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PROLOGUE

The British Empire is full of backwaters where Englishmen go to consolidate. More often than not they leave the place just as it was, vastly altered themselves, when they return to England to dwell on the time when they were big frogs in little pools. They throw away their engagement books, remembering the hospitality of Canada, Australia, etc., and ponder on how expansive a country can be. They are inclined to believe my friend Higginson of Boston when he said, nature got tired of the Englishman and took one more drop of nervous fluid to make the American. But soon they are trotting round their sceptred isle, like Agag, walking delicately in honour of the many gradations between the under-strapper and the century-old-lord in his feudal castle. As their reflexes tauten once again, they are inclined to remember with shock that the Americans found such attitudes ‘real quaint.’

Things about the Englishman the same at home and abroad are grey flannel, pin-stripes, and tweeds, not to mention the moorings they lace on their feet. The Empire owes much to brogues and the earth-bound scuff of desensitized soles. Should the outpost heroes be buried in them, they will wake from resurrection, like men stepping from a boat or train, to begin more colonization. Even quite good scientists hope for something from the soul of man. They admit that cows do not stop grazing to gaze at the sunset. Such a pronouncement makes immortality more interesting for Britain, when she believes in hosts of the elect commissioned for earthly improvement.

There was a Frenchman once who was accustomed to treading the earth in light, double A shoes. Visiting England he acquired a pair of brogues, buying them for two reasons. First because he felt bad form in his own shoes: secondly because they looked impressive, imparting a kind of pedestal base to a man. Dragging across the room in his new purchase he threw his hands in the air, “ah, now I understand Englishmen for the first time. I could not cry for the moon in those shoes. It is why they do not know Big Ben is flat! As for those quarter-bells—”

This story might go over to America, man meets woman, man gets woman, woman loses man, man loses woman! Three is an inauspicious number whose significance can be traced through the ages, but this time the triangle was not traditional. The couple met twelve years ago in an English backwater but their eyes were cellophane-wrapped. He was blinded by ambition and she by virginity: two ice-cold qualities that foster the empty eye. He did not see her at all, though he dined at her father’s table. She saw him a little in an immature way. There was such a compelling difference between his hands and his face, and in that way she had been taught to read signs and symptoms. Once when enduring a dreary convalescence from typhoid fever, her father had given her a book about hands and faces, describing from ill-assorted fingers and thumbs, the warring instincts of men and women. She learned many things, and above all that men with no backs to their heads were minus parental affection. This man had a head with a beautiful back, and though other people said he had brains and initiative, she knew he had parental affection. He had the face of a chaste knight, and hands that would be serviceable to a mechanic, and once when he opened his palm to grasp something her father passed, she saw one line cleaving his palm. She knew it indicated loyalty, rutted and deep. Loyalty to what? By looking at his face she was conscious of a world which a man and woman could inhabit with equal felicity.

By looking at his hands she could see him riding rough-shod over obstacles. Their purposeful strength predicted for him. He was dressed well enough but she could see him in pin-stripes from Savile Row, and she knew his shirts were destined to be handmade. It was inevitable they would be folded away in tall-boys standing in two hundred acres or driven up to London over tires of special rubber compound. When language was pedantic in England, they would have said his hair was as yellow as Ceres’ golden grain. Now the purest scholars would say it was like ripe corn.

Apart from his job and the rut of his one-minded way, he kept himself fit by riding horses on hard flinty roads, continuing it even when he was travelling on big business, and talking to men about hydro-electric power, but his voice was so composed and beautiful, that he referred to such things as if they were delicate intimacies. At the wrong end of a dozen years his horse had a naglike quality, but it was a good obedient animal and did duty to the man’s liver. A blood-mare was also predestined.

Sara was light-haired with black smouldering eyes, but then their fire was ventless. She knew about calf-love, birds and spring and had survived a time when a single loss seemed a gigantic secret. She knew nothing about love in the grand manner. Even to entertain such a thought made her close her eyes in repudiation, until she was compelled to open them for another look. Everything she felt and did was the result of her contacts with the new and old world, plus the motley that ran in her blood. She could be adaptable and pliant because she had never known long, strong roots expanding in one spot, and she was aware that the tops of living demanded discipline and formality. But there were many elements in her that would not blend. Instincts were strong to sack the byways, and get to the core of mysteries. Somewhere there was liberation, harmony, beauty, and a grand unbuttoned communion with the one nearest her identity. When she skirmished, and retreated disappointed, there was no bile in her blood. Tinsel had not seemed tinsel, when it was afar off. The fact that she had descended from a Russian ancestress gave her a sense of Slavic acceptance.

When they met, destiny could afford to be blind, knowing what can happen in an hour, after a dozen years. Only Sara gave the restless sigh for the unknown and unknowable, wishing for the man’s composure that might balance her zest of living.

Back in the island that is Heaven’s peculiar care, the man had a wife. He had detoured from waste by marrying young, accepting the fact that wives give their husbands well-regulated love to free them for other things.

When the women were alone after her father’s dinner, Sara heard them talking about him. She sat quiet, like youth at the feet of experience. A sophisticated woman with a bite in her tongue dissected him first.

“My dear, did you ever see such a face? Galahad, if ever there was one! And such a mouth! I feel it’s never kissed anything but the Bible, and sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Drinking champagne beside him is like going to Evensong. I worked very hard and he didn’t see me at all, and this frock just out on the English boat. I wanted to put on white samite and set out on a barge—”

“The men say he’s an astute business man, very disciplined, and he can go on like that for hours. When the rest of the tempers are worn thin, he crosses the t’s and dots the i’s, and gets just the contract he wants—”

The interruption was light and sweeping.

“Doubtless, my dear, hydraulics or whatever they are! But a man like that must know something about the seven ways of seduction. I hear he’s married, but by the look in his eyes, I should say his wife gets thin rations—”

“He likes children!”

A woman with no pretensions about her but a body of excessive maternity, interrupted with the precedence contentment can take over sophistication. It had the effect of claiming the audience.

“Yes, he idolizes children! He had lunch with us yesterday and mine simply gravitated to him. He was adorable, and let the baby climb all over him. He told me quite naturally his wife was expecting a baby and he was crazy to get back to England. He wants a large family and is prepared to have as many as they can. He’s very simple—”

“Possibly,” drawled the woman who had spoken first, “but really, my dear, I’m not in favour of litters. I feel like the man who pined for an hour of Herod. I’m going to adopt, and then one can shop at the best places and complain about the nose and ears.”

Sara sat staring at her hands, wondering if they would expect her to blush. She had stopped blushing years ago, following her father, who did hard jobs for the Colonial Office, binding up Empire sores in good English red-tape. She mixed enough to know that his efforts were often unappreciated. Frequently the Colonials thought their sores looked more painful than ever in unyielding red-tape.

So the world rolled round for a dozen years. War neurasthenia increased and people who lived on the ground looked for destruction from the air. The parable of the rock and the sand no longer applied. It was useless to build a house anywhere and feel it had any permanency. Old values were sterile, nerves were rasped and ridden, unpredictable forces were let loose, music was whimpering, and people accepted it because they were afraid of good loud bangs. But the man and woman lived this episode before Aryan blood was quite so important, before the Germans wanted to go home, and all over the place at the same time. They met in the backwater when there was comparative peace, and in England when the diehards said that common sense would prevail.

CHAPTER ONE

When they met again their cellophane sight was gone. They could see around corners and behind minds, and did not have to await the dreadful day of judgement for the secrets of the heart to be made known. She had been up and down the world once, and round everything twice, and he had been long enough at the goal to raise his head and look around. In London he was an impeccable figure, and people spoke of his Crusading face. No woman had been able to determine the colour of his eyes. They were an off-colour, and the nearest description seemed to be like sea-water on a day with a grey sky. Twelve years had not detracted from his yellow hair. It was as bright as if the pigment had been certified for three score years and ten. At home he was a successful man, and could be rated as a considerate husband and a perfect father. But he had been out of England a good deal which might account for his hard riding when he returned. There must be some reason for the assertion, that when Englishmen travel, they do not travel to meet Englishmen! It was impossible to suspect him of anything. He looked so stainless, impelling wives to sigh, and stare resentfully at the broken vows in their husband’s faces. When he spoke it sounded as if nothing could be a major issue. Yet, there were the big deals he had manipulated, and the contracts he had concluded; always in the interests of his own firm. He took a lawyer around with him to reduce everything he said to whereas and herewith. At this stage he was in another backwater which had natural resources his Company could use very well. His wife was in England guarding his superstructures. Because this backwater belonged to Great Britain, there had to be a Governor’s mansion, where a head man put on his medals at the right moments, and women kept away from his legs, for fear of his clanking sword. They also avoided breasts stuck with signs of valour. The most doughty women know that even the V.C. can scratch.

There was a British ship in and the Governor and his lady were giving a ball! On this occasion His Excellency was arrayed in conventional dress, with pale-blue lapels, and two rows of medals. As he was a tall thin man, there did not appear to be quite enough chest and no one had thought of starting a third row. It seemed a waste of a medal or two, as some were inclined to slip under his arm. Lesser men swarmed round with lesser medals, while a few wore their titles round their necks. The English deputies who were tops, made a group, with an air of suffering the Colonies ungladly. Having achieved their accents and ties at the best places they looked like exiles in the outer pale of Empire. The lesser deputies mingled. Meeting many grand people they could never meet in England they were happy and respectful in their fashion. For them the social scales were uncomplicated. It was beyond dispute that a ball at Government House was infinitely more glamorous than a whist-drive at Golders Green. With the wrong voices and ties, their more exalted countrymen thankfully threw them to the Colonials. There was also the navy with the brevity of monkey jackets: a dress very trying to a fat man.

In the spacious halls carpets were soft at full length pictures of the Royal family. Glass cases held silver cups, and here and there horned heads spoke of jungle, and where elephants went to die. Many looked lacklustre with natural ferocity mitigated by glass eyes. Others seemed woefully decapitated and drooping for the main body of their indigenous dust. Four great rooms had been stripped to make a British holiday. Everybody who was anybody was there, and even some of the garden-party list had been thrown in. What had happened to the furniture made a mystery. All that was straight-backed was flattened against the walls, but the disappearance of the bulk induced a belief in ‘hey presto.’ Sofas and armchairs, tables and tabourets, seemed to have been whisked under Britannia’s skirts, that her subjects might dance. If, in her brooding care, she had to listen to hotcha and hi-de-ho, she had been instructed that even Governors had capitulated to poop-a-doop tunes.

Sara was dancing, smooth as cream inside taffeta, with a fitted bodice and softly full skirt. Taffeta can be a hazard and suggest a lamblike desire in the mouton, but no disquiet disturbed her on behalf of her gown. She knew it had been lured away from any virginal effect. With her, dressing was deft, and the taffeta cut to enhance. So far, there appeared to be nothing at the ball to justify the anticipation in her veins. Her blood felt like a barometer, veering to fair and warmer. True it was summer, and there was a general swoon towards its sweetness, and couples were entwining as if rhythm was seeping into pulse and vein. She was dancing with a Major-General, after a dance with an Admiral. Reverent as she was, and quite prepared to praise famous men, she might have done it better at a distance, before their dancing detracted from their deeds. Fortunately her gown was backless, or the seams that should have lain in a straight line down her spine would have been across her chest by now. The Major-General was restless, dancing quite by himself, although he held her, in a ‘what we have we hold’ grip. It was quite impossible to follow his gay ‘pas seul,’ but he did not appear to expect it. Medals suggested his arrival at a place where he could afford to move by himself. She resigned herself to feeling like a battalion, in which he had stuck a pin, to be moved from here to there. Conversation came in a volley, principally in outraged complaints of the music, and the audacity of His Excellency in supplying jungle-tunes. Sara gathered the Major-General’s first favourite had been ‘Dolly Gray.’ Sitting down, it was better. He was a becoming bit of Headquarters, daring a partner to take her away. She felt sand-bagged, entrenched, and a challenge to a V.C. Couples seethed by, while the Major-General told her exactly what was wrong with the world. Not enough people were being shot, and the whole of America should be exterminated, for giving the world cocktails, and the League of Nations. Not at all squeamish, he was murdering in the grand manner. Sara felt spacious, like Innocent the Third, “kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own.”

With her eyes dancing, she gave Nora a still smile, and for a second they exchanged a look of woman’s understanding. Nora walked on, with her arresting Tuscan face and English body, that made everyone stare, and wish for greater unity between her head and her tail. She gazed at life with the grey eyes of Paradise, set in a face of a dreaming Madonna. There the spiritual illusion ended! From her neck down she was utterly English, with long arms, striding legs, and feet flat on the earth as a dory is flat on the water. Sara thought she looked marvellous in bed with the sheet tucked under her chin. When Bob saw her like that he must want to pray, and purge himself of earthly desires. But the Major-General was sounding querulous, making her withdraw her eyes from Nora’s receding back. He had stopped murdering, and was complaining about the things that can happen to an ordinary decent fellow. It appeared he had been recently on the high seas, and assembling for boat-drill the first day, he had found himself next to a little Assyrian boy, and damn it all, he had gone straight to the Captain and had himself shifted to another boat. He did not mind in the least going down with the ship, but he was within his rights in insisting on going down with white people! Sara was soothing and sympathetic, expressing the right amount of regret, until the music crashed on a picture of a life-boat swinging on its davits, holding people suitably graded to enter the valley of the shadow together.

“Another of those jungle-tunes,” he said in a beautiful irritated voice, “well—” There was no doubt he was going to perform his gay ‘pas seul’ with eleven other women. He was like Henry the Eighth, ‘the things I have done for England!’ Sara gave him a smile that was almost as fatal as Anne Boleyn’s, making him appear quite indecisive, and unworthy of a chest full of medals.

“I say, ah—have you got this one engaged? May I stay with you until—”

“Thank you! I’m engaged, but I’ll stay here until my partner finds me. We might play hide and seek—”

She did not hear a word of how much the Major-General had enjoyed dancing with her. She had seen some one standing by a pillar, but far enough away to repudiate any idea of it as support. He looked as if he were alone, standing forward, with his legs a little apart. The pose held unconscious insolence, but the effect was physical, emanating from a body disciplined to whalebone and whipcord. Sara looked at his riding legs, and remembered a prediction about a blood-mare. A streaklike identification sent her back a dozen years. The Galahad face was unmistakable, and this time his hands were buttoned up in gloves! She felt buoyant and gay, as if she could pillage the heart of the man who had not seen her twelve years ago. Her next partner was a man who had reduced the harmony of life to his legs. Nice, but— With a casual gesture she dropped her programme behind her chair, and advanced with destiny impelled steps. Chains should have clanked as she went, and visions of stellar Siberias, but she never thought of questioning the gay urge she had to acclaim him. She did not think at all, or know that her future might be amongst the tents of Shem. She only knew she remembered a head full of parental affection.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked arriving in front of him.

He stared right at her, and for a freezing second he looked as isolated as Britain without a draw-bridge, but she laughed lightly, gaily, comprehendingly, reassuring him with references, and above all with her father’s name.

“You dined with us once and I noticed your hands and your face did not match. And your dinner-partner said you did not see her at all though she was the most beautiful woman in the settlement. She complained out loud that she wanted to dress in white samite to help your Crusade.”

He looked momentarily startled with words beyond how-do-you-do, but he rallied magnificently, and even as she went on she noticed the glaze leave his eyes to be replaced by a male awareness of what she represented.

“Of course I remember you,” he said whether he did or he didn’t. “I’m sorry I neglected my dinner-partner, but I didn’t notice much beyond work in those days. I was very busy. I’m so glad you’re here. I was feeling lonely without some one I knew. I won’t be bromidic and say—”

“The world is small. No, don’t, but it is! It dwindles every day I grow older. There’s always a man who knew a man, who heard a fellow say—”

“Yes, there is indeed,” he agreed, as arrested as if he had heard a profundity. Unconscious of his surroundings he stood staring with a face venturing towards mirth that only became absolute when she led him in rich laughter.

“We’ll dance,” he said at once.

“Yes,” she said agreeably.

She was in his arms, and even while they danced in effortless mutuality, all of her seams stayed straight. There was no grabbing, or what we have we hold grip. Nothing but a delicate sense of fusion that the jungle-tune could not churn into anything gross. Over a black shoulder she saw Nora ask a mute question, but she dropped her eyes, isolating herself in a ballroom Eden.

“And your father?” he questioned of the swept back curl at her right temple. His voice was gentle, as if tuned to hear of her father’s life or her father’s death.

“Dead, poor Daddy,” she said briefly. “It was sudden! He died in a day.”

His arms did not tighten as much as sustain, seeming to convey the fact that life must be unendurable without a father. That should have been the moment for the tolling of bells, but destiny has a way of being unprophetic.

“What are you doing here?” he asked with great interest. It was amazing how clearly he spoke through barely parted lips. It was the type of voice that might have taken diction, and learned to drop out p and b, t and d, with soft clarity.

“It’s my second visit here. First I came out to stay with a school friend. We were at Eastbourne together. If you can find a woman in the room who looks as if you could say an Ave to her face, and lay a golf ball at her feet, that will be Nora.”

His laugh was slight but spontaneous, extending more spaciously to his off-coloured eyes.

“I met one like that this afternoon,” he said at once. “We were at cocktails from six to seven. I recognise her from your description. We talked! She told me she had two children, Rosamund and Jennifer.”

“It’s a nice thing to remember of a woman,” she said, marvelling at his retention. “You should see Jennifer. She looks as if she were a child of Nora’s face, and not her body. She’s like a miniature angel. It’s frightening, unless you believe there are earthly moments in Paradise.”

“Heavenly moments on earth,” he corrected, “I believe nothing of Paradise.”

“M’mmm, perhaps,” she conceded. There was a long silence during which they became receiving-sets and amplifiers for intangible things.

“Your memory is better than it was,” she said, afraid of too significant silence. “You must have taken a course since I met you twelve years ago.”

“Many courses,” he said inscrutably. “Don’t talk about it now. We’ll do that later.”

She made no protest, neither did she attempt any banality at his definite command. She detached her brain, and let her lesser self make acknowledgement of one excitingly near its own identity. When the music stopped he released her at once, even while the last note vibrated in the air like a ghost of sound. It was evident that the dancing was over. He had no intention of waiting for the encore.

“We must talk about it,” he said.

She knew he was a man of initiative when she felt his short dogged fingers under her elbow guiding her away. They had arrived at a place where there could be a free interchange of information about each other, and the various phases of other men and women. Nothing binds a man and woman together like a straightforward talk about the facts of life. “You must tell me everything,” he said invitingly.

“There,” he said, when they were settled in a corner that looked lightly casual, and yet isolated them in a semi-oasis of silence. Through open doors and windows the night sighed with summer, and turned over in the rich dark. Inside, the music from the ballroom came like echoes from a sophisticated swamp. A few couples drifted through the halls, and out into the gardens with an apologetic air for venturing out quite so early. Gloves were being peeled off, and ceremonial unbuttoned, as the ball got underway.

“There,” he said again, facing her with distinct triumph. “Tell me all you’ve done in a dozen years.” He looked as if he really expected to hear.

She laughed answering with amused gravity.

“That would take many hours, and even Governors take off their medals sometimes, though it’s hard to imagine them in Viyella.” At the smile in his eyes she rushed on with ingenuousness recaptured from the realms of youth. “When I was a child I thought Kings and Queens never did ordinary things like going to bed, or—or—”

“Yes, I quite understand,” he said gravely. “I suppose you thought they were put away at night like the wax-works, sitting up with their orb and sceptre.”

“Did you think so too? You might have been that kind of a little boy,” she said examining his face.

“Don’t talk rot,” he said at once. “I had very little chance of being young. Tell me what you think, now that you know Kings and Queens wash their ears.” He looked at her slender hand, just emerging from a glove.

“Married?” he queried on a gentle inflection.

“Yes, twice!” Her voice was conversational, holding no clue to her present state, neither did her face show any residue of anguish. Nor was it a divorcing face.

“Is your husband here tonight?” was all he permitted himself.

“That would be impossible,” she said in the same voice. “He’s dead, they’re both dead. When my mother died, my father taught me to be natural about death. He would not let me be awesome. You thought I might have been divorced? No, my marriages were made in full Divan of the Church of England, and I expected them to go on for ever and ever, until fate intervened.”

“Oh,” he murmured, with magnificent English sympathy, “should I—”

“No, you shouldn’t,” she said reassuringly, diluting any picture of herself looking over her shoulder towards the past. “They’re dead, and I didn’t have either of them very long. They seemed to have been snatched in their boots, doing this and that for England, and of course I left them, to make in that rich earth a richer dust concealed, as laid down by Rupert Brooke!”

“He was a fool,” he said with calm heresy.

“Oh, no, not quite,” she protested, “not his beautiful lyric poetry! Perhaps his ideals—”

“Who wants to make rich dust before he has to?” The question was scornful, disdaining the heedless way men died.

“No one,” she said meekly. Then she remembered something. “Don’t you risk your neck riding horses on hard flinty roads?”

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“I just know! A chance remark at my father’s dinner-table.”

His eyes looked retrospective under thin hooded lids.

“I remember the occasion well. It’s impossible I do not remember you better.”

“Oh, not at all! I was only eighteen—”

“That makes you thirty now,” he said at once.

“Nearly thirty-one,” she said suffering his mathematics with the serenity of a woman who has felt no frost in the years. “At eighteen I looked on and said little. I’ve been talking ever since.”

“And still looking, I think. I’m sure you know the painter for the picture, who wrote the music on the air and—”

“What a young woman should know? Yes,” she agreed gravely. “I’ve read about men and women, and how Raymondin spied on his wife to see what she was doing on Saturday. When I look at your hands, I know that you think. When I look at your face, I wonder! You’ve got such a lovely stainless face— No, don’t glare— It really isn’t a line, as the Americans say.”

Her voice was so full of gaiety that he had to laugh and throw away his modesty.

“Why is thought confined to my hands? It feels as if it went on inside my head, and I’ve been known to have a headache.”

“Oh, because it’s so harmonized, almost beautiful,” she said, frankly enjoying his male squirm over personalities. “Who was it said beauty should not think? It should be left to plain men to become bumpy-browed and hollow-eyed. Haven’t people mentioned your face before?”

“I—I—”

“What a strain it is to be an Englishman,” she said soothingly. “Never mind! I know all that you would say if you weren’t stifling with modesty.”

“It’s just your chatter, my dear,” he murmured barely between his lips, making her eyes widen at the intimacy of his voice. For a second she sat mute and uncertain, until his face became definitely critical, as if the story of her life was inefficient. “It was inconsiderate of your husbands to leave you. Children?” he questioned, as if there lay her precious compensation.

“No,” she said briefly.

“Why,” he queried like an accusing monk. “Contraceptives?”

“For a while, Father,” she said lowering her eyes with beautiful penitence. “At first I was young, and living in my trunks. There was a place for everything but the baby.”

“Pity,” he said sternly. But he relaxed indulgently, laughing as loud as he knew how. Everything she said seemed to amuse him, and his eyes looked like blotting-paper for her rich vitality. She ventured to think his wife was not amusing and he wilted often for a stimulant to laughter. “You should have had a child,” he pronounced. “It is all wrong that you didn’t.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “And I like the society of children. They make you feel fresh and uncomplicated, but I’ve never craved one yet.”

“Yet,” he said thoughtfully.

“Have you any?” she asked quickly.

“One,” he said with a twisted expression on his lips indicating profound thought on the subject. His voice sounded frustrated, as if he hated his limitations of fatherhood.

“At least you are richer than I am,” she suggested gently.

“Yes, it’s a good deal. You should have had one. Your husbands should have insisted.” The way he reproved them, must have made a stirring of dry bones in two distant graves. “Tell me about them. Where did you meet them, and what did they do for a living?”

She made a gesture with her long hands dropping them palm up in her lap. Whatever his mental capacity, intense interest seeped through his modulation, interest that must extend to other men and women. He might be a spectator enthralled at the way people hurled themselves at life. His intent gaze impelled her to talk with a deprecating shrug of her shoulders.

“Colin was A.D.C. at Government House where we met twelve years ago. He was in the Army, but also the heir to a place in Scotland. He was nice, with more imagination than you find in most Service men, but he had a short neck, which made his mother send him into the Army to harden him up. After we were married he was going to send in his papers and live in Scotland. But he had six months more to put in as A.D.C. so we just had a short honeymoon at his place, and instantly I knew what I wanted him to give me for a wedding-present. It was central-heating, or the death of the bride! English women could bear it, but I died every time I wore evening-dress. Changing my clothes meant diving from one sweater to another. He promised, and the heating was begun at great expense. While the pipes were being laid over there, a flagship came in where we were. After the Admiral had called at Government House, Colin and the Governor had to return the call. What happened after seemed an appalling piece of negligence, and the sort of thing the Navy would say could never happen! But it did! When they got alongside, there was a line of saluting officers, top and bottom of the accommodation-ladder. The Governor got absorbed in saluting and did not see the little platform collapse, and drop Colin into the sea. I heard after, the officers went on saluting. There was nothing in the book to provide for such an emergency, and they expected Colin to get out of the water by himself. I always thought it was because he was an Army man that they let him soak so long. My poor Colin literally hung on by his fingernails, and he always wore his fingernails short. When I got him back he was blue, and though I put him to bed right away, it was not long before he got hot and cold, and in two days he was dead, as dead as can be, of pneumonia.”

Her voice held no flippancy, nothing but the light and shade that comes from varied experience.

“You minded very much, didn’t you?”

“Terribly,” she said, with more candour than intensity. “But I went on a tear. I’m like that. I can never sit still in sorrow. I only stopped sometimes to listen to music, and when I closed my eyes I could hear my own blood and the protest of my heart, but I went on just the same.”

Now he looked uncertain, apprehensive of a state a man can bestow on a woman.

“It was wrong to get in poor condition,” he said gravely.

“Possibly,” agreed Sara, looking into space with gay ironical eyes.

“Then what?” he insisted.

“Oh, yes— Then I packed, and went to Scotland. As we had no baby the heir got the place and the beginning of the central-heating. I was left with money, a lot of furniture, and knives and forks I’ve never held in my hand.”

“Then?” he probed, with deepening interest.

“Then,” she smiled. “I went to work.”

“What!” he exclaimed, as if it was the last thing he expected to hear. “You got a job?”

“Oh, no. I got in a state where I realised that a woman adrift was a danger. I was so restless that I felt I must do something or expire. One day I went into the Park at Stanhope Gate, and walked over to the Round Pond. I remember standing there for ages, and it came into my mind to try and write a book. I had so much experience of places and people I had met travelling round with my father. So I began. It was very painful and difficult, and when it was finished I tore it up and wrote it again. Then when it was finished, I thought it was not too bad, so I got an introduction to a publisher, and after several terrifying interviews with men who made you feel back at school with a badly prepared lesson, they said in spite of many technical errors, and objective this and subjective that, they would publish, though they would never make a penny out of it. Then they all stood up in a body, and shook hands with intense patronage and I thought they were like Colin and Bruce dismissing me for big male business. I was just interested and amused, as I did not write for a meal-ticket. It gave me a life, and I found lots of women who were happy beyond house and home, with a hobby.”

He sat up with a stiff contending spine. “Nonsense, my dear, you wouldn’t have needed the book if you were left with a baby.”

Sara examined him gravely and for a moment their eyes quarrelled, mutely and fiercely, over male and female issues.

“I won’t argue,” she said very gently. Then he changed to softness and tenderness as if he knew he had been a brute.

“Where can I get your book?”

“Oh,” she said, laughing with a thrown back head. “There are several now, and I’m in the middle of another.”

“What’s it about?” he asked with flattering interest.

“A man and a woman of course, and the things they do.”

“How far have they got now?”

“Oh,” she mused, “let me see! They’re suspended on the typewriter on the way upstairs.”

“Going to bed?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“No, of course not. They’re in the same house in different rooms, and really behaving in a tiresome fashion. I do hate a delayed bed when it’s inevitable on page one.”

“You’re—decisive about those things?” he asked casually.

“In my books,” she replied smoothly. “Where were we?”

“You were by the Round Pond. We’ll discuss the books another time,” he said with a nice suggestion of infinity in their relations. “Where are you staying? I’m in a hotel, with two rooms for myself, another for my lawyer, and an office for a young woman with nails like tomato juice. Where are you staying?”

“Couldn’t I ask some questions myself?”

“Not just yet. I’m tidying my mind about you. I’m used to assembling facts in their proper sequence. What do you call yourself? English, French, Colonial—”

“I’m the daughter of a full-English father, and an American mother who was born in Louisiana, of a French mother, whose mother was a Russian. According to English standards I’m a hybrid. My mother died when I was quite young, but I remember her very well. She took me to a lot of concerts, and many operas, and made me sit still. She bade me like good music, not because she was high-brow, but because she thought cheap music was full of self-pity. The only other thing I remember well, was an oft repeated remark, ‘if thou wouldst be well served, serve thyself.’ ”

“I like the sound of your mother,” he said nicely. “And you’re here because—”

“Because I’ve taken a cottage on a lake next door to Nora, the girl with the Madonna face and English feet. We share everything, even the cat. I’m thirty, twice a widow, three times an author and I weigh one hundred and twelve pounds. After this I go back to England, and on to some Southern place if the world leaves a country safe enough to visit. If not, I will cross over to Bermuda and ride a bicycle. Then I can run to the Crystal Caves, and hide under the stalactites when the bombs are bursting.”

He laughed, even while his attitude indicated it was a poor programme for a woman.

“It’s quite wrong,” he said as if it must be changed at once. “Go back to where you were—”

“Alone in London,” she smiled. “Then I wrote another book, and suddenly got sick and tired of people living inside covers. I wanted to be young and foolish, and have some one kiss my feet in rare moments.”

“There must have been many men—”

“Oh, yes, here and there, for occasions like dinner, shows and cinemas, and many to urge me to a few harmless kisses, but not— The awful part of being—”

As she hesitated too long he supplied the word for her.

“Being a widow,” he said inexorably.

She made a face like a child tasting something it loathed.

“It’s the most desolate word in the language,” she protested.

“Yes, perhaps it is, but what is the most awful part?”

He was a gentle implacable extractor.

“Not having your own escort when you want to go out in the evenings. You feel like a person with one leg, and sometimes you wake up in the night and put out your hand, and find nothing there. Where you’re used to being married, it’s a comfort to know there’s a large male body near, even though it breathes too heavily.”

He looked at her with a very discriminating eye.

“In London my house is on a corner. My room looks out on one street and my wife’s on another.”

“I should never allow that,” she said definitely.

“It would not happen to you, my dear.”

“It should not happen to you. It’s quite beyond me,” she smiled. “I do hope you visit—you know, like a set of Lancers.”

“Yes, we visit.” Then he remembered whom he was discussing, and his voice got very stern. “Continue! You’re bored with writing and ready for love.”

“Did I say that?” she asked with wide-open eyes.

“No, I did. It’s the argument.”

“Very well,” she said obediently. “By all means let us call a spade a spade. It is my very special forte. Is it yours?”

“I don’t know,” he said as if analysis of himself was the last thing of interest.

“You know,” she mused, giving him a very full smile, “I might be paying three guineas in Harley Street to say all this, and they might find me full of psychic poison, and call me back again and again, because they dug it out of me that sometimes I feel frightened to death, and know that life could be unendurable if there was nothing to grasp—”

“Pirates,” he said disposing of Harley Street, in much the same way as the Major-General had disposed of America. “I suppose your husbands looked after you very beautifully?”

“They did,” she said with a smile like a Benediction to memory. “When they died I stopped clinging. I found I actually could step into a train, and stroll up a gangway without a man breathing on my back. And when it was stormy at sea, I could lie quietly without a jitter. Before, I would have had them holding my hand. Courage can come from great indifference to what might happen. It is only happy people who dwell on the evils that never arrive.”

“Are you sure of that? It’s a point.”

“Quite sure, I was tested! Coming out here the first time, we ran into a ninety mile an hour gale. Trunks and suitcases flew around like projectiles. In the night a wave struck the ship like a cannon, and turned her bow back to England. Almost at once the alarm signal went off. I recognised it from the little framed explanation in the cabin. You know, six short blasts, and one long blast on the steam-whistle, after which you muster on the promenade-deck.”

“Yes,” he smiled. “I’ve often read it when I was shaving. Did you muster?”

“No, I didn’t muster. It seemed foolish when the waves were mountains high, and the bed was safe for the minute. There was great confusion in the alley-ways, and the sound of voices on high notes, and very soon a man rushed into my room with his braces dangling. He was a clergyman and he said only One could save us now. As that was the very reason I was staying in bed, I asked him to go. We didn’t drown! After a twelve hour wallow, the Captain got the ship round again. The clergyman came to call on me, without his braces dangling, as it appeared he had become very interested in my attitude. I let him lecture me very gently and I didn’t contradict him once.”

