*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12673 ***

THE PRETTY LADY

A Novel

by

ARNOLD BENNETT

1918






    "_Virtue has never yet been adequately represented by any
    who have had any claim to be considered virtuous. It is the
    sub-vicious who best understand virtue. Let the virtuous
    people stick to describing vice--which they can do well
    enough_."

    SAMUEL BUTLER





CONTENTS


Chapter


 1. THE PROMENADE

 2. THE POWER

 3. THE FLAT

 4. CONFIDENCE

 5. OSTEND

 6. THE ALBANY

 7. FOR THE EMPIRE

 8. BOOTS

 9. THE CLUB

10. THE MISSION

11. THE TELEGRAM

12. RENDEZVOUS

13. IN COMMITTEE

14. QUEEN

15. EVENING OUT

16. THE VIRGIN

17. SUNDAY AFTERNOON

18. THE MYSTIC

19. THE VISIT

20. MASCOT

21. THE LEAVE-TRAIN

22. GETTING ON WITH THE WAR

23. THE CALL

24. THE SOLDIER

25. THE RING

26. THE RETURN

27. THE CLYDE

28. SALOME

29. THE STREETS

30. THE CHILD'S ARM

31. "ROMANCE"

32. MRS. BRAIDING

33. THE ROOF

34. IN THE BOUDOIR

35. QUEEN DEAD

36. COLLAPSE

37. THE INVISIBLE POWERS

38. THE VICTORY

39. IDYLL

40. THE WINDOW

41. THE ENVOY




Chapter I

THE PROMENADE


The piece was a West End success so brilliant that even if you
belonged to the intellectual despisers of the British theatre you
could not hold up your head in the world unless you had seen it; even
for such as you it was undeniably a success of curiosity at least.

The stage scene flamed extravagantly with crude orange and viridian
light, a rectangle of bedazzling illumination; on the boards, in the
midst of great width, with great depth behind them and arching height
above, tiny squeaking figures ogled the primeval passion in gesture
and innuendo. From the arc of the upper circle convergent beams of
light pierced through gloom and broke violently on this group of the
half-clad lovely and the swathed grotesque. The group did not quail.
In fullest publicity it was licensed to say that which in private
could not be said where men and women meet, and that which could
not be printed. It gave a voice to the silent appeal of pictures and
posters and illustrated weeklies all over the town; it disturbed the
silence of the most secret groves in the vast, undiscovered hearts of
men and women young and old. The half-clad lovely were protected from
the satyrs in the audience by an impalpable screen made of light and
of ascending music in which strings, brass, and concussion
exemplified the naïve sensuality of lyrical niggers. The guffaw which,
occasionally leaping sharply out of the dim, mysterious auditorium,
surged round the silhouetted conductor and drove like a cyclone
between the barriers of plush and gilt and fat cupids on to the
stage--this huge guffaw seemed to indicate what might have happened if
the magic protection of the impalpable screen had not been there.

Behind the audience came the restless Promenade, where was the reality
which the stage reflected. There it was, multitudinous, obtainable,
seizable, dumbly imploring to be carried off. The stage, very daring,
yet dared no more than hint at the existence of the bright and joyous
reality. But there it was, under the same roof.

Christine entered with Madame Larivaudière. Between shoulders and
broad hats, as through a telescope, she glimpsed in the far distance
the illusive, glowing oblong of the stage; then the silhouetted
conductor and the tops of instruments; then the dark, curved
concentric rows of spectators. Lastly she took in the Promenade, in
which she stood. She surveyed the Promenade with a professional eye.
It instantly shocked her, not as it might have shocked one ignorant
of human nature and history, but by reason of its frigidity, its
constraint, its solemnity, its pretence. In one glance she embraced
all the figures, moving or stationary, against the hedge of shoulders
in front and against the mirrors behind--all of them: the programme
girls, the cigarette girls, the chocolate girls, the cloak-room girls,
the waiters, the overseers, as well as the vivid courtesans and their
clientèle in black, tweed, or khaki. With scarcely an exception they
all had the same strange look, the same absence of gesture. They
were northern, blond, self-contained, terribly impassive. Christine
impulsively exclaimed--and the faint cry was dragged out of her, out
of the bottom of her heart, by what she saw:

"My god! How mournful it is!"

Lise Larivaudière, a stout and benevolent Bruxelloise, agreed with
uncomprehending indulgence. The two chatted together for a few
moments, each ceremoniously addressing the other as "Madame,"
"Madame," and then they parted, insinuating themselves separately into
the slow, confused traffic of the Promenade.




Chapter 2

THE POWER


Christine knew Piccadilly, Leicester Square, Regent Street, a bit of
Oxford Street, the Green Park, Hyde Park, Victoria Station, Charing
Cross. Beyond these, London, measureless as the future and the past,
surrounded her with the unknown. But she had not been afraid, because
of her conviction that men were much the same everywhere, and that she
had power over them. She did not exercise this power consciously; she
had merely to exist and it exercised itself. For her this power was
the mystical central fact of the universe. Now, however, as she stood
in the Promenade, it seemed to her that something uncanny had happened
to the universe. Surely it had shifted from its pivot! Her basic
conviction trembled. Men were not the same everywhere, and her power
over them was a delusion. Englishmen were incomprehensible; they were
not human; they were apart. The memory of the hundreds of Englishmen
who had yielded to her power in Paris (for she had specialised in
travelling Englishmen) could not re-establish her conviction as to
the sameness of men. The presence of her professed rivals of various
nationalities in the Promenade could not restore it either. The
Promenade in its cold, prim languor was the very negation of
desire. She was afraid. She foresaw ruin for herself in this London,
inclement, misty and inscrutable.

And then she noticed a man looking at her, and she was herself again
and the universe was itself again. She had a sensation of warmth and
heavenly reassurance, just as though she had drunk an anisette or
a crême de menthe. Her features took on an innocent expression; the
characteristic puckering of the brows denoted not discontent, but a
gentle concern for the whole world and also virginal curiosity. The
man passed her. She did not stir. Presently he emerged afresh out of
the moving knots of promenaders and discreetly approached her. She
did not smile, but her eyes lighted with a faint amiable
benevolence--scarcely perceptible, doubtful, deniable even, but
enough. The man stopped. She at once gave a frank, kind smile, which
changed all her face. He raised his hat an inch or so. She liked men
to raise their hats. Clearly he was a gentleman of means, though in
morning dress. His cigar had a very fine aroma. She classed him in
half a second and was happy. He spoke to her in French, with a slight,
unmistakable English accent, but very good, easy, conversational
French--French French. She responded almost ecstatically:

"Ah, you speak French!"

She was too excited to play the usual comedy, so flattering to most
Englishmen, of pretending that she thought from his speech that he was
a Frenchman. The French so well spoken from a man's mouth in London
most marvellously enheartened her and encouraged her in the perilous
enterprise of her career. She was candidly grateful to him for
speaking French.

He said after a moment:

"You have not at all a fatigued air, but would it not be preferable to
sit down?"

A man of the world! He could phrase his politeness. Ah! There
were none like an Englishman of the world. Frenchmen, delightfully
courteous up to a point, were unsatisfactory past that point.
Frenchmen of the south were detestable, and she hated them.

"You have not been in London long?" said the man, leading her away to
the lounge.

She observed then that, despite his national phlegm, he was in a state
of rather intense excitation. Luck! Enormous luck! And also an augury
for the future! She was professing in London for the first time in her
life; she had not been in the Promenade for five minutes; and lo! the
ideal admirer. For he was not young. What a fine omen for her profound
mysticism and superstitiousness!




Chapter 3

THE FLAT


Her flat was in Cork Street. As soon as they entered it the man
remarked on its warmth and its cosiness, so agreeable after the
November streets. Christine only smiled. It was a long, narrow flat--a
small sitting-room with a piano and a sideboard, opening into a larger
bedroom shaped like a thick L. The short top of the L, not cut off
from the rest of the room, was installed as a _cabinet de toilette_,
but it had a divan. From the divan, behind which was a heavily
curtained window, you could see right through the flat to the
curtained window of the sitting-room. All the lights were softened by
paper shades of a peculiar hot tint between Indian red and carmine,
giving a rich, romantic effect to the gleaming pale enamelled
furniture, and to the voluptuous engravings after Sir Frederick
Leighton, and the sweet, sentimental engravings after Marcus Stone,
and to the assorted knicknacks. The flat had homogeneity, for
everything in it, except the stove, had been bought at one shop in
Tottenham Court Road by a landlord who knew his business. The stove,
which was large, stood in the bedroom fireplace, and thence radiated
celestial comfort and security throughout the home; the stove was
the divinity of the home and Christine the priestess; she had herself
bought the stove, and she understood its personality--it was one of
your finite gods.

"Will you take something?" she asked, the hostess.

Whisky and a siphon and glasses were on the sideboard.

"Oh no, thanks!"

"Not even a cigarette?" Holding out the box and looking up at him,
she appealed with a long, anxious glance that he should honour her
cigarettes.

"Thank you!" he said. "I should like a cigarette very much."

She lit a match for him.

"But you--do you not smoke?"

"Yes. Sometimes."

"Try one of mine--for a change."

He produced a long, thin gold cigarette-case, stuffed with cigarettes.

She lit a cigarette from his.

"Oh!" she cried after a few violent puffs. "I like enormously your
cigarettes. Where are they to be found?"

"Look!" said he. "I will put these few in your box." And he poured
twenty cigarettes into an empty compartment of the box, which was
divided into two.

"Not all!" she protested.

"Yes."

"But I say NO!" she insisted with a gesture suddenly firm, and put a
single cigarette back into his case and shut the case with a snap, and
herself returned it to his pocket. "One ought never to be without a
cigarette."

He said:

"You understand life.... How nice it is here!" He looked about and
then sighed.

"But why do you sigh?"

"Sigh of content! I was just thinking this place would be something
else if an English girl had it. It is curious, lamentable, that
English girls understand nothing--certainly not love."

"As for that, I've always heard so."

"They understand nothing. Not even warmth. One is cold in their
rooms."

"As for that--I mean warmth--one may say that I understand it; I do."

"You understand more than warmth. What is your name?"

"Christine."

She was the accidental daughter of a daughter of joy. The mother, as
frequently happens in these cases, dreamed of perfect respectability
for her child and kept Christine in the country far away in Paris,
meaning to provide a good dowry in due course. At forty-two she had
not got the dowry together, nor even begun to get it together, and she
was ill. Feckless, dilatory and extravagant, she saw as in a
vision her own shortcomings and how they might involve disaster
for Christine. Christine, she perceived, was a girl imperfectly
educated--for in the affair of Christine's education the mother had
not aimed high enough--indolent, but economical, affectionate, and
with a very great deal of temperament. Actuated by deep maternal
solicitude, she brought her daughter back to Paris, and had her
inducted into the profession under the most decent auspices. At
nineteen Christine's second education was complete. Most of it the
mother had left to others, from a sense of propriety. But she herself
had instructed Christine concerning the five great plagues of the
profession. And also she had adjured her never to drink alcohol save
professionally, never to invest in anything save bonds of the City of
Paris, never to seek celebrity, which according to the mother meant
ultimate ruin, never to mix intimately with other women. She had
expounded the great theory that generosity towards men in small things
is always repaid by generosity in big things--and if it is not the
loss is so slight! And she taught her the fundamental differences
between nationalities. With a Russian you had to eat, drink and
listen. With a German you had to flatter, and yet adroitly insert, "Do
not imagine that I am here for the fun of the thing." With an Italian
you must begin with finance. With a Frenchman you must discuss finance
before it is too late. With an Englishman you must talk, for he will
not, but in no circumstances touch finance until he has mentioned
it. In each case there was a risk, but the risk should be faced. The
course of instruction finished, Christine's mother had died with a
clear conscience and a mind consoled.

Said Christine, conversational, putting the question that lips seemed
then to articulate of themselves in obedience to its imperious demand
for utterance:

"How long do you think the war will last?"

The man answered with serenity: "The war has not begun yet."

"How English you are! But all the same, I ask myself whether you would
say that if you had seen Belgium. I came here from Ostend last month."
The man gazed at her with new vivacious interest.

"So it is like that that you are here!"

"But do not let us talk about it," she added quickly with a mournful
smile.

"No, no!" he agreed.... "I see you have a piano. I expect you are fond
of music."

"Ah!" she exclaimed in a fresh, relieved tone. "Am I fond of it! I
adore it, quite simply. Do play for me. Play a boston--a two-step."

"I can't," he said.

"But you play. I am sure of it."

"And you?" he parried.

She made a sad negative sign.

"Well, I'll play something out of _The Rosenkavalier_."

"Ah! But you are a _musician_!" She amiably scrutinised him. "And
yet--no."

Smiling, he, too, made a sad negative sign.

"The waltz out of _The Rosenkavalier_, eh?"

"Oh, yes! A waltz. I prefer waltzes to anything."

As soon as he had played a few bars she passed demurely out of the
sitting-room, through the main part of the bedroom into the _cabinet
de toilette_. She moved about in the _cabinet de toilette_ thinking
that the waltz out of _The Rosenkavalier_ was divinely exciting. The
delicate sound of her movements and the plash of water came to him
across the bedroom. As he played he threw a glance at her now and
then; he could see well enough, but not very well because the smoke of
the shortening cigarette was in his eyes.

She returned at length into the sitting-room, carrying a small silk
bag about five inches by three. The waltz finished.

"But you'll take cold!" he murmured.

"No. At home I never take cold. Besides--"

Smiling at him as he swung round on the music-stool, she undid the
bag, and drew from it some folded stuff which she slowly shook
out, rather in the manner of a conjurer, until it was revealed as a
full-sized kimono. She laughed.

"Is it not marvellous?"

"It is."

"That is what I wear. In the way of chiffons it is the only fantasy
I have bought up to the present in London. Of course, clothes--I have
been forced to buy clothes. It matches exquisitely the stockings, eh?"

She slid her arms into the sleeves of the transparency. She was a
pretty and highly developed girl of twenty-six, short, still lissom,
but with the fear of corpulence in her heart. She had beautiful hair
and beautiful eyes, and she had that pucker of the forehead denoting,
according to circumstances, either some kindly, grave preoccupation or
a benevolent perplexity about something or other.

She went near him and clasped hands round his neck, and whispered:

"Your waltz was adorable. You are an artist."

And with her shoulders she seemed to sketch the movements of dancing.




Chapter 4

CONFIDENCE


After putting on his thick overcoat and one glove he had suddenly
darted to the dressing-table for his watch, which he was forgetting.
Christine's face showed sympathetic satisfaction that he had
remembered in time, simultaneously implying that even if he had not
remembered, the watch would have been perfectly safe till he called
for it. The hour was five minutes to midnight. He was just going.
Christine had dropped a little batch of black and red Treasury
notes on to the dressing-table with an indifferent if not perhaps
an impatient air, as though she held these financial sequels to be
a stain on the ideal, a tedious necessary, a nuisance, or simply
negligible.

She kissed him goodbye, and felt agreeably fragile and soft within
the embrace of his huge, rough overcoat. And she breathed winningly,
delicately, apologetically into his ear:

"Thou wilt give something to the servant?" Her soft eyes seemed to
say, "It is not for myself that I am asking, is it?"

He made an easy philanthropic gesture to indicate that the servant
would have no reason to regret his passage.

He opened the door into the little hall, where the fat Italian maid
was yawning in an atmosphere comparatively cold, and then, in a change
of purpose, he shut the door again.

"You do not know how I knew you could not have been in London very
long," he said confidentially.

"No."

"Because I saw you in Paris one night in July--at the Marigny
Theatre."

"Not at the Marigny."

"Yes. The Marigny."

"It is true. I recall it. I wore white and a yellow stole."

"Yes. You stood on the seat at the back of the Promenade to see a
contortionist girl better, and then you jumped down. I thought you
were delicious--quite delicious."

"Thou flatterest me. Thou sayest that to flatter me."

"No, no. I assure you I went to the Marigny every night for five
nights afterwards in order to find you."

"But the Marigny is not my regular music-hall. Olympia is my regular
music-hall."

"I went to Olympia and all the other halls, too, each night."

"Ah, yes! Then I must have left Paris. But why, my poor friend, why
didst thou not speak to me at the Marigny? I was alone."

"I don't know. I hesitated. I suppose I was afraid."

"Thou!"

"So to-night I was terribly content to meet you. When I saw that it
was really you I could not believe my eyes."

She understood now his agitation on first accosting her in the
Promenade. The affair very pleasantly grew more serious for her. She
liked him. He had nice eyes. He was fairly tall and broadly built,
but not a bit stout. Neither dark nor blond. Not handsome, and yet
... beneath a certain superficial freedom, he was reserved. He had
beautiful manners. He was refined, and he was refined in love; and yet
he knew something. She very highly esteemed refinement in a man.
She had never met a refined woman, and was convinced that few such
existed. Of course he was rich. She could be quite sure, from his way
of handling money, that he was accustomed to handling money. She would
swear he was a bachelor merely on the evidence of his eyes.... Yes,
the affair had lovely possibilities. Afraid to speak to her, and
then ran round Paris after her for five nights! Had he, then, had the
lightning-stroke from her? It appeared so. And why not? She was not
like other girls, and this she had always known. She did precisely
the same things as other girls did. True. But somehow, subtly,
inexplicably, when she did them they were not the same things.
The proof: he, so refined and distinguished himself, had felt the
difference. She became very tender.

"To think," she murmured, "that only on that one night in all my life
did I go to the Marigny! And you saw me!"

The coincidence frightened her--she might have missed this nice,
dependable, admiring creature for ever. But the coincidence also
delighted her, strengthening her superstition. The hand of destiny was
obviously in this affair. Was it not astounding that on one night of
all nights he should have been at the Marigny? Was it not still more
astounding that on one night of all nights he should have been in the
Promenade in Leicester Square?... The affair was ordained since before
the beginning of time. Therefore it was serious.

"Ah, my friend!" she said. "If only you had spoken to me that night at
the Marigny, you might have saved me from troubles frightful--fantastic."

"How?"

He had confided in her--and at the right moment. With her human lore
she could not have respected a man who had begun by admitting to a
strange and unproved woman that for five days and nights he had gone
mad about her. To do so would have been folly on his part. But having
withheld his wild secret, he had charmingly showed, by the gesture of
opening and then shutting the door, that at last it was too strong for
his control. Such candour deserved candour in return. Despite his age,
he looked just then attractively, sympathetically boyish. He was a
benevolent creature. The responsive kindliness of his enquiring "How?"
was beyond question genuine. Once more, in the warm and dark-glowing
comfort of her home, the contrast between the masculine, thick rough
overcoat and the feminine, diaphanous, useless kimono appealed to her
soul. It seemed to justify, even to call for, confidence from her to
him.

The Italian woman behind the door coughed impatiently and was not
heard.




Chapter 5

OSTEND


In July she had gone to Ostend with an American. A gentleman, but mad.
One of those men with a fixed idea that everything would always be
all right and that nothing really and permanently uncomfortable
could possibly happen. A very fair man, with red hair, and radiating
wrinkles all round his eyes--phenomenon due to his humorous outlook on
the world. He laughed at her because she travelled with all her bonds
of the City of Paris on her person. He had met her one night, and
the next morning suggested the Ostend excursion. Too sudden,
too capricious, of course; but she had always desired to see the
cosmopolitanism of Ostend. Trouville she did not like, as you had sand
with every meal if you lived near the front. Hotel Astoria at Ostend.
Complete flat in the hotel. Very chic. The red-haired one, the
_rouquin_, had broad ideas, very broad ideas, of what was due to a
woman. In fact, one might say that he carried generosity in details to
excess. But naturally with Americans it was necessary to be surprised
at nothing. The _rouquin_ said steadily that war would not break out.
He said so until the day on which it broke out. He then became a Turk.
Yes, a Turk. He assumed rights over her, the rights of protection, but
very strange rights. He would not let her try to return to Paris. He
said the Germans might get to Paris, but to Ostend, never--because
of the English! Difficult to believe, but he had locked her up in the
complete flat. The Ostend season had collapsed--pluff--like that. The
hotel staff vanished almost entirely. One or two old fat Belgian
women on the bedroom floors--that seemed to be all. The _rouquin_ was
exquisitely polite, but very firm. In fine, he was a master. It was
astonishing what he did. They were the sole remaining guests in the
Astoria. And they remained because he refused to permit the management
to turn him out. Weeks passed. Yes, weeks. English forces came to
Ostend. Marvellous. Among nations there was none like the English. She
did not see them herself. She was ill. The _rouquin_ had told her
that she was ill when she was not ill, but lo! the next day she was
ill--oh, a long time. The _rouquin_ told her the news--battle of the
Marne and all species of glorious deeds. An old fat Belgian told her
a different kind of news. The stories of the fall of Liége, Namur,
Brussels, Antwerp. The massacres at Aerschot, at Louvain. Terrible
stories that travelled from mouth to mouth among women. There was
always rape and blood and filth mingled. Stories of a frightful
fascination ... unrepeatable! Ah!

The _rouquin_ had informed her one day that the Belgian Government had
come to Ostend. Proof enough, according to him, that Ostend could not
be captured by the Germans! After that he had said nothing about the
Belgian Government for many days. And then one day he had informed
her casually that the Belgian Government was about to leave Ostend
by steamer. But days earlier the old fat woman had told her that the
German staff had ordered seventy-five rooms at the Hôtel des Postes at
Ghent. Seventy-five rooms. And that in the space of a few hours Ghent
had become a city of the dead.... Thousands of refugees in Ostend.
Thousands of escaped virgins. Thousands of wounded soldiers.
Often, the sound of guns all day and all night. And in the daytime
occasionally, a sharp sound, very loud; that meant that a German
aeroplane was over the town--killing ... Plenty to kill. Ostend was
always full, behind the Digue, and yet people were always leaving--by
steamer. Steamers taken by assault. At first there had been
formalities, permits, passports. But when one steamer had been taken
by assault--no more formalities! In trying to board the steamers
people were drowned. They fell into the water and nobody troubled--so
said the old woman. Christine was better; desired to rise. The
_rouquin_ said No, not yet. He would believe naught. And now he
believed one thing, and it filled his mind--that German submarines
sank all refugee ships in the North Sea. Proof of the folly of leaving
Ostend. Yet immediately afterwards he came and told her to get up.
That is to say, she had been up for several days, but not outside. He
told her to come away, come away. She had only summer clothes, and it
was mid-October. What a climate, Ostend in October! The old woman said
that thousands of parcels of clothes for refugees had been sent by
generous England. She got a parcel; she had means of getting it. She
opened it with pride in the bedroom of the flat. It contained eight
corsets and a ball-dress. A droll race, all the same, the English.
Had they no imagination? But, no doubt, society women were the same
everywhere. It was notorious that in France....

Christine went forth in her summer clothes. The _rouquin_ had got
an old horse-carriage. He gave her much American money--or, rather,
cheques--which, true enough, she had since cashed with no difficulty
in London. They had to leave the carriage. The station square was full
of guns and women and children and bundles. Yes, together with a
few men. She spent the whole night in the station square with the
_rouquin_, in her summer clothes and his overcoat. At six o'clock in
the evening it was already dark. A night interminable. Babies crying.
One heard that at the other end of the square a baby had been born.
She, Christine, sat next to a young mother with a baby. Both mother
and baby had the right arm bandaged. They had both been shot through
the arm with the same bullet. It was near Aerschot. The young woman
also told her.... No, she could not relate that to an Englishman.
Happily it did not rain. But the wind and the cold! In the morning
the _rouquin_ put her on to a fishing-vessel. She had nothing but her
bonds of the City of Paris and her American cheques. The crush was
frightful. The captain of the fishing-vessel, however, comprehended
what discipline was. He made much money. The _rouquin_ would not come.
He said he was an American citizen and had all his papers. For the
rest, the captain would not let him come, though doubtless the captain
could have been bribed. As they left the harbour, with other trawlers,
they could see the quays all covered with the disappointed,
waiting. Somebody in the boat said that the Germans had that morning
reached--She forgot the name of the place, but it was the next
village to Ostend on the Bruges road. Thus Christine parted from the
_rouquin_. Mad! Always wrong, even about the German submarines. But
_chic_. Truly _chic_.

What a voyage! What adventures with the charitable people in England!
People who resembled nothing else on earth! People who did not
understand what life was.... No understanding of that which it
is--life! In fine ...! However, she should stay in England. It was
the only country in which one could have confidence. She was trying
to sell the furniture of her flat in Paris. Complications! Under the
emergency law she was not obliged to pay her rent to the landlord; but
if she removed her furniture then she would have to pay the rent.
What did it matter, though? Besides, she might not be able to sell her
furniture after all. Remarkably few women in Paris at that moment were
in a financial state to buy furniture. Ah no!

"But I have not told you the tenth part!" said Christine.

"Terrible! Terrible!" murmured the man.

All the heavy sorrow of the world lay on her puckered brow, and
floated in her dark glistening eyes. Then she smiled, sadly but with
courage.

"I will come to see you again," said the man comfortingly. "Are you
here in the afternoons?"

"Every afternoon, naturally."

"Well, I will come--not to-morrow--the day after to-morrow."

Already, long before, interrupting the buttoning of his collar, she
had whispered softly, persuasively, clingingly, in the classic manner:

"Thou art content, _chéri_? Thou wilt return?"

And he had said: "That goes without saying."

But not with quite the same conviction as he now used in speaking
definitely of the afternoon of the day after to-morrow. The fact
was, he was moved; she too. She had been right not to tell the story
earlier, and equally right to tell it before he departed. Some men,
most men, hated to hear any tale of real misfortune, at any moment,
from a woman, because, of course, it diverted their thoughts.

In thus departing at once the man showed characteristic tact. Her
recital left nothing to be said. They kissed again, rather like
comrades. Christine was still the vessel of the heavy sorrow of the
world, but in the kiss and in their glances was an implication that
the effective, triumphant antidote to sorrow might be found in a
mutual trust. He opened the door. The Italian woman, yawning and with
her hand open, was tenaciously waiting.

Alone, carefully refolding the kimono in its original creases,
Christine wondered what the man's name was. She felt that the
mysterious future might soon disclose a germ of happiness.




Chapter 6

THE ALBANY


G.J. Hoape--He was usually addressed as "G.J." by his friends, and
always referred to as "G.J." by both friends and acquaintances--woke
up finally in the bedroom of his flat with the thought:

"To-day I shall see her."

He inhabited one of the three flats at the extreme northern end of the
Albany, Piccadilly, W.I. The flat was strangely planned. Its shape
as a whole was that of a cube. Imagine the cube to be divided
perpendicularly into two very unequal parts. The larger part,
occupying nearly two-thirds of the entire cubic space, was the
drawing-room, a noble chamber, large and lofty. The smaller part was
cut horizontally into two storeys. The lower storey comprised a very
small hall, a fair bathroom, the tiniest staircase in London, and
G.J.'s very small bedroom. The upper storey comprised a very small
dining-room, the kitchen, and servants' quarters.

The door between the bedroom and the drawing room, left open in the
night for ventilation, had been softly closed as usual during G.J.'s
final sleep, and the bedroom was in absolute darkness save for a faint
grey gleam over the valance of the window curtains. G.J. could think.
He wondered whether he was in love. He hoped he was in love, and the
fact that the woman who attracted him was a courtesan did not disturb
him in the least.

He was nearing fifty years of age. He had casually known hundreds of
courtesans in sundry capitals, a few of them very agreeable; also a
number of women calling themselves, sometimes correctly, actresses,
all of whom, for various reasons which need not be given, had proved
very unsatisfactory. But he had never loved--unless it might be,
mildly, Concepcion, and Concepcion was now a war bride. He wanted to
love. He had never felt about any woman, not even about Concepcion, as
he felt about the woman seen for a few minutes at the Marigny Theatre
and then for five successive nights vainly searched for in all the
chief music-halls of Paris. (A nice name, Christine! It suited her.)
He had given her up--never expected to catch sight of her again; but
she had remained a steadfast memory, sad and charming. The encounter
in the Promenade in Leicester Square was such a piece of heavenly and
incredible luck that it had, at the moment, positively made him giddy.
The first visit to Christine's flat had beatified and stimulated him.
Would the second? Anyhow, she was the most alluring woman--and
yet apparently of dependable character!--he had ever met. No other
consideration counted with him.

There was a soft knock; the door was pushed, and wavy reflections of
the drawing-room fire played on the corner of the bedroom ceiling.
Mrs. Braiding came in. G.J. had known it was she by the caressing
quality of the knock. Mrs. Braiding was his cook and the wife of his
"man". It was not her place to come in, but occasionally, because
something had happened to Braiding, she did come in. She drew the
curtains apart, and the day of Vigo Street, pale, dirty, morose,
feebly and perfunctorily took possession of the bedroom. Mrs.
Braiding, having drawn the curtains, returned to the door and from the
doorway said:

"Breakfast is practically ready, sir."

G.J. perceived that this was one of her brave, resigned mornings.
Since August she had borne the entire weight of the war on her back,
and sometimes the burden would overpower her, but never quite. G.J.
switched on the light, arose from his bed, assumed his dressing-gown,
and, gazing with accustomed pleasure round the bedroom, saw that it
was perfect.

He had furnished his flat in the Regency style of the first decade
of the nineteenth century, as matured by George Smith, "upholder
extraordinary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales". The Pavilion
at Brighton had given the original idea to G.J., who saw in it the
solution of the problem of combining the somewhat massive dignity
suitable to a bachelor of middling age with the bright, unconquerable
colours which the eternal twilight of London demands.

His dome bed was yellow as to its upper works, with crimson valances
above and yellow valances below. The yellow-lined crimson curtains (of
course never closed) had green cords and tassels, and the counterpane
was yellow. This bed was a modest sample of the careful and
uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere
carried out in his abode.

The drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window,
had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. Here the clash
of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze
girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws,
the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a
drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum
weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a
real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style
which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to
appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good; but
it was a style. And G.J. had scamped no detail. Even the pictures were
hung with thick tasselled cords of the Regency. The drawing-room was a
triumph.

Do not conceive that G.J. had lost his head about furniture and that
his notion of paradise was an endless series of second-hand shops.
He had an admirable balance; and he held that a man might make a
faultless interior for himself and yet not necessarily lose his
balance. He resented being called a specialist in furniture. He
regarded himself as an amateur of life, and, if a specialist in
anything, as a specialist in friendships. Yet he was a solitary man
(liking solitude without knowing that he liked it), and in the midst
of the perfections which he had created he sometimes gloomily thought:
"What in the name of God am I doing on this earth?"

He went into the drawing-room, and there, by the fire and in front of
a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning
heads of bronze lions, stood the lacquered table consecrated to
his breakfast tray; and his breakfast tray, with newspaper and
correspondence, had been magically placed thereon as though by
invisible hands. And on one arm of the easy-chair lay the rug which,
because a dressing-gown does not button all the way down, he put over
his knees while breakfasting in winter. Yes, he admitted with pleasure
that he was "well served". Before eating he opened the piano--a modern
instrument concealed in an ingeniously confected Regency case--and
played with taste a Bach prelude and fugue.

His was not the standardised and habituated kind of musical culture
which takes a Bach prelude and fugue every morning before breakfast
with or without a glass of Lithia water or fizzy saline. He did,
however, customarily begin the day at the piano, and on this
particular morning he happened to play a Bach prelude and fugue.

And as he played he congratulated himself on not having gone to seek
Christine in the Promenade on the previous night, as impatience
had tempted him to do. Such a procedure would have been an error in
worldliness and bad from every point of view. He had wisely rejected
the temptation.

In the deep blue arm-chair, with the rug over his knees and one hand
on a lion's head, he glanced first at the opened _Times_, because
of the war. Among the few letters was one with the heading of the
Reveille Motor Horn Company Ltd.

G.J. like his father, had been a solicitor. When he was twenty-five
his father, a widower, had died and left him a respectable fortune
and a very good practice. He sold half the practice to an incoming
partner, and four years later he sold the other half of the practice
to the same man. At thirty he was free, and this result had been
attained through his frank negative answer to the question, "The law
bores me--is there any reason why I should let it continue to bore
me?" There was no reason. Instead of the law he took up life. Of
business preoccupations naught remained but his investments. He
possessed a gift for investing money. He had helped the man who had
first put the Reveille Motor Horn on the market. He had had a mighty
holding of shares in the Reveille Syndicate Limited, which had so
successfully promoted the Reveille Motor Horn Company Limited. And in
the latter, too, he held many shares. The Reveille Motor Horn Company
had prospered and had gone into the manufacture of speedometers,
illuminating outfits, and all manner of motor-car accessories.

On the outbreak of war G.J. had given himself up for lost. "This
is the end," he had said, as a member of the sore-shaken investing
public. He had felt sick under the region of the heart. In particular
he had feared for his Reveille shares. No one would want to buy
expensive motor horns in the midst of the greatest war that the world,
etc., etc.

Still the Reveille Company, after sustaining the shock, had somehow
continued to do a pretty good business. It had patriotically offered
its plant and services to the War Office, and had been repulsed with
contumely and ignominy. The War Office had most caustically intimated
to the Reveille Company that it had no use and never under any
conceivable circumstances could have any use whatever for the Reveille
Company, and that the Reveille Company was a forward and tedious
jackanapes, unworthy even of an articulate rebuff. Now the autograph
letter with the Reveille note-heading was written by the managing
director (who represented G.J.'s interests on the Board), and it
stated that the War Office had been to the Reveille Company, and
implored it to enlarge itself, and given it vast orders at grand
prices for all sorts of things that it had never made before. The
profits of 1915 would be doubled, if not trebled--perhaps quadrupled.
G.J. was relieved, uplifted; and he sniggered at his terrible
forebodings of August and September. Ruin? He was actually going to
make money out of the greatest war that the world, etc. etc. And why
not? Somebody had to make money, and somebody had to pay for the
war in income tax. For the first time the incubus of the war seemed
lighter upon G.J. And also he need feel no slightest concern about
the financial aspect of any possible developments of the Christine
adventure. He had a very clear and undeniable sensation of positive
happiness.




Chapter 7

FOR THE EMPIRE


Mrs. Braiding came into the drawing-room, and he wondered, paternally,
why she was so fidgety and why her tranquillising mate had not
appeared. To the careless observer she was a cheerful woman, but the
temple of her brightness was reared over a dark and frightful crypt
in which the demons of doubt, anxiety, and despair year after year
dragged at their chains, intimidating hope. Slender, small, and neat,
she passed her life in bravely fronting the shapes of disaster with an
earnest, vivacious, upturned face. She was thirty-five, and her aspect
recalled the pretty, respected lady's-maid which she had been before
Braiding got her and knocked some nonsense out of her and turned her
into a wife.

G.J., still paternally, but firmly, took her up at once.

"I say, Mrs. Braiding, what about this dish-cover?"

He lifted the article, of which the copper was beginning to show
through the Sheffield plating.

"Yes sir. It does look rather impoverished, doesn't it?"

"But I told Braiding to use the new toast-dish I bought last week but
one."

"Did you, sir? I was very happy about the new one as soon as I saw
it, but Braiding never gave me your instructions in regard to it." She
glanced at the cabinet in which the new toast-dish reposed with other
antique metal-work. "Braiding's been rather upset this last few days,
sir."

"What about?"

"This recruiting, sir. Of course, you are aware he's decided on it."

"I'm not aware of anything of the sort," said G.J. rather roughly,
perhaps to hide his sudden emotion, perhaps to express his irritation
at Mrs. Braiding's strange habit of pretending that the most startling
pieces of news were matters of common knowledge.

"Well, sir, of course you were out most of yesterday, and you dined at
the club. Braiding attended at a recruiting office yesterday, sir.
He stood three hours in the crowd outside because there was no room
inside, and then he stood over two hours in a passage inside before
his turn came, and nothing to eat all day, or drink either. And when
his turn came and they asked him his age, he said 'thirty-six,' and
the person was very angry and said he hadn't any time to waste, and
Braiding had better go outside again and consider whether he hadn't
made a mistake about his age. So Braiding went outside and considered
that his age was only thirty-three after all, but he couldn't get in
again, not by any means, so he just came back here and I gave him a
good tea, and he needed it, sir."

"But he saw me last night, and he never said anything!"

"Yes, sir," Mrs. Braiding admitted with pain. "I asked him if he had
told you, and he said he hadn't and that I must."

"Where is he now?"

"He went off early, sir, so as to get a good place. I shouldn't be a
bit surprised if he's in the army by this time. I know it's not the
right way of going about things, and Braiding's only excuse is it's
for the Empire. When it's a question of the Empire, sir...." At that
instant the white man's burden was Mrs. Braiding's, and the glance of
her serious face showed what the crushing strain of it was.

"I think he might have told me."

"Well, sir. I'm very sorry. Very sorry.... But you know what Braiding
is."

G.J. felt that that was just what he did not know, or at any rate had
not hitherto known. He was hurt by Braiding's conduct. He had always
treated Braiding as a friend. They had daily discussed the progress
of the war. On the previous night Braiding, in all the customary
sedateness of black coat and faintly striped trousers, had behaved
just as usual! It was astounding. G.J. began to incline towards the
views of certain of his friends about the utter incomprehensibility
of the servile classes--views which he had often annoyed them by
traversing. Yes; it was astounding. All this martial imperialism
seething in the depths of Braiding, and G.J. never suspecting the
ferment! Exceedingly difficult to conceive Braiding as a soldier! He
was the Albany valet, and Albany valets were Albany valets and naught
else.

Mrs. Braiding continued:

"It's very inconsiderate to you, sir. That's a point that is
appreciated by both Braiding and I. But let us fervently hope it won't
be for long, sir. The consensus of opinion seems to be we shall be
in Berlin in the spring. And in the meantime, I think"--she smiled an
appeal--"I can manage for you by myself, if you'll be so good as to
let me."

"Oh! It's not that," said G.J. carelessly. "I expect you can manage
all right."

"Oh!" cried she. "I know how you feel about it, sir, and I'm very
sorry. And at best it's bound to be highly inconvenient for a
gentleman like yourself, sir. I said to Braiding, 'You're taking
advantage of Mr. Hoape's good nature,' that's what I said to Braiding,
and he couldn't deny it. However, sir, if you'll be so good as to let
me try what I can do by myself--"

"I tell you that'll be all right," he stopped her.

Braiding, his mainstay, was irrevocably gone. He realised that, and it
was a severe blow. He must accept it. As for Mrs. Braiding managing,
she would manage in a kind of way, but the risks to Regency furniture
and china would be grave. She did not understand Regency furniture
and china as Braiding did; no woman could. Braiding had been as much a
"find" as the dome bed or the unique bookcase which bore the names of
"Homer" and "Virgil" in bronze characters on its outer wings.
Also, G.J. had a hundred little ways about neckties and about
trouser-stretching which he, G.J., would have to teach Mrs. Braiding.
Still the war ...

When she was gone he stood up and brushed the crumbs from his
dressing-gown, and emitted a short, harsh laugh. He was laughing at
himself. Regency furniture and china! Neckties! Trouser-stretching! In
the next room was a youngish woman whose minstrel boy to the war had
gone--gone, though he might be only in the next street! And had she
said a word about her feelings as a wife? Not a word! But dozens
of words about the inconvenience to the god-like employer! She had
apologised to him because Braiding had departed to save the Empire
without first asking his permission. It was not merely astounding--it
flabbergasted. He had always felt that there was something
fundamentally wrong in the social fabric, and he had long had a
preoccupation to the effect that it was his business, his, to take a
share in finding out what was wrong and in discovering and applying a
cure. This preoccupation had worried him, scarcely perceptibly, like
the delicate oncoming of neuralgia. There must be something wrong when
a member of one class would behave to a member of another class as
Mrs. Braiding behaved to him--without protest from him.

"Mrs. Braiding!" he called out.

"Yes, sir." She almost ran back into the drawing-room.

"When shall you be seeing your husband?" At least he would remind her
that she had a husband.

"I haven't an idea, sir."

"Well, when you do, tell him that I want to speak to him; and you can
tell him I shall pay you half his wages in addition to your own."

Her gratitude filled him with secret fury.

He said to himself:

"Futile--these grand gestures about wages."




Chapter 8

BOOTS


In the very small hall G.J. gazed at himself in the mirror that was
nearly as large as the bathroom door, to which it was attached, and
which it ingeniously masked.

Although Mrs. Braiding was present, holding his ebony stick, he
carefully examined his face and appearance without the slightest
self-consciousness. Nor did Mrs. Braiding's demeanour indicate that in
her opinion G.J. was behaving in a manner eccentric or incorrect. He
was dressed in mourning. Honestly he did not believe that he looked
anywhere near fifty. His face was worn by the friction of the world,
especially under the eyes, but his eyes were youthful, and his hair
and moustache and short, fine beard scarcely tinged with grey. His
features showed benevolence, with a certain firmness, and they had the
refinement which comes of half a century's instinctive avoidance of
excess. Still, he was beginning to feel his age. He moved more slowly;
he sat down, instead of standing up, at the dressing-table. And he was
beginning also to take a pride in mentioning these changes and in the
fact that he would be fifty on his next birthday. And when talking to
men under thirty, or even under forty, he would say in a tone mingling
condescension and envy: "But, of course, you're young."

He departed, remarking that he should not be in for lunch and might
not be in for dinner, and he walked down the covered way to the
Albany Courtyard, and was approved by the Albany porters as a resident
handsomely conforming to the traditional high standard set by the
Albany for its residents. He crossed Piccadilly, and as he did so he
saw a couple of jolly fine girls, handsome, stylish, independent of
carriage, swinging freely along and intimately talking with that mien
of experience and broad-mindedness which some girls manage to wear in
the streets. One of them in particular appealed to him. He thought how
different they were from Christine. He had dreamt of just such girls
as they were, and yet now Christine filled the whole of his mind.

"You can't foresee," he thought.

He dipped down into the extraordinary rectangle of St. James's, where
he was utterly at home. A strange architecture, parsimoniously plain
on the outside, indeed carrying the Oriental scorn for merely external
effect to a point only reachable by a race at once hypocritical and
madly proud. The shabby plainness of Wren's church well typified all
the parochial parsimony. The despairing architect had been so pinched
by his employers in the matter of ornament that on the whole of the
northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub's heads!
What a parish!

It was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass
plates. And the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob
and every brass plate every morning. What happened in the way of
disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had
no importance. The conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass
door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence
by a vast early-rising population. Recruiting offices, casualty lists,
the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the
high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those
brass plates.

The shops and offices seemed to show that the wants of customers were
few and simple. Grouse moors, fisheries, yachts, valuations, hosiery,
neckties, motor-cars, insurance, assurance, antique china, antique
pictures, boots, riding-whips, and, above all, Eastern cigarettes!
The master-passion was evidently Eastern cigarettes. The few provision
shops were marmoreal and majestic, catering as they did chiefly for
the multifarious palatial male clubs which dominated the parish and
protected and justified the innumerable "bachelor" suites that hung
forth signs in every street. The parish, in effect, was first an
immense monastery, where the monks, determined to do themselves
extremely well in dignified peace, had made a prodigious and not
entirely unsuccessful effort to keep out the excitable sex. And,
second, it was an excusable conspiracy on the part of intensely
respectable tradesmen and stewards to force the non-bargaining sex to
pay the highest possible price for the privilege of doing the correct
thing.

G.J. passed through the cardiac region of St. James's, the Square
itself, where knights, baronets, barons, brewers, viscounts,
marquesses, hereditary marshals and chief butlers, dukes, bishops,
banks, librarians and Government departments gaze throughout the four
seasons at the statue of a Dutchman; and then he found himself at his
bootmaker's.

Now, his bootmaker was one of the three first bootmakers in the West
End, bearing a name famous from Peru to Hong Kong. An untidy interior,
full of old boots and the hides of various animals! A dirty girl was
writing in a dirty tome, and a young man was knotting together two
pieces of string in order to tie up a parcel. Such was the "note" of
the "house". The girl smiled, the young man bowed. In an instant the
manager appeared, and G.J. was invested with the attributes of God. He
informed the manager with pain, and the manager heard with deep
pain, that the left boot of the new pair he then wore was not quite
comfortable in the toes. The manager simply could not understand it,
just as he simply could not have understood a failure in the working
of the law of gravity. And if God had not told him he would not have
believed it. He knelt and felt. He would send for the boots. He would
make the boots comfortable or he would make a new pair. Expense was
nothing. Trouble was nothing. Incidentally he remarked with a sigh
that the enormous demand for military boots was rendering it more and
more difficult for him to give to old patrons that prompt and plenary
attention which he would desire to give. However, God in any case
should not suffer. He noticed that the boots were not quite well
polished, and he ventured to charge God with hints for God's personal
attendant. Then he went swiftly across to a speaking-tube and snapped:

"Polisher!"

A trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid,
weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of St. James's, and knelt
before God far more submissively than even the manager had knelt. He
had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed
alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand
what he had done with his brush. He never looked up, never spoke. When
he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements
and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back
into the earth of St. James's. And because the trap-door had not
shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man
definitely into the darkness underneath. And then G.J. was wafted out
of the shop with smiles and bows.




Chapter 9

THE CLUB


The vast "morning-room" of the Monumental Club (pre-eminent among
clubs for its architecture) was on the whole tonically chilly. But
as one of the high windows stood open, and there were two fires
fluttering beneath the lovely marble mantelpieces, between the fires
and the window every gradation of temperature could be experienced by
the curious. On each wall book-shelves rose to the carved and gilded
ceiling. The furlongs of shelves were fitted with majestic volumes
containing all the Statutes, all the Parliamentary Debates, and
all the Reports of Royal Commissions ever printed to narcotise the
conscience of a nation. These calf-bound works were not, in fact,
read; but the magnificent pretence of their usefulness was completed
by carpeted mahogany ladders which leaned here and there against the
shelfing, in accord with the theory that some studious member some day
might yearn and aspire to some upper shelf. On reading-stands and on
huge mahogany tables were disposed the countless newspapers of Great
Britain and Ireland, Europe and America, and also the files of such
newspapers. The apparatus of information was complete.

G.J. entered the splendid apartment like a discoverer. It was empty.
Not a member; not a servant! It waited, content to be inhabited,
equally content with its own solitude. This apartment had made an
adjunct even of the war; the function of the war in this apartment
was to render it more impressive, to increase, if possible, its
importance, for nowhere else could the war be studied so minutely day
by day.

A strange thing! G.J.'s sense of duty to himself had been quickened
by the defection of his valet. He felt that he had been failing to
comprehend in detail the cause and the evolution of the war, and that
even his general ideas as to it were inexcusably vague; and he had
determined to go every morning to the club, at whatever inconvenience,
for the especial purpose of studying and getting the true hang of the
supreme topic. As he sat down he was aware of the solemnity of the
great room, last fastness of the old strict decorum in the club. You
might not smoke in it until after 10 p.m.

