss Draft turning the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“You needn’t bother about that. The girl’s going to live.”

“Oh!”

Miss Draft’s countenance expressed neither disappointment nor relief. Stella would have preferred her to look disappointed. It would have been an inhumanity that would have at least proved that Miss Draft herself was human; that she had emotions; even if they were focused on a Cause. She would have preferred to think of Miss Draft as someone who welcomed a friend’s death if it helped an issue. That abrupt “Oh” was singularly negative. A fish, she thought, an animated fish, and it’s among you that a real woman like myself has to live in order that real women may be given something for which they haven’t asked.

“There’s a big meeting in the Albert Hall next week,” Miss Draft remarked. “There’ll be several Cabinet Ministers on the platform. We ought to do something to upset it.”

“It’s about time I waved a flag.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, Miss Balliol.”

“I don’t care whom you meant; it’s time I waved one.”

Action would be a good thing. She had spent too much time at a desk, with telephones and papers. It was time that she was on the road again, speaking, fighting; an active, not an “arm-chair” militant.

“We’ll be wanting another girl to work here. My niece isn’t coming back,” she added.

VIII

A Month later on the eve of her departure for Penang, Lucy sat before an array of open trunks, the floor and the bed covered with frocks, shoes, hats, camisoles; and Ruth curled up in an armchair beyond the débris.

“I can’t really believe I’m going,” Lucy said.

It had happened so quickly that she had hardly realized that it was happening. Everything had been arranged for her. She hadn’t been consulted. She had just been told what was going to be. The trip had been presented to her as a settled fact. They had asked the doctor when she could sail, before they had asked her whether she wished to sail. It had been assumed that she would “leap at the idea,” as her father put it parenthetically. Everyone told her how lucky she was; what a lovely time she would have; what messages to give; what things to be sure not to miss; what to bring back with her. There had been interviews with shipping agents, with bank managers. There had been trunks to be bought, clothes to be chosen. There had been a succession of good-bye parties. No, she just had not had time to realize what was happening. To Stella alone had she made a protest; and that a brief one.

“I had thought I was coming into work with you,” she had expostulated.

“So you are,” Stella had answered breezily. “Only you need a rest after a smash like that. This is too good an opportunity to miss. I’d have given a good deal to have it myself at your age. You take your holiday. Make it a good one. You’ve deserved it. Then come back here. We’ll settle down to some real work together.”

Stella had assumed her going as unquestioningly as had her parents. In that case, I’d better go, she had thought. And it’s no good my pretending that I’m not excited. I am. It’ll be lovely. All my worries are over now. I’m friends with Stella. When I come back we’ll start planning things. In the meantime there’s this holiday. I’ve deserved it. I’m going to enjoy it. As she relaxed more and more to the excitement of departure, she thought more and more of the immediate future; less and less of the “after I come back,” to which all that was supposedly a prelude. Her thoughts were entirely on her journey as she knelt, on that last evening, among her clothes and trunks.

She chattered inconsequently as she packed. “Now, this is the trunk I’ll be having in my cabin. Do you think I’ll be needing the green dress? I wonder if there’ll be anyone to look after one’s things on board: press them and iron them. I shall need a terrible lot of things with me if there isn’t.”

Pensively her sister watched her. In the full summer of her girlhood Ruth was clearly not going to become a beauty; but she had a vivacity, a mischievous prettiness that promised adventure. Her zest for living was unabated, she was clear-skinned and healthy-eyed; though she still had something of that long-legged faunishness that, in the nursery, had made her seem a tomboy. Her shoulders and arms were full, their lines rounded. Most men would take the trouble to look twice at her.

“It’s funny to think of all that may happen to you before you spend another night here,” she remarked.

“What sort of things?”

“Oh, anything: you may be married.”

Lucy laughed at that. “At my age!”

“Mother was married and had had two children at your age.”

“People married younger then. Married! Why, no one’s even looked like making love to me!”

“What!”

Ruth’s astonishment was so genuine that Lucy felt that she owed, to her dignity as an elder sister, some qualification of this confession.

“I don’t count the boys who try to kiss you on the stairs at dances.”

“Did you ever let them?”

“Of course not.”

“Why ever not?”

“It seemed so silly. They were so frightened of me.”

“The only man who’s ever kissed me wasn’t in the least afraid.”

“Ruth, you never told me anything about that!”

“It wasn’t anything.”

“It must have been. Tell me. Don’t be mean. Tell me everything: who it was, when it was, what was he like?”

“Well…” Ruth hesitated. She hadn’t meant to tell Lucy. She hadn’t meant to tell anyone. It had slipped out.

“When was it, where was it?” Lucy was insisting. “Come on. Right from the very start.”

There was nothing to be done but tell her. “It was at a picnic in the spring; a year ago. You remember when I was staying with the Manningtons. There was a young man who kept looking at me. We were picking bluebells. Suddenly I found I was alone with him. And then… oh, well… he just kissed me.…” She finished weakly.

It sounded tame, fearfully tame; and it hadn’t been at all. There had been the day itself: a late May afternoon; everything green and sparkling. The sky blue, the sun warm, the bluebells in the woods. One couldn’t believe in the reality of a blue so brilliant. And that young man, graceful and tall and languid, who had kept looking at her; so that she had felt her heart beating excitedly. She had wanted to be alone with him, yet had been afraid of being alone with him. She had been stooping to pick bluebells. She had stood up, there he was beside her. Everyone else was out of sight. He was smiling down at her. Her arms were full of flowers. “You are very pretty,” he had said. He had put his hand under her chin and lifted it; then bent his head, there had been sunlight on his hair; he had kissed her, it had been so simple and graceful—in tune with the May day and the sense of spring. But she couldn’t convey anything of that in a description. And there was Lucy persisting with her questions. What was the man like really? Had she ever seen him again since? Did she want to see him again?

“And what was it like, really? Did you like it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It made me feel rather a devil, I suppose.”

Lucy shook her head, in mock reproof.

“I may be four years older than you are. But I think you’ll be married years before me.”

“Perhaps, but——” Ruth paused, a pensive expression on her face. “It’s funny how little one really does know about marriage,” she went on. “They talk about Victorian innocence and modern enlightenment, and of course we do know a lot—compared with our grandmothers, that’s to say. But how little we know, of the things we want to know. No one’ll tell us. It’s not in any book.…” She paused again; then turning quickly in the chair, kneeling up on the seat and bending forward, her elbows on the side, her chin rested on her wrists: “Lucy,” she said quickly, and her cheeks were flushed—“Let’s make a pact. Let’s promise that which ever of us marries first tells the other everything: really everything. Do you agree?”

“Well… oh… yes, I suppose so.”

“Good. That’s agreed, then.”

Only Balliol and Jane went down to see Lucy off. She was to pick up a P. & O. boat at Marseilles. She was crossing by an ordinary continental service. The platform presented so familiar an appearance that it was difficult to realize that she was starting on a long journey. The atmosphere was that of a short trip to Paris, a week-end at Le Touquet; at the most a fortnight’s holiday at Biarritz. There was nothing to suggest the hot sands of Egypt, the palm groves of Mount Lavinia, the attar huts round the islanded entrance to Singapore. The casual nature of their talk was in tune with that week-end atmosphere. There was no feeling of an occasion about it. The only suggestion that Lucy was destined for anything more than a forty-eight hours’ jaunt was made, surprisingly enough, by her mother.

“There’s a young man you may come across that I used to know. He does work of some kind for your father’s firm in the Far East. Rickman: Roy Rickman. If you do see him, give him nice wishes from me.”

She flushed a little. Balliol looked at her quickly, enquiringly. It was the first time that she had mentioned Rickman’s name since he had first left for the Far East. Did she think often of him, he wondered. They couldn’t have corresponded. If they had, she would have known that he was in England eighteen months ago. She would have made some comment; suggested an invitation to some meal. Himself, he had carefully avoided any reference to the boy’s return; had, for that matter, only seen him twice. They had discussed their business, and left it there. The business had proved profitable. It was odd the way things turned out. He would never have thought of employing Rickman unless he had wished to get him out of England. And now the act directed to one purpose had proved profitable in another.

He wondered what would have happened had Rickman remained in England. He wondered how much that episode had meant to Jane. She was so vague, so indirect; only occasionally appearing to have definite wishes, preferences, dislikes. Again he had the feeling of being a stranger to her. But there was the guard waving his flag, sending the passengers into their compartments; warning their friends back from the footboard. A whistle blew, the train jerked, grunted, then slowly, in a smooth rhythm, drew away. The face at the window grew indistinct. I wonder what stranger will come back to me, he thought.

That afternoon was the end of term prize-giving at Francis’s school. It was like all the other prize-givings. It was held in the gymnasium. There was a stage at one end of it. The headmaster stood at a desk, on which were arranged a collection of calf-bound trophies. His staff of seven masters were arrayed behind him. In the centre of the hall on chairs were seated the parents, guardians, relatives on whose patronage the fortune of the school depended. Behind them, and at their side, on forms, were the boys to whose service the school was dedicate.

Balliol never missed such functions. He always attended them with an amused curl of the lip. The atmosphere was very like a shareholders’ meeting; where the Chairman is aware that he has a good dividend to declare, but is anxious to convince the shareholders that the actual results are better than their appearance.

The formula for a prize-giving was a fixed one. The headmaster was large, genial, middle-aged, rubicund with golf. He smiled down upon the school and upon its parents. He addressed himself to the boys.

“Before I start distributing the prizes, there’s just one thing that I would like to say. It’s to the school now that I am speaking. Well, you boys, it’s this. I want to tell you how pleased I am with the way you’ve backed me up this term. You’ve worked hard and you’ve played hard. I don’t know how long it is since we’ve had such a thoroughly satisfactory term. Of course, there are one or two young gentlemen”—and at this point a twinkle appeared in the corner of his eye—”who have been a trifle, well, shall we say difficult? But that’s past history. We won’t say anything more about it, and, as a whole, as I’ve already said, I don’t think I’ve ever had such a satisfactory set of fellows. Thank you very much.”

He made practically the same speech every prize-giving. Balliol once remarked on this to one of the assistant masters, with whom he was on terms of closish intimacy. The master laughed.

“The Head’s a wonder. Always the same speech. Hardly a phrase different. It sends the parents away in just the right frame of mind. They’ll get their account to-morrow. Of course he doesn’t know that’s why he’s doing it. But that’s the reason right enough. And how clever that bit about the young gentlemen who’ve been difficult. It makes every mother feel that her boy is better than her neighbour’s.”

Balliol had suggested that such an opinion was likely to be revised by the evidence of the terminal report.

“Not a bit of it,” the master answered. “All our reports are strictly censored. We write them out on a piece of foolscap and the Head gets them typed. When we write ‘lazy and unintelligent’ the parents read ‘moderate.’ You can take it from me that the boy who gets ‘moderate’ in his report more than once is one of earth’s best dunces.”

Balliol had not repeated this conversation to his wife. He was able consequently to take a pleasantly ironic pleasure in the delight that Francis’s reports invariably caused her. “It is nice how well he’s doing,” she would say. And again, “I’m glad there’s such a good tone in the school. I should hate Francis to be somewhere where they’re always having rows.”

As he sat back in the uncomfortable school chair, he watched the effect on Jane of the headmaster’s oratory. She was leaning forward, her eyes on the headmaster’s face, her lips a little parted: eager, animated, expectant. Yes, the old Head knew how to get round mothers; there was no mistaking that. The expectant look on her face grew keener when they reached Francis’s class: the third. He began reading the names out from the bottom. Twelfth, eleventh, tenth, ninth. He’s doing rather well, thought Balliol. Himself he was not a believer in forcing a young boy; he would rather back the man who won a scholarship to a University than to a prep, school. That fact and his own opinion of the standard of teaching in the school had prevented him from taking much interest in Francis’s scholastic achievements. There was plenty of time for that. All the same, it was exciting to hear the names being read out one after another. It was like a race. Sixth, fifth, fourth, anyhow, he was in the running. Third. Still not Francis. A second: another name. Jane gave a little gasp. “Oh!” “First, Balliol.” With hands clapping on all sides of him, a sturdy, Eton-collared urchin was walking up to the stage.

Francis’s reward for a term’s industry was Mallory’s Morte d’ Arthur. He turned a page or two while the two senior forms were read. “Looks pretty mingy,” the boy next him whispered. “Don’t care about that. My father gives me half-a-crown every time I get a prize. That’s what I work for.”

It was to his father that he brought the book the moment the last echoing three cheers had died away. But his mother’s arm that he took.

“I thought we might go and have tea at Stewart’s,” she was saying. “You’d like that, darling, wouldn’t you?”

“Rather!”

Balliol watched them as he turned the pages of the Mallory. There was no doubt that Francis was his mother’s favourite. There was a deeper note in her voice, a different look on her face when she was with him. Just as there had been on his, he supposed, when he was with Lucy. However parents might try, they couldn’t help having a favourite. And they couldn’t conceal that preference from their children. It wasn’t the injustice that people supposed it was. Lucy and Francis were the difficult ones. They needed more careful attention than Hugh and Ruth. Those two were self-reliant in a way the others weren’t. They could stand alone; on their own feet. Helen… But it was a long time before she would begin to be a problem.

In spite of Balliol’s devotion to Lucy, it was his wife who took the more real interest in her letters; who looked up sailing dates, figured out how soon the letter from Port Said might be expected; the letter from Aden; the next, Colombo; who read and re-read the letters when they arrived; who kept bringing reference to Lucy’s doings into her talk. She took the detached interest in Lucy which it is only possible to feel towards someone of whom you are very fond; but with whose interests your own interests are not involved. She was genuinely anxious to know what Lucy was doing, thinking, seeing. Balliol, on the other hand, when the train had drawn out of Victoria Station, had thought, “That’s that.” He had seen her departure, as the end of a relationship. Something had died. It would never be the same again. The Lucy round whom he had built dreams was taken from him. It was some other person who was writing amusing descriptions of fellow-passengers and ports of call.

They were good letters: lightly written. The people and the places that she described were real. He did not discourage Jane from reading extracts from them to her friends. They were letters of which any parent might be proud. But he did not re-read them when he was alone. The letter in which he took the chief interest was one in which she described her meeting with Roy Rickman.

“He’s a nice fellow,” she wrote, “handsome, very jovial. Usually the centre of a group. Generous, he gives a lot of parties. I think people like him; at any rate, he’s always with people. I sat next to him at a pahit party the other day. He’s much more interesting than I had expected. He writes poetry. He showed me some of it. I thought it rather good, though of course I don’t know anything about those things. Still, I think it’s rather remarkable that he should want to write poetry at all, don’t you?

“He’s going about a great deal with the daughter of one of the planters. I don’t know if there’s anything in it. You know what things are like in a small place. If a man’s seen dancing with the same girl twice, he’s asked what his intentions are. But there may be something here. Everyone says there is. As far as I can see it would be very suitable. She’s an only daughter. Her father’s very rich. She’s perhaps a little older than the story books tell one is the ideal. I shouldn’t say she was much younger than Mr. Rickman. If at all. But she’s really rather lovely. Dark, pale skin; a rather languid manner. She looked as though she might be managing. But haven’t you always said that the man who marries money, earns it.…”

Balliol commented on that letter as he returned it to Jane: “You prophesied a worldly marriage for the young man.”

Regularly every five or six days through the autumn a letter came from Lucy. She was due to return to England in the spring. In November, however, one morning after Balliol had left for his office, two cables arrived from Singapore. One was from the woman whose guest Lucy was. It said: “Thoroughly approve Lucy’s choice. Writing.” The other was explanatory. “Want to become engaged to Stephen Chambers. Important lawyer. Writing full particulars. Love, Lucy.”

Ruth and Hugh were in the house when the cables arrived.

Said Ruth: “I had a feeling that something like this might happen.”

Said Hugh: “I bet our father will make difficulties.”

Hugh was wrong, however. Balliol was delighted. “It sounds what I believe is called ‘a very suitable alliance.’ I have made enquiries about Chambers. He is highly esteemed by the profession. I expect that Lucy will finish as her ladyship. He isn’t particularly young. He’s thirty-seven. But Lucy is one of those serious-minded women who wouldn’t take a young man seriously. She needs guiding. I don’t think she would be happy with anyone who wasn’t several years older than herself. No, I must say, I’m very pleased about it. Though I’ll be grateful, naturally, to have some particulars.”

Jane asked if that would mean her living out of England.

“There’s an old adage about a wife’s place being beside her husband.”

Jane looked at him, with a puzzled expression, half opened her mouth as though she were going to say something, then seemed to think better of it.

Said Francis: “Bags I Lucy’s room.”

It was his first contribution to the discussion; everyone turned round to him as though some inanimate object had given tongue.

“What do you mean?” asked Hugh.

“She won’t be coming back. She won’t want her room any more, will she?”

There was a silence as though they were all realizing for the first time the significance of Lucy’s marriage.

“No, I suppose she won’t be needing her room any more,” said Balliol slowly. “Yes, I suppose you might as well have it, if you want it.”

“Then may I have the cupboard moved and…”

His father cut him short.

“You may arrange it exactly as you like.”

It was a month before they could hope to receive particulars from Malaya. During that month Lucy’s letters had the curious effect of old newspapers, in which you read prophetic leaders on issues whose outcome has been long settled. Everything she had to tell of her parties, her plans, of the people she had met, the people she was about to meet, were as dated by that cable as a last year’s frock. The letters, however, were read by the family with a far greater interest than those that had contained news. They had been written during the days before she had been proposed to; before at any rate, she had accepted the proposal; the days when she was falling in love; when she was making up her mind, having it made up for her. Had she been happy then: confident, uncertain, worried? The family read the letters eagerly, searching for clues to her state of mind when she had written them; studying them for clues as a detective will sift evidence.

There were no obvious clues, however. These letters, as her earlier ones, were bright bulletins of fact and comment.

“Have you noticed that she hasn’t referred to Stephen Chambers once?” Jane remarked.

Said Balliol: “That’s the best proof there could be that she’s in love with him. She never did speak about the things that really mattered to her.”

At last the awaited mail arrived. But the letters so long expected proved so conventional in content and expression that they told very little. There was an excitable, girlish letter from Lucy.

“Darling Mum and Dad. It was sweet of you to cable out in that way. I’m so happy about it all. And I know you’ll love Stephen. He’s the finest person I’ve ever met. I’m so proud of him.…” There was a great deal more in the same key.

From Stephen Chambers, there was a stiff, formal letter, expressing, appropriately, his devotion to Lucy, his fortune in securing her affection, his appreciation of her parents’ sacrifice in allowing their daughter to join her lot with a man whose life work lay far from home; his resolve to make her a good husband. He gave some facts about his income, position, future. The figures were impressive.

“He is clearly able,” was Balliol’s comment, “to maintain her in what I believe is called ‘that standard of comfort to which she had been accustomed’.”

There was a rather flurried letter from Lucy’s hostess. “The kind of letter,” said Balliol, “that a house-master sends when your boy gets measles: excusing himself, saying he’s not to blame, that all care will be taken, that anyhow it’s something that has to be got over some time.”

“I know, of course, that this must be a great surprise and shock to you; that you must be very anxious about it all; particularly as Mr. Chambers is so much older than Lucy. But I can assure you that he is really a sound man. Otherwise of course we wouldn’t have let her meet him. Though actually it was rather a surprise to us. But I do think he’ll make her a good husband; and they do seem devoted to one another; and though Lucy’s not the demonstrative type, it makes me quite sentimental seeing them together. I know you must be anxious, and I don’t suppose it’s the way you’d have preferred it to happen—Lucy having to live abroad and all that—but I really think that it’s something you’ll be very happy about in the end.”

In this last letter a snapshot was included. “I know you’ll be curious to know what your future son-in-law looks like.” The snapshot was of a group, taken presumably at some tennis party. The men were coatless and in flannels. The women, in spite of their wide hats, suggested some assay at exercise. In the background was a long bungalow set about with palms. A circle of ink islanded the broad shoulders, the heavy jowl, the clean-shaven face, the close-cropped head of Lucy’s chosen.

The photograph was passed in silence round the table, till it finally reached Francis. “Gosh!” he said.

The following morning an announcement of the engagement appeared in The Times, Morning Post, and Telegraphy under which encouragement a cable signed Lucy and Stephen craved permission to be married in Penang in January. Jane looked interrogatively at her husband. She anticipated opposition. None came, however.

“I don’t see why they shouldn’t. Chambers is the kind of man who knows his mind. He’s got his work out there. It would be senseless to bring him back here for a wedding. There would be nothing for Lucy to do. A year’s engagement can be a very amusing thing for a girl living in London if she’s got her young man over here. But there’s no point in separating them now. The sooner Lucy starts a life of her own the better.”

Said Ruth: “And I’d been so looking forward to being a bridesmaid.”

Said Hugh: “I feel as though I were being done out of a binge.”

Said their father: “We’ll have festivities of some kind of our own.”

Said Francis: “It won’t be the same thing.”

It wasn’t. Certainly not for Helen, who instead of carrying a bouquet of flowers as a bridesmaid, was presented with a china doll that opened and shut its eyes, but which she broke within an hour of its arrival, and mourned tearfully for the remainder of the day; nor for Francis who, adjudged too young for dinner at the Savoy and a box at Wyndham’s, was instead taken by his mother to a matinée performance of Puss in Boots: nor, indeed, for the others was it a particularly successful evening. They did their best to pretend that they were enjoying themselves immensely. But over each in their separate way hung the knowledge that the corporate family life that they had shared for twenty years was over. One of them had gone; the rest would go.

In the dark shadow of the theatre Ruth’s attention wandered from the play. A quarter to nine now. Eastwards in Malaya midnight would be long since passed. She remembered that last evening, and her pact with Lucy. But, of course, Lucy would never tell her anything. She had realized that when she had seen the photograph of Stephen Chambers: that tall, stern stranger who had been an undergraduate when Lucy was in her cradle. What could Lucy have to tell to a younger sister of her life with such a one? It would be something secret to herself. There was a freemasonry among married women from which girls were permanently excluded. However intimate you might be with a friend or a sister, that intimacy ended with marriage. Marriage was a club, in which guests could only be taken into certain rooms. Lucy was a member now.

Yes, that was how it was; that was how it had been. You were curious about that club: what were its secrets: its privileges: its rules of membership. But no one would ever tell you. You had to be elected as a member first. That knowledge woke the spirit of devilry in Ruth. It would be fun to play the spy; to find out for oneself; to fool them all.

If I ever get the chance, she thought.…

Book III

Ruth

I

It was in 1912 that Lucy was married. It was in the spring of 1914 that her first child, a girl, was born. In retrospect those months have acquired a significance that at the time they did not have. Europe was living under conditions that will never return. Russia was an empire, Austria and Germany were empires. In England the colonial formula included the dominions. There were such things as “gilt-edged securities” and trustee stocks. Money had a real value; the pursuit of wealth was a tangible ambition. The interests of the land controlled the cities. That world has passed. And because it passed suddenly, in an afternoon, historians of that period tend to idealize it, as a period of ease and plenty.

For certain people, for certain classes it may have been. But for the vast majority life was not in its essentials so very different from what it is to-day. As a schoolboy I have only second-hand evidence to go upon; but the conversation of schoolmasters and the guests at my father’s table followed much the same course that it does now. Then, as now, the country was going to the dogs. Only then it was the Radicals, not the Socialists, who were driving it to the kennels. The land, property, invested wealth, were being plundered by a spendthrift government. Only then capital was being taxed out of the country, not out of existence. There was talk of the weak hand in India. We should have soon lost our empire; have sunk to the level of a third-rate power. Germany was building ships, the Liberal government was cutting down the army, National bankruptcy was imminent. That was how general problems were discussed.

Private problems were discussed on a similar note of gloom. Never, I heard, had the book trade been so bad. Books were luxuries. The public would pay ten shillings for a stall but struck at four and six for a novel. Yet then, as now, a great many publishers and quite a few writers were drawing comfortable sustenance from that bankrupt enterprise. People were worried then about much the same things that they are to-day; only in a different way. Those who describe the pre-war years as a period of peace, prosperity and plenty, are in the main idealizing their youth, manhood or maturity; the time when they had the faith, strength, confidence to take difficulties in their stride.

In a similar way historians of that period try to detect signs of an approaching climax in those last months, as though Europe recognized that it was living through an epoch’s close; was saying to itself, “This is too good to last. Let us make the most of the moment before it flies.” I do not believe there was such a feeling. Looking back now to the parties, moods, meetings of that last summer, recognizing now from the distance of knowledge, their “last moment” quality, we fancy that we lived and enjoyed in a “last moment” spirit. But there was no indication that we should never see again that group of persons gathered together beneath that roof. One happy hour followed upon another in an orderly succession of such hours. They had no particularly dramatic quality.

At the same time those months in retrospect have an appeal to the imagination that no other months can have. It is like looking at snapshots of ourselves in an old album. “Were we really like that?“ we think. For though the world may be very much the same now in its essentials as it was then, we ourselves are different. In the summer of 1914 we were dreaming dreams that we were never to dream again.

Myself, I was just sixteen. The horizon was widening every hour. At school I was half-way up the sixth, I had just earned a place in the eleven. Through my father I was exploring every holiday fresh fields of literature. Life was full, with every prospect of it growing fuller. My ambitions of the kind that are associated with that age were violently contradictory. On the one hand I wanted to be a poet, of the Dowson school, living in a garret, the prey of disastrous but intense romance, of subtle and sad experiences out of which would flower a sheaf of sonnets—that on the one hand. On the other there was the Balzacian desire to cut a dash, to wear smart clothes, to present myself at stage doors with bouquets. Ascot, Ranelagh, Cowes, were the passwords to a world that was waiting to receive me. I looked at a wardrobe stocked with velvet jackets, loose ties, tam o’shanter caps, and at another with silk hats, opera cloaks, patent-leather shoes, gold-mounted canes and could not decide which to patronize.

It was inevitable that in this mood of indecision I should see focused in the personality of Hugh Balliol the sum of my Balzacian aspirations. Three years of Oxford and a year of London had made him the complete man about town. He was tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted; with the kind of figure that tailors thank heaven for. Every time I saw him he seemed to be wearing a new suit. His ties, socks, and the crêpe handkerchief at his breast pocket were symphonies in green, brown, orange, purple. He walked with a swift stride as though he were on his way to something extremely important, the happy, carefree expression on his face suggested that that something was extremely pleasant. “It would be lovely,” I thought, “to live a life like that.”

In the case of the majority of one’s friends one likes to isolate one particular moment, one fortunate combination of time and place, to say of it: “That’s how I’d like to remember him. He was at his best then.” When I think of Hugh Balliol, I like to remember a July day when he came down for the M.C.C. to play against the school. It was not that he enjoyed any spectacular success. As far as I can remember he did not reach double figures and his bowling was ineffective. But he was easily the most distinctive person on the field. His trousers looked as though they had just been taken from the press; a silk shirt fluttered back against his skin, showing the muscles on his chest. He moved with an easy grace between the wickets. The very indifference with which he accepted his lack of success proved how much success came his way. Where he had failed to-day, he had succeeded yesterday and would succeed tomorrow. I pictured his thoughts already centring upon the London to which he would return that night. Probably he had arranged some party or other. While for me the cloistered day was at its close, he would be walking down the steps of a restaurant, a head waiter would be bowing him to a table, a girl would be at his side. The drama of the day would have only just begun.

“I don’t suppose he’s got a trouble in the world,” I thought.

Which is the way in which a great many very young people feel about their seniors, but in point of fact Hugh Balliol had at that time remarkably few troubles. His main trouble was one that I should never have suspected. And was provided by his inability to impress with a sense of his own importance the heir of his father’s chairman, the Honourable Victor Tavenham. It was not a question of jealousy, it was not a question of rivalry, it was not so much that Victor Tavenham did the same things as Hugh rather better than Hugh did them, but that he did not recognize that Hugh was in any kind of competition with him.

Victor Tavenham was on the brink of thirty. He was a bachelor on whom a great many designing mothers had their eye. He was tall, elegant, slim, with a long nose, pale blue eyes, a high forehead, and a look of that which cannot be otherwise described than by the French word “race.” There was an air of carelessness about his elegance, as though he had dressed hurriedly. Something was always slightly out of place; yet nothing in his manner suggested that the fact of having to hurry had flurried him in any way. He was a polo player, rated at four goals. He had a handicap of five at Prince’s. His name had been linked two seasons back with an exceedingly prominent actress. It was understood he was not interested in marriage. Everything that Hugh did, he did better. Finally, not only had he a considerably larger income, but he did not have to earn it.

Had he been told that he was a source of irritation to Hugh, he would have been astonished and indignant. “But I like the man,” he would have explained. “A very decent fellow. He belongs to my club. We play cards sometimes; if one plays cards with a fellow, after all, I mean.…”

Hugh would have found it hard to say where exactly the irritation lay. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Tavenham. He did. But whenever he saw Tavenham, he felt less satisfied about himself. His clothes did not seem so good; his manner so easy. He never felt at his ease with Tavenham. The consciousness of Tavenham’s superiority made him want to assert himself, to do things that weren’t like him: to be boastful, arrogant, self-important. When Tavenham had gone he would think, “Did I say the wrong thing? Did I give the wrong impression?” In the same way that on the morning after a party where one is conscious that one drank unwisely one rings up a trusted friend and asks “Did I do anything too appalling yesterday?” Hugh would have been happier about Tavenham had he felt less respect for him. But his respect for him was vast. It measured the dissatisfaction with which he realized that Tavenham simply did not recognize him as a competitor.

On the afternoon after the M.C.C. game, Hugh walked into his club to find Tavenham the sole occupant of the drawing-room annexe. A pot of tea and a plate of toast were at his side. He was busily studying the Sportsman. He looked up friendlily at Hugh’s entrance.

“What are you backing for the two-fifteen?” he asked.

Hugh never backed horses. He knew nothing about horses. He only followed such sports as he understood by playing them: cricket, Rugby football, tennis, golf.

“I didn’t even know there was a race meeting.”

Tavenham raised his eyebrows; then nodded his head quickly as though he were remembering.

“Of course, yes, I remember. You’re a cricketer.”

It was said without any undercurrent of reflection. But Hugh read an implied criticism into the surprise followed by the explanation. As though he were the kind of person who would not know about horses, because he had not a country place; who would follow an urban, plebeian game like cricket.

Nor was Tavenham’s next remark calculated to restore Hugh’s self-respect.

“I heard something that might be useful to you, yesterday. Met a man just back from Hamburg. Told me that everyone over there was talking about war; they expect it before the autumn. Why don’t you lay in a big store of hock? German wine may be very hard to get.”

Hugh resented the reference to his occupation. A man in trade, that’s how Tavenham thought about him. He assumed a patronizing manner.

“That sounds sense. It’s not really my line, of course. But I’ll hand it over to the fellow whose job it is.” He paused, fretted by the necessity to restore himself in his own esteem, and Tavenham’s. He began an anecdote.

“There’s a lot that’s very boring about business. But there’s a lot that’s fun,” he said. “The thing I like about it is the chance it gives you of being able to beat people at their own game. I had an amusing experience the other week, with one of those northern industrialists. You know the type: made of money; thinks everything’s for sale; pleased as punch with himself for having more money than the rest have. I was giving a small lunch party—I have to now and then—mostly for clients or prospective clients. Though I’d never sold anything to this particular fellow, and didn’t much care whether I did or not. He interested me, in himself, as a man whose entire world was bounded by bank notes. Well, I gave this lunch party, here. I brought my own wines with me. They were chosen pretty carefully, you can believe me. It was the kind of lunch where there was just not too much drink, so that a man would not only feel he was having a good time while he was there, but would go on thinking it, three hours later.

“I hoped, of course, that at least one of them would ask me about the wines afterwards, would place a pretty considerable order with me, I’d got a hock that was something special. But I didn’t expect hock to appeal to this particular fellow. He was the kind that calls champagne wine and doesn’t think that there are any other wines; that really only likes what he’d call short drinks: port, whisky, brandy. I noticed from the way he held the port in his mouth that he was enjoying it. He took a second sip quickly, then a third and longer one. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘that’s pretty good port you have given me. I don’t care what it stands me in. You can put me down for a pipe of it.’

“It was a pretty awful thing to do, of course. There’s a convention that when two men are having a business lunch they don’t start talking business till they’ve reached the coffee; when there are several men and you’re trying to sell something to them separately, you’re supposed to pretend they’re not there for anything but the pleasure of each other’s company. It’s silly, but it’s one of the rules of the game. There was a very surprised hush, all round the table. Luckily I kept my head.

“‘I shouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ I said.

“He was so surprised that he couldn’t do more than gape. I don’t suppose that in his whole life he had seen an order treated in that way. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ he said.

“‘Just that a port like this wouldn’t be any use to a person like yourself, who does most of his entertaining at home and in the evening. A port like this is very pleasant for lunch, when you don’t want to drink more than a glass. But it’s too rich, and sweet, for you to take more than a couple of glasses, as you’d want to, more likely than not, in the evening. I’ll tell you what. I’ll send you down a couple of bottles, and if you still want that pipe of it, I’ll be surprised.’

“I’ve never seen anyone have the wind so completely taken out of their sails.”

The story was told effectively, with an actuality that is only possessed by the things of the imagination. For it had not happened in this way at all. The industrialist had taken a sip at his glass, had held the wine in his mouth, had taken a second sip quickly, then a third and longer one. “Young man,” he had said, “that’s a pretty smooth-tasting wine. If I could be certain that every glass would taste as smooth, I’d place an order for a pipe of it. But I’ve a fancy that it won’t however. Here, hand me a tumbler, and send that decanter round.”

He had filled the tumbler three quarters full, and in the space of a minute and a half, during which no one else at the table spoke, he consumed with long slow sips its entire contents. Then he had made a wry face and pushed the decanter over to his left. “Too sweet Leaves a bad taste in the mouth after the second glass. Sorry, young fellow. But you’ll have to do better than that, if you want to get Jock Martin on your books.”

It had been for Hugh a humiliating moment. Afterwards he had relived the scene in his imagination, re-enacting it as he would have had things happen; in terms of his own triumph. “That’s how it should have been,” he had thought. The revised version made an effective story.

Tavenham was definitely impressed by it. Before the story was half-way through, he was sitting upright in his chair.

“That’s good, that’s fine, and the sequel? What happened afterwards? You sent him the two bottles?…”

“Of course I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“He agreed with me. He thanked me very much for having saved him from a big mistake.”

“Now I suppose he’ll have such faith in your judgment that he’ll buy all his wine from you?”

Hugh chuckled.

“I can’t say I’ve lost by turning down that order for a pipe.”

On Tavenham’s face there was such a look of admiration as the respectable reserve for outlawed exploits. Themselves, they prefer to live within the law, but they respect those others from a different sphere who run wild hazards.

“You’re certainly smart.”

“And the best thing about it all is this,” concluded Hugh; “there really wasn’t anything wrong with the port at all. I just told him that there was, to get my own back on him for trying to make me look small before my friends.”

The look of admiration on Tavenham’s face grew brighter.

“I must say I envy you the chance of being able to pull a bluff like that,” he said. “Let’s go down and have a hand of bridge. Let’s see how you put a finesse across.”

Hugh played a good deal of bridge. Stakes at his club were high, a pound a hundred. But he was a careful and skilful player. He expected the month to show a profit of fifteen to twenty pounds. Tavenham on the other hand was a careless and reckless player, who seemed to give less than half his attention to the cards, but every now and again would become electrified into interest and play a succession of hands with brilliant, controlled daring. It was when the luck was running against him that he played best.

There were four tables occupied in the card-room. A rubber was just ending. They cut in and found that they were partners. “This means an expensive rubber for me,” thought Hugh. He did not mind losing money at the table, but it bored him to see tricks flung away.

As Tavenham picked up his first hand, a tense look came into his eyes. The first time that Hugh had seen it he had thought, “That look’s a grand slam.” He knew better now. Probably it meant a Yarborough. Tavenham was that rare type of player who managed a losing far better than a winning hand; who lost interest when he picked up a hand bristling with picture cards and aces. Life, Hugh supposed, had come to him so easily, that what he chiefly relished in games was the contrast of opposition. Hugh welcomed that eager look. It meant that Tavenham was going to try.

And indeed against a succession of appalling hands he put up such a magnificent rearguard action that at the end of the rubber, by which time the luck had begun to change, they were only two hundred down. But when in the following rubber the cards began to fall really well, he played so casually that Hugh was driven to the desperate device of calling him out of his first and proper bids so as to play the hands himself. At the end they were three hundred up. Tavenham pocketed his sovereigns as a waiter picks up a shilling tip as though he were not noticing its presence.

“Interesting hands,” he said, as he and Hugh left the card-room. “Quite interesting hands. I’ve lost pretty heavily this week. Could you lend me twenty pounds till the end of the month?”

“I haven’t so much on me.”

“A cheque will do.”

“All right.”

“Thanks. That’s nice of you.”

The money was borrowed as casually as a postage stamp, and with as much likelihood of its return. Tavenham was as liberal a borrower as, when he was in funds, which was frequent, he was a liberal lender. Neither as borrower nor as lender did he let his behaviour show that any such transaction had taken place. He had the indifference for money that is the privileged attribute of those who have had plenty of it without ever having earned it. He actually did forget who had lent him money and to whom he’d lent it. He owed far less than he was owed and he was scrupulously careful not to borrow money from people who could not afford to lend it.

A fact of which Hugh was very well aware.

“And by the way, I’m throwing a party to-morrow evening,” said Tavenham. “A kind of studio dance affair. It might amuse you.” He gave him the address. “Any time after ten. But bring a girl.” He proffered the invitation as casually as he had pocketed his winnings and his loan.

“I suppose he looks on this party as interest for the loan,” thought Hugh. But it wasn’t that; and Hugh knew it wasn’t. Tavenham was just casual. If a man was good enough to borrow money from, he was good enough to ask to a party. He would not have asked Hugh to the party unless he had happened to meet him in the club, but then he equally would not have gone out of his way to ask him for a loan. He was one of those casual people who took things as they came.

It must be nice to be like that, thought Hugh, as he walked out into the sunlit length of Piccadilly. Nice not to worry about what people thought of you; to be self-assured; to have poise. If I hadn’t told him that absurd story about the port, he’d never have borrowed that twenty pounds. I let him think that I was full of money, which I’m not; not full enough anyhow to make presents of twenty pounds. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see it again. If he’d known what my bank balance looked like, he’d never have asked me. But I couldn’t refuse; not after boasting in the way I did. One has to see one’s bluffs through. Heaven knows why I should want to boast. I don’t with other people. There wasn’t a word of truth in that damned silly story. It was an expensive lie, all right. Still, there is the party.

It should be a good party. Tavenham’s parties had a reputation. Hugh wondered what kind of people would be there. There were bound to be some amusing people: actresses very likely; some of those modern girls one read about. Tavenham had told him to take a girl. It would be more amusing if he did. He might not know many people there. He didn’t suppose there’d be much introducing. You’d be left to look after yourself. He might be lonely, if he went alone. At the same time, the worst of taking a girl to that kind of show was that you might meet somebody really thrilling, and if you had a girl with you there was nothing that you could do about it. You couldn’t take a girl to a party and then neglect her. That was one of the advantages of a sister. You had all the fun of taking a pretty girl about, and if something really exciting came along, you could park her somewhere. There wouldn’t be jealousies or scenes, or feeling hurt. As likely as not she’d have found someone for herself. It might not be a bad thing to take Ruth along. On the contrary, it might be an extremely good one. She was old enough now to know what was what.

II

Victor Tavenham surveyed his party with disfavour. It looked as though it were a successful party. The studio that a friend had lent him was three-quarters full, which meant that there was room to move about, to see who was there. Yet a sufficient crowd for one to be able to edge away, unobtrusively from the conversation that proved tiresome. People seemed to be enjoying themselves. The conversation was animated. There was a good deal of noise. There was a certain amount of dancing. The man at the buffet bar was reasonably busy, there was still a hospitable display of food. On cushioned sofas curled couples were leaning towards each other in intimate, earnest discourse. It was after half-past twelve. The men and women looked young, well-dressed, gay. Three hours earlier the studio had seemed bare and chill with its high, blinded windows, its uncarpeted floor, its chairs and divans drawn back against the wall, and its sole splash of colour, the long, white-clothed, refectory table with its rows of glasses, its jugs of iced coffee, its high-piled plates of savoury sandwiches, stuffed eggs, a Brandenburg ham, a large bowl of lobster salad, its steaming silver-plated basket in which gold-foiled necked bottles were slowly cooling. The studio had looked like a garden in winter time. Now, with its bright, many-coloured dresses, it was like a herbaceous border in full summer radiance. Yes: it was a good party. The kind of party that people would talk about till he gave the next.

He could imagine the half-dozen or so bread-and-butter letters that he would receive two mornings later from those who wanted to make sure of being re-invited. “It was perfect,” they would say, “like all your parties.” That, precisely, was what the trouble was. It was like all his parties. The same guests, the same kind of hospitality. He did not know why he went on giving parties. He didn’t enjoy it really. He couldn’t afford it really. He was always overdrawn, always having to borrow money. Every guest meant a potential sponger.

Why did he give these parties? Because of a girl usually. He met someone new. He felt expansive; anxious not to so much impress her as to give her a good time. And then as likely as not, before the time for giving the party came, he’d lost interest in the girl for whose sake in the first place he had given it. He certainly wouldn’t care if he never saw Marigold again. She had been too easy. That was the trouble about women nowadays. They tumbled into your arms as soon as you showed an inclination to open them; or at least, the women he knew did. The minor actresses and the minor débutantes. Not in any particular spirit of adventure. The débutantes because they thought it was the smart thing; the actresses because they thought he might be useful. The Victorians must have had much more fun out of their long-laid siege to a maiden’s virtue. There had been something to struggle for, something to overcome. It had been more than a mere manoeuvring; a playing of cards, which was all that gallantry was nowadays: a branch of athletics, neither more than that nor less. It was fun, of course; but it should be more than fun.

This is the last party I’ll give till I fall genuinely in love, he vowed, and remembered how often he had vowed that before. It’s time I remembered my duties as a host.

It was his view that a host should be in the background; that he should not stage-manage his effects; that he should leave people to amuse themselves, not run round introducing them to one another; only interposing himself when a person appeared to need assistance, had no one to talk to and wanted someone; or was being fatigued by an importunate conversationalist; or just now and again, when there were two particular people that he wanted to bring together. He cast a slow look round the room, wondering if there were anything that needed doing.

His glance rested on a girl that he did not remember having met before. She was fairly tall, she was graceful, with prettily rounded shoulders, and a slim ankle showing below her skirt; her hair was coiled low upon her neck, giving the sense of a bird’s plumage. She was standing alone, beside one of the easels, watching the movement of the party with a bright, eager gaze, looking from one group to another quickly, as though she were trying to take it all in at once; anxious not to miss anything. Her eager interest, her youthfulness, and something about her clothes, he could not say what, but she seemed differently dressed from the other women, made him suspect that she was in this atmosphere for the first time. He walked across to her.

“I’m Victor Tavenham. I don’t think we met when you arrived.”

She looked up with the same, quick interested expression with which she had been looking round the room. Her eyes were bright, her complexion fresh, her lips were half-parted in a smile that was there not for any specific reason but just because she was enjoying herself.

“I’m Ruth Balliol.”

Tavenham was surprised. He had never thought of Balliol as the kind of fellow who would have a pretty sister. He had not indeed thought of him at all as a person who had a home, a father, sister, associations. Tavenham was incurious about the ways of life that lay outside the range of his immediate vision. He thought of people in the particular setting in which he chanced to meet them. He did not wonder how large or small a part of that person’s life was circumscribed by that setting. Hugh Balliol for him was a man he met at the club and occasionally played cards with; whose father ran some wine business that paid his father substantial emoluments as a director. Some time ago there had been headlines about a suffragette jumping in front of some horses, who was some kind of relation, he had been told. But he had never thought of Balliol outside the card-room and the lounge annexe of the Clarion. To think that he should have such a pretty sister. He hesitated, anxious to make a pleasant impression with his first remark, wondering what he could best say to please her.

“Vivian would admire the way you’ve done your hair,” he said.

“Who’s Vivian?”

His surprise at discovering that Balliol had a pretty sister was minute in comparison with the astonishment on hearing that a girl of twenty, who went to parties, would not respond to the flattery of being compared with the most discussed, the most photographed, the most sought after young woman of the hour.

“You’ve not heard of Lady Vivian Ash?”

“No. Who is she?”

But that was more than he could cope with. You couldn’t start explaining Vivian. You could only draw a parallel.

“You’ll be telling me next that you’ve not heard of Mary Patience!”

“Now, that name does sound familiar.”

She replied, however, in the dubious tone of voice that suggested she was not quite clear whether Lady Mary was a person in real life, or a character out of a book.

“Heavens, but who do you know?” he exclaimed.

“Well, there’s the Vicar. He’s not actually very thrilling but he’s read a lot. And there’s the doctor’s wife. She does the funniest recitations.…”

There was a twinkle in her eye, a look of roguishness that made him feel slightly silly; but in a rather jolly way. She had laughed at him, but she had laughed with him. “Let’s dance,” he said.

She danced well, smoothly with rhythm, readily responsive to his guidance; but in a way that somehow differed from that of the dancing to which he was accustomed. A difference such as there had been about her clothes, of which he was conscious but which he could not define. He tried to find a parallel.

Two lines intersected at a point. He and his friends were headed in a straight line, from a known origin to a known conclusion. Ruth Balliol had come at a different angle from a different source to a different destination. The lines had intersected. At this moment she and they were at the same point; but the fact of having come at a different angle, gave her a sense of difference. For she was different. She had laughed at him; had pulled his leg about Mary Patience; but she had not heard of Vivian. It would have done Vivian a lot of good to have heard that.

When the gramophone ran down, he led her over to the buffet. Because he had not her measure, did not know how to take her, he adopted a self-protective flippancy, continuing their badinage of the vicar and the doctor’s wife. He supposed that such a one would be shocked at being offered anything stronger than iced coffee.

“Oh no, we often have claret cup at our tea-parties.”

She smiled at him friendlily over the rim of her glass. She’s fun, he thought. She is enjoying things more than the girls I’m used to. They’re all so bored. Or else terribly hearty, trying to pretend they’re having a better time than they really are. She’s just enjoying herself.

He asked her whether the vicar’s wife approved of her going out to such late parties.

“She’d say I was quite safe as long as I was chaperoned by my brother.”

“Are you always chaperoned?”

“In a way.”

“What am I to take that to mean?”

“That I’m only allowed a latch-key when my parents know exactly what I’m doing, where I’m doing it and who with.”

“What happens when you haven’t a latch-key?”

“They have to let me in. Then they know what time I get back.”

Tavenham stared. She had evoked the picture of a world, entirely foreign to his own, where the Victorian idea of a chaperon persisted in this typically British point of view that no mischef could befall a girl before midnight and that there was no kind of mischief that might not befall her after. How incredibly different was her world from his. And on the surface how alike they looked. It was not surprising that he should be conscious of a difference in her. He wondered what she was like herself; what she was really like. He looked at her pensively. He was a man who made up his mind quickly. What he wanted to know, he set about finding out.

“Let’s go to a theatre to-morrow night.”

She answered him as directly. “I should like to do that.”

“Where shall I call for you?”

“Don’t bother to do that. I live miles out. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“The Ritz then. At seven-thirty.”

“Very well.”

Their eyes met in a long steady look as though they were taking stock of one another. There came into Tavenham’s face the same expression of excited determination that Hugh had seen there in the card-room when he had picked up a Yarborough.

At the breakfast table on the following morning Ruth announced that she would be dining out that night. No comment was made; no questions were asked. Had she said, “Frank’s taking me to a show this evening,” and had Frank been a person whom the family had inspected and approved, her mother would have said, “That’ll be nice for you. I expect you’d like a latch-key.” It was the compromise at which her parents had arrived after considerable consultation. They had agreed that the days of the chaperons were past; at any rate as far as they were concerned; that anyhow it would be impossible to chaperon a girl like Ruth. There was nobody to do it. At the same time they couldn’t just let her run wild. They had both to trust her and to supervise Ruth.

“We must make her realize that her friends are welcome here,” said Balliol. “We must encourage her to bring them here. Occasionally she may want to go out with someone and not tell us. That’s natural. It probably doesn’t matter. But if it’s a question of going out practically every night with some one of whom she suspects we would not approve, she would be certain to feel qualms about waking us up night after night. She would either bring the young man to see us, or she would stop going out with him. The great thing,” he continued, “is to make it easier for her to behave the way we want her. One can’t control young people’s lives, one can only direct them. You can only give them advice when they come to ask you for it.”

“I seem to remember that you said that in Lucy’s case.”

“Did I? Well, I was right, wasn’t I?”

“I suppose you were.”

Which was the most that he could say of his own conduct. He had often asked himself whether if he had done this or left that undone things would have been any different. He doubted it. And anyhow, as things were now, they might not be any better had he followed a different course. At least as far as Lucy was concerned. She was happy now. The accounts that came back from friends pictured a happy, occupied home life, with a healthy child and a devoted husband. He had lost her, but that sooner or later must have happened. Things usually worked out, not for the best one hoped, but as well as one had the right to expect. He did not worry about Ruth. He had confidence in her self-reliance.

“You can always have a latch-key when we know where you are going,” he had said.

There had been no argument when the regulation had first been made. There was no one with whom Ruth had wanted to go out that she would not be quite pleased to bring into her own home. And she did not believe in quarrelling over problematic issues. She never started rows “for the principle of the thing.” When the time came for her to need greater freedom, then would be the time to put in her demand for freedom. But the time might never come. At any rate, the thin end of the wedge had been inserted.

The expedition with Victor Tavenham was in point of fact the first occasion on which she had availed herself of her freedom without a latch-key. There was no reason why she should not have told them where she was going. But too much curiosity would have been aroused. Her first evening with him might well be her last. She would not like to have Francis saying afterwards “Have you seen anything of that grand friend of yours?” to have references made to this one evening whenever Victor Tavenham was discussed; to hear her mother say, “No, I’ve not met him, but Ruth.…”

The evening with Tavenham might be an episode that she would prefer afterwards to forget. It might well be. She knew well enough in what spirit he had invited her. She did not delude herself on that point. She had heard women complain that “men only want you for one thing.” Well, and why shouldn’t they, since it was an important thing? And since women in their way only wanted one thing from a man: to be spoilt, to be made much of, to have time and money spent on them. Neither generalization was quite true. But the one was as true as the other was. She could never picture herself turning round with the indignant protest, “So that’s all you wanted, was it?” At the same time there was a difference between Tavenham’s invitation and that of the other young men who from time to time had taken her to dances and theatres. They were men of her own class. Marriage might not be part of their intentions, but there was no reason why it should not be. It was certain to be no part of Tavenham’s. Other young men might ask her out for a variety of reasons; they might have mutual friends; they might as friends have a great deal in common. Her father might be able to be of use to them. They might want to confide some secret in her; to ask her advice about a girl they were in love with. A vast variety of reasons. Not one of which explained Tavenham’s invitation. He had only one reason for asking her out with him: to see if she was the kind of girl that would be amusing in that way.

And I’m not. I’m not like the girls he goes about with: actresses and married women, and the fast kind of society girl one reads about. I’m going out with him on false pretences. It’s silly of me. What’s the point?

But deeper than any cautionary argument, was the instinct of curiosity. The love of risk. The need to savour a new experience. Nothing like this had happened to her before. She was not entirely inexperienced. More than one young man who had not been satisfied with kisses, had lost his head and had to be repelled. More than once she had seen in a young man’s eyes longings that he lacked the courage and experience to express. Hot-headed moments had surprised young men into actions and avowals of which afterwards they had felt ashamed, for which they had apologized. “Would she ever be able to feel about them in the same way again?“ they’d asked. She’d laughed. She’d told them not to be idiots. She’d felt flattered and excited; rather a devil. It had been the excitement of walking on thin ice. There had been the thrill of the unknown. The asking yourself “What’s going to happen next?” There had been such incidents. But they were altogether different. She’d never before had a man of the world set out deliberately to seduce her.

Nothing could have been further from the atmosphere of a seduction than Tavenham’s welcome to her in the many-chaired Ritz lounge. During the long, slow passing day Ruth had worked herself up into such a state of nervous anticipation, had done so much counting of hours, minutes, seconds, up till seven thirty, as though her stepping across the threshold of the Ritz would be like the pistol start of a race; creating an appropriate mood of preparation for that one minute, as though it were from that instant that the evening’s drama would begin; that when Tavenham came towards her with his friendly, easy welcome she felt as unprepared as she would if she had discovered on reaching a drawing-room that she had arrived at the wrong house. She had come prepared for battle; for the deploying of forces; a manoeuvring for position: the kind of fight in which two opponents walk round and round each other, waiting till the other is off his guard, choosing the right moment to spring. That was what she had expected. But it was not like that at all. She was at a party. An extremely attractive and gracious person was making it his business to see that she enjoyed herself. Or rather, that they enjoyed themselves. Instead of a feeling of opposition there was one of partnership; as though the two of them in this large city on this one evening were conspiring to draw the greatest measure of entertainment.

She began to enjoy herself in the way that she had not expected; in a childish Cinderella way. The drama of walking into the restaurant at his side. He was tall, handsome, well-known. Heads were turned to look at them. People whispered across tables, “Victor Tavenham.” One or two people smiled at him. There was a “Hullo, Victor!“ She was conscious of a tall, imperious woman in the middle thirties, staring at her, wondering who she was. She had never before made such an entrance into a restaurant. And it wasn’t simply that she felt proud at walking beside a man who attracted such attention. She felt proud for her own sake; because she was a match for him; because her looks were the complement of his; so that not only was she more impressive because of him, but he was more impressive because of her. People who did not know either of them were remarking on “that striking-looking couple who’ve just come in.” They wouldn’t have noticed Tavenham in the same way had she not been with him.

She enjoyed, too, the deference with which the waiters treated them; and the friendly terms on which he stood with the head waiter; terms that at the same time made clear the difference in their positions. Tavenham was one of those who knew the exact tone to adopt towards a servant; the friendly, courteous concern that never became familiar. She liked too the easy way in which he played his part of host, the immediate skill with which he put her at her ease. On the previous night she had been too excited at being noticed by him to notice him. But now she did and taking stock of him, in the same way that he had noted a difference in her, she found herself noticing a difference in him that she found it difficult to define. She was accustomed to the company of good-looking, graciously mannered men, but their elegance and their charm had been of a different order. For six generations the Tavenhams had exercised authority with the knowledge that they would be unquestionably obeyed. They had enjoyed leisure, luxury with an unquestioning acceptance of their right to them. They had never had to explain themselves. What others had had to fight for they had inherited. What you acquire you suspect that someone will take from you. What you inherit you know is yours. The Tavenhams had never known self doubt. They had known that what they asked for within reason would be theirs. In consequence their manner, their attitude to life had such a deep, inherent, unconscious confidence as athletes display when they have mastered their technique; when they have reached the point of no longer knowing how they do a thing; when the effortless grace with which they sweep a golf ball from a tee, or stroke a long hop through the slips, is unconscious and unconsidered.

Ruth, listening to Tavenham’s talk, watching the changing expression on his face, noting the movements of his hands, had that same impersonally aesthetic delight that you get when you watch an athlete, an acrobat, an actor making something that is really difficult, whose mastery has been perfected only by long combinations of thought and skill, appear mere child’s play. His novelty fascinated her. He had a rather high-pitched laugh. He was always laughing: at what he said, at what she said. To keep the ball of laughter rolling, she found herself talking better than she remembered herself to have ever talked. The laughing responses he gave her, encouraged her, made her talk more easily, be more herself. Never had she felt more gay, more irresponsible, more alive.

He had not yet booked seats for anything. “I thought we might decide that ourselves, over dinner,” he said. “Nothing’s so full that you can’t get in at the last moment if you really want to.” So they got a theatre programme from the waiter, and the discussion of the various merits of the various pieces gave her the same feeling of partnership that she had had when she had walked into the restaurant at his side. It was the two of them arranging how they could get the most fun together, not he arranging some cut-and-dried scheme in which he expected her to fit.

They decided on “Hullo, Tango.” They both agreed that they did not want anything serious; that they went to a theatre to be amused, not to be instructed. They wanted bright lights, movement laughter, dresses.

At the theatre there was that same proud feeling of heads turning in their direction as they strolled round the foyer between the acts; the same happy feeling of partnership as they laughed at the same jokes, turning towards each other to exchange a smile when anything particularly amusing was said or done.

Afterwards, as they stood on the pavement in the warm, lamplit night while a commissionaire sought a taxi, he turned laughingly towards her.

“Have you brought your latch-key with you?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t want to be too late.”

“Not too late.”

“I thought we might have gone on to dance somewhere. But in that case, I think we might as well go straight back to supper.”

And that, too, seemed another facet of their partnership.

Tavenham had a flat in Westminster. In a large block of service flats. It was on the fifth floor. The windows of its sitting-room looked out upon the river. The curtains were undrawn. The vistaed view of the Embankment with its line of lights, the double-decked tramcars swaying along its length; the dark barges drifting slowly down the moon-silvered water; the chimney stacks and warehouses on the Surrey side was like a picture. Ruth gasped. It was so lovely. She walked towards it, as you do at an exhibition when a picture glimpsed across the room catches your attention. A cushioned seat ran under the low-set window sill. She knelt there, looking down. He stood beside her. She was grateful to him for remaining silent, till she turned away.

“Would you like to leave your cloak in there?” He pointed to his bedroom.

As he closed the door behind her, leaving her alone for the first time that evening, for the first time since she had walked into the Ritz, she realized her position. She had never been alone in a man’s flat before. She smiled as she remembered the numerous films and novelettes which portrayed trapped girlhood. As though anything could happen to her that she was not ready to let happen.

She looked round the room. It was a masculine kind of room: a thick fawn pile carpet, a low, wide bedstead, a table at its side; a shaded reading-lamp, two novels, a water jug and tumbler. Thick damask curtains falling in heavy gold-shot folds. A walnut wardrobe, a walnut dressing-table set with bottles, a silver-backed pair of hair brushes. A full length mirror spanned the gap of wall between the dressing-table and the wardrobe. In a corner were two pairs of riding-boots. Along the mantelpiece was set out a row of invitation cards. Above it was a large, brightly coloured hunting print. A man’s room. And yet it had an atmosphere of warmth and of comfort. There was nothing bare or bleak about it. Thought Ruth, “This room could tell some stories.”

A bathroom opened out of it. It was a very modern bathroom with pale blue tiles. The bath was long, low, rectangular. There were glass shelves, set with bottles; a frameless mirror; a thick carpet-looking squared linoleum; a spongey indiarubber mat. A shower was fixed above the bath. It had a number of brightly polished taps. It suggested health, comfort, cleanliness. Through its open door was the warm opulence of the damask curtains. Whatever stories the room might have to tell they would not be squalid ones.

How often women must be held back from that taking of the final plunge by the fear of a squalid setting. Before her eyes, when the hot mounting blood had counselled her to courage there had risen the picture of a cold, cheerless flat, a draughty passage, a gas fire that popped; or some tawdry, suspect suite in a hotel. She had shuddered, and kept her head. How different from that was this. Whatever happened here, an atmosphere of Victor’s choosing would be in keeping with his own fastidious taste. A thing of grace and beauty.

When she came back into the sitting-room he was standing by a small supper table. He was drawing a cork, slowly, from a bottle. It came out so gently that there was scarcely a sound as it left the bottle’s mouth. There was a gurgle and the chink of ice as the bottle sank back into the steaming pail. He turned; pulled back a chair for her; patted it.

“I hope you’ll like what I’ve ordered for us.”

The use of the word “us” rather than “you” gave her again that happy sense of partnership.

Alone with Tavenham again after the thronged noise of the theatre that same aesthetic pleasure of watching him returned, of listening to him, of seeing a thing done perfectly; though in a more marked degree than during dinner, for then her attention had been distracted by the movement of the restaurant, the people round her, the talk. Here, there was nothing to distract her. All her faculties were concentrated upon him.

In the centre of the supper table was a large bowl of lobster salad. It was the kind of dish that she would herself have chosen had she been handed a long menu. The cool wine was sweet, but it was not sugary. It was rich, full-blooded. She did not know what it was. She knew nothing about wine. She was grateful that he had not offered her the obvious champagne.

His talk was easy, gay, as it had been at dinner. There was no sense of embarrassment or constraint. You’re nice, she thought. Nicer than I ever thought you’d be. I didn’t think it would be like this; that you’d be so friendly; that there’d be this feeling of our having a happy time together. I thought it would be a sparring all the time; a game of attack and of defence. I was excited to know how you’d behave; what you’d do and say; what happens when a man like you tries to seduce somebody like me. But the very word “seduce” seems to convey something that’s underhand, sly, tricky. No, it isn’t in the least like that. You’re not like that.

But at the same time she knew very well that he would not have asked her out, would not have brought her here, unless he intended to make love to her. And with a part of her mind she was still detachedly, inquisitively wondering what would happen next. Yet with only a small part of her mind thinking that; only in small part was she detached. More and more she found herself relaxing to the emotional atmosphere of the moment. This was an evening she well knew that she would remember all her life; which would form a standard by which other evenings would be judged. It would make a second-best of a great deal.

It might be that within a very little while she would meet the man with whom she was destined to share her life; at whose side she would go to marriage as inexperienced as her mother. It was possible but it was unlikely. She was not the girl to marry merely for the sake of being married. She was not going to marry till she was certain that she had found the man to whom she could be the kind of wife she wanted to become. It was very likely that she would have to wait many months. She knew herself; and she knew how more than probable it was that during that time of waiting some hot-blooded moment would break down her reserve. That moment, when it came, would be ruined for her by the memory of this night. “Yes, yes, this is well enough. But it ought to have been then.” Never again would the moment and mood, the place and the person fuse so exquisitely. If ever it has to be, and in all human probability it has to be, it should be now. So, as she talked and laughed and listened, the various arguments of the issue chased themselves through her brain; chased themselves until they wearied her; until the power of self-dissection left her. “I’ll leave it to you. Whichever you make it the easier to say,’ Yes’ or ‘No,’ it shall be.”

The last drop of the cool golden wine had been poured into the long-necked glasses. Tavenham rose to his feet.

“Let’s go and sit over there. It’s more comfortable.”

He held out his hand to help her to her feet. He lifted her and they stood close. Her head was on a level with his chin. She leant back her head, looking up at him. He was smiling down at her. “You’re a lovely thing,” he said. He put his arms round her very gently, then his hold tightened. She closed her eyes. It’s like that first time in the woods, only it’s lovelier now, because he’s finer, because I’m older, because it means more to me. I’ve more to compare him with. Now, as then, she had a feeling of the wine of life being offered to her to drink.

Yet all the time there was that detached part, watching her, outside, criticizing, taking stock, thinking, “Yes, but what’s he going to do next? What’s he going to say? What’s the next step? Is it to be ‘Yes’ or ‘No?’” In the moments when her imagination had brooded on such a scene she had pictured the moment of transition from undeclared to manifest intention in terms of embarrassment, awkwardness, clumsiness. I couldn’t stand that. If he were to be shy and awkward, it would spoil everything. I couldn’t stand it. I’d just go.

Her imagination had never succeeded in picturing the scene as she would have it happen. She had never suspected that the tension at such a moment would be broken by a laugh, so that everything would be made easy, friendly, the sharing of a joke.

He lifted her into his arms; right off her feet. Cradling her with one arm below her bent knees he carried her across the room; lowered her gently on the bed.

“In novels, with a touch of the hand a heroine’s clothes fall to the ground in a pool as if by magic. But in real life they don’t. It’s a very intricate and awkward business.”

He handed her a Chinese dressing-gown.

“In exactly seven minutes I’ll be back,” he said. There was no discussion, no question of saying “Yes” or “No.” It was very, very simple to relax, to do things the way he chose.

Seven hours later her maid was rousing her with her morning tea. She sat up in bed, abruptly; rubbed her eyes, blinked them, stared quickly round the familiar room. “Well, is it a dream?” she asked herself; shook herself, poured out a cup of tea, gulped at it and decided that she really was awake. She thought hard; then nodded. No, it wasn’t a dream. It had happened right enough. She jumped out of bed, ran over to her mirror, stared at her reflection. “Well, and you don’t look any different.” She smiled; the reflection smiled back at her. She began to laugh. “So that’s how you feel about it; proud as Punch. No end of a devil. Who’s fooled all these stodgy matrons with their ‘All in good time, my dear.’ Think yourself the cleverest person that ever was. Well, I’m not sure I don’t agree with you.”

As she brushed out her hair, she began to hum one of the tunes from last night’s revue.

“He had to get under, get out and get under to patch up his little machine.”

The humming broke into words, her feet beat time under her chair. She wanted to dance, she was so happy. I’ll never regret it, never. He’s just a darling. I’ll be grateful to him till the day I die. He made everything seem so right, it might have been made so horrid. By knowing what it had been with him, she could realize what it might have been with someone else. What a mistake I might have made. What he’s saved me from. I’ll never see him again, most likely. He’ll lose interest. He’s so busy. There must be so many other girls. But I’ll never forget him, never. I’ll be grateful till the day I die.

Never had she felt so happy, so alive, so self-confident. At breakfast she could hardly restrain her exuberance. To the rest of the family it was an ordinary morning, just as yesterday had been an ordinary day. Hugh was consulting the columns of The Sportsman, wondering whether it would be worth while going to the Oval that afternoon. Sussex were playing there. He didn’t think they had a chance of making a match of it. But it would be interesting to see Knight bat.

A letter had arrived from Lucy. She was going to have another baby in the autumn. That meant she wouldn’t be able to come back to England till the following summer. Her father was perturbed as far as he was capable of perturbation, by the Irish situation. In his opinion, Civil War would have started in a month. Her mother had asked whether he considered there was any likelihood of trouble over all these ultimatums that Austria and Serbia were sending one another.

“Far too far away to affect us, anyhow,” said Balliol.

Francis in the intervals of this disconnected stream of comment and conjecture was trying to obtain permission to join some friends who had taken a villa for the summer in Wimereux. He had never been abroad. He was desperately anxious to accept.

“But you can’t cross to France by yourself,” his mother was objecting.

“The moment I arrive at Boulogne I’ll be met. I’ve done train journeys before.”

“This is different.”

“How is it different? I changed trains at Frome going to Wells. It’s only a question of one change from the train to the boat at Dover. A boat’s the same thing as a train.”

“It isn’t the same thing. We’ll consider it if you can find someone to go across with you and bring you back.”

“How am I to find that?” he grumbled.

Ruth scarcely listened. Cricket matches at the Oval; first trips to France; a niece in Penang; trouble in Ireland; ultimatums to the Serbs. What did they matter on a day like this? She felt hungry, yet she was too excited to eat. She wanted to talk, but there was nothing she wanted to say. She sat on her chair, crumbling a piece of toast, looking round the room with quick bright glances. Helen, recently promoted to a downstairs meal, stared at her with a puzzled curiosity.

“How strange Ruth looks this morning.”

“Finish up your porridge,” her mother told her.

“Her eyes are so bright,” said Helen.

Said Francis: “At Helen’s age I wasn’t allowed down to breakfast.”

Said her father: “Keep moving. We’ve got to be starting in five minutes.”

Hugh handed her across the paper. She glanced at the headlines. Divorces, murders, boxing matches. Political actions, international situations, the King at Windsor. Social tittle-tattle. To think that all those other things had happened yesterday.

She had nothing to do that morning. She had left the day free on purpose. After two late nights she had fancied that she would want to sleep late into the morning. She had never felt less sleepy. As often, when she had nothing in particular to do, she went in by ‘bus to London, riding on the top deck, not because she had anything to do in London, anyone to see, anything to buy; it was just that she wanted to watch London’s streets, to look down on London from a ‘bus; to draw a sense of life from London’s rich vitality. Never had she been more conscious of her youth, her power, her capacity to enjoy than on this sunlit July morning. She wanted to shout her secret boastfully from the housetops. She surveyed with a sense of proud superiority the girls who loitered before shop windows; at the side of elderly chaperons. What they dreamed about, thought about, whispered over, she knew.

On her return to Ilex she was surprised by the maid’s announcement that a box from Gerard’s had just arrived for her. No one was in the habit of sending her flowers. It was a short carton. She tore it open. It was a spray of purple orchids mingled with lilies of the valley. There was a note enclosed. It was pencilled on the back of a calling card. “Please ring me up at once to tell me that you’ll wear these when you dine with me to-night.” There was no need to turn the card to read the sender’s name. She looked at the flowers, then at the card, colour flooding her cheeks to crimson.

But she could not dine with him that night. Her parents had people dining, and for the night after she had a promise to make up a four at which she would fulfil the rôle of gooseberry from which she could not honourably extricate herself. But the day after tomorrow was far too long to wait. “It’ll have to be lunch tomorrow,” he decided. “Let’s make it Claridge’s at one-fifteen?”

Pensively, she laid down the receiver. Could Helen have seen her then, she would have noticed that the strange brightness of her eyes was misted.

It was nervously, however, that she waited for Tavenham in the lounge at Claridge’s. She had had half a mind that morning to send a telegram, to say that she could not come. It might be better if she were never to see him again. She could not bear to have the memory of that one night spoilt. It might be spoilt so easily. Good things ought not to be repeated. Love what you won’t see twice. Victor might not be so charming as he had been; he might be casual, arrogant, possessive. She had always heard that men “were different afterwards.” She had a good mind not to go. Only if I don’t, I’ll regret it always. There’ll be something I may have missed. I’ve got to know. But it was nervously that she sat there waiting, her toes curling backwards towards her soles. And it was with a relief greater than she cared to measure that she realized in the first instant of Victor’s greeting that he was not any different; that he was just the same. He was not treating her any differently because she had draped herself in a Chinese dressing-gown. On the contrary, the memory of that moment brought them closer to one another, in a friendlier intimacy, so that she could drop her defences in a way that she had been unable to before, so that she could be herself, knowing that he would understand.

The talk flowed easily and lightly. They were laughing half the time, every minute or so their eyes would meet across the table; their glances would hold each other, would become a slow look. Their laughter a smile that said, “It’s fun, isn’t it, that we should be amused by the same things this way?”

It was not till the very end of lunch that he made any reference to the Chinese dressing-gown, then indirectly.

“It’s a pity about that latch-key of yours. And all its Cinderella business.”

She smiled. “I know. It’s a nuisance. It’s the kind of agreement one drifts into and then finds it hard to break.”

“That makes me think you ought to introduce me to your parents.”

“Oh, but why.…”

“Then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting back, or when or how often.”

“Yes, but.…” She hesitated, a puzzled frown on her face. It would be easier, admittedly. But at the same time.… She shook her head.

“No, I know it’s a nuisance, and it might be easier, but I don’t know. It would be a bore for you and.… Oh, I don’t know.… I think we’re better as we are.”

She had no means of guessing how much that moment of puzzled deliberation and her ultimate decision counted with him; of knowing how it forced on his memory a comparison between her and all those girls who had tried to turn his interest in them to their own advantage; who had wanted to show him off to their friends and relatives; who had angled for invitations to week-end parties at his father’s house; whose interest in him was measured by the glamour they derived from it. Ruth was the very first who had been unaffected by such considerations; who was happy to be with him irrespective of what it brought to her. The quick eager light came back into his blue eyes. He had been right about her, then. She was different, fundamentally. He had thought that the difference would make her difficult; in an obvious way. It hadn’t. But in a subtler way it had. There was more to her, more to encompass; sides that were not easily revealed; that were slow to show themselves. To be with her was to be launched on a voyage of discovery; the excitement of new landscape. I’m not letting her out of my life at once.

“Then if you won’t do that, don’t you think it would be possible for us to be in the same place for a time, when no one knows we are there, and there aren’t chaperons?”

“How do you mean?”

“Couldn’t you say you were going away to stay with friends, and then not go to them?”

“Well.…”

“Somewhere a long way off.”

“What do you mean by a long way off?”

“Paris can be a long way off. Haven’t you friends in Paris you could visit, and not visit?”

“When?”

“This afternoon.”

They laughed at that. But, seriously, it might be possible. Suppose she were to offer to take Francis to Wimereux. Her parents would never let him go alone, nor would they let her go alone. But in that killing of two birds with a single stone, she would be able to conceal the fact that her own invitation to stay with a friend in Dieppe was a flimsy one. She could say “It’s such luck. The Martins have asked me to stay with them. That means there would be someone to take Francis across to Wimereux.” And in Francis’s excitement and the general discussion of his plans, her own movements would be overlooked. It was the kind of chance that would not come again.

“If you meet the midday train from London next Tuesday at the Gare du Nord, you’ll find me on it.”

“And then?”

“I’ll put myself entirely in your hands. For a week, if you want me for that long,” she added.

He did not ask her to go back with him to his flat. She half-thought he would. She would have gone if he had asked her. But she was glad he hadn’t. For a moment, as they stood side by side on the pavement of Davies Street, he put his hand upon her arm above the elbow, pressing it.

“I’ll be counting the seconds until Tuesday. It’ll be heaven having you to myself.”

Then the taxi had drawn up and he was gone. Her eyes followed the small shaking cab. Only five days off. Yes: it would be heaven. She had never thought she would feel about him in this way. It wouldn’t last, she knew that. In the nature of things it couldn’t. I must be careful not to fall too much in love with him. I mustn’t let myself be hurt too much, when it’s all over.

But she didn’t care how much she was going to be hurt. She only knew that she was falling, headlong, into love. She didn’t care. She was so happy. She would enjoy this loving to the full. It would never come again; not in the same way. First honeymoon. She wondered if he had guessed he was the first. I’d like to tell him. But I never shall. Many years hence, perhaps; not now. It might spoil things for him; give him a sense of responsibility. It might worry him. That mustn’t happen. I want it to be perfect for him as it is for me. I want him to have all the happiness he knows how to take.

Sunlight was in the streets and sunlight was in her heart as she walked southwards to Piccadilly. She wanted to sing, she was so happy. Five days. Then Paris. To be alone with him; to be in love in love’s own city. Five days. Five days. Five days. Her heart beat to the rhythm of the refrain. Five days. Five days.

But it was in the last hours of July that the rhythm beat through her heart. And the year was 1914.

III

There have been written innumerable descriptions of those last July days and that first week in August. On the memory of those old enough to be aware of what was happening every detail is clearly cut. It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. I was then sixteen. At prize-giving on the last Monday in July the headmaster spoke of the “serious news that we have read in our morning’s papers.” I thought he referred to Ireland. On the next day I returned home for the summer holidays. I was chiefly concerned with Middlesex’s chance of winning the county championship. On the following Saturday I went to Blackheath to watch the last day of the Kent and Surrey match. So much had happened during those four days that as I watched Colin Blythe run up to the wicket with that slow tripping run and the left arm curled behind his back, I thought, “Shall I ever watch another first-class cricket match?” I was sitting next Philip Trevor. He was reporting the match for the Daily Telegraph. “My account of this match will never be printed. There’ll be no sports page in Monday’s paper.” On the Sunday I travelled down into the country. Outside the station stood a group of villagers. “Have you any news?” they asked. They had waited for the London train, believing that Londoners would know more than they did.

Everyone has memories of that kind. And everyone has memories, similar to mine, of the stages by which during that long, slow-passing, sun-soaked August he came to realize that this war was not like every preceding war, to be the concern solely of the professional soldier; that the civilian population had to make larger and costlier contributions than an increase in income tax.

I spent that August with my aunts in Somerset. I had planned it to be a cricket-playing, cricket-watching holiday. But in the matches that I had meant to watch no one took any interest. No one cared whether Surrey, Kent or Middlesex were champions. The games in which I had meant to play were cancelled. It was no longer possible to find eleven players. Every day brought the message of some new person “joining up.”

Everyone has memories of such a kind. In detail they are different; but in essentials they are the same. They provide snapshots of a world, unprepared for war, leading a personal life, happily or unhappily, as the case might be; realizing first that war was imminent, then more surely that the problems of war were personal. During the war, for purposes of propaganda, addressed in the main to neutral countries, Britain’s unpreparedness for war was over-stressed. There was so much talk of “the unprovoked assault” that since the war the tendency has been to argue that Britain was no less ready for war than Germany, France, Russia; that twentieth-century diplomacy had created a situation which could have had no other outcome; that “in tragic life God wot, no villain need be.”

That is the modern tendency; and it may be that a few politicians, industrialists, diplomatists were awake to the closeness and reality of the danger. But for the majority of thinking English, the outbreak of the war came without any warning.