“You must have been down,” he said thoughtfully.

“I was! Can’t you understand such indifference?”

“Yes, I think I can, but I can understand how irritated the man must have been. It was a time for a woman to have no mind of her own and let the man be a hero.”

His voice held a slight tinge of mockery.

“I couldn’t cope with a hero. It was too soon after Bruce. I did my best to behave, and felt quite prepared to meet my Maker in a rather wilted way.”

“Don’t talk rot, my dear. There’s no hereafter! The grave is the end!”

Now she looked really shocked, with eyes and mouth one mystical protest. For a moment her lips trembled with words, until sanity acknowledged her surroundings. The outer hall of Government House was no place for a wrangle on immortality.

“You must not think that,” she said with sweet reason. “Especially when you look like a Galahad. I’d have to throw in my hand if I thought that—”

“You don’t throw in your hand over little things,” he said as crisply as his voice would permit.

“It’s not a little thing,” she said intensely. Then she shrugged, realising the scope of the argument. “We won’t talk about it, but you’re wrong. Life is intolerable and awful, and wonderful at the same time. ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.’ ”

“Oh, no,” he protested, “let’s not consider her now. She’s so low on the ground. The lion and the mouse, the hare and the tortoise, but not the ant. I don’t like insects.”

“Well, the bee then,” she said concedingly. “It’s only that their world seems wiser than ours. It will give you such infinite faith if you read ‘The Life of the Bee.’ ” Her tone was spacious, offering him the condensation of all doubt.

“Will it?” he asked much amused. “Why?”

“Because it’s so sensible, and seems such a good lesson for modern times. Everybody works and the unemployed are put to death, all males, of course,” she explained. “The honorary post of lover isn’t sufficient justification for existence—”

“Honorary post? Sort of ex-officio? It’s not very promising.”

“No,” she agreed blandly, “but beside that, they eat all the honey, and when the women can bear it no longer, they kill them. It makes life rather simple.”

“It’s a hard life for bees, isn’t it?”

“M’mmm,” she said smiling, “but there’s one great moment for the males, which is one up for hives! Many men have no great moments.”

“Granted,” he said gravely. “I’m afraid I’m not up on bees. Could I know about the great moment?”

“The Nuptial Flight, when the Queen flies out, pursued by thousands of males.”

“Heaven indeed,” he murmured, with amused irony.

“Oh, quite,” agreed Sara, on behalf of all women. “Think of the Queen Bee’s wedding way up there.” Way up there was indicated by a wave towards a crystal chandelier. “It’s very thrilling, like the Derby or the Grand National.”

“Only one horse can—”

“Only one,” she agreed happily. “Up she goes, until the aged and infirm have fallen out, and only the eugenically perfect bees are left. Then with a last spurt—” She tilted her face towards the light. “Am I blushing?” she asked gravely.

His examination of her face stayed on her brown-black eyes.

“I’m afraid not. It’s a bad case of indelicacy.”

“Then,” she said, dropping her lashes modestly, “I’d better close with a row of dots or a fall of the curtain to denote a lapse of time.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he commanded. “I can’t have her returning in shame—”

“Shame,” she said reproachfully, “there’s no shame. It’s marriage on a marvellous morning in sight of God, and all His holy angels.”

“Quite, my dear, a ring-side seat!”

“I’m afraid you’re very vulgar,” she said gazing at the absolute contrast of vulgarity. “Now the last male has seized her—”

“Only one,” he said with deep disapproval. “It’s a shocking example of poor training.”

“Only one,” she chuckled in high delight, “he has seized her—”

“Yes, I heard you the first time. They are—ah—clinched—”

“Clinched,” she said in soft protest. “Men use strange words! No, embraced, intertwined, whirling for a second in the madness of love! That’s what the book says. Have I blushed yet?”

“No, you’re a very brazen girl, I’m afraid.” The way he said it made her something infinitely more desirable. It had the effect of making her speech more liberal.

“Then I can tell you the rest. When all is over, the male dies at once with the tremendous honour. His wings relax—”

“That, my dear, is a Hell of a story.”

The expression on his face delighted her. It was full of disapproval that nature could be so badly arranged. The sacrifice of the male was an outrageous piece of effrontery, something to be brushed aside at once. The tilt of his head was a defence for all males. Then their eyes met, and they laughed extravagantly.

“After all,” she said soothingly, “death is better than a life devoted to laying eggs.”

“No more flights—”

“No more flights! It’s a very sad story.”

Even as he smiled with her, he seemed to show more interest in her own Nuptial Flights, taking her back to the place from where they had digressed to consider the ant.

“You married Bruce because you were tired of books and ready for love?”

“I did not,” she said with beautiful candour. “I married Bruce because I was afraid of taking a lover. He was a friend of my father’s, twenty years my senior, and very thoughtful and kind. At the time I was going out continually with a man from the War Office, a young brittle type whose mind ran in a straight line. He never thought of asking me to marry him as there was no place for me in the kit he was getting ready for India, but he did think quite seriously of sleeping with me. Often we had great fun, going to shows, and lunching at the Army and Navy Club, where the air was so reverential that we adored it as a setting for outrageous chat. Often we went to Ranelagh, where he became entranced with the ponies and I kept off the wasps. He was really annoying at Ranelagh! He wanted me to walk over every blade of grass, and one afternoon he would not leave until a peacock put up its tail. He waited a long time, as the peacock was inclined to be obstinate. Eventually Kenneth tipped the waiter, and he did something that made the peacock put up its tail at once. What one does to make a peacock put up its tail I can’t imagine! When he was about to sail he wrote me from the Club and ventured to suggest, very delicately, that we both arrange to be in the same hotel, in adjoining rooms. It seemed to be the one thing in his mind that would perpetuate the thought of England, Home and Beauty.”

“Cad,” he said with supreme brevity.

Now she looked at him with a very straightforward eye.

“No,” she said in gentle defence, “he was not a cad! It was just his generation. It only sounds caddish in the telling. It was unfortunate for him that I got the note one spring morning when the tops of the trees were like lace, and the sun came in on a bowl of daffodils. The trumpets were long and yellow, and absolutely flawless. If they had been mud-spattered, things might have been different. Then when my breakfast came, it was chilled grapefruit, very fresh in the mouth. Kenneth and I seemed shoddy, without the urge of genuine emotion, so I wrote and said I was very sorry, but the day suggested discipline, and I wished him ‘bon voyage.’ The morning after he sailed, I received a great bunch of lilies, and I didn’t know whether they were sent in derision or delight.”

“He was most unskilful,” he said, as one man to another.

It was amazing how they could talk without an atom of consciousness. For a moment he was silent, staring frankly into her eyes, like a man who had walked on the rim so long, that he was probing the dark pool into which he might dive.

“Then you married Bruce?” he said with his lips.

“Yes, I married Bruce,” she said, as if she was tired of her own past. “He was in the Civil Service and we lived in London for quite a while, until he was lent to South America to reorganize a Postal Service. He decided to go out first and look around, but he had barely landed when he caught a tropical germ, something on lettuce I believe, that had not been washed in the right solution. He literally burned out with fever before I could get to him, and he died too! Almost at once Nora asked me to visit her here, where I would have a complete change, and I liked being with her so much that I came again, but this time on my own. It’s a cosy place, very gay, where they know if you change your mind, but if you’re very, very quiet about your personal affairs you can live your own life.”

“Small places are curious after London. Warm-hearted and hospitable, but intensely personal.”

“Yes, but I’ve been in small places before, the Falkland Islands and Trinidad, and many Southern towns in America. In big places one only knows the skeleton of lives, but in places like this you can see the human heart. It’s very interesting and makes excellent copy.”

For a second he looked frightened, as if he saw himself on the frontispiece of a book, but he saw such an unconspiring face that fear was exorcised at once. Nothing looked strong in him to stroll away and fight the good fight.

“We’re up to date,” he informed her, with the air of a president having absorbed every word of the minutes. “Let’s go outside. It’s a lovely night.”

The outer hall was being invaded by other couples on their way to the garden. Sara rose silently, adapting herself to his casual air and pointless feet. Her taffeta gave her a bouffant feeling, suggesting a return to a Watteau night, and a gay impromptu of the great pleasure-age. The dark trees offered moonless retreats, uninvaded by the glare from the great building. Many lights blazed forth, picking up colour here and there like a silken patchwork. Overhead the stars were niggards, withdrawn to some remote world of their own. Around the gardens curved an avenue, with cars brooded over by several policemen. People were banging doors, and showing a disposition to stay within the frame of the machine-age, rather than wander into a Watteau garden. Sara’s escort was of the same mind, though the light on his hair, and the set of his reindeer head, suggested an ascetic by Savile Row, seeking the cloister of a sanctuary. He appeared to know just where such a place lay.

“Let’s sit here,” he suggested, “this car belongs to a man I know.”

Instantly she knew him for a conservative man, who would wish to sit in a car he knew. All the conventions would be maintained if it was that kind of a car.

“There,” he said, with the satisfaction of a born organizer. “This is very comfortable.”

“I can’t see you,” she said, across the gentle dark. “All I can see is a patch of shirt-front.”

“And I can see you very well. You’re in the light of a window. What’s wrong with my hands, my dear?” He took hers in his own and their palms came together, warm and dry and unselfconscious.

“It’s my turn for questions.”

“The time has come the Walrus said, to talk of other things—”

“You read books,” she accused.

“Only children’s books! I have a son!” In much the same way a Knight might have said, “I keep a vigil.” His free hand touched his breast-pocket as if he was about to pass out snapshots of his son. “Not there,” he murmured through his lips, “these clothes—” For a moment he looked as if he had lost something, sitting forward in the light from the window. His hand slackened around her own.

“Never mind,” she said soothingly, “I’ll see them another time. I’m sure he’s a tall slim little boy, with narrow hips—”

“Yes, my son, I—”

Instantly she gave him the words he wanted.

“Yes, your son! One doesn’t upset safe established things.”

“You’re a very well-balanced woman,” he said gathering her hand back in rich warmth, and for a while she really thought she was.

“What’s wrong with my hands?”

“I can’t see. I can only feel.”

“Tell me by touch. Touch is blind.”

Her fingers slid down his as if she were fitting him with gloves.

“They’re short, dogged, with analytical joints. I’m not sure they couldn’t be very ruthless. They make me think I should remind you, that the Walrus ate more oysters than the Carpenter, even though he was very sorry for them.”

He laughed, touching her face with his other hand.

“Where would I be with long thin fingers? On the streets, like Tommy Tucker singing for his supper, or possibly sleeping in St. Martin’s in the Fields, instead of which—”

“Yes, tell me that much, I insist.”

“Instead of which I have all the money I wish, and much more than I need.”

“Oh, I know that. Tell me—”

“No, my dear, not now,” he said definitely, and the car belonging to a man he knew pulsed with a delicate sense of fusion. “We click.” It was not the word she would have used, but perhaps it was because she was a writer, and very particular about the words she used in her love-scenes. Even while one small brain-cell challenged the explanation of their state, she felt herself gathered into his arms, with his cheek against hers, in the same happy contact as their palms.

“There,” he said with a little sigh, as if he wanted to put his head down. For a while they stayed in light tranced motion.

“I desire you very much. Do you desire me?”

“Yes,” she said at once, but he didn’t sweep on like an avalanche.

“You’re so genuine. There’s something male about you, my dear.”

“Male?” she said with soft incredulity. “Have you found trousers in my disposition?”

“Don’t talk rot, my dear.”

It seemed to be his favourite expression, tendered when she was saying little foolish things about serious subjects.

“I mean, you meet a man foursquare.”

“Is that male?” she mocked against his ear. “I didn’t know.” Their faces were so hospitable, making each guest cheek feel so at home. He stirred, until his mouth dwelt at the corner of hers.

“Do you use lipstick, my dear?”

“I’m afraid so,” she whispered, “but dark, like Richmond Red.”

“It smears just the same.”

She laughed, laughed out loud, rocking him a little in her arms.

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant smears but once.” With a lightning gesture she snatched his folded handkerchief, and laid it over his face. Through the fine silk his lips were warm, curved and delicately intense in their inclination to linger. Through infinite delight they found themselves laughing, and still kissing with the silk between, until there was a sense of tugging and sliding, a change in the contact and she knew she was kissing his lips. Like Francesa da Rimini they talked no more. Instead of a book lying on the floor of a medieval palace, a handkerchief made a white blur on the floor of a modern car.

      *      *      *      

“It’s very quiet, my dear.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “have they all gone home?”

“Let’s hope not,” he said, holding his wrist in the air. “It’s twelve o’clock.”

“And Cinderella has lost more than her slipper. The ugly sisters won’t like it. We’re ruined!”

“I hope not, indeed,” he said with more energy than usual. “I have a contract to frame, or at least my lawyer has—”

“On the party of the first part, or the party of the second part?” she gabbled smoothly, making him laugh again. “Darling, what is your name?”

“Oh, my name! Yes, of course! Blair, you know! John Murray Blair!”

“What do they call you?”

“John.”

“Does anyone call you Murray?”

“Not a soul!”

“I shall call you Murray,” she said, as if she were calling him blessed. “And I give you permission to murder, with the ruthlessness your hands suggest, if aught but me—”

“It’s yours, my dear, even into a murder. How shall I murder? By taking a neck between my hands?” His illustration of the method would have made the crime exceedingly comfortable and stimulating.

“No,” she said definitely, “don’t murder like that. You can shoot her, neatly, with a small bullet hole. I detest an untidy murder, with blood. I read thrillers! They’re very soothing!”

“Darling, you’re so unexpected! What’s your name? Why isn’t your hair dark like your eyes, and your lashes? Every now and then you lie in a beam, and I see you as a brunette, and then you bend forward in the light, and I see you almost blonde.”

“I’m afraid it’s the result of the reckless things my father and mother did.”

“I can imagine you looking frail, my dear,” he said continuing his investigations. “Are you frail?”

He appeared to be a discerning man, impossible to classify. At one moment he had an Englishman’s ego, well-bred and stock-size. Then he seemed complex, sharp with many facets. The one quality that lay over everything was modulation. Even in love he was a quiet man, prepared to sip a long drink. Now in half light he had discerned a sigh of delicacy in her, when she felt full of well-being.

“I am a little frail sometimes,” she admitted at once, and being a gentleman, as well as a gentle man, he said no more, but she continued herself. It seemed as if she had found a sanctuary to store up absolute knowledge of herself.

“Once I had adhesions, and the appendix got lost. They got so interested, that they forgot I might like to wake up. I believe they went so far as to ring a bell, and start other doctors running to see my poor insides. I was very ill, and because I had to lie still for a long time, I got more adhesions. But I’m very well, so let’s not talk about it. Only, Murray, I can’t eat vinegar because it gives me a pain.”

“Well, my dear,” he said reasonably, “you can live without vinegar.”

“Of course, but you’d be surprised how often it turns up.”

“Darling, I promise when we dine, we won’t have any vinegar. I’ll ring up the headwaiter myself, and tell him to use lemon. I know nothing about food, but my wife says Noel must have things with alkaline reactions.”

“Murray,” she asked swiftly, “does your wife love you?”

“As much as any woman can love a man.”

She laughed, challenging him for all women.

“And do you know how much that is?”

“According to her capacity,” he said at once.

“Quite different,” she said in a voice of soft satisfaction. “And your capacity?”

“Infinite,” he said in a godlike voice.

“I wish I could have you,” she said, conversationally to his cheek.

“It’s hard to think there’s another life that claims me.”

“M’mmm,” she sighed. “But it wouldn’t make any difference. Everything dies that I touch. If we were married your horse would kick you tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t talk rot, darling. I wouldn’t ride that kind of a horse. Don’t look ahead. There’s all of now. We must go. Kiss me, good-night.”

She did, softly and extravagantly, after he had kissed her first. She tipped his head into the hollow of her arm, and trailed minute kisses over every inch of his face, finally travelling across his mouth with light provocative affection. He showed an inclination to linger until he sat up with final decision.

“We must go, my dear. You’re a lover.”

Like conspirators, they crept out of the car, blinking a little at the Argus-eyed building.

“This way,” he said putting his hand under her elbow, and directing her across to the garden, and round to the front of the house. Several policemen’s eyes slid over them as they passed.

“I feel guilty,” she whispered, “will they have us in the courts in the morning? I think I must have stolen something.”

“You have! Didn’t you know?”

“I should have had it twelve years ago. It held a quality I wanted then.”

He laughed, humouring her with happy tolerance.

“Look, my dear,” he said peering intently ahead. “They’re eating. Let’s be Peeping Toms.”

Nothing could please her more, as long as she could peep with him. He drew her back in the shade of a tree, from where they had an uninterrupted view of a great dining-room seating many people. There was a centre table, where most of the medals and neck-pieces were massed in glittering array.

“Look, Murray, the right and left hand, and a few below the salt.”

He sounded urgent, gripping her arm like a boy.

“My dear, see that man? Next the woman in the white dress. There, the one with the big mouth. Tell me what you think of his face. He has an option on everything I want.”

“Where?” she said craning forward with a speculative eye. “Yes, I see. A better to eat you with, kind of mouth. But how strangely he eats! Like a rabbit nibbling.”

He gave her arm a delighted squeeze.

“Right first time! I’ve noticed that. When he eats with women, he simply refuses to use his lower jaw. Some peculiar modesty. With men he’s quite hearty, and smacks his lips.”

She chuckled, watching the light on his yellow hair.

“Look again,” he ordered her, “I want to know what you think of his face. You know so much.”

“M’mmm,” she mused, peering ahead to oblige him. “He has a bruiselike look about his skin. I should say he drinks less modestly than he eats, unless his wife pinches him.”

“No,” he murmured in denial, “I’ve dined there! She’s not a pincher. Too refined.”

“Not even a nip, Murray?”

“Not even a nip.”

“Then it must be drink,” she said acceptingly. “And I tried to find his better part. He has a sloping forehead, and an acquisitive eye. I should say he loves a bargain, and it doesn’t matter how little, as long as he can get some one to knock off a penny.”

“Clever girl,” he said approvingly. “The thing is to get in the position where the penny doesn’t matter.”

“You’ll get there, darling,” she said calmly, “I’m sure he talks louder than you do, and you let him go on for a long time. Then when your gentle voice gives tongue, he thinks he’s still bullying you.”

“You know too much,” he said severely, though it was obvious he was much impressed. “You make me feel limited. You know London better than I do, and I’m seven years older than you, and live there. You haven’t told me your name, my dear.”

They were back in the shade of the tree, dismissing the great sea of supping faces.

“My name,” she said with a frown in her voice. “I’ve had so many. First, I was Sara Johnson, then Mrs. Colin Campbell, and now Mrs. Bruce Colville. I’m just Sara to you.”

“Sara! It’s very brief, and too little a name for such as you. It’s been quite perfect, my dear. It’s the most spontaneous evening of my life. I’ll telephone you, the first thing in the morning.”

“And I’ll lend you ‘The Life of the Bee,’ ” she said generously. “It’s been marvellous, like a little Scherzo! ‘Here we have Beethoven in a truly unbuttoned mood!’ ”

“We’re very rich, darling.”

“Gorgeously rich,” she said like a person who did not want another penny. “Darling, let’s not go in together. You go in that side entrance. I know it leads into the dressing-rooms, and I’ll stroll through the main hall as casually as a feather. They’re sure to think, if they think at all, that I’ve been out in the garden with my thoughts. Yes,” she said answering a question in his eyes, “you’re quite smearless and starched, and you look like Lohengrin, loosening the swan’s golden chain. Such a stainless face, and so very deceiving! I’d keep my hands in my pockets if I were you. No one would dream they could tilt a holy lance—”

“I don’t understand half that you say, my dear. We’d need a thousand and one nights—”

“And I could tell you such stories!”

“Bedtime stories, my dear?”

There was something boyish and bad in the way he moved towards the side entrance. Then she saw him slow down, and assume the proud set of the head defying the most acrid mind to raise a question about him. He looked an impressive man to command, and suggest that he should keep his hands in his pockets. The set of his tails was a miracle of tailoring, and later, when she saw him dancing, his face was a contemplative mask, and she knew by the bare movement of his lips, that he was saying the most respectable things to his partners. Mendaciously, Sara was telling a man that she had lost her programme, and she was really very sorry, etc. etc. There was no reason why her partners should forgive her, but she was so palpably gay, and so sweetly and insolently poised, that the hunter in the male knew at once that she must be absolutely sure of another man, to make her so sure of herself. It was the attitude that brought forgiveness, seventy times seven. The men simply had to know what the other fellow could see in her. Honey-smooth she danced for the rest of the evening. Once in passing he gave her a look that was like a delicate embrace, returning at once to his partner like a saint to his contemplation.

“Truly,” she thought, saturated with the feel of his arms and lips, “he looks a most unassailable man.”

CHAPTER TWO

Sara’s room was filled with the freshness of morning, while her unconscious nose breathed lilac blossoming on the tops of trees separating Nora’s cottage and her own. The cottages were designed to be presentable front and back. A white road leading from the town swept past an enclosed square of garden, while behind lay a flagged path above three terraces sloping to a lake. Grass was inclined to be long, as if to spare the daisies lending it a polka-dotted look. Steps leading from a door cut the terraces in two, ending by a wharf mooring a canoe. Beside the lilac hedge there were twelve laburnums in an ecstasy of bloom, suggesting yellow heads descending to the lake. The clumps of lilac and the drip of golden tassels, gave an illusion of Japan, making a festival far away. Summer was fresh and gay, with an exaltation of all things young. The laburnums lolled towards the grass as if desirous of shedding a petal on some upturned face. In the morning stillness it was not difficult to imagine an oriental woman in costly robe and silken obi, squatting on her heels and praying to the sun. She could be there to illustrate the obi tied in front. As the sign of widowhood in Japan, it was such a gentle way of telling suitors to ask no more! Asleep, Sara did not resemble a widow. She stirred luxuriously, dilating her nostrils, as if acknowledging the cool trail of lilac. Her door opened, and a voice belonging to a hand on a curtain, dispersed the middle-mists of sleep.

“Good-morning, Madam! Your cold water!”

“M’mmm,” drowsed Sara, with a last clutch at incoherency. “Oh, good-morning, Annie.” She opened her eyes on a maid standing ready with a pair of extra pillows to slip behind her head. Sara drew herself up, with the svelte motion of a body saturated with well-being. Sipping cold water, which was a rite to her adhesions, she gave the maid an approving smile, as if her eyes had encountered some miracle of housekeeping. It had the effect of making Annie voice the words on the tip of her tongue.

“Madam, if it’s not too early to ask, may I have late-leave tonight? And Madam, if you would let me sleep in town with a girl-friend, I would be back by eight to serve your breakfast. You’ve been very kind with late-leave, Madam, but this is something very special—”

“I know, Annie,” said Sara with lazy tolerance. “There’s a ship in, and you’ve met a sailor.”

“Yes, Madam, how did you know?” gasped Annie, while her face became suffused with a bright untrained blush. “Oh, yes, of course,” she floundered on, “the officers must have been at the dance last night. I hope you met one to your liking, Madam.” Annie had recovered, and while her tone was deferential, it indicated as one woman to another, that the thrill of His Majesty’s navy extended to all walks of life. Annie had not lived in a British Colony for nothing. She knew all about the stir upstairs when a sloop, cruiser, or flagship crept into the harbour and anchored like a bulwark of consolidation. When accommodation-ladders ran down blue-grey sides, and strewed the town with sailors, there was also a mid-summer dream for maids below stairs. It took a Colonial girl to speak wisely of seafaring men!

“No, Annie, I didn’t see much of the Navy,” said Sara, acknowledging her failure with smiling indifference.

Annie’s voice was pitying.

“Oh, Madam, and you looked so beautiful too! ’Tis a lovely line the new dresses have, and your taffeta is a dream.”

“Thank you, Annie, but I did very well at the dance.” For a few moments Sara gave her maid a very discerning scrutiny. Annie had a compact plump figure that might be the result of a trim corselette, or flesh that did not sag. Sara could see her as a head-tosser, drawing men on and turning them down, if they presented the bill for the promise of her eyes. Definitely a type impelling a chase.

“Annie,” suggested Sara gently, “I thought you were engaged. Mrs. Hervey told me so when I arrived.”

Annie gave an excellent illustration of the head-tossing Sara had imagined, in her attitude towards men.

“So I am, Madam, but I had Alf all winter. Principally when the roads were bad. He’s a taxi-driver, and out until all hours, especially in the summer, and a girl can’t sit home alone these grand nights. Besides, Madam, Alf has never been further than the longest fare his taxi takes him, and this sailor has been everywhere. It’s a real education to hear about China and the Mediterranean ports—”

“I’m sure it is, Annie, but—”

“Oh, Madam, it’s nothing but a ship that passes in the night,” said Annie with a worldly off-hand manner. “I like to hear about the East, and a place called Wee-wee-wee.”

Sara laughed spontaneously.

“I think you mean, Wei-hai-wei, Annie. Well, you can have late-leave but be prompt in the morning.”

“Will Madam be afraid to stay in the—”

“No, of course not, Annie. I’m accustomed to being alone. The point is, you can’t get off until eight-thirty. It’s possible I may have a guest for dinner, but you can telephone to Mrs. MacCurdle and engage her for the day. Then you can leave when dinner is over.” Annie looked pleased, making Sara add with beautiful indulgence, “should you decide to return this evening, come in very quietly and do not disturb me. I shall be sleeping.”

She lay back, with innocent anticipation of an early night.

“Yes, Madam, thank you very much. Now I’ll bring your breakfast.”

Sara struggled with the standards of a good mistress, resisted, and then said with sighing speed.

“And I feel I should say, Annie, that it’s not very wise to throw away substance for shadow. It isn’t as if you weren’t engaged, and Alf should be considered a little. Summer won’t last forever.”

Virtue was accomplished, and Sara looked appeased. Annie gazed back over her shoulder, comely in a blue cotton dress and plain white apron. There was a world of knowledge in her voice, and a look in her eyes that could see to the core of illusion.

“Men are the same at all times, Madam, and it doesn’t matter to Alf whether I sit home or go out. He acts just the same. I’ve tried both ways. I behave myself, and allow no—”

“I should hope not, Annie,” said Sara with nun-like reproof. It was definitely a moment for do as I say, not do as I do.

“Yes, I behave myself, Madam,” assured Annie, “but if Alf sees me looking at another fellow, he gets in fighting trim. Sometimes I think it’s because he sits down all day, and he must be glad to stand up—”

“It’s a point,” said Sara reasonably.

“Then, Madam, when he goes off in a huff, I must say he has a way of consoling himself—”

“What does he do?” asked Sara who could never resist the ways of men and women.

“He takes a drop too much, Madam, and gets very sorry for himself. Then when he can’t look his breakfast in the face, he comes round and asks me to forgive him, and swears never to be jealous again.”

“M’mmm,” mused Sara, “it has a familiar sound. And I gather you forgive him?”

“Oh, yes, Madam,” said Annie worrying the knob of the door. “What else can I do? But I tried a total abstainer and that was worse. He thought smoking was a sin, and walking sprightly on Sundays. Then when he kissed me too hard he kept apologising, as if that was wrong too. I could do nothing with him, but he was more trouble to himself than he was to me, so I went back to Alf. As for the lot of them, I could keep myself better any day, but a girl must get married sometime, and there’s nothing to marry but what they call men.”

Annie went cheerfully out, with determination in her back to accept the burden of Eve. Sara laughed to herself, staring at a telephone and willing it to ring. With her breakfast came a large tabby cat, who jumped on her bed treading the sheets.

“Good-morning, Richard,” she said conversationally, “you’re early this morning, or did you sleep here?” Richard trod on, humming in a sunny mood. But he was a polite cat and sat back on his haunches, anticipating the crumbs that always came from this special tray. Sara ate her own breakfast making him wait, until the round childlike eyes accused her.

“Richard, you know as well as I do, this bacon is for you. Now don’t spit it out. Take it like a gentleman.”

With animals her fastidiousness halted. She could reprove her maid for slovenliness, even while Richard, the lion-hearted, slept in a sooty round on her bed. Now he gobbled bacon with his ears back and his eyes slits of greed.

“Richard,” she whispered conspiringly. “I’ve got something to tell you. You must know how I feel! No, I forget! Nora said you were a doctored cat. I wish cats had been doctored when I was a child. It was one of the black spots drowning the kittens. I’ll never forget the pups who revived under the apple tree. Poor Christina! How I cried. Funny how I still dream of her. On black nights I think of her creeping to her death. Dear, dear Christina! John Murray Blair would have loved her! Richard, wives and husbands are often incompatible, but children and parents are incompatible too.” She paused in her one-sided conversation, gazing out with wide-open eyes. “Richard,” she mused in a graver voice. “He loves his son and wants to possess him. But you know, and I know, that children belong to life.” She frowned a little with diminishing radiance, until a reckless shake of her head made a deeper dent in the pillow. “But I won’t dwell on that, now. The Gods knew when to make Lancelot ride by, and it isn’t going to be tirra-lirra by the river. Oh,” she ejaculated with a startled leap. Outside from Annie’s quarters came the insistent ringing of the telephone, making Sara relax with a disdainful face. “No, I won’t answer. Imagine after my experience jumping like a school-girl at the sound of a bell. What is it?” she asked Annie after a prolonged minute of simulated indifference.

“The telephone, Madam. When I attempted to take the message, the party said he would like to speak to Mrs. Colville himself. An English voice, Madam, very soft and collected—”

“Take the tray,” said Sara dismissingly. Something had humanized her maid a little too much, she thought. Probably a few seafaring kisses! She waited until she was behind a closed door with no one to hear but Richard, before she cuddled back with the telephone on her chest.

“Yes,” she said, in what she hoped was a casual voice.

“Good-morning, my dear.” It was a lover’s voice, as mellow as port resting in a decanter. The one she sent back was muted, like one making an enchanted query.

“Then it did happen, Murray? It had the quality of a dream. I seem to need the reality of your voice, to tell me—”

“I needed yours too. I don’t seem to be able to remember—”

“Oh, have you forgotten the story of my life? I won’t tell you again. It takes such a long time, and seems to belong to the past.”

“Yes, the past. No, I haven’t forgotten a word,” he reassured her with intense conviction. “It’s just that other things are—”

“What?” she questioned softly.

“Well, ah—”

“A beautiful blur?” she suggested.

“Yes! Thank you. That’s what it seems. We were so suddenly—”

“What?” she questioned, as he paused again.

“Well, so suddenly—”

“Close?” she inflected.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

Sara smiled over the top of the telephone. “Now I’m four miles away.”

“No, you’re not,” he contradicted impressively.

“I am! It’s quite four miles in Long Measure.”

“Well,” he conceded indulgently, “what are you doing so far away, with no one to take care of you?”

“Murray,” she murmured reproachfully, “you’re rubbing it in that I’m a widow, and I don’t feel in the least like a widow.”

“I hoped you didn’t, my dear. How did you sleep?” It sounded the most important question of the day, infinitely more stupendous than the state of Europe.

“Well,” she said happily. “And you? I hope you went straight to bed?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t. The man with the better-to-eat-you-with smile—”

“And the wife who doesn’t pinch?”

“And the wife who doesn’t pinch, insisted on my joining them for a last drink, in my case the first drink. We didn’t have one all evening, if you remember.”

“No, we didn’t, did we? I hadn’t remembered. That makes it better. What are you doing?”

“Sitting on my bed, talking to you. What are we going to do? We can’t compete with London, but I could order a dinner without vinegar, and there’s a three-piece orchestra that might be induced—”

“No, Murray, we won’t pine for a love-song from the first violin. It’s difficult to be glamorous—”

“We could be together,” came the quiet suggestion.

“Yes, we could,” she agreed in an enchanted voice. “When will we be glamorous like that?”

His voice became businesslike, without departing from its muted tone. He might be regarding a timetable, and bending his arrogant head.

“Well, my dear, I have meetings and conferences until four, after which I play golf until five-thirty. Then I feel the day is done. Aren’t you going to work today? What are they going to do? You must get them off the stairs.”

“Murray,” she said, impressed. “How well you remember! It must be a dream that you let me talk about myself, instead of interrupting to talk about yourself. It will be your turn this evening. You can tell me everything,” she said with persuasive imitation of his own voice.

“There’s very little to say. I’m a very ordinary fellow.”

“Don’t be foolish, darling! You’ve got such a Good Friday face.”

“My hands and my face! Nobody ever made so many remarks—”

“It’s because you live in England, and Englishwomen notice handicaps first.”

His voice was grim in the way of men disgusted with their golf.

“There’s nothing impressive about that. I haven’t been playing very long. I’ve been too busy, much too busy, to play at all.”

“Oh!”

“Why, oh, my dear? I’ve been a very faithful husband.”

“But you must have sowed an oat or two, Murray?”

He laughed as if he were really amused.

“Not an English oat.”