Two other members came in immediately, one after the other. The first,
a little, very old and very natty man, began to read _The Times_ at
a stand. The second, old too, but of larger and firmer build, with a
long, clean-shaven upper lip, such as is only developed at the Bar,
on the Bench, and in provincial circles of Noncomformity, took an
easy-chair and another copy of _The Times_. A few moments elapsed, and
then the little old man glanced round, and, assuming surprise that
he had not noticed G.J. earlier, nodded to him with a very bright and
benevolent smile.

G.J. said:

"Well, Sir Francis, what's your opinion of this Ypres business. Seems
pretty complicated, doesn't it?"

Sir Francis answered in a tone whose mild and bland benevolence
matched his smile:

"I dare say the complications escape me. I see the affair quite
simply. We are holding on, but we cannot continue to hold on. The
Germans have more men, far more guns, and infinitely more ammunition.
They certainly have not less genius for war. What can be the result?
I am told by respectable people that the Germans lost the war at the
Marne. I don't appreciate it. I am told that the Germans don't realise
the Marne. I think they realise the Marne at least as well as we
realise Tannenberg."

The slightly trembling, slightly mincing voice of Sir Francis denoted
such detachment, such politeness, such kindliness, that the opinion it
emitted seemed to impose itself on G.J. with extraordinary authority.
There was a brief pause, and Sir Francis ejaculated:

"What's your view, Bob?"

The other old man now consisted of a newspaper, two seamy hands and
a pair of grey legs. His grim voice came from behind the newspaper,
which did not move:

"We've no adequate means of judging."

"True," said Sir Francis. "Now, another thing I'm told is that the War
Office was perfectly ready for the war on the scale agreed upon for
ourselves with France and Russia. I don't appreciate that either. No
War Office can be said to be perfectly ready for any war until it has
organised its relations with the public which it serves. My belief
is that the War Office had never thought for one moment about the
military importance of public opinion and the Press. At any rate, it
has most carefully left nothing undone to alienate both the public and
the Press. My son-in-law has the misfortune to own seven newspapers,
and the tales he tells about the antics of the Press Bureau--" Sir
Francis smiled the rest of the sentence. "Let me see, they offered the
Press Bureau to you, didn't they, Bob?"

_The Times_ fell, disclosing Bob, whose long upper lip grew longer.

"They did," he said. "I made a few inquiries, and found it was nothing
but a shuttlecock of the departments. I should have had no real
power, but unlimited quantities of responsibility. So I respectfully
refused."

Sir Francis remarked:

"Your hearing's much better, Bob."

"It is," answered Bob. "The fact is, I got hold of a marvellous feller
at Birmingham." He laughed sardonically. "I hope to go down to history
as the first judge that ever voluntarily retired because of deafness.
And now, thanks to this feller at Birmingham, I can hear better than
seventy-five per cent of the Bench. The Lord Chancellor gave me a hint
I might care to return, and so save a pension to the nation. I told
him I'd begin to think about that when he'd persuaded the Board of
Works to ventilate my old Court." He laughed again. "And now I see
the Press Bureau is enunciating the principle that it won't permit
criticism that might in any way weaken the confidence of the people in
the administration of affairs."

Bob opened his mouth wide and kept it open.

Sir Francis, with no diminution of the mild and bland benevolence of
his detachment, said:

"The voice is the Press Bureau's voice, but the hands are the hands
of the War Office. Can we reasonably hope to win, or not to lose, with
such a mentality at the head? I cannot admit that the War Office has
changed in the slightest degree in a hundred years. From time to time
a brainy civilian walks in, like Cardwell or Haldane, and saves it
from becoming patently ridiculous. But it never really alters. When I
was War Secretary in a transient government it was precisely the same
as it had been in the reign of the Duke of Cambridge, and to-day it is
still precisely the same. I am told that Haldane succeeded in teaching
our generals the value of Staff work as distinguished from dashing
cavalry charges. I don't appreciate that. The Staffs are still wide
open to men with social influence and still closed to men without
social influence. My grandson is full of great modern notions
about tactics. He may have talent for all I know. He got a Staff
appointment--because he came to me and I spoke ten words to an old
friend of mine with oak leaves in the club next door but one. No
questions asked. I mean no serious questions. It was done to oblige
me--the very existence of the Empire being at stake, according to
all accounts. So that I venture to doubt whether we're going to hold
Ypres, or anything else."

Bob, unimpressed by the speech, burst out:

"You've got the perspective wrong. Obviously the centre of gravity
is no longer in the West--it's in the East. In the West, roughly,
equilibrium has been established. Hence Poland is the decisive field,
and the measure of the Russian success or failure is the measure of
the Allied success or failure."

Sir Francis inquired with gentle joy:

"Then we're all right? The Russians have admittedly recovered from
Tannenberg. If there is any truth in a map they are doing excellently.
They're more brilliant than Potsdam, and they can put two men into the
field to the Germans' one--two and a half in fact."

Bob fiercely rumbled:

"I don't think we're all right. This habit of thinking in men is
dangerous. What are men without munitions? And without a clean
administration? Nothing but a rabble. It is notorious that the
Russians are running short of munitions and that the administration
from top to bottom consists of outrageous rascals. Moreover I see
to-day a report that the Germans have won a big victory at Kutno. I've
been expecting that. That's the beginning--mark me!"

"Yes," Sir Francis cheerfully agreed. "Yes. We're spending one million
a day, and now income tax is doubled! The country cannot stand it
indefinitely, and since our only hope lies in our being able to stand
it indefinitely, there is no hope--at any rate for unbiased minds.
Facts are facts, I fear."

Bob cried impatiently:

"Unbiased be damned! I don't want to be unbiased. I won't be. I had
enough of being unbiased when I was on the Bench, and I don't care
what any of you unbiased people say--I believe we shall win."

G.J. suddenly saw a boy in the old man, and suddenly he too became
boyish, remembering what he had said to Christine about the war not
having begun yet; and with fervour he concurred:

"So do I."

He rose, moved--relieved after a tension which he had not noticed
until it was broken. It was time for him to go. The two old men were
recalled to the fact of his presence. Bob raised the newspaper again.

Sir Francis asked:

"Are you going to the--er--affair in the City?"

"Yes," said G.J. with careful unconcern.

"I had thought of going. My granddaughter worried me till I consented
to take her. I got two tickets; but no sooner had I arrayed myself
this morning than she rang me up to say that her baby was teething
and she couldn't leave it. In view of this important creature's
indisposition I sent the tickets back to the Dean and changed my
clothes. Great-grandfathers have to be philosophers. I say, Hoape,
they tell me you play uncommonly good auction bridge."

"I play," said G.J. modestly. "But no better than I ought."

"You might care to make a fourth this afternoon, in the card-room."

"I should have been delighted to, but I've got one of these
war-committees at six o'clock." Again he spoke with careful unconcern,
masking a considerable self-satisfaction.




Chapter 10

THE MISSION


The great dim place was full, but crowding had not been permitted.
With a few exceptions in the outlying parts, everybody had a seat.
G.J. was favourably placed for seeing the whole length of the
interior. Accustomed to the restaurants of fashionable hotels,
auction-rooms, theatrical first-nights, the haunts of sport, clubs,
and courts of justice, he soon perceived, from the numerous samples
which he himself was able to identify, that all the London worlds were
fully represented in the multitude--the official world, the political,
the clerical, the legal, the municipal, the military, the artistic,
the literary, the dilettante, the financial, the sporting, and the
world whose sole object in life apparently is to be observed and
recorded at all gatherings to which admittance is gained by privilege
and influence alone.

There were in particular women the names and countenances and
family history of whom were familiar to hundreds of thousands of
illustrated-newspaper readers, even in the most distant counties, and
who never missed what was called a "function," whether "brilliant,"
"exclusive," or merely scandalous. At murder trials, at the sales of
art collections, at the birth of musical comedies, at boxing matches,
at historic debates, at receptions in honour of the renowned, at
luscious divorce cases, they were surely present, and the entire
Press surely noted that they were present. And if executions had
been public, they would in the same religious spirit have attended
executions, rousing their maids at milkmen's hours in order that they
might assume the right cunning frock to fit the occasion. And they
were here. And no one could divine why or how, or to what eternal end.

G.J. hated them, and he hated the solemn self-satisfaction that
brooded over the haughty faces of the throng. He hated himself for
having accepted a ticket from the friend in the War Office who was
now sitting next to him. And yet he was pleased, too. A disturbed
conscience could not defeat the instinct which bound him to the whole
fashionable and powerful assemblage. For ever afterwards, to his dying
hour, he could say--casually, modestly, as a matter of course, but he
could still say--that he had been there. The Lord Mayor and Sheriffs,
tradesmen glittering like Oriental potentates, passed slowly across
his field of vision. He thought with contempt of the City, living
ghoulish on the buried past, and obstinately and humanly refusing to
make a pile of its putrefying interests, set fire to it, and perish
thereon.

The music began. It was the Dead March in _Saul_. The long-rolling
drums suddenly rent the soul, and destroyed every base and petty
thought that was there. Clergy, headed by a bishop, were walking down
the cathedral. At the huge doors, nearly lost in the heavy twilight of
November noon, they stopped, turned and came back. The coffin swayed
into view, covered with the sacred symbolic bunting, and borne on the
shoulders of eight sergeants of the old regiments of the dead man.
Then followed the pall-bearers--five field-marshals, five full
generals, and two admirals; aged men, and some of them had reached
the highest dignity without giving a single gesture that had impressed
itself on the national mind; nonentities, apotheosised by seniority;
and some showed traces of the bitter rain that was falling in the
fog outside. Then the Primate. Then the King, who had supervened from
nowhere, the magic production of chamberlains and comptrollers. The
procession, headed by the clergy, moved slowly, amid the vistas ending
in the dull burning of stained glass, through the congregation in
mourning and in khaki, through the lines of yellow-glowing candelabra,
towards the crowd of scarlet under the dome; the summit of the
dome was hidden in soft mist. The music became insupportable in its
sublimity.

G.J. was afraid, and he did not immediately know why he was afraid.
The procession came nearer. It was upon him.... He knew why he was
afraid, and he averted sharply his gaze from the coffin. He was afraid
for his composure. If he had continued to watch the coffin he would
have burst into loud sobs. Only by an extraordinary effort did he
master himself. Many other people lowered their faces in self-defence.
The searchers after new and violent sensations were having the time of
their lives.

The Dead March with its intolerable genius had ceased. The coffin,
guarded by flickering candles, lay on the lofty catafalque; the eight
sergeants were pretending that their strength had not been in the
least degree taxed. Princes, the illustrious, the champions of
Allied might, dark Indians, adventurers, even Germans, surrounded the
catafalque in the gloom. G.J. sympathised with the man in the coffin,
the simple little man whose non-political mission had in spite of
him grown political. He regretted horribly that once he, G.J., who
protested that he belonged to no party, had said of the dead man:
"Roberts! Well-meaning of course, but senile!" ... Yet a trifle! What
did it matter? And how he loathed to think that the name of the dead
man was now befouled by the calculating and impure praise of schemers.
Another trifle!

As the service proceeded G.J. was overwhelmed and lost in the grandeur
and terror of existence. There he sat, grizzled, dignified, with the
great world, looking as though he belonged to the great world; and
he felt like a boy, like a child, like a helpless infant before the
enormities of destiny. He wanted help, because of his futility. He
could do nothing, or so little. It was as if he had been training
himself for twenty years in order to be futile at a crisis requiring
crude action. And he could not undo twenty years. The war loomed about
him, co-extensive with existence itself. He thought of the sergeant
who, as recounted that morning in the papers, had led a victorious
storming party, been decorated--and died of wounds. And similar deeds
were being done at that moment. And the simple little man in the
coffin was being tilted downwards from the catafalque into the grave
close by. G.J. wanted surcease, were it but for an hour. He longed
acutely, unbearably, to be for an hour with Christine in her warm,
stuffy, exciting, languorous, enervating room hermetically sealed
against the war. Then he remembered the tones of her voice as she had
told her Belgian adventures.... Was it love? Was it tenderness? Was
it sensuality? The difference was indiscernible; it had no importance.
Against the stark background of infinite existence all human beings
were alike and all their passions were alike.

The gaunt, ruthless autocrat of the War Office and the frail crowned
descendant of kings fronted each other across the open grave, and the
coffin sank between them and was gone. From the choir there came the
chanted and soothing words:

  _Steals on the ear the distant triumph-song_.

G.J. just caught them clear among much that was incomprehensible. An
intense patriotism filled him. He could do nothing; but he could keep
his head, keep his balance, practise magnanimity, uphold the truth
amid prejudice and superstition, and be kind. Such at that moment
seemed to be his mission.... He looked round, and pitied, instead of
hating, the searchers after sensations.

A being called the Garter King of Arms stepped forward and in a loud
voice recited the earthly titles and honours of the simple little dead
man; and, although few qualities are commoner than physical courage,
the whole catalogue seemed ridiculous and tawdry until the being
came to the two words, "Victoria Cross". The being, having lived his
glorious moments, withdrew. The Funeral March of Chopin tramped with
its excruciating dragging tread across the ruins of the soul. And
finally the cathedral was startled by the sudden trumpets of the Last
Post, and the ceremony ended.

"Come and have lunch with me," said the young red-hatted officer next
to G.J. "I haven't got to be back till two-thirty, and I want to talk
music for a change. Do you know I'm putting in ninety hours a week at
the W.O.?"

"Can't," G.J. replied, with an affectation of jauntiness. "I'm engaged
for lunch. Sorry."

"Who you lunching with?"

"Mrs. Smith."

The Staff officer exclaimed aghast:

"Conception?"

"Yes. Why, dear heart?"

"My dear chap. You don't know. Carlos Smith's been killed. _She_
doesn't know yet. I only heard by chance. News came through just as I
left. Nobody knows except a chap or two in Casualties. They won't be
sending out to-day's wires until two or three o'clock."

G.J., terrified and at a loss, murmured:

"What am I to do, then?"

"You know her extremely well, don't you? You ought to go and prepare
her."

"But how can I prepare her?"

"I don't know. How do people prepare people?... Poor thing!"

G.J. fought against the incredible fact of death.

"But he only went out six days ago! They haven't been married three
weeks."

The central hardness of the other disclosed itself as he said:

"What's that got to do with it? What does it matter if he went out six
days ago or six weeks ago? He's killed."

"Well--"

"Of course you must go. Indicate a rumour. Tell her it's probably
false, but you thought you owed it to her to warn her. Only for God's
sake don't mention me. We're not supposed to say anything, you know."

G.J. seemed to see his mission, and it challenged him.




Chapter 11

THE TELEGRAM


As soon as G.J. had been let into the abode by Concepcion's venerable
parlour-maid, the voice of Concepcion came down to him from above:

"G.J., who is your oldest and dearest friend?"

He replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of
cheerful abruptness:

"Difficult to say, off-hand."

"Not at all. It's your beard."

That was her greeting to him. He knew she was recalling an old
declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard. The
parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm
Concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants. G.J. looked
up the narrow well of the staircase. He could vaguely see Concepcion
on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather
fluffilly dressed, for her.

Concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the
sale of grand pianos. Her front door was immediately at the top of a
long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood
one step higher than the person desiring entrance. Within the abode,
which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up. "My
motto is," she would say, "'One room, one staircase.'" The life of the
abode was on the busy stairs. She called it also her Alpine Club. She
had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had
therefore caused rents to rise. In the drawing-room she had hung
a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a
chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in German gilt, and under
it she had inscribed, "Presented to Miss Concepcion Iquist by the
grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem
and regard."

She was the only daughter of Iquist's brother, who had had a business
and a palace at Lima. At the age of eighteen, her last surviving
parent being dead, she had come to London and started to keep house
for the bachelor Iquist, who at that very moment, owing to a fortunate
change in the Ministry, had humorously entered the Cabinet. These two
had immediately become "the most talked-of pair in London," London in
this phrase signifying the few thousand people who do talk about
the doings of other people unknown to them and being neither kings,
princes, statesmen, artistes, artists, jockeys, nor poisoners. The
Iquists had led the semi-intelligent, conscious-of-its-audience set
which had ousted the old, quite unintelligent stately-homes-of-England
set from the first place in the curiosity of the everlasting public.
Concepcion had wit. It was stated that she furnished her uncle with
the finest of his _mots_. When Iquist died, of course poor Concepcion
had retired to the upper part, whence, though her position was
naturally weakened, she still took a hand in leading the set.

G.J. had grown friendly and appreciative of her, for the simple reason
that she had singled him out and always tried to please him, even when
taking liberties with him. He liked her because she was different from
her set. She had a masculine mind, whereas many even of the males of
her set had a feminine mind. She was exceedingly well educated; she
had ideas on everything; and she never failed in catching an allusion.
She would criticise her set very honestly; her attitude to it and
to herself seemed to be that of an impartial and yet indulgent
philosopher; withal she could be intensely loyal to fools and worse
who were friends. As for the public, she was apparently convinced of
the sincerity of her scorn for it, while admitting that she enjoyed
publicity, which had become indispensable to her as a drug may become
indispensable. Moreover, there was her wit and her candid, queer
respect for G.J.

Yes, he had greatly admired her for her qualities. He did not,
however, greatly admire her physique. She was tall, with a head
scarcely large enough for her body. She had a nice snub nose which in
another woman might have been irresistible. She possessed very little
physical charm, and showed very little taste in her neat, prim frocks.
Not merely had she a masculine mind, but she was somewhat hard, a
self-confessed egoist. She swore like the set, using about one
"damn" or one "bloody" to every four cigarettes, of which she smoked,
perhaps, fifty a day--including some in taxis. She discussed the
sexual vagaries of her friends and her enemies with a freedom and an
apparent learning which were remarkable in a virgin.

In the end she had married Carlos Smith, and, characteristically, had
received him into her own home instead of going to his; as a fact, he
had none, having been a parent's close-kept darling. London had only
just recovered from the excitations of the wedding. G.J. had regarded
the marriage with benevolence, perhaps with relief.

"Anybody else coming to lunch?" he discreetly inquired of his
familiar, the parlour-maid.

She breathed a negative.

He had guessed it. Concepcion had meant to be alone with him. Having
married for love, and her husband being rapt away by the war, she
intended to resume her old, honest, quasi-sentimental relations with
G.J. A reliable and experienced bachelor is always useful to a young
grass-widow, and, moreover, the attendant hopeless adorer nourishes
her hungry egotism as nobody else can. G.J. thought these thoughts,
clearly and callously, in the same moment as, mounting the next
flight of stairs, he absolutely trembled with sympathetic anguish for
Concepcion. His errand was an impossible one; he feared, or rather he
hoped, that the very look on his face might betray the dreadful news
to that undeceivable intuition which women were supposed to possess.
He hesitated on the stairs; he recoiled from the top step--(she had
coquettishly withdrawn herself into the room)--he hadn't the slightest
idea how to begin. Yes, the errand was an impossible one, and yet such
errands had to be performed by somebody, were daily being performed by
somebodies. Then he had the idea of telephoning privily to fetch her
cousin Sara. He would open by remarking casually to Concepcion:

"I say, can I use your telephone a minute?" He found a strange
Concepcion in the drawing-room. This was his first sight of Mrs.
Carlos Smith since the wedding. She wore a dress such as he had never
seen on her: a tea-gown--and for lunch! It could be called neither
neat nor prim, but it was voluptuous. Her complexion had bloomed; the
curves of her face were softer, her gestures more abandoned, her
gaze full of a bold and yet shamed self-consciousness, her dark
hair looser. He stood close to her; he stood within the aura of her
recently aroused temperament, and felt it. He thought, could not help
thinking: "Perhaps she bears within her the legacy of new life." He
could not help thinking of her name. He took her hot hand. She said
nothing, but just looked at him. He then said jauntily:

"I say, can I use your telephone a minute?" Fortunately, the telephone
was in the bedroom. He went farther upstairs and shut himself in the
bedroom, and saw naught but the telephone surrounded by the mysterious
influences of inanimate things in the gay, crowded room.

"Is that you, Mrs. Trevise? It's G.J. speaking. G.J.... Hoape. Yes.
Listen. I'm at Concepcion's for lunch, and I want you to come over as
quickly as you can. I've got very bad news indeed--the worst possible.
Carlos has been killed at the Front. What? Yes, awful, isn't it? She
doesn't know. I have the job of telling her."

Now that the words had been spoken in Concepcion's abode the reality
of Carlos Smith's death seemed more horribly convincing than before.
And G.J., speaker of the words, felt almost as guilty as though he
himself were responsible for the death. When he had rung off he stood
motionless in the room until the opening of the door startled him.
Concepcion appeared.

"If you've done corrupting my innocent telephone ..." she said, "lunch
is cooling."

He felt a murderer.

At the lunch-table she might have been a genuine South American.
Nobody could be less like Christine than she was; and yet in those
instants she incomprehensibly reminded him of Christine. Then she
started to talk in her old manner of a professional and renowned
talker. G.J. listened attentively. They ate. It was astounding that
he could eat. And it was rather surprising that she did not cry out:
"G.J. What the devil's the matter with you to-day?" But she went on
talking evenly, and she made him recount his doings. He related the
conversation at the club, and especially what Bob, the retired judge,
had said about equilibrium on the Western Front. She did not want to
hear anything as to the funeral.

"We'll have champagne," she said suddenly to the parlour-maid, who was
about to offer some red wine. And while the parlour-maid was out of
the room she said to G.J., "There isn't a country in Europe where
champagne is not a symbol, and we must conform."

"A symbol of what?"

"Ah! The unusual."

"And what is there unusual to-day?" he almost asked, but did not
ask. It would, of course, have been utterly monstrous to put such
a question, knowing what he knew. He thought: I'm not a bit nearer
telling her than I was when I came.

After the parlour-maid had poured out the champagne Concepcion picked
up her glass and absently glanced through it and said:

"You know, G.J., I shouldn't be in the least surprised to hear that
Carly was killed out there. I shouldn't, really."

In amazement G.J. ceased to eat.

"You needn't look at me like that," she said. "I'm quite serious. One
may as well face the risks. _He_ does. Of course they're all heroes.
There are millions of heroes. But I do honestly believe that my Carly
would be braver than anyone. By the way, did I ever tell you he was
considered the best shot in Cheshire?"

"No. But I knew," answered G.J. feebly. He would have expected her to
be a little condescending towards Carlos, to whom in brains she was
infinitely superior. But no! Carlos had mastered her, and she was
grateful to him for mastering her. He had taught her in three weeks
more than she had learnt on two continents in thirty years. She
talked of him precisely as any wee wifie might have talked of the
soldier-spouse. And she called him "Carly"!

Neither of them had touched the champagne. G.J. decided that he would
postpone any attempt to tell her until her cousin arrived; her cousin
might arrive at any moment now.

While the parlour-maid presented potatoes Concepcion deliberately
ignored her and said dryly to G.J.:

"I can't eat any more. I think I ought to run along to Debenham and
Freebody's at once. You might come too, and be sure to bring your good
taste with you."

He was alarmed by her tone.

"Debenham and Freebody's! What for?"

"To order mourning, of course. To have it ready, you know. A
precaution, you know." She laughed.

He saw that she was becoming hysterical: the special liability of
the war-bride for whom the curtain has been lifted and falls
exasperatingly, enragingly, too soon.

"You think I'm a bit hysterical?" she questioned, half menacingly, and
stood up.

"I think you'd better sit down, to begin with," he said firmly.

The parlour-maid, blushing slightly, left the room.

"Oh, all right!" Concepcion agreed carelessly, and sat down. "But you
may as well read that."

She drew a telegram from the low neck of her gown and carefully
unfolded it and placed it in front of him. It was a War Office
telegram announcing that Carlos had been killed.

"It came ten minutes before you," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me at once?" he murmured, frightfully shocked. He
was actually reproaching her!

She stood up again. She lived; her breast rose and fell. Her gown had
the same voluptuousness. Her temperament was still emanating the same
aura. She was the same new Concepcion, strange and yet profoundly
known to him. But ineffable tragedy had marked her down, and the sight
of her parched the throat.

She said:

"Couldn't. Besides, I had to see if I could stand it. Because I've got
to stand it, G.J.... And, moreover, in our set it's a sacred duty to
be original."

She snatched the telegram, tore it in two, and pushed the pieces back
into her gown.

"'Poor wounded name!'" she murmured, "'my bosom as a bed shall lodge
thee.'"

The next moment she fell to the floor, at full length on her back.
G.J. sprang to her, kneeling on her rich, outspread gown, and tried to
lift her.

"No, no!" she protested faintly, dreamily, with a feeble frown on her
pale forehead. "Let me lie. Equilibrium has been established on the
Western Front."

This was her greatest _mot_.




Chapter 12

RENDEZVOUS


When the Italian woman, having recognised him with a discreet smile,
introduced G.J. into the drawing-room of the Cork Street flat, he saw
Christine lying on the sofa by the fire. She too was in a tea-gown.

She said:

"Do not be vexed. I have my migraine--am good for nothing. But I gave
the order that thou shouldst be admitted."

She lifted her arms, and the long sleeves fell away. G.J. bent down
and kissed her. She joined her hands on the nape of his neck, and
with this leverage raised her whole body for an instant, like a child,
smiling; then dropped back with a fatigued sigh, also like a child.
He found satisfaction in the fact that she was laid aside. It was
providential. It set him right with himself. For, to put the thing
crudely, he had left the tragic Concepcion to come to Christine, a
woman picked up in a Promenade.

True, Sara Trevise had agreed with him that he could accomplish no
good by staying at Concepcion's; Concepcion had withdrawn from the
vision of men. True, it could make no difference to Concepcion whether
he retired to his flat for the rest of the day and saw no one, or
whether, having changed his ceremonious clothes there, he went out
again on his own affairs. True, he had promised Christine to see her
that afternoon, and a promise was a promise, and Christine was a woman
who had behaved well to him, and it would have been impossible for
him to send her an excuse, since he did not know her surname. These
apparently excellent arguments were specious and worthless. He would,
anyhow, have gone to Christine. The call was imperious within him,
and took no heed of grief, nor propriety, nor the secret decencies of
sympathy. The primitive man in him would have gone to Christine.

He sat down with a profound and exquisite relief. The entrance to the
house was nearly opposite the entrance to a prim but fashionable
and expensive hotel. To ring (and ring the right bell) and wait at
Christine's door almost under the eyes of the hotel was an ordeal....
The fat and untidy Italian had opened the door, and shut it
again--quick! He was in another world, saved, safe! On the dark
staircase the image of Concepcion with her temperament roused and
condemned to everlasting hunger, the unconquerable Concepcion blasted
in an instant of destiny--this image faded. She would re-marry....
She ought to re-marry.... And now he was in Christine's warm room,
and Christine, temporary invalid, reclined before his eyes. The lights
were turned on, the blinds drawn, the stove replenished, the fire
replenished. He was enclosed with Christine in a little world with no
law and no conventions except its own, and no shames nor pretences. He
was, as it were, in the East. And the immanence of a third person,
the Italian, accepting naturally and completely the code of the little
world, only added to the charm. The Italian was like a slave, from
whom it is necessary to hide nothing and never to blush.

A stuffy little world with a perceptible odour! Ordinarily he had the
common insular appetite for ventilation, but now stuffiness appealed
to him; he scented it almost voluptuously. The ugliness of the
wallpaper, of the furniture, of everything in the room was naught.
Christine's profession was naught. Who could positively say that her
profession was on her face, in her gestures, in her talk? Admirable
as was his knowledge of French, it was not enough to enable him to
criticise her speech. Her gestures were delightful. Her face--her face
was soft; her puckered brow was touching in its ingenuousness. She
had a kind and a trustful eye; it was a lewd eye, indicative of her
incomparable endowment; but had he not encountered the lewd eye in the
very arcana of the respectability of the world outside? On the sofa,
open and leaves downward, lay a book with a glistening coloured cover,
entitled _Fantomas_. It was the seventh volume of an interminable
romance which for years had had a tremendous vogue among the
concierges, the workgirls, the clerks, and the _cocottes_ of Paris. An
unreadable affair, not even indecent, which nevertheless had
enchanted a whole generation. To be able to enjoy it was an absolute
demonstration of lack of taste; but did not some of his best friends
enjoy books no better? And could he not any day in any drawing-room
see martyred books dropped open and leaves downwards in a manner to
raise the gorge of a person of any bookish sensibility?

"Thou wilt play for me?" she suggested.

"But the headache?"

"It will do me good. I adore music, such music as thou playest."

He was flattered. The draped piano was close to him. Stretching out
his hand he took a little pile of music from the top of it.

"But you play, then!" he exclaimed, pleased.

"No, no! I tap--only. And very little."

He glanced through the pieces of music. They were all, without
exception, waltzes, by the once popular waltz-kings of Paris and
Vienna, including several by the king of kings, Berger. He seated
himself at the piano and opened the first waltz that came.

"Oh! I adore the waltzes of Berger," she murmured. "There is only he.
You don't think so?"

He said he had never heard any of this music. Then he played every
piece for her. He tried to see what it was in this music that so
pleased the simple; and he saw it, or he thought he saw it. He
abandoned himself to the music, yielding to it, accepting its ideals,
interpreting it as though it moved him, until in the end it did
produce in him a sort of factitious emotion. After all, it was no
worse than much of the music he was forced to hear in very refined
circles.

She said, ravished:

"You decipher music like an angel."

And hummed a fragment of the waltz from _The Rosenkavalier_ which he
had played for her two evenings earlier. He glanced round sharply. Had
she, then, real taste?

"It is like that, isn't it?" she questioned, and hummed it again,
flattered by the look on his face.

While, at her invitation, he repeated the waltz on the piano, whose
strings might have been made of zinc, he heard a ring at the outer
door and then the muffled sound of a colloquy between a male voice and
the voice of the Italian. "Of course," he admitted philosophically,
"she has other clients already." Such a woman was bound to have other
clients. He felt no jealousy, nor even discomfort, from the fact that
she lent herself to any male with sufficient money and a respectable
appearance. The colloquy expired.

"Ring, please," she requested, after thanking him. He hoped that she
was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence. Surely
she would be incapable of such clumsiness! Still, women without
imagination--and the majority of women were without imagination--did
do the most astounding things.

There was no immediate answer to the bell; but in a few minutes the
Italian entered with a tea-tray. Christine sat up.

"I will pour the tea," said she, and to the Italian: "Marthe, where
is the evening paper?" And when Marthe returned with a newspaper damp
from the press, Christine said: "To Monsieur...."

Not a word of curiosity as to the unknown visitor!

G.J. was amply confirmed in his original opinion of Christine. She was
one in a hundred. To provide the evening paper.... It was nothing, but
it was enormous.

"Sit by my side," she said. She made just a little space for him on
the sofa--barely enough so that he had to squeeze in. The afternoon
tea was correct, save for the extraordinary thickness of the
bread-and-butter. But G.J. said to himself that the French did
not understand bread-and-butter, and the Italians still less. To
compensate for the defects of the bread-and-butter there was a box of
fine chocolates.

"I perfect my English," she said. Tea was finished; they were smoking,
the _Evening News_ spread between them over the tea-things. She
articulated with a strong French accent the words of some of the
headings. "Mistair Carlos Smith keeled at the front," she read out.
"Who is it, that woman there? She must be celebrated."

There was a portrait of the illustrious Concepcion, together with some
sympathetic remarks about her, remarks conceived very differently from
the usual semi-ironic, semi-worshipping journalistic references to the
stars of Concepcion's set. G.J. answered vaguely.

"I do not like too much these society women. They are worse than us,
and they cost you more. Ah! If the truth were known--" Christine
spoke with a queer, restrained, surprising bitterness. Then she added,
softly relenting: "However, it is sad for her.... Who was he, this
monsieur?"

G.J. replied that he was nobody in particular, so far as his knowledge
went.

"Ah! One of those who are husbands of their wives!" said Christine
acidly.

The disturbing intuition of women!

A little later he said that he must depart.

"But why? I feel better."

"I have a committee."

"A committee?"

"It is a work of charity--for the French wounded."

"Ah! In that case.... But, beloved!"

"Yes?"

She lowered her voice.

"How dost thou call thyself?"

"Gilbert."

"Thou knowest--I have a fancy for thee."

Her tone was delicious, its sincerity absolutely convincing.

"Too amiable."

"No, no. It is true. Say! Return. Return after thy committee. Take me
out to dinner--some gentle little restaurant, discreet. There must be
many of them in a city like London. It is a city so romantic. Oh! The
little corners of London!"

"But--of course. I should be enchanted--"

"Well, then."

He was standing. She raised her smiling, seductive face. She was
young--younger than Concepcion; less battered by the world's contacts
than Concepcion. She had the inexpressible virtue and power of youth.
He was nearing fifty. And she, perhaps half his age, had confessed his
charm.

"And say! My Gilbert. Bring me a few flowers. I have not been able
to go out to-day. Something very simple. I detest that one should
squander money on flowers for me."

"Seven-thirty, then!" said he. "And you will be ready?"

"I shall be very exact. Thou wilt tell me all that concerns thy
committee. That interests me. The English are extraordinary."




Chapter 13

IN COMMITTEE


Within the hotel the glowing Gold Hall, whose Lincrusta Walton panels
dated it, was nearly empty. Of the hundred small round tables only one
was occupied; a bald head and a large green hat were almost meeting
over the top of this table, but there was nothing on it except an
ashtray. A waiter wandered about amid the thick plushy silence and the
stagnant pools of electric light, meditating upon the curse which
had befallen the world of hotels. The red lips beneath the green
hat discernibly moved, but no faintest murmur therefrom reached the
entrance. The hot, still place seemed to be enchanted.

The sight of the hotel flower-stall recessed on the left reminded G.J.
of Christine's desire. Forty thousand skilled women had been put out
of work in England because luxury was scared by the sudden vista of
war, but the black-garbed girl, entrenched in her mahogany bower, was
still earning some sort of a livelihood. In a moment, wakened out of
her terrible boredom into an alert smile, she had sold to G.J. a bunch
of expensive chrysanthemums whose yellow petals were like long curly
locks. Thoughtless, he had meant to have the flowers delivered at
once to Christine's flat. It would not do; it would be indiscreet. And
somehow, in the absence of Braiding, it would be equally indiscreet to
have them delivered at his own flat.

"I shall be leaving the hotel in about an hour; I'll take them away
myself then," he said, and inquired for the headquarters of the
Lechford French Hospitals Committee.

"Committee?" repeated the girl vaguely. "I expect the Onyx Hall's what
you want." She pointed up a corridor, and gave change.

G.J. discovered the Onyx Hall, which had its own entrance from the
street, and which in other days had been a café lounge. The precious
pavement was now half hidden by wooden trestles, wooden cubicles,
and cheap chairs. Temporary flexes brought down electric light from
a stained glass dome to illuminate card-indexes and pigeon-holes and
piles of letters. Notices in French and Flemish were suspended from
the ornate onyx pilasters. Old countrywomen and children in rough
foreign clothes, smart officers in strange uniforms, privates
in shabby blue, gentlemen in morning coats and spats, and untidy
Englishwomen with eyes romantic, hard, or wistful, were mixed together
in the Onyx Hall, where there was no enchantment and little order,
save that good French seemed to be regularly spoken on one side of
the trestles and regularly assassinated on the other. G.J., mystified,
caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful
expression.

"And you?" she inquired perfunctorily.

He demanded, with hesitation:

"Is this the Lechford Committee?"

"The what Committee?"

"The Lechford Committee headquarters." He thought she might be rather
an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party.

She gave him a sardonic look and answered, not rudely, but with large
tolerance:

"Can't you read?"

By means of gesture scarcely perceptible she directed his attention to
an immense linen sign stretched across the back of the big room, and
he saw that he was in the ant-heap of some Belgian Committee.

"So sorry to have troubled you!" he apologised. "I suppose you don't
happen to know where the Lechford Committee sits?"

"Never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. Then she smiled
and he smiled. "You know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but
this is the biggest by a long way. They can't let their rooms, so it
costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes."

He liked the chit.

Presently, with a page-boy, he was ascending in a lift through
storey after storey of silent carpeted desert. Light alternated with
darkness, winking like a succession of days and nights as seen by
a god. The infant showed him into a private parlour furnished
and decorated in almost precisely the same taste as Christine's
sitting-room, where a number of men and women sat close together at a
long deal table, whose pale, classic simplicity clashed with the rest
of the apartment. A thin, dark, middle-aged man of austere visage
bowed to him from the head of the table. Somebody else indicated a
chair, which, with a hideous, noisy scraping over the bare floor,
he modestly insinuated between two occupied chairs. A third person
offered a typewritten sheet containing the agenda of the meeting. A
blonde girl was reading in earnest, timid tones the minutes of the
previous meeting. The affair had just begun. As soon as the minutes
had been passed the austere chairman turned and said evenly:

"I am sure I am expressing the feelings of the committee in welcoming
among us Mr. Hoape, who has so kindly consented to join us and give us
the benefit of his help and advice in our labours."

Sympathetic murmurs converged upon G.J. from the four sides of the
table, and G.J. nervously murmured a few incomprehensible words,
feeling both foolish and pleased. He had never sat on a committee;
and as his war-conscience troubled him more and more daily, he was
extremely anxious to start work which might placate it. Indeed, he
had seized upon the request to join the committee as a swimmer in
difficulties clasps the gunwale of a dinghy.

A man who kept his gaze steadily on the table cleared his throat and
said:

"The matter is not in order, Mr. Chairman, but I am sure I am
expressing the feelings of the committee in proposing a vote of
condolence to yourself on the terrible loss which you have sustained
in the death of your son at the Front."

"I beg to second that," said a lady quickly.

"Our chairman has given his only son--"

Tears came into her eyes; she seemed to appeal for help. There were
"Hear, hears," and more sympathetic murmurs.

The proposer, with his gaze still steadily fixed on the table, said:

"I beg to put the resolution to the meeting."

"Yes," said the chairman with calm self-control in the course of his
acknowledgment. "And if I had ten sons I would willingly give them
all--for the cause." And his firm, hard glance appeared to challenge
any member of the committee to assert that this profession of parental
and patriotic generosity of heart was not utterly sincere. However,
nobody had the air of doubting that if the chairman had had ten sons,
or as many sons as Solomon, he would have sacrificed them all with the
most admirable and eager heroism.

The agenda was opened. G.J. had little but newspaper knowledge of the
enterprises of the committee, and it would not have been proper to
waste the time of so numerous a company in enlightening him. The
common-sense custom evidently was that new members should "pick up the
threads as they went along." G.J. honestly tried to do so. But he was
preoccupied with the personalities of the committee. He soon saw that
the whole body was effectively divided into two classes--the chairmen
of the various sub-committees, and the rest. Few members were
interested in any particular subject. Those who were not interested
either stared at the walls or at the agenda paper, or laboriously drew
intricate and meaningless designs on the agenda paper, or folded
up the agenda paper into fantastic shapes until, when someone in
authority brought out the formula, "I think the view of the committee
will be--" a resolution was put and the issue settled by the
mechanical raising of hands on the fulcrum of the elbow. And at each
raising of hands everybody felt that something positive had indeed
been accomplished.

The new member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that
the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford
Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the
committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem
as it was presented--the drains (postponed), the repairs to the
motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the
dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence,
the cost per day per patient, the relations with the French civil
authorities and the French military authorities, the appointment of
a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the
great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for
excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses--each
problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that
men and women were toiling therein, and that French soldiers in grave
need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. And
it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come
to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly
sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising
hands....

G.J.'s attention wandered. He could not keep his mind off the thought
that he should soon be seeing Christine again. Sitting at the
table with a mien of intelligent interest, he had a waking dream of
Christine. He saw her just as she was--ingenuous, and ignorant if you
like--except that she was pure. Her purity, though, had not cooled her
temperament, and thus she combined in herself the characteristics
of at least two different women, both of whom were necessary to his
happiness. And she was his wife, and they lived in a roomy house in
Hyde Park Gardens, and the war was over. And she adored him and he
was passionately fond of her. And she was always having children; she
enjoyed having children; she demanded children; she had a child every
year and there was never any trouble. And he never admired her more
poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born,
when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the French
Renaissance Virgin in marble that stood on a console in his
drawing-room at the Albany.... Such was G.J.'s dream as he assisted
in the control of the Lechford Hospitals. Emerging from it he looked
along the table. Quite half the members were dreaming too, and he
wondered what thoughts were moving secretly within them. But the
chairman was not dreaming. He never loosed his grasp of the matter in
hand. Nor did the earnest young blonde by the chairman's side who took
down in stenography the decisions of the committee.




Chapter 14

QUEEN


Then Lady Queenie Paulle entered rather hurriedly, filling the room
with a distinguished scent. All the men rose in haste, and there was a
frightful scraping of chair-legs on the floor. Lady Queenie cheerfully
apologised for being late, and, begging no one to disturb himself,
took a modest place between the chairman and the secretary and a
little behind them.

Lady Queenie obviously had what is called "race". The renown of her
family went back far, far beyond its special Victorian vogue, which
had transformed an earldom into a marquisate and which, incidentally,
was responsible for the new family Christian name that Queenie herself
bore. She was young, tall, slim and pale, and dressed with the utmost
smartness in black--her half-brother having gloriously lost his life
in September. She nodded to the secretary, who blushed with pleasure,
and she nodded to several members, including G.J. Being accustomed
to publicity and to seeing herself nearly every week in either _The
Tatler_ or _The Sketch_, she was perfectly at ease in the room, and
the fact that nearly the whole company turned to her as plants to the
sun did not in the least disturb her.

The attention which she received was her due, for she had few rivals
as a war-worker. She was connected with the Queen's Work for Women
Fund, Queen Mary's Needlework Guild, the Three Arts Fund, the Women's
Emergency Corps, and many minor organisations. She had joined a
Women's Suffrage Society because such societies were being utilised by
the Government. She had had ten lessons in First Aid in ten days, had
donned the Red Cross, and gone to France with two motor-cars and a
staff and a French maid in order to help in the great national work
of nursing wounded heroes; and she might still have been in France had
not an unsympathetic and audacious colonel of the R.A.M.C. insisted on
her being shipped back to England. She had done practically everything
that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a
Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen
hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight. It was from
her mother that she had inherited the passion for public service. The
Marchioness of Lechford had been the cause of more philanthropic work
in others than any woman in the whole history of philanthropy. Lady
Lechford had said, "Let there be Lechford Hospitals in France,"
and lo! there were Lechford Hospitals in France. When troublesome
complications arose Lady Lechford had, with true self-effacement,
surrendered the establishments to a thoroughly competent committee,
and while retaining a seat on the committee for herself and another
for Queenie, had curved tirelessly away to the inauguration of fresh
and more exciting schemes.

"Mamma was very sorry she couldn't come this afternoon," said Lady
Queenie, addressing the chairman.

The formula of those with authority in deciding now became:

"I don't know exactly what Lady Lechford's view is, but I venture to
think--"

Then suddenly the demeanour of every member of the committee was
quickened, everybody listened intently to everything that was said;
a couple of members would speak together; pattern-designing and the
manufacture of paper ships, chains, and flowers ceased; it was as
though a tonic had been mysteriously administered to each individual
in the enervating room. The cause of the change was a recommendation
from the hospitals management sub-committee that it be an instruction
to the new matron of the smaller hospital to forbid any nurse and
any doctor to go out alone together in the evening. Scandal was
insinuated; nothing really wrong, but a bad impression produced
upon the civilians of the tiny town, who could not be expected to
understand the holy innocence which underlies the superficial
license of Anglo-Saxon manners. The personal characters and strange
idiosyncrasies of every doctor and every nurse were discussed; broad
principles of conduct were enunciated, together with the advantages
and disadvantages of those opposite poles, discipline and freedom. The
argument continually expanded, branching forth like the timber of
a great oak-tree from the trunk, and the minds of the committee
ran about the tree like monkeys. The interest was endless. A
quiet delegate who had just returned from a visit to the tiny town
completely blasted one part of the argument by asserting that the
hospital bore a blameless reputation among the citizens; but new
arguments were instantly constructed by the adherents of the idea of
discipline. The committee had plainly split into two even parties.
G.J. began to resent the harshness of the disciplinarians.

"I think we should remember," he said in his modest voice, "I think we
should remember that we are dealing with adult men and women."

The libertarians at once took him for their own. The disciplinarians
gave him to understand with their eyes that it might have been better
if he, as a new member attending his first meeting, had kept silence.
The discussion was inflamed. One or two people glanced surreptitiously
at their watches. The hour had long passed six thirty. G.J. grew
anxious about his rendezvous with Christine. He had enjoined
exactitude upon Christine. But the main body of the excited and happy
committee had no thought of the flight of time. The amusements of the
tiny town came up for review. As a fact, there was only one amusement,
the cinema. The whole town went to the cinema. Cinemas were
always darkened; human nature was human nature.... G.J. had an
extraordinarily realistic vision of the hospital staff slaving through
its long and heavy day and its everlasting week and preparing in
sections to amuse itself on certain evenings, and thinking with
pleasant anticipation of the ecstasies of the cinema, and pathetically
unsuspicious that its fate was being decided by a council of
omnipotent deities in the heaven of a London hotel.

"Mamma has never mentioned the subject to me," said Lady Queenie in
response to a question, looking at her rich muff.

"This is a question of principle," said somebody sharply, implying
that at last individual consciences were involved and that the
opinions of the Marchioness of Lechford had ceased to weigh.

"I'm afraid it's getting late," said the impassive chairman. "We must
come to some decision."

In the voting Lady Queenie, after hesitation, raised her hand with the
disciplinarians. By one vote the libertarians were defeated, and the
dalliance of the hospital staff in leisure hours received a severe
check.

"She _would_--of course!" breathed a sharp-nosed little woman in the
chair next but one to G.J., gazing inimically at the lax mouth and
cynical eyes of Lady Queenie, who for four years had been the subject
of universal whispering, and some shouting, and one or two ferocious
battles in London.

Chair-legs scraped. People rose here and there to go as they rise in
a music hall after the Scottish comedian has retired, bowing, from
his final encore. They protested urgent appointments elsewhere. The
chairman remarked that other important decisions yet remained to be
taken; but his voice had no insistence because he had already settled
the decisions in his own mind. G.J. seized the occasion to depart.

"Mr. Hoape," the chairman detained him a moment. "The committee hope
you will allow yourself to be nominated to the accounts sub-committee.
We understand that you are by way of being an expert. The
sub-committee meets on Wednesday mornings at eleven--doesn't it, Sir
Charles?"

"Half-past," said Sir Charles.

"Oh! Half-past."

G.J., somewhat surprised to learn of his expertise in accountancy,
consented to the suggestion, which renewed his resolution, impaired
somewhat by the experience of the meeting, to be of service in the
world.

"You will receive the notice, of course," said the chairman.