The same tendency to contradict our earlier attitude of exaggeration has since led many to mistake the spirit in which during that first autumn Kitchener’s first army was recruited. The pulpit and the press delivered so much intolerable highfalutin about the sacred cause of a crusade that the soldier is informed to-day by those who were too young, or physically unfit to serve, that he joined up either because he thought it would be fun, or because he was coerced by public opinion. I doubt if a single soldier enlisted in the recruiting-poster spirit of crusade with which the press endowed him. Many, no doubt, were excited by the spirit of adventure; nobody knew then that three-quarters of active service consisted of wading through mud-filled trenches. Nobody cares to be “out of things.” But Kitchener’s army, even so, was for the most part recruited from men who believed that an honourable obligation had been laid upon them not to desert their friends.

Edward Balliol spent the month of August in London. He preferred to take his holiday in October. The golf links of East Kent were by then pleasantly free of “green-fee” visitors. He was a member both of Royal St. George’s and the Cinque Ports Club at Deal. He took a golfing holiday at a time when golf could be enjoyed in its proper setting: at the seaside, in a leisured atmosphere, when the wind is fresh, but not a gale; when it is more likely to be dry than wet; when sunshine is intermittent; when the fairways are fresh and green; when the light is still good at tea-time.

In consequence his memories ofthat August were London ones; of scare headlines: of newspaper boys announcing sensation upon sensation: of rumours: of men in his club who had this, that or the other thing, on the very best authority. They were such memories that he shared with a million other Londoners. There were those other ones that were personal to himself.

There was the Bank Holiday Monday, with war practically certain; with Ruth suddenly flinging down the paper on the breakfast table, rising to her feet, her meal half finished, walking over to the window, leaning there, her head on her hand, staring at the garden. Francis saying “I suppose this means I shan’t be able to have my holiday in France”; Ruth swinging round from the window, on her face a look of anger that was almost hatred. “Your holiday!” then turning back to stare out of the window. Francis’s mouth gaped wide, as though he had been struck across the face. Jane stretching out a consoling hand: “Darling, you shall have the loveliest holiday when it’s over.”

There was the first board-meeting of Peel & Hardy. As he passed through the counting-house on his way to the board-room, he found half the staff grouped round a khaki-clad figure. He paused, for an explanation.

“It’s Walker, sir, he’s been called up. He’s come to say goodbye to us.”

In his short-tunicked, baggy-trousered, high-collared uniform, he looked very much as he had done seven years earlier when he had appealed to the board for a rise of wages. There was the same roguish twinkle in his eye. Though his hair had been clipped close where it would show beneath his hat, the front lock still curled with an auburn daring.

Balliol shook him by the hand.

“I’d no idea you were a reservist.”

“I’m not, sir. A terrier; joined up last year; thought as ‘ow it’d get me a good ‘oliday fer nothink. Seems like I’m getting it.”

Balliol recounted the incident in the board-room afterwards. Lord Huntercoombe nodded his head sagely.

“I remember him; liked the look of him. A rascal. I like rascals. Not enough of ’em nowadays. Everyone too well-behaved. No spirit. I suggest that as he’s the first man from this office to join the colours, the board should make him a present of five pounds. He won’t be the first to go. My boy’s in camp. His commission will be through now any day.”

On his way back that evening Balliol saw a huge crowd gathered round a platform in Trafalgar Square. The platform was decorated with the Union Jack and the flags of France, Belgium, Russia. A dozen or so persons were seated upon the platform. Several of their faces were familiar to Balliol. There were two Cabinet ministers, a Conservative ex-minister. There was the Bishop of Banchester; a nonconformist publicist; a couple of Socialists; a prominent Trades Union official. It was a gathering representative of the main half-dozen currents of English thought. A tall, strong-featured woman was speaking. She wore a tailor-made coat and skirt. As she spoke, she kept her hand in her coat pocket. Her voice was clear-toned; the sentences short, tense, banged home, one after the other: as a shoemaker bangs nails into a sole.

Balliol stopped. It was nearly a year since he had seen his sister. They had never really liked each other. He knew he had no right to blame her for Lucy’s accident; but he did. She knew he did: and she resented it. Their meetings had been less and less frequent, more and more formal, till they had become little more than an occasional “duty” dinner. The last two invitations she had declined. She was too busy, she had said. He could well believe it. Speaking here, heckling there; scarcely ever long out of the press; harried by the “cat and mouse” act; a political refugee. But now apparently all that was over. She had called down the curtain. All her energies, all the scope of her organization were flung into the war.

He listened to her speech.

“We must close the ranks. Three weeks ago those who stood before you now were, in our different ways, sworn enemies of one another. We were opposed by irreconcilably hostile points of view. We were prepared to fight with our last breath for what we held and still hold to be the truth. To-day, in the face of a greater danger, a more ruthless foe, we stand united. We have forgotten our points at issue. We have only one enemy; a common enemy. Till that enemy is broken and humbled we shall fight side by side. We must close the ranks.”

From the huge crowd rose a swelling murmur of applause. Yes, she could move audiences, all right. She was strong and she spoke the truth. She had no axe to grind. She was an important woman, he supposed. One of the people who influenced events. It was hard to realize that one’s sister should be somebody that mattered.

He found, on his return, in the hall a large canvas kit-bag. It was stamped with the letters I.C.O.T.C.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.

But he did not need telling. He read the reply in the eager, excited expression of Hugh’s face.

“When do you go?” he asked.

“Not to camp for another fortnight. There’ll be some preliminary training in the Inns of Court depot at Lincoln’s Inn. Then we go to Berkhamsted. I stay here till then. I shall probably get my commission in November.”

“We must try and make things nice for you.”

His son! The Inns of Court; that kit-bag in the hall. An officer in November, and then.… But quite likely the war would be over before then.

Every evening before taking his bath and changing into his velvet dinner-jacket he spent half an hour or so with Helen, telling her a story: some adaptation of Grimm and Andersen: a long serial story that wandered on from evening to evening till he had quite forgotten how the story had begun, where or with what characters. He took care to end upon an atmosphere of suspense, so that the next day he should be able to pick up the thread of the narrative. Helen would say, “The prince was just going to be bewitched by the ogre. Quick, daddy, what happened?” Balliol would recount the episode of the ogre. By the time he had finished that, he would be in his stride and able to think of something else.

He would devise episodes for about twenty minutes. “Now it’s time for you to say your prayers and go to sleep.” She would jump out of bed, kneel down beside him and repeat her prayers.

This evening, as she knelt, he checked her. “I want you to alter your prayer. I want you, when you get to Hugh, to add ‘who is going to be a soldier, please bring him back safe to us.’“

Helen frowned, memorizing the sentence as though it were a lesson, repeating it over to herself; then bent her head forward into her hands.

“Anyhow, the war won’t touch her,” thought Balliol.

She was, it seemed, the only member of the family whom it wouldn’t. One morning, half-way through the month, Ruth came down to breakfast with a set, resolute expression on her face.

“It’s no good,” she announced. “I can’t stand this any more. It’s driving me mad. I can’t sit about here doing nothing. I’ve got to do something.”

“What are you going to do,” asked Francis, “sew shirts for soldiers?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, exactly. I’m going to Aunt Stella. She’ll find something for me to do.”

Her mother was about to protest, but Balliol checked her. It was the best thing that she could do, Stella would be able to find something for her: was the one woman who could.

When war broke out, she had an organization ready made that she could put at the disposal of war services. During those first weeks of the war, when everyone wanted to do something and nobody knew what, she was the one person who seemed able to direct their enthusiasm into appropriate channels. She was the chairman of innumerable committees. Letter after letter bearing her signature appeared in the daily Press, suggesting the various ways in which women might be useful. The Suffragettes were the first organized group of women since the days of Boadicea. Their organization was a nucleus from which the main body of woman’s war work might be attacked. Punch had a cartoon of Kitchener and Stella Balliol standing side by side; the one was beckoning to the men, the other to the women. Each pointed towards a road that, littered in the middle distance with signs of war, led to a shadowly effulgent group of towers labelled Victory. This cartoon was displayed with great prominence in recruiting offices, and outside village halls. No one recalled that three months earlier Stella had been caricatured by the same hand as a wild-haired, ragged-skirted, pince-nezed fanatic, waving a mallet in one hand and a firebrand in the other, to whom an exasperated woman attired according to the dictates of middle-aged suburbanism pointed the finger of ignorant scorn. The caption ran: “If you knew the harm you were doing to my cause!” Balliol wondered whether Stella derived an ironic entertainment from the comparison. Probably she was unaware of it. She had a job to do and was busy doing it.

It was the first time that Ruth had visited her aunt’s office in the Temple. In consequence, she did not notice, as Lucy would have done, one of the first differences that the war had caused. Miss Draft was no longer seated in the front office. During the last two years Stella, remembering the earlier split that had come into the Union, had held herself a little apart from the central organization. She had worked beside rather than with it; suspecting that a time might come when she would value her independence; when she might want to act alone.

She was glad of her independence when the war began. There had been several clearly marked points of view at the first committee meeting. There were those who, in view of the Movement’s close connection with the Independent Labour Party, were in favour both of opposing the war and taking the opportunities that the war provided of attacking a government that would have its hands half tied. Another section was wholly for the war, was resolved to prosecute this war with all its power, to turn the Movement’s paper into an organ for patriotic propaganda, to conduct anti-German and recruiting meetings throughout the country in the same way that they had before conducted suffrage meetings. To both these policies Stella was opposed. To the first for the reason that her whole upbringing had taught her that in time of war there is only one attitude for a patriot: “My country, right or wrong.” The second because she was convinced that such a campaign would sooner or later prove more of a nuisance than a help.

“We must work,” she had asserted, “not independently, but with the government. We must behave as the Conservative politicians are behaving. We must say to them, ‘How can we help you? When? Where?‘ We must show them in what ways we can help them. The war has got to be won. Nothing matters, nothing can matter till it has been won.”

That was how she had argued. She had thought it better not to voice the argument, to her very potent, but whose expression at this moment would be misunderstood, that the Suffragettes, by abandoning their struggle now, would find themselves at the end of the war in an unassailable position. They would have proved their loyalty and their capacity. They would be entitled to their reward. The country would be on their side. In times of war bribes were offered to neutral countries to remain neutral; or to exchange their neutrality for an alliance. The vote was the price which the Suffragettes would receive for their alliance. It would not be phrased that way. But that, in fact, was how the bargain stood.

“Those who think otherwise, can act in such a way as they think right,” said Stella. “But I and those who agree with me will work at the side of whatever government is in office till the war is over.”

She knew that her words would be quoted all over England; that her opinion would be taken as the expressed opinion of the Suffragettes. She would have a large following. Her voice would carry weight when the time for the dictation of terms came. She knew she would carry a large following; and that she would receive the assistance of many, not Suffragettes, who would be ready after the war, because she had led them through the war and earned their loyalty, to stand at her side should she have need of them in a new campaign.

One old associate she did not, however, take with her. Miss Draft’s belligerent spirit was not offered sufficient scope by a vague policy of co-operation. She wanted an active waging of the war. She was eager for a sub-editorship of the new patriotic paper. She devised fierce headlines to stimulate recruiting. She urged women to shun the society of those men of military age who had not offered themselves for service. “No kisses for cowards!” was one of her happiest slogans. She spent two very enjoyable afternoons presenting to such civilians as appeared to her to be between the ages of nineteen and forty a posy of white feathers.

“I’m glad,” was Stella’s comment, “that you can still find an outlet for your dislike of the male sex.”

Her place was taken by a brisk, college-trained young woman in spectacles and overall. Her manner was like an advertisement saying, “Nothing of that sort here!“ You were given to understand that apart from office hours she was an attractive girl but that you would never be privileged to see her exercising her attraction; and that because you had exchanged a few sentences with her in an office you were not to imagine that you were introduced. She gave visitors—and the office was so crowded with visitors that the lease of a larger office was in an advanced stage of negotiation—to understand that she was the exceedingly busy mouthpiece of exceedingly busy people; that it was unlikely that she would be able to do anything for the applicants, but that the applicant’s one chance was a concise brevity. There was, in her opinion, little likelihood of her principal being able to give Miss Ruth Balliol three minutes of her time.

“I think she will. She’s my aunt, you know.”

“Oh, in that case.…”

The secretary looked at her suspiciously, then hurried towards the door marked “Private.” She was back almost before she had had time to close the door behind her.

“Will you please go straight through?”

Stella Balliol was one of those exceedingly busy people who give you the impression that they are not busy in the least. They welcome you as though you had come for a week-end. There is a pleasant atmosphere of leisure about their room. You never feel that anyone else is waiting to come in. There is no sense of hurry. At the same time, within three minutes you find yourself in the passage, having said all you went to say and settled the particular matter that had brought you there. You have been given the impression that any time you care to drop in for a chat, you will be extremely welcome. “There ought to be more people like that,” you tell yourself. At the same time you feel that you wouldn’t care to bother them, unless you had something that really mattered to discuss.

She had Ruth’s business settled within two minutes.

“I’d suggest canteen work for you at the present. It needs someone who’s tactful with men, who can be friendly with them without letting them get familiar. They need just the right handling. It’s more out-of-doors work, too. I don’t think you’re an indoor person. Can you drive a car? No? Well, I should learn as soon as I could. There’ll be a lot of work of that kind before very long. The most interesting work, too. I’ll give you some addresses now.”

On the desk in front of her were a number of small piles of typewritten cards. She took up three of them. She wrote over the top “To introduce Ruth Balliol.” She signed them with her own name at the foot. “They’ll be able to give you all the work you want; as much or as little. I hope it’ll be as much.” She stretched out her hand. The formal businesslike tone was dropped, a look of leadership lit the cold, stern features. “I think it’s fine of you to want to be with us,” she said.

Ruth left the room relieved that she was to be allowed to make her contribution to the hour’s effort; confident that her wish to help would not be misused; that her talents and capacities would not be allowed to rust; that they would be watched and directed where they were most fitted. She could understand the influence Stella had had over the young women of the Movement.

In the street outside, newsboys were shouting the latest communiqués from the Russian front. Another battle; more prisoners captured; more guns. No news from Flanders. The streets were full of khaki. How drab it looked. War; nothing but war. All the colour and glitter of life gone. The sooner she was herself absorbed by it the better. Work, long hours till your body ached, till your eyelids pressed down upon your eyeballs; so that dark thoughts had no chance to trample across your mind; so that you could forget what in your personal life had gone awry. It might have been so lovely. It would have been so lovely. There might have been unhappiness afterwards: strain, friction, heart-burning. But, there would have been that to look back upon. It won’t ever come again. Not in the same way. It’s lost for ever. The war’s taken it. The war’s taken something from everybody. It’s the common lot. I’m not going to grumble. If only it had come a little later. Just a week later. If only I could have had that first!

The knowledge of her own loss brought her into touch with all those whom the war had robbed of happiness. As she walked away from the Strand, she passed coming from the other direction a group of recruits on their way to camp. They were a motley crowd. Only a few of them were in uniform. They were in variegated costumes: Norfolk jackets, grey flannel trousers, riding-breeches, blazers, bowler hats, cloth caps, boaters, Homburgs. They carried brand new kit-bags across their shoulders. They marched jauntily, more or less in step. They were singing Tipperary.

Ruth looked closely into their faces as they passed. They seemed gay enough: self-consciously jovial for the most part; conscious that they were being stared at. But there must be at least one there whose heart was aching, as hers was; who had been robbed of a happiness that life had not again for giving. We’re all in the same boat. She felt less lonely as she hurried on to the Charing Cross Tube.

She returned to find Francis in a state of considerable excitement.

“You remember old Scottie? I told you about him: teaches maths. Well, he’s joined the London Scottish. He’s the one master who really made us work. I am looking forward to next term. We’ll be able to rag like billy-oh!”

Ruth told her father what Stella had arranged.

“You’d better have a couple of latch-keys cut for me. Heaven knows what hours I’ll be keeping.”

IV

Through those last August days and through September the Press varied their slogan of “Business as Usual” with denunciations of shirkers, slackers and all such unmarried men of military age as were not in khaki. From every hoarding portraits of Kitchener with extended finger that pointed straight at you, from whatever angle you approached, announced that “Your King and Country need you.” Recruiting bands marched through the streets. Restaurants changed Vienna patties into St. Petersburg steak. Patriots with names like Kaisar became Kingsley by deed of poll. Old men in their club wished they were younger. There was talk of spies, of food hoarders; everyone knew someone who had seen ten thousand Russians hurrying across England to the eastern front. While for the Balliols as for every other English family, the business of living went on, not as though nothing, but as though not too much, had happened.

In the offices of Peel & Hardy, there was a certain amount of alarm lest the war should be made an excuse by the teetotallers to place a check on the sale of wines. The example of Russia was alarming. Prentice was of the opinion that the tobacco branch should be enlarged.

“It is taking up a great deal of our capital already,” Balliol said.

“It is showing a very handsome profit.”

“Is there any reason to believe it is capable of enlargement?”

“There is every reason. A great many men will have more money than they have ever had before. There will be fewer things to spend money on. Tobacco is one of the few luxuries they will be able to afford when they are on active service. The inaction of their lives will increase the smoking habit. There are a great many young men who are now non-smokers who will become smokers during the war. It’ll be something for them to do. It’ll soothe their nerves. I’d like to have young Smollett’s opinion.”

Prentice’s protégé entered the board-room in a spirit of mingled terror and aggression. He was frightened out of his life and was ashamed of being frightened. He told himself that he was as good as they were; that he was better than they were; that he had worked his way up; that they had just picked up what they had found; that if they had been born where he had, they would be there still, if not a little lower. He was much better than they were, really; that’s how he had argued as he stood outside the board-room waiting to tap upon the door. But when he came into the room, the arguments lost their potency. The three men seated round the table appeared to belong to a different and a more powerful order. He felt himself getting hot. He did not know what to do with his hands, wondered whether his tie was straight, wondered whether the stain on the right side of his coat was noticeable. If he had known he was going to be called up to the board-room, he would have put on his Sunday suit. The very graciousness with which Lord Hunter-coombe pointed him to a chair increased his nervousness. People like that were never uncomfortable. They never worried about how they looked. They knew that they looked all right. And they did, confound them!

“Now, what we want to ask your opinion on is this,” said Huntercoombe. “It concerns the possible enlargement of the tobacco department. It would be better, perhaps, for Mr. Prentice to explain.”

The Chairman sat back brooding, his eyes half-closed, his elbows rested on the arms of his chair, the points of his fingers tapping. It was annoying, the way that electric light plant kept going wrong. It was a pity they had ever put it in. Such a mistake: trying to be modern. His man kept talking about carbonization. That meant nothing to him. All he knew was that Roger spent his whole time feeding the damned thing with oil instead of clipping the box hedge of the archery, and that with young Graham called up as a reservist, and no chance of getting a decent under-gardener at such a time.…

As Prentice began to explain, Smollett lost his nervousness. He stopped worrying about what he looked like, and what other people were thinking of him. He was realizing that the war was going to give him the opportunity he had waited for, but had not expected, had not known how to ask for. His eyes brightened as he listened.

But when Prentice had finished, when Balliol turned to ask him his opinion, his former nervousness returned. His anxiety to conceal his nervousness made his voice rough and insolent.

“I should prefer not to give my answer now. I should prefer to think the matter over. I should prefer to set some figures before the board at their next meeting.”

“Very good.”

As he walked towards the door he was unhappily conscious of six eyes following him, picking him to pieces, noticing the cut of his clothes, his worn shoes, the way his hair was cut. He wanted to run, so as to be in the passage quickly.

As the door closed behind him, Huntercoombe turned to his colleagues.

“I have no doubt that that young person is extremely efficient at his job. But I don’t like him. Frankly, I do not like him.”

At the next board-meeting Smollett’s report was read. It was concise and clear. There seemed reason to believe that the firm might profitably invest a portion of its capital in the enlargement of its tobacco side. Not that there seemed any likelihood of the main wine side being obscured. The teetotallers were silent. Though Kitchener had warned the troops against the dangers that they would encounter through wine and women, an encouraging spate of orders for port and spirits came from the army messes.

At Ilex life went on, not so very differently. When Hugh left for camp it was very like his going back to Oxford, his week-end leaves were very like those sudden incursions from Oxford when Balliol had returned to find the hall stacked with bags, greatcoats, tennis-racquets; when there had been a great deal of door slamming, of shouting over bannisters, of the splash of bath water, of notices pinned on doors: “On no account call me till I wake.” Very like that.

Ruth’s movements were as varied and rapid as they had been always. They were more irregular. That was the only difference. As Francis and he walked up the North End Road together after breakfast, now as then, it was a recital of school rags that Francis poured into his inattentive ear. The headlines of the daily papers, the topics one discussed at dinner tables and at one’s clubs, those certainly were different. But apart from that Balliol was unconscious of any basic change.

V

One morning half-way through September Ruth received a letter with a Nottingham postmark and a gunner badge. The handwriting seemed familiar. But she could not remember when. She tore it open. It was a pencilled note, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper. “Coming up to London on Friday for my first leave. Can you possibly meet the 12.50 Euston?” A signature sent the colour flooding through her cheeks. “Victor.” And on his first leave; that he should have thought first of her!

A barrier was drawn across the end of the platform. By the time Ruth arrived twenty to thirty people were gathered round it. They were women for the most part; some middle-aged, some quite old, others as young as she was. Were they waiting for lovers too, she wondered. Their faces seemed eager, alive, expectant; as though happiness were on its way to meet them. Was her face bright like theirs? What was it that Helen had said about her eyes that morning? Did a woman in love always betray herself?

Standing on tiptoe she edged her way towards the barrier. There was only one woman now in front of her. She was little and bent and old. She would be able to see over her. She looked up at the clock. 12.49. But the train was certain to be late. Trains always were; except when you were catching them. How late was it likely to be? Ten minutes? It couldn’t be much less than that. Quarter of an hour, say. If it had been more than that they’d have put a notice up. Quarter of an hour, then. That’s as far away from now if you think forwards, as that moment when I was coming up in the lift is, if you think backwards. That doesn’t seem long ago. It won’t be long to wait. It.…

But the train was punctual. With a slow, steady grind it ran up to the buffers. There was a flinging wide of doors; from every carriage khaki-clad men were leaping to the platform. They were carrying kit-bags, packs, suit-cases. In spite of their burdens, they were running towards the barrier; towards happiness; towards freedom. Standing on tiptoe she peered eagerly above the little bent old woman. Suppose he wasn’t here. Suppose something had happened. Suppose he’d sent a wire that had arrived after she left home. But nothing had happened. He was there. Taller than the rest; so strong, so straight. He had seen her. There was that gay look in his face. He was waving at her. He was hurrying with the long swinging stride. He was through the barrier. She had pushed backwards through the crowd. A strong arm had been passed through hers. She was being hustled towards a taxi. Taxis were hard to find, but he had found one. The door was open. A strong hand beneath her elbow lifted her. “The Ritz, driver.” The door had slammed. There was the sound of gears; the taxi began to move.

“Well, kitten?”

But she could not trust herself to speak. Her eyes ran him up and down, to make certain he was there; to make certain he was real. It was strange seeing him in uniform. Yet he looked so right in it. The close-fitting tunic that was not too tight, the shining well-worn Sam Browne, the riding-breeches that were not glaring yet somehow caught one’s eye. The riding-boots that had stood stout service. So many officers looked as though a tailor had hung garments on them. You did not feel that they could do anything in their uniforms. Victor looked a soldier. How his buttons shone, and his spurs!

And all the time he was chattering away. He hadn’t written; he didn’t believe in letters. One didn’t say things the way one wanted. One got misunderstood. Letters were a substitute. Always best to wait till you could see someone. Besides, he’d been busy. She couldn’t think how busy. Living in tents, too. He didn’t stop talking the whole way to the Ritz. Yet it was she, not he, who seemed breathless when they got there.

Not that she felt shy with him. On the contrary, she had the feeling of being at last back where she belonged. It was not till they had taken their seats in the restaurant, till lunch had been ordered and the wine agreed upon, that they really looked at one another. Then their eyes met in such a slow fond look of home-coming as the traveller fixes on a familiar, long-loved landscape: a recognition, a reassurance, a taking of it all in, bit by bit; a seeing that it is still all there, that for absence’ sake it is dearer than it ever was.

A smile came into their eyes. They burst out laughing. This is very good, they said.

Just as that other time that they had lunched, their talk was light, casual, easy. He told her about his camp, his brother officers, the men; what he liked, what he disliked about the life; what his plans were; when he expected to be sent out. She told him about the canteens she worked at; her various experiences; the things the men had said to her; the new types that she had met.

“It’s hard work,” she said. “A twelve-hour day quite often. And the nights.… One begins to feel pretty drear by four o’clock.”

It was not till the very end that he made any reference to their own plans, his and hers.

“I suppose that you’re not so chaperoned now that there’s a war on?”

There was a twinkle in his eyes. For answer she drew a latchkey from her bag and tossed it on to the table.

“No one knows where I am or what I’m doing, nowadays.”

“Are you on duty to-day, at all?”

“I was: from nine this evening; till I got your letter.”

There was no need for further explanation.

“Hampstead’s a long way off,” he said. “Shall I tell you what? We’ll save you the long journey out there by getting a dress at Paquin’s.”

“But.…”

“That’s a very nice coat and skirt. But I’m not going to let you wear it in my company after seven. Come along now.”

For a moment she hesitated; then fell in with his mood. Why not, after all? Since he was in a party spirit, since he had been away for six weeks from London and lights and dresses, since he was in the mood to enjoy wasting money; and since, all other things set aside, it would be so very much more convenient, would save so many explanations not to have to go back home to change.

So they went to Paquin’s, and a great many mannequins swayed and undulated in front of them; and a great many frocks were tried on, were set aside, were tried again, before almost in desperation Ruth pointed a finger at a shiver of silver tissue. “It’s got to be that,” she said.

“Now for some shoes,” said Victor.

His eyes had the brightness of a small child in a toy shop. For six weeks he had been exiled from luxury, elegance, display. He’s loving it, thought Ruth. I’d be a spoil sport to try and stop him. She did not check him when he insisted that she might like to sit in front of a fire after her bath, that she really needed a dressing-gown. And what was the point of a dressing-gown without a night-dress? And if she was going to wear a dressing-gown after her bath, a great many things were needed before she could have a bath. So he told the taxi, which was already high-piled with packages, and whose meter registered twenty-seven shillings, to drive to Elizabeth Arden. From which ten minutes later they withdrew, bearing a sponge two feet across, and a vast array of bath salts, face creams, drying powders. He was inclined to stop at Asprey’s and acquire a dressing-table set of hair brushes and mirrors. But there Ruth drew the line. “I’ve enough things to explain away already. Let’s take these back.”

As the taxi rattled towards the river, she remembered in what spirit she had driven there only seven weeks ago: excited, a little frightened, on her guard, ready to throw up defences. She was less excited now, more thrilled. There was no shyness left; no sense of being on her guard. On the contrary, the relief of being able to relax. Last time when she had come into the flat, she had taken a quick, apprehensive look about her; as though she were entering an arena, a scene set for conflict. She had now a sense of home-coming, just as Victor had. He had not been here for six weeks. He looked round with an air of relish. Though it was September, and still fairly warm, fires were burning in the sitting-room and bedroom. They were friendly and welcoming.

“I’m glad Chambers thought of that; he’s a stout fellow.”

He tossed the packages on to the chesterfield.

“I’ve not had a lie-down bath since Saturday. I’m going to have one now,” he said.

“And I want to try those bath salts.”

That first time she had been grateful to him for leaving her alone. She would have felt awkward pulling chemises over her head, getting caught up in them, not knowing what she must be looking like, with a slip of silk half-way up her back and her hands waving despairingly above her head. But now it seemed the most natural thing in the world to patter about the flat half-dressed, to dive her way out of camisoles in the middle of an anecdote; to perch herself on the edge of the bath, sprinkling him with crystals; to dry herself before the fire. It was all of it very different, and very much more jolly.

And afterwards, when he took her in his arms, that too was different.

Before, there had been a part of herself held back; a part of herself that was outside, that was watching what was going on, was thinking “Here’s Ruth Balliol having her first affair,” so that with a part of herself she was watching, waiting, wondering, making notes, almost scientifically. And in part, too, she had been afraid, with a nervousness that she had checked and concealed almost from herself, by the excitement of“ being a devil “; so that there had been an incompleteness that she had scarcely noticed; of which she was only fully aware now when there was no reserve, no outside part wondering what would happen next; instead a completeness of surrender, a giving and a taking that surprised her into a fullness of sensation of which before she had experienced casual intimations; not so much in point of actual rapture, as the feeling that she had never known herself before; that she was launched upon a voyage of self-discovery; a sea of limitless delight.

That evening in the restaurant she did not notice the heads that turned in her direction as she walked to their table at Victor’s side. At the theatre as they strolled round the hall between the acts, it was by shadows, friendly shadows, that they were hailed and greeted. She was conscious only of the warm feeling of happiness about her heart. In a little while, in three hours, two hours, one hour, I shall be in his arms again.

It was close on eleven next morning when she sat up with a start in bed. “I’ve got to get up,” she said.

She looked down at him as he lay beside her, his head cradled on the pillow in his crossed and lifted hands. His hair was ruffled and damp upon his forehead like a tousled faun’s. The sleeves of his pyjama coat had fallen back below his elbows. The skin of his forearm was very white, with a faint down of hairs on it; in contrast to his brown hands and face. His coat lay open, the line of his neck and shoulders had an Attic grace. “Yes, I love you, right enough. More than you know; more than you ever will know. It would worry you if I tried to tell you. You might have a feeling of responsibility to me then. It would make it all too serious for you. It might bring in tragedy. You want this to be light, carefree; a reckless spending of your last hours of freedom. I can make it that for you. That’s how I can prove my love to you; not by protestations, by writing you ten-page letters every day; but by making your leaves happy for you; by not being a nuisance; by being out of the way when you don’t want me; by being the thing you’d have me be.” And looking down at him as he lay there, she realized by that divinatory second-sight that takes you behind the screen of another’s thought—you are so absorbed in another person that you become that person, seeing through their eyes—how at that moment he was thinking of all the masculine things that he needed to do that day, his first day of leave; and was not quite sure that he’d be able to manage them because she was there. He was hardly aware that he was thinking that. But a shadow of preoccupation lay across his brow. Ruth knew how to settle that.

“Shall I tell you what I’m going to do now?” she said. “I’m going to go straight back home. I’m going to tell them that I’ve had a fearfully long night at the canteen, that I’ve got to be back in London again by seven, that I’m going straight up to my room and that I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Oh but… well… I thought we’d have lunch, and then do a matinée or something.”

His protest was not quite convincing. She detected, or fancied she detected, a tone of relief. Even if he isn’t relieved, it’s as well that he should have a holiday from me. He’ll be glad, really, to be alone; to go to his club, his hairdresser, see his friends. And even if he isn’t now, he will be another time. He mustn’t get the idea that he’s got to spend his whole time with me.

She ignored his protests.

“Though I’ve got a latchkey, I’ve still got to give some kind of an account of what I’m doing. Besides,” she added with a laugh, “I need some sleep.”

The autumn of ‘14 and the spring of ‘15 which have now in retrospect such different meanings for so many people, were for Ruth Balliol a protracted honeymoon. With his preliminary training finished, Victor was allowed a reasonable amount of leave. Practically all of it he spent in London, and Ruth was able to arrange her canteen duties to suit his leisure. She lived for his leaves. They never wrote to one another. They never planned ahead. They would take a casual leave-taking. “I’ll let you know when I’ll be coming up again,” he’d say. “Give me twenty-four hours’ warning and I’ll be free,” she’d answer. A week would pass, ten days, as much as a fortnight sometimes. Then there would be a telegram or a card: the day, the train, the station. And for a day, two days, three days, Ruth would be the inhabitant of another country.

Happiness has no history. There are no detailed stages to a happy honeymoon. Minutes were hours, hours days. They went to theatres; sometimes they drove out to Richmond for a morning’s golf; often when it was wet they would spend a whole day picnicking in the flat, playing a gramophone, dancing to a gramophone, kissing as they danced, turning on baths and then forgetting them; laughing, chattering, making love. Then in the evening when the hooded lamps flung their reflections on the glistening pavements they would dress and go out to dinner, languid with loving, utterly at peace.

For Ruth it was a deepening, widening enchantment. She had never known before, she had never suspected before, the luxury of giving, of yielding herself, her thoughts, her memories into another’s keeping; so that there seemed nothing left of herself to give; though every day, every night, she found there was. It was like diving into a deep, clear pool that grew deeper and deeper every second, whose floor she felt that she must surely reach at any moment, and yet never did. It was complete surrender. Yet in spite of its completeness, though she was utterly abandoned to another, she felt more alive, more herself, more complete than she had ever dreamed of being. She seemed to be knowing herself for the first time. Every hour with him the miracle widened, deepened, sweetened.

She was so happy that she never wondered what or how much it meant to Victor. She was so happy that the world round her had a shadowy look; the long hours at the canteen, the irritating supervisions of her superiors; the badinage with soldiers across a trestled table; her lessons at a garage, till she could not only drive a car but overhaul an engine, so that she should be ready, if occasion offered, to drive a lorry or an ambulance. All that was shadowy. Just as her life at home was shadowy. Her father’s discussion of to-day’s and the evening’s news, his recital of conversations; of what had been said to him by this man and what by that, the high-pitched precise voice, reducing to the same level of indifference the capture of ten thousand prisoners on the Western front and the duty on wine that the next Budget was likely to enforce. Hugh coming back on leave from Berkhamsted, first with a lance-corporal’s, then a corporal’s stripes upon his arm, then one afternoon in January jubilantly announcing the news that he was gazetted to the Loamshires; taking Francis with him on his first walk through London as an officer. Francis excitedly announcing afterwards, “He was saluted by eighty-one privates, ten corporals, a sergeant and”—after a pause—”two sergeant-majors.” Her mother’s vague acceptance of all this novelty, listening and rarely questioning, usually commenting at random as though she had been following another train of thought. The weekly letters from Lucy, with their amusingly out-of-date comments on events which already appeared to belong to another century, since they had happened three weeks earlier; the bulletins about Lucy’s health; her fears that she would have to stay in Malaya till the war was over, adding that she supposed it couldn’t be for very long. Of all that Ruth was too happy to take any real account.

She was too happy to look far ahead. She lived in the moment. On all sides of her she felt a living in the moment; in the hurry with which men and women walked the streets; the brightness of their eyes; the pitch and frequency of their laughs; the crowded restaurants; the queues outside the music-halls; the speed of the revues; the fast pulse of the music; as though there were everywhere a hurrying, a dread of missing something, a resolve to make the most of every instant. It was as though the world was saying, or all those “at least who lived in happiness were saying: “This cannot last, we know that. The dark hours lie ahead, we are prepared for them. But there is first this moment of happiness to be enjoyed. We will pay the price for it afterwards, to the last farthing. But we must have it first, to enjoy fully.” The knowledge that they were perched precariously on the branch that sustained this happiness made every moment richer, tenser, more complete. The thought “This may be for the last time” made them proudly, recklessly improvident.

She did not look ahead till the time when Victor’s battery would be sent to France. He had told her, vaguely, that he expected to be sent out in the early spring. The divisional general was very pleased with them, it seemed. They had trained on faster than had been expected. It was the ambition of every man, of every unit, to be declared fit for active service at the earliest possible moment. She had listened to such talk with a feeling of pride for him. Yes, he’ll be going soon. And I’ll have to fill the interval, in the only way that I can fill it, with hard work. I’ll know all about a car by then. Perhaps they’ll let me go out to France, as a lorry driver or with an ambulance, possibly for Y.M.C.A. work. I’ll do all that I can, then. I must have this time first.

Any time now he would be coming back for his last leave, he told her. There would be that; and after that, the need for courage, “fortitude and delicacy.” But there would be that week first.

It was in April that he expected that last leave. It was in the last week of March that two days of gathering alarm left her three days later with a terrifying certainty. But I can’t, she thought. It can’t be true. Things like that happen to other people, not to oneself. For me to have a child! But it isn’t possible. What shall I do? My father and mother… how can I ever tell them? But it can’t be. Not now. There were those first months when I was frightened. But then when nothing happened I thought it was all right. I didn’t worry. I suppose we were careless sometimes. Oh, but it can’t be true, it can’t!

Yet she knew it was.

For a day she lost her nerve. She rang up the canteen to tell them that she was ill. She mooned about the streets, not knowing what she was doing, buying things she did not want, walking into a restaurant, ordering a dish; finding she was not hungry; leaving it untasted; taking a ticket at a cinema; finding that the film bored her, coming out at once. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

For a day or two it went on like that. Then she pulled herself together. She did not yet know what she was going to do, but she knew what she was not going to do. She was not going to let Victor know.

It was a decision due in part to a feeling of personal pride, the resolve not to make a nuisance of herself, to give no one the right to think of her as tiresome; in part the wish that this honeymoon time of hers should not be spoilt for Victor, that he should be able to look on it with unalloyed happiness, so that he would regret her when other women came into his life, so that he would compare those other women with her, thinking “Yes, but that was better”; so that when in his old age he looked back on the love affairs that had filled his life it was of her that he would think first. “There’s been no one quite like her. There’s never been anything quite like that.” It was to that in part that her resolve was due: considerations that at any other time would have directed the conduct of a girl with a temperament such as hers.

But in this hour when life was more highly geared, more sensitive, more emotionalized, that same spirit of sacrifice which was sending men to Flanders in eager welcoming of a fate that might destroy them, turned for Ruth a duty that would have been accepted with a Stoic resignation, endured with “fortitude and delicacy,” into a destiny to be met with pride and happiness, since she could sacrifice herself in her woman’s way for those who in their men’s way were sacrificing themselves for her and for their country. A surrendering, as theirs was, of her security of future, a saying “If in any way I can make your lot less difficult, make use of me. If I have anything to give, however small, take it, it is yours”; a spendthrift giving, a reckless scattering of self.

When in the first week of April the postcard came “Euston 12.50 Thursday” she had one thought only; to make that last leave as cloudless as she could. No thought of her trouble, her future, must cloud that happiness. It must be unalloyed. He would have need of the memory of such happiness in the country that he was bound for. Perhaps—who knew?—the hours he had spent with her would serve as an amulet when the dark hour came.

To her surprise, however, she by no means found Victor in the holiday, carefree mood that she had expected. His face wore a preoccupied expression. His conversation gave the impression that he was following his own train of thought, that he was according only a minute part of his attention to their discussion of the plays that they would have to see during this one week. His manner was so unusual that she could scarcely avoid taking notice of it.

“What’s the matter, Victor? Are you worried about something?”

He shook his head, smiled quickly; blinked; as though he were waking himself out of a trance. Then once again and for the first time there came into his eyes the intimate, affectionate, familiar smile.

“I’ve got something rather difficult to ask you. I don’t quite know how to put it.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I was going to propose to you.”

“What!”

“You needn’t look so surprised.”

But it was no good his saying that. She was not surprised, she was dumbfounded. Marriage was the one thing that she had never contemplated in connection with herself and Victor. He would marry some day, she knew that. Someone out of his own world. It might be a romantic marriage. It would certainly be a marriage of mutually held tastes and interests, of obligations recognized on both sides; things that did not need explaining. There were women who were trained, were educated, to fulfil the responsibilities that would be required by the wife of such a person as Victor Tavenham. She wasn’t that kind of person. Nothing had ever astonished her so much as this proposal. In a way it embarrassed her. It was outside the rhythm of their relationship. She half resented it. It put her in a false position. It was the kind of situation that she herself had been at such particular pains to avoid.

“I don’t begin to understand,” she said.

“We’ve known each other a good while now.”

“That’s different.”

“In less than a fortnight now I’ll be going over.”

So that was it, then. He had a feeling of responsibility about her. He was going to the war. He might never come back. He had the means of making her life easier and pleasanter. Which he had, far more than he suspected. And it was dear of him to have felt that way about her. It showed that he had really cared. But she was not going to accept a proposal made in that spirit, inspired by a sense of responsibility; particularly from him, particularly at such a time. It was too final, like the making of a will, as though he were saying, “There’s no need for me to come back now.” Almost as though he were not wanting to come back, because the prospect of coming back to a life with her was out of tune with his life as he had planned it. And, no, she thought, it isn’t any good. I can’t marry him that way. I’ll tell him that I don’t want to settle down, that I want my freedom, that I want to look round a little further first. Something like that, something that’ll take away that worry of responsibility so that we can go back to what we were; so that we can be care-free and light-hearted: let this week-end be perfect. Then, when he’s gone, I’ll find some way of settling up my troubles so that my shoulder will bear the weight; so that he’ll never know; so that when he comes back I’ll make his leaves fun for him. That’s how it’s going to be, that’s how it’s got to be.

But he was smiling at her, in a new fond way and his voice had a new tenderness.

“I don’t want to talk dramatically,” he said, “but going to a war isn’t like going on a cricket tour. I may not come back. I’m an only son. My name’s stood for something. I don’t want it to die out.”

If he had surprised her when he proposed, now by the reason for that proposal he even more surprised her. But in a different way.

“You mean…?”

She paused. The idea was so new, so astonishingly new to her.

“But, Victor, darling, there are… I mean, if you are looking at it that way… There are so many other girls… who’d be… oh, I don’t know… so very much more suitable.”

He smiled away her protests.

“I want a son. I want my son to be a man. If I’m not going to make him a man myself I want him to be in the hands of someone I can trust. I want him to have a mother he can respect: someone who doesn’t know what playing crooked means.”

“Victor…”

But she could not trust herself to speak. The colour was flooding into her cheeks. She blinked her eyes. That he, that he of all people, should feel about her in that way. And if that was the way he felt… why, yes… oh, yes… oh, yes.

VI

If Ruth’s surprise had been considerable when Victor had proposed to her, her family’s when she announced her engagement to him was complete. There was a dead silence. Then a rapid, machine-gun spatter of questions.

Said her father: “In the vernacular of the lower orders you could knock me over with a feather!”

Helen asked if she could be a bridesmaid at the wedding.

Francis thought it would be fun to have a rich brother-in-law. “Won’t it impress the fellows! I bet he tips me jolly well.”

Hugh was frankly inquisitive. How long had she known him? When had she been seeing him?

“When I took you to that party of his last summer, you said you’d never met him.”

“I know. It began then.”

Said her father: “Was it what the novelists of my generation described as Love at First Sight?”

For once it was her mother who put the most practical question:

“When are you going to be married?”

“On Monday.”

“What!”

“Victor’s getting a special licence. I’m going down to-morrow to spend the week-end at Tavenham to see his father. Then you’ll all come down for it on the Monday.”

Said Francis: “That means I’ll get a day off from school.”

Hugh supposed that it would be a very quiet show.

“There’ll be bridesmaids, won’t there?” asked Helen anxiously.

“You shall carry my bouquet all right,” Ruth assured her.

“And what about Ruth’s room?” said Francis. “I wonder if I could make a workshop of it, now that she won’t want it any longer.…”

“There was in my childhood, Francis, and probably in yours, a proverb about not counting unhatched chickens,” his father warned him. “I expect Ruth will be very glad to have somewhere in London to keep her things till she has a house of her own in London.”

“Oh.… Still, bags I that room when the war’s over. By the way, how old is the old boy?”

“If you mean Lord Huntercoombe, I should say close on seventy.”

“Um… well, that’s not too bad. I shall like talking about my brother-in-law, Lord Huntercoombe.”

There was a burst of reproving laughter.

“All the same,” said Hugh, “it is rather strange to think of Ruth being the Viscountess Huntercoombe.”

It seemed rather strange to Ruth. She had not somehow visualized herself as Lady Huntercoombe. She had thought of herself as Victor’s wife.

On the next day she and Victor drove down to Tavenham. When he opened the door of the car, she moved over to the wheel. “I’ll show you how well I can drive,” she said.

He hesitated. Lady drivers were a favourite butt of the cartoonist. Then the quick, interested look came into his eyes.

“All right. I’ll have my hand near the brake in case anything too awful happens.”

But he had no need to touch the hand brake, and before they had been driving for ten minutes the interested look had left his face. “That’s all right. You know how to drive. I’ll take the wheel now. It’s a longish journey. I don’t want you to be tired out.”

With Victor at the wheel the speed of the car rapidly increased and more than once the hand brake was tugged back with a sudden jerk.

It was the first time that Ruth had been to Tavenham. The Tavenhams were of solid, county stock, who had been ennobled in the last years of the seventeenth century for services to William the Third of a possibly questionable nature. Their ennoblement had altered their character very little. They had not influenced the history they had lived through. No Huntercoombe had made a speech in the House of Lords. Victor’s father had kept saying that he really ought to do something about Lloyd George’s budget “just to show those fools in London how the country really thinks,” but when the time had come there had been a point-to-point that he could not miss. “One has certain responsibilities, damn it.” The Tavenhams had accepted history but had not made it. They had sent ensigns to the wars who had returned captains. Certain “bad hats” had been despatched to such colonies as the exigencies of the time selected: Barbados in the eighteenth, Australia in the nineteenth centuries. Their sons had been born to the feudal tradition of the aristocracy that prescribed a period of wild oats as a prelude to the sober responsibilities of a seat and title. They looked on London as a glorified Luna Park, where you dined and drank and drabbed where it did not much matter what you did since no one who mattered saw you. In the county you had a position to keep up. You could only maintain the respect of your tenants by observing the conventions: Church going, charities, a firm hand but a kind one; riding your village as you rode a horse. That was how the Tavenhams had lived. And the house that they had built in the last years of the seventeenth century was the symbol and expression of that life.

To her surprise Ruth found that Tavenham reminded her of Ilex. It was long, two-storied, with a low roof; with high rectangular windows, white-shuttered and white-framed; with a portico at the head of a short flight of steps that was scarcely more than an elaborate window frame. There were no creepers on the front. The brickwork had been recently repointed. It had so fresh, new-minted an appearance that apart from its setting, it might have seemed as recent, if not actually more recent, than Ilex. It needed its setting to explain it. Just as Ilex and the life of its inhabitants was explained by the noisy, wheel-polished sweep of the North End Road, by the row of numbered villas reaching to the hill’s foot, by the pavement, the street lamps, the few poor trees, so was Tavenham explained by the wide parkland stretching from the lodge gates to the dower house, two miles away; by the broad avenues of chestnuts planted by men who could look a hundred years ahead, by the lake, bordered with early flowers, that trailed into a stream midway between the garden and the drive; by the two swans drifting statelily between clumps of water-lilies; the placidly grazing sheep; the trimmed yew hedges that flanked the rose garden, the huddled group of outbuildings; stables, sheds, their thatched roofs showing over the wall of the kitchen garden; the air of spaciousness, of leisure, of life growing wide and deep.

“And this is going to be my home,” Ruth thought.

As the car swung out of the main drive into the carriage drive the front door opened and a tall, stooping, grey-haired figure came out on to the steps. “That’s the old boy,” said Victor.

Ruth had been curious rather than anxious about the reception that she would receive from her future father-in-law.

“There’s nothing for you to worry over,” Victor said.

“I’m not worrying. I’m wondering. I can’t be what he expected. I can’t be what he really wanted. Will he ask lots of questions?”

Victor shook his head.

“He’s not that kind. He takes life as it comes to him. He… “Victor paused, his forehead furrowed. “It’s hard to explain. I’ve known my father so long that I can usually guess what he’s going to do. I’ve no idea why he does it. I’ve never known what he thinks. I can assure you of this: that there’ll be nothing of the heavy father.”

There wasn’t. He stood at the head of the steps, a half smile on his lips. As Ruth came up the steps towards him he leant forward, stretched out his hands, rested them on her shoulders, bent down and kissed her cheek. His face was pale and lined. As it bent to hers, Ruth was reminded of a moth wing when the down is brushed from it; when you see the veins dark against a surface that you are surprised not to find transparent. His kiss was like the contact of a cool, smooth pebble. She was aware of a smell; an old man’s smell, like the bouquet of certain sherries; a faint mustiness. He took her hand in his.

“It is my privilege to lead you across the threshold.”

It was cool and dark inside the hall. Sombre portraits in browns and sepias hung against oak panelling that stopped less than a foot below the moulded ceiling. A tall clock was ticking; in the large marbled fireplace was a framed strip of purple tapestry.

“The period that built this house was afraid of sunlight,” Huntercoombe explained. “They faced their houses east and north. They said that the sun bred disease. Perhaps it did, since they kept their windows shut. The rest of the house is more cheerful.”

He took her round the house, not in the manner of a guide who makes an inventory of historical associations, nor in any sense of personal pride, a saying “This is something remarkable and I own it.” He took the house for granted; assumed that she would. He pointed out certain things less because they would be of interest to her, than because it was necessary for her to be aware of them. He knew the house not as a museum exhibit but as a place that had been built to live in.

It was in that way that such a house should be shown. Tavenham had none of the quaintnesses, the unexpected recesses, thicknesses of wall, turns of passage, uncovered beams, low doorways, unearthed windows, that are the proof of different periods, of renovations and additions, of a long and changing story. Tavenham was not like that. It was of a piece; built in one period by a man who knew his mind. The home for two centuries of men who had accepted that tradition, approved that taste. The broad staircase, the wide passages, the high walls, the solid window-frames, the elaborate ceilings and fireplaces gave an air of solidity; like the broad avenue of chestnuts did. The men who had built this house had known what they were about.

That afternoon Victor took her over the estate; showed her the oast-houses and the hop-fields, the wood that in February had been thick with snowdrops; and in another month would be a lake of bluebells. The trout stream with its yellow bordering of primroses and jonquils; the paddock where he had learnt to ride; where he had practised brassie shots.

“I used to play with the stream in front of me. If I played a bad shot I probably lost the ball. I had only enough money to buy six balls a week. I don’t believe that I’ve ever really enjoyed the game since I passed the ball-losing stages.”

The hour’s walk had not taken them much farther than the dower house.

“I had no idea you had as much land as this. I must be marrying a very rich man,” she said.

He laughed.

“You’d be surprised if you knew how much of it was let off to other people; I don’t believe even my father knows how many mortgages there are.”

He took her through the village. “Nominally, we own this.”

It was a small nestling village, an affair of one main street flanked on the one side by a row of hygienic, modern unprepossessing cottages. On the other by rambler-covered, picturesque, insanitary, thatch-roofed, uneven-windowed amalgams of beams and mortar. At its far end was a square-towered church with the moss-stained roof of the vicarage showing beyond the cemetery. There was only one shop. It served as a post office and recruiting station. A Union Jack was hung across its window. There was no other sign that history had disturbed the village.

“The war seems a long way off in a place like this,” he said.

“There’s a good deal else that seems a long way off,” she answered.

So much else that she could scarcely measure it. The whole of her life as she had lived it, very nearly. For all the West country stock that lay beyond her, she had been brought up as a city child. Her first memories were bound up with city life; its sights and sounds; pavements; traffic; machinery: with those aspects of beauty that are the particular property of the townsman; the morning in May when the plane trees in the squares show a sudden emerald; the glitter of lamps on shining streets; a winter sunset seen through bare boughs across the Park. The countryside was associated with holidays, excursions, week-end visits. It had for her the same kind of unreality that city life has for the countryman: something to be enjoyed and left; not to be taken seriously. Ruth had taken London to be the axle round which English life revolved. She had seen England in terms of city life; so standardized and yet so individualized; where everyone looks alike, dresses alike, does the same thing, echoes the same opinions; yet where in actual fact everybody stands alone, fighting a solitary battle for his independence. Ruth had pictured her future in such a world—though she had never so phrased the problem, nor indeed been consciously aware of it—as one of self-assertion, self-fulfilment, self-realization; a getting of one’s own way as far as was compatible with the obligations one inherited towards one’s family and friends, towards the world of which she had formed a part.

That too was how she had seen her country. But now, walking across the land that one day was to be hers, among these villagers whose welfare would be her concern, she had a feeling of another England that was neither less nor greater than, but was the complement of the England that she had known. A world where everybody looked different, where the postman, policeman, farmers, gentry, grooms who made up the sum of the village were distinguishable from one another at a glance; yet were in fact part of a corporate life. They might be separate and individual, but there was a sense of interwoven interests of which the Londoner was scarcely conscious. Things were different here. People were different. Even Victor was not quite the same. The tweed coat and grey flannel trousers for which he had exchanged his uniform were a symbol of another change. He seemed to have put off something. As he was more at ease physically, so was he more at ease mentally; relaxed; as though he were back where he belonged. Before, she had seen the country from the outside, through the eyes of a Londoner seeking relaxation and rest from London life. She saw it now from the inside through the eyes of a countrywoman, for whom the country had a corporate existence of its own.

And this was going to be her world, in part.

She had thought that having a large place in the country would be like having a week-end cottage on a grand scale; that you would escape from London but continue a London life in a setting of calm and quiet. But it wasn’t going to be like that. She would be living a different life. When Francis had made his joke about his brother-in-law Lord Huntercoombe, she had laughed to herself, since she had never pictured herself as the Viscountess Huntercoombe, only as Victor’s wife. She saw now that Francis had been closer to the truth than she had been. She was going to be something more than just Victor’s wife.

That night as she sat at her bedroom window, the lamp turned out so that no lighted window might be held by the constabulary as a signal to hostile aircraft, looking out over the shadowed parkland, an emotion that she had not felt before made her heart tender, so that she would have found it difficult to speak. It was an emotion that she would have hesitated to describe as patriotism, that her childhood would not have recognized as patriotism, but that went deeper than the excitement she had felt during those first war weeks, when she had stood with shouting crowds, when she had torn open the papers with eager fingers to read the last press bulletins, when martial music had filled her with a sense of pride, a resolve never to admit defeat, a resentment that she could take no more active part than the washing of dishes, the cutting of sandwiches, later perhaps the driving of a car. The emotion that she felt now was of a different order.

Looking out on to the broad avenue of chestnuts, planted over two centuries back by a man who had looked far enough ahead to say “My great-grandchildren will look on this,” she realized for the first time fully what it was that the men in France were fighting to preserve. The tradition and dignity of English life; a tradition and dignity for which Victor was offering his life, which she herself would be continuing in the child whose heart she would feel in a few months beating beneath her own. In London she had not realized that. It had been there, but she had not recognized it. Here, easier to discern, was the manifest symbol of that force behind her country’s life that gave her pride of race. She was not just one woman, marrying for personal happiness, islanding one moment of happiness against a rising storm. She was one of many carrying the past to meet the future. In her case a past whose nature she had only now for the first time recognized; the obligations and responsibilities, the pride of service to which by her especial privilege she was to be especially privileged. She and Victor were no longer just two people.

It was a knowledge that made her see him in a different, tenderer, more intimate way. She had before seen him in terms of glamour, of excitement, of her spirit’s need to give. She saw him still as that; but as something more: as the sharer of a destiny, of the life which this house symbolized. She was separated from him now by the distance of half a corridor. There was no reason why he should not have come to her room that evening. No one would have heard or known. She had waited, listening, relieved as the moments passed that he was not coming; happy that he had felt as she had done. She would have had no argument with which to meet the scoffer who would have said, “But what difference can the fact that you’re to be married in two days make?” But it did make a difference: here. She was glad that he had felt it too; that he was leaving her this one night to sit and brood.

For it won’t come again, she thought. This feeling that I have now, will get blunted, will get pushed aside, elbowed out. I’ll forget it for whole months on end. But it will be there, since it’s existed once. It’ll be there. And I’ll come back to it. It’ll be a secret strength. Because I’ve felt this way once, I’ll be able to meet obstacles that would have overthrown me. It’ll.…

She paused; seeing with the eyes of vision the tests that must lie ahead. However life went, it would be difficult. But it’ll be real. It’ll have direction. It’ll have significance. It’ll never be meaningless again.

Book IV

Hugh

I

Usually our personal lives are the framework on which we hang the facts of history. If someone asks us about an election, a strike, a monetary crisis, a Wall Street scandal, a South American revolution, we fix the event by a reference to some private memory. We say, “Yes, let me see, that would be just after so-and-so’s marriage; after that uncle’s death; before the place in Hereford was sold.” That is how usually it is. During the war that process was reversed. We date things that happened to us personally from the headlines that on that day, through that slow-passing week screamed their bulletins in heavy-leaded treble-columned type.

On every adult memory those four years inscribed a diary; so that we can place no matter how casually recalled a date with reference to some battle, some political crisis, some scandal or other about spies, munitions, ration cards. If anyone were to say to us, “Can you remember when you met him first?” we do not reply as we would for any other period. “Oh, somewhere about 1925, I think.” Everything that happened during those four years is cut so deeply upon our memories, that we can remember on our way back from that first lunch, opening our evening paper and reading splashed across an entire page: “The Fall of Warsaw.” We can place the date: Galicia, August, 1915.

For Edward Balliol, a spectator of those years, the events of those years in his home, in his office, among his friends, events more varied and crowded than his life had known since early manhood, were pigeon-holed by the experiences he shared with an entire nation. Neuve Chapelle. The munitions scandal. Loos. Serbia. Lowestoft. The Somme. Asquith’s fall. The Peace proposals. The Russian revolution. … It was on such a framework that he was to arrange in retrospect his memories of Ruth, Hugh, Francis; of Jane and Helen; of the changes in his staff. On no framework less surely built would he have been able to keep separate and distinct the pictures that followed one upon the other more like a kaleidoscope than a cinematograph.

When he had sat reading The Times’ review of 1907 at the end of his first children’s party he had imagined that 1914 to 1920 would see the slow flowering of plants coming now to bud. He had pictured that Ilex would be the background for a cycle of change and progress, ordered, assured, rhythmic; as far, anyhow, as his own family was concerned. On the contrary, it was the very symbol of disorder; with the hall invariably littered with luggage, either Hugh’s or Ruth’s; with a telephone installed and its bell ringing incessantly; the pad at its side scrawled over with messages he did not understand from people he did not know; with the hours of meals constantly altered to suit an unexpected arrival or departure; with the quality of the service altered, since young women found they could be employed more remuneratively as farm labourers, ‘bus drivers and munition workers, servants became hard to get, harder to keep, and almost impossible to endure. Balliol never knew when he would see an unfamiliar face glowering at him above his morning tea, any more than he knew whether he would find Hugh or Ruth in the drawing-room breathlessly waiting for a snatched meal or a bath, before they dashed back into London or to catch some train. Helen, busy in the nursery with dolls, her alphabet and multiplication tables, and Francis, recounting on his way to school the last rag perpetrated upon “Musty”, alone maintained the tradition that eight years back he had fancied himself to be maintaining.

At the office there was the same scurry of events. The departure of Walker to the front soon after the battle of Neuve Chapelle had issued its demand for reinforcements, was the first of more than one vacancy in Peel & Hardy’s staff. The necessity for conscription was being forced home by the headlines of the daily press. The poster campaign on every hoarding reminded the laggard to the recruiting booths that those who did not go of their own free wills now, would be compelled to later.

Half-way through the summer, Smollett asked for an interview with Balliol. Such interviews had been frequent during recent weeks. Prentice had been right in his prophecy that the war would see a boom in tobacco sales. Cigarette cases in regimental colours, tobacco pouches with regimental crests, amber cigarette holders, patent lighters with watches let into them had become stock presents for departing subalterns. People had more time to smoke, more money to spend on cigarettes. Girls were growing less and less shy of opening cigarette cases in public. The firm was showing better profits than it had for years. In part these profits were due to the innumerable guest nights at innumerable officers’ messes. But whisky was more popular than claret. It was considered unpatriotic to drink hock. Balliol had always specialized in German wines and held large stocks in bond. The profit on whisky was standardized and small. Moreover, with Hugh a soldier and with many of his agents, such as Roy Rickman—married now to comfort, a captain in the Loamshires, and unlikely to return to trade—drinking more port than they were selling, he was unable to profit by the boom as fully as he had hoped. In proportion the tobacco side, though in actual turnover infinitely smaller, had shown a far greater increase of profit.

Week by week Smollett had presented his results in a self-consciously aggressive manner, as though he were saying, “That’s pretty good; I know it; you ought to know it. But I don’t suppose you will. You don’t know what I’m doing. Well, that’s your look-out. I’m not worried.”

It seemed to Balliol that Smollett was on guard against fifteen things at once. He was on guard against his employer’s presumed low opinion of him; against a betrayal of his own pleasure in his success. He wanted to be praised, yet did not expect to be praised. He was on his guard against any suggestion that he felt resentful. Yet at the same time he wanted to make a “God-damn-you-anyhow” impression. He had so many inferiority complexes that Balliol never knew which one would be in the ascendant. He drew more pleasure from Smollett than from any member of his staff. Smollett was never quite the same twice running. Balliol always received with a pleasurable anticipation a request from Smollett for an interview.

He was not on this occasion to be disappointed. There was a new excitement on Smollett’s face; also a new nervousness; as though something definite were at stake.

“Well, Smollett?”

Smollett cleared his throat; lifted his finger to the knot of his tie, moving it backwards and forwards as though he were trying all at once to straighten, loosen, and tighten it.

“I’m twenty-nine, sir. I’m not married. I’m in good health. It’s my duty to join the army.”

His attempt to keep his voice controlled and dignified was not particularly successful. It gave his announcement the effect of a simultaneous apology and boast. “He’s probably thinking that if he were to go it should have been much earlier.” At any ordinary time Balliol would have enjoyed watching the convolutions of the man’s embarrassment, but at a time like this he felt that he must make things easier for him.

“That’s very fine of you. We shall miss you. You don’t need telling that, I hope. Your place will be waiting for you when you return. What regiment do you think of joining?”

“That’s what I’ve come to ask you about, sir. I wanted to join the Inns of Court.”

“What!”

Balliol’s surprise was too great to be concealed. He stared at Smollett incredulously. His astonishment sent up Smollett’s defences with the abruptness of a medieval portcullis lowered to meet attack. His face changed colour as it did on the provocation of any large excitement. First of all it went a dead white that stranded the pimples on his forehead in scarlet and high relief; then, as though the pimples possessed not so much the protective capacities of the chameleon as the ability to make the surrounding landscape conform to their own appearance, a flush appeared to ooze out sideways from them, spreading down to the cheeks and chin; leaving them no more than damp projections from a uniform ruddiness of surface.

“I wanted to know if you would ask Lord Huntercoombe to be so good as to give me a testimonial.”

He had meant to ask Balliol himself for such a testimonial. His request to be sponsored by more august authority was an indirect but appreciable counter attack. It was as though he were saying, “Yes, I know I’m not the officer type. If I went on my own merits they would not look on me. So much so that your recommendation wouldn’t help me. I’d need something more than that. Someone like Lord Huntercoombe.” Balliol did not miss his point.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

Balliol’s eyes followed him as he walked towards the door. He had broad shoulders. His limbs moved easily. His back curved cleanly to his waist. He had an odd stoop; or rather lowering of his head between his shoulders. A drill sergeant would soon set that right. He might look well in uniform. A cap made a great difference. Hugh had told him that when colonels interviewed candidates for commissions, they had invariably made them take off their hats so that they could see what they were really like. Smollett might look no worse in the streets than a great many other “temporary gentlemen.” It was probably only because he was used to thinking of him as a subordinate that the idea of him as an officer seemed strange.

When he mentioned the matter to Huntercoombe the next morning, Prentice burst out laughing.

“What, that fellow! But, my dear Balliol, they’d never take a man like that.”

“They would, on our chairman’s recommendation.”

“Nonsense! They’d take one look at the fellow and decide that he was mad.”

Huntercoombe shook his head.

“Standards are changing.”

“They can hardly have changed that amount.”

Said Balliol: “It’ll be amusing to find out.”

Prentice fixed him with an amused, mocking look.

“I sometimes suspect, my dear colleague, that you have retained the natural inquisitiveness of a child.”

“What am I to take that to mean?”

“Nothing: except that I feel slightly on my guard with a person whose actions are largely dictated by curiosity. I cannot help feeling that one day a situation will arise when you will be faced by two alternatives. You know what’ll happen if you go one way. You don’t know what’ll happen if you go the other. You’ll follow the unknown route irrespective of whether it is the wise one.”

The criticism was put in so impersonal a way that it was scarcely criticism; certainly not hostile criticism. So that Balliol was able without weakness to admit that it was in part justified. Yes, he did like to see human equations worked out like sums in algebra; trying to guess at what it would all look like when the brackets had been taken away.

“I, on the other hand,” said Huntercoombe, “have considered man’s greatest blessing an ignorance of the future.”

“But to gratify my instinct I trust that you will write that letter?”

“Oh, very well, then.”

Three days later Smollett returned from Lincoln’s Inn with the news that Huntercoombe’s testimonial had proved successful. He brought the news in the same spirit that he had brought his weekly sales sheet; a mingling of pride, defiance, and self-distrust.

When Hugh heard the news, he lifted his arms in a histrionic gesture of despair.

“God! And don’t I know the type! We had a few in the Inns of Court when I was there. They’ve got a good deal more now, by all accounts. They always push themselves forward. They ask questions at lectures. They get given a stripe, which most chaps can’t be bothered with. They’ve never been under authority. They’re touchy as hell. They’ve never exercised authority. So they make fusses over the wrong things and let things pass that they should be firm about. They get an enormous kick out of giving orders to people who six months earlier would have been ordering them about; yet they are aware of those people all the time. They’re trying to get their own back but don’t know how to set about it. There’s nothing much more trying in a thing like the Inns of Court than the N.C.O. who hasn’t been to a public school.”

“What sort of an officer does he make?”

“Oddly enough, quite a decent one. He’s got his confidence: found his feet; besides, he’s ordering about men that he feels he has a right to order. I should say that Smollett in a mess would be the kind of chap whom anyone would be glad to have around, but I bet you anything he’ll have a stripe before he’s been at Berkhamsted ten weeks, and I’ll bet you that his section’s hell.”

Smollett’s departure made a gap in the firm that it would be, both Balliol and Prentice realized, extremely difficult to fill. There was no one else in the firm who had any real inside knowledge of the tobacco trade.

“We’ll have to ask Smollett’s advice,” said Balliol.

Smollett was prepared for such an inquiry. He received it as though whatever answer he gave would be suspected; that if he suggested someone who could take his place, he would be accused of nepotism; that if he had no suggestion to make, he would be giving a false impression of his importance and value to the firm; as good as saying that he was indispensible. Yet at the same time he wanted it to be quite clear that his advice was impartially given and the soundest available.

“I had been considering that,” he said; and his tone had the inflection of one who addresses an audience. “It is very necessary that we should both maintain the position we have won and endeavour to increase it. I know a man who is dissatisfied with his present employment. He works for Margin’s. He feels he has insufficien scope there. He is a very close friend of mine. He would, I know, be very glad to make a change in his position.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s my age. But there is no likelihood of his being accepted for military service. He has offered himself, but he has a very weak heart, varicose veins, and he is forced to wear very-powerfully-lensed spectacles.”

“From your account I should infer that before the army has need of him, the world that that army protected would be too weak-stomached for cigars.”

“One might put it that way.”

“Then we’d better see him. He realizes, of course, that when you return he will have to give up his post?”

Smollett smiled.

“I think he realizes that no one knows what the world will be like or who will be in it when the war ends.”

“He sounds practical, anyhow.”

When Smollett had left the room, Balliol turned to Prentice with a smile.

“I must say that I look forward to meeting the kind of person with whom Smollett would have what I believe is called in such circles ‘a jolly up’!”

The boon companion proved to be the kind of person with whom anyone might be expected to have a “jolly-up.” It was a little difficult indeed to picture him in any other light. He was little and perky; he was frankly vulgar; he had a short, wispy moustache that was stained ochre-dark with cigarette smoke. He wore a bright spotted tie and a check suit that clashed with it. His hands fluttered incessantly as he talked; he kept half moving them towards you, then withdrawing them, as though he had wanted to take you by the lapel and then thought better of it. You could picture him leaning against a bar button-holing, literally, the object of a ten minutes’ friendship: “And this now, is another one. …” It was much easier to picture him in a saloon bar than an office.

“I suppose we’ve got to take Smollett’s word for it,” said Balliol.

“I don’t see that we have an alternative.”

“It’s only for what is termed ‘the duration,’ after all.”

To their surprise, however, they were forced to realize before long that the substitute was an exceedingly efficient one.

Other vacancies in the staff were filled less easily. Walker was not the only packer to enlist. Nor was it only packers who enrolled under the Derby scheme and appeared in the counting-house with red-crowned armlets on a khaki background. It was not long before the unmarried were taken at their word and Punch was afforded the opportunity of pointing out the mobilization poster to a Derbyite with the words “I congratulate you. Your country needs you before you expected.” The gaps in the counting-house were not filled easily. There was not the necessary supply of men qualified in mathematics who were prepared to spend forty-eight hours a week on a stool in return for less than twice as many shillings. They could earn far more in the munition factories. For a little the experiment of working later and harder with raised wages was attempted. But the ledgers got behindhand. The columns of turnover were increasing monthly. Fewer men could not be expected to do more work, and more men were unobtainable.

“There is no alternative,” Balliol announced at a board meeting. “We shall have to employ a girl clerk in the counting-house.”

There was a silence in the board-room when the announcement was proclaimed: almost a funereal silence, as though an epoch were being buried. A girl clerk; in Peel & Hardy’s; in the counting house; powdering her nose, scattering powder on the ledgers, distracting the men’s attention, giggling, flirting. Girl clerks in the counting-house of Peel & Hardy’s!

Balliol listened to the objections of his colleagues. He had expected them. He was prepared for them. Young girls were different nowadays, he informed them. They were employed in Government departments. His sister had organized women mechanics, women farm labourers, women lorry drivers. Apparently their work gave satisfaction. The Government continued to make use of them. “And anyhow, we have no alternative.”

Lord Huntercoombe rose from the table’s head, lifted his hand as it may be assumed Sulla did when he resigned his consulship, in a proud, brave recognition of the ultimately inevitable.

“In that case, let it be,” he said. “But I insist that she be a woman, not a girl. I insist that she shall be plain. I insist that she shall be more than plain. I insist that she shall be positively dowdy.”

II

The changes in his office were kept pace with by the changes in his home. For the first month of her marriage, after Victor had gone to France, Ruth had remained at Ilex, continuing her routine of canteen work. But before long she found the strain too great. She had resolved to have her baby in the country at Tavenham. The sooner she went down and got into the atmosphere of her new home, the better. There would be plenty of work for her to do down there: things to be organized, charities, relief committees. She wanted to be away from the smoke and noise of London, to breathe fresh air. Those at least were the reasons that she gave her friends. The real reason that she would have been shy of confessing even to Victor, was the belief that if she herself were to relax during those months into the atmosphere of Tavenham, the child she carried would be born feeling himself a part of the fields and hills he would inherit; that there would be a real kinship between him and the trees that drew their strength from that soil; the sheep and cattle that drew their sustenance from those meadows; since the same process had produced them both. So that all his life, no matter how far he might wander, what share he might take in the larger interests of the world, it would be with a true feeling of homecoming that he would see the broad avenue of chestnuts stretching behind the red-fronted, white-windowed house: a recognition that it was there that he belonged.

Ruth took the majority of her things with her when she went. All that was really personal: her pictures and her books, the ridiculous china objects: cats and flowers, that were arranged along the mantelpiece. The engraved quotation that is cut on the statue to Stevenson in San Francisco. With predatory eyes Francis watched the packing.

“I can have the room now as a workshop, surely?”

There seemed no very good reason why he should not. It was unlikely that Ruth would need the room again. So the bed and the wardrobe and the washstand were moved over into a corner, a long trestle table was set under the window, the carpet was taken up, the bookcase was sent down to Tavenham. Its place was taken by a row of plain deal shelves, on which were set out an armoury of screws, saws, knives, hammers, chisels, pliers. Francis was only allowed to use such noisy instruments as hammers between ten and twelve in the morning and three and four in the afternoon, when Helen would be out of doors, and there was no one in the house likely to be disturbed. But even so, within a week so littered was the floor with chips and shavings that the housemaid had refused to be held responsible for its cleanliness.

“Once a month I’ll give it a good scour, but to go in there morning after morning and tidy up what Master Francis’ll ‘ave put back within the hour … no, m’m, that really is too much.”

Ruth would not have recognized the room as hers had she returned to it.

Not that Francis was to enjoy its disorder for very long. The time had come for him to leave the blue-capped school below the hill where for the last four years he had forgotten a greater part of the mathematics and practically all the history that he had learnt at his kindergarten in return for a knowledge of the classics so fragmentary that his common entrance paper barely entitled him to a place in the Shell at Fernhurst; than which there were only two forms lower. Francis was frankly puzzled by this performance.

“I thought I had done so well.”

“I’m afraid that the standard you set yourself as a result of your experiences as a blue cap is lower than the standard which the common entrance examiners expect,” his father explained to him. “As, however, you have more potential talent than the majority of those who passed in three forms above you, you should during your first few prize-givings form a pleasant nucleus for the collection of such books as are found in every gentleman’s library, unread.”

On a warm September morning Balliol and Jane took Francis down to Fernhurst. Balliol had not been there for eight years; not since the day when he had broken his journey there on his way back from his father’s funeral; when Hugh had been concerned about Stella’s suffrage demonstrations and had asked with boyhood’s self-centred belief in its own importance: “But surely if she realized she was making things difficult for me, she might go steady.” When the Chief had described Hugh, in the way that most fathers probably would prefer to have their sons described, as one of those who would not make history but would carry on the traditions and continuity of history; when he had returned to find Jane in that strange mood that had decided him to build a house in Hampstead. A great deal had happened since that day. But Fernhurst had not altered. There were recruiting posters on the windows of the post office; on the hoardings by the masonic temple; a detachment of the Wessex yeomanry was camped in the castle grounds and khaki figures with reversed puttees and white lanyards were swaggering down Cheap Street. But the square golden tower of the abbey whose bells had tolled for soldiers fallen through the wars of seven centuries, had rung their tributes to the outcome of a hundred battles, absorbed and subdued such externalities to itself, directing and controlling its cloistered life.

As he walked across the courts, past the lindens, to the drive, leading to the headmaster’s house, it seemed to Balliol that not a day had passed since he had walked there for the first time with Hugh. Nor did the headmaster seem any different as he came into his drawing-room, out of the book-lined study, to welcome a new pupil. He was a little greyer, the slope of his shoulders was possibly more marked. His slow speech pointed the same contrast between the scholastic tranquillity of the study he had just left and the busy mechanized civilization for which the boys under his care were trained. Faces might change, but the atmosphere was constant; the tradition of scholarship informing and surviving history.

On the first day of term a headmaster has not much time to bestow upon a parent. The Balliols limited their stay to fifteen minutes; passed for the most part in the conventionalities of conversation; war talk for the most part: a weighing of rumours and probabilities, where the Press was censored, where all news was second-hand, where no one knew what he could believe, where faith in the country’s leaders had begun to ebb, where suspicion and distrust had taken the place of gladly and proudly given service. Such conversation as was being made right through the country in clubs, offices, railway trains: wherever men met and talked.

“And Hugh,” the headmaster asked, “what news have you of him?”

There was very little news. He was a lieutenant now, expecting a captaincy before long, impatient at being kept in England; fretting, as were ten thousand other officers who had enlisted, to fight in Flanders, not to train drafts in Nottingham, listen to lectures on musketry at Hythe, prepare on the East Coast defences that one high-powered shell from a man-of-war would scatter to powdered sand.

“Not gone to France, then?” said the chief. “You’re lucky. My boy’s been there four months. One gets used to it. One gets used to everything. But I never see a telegraph boy turn out of Cheap Street towards the school without wondering whether he’s got that telegram for me.”

The Balliols’ train for London left shortly after five. At about the time that the train from London by which the greater number of the boys travelled back to school arrived. From the opposite platform they watched the swarm of boys in the bright ties and bowler hats that would in an hour or so be exchanged for black poplin and a wide-brimmed straw, hurry over the bridge in a laughing, chattering stream. Jane’s eyes followed them with a puzzled, sad misgiving. “They all look so big,” she said.

It was late when they returned. A cold supper had been laid out for them. It was the parlourmaid’s night out. The cook had a headache and had gone to bed. The nurse who, much against her will, with a bad grace and in return for a substantial increase, had been cajoled into taking her share of housework (“Now, mind you, it’s only for the duration!”) was reading in the nursery. The house seemed very empty. They ate their meal, practically in silence. As they rose from the chairs, he put his arm round her shoulder. She did not exactly move away, but she seemed to retreat, drawing herself closer to avoid his touch. He dropped his hand.