“Oh,” she said promptly. “Rupert again! There shall be in that rich earth a richer oat concealed! Was it a Caprice Viennois, Murray?”

“I’ve been to Vienna. I went to the Opera.”

“Do you go to the Opera?” she asked hopefully.

“Not if I can help it,” he said serenely sure of his tastes. “They seem long and the seats get hard.”

“Well, you’re a thin man,” she said sympathetically.

“Do you like it very much?” he asked tentatively.

“Yes,” she said, true to her loves. “But we don’t have to be alike, do we? I don’t ride horses on hard flinty roads. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least. I like riding alone.”

“Yes, I’m afraid of that.”

“What do you mean? Don’t be subtle, Sara. I’m a plain man.”

“With a Good Friday face, darling,” she drawled. “I’m glad it was Vienna. It might have been Paris.”

“I go to Paris, often!”

“Oh, perhaps you go to Versailles by moonlight and feel it’s not heinous to sin out of doors.”

“I thought I had a Good Friday face,” he suggested, noncommittally.

“That belongs to Jekyll. Hyde must do other things. Shall we dine here, and go out in my canoe and imagine we’re in Venice?”

“No, thank you very much. Canoes tip over very easily.”

“But you’re a quiet man. Then, will you dine and borrow ‘The Life of the Bee’?”

“You can’t do anything about that,” he said in a tone indicating she must take him as she found him. “I have no beliefs.”

Sara laughed, with infinite comprehension. “I won’t try and change you, Murray. That’s what women do. They love that certain thing in man, and then try and make it over.”

His laugh made grim agreement, making her continue in soothing indulgence. “But I had to stop Bruce cracking nuts and throwing the shells back in the bowl. And he tried to stop me going off by myself. He was the sort of man who couldn’t swallow at his own table unless I was always there. I’m afraid he often missed a meal looking out the window, and pulling at his watch.”

“Marriage is like that. I can manage to swallow alone.”

“That’s satisfactory, but not for this evening. Come out here when you’ve changed after golf, and I’ll show you my cottage. We might go to Nora first and have a drink. You remember—”

“Yes, very well. We danced—”

“I saw you. You looked like Gabriel whispering in her ear.”

“We were talking about Noel and the time he had mumps.”

“Oh, poor Noel,” she said sweetly. “Now, I really must go. Nora comes every morning with the children. Then they walk and we gossip. We shall probably talk about you and your ears will begin to burn when you get to the place where knocking off the penny doesn’t matter.”

“How well you remember, my dear.”

“Everything,” she said spaciously. “Well, I’ll hope to give you dinner. But my maid is walking out with a sailor—”

“More power to her,” he said with beautiful tolerance. “I can see the ship from the window.”

“Are you homesick for England, Murray?”

“It’s hard to think there’s another life that claims me.”

“You said that last night. We must be very old friends, when you can repeat yourself.”

“Very old friends. Now stop chattering, Sara. I have to get to work. I’ll take a taxi to your cottage and walk back.”

“It’s four miles in Long Measure, Murray.”

“I’ll walk just the same. I like to walk late at night.”

“Oh,” said Sara. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” he said in a two-word Benediction.

Sara lay on looking out with eyes that were lawless and enchanted. “Richard,” she said to the sleeping cat. “Englishmen are deceptive. They talk so soft and—”

She stopped abruptly at the opening of the door.

      *      *      *      

“Good-morning, Sara.”

“Sara, Auntie Sara! Oh, there’s Richard, Mummy.”

“Sawa, Sawa, Sawa!”

In three ways she was greeted by the breath-taking little group. Behind Rosamund and Jennifer, Nora Hervey looked like an altarpiece: Madonna with infant children! Having known her as a gawky school-girl, Sara could always remember her sense of transformation when she looked at Nora’s face. Imagination had to dress her in complicated drapery, concealing the anatomy of the flesh and blood woman. Then she completed the mystical suggestion of her face. But the drapery must be ample, or adoration would be divided between brogues and motherhood.

At six, Rosamund was like a Venetian child with reddish hair, and white flesh dipped in golden tints. Except for her external beauty she was not exceptional, and there was no complication of old-world charm in her childish gusto. Jennifer was like a minute angel. Inheriting her mother’s face, she excelled it, in the way flesh lay over bone, like carved ivory. She seemed like a child conceived on the meadows of Heaven. As a group they impelled imagination, but when they moved as separate beings, the present century came back. There was nothing mystical in Nora’s sigh as she collapsed in a chair.

“My feet hurt! It was a long dance. You must be exhausted, Sara. Not a moment off the floor!”

Sara smiled comprehensively, but it was the children’s visit and adult discussion must be delayed. Rosamund was ruffling Richard’s fur with a rousing hand, and the long-suffering cat did no more than unclose an eye.

“Sara, did Richard have his breakfast?”

“Yes, bacon.”

“Sawa, Sawa, bweakfast,” singsonged Jennifer, who was plodding towards speech on the voice of her sister.

Rosamund dragged Richard from the bed, holding him tight around his stomach. Jennifer stayed by Sawa playing with her hand, and a bracelet she had forgotten to remove in preoccupation with other things. Richard wriggled out of Rosamund’s clasp and jumped back on the bed, with a reproachful look that said his morning nap was not over.

“Poor Richard,” said Sara soothingly. “Go to sleep again.”

“Wichard,” piped Jennifer patting him with her tiny hand, but her touch was gentle, unlike the gigantic disturbance of her elder sister’s fingers. Rosamund was roaming around the room, picking up everything within reach, and frequently dropping what did not hold her interest. Nothing held it for more than a second, but she had an endless zest for investigation. Sara left the correcting to Nora, and did not flinch when precious things were dropped on the floor. Perhaps because their mother’s feet hurt, the children were dismissed earlier that morning.

“That’s all, children,” said Nora rising with decision, “let’s find Nurse, and she’ll take you for a walk. Jennifer must ride in her cart.”

“Want to stay, Mummy,” said Rosamund, who protested everything adult on general principles. She was enthralled with a gigantic powder-puff and tentatively dabbing her nose as if she did not try the same thing every morning. Nora patiently replaced it, bringing a mutinous look to the curved mouth. The psychology for Rosamund was distraction.

“There’s a bottle of barley-sugar in the kitchen with Annie,” suggested Sara, in the most conversational voice. “Good-bye, my baby,” she said, leaning over the smaller child, and dropping a kiss on the fair head. “Nice fresh head,” she sniffed luxuriously, “lovely baby soap! Sara will see you this afternoon.”

“Stowy,” said Jennifer leaving without rebellion. It was nothing to her child’s mind that she would not understand a word. If Rosamund would listen, she would listen also.

“We’ll see,” said Sara nodding like a mandarin.

Nora was back again, seating herself with another sigh.

“I feel my age,” she said, extending her feet across the carpet. “Nice dance, Sara. Lots of strangers around.”

“Yes, I had a bit of Jutland, and a scrap of the Somme. The Somme jostled me.”

Nora was smiling with inward delight.

“How the men hate it, when the Navy comes in! The girls are positively ruthless, to say nothing of wives.”

“Good for them,” said Sara with heartfelt approval. “The men in small places are spoiled. When they get competition they can’t take it.”

“There were some women biting their nails over your monopoly.”

Sara arched her body stretching to the tips of her fingernails.

“We only danced once,” she said innocently.

“Don’t block, Sara,” commanded her friend. “Tell me about it. He’s got a face like a knight-at-arms.”

“Well,” explained Sara, “I found him palely loitering. I met him a long time ago, but of course he didn’t remember, which shows he made more impression on me, than I did on him.”

“He must be positively dented this morning,” said Nora dryly. “If you’d only listened, you would have known it was the man I raved about after the cocktail party yesterday. See what you missed by being high-hat with your work.”

“Yes, that’s true! I didn’t go! It must have been arranged,” said Sara fatefully. “It was all so spontaneous and beautiful. What did you think of him, Nora?”

“A lot,” she admitted. “Perhaps because I was flattered when he talked to me instead of the younger girls. Then I found he was a devoted father who could talk nicely of children’s diseases. He made me show him some snaps of the children. I always try not to, but—”

“Don’t apologise,” said Sara warmly. “If I had them I’d positively flaunt. He remembered too, because he told me their names.”

“Did he?” said Nora with the pleased air of a woman promoting a man to a much higher place.

“M’mmm! Did Bob enjoy the dance?”

“More or less,” said Nora dubiously. “He can dance very well but—”

“It was a warm night and he was too tired,” explained Sara adequately.

“Exactly, but he held up doorways rather nicely.”

“I should say he blocked them, but he’s a nice thing to stop a woman on her way.”

“When you cut his dance,” accused Nora, “he—”

“We made up last night,” interrupted Sara, unrepentant. “He kissed me at the gate, more in sorrow than in anger.”

“So I noticed, but you know Bob. There had to be some reason why he lowered one or two.”

“But, darling,” said Sara in palliation, “drink is so uniting to men!”

“Yes, but he snored all night. Why do men snore when they drink?”

Sara’s hands gestured mutely.

“You’re lucky,” she said retrospectively, “that he doesn’t grind his teeth.”

“He does! As a wife I’m let off nothing. I was awake nearly all night, and this morning he told me he wouldn’t be home for lunch as he’s going on board the ship.”

“We’ll have a nice quiet day. Have lunch with me and Annie will make us something foolish. There’s unexpectedly no engagements.”

“The women are too busy to entertain when the Navy is in. Bob and I are going in town to play Bridge this evening. Will you mind being alone?”

Sara smiled shaking her head. She, the most independent of women, was coddled by Nora to the point of having every minute rounded out in some congenial way. With infinite resource in herself she could spend hours and days alone and not feel empty. Moreover she had the habit of cities, and did not anticipate the ceaseless running in and out, and eternal gad that was the lifeblood of small places. But Nora was her sponsor, worrying continually because she lived in a cottage, with only the frail protection of Annie. She had the feminine conviction that safety was assured, when a man slept in the house, if only in the cellar. That was another contradiction in Sara’s feminine person. She could not be intimidated by noises in the night, or the unexpected ringing of a bell. She was inured to shock, and prepared to walk out and meet it. Now in view of Nora’s considering expression, she said reassuringly, “it will ease your mind to know, Murray is coming to dinner.”

The information had the effect of making Nora raise her eyebrows.

“Murray indeed? His name is John.”

“John to you,” said Sara smiling at the ceiling.

Nora was patient, but humanly curious, and Sara had the air of Richard, when he was bland after a stolen feast. There was no thought of Sara withholding information. Interchange was as ordinary to them as breath. It had begun in schooldays when they probed the future through the fog of ignorance, and the fantasy of youth. Now there was less of both qualities and they heard themselves speak with the tongue of realism. They talked of motherhood, friendship, the companionship of a man and a woman, the sexual side of love, and the growth or stunt of marriage. Sara went one further, expressing the ever-present need of something to colour and fortify life, something that could stand like a sunlit rock in shifting sands. Nora would stare at her, and appraise her own stalwart husband. Those were strange sentiments from a Sara who could lock her own front door, and travel vast distances with the air of a woman stepping on a tram. Sara said she had changed about romance since schooldays. It did not mean places to go, or the sight of other blades of grass. It was a quality of mind towards the motley of living. Nora was too early a mother to feel her own needs too strongly, but she could listen to Sara and live vicariously. This morning she did it again. If John Murray Blair was in conference, trying to get to the point where knocking off a penny did not matter, his ears must have scorched with a sudden reminder of other things. Sara talked with beautiful directness, withholding nothing of all she had said, and done. Nora listened like a wise Madonna, registering points on which she might comment later. When Sara wound up in a bemused voice, “I love the sound of his voice, and the look of his face. Every other man is wiped from my mind, even Bruce and Colin,” she said, with an apologetic look towards a picture. “He has some quality I’ve been looking for, gentleness in one hand, and purpose in the other, and such exciting content in his arms. That’s all! He’s arriving at six, and I love him.”

“M’mmm,” mused Nora with wide considering eyes. “It’s hardly a plant of slow growth, is it?”

“No, but these things happen. People have loved at once, and recognised the sight of a dream.”

“The same dream with a different face?” suggested Nora.

“No,” said Sara with bewitched finality. “This is really different. My mind is made up, but don’t let that stop you, Nora darling. Go on and say all the wise things you must! I’ll listen.”

Nora laughed and reached out for a cigarette which she rolled round and round in her fingers, without smoking.

“It’s only,” she began slowly, “that it might be mid-summer madness, reaction because you’ve come to life again. You probably exaggerate a gorgeous time because he was attracted and attentive, and it would be a poor man who wouldn’t find you stimulating—”

“Thanks for the nuts, darling,” smiled Sara, with no sense of doing anything, but listening to words without meaning.

“I feel it’s useless talking,” said Nora, “but I’m sure you’re going to get hurt. I have eyes too. Every ounce of that man has gone into making himself what he is, and I should say his highest pitch of living will stay in his son. When a man with a face like that talks anxiously about mumps, it’s more than possible he will preserve—”

“Noel, before his own desire,” said Sara, undigesting the prospect.

“Yes,” agreed Nora steadily. “Do you know what I really think? I’m a wife and I know. The last thing a nice man will sacrifice is his own roof, his wife and his children.”

“Wives should rejoice,” said Sara pleasantly.

“They should indeed, instead of making so much fuss. More homes could be preserved if women could ignore a lapse here and there. I’m sure Bob was unfaithful to me when he was in Mexico.”

“What!” ejaculated Sara. The thought made her rise on her elbow searching Nora’s face.

“Yes,” said her friend smoothly. “I suspected the sapphire he brought me. Poor lamb, he was unhappy when he saw me and the children again. Most of the things he gives me he forgets about at once, but every now and then he looks at the sapphire and asks me if I don’t think it’s a very fine stone. I always agree, but he was too generous, especially as I had to economise after the trip.”

“Well,” said Sara with a spontaneous laugh, “you had to economise to pay for the sapphire? Did you mind, Nora?”

“Yes, of course,” she confessed instantly, “any woman would, but I showed nothing of what I felt. Things are altered when you have children. I just let Bob simmer, but I had to put my foot down on more presents. Then I knew it was an affair, and not a casual encounter, because he kept trying to give me things. When he forgot to send me flowers on our anniversary, I knew his conscience was appeased.”

“Oh, stop, Nora, it’s—”

“Just a husband abroad, my dear. Poor Bob! He couldn’t resist those dark eyes.”

Sara looked speculative. “Do you think I’m leading Murray on a path that will make him buy sapphires for his wife?”

“I should say so, unless he feels he must propitiate his son. I should think he not so much loves him, as worships him. That’s dangerous.”

There was a detached appreciation in the look Sara gave Nora. She was too intelligent not to know attraction could obscure judgement, and her brain applauded, while her heart raced deliriously on. The summer-sweet sense of her blood held today, while Nora displayed tomorrow. Restlessness made her fling her legs out of bed, with her feet pointed down like a dancer. Then she crossed the room on bare feet looking out on the golden drip of the laburnum.

“Those trees are miracles,” she said irrelevantly. “If that blossom could only last. I suppose you’d say that was significant?” she challenged, glancing back. “But if the flowers can fade, so can I, when autumn comes. I’m as experienced in loss as I am in love.” She stretched again, and touched her toes with fingers that could have gone further than the floor. When she stood up she smiled invitingly at Nora. “Come and lecture me while I have my bath, and when you’re finished, I’ll say I intend to drink from this cup even though Caesar Borgia is at the bottom.”

As Sara walked through a door with a conquering back, Nora found herself murmuring, “you’ve a nice figure for it! I have to be modest because I’m so angular. I forgot to tell you, Sara, that I invited him to spend the week-end after next. I was so flattered about the children.”

“Well,” said Sara stooping so suddenly that Nora nearly fell between her shoulder-blades. “He never said, and how like you to keep the best till the last. I shall be shamelessly on your doorsteps from Saturday to Monday. And I forgot to tell you, my pet, that I’m bringing him across for a drink before dinner.”

“Very well,” said Nora sitting on a porcelain stool, “but I wish you’d try and remember that he’s just an attractive Englishman, and you know what they’re like.”

“I do,” said Sara making the bathroom steamy with hot water. “You can find them in the colonies looking as if they knew the classics from cover to cover, but were much too well-bred to say anything, but, ‘thanks, I will have another spot.’ ”

CHAPTER THREE

Like a sleek sausage inside a Puritan grey skin Annie idled at a porcelain-topped table. The late afternoon sun made the laburnums simmer with heat, but she was denied the sight of the flower-spotted terraces dropping to the lake. In her dream-like state it was no curtailment. She was not in a mood to dwell on the beauties of the natural earth. Like her mistress she had human expectations, and perhaps better than Sara, she had the extra thrill of playing the homespun Alf against the spit and polish of a man of the world. It was the sameness of a fixed star against the exciting appearance of a comet. For the moment she could suspend her plump hands and anticipate. There was a defter hand cooking a dinner for John Murray Blair. Whenever Sara wished to eat beyond a boiled egg and a salad, a woman came in by day. The extra was worn and lacklustre with no emotional fidgets towards yesterday, today or tomorrow. Seasons could come and go, and still leave her with down-cast eyes, stirring another concoction for man’s lesser parts. She looked like a black crow of a woman: someone who should not walk abroad in blossom-time, but wait until the trees were skeleton ghosts again. Sara knew all about her, having heard her story told in the scant words of the under-privileged. A comely cook once, she had married a man who drank. The habit had stayed and increased, and as a provider, MacCurdle had soon ceased to contribute anything but the results of marriage. So many mouths to feed had forced his wife out to cook by day, and home to cook by night. Unsolicited speech was so rare in her, that Annie jumped when she spoke.

“She’s cooking for a man. A savoury instead of a sweet!”

“She met him last night,” said Annie, always ready to talk about the human heart. “He must be something extra for her to take on. Haven’t I heard her on the telephone refusing to go out with this one, and that one, and running over to see Mrs. Hervey. Queer way to act when you’ve a chance of a date.”

“She’s buried two, so she knows what’s what.”

“And don’t I?” asked Annie with a toss of her head.

“No,” said Mrs. MacCurdle, without raising her eyes from the cheese mixture she was stirring, “you’re just a bit of before, not after.”

Too palpably true for contradiction, Annie sat staring at the wreck of a good female body. There was something about Mrs. MacCurdle commanding respect, even while eyes abominated the thing she had become. Instinctively the reason rushed from Annie’s lips.

“You wouldn’t have gone off so, Mrs. MacCurdle, if you hadn’t had so many children.”

Mrs. MacCurdle made a sound like the cap and bells of a snort. “MacCurdle was a Catholic, and when he went to Confession he liked to think there was something he hadn’t done.”

Annie flinched that the mystery of sex should be so profaned.

“He drinks, doesn’t he?” she asked hurriedly.

“Continual,” said Mrs. MacCurdle. “He has a pension from the war. Thirty per cent disability for gas. He got ideas there, seeing the officers drink. He says it’s a gentleman’s fault, and when he has a drop too much, he tells me the things a man learns at the impressionable age stay with him for life. I had no impressionable age, except the impression I made on the kitchen stove, and nobody pays me disability for a fallen womb.”

There was a ghoulish candour about Mrs. MacCurdle making Annie press on.

“Isn’t marriage worth something when you’re young—”

“That soon leaves you,” said Mrs. MacCurdle, with the air of a woman who knew youth was a fugitive thing. “Nothing is worth having, like your own money to spend, and knowing the next meal will be there when the stomach comes round. You’ll never have as much, as you’ve got now to spend on your back. You’ll try stretching it around a lot of things and you won’t need a chalk-mark to show you where the ends don’t meet.”

Annie refused to be depressed. With the egotism of youth, she could concede pitying contempt for something that could not possibly happen to herself.

“I might meet my fate tonight, and go and live in England.”

Now Mrs. MacCurdle’s response was an unqualified snort.

“You’ll find he’s married, and when things are getting hot he’ll hand you out a snapshot of his wife and kids. The best he’ll do will be to tell you he’s misunderstood, and go back to brass-rags.”

Annie was impressed, though it was hard to imagine a time when Mrs. MacCurdle had linked up with a sailor, but she was a sensible girl and knew that the British Navy had not been recently organized to give her a date.

“I don’t care,” she said, reduced to the foolish reply ending so many issues. “Married or not, I’ll have a bit of a fling. We’re only young once. I wish I could get off earlier though. He’ll be here at six, and then they’ll dilly-dally until half past seven, while I’m dying to go to town.”

“Pity about you! Why you want to be dancing on a hot summer night I don’t know. Your feet’ll hurt—”

“They won’t,” said Annie, tap-dancing under the kitchen table.

“They will then,” prophesied Mrs. MacCurdle. “It won’t be long before they’ll hurt all day, and when you’re stretched out for the first bit of rest you’ll get, you’ll find that’s all! Grand life, and you with your talk of dancing!”

“You’re a gloomy Gus and no mistake,” said Annie pertly, “and I with one of the new dresses she gave me—”

“And I bet you fill it up sideways,” said Mrs. MacCurdle with an unflattering glance at Annie’s sleek sides. “If the dresses weren’t bias cut you’d never get near it.”

It was no good to protest to Mrs. MacCurdle. She appeared to know the lowest reasons for everything, even bias seams, and Annie was a trifle conscious that the dress Sara had given her strained a little over womanly curves. She was glad to answer the front doorbell with a defiant toss of her head. In the brief walk through the hall she became the smooth medium, with the perfectly detached manner. There was no glance at her mistress insinuating she might be admitting an Adam to an Eve. If the apple reddened, Annie did not pry. She knew her place, and the veiled look she gave John Murray Blair told her she must compensate with a lesser man. But had she questioned the vague way her mind turned over to something she had learned in school, she would have known she was fumbling with a stimulus that suggested tournaments and jousts, and men springing on the backs of Barbary horses.

      *      *      *      

They met like two people near the prime of knowledge of what constitutes the enigma of union. Both stayed a little on the arrested minute, giving recognition to rarity, before body acclaimed the sense of touch. In their hesitation there was a platonic touch, a moderation, bidding flesh stay on the leash, and savour the fusion of mind. If, according to Nora, he might be empty of many things, he had a sweet intimate smile, a touch, voice, and eyes that gave promise of an ample range. The first silence was close-companioned and full of a deepening urge.

She turned from her view of the western sky growing brazen with gold. The lake was round, mirroring light, as if the sun had flung itself down to lie on the ground. When she rose, it beamed on her head like a lover, until it left it with a mere burnish, to acknowledge another nearer its own colour. For a moment she could not see him for the glare in her eyes, but she stood smiling with a shimmer of flesh from a deep sense of well-being. When they stirred, movement was simultaneous, a reach from arms, circled with candour. They did not kiss at once but stood resting their faces as if they were established lovers savouring a renewal. Then they kissed slowly with quiet joy.

He held her back subjecting her face to the revelation of hot yellow light, making a survey which she endured with the complaisance of a woman unembarrassed by her flesh.

“How do you like me by daylight?” she asked with smiling lips permitting a view of her white teeth, in case he should miss something.

“Younger,” he said approvingly. “Last night when I saw you dancing with other men I thought you looked a little—”

“What?” she persisted, as he seemed to hunt for a word.

“Stately, I think?” he asked in half-humorous question.

She laughed. “It’s long dresses, Murray. They help a woman towards elegance, and perhaps because I’ve been defeated inside, I restrain it from showing outside.”

His eyes considered her with musing intensity. “It works very well, my dear. How do you like me by daylight?” he asked with a human suggestion of vanity.

She swayed back staying in the circle of his arms.

“M’mmm,” she reflected fondly, “older, I think, with a tiny look of strain round the eyes. Last night I thought you looked quite unassailable. Now—” She paused, challenging him with warm brown eyes.

“Yes?” he insisted.

“Now,” she admitted, “you might be a bit more approachable in grey flannel.”

He smiled with restrained humour. “Was I—ah—distant? I felt as if we were close and quite alone.”

“Yes, so we were,” she agreed with sweet irony. “In Sahara with two hundred and ninety-eight other people.”

He raised his eyebrows in gay interrogation. “I didn’t see a soul.”

The young smile in his eyes made Sara press her face against his.

“Do you mind being a little older this afternoon, darling?” In case he should her lips on his cheek made it manifestly absurd.

“Not in the least. I work hard, but I keep very fit.”

“So I see,” she said running her hands down his lean sides. “Almost too thin. Is it necessary to ride off your last shred of flesh? If I were the woman who pinched, I couldn’t find a nip.”

“I’ll get fat for you,” he said obligingly. “I never felt better in my life.”

She swayed back again to question his face. “Could it be because you’re happy?”

“I strongly suspect it, my dear.”

“Yes,” she agreed examining him very closely. “You have a quietly happy face. You’re the sort of man who would look wintry if you were miserable. Your skin would go grey—and your lips—” She narrowed her eyes looking deeply reflective. “I know, darling,” she rushed on, “ ‘his lips were pinched to kiss at the noon—’ ”

“ ‘Two red roses across the moon,’ ” he finished neatly.

“Murray,” she ejaculated, accusing him as she had last night. “You read books! Poetry books as my nurse used to say.”

“I do not,” he contradicted. “But that’s in one of Noel’s books. I always read his books.”

“And what is he reading now?” she said with immediate interest in his son’s books.

He answered at once. “He’s just discovered Robinson Crusoe, and he wanted to read the Musketeers but it was a little beyond him, so I was reading it to him. I couldn’t expect you to know about boys’ books, darling.”

“Couldn’t you, darling,” she mocked. “I read the Musketeers to a point where I could open them anywhere. I was delighted when Milady lost her head, I got sick when Charles lost his. I cried when Porthos was crushed, but I have to admit, Murray,” she said innocently, “I had to grow up to know how Athos got his son. I used to read and read and wonder what happened to give him a son.”

“You know now, darling?” he asked provocatively. “If not, I might—”

“Thank you, darling,” she said to his very sunny face. “I—”

She got no further, being impelled towards the quiet delight of his lips, and to lean against him as if she would push through to his heart.

“M’mmm,” she said nuzzling his cheek. “I understand biting since yesterday. I’m like Nora. I’ve seen her holding the children, and then squeezing them so hard that I’m sure she’s a sadist.”

He laughed, without shock for the extremes of affection. “The animals do it, my dear. They eat the children to save them.”

“I know,” she said acceptingly. “I had a white Persian cat who always had white kittens, but one day she had a black kitten with short hair. She kept worrying it with her paw, and then she bit it to death. I wondered if she was expiating the black spot in her life or really loving her kitten. I thought I’d never forgive her, but I did. I’m not very good at grudges. Are you forgiving, Murray?”

His face grew sombre. “Not very, I’m afraid. One clear case against a person is enough for me. Then my mind is made up.”

“Oh, don’t be hard,” she urged in a softening voice. “I couldn’t bear it if you were hard with me.”

“Couldn’t you?” he speculated, assessing her from under thin hooded lids. “It’s not easy for me to trust people readily. The world I know is insincere, devious, with ways men call good business. I can’t believe that you—”

“What?” she insisted.

“Never mind that now,” he said with a sudden change of tone. “You seem so honest. I love you for it. Tell me all you’ve done. Have you been out?”

“No.”

“Why?” he said reproachfully.

“Because when I got up I was working at them, but don’t worry, darling, I had a swim at four so I had some exercise.”

He smiled in awareness of her delicate mockery. “Must take exercise,” he insisted gently. “How are they getting on?”

She frowned. “Badly! Yesterday she was one thing and today she’s another, and there’s nothing to indicate to the reader why she’s kicking up her heels.”

“Does it matter, darling?” he said comfortingly. “Can’t she suddenly go off the deep end—”

“Murray!” she said with deep shock. “You don’t understand publishers. They’re disillusioned consistent men, and they worry so much over what the public will like, when all it wants is glamour, and escape, and a lovely bit of slop, because people have raw nerves, men have no jobs and women are afraid to have babies in case the bombs—”

“Stop,” he said with a wry face. “A thing like that can never happen. No men could permit it. Common sense will prevail.”

“It won’t,” she said in soft disagreement. “Not even though the nicest Englishmen say so. They won’t look beyond the Channel because it might interfere—”

“Very wise,” he said sternly. “We must hang on to what we’ve got. England is the best there is. Life there is—”

“I know,” she sighed softly. “Life there is lovely, if you can live it out to the end, but mothers with sons want to lock them up. It’s another age of despots—”

“Aren’t you neurasthenic?” he said giving her a gentle shake.

“Yes, I expect so,” she said disarmingly. “Everyone is except you. You’re composed and yet warm, like the clink of ice in hot water. It’s because you’ve been successful in England, and you couldn’t know Big Ben is a very flat bell.”

“Impossible, darling. It’s a very fine bell. And when I’m away—”

“It makes you homesick? No, Murray, the bell is flat, but it doesn’t matter. I’m only chattering as you said last night. What have you been doing today? Did you wake up and think of me once, and dare I think you got muddled between the party of the first part, and the party of the second part? Or were you adequate?”

“Adequate, I think,” he said modestly. “In fact, I did a good day’s work.”

“I expected as much, and that, Murray, is the difference between a man and a woman. I did a bad day’s work, at least a bit that did not fit in with yesterday. That goes to show how unstable I am. I should be able to separate my brain from my body.”

For a moment he held her, staring into her face as if he would read forward from her mental capacity to the flesh and blood tints of the woman.

“You’re so genuine, Sara.”

“Am I? It’s the masculine parts you mentioned last night.”

“I should say you were the most feminine woman in the world.”

“Am I?” She smiled again. “We’re only on the fringe of that argument. I hope you don’t contradict yourself so often in conferences.”

“No, my lawyer sees to that,” he said easily. “I’m so glad to see you again.”

“Darling,” she said destroying the space between them, “we’re going over to Nora’s for a drink.”

“Are we? Just as you say, but not just yet. I want to look round and see where you live.”

Retaining her hand he stared out, responding to the green and yellow shimmer by a slight contraction of his eyes.

“Do you see, Murray? It’s spring inside and out.”

Behind him the room glowed with a diminished lustre of the outside world. Looking back he saw pale yellow walls and long-legged light furniture seeming to grow out of a carpet like a field.

“It is like that,” he admitted. “Not very permanent.” He spoke like a man who might have surrounded himself with the solidity of an old house, and the clutter of tradition.

“Where am I in the room, Murray? I added a touch here and there.”

Head up with its arrogant tilt, he looked for signs of the woman at his side.

“The untidy books,” he ventured, “and perhaps those two hot-looking pictures.”

“Oh,” she said enchanted. “It’s true! Do you mind if I kiss you?”

“Not in the least,” he said drawing her towards him with happy co-operation.

“So agreeable,” she murmured. “There— Darling, the pictures are a haphazard Renoir and a Monet, picked for colour. Anything else? You seem to find me very easily.”

Now he walked away holding her hand. It was a spacious room taking up the major portion of the floor-space of the cottage. Eventually he stopped before a dark cabinet gramophone.

“This, my dear! The wood is dark and the rest is light. It’s too easy!”

“Perhaps,” she smiled. “I have that because I don’t have to take what’s on the air. I’m never lonely with music. It takes me beyond myself.”

He was leaning over albums peering at titles.

“M’mmm,” he reflected with raised eyebrows. “They’re a bit beyond me. Beethoven, Franck—I can’t take it, my dear. Too high-brow!”

“Not really,” she said without persuasion. “It’s something for every mood, and I’m not too high-brow to dislike Swing and Jazz. But so much whimpering and crooning makes me sorry for myself. Sometimes it’s really decadent.”

“Awful stuff!” he said austerely. “Only people without backbone could really like it.”

“Yes,” she said regarding him with delighted appreciation. “That’s what I mean. I should have thought of it.”

“Would you like to kiss me again?” he suggested. “I’m not usually so bright. Just a thought, my dear.”

“A very good thought,” she said co-operating extravagantly. “I enjoy kissing you very much. Do you mind?”

“I haven’t shown any resentment so far, have I?” he questioned, smiling as her nose frankly inhaled his face.

“Darling,” she sniffed, “do you by any chance use Cologne, here and there?”

“Here and there,” he admitted, with the frankest smile he had given yet. “I’m not at all afraid of you now. I understand you best when you’re eighty per-cent sense. Show me round, Sara. Show me where you eat, where you work, and where you sleep.”

“Oh, it will be a small tour for that. There’s just about that much space. Very well,” she said moving forward with an inviting hand trailing back. “Here, opening off this room is a very little room, laid as you see with dinner for two.”

“Very nice,” he said approvingly, “we’ll see more of this later. What next?”

“Through this door and facing the road is my work-room. I find it less distracting than the lake and the terraces. As you see there’s my heroine half in and half out of the typewriter, and,” she added with light venom, “I hope she likes her position.”

He laughed, moving round, looking but not touching, and she noticed that his eyes stabbed everything once. “Very businesslike,” was all he said.

“Through this hall, and we’ll leave the kitchen quarters, past the bathroom door— Do you by any chance want to see the bathroom?”