Down below, just as G.J. was getting away with Christine's
chrysanthemums in their tissue paper, Lady Queenie darted out of the
lift opposite. It was she who, at Concepcion's instigation, had had
him put in the committee.

"I say, Queen," he said with a casual air--on account of the flowers,
"who's been telling 'em I know about accounts?"

"I did."

"Why?"

"Why?" she said maliciously. "Don't you keep an account of every penny
you spend?" (It was true.)

Here was a fair example of her sardonic and unscrupulous humour--a
humour not of words but of acts. G.J. simply tossed his head, aware of
the futility of expostulation.

She went on in a different tone:

"You were the first to see Connie?"

"Yes," he said sadly.

"She has lain in my arms all afternoon," Lady Queenie burst out, her
voice liquid. "And now I'm going straight back to her." She looked
at him with the strangest triumphant expression. Then her large,
equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their
expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amusement full of
mischievous implications. She ran off without another word. The glazed
entrance doors revolved, and he saw her nip into an electric brougham,
which, before he had time to button his overcoat, vanished like an
apparition in the rainy mist.




Chapter 15

EVENING OUT


He found Christine exactly as he had left her, in the same tea-gown
and the same posture, and on the same sofa. But a small table had
been put by the sofa; and on this table was a penny bottle of ink in
a saucer, and a pen. She was studying some kind of official form. The
pucker between the eyes was very marked.

"Already!" she exclaimed, as if amazed. "But there is not a clock
that goes, and I had not the least idea of the hour. Besides, I was
splitting my head to fill up this form."

Such was her notion of being exact! He had abandoned an important
meeting of a committee which was doing untold mercies to her
compatriots in order to keep his appointment with her; and she, whose
professional business it was that evening to charm him and harmonise
with him, had merely flouted the appointment. Nevertheless, her
gestures and smile as she rose and came towards him were so utterly
exquisite that immediately he also flouted the appointment. What,
after all, could it matter whether they dined at eight, nine, or even
ten o'clock?

"Thou wilt pardon me, monster?" she murmured, kissing him.

No woman had ever put her chin up to his as she did, nor with a glance
expressed so unreserved a surrender to his masculinity.

She went on, twining languishingly round him:

"I do not know whether I ought to go out. I am yet far from--It is
perhaps imprudent."

"Absurd!" he protested--he could not bear the thought of her not
dining with him. He knew too well the desolation of a solitary dinner.
"Absurd! We go in a taxi. The restaurant is warm. We return in a
taxi."

"To please thee, then."

"What is that form?"

"It is for the telephone. Thou understandest how it is necessary that
I have the telephone--me! But I comprehend nothing of this form."

She passed him the form. She had written her name in the space
allotted. "Christine Dubois." A fair calligraphy! But what a name!
The French equivalent of "Smith". Nothing could be less distinguished.
Suddenly it occurred to him that Concepcion's name also was Smith.

"I will fill it up for you. It is quite simple."

"It is possible that it is simple when one is English. But
English--that is as if to say Chinese. Everything contrary. Here is a
pen."

"No. I have my fountain-pen." He hated a cheap pen, and still more a
penny bottle of ink, but somehow this particular penny bottle of ink
seemed touching in its simple ugliness. She was eminently teachable.
He would teach her his own attitude towards penny bottles of ink....
Of course she would need the telephone--that could not be denied.

As Christine was signing the form Marthe entered with the
chrysanthemums, which he had handed over to her; she had arranged them
in a horrible blue glass vase cheaply gilded; and while Marthe was
putting the vase on the small table there was a ring at the outer
door. Marthe hurried off.

Christine said, kissing him again tenderly:

"Thou art a squanderer! Fine for me to tell thee not to buy costly
flowers! Thou has spent at least ten shillings for these. With ten
shillings--"

"No, no!" he interrupted her. "Five." It was a fib. He had paid half a
guinea for the few flowers, but he could not confess it.

They could hear a powerful voice indistinctly booming at the top of
the stairs. "Two callers on one afternoon!" G.J. reflected. And yet
she had told him she went out for the first time only the day before
yesterday! He scarcely liked it, but his reason rescued him from the
puerility of a grievance against her on this account. "And why not?
She is bound to be a marked success."

Marthe returned to the drawing-room and shut the door.

"Madame--" she began, slightly agitated.

"Speak, then!" Christine urged, catching her agitation.

"It is the police!"

G.J. had a shock. He knew many of the policemen who lurked in the dark
doorways of Piccadilly at night, had little friendly talks with them,
held them for excellent fellows. But a policeman invading the flat of
a courtesan, and himself in the flat, seemed a different being from
the honest stalwarts who threw the beams of lanterns on the key-holes
of jewellers' shops.

Christine steeled herself to meet the crisis with self-reliance. She
pointedly did not appeal to the male.

"Well, what is it that he wants?"

"He talks of the chimney. It appears this morning there was a chimney
on fire. But since we burn only anthracite and gas--He knows madame's
name."

There was a pause. Christine asked sharply and mysteriously:

"How much do you think?"

"If madame gave five pounds--having regard to the _chic_ of the
quarter."

Christine rushed into the bedroom and came back with a five-pound
note.

"Here! Chuck that at him--politely. Tell him we are very sorry."

"Yes, madame."

"But he'll never take it. You can't treat the London police like
that!" G.J. could not help expostulating as soon as Marthe had gone.
He feared some trouble.

"My poor friend!" Christine replied patronisingly. "Thou art not up
in these things. Marthe knows her affair--a woman very experienced in
London. He will take it, thy policeman. And if I do not deceive myself
no more chimneys will burn for about a year.... Ah! The police do not
wipe their noses with broken bottles!" (She meant that the police knew
their way about.) "I no more than they, I do not wipe my nose with
broken bottles."

She was moved, indignant, stoutly defensive. G.J. grew self-conscious.
Moreover, her slang disturbed him. It was the first slang he had heard
her use, and in using it her voice had roughened. But he remembered
that Concepcion also used slang--and advanced slang--upon occasion.

The booming ceased; a door closed. Marthe returned once more.

"Well?"

"He is gone. He was very nice, madame. I told him about madame--that
madame was very discreet." Marthe finished in a murmur.

"So much the better. Now, help me to dress. Quick, quick! Monsieur
will be impatient."

G.J. was ashamed of the innocence he had displayed, and ashamed, too,
of the whole Metropolitan Police Force, admirable though it was in
stopping traffic for a perambulator to cross the road. Five pounds!
These ladies were bled. Five pounds wanted earning.... It was a good
sign, though, that she had not so far asked him to contribute. And he
felt sure that she would not.

"Come in, then, poltroon!" She cooed softly and encouragingly from the
bedroom, where Marthe was busy with her.

The door between the bedroom and the drawing-room was open. G.J.,
humming, obeyed the invitation and sat down on the bed between two
heaps of clothes. Christine was very gay; she was like a child. She
had apparently quite forgotten her migraine and also the incident of
the policeman. She snatched the cigarette from G.J.'s mouth, took a
puff, and put it back again. Then she sat in front of the large mirror
and did her hair while Marthe buttoned her boots. Her corset fitted
beautifully, and as she raised her arms above her head under the
shaded lamp G.J. could study the marvellous articulation of the
arms at the bare shoulders. The close atmosphere was drenched with
femininity. The two women, one so stylish and the other by contrast
piquantly a heavy slattern, hid nothing whatever from him, bestowing
on him with perfect tranquillity the right to be there and to watch
at his ease every mysterious transaction.... The most convincing proof
that Christine was authentically young! And G.J. had the illusion
again that he was in the Orient, and it was extraordinarily agreeable.
The recollection of the scene of the Lechford Committee amused him
like a pantomime witnessed afar off through a gauze curtain. It had no
more reality than that. But he thought better of the committee now. He
perceived the wonderful goodness of it and of its work. It really was
running those real hospitals; it had a real interest in them. He meant
to do his very best in the accounts department. After all, he had been
a lawyer and knew the routine of an office and the minutest phenomena
of a ledger. He was eager to begin.

"How findest thou me?"

She stood for inspection.

She was ready, except the gloves. The angle of her hat, the
provocation of her veil--these things would have quickened the pulse
of a Patagonian. Perfume pervaded the room.

He gave the classic response that nothing could render trite:

"_Tu es exquise_."

She raised her veil just above her mouth....

In the drawing-room she hesitated, and then settled down on the
piano-stool like a bird alighting and played a few bars from the
_Rosenkavalier_ waltz. He was thunderstruck, for she had got not only
the air but some of the accompaniment right.

"Go on! Go on!" he urged her, marvelling.

She turned, smiling, and shook her head.

"That is all that I can recall to myself."

The obvious sincerity of his appreciation delighted her.

"She is really musical!" he thought, and was convinced that while
looking for a bit of coloured glass he had picked up an emerald.
Marthe produced his overcoat, and when he was ready for the street
Christine gazed at him and said:

"For the true _chic_, there are only Englishmen!"

In the taxi she proved to him by delicate effronteries the genuineness
of her confessed "fancy" for him. And she poured out slang. He began
to be afraid, for this excursion was an experiment such as he had
never tried before in London; in Paris, of course, the code was
otherwise. But as soon as the commissionaire of the restaurant at
Victoria approached the door of the taxi her manner changed. She
walked up the long interior with the demureness of a stockbroker's
young wife out for the evening from Putney Hill. He thought, relieved,
"She is the embodiment of common sense." At the end of the vista of
white tables the restaurant opened out to the left. In a far corner
they were comfortably secure from observation. They sat down. A waiter
beamed his flatteries upon them. G.J. was serenely aware of his own
skilled faculty for ordering a dinner. He looked over the menu card at
Christine. Nobody could possibly tell that she was a professed enemy
of society. "These French women are astounding!" he thought. He
intensely admired her. He was mad about her. His bliss was extreme. He
could not keep it within bounds meet for the great world-catastrophe.
He was happy as for quite ten years he had never hoped to be. Yes, he
grieved for Concepcion; but somehow grief could not mingle with nor
impair the happiness he felt. And was not Concepcion lying in the
affectionate arms of Queenie Paulle?

Christine, glancing about her contentedly, reverted to one of her
leading ideas:

"Truly, it is very romantic, thy London!"




Chapter 16

THE VIRGIN


Christine went into the oratory of St. Philip at Brompton on a Sunday
morning in the following January, dipped her finger into one of the
Italian basins at the entrance, and signed herself with the holy
water. She was dressed in black; she had the face of a pretty martyr;
her brow was crumpled by the world's sorrow; she looked and actually
was at the moment intensely religious. She had months earlier chosen
the Brompton Oratory for her devotions, partly because of the name of
Philip, which had been murmured in accents of affection by her
dying mother, and partly because it lay on a direct, comprehensible
bus-route from Piccadilly. You got into the motor-bus opposite the end
of the Burlington Arcade, and in about six minutes it dropped you in
front of the Oratory; and you could not possibly lose yourself in the
topographical intricacies of the unknown city. Christine never took a
taxi except when on business.

The interior was gloomy with the winter forenoon; the broad
Renaissance arches showed themselves only faintly above; on every side
there were little archipelagos of light made by groups of candles in
front of great pale images. The church was comparatively empty, and
most of the people present were kneeling in the chapels; for Christine
had purposely come, as she always did, at the slack hour between the
seventh and last of the early morning Low Masses and the High Mass at
eleven.

She went up the right aisle and stopped before the Miraculous Infant
Jesus of Prague, a charming and naive little figure about eighteen
inches high in a stiff embroidered cloak and a huge symbol upon his
curly head. She had put herself under the protection of the Miraculous
Infant Jesus of Prague. She liked him; he was a change from the
Virgin; and he stood in the darkest corner of the whole interior,
behind the black statue of St. Peter with protruding toe, and within
the deep shadow made by the organ-loft overhead. Also he had a motto
in French: "Plus vous m'honorerez plus je vous favoriserai."

Christine hesitated, and then left the Miraculous Infant Jesus of
Prague without even a transient genuflexion. She was afraid to devote
herself to him that morning.

Of course she had been brought up strictly in the Roman Catholic
faith. And in her own esteem she was still an honest Catholic. For
years she had not confessed and therefore had not communicated. For
years she had had a desire to cast herself down at a confessional-box,
but she had not done so because of one of the questions in the _Petit
Paroissien_ which she used: "Avez-vous péché, par pensée, parole,
ou action, contre la pureté ou la modestie?" And because also of
the preliminary injunction: "Maintenant essayez de vous rappeler vos
péchés, _et combien de fois vous les avez commis_." She could not
bring herself to do that. Once she had confessed a great deal to a
priest at Sens, but he had treated her too lightly; his lightness
with her had indeed been shameful. Since then she had never confessed.
Further, she knew herself to be in a state of mortal sin by reason of
her frequent wilful neglect of the holy offices; and occasionally, at
the most inconvenient moments, the conviction that if she died she was
damned would triumph over her complacency. But on the whole she had
hopes for the future; though she had sinned, her sin was mysteriously
not like other people's sin of exactly the same kind.

And finally there was the Virgin Mary, the sweet and dependable
goddess. She had been neglecting the very clement Virgin Mary in
favour of the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague. A whim, a thoughtless
caprice, which she had paid for! The Virgin Mary had withdrawn her
defending shield. At least that was the interpretation which Christine
was bound to put upon the terrible incident of the previous night in
the Promenade. She had quite innocently been involved in a drunken
row in the lounge. Two military officers, one of whom, unnoticed by
Christine, was intoxicated, and two women--Madame Larivaudière and
Christine! The Belgian had been growing more and more jealous of
Christine.... The row had flamed up in the tenth of a second like an
explosion. The two officers--then the two women. The bright silvery
sound of glass shattered on marble! High voices, deep voices! Half the
Promenade had rushed vulgarly into the lounge, panting with a gross
appetite to witness a vulgar scene. And as the Belgian was jealous of
the French girl, so were the English girls horribly jealous of all the
foreign girls, and scornful too. Nothing but the overwhelming desire
of the management to maintain the perfect respectability of its
Promenade had prevented a rough-and-tumble between the officers.
As for Madame Larivaudière, she had been ejected and told never to
return. Christine had fled to the cloak-room, where she had remained
for half an hour, and thence had vanished away, solitary, by the side
entrance. It was precisely such an episode as Christine's mother would
have deprecated in horror, and as Christine herself intensely loathed.
And she could never assuage the moral wound of it by confiding the
affair to Gilbert. She was mad about Gilbert; she thrilled to be his
slave; she had what seemed an immeasurable confidence in him; and yet
never, never could she mention another individual man to him, much
less tell him of the public shame that had fallen upon her in the
exercise of her profession. Why had fate been thus hard on her? The
answer was surely to be found in the displeasure of the Virgin. And so
she did not dare to stay with the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague,
nor even to murmur the prayer beginning: "Adorable Jésus, divin modèle
de la perfection ..."

She glanced round the great church, considering what were to her
the major and minor gods and goddesses on their ornate thrones: St.
Antony, St. Joseph, St. Sebastian, St. Philip, the Sacred Heart, St.
Cecilia, St. Peter, St. Wilfrid, St. Mary Magdelene (Ah! Not at that
altar could she be seen!), St. Patrick, St. Veronica, St. Francis,
St. John Baptist, St. Teresa, Our Lady, Our Lady of Good Counsel. No!
There was only one goddess possible for her--Our Lady of VII Dolours.
She crossed the wide nave to the severe black and white marble chapel
of the VII Dolours. The aspect of the shrine suited her. On one side
she read the English words: "Of your charity pray for the soul of
Flora Duchess of Norfolk who put up this altar to the Mother of
Sorrows that they who mourn may be comforted." And the very words
were romantic to her, and she thought of Flora Duchess of Norfolk as a
figure inexpressibly more romantic than the illustrious female figures
of French history. The Virgin of the VII Dolours was enigmatically
gazing at her, waiting no doubt to be placated. The Virgin was
painted, gigantic, in oil on canvas, but on her breast stood out
a heart made in three dimensions of real silver and pierced by the
swords of the seven dolours, three to the left and four to the right;
and in front was a tiny gold figure of Jesus crucified on a gold
cross.

Christine cast herself down and prayed to the painted image and the
hammered heart. She prayed to the goddess whom the Middle Ages had
perfected and who in the minds of the simple and the savage has
survived the Renaissance and still triumphantly flourishes; the Queen
of heaven, the Tyrant of heaven, the Woman in heaven; who was so
venerated that even her sweat is exhibited as a relic; who was softer
than Christ as Christ was softer than the Father; who in becoming a
goddess had increased her humanity; who put living roses for a sign
into the mouths of fornicators when they died, if only they had been
faithful to her; who told the amorous sacristan to kiss her face and
not her feet; who questioned lovers about their mistresses: "Is she as
pretty as I?"; who fell like a pestilence on the nuptial chambers of
young men who, professing love for her, had taken another bride; who
enjoyed being amused; who admitted a weakness for artists, tumblers,
soldiers and the common herd; who had visibly led both opponents on
every battlefield for centuries; who impersonated absent disreputable
nuns and did their work for them until they returned, repentant, to
be forgiven by her; who acted always on her instinct and never on her
reason; who cared nothing for legal principles; who openly used her
feminine influence with the Trinity; who filled heaven with riff-raff;
and who had never on any pretext driven a soul out of heaven.
Christine made peace with this jealous and divine creature. She felt
unmistakably that she was forgiven for her infidelity due to the
Infant in the darkness beyond the opposite aisle. The face of the
Lady of VII Dolours miraculously smiled at her; the silver heart
miraculously shed its tarnish and glittered beneficent lightnings.
Doubtless she knew somewhere in her mind that no physical change had
occurred in the picture or the heart; but her mind was a complex, and
like nearly all minds could disbelieve and believe simultaneously.

Just as High Mass was beginning she rose and in grave solace left the
Oratory; she would not endanger her new peace with the Virgin Mary by
any devotion to other gods. She was solemn but happy. The conductor
who took her penny in the motor-bus never suspected that on the pane
before her, where some Agency had caused to be printed in colour the
words "Seek ye the _Lord_" she saw, in addition to the amazing oddness
of the Anglo-Saxon race, a dangerous incitement to unfaith. She kept
her thoughts passionately on the Virgin; and by the time the bus
had reached Hyde Park Corner she was utterly sure that the horrible
adventure of the Promenade was purged of its evil potentialities.

In the house in Cork Street she took out her latch-key, placidly
opened the door, and entered, smiling at the solitude. Marthe, who
also had a soul in need of succour, would, in the ordinary course,
have gone forth to a smaller church and a late mass. But on this
particular morning fat Marthe, in déshabille, came running to her from
the little kitchen.

"Oh! Madame!... There is someone! He is drunk."

Her voice was outraged. She pointed fearfully to the bedroom.
Christine, courageous, walked straight in. An officer in khaki was
lying on the bed; his muddy, spurred boots had soiled the white
lace coverlet. He was asleep and snoring. She looked at him, and,
recognising her acquaintance of the previous night, wondered what the
very clement Virgin could be about.




Chapter 17

SUNDAY AFTERNOON


"What is Madame going to do?" whispered Marthe, still alarmed and
shocked, when they had both stepped back out of the bedroom; and she
added: "He has never been here before."

Marthe was a woman of immense experience but little brains, and
when phenomena passed beyond her experience she became rather like
a foolish, raw girl. She had often dealt with drunken men; she had
often--especially in her younger days--satisfactorily explained a
situation to visitors who happened to call when her mistress for the
time being was out. But only on the very rarest occasions had she
known a client commit the awful solecism of calling before lunch;
and that a newcomer, even intoxicated, should commit this solecism
staggered her and left her trembling.

"What am I going to do? Nothing!" answered Christine. "Let him sleep."

Christine, too, was dismayed. But Marthe's weakness gave her strength,
and she would not show her fright. Moreover, Christine had some force
of character, though it did not often show itself as sudden firmness.
She condescended to Marthe. She also condescended to the officer,
because he was unconscious, because he had put himself in a false
position, because sooner or later he would look extremely silly. She
regarded the officer's intrusion as tiresome, but she did not
gravely resent it. After all, he was drunk; and before the row in the
Promenade he had asked her for her card, saying that he was engaged
that night but would like to know where she lived. Of course she had
protested--as what woman in her place would not?--against the theory
that he was engaged that night, and she had been in a fair way to
convince him that he was not really engaged that night--except morally
to her, since he had accosted her--when the quarrel had supervened
and it had dawned on her that he had been in the taciturn and cautious
stage of acute inebriety.

He had, it now seemed, probably been drinking through the night. There
were men, as she knew, who simply had to have bouts, whose only method
to peace was to drown the demon within them. She would never knowingly
touch a drunken man, or even a partially intoxicated man, if she
could help it. She was not a bit like the polite young lady above, who
seemed to specialise in noisy tipplers. Her way with the top-heavy
was to leave them to recover in tranquillity. No other way was safe.
Nevertheless, in the present instance she did venture again into the
bedroom. The plight of the lace coverlet troubled her and practically
drove her into the bedroom. She got a little towel, gently lifted the
sleeper's left foot, and tied the towel round his boot; then she did
the same to his other foot. The man did not stir; but if, later, he
should stir, neither his boots nor his spurs could do further harm to
the lace coverlet. His cane and gloves were on the floor; she picked
them up. His overcoat, apparently of excellent quality, was still on
his back; and the cap had not quite departed from his head. Christine
had learned enough about English military signs and symbols to enable
her to perceive that he belonged to the artillery.

"But how will madame change her dress?" Marthe demanded in the
sitting-room. Madame always changed her dress immediately on returning
from church, for that which is suitable for mass may not be proper to
other ends.

"I shall not change," said Christine.

"It is well, madame."

Christine was not deterred from changing by the fact that the bedroom
was occupied. She retained her church dress because she foresaw the
great advantage she would derive from it in the encounter which must
ultimately occur with the visitor. She would not even take her hat
off.

The two women lunched, mainly on macaroni, with some cheese and an
apple. Christine had coffee. Ah, she must always have her coffee.
As for a cigarette, she never smoked when alone, because she did
not really care for smoking. Marthe, however, enjoyed smoking, and
Christine gave her a cigarette, which she lighted while clearing the
table. One was mistress, the other servant, but the two women were
constantly meeting on the plane of equality. Neither of them could
avoid it, or consistently tried to avoid it. Although Marthe did not
eat with Christine, if a meal was in progress she generally came
into the sitting-room with her mouth more or less full of food. Their
repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings,
begun and finished in a few moments. And if Marthe was always untidy
in her person, Christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also
untidy. They went about the flat in a wonderful state of unkempt and
insecure slovenliness. And sometimes Marthe might be lolling in the
sitting-room over the illustrations in _La Vie Parisienne_, which was
part of the apparatus of the flat, while Christine was in the tiny
kitchen washing gloves as she alone could wash them.

The flat lapsed into at any rate a superficial calm. Marthe, seeing
that fate had deprived her of the usual consolations of religion,
determined to reward herself by remaining a perfect slattern for the
rest of the day. She would not change at all. She would not wash up
either the breakfast things or the lunch things. Leaving a small ring
of gas alight in the gas stove, she sat down all dirty on a hard
chair in front of it and fell into a luxurious catalepsy. In the
sitting-room Christine sat upright on the sofa and read lusciously a
French translation of _East Lynne_. She was in no hurry for the man to
waken; her sense of time was very imperfect; she was never pricked by
the thought that life is short and that many urgent things demand to
be done before the grave opens. Nor was she apprehensive of unpleasant
complications. The man was in the flat, but it was her flat; her law
ran in the flat; and the door was fast against invasion. Still, the
gentle snore of the man, rising and falling, dominated the flat, and
the fact of his presence preoccupied the one woman in the kitchen and
the other in the sitting-room....

Christine noticed that the thickness of the pages read had
imperceptibly increased to three-quarters of an inch, while the
thickness of the unread pages had diminished to a quarter of an inch.
And she also noticed, on the open page, another phenomenon. It was the
failing of the day--the faintest shadow on the page. With incredible
transience another of those brief interruptions of darkness which in
London in winter are called days was ending. She rose and went to the
discreetly-curtained window, and, conscious of the extreme propriety
of her appearance, boldly pulled aside the curtain and looked across,
through naked glass, at the hotel nearly opposite. There was not a
sound, not a movement, in Cork Street. Cork Street, the flat, the
hotel, the city, the universe, lay entranced and stupefied beneath
the grey vapours of the Sabbath. The sensation to Christine was
melancholy, but it was exquisitely melancholy.

The solid hotel dissolved, and in its place Christine saw the
interesting, pathetic phantom of her own existence. A stern, serious
existence, full of disappointments, and not free from dangerous
episodes, an existence which entailed much solitude and loss of
liberty; but the verdict upon it was that in the main it might easily
have been more unsatisfactory than it was. With her indolence and
her unappeasable temperament what other vocation indeed, save that
of marriage, could she have taken up? And her temperament would have
rendered any marriage an impossible prison for her. She was a modest
success--her mother had always counselled her against ambition--but
she was a success. Her magic power was at its height. She continued to
save money and had become a fairly regular frequenter of the West
End branch of the Crédit Lyonnais. (Incidentally she had come to an
arrangement with her Paris landlord.)

But, more important than money, she was saving her health, and
especially her complexion--the source of money. Her complexion could
still survive the minutest examination. She achieved this supreme end
by plenty of sleep and by keeping to the minimum of alcohol. Of course
she had to drink professionally; clients insisted; some of them
were exhilarated by the spectacle of a girl tipsy; but she was very
ingenious in avoiding alcohol. When invited to supper she would
respond with an air of restrained eagerness: "Oh, yes, with pleasure!"
And then carelessly add: "Unless you would prefer to come quietly
home with me. My maid is an excellent cook and one is very comfortable
_chez-moi_." And often the prospect thus sketched would piquantly
allure a client. Nevertheless at intervals she could savour a
fashionable restaurant as well as any harum-scarum minx there. Her
secret fear was still obesity. She was capable of imagining herself
at fat as Marthe--and ruined; for, though a few peculiar amateurs
appreciated solidity, the great majority of men did not. However, she
was not getting stouter.

She had a secret sincere respect for certain of her own qualities; and
if women of the world condemned certain other qualities in her, well,
she despised women of the world--selfish idlers who did nothing, who
contributed nothing, to the sum of life, whereas she was a useful and
indispensable member of society, despite her admitted indolence. In
this summary way she comforted herself in her loss of caste.

Without Gilbert, of course, her existence would have been fatally
dull, and she might have been driven to terrible remedies against
ennui and emptiness. The depth and violence of her feeling for Gilbert
were indescribable--at any rate by her. She turned again from the
darkening window to the sofa and sat down and tried to recall the
figures of the dozens of men who had sat there, and she could recall
at most six or eight, and Gilbert alone was real. What a paragon!...
Her scorn for girls who succumbed to _souteneurs_ was measureless; as
a fact she had met few who did.... She would have liked to beautify
her flat for Gilbert, but in the first place she did not wish to spend
money on it, in the second place she was too indolent to buckle to the
enterprise, and in the third place if she beautified it she would be
doing so not for Gilbert, but for the monotonous procession of her
clients. Her flat was a public resort, and so she would do nothing to
it. Besides, she did not care a fig about the look of furniture; the
feel of furniture alone interested her; she wanted softness and warmth
and no more.

She moved across to the piano, remembering that she had not practised
that day, and that she had promised Gilbert to practise every day.
He was teaching her. At the beginning she had dreamt of acquiring
brilliance such as his on the piano, but she had soon seen the
futility of the dream and had moderated her hopes accordingly. Even
with terrific efforts she could not make her hands do the things
that his did quite easily at the first attempt. She had, for example,
abandoned the _Rosenkavalier_ waltz, having never succeeded in
struggling through more than about ten bars of it, and those the
simplest. But her French dances she had notably improved in. She knew
some of them by heart and could patter them off with a very tasteful
vivacity. Instead of practising, she now played gently through a
slow waltz from memory. If the snoring man was wakened, so much
the worse--or so much the better! She went on playing, and evening
continued to fall, until she could scarcely see the notes. Then she
heard movements in the bedroom, a sigh, a bump, some English words
that she did not comprehend. She still, by force of resolution, went
on playing, to protect herself, to give herself countenance. At length
she saw a dim male figure against the pale oblong of the doorway
between the two rooms, and behind the figure a point of glowing red in
the stove.

"I say--what time is it?"

She recognised the heavy, resonant, vibrating voice. She had stopped
playing because she was making so many mistakes.

"Late--late!" she murmured timidly.

The next moment the figure was kneeling at her feet, and her left hand
had been seized in a hot hand and kissed--respectfully.

"Forgive me, you beautiful creature!" begged the deep, imploring
voice. "I know I don't deserve it. But forgive me! I worship women,
honestly."

Assuredly she had not expected this development. She thought: "Is he
not sober yet?" But the query had no conviction in it. She wanted
to believe that he was sober. At any rate he had removed the absurd
towels from his boots.




Chapter 18

THE MYSTIC


"Say you forgive me!" The officer insisted.

"But there is nothing--"

"Say you forgive me!"

She had counted on a scene of triumph with him when he woke up,
anticipating that he was bound to cut a ridiculous appearance. He
knelt dimly there without a sign of self-consciousness or false shame.
She forgave him.

"Great baby!"

Her hand was kissed again and loosed. She detected a faint, sad smile
on his face.

"Ah!"

He rose, towering above her.

"I know I'm a drunken sot," he said. "It was only because I knew I
was drunk that I didn't want to come with you last night. And I called
this morning to apologise. I did really. I'd no other thought in my
poor old head. I wanted you to understand why I tried to hit that
chap. The other woman had spoken to me earlier, and I suppose she was
jealous, seeing me with you. She said something to him about you, and
he laughed, and I had to hit him for laughing. I couldn't hit her. If
I'd caught him an upper cut with my left he'd have gone down, and he
wouldn't have got up by himself--_I_ warrant you--"

"What did she say?" Christine interrupted, not comprehending the
technical idiom and not interested in it.

"I dunno; but he laughed--anyhow he smiled."

Christine turned on the light, and then went quickly to the window to
draw the curtains.

"Take off your overcoat," she commanded him kindly.

He obeyed, blinking. She sat down on the sofa and, raising her arms,
drew the pins from her hat and put it on the table. She motioned him
to sit down too, and left him a narrow space between herself and the
arm of the sofa, so that they were very close together. Then, with
puckered brow, she examined him.

"I'd better tell you," he said. "It does me good to confess to you,
you beautiful thing. I had a bottle of whisky upstairs in my room at
the Grosvenor. Night before last, when I arrived there, I couldn't get
to sleep in the bed. Hadn't been used to a bed for so long, you know.
I had to turn out and roll myself up in a blanket on the floor. And
last night I spent drinking by myself. Yes, by myself. Somehow, I
don't mind telling _you_. This morning I must have been worse than I
thought I was--"

He stopped and put his hand on her shoulder.

"There are tears in your eyes, little thing. Let me kiss your eyes....
No! I'll respect you. I worship you. You're the nicest little woman I
ever saw, and I'm a brute. But let me kiss your eyes."

She held her face seriously, even frowning somewhat. And he kissed
her eyes gently, one after the other, and she smelt his contaminated
breath.

He was a spare man, with a rather thin, ingenuous, mysterious,
romantic, appealing face. It was true that her eyes had moistened. She
was touched by his look and his tone as he told her that he had been
obliged to lie on the floor of his bedroom in order to sleep. There
seemed to be an infinite pathos in that trifle. He was one of the
fighters. He had fought. He was come from the horrors of the battle. A
man of power. He had killed. And he was probably ten or a dozen years
her senior. Nevertheless, she felt herself to be older than he was,
wiser, more experienced. She almost wanted to nurse him. And for her
he was, too, the protected of the very clement Virgin. Inquiries from
Marthe showed that he must have entered the flat at the moment when
she was kneeling at the altar and when the Lady of VII Dolours had
miraculously granted to her pardon and peace. He was part of the
miracle. She had a duty to him, and her duty was to brighten his
destiny, to give him joy, not to let him go without a charming memory
of her soft womanly acquiescences. At the same time her temperament
was aroused by his personality; and she did not forget she had a
living to earn; but still her chief concern was his satisfaction,
not her own, and her overmastering sentiment one of dutiful, nay
religious, surrender. French gratitude of the English fighter, and a
mystic, fearful allegiance to the very clement Virgin--these things
inspired her.

"Ah!" he sighed. "My throat's like leather." And seeing that she did
not follow, he added: "Thirsty." He stretched his arms. She went
to the sideboard and half filled a tumbler with soda water from the
siphon.

"Drink!" she said, as if to a child.

"Just a dash! The tiniest dash!" he pleaded in his rich voice, with a
glance at the whisky. "You don't know how it'll pull me together. You
don't know how I need it."

But she did know, and she humoured him, shaking her head
disapprovingly.

He drank and smacked his lips.

"Ah!" he breathed voluptuously, and then said in changed, playful
accents: "Your French accent is exquisite. It makes English sound
quite beautiful. And you're the daintiest little thing."

"Daintiest? What is that? I have much to learn in English. But it is
something nice--daintiest; it is a compliment." She somehow understood
then that, despite appearances, he was not really a devotee of her
sex, that he was really a solitary, that he would never die of love,
and that her _rôle_ was a minor _rôle_ in his existence. And she
accepted the fact with humility, with enthusiasm, with ardour, quite
ready to please and to be forgotten. In playing the slave to him she
had the fierce French illusion of killing Germans.

Suddenly she noticed that he was wearing two wrist-watches, one close
to the other, on his left arm, and she remarked on the strange fact.

The officer's face changed.

"Have you got a wrist-watch?" he demanded.

"No."

Silently he unfastened one of the watches and then said:

"Hold out your beautiful arm."

She did so. He fastened the watch on her arm. She was surprised to see
that it was a lady's watch. The black strap was deeply scratched. She
privately reconstructed the history of the watch, and decided that it
must be a gift returned after a quarrel--and perhaps the scratches on
the strap had something to do with the quarrel.

"I beg you to accept it," he said. "I particularly wish you to accept
it."

"It's really a lovely watch," she exclaimed. "How kind you are!" She
rewarded him with a warm kiss. "I have always wanted a wrist-watch.
And now they are so _chic_. In fact, one must have one." Moving her
arm about, she admired the watch at different angles.

"It isn't going. And what's more, it won't go," he said.

"Ah!" she politely murmured.

"No! But do you know why I give you that watch?"

"Why?"

"Because it is a mascot."

"True?"

"Absolutely a mascot. It belonged to a friend of mine who is dead."

"Ah! A lady--"

"No! Not a lady. A man. He gave it me a few minutes before he
died--and he was wearing it--and he told me to take it off his arm as
soon as he was dead. I did so."

Christine was somewhat alarmed.

"But if he was wearing it when he died, how can it be a mascot?"

"That was what made it a mascot. Believe me, I know about these
things. I wouldn't deceive you, and I wouldn't tell you it was a
mascot unless I was quite certain." He spoke with a quiet, initiated
authority that reassured her entirely and gave her the most perfect
confidence.

"And why was your friend wearing a lady's watch?"

"I cannot tell you."

"You do not know?"

"I do not know. But I know that watch is a mascot."

"Was it at the Front--all this?"

The man nodded.

"He was wounded, killed, your friend?"

"No, no, not wounded! He was in my Battery. We were galloping some
guns to a new position. He came off his horse--the horse was shot
under him--he himself fell in front of a gun. Of course, the drivers
dared not stop, and there was no room to swerve. Hence they had to
drive right over him ... Later, I came back to him. They had got
him as far as the advanced dressing-station. He died in less than an
hour...."

Solemnity fell between Christine and her client.

She said softly: "But if it is a mascot--do you not need it, you, at
the Front? It is wrong for me to take it."

"I have my own mascot. Nothing can touch me--except my great enemy,
and he is not German." With an austere gesture he indicated the glass.
His deep voice was sad, but very firm. Christine felt that she was in
the presence of an adept of mysticism. The Virgin had sent this man to
her, and the man had given her the watch. Clearly the heavenly power
had her in its holy charge.

"Ah, yes!" said the man in a new tone, as if realising the solemnity
and its inappropriateness, and trying to dissipate it. "Ah, yes! Once
we had the day of our lives together, he and I. We got a day off to go
and see a new trench mortar, and we did have a time."

"Trench mortar--what is that?"

He explained.

"But tell me how it works," she insisted, not because she had the
slightest genuine interest in the technical details of war--for she
had not--but because she desired to help him to change the mood of the
scene.

"Well, it's not so easy, you know. It was a four and a half pound
shell, filled with gun-cotton slabs and shrapnel bullets packed in
sawdust. The charge was black powder in a paper bag, and you stuck
it at the bottom end of the pipe and put a bit of fuse into the
touch-hole--but, of course, you must take care it penetrates the
charge. The shell-fuse has a pinner with a detonator with the right
length of fuse shoved into it; you wrap some clay round the end of the
fuse to stop the flash of the charge from detonating the shell. Well,
then you load the shell--"

She comprehended simply nothing, and the man, professionally absorbed,
seemed to have no perception that she was comprehending nothing. She
scarcely even listened. Her face was set in a courteous, formal
smile; but all the time she was thinking that the man, in spite of
his qualities, must be lacking in character to give a watch away to
a woman to whom he had not been talking for ten minutes. His lack of
character was shown also in his unshamed confession concerning his
real enemy. Some men would bare their souls to a _cocotte_ in
a fashion that was flattering neither to themselves nor to the
_cocotte_, and Christine never really respected such men. She did
not really respect this man, but respected, and stood in awe of,
his mysticism; and, further, her instinct to satisfy him, to make a
spoiled boy of him, was not in the least weakened. Then, just as the
man was in the middle of his description of the functioning of the
trench mortar, the telephone-bell rang, and Christine excused herself.

The telephone was in the bedroom, not by the bedside--for such a
situation had its inconveniences--but in the farthest corner, between
the window and the washstand. As she went to the telephone she was
preoccupied by one of the major worries of her vocation, the worry of
keeping clients out of each other's sight. She wondered who could be
telephoning to her on Sunday evening. Not Gilbert, for Gilbert never
telephoned on Sunday except in the morning. She insisted, of course,
on his telephoning to her daily, or almost daily. She did this to
several of her more reliable friends, for there was no surer way of
convincing them of the genuineness of her regard for them than to
vituperate them when they failed to keep her informed of their health,
their spirits, and their doings. In the case of Gilbert, however, her
insistence had entirely ceased to be a professional device; she adored
him violently.

The telephoner was Gilbert. He made an amazing suggestion; he asked
her to come across to his flat, where she had never been and where
he had never asked her to go. It had been tacitly and quite amiably
understood between them that he was not one who invited young ladies
to his own apartments.

Christine cautiously answered that she was not sure whether she could
come.

"Are you alone?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes, quite."

"Well, I will come and fetch you."

She decided exactly what she would do.

"No, no. I will come. I will come now. I shall be enchanted."
Purposely she spoke without conviction, maintaining a mysterious
reserve.

She returned to the sitting-room and the other man. Fortunately the
conversation on the telephone had been in French.

"See!" she said, speaking and feeling as though they were intimates.
"I have a lady friend who is ill. I am called to see her. I shall not
be long. I swear to you I shall not be long. Wait. Will you wait?"

"Yes," he replied, gazing at her.

"Put yourself at your ease."

She was relieved to find that she could so easily reconcile her desire
to please Gilbert with her pleasurable duty towards the protégé of the
very clement Virgin.




Chapter 19

THE VISIT


In the doorway of his flat Christine kissed G.J. vehemently, but with
a certain preoccupation; she was looking about her, very curious. The
way in which she raised her veil and raised her face, mysteriously
glanced at him, puckered her kind brow--these things thrilled him.

She said:

"You are quite alone, of course."

She said it nicely, even benevolently; nevertheless he seemed to hear
her saying: "You are quite alone, or, of course, you wouldn't have let
me come."

"I suppose it's through here," she murmured; and without waiting for
an invitation she passed direct into the lighted drawing-room and
stood there, observant.

He followed her. They were both nervous in the midst of the interior
which he was showing her for the first time, and which she was
silently estimating. For him she made an exquisite figure in the
drawing-room. She was so correct in her church-dress, so modest, prim
and demure. And her appearance clashed excitingly with his absolute
knowledge of her secret temperament. He had often hesitated in his
judgment of her. Was she good enough or was she not? But now he
thought more highly of her than ever. She was ideal, divine, the
realisation of a dream. And he felt extraordinarily pleased with
himself because, after much cautious indecision, he had invited her
to visit him. By heaven, she was young physically, and yet she knew
everything! Her miraculous youthfulness rejuvenated him.

As a fact he was essentially younger than he had been for years. Not
only she, but his war work, had re-vitalised him. He had developed
into a considerable personage on the Lechford Committee; he was
chairman of a sub-committee; he bore responsibilities and had worries.
And for a climax the committee had sent him out to France to report on
the accountancy of the hospitals; he had received a special passport;
he had had glimpses of the immense and growing military organisation
behind the Front; he had chatted in his fluent and idiomatic French
with authorities military and civil; he had been ceremoniously
complimented on behalf of his committee and country by high officials
of the Service de Santé. A wondrous experience, from which he had
returned to England with a greatly increased self-respect and a
sharper apprehension of the significance of the war.

Life in London was proceeding much as usual. If on the one hand the
Treasury had startlingly put an embargo upon capital issues, on the
other hand the King had resumed his patronage of the theatre, and the
town talked of a new Lady Teazle, and a British dye-industry had been
inaugurated. But behind the thin gauze of social phenomena G.J. now
more and more realistically perceived and conceived the dark shape
of the war as a vast moving entity. He kept concurrently in his mind,
each in its place, the most diverse factors and events: not merely
the Flemish and the French battles, but the hoped-for intervention of
Roumania, the defeat of the Austrians by Servia, the menace of a new
Austrian attack on Servia, the rise in prices, the Russian move north
of the Vistula, the raid on Yarmouth, the divulgence of the German
axioms about frightfulness, the rumour of a definite German submarine
policy, the terrible storm that had disorganised the entire English
railway-system, and the dim distant Italian earthquake whose
death-roll of thousands had produced no emotion whatever on a globe
monopolised by one sole interest.

And to-night he had had private early telephonic information of a
naval victory in the North Sea in which big German cruisers had been
chased to their ignominious lairs and one sunk. Christine could not
possibly know of this grand affair, for the Sunday night extras were
not yet on the streets; he had it ready for her, eagerly waiting to
pour it into her delicious lap along with the inexhaustible treasures
of his heart. At that moment he envisaged the victory as a shining
jewel specially created in order to give her a throb of joy.

"It seems they picked up a lot of survivors from the _Blucher_," he
finished his narration, rather proudly.

She retorted, quietly but terribly scornful:

"_Zut_! You English are so naive. Why save them? Why not let them
drown? Do they not deserve to drown? Look what they have done, those
Boches! And you save them! Why did the German ships run away? They had
set a trap--that sees itself--in addition to being cowards. You save
them, and you think you have made a fine gesture; but you are nothing
but simpletons." She shrugged her shoulders in inarticulate disdain.

Christine's attitude towards the war was uncomplicated by any
subtleties. Disregarding all but the utmost spectacular military
events, she devoted her whole soul to hatred of the Germans--and all
the Germans. She believed them to be damnably cleverer than any other
people on earth, and especially than the English. She believed them
to be capable of all villainies whatsoever. She believed every charge
brought against them, never troubling about evidence. She would have
imprisoned on bread and water all Germans and all persons with German
names in England. She was really shocked by the transparent idiocy of
Britons who opposed the retirement of Prince Louis of Battenberg from
the Navy. For weeks she had remained happily in the delusion that
Prince Louis had been shot in the Tower, and when the awakening came
she had instantly decided that the sinister influence of Lord Haldane
and naught else must have saved Prince Louis from a just retribution.
She had a vision of England as overrun with innumerable German
spies who moved freely at inexpressible speed about the country in
high-powered grey automobiles with dazzling headlights, while the
marvellously stupid and blind British police touched their hats
to them. G.J. smiled at her in silence, aware by experience of the
futility of argument. He knew quite a lot of women who had almost
precisely Christine's attitude towards the war, and quite a lot of men
too. But he could have wished the charming creature to be as desirable
for her intelligence as for her physical and her strange spiritual
charm: he could have wished her not to be providing yet another
specimen of the phenomena of woman repeating herself so monotonously
in the various worlds of London. The simpleton of fifty made in his
soul an effort to be superior, and failed. "What is it that binds me
to her?" he reflected, imagining himself to be on the edge of a divine
mystery, and never expecting that he and Christine were the huge
contrivances of certain active spermatozoa for producing other active
spermatozoa.

Christine did not wonder what bound her to G.J. She knew, though she
had never heard such a word as spermatozoa. She had a violent passion
for him; it would, she feared, be eternal, whereas his passion for her
could not last more than a few years. She knew what the passions of
men were--so she said to herself superiorly. Her passion for him was
in her smile as she smiled back at his silent smile; but in her
smile there was also a convinced apostleship--for she alone was the
repository of the truth concerning Germans, which truth she preached
to an unheeding world. And there was something else in her baffling
smile, namely, a quiet, good-natured, resigned resentment against the
richness of his home. He had treated her always with generosity, and
at any rate with rather more than fairness; he had not attempted to
conceal that he was a man of means; she had nothing to reproach him
with financially. And yet she did reproach him--for having been too
modest. She had a pretty sure instinct for the price of things,
and she knew that this Albany interior must have been very costly;
further, it displayed what she deemed to be the taste of an exclusive
aristocrat. She saw that she had been undervaluing her Gilbert. The
proprietor of this flat would be entitled to seek relations of higher
standing than herself in the ranks of _cocotterie_; he would be
justified in spending far more money on a girl than he had spent on
her. He was indeed something of a fraud with his exaggerated English
horror of parade. And he lived by himself, save for servants; he was
utterly free; and yet for two months he had kept her out of
these splendours, prevented her from basking in the glow of these
chandeliers and lounging on these extraordinary sofas and beholding
herself in these terrific mirrors. Even now he was ashamed to let his
servants see her. Was it altogether nice of him? Her verdict on him
had not the slightest importance--even for herself. In kissing other
men she generally kissed him--to cheat her appetite. She was at his
mercy, whatever he was. He was useful to her and kind to her; he might
be the fount of very important future advantages; but he was more than
that, he was indispensable to her. She walked exploringly into the
little glittering bedroom. Beneath the fantastic dome of the bed the
sheets were turned down and a suit of pyjamas laid out. On a Chinese
tray on a lacquered table by the bed was a spirit-lamp and kettle, and
a box of matches in an embroidered case with one match sticking out
ready to be seized and struck. She gazed, and left the bedroom, saying
nothing, and wandered elsewhere. The stairs were so infinitesimal
and dear and delicious that they drew from her a sharp exclamation of
delight. She ran up them like a child. G.J. turned switches. In the
little glittering dining-room a little cold repast was laid for two on
an inlaid table covered with a sheet of glass. Christine gazed, saying
nothing, and wandered again to the drawing-room floor, while G.J.
hovered attendant. She went to the vast Regency desk, idly fingering
papers, and laid hold of a document. It was his report on the
accountacy of the Lechford Hospitals in France. She scrutinised it
carefully, murmuring sentences from it aloud in her French accent. At
length she dropped it; she did not put it down, she dropped it, and
murmured:

"All that--what good does it do to wounded men?... True, I comprehend
nothing of it--I!"