As he climbed the stairs, to change into the velvet smoking-jacket that he put on every evening after dinner, he checked his step, as though the wall of the long corridor in front of him had become transparent; and he could see into that long succession of empty rooms. Lucy’s, Hugh’s, Ruth’s, Francis’s. One by one they had gone, the four people for whom he had built this house; whose tastes and privileges he had in mind, thinking “This’ll be Hugh’s room. Then Lucy and Ruth will want a room of their own where they can write and talk and see their friends. Then Francis. He’ll need a whole nursery.” He had pictured Ilex as his children’s home. And now.…

There was no need for him to open the doors to recreate the blank interiors. Lucy’s, still kept on more or less as she had left it. It served as a spare room now. The Liberty curtains she had insisted on, the William Morris wall-paper with its extravagant pattern that had then seemed melancholy and now seemed oddly out of date, since the post-impressionists had imposed a new idiom on decoration. He wondered whether she would think it old-fashioned now, or whether her taste had remained static in a country that had never seen Cézanne. It would be many months anyhow before she saw it. Her letters were always in the same key “I wish I could come home. But how can I run the risk of bringing my children back, with all that danger of mines and submarines? And I can’t leave them. Besides, there’s Stephen. He’s got so much to do that the Government wouldn’t think of letting him enlist; of course he’s dying to. Though, as he says, being what is practically a government official in a place like Ipoh is much more important than being just a platoon officer in France. Not, of course, that he’d remain a platoon officer for long. But he can’t possibly get away. And he does need me, so you see, dear father.…”

No, it would be many moons before she saw again that elaborately traced foliage and it would be many moons and much would have needed to have happened before Hugh regarded as more than a kind of lumber loft for valises and suitcases, the carefully planned bed-sitting-room, with its writing-desk, heavy leathered arm-chairs, its photographs of schools and college groups, with tasselled caps hung from the corners, inscribed oar above the mantelpiece, low divan bed that by day concealed its nature beneath a pile of cushions, the fire-guard with cushioned fender. “What I believe women designate as a den,” as Balliol put it.

Ilex was a place that Hugh made use of. It was not in any sense of the word an axle round which his life revolved. And it was as that that he had pictured Ilex; for Hugh and for his other children. A place where they would lead their personal lives, seeing their friends, following their interests, until the time should come for them to marry and make homes of their own. Already, in eight years, they had come each in their separate way to feel no longer any real need of Ilex. The only one whose life was completely bounded by its walls was Helen, whose existence had been unforeseen when those walls were built. The only light along the corridor came from the nursery. The nurse had converted it, now that Francis had relatively adult tastes, into a personal sitting-room. The corner where Francis had spread out his trains at that first party was so set apart from the rest of the room with an arm-chair, a writing-table, a sewing machine, as almost to be a room of its own, with the remainder left for Helen and her toys.

“If it weren’t for Helen, Jane and I might just as well be living in a small service flat. In many ways it would be more convenient.”

He came down into the drawing-room to find Jane standing before the fire-place, one foot raised upon the fender, an arm lying along the mantelpiece, her head drooped forward. Something in her pose reminded him of the way she had stood before the fire-place at that long-ago dinner party in Easton Square, when she had met Roy Rickman for the first time; when she had turned round and said in her quiet, but definite voice:

“Edward, I don’t want to go on living here any longer.”

He had the curious feeling that he was relieving something that had already happened, as she turned round now with the same intent, resolved expression on her face, and in her voice was the same quiet, determined tone.

“Edward, I can’t stand it now that Francis has gone. I just can’t sit here doing nothing. I’m going to see Stella. She’s sure to be able to find something for me to do.”

Balliol made no attempt at opposition. It seemed a very sensible thing for her to do. It was odd, though, the quiet, unobtrusive way in which Jane would come to decisions, clearly important to herself; the result obviously of a mental crisis, of which she had shown on symptoms. Where other women would be nervous, fretful, irritable for days as a prelude to some suddenly blurted out, “Of course I know you’ll not care to listen to what I’ve got to say, but at the same time …” Jane calmly thought out her problem, then stated her conclusion. And you realized that there was a definite finality about her conclusions: that what appeared a caprice, the outcome of a mood, was on the contrary a logically reached decision.

It was curious, too, the way in which one after another his womenfolk had turned for guidance to his sister. First Lucy, then Ruth, now Jane. He remembered how anxious his father had been that Stella should marry; how Jane and he had tried to find beaux for her, had all three of them visualized success and happiness in terms of marriage. They had not realized that there were women to whom marriage would be a hindrance. Stella would never have done what she had done if she had had the responsibilities of a house and children.

And she had done a great deal: not merely as a Suffragette; not merely as a war worker; but in the lead that she had given to other women; the chance to lead positive, useful lives that she had given to women who would otherwise have lived idly, foolishly: the women who would never marry, the childless wives; the women whose children no longer needed them, who in various ways had gone out into the world; the girls who were uncertain of their own inclinations, who wanted to look round before they made any irrevocable decision. It was thanks to women like his sister that the woman of the future would be more than the object of ornament, and intrigue, that she had been since history started. Stella would have been unable to do so much had she accepted the easy and obvious course of marriage. The old mystics were right when they had insisted that the world’s work is best done by celibates.

III

Hugh’s habit of announcing his return was a telegram, arriving in the late afternoon, “Expect me some time to-night,” which might mean that he was catching a late train, or might mean that after a heavy evening he liked waking to the clean cool air of Hampstead. In either case the Balliols’ action was the same. They made up his bed, left the front door unbolted, placed a key under the boot-scraper and in the morning asked the maid to see what manner of message was pinned outside his door. They were surprised, therefore, when towards the end of November an annunciatory telegram was followed at two o’clock in the morning by a tapping on their bedroom door and a whispered, “Father, can I speak to you a minute?” Hugh was wearing a cap, and British warm; a haversack was slung across his shoulders. There was a wild, excited look in his eyes. At first Balliol thought he had been drinking.

It wasn’t that.

“I’m going to France. First thing to-morrow morning.”

“My dear boy.…”

“Seven o’clock from Victoria. We ought to be there at twenty to. That means leaving here before six.… We’ll never get a taxi. I’ve left my valise at Victoria. That’s why I’m so late. Look here, I’ll be back in a second. I’ve got to telephone.”

As he clattered noisily downstairs, Jane came out on to the landing, a velvet dressing-gown pulled round her shoulders. It was scarcely a minute since she had been woken. Yet her hair was smooth and her eyes clear. It was extraordinary, Balliol reflected, that women should demand that twenty minutes before a mirror over those final touches that made no appreciable difference, yet be able, literally, at a moment’s notice to present themselves with the poise and finish of a mannequin. Even her voice was level.

“What’s the matter, Edward? Is there anything wrong? Didn’t I hear Hugh’s voice?”

“He’s going to France: to-morrow, or this morning rather. He’s downstairs telephoning.”

“Telephoning? Whatever about?”

“How should I know? There! Listen!”

The bell from the hall was faintly tinkling, the receiver clasp was being rattled. But there was no sound of talking. They waited, shivering slightly in the cold passage, not speaking; waiting. Balliol took a sidelong glance at Jane. What was she thinking? What was she feeling? A son going to the war.… Her face wore its habitual, vague, impassive look. Once again, as at other crises of their lives, he marvelled at the way in which a man and a woman can live for years in happy, contented harmony and yet remain strangers to each other.

There was a final tinkle of the bell. Then the sound of a chair pushed roughly back along a polished surface, the scrape of nailed shoes on oak, and Hugh was bounding up the stairs.

“No luck. I’ll have to try again, later. Now look here, you two; you run along and get some sleep. I’m expecting you both to come and see me off. I’ll call you when it’s time to start. I’ve got a hundred and one things to do: packing, letter-writing and all that; barely three hours to do it. So you run along and leave me to it. I’ll see that you’re not late.”

He stood between them, an arm round each of their shoulders. He gave them a friendly, an affectionate squeeze. He was clearly resolved not to make a sentimental occasion of it.

“Now run along.”

He half-led, half-pushed them towards the door.

It was after two, and in little more than three hours they would have to start getting up. It was barely an hour since Balliol had folded away his Times and put the key beneath the door. But Balliol had reached the age when a man sleeps fitfully; when sleep, once disturbed, is not easily recaptured. Through the long hours of the night he lay sleepless, hearing the occasional sounds of Hugh’s footsteps, of a moved chair, a suitcase, hearing every ten minutes through that long three hours the vain tinkle of the telephone. When Hugh tapped on his door to tell him that it was a quarter-past five, he had already begun to shave.

The next two hours passed very quickly; so quickly that he did not feel they were quite real He had read so many descriptions of the last morning, so many fathers had described their feelings as a train carried their sons away from them, that he could not believe it was really happening to him.

It was so much of a rush; the dressing, the breakfast, the last things to be remembered, the good-bye to Helen. The small child being roused out of her slumber, not realizing what was to happen to the large, khaki-clad brother who lifted her in his arms to tell her that he was going to France and that he would be soon back, bringing her a helmet.

“A spiked helmet?” she murmured drowsily.

“Yes, a beautiful spiked helmet.”

He had lowered her back into her bed. She was fast asleep long before the front door had shut behind her brother.

It was still dark when they came out into the street. The lamps were throwing their cones of light on to a deserted roadway. The searchlights were sweeping the sky; their beams, now crossing, now throwing up the edges of a cloud in sharp relief. As they walked down the hill Hugh maintained an eager, excited flow of talk. Of what was he thinking, Balliol wondered. Was he aware of the last-time feeling which was fretting his mother and himself? He had taken no last look back at the house as he shut the garden gate behind him. As they walked to the station he never once cast round him that taking-of-it-all-in-for-the-last-time look with which usually one fixed a familiar landscape that one may not see again. As the tube train ran into the tunnel of Golders Hill there was just a second when you could, by craning your neck, catch a last glimpse of Ilex. On going back to school Hugh had always craned his neck. He did not now. Was it out of the Englishman’s reluctance to display emotions: a resolve to appear cold rather than sentimental? Was it because he was only too well aware that now it might be really a last look, that he had not the heart to see the roof of the tunnel cut across the vistaed outline of his home? Or was it far more simply that he was not thinking about that at all, that he was what he appeared to be, a young officer thoroughly excited to be going to the war at last? Balliol had never seen quite such an excited light in his face before; not since boyhood had he heard him talk with such eagerness and enthusiasm.

Right up till they reached Victoria, even against the noise and rattle of the tube, he continued his excited flow of comment and conjecture. Then suddenly his manner changed, he grew nervous, worried, fretful. They had twenty minutes to spare before the train went, but he became impatient with the porter who was getting his luggage out of the cloak-room with very tolerable speed. “Hurry, hurry! I haven’t all day to wait. For God’s sake get a move on.” He walked to the platform with a quick stride that looked likely at any moment to break into a trot He looked about him quickly, anxiously; the stride broke into a trot. “Want to make sure of my Pullman seat,” he called over his shoulder in explanation.

Balliol and Jane followed beside the luggage. It was the first time that Balliol had been to see the departure of a leave train, but the scene had no novelty for him, so often had it been described to him: in articles, in speeches, in offices and clubrooms. It was exactly as he had expected: the noise; the lights; the bustle; the groups of soldiers singing to keep their spirits up; the mothers dabbing at their eyes with rolled-up handkerchiefs; the lovers silent, hand in hand; girls with Tommies’ caps stuck on the backs of their heads, dancing and tossing up their skirts; a couple of soldiers who a few hours earlier had been uproariously and gloriously drunk, supporting each other like twin towers of Pisa on a staggering excursion down the platform: the military police, very brisk and smart, casting quick warning looks from side to side. It was all just as he had known it would be.

In the doorway of one of the Pullman carriages Hugh was waiting with the same nervous, impatient expression on his face. He was glancing first in one direction, then in another.

“There ought to be some people I know on this train. Can’t see them, though. One or two from the same draft. I expect they’ll cut it pretty close. Still, there should be someone. Leave train’s rather like a club. Certain to meet somebody you know. Hi, boy! Yes, I’d better have magazines. Tatler. That’ll be Fish. And the Bystander. That’ll be the new Bairnsfather. Oh, and you’d better throw in a couple of story magazines. Nash’s and the Strand. I suppose it’ll be all right about my breakfast. Not that I’m hungry. I’ve had one. Still, it passes the time and when the other men are eating.…”

The flow of talk rattled on continuously, but there was no longer the same happy look at the back of his excitement. He was restless, worried, looking about him, hardly conscious of his parents. “Wish I could have seen Ruth before I’d gone. I suppose I can expect to be an uncle any day now. Fancy that. Uncle of a peer. I wonder if they’ll make me a godfather. Get a nice mug for him anyhow, in my name, for the christening. And you might tell Victor…” But Balliol never knew what he was to tell Victor. The worried look had gone out of Hugh’s face, replaced suddenly by an eager, bright-eyed excitement.

“Look, there she is!”

He pointed towards a girl who was hurrying towards them down the platform. She was bare-headed, close-gathered in a fur; very high-heeled shoes gave her a quick, shuffled, top-heavy movement. It was the first time that Balliol had ever seen her. She was young, in the early twenties. With her dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, her teeth very white and even against full, parted lips, with the suggestion of plump shoulders, she seemed to him a honey-pot kind of girl. She ran forward to Hugh, one hand outstretched towards him, the other held close beneath her chin, keeping her fur in place. Hugh with both his hands took hers in his.

“Oh, my dear, and I thought you’d never come!”

There was a richness in his voice, on his face a transfigured look of which Balliol had not believed him capable. It was as though no one else existed on that crowded platform; as though an enchanted instant were islanded beyond space and time.

“I got your telegram.” Her voice had an eager breathlessness.

“I didn’t think you’d get it. I’d been ringing you up all the morning.”

“Have you? I’ve only just got back. I’ve been dancing. I’ve only just got your wire. Look!”

For an instant she pulled back her fur. She was in evening-dress. They burst out laughing. Her hand was still held in his. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said. “Not here.”

Beyond the bookstall, hand in hand, they stood facing one another.

“This isn’t the place to be saying this,” he said. “It isn’t the place I’d meant to say it. I didn’t know it was going to be so soon. But it’s what I’ve been wanting to say to you ever since that first day. You’re marvellous. I’m crazy about you. I’ve only known you three months. I’ve only seen you half a dozen times. But I knew the first time, within twenty minutes, that there never had been anyone like you. There never could be anyone like you. I’ve not thought of anything but you since: planning how I could see you, living over our last meeting. Darling, when I come back on my first leave, you’ve got to marry me.”

She gave a laugh, that was half a sigh, that was a catch of breath.

“If you knew how I’d been longing for you to ask me that!”

“You will?”

“Of course I will.”

“I suppose I couldn’t kiss you with all these people here?”

“Idiot!”

Balliol, standing by the Pullman’s mouth, saw the girl lift herself upon her toes, saw the fleece-lined arm clasped tight round the chinchilla cloak, saw the dark head crushed close under the low peak of the khaki cap, saw the high heels sink back upon the platform reluctantly, as though something that was winged had been forced to earth; then watched them, still hand in hand, turn back towards the train.

Above their heads the minute-hand of the clock was nearing twelve. A station-master was waving the soldiers into their carriages, waving the civilians back. “I’ve got to get in,” said Hugh. Since the girl’s arrival, he had said nothing to his parents, had scarcely noticed their existence; and now as he kissed his mother’s cheeks, as he shook his father’s hand, it did not seem that there was anything to say. His last word was for the girl. “I’ll send you a ring from Amiens,” he said. “Do that,” she answered. Then he was at the window, one head among a row of heads. A waved hand, features that grew indistinct, a white blur, were cut from view by the curved swing of following carriages. The three who had come to see Hugh Balliol off stood beside empty rails. They turned, taking stock of one another. There had been no introduction. It was the girl who spoke.

“So you’re Hugh’s parents. I’ve just got engaged to him. No, don’t look so alarmed. I’m not a tart or anything.”

She laughed: the kind of laugh that did not tell you whether she were on the brink of breakdown or was simply nervous and on defence.

“And it’s now seven and I’ve got to be typing letters in Whitehall at ten. And I’ve had no sleep. Good-bye. I must be rushing.”

She was gone as dramatically as she had come. Balliol’s eyes followed as she scuttled away at the tripping pace that made him expect that every step she would fall forward on her face.

“Have you any idea who that is?” he asked.

“None.”

“I suppose that in the course of time Hugh will enlighten us.”

Said Jane: “I may be quite wrong, of course. One can’t see very clearly in this light, one shouldn’t judge anyone hastily, but I must say that I believe that girl wore make-up.”

Through a window misted with heat and smoke, Hugh Balliol watched the oast-houses of west Kent take on colour and distinctness in the morning light. It was nearly two years since he had made this journey; since this journey had been a part of his life’s ordinary routine; since he had talked casually of “having to run over to France this week to see our shippers” when friends had asked him to do this or that. How surprised he would have been had he been told, when he made that last journey in the spring of 1914, that it would be twenty months before he would see Napoleon’s column over the hills behind Boulogne; and then as an officer, in khaki, on his way to a front-line trench. He wondered how long it would be before he saw it again, in civilian clothes, as a London merchant, carrying his little attaché case with its pile of invoices. He wondered, but with no precise sense of time. You could not look that far ahead. You enlisted for the duration. You lived for the duration. “Après la guerre.” The troops might sing their “When this bloody war is over” but that was a time distant beyond computation. You could see, you could plan, no further than your next leave. If he were back in those days when you could say, at a moment of indecision, “Yes, this may be all very well now, but how shall I be feeling about it in ten years’ time?” would he be engaged to a girl that he’d known three months, that he’d met six times? There’d have been interviews with parents, considerings of ways and means, the slow ritual of courtship, a careful test of the ground, with love unfolding slowly; not this eager, hungry snatching at fruit that might know no morrow. That’s how it would have been.

Or wouldn’t it? Might there not even in those sheltered days have been a wooing as hasty, as precipitate? Hadn’t people fallen in love at a first meeting, when they had a century to make love in? Wouldn’t he have fallen in love with her just the same, even if there hadn’t been a war? Wasn’t it only that the war made it easier, gave him the right to rush his fences?” Wasn’t it simply the war made the setting different, gave one different opportunities?

I’d have met her at some rather formal dance, in the country. There’d have been an introduction. “Joyce dear, I want you to meet Hugh Balliol. Miss Joyce Barrington.” He’d have bowed stiffly from the waist. He would have asked her if he could have the pleasure of a dance. Number seven, she would have told him. During dance six he would have thought “‘Blue dress’—who’s this I’ve got to dance the next with? There are three blue dresses that I’ve met already.” When the music for the seventh dance began he would have stood looking for a girl who seemed familiar and who seemed to have no partner, to whom after such an interval as seemed appropriate, he would walk across. “I believe that this is ours?”

He would lead her away from the wall, into the music, he would be thinking, “Really, this kind of dance is far more trouble than it’s worth, making conversation to someone one doesn’t know.” As they danced he would open the kind of conversation that one reserves for partners at dances in the country, and she would answer in the manner that was prescribed for young women, to whom strange young men from London had been presented. Just like any other dance. Till suddenly, to his surprise, he would find that after all he was not making conversation; that he was talking easily, and enjoying talking; that he was anxious to make an effect; that he had begun to wonder about his partner; who she was, what she was, what were her interests, her ambitions; that he became impatient with the ritual dance programmes and introductions that fixed you to one dance and one dance only with a girl that you met for the first time; for the knowledge that so late as an eighth dance it was not possible to ask if she had another dance unmortgaged. “Nothing before the fourth extra,” she would say. And hours before then his party would have insisted on his going back home. “But I’ve got to see her again. I’ve got to find out about her. This isn’t going to end here. I’ve got to find out what she’s really like.”

That’s how it would have been if he had met her in a normal atmosphere, when it might have taken him a year or eighteen months to get to know her, when any step had to be taken thoughtfully.

Nothing could have been more different from that, externally, than the whirlwind courtship that had just ended in his proposal and its acceptance. Yet the essential situation was the same.

He had met her to the sound of music; only it had not been at a hunt ball in the Shires, but at a crowded restaurant in London. There had been the same reluctance at the start. He had just come up from Grantham for a week-end leave. He and another officer. They had decided to make a night of it; to order the best dinner that a London restaurant had upon its menu; then “see life.” He had been resentful when another officer, a man in the same mess, whom he rather liked, had come across to him towards the end of dinner with the request that they should join up with his party afterwards. Two of his party had had their leaves cancelled at the last moment. They were two girls too many. Their whole evening was being spoilt; it ought to have been such fun. It could be such fun. It would be, if only Hugh would come across.

Hugh had resented the interference with his plans. “What kind of girls were they?” he had asked.

“Very jolly. Lots of fun and really pretty. Everard’s sister.…”

But that was enough for Hugh. He didn’t want that kind of party. People’s sisters indeed! He wanted to enjoy himself, “see life.”

“Oh, but come on. Be a sport,” it had been insisted. “It’ll be fun, really it will. I promise you. And if you don’t enjoy yourself, you can always go. You can make some excuse. I won’t try and keep you. Give it a chance, anyhow.”

In the end, reluctantly, Hugh had yielded. And to begin with, it had been, just as the hunt ball would have been, a tedium and a strain. There were strange faces. There were introductions. There was a flow of talk from which he felt himself excluded because he had not the necessary links with it of mutual friends and settings. There was the making of conversation. There were the attempts at dancing, impossibly unsatisfactory on that narrow, crowded floor. “How soon can I decently get out of this?”

But, just as at the hunt ball he would have realized that he was talking, not making conversation, so now imperceptibly he grew aware that his attention was being held, his interest roused by a girl seated across the table, whose name when they had been introduced he had not caught. She was dark-haired, pale-skinned; her eyes very dark and bright. Her teeth were very white and even; her lips were parted. She was talking quickly, in a low, eager ripple. She appeared completely absorbed in her conversation. Yet Hugh had the feeling that she was aware of him in the same way that he was aware of her, though they had not exchanged a word, though she had not once looked at him. He became interested, alert, curious. He felt resentful of the conditions of a party of this kind where you were introduced to girls, but had no chance of talking to them, where there was the width of a table in between; where the dance floor was so crowded that dancing was scarcely possible; where it was impossible if you were interested in any one person, to see them more than a little, since their place in the evening was already made, since you couldn’t break in upon another person’s party. “I wonder what she’s like.”

And then suddenly she turned away from the man beside her, she looked at him, their eyes met in a long steady glance that turned to a half smile of recognition before she turned away. He was startlingly conscious of being alive in every sense. “I’ve got to see her. I’ve got to find out about her. This isn’t going to end here. I’ve got to find out what she’s really like.”

If he had felt that way about a girl met at a hunt ball, he would have made inquiries about her among friends; he would have found out the houses that she frequented; he would have got himself invited to some party she would be at, or asked some friend to arrange a meeting that would appear casual, unforeseen. That’s how it would have been in the country, in the days of peace, when there was leisure for slow growth. But in the hothouse atmosphere of war-time London, you did not postpone things to a morrow that might never dawn. Hugh pushed back his chair. He walked round the table. “Shall we dance?” he asked the girl.

The dance was an excuse. They had agreed, all of them, that dancing was impossible; that it would be the wise thing to wait till the floor was empty. But the girl had risen to her feet. She looked up at him as they stood on the edge of the cleared floor. She smiled. He put his arm round her. He was conscious of softness, pliancy; of an electric feeling of vitality. The music had a barbaric stridency. His feet twitched to respond to it, to be lost with her in the music’s rhythm. It would be heaven to dance with her. One half turn of the room showed him how impossible that was. They could not dance. All that any of the dancers could do was to shuffle their feet and sway their shoulders. There was an excuse for contact, that was all. And Hugh wanted more than that. He wanted to dance, really dance.

“This isn’t any good.”

“Not any.”

“Why don’t we go out to-morrow somewhere where we can really dance?”

“I’d like that.”

That was how it had begun. That was how it had continued; with the sense of being alive quickening with every hour he spent with her. Not merely, not only rather, through the heightened stirring of the senses, but through the feeling that everything was more fun because she was there; everything was more amusing, more interesting. He talked more easily, he talked better. He had a new ease and confidence. The reflection of her response to him. He was only alive when he was with her. The times when he was away from her were sandy tracts of desert. He was, in fact, in love.

“And I shouldn’t be any the less in love if I’d been wooing her for eighteen months. The war telescopes things. It’s a hothouse atmosphere. It brings things to fruit quickly. But it’s the same plant. It’s just that the setting’s different. People’ll say—old people—that it’s madness for us to marry having known each other for so short a time. But every marriage is a gamble; must be, in the nature of things. We are as likely to be making a success of marriage in 1950 as any couple that have grown up in the same village and haven’t a secret from one another. We know our minds quicker now, that’s all.”

Thus he argued with himself, picturing himself a father and a husband; thirty-five years ahead.

But those were the arguments that he had rehearsed to convince the inherited cautionary instincts that regarded marriage as a stage in a logical process of self-establishment. They were the arguments that he would use to his father, to Joyce’s father. Himself he did not look ahead. He did not picture as the mid-Victorian fiancé did, a future of firesides and cradles; the wage-earner returning from his office at the day’s end to the bosom of his family; the son trotting at his father’s side; the son bringing home from school and college, later from the larger arena of life, the prizes which old men in their clubs vie with one another in comparing—nor did his imagination paint such a picture as had he fallen in love three years earlier, he would have made out of changed circumstance—a home of his own; a flat first, then a house; the fun of entertaining; the status of a married man; the pride of taking out a pretty wife; of going down into the country for week-ends; his old life, only pleasanter.

Hugh Balliol did not attempt to visualize the life that he and Joyce, when the war was over, would build up together. That was too far ahead. His vision was prescribed by the immediate future. No man could look further ahead than his next leave. And it was of his next leave, that would be his honeymoon, that picture after picture flickered before his eyes. The wedding by special licence, within forty-eight hours of his return; the little restaurant lunch party, the speech or two; all that as a prelude: the twelve halcyon days that they would spend in London, since London was the one place that weather could not spoil. They would take a suite at the Savoy, looking out over the Embankment. The windows would be banked with flowers. For that one fortnight they would consider nothing but themselves. They would tie themselves down to nothing. They would act as the mood moved them. If it were summer and the day was fine they would motor down to Taplow, leave the car beside the river, hire an electric canoe, picnic through a long afternoon in shadowed backwaters; or maybe it would be in the early spring, or autumn. It would be too late or early for the river. On days when the sky was grey but the clouds were moving too quickly for a fall of rain, they would motor out to Addington or Wentworth, for a long day’s golf, returning when the skies were darkening, when lights were waking between close-curtained, close-shuttered windows, when streets had the strange mysterious appeal of war-time London; the darkened lamps flinging their spreading cones upon the pavement. There would be restaurants and theatres, bright lights, gay frocks and music; a kaleidoscope of changing scenes. One thing upon another. Yet all that change of scene, the animation, the excitement, people and noise and music, would be the background to the hours when they would be alone together; in the flower-decked suite that looked on to the curving river.

But that he could not picture. His mind showed him no mental photographs. That was an untravelled country; a mystery that he could guess at, but not visualize. One thing alone he knew for certain: that it would be utterly different from anything he had ever known; the casual wild nights in London, Paris, or during his time in camp, at Nottingham and Watford, they had been fun enough. They had been exciting in their way. They had added their savour to a week-end leave, to a business trip to Paris, but how could they be expected to compare with this? To Joyce, someone of one’s own world, somebody that one really loved. He trod the threshold of initiation.

Through the grey-green fields of Kent the train ran into Folkestone. A wind was blowing from the shore. In the Pullman carriage there was a craning of necks, a rubbing of window panes to see whether or not there were white horses out at sea. There were more than white horses. Quite definitely it was going to be rough. Hugh thanked heaven he was sleepy. He would go below at once. He would be asleep before the boat had started. He had no sentimental “last minute” wish to take a last look at the white cliffs. He felt none of the obvious emotion of the soldier leaving for the war. He was glad it had come at last, the test for which he had been in training for sixteen months. He had hated being out of things when he had heard others comparing notes of front-line experience. He wanted to be at one with his generation, to move side by side, in step with his age, to miss nothing that his generation accounted as experience. He did not see war in terms of Agincourt and Crecy. He did not expect glamour of it. He expected it to be dull, shot through by hours of horror, lit by an occasional excitement. He knew that through how many dark and lonely days he would turn for comfort and reassurance to the knowledge that Joyce was waiting for him. He would carry her memory as the crusaders had carried amulets. As he stepped off the dock on to the gang-plank he thought in a moment of prescience and vision, “For all that she means to me now, she’ll mean a hundred times more to me before I set foot on this dock again.”

IV

A Week later an orderly walked into the ante-room of the machine-gun base depot.

“Are any of the following gentlemen in the mess, please? Mr. Ashworth, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Balliol.…”

“Yes.”

“Sir, you have been posted to the 305th Machine Gun Company. You are to have your kit ready by six o’clock. A lorry will take you to the station.”

“What shall I do then?”

“The R.T.O. will tell you.”

The R.T.O. consulted a sheaf of papers.

“The 305th Machine Gun Company? That’ll be the 131st division. That’ll be Ambreville. They’ll tell you there.”

In England Hugh had experienced that side of war-office officialdom which Ian Hay had christened “the practical joke department.” He had indented for three G.S. wagons and received four mules. His bank account had been mysteriously credited with an allowance for lodging, light and fuel during a month that he had spent in barracks. He had filled up endless forms to account for the loss on night manœuvres of one entrenching tool and finally received in compensation a prismatic compass. But he had imagined that things were run more efficiently in France. It did not seem to be so. Through thirteen long, bleak hours, he changed trains, saluted majors with blue hat bands, shivered in an unheated carriage. He was hurried on from train to train, from R.T.O. to R.T.O. as though the administrative authorities were indulging in some elaborate adult version of “Old Maid”; as though he were the unlucky card, which each player in turn passes on to the next, indifferent to its ultimate destination, with a sigh of thanksgiving the moment he is relieved of his own responsibility. Seven o’clock had come before he reported to the R.T.O. at Ambreville. At last, he thought, at last! He was to repeat those two words a great many times, with a great many varieties of intonation, during the next twelve hours.

The R.T.O., like every other R.T.O. along the track, was affable, courteous, encouraging.

“Mr. Balliol? The 305th Machine Gun Company? Splendid! They’ll be glad to have you. They’re at Rideau now. About fifteen kilometres off.”

“How am I to get there?”

“You’re in luck. On ordinary nights you’d have to walk; to-night the light-duty railway is running a carriage down there. You can go in that as far as Langeais, then walk. It’s quite simple. Anyone will tell you the way. You’re jolly lucky to have the railway.”

With a kindly smile the R.T.O. turned his attention to the next claimant.

Rather dubious about his good fortune, Hugh returned to the railhead, to be informed by a military policeman that the train was due any minute.

“There’s no time for me to get anything to eat, then? “He had existed the whole day on nothing more substantial than the small packet of sandwiches issued to him at the Base depot.

The policeman was somewhat shocked at the implied suggestion that military railheads possessed restaurants.

“Oh no, sir, there be no time for that. Train’s due any minute, it’s the only train to-night. You can’t afford to miss it. Let’s see, where be you going? Rideau, sir? Then you’ll have to change at Lillecourt.”

“The R.T.O. told me to change at Langeais.”

“Oh no, sir, no. Lillecourt. It’s much nearer. ‘Ere, Bill!” he shouted to a perspiring orderly. “What be the nearest place for Rideau?”

“Oh, ah should think as ‘ow Millemont were,” replied Bill, without looking up from the floorboard he was scrubbing. “Or else Fleurville. One of the two, any’ow.”

Hugh looked at the Sergeant hopelessly.

“Where am I to get out?”

“Can’t say as ‘ow it matters much, sir. They be all close enough anyway. I’m for Lillecourt myself. But each man to ‘is own opinion.”

With this final expression of a philosophy of general toleration, the Sergeant departed to a Y.M.C.A. canteen, leaving Hugh seated on his valise, to grow hungrier and hungrier every minute, as he watched the raindrops splash in the muddy puddles.

The train did not arrive till ten minutes past nine. It was not a train at all; a collection of four open trucks. But Hugh could not have welcomed the Golden Arrow with greater relish. He shouldered his valise on to a truck, and climbed in after it; cheered by the Sergeant, who, having deceived and deserted him for upwards of two hours, arrived at the last moment in eager expectation of largesse with the useful information that on the whole he had best get out at Maintenant-Les-Loges.

If this were a game of “Old Maid” one of the players had cheated somewhere, Hugh suspected. One or other of the R.T.O.’s instead of passing on the unwanted card to his next door neighbour, had dropped it underneath the table and made an end of the business altogether.

“I suppose I shall get somewhere, sometime,” he reflected.

He was to feel dubious on this point later, after forty shivering minutes in an open truck when he and his valise were deposited at Langeais. He was assured that he would find Rideau without any difficulty. A corporal in the R.E.’s promised to look after his valise till his own company had time to collect it in the mess cart. The mess cart did find it in the end, but it wore a depleted look. Everyone seemed anxious for him to start as speedily as possible. It was just down the main road; less than two kilometres; twenty minutes’ walk at the outside.

Hopefully Hugh set out.

Soon he caught a glimpse through the moon-struck dusk of houses and roofs and gables. There rose before him visions of food, a bed, and rest.

But the game of “Old Maid” was only to begin in earnest. Rideau was one of the villages from which, after heavy fighting, the Germans had retreated only a few months back. There remained of it nothing but broken walls and leaning arches. In the dark, it presented an appearance of complete and utter desolation. There were no signs of life. Hugh had thought that as soon as he reached Rideau his odyssey would be completed. He now saw that it had only just begun.

Of the 305th M.G. Company there were no signs. Nor were there any signs of recognizably human habitation. After twenty minutes stumbling among stone-strewn paths he saw a light glimmering beneath a particularly dilapidated outhouse. With hope reborn, he beat on the door and pushed it open.

It was the quarters of the regimental S.M. of the 24th Westshire Regiment.

“I say, do you know where the 305th M.G. Company is?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, look here; can I see any of your officers? They might know.”

The S.M. drew himself to his full height. He was an old regular and a guardsman. He was not used to being woken up in the middle of the night by every new army officer who chose to walk in. It was out of order.

“I’m sorry, sir, it can’t be done.”

“But look here.… I mean … can’t I see the adjutant or someone?”

“It can’t be done, sir, it can’t be done.”

Hugh, realizing that he could gather nothing from this relic of reaction, turned dismally to the deserted street. Under a farther light a group of gunners were playing Crown and Anchor. No, they didn’t know nothing about no Machine Guns, “but Bill at the cookhouse, ‘e might know summat. ‘Is brother was a machine gunner.”

Not so hopefully now, Hugh sought the cookhouse. “No,” said Bill, “I don’t know where they could be. My brother ‘e’s in the 323rd; but they’re in England still. I dunno I’m sure, but the Corporal of the gas guard might tell ’ee. ’E do know more than I do about these things.”

The Corporal of the gas guard was equally vague. He thought there were some Machine Guns somewhere in Rideau; but where they were he didn’t know. Hugh thanked him with frigid gratitude. He had read that a soldier’s first night in the line was an unforgettable experience. It was.

He wandered on. A mounted Captain assured him that he would find Brigade Headquarters second on the right, and third on the left, that they would be able to tell him there for certain. But it was not very helpful information, for in the dark it was impossible to tell the difference between a track, a disused tradesman’s entrance, and a gap between two battered houses. After following innumerable blind alleys and tripping over countless wires, he was unable to discover the point from which he had started, so that “second on the right and third on the left” became as useful a guide as longitudinal bearings would be to a mariner without a compass.

But a limit is set to the longest pilgrimage. At last even the most weather-beaten Ulysses sees the white crags of his long-loved Ithaca. Shortly after one o’clock there came upon Hugh’s ears the well-known pop-pop-pop of the Vickers Gun. Eagerly he hurried in the direction of the sound. The Company Headquarters dug-out loomed a few yards beyond the gun emplacement.

“At last,” he thought. “At last!”

At last he would be able to get some food, a bed and sleep. He marched smartly into the dug-out. Recollecting quickly all he had been taught at the Inns of Court about reporting himself to his unit, he clicked his spurs and heels together, gave the regulation salute and rapped out:

“Lieutenant Balliol, sir, reporting for duty.”

The Captain looked at him, half in surprise, half in amusement.

“What company are you reporting to?” he asked at last.

“The 305th Machine Gun Company, sir.”

The Captain laughed.

“Sorry, old son, this is the wrong place. Your crowd have gone up north. We relieved them here last night!”

V

On the following morning, in the light of day and with informed guidance, Hugh discovered the whereabouts of his company. It was a moment that he had a little dreaded. Life in a machine gun company was, he knew, very different from life in an ordinary battalion. A machine gun company lived very much upon its own. It was under the direct orders of Brigade. Its ten officers led a self-contained, independent life. They were separated for long periods from one another: three sections scattered over a Brigade front, with the adjutant, the captain, the transport officer, and one section in reserve at details. The company worked only occasionally together, as a whole before a show or after a show; or during a divisional rest. In consequence the happiness or unhappiness of an officer, at any rate, the personal atmosphere of his life, depended far more on the success or failure of one or two personal relationships than would that of a platoon officer in a line battalion. Hugh could guess how much depended on the two or three officers with whom he was brought most in contact. The inquiries that he made about his future captain, from the company whose guest he had by misadventure found himself, were emphatically answered.

“The skipper of the 305th? Rickman, a first-class fellow. Everyone likes him. Youngish, about thirty-three. Good-looking, good athlete, very generous; got a good deal of money; always stands the mess champagne after a bad time in the line and sends a couple of barrels of beer round to the men. They all swear by him. Somebody told me that he wrote poetry. But”—it was added hastily—“you’d never think that to look at him.”

From this description Hugh was not absolutely convinced that the skipper was his type. It suggested a rather overwhelming heartiness. He had not, however, been two minutes in the headquarters of his new company before he had realized that he was in luck. He was welcomed by one of those few men who can contrive to look at the same time extremely smart and extremely comfortable in uniform, with a handshake that was firm and friendly, yet did not crush the fingers.

“So you’ve got here at last. I can’t say how glad I was when I heard you were coming to my company. You won’t know me; though you may have heard my name. But I know your sister Lucy very well. I worked for your father for several years.”

“What, you’re not Roy Rickman?”

“That’s the criminal. We shall have lots to tell each other, I expect. I’ve seen your sister since you have. I know her husband. I got engaged to be married just about the time she did. And I want to hear all about your parents. When I knew them first they were just starting to build that house of theirs in Hampstead. What was it called? Ilex. You’re still there, I suppose?”

It was as unlike as could be to the reception that he had expected from his company commander. But Hugh’s pleasure was only in part due to the surprise of finding a personal friend where he had least expected one. It was very largely a relief in recognizing in Rickman the kind of soldier he would be proud to serve under. As an athlete he had always known that he could only play well if he were himself captain or were well captained. He needed to lead, or to be led by someone on whom he could rely.

He had recognized the leader in Rickman before one word had been passed to underline the real reason for his presence in this dugout. They had not spoken of soldiering. But Hugh could sense Rickman’s power of leadership, his confidence, his manliness, his courage, his capacity to decide quickly. “I’ll be able to give my best under a man like this,” he thought.

“You must remember me to your mother when you write. She used to encourage me with my verses. Of course, I don’t suppose you’d know that: but I do a little scribbling sometimes: sonnets mostly.”

“I’d heard that.”

“Really?”

When Rickman began to speak about his verses an odd look of nervousness and embarrassment replaced the self-assured confidence with which he had been discussing the characteristic peculiarities of Lucy’s husband. He flushed with an eager interest when Hugh said that he had heard about his sonnets. Had Hugh read any of them, he asked.

“Well, as a matter of fact.…”

“No, no, of course you wouldn’t. They’re just trifles. I scribble them off at odd moments. They have been published, though—quite a lot of them. Some of my friends have suggested I might make a book of them. I doubt if I shall. They’re not really up to anything. But people seemed to have liked them. I’ve had some very nice letters about them. It might be a good idea to do a book. Anthologists might care to have one of them occasionally. I must show you them some day. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that I’ve not got one of them on me now.”

He began to feel in the flap of his tunic pocket.

The largest and noblest contribution to the sum of the world’s poetry has been made by the English language. Hugh had the normal Englishman’s distrust of poetry. With alarm he watched Rickman fumble among a wad of letters. Since he had begun to talk about his poetry, Rickman had become a different person: afflicted with an intense self-consciousness; on the defence; desperately concerned about his verse; yet desperately anxious to give the impression that he set small store by it; quite unable to resist the temptation to find an appreciative audience; yet anticipating hostile criticism.

“Yes, let me see.… Here it is,” he was saying. “It won’t take you a minute. It’s nothing, of course; just a little thing I tossed off the other night, when I was waiting for a section officer’s report. It’ll give you an idea, though, of the sort of thing I do do.”

He handed across a sheet torn out of a field service pocket-book, on which fourteen lines of verse were inscribed in a clear boyish script. It was entitled Here and There. The octave described a young woman reading a book over a fire in a London flat. The sextet presented in contrast the picture of her lover watching from a front-line trench the light of star shells flickering on No Man’s Land. Hugh would have found it hard to recall an occasion when he had read a poem of his own free will. He could not imagine why anyone should want to write one; but at the same time he considered it an achievement to be able to. The poem that Rickman handed him appeared to scan, appeared to rhyme, and one could get the general sense of what it was about. There might be no particular point in doing it, at the same time it was something to have done.

“I think that’s jolly fine,” he said.

Rickman flushed with pleasure. Hugh had been conscious of his eyes fixed closely on him while he read.

“You do? I am glad. It’s only a little thing, of course. At the same time, people seem to like them. I’ve always done things like that, you know. I used to show your mother my poems sometimes. She was very encouraging. I used to feel awfully shy about it. In those days writing poetry seemed … well … rather an unmanly kind of thing to do. But it’s different now, of course. With the War on. Poetry’s come into its own.”

Hugh nodded his head. As far as he was concerned, it hadn’t. But he had read a number of press references to War Poetry; had seen a great many photographs of War Poets; had listened on Church Parade to a great many sermons in which the poetry which had been inspired by the war had been allowed to testify to war’s purifying influence. He had noticed in fashionable drawing-rooms that a slim volume tossed on to an occasional table was considered part of the general decorative scheme. He had gathered that there was a boom in verse.

“We’ve got a real literary light, though, in our company,” Rickman continued. “I expect you know his work well; Frank Tallent?”

Hugh shook his head. No, he was afraid he didn’t.

“Oh, but you should. He’s really one of the best of the younger novelists. Sombre stuff, but really powerful. I tell him that I’m looking forward to being one of the characters in the war novel. I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t write it. There’s nothing he mightn’t do.”

Rickman’s eulogy could not have been delivered with a more convincing gusto. Yet Hugh fancied that he detected a quick look of relief on Rickman’s face when he had denied knowledge of him, and that in consequence the praise had been given with a warmer generosity.

“You’ll see quite a bit of him to begin with,” Rickman was continuing. “I am putting you in his section. Not for long, of course. I’ll give you a section of your own in a month or so. But for the start I think it’ll be best for you to get an idea of the way things are run out here; in particular of how we run them in this company, from someone a little bit your senior. You won’t find it difficult. But things are different, necessarily. There are a lot of things that they bother about at depots that don’t cut any ice in a front-line gun emplacement. And there are other things that do. You’ll have picked them all up before you’ve been a week with Tallent. We’ll go up to his position this afternoon. You’ll find this a good company to soldier in. And now, what about an apéritif? I’m afraid I can’t offer you the kind of sherry I used to sell for your father’s firm. But it’s drinkable.”

He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. As he did so, he began to cough. He hit his chest once or twice.

“There’s only one thing really wrong with the life out here, and that’s not the Germans. It’s the damned havoc that the damp plays with your chest if your lungs aren’t like leather.”

“I noticed you were wheezing.”

“I’ve had asthma since I was a kid. It’s hell’s own business. You never know when it’s going to get you, or where. You’ll get it one side of the street and not the other. You’re never safe from it. Heaven only knows what mine will be like before I’ve finished with the trenches. Still, don’t let’s bother about that. You want your sherry. I need it.”

With a laugh, he had put his hand upon Hugh’s elbow and led him over to the mess. As soon as he had started talking about the war, about Hugh’s position as sub-section officer, about the company, he became again the leader that Hugh had recognized and respected at the beginning of their interview.

There were three officers in the mess when Rickman and he came into it. At a first glance they seemed representative of the type of officer that was to be found in a new army unit. There was a precise, middle-aged man who looked as though he had been a solicitor; rather stiff in his manner, conscious of his age, and seniority; yet rather boyishly excited at being able to mix on terms of equality with men fifteen years younger than himself.

There was a young subaltern, barely twenty; very pink and white and eager; who eight months earlier had been a prefect at a public school; who saw the war as a kind of glorified football match; who looked on the army as in different circumstances he would have looked on a University. He wanted to earn decorations so that his old school would be proud of him; as at Oxford he would have wanted to be a blue. He still read the newspapers with the eye of a public school. “I see that R. L. Maybrick who was in the Winchborough Eleven in ‘13 is in the casualty list this morning.”

The third officer was one of those men in the middle thirties whom you cannot exactly place. They have been to a recognizable public school, though they do not seem public school men and take no interest whatever in their school. They have lined faces. They are hard drinkers, but they are never drunk. They give the impression of having roughed it somewhere, some time. But they are at ease in the exhibition side of London; its restaurants and music-halls; who have no small talk, but tell an anecdote extremely well; whose idea of a “cheery evening” is either “a binge with a girl” or four or five men sitting over a bottle of whisky, each in turn telling the story that reminds another of “an interesting experience that came his way.” A typical new army mess. And Hugh could tell from the way Rickman managed the introductions, the exact terms of friendship on which he was with each of the three others; definitely there was friendship, but definitely he was the skipper. He would be able to pass quite easily from the off parade manner of the mess to the on parade manner of the square. “I’m in luck all right,” Hugh thought.

That evening after tea he rode up with Rickman to the gun position that Tallent’s section occupied. They were in a quiet part of the line. A few months back there had been heavy fighting, the Germans had withdrawn destroying the country as they went. It was through a bleak landscape that the uneven cobbled road led, between its broken footpaths to the main trench system. To the right there was an occasional shelling. The skyline would be lit by a flash. A few seconds later there would be a dull hollow roar. Every now and then the rattle of machine-gun fire would penetrate the varied noises of the night. A Véry light would mount slowly into the sky, would hang suspended, casting a white flickering iridescence over the ruined houses, the broken gates, the piles of masonry; so that they seemed through the winter dusk like the fabric of a magician’s dream.

And indeed, apart from the wizardry of the star shells, the forlorn grey landscape had the beauty that is possessed by all subjects in which every detail is subdued to a single and shared harmony. Even if that harmony is sombre. Everything was in tune with winter; the silent group of men who trudged by on their way to working-parties and reliefs; the mules who dragged, with their harness slightly rattling, the limber of rations and ammunition to the line. It was all of a piece.

“We may find Tallent at the ration dump, but I don’t expect so,” Rickman said. “He prefers to stay in his dug-out at this time.”

Hugh had refrained on the way up from asking what kind of person Tallent was. It was scarcely his place to put such a question to Tallent’s commanding officer. He was more than a little anxious to see what he would be like, both because he would have to spend the greater part of the month in his company and because he was curious to see what an author really looked like. He had never met an author. At Oxford, there had been some tiresome aesthetes who wore odd ties and their hair long, whose rooms one shipped on bump-suppers. But he had not considered them real authors. He had seen photographs in the illustrated paper beneath which he had read the editorial “Lieutenant So-and-so, whose new volume of poems is in the press.” But that, somehow, had not seemed to him quite real. He could imagine solicitors, doctors, architects, scientists becoming soldiers, but the idea of a poet in charge of a platoon did frankly seem rather incongruous to him. Tallent was a novelist, not a poet. But even so, a man who wrote books.… He was very curious to see what he was like.

To Hugh’s surprise, he was like anybody else. He was a little wiry man, thin, sallow-cheeked, clean-shaven. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed. His eyes were very bright and restless. It was his eyes only that gave you the impression that he was in some way different from other people. Not so much that he was more intelligent, as that he was more highly-geared. If you were to see him in the ante-room of a mess reading a newspaper, you would take no notice of him. He would seem rather undersized, with no particular good looks. But the moment he looked at you, you became inquisitive; you said to yourself: “Who is this person? What is he?” His movements and his way of talking were like his eyes. They were quick and restless.

During the first few minutes in the dug-out Hugh had a good opportunity of watching him. At the head of the steps Rickman had begun to cough; by the time he had reached the bottom he had begun to choke, his face had gone scarlet, his fingers worked impatiently at his collar, loosening the tie, unbuttoning the stud. He leant forward against the table gasping, fighting for breath. Tallent, as though he were accustomed to the sight of such attacks, poured out a glass of water, splashed it with whisky, handed it across.

Rickman snatched at it, took a quick gulp, tossed back his head, then squared his shoulders. For a minute or two he stood there, breathing heavily. Then, with a little laugh, he pulled the chair back and sat down.

“God damn my chest! I don’t know what it is: these damp walls, and cigarette smoke, I suppose. Thanks for the whisky, Tallent. Here’s Balliol. I told you about him in my chit. I shan’t be letting him stay with you long. You’re too good to need as good a sub-section officer as he’ll be. Just show him the ropes for a week or so. Have you anything to show me?”

“There was that matter of the alternative gun emplacement at Beauville.”

“Of course. Yes. Let’s have those maps out. You listen to this, young Balliol, it will come in useful.”

The maps spread on the table, with a chart beside them to mark out the indirect fine angles, Rickman and Tallent considered the advantage and disadvantage of a scheme that the Brigadier had very tentatively suggested. There was in actual fact no particular point to it. A gun team at such a place could only have a defensive value and nothing was less likely than a German attack on that particular section of the front. They were both, however, in favour of digging it.

“It’ll be something for the men to do,” said Rickman. “Give them something definite to grouse over. If you don’t give them trouble, they’ll imagine some; and the imaginary ones are always the worst kind.”

“And it’s nice to think one can put the old general’s mind at peace, he thinks of the front line as a succession of map references. It is nice for him in the evening to get out his map, look at the blue circle and the yellow circle, and say to himself, ‘Of course the Germans can’t get through now.’”

Their discussion of the point was sensible but not serious. They knew that it didn’t matter either way; that it was a question of taking the more prudent course. But when an important issue came, they’d recognize it as important, Hugh reflected.

For a few further minutes Rickman asked a question or two about individual men; then he pushed back his chair.

“It’s late. I’ve got to go over and see Mailey. I’ll have a look at the gun teams on the way. No, don’t bother to come with me. You stay and help Balliol get moved in.”

He turned towards the dug-out steps, then paused, his eye caught by a couple of papers that lay on the edge of Tallent’s wire bed. He picked them up. They were The Spectator and The Nation.

“I see there’s an article on War Poetry in The Nation. Is it any good?”

Tallent shrugged his shoulders.

“You know what The Nation is. Negative, critical, snobbishly intellectual; and in the long run nearly always right. Most of it’s an attack on The Poetry Magazine.”

“Oh, is it? Well. … I’d like to borrow it some time. Not now. Good night. Good night, Balliol.”

While he had been discussing a military problem, Rickman had remained the self-confident, confidence-inspiring soldier. The moment he had picked up The Nation, that odd self-consciousness had come back into his manner. And into Tallent’s manner had come the suggestion of what Hugh could best describe as a supercilious drawl. As the gas curtain flapped behind Rickman, Tallent gave an impatient little laugh.

“I shouldn’t have done that, I suppose, but I just couldn’t resist it. I left that paper out there specially. He makes me so mad with his damned poetry, and The Poetry Magazine is where most of it comes out. But I suppose all this is gibberish to you.”

“I knew he wrote poetry.”

“Did you? Yes, of course, you would. Anyone would before they’d been in the mess five minutes. ‘A little thing I tossed off the other night.’ And you know quite well he’d been polishing it for weeks. That fumbling gesture in his pocket. How well I know it. The way he leads the subject round. ‘By the way, I’m not certain that I haven’t got it on me now.’ As though he wasn’t sure, when you know damn well that he takes it out of his pocket and reads it over to himself every time he goes to the latrine. God, it makes me sick!”

His outburst astonished Hugh. He couldn’t imagine anyone getting so excited over so amiable, if incomprehensible, an idiosyncrasy as poetizing.

“But the stuff is all right, isn’t it? The thing he showed me seemed to be.”

“Oh, it’s well enough. It scans, it rhymes, you can see what it’s driving at. But it isn’t poetry. And there are no two ways about a poem. Poems aren’t like novels. A novel can have interest and value without being literature. It can argue a case; it can present a setting; its subject matter may be significant. At the worst it can give entertainment. But verses that aren’t poetry haven’t any reason or excuse for their existence. It’s one thing or the other. There’s no middle way. And when you know men, as I do, who’ve given their lives to poetry, to have to listen to a man like Rickman.… Hell’s bells, it makes me mad. Forget it. Let’s have some whisky. Then I’ll take you round the guns.”

There were four guns to each section. The section covered the half of a brigade front. One gun team was actually in the front line system. The other three were echeloned in reserve at a distance of four to five hundred yards apart. Over the muddy, slippery duck-board track it took the best part of two hours to go round the guns.

The gun teams, like the company itself, led an independent, self-contained existence; not unlike that of shipwrecked sailors. The landscape, as far as the eye could travel, was grey-brown, undulating plains. The villages were crumbled walls and heaps of rubble. The roads ran straight and wide flanked by tall trees that thinned and dwindled as they neared the line. The sentry leaning against the parapet could see them leading towards the German line, to be lost in the brown mud of the unowned shell holes, to reappear on the other side, to pass over the horizon, leading no-whither. Looking backwards, he could see the same road vanishing he knew not where in the grey distances of a foreign land. He was as much marooned as any sailor on a Pacific atoll. His home was the narrow strip of trench, its dug-out, its emplacement, where he and his dozen fellows depended for everything on one another.

“You’d think they were pretty wretched, but they’re not really,” Tallent said to Hugh. “They’ve got their jokes. They’ve got companionship. They’ve the same things to grouse over. Everything’s shared. They’ve got none of the responsibilities that they had in civilian life: the making of ends meet, the fear of losing a job when they’ve wives and children dependent on them. They’ve been relieved of a great deal. They grouse like hell now but when it’s all over a good many of them will look back and wonder whether it really was the hell they thought it.”

In the course of his round of the guns Hugh was to meet another old acquaintance. A pair of perky eyes, surmounted by a shock of red and rebel hair that even a steel helmet could not subdue, grinned recognition at him.

“Good lord, it’s Walker!”

“Yes, me, Mr. Hugh; Sir, I mean.…”

“I never knew you were a machine-gunner.”

“No, sir. I’ve been transferred a bit.”

From the dug-out came a stifled titter which suggested that a story lay behind this admission. Hugh could imagine that.

“I expect you find this a bit of a change from packing cases for Peel & Hardy.”

“Yes, sir. Used to pack cases. Now I carries them.”

His voice was as confident and cheeky as it had ever been. In spite of the steel helmet, the leather jacket, the khaki trousers, the sandbagged shins, Hugh could not see that the war had made any essential difference to the packer who had been hauled up to a board meeting to be reprimanded and had instead received a rise of salary, because the chairman had liked the look of him.

“What sort of a soldier is he making?” Hugh asked the moment they were out of earshot.

Tallent shrugged his shoulders.

“He’s a very typical old soldier.”

“Does that mean he’s never out of trouble?”

“That he never ought to be out of trouble. As a matter of fact, he’s got about the cleanest crime sheet in the company. Heaven knows how he manages it. But … oh well, this’ll be an example. It was about six months ago, before Rickman took over, when we were out on rest. Evans was in charge. He was a terror. I don’t think anyone was sorry when he got a Blighty one at Loos. But anyhow, this is the story. It’s a fair example.”

It was a story that had been often recounted, not only in the officer’s, but in the sergeants’ and the corporals’ messes. And always to the accompaniment of many laughs from those who knew Walker well.

One morning Walker had overslept. It was not the first time he had done so, nor would it be the last. Reveille had gone at 6.30. It was now nearly seven o’clock, only just time to shave and wash before his breakfast. He had meant to clean the barrel of his gun; it was in a fearful state. He had dropped it in the mud the night before. It must be cleaned before the next parade. One never knew when it might be inspected. You could never trust officers, they always did things at funny times. That barrel had to be cleaned, and yet the mess orderlies were just going for the food. If he cleaned it now, he would miss his meal, and Walker could not remember a single occasion on which he had done that. No, the barrel would have to wait; breakfast was much more important.

The morning of Walker’s rest also happened to be the morning Captain Evans had chosen for one of his surprise visits to the gun teams. No one ever knew when he was coming; usually he never knew himself till five minutes before. Nothing was ready for him. His visits were a menace to the subaltern.

Half-way through the morning parades a whisper ran round No. 2 section: “Cap’n’s coming round.” Walker’s heart had sunk within him. He pictured himself in irons bound to a wheel, undergoing ten days’ Field Punishment No. 1. He had visions of courts martial; of a crime sheet inches long. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Captain Evans inspecting the gun; he saw him take out the barrel, and hold it to the light.

“Mr. Tallent,” the Captain called.

“Sir?”

“Here a minute.”

They walked out of earshot of the section. Tallent had known what that meant. Evans was very particular about not criticizing his officers before their men.

“This barrel is filthy, Mr. Tallent. A disgrace to the company.”

“Yes, sir. Sergeant Simpson.…”

“I don’t want to hear anything about Sergeant Simpson. This gun is under your charge. I expect it to be clean. That’s what section officers are for. You don’t know your duty. If you can’t keep your guns clean when you are out of the line, what are you going to do in action? Very bad, Mr. Tallent, very bad. I can see that you’ve got no hold over your section. I shall be forced to cancel your leave to Amiens.”

Tallent had been counting on that leave. He had returned to the section, restless for revenge. Some one was going to pay for this. It wasn’t his fault that the gun was dirty; that wasn’t his job, it was the Sergeant’s job. He wasn’t going to take this sort of thing lying down. He despatched an orderly for the section sergeants.

“Look here, you two, this barrel is absolutely filthy.…”

“Yes, sir. Lance-Corporal.…”

“I don’t want to hear anything about any Lance-Corporal. You two are directly responsible for the gun’s cleanliness. That’s what you are sergeants for. If you don’t keep your guns clean you are not fit to be sergeants. You are both under open arrest.”

As soon as he had gone the two sergeants looked at each other.

“‘Tweren’t our fault, Bill.”

“Naw, Joe, ‘twas that blarsted fool of a Lance-Jack.”

“‘Ere you,” he bawled at one of the men, “run off and fetch me Lance-Corporal Wilkinson and hustle yerself.”

“Now, ‘ere, me lad,” said Sergeant Simpson to the perspiring one stripe, “that there barrel of yours is dirty, can’t see down it.”

“Is it now?”

“Not ’arf it isn’t.”

“Well, Sergeant, Private Walker.…”

“I don’t want to hear nothing about your Private Walker. It’s your fault if ‘e don’t clean his gun, that’s what you’re there for. Don’t think yer a Lance-Jack for your looks, do yer? You can go under close arrest, you can. Off yer get to the guardroom and quick too.”

Lance-Corporal Wilkinson went to the guardroom, but on the way he had five minutes’ vituperative conversation with Walker.

“See ‘ere, you bloomin’ fool, that gun o’ yours is dirty, got that? It’s your job to see it’s clean, got that? And termorror mornin’ you’ll be up before the Cap’n, got that? Twenty-six days’ number one, that’s what you’re in for, got that? Now then, don’t answer me back; you’re for it. See?”

At last the long arm of justice had fallen on the collar of the real culprit.

Next morning there was a string of prisoners for company orders. The two Sergeants were marched in first.

“Dirty barrel, sir,” Tallent had explained. “It was in a most filthy state. It’s the Sergeant’s business to see it’s clean, sir.”

“H’m. Is this the gun I spoke to you about, Mr. Tallent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“H’m, well, er, yes.” It was obviously the section officer’s fault that the barrel was dirty and yet he had to back up his officers. “Look here!” he blazed out. “You’re Sergeants, and are supposed to look after your section. You’ve got no excuse.…”

“Please, sir.…”

“Don’t answer me back, you’ve got no excuse whatever. It’s through Sergeants like you that the company will be losing its good name, do you see?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well … er … let me see. There’s a twenty mile route march to-morrow, isn’t there, Sergeant-Major? I thought so. You’ll conduct it Sergeant Simpson, and Sergeant Henry, you’ll attend. March out.”

Then Lance-Corporal Wilkinson was marched in.

“A dirty barrel, sir,” explained the two Sergeants in unison. “It’s the Lance-Corporal’s job to see that the gun is cleaned. We can’t do it all, sir; we expect him to do that, sir. We have a lot to do, sir. What with guards, sir, and.…”

“Yes, yes,” said the Captain. This was getting beyond a joke; still, he supposed he had to back up his Sergeants. If he didn’t punish the men his N.C.O.s brought up, they would cease to take interest in their work.

But it was considerably less firmly that he addressed the Corporal.

“It’s the Corporal’s job to see after his gun. If the gun’s dirty, it’s your fault.”

“But, sir.…”

“Don’t answer me back. I hold you responsible. Sergeant-Major, put Lance-Corporal Wilkinson down for Cookhouse Guard. March out.”

And then, trembling and without excuse, Private Walker, No. 1352 of the 305th M.G. Company, was brought into the presence of Justice.

“A dirty barrel, sir,” said Lance-Corporal Wilkinson. “It’s his fault. I allus says to my No. 1. ‘It’s you ‘as got to fire that there gun, an’ it’s up ter you ter see that it’s clean.’ That’s what I says, sir, to my No. 1. ‘No. 1,’ I says, sir.…”

“Thank you, Corporal, quite enough. Now, is this the same gun?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I am sick of it. I’ve heard enough about this beastly gun, and I am not going to hear any more. It’s wasted enough of my time already. Case dismissed. March out.”

It was a story that had been told many times.

“The leopard doesn’t change his spots,” thought Hugh. “I think I’ll take him as a runner. He’s the kind of man to keep me in a good humour in a place like this.”

Walker’s gun team was posted in a sunken road that ran about a quarter of a mile behind No Man’s Land and joined the main communication trenches of a battalion front. The high banks of the road were scarred with the bare earth of funk-holes and lined with the stumps of trees whose latticed branches had once formed a green canopy over the green grasses, where weeds and wild fruit and flowers had rioted in confusion.

At four o’clock on the following afternoon the greater part of the gun team was seated round the dug-out’s mouth, cleaning themselves, their rifles, the spare parts of the gun. One or two crouched, huddled in great-coats, their shirts across their knees, searching the seams for lice. With steady deliberation Walker announced his captures.

“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Damme if I don’t believe I’ll get my fifty.”

“You’d better chuck it,” an old soldier counselled him. “You’ll never get rid of them things. Why, I was once seven weeks.…”

The Corporal interrupted the discussion.

“You let Walker alone, ‘e’s doin’ no harm by that, which is more than ‘e can usually say for himself. Did you ‘ear about wot ‘e did last relief?”

Every man in the section had heard the story at least six times, but it was a good yarn, so they murmured “No.” They let the Corporal carry on.

“Well, ‘e was carryin’ some belt boxes down to the dump and as they kept on slippin’ off his rifle, Walker ‘e looks round for a bit of rope to tie ‘em on with. Well, o’ course ‘e didn’t find any. So wot do you think ‘e does? ’E whips out ’is wire-cutters and goes up to a bit of telephone wire that was running alongside of the trench, and damme if ‘e doesn’t shear off a bit two yards long. ’E ties up ’is belt boxes and trots along to the dump perfectly happy and then next morning the Colonel’s telephone’s out of order, and Walker wonders why.”

The story was greeted with the usual good-humoured laugh. From the main communication trench came the sound of a fatigue man singing:

“There’s a good time coming for the ladies

There’s a good time coming for the girls.…”

The gun team caught up the refrain. For Walker it had associations.

“I guess this lane’s seen a bit of cuddling in its time.”

“Just like ’Ampstead on a Sunday.”

“That’s where I used to go when I was walking out. There was always a nice shady spot somewhere round the Leg o’ Mutton pond. Could do with a little of it now.”

The singing from the communication trench grew louder and nearer.

“‘Ullo, ‘ere’s the water party back.”

Two men with petrol cans slung round their shoulders, slithered down the track.

“Any news?” they were asked, eagerly.

“Sergeant Major’s gone on leaf.”

“Good. Anythink else?”

“Dunno for certain, but a gunner told me as ’ow ’e’d over’eard one of ’is orficers sayin’ as ’ow we were going out of the line for a three weeks’ rest soon.”

“Good again.”

Walker grunted ominously.

“Don’t trust rumours like that. The army don’t do you a good turn unless it knows it can get its own back later on. A rest now only means the bloody salient a fortnight later.”

“You’re a cheerful blighter!”

“I’m an old soldier. I know their games.”

“There’s no need to grumble even if you are.”

“I don’t grumble.”

“Don’t you! You grumble more than the rest of the ‘ole gun team put together.”

“That’s because I’m tireder of the war than they are. What are we doing to-night, any’ow?”

“What we allus do: deepen the emplacement, sandbag the dugout.”

“As usual.”

“As usual.”

“As per bloody usual.”

“And it’s time we was gettin’ busy on it,” the Corporal said.

It was beginning to grow dark. The lilac of a winter sunset was fading into grey. The outline of an occasional lonely gable stood black against the sky. From behind the line came the rumble of heavy guns. The business of war resumed its suspended life. It was time to post sentries; to arrange the screens that would hide the gun flash, to send a party to the dump for rations.

The arrival of the limbers provided the one excitement of trench life. It was the one thing in the daily routine that really mattered. Attacks might fail, a gun team might be wiped out, dug-outs might be wrecked. That was part of the inevitable machinery of war. One was prepared for that, but if anything went wrong with rations.…

With the rations arrived the mail, the rum issue, rumours. The limber corporal was never without some sensation. Leave had been stopped; there was a big push up north; the Company was to be relieved next week. The men lived for rations. When it was over there was nothing left but to wait patiently till another twenty-four hours had passed.

“Rations up!” cried someone.

There was a surge forward; the men clustered round the bulging sandbag.

The Corporal got hold of the mail and began to read the names out.

“Parker—Griffiths—Parker —Parker—Evans—Parker —the man must write letters to himself—Jones—Fitzgerald. No parcels. That’s the lot.”

Parker retired to read his letters; the remainder of the men stood round while the Corporal unpacked the sandbag.

“Bacon—good bit of bacon; two tins of jam; no butter; sugar, tea. Now ’ow many loaves are there? Let’s see—six—’arf a loaf a man; that’s good. Meat—oh, bloody hell, it’s bully!”

The men, quite forgetting the generosity of the bread ration, cursed the ration as “bloody awful” and went back to their several jobs.

The night’s work started; as it had for the last ten nights, in the same routine. Sometimes there was a traverse to be widened, sometimes a gun position to be dug, sometimes, as to-night, a dug-out that had fallen in to be repaired. But it amounted invariably to the same thing; digging and filling sandbags.

Slowly the hours passed. It was a very quiet part of the line. An occasional machine-gun bullet fizzed over the men’s heads, to bury itself in the bank behind them. But it was safe, as far as any spot could be called safe that was within range of German guns. So far the section had been in the line ten days and had not had a single casualty.

For the first hour or two the men worked cheerily enough, talking and laughing together. Their conversation ran along the usual lines. There were anecdotes of past battles, of hazards that had been shared together. They talked about their chances of leave; what they would do when they got home … après la guerre.

For the first hour or so they worked and gossiped happily. But as the night passed their jokes lost their flavour, conversation flagged; for the most part they worked in silence. They were tired now, unutterably tired; of their work, of their surroundings, of a war which was sapping their years of youth, which seemed unending. They remembered the comforts of ordinary life: sheets, pillows, tablecloths, the routine of an office that once had seemed so irksome, the intimacies of love; all the things that they had once had and might never enjoy again.

Only Walker talked. He was the gun team’s grouser and on the whole they were grateful to him for saying what they felt and were too lazy, too tired to say; or that they thought they shouldn’t say; or that they were glad he had said so that they could tell him to shut up, could argue against him and by adducing arguments to disprove contentions that they knew were justified, might actually succeed in persuading themselves that things were not as bad as they believed them, and indeed knew them to be. They cursed at Walker, his incompetence, his laziness, his complaints; but they knew very well that they would miss him desperately if he were to go.

As there are those who conduct their entire lives eating, reading, talking, making love, to the sound of music—that is to say, with the Radio turned on—so the gun teams worked through the long night with the river of Walker’s vituperation flowing round them. He cursed the war, the army, the general staff, the machine gun corps, the 131st Division, the 305th Machine Gun Company, its third section and, in particular, the second gun team. He cursed the life he had to lead, and the men he led it with. He was bored, bored sick, with the whole business. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get away from it. Anything for a change. The salient was better. The infantry was better. He was going to be an air mechanic. No, he was going to train as a groom for the R.G.A. Anything for a change, any bloody thing, any per bloody thing. His voice flowed on in an even, unhastened flow. It had a singularly soothing effect upon the minds and spirits of Corporal Player’s gun team.

Towards one o’clock the sentry’s suddenly rapped-out challenge announced the nightly visit of the section officers. A minute later Tallent’s voice was enquiring for Walker.

“No, Walker, don’t be alarmed,” he said. “It isn’t trouble this time. Mr. Balliol was wondering if you would care to be his runner.”

Walker drew himself up. The post of runner was a very envied one. You were with an officer all the time. You shared his dugout with his servant. You got good food. You had variety. You were always being sent with messages to details. It was interesting work. It was safer than most jobs. It was a considerable tribute to be singled out for it. Walker savoured to the full the superiority that it gave him over his astonished fellows. He looked down on them with a supercilious contempt. Then he shook his head.

“It’s very good of you, sir. But … well, I dunno … I’ve sort of got used to things ‘ere with the boys.”

He spoke as though he were being asked to leave a party he was enjoying.

But the moment the officers were out of earshot he resumed his litany of wrath. One by one he enumerated the articles of his hate. The war: the army: the general staff, the machine gun corps: the 131st Division, the 305th Machine Gun Company: the third section and its second gun team: the corporal, the members; that a man should have to endure such company.

Further down the trench Hugh was turning to Tallent with some surprise.

“Doesn’t that rather surprise you?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“I should have thought he would have jumped at a softish and certainly quite pleasant job.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn about the old soldier if you think that.”

VI

In England Hugh had imagined that he would find trench life utterly different from the parade ground atmosphere. He was surprised to find how alike it was. There was a difference of atmosphere that made soldiering in France infinitely preferable. In England everyone in authority from a Lance-Corporal upwards behaved as though his immediate junior in rank was trying to shirk his job. In France it was assumed that he was trying. There was an atmosphere of trust, as opposed to distrust; a soldier in the line had two concerns: to get on with his job, the one job that in war-time mattered; and to help the other man to get on with his. In the fighting areas every soldier, from a private to a divisional general, did his best to make things easy for anyone accepted as “a member of the show.” In England everything had been done to make things difficult. Before he had been a week in the line he was to contrast this atmosphere of friendliness and co-operation with the bullying non-commissioned officers of the Inns of Court; the War Office bureaucrats, the depot adjutants; all the people with soft jobs who meant to keep them, who enveloped their activities with a threat: “There’ll be trouble for you if you don’t do this;” as though the soldiers and officers under their command had not enlisted of their own free will. In France there was a freemasonry of friendship and co-operation between all “fighting area” soldiers.

There was that big difference between soldiering in England and in France. There was a difference also of routine. Night became day, day night. You lived in a dug-out instead of in a tent; in Nissen huts instead of barracks; the days of the week had no significance. You did not know whether it was Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You judged time by the number of days you had been in the line. For nights on end you would never wear pyjamas. There were all those and innumerable other surface differences. But such differences were of kind, but not of order. The routine of the line and rest billets was another branch of military life.

Hugh in a very little while adapted himself to the changed atmosphere. It boiled down to the same things. There were inspections of the men and their equipment; seeing that they did not lose discipline in the line. There was his care for their comfort. There was the maintenance of his prestige in the men’s eyes by personal smartness, by occasional proof that he not only knew his job but theirs as well; the slow forging of a bond of sympathy by little remarks and questions, proving that each one of them had a separate and personal significance for him; so that they would not merely respect his uniform; but recognize in him a friend and leader. All that was exactly as it had been in the barrack-room atmosphere of Grantham.

There was his relationship with his senior officers. As a subsection, and later as a section officer, he was far more on his own than he had ever been in barracks. For three or four days on end he would not see his immediate superior. Yet there was a constant feeling of supervision. There were the daily reports to be sent down to Company headquarters. There was the knowledge that at any moment a visit might be expected; that everything must be in order for that visit. The Germans were less than half a mile away; from the artillery observation post he could see their curved helmets moving along an exposed trench. Every evening and every morning there was a half-hour of spasmodic shelling. Every few minutes of the night there would be the sharp pop-pop-pop of a traversing machine gun, the whistle of bullets against the parapet. But it was not of the Germans that he thought when he made sure that screens were set to mask the flash of his gun’s fire; when he satisfied himself that the sentries knew their orders; that the guns and their spare parts were in working order. He was under the orders of his own command. He saw that those orders were carried out, not so that his men would be equipped to combat hostile tactics and conceal their own, but that the Company Commander, when he came round the guns, should find everything in the condition that he had ordered. He no more took the Germans into account in the trenches than he had in the Inns of Court operations in Ash ridge Park.

When they were out of the line in rest billets or in Nissen huts there were the same tactics of smartening up to which troops back from musketry courses or autumn manœuvres had been subjected: the recall to the discipline of the parade ground; of shining buttons; of heels clicked and wrists banged on magazines; that tightening up which the townsman finds so necessary when he returns to his chambers in Albany after a month in Cornwall.

And though there was no longer the relaxation of London and its week-end leaves, there was an equivalent in the day passes to Amiens, and the occasional dinners at the cafés that were turning to rich profit their proprietors’ resolve to remain within distance of the guns. Though he was within sight of German helmets, Hugh did not feel that he was any nearer to the war, here, than he had been in England. Though his guns discharged daily some hundred rounds of ammunition whose indirect fire was supposed to harass German fatigue parties, he did not feel that he was so much on active service, engaged in warfare, as conducting the job of soldiering in another place.

And here, just as in England, he found that his main concern, his main interests, were the personal relations of his fellow officers. In particular those of Rickman and Frank Tallent. They were the most vital personalities in the mess; it was with them that he was brought most in contact; especially with Tallent. At the start, he was his sub-section officer. Later, when he had a section of his own, it invariably happened that their two sections were in line together and at rest together. In the line they formed the habit of dropping in on one another two or three times a week. When they were back in billets they sought each other’s company, arranging their day passes to Amiens and their experiments in French cooking at back area estaminets.

For Hugh his companionship with Tallent was as big a widening of horizons as the change from school to University had been. He saw the world from another angle. It was not that Tallent was informative in talk, or that he was indeed a particularly good conversationalist. He was not. He would talk very quickly, so quickly as to be almost inaudible; then pause, stammer, start off with a rush again, as though his thoughts moved faster than his powers of expressing them; as though he were unwilling to use a word that did not express his exact meaning, but could not find that word without deliberation; as though he were thinking as he talked. Oddly enough, since as a novelist he had a very real gift of narrative, he recounted an anecdote extremely badly. He seemed always to be in a hurry to get to the end quickly; as though he were afraid that he were boring his audience. Only occasionally did he speak fluently and clearly, and then it was without the eager flicker in his eyes; as though he had made up his mind about the matter, knew the exact phrase, with which to convey his meaning, but had lost interest in what was already settled for him. It was not new things, but a new way of seeing things that Hugh learnt from Tallent.

Tallent was in the middle thirties. He was ambitious. He had earned a measure of success. He wanted more success. Yet he had no use for the success that was not of the precise nature of his seeking. He enjoyed the tributaries of success: money, position, fame; yet he could dispense with them. He regarded as means the things that other men regarded as an end. He judged men and matters by the standard of an unworldliness that Hugh had previously associated with eccentrics, neurasthenics, people weak in health, devitalized, who despised what lay beyond their grasp. Tallent did not depise material success; he was thoroughly, healthily capable of enjoying its rewards. But he set no great store by it. He regarded success as the best kind of athlete regards the actual result of a game: as something to be striven at during the game; but not to be brooded over, before and after; as ultimately unimportant.

But there were other things which he did not look on as a game.

