CHILDREN OF NO MAN’S LAND

CHILDREN
OF NO MAN’S LAND

BY
G. B. STERN
AUTHOR OF
‘PANTOMIME,’ ‘SEE-SAW,’ ‘TWOS AND THREES,’
‘GRAND CHAIN,’ ‘A MARRYING MAN’

LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

All Rights Reserved

First published 1919

Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh

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

Aunt Stella assented. “Why shouldn’t she go? Anything for a change, when one is twenty-three. Anything for excitement. And she can come to no harm. Besides, Richard is invited too.”

“No harm,” chirruped her brother. “Liberty for the young! We have missed enough, Stella, you and I, through old-fashioned prejudices.”

Old Hermann Marcus did not join in the conversation. He sat heavy and immovable; his faded blue eyes, under their fierce ridges, travelling contemptuously from his son to his daughter. Weaklings! short-sighted weaklings, with their foolish chatter of “liberty for the young.” Was this the way to bring up one’s children, with authority trailing like a slack rope along the floor? What was to become of the old, if the young were allowed to live for their own pleasure? Where would he be now, he, Hermann Marcus, crippled with rheumatism, financially insolvent, approaching his eightieth birthday, if Ferdinand and Stella had not been trained, very carefully trained, to unquestioning obedience and duty?

He was impotent where Ferdinand’s children were concerned. His day of authority was over. But—“a good time,” he muttered. “They will see....” He called loudly to Stella to bring him at once the English papers, which would not arrive at the Swiss hotel for fully an hour yet. Hermann Marcus was perfectly aware of this.

[2]

“But everyone knows for a positive fact that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all. Why, who has ever heard of your Goethe, outside Germany?”

“And who has ever read your Shakespeare, inside England?” Lothar retorted, with the horrid glee of a person who has made a remark with an unpleasant amount of truth in it. His spectacles gleamed, two round, triumphant dazzles in the sunset which streamed through the closed windows of his study.

Richard repeated stubbornly, but without conviction: “Everyone knows Shakespeare is the greatest writer.” His defence of Shakespeare was strictly impersonal; he had no vehement sentiments on the subject; the whole argument bored him. But on principle, when a German boy asserts that Goethe is greater than Shakespeare, the English boy can have no option but to make reply that Shakespeare is greater than Goethe.

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

And Richard had an inspiration. “Shakespeare has been translated into German, because you jolly well couldn’t get on without him. I’ve never seen Goethe properly put into English. That about proves I’m right.”

“There was no Englander great enough to translate a man so great. I do not say,” Lothar explained conscientiously, “that I have not of the works of your Shakespeare also with much benefit an exhaustive study made. Let us converse on them. Do you then prefer Macbess or Otello?”

“Macbeth,” Richard muttered at a venture, and walked restlessly to the window; fidgeted with the beaded blind-cord, to signify that he expected better entertainment from his host than this irritating controversy. He wished his sister had not been so quick to accept Mrs Koch’s invitation to visit her at Dorzheim. To be dragged away in the middle of the extra July of summer holiday which an epidemic of scarlet fever at school had procured him; dragged away from a jolly hotel in Switzerland, to this stupid, little, dead-and-alive German town; finally, to be expected to chum up with Lothar von Relling, merely because they were “of the same age”—it was a bit thick!

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

[3]

He wondered why Lothar was crossing and uncrossing his legs in their bright striped stockings, and breathing heavily as though about to unburden himself of a confidence.

“Have you a heart’s dearest, you?”

Richard Marcus was fifteen. A normal boy, muscular, pugnacious, taciturn. The question drew from him a shout of laughter.

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

“You English boys are babies all,” Lothar said, unexpectedly scornful. “You play always your stupid games, rather than write verses to the loved one. Ach, but she ...” he whirled his hearer along an incoherent tide of description: “a wonder, a dream, a night of scented dusk,” that mysterious goddess who seemed but recently to have emerged from the nebulous glamour which encircles all womanhood for the Teuton yet in his teens.

“Are you engaged to her?” yawned Richard, who by the merest fraction preferred these confidences to the Goethe-Shakespeare debate.

“Betrothed? But not possible. I am already betrothed to Frieda-Marie. Our peoples betrothed us a great many years ago. It is wearisome, but——” Lothar shrugged his plump shoulders—“it is suitable. We are of one faith. Her father, the Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe, will withdraw his sanction if he outfinds anything of my faithlessness.”

Richard swung round and surveyed with disfavour Lothar’s vague features under their bush of upstanding tow. “Do you mean there’s really anything for him to find out about you and the other girl, or are you swanking?”

“Only that I schwärm—I swarm with love for her. I watch in the streets, and once I drop at her feet a fair rose costing fifty pfennig. She knows nothing of my passion. But what goes me that on? It is more beautiful, more ideal, so.” Suddenly he slid from lofty altitudes. “One has also one’s emotions away from these. One is flesh. One is not altogether air....” He spattered a few inky hints regarding the demands of his adolescence. From a pink, chubby face his spectacles glittered knowingly, inviting his companion to betrayal of like perplexities. But Richard preserved that admirable stolidity for which his looks were so well adapted: powerful jaw, big nose, dark head well thrust forward from the short neck and broad shoulders; and, rather obscured by all[4] these pugnacities, a pair of pleasant, humorous light-grey eyes, from which now, however, he had chased all expression save of blank idiocy. Not likely he would give himself away to Master Lothar! Richard wondered if there were a German boy good form enough to know that Lothar was bad form, and to ostracize him as such. Unlikely; the fellow would hardly be as cocksure if he had once been put in his place. All this blither about Goethe and girls.... “Do you mean to marry this person?” interrupting the other’s critical appraisement of a lady professionally well-known in Dorzheim, appraisement to which Lothar had essayed to impart the personal note.

“I have explained,” patiently, “I am plighted to Frieda-Marie. She is a good Christian maiden. She learns cooking. She has a respectable gift-along. Why do you smile?”

“Your English is so funny.”

“I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing your German,” politely sarcastic. For Richard had felt in honour bound not to reveal to Dorzheim that his knowledge of their tongue, though faulty, was fluent enough, as was natural in a grandson of Hermann Marcus of Munich.

“I will take me a wife when I am twenty-seven. First must I be through with my examinations. Then do I perform my military service. You also? No?”

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

“It is for the Fatherland. Also one is attractive in uniform. One dashes. One lives. Me, I must betray a several of maidens before I can afford one to keep.”

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

“At sixteen one is no longer a child. One cannot go mad....” To Richard’s horror, Lothar suddenly buried has head in his arms, shuddering violently.... “That I were dead! that I were dead!” he moaned.

The English boy stared at him. These outbursts of confidence, alternately sentimental and morbid, seemed to emphasize his growing sense of having been brought into a world completely alien. He sent a swift thought to his chum, Greville Dunne, now on board a training-ship; wished old Greville were here. Foreign kids were unbalanced, hysterical; they read too much; brooded too much; talked too much.... Lothar had no right to unburden himself to a stranger, of[5] different nationality and hostile outlook. Richard began to be afraid he had given an impression of too ready sympathy.

Lothar raised his head and announced solemnly: “Swine-hound that I am, believe that I preserve a reverence supreme for my Loved One!” His eyes were swamped in facile tears. “I have no father,” he added, after an uncomfortable pause; “and you, you have no mother, I hear.”

“Oh, that’s all right, thanks,” Richard’s shoulders were expressive of sullen embarrassment. “Got a stamp collection?”

“I will show you my botany-box.” And Lothar littered the blue and red check table-cloth with his specimens of pressed leaves and flowers, neatly labelled. Presently he reverted to the subject of Frieda-Marie. It appeared as though he were trying unsuccessfully to tell Richard something....

“Pity that she should be so blonde. The Ideal One is a brunette. She is a witch; a black velvet pansy. Hark, I will describe her to you.”

A full five minutes elapsed, however, before Richard awoke to the fact that the concrete sum of Lothar’s lyrical ecstasies made up a personality closely resembling that of his sister.

“Good Lord! Deb!”

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

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

This was too great a strain on Lothar’s English. “She was mine from the first moment I saw her feet on the pavement my window outside press,” he breathed.

“Look here—do you want to marry Deb?”

“You come me always with that!” peevishly. “I tell you I am betrothed to Frieda-Marie. I cannot marry your sister. She is only a Jewess.”

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

“I can worship her.”

“Umph!”

“You also, you admire her?”

“She’s not so dusty.”

Again Lothar had to confess himself vanquished. He lugged down an English-German dictionary from the shelf, and conscientiously looked up ‘dusty.’

“Nicht so staubig—ach!... Hark, there is Mama who calls us. Doubtless you are fetched to go home.”

[6]

They ran down the polished stairs, Richard grinning at the notion of being “fetched.”

In the drawing-room Felix Koch was apologizing profusely for his wife’s absence, while Frau von Relling plied him with coffee and cream cakes and delicatessen sandwiches.

“You will be welcome whenever you come again to play with my Lothar,” she condescended to Richard. Then sighed heavily: “My big boy!” and took Lothar’s hand and fondled it. Lothar received the caress with an expression which was decorously demure. “Smug little humbug!” reflected Richard.

“Indeed, Herr Koch, it is well that the dear Marianna did not call to-day, as it is possible that your honoured Frau Mama might be drinking coffee with me presently.”

“So?” Koch nodded gloomily. His wife and his mother were not on speaking terms; and all the town knew why. He had committed an unprecedented folly in marrying the pretty daughter of a shopkeeper in Bingen.

Frau von Relling continued: “Doubtless the dear Marianna is busy with the entertainment of the little English Miss.” Then eagerly: “Has she received any offers yet?”

“She has only been with us three days,” Koch replied. And added with a mysterious inflection, “But Salzmann has sent to Frankfurt for his brother.”

“And how many bouquets?”

“Eleven. And two chocolate-boxes.”

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

The man bent upon his questioner a look of displeasure. “Sigismund knows well he has no concern with any young Miss who is my guest!”

For, though partners in the same bank, he and his younger brother were not on speaking terms. They had quarrelled violently a little while before the death of their father, Emil Koch, founder of the bank, who, with more sense of humour than can usually be accredited to his nation, had left it to them as a joint and firmly-knit inheritance.

Frau von Relling hastened to cover up her intentional piece of malice. “Of course not, of course not. And the dear Marianna will be arranging a Klatsch to introduce the beautiful Miss to Dorzheim?”

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

“Will Wanda be present?” Frau von Relling played nervously with her son’s fingers, which she still retained.

[7]

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

“In that case——” Frau von Relling rose with dignity. She was not on speaking terms with her sister-in-law: a question of a funeral-wreath.... Amid such complications did the society of Dorzheim walk precariously.

Felix gave a murmur which placed his sympathies definitely on the side of Frau von Relling, and at the same time deplored these needless feuds in an otherwise attached family. Then with Richard he took formal leave.

“We are the only Jews in Dorzheim with whom the von Rellings have traffic,” he remarked, as they walked home through the little manufacturing town. “But you will count now how many hats are raised to me. The Kochs have ever been deeply respected even among the Christians who bank with us.” He beamed with naïve pleasure at each salutation; and looked sharply at Richard to see if the latter were indeed taking note.

Twilight in the streets; and the sky was a dark, thick blue. Crowds of men were already jostling out of the workshops where the cutting, polishing and setting of precious stones formed the principal industry of Dorzheim. Swarthy giants from some legend of forest and charcoal and red-glowing cavern, they did not immediately disperse, but stood about muttering on the pavements, with a scowl for the passer-by who brushed their group too closely. Somewhere a great brazen bell was clanging. It was all rather unreal....

“We shall shortly have trouble with these fellows,” remarked the banker to Richard. “Those infernal socialists with their talk——”

Richard was again attacked by a melancholy sense of complete isolation from his surroundings. What was he doing here? He, Marcus, of the Winborough fifth—in this gabled, German burgher town, grotesque to him as an old steel-engraving in a musty folio. Ring of sombre fir-shaggy hills tipped against the sky; ornamental bridges like toys across the river, which ran alongside the one broad street; warm aroma of coffee from the shops, blending with a mournful resinous fragrance that drifted down with the wind from the woods; clusters of people round the small iron tables dotted outside the restaurants; and behind the large open windows of these, dim groups sprawling through a dense smoke-heavy[8] atmosphere; chatter and bellow and screech; gibberish which was yet disconcertingly comprehensive to Richard. He revolted against his very understanding of their language. They were not his people; Lothar, with his flaxen hair and his botany-box and his repellant morbidity; this trotting little man, counting the hats that were raised—ah, there was another! ... and another! ... like clockwork, up went the hand to the brim.... Three elongated boys in capes, whistling “Die Wacht am Rhein”—

No, these were not his people; this was not his land. Richard stiffened himself against any insidious process of adaptation to circumstances. Daisybanks, Lansdowne Terrace, London, England—that was his address, when he was not at Winborough. Good enough for him. Switzerland was all right, of course ... the hotel was under English management, and one just went about with one’s own set, and behaved much as usual, except that there were mountains. His spirit approved of a Continent moulded on sternly British lines.

And then Deb had dragged him into—this!

A question stirred in his mind! Nationality—was it a fact of any importance, then, to make so much difference when put to the test?... He shoved the question away again. Why fuss? This sort of misery—for it was misery—would not pursue him further than across the map of Germany. Let him get back to his own folk; he was homesick, that was all. England became above all desirable as a place where you were jolly and ordinary; took things for granted; no need to think;—there was a quality of purposeful concentration about these German people that oppressed Richard uneasily; why were they so absorbed and ponderous over the minutest detail?

Again Herr Koch jerked off his hat. “Did you see who saluted me? No other than Sanitäts-Rath Maximilian Hauffe. He could quite well have pretended not to see me; there was no lamp where he passed us. But I tell you the Kochs are esteemed in Dorzheim. That was his daughter Frieda-Marie along with him.”

Richard looked back, interested to catch a glimpse of Lothar’s betrothed. She looked back at the same time.... A plump rosy face; swing and dangle of two golden plaits.

[9]

Outside the door of their house they were joined by Mrs Koch and Deborah. Felix inserted his latchkey and preceded them into the hall.

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

“Not—not very much.”

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

With infinite pains and pride had this sole Englishwoman in Dorzheim been excavated for the girl’s benefit. Deb felt acutely the reproach in his tones. The meeting ought to have been at least as momentous as that of Stanley and Livingstone in the desert. Deb herself, after only three days spent in thickly Teutonic company, had been quite excited at the prospect of drinking coffee with Herr Ladenberg’s wife from Manchester. She recognized now how unreasonable she had been to have expected instant affinity merely on the negative grounds that neither she nor Elly Ladenberg happened to be German.

At the same moment, Marianna was enquiring of Richard: “Well, and have you made a great friendship with Lothar von Relling?”

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

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

Richard grunted, and escaped to his room to dress for that meal which, neither dinner, tea, nor supper, mingled the richness and biliousness of all three.

Felix went into the sitting-room and flung himself on the sofa. Deb and his wife followed him in. The girl went straight to the window, and with some difficulty succeeded in opening it; the decent German window protesting loudly, as it had every right to do. She leant out, cooling her hot cheeks. She had behaved disgracefully that afternoon....

Marianna Koch glanced at her. Then at Felix. An elusive meanness flickered from her narrow light-brown eyes; at the comers of her pretty, fretful mouth. She was very unlike the accepted Saxon type of large blonde beauty. There had been a scandalous babble of tongues in Dorzheim when Felix Koch had first brought her back from a brief holiday he had spent in Bingen. Little worldling that she was, she had yet contrived to trap him in manner incongruously reminiscent of a Grimm’s fairy-tale. The broad window above the ironmonger’s[10] shop; the wistful maiden, youngest of three sisters, who daily stationed herself there, hairbrush held in her hand, a light-brown, feathery cloud surrounding her pale face.... He was cured of his infatuation now, after two years’ subjection, but could still recall it with painful vividness at a thought flung backwards to that window and the magic it had framed for him. Marianna! ... but she was common and petty, and snobbish and quarrelsome; she had married him solely because he was a banker, a fine gentleman. He had a suspicion lately that she would like to be rid of him; yes, now, when he had barely placated a bitterly offended mother; when, with his reputation for sobriety and prudence, he had made a fool of himself in sight of all Dorzheim. If it had been Sigismund!... It was a constant smart to the vanity of Felix that Sigismund was still highly eligible, whereas he——

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

In which case Sigismund would laugh. And Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe would perhaps omit to raise his hat as punctiliously.

Koch’s eyes wandered to Deb, in her bluish lilac crêpe dress; harem skirt that clung as though in well-cut adoration ... the nape of her neck showed astoundingly bare; in Dorzheim it was considered smart to wear something called a jabot, and to prop the chin and ears with a high erection of lace and whalebone; in Dorzheim the dressmakers were commissioned to destroy line, not create it—as in the case of a harem skirt. She was obviously not quite “good class” this girl; probably some sort of an artist, though he had gathered her people were wealthy. “These English!”—one could account for everything by that contemptuous phrase.... And Deb had immensely gratified him that morning at breakfast by remarking: “One might easily mistake you for an Englishman, Herr Koch!”... Yes, he liked the girl; was quite glad that Marianna had taken a fancy to her recently in Switzerland, and had insisted on bringing her back for a visit. It relieved the tension of their constant bickering; and it gave him a hearer on whom to impress his status in Dorzheim. Then, too, one acquired importance in the little town, when one had guests from England. Relations from Frankfurt, yes—but guests from England were almost unheard of.

And nobody need know that Marianna had practically run away from him to Montreux. She was anæmic, needed a[11] holiday; that sufficed for public explanation. He had recalled her with a promise of a fur coat. He had not yet given her the fur coat.

“I can smell Rindbraten,” remarked Felix appreciatively, from the sofa. “Do we have it for evening-eating? Stuffed? There was some left over from mid-day, was there not? I trust, Marianchen, that you made it clear to Emma it was not for her?”

He was smitten with gloom at the thought of the servant browsing over his Rindbraten. His wife reassured him. And she added, with slow emphasis: “I tried on some sable coats at Elly Ladenberg’s. Her husband had sent for sample styles from Köln. There was one—four thousand marks. It hung well on me. The Ladenberg has already chosen another with a fox collar. Mine has a brocade lining.”

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

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

“Four thousand marks is too much.”

“Not for the best.”

“My mother says——”

“Your mother hates me. She would like to see me wear cotton in a snowstorm. She would die of spite if she saw the Frau Sanitäts-Rath Maximilian Hauffe envying me my beautiful sables.”

She paused to see if her last artful thrust at his besetting weakness had at all moved her husband. He thundered, to hide his uneasiness: “I tell you, four thousand marks is too much. You are beggaring me. You!”

The woman’s eyes grew larger and brighter. She smiled at Deb, who was trying to slip from the room unperceived. “But where are you going? Felix, the child is running away because she thinks we are quarrelling.”

Felix laughed uproariously at the notion.

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

“There is no couch in your room. Here, you had better to rest beside my husband. Make room for her then, clumsy bear!” She laughed a sharp little trill. “How shocked she is! Heavens, what have I asked her to do? Surely with a respectable old married man.... Come, Felix, be a little gallant. Our English Miss is afraid of you. Na, she was bold[12] enough this afternoon, having a fine flirt with Meester von Sittart.”

“She thinks you are another jealous Huldah von Sittart, Marianna. Did that old woman make ugly grimaces at you, Fräulein Deb? We must be careful where there are handsome husbands from America. But with old Felix Koch—Come, I will be asleep, that will put you at your ease.” He rolled over with his face to the wall, and affected to snore loudly.

Marianna applauded the performance. Her teasing eyes informed Deb that she was a stiff little fool, putting a wholly idiotic construction on what was mere playful friendliness on the part of her host and hostess. So Deb lay down beside Felix.... It struck her suddenly that the wife has the supreme advantage over the girl in almost any conjunction of circumstances.

Frau Koch moved to the door. “Sleep well, dear children!” It was uttered in the mock-solemn spirit of a benison. But Deb was aware of malice in the woman’s stealthy little smile; more than malice—enmity. To her or to Felix?—She would have sprung upright again, save for the feeling that in lying down she had committed herself ... to what, she did not know. But she did know very definitely, as the door closed gently behind Marianna, that she had made a mistake, and that it was useless to try and repair it. Deb was to suffer all her life from an illusion that one step backward would not avail her after one step forward had already been taken.

... Felix had his back still turned to her. But he had abandoned the farcical pretence of snoring. They could not lie much longer in this absurd silence, back to back, solemn, motionless.... Deb began to laugh softly. It was really rather ridiculous, except—except that Marianna’s face had frightened her.

Should she jump up now—and run? No, that would give alarming point to the situation. Probably Felix had no intentions——

He turned sharply, pulled her round towards him, kissed her and kissed her. And he was thinking: “If this was what Marianna wanted, then there and there—and there——” The girl did not matter. She was not like a German Mädchen who has been nicely brought up and carefully guarded for matrimony. Her people had let her come here, to complete strangers.[13] And she wore collarless blouses and had flirted conspicuously with von Sittart.

... Her throat—how long and thick and dusky white ... what a firm column for that three-cornered, weary little face.

Marianna was, he felt sure, just outside the closed door. What was her motive in all this? That when it came to it, when he found her out, she should also have an accusing finger to point?—“Can you wonder, my friends? First he does not give me a fur coat, and then he makes shameless love to the guest under my roof....”

Felix Koch was pale with anger and humiliation. While he had joined his wife in chaffing Deb, he had been inclined to shout aloud: “Who is the man? Who is he? What do you think I am made of, forcing this upon me?—After you have been six weeks in Switzerland away from me—and yesterday you were tired after the journey—too tired! ... and I—and I.... Now, this insult!”

He had controlled himself, curious to see what she would do next. He was not going to control himself any more. Let Marianna, if indeed she stood poised on tiptoe, just outside, her light eyes flickering spitefully, let Marianna realize how little he cared for her rebuffs, last night, and the night before.... Fur coats? Wives did not get fur coats unless they earned them better.

Deb did not try to break away from the cramping pressure of his arms. She recognized that she had been to blame; had been—careless, somewhere, she was not quite sure where. But she too had now a dim sense of Marianna’s object in inviting her, of Marianna’s pinched smile outside the door.

... This man was rather handsome, viewed from the close range which usually brings distortion of features. She tried to laugh under his stinging kisses, to pick up the spirit of burlesque where they had dropped it.... “Pretty child,” he muttered; “pretty neck—no wonder she leaves it always unclothed.”

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

“Felix, then.”

“I want to rest, Felix——” She took advantage of a momentary relaxation of his arms, to snuggle down into the cushions, as a baby might; to close her eyes with a semblance of trustful drowsiness ... her lips were half parted, her breathing regular; one curled-up fist pushed against her cheek. At any moment she might just drop off to sleep....

[14]

Would he leave her alone now? Was she safe under this guise of silly, innocent confidence? Any sophisticated recognition of his attempt to start a surreptitious affair with her, would have been fatal.

Felix Koch, like all South Germans, was a sentimentalist. Church spires by moonlight, or a slumbering infant, were unfailing bell-pulls to his softer nature. Gently he touched her hair with his fingers. “Sleep then, pretty child, there is nothing to fear,” he murmured, profoundly moved by this self-evidence of the rake’s reverence for purity. It was all the easier to assume, since he did not really care for Deb.

Deb thought: “And so one must love a man, to like being kissed by him?... Or is it only because he is married that I can’t like it?”

She had been in love, of course; not the conventional once and once only, but twice. A glamorous episode with a young Territorial Captain, Con Rothenburg, eldest son of her father’s partner. And later on, a man whose age doubled hers: the doctor who had taken over the practice while the Marcus’ old family practitioner went round the world for his health. This was a less complete attachment than with Con, for Doctor Steele was not even aware of her tremulous passion; nor with what conscientious honesty she prevented herself from deliberately seeking to contract the ailments which would have ensured his attendance. It had occurred to her, while his hand was on her racing pulse: “How easy it would be for him just to bend down and kiss me. So easy that it doesn’t seem fair he shouldn’t. So easy—he could forget it at once; and I should always remember....” But Doctor Steele had relinquished his locum tenency, and disappeared, leaving Deb with no such memory.

There had been other—minor adventures. A great many. So irresistibly did she attract them, that one might fancy her reincarnated from some famous harlot of old history. And besides, she involuntarily invited them because she was so plainly on the look-out. Yet she was on the look-out not for minor adventures, but for the big thing; the thing to engross her existence; to dwarf its lesser trickiness; to drench her quick nervous soul with peace; provide employment for her restless, life-bitten brain. If Deb had been an artist, the big thing had been easier to find. She was an artist, but in appreciation only; non-creative. Or if Deb had been religious....[15] Religion attacked her imagination as little as the winged Victory, rushing like wind down the steps of the Louvre. She knew that the masterpiece was there; she had not seen it herself; others had seen it; she hoped one day to see it. Meanwhile—she could do without it, and not feel the loss.

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

But this special incident ought not to have occurred. Instinct told her there was a certain type of girl to whom it could not have occurred. She had always hoped she was this girl; sheathed in a sort of hard, transparent whiteness from which anything that was not the one big thing would infallibly slide off, without giving the occupant of this convenient armour the slightest trouble.

Of late, however, she had been growing suspicious of her powers to ward off an accumulation of petty experiences.

Experiences?—but she wanted experience.

She tried to trace back the initial carelessness—yes, carelessness was the only word for it—which had led to her present plight. She ought to have gone to her room to lie down, in spite of Marianna’s sneers. Yet that would have seemed a ridiculous affectation of prudery, especially as that very afternoon.... Ah, here the fault, then!... But she had not really flirted with Ralph von Sittart; the ladies of Dorzheim had misread that spurt of revolt which had suddenly lit her to flame; revolt from their disapproval of her; revolt from the stiff chairs on which each one stiffly sat, with her stiff neck upheld in whalebone.... Rather than make one of them, she had preferred to squat upon the bearskin in front of the tall, white, frozen stove; bend down her unfettered neck to rub her cheek caressingly against the animal’s beautiful head—Oh, it had been an exhibition of bad manners, certainly; even cheap bad manners ... bearskins and tigerskins were a bohemianism which London had long discarded; but these German women could be shocked by nothing more subtle than the effronteries of five seasons ago. And Deb had to shock them, in the impish mood which possessed her, for which Elly Ladenberg (née Harrison) was perhaps primarily responsible. “You haven’t brought your needle-work?” “I haven’t got any,” laughed Deb. “Then you have finished your present for Frau Koch?” in a discreet undertone. Deb learnt that it was the sacred custom here for any young girl staying with a[16] married lady, to stitch a most elaborate piece of embroidery as a thank-offering for her hostess.

The information depressed her. She enquired if it would not be possible to obtain the same effect of overpowering gratitude, by sending to an expensive shop in London.

“You can see for yourself that it would not do. The sentiment would not be the same.”

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

... The word was passed round that the English girl was, to say the least of it, eccentric. Anything sensational might be expected of her.

Deb responded flauntingly to their expectations. Impossible anyway to efface herself from the conspicuous position she occupied as “Frau Koch’s visitor.” Guests were rare in Dorzheim; no jolly, casual happening, but a solemn event which exacted a whole code of ceremonial. And even then the visitors were usually somebody’s relations. But all of a sudden a strange girl—from that mad country—even Frau Koch confessing to a minimum of previous acquaintance.... “The poor Marianna tells me she had no idea that the father would permit it.” “Odd, very odd. Has she money, do you know?” “Oh, surely; her dresses are of the best material, even though they are fashioned in a style ... dearest Frau Bergmann—that skirt!”

And then Ralph von Sittart had strolled into the party; handsome, middle-aged German-American, who propped up his indolence by an elderly wife’s income. And it had been a well-nigh hysterical relief for Deb to hear English spoken.... Frau von Sittart’s face ... the whispers ... and all the knitting-needles clacking....

She had behaved outrageously. But only under the goad of alert protest to her entire personality, to her slightest act. She was in a false position from the start. She should not have come. She had only come because of John Thorpe’s mother and the ear-trumpet....

At this stage of her attempts to track consequences to their motive lair, Deb became aware that her feet were being plagued by pins and needles, and that she most desperately desired to[17] wriggle. She judged that it would be safe now to awake from slumber ... it must be a full half-hour that she and Felix Koch were lying motionless side by side. She opened her eyes, raised herself on one elbow, sighed deeply, as one who yields up a pleasant dreamland. Then only did she perceive that all this pantomime was unnecessary; her companion was quite peacefully asleep.

Deb slithered off the couch, tip-toed to the door, closed it soundlessly behind her. No one was in the hall. She ran upstairs, and knocked at the door of her brother’s room.

Richard, in his shirt-sleeves, was standing in front of the looking-glass; and with a brush ferociously brandished in either hand, was frustrating his hair’s racial inclination to curl.

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

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

“When in Rome——”

“Do as the Romans don’t—if they’re Germans!”

“Richard—we had awful trouble at home sometimes to get you to dress in the evenings.”

He grinned. “Had you? I shouldn’t be surprised if you had it again.” After a pause, he enquired: “How long d’you want to stop here, Deb?”

“In Dorzheim? Don’t you like it?”

He considered a moment. “No.”

“Why not?”

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

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

“All right.”

Deb sat down on the bed. Immediately the great inflated pillow that acted as eiderdown almost submerged her in its rising billows. She struck them down passionately—

“Richard.”

“Um?”

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

She was prepared for a brotherly outburst: “D’you mean to say the fellow dared——” But Richard laid down his brushes, and took up his collar, with a total absence of all emotion. “Oh, all right.”

A few days later, Felix Koch came back at an unwonted hour, between dinner and supper, and beckoned his wife to a private conference. Her luminous eyes, as she went, testified to a hope that the mystery enveloped a fur cloak.

Presently Richard was summoned.

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

“Lothar?”

“Gloomy little beggar with the astonished hair who came here once to tea. You ought to know, Deb. The whole shindy concerns you. What have you been up to?”

She reflected a moment before confession. Prudence prompted the query: “What do they say I’ve been up to?”

Richard chuckled—then became instantly solemn. “This morning, Herr Sanitäts-Rath Oberunterammergau von und zu hellofarau Maximilian Hauffe called upon the honest and respected banker, Felix Koch, to complain that his daughter Frieda-Marie had been slighted and insulted by said daughter’s plighted husband-to-be, Lothar von Relling, who was seen two evenings ago in the darkest portion of the Grünewald—need I go on?”

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

Richard dropped into a creditable imitation of Felix Koch:

“So I say with dignity to Herr Hauffe: ‘Herr Hauffe, tell me only this: is your anger at what has occurred, is it because my guest is a Jewess? because I myself am a Jew? If so, I regret, but I will not move in the matter.’ And he replied, taking off his hat: ‘Herr Koch, let me now assure you that there is no one in this town for whom I have a respect more profound than for yourself; I am a broad-minded man, and had your guest been a Christian lady, which she is not, I should have still been obliged my present course in defence of my[19] daughter’s honour to pursue.’ At this I started up, and put on my hat, and gave him my hand in friendship, and together we went to Frau von Relling. Ei, but Dorzheim stared to see us arm-in-arm; twenty-seven Catholics alone took off their hats to us——”

“Is there lots more about hats, Richard?”

“No, the rest is mostly about Lothar and you. The whole town is simply ramping. You’re a goose, Deb. ’Tisn’t worth it. Why, he’s only six months older than I am—and a German!”

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

But it was niggardly to grudge something that lay within her power to give. Or wasn’t it?... Chastity—the girl in white armour.... To give so easily, though—she remembered Doctor Steele. And the gloomy little boy had thirsted for that one kiss; too inarticulate to ask for it; too comic, in his owl’s spectacles and low collar and vertical crest of hair, to make a silently romantic plea, he just sat on the pile of logs looking up at her in dazed sickly reverie, as she came towards him along the misty blue road that meandered among the fir trees behind the town. She understood that by lightly dropping her lips on to his, there, in that scene, at that hour, she could give him an exquisite moment to carry through the sentimental years into manhood. Why not, then? The girl who withholds such chance gifts in her power, for the sake of what was called her bloom, what was she, after all, but a miser?

Deb’s kiss was just an impulse of almsgiving. She did not shatter the boy’s ecstasy by speech. Hardly pausing in her walk, she bent ... he had a vision of her serious mouth and warmly glowing eyes ... and she went swiftly on.

Frau Huldah von Sittart, who witnessed the idyll and reported on it, could not have been expected to interpret its psychology correctly. But to Richard, Deb tried to explain.... It was intolerable that he should suppose she enjoyed kissing scrubby little schoolboys.

He listened, brows knitted severely: “But, my dear kid, that sort of philanthropy is rather dangerous, isn’t it, where men in general are concerned?”

“It’s just whether one is to be generous or stingy—oh, don’t you see? ... to give what matters so little to me, and so tremendously much to them——”

[20]

“Make a habit of it, you’ll end by giving what means so much to you and so precious little to them.”

Richard’s wisdom was a mere accident of repartee; and Deb did not smile; she very rarely smiled; but her voice at all times held a certain clear joyousness that was in startling contrast to her tired little face; her voice was a child, years younger than her lips or her eyes. So that Richard could only dimly suspect her of hidden laughter as she said: “I esteem your judgment, but—you’re rather precocious, aren’t you?”

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

“Dropping magic,” she corrected him gravely. “And if I’m not the poorer, and am quite sure they will be the richer....” She tilted her head defiantly: “Richard, I’d rather be royal than—good!”

Richard pondered a moment over this. His sister watched him with eyes that were half sorrowful, half impudent. Most people would have been astonished that she could confide such feminine subtleties in a brother eight years her junior. But she had never yet been disappointed by a rebuff from Richard that was sheer scoffing schoolboy and no more. He possessed certain qualities she lacked, of uncompromising fairness and sanity. Also, he was shock-proof; an imperturbable Mahomet to whom all mountains came, and were received in a take-it-for-granted spirit.

Sometimes Deb wondered just where, in all this mass of solidity, lay buried that mysterious streak of understanding—kinship, perhaps—on which she relied.

Now he said: “Well, I wouldn’t practise your theory of magic-dropping in Dorzheim, if I were you. ’Tisn’t the right place for it. Too many Germans about. Germans take things seriously.”

Richard was right. Dorzheim did take this act of Deb’s with great and exceeding seriousness. They had primarily consulted Richard, and begged him to reprimand his sister, in the Teuton spirit that the male, in all emergencies, takes precedence.

The pastor and the schoolmaster and Frau von Relling and Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe and Huldah van Sittart and Felix Koch paid one another a succession of formal calls. Then suddenly Frau von Relling called no more upon the Kochs ... and small wonder, since Frieda-Marie Hauffe had been promised an exceptionally large dowry, and it was sheer[21] madness for Lothar to have imperilled this. True, Wanda von Relling still came to Marianna’s At Home day; but this was merely an act of defiance towards old Frau Koch (not on speaking terms with Marianna) who had condoled with Frau von Relling (not on speaking terms with Wanda) on her affliction for which the younger Koch household was responsible. And anyhow, all Dorzheim knew that Wanda had tried to get Sigismund Koch and had failed; so naturally and out of spite, she would choose to continue visiting at the house of Felix (not on speaking terms with Sigismund).... But all this led back to ancient history; and Dorzheim, flushed and garrulous, was not to be diverted from the delicious new scandal of the daughter of Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe insulted through the medium of the English girl staying with the Felix Kochs. Well, and had she not flirted with Ralph van Sittart as well? Half Dorzheim had seen her do it. The other half of Dorzheim had noticed her drinking coffee with Sigismund Koch; yes, actually setting her cap at him, the buck of the town, the famous rake—Ach! and did Felix know?... “And what was she doing walking alone in the woods at that hour of evening?” demanded Frau Huldah with relish: “Do modest maidens walk without escort? Though to be sure I have heard her say she is already twenty-three; doubtless she is in fear she will be left sitting.” “And Lothar von Relling is a Protestant; has been confirmed only half a year ago, with my Karl; that comes of it, then, when one permits oneself to be intimate with a Jewish family; I could have told Frau von Relling....”

The scandal threatened to broaden into religious controversy.

And Frieda-Marie, poor wormling, was, ach, inconsolable! Hitherto in Dorzheim a betrothal was sacred. Others of our sons may follow Lothar von Relling’s example of insubordination. To prevent which calamity, Lothar was first expelled from the Gymnasium; then locked into his bedroom; visited alternately by the pastor and the schoolmaster; finally, banished to an aunt and uncle in Dresden. Lothar went, darkly uplifted in his martyrdom; thrilling to a certain deathless memory; but wishing, nevertheless, that before going he might have had a word or two with Frieda-Marie, of whom he was very fond, and who was after all his betrothed....

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

[22]

Deb did quite a lot. She was heady with her first draught of conspicuous unpopularity. Vivid and defiant and a little frightened too. Never before had she found herself so the centre of animated disapproval. And as none of those who disapproved were of the people who mattered to her, she was not hurt, nor cast down, but merely possessed by the mischievous wish to do her worst on the propriety of Dorzheim; to avenge their harsh dealings with inoffensive little Lothar von Relling; to yield them more and more material for spiteful gossip. In brief, to earn their condemnation—these folk, who would not, could not, laugh.

She had plenty of social opportunity for exploiting her histrionic demon. For whatever Dorzheim’s private opinion of Deb, etiquette decreed that Frau Koch’s guest should be shown “attention,” should be feted and entertained. Dorzheim did its duty by Deb, and so considered itself free to censure her. She was invited to attend numerous afternoon coffee-parties, and one big dinner-party at which lawyers and doctors and their wives formed the majority, and Felix Koch was the only banker, as he gleefully informed Deb. She learnt then for the first time the exact ladder of snobbery, of which the apex is the nobility; thence on a descending scale to the military—the professionals—bankers—merchants—clergy and schoolmasters—everybody heedful of their head among the feet on the rung above; everybody ignoring the humbler position of their own feet. Jews had their own parallel ladder of snobbery; and actors and artists were not properly considered on any ladder at all.

The great event of her stay was a Masonic entertainment, where she was conspicuous in her dead-black crêpe-de-chine evening-dress. “An unmarried girl in black—Gott in Himmel! And brunette too; had she been a blonde, one might have forgiven her, though even then——” Most of the other ladies wore afternoon toilet; and a few were in tartan blouses with the neck ripped out, and dark skirts. At this party Deb made the acquaintance of the owner of the largest jewel factory in Dorzheim; who the next day formally conducted her over the premises; into the cavernous underground workshops; dimness speckled by small shaded red lights; at each separate table a man in tinted blinkers intent on a heap of precious stones that he would sift carelessly through his huge hairy fingers, before selecting one for his mysterious tools. None[23] of these men looked up as their employer and his party passed among them. Deb felt the sunless air choked up with hatred and menace; the whirring of the thousand little machines oppressed her; it was an evil place—and she remembered Koch’s allusion to the Socialist influence and possible trouble....