“Of course,” he said at once. “I’m attached to bathrooms. Is it an American bathroom? Last year in New York I stayed at a place where I had one in mother-of-pearl and rose. It had a bath, and a cabinet with needle-showers, and large pink towels. I felt like a gigolo.”

“I know, darling,” she said sympathetically, “and you pined for a cold English bathroom with wet towels.”

“Well,” he said with an answering gleam in his eye, “this is exotic enough!”

“Yes, yellow and green. It’s a springy cottage.”

“Yes,” he said reflectively. “Not very permanent—”

His off-coloured eyes became green from the tint of the walls, and for a second his short-fingered hands touched his breast-pocket, hovering over the case that she knew held pictures of his son. His face changed completely, challenging her with the present.

“You, Sara! You’re so sweet—but what am I doing—”

Fantastically in a bathroom their eyes met and clung, with complete repudiation of their surroundings. It was a long visual duel of a man and a woman, full of question, answer, pillage, and an ultimate probe to ask why, of each other’s eyes. In sight of her face, his hands dropped back to his sides and his absent son retreated. Inevitably vision had to cloud, veil itself in the face of the insoluble. She gave way first, questioning it in words.

“Murray, we don’t know, do we? How did this happen? Why are we here so at home in each other’s arms? Are we one? Are we two? Will we be like the cottage, not very permanent? It’s out of bounds, it’s against the rules, but I don’t want to hurt you. We’re breaking—”

“Conventions, my dear,” he said like a blessed reassurance to her hair, but the sombre note was in his voice, as if he was questioning deeply himself. She looked up and saw something lurking that would take him away to the green and yellow of England. He looked down, seeing her, questioning her, putting her on the scales, sombrely sacrificing her—

“Murray,” she smiled with lightning faculty to lighten the moment. “You look as if you’re trying to break through my face. I’d like to see behind yours. If I could be a little eel I’d wriggle to the back of your throat, and rear my head and look around.”

“I’d gag, darling,” he said with a relaxing smile. “I never could bear a spoon at the back of my throat.”

“But I’d slip down so easily. We’re in the bathroom. Do you want to finish the tour and go into the bedroom?”

“Are you sure you mean it, darling?” he said with a palpable shedding of every conflict. “It might mean the row of dots you spoke of. I’m yours to command even unto the bedroom.”

“Murray,” she recited, with delicate impudence:

“Very wicked,” he accused her. “And I’m not a son of Casanova.”

“No wickedness at all, Murray?” she asked invitingly.

“Well, here and there—”

“Here and there,” she said acceptingly.

“Sara,” he said drawing her back in front of him. “This hasn’t happened to me before. This is different.”

She looked at him with soft aware eyes.

“Murray,” she agreed, “that’s the worst and the best of love. It’s always different. I said so too.”

“Extremely different,” he said, as if he must be sure of his point.

“But it’s I who know that,” she insisted. “It is different. Come on, darling, give me your hand. Nora will be waiting for us, and it’ll give you courage to walk over the doorstep— Such a hard hand, darling. I wish your face and hands matched. They tell me that an ounce of prevention is—”

“Don’t talk rot, Sara,” he said firmly. “What’s wrong with my hands anyway? Tell me, I insist.”

With the frank egotism of a man laying down his mask, he sat unselfconsciously on the bed drawing her down beside him. “We’ll look at the room later, and I shall study those two men staring at me over there.”

“Colin and Bruce,” she said looking over her shoulder like an unregretful Lot’s wife. “I wish I hadn’t started packing them up, and taking them along. The best memory lies in the heart. In time pictures become flat, but once you start, it seems bad manners to leave them behind. People are foolish in the beginning, and if you look at Colin, you’ll see tears down his face. Now I know I was more loved than loving. They were nice, nice, and so good to me. I don’t think I was as nice to them, but I can’t help it now—”

“I’ll look at them later, my dear,” he said dismissingly, “tell me about my hand.”

She turned and saw his hand palm up towards her, and in the fine austere face lay a boyish plea for indulgence. With a smiling shrug she took the hand, examining it with concentration, feeling the fingers, testing the space between the thumb and first finger, pulling the fingers apart, and running an exploratory finger over the mounts. In her scrutiny, and slow advance into speech lay the conviction of one who believed what she was going to say. For a fluent woman, the fact of her careful survey was significant of knowledge. He had no thought of hurrying her, sitting patiently with unstirring body. When she was ready she spoke, shaking her head as if she would like to repudiate what she was going to say.

“Murray, your palm is unyielding, and a phalange on your thumb is too long. Such a contradiction says your balance between determination and stubbornness is finely drawn. I’m sure you’ve got a marvelous handshake which is reassuring to the men whose options you want to snatch, but they would not see your capacity for taking advantage of an opportunity, indicated by the smooth beginning of your fingers. Your driving-force has let you arrive, but your stubbornness sometimes obscures your judgement. One of your fingers shows mental pliability, but only one! It’s not enough,” she said reproachfully, “when you have ten fingers.” She dipped his hand into her lap, searching his eyes. “Shall I go on, or—”

“Go on, please,” he ordered in modulated but definite command. “I sound complex and not very straight.”

“Oh, but very, very nice,” she said soothingly. “I can see you giving money to beggars and children. I’m also glad to see that you have a tendency to allow the emotions full sway, until—”

“Until what, my dear? Nothing must stop us now.”

“Until,” she mused, momentarily detached from personalities, “until we leave the smooth beginnings of your fingers and arrive at the developed joints. They make you stop and examine every tendency which leads away from self-discipline. People can have too much heart, darling, and do foolish things, but they can have too much head, which makes them do ruthless things. I believe you could be like that,” she declared meeting his eyes and making a statement instead of a question. “And it would not be because of the limitations of your heart but because you had it whipped into shape. Your capacity to soar—”

“Like that bee you were talking about, darling? I assure you I’d be the last persevering male. I keep very fit.” His tone was light, as if determined to keep the analysis of himself inconsequential. That he was impressed by her findings was evident in his appraisal of her face. This time she answered him firmly.

“Don’t be flippant, Murray. What I say is true. The book says! Aren’t you enjoying it? Most people love to be talked about for several minutes. I’ve known some one who could go on for hours. Shall I stop, darling?”

She was so sweetly gay in her bend towards him that he was defeated.

“Go on,” he said gravely. “I can’t help being interested.”

“Of course not. It’s so flattering to the self-esteem.”

“If you leave them any,” he said, gently grim. “You’re not slavish with admiration.”

“But I love you,” she said with such open-hearted grace that he sat speechless for several seconds.

“Since when?” he asked with incredulity.

“Oh, years and years ago. You had a quality I knew I would like.”

“I’m a very ordinary fellow, my dear.” Progress had been achieved since last night. He no longer looked overwhelmingly modest or showed an instinct to torture his tie. He did not squirm at all, but maintained the proud blend of lover and father listening indulgently to a child.

“Where were we?” she asked, examining his hand again.

“Yes, where were we? I was soaring to great heights or failing to soar to great heights. Continue!”

“Oh, thank you, darling. I think I was going to say your capacity to soar can be stifled by a self-conscious walk. You can diminish yourself through stubbornness, or fanaticism. It’s a pity, because you seem to have a lot there that I like. There’s one great loyal line across your palm—”

“A man must have something to live for, my dear.” There was a definite wish to draw his hand away, but she held on.

“You can’t beg off now, Murray. You asked for it! You’ve learned to keep your thoughts to yourself and were we living in another age you’d never need the punishment of having your tongue cut out. Your hand says we may quarrel—”

“Why should we quarrel, my dear?”

The gentleness of the question was a reproof against such a possibility. She smiled as if she understood she had questioned his manners.

“I don’t mean shouting at the tops of our voices. I mean quarrelling in a way that the gap becomes wide. If it happens it will hurt me most as I am vulnerable that way, and that will be found in my middle-finger.”

“Where?” he said taking her hand as if he wished no more knowledge of himself. “Darling, I think you know too much, but I wish you sat with me at some conference-tables.”

“Thank you, darling,” she smiled, “and may I say on a last analysis that we both have a nice Mount of Venus. It suggests ardour—”

“Yes,” he said absent-mindedly, seeing her with the quality of the Mount. Urge was in the air and a simultaneousness of gesture from arms encircling each other. Time became blurred, until Sara looked up and saw the face of a clock.

“Murray, we must go at once.”

“Yes, of course, just as you say.” He was on his feet at once, a figure of impeccable convention, and as he stood he raised his chin in unconscious settling of his mask. “Are you ready, my dear?” he said with the faint reproach of a man for a woman who lingered to give deft touches to her face and hair.

Sara was at a mirror with the unselfconsciousness of a woman accustomed to men around her.

“Come,” she smiled. “If you want to see the children—”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“Murray,” she said extending her hand, “if you love children so much I must tell you about Christina.”

“Yes,” he said attentively.

“But not now,” she denied him. “She was such a sad, sad child and I loved her— We can go out by this door—”

“We’ll go by the front door,” he decided for her, and she smiled as she picked up her bag. He had remembered discretion when she had thought of the quickest way out.

CHAPTER FOUR

In all men the uneasy warp of living is crossed by tenuous beauty. Fugitive to many it comes and goes like a rainbow, too iridescent to be clarified to separate hues. Some feel it as magic, while others hear it like a drift of melody above the turmoil of the world. Through boundless mediums all must be reached. Even the very turbid must get a glimmer, like light filtering through a dirty window. Because the facets are so many, few men can crystallise their idea of felicity, even in the unguarded hour. John Murray Blair did that in the brief visit to Nora and Bob. Sara saw it and wanted to grapple with the children for a delight that went beyond the love of man for woman. Such felicity to him must mean the ecstasy beyond, and the strongest bliss in the tangible fruit of love. It was as if he had made irrevocable decision that in a man’s seed lay his good inheritance, making his covenant between individualism and immortality. It appeared to be enough Heaven for him. For the first time in her life, Sara felt her veins scald with desire for conception. Though the man would come first, it would be the means of fastening hooks of steel in his love, and holding him with the fetters he forged himself.

Nora saw him with her children, and sensed the fabric of a man who had been rudely snatched from the realms of childhood. He had not played snug and secure in its protective shell. A forcing-house had changed him into a tight-lipped little man, when he should have been a boy, with questing eyes and tender lips. There was an intensification of lost living, and too important delight in the way he responded to the children. Exaggerated parenthood permitted them to sack his pockets, crawl all over him, snatch his handkerchief, and call him out from behind his mask. They might have given him the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, when they accepted him, kissed him, chattered to him, and then dismissed him for the next event in their snug routine.

Bob Hervey saw it and rather ostentatiously preened his male feathers. If he had a beak he would have trimmed them. It was a triumph of effulgent fatherhood over an older man. Bob had no subtleties and knew nothing of life that did not shine in high noon, and his beautiful children were accepted in the general excellence of living. It was only when they were noticed beyond normality that he saw them as a personal compliment to himself. His worst sorrows had been thick heads from overindulgence, and the few pin-pricks of conscience that a man brings on himself. He was just a man, made in God’s image! It was a simple definition, needing no analysis. Over a uniform frame, his envelope of flesh was indisputably handsome. As it was well distributed, and flat in the right places, women could hear of his fifteen stone weight, without a horrified thought for his wife. Neither was he highly coloured, maintaining as he did a pale clear skin, through abstinence and excess. Hair was chestnut, and eyes a light hazel. He moved slowly, and spoke lazily through lips that could widen and yawn as frankly as a tomcat. The oval of his face was remindful of the cat, or a more magnificent creature of the genus Felis. He had inherited an established place in a business founded by his grandfather, and worked with deferential deputies through a six-hour day. He had been licked into shape at an English Public School, and proved an excellent medium for the one-pattern training. Too lazy for extensive conversation, he found English brevities the best thing in England. His worst relapses from his school-tie were the yawns, and an inclination to let people trip over his legs, but as he had left his magnificent measurements with a London tailor, it was impossible to find fault with his earthly parts. He never read beyond a newspaper, or a man performing feats on a horse, but when Nora made him play games at foolish parties, he could recall an occasional King and Queen of lost antiquity. Latin was remembered for the helpful knowledge of ‘in vino veritas.’ Being entirely satisfied with his wife’s face, his scrutiny of other women began at the neck, and went down. Sara was quite convinced that after a five months’ visit at their town house, Bob would remember her slender body far better than her face.

It was a relaxed domestic hour in Nora’s cottage. Windows were wide open, with sun slanting on gay chintz. Bob uncoiled in lazy welcome with a hand-grip for John Murray Blair that seemed to be his last exhausting effort for the day. He had a sleepy smile for Sara, and an indolent question for her behaviour of last evening. Elaboration of the theme might have gone on, had not some quality in her partner suggested a walk in the gardens for some exultation beyond a plain man. When he lounged to a table and rattled a cocktail-shaker, Sara sat still, gazing out on the splendour of the dying day. The sun-wash held her, causing a cessation of conversational effort. So much that she had to say, and would say to Murray, had become private and personal conversation that Nora was left to cope with generalities, plus a few purrlike mumbles from Bob. He was tired, waiting for the moment to resume his seat, and extend his legs across his carpet.

Contrast between the men was arresting. Bob had the advantage of height and fifty extra pounds, but his body was indolently held, and ready to slump at a word. Murray’s stature was moderate, but so straight and balanced that it gave the illusion of greater height. His whole aspect was a mute evidence of control, and though externals said fortune had favoured him, he looked as if he had gone with it every step of the way. When he sat down he rested quietly, talking neither little nor much. He accepted a cocktail but after a casual sip put it on a table beside him, giving all his attention to his hostess. His modulation might have been tepid, had it not been for the emanation of controlled force, and the vigilance of his eyes.

They had not been seated long when the children rushed in, like an ecstatic avalanche. It was their last romp for the day, before adults dismissed them to bed. Both were in blue slippers and silk gowns, which the sun changed to deep azure. Rosamund made a wild advance tossing a drift of reddish hair, while Jennifer stumbled in her wake, like a newly washed angel encircled in gold.

“Daddy, Mummy, Sara—”

At the sight of the stranger, the dumbness of childhood took their tongues. Nora reached out an encouraging hand while Bob drew in his legs to make way for his daughters. Sara sat and smiled, trying to woo them out of their trance. As a mother, mindful of manners, Nora introduced them, inducing Rosamund to advance with a decorum far removed from her rowdy entrance. Jennifer reached his knee first, gazing up with the limpid eyes of childhood that can be so disturbing to an adult. At that moment the elders died to his eyes, as he sat forward gathering two small hands in a tender clasp. But he made no attempt to cajole, or force interest in himself. Rather, he waited for the children to make their own estimate, and accept or dismiss him. Everything seemed suspended, while he endured that round-eyed probe. Adult sensitiveness shivered, in case the children should administer a snub. Jennifer decided first, wriggling her way up, with a clutch at his lapel.

“Up,” she commanded with a small gurgle that signified approval. In a second she was in his arms, with her hair spilling over his chest. Childlike she did not rest, but began an instant survey of his person. The first pillage was his handkerchief, plucked and passed on to her sister. Rosamund shook it out like a flag of truce, capering with undisciplined grace.

“Oh, oh,” she squealed, running back at the sight of more spoils, and dropping the handkerchief indifferently to the floor.

“Rosamund, pick up—” There was the adult voice curbing the natural picture. Nora received a kick on her ankle that made her turn towards Sara sitting up with naked eyes. They looked like black pansies, shocked with vision. Nora glanced anxiously at her husband, but his obtuseness was evident. Utterly unconscious of atmosphere, he could see nothing but the top of anything. His eyes were on his children and promised to stay. It was not his watch that Jennifer was shaking, and holding to her ear. Neither was it his gold cigarette case and match-box, that Rosamund was rubbing together with every hope of inducing a scratch. When she was bored with them they followed the handkerchief to the floor, while Nora watched with a vigilant eye. When all the spoils had received fugitive interest, Rosamund claimed his other knee demanding a story.

“Stowy,” echoed Jennifer. “Foxes and Sockses!”

“Foxes and Sockses,” he said gravely, “I don’t think I know that.”

“I taught her,” shrilled Rosamund, making Nora pucker her smooth forehead. “I’ll tell you. Will I tell you?”

“Yes, thank you. What is it?”

Rosamund nodded her head, mouthing something to herself. Then she licked her lips and recited confidentially.

“Hanky,” said Jennifer pulling at his empty pocket.

“On the floor,” said Rosamund, obligingly sliding down and diving for the handkerchief. Giving it to her sister she skipped over to a small cottage piano. “I can play chop-sticks! I can play chop-sticks! I can find the middle C!”

“Middle-seat, middle-seat,” gabbled Jennifer, making the elders laugh out loud.

“My blessed baby,” said Nora firmly, “it’s not the middle-seat. Come to Mummy, and we’ll find nurse. You must go to bed and to sleep.”

Jennifer shook her head, cuddling down into comfortable arms. But obediently she closed her eyes showing an amazing length of curled eyelashes. No exotic beauty could look more enslaving than the head against a grey pin-stripe suit.

“Don’t want to go to bed,” said Rosamund showing instant co-operation with her sister.

“I’ll carry you, Jennifer,” said Bob without moving. It did not find favour in his daughter’s eyes. She stuck to the man of her adoption like a barnacle. There was no doubt of his delight, or his wish to retain her, with his chin resting on top of her head.

“She must go,” said Nora firmly, reaching out her hand to her elder child.

“May I carry her to bed?” questioned the guest, rising easily with the child in his arms. Turning round he met Sara’s eyes, and stared over a pale gold head. The look was too exposed for a room with other people in it, but for a second the man had ceased to be the lord and owner of his face. Nora bent over her child with a casual affectionate voice.

“Can’t Mummy take you to bed, my baby?”

With instant fickleness Jennifer consented to the transfer of her person, but she went with a trailing arm and a sweet backward smile for the man who had just held her. The docility of her sister made Rosamund walk politely round and say good-night. When the door shut them out, Bob managed a few lazy comments about the children, but they were received by a man with a bent head, restoring his possessions to his pockets. Nora returned to a petrified lull, and in a second had eased them into the normality of time and place. When she stood up to go, Sara was laughing, with her feeling whipped behind her eyes.

“Dinner will be waiting. Thanks, Nora dear. I’ll see you in the morning. Bye, Bob.”

“Stay both of you,” said Bob with obtuse, but hearty hospitality.

“Sorry, Bob, but Mrs. MacCurdle would be insulted.”

“I’m so glad you didn’t say yes,” smiled Nora. “Bob had forgotten that we must play Bridge this evening. Good-bye, John,” she said to her guest. “I’m looking forward to the week-end. It will be delightful to have another nurse for the children. Next time you come will you fill up your pockets with Woolworth’s?”

“May I buy them something?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes,” agreed Nora pleasantly, “at Woolworth’s! Children have no sense of value. A shilling does as much as a pound.”

“I realise that,” he said with smiling lips and eyes. “Once I gave Noel an expensive electric train, and he played all Christmas Day with a tin can and a rusty nail.”

Sara walked down the few steps. That brotherhood of parents!

“Typical of a child,” said Nora to her back. “Nothing over a shilling! I shall expect you to be on duty all Sunday, with no afternoon out.”

“It’s a nice prospect,” he laughed. “Thank you very much.”

Sara was silent, strolling casually until they were out of earshot.

“Murray,” she said with concentrated emphasis, “do you know what I decided when you were playing with the children?”

“They’re beautiful children,” he said in a bemused voice. “The little one—”

“Yes,” she agreed, “they’re like rare porcelains. But do you know what I’d fear most as the mother of your children?” Her voice penetrated his withdrawn state, and demanded his return. It was impossible to say whether the sudden stab from his eyes was due to interest, or shock from the thought she suggested.

“What, my dear?”

Sara gazed sideways, speaking with startling candour.

“Murray, if I were your wife and going to have a baby, I would go into labour with one thought. Will the moment come when the doctor leaves the room and asks whether he’ll save your wife or your child?”

His recoil was unconscious like a dumb protest.

“They couldn’t ask that of a man!”

“They could, and they do,” said the inexorable Sara, “and you’d have to answer. They’d wait until you did, and in the meantime both might die. What would you say?”

He looked hunted with eyes darting from her to the lake, to the terraces, and finding no spot where his gaze could rest. Sara watched, and saw the stir of his nostrils, and upward fling of his head, as if he must toss responsibility away in that summer evening. But he was under her domination sufficiently, to be projected to the scene she suggested. Her dramatic sense and deepened voice would not let him off. Both came to rest on their feet, staring at each other as if she was in labour, and the doctor was shouting a question at him.

“What would you say, Murray?” she pleaded, and in the fever of the sun, her voice was almost racked, with the cry of a woman in travail.

“I don’t know,” he said, with tormented but honest doubt, “I think it would be the worst thing that could happen to me.”

“I’m sure it would,” she agreed. She was standing at the top of the terrace-steps, bathed in yellow light. It burnished her hair, made light-spots in her eyes, and permitted the sun to honey her skin. Unconsciously she stood defiantly, like a victim keyed to an oblation.

“Let’s go inside,” he suggested with gentle evasion.

“No,” she refused, “let me think of myself waiting, while you made a choice.”

“You’re being very uncomfortable, my dear.” Manlike his eyes looked round for a door, so that he could go out, and walk off his disquiet.

“Of course,” agreed Sara. “I’m a nuisance. Women are, when they try and make men answer questions like that.”

“What would Bob Hervey say?”

“Oh,” she said at once, “Bob would say, ‘save Nora, you fools,’ and kick the doctors back in the room.”

“How do you know? He doesn’t look as decisive as that.”

“Perhaps not, but he loves Nora for the other half of his life. He hasn’t enough imagination to visualize an unseen child, or recognise it as a symbol.”

“He’s very good-looking,” he said inadequately, “but he looks lazy.”

Sara smiled, showing her white teeth. She let him off. His whole being pleaded for evasion, and a return to the happy moment. Understanding of everything went into the way she followed his mood. Inwardly she grimaced, feeling that women would always be squaws.

“Bob sleeps,” she explained. “It’s his hobby. He does it in waiting-rooms, in trams and trains, shows and cinemas, and quite frequently the dentist wakes him up to say the tooth is filled. When I stayed with them first, I thought he liked to sleep because he dreamt. It might have been his special withdrawal to the things a man doesn’t speak of. Then I knew I was wrong. Bob just sleeps.”

“Are they happy?” This time his tone indicated that he would be pleased to linger and hear about the personal relations of his host and hostess.

“M’mmm,” she agreed. “I should say so, though Nora could be used up a good deal more. If they stay home for an evening, Bob sleeps.”

“It’s rather loutish,” he said distastefully. “Why doesn’t he exercise?”

“He does,” she smiled, “and it only makes his sleep sweeter. Bob is a pleasant animal, but he doesn’t stay awake long enough to see the world around him.” Turning a mental eye on Bob made her smile with gay humour. “It might comfort you to know, darling, that Bob goes to sleep at the opera. Nora only gave him one chance. It was on their honeymoon, and she picked ‘Martha’ for the sake of his comic ear. But he slept then, quite gently and inoffensively! It would have been all right if he hadn’t waked up when an eminent tenor was singing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ Bob recognised it as a tune that he knew, and began to hum, out loud, like a large contented bumble-bee. Nora said it was quite the worst moment of her life, and in that hour she decided marriage held worse things than adultery. At least adultery was private and could be kept to themselves.”

He smiled as much with relief, as humour.

“Is he well off?” he asked, as if he would like to know the extent of the man’s achievement.

“Quite,” said Sara, “and I think that’s his worst trouble. He’s never had any deprivation, and he did not have to make his own money. Everything was ready for him. That’s bad for a man. No matter how nice, men lack something who live solely on inherited money.”

“Parasites,” he said through his lips. “They ought to be exterminated at birth.”

Here was absoluteness of opinion admitting of no nuances. Sara opened wide delighted eyes.

“That, Murray,” she said ingenuously, “is what I call a nice definite opinion.”

“It’s what I think,” he said in the same concentrated tone. “Every man should work and exercise. My father inherited money and it gave him time for his vices. He used to write to my mother from the Meurice, and say how hard up he was.”

“Hard up, from the Meurice?” questioned Sarah incredulously. “It hardly—”

“Of course not, but he managed to put one over on my mother and she always sent him money, also inherited. It meant that I had to be taken from school and put to work. That’s why I don’t know anything.”

“But, darling,” said Sara in a warm rushing voice. “Now you’ve arrived! You’ve lots of time. The world is wonderful, and you can look around.”

“I want children to spend my money on, and to have as companions.”

His voice was sombre, but absolute in the surety of his needs.

“Nothing is ever quite right, Murray. That’s not a bromide. It’s what we know.”

“What we know, Sara! It’s strange, my dear, that you would encourage a man to work when it would take him away from the things you like. Culture—” He shrugged, and made a slight deprecating motion with one hand. “It’s a dreadful word, but I use it because I can’t think of a better one. A man can’t put every ounce of himself into work, and store up a rich mind—”

“Of course he can’t, Murray! Actually the all round culture you mean is generally found in queer men. Ones that a woman could not possibly love. Darling, I think you and I are adult—”

“You’re often a great child, Sara.”

She smiled, accepting it as a loving compliment from him.

“But we’re adult, darling. We know there’s no perfection, but we can go on longing for it. Most people are nostalgic but I’m not a highfalutin’ woman. Being married to two men is levelling, but may I say in this hour, that never in my whole life have I talked so openly to a man. That’s one of the reasons I love you so much. I can say anything that pops into my head, and you receive it so nicely, even though you tell me not to talk rot. I’d like to show you the things I like, and play you the gorgeous melodies I love, and I’d like to read to you, day after day—then with the feeling between us—”

“There’s another life that claims me.” Instinctively his hand went to his breast-pocket, as if he were touching a talisman. Without glancing down, Sara said with fluid sensitiveness, “Murray, after dinner you must show me the picture of Noel, and tell me all about him. He must be such a nice little boy if he’s your son. Let’s go in to dinner. I’m sure my maid is frantic to get to her sailor. Come—” With a quick turn, she slipped her hand in his arm impelling him up the steps. She was laughing and light, and far away from the things that could shake the foundations of a man’s life.

      *      *      *      

Outside it was night with a half-lighted sky like sooty milk. A sheen of black satin lay on the water, with its depth pierced by spears of light. The laburnums drooped for unheeded beauty, and the lilac breathed on the couple seated on the highest terrace-steps. Transcience seemed dead, due to the profundity of the night. They were part of it, clasped close in perpetuity. Sara was sure that forever and a day she would go on with this man, holding his image in her heart. Wherever she looked she would see him first. At that moment they had no grip in them, but only a sense of rest. They could lie against each other and prolong a kiss until closed eyes made a world of blacker bliss. It was like aftermath and prothalamium together. Perhaps both were a little tired, keyed to their separate ways, and unaware of the strain. Sara wondered if they were asleep in a light coma, refusing to relinquish the happy contact. Inevitably she must sigh, and because her mouth was so fused, breath came wistfully through her nose.

“What is it, my dear?” She slipped away from his lips, and crowded in his arms, putting her hands under his coat. Her sigh had impelled a return to speech.

“What is it? Tell me!” A grip of his arms demanded it.

“Nothing, Murray. I had forgotten all the problems, and believed there was no spot we must reach that would lead in different directions. I had forgotten that you might love my children better than me. I had forgotten that we might fall into the lake—”

“Who, darling? We’re very far away from the lake.”

“Not us, Murray. The baby and me, and you could only save one, and I was worrying all through dinner because I knew you’d save the baby.”

“Foolish child,” he said pressing her head deeper into his chest. “Don’t think.”

“No, perhaps I won’t,” she said with muffled content. Her arm touched a well-filled pocket, and she was more than ever reminded of circumstances.

“Murray, you haven’t showed me your pictures of Noel, and you haven’t told me about your people. Who was your father, who was your mother, and why did he write from the Meurice to say he was hard up? It sounds foolish.”

“I told you, my dear. There’s not much to say. My father ran off with another woman when I was very young. He squandered everything he had, capital and all. He also drank excessively, and in time the other woman returned him to my mother. She said he had a love bigger than any human love, and a drunkard’s purse was in his bottle. She was quite honest and insolent, but my mother took him back, and squandered her money on him, trying to reform him. An utterly useless process. But she was slavishly loyal and never thought of kicking him out. She loved him, as the sot he became, much better than her children.”

“Oh,” said Sara, most significantly. But he went on with a story that she knew was distasteful to him. In the dark she was quite sure he saw blackness that was dirty. Sorry for the introduction of the subject, she had to know. He was terse, even for a terse man, but the condensation appealed to her writing ear.

“My brother and sister cleared out and went to work. When I was twelve I did the same thing. There was no money to keep me at my school. The one thing my mother did was to place me. She had a friend in London, who I think must have loved her when she was young. He was a very plain, raw-boned man, and she was beautiful.”

“You’re like her, darling,” she said in a voice that would be balm to his wounds.

“Perhaps, in a masculine way. He took me in beside him as a personal office-boy. It was a very wealthy firm with wide international interests. For some reason he kept me right at his side, letting me wait on him hand and foot, and being under his feet most of the time. I learned everything there was to learn and when the War came, I had a bigger chance. All the important men cleared out. I went to night-school and took shorthand and typewriting, becoming in time his secretary. The old man lost two sons, and it broke him up. I was seventeen when the War was over, and deeply entrenched. My father was dead—”

“Oh, did he keep on drinking?”

“Day and night,” he said grimly. “And at last he died. My mother died too, and we all met once and cleaned up the mess. Then I began to travel with the old man, and what he knew I knew. I worked night and day, and did nothing else.”

“No fun at all, Murray?”

“Not a bit. When I had leisure I walked, because I couldn’t afford anything else.”

“It’s an education in itself, Murray. Think of knowing all the skyline of London.”

“I know the shape of everything,” he said, and she knew by his voice that he did.

“Then the old man got ill, and I had to be with him round his house. I met his daughter and married her.”

“Oh, why?” she asked quickly.

“Obvious reasons, my dear,” he said, but Sara could think of so many that were not obvious. “I took responsibility more and more, and three years ago I became Managing-Director of the Company. When we married he made a settlement on his daughter. It would save death duties. But beside that I made money myself.”

“Are you very rich, Murray?” she asked.

“Quite rich,” he said honestly, “but I know what it is to tighten the belt. The worst curtailment in life is poverty. It stifles every gracious instinct.”

Sara held him close. His voice told more of his story than his words.

“You must have been such a busy little boy.”

“I was never a little boy. We weren’t allowed to be. There was always my father’s vices and my mother’s tears. We were frightened, and even when we had a little fun it was always washed out when we came home.”

“Murray, that’s why you are as you are, and for that reason you will lean too far the other way. Beside a natural capacity for fatherhood, and the fact that you are a sweet affectionate man when many men are merely passionate—”

“Are they, darling? You’ve only had two husbands. Have you had a lover since either of them died?”

Sara was not disturbed towards any body protest. She rested on, feeling it was a natural question from a man.

“No,” she said honestly. “But I’ve wanted to. I’ve only been a widow for a year and a half, and I’ve been working. Some men would have consoled me. I know, I could see it in their eyes, and Murray darling, it’s quite true that men have a different conduct for widows. No matter how young you are, they know a widow is not a virgin. I was a bare girl when Colin died, and my little hat was becoming. Never, never have I had so much attention, or seen men stoop so often to pick things up for me, or give me the best seats as if I was perpetually tired. As for parcels, they would carry them, if they weighed an ounce. When I was travelling in my little hat, I did not have to think for myself. Attention was almost embarrassing, but if just for a moment I recognised a man as a man, and not as a cavalier for a sorrowful woman, there was something to cope with. It’s that bit of white on the hat. I’ve been a widow twice, and I know.”

“Bounders, darling,” he said in an austere voice, clasping her close for protection.

“No, Murray, just men, and quite nice men. No, I’ve never slept in a bed not blessed by the church.”

“Were you a faithful wife, darling?”

Now she laughed as if he were being really ridiculous.

“Of course I was. You seem to want to make me a— It’s a simple Old Testament word, Murray.”

“Whore, darling?” he suggested helpfully, using the word with Mayfair delicacy.

“Yes,” she said laughing. “Bruce would not let me use simple little words, though he often used them himself when he was goaded. He did not like to think I could spell them. Once I asked him how many men it took to make a woman a whore, and he nearly had a stroke. I was often a great shock to Bruce.”

John Murray Blair was laughing softly, making her ask the same question of him.

“I don’t know, darling,” he said gravely, “but I should say one would be enough, if you loved the woman. I haven’t gone into it.”

“Well, don’t bother,” she said, waving the problem away. “I’m not really worried by the Church. It doesn’t seem to make up its mind what to bless.”

“Ours won’t be blessed by the Church, darling.”

She lay still, scarcely breathing. Her chest seemed shallow, with skipped heart-beats, permitting no words.