Then she sat to the piano, whose gorgeous and fantastic case might
well have intimidated even a professional musician.

"Dare I?" She took off her gloves.

As she began to play her best waltz she looked round at G.J. and said:

"I adore thy staircase."

And that was all she did say about the flat. Still, her demeanour,
mystifying as it might be, was benign, benevolent, with a remarkable
appearance of genuine humility.

G.J., while she played, discreetly picked up the telephone and got the
Marlborough Club. He spoke low, so as not to disturb the waltz, which
Christine in her nervousness was stumbling over.

"I want to speak to Mr. Montague Ryper. Yes, yes; he is in the club.
I spoke to him about an hour ago, and he is waiting for me to ring him
up.... That you, Monty? Well, dear heart, I find I shan't be able to
come to-night after all. I should like to awfully, but I've got these
things I absolutely must finish.... You understand.... No, no.... Is
she, by Jove? By-bye, old thing."

When Christine had pettishly banged the last chord of the coda, he
came close to her and said, with an appreciative smile, in English:

"Charming, my little girl."

She shook her head, gazing at the front of the piano.

He murmured--it was almost a whisper:

"Take your things off."

She looked round and up at him, and the light diffused from a thousand
lustres fell on her mysterious and absorbed face.

"My little rabbit, I cannot stay with thee to-night."

The words, though he did not by any means take them as final,
seriously shocked him. For five days he had known that Mrs. Braiding,
subject to his convenience, was going down to Bramshott to see the
defender of the Empire. For four days he had hesitated whether or not
he should tell her that she might stay away for the night. In the end
he had told her to stay away; he had insisted that she should stay;
he had protested that he was quite ready to look after himself for a
night and a morning. She had gone, unwillingly, having first arranged
a meal which he said he was to share with a friend--naturally, for
Mrs. Braiding, a male friend. She had wanted him to dine at the club,
but he had explained to Mrs. Braiding that he would be busy upon
hospital work, and that another member of the committee would be
coming to help him--the friend, of course. Even when he had contrived
this elaborate and perfect plot he had still hesitated about the
bold step of inviting Christine to the flat. The plan was extremely
attractive, but it held dangers. Well, he had invited her. If she had
not been at home, or if she had been unwilling to come, he would
not have felt desolated; he would have accepted the fact as perhaps
providential. But she was at home; she was willing; she had come.
She was with him; she had put him into an ecstasy of satisfaction and
anticipation. One evening alone with her in his own beautiful flat!
What a frame for her and for love! And now she said that she would not
stay. It was incredible; it could not be permitted.

"But why not? We are happy together. I have just refused a dinner
because of--this. Didn't you hear me on the 'phone?"

"Thou wast wrong," she smiled. "I am not worth a dinner. It is
essential that I should return home. I am tired--tired. It is Sunday
night, and I have sworn to myself that I will pass this evening at
home--alone."

Exasperating, maddening creature! He thought: "I fancied I knew her,
and I don't know her. I'm only just beginning to know her." He stared
steadily at her soft, serious, worried, enchanting face, and tried
to see through it into the arcana of her queer little brain. He could
not. The sweet face foiled him.

"Then why come?"

"Because I wished to be nice to thee, to prove to thee how nice I am."

She seized her gloves. He saw that she meant to go. His demeanour
changed. He was aware of his power over her, and he would use it.
She was being subtle; but he could be subtle too, far subtler than
Christine. True, he had not penetrated her face. Nevertheless his
instinct, and his male gift of ratiocination, informed him that
beneath her gentle politeness she was vexed, hurt, because he had got
rid of Mrs. Braiding before receiving her. She had her feelings, and
despite her softness she could resent. Still, her feelings must not
be over-indulged; they must not be permitted to make a fool of her. He
said, rather teasingly, but firmly:

"I know why she refuses to stay."

She cried, plaintive:

"It is not that I have another rendezvous. No! But naturally thou
thinkest it is that."

He shook his head.

"Not at all. The little silly wants to go back home because she finds
there is no servant here. She is insulted in her pride. I noticed it
in her first words when she came in. And yet she ought to know--"

Christine gave a loud laugh that really disconcerted him.

"Au revoir, my old one. Embrace me." She dropped the veil.

"No!"

He could play a game of pretence longer than she could. She moved with
dignity towards the door, but never would she depart like that.
He knew that when it came to the point she was at the mercy of her
passion for him. She had confessed the tyranny of her passion, as such
victims foolishly will. Moreover he had perceived it for himself.
He followed her to the door. At the door she would relent. And,
sure enough, at the door she leapt at him and clasped his neck with
fierceness and fiercely kissed him through her veil, and exclaimed
bitterly:

"Ah! Thou dost not love me, but I love thee!"

But the next instant she had managed to open the door and she was
gone.

He sprang out to the landing. She was running down the stone stairs.

"Christine!"

She did not stop. G.J. might be marvellously subtle; but he could not
be subtle enough to divine that on that night Christine happened to
be the devotee of the most clement Virgin, and that her demeanour
throughout the visit had been contrived, half unconsciously, to enable
her to perform a deed of superb self-denial and renunciation in the
service of the dread goddess. He ate most miserably alone, facing an
empty chair; the desolate solitude of the evening was terrible; he
lacked the force to go seeking succour in clubs.




Chapter 20

MASCOT


A single light burned in Christine's bedroom. It stood low on the
pedestal by the wide bed and was heavily shaded, so that only one half
of the bed, Christine's half, was exempt from the general gloom of the
chamber. The officer had thus ordained things. The white, plump arm of
Christine was imprisoned under his neck. He had ordered that too. He
was asleep. Christine watched him. On her return from the Albany she
had found him apparently just as she had left him, except that he
was much less talkative. Indeed, though unswervingly polite--even
punctilious with her--he had grown quite taciturn and very obstinate
and finicking in self-assertion. There was no detail as to which he
did not formulate a definite wish. Yet not until by chance her eye
fell on the whisky decanter did she perceive that in her absence
he had been copiously drinking again. He was not, however, drunk.
Remorseful at her defection, she constituted herself his slave; she
covered him with acquiescences; she drank his tippler's breath. And he
was not particularly responsive. He had all his own ideas. He ought,
for example, to have been hungry, but his idea was that he was not
hungry; therefore he had refused her dishes.

She knew him better now. Save on one subject, discussed in the
afternoon, he was a dull, narrow, direct man, especially in love. He
had no fancy, no humour, no resilience. Possibly he worshipped women,
as he had said, perhaps devoutly; but his worship of the individual
girl tended more to ritualism than to ecstasy. The Parisian devotee
was thrown away on him, and she felt it. But not with bitterness. On
the contrary, she liked him to be as he was; she liked to be herself
unappreciated, neglected, bored. She thought of the delights which she
had renounced in the rich and voluptuous drawing-room of the Albany;
she gazed under the reddish illumination at the tedious eternal
market-place on which she exposed her wares, and which in Tottenham
Court Road went by the name of bedstead; and she gathered nausea and
painful longing to her breast as the Virgin gathered the swords of
the Dolours at the Oratory, and was mystically happy in the ennui of
serving the miraculous envoy of the Virgin. And when Marthe, uneasy,
stole into the sitting-room, Christine, the door being ajar, most
faintly transmitted to her a command in French to tranquillise herself
and go away. And outside a boy broke the vast lull of the Sunday night
with a shattering cry of victory in the North Sea.

Possibly it was this cry that roused the officer out of his doze. He
sat up, looked unseeing at Christine's bright smile and at the black
gauze that revealed the reality of her youth, and then reached for his
tunic which hung at the foot of the bed.

"You asked about my mascot," he said, drawing from a pocket a small
envelope of semi-transparent oilskin. "Here it is. Now that is a
mascot!"

He had wakened under the spell of his original theme, of his sole
genuine subject. He spoke with assurance, as one inspired. His eyes,
as they masterfully encountered Christine's eyes, had a strange,
violent, religious expression. Christine's eyes yielded to his, and
her smile vanished in seriousness. He undid the envelope and displayed
an oval piece of red cloth with a picture of Christ, his bleeding
heart surrounded by flames and thorns and a great cross in the
background.

"That," said the officer, "will bring anybody safe home again."
Christine was too awed even to touch the red cloth. The vision of the
dishevelled, inspired man in khaki shirt, collar and tie, holding
the magic saviour in his thin, veined, aristocratic hand, powerfully
impressed her, and she neither moved nor spoke.

"Have you seen the 'Touchwood' mascot?" he asked. She signified
a negative, and then nervously fingered her gauze. "No? It's a
well-known mascot. Sort of tiny imp sort of thing, with a huge head,
glittering eyes, a khaki cap of _oak_, and crossed legs in gold and
silver. I hear that tens of thousands of them are sold. But there is
nothing like my mascot."

"Where have you got it?" Christine asked in her queer but improving
English.

"Where did I get it? Just after Mons, on the road, in a house."

"Have you been in the retreat?"

"I was."

"And the angels? Have you seen them?"

He paused, and then said with solemnity:

"Was it an angel I saw?... I was lying doggo by myself in a hole,
and bullets whizzing over me all the time. It was nearly dark, and a
figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still
and the German bullets went on just the same. Suddenly I saw he was
wounded in the hand; it was bleeding. I said to him: 'You're hit in
the hand.' 'No,' he said--he had a most beautiful voice--'that is an
old wound. It has reopened lately. I have another wound in the other
hand.' And he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too.
Then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although I'd eaten
nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, I got up and ran the way he
pointed, and in five minutes I ran into what remained of my unit."

The officer's sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as
though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was
suspended in absolute silence.

"That's what _I_ saw.... And with the lack of food my brain was
absolutely clear."

Christine, on her back, trembled.

The officer replaced his mascot. Then he said, waving the little bag:

"Of course, there are fellows who don't need mascots. Fellows that if
their name isn't written on a bullet or a piece of shrapnel it won't
reach them any more than a letter not addressed to you would reach
you. Now my Colonel, for instance--it was he who told me how good my
mascot was--well, he can stop shells, turn 'em back. Yes. He's just
got the D.S.O. And he said to me, 'Edgar,' he said, 'I don't deserve
it. I got it by inspiration.' And so he did.... What time's that?"

The gilded Swiss clock in the drawing-room was striking its tiny gong.

"Nine o'clock."

The officer looked dully at his wrist-watch which, not having been
wound on the previous night, had inconsiderately stopped.

"Then I can't catch my train at Victoria." He spoke in a changed
voice, lifeless, and sank back on the bed.

"Train? What train?"

"Nothing. Only the leave train. My leave is up to-night. To-morrow I
ought to have been back in the trenches."

"But you have told me nothing of it! If you had told me--But not one
word, my dear."

"When one is with a woman--!"

He seemed gloomily and hopelessly to reproach her.




Chapter 21

THE LEAVE-TRAIN


"What o'clock--your train?"

"Nine-thirty."

"But you can catch it. You must catch it."

He shook his head. "It's fate," he muttered, bitterly resigned. "What
is written is written."

Christine sprang to the floor, shuffled off the black gauze in almost
a single movement, and seized some of her clothes.

"Quick! You shall catch your train. The clock is wrong--the clock is
too soon."

She implored him with positive desperation. She shook him and dragged
him, energised in an instant by the overwhelming idea that for him to
miss his train would be fatal to him--and to her also. She could and
did believe in the efficacy of mascots against bullets and shrapnel
and bayonets. But the traditions of a country of conscripts were
ingrained in her childhood and youth, and she had not the slightest
faith in the efficacy of no matter what mascot to protect from the
consequences of indiscipline. And already during her short career
in London she had had good reason to learn the sacredness of the
leave-train. Fantastic tales she had heard of capital executions for
what seemed trifling laxities--tales whispered half proudly by the
army in the rooms of horrified courtesans--tales in which the remote
and ruthless imagined figure of the Grand Provost-Marshal rivalled
that of God himself. And, moreover, if this man fell into misfortune
through her, she would eternally lose the grace of the most clement
Virgin who had confided him to her and who was capable of terrible
revenges. She secretly called on the Virgin. Nay, she became the
Virgin. She found a miraculous strength, and furiously pulled the poor
sot out of bed. The fibres of his character had been soaked away,
and she mystically replaced them with her own. Intimidated and, as
it were, mesmerised, he began to dress. She rushed as she was to the
door.

"Marthe! Marthe!"

"Madame?" replied the fat woman in alarm.

"Run for a taxi."

"But, madame, it is raining terribly."

"_Je m'en fous_! Run for a taxi."

Turning back into the room she repeated; "The clock is too soon." But
she knew that it was not. Nearly nude, she put on a hat.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Do not worry. I come with you."

She took a skirt and a jersey and then threw a cloak over everything.
He was very slow; he could find nothing; he could button nothing. She
helped him. But when he began to finger his leggings with the endless
laces and the innumerable eyelets she snatched them from him.

"Those--in the taxi," she said.

"But there is no taxi."

"There will be a taxi. I have sent the maid."

At the last moment, as she was hurrying him on to the staircase, she
grasped her handbag. They stumbled one after the other down the dark
stairs. He had now caught the infection of her tremendous anxiety. She
opened the front door. The glistening street was absolutely empty; the
rain pelted on the pavements and the roadway, each drop falling like
a missile and raising a separate splash, so that it seemed as if the
flood on the earth was leaping up to meet the flood from the sky.

"Come!" she said with hysterical impatience. "We cannot wait. There
will be a taxi in Piccadilly, I know."

Simultaneously a taxi swerved round the corner of Burlington Street.
Marthe stood on the step next to the driver. As the taxi halted she
jumped down. Her drenched white apron was over her head and she was
wet to the skin.

In the taxi, while the officer struck matches, Christine knelt and
fastened his leggings; he could not have performed the nice operation
for himself. And all the time she was doing something else--she
was pushing forward the whole taxi, till her muscles ached with the
effort. Then she sat back on the seat, smoothed her hair under the
hat, unclasped the bag, and patted her features delicately with the
powder-puff. Neither knew the exact time, and in vain they tried to
discern the faces of clocks that flew past them in the heavy rain.
Christine sighed and said:

"These tempests. This rain. They say it is because of the big
cannons--which break the clouds."

The officer, who had the air of being in a dream, suddenly bent
towards her and replied with a most strange solemnity:

"It is to wash away the blood!"

She had not thought of that. Of course it was! She sighed again.

As they neared Victoria the officer said:

"My kit-bag! It's at the hotel. Shall I have time to pay my bill and
get it? The Grosvenor's next to the station, you know."

She answered unhesitatingly: "You will go direct to the train. I will
try the hotel."

"Drive round to the Grosvenor entrance like hell," he instructed the
driver when the taxi stopped in the station yard.

In the hotel she would never have got the bag, owing to her
difficulties in explaining the situation in English to a haughty
reception-clerk, had not a French-Swiss waiter been standing by. She
flung imploring French sentences at the waiter like a stream from a
hydrant. The bill was produced in less than half a minute. She put
down money of her own to pay for it, for she had refused to wait at
the station while the officer fished in the obscurities of his purse.
The bag, into which a menial had crammed a kit probably scattered
about the bedroom, arrived unfastened. Once more at the station, she
gave the cabman all the change which she had received at the hotel
counter. By a miracle she made a porter understand what was needed and
how urgently it was needed. He said the train was just going, and ran.
She ran after him. The ticket-collector at the platform gate allowed
the porter to pass, but raised an implacable arm to prevent her from
following. She had no platform ticket, and she could not possibly be
travelling by the train. Then she descried her officer standing at an
open carriage door in conversation with another officer and tapping
his leggings with his cane. How aristocratic and disdainful and
self-absorbed the pair looked! They existed in a world utterly
different from hers. They were the triumphant and negligent males.
She endeavoured to direct the porter with her pointing hand, and then,
hysterical again, she screamed out the one identifying word she knew:
"Edgar!"

It was lost in the resounding echoes of the immense vault. Edgar
certainly did not hear it. But he caught the great black initials,
"E.W." on the kit-bag as the porter staggered along, and stopped the
aimless man, and the kit-bag was thrown into the apartment. Doors were
now banging. Christine saw Edgar take out his purse and fumble at it.
But Edgar's companion pushed Edgar into the train and himself gave a
tip which caused the porter to salute extravagantly. The porter, at
any rate, had been rewarded. Christine began to cry, not from chagrin,
but with relief. Women on the platform waved absurd little white
handkerchiefs. Heads and khaki shoulders stuck out of the carriage
windows of the shut train. A small green flag waved; arms waved like
semaphores. The train ought to have been gliding away, but something
delayed it, and it was held as if spellbound under the high, dim
semicircle of black glass, amid the noises of steam, the hissing of
electric globes, the horrible rattle of luggage trucks, the patter of
feet, and the vast, murmuring gloom. Christine saw Edgar leaning from
a window and gazing anxiously about. The little handkerchiefs were
still courageously waving, and she, too, waved a little wisp. But he
did not see her; he was not looking in the right place for her.

She thought: Why did he not stay near the gate for me? But she thought
again: Because he feared to miss the train. It was necessary that he
should be close to his compartment. He knows he is not quite sober.

She wondered whether he had any relatives, or any relations with
another woman. He seemed to be as solitary as she was.

On the same side of the platform-gate as herself a very tall, slim,
dandy of an officer was bending over a smartly-dressed girl, smiling
at her and whispering. Suddenly the girl turned from him with a
disdainful toss of the head and said in a loud, clear Cockney voice:

"You can't tell the tale to me, young man. This is my second time on
earth."

Christine heard the words, but was completely puzzled. The train
moved, at first almost imperceptibly. The handkerchiefs showed extreme
agitation. Then a raucous song floated from the train:

  "John Brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_--
  John Brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_--
  John Brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_--
  and we all went marching home.
  Glory, glory, Alleluia!
  Glory, glory ..."

The rails showed empty where the train had been, and the sound of the
song faded and died. Some of the women were crying. Christine felt
that she was in a land of which she understood nothing but the tears.
She also felt very cold in the legs.




Chapter 22

GETTING ON WITH THE WAR


The floors of the Reynolds Galleries were covered with some hundreds
of very well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women and some
scores of men. The walls were covered with a loan collection of
oil-paintings, water-colour drawings, and etchings--English and
French, but chiefly English. A very large proportion of the pictures
were portraits of women done by a select group of very expensive
painters in the highest vogue. These portraits were the main
attraction of the elegant crowd, which included many of the sitters;
as for the latter, they failed to hide under an unconvincing mask of
indifference their curiosity as to their own effectiveness in a frame.

The portraits for the most part had every quality save that of
sincerity. They were transcendantly adroit and they reeked of talent.
They were luxurious, refined, sensual, titillating, exquisite, tender,
compact, of striking poses and subtle new tones. And while the heads
were well finished and instantly recognisable as likenesses, the
impressionism of the hands and of the provocative draperies showed
that the artists had fully realised the necessity of being modern. The
mischief and the damnation were that the sitters liked them because
they produced in the sitters the illusion that the sitters were really
what the sitters wanted to be, and what indeed nearly every woman in
the galleries wanted to be; and the ideal of the sitters was a low
ideal. The portraits flattered; but only a few guessed that they
flattered ignobly; scarcely any even of the artists guessed that.

The portraits were a success; the exhibition was a success; and all
the people at the private view justly felt that they were part of and
contributing to the success. And though seemingly the aim of everybody
was to prove to everybody else that no war, not the greatest war,
could disturb the appearances of social life in London, yet many were
properly serious and proud in their seriousness. It was the autumn of
1915. British troops were triumphantly on the road to Kut, and British
forces were approaching decisive victory in Gallipoli. The Russians
had turned on their pursuers. The French had initiated in Champagne
an offensive so dramatic that it was regarded as the beginning of the
end. And the British on their left, in the taking of Loos and Hill 70,
had achieved what might have been regarded as the greatest success on
the Western Front, had it not been for the rumour, current among the
informed personages at the Reynolds Galleries, that recent bulletins
had been reticent to the point of deception and that, in fact, Hill
70 had ceased to be ours a week earlier. Further, Zeppelins had raided
London and killed and wounded numerous Londoners, and all present in
the Reynolds Galleries were aware, from positive statements in the
newspapers, that whereas German morale was crumbling, all Londoners,
including themselves, had behaved with the most marvellous stoic calm
in the ordeal of the Zeppelins.

The assembly had a further and particular reason for serious pride.
It was getting on with the war, and in a most novel way. Private views
are customarily views gratis. But the entry to this private view cost
a guinea, and there was absolutely no free list. The guineas were
going to the support of the Lechford Hospitals in France. The happy
idea was G.J.'s own, and Lady Queenie Paulle and her mother had taken
the right influential measures to ensure its grandiose execution. A
queen had visited the private view for half an hour. Thus all the very
well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women, and all the men who
admired and desired them as they moved, in voluptuous perfection, amid
dazzling pictures with the soft illumination of screened skylights
above and the reflections in polished parquet below--all of both sexes
were comfortably conscious of virtue in the undoubted fact that they
were helping to support two renowned hospitals where at that very
moment dissevered legs and arms were being thrown into buckets.

In a little room at the end of the galleries was a small but choice
collection of the etchings of Félicien Rops: a collection for
connoisseurs, as the critics were to point out in the newspapers the
next morning. For Rops, though he had an undeniable partiality for
subjects in which ugly and prurient women displayed themselves in
nothing but the inessentials of costume, was a classic before whom it
was necessary to bow the head in homage.

G.J. was in this room in company with a young and handsome Staff
officer, Lieutenant Molder, home on convalescent leave from Suvla Bay.
Mr. Molder had left Oxford in order to join the army; he had behaved
admirably, and well earned the red shoulder-ornaments which pure
accident had given him. He was a youth of artistic and literary
tastes, with genuine ambitions quite other than military, and after a
year of horrible existence in which he had hungered for the arts
more than for anything, he was solacing and renewing himself in the
contemplation of all the masterpieces that London could show. He
greatly esteemed G.J.'s connoisseurship, and G.J. had taken him in
hand. At the close of a conscientious and highly critical round of
the galleries they had at length reached the Rops room, and they
were discussing every aspect of Rops except his lubricity, when Lady
Queenie Paulle approached them from behind. Molder was the first to
notice her and turn. He blushed.

"Well, Queen," said G.J., who had already had several conversations
with her in the galleries that day and on the previous days of
preparation.

She replied:

"Well, I hope you're satisfied with the results of your beautiful
idea."

The young woman, slim and pale, had long since gone out of mourning.
She was most brilliantly attired, and no detail lacked to the
perfection of her modish outfit. Indeed, just as she was, she would
have made a marvellous mannequin, except for the fact that mannequins
are not usually allowed to perfume themselves in business hours. Her
thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and
carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence, and her tired,
drooping eyes their equivocal glance, as she faced the bearded and
grave middle-aged bachelor and the handsome, muscular boy; even the
boy was older than Queen, yet she seemed to condescend to them as if
she were an immortal from everlasting to everlasting and could teach
both of them all sorts of useful things about life. Nobody could have
guessed from that serene demeanour that her self-satisfaction was
marred by any untoward detail whatever. Yet it was. All her frocks
were designed to conceal a serious defect which seriously disturbed
her: she was low-breasted.

G.J. said bluntly:

"May I present Mr. Molder?--Lady Queenie Paulle."

And he said to himself, secretly annoyed:

"Dash the infernal chit. That's what she's come for. Now she's got
it."

She gave the slightest, dubious nod to Molder, who, having faced
fighting Turks with an equanimity equal to Queenie's own, was yet
considerably flurried by the presence and the gaze of this legendary
girl. Queenie, enjoying his agitation, but affecting to ignore him,
began to talk quickly in the vein of exclusive gossip; she mentioned
in a few seconds the topics of the imminent entry of Bulgaria into
the war, the maturing Salonika expedition, the confidential terrible
utterances of K. on recruiting, and, of course, the misfortune (due to
causes which Queenie had at her finger-ends) round about Loos. Then
in regard to the last she suddenly added, quite unjustifiably implying
that the two phenomena were connected: "You know, mother's hospitals
are frightfully full just now.... But, of course, you do know. That's
why I'm so specially glad to-day's such a success."

Thus in a moment, and with no more than ten phrases, she had conveyed
the suggestion that while mere soldiers, ageing men-about-town, and
the ingenuous mass of the public might and did foolishly imagine the
war to be a simple affair, she herself, by reason of her intelligence
and her private sources of knowledge, had a full, unique apprehension
of its extremely complex and various formidableness. G.J. resented the
familiar attitude, and he resented Queenie's very appearance and the
appearance of the entire opulent scene. In his head at that precise
instant were not only the statistics of mortality and major operations
at the Lechford Hospitals, but also the astounding desolating tales of
the handsome boy about folly, ignorance, stupidity and martyrdoms at
Suvla.

He said, with the peculiar polite restraint that in him masked emotion
and acrimony:

"Yes, I'm glad it's a success. But the machinery of it is perhaps just
slightly out of proportion to the results. If people had given to
the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what
they've paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls,
we should have made twenty times as much as we have made--a hundred
times as much. Why, good god! Queen, the whole afternoon's takings
wouldn't buy what you're wearing now, to say nothing of the five
hundred other women here." His eye rested on the badge of her
half-brother's regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds.

At this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice
as "G.J., old soul." An officer with the solitary crown on his
sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched
him--much gentler than he spoke--on the shoulder.

"Craive, my son! You back! Well, it's startling to see you at a
picture-show, anyhow."

The Major, saluting Lady Queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted:

"Morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear G.J. I called at the flat, and
the young woman there told me you'd surely be here."

While they were talking G.J. could hear Queenie Paulle and Molder:

"Where are you back from?"

"Suvla, Lady Queenie."

"You must be oozing with interest and actuality. Tell G.J. to bring
you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? _I_'ll tell him."
And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional. G.J. showed
decorously that he had caught his own name. Whereupon Lady Queenie,
instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly:

"G.J., what's come over you? What in the name of Pan do you suppose
all you males are fighting each other for?" She paused effectively.
"Good god! If I began to dress like a housemaid the Germans would
be in London in a month. Our job as women is quite delicate
enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental
superficiality.... I want you to bring Mr. Molder to tea _to-morrow_,
and if you can't come he must come alone...."

With a last strange look at Molder she retired into the glitter of the
crowded larger room.

"She been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?" Major Craive
demanded acidly under his breath.

G.J. raised his eyebrows.

Then: "That's not _you_, Frankie!" said the Major with a start of
recognition towards the Staff lieutenant.

"Yes, sir," said Molder.

They shook hands. At the previous Christmas they had lain out together
on the cliffs of the east coast in wild weather, waiting to repel a
phantom army of thirty thousand Germans.

"It was the red hat put me off," the Major explained.

"Not my fault, sir," Molder smiled.

"Devilish glad to see you, my boy."

G.J. murmured to Molder:

"You don't want to go and have tea with her, do you?"

And Molder answered, with the somewhat fatuous, self-conscious
grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a
good-looking fellow who knows that he has made an impression:

"Well, I don't know--"

G.J. raised his eyebrows again, but with indulgence, and winked at
Craive.

The Major shut his lips tight, then stood with his mouth open for a
second or two in the attitude of a man suddenly receiving the onset of
a great and original idea.

"She's right, hang it all!" he exclaimed. "She's right! Of course she
is! Why, what's all this"--he waved an arm at the whole scene--"what's
all this but sex? Look at 'em! And look at their portraits! You aren't
going to tell me! What's the good of pretending? Hang it all, when my
own aunt comes down to breakfast in a low-cut blouse that would have
given her fits even in the evening ten years ago!... And jolly fine
too. I'm all for it. The more of it the merrier--that's what I say.
And don't any of you high-brows go trying to alter it. If you do I
retire, and you can defend your own bally Front."

"Craive," said G.J. affectionately, "until you and Queen came along
Molder and I really thought we were at a picture exhibition, and we
still think so, don't we, Molder?" The Lieutenant nodded. "Now, as
you're here, just let me show you one or two things."

"Oh!" breathed the Major, "have pity. It's not any canvas woman that
I want--By Jove!" He caught sight of an invention of Félicien Rops, a
pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who
wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "What do you call that?"

"My dear fellow, that's one of the most famous etchings in the world."

"Is it?" the Major said. "Well, I'm not surprised. There's more in
this business than I imagined." He set himself to examine all the
exhibits by Rops, and when he had finished he turned to G.J.

"Listen here, G.J. We're going to make a night of it. I've decided on
that."

"Sorry, dear heart," said G.J. "I'm engaged with Molder to-night. We
shall have some private chamber-music at my rooms--just for ourselves.
You ought to come. Much better for your health."

"What time will the din be over?"

"About eleven."

"Now I say again--listen here. Let's talk business. I'll come to your
chamber-music. I've been before, and survived, and I'll come again.
But afterwards you'll come with me to the Guinea-Fowl."

"But, my dear chap, I can't throw Molder out into Vigo Street at
eleven o'clock," G.J. protested, startled by the blunt mention of the
notorious night-club in the young man's presence.

"Naturally you can't. He'll come along with us. Frankie and I have
nearly fallen into the North Sea or German Ocean together, haven't we,
Frankie? It'll be my show. And I'll turn up with the stuff--one, two
or three pretty ladies according as your worship wishes."

G.J. was now more than startled; he was shocked; he felt his cheeks
reddening. It was the presence of Molder that confused him. Never had
he talked to Molder on any subjects but the arts, and if they had once
or twice lighted on the topic of women it was only in connection with
the arts. He was really interested in and admired Molder's unusual
aesthetic intelligence, and he had done what he could to foster it,
and he immensely appreciated Molder's youthful esteem for himself.
Moreover, he was easily old enough to be Molder's father. It seemed
to him that though two generations might properly mingle in anything
else, they ought not to mingle in licence. Craive's crudity was
extraordinary.

"See here!" Craive went on, serious and determined. "You know the sort
of thing I've come from. I got four days unexpected. I had to run down
to my uncle's. The old things would have died if I hadn't. To-morrow I
go back. This is my last night. I haven't had a scratch up to now.
But my turn's coming, you bet. Next week I may be in heaven or hell or
anywhere, or blind for life or without my legs or any damn thing you
please. But I'm going to have to-night, and you're going to join in."

G.J. saw the look of simple, half-worshipful appeal that sometimes
came into Craive's rather ingenuous face. He well knew that look, and
it always touched him. He remembered certain descriptive letters
which he had received from Craive at the Front,--they corresponded
faithfully. He could not have explained the intimacy of his relations
with Craive. They had begun at a club, over cards. The two had little
in common--Craive was a stockbroker when world-wars did not happen
to be in progress--but G.J. greatly liked him because, with all his
crudity, he was such a decent, natural fellow, so kind-hearted,
so fresh and unassuming. And Craive on his part had developed an
admiration for G.J. which G.J. was quite at a loss to account for. The
one clue to the origin of the mysterious attachment between them had
been a naive phrase which he had once overheard Craive utter to a
mutual acquaintance: "Old G.J.'s so subtle, isn't he?"

G.J. said to himself, reconsidering the proposal:

"And why on earth not?"

And then aloud, soothingly, to Craive:

"All right! All right!"

The Major brightened and said to Molder:

"You'll come, of course?"

"Oh, rather!" answered Molder, quite simply.

And G.J., again to himself, said:

"I am a simpleton."

The Major's pleading, and the spectacle of the two officers with their
precarious hold on life, humiliated G.J. as well as touched him. And,
if only in order to avoid the momentary humiliation, he would have
been well content to be able to roll back his existence and to have
had a military training and to be with them in the sacred and proud
uniform.

"Now listen here!" said the Major. "About the aforesaid pretty
ladies--"

There they stood together in the corner, hiding several of Rops's
eccentricities, ostensibly discussing art, charity, world-politics,
the strategy of war, the casualty lists.




Chapter 23

THE CALL


Christine found the night at the guinea-fowl rather dull. The
supper-room, garish and tawdry in its decorations, was functioning as
usual. The round tables and the square tables, the tables large and
the tables small, were well occupied with mixed parties and couples.
Each table had its own yellow illumination, and the upper portion
of the room, with a certain empty space in the centre of it, was
bafflingly shadowed. Between two high, straight falling curtains could
be seen a section of the ball-room, very bright against the curtains,
with the figures of dancers whose bodies seemed to be glued to each
other, pale to black or pale to khaki, passing slowly and rhythmically
across. The rag-time music, over a sort of ground-bass of syncopated
tom-tom, surged through the curtains like a tide of the sea of
Aphrodite, and bathed everyone at the supper-tables in a mysterious
aphrodisiacal fluid. The waiters alone were insensible to its
influence. They moved to and fro with the impassivity and disdain of
eunuchs separated for ever from the world's temptations. Loud laughs
or shrill little shrieks exploded at intervals from the sinister
melancholy of the interior.

On Christine's left, at a round table in a corner, sat G.J.; on her
right, the handsome boy Molder. On Molder's right, Miss Aida Altown
spread her amplitude, and on G.J.'s left was a young girl known to
the company as Alice. Major Craive, the host, the splendid quality of
whose hospitality was proved by the flowers, the fruit, the bottles,
the cigar-boxes and the cigarette-boxes on the table, sat between
Alice and Aida Altown.

The three women on principle despised and scorned each other with
false warm smiles and sudden outbursts of compliment. Christine knew
that the other two detested her as being "one of those French girls"
who, under the protection of Free Trade, came to London and, by their
lack of scruple and decency, took the bread out of the mouths of the
nice, modest, respectable, English girls. She on her side disdained
both of them, not merely because they were courtesans (which
somehow Christine considered she really was not), but also for their
characteristic insipidity, lackadaisicalness and ignorance of the
technique of the profession. They expected to be paid for doing
nothing.

Aida Altown she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival Promenade.
Aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which Christine always
feared. Despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful
woman in the English manner, blonde, soft, idle, without a trace of
temperament, and incomparably dull and stupid. But she was ageing;
she had been favourably known in the West End continuously (save for
a brief escapade in New York) for perhaps a quarter of a century. She
was at the period when such as she realise with flaccid alarm that
they have no future, and when they are ready to risk grave imprudences
for youths who feel flattered by their extreme maturity. Christine
gazed calmly at her, supercilious and secure in the immense advantage
of at least fifteen years to the good.

And if she shrugged her shoulders at Aida for being too old,
Christine did the same at Alice for being too young. Alice was truly
a girl--probably not more than seventeen. Her pert, pretty, infantile
face was an outrage against the code. She was a mere amateur, with
everything to learn, absurdly presuming upon the very quality which
would vanish first. And she was a fool. She obviously had no sense,
not even the beginnings of sense. She was wearing an impudently
expensive frock which must have cost quite five times as much as
Christine's own, though the latter in the opinion of the wearer was
by far the more authentically _chic_. And she talked proudly at large
about her losses on the turf and of the swindles practised upon her.
Christine admitted that the girl could make plenty of money, and would
continue to make money for a long, long time, bar accidents, but her
final conclusion about Alice was: "She will end on straw."

The supper was over. The conversation had never been vivacious, and
now it was half-drowned in champagne. The girls had wanted to hear
about the war, but the Major, who had arrived in a rather dogmatic
mood, put an absolute ban on shop. Alice had then kept the talk, such
as it was, upon her favourite topic--revues. She was an encyclopaedia
of knowledge concerning revues past, present, and to come. She had
once indeed figured for a few grand weeks in a revue chorus, thereby
acquiring unique status in her world. The topic palled upon both Aida
and Christine. And Christine had said to herself: "They are aware of
nothing, those two," for Aida and Alice had proved to be equally and
utterly ignorant of the superlative social event of the afternoon, the
private view at the Reynolds Galleries--at which indeed Christine had
not assisted, but of which she had learnt all the intimate details
from G.J. What, Christine demanded, _could_ be done with such a pair
of ninnies?

She might have been excused for abandoning all attempt to behave as
a woman of the world should at a supper party. Nevertheless, she
continued good-naturedly and conscientiously in the performance of her
duty to charm, to divert, and to enliven. After all, the ladies
were there to captivate the males, and if Aida and Alice dishonestly
flouted obligations, Christine would not. She would, at any rate, show
them how to behave.

She especially attended to G.J., who having drunk little, was taciturn
and preoccupied in his amiabilities. She divined that something was
the matter, but she could not divine that his thoughts were saddened
by the recollection at the Guinea-Fowl of the lovely music which he
had heard earlier in his drawing-room and by the memory of the Major's
letters and of what the Major had said at the Reynolds Galleries
about the past and the possibilities of the future. The Major was very
benevolently intoxicated, and at short intervals he raised his glass
to G.J., who did not once fail to respond with an affectionate smile
which Christine had never before seen on G.J.'s face.

Suddenly Alice, who had been lounging semi-somnolent with an extinct
cigarette in her jewelled fingers, sat up and said in the uncertain
voice of an inexperienced girl who has ceased to count the number of
glasses emptied:

"Shall I recite? I've been trained, you know."

And, not waiting for an answer, she stood and recited, with a
surprisingly correct and sure pronunciation of difficult words to show
that she had, in fact, received some training:

  Helen, thy beauty is to me
  Like those Nicean barks of yore,
  That gently o'er a perfumed sea
  The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
  To his own native shore.

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
  Thy naiad airs have brought me home
  To the glory that was Greece,
  To the grandeur that was Rome.

  Lo! In your brilliant window niche,
  How statue-like I see thee stand,
  The agate lamp within thy hand!
  Ah, Psyche from the regions which
  Are Holy Land!

The uncomprehended marvellous poem, having startled the whole room,
ceased, and the rag-time resumed its sway. A drunken "Bravo!"
came from one table, a cheer from another. Young Alice nodded an
acknowledgment and sank loosely into her chair, exhausted by her last
effort against the spell of champagne and liqueurs. And the naive, big
Major, bewitched by the child, subsided into soft contact with her,
and they almost tearfully embraced. A waiter sedately replaced a glass
which Alice's drooping, negligent hand had over-turned, and wiped the
cloth. G.J. was silent. The whole table was silent.

"_Est-ce de la grande poésie_?" asked Christine of G.J., who did not
reply. Christine, though she condemned Alice as now disgusting, had
been taken aback and, in spite of herself, much impressed by the
surprising display of elocution.

"_Oui_," said Molder, in his clipped, self-conscious Oxford French.

Two couples from other tables were dancing in the middle of the room.

Molder demanded, leaning towards her:

"I say, do you dance?"

"But certainly," said Christine. "I learnt at the convent." And she
spoke of her convent education, a triumphant subject with her, though
she had actually spent less than a year in the convent.

After a few moments they both rose, and Christine, bending over G.J.,
whispered lovingly in his ear:

"Dear, thou wilt not be jealous if I dance one turn with thy young
friend?"

She was addressing the wrong person. Already throughout the supper
Aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society
is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady
on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely,
had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse--and
particularly the intercourse in French--between Christine and Molder,
who was officially "hers". That these two should go off and dance
together was the supreme insult to her. By ill-chance she had not
sufficient physical command of herself.

Christine felt that Molder would have danced better two hours earlier;
but still he danced beautifully. Their bodies fitted like two parts
of a jigsaw puzzle that have discovered each other. She realised that
G.J. was middle-aged, and regret tinctured the ecstasy of the dance.
Then suddenly she heard a loud, imploring cry in her ear:

"Christine!"

She looked round, pale, still dancing, but only by inertia.

Nobody was near her. The four people at the Major's table gave no sign
of agitation or even of interest. The Major still had Alice more or
less in his arms.

"What was that?" she asked wildly.

"What was what?" said Molder, at a loss to understand her
extraordinary demeanour.

And she heard the cry again, and then again:

"Christine! Christine!"

She recognised the voice. It was the voice of the officer whom she had
taken to Victoria Station one Sunday night months and months ago.

"Excuse me!" she said, slipping from Molder's hold, and she hurried
out of the room to the ladies' cloak-room, got her wraps, and ran past
the watchful guardian, through the dark, dubious portico of the club
into the street. The thing was done in a moment, and why she did it
she could not tell. She knew simply that she must do it, and that she
was under the dominion of those unseen powers in whom she had always
believed. She forgot the Guinea-Fowl as completely as though it had
been a pre-natal phenomenon with her.




Chapter 24

THE SOLDIER


But outside she lost faith. Half a dozen motor-cars were slumbering
in a row near the door of the Guinea-Fowl, and they all stirred
monstrously yet scarcely perceptibly at the sight of the woman's
figure, solitary, fragile and pale in the darkness. They seemed for an
instant to lust for her; and then, recognising that she was not their
prey, to sink back into the torpor of their inexhaustible patience.
The sight of them was prejudicial to the dominion of the unseen
powers. Christine admitted to herself that she had drunk a lot, that
she was demented, that her only proper course was to return dutifully
to the supper-party. She wondered what, if she did not so return, she
could possibly say to justify herself to G.J.

Nevertheless she went on down the street, hurrying, automatic, and
reached the main thoroughfare. It was dark with the new protective
darkness. The central hooded lamps showed like poor candles, making a
series of rings of feeble illumination on the vast invisible floor of
the road. Nobody was afoot; not a soul. The last of the motor-buses
that went about killing and maiming people in the new protective
darkness had long since reached its yard. The seductive dim violet
bulbs were all extinguished on the entrances of the theatres, and,
save for a thread of light at some lofty window here and there, the
curving facades of the street were as undecipherable as the heavens
above or as the asphalte beneath.

Then Christine's ear detected a faint roar. It grew louder; it became
terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with
peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind
the next, shaking the very avenue. The slightest misjudgment by the
leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness--and the whole
convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh,
blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward
till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished. The
avenue ceased to shake. The thunder died away, and there was silence
again. Whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent
command? Whither it was bound? What it carried? No answer in the
darkness to these enigmas!... And Christine was afraid of England. She
remembered people in Ostend saying that England would never go to war.
She, too, had said it, bitterly. And now she was in the midst of the
unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid
of an unloosed might....

What madness was she doing? She did not even know the man's name.
She knew only that he was "Edgar W." She would have liked to be his
_marraine_, according to the French custom, but he had never written
to her. He was still in her debt for the hotel bill and the taxi fare.
He had not even kissed her at the station. She tried to fancy that she
heard his voice calling "Christine" with frantic supplication in her
ears, but she could not. She turned into another side street, and saw
a lighted doorway. Two soldiers were standing in the veiled radiance.
She could just read the lower half of the painted notice: "All service
men welcome. Beds. Meals. Writing and reading rooms. Always open." She
passed on. One of the soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of mature
years, solemnly winked at her, without moving an unnecessary muscle.
She looked modestly down.

Twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier
whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans,
tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some
military Father Christmas on his surreptitious rounds. She knew that
he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches. He was
staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been. He
glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice:

"Pardon me, Madam. Is this Denman Street? I want to find the Denman
Hostel."

Christine looked into his face. A sacred dew suffused her from head
to foot. She trembled with an intimidated joy. She felt the mystic
influences of all the unseen powers. She knew herself with holy dread
to be the chosen of the very clement Virgin, and the channel of a
miraculous intervention. It was the most marvellous, sweetest
thing that had ever happened. It was humanly incredible, but it had
happened.

"Is it you?" she murmured in a soft, breaking voice.

The man stooped and examined her face.

She said, while he gazed at her: "Edgar!... See--the wrist watch,"
and held up her arm, from which the wide sleeve of her mantle slipped
away.

And the man said: "Is it you?"

She said: "Come with me. I will look after you."

The man answered glumly:

"I have no money--at least not enough for you. And I owe you a lot of
money already. You are an angel. I'm ashamed."

"What do you mean?" Christine protested. "Do you forget that you gave
me a five-pound note? It was more than enough to pay the hotel.... As
for the rest, let us not speak of it. Come with me."

"Did I?" muttered the man.

She could feel the very clement Virgin smiling approval of her fib;
it was exactly such a fib as the Virgin herself would have told in a
quandary of charity. And when a taxi came round the corner, she knew
that the Virgin disguised as a taxi-driver was steering it, and she
hailed it with a firm and yet loving gesture.

The taxi stopped. She opened the door, and in her sombre mantle and
bright trailing frock and glinting, pale shoes she got in, and the
military Father Christmas with much difficulty and jingling and
clinking insinuated himself after her into the vehicle, and banged to
the door. And at the same moment one of the soldiers from the Hostel
ran up:

"Here, mate!... What do you want to take his money from him for, you
damned w----?"

But the taxi drove off. Christine had not understood. And had she
understood, she would not have cared. She had a divine mission; she
was in bliss.

"You did not seem surprised to meet me," she said, taking Edgar's
rough hand.

"No."

"Had you called out my name--'Christine'?"

"No."

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you were thinking of me? I was thinking of you."

"Perhaps. I don't know. But I'm never surprised."

"You must be very tired?"

"Yes."

"But why are you like that? All these things? You are not an officer
now."

"No. I had to resign my commission--just after I saw you." He paused,
and added drily: "Whisky." His deep rich voice filled the taxi with
the resigned philosophy of fatalism.

"And then?"

"Of course I joined up again at once," he said casually. "I soon got
out to the Front. Now I'm on leave. That's mere luck."

She burst into tears. She was so touched by his curt story, and by the
grotesquerie of his appearance in the faint light from the exterior
lamp which lit the dial of the taximeter, that she lost control of
herself. And the man gave a sob, or possibly it was only a gulp to
hide a sob. And she leaned against him in her thin garments. And he
clinked and jingled, and his breath smelt of beer.




Chapter 25

THE RING


The flat was in darkness, except for the little lamp by the bedside.
The soldier lay asleep in his flannel shirt in the wide bed, and
Christine lay awake next him. His clothes were heaped on a chair.
His eighty pounds' weight of kit were deposited in a corner of the
drawing-room. On the table in the drawing-room were the remains of a
meal. Christine was thinking, carelessly and without apprehension, of
what she should say to G.J. She would tell him that she had suddenly
felt unwell. No! That would be silly. She would tell him that he
really had not the right to ask her to meet such women as Aida and
Alice. Had he no respect for her? Or she would tell him that Aida
had obviously meant to attack her, and that the dance with Lieutenant
Molder was simply a device to enable her to get away quietly and avoid
all scandal in a resort where scandal was intensely deprecated. She
could tell him fifty things, and he would have to accept whatever she
chose to tell him. She was mystically happy in the incomparable marvel
of the miracle, and in her care of the dull, unresponding man. Her
heart yearned thankfully, devotedly, passionately to the Virgin of the
VII Dolours.