Home-life did not exist for the Kochs; every evening, when no set form of entertainment was offered, Felix and Marianna, Deb and Richard, sat in the big restaurant in Lindenstrasse; sat there for two or three hours, drinking coffee or syrups, eating sweet cloying cakes; while the men roared their politics or slammed the domino-cubes on the table, and slowly obliterated their womenfolk in clouds of foul smoke. The group about the Kochs was always a large one, and included the younger brothers who had been hastily sent for from neighbouring towns on rumour of Deb’s enormous dowry. Deb was herself responsible for this rumour. It was one of her first acts of devilry. Actually it procured her three proposals ... her excited fancy multiplied these to a grotesque figure out of all proportion to the truth. The trio of smug-correct young men, overwhelming her with staccato bows and wired nosegays and compliments which an intelligent child of ten might have disdained, made their offers of marriage almost simultaneously, and were all three accepted, with meek surprise that they should care for a portionless damsel ... at which they melted to the limpness of three candles left in a strong sun, and melted out of Deb’s sight, and melted away from Dorzheim. And two of them, because they had begun to love her, kept silence as to the reason for their withdrawal. But Ludo Salzmann wrote vindictively to the sister-in-law who had summoned him. And Deb, compelled in self-respect to commit one villainy the more, accepted Sigismund Koch’s invitation to drink tea with him in his rooms ... “English fashion—yes, I have dwelt some time in England.”

He had been accidentally introduced to her at the Lodge entertainment. And afterwards Felix remarked wrathfully, and hardly in the spirit of Masonic or natural brotherhood: “You are not to speak to that fine fellow. You understand? Not with my consent. Hundert-tausendteufel!—and what did you think of him?”

“He’s very handsome,” demurely.

“Ach, he is a scoundrel! And do you know what they call him in the town, with his brown curly beard and pale face?[24] They call him Jesus Christus. That’s a joke, you see.” Felix laughed uproariously, and Richard asked: “Why is it a joke, sir?” “But can’t you see? He, my brother, is a Jew ... and they call him Jesus Christus!” “But Jesus Christ was a Jew,” argued Richard stolidly. Koch stared at him. The English had no sense of humour. He turned the conversation from wit to politics: “What in your opinion are the present aims of Mister Usskeess?” But Richard was unable to fit the name to any English statesman of his knowledge, so did not take up the challenge.

With all his reputation of a fascinating rake, Sigismund behaved at his tea-party with exemplary decorum. Moreover, he had invited his mother to be present. Deb liked him better than any one she had met since her arrival in Germany.

“What are you doing in Dorzheim, for goodness’ sake, child?” This query he put when he was escorting her home.

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

“To find yourself in worse scrapes here?”

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

His eyes twinkled. “Tongues wag in Dorzheim.”

“May—may I come to you about it ... if things get bad?” For in spite of bravado, she was becoming apprehensive of the sly malice ever more apparent in Marianna’s conversation; of the enmity piling up against her; and of a vague, more impersonal enmity which, strangely, seemed to loom behind.

“Heaven protect me—and you too!” exclaimed Sigismund in mock horror. “And you suppose Dorzheim would regard me, me of all people, as a suitable confessor for your sins?”

It was evident that Sigismund prided himself on his reputation as a “dangerous man.”

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

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

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

“He did not try anything of the sort!” indignantly. “And I have no money. And your Frau Mama was there.”

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

Marianna was enraged because her well-planned intentions with regard to her husband and Deb had miscarried. Yet more enraged, because they had not quite miscarried. Moreover,[25] Sigismund happened to be the unknown rival whom Felix suspected in the background. If this does not accord with his care in providing an adequate chaperone for the little English rebel who so indiscreetly accepted an invitation to his rooms, let it be remembered that there is no element with whom the true rake deals more circumspectly than with girlhood ... until he reaches the age when chastity becomes desirable instead of formidable.

Marianna was further enraged because Felix had said he could not afford visitors and fur cloaks. The von Rellings had ceased to call. And now Deb was drinking tea with her mother-in-law—and not even bothering to lie about it.

And yet, when Richard proposed abruptly, at supper, that they ought to be thinking of departure, both his host and hostess were unable to stem themselves in mechanical utterance of their habitual code of protest and renewed hospitality: “But certainly you must not dream of leaving us yet—we shall not allow it—you have been with us so little time—it is such a pleasure. No, no, indeed you must not go....”

The next day, most of the workmen in the factories went on strike. Those who refused were attacked as blacklegs. The quaint, sunshiny streets were hideous with brawling. And Deb could no longer with safety be allowed to take her solitary walks, which were the only relief from the strain of Marianna’s perpetual smiling hatred.

By degrees, her feverish mood of excitement evaporated entirely. She began to dread stumbling over the traces of her own joyous misdemeanour. Was there no careless youth in this tight, compressed little city of envious wranglings and complicated feuds and bitter snobbery? It struck her with a shock that Dorzheim seemed to contain no element between subdued childhood and ambitious or self-satisfied matrimony.

Something ominous was afoot; she was no longer the centre of interest; men came and went on short journeys; men held whispered conferences, excluding their womenfolk. Deb felt ever more urgently the need for departure. But she was waiting for a letter from her family to say when they intended leaving Switzerland; and if she and Richard were to rejoin[26] them at Montreux, or at home in England. The letter was delayed; morning after morning she expected it, and it did not come. It ought to have contained money for the journey....

Dorzheim was no longer a funny little German town, inhabited mainly by caricatures. It was a place of horror.... She was wakeful at nights; and musing at her window, she saw, or thought she saw, long phantom trains glide without shriek or rumble over the railway-lines some half-mile distant. Black shapes of trains, no single window lit ... all night they were creeping past in the darkness ... and the next night ... and the next ... every time she rose from her bed to look again....

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

“Yes. Well?”

“Seen the papers lately?”

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

“Russia has joined Servia, and Germany has declared war on Russia, and—we’re in Germany. They say that France will have to join up with Russia, and perhaps England with France. Then there’s Holland and Belgium ... doubtful if they can keep out....”

With a sound like the rush of bursting waters, Deb’s nightmare ceased to be her private affair.... Bursting waters ... yes, a piece of music—Ravel, was it? She had heard it before she left London—the Sorcerer’s ignorant apprentice left alone with the magic broom ... trickle of water that he summoned up ... torrents of water ... multiplying devouring water ... it swamped the room and the corners of the room and the street outside and the world beyond ... gleeful swirls of water, unrelenting, irresistible, that pursued and flooded every inch of dry ... every inch of dry ... the music roared deafeningly in her head, drowning coherent thought.... Somebody had touched the broom....

She told Richard about the fantastic procession of trains.

“Troops, of course. Being hurried to the frontier. They[27] must have quenched all the lights. Didn’t want us to know they were prepared.”

“Us? You and me?”

“England, you ass!” Richard grinned at the idea of a nation plunged in darkness for the benefit of himself and Deb. Deb—umph! he hunched his shoulders, and stared at her moodily. He was responsible for Deb’s safety.

“You wouldn’t care to marry somebody here and settle down, I suppose? It might come cheaper than hauling you along to England. It would be sport getting through if I were alone....”

“I’m sorry. No, I’d rather not settle in Dorzheim for good. But we could go home by two separate routes.”

“Job enough to find one route, I should say. Stop ragging, Deb; this isn’t a joke.”

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

“That idiot Koch ought to have warned us. He must have known something. We should have left here a week ago, when I suggested it.... If it’s going to be a general flare-up, then one jolly well wants to be in one’s own country, and not in somebody else’s!”

Patriotism, even more than bunting-deep, is largely a matter of habit. Before August, nineteen-fourteen, Richard had rather taken his country for granted. Now he awoke to an England that in return for years of security and a lazy pleasure at the sight of so many red patches on the school-map, suddenly exacted service—fighting service. Richard cursed his age; welcomed any indication in the trend of things “out there” that seemed to prophesy a minimum of three years’ activities. “If only the war holds out till I can get to it!” He suffered from disturbing premonitions of a peace signed and ratified just one day before his eighteenth birthday.

War, as a pastime, a profession, an emotional outlet, fulfilled every unspoken need of his temperament. He was a born pugilist; he did not mind bodily discomfort; he was endowed with splendid physique; he kept cool in emergencies; he had an infinite preference for male society; he was under a firm impression that he was devoid of that cumbersome burden called imagination; he lacked graceful accomplishments. What did the future hold for a boy of such capacities and disqualifications? Nineteen-fourteen came like an answer to an obstinate riddle.

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

Winborough had its Cadet Corps, which was a slight compensation for the utter meaningless absurdity of Latin and Greek—dead studies in a time of live history. At least, one was preparing for a later share in the conflict. The ethics of war and peace did not bother him. War suited him, as a definite opportunity for concerted action; whereas peace appeared a condition infinitely more difficult, more scattered and involved and hesitant. Richard approved of the indubitable simplicity of a nation at war: every mind thinking alike; every effort directed towards the same end; loyalty accepted as a predominant emotion, without need to fuss over[29] lesser problems of one’s personal age. He was animated as yet by no special rancour towards the Germans.... Poor old Grandfather was a German; rotten for him, these days! Pater was naturalized, so he was all right (the yellow press was not circulated at Winborough).... The natural conditions of war demanded an enemy, and the Germans would do as well as anyone else; better, in fact; for they were powerful and well-prepared, so that there was an excellent chance that hostilities would last till Richard was eighteen——

He always came back to that.

The Dunnes were both in the navy; Greville, just about to join the Grand Fleet on H.M.S. “Canada”; young Frank, still at Osborne. Richard spent this Christmas of Greville’s final leave at Mrs Dunne’s jolly, crowded cottage in Essex, on the outskirts of a little country town that was just about the same size as Dorzheim.... He amused the Dunnes exceedingly by his accounts of that place, and of his headlong scramble home with Deb. It was something of an exploit to have been caught in enemy territory on the eve of war: “If we had started for home two days later, we shouldn’t have started at all; they’d have kept us there for weeks, probably, and then goose-stepped us over the frontier under strict official supervision.”

“Deb, not you,” Greville corrected. “I knew a chap of our age who was at Dresden at the time, and they’ve interned him over there.”

“Lord, not really! That would have been a swizzle, missing all the fun, tucked away with a lot of rotten Germans——”

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

“M’yes, so they would. Still, one would be horribly out of it all; not that Winborough’s much better”—reverting to the old grievance—“I wish I’d plumped for the navy when you did.”

Mrs Dunne smiled rather wistfully. “I wonder if your father shares that wish of yours, Richard.”

“Dunno. Shan’t see him till Easter, I expect. I was glad to be away these hols. out of all the fuss of moving. We’ve let our house, you know.”

“You must have cheered when you got your hoof in England again,” Greville remarked, reverting to the journey from Dorzheim.

[30]

But instead of the “You bet!” one might have expected, Richard was silent.... He was still shy of remembering the rush of sentiment which had attacked him on arrival at Folkestone that second of August, after three chaotic days and nights through a continent that was screaming mad with war.... God bless these stolid English porters—these English engines that knew reliably whither they were bearing the train—this decent Sunday evening quiet everywhere.... Richard dug his hands in his pockets and snapped his lips firmly as he strode up the gangway of the boat; he was neither lunatic nor poet, to shout aloud the pæan: “England, my England!” that was tightening his throat and thrumming in his heart ... but he had vowed, nevertheless, as he stepped on shore, that he would prove to the utmost stretch of his powers a good citizen, a loyal patriot. He was definitely grateful to his country at this moment for its mere existence.

The emotion had died to a vague shame at having made an exhibition of himself, even with himself as the only witness. Yet now, as he bent forward to turn the chestnuts roasting over the fire, and tossed a burnt one on to the lap of Molly Dunne, Greville’s flapper cousin, he experienced the kind of satisfaction with his surroundings which can best be translated into a heartfelt grunt. They were the conventionally right sort of people: Mrs Dunne, frail and pleasant; the two boys in their blue and gold uniforms; Molly, tanned brown as her own tangle of hair—an ugly kid, but good sport. A rough little terrier lay on the hearthrug; everybody’s skates, caked from recent use, sprawled all over the shabby chintz furniture; and the big holly-twined portrait of the late Commander Dunne domineered the room from above the mantelpiece. Jolly things strewn about, too; the model of a Chinese junk; bits of queer distorted coral and stone and shell; fantastic weapons slung on the walls; photographs of battleships and their crews—all these evidences of a sailor family, and far lands, without in the least influencing the typically English atmosphere of the room. If the Dunnes had settled in Japan or Bulawayo, their apartments would still have been as—Dunne-ish. These curios—they were just curios, neither more nor less; and as such, were given their proper place.

Queer, reflected Richard, that before the spasm of homesick misery which had thrust at him on a certain evening in the streets of Dorzheim, he had never been consciously aware,[31] as at present, of a state of well-being. He supposed the contrast had for good or for evil awakened him; and questioned glumly whether it were altogether convenient to be at the mercy of perceptions as sharpened and sensitive.

If this were Dorzheim, then the chestnuts would be gingerbread; Greville and Molly would be “betrothed” by arrangement of their elders; and Richard would be proudly noting the fact that he was the one Jew with whom the Dunnes had “traffic....”

Thank goodness, in England you could be a Jew, and hardly even know it....

Jews ... but the Marcus children were yearly allowed to hunt for hidden Easter eggs in their garden. Dorothea, Ferdinand’s wife, had been the mildest of Protestants, as he was the most tolerant of Israelites; and there were times when bacon and matsas had appeared simultaneously upon their table, not from any unadjusted clash of orthodoxy, but merely that Ferdinand insisted on the British national breakfast, and Dorothea had an eccentric liking for unleavened bread when it was “in season.” Richard and Deb never learnt any Hebrew, till the approach of the boy’s “Barmitzfa” rendered necessary in his case a certain knowledge of the language, easily forgotten. The occasion itself struck him as mainly remarkable for the amount of presents he received. Deb considered it distinctly unfair that boys should be able to put in such a profitable extra birthday; she tried to get quits in hard value, by accepting as often as offered the post of bridesmaid, whether in church or in synagogue. Both religious ceremonies made an equally profound impression upon her—for an hour. The Marcuses did not keep up the Jewish feast-days and holidays, and consequently the younger generation were rather hazy as to their origin and significance. Ferdinand made a half-hearted effort to keep them reminded of the most important of these, so that they should not give offence to such of their friends and relatives as were strict in observance, by a blank stare of ignorance on receiving salutation: “Muzzeltoff!” They wished each other a Happy New Year quite impartially in the autumn and on the first of[32] January; and Christmas was a jovial mingling of whatever customs were pleasantest of diverse creeds and countries.

Dorothea and Ferdinand had agreed that whatever children might be born to them, should make their own choice of religion, or no religion, when they were old enough. Themselves had endured much from despotic parents, and were eagerly and insistently broad-minded in their educational intentions.

Old Hermann Marcus had sent his son to England on business when the lad was barely twenty—a shy, plump, sweet-faced little fellow, with bright brown eyes round with admiration for England and England’s ways. Peremptorily recalled to Bavaria after two years of Paradise, he summoned all his courage, and—from a safe distance—defied the tyrant ... somewhat tempering the grand effect of his rebellion by a diplomatic postscript pointing out that in London he could be of more service to the firm than in Munich; was rapidly gathering custom; and hoped in a few years to be able to marry. His father replied tersely that he was a thickhead, had always been a thickhead, would always be a thickhead, and was therefore admirably adapted by nature to settle down in a nation of thickheads—“but in that case, you will at once sever connection with my business.” Ferdinand dutifully trotted back to Germany; spent several wretched months in vain longings for his adopted country; and finally, not being of that stuff of which heroes are made, sneaked back to his Hampstead boarding-house, his tennis, his Sunday river-parties, and mysterious November fogs, leaving his sister Stella to break the news to old Marcus. The latter promptly cut his son out of his will. Ferdinand perseveringly worked himself up to a sufficiently good position on the Stock Exchange to be able, at the age of twenty-seven, to rescue Dorothea Ladislov from an uncongenial home, and marry her romantically at the registrar’s. The pretty, black-haired girl was the daughter of an aristocratic Czech family, which had settled in England before she was born. She and Ferdinand had fallen in love over their compared experiences of early years heavy and burdensome with must-nots. Deb, directly she appeared on the scene, flitted like a will-o’-the-wisp through dream-acres of sunshiny freedom planned for her by her parents, entirely from contrast with their own rigidly enclosed childhood. Not all the present bliss in the world could quite compensate for[33] those best lost years. Deb should live carelessly radiant from the very beginning—“Not spoilt, Ferdie; that’s different and hateful. She must learn reasonable manners and control; obedience even. Only there needn’t be so very much to obey. And as soon as she can think for herself——”

“She shall dance to her own melodies. Ja, ja, it will be pleasant to have a happy little daughter, not checked, not afraid. And we must learn not to be shocked at her, as we grow older. She shall know that we trust her. Indeed, yes, it will be all right. When one is happy, one is also good. Our parents never understood that.”

“It will be all right,” echoed Dorothea, her dark eyes tender and luminous. “And we won’t grumble, or ask questions, will we? Papa was always grumbling, and Mama asked so many questions.... Ferdie, it would be terrible if we should forget, and wake up one morning to find we were only ordinary parents.”

She gave a little gasp of horror. Her husband took her face between his hands and kissed it....

They made quite a pretty hobby out of extraordinary parenthood.

Then, as if to remind them that the other species still existed, when Deb was a wilful little creature of seven, came an imperious summons from Ferdinand’s father, who most inopportunely had decided to forgive them. The old thraldom held; they had no option but meekly to submit to forgiveness. This necessitated a journey to Bavaria—a long stay in Munich. Stella was so glad of them, so glad of this young, laughing sister-in-law in the house. But Marcus defied all tradition of stern grandfathers by refusing to succumb instantly to the pretty fearless ways of his first grandchild; in fact, he disapproved so completely of Deb, her looks, her English education, her unrebuked chatter, her clothes, her nurse, her loose shower of black hair, of everything that was Deb’s, that she was kept as much as possible out of his way. Sweet-natured and subservient in all else, Ferdinand was implacable on the one point: the old autocrat should not interfere with the happiness of one more girl-child. Already he had doomed Stella to spinsterhood; he forbade young men inside the house, and forbade Stella outside the house. One conventional marriage arrangement he had made for her with the parents of a sufficiently wealthy suitor, who, however, turned from Stella[34] to a larger dowry. No father could be expected to do more in the way of duty. An arrangement which Stella had the temerity to make for herself, he countered by the simple Teutonic method of locking her up, and shouting at her till she was tired....

For Ferdinand, he had gained a slight respect. The boy had at least managed to win some sort of commercial foothold. “What do you reckon to make per annum, wass?” “About six hundred to a thousand.” Marcus was distinctly impressed: “Ach! as little as that?” Ferdinand enquired after the old firm. “The profits are excellent, sir; increasing yearly. Bah, did you think we should go to pieces because you left us?” sarcastically.

The arrogant old merchant was lying. At Dorothea’s death he was thankful for an excuse to let Stella go to England and take over the charge of her brother’s household; thankful for an excuse to cut down expenses ... the business was rapidly running downhill. He warded off bankruptcy for another eleven years—then came the irrevocable crash. Ferdinand, who could not rid himself of the filial habit, immediately wrote and offered his father a home with them. So Hermann Marcus, at the age of seventy-seven, came to England, to “Daisybanks,” in Lansdowne Terrace. He found himself instantly relegated to a very comfortable back-seat among his children and grandchildren. Ferdie, though still timid in actual converse with his father, yet proved stubbornly master in his own house; and Stella had developed a brisk liveliness which was a true source of grief to her father. The two now treated his attempts to bully them, with a semi-humorous tolerance which the puzzled despot could only ascribe to his loss of income—“Of course, if I were swollen with money,”—with grim common-sense he resigned himself to dependence and rheumatism; it comforted him to suppose his loss of authority was due to material and not to moral causes.

As for the third generation, he continued to disapprove of Deb, but liked Richard infinitely better. “You’ve no eyes for anyone but the girl,” he would growl at Ferdinand. “To my two children I dispensed equal affection.” Ferdinand smiled.... When he smiled he more than ever resembled a cheerful little troll, his small ripe face a web of intersecting spidery wrinkles. It was true that Deb was his darling who[35] could do no wrong; it was for Deb that he and Dorothea had built up so many defiant immature plans—beautiful plans. Dorothea had died for Richard’s life ... she would have loved the boy best, if she had lived; Ferdie guessed it, and conscientiously tried to supply a double quantity of favouritism. But Richard was undemonstrative; had started the schoolboy attitude even while his nurse was hopefully striving against odds to turn him into a pretty dear, a Fauntleroy. At three years old, his voice was gruff, his knees scraped, his manner properly off-hand, his tastes independent; he called ladies and gentlemen by their surnames, without prefix, when they bent to caress “dear little Dickie.” It was disconcerting to Ferdie’s kindly-disposed partners, misled by the white suit and deep lace collar, to find heavy brows bent upon them, while they were boomingly hailed as “Nash” and “Rothenburg.” Aunt Stella, wisely accepting the inevitable, bought her nephew a couple of rough navy-blue jerseys, a pair of sturdy boots, and a Newmarket overcoat; Nurse lamented that this latter article was not in white bunny-fur—“Master Dickie looks such a darling in white.” “He looks something between a burglar and a prize-fighter in anything; for the future, Nurse, he had better be known only as Richard.” “Oh, Madam, he’s but a baby yet!” Richard overheard, and: “I’m but a baby yet,” he pleaded with dignity the next time his father attempted to administer mild but well-deserved chastisement. From sheer astonishment, Ferdie let him off.

And after that, he seemed to be always at school, or “knocking round with other chaps.” He fell into frequent scrapes, and usually managed to fall out of them again without extraneous assistance. He stolidly kept a place in class a little above half-way, without spurts or lapses. His philosophy was eminently suited to practical needs; he kept his ugliness well brushed and tubbed and free from eccentricity, and his slow white grin had a bewildering fascination.

“Our young Richard, my dear,” commented Aunt Stella to Deb, “reminds me of the best quality of almond rock; you take it home, and prepare for a treat, and then you find the sweetshop girl has forgotten to break it up for you.” She spoke English perfectly, but with foreign vivacity and a strong foreign accent. “Richard has never been broken up; he is unwieldy; he cannot be put in the mouth.”

[36]

“But he is of the best quality,” Deb quickly defended him; and was silent for a moment, thinking about Richard. She adored the boy; was content to know that she came first with him, though he rarely saw her, and still more rarely spoke to her except in the ordinary way of younger-brother teasing.

“Aunt Stella, Richard isn’t so stodgy as he likes to think he is,” she said suddenly. “Do you know, twice I’ve seen him nearly hysterical.”

“My child, you’re dreaming.”

“I’m not. Once was because a wasp was circling over his plate, and wouldn’t go away. And the other time was over a book.”

“Dear me, what book?”

But Deb was sorry now she had spoken so impulsively. Stella Marcus had a disconcerting way of making every subject seem as a hollow ball with a tinkle inside, to be lightly tossed, twice, thrice, and then let fall ... to roll away.

“What book?”

“‘A Tale of Two Cities.’”

“Oh, every little boy cries over that.”

Deb had lied. It was not “The Tale of Two Cities,” but an account of the Dreyfus case.

This first war Christmas of nineteen-fourteen, the Marcuses moved out of their house in Lansdowne Terrace. The Stock Exchange was one of the definite places where a man of German extraction could be made to feel uncomfortable; very uncomfortable. Ferdinand Marcus did not complain of the cold-shouldering he received. “It’s natural, Stella; every time I open my mouth they are bound to be reminded.” But then some arbitrary stockbroker accused him publicly of being a spy and a traitor ... and Marcus quickly resigned his partnership in the firm of Nash, Rothenburg and Marcus; and withdrew to live as best he might on his income. The little man was hurt and sorrowful; he loved England passionately—he had renounced Germany and chosen England from motives of pure love. Not all the sons of Germany are as violently attached to the Fatherland as the Fatherland would like to make out. Some among them have resented the prison-wall system, the prevalent aggressive despotism that crushes out their human ways and wishes. So they had come to England, and had found a difference, and had stayed.... “Especially we Jews find the difference,” Ferdinand explained[37] to his sister, when he told her what had occurred on the Exchange. “They don’t realize, over here, how the Jews are still treated in Germany. And so they won’t believe that our loyalty to a country adopted is not hypocrisy, and that we can be truly glad if England wins the war. Stella, I wish they would believe it; I wish they would.” His lips trembled with the pathos of a child who has received an unmerited snubbing. “What ho! who cares?” he cried jerkily. Ferdie took pride in his collection of English slang; a pride which dated back to his enforced return to Germany, thirty-two years ago, with a few typical samples of the period. Stella remembered how he had kept up his forlorn spirits by use of such defiant oddments as “By Jingo,” “Here we are again,” “It’s all my eye and Betty Martin,”—“What’s that?” thundered his father, overhearing. Ferdie, blushing crimson, tried to explain that Betty Martin was the name of a lady—and—and the rest was idiom. “You will hold your mouth,” came the irritable edict....

Now—“What ho! who cares?” But he was miserable at the necessity for leaving his home. He was at that ripe pippin stage of the late forties when comfort, sentiment, and beaming good-humour make a happy blend of man. His voice had loudened to a hearty geniality. When he sat in a chair, he expanded and filled it out. On the anniversaries of Dorothea’s death and of their wedding-day, he did not go to business, but put white flowers under her portrait, and sobbed tenderly and unashamedly over the memories aroused. He liked standing with his carving-knife at the head of his own table, with a well-roasted joint in front of him. He liked Christmas carols, and happy faces, and giving presents to his family, and surprises, and Deb’s arms round his neck while she pleaded for some special treat; and songs with a bloom of mellow sadness over them; and a tame landscape with a sort of chubby frolic to it—cottage-children or lambs in the sunshine; and well-worn slippers, and moonlight. If he had continued to live in South Germany, he would no doubt have liked Schumann and beer, and the Lorelei and charcoal-burners and Grimms’ Fairy-tales. Perhaps these tastes still lingered on, unsuspected, in his system, subservient to a solemn love for the river Thames; he had given his heart to the Thames while he was still a stripling, and no Rhine-memories could alter the preference. Richard certainly should go to Oxford;[38] Ferdie looked forward to visiting him there; to some mysterious festivity entitled Commem.

Above all, perhaps, he loved the sight of lovers. Lovers such as he and Dorothea had been: compounded of joy without ecstasy; sadness without anguish; youthful, blushing lovers who held hands, and could be teased and blessed.... And later—“the bride was given away by her father.”... And later still: “—of a girl” ... who would soon learn to blow on his watch and crow when it flew open.

For of course he was thinking of Deb.

No parental coercion in her case; no prudent selection by her elders. To that he was pledged; had not he and Dorothea planned that Deb should seek out her own true mate in her own good time, and bring him home?

And bring him home.... But home was “Daisybanks,” Lansdowne Terrace. Ferdie’s pleasures were not of the scattered order, but had associated themselves very closely with just that click to the gate, announcing his home-coming every evening; just that virginia creeper, matting one side of the house in red; and just that half-acre of garden at the back, where the sweet-william and the canterbury bells repaid so gratefully his careful watering every summer evening, though the hose still leaked at that one faulty portion of rubber tubing.

“We shall have to tell them about that leak, Stella,” was all he found courage to say, when his sister informed him that she had already found a tenant to take over their expiring lease, and to buy the furniture.

Stella was the practical person of the family. Stella had beautiful white teeth, and a shrill excitable voice. Because she rattled on incessantly, she was regarded by her contemporaries as a wit; and her popular entrance into a room was usually hailed uproariously, as though the assembled company had been awaiting its jester. Her secret horror was to be regarded as the traditional narrow-minded and intolerant old maid; and to avert this she harped facetiously on the topic. She owned a unique collection of the sort of cayenne “good tale” which can always be relied upon to raise at least one blush and one protest; and so by repartee and impromptu, she managed to achieve an enfant terrible reputation, of which she was as vain as younger girls of their conquests. Men called her “a sport,” and would often drop into a chair by[39] her side, with the latest chuckle from Town Topics or the Pink ’Un—“Nothing shocks Stella Marcus, you know!” ... and certainly, as far as anything verbal was concerned, Stella fancied herself well in the van of the New Movement. But she did not realize that lip-service was no longer vassal to emancipation; and that: “Do shocking things, not say them all day long,” was the up-to-date rendering of Kingsley’s advice; did not realize, in fact, that for all her breathless determination, she was not quite able to catch up with Deb’s generation.

Deb! ... of necessity she could not stand for a cipher in Stella’s emotions; was bound to arouse love or hatred ... perhaps the conflict was not yet finally decided. For Deb was not only the daughter she might have borne—if Hermann Marcus had not interposed his bulky will between Stella and Stella’s destiny, but also the girl she might have been—again if Hermann had taken the same views of fatherhood as Ferdie. Out of the non-fulfilment of Stella’s existence had arisen Deb’s present Paradise of liberty; Stella herself perceived that: herself the ashes and Deb the gaily-plumaged phœnix. Ferdie, as a father, needed the tragic example afforded him by his elder sister unmarried—for marriage, when it is obviously a vocation squandered, is as true tragedy as the squandering of some great gift. Stella by nature had been just such a girl as Deb was now.... And she did not hate Deb, nor use her authority to baulk the girl where herself had been baulked. To her credit, she took instead a fierce, yet half-amused pride in flaunting Deb’s emancipation from control, before the grimly disapproving glare of Deb’s grandfather; it was revenge by proxy.... “You prevented me from acting thus—and thus—and thus—You have no power here. Look—and look again: this is what I should have been, this is what I should have done. But all the spilt joy has been gathered into another cup—and yours are no more the fingers at the handle!”... So Stella’s long-shaped greenish eyes danced their wordless triumph at her father; while Deb, innocent of interplay, was frankly and chummily telling Ferdie about some successful impertinence of girlhood.

She did not hate Deb. She did not love her either—at least, not in any tender lullaby ways. If she exulted in Deb’s happiness, promoted it wherever possible, defended her against[40] aggressive comment, nevertheless she was curiously aware all the time that the relations between herself and Deb had not reached completion; were hovering on the verge of something fundamental and savage of either love or hatred—she did not know. Meanwhile Deb, in her lordly childishness, was heartily fond of Aunt Stel; and people remarked how nice it was that Miss Marcus and her niece were almost like sisters together!

It was Stella who arranged that they should temporarily move into a boarding-house till Mr Marcus was able to ascertain more exactly what his very reduced income was likely to be. Some of his money was invested abroad, and nobody knew how long the war would last.... It was best not to enter upon a definite mode of living just now; and she did not care about house-keeping in apartments; their own house, or nothing.

Montagu Hall in South Kensington would do very well; she and Deb were each to have a small single room; Ferdinand shared a double bedroom with his father, who required a certain amount of attention and nursing. Richard was going to spend Christmas with the Dunnes, and therefore need not be considered till the Easter holidays; and perhaps by then....

Stella Marcus, for all her caustic, jesting shrewdness, was not aware that those who once acquire the boarding-house habit will continue to say from season to season, from anniversary to anniversary, from year to year: “Perhaps by then ...;” will never own that they have settled down to unsettlement.

They drew up with all their baggage at about five o’clock on the second of January. As the front door was opened to them, a voice from the hall rasped out into the foggy air:

“—I like a dog to be a dog, not—Shut that door, can’t you?... Oh, I see——”

Three men were standing about in the hall, smoking. The owner of the rasp also possessed a long domed head, crude pink where the hair had worn away on top, and a face of the same nursery pink, ploughed by implacable lines of opinion and ill-humour. He stopped his complaint, and stared with curiosity at the newcomers passing through the hall.

Deb knelt in front of the squat sturdy oil-stove with “Cora” gold-lettered across its front, and began carefully to trickle a supply of kerosene into the tank. Cora was essential to the evening’s enjoyment of her three votaries; their friendship grouped itself round her personality, and Aunt Stella, whose wit ran fatally in the direction of punning, had even dared to nickname their union the Chorus.

Deb knelt, perplexed, musing, a vestal before the altar....

Cora was six weeks old, and was just losing her first fragrance when Deb bought her.... “Does anyone want an oil-stove cheap?” she demanded, rushing like tragedy upon the assembled company in the lounge of Montagu Hall Hotel. “With saucepan, feeder, gallon-can, and all my illusions, complete for five-and-tenpence?”

“My dear child!” cried Stella, “Cora has been yours for exactly half a day.”

Deb sank down despairingly on the fender-seat. “Five-and-eightpence,” she amended. Then, darkly: “To be bested by a rotten little piece of ironmongery one foot by two——!”

“Does she smell?” Jenny Carew exclaimed impulsively; “oh, then something must be wrong with her.” (They commented afterwards how queer it was that never for an instant had Cora been “it” to any of them; always “her.”) “Do let me take her to pieces for you, and put her together again. Do let me, Miss Marcus. I haven’t had a thrill for ages. And if I fail I’ll buy the fragments for Bobby to play with. Dolph, who did we last lend our screw-driver to?”

Her husband, morose and bearded, was not interested in Cora. “Somebody who hasn’t given it back.”

“All right, Mrs Carew; and you can have the bits for Bobby anyway, when you’ve thrilled long enough. I don’t want the little brute, whole or in pieces; I would have thrown her out of the window, but just at that moment she threw me out at[42] the door. She certainly has character, and a perfumed soul, and—and I was so happy, carrying her home in my arms this morning.”

Someone spoke indolently from the deepest armchair at the best corner of the fire. “Miss Marcus, I’ll buy your disillusion for five-and-eightpence.”

“Will you? Will you really? Do you want her?” Deb looked across at him shyly. The soldier had not been long at Montagu Hall; rarely spoke, except, lately, to Jenny; and generally did not give an impression that he could be stimulated from a state of sunken lethargy for anybody on earth.

“Not for myself. Heaven forbid! But my men are always shouting for more stoves. Doubt if even Cora could throw half a hundred lusty fusiliers out of their recreation room. I’ll have a look at her, if I may.”

He and Jenny and Deb went up to the second floor to inspect Cora.

“There she is already ...” mourned Deb, on the first floor landing.

Presently the three of them were standing with gaze fixed in fascinated silence upon the object for purchase. There was no other illumination in the room; Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of white light and black shadow....

A boarding-house—an oil-stove—the soldier—Jenny Carew—it struck Deb from what a bizarre rag-bag romance drew its patchwork pieces. She stole a look at Burton Ames; he was old; possibly about forty-six; and had an air of being neglected—neglectful: his khaki slouched over his chunky shoulders; his hair, grizzled fawn, was disordered and ragged; the corners of his eyes gathered into wrinkles. Not young, not successful, not handsome, and married ... she had heard him mention a wife somewhere in the West Country.... Preposterous that even for five swift seconds she should have received an impression that the big thing might be hidden here for her—

And then she saw that Jenny’s charming little gamin face was alive, and warm, and flickering as firelight; roguery achase round her lips; tears on her brown, blunt lashes; promise and mutiny and tenderness ... what was the matter with Jenny? Slowly the soldier’s hand came out and closed tightly round her arm, just above the elbow.... Deb, still watching, almost winced at sight of the grip....

And then Ames let go; and flung himself down in the armchair[43] close at hand; and said, with the content of a man who unexpectedly finds sanctuary: “Let’s stop up here. We don’t want other people. I’m sick of the trail of other people littering the house. I like it up here.”

Yes—but where was the place for Deb, in Deb’s room?

She had no need of married people; took it for granted that the married man cannot lead by splendid sun-beaten ways to finality; that a married woman has ever the advantage over a maid, by won tranquillity of experience. She had no need of these two. Then why did they leave it lying about under her notice ... whatever it was they had found? The atmosphere was neither amorous nor exotic; but Deb had an impression as though the eternal man and woman had just come home; and that at any moment he might commit some little commonplace act—slip off his coat and hand it to Jenny to be mended, to make significant the fact that they were man and woman come home—

—In her room. Petulantly she turned away from sight of Jenny’s face ... could she reach the door and get out before Jenny’s lidded emotions brimmed over into action?—Too late! ... Jenny’s arms were strangling Deb, Jenny’s scorching lips were on Deb’s cheek and neck, Jenny’s half-sobbing half-laughing runs and murmurings of incoherence were thrown upon the unnatural silence ... “You darling—darling—darling! I’ve wanted to hug you like this since the first night you crept into the lounge. You’re such a beautiful little thing ... isn’t she? Isn’t she? Oh, I’m so happy you’re here—do let’s all three be pals—I hate everyone else in this beastly place ... little funny, sorrowful, creamy kid, I like you—I like you——”

And all the while her eyes were on the soldier. And all this boundless slippery exuberance was for the soldier—at the soldier—it did not matter upon what pretext it vented itself. Warmth and excitement to spare for Deb too ... Deb felt this, or she would have torn herself away from the embrace ... but Jenny was wholly unconscious that she was making love to a man with a girl as the intermediary; she was no self-analyst. But the soldier and Deb, in one look exchanged, established that mental kinship which exists between those who see things alike introspectively and from the outside view; with meaning duplicated and tripled; made grotesque by circumstance or contrast; backwards from the future, and[44] twisted this way and that by imps of irony; kinship of those who can see with the chill impersonality of gods on Olympus, and also with pointed application to their own tiny scheme of things; restless subtle kinship of those who dream and those who question.

And even as they silently hailed each other, he smiling a little under his fair drawn eyebrows, and she very serious; hailed each other through the froth and tumble of Jenny’s excited talk, the white light which rayed the ceilings and walls of the room, was sucked into soft inky chokiness....

“Little beast has gone out,” commented the soldier, in disrespectful reference to Cora. “Light her again, and let’s sit round and be comfortable.”

Of course Deb did not sell Cora.

Round Cora they hacked a sort of intimate privacy, with privileges for their trio alone. Cora was their excuse, the ostentatious cause of their withdrawal from the rest of the boarding-house: they were going to smoke a cigarette with Cora; they were going to fry potatoes on Cora; Cora was depressed, and needed the instalment of a fresh wick. Perhaps they rather overdid Cora; but the intangible need binding them together needed to solve itself into tangible expression. Cora, whether as an exaggerated joke or a temperamental goddess, was ... convenient. “Are you coming home to Cora to-night?” or “I saw Cora was lit, so I walked in!” Deb was High Priestess of the Oil-can; Jenny, principal engineer and mechanic; and the soldier serenely enjoyed results, as was typical of him.

And then Stella Marcus crystallized their dependence on the Cora legend into a pun. They took up the nickname—“The Chorus meets to-night!”—schoolgirlish methods of allusion ... but Jenny and the soldier had been battered by realities, and welcomed the silliness of their present relapse. And Deb, her soul a responsive barometer, sank alternately to the soldier’s semi-humorous apathy of nothing-worth-while, and leapt again to Jenny’s soaring irresponsibility.

The soldier had been thus labelled by Deb in the spirit of irony, when he told her that he had been twenty-three years[45] in the army, and was not, as she had at first imagined, one of that gallant mushroom crop raised by the call of war. He had been in India and South Africa, Aden, Singapore, Malta and Gibraltar. It was difficult to conceive of anyone less of the accepted military type: an individualist of the let-me-alone order; an atheist; a keen but destructive logician; a hopelessly romantic pessimist; he could not understand ready-made standards of conduct, of honour, of conviviality; would not conform to the prevalent disposition to flock together, pray together, stand or fall together. A soldier, even a good soldier, without esprit de corps, was a deplorable spectacle; hardly likely to prove an acquisition to the mess. His fellow-officers, after a perplexed interval of acquaintance, were wont to pronounce him a rum beast. To which, very occasionally, was made the resentful addition: “Tries to be funny”—when Burton Ames unleashed his weary but mordant form of humour. He was more popular with his men, who appreciated the eccentric interest he was prone to waste on them singly and as persons, however much he depreciated them collectively.