“There’ll never be a night like this, Sara. Your maid is out. The woman has gone, and Nora and Bob have gone to town.”

“Perhaps I arranged it,” she said with a questioning voice. She sat up, looking at his profile outlined against the dark. It seemed fine and white like a cut shell.

“We seem very honest, Murray.”

“What’s the point in not being, Sara?”

She dropped her head against him, feeling his quiet breath against her face.

“I love you, Murray.”

His voice was gently incredulous. “My dear, I don’t see why you do. Tell me!”

But Sara was murmuring to herself. “Everything changes! People die—”

“I promise you I won’t die,” he said confidently, like a man with a special body-guard.

“But you’ll leave,” she said fatefully.

“Not for a long time,” he assured her, refusing to separate yesterday, today or tomorrow.

“But there’s no real always in you, Murray. You believe in hanging on to what you’ve got. I believe in going on and on, with life, more life, through other lives, until we glimpse the enigma of living. I don’t want to change you, but I wish, how I wish—”

“Don’t talk about that now, my dear. There’ll never be another evening like this. Kiss me, like you did last night!”

      *      *      *      

Inside it was late night with one muted lamp on the bedside table. Squares of furniture made spindle shadows, as unsubstantial as the lilac spending its last breath through the windows. Now there was no perpetuity to the prothalamium she had felt on the steps. Dimly through the shadows Colin and Bruce peered at her, remindful of separateness subsequent to union. This impending death would leave her the absolute widow. Useless to apologise to them. She had done that already when she had placed them face to face under mica. It had cost her something to fold them up in a double frame, but it had been a problem travelling with husbands enshrined by photographers. One defiant slap bade them get acquainted in her trunk. If Bruce did not like it, he could continue gazing ahead. His custom of being photographed in profile permitted the privilege of looking beyond the things he did not like. Colin would not mind. Above his short neck, his young face was benign, with the tentative eyes of a man trained to see the odd creatures an empire could offer. It was a Service look, assuring tolerance to the widow carrying him around. Would they approve of her now? It was the third time she had lain down in love with a man. It was not the purest monarchy of the heart, but it seemed as if experience was necessary for adult emotion. Many might think it a Hollywood turn-about, but at least her two discards were death-devoted, and not pursuing the same dream with a different face. Colin was probably playing polo on the flowery meadows of Paradise, and keeping his eyes off the angels for fear they might be natives. Bruce would be looking for something to organise. She hoped they had put the book of rules in his satin-lined coffin. Bruce had a poor memory, and was inclined to be irritable when he could not find the right reference books. Try as she could, there was no memory of her husbands producing this deep-toned satisfaction. The man beside her was her mate. St. Augustine had said they were all God’s beasts. After imperfect selection she was ready to be as constant as a wolf. Useless to be a Niobe about it. Wise in sorrow, she knew tears were life’s greatest waste. They were dimming to vision, and the extinguisher of interest. She regretted her tears, and the times she had wept distorted, with a heart in a backward flop. Would it be any better now with eyes full front? She went to the edge of the future and looked over. She was there propelled ahead on the stream of time, and as she advanced the way looked shallow. Nothing she could do would deepen it according to her needs. Work was not enough, neither was an identification with the stream of life, or a recognition of the world’s beauty. Most of its loveliness was too soul-shattering for joy. Some individual splendour was essential, some warm brilliance of the heart. The natural world had it, and after its blackest night the sun returned in a grander manner. Then why should not God’s beasts have it? She was in a mood to demand some fruit from this blossom-time. Neither did she hesitate on the woman’s fear of possession. Husbands chafed under it, how much more would a lover? He held her in his arms as if he were holding eternity, resting for ever in a calm lotus-land. It was the illusion of a man’s arms. When they cared they relaxed like mariners lying beside their nectar. But it must be remembered they could shake themselves into their pin-stripes in the morning, and go out into the world again. She must not be lost to reality. This man’s roots were deeply planted, and though she might shake the tree she could not touch its roots. Noel, his son! It was his obsession, to give him what he had missed himself, and love him to the point of idolatry. She would not disturb it, but in the sight of it she felt frail, and unidentified with life. The fecundity in her was frustrated, and her roots too fibril for growth. She craved something from him to have and to hold, and she knew what she wanted at once. When she spoke her voice was vital, cutting with gemlike hardness through the languors of the flesh.

“Murray!”

“What, darling?” His voice was so full of nectar that it threatened her purpose. Why not ease into the days that were left, rather than risk them at this moment?

“Murray, will you let me talk to you for a while without interruption, no matter what you think?”

“I think that happens quite frequently, Sara.” He spoke humorously, as a terse man accused of oratory.

“Yes, I know, but this will startle you. Will you promise?”

“Yes. What is it? You can tell me when I can answer.”

“Thank you, darling.” They could not be closer together but a movement of her body achieved the impossibility. She placed her cheek on his shoulder, her brow against his chin. It left her lips free to speak to his ears.

“I will begin reasonably, Murray, and not try and get what I want through my body. I think that would be useless as I know you must see with your mind. I am thirty-one, and I have been married twice, I will not marry again—”

A slight quiver in his chin indicated that his lips had opened to protest, but he remembered his compact and remained still.

“I may live a long time. I may not. I have adhesions, and a brick might fall on my head at any moment. Walking with death makes life more exciting, and you get that way when you have looked at a lot of dead faces. You or I tomorrow? It’s the way of life, so there’s nothing to say. If you want to agree with me, darling, you can nod. I find my forehead is very sensitive to your reactions. You’ve wanted to speak twice.”

Like a tuned instrument, her brow recorded an affirmative.

“I’ve proved that work is not sufficient for life, neither is the social round that becomes enervating and exhausting. I want something to make, other than books. You’ve told me very clearly what you want in life. You have very little of that want—”

Now he was answering more expressively than if he had shouted with his lips. Every muscle in his body flexed, like a man preparing to meet an attack that would hit him in his most vulnerable point. Sara ran her hands over his body, and shook her forehead against his chin.

“You’re answering! Don’t be on the defensive, Murray. Please wait. You’re all crunched up, as if I were going to blackmail you. Relax, darling, please.”

She waited, refusing to continue until some of the strain left his body.

“I’m independent, having inherited three times, and my money is managed by a Trust Company. It seems as safe and solid as money can be, and safer than most because they make me take appallingly low percentages. For that reason I can choose my own life, and if I decided to go across the world tomorrow there is nothing to stop me. I have many distant relations, and hosts of friends in odd places, but I haven’t anyone very close. Nora is the closest in the way of women. I love you very much. Why one cannot ask, because it’s young, for so big an emotion. Don’t wriggle, darling! I know that was intended to be a modest wriggle. We don’t know why we love people, do we? We just do. You’ve got to go away in two weeks at the most, and put the ocean between us, and even if I follow you to England I know I can’t see you. The way you have made must be preserved at all costs. What I want, I want for the future. Loving you as I do, it will be impossible not to conceive. I want you to let me have a child.”

“Sara—” His voice was excited, spontaneous, beyond regard for any promise.

“No,” she commanded. “I haven’t finished. You leave me with a child and go away. It’s a woman’s business having a baby. Even if you were with me it couldn’t be any different. When it starts, I alone must go on with the baby. You could be walking into an hotel on the other side of the world, and you would not know I was in labour—”

“I would,” he broke out in sharp protest.

“No, you wouldn’t,” she urged, forgetting to reprove him for his speech. “I would go on and on, with the pains getting worse, until I was nothing but an animal, trying not to scream. I know about it, because I stayed with a woman to the very end. It’s a woman’s business. Our baby might be born while you were in conference, or eating a chop at your club. There’s no place for a man while it’s on—”

“Do you think I don’t know?” he challenged grimly. “I have a son, I didn’t make it that way. How do you think we feel? You’re out of your mind, Sara. It can never be—”

“Oh, yes, yes, Murray—”

“No, no, positively no! I won’t think about it.” He strained away from her, and she let him go. “Do you think I’d let such a thing happen? Imagine how I could feel, knowing you were having a child, and me not there to take care of you, and go with you as far as I could. It’s unthinkable.”

“You don’t have to know, Murray.”

His voice was grim with irony. “Leave you to bear a child that I could not acknowledge? Let a child come into the world without a name? Let Noel have a relative who might—”

“Might nothing,” she said crisply. Then she laughed with real humour, knowing that his life must have made him suspicious of integrity.

“Darling,” she said soothingly, “please don’t have low thoughts about it, and imagine me in the courts with your child in my arms. I promise you, the baby and I won’t blackmail, or appear at your house, and kick down the door. We’ll stay out of England—”

“Impossible,” he snapped like a steel trap. “Where would he go to school?”

Sara caught her breath. “Murray, can I have him?”

In sorrow he came back to her arms, and gave her a deep, rather heart-broken kiss.

“No, my dear, I’m sorry. It’s out of the question, but thank you very much for asking. I shall remember. It’s ironical—my greatest wish—for a moment—”

She bit her lip, defeated by tenderness, velvet-lining irrevocable decision. She spoke once more.

“You’re quite sure, Murray? I won’t ask again if you’re really sure. We’d have a lovely baby—”

“Don’t my dear, don’t!” His voice held pain, and his arms no longer gripped her. Sliding lower, he made mute demand that she should hold him. Sara did, with an ecstasy of tenderness, but her mind went on. She respected decision, and the fact that she had lost in a big gamble. But she could have made the father angle right with the child. Nowadays there were so many places a man could die and leave a posthumous child. And they said men were gamblers! They weren’t! They were too impregnated with caution and suspicion. It took woman to sound the clarion! He accepted the sensual joy, and would not concede a child without a name. And his greatest wish! Was he being utterly selfish for Noel? There was this separateness of men and women. The story of the creation was wrong. Woman was not made from man’s rib. She was dropped haphazard, into the Garden of Eden from some separate planet. That it coincided with the moment of man’s greatest need was incidental. She merely co-operated, and went her secret way. She knew this man was unhappy, seeking reassurance that he was right, making it impossible to withhold comfort, when the kisses on her breast were a sorrow for denial.

“Don’t mind, Murray,” she said lightly. “It was just a thought. Perhaps I remembered that the doctor said it was a nice natural way of breaking down the adhesions—”

“Sara, you must marry again.”

“No, thank you,” she said with equal, irrevocable decision. “With me, it’s your child, and you, it’s a child. I happen to be a woman who loves the man more.”

He took the man’s way of consoling her. Her acceptance, and her complete cessation of sensuous challenge, seemed to impress him a good deal. The ensuing hour gave her unsolicited love, demanding the rush of her flesh towards his. Will made her passive, and it gave her infinite returns, in the special pleading for a return of her lover’s lips and arms. She lay smiling in the shadow, conscious of the criticism of her mind. She was thinking, when thought was wiped from his mind. At that moment she could have cheated. He would hate her! Not honour made her stop, but the dread of his hate. She could not bear it if he hated her, so she was honourable. When she was a child, small in his arms, he gave her an ecstasy of paternal tenderness.

“Murray, I’m awfully hungry. I’ve been thinking of quite gross things. Are you hungry?”

She could feel the silence of his laughter.

“I feel a bit peckish,” he said obligingly. “What can we do about it?”

“We could cook ham and eggs. There’s no maid with a suspicious nose. I’m so glad. I would hate to give her ideas. I must be an example. I had one fallen maid—”

“Tell me,” he said at once. It was really amusing his instantaneous interest in people. She laughed, settling back in his arms.

“I thought she was a very superior girl, but one day Bruce looked at her waistline and would not believe me when I said her loss of lines was due to better food. Bruce had a lower mind, and insisted on my ringing the bell, just as you would for tea, and asking if she was going to have a baby. She denied it at once, so to settle matters I got the doctor and he said it was unmistakable. Bruce was full of I-told-you-so, and more than a suggestion that it was all my fault. If I had—”

“Men are not like that,” he said indulgently.

“No, darling, of course not,” she agreed. “Only husbands!”

“They’re men too. Women are unreasonable. They refuse to face facts—”

“DO they?” she asked, in a swift voice. “Darling, do you want to hear this story?”

“Certainly! Bruce said it was your fault—”

“Yes, but I took no notice, especially after he said such things did not happen in a decent English home. When I drew his attention to the one and only plot of seduction in the Victorian novels, he complained of my reading. He may have been right, darling, but I definitely cannot be sustained on blue-books and white-papers—”

“What did you do about the maid?” he asked presidentially.

“Oh, poor Susie, she cried and cried, and I’m afraid I was very sympathetic. Then after she cried enough she told me such a funny story. It appears she had met an Indian student, and because he was shivering in the English climate, she consented to go to his lodgings in Bloomsbury, and when she got there they did not get on very well conversationally, so they lapsed into an international habit that seems more cementing than a treaty. Poor Susie, she liked it very much, and when I thought she was taking a nice wholesome walk in the Park, she was shut up in Bloomsbury. And though I was convinced she was a girl who would appreciate learning Hindustani, I have to admit it was one of the times when Bruce was right. But he was detestable—”

“Didn’t he give her some money?” he said, as if he was following Susie with a five-pound note.

“No, he did not,” she said definitely. “He wanted me to turn her out and wash my hands of it. But I gave her fifty pounds from Colin’s estate, because he was a Laird in Scotland, and accustomed to an extra baby here and there from the tenants. I kept my eye on Susie and she called the baby after me, but Murray, darling, it’s a very swarthy little girl, and I’m always tempted to buy it beads. She’s married now to a kind forgiving man— Would you like two eggs or three, Murray?”

“Two, darling, I think. I’ve got four miles to walk.”

“You can still get a taxi, Murray.”

“But then the eggs—”

“Would lie heavy? Yes, I expect they would. I must hurry,” she said sitting up and shaking her hair back from her face.

She was up looking down at him with complete unselfconsciousness.

“Get up, Murray. As they say time driveth onward fast!”

“Very well, my dear, but don’t begin to cook until I come. I love breaking eggs, and there’s something about bacon-fat—”

“And the glory that was grease!” she said with a rich chuckle.

Then she was arrested by his expression of delighted appreciation, making her rush back and encircle his neck.

“Fun, fun, oh Murray, we’re such fun. When you go you’ll remember best that we could laugh so much together. Darling, darling, keep this sweet for me, and I’ll remember the truly perfect honeymoon.”

“How could it be any other way, my dear?”

His voice was beautiful and convincing, but had she seen his eyes she would have known he had never coped with quite so much woman in his life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ostrichlike Sara buried her face in his breast, feeling her enemies, time and circumstances, could not see her. Nora said she was like Rosamund. When correcting some fault the child said it did not matter, no one had seen. Very gravely Nora explained there was one who always saw, and instantly Rosamund requested a flour-barrel to put over God’s head. Sara felt a kinship with the child, though the thought of God seemed like personal rays of the sun. There was a zest in her plunge, and an intense quickening of every faculty. Thought was swift, permitting her tongue and pencil to march with it. When she was out, the gay spate of words and lilt in her voice claimed instant attention. It did not matter that she had no continuity! The community was careless, making the art of listening the least of social requirements. Vitality and resource made her an acceptable guest, and she and Nora were in constant demand, with John Murray Blair collected by avid hostesses. By casual but careful arrangement they made four, effecting discretion for censorious tongues. The cottage was the sanctuary, where fed without stint, they learned to be meagre outside. Special conversation could retreat to eyes, and it was indisputable he acclaimed her with those weighted looks a man gives a woman when his flesh is rich with memory. Conscious of the seep from within, other men found her beautiful, but searching for a cause they saw nothing but general diffusion, suggesting that time had really dulled the pain. Ties were pulled, throats cleared, and a belated tenderness extended to a most unsorrowing relict. With a kiss-to-make-it-well manner they mumbled amongst themselves, ‘pretty little thing’—‘damn stunning girl’—‘two of them’—‘hard luck at her age’— Decent male grunts obliterated the rest of their thoughts, and the broad curve of their sympathy. By his face, his manner, and the reassurance of his hired horse, John Murray Blair was accused of nothing more than wearing her riband on his crop, and with the idealism that lies at the base of men’s hearts they sighed for his restraint. Women testified to his high sense of distinctions, and his recognition of the difference between a tablecloth and a sheet. It had been hard on some men since the advent of doilies!

Murray and she compared notes every morning. If he was free and she was not, Annie’s voice commiserated on the telephone for Mrs. Colville’s retirement, due to overwork. In the shape of accommodation-ladders, the British ship had drawn up its gangways, and sailed away to another latitude of arms and lips. Annie’s sailor was enshrined in her voice, producing the perfect note of regret for a headache, and projecting Sara over the wire as a martyr of scholarship. What the maid must have thought when she witnessed a miraculous cure, was a matter of indifference to her mistress. She hoped Annie was high-minded enough to dwell on Lourdes! But Annie did not judge. She was kissing her sailor vicariously, through the lips of homespun Alf.

When Murray was invited to dine with the better-to-eat-you-with man, and Sara was not, there was no thought of a headache. His presence was needed for his contract, so he went, conceding the prospect of being able to drive out to the cottage, should the dinner permit. Sara did not quibble! She had been trained in a sense of duty by an English father, and she accepted without question the Olympian importance of men’s affairs. Had not Colin been frequently snatched from her side to deputise at official funerals, and had she not learned there was no mystical union between them when he marched behind purple and plumes? Her eyes might plead for recognition, and find a zero of personal life. Had she not seen him high up on platforms while she sat below the salt? A woman could not possess a man’s work. Murray was conceded his dinner, and she reason to bless it. It was one of their most ecstatic evenings, utterly unswaddled, and crescendoing to a sensuousness, which in retrospect might make the model Englishman ride himself saddle-sore for fear of capitulating to damn foreign tricks. When he arrived at eleven-thirty, he was in tails, advertising the fact that the wife who didn’t pinch had entertained a few of her own friends as well. There was barely time to form the thought before it slid from her mind. The man who came in was at least ten years younger, gay as a boy and ready to shed responsibility. With eyes like happy pansies Sara accused him of stopping the port more than once! She knew now, he was an abstemious man, drinking nothing unless sociability demanded it. Indulgence was reserved for the shoulder rubs with his fellow-man, and even then he strained towards the maximum of moderation. She further knew he was capable of simulating a one-bottle man should his contract require it, and quite casually he had told her it was easy to dispose of drinks when the other fellow wasn’t looking. The minute he entered a room he identified the fern bowls at once. This time either the centrepieces were arty, or the room had lacked flower pots, for he had lowered the drinks himself. In the finer sense the result was intoxicating, and the fact that he had left his real world to enter one with her made it like water into wine. Neither did she mind that his censor was off duty, and his self-criticism dead. He was a man mindful only of the moment, and unworried over the dire things that could happen to his beloved Noel. In spite of his liberation, modulation did not leave him, and she saw that it was inborn. He had merely a richer mixture of blood for her, and a generous outpouring of sense. He seemed to take charge and sweep her along. Picking up her hands he laid them against his face, kissed them, and clamped them against his breast. Under his black coat she could feel the strong thud of his heart.

“I got here,” he said triumphantly. “It was very successful. Everything is going my way. When the women went— My business is practically finished.”

“Laurels, darling,” she smiled, unable to hear the knell of a completed contract, when the present was whirling ahead. He was so palpably happy, with his heart beating under her hand.

“Murray,” she accused, “you’re out of condition! Your heart is hopping! Is it the contract, the port or me?”

“You,” he said at once, “you’re bad for me, very upsetting and bad.” Then he proceeded to embrace all that was bad, in the way of a man worshipping the lovely light from the candle burning at two ends.

Only Richard, the lion-hearted, saw him go at a time when a good cat deplores the passing of a wide-awake man.

Nora knew it all. At an arranged time Sara would run down the terraces sloping to the lake, and swim towards the meditative face approaching like peace on the water. Nora swam so unhurriedly that she did not disturb it, and it was always a shock to see her emergence. She should have slipped out as smoothly as syrup, instead of which she knocked the water with knees and elbows. Sara would barely begin to swim, when she would float, as if the surface of the lake was resilient with springs. Then she must relax on the flower-starred grass, and let the sun saturate her flesh. She could not be extinguished, and Nora was human enough to experience a vicarious thrill from another woman’s daring. After Murray had loved her with wine in his veins, Sara lost the last reticence of her tongue.

“I’m alive, Nora! We talk of people, the things men and women do, and we often wrangle about the immortality of the soul. I must plunge up to the neck, and if necessary let the water go over my head. I know all about loss, but I’ll never know enough about love, or the thirst for genuine union. So few men give a woman a feeling of self-fulfillment. There’s always something fresh to say and something else to laugh at, and as long as he leaves me with a blessing I shall be happy. But I promise you when he goes, I won’t make a Rosary of yew-berries, or let the beetle—”

“Ode to melancholy?” inquired Nora serenely.

“Yes, of course,” smiled Sara, “though Murray wouldn’t know the difference between Keats and me. When I talk like that, he can’t see, poor lamb, that I just lap up the things I like.”

Nora’s voice was meditative.

“Keats loved a slut, and thought he’d found an ideal. Sublimation, transcendence—”

“Thanks for the nuts,” smiled Sara. “Now you’ve added acid to yesterday’s lemon! I know, darling, you must! You should hear me with Annie. I disillusion her as if I existed on stodge. It’s the wisdom we give to other people’s affairs. It’s useless. We have your week-end, and tomorrow he’s taking the day off—”

“Day off?” questioned Nora with real surprise. “What else has he been doing?”

Sara gave her a woman’s smile.

“I nearly asked myself, Nora, but golf games with clients, and a spot here and there with the president of this and that, appear to be in the nature of toil. For the last month he’s been travelling on the best liners, the best trains, and suspending work at four-thirty, but—he hasn’t had a day off for months! I didn’t argue or reason why. I agreed that a day off would do him good.”

“Of course,” said Nora dryly. “I do hope he’ll be more rested when he comes home. What are you going to do?”

“He’s hiring a car, and we’re going to meander in the meadows.”

“If he’s so run-down with work, I’d better put him on your side of the cottage in case the children keep him awake.”

“It’s a nice thought,” said Sara, smiling at the lilac that had a gap. “I hope the children won’t be too angelic. They’re definite rivals.”

Nora sat up, plucking grass, with her mind obviously far away from the process.

“Sara, did John tell you his wife had cabled to say Noel had a cold?”

“No,” said Sara sitting up at once. “He didn’t mention it last night. When did he tell you?”

“Yesterday, when we met on the course. It was at number eight. I sliced my ball—”

“Yes,” said Sara brushing such details aside, “but why didn’t he tell me? Even when he telephoned this morning he didn’t mention it.” Her eyes demanded an explanation from Nora.

“I don’t know, I couldn’t say. I thought he was worried.”

“He was anything but worried last night.” In spite of the memory, she plucked grass herself with a nervous hand. “We don’t talk much of Noel now,” she murmured, “it isn’t that we can’t, but we rather avoid it. I saw all his pictures, big and little, and I was surprised to find him with hair as black as ink, when I expected him to be Saxon-fair, like—”

“He has a mother,” Nora reminded her.

“I saw her too,” said Sara tensely. “She’s quite dark, rather large, with a nice face, much too nice, but she’s quiet! I asked him. They must spend hours saying nothing. Murray has to be carried along, and then he’s like blotting-paper, unless—” Sara stopped, seeing some of his blind-alleys. Her voice grew vague. “If he’s not carried along—”

“He might be dull,” suggested Nora, smiling when Sara’s eyes kindled with bright flames.

“He might not, Nora. That’s the last thing you could call him. I wish Noel didn’t have a cold. A cold! What’s a cold?” Imperiously her face questioned the overt anxiety of parents. “Did the cable say how many times he had sneezed?” she asked ironically.

“Ask him yourself,” suggested Nora.

“It’s a lot of distance to cable about a cold!”

“You don’t sound very womanly,” accused Nora.

“As tender as a tigress,” said Sara wrinkling her nose, adding with supreme honesty, “it’s because I don’t want to be interrupted, and this is like a reminder—”

“Of hands across the sea?”

Sara was sitting up, with her legs curled under her. Her head was flung back with the defiant look the outward body takes when the mind is in protest. Light touched her, showing the contrast of hair and eyes. There was youth in her figure, vitality in her eyes, but she looked tense, as if her clutch at the present was sapping her strength. It was the first sign of extinguishment. Nora started to look sympathetic, then squared her shoulders. In her hand was a bunch of grass with a few daisies. Flattening her palm she touched the flowers with her finger, counting and recounting them without explanation of her action. Sara stared suspiciously, sensing significance in the action.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a Rosary of yew-berries,” answered Nora, like a person picking up a cue.

“M’mmm,” said Sara rather grimly. “Thanks for the reminder. There was a chill and I shivered. I’ll be good, Nor,” she said, returning to the brief little name of schooldays. “I promise I won’t make moan. We’ll go places and do things, then I’ll pull up and write another book. It’s difficult to be broken-hearted when you stick to work. There’s not enough left over.”

“Yes, there’s lots to do here,” agreed Nora, but there was no confirmation of remedy in her voice. There was doubt of Sara’s capacity to prolong such an heroic programme. She was in love with an adult appetite, and strung in every fibre to an exaltation of living. It hurt more to drop from a hill than a hillock.

      *      *      *      

There was rich choice in the ways of spending a day. The hinterland offered sun, dappled woods with drifts of blossom, and lakes like wide-open eyes. There was a coast-road with sandy beaches sucked by the sea. Sara chose one, with rounded hills rising behind, and in the distance a farmhouse and stables waiting to welcome the men and beasts nosing at the land. There was nothing in sight on the sea. Not a keel cut the water, neither was there a smell of engine or any sound of phut-phut. It stretched in smiling mystery, sun-bathed towards infinity. It was an expansive day, warm, benign, bidding no scrutiny of tomorrow’s rains, or yesterday’s snows. Sara walked in its drapery, choosing to sit by the sea because it was as various as the heart of man. Not for her to picnic by a quiet lake. It was too small, cramped by a watching world.

At noon the car was parked on the side of the road, and they had descended through slippery grass. Hamper at their feet, they sat in muted energy, gazing out with sun-dazzled eyes. Beneficently, a pair of rocks offered support for lazy backs. There were other rocks, but these two cuddled together with a look of fellowship. Her extended legs were bare with ankle socks under competent white shoes. Her dress was yellow, and her hair abandoned to the caprice of the wind. He was stripped to a white shirt and grey flannel trousers and she teased him because he wore an American belt. As always, the sun made love to his hair, and discovered some down on the top of his cheeks. Now his eyes were almost blue, but they never quite got there, being too influenced by the grey-green tones of the sea. His chin was up, meaning he was not quite relaxed. The light was a torment to vision and like a man prepared for everything he reached for his coat and produced two pairs of sun-glasses.

“Wear these,” he commanded, “you’re protected from the ultra-violet then.”

“Oh,” she said gratefully, but when she had them on, she challenged him, holding the tortoise-shell rims, “now we’re not even blinded. Things look more lovely than ever.”

“We couldn’t enjoy it if we had to blink. It’s much better.” He relaxed completely, lying against the rock. “I feel very lazy.”

“Good for you,” she said drowsily, “I intended to swim at once, but the sea must wait. I have a divided heart with the grains of sand. Could I swim in my skin when I do?”

He looked round, raising his head for a complete scrutiny.

“No, you can’t, my dear. There’s a couple of cows—”

“And a man with a hoe! I think he counts most. The cows have their eyes on the ground.”

“So has the man.”

“Men raise their heads when they see—”

“Things like you! You can’t hold that against them, my dear. He won’t stay all day. He’s bound to get hot doing that.”

“Hot, Murray! Farmers expect to get hot! They’re patient men, martyrs to their pores. Imagine weeding a weed that you know will be back in a week. I like to garden, because I love the smell of earth, but it’s too much stooping for me. I hope he won’t chaperone us all day, darling.”

“I hope not,” he said, in a dismissing voice. “He’ll dodge off somewhere by and by. Isn’t there always a five-acre field behind the house with more weeds—”

“That’s where they keep the bull, Murray.”

“Oh no, darling, that’s too much room for the bull. As a landowner—”

“You ought to know,” she said sweetly, conceding him knowledge of bulls. “I stayed on a farm once. I liked it! It was full of smells, good and bad. There was chicken cooked in cream, cider, and oak-beams older than God. There were moors and tors, and days without beginning or end.”

“When was that, darling? You seem to know a lot about England.”

“It was when I was at school, and Daddy wanted me to have a good wholesome summer. I loved the farmer’s wife. The farmer hardly ever spoke to her, but one day he did, and she cried because he said he was going to kill her largest turkey. It was an enormous bird, and she said it weighed thirty pounds on the hoof.”

Under the glasses his lips were curved and smiling as they frequently did when she chattered. The happiest thing he did was to listen. Now he said very wisely, “farmers don’t kill turkeys in the middle of summer, my dear.”

“This one did,” she insisted. “Perhaps it was because his wife cried. I gathered from the talk that it was a very useful turkey, but he said he would get her another to do the same work without the same weight.”

He chuckled in the same light way, as on the night when he had stopped the port.

“I think it was a Devonshire turkey, my dear.”

“It was, quite near Totnes. Before I went back to school an aunt picked me up and drove me all over South Devon. I loved it. English country is soothing.”

“You love England, Sara?”

“Of course, and London is my love, in spite of Paris and Vienna. There’s a row of Forsythia in Hyde Park that knows me well. It’s that strip by Bayswater.”

“I know it myself. Very yellow!”

“When you walk by, will you always send me your love?”

“Always! Even when it’s not in bloom.”

“Thank you, darling.”

Now his voice held a shade of anxiety.

“Will you be in England this autumn?”

“If I am, could we just have lunch?”

“Could we just have lunch, my dear?”

“No!”

“Then—”

“Then I won’t be in England.”

His mouth had lost its curved lines, telling her they were travelling away from the present.

“What’s for lunch?” she asked quickly. “The hamper looks big.”

“Oh, the hamper,” he said coming back. “There’s something in aspic, cold chicken, salad, and ice-cream in a thermos arrangement—”

“Delicious,” she said greedily. “I’ll begin on the ice-cream.”

“You will not! I won’t allow you to eat backwards. It’s bad for your adhesions.”

“Thank you, darling,” she said with sweet gratitude, tinged with mockery, “but I wish you’d keep them from eating ham and eggs. They don’t like them at all.”

“I’m sorry, my dear. Did they upset you?”

“They were uppermost, Murray, when I should have been languorous with love. It’s dreadful to love you so much, and then have to take a pinch of soda.”

“It won’t happen again,” he promised her. “You’ll have Ovaltine. I haven’t brought anything to drink, my dear. Just a quart of lemonade in another thermos.”

“Nice,” she said happily. “It’s unique to picnic with a man who can drink lemonade. I’ve had a lot to do with yardarms, and sun-downers and snifters, because it’s before and after, and just another spot to endure the insupportable strain of being with me. I never need a stimulant, least of all with you, Murray.”

“No,” he admitted, with candour that had flattering intent. “Men would not be as they are, Sara, if wives were as loving as you.”

“And,” she said in swift defence of all women, “wives would be more loving if husbands tried to be lovers. It’s responsible for a lot of maladjustment.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but it takes two.”

“M’mm,” agreed Sara, “and we’re it.”

They had reached a point where the sun had a slant. Everything had been done in a leisurely way. The lunch had been eaten, and flies had appeared to sit on the crumbs. Bathing-suits had dried on their bodies before they remembered to dress. The man with the hoe had kindly disappeared to a possible five-acre field, leaving the cows to see what they did. Grazing went on, undisturbed by a view of God’s beasts. It was five o’clock and time for tea, but neither of them noticed. They rested against the rocks in the light affectionate clasp that was the residue of passion. She should have been content to call it a day, but with him, speech was on her tongue before the thought was complete in her mind.

“Murray,” she said so suddenly, that some of the flies fell off the crumbs, “Nora said you had a cable about Noel. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” he said in the sombre voice she knew so well. Already there was distance between them, but Sara pressed on.

“Are you worried about him?”

“Yes.” It seemed incredible that so much should go into one syllable. Distance grew wider and wider, even though neither of them had moved more than a muscle.

“Why are you, darling?” she said, pleading for his return. “It’s only a cold.”

“Colds begin many things. I cabled at once.”

“Have you heard since?”

“Yes, this morning. He still has a cold.”

She was completely to blame for his sudden sitting position and farsighted gaze over the water. Beyond the horizon lay London with Noel sneezing through a late June day. She sat away from her rock, turning sideways towards him.

“But it’s only a cold,” she persisted rather helplessly.

“Oh yes, he’ll be all right,” he said in the voice weighted with the worry of things that rarely came to pass, but it was hard for Sara to progress from the common cold, towards plague and pestilence.

“Why do you worry about him like you do, Murray? It’s not consistent with the rest of you.”

He gave a short humourless laugh.