In the profound nocturnal silence broken only by the man's slow,
regular breathing, she heard a sudden ring. It was the front-door bell
ringing in the kitchen. The bell rang again and again obstinately.
G.J.'s party was over, then, and he had arrived to make inquiries. She
smiled, and did not move. After a few moments she could hear Marthe
stirring. She sprang up, and then, cunningly considerate, slipped from
under the bed-clothes as noiselessly and as smoothly as a snake, so
that the man should not be disturbed. The two women met in the little
hall, Christine in the immodesty of a lacy and diaphanous garment,
and Marthe in a coarse cotton nightgown covered with a shawl. The bell
rang once more, loudly, close to their ears.

"Are you mad?" Christine whispered with fierceness. "Go back to bed.
Let him ring."




Chapter 26

THE RETURN


It was afternoon in April, 1916. G.J. rang the right bell at the
entrance of the London home of the Lechfords. Lechford House, designed
about 1840 by an Englishman of genius who in this rare instance had
found a patron with the wit to let him alone, was one of the finest
examples of domestic architecture in the West End. Inspired by the
formidable palaces of Rome and Florence, the artist had conceived
a building in the style of the Italian renaissance, but modified,
softened, chastened, civilised, to express the bland and yet haughty
sobriety of the English climate and the English peerage. People
without an eye for the perfect would have correctly described it as
a large plain house in grey stone, of three storeys, with a width
of four windows on either side of its black front door, a jutting
cornice, and rather elaborate chimneys. It was, however, a masterpiece
for the connoisseur, and foreign architects sometimes came with
cards of admission to pry into it professionally. The blinds of its
principal windows were down--not because of the war; they were often
down, for at least four other houses disputed with Lechford House the
honour of sheltering the Marquis and his wife and their sole surviving
child. Above the roof a wire platform for the catching of bombs had
given the mansion a somewhat ridiculous appearance, but otherwise
Lechford House managed to look as though it had never heard of the
European War.

One half of the black entrance swung open, and a middle-aged gentleman
dressed like Lord Lechford's stockbroker, but who was in reality his
butler, said in answer to G.J.'s enquiry:

"Lady Queenie is not at home, sir."

"But it is five o'clock," protested G.J., suddenly sick of Queen's
impudent unreliability. "And I have an appointment with her at five."

The butler's face relaxed ever so little from its occupational
inhumanity of a suet pudding; the spirit of compassion seemed to
inform it for an instant.

"Her ladyship went out about a quarter of an hour ago, sir."

"When d'you think she'll be back?"

The suet pudding was restored.

"That I could not say, sir."

"Damn the girl!" said G.J. to himself; and aloud: "Please tell her
ladyship that I've called."

"Mr. Hoape, is it not, sir?"

"It is."

By the force of his raisin eyes the butler held G.J. as he turned to
descend the steps.

"There's nobody at home, sir, except Mrs. Carlos Smith. Mrs. Carlos
Smith is in Lady Queenie's apartments."

"Mrs. Carlos Smith!" exclaimed G.J., who had not seen Concepcion for
some seventeen months; nor heard from her for nearly as long, nor
heard of her since the previous year.

"Yes, sir."

"Ask her if she can see me, will you?" said G.J. impetuously, after a
slight pause.

He stepped on to the tessellated pavement of the outer hall. On the
raised tessellated pavement of the inner hall stood two meditative
youngish footmen, possibly musing upon the problems of the
intensification of the Military Service Act which were then exciting
journalists and statesmen. Beyond was the renowned staircase, which,
rising with insubstantial grace, lost itself in silvery altitude
like the way to heaven. Presently G.J. was mounting the staircase and
passing statues by Canova and Thorwaldsen, and portraits of which
the heads had been painted by Lawrence and the hands and draperies
by Lawrence's hireling, and huger canvasses on which the heads and
breasts had been painted by Rubens and everything else by Rubens's
regiment of hirelings. The guiding footman preceded him through a
great chamber which he recognised as the drawing-room in its winding
sheet, and then up a small and insignificant staircase; and G.J. was
on ground strange to him, for never till then had he been higher than
the first-floor in Lechford House.

Lady Queenie's apartments did violence to G.J.'s sensibilities as an
upholder of traditionalism in all the arts, of the theory that every
sound movement in any art must derive from its predecessor. Some
months earlier he had met for a few minutes the creative leader of the
newest development in internal decoration, and he vividly remembered a
saying of the grey-haired, slouch-hatted man: "At the present day
the only people in the world with really vital perceptions about
decoration are African niggers, and the only inspiring productions are
the coloured cotton stuffs designed for the African native market."
The remark had amused and stimulated him, but he had never troubled to
go in search of examples of the inspiring influence of African taste
on London domesticity. He now saw perhaps the supreme instance lodged
in Lechford House, like a new and truculent state within a great
Empire.

Lady Queenie had imposed terms on her family, and under threats of
rupture, of separation, of scandal, Lady Queenie's exotic nest had
come into existence in the very fortress of unchangeable British
convention. The phenomenon was a war phenomenon due to the war,
begotten by the war; for Lady Queenie had said that if she was to
do war-work without disaster to her sanity she must have the right
environment. Thus the putting together of Lady Queenie's nest had
proceeded concurrently with the building of national projectile
factories and of square miles of offices for the girl clerks of
ministries and departments of government.

The footman left G.J. alone in a room designated the boudoir. G.J.
resented the boudoir, because it was like nothing that he had
ever witnessed. The walls were irregularly covered with rhombuses,
rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles, and parallelograms; the
carpet was treated likewise, and also the upholstery and the cushions.
The colourings of the scene in their excessive brightness, crudity and
variety surpassed G.J.'s conception of the possible. He had learned
the value of colour before Queen was born, and in the Albany had
translated principle into practice. But the hues of the boudoir made
the gaudiest effects of Regency furniture appear sombre. The place
resembled a gigantic and glittering kaleidoscope deranged and
arrested.

G.J.'s glance ran round the room like a hunted animal seeking escape,
and found no escape. He was as disturbed as he might have been
disturbed by drinking a liqueur on the top of a cocktail. Nevertheless
he had to admit that some of the contrasts of pure colour were rather
beautiful, even impressive; and he hated to admit it. He was aware of
a terrible apprehension that he would never be the same man again, and
that henceforth his own abode would be eternally stricken for him with
the curse of insipidity. Regaining somewhat his nerve, he looked for
pictures. There were no pictures. But every piece of furniture was
painted with primitive sketches of human figures, or of flowers, or
of vessels, or of animals. On the front of the mantelpiece were
perversely but brilliantly depicted, with a high degree of finish,
two nude, crouching women who gazed longingly at each other across the
impassable semicircular abyss of the fireplace; and just above their
heads, on a scroll, ran these words:

"The ways of God are strange."

He heard movements and a slight cough in the next room, the door
leading to which was ajar. Concepcion's cough; he thought he
recognised it. Five minutes ago he had had no notion of seeing her;
now he was about to see her. And he felt excited and troubled, as much
by the sudden violence of life as by the mere prospect of the meeting.
After her husband's death Concepcion had soon withdrawn from London.
A large engineering firm on the Clyde, one of the heads of which
happened to be constitutionally a pioneer, was establishing a canteen
for its workmen, and Concepcion, the tentacles of whose influence
would stretch to any length, had decided that she ought to take up
canteen work, and in particular the canteen work of just that firm.
But first of all, to strengthen her prestige and acquire new prestige,
she had gone to the United States, with a powerful introduction to
Sears, Roebuck and Company of Chicago, in order to study industrial
canteenism in its most advanced and intricate manifestations.
Portraits of Concepcion in splendid furs on the deck of the steamer
in the act of preparing to study industrial canteenism in its most
advanced and intricate manifestations had appeared in the illustrated
weeklies. The luxurious trip had cost several hundreds of pounds,
but it was war expenditure, and, moreover, Concepcion had come into
considerable sums of money through her deceased husband. Her return to
Britain had never been published. Advertisements of Concepcion ceased.
Only a few friends knew that she was in the most active retirement on
the Clyde. G.J. had written to her twice but had obtained no replies.
One fact he knew, that she had not had a child. Lady Queenie had not
mentioned her; it was understood that the inseparables had quarrelled
in the heroic manner and separated for ever.

She entered the boudoir slowly. G.J. grew self-conscious, as it were
because she was still the martyr of destiny and he was not. She wore a
lavender-tinted gown of Queen's; he knew it was Queen's because he had
seen precisely such a gown on Queen, and there could not possibly
be another gown precisely like that very challenging gown. It suited
Queen, but it did not suit Concepcion. She looked older; she was
thirty-two, and might have been taken for thirty-five. She was
very pale, with immense fatigued eyes; but her ridiculous nose had
preserved all its originality. And she had the same slightly masculine
air--perhaps somewhat intensified--with an added dignity. And G.J.
thought: "She is as mysterious and unfathomable as I am myself." And
he was impressed and perturbed.

With a faint, sardonic smile, glancing at him as a physical equal
from her unusual height (she was as tall as Lady Queenie), she said
abruptly and casually:

"Am I changed?"

"No," he replied as abruptly and casually, clasping almost inimically
her ringed hand--she was wearing Queenie's rings. "But you're tired.
The journey, I suppose."

"It's not that. We sat up till five o'clock this morning, talking."

"Who?"

"Queen and I."

"What did you do that for?"

"Well, you see, we'd had the devil's own row--" She stopped, leaving
his imagination to complete the picture of the meeting and the night
talk.

He smiled awkwardly--tried to be paternal, and failed.

"What about?"

"She never wanted me to leave London. I came back last night with only
a handbag just as she was going out to dinner. She didn't go out to
dinner. Queen is a white woman. Nobody knows how white Queen is. I
didn't know myself until last night."

There was a pause. G.J. said:

"I had an appointment here with the white woman, on business."

"Yes, I know," said Concepcion negligently. "She'll be home soon."

Something infinitesimally malicious in the voice and gaze sent the
singular idea shooting through his mind that Queen had gone out on
purpose so that Concepcion might have him alone for a while. And he
was wary of both of them, as he might have been of two pagan goddesses
whom he, a poor defiant mortal, suspected of having laid an eye on him
for their own ends.

"_You've_ changed, anyhow," said Concepcion.

"Older?"

"No. Harder."

He was startled, not displeased.

"How--harder?"

"More sure of yourself," said Concepcion, with a trace of the old
harsh egotism in her tone. "It appears you're a perfect tyrant on the
Lechford Committee now you're vice-chairman, and all the more footling
members dread the days when you're in the chair. It appears also
that you've really overthrown two chairmen, and yet won't take the
situation yourself."

He was still more startled, but now positively flattered by the
world's estimate of his activities and individuality. He saw himself
in a new light.

"This what you were talking about until five a.m.?"

The butler entered.

"Shall I serve tea, Madam?"

Concepcion looked at the man scornfully:

"Yes."

One of the minor stalwarts entered and arranged a table, and the other
followed with a glittering, steaming tray in his hands, while
the butler hovered like a winged hippopotamus over the operation.
Concepcion half sat down by the table, and then, altering her mind,
dropped on to a vast chaise-longue, as wide as a bed, and covered with
as many cushions as would have stocked a cushion shop, which occupied
the principal place in front of the hearth. The hem of her rich
gown just touched the floor. G.J. could see that she was wearing the
transparent deep-purple stockings that Queen wore with the transparent
lavender gown. Her right shoulder rose high from the mass of the body,
and her head was sunk between two cushions. Her voice came smothered
from the cushions:

"Damn it! G.J. Don't look at me like that."

He was standing near the mantelpiece.

"Why?" he exclaimed. "What's the matter, Con?"

There was no answer. He lit a cigarette. The ebullient kettle kept
lifting its lid in growing impatience. But Concepcion seemed to have
forgotten the tea. G.J. had a thought, distinct like a bubble on a sea
of thoughts, that if the tea was already made, as no doubt it was, it
would soon be stewed. Concepcion said:

"The matter is that I'm a ruined woman, and Queen can't understand."

And in the bewildering voluptuous brightness and luxury of the room
G.J. had the sensation of being a poor, baffled ghost groping in the
night of existence. Concepcion's left arm slipped over the edge of
the day-bed and hung limp and pale, the curved fingers touching the
carpet.




Chapter 27

THE CLYDE


She was sitting up on the chaise-longue and had poured out the tea--he
had pushed the tea-table towards the chaise-longue--and she was
talking in an ordinary tone just as though she had not immodestly
bared her spirit to him and as though she knew not that he realised
she had done so. She was talking at length, as one who in the past had
been well accustomed to giving monologues and to holding drawing-rooms
in subjection while she chattered, and to making drawing-rooms feel
glad that they had consented to subjection. She was saying:

"You've no idea what the valley of the Clyde is now. You can't have.
It's filled with girls, and they come into it every morning by train
to huge stations specially built for them, and they make the most
ghastly things for killing other girls' lovers all day, and they go
back by train at night. Only some of them work all night. I had to
leave my own works to organise the canteen of a new filling factory.
Five thousand girls in that factory. It's frightfully dangerous. They
have to wear special clothing. They have to take off every stitch from
their bodies in one room, and run in their innocence and nothing else
to another room where the special clothing is. That's the only way
to prevent the whole place being blown up one beautiful day. But five
thousand of them! You can't imagine it. You'd like to, G.J., but you
can't. However, I didn't stay there very long. I wanted to go back to
my own place. I was adored at my own place. Of course the men adored
me. They used to fight about me sometimes. Terrific men. Nothing
ever made me happier than that, or so happy. But the girls were more
interesting. Two thousand of them there. You'd never guess it, because
they were hidden in thickets of machinery. But see them rush out
endlessly to the canteen for tea! All sorts. Lots of devils and cats.
Some lovely creatures, heavenly creatures, as fine as a queen. They
adored me too. They didn't at first, some of them. But they soon
tumbled to it that I was the modern woman, and that they'd never
seen me before, and it was a great discovery. Absurdly easy to
raise yourself to be the idol of a crowd that fancies itself canny!
Incredibly easy! I used to take their part against the works-manager
as often as I could; he was a fiend; he hated me; but then I was a
fiend, too, and I hated him more. I used often to come on at six in
the morning, when they did, and 'sign on'. It isn't really signing on
now at all; there's a clock dial and a whole machine for catching
you out. They loved to see me doing that. And I worked the lathes
sometimes, just for a bit, just to show that I wasn't ashamed to work.
Etc.... All that sentimental twaddle. It pleased them. And if any
really vigorous-minded girl had dared to say it was sentimental
twaddle, there would have been a crucifixion or something of the sort
in the cloak-rooms. The mob's always the same. But what pleased them
far more than anything was me knowing them by their Christian names.
Not all, of course; still, hundreds of them. Marvellous feats of
memorising I did! I used to go about muttering under my breath:
'Winnie, wart on left hand, Winnie, wart on left hand, wart on left
hand, Winnie.' You see? And I've sworn at them--not often; it wouldn't
do, naturally. But there was scarcely a woman there that I couldn't
simply blast in two seconds if I felt like it. On the other hand, I
assure you I could be very tender. I was surprised how tender I could
be, now and then, in my little office. They'd tell me anything--sounds
sentimental, but they would--and some of them had no more notion
that there's such a thing on earth as propriety than a monkey has. I
thought I knew everything before I went to the Clyde valley. Well,
I didn't." Concepcion looked at G.J. "You know you're very innocent,
G.J., compared to me."

"I should hope so!" said G.J., impenetrably.

"What do you think of it all?" she demanded in a fresh tone, leaning a
little towards him.

He replied: "I'm impressed."

He was, in fact, very profoundly impressed; but he had to illustrate
the hardness in himself which she had revealed to him. (He wondered
whether the members of the Lechford Committee really did credit him
with having dethroned a couple of chairmen. The idea was new to his
modesty. Perhaps he had been underestimating his own weight on the
committee. No doubt he had.) All constraint was now dissipated between
Concepcion and himself. They were behaving to each other as though
their intimacy had never been interrupted for a single week. She
amazed him, sitting there in the purple stockings and the affronting
gown, and he admired. Her material achievement alone was prodigious.
He pictured her as she rose in the winter dark and in the summer dawn
to go to the works and wrestle with so much incalculable human nature
and so many complex questions of organisation, day after day, week
after week, month after month, for nearly eighteen months. She had
kept it up; that was the point. She had shown what she was made of,
and what she was made of was unquestionably marvellous.

He would have liked to know about various things to which she had made
no reference. Did she live in a frowsy lodging-house near the great
works? What kind of food did she get? What did she do with her
evenings and her Sundays? Was she bored? Was she miserable or
exultant? Had she acquaintances, external interests; or did she
immerse herself completely, inclusively, in the huge, smoking,
whirring, foul, perilous hell which she had described? The
contemplation of the horror of the hell gave him--and her, too, he
thought--a curious feeling which was not unpleasurable. It had
savour. He would not, however, inquire from her concerning details.
He preferred, on reflection, to keep the details mysterious, as
mysterious as her individuality and as the impression of her worn
eyes. The setting of mystery in his mind suited her.

He said: "But of course your relations with those girls were
artificial, after all."

"No, they weren't. I tell you the girls were perfectly open; there
wasn't the slightest artificiality."

"Yes, but were you open, to them? Did you ever tell them anything
about yourself, for instance?"

"Oh, no!"

"Did they ever ask you to?"

"No! They wouldn't have thought of doing so."

"That's what I call artificiality. By the way, how have you been
ruined? Who ruined you? Was it the hated works-manager?" There had
been no change in his tone; he spoke with the utmost detachment.

"I was coming to that," answered Concepcion, apparently with a
detachment equal to his. "Last week but one in one of the shops there
was a girl standing in front of a machine, with her back to it. About
twenty-two--you must see her in your mind--about twenty-two, nice
chestnut hair. Cap over it, of course--that's the rule. Khaki overalls
and trousers. Rather high-heeled patent-leather boots--they fancy
themselves, thank God!--and a bit of lace showing out of the khaki at
the neck. Red cheeks; she was fairly new to the works. Do you see her?
She meant to be one of the devils. Earning two pounds a week nearly,
and eagerly spending it all. Fully awake to all the possibilities of
her body. I was in the shop. I said something to her, and she didn't
hear at first--the noise of some of the shops is shattering. I went
close to her and repeated it. She laughed out of mere vivacity, and
threw back her head as people do when they laugh. The machine behind
her must have caught some hair that wasn't under her cap. All her hair
was dragged from under the cap, and in no time all her hair was torn
out and the whole of her scalp ripped clean off. In a second or two I
got her on to a trolley--I did it--and threw an overall over her and
ran her to the dressing-station, close to the main office entrance.
There was a car there. One of the directors was just driving off.
I stopped him. It wasn't a case for our dressing-station. In three
minutes I had her at the hospital--three minutes. The car was soaked
in blood. But she didn't lose consciousness, that child didn't. She's
dead now. She's buried. Her body that she meant to use so profusely
for her own delights is squeezed up in the little black box in the
dark and the silence, down below where the spring can't get at it....
I had no sleep for two nights. On the second day a doctor at the
hospital said that I must take at least three months' holiday. He said
I'd had a nervous breakdown. I didn't know I had, and I don't know
now. I said I wouldn't take any holiday, and that nothing would induce
me to."

"Why, Con?"

"Because I'd sworn, absolutely sworn to myself, to stick that job till
the war was over. You understand, I'd sworn it. Well, they wouldn't
let me on to the works. And yesterday one of the directors brought
me up to town himself. He was very kind, in his Clyde way. Now you
understand what I mean when I say I'm ruined. I'm ruined with myself,
you see. I didn't stick it. I couldn't. But there were twenty or
thirty girls who saw the accident. They're sticking it."

"Yes," he said in a voice soft and moved, "I understand." And while
he spoke thus aloud, though his emotion was genuine, and his desire to
comfort and sustain her genuine, and his admiration for her genuine,
he thought to himself: "How theatrically she told it! Every effect
was studied, nearly every word. Well, she can't help it. But does she
imagine I can't see that all the casualness was deliberately part of
the effect?"

She lit a cigarette and leaned her half-draped elbows on the
tea-table, and curved her ringed fingers, which had withstood time and
fatigue much better than her face; and then she reclined again on the
chaise-longue, on her back, and sent up smoke perpendicularly, and
through the smoke seemed to be trying to decipher the enigmas of the
ceiling. G.J. rose and stood over her in silence. At last she went on:

"The work those girls do is excruciating, hellish, and they don't
realise it. That's the worst of it. They'll never be the same again.
They're ruining their health, and, what's more important, their looks.
You can see them changing under your eyes. Ours was the best factory
on the Clyde, and the conditions were unspeakable, in spite of
canteens, and rest-rooms, and libraries, and sanitation, and all this
damned 'welfare'. Fancy a girl chained up for twelve hours every day
to a thundering, whizzing, iron machine that never gets tired. The
machine's just as fresh at six o'clock at night as it was at six
o'clock in the morning, and just as anxious to maim her if she doesn't
look out for herself--more anxious. The whole thing's still going on;
they're at it now, this very minute. You're interested in a factory,
aren't you, G.J.?"

"Yes," he answered gently, but looked with seemingly callous firmness
down at her.

"The Reveille Company, or some such name."

"Yes."

"Making tons of money, I hear."

"Yes."

"You're a profiteer, G.J."

"I'm not. Long since I decided I must give away all my extra profits."

"Ever go and look at your factory?"

"No."

"Any nice young girls working there?"

"I don't know."

"If there are, are they decently treated?"

"Don't know that, either."

"Why don't you go and see?"

"It's no business of mine."

"Yes, it is. Aren't you making yourself glorious as a philanthropist
out of the thing?"

"I tell you it's no business of mine," he insisted evenly. "I couldn't
do anything if I went. I've no status."

"Rotten system."

"Possibly. But systems can't be altered like that. Systems alter
themselves, and they aren't in a hurry about it. This system isn't
new, though it's new to you."

"You people in London don't know what work is."

"And what about your Clyde strikes?" G.J. retorted.

"Well, all that's settled now," said Concepcion rather uneasily, like
a champion who foresees a fight but lacks confidence.

"Yes, but--" G.J. suddenly altered his tone to the persuasive: "You
must know all about those strikes. What was the real cause? We don't
understand them here."

"If you really want to know--nerves," she said earnestly and
triumphantly.

"Nerves?"

"Overwork. No rest. No change. Everlasting punishment. The one
incomprehensible thing to me is that the whole of Glasgow didn't go on
strike and stay out for ever."

"There's just as much overwork in London as there is on the Clyde."

"There's a lot more talking--Parliament, Cabinet, Committees. You
should hear what they say about it in Glasgow."

"Con," he said kindly, "you don't suspect it, but you're childish.
It's the job of one part of London to talk. If that part of London
didn't talk your tribes on the Clyde couldn't work, because they
wouldn't know what to do, nor how to do it. Talking has to come
before working, and let me tell you it's more difficult, and it's more
killing, because it's more responsible. Excuse this common sense made
easy for beginners, but you brought it on yourself."

She frowned. "And what do you do? Do you talk or work?" She smiled.

"I'll tell you this!" said he, smiling candidly and benevolently. "It
took me a dickens of a time really to _put_ myself into anything that
meant steady effort. I'd lost the habit. Natural enough, and I'm not
going into sackcloth about it. However, I'm improving. I'm going
to take on the secretaryship of the Lechford Committee. Some of 'em
mayn't want me, but they'll have to have me. And when they've got
me they'll have to look out. All of them, including Queen and her
mother."

"Will it take the whole of your time?"

"Yes. I'm doing three days a week now."

"I suppose you think you've beaten me."

"Con, I do ask you not to be a child."

"But I am a child. Why don't you humour me? You know I've had a
nervous breakdown. You used to humour me."

He shook his head.

"Humouring you won't do _your_ nervous breakdown any good. It might
some women's--but not yours."

"You shall humour me!" she cried. "I haven't told you half my ruin.
Do you know I meant to love Carly all my life. I felt sure I should.
Well, I can't! It's gone, all that feeling--already! In less than two
years! And now I'm only sorry for him and sorry for myself. Isn't it
horrible? Isn't it horrible?"

"Try not to think," he murmured.

She sat up impetuously.

"Don't talk such damned nonsense! 'Try not to think'! Why, my
frightful unhappiness is the one thing that keeps me alive."

"Yes," G.J. yielded. "It was nonsense."

She sank back. He saw moisture in her eyes and felt it in his own.




Chapter 28

SALOME


Lady Queenie arrived in haste, as though relentless time had pursued
her up the stairs.

"Why, you're in the dark here!" she exclaimed impatiently, and
impatiently switched on several lights. "Sorry I'm late, G.J.," she
said perfunctorily, without taking any trouble to put conviction into
her voice. "How have you two been getting on?"

She looked at Concepcion and G.J. in a peculiar way, inquisitorial and
implicatory.

Then, towards the door:

"Come in, come in, Dialin."

A young soldier with the stripe of a lance-corporal entered, slightly
nervous and slightly defiant.

"And you, Miss I-forget-your-name."

A young woman entered; she had very red lips and very high heels, and
was both more nervous and more defiant than the young soldier.

"This is Mr. Dialin, you know, Con, second ballet-master at the
Ottoman. I met him by sheer marvellous chance. He's only got ten
minutes; he hasn't really got that; but he's going to see me do my
Salome dance."

Lady Queenie made no attempt to introduce Miss I-forget-your-name, who
of her own accord took a chair with a curious, dashed effrontery. It
appeared that she was attached to Mr. Dialin. Lady Queenie cast off
rapidly gloves, hat and coat, and then, having rushed to the bell and
rung it fiercely several times, came back to the chaise-longue and
gazed at it and at the surrounding floor.

"Would you mind, Con?"

Concepcion rose. Lady Queenie, rushing off again, pushed several more
switches, and from a thick cluster of bulbs in front of a large mirror
at the end of the room there fell dazzling sheets of light. A footman
presented himself.

"Push the day-bed right away towards the window," she commanded.

The footman inclined and obeyed, and the lance-corporal superiorly
helped him. Then the footman was told to energise the gramophone,
which in its specially designed case stood in a corner. The footman
seemed to be on intimate terms with the gramophone. Meanwhile Lady
Queenie, with a safety-pin, was fastening the back hem of her short
skirt to the front between the knees. Still bending, she took her
shoes off. Her scent impregnated the room.

"You see, it will be barefoot," she explained to Mr. Dialin.

The walls of London were already billed with an early announcement of
the marvels of the Pageant of Terpsichore, which was to occur at the
Albert Hall, under the superintendence of the greatest modern English
painters, in aid of a fund for soldiers disabled by deafness. The
performers were all ladies of the upper world, ladies bearing names
for the most part as familiar as the names of streets--and not a
stage-star among them. Amateurism was to be absolutely untainted by
professionalism in the prodigious affair; therefore the prices of
tickets ruled high, and queens had conferred their patronage.

Lady Queenie removed several bracelets and a necklace, and, seizing a
plate, deposited it on the carpet.

"That piece of bread-and-butter," she said, "is the head of my beloved
John."

The clever footman started the gramophone, and Lady Queenie began
to dance. The lance-corporal walked round her, surveying her at all
angles, watching her like a tiger, imitating movements, suggesting
movements, sketching emotions with his arm, raising himself at
intervals on the toes of his thick boots. After a few moments
Concepcion glanced at G.J., conveying to him a passionate, adoring
admiration of Queen's talent.

G.J., startled by her brightened eyes so suddenly full of temperament,
nodded to please her. But the fact was that he saw naught to admire in
the beautiful and brazen amateur's performance. He wondered that she
could not have discovered something more original than to follow the
footsteps of Maud Allan in a scene which years ago had become stale.
He wondered that, at any rate, Concepcion should not perceive the
poor, pretentious quality of the girlish exhibition. And as he looked
at the mincing Dialin he pictured the lance-corporal helping to serve
a gun. And as he looked at the youthful, lithe Queenie posturing in
the shower-bath of rays amid the blazing chromatic fantasy of the
room, and his nostrils twitched to her pungent perfume, he pictured
the reverberating shell-factory on the Clyde where girls had their
scalps torn off by unappeasable machinery, and the filling-factory
where five thousand girls stripped themselves naked in order to lessen
the danger of being blown to bits.... After a climax of capering
Queen fell full length on her stomach upon the carpet, her soft chin
accurately adjusted to the edge of the plate. The music ceased. The
gramophone gnashed on the disc until the footman lifted its fang.

Miss I-forget-your-name raised both her feet from the floor, stuck her
legs out in a straight, slanting line, and condescendingly clapped.
Then, seeing that Queen was worrying the piece of bread-and-butter
with her teeth, she exclaimed in agitation:

"Ow my!"

Mr. Dialin assisted the breathless Queen to rise, and they went off
into a corner and he talked to her in low tones. Soon he looked at his
wrist-watch and caught the summoning eye of Miss I-forget-your-name.

"But it's pretty all right, isn't it?" said Queen.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" he soothed her with an expert's casualness.
"Naturally, you want to work it up. You fell beautifully. Now you go
and see Crevelli--he's the man."

"I shall get him to come here. What's his address?"

"I don't know. He's just moved. But you'll see it in the April number
of _The Dancing Times_."

As the footman was about to escort Mr. Dialin and his urgent lady
downstairs Queen ordered:

"Bring me up a whisky-and-soda."

"It's splendid, Queen," said Concepcion enthusiastically when the two
were alone with G.J.

"I'm so glad you think so, darling. How are you, darling?" She kissed
the older woman affectionately, fondly, on the lips, and then gave
G.J. a challenging glance.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and called out very loud: "Robin! I want you at
once."

The secretarial Miss Robinson, carrying a note-book, appeared like
magic from the inner room.

"Get me the April number of _The Dancing News_."

"_Times_," G.J. corrected.

"Well, _Times_. It's all the same. And write to Mr. Opson and say
that we really must have proper dressing-room accommodation. It's most
important."

"Yes, your ladyship. Your ladyship has the sub-committee as to
entrance arrangements for the public at half-past six."

"I shan't go. Telephone to them. I've got quite enough to do without
that. I'm utterly exhausted. Don't forget about _The Dancing Times_
and to write to Mr. Opson."

"Yes, your ladyship."

"G.J.," said Queen after Robin had gone, "you are a pig if you don't
go on that sub-committee as to entrance arrangements. You know what
the Albert Hall is. They'll make a horrible mess of it, and it's just
the sort of thing you can do better than anybody."

"Yes. But a pig I am," answered G.J. firmly. Then he added: "I'll tell
you how you might have avoided all these complications."

"How?"

"By having no pageant and simply going round collecting subscriptions.
Nobody would have refused you. And there'd have been no expenses to
come off the total."

Lady Queenie put her lips together.

"Has he been behaving in this style to you, Con?"

"A little--now and then," said Concepcion.

Later, when the chaise-longue and Queen's shoes had been replaced, and
the tea-things and the head of John the Baptist taken away, and
all the lights extinguished save one over the mantelpiece, and Lady
Queenie had nearly finished the whisky-and-soda, and nothing remained
of the rehearsal except the safety-pin between Lady Queenie's knees,
G.J. was still waiting for her to bethink herself of the Hospitals
subject upon which he had called by special request and appointment
to see her. He took oath not to mention it first. Shortly afterwards,
stiff in his resolution, he departed.

In three minutes he was in the smoking-room of his club, warming
himself at a fine, old, huge, wasteful grate, in which burned such
a coal fire as could not have been seen in France, Italy, Germany,
Austria, Russia, nor anywhere on the continent of Europe. The war had
as yet changed nothing in the impregnable club, unless it was that
ordinary matches had recently been substituted for the giant matches
on which the club had hitherto prided itself. The hour lay neglected
midway between tea and dinner, and there were only two other members
in the vast room--solitaries, each before his own grand fire.

G.J. took up _The Times_, which his duties had prevented him from
reading at large in the morning. He wandered with a sense of ease
among its multifarious pages, and, in full leisure, brought his
information up to date concerning the state of the war and of the
country. Air-raids by Zeppelins were frequent, and some authorities
talked magniloquently about the "defence of London." Hundreds of
people had paid immense sums for pictures and objects of art at the
Red Cross Sale at Christie's, one of the most successful social events
of the year. The House of Commons was inquisitive about Mesopotamia
as a whole, and one British Army was still trying to relieve another
British Army besieged in Kut. German submarine successes were
obviously disquieting. The supply of beer was reduced. There were to
be forty principal aristocratic dancers in the Pageant of Terpsichore.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer had budgeted for five hundred
millions, and was very proud. The best people were at once proud and
scared of the new income tax at 5s. in the £. They expressed the
fear that such a tax would kill income or send it to America. The
theatrical profession was quite sure that the amusements tax would
involve utter ruin for the theatrical profession, and the match trade
was quite sure that the match tax would put an end to matches, and
some unnamed modest individuals had apparently decided that the travel
tax must and forthwith would be dropped. The story of the evacuation
of Gallipoli had grown old and tedious. Cranks were still vainly
trying to prove to the blunt John Bullishness of the Prime Minister
that the Daylight Saving Bill was not a piece of mere freak
legislation. The whole of the West End and all the inhabitants of
country houses in Britain had discovered a new deity in Australia
and spent all their spare time and lungs in asserting that all other
deities were false and futile; his earthly name was Hughes. Jan Smuts
was fighting in the primeval forests of East Africa. The Germans were
discussing their war aims; and on the Verdun front they had reached
Mort Homme in the usual way, that was, according to the London Press,
by sacrificing more men than any place could possibly be worth; still,
they had reached Mort Homme. And though our losses and the French
losses were everywhere--one might assert, so to speak--negligible,
nevertheless the steadfast band of thinkers and fact-facers who held
a monopoly of true patriotism were extremely anxious to extend the
Military Service Act, so as to rope into the Army every fit male in
the island except themselves.

The pages of _The Times_ grew semi-transparent, and G.J. descried
Concepcion moving mysteriously in a mist behind them. Only then did he
begin effectively to realise her experiences and her achievement and
her ordeal on the distant, romantic Clyde. He said to himself: "I
could never have stood what she has stood." She was a terrific
woman; but because she was such a mixture of the mad-heroic and the
silly-foolish, he rather condescended to her. She lacked what he was
sure he possessed, and what he prized beyond everything--poise. And
had she truly had a nervous breakdown, or was that fancy? Did she
truly despair of herself as a ruined woman, doubly ruined, or was
she acting a part, as much in order to impress herself as in order to
impress others? He thought the country and particularly its Press,
was somewhat like Concepcion as a complex. He condescended to Queenie
also, not bitterly, but with sardonic pity. There she was, unalterable
by any war, instinctively and ruthlessly working out her soul and her
destiny. The country was somewhat like Queenie too. But, of course,
comparison between Queenie and Concepcion was absurd. He had had to
defend himself to Concepcion. And had he not defended himself?

True, he had begun perhaps too slowly to work for the war; however,
he had begun. What else could he have done beyond what he had done?
Become a special constable? Grotesque. He simply could not see himself
as a special constable, and if the country could not employ him more
usefully than in standing on guard over an electricity works or a
railway bridge in the middle of the night, the country deserved to
lose his services. Become a volunteer? Even more grotesque. Was he, a
man turned fifty, to dress up and fall flat on the ground at the
word of some fantastic jackanapes, or stare into vacancy while some
inspecting general examined his person as though it were a tailor's
mannikin? He had tried several times to get into a Government
department which would utilise his brains, but without success. And
the club hummed with the unimaginable stories related by disappointed
and dignified middle-aged men whose too eager patriotism had been
rendered ridiculous by the vicious foolery of Government departments.
No! He had some work to do and he was doing it. People were looking
to him for decision, for sagacity, for initiative; he supplied these
things. His work might grow even beyond his expectations; but if it
did not he should not worry. He felt that, unfatigued, he could and
would contribute to the mass of the national resolution in the latter
and more racking half of the war.

Morally, he was profiting by the war. Nay, more, in a deep sense he
was enjoying it. The immensity of it, the terror of it, the idiocy
of it, the splendour of it, its unique grandeur as an illustration of
human nature, thrilled the spectator in him. He had little fear for
the result. The nations had measured themselves; the factors of the
equation were known. Britain conceivably might not win, but she could
never lose. And he did not accept the singular theory that unless she
won this war another war would necessarily follow. He had, in spite
of all, a pretty good opinion of mankind, and would not exaggerate
its capacity for lunatic madness. The worst was over when Paris was
definitely saved. Suffering would sink and die like a fire. Privations
were paid for day by day in the cash of fortitude. Taxes would always
be met. A whole generation, including himself, would rapidly vanish
and the next would stand in its place. And at worst, the path of
evolution was unchangeably appointed. A harsh, callous philosophy.
Perhaps.

What impressed him, and possibly intimidated him beyond anything else
whatever, was the onset of the next generation. He thought of Queenie,
of Mr. Dialin, of Miss I-forget-your-name, of Lieutenant Molder. How
unconsciously sure of themselves and arrogant in their years! How
strong! How unapprehensive! (And yet he had just been taking credit
for his own freedom from apprehensiveness!) They were young--and he
was so no longer. Pooh! (A brave "pooh"!) He was wiser than they. He
had acquired the supreme and subtly enjoyable faculty, which they had
yet painfully to acquire, of nice, sure, discriminating, all-weighing
judgment ... Concepcion had divested herself of youth. And Christine,
since he knew her, had never had any youthfulness save the physical.
There were only these two.

Said a voice behind him:

"You dining here to-night?"

"I am."

"Shall we crack a bottle together?" (It was astonishing and deplorable
how clichés survived in the best clubs!)

"By all means."

The voice spoke lower:

"That Bollinger's all gone at last."

"You were fearing the worst the last time I saw you," said G.J.

"Auction afterwards?" the voice suggested.

"Afraid I can't," said G.J. after a moment's hesitation. "I shall have
to leave early."




Chapter 29

THE STREETS


After dinner G.J. walked a little eastwards from the club, and,
entering Leicester Square from the south, crossed it, and then turned
westwards again on the left side of the road leading to Piccadilly
Circus. It was about the time when Christine usually went from her
flat to her Promenade. Without admitting a definite resolve to see
Christine that evening he had said to himself that he would rather
like to see her, or that he wouldn't mind seeing her, and that he
might, if the mood took him, call at Cork Street and catch her before
she left. Having advanced thus far in the sketch of his intentions,
he had decided that it would be a pity not to take precautions to
encounter her in the street, assuming that she had already started but
had not reached the theatre. The chance of meeting her on her way
was exceedingly small; nevertheless he would not miss it. Hence his
roundabout route; and hence his selection of the chaste as against
the unchaste pavement of Coventry Street. He knew very little
of Christine's professional arrangements, but he did know, from
occasional remarks of hers, that owing to the need for economy and the
difficulty of finding taxis she now always walked to the Promenade on
dry nights, and that from a motive of self-respect she always took
the south side of Piccadilly and the south side of Coventry Street in
order to avoid the risk of ever being mistaken for something which she
was not.

It was a dry night, but very cloudy. Points of faint illumination,
mysteriously travelling across the heavens and revealing the
otherwise invisible cushioned surface of the clouds, alone showed that
searchlights were at their work of watching over the heedless town.
Entertainments had drawn in the people from the streets; motor-buses
were half empty; implacable parcels-vans, with thin, exhausted boys
scarcely descried on their rear perches, forced the more fragile
traffic to yield place to them. Footfarers were few, except on the
north side of Coventry Street, where officers, soldiers, civilians,
police and courtesans marched eternally to and fro, peering at one
another in the thick gloom that, except in the immediate region of
a lamp, put all girls, the young and the ageing, the pretty and
the ugly, the good-natured and the grasping, on a sinister enticing
equality. And they were all, men and women and vehicles, phantoms
flitting and murmuring and hooting in the darkness. And the violet
glow-worms that hung in front of theatres and cinemas seemed to mark
the entrances to unimaginable fastnesses, and the side streets seemed
to lead to the precipitous edges of the universe where nothing was.

G.J. recognised Christine just beyond the knot of loiterers at the
Piccadilly Tube. The improbable had happened. She was walking at what
was for her a rather quick pace, purposeful and preoccupied. For an
instant the recognition was not mutual; he liked the uninviting stare
that she gave him as he stopped.

"It is thou?" she exclaimed, and her dimly-seen face softened suddenly
into a delighted, adoring smile.

He was moved by the passion which she still had for him. He felt
vaguely and yet acutely an undischarged obligation in regard to
her. It was the first time he had met her in such circumstances. A
constraint fell between them. In five minutes she would have been in
her Promenade engaged upon her highly technical business, displaying
her attractions while appearing to protect herself within a virginal
timidity (for this was her natural method). In any case, even had
he not set forth on purpose to find her, he could scarcely have
accompanied her to the doors of the theatre and there left her to the
night's routine. They both hesitated, and then, without a word, he
turned aside and she followed close, acquiescent by training and by
instinct. Knowing his sure instinct for what was proper, she knew at
once that hazard had saved her from the night's routine, and she was
full of quiet triumph. He, of course, though absolutely loyal to her,
had for dignity's sake to practise the duplicity of pretending to make
up his mind what he should do.

They went through the Tube station and were soon in one of the
withdrawn streets between Coventry Street and Pall Mall East. The
episode had somehow the air of an adventure. He looked at her; the
hat was possibly rather large, but, in truth, she was the image of
refinement, delicacy, virtue, virtuous surrender. He thought it was
marvellous that there should exist such a woman as she. And he thought
how marvellous was the protective vastness of the town, beneath whose
shield he was free--free to live different lives simultaneously, to
make his own laws, to maintain indefinitely exciting and delicious
secrecies. Not half a mile off were Concepcion and Queen, and his
amour was as safe from them as if he had hidden it in the depths of
some hareemed Asiatic city.

Christine said politely:

"But I detain thee?"

"As for that," he replied, "what does that matter, after all?"

"Thou knowest," she said in a new tone, "I am all that is most
worried. In this London they are never willing to leave you in peace."

"What is it, my poor child?" he asked benevolently.

"They talk of closing the Promenade," she answered.

"Never!" he murmured easily, reassuringly.

He remembered the night years earlier when, as a protest against some
restrictive action of a County Council, the theatre of varieties whose
Promenade rivalled throughout the whole world even the Promenade of
the Folies-Bergère, shut its doors and darkened its blazing facade,
and the entire West End seemed to go into a kind of shocked mourning.
But the next night the theatre had reopened as usual and the Promenade
had been packed. Close the Promenades! Absurd! Not the full bench
of archbishops and bishops could close the Promenades! The thing was
inconceivable, especially in war-time, when human nature was so human.

"But it is quite serious!" she cried. "Everyone speaks of it.... What
idiots! What frightful lack of imagination! And how unjust! What do
they suppose we are going to do, we other women? Do they intend to put
respectable women like me on to the pavement? It is a fantastic idea!
Fantastic!... And the night-clubs closing too!"

"There is always the other place."

"The Ottoman? Do not speak to me of the Ottoman. Moreover, that also
will be suppressed. They are all mad." She gave a great sigh. "Oh!
What a fool I was to leave Paris! After all, in Paris, they know what
it is, life! However, I weary thee. Let us say no more about it."

She controlled her agitation. The subject was excessively delicate,
and that she should have expressed herself so violently on it
showed the powerful reality of the emotion it had aroused in her.
Unquestionably the decency of her livelihood was at stake. She had
convinced him of the peril. But what could he say? He could not say,
"Do not despair. You are indispensable; therefore you will not be
dispensed with. These crises have often arisen before, and they always
end in the same manner. And are there not the big hotels, the chic
cinemas, certain restaurants? Not to mention the clientèle which you
must have made for yourself?" Such remarks were impossible. But not
more impossible than the very basis of his relations with her. He was
aware again of the weight of an undischarged obligation to her. His
behaviour towards her had always been perfection, and yet was she not
his creditor? He had a conscience, and it was illogical and extremely
inconvenient.

At that moment a young man flew along the silent, shadowed street, and
as he passed them shouted somewhat hysterically the one word:

"Zepps!"

Christine clutched his arm. They stood still.

"Do not be frightened," said G.J. with perfect tranquillity.

"But I hear guns," she protested.

He, too, heard the distant sounds of guns, and it occurred to him that
the sounds had begun earlier, while they were talking.

"I expect it's only anti-aircraft practice," he replied. "I seem to
remember seeing a warning in the paper about there being practice one
of these nights."

Christine, increasing the pressure on his arm and apparently trying to
drag him away, complained:

"They ought to give warning of raids. That is elementary. This country
is so bizarre."

"Oh!" said G.J., full of wisdom and standing his ground. "That would
never do. Warnings would make panics, and they wouldn't help in the
least. We are just as safe here as anywhere. Even supposing there
is an air-raid, the chance of any particular spot being hit must be
several million to one against. And I don't think for a moment there
is an air-raid."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't," G.J. answered with calm superiority. The fact was
that he did not know why he thought there was not an air-raid.
To assume that there was not an air-raid, in the absence of proof
positive of the existence of an air-raid, was with him constitutional:
a state of mind precisely as illogical, biased and credulous as the
alarmist mood which he disdained in others. Also he was lacking in
candour, for after a few seconds the suspicion crept into his mind
that there might indeed be an air-raid--and he would not utter it.

"In any case," said Christine, "they always give warning in Paris."

He thought:

"I'd better get this woman home," and said aloud: "Come along."

"But is it safe?" she asked anxiously.

He saw that she was the primeval woman, exactly like Concepcion and
Queen. First she wanted to run, and then when he was ready to run
she asked: "Is it safe?" And he felt very indulgent and comfortably
masculine. He admitted that it would be absurd to expect the conduct
of a frightened Christine to be governed by the operations of reason.
He was not annoyed, because personally he simply did not care a whit
whether they moved or not. While they were hesitating a group of
people came round the corner. These people were talking loudly, and
as they approached G.J. discerned that one of them was pointing to the
sky.

"There she is! There she is!" shouted an eager voice. Seeing more
human society in G.J. and Christine, the group stopped near them.

G.J. gazed in the indicated direction, and lo! there was a point of
light in the sky.

And then guns suddenly began to sound much nearer.

"What did I tell you?" said another voice. "I told you they'd cleared
the corner at the bottom of St. James's Street for a gun. Now they've
got her going. Good for us they're shooting southwards."

Christine was shaking on G.J.'s arm.

"It's all right! It's all right!" he murmured compassionately, and she
tightened her clutch on him in thanks.

He looked hard at the point of light, which might have been anything.
The changing forms of thin clouds continually baffled the vision.

"By god!" shouted the first voice. "She's hit. See her stagger? She's
hit. She'll blaze up in a moment. One down last week. Another this.
Look at her now. She's afire."

The group gave a weak cheer.

Then the clouds cleared for an instant and revealed a crescent. G.J.
said:

"That's the moon, you idiots. It's not a Zeppelin."