Fitly, he should have been apprenticed to some trade or profession which combined the essentials of a sailor, an explorer, a landed proprietor, a hermit and a carpenter. The career of Robinson Crusoe answered all requisites to perfection....

Out of Deb’s little crowded room, made vivid by her own books and pictures, he created for himself a sort of amateur desert island, away from the gregarious herd in the smoking-room and lounge and drawing-room downstairs. His own room was bare and uncomfortable, as only a soldier’s can be who has many times shifted camp, and without a woman to look after him. And Jenny’s larger room was liable to intrusions from Dolph and Bobby. But in Deb’s room he hung curtains, and fiddled with Cora, and altered furniture, and smoked his pipe, and examined books, and listened to Deb’s wicked imitations of their fellow-boarders, and cooked potatoes by his own home-made method of so many heart-beats to the moment and so many moments to the boil, and confided in Deb and Jenny his love of complete solitude, with ever-deepening tranquillity of mood. Sometimes they all went out together on some impromptu ramble leading to Hampstead Heath or a cinema or a coffee-stall. But usually they were to be found in a careless group round Cora; Burton Ames lumbering in[46] the only armchair; one figure a-sprawl on the bed; the other flopped on the floor; accommodation of the soldier’s huge inert limbs reducing to nil the already limited space. A clammy February and bleak March urged a desire to huddle, morally and actually. It was scarcely possible for one of them to make a movement without brushing against one of the others.... Sometimes Dolph would meander into the room in funereal quest of his wife; and sometimes Aunt Stella left her rubber of bridge to exchange a few jokes with Major Ames. But for the most part they were tacitly left alone, or unjustly alluded to as a “noisy gang” by Mr Gryce, whose room was below theirs.

Ferdie Marcus was far too glad that Deb was occupied and amused to question the propriety of this bedroom intimacy. If all had gone well, if there had been no war, the poor child would have continued in possession of her own sitting-room in “Daisybanks,” where she had formerly received her friends—“ragged” with her friends was the mysterious term applied—Ferdie had, of course, appropriated it to his own use: “Na, my darling, did you have a good rag this evening?”... He gathered she was having a “rag” now; it was natural to her age; but everything that Deb did, he whittled to fit this assumption of nature—only natural that the child should want to be out—only natural that the child should want to be at home—“Leave them alone, Stella; Jenny Carew is always present; it is only natural that Deb likes the company of young folk. Forty-six, is he? All the better, then; a harmless fogey, almost as old as I am; it livens him up to be with Deb and the pretty little Carew—tells them tales of war ... ho! ho! the new Othello. Only, Stella ... Papa need not know what is going on—wass? He would not understand.”

Harmless? Certainly Burton Ames intended to be harmless. He did not believe himself in love with either Deb or Jenny. He valued them for their companionship, for their interest in himself, for their distinct and unique personalities. They were a stimulating find among the heterogeneous nomads of boarding-houses. He thought he liked them as two charming boys. With his scorn for platitudes and for platitudinous happenings, he underrated the dangers of propinquity. If one were careful ... his careful attitude was his undoing;[47] it goaded Jenny and Deb out of shelter. They knew well enough that from their reliance on—well, on Cora, was sure to arise this equation of danger; they courted it, hunted it, even. Ames was such an insistently masculine factor in that room; a girl’s room. The very rough feel of his sleeve—Jenny knew ... every time she moved.... And she was a restless creature, forever thrilling her wings.

Jenny was just an atom of life-force, twinkling wildly, all the time, in every direction; jostling to be noticed, petted, admired; a gyrating dizzy mote in the sunslant; a savage little brown bundle of sexual impulses. That was primarily Jenny. Funnily opposed to this, some of her instincts and education and ways of speech were those of the typical suburban sparrow: she was suspicious of people who could correctly pronounce foreign languages; scoffed at what she called “highbrow stuff.” What else was Jenny than this? Most of all, perhaps, an insatiable mother; wearing herself out in service to anyone sick or bothered; proud of these calls on her reputation for quick practical efficiency. Cooking, bandaging, scrubbing—she had five brains on each hand. Her notion of spoiling a beloved person was by virtue of touch ... a smother of kisses ... chair and cushions and fire ... healing contact of warm flesh upon flesh ... cosseting ways that were all the realities she knew or cared about. “That sort of rubbish never did anyone a bit of good!” she would interrupt with almost shrewish impatience, when Deb and the soldier were astray in realms ethical or fantastic. Life was four walls and a roof—babies within, and the smell of dinner, and sacrifice, and somebody crying, and body’s pain.... A little fun to be squeezed in at the cracks; fun that was substantial, and never ethereal; fun that was crowds and a pretty dress, a waltz, chocolates, a bottle of wine, a ride in a motor-car....

And love was just touch again—for Jenny.

Jenny had no reserves and no discrimination; she could hastily damn a stranger to perdition without any attempt at sane reasoning—and a week later one would find her impenitently ensconced at the other extreme of judgment. She was not actually beautiful: a small, round head, and a small round chin; brown sloe eyes tilted at the outer comers; round the eyes and mouth a crinkling resemblance, mirthful, mournful, to a baby monkey; Bobby, her young son, had inherited[48] this. But her eyebrows were delicate umber sickles on the low white forehead. And she could look all things in a second’s space of time....

Jenny had been given sordid tragedy for her lot on earth: poverty of the shoddiest kind; illness that had brought her three times gaspingly close to death. And she had come out well in the test ... better, perhaps, than a schooled philosopher. Loyal to Dolph, competent in the bread-struggle, plucky in the very extremities of pain. To Deb and the soldier she was a sort of Complete Home on tour. He, especially, seemed to rely on her for the daily wants of an ordinary man adrift and ill. For he was already a victim of the war; shell-shock and neurasthenia had left him incompetent for any more strenuous job than his present light ordnance duties. Jenny rejoiced in the very egoism which brought him to her at all times with some slow ponderous helplessness to confide: “Look here—what am I to do?”—She gave prodigally, without thought of barter. And as between her husband and Ames existed that casual masculine friendship which blooms mainly on the borrowing and lending of matches, she was able, under cover of this, to cosset him to her heart’s content; run into his room with soup and custards when he was laid up, ask for his clothes to patch and darn—all the little real things ... advantages of a married woman again.... Deb fretted against her own disabilities. It seemed that Jenny, without cheapening herself in the soldier’s esteem, could softly trail her fingers across his furrowed brows ... murmur: “Darling, how hot your head is!” ... Deb’s modesty bled in scarlet on her cheeks and neck. Jenny, how can you? how can you? ... and oh, if I could only do the same! But she was still dream-crusted with the convention that a man shall avow, and a girl deny or concede; could not force herself to reverse the process, even though Jenny scored—scored all the time.... The soldier’s head lay for an instant drawn back against Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny, magically stilled by the contact, was crooning a song that the sea might have composed to the beloved vessel at last in harbour. Deb, wistful of the other’s frank facility in wooing, redly ashamed lest the soldier should despise it, hating Jenny for giving him cause to despise it, mutinous at her own instinctive adherence to girlhood’s creed, Deb whispered to herself in promise for this empty moment: “When I am married....”

[49]

“When I am married”—and marriage is found with love as surely as the picture-coupon in the opened packet of cigarettes, inessential but inevitable. Yet here she had fallen in love where no ultimate together-being was possible; even no passionate response forthcoming. Then was this love at all?—hitherto accepted as a divided flame burning to some splendid fulfilment....

Deb knelt in front of Cora, perplexed, musing; a vestal before the altar. What if she had envisioned the altar of romance as a mountain-peak in the sunset? Here it was a mat before an oil-stove. An altar, nevertheless, where she made painful sacrifice of illusion. For love was complete in itself, without past or future. She might not put eager question, before admitting love: is he young? is he free? does he care? does it hold chance of the final happiness? But she must accept it, barren and bitter and an unshared burden, a journey without ultimate lure of rest. Love was the big thing—the conviction remained. Only she had thought it conditional. And it was absolute.

... Slowly she lit a match, and applied it to the wick. From the mirrors and walls of the many-cornered room, a dozen Debs rendered variation of her dense black hair, her thick storm-grey eyes, and lustreless ivory skin. For Deb’s looks were of that mutable type which inspired every fourth-rate art faddist to paint her Holding a Melon; or in a Blue Jacket; or with head flung back against their favourite bit of Chinese drapery; or absorbed in the contents of a dust-bin (symbolic realism); or as a figure on an Egyptian frieze; or as Mary Magdalene; or as a Wood-nymph pursued by Silenus; or as a coster girl dancing to a barrel organ by naphtha-lights; or merely as “Deborah, an Impression”—till the sight of Deb herself was a repose from these fantastic and distorted relics of pre-war art-phases.

Deb as Reverie of a Girl, was so absorbed that she let the match burn down to her fingers before she was recalled to actualities. Quickly she let it drop; and at the same moment Jenny rushed in:

“The Chorus is off for to-night, Deb; isn’t it a shame? Mad’m llorraine is giving a squawking party in her room, and you and I have been specially invited.”

[50]

This was catastrophe.

“Oh Jenny—must we? Hasn’t she invited the soldier?”

“Out of compliment to us two, yes. But she can’t stick him, really, because he doesn’t jump about opening doors like a foreign monkey-on-a-stick.”

“I wish he would open some doors—to-night. I know exactly what will happen, Jenny: La llorraine will say: ‘Come, now we will be truly cosy!’—and immediately block all forms of ventilation. And then she’ll sing as if she were let loose again in the Paris opera-house, and I shan’t know if it’s my head bursting, or the walls and ceiling, or her voice. Old Gryce will object, and so will grandpapa, but they won’t take any steps, because each one will be afraid of putting a stop to something that is annoying the other more than himself——”

“Darling idiot, why did you ever say you wished you could hear her sing?”

Deb wailed: “I didn’t know that it meant a prima-donna’s powerful mezzo-soprano in a bed-sittingroom already containing two suites of Louis Quinze furniture, and forty-two cases of fur cloaks, and a permanent dog with permanent asthma, and an anthracite stove fire, and a grand piano, and complicated domestic arrangements for producing food at a moment’s notice, and a clothes-line, and litter from their last year’s variety entertainment, and My Child My Solace complete with curls——”

Jenny stopped laughing as the last item was catalogued. “Dolph’s potty about her....”

“About Manon....” Deb nodded gravely. She and everybody else had noticed what was so blatantly happening. She cuddled on the floor beside Jenny’s knees, and leant her cheek against the other’s dangling hand; then she slid her lips along the smooth warm arm the whole way up to the elbow.... One comforted Jenny by Jenny’s own methods.

For the coming of La llorraine and her daughter to the second floor of Montagu Hall Hotel had made a difference to the Chorus. It was not so tight-fitting. A rival cluster of intimacy had been established by the newcomers, Stella Marcus, and Dolph Carew; and Jenny was perforce drawn into it from time to time ... Dolph was insistent that she should be kind to Manon, aged sixteen. And La llorraine, with her overpowering conviviality, had sought to make an undivided[51] bohemian settlement out of the bedroom inhabitants of the second floor; all doors open at all times, and a general pooling of minor difficulties.... “Now Stella, my dee-urr, will you be kind and count me that washing while Manon play with Bobby Carew and I buy a von-derful cream cheese for the Countess who dejeuners with me in my room to-day. Then need I say, my dee-urr, that I expect you to com’ in and share.” And Stella, who took delight in La llorraine, replied: “Chère Madame, you are as generous with your Countess as with your cheese.”

La llorraine stood for the Continent, as the Continent ached in the memory of those who had loved it before 1914. Not for any one country or another, but for all the gay cities: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, St Petersburg ... irrespective of the distinctions of war. Actually, she was born in some small town on the divisions of Russia and Poland. Her present appellation, which covered stage and private use, could, in its initial eccentricity only be explained by the admiration awakened in her on first encounter with ffoulkes, ffolliott, and ffrench.... “My dee-urr, but what an advertisement! Bah—I know how to catch that public by the ear. They are swine, I tell you ... but this will br-r-ring them in millions. You will see!” So she became La llorraine. And as La llorraine, she stood for every aspect of continental life; garret, and hotel and court; grande dame, and then third-rate mummer; the popular artiste, or the good thrifty woman who can cook succulent dishes for her household. Physically, she was built on a magnificent scale, and always wore plain and expensive black—save for breakfast, when she horrified the boarding-house by appearing in a soiled dressing-gown, red-and-gold Turkish slippers, and a knitted blue woollen shawl over the short dyed yellow hair which formed such a crazy mop to her clear-cut aristocratic face, long and pale, with kind eyes and delicate, sneering mouth. There was no adventure of the demi-monde too lurid for imagination to cast her as heroine; and against that she could whisper mysterious tales of court intrigue, and call Grand-Dukes by their pet names, with an air that betrayed her a careless participant of their intimate revels.

Fiercely she adored Manon, whose hair hung in streaked yellow curls over her shoulders, and from whose red, greedy little wolf’s mouth one could envisage the dart of a red pointed[52] little tongue. Manon fulfilled all expectations as the foreign ingénue: soft, lisping voice, demure eyelids. In a frequent spasm of recollection, La llorraine would dismiss her from the room when the conversation was too adult for due preservation of a maiden’s bloom; but on those occasions that her mother forgot to dismiss her, no doubt Manon picked up much valuable information.... Certainly, whether from innocence or art, she managed Dolph Carew exquisitely, never seeming aware of an infatuation so blatant that it shrieked itself aloud at every moment; yielding not a dewdrop of her freshness to his importunity; and at the same time contriving to keep him attached and useful. “My dee-urr,” La llorraine declaimed to Stella Marcus, “such a clown for my Manon?—not for anything in that world. I have ... plans for her!” ... a queer impression stealing on the heels of her remark, that Manon was designed to be mistress of a third-rate illegitimate royalty of a fourth-rate kingdom.... A faded Louis drawing-room in vieux-rose—an old roué bowing his entrance ... waxed moustache and imperial ... careful buttonhole.... “I have sent for my little daughter!” regally from La llorraine.

Grumbling prophecies were afloat in Montagu Hall, that some catastrophe was bound soon to happen among that second-floor crowd—the Carews, the Marcuses, Burton Ames, and—with vindictive inflexion—those disreputable mummers! It was really getting insupportable; and fancy Mrs Carew taking no steps about her husband’s ridiculous behaviour with that nasty little thing in ringlets, but to be instead forever running after Major Ames, who isn’t my idea of an officer—not at all well-set-up—and the noise—and in and out of the bedrooms—how Mr Marcus can allow his daughter ... but it isn’t as if they were English, no, nor Dutch either, although they never said they were. Did you know that they dressed up on Christmas Eve, all the lot of them, and had a procession up and down the stairs, and the—girl—wore—tights?——

Thus Deb mimicked with diabolical accuracy, the existing Drawing-room Opinion.

“And very attractive you looked in ’em, darling!”

“Jenny, I believe when our gang was singled out for influenza last month, they looked on it as an awful visitation of justice; a sort of plague of Egypt.”

[53]

“Perhaps it was. Everyone in the house escaped it except our landing. Do you remember the day I had bolted five aspirin, and the soldier sauntered in, and looked at me, and thought I was dying, and gasped out: ‘Oh, I w-won’t detain you.’ Ass!—but I think it saved my life, I laughed so. And the night I was so awfully bad that Dolph specially got up out of bed to make a cup of Bovril for Manong?”

“Don’t, Jenny! I ... I hated him, that time.”

“Ah, well, I’ve had some jolly enough razzles with old Dolph; he can’t help it when he gets taken this way.” Into Jenny’s tones had crept that note of possessive defence that one hears from the woman in the police-court, shrewishly denying the black eye given her by her “man.” “Poor old boy! he’s gloomier than ever; but then I married him because he reminded me so of Martin Harvey. Dolph says that Manong makes him feel pure again, which is out of my line as I forfeited my purity in his sight by having married him. It sounds a bit mixed up, and I don’t quite see where I come in—with the washing on Saturday morning, I s’pose. Only I’m hanged if I don’t have my little fling too.”

“Does Dolph mind the soldier?”

“Lately he does; haven’t you noticed? yellow with jealousy; tries to keep both eyes on his wife, and not lift them off Manong; wants to confide his woes in me, and take the high moral stride as well. Can’t be done, my lad! But it was quite a rag during the ’flue, Deb; we were all able to take patterns of each other’s dressing-gowns, weren’t we? La llorraine in ermine and her head tied up in a duster was a treat. She and your aunt can tell some smoke-room stories when they get started—my word! Dolph was shocked—afraid Manong would hear.”

“The soldier was bad that one week.”

“Wasn’t he? And wouldn’t let me do much for him either, worse luck. I almost wondered if I should have wired for his wife, off my own bat. But he’d have been so furious.”

“Why? doesn’t he like her?”

“Child—don’t you know? he’s crazy about her....”

“Oh....”

“Didn’t you know? Why else do you suppose he’s so precious backward with us? Hang it, Deb, we’re not exactly unattractive. The chances he’s had.... Another man would have worn my throat away with his lips at it, before[54] now!” Jenny clenched her hands passionately. “Deb, haven’t you noticed that he’s never kissed either of us?”

“Yes. I had noticed.”

“He told me the whole story, mooching about the streets in a fog one night. He had fooled about with some chit, not caring for her a tuppenny curse—as he might have fooled with us. Someone told his wife; and she just gave him notice to quit—‘I’ll send for you when I can bear the sight of you again!’ ... that was four years ago. God! she must be made of ice. With a war on, too. Can’t she guess that the man wants looking after; and that if her fingers don’t sew his buttons on, someone else will volunteer for the job. Not that I’ve had much from him, except thanks, for trying to buck him up and brush him up ... a more dejected-looking object I’ve never seen than when he first slouched in here. Thanks? oh yes, he thanked me then, in the fog, for having listened to his drivellings; as if I could have helped myself, with his hand grabbing my elbow; I was bored stiff. That was before you came in with us, kid.”

“I’ll drop out again.... You’re married, Jenny, and so is he, and you can fit each other with what’s left over. But I want something whole——”

“Yes; you’ve got everything to give. But you and I might just as well go on being pals, darling,—he doesn’t care a rap for either of us. And he’d be terrified of me without you, Deb; or of you without me. I’ve never struck such a Cautious Willy. When he’s left alone with one of us he goes to fetch his pipe—till the other comes back. I tell you, it works up all the devil in me....”

“And in me....”

“Deb, he’s a real man, or I shouldn’t care like this. He’s been perfectly sweet to me once or twice. Perfectly ... dear. He can be, when he likes. Have you ever felt the muscles of his arm? ever bent it back? like iron. Deb—I’m sure he’s sworn some gimcrack oath to himself, not to ever let it reach a kiss—with us, I mean.”

“Because of her.”

“Why shouldn’t we set ourselves to break it down? After all, she must be a beast. And she should have kept him while she had him. It’s our innings. Deb, I bet you a gallon of oil for Cora that one or the other of us gets a kiss from him to-night. I’m mad to-night—mad—game for anything!...[55] There! I forgot that blooming party next door. Mad’m’s got a pal in to play her accompaniments; she won’t let us off; not just for a Chorus meeting.”

A conspirator’s rap at the door; the soldier thrust his head stealthily round the corner; ascertained with relief that both members of the Chorus were present; and entered, pulling from his pocket a smoked haddock by its tail.

“I’ve brought a present for Cora; two presents,” from the other pocket he extracted a tin of asparagus. “Shall we revel up here to-night, as a thanksgiving? I don’t know for what; but I’m in the mood.” His brick-coloured face was impassive; his voice slow and toneless; his entire personality redolent of beef decently roasted and eaten at the proper time at a proper table. Anyone more obviously opposed to riotous revels, or to moods of any kind, it would be hard to imagine.

“H’m ... I believe we shall have to divide the haddock before we cook it,” Jenny speculated with a dubious eye on Cora’s limitations, while Deb ruefully explained their evening’s engagement.

“Damn,” said the soldier gently. “Am I invited? I won’t go. I have to sit at attention when I hear music, or else I don’t look as if I were listening. And that’s so tiring. Look here, I can’t endure an evening without you two; honestly I can’t. Why not pretend to be ill, one of you?” Hastily he amended: “Both of you.”

“I can; I’ve been feeling frightfully rotten on and off lately, since the ’flue. My heart’s gone funny from too many operations, or too many aspirin, or something. We could go in next door for about ten minutes, and then I’ll pretend I’m taken suddenly bad, and slip out in a I-hope-nobody-will-notice-or-make-a-fuss manner; and Deb will naturally follow me out, looking—what’s the word, you high-brows? sol—? sol—? something to do with lawyers.”

“Looking solicitous. Right then; I’ll skulk about on the landing till I hear you. Say I’m out for the evening. That’s settled. We can always throw Jenny on the bed, and me under it, if anybody knocks to enquire. You’d better put the haddock in your wash-basin for the present, Deb.”

“And please, where am I to wash?”

Ames thought it over. He bestowed on every question, great or small, exactly the same amount of stolid phlegm. “In Jenny’s room.”

“Not available. Dolph and Manong are spooning in there.”

[56]

“Alone?”

“Oh, you bet Mad’m or Miss Marcus or Bobby is with them. Our precious flapper mayn’t go a second unchaperoned. It’s hard luck on Dolph.”

“Dear Jenny, your point of view as Dolph’s wife is rather a novel one.”

“Excuse me, but is Jenny here?” A very aggrieved Carew stood on the threshold, glaring at his wife through an enmuffling tangle of beard and eyebrow. He was incredibly like the popular notion of a bushranger. Actually he had been traveller for a wholesale tobacco firm in the City. And was now out of work.

“Jenny, you might think of a fellow sometimes, I must say. Bobby keeps on running out of the room, and I’ve always got to haul him back. And you know quite well what Mad’m is like about Manong. Why don’t you sit with us and do some sewing till Bobby’s bed-time? You’re so selfish.”

Another ferocious glare—and Dolph was gone.

“Charming fellow, isn’t he?” remarked Jenny lightly. She shrugged her shoulders, and followed him out.

The soldier looked at Deb expressively: “Bit thick, isn’t it?”

“I hate Dolph Carew!”

“He doesn’t count. But she—she’s the pluckiest little soul in England. One can’t interfere, that’s the worst of it.”

“Why can’t one? Because one might compromise oneself?”

He smiled a little at her passionate scorn, accepting the implication calmly. “Yes. Partly that.”

“Mostly that.”

“You admire rash impulse, and headlong defiance, and all those virtues that make a muddle in the world, don’t you?”—From teasing Deb, he awoke to awful realization that he was alone with her. “I say—I must be off!”

“Yes, hurry!—a whole half-minute.” Daringly she challenged his unspoken thought.

“Ridiculous child. Remember to put the haddock in the basin.” He just touched her shoulder ... all his warmer marks of affection were reserved for the times when the Chorus was present in full membership ... and went out.

Deb crossed straight to the long mirror, and made the discovery that she had not been looking beautiful enough to say[57] what she had said. She began to dress for the evening with a sort of revengeful deliberation. The deliberation was necessary to ensure good result. No wise woman can fly, with spirit aflame, into her clothes, and then hope to prove seductive. The dash was in her spirit, nevertheless. She was angry with the big thing for not proving the mellow, englamoured sanctuary she had every right to expect. This evolution of a dream into fact was futile; worse than that—destructive—to herself. A stupid, lop-sided business! Deb was not glad of love now it had come. Only a troublesome but intelligent honesty kept her from repudiating it altogether as the big thing; returning to her former state of silver-misty anticipation.... “One can pretend, I suppose?”—pretend that the soldier was a mere wayside incident. Only she knew too much about wayside incidents, to commit that error.

—Well then, since she was so sure, were not the issues worth a forced initiative on her part? Could she compete with Jenny’s boldness—if she chose? For with Deb, as with Jenny, the soldier’s steady, profiting self-control had become a nightmare which had to be exchanged at all costs, even for his scorn, even for self-destruction, even for evil....

Her temper resolved itself into action. There was mischief in her selection of the pure ivory taffeta dress, the golden shoes, and cobwebby gold stockings that the supple fancy could continue on limbs straight and slender inside the blown white cup of her skirts. Deb could wear white and pearl and dove-tints without fear of looking miss-ish; by contrast with her deep colours, they enhanced her vivid grace more than the traditional purple or flame. Sufficient of purple in her sombre twilight eyes; flame enough in her lips. Her hair she turned inwards, concealing its masses so skilfully, that, sleek on top and bulging rhythmically into a smooth pear-shape round the cheeks and the nape of the neck, it gave her somewhat the appearance of the knave of clubs as pictured in a pack of cards.

Then she went back to the mirror, and scrutinized her looks long and earnestly, and—like all heroines in every crisis of each love-affair—reflected how queer it was that just these curves and colours should have been the haphazard outward accessories to—her soul? ... no, souls were mawkish things!—to her essential Deb-ness.

The girl who was playing the accompaniments to La llorraine’s singing glanced aside once or twice from Deb to Jenny, contrasting mystery and mobility. Jenny attracted her the most; she made up her mind to speak to Jenny directly the song was over.... And then she saw Jenny bite her lip, clutch tightly at the arm of the chair ... after a minute or two of apparent bodily agony, rise and grope an unsteady way through the edges and corners of furniture, to the door. Antonia Verity went on with the Aria from “Samson et Delilah.” She had seen a swift look interchanged between Deb and Jenny, just before the spasm of pain which drove the latter from the room. Also, in the instant’s silence before the prima-donna had begun to let herself go in “Mon cœur s’ouvre a ta voix,” Antonia fancied she had detected a scraping sound and heavy breathing outside the door.

Stella had also remarked Jenny’s symptoms, and half rose to follow her out without interrupting the singing; but Deb murmured: “All right, Auntie, I’ll go” ... and slipped noiselessly in Jenny’s wake. Dolph was wrapt up in Manon, who was wrapt up in her own indifference to Dolph. And La llorraine was back in the Paris opera-house, eyes uplifted to the imaginary tiers of packed faces, voice soaring resonantly to a non-existent acoustic.... Antonia wondered if the drum of her left ear were being shattered; she also wondered a little what was afoot outside the door....

“Did you hear me sleuthing?” queried Ames, contentedly lopping the haddock to fit Cora’s limitations.

“Is that what you were doing? Of course we heard.” The three had been recently present at a cinema film which[59] portrayed a quantity of flickering doors, set in a flickering corridor, down which a flickering procession of waiters, detectives and gentlemen burglars—all impartially in evening dress—portrayed the diverting art of sleuthing: they skulked along close to the wall, one arm shielding their eyes to avoid observation, and at every bedroom door they bent and applied an ear to the keyhole—then started erect, confirmed in their worst suspicion, and went to the next keyhole....

“I sleuthed all over the house, till I sleuthed outside Miss Lamb’s door——” he stopped abruptly.

“And then?”

“Then I stopped sleuthing. It’s an ignoble pastime. Get me my screw-driver; something’s wrong with Cora.” A minute later he was completely happy, surrounded by Cora in eleven fragments; while Jenny, very excitable and talkative, enacted to him exactly how she had been “taken ill” during La llorraine’s song.

“—There. Now she’ll do.”

“There was nothing wrong with Cora; you wanted an excuse to pull her to bits,” Deb accused him.

“A man is only a child; he must play.”

“Fiddling at things?”

“Tinkering with things. Pottering over things. That’s a mercy!” as Dalila, on the other side of the wall, died to silence. “Our invalid had better be hoisted on to the bed; they’ll be coming in to enquire.”

Just in time Jenny hurled herself among the pillows, and drew the quilt up to her flushed cheeks. A knock at the door. The soldier eliminated himself against the wall. Deb went softly to the threshold: “Is that you, Manon?... Yes, she’s in here.... No, I wouldn’t come in; she ...” Deb backed the unseen visitor onto the landing. The other two, listening breathlessly, heard her low, capable, reassuring explanations: “... be all right presently ... room too hot ... strain of the last few weeks ... might do her good ... tell them not to worry....”

Jenny inserted a moan of corroboration.

“I’m so vairry sorry——” from Manon.

Deb returned to the room, closing the door. And Jenny cried:

“Little humbug! much she cares!”

“Well, nurse, shall we operate?” demanded Ames cheerily.[60] He stood at the bedside, assuming a professional manner, one finger on the patient’s pulse. “Um. Um. This is excellent. We shall soon be all right. Up to-day and down to-morrow and dead the next day. A great improvement here, nurse. I should give her ...” he drew the pseudo-nurse aside to a little distance, dropping his voice to a grave undertone. Jenny burst out laughing at the foolery—then shuddered—and laughed again:

“Bravo! It’s the real thing. God—how often I’ve seen ’em do just that at the hospitals and nursing-homes. I’ve been turned inside out and put on the table so often, I wonder there’s any of me left kicking. Like poor old Cora over there—the doctors had all the fun, tinkering and fiddling.”

“It sounds fun, when you put it like that,” Ames said appreciatively. And drew a clumsy penknife from his pocket. “Where will you have it?” he demanded considerately, throwing off his coat and rolling up his shirt-sleeves.

“Deb! Deb!” shrieked Jenny, in hysterical appeal.

Deb flung herself to the rescue. She and the soldier sleuthed each other malevolently round the room, he with the penknife and she with the screw-driver, till they ended up with a neat little burlesque of a murder in the middle of the carpet; La llorraine, next door, supplying unconscious atmosphere by the torture scene from “Tosca.”

“Die!” said Deb lightly.

“With my fingers buried in your raven tresses!”

“Miscreant!”

“Don’t call me names. I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m not!” he tried to hoist himself up by the coarse black ropes of her loosened hair. Deb resisted fiercely. Jenny, tossing from one side to another, called out petulantly that she was forgotten—it was her party!—and was half off the bed, before another knock sent her flying back to the shelter of the coverlid. The soldier lurched into his special arm-chair and took up the screw-driver—“for a disguise,” he murmured. And Deb, wildly dishevelled, clutched after her expression of calm but anxious best friend to the invalid.

Antonia Verity entered, with a glass of tea and a slice of lemon.

“They thought this might do you good,” to Jenny, who extended a feeble hand, took the glass, raised it shakily to her[61] lips, spilt a few drops, smiled bravely—then, with a sudden gesture of repugnance, handed it to Deb. “Presently, dear ... not now.”

Deb was surprised that she did it so well. Usually Jenny was prone to over-act.

After a single look bestowed upon the perplexing and unexplained presence of a gentleman in shirt-sleeves cooking asparagus over an oil-stove, Antonia’s eyes returned to Jenny:

“I thought you were shamming just now, in the next room. But I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

She lingered a moment, seemingly in expectation. But the atmosphere was feverish and hostile. “I’m sorry,” she repeated; and went.

“Jenny, you’re a genius! that bit of bye-play with the glass was magnificent.”

“I am, I am, aren’t I?—‘I thought you were shamming, but I was wrong,’” she mimicked triumphantly. “—Oh Hell!” and burrowed her face sharply into the pillow.

“What is it?” alarmed, Deb sprang forward.

“You taken in too?” Jenny, without lifting her head, broke into shrill peals of laughter which she seemed unable to repress. “Oh—oh—oh—I’ve taken you in too!... Dearest—” this in response to the soldier’s fingers roaming at the nape of her neck—“Don’t pull your hand away—don’t—it’s heavenly—it soothes me.... What does it matter? we’re all playing the fool; Dolph is playing the idiot in the other room; we’re all mixed up, anyway. Deb, give me that tea—I’m crazy with thirst,” she snatched the glass; gulped down the contents. “What about those asparagus?”

“They ought to be done enough now; you shall have some if you’re good. What do you think, nurse? one or two? and the rest for us.”

Deb nodded professionally. But it struck her that Jenny was rather making capital out of the privileges of her present rôle. Why had she not thought to be herself the one who was ill? But Jenny was really ill so often—it was less likely to cause suspicion.

The soldier removed the tin of asparagus from Cora; and seating himself on the edge of the bed, began to curl them slowly, tantalizingly, into Jenny’s mouth. “I’ve never seen you look quite so healthy; in case any more of the neighbours drop in to enquire, we may as well cast a dissembling shadow[62] on that blooming cheek, those brilliant brown eyes. Deb, put out the light.”

Deb obeyed. The asparagus were finished, one by one. A crash of discordances, as though someone had suddenly sat on the keys of the piano, sounded from the adjoining room; and La llorraine’s wild, deep laughter. Jenny lay as though exhausted, nuzzling against Burton Ames’ shoulder.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“So miserable ... and I’m tired of going on.”

“I am, too. Never mind—it’s not so bad being miserable together.”

“You’re rather nice”—then lower still—“kiss me....”

He laid his cheek down against her’s—no more. But she seemed content ... and Deb turned away; stood, forlornly enough, with her back to the bed, looking down at Cora.... “I’m miserable too,” she whispered. But Jenny heard:

“Deb!—Deb, come over here—come over to me at once. How dare you not come ... feeling like that? Deb!”

Deb crouched beside the bed, with Jenny’s arms tightly wound about her shoulders. The soldier’s knee, hard as granite, pressed against her side. They were all three very near together ... a magnetic sense of rest was born in this close contact—Jenny’s hot skin, Deb’s tumble of hair, harsh feel of the soldier’s frayed tweed coat.... There was no other illumination in the room, and Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of white light and black shadow.

“Good old Chorus,” breathed Jenny.

“You’re a really-and-truly person, Jenny, aren’t you?”

“Sweetheart, what do you mean?”

“I used to ask about people in stories: are they really-and-truly real? Somehow I always know that you are; at least you, if nobody else.”

“Of course she is,” grunted Ames; “considering she’s a Christian, quite remarkably real.”

“Hush!” quickly Jenny laid her fingers over his mouth; “you must leave me that at least—my religion.”

“Child, child, religion is a man-made door, blocking all hope of vistas beyond.”

“Faith is a crystal window,” whispered Jenny, her brown eyes steadfast.

“Maybe. Nothing so opaque as crystal.”

[63]

Deb said reproachfully: “What can you give her to hang on to, for what you take away?”

“Herself. The courage and pride in her. It’s much more comforting really than a vague hope that God will come to the rescue in extremes. You can be definitely certain of the measure of your own powers; but God is at best a gamble.”

Jenny’s eyes strayed fearfully ceilingward....

“Looking for the thunderbolt that will destroy the blasphemer?”

“I remember looking up in just that way, the first time I said damn,” Deb murmured reminiscently.

“It’s what we learn at our mother’s knee. We’ve all got mother’s knees in our system—Jenny here worst of all—and till we learn to see through it——”

“Your metaphor is in peril, as well as your soul.”

“S.O.S.,” he laughed.

But at this tendency of the conversation to become highbrow, Jenny’s mood, as usual, flickered to restlessness. “I ought to go and see if Bobby’s all right; I haven’t been in all the evening.”

“You forget that you’re in a highly critical condition, and mustn’t be seen dancing about the corridors. I’ll go.”

And Deb wondered, as she closed the door behind her, if, in her absence, Jenny would contrive to win the gallon of oil for Cora....

Bobby was soundly asleep in his cot; his round, monkey face, so comically a replica of Jenny’s, snuggled half under the bed-clothes to meet his huddled-up knees. Deb was compelled to bend and lightly kiss him, for the sake of her private fondness for all small boys. A night-light floating on the table beside him was suddenly quenched. Deb turned to grope her way out of the room. She heard a groan behind her—and, for Bobby’s sake, bit back a sharp scream of terror—

“It’s only me,” came Dolph’s despondent reassurance.

“You? But I thought you were with—with the others.”

“They don’t want me.”

She hung about uncomfortably, her hand on the door-knob.

“Jenny’s better,” she volunteered at last.

“Is she?” quite indifferent. Then he burst out: “Deb, d’you know that I’ll be rich one day, when my uncle dies. Rich. People will treat me differently then. I tell you, Deb, money does everything with some people. Not with a young[64] girl, of course—but with their mothers. I’m nobody now. Anyone can insult me, give me the sack. I wish I was dead and buried.... Bobby oughtn’t to be left the whole evening alone; tell Jenny I said so. That’s why I’m in here; that’s why; the only reason,” he mumbled. “Else why shouldn’t I be with the others?”

Apparently some shattering of the next-door alliance had occurred on this evening of happenings.

“Send Jenny in to me. I won’t sit alone. Why should I? She’s always shut away with you and Ames, when I want her.—Deb, I’m so wretched.”

“Yes ... but I don’t like you one bit,” reflected Deb. Aloud she said: “I expect it’ll be all right to-morrow, Dolph; La llorraine has sudden moods, like all artists.”

It was queer, this all-round tacit acceptance of unofficial affections, on the second floor landing at Montagu Hall.

Carew merely groaned again; which Deb interpreted as welcome dismissal.

... Had Jenny won that kiss in her absence?—Deb slid open the door, in a bewilderment of dread and curiosity. Had Jenny——

Impossible to say. For La llorraine was sitting on the bed, eclipsing by gesticulation and oratory, a helplessly recumbent invalid. The soldier was calmly smoking and reading in the armchair at the farther end of the room, his back to the bed, Cora among his feet. His presence in the room seemed almost part of the general acceptance. How funny, Deb thought, if they all suddenly started questioning and sorting and clearing up....

It appeared that Nadya llorraine, at least, was doing something of the sort.

“My dee-urr, now listen to me. I tell you how to win back that husband of yours. I have said to me: it is enough now, it shall end! Jenny, see how you lie here, wizout a manicure, your hair in a puzzle, a blouse that has no seduction.... And he, that fool, that booby,—shall I tell you vat vill happen? he falls into the hands of adventuresses! My dee-urr, they snap him up from you....” Sincerity of pity for the abandoned wife dominated any personal association with the said adventuresses.[65] “They snap him up—and spit him out!” La llorraine dignified the process by accompanying pantomime, grotesquely mimicked by the enormous shadow cast on the wall behind her. “I will tell you that secret, Jenny, my dee-urr, which I ’ave learn: you must be woman to him as well as wife....” She grasped Jenny’s wrist, swooped forward, and lowered her tones to a key of thrilling confidence. She breathed in Jenny’s face. She took possession of Jenny.

Deb and the soldier were cut off to a complete isolation.

“What have you got?” she bent over his shoulder to see the title of the book he held. “Oh, that’s not fair!” indignantly. For the Chorus had been half-reading half-acting Shaw’s “Pygmalion” for their mutual amusement; and he had anticipated that portion of the play to which Deb had been secretly straining forward.

“You wanted to make sure of being Eliza in that bit where she throws the slippers, of course. You’re a shocking savage, Deb. And anyway, the part isn’t fit for any gentlewoman, and naturally falls to me. You can be Higgins.”

“I won’t be Higgins. I’ll be Eliza. You—you tempt slippers.”

“M’yes—I daresay I do. Slippers are mild. I’ll lend you my trench boots.”

“Thanks.”

“Why do you hate me so, Deb?” lazily he threw back one hand to where she was still leaning over his chair, and grasped some of her hanging hair.

She was exultant at having at last urged him to a personal reflection. “Because you don’t take enough notice of me,” she replied, in a freakish impulse of candour.

“Dear Eliza, isn’t my step bent straight for this room, when I enter the house?”