It was this indifference to what constitutes for the majority an aim in life that was responsible, not actually for an unpopularity in the mess—that would be to put it too strongly—but the fact that he was not particularly liked. Not one of the men would actually admit the fact, a loyalty to the members of one’s mess forbade that. They would drop such remarks as, “Odd fellow. Moody. I suppose he must find it rather strange being in a place like this, after the kind of life he must have led before.” They called him moody because very often, in contrast to his usual restlessness, he would sit silent and immobile, staring in front of him, apparently at nothing. Hugh, who knew him best, felt that it was at such times that he was most close to happiness.

But it was not his moodiness that set him apart from the others, nor did his position in the public eye make the rest jealous. The company of even a minor celebrity would have been a kind of privilege. They would have enjoyed discussing his peculiarities with officers from other companies. Nor did the fact that before the war he had mixed in a world different from their own, create an obstacle. With all that they could have coped.

“Rum fellow,” they would have said. “Moody, you know; sits silent for hours on end, thinking out his novels, I suppose. Odd the way you meet fellows through the war that ordinarily you’d never be within a mile of. I suppose a fellow like Tallent spent all his time with literary blokes, painters, long-haired poets and the kind of women who take up birds like that. You’d never think it, though, to look at him; seems like everybody else.”

There was no limit to the peculiarities that the new army were ready to overlook. They would even have overlooked it had he been a weakling, had he been inefficient, had he been unable to keep discipline in his section. “Poor devil, he wasn’t built for this kind of life. We do our best to let him down lightly.” But he was none of those things. He was as efficient as they were; as competent, as worldly, as able to cope with wordly problems; for the matter of fact, able to advise most of them on the practical management of their lives. What puzzled Tallent’s brother officers was his indifference to the things they set most store by. The fact of his indifference, never stated, but implied irresistibly in his manner, in the same way that in his novels he implied but never stated his own opinions, conveyed to his fellow officers a criticism of their absorption in interests that to him seemed trivial. They were worried by his aloofness. They never felt quite at ease in his company. They were always happier when he was away. When he left the mess the others shifted in their chairs with a sense of relief, a prospect of comfort; as one does when the window that was causing a draught is closed.

Rickman alone spoke of him with enthusiasm.

“He’s a grand fellow; first-class officer; first-class writer; maybe he takes a little knowing, but when you’ve once taken the trouble to break the ice, there’s no one like him.”

He spoke with an extreme heartiness; but that self-consciousness which Hugh had noticed when Rickman first talked to him about his poetry was always liable to reappear in Tallent’s presence. His attitude towards Tallent was a mixture of mental respect and emotional dislike. Hugh once found him reading Tallent’s latest novel. It was a short book: the study of a couple of late Victorian spinsters; punctilious, undramatic; with a close care for detail; the elaborate recreation of a setting, to which Tallent during a period of training in England had turned for relief from the heavily emotionalized atmosphere of the hour. It was a book addressed to a public that, small in peace time, was necessarily minute in war. It was published unobtrusively, was dropped out of the advertisements after a week, was referred to by the general press as “a relaxation from Mr. Tallent’s more usual and more important work,” but that was treated at length and with respect by those reviewers who regarded the publication of a new book not as news but as an intended contribution to literature.

Rickman put the book down as Hugh came into the mess.

“There’s no doubt about it. This man can write,” he said.

It was said almost grudgingly, as though he would have been relieved if he could have taken the general view, have found it dull and trivial, so that he could have said, “He’s a dull, trivial fellow. Why should I care what he thinks of me?” For he knew that he bored and exasperated Tallent by the interminable production of poems from his tunic pocket. It infuriated him to see on Tallent’s face that look of condescension, to hear his wearily articulated “Yes, I like that” as he handed back the poem. At such moments he hated Tallent. He would have given a great deal to be able to despise what he disliked. But his good taste and his intellectual honesty would not allow him to do that. He tried to persuade himself that he really liked Tallent, because his inability to like a man of merit would have been a proof of deficiency in himself. Because he had so high an opinion of Tallent’s work, because he was proud to be able to recognize there qualities that the many could not see, he more than ever wished to earn Tallent’s approval for his sonnets. He knew that Tallent admired him as a soldier and on the whole liked him as a man. But it was not personal affection, it was not respect for himself as a soldier, but tribute to him as a poet that Rickman wanted. Every time he wrote a sonnet he thought “Now, surely this is good. Surely Tallent will notice that it is.” When he received a letter from the editor of The Poetry Magazine: “Dear Captain Rickman, I am delighted with your sonnet sequence. It will make a fine contribution to our special ‘On Active Service’ number that we are preparing for October,” or better still, when a proof from the Saturday Westminster or a cheque from Country Life proved that he had been admitted to the columns where not only was poetry paid for, but which established poets accepted as a platform, “Surely Tallent will be impressed by that.” He did not know whether he was more angry or disappointed when Tallent handed it back, after a moment’s cursory perusal, with his habitual bored “Yes, I like that.”

Once Hugh asked Tallent why he wouldn’t simulate a little more enthusiasm over the skipper’s sonnets.

“After all, it’s a very amiable weakness. It doesn’t do anybody any harm.”

Tallent had replied impatiently.

“Doesn’t it? No, I suppose it doesn’t. But the whole business makes me sick. A concern like The Poetry Magazine having its ‘On Active Service’ number, fashionable women getting up readings for Charity. Every subaltern with a knack for rhyming getting his poems published and his photograph in the press. And all the time the real poets can’t get a hearing. Oh, I know a great many of them can. I know poetry’s selling as it’s never sold before, and a lot of it’s really good. But there’s a great deal that’s really important being swamped by this deluge of minor verse writing. It’s.…”

He paused, his forehead wrinkled, trying to find the right word to convey his meaning.

“You can’t see that it matters what our friend the sonneteer does with his spare time and a pencil at company headquarters, but when your friends have given their lives to a thing as mine have.… You see, before all this began there was a whole group of us: there was Granville Barker in the theatre, there were Cannan, Lawrence, Mackenzie, Walpole writing novels, there was Harold Monro running the Poetry Bookshop and Poetry and Drama, there was Eddie Marsh editing Georgian Poetry. In our different ways we all seemed to stand for something. But that’s gone now, or going. The only poetry, the only art there’s room for, is the art that fits in with the war; that can be part of an orthodox movement, and that leaves the extreme left out; people like Eliot, and Pound and Flint and Aldington. All that’s tapageur. What’s happening to them? I don’t know. They’ve had their platform taken from them. And they matter. They matter a whole lot. But they’re being elbowed out, while nincompoops like the sonneteer are allowed a hearing.”

A copy of The Tatler was lying on the dug-out table. Tallent picked it up. It contained a full-page portrait of an imposingly handsome woman; bare-shouldered, with high-piled dark hair, with an imperious manner. It was captioned “Indefatigable in War Work.” In smaller print appeared, “A recent photograph of the beautiful Mrs. Roy Rickman who is on the council of the new hospital at Gideon Park. Her husband, a captain in the Machine Gun Corps, is one of the many soldiers in whom the war has revealed latent but unsuspected talents as a poet. He has a volume of sonnets in the press.”

“That,” said Tallent, “is the kind of thing that makes me very sick.”

A few days later the two sections in the line were due to be relieved. It was a night that Hugh was never to forget. For days it had rained steadily. In the late afternoon it became a downpour. The sides of the trench began to crumble and fall into the rising tide of mud. The business of moving the gun kit to the limbers grew minute by minute harder. The men floundered in the slush, the weight of the belt-boxes seeming to tear the arms out of their sockets. The communication trench was continually being blocked. Men were streaming up to the front line staggering under the weight of dixies and sandbags. There was hardly room for the outgoing party to pass. All along the trench men were getting stuck in the mud, having to be dragged out. All the time the rain was lashing against their faces, soaking them through and through.

It was the kind of night on which a relieving party would be late. The relief was due at nine. By half-past eight the gun material had been stacked away on the limbers. But by ten o’clock there was still no sign of a relief. Hugh and Tallent stood in the dug-out mouth stamping their feet and shivering. The men by the limbers huddled together for warmth; the drivers crouched against their mules to protect themselves from the rain. The minutes passed. The mud in the trench rose till in places it was knee-deep; and the men had to trudge across the open.

The limbers were in an exposed position; every now and then bullets from a machine gun would patter about their wheels. But a stage of exhaustion had been reached when the men no longer worried about safety. They were too weary to duck even, at the slow screech of a shell.

The men kept up a murmur of talk that was like the chorus of a play.

“What about peace to-night, kid?”

“At any price.”

“At any bloody price.”

“Crowds just coming out of the Hippodrome in London.”

“Think of Leicester Square to-night, all of ‘em laughing and jolly, and running to the tubes.”

“We could do with a tube to-night.”

“It’s funny to think all that’s going on just the same as it used to.”

“Well, kid, probably last time you was at the Brixton Panto, there was some poor blokes out ‘ere waiting for a damned relief to turn up.”

A runner from Brigade emerged out of the night, singing.

“Is this the way to the Ritz?” he asked.

“Straight on, sonny, that’s the way. Got your gal with yer?”

“Not ‘arf … in this ‘ere sandbag.”

“You’ll want a wash and brush up first.”

“I’m smelling of sweet mud, not violets.”

He passed on, singing.

“Cheery cove.”

“And ‘e ain’t singing for bloody joy, either.”

It was after twelve before the relief arrived. It was one before the positions had been handed over, the guns dismounted, the limbers ready for the long trudge back to billets with foreheads frozen by the rain, eyes red and heavy with hours of watching, puttees and trousers heavy with clinging mud, feet moving mechanically over the rough track, the limbers sticking in the mud and having to be pulled out. Once one of the mules floundered in a shell hole and guns, packs and ammunition had to be unloaded before it could be freed. The grey landscape of lopped trees, roofless houses, broken garden walls, stretching on every side of them, in its vast expanse not one sign of homeliness or comfort; nothing but abandonment and waste, was an appropriate backcloth for the small party of men, struggling on, suffering like the fields and hedgeways, mutely, without understanding why.

It was on the afternoon of such a night that Rickman asked Tallent’s advice on the sonnet sequence that was to form the centre piece of The Poetry Magazine’s “On Active Service” number. There came into Tallent’s face such a look of moral, righteous vituperative indignation that Hugh thought that the outburst was at last to come. For about a minute he looked at Rickman as though he were a scientist surveying some uncatalogued species. Then with surprising quietness, he held out his hand.

“Have you got the proofs there? Good. I’ll have a look at them. I suppose it’s not too late to alter anything? That’s splendid. We must make them as good as we ever can. I don’t suppose there is anything I can suggest but there might be an alternative rhythm, another way of breaking up the metre.”

Rickman was surprised and flattered at Tallent’s interest.

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all, not at all. This is an important occasion. The Poetry Magazine’s ‘On Active Service’ number.… We mustn’t let down your standard.”

He took them over to his cubicle. While Hugh spent the entire afternoon in sleep, Tallent spent a full two hours over Rickman’s proofs. At tea-time he returned them.

“Just a suggestion or two,” he said.

Hugh caught a glimpse of the proofs as Rickman took them. They were practically rewritten from the first line to the last. Rickman kept his temper. He glanced at sheet after sheet, the colour mounting in his cheeks. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. His voice was even-toned. But there was a look in his eyes that not even the most delinquent sergeant had ever seen in the orderly room.

The look frightened Hugh.

“There’s no power on earth, that can keep those two from a real stand-up row.”

VII

On a February morning of grey skies and drizzled rain, Ruth’s child was born: a son. The last sight to fade from pain-dazed eyes as the mist of chloroform laid its peace about her was the broad leafless avenue of chestnuts. As the calming fumes released her the proud line of trees was the first object to grow clear to her.

On the following Friday there was a mellow expression on Lord Huntercoombe’s face as he took his place as chairman of Peel & Hardy’s board that resignations and deaths had reduced to the barest quorum of three members. Before he asked the secretary to read the minutes of the last meeting, he looked from one to the other of his colleagues.

“When I consider that each one of us has at this moment a son serving at the front; when I reflect on the kind of world that we have given to our sons to live in, I suppose it’s foolish to be enthusiastic over the birth of a male child; but I must say that I feel very proud and happy to be a grandfather.”

He paused; then in his customary voice: “Will the secretary please read the minutes to us?”

There was not a great deal on the agenda paper. There rarely was nowadays. The firm was doing better business than it had ever done. The staff was busier than it had ever been. But the problems that arose were of a routine nature and did not need to be referred to the directorate. Smollett’s perky substitute was proving himself not only popular but efficient. The board meetings rarely lasted for more than half-an-hour. The moment the actual business was over the chairman took his leave.

Prentice’s eyes followed him as he walked slowly, with bent shoulders, towards the door.

“He’s looking very old,” he said, when the secretary had gone and they were alone. “How old is he, seventy? I don’t suppose he’ll last a great deal longer.”

And then, thought Balliol, his grandson would be the heir. Hugh had said that it would be strange to be the uncle of a peer. But it seemed to him far stranger to be the grandfather of one.

To a man of his generation living in the country the gap between the aristocracy and the gentry had been far greater than it had been for a man of Hugh’s generation living in London. Distinctions of class were less marked, or less discernible, in a great city, where peers and commoners were meeting frequently on equal terms; particularly since Edward VII had admitted Jews and Americans and industrialists into society, and Lloyd George’s budget had lowered the prestige and power of the Upper Chamber.

It had been different in his day. Living in the country he had been conscious of as much difference between his father and the peer who owned the greater part of the neighbourhood, as there was between himself and the local doctor. He would have no more expected his sister to marry an aristocrat than the son of a local tradesman. Country life had been communal and friendly. Everyone had been on speaking terms with everybody else. But the feudal distinctions had been rigidly maintained. There was the aristocracy, then the gentry, which might or might not include the rector; there were the big farmers, the doctor, the lawyer; then in a descending scale according to the dimensions of their activities, the local tradesmen, the small-holders, the peasants. Each had his own pigeon-hole.

Hugh never had known that world. By the time he was old enough to recognize the social framework, it had gone, never to return; its going symbolized by the inability of a family such as his to maintain its standard of living out of the land it had inherited; so that it had either to expand or to contract. The gentry class, as Victorian England had known it, had disappeared. It had been the framework of the feudal system, maintaining the balance between the peasantry and the aristocracy. With its disappearance the feudal system had gone too. So that to a man like Hugh that whole world would have the interest of a museum piece. To himself who had been nurtured in that world, the old distinctions still had significance. It did seem to him fantastic that his grandson should be the next heir to Tavenham.

He wondered in what light Huntercoombe saw the change. The different position of his own class had clearly so innoculated him that he was able to accept any further change with equanimity. When the question of recommending Smollett for a commission had arisen, it was Prentice, not Huntercoombe, who had expressed surprise. Huntercoombe had seen in the raising of a man like Smollett to the officer class a fusion of upper-middle, with middle-middle class, which exactly paralleled the fusion in his own world of the gentry and the aristocracy. Victor Tavenham and Hugh were brothers, and Hugh and Smollett were brother officers. And just as the differences between Hugh and Tavenham were so minute that a foreigner would not have been aware of them, so Balliol was forced to wonder, when Smollett paid his first visit after he had been gazetted, what difference a foreigner would see, apart from physique and health, between him and Hugh. Smollett looked very well in khaki. Military training had brought a healthy glow to his cheeks; he had squared his shoulders, set back his head. He looked a real officer, not a tailor’s dummy. That was the thing about uniform. Men who had never known how to dress, who had always looked wrong somewhere, suddenly became all right. “It’s hard to know where one is nowadays,” he thought.

It was on the occasion of one of Smollett’s visits, on a midsummer afternoon, that the door of Balliol’s office was noisily flung open, with no preliminary knock, and a tall, khaki-clad figure was striding into the room, with a “Hullo, father!”

“My dear boy!”

Hugh looked so well, so unchanged that it was difficult to believe that it was six months since that bleak winter morning, when they had set out to Victoria in the dark. For those six months while he himself had been following the ordinary routine of the city day, his son had been in hourly danger of his life, had known cold, exposure, hunger. But his manner was of one returning for a week-end leave. There was the same absence of ceremony; an atmosphere so casual that Smollett’s appearance as an officer seemed more of an occasion than Hugh’s return from France.

“Here’s someone you did not expect to see,” said Balliol.

The last time that they had met, Smollett had been Smollett to Hugh, Hugh had been Mr. Hugh to Smollett. Now they were brother officers. The adjustment in their positions was underlined by the technical nature of Smollett’s greeting. He talked military shop. He asked questions; he compared notes; he made great use of his permission to address Hugh as Balliol. He made it abundantly clear that two equals were meeting on equal terms. When he had at last gone with a, “Cheerio, Balliol. I’ll be coming across soon to join you,” Hugh turned to his father with an amused smile.

“I wonder how people like that will feel when it’s all over and they’ve got to go back to where they were.”

At an ordinary time Balliol would have accepted such a remark as the cue for an impersonal, unbiassed, lightly-phrased monologue. But on his son’s face was an eager, self-absorbed look that did not suggest a potential audience.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“Father, I’ve no idea.”

He was seated on the table; swinging his putteed legs, tapping his cane against the heavy, nail-shod soles. He looked up, laughing. The pictured memory of that parting came back to Balliol. His son’s sudden impatient fretfulness, the girl bareheaded, in her fur coat, hurrying down the platform, the determined walk towards the bookstall. So that was how the land lay, was it? It had been real, then: not simply the mood and moment coinciding. Hugh had his plans, all right. If not an exact plan, still, a kind of plan.

“You won’t be dining at home to-night, then?”

“No, not to-night.”

“We’ll have your room made up?”

Hugh hesitated.

“Yes … yes, do that. But leave the key under the door. I can’t tell when it’ll be, not yet. …” He paused, then looked up quickly. “I’m sorry, father. I’m longing to see you all, to tell you everything. But it’s all a fog. I don’t know where I am. I shan’t know till this evening’s over.”

But you do know, Balliol thought. You know very well what it is you’re planning. Only you don’t want to talk too soon. You won’t, in the vernacular of the proverb, count unhatched chickens. But you know what you’ll be saying to her to-night. You know the answer you’re expecting. You’re already picturing the scene at Ilex to-morrow morning when you walk down to breakfast with the announcement, “Father, get that silk hat out. You’ll be needing it to-morrow.”

Balliol could read into his son’s mind; but he asked no questions. The less one asked the more one learnt. People preferred to tell things in their own way, in their own time. Besides, there was not much that his son could tell him. He could guess at his son’s thoughts as he listened to the heavily-nailed soles clattering down the stairs.

And indeed in the actual diagnosis of Hugh’s state of mind he was accurate enough. Hugh’s thoughts, Hugh’s plans, were as his father guessed at them. But the emotions that lay behind those thoughts and plans, the emotions that coloured them, gave them their particular quality and meaning, was a closed door to Balliol. As Hugh ran out into the sunlit street, he was lifted by an emotion peculiar to his day and race; to be understood only by those who actually have experienced it, who have seen suddenly with new eyes a prospect familiar to them since childhood in the contrasted light of the desolate world that they have left.

It was an emotion far more complex, far deeper than the excitement of any ordinary homecoming after no matter how long a separation. It was far more than the feeling, “Here I am back once again where I belong. It hasn’t altered. It never will alter. It is eternal in the scheme of things. However far I travel, I shall find this waiting.” It was in part that feeling. But it was far more than that. Not only was there the contrast between the loneliness and the squalor that had been left and the friendly familiar beauty that had been recovered, but there was the explanation and the justification of that contrast. It was a feeling that was illogical, unreasoned; that the cool brain of an examining counsel could ridicule in fifteen questions; but it was a feeling that encompassing reason, silenced it.

At the corner of Bury Street and Piccadilly, Hugh paused, watching the stream of London’s traffic clatter past. It was after five. The heat of the day had lessened. The pale cobalt of the sky had deepened. The sun had lost its metallic quality. It quivered in luminous, caressing folds on the crowded pavements; the slate roofs; the patterned awnings; on the taxis snorting and grunting with changes of gear and screech of brakes; on the large low-bodied cars soundlessly increasing and diminishing their speed; on the buses, with their top decks crowded. It was an ordinary London scene, such as Hugh had absorbed without noticing it a hundred times. But to-day, seen after six months’ separation, he saw it suddenly as in itself it was; saw it transfigured, so that for one moment this ordinary London scene became the symbol of London’s life, its variety, its greatness. This eager stir of life, the hurrying crowds, the officers and soldiers, the brisk martial stride; the salutes given and returned; the old men in their stiff hats slowly sauntering towards their clubs; the languid ladies pausing before shop windows; the eager, bright-eyed girls laughing up into the faces of the men beside whom they trotted, from whose khaki arms they hung; the nondescript shabby men, walking slowly as though there was no object in their walk; seeing all that and realizing how each different type formed the sum of the city’s greatness, realizing that he, too, was part of it, that he drew his life and strength from it, that without it he was nothing, since he had been born and bred here, as much as any tree planted in kindly soil; that here in this city was all of life that really mattered to him; that should the life of this city perish, there would remain no life for him that would be worth the living; seeing all that, because of that sight, knowing how, whatever happened, the city’s life blood must flow unchecked, he knew that if the price of that flowing were the desolation that he had left, the desolation he was to return to, the price was not too high.

Once to every soldier such a moment came. It might come at the sight of a familiar copse, of a half-ploughed field with drifting rain, at the sight of a tall-pointed tower, the calm of a cathedral close. It came in different guises. But it came: for a moment only; as a revelation, to be lost, set aside, mislaid, but never forgotten altogether; so that later in spite of argument, there would remain at the back of the soldier’s mind the knowledge that “Yes, there had been a purpose to it; it was not all loss; something worth fighting for had been preserved.”

For a moment the mood flickered, deeply, unforgettably; then once again Hugh Balliol was the thing he seemed to be: an officer on his first hour of leave, excited with the prospect of a fortnight’s freedom, his heart beating quickly because in an hour’s time the girl who for six months had been dreamed of, planned for, would be walking across the lounge of a restaurant to meet him.

He had arranged that they should meet at half-past-six. They would have a cocktail. They would consult the theatre list; they would despatch page boys to ring up the box offices; they would devise for his first dinner in England the most elaborate, the most recondite of menus. That was how he had outlined the plan to her. With her even as with his father, he had a horror of counting un-hatched chickens. But it was not in terms of menus, of theatre lists that he saw the evening.

He had arranged to meet her at half-past-six. But by quarter-past he had taken his place at the corner table from which he would be able to see her as she came through the glass doors, out of the street, walking slowly, looking around her, with that quick, birdlike dart of the eye from side to side. Then the questing look changed suddenly to a smile as he came forward towards her. He could picture the scene distinctly, so often had he rehearsed it during the long wet nights when he had tramped from one gun position to another. Yet in spite of his excitement he was nervous, uncertain of how they would feel after this long interval; whether it would not be the meeting of two strangers; whether in spite of all their letters they might not find that they had drifted away from one another. He was absurdly, unreasonably nervous, lest in spite of the distinctness of that pictured scene, they should not recognize each other. He had never seen her in summer things; his mental pictures were of someone wrapped close in furs; or at night, bare shouldered under the glare of lights. Would she look very different in flowered chiffon, in a wide-brimmed floppy hat? How awful if after these months of waiting, the first thing he said to her was to be “It is you, isn’t it?“ It was so ridiculous a prospect that he laughed away its possibility. That couldn’t happen. At the same time, something like it might. Their eyes might meet in a questioning glance, a making sure, a saying to oneself—of which each would be aware—” It is? Yes, of course it is. It must be.” Something like that might happen.

It didn’t, though.

It happened just as he had dreamed it; as things so rarely do. He had sat watching at the same time the clock above the entrance and the glass doors through which she would come to him. He had counted the hurrying minutes: twenty-five past, twenty-seven past, the half-hour, twenty-eight to, twenty-four to. At any moment she would be coming now. Twenty-to, quarter-to. His nervousness and excitement alike increasing. Had something gone wrong? Wasn’t she coming then? Ten-to. And then suddenly she was there. It was just as he had dreamed it. She was just as he had dreamed her. She came through the glass doors just as he had known she would, with a quick breathless half-trotting step, because she had known that she was late, that had changed instantly on her entrance to the slow drawled stroll that was appropriate to the leisured atmosphere of a restaurant. And just as he had expected her eyes darted quickly like a bird’s from side to side, looking from one table to another in search of him. And then, as he had expected, there came that bright flooding smile as he came towards her.

Afterwards, too, it was as he had hoped; as he had hoped rather than as he had dreamed. He had not pictured clearly that first ten minutes. They might be shy, self-conscious. There would be the making of conversation, the quick gulping of a cocktail, till they had found their way back to their old easy intimacy. That was how he had feared it might be. It wasn’t. There was no sense of constraint, embarrassment. It was just as though there had been no separation, as though it was only yesterday that they had danced together. And though it was with light talk of theatres, music-halls, and menus that they took their places beside their cocktails at the corner table, it was not in any spirit of making conversation; it was the interlude in a long talk temporarily interrupted. As Hugh sat beside her, while she chatteringly discussed to what play they would go after dinner, he knew very well how easy it would be to say to her the things that during the long hours of night marches he had phrased and rephrased in those endless imaginary conversations.

His heart was lifted with a tense thrilled exhilaration. Here at last she was; the girl whose image had watched beside him through those long six months; for whose letters day after day he had counted the minutes for the arrival of the ration limber; who had stood for him in his exile as the composite vision of all that life held of graciousness, sweetness, light, adventure. During those six months he had not, apart from the exchange of an occasional facetious banality with a waitress in Amiens, spoken to a single woman. The world of women, its charm, its colour, its decoration, had not existed for him. During those six months, she had been all women for him. Her image had walked beside him, preserving him from despair. “There is a world elsewhere,” he had told himself. “One day I shall be again beside her. None of this will count, none of this will matter.” So had his thoughts run. And the miracle had been accomplished. He was beside her. Nothing else in the world existed.

With an ease that would have astonished him had he been capable at such a moment of detached self-study, the long-stored sentences poured, wave-like, one upon another: a flood of adoring epithets. With bowed head she listened, on her face such a look of rapt content as you see upon the stone-cut features of a statue before whose altar a priest swings incense. As he paused, she lifted her head, looking straight into his eyes fondly, gratefully. Across the table she stretched out her hand to his. With his fingers folded about hers, he put the question to which that long flow of words had been the prelude.

“How soon can we get married? To-morrow, or must we wait till the day after?”

She smiled, fleetingly; then her face grew serious. Her voice, when it replied, was firm.

“Darling, I’m not going to marry you,” she said. “Not now.”

It was said firmly, decisively. But he refused to accept its implication.

“You don’t expect me to take that answer?”

“It’s the only one that I can give you.”

“I’m going to badger you with proposals till you say ‘Yes.’”

“I shan’t say it.”

He refused to believe that. She felt about him in the same way that he was feeling about her. She must be. Wasn’t she wearing on her finger the ring that he had sent to her from Amiens? It was simply that she needed to be persuaded; to be wooed; to be convinced though she already was convinced. She wanted to set a trial to his persistence. To make sure that he really loved her. Well, he would convince her on that score all right.

“Badger with proposals” was the right description for the tactics that Hugh adopted. He proposed by telegram. He proposed by letter. He proposed by telephone. He proposed with flowers, with chocolates, with offerings of handkerchiefs and gloves. He proposed over a lunch-table, a tea-table, while they were dancing, in the intervals of a play, on the golf course as they walked from green to tee. He proposed in taxis and tubes, on the tops of buses. He proposed lightly, seriously, flippantly, despairingly; with appeals to her brain, with appeals to her emotion. For the first day or so his proposals were light-hearted. He was playing a game that he enjoyed. He was certain of his ultimate success. It was annoying that his honeymoon should be curtailed, but it would be the more exciting when it came. After the third day he became less certain. By the fifth day he became doubtful. By the end of the week he had become alarmed.

“But I believe you really mean this nonsense.”

“Of course I do. And it isn’t nonsense.”

Alarm became despair. He tried to break down her opposition, fiercely, through her senses and emotions. On the way from restaurants to theatres, from theatres to dance clubs, he would plead to her, close-held within his arms.

“But you love me. You must love me. You couldn’t be like this if you didn’t love me.”

“Darling, I do love you.”

“Then why won’t you marry me?”

“Oh, darling, why must we go into, all that again?”

At other times, as they sat opposite each other at a restaurant, or as they motored out into the country for a day at Ranelagh or on the river, he would argue; bringing up the long lines of reasons that he had marshalled through the imaginary conversations of a sleepless night. Reasons that during those imaginary conversations would seem unassailable, would be met next day with the same rigid resolve.

“It’s no good arguing, Hugh, my mind’s made up. I’m not going to commit myself to anything. It isn’t fair to you, to me, to anyone. You enlisted for the duration. We’ve got to live for the duration. Marriage is something that’ll go on after the war. I don’t know what I’ll be, what I’ll want, when the war’s over. But I do know this. It’s going to be a fresh world. I’m going to be in a position to make a fresh start in it.”

With that one argument she met all his arguments. She would sit silent, half-listening, her head bent. Sometimes she would look up at him with a look in her eyes that he was to remember afterwards. “You spoil everything,” she would say. “And we could have such fun.” In her voice there would be a wistful note. Sometimes he would grow angry with her, using arguments of which he was ashamed; using the one weapon that no soldier should use. “Fun, indeed! It’s all very well for you to talk of fun. But this may be the last leave I’ll ever have.” He loathed and despised himself for such an exploitation of her pity. He was aware of her recoil from it, of the barrier of self-defence that she flung up, so that she became on her guard with him, never relaxing, never her real self, on the alert to steer the conversation out of dangerous waters; thinking before she answered; so that there was no more any longer of that happy intimacy, that sense of being at one with one another. They were enemies, watchful, distrustful, cautious.

For three days, three wretched interminable days, it went on like that. Then suddenly Hugh realized that it was no use; that no argument could move her, that she was not to be swept off her feet, that nothing he could do or say would alter her resolve; realized it in the very middle of one of their interminable arguments when they faced each other like enemies across the table of a restaurant. And just as a boxer will in the very middle of an exchange of blows, realize that the game is up and drop his fists, so Hugh right in the very middle of a sentence, checked the flow of words, paused, let a smile displace a frown.

“I’m sorry. I quit. I don’t know why I’ve been going on like this. It’s no use, I see that now.”

And just in the same way as when a fight is finished, the enmity that was between two boxers is concluded instantly, so with that one admission of her will, the enmity that was between them ended. They could meet once again as friends, openly, with nothing to conceal from one another. The friendly smile came back into her eyes.

“It never was any use,” she said. “But I thought you’d never realize it.”

And just as two boxers when the fight is over will compare notes, revealing the secrets that during the fight they were at such pains to conceal, asking “Did that left hook in the second really shake you?” “Did you think you’d got me when I took that count?” So now they could confess to one another what had been from the beginning in their thoughts.

“I never thought you’d want to marry me. Not on this leave anyhow,” she said.

“But you knew that I meant it that last day at Victoria?”

“That was different. I meant it too, then. But I thought that you’d feel differently after you’d been out there.”

“That I’d change my mind about you?”

“No, not that. Just that you’d feel differently.” She paused. “There was a man I met on leave. Two months ago. I’ve never forgotten what he said. ‘At a time like this we should not look ahead. We should live like mayflies that are destined for death at sundown.’ It seemed such an odd way of putting it. I’ve never forgotten it. I thought that’s how you might feel after you’d been out there for a time.”

It was said casually enough, but through that second sight which is granted now and again to lovers who by identifying themselves with another person, by letting themselves be absorbed by another person, are able to guess at her thoughts, sensations, intimations; thoughts that are as much theirs as hers, Hugh knew for very certain that her meeting with this man had not so much made her expect her half fiancé to feel differently about her as it had made her feel differently about him. “Who was the man?” he asked.

“I’ve forgotten his name. I don’t think I ever knew it. He’s someone that I met that once, and don’t ever expect to see again.”

“Was he in love with you?”

“What an absurd question!”

She had not answered it directly. He looked at her, curiously, inquiringly. That man, whoever he was, had meant something very definite in her life.

“I wonder whether if you hadn’t met him you would have been ready to marry me when I came back.”

A thoughtful look came into her face, as though that particular problem had been set to her for the first time.

“Would I? I might have. I think I should have. Possibly. Oh, I don’t know. Why look backwards? It’s as foolish as looking forward. We’ve this minute to live in. That’s all we know. He was right. We ought to live like mayflies, in a mayfly world.”

She looked at him with that oddly wistful look that he was to remember afterwards.

It was on July the first that she said that, across a lunch-table. As he came out into a sunlit Piccadilly, the paper-boys were shouting the news of a great advance, across a thirty-five mile battle-front.

So it had come at last, then, the big push for which ever since Loos the higher commands had been preparing. It was appropriate that it should have come on such a day. It struck the right note of finality. This business was settled, and soon would be that other one. Already as likely as not his division would have been hurried south. He would return to the bustle of last minute preparations. There would be action, a curtain falling on a curtain. And afterwards a new world to be adjusted. A world where there was no “her” to dream about; where the half of his company would have been shot to pieces; where everything would have to be rebuilt. There would be time then to wonder what kind of future he must build himself. In the meantime there was battle waiting; and the last three days of a leave that had been divided completely into two divisions: the hours he had spent with Joyce, and those that he had spent with his family, and among his friends. So that in retrospect it seemed to him that there had been two leaves, not one; distinct, separate, consecutive. The story of his foiled love-affair and the resumed life of Ilex.

With his father he spent more time than sons did usually on their return from France in talks about the business, about their plans for the future; about the war; conducted on that note of impersonal intimacy that exists between fellow members of a club who speak openly with one another, welcome each other generously, sit at the same table when they are without a guest, consider themselves “bosom friends”; yet were one of them to take a two-year trip to the jungles of the Amazon the other would be unlikely to notice his absence from their club. Hugh and his father enjoyed each other’s company, but there was no question of their being indispensable to one another.

One afternoon Hugh motored down to Tavenham. Victor had been slightly wounded in the shoulder. He was on sick leave. He did not expect to be sent back to France before the autumn. Ruth in the summer of her recovered health wore a beauty that he had never before suspected. She was transfigured by happiness and fulfilment. Victor and she were living in the glow of a second honeymoon. Hugh’s nephew, a healthy, pop-eyed object was just becoming aware that it had fingers. Lying on its back it would play contentedly with them before its face, during the wakeful hours of the afternoon. He, anyhow, would be spared his uncle’s and his father’s fate.

Hugh had the same feeling about Helen, when he took her to the Zoo, watching her excited absorption in the squirrel house. She was six years old when the war had started. She would have no clear memories of pre-war England. She would never know what it was to handle a gold half-sovereign. Her early memories would be of war-time London. The world which had been destroyed in August 1914 would not be a personal memory, but a period in history. Between the men and women of his generation and of hers there would be a gulf that Francis’s generation would find it hard to bridge. Francis had fallen between two worlds. He could remember pre-war England, his early ideas had been drawn from the conditions that existed then. He had been educated at the start, to fill a place in a world that would continue the traditions of pre-war England. His education was like the changing of horses in mid-stream. He was planted firmly in neither world. Hugh was not certain that after the war the business of self-adjustment would not be more difficult for him than for any of them.

The school authorities had allowed Francis one night in London in celebration of his brother’s leave. Francis was at the typical fifteeen-year-old stage when one day a boy looks nearly a man, the next a grubby street urchin. He was incapable of sustained tidiness. He was able to smarten himself for one appearance; but within an hour or so his hair would be rumpled, or his collar dirty, his tie askew, his boots muddied, one trouser leg turned up, the other down; the collar of his coat rucked up. He was at the stage when a boy’s public appearances do not confer credit on a parent. He was, however, alert, animated, talkative, with none of the sulky secretiveness that had made him as a child difficult and uncomfortable to approach. He was on the contrary definitely and outspokenly rebellious. He found his elder brother a fitting audience.

“Now tell me,” he would say, “how often did the Corps parade in your time?”

“Once a week.”

“Did you have section drill?”

“Hardly ever; an occasional one before a competition.”

“And what about P.T.?”

“There used to be an hour’s P.T. a week, by forms.”

“There, that’s what I tell them,” Francis expostulated. “Nowadays we have two parades a week. We have section drill twice a week. We have P.T. literally every morning before breakfast. Twenty minutes of it.”

“There’s a war on.”

“Yes, I know. That’s what they say every time they want us to do something we don’t like. But it’s such nonsense, and so illogical. We’re told at one moment that the men who took commissions in 1914 straight from the public schools and universities were the perfect officer type; that they could walk straight from the cricket field to the parade ground. Well, if that’s so, and I expect it is so, why can’t they give us the same training as they gave you? What was good enough for you ought to be good enough for us. You didn’t have to spend all your spare time on section drill and P.T. classes. Why should we?”

The indignation was so genuine and the argument so persuasive that Hugh declined to be lured into controversy.

“Everyone gets a bit hysterical in war-time. People want to do things even if they’re not much use, just so that they can feel they’re doing something. Schoolmasters who aren’t at the war manage to calm their consciences by giving themselves a lot of trouble, supervising P.T. classes and section drill.”

“That may be all right for them. What about us?”

“Most of us are doing a good many things we don’t much like just now.”

“I thought you’d say that. I’m so sick of having the war brought home to me.”

In spite of his rebellion he was making a very tolerable progress at the school. Balliol had been right in his prophecy that starting from scratch, released from scratch, released from the handicap of his blue cap education, he would amass prizes and promotion at an agreeable rate. He had already collected two war-savings certificates, and expected to be rewarded with at least one more at the end of the term. With dramatic pride he reserved this announcement for his mother’s ears.

“I shall have a library by the time the war’s over.”

Jane looked puzzled.

“After the war? I don’t understand, my dear. Don’t you get given your prizes when you win them?”

It was explained to her.

“We’re given war-saving certificates instead of prizes, Mother. Or rather, the school authorities buy war-saving certificates with the prize money. When the war’s over they’ll sell the certificates and give us prizes.”

“That sounds a very sensible idea.”

The apathy with which she received the news of Francis’s success in contrast with the excitement she had displayed previously over his least achievement, typified for Hugh an odd change of manner in his mother.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked his father. “She seems quite different. She does not seem to be aware of what’s going on around her. She only seems half here. Yet she looks very well, and happier really than I’ve ever seen her.”

“She’s very busy now. That’s made a difference. It’s given her an occupation. It’s taken her mind off things. Most women of our class are discontented because they haven’t enough to do.”

He supposed that was the reason. But he could not help wondering whether his father, who had watched his mother day by day, was as conscious of the change in her as he, who after an interval of six months could compare the mother he found on his return with the mother he had said good-bye to.

“Yet she looks well. She looks happy. There can’t be anything to worry over.”

VIII

Side by side, like trains running on parallel tracks, separate and distinct, his two leaves ran their way to the last rushed morning at Victoria: a day of blue sky and sunlight, with the air keen and fresh as he walked with his parents down the North End Road to the hill’s foot; with the trees by the terrace scarcely moving; with the few dove-coloured clouds stationary against the arched backcloth of the sky; with the promise of a windless warmth; of the sea glass-like; with a haze of heat so that the white cliffs would be out of sight before the high column of Napoleon took shape above the clustered climbing houses. As the tube rushed into the dark tunnel below the hill, he craned his neck to catch a last glimpse of the low wide roof of Ilex. Then as the daylight was extinguished he spread out his Times. So the battle was continuing; the advance was continuing. It wouldn’t be long before they had flung his division into it.

In every way this summer leave-taking was different from that bleak winter morning. There was no need for any impatient bullying of porters. He knew there would be room for him in the Pullman. He had arranged that the night before. If there was anyone he knew upon the train, he could wait till he was on the boat to find it out. There was no sense in buying a lot of papers. He would be fast asleep before they had passed Dulwich. There was nothing to be flustered over: nothing on his mind to prevent him standing in quiet talk beside his parents, till the guard’s whistle blew, and the slamming of the doors started down the platform’s length. No leave-taking could have been less like that other one.

Nor afterwards could anything have been less like. This time there was no long wait at Camières; no bother with R.T.O’s. The blue-hatted captain at Boulogne had very precise instructions for all officers returning to recognized units from a leave. There was a night that he could spend in the officers’ club, or some hotel or other if he preferred. At six” next morning a train would be leaving for the line. He had got to be on that. His time was his own till then. That evening after dinner he walked through the streets of the upper town. Dusk was falling. Windows were tightly shuttered for fear of aircraft; lamps were dimmed, their tops painted so that no more than a cone of light was flung upon the pavement. There was hardly any traffic. Not only the sidewalks but the cobbled streets were crowded, with officers, with soldiers, with women who caught at the sleeve of the khaki tunics as they passed, flashing electric torches into their faces; with shabby down-at-heel civilians whispering the secrets of their sisters’ charms. There was no longer any reason why Hugh should withhold himself as for six long months he had done. He might never again hear the sound of a woman’s laughter. There was no reason now why he should stand back. But he shrugged his shoulders. A time would come for that; later, but not now. He turned back to the lower town, to the shipping that flanked the harbour’s side, to the brasseries, and the kindly anodyne of wine.

Next morning he began the slow jolting journey to the line.

It was a different journey back, to a different landscape, to a part of France that was unscarred by warfare: a fertile well-tended countryside, with hayricks, windmills, cottages. Their camp was pitched in an open meadow, by a farm. Children ran along the fence, selling chocolates and cigarettes. The old madame at the farm had a liberal supply of eggs which she marketed at a fabulous profit with the manner of one who makes a present. There was nothing she would not do for the brave boys.

It was an ironically rural station for troops engaged upon their ten days of intensive training. For on that point there was no attempt at secrecy. Every man in the division knew that these long hours of parades, of marches, of manœuvres were a physical and military preparation for the Somme battlefields. The eminent divine who addressed them on their last Sunday before they were despatched south was in a valedictory mood.

A hot and sultry afternoon had followed upon a morning of dripping golden mists. The 305th brigade, formed up for Church Parade in hollow squares, listened listlessly to the repetition of the well-known prayers. Before the service there had been an inspection by the divisional general, and the only sentiments at all approaching the religious were those of the men who had come on parade with slightly dusty boots, of whom one half were thanking God that they had not had their names taken, while the others were cursing Him that they had.

At the words “Will you be seated, please?” a faint murmur of relief was whispered over the hollow square. The sermon at last, Gratefully the men stretched themselves on the warm, dry grass; lying on their backs, watching the fleecy clouds travel in leisurely procession across the sky.

Slowly the wind of words passed over them.

“You are fighting for all that is noblest in humanity; for all that distinguishes the human being from the beast. Your cause is glorious and just. Some of you will never return from the hazards that lie ahead of you. But in such a cause it is glorious for a man to lay down his life. With blessed banners you are entering the battle. You are fighting not only for your King, but for the King of Kings.…”

The flood of rhetoric flowed on. Hugh resting upon his elbow beside Frank Tallent scarcely listened. He was following the train of his own thoughts. To-morrow they were going south. There would be an end one way or the other to the suspense that ever since that last lunch had troubled him. That was settled. But till this was too, there could be no starting of a life afresh, no seeing of a way clear. There was an interval of marking time: a tense, nerve-strained interval.

In the mess he was conscious of it. An unworded feeling: “Let’s not commit ourselves. Let’s not do anything definite; not now; not till this thing is over. Then we can discover where we stand.” In particular was he aware of this in the relations between Tallent and Roy Rickman. Sooner or later it was certain things must reach a head. Ever since Tallent had rewritten Rickman’s poems in proof, they had grown more and more nervously aware of one another. Sooner or later their irritation with one another would find expression. But each was desperately anxious to postpone the issue. They adopted an elaborate tact towards each other. They steered clear of dangerous subjects. When they discussed literature, it was always in the past; as something dead. They never discussed a living writer. There was a tacit, unframed agreement to let things wait, to get this settled first.

Among the men and among the other officers there was the same, though less taut atmosphere of suspense.

“It’s a difficult time,” Rickman said to Hugh. “The company’s never been in a battle before: as a single unit. A great many of the men have; but that’s another thing. No unit’s really united till it has been in a show. There’s a comradeship that nothing can ever really break between the men who’ve been through the same show together. You’ll see the change afterwards. There’ll be an entirely different atmosphere. There’ll be a unity, that there isn’t now. And yet oddly enough, a show like this destroys a company. It isn’t just the men who are going to be killed. It’s those that are left. They don’t know what’s ahead of them now. They’re fearless because they don’t know what there is for them to be afraid of. But when they do know, when they’ve seen, and learnt, they’re not going to be the same. They’ll need new blood, recruits who’ve yet to learn. That’s what’s tragic: the knowledge that this company we’ve worked so hard at it will never be as good as it is now, till we’ve brought strangers in.”

Of all that Hugh thought as he lay there on his elbows, hardly aware of the sermon swelling now to its peroration, to the last exhortation to courage, the last assurance that “no peace was possible that was not a complete and utter victory, till the perfidious foe was left without the power to do harm,” the final promise that for all those who fell awaited a reward not of this earth’s giving “not as the world gives, gives He unto you.” In forty-eight hours he too would have seen and learnt. He would know what there was to see and know.

Forty-eight hours later he was leaning against the parapet of a shallow trench while a hail of shells burst round him. He knew now. For the last twenty hours he had known, what war was really like. Leaning there while the shells crashed round him, flinging up their fountains of mud and steel, while the men cowered behind their traverse; while the whine of the English shells mingled with the whine of the German shells above his head, he tried to find, in a desperate attempt to occupy his mind, a simile that would explain the contrast between that and war as he had seen it during the trench routine of the winter months.

He found a simile.

He thought of sickness as the ordinary healthy man pictures it. There are headaches, there are bilious attacks. There are colds, there are epidemics of influenza, with ricochetting temperatures and a night or two of anxiety. There are the stock ailments: measles, whooping cough, chicken-pox; there were accidents like sprained ankles, broken collar-bones, dislocated wrists. It was in such terms that the average healthy man saw sickness.

And then one day he is taken round a hospital. He sees what sickness is for those that are really ill. The operating tables, the rubber gloves, the knives, the chloroform, the antiseptic bandages, the suppurating wounds, the injections of morphia and strychnine; he thinks, “Is this what sickness really is?”

The simile held true. Trench routine bore the same relation to the warfare of the battlefield that the casual sickness of the healthy man bore to the ill health of the permanent invalid; that headaches and feverish colds bore to diseases, to organic ailment. In trench routine there were the discomforts of cold, exposure, lack of sleep; there was the unending friction of exhausted nerves; there was at night the sharp ping of bullets, the occasional direct hit with a shell, when a dug-out would be blown to pieces, and casualties rushed to a field dressing station. It was this that the eminent visitors to the line were shown: the publicists, politicians, priests, who went home imagining they had been shown war.

But this; the desolate carnage of the battlefield; this was an altogether other thing, the long unending plain of mud holes, water-filled, precariously lined by duckboard tracks; the bombardments through which it was impossible to make one’s voice carry beyond a traverse; when the shells hailed down so fast that you could not distinguish individual trajectories when there would be a roar at one side or another; and a fountain of earth and iron tossed in a high cascade; when the stretcher bearers were fewer than their tasks, when not only No Man’s Land but the long stretch of reclaimed land over which the tide of field-grey uniforms had receded slowly was littered with the bodies of distorted and unburied men.

During the days of trench routine Hugh had often wondered when he had marched his section up the line alone along a lonely road what he would do if a stray shell were to burst among his men; what would he do with the wounded? Would he detail men to take them back to a dressing station, or would he just leave one man to look after them, having sent a runner in search of stretcher bearers? His job was to take four gun-teams into the line to relieve a section. Was his first duty to the section he was detailed to relieve or to the wounded? It was a point that he had pondered more than once as he had marched his men up the line along a lonely road. The occasion to settle it had never come. Not during the days of trench routine.

Last night it had come, however. With shell fire sweeping every road; with every dump, every cross-road the target for artillery. It had come. There had been no question then about what to do. The guns had to be got into their place, the half-wounded could care for the badly wounded. There were stretcher bearers and dressing stations. When a man fell sick at home there was laid a responsibility on amateur capacity. In hospitals the professionals took charge.

Leaning now against the parapet, in the late afternoon while the brazen frenzy of the evening hate broke round them, he could not assemble detail by detail the disorder of that relief; the shells bursting among the limbers, the screaming of the mules; the effort to make his voice heard above the din, the hurried conferences with the officer he was relieving, the perfunctory checking of the stores, the examination of the dug-out shelter, the scrawled signature, the roll call of his men, the reappointing of the gun teams with one gun damaged beyond repair, and half its team on the way back to details. The attempt to restore confidence and good humour; to make jokes about the increased rum ration that would be due that evening; the drear-eyed waiting for the dawn.

It was an experience that he had not suspected life to hold or himself to possess the resilience to sustain. And yet to these new conditions he could adjust himself within a day in just the same way that from his experience of training in England he had adjusted himself to ordinary trench life. Different though it was, different though that had been, each in its separate way was a branch of soldiering, with the same main duties; inspection of men and kit, care for the comfort of the men, the maintenance of his prestige; the responsibility to his senior officers, the orders to be carried out, the reports to be sent in; with the same feeling that he was carrying out those orders not because there were Germans three-quarters of a mile away, but because there was a company commander at headquarters, whose visit of inspection might surprise him. Even here, it was only in external detail that his world had altered.

An advance was fixed for the following morning. The guns of the 305th company were set for a barrage of indirect fire that was to lift as the infantry advanced. Hugh’s section and Tallent’s section were in the same trench. Of their eight guns only five remained; with about two thirds of their gun teams left. They shared a small funk-hole dug-out, most of which was taken up by a table made out of empty S.A.A. boxes that was hardly large enough to hold a full-spread map. A couple of stretchers served as beds. They had decided to run their five guns as a single section for purposes of supervision and control, taking it in turns to rest: on duty together whenever there was a likelihood of danger. Tallent had been asleep when the evening barrage opened. Hugh tapped his shoulder.

“It’s started,” he said.

They both knew what they had to do. There was no likelihood of attack, anyhow of an attack that would reach as far back as their position. The trench had not been selected with a view to direct fire. There would be no targets for them. The men had instructions to take such shelter as they could, crouched under the lip of the parapet. There was nothing for them to do but wait. All that could be done lay in the hand of Hugh and Tallent. By walking up and down the trench, by joking together, by appearing unconcerned, by exchanging a cigarette with a sergeant, by swopping an anecdote with a sentry, they could do something to keep the men’s spirits up.

It was while they were strolling together up the trench, talking, creating within themselves a kind of exhilaration out of their attempts to persuade themselves that they were not frightened, that Hugh turning, saw coming across the open, alone, along a road that was little more than a path zigzagging its way through the maze of shell holes, a figure that seemed familiar.

“Heavens, but it can’t be him!”

They turned and looked. It was an officer. He was coming towards them, as straight as the deviations of the path allowed. Shells were breaking on all sides of him. He did not appear to notice them. The roll of his walk was very much like Rickman’s.

“But what on earth would he be doing here at a time like this?”

“And without a runner.”

The absence of a runner was as extraordinary as Rickman’s presence. You would never expect a visit till after dark. It was unheard of for a company commander to go round the guns alone. But it was Rickman right enough. He swung himself down into the trench.

“Well, how are you all? Sorry I couldn’t get up before. The Brigadier’s been very trying. We’ve got him to sleep at last, thank heaven. What sort of a dug-out have you? Doesn’t look as though it would do much more than keep the rain out. We’ll get you out of it as soon as possible. The show’s to-morrow, then the relief the instant it can be arranged. How are the men? I’ll just stroll down and see how they’re getting on.”

The barrage was breaking about the trench in unlessened frenzy, but Rickman sauntered past the gun teams as though he were making the most casual of kit inspections. He had a joke or so for every gun team.

“Ah, there’s Walker. I’m afraid you won’t find much telephone wire up here when you want to tie your pack on.”

The laugh that went up from Walker’s team was as light-hearted as if they were camping in bell tents in Grantham. Rickman made no attempt at an inspection. Just exchanged a word or two with each gun team, then turned back to Tallent.

“Now let’s go and have a look at your barrage charts.”

But he did not want to look at any barrage charts.

“Give me a whisky. No, no water.”

He poured it out himself: a long steady splash into the enamel mug. He swallowed it as though it were a glass of beer. He blinked, shook his head.

“There’s no need to bother about those charts. If we didn’t get them right in rest billets, we won’t get them right in reserve line dug-outs. I only wanted to see how you all were. The worst’s over. You’ve done grandly getting here. The show won’t be anything, not for us. The next thing that’ll really matter will be the relief, and the celebration dinner back in billets. I must push on and see Symes now. You’re doing splendidly, you two. Keep going.”

He scrambled out of the trench, into the open, on to the zigzagging shell-pocked road. Hugh and Tallent looked in silence at one another.

“There was no need for him to come.”

“No need at all. Just because he wanted to show the troops that he wasn’t frightened.”

“And he was frightened. Who wouldn’t be? Look at the whisky he needed to pull his nerves round.”

“He didn’t bring a runner because he wasn’t going to have another man expose himself to a risk like that on his account.”

“It’s made a big difference to the men. It put new heart into them. In a way we couldn’t do.”

“He’s a man all right.” Tallent paused. “And a crazy one at that,” he added. “His life’s too valuable to be risked like that. And walking up to the trench, in daylight, right across the open, so that every observation post behind the German lines that’s interested will know there’s something here, will be able to send our map reference to their artillery. That visit’s going to cost us more than one casualty. And yet … oh yes, it is worth it. It’s meant something to these men, they’ll not forget. It’s a grand gesture. That’s always justified.” He paused again. “Why the devil should a man who can live real poetry want to write bad verse?”

Rickman had said: “The show won’t be anything; not for us.” It shouldn’t have been. But he had counted without the Brigadier. On the last morning of the show he was summoned to Brigade Headquarters. The Brigadier was seated at a long table, on which a large-scale map was spread. It was pin-pricked with innumerable flags, pencilled in green and blue and orange. On the wall in front below the invariable dug-out decorations by Kirchner and his imitators were arranged in a row of pointed hooks, the successive reports from battalion and company commanders. He beckoned Rickman to his side. With the point of a paper knife he pointed out the line of the Brigade front.

“This is where we were last night before we attacked. This is where we were at eight o’clock this morning. This was our line at ten. This should be our line now. It isn’t. I think it is this. I’m not certain of that even. There’s another report to come in yet. There’ll be a counter attack, that’s certain. We must strengthen the front line with machine-guns. How many can you spare?”

Rickman glanced over the Brigadier’s shoulder. He could see six small pencilled circles. That was presumably the gun positions the Brigadier had in mind. He wanted to chalk them in blue, so that they would look pretty when the divisional general asked about his defence scheme. The Brigadier had not been over that piece of ground. Rickman had. He did not believe in sending machine guns forward. Lewis guns could do that work. Vickers guns were a kind of light artillery that should be kept slightly in reserve. But this was no time for arguing about that. Guns had to be sent to the front line. All he could do was to reduce the Brigadier’s estimate of their importance.

He opened his own map. He spread it beside the general.

“The great thing is to cover as much of the line with as few guns as possible. Now, there’s a slight valley here that a single gun could cover. It isn’t very clearly marked upon the map, but there’s a spur here and a re-entrant there.”

He talked quickly, but authoritatively. In a couple of minutes he had the Brigadier befogged in a mist of topographical detail. Another minute and the Brigadier had ceased to listen. For yet another minute Rickman talked. Then he reached over to the scarlet pencil. He marked three circles on his map.

“If we were to have one gun here, another there, a third here, we should be able to arrange a cross-fire that ought to hold any counter attack.”

The Brigadier looked pensively at Rickman’s map. Yes, those three red circles looked effective. He turned back to his own map. Rickman leant over him, the pencil in his hand.

“Here, here, and the last here.”

He drew the circles deftly. The chromatic effect was definitely pleasing. The Brigadier surveyed it, turning his head first to the one side, then the other. It looked all right.

“If you really think three guns are sufficient, Rickman?”

Rickman tapped the table.

“You can see for yourself,” he said.

It was an answer that was singularly soothing to the Brigadier. It was putting words into his mouth. That was what he would say when the general asked him about his defence scheme. He would tap the table with his pencil. “You can see for yourself,” he’d say.

“And that’s three guns saved, anyhow,” thought Rickman, as he climbed the dug-out steps. There remained the question which guns he was to send. And that question resolved into two alternatives. For two of the sections there had been arranged a complicated defensive barrage with the divisional machine gun company that could not be disturbed. Either Tallent or Hugh Balliol had to go.

Everything pointed to his sending Tallent. Two of Hugh’s guns were out of action. Tallent’s three guns were a co-ordinated easily detached unit. Tallent was the senior, the elder; had been longer with the company. By every obvious reason Tallent should have been sent. And yet the very fact that he and Tallent were on the brink of quarrel, that they disliked each other, made him hesitate to send Tallent into such obvious danger. He had seen enough of the war to know that the odds were against the survival of an officer despatched on such a mission. “I can’t send a man that I hate. But that’s absurd,” he told himself. “Are you going to allow personal feelings to influence you to such an absurd extent that you are going to sacrifice your friends for your enemies, that you’re going to reverse the process of favouritism till it would seem to be of greater use for a man to be against you than for you? Are you going to be like those fathers who when their sons work in their businesses, refuse them promotion just because they are their sons? If there were no personal feelings involved either way, you know, don’t you, it is Tallent that you’d send. Is Balliol to suffer because he’s your friend, and the other isn’t? Don’t be absurd. Come now, give the order.”

But deeper than reason was the instinct forbidding him to send into a danger that might mean death, a man that with one side of himself he hated, with another respected, and by whom he was jealous to be liked. He did not want his relations with Tallent to end here; he could not picture himself writing to Tallent’s family the condolences over a death for which he was himself responsible. Tallent’s contempt for him had struck him on his weakest point. That contempt would always rankle. If only he could force Tallent to reconsider his opinion. If only he could cancel that contempt. His desire to be reinstated in Tallent’s eyes was greater than his sense of justice.

“I can’t,” he thought. “It’s no good. It must be Balliol.”

During the brief lull of the afternoon the instructions were sent up by runner to the gun positions.

As soon as it was dark, Lt. H. S. Balliol was to take his two guns and one of the gun team from Lt. Tallent’s section and proceed to the following map references. He was to hold these positions to the last. He was himself advised to remain with the most distant gun team, keeping in touch with the other two by runner.

Hugh whistled as he read the message. He handed it across to Tallent.

“That doesn’t look as though the front gun teams were going to have a picnic.”

Tallent did his best to be optimistic.

“Except when an actual show’s on. I’m not sure the very front line isn’t the safest place. The big stuff can’t get at you.”

“There may be a counter attack.”

“A half-hearted one, most likely.”

At that actual moment it was hard to believe in any very real imminence of danger. A midsummer afternoon was wearing towards evening, with the sun’s heat lessening, and the sky a paling hyacinth. The brown stretch of shell holes with their occasional rows of broken tree stumps had a uniform carpetted appearance. The shelling was casual and intermittent. A spurt of earth would rise from a distant ridge where a battery was range-finding; an aeroplane was droning in the sky with the white puffs of the “Archies” scattering around it. The only sign of the morning’s fury was the steady trickle of wounded down the road, some limping with bandaged heads, alone; others supporting one another. Now and then a party of stretcher bearers filed by. Once a group of prisoners slouched past under the escort of a Jock.

“I wonder how many men were killed beyond that ridge between six and ten this morning,” Tallent said.

“Don’t be so cheerful.”

“Well, they’re out of it, which is more than those poor devils are, limping down there with broken shoulders.”

“They’ll be in England in a week. They are probably as pleased as Punch.”

“They may be now, they’ve got ‘blighties,’ they are out of it. But the world isn’t going to be so amusing for them when it’s all over and they’ve got to face life with a permanent limp, or their lungs so full of gas that they live in perpetual terror of a chill. There’ll be a good many times when they’ll feel envious of the friends they left there beyond this ridge. I don’t suppose that they’re the only ones who’ll feel envious of them, either.” He paused, leaning back on the improvised stretcher bed in the cool dusk of the dug-out, looking on to the hot, churned plain and the small parties of wounded winding their way towards the ambulances of the clearing station.

“Those fellows aren’t the only casualties of war. No, not by a long chalk.”

With hands crossed behind his head he looked through the dugout’s opening with an abstracted stare, as though he were seeing not so much the desolate landscape of northern France, but the future to which this landscape was the emotional and mental prelude. “It isn’t going to be what we think it is,” he said. “It’s going to be harder in ways we don’t suspect. In many ways life is very easy now. It’s been simplified. We don’t have to worry about livelihood. We are clothed and fed and housed. We are welcomed when we come back on leave; we stand for romance, adventure. It won’t be like that when the war’s over. There’ll be a spate of new problems. These fellows aren’t going to find it so easy to earn a living, they won’t be symbols of romance to their women-folk and families. They won’t be heroes coming back from the wars with nine months’ pay to spend in a fortnight. They’ll be harassed clerks, worrying about the rent. It isn’t only conditions that’ll be different. It’s the people they’ll be entangled with. Their womenfolk particularly. Women aren’t going to be the tame creatures that they were, now that they’ve learnt independence, had money of their own to spend, seen what a man’s world is like. They’ll be a different race. They’ll be able to be themselves at last. Not just what men have wanted them to be.

“How do all these men picture the homes that they’ll be returning to or building when they return? An affectionate, docile woman waiting by a hearth, and that’s what women have been, up to now. That’s what they’ve had to be, since that’s what men wanted. Men held the power. But it wasn’t necessarily what they wanted for themselves. When a girl of twenty fell in love with a man of twenty-five without much money, she didn’t necessarily want to set up house with him and start having children. A woman of thirty might, but not a girl of twenty. It’s what she had to do, though, if she were in love with the man and wanted him. She won’t have to any more. She has learnt what it is to be independent. She’s known that she does not need to have children unless she wants them. She can earn her living, stand on her own feet. When the war’s over, men aren’t going to find waiting for them the same women that they said goodbye to, or got engaged to, in 1914. They aren’t going back to the kind of home that they expect. I’m not sure that that isn’t going to be the biggest surprise that’s waiting for the ex-soldier.”

He paused.

“I had an experience on my last leave that I must say surprised me.”

Hugh had listened to Tallent’s diatribe with attention but no particular interest. Tallent was in the habit of indulging in such outbursts. Generalizations never carried much weight with Hugh. He was only impressed by facts; by rows of figures from which a conclusion could be deduced. He became alert when Tallent spoke of a specific instance.

“Tell me.”

Tallent shrugged his shoulders.

“It wasn’t anything. It’s the kind of thing that’s happened to hundreds of other fellows, only it hadn’t happened to me before. A girl that I’d met for the first time came back to my rooms within three hours of my meeting her.”

“What kind of a girl?”

“That’s the point: the last kind of girl that you’d expect it of. I’ve knocked about a bit. I’ve travelled. I’ve moved in what’s called Bohemian circles. But this was different. She wasn’t the Chelsea model type. She was what one’s father would have called a lady.”

It was an experience that would have equally astonished Hugh. Before the war, and before he had met Joyce, he had knocked about in the manner of young men of his age and class. There had been wild nights in Paris; he had presented bouquets at stage doors; but he had drawn a very distinct line between that kind of girl and the girls one’s sister knew. He was curious and inquisitive.

“How did you meet her? Tell me all about it.”

“Where one always does seem to meet people: at a dance.”

The kind of dance that was arranged in war-time, hurriedly, to collect funds for some charity or other; where you induced your friends to take tickets and “join our party”; but where the parties became dispersed and scattered before the second foxtrot had begun.

“And you fell in love with her at sight?” Hugh asked.

Tallent laughed.

“I’ve written so many novels in which men and women have asked themselves whether they’re in love or not that I don’t know what love is. We liked each other. There was attraction. You can tell that kind of thing at a first glance.”

“But how did it come to happen? How did you lead up to it?”

“Chance; in the way those things do happen. There was some trouble about getting drinks. You know what these new licensing laws are like. You never quite know where you are with them. I got impatient. I said I’d get some at my place; that I’d go back and get it. I’d just been dancing with her. I said I didn’t want to go alone, would she come with me? I’d got rather a jolly flat, taken over from a friend for the fortnight of my leave. There was a fire burning, it all looked very cosy.”

“And it happened just like that?”

“Yes.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty—twenty-two.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Attractive, in a darkish way.”

“Did you know anything about her?”

Tallent shook his head.

“She was working in some government office. She had parents in the country. I think she was engaged to someone.”

For Hugh the incident had the lovely fantastic quality of a tale of the Decameron. It was the kind of thing that one dreamt of having happen to one, but never expected would. Hugh could not ask too many questions.

“But wasn’t it very difficult? Hadn’t you to be very eloquent? Did she take a fearful lot of persuading?”

“No. It was all very easy and natural. We’d kissed. It was one of those kisses that explain everything—that make words unnecessary. I said something about living in the moment at a time like this, that we were like mayflies destined to die at sundown, that we should live as mayflies did.”

Hugh had read of a casually dropped phrase that was like a blow between the eyes. He had read of men carrying on with the routine of their normal lives, quite competently, without realizing what they were doing; as though they had been stunned: of men moving like machines through a succession of tabulated scenes. He had read of that.

He gave no sign that any such blow had crashed between his eyes. He rose from the improvised stretcher bed. He must be giving his orders to the gun teams, he told Tallent. Since he had to borrow a gun team, he might as well, for the sake of association, borrow Walker. Tallent had agreed. Since Hugh would be on trench duty for the next hour he would get a few moments’ rest. By the time Hugh was back, he was asleep, curled up on his side, his knees drawn up towards his chest, an arm bent behind his head, his dark hair ruffled, his chin darkened with a half-day’s stubble. His mouth a little open. In sleep his profile, sharp-cut, had dignity and distinction. Joyce must have noticed that.

Shortly after eight the rations came. There were letters for men who had been wounded or killed that morning. The rations for a complete section had been sent up. The men would not go hungry to their front line gun posts. There was a full section’s rum ration. Their blood would be warm to-morrow. Whatever might happen in the line, the routine of trench life continued: rations for men who would never eat them; letters that would be returned unread. Back at details to-morrow afternoon they would be packing the mail and rations for three gun teams. There might be someone left.

At half-past eleven Hugh set out. It was a stranger, someone he did not know, who shook hands with Tallent; who lined his men up by the duckboard track; who at the sergeant’s side began the long search for three obscure map references. His real self was apart from this, was watching a section of machine gunners plod slowly along the slippery track that meandered between the water-filled shell-holes, with a subaltern at its head who answered the incessant questions of weary infantry: “Are you the relief we were expecting?” It was a stranger who at last found a strip of trench that looked as though it might be the one he looked for; who put one gun team there and pushed on towards two other ditches that might or might not be the correct ones; but of which no one would be any the wiser were they wrong, since no brigadier was likely to get as far as this; since in this waste of shell-holes such a civilized science as topography had no scope; since the objects by which men computed distances were levelled to one common element: an indistinguishable brown sea of mud.

It was another man, not he, who was responsible for the protection of this morass.

The person that was himself was occupied with other thoughts. So that was what really happened. We should live like mayflies. And it was Tallent who taught her that. They meet at a dance, they are attracted by each other, they probably don’t know each other’s name! They know nothing about each other, but they are attracted by one another. That is enough. That is all that matters. In wartime, when we should live like mayflies. And I’d never suspected it. I thought that when you fell in love with a girl like that, you fell in love with her in terms of marriage; that there was no other way; not even in a mayfly world. But I was wrong. One lives in the moment, women as well as men; that kind of woman as well as any other. The moment comes, the lovely lyric moment. It’s on the wing. One must fly with it or lose it. That’s what she meant when she said: “We could have had such a lovely time;” when she looked at me in that odd wistful way. I’d loved her so; dreamt about her; planned about her; but that’s not what women want; to be dreamt about, to be planned for. They want glamour: the hot-blooded moment. Tallent, who didn’t love her, who never dreamt about her, it’s to him she gives the thing that with all my heart and brain I’d hungered for; gives casually, carelessly, heedlessly; to someone who accepts the gift as casually. That dark profile, the dark chin, the hair tumbled forward on the forehead, that’s a real man, she must have thought; a man who can take his opportunities, knowing they won’t return. Not like that other one, with his “forever” promises. Mayflies; in a mayfly world.

He did not feel jealous. He did not feel revengeful. That would come later, when he saw more clearly. He was too dazed now for jealousy, or hatred. Just as he was too dazed to appreciate his danger, even when the thunder of the barrage broke around him with a sustained fury that proved itself very clearly to be no morning hate but the prelude to a counter attack; even when the lifting of the barrage and the sight, through the mist, of curved helmets and grey uniforms, told him that the front line defences had been pierced.

He knew what he was doing, in the same way that when you are reading a cheap detective story you are alert for what is going to happen next; your attention is concentrated upon the page before you. You recall the immediately preceding episodes. Yet you know that within one week you will be unable to remember one character, one incident.

Sometimes in one of those dreams, that without actually being a nightmare, seem likely to become one at any moment, he had had the sensation of simultaneously reading and living in a melodrama. He had that particular sensation now; even when the direct hit of a trench mortar scattered the gun team he was stationed with; when he strapped up as best he could the tattered flesh, covered the faces of the dead, re-organized the numbers; as later, with the sun mounting in the sky and the barrage pounding on the ridge behind the machine gun, silence on his left made him wonder whether his gun team there was still in action; made him decide to cross the rising hundred-and-fifty yards that lay between him and them; even when half-way across, the scream of a shell, and the sudden thud on his thigh rather like a heavy collar on the football field, flung him into the muddy chill of a shell-hole; with his runner whimpering feebly at his side: “Oh, kill me, kill me. I can’t bear this pain!” even when his hand upon the revolver, he wondered looking upon the tortured, twitching thing that could not hope to survive another hour, whether it was not his duty as a human being to end human suffering; even when the crack of shrapnel above his head absolved him of that necessity.

None of it was real to him; not even when the sun mounted in the sky; when the numbness of his wound wore off; the pain mounted from his instep to his thigh; when the intensity of the pain roused him from his lethargy to the thought: “I’ve got to find the gun team,” when he dragged himself, the smashed leg trailing in the mud behind him, over the shell-hole’s lip, along the slippery track, towards the shell-battered trench system wrested from the enemy the day before with parapet facing the wrong way, where in the dark of the previous night he had left the borrowed gun team: when his parched whisper “Any of the 305th there?“ received no answer: when he dragged himself down the trench, to find by a mounted but untended gun, with three men lifeless at his side, Walker, blear-eyed and shaken, mechanically fitting a belt with cartridges.

He could get no clear answer from his questions. He hoisted himself on Walker’s arm, to the edge of the gun emplacement; looking beyond the ridge a quarter of a mile away, he could see massed in a sunken road, enfiladed to him, a clear line of fire, a cluster, a swarm of field-grey uniforms. “Belt boxes, quick!” he whispered: pulled back the crank handle, tugged through the tag, pressed the thumb piece, saw the massed cluster scatter as mayflies above a summer storm.

But it was in a dream that all that happened. He had no idea of the part he had played in the counter attack: of the havoc suddenly wrought at a pivotal point, by a gun silent through half a day, whose existence the reforming enemy had not suspected. He knew nothing of all that. And later in the evening’s hush, when the returning infantry sent out their patrols to regain contact, pain and loss of blood had placed him beyond the reach of explanation. The stretcher bearers whom a vague, inconsequent machine-gun private salvaged, found him lying across his gun, babbling, delirious.

IX

FIVE mornings later Francis purposely overslept. It was the last week of term. Discipline was relaxed. Roll call at morning P.T. was perfunctory. There was a reasonable chance of his being able to get away with it. Nine times out of ten he would. This happened to be the tenth. It was a warm and sunny morning. The house tutor had woken early; with a headache and a bad temper. He had taken the roll himself.

“Where is Balliol?” he had asked.

There was no answer.

“Is he ill?”

Nobody had heard he was.

“Very well. Carry on with the drill, Musgrave.”

Glad of a potential opportunity of working off his ill-humour, the house tutor strode over to the dormitories. He found Francis, just back from the shower-bath, pensively considering a choice of a tie.

“Have you any excuse to give?”

“No, sir.”

The house tutor looked him slowly up and down.

“You wretched little worm. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, shirking, at a time like this. You ought to be proud of the opportunity of doing a keen thing, of getting yourself fit. It’ll be a bad look-out if the war goes on long enough for worms like you to be needed in it.”

A long-handled clothes brush was lying by one of the wash-hand stands. He picked it up.

“Come on, bend over.”

He gave Francis six. They hurt exceedingly. But that, Francis considered as he stood rubbing himself, while the house tutor’s footsteps clattered down the passage, was only just. If you cut P.T. and were found out, you expected to be punished. That was part of the bargain. But what was not just, what he could not forgive, was this perpetual harping on the war. If you were slack at games, if you were late for lock-up, if you were low in form, if you ragged in the dormitories after lights out, why should you be punished more because it was in war-time you were slacking, ragging, being late and idle? It was not fair that masters should take advantage of the war; trying to make you ashamed of breaking the rules, which by long tradition it was the privilege of lower school-boys to attempt to break. Why should it be worse to rag in war-time than in peacetime? Hugh had been idle, late, slack, and been beaten when he was caught. Hugh and his generation were now held up as idols. It wasn’t fair.

On his plate at breakfast was a letter from his father.

“MY DEAR BOY,

I did not send you a telegram, for I thought it would needlessly alarm you. But we received news last night that Hugh has been seriously wounded, and moved to a base hospital. Your aunt has got in touch with the authorities by telephone. In their opinion, though Hugh is very seriously ill, and still in danger, he should survive. He showed apparently great gallantry in action.…”

Francis laid the letter down. Hugh wounded. His life in danger. And twenty minutes earlier he had been grumbling because he had to get up twenty minutes earlier to do P.T. He visualized what Hugh had suffered; lying out there in agony between the lines; hungry; parched; chilled; while he, his brother, after an ample dinner, had been playing cricket. It was a contrast that shamed him. “That beast was right. I am a wretched little worm. What right have I to grumble, while my brother is going through all that, so that I can be warm, fed, safe?”

That was how he felt at first; on the wave of an emotional reaction. But later, the cold processes of logic restored him to his first point of view. Even if Hugh had been wounded, that was no reason why he as a schoolboy should be blamed for doing what Hugh had done or would have done as a fourth former. He was prepared when the time came to enlist as Hugh had done. Why, until then, should he not be allowed to enjoy his school days in the same way that Hugh had? It wasn’t fair, to force on him a code that his brother and his brother’s generation would have laughed at. What sufficed for them, should surely suffice for him. He felt that he was being cheated out of the enjoyment to which his boyhood was entitled.

They gave Hugh an M.C. for the part he had played on that last morning. Walker was awarded an M.M. They would have recommended him for a D.C.M. had he been able to give any coherently consecutive account of his own performance. What apparently had happened had been this: The lance-corporal in charge of the gun team had taken one of the spare numbers in an attempt to make touch with the emplacement on his right. He had lost his way, and found himself unable to get back to his own team. He had shouted himself hoarse, he said, but unavailingly. When Walker was questioned about what happened between the departure of the corporal and Hugh’s arrival he had hung his head and muttered something about a whizz-bang pitching in the trench, and his not being clear about what happened afterwards. He was unwounded, but the fact that he had been violently sick suggested that he had had a slight concussion. He was, anyhow, given a forty-eight hours’ pass to Amiens to convalesce.

“He’s probably deserved a V.C.,” was Rickman’s comment. “But he’s such a damned fool that all he’ll get is a Military Medal.”

Hugh had the account of this as he lay in hospital from Mrs. Rickman. She was a tall, handsome, expensive-looking woman; dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned. She was in the early thirties. She had a slow dignified way of walking. She was the kind of woman of whom one thought, “She’ll look a finer woman at forty that she did at twenty.” Hugh did not think he would ever like her, but he imagined that if he were in her company much, he would find it difficult to resist making love to her. He fancied that she would accept such a campaign very practically; that her head ruled her heart; that she would yield to a caprice if it suited her scheme of living, but not otherwise. She had a self-reliant, self-possessed look. She appeared to know exactly what she wanted, exactly how to get it. She was rich, Hugh had heard; he imagined that she had decided she was going to marry Rickman before Rickman had decided he was going to marry her.

“Roy said that you were lucky to be sent forward when you were,” she told him. “The German artillery got on to your position the next morning and blew that first position of yours to pieces. A shell pitched directly on your dug-out. Poor Mr. Tallent was killed instantaneously.”