“Because he’s all I have, and the best of what I’ve made.” He paused, before giving utterance to a bit of his inner self. In that he showed the Sara-effect. “My immortality is in Noel,” he said quietly, and the name of his son came through his lips as a mystic might speak of Holy Bread.

Sara winced, but said nothing to contradict him. Contemplation of the boy widened distance, until oceans lay between them. Her dead silence brought him back to say with a half-challenge, “the survival you’re so keen on, my dear! Mine is in Noel! When he’s ill, I feel it threatened, for myself as well as for him. It’s all I believe in.”

Sara was staunch, and rushed in where his own particular angel might fear to tread.

“Partial survival, Murray, insomuch as parents give their children bodies. But Noel is another individual, just a son who must leave you some day. You can only do your best for children, and let them go to life.”

“My life,” he said sternly. “Don’t talk rot, Sara. He’ll carry on where I leave off, do what I did—”

“He won’t,” she contradicted flatly, and he almost glared at her. His temper was slow, but indisputably there. It made no difference. Sara was launched, with sails and oars speeding her boat. “It’s impossible for Noel to be in the least like you, Murray.”

Again the short humorless laugh.

“A great deal better, I hope.”

“That too is impossible, but you’ve no sense of proportion about Noel.”

“Then we won’t talk about it, my dear,” he said in a gentle dismissing voice. Most women would have quailed, and followed the austere change.

“We will talk about it, Murray,” she said with absolute decision. “Noel won’t be different just because you insist he will be different. Will he? Answer me, Murray. Weren’t all your values learned from deprivation, and knowing you dare not slack, for fear some one else would tread you down?”

“Yes,” he said probing her with startled eyes. They told their own egocentric story. No one, least of all a woman, had dared take him apart before in his own hearing. They further said that she was thought-provoking, even while he bade her let his son alone. Sara’s voice went soft as if forcing him under the kindest light.

“You’re gentle and hard by turns, Murray, like a knight with a sword in one hand, and courtesy in the other. Everything you have, you won yourself, and you hold it almost in a death-grip. Noel will have none of that attitude.”

“Why not?” he challenged. “He will have every advantage—”

“Exactly,” she said smoothly, “he will be a rich man’s son. You’ve returned him to the privileged classes, which you yourself called parasites—”

“No,” he interrupted, “it’s just economic security, giving him everything I should have had when I was a boy.”

“Murray,” said Sara with her chin up, and her eyes bound to risk. “In your idolatry of Noel, you know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

His eyes looked unhappy, bidding her say it if she must. Sara examined her long hands and then met his eyes like a valiant boy.

“You’re going to give Noel time for his vices.”

He looked as if she had hit him, going grey from suddenly chilled blood. His eyes accused her as if she was just as impossible as when she had asked him to choose between his wife and his child. Sara smiled back with soft lips but did not plead with her touch.

“Please, Murray, don’t look like that. It’s just that I believe in individualism, and you’re sinking too much in Noel. You might have many more children—”

“My wife can’t have any more children.”

“Oh,” she said sorrowfully. It explained so much. Now she had invaded his greatest frustration, and the unhappiness of his eyes troubled her, as he sat staring at the horizon contemplating the picture of his son that she had suggested. He looked like a Crusader suddenly unsure of his war. Having neither physical nor mental fear of him she knelt in the sand, putting her arms around him. Thankfully she felt the return of his flesh, and the drop of his forehead against her face.

“Darling,” she said, in the voice as soft as the upper air, “you’re not very happy, are you?”

“Not very,” he agreed, and she felt the admission was the peak of their intimacy, and because she loved him with such a generous heart, she stared resentfully at the sky, as if it must open and give him the things he wanted. Some reaction made him begin to kiss her from her ear to the edge of her dress, until the strength of his lips made her bend over.

“Murray, I love you,” she said like an accompaniment to the kisses, “it kills me to think of your one-minded way, and your single source of happiness. There’s your own entity and what you’ve made of yourself. You of all people would despise a purposeless life, and all around us is evidence of plan and purpose, letting quite ordinary people get a glimpse of something infinite. There is survival! We’ve found something in each other and strain towards it, and we can strain past it to more absolute beauty. These things can’t be without mind and spirit—”

“A sense of direction, my dear, ordinary decent conduct.”

“Not that alone,” she insisted. “We’ve had a glimpse of unity, seen a place where desire can be attained, where we can grow because of each other—call it transcendence, sublimation—what you like. Labels mean nothing, but great large feelings do. Can’t you be sustained by some trust—”

“No,” he said inexorably, “I feel conclusively, there’s nothing beyond the grave.”

“But, Murray,” she said giving him an exasperated shake, “you won’t argue, you won’t say why, and you know you’re not that way through scholarly conviction. When I pressed you the last time, you said Christianity was a drug, and I was as horrified as when you said, no Father would give his Son to save miserable sinners. I feel it’s all deeply mixed up from your own father, and the remembrance of a life you would not wish to continue—”

“Absolute nonsense,” he said raising his head, as if he had been blind while she guided him towards neurotic paths. His nostrils moved, and his eyes ordered her to stop, snubbing her for conversation beyond a lover’s tolerance.

“We must go,” he said coldly, “it’s getting late.” His arms left her, and he reached for his coat, while Sara sat back, feeling the wind from the north.

“It’s very cold now,” she said with a real physical shiver. In a second he had turned back, examining a face that held extinguished eyes, and lips that looked pinched. It had the effect of making him take her hands, and be startled by their chill.

“Cold, my dear?” he asked in another voice.

“Yes,” she said, almost with chattering teeth. “The sun is going down.”

Meanly she let him hold her hands, and cuddle her in a warm grip with her head in profile against his breast. The spilled hair hid her eyes, fainting with relief at the paternal care of his arms. It was not exactly walking equal, like Sheba at the court of King Solomon, but at that moment she did not feel particularly honourable about equality. The brave things men and women can say to each other, had sometimes to be effaced by the physical touch. Under his chin, the dawn of a smile ousted the chill of her lips. Did his wife know that the way through his anger lay in a childlike appeal to protection? Had she, herself, got to the point where she had to manage him a little? At that moment it would be very wise to stay cold until he had forgotten the assault of her words. Sara wrinkled her nose, even while she slid her arms under his coat, and clung to the lightly fleshed warmth of his body.

“Warmer now?” he said, in such a considerate voice that she should have felt shamed.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, sliding down, and looking out to sea, while his hand caressed the back of her neck.

“We mustn’t stay when the sun gets cool, my dear.”

“No,” she agreed, in a voice of rising gaiety, “but they do say it will last for a million-million years. I wonder where we’ll be then?”

Persistence in the face of such risk? But now her voice was as light as a snowflake, falling inconsequentially on a rock of mystery. She wrapped her arms round his legs, and let the warmth of her cheek penetrate grey flannel. “You mustn’t tell me not to talk rot, Murray. I’m like a cat, looking forward to my nine lives. I haven’t wasted my time, and you know I’ve lapped up a lot of life, but the saucer is so big, like a feast we must die to before we get to the soup. I’m like Bernard Shaw, I want to be better than Shakespeare! Then I must be one with Beethoven, and I must have a life to be the ice-skating champion of the world. I’ve put in the spade-work already—”

“Can you skate, darling?” he asked with the prompt interest he gave to all body activity.

“Very well,” she said serenely. “I’ve skated in Switzerland and Canada. Swimming and skating are my special loves. You can have the rest. Golf is flatfooted and tennis is hot. You must want to be something yourself, Murray? Perhaps a Rothschild, or maybe a famous jockey coming in on his horse?”

“No,” he smiled, “much too conspicuous.”

“Stodgy Tom Bull,” she said, rubbing her face against his leg.

“John Bull, darling.”

“Well, Tom, Dick or Harry Bull! It’s all the same thing.”

With a strong hand he turned her, so that he could examine her face, naked from the backward fall of hair, lighter and brighter than the sand. Her eyes were smiling, mysterious with the enigma of woman gazing up at the well-loved man. A probe of eyes told him nothing, even when he looked imperious, ordering her to say whether she was grave or gay, inconsequential or intense with many problems. Her response lay solely in the unreadable smile on her face.

“Sara, you baffle me,” he said gravely.

“But I love you, Murray,” she said, throwing mystery away.

“You can’t, darling,” he said, unconvinced, “it’s a leg-pull.”

Sara’s eyes widened in shock, and then her lips opened to speak, but she changed her mind, turning inward towards him, and laughing so silently that he lifted her with a slight show of temper.

“What are you laughing at, Sara?”

“You darling, darling,” she said, with sweet candour. “We click, and it’s a leg-pull that I love you! Can you wonder that I laugh? Don’t look so murderous, Murray, let’s pack the hamper.”

A lithe movement brought her upright in the sand, while she reached for their possessions with a businesslike air. Even as he regarded her with a troubled face she changed her mood.

“Flies,” she grimaced, with a wave of both arms, making him contribute a flap with his handkerchief.

“They’re very persevering,” he said, as they pitched greedily back on the crumbs. “Shall we consider them, darling, as we did the ant and the bee? No, perhaps not, they’re, ah, playing leap-frog—”

“Leap-frog, Murray,” she questioned, bending towards him. “What utter nonsense! ‘The gilded fly doth lecher in my sight!’ Don’t be shocked, Murray. It’s Shakespeare, and he mentioned it when he said, ‘let copulation thrive’—”

“Miss Know-all,” he said with a glad return to foolish chatter. “Are you glad we came, darling?”

“Glad, Murray, very glad! Pass me that plate before the flies carry it off.”

He was an exasperating man. She might have admitted bafflement, could a woman find anything in a man that she did not understand. With a cast-iron mind behind an idealistic face, and an inexorable voice through gentle lips, he would not attempt to analyse man, in his relation to the riddle of the universe. Because he was her lover, and he found her very lovesome, he conceded tolerance to all her chatter. When he slaughtered her spiritually, it was not through any need to conciliate his intellect. There was an element of “that’s that, darling,” without dogmatism. If she differed, he was willing to drop it at once, while pursuing his own thoughts. In many ways he was as flexible as flint, and she was as fluid as syrup. Sprinkle any seed on her mind and it would grow. But she called him the friend nearest her own identity, and that was that!

They were in sight of the town with its illumined streets, intertwining like lines of interference, when they stopped on the top of a hill. The sun-roof of the car had become a star-roof, and Sara was gazing at a sky that truly resembled the infinite meadows. There did not seem to be enough room for the stars, inclining many to jostle their neighbours, and wink the better to see. It was a night of unity with no veil between Heaven and earth. Sara was in danger of a crick in her neck, and a glance from a road he did not know, made him see her white profile, and wide bewitched eyes. She looked as aloof and far away as the sky.

“We must look at the stars,” he said, as if he had to join her. When she conceded an earth-bound glance, they had left the road for a grassy patch, surrounded by tall young trees.

“There,” he said, in his organizing voice, “I want to look too.”

His head lay beside hers, but she did not stir.

“You’ve been very quiet, my dear.”

“I was thinking of the story of the old woman who dropped dead trying to count the stars, and I was picking one, where I could be an exalted native of a better star.”

“Which one did you pick, my dear? There seems to be a lot of choice.”

“M’mm, that’s what I was thinking myself.”

“They’re very wonderful tonight, but they’re not as wonderful as we are.”

“What?” she said, abandoning the Heavens at once. “Say that again, Murray.”

Quite calmly he repeated himself.

“They’re not as wonderful as we are. They represent power, organization, but man has a mind of his own. He’s much more wonderful.”

“Well,” breathed Sara, rather speechlessly. “What’s the answer?”

“No answer at all! Just the way things are!”

His voice suggested that she be done with dispute. She obeyed, leaning against his shoulder, but her dreaming voice and subsequent theme might have been a design for punishment.

“Strange how things remind you of other things, like smells that bring back another world. Just then I was in South Carolina! Mama and I were coming up from Trinidad, and we stopped to visit her sister. Because the servants were black, I was given a real coloured mammy to put me to bed. She took me out into the garden to look at the sky. It was an unbelievable garden, with camellia, azalea, and purple drips of wistaria like a picture-book, but the sky was just like this, and I asked her why it was light some nights, and black other nights. She was a mammy with a voice like black comfort, and she said, ‘honey chile, the stars is sky-holes so that the chillen can see, who ain’t done seeing on earth! This night the white chillen is looking, and where the stars is blinking, is where they is running to another sky-hole. When the sky is black, the black chillen is looking down.’ I can see now, Murray, that she couldn’t conceive of a Heaven where the children could look down together.”

He was silent, under the influence of a voice that had been the voice of the nigger-mammy.

“The stars are very clean tonight, Murray. Every white child’s face must have been washed to look down. If you lost your child—”

“Stop,” he said, like the crack of a whip. “I know what you’re trying to do, Sara.”

“Yes,” she said, unrepentant, “I didn’t expect you to be stupid.”

“Must you, my dear?”

“No,” she said at once. “I mustn’t! Women are devils, Murray. In a thousand ways they keep on, like filing one finger nail all day. But do remember, darling, that if I flick you a little, you flick me too. Will you forgive me?”

His forgiveness was deeply but silently spoken. Whatever she said to disturb him, he had no body protest of any kind. He sighed a little as if she was too generous.

“My dear, this is good-night. I shall drop you, and go right back to the hotel. I’m rather tired.”

“So am I,” she agreed at once. “I don’t know which is the most depleting, work or pleasure.”

“Pleasure sometimes! Mostly I’m exhilarated with you, but today was exhausting. I can’t help thinking, Sara, that I get back more than I give.”

“There’s an element of gratitude in love, Murray.”

“Yes, a great element. I’m very grateful.”

“It’s the first time I’ve really wanted to give pleasure, darling. I must love you a great deal.”

He rested his brow in the silent way when he could not answer, while she skimmed his face with small delicate kisses.

“I’m sorry you’re tired, Murray, but when you think about it, you’ll know I tried to make you face some things. Sometimes I hope my love will walk with you like a presence, making you see and hear more acutely, and I’m sure when you pass the Forsythia you’ll really see my ghost.”

“In yellow, like the bit in the park. Yellow suits you! I must ride in the morning—”

“Speaking of the Park!” she mocked him lightly. “ ‘Oh, lucky horse that bears the weight of Antony’!”

He laughed, clasping her with vital arms and fatigue was effaced as they said good-night.

CHAPTER SIX

“Good-morning, Madam.”

“Good-morning, Annie,” said Sara, receiving her cold water.

“It’s a lovely day, Madam. Pity the lilac is over. We won’t have—”

“What!” said Sara, as if it was outrageous of the lilac to submit to its natural span.

“Yes, Madam, the blossom is getting brown.”

“And the laburnums?” questioned Sara fatefully. “I’ve forgotten to look of late.”

Annie stared out with intent eyes above smooth tight cheeks.

“The terraces are dirty, Madam. The flowers are going to seed.”

“I wish they were,” said Sara so fervently that Annie stared at her gravely. Eyes of mistress and maid met with some comprehension. The toss of Annie’s head was muted, and her voice held a subdued note.

“You said, Madam—”

“I said, Annie,” answered Sara cryptically, “that I wasn’t born in a wood to be scared of an owl, but it’s only one of those proverbs, so take no notice.”

Annie stared to goggling point. But she was astute. As a mistress Sara was an education, and Mrs. MacCurdle was inclined to be epigrammatical.

“You mean, Madam,” she said tentatively, “that you were down-hearted twice—”

“Many times,” agreed Sara, with no snub in her voice. “I’m sorry about the laburnum, that’s all. Don’t you feel sorry when blossom goes?”

“Only since the ship went out, Madam, and I don’t sleep.”

“Oh, haven’t you been sleeping?” inquired Sara sympathetically.

“Not very well, Madam, I seem restless at night.”

“What do you think about when you lie awake, Annie?”

Annie was ready to speak the truth. There was a liberation in honesty, and after a talk with Sara, she would work lighter of foot.

“I follow the ship, Madam, and wonder if he’s in port with other girls, or on the ship, only he said I should say, in the ship. I wonder what he’s doing and if he’s—”

“ ‘Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard’?” suggested Sara helpfully.

“Yes, Madam, you put it so clear,” said Annie, as if generations of seafaring men lay behind her. “I’ve thought, since he left, that I was foolish to put so much into it.”

“M’mm,” said Sara. “Put it down to experience, Annie, and take the bitter with the sweet.”

“Oh yes, Madam,” said Annie heroically. “At the pictures last night, it said it took a lot of heart-break to make an actress.”

“Actress, Annie? Are you going to Hollywood because he kissed you and sailed away?”

“No, Madam, of course not. I’m going to marry Alf as soon as the roads are bad enough for him to get off.”

“Couldn’t he spare a few days from the good roads?”

“Oh no, Madam,” said Annie acceptingly. “His taxi comes first.”

“Dogs, horses, taxis! Official dinners and the Civil Service! So many things can come between a woman and a man, Annie. You must have a life of your own. However, I’ll give you three of everything to start off with. Three knicks, three slips and three nighties. In case I forget, I’ll put them out today.”

“Oh,” said Annie, flushing in spontaneous young gratitude. “It’s—”

“Don’t say anything, Annie, but bring my breakfast.”

“Very good, Madam, thank you very much.”

With breakfast came the shattering sound of an engine. It died, was born again, became staccato, until it settled into a rhythmical phut-phut.

“Who’s on the lake?” asked Sara idly.

It appeared Annie did not need to look.

“Mr. Hervey is taking the children out in the Sea-Gull, Madam. Mr. Blair has been riding. A groom arrived with a horse at seven-thirty. He is now having his breakfast, and then he is going to play golf with Mr. Hervey.”

“Indeed,” said Sara with smooth acid in her voice. “And what is Mrs. Hervey having for lunch, Annie?”

“It’s dinner today, Madam, at one-thirty. She’s having melon, cream soup—” The expression in Sara’s eyes brought her to an abrupt close.

“You can have the day off, Annie, when I’m ready myself,” said Sara dismissingly.

“Very good, Madam.”

Annie turned with a snubbed back, making Sara ask lightly, “do you like white, pink, or blue, Annie?”

“Oh pink, Madam,” said Annie in vast relief. Watching the change in her back, Sara marvelled at the way the human body reflected the mind. She was as good as her word, and the maid was not to know that her generous gift was an offering to joy. She did not give reach-me-downs or garments with washed out tones, but those in which she would face love herself. She knew what inspired confidence, and made a woman sure of her flesh. If Alf was a lout, Annie was a woman.

Saturday evening had been spent across the path, with Murray making a contented fourth. They had dined and played Bridge, and no one was grim. Bob and Nora could partner each other and forget they were husband and wife. Card-sense can be found in unexpected vessels. Bob Hervey who couldn’t have earned a penny with his brains, played better Bridge than John Murray Blair, who was a wizard at finance and drove the hardest of velvet-lined bargains. Nora was steadfast, standing pat in the sanctuary of a game. Sara soared to slams, and continually went down one. It was an evening when they saw themselves in ordinary roles, with feet placed happily on the earth. The jog-trot could be accepted in view of the exaltation they could always attain. There was no protest in her, when Bob obtusely walked her across the path, leaving Murray to smile at her, as if she was the most transient of attractive women. When she was ready for bed, she put out her light and looked out. Growing accustomed to the dark she saw him as a blur in his window. It was so easy! But he did no more than wave a silent greeting. Sara went to bed with smiling lips. It would be a violation of hospitality to leave the roof provided by his host. Tomorrow was another day! She could picture him serenely asleep, relaxed in high-minded discipline. But a man did not propitiate his Gods twice during the same week-end!

At one o’clock she entered the green and yellow room and found him staring out of the window. His back was grey flannel perfection, and for a second she felt as foolish as a girl, satisfied with the pale compensations of love. The back of his head and the good lines of his legs! The open door had permitted a quiet entrance, and she was behind him before he knew she was there.

“Good-morning, John Gilpin. I hope the horse didn’t wonder what he had on his back?”

“My dear,” he said, with an ever-ready arm that took her in. “Of course not. He didn’t know I was there. I’ve been sent to fetch you. Isn’t it a long time since I’ve kissed you?”

“Much too long, but I feel it’s my duty to tell you the lipstick is fresh.”

“Well you can put it back, while I wash my face in the green and yellow bathroom.”

It was a small routine to perform for the ecstatic minute. Annie was out, so she could call to him from the bedroom.

“Did you sleep well, Murray?”

“Very well! It was a nice evening. You play Bridge much too well. How did you sleep?”

“Very virtuously.”

“I should hope so indeed.” There was silence and the splashing of water. “Sara!”

There was something portentous in his voice, making her turn with her hand in mid-air.

“Yes, Murray?”

“My business is finished, signed on the dotted line. I’m sailing this coming week.”

“Oh!” It was a long, drawn out word, like a rounded wail. Then she rallied, and swung back to the mirror, answering through lips flattened for the lipstick.

“I won’t think of it today. How is Noel?”

The flow of water seemed snapped off.

“I telephoned the hotel this morning, and there was nothing. I expect a long week-end message tomorrow morning.”

“Murray, the English boat sails on Wednesday morning. I know, because I’m sending the book.”

“Good girl,” he said approvingly. “I’m very pleased with you. You haven’t slacked. I admire you very much.” The words fell in her ears like sweet oil.

“Thank you, Murray. Must you go on the very earliest boat?”

“I must, my dear. I’ve been away too long as it is.” Now there was more silence, and she knew he was wiping his hands. Moreover she knew he would fold the towel, and match the edges like two parallel lines.

She called very softly. “Is this the last day?”

“There’s that dinner-dance tomorrow evening. Tuesday is washed out. I shall be busy tidying up—perhaps in the evening—”

Sara touched objects on her dressing-table, familiar things that would be in front of her when he was far away. How clearly would she see him when he was gone? She closed her eyes, pressing the lashes together. Against the sightless dark she could see him like a living cameo. There was no doubt about it, he was photographed on eternal film. But the face she turned towards him, was unmindful of separation. Strolling towards the glass door he left a breath of good soap.

“Can you open this from the outside?”

“No, there’s the screen door as well, and they both shut from inside, but don’t worry, darling, I’ll have welcome on the doormat.”

“It’s not very mannerly, my dear, but—”

He shrugged, like a man sacrificing something little for something big.

“Come, Sara! Bob is waiting to have a drink.”

“You don’t drink in the middle of the day.”

“One must sometimes, my dear. He expects it. He beat me, one up, this morning. He has a mighty drive, but his short game is careless.”

“He’ll sleep all afternoon. Does Nora want to drive?”

“No, I’m going to play with the children. The little one trotted in to see me this morning, very early. She got in bed with me,” he told her happily.

“Naughty little child,” said Sara, holding on to one of his lapels. “I know you loved it, darling. While you play, I shall swim.”

“We’ll watch you,” he promised her. “It will make another picture of you in my mind. That and your books—”

“We’ve nothing like that of each other, have we, Murray? Not even a scratch of the pen.”

“Better so, but I wish—” The upward tilt of his chin told her he had stopped because he feared to go on.

“What do you wish, Murray?”

“That I could give you something really rare—”

“No, no, no,” she protested, recoiling instinctively, “I mean, thank you very much, but—”

“Don’t go away like that,” he said gently, drawing her back into the circle of his arm. “It was only selfishness on my part. I wanted to give—”

“Thank you, darling,” she said touching his face graciously with her own, “but I won’t have anything if you don’t mind. Things to touch, and take around, mean nothing to me.”

“Just as you say, my dear.”

“An unruffled memory is the richest thing you can leave me. I’ll feel diamond-decked, Murray.”

“How could it be any other way?” His voice was a caress, cemented with preservation. “At least I can send you flowers?”

“Not even that, if you don’t mind. They would fade and I’d have to throw them away. Just send me your love, when you pass the Forsythia.”

“And many other times.”

Her hand tugged at his lapel. “Will you send me your love when you’re walking with Noel?”

“Of course,” he said at once. “Good things can’t hurt Noel. They mustn’t! I won’t let them.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “and drink a stirrup-cup to you and me.”

His agreement was silent, warm and deep in the pressure of his hand on her arm.

Bob Hervey was stretched on a canopied hammock, like a gorgeous man-beast asleep after food. In his relaxation went acquiescence to do no manner of work, and conviction that the stranger within his gates would be of the identical opinion. He slept profoundly, undisturbed by his children at play.

One terrace down, Nora sat with her face supported by her hands, and her elbows by her knees. She was watching John Murray Blair who sat sideways, looking at Sara and the children. So far his intention of playing had gone no farther than a smiling co-operation with every action. Several dolls were sprawled on the grass, in spite of Sara’s frequent attempts to make them sit or lie in a decorous position. It appeared to bother her if they looked uncomfortable. Not so Rosamund, who dragged them around by an arm or a leg. Decidedly an untender child towards her dolls!

Richard, the lion-hearted, made a ludicrous picture, mountebanking in a doll’s dress, with his most unlion-hearted tail emerging from a muslin frill. It was Sara’s doing, dressing him up, but he was a docile cat, accepting his degradation with sleepy unconcern. As the dress was ample enough for his tabby chest, he sat aloof, until such time as Sara would choose to undress him. Rosamund said he was the wolf in Red Riding Hood, but very gravely, Murray told Sara, she had destroyed the last remnant of Richard’s manhood. Instantly Rosamund wanted to know why, and the women smiled while he competently explained that Richard, the real lion-hearted, would hate to have a namesake in a muslin dress.

“It’s softer,” shrilled Rosamund, dismissing the discomfort of men, bred to arms.

Richard rested, with sleep delayed by a pair of white butterflies. Of two minds whether to be a cat or a doll, his indecision let the wings flutter close to his nose.

“He’s in conflict,” said Sara. “It’s the doll’s dress.”

“It’s too nice a day to eat butterflies,” said Nora lazily.

“He likes them, Mummy,” said Rosamund. “He has milk for soup, and meat by itself. He won’t eat carrot or spinach, and he likes to catch his own pudding. Sometimes it’s a blue-bottle— Oh—”

Richard had sprung with great accuracy, in spite of his impediment. In a second he had gobbled a butterfly, springing across the grass after the lonely mate. His gait was grotesque, causing laughter from more than the children.

“Poor Richard,” said Sara springing up in pursuit. When she returned Richard was a cat again.

“I couldn’t change him,” she said subsiding on the grass. “A cat is not a doll because—”

“Don’t tell me no moral,” screamed Rosamund, swinging a doll in the air by its arm.

“Well,” ejaculated Nora. “What a good nurse I must have! Rosamund—”

“Skip it,” said Sara, with a real urchin smile. “It’s too much of a strain to decide whether you object to the grammar or the sentiments.”

“Both,” said Nora, in a mother’s didactic voice. “What do you do, John, on occasions like this?”

“Not much,” he confessed. “I leave the training to others.”

“It has a familiar sound,” said Nora. “Just like Bob. He’s never raised his voice to the children. That’s why they like him so much better—”

“He gives us ice-cream and chocolate-bars,” said Rosamund, explaining the depths of filial love.

“Idealistic, isn’t it?” smiled Sara from the grass.

“Just children,” he said, with beautiful tolerance.

Sara hid her eyes with her arm, to shut out the sun, and idly Rosamund covered the lower part of her face with a handkerchief, which was blown in the air like a tiny cloud. Instantly it became a game, demanding much repetition. The child’s part was to replace the handkerchief, while Sara blew it, high or low according to the capacity of her breath. Like a gambolling puppy Jennifer got in the way, sitting down suddenly, getting up, laughing, and continuing, when there was nothing to laugh at, but just being a baby on a beautiful day. With the extremes of childhood Rosamund led her sister to ecstatic hiccups, and took a large toll of Sara’s breath. At length she rolled over in protest.

“I’m winded! Go away, Rosamund! Make Uncle John Murray Blair blow the handkerchief. He can huff and puff and blow the house in. Get his own handkerchief,” she suggested guilelessly. “This is much too small for a man’s breath—”

“Get a tablecloth,” he said agreeably. Rosamund bounded towards the steps, falling against him and seizing his large handkerchief, but Jennifer was standing like a distressed cherub, with her face jerking in the air as each little hic came out of her mouth. It was Murray who got to her first, picking her up, and sitting so that the child’s face was turned away from the sun.

“Must be quiet,” he said soothingly.

Down below on the grass Sara could see the rise and fall of the baby chin.

“Sara was noisy,” she said crawling over on her knees. “Did we give you hiccups? Oh, God bless us,” she laughed as a big hic tore through the baby lips.

“I’ll get a glass of water,” said Nora at once. “Rosamund, be quiet for a while. Come with me and carry the water.”

“Can I have an ice-cube? Can I have an ice-cube?” asked Rosamund, doing her mother’s bidding in view of another distraction.

“Ith-cube,” hiccuped Jennifer, faithful to her parrot-speech.

“Yes, darling, ith-cube,” said Sara taking the small hand which Jennifer let her hold in peace. Three were left to make a group on the terrace-steps, while the intervals between the hiccups got longer. Their sudden quietude was soothing and there was a contribution of peace from the arms round the child.

“You don’t play, Murray. You just watch and rescue.”

“I was watching you, Sara, and wishing I could think of you with a child of your own.”

“I asked Santa Claus for one,” she whispered swiftly. “No, don’t be cross, Murray. You mentioned it first. These are other people’s children. If they were our own, wouldn’t we have to say, ‘don’t and stop,’ and fill up their days with, ‘should and ought?’ ”

“No,” he said, as if he knew just how to cope with essential training. “We’d have good nurses to do the routine work, and then we could be really charming to our children—”

“Oh,” she said, running up the terrace-steps to get to the top before Nora started down.

“Where are you going?” demanded Nora.

“To get ready for a swim,” said Sara without turning round, while swift feet took her through the gap in the lilac. Nora stared, then descended towards a head full of parental affection. Now it was in the air, wrenched away from the solicitude for her child. Without comment Nora sat, and administered small sips of water.

“Going to swim, John?”

“No, thank you. I’ve had enough exercise today.”

Very deliberately he watched his hostess with her large knuckles in evidence from her grip on the glass. From her flat wrist, his eyes travelled up to her beautiful face. Her serenity made him a very natural man.

“Nora, isn’t it a pity that Sara has no child?”

“A great pity,” she agreed, without undue emphasis.

“Did you know either of her husbands?”

“I met Bruce in England once, and Sara and I have always corresponded since schooldays—another sip, my baby— There were lots of things Sara could have been. She was many-sided at school, but she always had men in her life. Colin and she were just young. Bruce was too old for her, and to be quite candid, John—” Nora looked round. Rosamund was far away on the grass, getting beautifully wet from an ice-cube in either hand. The baby in Murray’s lap did not parrot her mother.

“Yes, tell me,” he asked, in gentle command.

Nora met his eyes with a woman’s steadiness.

“I think Bruce was so overcome, from the honour of being her husband—”

“Quite! Twenty years is too much. Does she ever baffle you?”

“No, of course not. I’ve known her too long and through too many phases. I remember the day she arrived at school. Her boat was late, and she was glamorous because she’d been so much abroad. The overseas girls often are in English schools. I was one myself, but I hadn’t been around like Sara. I can see her now, an eager amused girl, laughing even while she conformed. She could have been expelled once or twice, but her crimes were too human.”

“What did she do?”

“Ran out of the croc one day because an angel-faced little boy was pulling the wings off a swallow-tail butterfly. She boxed his ears, and there was a terrible to-do— Then she climbed the garden wall to rescue a cat and fell down in the garden next door, and had the nerve to have tea with a very charming couple she found on the lawn. She told the mistresses she forgot to hurry back, because the man had been to Trinidad, and she felt lonely for people who knew the places she knew, and his wife was an American who had been to New Orleans, and Sara quite forgot she was an English school-girl, until she got back— Miss Linton did not know what to do about it—”

“It doesn’t sound very vicious,” he said with immediate defence of Sara.

“No, of course not! We were transfixed over her daring, and her crushes cried their eyes out for fear of results, but I knew her well. She just laughed, and said nobody could be so foolish as to mind a thing like that. She’s still capable of doing the same things today. Don’t you know Sara?”

“I don’t know that I do,” he said thoughtfully.

“She’s got an excellent brain, and a very simple heart. That’s all!”

“I’ve wondered,” he said, and the smile he gave Nora indicated that the conversation was the very height of confidence. Nora’s lips smiled a little, but she did nothing but watch the peaceful finish of Jennifer’s hiccups, and the sleepy fall of her lashes. She would have preferred to remove her daughter to her bed, but in view of the happiness of her guest she could only conclude it would be the act of a bad hostess.

      *      *      *      

“Don’t go, Murray! Stay long enough so that I can sleep, and wake once in the dark and hear you breathe.”

“Oh, my dear.”

Behind her head his left wrist was lifted for a peer at a luminous dial.

“It’s three-fifteen, darling. I should go. What time do Nora’s maids get up in the morning? We mustn’t have a breath of scandal about us.”

“Not a breath,” she agreed, in an untroubled voice, “though I believe I could live if I saw a policeman at the foot of our bed.”