“That’s because of—Cora. Because we make you comfortable.”

“I suppose it is. Funny hair you’ve got, Eliza; like a strong, stormy black sea. I thought women’s hair was always fluffy and soft.”

“As one woman’s was? ...” flitted through Deb’s mind. But she did not say it.

He still examined with minute interest the thick tress which lay across the palm of his hand. “To a man of ingenuity and resource, it would be useful for all sorts of things[66] if one were wrecked on an island; Eliza, I wish I could be stranded on a desert island with your hair.”

“With ... only my hair?” She was breaking through it now, that nameless barrier which her nameless creed had set up; useless barrier, Jenny had shown her.... Yes, but Jenny was different. Because she was married?—well, because she was different. Because she let her passions bubble over when and where and how she chose ... unruly, undisciplined Jenny. But Deb had promised herself to compete with Jenny this time.... A pulse ticked in each wrist—two frantic little clocks. On the other side of the wall someone—Antonia probably—was playing Debussy ... mournful, soul-flattening discordances ... La llorraine’s rush of inaudible speech still expounded man and the ways of man:

“And I say to ’im, that minute ago even, my dee-urr: ‘You should kneel to your wife like a thief to a goddess, for you ’ave r-r-robbed ’er of all ’er gifts!’ Ha! ’e did not like that, Jenny, I tell you. He sulks now in his room, the booby——”

“Well, it was rude, considering he was your guest,” from Jenny, in shrill defence of her male property.

... “What should I do with the rest of you, Eliza?”

“Would another man ask that?”

Deb was on a false trail, her manner hectic and unnatural, her senses over-stimulated. But, knowing all this, she dragged her reluctance to the gap in the last barrier—plunged through—bent her mouth to his up-turned, sleepy face——

And suddenly she remembered little Lothar von Relling ... and pleaded to whatever Justice might be presiding somewhere, that she had been generous then, had given ardently for a boy’s pleasure.... Would Justice please choose this moment to reward her?

... His fingers slowly loosened grip of her hair; it dropped heavily against his shoulders. And in swift reaction at seeing it there, Deb flung back her head, stood upright, pale and ashamed, ... over his head their eyes met in the mirror which topped the fireplace in front of them. Reaction ... she had had enough of this cramped, stuffy room, and all their cramped, stuffy passions; stupefaction of everyone’s moral sense; a sort of frowsiness; smoke and shut windows, and unaired emotions.... She wanted, at once and instantly,[67] a wind blown in with the running tide; sanity and humour and keenness. Oh, anything but this room, at this moment, and the necessity of meeting the mirrored gaze of a man to whom she had just given herself away.

... The moment stretched, an interminable grey length. Then the music next door trickled away to silence, and it seemed as though the unsupported moment would have to trickle away with it....

“I’m only human!”—thus to himself the soldier stifled a protesting loyalty. Heavily he shifted round in his chair towards the girl, standing now so stiffly and primly erect behind him——

“Deb”....

A rap at the door. The evening had been punctuated by such staccato interruptions. This time it was Aunt Stella.

“Is Major Ames here? Yes? You’re wanted on the ’phone; trunk call, the page said. They came to look for you next door. Well, how’s the patient?” as Jenny emerged wanly from the clutch of La llorraine’s overpowering personality. “My dear child, surely you would be better inside your own bed than outside someone else’s. Off with you! Make your husband attend to the hot-water bottle ... fill it with his burning tears, if he likes. Deb, being your prying spinster aunt, it is my duty to inform you that this room has a horribly dissipated smell of fish and stove-oil and smoke, and one doesn’t put one’s hair down for the evening till all the visitors have left; I ought to fetch your grandpapa—only he’d have a stroke. Madame, Miss Verity threatens to go already, and wants to say good-bye.”

Burton Ames, as he lumbered downstairs, was angry with himself for being angry at the interruption. It was much better; if he once budged from his safe resolve, the Chorus would become quite impossible. And he would miss it—would miss them—quite intensely. They had obviously set out to try him pretty severely this evening. Why? Sheer mischief? Deb was the more dangerous of the two. One could feel tenderly, an absurd, almost pathetic tenderness, for Jenny[68] out-of-bounds ... passionate, ill-used little urchin. But Deb.... Damn this ’phone call!

“Hello!”...

Deb and Jenny were alone.

“Deb—I saw.”

“Saw what?” said Deb absently.

“When you bent his head back ... just now. And then Mad’m came between. Deb—did he?”

Deb did not answer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, hands clasped round her knees, ears straining, straining for his returning tread, she examined her behaviour of a moment ago, and decided that self-verdict must wait on subsequent events. If only he made it worth while....

The room had grown unaccountably darker. Jenny shuddered; propped herself up on one elbow:

“Deb, old girl, it’s a fool’s game to pretend one is ill when one isn’t, because——”

“There he is!” burst from Deb’s lips, oblivious of Jenny.

Burton Ames swung into the room, rejuvenated.

“Jenny—Deb—I’m off to-night,”

His voice was still quiet and controlled; but the weary inflexion to which they were accustomed from him had been replaced by tense virility; his bent shoulders were squarely flung back; his eyes snapped and tingled like bright blue fire under the grizzled jutting eyebrows.

“I’m off to-night.”

“She ... your wife ... she wants you again,” Jenny gasped.

“Yes. I spoke to her on the ’phone. She has taken a house in London; Campden Hill; just moved in. I’m joining her at once; she has invited me,” with a quick, whimsical smile. “I wish it hadn’t occurred to you to be ‘taken ill’ just to-night, Jenny dear; you could have helped me pack. Deb’s disqualified, of course; good little girls mayn’t pass the ogre’s threshold, according to Mother’s-Knee. Never mind, I’ll send my orderly down in the morning; can’t wait now. I say, look at Cora!”

Simultaneously the three turned and stared at the altar of their union; the line of flame was slowly narrowing, and the[69] walls and ceiling and furniture, and the faces of the three grouped round and on the bed, hitherto sharply defined in black and white, were already smudged to a mere dimness.

“Cheap irony—oh, very inexpensive indeed!” scoffed Deb. And she was grateful to Cora ... deeply grateful.

“On the contrary, a histrionic sense of the fitness of things. When did you last fill the oil-tank, Deb?”

“Before dinner—no, though, I didn’t—I remember now, Jenny came in and distracted me. That explains it.”

Nevertheless, the gradual ebbing of the light, coincident with the silence succeeding the waves of noise and music next door, wrought eerily upon the nerves of the two of the Chorus who had not received their call of “all’s right with the world.”

Even Ames was touched to a cheery sentimentality: “I shall miss you both tremendously; you’ve been so awfully good to me.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve been very welcome,” said Deb lightly. “You’re in a hurry—don’t let these obsequies delay you. We bury Jenny the day after to-morrow, at two o’clock, if you care to attend.”

“As I was responsible for her death-bed scene, I suppose I must. But it’s been worth it, hasn’t it, Jenny beloved, to have had this last fling together?”

Jenny played up. “Oh, it has! it has! I’ve lived my life down to the very dregs! And now, as the light slowly fades——”

“And the music dies away——” supplemented Deb.

“And the asparagi have been trickled one by one down that dark and narrow path that engorges all asparagi——”

“So that young life, too, throbbed to silence. Whistling, he went on his way, and never knew till afterwards——”

“I can’t whistle,” the soldier interrupted Deb. “But I’ll do all the rest of the stunts. Good-bye, Jenny, my darling; I’ve been a fearful rotter ...” his voice broke in mock pathos. Secretly he was rather glad of this burlesque which covered any necessity for real pathos; because he was so happy, he just could not pretend otherwise.

“I’m—not—in—pain!” gasped Jenny. “See—I’m smiling ... quite a beautiful smile, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall be well ... to-morrow. No, I shan’t!” she screamed. “No to-morrow for me. Soldier ... don’t—don’t go.... Wait till ... I ...”

[70]

“Sweetheart, I can’t; you might be ever so long about it, and I really must be off. Good-bye, Jenny; good-bye, Deb”; he lingered a moment still, though it was evident that every nerve in him was chafing at the delay. “You’ve both been so awfully decent to me,” he repeated, sincerely this time. And he kissed first Jenny and then Deb, in boyish, spontaneous gratitude.

So they gained, quite without effort, what they had set out to gain, that evening.

“Good-bye!” the door slammed behind him in sheer exuberance of high spirits. Then repetition of the same business with his bedroom door. Then silence. And the room a black pall now, with just a last faint quaver of light—suddenly quenched.

It was unnecessary, Deb reflected, that he should have shown himself to them in this new splendour of recovered buoyancy.... It was bad enough before.... Her fancy, feverishly active, followed his taxi along the streets, followed him up the steps and past the front door of the house in Campden Hill—into the room where a woman waited——

Fancy was jerked to a standstill here; he would utter her name; what was it?—Cicely?—Irene?—Eleanor? ... Yes, she could hear his voice speaking any of these ... very low and taut ... “Eleanor”....

Then of course he would kiss her. Well....

And for the girl who sat on the edge of the bed, the knowledge of having made—rather an exhibition of herself. It did not help much that he seemed to have forgotten the incident. The main thing was that she remembered it. Would always remember it.

She thought she heard a little sigh from the bed. Jenny! ... quick and warm came to Deb realisation of the blessed solace of a companion in suffering. Jenny would just understand, as she never failed to understand the simple everyday things such as hunger and pain and the loss of love. Jenny would heal her with that wonderful touch of hand and cheek that was like balm.... Deb felt shivery and childish and desolate.... She laid her head down on Jenny’s breast, and lay for several moments quite still, waiting for comfort to steal into her. She was glad that Jenny did not attempt to talk about what had happened.

Suddenly Deb started away, wildly frightened. Why—Jenny’s heart was not beating....

Richard found his Easter holidays dull. Montagu Hall was not a satisfactory substitute for Daisybanks, where he had owned his own carpentering shed in the garden, in which he might rampage as he pleased. Ferdie had been an understanding father in supplying Richard and Deb with full facilities to rag and to rampage. Now Richard passed most of his time reading books that dealt with the practical side of the war, and keeping fit in preparation for when he was eighteen. Perhaps he could squeeze himself in next year already by mis-stating his age ... there was always the dreadful possibility that the war might suddenly come to an end, and leave him what it had found him, a Winborough fifth form boy.

He was glad when the last week of the holidays came round; Deb was always about with some girl—Antonia Verity; and most of his chums being older than himself, were scattered about the country in training, or else in the trenches. David Rothenburg, of course, was about the same age; but Rothenburg was a moony sort of chap, especially lately. More from boredom than affection, Richard spent an afternoon at Bertie Fraser’s home in the south-west of London. The news of the torpedoing of the Lusitania had come through a couple of days before; and the two boys vented some of their hot indignation by experiments with a model submarine which should “damn well teach the blackguards not to mess about with our passenger liners!”

“I’ll put you on your way,” Fraser volunteered, when Richard had to go.

They turned from the quiet street of houses into a mews; then through a slum displaying barrows with highly-coloured wares, gaudy with small shops gustily illuminated, raucous with slatternly women calling from the upper windows to their offspring in the gutters.

[72]

“Short cut to the trams,” explained Fraser. “Hullo, what’s the row?”

A woman was huddled on a doorstep, wailing loudly, openly, without any pretence of hiding her stark grief. Her wisps of grey hair were blown by the wind flat across her distorted face, which she neither burrowed in her arms nor covered with a handkerchief. For she had just received tidings that her daughter had gone down in the steerage of the Lusitania, and she wanted God and man to know it.

A knot of sympathizers, neighbours and casual passers-by, stood dumbly around her, listening to the saga of Ethel Ann’s childhood, and Ethel Ann’s adolescence, and Ethel Ann envisioned powerfully but crudely as a human livid face, struggling, gulping, pleading for help ... help refused.... “They pushed ’em back into the water!” screamed the old crone. “My little ’un. Curse the Germans!—Curse ’em! They watched ’er drowning, and they laughed. A-a-aaah ...” articulation trailed away into a long-drawn-out cry of rage and mourning and hate. She strained her skinny arms in a tight line upward, as though in one gesture could be uttered all that her tongue had failed to say.

Richard felt it was impossible just to stand still and look on at this. He glowered about him in a spirit of desperate truculence. The others of the group were in exactly the same case, their eyes roaming stupidly up and down the narrow street, as though in search of some immediate measures. A carter leaning against his dray drawn up to the kerb opposite, spoke out fiercely:

“Ay. ’Uns. That’s the sort they are. Wish I ’ad one or two under my fist now. I’d show ’em what for.”

“You have got ’em under your fist now—plenty—if you know where to look!” A lantern-jawed man with the hollow eyes of a fanatic, sprang onto the tail-board of the dray. At once he formed a vortex for all the loose and aimless emotions adrift in that street. Richard and Fraser found themselves in a wedge of men and women, women predominating, swaying with that sort of concerted drunken rhythm peculiar to all crowds. Even the mother of the drowned girl stopped her wails, and stared fixedly at the demagogue.

“Germans everywhere in this country—millions of ’em, laughing up their sleeves because we’re such ruddy softs as[73] not to chuck’em out. Laughing now, I expect, over our women and children pushed back into the icy water; English women and children. Yes, it’s a good joke, ain’t it? First-class!... I ’ad a pal on the Lusitania—well, never mind that—there’s some ’ere as ’ad more than pals. Are we going to stand it—that’s what I want to know? Are we going on trading with murderers and cowards, living cheek by jowl with ’em, buying our very bread from ’em ... poisoned bread! I tell you, there are Germans in the next street, in this street, and in a thousand other streets in England, with their dirty names over the shop-windows. Ask the Government!—ah! the Government’ll do something about it, per’aps, by and by. Ask ’em—they’ll say they’ve took the proper measures of precaution. We don’t want precaution, thank yer all the same. We want revenge on the foul scum what sank the Lusitania! We want revenge—not by and by, but now! We want revenge—and by the dying agonies of our children, and for the sake of those they’ve left, we’ll have it!”

His hearers had been like empty bottles offering no resistance to the fiery liquid he poured into them. Yes—they wanted instant revenge; that was what they had sought by their vacant stares. With a scattered howl, from which the human element seemed long since to have been drained, they swirled up the street. Richard was borne along by the impetus of their fury. He had lost sight of Fraser, who, missing him, had probably returned home; it did not matter; this was rather a lark—one of the Lusitania riots; they had been breaking out all over London since the news had come through. No—not exactly a lark ... it swelled into something more formidable and animated by a spirit of deeper satisfaction than warranted by the schoolboy description: this was action; this was war; he was in direct contact with it at last. A gang of men in an ugly temper, running in a set direction ... he could feel purpose behind the lurching, staggering passage of the mob.... They were on their way to punish the Germans—coarse hulking giants who could laugh at Ethel Ann’s drenched face helpless in a green tumble of breakers.... Brutes! damned brutes! we’ll show them!...

This was all the jerky elated comment his brain could register during the headlong stampede up the cramped alley; that—and a confused impression of the women’s faces here and there patching the rest: streaming hair, with the iron pins still[74] clumsily caught in it; mouths open and awry; damp red skins. Mob-women—they were hideous....

The lantern-jawed man, still leader, halted abruptly in front of a small baker’s shop. “What about that?” denunciatory forefinger thrown out to indicate the name painted over the window: Gottlieb Schnabel. The crowd replied by another exultant howl ... it was beginning to merge its separate identities into the Demos-beast, at once frightful yet silly; incapable alike of retreat or initiative; a beast that uttered meaningless sounds; could be deflected hither and thither; a beast without logic or coherence; but a beast that was out, very obstinately, to maul somebody ... the Germans....

“What about that?”

Those in the van swerved so sharply into the little doorway of the shop, that their comrades immediately behind them could not restrain themselves from reeling past it by weight of impetus; then turned, and pressed back, with a violent impact jamming the rearmost in the narrow aperture; so that it seemed that dark menacing figures were springing out of the shadows from all sides and directions, into the pallid flare of the gas-jets singing forlornly over the counter.

The shop was deserted. Violent hands ripped down the curtains that divided off the back-parlour, and about a dozen roughs hurled themselves up the stairs, chanting: “Schnabel: Schnabel!” in hideous sing-song. Their feet could be heard trampling the upper premises in search of the owner: “Come aht of it, yer bloody funk! Wot abaht the Lusitania?”... The shop-door swung backwards and forwards in the draughts of wind which blew down the street; and at each oscillation, a little bell tinkled the warning of customers—an innocent tinkle, like a distant sheep-bell ... inadequate tinkle that recurred thinly through all the chaos of heavier sound: Crash of splintered glass, as the scales and weights were sent flying through the front window of the shop. The majority of avengers were working off their blood-lust by hullabaloo and wreckage; tossing about the buns and cakes; swinging and smashing the rows of big sweet-bottles; sending a hurricane of piled-up bread-baskets over the floor. It had been a neat little interior, three minutes before...!

[75]

But Richard was impatient of all this mere monkey destruction; his imagination was a-sweat to vent itself upon Germans, not upon rolls and doughnuts. He raced up the back stairs—and down again; no Germans there; and the rioters engaged in the same stupid business of destruction. But the Germans ... pointed steel helmets, puffed-out cheeks, and thick sensual lips—where had they contrived to stow themselves away? The notion had got started that they were here ... somewhere ... the excited boy did not stop to reason it out. He wanted to batter with his fists against a fat resisting carcase. Here?—of course they were; somebody had said so. Dodging the volley of loaves, he bolted out of the shop, and round the corner to the tiny yard at the back, unheeding whether he were alone or followed. The bakehouse!—must be one under the shop. Yes—beneath this wooden flap. Guided by the hot good smell of bread in the oven, he wrenched at the hinges; and rashly taking the ladder for granted, plunged into the gaping black space. Fragments of tales relating to the Lusitania horrors were flying loosely about in his mind, like the loaves in the shop: sickening details gasped out by the dazed survivors, and written up for the public in lurid journalese. Fighting—was that the Hun idea of fighting?—swine! cheats! butchers!—his turn to show them now....

Richard bumped his feet on level ground; he blinked an instant in the red dimness of his surroundings ... then, gradually, a face swam into his consciousness—a face over there, by the barrels—a face smeared in flour, and channelled by the drip of perspiration—a face that would have been ludicrous, were it not for its expression of deadly shivering fear ... trapped fear....

With knowledge of utter helplessness in his fascinated gaze, he confronted Richard. Beside him, a plump woman and two or three children crouched in a shadowy lump.

No army of Germans here. Only the little baker, Gottlieb Schnabel, and his family.

He stared at Richard. Richard stared back. And then his swollen illusion was pricked and shrivelled. So this was the reality of what he had been vengefully hounding down, he and the bawlers overhead? this one peaked, unhappy little face, white with dabs of flour, white in the last dumb extremity of panic.

[76]

Schnabel’s dry lips moved convulsively.... “Ach, bitte,” he babbled; then, with an effort: “Can—I—help—for—it?”...

Richard just caught the words. He recoiled; turned and stumbled up the ladder.... One must get away from that face.... Not so easy—some of the crowd had followed him after all, were swarming round the entrance to the bakehouse. “There’s no-one there,” muttered Richard; “no-one there” ... his voice was choked as though in a thick fog. “No-one there——” But the main thing was to get out, into the street, before they began to do things—no, that did not matter,—but before he could hear them doing things. They were pressing him back again, down again.... “There’s no one there, I tell you!” Blindly he buffeted right and left the heads which blocked his passage. Some of them, believing him, gave way ... melted out of reach from his hard fists and powerful driving shoulders. Others went shuffling and clattering past him, down the wooden rungs. “Schnabel! Schnabel!”—and a sharp scream. One must get away, quickly....

A great surge of bodies in the yard. Thrusting forward, with his head low down, through a rank smell of boots and corduroys and rusty skirts, Richard got clear at last. Round the corner—into the street—a number of people running in his direction—three or four policemen. “There’s no-one there!”—half-sobbing, he dodged through a mews into a wider street; again that loud trample of feet beating towards him—would they never let him escape? he wanted to be free of mobs. What did this mob want? Schnabel? ... No, it was only a helter-skelter of gnome-like urchins, shrieking hoarsely their late editions. He paused to draw breath; leant up against an adjacent wall; his cap had gone long ago, and the wind blew in hard, fresh gusts through his hair.

Presently he walked on again, slowly. Hysteria had evaporated, and was replaced by the usual shame. Now he came to think over the matter coolly, what had so upset him? The little rat of a baker had been in a funk, certainly; probably justified; probably the rabble had handled him fairly roughly. What of that? Ethel Ann, equally innocent, equally helpless, had met with an infinitely worse fate.

Oh, he was not going to take part in the baiting himself. No sport in it. The wisest course to pursue had been to depart[77] from the scene, as he had done. Had he “departed from the scene” or made an exit—rather less dignified than that inferred? Well, he could hardly be expected to stay and look on. Nor could he have protected Schnabel—hang it! the man was a German. Not “the Germans”—but still a German. Richard, impatiently, classified the whole experience as “quite a decent scrum”; and as such, stuck it up on a shelf in his memory, like a book with several pages safely gummed together. He proved to be in a completely strange neighbourhood; and devoted all his present faculties in discovering the whereabouts of Montagu Hall.

“Richard, is that you?”

“Yes, Pater; I’ve just come in.”

“I want to speak to you, my boy.”

“Right-o!” Richard turned on the stairs, interrogatively.

“Not here. In my room.”

Old Hermann Marcus looked up with a queer gleam in his eyes, as Richard and Ferdie entered. Almost as though he were sorry for the boy—and yet secretly and maliciously triumphant.

“How are you getting on at Winborough?” Ferdinand asked jerkily, after a pause.

“Same as usual: excellent all-round ability, but no outstanding merit, as old Skeffington says. I say, dad, would you have any objection if I joined up next year already?” since his father had seemingly nothing of any importance to impart, Richard thought he might as well use the formal interview for his own purpose.

“Joined up what?”

“The army, of course. Royal Flying Corps, for choice; I’m fit enough to stand the medical test. And lots of fellows are passing themselves off as older than their age. Only I’m not very tall ...” his tone implied reproach for his father’s lack of inches. There was silence for a moment; he felt the two men were not attending to his request as they should; so he went on in further explanation: “It’s so rotten to be just under age for enlisting. Different if you’re a kid, and out of it altogether. Rogers—you remember him? he was head[78] boy at Winborough—Rogers is only eighteen months older than I am, and he’s in the thick of it. And to-day more than ever——” he stopped dead.

“Why to-day more than ever?” Ferdinand enquired, very gently.

Richard was not quite sure why: except that to-day he had expended a lot of heat and energy on a cause which had repaid him neither in vigorous defence nor in ultimate satisfaction; and he wanted an experience of real, substantial war and real, substantial Germans to make up for the futile civilian imitation. But he was unwilling to explain all this about Germans in front of his grandfather, or even to his father, who might be subject to occasional sensitive twinges on that score. So he swerved from the direct question:

“Quite frankly, dad, I mean to enlist next year, with or without permission. But I thought I’d like to hear if you have any special objection; good of me, isn’t it?” laughing.

“Certainly I should be proud and glad if you could fight for England, but——” Ferdie evidently found an increasing difficulty in going on. He took up an evening paper from the table: “Have you seen the late editions, Richard?”

“No. Any news? Not—not a defeat?”

“The Prime Minister has made certain promises ... there have been more anti-German riots over this Lusitania business——”

“Conceited fools, who haven’t the brains to win a victory at the Front, think themselves patriots if they break a few shop-windows,” growled Marcus from his corner.

Richard flushed darkly, and his hands clenched in his pockets: “They’d be doing the same, and much worse, to us in Germany, if we’d established ourselves all over the place there, as they have here. And the sinking of the Lusitania was a foul, cowardly affair; no wonder we’ve lost control of our tempers, hearing about it.”

“We?” echoed the old Bavarian, with a sarcastic inflexion; “and you as German as I, my boy! You won’t be allowed to forget it as easily, in the future.”

“Rubbish!” said Richard shortly. He had no desire to quarrel with his grandfather, who, as a lonely but unyielding unit in enemy country, demanded a certain chivalry of treatment.—But no fellow was going to stand being called a German, nowadays! “Have you done with me, dad? I’m[79] sorry about the fuss in the papers, but it will all blow off presently. I don’t think they’ll do anything to the naturalized Germans, anyway; not to those who have been settled in England as long as you.” He sauntered towards the door; then halted to add in a sudden inspiration of diplomacy: “The sooner I’m fighting, dad, the better for you, all of you. A son in the army makes a huge difference to public feeling.”

“That depends on which army ...” threw in Hermann Marcus. And Ferdie said, with a stupendous effort: “You can’t fight for England in this war, Richard. I’m sorry, as you are so dead nuts on it,” carefully negotiating the idiom. “But they will not take you. You are a German.”

Richard burst into a great shout of laughter. “What rot, dad! How can I be a German? I’m as English as they make ’em.”

“You were born in Germany. And I was not naturalized at that date.”

“Born—in—Germany?”

“You see,” Ferdie apologized, miserably avoiding his son’s eyes, “your grandfather invited us to pay him a long visit to Munich. I and Deb—and your dear mother, of course. He had never seen little Deb ... she was seven years old——”

“A quite abominable pest of a child!” from the depths of the armchair in the corner.

“And so we all went over. And you were born there. Your poor mother died of it ...” he cleared his throat, and blew his nose. “That, perhaps, is why it was never mentioned to you.”

Ferdie was right. He had felt the loss of Dorothea so keenly that sentiment demanded of the household that her death should never be alluded to. Whence followed that Richard’s birth was likewise hushed up, being intimately linked with the bereavement and all its tragic circumstances. He had never bothered about the matter, taking it for granted that, like Deb, he was born at Daisybanks.

“But, father, I can’t be a German. I—I don’t like Germans. I can’t stick them at any price.” His tone was sharp with the first agonized belief that some truth might lurk in the altogether staggering accusation that these two were bringing against him. “I don’t like Germans. And we’re fighting them. I’m English—like other chaps. You can’t make a fellow German by saying he is,” relieved commonsense asserting[80] itself over a frame of mind which was almost babyish in its reliance on the repetition: “I don’t like Germans!”

And then, a criminal before the sternest of judges, Ferdinand Marcus made his confession:

“You see—when I was naturalized afterwards, you—you were not naturalized at the same time. I wanted you to choose for yourself when you came of age; to be free to make your own choice for one country or another—for any country. I, as a boy, had never been consulted what were my private wishes——” His father here gave utterance to a grunt pregnant with rich opinions of the unimportance of Ferdie’s wishes, whatever they might have been. “—It should be different for you, I said. Who knows if you would want to find yourself a British subject, in twenty-one years? Time enough then. So I left it till you should be old enough——”

“It didn’t strike you, I suppose, that a war might break out in the meantime?”

“It did not strike a great many other people, Richard.”

“Doch! everyone but an idiot; an idiot and a bungler ... with your prate of ‘my children’s rights,’ and ‘my children’s opinions’ and ‘my children’s liberty.’... A bungler with your children, like with everything else, you are bringing one of them to an internment camp; we will see to what fine end you bring the other.”

Richard faced round sharply: “Is that what it means for me?”

“We cannot tell for certain; I will make an appeal on your behalf——”

“Damn! I don’t want any appeals. It’s not a felony to be born in one place instead of another. What’s the law?”

“By pre-war law, you took your father’s nationality while you were a minor—but all that has been altered——” Ferdinand took up the paper: “They’ve been lenient so far; but all this agitation—the Home Secretary has had to make concessions to the public. They are rounding up enemy aliens of military age; that does not concern you at present. You will have to register under the Five-Mile Act until—until——”

“Until I’m old enough to have enlisted,” muttered the boy. “And Deb?”

“Deb is all right; she was born in England. At least—I must see: there is still some confusion under these new conditions[81] as to whether you are what your father is, or where you were born. And they alter the law every five minutes. But I think she is all right.”

“Good,” with a breath of relief. “And you, dad?”

“They are not persecuting the naturalized, so far. There is an outcry from the extreme party, but——” Ferdie shrugged his shoulders, “I am a British subject.”

“And grandfather? And Aunt Stella?”

“They are repatriating the old people and the women and children. But exemptions are to be made in special cases; Stella has been a resident here for so many years——”

“And I, being a cripple of nearly eighty, your English may have the kindness to allow me to die under a flag which I have certainly no wish to live under.”

“Cut all that!” his grandson silenced him roughly. “It’s rank pro-German——”

“German,” Hermann methodically corrected him. “I at least know what I am.”

“And Richard and I also know what we are, too,” Ferdie shouted warmly, clapping his hand on Richard’s broad, and at that moment exceedingly forbidding shoulder; “our sentiments for this country of ours are loyal as any Britishers’; we cheer their victories. We continue to salute the Union Jack with pride in our hearts——”

“Whatever such foolishness you may commit, liebe Ferdinand, you remain only half an Englishman.”

Ferdie’s resolute bellow gained strength with every caustic interruption from his parent. “We will cheerfully give help where we are permitted——”

Richard broke in: “—And cheerfully let ourselves be hoofed out where we’re not? No, I’m not going to hang round the edges of patriotism like a beggar. Why wasn’t I told of all this till now?”

It struck Ferdie that Richard was at times disconcertingly like his grandfather. “Why should you have been made worried and uncomfortable at school, while there was still no need? And before the war, what did it matter where you were born?”

“And now, what else matters in all the world?” the first numbness of shock had passed, and Richard’s innermost being was plunging in every direction like a tortured bull caught inside the ring-fence. “You’ve robbed me of my nationality—professing[82] to be so keen on my happiness. Born in Germany, and lugged over to England; educated in England, and allowed to take it for granted I was English, and all the while a German subject—in God’s name, where do I belong? what am I? who can claim me? Oh yes, you’ve been jolly good to me, I don’t deny that; you’ve spoilt me; you’ve given me everything—except a country. But to shove a fellow in a position where an outbreak of war leaves him with his sentiments in one place, and his birth-certificate in another, is rather overdoing the freedom-of-choice stunt. You might have known all along I’d care to be rooted somewhere. Citizenship doesn’t go for nothing, even in peace——”

“Nonsense, Richard; be honest; how much did you trouble your head about citizenship, before nineteen-fourteen?”

“I thought I was English,” Richard said. And repeated, with a sort of dazed pugnacious idiocy: “I thought I was English.” Then he flared out again: “You didn’t think at all. You were just careless. Why on earth did you want to take me to Germany to be born?”

“I have told you; your grandfather sent for us.”

“It wouldn’t have hurt him to wait a year or two. Much he cared if he never saw any of you again. You were all afraid to say no to him. I thought myself so lucky to be born in these times. What’s the good of the war now?”

His father could not forbear from a smile at the savage young egoism. The boy saw it, and raged on: “It would have been better if I’d died when my mother died——”

“Hush, hush, my son.”

... Richard crashed his weight on to a chair, head butted down on his arms along the back rail. And the two men watched him in silence; one of them thinking with a slow, grudging, resentment how good a moment it might have been for him to have seen this youngster in an officer’s light-blue uniform, come clanging and jangling into a certain house in Munich, to bid good-bye before his departure to win glory for the Vaterland. And the other was vainly groping round for what comfort he could give his only son in trouble; Dorothea would have so known what little tender thing to do or say ... his eyes filled with tears, and in his over-anxious endeavour to play mother at this juncture, he blundered dismally:

“Come, come, my boy—buck up! You who are usually so sensible. It isn’t such a tragedy, even if it should end,[83] at the worst, by internment. You will be safe, and with friends——”

Richard slowly lifted his head. He looked rather old for sixteen, and his voice dragged like tired footsteps on a heavy road:

“Sorry if I was rude, dad. Yes, of course I’ll be safe. Much safer than in the Flying Corps. I didn’t think of that. I’m going to bed now. Good-night.”

Half-way across the room, he came back for the evening paper. Then he went out.

... Strange that his brain should have shot right away from the main catastrophe on to this tangent question of reprisals! There, out in mid-ocean, a liner sunk; here, in a London slum, a baker’s shop raided. Where was the connection? A Gottlieb for an Ethel Ann.... “Yes, but is it quite fair—revenge by proxy? it wasn’t Schnabel who drowned Ethel Ann; it was another German; Schnabel was all the while harmlessly selling loaves. Why should he have to pay?” Were they thinking of that, the mad herd who had rushed up the street, brandishing their crowbars and axes and pokers? “Was I thinking of it? To relieve one’s feelings ... biting on the tooth—yes, but it’s got to be that especial nervous tooth—and you should want to hit the same German, not any old German, or the next-best German. If Ethel Ann’s mother could have got in on one of the torpedo crew ... I suppose one can’t expect a crowd to reason that way. But I might have saved him.... Damn it, why should I? he’s a German!”

And so am I—and so am I—knocked the meaningless hammer refrain from the walls and ceiling of his room, from every corner and cranny; in the wind that fitfully rattled the blind; in the creak of the chair; and from the rumble of traffic far below.... So am I—so am I—everywhere but inside his brain, where the mere statement might have been quickened to torturing realization—but it seemed unable to force an entrance, pushed out by a fantastic jumble of oddments he had never thought out before, never bothered to think out.

[84]

—Naturalized ... what exactly did that stand for? A paper which was given in payment of some small sum, stating that you were no more of one nationality, but of another.... But surely nationality was no surface matter, to be dealt with in this arbitrary fashion? it went deeper: your own country, your own soil. “‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead!’ how Fraser ranted that, last term when they were doing Scott. Beastly showing-off!... What will they say at Winborough when I tell them?—No, hang! that wasn’t it.... Nationality—the place where you were born——”

A dead halt in the onrush of thought. Richard stared blankly around him.... Then it began again, mental machinery that whirled ever faster, grinding, minutely grinding, at all that stray lumpy stuff....

“Nothing to do with where you were born. I can swear to that. That’s accidental. And your father’s nationality—accidental too, as far as you’re concerned; can’t be tacked on to it as a matter of course.

“What is it, then? The land that holds a meaning for you; it might be a question of habitation, or tradition, or convenience—herd instinct with the people you live among. Or—or imagination.

“No—it digs further down than that even.

“It ought to be the sum of where you were born, and where your father was born as well, and his father; where you have always lived, and always hope to live.”

But people move about. Cross over. Get mixed. You cannot actually fasten down humanity as neatly as on a map; a line here, and a line there, and this side is English, and this side German. During all these years of peace, little separate individuals busily and happily intermarrying and begetting children; becoming entangled in trade and in friendship; by a million amenities of commerce and art and amusement and family, semi-obliterating the sharp boundary outlines——

“People drift about. And then a war happens. Like a ripping of canvas. No—like two lines of trenches.... A scramble apart to either trench—lucky beggars who know quite distinctly where they belong. And No Man’s Land between. And some stranded in No Man’s Land....

“To be officially of No Man’s Land—that’s one thing; can’t be helped; penalty of carelessness beforehand. But is[85] it possible, I wonder, to feel yourself not for one country nor another? neither mattering? neither victory mattering?

“Socialism—international socialism. But then one must care principally for all humanity—in a lump. And that’s patriotism too, on the largest scale of all. Just like a man crazy only on his own duck-pond is a patriot—a local patriot. All Man’s Land ... One Man’s Land....

“Not for me, thanks. If I had been twenty-one before all this shindy, I’d have been naturalized English!”

Naturalized! Was that only an official cover again? And under the covers, what were those people actually thinking? The Rothenburgs? thousands like them—the half-and-half people....

“I like a German to be a German!”... “Naturalized or unnaturalized, it’s all the same to me!”... “Can a leopard change his spots?”...

Memory offered him these stray phrases perpetually uttered and repeated in a penetrating rasp—where?... in the hall downstairs, and at—at breakfast, surely? (memory struggled)—Oh yes! old Gryce. Behind the voice a crude pink face materialized, with an ugly sag of line at the corners of the mouth and a wisp of white beard wagging from the chin. Old Gryce was always ejecting that type of remark.

“Intern them all!... We didn’t ask them to settle over here. We don’t want them....”

The boy paced up and down the room, head bent, hands locked behind him, brows heavily knit, thinking it out:

Naturalization was, after all, a promise—well, a bargain then; what was a bargain but a mutual promise? A whole community had learnt to rely securely on such a promise; had confidently forfeited the protection and advantages of their native land, in favour of an adopted country. And now if their security were repudiated on excuse of war——

“Is there any stipulating clause in the naturalization contract, making it void in the event of war, I wonder? Because if not——

“But we can’t leave enemy blood loose about the country during war-time. It isn’t safe. They might all be spies. Some of them are. And spying is the worst thing of all—abuse of hospitality. No wonder the thought of it drives people to a sort of madness——”

He took up the evening edition—flung it down again; too[86] dark to read anything but the headlines: “More Anti-German Riots”——

... Someone crouching low in the corner by the cupboard. A patch of white. A face—mad-frightened.... “Ach, bitte——”... The little German baker.—Or ... no—the face had changed—it was Richard himself, staring panic-stricken, yet reproachfully, at that other Richard who was leading against him a hostile mob:

“He’s a German!”

“And so am I—and so am I——”

It had stabbed through to the brain at last.

“I’m not a German. It’s a lie. I’m not. I hate the Germans. They have drowned Ethel Ann ... Ethel Ann....”

How had she looked? had she brown or fair hair?—but all hair is the same in the water ... dank seaweed round a discoloured pulp....

“Swine! Swine!”—he was pacing again with rapid, demented step. “That’s not the game as it should be played, as it was arranged to be played. It’s a breach of the rules. Women and children and non-combatants excluded, and every man with a chance of self-defence. The conventions of war——”

And suddenly Richard stood still and began to laugh. And what chance of defence had a man standing beside a bursting bomb thrown by an unseen hand from fifty yards away? Little silly, fretful rules—with death and destruction and decay streaming wide over one country after another; whirring in the very air above God’s churches; throbbing in the sea under the millionaire’s pleasure-ship; each individual helplessly involved with their bodies or with their goods or with their hearts. Then, what the devil is the use of some abstract gabble about the conventions of a game? ... All that was for five hundred years ago, when one soldier had it out with another soldier according to the laws of chivalry. But in this wholesale welter.... All that fuss about two or three isolated lives sacrificed against the rules, as compared to the thousands according to rule; agony outside the rules, and agony according to rule. When it comes to it, what’s the difference? Ludicrous to reason in the old way—the ravings of an idiot; we have ramped so far round in the circle of civilization that we are miles behind again....

[87]

Richard did not attempt to turn his feverish, dishevelled reflections into coherence; but he could not force his mind from fastening with this queer new tenacity on aspects to which, until now, it had been muffled to a remote indifference. The war and all its immense and tendril complexities—how could he ever have viewed it just as a matter of dealing blows?

“It’s because I was to have had an active part in it. I was going to join up. The only way to avoid war-horror is to take part in it. What will it look like from the internment camp?——”

Imagination pierced—and recoiled from the threatened nausea of stagnation. Internment ... why, he and Deb had joked about it (“Yes, Deb’s all right; I’m glad Deb’s all right!”)—Concentration camps; potted Germans—“Did you know, Richard, Gustav Fürth was potted yesterday?” ... Jokes!—What were they like, these camps? the prisoners were well-treated, he had heard; but what did you do? ... Vision of two fattish young Teutons sleepy over their game of dominoes. This for him, while out there, out there, was the scrum and the sacrifice. This for Richard, who was a fighter ... “Oh God! let the war be over before I’m eighteen!”