Hugh smiled grimly to himself. He remembered how Tallent had said that someone would have to pay for Rickman’s gesture.

He wondered what Tallent would have thought of his obituaries. They were lengthy and adulatory enough. But the novels themselves were regarded with interest chiefly because the man who had written them had been killed on active service. “Another name has been added to that sadly but nobly lengthening list of writers.…” It was as though he had qualified to membership of an honourable company not so much by writing novels as by being killed. When the next poet, painter or novelist was killed Tallent’s name would certainly be mentioned. It would be mentioned as often as tribute was paid to war poets and war novelists. He would be a name in a list. He would be remembered for nothing else. No one would bother to ask what he had really stood for. He was pigeon-holed. He had an immortality of a kind.

Hugh also wondered whether Joyce, turning the pages of the Sketch or Tatler, would recognize in the photograph of a dead soldier the features of her mayfly lover. He wondered, though more casually, whether she was aware that he himself was wounded. He had no news value that would place his photograph in the illustrated weeklies. Thus late in the war, no one as busy as Joyce could be bothered to read through the casualty columns of The Times. She was never a prolific correspondent; an occasional postcard, a scrawled note. Once every month or so when she was in the mood, a vivid outpouring of herself on paper. He had only written to her once since his return from leave. She would attribute his silence to the quarrels of that leave. If she troubled to think of him that much.… Was Tallent a solitary surrender, or one of many? Or just the first of many? He did not know. He did not want to know. He wanted to forget; never to see her again; to begin life anew, in the knowledge of this new light on women.

Hugh’s wounds proved to be less serious than had been at first feared; but the damage to his lungs through mustard gas was likely to leave him in weak health for life. He would always walk with a limp. Wet weather would be likely to give him rheumatism. He would have to be careful of chills. He must avoid violent exercise: cricket, squash, tennis. He could play golf, but must avoid heavy courses that involved climbing. He was what insurance companies called a bad life, and medical boards marked B3. “You’re a lucky devil,” people told him. “They’ll never send you back.”

He thought he was pretty lucky. He wouldn’t have to rejoin his depot for a year. A good deal of that time he would be on sick leave. He would have all the money that he had saved in the line and in hospital. He would have nothing to spend it on but his own enjoyment, in a London that seemed to have been particularly designed for the entertainment of officers on leave with pay and leisure. He was not going to miss his opportunities this time. He was going to put that lesson to good account.

By Christmas he was well enough to exchange crutches for a heavy indiarubber-ferruled stick. In February he was able to fulfil his promise to Francis of giving a lunch party at the Eversham Hotel to a jealously selected nucleus of the fifth-form table.

It was the first time that he had been to Fernhurst since the summer of 1914. It was remarkable how unchanged it was. London seemed a different city, with its khaki-filled streets and restaurants, its changed lights, its hectic, unceasing animation. But the straw-hatted, black-coated boys who sauntered down Cheap Street and the courts; the bloods with their hands deep-driven in their trouser pockets; the semi-bloods with their hands in their coat pockets; the sixth-formers with walking-sticks and an air of scholarship; the athletes, loud-voiced and conspicuous; the masters in their gowns and mortar-boards, did not seem in any detail different.

The chief shook his head when he told him that.

“It may seem that to you, but in point of fact, it’s very different. To begin with, boys are leaving early. Many go at seventeen. Nobody stays on after eighteen. Boys of sixteen are prefects. There are boys of fifteen in the eleven. There’s not the same period of transition between the dayroom and the sixth-form table. The prefects haven’t the same sense of responsibility. They didn’t, as fags, have the discipline of responsible prefects. In fact, they’ve never been really disciplined at all. Their parents can’t give them the attention that they ought to have. Their uncles and elder brothers are at the front. If their fathers aren’t in khaki they’re either overworking in offices or spending their spare time as special constables. Their mothers are nurses or canteen workers. Nothing’s arranged for them; no holidays abroad, no expeditions. They are left far too much to their own devices. They’re given too much pocket-money; their parents haven’t time to look after them, so they give them money to spend instead. They feel that no one’s interested in them, that they are just marking time till they’ll be able to join up. They’re a very different generation from yours, my dear Balliol. Frankly, I don’t care to think what they’ll make of the world when they’re in charge of it. They’re going to be a problem.”

It was the first time that Hugh had realized that such a problem existed. He had known that for Francis’ generation the business of readjustment to peace would be difficult; that Francis’ was a generation that had fallen between two worlds but he had not visualized the exact nature of those difficulties and their cause.

“Yes,” he thought to himself, “I suppose that is so. Nobody bothers about Francis much. How excited he was about going to France just when the war broke out. The war stopped that, there’s been no chance of his going since. Yes, it is true. He comes back for his holidays and nothing’s done for him. No children’s parties. What does he do with himself? I don’t know. Does father know? Does mother know? He never tells me anything; not anything really personal about himself. He talks a lot. But he’s secretive in a funny way. He’s usually got something to be rebellious over. Yes, that’s how it is. I’d never thought of it before.

“It’s an entirely new point of view to me,” he told the chief.

“And it’s not as though it ended there,” the chief went on. “There’s the problem of the masters. The best young masters are at the war. We’re left with those who are too old to serve; those who aren’t fit to serve, and those who’ve managed to avoid serving. The boys don’t respect them. They rag and grow slack. You can take my word for it, Balliol, there’s a thoroughly undisciplined generation going out into the world in about 1920. The War Office would be doing a real service to the ultimate interests of the country if they were to send certain selected officers to work on the staff of public schools. They’d be doing far more good here than they would supervising a sergeant who’s instructing a squad in musketry. But of course you can’t expect the War Office to see a thing like that. They look on the public schools as O.T.C’s. They might send a leather-voiced, wooden-pated major to supervise the corps, but they’d never send an athlete or a scholar to knock a little sense into the lower fourth.”

It was a problem that Hugh had not recognized before. He pondered it thoughtfully on the way back to London. The following morning he wrote a letter to the chief.

“I’ve been thinking very carefully over what you said,” he wrote. “I shall be on sick leave right through the summer. If I stay in London I shall only get into debt and trouble. It’s possible that at Fernhurst I might be of some use. You know the kind of scholar that I am. I probably know less now than I did when my Greek accents used to cause you sleepless nights. But I think that I’m still a lesson or so ahead of the lower forms. And I ragged enough when I was a fag to be up to a good many of the ruses they would try to put past me. Anyhow, if you think I can be of any use to you, I’ll be glad and proud to come.”

The letter was answered by a telegram.

“Accept with delight your generous offer. Suggest form-mastership of the Shell.”

The Shell was the form that linked the lower with the middle school. It had the reputation of containing the most hardened ragsters and the stupidest students in the school.

Hugh thought: “I think I can cope with the ragsters, anyhow.”

From an atmosphere of “war-preparedness” at school, Francis returned to an atmosphere of “war-time duty” at North End Road. On the second evening of the holidays the wife of a neighbouring vicar called upon his father. She was a plump, prosperous, modishly-dressed woman in middle life. She spoke in a breathless manner as though the office of good works left her little leisure. She carried a small attaché case which she opened the moment she sat down. It was full of pamphlets, notebooks, papers, letters. She extracted a long bundle, held together by an indiarubber band. The word “Pageant” printed out on a ticket dangled from its corner. Her name was Mrs. Simonds. She had not long been in the neighbourhood. Speedy preferment was promised for her husband.

“I know you are a very busy man, Mr. Balliol. I wouldn’t disturb you for worlds; not for worlds. And I know you are not one of my husband’s parishioners. But at times like this, I feel, we must all feel, I’m sure you must feel, that we’re members of one vast parish. There are no boundaries now; there’s so little that we who remain here can do, to show our brave boys that we too know our duty. Not, of course, that you’re doing nothing, Mr. Balliol. Your brave son. Magnificent. I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw his name in that list. The example he is setting to us all. And then your son-in-law. I think it’s magnificent the way the aristocracy has given us the lead. When you think of all the things that were said about them before the war. That terrible Lloyd George. Not that he is terrible any longer, of course. Saviour of his country, my husband calls him. That’s why the war’s so fine, my husband’s always saying. It’s brought out the best in everyone, literally in everyone. And what I was thinking, Mr. Balliol, was this: that we ought to do more for the spiritual side of our dear boys when they’re on leave. We ought to bring them to us in the way that the Church used; with its mystery plays. We ought to combine the secular with the spiritual; give them something that they’ll enjoy; but also something that’ll remind them of their duty to a higher cause. Now, my husband’s curate, such a charming, such a clever young man, Mr. Parkinson, has written a little Passion Play. I thought how nice it would be if we could act it on Maundy Thursday. No entrance fee, of course. Just a meeting to make everyone feel what Good Friday is. And I wondered … I know of course what a busy man you are, Mr. Balliol, but it would be so nice, just as an act of devotion, you know, if you would be St. John.”

Balliol smiled. His inquisitiveness led him to the acceptance of many offers that astonished his friends. “Do you ever refuse any invitation?” one of them had asked him. “Not if I’m disengaged. Why should I?” he had replied. He saw no reason now why he should not impersonate St. John. It was something that he had never done before.

Mrs. Simonds’ gratitude was so volubly expressed, and with so prodigal an employment of the superlative that Balliol was tempted to present her husband’s altar with a Queen Anne reredos, to see how her vocabulary would stand an added strain. She had already described his goodness as “most unique.” He was curious to know what would be the comparative to that. But her conclusion was something of an anti-climax.

“I know that you’ll be grateful for your own goodness. It’s so little that we can do. We must do all that we can. I’m sure you’ll be glad I came to you.”

It was as though she had conferred a favour, rather than Balliol, by giving him the opportunity of doing a righteous act. She had not finished her offices, however. She had yet another prospective recipient of celestial grace. She turned to Francis.

“I know you must feel the same way as your dear father; particularly after the noble example your brother sets you. I’m sure that you’ll take the part of one of the Roman soldiers.”

Said Balliol heartily, before his son could reply: “My son will be delighted.”

“He will? But there, I knew he would. An act of real devotion; for our soldiers’ sakes. They need all that we can give them. I must go and see Mrs. Mcfadden. I want her to be an angel. In a way, I suppose she’s a little old. But then I don’t know what there is in the Scriptures to make us think that all the angels were young. And anyhow, the dresses will hide a lot. We have the most splendid dresses. Lady Lovemay has financed us. You know her, of course? No? Ah, but you should. I must try and arrange that, sometime. Such a sweet, such a gracious person. A soul. You can see it in her face. And the first rehearsal. Tomorrow evening, at eight-fifteen. And sharp, if you please.”

The moment the door had closed behind her Francis turned on his father with some indignation.

“I do think you might have asked me what I thought first!”

“If I had, you would have refused, and that would have been a pity. I don’t for a moment think that you’ll enjoy yourself. But the more you can see now of different kinds of people the better. You’ll find yourself in a rut quite soon enough.”

“Oh, well, perhaps you’re right.” Francis was so relieved to be given some reason other than “duty to the troops” for doing what he didn’t want, that his opposition crumbled.

“And after all, it may be fun.”

It was. In the way that most communal activities contrive to be. There was the team spirit of doing a thing together. There was the interest of meeting new people and the dramatic sense of watching them interact. He was caused some, and his father considerable, entertainment by the conduct of a sallow-faced, bowed-shouldered undergraduate who had been rejected for military service for short sight, varicose veins and a weak heart. He was an earnest student of the drama. The play was written in a blank verse that was frequently reminiscent of Tennyson and William Morris. The ear of the undergraduate was constantly detecting echoes. He would sidle up to the curate, script in hand.

“Now, this line, Mr. Producer, reminds me of a passage in The Earthly Paradise. I cannot exactly recall where. But that particular fall, the caesura in the fourth foot, is strangely familiar. It’s not so much the actual words as their underlying sense; the rhythm.”

There was one line that caused him particular concern.

“How art thou fallen, son of the morning.”

“It’s absolute plagiarism,” he said, “straight out of Stephen Phillips’ Christ in Hades. ‘Oh, all fresh out of beautiful sunlight.’”

“There doesn’t seem to me much resemblance between those lines,” said Balliol.

“Haven’t you any ear? I don’t mean in the literal sense: in the meaning of the lines: that’s nothing. Poetry is sound not sense. Listen to the two lines ‘How art thou fallen, son of the morning—Oh, all fresh out of beautiful sunlight.’”

“If you asked me my opinion I should say that neither of those lines scanned.”

“My dear sir! Why, a judge of prosody like Robert Bridges, described that line as the finest in the whole poem!”

“I don’t know about Robert Bridges and Stephen Phillips but as far as Mr. Parkinson is concerned, I am convinced that it is a case of a defective ear. I’ll investigate.”

Balliol walked over to the producer.

“Have you ever read a poem called Christ in Hades?”

“Well … er … I know … I’m afraid … my spare time is very limited: parochial matters.”

“Have you ever heard of a poet called Stephen Phillips?”

“In a way … I don’t know … the name does seem in a way familiar.”

“Thank you very much.”

But the young intellectual was not convinced. “There is such a thing as subconscious influence. You remember Kipling’s story about the chemist’s assistant who was found writing a poem beginning: ‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains.’ It isn’t as though that was the only line, now look at this …”

His interruptions grew so frequent that the curate sought Balliol’s advice.

“Is it all right; about the play, I mean? That young man keeps harping on plagiarism. I couldn’t get into any trouble, could I?”

Balliol reassured him.

“The play is vastly improved by it.”

The undergraduate was taking the part of Mark. It was a small part; a matter of fifteen lines, which he declaimed like a Union debater. He began as though he were to continue for at least twenty lines; the surprise to the audience when he stopped at the twentieth syllable was that of a tube-train traveller when the car stops in the middle of a tunnel. But he could not have been more conscientious had he been cast for Peter. He was frequently consulting the curate’s advice on the correct interpretation of his part. “Now, what is the psychology of Saint Mark?” he would inquire. “I mean, what is your conception of his character? Is he as stupid as he appears, or is he a wise man pretending to be a fool?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I mean … I didn’t know he appeared to be stupid.”

“But, Mr. Producer, look at the things he has to say!”

And he declaimed in their entirety the fifteen lines of his part.

Said Edward Balliol: “That young man is an unmitigated nuisance, but he has added considerably to my enjoyment of this exceedingly absurd activity.”

But the greatest amusement unquestionably was provided by what Balliol described as the episode of the Virgin. The part of Mary was taken by a young person whose accent precluded any doubt as to her origin. She was pretty, pleasant, and she threw herself into the rôle with a commendable zest. But the blank verse of Mr. Parkinson was beyond the scope of her Board School education. Mrs. Simonds was frankly distressed. At the end of the first rehearsal she took Balliol aside.

“I must explain about Gertrude. She is my husband’s choice. I had wanted to ask Miss Stone. You know her? No? Ah, but you should. Her mother’s the Honourable Mrs. John Stone. Lady Tathly’s daughter-in-law. Such a beautiful face, so reverent, so wistful. But my husband said ‘No. If we have a girl like that it will look as though we are worshipping the Virgin. And the Bishop would not approve.’ So he chose Gertrude. And frankly, Mr. Balliol, I’m not happy at all about her. A good girl, but not a lady. Quite common. That hat now; dreadfully bad style. I hope you don’t mind acting with her?”

“Why ever should I! At my age.…”

“Oh, but it wasn’t you I was thinking of. It’s Francis far more.” She looked across to where Francis and Gertrude were in conversation. “He’s so much younger, of course. I suppose it’s really quite all right. But mixing with a girl like that … I’m not sure that I should like it in the case of my own boy. For his sake, of course, not mine. As far as I’m concerned class simply does not exist. And if you feel the same way … Oh well, I’m very glad.”

Gertrude was absent from the next rehearsal.

“What’s the matter?” Balliol asked.

The curate looked embarrassed.

“As a matter of fact, I think she’s giving up her part.”

“Why? I thought she was rather good.”

“Apparently some of the people here objected to her.”

“What people?”

The curate’s embarrassment increased.

“As a matter of fact your name was quoted.”

“Was it? I’ll write to Mrs. Simonds.”

The letter he wrote to Mrs. Simonds was a stern one. The next rehearsal saw Gertrude reinstated. But Mrs. Simonds was unabashed. “I was so glad to get your letter: to know that you feel as I do about these things. There are so many people who don’t. And I was afraid that you only spoke that way about Gertrude, so as to make things easier for me: that at heart you were worried. Of course, myself, I’d eat my dinner off the floor with anyone. But then I’ve been brought up with them, I know them. I know how to make allowances for girls like Gertrude. She’s such a radical, you know, Mr. Balliol, so independent. Do you know, I once wrote and asked her to come to a G.F.S. outing. She just sent a card saying ‘Sorry, other engagement. Can’t come.’ What can one do with a girl who behaves like that? Still, since you understand.…”

Said Balliol that evening in Francis’s hearing, “When people tell you that class does not exist for them, you can be fairly certain that they are riddled with class-consciousness.”

Easter drew near. Maundy Thursday arrived. The play suffered perhaps from the pomp that Lady Lovemay had showered on it. The contrast was too great between the uncertain acting, the uncertain lines, and the glitter of spears and armour and gilded banners. But the evening was admittedly a success. The hall was crowded, the friends and relatives of the actors were delighted at the spectacle of a familiar figure resplendent in unaccustomed plumes. And a telegram from the Bishop was read out in which he expressed his regret at not being able to be present, and wishing the company all success.

As the cast was disrobing afterwards, the Vicar of St. Cuthbert’s, a neighbouring and smaller parish, asked if he might speak to Mr. Balliol.

“I must congratulate you. A very reverent, a very beautiful piece of work. Now, I want to ask you a favour. Do you think you could persuade your cast to act it for us on Saturday? I will of course finance the moving. I should be proud if I could arrange for it to be acted in my parish.”

“Naturally, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s a matter for Mrs. Simonds and Mr. Parkinson to decide upon.”

The cast were enthusiastic over the prospect of a repeat performance. They had been touched by the glamour of the footlights. The curate was flattered at his play’s success. To everyone’s surprise, however, Mrs. Simonds refused to consider the idea.

“I’m sorry. But I couldn’t think of allowing that. I know my husband will see eye to eye with me. Maundy Thursday is one thing, Easter Eve another. It’s too big a strain on you, Mr. Parkinson. The Easter-day services ahead. And besides, people shouldn’t be appearing at a place of public entertainment, even if it’s a religious entertainment, at an hour when Our Lord was in Hell. We should all be preparing ourselves for our Easter Communion. No, really, Mr. Parkinson, I’m afraid I can’t allow it.”

The curate did not argue the issue.

“Mrs. Simonds knows her mind,” he explained to Balliol.

Remarked Balliol that evening: “My explanation of the matter is an extremely simple one. Mrs. Simonds had taken a great deal of trouble getting the patronage of Lady Lovemay. The production was a credit to her husband and to herself. The Bishop had taken notice of it. It was a step towards promotion. She had no intention of sharing any of the spoils with another parish.”

Francis’s opinion was unvoiced. But he remembered the spirit in which Mrs. Simonds invited their co-operation. All that talk about “duty,” about “war-time,” about our debt to the soldiers at the front. It was very much the same here as it was at school. People were trying to force you to do things you didn’t want, things that were in their interest, but not in yours; and were making the war an excuse. Getting away with murder. At the back of it all nothing but self-interest and self-seeking. “When I’m in a position to make decisions for myself,” vowed Francis, “I will never let myself be influenced by abstract arguments. I shall look on everything as a bargain. There are no such things as disinterested impulses. I’ll say: ‘Good. You want me to do something for you. What are you going to do for me in return?’ I’ll show them, when I grow up.”

Still he could not deny that he had enjoyed this particular manifestation of the spirit of good works. Time hung heavily on his hands afterwards. Holidays were dull in war-time. Everyone was busy. His father at the office all day, and on duty every other night as a Special Constable. His mother attending endless relief committees, addressing parcels to prisoners, lonely soldiers, refugees. Occasionally Hugh would take him to a matinée; but he could not be expected to bother often about a younger brother. Helen was a nuisance and a noise about the place. No one was giving parties. No one was arranging expeditions. What a different time Hugh had had. A whole month devoted to giving him as good a time as possible. And Hugh had had first Lucy, then Ruth, to go about with. He hadn’t a soul. He didn’t know one fellow of his own age who lived within six miles of him. At school it was cheek to know anybody in another house. In your own house you only knew your contemporaries. Five other new boys had arrived on the same day as himself. One of them lived in Ireland. Two were in the country somewhere. There was one at Richmond, a good hour off. And the fifth he didn’t like. No one for a fellow to go about with. And he didn’t see what chance he stood of finding anyone if nobody gave parties.

There wasn’t anything to do except read and go for walks. Occasionally his father would ask him what he was going to do that morning.

“Oh, mooch around,” he’d answer.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Mooch around.”

His father would then dive a hand into his pocket.

“Here’s half a crown. Take yourself to the cinema with it.”

A seat at the Theatre de Luxe at the foot of the hill cost him nine-pence. For a shilling with a twopenny bus fare there and back he could go to Cricklewood. His father’s tips usually left him with a comfortable supply of change. He had no reason to grumble over a lack of pocket money. He had more pocket money than Hugh had ever had. But less to spend it on. He found himself looking forward to his return to school.

Balliol had small idea of the rebellious, exasperated state of mind into which his second son was drifting. His capacity for curiosity had never been fully exercised on Francis. He had begun by thinking him a nuisance. Later he had told himself that the child was Jane’s concern, since she made no attempt to conceal he was her favourite. And now, when Jane was too busy with canteen work to have thought or care for anybody, he had grown into a too confirmed habit of ignoring Francis to take a very real interest in his concerns. The boy seemed to be doing well enough. He had been promoted practically every term; usually with a testimonial to his industry in the shape of a printed and signed statement that his prize account had been credited with two-thirds of a war-saving certificate. The reports were non-committally satisfactory. There did not seem anything particular to worry about; and there was much else that demanded his immediate concern.

Peel & Hardy was continuing to pay handsome dividends. The orders for champagne, port and whisky were unabated. No officer appeared to be equipped for service till he had a tobacco pouch and cigarette case in regimental colours and a pipe not markedly superior to any other pipe, but to be detected from another pipe by a small scarlet circle in the bowl for which insertion an additional charge of eleven shillings was exacted. There was also growing up among the younger members of the junior service the habit, highly profitable to a cigar merchant, of having specially blended tobacco, so that they could say in their mess, “Yes, this is my special mixture. It’s not made for anybody else. Peel & Hardy’s A317.” Each client had a different number and received such exclusiveness as could be obtained from the variously proportioned blendings of four standardized mixtures. The ordinary shareholders had received a dividend of twenty per cent on the last balance-sheet.

The profits were considerable but so was the strain on the executive. Conscription had come, and with it the weeding out of every office staff throughout the country. There were not the men available to fill their places. Women were now so highly-priced by the munition factories that it was no longer possible to pick and choose; to insist, as Huntercombe had demanded, on plain and dowdy women. You had to take what you could find. And for that matter, the supply of plain and dowdy women seemed singularly short. A job, money and independence had given to even the most ordinary of women a briskness of manner, a brightness of smile, a happiness of look, a personal pride, that prevented you from thinking of them as plain and dowdy. They looked dashing and smart as they hurried to their offices with attaché cases, as they came clattering out of their factories in overalls; as they punched holes in bus tickets and collected their fares. They added a new sense of colour to the day’s events. The sight of a woman in uniform in the London streets was so unexceptional that at first Balliol did not recognize the tall, trim khaki-clad, short-skirted, slouch-hatted figure who came striding towards him down St. James’s through the soft, luminous sunshot glow of a late May evening.

“Hullo, Edward.”

It was a brisk, familiar voice that called his name: a voice that he had scarcely heard during the last four years.

“Stella!”

She had not altered. The same lean handsome figure, the firm stride, the firm manner. She looked well in uniform.

“I hear Hugh’s out of hospital, and that Ruth’s going to have another baby. What news of Lucy? I suppose Francis is almost of military age; and that before we know where we are Helen’ll be coming to ask me for a job.”

She rattled the questions off as though she were giving orders to a squad of recruits. Balliol laid his hand upon her elbow.

“It’ll take me twenty minutes to answer all those questions. Haven’t you time to take a cup of tea with me?”

Rumpelmeyer’s was within a minute’s stroll. It was very crowded: officers in khaki, their buttons shining: young women smiling at them beneath wide-brimmed hats: a band playing, “Let the great big world keep on turning:” three or four couples dancing. A typical war-time scene. They had some difficulty in finding a table.

“Shall I go and get you an éclair?” Balliol asked.

“I’ll choose for myself, thank you.”

Cream cakes were difficult to get in war-time. Balliol noticed with amusement that Stella took considerable trouble over her selection, and left the counter with a high-piled plate. There was something feminine about her, anyhow.

It was many months since brother and sister had seen each other. The chain of Stella’s obligations and responsibilities had grown heavier every month. They had a lot to tell each other. In particular Stella wanted news of Lucy.

“It’s only six years since she went. But she’ll return a stranger.”

Stella nodded. She looked away, a soft reminiscent light upon her face. She could think of Lucy without heartburn now.

“Lucy was a type that will exist less and less in future,” she maintained. “She’s the hundred-per-cent. woman; she fulfils herself by surrender to some creative force; a person, or a cause. She’ll have given herself to marriage as she gave herself to our Cause, wholeheartedly, unquestioningly.” Stella paused. “To think that all that’s only three years away.”

Only three years since a woman like Stella was the Aunt Sally of cheap gibes; had been described as woman’s own worst enemy; who had put back her Cause a hundred years by proving that women were irresponsible, uncivilized, incapable of measured judgment. She was a kind of heroine now; and it was because women such as she had given during the war such irrefutable proof of their capacity that public opinion towards the vote was changing so rapidly that no one really doubted that when the franchise was extended to include soldiers and sailors, women would also be admitted to it.

“And everyone will say, of course, that we earned the vote by our war work,” Stella said. “But we didn’t. We’d never have got the vote even if we hadn’t forced ourselves on the public attention by breaking windows, if we hadn’t had our organizations ready when the war broke out to show what we could do, if we hadn’t been ready to insist, in a mood to insist, on our right to service. For we had opposition, you know. We had to fight, as we always have had to. The war gave us a chance of fighting in a different way, that’s all. It’s odd when you come to think of it that men only believe women are capable when they show that they can tackle a man’s job. Why a woman deserves a vote because she can be a tolerable substitute for a lift attendant, rather than by being a first-class milliner, I don’t know. But that’s the way things are. The great thing is that the vote’s become a practical certainty.”

“Do you think you’d have got the vote if there hadn’t been a war?”

“Yes; only not so quickly. The war’s telescoped events, but it hasn’t created them. It’s just made things happen in five years instead of in fifteen. It’s hastened things, it hasn’t changed things. Historians will probably forget or gloss over the militant side of the Suffrage Movement. They’ll talk about our splendid work for the country. They’ll forget all about the outcasts of 1913. But it’s to people like Lucy that the women of the 1920’s will owe their independence.”

“When do you expect the vote?”

“Before the next election.”

“Then I suppose you’ll start agitating for a seat in parliament?”

“You know the old cliché; the thin end of the wedge.”

For a few minutes longer they sat talking, then Stella pushed back her chair.

“I must be going. I can’t allow myself interludes like this. Give my love to Jane. How is she?”

“So busy that I hardly ever see her.”

“Busy? What about?”

“You should know that better than I do.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s you who are keeping her busy.”

An extremely puzzled look came into Stella’s face.

“I really don’t understand you.”

“Her war work. You’re responsible for that.”

Stella laughed.

“Are you going to hold me responsible for every woman who sees herself in khaki?”

“For those, anyhow, who come to you direct.”

“Jane never came to me.”

“What!”

Again Stella laughed. “I’m afraid you exaggerate my importance. I’m only one out of a great many women who sit as chairmen of committees. You mustn’t imagine that because Jane said ‘I’m going to do war-work’ she came to me about it.”

Balliol laughed too, at that.

“It was a very natural mistake,” he said.

But he was fairly confident that he was not mistaken.

On his return home he found a pencilled message beside the telephone. Mrs. Balliol would not be back for dinner. She would be kept late at the canteen. That was the second time this week. There was a letter with a Fernhurst post-mark. It was addressed with such care that Balliol for a moment did not recognize the handwriting as his second son’s. It was a long letter. There were no blots in it. It gave every sign of the most careful composition.

A request for money, Balliol thought.

His surmise was right. The letter started with a detailed account of the new term’s opening: the probable composition of the eleven, his own chance of getting in the Colts, his new form master. There was a reference to Hugh’s appointment. “Hugh seems to be all right,” it said. There was a description of various war-time economies. The eleven were not allowed to wear gold-embroidered badges upon their pockets. In his opinion this was very foolish. There were other economies. Twice a week they had meatless dinners: fish was the usual substitute; occasionally there were eggs or macaroni. It really was not sufficient. One would be terribly hungry if it were not for the tuck shop. And at the tuck shop the price of everything was going up. A sausage on toast that used to cost sixpence now cost eightpence. And on meatless dinner days one sausage was not enough; one needed two. In fact, Francis concluded, he really did not see how he was going to manage on the fifteen shillings with which his father had instructed him to balance his budget until half-term.

The argument had been led with considerable adroitness to the final climax. Balliol smiled. A letter as well-phrased was certainly worth ten shillings.

It was close on ten when Jane returned. Her face wore the tranquil, abstracted expression that during the last months had grown habitual with her. Her voice had taken on a slower cadence, in tune with her changed expression.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get back. Was the dinner all right? It’s difficult to arrange amusing meals. One has to keep delicacies till one entertains. Oh, but I feel tired.”

She stretched her arms slowly behind her head, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her head leant back. It was a weary gesture, but the weariness that inspired it was a happy one: “a glad fatigue.” Balliol looked at her closely.

“I suppose it’s pretty hard work there, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I don’t imagine that you see Stella very often?”

“Only now and again.”

“People go to her in the first place. She finds the right job for them. And then it ends?”

“More or less.”

“That’s what happened in your case, for instance?”

“Yes.”

“Who would have thought five years ago that we should be seeing Stella in a position of this kind.”

But it was not of his sister’s changed position that he was thinking. Jane’s lied to me, he thought. She never went to Stella. She wanted for some reason or another to have control of her spare time, to have a ready and unanswerable excuse for missed meals, irregular hours, an unregulated life. He looked closely at her. That tranquil and abstract expression; that happy languor. He had attributed them to the content that followed upon work completed. Most women were discontented because they hadn’t enough to do. That had been Jane’s trouble. Too much time for brooding. No wonder she seemed different now that her days were filled. That was what he had thought. But now, in the light of this new knowledge, he was less certain. He looked closely at her. How old was she? Forty-six? Forty-seven? Forty-eight? She was a grandmother, her hair was grey. But her figure had never lost its suppleness, or rather had exchanged the turbulent elasticity of youth for a slow and rhythmed ease. Spring had changed to autumn. But the grey hair did not belie the youthfulness of the grey-brown eyes. There was the same expression of puzzled candour that had made people exclaim of her in the early years of their marriage, “I can’t believe that you’ve got two children. You look a bride!“ Because he was old himself, he thought of her as old. But a young man.…

Impatiently he shrugged away the suggestion. It wasn’t possible. Jane … after thirty years of marriage … it was inconceivable. There was some other reason; there must be. Jane … at her age. It was monstrous, inconceivable. He shut away the memory of anecdotes he had heard, of novels he had read, of scandals that had found their way into the press. There might be women like that. There might be men—young men—who were attracted by women on the brink of fifty. But not Jane. It wasn’t possible.

Later, however, alone in his dressing-room, standing before the mirror, he took stock of himself as one might of the debit column of a balance sheet, noting the white hair that receded about the temples, the pouches that grew beneath the eyes, the teeth that no dentist’s skill could make to seem his own, the strain upon the button of his coat, the added weight that had made him hesitate in crossing streets.

I’m old. I feel old. I look old. Youth, all that goes with youth is a closed door to me. How should I know how they feel, through whose veins the blood runs hotly? I’ve forgotten. It’s the wise course to shut one’s eyes, to see only what lies under one’s immediate vision. They’ll let me alone as long as I keep quiet. I can preserve my dignity if I preserve my ignorance. It may be, or it may not be. I can’t do any good by interfering. It was different ten years ago when young Rickman was about. There might have been a scandal then. There was Lucy to be considered. She had to be given a fair chance. But there’s no one to be considered now. It’s too late for there to be any talk of home-breaking. The time for that has passed, with it the need for interference.

To close one’s eyes, to shut one’s ears, that was the wise course when one was old.

X

Francis’s terse comment that “Hugh seems to be all right” was as far as Fernhurst in general was concerned an accurate communiqué. The announcement at the close of the Easter term that the Shell was to have a new form master caused little interest to anybody except the Shell. The school was accustomed to sudden changes in the Staff. But to the Shell the news of this change was exceedingly unwelcome. Its members were reluctant to be woken out of their scholastic lethargy and relieved of their privilege to rag.

“It’ll be pretty grim, if we can’t amuse ourselves, and have to work,” they thought.

Their ragging was less an ebullition of natural high spirits than an attempt to relieve boredom. They had never needed to work in form. They had never needed to prepare their lessons. Consequently since they had had to have something to look forward to, to plan for, to feel alive about, they had ragged. They were on the whole less alarmed at the prospect of work than of the loss of entertainment.

The chief ragster, Nichols, did his best to reassure them. He was a burly, aggressive creature who had more wits than his position in the school suggested. He was lazy, but not a fool. He enjoyed the exercise of authority, in the Shell he was able to indulge this instinct. He had no ambition to rise above it. In the days when “the bad hat of the family” was shipped to the Colonies, he would have profited by his transportation to a rougher atmosphere. His capacity for leadership would have been effective, he would have probably returned to England a millionaire. In 1917, at the age of fifteen, he was definitely a nuisance. And an unpleasant nuisance in a lower form of an inadequately staffed public school.

On the news that Hugh Balliol was to be his future form master, he assumed a superior, contemptuous manner.

“What, the brother of that young ass in the School House? I’ll soon put him in his place. You wait. We’ll soon have things going just as happily next term as we have this.”

The boast had been repeated to Francis. It disquieted him. He had more faith in Nichols as a ragster than in his brother as a disciplinarian. I do hope he doesn’t make an ass of himself. It was a bit thick anyhow having one’s brother coming as a master to one’s own school; knowing everything that one was doing. It would be more than a bit thick if that brother were to make himself ridiculous, so that one got ragged about it. It simply wasn’t giving one a chance. The sins of the elder brother would be visited on the younger brother. “Oh, hell!”

Francis had made no reference during the holidays to the kind of reception that the Shell had in readiness. That was Hugh’s own lookout. Hugh might be his brother, but he was a master. He had joined the other camp. Hugh had brought this on himself. There had been no need for him to take on the job. Francis maintained an impassively surly countenance, which he mistook for dignity, when Helen made joking references to “What’ll Hugh do if he finds Francis smoking?” He frankly disapproved of the arrangement.

Hugh, after his talk with the chief, had little doubt of the atmosphere that awaited him. He went to meet his class in a belligerent spirit, resolved to get his blow in first. As he walked up the three short stairs to his daised seat, his mortar board on his head, the unaccustomed gown tucked under his arm, he compared with his present mood the spirit in which he had walked up to his platoon for the first time. He had been nervous then. But he had known that he was addressing himself to friends. “If I play square by you, if I prove to you that I’m a man you can trust and follow, and you are prepared to let me prove it—you want me to prove it—then you will stand by me.” Then he had been addressing potential friends. But now he was addressing potential enemies. “Unless you prove to us that you can master us, we will make your life a misery.”

He looked down at the twenty-seven boys who comprised the Shell. Not one of them was older than sixteen, several of them were only thirteen. Some of them were neat and dapper with carefully-brushed hair and broad, white Eton collars; others were awkward, their neckties like bootlaces, their dark-clothed shoulders powdered with dandruff, the front lock of their hair swept with one sweep of a damp brush across their foreheads. Some had bright, keen, alert expressions; others were dull, stupid, irresponsive. There was not one who in a drawing-room would not have been shy and stammering in the presence of a man of thirty. It was extraordinary that in a group these Lilliputians should be able to make the life of a grown man hell. They had done that for his predecessor. They would do that for him if he were to let them.

He was in the kind of mood when one welcomes conflict. He was feeling ill; his head ached; he had the sensation of wanting to be sick, feeling he was going to be at any moment; yet knowing very well that he was not. He had had a heavy night of it. He had been talking over old times with one of the house masters. His wound had begun to hurt him. Whisky was the one thing that could stop that. He was feeling like hell now, but he would have felt even more like hell last night if he had stuck to beer. As happens so often when one is feeling ill, his perceptions were preternaturally acute.

As he took his seat in his cushioned chair, he heard beneath him the faint scrunch of broken glass. A second later a foul and penetrating smell had begun to fill the air. A stink bomb. That old trick. There was an atmosphere of nervous expectancy in the room. They’re all waiting to see what’ll happen; what I’m going to do. Well, I’ll fool them. Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll take no notice. Then one of them will feel it’s up to him to start the party. He’ll be the man I’ll go for.

He proceeded with the lesson as though nothing was happening.

“While I’m hearing your repetition, you’ll prepare the next chapter of Roman history. Meredith, we’ll start with you.”

A small, spectacled urchin, with a long beaked nose that gave him a birdlike look, came up to the desk, and in a quick, breathless voice so that the sentences were run one in another, rattled through his repetition. Hugh scarcely listened. The smell of the stink bomb was growing insupportable. One or two boys had begun to sniff, to look enquiringly at one another. One of them’s bound to say something in a minute. It may be a completely innocent person who does, but the betting is that it will be the ringleader. He’ll be growing nervous, feeling that his plot’s failed. I’ll act, anyhow, as though he were. If one has to make a mistake, it’s better to be on the side of injustice than over-leniency. One’s got to concentrate one’s attack. I’ll go straight for the one who speaks. It’ll frighten the rest if it does nothing else. Someone’s bound to speak in a minute.

He had foreseen correctly. Before Meredith had finished his repetition, Nichols had risen to his feet.

“Please, sir, there’s a very curious smell somewhere in the room.”

“Really, Nichols?”

“Yes, sir. It seems to be coming.… Well, I’d have said, sir, that it was coming from your chair.”

There was a titter from the benches. It was the prelude to the kind of ragging that consists of cheeking a master with a serious face, a respectful manner and remarks to which no logical exception can be taken. It was a kind of attack at which Nichols was an expert. Hugh had employed it in his time and recognized the gambit.

“Really? Now, that’s very interesting. Do any of you others notice it?” he asked the form. There was a chorus of assent. He raised his eyebrows. “So? Then my cold must be worse than I had thought it was. I confess I hadn’t noticed. Still, we can’t have the form suffering on that account. Nichols, will you go to the master’s common room and ask the steward to give you my great coat, my cardigan waistcoat and my scarf?” In a minute Nichols was back. “Thank you. Will you help me on with my coat? Thank you again. Now, will you open every window in the room?”

It was a bitterly cold day. May at its worst and bleakest. The central heating was not on. The form began to shiver in its place. “They won’t be grateful to Master Nichols for this,” Hugh thought, as he turned up the collar of his coat and tucked his hands deep into his coat pockets.

“Now, Nichols, let’s hear what you’ve made of your repetition.”

Nichols came up to the desk in a manner that was in part nervous, in part apologetic, in part aggressive. Things were not going in quite the way that he had planned. He was uncertain of his next move. He was shiveringly cold. He had the form’s antagonism. His position of leadership was threatened.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but I’ve made a mistake. I’ve learnt the wrong passage for repetition. I thought it was page thirteen, not thirty.”

His nervousness made the statement sound unexpectedly convincing. Hugh looked at him searchingly. It might be that the excuse was genuine. A first day of term mistake, before the form had settled down into its routine. Nichols’ tone of voice was that of a boy who was worried not so much by the prospect of punishment as by the loss of marks. Had a private soldier produced an excuse in that manner Hugh would have accepted it. But he was determined not to earn a reputation for mildness.

“Have you, Nichols? That’s a pity. I must learn to write more distinctly. It’s bad luck on you. But as you have not prepared and therefore do not know the passage that I set the form, I must ask you to do me fifty lines.”

Nichols gasped. The passage on page thirteen, which he had prepared, he had had no need to learn. It was a very familiar passage. It was the stock passage that had been shown up as lines to Hugh’s predecessor. Everyone in the form knew it by heart. Nichols had looked forward to the titter with which his recitation of the opening phrase would be received.

“But, sir.…”

Hugh caught him up.

“Yes, perhaps you’re right, Nichols. I had thought fifty lines would be enough, but perhaps a hundred would meet the case more satisfactorily.”

“Sir!”

“Or a hundred and fifty. Yes, I think we’d better say a hundred and fifty. And before lock-up to-morrow night. Splendid. Now then, Ferguson, your turn.”

In the cloisters afterwards, as the form was separating on its way to lunch, Jones-Evans, the patriarch of the form, brought down his hand heavily on Nichols’ shoulder.

“Well, my lad, and what now of this plaice-faced-looking ass of yours? Is he going to be a softer job than old Musty?”

There was a titter at Nichols’ expense; from quite small urchins, too, children who had only been in the school a year, and the form a term. It was galling to Nichols. He liked to be thought a big man by his juniors.

“That’s nothing. It’s only the first round. Haven’t you ever seen a boxer let himself be hit in the first round, so as to make his opponent over-confident?”

“We have. But, at the same time, I think we can say, in terms of sport, of that hundred and fifty lines that in the first round Nichols took a straight left to the jaw and went down for a count of six.”

Nichols laughed.

“Boxers often go down to take a rest. And besides, I don’t intend to do the lines.”

Nor did he. The hour between tea and prep., which is usually reserved for impositions, he spent playing stump cricket in the day-room.

“Do those lines? You don’t catch an old-stager like me out that way. Just you wait. I’ve got a plan up my sleeve that will make that Balliol look the biggest ass that ever sat in a Fernhurst form room.”

Two mornings later the Shell assembled in that mood of happy and tense expectancy that is always caused by the prospect of a row in which one’s own safety is not involved. The form was not to be disappointed.

When Hugh arrived a couple of minutes later, he was carrying under his left arm a pile of books, and in his right hand a large sheet of foolscap paper. He placed the pile of books upon his desk and stood for a moment looking at the sheet of foolscap. Then he turned to the form.

“I don’t want to be personal, Nichols, but is your Christian name Adolphus?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Nichols rose from his place.

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought so. I thought I recognized the clear Roman hand. A quotation. You cannot place it? I feared as much. But that is immaterial. I hope,” he continued, turning to address the form, “that you will pardon me for taking up a few moments of your valuable time on an entirely personal matter, but I have received by this morning’s post a very curious communication. It is headed, ‘The School House, Fernhurst,’ it is addressed to ‘My dear Parents,’ and signed ‘Your affectionate Adolphus.’ From the extreme illegibility of the handwriting, the original, I might almost say colloquial, nature of the spelling, and from the information that Nichols has already given us, we may safely assume that this letter was written by Nichols to his parents, and that it has, inadvertently, been placed in the wrong envelope.”

“Yes, sir, I think, sir——” but Hugh cut him short.

“No, no. One moment, please. All in good time you shall tell us later exactly how you think the mistake occurred. In the meantime,” and Hugh again turned to address the form, “in the meantime, there are just one or two little points about the letter that have rather puzzled me. You see, I hardly like to take notice of a letter that was not intended for my eyes, but—well, I should rather like to ask your advice on it. Let me see now …” he cast his eye along the form, “who is the senior boy here—Jones-Evans? In that case I’ll make you spokesman for the form. If you’ll just come up here, we’ll go over this letter and decide what we are to do.”

The form was smiling now, ready to burst out laughing any moment. Hugh had suspected it did not much mind who was ragged as long as someone was. It had expected Balliol to be the Aunt Sally, but Nichols would do just as well.

Hugh spread out the sheet of foolscap.

“The letter opens thus: ‘My dear Parents, the term has begun extremely well.’” He paused. “Really, Nichols, for you I should have hardly thought so.”

There was a roar of delighted laughter. The form, realizing that it was in for an amusing morning, settled down to enjoy itself. Nichols shifted uneasily from one foot to another and blinked uncomfortably. Things were not going at all as he had expected.

“There follow,” Hugh continued, “a few remarks which I will now read you on the probable composition of the School fifteen. There is, however, one little point in connection with this remark. Tell me, Jones-Evans, how would you spell separate? S-E-P-A-R-A-T-E. Exactly. But Nichols spells it E-R-A-T-E. And it is here that I should especially value the form’s advice. Don’t you consider, Jones-Evans, that when Nichols’ father receives this letter containing such an elementary mistake in spelling, he will receive the impression that we of the Shell pay insufficient attention to English grammar, and are a highly illiterate community?”

Jones-Evans accepted the spirit of the joke.

“I consider, sir, it will be most unfortunate.”

“It amounts practically to a libel on the form’s intelligence?”

“Practically, sir.”

“Then, as I think the form and I are in complete agreement, we must protect ourselves against the repetition of the libel. Perhaps, therefore, Nichols, to ensure us against such a disaster, you will write out a hundred times: ‘This is how separate is spelt.’”

“But, sir.…”

“Two hundred times, then, Nichols.”

The would-be rebel relapsed into miserable silence.

“We now come,” Hugh continued, “to some rather more interesting material. ‘This term,’ our correspondent writes, ‘we have a new form master, a man called Balliol. He is a stupid-looking man, youngish, over-grown. I don’t know whether the form will put up with his conceit. But being so unattractive in appearance, I should doubt it.’”

Hugh paused and there was an embarrassed stir in the desks in front of him. No one had quite expected this. It was going to be rather awkward and unpleasant, but not so amusingly exciting as they had expected. Nichols stared stolidly in front of him, rehearsing the defence he had planned the previous day. His confidence had been impaired certainly by that silly mistake in spelling. Balliol had scored there, clearly. But he would get his own back now. “I am sorry, sir,” he would say, “but I am at perfect liberty to say to my parents exactly what I choose.” Balliol could be as sarcastic as he liked, he had no weapon to pierce that armour.

There was a pause. Then again Hugh spoke, in the same tone of agreeable raillery.

“Of course, Nichols, I am, as your master, extremely interested to learn your opinion of me, but I must confess that your last sentence puzzles me. I cannot understand why, because your personal appearance is unattractive, the form should find it difficult to put up with my conceit.”

There was a titter at that. So he was going to make a joke of it, after all. The form was relieved; it again settled itself down to enjoy itself. He was a sportsman, this man, undoubtedly.

Nichols stammered awkwardly.

“Sir, I didn’t, sir—that’s not what I meant, sir.”

“It’s what you’ve said. ‘Being so unattractive in appearance, I should doubt it.’ Those are your exact words. ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence, and that clause is adjectival to it. Isn’t that so, Jones-Evans?”

“Certainly, sir, certainly.”

“Then, please, Nichols, please, explain to the form and to myself what exactly you meant to say.”

There was a moment’s pause. Then, in a desperate rally of insolent courage, Nichols faced his master.

“I meant, sir, because you were so unattractive in appearance.”

There was a gasp of surprise from the rows of benches.

Hugh’s urbane smile remained unaltered. “Then why on earth, if that is what you meant, did you not say so? In fact,” he continued, turning to Jones-Evans, “I’m very much afraid that our young friend has again perpetrated a libel on us. I shudder to think what Mr. Nichols will imagine to be our standard here. ‘They cannot spell,’ he will say. ‘They cannot write English.’ I’m afraid, Nichols, that the form will again have to protect its interests. So, perhaps you will write out a hundred times and deliver to me before lock-up to-morrow, the sentence as you should have written it. Let me see, how shall we phrase it? Ah, yes! ‘I rather doubt if the form will put up with Mr. Balliol’s conceit, because he is so unattractive in appearance.’ I think that will do, Jones-Evans? Yes—I had hoped so. And a hundred times, Nichols, before lock-up to-morrow. That will be admirable. And now, perhaps, you will tell us how the letter came to reach me?”

“It got into the wrong envelope.”

“That, Nichols, we have surmised. One does not usually send to one’s form master private communications to one’s parents. How did you come to be writing to me at all?”

Nichols’ power of repartee was spent. He gazed at the floor sullenly, while the small boys tittered.

“That imposition, sir. I hadn’t time to bring it. So I sent it through the post.”

Hugh threw up his hands. “That imposition! I was just wondering what had happened to it. So, instead of that interesting, if ill-written, letter, your father has received one hundred and fifty lines. Well, I hope he has found them legible. In the meantime, it is a little unfortunate because, you see, I have made a hobby of collecting lines. I amassed while I was a prefect here, two thousand lines. I had reserved for you the honour of opening my collection as a master. I suppose the only thing to be done, is for me to write to your father, enclosing this letter and asking him to return the lines.”

A look of blank and horrified dismay was spread over Nichols’ features. He began to stammer a protest.

“But, sir, really sir—I mean, sir—my f-father, sir, he’s cer-certain to have destroyed them.”

Hugh’s equanimity remained unruffled.

“Possibly, Nichols, possibly. But we must do the best we can. I shouldn’t like you to be put to the trouble of writing these lines again. In fact, the sooner we get the letter off to your father the better. I’ll just scribble a little note. His address is, you say, 142, Hammerton Place. Thank you very much. Now, Jones-Evans, if you’ll just take this down to the post office? Thank you very much.”

As the door closed behind the Shell’s spokesman, Hugh smiled pleasantly on his assailant. “Well, I have done the best I can for you. We may get the lines back, who knows? Now, I think you can return to your seat and we’ll begin our lesson.”

In a stupor Nichols walked back to his desk. He had meant it to be so supreme a hoax. First of all, he would have let Hugh know exactly what he thought of him with impunity. Secondly, he would have got off doing his hundred and fifty lines. He would certainly be able, he had thought, after that letter to bluff it through. Thirdly, he would have reinstated himself in the form’s good opinion. As it was, he had got three hundred additional lines and that tell-tale letter was on its way to Hammerton Place.

The thought of that letter, like the splashing of cold water on the face of a dazed man, recalled him to his senses. Whatever happened, whatever the punishment, however ignominious the confession, he must stop that letter from reaching his parents.

He jumped suddenly to his feet.

“Please, sir, that letter … may I stop it? It’s all untrue. I didn’t send those lines home. I never did them.”

Hugh lowered the book from which he had been reading to the form.

“My dear Nichols, none of us ever thought you had.”

There was another roar of laughter, through which Nichols stammered miserably.

“Then, may I, sir, please, sir, may I?”

Slowly, while his victim endured agonies of impatience, Hugh drew out his watch from his waistcoat pocket.

“It would take me less than five minutes to walk from here to the post office. Jones-Evans will not, I imagine, hurry himself. It will probably take him seven. It is six minutes since he left the room. You have, therefore, one minute in which to catch him. Run!”

The last word came abruptly like an order on parade. In obedience to it Nichols leapt from his seat and precipitated his body through the door.

Six minutes later he returned with Jones-Evans; he was gasping, a hang-dog expression on his face. He was in for it now, he supposed. Six of the best, at least.

But Hugh was too clever to allow him the faint glory of a punishment bravely borne. He looked at him with a smile of indulgent, fatherly contempt.

“We have reached the end of line 47. You will proceed to translate from there. And if, Nichols, you are no better at Latin translation than you are at ragging masters, you will have, I fear, to write the lesson out again.”

There was a roar of laughter, and in that laugh Nichols’ reputation as a ragster passed for ever. The Shell was amenable to discipline.

“At last,” thought Hugh, “I can not only treat these people like human beings, I can behave like one.”

The news of Nichols’ discomfiture did not take long to become common property throughout the school. For the first time Francis felt really proud of his brother: or rather, for the first time was able to take personal pleasure in one of his achievements.

“It was fine,” he told him. “Everyone’s saying what a sport you are.”

His enthusiasm was so considerable that to his brother it seemed excessive. In the reaction from a success, Hugh had begun to feel that the contest, if not unworthy of being waged, should never have begun. There seemed too much fighting everywhere. You could only win people’s respect by stamping upon someone else’s face. He felt resentful at having had such a fight forced on him.

“I must say that I was rather surprised at the way they started ragging,” he told Francis.

“How did you expect them to begin?”

“I don’t know. I thought they’d have waited a little.”

“They’d have missed their best chance then. Hit a bowler off his length before he has a chance of finding it.”

“I should have thought in the circumstances.…” He paused, uncertain of what exactly he did mean.

Francis laughed.

“Now you don’t mean that you expected to be let down lightly because you were an Old Boy, and had been a soldier and got wounded, and won a cross or something?”

“Of course not.”

But as a matter of fact that was more or less what he had thought. And the scorn with which Francis had received the suggestion explained even more clearly than the actual ragging had done the difference of attitude between Francis’s generation and his own. He did not expect any sympathy or consideration as “a war hero.” To ask for it would have been the last thing he would have done. At the same time he did feel he was entitled to some kind of differential treatment. There were special circumstances in his case: to which he would have been ashamed to draw attention, but which he expected others to recognize; which he felt that he himself as a boy would have recognized, but that Francis did not.

In the whole nature of the Shell’s attack on him there was a spirit of unsentimental ruthlessness: the self-sufficiency of a generation that had been ignored, that had been left to its own devices, to find its own entertainment in its own way: that was not so much cruel as blind to everything but self-interest. His brother’s generation had not so much been brought up as left to bring itself up. It had a feeling of the world against it; of fun to be got in spite of others: not because of others: it had a capacity for contempt that it was ready to turn upon itself. They had been brought up under the shadow of the war. But it was unlikely that they would take any active part in it. Suddenly the war would end as abruptly as it had begun, and they would be faced with an entirely new set of problems. Their life had not the continuity of impulse that his generation had had. Once again they would be left to their own devices.

“I wonder what they’ll make of it,” he thought. He wondered into what kind of men would grow up the boys who thought consideration for “a war hero” merely the foolish flinging away of a good hand.

Book V

Francis and Hugh

I

History records that the war started on August 4th, 1914 and ended in 1919 on the 19th of July. But the lives of individuals are not arranged on the same framework of dates as the lives of nations. For each individual the war began when he became absorbed in it, and ended when his part in it was finished. For some it had started before August 1914; for many it did not start till considerably later. For many it ended before the Armistice. There are those for whom it has not finished yet. For Hugh Balliol it ended with the burst of a whizzbang on the Somme offensive. As for innumerable others during those weeks, it both began and ended.

For rough purposes of generalization the war may be divided into two halves; up to the Somme and after the Somme. It was a different war after the Somme; it was fought in a different spirit by different men. The basic political and international differences—the fall of Asquith, Russia out of the war, America in the war, the failure of 1916 Peace negotiations, the U-Boat campaign—had their counterpart in the line. Up to the Somme the war had been fought by the old regulars, the territorials, the first Kitchener recruits. Most of that lot were out of the war by the Christmas of 1916. Their places were taken by Derbyites, conscripts, by those who had been too young to enlist in the first autumn. The post-Somme armies went to the front in a different mood. Though the young ones most of them had been fretting till they had passed the age test, they had come not of their own free wills: there was an atmosphere of coercion. The crusade spirit had been exchanged for a spirit of distrust; distrust of the generals who were mismanaging the war; the politicians who put office before country; the industrialists who were making money out of the war; the old men who demanded from their club arm-chairs the exactment of the last pound of flesh; the dignitaries of the press and pulpit who blessed the banners that they let others carry. At home there were the food queues and the ration cards. The spirit of Passchendaele was very different from the spirit of Loos and Neuve Chapelle.

For the Balliols—with the exception of Stella, rising rapidly from one position of importance to another as the importance of women’s contribution to the war was recognized—the last half of the war was a harbourage after the storm-tossed passage of the first two years. Ruth was still at Tavenham; a mother for the second time, with Victor wounded again at Bullecourt, second-in-command of the depot, and unlikely to be sent overseas again. For Francis the war was post-dated to his eighteenth birthday: the 15th September 1919. Till then there was the barrack-room atmosphere of school; athletics, at a time when games were derided as a wartime occupation, but adulated as the pre-war training of the new army; when it was considered a fine thing to have been an athlete before the war, but contemptible to take a game seriously during it: form work when it was uncertain whether a world would return that would value scholarship: parades and squad drill and P.T. when it was doubtful whether their training would be tested on the battlefield; lectures, addresses, sermons on duty, patriotism, responsibility at a time when one’s destiny was obscure, when one was travelling one knew not where, when one was being trained for one knew not what.

From Lucy, immune in Malaya from air-raids, U-boat campaigns, food shortage, came modestly proud accounts of her children’s progress: of how Jane could read and Marion could talk. She enclosed drawings in coloured chalks that ingenuity could recognize as the representation of palm trees and canoes. She described the industry of her husband who, with his two partners at the war, was responsible for the entire firm. She enclosed a photograph of their new car. “It seems an extravagance in wartime, but one must allow oneself some luxuries even at a time like this.” They were moving into a new house. It was much larger than their old one. They would now need a staff of six boys to run it properly. But really Stephen owed it to his position.

For Helen the war existed as a khaki-clad brother who kissed her good-bye and brought her presents; as a map in the study on which her father moved the flags that represented armies; as an ogre called the Kaiser who displaced in nightmares the giants and sorcerers of fairy lore.

For Jane there were the uncertain hours, the missed meals, the long absences and on her face the look of tranquil, abstract happiness whose nature and reason her husband was resolved to explore.

For Balliol there was the routine of work, whose emoluments increased in pace with the purchasing power of the nation. He invested the additional profits to himself in French War Loan, regarding it as his contribution to the war. His patriotism was recompensed at an interest of five per cent. He enrolled as a special constable but declined on account of his age to parade in the grey uniform of the Georgius Rex on Hampstead Heath. He played his regular game of golf on Saturday afternoons; he complained to the committee about the condition of the greens; but was told that in wartime green-keepers were few and dear. The supply of caddies was also inadequate. But the relative emptiness of the course amply compensated for these deficiencies. And as the committee had been able, using the plea of officers on leave who needed healthy entertainment, to revoke the decision of the landlords of the ecclesiastical commission, that golf should be forbidden upon Sundays, he derived greater enjoyment from his golf than at any other time. His drive was shorter, but it was straighter. If his approach shots were less bold, his chipping and his putting were more accurate. As always at the end of a round a comparison with recent scores convinced him that he was playing at least two strokes better; but his handicap remained fourteen.

In October a medical board reported that Hugh was fit for light duty and he was posted to an instructor’s course at Grantham. An attempt was made to retain him on the staff at Fernhurst, but the War Office replied that it could not dispense with the services of so experienced an officer. If the headmaster of Fernhurst were to apply for an officer to take charge of the O.T.C., that would be another matter. But in that case they would appoint an officer who was capable of full military duties. The chief made no such application.

“You’d be doing more good here than you will there,” he said to Hugh. “If you ever feel like coming back here after the war, which I know you won’t, remember that there’s always a place on the staff waiting you. In the meantime I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am to you for the help that you’ve given me. The Shell won’t forget their lesson in a hurry.”

At Grantham life was very much as he had left it a year and a half back. He was on an instructor’s instead of on a student’s course. As an instructor he was lecturing not to recruits but to officers and to N.C.O.s. It amounted to the same thing. There was the same kind of mess; the same kind of officer in the mess; the Sunday leaves to Nottingham; the dinners at the George; the week-end leaves to London when in the light of that new knowledge that had come to him on that last night in the line in France, he lived in the moment with an eager, calculating haste, as though he were making it up to himself for what he had missed; almost as though he were taking a revenge, in the way that a batsman will steadily and relentlessly pile up a score after the match is virtually won, forcing a victory home.

It was the kind of life that he would have considered ideal two years ago. His share in the war finished, himself justified, graduated in the university of the trenches, with nothing to do but to wait comfortably for the war to end. People called him a lucky devil. And he knew himself to be a lucky devil. He could wish, however, that he were well enough to enjoy his good fortune oftener. He felt ill half the time. He would get sick headaches, the result of mustard gas. Wet weather would send a dull throbbing, punctuated by sharp twinges, down his leg from thigh to ankle. Whisky was the only remedy and whisky in sufficient quantity to numb that throbbing, woke him at six next morning with a dry mouth and a drear sunk sensation that warned him that he would have to exercise severe self-control if he were to get through the day without loss of temper. The mess president told him with a laugh that he was the most profitable member of the mess; that his whisky bill was twice anybody else’s. Then added: “You are hitting the high spots, you know.”

Hugh laughed away the implied criticism.

“I’m between the devil and the deep sea. If I don’t drink at night I feel like hell. And if I drink at night, I feel like hell next morning. On the whole I prefer good nights and bad mornings, to good mornings and bad nights.”

It would be a relief, when the war was over; when he could get away from the chill and draughts and damp of army huts. He’d never get colds and rheumatism when he was in a properly built house with fires and central heating, doors that fitted, windows that didn’t rattle, roofs that didn’t leak. He remembered the way Rickman had wheezed and groaned with asthma. He was never like that at home, he’d said. He would be all right himself, too, when the war was over.

Like Ruth and Francis, Lucy and Helen, like his parents too, in their way, he marked time, waiting for the war to finish.

Stella was the only one of them who was carrying on with her ordinary career; who was in full exercise of her capacities. For her every month brought new duties, new responsibilities. Wherever there was talk of women’s war work, whenever an article appeared on Women in the War, whoever’s name might be omitted or included, hers, invariably, inevitably, was there. She had not only organized the activities of women, she had harnessed them to her own leadership, inspiring them with a feeling of loyalty and trust very similar to that which had made her four years earlier one of the government’s most dreaded foes. So absorbed was she in her work, so occupied by it that it was with no more than the half of her attention that she followed the slow passage to the Statute Book of the Bill that would admit women to the suffrage. Within three years public opinion had completely altered: or it might be more accurate to say the cabinet had become aware of what on that particular issue public opinion was. For so long now the Bill’s passage had been accepted as a matter of course that Stella Balliol scarcely realized on the bleak January evening of the final House of Lords debate that the goal for which so many women had worked so long, so bravely, so recklessly, at times so blindly, had been reached at last.

Or rather, she could not believe that it had come like this: so quietly, without conflict, without opposition, with no parade, no celebration. She had thought of the Cause as her life’s work. She had sacrificed everything for it: comfort, safety, personal happiness; almost, she could say, her womanhood. She had pictured the day of triumph in terms of banners, processions, speeches, massed meetings in Trafalgar Square. Displays that would match the demonstrations of the pre-war movement. But it had come and there were no cheers, no speeches. Those who would have marched with waving flags, were scattered. They were in munition factories, working upon farms; they were driving lorries, sweeping hospital wards; they were in charge of ’uses, tubes, lifts: they were collecting tickets at railway stations; they were in danger, many of them; they were worn out with a day’s labour; they wore the uniform of service. They had other things than the Vote to think about.

Just as she herself had other things to think about.

She had imagined that with the Vote won, her work would be accomplished; that there would be no more for her to do. It was a high ridge beyond which from the valley of her struggle she could not see. Now that she had reached that ridge she could see the succession of ridges that lay beyond. No one could think of their work as having done more than pass a stage at a time like this, when the very liberty of the country was in danger; when beyond the Rhine the enemy were already massing for the last desperate assault, that might achieve who could tell what effects. Beyond that ridge of the moment’s immediate needs who knew what succession of ridges waited? You followed a dream that was beyond your dream. You set yourself a mark. When you reached that mark you found that the thing you sought was farther on. Admitted now to the franchise, women would have to prove themselves worthy of it.

As she walked westward through the chill dark night the solemn sentences of Curzon’s speech echoed through her mind. Curzon had been the most implacable enemy of the Cause. He was the leader of the House. It was from him if from anyone that opposition was expected. There was a slight shuffle in the gallery as he had risen; as he had lifted his head in that familiarly disdainful gesture as though there were a faintly unpleasant smell beneath his nose. The suffragettes had been prepared for opposition. But none had come. His speech had been an acceptance of the inevitable. He could not, he said, recommend their lordships to embark upon a conflict with a majority of 350 in the House of Commons of whom nearly 150 belonged to the party to which most of their lordships belonged also; a conflict from which their lordships would not emerge with credit.

But he had not on that account approved the measure.

When other peers had spoken in praise, he had spoken in dispraise of women’s political responsibility. He regarded the bill frankly as a mistake “vast, incalculable, almost catastrophic, without precedence in history, without justification in experience … the opening of floodgates to something more than a mere tidal wave.” There were the familiar arguments to which she had listened often in the past, by which she had been exasperated, to which no Englishwoman would be again forced to listen; arguments to which for that very reason she found herself listening for the first time with respect. Curzon’s solemn periods had the quality of prophetic utterance. By an irony of contrast, Curzon, a man destined by the world’s and nature’s gifts to success of the most marked order, precluded from full and proper employment of those gifts by the evil fairy who had denied him that leaven of humanity which would have preserved him from the insensitiveness, the pomposity, the arrogance that made his successes unpopular and harsh; Curzon, a man who, through being unlovable, was deprived of the leadership to which his gifts entitled him, possessed in a high degree that rare gift of being able to achieve dignity in defeat. In spite of his many triumphs, his biggest moments were moments of failure, not of victory.

His stern sentences rang through her head as she turned westward towards Piccadilly. A time would come when those sentences would seem justified. There were two pictures to women’s share in the war. There were the nurses, the lorry-drivers, the farm girls. the munition workers; but there were also the silly addle-pated flappers to whom the war had been one glorious Luna Park: a succession of night clubs and flirtations; an unparallelled opportunity for breaking parental discipline. When it was all over; when the men came back to their jobs; when there was no need for land girls and nurses and tram conductors; when women would be faced with the problem of finding an economic place for themselves in the economic structure, the frivolous and empty-headed would remain, flitting from night club to love affair. It was on them that the limelight would fall. They would justify the mocking comment, “Well, you’ve asked for freedom. Now you’ve got it, what use are you making of it? Aren’t you behaving just as we always said you would?”

That time would come. And those who disbelieved in progress, who saw only a change in externality that was at the most relative; who refused to look far enough back or far enough forward to appreciate how vast a way the human race had travelled towards civilized fellow-feeling, would shrug their shoulders, would say: “Well, and was the struggle worth it?”

The end of the war as far as women were concerned would mean the start of another struggle to hold the ground that they had won in face of what men would call the laws of economic necessity. For a moment Stella felt weary and disenchanted at the prospect of this opening panorama of fresh campaigns. Then she squared her shoulders. That was a long way off. She had this present business. She was due to make a speech to a detachment of Waacs going overseas to-morrow. She would only have time for a hurried sandwich supper. She dismissed the future and began to phrase in her head the opening and concluding sentences of her speech.

II

Nature can provide vivid contrasts to the moods of man. During that slow, sad March of 1918 over which hung the shadow of the big offensive, the sun shone with a gentle radiance from skies of watered cobalt. Day followed day in leisurely calm procession. Lord Hunter-coombe pottering about his garden, watching first snowdrops, then crocuses, spray the leaf-strewn copse with colour, found it difficult to believe in this atmosphere of sun-washed tranquillity that only a few miles away within earshot almost, plans were maturing for the greatest battle in the world’s blood-soaked history; that summer and peace were not already on their way.

Loitering down the moss-covered paths, pacing the smooth lawns, aware only of the blue sky above him, the sun’s warmth upon his face, deluded by the sun and warmth into a belief in summer’s actual return, he ignored the dampness of the ground beneath his feet, the treacherous chill that rose from a fresh-turned earth as the sun grew larger and redder behind the leafless trees; just as the sentries looking out over the plains of Picardy might have been lured out of suspicion by the seeming innocence of that long stretch of ground, within whose folds the plans of battle were concealed. Just as the sentry might not have recognized as the proof of a tunnelled mine shaft the sprinkle of new-turned earth upon a parapet, so the old man deliberating with the head gardener as to whether patriotism demanded that the archery should be planted with potatoes, suspected no danger in the slight huskiness with which for the last three mornings he had woken, the wheeziness which had troubled his breathing after dinner.

He was utterly unprepared for the sickness which struck him as suddenly as the big offensive broke upon the English troops in France. One afternoon he had come in rather earlier than usual from the garden; though the sun was shining he had felt cold. He had told the butler to bring him a rug to tuck round his knees as he sat after tea before the fire reading. But he had felt disinclined to read, although only that morning he had received from the library a detective story to which for several days he had been looking forward. He was content to sit there, dozing. At dinner he had no appetite. He had gone to his room early. He had taken two aspirins and a hot whisky. A good sleep and a sweat would put him straight.

He had woken out of a nightmare, with the hands of his luminous clock pointing to five to three; with the sensation that someone was kneeling upon his chest. He struggled, heaved himself with his elbows upon the pillow, rested there, half upright, his forehead damp from the effort, gasping, each breath coming like the quivering sigh which a runner takes at the end of a long and hard-run race; with the struggle growing harder instead of easier with each breath. He turned on the switch of his electric lamp. He turned so that he could see himself in the mirror above his dressing-table. “I’m in pretty bad shape,” he thought.

All through the day the sense of struggle gathered. It lessened towards evening. But only because his strength was lessening; not because the passages of his lungs were clearer. He lay there, his eyes closed, his cheeks flushed, his forehead damp, his chest rising and falling in short, quick gasps that gave the impression that he was gathering his strength for one sudden effort, one desperate heave to fill his lungs with the air that was being pressed inexorably from them. The doctor stood pensively by his side.

“He’s over seventy,” he said to Ruth. “His reserves of strength are scanty.”

For thirty-seven hours the fight went on, with sudden spasms of struggle, punctuated by lapses into inertia that grew longer and more frequent.

Most of the day Ruth sat beside him. It was the first time that she had watched the approach of death. It was less terrifying than she had expected. But it was no less sad. It was very like the action of a car that has run out of petrol. There is a period of short, jerky movement. Then suddenly, quite quietly it runs into a standstill. It was in very much that way that the life went out of the old man. He had ceased to struggle. He lay with his eyes closed. He might have been asleep. One moment he was breathing. The next moment he had ceased to breathe.

It was the first time that Ruth had looked upon the face of death. With a wondering reverence she stared down at the calm bloodless mask. Born not so much in an age of doubt, as in an age that accepted as insoluble the problem of an after life, Ruth did not know for certain what she believed and what she disbelieved. Standing at her father-in-law’s side alone, she knew for very certain, fully appreciated for the first time, that the body laid out below her on the bed was not the person she had known; that that person either had ceased to exist or was somewhere else.

Often during the long months when she had paced the gardens and avenues of Tavenham, awaiting the birth of her two children, Ruth had wondered how she would feel when she became its mistress. It was a lot that ninety-nine women in a hundred would envy her. But she was not certain whether at her age she would not find its responsibilities a rather overwhelming burden. It would be an end of freedom; of careless unreflecting action. She would become the kind of person of whom things were expected. Although she was in the early twenties, she would have to behave as though she were a person in the thirties. And she had had so little a time of freedom. That first year of war: that, and no more than that. She would feel cheated if, when the war was over, she was unable to have the irresponsible “good time” that her generation had promised itself.

Victor, she knew, quite frankly looked on his accession to the title as the curtain’s fall on what he imagined would appear in retrospect to be the happiest period of his life.

“Now our troubles begin,” he said, as he and Ruth presented themselves at the Chambers in South Square, Gray’s Inn, where his father’s will was to be read to them, and the conditions of the estate’s finances explained.

They had expected the interview to present them with a list of problems; they had not, however, expected it to be opened with the dramatic choice of alternatives that the family solicitor had prepared.

It was the first time that Ruth had met him. He was different from what she had expected. She had pictured a family solicitor in terms of the stage; a prim, precise little man, short-sighted, peering over spectacles, bald-headed, black-coated, with a black bag full of papers among which he fumbled. The guardian of the Tavenham finances was not at all like that. He was large, ample, untidy, with a soft loose collar, a draggled Old Etonian tie, a coat with bulging pockets of a different material from his trousers. The powdering of his waistcoat suggested snuff. His hands in contrast to the remainder of his person, were small and carefully tended. He gesticulated with them as he talked, twiddling the front lock of his hair into a Mephistophelean peak. He had at moments a boyish look, but was presumably in the latish fifties. His voice was genial but husky.

“Now, before we start looking at these figures, I’d better tell you what the situation as a whole amounts to. Does Tavenham mean so much to you that you are prepared to keep it on at the sacrifice of every other interest you have?”

He proceeded to explain. The estate had been mortgaged heavily when Victor’s father had inherited it. As a result very largely of the Budget of 1910 it had become more heavily mortgaged. During the last years increased income tax demands had been met by a further loan on the estate. The estate was solvent during his father’s life. But death duties would be very heavy.

“I don’t think your father realized how an estate that can pay its way during an owner’s life will become insolvent for the heir who has to raise further mortgages to meet death duties. When I tried to explain to him, he asked me how else the money was to be found. It was in its way a perfectly fair question. Under the present system of taxation any large estate is the victim of a process of diminishing returns. There are, at the rate things are going, few estates that could remain solvernt for six generations unless they were substantially added to. The old theory that what a man owns his family can keep, is not accepted in a democratic age. What one man wins returns into the open market unless his heirs can add to it.”

Victor cut him short. He was not prepared to listen to a lecture on the rights of property.

“Let’s get down to facts. Are you telling me that I can’t afford to keep up the place?”

“No. You can. But if you decide to keep it on, there’s nothing much else that you will be able to afford.”

“You mean that every penny I get will have to go on the upkeep of Tavenham?”

“Exactly. It is for you to decide whether or no you think that worth it.”

Ruth and Victor exchanged a glance. They could feel that each was thinking the same thing.

“We’ve got to keep it on for the boy’s sake,” said Victor.

The man of law looked at him reflectively.

“Do you anticipate any substantial addition to your capital?”

“No, how could I?”

“I mean either from your wife.…” He paused, looking across at Ruth; she shook her head.

“My father won’t have much over to leave to me, poor pet.”

“Or,” he continued, turning to Victor, “you might be yourself meditating some profitable excursion into finance?”

Victor, in his turn, shook his head.

“I don’t see myself as a king of commerce.”

“In that case I think you may assume that your son will never be in a position to make his home at Tavenham. The estate will just stand one instalment of death duties, it certainly cannot stand a second. You have to consider the issue entirely from your own points of view. Do you prefer to spend your lives at Tavenham, or in such places as your fancies under such restrictions as your income imposes, decide?”

He looked from one to the other with a bland, judical indifference.

“It’s a question that should need a great deal of thinking over. Shall we proceed with the other business?”

For a week they discussed the matter from every point of view: from their own and from their children’s. Whether they would get more fun maintaining the feudal atmosphere of Tavenham, or living as their fancies chose: Monte Carlo in the winter, a furnished house in London for the season, Scotland in the autumn; freedom to travel, to know variety, to be mobile at a time when speed was a religion. As far as they were themselves concerned, they were agreed that they would get more out of life if they were to put Tavenham on the market. If Tavenham were to prevent them from joining in the main currents of life, they might well come to think of it not as a home but as a prison. On the other hand, would the children stand a better chance brought up in the country, in its cleaner air, in touch with country things, learning to ride and shoot, to absorb that kinship with nature that no townsman ever had, in touch with the continuity of their own tradition, aware of their family, as living in a city they could never be? It might be that for their children’s sake it would be better to keep on Tavenham.

In the end they decided, even for their children’s sake that it would be wiser to let it go. “They won’t be able to live there themselves,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to let them get too fond of it. Besides, it’s best to bring a man up in the atmosphere where he’s going to live. Most of us are going to be townsmen in the future. Children should be brought up in the future, not the past. In ten years’ time Tavenham and all it stood for may be an anachronism.”

In the directorate of Peel & Hardy the death of Huntercoombe involved the reconsideration of old arrangements. With profits increasing at an agreeable ratio, with the shareholders content and silent, there had seemed no reason to look ahead. The death of Hunter-coombe meant more than an empty seat upon the Board. It entailed a mental stock-taking. As each deliberated on the best policy to adopt, each in his own way wondered what position he himself would want to occupy when the war was over and the firm resumed its normal activities.

For the first time since he had resigned his position in the firm to join the Inns of Court, Hugh discussed his own future with his father.

“I’ll never be able to go back to an office desk after all this. I’ve got restless. I want movement, variety. I want to be able to use my freedom. If I had to sit at a desk all day, I’d just go mad.”

“My dear fellow, no one’s suggesting that you should.”

“There’ll be lots of things that I could do: outdoor things; my war record’ll be a help. Of course, I’ll be able to do a lot of odd work for the firm still. I could go on with the commission side of things.”

“I’d thought of offering you a place upon the Board.”

“That’s talking.”