Even as he spoke he wondered, and regretted, that he should be calling
them idiots. They were complete strangers to him. The group vanished,
crestfallen, round another corner. G.J. laughed to Christine. Then the
noise of guns was multiplied. That he was with Christine in the midst
of an authentic air-raid could no longer be doubted. He was conscious
of the wine he had drunk at the club. He had the sensation of human
beings, men like himself, who ate and drank and laced their boots,
being actually at that moment up there in the sky with intent to
kill him and Christine. It was a marvellous sensation, terrible but
exquisite. And he had the sensation of other human beings beyond the
sea, giving deliberate orders in German for murder, murdering for
their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and
either laced their boots or had them laced daily. And the staggering
apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of war swept through his soul.




Chapter 30

THE CHILD'S ARM


"You see," he said to Christine, "it was not a Zeppelin.... We shall
be quite safe here."

But in that last phrase he had now confessed to her the existence
of an air-raid. He knew that he was not behaving with the maximum
of sagacity. There were, for example, hotels with subterranean
grill-rooms close by, and there were similar refuges where danger
would be less than in the street, though the street was narrow and
might be compared to a trench. And yet he had said, "We shall be quite
safe here." In others he would have condemned such an attitude.

Now, however, he realised that he was very like others. An inactive
fatalism had seized him. He was too proud, too idle, too negligent,
too curious, to do the wise thing. He and Christine were in the
air-raid, and in it they should remain. He had just the senseless,
monkeyish curiosity of the staring crowd so lyrically praised by
the London Press. He was afraid, but his curiosity and inertia were
stronger than his fear. Then came a most tremendous explosion--the
loudest sound, the most formidable physical phenomenon that G.J. had
ever experienced in his life. The earth under their feet trembled.
Christine gave a squeal and seemed to subside to the ground, but he
pulled her up again, not in calm self-possession, but by the sheer
automatism of instinct. A spasm of horrible fright shot through him.
He thought, in awe and stupefaction:

"A bomb!"

He thought about death and maiming and blood. The relations between
him and those everyday males aloft in the sky seemed to be appallingly
close. After the explosion perfect silence--no screams, no noise of
crumbling--perfect silence, and yet the explosion seemed still to
dominate the air! Ears ached and sang. Something must be done. All
theories of safety had been smashed to atoms in the explosion. G.J.
dragged Christine along the street, he knew not why. The street was
unharmed. Not the slightest trace in it, so far as G.J. could tell in
the gloom, of destruction! But where the explosion had been, whether
east, west, south or north, he could not guess. Except for the
disturbance in his ears the explosion might have been a hallucination.

Suddenly he saw at the end of the street a wide thoroughfare, and he
could not be sure what thoroughfare it was. Two motor-buses passed
the end of the street at mad speed; then two taxis; then a number of
people, men and women, running hard. Useless and silly to risk the
perils of that wide thoroughfare! He turned back with Christine. He
got her to run. In the thick gloom he looked for an open door or a
porch, but there was none. The houses were like the houses of the
dead. He made more than one right angle turn. Christine gave a sign
that she could go no farther. He ceased trying to drag her. He was
recovering himself. Once more he heard the guns--childishly feeble
after the explosion of the bomb. After all, one spot was as safe as
another.

The outline of a building seemed familiar. It was an abandoned chapel;
he knew he was in St. Martin's Street. He was about to pull Christine
into the shelter of the front of the chapel, when something happened
for which he could not find a name. True, it was an explosion. But the
previous event had been an explosion, and this one was a thousandfold
more intimidating. The earth swayed up and down. The sound alone of
the immeasurable cataclysm annihilated the universe. The sound and the
concussion transcended what had been conceivable. Both the sound
and the concussion seemed to last for a long time. Then, like an
afterthought, succeeded the awful noise of falling masses and the
innumerable crystal tinkling of shattered glass. This noise ceased and
began again....

G.J. was now in a strange condition of mild wonder. There was silence
in the dark solitude of St. Martin's Street. Then the sound of guns
supervened once more, but they were distant guns. G.J. discovered that
he was not holding Christine, and also that, instead of being in the
middle of the street, he was leaning against the door of a house.
He called faintly, "Christine!" No reply. "In a moment," he said to
himself, "I must go out and look for her. But I am not quite ready
yet." He had a slight pain in his side; it was naught; it was naught,
especially in comparison with the strange conviction of weakness and
confusion.

He thought:

"We've not won this war yet," and he had qualms.

One poor lamp burned in the street. He started to walk slowly and
uncertainly towards it. Near by he saw a hat on the ground. It was his
own. He put it on. Suddenly the street lamp went out. He walked on,
and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass. Then the road was clear
again. He halted. Not a sign of Christine! He decided that she must
have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself
either in Leicester Square or Lower Regent Street, would by instinct
run home. At any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were
together at the instant of the explosion. She must exist, and she must
have had the power of motion. He remembered that he had had a stick;
he had it no longer. He turned back and, taking from his pocket the
electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the
road for his stick. The sole object of interest which the torch
revealed was a child's severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on
it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand.
The blood from the other end had stained the ground. G.J. abruptly
switched off the torch. Nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of
the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (A month elapsed
before he could mention his discovery of the child's arm to anyone at
all.) The arm lay there as if it had been thrown there. Whence had it
come? No doubt it had come from over the housetops....

He smelt gas, and then he felt cold water in his boots. Water was
advancing in a flood along the street. "Broken mains, of course," he
said to himself, and was rather pleased with the promptness of his
explanation. At the elbow of St. Martin's Street, where a new dim
vista opened up, he saw policemen, then firemen; then he heard the
beat of a fire-engine, upon whose brass glinted the reflection of
flames that were flickering in a gap between two buildings. A huge
pile of debris encumbered the middle of the road. The vista was
closed by a barricade, beyond which was a pressing crowd. "Stand clear
there!" said a policeman to him roughly. "There's a wall going to
fall there any minute." He walked off, hurrying with relief from the
half-lit scene of busy, dim silhouettes. He could scarcely understand
it; and he was incapable of replying to the policeman. He wanted to be
alone and to ponder himself back into perfect composure. At the elbow
again he halted afresh. And as he stood figures in couples, bearing
stretchers, strode past him. The stretchers were covered with cloths
that hung down. Not the faintest sound came from beneath the cloths.

After a time he went on. The other exit of St. Martin's Street was
being barricaded as he reached it. A large crowd had assembled,
and there was a sound of talking like steady rain. He pushed grimly
through the crowd. He was set apart from the idle crowd. He would tell
the crowd nothing. In a minute he was going westwards on the left
side of Coventry Street again. The other side was as populous with
saunterers as ever. The violet glow-worms still burned in front of the
theatres and cinemas. Motor-buses swept by; taxis swept by; parcels
vans swept by, hooting. A newsman was selling papers at the corner.
Was he in a dream now? Or had he been in a dream in St. Martin's
Street? The vast capacity of the capital for digesting experience
seemed to endanger his reason. Save for the fragments of eager
conversation everywhere overheard, there was not a sign of disturbance
of the town's habitual life. And he was within four hundred yards
of the child's arm and of the spot where the procession of
stretcher-bearers had passed. One thought gradually gained ascendancy
in his mind: "I am saved!" It became exultant: "I might have been
blown to bits, but I am saved!" Despite the world's anguish and the
besetting imminence of danger, life and the city which he inhabited
had never seemed so enchanting, so lovely, as they did then. He
hurried towards Cork Street, hopeful.




Chapter 31

"ROMANCE"


At two periods of the day Marthe, with great effort and for
professional purposes, achieved some degree of personal tidiness.
The first period began at about four o'clock in the afternoon. By six
o'clock or six-thirty she had slipped back into the sloven. The second
period began at about ten o'clock at night. It was more brilliant
while it lasted, but owing to the accentuation of Marthe's
characteristics by fatigue it seldom lasted more than an hour. When
Marthe opened the door to G.J. she was at her proudest, intensely
conscious of being clean and neat, and unwilling to stand any nonsense
from anybody. Of course she was polite to G.J. as the chief friend of
the establishment and a giver of good tips, but she deprecated calls
by gentlemen in the evening, for unless they were made by appointment
the risk of complications at once arose.

The mention of an air-raid rendered her definitely inimical. Formerly
Marthe had been more than average nervous in air-raids, but she had
grown used to them and now defied them. As she kept all windows closed
on principle she heard less of raids than some people. G.J. did not
explain the circumstances. He simply asked if Madame had returned. No,
Madame had not returned. True, Marthe had not been unaware of guns and
things, but there was no need to worry; Madame must have arrived at
the theatre long before the guns started. Marthe really could not be
bothered with these unnecessary apprehensions. She had her duties to
attend to like other folks, and they were heavy, and she washed her
hands of air-raids; she accepted no responsibility for them; for her,
within the flat, they did not exist, and the whole German war-machine
was thereby foiled. G.J. was on the point of a full explanation,
but he checked himself. A recital of the circumstances would not
immediately help, and it might hinder. Concealing his astonishment at
the excesses of which unimaginative stolidity is capable, even in an
Italian, he turned down the stairs again.

He stopped in the middle of the stairs, because he did not know what
he was going to do, and he seemed to lack force for decisions. No harm
could have happened to Christine; she had run off, that was certain.
And yet--had he not often heard of the impish tricks of explosions?
Of one person being taken and another left? Was it not possible that
Christine had been blown to the other end of the street, and was now
lying there?... No! Either she was on her way home, or, automatically,
she had scurried to the theatre, which was close to St. Martin's
Street, and been too fearful to venture forth again. Perhaps she was
looking somewhere for _him_. Yet she might be dead. In any case, what
could he do? Ring up the police? It was too soon. He decided that he
would wait in Cork Street for half an hour. This plan appealed to him
for the mere reason that it was negative.

As he opened the front door he saw a taxi standing outside. The
taxi-man had taken one of the lamps from its bracket, and was looking
into the interior of the cab, which was ornate with toy-curtains
and artificial flowers to indicate to the world that he was an
owner-driver and understood life. Hearing the noise of the door,
he turned his head--he was wearing a bowler hat and a smart white
muffler--and said to G.J., with self-respecting respect for a
gentleman:

"This is No. 170, isn't it, sir?"

"Yes."

The taxi-man jerked his head to draw G.J.'s attention to the interior
of the vehicle. Christine was half on the seat and half on the floor,
unconscious, with shut eyes.

Instantly G.J. was conscious of making a complete recovery from all
the effects, physical and moral, of the air-raid.

"Just help me to get her out, will you?" he said in a casual tone,
"and I'll carry her upstairs. Where did you pick the lady up?"

"Strand, sir, nearly opposite Romano's."

"The dickens you did!"

"Shock from air-raid, I suppose, sir."

"Probably."

"She did seem a little upset when she hailed me, or I shouldn't have
taken her. I was off home, and I only took her to oblige."

The taxi-man ran quickly round to the other side of the cab and
entered it by the off-door, behind Christine. Together the men lifted
her up.

"I can manage her," said G.J. calmly.

"Excuse me, sir, you'll have to get hold lower down, so as her
waist'll be nearly as high as your shoulder. My brother's a fireman."

"Right," said G.J. "By the way, what's the fare?"

Holding Christine across his shoulder with the right arm, he
unbuttoned his overcoat with his left hand and took out change from
his trouser pocket for the driver.

"You might pull the door to after me," he said, in response to the
driver's expression of thanks.

"Certainly, sir."

The door banged. He was alone with Christine on the long, dark,
inclement stairs. He felt the contours of her body through her
clothes. She was limp, helpless. She was a featherweight. She was
nothing at all; inexpressibly girlish, pathetic, dear. Never had G.J.
felt as he felt then. He mounted the stairs rather quickly, with firm,
disdaining steps, and, despite his being a little out of breath,
he had a tremendous triumph over the stolidity of Marthe when she
answered his ring. Marthe screamed, and in the scream readjusted her
views concerning air-raids.

"It's queer this swoon lasting such a long time!" he reflected, when
Christine had been deposited on the sofa in the sitting-room, and the
common remedies and tricks tried without result, and Marthe had gone
into the kitchen to make hot water hotter.

He had established absolute empire over Marthe. He had insisted on
Marthe not being silly; and yet, though he had already been
silly himself in his absurd speculations as to the possibility of
Christine's death, he was now in danger of being silly again. Did
ordinary swoons ever continue as this one was continuing? Would
Christine ever come out of it? He stood with his back to the
fireplace, and her head and shoulders were right under him, so that he
looked almost perpendicularly down upon them. Her face was as pale as
ivory; every drop of blood seemed to have left it; the same with
her neck and bosom; her limbs had dropped anyhow, in disarray; a fur
jacket was untidily cast over her black muslin dress. But her waved
hair, fresh from the weekly visit of the professional coiffeur,
remained in the most perfect order.

G.J. looked round the room. It was getting very shabby. Its pale
enamelled shabbiness and the tawdry ugliness of nearly every object
in it had never repelled and saddened him as they did then. The sole
agreeable item was a large photograph of the mistress in a rich silver
frame which he had given her. She would not let him buy knicknacks or
draperies for her drawing-room; she preferred other presents. And now
that she lay in the room, but with no power to animate it, he
knew what the room really looked like; it looked like a dentist's
waiting-room, except that no dentist would expose copies of _La Vie
Parisienne_ to the view of clients. It had no more individuality than
a dentist's waiting-room. Indeed it was a dentist's waiting-room.
He remembered that he had had similar ideas about the room at the
beginning of his acquaintance with Christine; but he had partially
forgotten them, and moreover, they had not by any means been so clear
and desolating as in that moment.

He looked from the photograph to her face. The face was like the
photograph, but in the swoon its wistfulness became unbearable. And
it was so young. What was she? Twenty-seven? She could not be
twenty-eight. No age! A girl! And talk about experience! She had had
scarcely any experience, save one kind of experience. The monotony and
narrowness of her life was terrifying to him. He had fifty interests,
but she had only one. All her days were alike. She had no change
and no holiday; no past and no future; no family; no intimate
friends--unless Marthe was an intimate friend; no horizons, no
prospects. She witnessed life in London through the distorting,
mystifying veil of a foreign language imperfectly understood. She was
the most solitary girl in London, or she would have been were there
not a hundred thousand or so others in nearly the same case.... Stay!
Once she had delicately allowed him to divine that she had been to
Bournemouth with a gentleman for a week-end. He could recall
nothing else. Nightly, or almost nightly, she listened to the same
insufferably tedious jokes in the same insufferably tedious revue. But
the authorities were soon going to deprive her of the opportunity of
doing that. And then she would cease to receive even the education
that revues can furnish, and in her mind no images would survive but
images connected with the material arts of love. For, after all,
what had they truly in common, he and she, but a periodical transient
excitation?

When next he looked at her, her eyes were wide open and a flush was
coming, as imperceptibly as the dawn, into her cheeks. He took her
hands again and rubbed them. Marthe returned, and Christine drank. She
gazed, in weak silence, first at Marthe and then at G.J. After a few
moments no one spoke. Marthe took off Christine's boots, and rubbed
her stockinged feet, and then kissed them violently.

"Madame should go to bed."

"I am better."

Marthe left the room, seeming resentful.

"What has passed?" Christine murmured, without smiling.

"A faint in the taxi, my poor child. That was all," said G.J. calmly.

"But how is it that I find myself here?"

"I carried thee upstairs in my arms."

"Thou?"

"Why not?" He spoke lightly, with careful negligence. "It appears that
thou wast in the Strand."

"Was I? I lost thee. Something tore thee from me. I ran. I ran till I
could not run. I was sure that never more should I see thee alive. Oh!
My Gilbert, what terrible moments! What a catastrophe! Never shall I
forget those moments!"

G.J. said, with bland supremacy:

"But it is necessary that thou shouldst forget them. Master thyself.
Thou knowst now what it is--an air-raid. It was an ordinary air-raid.
There have been many like it. There will be many more. For once we
were in the middle of a raid--by chance. But we are safe--that is
enough."

"But the deaths?"

He shook his head.

"But there must have been many deaths!"

"I do not know. There will have been deaths. There usually are." He
shrugged his shoulders.

Christine sat up and gave a little screech.

"Ah!" She burst out, her features suddenly transformed by enraged
protest. "Why wilt thou act thy cold man?"

He was amazed at the sudden nervous strength she showed.

"But, my little one--"

She cried:

"Why wilt thou act thy cold man? I shall become mad in this sacred
England. I shall become totally mad. You are all the same, all, all,
men and women. You are marvels--let it be so!--but you are not human.
Do you then wish to be taken for telegraph-poles? Always you are
pretending something. Pretending that you have no sentiments. And you
are soaked in sentimentality. But no! You will not show it! You will
not applaud your soldiers in the streets. You will not salute your
flag. You will not salute even a corpse. You have only one phrase: 'It
is nothing'. If you win a battle, 'It is nothing' If you lose one, 'It
is nothing'. If you are nearly killed in an air-raid, 'It is nothing'.
And if you were killed outright and could yet speak, you would say,
with your eternal sneer, 'It is nothing'. You other men, you make love
with the air of turning on a tap. As for your women, god knows--! But
I have a horror of Englishwomen. Prudes but wantons. Can I not guess?
Always hypocrites. Always holding themselves in. My god, that pinched
smile! And your women of the world especially. Have they a natural
gesture? Yet does not everyone know that they are rotten with vice and
perversity? And your actresses!... And they talk of us! Ah, well! For
me, I can say that I earn my living honestly, every son of it. For all
that I receive, I give. And they would throw me on to the pavement to
starve, me whose function in society--"

She collapsed in sobs, and with averted face held out her arms in
appeal. G.J., at once admiring and stricken with compassion, bent
and clasped her neck, and kissed her, and kept his mouth on hers.
Her tears dropped freely on his cheeks. Her sobs shook both of them.
Gradually the sobs decreased in violence and frequency. In an infant's
broken voice she murmured into his mouth:

"My wolf! Is it true--that thou didst carry me here in thy arms? I am
so proud."

He was not in the slightest degree irritated or grieved by her tirade.
But the childlike changeableness and facility of her emotions touched
him. He savoured her youth, and himself felt curiously young. It was
the fact that within the last year he had grown younger.

He thought of great intellectuals, artists, men of action, princes,
kings--historical figures--in whom courtesans had inspired immortal
passion. He thought of the illustrious courtesans who had made
themselves heroic in legend, women whose loves were countless and
often venal, and yet whose renown had come down to posterity as
gloriously as that of supreme poets. He thought of lifelong passionate
attachments, which to the world were inexplicable, and which the world
never tired of leniently discussing. He overheard people saying: "Yes.
Picked her up somewhere, in a Promenade. She worships him, and he
adores her. Don't know where he hides her. You see them about together
sometimes--at concerts, for instance. Mysterious-looking creature she
is. Plays the part very well, too. Strange affair. But, of course,
there's no accounting for these things."

The role attracted him. And there could be no doubt that she did
worship him utterly. He did not analyse his feeling for her--perhaps
could not. She satisfied something in him that was profound. She
never offended his sensibilities, nor wearied him. Her manners were
excellent, her gestures full of grace and modesty, her temperament
extreme. A unique combination! And if the tie between them was not
real and secure, why should he have yearned for her company that night
after the scenes with Concepcion and Queen. Those women challenged
him, discomposed him, fretted him, fought him, left his nerves raw.
She soothed. Why should he not, in the French phrase, "put her among
her own furniture?" In a proper artistic environment, an environment
created by himself, of taste and moderate luxury, she would be
exquisite. She would blossom. And she would blossom for him alone.
She would live for his footstep on her threshold; and when he was
not there she would dream amid cushions like a cat. In the right
environment she would become another being, that was to say, the same
being, but orchidised. And when he was old, when he was sixty-five,
she would still be young, still be under forty and seductive. And the
publishing of his last will and testament, under which she inherited
all, would render her famous throughout all the West End, and the word
"romance" would spring to every lip. He searched in his mind for the
location of suitable flats.

"Is it true that thou didst carry me in thine arms?" repeated
Christine.

He murmured into her mouth:

"Is it true? Can she doubt? The proof, then."

And he picked her up as though she had been a doll, and carried her
into the bedroom. As she lay on the bed, she raised her arm and looked
at the broken wrist-watch and sighed.

"My mascot. It is not a _blague_, my mascot."

Shortly afterwards she began to cry again, at first gently; then sobs
supervened.

"She must sleep," he said firmly.

She shook her head.

"I cannot. I have been too upset. It is impossible that I should
sleep."

"She must."

"Go and buy me a drug."

"If I go and buy her a drug, will she undress and get into bed while I
am away?"

She nodded.

Calling Marthe, and taking the latch-key of the street-door, he went
to his chemist's in Dover Street and bought some potassium bromide and
sal volatile. When he came back Marthe whispered to him:

"She sleeps. She has told me everything as I undressed her. The poor
child!"




Chapter 32

MRS. BRAIDING


G.J. went home at once, partly so that Christine should not be
disturbed, partly because he desired solitude in order to examine and
compose his mind. Mrs. Braiding had left an agreeable modest fire--fit
for cold April--in the drawing-room. He had just sat down in front of
it and was tranquillising himself in the familiar harmonious beauty
of the apartment (which, however, did seem rather insipid after the
decorative excesses of Queen's room), when he heard footsteps on
the little stairway from the upper floor. Mrs. Braiding entered the
drawing-room.

This was a Mrs. Braiding very different from the Mrs. Braiding of
1914, a shameless creature of more rounded contours than of old, and
not quite so spick and span as of old. She was carrying in her arms
that which before the war she could not have conceived herself as
carrying. The being was invisible in wraps, but it was there; and she
seemed to have no shame for it, seemed indeed to be proud of it and
defiant about it.

Braiding's military career had been full of surprises. He had expected
within a few months of joining the colours to be dashing gloriously
and homicidally at panic-stricken Germans across the plains of
Flanders, to be, in fact, saving the Empire at the muzzle of rifle
and the point of bayonet. In truth, he found that for interminable,
innumerable weeks his job was to save the Empire by cleaning harness
on the East Coast of England--for under advice he had transferred to
the artillery. Later, when his true qualifications were discovered,
he had to save the Empire by polishing the buttons and serving the
morning tea and buying the cigarettes of a major who in 1914 had been
a lawyer by profession and a soldier only for fun. The major talked
too much, and to the wrong people. He became lyric concerning the
talents of Braiding to a dandiacal Divisional General at Colchester,
and soon, by the actuating of mysterious forces and the filling up of
many Army forms, Braiding was removed to Colchester, and had to save
the Empire by valeting the Divisonal General. Foiled in one direction,
Braiding advanced in another. By tradition, when a valet marries a
lady's maid, the effect on the birth-rate is naught. And it is certain
that but for the war Braiding would not have permitted himself to act
as he did. The Empire, however, needed citizens. The first rumour that
Braiding had done what in him lay to meet the need spread through
the kitchens of the Albany like a new gospel, incredible and
stupefying--but which imposed itself. The Albany was never the same
again.

All the kitchens were agreed that Mr. Hoape would soon be stranded.
The spectacle of Mrs. Braiding as she slipped out of a morning past
the porter's lodge mesmerised beholders. At last, when things had
reached the limit, Mrs. Braiding slipped out and did not come back.
Meanwhile a much younger sister of hers had been introduced into the
flat. But when Mrs. Braiding went the virgin went also. The flat was
more or less closed, and Mr. Hoape had slept at his club for weeks.
At length the flat was reopened, but whereas three had left it, four
returned.

That a bachelor of Mr. Hoape's fastidiousness should tolerate in his
home a woman with a tiny baby was remarkable; it was as astounding
perhaps as any phenomenon of the war, and a sublime proof that Mr.
Hoape realised that the Empire was fighting for its life. It arose
from the fact that both G.J. and Braiding were men of considerable
sagacity. Braiding had issued an order, after seeing G.J., that his
wife should not leave G.J.'s service. And Mrs. Braiding, too, had her
sense of duty. She was very proud of G.J.'s war-work, and would
have thought it disloyal to leave him in the lurch, and so possibly
prejudice the war-work--especially as she was convinced that he would
never get anybody else comparable to herself.

At first she had been a little apologetic and diffident about her
offspring. But soon the man-child had established an important
position in the flat, and though he was generally invisible, his
individuality pervaded the whole place. G.J. had easily got accustomed
to the new inhabitant. He tolerated and then liked the babe. He had
never nursed it--for such an act would have been excessive--but he had
once stuck his finger in its mouth, and he had given it a perambulator
that folded up. He did venture secretly to hope that Braiding would
not imagine it to be his duty to provide further for the needs of the
Empire.

That Mrs. Braiding had grown rather shameless in motherhood was shown
by her quite casual demeanour as she now came into the drawing-room
with the baby, for this was the first time she had ever come into the
drawing-room with the baby, knowing her august master to be there.

"Mrs. Braiding," said G.J. "That child ought to be asleep."

"He is asleep, sir," said the woman, glancing into the mysteries of
the immortal package, "but Maria hasn't been able to get back yet
because of the raid, and I didn't want to leave him upstairs alone
with the cat. He slept all through the raid."

"It seems some of you have made the cellar quite comfortable."

"Oh, yes, sir. Particularly now with the oilstove and the carpet.
Perhaps one night you'll come down, sir."

"I may have to. I shouldn't have been much surprised to find some
damage here to-night. They've been very close, you know.... Near
Leicester Square." He could not be troubled to say more than that.

"Have they really, sir? It's just like them," said Mrs. Braiding. And
she then continued in exactly the same tone: "Lady Queenie Paulle has
just been telephoning from Lechford House, sir." She still--despite
her marvellous experiences--impishly loved to make extraordinary
announcements as if they were nothing at all. And she felt an uplifted
satisfaction in having talked to Lady Queenie Paulle herself on the
telephone.

"What does _she_ want?" G.J. asked impatiently, and not at all in a
voice proper for the mention of a Lady Queenie to a Mrs. Braiding.
He was annoyed; he resented any disturbance of the repose which he so
acutely needed.

Mrs. Braiding showed that she was a little shocked. The old harassed
look of bearing up against complex anxieties came into her face.

"Her ladyship wished to speak to you, sir, on a matter of importance.
I didn't know _where_ you were, sir."

That last phrase was always used by Mrs. Braiding when she wished to
imply that she could guess where G.J. had been. He did not suppose
that she was acquainted with the circumstances of his amour, but he
had a suspicion amounting to conviction that she had conjectured it,
as men of science from certain derangements in their calculations will
conjecture the existence of a star that no telescope has revealed.

"Well, better leave Lady Queenie alone for to-night."

"I promised her ladyship that I would ring her up again in any case in
a quarter of an hour. That was approximately ten minutes ago."

He could not say:

"Be hanged to your promises!"

Reluctantly he went to the telephone himself, and learnt from Lady
Queenie, who always knew everything, that the raiders were expected to
return in about half an hour, and that she and Concepcion desired his
presence at Lechford House. He replied coldly that he was too tired to
come, and was indeed practically in bed. "But you must come. Don't
you understand we want you?" said Lady Queenie autocratically, adding:
"And don't forget that business about the hospitals. We didn't attend
to it this afternoon, you know." He said to himself: "And whose fault
was that?" and went off angrily, wondering what mysterious power of
convention it was that compelled him to respond to the whim of a girl
whom he scarcely even respected.




Chapter 33

THE ROOF


The main door of LECHFORD HOUSE was ajar, and at the sound of G.J.'s
footsteps on the marble of the porch it opened. Robin, the secretary,
stood at the threshold. Evidently she had been set to wait for him.

"The men-servants are all in the cellars," said she perkily.

G.J. retorted with sardonic bitterness:

"And quite right, too. I'm glad someone's got some sense left."

Yet he did not really admire the men-servants for being in the
cellars. Somehow it seemed mean of them not to be ready to take any
risks, however unnecessary.

Robin, hiding her surprise and confusion in a nervous snigger, banged
the heavy door, and led him through the halls and up the staircases.
As she went forward she turned on electric lamps here and there in
advance, turning them off by the alternative switches after she had
passed them, so that in the vast, shadowed, echoing interior the two
appeared to be preceded by light and pursued by a tide of darkness.
She was mincingly feminine, and very conscious of the fact that G.J.
was a fine gentleman. In the afternoon, and again to-night--at first,
he had taken her for a mere girl; but as she halted under a lamp to
hold a door for him at the entrance to the upper stairs, he perceived
that it must have been a long time since she was a girl. Often had he
warned himself that the fashion of short skirts and revealed stockings
gave a deceiving youthfulness to the middle-aged, and yet nearly every
day he had to learn the lesson afresh.

He was just expecting to be shown into the boudoir when Robin stopped
at a very small door.

"Her ladyship and Mrs. Carlos Smith are out on the roof. This is the
ladder," she said, and illuminated the ladder.

G.J. had no choice but to mount. Luckily he had kept his hat. He put
it on. As he climbed he felt a slight recurrence of the pain in his
side which he had noticed in St. Martin's Street. The roof was a very
strange, tempestuous place, and insecure. He had an impression similar
to that of being at sea, for the wind, which he had scarcely
observed in the street, made melancholy noises in the new protective
wire-netting that stretched over his head. This bomb-catching
contrivance, fastened on thick iron stanchions, formed a sort of
second roof, and was a very solid and elaborate affair which must
have cost much money. The upstreaming light from the ladder-shaft was
suddenly extinguished. He could see nobody, and the loneliness was
uncomfortable.

Somehow, when Robin had announced that the ladies were on the roof he
had imagined the roof as a large, flat expanse. It was nothing of the
kind. So far as he could distinguish in the deep gloom it had leaden
pathways, but on either hand it sloped sharply up or sharply down. He
might have fallen sheer into a chasm, or stumbled against the leaden
side of a slant. He descried a lofty construction of carved masonry
with an iron ladder clamped into it, far transcending the net. Not
immediately did he comprehend that it was merely one of the famous
Lechford chimney-stacks looming gigantic in the night. He walked
cautiously onward and came to a precipice and drew back, startled, and
took another pathway at right angles to the first one. Presently
the protective netting stopped, and he was exposed to heaven; he had
reached the roof of the servants' quarters towards the back of the
house.

He stood still and gazed, accustoming himself to the night. The moon
was concealed, but there were patches of dim stars. He could make out,
across the empty Green Park, the huge silhouette of Buckingham Palace,
and beyond that the tower of Westminster Cathedral. To his left he
could see part of a courtyard or small square, with a fore-shortened
black figure, no doubt a policeman, carrying a flash-lamp. The
tree-lined Mall seemed to be utterly deserted. But Piccadilly showed
a line of faint stationary lights and still fainter moving lights.
A mild hum and the sounds of motor-horns and cab-whistles came from
Piccadilly, where people were abroad in ignorance that the raid was
not really over. All the heavens were continually restless with long,
shifting rays from the anti-aircraft stations, but the rays served
only to prove the power of darkness.

Then he heard quick, smooth footsteps. Two figures, one behind the
other, approached him, almost running, eagerly, girlishly, with
little cries. The first was Queen, who wore a white skirt and a very
close-fitting black jersey. Concepcion also wore a white skirt and a
very close-fitting black jersey, but with a long mantle hung loosely
from the shoulders. Both were bareheaded.

"Isn't it splendid, G.J.?" Queen burst out enthusiastically. Again
G.J. had the sensation of being at sea--perhaps on the deck of a
yacht. He felt that rain ought to have been beating on the face of the
excited and careless girl. Before answering, he turned up the collar
of his overcoat. Then he said:

"Won't you catch a chill?"

"I'm never cold," said Queen. It was true. "I shall always come up
here for raids in future."

"You seem to be enjoying it."

"I love it. I love it. I only thought of it to-night. It's the next
best thing to being a man and being at the Front. It _is_ being at the
Front."

Her face was little more than a pale, featureless oval to him in the
gloom, but he could divine from the vibrations of her voice that she
was as ecstatic as a young maid at her first dance.

"And what about that business interview that you've just asked for on
the 'phone?" G.J. acidly demanded.

"Oh, we'll come to that later. We wanted a man here--not to save us,
only to save us from ourselves--and you were the best we could think
of, wasn't he, Con? But you've not heard about my next bazaar, G.J.,
have you?"

"I thought it was a Pageant."

"I mean after that. A bazaar. I don't know yet what it will be for,
but I've got lots of the most topping ideas for it. For instance, I'm
going to have a First-Aid Station."

"What for? Air-raid casualties?"

Queen scorned his obtuseness, pouring out a cataract of swift
sentences.

"No. First-Aid to lovely complexions. Help for Distressed Beauties.
I shall get Roger Fry to design the Station and the costumes of my
attendants. It will be marvellous, and I tell you there'll always be
a queue waiting for admittance. I shall have all the latest dodges in
the sublime and fatal art of make-up, and if any of the Bond Street
gang refuse to help me I'll damn well ruin them. But they won't refuse
because they know what I'll do. Gontran is coming in with his new
steaming process for waving. Con, you must try that. It's a miracle.
Waving's no good for my style of coiffure, but it would suit you. You
always wouldn't wave, but you've got to now, my seraph. The electric
heater works in sections. No danger. No inconvenience to the poor old
scalp. The waves will last for six months or more. It has to be seen
to be believed, and even then you can't believe it. Its only fault is
that it's too natural to be natural. But who wants to be natural? This
modern craze for naturalness seems to me to be rather unwholesome, not
to say perverted. What?"

She seized G.J.'s arm convulsively.

Concepcion had said nothing. G.J. sought her eyes in the darkness, but
did not find them.

"So much for the bazaar!" he said.

Queen suddenly cried aloud:

"What is it, Robin? Has Captain Brickly telephoned?"

"Yes, my lady," came a voice faintly across the gloom from the region
of the ladder-shaft.

"They're coming! They'll be here directly!" exclaimed Queen, loosing
G.J. and clapping her hands.

G.J. thought of Robin affixed to the telephone, and some
scarlet-shouldered officer at the War Office quitting duty for the
telephone, in order to keep the capricious girl informed of military
movements simply because she had taken the trouble to be her father's
daughter, and in so doing had acquired the right to treat the imperial
machine as one of her nursery toys. And he became unreasonably
annoyed.

"I suppose you were cowering in your Club during the first Act?" she
said, with vivacity.

"Yes," G.J. briefly answered. Once more he was aware of a strong
instinctive disinclination to relate what had happened to him. He was
too proud to explain, and perhaps too tired.

"You ought to have been up here. They dropped two bombs close to the
National Gallery; pity they couldn't have destroyed a Landseer or two
while they were so near! There were either seven or eight killed and
eighteen wounded, so far as is known. But there were probably more.
There was quite a fire, too, but that was soon got under. We saw it
all except the explosion of the bombs. We weren't looking in the right
place--no luck! However, we saw the Zepp. What a shame the moon's
disappeared again! Listen! Listen!... Can't you hear the engines?"

G.J. shrugged his shoulders. Nothing could be heard above the faint
hum of Piccadilly. The wind seemed to have diminished to a chill,
fitful zephyr.

Concepcion had sat down on a coping.

"Look!" she exclaimed in a startled whisper, and sprang erect.

To the south, down among the trees, a red light flashed and was gone.
The faint, irregular hum of Piccadilly persisted for a couple of
seconds, and then was drowned in the loud report, which seemed to
linger and wander in the great open spaces. G.J.'s flesh crept. He
comprehended the mad ecstasy of Queen, and because he comprehended it
his anger against her increased.

"Can you see the Zepp?" murmured Queen, as it were ferociously. "It
must be within range, or they wouldn't have fired. Look along the
lines of the searchlights. One of them, at any rate, must have got on
to it. We saw it before. Can't you see it? I can hear the engines, I
think."

Another flash was followed by another resounding report. More guns
spoke in the distance. Then a glare arose on the southern horizon.

"Incendiary bomb!" muttered Queen. She stood stock-still, with her
mouth open, entranced.

The Zeppelin or the Zeppelins remained invisible and inaudible.
Yet they must be aloft there, somewhere amid the criss-cross of the
unresting searchlights. G.J. waited, powerfully impressed, incapable
of any direct action, gazing blankly now at the women and now at the
huge undecipherable heaven and earth, and receiving the chill zephyr
on his face. The nearmost gun had ceased to fire. Occasionally there
was perfect silence--for no faintest hum came from Piccadilly, and
nothing seemed to move there. The further guns recommenced, and then
the group heard a new sound, rather like the sound of a worn-out taxi
accelerating before changing gear. It grew gradually louder. It grew
very loud. It seemed to be ripping the envelope of the air. It seemed
as if it would last for ever--till it finished with a gigantic and
intimidating _plop_ quite near the front of Lechford House. Queen
said:

"Shrapnel--and a big lump!"

G.J. could see the quick heave of her bosom imprisoned in the black.
She was breathing through her nostrils.

"Come downstairs into the house," he said sharply--more than sharply,
brutally. "Where in the name of God is the sense of stopping up here?
Are you both mad?"

Queen laughed lightly.

"Oh, G.J.! How funny you are! I'm really surprised you haven't left
London for good before now. By rights you ought to belong to the
Hook-it Brigade. Do you know what they do? They take a ticket to any
station north or west, and when they get out of the train they run to
the nearest house and interview the tenant. Has he any accommodation
to let? Will he take them in as boarders? Will he take them as paying
guests? Will he let the house furnished? Will he let it unfurnished?
Will he allow them to camp out in the stables? Will he sell the
blooming house? So there isn't a house to be had on the North Western
nearer than Leighton Buzzard."

"Are you going? Because I am," said G.J.

Concepcion murmured:

"Don't go."

"I shall go--and so will you, both of you."

"G.J.," Queen mocked him, "you're in a funk."

"I've got courage enough to go, anyhow," said he. "And that's more
than you have."

"You're losing your temper."

As a fact he was. He grabbed at Queen, but she easily escaped him.
He saw the whiteness of her skirt in the distance of the roof, dimly
rising. She was climbing the ladder up the side of the chimney. She
stood on the top of the chimney, and laughed again. A gun sounded.

G.J. said no more. Using his flash-lamp he found his way to the
ladder-shaft and descended. He was in the warm and sheltered interior
of the house; he was in another and a saner world. Robin was at the
foot of the ladder; she blinked under his lamp.

"I've had enough of that," he said, and followed her to the
illuminated boudoir, where after a certain hesitation she left him.
Alone in the boudoir he felt himself to be a very shamed and futile
person, and he was still extremely angry. The next moment Concepcion
entered the boudoir.

"Ah!" he murmured, curiously appeased.

"You're quite right," said Concepcion simply.

He said:

"Can you give me any reason, Con, why we should make a present of
ourselves to the Hun?"

Concepcion repeated:

"You're quite right."

"Is she coming?"

Concepcion made a negative sign. "She doesn't know what fear is, Queen
doesn't."

"She doesn't know what sense is. She ought to be whipped, and if I got
hold of her I'd whip her."

"She'd like nothing better," said Concepcion.

G.J. removed his overcoat and sat down.




Chapter 34

IN THE BOUDOIR


"We aren't so desperately safe even here," said G.J., firmly pursuing
the moral triumph which Concepcion's very surprising and comforting
descent from the roof had given him.

"Don't go to extremes," she answered.

"No, I won't." He thought of the valetry in the cellars, and the
impossible humiliation of joining them; and added: "I merely state."
Then, after a moment of silence: "By the way, was it only _her_ idea
that I should come along, or did the command come from both of you?"
The suspicion of some dark, feminine conspiracy revisited him.

"It was Queen's idea."

"Oh! Well, I don't quite understand the psychology of it."

"Surely that's plain."

"It isn't in the least plain."

Concepcion loosed and dropped her cloak, and, not even glancing at
G.J., went to the fire and teased it with the poker. Bending down,
with one hand on the graphic and didactic mantelpiece, and staring
into the fire, she said:

"Queen's in love with you, of course."

The words were a genuine shock to his sarcastic and rather embittered
and bullying mood. Was he to believe them? The vibrant, uttering voice
was convincing enough. Was he to show the conventional incredulity
proper to such an occasion? Or was he to be natural, brutally natural?
He was drawn first to one course and then to the other, and finally
spoke at random, by instinct:

"What have I been doing to deserve this?"

Concepcion replied, still looking into the fire: "As far as I can
gather it must be your masterful ways at the Hospital Committee that
have impressed her, and especially your unheard-of tyrannical methods
with her august mother."

"I see.... Thanks!"

It had not occurred to him that he had treated the Marchioness
tyrannically; he treated her like anybody else; he now perceived that
this was to treat her tyrannically. His imagination leapt forward as
he gazed round the weird and exciting room which Queen had brought
into existence for the illustration of herself, and as he pictured the
slim, pale figure outside clinging in the night to the vast chimney,
and as he listened to the faint intermittent thud of far-off guns.
He had a spasm of delicious temptation. He was tempted by Queen's
connections and her prospective wealth. If anybody was to possess
millions after the war, Queen would one day possess millions. Her
family and her innumerable powerful relatives would be compelled to
accept him without the slightest reserve, for Queen issued edicts;
and through all those big people he would acquire immense prestige
and influence, which he could use greatly. Ambition flared up in
him--ambition to impress himself on his era. And he reflected with
satisfaction on the strangeness of the fact that such an opportunity
should have come to him, the son of a lawyer, solely by virtue of his
own individuality. He thought of Christine, and poor little Christine
was shrunk to nothing at all; she was scarcely even an object of
compassion; she was a prostitute.

But far more than by Queen's connections and prospective wealth he was
tempted by her youth and beauty; he saw her beautiful and girlish, and
he was sexually tempted. Most of all he was tempted by the desire to
master her. He saw again the foolish, elegant, brilliant thing on the
chimney pretending to defy him and mock at him. And he heard himself
commanding sharply: "Come down. Come down and acknowledge your ruler.
Come down and be whipped." (For had he not been told that she would
like nothing better?) And he heard the West End of London and all the
country-houses saying, "She obeys _him_ like a slave." He conceived a
new and dazzling environment for himself; and it was undeniable that
he needed something of the kind, for he was growing lonely; before
the war he had lived intensely in his younger friends, but the war had
taken nearly all of them away from him, many of them for ever.

Then he said in a voice almost resentfully satiric, and wondered why
such a tone should come from his lips:

"Another of her caprices, no doubt."

"What do you mean--another of her caprices?" said Concepcion,
straightening herself and leaning against the mantelpiece.

He had noticed, only a moment earlier, on the mantelpiece, a large
photograph of the handsome Molder, with some writing under it.

"Well, what about that, for example?"

He pointed. Concepcion glanced at him for the first time, and her eyes
followed the direction of his finger.

"That! I don't know anything about it."

"Do you mean to say that while you were gossiping till five o'clock
this morning, you two, she didn't mention it?"

"She didn't."

G.J. went right on, murmuring:

"Wants to do something unusual. Wants to astonish the town."

"No! No!"

"Then you seriously tell me she's fallen in love with me, Con?"

"I haven't the slightest doubt of it."

"Did she say so?"

There was a sound outside the door. They both started like plotters in
danger, and tried to look as if they had been discussing the weather
or the war. But no interruption occurred.

"Well, she did. I know I shall be thought mischievous. If she had the
faintest notion I'd breathed the least hint to you, she'd quarrel with
me eternally--of course. I couldn't bear another quarrel. If it had
been anybody else but you I wouldn't have said a word. But you're
different from anybody else. And I couldn't help it. You don't know
what Queen is. Queen's a white woman."

"So you said this afternoon."

"And so she is. She has the most curious and interesting brain, and
she's as straight as a man."

"I've never noticed it."

"But I know. I know. And she's an exquisite companion."

"And so on and so on. And I expect the scheme is that I am to make
love to her and be worried out of my life, and then propose to her and
she'll accept me." The word "scheme" brought up again his suspicion
of a conspiracy. Evidently there was no conspiracy, but there was a
plot--of one.... A nervous breakdown? Was Concepcion merely under an
illusion that she had had a nervous breakdown, or had she in truth had
one, and was this singular interview a result of it?

Concepcion continued with surprising calm magnanimity:

"I know her mind is strange, but it's lovely. No one but me has ever
seen into it. She's following her instinct, unconsciously--as we all
do, you know. And her instinct's right, in spite of everything. Her
instinct's telling her just now that she needs a master. And that's
exactly what she does need. We must remember she's very young--"

"Yes," G.J. interrupted, bursting out with a kind of savagery that he
could not explain. "Yes. She's young, and she finds even my age spicy.
There'd be something quite amusingly piquant for her in marrying a man
nearly thirty years her senior."

Concepcion advanced towards him. There she stood in front of him,
quite close to his chair, gazing down at him in her tight black
jersey and short white skirt; she was wearing black stockings now. Her
serious face was perfectly unruffled. And in her worn face was all her
experience; all the nights and days on the Clyde were in her face; the
scalping of the young Glasgow girl was in her face, and the failure
to endure either in work or in love. There was complete silence within
and without--not the echo of an echo of a gun. G.J. felt as though he
were at bay.

She said:

"People like you and Queen don't want to bother about age. Neither
of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only
telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't
she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with
poignancy: "I know if I were a man I should find her irresistible."

"Just so."

A look of sacrifice came into Concepcion's eyes as she finished:

"I'd do anything, anything, to make Queen happy."

"Yes, you would," retorted G.J. icily, carried away by a ruthless
and inexorable impulse. "You'd do anything to make her happy even for
three months. Yes, to make her happy for three weeks you'd be ready
to ruin my whole life. I know you and Queen." And the mild image of
Christine formed in his mind, soothingly, infinitely desirable. What
balm, after the nerve-racking contact of these incalculable creatures!

Concepcion retired with a gesture of the arm and sat down by the fire.

"You're terrible, G.J.," she said wistfully. "Queen wouldn't be thrown
away on you, but you'd be thrown away on her. I admit it. I didn't
think you had it in you. I never saw a man develop as you have.
Marriage isn't for you. You ought to roam in the primeval forest, and
take and kill."

"Not a bit," said G.J., appeased once more. "Not a bit.... But the new
relations of the sexes aren't in my line."

"_New_? My poor boy, are you so ingenuous after all? There's nothing
very new in the relations of the sexes that I know of. They're much
what they were in the Garden of Eden."

"What do you know of the Garden of Eden?"

"I get my information from Milton," she replied cheerfully, as though
much relieved.

"Have you read _Paradise Lost_, then, Con?"

"I read it all through in my lodgings. And it's really rather good.
In fact, the remarks of Raphael to Adam in the eighth book--I think it
is--are still just about the last word on the relations of the sexes:

  "Oft-times nothing profits more
  Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
  Well-managed; of that skill the more thou
  know'st,
  The more she will acknowledge thee her head
  _And to realities yield all her shows_."

G.J., marvelling, exclaimed with sudden enthusiasm:

"By Jove! You're an astounding woman, Con. You do me good!"

There was a fresh noise beyond the door, and the door opened and Robin
rushed in, blanched and hysterical, and with her seemed to rush in
terror.

"Oh! Madame!" she cried. "As there was no more firing I went on to the
roof, and her ladyship--" She covered her face and sobbed.