“God forbid,” he said in a less hospitable voice. “He might be a London policeman.”

“Don’t be insular, Murray. There are some other policemen in the world.” In the warm dark he could feel her laughing, as she always did when she thought of something amusing.

“Go on,” he said encouragingly. “I know the signs by this time. Something about a policeman.”

“How did you know?” she said, rewarding him with a light kiss. “It’s only, that perhaps London policemen are the best in the world. Yesterday I took Nora’s car to town, and I’m afraid I parked rather amply. When I came out, there was a policeman giving a very nasty look to the space between the car and the curb. I knew I was wrong, so while I was asking what was the matter—”

“Very innocently of course?”

“Very,” she agreed. “But I gave him my most propitiatory smile.”

“I know it, darling. It comes when you think you’ve gone a shade too far.”

“Oh! Well, the policeman didn’t know me so well, but he noticed the smile, because he started to be mad, and then he licked his lips. Always a sign—”

“You’re not very nice, my dear.”

“I know,” she sighed, repentantly, “but I can’t be. I’m a defenceless widow.”

“Very defenceless! You vamped the policeman—”

“I did not! I merely smiled, hoping to ease away, but by the time all the gadgets were off and on, he managed to say, ‘Miss, your tail is out.’ ”

Her own feckless delight made him laugh in the same silent way.

“I can’t have you spoken to like that, darling, when I’m not there to protect you. I hope you looked very high-hat.”

“I did not, Murray. That would be admitting a low mind. I thanked him for telling me, and drove off.”

“He should be reported. This is all very pleasant, my dear but—”

“You should be back at Nora’s.”

“Yes, we mustn’t have a breath of scandal about us,” he said in such an austere voice, that she was almost persuaded he was back in his own bed.

“And I agree with you, Murray,” she said, destroying the last millimetre of space between them. The way she relaxed indicated that the night could continue forever, and the whole world would sleep until she was ready to stir. When she spoke her voice was softly reminding.

“Have you thought, Murray, that this will be the last time we will touch like this?”

“Very deeply, my dear.” But he was not the type to ask the headsman to suspend the axe, while he read a book of verse. “What time do the maids get up?”

The remote possibility of anyone getting up barely penetrated. Her voice was a drowse between her lips and his neck.

“Answer me, Sara!”

“Oh,” she said with great definiteness, “in about a hundred years.”

“Will it be seven?” he asked with a father’s patience, making her attend more sensibly.

“No, darling, they’re lazy. This is a come-day, go-day place! In the morning, cobwebs could twine round their necks and they wouldn’t notice.”

“I won’t laugh at you, Sara. What time do the maids get up?” Some quality made the modulated voice sound like a shout.

“At seven-thirty, darling,” she said soothingly. “Sometimes later! Then they rattle a few things to give an energetic illusion. Mine does it too.”

“You’re quite sure,” he said, leaving the feel of a smile in her hair.

“Quite sure. Does it matter at this moment?”

“Very much! I’ll wake at six sharp. Six sharp!”

She felt his wrist rise again, as if he was making a tryst with his watch.

“Six sharp!”

“Yes, dear. Three times and make it your own. It’s Pelman!”

“It’s common sense. If you make up your mind to get up at a certain hour you wake on the dot. Six sharp!”

“Six sharp! Six sharp!” she gabbled, completing the trinity for him. “I’ll wake when the birds begin to plump out. Darling, you vex the nightingales with your talk of clocks.”

“Go to sleep,” he commanded. “I’ll look after the waking.”

“May I make one remark?”

“If it’s very short.”

“It’s very short and very long! I love you, love you, love you!”

As usual he did not answer except in the drop of his forehead against her own. It seemed as if he must keep his lip-service for the temple he had built for himself. She did not mind. There were other signs, and men had inconsistent loyalties.

“Go to sleep, darling.”

Her acquiescence was a pressure of her face against his, bringing a drowsy complaint, “needles and pins, Murray.”

“Am I very rough?” he asked with such anxiety, that she wondered if he would get up and shave at once.

“Not very,” she said soothingly, “you’re not very beardy.”

Silence settled like a presence, and when it was utterly stirless, she had to open her eyes to see it. Across the room, high up on a tall-boy, two glass-alley eyes told her they were watched.

“Murray,” she hissed, “we’ve been seen!”

“Where, what, how?” he asked, in three staccato notes, and the body she held in her arms became a set of steel springs. “Oh,” he said with gigantic relief that she could follow through the unbracing of his muscles. “Richard! Darling, you really frightened me. I’ll have you both chloroformed in the morning. Kiss me, and go to sleep.”

She turned her lips very willingly, but let him meet them, offering no return pressure. There was nothing but soft contact, challenging him to choose sleeping or waking. No matter how much he kissed her, she did not kiss him. He found it impossible to sleep without mutuality, and during the demand he became the absolute lover, equalising the love and desire in herself. If they were strangers, if men and women were foreigners to each other, and mortals walked alone, they rocketed as near union as humans can go.

“We’re very rich, darling,” he barely murmured, and went to sleep like a child.

      *      *      *      

It was exactly six o’clock when she woke for the third time. For a while she lay without motion, while he stayed the same. He was just as she had left him, serenely empty of anything but sleep. If he had ever known inclination towards rumpling nerves, he had disciplined them away from pitch and toss. His face looked fine with thin flesh over bone, making her follow him past death and see the excellence of his skeleton. Now his lips held human rest, gentle, relaxed, the ideal state between uneasy sleep, and the profound flop of large-bodied men. Impossible to imagine him snoring or blowing like an ecstatic whale. After the Governor’s official dinners, Colin had always snored, and often ground his teeth. It was frequently the result of whiskey after a formal march of wine, and often she had implored him to drink brandy, but he had a he-man idea of capacity, frustrated by his short neck. Bruce was a heavy breather, but when he was really collapsed and inclined to sag, he looked as impressive as Napoleon glowering on the Bellerophon.

Murray was holding his sleep dear, while light lined the curtains with yellow. Savouring the unusual minute, she stayed the small touch that would return him to life.

Six sharp! There was a gay quirk at the corners of her mouth. It was now six-ten, and he would feel so undisciplined at the failure of his system. It might suggest demoralisation, making him see her as a cause of enervation. That would not do! With one finger she touched his lips, tracing the curves up-hill and down-dale.

“Murray, wake up, wake up!”

He did so at once, clear-eyed and steady in his first recognition. The spread of expression held humorous tenderness.

“What are you doing here? You must leave at once! You’re a very naughty girl.”

“I belong here,” she said primly. “There’s been somebody lying on my bed.”

“I belong here too,” he said nicely. “Have you been happy, darling?”

Sara relaxed once more to put her arms round him, and lay a prolonged kiss on his chin.

“Happy, Murray, as happy as one of the geysers in Yellowstone Park. And you, darling?”

“The same,” he said with deep sincerity, “only I wouldn’t have thought of the geyser.”

“They come in places where the earth is so happy it has to spout. The one I’ll be is Old Faithful, even if it’s the last time I can hold you like this.”

The bubble and spring of her voice brought the sombre expression into his eyes.

“Sara, I wish you were older—”

“Older, Murray?” she questioned, leaning back to examine his face. “Perhaps you mean steadier, more restrained in my ardours— Is that what you mean?”

“No,” he said at once, “I mean less childlike—”

“Well, darling,” she said with a very adult smile, “I don’t do very childlike things.”

“No, it’s not that—but I must go,” he said on a different note, as if all problems must be shelved at once.

“Yes,” she said, in dulcet agreement. “Good-bye, darling—”

“Don’t kiss me, Sara,” he ordered, as if she had not been doing it all the time. “I’m very rough.”

“M’mmm, darling, I won’t contradict you, but I can bear the prickles because I’d love you if you woke like Rip Van Winkle.”

Very thoughtfully he drew his hand over his face and chin, looking as if he would like to please her by waking closely shaved.

“I’d like a razor and a horse, and then I could ride. People sleep very late here. Nobody takes much exercise.”

“I do, darling,” she said sitting up energetically. “A few setting-up exercises when my adhesions are very tractable.”

Slipping from his arms, she stepped out of bed and stood up, shaking back her hair with a rich sense of the morning. In a second she was hidden by the closet-door, and when she stepped into view again, she was wearing a brief one-piece bathing suit.

“You mustn’t swim,” he commanded. “The water is too cold so early in the morning.”

Sara smiled at him as if nothing could injure her in that hour, but as she made a quick lithe turn towards a dressing-gown she doubled up in a way that wiped the radiance from her face.

“What?” he demanded at once.

“Nothing,” she said in a muted voice.

Half out of bed his voice became tenderly peremptory. “There is something. Tell me, darling.”

“Pain,” she whispered. “The pain. It comes and goes,” but without another word, she had belted herself in the long gown, and was out through the door.

When he joined her wearing a blue harmony of slippers, pyjamas and dressing-gown, he found her crumpled sideways on the Chesterfield, and two strides brought him near, where he could look down at her bright bent head.

“My dear,” he said with exquisite concern. “I must give you the address of Noel’s doctor.”

“Why not your own?” she whispered against the hand that had gone under her chin.

“Because I never have anything the matter with me, my dear.”

“But you don’t want me to go to England,” she said quite loudly, “so what’s the use of giving me—”

“Hushhh,” he said in a father’s soothing voice, as his arms rocked her with a will to extract any pain in her body, and Sara rested with closed eyes that would take a long sleep against him.

Above her he looked at his watch, and immediately she comprehended his gesture.

“You must go, I know,” she murmured unprotestingly.

“But are you better?” he urged her.

Against his body Sara nodded briefly, but she was so quiet when he kissed her, that he lingered to kiss her again, and examine her white face.

“My dear—” he muttered unhappily.

Then Sara sat up, blinking a little and looking out through the glass doors to where the light made a shimmer on the grass. Immediately her fingers clutched his arm, and she sprang like a creature so jolted to primal emotion that she dropped all thought of herself.

“Murray, for God’s sake, look! Jennifer!”

“Where? What?” he demanded rising like a steel spring himself. “Good God!”

They both fell against the door in such urgent haste that one hindered the other, and as they fumbled with the lock, their apprehensive eyes saw a blue spot far down on the platform, and Jennifer’s small arms reaching for the rope mooring the canoe. Topple was suggested in her every motion, and a baby’s unawareness of danger.

“Oh God,” moaned Sara like a prayer, and now the door was open and the two hindered each other trying to get through together.

“Stay where you are,” Murray commanded. “I’ll go. You’re not well, and don’t call,” he entreated in a voice that was a sheer appeal to sense.

To any eye it was apparent that shock would upset the last vestige of Jennifer’s balance. Another throat did it for her. Round the house pelted the nurse with her mouth wide open on raucous commands.

“Jennifer! Jennifer! Come back! Jen-nif-fer!”

The screech scarped the quiet morning, making the child waver in an endeavour to look up. The fair head jerked in surprise, small hands sawed the air, and like a blue bundle Jennifer flopped into the lake.

John Murray Blair put Sara behind him and started forward, just as the nurse’s screams announced her like a hunted thing, right in front of the door. In a flash of a second John Murray Blair was behind Sara, inside her door, as she rushed forward, dropping her gown as she went.

The nurse screamed again, as Sara rushed by, literally falling down the terrace-steps, lost to all sense of self-preservation.

In a split second John Murray Blair had retreated to the bedroom, where he stood on relentlessly anchored feet in the shadow of the window. Jennifer’s blue robe was holding her up, but her fair head seemed to be going under water, and the sight made him assume the tormented expression of a man seeing the impossible. Then Nora came like a distracted Madonna, belting a gown as she ran, and after her sped the cook and the housemaid, followed by Annie, expelling herself from Sara’s front door. It was a moment when murder could have been committed on the upper terrace, and no one would see because of the sight down below. In a second Murray was through the gap, in his own room, and out through Nora’s hall, catching a glimpse of her husband sprawled in gigantic oblivion. Without hesitation the guest strode in and took his host by his large shoulder.

“Wake up, Hervey! Wake up, man!” he said giving Bob a ruthless shake. Then as Bob merely grunted he said in a voice more penetrating than a shout, “can’t you see Nora is gone? Jennifer fell in the lake.”

“What the hell—” muttered Bob, opening bewildered hazel eyes. It was enough for the other man that he was awake, and now as he went he snatched a bath-sheet from the bathroom, while recklessness lent wings to his feet speeding down towards the lake.

CHAPTER SEVEN

On the little platform there was solidarity amongst the women. They crowded, compact with attitude, as well as rumpled heads and varied dressing-gowns. The maids sniffed, and the one who should have been in charge of Jennifer had a hang-dog look. Nora clasped the dripping child in her arms, with a grip that squeezed the water from one gown to the other. The back of the fair head was darker from its dip, but the child cried more from discomfort than from shock. Sara had been wildly expeditious, and like Ophelia the blue robe had borne Jennifer up, until succour was almost there. With a fresh morning face Annie stood a step away from the group, ready to aid her mistress, but when she saw the man competently holding a towel, she stepped modestly aside. John Murray Blair stood gazing from Jennifer in her mother’s arms, to Sara in the water, with one arm round the mooring-post of the canoe. Her head had a drowned sleek look, with hair pointing round her neck like a fall of snakes. Drops fell from her face, and she looked cold in all but the eyes. Apparently they could perceive the indecision regarding the bestowal of the towel.

“Put it round Jennifer,” she decided for him, and he started a little, gazing down into fathomless eyes. “And, Nor, get going. Jennifer is wet!”

“Yes,” agreed Nora who seemed dead to externals. All over her was the shock of a mother seeing the insecurity of life for her child, but at the suggestion of direction she started forward, with the skirt of her gown heavy with water. In her path came Bob, lumbering down like a tousled giant.

“Darling,” he asked in a dazed voice, “what happened?”

Nora speeded up, as if the voice of her lord and master had lent impetus to her flight, and her grip on Jennifer made her a one-parent child.

“What the Hell—” muttered Bob.

Now Sara had drawn herself out of the lake disdaining Murray’s extended hand. For a second she stood raining spots that the sun kindly turned to rainbow hue. Transfixed, the maids stared at her all but naked body, with lines exposed to every eye. Like a possessor, wishing to cover her, Murray offered the towel spread out like a cape.

“Put this—”

But like Nora, Sara had no ears, as a dryad step took her up the steps, leaving them with fugitive glimpses of ascending heels. Then the maids became infused with the matriarchal spirit, filing up with tight withdrawn faces.

“Hell,” said Bob Hervey, as if he had tasted a breakfast of bitter herbs.

John Murray Blair did not answer. Externally nothing could diminish him, but as he stalked up the steps, his expression did not indicate a strong sense of self-esteem. Bob padded after him, mumbling to an implacable back.

“Like a drink, Blair?”

“No, thanks,” repudiated an austere voice.

“How did it happen?”

“She fell in the lake,” answered Murray, as if it was the height of enlightenment. Bob sounded unexpectedly ironical.

“So I notice. Where was the God damn nurse?”

“In bed I suppose.”

“How did Sara—”

The slighter man’s pace took him well ahead, and Bob was left to sort a modulated incoherency. He sprinted up, permitting an ascent shoulder to shoulder with his week-end guest. In his own door stood Nora, in a blue gown wet from neck to hem, but in spite of the slimming drag of water, her body looked ampler, forbidding them entrance. From inside came the sound of running taps, and Jennifer’s sobs dying to plaintive protest.

“Is she all right?” asked the father and the guest in different keys.

“Yes,” said Nora briefly. “She’s having a hot bath. I’ll take that towel, John.”

“Will I get the doctor?” asked Bob helpfully.

Nora’s look reproved him for male foolishness.

“It’s not at all necessary. Sara was very quick. Go, the two of you, please, and see how she is. Sara is very careless about herself. Tell her to have some brandy. She’s not at all strong.”

Nora’s voice was ordinary, unweighted with accusation, but quite subtly it conveyed the fact of Sara’s frailty, making the men hate their own strength. Bob put his hand to his neck seeking the tie that wasn’t there, while John Murray Blair stalked down the steps like a good guest bound to his hostess’ will. There was the same emanation at Sara’s cottage. Annie met them at the door, her neat gown lending her as much dignity as the primmest uniform. She had found time to smooth her hair, and she blocked them, vested with authority.

“Where’s Mrs. Colville?” asked Bob, pulling at his pyjamas collar again.

“I’ve just rubbed her down,” said Annie blandly. “The water was cold so early in the morning.” Quite respectfully, her whole being made the coldness of the water a male fault.

“Is she all right?” asked Bob anxiously.

“She was shivering, and her nails were blue,” said Annie with meticulous attention to detail.

“Mrs. Hervey wants her to have some brandy,” said John Murray Blair in the easy voice that should have effected immediate entrance, but all effects were reversed that morning. Women were in possession, despoiling men’s power.

“I’m getting some coffee,” said Annie, with every air of doing her duty.

One of the voices got very stern.

“We’d like—”

“Very well,” said Annie, looking between the two of them and seeing neither. “If you’ll just step inside, I’ll tell Mrs. Colville you’re here.”

She threw open the door as if the hour was the peak of conventionality, and she was quite prepared to receive their hats and gloves. Bob did not quite understand it all, but his look damned all women.

“Tell Mrs. Colville we’re here to see that she has—”

“A stimulant,” said John Murray Blair, commanding the maid out with his eyes.

“Very good, sir,” said Annie, who must have been reading books about the perfect butler. Very quietly she retreated, shutting the door as if fearing to rack an agonised mistress. The men were alone, grim as granite that had not been a foundation at the right moment. Very shortly Annie returned.

“Mrs. Colville says, thank you very much, but she’d rather have a cup of coffee.”

Annie went again, blasted on the sound of Bob’s voice.

“Sara, where are you?”

“Here,” answered an ominously pleasant voice.

“Come out like a good girl, I want to see how you are. You’ve got to have a drink. Nora says!”

“I’m naked, Bob.”

“I don’t mind. God!” said Bob with every suggestion of strangling, “I mean, put on a dressing-gown, and have a nice little snifter? Do you no end of good.”

“My hair is wet.”

“Then for Christ’s sake put a towel round it.”

There was a reassuring chuckle, suggestive of humanity and humour.

“Very well, Bob, my pet. I suppose you wouldn’t dare face Nora if I didn’t have some brandy,” she said, carolling the reason of his intense concern.

“Blast!” said Bob, who seemed to find relief in expletives. Large and tousled he sat down, with curls separating on his head. More than ever he looked like a cat, goaded from its comfort. John Murray Blair was unconsciously posing for what the well-dressed man will wear to bed, when Sara swept in. She was wrapped in an ample white gown, with her head swathed turban-wise, imparting an Eastern effect, strongly increased by the shape of her face and the size of her eyes. She looked definitely foreign, an arrival from some unfamiliar world. Bob gaped, and there was nothing about the woman glancing at John Murray Blair, that might assure him she had slept cosy and cuddled in his arms.

“Oh, the two of you,” she said lightly. “Well, please go home and tell Nor not to fuss.”

“You must have a drink,” said Bob with a one-minded sense of duty. Sara glanced from one to the other, up at the tall man who had risen at her entrance, holding in his eyes a plea to let him do something, however belated. More on a level she met Murray’s eyes, but they told her nothing, so she trailed slowly between them, sitting down like an odalisque in a seraglio.

“Yes,” she said softly, “I will have a drink, Bob. You’ll find whiskey or brandy in the dining-room, and Annie will get you whatever you think should go with it.”

Bob padded off on large relieved feet, leaving Sara and her lover alone. Their eyes flew together, while their bodies stayed apart.

“Sara!”

“What?”

Now his face was undressed, with a twisted mouth, but his words were very direct.

“You must see this very sensibly.”

Sara said nothing, waiting for him to continue. His tone was unpleading, demanding a measure of ordinary common sense, and his haughty chin suggested that if she did not produce it at once she would be unworthy of his consideration. It bordered on coercion.

“Our reputations,” he said sternly.

Sara stared big-eyed, moved to speak in a slow musing voice. Too aptly the right quotation sprang to her lips.

“ ‘Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and the angels think of us!’ ”

He looked exasperated, speaking with instant grimness.

“It’s another of the times when you talk rot, my dear. It’s men and women who look out of doors and windows. God and the angels wouldn’t destroy me—us—to—”

“To your wife and son?” she asked quietly, staring at him, in a detached and unaccusing way. Everything about him suggested he would go through fire and water for— For whom? Gentleness lay in his lips, integrity in his eyes, strength in his hands, and protection in every line of his body. But a man cannot run two ways at once. Her proud back sagged inside her gown, and her eyes shadowed in the face that could look quickly frail. John Murray Blair saw with frustrated eyes turning towards the dining-room door.

“My dear, you’re worn out, exhausted, and you were feeling ill—”

“Not at all,” she denied, straightening at once. “I’m quite all right. We’ll have a drink. The water was cold.” Unconsciously she was a hostess including the men in her immersion. His face became more twisted.

“Has it hurt you, Sara? Will it make any difference?” He ventured one forward step towards her. “I’d hate to go away—”

“It’s quite all right,” she said simply. “You were wise and thoughtful when I was foolish.” She gave him a grave look, ready to capitulate to his ideas of expediency. He made a mute gesture with his hands, quickly dropping them as Bob came back, and swinging on his heel he stared out of the window. Then he returned, ready to make a normal fuss over her. Sara permitted it, drinking brandy that made her momentarily colder, because Bob could not conceive of a warming drink that did not have ice in it. When she could, she got rid of them, sending them away with the indulgence of a mother, giving a pat to importunate children.

She was too rooted to move. The ecstatic night had receded to some far-away memory. Now she was warmer, growing cosy and muddled, and inclined to sleep. She relaxed on the Chesterfield, and did not feel Annie’s hands, solicitous on an eiderdown. With great consideration the maid ate her breakfast, and ran across to tell Mrs. Hervey her mistress was asleep. It enabled Annie to catch a glimpse of another breakfast, and watch two grim men settle in a car on their way to town. The most obvious eye could see they had used their razors rather closely, scraping chins in a spirit of self-flagellation. Man’s stock was down, and his reflexes needed reconditioning.

      *      *      *      

When Sara woke up, Nora was looking down at her and the sun was high in the heavens. Nora wore a town dress, a hat, and carried gloves and a bag in her hands. When Sara’s eyes flew open, Nora sat down on the foot of the Chesterfield.

“Gracious,” said Sara, in a bewildered voice. Then her face crumpled up, and her lips moved like a woman disliking the taste of her own mouth. “Heavens, Nora, have I been on a binge?”

Nora looked unhappy, struggling to speak, and for some reason on the verge of tears.

“What is it?” asked Sara anxiously. “Is Jennifer—”

“No,” said Nora at once, “she’s sound asleep and the maid is sitting beside her. It’s just that— Oh, Sara, supposing she’d—”

Nora ducked her head, wiping away tears that came frankly to her eyes. Then she blew her nose smudging a fresh coat of powder. “I can’t help thinking what would have happened if you hadn’t been there. The maid can’t swim. Sara, how can I ever—”

“Oh,” smiled Sara, with illumination, “you’re trying to be grateful.”

“Yes, two men in the house—”

“Forget it, will you,” Sara asked urgently. “Nor, Murray was with me—”

“I thought so,” said Nora slowly. “Then—”

“Yes, listen!”

Very gravely, Sara related the disastrous end to the night, his retreat after his forward leap, and their snatched conversation of the morning. Like women uncertain of judgement, they spoke slowly, probing each other’s eyes, and trying to follow the mind of a man. Nora sat very still, with a weighted brow, and when she spoke she seemed to hold more than her child on her mind.

“I’m sure he was right, Sara, and you mustn’t hold it against him. By all romantic theories it’s wrong, but you’re too intelligent to be sentimental. He knew you were an experienced swimmer, and he only lost a minute or two, though he stopped to wake Bob— Why, I wonder—”

“He was ashamed for him,” said Sara with prompt candour that did not hurt. “Murray couldn’t bear to see Jennifer’s father sleeping—”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Nora truthfully. “I was ashamed for him too, though the poor darling can’t help sleeping like that. Since the children came, I hear them if they turn over. Bob doesn’t hear thunder, let alone Jennifer—”

“No, he sleeps,” said Sara, disposing of Bob.

“Murray simply couldn’t leap out of your door, Sara, in full view of the maids. Why, it would be all over the place before lunch.”

“Yes, I know, and I’m really glad. But what amazes me, Nor, is the strength of mind that could let him do it. In moments like that I’m an impulse. He adores Jennifer—”

“But he cherishes his position, and he idolises his son. It held him back as it always will.”

Something portentous in her voice made Sara stare at her with sudden suspicion.

“Nor, has something else happened?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so, Sara, something that I was afraid would happen. Murray just telephoned to me.”

“To you?” questioned Sara in deep surprise.

“Yes! You know tonight we were going to pick him up and go to the dinner together. He said not to wait for him. He’d be working until the last minute, and would be late. When he got back to the hotel—”

“There was a cable,” said Sara in a flat voice. “Noel is dead!”

“Don’t be foolish,” snapped Nora, in mitigation of the wild guess. “Do you think he’d go to a dinner if his son was dead? Noel has measles.”

“Measles,” breathed Sara, in gigantic relief. “What are measles? They’re nothing—”

“Will they be to Murray?” asked Nora quietly. “He’d already got in touch with the hotel doctor to know what he has to fear.”

Sara sat like a brooding sibyl with the towel lopsided on her head.

“You’re right, Nor! It might be smallpox, or any disease with a name.” Her lifted head had a listening look, like a woman hearing sweet bells jangling out of tune. “It’s the end! I feel it. This morning he asked me if it would make any difference because he couldn’t save Jennifer. Now he won’t care how he goes. I’m the cause of Noel’s measles, the consequence—”

“No,” protested Nora, “he couldn’t be so silly. He loves you, I’m sure he does, but—”

“ ‘His honour rooted in dishonour stood, and faith, unfaithful, kept him falsely true,’ ” said Sara at once. “Those words sounded glib before. Now they’re real meaning. I could have written them myself this morning. But for my own peace of mind I must try and preserve what we’ve had. Annie—”

Sara stood up, bracing her body as if for battle.

“Yes, Madam,” said Annie, almost instantaneously. “Shall I bring your breakfast?”

“No—”

“Yes,” said Nora, decidedly, “don’t be a fool. You can’t preserve anything on an empty stomach.”

“Very well, my breakfast,” said Sara with some impatience, “and, Annie, ring up the beauty parlour, and make an appointment for hair, face and nails. In my trunk is a dress I haven’t worn. It’s a gown, not a dress, and I thought it was too elaborate—”

“The dinner is at a Club, Sara.”

“Yes, but a nice Club! I’ll wear the dress, Annie. If it needs pressing see about it at once, and there’s a cape that goes with it, with a white-fox collar.”

“Yes, Madam,” said Annie retreating with agreeable anticipation in her face.

Sara was walking about with a tiger prowl.

“The dress is black, Nora, but very glamorous. Whatever happens I’m not going scourged to my dungeon. Measles. What are measles to spoil our love—”

Dramatically she asked it of the air, sweeping round as if she could obliterate Noel’s spots by violent action.

“Wait for me to go to town, will you, Nor?”

“Certainly, that’s what I intended.”

“Measles,” said Sara, charging towards her bedroom. “I feel spotted already. By tonight I know I’ll have a rash! Dear God, Noel, I could kill you.”

Nora followed and found Sara regarding herself resentfully in the mirror.

“Just look at my hair, will you, Nor! Such a business being beautiful! Just when one thing is right, the other goes wrong. Moddom needs a little oil on her nails! Moddom’s scalp is dry! Moddom is a little run-down—and then just as Moddom has corrected all the faults, her toenails look reproachful and say they’re not in the very best tradition—I swear if I’d written ‘Gone with the Wind,’ I’d go Chelsea and slop round in sandals and dirty yellow velvet. As for manicuring my toenails—”

The impossibility of such futility made Sara snatch open a drawer, while Nora sat down on the bed, following the quick light movements of a foreboding woman. Sara was bolstering herself up with temper and words.

“You couldn’t, Sara. You’re too vain.”

“M’mm,” said Sara, whose hand was going round the drawer like a spoon in a bowl. “Perhaps you’re right, and Murray loved my feet. Dear God! There I am speaking in the past tense! The poor darling, his poker face was all upset this morning, and he hated living with himself. What’s that awful tag, ‘I have to live with myself and so, I must be fit for myself to know.’ Unfortunately, we can’t go round high-hatting ourselves. Noel, Noel, how I love your father, and how unlovable you make me feel about your measles—”

“Poor little boy,” said Nora reproachfully, “measles in the summer when he should be out of doors—”

Sara swept into the bathroom, giving her friend a look from eyes like live coals.

“Noel’s measles! They’re my measles, Nor! I’m sure you see my skin going spotty.”

Sara was in woman’s armour, with light-brown ringlets upswept from her temples, and set low on her neck. The gown looked simple, owing everything to fabric and cut. The lines round the shoulders were stitched and tailored, contrasting a delicate expanse of bare skin. Her face held a balmlike freshness, and the pink of her cheeks owed everything to excitement and recent massage. Outwardly she was polished, and dusted with powder to the highest peak of perfection. To arrive stately in a gown appealed to her more than floating in young and appealing and softer lines, and she was at the age when either would be right. In a lounge with wicker furniture, soft carpets and pale summer walls, the cocktails had impelled their usual crescendo when she saw him enter. By that time her dinner-partner was at her side claiming her attention. For a moment her responses became automatic, as she followed the quest of Murray’s head. When he found his host and hostess he stayed in their vicinity, dismissing a cocktail and talking to a high-voiced woman through calm lips. Casually vigilant, Sara saw him scan the room when his eyes were free, and sensitively she knew when he found her, although she talked to her partner as though he were the man of the happy moment. Murray’s chin was up, and he looked as if he were thinking of every aloof thing to say. Now they were moving in a mass, through three other rooms, with the middle one stripped for dancing. The dinner was large, and Sara’s cheeks burned feverishly when she saw they were many places apart. But they were on opposite sides of the table, and occasionally their eyes must meet. She would not look, feeling she might become like a bird unable to drag her eyes away from a coiling disenchantment. She knew he examined her several times, but he found her attentive to a tall thin man talking about Karachi, bazaars, and the wanderings of the sacred cow. Sara listened with the blankest mind and the most attentive face, but the man was interested in his own subject and did not require a conversational goad. It seemed interminable food and interminable India, though she was convinced she would have been extremely interested in the sacred cow on any other evening. Now this preoccupation with cows made her think of their picnic, and the ones that had grazed in a quite unsacred way. She was glad to dismiss them for salt-pans, and the fact that her partner had once seen Gandhi in a loin-cloth. She beamed, letting him whirl her away to Malabar Hill, until the hostess gave the signal of release. Sara hoped she rose nonchalantly, but her mind hurried her along, like a person fleeing from a burning building. She managed a smile for an interrupted story, making her partner promise its completion during the first dance. As her dinner-partner—

Sara trailed out, feeling curiously empty after such a large meal. She felt her lover’s eyes in the middle of her back, but while making no sign she praised famous dressmakers and the works they could do for women. She became part of and utterly apart from the women’s chatter, until suddenly she stared externally, with the urge to know the core of all hearts. Did they drivel too for fear of a loud lament? Interesting! People put their legs under other people’s tables, feeling the baked meats will really choke them, as they murmur how truly delicious! Murray had eaten as little as herself.

The men arrived inducing a throb of music from the middle-room. Sara was one of the first on the floor, either from her partner’s desire for herself or from the zeal of a raconteur to tidy up the tale of Malabar Hill. Salt-pans, loin-cloths, any topic would do, until the time came to speak from the heart.

Incredulity lay in the fact that he danced with so many other women before her. True, there were some there connected with his business as wives of presidents, and vices, first, second and third, but it was his only sign of a scrupulous social conscience. He was like a vassal to precedence, dancing gravely, and talking as much as could be expected of a quiet man. He even laughed at well-spaced intervals, but Sara thought he looked ill with an undertinge of grey from inward chill. Once their eyes met, and his stayed neutral, untipped towards significant expression. After that she dismissed him, dedicating herself to her own partner and skating the surface of any topic with brittle conversation that came as involuntarily as breath. As partners seemed reluctant to leave and quick to come, she assumed her make-believe was adequate. It must have been Nora who made him ashamed of his opposition. Not by speech. Sara could be sure of that, but Nora was capable of accusation, from a face compelling good-conduct. When the notes of a slow waltz caused the first shuffle, Sara saw his eyes precede him towards her. Every gesture, every tiny thing about him was familiar to her now, and at that moment he was assuming formality and challenging her to penetrate it at such a time. His bearing certified the impeccability of dances, and their impossibility as places of recrimination. Watching him from the tail of her eye she wanted to laugh—as if there had not been another dance—

“Will you dance?” he murmured formally.