“Of course I’d hoped you’d take my place here as Managing Director. I’ll have to sit rather looser in the saddle before very long. But I see that’s impossible. You couldn’t stand that kind of work. Not after all you’ve been through. You’re entitled to enjoy yourself. You’ve earned that. We’ll see you have it. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t help yourself to a share of our excess war profits.”

Prentice, too, took Huntercoombe’s death as the signal for his own retirement.

“I’ve been here long enough,” he said. “I’m over sixty. I want to enjoy my last few years. There’s my boy who’ll need all the money he can lay his hands on when he’s out of khaki. I’ll make my shares over to him, nominally. They’ll entitle him to a place on the Board. Why shouldn’t he have it? He’ll be quite useful, or rather, he’ll be no more useless than the average director is.”

The suggestion was put forward with that “We’re both rogues, aren’t we?” look that Balliol never found it easy to resist. He knew what Prentice was thinking. “You want your son on the Board. I want mine; I won’t oppose his election if you’ll see that my son gets on too.” How Prentice enjoyed playing to what he considered the baser human motives. How he smacked his lips over the venality of mankind.

It was as much as anything to bring into Prentice’s watchful eye that gloating look of a gourmet before a richly-seasoned dish, that he made as a definite proposition what he had intended to put forward as a very tentative and not very serious suggestion.

“I can’t help feeling that we should be wise to maintain the family traditions and invite the present Lord Huntercoombe to take his father’s place as Chairman of our Board.”

The quick light came into Prentice’s grey eyes. Balliol could guess his thoughts. Ah, but this is too rich, first his son, then his son-in-law. Nepotism run riot. Well, I’ve a card to play which’ll show that I recognize the game he’s up to.

“In that case I suggest that we should call a shareholders’ meeting at the shortest possible notice. When you’ve anything very radical to put across, it’s always best to do it when those who would normally be insurgent are too busy over something else to notice what you’re doing. Yes, I think we’d be wise to do that, Balliol.”

The slow smile with which he accompanied his advice was the chuckle with which the villains of melodrama rub their hands while they plot the kidnapping of the heroine. Prentice liked to conduct a conference as though the details of an incredibly shady transaction were being arranged. He could never realize that self-interest might be linked to a general welfare. As a matter of fact, Balliol reflected, an imminently suitable arrangement had just been made; far more likely to prove advantageous to the shareholders than any that could have been devised by the type of person who would have thought: “My son, my son-in-law, my partner’s son? But that’s impossible. Whatever will people think!”

The shareholders’ meeting was held half-way through September. The Board room was rearranged to accommodate a gathering of fifty. The Board table was moved below the window, with barely room for the directors to push back when they took their seats. Across the fireplace were three rows of chairs; each chair bore the printed report, sent to every shareholder, containing the balance sheet, the profit and loss account, the announcement that preference shareholders would receive their stipulated dividend of seven and a half per cent, and that for ordinary shareholders there would be a fifteen per cent, dividend. On the board table was a leather-bound brass-locked volume in which shareholders were invited to sign their names. The meeting was fixed for three o’clock. Anyone entering the room at half-past two would have imagined the scene set for one of those high dramas of modern commerce with which the novel and the film have familiarized the layman.

By ten past three, four of the chairs were occupied. Three of them by members of the staff who at a time of crisis had been given shares in lieu of a rise of salary and had found the exchange extremely profitable. They sat together self-consciously, aware of the power granted them this once a year to criticize their employers in the very room to which ordinarily they were summoned to answer the charge of their delinquencies. The fourth chair was occupied by a stranger: a nondescript man of nondescript appearance. He might be thirty years old, he might be sixty. He might have an income of three hundred, he might have an income of three thousand.

At a quarter past three Victor rose to his feet.

“As I think that as many shareholders as can be expected to arrive, already have arrived, I will call upon the Managing Director to read you his report.”

It was a long report. Balliol enjoyed addressing a meeting of four persons as though it were a gathering of four hundred. No one reading the typewritten account of the proceedings would have imagined that he was not trying to convince an audience that contained innumerable different points of view. His sense of humour was tickled by the patent absurdity of the dramatic pause with which he would preface some such exordium as “Gentlemen, there must be, I am aware, those among you will hold …” to be followed a few sentences later by “I will give the same answer to those others who are dissenting on the grounds that…” His vindication of the firm’s policy, his prophecy of the firm’s future, his tribute to the loyal industry of the staff lasted twenty-seven minutes.

The proceedings after this oration proceeded with exemplary speed. The adoption of the report and balance sheets was moved, seconded, passed. The firm’s action in co-opting three new directors and electing a new chairman was approved. A vote of sympathy to the late chairman’s son was moved and seconded. With no opposition a vote of thanks to the chairman was proposed. The motions were proposed and seconded by the three shareholder members of the staff. Each in turn rose self-consciously. “I should like to move that,” “I should like to second that.” The nondescript stranger took no part in the proceedings. He sat silent and motionless. The moment the meeting was declared to be at an end, he picked up his hat and left the room.

“Now who on earth was that?” asked Balliol.

The leather-bound volume was examined. His name was Briggs. He lived at Maidstone. For fourteen years he had been the owner of four shares. It was the first time he had attended a meeting.

“And why now?” said Balliol. “And then to do nothing when he comes; neither to express gratitude nor to find fault? His purpose eludes me. There are times when the purpose of the whole human race eludes me.”

“That is neither here nor there,” said Prentice. “Let us be thankful for his solitary presence. The moment we cease declaring a dividend you will find our seating accommodation uncomfortably inadequate.”

The board meeting that followed the departure of the shareholder was of a perfunctory nature. Minutes were read and signed. There was no business to be transacted. The caretaker’s wife presented herself with a tray of office tea and office bread and butter.

Prentice took one bite at his slice, then laid it down.

“Margarine. I really think that it is to the return of butter that I look forward more than anything when I consider how pleasant the world will be when the war is over.”

“I don’t think you’ll have long to wait,” said Victor.

Every issue of the evening papers brought the news of hastening victory. The allied armies were streaming across northern France. In the east the Turks and Bulgarians were near the breaking point. It was happening so fast that nobody could realize that it was happening. Only yesterday the Germans had been shelling Paris. Haig had written his “Back to the Wall” despatch. Peace was centuries distant. Complete victory was declared impossible.

But now, only a few weeks later, peace terms were a general topic of discussion.

“I’ll be glad of a holiday,” said Hugh.

His brother-in-law looked at him searchingly.

“I can’t say that you look too fit.”

“I don’t feel too fit.”

“What’s the matter? That gas still?”

“That and other things.”

“You’d better come down to Tavenham for a rest cure. We’d best have all the fun out of it we can while it’s still there.”

Early in May the first announcements that Tavenham was for sale had been sent out. Every house agent in London had its particulars. Once a month a small photograph appeared on the back page of The Times. But nobody was very confident that a purchaser would be found till the war was over. No one was going to commit himself at a time when the future was so uncertain. Putting it up for auction would be a waste of time and money. Early in October, however, Victor received a typewritten letter signed Johnstone Buckleigh, with the word “Sir” in typed brackets after the signature, stating that Messrs. Willett of Sloane Square had given him an order to view Tavenham, and that with Lord Huntercoombe’s permission he would avail himself of that permit on the following Friday afternoon.

Victor looked him up in Who’s Who. He had been knighted in 1917. He was not in the 1916 issue. He was a man of forty-three. He had been educated privately. He was married and had two children. He was the chairman of the Phitclose Shoe Company. His recreation was golf. He was a member of the National Liberal Club. “Government contracts and a gift to the party funds,” was Victor’s verdict. “A vulgarian, I bet you.”

On the following Friday a long, low, very polished Rolls-Royce limousine swung soundlessly up the drive.

Said Victor, “As I expected, he’ll be fat, red-cheeked; veined nose, double chin. He’ll be wearing violently checked plus fours, a club tie and gleaming brogues.”

To his surprise a tall, thin, quietly-mannered, quietly-dressed man opened the car’s door for himself, and stood, looking up at the long low line of the house’s frontage.

“That’s nice,” he said. “It’s how I hoped it would look, how I was afraid it wouldn’t.”

He spoke as though he had already made up his mind. He had a manner that Victor liked. His voice was characterless in a way which suggested that at some time or another a brogue or accent had been ruthlessly rolled out. But it had a pleasantly unaggressive self-confidence. He was wearing a brown tweedy kind of suit. His shoes were thick-soled and had the rich brown that comes of use. His shirt was of a pale neutral-coloured cashmere flannel. His tie was a dark brown poplin. They were the kind of clothes that a countryman would have worn. But something in the way he wore his clothes, perhaps Victor thought, in the neatness with which the tie fitted in the angle of the collar, showed quite definitely he was a townsman.

As they walked round the house and grounds he talked of himself with an engaging candour.

“The war made me, of course. I was well-to-do before the war. I am a rich man now. You will say that nobody has a right to make money out of the war. That’s nonsense. War gives a man a chance to show his talent. A lieutenant becomes a general, an industrialist becomes a millionaire. The country rewards those who are of service to her. And I have been of service. I’ve kept my factories running day and night. I’ve seen that the troops had boots when they were needed: good boots. I did something that was necessary better than the others could. One deserves to have a reward for that.

“And now I mean to have a say in the way the country’s run. I’m going into Parliament. That’s why I want a place in the country. If you’re going to represent the people, you’ve got to know the people, move among them. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to move away from the Midlands. I shouldn’t carry the same weight down there. They remember my beginnings. I picked on this place because the village was called Buckley. In a generation or two my name and the village will get linked. There’ll be a feeling we came from the same roots. It’s nonsense in a way, but at the same time it stands for something. Yes, this is the kind of place I want. The only thing is that I want it quick. I believe the war’ll be over before Christmas. I believe there’ll be a general election before Easter. I want to run as an M.P. for this division with a real stake in the place. I want these people to know whom they’re voting for. The man who’s taken Tavenham; that’ll mean something to them. Can I move in by the end of the month?”

The speed of his decision astonished Victor.

“Do you always make up your mind as fast as that?”

“Always. I never reason about things. I go by instinct. The heads of my departments bring me sheets of figures. I never look at them. I say to myself, ‘You’ve taken forty hours making out that balance sheet. I haven’t spent forty seconds looking at it. That explains why you’re where you are and I’m where I am.’ Well, that’s settled then, Lord Huntercoombe. I move in on November the first. Whatever minor details there are our lawyers and agents can arrange. I’m not a man to bother about pennyworths of tar.”

He shook hands heartily.

It was half-past four. For two and a quarter centuries the Tavenhams had owned this house. In seventy-five minutes its transfer had been arranged to a family of whom no record had existed anywhere when the last brick of Tavenham had been laid.

“Still, I’m glad it is going to a man like that,” thought Victor. “There are some people whom I’d have hated to think of here; whom I’d not have sold it to. But this man’s real. He’ll start a tradition here. It’ll be a new tradition. But it’ll be English. It’ll be sound.”

The house would still stand for an ideal of service.

III

On a November morning with the long avenue of chestnuts gold and amber in the misted sunlight, with the dead leaves lying like crimson shadows below the beech trees; the tufted grasses of the paddock sparkling with dew-rimmed cobwebs, Ruth and Victor drove away from Tavenham to a London that was breathlessly awaiting the Armistice that meant Peace and Victory.

“I’m glad it’s happening now,” said Victor. “I don’t think I could have borne it afterwards, when everyone was coming back from the war and the place was settling back into its old life. Now it’s just one more change, when everything is change.”

They had decided to stay at Ilex till they had found a suitable London house.

It seemed very much like old times to have Ruth back in her old room again, to hear from the hall the sound of children’s voices, to find a pram set in the shelter of the balcony. It was to seem even more like old times a few days later, when the morning of the thirteenth brought an excited cable from Malaya. “Darling, I am so happy. We are coming back all of us by the first boat—Lucy.”

It seemed as inconceivable that Lucy should be coming back as that the Armistice had been signed. “We shall have the whole family here for Christmas,” Balliol prophesied. It did not seem possible. Two years ago the family had been scattered. Lucy in Malaya, Ruth at Tavenham, Hugh in France, Francis at Fernhurst, only Helen left. And now they were all coming home. It wasn’t possible. Something was bound to happen to prevent it.

But nothing did. First Francis came back from Fernhurst for his Christmas holidays. Then Hugh arrived from Grantham with a fortnight’s leave pending demobilization. Then on Christmas Eve itself a taxi, laden with luggage drew up at the front door, Lucy was rushing up the path, behind her two little girls were pulling each other by the hand, while a large, florid, heavily-built man argued with the taxi-driver. Lucy was in her father’s arms, he was holding her away from him at arm’s length, examining her, saying, “But you haven’t altered in the least.” Her mother was agreeing. “She’s exactly the same, isn’t she, Ruth?” “Of course she is. And I thought she’d be shrivelled with tropic heat—and Lucy darling, this is heaven. Oh, the toddlers, and Stephen.”

And really she didn’t seem any different, because her face was flushed, and she was happy: because she was home again; because she felt a girl again in the house that she had lived in as a girl. And there was her old room, just as it had always been: the Liberty curtains, the Morris wallpaper. Nothing seemed any different. Even Francis, though he was a public school boy. She hoped he wasn’t too angry at having his workshop turned back into a nursery. Why, of course he wasn’t. Besides, he was getting rather too big for a workshop now. Helen was certain that she’d have known Lucy anywhere, though she had only been three when Lucy left.

Then there was the first dinner with Stephen taking his place for the first time with his in-laws. With Lucy asking, “Well, now, is he what you’d thought he’d be?” With Ruth answering obliquely, “Are we what he’d thought we’d be?“ And though neither question was answered, there was the general feeling that there wasn’t any need for them to be; that Stephen was friendly and impressive-looking, sound, serious; the kind of person to keep a firm hand on Lucy; stop her jumping in front of circuses; a man’s man more than a woman’s; the best kind of husband. They all felt that they were liking him, that he was liking them. And that since that was so, it didn’t matter whether they were like or unlike what he’d expected, or he was like or unlike their pictures of him.

It was many years since the dining-room at Ilex had witnessed such a noisy gathering. Everyone was busy asking questions. No one bothered to hear or answer the questions he was set. Each was waiting for his own next sentence. Champagne corks popped briskly. They were too excited, too talkative, to eat. The pace and noise of the conversation was so sustained that it was a relief when the time came for Jane to signal to her daughters and the four men were left alone with their cigars and brandy and Stephen’s explanation of the extreme difficulties with which a colonial lawyer had been faced in war-time.

“You fellows over here can’t realize what we had to do. You had troubles of your own, of course. But they weren’t like ours. We were so cut off. Suppose anything had happened—a rising; something of that kind—where should we have been? No chance of getting any help from England. We had to rely upon ourselves. It was the job of the lawyers to see that no rising did take place; the native had to be kept in his place, but not irritated. Every situation had to be handled with kid gloves. I served on the bench for eighteen months. I know. And the work in my office… When I tell you that both my partners joined up and left me in the lurch to carry on their work for them! No light job, I can tell you. And all the thanks fellows like myself got was a suggestion from Whitehall that we should make a contribution to the war in the shape of income tax. Our contribution, indeed! As though our work and the money we invested in War Loan weren’t a sufficient contribution. I am glad to say that I was largely instrumental in putting a stop to that. I pointed out that most of the money in Malaya was owned by the Chinese and that you couldn’t tax the Chinese because you couldn’t read their figures. I pointed out that if the English were taxed and the Chinese weren’t, we should be just made ridiculous, and that we couldn’t afford that. Have to keep the prestige of the British flag.”

Victor nodded his head approvingly. On such an evening even that sounded quite all right.

In the boudoir room which had been once their own and which now was temporarily Ruth’s bedroom, the two sisters sat exchanging confidences. As they compared their experiences in childbirth, Ruth remembered their last talk here on the evening before Lucy had sailed; of how they had promised to tell each other exactly what marriage was. It was about that that they had been curious then. They were enlightened now. But they had so come to accept that side of life as a matter of course, that they felt no curiosity, no wish to exchange confidences of that kind with one another. Ruth wondered whether Lucy were remembering that last talk; wondered what Lucy would say, or rather think, if she were to tell her of that flat in Westminster, and a summer evening. It was only four years ago, yet it seemed so long ago that she could not think of herself as the girl who flung bonnets over windmills. She had thought of herself as Victor’s wife now for so long. No other man had looked like coming into her life. She could not picture her world without Victor as her background. She was still in love with him; in the way that a woman four years married interprets that emotion. The Ruth who had worn a Chinese dressing-gown was as much a dead self as the Lucy who had flung herself before a circus. “Yet even so, I’m under thirty. It really does seem rather strange that at that age, when I and my sister are having an intimate talk about those things, we should be discussing labour pains and chloroform and dry confinements.”

On the Christmas Day there was a complete family reunion. A long lunch table with the children at one end of it. A turkey punctured with holly, a plum pudding alight with brandy, crackers, balloons, paper caps, whistles and paper hoops that when lit in the right place sailed flaming towards the ceiling. Stella had been invited.

Lucy trembled when the parlourmaid announced the name. She had looked forward to this meeting for seven years, wondering how she would feel again when she met the woman who had once so influenced her. The force of that influence had weakened rapidly since her marriage. But something of it remained: the suspicion that something had gone from her that she could not recall; that since she had given something of herself, without Stella she could never be quite complete. Enough, anyhow, of that early influence remained to make her tremble when the maid announced “Miss Stella Balliol.”

Then from behind the door appeared a tall gaunt figure, a middle-aged woman with grey short-cut hair, lined features, close-drawn lips; in uniform, with a neat pinned collar. A close-fitting tunic, and Sam Browne belt toned with a masculine swinging stride. Across the room Stella’s eyes looked for hers, met and held them. It was a long steady look. Lucy felt a burden slipping from her shoulders. The woman whom her memory had retained in terms of glamour was absorbed and superseded by this stranger. The old influence was dead. I’m free at last.

Lucy was at pains not to sit next her aunt at lunch. There would have been nothing for them to say to one another. But every now and then she would hear from the other end of the table the firm resonant voice that had gained pitch and strength since its experience of the parade grounds. There was talk of woman’s part in the next election.

“They offered me a practically safe seat on the coalition ticket,” Stella said. “But I felt it was too soon. I’m going back into politics. But I’ve not yet decided on what side or on what terms.”

There was talk of the new title to be conferred on women: the dameship that was to be the equivalent of knighthood.

“You ought to have one of those, Aunt Stella,” Francis said.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

At the end of the meal Balliol rose to his feet.

“I am not going to make a speech,” he said. “But I think this is an occasion on which we all might be permitted to rise and drink our own healths. I never expected that a day would come when we should all be seated together at this table. The war scattered us; the war has brought us back to one another. Only when I look round and see these new faces at our table, I realize how much each of us has become enriched; how the whole family has become the richer.”

In most homes, in most families, there was some such occasion. Sons had returned to mothers, husbands to wives and children; sweethearts could plan their marriage. Peace had come, and victory. Bank balances were pleasantly inflated. No one was out of work. Gratuities were waiting to be spent. Freedom lay ahead. The golden road of opportunity stretched clear. There can have been few homes in England during that Christmas whose happiness was not mainly inspired by the thought “And now our innings is really going to begin.”

And then.…

But quickly though the reaction came from the optimism of the immediately post-war period, its advance was imperceptible, so smooth was the descent, so many landmarks were passed upon the way. The journey that is long in distance seems long in time. An eventless year in retrospect appears to cover a shorter period of time than a crowded fortnight. And the early months of 1919 were packed with incident. Before the time came for Francis to return to Fernhurst, Ilex had returned to what had become its normal state.

Lucy had found the English climate too rigorous after the sultry heat of the tropics and had moved her family to San Raphael. Ruth had taken the seven years’ lease of a house in Brompton Square, very similar to, though smaller than the house in Easton Square in which she had been born and had spent her childhood. In the middle of January Hugh was demobilized. His wound and war gratuity were credited to his account at Holt’s. He took one look at his passbook; then walked straight into a house agent’s office. “I want a two-roomed service flat within a shilling’s taxi ride of Piccadilly Circus.”

When Carter Paterson’s van called at Ilex for Francis’ trunk and playbox in the last week of January, the house was as empty as it had been six months earlier.

In the same week Hugh attended his first board meeting as a director in Peel & Hardy’s. As he came in through the trade entrance, he saw a familiar figure bending an auburn head over a packing case. He laid a hand upon its shoulder. “Now then,” an aggrieved voice answered; a head turned. At the sight of Hugh it immediately shot up, straightened itself, shoulders back, hands at the sides, thumbs down the seam of the trousers, a soldier on the parade ground. “Sorry, sir. Didn’t know it was you.” Then grinned, realized that those days were over; relaxed its tension.

It was the first time that Hugh had met Walker since with one Vickers gun they had assured a counter-attack’s success. They had a good deal of gossip to exchange.

“You ought to have got a D.C.M. at least that day,” Hugh told him. “Why on earth didn’t you give yourself a proper show?”

A sly look came into Walker’s face. “Well, sir, it was like this. Things wasn’t quite the way you thought they was. It was…” He paused, looking at Hugh suspiciously. “It is all right my telling you this now sir, isn’t it? I mean we are out of khaki, and all that, aren’t we?”

“We are free men now, Walker.”

“Well then, it was like this, sir. I’ve never ‘ad the wind up quite so much. There were the six of us, left together. And when Jerry came over, the corporal ’e began to get worried like; wanted to know what was ‘appening be’ind; thought as ’ow maybe we should fall back. Said ’e was going back to see; ’e went. Well, there we was, the five of us, feeling pretty glum. Bertie ’e says wot about a drop of that Dutch courage? We’d all got a bit extra for the doings, and you know ’ow it was just then. They was sending up a full section’s rations and there wasn’t more than half a section at the other end. Well, our gun team had been pretty clever. We’d kept most of the buckshee stuff to ourselves. We got a water bottle full of it between us. ‘Wot abaht it?’ Bert says. We all agree. But just as he’s reaching for the stopper, bang comes one of those there whizz-bangs, right among us. It didn’t ‘it the rum bottle luckily, but that’s abaht all it didn’t ’it. That, and me. The trench was a rare mess; but you’ll be remembering that yourself, sir. Well, there I was with the gun and me four chums gone west, so I thought, ‘I’d better have that drink.’ I was feeling pretty lonely. So I took a good long swig. I felt better so I took another, and felt better still. I thought I’d best stick to the medicine that was helping me; there was the sun shining and I began to feel nice and warm, when suddenly what should I ‘ear but corporal’s voice calling ‘No. 3 gun-team! Walker, No. 3 gun-team, where the ’ell ’ave you bastards got to? ’ Then I did ’ave the wind up proper. God knew what ’e’d think if ’e found me there ’alf plastered, and no one to carry on the war. This is the firing squad for you, I think. So I lay low and doesn’t dare to breathe. There the corporal was shoutin’ for his gun-team. Sometimes ’e would seem quite close. Then ’e got far away. In the end I couldn’t ’ear ’im. ’E’d either gone, I thought, or stopped a whizz-bang, so I finished off the bottle. Then I suppose I must ’ave gone to sleep. I’d just begun to come round when you came tumbling down the trench. Gawd, but I felt ill. Gawd, ’ow I tossed the cookies. And Gawd, ’ow I’d got the wind up when the cap’n started asking me questions about what ’ad ’appened. I thought ’e was sending me up for a court-martial. I’d no idea it was going to mean a bit of ribbon.”

Hugh’s astonishment had grown with every clause of the recital. He laid his hand upon Walker’s shoulder.

“You’re a great fellow, Walker. If there hadn’t been men like you out there, we’d never have won the war.”

In the board-room he put forward Walker’s claims to be put in charge of the packing department with such personal conviction that his colleagues’ qualms were overcome.

“He’s the kind of fellow for whom nothing ever goes wrong. He does the right thing even if he goes the wrong way about it. If anything went wrong with Walker, I should lose faith in heaven.”

The spirit in which Walker was promoted to departmental management was the spirit in which most of the plans for the firm’s immediate future were laid at that first meeting. Everyone was confident and happy; ready to make things as easy as they could for one another; feeling that each was entitled by the firm’s position and the moment’s mood to sit lightly in the saddle; resolved to get the most they could out of life; anxious to see how far the firm could help them to that goal.

“In fact,” Balliol remarked, “it would seem to be our object to do as little work and get as amply remunerated as possible.”

He himself had decided to be a supervisor rather than an administrator. He would arrive at about eleven; he would leave shortly after four. He would dictate a few letters, interview departmental heads; see that the machine was moving smoothly; would conduct over the lunch-table such negotiations as were specifically important. Young Prentice as a lecturer on economics at London University, would have little time to do much more than attend board meetings. His advice, it was argued, would be of immense help to his colleagues. He was a thin, cadaverous, spectacled young man, with a serious, unsmiling countenance. Hugh could not imagine what kind of a figure he must have cut in uniform. Hugh, for his part, was still resolved to remain a free lance, drawing director’s fees and a commission on the orders that his friends brought.

“I think I’d better have a room of my own inside the office though I don’t suppose I’d use it much. But there might be an occasional interview when I’d be more effective with the background of my own room and my name painted on the door.”

It was agreed that a room should be given him.

In view of this re-allotment of the office work it was clear that the old system by which two directors, working inside the office and responsible to a chairman, were direct controllers, organizers and administrators, would have to be discontinued. It was also clear that the work which had before been divided between Balliol and Prentice would now have to be delegated. There were only two possible applicants. Smollett and his protegé, Jenks.

“But do you think they’ll be able to manage it?” young Prentice asked. “The work that you and my father undertook must be of a very responsible nature.”

Balliol smiled.

“Smollett’s responsible enough. And Jenks will be, with Smollett’s eye on him.”

That evening Balliol conveyed to Smollett the board’s decisions.

Smollett had returned from the war a lieutenant, with two blue chevrons on his arm, a short clipped moustache and what Hugh described as an ante-room manner. He would say “That suits me,” pronouncing “me” as though it were the French accusative of je. He had a very military way of tapping his cigarette against his cigarette case. He crossed his legs as though his heels were spurred. He was wearing a modishly cut suit, and a pearl pin held his tie in place. He was clearly resolved to maintain his officer-class status.

He listened to Balliol’s explanations of the proposed change in his routine, rather as an adjutant would listen to his colonel’s outline of a move. He was receiving orders yet at the same time he was allowed to make suggestions.

“Then your son will take no actual part in the administration of the firm?”

Balliol shook his head. Smollett would have called him “Mr. Hugh” before the war.

“And young Mr. Prentice. He will be working outside the office too?”

Balliol nodded.

“Apart from the fact that he’s his father’s son, has he any particular interest in the business?”

“He is a lecturer on economics at London University. As an expert on such matters his advice will be of great value to the board, naturally.”

“Naturally,” Smollett echoed.

The echo struck a note that made Balliol look up quickly. It had, or he fancied that it had, an ironical inflection. But Smollett’s face bore its habitual unsmiling look. Balliol changed the subject.

“We shall of course raise your salary in proper proportion to the increased value of your services. And I can’t say, my dear fellow, how glad I am, how glad we all are, to have you back. I hope that the next ten years are going to be the happiest and most prosperous in all our lives.”

He stretched out his arm and shook Smollet’s hand very heartily.

It was in a contented and tranquil frame of mind that he walked that evening over the hill from Hampstead station. No searchlights swept across the sky. Their absence symbolized for him the tranquillity that throughout the entire world had taken the place of the last years’ turmoil. There was every reason to believe that his prophecy to Smollett would be justified. The next ten years should be the happiest and most prosperous in all their lives, a business going well, semi-retirement for himself, politically an assured future. It would be many years before Europe could afford the folly of another war. His son at home again, his grandchildren growing up. Had anyone the right to ask more than that of life?

He was not the only one who was setting himself that question at that moment. Ruth, as she welcomed Victor back from the board-meeting into the cosy comfort of their first real home; Lucy, as she tucked up her children for the night before going to join her husband at the Casino Palace; Hugh, in his new flat, a fire blazing brightly, a cocktail shaker and two glasses on the lacquer table beside the wide low, many-cushioned divan, waiting for the bell ring that would open the door to who could tell what entrancing chapter of romance; Helen, in her bath, holding her toes above the surface, thinking “I’m eleven now. Two thirds of the way to being quite grown up.” They were all in their separate ways thinking “The ball’s at my feet now.” Of them all Francis alone was viewing the future cautiously.

IV

Back at Fernhurst, away from London where things were happening so fast that you could not tell what was happening, Francis was by no means certain that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He had seen the war as Lucy, Ruth and Hugh had not seen it; as Helen had been too young and his father too old to see it; as one outside but still a part of it. His perceptions were acute, his mind logical. He had watched from the start down to the end that process of ignoble material self-seeking that drove into some form of pacifism most thinking men who spent the war in England. It was when they were at home, not when they were in the trenches, that soldiers were goaded into revolt by the manner in which the war was being run. The man who for reasons of health was unable to enlist in 1914, if he had a brain to use and used it, would have been by 1918 on the verge of militant pacifism.

Francis had had no chance of seeing what was fine and genuinely heroic in the war; he had seen on the other hand the smugness of the charity organizers; the cant about “the good the war was doing;” politicians and the press-kings boosting the war as though it were a kind of soup, as though it were a cure for all mortal ills, a social purge. He had heard the vindictiveness of the old men in their clubs; the dishonesty with which in every walk of civilian life interested persons tried to force through the measures that would profit them, on a plea of patriotism. He had seen the word “patriotism” exploited, till it was counterfeit currency. He knew how the war itself had been presented to the public in terms of glamour, not for the thing it was. There had been a conspiracy of silence. Those who had tried to speak the truth had been imprisoned. He felt that ordinary people had been tricked and cheated into accepting the war as something other than it was. He was by no means certain that peace, any more than war, would prove to be the commodity that had been advertised.

At Fernhurst there was the complete change of atmosphere. The hoisting of the new slogan “back to normal.” Morning P.T. was cancelled. Section drill before lunch became punishment drill. There was only one parade a week. The elevens were allowed to wear badges on their blazers. The War Savings Certificates were exchanged for calf-bound testimonials. There was talk of reconstruction, of the work that lay ahead to make the country worthy of the men who had fallen for it. Three visiting preachers during the Lent term used the simile of the torch bearers. This generation must carry on the torch that its brothers and fathers had handed it. The simile provided some very powerful perorations.

“Yes, that’s all very well,” thought Francis. “But our fathers and grandfathers ran the world so badly, that Hugh’s generation had to salvage it, and my generation is going to have a very much less amusing life. It’s all very well to talk about hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay, but the people who are really responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves are the very people who are doing all this talking. They’re the people who didn’t know where we were going and ran the machine into a ditch. The machine’s been dug out and put upon the road. But the same people are still steering it. And I’m by no means sure that the car’s still roadworthy.” He was in a rebellious mood.

The opportunity for expressing his rebellion came.

In the following September the Fernhurst XV played its first match against a London club side since the war. To Rosslyn Hill went this distinction. The Hill side was captained by an old Fern-hurstian. He was a tall, imposing man, with a stiff upright bearing. He led the side, not exactly from the rear; but from whatever part of the field in which he happened to find himself he directed operations in a loud steady flow of commentary and criticism, that appeared to have the action of a magnet in drawing the game towards him. He never followed the ball; the ball, however, often happened to be in the spot where he also was. He then displayed astonishing agility until such time as the ball had been transferred to another section of the field. By the end of a not particularly high scoring game, he had personally accounted for two tries.

Francis sat next to him during tea. His name was Malcolm. He stated that he was thirty-two, and a subsequent investigation of the school register corroborated this statement. But Francis found it difficult even remembering his energy and eloquence upon the field to believe that he was under forty. He had not so much an old as a mature air. He wore an eyeglass, and a high stuck-up collar with a very wide opening. He had a stiff carriage, and he addressed his team in an avuncular manner as “my juniors.” He recounted at tea a great many anecdotes of his own career at Fernhurst with skill and gusto.

The fifteen was considerably impressed. Back numbers of the Fernhurstian were searched for records of his achievements. But beyond a reference to the fact that he had left in 1906 and had been a corporal in the O.T.C., they could discover nothing. It was odd, they were agreed, that a fellow who was clearly so successful now should have made so little mark at school. There were some fellows, they supposed, who developed late. From his manner Francis imagined that he was a barrister.

His astonishment was consequently considerable when, searching Selfridge’s tobacco department for a Christmas present for his father, he saw the captain of Rosslyn Hill, hatless, and beside a counter, explaining to a venerable and aristocratic prelate the merits of a cigarette box that played Humoresque when you pressed the catch. He recognized Francis with a lowered eyelid, and continued the explanations which concluded apparently in an order, since he handed the box over to a brown-coated salesman who was standing behind the counter. The authority of the gesture and the fact that whereas the salesmen were wearing brown holland coats, Malcolm was in an ordinary lounge suit, suggested to Francis that he occupied a position of some consequence.

The moment he was disengaged, Malcolm walked across to Francis with the same stately stride with which he had followed a receding scrum.

“You are surprised to see me here. Yes, I know: others are in your plight. And you have come to select a Christmas present for your father. Admirable. If you will follow me to the private sanctum where I interview my really important customers.…”

He led the way behind the glass counters, up a narrow winding iron stair, into a low wide room furnished with cabinets of cigars, a large desk, and a window looking on to the store from which Malcolm could watch the conduct of proceedings in his department. He pointed out a chair to Francis.

“Sit down. I always enjoy the surprise on my friends’ faces when they find me here. They don’t know what to say. They don’t know whether it wouldn’t be kinder of them not to recognize me. As though they’d met me in a dubious place in dubious company. Now tell me about the Alma Mater. I see that we beat Tonswick. A very stout performance.” He talked Fernhurst gossip as amply as he had in the school tuck-shop.

To Francis it was a very astonishing experience. He had known that Selfridge’s were making the experiment of taking public school boys into the store as salesmen. He had considered it a sound idea. But he had never imagined that anyone he knew would apply for such a post. It was very strange to find the captain of Rosslyn Hill A, an old Fernhurstian whom he had met and taken for a barrister, in charge of a tobacco department.

Malcolm eyed him with an urbane smile.

“Yes, I know. There’s no need to ask me. I know what you’re thinking. What is this very fine footballer doing in this emporium? Shall I tell you the story of my life? I will not. I will tell you this. A great many of us who never imagined before the war that they would have to do more work than was necessary to supplement an inherited income, found themselves after the war in the position of having to bustle if they were not going to spend their nights on the Embankment. Before the war I had a quarter share in a tobacco business. I had a great deal of spare time so I took the trouble to learn what the business was about. When the war was over and the King had no further reason to call upon my services, I said to myself, ‘Little Malcolm, what qualifications have you to put upon the market? What do you know, what can you do? Do you know anything, can you do anything?’ I decided that the only thing that I knew anything about was the tobacco business, so here I am.”

It sounded simple, but there was more, a great deal more, that Francis was curious to know. Why, instead of taking up his quarter share in the private tobacco business, had he come here, for instance? That would have been more amusing, he would have thought.

“You mean I shouldn’t have had to work behind a counter? I shouldn’t have had to call people of what is called my own class, ‘Sir.’ Yes, I’ll admit I’d thought of that. But I don’t believe in the future of the small, privately owned business. Before the war it was just able to provide the small addition to an income that the people who were responsible for it required. But the tendency now is all against the small dealer. We haven’t got the American system of the Chain Store yet. But we’re on our way there. The more you centralize, the more you produce a sound, standardized article, the more you can cut down overheads. ‘Little Malcolm,’ I said to myself, ‘the future is with the big companies. You go where the future is.’”

It was the first time that such ideas had been presented to Francis. He pondered them. They seemed sound enough. All the same, it was queer when you came to think of it that a man’s parents should educate him expensively for ten years at a preparatory and at a public school, and at the end of it all his only marketable capacity was a familiarity with the workings of the tobacco trade, that he had acquired, subsequently, as a hobby. He suggested as much to Malcolm.

Malcolm shrugged his shoulders.

“It isn’t queer when you reflect that the world for which I was trained at school is a world that exists no longer. In my day on a very small income a bachelor could lead a varied and comfortable life. He could do most things. If he had a few hundreds coming to him from land or consols, he needed only to look round for some very half-time occupation that would keep him employed and make some small addition to his private means. A man brought up as I was to the kindly world I expected to live in, didn’t need commercial assets. To-day he does. He can’t lead the same kind of life on a small income. Those few hundreds coming in from land and consols aren’t more than about a few fivers. They buy about a tenth. And those half-time occupations don’t exist. A man’s either working or he isn’t working. And if he is working, it’s at a whole-time job. No, no, the world you are being trained for is very different from the one to which little Malcolm imagined he would devote his talents. It needs some adjustment to fit into it. But after all, at the end of it, here one is.”

And one might be in a worse place, in a considerably worse place, Francis thought as he waited at the corner of Orchard Street for a ‘bus back to Golders Green. He might consider himself lucky if he found himself in as good a place in ten years. For what was it that he was headed, after all? He was now in his last year at Fernhurst. In the following autumn he would go up to Oxford. If he worked at all hard he should get a second. If he worked really hard he might get a first. But after that? No definite plans had been made for him. It was assumed that if you went through the normal educational curriculum of your class, the future took care of itself; or arranged itself in terms of the position to which at the end of that curriculum you had graduated. But what were the prospects offered to the kind of graduation that he was likely to achieve? He had not the precise brain that would fit him for prominence in the fields of formal scholarship. Besides, he had taken things easily during the war years. There had been so many other things. You could not pursue wholeheartedly courses for which the world might hold no employment. He doubted whether he was likely to enter into sufficiently effective competition with the best brains of his generation to pass high enough into the Civil Service to see the opening for swift promotion. For one of his talents, under pre-war conditions, a post in the Indian Civil would have been expected. But who wanted to go to India at a time like this, when within a decade for all one knew India would have been handed back to her own mismanagement; when the man on the spot was faced with problems that demanded prompt and ruthless action for which those at home would afterwards fail to back him up? You had to choose between the safety of the white residents and possible hardship to a few natives. You protected your own people and were reprimanded by Whitehall. Nobody but a fool would want to go to India now. And what else was there? There had been a time when public school men had had a monopoly of a certain kind of job. They had that monopoly no longer. Such soft jobs as were going were reserved, and rightly reserved, for ex-officers. And besides, it wasn’t a soft job that he was looking for. He was ambitious. He wanted a scope for his ambition. “I wonder whether my father has any ideas about what’s going to happen to me?”

Very few, apparently, from the replies that he gave that evening to Francis’s questions.

“What are you going to do when you come down from Oxford? I should say that that was one of the questions that can be best left till you actually have come down. The world, in terms of the quotation, will be all before you where to choose. And if you do not immediately, as I believe the military phrase it, reach your objective, I fancy that a little general co-operation will have no difficulty in discovering an acceptable solution.”

“You mean that if everything else fails there is always Peel & Hardy?”

“That is not precisely what I meant. But as you say, there is always Peel & Hardy.”

Which means nothing, thought Francis; that no one’s really bothering about me: no one ever has: no one ever will. And that old feeling of being alone, neglected, unaided, “out of things,” that had made him reserved and secretive as a child, volubly rebellious during his first terms at Fernhurst, made him now ruthlessly resolved to decide his future for himself. Malcolm had said that a new training was needed for the new world; but was he not being trained in precisely the same way as his brother had and before that his father. The slogan “back to normal” assumed that the England of the 1920’s was going to resemble the England of 1900. But was it? Was not peace being boomed in just the same way that war had been and just as truthlessly?

During the long dark evenings of the Easter term he scrutinized The Times and Express and Mail as though he were a detective in search of evidence. Reading between the lines, avoiding the leaders, studying the news itself, what proof was there that the ample Edwardian days were to return? The war might be over as regards actual fighting; but belligerent instincts were on the prowl. Class hatred was a potent force; socialism was no longer a subject for abstract debate; capital and labour had resumed their temporarily suspended conflict. The trade boom was at an end. Income tax had not been lowered. The army of the dole-fed unemployed grew larger; strike followed strike. The spacious Edwardian age, indeed! Georgian England was going to be different.

There was a marked change in the atmosphere of Ilex on his return at Easter. For one thing Hugh was back. He had let his flat. It was proving rather more of an expense than he had anticipated.

“So I’m to let it for six months of the year and live rent free on the profit for the other half. You can always get a good rent for a furnished flat.”

He put a brave face on it. “But that’s not the real reason,” Francis thought. “It’s not that the flat cost more than he expected but that he’s earning less.”

There was that change. There was also a servant less. The house was run by a house-parlourmaid and a cook-general. The quality of the meals had suffered. Shoes shone less brightly. He had to brush his own clothes if he wanted to look smart. His father spoke of the difficulties of getting decent servants. Women had been spoilt by war work. They thought it beneath their dignity to go into domestic service. “When you are fortunate enough to have two servants who can work in harmony, you daren’t risk bringing in a third who may start the process which is I believe described as setting them by the ears.”

He, too, put a brave face on it. But his mother had told him that his father had been badly hit by the depreciation of the franc. He had bought French War Loan with the franc at twenty-seven. The franc was fluctuating between seventy and eighty. In the same way Lucy explained her return to Malaya six months before she had intended with the argument that a wife’s place really was beside her husband. But Francis suspected that the slump in rubber had something to do with that. Just as he was doubtful whether Victor’s acceptance of a number of directorates was entirely because his experience with Peel & Hardy had made him feel that business was rather fun. From all accounts Ruth was being encouraged to entertain on a large scale in her London house; it was rumoured that her husband was one of the unfortunate but interested backers in the expensively staged revue at the Pagoda which had run ten nights.

On all sides there was a brave showing; but behind that façade the pinch was being felt. Peace was following the example of war. On the surface everyone was pretending that everything was grand, but below that surface everyone was worried and on his guard.

As usual no plans had been made for Francis’s holiday. He was left to his own resources. Walking the London streets he noted the restaurants and shops that had opened a year earlier with such a flourish of peace and prosperity; and that now had “Change of Management” announcements in their windows. He counted the numbers of ex-officer-looking men who were wearing suits with the breast pocket on the right-hand side, who had had their suits turned to economize. Yes, there were signs enough for the observant, that all was not for the best for everyone in the best of all possible worlds.

For everyone; on that point he insisted: there must be others for whom the tide was running: who were at one with this new world, in step with it; not so much following its changes as directing them. Only who were they? Certainly not those for whom the Edwardian era had been spacious. It was others, for whom that era had been penurious and constrained, who were finding in Georgian England the climate that would mature their talents.

Who were they? Listening to his father’s and Hugh’s talk, remembering what Malcolm had said, he wondered whether the same class of person whom the war had given a chance to rise into the officer’s class was not now being given by the peace a chance of self-establishment in that same world. He had heard it said that the “temporary gentleman” kind of officer would find it difficult when the war was over, going back to what he had been before. But in point of fact had they gone back, those that had genuine talent and ambition, men of the Smollett type?

As far as he could gather most of the work at Peel & Hardy’s was done by Smollett; most of the responsibility was delegated to him. He had started at the foot of the ladder. He knew the business. That was the kind of man that was wanted in this new world; that was the kind of man he himself would have to be if he was going to succeed. The new world was going to be run by a different kind of man. The day of the big land-owners was at an end. They had been taxed out of their power. The Church had lost prestige. If no soldier had managed to rise to a position of political importance during the war, it was certain that none would be able to in peace. It was big business that was going to run the country. Trade had become so international that every political and diplomatic issue had become a matter of finance. Everything turned on money. The industrialists would have the first word and the last. So Francis deliberated with himself, following a line of argument that brought him back inevitably to its starting point. His talk with Malcolm.

“I’ve got to meet that man again,” he thought.

“Dear Mr. Malcolm (he wrote), I don’t suppose you will remember me by name, but I sat next you at tea when you came down to Fernhurst with Rosslyn Hill. And I had a talk with you last Christmas in your office. There is a matter about which I particularly wanted to ask your advice. May I call some time and see you?”

The answer came by return of post. It was typewritten.

“Such matters can be discussed more easily and very much more pleasantly over a lunch table. Will you lunch with me at the Granville Club; any day next week but Tuesday, at 1.25?”

Malcolm was one of those who remain the same person against a series of different backgrounds. The same precise, stately figure who had fixed a luncheon for 1.25, had conducted the strategy of a football side from a distance of thirty yards, had convinced a prelate that his home would be incomplete till it possessed a cigarette box that played a tune, extended to Francis an ample welcome in the ante-room of the Granville Club.

“I am uncertain as to what manner of beverage I should offer you,” he said. “In my day a prefect at a public school would have considered beer a pleasant but inessential adjunct to his digestion. Perhaps now a less robust generation prefers barley water. Or it may be that you are one of these bright young people who I am informed drink champagne for breakfast? I offer you the freedom of your choice.”

He ordered the lunch in the same expansively avuncular manner.

“In my day a young man would think nothing of putting away a dozen oysters and a steak and making a substantial cavity in a gorgonzola. But there are no real trenchermen to-day. I suppose that what you’d prefer is a grilled sole and some oatmeal biscuits?”

At any ordinary time Francis would have been entertained by this kind of badinage, but he was nervous lest it would be continued right through the meal; lest Malcolm should follow the business etiquette of discussing nothing of importance till the coffee stage was reached, by which time he would, he suspected, be incapable of making the nature of his predicament plain to Malcolm. It was clear in his mind now, but by the end of lunch it very likely would have ceased to be. Malcolm had the sensitiveness, however, to perceive that his guest was incompletely at his ease.

“Well, and what’s on your mind?” he said.

All that Francis had been logically and systematically deliberating; all the carefully phrased and co-ordinated argument's were blurted out in a pell-mell of “What I really think’s” and “Don’t you agree with me that’s” from which Malcolm gradually disentangled Francis’s main concern: that the industrialists were the power of the future and that he wanted to come in on the ground floor.

“So you have come to ask little Malcolm’s advice. I’m afraid I can’t promise you a rise to fame in the world of commerce quite so spectacular as his has been. At the same time …” He paused interrogatively.

“I was wondering whether you couldn’t get me into Selfridge’s as one of these public school salesmen. I want to start at the bottom and work up.”

“I see.”

“I thought that if I were going to start at the bottom, I ought to start at once: that going up to Oxford would be a waste of time.”

“If you are going into Selfridge’s, in that way, it would be best for you to go in at once.”

“But could you get me in?”

“I imagine so. At the same time …” He paused. He had dropped his facetious manner. His face had taken on a serious expression, since a serious matter was to be discussed.

“It isn’t quite such an easy thing as you might imagine.”

“You mean that I’ve been brought up soft.” On his face was a defensive, on-guard look, such as that with which ten years back his eldest sister had met the suggestion that she was not strong enough to be a militant. “You mean that I shouldn’t be able to stand being ordered about by people of another class; that I should lose my temper when customers made complaints; that it would go against the grain to call them ‘Sir.’”

Malcolm shook his head.

“No, it isn’t that; not altogether; though that is difficult. But not any more difficult than getting a commission through the ranks, which a great many from our class did. It’s the atmosphere of commerce. Things justified by results; not by intentions, as in certain other worlds they are. You’d be in competition with ruthlessly ambitious people. Don’t misunderstand me. There’s not a cut-throat feeling; not at all. There’s very much the same feeling of esprit de corps inside a big store that there is inside a school. They want to get on themselves. They know they can get on best if the firm’s doing well. There’s a team spirit. And because there’s that team spirit, nobody’s got any use for the man who isn’t trying, who isn’t working all out. Any more than a football side has. There’s no helping of lame dogs over stiles. They take work seriously there. The simile of the football team is a pretty sound one. The pace is set by the fastest, not the slowest. At a school the form has to wait till the dunce has understood. In a store like this one, if you can’t stay the pace, nobody’s going to stay behind to help you. You just drop out.”

To Francis the existence of difficulties only made the adventure more exciting.

“I could stand that.”

“It’s a burning of your boats, you know,” Malcolm warned him. “It’s a bad job to fail at. It’s a road you can’t retrace. It’s not like reading for a law degree at Oxford and then finding after a year or two in chambers that the law isn’t your line of country. You can change on to another line. You’ve still got Oxford at the back of you. It’ll be very different to find yourself at twenty-one with nothing at the back of you except a failure at Oxford Street.”

The word “failure” did not exist in the lexicon of Francis’s future.

“You will arrange it for me, then?”

“If your father approves.”

“What’s it got to do with him?”

“It’s got a good deal to do with him. A student, and that’s what you’ll be for at least six months, only gets a pound a week. We’ve got to be assured that while you are a student, you are being properly looked after. Either in your father’s home, or in lodgings paid for by your father. If you bring me a signed statement from your father, then I’ll see what I can do.”

Francis had little doubt that he could obtain eventually the certificate from his father. But he was certain that he would meet with opposition. The prospect of conflict on the whole pleased him. At the end he would have a feeling of achievement. His conscience was completely clear. He would not, as the Victorian novelists described it, be causing his parents pain. They would disapprove because they would consider it their duty as parents to disapprove; but presumably they would not care. They never had cared about him much. They had liked him. They had been generous. But they had never identified themselves with him in any way. They had never lived in him. Up to a point his mother had, until he had gone to Fernhurst. She had been quite different when he returned at the end of his first term. Possibly because he was different. He had been told that a mother often lost interest in a son when he ceased to be dependent on her. She had taken so little real interest in him that when he had converted his War Savings Certificates into calf-bound editions of the Oxford Classics, she was astonished at his demand for a special bookshelf.

“Darling boy, I’d no idea that you’d been winning all those prizes.”

“I told you every time.”

“Did you, darling?”

She was not really interested in him. She would not care whether he was a barrister or a salesman, or a professional footballer, “so long as you’re happy, dear boy”; leaving him to discover happiness for himself. As for his father, Francis could not picture the issue that he would regard as personal to himself. He took the same detached interest in his son’s career as in the composition of the Ryder Cup Team. It was Hugh that he looked on as his chief opponent.

Hugh returned home in a belligerent mood that evening. A number of little things were going wrong. To begin with there had been a rather irritating discussion at Peel & Hardy’s that had ended in his relinquishing his office room to Smollett’s secretary. The discussion had been conducted in an extremely amiable and pacific manner. It was clear that Smollett must have a secretary. His correspondence was considerable. There was a great deal of routine work that he needed to be spared. It was also essential that she should have a room of her own to work in. Smollett received a number of callers. He needed to be alone with them. There was, however, no obviously available room for her. Room by room the geography of the offices had been considered; until finally Hugh’s corridor was reached. Smollett was drawing a diagram. He pointed his pencil at Hugh.

“Now, let me see. At the end there’s your room, Balliol.”

“Yes, there’s my room.”

There was a pause.

“I suppose you really need that room?”

“How do you mean?”

“I know, of course, that you are frequently interviewing clients, or prospective clients. Your accounts prove that. But I was wondering how much of your work doesn’t fit in with your ordinary life. I wondered how often you actually did use that room.”

“Well…” Hugh hesitated. He used his room quite a bit because his club was in Grosvenor Square and it was useful to have a place that you could pop into when you had ten minutes to dawdle away in Piccadilly, and where, for that matter, you could get a buckshee glass of sherry. But he doubted in point of fact if he had used it officially more than twice a month. He suspected that Smollett was aware of this.

“Because,” Smollett was continuing, “I was thinking that if you didn’t really use the room as much as you thought you were going to, it might be simpler for a time at any rate to move my secretary in there, than to divide up my own room into two with a partition. We could do that, of course, but it isn’t really very convenient. One hears every word through that matchboard, and typing, even with a modern machine, is noisy. I naturally don’t want to disturb you in any way, but I was just thinking that if you don’t really need that room.…”

“I don’t.”

It was said quickly and decisively. His father had looked at him with surprised interrogation. Hugh was very well aware that he could have retained the room, had he even so much as said that it was a convenience to him. Which it was. But definitely it was not a necessity. He would have hated to have kept the room when a man like Smollett was grudging him, and after all with justice, his possession of it; was keeping count of the use he made of it. Ownerships were only pleasant when they could be enjoyed freely, and with propriety. As far, anyhow, as he was concerned.

He gave no sign that he was annoyed.

“I hardly use the room at all,” he had said. “Certainly, you take it.”

“Of course, later on—if you find you do really need it …” Smollett had assured him.

“I’ll let you know all right.”

But he had been annoyed. Or rather, the episode of the room had been contributory to a mood of general irritation. There had been other factors. There had been that girl he had met yesterday at lunch. They had sat next each other. She had been gay, debonair. He suspected wilful. He fancied he had been a success with her. “I’d like to see more of her,” he had thought. But when you hadn’t a flat it was very difficult without spending a good deal of money to develop an acquaintance. And it was just because he hadn’t any money at the moment that he was without a flat. If he had had a flat, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have said, “I’ve got one or two people dropping in at cocktail time to-morrow. Won’t you come?” That would have been easy and informal. They would have had an opportunity of making up their minds about each other. But without a flat he would have to make some rather ample gesture. Arrange a lunch party, or take her to a theatre. And that would be only the beginning. A flat was essential if you were going to conduct a campaign of gallantry; unless you had a great deal of money. In another three months he would have his flat back, and he would have economized enough to have an amusing time with it. But that would be too late; as regards this girl anyhow. You had to strike while the iron was hot. It was maddening to be so broke. Nobody seemed to have the money to lay down cellars nowadays. None of the people he knew, anyway. They drank beer or whisky; or on occasions took a couple of bottles of club champagne back with them from their club. He wasn’t making the half of what he’d hoped.

And on top of all that he had woken to one of his bad mornings; a headache, lassitude, no appetite. He didn’t get enough exercise, he supposed. But it was hard to keep fit, when doctors denied him the particular forms of training by which Londoners kept well. Before the war he had played squash twice a week during his lunch hour. But squash was considered too violent for him now. It was hard to find golf partners on a week-day, particular in the winter, when the ground was either frozen hard or so soft that the ball stopped when it pitched, and the fairways were thick with worm casts. He had to take his exercise in Turkish Baths. That wasn’t the same thing. In cold weather his legs began to hurt. And it was all very Well his friends telling him that he’d feel worse next day if he doctored himself with whisky. They didn’t know what it was like to sit through an evening with the whole of one side of one’s body throbbing. Never knowing when the throbbing was to be punctuated by the stab of a sudden twinge. In 1917 he had thought himself very lucky to have his lungs full of mustard gas and his thigh of metal. He was beginning to think that it was the others who had been lucky.

He returned home in no mood to accept with equanimity his younger brother’s decision to become a salesman at Selfridge’s.

It was in point of fact the vehemence of Hugh’s opposition, that, in the last analysis, decided Francis to make good his boast. Hugh returned home at the point where Francis was beginning to waver. His father had brought forward a number of sensible arguments.

“There are a number of points to be considered,” he had said. “I am not saying that you are mistaken in your contention that it is by the big industrialists that the country is going to be governed in the future. I daresay you are right in thinking that those who have begun at the foot of the ladder stand the best chance of climbing to the top. A store such as Selfridge’s, which makes a point of training public schoolboys, would certainly give you the best chance. At the same time, there does not seem to me to be as much need for hurry as you suppose. I am not being what in the melodramas of my boyhood was described as ‘the heavy father.’ I am not saying that you will think differently in two years’ time. But there is a possibility that you may. After all, you feel differently now from the way in which you felt two years ago. If you go into Selfridge’s at once, and find two years later that that kind of life is unsympathetic to you, you will be in a difficult position. You will have prejudiced your chances of making a success at Oxford, and will consequently have cut yourself off from all those callings to which a successful career at Oxford is the necessary prelude. If, on the other hand, you finish your time at Fernhurst, go up to Oxford, feel at the end of a year that you are wasting your time, you will still be able to go into Selfridge’s, at the loss of only a few months. It seems to me that by going to Oxford for a year you have everything to gain and nothing at all to lose. Very likely you will feel out of touch with Oxford, but I think you should give yourself a chance of seeing what it is like. You have been born with certain material advantages. It would be a mistake to discard those advantages until you know precisely what it is that you are discarding.”

He spoke calmly, reasonably. Francis was half convinced. Then Hugh arrived.

“We are engaged,” his father told him, “on what is popularly described as a family council. Your brother has expressed a wish to leave Fernhurst and graduate at Selfridge’s as a salesman.”

“You mean serve shirts behind a counter?”

“Shirts or their equivalent.”

“That’s quite impossible.”

He spoke with a vehemence that was more than anything a working out of the irritation to whose sum during the day so many incidents had made their separate contribution.

“You can’t do that: stand behind a counter; call people ‘sir’; flatter them; exploit salesmanship, which means trying to trick them into buying something they don’t want, or something that’s more expensive than they want. That’s not a gentleman’s job.”

His vehemence counteracted his father’s reasonableness, forcing Francis into a position of defiant opposition. These were the arguments that he had expected. A gentleman’s job. You could sell wine in an office seated at a desk and remain a gentleman, but you lost caste if you sold socks in a store, standing behind a counter. That was the pre-war attitude; the thing he had to fight. The world was a different place; it was going to become more different. People like Hugh didn’t realize it. That’s why they couldn’t afford to run a flat and had to economize by living at home at the age of thirty. The more fiercely Hugh argued, the more mule-like became Francis’s resolve to vindicate his independence.

“I’ll show them,” he thought. “I’ll stick to my point. They’ll have to give way. In a year’s time they’ll realize they were wrong.”

Francis got his way.

V

Going to Selfridge’s was very much like going back to school. He was posted with a dozen other students to a students’ course. He sat at a desk each morning in the Education Office and listened to lectures on salesmanship, on department routine, on store organization. He was detailed for a fortnight to the Despatch Office at Irongate Wharf. In the return room he helped in the opening of parcels that for one reason or another had been returned by the customers. The letters accompanying these parcels brought him in touch with the kind of people with whom, as a salesman, he would have to deal; the kind of mistakes that a salesman was likely to make, the kind of mistake on the part of a customer that a salesman had to rectify. He had never realized that people could be quite so unbusinesslike as the customers who returned goods without giving their addresses, without explaining whether or not the goods had not been sent upon approval, whether they wanted some other article to be sent them in exchange. He had never realized how elaborate a system was required to fulfil the separate needs of each customer; nor through how many hands the parcel that the customers had ordered in Oxford Street that morning would have to pass before it was placed upon the afternoon van and delivered at his London home that evening. He had had no idea that so many different departments were needed in the Despatch Office alone—the Post Mail, Purchase Assembly card, Record, General Packing, Letter Order, Adjustment, Sanction. Each department fulfilled its own necessary function. One day he was sent out with a van, on a drive northward, through Mill Hill to Barnet. He had realized then how much time could be wasted by a salesman’s carelessly illegible or inaccurate entering of an address.

Posted back to the main building in Oxford Street he continued in the adjustment office the same kind of store education that had been begun at Irongate. Salesmanship, the actual taking of an order from a customer across a counter was the last step in that education. Before he was allowed to deal with a customer, the student had to know exactly what happened to the parcel that he had wrapped up hastily and handed to the collecting van. He had to know the kind of mistake he was likely to make, the kind of trouble that he was likely to cause, before he was given a chance of making mistakes or causing trouble. For three weeks in the adjustment office he absorbed the system by which delays, mistakes, misunderstandings were put right. He had been a member of the staff three months before he was allowed to make his first sale across a counter.

At the end of his fourth month he received an invitation to lunch from Malcolm.

“And how do you find life in the emporium?” he was asked.

It was a question that Francis found it difficult to answer. He had been interested, he had been excited, seeing his own future clear ahead of him; with the feeling that the probationary period of his life was over, that he had really begun to live. That he had expected to feel, before he was enrolled upon the staff. But there was one kind of excitement that he had not expected; the definite pride of being identified with an organization so vast, so powerful, and at the same time so personal, in which he felt that though he was no more than a cog in a machine, he had not been absorbed by that machine, that he had retained his personality, that his own contribution to the store’s prosperity was individual and was recognized as individual.

But he did not see how he was to explain that to Malcolm in phrases that would not come priggishly bromidic.

“Oh well, it’s all right,” he said.

“And in which particular branch of our activities would you like to emulate, and perhaps eclipse, the example I have set you?”

“Well …” He paused. He had known that he would be given the choice of departments. But he could not say that he would find one department more interesting than another. He was interested in the general processes of salesmanship, but not in any particular commodity. He would be just as happy selling shirts as bicycles. He told Malcolm this. Malcolm pursed his lips.

“That’s a pity, you know. One can’t sell a thing unless one’s really interested in it. One can’t talk about it in the right way. You’ve got to make the customer feel enthusiastic. You can always do that best if you’re talking about something that you’d give anything to be able to afford yourself. I should have myself been an admirable salesman of Rolls-Royce cars. Now, what is there that you’d give your soul for?”

Francis laughed.

“I want to have a good time, of course, but I’ve never felt that depended on having anything in particular. I want a certain amount of money, a position of a sort, so that I stand for something; I want independence, I want leisure. But as for specific things, no, I can’t really think of anything that would make all the difference.”

“If you don’t make some suggestion the great men in the Staff Office will think you ambitionless. If you can’t think of anything you particularly want to sell, it might be a help if you were to think of a few things you wouldn’t handle with a barge-pole. Then they’ll say: “Well, anyhow, he’s got dislikes.”

“As a matter of fact I’d soonest work in the Sanction Office.”

The Sanction Office was the one department in the Despatch Office that was no more than cursorily included in the students’ course. It was designed as a check on account customers who might considerably overdraw the extent to which they were allowed credit by making a number of purchases in various departments. The separate tickets would not reach the accounting office and be entered till the goods had been despatched. The Sanction Office acted as a check. Every single parcel passed through it; those which were account purchases were examined. One side of the room was filled with a large card index containing the record of every account upon the books. Every doubtful purchase was referred to this index. The superintendent had a memory which enabled him to spot any name that had caused the accounts staff anxiety. A name that was new to him he would hold back to verify the entry in the index; he would make a note in case later in the day other parcels should come from another department. If the aggregate of parcels exceeded the approved credit a reference would be made to the head office before the parcels were despatched.

Students were not allowed in the Sanction Office. They would have interfered with its running. If they were to make a mistake there the results might be extremely serious. The working of the office was no more than pointed out by the superintendent. But its routine had appealed to Francis’s imagination. He had been fascinated by the stream of parcels perpetually passing through on the moving belt, on its way to the mail and general packing room. It was like Judgment Day. The sheep being divided from the goats. The hand stretched out to an account purchase, the examination of the address; sometimes the parcel would be put back on the revolving belt; sometimes it would be set aside till a message had been sent over to the accounting office; sometimes the parcel would be put back, but a note made to check any further parcels that might have been ordered by that customer.

Francis was fascinated, too, by the vast card index whose existence in Irongate was unsuspected by the many thousands who said so lordlily across the counters in Oxford Street “Put it down to my account.” There were half a million entries in that index. The average householder, anyone in fact who was liable to income tax, would find in that index the half of his acquaintance. It contained innumerable secrets, small, amusing secrets; the unsuspected secondary addresses, the authorities given to draw against it, the cheques on credit, the surprisingly low credit allowed to some, the high credit allowed to others. There were the more dramatic secrets; the entries in red of bankrupts, of bad debts, of those who had fled the country, with the minute biographies compiled by protection societies to which commerce entrusts its interests; the numbers which to the layman would mean nothing, but to the holders of the code would be the clues to those houses that could give information or had issued warnings to their colleagues against defaulting customers; the intricate system of espionage with agencies in every town, by which the tradesman was protected. The person who knew where to look would discover, if left alone for half an hour with that index, much to surprise him about even his closest friends. Francis felt that working in the Sanction Office he would not only be at the very centre of the store’s life, but he would be holding a telescope to his eye from which he could look out on London’s vaster life.

“That’s where I’d really like to work,” he said to Malcolm.

“It could be arranged.”

It was not, Malcolm said, what he would himself have recommended. The big money was made by the buyers at Oxford Street, not at Irongate. Even if Francis were to be in control of the entire accountancy, he would be in no danger of supertax. At the same time it was wise to work where one was interested. There was plenty of time. A couple of years would experience him in store routine. “Regard it as a stepping stone,” said Malcolm, “and you’ll be all right.”

The value of Francis’s services to the Sanction Office was assessed by the authorities at fifty-five shillings a week. He received it every Thursday, in a small blue envelope on whose flap was printed some message of admonishment, encouragement, congratulation. Francis kept the first envelope as a souvenir of the first money that he had ever earned. On its flap was printed:

A customer has just acquainted us with an incident that pleased her enormously.

Living in the North, and only a rare visitor to the Store, she was considerably surprised, when in a department quite recently, to be recognized and her precise address remembered.

Cultivate your memory with regard to faces and names. You will always find your customer pleased to be remembered.

SELFRIDGE & Co., LTD.

He felt very proud at earning money of his own.

He also felt very rich. Living at Ilex he had no expenses, and he had driven a bargain with his father.

“How much would I have cost you during my four years at Oxford?” he had asked.

“About three hundred a year to three hundred and fifty.”

“I should have got into debt. You’d have had to settle them when I came down. It would have probably been four hundred a year. You’ve saved sixteen hundred on me. Now, look here, father. We’ll compute. You invest fifteen hundred for me in War Loan. I’ll say no more about it.”

He gained his point. He had over four pounds a week. He had not believed so much money existed. He went to Hugh’s tailor and ordered himself two suits.

Malcolm had told him to look on his work in the Sanction Office as a stepping stone. It was easy advice for him to take. Everything seemed a stepping stone. The things he did were fun. That which they led to would be greater fun. Life was gay and varied, opening new vistas for him every day. Everything was discovery. Nothing was being done for the second time.

He enjoyed his work at Irongate. There was an atmosphere of reality, of achievement there. It was compact and practical. He liked the rough blind alley of a road that led to the Wharf and warehouse. He liked the dead end of the canal that curved below its windows, its surface thick with a slime of sediment, with cabbage stalks, banana skins, pieces of floating bark, with barges moored against the wall, and pigeons circling over it, in search of food. He liked the quiet hours of the morning, when correspondence and such odd jobs as might have been left over from the night before were settled with. Till midday the work was casual and intermittent. From midday till six it was strenuous, unceasing; a steady stream of parcels on the moving belt. As the day passed Francis would watch with a sense of exhilaration the large shelves of the P.A.C. department filling up. As he went out to his lunch he would watch the vans being stacked up, while the sorters distributed the parcels now packed firmly and addressed into their separate sections. Francis, during his last term at Fernhurst, had felt despondent, reading the newspaper accounts of strikes, collapsing currencies, evidences of class hatred and party strife. Here, in this atmosphere of successful effort, it was easy to feel that whatever the newspapers might record, the wheels of the world were revolving smoothly.

Irongate was a quarter of an hour away by bus from the main building. The occasions were few on which Francis was despatched to Oxford Street for an official reason; barely once a fortnight. He rarely, however, missed an opportunity of walking through the store; on his way to lunch or on his way back from lunch. Very often, indeed, actually lunching in the store. He enjoyed the comparison between the predatory spirit in which he had walked down its long avenues as a customer, wondering what he could afford, with the personal, watchful scrutiny with which now he absorbed an atmosphere to which he was a contributing part. His eye took in the arrangement of the counters, the brisk amiable efficiency of the salesmen, the sauntering, unobtrusive supervision of the departmental heads, the unending stream of customers. The buyers, the salesmen, the superintendents, the lift girls in their pantomime attire existed for him as symbols of modern commerce, not as individuals, with lives and problems of their own, with houses, flats, cottages; with husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children; to make their lives gay or sombre, sad or happy. It was slowly, imperceptibly, that one person became detached and separate for him; to be thought about, brooded over, looked for.

It was a slow awakening; first of all the sight of a dark shingled head bent over a tray of handkerchiefs; then the curve of a neck, with the dark blouse falling a little back, the white skin running into the short bristles where the shingle started; the profile, seen in silhouette against the white background of a display of scarves, the lips full, parted, the nose tip-tilted; the fringe cut low upon the forehead. The sound of a voice, slow, drawled, like a tired purr. A figure, little and lithe and rounded; an instep arched and high-lifted upon tall heels; hands that were plump and dimpled, with short fingers and rounded finger nails. A series of snapshots composing little by little a person to be thought about, looked for; so that his passage through the store always took him through that one department; so that his step that was brisk and alert as he came in from Orchard Street, slowed down to a dawdle as he reached the series of counters over which was hung the placard “Scarves and Bags;” so that he became nervously excited, just as he did at cricket before going in to bat; so that he made some excuse to dawdle after he had passed into the next department, examining some article, so that he should have an excuse for turning round, for looking at her from another angle.

Who was she? Where did she live? What was she doing here? Was she married, was she engaged to anyone? If only there were some way of meeting her. If only there were some way of finding out. It was difficult in a store where one worked oneself. He felt shy of asking questions about her. He would not know whom to ask. He couldn’t just wander round asking everyone in the store he knew, “Can you tell me anything about the pretty girl who works in the Bags and Scarves?” If he hadn’t been employed in the store, he might have tried to get into conversation with her. But that would be against store discipline. He couldn’t stand there chatting to her, wasting her time and his. That would get not only him into trouble, but, what was more important, her as well. If only there were some way of meeting her; some way in which he could get introduced to her. He wondered if she went out to the store sports ground. He wondered whether she was a member of the theatrical society. Till the weather got too cold, he went out every week-end to the sports club for tennis, a game that he was bad at, and consequently despised. But there was no sign of the small, lithe, dark-haired figure, with the tip-tilted nose and slow drawled voice which occupied so many of his thoughts. When tennis was at an end, and the Rugby season started, though he possessed small histrionic skill, he joined the theatrical society. But she was not one of the lesser girls in the cast of Ambrose Applejohn’s Adventure.

“But I must see her, I must!” he thought. He was not yet twenty-one. His knowledge of the world of women had come to him through books and plays and films. He had thought about them consistently, he had talked about them a great deal. But he had talked to them very little. He had no idea how to embark upon a courtship. He built day-dreams round some romantic and unexpected meeting; at a point of danger his turning to her in the calm centre of the typhoon with one peril survived, another to be lived through. “You’ve never seen me before,” he’d say. “But if you knew how many times I’ve watched you; how many hours I’ve spent dreaming about you.” Her eyes would grow wide and tender. The winds of the tempest would begin to louden. “I must attend to the top sail,” he’d say. “But if we both survive this, will you lunch with me to-morrow week?” Something like that.

But nothing remotely like that happened. During the autumn he did not refuse a single invitation of no matter how boring a nature, to no matter how distant a surburban residence of a school friend’s uncle in the hope that at some gathering he might encounter her. No such encounter came.

As Christmas approached his dream-fed anxiety grew desperate. His visits to Oxford Street grew more frequent. He had arranged to lunch during the unlikely hour of 11.30 to 12.30 so that he should be certain of passing through the Bag and Scarf department when she was there. His lunch grew scantier; so that he should have a longer period to dawdle there. He was able to manage two distinct passages sufficiently separate in time to pass unnoticed.

He had watched her from every angle. He knew her every gesture: the slow, graceful way in which she would bend her head; the easy way in which she would simultaneously talk to a customer and wrap a parcel; the tired gesture with which she would close her eyes, lean back her head as a customer walked away, the parcel beneath her arm. There was not one pose he had not studied, one movement with which he was not familiar. In absence he would recreate her, feature by feature, gesture by gesture; as with no one else that he had ever known had he been able to. Yet to her he was a complete stranger.

I must see her, I must, I must!

If only there were someone that he could turn to for advice. But there wasn’t. There never had been. He had always had to do things for himself. In the calm that followed the Christmas rush he came to his decision. He had got to make a beginning. He had got to speak to her. He would avail himself, since there was no other way, of the privilege accorded to every human being beneath the sun who possessed two shillings, of making a purchase, however infinitesimal, across her counter. He would buy a bag for his mother. It would serve, anyhow, as an introduction.

In a mood of high adventure he strode out of the bleak cold of Orchard Street into the store’s coloured warmth. For once his step did not slow down to a dawdle as he approached the high-hung placard “Bags and Scarves.” He walked straight up to the counter.

“I want …” he began, then stopped, speechless.

She was not there.

He extracted himself with some ingenuity from his confusion by a simulated paroxysm of coughing. He said something about January frosts. He purchased a bag for eighteen pence, without claiming the staff twenty per cent, reduction to which he was entitled, and hurried quickly towards the ribbon and the cutlery department. Out of sight and earshot he paused and drew a long, slow breath. Then laughed. Well, that should teach him. He must go more cautiously next time. Charging up to the counter in that way. He was glad she hadn’t been there. How silly he must have looked. It was a good thing she had not been there. The first visit should act as a dress rehearsal. He would manage better the second time.

Half an hour later, after a lunch consisting of a cup of coffee and a toasted sandwich that he left half eaten, he sauntered in his most negligently confident manner through the ribbon and cutlery department, looking to the right, his feet following his eyes, then pausing.

She was still not there.

He walked away, puzzled and a little worried. He could not understand her not being there. She would hardly be lunching at such a time. It might be that she was ill. He could think of no other explanation. He returned on the following day, anxiety mixed with eagerness. She was still not there.

Nor was she there the next day, nor the day after that. Nor that week at all. Nor the week after that. She must be really ill; or possibly she was on a holiday: winter sports, Monte Carlo… How long would she be away? A fortnight? Not more than that. A girl in her position. No, certainly she would not get more than that. But the third week came and she was still not back. She couldn’t be on a holiday. She must be really ill; or possibly she had been moved to another department. Perhaps she had been promoted. For the next fortnight he devoted his luncheon hour to a steady search of the long, counter-clustered avenues. His lunch was of the scantiest: a sandwich bought at a coffee stall and munched on the way from Irongate. For thirty minutes every day he tramped systematically the innumerable departments of London’s largest store. The exercise was admirable training for his weekly Rugger match but its immediate object was unachieved. At the end of a fortnight he was convinced that she was nowhere else. She must be ill then; really ill. “I’ve got to find out. They’ll know in her department. I shall feel an awful fool among them. They’ll ask me ‘Do you mean Miss So-and-so?’ and I shan’t know if that’s her or not. I shall have to describe her. They’ll think that I’m quite mad. I’ve got to do it, though. I must find out.”

He was spared that ordeal, however.

His mother had asked him to call and collect some theatre tickets for her at an agency in Bond Street. He was in a hurry. He walked quickly up to the counter.

“I want some tickets left here for Mrs. Balliol. It’s for.…”

He stopped abruptly. From the other side of the counter the girl who had exercised so much of his time and thought was watching him, a smile of mockery and challenge in her dark, long-lashed eyes. He was so astonished that at first he could not speak. In his dreams he had rehearsed this moment a hundred times, but now that it had come he had no idea what to do. He stared at her stupidly, then blurted out:

“I used to see you at Selfridge’s.”

“I know you did.”

“I’ve been looking for you for three weeks. I’d missed you.”

“They fired me. They said I was lazy. They were right, I guess.”

The smile in the dark eyes had grown more mocking and more challenging. So she’d noticed him. She’d been aware that he was watching her. She must have looked for him, then, as he’d looked for her. They didn’t need any introduction, then. She knew—and she wasn’t angry. It was heady knowledge.

“Will you come out to dinner with me to-night?” he asked.

“It’s about time we got to know each other.”

VI

To most demobilized officers whose accounts at Holt’s and Cox’s had been credited with a substantial war gratuity, there came during the last weeks of 1919 and the first days of 1920 the unwelcome surprise of a banker’s letter stating that their account appeared to be overdrawn at a time when they imagined that fully a half of their gratuity was unexhausted. They stared at the letter incredulously. They could not believe it. Where had the money gone? They had never dreamt that it was slipping away like that.

A similar surprise attended the directorates of a good many businesses during the first four post-war years. One year they had declared a comfortable dividend; the board had voted a bonus to the staff. Business during the ensuing year had appeared to follow a course of identical good fortune. But the balance sheet at the year’s end showed a profit so diminished that not only was there no bonus for the staff but an extremely minute dividend for the shareholders. In the following year there was no dividend at all. The directors stared at the balance sheet uncomprehendingly. They simply could not understand how it had happened.

It was in such a spirit that in the spring of 1922 the directorate of Messrs. Peel & Hardy considered the balance sheet with which the company’s secretary had just presented them. They could not understand how it had happened. They had fancied that during the last year they had been fulfilling the Government’s instructions of “Back to Work” and “Business as Usual” to their own and everybody else’s profit. There had always been plenty on the agenda every Friday; plenty of cheques to sign; every indication of steady trading. But there the figures were. They would only just be able to pay their preference shareholders. The ordinary shareholders would have to be satisfied with a dividend of two per cent. Hugh alone examined the document with equanimity.