[88]

“It was your pal I wanted really—not you,” Antonia Verity informed Deb, when their friendship was sturdy enough to withstand such frankness, “I didn’t like you.”

“Jenny?—Yes, she was worth fifty of me.”

“And yet you’re not really humble,” the other laughed. “Ring for tea, Deb. I’m tired of seeing you brooding like a sphinx. The pleasure grows monotonous. I suppose you can’t brood while you eat macaroons?”

“Easily; they’re quite dry and manageable.”

“Tea, please, and a poached egg for Miss Marcus,” Antonia commanded of the servant. “I can’t help it if you don’t want it, Deb—you must be cured of that inscrutable habit. I just can’t bear it. How many men have called you Sphinx in your exotic career?”

“All, except one or two. It’s very popular. So is Serpent of the Nile and Cleopatra and little Princess of Egypt. When I am moved to cry ‘Yah, chestnut!’ to these endearments, they offer to strangle me in my own hair.”

“Which usually hangs down in readiness. You’re the only person I’ve met outside fiction whose hair naturally gravitates towards your heels. Even on the night we first met——”

“Yes. The soldier and I had been fooling.... Antonia, you guessed, didn’t you, that time—about Jenny?”

“I saw that she was really ill when I came into your room. And I was puzzled, because I had been quite sure before, that you and she were in some plot to escape from La llorraine. But I doubt if she knew herself, in that semi-hysterical condition, when sham ended and the real began. What did she actually die of?”

“Heart failure. She was weakened by a lot of ’flu, and aspirin, and operations, and nursing other people. I ought to have known the difference. But she was always wildly emotional, and almost as often in pain, and then that evening’s[90] excitement——” Deb broke off. It was four months now since the night when Cora had lowered her flame in sympathy with the break-up of the Chorus. Four months—and Jenny dead was so very dead.... Her memory did not abide as lingeringly as in the case of a more spiritual or more intellectual personality. A warm quick reality of everyday little touches and eager practical services ... these things die with the flesh. Deb just knew that neither Cora nor the room nor the soldier nor her own family had stood for home-always-on-the-tap on the second floor landing, as Jenny did. And the little group of people surrounding Jenny seemed mechanically to flop away in different directions, after that evening. Dolph took Bobby away to his people. La llorraine and Manon left Montagu Hall in a whirlwind of rage, because Mr Gryce had complained of Madame’s breakfast costume; the Turkish slippers seemed particularly to offend him. Of the Soldier no more had been heard. And even Deb’s room in which it had all happened, was abandoned. “D’you mind if we share a double-room, Deb?” Aunt Stella had asked rather anxiously, about a month later. “Now that Richard is coming back for the Easter holidays and will want a den of his own, I suggested it might be a saving for your father if we don’t scatter quite so much. But he says you must be asked first if you’ll consent to sleep with a soured old maid,” with that tinkling laugh that never sounded quite as mirthful as the spirit it accompanied.

Deb was quite glad of the change. The associations of her old bed were rather poignant. Stella could not bear the smell of Cora, who was henceforth packed away in a boxroom. And Deb began to wonder if all her life would be a succession of disjointed episodes, each with its full complement of cast and scenery, and each when it was over to be slipped as easily as a bead off a string. Daisybanks, in the careless life before the war: what was known as the “Portman Rooms set” of wealthy semi-artistic young Israelites—dances—the river—frequent companionship of Hedvig and Lenchen Rothenburg. That bead slipped. Dorzheim, and its marionette figures: Felix and Marianna Koch, Sigismund who looked like Jesus Christ, Ralph and Huldah van Sittart, Elly Ladenberg from Manchester, clearest of all, perhaps, the upturned face of Lothar von Relling.... They existed now and performed their parts, hidden away behind a thick black curtain ... what matter if it were never raised again. Then the Chorus....

[91]

What next?

After a pause, Antonia Verity answered that question. Antonia, following up a whim, came to Montagu Hall to see Jenny. Not finding Jenny, she knocked at the door of Deb’s former bedroom. Deb was just moving—that is to say she was sitting dreamily on an overturned drawer, in the midst of a scrum of her possessions, reading a mid-Victorian novel entitled “Anna Lee, Maiden, Wife and Mother.”

“Come and listen to this,” she bade Antonia without further greeting.

They became intimate over “Anna Lee.”

In Antonia Verity, Deb recognized with mixed feelings the temperament she had always most coveted, most desired to find in herself. The natural Artemis, Artemis from no simpering prudery nor actual coldness of disposition—but that Artemis who instinctively runs from the pursuer; Artemis in love with her own chastity. Her eyes, changing from hazel to green, deepset in shadow and drooping at the corners, were at perpetual war with the pure scissored curves of her mouth. Deb was aware that Antonia could never deal in fragments where her love-affairs were concerned; and that she rather wondered at those who did. It seemed therefore a foregone conclusion to Deb, whose mind was prone to run on lines of fairy-tale justice, that life must hold for Antonia the eventual big thing; bank in which this guarded stored-up treasure would ultimately find safe deposit. It remained a miracle to her how Antonia managed not to fritter the treasure. She never saw that trifles simply did not happen to the other girl. Men ... knew. They liked her peacefully, but some fundamental quality in her gave them their cue for decent behaviour as a matter of course. As a same matter of course, they embarked on amorous experiment with Deb; could not leave her alone. And this, though Deb longed for Antonia’s secret to attract the better treatment; more than ever admired her ideal of a girl clad in a sort of symbolic moonwhite armour, now that it had become incarnate. Though she had been often to Antonia’s studio, she had never yet succeeded in probing a certain aloofness in her friend....

Jenny—and then Antonia. Jenny whom one touched ... a fervent cosiness of friendship punctuated throughout by touch—it was impossible to conceive of friendship with Antonia thus emphasized. Antonia was good to look at—delicate,[92] clean lines—no mess; her mind clearly braced to all encounter, whether of laughter or argument. But it was unthinkable that one should touch Antonia, nor seek touch from her; Antonia guarded something ... as yet inviolable.

“Who was the man in the room?” Antonia enquired suddenly, at work upon her portrait of Deb.

“Oh—he was—a—a man.”

“Yes, I gathered that with the naked eye.”

“Incredible, Holmes—it passes human understanding.”

“It passes human understanding what that gentleman in shirt sleeves was doing, cooking asparagus in your room.”

“No scandal about asparagus, I hope?”

“They reeked of it—that night.”

Deb moved restlessly. “Don’t be priggish, Antonia.”

“It isn’t priggishness. Oh, do understand that. It’s—decency. Not towards other people, but towards one’s self. I don’t care about conventions.... Yes, I do—they prevent litter and disorder—and they can’t really get deep enough to handicap the emotions. What I meant was that I don’t care about opinion. I do as I like.”

“Well then ... So do I.”

“No. A man in your bedroom for an hour or two, just to talk to ... and then good-night—that’s not doing as you like. He shouldn’t have been there at all. Taking you and your room for granted. And your lips.”

“He never kissed me,” said Deb in a very low voice.

“I said he took your lips for granted—and the possibility of them. His decision is beside the point. Deb, how I wish you wouldn’t!”

After a pause the other girl said, “I won’t ask ‘what?’ because I suppose I know.... And I agree with you. We ought to save it all up for the one man——”

“No, no, no. That’s merely commercial. To keep one’s market value uncorrupted.... Manon llorraine’s standards. Horrid little ingénue. She reckoned every look thrown to that poor begging man Carew as so much profitless waste of virgin stock.”

“I must say, you took in rather a lot, that one hectic evening at Montagu Hall.”

Antonia rushed on: “Not to save all up for the one man—but[93] ... isn’t maidenhood in itself rather a splendid thing? I wish that didn’t sound so affected. This isn’t the Suffrage standard. I don’t hate the other sex—not a bit. I like them. But ... just to be proud, and not slovenly.”

“You think I’m slovenly?”

“I’ve never seen you for more than a minute in male company. But I fancy, if I had, I should have wanted to cry out every minute: ‘don’t—oh don’t!’”

“As bad as that?” lightly Deb had to feign amusement, for her Artemis girl was flicking her well on the raw. She remembered how she had experienced just that desire to cry out “don’t” when Jenny——

So she stood half-way between Antonia and Jenny. But Jenny had been married—and Antonia said “isn’t maidenhood in itself rather a splendid thing?”

A chill white dawn faintly shot with gold ... for Antonia? for herself and Antonia? But surely such divine hesitancy and glamour were for the girl of eighteen, seventeen, sixteen ... wide eyes, intent on vision, tremulous childish lips, “no one shall kiss me until he comes....” And the end of the legend was that he came, and kissed her—just before she was tired of waiting—at twenty, say; or twenty-one. That answered the riddle so easily for young Artemis. But if the legend missed its obvious conclusion?... She was now twenty-four, and Antonia twenty-six ... Antonia’s austere demands were rather a strain on passion unsatisfied in the late twenties—rather a strain on the chill-white-dawn ideal. Antonia at sixteen, tingling from hot indignant scorn at anything which ran counter to her unshaken, unshakeable schoolgirl principles of what was “right”—Antonia at sixteen, not unlike Deb at sixteen; dreaming in a walled garden of lilacs. They had outgrown it——

What now?

Some sort of a compromise ... a dream semi-yielded, semi-cherished.... Oh, just chance it! A separate code of rules for every transient episode—or none at all—or trust to the moment’s inspiration—take love haphazard—compromise.... Burton Ames had left her possessed by the very desperation of restlessness. And it was easier now to give lightly, since striving to compete with Jenny, she had once broken bounds. Jenny had died, without getting what she wanted; Jenny had shown how easy, how frighteningly easy, it was to die ...[94] slip away. So cram in something at all costs, lest it should happen to you like that....

“Here you are!” Antonia threw her the sketch on which she had the last half hour been working. It was a startlingly clever study in crayons. Underneath it was scrawled “Girl of the Transition Period.”

Petulantly Deb flicked it away. “‘It’s pretty—but is it art?’” she quoted.

“No. It’s psychology.”

“Résumé of our conversation. And yet my people allow me to do what I please, say what I please, go where I please, with whom I please—they’re awfully broad-minded.”

“That’s just why your career is so precarious, my wee one. You’re up against nothing—except your own extremely hazy sense of self-respect. If your father and your Aunt Stella were saying ‘don’t’ all the time, and locking you in your room, and forbidding men the house, and intercepting letters, and generally behaving as we’ve been taught the Best Parents ought to behave, you’d be kept busy defying them, which is a quite healthy occupation. At the worst, in a mood of superlative defiance, you’d go right over the wall ... well, that’s at least honest. All this laxness and let-her-do-as-she-likes, and ‘I’m sure young men are to be trusted now-a-days’.... But parents are not to be trusted. I don’t know what parents are coming to. My mother—it’s her sorrow that I haven’t yet formed a Bold Free Union for her to countenance and encourage——”

“And you would never consent to do it; have no desire to do it. It’s a sad waste of an indulgent parent, Antonia. Thousands of girls get cursed and kicked out of home for just that boldness and freeness which your mother pines to find in you.”

“The darling!—it’s only theoretical pining. Any vivid details of a Bold and Free Union would shock her beyond words. I suppose the truth is that parents are thinking too much—and not enough. It’s still only surface lenience. They’d howl quite as loudly, and break their hearts quite as vehemently as the old-fashioned parent, if we really transgressed.”

“Father would, of course, which puts it out of the question.”

“You being financially dependent on him?”

“Not only that. I happen to be fond of him.”

Antonia smiled, a sweet slow warmth and kindling of her[95] wonted frostiness. “Is there that much grace in you, woman?”

“Though you didn’t allow for it in the sketch—yes, there is.”

“I won’t exhibit the sketch, I promise you.”

“Antonia, dear——” Mrs Verity stood, with one hand pushing aside the dark blue and green portière of the studio. A neat little figure in a black dress with white collar and cuffs; a precise little spinster, one would say, from a novel of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell. Manners of superlative delicacy; speech in which each separate syllable was clearly articulated; a habit of mind which seized on the most trivial utterance of others, and smoothed it out flat for earnest consideration. Mrs Verity’s personality was such as to make it quite credible that Antonia was found in a gooseberry bush.

“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus. Are you quite well? Yes? Really? I am so pleased. It is delightful to find you here with Antonia. I wonder if I might ask for a cup of tea? Not if it is at all inconvenient, Antonia. I can order it in the dining-room, indeed I can. Do you not think the parks are looking lovely? I wonder if—— But I interrupted you, Miss Marcus.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Deb, who had only begun an affirmative: “Yes, aren’t they?” in reference to the parks.

“Oh, but please, please say what you were going to say. It was unpardonably rude of me to cut you so short.”

“It wasn’t anything worth repeating, Mrs Verity. Do go on with what you were going to say—‘I wonder if——’”

“No, indeed, that can quite well wait till you say what you were going to say.”

“But really—I’ve forgotten it,” cried Deb, by now hysterically incapable of the “Yes, aren’t they?” of her original intention.

“My fault; how could I——”

“Here’s your tea, mother;” Antonia smiled mischievously down on the punctilious little lady’s distress.

Deb stretched her limbs lazily, without displaying, however, much determination to move. She was rather hoping that Antonia would invite her to stay. But:

“I have to be going out presently, but in an opposite direction, or I’d ask you to wait for me.”

“Are you supping with Gillian? I thought you told me you expected her here; Miss Marcus, do you not agree[96] with me that Gillian Sherwood is quite a remarkable character?”

An almost imperceptible contraction of Antonia’s brows expressed impatience. “What was the lecture like?” she asked. Deb pondered on the unknown Gillian, hardly hearing Mrs Verity’s painstaking description. This was one of the moments when she was convinced of mystery in the background of Antonia’s life. Why had she never mentioned a Gillian who had a remarkable character, with whom she was on terms of supper? Why did she apparently object so strongly to her mother’s introduction of the name? Why was she on certain occasions so anxious to rid herself of Deb’s company? Why was she so vague and elusive as to the manner in which she had spent the foregoing day, or intended to spend the morrow? Why had she once said casually “Don’t drop in here without letting me know, Deb. Always ’phone. I’m out such a lot, it’s hardly worth your while to chance it....” Antonia herself was always “chancing it” at Montagu Hall.

A second door in the studio led to a small garden. Beyond the panes a tall young man suddenly loomed, and rapped three times, as might a conspirator.

“It’s Cliffe Kennedy,” remarked Mrs Verity, and nodded cheerfully to him. Immediately, as though at some signal, he opened the door, strolled in, and immediately burst forth: “I’ve just told a man that his wife was an abominable female! Yes, an abominable female! and he didn’t know whether to agree with me or not.—Antonia, one doesn’t put tea away when a visitor comes. One brings it out.—I think people ought to know their own minds about that sort of thing, don’t you, Mrs Verity?”

Mrs Verity, as was her wont, gave the matter her weightiest consideration of puckered brow and clasped fingers. “It certainly seems to me of the utmost importance that a man should be aware of his exact state of harmony or disharmony towards the woman in whose company he is compelled to pass at least two-thirds of his normal existence,” she pronounced. “But perhaps he hesitated to express his opinion to you in the fear that it might by some means be carried back to his wife?”

“Not the slightest fear of that—she was there, my dear lady, beside him at the very moment when I said ‘Your wife is an abominable female’—did I say abominable or loathsome? I forget!—‘And all your old pals including myself consider[97] you’ve ruined yourself by marrying her. Throw her off, man, throw her off!’ That was the time for him to agree and get rid of her. Permanently. No woman of spirit could stop with a man aware of the opinion of his pals. But he’s ruined, I tell you. His pluck is broken. He just sniggered and moved away backwards conciliatingly; and She, the hag, the doll, the curly hypocrite, murmured: ‘Come along, Bertie!’—I ask you! ‘Come along, Bertie!’... Antonia, who’s that Florentine page lying over there among the cushions wondering about the handsome young man with hair like the village idiot?”

Deb started at this accurate guess at her reflections, and Cliffe Kennedy grinned at her in excellent fellowship.

Mrs Verity exclaimed: “Forgive me, I have been exceedingly remiss. I should have introduced you before, indeed I should. How could I have neglected to do so?”—though it was hard to say at which point of Mr Kennedy’s speech she could have effected the introduction.

“This is Antonia’s great friend, Deb Marcus. Miss Marcus, Mr Cliffe Kennedy. Cliffe, I will think about the problem of your friend and his wife. I am sure you meant to do good by your intercession. It seems to me a great pity under the circumstances that they should be definitely and not merely experimentally married. And now, since we may not meet again to-day——” She bade good-bye to Deb and Kennedy, patted her daughter’s shoulder, and slipped unobtrusively away.

“Well,” flung out Kennedy to Deb, “was I right about the village idiot?”

She glanced at his golden shock-head, and parried to save herself. “I see no straws spiking in every direction in your hair.”

“And you can’t make village idiots without straw. Good. Nor can you break camels’ backs. Nor tell which way the wind is blowing.”

“Nor eat ice-cream sodas.”

“The straw is a useful animal. Awful dearth of village idiots because Selfridge’s have made a corner in straws for their soda fountain. Species practically extinct. Sole surviving specimen, C. Kennedy, Esq., fireman, pageant-maker and pork-butcher. Pageants and pork while you pause. Preposterous prices! Antonia, you remember my inspiration[98] for a grand historical pageant of barques up the Thames in commemoration of the death of Ethelred the Unready?”

“I remember a few rough suggestions you threw out, of a sort of Lord Mayor’s show,” laughed Antonia, “presenting every sort of special occasion on which the English people were notoriously unready, headed by Ethelred himself, refusing to get up on his wedding-morning because he had overtired himself the night before, taking cinema films of a tortoise——”

“And ending with a symbolic presentment of the proverb ‘Always lock the stable door after the horse has got away; it does no harm and amuses the horse’—tableau of same, with horse smiling happily over the adjoining hedge. Would you believe it, Antonia, that when I approached the Lord Mayor on the subject, and put it to him that this was the undoubted moment for the Educational Value of such a moral lesson upon the psychology of the gritty-nosed board-school child, and would he lend me some of the comic costumes and coachmen he must have lying about from his own piffling show—Antonia, he said: ‘Young man, are you aware that this country is at war?’ and handed me a white feather torn from the hindmost of a flock of geese who happened to be waddling across the hall. I didn’t lose my temper, Antonia. I put it into my buttonhole, and said very calmly, ‘Thank you—that’s the second present I’ve had to-day,’ and turning back the coat lapel on the other side, I showed him my V.C. where the King had pinned it. Then all the geese rose on their hind legs and cheered——”

Deb’s childish peals of laughter broke off his narration. Till the last episode recounted, she had been in bewilderment trying to sift fantasy from fact; with such vivid conviction did the speaker present each succeeding picture: the smiling horse, the mayor bending for the feather, the proud young V.C. ... but that incident at least might quite well be true——

“Are you a V.C.?”

He gave her rather a queer look from his candid forget-me-not blue eyes. And he put down his cup and walked sharply to the window, and remarked in a very matter-of-fact tone: “No. I’ve been medically rejected for the Army. You see, I’ve only been given another year to live, and I suppose they thought it a pity to reduce the allowance.”

“Never mind, Cliffe,” said Antonia gently—and Deb, the tears choking in her throat, waited for the message of divine womanly consolation that was doubtless on its way—“A[99] well-meaning man can tell an enormous quantity of lies even in one year. Don’t give up. Look at him well, Deb—he has a wrinkle in his face for every lie his lips have spoken.”

The man turned round to give the entire benefit of his long face, webbed and wrinkled by a thousand evidences of inaccurate statement. Sombrely he looked at Deb:

“Shall I tell you how I was cured of my habit of lying, in spite of Antonia? Yes, cured, by God, and by pretty drastic means....” He bent his chin on to his hands. Deb knew instinctively that on this one occasion, if never again, out of a fever of imaginative falsehood was emerging a simple and rather poignant piece of truth——

“Never mind the details,” he broke out abruptly—“just take it that there was a woman, and she loved me—I never knew how much. She was responsive to my moods as a field of barley to the wind—rustling to shadow and waving back to pure light. A field of barley, I tell you!” he cried fiercely, striking the table with his fist.... “I was miserably depressed over something or other—again a detail—and she tried to laugh it off. That irritated me—she wasn’t taking the tragedy seriously enough. My tragedy! ‘Ring me up to-morrow, Cliffe, between seven and eight, and let me hear the worst,’ and again that forced silly little laugh. I replied with an inflexion of mocking composure—intensely dramatic: ‘Very well, dear. If I haven’t rung up by five minutes to eight, you’ll know I’ve put a bullet through my head.’ And left it at that.”

He brooded a moment.

“I rang up at two minutes past eight. And it was she who had put a bullet through her head.... Couldn’t endure the prospect of life without me. Oh, no, I hadn’t waited deliberately; I was merely rather rushed, and I’d forgotten the terms of my farewell the evening before. And she had waited ... at the other end ... fifty-five minutes of slow agony....”

“Well, you can understand it cured me of the habit of the effective lie.”

The girls were both silent. The light was fading from the studio. Antonia’s voice spoke with a quiver of laughing accusation: “Cliffe, dear, do I spy another and very recent wrinkle?”

Deb cried in sharp distress, “Oh, Antonia ...” for either[100] the other had trodden with profane feet on sacred ground, or.... She appealed to Cliffe. “It was true?”

“It depends what you mean by true,” he replied with the air of a man slowly descending to earth by parachute. “I think that somewhere or other, and for the reason I have told you, a woman must have sat listening through fifty-five moments for the tinkle of a telephone bell to release her—or how could I know it all so vividly? They say the human imagination is incapable of conceiving outside reality. That the man was not myself?—an accident. Or perhaps it was indeed myself, and I have forgotten it, and in telling you this as a mere tale I’m calling truth itself a lie....”

“I must go,” said Deb politely. “Good-bye.”

“I’ll see you home, wherever it is.” Cliffe lounged to his feet.

“No, thanks,” coldly.

“But I want to. You’re angry with me. And I must put myself right——”

“By another lie?” A flame of indignation in the grey eyes that accused him of rousing her emotions by false pretences. Deb had been profoundly moved by the climax of the tale.

Cliffe argued good-humouredly: “For goodness’ sake, why all this arbitrary distinction between what I invent and what God invents. Of course I’ll see you home.”

“Deb’s stopping to supper with me,” Antonia struck in. “She’s dying to ask me all about you, and my account will be just as picturesque and much more reliable than yours.”

“But, Antonia, I thought you were supping out—with Gillian somebody?”

“Mother said so. I didn’t. I’m supposed to go to some very dull people and I’ve decided to ’phone them off.”

“What do you think of our Gillian?” Cliffe asked of Deb.

“I don’t know her.”

“Don’t know her—but she’s always here or at Zoe’s.”

“Who’s Zoe?”

Kennedy turned excitedly to Antonia: “I say, they must meet, mustn’t they? I believe she and Gillian would hit it off frightfully well. And Zoe’s a whole music-hall entertainment in herself, though I abominate the Spanish Jew of a shoemaker she’s walking out with now. Let’s phone them to come round here to-night. And Winny too——”

“This isn’t a branch of the Y.W.C.A., Cliffe,” Antonia tried[101] amusedly to check his exuberant overflow of conviviality. But Cliffe ran on.

“No—let me see—Zoe shows off best in her own Palais Royale flat—she needs all the doors and cupboards to be really at her best. I’ll give a tea-party there next Saturday. Blair Stevenson may be up on leave, and has asked me to let him meet that singer woman I told him about, with hair just like mine! You must meet her too, Miss Marcus—you positively must.”

“You mean La llorraine—oh, I know her well.” Deb was glad to have found one name familiar among all these pattering new names.

“Good. You’ll come to the tea-party? Antonia will bring you—it’s in a street rather tricky to find. I’m keen on backing Zoe against La llorraine for sheer verbal energy. Take the field bar none. For this evening we’ll just have Gillian and Winifred and Theo. Shall I ’phone them, Antonia, or will you?”

“You can,” said Antonia. “No—bother! Gillian is away till Tuesday, and Winny without her sends me to sleep. And Theo Pandos is a bounder—Deb wouldn’t care about him.”

“That brings the party down to the present three. At least, I suppose I can stop to supper, Antonia, as you’re not going out after all? You haven’t invited me yet.”

“Of course you can. Don’t you know that a studio girl always keeps a stray tin of sardines in the cupboard?”

“And a black and emerald cushion on the divan. Curse it, what I’ve had to suffer dodging the lure of the generic studio cushion. But yours is hardly the generic studio, Antonia. You actually use it for the quaint and unusual purpose of painting pictures in it. The girl of nowadays rents a studio to picnic in by moonlight, or because it has such a ducksome musician’s gallery to sleep in, or a parquet floor for fox-trotting, or an acoustic. Have you a studio, Miss Marcus? Excuse me not calling you by your Christian name for a few weeks, but the whimsical Bohemian vagabond, a species whom I abhor, always uses Christian names within three minutes of introduction.”

“Or else a charming invented name,” Deb supplemented. “I’ll call you ‘Big-Brother-Man’ and you shall call me ‘All-Alone-Girl.’”

“Or you call me ‘Daddy Longlegs’ and I’ll call you ‘Peg o’ my Heart.’”

[102]

“May I? Oh, may I really? And will you? Will you really?”

“Antonia, I’m rather taken with this new person. Where did you pick her up?”

“In a boarding-house. Go on appreciating her, while I ’phone up my hostess for this evening and tell her I have toothache.” Antonia ran up the two steps to the door which led to the house; and stood an instant poised on the topmost, surveying Deb and Cliffe with a provocative smile: “It makes me so happy to think that the two beings whom I love most on earth may also grow to love each other....”

She vanished. And Cliffe murmured: “And she doesn’t care a snap of the fingers for either of us.”

“No. More than anyone else I’ve met, Antonia is absolutely sufficient unto herself.”

“Yet one can’t leave her alone. She’s always the indifferent centre of a swarm of nibblers. What’s the attraction, I wonder.”

“Have you ever caressed a crystal or a lump of jade, or an ornament in soapstone, something with a surface perfectly smooth and cool—something hard and cut and clear, without fuss or anything except its own polish and beauty? ... that’s the beauty of Antonia, and her fascination.”

“An exquisite statuette in green bronze, standing high up on the mantelpiece. Psyche with the lamp.”

“Artemis. Psyche is too human—too curious.”

“More in your line—eh?”

Deb shook her head. And on pretext of needing to do her hair afresh for supper, she followed Antonia into the house. She required to snatch some general information from Antonia about this long, thin beaky-nosed Cliffe Kennedy, with the sunny, forget-me-not blue eyes, and outrageously nimble tongue, before she presented him with the confidences for which he was angling. As she emerged from the garden passage into the hall, she heard Antonia speaking in that peculiarly distinct voice one reserves for the telephone: “No, I want Gillian—Oh, isn’t she?—Well, listen, Winny—Say I simply must go out to-night. I muddled the days—I expect her to-morrow night instead....”

Deb walked slowly through the hall and up the stairs. She was puzzled....

[103]

Antonia had not seen her. A moment later she came into the bedroom.

“Oh, was Cliffe too much for you?”

“You said you would tell me about him.”

“Certainly,” said Antonia obligingly, sitting on the edge of the bed and clasping her hands round her knees. “He’s a rich subject—Cliffe Kennedy, aged twenty-nine—only son of a perfectly sweet old mother. He’s a completely harmless-uncle type, from the sex point of view; and also the most dangerous and mischievous person that ever walked this earth, because he attracts all confidences and secrets, and then betrays them lavishly as the freakish impulse takes him.”

“But forewarned——”

“Is not forearmed—with Cliffe. He has a magnetic and fatal lure, that draws and draws you.... You seek comfort each time by an instinctive self-assurance that just this once and only this once Cliffe is to be trusted; and when he is relating one of his best impromptus, your instinct equally assures you that just this once and only this once Cliffe is telling the truth. Yes, you needn’t flush quite so hotly, Deb; which one was it you believed? The episode which cured him of lying? Why, he lies by mechanism. He keeps a sort of stock-pot, into which he throws the bare bones of every dramatic incident which takes his fancy, and fishes it up again meated with personal application. He’s everybody’s best friend and everybody’s worst enemy in succession, and gyrates from one extreme to the other so quickly that you may be unburdening your inmost heart to him under an entirely false impression that you are still on the friendly category. There’s the gong, Deb. Any more questions, before the Court rises?”

“Why isn’t your best boy in khaki?” laughed Deb.

“He has been medically rejected. That bit of information happened to be correct. It’s those dotted fragments of truth which make the whole so perilous. It can’t be altogether discarded.”

“And has he really only a year to live? Oh, Antonia——”

“Bless your tears of sympathy, little girl. Cliffe will probably be a hale old man of eighty. Come along....”

Mrs Verity detained Deb after supper on some pretext, while Cliffe and Antonia returned to the studio. In any[104] normal mother, this piece of manœuvring could easily be interpreted as a wish to further a favourable “match” for Antonia; and Mrs Verity’s intentions were similar and yet startlingly dissimilar; she was benignly hopeful that a free union with that charming Mr Kennedy would be that step in the wrong direction, which she so earnestly desired for Antonia’s good.

“Antonia is the sweetest of companions, and also deserves my supreme respect as an artist,” she told Deb. “But sometimes, Miss Marcus, and oh, I trust indeed that I may be mistaken, sometimes she strikes me as being just a trifle narrow-minded. She seems too content to accept those illogical conventions which have been fetishes since countless years. It would grieve me inexpressibly if Antonia should miss some of the Fullness of life. Do you not agree with me, Miss Marcus, and pray, if you do not agree, do not hesitate to contradict me—do not hesitate to call me unreasonable, but do you not think”—mittened hands fervently clasped in her lap—“that it is Antonia’s duty to the Age to be a little more abandoned in her conduct?”

If one could judge by Kennedy’s conversation during the rest of the evening, Antonia’s friends at least were certainly not to be complained of in that respect. Cliffe slaughtered their presumable confidences with as little ruth as a butcher slaughters lambs, and then disported himself merrily among the mangled heaps. A certain Theo Pandos, after completely maiming the glorious genius of Gillian Sherwood, was flirting shamefully with “Winifred,” who, it seemed, was found in dire need by Gillian on her doorstep, and taken in and clothed and fed. “And I tell you, Antonia, and this is Gospel truth, that sticky, white-slug girl has done the doorstep trick before.... Blair Stevenson knows a man who swears for a fact he met her at Tom Maryon’s, the dramatist, three years ago, under the very same conditions. He made Blair take his oath never to breathe one word about it, for fear of making mischief. One doorstep?—she’s lain on twenty-seven doorsteps.”

From “Winifred,” Cliffe went on to “Zoe” and “Blair,” and was equally startling in his revelations. There was nothing of vindictive or paltry gossip in Cliffe’s stupendous onslaughts upon the truth. He committed mortality on lines that waxed from merely generous to colossal, breath-taking. He flung about reputations and caught them, as deftly as a juggler his[105] plates; or dropped them with magnificent disregard of the smash. Treachery was here conducted on as opulent a scale of grandeur as falsehood. Coincidence was blown out to a lusty, full-bellied creature triumphant over those meagre, lean-throated sisters of accuracy and consistency. No human being could have survived one day of life under such a stress of superlative achievement, such haphazard of occurrence, such complicated interplay of motives, actions, and reactions.

Antonia did not interrupt Mr Cliffe Kennedy’s entertainment. It was a very fine one-man performance, and lasted until eleven o’clock. Then he relapsed into moody depression, and said he would go mad unless he could be solitary ... but would kindly see Deb home first, if she promised not to talk.

And he hovered a moment on tip-toe, taller even than nature had made him, looking down at Antonia with a wry smile; where she lay dreamily back in her chair, with hands clasped behind the beautiful, delicate shape of her head. Then he bent, and took that head between his long, thin, brown fingers, as though she were a holy saint, and reverently touched her forehead with his lips, and put her from him, and swung out of the studio.

Deb understood that it was a kiss of renunciation. And that his passion for Antonia was very real and very hopeless....

Did Antonia know of it?

Antonia telephoned early the next morning to make amused enquiry how much of her inmost soul Deb had been lured to commit to Kennedy’s precarious keeping during the homeward walk.

Deb faltered an evasive reply, ashamed to confess that she had inexplicably delivered up to this persuasive highwayman of secrets the complete comedy and tragedy of the Chorus.

“Did he say anything about me?” Antonia questioned her further.

Again Deb faltered an evasive reply ... whilst in her ears rang a guilty echo of Cliffe’s peroration to the bizarre history of Charlotte Verity’s bold infatuation for a now defunct Arctic explorer who was Cliffe’s own father (“twenty-nine years ago. And all this time neither she nor I have dared to tell Antonia that she’s my own half-sister and a child of love.”...)

“No, nothing, Antonia.”

[106]

“What did he talk about, then? Well—whom did he talk about?”

“His m-mother.”

“Deb, I can positively hear you squirming. Own up. Why are you shielding him?”

“I’m not,” protested Deb unhappily.

Antonia let her off. “What are you doing to-day?”

“I think I’ll go to Hampstead and ask myself to tea with the Rothenburgs—the Redburys, I mean. Nell was the kiddy I introduced to you last week; you liked her, didn’t you?”

“Yes—I’ve just rung her up to invite her to the show of etchings at the Leicester Galleries.”

“Never mind. I can see her another time.”

“Sure you don’t mind?”

“Not a bit. Any message for La llorraine? I’ll pay them a visit this afternoon, instead of the Redburys.”

“Will you? Then I shall probably come on there after the show—if you don’t object.”

“Why should I object? I’m very happy in your company.”

“I accept your act of homage,” serenely.

“’Tisn’t anything of the sort,” Deb repudiated the suggestion with extreme indignation.

“Very well, dear. Ask your Aunt Stella if she’ll lunch with me to-morrow.”

“Me too?”

“The perfect hostess never mixes her generations.”

“That’s an excuse not to give me lunch.”

“You may come to supper the day after, if you bring your brother, as you once promised.”

“And my grandfather?”

“The old Hun? Certainly. I prefer him to the oh-so-English Mr Otto Redbury, anyway.”

“Does the oh-so-English Herr Otto Rothenburg go and sit in the bathroom and sulk when you are there? because it honours you too highly if he appears, and you might get conceited about it.”

“On the contrary, he entertains me with his most irreproachable Jingo sentiments—rather loudly, in case a policeman is posted outside the door.”

“An old lady has been posted outside this door for a good[107] twenty minutes, waiting to wash her hands. Shall I let her in?”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“The ’phone and the wash-basin live together at Montague Hall. Good-bye, Antonia—do you like me?”

“Moderately. Good-bye, child.”

The Redburys were at Saturday dinner. Their numbers indicated a party, but in reality no one but the intimate family was present. Mr and Mrs Redbury, their sons Hardy and David; Hardy’s wife Beatrice, and her brother Sampson Phillips; the two daughters of the house, Hedda and Nell; and Miss Swinley, the strictly English governess. Four members were missing from the company: Con, the eldest Redbury, since several months at the Front; Wilhelmina, the infant child of Hardy and Beatrice, who had annoyed her grandfather and been banished to the nursery; Hedda’s husband, Gustav Fürth, interned in England for being a German; and Max, the boy who came between Hardy and David, interned in Germany for being an Englishman.

The international situation round the table was one of extremest delicacy. Otto Rothenburg had settled in England for business purposes, and was naturalized directly after his marriage with Trudchen Wagner. But he made no secret of his dislike of the English, and his contempt of the semi-English; and had always petulantly insisted that his household should be conducted on sound and hearty Teuton principles, of which the main points were a diet of rich sufficiency for the elders, and no nonsense and no discrimination for the tribe of children. Though the quantity of these—six alive and two dead—indicated that he did not confine his German ideas wholly to the table. Each of the six played a chosen musical instrument—chosen by Herr Rothenburg himself, be it remarked. The two girls had frequently been burdened by plaid frocks; German was the language spoken as a matter of course at meals; filial obedience and the good-night kiss were insisted upon; and there was a frequent coming and going of relatives scattered over Germany and Austria, with large gay packets of gingerbread tied up in silver paper; or of polite unknowns bearing letters of introduction from the[109] Rothenburg relatives abroad; and very eager to be invited to a meal.

When Hedvig, at eighteen, was wedded to a German, her father was delighted. Hedvig herself had never been consulted on the match. When Gerhardt, at twenty-four, had displayed unexpected initiative and engaged himself to Beatrice Phillips, Rothenburg fretted and objected and sulked, and locked himself in the bathroom, and came out again when it was least desirable that he should do so; and during a full six months rendered the lives of all about him wholly unbearable. He was finally only reconciled to the bride’s English birth and parentage by her large settlements. Max, two years younger than Gerhardt, was, however, immediately despatched out of danger to his Uncle Karl in Hanover, there to learn the business and eventually to marry his Uncle Karl’s daughter Klara. Konrad’s enthusiasm for territorial drill—well, with a stretch of the imagination, that could be ascribed to his German blood revealing itself in a wistful passion for the obligatory military service which could never be his; therefore, Konrad, who of all the brood was his mother’s darling, was grudgingly permitted to remain in London and read for the Bar. David, sent to a day-school, was destined later for Heidelberg University, as a corrective to any ultra-English notions which St Crispin’s may have put into his head.

And then had occurred this most inconvenient war.

Herr Otto Rothenburg did not wait to be subtle about his change of front. Immediately he scuttled for cover. He became in name, in sentiment and in habit what he already was by law—a fine old English gentleman. His household was revolutionized; he turned livid at the sound of a single German word spoken; he clung to such English acquaintances as were his, with a limpet-like fervour of affection which no coldness could disconcert. He forbade all communication with relatives abroad; and all mention of them. In short, Mr Otto Redbury was afraid. To their mother’s utter bewilderment, Hedvig, Lenchen, Konrad and Gerhardt were metamorphosed to Hedda, Nell, Con and Hardy. His fever reached its zenith when Gustav Fürth, an unnaturalized German of military age, was arrested and interned. And his daughter Hedda, penniless and unprotected, but in the highest spirits, returned to the parental roof, with the obvious and natural intention of remaining where she was for the duration of the[110] war. Once supremely her father’s good girl, Hedda was not at all popular in this crisis. It was difficult airily to disavow all enemy connection, with concerned enquiries emanating from all quarters as to Fürth’s whereabouts and treatment. Supposing, too, that when she came to the house, Beatrice should be offended at Hedda’s presence there ... Beatrice, that never-to-be-sufficiently appreciated link with solid British stock!

Beyond a little astonished realization at finding herself encircled by alien enemies—her attitude conveyed that she had never noticed before that the Rothenburgs were German—Beatrice had a nature too well-bred and womanly—gentle-womanly, David was wont to call it—to have expressed as yet any sort of resentment. She was very nice and tactful to Hedda about “poor Gustav.” It was a miracle that Hardy could have been sensible and far-seeing enough as to have married so successfully. Mr Redbury propitiated her with a determination and unction that—again to quote David—“fair gives one the sicks.” But then Mr Redbury was desperately afraid.

“Bodadoes, Beatty, mein Schatz?” enquired Mrs Redbury, dumpy and apple-cheeked and very harrassed by her husband’s perpetual amendment of her accent, and by the awful trinity of Briton’s representatives present in the dining-room.