G.J. jumped up.

"Go and see," said Concepcion in a blank voice, not moving. "I
can't.... It's the message straight from Potsdam that's arrived."




Chapter 35

QUEEN DEAD


G.J. emerged from the crowded and malodorous Coroner's Court with a
deep sense of the rigour and the thoroughness of British justice, and
especially of its stolidity.

There had been four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims:
a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby--all belonging to the thick
central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a
bomb full in the face--and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were
stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid;
the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the
representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave the most
minute evidence about the habits and circumstances of the slum; and
the jurymen were very stolid, and never more so than when, with stubby
fingers holding ancient pens, they had to sign quantities of blue
forms under the strict guidance of a bareheaded policeman.

The world of Queenie's acquaintances made a strange, vivid contrast
to this grey, grim, blockish world; and the two worlds regarded each
other with the wonder and the suspicious resentment of foreigners.
Queen's world came expecting to behave as at a cause célèbre of, for
example, divorce. Its representatives were quite ready to tolerate
unpleasing contacts and long stretches of tedium in return for some
glimpse of the squalid and the privilege of being able to say that
they had been present at the inquest. But most of them had arrived
rather late, and they had reckoned without the Coroner, and
comparatively few obtained even admittance.

The Coroner had arrived on the stroke of the hour, in a silk hat and
frock coat, with a black bag, and had sat down at his desk and begun
to rule the proceedings with an absolutism that no High Court Judge
would have attempted. He was autocrat in a small, close, sordid room;
but he was autocrat. He had already shown his quality in some indirect
collisions with the Marquis of Lechford. The Marquis felt that he
could not stomach the exposure of his daughter's corpse in a common
mortuary with other corpses of he knew not whom. Long experience of
the marquisate had taught him to believe that everything could be
arranged. He found, however, that this matter could not be arranged.
There was no appeal from the ukase of the Coroner. Then he wished
to be excused from giving evidence, since his evidence could have no
direct bearing on the death. But he was informed by a mere clerk, who
had knowledge of the Coroner's ways, that if he did not attend the
inquest would probably be adjourned for his attendance. The fact was,
the Coroner had appreciated as well as anybody that heaven and the war
had sent him a cause célèbre of the first-class. He saw himself
the supreme being of a unique assize. He saw his remarks reproduced
verbatim in the papers, for, though localities might not be mentioned,
there was no censor's ban upon the _obiter dicta_ of coroners. His
idiosyncrasy was that he hid all his enjoyment in his own breast. Even
had he had the use of a bench, instead of a mere chair, he would never
have allowed titled ladies in mirific black hats to share it with him.
He was an icy radical, sincere, competent, conscientious and vain. He
would be no respecter of persons, but he was a disrespecter of persons
above a certain social rank. He said, "Open that window." And that
window was opened, regardless of the identity of the person who might
be sitting under it. He said: "This court is unhealthily full. Admit
no more." And no more could be admitted, though the entire peerage
waited without.

The Marquis had considered that the inquest on his daughter might be
taken first. The other three cases were taken first, and, even taken
concurrently, they occupied an immense period of time. All the bodies
were, of course, "viewed" together, and the absence of the jury seemed
to the Marquis interminable; he thought the despicable tradesmen were
gloating unduly over the damaged face of his daughter. The Coroner had
been marvellously courteous to the procession of humble witnesses. He
could not have been more courteous to the exalted; and he was not. In
the sight of the Coroner all men were equal.

G.J. encountered him first. "I did my best to persuade her ladyship to
come down," said G.J. very formally. "I am quite sure you did,"
said the Coroner with the dryest politeness. "And you failed." The
policeman had related events from the moment when G.J. had fetched
him in from the street. The policeman could remember everything, what
everybody had said, the positions of all objects, the characteristics
and extent of the wire-netting, the exact posture of the deceased
girl, the exact minute of his visit. He and the Coroner played to each
other like well-rehearsed actors. Mrs. Carlos Smith's ordeal was very
brief, and the Coroner dismissed her with an expression of sympathy
that seemed to issue from his mouth like carved granite. With the
doctor alone the Coroner had become human; the Coroner also was a
doctor. The doctor had talked about a relatively slight extravasation
of blood, and said that death had been instantaneous. Said the
Coroner: "The body was found on the wire-netting; it had fallen from
the chimney. In your opinion, was the fall a contributory cause of
death?" The doctor said, No. "In your opinion death was due to an
extremely small piece of shrapnel which struck the deceased's head
slightly above the left ear, entering the brain?" The doctor said,
Yes.

The Marquis of Lechford had to answer questions as to his parental
relations with his daughter. How long had he been away in the country?
How long had the deceased been living in Lechford House practically
alone? How old was his daughter? Had he given any order to the effect
that nobody was to be on the roof of his house during an air-raid?
Had he given any orders at all as to conduct during an air-raid? The
Coroner sympathised deeply with his lordship's position, and felt
sure that his lordship understood that; but his lordship would
also understand that the policy of heads of households in regard to
air-raids had more than a domestic interest--it had, one might say, a
national interest; and the force of prominent example was one of the
forces upon which the Government counted, and had the right to count,
for help in the regulation of public conduct in these great crises of
the most gigantic war that the world had ever seen. "Now, as to the
wire-netting," had said the Coroner, leaving the subject of the force
of example. He had a perfect plan of the wire-netting in his mind. He
understood that the chimney-stack rose higher than the wire-netting,
and that the wire-netting went round the chimney-stack at a distance
of a foot or more, leaving room so that a person might climb up
the perpendicular ladder. If a person fell from the top of the
chimney-stack it was a chance whether that person fell on the
wire-netting, or through the space between the wire-netting and the
chimney on to the roof itself. The jury doubtless understood. (The
jury, however, at that instant had been engaged in examining the
bit of shrapnel which had been extracted from the brain of the only
daughter of a Marquis.) The Coroner understood that the wire-netting
did not extend over the whole of the house. "It extends over all the
main part of the house," his lordship had replied. "But not over the
back part of the house?" His lordship agreed. "The servants'
quarters, probably?" His lordship nodded. The Coroner had said: "The
wire-netting does not extend over the servants' quarters," in a very
even voice. A faint hiss in court had been extinguished by the sharp
glare of the Coroner's eyes. His lordship, a thin, antique figure, in
a long cloak that none but himself would have ventured to wear, had
stepped down, helpless.

There had been much signing of depositions. The Coroner had spoken of
The Hague Convention, mentioning one article by its number. The jury
as to the first three cases--in which the victims had been killed by
bombs--had returned a verdict of wilful murder against the Kaiser.
The Coroner, suppressing the applause, had agreed heartily with the
verdict. He told the jury that the fourth case was different, and
the jury returned a verdict of death from shrapnel. They gave
their sympathy to all the relatives, and added a rider about the
inadvisability of running unnecessary risks, and the Coroner, once
more agreeing heartily, had thereon made an effective little speech to
a hushed, assenting audience.

There were several motor-cars outside. G.J. signalled across the
street to the taxi-man who telephoned every morning to him for orders.
He had never owned a motor-car, and, because he had no ambition to
drive himself, had never felt the desire to own one. The taxi-man
experienced some delay in starting his engine. G.J. lit a cigarette.
Concepcion came out, alone. He had expected her to be with the
Marquis, with whom she had arrived. She was dressed in mourning. Only
on that day, and once before--on the day of her husband's funeral--had
he seen her in mourning. She looked now like the widow she was.

Nevertheless, he had not quite accustomed himself to the sight of her
in mourning.

"I wonder whether I can get a taxi?" she asked.

"You can have mine," said he. "Where do you want to go?"

She named a disconcerting address near Shepherd's Market.

At that moment a Pressman with a camera came boldly up and snapped
her. The man had the brazen demeanour of a racecourse tout. But
Concepcion seemed not to mind at all, and G.J. remembered that she was
deeply inured to publicity. Her portrait had already appeared in the
picture papers along with that of Queen, but the papers had deemed it
necessary to remind a forgetful public that Mrs. Carlos Smith was
the same lady as the super-celebrated Concepcion Iquist. The taxi-man
hesitated for an instant on hearing the address, but only for an
instant. He had earned the esteem and regular patronage of G.J. by a
curious hazard. One night G.J. had hailed him, and the man had said in
a flash, without waiting for the fare to speak, "The Albany, isn't it,
sir? I drove you home about two months ago." Thenceforward he had been
for G.J. the perfect taxi-man.

In the taxi Concepcion said not a word, and G.J. did not disturb her.
Beneath his superficial melancholy he was sustained by the mere joy
of being alive. The common phenomena of the streets were beautiful
to him. Concepcion's calm and grieved vitality seemed mysteriously
exquisite. He had had similar sensations while walking along Coventry
Street after his escape from the explosion of the bomb. Fatigue and
annoyance and sorrow had extinguished them for a time, but now that
the episode of Queen's tragedy was closed they were born anew. Queen,
the pathetic victim of the indiscipline of her own impulses, was gone.
But he had escaped. He lived. And life was an affair miraculous and
lovely.

"I think I've been here before," said he, when they got out of the
taxi in a short, untidy, indeterminate street that was a cul-de-sac.
The prospect ended in a garage, near which two women chauffeurs were
discussing a topic that interested them. A hurdy-gurdy was playing
close by, and a few ragged children stared at the hurdy-gurdy, on the
end of which a baby was cradled. The fact that the street was midway
between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, and almost within sight of the
monumental new mansion of an American duchess, explained the existence
of the building in front of which the taxi had stopped. The entrance
to the flats was mean and soiled. It repelled, but Concepcion
unapologetically led G.J. up a flight of four stone steps and round
a curve into a little corridor. She halted at a door on the ground
floor.

"Yes," said G.J. with admirable calm, "I do believe you've got the
very flat I once looked at with a friend of mine. If I remember
it didn't fill the bill because the tenant wouldn't sub-let it
unfurnished. When did you get hold of this?"

"Yesterday afternoon," Concepcion answered. "Quick work. But these
feats can be accomplished. I've only taken it for a month. Hotels seem
to be all full. I couldn't open my own place at a moment's notice, and
I didn't mean to stay on at Lechford House, even if they'd asked me
to."

G.J.'s notion of the vastness and safety of London had received a
shock. He was now a very busy man, and would quite sincerely have told
anybody who questioned him on the point that he hadn't a moment to
call his own. Nevertheless, on the previous morning he had spent
a considerable time in searching for a nest in which to hide his
Christine and create romance; and he had come to this very flat.
More, there had been two flats to let in the block. He had declined
them--the better one because of the furniture, the worse because
it was impossibly small, and both because of the propinquity of the
garage. But supposing that he had taken one and Concepcion the other!
He recoiled at the thought....

Concepcion's new home, if not impossibly small, was small, and the
immensity and abundance of the furniture made it seem smaller than it
actually was. Each little room had the air of having been furnished
out of a huge and expensive second-hand emporium. No single style
prevailed. There were big carved and inlaid antique cabinets and
chests, big hanging crystal candelabra, and big pictures (some of
them apparently family portraits, the rest eighteenth-century
flower-pieces) in big gilt frames, with a multiplicity of occasional
tables and bric-à-brac. Gilt predominated. The ornate cornices were
gilded. Human beings had to move about like dwarfs on the tiny free
spaces of carpet between frowning cabinetry. The taste and the aim
of the author of this home defied deduction. In the first room a
charwoman was cleaning. Concepcion greeted her like a sister. In the
next room, whose window gave on to a blank wall, tea was laid for one
in front of a gas-fire. Concepcion reached down a cup and saucer from
a glazed cupboard and put a match to the spirit-lamp under the kettle.

"Let me see, the bedroom's up here, isn't it?" said G.J., pointing
along a passage that was like a tunnel.

Concepcion, yielding to his curiosity, turned on lights everywhere and
preceded him. The passage, hung with massive canvases, had scarcely
more than width enough for G.J.'s shoulders. The tiny bedroom
was muslined in every conceivable manner. It had a colossal bed,
surpassing even Christine's. A muslined maid was bending over some
drapery-shop boxes on the floor and removing garments therefrom.
Concepcion greeted her like a sister. "Don't let me disturb you,
Emily," she said, and to G.J., "Emily was poor Queenie's maid, and she
has come to me for a little while." G.J. amicably nodded. Tears came
suddenly into the maid's eyes. G.J. looked away and saw the bathroom,
which, also well muslined, was completely open to the bedroom.

"Whose _is_ this marvellous home?" he added when they had gone back to
the drawing-room.

"I think the original tenant is the wife of somebody who's interned."

"How simple the explanation is!" said G.J. "But I should never have
guessed it."

They started the tea in a strange silence. After a minute or two G.J.
said:

"I mustn't stay long."

"Neither must I." Concepcion smiled.

"Got to go out?"

"Yes."

There was another silence. Then Concepcion said:

"I'm going to Sarah Churcher's. And as I know she has her Pageant
Committee at five-thirty, I'd better not arrive later than five, had
I?"

"What is there between you and Lady Churcher?"

"Well, I'm going to offer to take Queen's place on the organising
Committee."

"Con!" he exclaimed impulsively, "you aren't?"

In an instant the atmosphere of the little airless, electric-lit,
gas-fumed apartment was charged with a fluid that no physical
chemistry could have traced. Concepcion said mildly:

"I am. I owe it to Queen's memory to take her place if I can. Of
course I'm no dancer, but in other things I expect I can make myself
useful."

G.J. replied with equal mildness:

"You aren't going to mix yourself up with that crowd again--after all
you've been through! The Pageant business isn't good enough for you,
Con, and you know it. You know it's odious."

She murmured:

"I feel it's my duty. I feel I owe it to Queen. It's a sort of
religion with me, I expect. Each person has his own religion, and I
doubt if one's more dogmatic than another."

He was grieved; he had a sense almost of outrage. He hated to picture
Concepcion subduing herself to the horrible environment of the Pageant
enterprise. But he said nothing more. The silence resumed. They might
have conversed, with care, about the inquest, or about the funeral,
which was to take place at the Castle, in Cheshire. Silence, however,
suited them best.

"Also I thought you needed repose," said G.J. when Concepcion broke
the melancholy enchantment by rising to look for cigarettes.

"I must be allowed to work," she answered after a pause, putting a
cigarette between her teeth. "I must have something to do--unless, of
course, you want me to go to the bad altogether."

It was a remarkable saying, but it seemed to admit that he was
legitimately entitled to his critical interest in her.

"If I'd known that," he said, suddenly inspired, "I should have asked
you to take on something for _me_." He waited; she made no response,
and he continued: "I'm secretary of my small affair since yesterday.
The paid secretary, a nice enough little thing, has just run off
to the Women's Auxiliary Corps in France and left me utterly in the
lurch. Just like domestic servants, these earnest girl-clerks are,
when it comes to the point! No imagination. Wanted to wear khaki, and
no doubt thought she was doing a splendid thing. Never occurred to her
the mess I should be in. I'd have asked you to step into the breach.
You'd have been frightfully useful."

"But I'm no girl-clerk," Concepcion gently and carelessly protested.

"Well, she wasn't either. I shouldn't have wanted you to be a typist.
We have a typist. As a matter of fact, her job needed a bit more
brains than she'd got. However--"

Another silence. G.J. rose to depart. Concepcion did not stir. She
said softly:

"I don't think anybody realises what Queen's death is to me. Not even
you." On her face was the look of sacrifice which G.J. had seen there
as they talked together in Queen's boudoir during the raid.

He thought, amazed:

"And they'd only had about twenty-four hours together, and part of
that must have been spent in making up their quarrel!"

Then aloud:

"I quite agree. People can't realise what they haven't had to go
through. I've understood that ever since I read in the paper the
day before yesterday that 'two bombs fell close together and one
immediately after the other' in a certain quarter of the West End.
That was all the paper said about those two bombs."

"Why! What do you mean?"

"And I understood it when poor old Queen gave me some similar
information on the roof."

"What _do_ you mean?"

"I was between those two bombs when they fell. One of 'em blew me
against a house. I've been to look at the place since. And I'm dashed
if I myself could realise then what I'd been through."

She gave a little cry. Her face pleased him.

"And you weren't hurt?"

"I had a pain in my side, but it's gone," he said laconically.

"And you never said anything to us! Why not?"

"Well--there were so many other things...."

"G.J., you're astounding!"

"No, I'm not. I'm just myself."

"And hasn't it upset your nerves?"

"Not as far as I can judge. Of course one never knows, but I think
not. What do you think?"

She offered no response. At length she spoke with queer emotion:

"You remember that night I said it was a message direct from Potsdam?
Well, naturally it wasn't. But do you know the thought that tortures
me? Supposing the shrapnel that killed Queen was out of a shell made
at my place in Glasgow!... It might have been.... Supposing it was!"

"Con," he said firmly, "I simply won't listen to that kind of talk.
There's no excuse for it. Shall I tell you what, more than anything
else, has made me respect you since Queen was killed? Ninety-nine
women out of a hundred would have managed to remind me, quite
illogically and quite inexcusably, that I was saying hard things about
poor old Queen at the very moment when she was lying dead on the roof.
You didn't. You knew I was very sorry about Queen, but you knew that
my feelings as to her death had nothing whatever to do with what I
happened to be saying when she was killed. You knew the difference
between sentiment and sentimentality. For God's sake, don't start
wondering where the shell was made."

She looked up at him, saying nothing, and he savoured the intelligence
of her weary, fine, alert, comprehending face. He did not pretend to
himself to be able to fathom the enigmas of that long glance. He had
again the feeling of the splendour of what it was to be alive, to have
survived. Just as he was leaving she said casually:

"Very well. I'll do what you want."

"What I want?"

"I won't go to Sarah Churcher's."

"You mean you'll come as assistant secretary?"

She nodded. "Only I don't need to be paid."

And he, too, fell into a casual tone:

"That's excellent."

Thus, by this nonchalance, they conspired to hide from themselves
the seriousness of that which had passed between them. The grotesque,
pretentious little apartment was mysteriously humanised; it was no
longer the reception-room of a furnished flat by chance hired for a
month; they had lived in it.

She finished, eagerly smiling:

"I can practise my religion just as much with you as with Sarah
Churcher, can't I? Queen was on your committee, too. Yes, I shan't be
deserting her."

The remark disquieted his triumph. That aspect of the matter had not
occurred to him.




Chapter 36

COLLAPSE


Late of that same afternoon G.J., in the absence of the chairman,
presided as honorary secretary over a meeting of the executive
committee of the Lechford hospitals. In the course of the war the
committee had changed its habitation more than once. The hotel which
had at first given it a home had long ago been commandeered by the
Government for a new Government department, and its hundreds of
chambers were now full of the clicking of typewriters and the
dictation of officially phrased correspondence, and the
conferences which precede decisions, and the untamed footsteps of
messenger-flappers, and the making of tea, and chatter about cinemas,
blouses and headaches. Afterwards the committee had been the guest of
a bank and of a trust company, and had for a period even paid rent to
a common landlord. But its object was always to escape the formality
of rent-paying, and it was now lodged in an untenanted mansion
belonging to a viscount in a great Belgravian square. Its sign was
spread high across the facade; its posters were in the windows; and on
the door was a notice such as in 1914 nobody had ever expected to see
in that quadrangle of guarded sacred castles: "Turn the handle and
walk in." The mansion, though much later in date, was built precisely
on the lines of a typical Bloomsbury boarding-house. It had the same
basement, the same general disposition of rooms, the same abundance
of stairs and paucity of baths, the same chilly draughts and primeval
devices for heating, and the same superb disregard for the convenience
of servants. The patrons of domestic architecture had permitted
architects to learn nothing in seventy years except that chimney-flues
must be constructed so that they could be cleaned without exposing
sooty infants to the danger of suffocation or incineration.

The committee sat on the first floor in the back drawing-room,
whose furniture consisted of a deal table, Windsor chairs, a row of
hat-pegs, a wooden box containing coal, half a poker, two unshaded
lights; the walls, from which all the paper had been torn off, were
decorated with lists of sub-committees, posters, and rows of figures
scrawled here and there in pencil. The room was divided from the main
drawing-room by the usual folding-doors. The smaller apartment had
been chosen in the winter because it was somewhat easier to keep warm
than the other one. In the main drawing-room the honorary secretary
camped himself at a desk near the fireplace.

When the clock struck, G.J., one of whose monastic weaknesses was a
ritualistic regard for punctuality, was in his place at the head of
the table, and the table well filled with members, for the honorary
secretary's harmless foible was known and admitted. The table and the
chairs, the scraping of the chair-legs on the bare floor, the agenda
papers and the ornamentation thereof by absent-minded pens, were the
same as in the committee's youth. But the personnel of the committee
had greatly changed, and it was enlarged--as its scope had been
enlarged. The two Lechford hospitals behind the French lines were
now only a part of the committee's responsibilities. It had a special
hospital in Paris, two convalescent homes in England, and an important
medical unit somewhere in Italy. Finance was becoming its chief
anxiety, for the reason that, though soldiers had not abandoned
in disgust the practice of being wounded, philanthropists were
unquestionably showing signs of fatigue. It had collected money by
postal appeals, by advertisements, by selling flags, by competing with
drapers' shops, by intimidation, by ruse and guile, and by all the
other recognised methods. Of late it had depended largely upon the
very wealthy, and, to a less extent, upon G.J., who having gradually
constituted the committee his hobby, had contributed some thousands
of pounds from his share of the magic profits of the Reveille Company.
Everybody was aware of the immense importance of G.J.'s help. G.J.
never showed it in his demeanour, but the others continually showed
it in theirs. He had acquired authority. He had also acquired the sure
manner of one accustomed to preside.

"Before we begin on the agenda," he said--and as he spoke a late
member crept apologetically in and tiptoed to the heavily charged
hat-pegs--"I would like to mention about Miss Trewas. Some of you know
that through an admirable but somewhat disordered sense of patriotism
she has left us at a moment's notice. I am glad to say that my friend
Mrs. Carlos Smith, who, I may tell you, has had a very considerable
experience of organisation, has very kindly agreed, subject of course
to the approval of the committee, to step temporarily into the breach.
She will be an honorary worker, like all of us here, and I am sure
that the committee will feel as grateful to her as I do."

As there had been smiles at the turn of his phrase about Miss Trewas,
so now there were fervent, almost emotional, "Hear-hears."

"Mrs. Smith, will you please read the minutes of the last meeting."

Concepcion was sitting at his left hand. He kept thinking, "I'm one of
those who get things done." Two hours ago, and the idea of enlisting
her had not even occurred to him, and already he had taken her out
of her burrow, brought her to the offices, coached her in the
preliminaries of her allotted task, and introduced several important
members of the committee to her! It was an achievement.

Never had the minutes been listened to with such attention as they
obtained that day. Concepcion was apparently not in the least nervous,
and she read very well--far better than the deserter Miss Trewas, who
could not open her mouth without bridling. Concepcion held the room.
Those who had not seen before the celebrated Concepcion Iquist now saw
her and sated their eyes upon her. She had been less a woman than a
legend. The romance of South America enveloped her, and the romance of
her famous and notorious uncle, of her triumph over the West End, her
startling marriage and swift widowing, her journey to America and her
complete disappearance, her attachment to Lady Queenie, and now her
dramatic reappearance.

And the sharp condiment to all this was the general knowledge of the
bachelor G.J.'s long intimacy with her, and of their having both
been at Lechford House on the night of the raid, and both been at
the inquest on the body of Lady Queenie Paulle on that very day.
But nobody could have guessed from their placid and self-possessed
demeanour that either of them had just emerged from a series of
ordeals. They won a deep and full respect. Still, some people ventured
to have their own ideas; and an ingenuous few were surprised to find
that the legend was only a woman after all, and a rather worn
woman, not indeed very recognisable from her innumerable portraits.
Nevertheless the respect for the pair was even increased when G.J.
broached the first item on the agenda--a resolution of respectful
sympathy with the Marquis and Marchioness of Lechford in their
bereavement, of profound appreciation of the services of Lady Queenie
on the committee, and of an intention to send by the chairman to the
funeral a wreath to be subscribed for by the members. G.J. proposed
the resolution himself, and it was seconded by a lady and supported
by a gentleman whose speeches gave no hint that Lady Queenie had again
and again by her caprices nearly driven the entire committee into a
lunatic asylum and had caused several individual resignations. G.J.
put the resolution without a tremor; it was impressively carried; and
Concepcion wrote down the terms of it quite calmly in her secretarial
notes. The performance of the pair was marvellous, and worthy of the
English race.

Then arrived Sir Stephen Bradern. Sir Stephen was chairman of the
French Hospitals Management Sub-committee.

G.J. said:

"Sir Stephen, you are just too late for the resolution as to Lady
Queenie Paulle."

"I deeply apologise, Mr. Chairman," replied the aged but active Sir
Stephen, nervously stroking his rather long beard. "I hope, however,
that I may be allowed to associate myself very closely with the
resolution." After a suitable pause and general silence he went on:
"I've been detained by that Nurse Smaith that my sub-committee's been
having trouble with. You'll find, when you come to them, that she's on
my sub-committee's minutes. I've just had an interview with her, and
she says she wants to see the executive. I don't know what you think,
Mr. Chairman--" He stopped.

G.J. smiled.

"I should have her brought in," said the lady who had previously
spoken. "If I might suggest," she added.

A boy scout, who seemed to have long ago grown out of his uniform,
entered with a note for somebody. He was told to bring in Nurse
Smaith.

She proved to be a rather short and rather podgy woman, with a
reddish, not rosy, complexion, and red hair. The ugly red-bordered
cape of the British Red Cross did not suit her better than it suited
any other wearer. She was in full, strict, starched uniform, and
prominently wore medals on her plenteous breast. She looked as though,
if she had a sister, that sister might be employed in a large draper's
shop at Brixton or Islington. In saying "Gid ahfternoon" she revealed
the purity of a cockney accent undefiled by Continental experiences.
She sat down in a manner sternly defensive. She was nervous and
abashed, but evidently dangerous. She belonged to the type which
is courageous in spite of fear. She had resolved to interview the
committee, and though the ordeal frightened her, she desperately and
triumphantly welcomed it.

"Now, Nurse Smaith," said G.J. diplomatically. "We are always very
glad to see our nurses, even when our time is limited. Will you kindly
tell the committee as briefly as possible just what your claim is?"

And the nurse replied, with medals shaking:

"I'm claiming, as I've said before, two weeks' salary in loo of
notice, and my fare home from France; twenty-five francs salary and
ninety-five francs expenses. And I sy nothing of excess luggage."

"But you didn't _come_ home."

"I have come home, though."

One of those members whose destiny it is always to put a committee in
the wrong remarked:

"But surely, Nurse, you left our employ nearly a year ago. Why didn't
you claim before?"

"I've been at you for two months at least, and I was ill for six
months in Turin; they had to put me off the train there," said Nurse
Smaith, getting self-confidence.

"As I understand," said G.J. "You left us in order to join a
Serbian unit of another society, and you only returned to England in
February."

"I didn't leave you, sir. That is, I mean, I left you, but I was told
to go."

"Who told you to go?"

"Matron."

Sir Stephen benevolently put in:

"But the matron had always informed us that it was you who said you
wouldn't stay another minute. We have it in the correspondence."

"That's what _she_ says. But I say different. And I can prove it."

Said G.J.:

"There must be some misunderstanding. We have every confidence in the
matron, and she's still with us."

"Then I'm sorry for you."

He turned warily to another aspect of the subject.

"Do I gather that you went straight from Paris to Serbia?"

"Yes. The unit was passing through, and I joined it."

"But how did you obtain your passport? You had no certificate from
us?"

Nurse Smaith tossed her perilous red hair.

"Oh! No difficulty about that. I am not _without_ friends, as you may
say." Some of the committee looked up suspiciously, aware that the
matron had in her report hinted at mysterious relations between Nurse
Smaith and certain authorities. "The doctor in charge of the Serbian
unit was only too glad to have me. Of course, if you're going to
believe everything matron says--" Her tone was becoming coarser,
but the committee could neither turn her out nor cure her natural
coarseness, nor indicate to her that she was not using the demeanour
of committee-rooms. She was firmly lodged among them, and she went
from bad to worse. "Of course, if you're going to swallow everything
matron says--! It isn't as if I was the only one."

"May I ask if you are at present employed?"

"I don't _quite_ see what that's got to do with it," said Nurse
Smaith, still gaining ground.

"Certainly not. Nothing. Nothing at all. I was only hoping that these
visits here are not inconvenient to you."

"Well, as it seems so important, I _my_ sy I'm going out to Salonika
next week, and that's why I want this business settled." She stopped,
and as the committee remained diffidently and apprehensively silent,
she went on: "It isn't as if I was the only one. Why! When we were in
the retreat of the Serbian Army owver the mahntains I came across
by chance, if you call it chance, another nurse that knew all about
_her_--been under her in Bristol for a year."

A young member, pricking up, asked:

"Were you in the Serbian retreat, Nurse?"

"If I hadn't been I shouldn't be here now," said Nurse Smaith,
entirely recovered from her stage-fright and entirely pleased to be
there then. "I lost all I had at Ypek. All I took was my medals, and
them I did take. There were fifty of us, British, French and Russians.
We had nearly three weeks in the mahntains. We slept rough all
together in one room, when there was a room, and when there wasn't we
slept in stables. We had nothing but black bread, and that froze in
the haversacks, and if we took our boots off we had to thaw them
the next morning before we could put them on. If we hadn't had three
saucepans we should have died. When we went dahn the hills two of
us had to hold every horse by his head and tail to keep them from
falling. However, nearly all the horses died, and then we took the
packs off them and tried to drag the packs along by hand; but we soon
stopped that. All the bridle-paths were littered with dead horses and
oxen. And when we came up with the Serbian Army we saw soldiers just
drop down and die in the snow. I read in the paper there were no
children in the retreat, but I saw lots of children, strapped to their
mother's backs. Yes; and they fell down together and froze to death.
Then we got to Scutari, and glad I was."

She glanced round defiantly, but not otherwise moved, at the
committee, the hitherto invisible gods of hospitals and medical units.
The nipping wind of reality had blown into the back drawing-room. The
committee was daunted. But some of its members, less daunted than the
rest, had the presence of mind to wonder why it seemed strange and
strangely chilling that a rather coarse, stout woman with a cockney
accent and little social refinement should have passed through, and
emerged so successfully from, the unimaginable retreat. If Nurse
Smaith had been beautiful and slim and of elegant manners they could
not have controlled their chivalrous enthusiasm.

"Very interesting," said someone.

Glancing at G.J., Nurse Smaith proceeded:

"You sy I didn't come home. But the money for my journey was due to
me. That's what I sy. Twenty-five francs for two weeks' wages and
ninety-five francs journey money."

"As regards the journey money," observed Sir Stephen blandly, "we've
never paid so much, if my recollection serves me. And of course we
have to remember that we're dealing with public funds."

Nurse Smaith sprang up, looking fixedly at Concepcion. Concepcion had
thrown herself back in her chair, and her face was so drawn that it
was no more the same face.

"Even if it is public funds," Concepcion shrieked, "can't you give
ninety-five francs in memory of those three saucepans?" Then she
relapsed on to the table, her head in her hands, and sobbed violently,
very violently. The sobs rose and fell in the scale, and the whole
body quaked.

G.J. jumped to his feet. Half the shocked and alarmed committee was on
its feet. Nurse Smaith had run round to Concepcion and had seized her
with a persuasive, soothing gesture. Concepcion quite submissively
allowed herself to be led out of the room by Nurse Smaith and Sir
Stephen. Her sobs weakened, and when the door was closed could no
longer be heard. A lady member had followed the three. The committee
was positively staggered by the unprecedented affair. G.J., very pale,
said:

"Mrs. Smith is in competent hands. We can't do anything. I think we
had better sit down." He was obeyed.

A second doctor on the committee remarked with a curious slight smile:

"I said to myself when I first saw her this afternoon that Mrs. Smith
had some of the symptoms of a nervous breakdown."

"Yes," G.J. concurred. "I very much regret that I allowed Mrs. Smith
to come. But she was determined to work, and she seemed perfectly calm
and collected. I very much regret it."

Then, to hide his constraint, he pulled towards him the sheet of paper
on which Concepcion had been making notes, and, remembering that a
list of members present had always to be kept, he began to write down
names. He was extremely angry with himself. He had tried Concepcion
too high. He ought to have known that all women were the same. He
had behaved like an impulsive fool. He had been ridiculous before
the committee. What should have been a triumph was a disaster. The
committee would bind their two names together. And at the conclusion
of the meeting news of the affairs would radiate from the committee's
offices in every direction throughout London. And he had been unfair
to Concepcion. Their relations would be endlessly complicated by the
episode. He foresaw trying scenes, in which she would make all the
excuses, between her and himself.

"Perhaps it would be simpler if we decided to admit Nurse Smaith's
claim," said a timid voice from the other end of the table.

G.J. murmured coldly, gazing at the agenda paper and yet dominating
his committee:

"The question will come up on the minutes of the Hospitals Management
Sub-committee. We had better deal with it then. The next business on
the agenda is the letter from the Paris Service de Santé."

He was thinking: "How is she now? Ought I to go out and see?" And the
majority of the committee was vaguely thinking, not without a certain
pleasurable malice: "These Society women! They're all queer!"




Chapter 37

THE INVISIBLE POWERS


Several times already the rumour had spread in the Promenade that the
Promenade would be closed on a certain date, and the Promenade had not
been closed. But to-night it was stated that the Promenade would be
closed at the end of the week, and everybody concerned knew that the
prophecy would come true. No official notice was issued, no person
who repeated the tale could give a reliable authority for it;
nevertheless, for some mysterious reason it convinced. The rival
Promenade had already passed away. The high invisible powers who ruled
the world of pleasure were moving at the behest of powers still higher
than themselves; and the cloak-room attendants, in their frivolous
tiny aprons, shared murmuringly behind plush portières in the woe of
the ladies with large hats.

The revue being a failure, the auditorium was more than half empty. In
the Promenade to each man there were at least five pretty ladies, and
the ladies looked gloomily across many rows of vacant seats at the
bright proscenium where jocularities of an exacerbating tedium were
being enacted. Not that the jocularities were inane beyond the usual,
but failure made them seem so. None had the slightest idea why the
revue had failed; for precisely similar revues, concocted according to
the same recipe and full of the same jocularities executed by the same
players at the same salaries, had crowded the theatre for many months
together. It was an incomprehensible universe.

Christine suddenly shrugged her shoulders and walked out. What use in
staying to the end?

It was long after ten o'clock, and an exquisite faint light lingering
in the sky still revealed the features of the people in the streets.
The man who had devoted half a life to the ingenious project of
lengthening the summer days by altering clocks was in his disappointed
grave; but victory had come to him there, for statesmen had at last
proved the possibility of that which they had always maintained to be
impossible, and the wisdom of that which they had always maintained to
be idiotic. The voluptuous divine melancholy of evening June descended
upon the city from the sky, and even sounds were beautifully sad. The
happy progress of the war could not exorcise this soft, omnipotent
melancholy. Yet the progress of the war was nearly all that could be
desired. Verdun was held, and if Fort Vaux had been lost there had
been compensation in the fact that the enemy, through the gesture of
the Crown Prince in allowing the captured commander of the fort to
retain his sword, had done something to rehabilitate themselves in the
esteem of mankind. Lord Kitchener was drowned, but the discovery had
been announced that he was not indispensable; indeed, there were those
who said that it was better thus. The Easter Rebellion was well in
hand; order was understood to reign in an Ireland hidden behind the
black veil of the censorship. The mighty naval battle of Jutland had
quickly transformed itself from a defeat into a brilliant triumph.
The disturbing prices of food were about to be reduced by means of a
committee. In America the Republican forces were preparing to eject
President Wilson in favour of another Hughes who could be counted
upon to realise the world-destiny of the United States. An economic
conference was assembling in Paris with the object of cutting Germany
off from the rest of the human race after the war. And in eleven
days the Russians had made prisoners of a hundred and fifty thousand
Austrians, and Brusiloff had just said: "This is only the beginning."
Lastly the close prospect of the resistless Allied Western offensive
which would deracinate Prussian militarism was uplifting men's minds.

Christine walked nonchalantly and uninvitingly through the streets,
quite unresponsive to the exhilaration of events.

"Marthe!" she called, when she had let herself into the flat. Contrary
to orders, the little hall was in darkness. There was no answer. She
lit the hall and passed into the kitchen, lighting it also. There, in
the terrible and incurable squalor of Marthe's own kitchen, Marthe's
apron was thrown untidily across the back of the solitary windsor
chair. She knew then that Marthe had gone out, and in truth, although
very annoyed, she was not altogether surprised.

Marthe had a mysterious love affair. It was astonishing, in view of
the intensely aphrodisiacal atmosphere in which she lived, that Marthe
did not continually have love affairs. But the day of love had seemed
for Marthe to be over, and Christine found great difficulty in getting
her ever to leave the flat, save on necessary household errands. On
the other hand it was astonishing that any man should be attracted
by the fat slattern. The moth now fluttering round her was an Italian
waiter, as to whom Christine had learnt that he was being unjustly
hunted by the Italian military authorities. Hence the mystery
necessarily attaching to the love affair. Being French, Christine
despised him. He called Marthe by her right name of "Marta," and
Christine had more than once heard the pair gabbling in the kitchen
in Italian. Just as though she had been a conventional _bourgeoise_
Christine now accused Marthe of ingratitude because the woman was
subordinating Christine's convenience to the supreme exigencies of
fate. A man's freedom might be in the balance, Marthe's future might
be in the balance; but supposing that Christine had come home with a
gallant--and no _femme de chambre_ to do service!

She walked about the flat, shut the windows, drew the blinds, removed
her hat, removed her gloves, stretched them, put her things away; she
gazed at the two principal rooms, at the soiled numbers of _La Vie
Parisienne_ and the cracked bric-à-brac in the drawing-room, at the
rent in the lace bedcover, and the foul mess of toilet apparatus in
the bedroom. The forlorn emptiness of the place appalled her. She had
been quite fairly successful in her London career. Hundreds of men had
caressed her and paid her with compliments and sweets and money. She
had been really admired. The flat had had gay hours. Unmistakable
aristocrats had yielded to her. And she had escaped the five scourges
of her profession....

It was all over. The chapter was closed. She saw nothing in front of
her but decline and ruin. She had escaped the five scourges of her
profession, but part of the price of this immunity was that through
keeping herself to herself she had not a friend. Despite her
profession, and because of the prudence with which she exercised it,
she was a solitary, a recluse.

Yes, of course she had Gilbert. She could count upon Gilbert to a
certain extent, to a considerable extent; but he would not be eternal,
and his fancy for her would not be eternal. Once, before Easter, she
had had the idea that he meant to suggest to her an exclusive liaison.
Foolish! Nothing, less than nothing, had come of it. He would not be
such an imbecile as to suggest such a thing to her. Miracles did not
happen, at any rate not that kind of miracle.

In the midst of her desolation an old persistent dream revisited her:
the dream of a small country cottage in France, with a dog, a
faithful servant, respectability, good name, works of charity, her
own praying-stool in the village church. She moved to the wardrobe
and unlocked one of the drawers beneath the wide doors. And rummaging
under the linen and under the photographs under the linen she
drew forth a package and spread its contents on the table in the
drawing-room. Her securities, her bonds of the City of Paris, ever
increasing! Gilbert had tried to induce her to accept more attractive
investments. But she would not. Never! These were her consols, part of
her religion. Bonds of the City of Paris had fallen in value, but not
in her dogmatic esteem. The passionate little miser that was in her
surveyed them with pleasure, even with assurance; but they were still
far too few to stand for the realisation of her dream. And she might
have to sell some of them soon in order to live. She replaced them
carefully in the drawer with dejection unabated.

When she glanced at the table again she saw an envelope. Inexplicably
she had not noticed it before. She seized it in hope--and recognised
in the address the curious hand of her landlord. It contained a week's
notice to quit. The tenancy of the flat was weekly. This was the last
blow. All the invisible powers of London were conspiring together to
shatter the profession. What in the name of the Holy Virgin had come
over the astounding, incomprehensible city? Then there was a ring at
the bell. Marthe? No, Marthe would never ring; she had a key and
she would creep in. A lover? A rich, spendthrift, kind lover? Hope
flickered anew in her desolated heart.

It was the other pretty lady--a newcomer--who lived in the house:
a rather stylish woman of about thirty-five, unusually fair, with
regular features and a very dignified carriage, indeed not unimposing.
They had met once, at the foot of the stairs. Christine was not sure
of her name. She proclaimed herself to be Russian, but Christine
doubted the assertion. Her French had no trace of a foreign accent;
and in view of the achieve-merits of the Russian Army ladies were
finding it advantageous to be of Russian blood. Still she had a fine
cosmopolitan air to which Christine could not pretend. They engaged
each other in glances.

"I hope I do not disturb you, madame."

"Not at all, madame. I am obliged to open the door myself because my
servant is out."

"I thought I heard you come in, and so--"

"No," interrupted Christine, determined not to admit the defeat
of having returned from the Promenade alone. "I have not been out.
Probably it was my servant you heard."

"Ah!... Without doubt."

"Will you give yourself the trouble to enter, madame?"

"Ah!" exclaimed the Russian, in the sitting-room. "You will excuse me,
madame, but what a beautiful photograph!"

"You are too amiable, madame. A friend had it done for me."

They sat down.

"You are deliciously installed here," said the Russian perfunctorily,
looking round. "Now, madame, I have been here only three weeks. And
to-night I receive a notice to quit. Shall I be indiscreet if I ask if
you have received a similar notice?"

"This very evening," said Christine, in secret still more disconcerted
by this further proof of a general plot against human nature. She was
about to add: "I found it here on my return home," but, remembering
her fib, managed to stop in time.

"Well, madame, I know little of London. Without doubt you know London
to the bottom. Is it serious, this notice?"

"I think so."

"Quite serious?"

Christine said:

"You see, there is a crisis. It is the war that in London has led to
the discovery that men have desires. Of course, it will pass, but--"

"Oh, of course.... But it is grotesque, this crisis."

"It is perfectly grotesque," Christine agreed.

"You do not by hazard know where one can find flats to let? I hear
speak of Bloomsbury and of Long Acre. But it seems to me that those
quarters--"

"I am in London since now more than eighteen months," said Christine.
"And as for all those things I know little. I have lived here in this
flat all the time, and I go out so rarely--"

The Russian put in with eagerness:

"Oh, I also! I go out, so to speak, not at all."

"I thought I had seen you once in the Promenade at the--"

"Yes, it is true," interrupted the Russian quickly. "I went from
curiosity, for distraction. You see, since the war I have lived
in Dublin. I had there a friend, very highly placed in the
administration. He married. One lived terrible hours during the
revolt. I decided to come to London, especially as--However, I do not
wish to fatigue you with all that."

Christine said nothing. The Irish Rebellion did not interest her.
She was in no mood for talking about the Irish Rebellion. She had
convinced herself that all Sinn Feiners were in German pay, and naught
else mattered. Never, she thought, had the British Government
carried ingenuousness further than in this affair! Given a free hand,
Christine with her strong, direct common sense would have settled the
Irish question in forty-eight hours.

The Russian, after a little pause, continued:

"I merely wished to ask you whether the notice to quit was
serious--not a trick for raising the rent."

Christine shook her head to the last clause.

"And then, if the notice was quite serious, whether you knew of any
flats--not too dear.... Not that I mind a good rent if one receives
the value of it, and is left tranquil."

The conversation might at this point have taken a more useful turn if
Christine had not felt bound to hold herself up against the other's
high tone of indifference to expenditure. The Russian, in demanding
"tranquillity," had admitted that she regularly practised the
profession--or, as English girls strangely called it, "the
business"--and Christine could have followed her lead into the region
of gossiping and intimate realism where detailed confidences are
enlighteningly exchanged; but the tone about money was a challenge.

"I should have been enchanted to be of service to you," said
Christine. "But I know nothing. I go out less and less. As for this
notice, I smile at it. I have a friend upon whom I can count for
everything. I have only to tell him, and he will put me among my own
furniture at once. He has indeed already suggested it. So that, _je
m'en fiche_."

"I also!" said the Russian. "My new friend--he is a colonel, sent from
Dublin to London--has insisted upon putting me among my own furniture.
But I have refused so far--because one likes to know more of a
gentleman--does not one?--before ..."

"Truly!" murmured Christine.

"And there is always Paris," said the Russian.

"But I thought you were from Petrograd."

"Yes. But I know Paris well. Ah! There is only Paris! Paris is a
second home to me."

"Can one get a passport easily for Paris?... I mean, supposing the
air-raids grew too dangerous again."

"Why not, madame? If one has one's papers. To get a passport from
Paris to London, that would be another thing, I admit.... I see that
you play," the Russian added, rising, with a gesture towards the
piano. "I have heard you play. You play with true taste. I know, for
when a girl I played much."

"You flatter me."

"Not at all. I think your friend plays too."

"Ah!" said Christine. "He!... It is an artist, that one."

They turned over the music, exchanged views about waltzes, became
enthusiastic, laughed, and parted amid manifestations of good breeding
and goodwill. As soon as Christine was alone, she sat down and wept.
She could not longer contain her distress. Paris gleamed before her.
But no! It was a false gleam. She could not make a new start in Paris
during the war. The adventure would be too perilous; the adventure
might end in a licensed house. And yet in London--what was there
in London but, ultimately, the pavement? And the pavement meant
complications with the police, with prowlers, with other women;
it meant all the scourges of the profession, including probably
alcoholism. It meant prostitution, to which she had never sunk!

She wished she had been killed outright in the air-raid. She had an
idea of going to the Oratory the next morning, and perhaps choosing
a new Virgin and soliciting favour of the image thereof. She sobbed,
and, sobbing, suddenly jumped up and ran to the telephone. And even
as she gave Gilbert's number, she broke it in the middle with a sob.
After all, there was Gilbert.




Chapter 38

THE VICTORY


"Get back into bed," said G.J., having silently opened the window in
the sitting-room.

He spoke with courteous persuasion, but his peculiar intense
politeness and restraint somewhat dismayed Christine. By experience
she knew that they were a sure symptom of annoyance. She often, though
not on this occasion, wished that he would yield to anger and make a
scene; but he never did, and she would hate him for not doing so. The
fact was that under the agreement which ruled their relations, she had
no right to telephone to him, save in grave and instant emergency,
and even then it was her duty to say first, when she got the
communication: "Mr. Pringle wants to speak to Mr. Hoape." She had
omitted, in her disquiet, to fulfil this formality. Recognising his
voice, she had begun passionately, without preliminary: "Oh! Beloved,
thou canst not imagine what has happened to me--" etc. Still he had
come. He had cut her short, but he had left whatever he was doing
and had, amazingly, walked over at once. And in the meantime she had
hurriedly undressed and put on a new peignoir and slipped into bed. Of
course she had had to open the door herself.