“I’m not surprised. I told you things were rotten. My commission down to nothing. You all thought it was because I was getting lazy. It isn’t. People haven’t the money to buy wine with. Things are bad.”

No one contradicted him.

Said Balliol: “I must have a talk with Smollett.”

He arranged an interview with him for the following morning. Smollet came into the room with the brisk, confident, abrupt manner that, acquired during the war, had been accentuated during the last two years. He was still, Balliol noticed, wearing expensive clothes. He seemed to have abandoned the sub-manager’s idiom of “an office suit.”

“Now, Smollett, about this balance sheet.”

“Exactly, sir. I had hoped that you would raise that matter.” He paused; took a gulping breath; then started.

Balliol had imagined that Smollett would produce some practical suggestions for reducing overhead expenses, increasing sales, blocking leakages. Not at all.

“The shareholders will certainly be very disappointed with the balance sheet. In my opinion it will be necessary to give them some proof that the board is doing its best to ensure improvement.”

“You think the shareholders are going to make a fuss?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My dear Smollett, I have addressed shareholders’ meetings for over thirty years. I’ve never known more than three shareholders attend.”

“The balance sheets have been invariably good.”

“For that very reason I doubt if old friends will turn against us as the result of one bad year.”

“They are not all old friends. Our recent balance sheets have encouraged a good many speculative investors to take shares in the company. They’ll feel they’ve made a bad investment. They’ll be angry with themselves. They’ll work their ill temper off on us.”

“I see.”

Balliol looked thoughtfully at Smollett; so thoughtfully that Smollett began to flush. Thought Balliol: “I wonder what your game is. I wonder how you knew that. Shares have been changing hands; quite large blocks during the last two years. Who told you that? How much more do you know?”

He asked: “What proof of our good intentions do you suggest that we should proffer to the shareholders?”

“My election to the board.”

“What!”

His astonishment was as complete as it had been seven years earlier when Smollett had applied for a commission. Into Smollett’s face came the same defiant flush; the same precise, tight-lipped, self-controlled statement of his case.

“I am presenting the matter as I see it from the shareholders’ point of view,” he said. “Before the war this business was run by two experienced wine merchants, working under the nominal leadership of a chairman whose title conferred prestige upon the firm. The two men who ran the business worked a full working week inside the office. The firm paid steady dividends. To-day there is the still nominal leadership of the chairman. You realize of course, sir, that I am setting this matter out simply as it would appear to a shareholder?”

“I realize that.”

“As I was saying, sir, the shareholder might say to himself, ‘There is the same nominal leadership. There is Mr. Balliol working at half pressure. The other two places on the board are filled by men who have actually no offices in the building. The working of the firm is therefore only represented on the board with a quarter of its pre-war strength. The firm is declaring a poor dividend.’ I feel, sir, that the shareholder, mistakenly, no doubt, would put two and two together. He would like to see the office more strongly represented on the board.”

“I see, Smollett. Well, I will discuss the matter with the board. I will let you know what they decide.”

Balliol had no doubt as to what Smollett had done or what Smollett was intending. Nor had the board when the facts were placed before them.

“There is absolutely no doubt what he has done,” said Balliol. “Smollett has persuaded a number of his friends to buy up shares. As long as our balance sheets were good, he was content to have found a good investment for them. When things went badly, he put his friends’ irritation to good use. Of this we can be very sure: if we do not elect him to the board, he will be proposed at the next shareholders’ meeting. He will probably be elected there. If we on the board decline to accept that vote at the shareholders’ meeting, and demand a poll, well, gentlemen, we are embarking on a contest from which We may not emerge with success. Very certainly we shall break that spirit which we heard during the war so variously described as esprit de corps”

As Balliol paused, young Prentice rose to his feet in a gale of academic indignation.

“But this is preposterous; this is outrageous. This man has been working against us, behind our backs. There is only one thing to be done: dismiss him; find another man to take his place. Damn those shareholders, they are only a minority. Demand a poll; make a fight of it.”

Simultaneously Hugh and Victor interrupted him. They both stopped, looked at one another. “You go on,” said Hugh.

In detail, in minor transactions, Victor made small contribution to the board’s debates. He conducted the deliberations, but did not direct or lead them. When, however, a broad problem, dealing with general strategy, with the human factor, was presented, it was his voice that led, his opinion that was followed.

“This isn’t a question of what’s right or of what’s wrong. It’s a question of what’s happened, what’s going to happen next; of a choice between the lesser of two evils. We have made three mistakes. We have allowed the business to get into a bad position; we have not realized what Smollett was planning. But the greatest of all mistakes was: we did not foresee that such a situation was like to arise, that Smollett was ambitious; that he meant to be a director. We ought to have then asked ourselves: ‘Is he a fit man to be a director?’ If the answer was yes, we should have asked him to join us. He would then have been on our side. We would have unarmed him. If, on the other hand, he was not a fit man to be a director, we should have prepared our defence long ago against whatever attempt he might have made. The consequences of that last mistake we cannot assess. There are only two questions for us to decide now. Is Smollett or is he not the kind of man that we could work with on this board? Is he indispensable to the office?”

Balliol hesitated. Yes, he supposed that Smollett was indispensable. He was capable, energetic. He understood the business. He and Jenks worked well together. If Smollett went, Jenks would go as well. To replace them would be difficult, if possible, at short notice. The firm’s position did not allow the year’s slackening of energy that would be entailed by the teaching of a new man his job. Yes, as far as anyone was indispensable, Smollett was. And as for the other point: yes, he supposed that Smollett was the kind of man that one could work with on a board. Before the war he would not have thought so. If he had been told fifteen years ago that the nervous young man whom Prentice had introduced into the firm to enlarge its tobacco side would one day occupy a seat upon its board, he would have laughed. But there had been a good many changes in the last ten years. There were still class barriers; but they were different barriers. He had often recalled the afternoon of Hugh’s return from leave; of how Hugh had said after Smollett as he had walked towards the door: “I wonder how he’ll feel going back again, when it’s all over.” Well, they knew now, but it was for men of Hugh’s type, not Smollett’s, that the going back had been most difficult. Smollett on the board indeed!

“To both your questions, the answer’s ‘yes,’“ said Balliol.

“Then in that case,” said his son-in-law, “I consider we should elect him. I consider that we should try to forget that he laid these plans. You may say he was working behind our backs. But a person in his position knows that he is fighting a lonely battle; that he has to depend upon his own resources. He had no reason to believe that we would meet him half way. What reason, indeed, had we given? He asked himself—and what ambitious man in his position would not have done the same—’How can I force these people to elect me to their board?’ He has thought of us, if not as enemies to him, at least as enemies to his ambition. I hope that you agree with me.”

He looked from Hugh to Prentice. Prentice, like so many men of academic training, could only argue along a groove; against arguments that accept certain given premises. He could not argue when expediency rather than inherent rectitude was the standard by which actions and decisions were to be measured.

“I suppose you’re right. If you argue from that point of view.”

Hugh also was in agreement.

“I didn’t learn much from the war, but I did learn this. It’s worth eating quite a lot of humble pie to avoid actual fighting. One talks about going to war to save one’s dignity. Actually one’s cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. I’d rather put up with Smollett, than start a fight with him. It’ll probably turn out better than one expects. Things usually do. Neither as well nor as badly as one expects.”

At least that’s what one says, he thought. One pretends that that’s the way things go; half way between what one fears and hopes; that one muddles through. I suppose we do: most of us. And we talk about the lessons that the war’s taught us. But have we? Life’s still a fight. However we may cover it over. A preying and a being preyed on. Plotting and being plotted against. People like Smollett laying their plans years ahead. He had thought that when the war was over that he had done with fighting. But he hadn’t. He had ended one fight only to begin another.

He returned to Ilex in a disgruntled mood to find his younger brother in a state of even more profound despondency. Francis was lolling back in an arm chair, his hands crossed behind his head, his legs driven straight against the fender, his mouth drooping in a surly pout.

His depression irritated Hugh. When he was feeling in a bad temper, he liked others to be laughing and happy, so that he could contrast their gaiety with his gloom. To meet someone even more bowed with sorrow was being beaten at one’s own game. He eyed his young brother with disfavour. What the devil had he to be grousing over? He was young, he had his health. Debts, he supposed, or women! That girl who had worked in Selfridge’s. She had gone to a theatre ticket agency; had got the sack from that and was talking about a walking-on job at the Hepworth Studios. Francis seemed to be spending most of his spare time with her. He had brought her out here once. She had seemed well enough: lively and companionable. She was not his own type exactly; too young, expecting too much, too much attention, too many presents; always wanting to be taken somewhere. He hadn’t the time for that kind of thing. It was only another way of buying women. You always bought women in one way or another. He preferred the old-fashioned way: ringing up a flat in Jermyn Street, making an appointment. It was the same thing you bought. They were nice to you for just so long as you were there; as long as you were useful to them. Which was all any woman was. All this nonsense about the real thing; being loved for one’s own sake. It was only that one was buying in a different market.

So he argued, savagely, trying to convince himself, not succeeding wholly, turning his ill-humour upon Francis, resolved to convince somebody of something.

“Well, what’s your trouble? That girl again?”

Francis nodded.

“And what’s gone wrong? Has she turned you down?”

“Not that exactly.”

“But she doesn’t love you?”

“It doesn’t look as though she did.”

“Why not?”

“She won’t marry me.”

Hugh laughed: scornfully, savagely.

“Marry you! Why should she marry you? You don’t want to marry her.”

“I do.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. You may think you do. But you don’t really. You don’t want a house, babies, servants, responsibilities. That’s what marriage is. And you don’t want that. You’re in love with her. You want to go to bed with her. And you think you can’t go to bed with her till you’ve married her. That’s the only reason that you’re talking about marriage. Come now, isn’t it?”

Francis flushed. There were times when he almost hated Hugh; or rather, hated things about him: the spite, the loose-lipped sneer, the mottled blurring red lines below his eyes, the bullying manner that was a kind of shield to conceal weakness. Yet even when Hugh was most aggressive, there was a certain vigour and masculinity about him that Francis against his will respected. He tried not to lose his temper.

“It’s silly to talk like that, with a girl like Marjorie.”

“A girl like Marjorie, indeed! That old-world nonsense. The two kinds of girl. The girls that one’s sister knows and the other sort. That may have been all very well fifty years ago. It isn’t now. Girls know too much. They’ve got their eyes open. They’ve worked pretty hard to be independent. They mean to stay free. They’re out for a good time just like you and I are. They don’t want houses, children, servants, responsibilities, any more than you do; not till the settling down time comes. And that time’s a long way off as far as you and your Marjorie are concerned. Don’t you make any bones about it. She’s got her head screwed on the right way. Stop talking to her about marriage and start talking about a week-end at Brighton. Then you’ll both get what you want. And good luck to you.”

He spoke on a note of rising heat; his face mottled, his eyes half closed; transported to an earlier period of his life; to a front line dugout to the north of Albert. It was the voice of a dead man that he was echoing. It was of another girl that he was thinking. It was that earlier self of his he was admonishing.

“Be honest with yourself,” he said. “You don’t really want marriage any more than she. Have a good time, the two of you. They’re only three things a man needs in London to enjoy himself. Enterprise; enough pocket money to run to taxis; and a comfortable place of his own where he can take a girl. Arrange it so that it won’t be squalid. That’s all that matters.”

And on that note of admonition he stumped angrily from the room.

Thought Francis: “Of all the silly nonsense.…”

He did not forget it all the same. Turning it over in his mind he was forced to admit that a great deal of it was common sense. He might be in love with Marjorie; but he was not particularly in love with the prospect of a life that included flats, babies, servants, responsibilities. He enjoyed his independence. He had no wish to forfeit it. At the same time he wanted Marjorie. He had been brought up to believe that if you wanted a girl like Marjorie you proposed marriage; that if she was in love with you she accepted you. But though Marjorie might be in love with him, she certainly did not want to be talking about marriage. “Darling, is there any need to talk about that now?” she had said.

He had imagined that it was because she was not in love with him that she would not answer his proposals. But suppose that it was not that; that it was not she was not in love with him, but that she was not in love any more than he was with the prospect of a life devoted to babies, flats, servants, responsibilities? It had been assumed that women wanted marriage, that women wanted children. But might it not be that women wanted independence; that in the days of chaperones and parental authority they had more independence as wives than débutantes? Now they had more freedom as bachelor girls. And as regards children, since in those days women had not known how to prevent them, they had persuaded themselves that they had desperately needed what after all was the unavoidable corollary to an independence achieved through matrimony. Men did not want homes and children while they were in the twenties. But girls he had been told felt differently about these things. Why should they? Why should they, he thought. Why shouldn’t they want the same amusing time that men had? Like men they wanted marriage, home, children; one day; but not at once. Why should Marjorie because she was a girl feel differently from a man about those things? Why? He could see no reason. Girls did so many things that men did. They drove cars, they played games, they had votes, they sat in Parliaments, they had careers and cheque books. Why shouldn’t they feel the same way that men did; that the twenties was a time to be enjoyed?

Oh, but that’s nonsense, he told himself. They are different. They must be. Of course they are.

At the same time he began to consider very seriously the idea of taking a small flat on his own somewhere. Not because of Marjorie, or at least Marjorie was not the reason that he ostensibly offered to his conscience. He told himself that it would be fun to have a place where he could see his friends; that Ilex was too far out; that he had barely time to get home and change and get back again into London at the end of his day’s work. He must spend two hours a day of his limited leisure in tubes and buses. At Ilex he saw his parents’ friends, and his brother’s friends. He did not live his life, he lived theirs. Half the other fellows he knew had places of their own. And it was the fellows on their own, who were the most alert, had the most to tell one, had the most to say for themselves. Naturally, they lived more interesting lives. He’d never amount to anything till he was on his own. So he argued, never admitting to himself the itch, the curiosity to put Hugh’s contention to the test.

It was clear that he must find a flat.

What one looks out for usually one finds. It was a fellow in the Selfridge Rugger side who put him on to it. Some friends of his were running a communal establishment in Bayswater; not far from Irongate. They had a room to let. He didn’t think they were asking more than a pound a week for it, and it was furnished. It would be worth while having a look at it, anyhow. Francis went.

There was an improvised quality about all immediately post-war living of which this particular establishment was a typical example. The house was owned to the extent of a ninety-nine years’ lease of which seventy-one years had still to run, by a family who had lost two sons and most of their capital in the war. They could no longer afford, nor did they need, a four-storied, basemented house for which in peace-time a staff of two servants had been required. They had decided to live on the two top floors and let off the two bottom floors as maisonettes. Their sub-tenants had in their turn over-estimated their assets, and under-estimated their expenses. The maisonettes had been sub-divided into flats and the flats let off as single rooms. So much so had it become a case of lesser fleas having lesser fleas and so on ad infinitum, that there were as many as ten distinct families living beneath one roof, engaging in periodic forms of guerilla battle about noise and gramophone parties and bath taps which took the shape of complaints to a senior sub-tenant or letters from a solicitor, in accordance with the nature of the grievance and the dimension of their bank account.

The room that was available for Francis was on the ground floor and was originally part of a three-roomed flat with a bathroom and kitchenette. His room had been the spare bedroom. It communicated with the bathroom, as did the room beyond which had been the connubial chamber. The other room, the living-room, was across a narrow passage. Each of the three rooms had been converted into a bed-sitting-room with a gas fire. The flat was tended by a charwoman who arrived every morning at eight, got her young gentlemen’s breakfasts, scoured the flats after they had left, and departed before midday. For this she received five shillings from each tenant. The charge for breakfast was a shilling a head. If the young gentlemen wanted any meal but breakfast they must prepare it themselves on their own gas ring. Any dirty plates left in the kitchen would be washed up by the charwoman next morning. Strict privacy was ensured between the occupants of the three rooms by a system of signals. Each door had three cards: Out, In, Busy. A similar system arranged for an equitable allotment of the morning bath water.

“You don’t have to take it for longer than a month at a time,” Francis was told. “So that if things aren’t comfortable, you don’t stand to lose much.”

To Francis it seemed the kind of scheme that depended for its success entirely on the behaviour of the other tenants. It might be hell. It might be fun. Anyhow, it would be an experience. And though the room itself in its present condition might not be particularly attractive, the expenditure of a very few pounds would make it cosy and comfortable and picturesque. It was the kind of room which was worth taking a little trouble over. Its proportions were good: high, with a pleasantly moulded ceiling and a marbled fireplace: an Adams copy. The wall-paper was inoffensive: a neutral buff colour against which pictures would stand out well. “If I were to get some decent curtains, a standard lamp, a covering for that divan and a few cushions.…”

Francis made his decisions quickly.

“I’ll take it, from to-morrow week. Have you got a tape measure? I want to take the measurement of the windows.”

He knew exactly what he wanted. Back at the store he did not waste one second of the salesman’s time. “I want dark green damask: sage green, with a faint gold pattern. Yes, that’s it. And I want it to run on wooden rods: black, with a big kind of blobule on the end. You know. Now, how long will that take? Ten days? Now, couldn’t you do it in a week for me? As an exception? It really is important. Eight days? That’s splendid. This is the address.”

The curtains would cost him a good twenty pounds. The standard lamp, the divan spread, the cushions. There wouldn’t be much left out of fifty pounds. But there was that fifteen hundred in the bank in War Loan. They’d let him overdraw against it. There was no need to worry. And he’d got to make this place as jolly as he could.

He didn’t tell his parents what he had done: not in so many words. A friend had lent him his place for a month, he said, which was in its way true. No, it wasn’t really a flat, he explained. A bed-sitting-room. Oh yes, there’d be someone to look after him. An old woman who’d do his breakfast. He’d probably be back at Ilex most nights for dinner. Yes, there was quite nice furniture there, but the pictures were pretty awful. He thought he’d take one or two just to cheer it up a little. But he must rush now, really. He’d got to pack.

He took a well-stocked trunk. Half a dozen pictures, a cushion or two, a rug out of a room that nobody bothered to use now. The curtains would be up when he arrived. He was trembling with nervous excitement. He did hope it looked all right. He’d never furnished anything before: only a school study, and that was different. “Wait here,” he told the cab driver. “I’ll be back in a moment to help you with that trunk.” He could not wait to see what his room looked like. He did not want to share that first sight of it with anyone. He shut his eyes as he flung wide the door, kept them shut till he had closed the door, then opened them.

He gave a gasp of pleasure. It was better than he had dreamed: the curtains falling in heavy gold-shot folds, the cushions green and black and primrose against the dark shadow of the divan; the standard lamp with its bright brass stem, and the coloured parasol effect of its silk shade. And it’ll look even better when the pictures are up, when the rug’s down. It’ll look better still to-night when it’s lighted up.

He had not told Marjorie that he had taken the flat. He had made no plans for the evening. He had arranged to meet her at the junction of Edgware Road and Oxford Street. It was a half-way house for both of them.

He took care always to arrive there first. “Well, and what’s it to be this evening?” That was her first question. It was put rather petulantly. It was a typical May evening; cold and windswept, with a suspicion of rain. The prospect of a long slow twilight. She was shivering, her coat drawn tightly round her, huddling; her face half buried below its collar. A forlorn expression. Francis was glad that it was such an evening, that sunlight and blue skies were not luring them to the Heath, to Richmond, to the river. He chuckled to himself, placing his hand guidingly on her arm.

“I’ve got a surprise for you. You wait.”

She looked up quickly, questioningly.

“A surprise? What? Tell me!”

“You wait.”

The house was barely five minutes’ walk away. He talked with an intangible fluency all the way; not really knowing what he was saying; very conscious of the quick, puzzled glances that she kept casting up at him; her bewilderment increased with every step they took. She could not understand why she was being led away from the bright lights, the crowded thoroughfares where restaurants and cinemas abounded.

When he turned from the pavement, towards the steps of an imposingly-porticoed mansion, she stopped dead.

“Now what is all this about? Am I being kidnapped, or what?”

“It’s all right. I live here.”

“You … what?”

But he did not give her time to dispute the point. He had taken her by the arm, he had led her down the passage, had guided her through the matchboard partition of the sub-tenancy, had flung open the door of his own flat.

“This is my flat. I’ve just taken it.”

It was her turn to gasp. As she stood in the doorway, looking round her.

“Your flat … but … oh, darling … it is lovely … really!”

And it was. In a cosy, intimate, friendly way. Though the month was May and the light had not faded in the sky, the curtains were drawn, the fire lit, the lamp turned on. It was a room of warmth and light and kindly shadows. The kind of room where you could relax, where you could be yourself, where you could leave your troubles behind you in the passage, where you could feel that nothing existed outside this circle of warmth and friendliness.

“I must see everything,” she was saying. “You must show me all of it.” She had taken off her coat, tossed her hat on to a chair, was busy opening cupboards, peering behind curtains, examining the material of the cushions, the curtains, the divan spread; looking at the pictures; opening the bathroom door; asking to have everything explained to her: how he managed about meals, insisted on seeing the kitchen. “What fun one could have with a place like this.” Returning to the room, resuming her examination, finding a bowl of eggs and rows of tins behind a curtain: New Zealand whitebait, a tongue, peaches.

“You’ve got food here?”

“I thought we might have a picnic.”

“Do let’s.”

“I’ve got frying-pans and things.”

She helped him collect plates and knives and glasses. They got in each other’s way and laughed. He opened a bottle of white wine that he had borrowed from his father’s cellar.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s better than what my father’s friends give me when they take me to the Ritz,” she said.

And the omelet tasted better than anything he had eaten there

“Now let’s open one of those tins,” she said.

“One ought to dance between courses,” he reminded her. “I’ve got a gramophone.”

They pulled back the rug: the narrow square of boarding did not make them envious for the ivory-smooth floors of Brook Street.

They laughed and danced, opened more tins than they could need possibly, finished the wine, vowed they had never enjoyed themselves as much at any restaurant.

“Let’s move these plates away into the kitchen,” he said. “There’ll be more room to dance.”

But when they were back again she said that no, she’d like to rest a little.

“I’ll pull the divan round, then we can throw cushions on the floor and lean against it.”

He pulled it round. “That’s it. No, that light’s shining in your face. I’ll cover it.” He draped a thick school scarf above the globe; so that its light was as dimmed as the moon’s is when a cloud conceals it. The glow from the fire shone ruddily warm upon them. He opened his arms to her.

Close, close against his heart he held her. His kisses soft at first and gentle, barely a touching of the lips, grew longer, more lingering, tenser. “Ah, my sweet. If you only knew how much I loved you.” It was such a moment as he had used at other times as the prelude to what she had described as his “forever speeches”; protestations of how he would love her always; of how he would work for her; how he would arrange their life for them; of the happiness of being with her at last for always. He made no such speeches now. The memory of his brother’s tirade fired his enterprise. His kisses grew fiercer, deeper; his words wilder, tenser. “You’re so lovely,” he whispered, “the loveliest thing beneath the sun. I want to kiss you, all of you, here and here and here.” His fingers fluttered along her body. She sighed; shuddered; drugged by his words and kisses. He was fired, in part by her nearness, by the touch and the response of her; half by the dizzy, heady excitement of an approaching conquest. He had not believed it possible, he could not now believe it possible. And yet it was possible. If he kept his head, if he kept his courage. In his arms she grew weaker, limper, as he grew bolder; her very weakness a response. Her closed eyes, a challenge; her quick breathing, her arms limp-hanging by her sides, a call to courage. Even now he could scarcely believe that it was really happening, that it was his lips that were pleading. “Darling, you are so lovely now; as you really are you would be so much lovelier. Please, my darling, please!“ Was it his lips that whispered that, was it his ears that heard her low, scarcely articulated murmur: “Look away then, darling, for a moment, please.”? Was it his ears that a moment later heard her whisper, half-shy, half-proud, “Am I really as lovely as you thought?” Was it to his eyes, his lips, his hands that loveliness was yielded?

Even next morning he could hardly believe that it had happened. So Hugh was right, then. He could never have believed it was so easy; that the fortress would fall at the first really resolute assault. It was so much easier than he had ever thought. At the same time it was so much lovelier than he had ever dreamed. It was the sudden discovery of an enchanted garden.

As he sauntered slowly that morning during his luncheon hour from the Marble Arch eastwards towards Orchard Street, it was with new, awakened eyes that he watched the eddying flow of shoppers that thronged that crowded pavement; the exquisite and languid ladies with their chauffeured cars drawn up waiting by the kerb; the shop-girls, secretaries, typists, in their trim office clothes, spending their hour of liberty before shop windows. Girls in light summer frocks and floppy hats hurrying, a smile upon their lips, as though happiness were on its way to meet them. It was a familiar enough scene. Yet these girls with their set or smiling faces; with their slow or hurrying steps, their Paquin or cheap muslin frocks; on this morning of revelation seemed new to him; were the creatures of another world: a world that he had just discovered. An enchanted garden was bright with colour; rich and many-scented; its fruit and flowers waiting to be picked.

VII

A few days later the agony column of The Times contained the following advertisement:

Opportunity for ex-officer to improve position. Qualifications: bachelor between thirty and fifty employed continuously during last two years at salary of not less than £400 not more than £ 600. Write Box 773.

Thought Hugh: “That seems to meet my case.”

He scarcely expected to receive an answer to his application. An advertisement such as that would fill a mail bag. He was considerably surprised to open in the following week a typewritten letter, signed “P. Burke” and bearing the heading of the St. Charles’s Club.

“Dear Captain Balliol,” (it ran) “I thank you for replying to my advertisement. If you will call on me here to-morrow afternoon (Tuesday) at 3.45, I will discuss my proposal with you.”

Hugh believed that a slight unpunctuality makes a good impression. He arrived at the St. Charles’s Club at seven minutes to four.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Burke is expecting you,” the porter told him. “Page, show this gentleman where to leave his hat and gloves.”

He was received by a tall, ample man with a bald head, a paunch, a white imperial, a waxed Shakespearian moustache and an ambassadorial manner.

“The kind of man who doesn’t ask you anywhere unless he’s meaning business” was Hugh’s mental verdict.

The tone of his reception was encouraging.

“Ah, yes, Captain Balliol. It is charming of you to come. It was charming of you to answer my advertisement. I have made some inquiries about you, naturally. I will recapitulate what I have discovered. You will interrupt me if I make a mistake. You are thirty-three years old. You are of a Wessex family. You are an old Fernhurstian. You served in the Machine Gun Corps. You were wounded and awarded the M.C. You are now a director of Peel & Hardy’s. You receive a commission on the wine that your friends purchase. Times are not good. The last balance sheets of Peel & Hardy’s were not encouraging. You probably, all things considered, account yourself lucky to be able to earn as much as five hundred pounds a year.”

Mr. Burke paused. His speech was fluent, his manner smooth, his smile urbane.

“Summing me up,” thought Hugh; “talking, so as to gain time; talking, so as to create a congenial atmosphere. I don’t like him. I quite definitely don’t like him. But I’m prepared to put up with a good deal from anyone who’ll make it possible for me to run my flat again.”

“You’re right so far,” he said.

Mr. Burke inclined his head.

“I have received, naturally, a number of answers to my advertisement. There are, alas, a great many ex-officers anxious to better their positions. But simple though my requirements were, a great many of the applicants did not satisfy them, particularly as regards marriage. Several seemed to imagine that a man living apart from his wife could claim to be a bachelor. In many cases he can claim to be, no doubt. But not in this. Now, there is one point on which I want to make quite sure before I go any further. You are, I know, a bachelor. But have you complications of any other sort?”

The small lines round Hugh’s eyes wrinkled into a smile.

“It is many moons since romance tarried upon my pillow,” he replied.

Mr. Burke’s smile was a wintry sally. “Not much sense of fun, this fellow,” was Hugh’s thought.

“Admirable,” said Mr. Burke. “In that case …” He paused again, then looking Hugh very directly between the eyes, began to speak more slowly. “As you will probably have guessed from my advertisement, I am looking for a man of breeding and education, old enough to have common sense, young enough to have as much of life before him as at his back. The stipulation that he should have held a post of over four hundred pounds for a couple of years is a proof of capacity and reliability. A man with a salary of over six hundred pounds would scarcely be interested in my proposition.”

He paused.

Hugh made no comment, but the pulse of his heart was beating hurriedly. “Don’t be a fool,” he warned himself. “Don’t excite yourself. Nothing’s going to come of this. Don’t build castles in the air. Don’t be a fool; don’t get yourself worked up.” But all the same he was absurdly, desperately excited.

Mr. Burke continued: “Have you ever considered what is your most valuable possession?”

“He’s coming to the point now,” Hugh thought. “Whatever answer I give will be the wrong one. I’d best be flippant.”

“My wardrobe, I suppose.”

Mr. Burke smiled.

“In a sense, yes; but your wardrobe is scarcely a marketable asset. It is not in the same category as your passport.”

Hugh stared at him.

“A passport? That’s something that anyone can get.”

“That any Englishmen can get. Have you thought how many people there are who, for various reasons at a time like this, want to remain in this country but cannot, because they have not a British nationality? Captain Balliol, I will come to the point. I have a client, a very charming lady. She is thirty-three. She is handsome. She is not poor. It is very important that she should have British nationality. It is very important that she should have a husband who will not interfere with her, but will appear with her in public on certain stipulated occasions; and will do her credit there. She is prepared to make a substantial allowance to her husband. I may add that my client is an honourable, law-abiding person. It is for personal, not public or political reasons that she wishes to take up her domicile in England. I want to know whether you would be prepared to consider becoming the husband of my client.”

Hugh’s heart sank.

“So that’s what it is,” he thought. “And I daresay there are a lot of chaps who’d leap at it. I’m sure Burke’s got a hundred and one reasons to explain why it’s quite all right. And because I’d give anything to believe it was, if I listened I’d start agreeing with him. I might accept. If I once start listening I’m done for. There’s only one thing for me to do and that is this!”

He rose to his feet.

“I just can’t think how you managed to get elected to a club like this,” he said.

But it was less of Burke’s election to the St. Charles’s Club, he thought, than of the position of the ex-officer to whom such an offer could be made with the confident assurance of its acceptance.

When you think what we were six years ago: nothing was too good for us. We were the white-headed boys, They were going to make it up to us when the war was over. Only six years ago; less than that. Look where we are now. Thank heaven I haven’t reached the point where I’ve got to accept an offer of that kind. Not yet, anyhow.

VIII

With Francis’s establishment in a flat, Ilex became technically unoccupied except by Helen and her parents. In fact, however, it was as crowded, as it had ever been. Francis had followed Hugh’s advice; he was soon to follow Hugh’s example. A depleted bank account drove him to sub-let his room and return to Ilex. He lived like Box and Cox, a perpetual letting and sub-letting. One week in his flat, the next week not. On the whole more in than out. In contrast to Hugh, whose flat was now sub-let on a yearly tenancy, and might almost be called a resident at Ilex.

Lucy was back in England, now that the rubber slump was over, waiting for her husband’s retirement and the knighthood that rewards the colonial administrator’s renunciation of the pomp of official dignities for the obscurity of a chair beside the fireplace in the Oriental Club. She spent the summer in a furnished villa at Frinton, her winter in West Kensington hotels. There were crises however: financial and domestic; a cook that had given notice; an overdraft; an inability to find the kind of house she wanted: the children and their Nanny would then be despatched to Ilex. Sometimes, when the crisis was particularly acute, she would come herself.

Quite often Ruth would ring up during the afternoon and invite herself to dinner. Victor had to go and look after some business organization. Now and then his business would take him for a day or two to the north or Midlands. He was playing a great deal of golf. There were tournaments at Le Touquet to be run across for. On such occasions Ruth would spend a night or so at Ilex. She felt lonely by herself, she said.

In a way the life of Ilex was very much what it had been during the war; with the family technically scattered in houses and flats and seaside villas, yet with the house never really empty with one or other ringing up to invite him or her self for a meal, a week-end, a night or two. There were always bags and unexpected greatcoats in the hall, and messages scribbled on the pad beside the telephone.

This there was of difference, though; a difference that completely altered the atmosphere of Ilex. In the war Ilex had been home; the place to which Ruth had returned from her canteen, Hugh from his training camp, Francis from school, that Lucy far away in Malaya dreamed about. It was the first place they went to. They would be rather there than anywhere. Now their thoughts were in other places. Ilex was a last resort. They came there because there was nowhere else to go, because they were lonely, because the person they wanted to be with was somewhere else, because something had gone wrong: a nurse had been given notice; because they couldn’t afford to be where they wanted; because of rents and overdrafts. The atmosphere of a happy reunion had been replaced by one of discontent. To have one’s suit case unpacked at Ilex was an admission of failure. One had tried to do something and one had failed to do it. Here one was, back again.

Hugh, who was at Ilex nearly all the time, most closely typified this spirit. While for the others Ilex represented their periods of discouragement—the dark hours, days, weeks in a year that was for the most coloured—Hugh was never apart from the atmosphere of Ilex. He and it were one. It was because of him very largely that the others came to think of their old home in terms of failure. The moment they stepped across the hall they were conscious of his depression.

And, indeed, Hugh during those months was a despondent figure. He was rapidly becoming the typical ex-officer type; the man who, though young in years, is, and knows himself to be, a failure. He is not potential any longer. He is ambitionless. He is in the last analysis unhelpable. Every month Hugh’s commission account grew less. He had less money to spend. And money is, for the majority of men, the measure of their self-confidence. It is hard not to feel that the world has got the better of you when halfway through the month your account is overdrawn. Every time Hugh went into a Soho instead of a West End restaurant, he would think “So this is all I’m good enough for now.”

His appearance had altered, too. He was growing fat, unhealthily, with mottled cheeks, with puffiness under the eyes, with a thickened chin. His clothes were too tight. To conceal it he wore jumpers instead of waistcoats and left his coat unbuttoned. But even so, he had a puffed look. He had lost his athletic look, acquiring a kind of slouch that was half hang-dog, half aggressive, as though at the slightest provocation he would draw a gun. And in point of fact, he had become excessively splenetic.

He was always angry about something: about the government, the behaviour of a football crowd, a stage success. He read through the paper in the morning as though he were hunting for an opportunity to say, “I ask you now, isn’t this the limit?” He usually found such a peg for his irritation. And invariably he would address whoever happened to be in his company as though they were the defendants of that of which he disapproved. “Now tell me, what on earth does Baldwin consider to be the point.…” It was like a counsel’s cross-examination; so challenging that you found yourself driven to retort; very often to find yourself in the end defending something which you on the whole disliked. Hugh was rapidly becoming an extremely uncomfortable person. You felt when you were in his company that you had no right to find life amusing, that the only way to enjoy yourself was to have a thoroughly good grouse. It was not much good going out with him unless you were prepared to make a heavy evening of it. He grew angry with you if you did not drink glass for glass with him, and if you did drink glass for glass with him he got so angry with things in general that you had to hold yourself in pretty carefully to avoid a row.

We can all of us call to mind someone out of our acquaintance who, during the war, typified gallantry, courage, a spirit of youth and of adventure, but whom time has changed into a querulous, ill-humoured, spiteful failure; who drinks too much, borrows money, hates afterwards the people he borrowed from, develops an inferiority complex, fancies that everybody is against him, runs down and has suspicions of everyone who tries to help him; who has become, in short, impossible. We have all of us one such acquaintance. And in each case the verdict on him must be the same. “If there had been no war, he would have not become this person. Weaknesses to begin with there may have been. But had it not been for the war, those weaknesses would not have been developed in this way. Circumstances placed too heavy a strain upon him.”

Certainly in Hugh Balliol’s case this was so. And certainly during those immediate post-war years he was degenerating into the kind of person over whom shoulders are shrugged to-day. “It’s just no good. We’ve tried our best. He’s impossible. He must be let go to the devil in his own way. There’s nothing to be done about him.”

Whether Balliol was aware of this change in the atmosphere of his home, it was impossible to tell. Ageing now, he maintained that same impersonally interested attitude to his work, his family and the curious trance-like manner in which his wife watched the current of events that streamed past her. But to his friends and his acquaintances, his life, or such of it at least as was centred in his home at Ilex, gave the impression of some force rushing rapidly to the point of disintegration.

On a warm, sunny morning in the spring of 1924 Ruth rang up Hugh, asking if he could lunch with her that morning. Hugh was disengaged. He usually was nowadays. He could not afford to ask people out himself, and he had grown such bad company that his friends rarely bothered to invite him. He accepted the invitation with a bad grace. He had grown touchy, easily offended. “There’s no need now for her to bother to ask me a day or two ahead. She knows I’ll be doing nothing. She wouldn’t run the risk of having to refuse something that was really amusing because of me. She thinks she can use me as a last resort, when everything else falls through. And she can, of course. I’m not going to refuse a decent lunch.”

Ruth may have noticed his lack of grace, but she did not show that she had.

“That will be lovely. The Ritz grill at 1.15. It’s years since we really saw each other.”

He arrived there at twenty past. As he had expected, she had not arrived. He ordered himself a cocktail, and leant back against the green and white cushioned settee, thinking that it was over a year since he had sat there, over six months, for that matter, since he had been inside a West End restaurant; remembering the days when his life had been lived against such a setting; listening with amusement to the apologies with which woman after woman hurried in with frantic breathlessness. “I’m sorry. I’m dreadfully late, I know I am,” and the conviction with which men who had been waiting twenty minutes assured them that they had only just arrived.

He was glad that Ruth made no excuses of that kind. She was late, she knew she was late. And she didn’t care. She looked at Hugh’s glass, saw that it was empty. “Then let’s go straight in to lunch,” she said. “I’ve already had a cocktail.” But she hesitated in the glass doorway of the restaurant. “No,” she said. “On second thoughts I think we’ll have lunch upstairs.” She turned quickly and walked down the passage towards the staircase. “It will be cooler upstairs,” she said.

But Hugh knew well that that was not the reason. In that moment’s hesitation in the doorway he had seen, as she had done, across the room at the centre of the three tables under the flowered dais, Victor alone with an extremely pretty girl. So it was true, then; that whispering he had heard that it wasn’t only business and golf that took Victor to the Midlands and Le Touquet; that were responsible for Ruth’s sudden self-invitations to her parents’ house. Victor’s love of danger and a gamble had led him in post-war England to its most obvious expression.

Ruth’s manner had not changed at the sight of Victor. Perhaps there had been many such episodes to shrug away. But the fact that there had been such an episode dissolved Hugh’s irritation. There was no need for him to be on the defence with her. If he had his troubles, she had hers. They were in the same boat in their separate ways. He felt in tune with her as for many months he had not done, so that they were able to talk freely, openly, intimately.

They talked about themselves, about their family, comparing notes. “We’ve none of us done the kind of things we thought we would,” he said. “If we could turn back the clock to that first Christmas party when you put your foot through the ceiling and Francis would explain to the conjuror how he did all his tricks, and I bribed that fellow to put out the light, and see ourselves as we were then, we’d wonder ‘What could have happened in between to turn us into this?’”

“Yet nothing’s happened that might not have happened to anyone living through our period.”

“I thought Lucy’d do something rather grand.”

“And there she is now unable to talk about anything except her children.”

“And that appalling husband.”

“And how mother’s changed. From the day Francis went to school. She might be in a trance.”

“And who’d have thought Francis would develop into a kind of Casanova?”

“I saw him with another different girl last week.”

“What was she like?”

Ruth laughed.

“Fairly obvious.”

“If I’d been told fifteen years ago that one of us had to go wild, I’d have sworn it would be you.”

“One would have thought that, wouldn’t one?”

It even surprised her sometimes, how exemplary her life was. It wasn’t that she hadn’t met men who’d attracted her. It wasn’t that she had any scruples in particular. It was.… Well, perhaps if Victor had been different. … If I’d married the staid, correct kind of Englishman who boasted that since he’d met his wife, he’d never looked at another woman, I might have thought, “Heavens, but this is dull. I’ve got to do something to relieve this. We can’t both qualify for haloes.” But with Victor chasing after his “bits of nonsense.” No, it did seem that he was enough for one family, that dignity if nothing else, demanded that someone should keep a hand upon the brake. All the same, it was surprising.

She looked pensively at her brother.

“Do you remember that thing from Stevenson that father had illuminated as a kind of text and hung above the mantelpiece in our girls’ room?”

“About working a little, owing a little?”

“Yes, that’s it. You know they say that human beings run their lives on catchwords. There’s a phrase at the end about fortitude and delicacy. It sounds pretty silly to quote that in post-war London, but I do believe quite often that that phrase has made it less difficult for me to do certain things and stopped me doing others.”

It was a happy lunch. Its very happiness increased Hugh’s depression as he walked afterwards down the sunlit street, with a whole afternoon ahead and nothing in particular to do. He had a few shillings in his pocket. Those shillings were the tether by which his choice was measured. There were a number of things that he could do. There was a match at Lord’s; Hendren had been not out at lunch. There was a new Harold Lloyd film showing at the Coronet. There was a matinée of It Pays to Advertise. He would only miss a part of the first act. Or he could turn down into Jermyn Street and spend an hour or so at Clara’s. There were a number of things that he could do, all equally futile.

As his whole life was now.

Futile. Utterly purposeless, utterly selfish; an attempt to fill in the intervals between such forms of entertainment, of self-indulgence, as he could afford. If I were to die to-morrow no one would be any the worse off, no one would really mind. I’m not indispensable to anyone. I don’t even matter to anyone. No one relies on me for anything. It was all right living this kind of life before the war. I was young then, everything was ahead of me, everything was new for me. Then there was the war, there were my men, they relied on me, they needed me. I was doing something that was worth while. Then later at Fernhurst, as a master, there was a point to that. I was training fellows. But now … where’s all this getting me? Nowhere. Will I ever do anything that will get me anywhere? I don’t suppose so. I’ll never marry. What have I got to offer anybody? I’m not young. I’m a crock. I’ve no career. I’ve no money. I never shall have much. Half my father’s money was in that French War Loan that’s worth a quarter of what it was; less than that, with income tax. The rest of his money’s tied up in Peel & Hardy’s and heaven knew how much that was going to be worth at the rate things were going. Last year they’d paid no dividend at all on the ordinary shares. This year they’d only be able to pay the preference shareholders four per cent. There’d probably be ructions at next week’s meeting. He’d never have very much more than he’d got now. But that was more than a great many fellows had. He hadn’t any right to grumble. It would be all right if there were some purpose to his life; if he were able to convince himself that anything that he was doing mattered; as it had when he had been a soldier; and later, during that one term when he had taken the Shell at Fernhurst. He had not been really sorry, at the time, when the War Office had insisted on his going back to Grantham. He had felt sorry for the other masters; poor devils, he had thought, shut away in their cloistered backwater. He didn’t feel that way now. They are doing something, which I’m not. They’re building the future, or at least training those that will build it. They’re creative. I wouldn’t be sorry to be back there with them. They can justify themselves to their own consciences, which is more than I can do.

As he sauntered slowly down sunlit Piccadilly, the memory of that last talk with the Chief returned to him. “If you ever feel like coming back here, I don’t suppose you will, but there’s always a place waiting for you on my staff.” He had not thought of that last talk since. It returned now with compelling vividness. Why not, after all? He was doing no good to anyone in London. He might be of some use there.

His letter to the Chief was answered by return of post. He was delighted to hear from Hugh. Would Hugh come down and discuss the matter with him? A half holiday would be preferable. He suggested the following Tuesday. The day before the shareholders’ meeting? It wasn’t till three o’clock. He’d have time to catch the eleven train.

It was the first time that he had been down to Fernhurst since he had left in the July of 1917. He had forgotten how beautiful it was. Its square abbey tower, golden ochre against the blue of a summer sky, its mellow tranquillity brooding over the courts; the cloisters, the Gothic arches. It had watched the passage of eight centuries. Yet it was ageless; in the same way that youth was ageless; the youth it sheltered, trained, sent out into the world. Down the long corridor of those eight centuries Fernhurst had maintained that same contrast, renewed from one generation to another, between the permanence of mellow stone and the mobile fleetingness of youth. In essentials it had not changed since the monastic days when abbots had instructed novitiates in monkish Latin.

To Hugh, as he walked up from the station, there seemed no change since he had come here as a fag; since he had left here as a prefect. The same blazers, blue with the red dragon on the pocket; the same wide-brimmed straw hat; the same hatbands; the magenta and black of The School House; the dark blue of the sixth; the blue and gold of the eleven; the same hurry and animation; the same eager faces. Even the Chief himself although he was passing out of middle age; was very near to his retirement.

The Chief smiled, when Hugh remarked how unchanged everything appeared.

“It may seem so on the surface. But do you remember that when you came down here during the war you made precisely the same comment, and I explained to you how very different a generation it was that we were training. This generation of ours is as different from your brother’s generation as your brother’s generation was from yours. For this generation the word pre-war does not exist. The war is the first thing they can remember. Everything starts for them with the war. They expect life to be difficult. They are resolved to make a success of it, but they feel that their fathers and grandfathers are responsible for the present muddle. They are not going to sit meekly at their elders’ feet. They intend to rebuild the world to their own pattern. They have a sense of responsibility.”

The knowledge that they had a sense of responsibility made Hugh feel that he too had one: a part to play in the training of the generation that was resolved to rebuild the world after its own pattern. It was true, what the Chief had said eight years ago about the difference between his generation and Francis’s; of which Francis was himself not exactly a typical, but a good, example; of its defiance, of its lack of discipline. Francis had been resolved to do things in his own way. He had refused to go to Oxford; had gone, against everybody’s advice and wish, to work in Selfridge’s as a salesman; which had been a success as far as it had gone. But that defiance, that feeling that a good time was owed to him, had made him lose his head when he had discovered that girls of a certain kind were easy. Francis was only working at half pressure now.

And just as there had been that difference between his generation and Francis’s, the generation that in war-time had been ignored, undisciplined, left to its own devices, so there was a difference between Francis’s generation and this new one—his sister Helen’s generation. The generation for which the word pre-war did not exist; who felt that one phase of history had stopped in 1914, and that another phase had begun now, with them.

To help in the training of this generation would be a thing worth doing. As a master here there would be some reason, some justification for his existence. He could take a pride in himself again. For the first time for many months he felt confident, hopeful, self-reliant; with work that was worth while waiting to be tackled; with belief in his own capacity to tackle it.

During their walk round the cricket field that afternoon the Chief made no reference to Hugh’s offer to serve as a master on his staff. Nor did he that evening during dinner. Like men in business, he preferred to leave the discussion of business till the coffee stage was reached. But the moment his wife had left the table, the Chief excused himself.

“I have a large amount of correspondence that I must attend to. But I don’t need to tell you the way to the House Tutor’s room, or that you’ll be welcome there. If I finish my correspondence in time, I will come up and join you, but that is not likely, so I will say goodnight now. I shall expect you to breakfast to-morrow at eight o’clock, and we will have a talk together after chapel.”

With that arrangement Hugh was well content. He liked the Chief. He enjoyed his company. But there was a naturally a certain constraint between them. He could not relax in the way he could with the house tutor who was not so very much older than himself; who had served in the war; with whom he had shared much similar experience. He could be certain of a good time with him. He knew he would be welcomed there.

He was. A chair was drawn up before the fireplace. There were a couple of young masters to whom he was introduced. He was asked what he would drink. They were having a glass of beer. But there was whisky in the cupboard. “That’s what suits me,” said Hugh. The decanter and a syphon were set beside him. “Help yourself.” He filled his glass. He sat back in his chair. He had been rather on his best behaviour up to now. A parade manner. He could start enjoying himself. He felt warm and happy. The Chief kept a good table. And a good cellar too. There had been real body to that Burgundy. And I haven’t drunk port like that for a long time. Fancy such an abstemious fellow as the Chief bothering to keep such a good cellar. He only had one glass of Burgundy; barely half a glass of port. I noticed that. I took care to have a second glass myself. A good evening. This is going to be the best part of it.

The whisky was smooth upon his palate. He began to talk about the war. Comparing notes. Do you remember that estaminet on the right as you came out of Poperinghe? Not as far as Potise. No … no, the one where Maria was. She was Maria, wasn’t she? The red-haired girl. No, I mean that estaminet with the blue Dubonnet advertisement. You remember it? I thought you would. God, the times I had up there, after being shelled to blazes in the Salient.

God!—those had been the days. When you’d been in the line a fortnight, up to your knees in water half the time, with no proper trench; wretched earthworks; duckboard tracks across the open. Then you had seventy hours in which to settle that fortnight’s score. Those had been days. And there were so jolly few people with whom one could talk about them now. The best fellows had been left behind out there, pushing up daisies. The ones that had come back were so starchy and correct, in such a damned hurry to get somewhere. And then there were all those fellows who hadn’t been in the war at all. Conshies; and C3 men; chaps you hadn’t known existed then. Everyone seemed in khaki in the war. But the moment the war was over all these fellows came trotting out, like maggots when you lift a stone, enjoying themselves; getting jobs, looking fit and well; playing squash, taking girls to night clubs; with five times the stamina of fellows like ourselves, who had our lungs plugged with mustard gas.

And then all these youngsters coming on, thinking themselves Christmas. Where’d they be, I’d like to know, if it hadn’t been for us? It was more than one could stand to see the kind of people who were giving themselves airs in London. It’s a relief, I can tell you, to meet a fellow one can really talk to. It was like old times, this, yarning away, with another soldier; a bottle of whisky at your side. By the way, I’ll have finished this syphon in a minute. No, don’t bother, water’ll do. Oh well, thanks very much, that’s fine. I can’t tell you how mad I get when I see what people who weren’t in the war are managing to get away with. Look at that fellow MacDonald. Prime Minister of England. I ask you. When you think what people said about him in the war. Do you remember in 1917 how he wanted to go to some Pacifist Conference at Stockholm, and he couldn’t get a ship to take him out of the country?

It was a point on which Hugh felt very strongly. In London he never got a chance of saying what he really thought. Everyone was so busy forgetting things. You could only talk openly among people of your own sort. It was grand to get a chance of really letting go. It was a grand evening. He was sorry when the two young masters had to leave. But anyhow they were post-war. Just down from Oxford. They weren’t like good old Terence. He wished Terence wasn’t so damned abstemious. Leaving him to kill the bottle by himself. You’ve only had that one glass of beer. Term-time be damned. This is an exception. Oh, well, as you like. As I was saying, I wish all these fellows who shirked the war were made to wear medals so that you could spot them. For Services Avoided. The F.S.A. I think that’s rather a good joke. The F.S.A! I wouldn’t have a man in Parliament who was of fighting age in the war and didn’t serve.

He elaborated the point. He was still elaborating it when the Chief came up. So you’ve finished your letters after all. That’s fine. I’m having the grandest time. I’m just getting political. He explained to the Chief exactly what he would do to make certain that the country was run by the people who had saved the country; not by the people who had had it saved for them.

The Chief listened with that attentive smile that Hugh remembered from the days when he had taken his Latin verses to him. “Yes, I suppose that’s so. Yes, of course, if you look at it that way. And now I think we really must break up this party.” Oh, but must we, sir? It’s early yet. Surely. What time is it? There’s a clock there. Why, it’s only five past nine. What, quarter to one? Oh, that’s the minute hand. How silly of me. The long hand’s the minute hand. Yes, of course. “And you see, Terence has to be up for early school.” Why, of course he has, sir. I’d forgotten. Then Terence will you show Balliol to his room? He’s in the school-house sick-room. Good-night, Balliol. Good-night, Terence. Good-night, sir, good-night. Now, you show me the way, Terence. Ah, of course, yes. Down this passage, to the left. No, that’s the right. Do you remember the sergeant-major’s joke? No, no, the other left. Here we are. Yes, I know. That’s the bell and the light switch. Good-night, Terence. What an evening.

It was months since he had enjoyed himself so much.

He woke with a thirst, a headache, and the sunlight on his face. He blinked, reached for his tumbler, drained it, felt for his Eno’s. It wasn’t there. What! He sat upright, blinked at the bare wall. The uncurtained windows. Of course, yes, he remembered now. He was at Fernhurst. He’d forgotten to pack the Eno’s. He lay back, turned his pillow. For an instant the coarse cotton was cool against his forehead. He looked at his watch. Twenty past five. He must have been bad last night. He judged the thickness of the night by the hour he woke next morning. Anything before six was bad; anything after seven good. Twenty to seven was his usual time. Hell! but he was a fool not to have packed his Eno’s.

He closed his eyes. This was going to be a bad day. He knew the signs. He must have made heavy weather of it the night before. That vintage port at dinner; then, without any real interval, killing the whisky with old Terence. It had been a grand time. He couldn’t remember a great deal about it. They’d talked about the war, as far as he could remember. There’d been a couple of young masters there. They’d only been drinking beer. Then they’d gone. And after a while the Chief had come up to say good night. He’d told the Chief that he’d make war service a qualification for a seat in Parliament. He must have been pretty far gone by that time. Had the Chief noticed anything? Most likely not. The Chief wouldn’t see a fellow half-seas over once in a dozen months. He wouldn’t know what it looked like; thought of it in terms of sailors hiccoughing across a road. He’d never be able to spot it in a man like himself, who never really showed it. Nobody who didn’t know him really well could tell when he’d had a couple. It was probably all right. Of course it was all right. If only he’d remembered to pack his Eno’s.

With eyes closed, a thudding headache, and a mouth that felt as though it had been scoured with an oil rag, he waited for his morning tea; listening to the quarters chime on the abbey clock. Six, quarter past six, half past, and on the first chime of the half, the clatter of the bell ringing down the school-house dormitories. Old William going round shaking his hand bell; not a soul stirring; dead silence; till the quarter chimed. Then one or two languidly pushing back a blanket. The patter of reluctant feet down the boarded passage; the splash of a shower on to the zinc hip-bath. Then from the dining-hall the clatter of the five minutes bell, pandemonium breaking out; sheets flung back, towels grabbed at, doors swung open, shouting down the passage, shouting in the bathrooms, in the dormitories. A silent hasty collecting of odd garments, the first chime of the clock and a stream of flannel figures, tying their ties as they ran, pulling on their coats, panting to the roll-call at the study door. How clearly he could see it all! Only fifteen years ago. And all that had happened in that time.

At a quarter past seven they brought his tea. There were two pieces of bread and butter at its side. He took a mouthful, then for a moment he thought that the effort of swallowing it was going to make him sick. It was going to be a bad day. When he put his feet to the floor, he felt so dizzy that he had to sit back upon the bed. He cut himself when he was shaving.

He smiled at the sight of the Chief’s breakfast table. In the centre a revolving table set with loaves of bread brown and white, toast, butter, marmalade, jam, honey, fruit: the sideboard laden with a bowl of porridge, a plate of kedgeree, a dish of fried eggs and bacon and tomatoes. “I’m afraid I’ve got an urban appetite at this time of the morning,” he told the Chief, as he poured himself out a cup of tea and began the half-hearted peeling of an apple.

No matter how bad the night, Hugh was, however, capable of conversational enterprise at breakfast. He did most of the talking. Amusing and pertinent talk, too, he fancied. That would show the Chief that he had been running well within his strength last night. As they rose from the table, the Chief placed his hand affectionately on his arm. “I don’t suppose you’ll want to come to morning chapel; I’ll leave you alone here with the paper. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Hugh was curious to see whether or not Yorkshire had won at Birmingham. They had seemed in a bad position yesterday. But the close-set type blurred before his eyes. He wasn’t equal to that yet. He laid the paper down, resting his forehead against the window-pane; momentarily cooling it. Why in Hell’s name did he let himself get in a state like this? Why didn’t he check himself in time? There was a point, surely, when you could push your glass away. There should be. With wine there was. But with spirits, with whisky in particular, you weren’t aware that you were drinking heavily. You were just warm and comfortable and at ease. And then suddenly, without warning, you knew: it was too late. If you once started, it was just luck if you stopped in time. He closed his eyes. It was a long time since he had felt as bad as this.

He must have dozed, for it was with a start that he was conscious of the Chief’s hand upon his shoulder, the Chief’s voice saying, “I’ve got to go up to the sanatorium to see the matron. Would you care to walk up there with me?”

The sanatorium was a quarter of an hour’s stroll away. They walked in silence across the courts.

“Now about this question of your coming back to join the staff here—” He paused. From the tone of his voice Hugh could guess what the reply would be. So he had spotted then. I did give myself away. I’ve liked to think of myself as a man who can hold his liquor. But I’m not. Even someone like the Chief, who wouldn’t be suspecting that, wouldn’t be on the look-out for it, he can tell. I’m sodden, I suppose. I may not recognize it, but everybody else can. That’s what I’ve become. Of course he wouldn’t want a fellow like me down here now. He may have said he did in 1917, but I was a different person in 1917. I’ve crumpled up.

The Chief could not have been nicer.

“The point, my dear Hugh, is this.” And it was the first time that he had ever called Hugh by his Christian name. “Schoolmasters are criticized for their unworldliness. They never, it is said, step outside their own cloistered atmosphere. They leave school, they go to Oxford, they return straight to a mastership. They have never seen the world for which they train the young. This is held to be a deficiency. I could argue very easily that the critics of a scholastic profession are, on this point, justified. But my own belief is that for certain professions, unworldliness of a kind is necessary. For the priesthood, for example; and school mastership was at one time, and to some extent still is, a branch of the priesthood. At any rate, I have found that men who have lived for a long period in the world, are unfitted for a return to this particular atmosphere.

“I do not believe, my dear Hugh, that you would be able to fit back happily into what is a subscribed and narrow world. During the war it was rather different. You had spent practically your entire life in conditions of organized discipline. Here; at Oxford; then the army. The change was not great. But now, seven years later, I am convinced that you would find yourself fretted by restrictions which we scarcely notice, because we have never known what it is to be without them. A great many schoolmasters found themselves unable, after the war, to take up their old life where they had left it. In your case.…”

Yes, yes, thought Hugh. He’s trying to put it nicely; to let me down easily; to refuse me on general grounds, not because I am what I am, what I’ve become. Of course he’s right. You can’t have a drunkard on your staff. I ought to thank my stars that I did make that exhibition of myself last night, so that he was warned in time; so that I did not come down here as a master and disgrace myself in about the one place left where I’m respected.

He closed his eyes while the Chief with gentle tact developed his theory of the general unsuitability for mastership of the man-of-the-world type. “I’m convinced you would not be happy here. And only the schoolmaster who is happy at his job can make a success of it.” And that was true, too. And in another hour his train was due to go. He would be able to go down into the restaurant car and get a whisky. The hair of the dog: that was what he needed.

It was a three-and-a-half hour journey up to London. The waiter asked him if he’d like a sandwich. He shook his head. No, he wasn’t hungry. Just leave that bottle there. He sat in the dining-car watching the landscape that had been once so familiar slide backwards into the blue Wessex distance. When the train ran into Waterloo there wasn’t much change out of a pound. He jumped on to the platform before the train had stopped. He felt better now. He wondered if there would be trouble at the shareholders’ meeting that afternoon. He rather hoped there would. He felt belligerent. He strode towards the barrier with an aggressive confidence.

The meeting was fixed for three o’clock. He arrived in the board-room at a quarter to. Usually at such a time the fireplace would have been occupied by Victor and his father. The row of chairs with their printed notices of the meeting would have been occupied by three self-conscious members of the staff. There would have been an atmosphere of constrained but friendly informality. To-day, however, the fireplace stood empty.

It was the only part of the room that did.

The rows of chairs were mostly occupied; the three members of the staff were submerged by a wave of strangers. The directors had taken their seats on the other side of the table. The leather-bound, brass-locked ledger was black with entries. It lay between the directors and the shareholders rather like the football that before a match divides the opponents who are shortly to fling themselves on one another. The field was set for a battle. The last shareholder had arrived several minutes since. They were all resolved to be in time. It was annoying that the whistle could not be blown before three o’clock. The opposing forces whispered together, pretending not to notice their adversaries, but taking swift, suspicious glances across the table. Clearly there was going to be trouble. Balliol, glancing over the typewritten copy of his speech, was reminded of Prentice’s warning long ago. “Thank heaven there are no shareholders. We shall see them here soon enough when things start going badly.”

And they were going badly. It was no use pretending they were not. They were made to sound no better by the Chairman’s speech. There were the obvious statements about taxation, income tax in particular; D.O.R.A.; the licensing laws; the duties on wine; the restricted circumstances of the wine-drinking classes. Victor explained why things were bad. He ended on a note of optimism. He was confident that things must mend. He gave no tangible reasons for this confidence. He would call upon the general director to explain the situation in greater detail.

That Balliol did not do. He did not explain the situation. He amplified the chairman’s statements. He spoke of the debt settlement in America, of Germany’s gold-backed currencies, of night clubs, the modern flapper. He explained why it was more difficult to sell wine profitably to-day than it had been ten years ago. He gave no indication of the reasons for which both he and the chairman were confident that next year the board would have a more satisfactory balance sheet to present to the shareholders.

The chairman asked whether before he moved the formal adoption of the balance sheet any shareholder had any remarks to make or questions to ask. Three shareholders rose to their feet simultaneously; looked at one another; then sat down simultaneously. After a whispered conference—”Yes, you go on” “After you” “I’ll wait” —the presumably senior of the three stood up. He had not a great deal to say but what he had got to say was this. This was the third year running that the ordinary shareholders had received no dividend. The preference shareholders were seven per cent, in arrear. It did not look as though the ordinary shareholders were ever going to get a dividend. It was the limit, that’s what it was, the limit.

As he resumed his seat, the second of the objectors rose. He agreed with the last speaker that it was the limit. What he wanted to know was this: When was it going to stop being the limit? What were the directors doing about it? The chairman had said that times were bad. Were the board just going to sit there waiting for times to mend? Were they doing nothing of their own account to make things better? Times might get worse.

His successor produced from his attaché case copies of the last six balance sheets. His complaints were arithmetical. He compared various items; bad debts, sundry creditors; sundry debtors; goodwill; the salary list. He did not draw any conclusions from these comparisons, he merely called the board’s attention to certain facts: that the balance in the bank was greater than it had been in 1922, less than it had been in 1921; that the sundry debtors were less than in former years, the reserve for bad debts stationary. His only practical criticism was his assertion that the auditors’ services were overvalued at a fee of a hundred and fifty guineas. Balliol listened to his remarks with sympathetic interest. He felt a kinship with anyone who took so much interest in statistics. As he had once, over his bicycle records, and now did over the cards which he returned on medal days to the Hampstead Golf Club, and of which he was careful always to preserve a duplicate.

From the other speakers he could scarcely anticipate, nor did he receive, any particular amusement. One after another they rose to amplify the first speaker’s opinion that it was the limit, that’s what it was, the limit. Balliol looked down the table, caught the chairman’s eye. The chairman nodded. The instant the next speech was finished, Victor rose to his feet.

“We have now heard, gentlemen, a number of speeches deploring the position of the company. No one can deplore that position more than I do myself. I speak personally. For I hold as many shares as I fancy anybody in this room does. With the general director I can assure you that the losses sustained on this side of the table are as great as those sustained on yours. I can assure you that we are not going to sit here quietly waiting for times to improve. We shall take time by the forelock. I will now, unless any shareholder has any further question he would like to ask, move the adoption of report and balance sheet.”

A minute or two later Victor was on his feet again.

“There is one more piece of business on the agenda, gentlemen; the two directors to retire in rotation are Mr. Smollett and Mr. Prentice. They both offer themselves for re-election. I need not enlarge on the devotion, the whole-hearted devotion of these two gentlemen to the interests of the company. I shall be very grateful if one of you will propose, and another second, their re-election.”

A shareholder rose to his feet.

“May we please take those names separately?”

“Certainly, if you wish it. Mr. Smollett offers himself for reelection.”

“And I very cordially propose it. Mr. Smollett is the kind of fellow we want upon the board. He knows what’s what. He’s been up against bad times in his own life, so he’ll know the way to deal with bad times when it’s a question of bad times in business. He’ll know how to roll his sleeves up.”

Another shareholder arose to second him. “Does anyone oppose that motion? Very good. Will you show your assent in the usual manner? Thank you very much. Mr. Smollett is unanimously re-elected. Mr. Prentice offers himself for re-election. Will one of you please propose a motion to that effect?”

“Now that is exactly what I will not do.”

It was the original shareholder who was on his feet. Expectantly Balliol leant back in his chair. So that was their game, was it? He had suspected that something was in the air when they had asked to take the two names separately. His eyes brightened with curiosity.

“I will not propose Mr. Prentice’s re-election to the board, because I do not believe that he’s the kind of man we want there. I’m not saying anything against Mr. Prentice. I’m sure he’s very good indeed at whatever it is he’s good at. But what does Mr. Prentice know about this business, after all, except what he’s picked up from his father? His father was a very good friend to the firm. He helped build it up. But that doesn’t mean that his son’s the kind of person we want here at a time like this. The kind of person we want now is someone who knows this business from the bottom, like Mr. Smollett.”

A gleam of understanding lit Balliol’s eye. So that was their game then: or rather that was Smollett’s game; to get Prentice voted off the board and his own man Jenks voted on. Smollett felt lonely on the board: overawed and overwhelmed. He wanted someone to back him, to give him courage and confidence. It must be Jenks, it couldn’t be anybody else.

It was Jenks.

“You’ve a man in the firm now, junior to Mr. Smollett, but bred in the same school. A man who knows what’s what. What I’m suggesting is that we should elect Mr. Jenks in place of Mr. Prentice. I say this because.…”

He elaborated his reasons. He drew the obvious parallel between the firm as it was now, and the firm as it had been in its prosperous days; when the directing managers working in the office had been responsible to a chairman working outside the office. That plan had worked in the past, why not try and see if some equivalent could not be found for it?

All that he said was sound enough. Balliol recognized that. Reaching forward for his agenda paper, he scribbled a note to Victor. “Suggest you contrive tactfully postpone vote on this point. Say board will consider matter. Another shareholders’ meeting in a month’s time. Possibly in that interval Prentice might resign.” He folded the note and passed it over. Victor read it, caught Balliol’s eye and nodded. Balliol sat back in his chair. With tactful handling, and his son-in-law was tactful, a serious situation might be headed off.

“And that’s why I say,” the shareholder was concluding, “that Mr. Jenks is the man for us.”

Victor made a sign to Balliol. He placed the palms of his hands upon the table. He knew the dramatic value of slow movements. But before he could rise, from the other end of the table had come the shuffle of a chair being pushed back. “I don’t know whether I’m in order. I don’t care whether I am or not,” an angry, thickened voice was saying, “but I have been listening to enough nonsense from that side of the room this afternoon.”

There was a wild, unleashed light in Hugh’s eyes that his father had never seen there before. His face was flushed unhealthily, his fists were clenched.

“I have never heard such nonsense talked, nor such impertinence. I don’t know who this popinjay may think he is.…”

In a second the shareholder was on his feet, his face scarlet with outraged dignity.

“I’ll soon let you know who I am, young man. I’ve shares in this business the same as you have. It’s my money that.…”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Victor’s voice even at its quietest had the commanding quality of those who for generations have been accustomed to exact obedience. And it was not quiet now.

“Gentlemen, I cannot allow this. You will both please be seated. All remarks will be addressed to the chair—to me. This is a shareholders’ meeting, not a taproom.”

His voice could restore order, but it could not restore the situation to a plane on which tactful handling was possible. The shareholder, having resumed his seat in tribute to the chairman’s authority, was on his feet again.

“I’m sorry, my lord. I forgot myself. I’m not used to being spoken to like that. I’ll address the chair, and I trust he will, too. I’ll go back to where I was. I oppose the re-election of Mr. Prentice. I propose the election of Mr. Jenks. I am in order in doing that, I take it?”

“You are perfectly in order.”

“Then that is what I do.”

Victor, looking down the table, caught Balliol’s eye. Balliol was agreed, he could see that. There was no use attempting a tactful evasion of the issue. There was a baited-bull look on the shareholder’s almost apoplectic countenance. He was out for his pound of flesh. The motion must be put.

“Does anyone second that?”

“I do.”

“Does anyone oppose it?”

The three submerged members of the staff whispered together. They were so used to the routine of proposing and seconding motions, that they did not know how to behave in this unexpected situation. They looked for guidance towards the general director, received none, fell to whispering again. Finally one of them arose.

“Well, I think I’ll oppose that. I don’t think somehow that our old Chief’s son is being treated rightly.”

“Does anyone second that?”

“I do.”

Victor looked steadily along the line of expectant shareholders.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I am not going to declare this issue open to debate. Too many heated words have passed already this afternoon. I will take, however, a vote. But I must warn you, gentlemen, that no motion passed or rejected at this meeting can be taken as final. The board are within their power to demand a general poll. They may not accept this meeting as representative of the general body of shareholders. They may decide to give the shareholders as a body the right to override the decisions of this meeting. However, as I said, I will put this matter to the vote.”

Prentice was rejected by a considerable majority. A few minutes later Jenks’ election to the board was carried without even the formality of an opposition. Victor declared the meeting at an end.

“The motions have been duly noted, gentlemen. The board will consider them. We will give you in due course our decision whether we are, or are not, ready to accept them.”

A meeting of the board always followed the dispersal of the shareholders. There was silence as the five directors and the secretary stood grouped round the fireless grate while the caretaker and a couple of office boys rearranged the room. It was in silence that they took their places at the table. Victor at its head, the secretary on his left hand, Balliol on his right, Smollett next to him, Hugh and Prentice opposite. There was a pause, each waiting to see who would be the first to speak. Hugh rose to his feet.

Thought Balliol: “He’s going to apologize. That’s very fitting.”

Not at all. There was the same wild look in Hugh’s eyes, the same mottled flush on his cheeks, the same aggressive manner, the same belligerent, thickened voice.

“Before we do anything else, I want to ask Mr. Smollett a question. I want to ask him whether he was aware that this assault was to be made on us to-day.”

Victor interrupted him.

“I don’t think that is a point that concerns us as a board.”

“It is a point that concerns me as a member of the board, in my capacity as a member of this board. I want to put that question to Mr. Smollett.”

Smollett looked straight at Hugh, then turned to Victor. His face was very white, with the dappling of its pimples in pink protuberance.

“I am quite ready to answer that question. I did know that these particular criticisms would be made, and that the re-election of Mr. Prentice would be opposed.”

“Then I would ask Mr. Smollett why he did not inform the board of this.”

“I do not consider it part of my duty as a director to keep the board informed of every rumour that may reach me outside this office.”

“I do not call this a rumour. I would like to ask Mr. Smollett whether the chief speakers this afternoon were his friends.”

“Acquaintances.”

“I should like to ask Mr. Smollett whether it was on his advice that they became shareholders in this company.”

“Yes.”

“Then, gentlemen, I have this to say to you. In my opinion Mr. Smollett, on his own evidence, is convicted of the most treacherous behaviour. He has engineered this attack this afternoon. He encouraged his friends to take shares. He directed their tactics. It was at his instigation that they opposed the re-election of Mr. Prentice and proposed the election of his own friend, Jenks. He has engineered this behind his colleagues’ backs. A man capable of such disloyalty, such treachery, is not fit to associate on equal terms with a board that is composed of gentlemen.”

It was the last word, the word “gentlemen”, that flooded with a sea of scarlet the glistening pink peaks on Smollett’s forehead. He rose to his feet. He drew a long, slow breath through lips that were drawn tightly. He was desperately anxious to control his voice. There was a definite pause while he recovered his composure.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I never expected to be addressed in that manner, in this room. For the seventeen years that I have worked for this firm, I have put the firm’s interests before my own. The chief speakers this afternoon were acquaintances of mine. I encouraged them to buy shares because I believed in the firm’s future. I told them why I believed that. When the firm ceased to pay dividends, they were naturally angry; they blamed me. I knew that they would complain this afternoon. Originally they proposed to demand that the firm should be offered for sale; so that they might recover some of the money they had invested. I discouraged them from that. I told them that the firm was sound; that they must have patience. They asked me why, if the firm was sound, they were not getting dividends. They asked me whether the system on which the firm was run after the war was as effective as the system on which it was run before the war. I was doubtful of that; I told them so. They asked me whether I considered Jenks would be a good man on the board. I said yes. I plotted nothing. I schemed nothing. My conscience is quite clear.”

He paused. He was standing on his dignity; but he was not without dignity. Yes, you’ve a good case for yourself, thought Balliol. You haven’t answered the main criticism—why you didn’t warn the board that this attack was coming. But you’ve answered so much of Hugh’s criticism that you won’t realize that you’ve left that one point unanswered; nor, probably, will the others. You’ve done no more than what ninety-nine men in a hundred would have done in your position. You can acquit yourself in your own mind. That’s about as much as any of us can expect to do. But I must say I’d be glad to know where all this is leading.

He was to know in a second.

“I have been subjected to an accusation,” Smollett was continuing, “that no gentleman can overlook. I have no alternative but to resign my directorship and my post as manager.”

Stooping forward he gathered up his papers, pushed back his chair and walked in silence from the room.

In most quarrels there is a point where the anger that caused the quarrel subsides abruptly. A man and a woman are arguing face to face, hating one another. A blow is struck, and the hatred that inspired the blow is dead for ever. There is a horror-struck recovery of sense; the thought “What have I done? How could I have done it? How can I make amends?” Such a moment came to Hugh as the door closed behind Smollett. The anger that had been simmering all day, that swelling to self-expression in the meeting, had come to a final head, collapsed like a lanced abscess. “What have I been doing? What was it all about? What happens next?”

The exhilaration to which hours of drinking had contributed, subsided, leaving him limp, weak, apathetic. He sat forward, his head on his hands, scarcely listening to the low-toned discussion of the day’s events between Victor and his father. “Of course we can’t allow him to resign.” “He’s indispensable to us.” “Shall I lunch him or will you?” “We’ll get him round all right.” “We’ll be able to fix the poll.” “We’ll have to consider bringing Jenks on.” “Next year, not this.” “We must save our faces.” “Let the shareholders know who’s master.” The low-toned buzz of conversation was punctuated by an occasional futile academic interruption from Prentice. Once Hugh lifted his head to look at him. No wonder he had got Smollett’s goat. So trim and donnish. To think that they should have bothered to quarrel about him.

“So I think,” Victor was saying, “that we’ll leave the matter there. There is nothing more to be done about it now.” Prentice and Balliol were agreeing. Balliol was rising to his feet. “Well, I’m glad that’s over. Now we can ring for tea.” But Hugh did not want to wait for that. He wanted to get away, out of this room, into the clean air. He walked over to his father. He placed his hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, father. I was a damned fool.” His father smiled, with detached indulgence. “Don’t worry. We’ll put things straight.”

But they would take a lot of putting straight. He knew that all right. As likely as not they never would be really straight again. What was that thing he had learnt at school, as rep? “Never glad confident morning again.” Hell, but I’m a fool. As he ran down the office stairs he nearly collided with a tall, portly figure.

“Sorry, sir,” it was a familiar voice.

It was the first time that Hugh had laughed that day.

“Walker, you’re getting fat.”

“Easy living, sir. I’m needing another spell in those there trenches.”

Hugh cast a quick glance over him. Yes, he was getting fat; in a prosperous, healthy kind of way.

“You don’t look as though you were letting things worry you particularly.”

“No, sir. I can’t say as I do, or ever have. They talk about bad times and good, but I’ve always managed to get my fun all right.”

Which he would, thought Hugh. Whatever happened to the rest of the world, Walker would come up smiling. Well, it was good to see someone that the sun smiled on. It was a long time since it had smiled on him. Black thoughts besieged him as he walked towards the mews where his car, a very weather-worn two-seater Morris, was temporarily garaged.

A night of heavy drinking has mental aftermaths very closely allied to the dark pessimism with which the future confronts you during a sleepless night between three and five. Just as drink itself cheats you into a roseate optimism, so will its hang-over lower you into a well of gloom. As Hugh drove his car northward to the Hampstead heights, he saw his present and his future with the steady clarity of despair. The day’s double failure faced him. The Chief had been right. He wasn’t good for anything. He wasn’t even fit to sit upon a board. He’d no self-control. He’d drunk himself out of sense. It would take months to repair the damage he had done in a short afternoon. That’s all that he was able to do now: damage. He wasn’t doing any good to anyone. He was a nuisance; in the way; Hotsam and jetsam. He’d been a fool not to marry that woman; realize the one asset he had, his passport. He’d a right to sell it. He’d earned it, hadn’t he? If it hadn’t been for fellows like himself there’d be no passports; nothing worth selling, anyhow. If another chance like that came his way he’d take it. He’d know what he was worth now; or rather, what he wasn’t worth. He’d thought he amounted to something then. He knew better now. And it wasn’t as though he’d reached the bottom yet. That was a long way off. Though at the pace that he was going, he ought to be there soon. 1917 and now. If he’d got as far as this in seven years, where would he be in seventeen? I’m a failure. I’d better realize it; make no pretence; despise myself, but recognize myself; look myself in the glass.