And Beatrice blushed faintly and glanced apologetically at her brother Samson, who looked as wooden as though a toast of the King had just been proposed. Miss Swinley coughed, a delicate and pensive cough; something had annoyed Miss Swinley that morning, and she was ripe for revenge.

“I met a vellow in de Zity dis morning,” said Mr Redbury, glaring at his wife, “who vould by no means pelieve dat I vos bartly a voreigner. ‘Vot—you?—go on! all dese years I dake you for a bure-plooded Priton!’ He roared with laughter ven I told him my selige father was porn in Amsterdam. He vouldn’t pelieve me. ‘Your vife,’ he said, ‘she speaks wiz a slight aggsent. But you are von of us, Redbury, old man.’ He vouldn’t pelieve me——” himself roaring with laughter, but still glaring at Trudchen.

“And when I told him how beautiful you were,” sang Hedda—David kicked her to shut up. He could not bear it when the old man made an ass of himself.

“He wouldn’t believe me ...” Hedda chirrupped[111] irrepressibly. The world bereft of Gustav was so full of radiant possibilities that she could not refrain from bursting out. For her, at least, the war was not entirely an evil thing.

Mr Redbury spoke quite correct English, but his accent was not so irreproachable as to justify the complete good faith of the “vellow in the Zity.” And that “selige” had slipped in by mistake; and would prevent him from being quite so privately nasty to his wife about “mein Schatz” as he had anticipated.

A joint appeared on the table simultaneously with the post. One letter bearing the “opened by Censor” label, black letters on white pasted across the slit of the envelope, was handed by the servant to Mrs Redbury.

“Ach Gott! von der liebsten besten Anna!” as a second letter was revealed under cover of the first.

Mr Redbury hissed out a venomous “Put it away!” which his wife, fumbling and tearful over this communication from her beloved elder sister in Berlin, neither heard nor heeded. Mr Redbury dared not insist, in front of Rhoda, the parlour-maid—not to mention Beatrice, Samson Phillips and Miss Swinley. Besides, though his sway might be peevishly unpleasant, it never exacted the awed obedience yielded to a true despot. He quivered with horror at the present predicament, as it dawned upon him that his wife intended to read aloud the letter from Germany, in little bursts and snatches of joy. David was encouraging her by eager questions—that boy had no sense whatever. Mr Redbury began to talk very loud and fast.

“It makes me broud to see all the ghagi round my table”—he looked unutterable compliments at Samson Phillips’ captain’s uniform, then possessively at Hardy, who was short-sighted and had only been admitted to Home Service; and at David, a public-school cadet. “If only Con vere here, to gomblete our number; did I tell you, Captain Villips, zat my eldest boy has been mentioned in disbatches for botting four Huns wiz his own rifle?”

“Glad to hear Con has a sense of property!” muttered David.

“Ei, die Arme!” cried Mrs Redbury, weeping. “Franz has been shot. You remember little Franz, Otto? Ach verzeihen Sie—forgive me, Captain Villips. Such a dear little[112] boy, my sister’s youngest. He stayed with us for a whole year, and learnt his lessons wiz Nell.”

Vindictively Mr Redbury carved all the gristle for Hedda, who had a German husband. It was a vent to his feelings. He showed a nice discrimination in reserving the juiciest bits for Beatrice; Miss Swinley, he judged correctly, was past all such caressing treatment; one could safely anticipate her month’s notice the very next morning. Not that she was really necessary any longer to superintend Nell’s studies. Nell was seventeen, and in the ordinary course of events, would have been “out” next year. But Miss Swinley would spread a report that her principles would not permit her to remain in a household so pronouncedly pro-German.... To Mr Redbury’s jaundiced fancy, the tread of the policeman sounded nearer. And he was never far away—that mythical policeman.

“Oh, Mother, is there anything about Max?” asked Nell, her dark liquid eyes wistful with anxiety for her favourite brother.

Mrs Redbury fluttered the thin foreign pages, crossed with pointed scribble. “But yes—Max is well as can be hoped, and his Uncle Karl makes enquiries that he is gomfortable. That good Karl! And—ach, unglaublich!—his own nephew, Otto Salinger, is in a gonfinement camp over here, and Karl asks if we, in return, vill find him out and be nice to him? But yes, indeed; perhaps ze poor young man vould like some of my Dampfnudeln; he vill surely be homesick. Otto, do you hear?”

Miss Swinley repeated her pensive cough. And Mr Redbury, wrathfully ignoring the question of his unfortunate namesake, addressed himself again to Captain Phillips.

“Ven do you think we shall knock them out definitely?” His loud tones drowning Trudchen’s agitated twitter. “I have had a tip to lay in yards and yards and yards of punting.”

Samson Phillips’ handsome, heavy features expressed bewilderment.

“Punting?”

“Rather overdone the bunting to-day, haven’t you, father?” David suggested impertinently. It was flag-day for one of the minor Balkan states, and Mr Redbury wore his expensive trophies duplicated and tripled, with the air of a General bespattered with honourable medals.

[113]

Mr Redbury told an anecdote of the titled lady who had decorated him. And then Beatrice asked:

“Do you really think we shall win the war so soon? It’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it?” her pleasant, well-bred English voice was a relief after so much duologue from her parents-in-law. “But I don’t think it’s very nice of the Germans to use liquid fire, do you?”

Hardy beamed at her fondly through his glasses. “Not very nice of them, no. Not drawing-room manners, is it, darling?” He was a man of quaint appearance, a startlingly fair replica of Nell and David, who had the dark melancholy eyes, aquiline cast of feature, and sensitive lips that stamped them true Hebrew. But Hardy, with his light eyes, light hair, light skin, and enormous nose, gave somewhat the impression of a Jew who had been well bleached. Hedda’s colouring lay between the two extremes. Con enjoyed the good looks of the family; blue eyes always afire with mirth; tall, athletic figure; incarnate good-nature and high spirits, he was adored by his men, and well-liked by his superior officers. As for his mother—not Max nor Hardy nor David, nor Hedda nor Nell, could in sum equal her love for this miracle of an eldest-born, now in the trenches.

“Are you laughing at me?” Beatrice remained quite serene. “Yes, please; I will have some cream.”

“Die Anna writes zat zere is only a wee-little milk for each child in Berlin; not enough to keep zem alive, she say.”

“Let zem die!” cried Mr Redbury, with a ferocity that was really foreign to his nature—only he was afraid. “All the better. Let zem all die. Zey only grow up to be Cherman soldiers fighting against humanity.”

Nell flashed out: “Oh, father, how can you?—little soft babies——” and suddenly plunged back into silence, marvelling at her own temerity.

David as usual supported her in rebellion. “Not all German babies grow up to be German soldiers. Some grow up to be English soldiers” ... his ironic downward glance at his own uniform emphasized the remark.

“If Con were here, young ’un, he’d lick you for that,” and Hardy sent a message of strong disapproval over his glasses at his cadet brother.

“Con’s different. However keen he may be on his regiment[114] and England and all that, he never talks fatuous drivel about wanting all the German babies to die.”

“Vatuous trivel ...” shouted Mr Redbury.

“Dear me,” murmured Miss Swinley.

“I’m sure David doesn’t mean to be rude, father,” Beatrice put in mildly. “We none of us want babies to die, but of course it’s nicer if it isn’t English babies.”

David laughed. And his father ordered him from the table. Nell immediately slipped from her seat and joined him at the door.

“Ach Lenchen!” sobbed Mrs Redbury. “And you haf not touched the pie on your blate!”

“Gom back!” roared Mr Redbury. For there was always a possibility that she might find favour in the eyes of Samson Phillips. He had noticed with pleasure that a secret understanding seemed to exist between them; frequently they whispered together.... “My son-in-law a Captain in ze Zappers!”... Another link with safety. One might almost defy the policeman then.

The parlour-maid accosted David at the foot of the stairs. “Young Mr Marcus is in the schoolroom, sir. He said he would wait for you there.”

“Oh—thanks, Rhoda.”

“Hullo, Marcus. Not end of the term yet, is it? Scarlet fever again?”

“No. I’ve chucked Winborough.” Richard was lounging on the shabby fender-seat, drumming with one heel against the side of the fireplace. He was not looking well; dark marks under his eyes and a rather drawn expression round the mouth caused David, who was observant, to scrutinize him with some attention. He was rather surprised at this visit. On the whole Richard was not wont to seek out his society with overmuch enthusiasm. Richard’s friends were mostly sturdy athletes of the Greville Dunne order, who summed up David as “sloppy” because he played the cello, and hated games.

“Chucked Winborough? That’s pretty casual. What does your guv’nor say?”

“Said I could do as I liked about it.”

[115]

“Good Lord! mine would bellow the house down. He’s just slung me out of the dining-room over some nonsense about German and English babies.”

David threw himself disconsolately in the battered old armchair. The other boy glanced up with sudden interest.

“What’s your family’s attitude towards the war?”

“We’re all at sixes and sevens. Father’s more English than the English; and mother sits and worries in alternate layers over Con and her own people in Germany. Does not mention them, of course. Hardy is a genuine patriot, I believe, without making much row about it. Of course being married to Beatrice has influenced him. We hang the fact of Beatrice out in the front garden like the clean washing.... Sickening. And all the while there’s Max interned over there—and Gustave interned over here—also unmentionable ... not that Hedda minds much. But father.... You should see his face when visitors enquire after ‘poor Mr Fürth’—and they do it as if they were treading on egg-shells. The etiquette of internment is as yet very precarious. One isn’t at all sure if Gustave is to be exalted as a martyr or mysteriously hushed up as though he were a convict—I say, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m in for it too, that’s all.”

“Internment? You, Marcus? I—I’m sorry. I’d no idea....”

“All right. You needn’t do the egg-shell trick. I was born in Germany, and father didn’t have me naturalized, that’s all.”

David was silent a moment, thoughtfully staring at his boots. “Has he appealed?”

“Yes. No good. The Government has condoned too many cases, and the Anti-German section are beginning to protest. So they’ve had to tighten up again. We’ve got a let-off from deportation for grandfather and Aunt Stella. Can’t expect more, with all these spy cases about.”

He went on in a very matter-of-fact voice: “I couldn’t stick Winborough this term. Just knowing.—It’s absurd—I was as keen to lick the Germans as ever—but how could I join in when the fellows jawed about Huns and wiping ’em off the face of the earth.... I felt crimson inside—beastly—as though I were there on false pretences. And all the chaps of my age were preparing to join up next year ... last term I was still one of them. They couldn’t understand why....[116] It had to come out at last—the Head knew all along, naturally. But we were playing the Meltonians in their own field, twelve miles away—and I had to register and get permission, show my photograph—all that mush. Like a ticket-of-leave man. The fellows were awfully decent. They didn’t even cut me. Harrison, speaking for the majority, went so far as to say it was rough luck, and they knew I couldn’t help it”—Richard’s underlip twisted sardonically. “But they weren’t quite sure, after that, what ought to be said in front of me ... dead pauses when I strolled up to one group or another.... I came home at half-term, last Monday, and I’m not going back.”

“So you’re out of it,” whispered David, still staring as though fascinated at his boots. “Out of the fighting, and the need of fighting, and the need to choose ... you lucky beggar. Oh, you lucky beggar....”

“I realize the fact that I’m out of it, thanks. But I don’t quite follow your congratulations.”

“It’s that ... I’ve been in Germany, two or three times, once for six months, and—Oh, Richard, what has happened to the old Germany, the Germany we knew, to change it so? I simply can’t realize that they commit atrocities in Belgium and sink hospital ships and mutilate children, and are bragging and swaggering and blood-letting all over Europe.... I can only remember the little things—the silly, comfortable little things.... You follow the stream, and in a clearing in the heart of the great blue pinewood you come bang on the sturdy old forest-house, with antlers branching over the wooden doorway, and the coat-of-arms of some royalty ... perhaps you may catch a glimpse of him in his green hunting-coat ... tables with check blue and red cloths, and saucers of wood-strawberries like tiny drops of blood—do you know the smell and flavour of wood-strawberries?—and a flaxen peasant child who watches you with enormous solemn eyes while you eat, and curtseys by clockwork for hours after you’ve left her.... And all over the country the ridiculous wooden signposts that say on one arm ‘Zum Biergarten,’ and on the other ‘Zum Aussichtspunkt,’ and never get tired of it—and you never get tired of it either. Or of leaning out of your window in the early morning to hear them play the Chorale, slow and pure and stately—and the ground is a mist of blue bilberries—and the Rhine legends jostle each other on your excursion, and you[117] send off postcards on which everybody signs their names—and everyone says good-day—and everyone is musical.”

“Good God, how awful,” was Richard’s sotto voce comment on this list of blisses.

David heard, and said rather impatiently: “You’ve been to Germany, haven’t you? Can’t you understand what I mean?”

Richard ransacked his memory for a single incident or aspect of Dorzheim which had found tender home in his heart, and discovered not one.

“All the little things ...” David murmured again, hands clasped behind his head, and eyes mournfully brooding on the past. “Oh, I know I’m a sentimental idiot, but I can’t shake it all off to command. Not at once.”

“If you feel like that, I don’t honestly see why you need join up. ’Tisn’t compulsory.”

“I’ve got to ... there’d be such a fuss with father—and he would never forgive me. Max can’t, and Hardy’s married.... There’s only Con and me. Con—well, you know him—he rings British wherever you sound him.... I’ve seen mother look at him as though wondering how he could ever have happened to be her son. I don’t want Con to despise me—he’s always been ripping to us younger ones. And then—oh, just because there’s a doubt about us all, we can’t afford, as a family, to have a slacker about. If our name had always been Redbury”—again that melancholy smile and shrug of the shoulders, so typically Jewish.

“Have you changed it?”

“Dear old man, you didn’t commit the horrible error of asking our parlour-maid for Mr David Rothenburg?”

“Yes, I did. Sorry. I believe Deb warned me, but I forgot. Does it matter?”

“She may give notice to-morrow ... we live uncomfortably on a tight-rope nowadays, and some of us haven’t learnt how to walk it yet. Poor mother, for instance—she’s always side-slipping. Rhoda is fairly new, and father deludes himself that she doesn’t know our guilty secret. I say, you remember Miss Swinley?” The mischievous school-boy was uppermost in David now—“and how proud she was of being descended from the Hereford Swinleys? Well, now it’s got round to her how someone said publicly that of course she’s really a German and everybody knows her real name is Schweinthal!”

[118]

Richard threw back his head and filled the room with his guffaws.

“Schweinthal—Swine-valley ... Swinley! Oh, that’s top-hole! She was always so jolly full of swank and backbone. But all the same, Redbury, I’m all at sea with these swarms of English county people that have magically cropped up in our set during the last few weeks. No offence meant to you, but who the deuce are the Lanes and the Silvertons and the Mounts and the Gordons and the Meadowes?”

“All old familiar faces really. And I can tell you who the Mounts and the Meadowes are, anyhow ... they’re each one-half of my cousins, the Wiesenbergs. The elder and younger branch of the family have long been at daggers drawn, and they’ve hailed the opportunity to split into two. And the Mounts know nothing of the Meadowes, nor shall the Meadowes ever go to meet the Mounts. My other cousin, whose father changed his name about forty years ago, swears that he’ll change it back again from Holmes to Hohenheim by way of protest to all the funk and flurry.”

“Quite a pleasing moment at our boarding-house last week, when two Scandinavian ladies were introduced to each other and neither knew the language.”

“But both broke into floods of delighted German? That’s what happens these days when Swede meets Swede.”

“Aunt Stella says speaking German nowadays is as good a thrill as the invention of a new sin, and far superior to secret drinking or smoking or swearing.... You do it in a dark room, under your breath, looking over your shoulder.”

“And in public you carefully mispronounce German towns and Generals, in case it should be suspected that you pronounce them not wisely but too well. Father’s getting quite a dab at throwing off his little jokes about the Kayzer. Comic birthplaces are the fashion as well; two of the Ladenbach girls, when the question crops up, have been instructed to say they were born in a wagon-lit; and the boy Julius, on the steps of the Venezuelan Consulate....”

“Looks as if Frau Ladenbach had dropped ’em about rather carelessly,” chuckled Richard. He was glad he had come this afternoon. It was years since he had been at all intimate with David Rothenburg, and the impulse to seek him out had been the result of a strange weariness of all his other friends who[119] could not be taken for granted as understanding, without elaborate foreword and explanation, all these present chaotic conditions of Germans and semi-Germans....

“Come out,” David suggested. “It’s stuffy in here, and I want to take a parcel of books round to—to some people quite near.... You can help me carry ’em.”

In the hall Nell and Samson Phillips were talking in an earnest whisper. Nell wore heavy golden furs flopping over her thick brown outdoor coat, and a wide-brimmed golden hat. She was a very decorative figure in all shades from sallow through ivory to rich umber; her thick skin, the cream-dusky colour of honeysuckle, could certainly never flush to any shade of pink; only when she was moved, her eyes glowed deeper. They glowed now, at the sight of the two boys descending the staircase.

“Oh, Richard, where is Deb this afternoon? She said something about coming here?”

“Did she? I believe she’s gone to that Russian singing woman, La llorraine. Anyway, you’re going out, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Oh yes. Antonia Verity has invited me to a picture-show. I’m waiting for her to call for me. But I thought if Deb came ... but it doesn’t matter——” She glanced swiftly corner-wise at Samson Phillips, and her look said plainly “I’m sorry.”... Then Mr Redbury came out of the smoking-room into the hall.

“Vell, yong beople”—he beamed approval on Nell and Phillips—“I like to see yong beople enchoying zemselves togezzer. How is your fazer, Marcus? Vun doesn’t see much of him lately.” But he quickly changed the subject, for Ferdinand Marcus was hardly more English than Mr Otto Redbury himself, and therefore at present socially useless as an asset. “Ven are you going to put on ghagi, hein? You’re ze same age as David, aren’t you?”

“Nearly,” said Richard.

“David vos so keen—ah, vell, we can’t all be as keen.... Vish I vos a poy, and could choin up. Hey, Phillips, vill you take me as a regruit in your rechiment? Vere are you two off to, Nell?”

“Pictures, father.”

“To ze bictures? Good. Enchoy yourselves. Look vell after her, Phillips. She’s my only girl left, you see.”

[120]

“Your eldest daughter is living with you for the present, isn’t she, Mr Redbury?” enquired the hoped-for son-in-law.

The prospectively bereaved father did not look grateful for the proffered consolation of Hedda. “Run away to ze bictures, yong beople,” and prepared to re-enter the smoking-room.

“Pictures, father, not the pictures,” Nell, explained, speaking as she always did, like a shy but rapid cascade, perpetually dammed. “Miss Verity has invited me—she is fetching me. Not——” She dared not let him continue in the belief that she was to be escorted by Samson.

“Two girls vun vay and two boys anuzzer, and leave an old fogey like me to entertain the Gaptain? No, no, that’s a foolish arranchment. Vait for your friend, Nell, and all go to the bictures togezzer.”

“Pictures, father. Not the pictures. And I’m not sure if Antonia——”

“All be cholly togezzer,” her father commanded her, peevish at her second attempt at protest.

“Gom in veneffer you get leave, Phillips. Always velcome. Good-pye, yong Marcus. I hope to see you in ghaki next time;” and went into the smoking-room, irascibly slamming the door after him.

“I’m hanged if I’ll be convivial to order,” said David. “’Bye, Nell!” he nodded carelessly to Phillips. “Come along, Marcus.” On the steps they passed Antonia Verity on her way to fetch Nell.

“Are you waiting for me, Nell? good child!” She rested her calm lingering regard on Samson Phillips, who, stolidly planted against the umbrella-stand, did not budge.

Nell wished she could run away, wished she were dead; anything to be drastically removed from this awful predicament between two people who did not know each other, of one of whom she was still deadly shy, the other commanded by her father to be their escort.... What was she to do? How long could they all stand like this glaring at one another? The simple expedient of introducing Samson to Antonia never occurred to Nell, who was very childish for her seventeen years. She just stood with interlocked fingers, suffering.... “Perhaps if we wait long enough, Captain Phillips will go away.... Is that how things, dreadful things, come to an end?”

[121]

“Wonder he didn’t give me a white feather?” growled Richard, as they walked up the street.

David’s eyes were blazing in his thin brown face.

“Hanging on to anything, anybody, English: Beatrice—Con at the Front ... old Con.—And now he wants Samson Phillips; wants to shove Nell into the fellow’s arms.... It’s so cursedly undignified, this crawling round the feet of a country that stands about with folded arms, not wanting you.”

Richard was about to agree, when a peculiar thing happened to him. He was made aware of the Soul of Otto Redbury.... He saw it very clearly, small twitching pink nose of a rabbit—not at all unlike the Soul of Gottlieb Schnabel, the little baker. Alongside of these two, his own soul was an instant laid, then snatched away again ... queer company for the soul of Richard Marcus; he found Redbury objectionable, and despised Schnabel, but—he understood. Funny that David, who was supposed to be an imaginative womanish creature, thrilling quickly to response, a nature artistic and intuitive and all that sort of thing, should reveal himself in certain cases so hard and blunt.

Richard said slowly: “It’s such a beastly position for all of them—all of us,” he amended; but it still seemed a grotesque nightmare that he should be one of the band whom he was unwillingly compelled to understand and defend.

“It’s all very well to be down on your pater, Redbury, and of course one rags about the change of names, and Swiss waiters and so on—but it’s so utterly unnatural to have no country when your country is the one thing in all the world that matters. As good patriots as any are drifting about loose with nowhere to dump their load of patriotism. Oh, I know the stock argument—they should have stuck to the place where they were born. Well, a few thousands, a few tens of thousands haven’t done so; it’s no good pretending that it was as important before nineteen-fourteen as now.”

“I suppose the English didn’t overflow and get stranded on No Man’s Land in such numbers, because they could always colonize,” David conjectured.

“And now this war; we scramble for cover. And the safe people who have settled for generations in one place, of one country, of unmixed blood, laugh at us for scuttling. Do they[122] ever think how easy it is—no merit, but, God! how easy, to be born in England, wholly English, when they say of the half and half brigade: ‘Let ’em get back to their own country—we don’t want ’em!’? But they might have said that before 1914, to have given them a chance to get back. They can’t get back now. Their own so-called country doesn’t want ’em either.... Won’t have them; calls them renegades, who have severed all ties, all obligations. And there they are, absolutely helpless between the two. Belonging to both—no—belonging to neither. Can claim protection from neither. They’re frightened, I tell you, David. All this frantic jabber of the Hidden Hand—why, there have been practically no cases where the naturalized German has been proved guilty of plotting against England in the interests of the Hun. One or two, perhaps, among thousands. But rejected by Germany, rejected by England, dashed from one to the other—how can they help all those little acts that revolt you as being ridiculous or—what do you call it? undignified—ostentatiously planking down their names on subscription lists, kow-towing to the English servants, change of name, and pretending to be Dutch, and pitiful swanking of their English friends; even grabbing at Samson Phillips to get him in the family at all costs.—All that isn’t treachery, but ordinary childish human funk.”

“Why, at the worst, what can be done to them?”

“Nothing very bad. Nothing at all compared with what the men at the Front have to go through; think I don’t know that?” Richard questioned fiercely. “And yet they wouldn’t be funking if they belonged to a country, and had a united cause to fight for. It’s not being able to shout with the rest. It’s the bitter desolation, nowadays, of fighting for one’s own hand....”

He became aware of David’s slow quizzical smile.

“The miracle of the Sleeping Beauty awakened,” he commented softly. “If nothing else, the Great War has at least done this for one Richard Marcus. Rather a drastic kiss, but astoundingly effective.”

“Shut up!” Richard kicked at a stone in the roadway. Head bent, hands clenched in his pockets—as if he wanted to think. As if he welcomed this disconcerting upheaval of his imagination ... to be able to understand Otto Redbury—what next? To stick up for a lot of rotten Germans—Marcus of Winborough, champion half-back of the footer team—Greville[123] Dunne’s pal—average at his work, but a decent ordinary all-round fellow, and no end keen on a commission in the R.F.C. Never again, for him. Never again. Something had happened.... Richard walked along savagely mourning for the self that had once fitted him so easily.... Never again!

David noticed his dejection—and amusement softened into something resembling tenderness for this strong bull-necked fellow, helpless in the grip of his first individual problem. It must have been a bad shock so to have galvanized him from matter-of-course unthinking acceptance of a scheme of life which had been hitherto fair enough and good enough ... tread of many feet all marching in the same direction ... and now—No Man’s Land.

There was little for David himself to learn about the by-ways and customs of this nebulous territory—from his earliest childhood he had wandered there. And he realized that it was not to the habitual thinkers that the war and what it involved had made such a shattering difference—but to those who had never thought before.... Poor old Richard ... all those tumbled we’s and they’s of his utterance ... he hardly knew yet where he belonged—too doggedly proud to include himself with the nation who did not want him—yet jibbing at classification with the despised alien enemy. Poor old Richard, it was rather a shame.

“At any rate, we’re both in the same boat,” David exclaimed, carried away by a quick impulse to solace. Immediately his companion, in a manner of speaking, toppled him out of the boat.

“No, we’re not. You’re born over here. You’re all right. You’d be English if you weren’t a pro-German.”

“Damn it! I’m not a pro-German. I’m a Jew.”

“What the——” Richard in his astonishment stopped dead on the pavement.

“Well?”

“What has being a Jew got to do with it? It’s a question of nationality, not religion.”

“The Jews are a nation. If it were only a theological difference, why should that have affected such a very marked distinction of feature and temperament? Going to Synagogue instead of to Church doesn’t alter the curve of a nose. Of course we’re a nation apart, apart and scattered—but racially[124] the most united in the world. And that’s another of my private reasons for wearing khaki—because the English have been good to the Jews, have given them sanctuary and treated them as equals. They have a claim on our services. While Germany has always behaved like a swine to Judea.... I’m not a pro-German, Marcus, but there’s a kinship between English Jews and German Jews and Russian Jews and Italian and American and Polish and Roumanian and Austrian Jews, that no war ever waged can entirely destroy. I don’t want to see a Jew hurt—and, oh God! I don’t want to hurt another Jew. We’re a race of artists and financiers and wanderers—not of fighters.”

“I don’t know about that. Jehovah was a God of din and battle, wasn’t He? I’m a bit foggy about the Old Testament, but I seem to remember that they were always at it, hammer and tongs. And pater says that Jews are ardent patriots by temperament.”

“Yes—with nowhere to put it. All countries, and no countries, and the countries from which we’ve been driven, and the countries where we hope to go back.... I’m sorry we can’t change over, you and I, Richard. The feeling of persecution isn’t new to me.... I’ve got the sense of it in my very bones.... I’ve been hounded with my ancestors from the East through Russia ... through Central Europe....”

“Good Lord,” Richard broke in; “I believe you enjoy feeling like that.”

And David laughed: “I believe I do. It’s our heritage—this succulent style of melancholy, like seaweed swelling richly under water, compared with which all other sorrow is like seaweed, hard and stale and crackly, on the dry sand.”

“Can’t say that either is my style. I just get damned sick about things. I’m damned sick at not being able to join up in the Flying Corps.”

“You’re only a semi-Jew, Marcus, in spite of the rich promise of your face.”

“I am only a semi-Jew; my mother was a Christian. And what’s wrong with my face?” Richard demanded truculently. “I say—where are you taking me?” as David swerved into a narrow street of tall dingy-looking buildings.

“It’s all right. I just want to bring them these books.” He ran up some steps of a house with the “To Let” board forlornly plastering the windows; and as the bell dangled broken[125] from its socket, and no knocker was in evidence, banged with his fist on the panels of the front door.

“Rum,” thought Richard.

A tall, heavy-featured girl opened the door, and in silence led them to an unfurnished room littered with books and packing-cases and piles of tinned food. A babble of tongues struck harshly upon the ear.... For a second’s space of time Richard was walking up the wide twilit streets of Dorzheim—a dado of pines lowering blackly on the horizon—crowds brushing past, chattering—noisy guttural chatter from the pavements and cafés.... “You will see how many take off their hats to me....”

“This is my pal,” Redbury explained carelessly to the room at large. “He’s one of us——”

All Richard’s being uprose in a growl of contradiction. “One of us?” Why, these people were Germans—talking German, the whole gang of them—about eight or nine.... If he had been a tom-cat, he would have stiffened his fur and spat. As it was, he responded churlishly to salutations, and retired to a window-seat in the corner, from there to watch from beneath humped eyebrows the mysterious proceedings of these friends of David.

The atmosphere oppressed him with memory of all the rumours circulated about German spies ... German Secret Service.... England honeycombed with treachery.... What were they doing, in this empty house, talking German with the passionate zest of tongues let loose from hours of irksome restraint?... What was in those tins and cases?... How had they got hold of the German newspapers and pamphlets lying about?... One of the group was reading aloud a German letter now, and all listened tensely, some still kneeling on the dusty boards with their arms full of books—all except David and the heavy-looking girl and a boy with a flowing tie and thick lips and incredibly close shaven head, who were engrossed in some private discussion.... The girl produced a pile of music and their heads bent closer over the score.

Confounded insolence this, in the very heart of London! Richard’s mood wavered from indignation to a queer sort of panic at being thus associated. He wondered if he ought to give information? No, he could hardly do that, brought here in all good faith by David. But even supposing that these people were bent on no actual harm—and commonsense[126] asserted that they were merely packing hampers for the German prisoners, and at the same time enjoying a little licence of their native speech—even then, how dared David suppose that he was “One of us” among these—these Huns. Not a fibre of kinship in him stretched to meet them. He was as utterly an alien here as....

As he had been at Winborough, this last term.

A sudden ache asserted itself for Greville Dunne’s grey eyes looking straight from under the rim of his midshipman’s cap; for Greville’s English voice, and divine lack of understanding for all things save what was usual and fitting a young Britisher of eighteen should understand; ache for Mrs Dunne and for the Dunnes’ cottage home in Kent—for Molly’s tom-boy exuberance, and young Frank dashing into the chintz sitting-room with his toboggan.

Only of course they would be blank to the badgering perplexities which David Rothenburg——

In an effort to escape from the linked chain of thought, Richard took up a journal lying on the ground near his feet. It was a month-old copy of the Tageblatt. In little separate squares outlined in black were the names of those who had fallen in action: “Thomas Spalding—Gefallen, 14ten Juni 1915.”... What was this palpable English name doing among the list of German officers? Thomas Spalding? Richard speculated idly on the anomaly, till fancy quickened to realization that this Thomas Spalding was his own equivalent on the other side—over there a boy of English parentage brought up in Germany, enlisted in the German army, with his sympathies ... where? Over here, Richard Marcus, of German parentage, brought up in England—Ah well, Thomas Spalding had more luck than he. They had taken him in the army and he had been killed in action. Nevertheless, who knows what he may have had to endure first, from taunts and coldness and suspicion, outcast emotions pushed this way and that. Inevitably the lot of those who are not entirely sons of the soil on which they fight ... die ... “Thomas Spalding, Gefallen.”... Richard stared at the brief announcement till a sting of tears rushed to his eyes. He wished he could have had just one talk, one grip of the hand with his unknown comrade, suddenly nearer and more vivid to him than either Greville or David.

You and I, Thomas Spalding....

Samson Phillips was first and foremost a man of tenacious disposition. He heard Antonia mention that Deb was to be found that Saturday afternoon with a certain person of the name of llorraine, and that she intended a visit to the same person, on her way home after the picture-show. Therefore, by doggedly attaching himself to Nell and her friend during the picture-show, as he was well able to do after Otto’s admonition to conviviality; by dint of an afternoon’s complete boredom and stiff discomfort; and by steadfast repetition of “Well—where do we go now?” at every projected flight on the part of Antonia and Nell, when circumstances offered a break in the concerted programme, as outside the Redburys front door, or after the complete and lingering tour of the Leicester Galleries: “No, I don’t care much for this kind of picture.” Or after half an hour spent in some neighbouring and drearily respectable tea-rooms; in fact, by simple dint of “hanging on,” Samson presently found himself being welcomed by La llorraine, after the manner of a Royal Mistress of the Robes receiving the Royal Master of the Staghounds.... She was in one of her “legitimate” moods; wit and not coarseness was the passport for innuendo. They had rented a rambling underground flat off Elgin Avenue, where their furniture had at last a chance to spread itself; the vast drawing-room, lit by candelabra night and day, was thick-carpeted and sparsely furnished by a Louis couch and chair, a piano, and a table that held some delicate simpering miniatures. Manon moved about the dim spaces, a solitary unchildlike little princess with wide skirts and golden hair that was brushed high off her forehead and piled into stiff curls.... Obviously, the more disreputable phase of peroxide, clothes-line, and variety entertainment, was for the moment in abeyance.

Samson awkwardly approached Deb and Cliffe Kennedy, who were talking together by the window.

[128]

“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus.”

“You? How funny!” Deb began to laugh.

Samson was funny, in juxtaposition with La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy. He was so unplastic.

“Who brought you here? Antonia?”

“I came to see Miss Verity home.”

“But she has only just come.”

He held to his point. She would some time or other be obliged to make a departure, and then his services as an escort would naturally be required. A girl should not traverse the dark streets unaccompanied. A girl should be aware of perils besetting her, though ignorant of their nature.

Samson enquired how Deb proposed to reach home. “This is the worst end of Elgin Avenue,” he hinted darkly, and looked with suspicion at Cliffe Kennedy, who passed his hand across his eyes as though brushing away a hideous memory, and said abruptly: “I’ve never spoken to you of my little sister—have I?”

Deb knew that he was an only child. But she also knew by now his marvellous talent for fitting every subject that came up with local interest of personal experience. What she did not know was exactly how real was the momentary belief which inflated his account of the lovely and cherished little sister—Beth, her name—whom Cliffe had once been requisitioned to fetch from an evening party. There had been a woman—he had not gone. “Someone else will see the Babe home.”... Beth, tired of delay, having refused all other escort—“I’m waiting for my brother, thanks,” with childlike pride—had at last started off by herself....

“It was months before we gave up the search. And it killed my mother—spiritually,” Cliffe amended, recollecting that Deb had frequently lunched with Mrs Kennedy. “Her hair went snow-white during those months——” mournful eyes fixed on Samson’s aghast, attentive face. His gaze wandered to Deb’s, read there a gentle reminder of the dear old lady’s almost unpowdered dark brown coronal; and without the slightest perceptible break in the narrative, sank his voice to the supplementary explanation: “Yes—she dyed it for my sake. I simply couldn’t bear it. My fault—damnable ego-ridden slothful beast!—and the perpetual sight of that piled-up silveriness never let me forget for a moment what she had suffered—what we all suffered ... she guessed it was driving[129] me to madness—Other women condemned what she did—called it preposterous vanity ... at her age. God! one of the divinest impulses of pure love——”

By now, Cliffe was so swathed about in self-spun illusion of tender maternal sacrifice and a lost little sister, that Samson may have been pardoned for horrified credulity:

“And you never heard anything—no news—no clue——?”

“I spend regularly four nights a week in brothels,” Cliffe replied with exquisite simplicity—and Samson checked a stern protest at use of a word which, after all, Deb could not possibly understand.

“But I’m making you melancholy with all this. A chance word reminded me—I’ll see you home to-night, Deb; but I hope you’re not relying on me to pay your bus-fares; you still seem to cling to the outworn tradition that gentlemen, beautiful glossy eligible gentlemen who live in Kensington Palace Gardens, always pay the fare of the young lady they’re walking-out with—or rather riding-out with. I’ve noticed a semi-diffident, semi-expectant look that you always direct towards me when the conductor comes round, and you pull out your modest little purse—and I’m hypnotically compelled to the low rapid pained yet masterful and at the same time unobtrusive utterance: ‘No—please—allow me—I insist.’... And I can’t afford it, Deb. I’ll see you home to-night, but you must pay your own fares.”

Samson favoured the speaker with a look so expressive of the “beautiful glossy eligible gentleman who lived in Kensington Palace Gardens” that Deb’s eyes, encountering Kennedy’s, were an elves’ dance of green and grey merriment.

“I will accompany Miss Marcus home, if she allows me.”

“Are you pledged to see Nell home as well? Antonia and Nell and I all live in different directions, you know.”

“David Redbury is calling for his sister.” Samson stationed himself in an uncomfortable attitude beside the lounging intimate pair, and remained there unbudgingly on guard, declining to be drawn into their conversation; nor yet to be beguiled away by any inducement of refreshment or music.

Meanwhile, La llorraine was making Nell welcome.

“My dee-urr, you are that friend I have been wanting always for my Manon ... she grows too old, too staid—She is with me and the Countess and Stella Marcus and Mrs Verity—she[130] hears us talk—it is not always well that she should hear us talk. The Countess has a most tragic business on the carpet, my dee-urr ... wait, I will tell you—or when we have more time, perhaps. But my Manon—you shall see her every day—all day—so she will grow a child again—healthy, romping children, you and she.... You can eat your déjeuner here, and she her dinner with you—ideal!—it shall be planned ... for listen:” She sank her voice to the confidential pitch, holding Nell inexorably captive with one hand, and with the other sweeping wide descriptive circles. “At present she muses too much of marriage and what it brings. She sleeps badly. She put me questions—soch questions.... Wait, I will tell you my plans.... That marriage, when it koms—ah, it will be somesing! superb! you see. But it is essential she shall be fresh and unconscious and blooming.... Those girls, Antonia, Deb, they are no more early-morning, ... They dream not ... they laugh at love. My dee-urr, it vos vonderful you should been brought here for my Manon!

“Now tell me, my dee-urr, are you trobbled inside about that question of a hosband? Or your mother?”

“I don’t know ... I mean—I haven’t any....” And then, from the midst of confusion, Nell pushed out a courageous: “I think it’s horrid to talk about husbands and that sort of thing.”

La llorraine was switched off at the main. And Antonia, overhearing, smiled at Nell encouragingly. She and Deb agreed that it took weeks of hard labour to pierce young Nell’s creamy layers of impenetrability. As one put out a tamer’s hand, swiftly her fugitive spirit darted away, in a tremor of shadows and dreams; thoughts that frightened her, so like couchant, half-slumbering beasts they seemed. Sweeter thoughts that slipped from chill grey to silvery sheen—aspen-leaves stirred by a wind from nowhere, and hushed again. It amused Antonia not a little that La llorraine should in public and within the first five minutes of meeting, demand an outburst of articulate confidence on the subject of Nell’s troubled inside on that question of a husband.

Nell and Manon, swept imperiously together by the opera-singer’s enthusiasm, and expected to begin romping without delay, eyed each other in furtive dislike ... till Manon’s demure sang-froid relieved the situation.

“Would you like to see my canary?”

[131]

“No,” said Nell, in a passion of pity for the artificial life any bird must lead, in that hectic twilight atmosphere.

After a pause Manon tried again. “The young man who has just entered the drawing-room has beautiful eyes. Do you not think so?”

“He’s my brother David. And he’s only a boy. He’s the youngest of us.”