She obeyed his command like an intelligent little mouse, and he sat
down on the edge of the bed. He might inspire foreboding, alarm, even
terror. But he was in the flat. He was the saviour, man, in the flat.
And his coming was in the nature of a miracle. He might have been out;
he might have been entertaining; he might have been engaged; he might
well have said that he could not come until the next day. Never before
had she made such a request, and he had acceded to it immediately!
Her mood was one of frightened triumph. He was being most damnably
himself; his demeanour was as faultless as his dress. She could not
even complain that he had forgotten to kiss her. He said nothing about
her transgression of the rule as to telephoning. He was waiting, with
his exasperating sense of justice and self-control, until she
had acquainted him with her case. Instead of referring coldly and
disapprovingly to the matter of the telephone, he said in a judicious,
amicable voice:

"I doubt whether your coiffeur is all that he ought to be. I see you
had your hair waved to-day."

"Yes, why?"

"You should tell the fellow to give you the new method of hair-waving,
steaming with electric heaters--or else go where you can get it."

"New method?" repeated Christine the Tory doubtfully. And then with
sudden sexual suspicion:

"Who told you about it?"

"Oh! I heard of it months ago," he said carelessly. "Besides, it's in
the papers, in the advertisements. It lasts longer--much longer--and
it's more artistic."

She felt sure that he had been discussing hair-waving with some woman.
She thought of all her grievances against him. The Lechford House
episode rankled in her mind. He had given her the details, but she
said to herself that he had given her the details only because he had
foreseen that she would hear about the case from others or read about
it in the newspapers. She had not been able to stomach that he should
be at Lechford House alone late at night with two women of the class
she hated and feared--and the very night of her dreadful experience
with him in the bomb-explosion! No explanations could make that
seem proper or fair. Naturally she had never disclosed her feelings.
Further, the frequenting of such a house as Lechford House was more
proof of his social importance, and incidentally of his riches. The
spectacle of his flat showed her long ago that previously she had
been underestimating his situation in the world. The revelations as
to Lechford House had seemed to show her that she was still
underestimating it. She resented his modesty. She was inclined
to attribute his modesty to a desire to pay her as little as he
reasonably could. However, she could not in sincerity do so. He
treated her handsomely, considering her pretensions, but considering
his position--he had no pretensions--not handsomely. She had had an
irrational idea that, having permitted her to see the splendour of
his flat, he ought to have increased her emoluments--that, indeed,
she should be paid not according to her original environment, but
according to his. She also resented that he had never again asked her
to his flat. Her behaviour on that sole visit had apparently decided
him not to invite her any more. She resented his perfectly hidden
resentment.

What disturbed her more than anything else was a notion in her mind,
possibly a wrong notion, that she cared for him less madly than of
old. She had always said to herself, and more than once sadly to him,
that his fancy for her would not and could not last; but that hers
for him should decline puzzled her and added to her grievances against
him. She looked at him from the little nest made by her head between
two pillows. Did she in truth care for him less madly than of old? She
wondered. She had only one gauge, the physical.

She began to talk despairingly about Marthe, whom, of course, she had
had to mention at the door. He said quietly:

"But it's not because of Marthe's caprices that I'm asked to come down
to-night, I suppose?"

She told him about the closing of the Promenade in a tone of absolute,
resigned certainty that admitted of no facile pooh-poohings or
reassurances. And then, glancing sidelong at the night-table, where
the lamp burned, she extended her half-bared arm and picked up the
landlord's notice and gave it to him to read. Watching him read it
she inwardly trembled, as though she had started on some perilous
enterprise the end of which might be black desperation, as though she
had cast off from the shore and was afloat amid the waves of a vast,
swollen river--waves that often hid the distant further bank. She felt
somehow that she was playing for all or nothing. And though she had
had immense experience of men, though it was her special business
to handle men, she felt herself to be unskilled and incompetent. The
common ruses, feints, devices, guiles, chicaneries were familiar to
her; she could employ them as well as any and better than most; they
succeeded marvellously and absurdly--in the common embarrassments and
emergencies, because they had not to stand the test of time. Their
purpose was temporary, and when the purpose had been accomplished
it did not matter whether they were unmasked or not, for the
adversary-victim--who, in any event, was better treated than he
deserved!--either had gone for ever, or would soon forget, or was too
proud to murmur, or philosophically accepted a certain amount of
wile as part of the price of ecstasy. But this embarrassment and this
emergency were not common. They were a supreme crisis.

"The other lady has had notice too," she said, and went on: "It's the
same everywhere in this quarter. I know not if it is the same in other
districts, but quite probably it is.... It is the end."

She saw by the lifting of his eyebrows that he was impressed, that
he secretly admitted the justifiability of her summons to him. And
instantly she took a reasonable, wise, calm tone.

"It is a little serious, is it not? I do not frighten myself, but it
is serious. Above all, I do not wish to trouble thee. I know all thy
anxieties, and I am a woman who understands. But except thee I have
not a friend, as I have often told thee. In my heart there is a place
only for one. I have a horror of all those women. They weary me. I am
not like them, as thou well knowest. Thus my existence is solitary. I
have no relations. Not one. See! Go into no matter what interior,
and there are photographs. But here--not one. Yes, one. My own. I am
forced to regard my own portrait. What would I not give to be able
to put on my chimney-piece thy portrait! But I cannot. Do not
deceive thyself. I am not complaining. I comprehend perfectly. It
is impossible that a woman like me should have thy photograph on her
chimney-piece." She smiled, smoothing for a moment the pucker out
of her brow. "And lately I see thee so little. Thou comest less
frequently. And when thou comest, well--one embraces--a little
music--and then _pouf_! Thou art gone. Is it not so?"

He said:

"But thou knowest the reason, I am terribly busy. I have all the
preoccupations in the world. My committee--it is not all smooth,
my committee. Everything and everybody depends on me. And in the
committee I have enemies too. The fact is, I have become a beast of
burden. I dream about it. And there are others in worse case. We shall
soon be in the third year of the war. We must not forget that."

"My little rabbit," she replied very calmly and reasonably and
caressingly. "Do not imagine to thyself that I blame thee. I do not
blame thee. I comprehend too well all that thou dost, all that thou
art worth. In every way thou art stronger than me. I am ten times
nothing. I know it. I have no grievance against thee. Thou hast always
given me what thou couldst, and I on my part have never demanded too
much. Say, have I been excessive? At this hour I make no claim on
thee. I have done all that to me was possible to make thee happy. In
my soul I have always been faithful to thee. I do not praise myself
for that. I did not choose it. These things are not chosen. They come
to pass--that is all. And it arrived that I was bound to go mad about
thee, and to remain so. What wouldst thou? Speak not of the war. Is
it not because of the war that I am in exile, and that I am ruined? I
have always worked honestly for my living. And there is not on earth
an officer who has encountered me who can say that I have not been
particularly nice to him--because he was an officer. Thou wilt excuse
me if I speak of such matters. I know I am wrong. It is contrary to
my habit. But what wouldst thou? I also have done what I could for the
war. But it is my ruin. Oh, my Gilbert! Tell me what I must do. I
ask nothing from thee but advice. It was for that that I dared to
telephone thee."

G.J. answered casually:

"I see nothing to worry about. It will be necessary to take another
flat. That is all."

"But I--I know nothing of London. One tells me that it is in future
impossible for women who live alone--like me--to find a flat--that is
to say, respectable."

"Absurd! I will find a flat. I know precisely where there is a flat."

"But will they let it to me?"

"They will let it to _me_, I suppose," said he, still casually.

A pause ensued.

She said, in a voice trembling:

"Thou art not going to say to me that thou wilt put me among my own
furniture?"

"The flat is furnished. But it is the same thing."

"Do not let such a hope shine before me--me who saw before me only the
pavement. Thou art not serious."

"I never was more serious. For whom dost thou take me, little-foolish
one?"

She cried:

"Oh, you English! You are _chic_. You make love as you go to war. Like
_that_!... One word--it is decided! And there is nothing more to say!
Ah! You English!"

She had almost screamed, shuddering under the shock of his decision,
for which she had impossibly hoped, but whose reality overwhelmed
her. He sat there in front of her, elegant, impeccably dressed,
distinguished, aristocratic, rich, in the full wisdom of his years,
and in the strength of his dominating will, and in the righteousness
of his heart. One could absolutely trust such as him to do the right
thing, and to do it generously, and to do it all the time. And she,
_she_ had won him. He had recognised her qualities. She had denied any
claim upon him, but by his decision he had admitted a claim--a claim
that no money could satisfy. After all, for eighteen months she had
been more to him than any other woman. He had talked freely to her.
He had concealed naught from her. He had spoken to her of his
discouragements and his weaknesses. He had had no shame before her.
By her acquiescences, her skill, her warmth, her adaptability, her
intense womanliness, she had created between them a bond stronger than
anything that could keep them apart. The bond existed. It could not
during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty. A disloyalty,
she divined, would irrevocably destroy it. But she had no fear on that
score, for she knew her own nature. His decision did more than fill
her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness--it
re-established her self-respect. No ordinary woman, handicapped as she
was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ... And the
notion that her passion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous,
like the notion that he would tire of her. She was saved. She burst
into wild tears.

"Ah! Pardon me!" she sobbed. "I am quite calm, really. But since the
air-raid, thou knowest, I have not been quite the same ... Thou! Thou
art different. Nothing could disturb thy calm. Ah! If thou wert a
general at the front! What sang-froid! What presence of mind! But I--"

He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round
the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him
she kept muttering to him:

"Hope not that I shall thank thee. I cannot. I cannot! The words with
which I could thank thee do not exist. But I am thine, thine! All of
me is thine. Humiliate me! Demand of me impossible things! I am thy
slave, thy creature! Ah! Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. I love
thy hair. And thy ears ..."

The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as
she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound,
unchangeable difference between these two. She would discipline
her temperament; she would subjugate it. Women were capable of
miracles--and women alone. And she was capable of miracles.

A strange, muffled noise came to them across the darkness of the
sitting-room, and G.J. raised his head slightly to listen.

"Repose! Repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother," she
breathed softly. "It is nothing. It is but the wind blowing the blind
against the curtains."

And later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was
tranquillised, she said:

"And where is it, this flat?"




Chapter 39

IDYLL


Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mère Gaston, the new servant
in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to
"Hoape, Albany":

"Give it to me. I will put it in front of the clock on the
mantelpiece."

And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on
the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. She did so with a little
gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a
whole.

The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The
rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage
close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The
bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J.
in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it
was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the
cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty
spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an
interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it
even to her memory of G.J.'s flat in the Albany. Its golden ornateness
flattered her. The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames
of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in
historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. She had
never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like
it. But then Gilbert was always better than his word.

He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of
the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the
Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to
leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at
the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of
Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed
from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith. Judiciously, she had never
made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested
the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great
illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs.
Carlos Smith in the tenancy. And when Gilbert told her that he had had
his eye on the flat for her before Mrs. Carlos Smith took it, and had
hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud. And
reassured also. For this detail was a proof that Gilbert had really
had the intention to put her "among her own furniture" long before the
night of the supreme appeal to him.... Only he was always so cautious.

And Gilbert was the discoverer of la mère Gaston, too, and as frank
about her as about the flat. La mère Gaston was the widow of a French
soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of
wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the
Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her. A few weeks
earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding
had fallen ill for a space, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as
charwoman to aid Mrs. Braiding's young sister in the Albany flat. With
excellent judgment Gilbert had chosen her to succeed Marthe, whom he
himself had reproachfully dismissed from Cork Street.

He was amazingly clever, was Gilbert, for he had so arranged things
that Christine had been able to cut off her Cork Street career as with
a knife. She had departed from Cork Street with two trunks and a few
cardboard boxes--her stove was abandoned to the landlord--and vanished
into London and left no trace. Except Gilbert, nobody who knew her in
Cork Street was aware of her new address, and nobody who knew her
in Mayfair knew that she had come from Cork Street. Her ancient
acquaintances in Cork Street would ring the bell there in vain.

Madame Gaston was a neat, plump woman of perhaps forty, not looking
her years. She had a comprehending eye. After three words from Gilbert
she had mastered the situation, and as she perfectly realised where
her interest lay she could be relied upon for discretion. In all
delicate matters only her eye talked. She was a Protestant, and went
to the French church in Soho Square, which she called the "Temple".
Christine and she had had but one Sunday together--and Christine had
gone with her to the Temple! The fact was that Christine had decided
to be a Protestant. She needed a religion, and Catholicism had an
inconvenience--confession. She had regularised her position, so much
so that by comparison with the past she was now perfectly respectable.
Yet if she had been candid in the confessional the priest would still
have convicted her of mortal sin; which would have been very unfair;
and she could not, in view of her respectability, have remained a
Catholic without confessing, however infrequently. Madame Gaston,
as soon as she was sure of her convert, referred to Catholicism as
"idolatry".

"Put your apron on, Marie," said Christine. "Monsieur will be here
directly."

"Ah, yes, madame!"

"Have you opened the kitchen-window to take away the smell of
cooking?"

"Yes, madame."

"Am I all right, Marie?"

Madame Gaston surveyed her mistress, who turned round.

"Yes, madame. I think that monsieur will much like that _négligée_."
She departed to don the apron.

Between these two it was continually "monsieur," "monsieur". He
was seldom there, but he was always there, always being consulted,
placated, invoked, revered, propitiated, magnified. He was the giver
of all good, and there was no other Allah, and he had two prophets.

Christine sang, she twittered, she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful
joy. She had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune
had washed her pure. She looked at herself in the massive bevelled
mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful.
And she felt triumphant. Gilbert had expressed the fear that she might
get lonely and bored. He had even said that occasionally he might
bring along a man, and that perhaps the man would have a very nice
woman friend. She had not very heartily responded. She was markedly
sympathetic towards Englishmen, but towards English women--no! And
especially she did not want to know any English women in the same
situation as herself. Lonely? Impossible! Bored? Impossible! She
had an establishment. She had a civil list. Her days passed like an
Arabian dream. She never had an unfilled moment, and when each day was
over she always remembered little things which she had meant to do and
had not found time to do.

She was a superb sleeper, and arose at noon. Three o'clock usually
struck before her day had fairly begun--unless, of course, she
happened to be very busy, in which case she would be ready for contact
with the world at the lunch-hour. Her main occupation was to charm,
allure, and gratify a man; for that she lived. Her distractions were
music, the reading of novels, _Le Journal_, and _Les Grandes Modes_.
And for the war she knitted. In her new situation it was essential
that she should do something for the war. Therefore she knitted, being
a good knitter, and her knitting generally lay about.

She popped into the dining-room to see if the table was well set
for dinner. It was, but in order to show that Marie did not know
everything, she rearranged somewhat the flowers in the central bowl.
Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and
waited. The instant of arrival approached. Gilbert's punctuality was
absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. She could not
have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexactitude
of her clock.... The bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a
five-finger exercise. Often in the old life she had executed upon him
this innocent subterfuge, to make him think she practised the piano
to a greater extent than she actually did, that indeed she was always
practising. It never occurred to her that he was not deceived.

Hear Marie fly to the front door! See Christine's face, see her body,
as in her pale, bright gown she peeps round the half-open door of the
drawing-room! She lives, then. Her eyes sparkle for the giver of all
good, for the adored, and her brow is puckered for him, and the jewels
on her hand burn for him, and every pleat of her garments visible and
invisible is pleated for him. She is a child. She has snatched up a
chocolate, and put it between her teeth, and so she offers the half
of it to him, smiling, silent. She is a child, but she is also a woman
intensely skilled in her art....

"Monster!" she said. "Come this way." And she led him down the tunnel
to the bedroom. There, in a corner of the bathroom, stood an antique
closed toilet-stand, such as was used by men in the days before
splashing and sousing were invented. She had removed it from the
drawing-room.

"Open it," she commanded.

He obeyed. Its little compartments, which had been empty, were filled
with a man's toilet instruments--brushes, file, scissors, shaving-soap
(his own brand), a safety-razor, &c. The set was complete. She had
known exactly the requirements.

"It is a little present from thy woman," she said. "In future thou
wilt have no excuse--Sit down. Marie!"

"Madame?"

"Take off the boots of Monsieur."

Marie knelt.

Christine found the new slippers.

"And now this!" she said, after he had washed and used the new
brushes, producing a black house-jacket with velvet collar and cuffs.

"How tired thou must be after thy day!" she murmured, patting him with
tiny pats.

"Thou knowest, my little one," she said, pointing to the gas-stove
in the bedroom fireplace. "For the other rooms a gas-stove--I am
indifferent. But the bedroom is something else. The bedroom is sacred.
I could not tolerate a gas-stove in the bedroom. A coal fire is
necessary to me. You do not think so?"

"Yes," he said. "You are quite right. It shall be seen to."

"Can I give the order? Thou permittest me to give the order?"

"Certainly."

In the drawing-room she cushioned him well in the best easy-chair,
and, sitting down on a pouf near him, began to knit like an
industrious wife who understands the seriousness of war. Nothing
escaped the attention of that man. He espied the telegram.

"What's that?"

"Ah!" she cried, springing up and giving it to him. "Stupid that I am!
I forgot."

He looked at the address.

"How did this come here?" he asked mildly.

"Marie brought it--from the Albany."

"Oh!"

He opened the telegram and read it, having dropped the envelope into
the silk-lined, gilded waste-paper basket by the fender.

"It is nothing serious?" she questioned.

"No. Business."

He might have shown it to her--he had shown her telegrams before--but
he stuck it into his pocket. Then, without a word to Christine, he
rang the bell, and Marie appeared.

"Marie! The telegram--why did you bring it here?"

"Monsieur, it was like this. I went to monsieur's flat to fetch two
aprons that I had left there. The telegram was on the console in the
ante-chamber. Knowing that monsieur was to come direct here, I brought
it."

"Does Mrs. Braiding know you brought it?"

"Ah! As for Mrs. Braiding, monsieur--"

Marie stopped, disclaiming any responsibility for Mrs. Braiding, of
whom she was somewhat jealous. "I thought to do well."

"I am sure of it. But surely you can see you have been indiscreet.
Don't do it again."

"No, monsieur. I ask pardon of monsieur."

Immediately afterwards he said to Christine in a gay, careless tone:

"And this gas-stove here? Is it all right? Have we tried it? Let us
try it."

"The weather is warm, dearest."

"But just to try it. I always like to satisfy myself--in time."

"Fusser!" she exclaimed, and ignited the stove.

He gazed at it absently, then picked up a cigarette and, taking the
telegram from his pocket, folded it into a spill and with it lit the
cigarette.

"Yes," he said meditatively. "It seems not a bad stove." And he held
the spill till it had burnt to his finger-ends. Then he extinguished
the stove.

She said to herself:

"He has burned the telegram on purpose. But how cleverly he did it!
Ah! That man! There is none but him!"

She was disquieted about the telegram. She feared it. Her
superstitiousness was awakened. She thought of her apostasy from
Catholicism to Protestantism. She thought of a Holy Virgin angered.
And throughout the evening and throughout the night, amid her smiles
and teasings and coaxings and caresses and ecstasies and all her
accomplished, voluptuous girlishness, the image of a resentful Holy
Virgin flitted before her. Why should he burn a business telegram?
Also, was he not at intervals a little absent-minded?




Chapter 40

THE WINDOW


G.J. sat on the oilcloth-covered seat of the large overhanging open
bay-window. Below him was the river, tributary of the Severn; in front
the Old Bridge, with an ancient street rising beyond, and above that
the silhouette of the roofs of Wrikton surmounted by the spire of its
vast church. To the left was the weir, and the cliffs were there also,
and the last tints of the sunset.

Somebody came into the coffee-room. G.J. looked round, hoping that it
might, after all, be Concepcion. But it was Concepcion's maid, Emily,
an imitative young woman who seemed to have caught from her former
employer the quality of strange, sinister provocativeness.

She paused a moment before speaking. Her thin figure was somewhat
indistinct in the twilight.

"Mrs. Smith wishes me to say that she will certainly be well enough to
take you to the station in the morning, sir," said she in her specious
tones. "But she hopes you will be able to stay till the afternoon
train."

"I shan't." He shook his head.

"Very well, sir."

And after another moment's pause Emily, apparently with a challenging
reluctance, receded through the shadows of the room and vanished.

G.J. was extremely depressed and somewhat indignant. He gazed down
bitterly at the water, following with his eye the incredibly long
branches of the tree that from the height of the buttresses drooped
perpendicularly into the water. He had had an astounding week-end; and
for having responded to Concepcion's telegram, for having taken the
telegram seriously, he had deserved what he got. Thus he argued.

She had met him on the hot Saturday afternoon in a Ford car. She did
not look ill. She looked as if she had fairly recovered from her
acute neurasthenia. She was smartly and carelessly dressed in a summer
sporting costume, and had made a strong contrast to every other human
being on the platform of the small provincial station. The car drove
not to the famous principal hotel, but to a small hotel just beyond
the bridge. She had given him tea in the coffee-room and taken him out
again, on foot, showing him the town--the half-timbered houses, the
immense castle, the market-hall, the spacious flat-fronted residences,
the multiplicity of solicitors, banks and surveyors, the bursting
provision shops with imposing fractions of animals and expensive pies,
and the drapers with ladies' blouses at 2s. 4d. Then she had conducted
him to an organ recital in the vast church where, amid faint gas-jets
and beadles and stalls and stained glass and holiness and centuries
of history and the high respectability of the town, she had whispered
sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of
the organ. She had removed him from the church before the collection
for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had
borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall.

She said she had seen the Russian dancers once already, and that they
were richly worth to him a six-hours' train journey. The posters of
the Russian dancers were rather daring and seductive. The Russian
dancers themselves were the most desolating stage spectacle that G.J.
had ever witnessed. The troupe consisted of intensely English girls
of various ages, and girl-children. The costumes had obviously been
fabricated by the artistes. The artistes could neither dance, pose,
group, make an entrance, make an exit, nor even smile. The ballets,
obviously fabricated by the same persons as the costumes, had no plot,
no beginning and no end. Crude amateurishness was the characteristic
of these honest and hard-working professionals, who somehow contrived
to be neither men nor women--and assuredly not epicene--but who
travelled from country town to country town in a glamour of posters,
exciting the towns, in spite of a perfect lack of sex, because they
were the fabled Russian dancers. The Moot Hall was crammed with adults
and their cackling offspring, who heartily applauded the show, which
indeed was billed as a "return visit" due to "terrific success" on a
previous occasion. "Is it not too marvellous," Concepcion had said.
He had admitted that it was. But the boredom had been excruciating.
In the street they had bought an evening paper of which he had never
before heard the name, to learn news of the war. The war, however,
seemed very far off; it had grown unreal. "We'll talk to-morrow,"
Concepcion had said, and gone abruptly to bed! Still, he had slept
well in the soft climate, to the everlasting murmur of the weir.

Then the Sunday. She was indisposed, could not come down to breakfast,
but hoped to come down to lunch, could not come down to lunch, but
hoped to come down to tea, could not come down to tea--and so on to
nightfall. The Sunday had been like a thousand years to him. He had
learnt the town, and the suburbs of it; the grass-grown streets, the
main thoroughfares, and the slums; by the afternoon he was recognising
familiar faces in the town. He had twice made the classic round--along
the cliffs, over the New Bridge (which was an antique), up the hill to
the castle, through the market-place, down the High Street to the
Old Bridge. He had explored the brain of the landlord, who could
not grapple with a time-table, and who spent most of the time during
closed hours in patiently bolting the front door which G.J. was
continually opening. He had talked to the old customer who, whenever
the house was open, sat at a table in the garden over a mug of cider.
He had played through all the musical comedies, dance albums and
pianoforte albums that littered the piano. He had read the same Sunday
papers that he read in the Albany. And he had learnt the life-history
of the sole servant, a very young agreeable woman with a wedding-ring
and a baby, which baby she carried about with her when serving at
table. Her husband was in France. She said that as soon as she had
received his permission to do so she should leave, as she really could
not get through all the work of the hotel and mind and feed a baby.
She said also that she played the piano herself. And she regretted
that baby and pressure of work had deprived her of a sight of the
Russian dancers, because she had heard so much about them, and was
sure they were beautiful. This detail touched G.J.'s heart to a
mysterious and sweet and almost intolerable melancholy. He had not
made the acquaintance of fellow-guests--for there were none, save
Concepcion and Emily.

And in the evening as in the morning the weir placidly murmured, and
the river slipped smoothly between the huge jutting buttresses of the
Old Bridge; and the thought of the perpetuity of the river, in whose
mirror the venerable town was a mushroom, obsessed him, mastered
him, and made him as old as the river. He was wonder-struck
and sorrow-struck by life, and by his own life, and by the
incomprehensible and angering fantasy of Concepcion. His week-end took
on the appearance of the monstrous. Then the door opened again, and
Concepcion entered in a white gown, the antithesis of her sporting
costume of the day before. She approached through the thickening
shadows of the room, and the vague whiteness of her gown reminded him
of the whiteness of the form climbing the chimney-ladder on the roof
of Lechford House in the raid. Knowing her, he ought to have known
that, having made him believe that she would not come down, she
would certainly come down. He restrained himself, showed no untoward
emotion, and said in a calm, genial voice: "Oh! I'm so glad you were
well enough to come down."

She sat opposite to him in the window-seat, rather sideways, so that
her skirt was pulled close round her left thigh and flowed free over
the right. He could see her still plainly in the dusk.

"I've never yet apologised to you for my style of behaviour at the
committee of yours," she began abruptly in a soft, kind, reasonable
voice. "I know I let you down horribly. Yes, yes! I did. And I ought
to apologise to you for to-day too. But I don't think I'll apologise
to you for bringing you to Wrikton and this place. They're not real,
you know. They're an illusion. There is no such place as Wrikton and
this river and this window. There couldn't be, could there? Queen and
I motored over here once from Paulle--it's not so very far--and
we agreed that it didn't really exist. I never forgot it; I was
determined to come here again some time, and that's why I chose this
very spot when half Harley Street stood up and told me I must go away
somewhere after my cure and be by myself, far from the pernicious
influence of friends. I think I gave you a very fair idea of the town
yesterday. But I didn't show you the funniest thing in it--the inside
of a solicitor's office. You remember the large grey stone house in
Mill Street--the grass street, you know--with 'Simpover and Simpover'
on the brass plate, and the strip of green felt nailed all round the
front door to keep the wind out in winter. Well, it's all in the
same key inside. And I don't know which is the funniest, the Russian
dancers, or the green felt round the front door, or Mr. Simpover, or
the other Mr. Simpover. I'm sure neither of those men is real, though
they both somehow have children. You remember the yellow cards that
you see in so many of the windows: 'A MAN has gone from this house to
fight for King and Country!'--the elder Mr. Simpover thinks it would
be rather boastful to put the card in the window, so he keeps it on
the mantelpiece in his private office. It's for his son. And yet
I assure you the father isn't real. He is like the town, he simply
couldn't be real."

"What have _you_ been up to in the private office?" G.J. asked
lightly.

"Making my will."

"What for?"

"Isn't it the proper thing to do? I've left everything to you."

"You haven't, Con!" he protested. There was absolutely no tranquillity
about this woman. With her, the disconcerting unexpected happened
every five minutes.

"Did you suppose I was going to send any of my possessions back to my
tropical relatives in South America? I've left everything to you to do
what you like with. Squander it if you like, but I expect you'll give
it to war charities. Anyhow, I thought it would be safest in your
hands."

He retorted in a tone quietly and sardonically challenging:

"But I was under the impression you were cured."

"Of my neurasthenia?"

"Yes."

"I believe I am. I gained thirteen pounds in the nursing home, and
slept like a greengrocer. In fact, the Weir-Mitchell treatment, with
modern improvements of course, enjoyed a marvellous triumph in my
case. But that's not the point. G.J., I know you think I behaved very
childishly yesterday, and that I deserved to be ill to-day for what
I did yesterday. And I admit you're a saint for not saying so. But
I wasn't really childish, and I haven't really been ill to-day. I've
only been in a devil of a dilemma. I wanted to tell you something. I
telegraphed for you so that I could tell you. But as soon as I saw you
I was afraid to tell you. Not afraid, but I couldn't make up my mind
whether I ought to tell you or not. I've lain in bed all day trying
to decide the point. To-night I decided I oughtn't, and then all of
a sudden, just now, I became an automaton and put on some things, and
here I am telling you."

She paused. G.J. kept silence. Then she continued, in a voice in which
persuasiveness was added to calm, engaging reasonableness:

"Now you must get rid of all your conventional ideas, G.J. Because
you're rather conventional. You must be completely straight--I mean
intellectually--otherwise I can't treat you as an intellectual equal,
and I want to. You must be a realist--if any man can be." She spoke
almost with tenderness.

He felt mysteriously shy, and with a brusque movement of the head
shifted his glance from her to the river.

"Well?" he questioned, his gaze fixed on the water that continually
slipped in large, swirling, glinting sheets under the bridge.

"I'm going to kill myself."

At first the words made no impression on him. He replied:

"You were right when you said this place was an illusion. It is."

And then he began to be afraid. Did she mean it? She was capable of
anything. And he was involved in her, inescapably. Yes, he was afraid.
Nevertheless, as she kept silence he went on--with bravado:

"And how do you intend to do it?"

"That will be my affair. But I venture to say that my way of doing it
will make Wrikton historic," she said, curiously gentle.

"Trust you!" he exclaimed, suddenly looking at her. "Con, why _will_
you always be so theatrical?"

She changed her posture for an easier one, half reclining. Her face
and demeanour seemed to have the benign masculinity of a man's.

"I'm sorry," she answered. "I oughtn't to have said that. At any rate,
to you. I ought to have had more respect for your feelings."

He said:

"You aren't cured. That's evident. All this is physical."

"Of course it's physical, G.J.," she agreed, with an intonation of
astonishment that he should be guilty of an utterance so obvious and
banal. "Did you ever know anything that wasn't? Did you ever even
conceive anything that wasn't? If you can show me how to conceive
spirit except in terms of matter, I'd like to listen to you."

"It's against nature--to kill yourself."

"Oh!" she murmured. "I'm quite used to that charge. You aren't by any
means the first to accuse me of being against nature. But can you tell
me where nature ends? That's another thing I'd like to know....
My dear friend, you're being conventional, and you aren't being
realistic. You must know perfectly well in your heart that there's no
reason why I shouldn't kill myself if I want to. You aren't going to
talk to me about the Ten Commandments, I suppose, are you? There's
a risk, of course, on the other side--shore--but perhaps it's worth
taking. You aren't in a position to say it isn't worth taking. And at
worst the other shore must be marvellous. It may possibly be terrible,
if you arrive too soon and without being asked, but it must be
marvellous.... Naturally, I believe in immortality. If I didn't, the
thing wouldn't be worth doing. Oh! I should hate to be extinguished.
But to change one existence for another, if the fancy takes you--that
seems to me the greatest proof of real independence that anybody
can give. It's tremendous. You're playing chess with fate and fate's
winning, and you knock up the chess-board and fate has to begin all
over again! Can't you see how tremendous it is--and how tempting it
is? The temptation is terrific."

"I can see all that," said G.J. He was surprised by a sudden sense
of esteem for the mighty volition hidden behind those calm, worn,
gracious features. But Concepcion's body was younger than her face.
He perceived, as it were for the first time, that Concepcion was
immeasurably younger than himself; and yet she had passed far beyond
him in experience. "But what's the origin of all this? What do you
want to do it for? What's happened?"

"Then you believe I mean to do it?"

"Yes," he replied sincerely, and as naturally as he could.

"That's the tone I like to hear," said she, smiling. "I felt sure
I could count on you not to indulge in too much nonsense. Well, I'm
going to try the next avatar just to remind fate of my existence. I
think fate's forgotten me, and I can stand anything but that. I've
lost Carly, and I've lost Queen.... Oh, G.J.! Isn't it awful to think
that when I offered you Queen she'd already gone, and it was only
her dead body I was offering you? ... And I've lost my love. And I've
failed, and I shall never be any more good here. I swore I would see a
certain thing through, and I haven't seen it through, and I can't! But
I've told you all this before.... What's left? Even my unhappiness
is leaving me. Unless I kill myself I shall cease to exist. Don't you
understand? Yes, you do."

After a marked pause she added:

"And I may overtake Queen."

"There's one thing I don't understand," he said, "as we're being
frank with each other. Why do you tell me? Has it occurred to you that
you're really making me a party to this scheme of yours?"

He spoke with a perfectly benevolent detachment deriving from hers.
And as he spoke he thought of a man whom he had once known and who had
committed suicide, and of all that he had read about suicides and what
he had thought of them. Suicides had been incomprehensible to him, and
either despicable or pitiable. And he said to himself: "Here is one
of them! (Or is it an illusion?) But she has made all my notions of
suicide seem ridiculous."

She answered his spoken question with vivacity: "Why do I tell you? I
don't know. That's the point I've been arguing to myself all night
and all day. _I'm_ not telling you. Something _in_ me is forcing me to
tell you. Perhaps it's much more important that you should comprehend
me than that you should be spared the passing worry that I'm causing
you by showing you the inside of my head. You're the only friend I
have left. I knew you before I knew Carly. I practically committed
suicide from my particular world at the beginning of the war. I was
going back to my particular world--you remember, G.J., in that little
furnished flat--I was going back to it, but you wouldn't let me. It
was you who definitely cut me off from my past. I might have been
gadding about safely with Sarah Churcher and her lot at this very
hour, but you would have it otherwise, and so I finished up with
neurasthenia. You commanded and I obeyed."

"Well," he said, ignoring all her utterance except the last words,
"obey me again."

"What do you want me to do?" she demanded wistfully and yet defiantly.
Her features were tending to disappear in the tide of night, but she
happened to sit up and lean forward and bring them a little closer to
him. "You've no right to stop me from doing what I want to do. What
right have you to stop me? Besides, you can't stop me. Nothing can
stop me. It is settled. Everything is arranged."

He, too, sat up and leaned forward. In a voice rendered soft by the
realisation of the fact that he had indeed known her before Carlos
Smith knew her and had imagined himself once to be in love with her,
and of the harshness of her destiny and the fading of her glory, he
said simply and yet, in spite of himself, insinuatingly:

"No! I don't claim any right to stop you. I understand better,
perhaps, than you think. But let me come down again next week-end. Do
let me," he insisted, still more softly.

Even while he was speaking he expected her to say, "You're only
suggesting that in order to gain time."

But she said:

"How can you be sure it wouldn't be my inquest and funeral I should be
'letting' you come down to?"

He replied:

"I could trust you."

A delicate night-gust charged with the scent of some plant came in at
the open window and deranged ever so slightly a glistening lock on
her forehead. G.J., peering at her, saw the masculinity melt from her
face. He saw the mysterious resurrection of the girl in her, and felt
in himself the sudden exciting outflow from her of that temperamental
fluid whose springs had been dried up since the day when she learnt
of her widowhood. She flushed. He looked away into the dark water,
as though he had profanely witnessed that which ought not to be
witnessed. Earlier in the interview she had inspired him with shyness.
He was now stirred, agitated, thrilled--overwhelmed by the effect on
her of his own words and his own voice. He was afraid of his power,
as a prophet might be afraid of his power. He had worked a miracle--a
miracle infinitely more convincing than anything that had led up to
it. The miracle had brought back the reign of reality.

"Very well," she quivered.

And there was a movement and she was gone. He glanced quickly behind
him, but the room lay black.... A transient pallor on the blackness,
and the door banged. He sat a long time, solemn, gazing at the
serrated silhouette of the town against a sky that obstinately held
the wraith of daylight, and listening to the everlasting murmur of the
invisible weir. Not a sound came from the town, not the least sound.
When at length he stumbled out, he saw the figure of the landlord
smoking the pipe of philosophy, and waiting with a landlord's fatalism
for the last guest to go to bed. And they talked of the weather.




Chapter 41

THE ENVOY


The next night G.J., having been hailed by an acquaintance, was
talking at the top of the steps beneath the portal of a club in
Piccadilly. It was after ten by the clocks, and nearly, but not quite,
dark. A warm, rather heavy, evening shower had ceased. This was the
beginning of the great macintosh epoch, by-product of the war,
when the paucity of the means of vehicular locomotion had rendered
macintoshes permissible, even for women with pretensions to smartness;
and at intervals stylish girls on their way home from unaccustomed
overtime, passed the doors in transparent macintoshes of pink, yellow
or green, as scornful as military officers of the effeminate umbrella,
whose use was being confined to clubmen and old dowdies.

The acquaintance sought advice from G.J. about the shutting up
of households for Belgian refugees. G.J. answered absently, not
concealing that he was in a hurry. He had, in fact, been held up
within three minutes of the scene of his secret idyll, and was anxious
to arrive there. He had promised himself this surprise visit to
Christine as some sort of recompense and narcotic for the immense
disturbance of spirit which he had suffered at Wrikton.

That morning Concepcion had been invisible, but at his early breakfast
he had received a note from her, a brief but masterly composition,
if ever so slightly theatrical. He was conscious of tenderness for
Concepcion, of sympathy with her, of a desire to help to restore
her to that which by misfortune she had lost. But the first of these
sentiments he resolutely put aside. He was determined to change his
mood towards her for the sake of his own tranquillity; and he had
convinced himself that his wise, calm, common sense was capable of
saving her from any tragic and fatal folly. He had her in the hollow
of his hand; but if she was expecting too much from him she would be
gradually disappointed. He must have peace; he could not allow a bomb
to be thrown into his habits; he was a bachelor of over fifty
whose habits had the value of inestimable jewels and whose perfect
independence was the most precious thing in the world. At his age he
could not marry a volcano, a revolution, a new radio-active element
exhibiting properties which were an enigma to social science.
Concepcion would turn his existence into an endless drama of which
she alone, with her deep-rooted, devilish talent for the sensational,
would always choose the setting, as she had chosen the window and the
weir. No; he must not mistake affectionate sympathy for tenderness,
nor tolerate the sexual exploitation of his pity.

As he listened and talked to the acquaintance his inner mind shifted
with relief to the vision of Christine, contented and simple and
compliant in her nest--Christine, at once restful and exciting,
Christine, the exquisite symbol of acquiescence and response. What a
contrast to Concepcion! It had been a bold and sudden stroke to lift
Christine to another plane, but a stroke well justified and entirely
successful, fulfilling his dream.

At this moment he noticed a figure pass the doorway in whose shadow he
was, and he exclaimed within himself incredulously:

"That is Christine!"

In the shortest possible delay he said "Good-night" to his
acquaintance, and jumped down the steps and followed eastwards the
figure. He followed warily, for already the strange and distressing
idea had occurred to him that he must not overtake her--if she it was.
It was she. He caught sight of her again in the thick obscurity by the
prison-wall of Devonshire House. He recognised the peculiar brim of
the new hat and the new "military" umbrella held on the wrist by a
thong.

What was she doing abroad? She could not be going to a theatre. She
had not a friend in London. He was her London. And la mère Gaston was
not with her. Theoretically, of course, she was free. He had laid
down no law. But it had been clearly understood between them that she
should never emerge at night alone. She herself had promulgated the
rule, for she had a sense of propriety and a strong sense of reality.
She had belonged to the class which respectable, broadminded women,
when they bantered G.J., always called "the pretty ladies," and as a
postulant for respectability she had for her own satisfaction to
mind her p's and q's. She could not afford not to keep herself above
suspicion.

She had been a courtesan. Did she look like one? As an individual
figure in repose, no! None could have said that she did. He had long
since learnt that to decide always correctly by appearance, and apart
from environment and gesture, whether an unknown woman was or was not
a wanton, presented a task beyond the powers of even the completest
experience. But Christine was walking in Piccadilly at night, and
he soon perceived that she was discreetly showing the demeanour of
a courtesan at her profession--she who had hated and feared the
pavement! He knew too well the signs--the waverings, the turns of the
head, the variations in speed, the scarcely perceptible hesitations,
the unmistakable air of wandering with no definite objective.

Near Dover Street he hastened through the thin, reflecting mire, amid
beams of light and illuminated numbers that advanced upon him in both
directions thundering or purring, and crossed Piccadilly, and hurried
ahead of her, to watch her in safety from the other side of the
thoroughfare. He could hardly see her; she was only a moving shadow;
but still he could see her; and in the long stretch of gloom beneath
the facade of the Royal Academy he saw the shadow pause in front of a
military figure, which by a flank movement avoided the shadow and went
resolutely forward. He lost her in front of the Piccadilly Hotel,
and found her again at the corner of Air Street. She swerved into Air
Street and crossed Regent Street; he was following. In Denman Street,
close to Shaftesbury Avenue, she stood still in front of another
military figure--a common soldier as it proved--who also rebuffed her.
The thing was flagrant. He halted, and deliberately let her go from
his sight. She vanished into the dark crowds of the Avenue.

In horrible humiliation, in atrocious disgust, he said to himself:

"Never will I set eyes on her again! Never! Never!"

Why was she doing it? Not for money. She could only be doing it
from the nostalgia of adventurous debauch. She was the slave of her
temperament, as the drunkard is the slave of his thirst. He had
told her that he would be out of town for the week end, on committee
business. He had distinctly told her that she must on no account
expect him on the Monday night. And her temperament had roused itself
from the obscene groves of her subconsciousness like a tiger and
come up and driven her forth. How easy for her to escape from la mère
Gaston if she chose! And yet--would she dare, even at the bidding
of the tiger, to introduce a stranger into the flat? Unnecessary,
he reflected. There were a hundred accommodating dubious interiors
between Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square. He understood; he
neither accused nor pardoned; but he was utterly revolted, and wounded
not merely in his soul but in the most sensitive part of his
soul--his pride. He called himself by the worst epithet of opprobrium:
Simpleton! The bold and sudden stroke had now become the fatuous
caprice of a damned fool. Had he, at his age, been capable of
overlooking the elementary axiom: once a wrong 'un, always a wrong
'un? Had he believed in reclamation? He laughed out his disgust ...

No! He did not blame her. To blame her would have been ridiculous. She
was only what she was, and not worth blame. She was nothing at all.
How right, how cursedly right, were the respectable dames in the
accent of amused indifference which they employed for their precious
phrase, "the pretty ladies"! Well, he would treat her generously--but
through his lawyer.

And in the desolation, the dismay, the disillusion, the nausea which
ravaged him he was unwillingly conscious of fragments of thoughts that
flickered like transient flames far below in the deep mines of his
being.... "You are an astounding woman, Con." ... "Do you want me
to go to the bad altogether?" ... In offering him Queen had not
Concepcion made the supreme double sacrifice of attempting to bring
together, at the price of her own separation from both of them,
the two beings to whom she was most profoundly attached? It was a
marvellous deed.... Worry, volcanoes, revolutions--was he afraid
of them?... Were they not the very essence of life?... A figure of
nobility!... Sitting there now by the window over the river, listening
to the weir.... "I shall never be any more good." ... But she never
had a gesture that was not superb.... Was he really encrusted in
habits? Really like men whom he knew and despised at his club?... She
loved him.... And what rich, flattering love was her love compared
to--!... She was young.... Tenderness.... Such were the flames of dim
promise that nickered immeasurably beneath the dark devastation of his
mind. He ignored them, but he could not ignore them. He extinguished
them, but they were continually relighted.... A wedding?... What sort
of a wedding?... Poor Carlos, pathetically buried under the ruthless
happiness of others! What a shame!... Poor Carlos!

(Nice enough little cocotte, nothing else! But, of course,
incurable!... He remembered all her crimes now. How she had been late
in dressing for their first dinner. Her inexplicable vanishing from
the supper-party, never explained, but easily explicable now, perhaps.
And so on and so on.... Simpleton! Ass!)

He had walked heedless of direction. He was near Lechford House.
Many of its windows were lit. The great front doors were open. A
commissionaire stood on guard in front of them. To the railings was
affixed a newly-painted notice: "No person will be allowed to enter
these premises without a pass. To this rule there is no exception."
Lechford House had been "taken over" in its entirety by a Government
department that believed in the virtue of mystery and of long hours.
He looked up at the higher windows. He could not distinguish the
chimney amid the newly-revealed stars. He thought of Queen, the white
woman. Evidently he had never understood Queen, for if Concepcion
admired her she was worth admiration. Concepcion never made a mistake
in assessing fundamental character.

The complete silent absorption of Lechford House into the war-machine
rather dismayed him. He had seen not a word as to the affair in the
newspapers--and Lechford House was one of the final strongholds of
privilege! He strolled on into the quietness of the Park--of which
one of the gate-keepers said to him that it would be shutting in a few
minutes.

He was in solitude, and surrounded by London. He stood still, and the
vast sea of war seemed to be closing over him. The war was growing, or
the sense of its measureless scope was growing. It had sprung, not
out of this crime or that, but out of the secret invisible roots of
humanity, and it was widening to the limits of evolution itself.
It transcended judgment. It defied conclusions and rendered equally
impossible both hope and despair. His pride in his country was
intensified as months passed; his faith in his country was not
lessened. And yet, wherein was the efficacy of grim words about
British tenacity? The great new Somme offensive was not succeeding in
the North. Was victory possible? Was victory deserved? In his daily
labour he was brought into contact with too many instances of official
selfishness, folly, ignorance, stupidity, and sloth, French as well as
British, not to marvel at times that the conflict had not come to an
ignominious end long ago through simple lack of imagination. He knew
that he himself had often failed in devotion, in rectitude, in sheer
grit.

The supreme lesson of the war was its revelation of what human nature
actually was. And the solace of the lesson, the hope for triumph,
lay in the fact that human nature must be substantially the same
throughout the world. If we were humanly imperfect, so at least was
the enemy.

Perhaps the frame of society was about to collapse. Perhaps Queen,
deliberately courting destruction, and being destroyed, was the symbol
of society. What matter? Perhaps civilisation, by its nobility and its
elements of reason, and by the favour of destiny, would be saved from
disaster after frightful danger, and Concepcion was its symbol....

All he knew was that he had a heavy day's work before him on the
morrow, and in relief from pain and insoluble problems he turned to
face that work, thankful; thankful that (owing originally to Queen!)
he had discovered in the war a task which suited his powers, which was
genuinely useful, and which would only finish with the war; thankful
for the prospect of meeting Concepcion at the week-end and exploring
with her the marvellous provocative potentialities that now drew them
together; thankful, too, that he had a balanced and sagacious mind,
and could judge justly. (Yes, he was already forgetting his bitter
condemnation of himself as a simpleton!)

How in his human self-sufficiency could he be expected to know that
he had judged the negligible Christine unjustly? Was he divine that
he could see in the figure of the wanton who peered at soldiers in the
street a self-convinced mystic envoy of the most clement Virgin, an
envoy passionately repentant after apostasy, bound at all costs to
respond to an imagined voice long unheard, and seeking--though in vain
this second time--the protégé of the Virgin so that she might once
more succour and assuage his affliction?

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12673 ***