So he told himself, as his car climbed Fitzjohn’s Avenue, climbed Heath Street, turning to the right towards the White Stone Pond. He drove thoughtlessly, or rather without thought, mechanically; with care but without forethought; unprepared for an emergency. So that he hadn’t recognized till it was right on him the long, red, racing Lanchester driven by one of those drivers who boast that they go through traffic at forty and never have an accident; who have a foot jammed on the accelerator, a wrist pressed on the horn; who avoid accidents because they give other drivers warning that a crazy selfishness is on its way. And Hugh was not on the look out. In an automatic way with his own hand outstretched, he had taken a small Austin’s signal and was going past it. He was quarter way past when the screech of a Klaxon came from behind a lorry. At the same instant there would be four cars abreast on a road wide enough for three. He had not time to stop; he was not fast enough to clear the Austin. He had a second in which to think. If I swing to the right, in front of the lorry and the Lanchester, I pile myself on the pavement. The pavement’s empty. I might manage it. Just. It’s the one chance. I must. He swung over the steering wheel. The car responded. The front wheels hit the kerb. He heard a scream. A child had run forward from its nurse, was running straight towards the pavement to the point that his car would hit. On the side of the pavement was a row of railings, beyond them a steep decline running down to the old pond. I’ve got to get across before she does. He stamped on the accelerator. As the car shot forward he tugged at the steering wheel. I’ve missed the child. His front wheel hit the railings. There was a jerk. The car shuddered, then to his astonishment went forward. He was through the railings. The windscreen splintered against his face. The green of the heath was suddenly above his head. I’ve somersaulted. God! There was a crash. Before his eyes the dazzle of a million lights; then darkness. In his ears the thunder of a million gongs; then silence.

IX

The bodies that lie under white crosses in northern France are not the only casualties of war. As I stood, five days later, beside Hugh Balliol’s grave, remembering the boy who had offered me sixpence at that first children’s party to turn out the light; the young man who had come down to Fernhurst for the M.C.C. in the summer of 1914 in the confidence and pride of health, success and youth; the officer who had walked down the North End Road on a July morning on his way to the Somme battlefields, I could not help feeling that Hugh’s real life had ended on those battlefields, every bit as much as those who lie there still. He returned with a broken health that had in its turn broken everything in him except a certain defiant courage. All that followed that long morning had been anti-climax. The curtain should have fallen then. Of the group of relatives and friends collected in the Hampstead cemetery there was not one whose memories did not return to the Hugh that they had known before and through the war.

In a circle they stood round the grave, while the first grains of earth were scattered on the coffin, while the solemn, immemorial sentences were spoken; their thoughts in part upon a chapter that was closed, in part upon the chapters that were waiting to be written; thinking of themselves and their own lives as much as of Hugh and his life: or rather reconstructing their own lives in the light of Hugh’s, recognizing how Hugh’s life had explained their own lives to them.

On Stella’s face there was a look of ironic speculation. Black suited her. It had the effect of a uniform. She looked very handsome, standing erect and straight, the grey hair showing under the rim of the small cloche hat. To her, too, had come the thought that it was by a war grave that they were standing; and to that thought had come the questioning corollary “To what end?”

To what purpose had Hugh and Hugh’s generation saved the country? So that their brothers should live, thoughtlessly, selfishly, irresponsibly? It was a question that she had often asked herself in relation to her own fight, the women’s equivalent for the war. As the men of Hugh’s generation had fought their man’s war for liberty, against barbarism, so in their different if lesser way had the women of her generation fought for woman’s liberty, against the legal survivals of a barbaric age. There were times when she asked herself to what purpose they had waged that fight. So that women like Miss Draft, who strictly speaking were not women at all, could find an ampler scope for their sex antagonism? So that futile, addle-brained young women could claim a right to live irresponsible lives, tumbling from one love affair to another, one shoddy expedient to another; boasting of a freedom that they had not earned and for which they could find no sensible employment? She had surrendered to that fight her chance of happiness. Lucy had risked her life for it. There were times when she wondered whether women were any the better off for it, in the same way that she wondered whether the world were any the better off for the sacrifice it had asked and been so freely, so prodigally given: the gift of a generation.

At her side her brother stood; an impressive, distinguished figure, leaning on his gold-mounted cane, the slope of his shoulders appropriate to the occasion. Stella took a steady, sidelong look at him. What thoughts were passing below that calm still mask? She knew what his friends were saying: “How terrible for his poor father. The eldest son, the heir, the house he’d built for him, the business he’d built up for him; a life’s work gone. It’s worse for his father than for anyone.” But it wasn’t worse for him; his sister knew that all right. He wasn’t vulnerable in that way. He had lived through his mind, not through his heart. He had been kind, generous, even-tempered, wise. But the most personal tragedy became impersonal to him. He had only cared for two people in his life; Lucy and his father; and for them half-heartedly. He had never known how to attract real affection to himself; he’d never known how to give. His wife had been a stranger, he had wanted her as a man wanted a woman; but there had been no harmony, no mutual absorption of two separate entities. He hadn’t the capacity of living personally; which I had, she thought, I could have lived personally. It was against my instinct to live as I have lived. That’s the difference between us. He was offered personal happiness, and did not recognize it. It’s me they’ll think of as a cold, hard woman, without affections, a livelier Miss Draft. But I’m not. It was all there, the capacity to give. Only.… She shrugged her shoulders. That was all long ago. She’d made something of her life. She’d make more of it before she was done.

At her side with impassive countenance Balliol listened to the familiar words; his thoughts unravelling the thread of ironic circumstance by which Hugh’s death was linked with events in which Hugh had played no part. For he connected Hugh’s death with the quarrels at the board meeting. The evidence at the inquest had been obscure. It had been in the interest of three people to conceal the facts. The two or three onlookers who had given evidence were unreliable as witnesses. But on this point Balliol was in his own mind convinced, that Hugh was too good a driver to have been involved in a smash of that kind had he not been pre-occupied with other worries. Had there been no quarrel at the meeting, Hugh would not be lying in that coffin now. And there would have been no quarrel if.… But the source of that river was a distant one. There would have been no quarrel if Smollett had never come into the firm. And Smollett would never have come into the firm, unless at a board meeting long ago he had been prepared to concede a point to Prentice in return for a concession to himself. Unless he had wanted Roy Rickman out of the country, he would have opposed Smollett’s appointment. How much dated back to Rickman. Hugh’s death; the purchase of Ilex; Helen’s birth. Jane had met Rickman on the evening of that April day when he and she had passed by a mound and a pile of scaffolding. She would never have thought of making a home in Hampstead unless she had met Rickman five hours later; unless discontent with her married lot, the outcome of that meeting, had focused itself upon a need for change. She had not dared to think, “I have lived with the same man for fifteen years. I am tired of him.” She had thought instead, “I’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years. I’m tired of it.” How much dated back to that day? If they had never taken that walk, if his golf partner had not scratched his game, if she had never met Roy Rickman, if one went back further still, if they had never set themselves the task of finding a husband for his sister.… Who could estimate the repercussions of any act? You tossed a pebble into a pond, the ripple drowned a butterfly sunning itself fifty feet away. Who could tell what cycle of events might not even at this moment be beginning?

So he mused, with his habitual aloof detachment, while the others, his wife, Francis, his three daughters, who lived, not as he did, through their hearts, were following their own thoughts; each in their own way, taking mental stock of themselves, their lives, their ambitions, of the road their feet were set upon.

To Helen, Hugh had been a shadowy figure, someone about the house, a piece of furniture, a nuisance more frequently than not, on whose account she was stopped doing things she liked; playing gramophones before breakfast for example; who suddenly for no reason produced presents that she did not particularly want. There was that Hugh, and another Hugh that she would scarcely connect with him. A tall figure in a fleecy coat that on a cold, dark winter morning had lifted her out of bed to tell her that he was going abroad to bring her back a German helmet, a spiked helmet. She looked down at the wooden coffin. It was the first time she had stood before a grave. This is how she herself would lie one day. She wondered where Hugh was now. Was there really such a place as Heaven?

Lucy had seen little of Hugh during these last years. She too found it difficult to align the undergraduate to whom she had said good-bye in 1911 and the unhealthy, uneven-tempered, slouching figure who had added so little to the enjoyment of her occasional visits to her home. It was terrible how some men went to seed. She was lucky to have found a husband like Stephen. She hoped her daughters would be as lucky. She would have to keep careful watch. If any one of the young men they were interested in displayed a tendency to overdrink … Stephen would have to keep his eye on that. Did they have a third glass of port, she would ask him afterwards.

I’m glad we had that last happy time together, Ruth was thinking. It was just as it used to be; when we were such friends; when he chaperoned me round the town. What years ago that seems! The very last party he took me to was the party where I met Victor. How strange to think that I once tossed my bonnet over windmills. I’m so respectable now; while Victor.… That girl at the Ritz the other day. Was there anything in that? Most likely. Knowing Victor. Ruth had long since given up trying to keep any check upon his movements. She’d no idea what he was doing half the time. As long as she didn’t have to know the facts she didn’t care. He wasn’t the kind of husband to sob his troubles out on a wife’s shoulder. And if any one of her friends started dropping hints they soon ceased to be her friends. As marriages go, she supposed it was a success. All the same.…

No, it isn’t what we meant. I wonder if I’m to blame. If I haven’t tried enough. If when I saw him going, I let him go. Standing on my dignity, thinking if I’m not enough for him, that’s his look out, I’m not running after anyone. Perhaps I was wrong there. Perhaps I ought to do something. It isn’t too late. Before we drift right apart; before we become just friends. If we went away together, just ourselves. I don’t see why we couldn’t. It’ll be worth trying.

Thought Victor: “I wonder what’s going to happen to the old boy now. I don’t suppose he’ll want to stay on in the business now that he hasn’t a son to leave it to. It’s not the kind of thing that would appeal to Francis, particularly after that row. Best to make a clean cut of it all, I’d say the best thing to do was to buy him out. I’ll see Smollett. I don’t believe in small, personal businesses. I’m for the chain store system. There’s a lot of money about just now. I know where a good deal of it’s to be found. One of these big warehouse firms would be glad to buy us out. We could be useful to them as a shop window, in a way that we can’t be to ourselves. It’s worth considering. I expect the old boy’ll be glad to have nothing to worry over for a while.”

“I’ll be head of the family now,” thought Francis. It was an impressive thought, for one who had played second fiddle all his life. It gave him a sense of responsibility, importance. “I must take life seriously; work; become someone that the rest of the family can look up to; stop chasing girls. I ought to leave the Sanction Office. It’s fun up there. But it’s the buyers who really count. I’ll go and see Malcolm. I’ll ask him what he thinks. I’ve got to start taking life seriously.”

“Whosoever believeth shall live, though he die, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Him shall not die eternally.”

“Yes, and that’s true,” thought Jane. “I know. These others don’t know for certain. But I do. I’ve been in communion with the other side. I’ll be able to tell him now. I’ve always wanted to. I’ve hated keeping it from my own husband but he’d have laughed at me. ‘Silly little spiritualist’ he’d have said. And to begin with I was shy. I wasn’t certain myself. But I was so unhappy. The world seemed soulless. When Francis was taken away from me and sent to school, I thought if there is no second life to remedy the misery of this, then it isn’t worth while living. I’d rather be dead. I had to find out. That’s why I told him I was going to ask Stella to find me war work. So that I should have the time to find out for myself. So that I needn’t account for my movements. So that I could go to the people who could help me. And then when they had convinced me, when I really knew, when I had been in communion with the other side, I wanted to tell him then. But I felt he’d laugh at me. He wouldn’t believe. And there was no one who he really wanted to get in touch with. No one he missed. But now that his son’s dead, that’s different. He’ll want to know. I’ll be able to show him that Hugh’s only a little way away; that we can still talk to him; that we shall soon join our son; that there is no death; that there is only change.”

The slow voice of the priest intoned his final sentences.

“The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

The last prayer was read. The group of friends and relations dispersed. A couple of cars were waiting to take the actual members of the family back to Ilex. “I wonder what they’ll do with their house now,” thought Stella. “It’s no use to them. It’s far too big. It costs a lot to run. They’d be glad to have it taken off their hands. I wonder if I couldn’t do something about that. The King’s Cross Nursing Home are looking for a house in Hampstead. It’d be the kind of house they want. And I’ve got that committee in my pocket. I really don’t see why not.”

Two months later, for a day and a half, the southern side of the North End Road was blocked with vans.

Epilogue

Helen

I

In a way, with the death of Hugh, the story of the Balliols ends, or at least that part of their story which had Ilex for its background which had begun with that walk from Hendon on an April day up a hillside unscarred by villas. A weaving together of threads had started then. Hugh’s death started their unwinding. It was not simply, that Stella arranged for the sale of Ilex, that Victor planned the amalgamation of Peel & Hardy with one of the larger shippers. The change was a more subtle one than that. For each of the main figures in the Balliol Chronicle that mental stocktaking at the graveside was a landmark; was the calling of a halt to that course of thoughts and acts that had run contiguous with the continuous stream of narrative that had been their life. For each of them something ended and something started then. It was not exactly the more essential part of themselves that ended, but it was that part of them which was strictly Balliol, which was linked with their father and their mother. The mental stocktaking that demanded a remodelling of their lives, set them on roads separate and their own; severed them from their first currents. As far as it is possible to discern in life any climatic moments except birth and death, which are themselves, seen from a certain angle, no more than pauses in a stream of change, that hour of speculation by a grave did mark a climax.

For myself the years that followed on Hugh’s death were a time of travel. I was in London little and for short times. But it is often easier to get a clear picture of a friend that one sees once every eighteen months, than the friend that one meets every other day. One is conscious of change and contrast, when the snapshot of to-day can be set beside the snapshot of yesteryear. You cannot tell how the person you see every day is altering.

It was in a succession of snapshots that I watched the Balliols during the years which bridged with an unreal prosperity the crises of the war with the crises of currency collapse. For old Balliol they were happy years. The sale of Ilex and the sale of Peel & Hardy left him with a sufficient income to satisfy needs that had grown modest. He took a service flat near Baker Street; the most central point in London, he maintained. He walked every morning to his club in Piccadilly. He arrived there at noon; for half an hour he would read the weeklies. He would then order a glass of sherry and engage a fellow member in conversation. He breakfasted lightly, so lunched amply. It was half past three before he would stir from his post-prandial doze. The evening papers would be in the club. A cup of tea at four. The card room till half past six. He invariably dined at home.

The atmosphere of his home was pleasanter than it had been for a long time. He liked living in a service flat: no stairs; and the meals were better. Jane’s vagueness had resulted in a corresponding vagueness in her staff. His relations with Jane were easier now. Her confession about spiritualism had, to his surprise, proved singularly soothing to his pride. It allowed him to survey his past with a more dignified complacence. Jane too appeared relieved to have “got it off her mind.” She had not persuaded him to attend a séance. No. He thought it was a mistake to meddle with that kind of thing. You didn’t know where it would lead you. One should live in this world while one had to, and not bother about the next world till one reached it. All the same, the man who said there was nothing in spiritualism was prejudiced: a fool. You might just as well try and argue away the miracles at Lourdes.

For the summer he takes rooms in Sandwich. The links are ntolerably crowded. But if you start from the first tee at Prince’s at about twelve, you can be certain of a quiet round. In the summer he breakfasts amply, misses lunch, and eats a tea that would ruin his dinner, were his dinner in seaside rooms capable of being spoilt. He enjoys his golf as much as ever. He rarely breaks a hundred nowadays. Even on a windless day he takes wood at the short third; and even with wood and a wind behind him he never carries the cross bunker at the fifth. But he usually gets down from the edge of the green in two. The attempts of the English Golf Union to introduce a standard scratch score for every course has caused him the liveliest pleasure. His chief interest as a newcomer to any course is the opportunity it provides for a mathematical computation of its strict par figure. No one talks more scornfully from a club arm-chair about “this Bogey nonsense.”

Sometimes his granddaughter, Lucy’s Jane, accompanies him round Prince’s. His yearly Christmas present to her is an associate membership. She is so like what Lucy was at her age, Balliol has himself so little altered, that, seeing them together, one feels that the clock has been put back twenty years. One would think it dull for her. But really it is rather a relief to get away with her grandparents. Her mother has become exceedingly strict. She is taking Hugh’s example to heart. She had resolved to be a mid-Victorian matron. Her husband, now on the committee of the Oriental Club, thoroughly applauds her sentiments. Discipline: that’s what the younger generation needs. He considers that motor cars are to blame. He would refuse a licence to any unmarried woman under twenty-five.

Shortly after Hugh’s death Ruth and Victor went abroad together for a month’s holiday alone. They have made a point ever since of taking two short holidays together every year. It’s the only chance they get of seeing one another, they maintain. In London, whenever they are at a party, entertaining or being entertained, there is always at least a half-table’s length between them. Business still takes him to the North and Midlands. But golf less frequently demands his attendance at Le Touquet tournaments. He has been heard to assert that backing plays is a mug’s game.

Francis, as he had promised himself, sought Malcolm’s advice on the day following Hugh’s funeral.

“I’m enjoying myself all right at Irongate. But I’m not getting anywhere. I think I’d better come across to the main building.”

“That’s what little Malcolm told you four years ago.”

“I am going to work now. I’m going to take life seriously,” he had vowed. To a certain extent he did. He was promoted, quickly. As a buyer he had to make fairly frequent trips across the Channel. His superiors were satisfied. But they were puzzled by, and convinced that he was mistaken in, his assertion that Brussels and not Paris was the European centre of the textile trade. They were unaware that three days a week a scented envelope bearing a Belgian postmark lay beside Francis’s breakfast tray.

Returning to London after absences of four, six, eleven months, I saw the Balliols in clearer outline than I had when as a Londoner I was seeing or hearing about them every other week. I saw them too, as a result of my travelling, in more clear perspective.

The tourist-traveller who spends six weeks in one island and three months in another may not learn a great deal about the places that he visits but he does learn a great deal about the country that he has left and to which he will later on return. He sees problems that puzzled him in his own country, presented on a smaller scale and consequently simplified. The six months that I spent in the West Indies clarified for me those processes of change which determined the fortunes of the Balliols and which they themselves so markedly exemplified.

The story of the West Indies can be told in a few words. There were in the first place the large plantations, for the most part of sugar cane, worked by slaves; the owners lived in large stone-built houses, in an atmosphere of feudal grandeur. Such towns as there were consisted of warehouses and dramshops, where the middlemen, the lawyers, the ship-chandlers, the petty traders made their middleman’s profit from merchantmen and planters. The extremes of luxury and poverty existed side by side. The phrase “rich as a Creole” was in household use. Little of that grandeur exists to-day; the rich planters impoverished their estates by spending the profits in Europe; the opening of other sugar markets reduced their intrinsic value. A mulatto class sprang up. The big estates went bankrupt. They were sold and split up among small owners. As the world price of sugar fell the small owners could no longer afford to keep up their plantations. They mortgaged them to the middlemen on the coast. Mulatto overseers were put in charge. Very often mulattos bought the estates that were put up for auction. A point was reached when the estate that could no longer support a white man’s standard, could support a mulatto’s whose plane was lower. No one could afford to maintain the large stone houses. They were deserted. The roofs fell in, the walls crumbled, they were used as stables. As the price of sugar fell the mulattos in their turn mortgaged their estates; till gradually the administration passed from the plantation to the coast; till the island was practically owned by the large shipping companies; by vested interests; till the towns, instead of the country, became the centre of comfort, breeding, ease.

For that process of change there was to be found a close parallel in the story of the Balliols. There was the original estate in Devonshire that no longer sufficed for Balliol. There was the migration to the cities; whose importance increased as the power of the land diminished; there was the business of Peel & Hardy large enough to suffice for Balliol but not large enough for his family; for Hugh and Francis. Yet large enough to offer scope to the enterprise of a man like Smollett, the English equivalent for the mulatto Creole. In Victor Tavenham there was an equivalent for the large feudal estate undermined by absenteeism; by urban extravagance; by mortgages that had grown heavier as the world price of commodities dropped. The large houses that in the West Indies became derelict ruins, in England became schools, or country clubs, or the week-end cottages of industrial millionaires. In every walk of life there was the tendency of the big business to absorb the small; for power to pass from the land to the cities; from the ploughshare to the desk and telephone; from manual labour to the machine.

In the West Indies the process of change that is altering the nature of English life is set out simply; so that one can see what has happened; what is happening; what is likely to happen. My months in the West Indies showed me the Balliols in more clear perspective.

My months in Tahiti showed me them from another angle.

There can be no one who has not at some time wondered whether the discoveries of science have done more than improve material conditions; whether the working classes are any the happier for being educated; whether machinery has not taken away the joy of craftsmanship; whether negroes were not better off as slaves; whether a married woman is happier for being able to own property; whether the process of standardization has not spread so far that human beings are turned out in the same mould as the clothes they wear, and the food they eat; whether the medicine serves any purpose that maintains the life which has become a torment to its possessor. There can be no thinking person who has not at some time seen all human effort as the pouring of so much water through a sieve.

There are those for whom a classical education serves as an amulet against that feeling. But for those like myself whose education, owing to the war, ceased on their sixteenth birthday, who have learnt what they know of life from life itself, travel alone can give that long view which precludes an over absorption in which is immediate and close at hand. To travel, to live beside a primitive and distant people reveals as much as any close scrutiny of history, the mountain source from which has flowed the river by which we travel.

Tahiti, even at this late day, can tell us what the garden of Eden must have been; and all that is symbolized by Eden in terms of simplicity, candour, generosity; a love of life and living. Tahiti is to-day a fast vanishing paradise. In the same way that our biblical forefathers were driven from their Eden by a desire for worldly knowledge, so has worldliness corrupted the sweetness and simplicity of Tahitian life. The average native’s idea of a good time is a dress copied from a Californian fashion plate, an afternoon of cocktails, a cinema in the evening and afterwards a drive along the beach in a closed Buick. It is easy to sentimentalize the passing of Tahiti. But it is profitless; because though it is in simplicity that the truest excellence lies, there is set between the simplicity of the peasant, the simplicity of folk-lore, and the simplicity of a man such as Turgenev, the gradual evolution of centuries of thought. The only significant simplicity is based upon experience and growth. Life has to become complicated, sophisticated, obscure before the ultimate simplicity can be reached. For that reason it is profitless to regret those Englands of the past, feudal England, rural England, the England of the trowel and the needle; they had to be destroyed. The process of sophistication must run its course. Those who have seen Tahiti and have felt her magic, know from what conditions of Eden primitive man emerged, can guess to what similar conditions of Eden ultimately he will return; they know what manner of thing it was that was destroyed; they recognize that it was inevitable that it should have been destroyed; they know that it is impossible to turn back the clock; that it is idle to regret Tudor, Elizabethan or Hanoverian England; states of development that served their purpose; but beyond which we have now passed; that we have to accept the world we live in; and the world that lies ahead; in our case the age of the machines.

It is a question of the terms in which a man sees his life; his own life; the life of his friends; and of his country. Whether in terms of frustration or of purpose. When I stood beside Hugh Balliol’s grave it would have been easy for me to have seen his life, the life of his family, the life for that matter of my entire generation as the pouring of so much water through a sieve. When I came back from my last long trip through the West Indies and Tahiti, I did not see it in that way, in terms of frustration; but of an inevitable process of building, destroying and rebuilding; that had a purpose. To build a sanctuary you must destroy a sanctuary. The Balliols are symbols of the particular manifestation of that process, in England, during the first quarter of the century.

Strictly speaking, with the death of Hugh Balliol that particular phase of the Balliols’ story ended. A new story started then. Yet in the same way that the significance of a past government is illuminated by the first acts of a new government; since that new government is in reaction to that former one; since what is new is bred out of what was old; since Victorian England is as much explained by the contrasted gaiety of Edwardian England, as by its own chronicles, Helen Balliol, though she played so negligible a part in the main story of her family, is in a way a comment on, an explanation of, a corollary to, that story. Looking at her one feels: Yes, this is what they did. She became this because of them. To understand them completely, one must look at her.

It was from the very last point of view that she would have herself seen herself. By age and by position she had lived apart from her brothers and her sisters. Born in the spring of 1908 her first vivid memory was the firing during a seaside holiday of a cricket pavilion by suffragettes. The declaration of war was the first public event that she remembered. She had been brought up in an atmosphere of conflict. Yet by the time that she was herself old enough to cross the threshold, the fighting was at an end. Women had earned their liberty. They sat in Parliament. Baldwin had promised votes to girls of twenty-one, which was more than Stella had expected in her lifetime. Central Europe was no longer a menace to England’s peace. There was a League of Nations at Geneva. Such international dispute as still continued was directed against those who had been England’s allies in the war; the French and the Americans. Helen had been brought up to see life in terms of fighting. By the time she was old enough to fight, there was no more fighting to be done. It had been done for her. She was faced with the question “What next?” Where Stella, Lucy, Ruth, Hugh, Francis, had been faced with tangible objectives, she had none. For Stella and Lucy, there had been “the Cause.” For Ruth there had been the survivals of Victorian morality. For Hugh the war. For Francis, the “Back to Normal” attitude; the attempt to force him into a world that was already an anachronism. They had all had something to fight against. There was opposition. There was an immediate objective that had given their life a purpose. For Helen there was not. She was offered without struggle the spoils of victory; a political existence, freedom from chaperons, the right to earn a living in what way she chose, to live her private life as freely as her brothers. There was the same law of morality for both. Standing among the spoils of battle it all seemed to her too easy. “What next?“ she asked herself.

From one point of view she was a typical product of her hour. She was pretty in the way that girls were pretty then; very thin, very made up, a drawled voice, her appearance altering from day to day in accordance with the demands of fashion. One day her eyebrows would be a smudge of mascara; the next plucked to a thin pale line. Technically she was a blonde, but the various treatments to which fashion demanded that her scalp should be subjected made her friends doubtful on this point. One day her hair would be swinging like a soundless bell about her ears, the next it would be shingled and her hand would be fretfully stealing towards the nape of her neck in the hope of warming it. One day her hair would be darkly plastered like a boy’s, with her ears showing, a parting at the side; the next it would be dragged forward over her forehead as though a gale were blowing it from behind. Small hats would be plumped on the back of her head with the hair dragged back under them as though she had been scalped or banged down over her eyes so that only the tip of her nose projected. Her photograph album was a mausoleum of faded fashions. High-necked jumpers, sham pearls, Russian boots. She never looked the same from one month to another. Yet she always looked precisely the same as the thousand and one other girls who thronged London’s streets and restaurants and dance clubs; so that every time you met her you thought “Is it really she or not?”

In its way, too, her manner of living resembled theirs. She had no fixed abode. She lived in a dressing-case and trunk which when she was in funds, she parked in the flat some friend had lent her. It was always a different flat. But it seemed the same. It was furnished with the same chromium-plated furniture. Its library consisted of the same two hundred books. By the telephone there was a large Cecil Beaton photograph of a profile silhouetted against a bank of lilies. When she was poor the suit-case was transferred to her club. When she was insolvent to her parents’ house. When she was in funds she rang up her friends and invited them to cocktail parties. When she was out of funds she rang them up and waited for them to invite her to lunch or dinner. Her parents were in the background; no one ever saw them. She was always in debt. But she never used tubes or buses. She would rather walk, even on a wet day, than that. She was always talking about a job, either as a dress designer or as a secretarial organizer of a charity, or as an interior decorator. She had just finished a job or was just going to begin one. But she never actually seemed to have one. Her conversation consisted of personalities; always Christian names. What Muriel was doing; Sylvia’s latest; John and Marigold. “My dear, that won’t last.” Of parties, personalities, clothes, debts. Externally she was like a thousand and one other girls running around London between 1926 and 1930. But there were differences, essential differences. She did not get drunk. She was not promiscuous. She did not borrow money from men. She did not talk about “my career.” She was a very tolerable athlete. She had not written a novel. She was extremely nice.

It is very much easier to find faults than to point out qualities; to explain why you dislike than why you like a person. The moment you start saying nice things about a person, people lose interest in her. There is no quicker way of putting one person off another than by cracking that other up. Personally when I want two people to like each other, I am diplomatically disparaging. “I think you should meet him. I don’t know that you’ll like him. He’s not really your cup of tea. He’s … but, oh well, you’ll see. There’s something, I don’t know what, about him.” With such an introduction the meeting is likely to be a success. As far, at any rate, as they are concerned. For you yourself will probably lose both friendships. They will compare notes. “I thought you were going to be awful.” “Did you really? I thought you were, too.” “What made you think that?” “The things so-an-so said about you.” “So he ran me down to you, did he? He ran you down to me all right.” “Did he? There’s a pretty friend for you.” It is wiser not to attempt introductions.

It is not easy to explain what it was about Helen Balliol that made you like her, that made you happy with her, that made you feel she was a thoroughly nice person. She was a good listener, which in her case did not mean that she had nothing to say for herself, but that she was genuinely interested in what you had to say, in what you had been doing, in what you were planning to do. She was a friend. She had pretty ways. She had a way now and then of looking very straight at you when you were speaking. Very often when a woman fixes you with a long, slow look, it does not mean that she is trying to gaze into your soul, but that she is short-sighted and is trying to focus you correctly. But Helen was not short-sighted. She had also an amusing baby-talk habit of talking about herself in the third person. “I’m afraid Helen’s done something rather silly. She got a letter this morning from her father.…” It sounds childish, and rather tiresome, but actually it was appealing, as though she were saying, “Now, what are we to do about this person?” For it was in that way that she thought about herself; someone about whom something should be done, but what she did not know.

Like many others of her contemporaries, she was at a loose end, with no arranged, clearly presented goal. She was ambitious to the extent that she wanted to make something of her life. But she had what the majority of her contemporaries lacked, a practical sense of her limitations. She did not delude herself with the illusion of “a career.” She did not see herself as a great novelist or actress, as a society hostess. She did not see herself making fortunes as a dress designer, or interior decorator. She did not see herself pleading in court or farming a constituency.

“It’s all very well,” she once said, “to talk about all the openings there are for women nowadays. But are there so many; for a girl like me, that’s to say? I could pick up three or four pounds a week, somewhere, I expect. And there are a great many girls to whom the ability to earn that makes all the difference between slavery and liberty, being under the thumb or not under the thumb of a parent, guardian or husband. But for a girl like myself whose father can perfectly well afford me an allowance and doesn’t attach any conditions to it, what point is there in my giving up all the best hours of my best years to a work that doesn’t really interest me, and that’s only keeping out of a job some girl who really needs my job? There are the important posts, of course, the real careers. But I’m not really built for that kind of thing. I’m not good enough. Besides, there’d be always the feeling at the back of everything I did, ‘I’ll probably get married some day. Then I’ll drop all this.’ The only people who really make successes are the people who know that they stand or fall by what they do.”

It was a point of view that showed how far the world had travelled since the time when Stella Balliol had worked in a London office. To Stella the fact that a woman could find a job at all was a proof of woman’s independence, of her right to equality with man. Now that that equality had been granted, the office desk had lost its importance as a symbol. A weekly envelope was only valuable if it fulfilled an intrinsic function. There was no point now in a girl working merely for the sake of being able to say she worked.

Helen had no illusions about herself. She knew that she was the kind of girl whose life would be fulfilled or spoiled by marriage. It was in the choice of a husband that her main issue lay. There would be for her the big decision. It was the nature of that decision that would explain her, and would explain too, her relations to the family chronicle to which her own story was the postscript. I wondered how soon she would fall in love; with what kind of man; and in what spirit. She was barely twenty-one. She was at a loose end. It was guidance, chiefly, that she missed. She wanted to have a way pointed out to her and her feet set on it. It seemed probable that she would fall in love with someone considerably older than herself.

She didn’t, though.

He was twenty-five. He was just down from Oxford. He was reading for the Bar. He had taken a first in Law. But he was a person of no particular position. He would have, very definitely, his way to make.

II

During the spring and summer of 1929 Helen confided her perplexities to me. There was no issue in the entire situation on which she was not perplexed. She was not even certain whether she was in love with Kenneth.

“I enjoy his company. He’s gay. He’s exciting. I’m never so alive as I am when I’m with him. He’s strong; he’s straight, I admire him. At the same time … oh I don’t know, but I can’t help feeling that there ought somehow to be something more to it than this. I feel I ought to have been swept off my feet in a way I haven’t been. Perhaps it’s my own fault; perhaps I’m cold; perhaps I wasn’t meant to feel that way. But there’ve been so many novels about girls marrying somebody they think that they’re in love with, and then meeting some one else and realizing that that wasn’t love at all. How’s one to tell: how can one tell what one feels when one’s nothing to compare it with? Kenneth wants us to have our engagement announced at once. But I don’t believe in long engagements. I believe in getting engaged one day and married the next week. But marriage … it’s so final. One’s got to be so very sure.”

She accepted the finality of marriage; to the extent, anyhow, of ceasing to be Helen Balliol and becoming her husband’s wife. Her position in the world would depend upon her husband; on his capacities and talents. She would be what he made her. She would have just so much prominence and importance as he could win for her. In that respect her views were surprisingly Victorian; but she had none of the Victorian’s simple faith in a world well lost for love; of that love compensating for the loss of no matter how much worldliness. She had a very proper appreciation of the rewards that worldly success offers. Nor had she the Victorian view that you fall in love once and for all time. “They never loved who say that they loved once.” She knew that if she lost this man she would fall in love again. Nor had she the Victorian’s capacity to believe that a man because she happened to be in love with him would be inspired by that love to enter into triumphant competition with his rivals. She was inclined to think that marriage was more likely to hinder him than help him.

“And if he does fail, I’ll be committed to a grimmish future. He’s clever, of course; but so are a hundred others. He’s not chosen an easy career. For one who really gets there, twenty don’t. Why should he be that one? He may be, but how can one tell?”

I told her that was one of the risks one had to run. If she were going to make certain of marrying a success, she would have to marry a man who was already a success. That meant a man of forty, at the least; which might not be what she wanted.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Helen’s a fool. She wants to have things both ways; but it isn’t easy for her. She doesn’t want to commit herself, and she doesn’t want to let this go. It may not ever come again; not in the same way. Something else’ll come. But not this. I don’t like the look of the alternatives. It’s all very well to talk about companionate marriage. But you can’t picture two people like ourselves setting up house together. And an affair; that’s so easy. Anybody can have affairs; there’s no real point to it.”

It was an astonishing remark. The more astonishing since it was said so naturally. It was less than thirty years ago that acidulated persons like Miss Draft had been laughed at for demanding the same code of morals for women as for men. Then there had been Ruth to whom half the charm of an affair had been its devilment; the thrill of the forbidden. Then there had been Hugh’s Joyce and Francis’s girls accepting their new freedom with such careless lightheartedness, that to the next generation the whole business of affairs had become so casual, so matter-of-course, so glamourless, that when a girl like Helen really cared, an affair was not the ready solution that it had been to Ruth. An affair was so easy that there was no real point to it. She had returned for entirely different reasons to an almost Victorian standard of morality. It would have been possible to have thought her priggish, but she wasn’t that. An affair seemed to her as much a spoiling or rather wasting of emotion as a complete denial of it.

All through that summer the debate in her mind continued. By the autumn it was beginning to leave its mark on her. A tired listlessness had displaced the bright-eyed happiness with which six months earlier she had welcomed love.

“We never have any fun together now. We just argue: whether we shall or whether we shan’t. He says I don’t love him. I say I do. At the rate we’re going we shall be hating each other by Christmas.”

“You ought to take a holiday. You ought to get right away from him,” I told her. “Go alone somewhere. Give yourself a chance to think it out.”

“I might do that.”

“Go somewhere where you won’t be worried: where there are games to play: new people to be amused by. Don’t think about him for a fortnight: then set yourself the three alternatives: wash it out altogether; or make an affair of it, work it out of your system that way: or else marry him. Do one of the three. Mooning around won’t get you anywhere.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

Two mornings later she rang up to tell me that she was taking my advice: that she was going to Devonshire: to the Eastpoint Hotel. That she had bought herself a vast Alsatian dog. To console herself for the loss of Kenneth, she explained. Helen will have made her mind up in a fortnight, she declared.

Ten days later I received a telegram “Helen in another mess. Do please come straight away.” I needed a holiday. I was fond of her. I am inquisitive. I went.

The Eastpoint Hotel is situated in West Devon on the edge of Dartmoor. A long, low Georgian building, set in parkland, for two centuries the country seat of an influential Wessex family, sold to liquidate death duties in the third year of the war, it has retained in its new guise some of the traditions of its past.

At certain times of the year, particularly in August and September, it is as near an approach to a country club as is to be found in England. Life there is communal. A golf course lies at its gates. Competitions of one kind or another are in daily progress. Most evenings there is dancing. Every Saturday there is a formal dance. Its atmosphere is not unlike that of a winter sports hotel in Switzerland to which the same people return year after year; where everyone knows or is in a position to know everybody else; where the days are devoted to games and the evenings to conviviality.

Helen was waiting the arrival of the station bus. She was breathless: dramatic; flurried: all in a rather imperious, self-important manner. She would not wait for me to check in at the reception desk.

“You needn’t bother about that. I’ve arranged it all. And the porters won’t lose your luggage. I want to talk to you. I can’t wait.”

She pulled impatiently at my arm.

“There’s never any one on the terrace now. We can talk there.”

From its grass-grown, shadowed length she pointed to the tennis-court below.

“There he is,” she said; “that’s my trouble.”

We stood watching: a mixed foursome was in progress. There was little doubt as to its outcome. The girls were evenly matched, but a young, loose-limbed, erratic, hard-hitting player was hopelessly outmanœuvred, outgeneralled, outpointed by his grey-haired, but tall and broadshouldered opponent.

Helen sighed.

“He really is a marvel. He must be nearing fifty: yet he’s as fit as an undergraduate. If it wasn’t for his grey hair, and I like his hair, he wouldn’t look a day over thirty.”

“So it’s the elder one then?”

“Why, of course. You wouldn’t expect me to fall in love with a child, would you?”

I looked at “the child.” He didn’t seem very much younger than her Kenneth. Then I looked back, more carefully, at the elder man. He was handsome certainly. A man of fifty, when he is physically as well as mentally attractive, is a rival of whom the most irresistible of young men have cause to be afraid. And I had always thought that it was with an older man that Helen would fall in love: she needed strength, guidance; to have her mind made up for her. I had a suspicion that Kenneth, against such a one, would not stand much chance. If the situation were a straightforward one, that was to say. Which apparently it was not. I looked closely at the man.

“There’s something about him that seems to me familiar.”

“Of course there is. He remembers you all right, though you haven’t seen him for ten years. He used to work in my father’s firm. No, don’t start telling me. I know. It couldn’t be a bigger mess. I’m not only half-engaged, but he’s married. He’s got two daughters. His wife’s got all the money; and what’s more, she’s charming. I couldn’t have got in a worse mess if I had tried. If I had said to you a month ago ‘Of all the men you know, which would be the most likely and the least suitable for me to fall head over heels in love with?’—you’d probably have said ‘Roy Rickman.’”

When people say “I must ask you your advice,” that is not really what they mean at all. It is not advice but an audience that they need. Helen did not want me to tell her what to do, she wanted to tell me “all about it”; to clear her own thoughts by a recital of them: in the same way that certain writers read their stories out loud to friends and families “to see what they sound like.” They do not want criticism or advice. They want to make their own minds up for themselves. It was important for Helen that she should have someone to “talk it over with”: but I recognized, and accepted my rôle as that of the spectator, not the mentor.

She told me everything; from the start.

“Even the beginning was dramatic.”

She was having trouble about her dog.

“If it hadn’t been for Roy, I should never have been allowed to stay here.”

In the organization both of the games and the conviviality of the Eastpoint Hotel Roy Rickman had played for ten years in succession a prominent part. He had an easy manner. He was experienced in men and life. He could talk to most people on their own subject. He was able to mix on terms of equality both with his seniors and his juniors. His firm and tactful personality gave him the necessary position of authority. His skill as an athlete assured him a welcome among the young. While he was a guest at the Eastpoint Hotel few things were attempted without his advice or undertaken without his co-operation. He had become, indeed, so a part of the hotel’s life that he felt very little regret when each autumn, to pay his income tax, he let the shooting of his place in Yorkshire to a transatlantic visitor.

“This place has become a second home to me,” he said.

He knew every member of the staff. He felt as much at home there as he did in his club in London.

It was, in fact, with very much of a clubman’s feeling that within his club the necessity for introductions had been dispensed with, that on the day of Helen’s arrival he had paused to pat the head of a vast Alsatian wolfhound that was standing at the reception desk by the side of a young, graceful, and well-dressed woman.

It was by the dog, not the woman, that Roy’s interest had been struck.

“That’s one of the finest dogs I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Its owner turned. She was not, he saw, a woman, after all. But a girl and an extremely pretty one.

“It certainly is. It’s just too bad that I should have to leave this nice hotel because of him.”

He looked at her, more closely.

“How do you mean—leave the hotel because of him?”

“They say they won’t let me keep him here.”

The assistant manager leant forward across the desk.

“If Miss Balliol had a chauffeur or someone who could look after the dog there would be no difficulty. But it would not be possible for her to look after the dog herself, not all the time, and she could not, for instance, take it into the dining-room or into the lounge. Guests would object.”

“It’s a perfectly quiet dog.”

“Madam, I am sure it is. But there have been many accidents caused through Alsatians. People are afraid of them. It is stupid of them, but there it is. In a hotel one has to make rules. One has to accept the prejudices of the majority.”

Roy Rickman appreciated the situation. The manager was right —indubitably so. People were nervous about Alsatians. At the same time, he both liked the dog and respected the courage of the girl who had brought it.

He turned to the manager.

“You’d make no objection if there was someone competent to look after the dog?”

“Of course not.”

“If you’ve no objection, that’s to say,” he added, turning to the girl. “My man’s experienced with dogs. He’ll take care of it all right. There are some kennels round by the garage.”

“That’s kind of you.”

She was looking at him intently, appraisingly; gratitude mixing with surprise and curiosity. Her look was so intent that it embarrassed him. He turned away to the manager.

“You might see that my man’s sent for, will you? And,” he added to the girl, “you’ll let me know, won’t you, if there’s anything you want?”

“You are very kind.”

Her look followed him as he walked towards the lounge, noting detail by detail the broad set of the shoulders, the firm stride, the well cut, comfortably-aged tweed coat, the high set of the head, the close-cut silvering grey hair with its crinkling wave above the temples, the lean fingers that swung half-closed against the clean well-creased flannel trousers. She drew a long, slow breath.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Captain Roy Rickman. He comes here every summer.”

“He’ll be here for a little while then?”

“A month at least. You see that lady he’s talking to?”

“The plump, rather handsome woman?”

“Yes; that’s his wife.”

“And I’d meant it to end there, really I had.” Helen explained to me, “I’m not the kind of girl to chase after other people’s husbands. I thought: ‘That’s that. And I’m out of luck.’ But it wasn’t easy in a place like this, where you keep seeing the same people every day; when you can’t help seeing them, when you’re playing games, and sitting round with them afterwards over drinks. It happens without your realizing that it is happening. First you become friends and then …”

She paused: looking away; such an abstract, tender expression on her face as I had seen sometimes on her mother’s: a kind of trance.

“It was at a dinner that it happened, that it began; that I … that we really knew.”

It had been at one of the Saturday dinner dances that are one of the features of the hotel’s life. She had been at the Rickman’s table. He was at the far end, six places away from her. She was glad that she was not sitting next to him. At any informal moment, on the tennis-court or golf course; when they were turning the pages of a newspaper on the sun porch over their evening cocktail, she felt more at ease with him than with any man that she had ever known. But on formal occasions she felt constrained. When she was set down beside him at a dinner table, knowing she had to talk to him, she could not think of anything to say. They were too intimate to make light talk. She was afraid of their talk becoming over-serious on occasions when seriousness would come amiss. She was glad she was not sitting next to him.

She had turned to the man beside her. She had begun to make easy talk. It had been smooth and friendly, enjoyable; no effort; just enjoyment. Then suddenly there had been a pause: she turned. She was conscious of Roy watching her. She had looked across. She had looked up. Their eyes had met.

She looked; then looked away.

She closed her eyes.

She had read about people exchanging looks like that: looks that made your breath check; that took the place of words; that made you think: “Yes, that’s how it is. He feels in the way I do.” She had read about looks like that. She had not believed in them; or rather, she had wanted to believe in them but had been sceptical as her generation was sceptical of “big words.” But it was true, all right. She knew that now. It was about the one thing of which she could be sure.

But this for very certain she did know: that she was proud to be capable of such emotion, she had been so afraid that she would never feel this way. She had been afraid that she was hard-boiled, or shallow; that she was not big enough for big emotions. She had met men, who had attracted her, men whom it had been fun to flirt with, who had thrilled her in a way. But she had never mistaken it for the real thing. They had been something to pass the time, to decorate a moment. Even with Kenneth, she had felt … but what was it she had felt for Kenneth? Something so different. A kind of playfellow feeling. She had felt alive when she was with him. But you felt alive when you were playing tennis. Kenneth was so much of her own age. They met as equals. There couldn’t be any sweeping off her feet. It wasn’t like this. This was the real thing.

“It is the real thing,” she assured me. “If only it weren’t so difficult. If there weren’t his wife. If she wasn’t so nice. For she is: terribly nice: the kind of woman I could be friends with: the kind of friend that Helen’s always needed: someone older than myself; who could advise me; guide me; who could be impersonally affectionate; who wouldn’t think I was in competition with her; to whom I could chatter about all my woman problems: not just clothes and face creams; the realer things; how to run one’s life. She’s been through it all before. She’d know what the road was like. She could tell me. I’ve always wanted somebody like this.

“If only she were not Roy’s wife.…

“Though somehow I can’t think of her as Roy’s wife. There’s such a gap between us. I’m ‘Helen’ to Mrs. Rickman; I could never imagine myself calling her ‘Fane.’ Between Roy and me there’s no such difference. From the start I thought of him as Roy.

“And then there are the daughters and his not having any money: not more than a little pocket-money; oh, but it’s a mess all right. Such a mess that if it weren’t for his wife I suppose I’d take the easy course: ‘I’d say It’s an impossible situation. It’s all too difficult.’ I’d take the second best. I’d make an affair of it and let it go at that. But when it’s a case of a woman of that kind I just can’t; it must be everything or not. If I can’t go straight to her, face her, lay my cards on the table, say ‘Your husband and I are in love with one another. We are going to run away together.’ If I can’t do that, well then I won’t do anything.”

“And are you going to do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Sometimes I think ‘yes’, sometimes I think ‘no.’ I suppose that it depends on him: on whether he can persuade me that he really needs me. I’m not going to spoil his life for him, but if I could make something real out of his life: if I could give him faith, ambition: he’d give anything for a son: if I could give him that. He’s so fine, and he’s so wasted. If I could help him make something of himself.”

Her infatuation for Roy Rickman fulfilled her two chief instincts: the need to be guided and the need to have a purpose to her life. The dice were heavily loaded against Kenneth.

I asked her about Roy Rickman. A good deal I knew: that his wife was rich: that he had retired from business after the war: that she had encouraged him to retire: he had earned his leisure, she had assured him. Acquaintances had suggested another reason: that his lack of employment, and consequent lack of money would give her a hold on him that might be valuable later on. That I knew. But there were other things I did not know. Had he hobbies: interests: ambitions of any other kind?

Helen shook her head. “He’s no one to be ambitious for. If he had a son … if there was some one to work for. Some one who depended on him.”

“Does he ever write poetry now?”

The war boom in verse was over. I had not seen Roy’s name in print for seven years.

Helen flushed at my question.

“He says he wrote nothing for ten years. Nothing inspired him. But he’s writing now.”

“Sonnets.”

She nodded. “He seems to do one every day. They just pour out, he says. He sits at a table: for half an hour or so: and they write themselves.”

I thought how Frank Tallent’s lips would have curled at the description.

“But if you run away together, I take it that he’s not proposing to support you on the proceeds of his sonnets?”

The extent of her infatuation may be gauged from her taking of my question seriously.

“Oh no,” she assured me. “He would still write poems of course, but I’d want him to have a real career.”

At fifty I thought! But Roy was strong: he was capable: he sat lightly in the saddle. He might make something of a career if he were forced. He could organize. He was good with men. There might be employment for his particular capacities in public life, at a time of crisis. Helen was right. He might make something of his life, if he had her.

“All the same,” I said, “though you have talked a lot about his wife making things difficult for you, you don’t seem to have taken her into any particular account.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve talked about what you feel for Roy, what Roy feels for you; whether you would ruin Roy’s life or make it; but you don’t seem to have considered what Fane Rickman’s likely to think about it all.”

“Oh, but we have. That’s one of the very first things I asked him: what would his wife feel: did she really need him.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That they were capital friends. That they got on very well together. But that it was her daughters that she really cared for: that she might miss him, but he wasn’t essential to her.”

“Then you don’t think she suspects anything?”

“Good heavens no. She’s middle aged herself; with all that sort of thing miles back in her past: she thinks it’s the same way with Roy.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“Oh quite.”

“And Roy agrees?”

“Of course he does. Fane Rickman hasn’t the least suspicion that we’re anything more than friends.”

I had only seen Fane Rickman twice: a long while back. But if I had been in their position I should not have been so confident of her credulity.

Helen was not alone, however, in thinking that she lived in a fool’s paradise. Later that afternoon, two women of advanced and accepted middle age were drawing the obvious comparisons between her and Roy. They were talking of Roy’s fitness, agility, youthfulness.

“Whereas Fane …” said one of them.

“Exactly; whereas Fane.…”

They exchanged a meaning glance.

“If I were Fane I wouldn’t know a moment’s peace of mind. I’m very glad now that I married a man twenty years older than myself. At the time I’ll admit I thought it rather dull, but it’s a great relief when one’s in the forties not to have to compete with children of nineteen, dieting to look thin, exercising to keep young.”

“Not that Fane bothers much about dieting and exercise.”

“My dear, that’s exactly what I was saying to her the other day. She’s forty-five and she looks it. She’s beautiful, still, in a way; I’ll admit that. But she’s plump, definitely. She plays no games. While Roy’s not got an ounce of fat on him, looks magnificent, is a scratch golfer, can beat men twenty years younger than himself at tennis. I told her that she should be careful; that she should keep herself young. One can so easily these days: ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you’re asking for trouble if you let yourself get middle aged when your husband can mix on equal terms with girls of twenty.’”

“You told her that?”

“I certainly did.”

“And what had she to say?”

“That a woman should be her age; that she wasn’t going to beat people at their game, they had to beat her at hers.”

“Whatever that may mean.”

“Exactly: whatever that may mean.”

“Look at her now.”

She was walking from the hotel veranda towards the tennis-court. Her dress, which was trailing and loose, precluded hurry; a parasol lay behind her shoulder. Her movements were slow and rhythmed. She wore no hat. Her hair was dark, low-rolled at the neck. Her skin was pale, her eyelashes very long and dark. Her mouth was full. Her shoulders white and rounded. Her neck and throat were smooth. You could tell that in her youth she had been a beauty. And in her way she was lovely still; with the loveliness of a September morning where all is calm, windless, warm and mellow.

The women on the terrace exchanged a glance.

“She’s the kind of woman that the twenty-five-year-old hero of a French novel would go crazy over.”

“But a man of Roy’s age?”

“Exactly.”

My eyes followed her. It might be of course that they were right: that she saw nothing, that she suspected nothing; or it might be that she had decided to shut her eyes, in her confidence that nothing that Roy might do or feel could injure his relationship with her. Nothing certainly could have been friendlier than her behaviour to Helen during those days when Helen was pondering the alternatives of “Yes” and “No.”

I was uncertain what Fane was feeling; I was still more uncertain as to what Roy was feeling. I did not really believe that in his sober moments he wanted to break a marriage that had survived successfully the chances and changes of close on twenty years; I suspected that he had begun a romance light-heartedly; that he had mistaken Helen for one of the casual-hearted post-war girls with whom he had no doubt shared casual hours; that he was unprepared for her seriousness; that he had never expected to be taken at his word; that her seriousness had been both a surprise and an intoxicant; that he had felt he was having his youth restored to him; that he was helpless now.

When a man has once set himself an objective he forgets the reason and wisdom of his decision. In the same way that having once started to play a game he is resolved to win, and does not in the playing of it pause to wonder whether he was wise to have begun the playing. Roy, having once burnt his boats, having once made his avowal, received his answer, was not considering the outcome of the “yes,” but only the winning of it. He had to persuade Helen that he really needed her, that it would be for his happiness and her happiness that they should begin a new life together. He flung himself into an ardent wooing, with the headlong precipitancy of youth.

All through that week, they were in each other’s constant company —on the golf course, on the tennis-court, dancing together in the evenings. They were always together, but never alone. His wooing was sandwiched into odd moments. The difficulties that surrounded them made his words more intense.

There is an eternal quality in love that makes it possible for lovers to exist and be happy in the moment, since the moment contains eternity. There is a capacity in love to transport lovers on to another plane, so that they can believe true what they would think true; so that they can justify behaviour that at the bar of any ordinary tribunal would be derided. They do with pride what without love they would do with guilt.

Helen moved through those hours in a dream. She could not feel that it was real; yet it was so lovely that she prayed it might be. She had never met a man that she admired so; who had the dignity of worldly success yet could meet young people at their own game; who could speak with authority, yet be gay and frivolously light-hearted when the occasion fitted. He was handsome with the formed look of maturity, not the emptiness of youth. He was young enough to be a companion, and strong enough for her to rely upon: to plan her life for her, to make decisions for her. She had never felt that about any man before. Yet it would not be a one-sided marriage. He needed her as much as she needed him. She could make a big thing of his life for him. If only he were free!

During her lonely hours when she lay awake night after night, she would tell herself that she was being silly, that she was being disloyal, that however lightly people nowadays might take divorce, however much freedom of a second chance might be allowed to those who had made one mistake, there could be no excuse for the woman who broke up a marriage that had survived happily and successfully the test of twenty years. She would think that, then. But when daylight came, when she felt the magnetism of Roy’s personality, saw him and heard his voice, “It must be all right. It’s got to be. It shall be,” she told herself.

She would look first at Roy, so fit, so strong, so healthy; then at Fane, lovely in her way, but languid, middle aged: no fit companion for a man like Roy. Helen could see how it had been: a boy and girl romance marriage when they were both in the early twenties. The start had been an idyll. But now Roy was being forced into a blinkered middle age at the very point of his maturity, when he should be blossoming and expanding.

Fane had no ambition for him; which was why he had no ambition for himself. He needed someone young to spur him on, to inspire him, to pace him down the course. She could do so much for him. She could give him a son to carry on his name. It would be hard on Fane; but she had her daughters.

So Helen argued with herself; at one moment deciding one way, at the next the other.

“I’ll decide over the week-end,” she said. They were going to picnic on the moor: it had been Fane’s idea: a kind of good-bye party.

“I’m tired of these dinner dances,” she had said. “Let’s go to Farleigh. I’ve always wanted to. Everyone says its charming. There’s only one way to see the moor properly. That’s to live on it; to spend two or three days watching the way it changes. Let’s make a party and spend our last week-end there.”

A dozen of us had been invited. It was the date that Helen had marked on her mental diary.

She would have, she knew, many opportunities of being alone with Roy.

“I think it is to be yes,” she thought.

She was even more certain that evening as they walked together after tea over the rough heather of the moor. It was the first time they had been alone, really alone, together. Here, with the vast space of the moor about them, they could feel that there was nothing in the world beside themselves. As they stood looking out over the wild moorland, that contained as far as the eye could see not one roof, not even the high signal of a telegraph pole, it was easy to believe in one’s capacity to forget the past, here, with nothing to remind one of it. He put his arm about her shoulders.

“Little one, I think you’d better say ‘yes,’ hadn’t you?”

She looked up, her eyes brimmed with tenderness, with adoration. He was so strong; she felt so safe committing herself into his hands.

“I suppose I had.”

“I’ll be very good to you.”

“Please; you’ll be all I’ve got.”

She had imagined that such a moment would be the prelude to a long, close-locked embrace. But the moment for that had passed. They stood quietly, hand in hand, not looking at one another, gazing out over the strange and darkening countryside, wondering at the destiny that awaited them.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

They returned in silence. He was breathing heavily with effort. She looked at him anxiously. His face wore a strained look, that woke a protective pity in her. She was sorry for him. He had a more difficult task ahead of him than she had. The parting with his wife would not be easy.

“Dearest, we’ll be going back on Monday to the Eastpoint,” she said. “Let’s leave decisions about everything till then. I don’t want anything said to anyone to-night. I want to-morrow to think over things in quietly.”

He started to reply, but the words caught in his throat. He choked and began to cough. It was a short, sudden spasm that flushed his cheeks and brought a film of moisture to his forehead. His fingers on her elbow tightened. He shook his head, laughed.

“I have fits like that sometimes.”

She looked at him apprehensively. She wished she could spare him the immediate worry. She would make it up to him later on.

“I’m going to my room,” she said.

As she walked through the hall there was in her eyes such a brightness as she had seen in her sister’s fifteen years before.

I had no doubt as to her decision now, no argument of mine could have deterred her. And it might be that her feet were as she believed, set on the road of happiness. It is vain to prophesy the outcome of any marriage. The marriages that seem foredoomed, survive; and young people who seem destined for one another are within twenty months witnesses in the divorce courts. And again there are certain people whose susceptibilities, whose sensitiveness become blunted by a happy marriage, while there are others who appear to reach self-fulfilment only at the cost of a distracted home. It might well be that Helen’s recklessness would seem justified in ten years’ time.

III

The hotel at which we were staying was little more than a summer camp. It was closed during the winter. It was wooden, draughty, with verandas running round it. It had only a dozen rooms. It was barely furnished, the fare was ample and nourishing but simple. Painters went there, authors, reading parties, an occasional recluse. There was fishing of a kind, in a stream that ran at the foot of its garden; but it was chiefly patronized during August and September by people like ourselves from the Eastpoint: who wanted for a few hours to be in touch with the primitive. Besides ourselves there were in the hotel only a couple of hikers, one of whom had a blistered instep and was resting.

It was close upon supper-time when Helen came down into the lounge. The Rickman party was grouped in the window-seat, round a bottle of sherry. There was laughter and an incessant flow of chatter. But on Roy’s face was the same strained look that she had noticed as they had walked home. Now, as then, he was breathing slowly and with effort. He was not joining in the conversation which ordinarily he would have dominated. She looked at him apprehensively. Had he broken his promise? Had he spoken to Fane already?

A glance at Fane proved conclusively that that had not happened. She was her usual gracious, smiling self. The smile with which she welcomed her was as friendly and gracious as it had ever been.

“Let’s go in to supper,” and as she rose she stretched out her hand to Helen.

“Now I want you to sit at the far end, my dear. Look after Mr. Barlow and Mr. Montague.”

Mr. Barlow did not need much looking after. He was in an advanced state of calf-love and was content to sit gazing at her in open-mouthed adoration. Charles Montague, on the other hand, was very much more interested in the girl who was seated on the other side of him. And anyhow, Helen was in no mood to look after anyone. She was worried and puzzled at the change in Roy. What was the matter with him that he should sit there, his breath coming in low, heavy gasps? His breathing was so heavy that you could hear it like an undertone of muffled drums. What was the matter with him? She watched him anxiously. As she looked away she saw that Fane had been watching him as well. Their eyes met. Fane made a sign to her that said: “It’s all right. Don’t bother. I know what it’s all about.”

And from the way Fane Rickman turned to the man next her, continuing her conversation readily, Helen knew that her rôle was to pretend that nothing was happening: that she was aware of nothing: to conceal from the others her knowledge that there was something wrong.

She turned towards young Barlow and began to talk to him with an eagerness that filled that young man with an optimism that her previous behaviour had done nothing to encourage. Eagerly though she talked, assiduously though Fane kept the ball of conversation rolling, it was not possible to keep from the general company for long an awareness that something definite was wrong.

Roy’s breathing grew heavier every moment. His chest lifted with every breath he took. Sometimes he would wheeze. It was a faint, penetrating squeak like the sound of an unoiled hinge, alternating with the soft rumbling purr of a contented cat. The effort to breathe was clearly testing him. His forehead was damp and shining. His cheeks were scarlet, his mouth hung open. It was impossible to ignore his condition. In the attempt to pretend that they did not notice, the party made their talk louder, their laughter unnecessarily hearty. But the effort could not be prolonged. They were all watching secretly the struggling man. Suddenly, in the way that general conversation will, there was a lull, and no one knew how to take up the thread of talk. There was a silence. Then three of them began a sentence simultaneously, giggled foolishly, and returned to silence. Roy lifted his head, was aware of everyone staring at him. He raised his hand to his throat, fingering it nervously.

“It’s this confounded asthma. I’m sorry. Did you bring any Himrod with you, Fane?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“You should have. One shouldn’t travel without it, ever. If I could only burn some of it, I might be all right. As it is. …”

He looked at her angrily, ill-temperedly, with an expression on his face that Helen had never seen before; of which she had not believed him capable.

He rose to his feet.

“I’ll go out. A change of air may put me straight.”

He shuffled rather than walked towards the door. His chest creaked and groaned with every breath he took. The moment the door had closed behind him a quick buzz of talk broke out. Everyone began to interrogate Fane. Was he all right? Oughtn’t something to be done? Shouldn’t someone telephone for a doctor? The inn wasn’t on the telephone. Shouldn’t someone motor in for a doctor? Surely it might be serious?

Fane shook her head.

It was very kind of them, but really it wasn’t as serious as all that. Roy was subject to these attacks. He had been, since childhood. It was what had stood in his way all along. He could have gone so much farther but for it. But asthma was one of those unaccountable things for which there really was no cure. You never knew when you would get it. One side of the road you’d have it; the other side you wouldn’t. It came without any warning.

“Poor Roy,” she explained to Helen. “It’s made things so difficult for him. I don’t know how he stood the war. He couldn’t have, of course, if I hadn’t managed to get him on the staff quite early. He never knew I arranged it. But I did. I had to. The war made it very much worse. It’s cut him off from so much. There are so many amusing things that he’s not been able to do, so many things that have been spoilt for him. We’ve often gone away for house-parties and had to come back at a moment’s notice. It’s been such a handicap. He’s been so brave about it. It’s not good trying to do anything about it. He’s rather touchy about it. He likes to be left alone. We’ll go in and see him in a minute.”

Helen listened with astonishment. She had never pictured Roy in any terms other than those of health and strength. She could not see him as an invalid. Yet that was what he was. And all these years Fane had been a kind of nurse to him. Fane had talked about how this illness had spoilt things for him, but what about the way in which it had spoilt things for her?

“Does he often get these attacks?” she asked.

“Not so much now. We’re very careful. We’ve found out the places that are safe; we don’t run risks. To begin with, of course, things like this were always happening. It was silly of me to have risked to-day. I thought as he was all right at Eastpoint he’d be all right here. It’s that stream, I suppose.”

I watched Fane closely as she spoke. There was a curious intonation to her voice, a curious expression on her face: a kind of tranquil triumph: as though carefully-laid plans were maturing in the way she had intended. “So you did know,” I thought. “You were waiting for your moment. You were resolved to show Helen what Roy was really like. That’s what you meant when you talked about winning at your own game. You knew that a place like this would give Roy asthma. You were content to wait.”

Helen stared at her incredulously. She could picture the life that Fane had led: that any wife of Roy’s would have been bound to lead. The constant anxiety for health, the surrender of carefully-chosen plans at a second’s notice, the playing for safety, the refusal of all that was adventurous and unexpected, of all that stood for glamour. She shuddered. Her health and love of health revolted as health is revolted by sickness. She sat silent during the remainder of the meal. As she followed the others towards the lounge she was nervous for the first time at the thought of meeting Roy. He had become a new person to her.

A newer and stranger person than she had thought it possible to expect.

As the door opened, a harsh voice that she scarcely recognized, snapped angrily:

“For heaven’s sake put that cigarette out. Smoke’s the worst thing possible for me.”

He was standing beside the open window, the light falling full upon his face. His hands were hanging limply by his sides. His chest rose and fell, creakingly. He was fighting for every breath. Sweat was falling from his forehead, drawing long lines from cheek to chin. His face was flushed and puffy. His eyes half closed, with pouches lifted under them. His mouth lay open, with a dribble of saliva in the corners.

Helen could not believe it was the same man she had vowed to love. She had thought of him as strong, and he was weak; that he was healthy, and he was ill; that he was young, but it was an old man who stood in front of her. She had thought she could rely on him, that he would look after her; but it was she who would have to nurse him. This was not the man she had fallen in love with.

Their eyes met.

Certain deep looks absolve one from the need of words. In the same way that the look they had exchanged on the evening of the dance had said, “Yes, there’s no need to speak. We both feel the same way about it,” so now, could they read the other’s thoughts. Just as he saw in her eyes horror and recoil, so did she read in his eyes resentment that she should have surprised and seen his weakness, coupled with an anger against the whole situation that had rendered him liable to detection; that had undermined his dignity; for the youth-fulness that had caused this party; for her, since she was associated with that youthfulness. In his tortured sickness he wanted one thing only, to be rid for ever of everything that had contributed to that sickness.

“It’s over,” she thought, “over. We couldn’t feel the same again about each other. We aren’t the people that we thought we were.”

Through a mist she heard him whisper: ‘Fane, I must get back. I’m through.” Vaguely, as if it were a long way off, she heard the soft answer: “Yes, of course, my dear, at once,” with all that answer implied of willing acceptance of a lot; through a mist she saw the woman she had thought of as old, lead the man who had been the incarnation of youth towards the door.

“It’s over,” she thought, “over.”

At the lodge at Farleigh Helen Balliol looked out over the dark sombre moor. She had come to the Eastpoint to make her choice between three alternatives. She had had that choice made for her. That swollen puffy face had been her answer. Whatever she could do without, health she must have: Health and Youth. And there was only one way that you could give yourself to youth: wholeheartedly.

“I’d be risking less with Kenneth; than with Roy: and anyhow what do risks matter? It’s all right playing for safety when you’re old; when you’re Roy’s age; but not at mine; not at Kenneth’s: I know what I want now.”

It is as dangerous as it is tempting to search for symbols: to say of a particular episode or person: this typifies a generation. But in the seriousness with which Helen Balliol contrasted her three alternatives; in the nature of the choice that was presented her, and the manner of its presentation, in her denial of the standards by which her immediate predecessors had run their lives, her readiness to turn for guidance to a generation whose standards those predecessors had discarded, is typified, if looked at from a certain angle, the attempt of a generation to combine points of view that had seemed irreconcilable, as though it were the function of that generation to bridge the conflict between Georgian and late Victorian England; while in her final choice is typified the resolve to accept the risks of her own day and hour; rather than those of an earlier period.

Helen Balliol was a Victorian stone in a Georgian setting. The convocation to a christening a year later was the fitting corollary to a marriage undertaken in that spirit.

IV

The letters of invitation contained very precise information as to the best ways of getting to the party by tube, bus, and car. The information was not superfluous. The letter-paper was headed Rudolph Circus. And Rudolph Circus is the centre of one of the most crowded slum districts in north London. It is, however, within a few minutes’ walk of St. Pancras. It was designed architecturally for the fortunes of an ample period. The proportions of the houses and the rooms are pleasantly classic. Owing to the neighbouring destitution, Helen was able to acquire for thirty shillings a week a two-floored maisonette for which in Bloomsbury she would have paid seven guineas.

Nor when you were once inside the house could you see any advantage to be had from Bloomsbury. The approach was slatternly and noisy. That Helen did not contest. But if one had to reside economically, it was better in her opinion to economize in dignity of approach than in floor space, light and air. The interior, admittedly, was charming; particularly in the winter, when the windows were closed, the curtains drawn, and the noise and savour of the street shut out.

The christening, however, took place on a warm September afternoon. The sitting-room was crowded; the windows were of necessity wide open. The inhabitants of Rudolph Circus who had never before been favoured with the spectacle of long low cars depositing silk-hatted figures on their pavement, had collected their neighbours to form a loquacious, gesticulating group outside. There was a great deal of noise inside the room. There was a great deal of noise coming from the street. Sir Stephen Chambers looked about him with manifest alarm. He kept very close to Lucy as though she was in danger of being kidnapped. “As Huntercoombe’s not here, I suppose I ought to propose the baby’s health. I wonder how soon I can decently get away.”

His father-in-law, on the other hand, was more interested in what was happening outside than what was happening inside the room. He was standing by the window, surveying with his bland, indifferent interest the eager and chattering infants. “A very interesting group of natives. The study of their tribal customs would well repay the anthropologist.”

Francis on the other hand was concentrating his attentions on the party. He was acting as secondary host. That is to say as barman. The champagne, the remnants of a wedding present from the directors of the reconstituted Peel & Hardy was admirable. His face was flushed, accentuating a slight puffiness of cheek. He had given up football the previous year and was growing fat. His work at Selfridge’s was still giving satisfaction, though his immediate superiors had been puzzled by his recent decision that Amsterdam not Brussels was the real centre of the textile trade. His visits to Amsterdam were, however, less frequent than his trips to Brussels had been. Gallantry had in part lost its savour for him. He had asked himself whether he had ever really loved. He was nearly thirty. He was in the mood to fall or to imagine himself seriously in love. A great deal indeed depended on the type of woman by whom he was next attracted. He was one of those men, one of a smaller minority than is recognized, whose life is so centred around women, that they can at a crucial point be made or broken by a love affair. If there was waiting for Francis the kind of marriage that subsides into a sympathetic comradeship, his life would continue on an even course of routine promotion. He was capable on the other hand of torpedoing his prospects for a married woman. While again the demands and caprices of a flibbertigibbet might tantalize, exasperate his ambition into genuine achievement. It was a toss up. One way or another the outcome lay hidden in the next five years.

Victor was not there. He had been unable to cancel an important board meeting at Hull. He was working at full pressure. The Wall Street panic had hit him badly. One evening he had returned from the city with a worried but animated expression on his face. He had tossed his paper on to the table with a laugh. “There are times when I’m pretty glad I’ve got a wife like you,” he had said to Ruth. “Now what am I to take that to mean?” “Oh, you know: a wife that stands by a man when his luck’s down. That doesn’t think about herself. That says ‘So that’s how it is. We’ll have to do the best we can about it.’” “Are things bad?” she had asked him. He had nodded. “As bad as they could be. I don’t know how much we’ll be able to salvage, but it means pretty well starting at the bottom.” It would mean, among other things, moving into a smaller house. But as they made their plans that evening there was an eager excited look on Victor’s face. What Hugh had called his “Yarborough look.” The look that came when he picked up a bad hand; that had come into his face at that first party when he had met Ruth. He was only really happy when the odds against him were over five to one.

Stella, too, was absent. She was in Parliament, as a National Conservative. Cabinet rank was prophesied for her. Her energy was as tireless as ever. She had no private life. Her friends were those with whom her social and political activities brought her into contact. The only way to get to know her was to serve on a committee with her. She had sent, however, an extremely elegant mug to grace the christening.

For me the party had a quality not exactly of wistfulness but of finality. Half of those I had expected to meet there were away. Three-quarters of those who were there I did not know. The story of the Balliols, as I had known it, was at an end. A number of new stories were beginning. But the story that had started with Edward Balliol’s slow climbing of the North End Road on an April afternoon: that was finished.

Ruth, too, I fancied, was oppressed by a like feeling. As soon as the baby’s health had been proposed, she made a sign to me.

“Shall we slip away?” she whispered. “I’ve got my car below.”

It was a grey two-seater Hotchkiss; a compact and practical kind of car.

“Where would you like to be dropped?” she asked.

Somewhere near Marble Arch, I told her. I was going to my club in Brook Street. She asked me if I were in any hurry. I shook my head.

“Then do you mind if we go over the Heath. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they’re pulling Ilex down and making a block of flats there. It would be a good day to take a last look at it.”

As she bent forward to turn the key of the car, I took a steady, sideways look at her. It was twenty-three years since I had seen her for the first time. She had been fourteen then. Yet I felt that the girl who had pressed her toes against the ceiling to see how much weight lath and plaster would resist, was the same person who was sitting beside me now. Through so much change her personality had survived distinct. She had remained herself.

I do not know what can be truly said to constitute success in life. Each person has his own view of that; of where the secret lies; whether it lies where Balliol found it in an avoidance of unhappiness; or his wife, in the discovery of an escape; or Stella, in the triumph of causes that she had at heart; or Lucy, in the surrender, in the self-obliteration into a personal and perhaps selfish happiness; or Hugh in a death that, though met belatedly, was in truth a soldier’s; or Francis in the lists of gallantry; or Helen in a new-found romance. It would be easy to argue that each one of them in their separate way had found solutions. But if the quotation that had hung over the mantelpiece in the girls’ room were to be taken as the test, Ruth more than any of them had faced with “fortitude and delicacy” the changing fortunes of her life.

The road from St. Pancras to Camden Town was crowded. Ruth’s foot rested lightly on the accelerator. But after Chalk Farm the road was clear. In barely five minutes we had turned the brow of the hill by the Bull and Bush.

It was the first time that I had been past Ilex for several months. The business of destruction was proceeding rapidly. The low wall with the chain-linked palings had been broken so that a broad plank-paved track for lorries could be run up from the pavement. The roof was off, scaffolding was round the walls. On the first floor the bricks had been struck away to the level of the white window frames. The whole of the front wall above the portico was gone. The house stood in skeleton. During the four years while it had been a nursing home the walls had been covered with a plain paper that would take whitewash. But now the cheap paper was peeling back, showing the papers that had hung there in the Balliols’ time, the mauve and grey of the girls’ room, Lucy’s elaborate William Morris’ foliage, the figured fairy-tale of the nursery: King Arthur, Little Red Riding Hood, Simple Simon; the sombre brown of Hugh’s bed-sitting-room. It was as though for the last time and for a few moments Ruth was being shown her own girlhood, her sister’s childhood, her brothers’ youth. She sat there looking, silent; while the pickaxes of the workmen swung, the barrows emptied their loads, the walls, brick by brick, sank to the level of the garden.

A person, apparently of some consequence, a man in the early fifties, plump, tall, prosperous, a grey Homburg hat tilted over his right eye, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, strolled over to us. He imagined no doubt that we were prospective flat owners. He waved a hand towards the process of demolition.

“Fine block of flats we’re going to put up here,” he said. “Every kind of flat: from the bachelor’s bed-sitter to the rich city man with a wife and several kids who wants a home: modern, a real modern home, if you get me. Big garages: lock-ups for as many cars as there are flats; central heating; service; frigidaires. Make housekeeping easy. That’s what people want nowadays. They don’t want to be bothered with servants and cooks and housemaids. Of course they don’t. They want a small place in London, near their work. Something they can shut up over week-ends, knowing it’ll be safe; get away somewhere in a car. Make the full use of their cars. Brighton, the Downs, that’s living, that’s life. A block of flats like this. When people see this they won’t want to live in houses any more. A block of flats like this, in a place like this. A portent, that’s what it is, a portent.”

He paused; then waved his hand towards the ruin. “A place like this now. Who wants a place like this nowadays? Four servants, who can afford that, who could get them if he could afford it? And what would he do with them when he had them? Spend his whole time looking after them, a prisoner in his own house. A place like this—” he paused again as though he were searching a limited vocabulary for the sufficiently opprobrious designation of this anachronism. Something, however, checked him, as though the sight of the tattered wallpapers touched a stream of sentiment; as though those pathetic survivals of the past were entitled to respect. “Ah well, it served its purpose.”

Ruth made no reply. She sat, her hand on the wheel. Looking at the peeling papers which had once framed her life and her family’s, the reel of the past was turned for her, so that in one steady glance she could see their story as a completed whole, with all that it had contained of good and bad. It was a moment that some would sentimentalize, others sneer against: before which others would resort, in self-protection, to irony, bitterness, indifference. For Ruth it had the flavour of those cool dry Rhineland wines that taste sour on certain palates and tasteless upon another’s, but for those that can appreciate them are rich and full. She closed her eyes as though she were savouring its bouquet, feeling its richness along her tongue; grateful that she could taste, knowing it for what it was, the wine that the years of her life had trodden.

A smile flickered on her lips. Then she turned away.

“Let’s go.”

Without turning back, she put the car in gear, released the clutch. With a slow-quickening pace the car moved forward, soundlessly over the gleaming roadway to the lights at the hill’s foot; the shops, the trams, the tubes, the sky signs, the roar and rattle of the machines.

Oswalds, 1933.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © 1934

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