Her prospective friend shrugged plump shoulders semi-bare in her quaint early Victorian frock. “Too young for me, bien entendu. Doubtless he will be infatuated with Mama. The men of her age who visit her, take no notice of Mama, comme femme, you understand, but try always to play with me. And they pretend it is as a child that they make a pet of me, and I pretend too, and Mama. But we all know it is not so,” she nodded wisely. Certainly, if Nell were to attempt the task of preserving Manon’s early-morning dreaminess, here was an excellent opportunity to start. Instead, she sped across the room to David; pulled imperiously, desperately at his arm. “David, I’m ready to go home with you. Quite ready.”

But David was not to be beguiled. He had found in La llorraine what had been so poignantly missing from his life since the outbreak of war. He had re-found his Continent. She embodied all the thraldom of a tour abroad; all the lost delights he had described to Richard. Her looks, her voice, her setting, her clothes and perfume even; the outflung movements of her long white ringed hands, her bits of richly suggestive reminiscences, with ejaculations given in all languages. Sudden familiarities; her exhaustive and professional acquaintance with foreign music, foreign artists and their very questionable careers; of foreign cities—their opera-houses and their royalties; gossip, garlic-spiced and succulent, or else melodramatic and sonorous—her whole attitude towards life, towards the ingénue, towards David himself——

He vowed afterwards to Antonia, in ecstatic gratitude for her share in bringing him hither, that never again while he had the freedom of the flat near Elgin Avenue, would he fret at island limitations. “She’s simply incredible. When she talks, I can smell hot coffee and those jolly bright brown lengths of bread that one plunged for at the buffet, arriving at Boulogne or Dieppe....”

“I’m glad you’re happy, at least. My other two introductions[132] to the party look simply sodden with misery. I think we must be unselfish, and get them away.”

She indicated Nell and Samson, the former still being entertained by Manon; the other, an obstinate misfit in the company of Deb and Kennedy.

Antonia Verity was Cliffe’s only fixed territory; his spiritual headquarters. He returned to Antonia after all his zig-zagging spurts of enthusiasm. But Deb was his present caprice. He took Deb with him everywhere; displayed her proudly to such fragments of his circle as were handy; told her all the stories of all his loves; telephoned her before and after meals; wrote her long and blasphemously witty letters, or postcards that were the scandal of Montagu Hall; made her free of his home and his books and his mother, teased her and argued with her and shocked her and bullied her and—did not make love to her.

It was an enervating existence—for Deb. There was a peculiarly flattering quality to Cliffe Kennedy’s absorption in her, even in its impermanence. Other queens had reigned ... other queens would reign.

She was not in the least infatuated by Kennedy, in spite of occasional efforts to believe this the cause of the diffused glamour on all her days and nights. His personality was not quite that of a real man ... it was a vivid tricky personality—wantonly elusive—wantonly exacting. He had to be forgiven half a hundred lapses of manners—even of humanity—per instant. He was a veritable lob of mischief-making, untrustworthy, with not even that one point of reliable consistency of being a law unto himself. No one could ever hope to pin him down to any statement or opinion. Yet, with these traits, there was nothing womanish about Cliffe Kennedy. His tastes were masculine; his language forcible; his brain elastic but brilliant. Other men—ordinary men—liked and sought his company, while deploring his fantastic appearance, the leathery spider-webbed face and the two bits of blue inset with the vividly light effect of a chimney-sweeper’s eyes among the soot; his abandonment of yellow hair; his wild sad thin legs that were like that kind of poem which having no end or beginning, straggles on and on in various shapeless forms of incoherence. It was a pity, with those legs, that he should favour so strongly the tweed knickerbocker style of clothing. He would have been better suited by a jester’s motley of red and yellow, or a[133] picturesque costume of fluttering rags and slouch hat and knotted staff. He resembled that sort of concentrated allegory in pedestrian form which a few years ago meandered variously through novel and drama as the Wanderer, the Pilgrim, the Minstrel, the Fiddler, the Vagabond, the Gypsy, the Tramp, the Pedlar, the Just-Outsider, the Never-Coming-Quite-in-er. He was the vanguard of that type with which Deb was presently to become so familiar—the young male of the transition period, who, perhaps in self-defence, rose to match the half-and-half girl; young male who required neither extreme of mistress nor wife, but accepted, in a spiritual sense only, the semi-privileges accorded him—the licence of speech confidential or witty; and temporary rights of appropriation—by an unspoken avowal that he might be trusted in all situations not to transgress limits; but in return it must be clearly understood that he was on his guard against the responsibilities of wedlock:

“Shouldn’t we be miserable together, Deb?” And she wondered what reply etiquette dictated to this ardent declaration of no-marriage in the various forms it was offered her. “Please, I wasn’t even trying ...” occurred to her as the likeliest.

Amongst the tricks of this twentieth-century style of liaison was a totally unembarrassed delight in hoodwinking such of the older generation who still took propinquity at its face value, to the belief that the two concerned were indeed formally engaged; wantonly depositing raw material for scandal, where it would be easiest picked up by the person for whom intended.

Cliffe was enchanted when Deb reported to him grandfather’s indelicate enquiries re that young Kennedy’s prospects and declarations; or sentimental Trudchen Redbury’s eagerness to discover when congratulations might be allowed to cast off their decent veilings, and appear on the doorstep in the form of a large basket of flowers, white and pink. He even insisted on propping up all such suspicion by escorting Deb to a formal Sunday afternoon call at the Redburys. “Und nun,” Trudchen babbled to her husband, as Cliffe’s decorous top-hat passed up the street in devoted juxtaposition with Deb’s best white fox furs—“it may at any moment ... how happy the dear Stella will be!”

Ferdie and Stella, true to resolve, put no direct questions to Deb. The child was enjoying herself ... she was always[134] out—that affirmed enjoyment. Stella was as rapacious of Deb’s conquests as though her own sterile girlhood were thus being avenged.... A gleam of triumph shot from her narrow dark eyes in the direction of Hermann Marcus, as Deb indifferently thwarted his industrious research. Here, at all events, the despot had no powers of destruction. Ferdie’s lenience rose from different motives. He prided himself on his lack of insistence that each succeeding episode should result in an eventual son-in-law. Plenty of time—plenty of time. His little Deb was flirting ... only natural! The younger generation governed themselves by new laws; how unlawful these laws Ferdie was happily ignorant. According to him, if “it did not come off,” then either one of the pair was indifferent to the other’s love, or else they were “just good friends, nothing more”—no reason why a man and a girl should not be comrades, in these enlightened days. But that any working arrangement could exist whereby passion was deliberately and even verbally harnessed with comradeship, and held in check, and given rein, and expelled again—no, that certainly never occurred to Ferdie Marcus. His outlook was just half a generation ahead of his own; half a generation behind his daughter’s. Deb, in a sort of wilful despair at her vain search for control and supervision either from the authority she would have been quick enough to defy, or by some innermost spiritual compass she lacked, Deb went where she pleased, in what company she pleased, at what hours she pleased; rubbed her spirit in pioneer literature, pioneer drama and pioneer discussion, till it was mournfully sterile of glamour or amazement; and for some inexplicable reason, played up to all assumptions on the part of the Studio gang, that she was even as they were in experience of sin ... only it was not the fashion to call it sin, except when the term was used humorously. Not one of them, girl or man, would have believed Deb, had she chosen suddenly to discard her pose of sophistication. She had experimented just enough for this—no more. Her passionate little face, poised on its thick column of neck; the heavy lids that were never quite drawn back from her eyes; slow-smiling mouth, the rich blood veiled by skin crinkled and transparent as poppy-petals in the sun-rays; above all, a quality in each supple movement she made, which a dancer once defined as “limb-consciousness”—combined to uphold the lie that vanity in her had started.

[135]

“What can it matter—my life is my own affair!” thus Deb, who hoped hers was a wayward soul, and knew it was merely slipshod....

What can it matter?—why, nothing had mattered much since she had kissed Burton Ames ... and he had been called away to the telephone. She had broken bounds then ... entered on forbidden country. Of what avail afterwards to turn and crawl tamely back through the gap, resume an existence where girls did not cheapen themselves?

If he had made it worth while ... he had not made it worth while, or worth anything. One had heard of girls who, disappointed in love, had flung themselves headlong “to the bad.” Deb did not do that. She merely meandered bad-wards; her steps, like those of a very intricate dance, advancing and retreating with sideway darts and curvetings and inexplicable rushes for cover and sudden boldnesses ... all the haphazard effect, to an onlooker, of a dance without the accompanying inspiration of music. But the onlooker could not have guessed that Deb had seen Jenny die with all the eagerness of her being unfulfilled, baulked....

“I never knew it was so easy to die—while one still wanted things as much. One must take—take—and take quickly!”

She was wont to tell Cliffe of her adventures and escapes on Debatable Ground. He listened with proprietary zest, and many oaths of secrecy. And then betrayed her to Antonia or Zoe or Timothy—whomever the object of his next momentary death-or-nothing spasm of intimacy. Deb, following after, cleared up the litter of her character, agreed with Antonia or Zoe or Timothy that Cliffe was simply impossible and deserved to be forthwith discarded ... and then went off with him for the week-end to his country cottage near Wycombe.

No—that was how Kennedy himself would have described the incident. As a matter of fact she went with him for the Saturday, as she had often done before, and they were to return in time for supper at Zoe’s flat, where Deb had arranged to stay for what was left of the night, because it was easier just to roll over on to the sofa in the sitting-room, than to worry about busses or trains to South Kensington. She was shedding the fundamental home-instinct that the black hours must necessarily be spent in one’s bedroom with all accompanying accessories of property. Really, once the sacred custom was[136] broken, one could tumble to sleep anywhere; at an inn, or on a divan with two or three other girls, or—in hot weather—out of doors.... Yes, she had grown lax over the geography of her nights. It was easy enough to ’phone Aunt Stella and say: “I’m staying with so-and-so till to-morrow.” “Very well, child—have a good time.” Stella supposed that so-and-so had a spare bedroom, and could lend Deb a nightgown. Gradually Deb trained them not to worry even if she omitted to ’phone her whereabouts; a ’phone was not always handy—“You’ll know I’m all right.”

And all this—for nothing at all. The girl’s behaviour, submitted to the essential interrogation, was as orthodox as her circumstances might be the reverse. That night at Seaview for instance—the sea was entirely a matter of fiction, but Cliffe insisted that such a name must shed a disguise of Philistine respectability over any dwelling. It was not even the dramatically inevitable outcome of a swiftly discovered passion setting them aflame and beyond all reason and remembrance; or else to be explained by a set of automatic coincidences, such as misunderstanding with the rest of the party, or a faulty time-table or a fog. Certainly it was raining rather drearily; and Cliffe declared that the prospect of Zoe and her surrounding aura of Soho waiters and impresarios and macaroni-merchants rendered him faint with boredom ... and they were having rather a jolly talk about something-or-other ... and there was plenty of cold-stuff supper in the larder.... And Deb was in a sort of fancy dress—she had discarded her wet and muddy tweed skirt for a pair of white knickers of Cliffe’s, which, with her own loose red-bordered white serge sailor smock, gave her the look of a trim and dashing principal boy in pantomime. She disliked the bother of resuming her skirt again.

“Oh, well, let’s stop on here,” said Cliffe impatiently. “Why do I pay a high rent if not to be able to talk quietly with a pal now and then, without interruption?”

“Five-and-six a week, isn’t it?” Deb indolently let lapse the question of their imminent return.

“Six-and-six. And cheap at that.”

“I suppose the baby-farm next door reduces the price. They do seem to make more noise than ordinary home-babies.”

Cliffe grinned. “The landlord tried to argue that out as a[137] special convenience ... ‘So handy just to drop it over the wall!’”

“When you first mentioned your country cottage to me, Cliffe, I pictured it with a thatched roof and an orchard and roses round the door.”

“‘Make me love mother more’” he hummed. “Curious psychological effect some vegetation seems to have! But what a hopelessly conventional imagination is yours, Deborah. Is it likely I’d be found dead in one of those old-fashioned traps for sentiment and earwigs? Seaview is a futurist conception of what a country cottage ought to be, in its stark, splendid ugliness.”

Seaview was a yellow-brick workman’s house, standing in a row with five others of the same build ... bare of ornamentation, and with the straight road to High Wycombe directly outside the door.

Deb balanced one bare tan leg across the knee of the other, clasped her slim ankle caressingly, and dangled a caked and clammy stocking near the fire, which, with the reckless squandering of much paraffin, Cliffe had at last wheedled to a ruddy pyramid.

“I wish you hadn’t tramped me through all the sploshiest fields, Cliffe.”

“‘Where there are cows there is dung!’—simple Russian proverb,” he replied sententiously. “I’m compiling a book of them. Besides, you shouldn’t have forgotten your umbrella.”

“I’ve never had an umbrella.... Think of it—never a little umbrella of my own—and sometimes my arms are empty—oh, so empty.... I have to watch other women dandling their umbrellas ... and wonder why such happiness should have been denied just to me. Sometimes, at night, I dream that I have, after all, one dear little golden-headed umbrella ... and then I wake up to find it all a dream—all a dream——perhaps I shall never have an umbrella now ...” Mournfully she wriggled her toes down into the foot of her stocking.

He watched her from his sprawling posture on the horsehair sofa, and smiled....

“Highly improper conversations.... Wonder if Samson Phillips would approve of it? Does he still write you those compromising letters about running brooks and Ella Wheeler Wilcox?”

[138]

“Every Friday. EllaWheelerWilcox sounds like an oath, the way you say it.”

He swung himself upright, striking the pillow-sausage with his fist. “It is an oath. Yes, I might have been a good man if some confiding aunt hadn’t roused my worst passions by a gift of those eleven white, innocent-looking vellum volumes.... ‘And they were wed on a horsehair bed, and the dying day was their priest.’ Deb, would Samson Phillips consider the dying day an adequate priest for you and me?”

“I’ll ask him if you like. I’m a privileged person with Samson; he used to kiss-in-the-ring with me at children’s parties—a very serious young man unbending to play with the little ones—and acquired a taste for me that way.”

Cliffe hummed:

He repeated the last line softly ... and a funny little smile pranced at the corners of his mouth. “Is the game old-fashioned, Deb, for present company? Here you are, hopelessly compromised—entirely at my mercy——”

She shook her head. “Much too old-fashioned!” but was nevertheless not quite sure how far the jocund spirit held sway.... There was an element of primitive commonplace in man which baffled all her utmost powers of histrionics—and she knew it; expecting its most unexpected appearances. When the invariable happened, she had hitherto been able to cope with it in all its forms so triumphantly as to surprise even herself—using alternatively the weapons of pure wonderment, appeal to good comradeship, elfin irony, pathos of reminiscence.... So far, she had had better luck than she deserved. But each averted peril left her a little wearier of wayside incident, a little more restless for the good thing which brought rest.

And now—Cliffe. Or was it merely her fancy that his eyes threatened? Even Cliffe, whose apparent happy sexlessness had been a subject of such absorbing debate between herself and Antonia and Zoe. Cliffe—even Cliffe—God’s understudy, who brought lovers together for his whimsy and parted them for caprice; and whom no girl of them had caught in lover mood himself—Even Cliffe—but he was a stranger to her now,[139] as they all were, the friendliest, when this thing touched to life some fundamental antagonism.

“Behind the times, am I? Well, try the new way, then. Advanced theory, and all that.... We don’t love each other, but let us experiment in life’s stuff. We may ... please each other without loving. Why not? The Youth of to-day refuses to squander itself in unsubstantial dreamings. Here am I—here are you—brilliant young intellectuals. Eugenics—and all that! Likewise, we are quite crudely frank about our respective pasts; and render it fully clear that we have no intention of making claims on sentiment or responsibility beyond the present hour. And I am cynically epigrammatic about marriage, and you are fairly amusing about chastity. And then, let me see—yes—then we become serious and rather subtle; introspective psychology—passion and its effect on the individual temperament.—God! deliver me from this modern fashion of erotic promiscuity masquerading as Repertory Ethics! Give me instead the old-fashioned blackguard and the out-of-date village maiden—and they’ll play me a decenter scene than ever achieved by all this twentieth-century tangle-talk. Deb—I know a man and a girl who consented to humour the State and get married for no better reason than because they had saved up the price of a divorce, to put in the bank—a sort of emergency exit. And they asked me to admire their hideous sanity. ‘We’ll take each other for better,’ the man sniggered—‘but why insist that two human beings should take each other for worse?’ smug fool—as though his beastly Marriage on a Reasonable Basis were worth while, anticipating dreariness and weariness and satiety. To go in for it gallantly, with hope and a ray of idealism—that’s marriage on a reasonable basis. But this fellow asked me to admire him....”

“Now, I wonder what you said to him to dispel that illusion?” Deb was quite serene and comfortable again now that Cliffe was making speeches. He could be reckoned to go on for hours, his out-thrust chin propped on his clenched fists. She suspected he might be equally wrathful and eloquent had he chosen to hold forth in defence instead of in condemnation of his subject. But still....

“People think, because there’s a war on, it ought to reduce the human psychology to a state of beautiful rustic Big Simplicity.... ‘We have no time for minute dissections of idea in these times when——’ Idiots! Windbags! As if war[140] itself—now—were a beautiful rustic simple Big thing. Everything’s complex to a verge of lunacy—it’s the tendency of evolution—war and peace and character and morality—The war hasn’t made a halfpenny-worth of difference—only a khaki embrace gives a fictitious impression of bluff manliness.... Complexity is raging everywhere beneath the surface layer of uniform, just the same—just the same. We’re all victims to it—you, Deb, and I, Deb. And the immediate tormenting question of me and you ... we don’t love each other, do we? You who know too much and have done too little?—do we?”

He rose to his gaunt height, and pressed his large hands on her shoulders, and stood looking down upon her ... she wriggled a trifle uneasily. There was monotony in this procession of negative wooings, and she would have welcomed a change. It might perhaps have been possible to care for Cliffe—if he had not damped her ardour by presupposing the contrary. If he had made love to her ... love, like the threshold of a dim yet familiar garden fresh with the night-breath of drenched petals——

And instead they were ruling her round with geometrical lines and angles—theories! She raised her dragging white eyelids and looked up at him with an intimate appeal for the garden ... the garden back again....

His face grew suddenly stern.

“Go up to bed, child—I’m going for a walk on the Common——”

But he did not remove his hands—till, swooping, he kissed her gently on the forehead. And strode abruptly out of the front door into the dark dripping road.

An uncanny familiarity about his action ... a detached feeling of having once been the spectator—then Deb remembered. She had seen Cliffe treat Antonia in exactly the same way. It was his celebrated Kiss of Renunciation, as performed before all the Crowned Heads of Europe....

“Why didn’t you turn up last night?” demanded Zoe Dene-Cresswell, stepping in and out of her tiny kitchen in a whirlwind effort to prepare dinner for Pinto, keep “Quelle Vie,” the King Charles spaniel, from the sitting-room cushions, entertain Antonia Verity with an account of her latest incredible adventure, and illustrate how she would play her new part for the Andrea Film Co. There was some reason—connected with the King Charles, or perhaps with keeping the draught from the stove, or was it an amorous Italian gas-fitter who was not to know she was at home?—which rendered it imperative that doors should be perpetually opened and shut as she dashed from room to room; and as there were more doors than sanity could find reason for in the fourth floor flat in Soho, Deb was inhospitably received by a gale of three separate slams, and was compelled to make an informal entrance through the bedroom. All the rooms led into one another, like a flat in farce; and, like a flat in farce, the frequent cupboard doors were constructed sufficiently like the others to trap a headlong fugitive into enforced concealment; and most parts of the wall disconcertingly flew open at a touch.

“It’s all right, Zoe—only Deb,” Antonia called into the kitchen.

“What did you do with Cliffe last night?” Zoe piped shrilly. “Such a perfectly awful thing happened here—I must tell you——”

“We stayed on at Seaview, and only came up this morning—down, Quelle Vie!—Zoe, she’s eating the radishes!”

“Shove her into the bathroom,” indistinctly from Zoe, enveloped in a cloud of steam. “My dear, a simply awful thing—I was just telling Antonia——”

“Here, you bulgy-eyed little brute——”

With a squeal Zoe darted out of the kitchen mists and stopped Deb and the spaniel at the very threshold of the bathroom.

[142]

“Come away—I forgot. Benvenuto’s in there—little Carlo from the ‘Napoli’—you know. He’s having a bath.”

“Why?”

“How should I know why?—he looked fairly all right from the top—but the poor little fellow begged me with the tears in his eyes—he hasn’t got one in his flat—and they’re so particular at the Napoli—I couldn’t refuse him, could I, Deb? He might lose his job. Besides, he’s such a little gentleman at heart—listen to him splashing so that he shouldn’t have to hear what I’m saying? I like that, don’t you, Deb? It shows nice feeling. And of course, he couldn’t lock the door because it doesn’t lock. You might have walked right in and how would he have felt then? The landlord never left me the key, and I can’t ask him for special favours because he’s so crazy about me he might take advantage—common little sand-worm—I was just telling Antonia——”

“I would hardly call it a special favour to ask for the key of your bathroom door.” Antonia’s voice, soft and amused, dropped like cool respite into Zoe’s loud insistent gabble.

Zoe’s conversational ability was a Juggernaut to her friends; it rolled on and on, destroying in its eternal passage those rash victims who hurled themselves beneath the wheels. Nothing could stop its course, not night nor anguish, nor the kettle boiling over, nor the tailor’s family doing murder on the landing below. It could not be ignored, nor suffered as accompaniment to other deeds. It claimed hypnotized attention, and by a perpetual insertion of “didn’t I?” “well, don’t you agree?” “What do you think?” exacted response, and exacting, passed over and crushed it.

And yet she was such a jolly little person, with a wide-eyed tip-tilted air of a seraphim just introduced into the Café Royal and anxious to get the hang of the place; tumbled silvery curls; and sleeves now rolled up to show a plump allure of forearm and elbow.

“Pinto is coming to supper, we’ve got to make up a quarrel, which means that he’ll throw the furniture about, especially if his crab salad isn’t just right, so I simply can’t come in and talk to you, girls, but I can hear you quite well, so do go on telling about Cliffe, Deb; was he almost human? I mean, did he make love to you? don’t say he did ... I like having Cliffe about the flat to remind myself that a man exists who can walk, breathe and eat and wash himself quite nicely, like[143] other men—and yet not want to kiss me. He doesn’t, you know—it’s so funny, isn’t it, Antonia? It never seems to strike him. I’ve sat on the arm of his chair and pouted at him, and stroked his head, and told him how lonely and miserable I was, and how Pinto had left me for good and it’s so hard for a girl alone, and I’ve rubbed off all the lip salve because he doesn’t like it, and drawn his attention to the fact—and still it doesn’t seem to strike him. Sometimes I wonder if something is broken inside him—No, I don’t mean ‘Wear one of Our Belts and lift the Grand Piano’ sort of thing—I meant a kind of moral spring. Because even the post-office man round the corner—it’s perfectly awful—he’s simply crazy about me, and I don’t know what to do, because one must have stamps, mustn’t one? I never dreamt he felt like that about me till yesterday when I went in to phone, and he pretended the penny-box was out of order, and came in to help me, and—well, there I was in the dark alone with him, and he was whispering in one ear about every part of me separately—really appreciative, I must say—and Timothy Fawcett bawling ‘Hello’ from the other end into my right ear—What was I to do? I didn’t know men were like that, did you, Deb?”

“There was no marked change for the worse in Cliffe’s behaviour,” Deb replied to Zoe’s question of ten minutes ago. “In fact, it was depressingly like spending the night with one’s great-aunt. He sent me up to bed at a quarter to ten, and then went for a short walk in the rain——”

“Wrestling with his evil passions, I hope—oh, Deb, do say he was wrestling, and that his better self prevailed in the end.”

“It must have, because I saw no more of him till he banged at my door with a morning carol, and no hot water. And I didn’t know men were like that, did you, Zoe?...”

Antonia said: “Cliffe will revise the episode, bind it, and illustrate it, with a preface, and additional notes, and alterations in the original text——”

“Oh, I’m prepared to meet it again, looking like Ophelia dressed by Paquin for the mad-scene. He’ll boom it for a fortnight, and then forget it. Cliffe never bothers to prop up his lies, once he’s tired of them; he lets them crawl about and go bad.”

“And then sometimes he remembers, and picks them up again in a very enfeebled condition, and coaxes them to take a little nourishment.”

[144]

“What I want to know,” Zoe clattered in with an assortment of plates, knives and forks, “is how much he believes in them himself?”

Antonia expressed her opinion that he believed in them altogether; was possessed of an illimitable imagination which did not timidly boggle at fact or possibility, but soared in ascending spirals of ecstasy to a heaven wherein as he spoke them all things were.

“Well, what I say is that it’s all very well when he’s just creating people that don’t exist, to fill a gap in the conversation, or to point a moral, or draw attention to himself. But he’s dangerous when he prods about for material about his friends. The things he’s said about me....”

“Oh, you, Zoe!” Antonia affectionately ruffled the other girl’s hair. “You outstep even Cliffe’s genius! Have the good people on these premises been warned about the curse you bring?”

For Zoe carried about with her an atmosphere of sensational happenings—police-court happenings. When she moved into new quarters, they were bound presently to be the scene of a murder with some novel attendant features; or a burglary on a particularly large scale; or a police-raid would reveal the premises to be a house of lurid ill-fame; or a criminal would be found taking refuge.... And in all these violent happenings, Zoe, wide-eyed as ever and volubly innocent, somehow contrived to take the stage as a central figure; she it was who all unsuspecting had inspired the Polish barrow-vendor with the passion which had aroused his wife’s homicidal frenzy; she who had detained the master-burglar—God only knows how!—while the police were being stealthily summoned; she whom the procureuse on the first floor had essayed to tempt into white slavery.... “My dear, she thought I was only seventeen and knew nothing!” and afterwards testified the same to a genial and admiring magistrate; she in whose flat the criminal was discovered in hiding—“poor fellow—you simply should have seen how he looked at me!”

So, like a Banshee visiting a parvenu Irish family who didn’t even know they had one, Zoe was now dwelling above a gradation of Jewish tailors—a tailor and his family to each floor—all in feud with one another. Cliffe Kennedy foretold an imminent pogrom as being novel and appropriate to her present surroundings. Zoe’s subsequent description of events[145] were always a delight to her audiences—and to herself; for though she pretended to extreme indignation at her victimage, yet no doubt but that her vanity was elated at being so conspicuously selected for the limelight.

It was during these narratives, animated by a complete pantomime of imitation, that a quality in Zoe which usually puzzled by its intangibility was washed broadly to the surface—a quality of eighteenth-century coarse heartiness, a fleshy stridency recalling the pictures of Hogarth....

Zoe read mostly of the Smollett, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne period. She had an odd liking for Dr Johnson and also for Dan Chaucer. The latter’s robust sensuality appealed to her. Though she often aped the loveable baby, she was a shrewd little body, well qualified to look after herself and to deal with her swarming adorers, of whom at least half as many existed in reality as in her rollicking fancy. Competent, too, at cooking and housekeeping—Pinto had seen to that.

Pinto was a bad-tempered and highly respectable Portuguese gentleman of means, who was engaged to marry Zoe. They had been engaged four years already, and although Zoe did not allow his formal proprietorship to interfere with her more enjoyable activities, yet the inexplicable freak of her love for Pinto admitted of no contradiction. He bullied her, and she was abject; he sulked, and she wooed him with succulent dishes; he shouted at her, and she was silent; he had toothache, and she wept. Her life was a perpetual scamper to clear her premises of their illegitimate riff-raff before the arrival of Pinto; for she was essentially “bonne gosse,” and could no more have refused one man her kiss, and another her company, than now her bathroom to Benvenuto the oboe-player.

Pinto was not a favourite among Zoe’s friends; and hearing that he was momentarily expected, Deb and Antonia rose to go.

“Come any time you like to spend a night here, Deb, to make up for yesterday. I love to have you, and you know the sofa is comfy enough. Antonia, you look such a darling in your khaki, I’ve half a mind to throw up the movies and become a General’s chauffeuse myself. I’m sure the dear old doddery thing would simply adore me, don’t you think he would? I could perch on his knee and pull his whiskers when I wasn’t driving him to Headquarters. I’ve really thought lately of[146] doing war-work, haven’t you, Deb? I know someone who said he could get me a job at the Admiralty.”

“Heaven forbid!” Antonia cried in horror; “Do remember that as a nation we rely above all on our command of the seas. To have the Admiralty demoralized into Palais Royale burlesque of banging doors and everybody helter-skelter after everybody else.... Prove your patriotism and stop where you are, Zoe! it’s safer. And I won’t have my Major-General tampered with either,” she added demurely; “He’s not much over forty and very good-looking.”

Zoe sighed: “You are lucky; there’s nothing you couldn’t do with that irresistible peak to your cap.... But I really should be sorry to chuck up the part I’m rehearsing; it’s a tremendously fascinating plot, and so simple. I must tell you: The boyish hero Jim falls in love with Dolores, a wild Spanish-gipsy sort of woman much older than he is, and marries her. She gets tired of him, and runs away with something débonair called Raoul, and they have a child, and Dolores dies. Seventeen years later Jim meets the child and adopts her and loves her and marries her—and she gets tired of him, and runs away with something débonair called Réné, and they have a child, and then get killed in a circus. Years later Jim meets the child and adopts her, loves her and marries her, and she gets tired of him, ... it goes on like that for generations, until dear old Jim gets a little silver-powdery at the temples, but even that doesn’t seem to stop him. I play the child each time.”

“And always the same Jim? The film ought to be called ‘The Recurring Decimal,’” laughed Deb. “We must go and see it when it comes on. ’Bye, Zoe, I hear Pinto’s step on the ground-floor, and Benvenuto’s bath-water running away.”

Zoe flew to smother the incriminating oboe-player; and Deb, and Antonia departed. On the dark stairs they encountered Pinto, puffing noisily, and carrying a large jar of olives.

“She will be pleased with the olives,” Pinto complacently informed himself. Then he tripped over a basin of some peculiarly odorous fish soaking in water, which the First Tailor’s children had left on the landing. His temper changed.

“She will be overjoyed—it may be she thought I had left[147] her for always. Now I return and I bring her olives. It is good of me....”

Zoe did not care for olives, but Pinto had overlooked this fact. He happened to have a taste for them himself....

A black figure shot past him and downstairs as though discharged from a catapult. It was Benvenuto the oboe-player.

On the next landing, the children of the Second Tailor came out and drove a hoop at Pinto’s legs, under the impression that he was a kind gentleman. He disabused them of the notion, and scowling heavily and panting more than ever, toiled on. It was deepest ingratitude on the part of Zoe to live on the fourth floor.

The children of the Third Tailor merely blocked his way, snuffling heavily. Their sombre eyes and unspoken speech was that of Maeterlinckian drama: “We have seen him before....” “We have seen him a great many times....” “He is seeking the princess in the tower-room....” “What is that he holds in his hand—I cannot tell—it is so dark....” “Hush—draw closer....”

Pinto had now reached the topmost flat, and handing Zoe the olives, coldly awaited her answering burst of enthusiasm. Unfortunately he had so often reprimanded her for displays of undue effervescence, that Zoe limited her gratitude to a meek “Thank you very much, Pinto.”

Pinto was aggrieved. He shrugged his shoulders—demanded his dinner; reproved Zoe for having her sleeves tucked up—(“You look like an ill-bred cook!”)—commented unfavourably on the sort of household which lacked a corkscrew—(“When I take trouble to bring you a jar of olives!”)—and finally broke the news that he was going to Paris on business for a month.

Zoe, smarting under the charge of a lack of feeling, flung herself into Pinto’s arms, wailing aloud her grief; he was horribly jarred by her piteous want of control, but shutting his eyes, suffered it uncomplainingly for a moment; then condescendingly pulled her ear, and remarked that he expected her behaviour during his absence to be circumspect, discreet and loyal.

Zoe promised.

[148]

“Coming home with me for dinner, Deb?”

“Yes. Antonia——”

“Well?” They had walked along in silence for a little while, after quitting Zoe’s flat.

“You’re thinking that I ought not to have stayed down at Seaview with Cliffe.”

“Why should you suppose I’m a prig who can’t mind her own business, Deb?”

“There was no harm in it,” Deb pleaded, as though Antonia had condemned her.

“That’s just it”—slowly. Then: “No, Deb, don’t make me—please——”

“I know. I know. The same whatever I do. No harm in it, but you wouldn’t have done it yourself.”

“Not with Cliffe.”

Deb assented in anxious self-defence: “One might as well be staying under the roof of a nice old lady.”

“Then—is it worth breaking the rules for—that?”

“You believe in rules. I don’t. I’m a rebel.”

“Half a rebel. Or you wouldn’t be justifying yourself quite so hotly.”

“And you’re wholly a saint!” Deb flared, rather unreasonably, as she had pushed the other girl to attack.

“Because I don’t stay under the roof of nice old ladies? It’s futile. When two people care like Gillian and Theo——” she stopped short, as though she had not meant to let slip the names.

“I’m always hearing of Gillian and Theo. Are they married?”

“No. Theo Pandos has got a wife somewhere. He’s a Greek. Clever—but a cad.”

“And Gillian Sherwood is a celebrity, isn’t she?”

“In her own line she’s supposed to be unique. Bacteriology.... She did a rather wonderful piece of research, and all the hoary professors of science and medicine bent before her and kowtowed. It’s a shame she should squander herself on Theo, just as it’s a shame——” Passionately she renewed her attack on Deb: “You’ve betrayed us all.... Cliffe will suppose that any girl—I—I hate him to think so. Why can’t you run away from them—instead of towards them?”

[149]

“I don’t,” whispered Deb piteously. “I stop where I am.”

“Then—run!” with an imperious stamp of the strapped and booted foot. “You little Oriental!”

“As if they were our natural enemies? perpetual hunters? It seems so silly and self-conscious.” Nevertheless she recognized Antonia’s spirit poised for flight, and applauded it—the spirit of a juvenile athlete.... It really had been a proceeding rather without purpose, to remain at Seaview. Antonia never did things without purpose. “I love you in gauntlets and puttees, Antonia.”

The General’s chaffeuse laughed at the flattery. “By the way, did Zoe say Timothy had been ’phoning her?”

“Little Tim Fawcett? Yes, I believe she mentioned him—it was rather swamped in a lurid story about a post-office clerk.”

“Take on Timothy—yes, you. I’m not keen on Zoe’s influence there. He’s such a serious baby, and he’ll idealize her.”

“He might also idealize me. Besides, I’m not going to ‘take on’ anybody. You’ve just been bullying me about it. My soul henceforth shall pace apart among narrow aisles of lilies——”

“Tiger-lilies?”

They were at the door of the house in St John’s Wood now. The maid admitted them, and Antonia, passing her, called out: “Come straight through into the studio, Deb.”

“Please, Miss Antonia, Miss Sherwood is there, waiting for you.”

“Gillian!” Antonia stopped short. She looked at the maid—then at Deb. A variety of baffling expressions flitted across her face.... “Has she been there long?”

“Oh yes, Miss, nearly an hour.” The maid disappeared.

“I’m so glad—I wanted to meet her.” Deb was frankly eager for the long-deferred encounter ... but Antonia was behaving strangely; standing rigid and immobile, her slender eyebrows contracted as in some desperate effort to rally a final expedient against fate. With a little sigh she let her clenched hands fall open in surrender....

“Come along,” and moved towards the passage which led down the garden towards the studio.

The large sky-lit spaces were empty. A scrawled note lay on the box of oil-tubes: “Sorry—couldn’t wait any longer. Come on Tuesday evening if you can. G.M.S.” Antonia read[150] aloud. The suspended colour had flooded back to her face drowning it in carmine. She crumpled the paper into a ball and flung it towards the waste-paper basket. Her aim just missed.

“Take off your hat, Deb,” she cried cheerfully.

“Let’s see the celebrity’s handwriting.” Deb picked up Gillian’s note and read: “Sorry, couldn’t wait any longer. Come on Tuesday evening if you can, and bring Deb Marcus. Cliffe says I’d like her. G.M.S.”

“Antonia!”

“Yes?” Antonia’s back was turned. She was apparently absorbed in scraping a palette.

“Why did you—Antonia, I want to know Gillian Sherwood. Why won’t you let me?”

“And the good angel and the bad shall fight together for this man’s soul,” murmured Antonia. Then she dropped the palette, and faced round, all her delicate pearliness broken up to passion—the passion of the earnest priestess for a convert in danger: “Yes, you’re right, Deb—I have been working to keep you and Gillian apart, now, and before now, and I’ve not given in yet. Accident has backed me up this time.”

“But why? Antonia—why? Not just jealousy?”

“No, child—not just jealousy. But Gillian Sherwood is on her way to do what you must be prevented from doing. And I don’t trust her influence. If Jill cares for Theo, and gives herself to Theo—it’s a splendid person thrown away, but not frittered away. But you,” scornfully, “you’d be all over the place—once you started. You shan’t start.”

Again Deb asked “Why?”

Antonia flashed her a smile which was a radiant appeal to good comradeship: “Because ... you’re such a little goose!”

Cliffe Kennedy, entering the Tube at Charing Cross, caught sight of Mr Otto Redbury between the bobbing hats and swaying bodies that crowded up the carriage; and immediately pushed his way to a strap which directly overhung that gentleman’s head.

Cliffe always asserted that on the occasion Deb took him to call, he had discovered a tricky fascination about Mr Redbury; this was clearly an opportunity to refresh the emotion.

Otto waved the evening paper at him, in jubilant greeting.

“Anozzer vamous fictory!”

“The little grandchild Wilhelmine has made the phrase immortal,” murmured Cliffe. “How lucky for her that she rhymed with village green.”

Otto looked uneasy; not comprehending the reference, but wishing that somebody had informed the young man that the Redbury grandchild was better referred to in public as Minnie. He changed the subject.

“You live somevere on zis line, Mr Gennedy? I get out at Pelzize Bark.”

“Oooo ... nice!” gurgled Cliffe. Otto looked interrogative.

Cliffe serenely covered his lapse from manners. “Hampstead is my station. Our house is on the Heath itself. You must come and make friends with my mother, Mr Redbury. She’d like you so much. Come to lunch one day. Come on Saturday.”

Mr Redbury beamed and puffed out his meagre chest, anticipating the conquest of Mrs Kennedy. This was undoubtedly a very pleasant and discriminating young man.... “but I always vind blenty in gommon viz English people—the good old shtock;”—sentiment reserved for the after benefit of Trudchen; and to impress Beatrice.

“Yoo-stone!” bawled the guard. A number of passengers squeezed their way out; and Cliffe dropped lightly on to the vacated seat beside Otto.

[152]

“My dear mother’s a widow, so don’t bring your wife. She was deeply attached to my poor father, and can’t bear the sight of any woman less fortunate in a husband alive.”

Otto, groping after what was complimentary in this outburst, came to the conclusion that the clang of the gates had obliterated its part meaning.

“Besides,” Cliffe ran on, in a rapid confidential undertone, “why be for ever bound by the conventions?—Look at all the jaded joyless faces——” A rubicund Jack Tar opposite grinned broadly, thrust his tongue in his cheek, his arm round his girl beside him, and rolled an expressive eye in Cliffe’s direction. “The day’s routine, and the jolting train, and a dreary little home in Camden Town, and the evening paper, and another day—and another, and yet another.... What those faces want, Mr Redbury, and I see you agree with me, is Paganism—joie de vivre—a gallop with the centaurs!”

His companion, who would have turned peevish and retired into his bathroom stronghold at the very first encounter with a centaur, nodded sagely....

“O glorious Life!” rhapsodized Cliffe, stretching forth his arms, oblivious of his neighbours’ discomfort and astonishment.

“Wass-vot? who vere you viz last night?” chuckled Otto, his eyes mere slits of lewd curiosity.

“Last night ... last night ...” ecstatically—then came an imperceptible halt, as Cliffe discarded a comparatively innocent evening spent at home with Philip Gibbs’ “Soul of the War,” in favour of his almost equally harmless adventure with Deb at Seaview the week-end before. This would serve, touched up with scarlet and purple; it was additionally spiced by the reflection of how Otto’s whetted tongue would loll out, metaphorically speaking, if he knew that the heroine of this presented drama of Real Life as it isn’t, was Deb Marcus, his late partner’s daughter, and a friend of his own daughter Nell.

“Two of us—and the great scented common rolling away from our doors to a star-stabbed sky. Two of us—for when the little Dryad so long immersed in the oak-tree of tradition, sprang out at last into my arms, her hair wildly ablow, and with lips red as blood, then all the pettier issues of the Philistines were trampled, I say trampled, Mr Redbury, under the wings which sprang godlike from our exultant shoulder blades!... (Oh God! what a sentence!...)”

“Camden Town!”

[153]

The morbidly interested school-girl on Cliffe’s left was reluctant to alight—but that happened to be her station, and she dared not be late for supper.

Otto, as the train gathered speed again, turned to Cliffe expectantly, as a hint that confidences might be resumed. Of course he disapproved of these casual rollicking nights spent unchaperoned save by the rolling common ... disapproved and was biliously envious: but—but—his look was akin to a nudge in the ribs—and Kennedy, always obliging, discarded poetic eloquence in favour of the one-dog-to-another style obviously more suited to the temperament of Mr Redbury. He was thoroughly enjoying his own pose of the young-Bohemian type he most abominated in practice.

“You know how it is——” was sufficient to sound the new note of waggishness. “You’ve heard the old joke about hanging pictures, Mr Redbury—I bet you have——”

“Ho! ho! ho!” from Otto.

“We were—hanging pictures ... and missed the train home—the last train but one——”

“And the last drain of all vent too late, eh?”

“Well—there it is, you see—you can’t bring a girl home at any hour—especially if her father’s at all particular—as fathers sometimes are—as fathers sometimes are, Mr Redbury.”

And Otto chuckled and winked and coughed and cleared his throat, and settled his cuffs, and chuckled again, as though the lives of Hedda and Nell were never rendered a burden to them by the paternal injunction: “Home by nine o’clock, and bed at ten”—and interposed a swaggering if somewhat laboured anecdote of his own secret unorthodoxy—“We dake it for granted this is between you and me, yong vellow!”

“Belsipark!” The doors flew ajar.

Cliffe replied with a corresponding drop into gravity: “I trust equally in your discretion regarding the confidence I have placed in you, Mr Redbury——”

“... Of course he’ll prattle—but I mentioned no names,” as Otto, trotting up the platform towards the exit, cast through the window of the compartment a look of unutterable fraternity and knowingness.

October brought Samson Phillips to town for six weeks of special signalling instruction. Quite suddenly, from lethargic standing about in the vicinity of Deb, as he had done since her kiss-in-the-ring days, some unseen goad prodded him into courtship. The old-fashioned word exactly expressed the flavour of his proceedings. Perhaps he was afraid she would sink too deeply into the mire of Bohemianism, as exemplified by La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy, in whose company he had found her on his previous leave. At all events, without quite knowing how it came about, Deb perceived the handsome sapper to be a prominent factor in her daily life. He rang her up on the ’phone regularly every morning, and was alternately facetious or reproachfully tender in claiming her day for the theatre, or a jaunt in the country, or dinner with his people. The play or the restaurant was always selected by him with due care for her innocence and not her preference. He loaded her with gifts that were a compromise between the generosity of an Eastern potentate in the wooing of a rapacious slave-girl, and such restraint as decorum demands before an engagement be a sealed fact: books of poetry, principally Spencer’s “Faerie Queene,” flowers, chocolates, crystallized fruits—gloves ... he was not quite sure about the gloves, and consulted his sister Beatrice, who said she thought a slight touch of unconventionality might be pleasing to Deb;—and war-trophies, which of course were “different.”

The Phillips men always conducted a courtship with their entire family rolling up behind them, wave after wave, and ready with a hearty benison instantly the signal for readiness should be given. A man with honest intentions need make no secret of them, Samson sturdily contended. Not only the Phillips’ mother and grandparents and sisters and three younger brothers with their wives, but also, by virtue of Beatrice’s marriage, the whole Redbury family assisted at the pretty spectacle of[155] a dark-haired Jewish maiden wooed and won by a son of the same tribe. Deb told Antonia it was like being courted in the Arena at Olympia on a day when thrown open to the general public. Her set also were amused, though less ostentatiously, by the progress of the affair; it was of a species new to them, and Zoe and Cliffe, in particular, were clamorous for details; puzzled that Deb withheld these. For in spite of her exasperation with the Phillips en masse, she was loyal enough Jewess to protect her own clan from the levity of the Gentile. She confided in Antonia; Antonia knew when to control mere ribaldry; and to consider Samson as a human being, instead of an entertainment.

The whole wooing was not so incongruous to Deb’s temperament as the Studio Gang believed it. They made no account of her fundamental racial instincts responsive to just such a reaction from truancy, nor to the first twenty years of her life, spent in an atmosphere where Samson’s methods would have seemed wholly normal and pleasing. The incongruity only appeared when contrasted with more recent imprints on her development. These were responsible for her first careless acceptance of Samson’s appropriation; she forgot, until too deeply committed for withdrawal, that his actions and her acquiescence were here expressive of more ponderous significance than in the case of Cliffe Kennedy, for instance. She forgot, in fact, at the outset of the event, that the Samsons of this world do not lend themselves to wayside incident.

Apprehension faintly stirred in her only when she saw escape everywhere blocked, by the solemnly joyful expectation of Samson’s mother and grandparents who had so long and patiently waited for the eldest son to make his choice; by the already-one-of-the-family chaff of his younger brothers and their wives (Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah was a recurringly favourite joke with them); by her own folly in having yielded whenever he petitioned for her company; mainly, by Samson’s propensity to propose to her in the form of an arithmetical allegory in which Cliffe Kennedy hazily figured—“Supposing one Man were to have known one Girl for sixteen years, and she had known another Man for three and a half months, while the first Man was away; and the first Man came home again for six weeks, how long ought he to wait before taking the Girl to drink from the Singing Stream?”

The Singing Stream was not a public-house. It was Samson’s[156] way of alluding to pure love. He was obsessed by the notion that if you take a girl to the water, she cannot help but be freshened and purified by mere sight of its freshness and purity.

Bohemia to him meant dancing and carnival and riot in hot studios; it meant glaring lights and stifling air and glittering evening dress. All the nineteenth-century rigmarole: the flash, and gleam of bare limbs; the dark hectic red of spilt wine; exotic music, and the stage, and doubtful witticisms and free love—free love as opposed to real love. It was his fixed idea that literally to remove Deb from the fetid atmosphere and take her to where a stream babbled and gurgled and splashed over the stones and between green banks, was then and there bound to react upon her system in the way that he so desired.

It did not take Deb long to perceive his motive for these day-long jaunts into the country; and mischief urged her to play up; to dabble her fingers among the slippery shallows—it was fortunately a warm October—and to sigh ... once or twice ... and murmur “I wish——” and be wistfully silent again ... and dabble a bit more ... was quite sufficient to make Samson preen himself, owning the stream, her thoughts, the crude blue sky, and the entire healing balm of Nature. He wished her to be convinced of her folly in lingering to gaze at Vanity Fair, when she might have been weaving willow garlands. It was inconceivable that she had done more than gaze with childish long-lashed eyes ... not knowing what she saw....

As though in complete sympathy with the cause of reform, running water seemed to follow him about automatically. Whatever haphazard portion of country they rambled, the persistent brook appeared like an obedient servant on command. Deb began to wish her education were completed; the weather might any day turn chill and dreary. With this in mind, she perched upon a couple of rickety boards which roughly bridged a sparkle of narrow river, and shamelessly determined to put forth her powers to exact forthwith the inevitable proposal, and thus be through with it.

She had not the same compunction in dealing with Samson Phillips that might have wrung her had he been the good-natured, faithful type of fool she had at first imagined him. The man had revealed himself a fanatic, whose gospel was Simple Goodness; but who in preaching it materialized its intangible fragrance as of garnered apples, into a quality of cold iron; forbidding, repellant. High-principled he certainly[157] was, but intolerantly throned and totally without forgiveness. He would have made martyrs where he could not make converts. He destroyed Simple Goodness, in his harsh advocacy, as he had destroyed the beauty of running water, by letting it serve as object-lesson.

On this berry and bronze morning of October, Deb opposed to him a dancing elfin mood that was far more nimbly in accord with the tags of fluttering colour blown from the trees into the eddies of writhing silver, with the jolly boisterous hedges, all aflame and a-prickle, a blaze of hips and haws webbed in the powdery tangle of old-man’s-beard—Deb was more wickedly and wantonly a part of such a morning as this, kicking her legs to and fro from the plank which spanned the water, than Samson with all his most complacent hopes for her betterment and cure could have deemed possible.

“This is how I like to see you looking,” he said, lying full length on the bank, and smiling lazily across at her. “Come, now, isn’t it better than studios?”

“Supposing a girl should marry a man”—(“and I don’t see why he shouldn’t do some mathematics for a change,” reflected Deb)—“Supposing a girl should marry a man, and the man had different tastes from the girl, about studios and nature, you know, and they had two children——” Samson turned his head away, and nibbled grass—“and both had the same tastes as either one of the parents, ought the other to give up his or her own feelings about things or force them on the children, supposing he or she to be sure his or her ways were the best?”

And she waited solemnly for him to work it out.

He won respect by neither flinching nor compromising. “A man should never allow his children to be brought up away from Nature, whatever they may want themselves.”

“Yes”—straddling the plank so as to face him—“but isn’t what they want themselves, Nature? And if it isn’t natural for them to want Nature——”

“Then they are unnatural children,” said Samson, stamping with firm boots on his mythical offspring.

Deb’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Fancy had quickened into momentary life a pair of baby creatures like herself, eager for bright, useless toys, perversely breaking them at each fresh disappointment ... her children, pressed and wrenched into the pattern their inflexible father judged best for them....

The might-have-been faded, and was replaced by an exultant[158] sense of escape. Thank God, these children—hers and Samson’s—need never live and be sorrowful; thank God, she was still free to scamper away and play.

“Deb——” he pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes; and his words were pumped out with extreme difficulty. “Deb, will you marry me?”

“No—oh, no”—reaction was still too violent to admit of polite temporizing.

A long silence while Samson assimilated her refusal. An interminable silence. Was he wondering what his family would say? They were in such a crucial condition of expectancy that he would have to tell them when he got home—the telling would not be easy.... Deb rebelliously tried to jerk pity aside; it was his own fault. The right sort of man would have been decently uncommunicative till his desire was an accomplished fact; so typically Jewish to drag in the entire household! Or else he should have chosen a maiden more suitable to be the object of his benevolent chivalry. She had not deliberately hoodwinked him into belief that she was this maiden, so unlettered in life as his obstinacy chose to assert. The accordion stretches or shrinks according to the player. She hummed a tag of verse:

—Outburst of romping spirits muted quickly at recollection of the figure lying motionless and with back turned towards her.... He was the only man who had ever spoken the actual words to her: “Will you marry me?” Funny! Years ago, before they quarrelled, she and Con were canoeing in a sort of hazy dreamland when it was taken for granted between them that they would canoe thus into all eternity; and the other men.... What on earth had led Samson to such a mistake in selection? From the outside, of course, she appeared to have most of the requisites: same faith, decent family, right age (a year or two older than perfection, perhaps, but nothing to fuss about!) good looks, good health, good manners—the presence of his mother had always petrified her into gentle orthodoxy ... but surely, surely, he must have sensed behind these layers, something wrong—Well, not exactly wrong, but different. Perhaps he did realize it now, and was relieved ... he hardly looked relieved—furtively[159] her eyes peeped towards him, and then quickly away again ... an almost stricken expression to his recumbent lines. Surely she could not be responsible for that? What possible thread of affinity was taut and silken between her and Samson that any act of her could reach him and hurt him? He should have been sensible—Deb kicked petulantly at a low bough near her foot—the suitable kind of girl would have accepted him joyfully; would be nestling her head against his shoulder by now; causing him to feel so strong and brave and protective; and he could have taken her home, and proudly trumpeted his engagement, and the united family could have poured out lavish blessings ... quite wonderful, in its Suitable way, this Suitable dream; she could see that; only it did not fit her, or else she did not fit it ... a dream going begging!

Still silent? Another glimmering look from between her lashes, two black fans, long in the centre, dwindling at either corner. He must be badly hurt ... grace touched her to penitence again. After all, he had wanted just her—so there must be a particle of her very self, apart from all misconception, which had tugged him to love and to pain.

Yes—but can’t he look after himself? Need I? need I? No one looked after me when the Soldier.... Need one be nice to grown-up men? Because even when it’s only a boy—even when it’s Lothar von Relling, nobody understands that you’re just “trying to be nice.”... She had been waiting over a year for a little heavenly approbation for that act. Nevertheless, she ought to have said something softening in answer to Samson’s avowal, besides the bald and honest: “Oh no” ... Manners!—What did one say? “Believe me, Sir, I am deeply sensible of the honour you have done me, though all unworthy of it,”—Deb could not suppress a joyous gurgle of laughter—she was free—free—light of heel and of heart. No more arithmetical allegories; nor deriving of solid moral benefit from the sight of running water; nor suffocation under the possessive approval of a good Jewish family; nor quaking in apprehension of the proposal to come. She was free to return to the set of wild young heretics who knew her as she was—or a little worse—in place of these others who thought her so much better, and to whom her real self would have been a mystifying disaster.

Samson stirred at the sound of her laugh. “Come along, we shall miss our train,” he said curtly. The peak of his cap stood between them all the way home. To avoid being alone[160] with her, he chose a crowded compartment for their journey home, and completed it in a motor omnibus, instead of a taxi-cab according to custom. Deb submitted meekly, feeling as though she were being punished for naughtiness. It was her nature to cling affectionately even to unpleasant conditions, directly they had established any claims of habit; so that it was with a pang of kindliness that from the steps of Montagu Hall she saw Samson salute her and stride away:

“And now I shall never see him again!”

She saw him again three evenings afterwards. His mother wrote, cordially bidding her to dinner. Deb, with every inclination to behave like a coward and refuse, yet felt it incumbent upon her to “face the music.”... She had eaten at the Phillips’ table every day and sometimes twice a day, for a fortnight. But she could not help considering the invitation a mistake in tactics—What more could they want of her, now?

She consulted Richard: “D’you think I need go? It’ll be like a funeral. I feel I ought to bring a wreath.”

“Sure you don’t want him?” asked Richard gravely.

“No—no—no. I should have to go to Synagogue, and dine with the whole family at Mrs Phillips’ every single night—they never seem, any of them, to dine at their own houses. And have a Visitors’ Day. And do good works; not good work, but good works. And never read anything except the Faerie Queene and Rosa Nouchette Carey, and the newspaper leaders. And give up all my pals, because they’re a bad lot. And be accountable to a man for my freaks.’

“Well—that’s just being married, isn’t it?”

“It’s just being married to Samson Phillips—and that’s being married three times thick. I say—I do believe you’re in favour of it.”

Richard said he did not want to force her inclinations. He was perfectly serious about it; these lapses overtook him at times.

She curled her arms round the balustrade post—their conversation took place at the foot of the Montagu Hall main staircase—and put her chin down on her arms and said: “Dear old boy, I warn you that you and father and Aunt Stella would be taken over by the Phillips family-life, and be absorbed[161] like ink into blotting-paper. I daresay grandfather would manage to stand out....”

“He’s a Major in the Sappers, isn’t he?”

“Samson? No, only Captain. Why?”

“Nothing.... I mean the family are known to be tremendously patriotic and all that sort of thing, aren’t they?”

“I suppose so. Rotting apart, Richard, d’you think I need go to-night?”

“Yes, I do.”

So Deb went, a shy, prim creature in flowered silk and fichu; all her troll mood of October dried into apprehension of spending three awful hours in the awful company of an awful family hating her because she had flouted it. More than ever did she quake at the sound of her unnecessarily loud and nervous peal at the bell, and wished that the Phillips would conduct their love affairs in solo, and not in the bulk.

By the end of dinner, she was, metaphorically, rubbing her eyes and wondering if she had dreamt the whole matter of Samson’s proposal and her rejection of it. The cicatrice of her infliction showed not a trace on the smooth firm skin of the Phillips’ complacency. The Phillips’ grandparents still made a fuss of the dear little girl, such a well-mannered little girl, and (in brackets) our Samson’s little girl. Mrs Phillips and Beatrice still included her in all their plans, and consulted her with pleasant humorous allowance for her immaturity. While Herbert and Abe, the two younger brothers—Joseph was at the Front—and their wives Martha and Gwendolen—Florence was not yet allowed to be up more than an hour a day, although little Fanny was a miraculously good baby—continued their chaff as though the situation were at exactly the same stage as last time Deb had dined there. Abe even made reference to the threadbare matter of Delilah and clipped locks....

Only Samson was imperceptibly more silent than usual; but he was never talkative. “Can’t he have told them?” but of course he had told them. They were probably informed beforehand of the exact hour he had meant to propose. Then ... what was the psychology of their present behaviour? Deb was helpless, rebellious, wholly perplexed, and disliking her company more than ever before, because she had imagined she was definitely rid of it; that she would never again sit amongst flashes of white teeth—they were a handsome healthy family and had married handsome healthy girls—and hear the curiously[162] robust conversation about Florence and her baby. When a married pair was in question, they knew no reticence; it was right and seemly that open discussion should take place, even in the presence of a young girl; no harm at all—had not Abe and Florence been enjoined in the Synagogue, within hearing of all, to wax fruitful?... But all jokes concerning love unsanctioned by the Rabbi were strictly prohibited by the Phillips’ men until they were in smoking-room seclusion. This was their code. The code of the Jewish male.

“I—I did say ‘no,’ didn’t I? I couldn’t have said ‘yes’ by mistake?” Deb racked her brains—and recognized with horror that her favourite pudding had been provided—a pudding she hated. She had told Mrs Phillips once that it was her favourite, because that lady was distressing herself over an imaginary poorness of fare; and ever since then it was carefully ordered for her, and beamingly heaped on to her plate. To-night the necessity for a second helping was worse than ever, because bewilderment had robbed her of appetite, especially for coals of fire.

Once or twice it seemed to her morbidly excited fancy as though the wedding had taken place already—while she was asleep or hypnotized or under drugs—and already she was a Phillips, doomed to dine at this seat at this table in this room for ever and ever, till she was as old as grandmother Phillips; until she died and all the male Phillips followed her corpse to its cremation, and were reluctant even then to scatter abroad the ashes.... “Yes, Mrs Phillips?” She started from her trance, to find the ladies had risen from their seats, and that she was being markedly beckoned upstairs by a would-be mother-in-law into her bedroom to see the corals purchased for little Fanny.

Deb thought: “It’s coming now....”

It came.

The explanation was simple after all: Samson, it appeared, according to his mother, did not understand girls. He had never taken any notice of them—till Deb. He was that sort of man. So when Deb in her first confusion and surprise had stammered “no” to his offer, he had believed she meant “no”.... He had come home in a terrible state—dear silly fellow!—till they had all assured him it was all right, and that he had only to press for a different answer, to get it.... “Girls aren’t as downright as men,” Beatrice had assured[163] him—“just the plain question, without even taking her hand?—and then you shut up completely? Oh, Samson, you old goose—you don’t deserve her!” To which her brother answered gloomily: “How can I take her hand before she has accepted me?”

“You know, little Deb”—Mrs Phillips wound up her recital, “Samson is so upright——”

Downright ... and upright ... yes, all that, but she did not want him. How to make these people aware that it was more than maidenly bashfulness which had prompted her to let drop the stupendous good fortune deposited in the palms of her hands.

Duly chastened, she sat quietly on a small pouffe, her head bent, her hands linked in her lap, while Mrs Phillips apologized for Samson’s remissness in not urging his suit to triumphant conclusion that afternoon on the bridge; and betrayed at the same time her stern pride in the rigid sense of honour which had forbidden her son to speak to the girl of his great love for her at the same time as he proposed marriage. “He argued that he didn’t want to influence you, dear. So I promised to put that right for him. He’s so absurdly chivalrous, that big boy of mine. All his brothers have had their little flirtations. Abe was quite a social success, as I daresay you are aware. But Samson, of course, is the eldest of the four; and his grandmother’s favourite; and that is quite important, as I daresay you know. He always refused to let a girl believe that he meant something serious when he didn’t. And I think, my child, that he was secretly waiting for you to grow up.”

“I’m twenty-five,” whispered Deb inadequately.

“My dear—not really? I thought you were at least three years younger than that. And you have never been in love until now?”

How Cliffe Kennedy would have let his hoyden invention romp at this juncture! But Deb was too aghast at the slow process which was ringing her in, for even the memory of Cliffe—somewhere in the world—to bring comfort.

“I’m not in love with your son,” she cried desperately.

“That does not matter at all.” Mrs Phillips spoke with unyielding decision. “Samson has a very high ideal of wifehood. He naturally will not require you to love him before you are married.”

“Oh!” gasped Deb.... The point of view was disconcerting;[164] but Mrs Phillips’ apparent certainty of the wedding was worse than disconcerting—it was terrifying! “I, Deborah, take thee, Samson——” it sounded like two Bible legends badly mixed up.... She rallied her forces for another thrust at the Phillips’ illusion; it was perfectly awful to know that it was still there; that she had done nothing as yet that counted towards damaging it. “Mrs Phillips—please—I—I did mean to say ‘no.’ I’m not worthy of your Samson, indeed I’m not.”

The imperturbable dark-skinned surface of Mrs Phillips’ face broke into a gleaming smile.

“Now I wonder who’s the best judge of that, you or he?” Then more solemnly: “I assure you, my dear little girl, all that matters is that you should make him happy.”

Deb’s rebellion shot up to hollyhock height as she reflected: “They take it for granted that he’ll make me happy.... Oh, but he would, if I were the Suitable Sort. All the hatefulness of refusing him over again....”

“Do you mind, Deborah, if I make a remark on the way you do your hair? It is, forgive me if I am rude—so very unbecoming. A young girl should always strive to make the best of herself, you know. Beatrice”—as her daughter came in with an enquiring air of is-it-all-right-now—“I was just telling Deborah how we all wish she would change her style of hairdressing.”

Mrs Phillips’ inflexion of the word “all” crushed Deb back again on to the pouffe, whence she had deprecatingly risen. All ... she heard the entire Phillips family owning her, re-modelling her, chanting as in chorus: “How we wish Deb would change her style of hairdressing!”

“Let me try how she looks with it done like mine,” exclaimed Beatrice brightly. “May I, Deb—just for fun? I’m supposed to have a way with hair”—she began to pull out the hairpins. “Oh, what masses—look, mother. I think it’s delightfully quaint the way you tuck it under like a boy, but it seems rather a shame that nobody should guess what a quantity you have, doesn’t it? Hardy says a woman’s crown of glory is her hair.”

“No, Samson said that,” Deb corrected dreamily. She knew that Hardy Redbury spoke rarely, but with a certain caustic originality.

“I believe it was Samson!” Beatrice and her mother[165] exchanged meaning glances of delight. So Deb recognized the utterances of the beloved!

“There—what do you say to that?” and Beatrice stepped back a pace or two while Mrs Phillips hovered round the victim.... “A little more off the forehead and ears,” she pronounced; “she has such nice little ears; so why not show them?”

Deb, accustomed to the thick tumble of hair to her eyebrows, and its warm cluster round her cheeks, stared aghast at her scalped and naked renaissance in the hand-glass Beatrice held up for her benefit. She might have cried with the famous savage who was asked why he did not feel the stress of the weather upon his person: “Me all face!”

“Doesn’t she look sweet?” Beatrice cried. And Mrs Phillips assented with less of majesty than usual: “It does indeed make a difference.”

“Come down and let Sa——the others see!” Deb was urged to the door and down the stairs, and pushed into the drawing-room, where by now the whole party were assembled.

“How do you like her?”

Truly abashed, head hanging, cheeks a crimson blaze, the girl stood just inside the doorway, while the expected chorus smote her unmuffled hearing:

“Hullo ... Beatrice at her old games.... By Jove, what a change! So she has got ears, has she? I often wondered.... Greedy little Delilah! all that hair, and then wanting Samson’s into the bargain!... Turn round—no, slowly.... It does suit you, Deb—you must always wear it like that....”

“Do you consider it an improvement, Samson?” enquired Samson’s mother.

“Yes.”

She could feel his eyes upon her—eyes of hot proprietorship—and knew all the sensations of the slave-girl exploited in the market-place for critical appraisement. The veiling had been ripped from large tracts of her person, leaving them bare—bare.... Deb, who could be quite happily unembarrassed, even unconscious, when the delicious cream-white slenderness of her limbs was exposed to view, who would not have minded a whit any haphazard spectator of her evening bath, cheek rubbed contentedly against her own satiny damp shoulder, loving the huddled contact, Deb now underwent sheer agony[166] at the novelty of stark forehead, ears, and nape of the neck. The erection on top of her head felt rickety, top-heavy; all the separate hairs dragged the wrong way, as hair is prone to do when forced out of its groove; the Phillips went on exclaiming, suggesting, twisting her about and around, trying the effects of her hat on the new coiffure.... And it was not so difficult to refuse Samson when, on the way home, he proposed to her for the second time.

“And now I shall never see him again.”

A week later came a formal invitation from Mrs. Phillips bidding Deb to dinner.

Nightmare ... and really nightmare, this. One lops off a head and it promptly grows again; or hits out ever so many times at a malignant beast-face and hits ... past it. And it pushes itself nearer.... What was the good of refusing Samson, if something in his temperament was blank to refusals? And she could not stay away, with the knowledge that in Sussex Gardens the Phillips’ illusion was still large and benign and unmutilated ... illusion that she and Samson were to be married. A smooth, shiny illusion, like a forehead bared of its tumble of fringe....

Something drastic had to be done to it. She would have to accept the invitation to dinner, and sit at that seat at that table in that room ... and watch the teeth flashing and gleaming ... hear again the joke about Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah ... be approved as one of the family by Mrs. Phillips ... and feel Samson’s eyes of fanatic proprietorship fixed upon her while she gulped down her favourite pudding. She would have to go, because the worse alternative was to remain in ignorance of just how much she was still engaged to Samson. And perhaps after dinner she would find another way of beating in her cry of freedom upon his unreceptiveness. But she was not very hopeful of this.... She was frightened.... The Phillips were altogether too much for her.

However, the nightmare did not precisely repeat itself. There was no flash and gleam of white teeth round the table; but instead long sombre faces; Samson the centre of commiserating[167] solicitude. An oppressive atmosphere of reproach directed towards Deb; the second refusal could not be thrown off as lightly as the first. Ultimate results, no doubt, would be the same ... inconceivable that the eldest son of the tribe should not have the maiden of his choice. But meanwhile the maiden was giving trouble ... how dared she? Mrs Phillips had much ado to keep the hatred from her eyes every time she brooded down the table at Deb. What better match could she want than Samson? Samson, with his splendid looks, and his grandmother’s fortune, and his loyal unwavering affection. The affection of a good Jew who would give her a comfortable home.... Obviously the girl was coquetting—testing her power—and making Samson suffer. She deserved to be whipped ... making Samson suffer. And a mother in such a crisis must control her primitive longings to use force upon stubborn opposition—to take Deb and throw her under Samson’s feet—“There—to do what you like with.... And now, sleep again and eat again and smile again ... my son ... my son ....”

Deb understood all this, understood and was passionately sorry for the irritable disappointed heart that craved for Samson’s babies to worship as none of the grandchildren had ever yet been worshipped, and cursed her for her perverseness in refusing birth to this small dark-skinned Samson. She wished she did not understand quite so well. Had she been wholly an outsider, she could have dealt her wound, and jigged away. Or had she been wholly in spirit one of these people, then what romance in the prospect of just such a home and babies! But betwixt and between ... a laughing vagabond soul who could ache in every fibre for the sorrows of a Jewish mother; light flying heels that yet lingered for their owner to look back regretfully on anchorage—a very unsatisfactory blend ... and, oh, what was going to happen after the interminable dinner?

After dinner, a series of weighty manœuvres left Deb alone with Samson in the small boudoir.

“What I want to know—what I feel you ought to tell me—is why won’t you marry me?” The question lifted itself from his glucose despondency.

Could he be made to see?—“Because—because—oh, Samson, we’re so utterly different.”

“Is that reason one? Look at Abe and Florence—how[168] quiet she is, and he’s such a lively fellow, and yet they couldn’t be happier.”

“But they belong to the same world—their code, their creed—and we don’t. Quiet and lively is only on top. You think things wrong that I think right, and the other way about.”

“There is no such thing as thinking things right or wrong, Deb. They are right or wrong.”

“Well—there you are!” eagerly. Perhaps by patient wriggling she could twist her way out of this earth-tunnel, instead of by one volcanic eruption. “I’d be frightened to believe that. It’s too simple....”

“Well, what do you believe right which I believe wrong?” She could not tabulate. And remained silent.

“There, you see!” conclusively.

“If you married me,” he persisted, “I’d give you every single thing you wanted”—with a mental reservation that his promise naturally did not include the things that were unfit for her.

She twisted in another direction. “You don’t like my friends.”

“No. They’re not real, Deb. And you won’t like them either when you learn that they’re not real. Nothing unwholesome can be real. I don’t care how clever they are—I’ve no respect for cleverness or art——”

“Not the ‘Faerie Queene’?” innocently.

“That’s wholesome. It has a sound moral. But your Bohemians ... they’re not good. Not good or kind. That’s all that matters—goodness and kindness.”

“They are,” obstreperously. “Bohemians are notoriously kinder-hearted and more generous than Philistines.”

The man smiled. “Yes, call me a Philistine. I’m proud of it. But you don’t understand, Deb. How much time does an artist give her husband or her children or her home?”

“His temperament needs variety, I suppose.”

Samson closed his mouth firmly; he was not going to discuss temperament with Deb, who mercifully did not know what she was talking about.

“I wouldn’t let you be dull, little girl, if that’s what you’re afraid of. We could travel.”

“Together or separately?”

He laughed at the joke. “And you wouldn’t want to see so much of your friends ... we’re a very united family, you know, and Beatrice and Flo and Esther are always together.”

[169]

A very united family—God, yes!

“So we’ve disposed of obstacle number one”; Samson’s spirits were rising rapidly. (But how have we disposed of it? thought Deb.) “Come now, what’s obstacle number two?”

“It’s because you’re such a united family”—she struggled hard to find expressive words—“that you owe it to them to put the right sort of girl in the spare place. Don’t you see, oh, don’t you see, Samson, that I should spoil the cantata.”

“But they like you tremendously, little girl; mother and Beatrice are awfully fond of you. And when you get to know Flo and Martha and Gwen——”

“It’s no good. I should make you wretched. Oh—why do you want ... just me?”

“You are the embodiment of the qualities I most admire in a woman.”

And he believed it, too. And was unaware that it was some elusive pixie element about the girl—a subtle swing of movement, a freshness thrilling in her voice, some fleeting curving trick of her lip and eyelids, a scornful daintiness which were magic to his manhood, and which would haunt him and escape him, trip up his senses and beckon him on again ... that it was this which, subconsciously, kept him persistent for just Deb, and no other girl. But he was sincere enough, talking rubbish about embodiment of qualities. This was her pixiness, translated into Samsonese.

Deb sighed. “One would suppose you wanted to be tormented for all the rest of your life.”

“In what special ways are you so determined to torment me?” he teased her.

“Everything can’t be drawn up in lists.... I should get restless moods, and want to do all sorts of things that you’d think funny or mad or imprudent—or unnecessary, and I should want to do them there and then and at once ... without thinking them over. And I shall hate being asked questions, and turn sulky over answering them. And I’d go away without you, and forget to write. And ask for a latch-key. And invite people to see me whom you aren’t sure are the right sort, and discuss topics that you’re quite sure are the wrong sort. And shock your mother by not taking enough interest in little Fanny. And get furiously excited over a book[170] or a picture or a bit of verse or a face or—or ... the way a studio is arranged, or the first summer day in March, before anyone expected it ... the first day that one can fling one’s self down on to warm green grass and lie there ... and lie there dreaming....”

The byway of argument was fatal. She had forgotten that Samson had a corner in Nature.

At once he rushed into enthusiastic confirmation; ignoring the former part of her speech except for a soothing remark to the effect that she’d be bound to settle down—as soon as she had a household of her own.

“I’d rather die than settle down,” breathed Deb—to the defiant youth in her. Samson did not hear.

“You’re quite good enough for me, little girl,” thinking she had been sufficiently chaffed, and the moment had come to strike a more serious note. “Quite good enough. Run yourself down as much as you please, nothing you can say will make any difference!”

No, nothing she could say would make any difference, or rid him of the supposition that she was merely deprecating—a prey to modesty....

“I’m different—not worse nor better. We can’t either of us be too good or too bad for each other if we’re different.”

“Very well, then, you’re right, we’re different. Don’t let’s say another word about it——” He smothered her uprising vehemence with a genial pretence of humouring her. “I give in. I’m entirely wrong. Have it your own way. We’re as different as you please. And now, shall I call mother and the others, and tell her it’s all right, and that we’ve made it up?”

“No, please don’t,” she whispered. Her vitality was worn-out from the struggle.

He turned back from the door, disappointed. “Deb—is there another man?”

“No,” again. If only there had been someone, that she could have rung out a triumphant yes.

Phillips was relieved; but knitted his brows anew over the problem of her obduracy. Then he asked her if she would marry him (a) “If I win the V.C. at the Front?” (b) “If I knew more about pictures?” (c) “If I were more lively?”

She shook her head at each tabulated item. But how queer, how pitifully queer that he should dream he could be perseveringly[171] refitted for her love as for a suit of clothes which required slight alteration.

“I’ve never cared for anyone but you, Deb. Never. Other fellows might say that and not mean it—but it’s true in my case. You can ask Beatrice, or mother. Or Abe—he always used to chaff me for not letting myself be plagued with girls. So you needn’t be jealous—you’re my first love, and I’m thirty-one.”

Calf-love, then.... No wonder he blundered at every move. But he ought to have got that phase over long ago. Calf-love, moon-love ... pretty enough from a lad of twenty-one; but from thirty-one you expect a man’s defter handling. “You needn’t be jealous.” Should she tell him her fervent wish that some suave brilliant woman had indeed shaped him for present enlightenment? Deb had no ambition to be instructress.... But he would not believe her ... impregnated as he was with his theory of female psychology.

“All girls say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’; all girls like to pretend they’re not worthy; all girls are jealous of the other woman in a fellow’s past; all girls——” Deb was too tired to combat the ‘all-girls’ convention.

She stood up: “I want to go home, Samson.” And he stood directly facing her.... A presentiment seized her that he was going to crush her in his arms. Perhaps, if he did—but no.

“I shall always be waiting for you when you want me, little girl. I don’t change, you know. Hope and wait—that’s going to be my motto!” He straightened his shoulders and pulled down his tunic and smiled at her.

Her hands flew up as though to push away a suffocating pressure. A past that held her only, the encompassing present—and now he claimed the future as well.... “It’s so heavy,” murmured Deb. He must not be allowed to wait for her—he must not. Could no word, no act of hers shrivel the Phillips’ illusion? Besides ... there were moods which might assail her, driven, persecuted moods that cried for anchorage; soft drowsy Oriental moods, when for sheer languor one might yield—neither of these moods ought to be open to the peril of a Samson waiting and hoping.

“It’s no good, Samson,” with ebbing conviction. And she hated his persistence—until she saw his eyes, dogged with misery, eager with the want of her.

[172]

“Then may I—I wonder if you would grant me a last favour? The victim at the block, you know,” stumbling over a laugh.

She knew what was coming....

“I wonder—if you will let me kiss you—just once?”

And because she had hurt him, and could make no other amends, and because she was ashamed it was such a trifle in importance to her; and because Deb could never bear to be avaricious of her chastity, she said: “Yes, if you like.”

He was very deliberate and careful about it, with continual sideway glances at her, as though in fear permission would be retracted. The kiss itself ... well, it was quite obvious that Samson had been speaking truth when he asserted that Deb was his first love. She clenched her hands tightly and endured ... it was soon over! But a curious change had come over Samson. Metaphorically, he began to strut.

“Ah! I feel I’ve advanced a step—now.”

Deb turned upon him in a blinding scatter of rage.

“Because I’ve allowed you to kiss me? Do you imagine, in your fatuous smug conceit, that it makes a difference, except to make me quite, quite sure—surer even than I was before—that you’re the wrong man? You and your strictly honourable intentions, countenanced by the whole family! Why, do you suppose the man I loved would have had to ask formal permission for that kiss?—and that I would measure him out just one at arm’s length as a dole? I, who know what kisses can be.... Oh, yes, I’m sick of pretending to be the Una of your private Faerie Queene. It’s men like you, with minds like yours, who make girls mean and haggling and nigglesome. What makes you imagine that if I hold out a piece of my face towards you ... just because ... because ...” a sob of sheer anger gulping up between the words ... “because you asked, and I wanted to be decent, and didn’t care much one way or another, what makes you dare to feel that you’ve ‘advanced a step’? You haven’t!—not a quarter of one!”

“Very well—I haven’t—we’ll say I haven’t—I give in—you’re quite right—I haven’t advanced—are you satisfied now?” Again that futile pretence of placating her. But: “Kisses ...” she whispered, dreamily, unheeding him, “kisses ... like a shower of stars on my lips. Stars that burn....”

[173]

Unconvinced of his error, he stated pompously: “I treated you with the respect which is due to a good girl, Deb.”

Her smile subtly mocked him. “Ah, but you see, I have—not—been—good.”

But Cliffe Kennedy was indubitably to blame. No one could spend so much time with Cliffe as Deb had done of late, without echoing his tendency to achieve a climax at whatever cost. His sense of dramatic effect abhorred a vacuum. Deb had caught the trick, that was all. She was always impressionable. “I have treated you with the respect due to a good girl ...” and then the pause—and, spoken almost mechanically, her curtain line.

“Well—he asked for it!”

The drawback to these histrionic displays in ordinary life, however, is lack of the aforesaid curtain. Certainly it should have fallen at that juncture: “You see, I have not been good ...” and Act III a fortnight later.... Meanwhile, Deb and Samson remained looking at one another, in Mrs Phillips’ boudoir, her head proudly tilted, so that the little three-cornered face was fore-shortened to an upcurling of black eye-lashes, and mouth a mutinous half-crescent, the corners trembling to a smile sternly chidden back again—“This is serious!”—but the irrepressible desire persisted.... Samson’s expression was such a marvel of Pharisaic indignation and disgust.