With a light farewell to her partner, she was in his arms, moving out on the floor in automatic rhythm, and for the first time their flesh was estranged. Close to him she could see the grey tinge of his skin and the grave look in his face. Detachment told her he looked thirty-eight. Perhaps he was thinking she looked thirty-one. Nothing had been gained by the meticulous toilet, or the choice of a gown instead of a dress. Externally he was as unconquerable as herself, and perhaps he was thinking her face was grey. There she knew she was wrong. He had only his own problem and Noel’s measles! Fear told her it might be her last touch of him, but it left her without any grip, giving her shallow breath and icy fingertips. She felt unsubstantial, unweighted as a leaf and dry behind the eyes. Once or twice she had experienced that inward shrivel, and it nearly always preceded a faint. She must not do anything spectacular. That would horrify him completely. Feeling was still communicable, and when she saw the increased greyness of his face, she had to whisper, “ ‘and his lips were pinched to kiss at the noon’!”

‘Two red roses across the moon’! The child’s poem in Noel’s book! His mouth set, as if she had run amok in a game. They who had been so easy, now danced as terribly intimate strangers. She let him take her round as if she was nothing in his arms, and once or twice his arms tightened as if seeking a reminder of a flesh and blood woman. It was the lightest coldest dance, like two ghosts moving together in close embrace. At last his face said if she would not support him, he would go all the way in convention.

“Well, how are you? None the worse for your wetting I hope?”

“No, thank you. I feel very well.”

“I’m off on Wednesday.”

“Yes, you mentioned it before.”

“Nice dance isn’t it? People in small places knock out a good time for themselves.”

“Very, and it costs less than in London.”

“People are hospitable.”

Sara wouldn’t, any more, but when she spoke her voice was neither pleading nor tragic.

“I will not, Murray, definitely not! I refuse to be like Noel Coward’s woman, ‘small talk, small talk, with other talk going on behind.’ If that’s all there is to say, don’t say anything.”

His eyes swept round, as if she had made him the cynosure of all eyes. He seemed surprised when nobody took the slightest notice of them.

“Nora told you about Noel?”

“Yes,” she said briefly. “Couldn’t you have told me yourself?”

“Let’s sit down,” he said, guiding her to a lounge with a bar at one end. Several people lingered near it, smoking and sipping, but he drew her casually on, to where two chairs stood together behind a glass-topped table. When they sat her knee touched his, yet as she made a mute plea for unity, it seemed they were poles apart, and she would call, and he would not hear. Neither would he meet her eyes, and never so much had he seemed the implacable man, with determination scourged towards stubbornness. Sitting in apparent lazy ease, Sara watched him, and again she wanted to laugh, bitterly, but laugh just the same. She knew so conclusively now, that love can be flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell, but she could not let it go yet. Even in the smoothest guise of civilisation she was ready to handle ice or fire with bare hands.

“Murray, are you trying to remember that Noel has only got measles?”

His eyes stopped roving, and fastened sombrely on her own. They accused her, calling her woman, something alien to man, tormenting him, when he wished to worry whole-heartedly about his son. They transmitted measles, as if he and she had made Noel infectious. Above all they asked her to let him go without a woman’s scene.

Her whole being gasped, even as she tried to tell him with every pulse beat, that she did not want anything but a gentle handling of themselves, but he was like a man scuppered of self, and blind to everything but the threat to his son. Above all, some intangible quality said if he had denied himself delight, his child would not have picked up a germ. His conflict had been to decide whether she was a well of happiness or a cause for confession. Invisibly she felt the scales dip towards the wrong side, and her fresh body afflicted with another invasion of spots. She had to tear her eyes away to look at her arms, and literally she was surprised to find them smooth and white.

“Murray,” she whispered with desperate question, “do I understand you want to go now without seeing me again?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said in a low wrung voice, that could look to the room as if he were asking her to smoke.

Sara could not bear it, neither was she prepared to wait for him to make up his mind. To ask for something that had been so royally given? It would be the death of spontaneous union. Then she did something that frequently makes a man hate a woman. She took decision from him, before he could pronounce himself when his fasting and praying was done. Her voice belonged to a woman who would go, before she was sent to the tents of Shem.

“You don’t want to come, and I know it. Then I won’t have you, my dear. You’re released! Please don’t say anything else.”

Completely startled, he endured her look until he had to blink. Now that she had given him what he wanted, he looked miserable, with his beautiful mouth going into the twisted smile of a nice man who knows he is being a Judas for his special conception of thirty pieces of silver. She ached for his shame, and the expression on his face that a woman would rather not see. Yet she felt no diminution of love for him, in sight of the fanaticism of his Achilles heel. Now he had forgotten to dress his face for others, in his shameful deliverance towards his son.

“Don’t look like that,” she had to warn him. “You can’t diminish us, no matter what you do.”

Unconsciously they both stood up, as if in response to music they had not heard. Small compensations favoured her, when another man stood in her path.

“Our dance, I think, Mrs. Colville?”

“Yes, I’m sure it is,” she said sweetly, walking forward with a tumbril back. She was barely dancing, when she saw Murray clasp another woman in his arms, and begin talking through the bleakest of lips. But the woman did not notice. Head back, she smiled provocatively, and even in sight of that austere face she dared wriggle forward, and dance brow to chin.

Poor thing, thought Sara in numb detachment, she’s bound to get measles. Like an automaton she danced on, seeing between turns and twirls of bodies, occasional glimpses of her lover trying to detach his chin from contact with his partner. His mouth was wry, repudiating the confusion of a woman’s touch.

The rest was a handshake when Bob began to look ample in doorways, and his unconcealed yawns induced Nora to hasten departure. They were in front of a buffet where the last drink was in circulation. Three of them walked away, after an unobtrusive farewell to the host and hostess. As if he had been waiting, Murray advanced, and his good-bye to Nora and Bob was an ‘au revoir’ suggestive of future meetings in London. They knew his address, his club, etc., etc.— They had been so kind—

Sara stood waiting. If he demanded a formal handclasp she was prepared to tender it, though when it came she made no artificial comment, or banality towards past or future. Neither did he. Their eyes had a flash of contending ice and fire, and each hand told the other it was freezing cold. Sara literally swept towards her cloak, with Nora treading behind like a distressed parent.

“Sara,” she pleaded to the modish back.

“Not a word,” said imperious lips, over a white shoulder. “Not one word, I implore you. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

It was unbelievable that Sara’s mercurial body could stay tranced until four o’clock in the morning. But she reflected the numbed heart within, which bade her linger in unresisting deprivation before she began to ache. Only her eyes were alive, and the glossy hair above the fox collar of the satin cape. She sat still, like a woman waiting for an escort to take her to some nocturnal revel. The one stir was suggested in the march of thought behind her eyes. But when the sound of scrunching came on the gravel, she turned her head with eyes leaping to a peak of expectancy. Feet on the flagged path, hands on a door—but only Nora came in, entering like a figure of motherhood, bearing such balm in her hands, as one human being can drop on another. Hope snapped from Sara’s eyes, like light from a window.

“Sara, I looked out, and saw you were still up. I haven’t slept. Bob was drinking, so now he’s snoring. I wouldn’t have slept anyway. I had to come over.”

“It was good of you, Nor. I couldn’t move. Somehow I couldn’t move for a while.”

Nora sat down emanating a quality of large friendship. Without preamble she elucidated the distress in her own eyes.

“Sara,” she said, with hands clasped so intensely that the knuckles showed white, “I’ve been thinking, thinking, wondering what it would be like to have a child I couldn’t pray for.”

“Yes?” questioned Sara, jolted to external life.

Nora went on, as if racked with some personal anguish.

“Think of it, when you have to watch them tossing in the fevers they get so quickly, and when they pick up the childish diseases that so often leave a permanent disability. Think of sending them out every day without a prayer for their safety. Think of believing there was——”

“ ‘No pity sitting in the clouds?’ ” suggested Sara, with immediate response. Her body had not moved, but she was looking at Nora with an awakening face.

“Yes, wherever it is, but instinctively we look up. Parents need to more than others. The prayers of single people must naturally be more selfish. Even if Murray were ready to die for Noel, he couldn’t go with him all of the way—”

“That’s what I tried to tell him, Nor.”

“But because he believes in nothing, he has to be father, God, doctor—”

“In fact, a despot to himself and to his child?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I’m desperately sorry for you, Sara, but I’m equally sorry for him.”

Both women looked momentarily withdrawn recalling in visual imagery the man who at that moment would have little capacity for their consideration.

“This morning,” whispered Nora, “I felt the shadow of loss for the first time.”

“Will it make you as fanatical as Murray?” asked Sara somewhat grimly.

“No,” said Nora, in the voice of a woman who would see her limitations, “I know I can’t go with them all the way.”

“Poor Murray,” mused Sara, in a voice that was a caress to the absent lover. “He’s trying to do all that!” More slowly she continued like a person sorting fragments of thought, and placing them into some semblance of continuity. “You’re right, Nor, it’s the way I was thinking myself, and seeing how absolutely personal all experience must be. I would be willing to say from real knowledge that Murray and I came as near real union as a man and woman can go, but though often we were one, we really were two. You want to help me as a near friend, because I’m broken-hearted, but you know there’s little you can do. Most of life is a monody! I’ve been thinking in circles, and remembering the women who stand out in literature. Some seem glittering, but uncomprehending. Then I got to Christina Rossetti, and how one day she could feel her heart like a singing-bird, until she came to a place where she wrote those lines about the band of inner solitude. I stopped there, feeling how necessary God must be to everyone. Then you came in, and for a wild moment I hoped it was Murray. That was foolish! He’d never change his mind even though I made it up for him, just before he did it himself. I shall ache for him all my life, but I wouldn’t exchange him for the smuggest of memories, so you can go home, Nor, and go to bed. I know the way of loss, but—”

“But what?” insisted Nora, with a little shiver. The day had been emotional and the hour was the nadir of living. Both women looked drained, with the smudged eyes of exhaustion.

Sara rose with determination, like a person arraigning herself for being up so late. But she stared at Nora, speaking to space rather than a human being.

“What men believe is important! As long as women love with all their hearts, and have babies, they can’t do much real harm.”

“The prisons are full of men,” said Nora ingenuously, making Sara laugh with grim humour.

“Yes, Nor, I believe you! Possibly because they’ve lost their way. Now every man I meet, I would like to ask him what he believes. They bear the onus of direction, as it’s still a man’s world.”

Nora walked towards the door, and as she opened it both women winced with the breath of day. Light touched the world with chill revelation.

“You’ll go to bed, Sara?” said Nora hesitatingly.

“Yes, of course, and thanks awfully, Nor, for not saying, I told you so. It was a magnificent opportunity.”

“I’m sorry for him, Sara,” she said, as if she were pleading for the man.

Sara smiled like a woman who could sweeten her own hemlock.

“And I love him, Nor! Good-night.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sara’s loneliness was acute, and her body felt as if it had been denied an essential food, causing depletion, and a peculiar sinking in the pit of her stomach. In spite of bacon and eggs, and the subsequent pinch of soda, Murray had been magic to her digestion. Now, though she had no bile in her memory she felt it accumulating in her system. It was unfortunate that most meals seemed to be a concentrate of foods serving her worst. Always out, the cottage became a roof, and a place for changing her clothes. Her book was finished and Murray was gone, so she went on the feminine equivalent of a bender, doing every reckless thing that did not involve a personal adventure. And naturally she did not get drunk. Like Mr. MacCurdle she knew it was a gentleman’s fault, so she stayed in traditional channels. Parties piled up, and she seemed to be peering continually at a drowned olive, while nibbling nuts: round, oval, wrinkled and curled. When she ate the bits impaled on a toothpick her stomach got peevish. She paid no attention. It was no time to be full of water like poor Ophelia. Neither did she have any inclination to make fantastic garlands, or chant snatches of old tunes. Experience said, she could call on the unreplying skies, and they would roll on as aloofly as the boat bearing her lover to England. Nothing could destroy her visual sight of him. Quite literally she saw him all day, and there was no diminution of her after-love. He persisted as if he walked, talked and lay down with her. But she truly set him a pace in the activity of a widowhood that did not demand a dolorous hat. That Nora bore the burden of knowledge alone became assured from the women’s gossip. In a place where it passed for conversation, a luncheon told Sara that Murray had achieved his wish. There had not been a breath of scandal about them. His ship had barely sailed when the women took down their back-hair about him.

It was an intimate gathering of eight young matrons who enjoyed gossiping about imperfection, and the ignoble deeds of the human family. Satisfaction came in hearing as many intimate details as possible. After sherry and a course, many names had cropped up, to be tossed aside with sanctity or a social hiss, and Sara was appalled when she contemplated what might have been said about Murray. She knew what they would have said about her. Serve her right! She should have known better! What can you expect from a woman twice a widow? They wouldn’t trust her within an English mile of their own husbands.

She was braced and armoured when Murray’s name hit her like an arrow in the heart.

“Who says he’s gone? Why, I was going to have him to dinner. He goes so well with the best cloth. Is it possible he came and went without an affair? Where are the husband-snatchers? We must be losing our grip.”

“He’s married,” said Nora a little too hastily, and there was a general laugh over the suggestion of impeccability.

“Yes, Nora,” drawled another light-hearted inquisitor, “we all know about marriage. But who was the owner of this beautiful male creature? He looked a lovely bit of man to me.”

Gay glinting eyes swept challengingly around the table, demanding a betrayal of some face, until sudden memory made the eyes brake on Sara.

“Of course, I forgot. Sara! She had him in fetters. Darling, what was he like?”

Sara met the eyes with poised, smiling candour. “Nice! Very nice indeed! I knew him in my salad-days. He week-ended with Nora and—”

“Bob was there,” added Nora with dry humour. “You’d know a lot more about him if you’d invited Rosamund and Jennifer.”

“Baby take a bow! My dear, I hear one of the children fell in the water, and Sara rescued her, while the men slumbered and slept.”

Sara sat repressing a wish to be thoroughly vulgar, and tell them to lay off, but she answered casually. “I was a Girl Guide once and they taught me to—”

“Obviously! Most of us would have—”

“I’d like to get behind Mr. Blair’s mask,” said another young wife with avid curiosity. Another thing Sara noticed in small places was that one rarely got to the end of a sentence before there was some inconsequential interruption. There were no listeners.

“There’s no mask,” Nora decided pleasantly. “He’s just nice, and I should say most happily married.”

“So are they all, all happily married! But Brutus says they are polygamous—”

“Brutus? Do I know him? Is he in the navy? Oh—” said an ingenuous voice so definitely in the twentieth century that they all laughed uproariously. When they subsided another name was up for consideration. Had they been more observant they would have noticed Sara toying with food that never reached her mouth, because she had come to a place where she could hold everything in her head and heart, but nothing in her stomach.

      *      *      *      

Sara had a pain that made her prowl up and down the green and yellow room. She said the pain was lumpy, like a handful of insides clutched by an intimate fist. Walking fast she created the illusion of a wind in the room fluttering her dress, and as Nora saw the goaded step, she noted the delicate boniness of wrists and ankles. Behind larger eyes there was an emotional intensity that had permitted Sara to feed her body with things that could be tossed off as she stood on her feet. Cigarette in hand she halted at the window to look out on a morning fretful with wind and rain. Overhead the sky pressed down, glowering with a leadenness reflected in the surface of the lake. Summer was muted, huddling away from untimely storm.

“Let’s have a fire,” said Nora with sudden inspiration. “I adore a summer fire.”

Sara appeared not to hear as she stared out with musing eyes, but confirmation was not needed and soon a crackle started behind her back.

“I must have that lilac cut,” she said distastefully. “Those brown flowers depress me.”

Nora was patient, nursing a fire to make her warm, as the blaze was having difficulty in struggling through the extra rubbish thrown on top of wood and coal.

“Look at this grate,” demanded Nora. “Maids are slovens.”

“No, people like ourselves,” Sara protested at once. “The only difference is, I lie in bed while Annie gets up and cooks my breakfast. She probably loved her sailor as much as I loved Murray. Is it all cockeyed, Nor? Are we on the wrong track? Is the brotherhood of man all Cain and Abel? Is it Judas or Pontius Pilate? Are there no big beautiful imponderables? What Murray believed has left me bleak.”

“It’s the day,” said Nora comfortingly.

“ ‘As the devil said to Noah, it’s bound to clear up,’ ” murmured Sara with a slight laugh. “But Murray had an autumn heart. Sometimes he was crazy and young, and other times as rigid as iron. He was the true Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll laughed and loved, and dared be indiscreet, but Hyde was hard on Jekyll, making him believe in consequences. Why was he like that, Nor?”

Sara turned round as if her friend must answer the all-important question.

“Oh, a fire! How nice, I think I’m cold.”

For a moment she relaxed in a deep chair stretching her legs towards the blaze. “Don’t bother to answer, Nor. Nobody knows the answer to anything. This week I met such a disillusioned young man and I’m influenced. He wanted to kiss me, and I was tempted to let him because he looked so bleak, and I could have washed my face after. Women are such fools! Can you imagine a man conceding his kisses because he thought a woman looked bleak.”

“Well, hardly,” said Nora smiling at the thought. “Sara, I wish you’d begin to rest a little and see about that pain. You can’t see anything in proportion when your body—”

“I’m quite all right, Nor. It’s an old story and all my own fault. I’ve been eating acid when I should eat alkaline. I hate doctors. They look ghoulish, and ask you if your relations with your husband were—ahem! And what have you?”

“Doctor Mann won’t,” said Nora decidedly. “He’s the least psychological man I know. A stomach is a stomach to him, and not something that’s upset because your husband made eyes at a beautiful blonde. I had him when the babies were coming. It’s a time when I definitely don’t want my hand held. Let me ring him up, Sara, please.”

“Thanks, Nor, not yet. The very thought of one makes me see needles and tubes and oddly shaped pans.”

She began to walk again, and in giving her hands a dry wash Nora saw symptoms of good hard pain.

“It was not like Murray,” Sara said almost wildly. “It must have cost him something to be so cruel.”

“And you still love him?”

“Of course,” Sara said gently, “so true a fool is love.”

“Why don’t you force him out of your mind—there are other men— Oh, I know,” shrugged Nora in sight of Sara’s smile. “It’s easy to talk, but you’re accustomed to men. You must marry again. The time will come when you’ll want love very badly—”

“You mean sex,” said Sara, standing still with every intention of calling a spade a spade. “I’m sure of it. I believe in it whole-heartedly.”

“What will you do?”

With a quick change from brooding Sara grinned. “Perhaps do as men do. I could not live and remember, sort of thing, and so I love and forget. Then when I meet him in a happier day, I shall say in the vernacular, ‘it didn’t mean a thing, my darling, it was only a flash in the pan,’ and when I’ve sobbed at his feet, I shall get up, and brush off the knees of my pants and expect him to call it a day.”

“M’mm,” replied Nora grimly, “it would be traditional to show you the door.”

“Yes, I suppose, men being nitwits about women. They think sex is masculine. For years they’ve been the authority, writing that with men it’s functional, with women it’s blah, blah, blah— Women know as well as men that sex and love are poles apart, but it doesn’t diminish a primal appetite. It’s a point in our favour that we’re not nitwits the way men write about us.”

“But you can’t take a lover willy-nilly,” protested Nora, as if she saw Sara giving the glad-eye somewhat promiscuously.

“No, of course not,” she agreed beginning to walk again. “It’s only that I think Murray was belittling to me, in not leaving me a good memory. Why—why—”

“Sara,” said Nora in a voice that must end all argument, “did you ever meet a man—father, brother, husband, who wouldn’t detour a hundred miles to avoid being straightforward with a woman? They have some fixed idea it means a scene. Bob is appallingly lazy, but he’d run himself ragged to avoid a showdown with me. In doing that, men forget that most human issues are between two people. As long as they can get away with a clean pair of heels they won’t dwell on the unwritten letter, the telephone call they should have made, the flowers they should have sent, the meeting that would have made all clear—Murray is only a man, a little nicer than most. That Tuesday I saw him punishing the golf-course, and the moral strength that should have gone into a meeting with you, went into his divots— I’m sure he was replacing them the whole way round.”

“Poor Murray,” said Sara with a complete lack of rancour, “and he said he’d be busy all that day.”

“Well, he wasn’t,” declared Nora. “He was playing golf. I haven’t a high opinion of men’s moral courage, Sara. Think of old world literature—Italian tales when men were so brave that it hurt. Weren’t they always flourishing a sword and burying it up to the hilt in some unfortunate body? And weren’t they always hiding in closets when the wife raided the mistress?”

“Yes,” said Sara, with a spontaneous chuckle.

“Why aren’t you writing, Sara?”

“Because I can’t think of anything to say.”

“It’s just a fallow period.”

“No, it’s gone,” she said despairingly. “The only thing I’d really like would be a child of my own. Children are so refreshing and young-making— I’m sure, Nor, I wouldn’t have been so well off, if it hadn’t been for Rosamund and Jennifer. They make me ache— Oh, here they are—” As if glad of distraction she strode to the glass door, admitting the children on the forward urge of a gust of wind. Jennifer’s eyes were squeezed together and her eyelashes positively blew.

“The win’, the win’, Sawa,” she complained struggling in a blinded way.

“Come in, my baby, and we’ll shut the door fast.”

“It’s terrible awful, Sara,” said Rosamund, who revelled in the most incongruous words. Too much notice made her positively gleeful in repetition making Nora assume the happy technique of taking no notice. Now the child stood with tilted chin, waiting for the reproof that did not come.

“Yes, it’s a horrid day,” answered her mother serenely. “Where’s Nurse? Haven’t I told her not to leave Jennifer for a minute?”

“I brought her,” said Rosamund, as if she was the most desirable of escorts.

Jennifer was clutching Sara’s skirt, seeming plaintive with the wind.

“Horsey go widey, Sawa,” she said, weighting Sara with her drag.

“Certainly not,” said Nora at once. “Sara couldn’t possibly play a rough game like that. You must wait for Daddy—”

“Muwway,” said the child, from some haunt of memory. During the week-end he had made a very faithful horse for Jennifer.

Sudden defiant strength made Sara swing the child up on her shoulders and begin the wild romp beloved by the children. It was a strenuous game, involving walking, running, trotting, with Jennifer perched high on a back. The elder child paced, setting a speed that generally left the adult in utter breathlessness. Now Sara could play with no evidence of pain or a back bowed with its burden. She went through all the paces, with Rosamund whooping beside her, and Jennifer laughing in her hair. The three fell together in a general collapse on the blonde Chesterfield, with their heads together in a heedless way. It was only when Sara sprang up like a Jack-in-the-box that the children thought it was another game. But her face was poppy-red and then white as tissue paper. Without further protest she slumped forward with her hair making a circle on the moss-green carpet. Moving without hysteria Nora swooped down, turning her over on her back, while speaking to her elder child in quick command.

“Rosamund, go and get Annie at once!”

Sobered the child hastened to do her bidding, while Jennifer sat with open mouth, watching like a dishevelled cherub.

      *      *      *      

Later, several minutes later, Sara was lying in a prone line on the Chesterfield. The children had disappeared and there was a strong smell of ammonia in the air. It was so pungent that Sara sat up.

“Lie down,” said Nora, giving her a strong backward push. “You brought it on yourself. Annie has telephoned Doctor Mann. She got him at his own nursing-home and he’ll be here in half an hour.”

“Damn,” said Sara violently, “see him yourself, will you, and tell him I’m not afraid of open or closed spaces—”

“He’s not that kind of a doctor,” said Nora with great composure, “and if I were you I’d have a good cry.”

“Have one yourself,” said Sara with the rudeness that was a substitution for Nora’s remedy. “I wouldn’t dream of crying. It stops up your nose, and spoils your eyes—”

“Well, whether you like it or not, you’ve got to undress and let Doctor Mann examine you.”

“Hell,” said Sara, rising with a quickness that held no backwash of a faint. But she went obediently out, with Nora following in placid determination. Decidedly Sara had shown a good deal of temperament for one morning. Nora knew why. Sara was very ill.

      *      *      *      

Doctor Mann was unique and sheer interest in him made Sara forget her pain. From his head to his toes there was not an ounce of truckle in him. Neither did he sit by the bed to attempt any social contact that might bridge the way to professional change. He did not sit down at all, but loomed above the bed like a square block. Unlike most men who seem to have a monopoly of narrow hips, he had enormous thighs, broad shoulders, while managing to retain a flat stomach. Under his red-brown face ran a glittering white circle suggesting that angels must have snatched his collar from a steriliser to lay it round his neck. His brown eyes were bright holding a glint of humour. Sara thought he might be the type who could roar with laughter over an obvious joke, or do something foolish on April Fool’s Day. It was impossible to imagine him paying a tribute to delicate mental wit, or listening for a second to neurasthenic nonsense.

She gave him no trouble. Her pain was an old story and she thought she knew all about it. The doctor appeared to think little of what the patient had to say for himself, and to her vague remark that she had adhesions, he indicated by a wave of his hand, he would see for himself. Decidedly a practical man, emanating the air of a mechanic looking for a knock in the engine.

While he prodded with surprisingly gentle fingers, Nora gazed dreamily out of the window. When Sara jumped satisfactorily, he gave a contented snort. Then he listened to her heart, and gave a disgusted snort. With the stethoscope dangling from his ears he said, “turn over.”

Sara obliged, and lay flat on her face, trying to keep laughter from bubbling in her lungs. The hoist he gave her glamorous gown suggested he disdained any difference between sail-cloth and delicate silk. Instantly she formed the lowest opinion of Mrs. Mann.

“Breathe,” he commanded, as if it was a voluntary process and she had stopped to annoy him. Doing her best he did not reward her with compliments.

“You’re a poor breather,” he said dismissingly. “You’ve been smoking too many cigarettes.”

“Yes,” said Sara in baffling agreement.

“Breathe again,” he commanded. “In, out! In, out! Now, say ninety-nine.”

“Ninety-nine,” she said conversationally. What did she know of ninety-nine? Some inner itch made her strain to elucidate. Ah, yes! There were ninety and nine safe in the fold! It was a dolorous tale about a poor little lamb—

“Say ninety-nine!”

“Ninety-nine,” she mused out loud. The poor little lamb was so hopelessly outnumbered. It must have been solitary away from the fields of gold. Dear, dear Murray! She hoped he wouldn’t be like the lamb, because he did not believe in Shepherds—

“Say ninety-nine,” bawled Doctor Mann.

“I’ve said it twice,” Sara reminded him.

“You’ve whispered it. Use your lungs, girl! Like this! Ninety-nine!”

His illustration would have done credit to a sergeant-major. Sara was glad she was lying on her face and could not meet Nora’s eye.

“Ninety-nine,” she said in faithful imitation of his voice.

“That’s better. Now you can turn over.”

Lying on her pillow right side up, she avoided meeting Nora’s eyes, knowing they were both near a capitulation to school-girl giggles, so she stared at Doctor Mann’s collar and longed to replace it with a nice brown stripe, more in harmony with his face and neck. The white circle had a soulless glitter.

“Well,” he said collapsing his stethoscope, “there’s something the matter with you. You’d better have a full Clinic.”

“The pain is in my stomach,” insisted Sara, but Doctor Mann was not used to opposition.

“You can have a pain in your ankle because you’ve got the toothache.”

Sara felt snubbed.

“I have adhesions. My doctor in—”

“I’ll find out for myself.” His tone indicated he had no faith in his colleagues. “Be at my office tomorrow morning without any breakfast. After that I’ll make an appointment at the hospital for you to have an Electro Cardiograph made of your heart. Have you ever had rheumatic fever, scarlet—”

“No, but I’ve had typhoid.”

“That wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sara sweetly.

Doctor Mann stabbed her with his eyes.

“Do you want your pain cured?” It was palpable he wanted a plain yes or no, and would not cope with any tomfoolery.

She looked at Nora and met eyes of definite command.

“Yes,” said Nora for her.

“Yes,” said Sara with resignation.

“Then do as I say, and the next morning I’ll do the gall, and then you must enter my nursing-home for a Basal Metabolism test, and an internal examination.”

“It’s quite a programme,” said Sara with an air of a woman looking for her engagement book.

“Do you want anything for the pain now?”

“No, thank you very much. It’s better now. Like the toothache that goes when you get to the dentist.”

Doctor Mann looked at her exasperated face, and Sara knew he was really seeing her for the first time. He appeared to halt as if he had experienced a rare moment of indecision.

“Are you always as thin as that?” he asked with definite dissatisfaction. “You look wishy-washy.”

“Yes,” said Sara with eyes that defied the accusation. “I’m all washed up.” It was the first time she had ever used the expression, but to get on with Doctor Mann it was necessary to meet him more than halfway. Coupled with her humour was growing temper that she should be ordered around like that, and probed with eyes like an X-ray flash.

“D’y’sleep?” he asked running it all together. Nora stepped coolly forward, answering as she might for Jennifer or Rosamund.

“No, she doesn’t. She walks round a good deal at night.”

“What for?” he snapped, as if the procedure was the height of nonsense. Sara lay back with the conversation out of her hands. Doctor Mann had dismissed her, to talk to Nora as if the patient was out of earshot.

“It’s because the pain is bad at night,” said Nora without mentioning which particular pain kept Sara awake. “Would it be possible to give her a slight sedative?”

There appeared to be confidence between the two. Nora must have had her babies like a soldier to get such immediate response from her doctor. He snatched a prescription pad from his pocket with the air of a man who could capitulate when he saw fit.

“There,” he said after an impressive scribble, “get that for your friend, and see that she’s at my surgery tomorrow morning. She’s in poor shape.”

Sara bit her lip but the doctor was gone before anyone could tender the civility of seeing him out. Nora stood staring at the prescription until the front door banged, when Sara literally spat out her held breath.

“Nora, I could kill you! Now see what you’ve let me in for. The man is a machine. The only thing he didn’t suggest was a dandruff-test.”

“Sara, I’m sorry, but I think it will do you good. You’ve lost pounds—and—and—”

Nora looked so worried and full of self-blame that Sara laughed with repudiating humour.

“What’s on the little chit?” she asked stepping out of bed in her eager way. “Let me see! Oh, twelve luminal, to be taken with a glass of hot milk at ten-thirty. Heavens, he’s even deciding my bed hour. Tests, tests, I don’t want any tests.”

“I’ll go and see you twice a day,” said Nora consolingly.

Sara almost screamed. “Shut up, Nor! I can see you coming in with the flowers, and asking for a vase. Anyway I’ll get the luminal on the way home from the lunch, and tonight I’ll positively wallow in sleep.” For a moment she stared at the slip of paper, as if it held magic powers. “Just think,” she said in a musing voice, “the power of pills. Twelve sleeps in twelve pills! One sleep in twelve!”

“Sara,” protested Nora with all a healthy person’s fear of such a remark. “I’ll take them and give you one at a time.”

Sara laughed in light scorn. “Don’t be a fool, Nor! In spite of the world’s worst, I’d be hard put to take that escape. Tonight I might lie down in despair, and wake up big with hope. Why—why—Murray’s wife might die! She’s as mortal as I am, isn’t she?”

Nora looked shocked, watching Sara pull open a drawer and lift a pile of delicate clothes.

“You’re not hoping for it, are you?” she asked severely.

“Well, I just thought of it,” she answered, like a person prepared to examine her lowest thoughts. “But remind me, Nor, to take an English paper with the most obituaries.”

“Sara, you’re awful!”

“Not at all,” said Sara, making a shimmering curve with a pair of satin knickers. “I’m just vulgarly honest, Nor. My gutter side! I happen to know what I want, and I wouldn’t dream of sitting delicately by to observe all the nice feelings that consume so much time. If I saw her death notice, by hook or by crook I’d take the house next door, and when he was returning from the cemetery—”

“He might cremate,” said Nora, interested into considering every possibility.

Sara shook her head with real decision. “No, Murray is not a cremating husband. Some men could do it, and not think it was arson, but not Murray. When I saw him coming back from the cemetery, I’d stroll out and say, ‘Murray, darling, fancy seeing you here.’ ”

Sara threw off her night-dress and picked up her girdle with the sleek movements of a woman enjoying the programme she had imagined for herself.

“You think he’d see you when his wife was newly dead?”

“M’mm,” said Sara, “because I’d see him, and because he’d left her in marble, I’d be just the nice warm room he was looking for.”

Sara continued to dress with the restoration of light exuberant movement. Her skin had lost its bleak tinge, and her eyes were full of indelicate anticipation. She looked lawless, supple with knowledge, a vital woman who had left the age of innocence, and knew that the age of adventure was a much greater thing. Nora sighed, clutching at a more conventional picture of Sara.

“You frighten me, Sara. Some day you’ll get into trouble.”

“I would have enjoyed it,” she said agreeably. “Don’t be shocked, Nor. Lots of people feel like that only they never admit it. The other night I was having a heart to heart over the fish with an awfully nice man, and do you know what he said, even as he was looking at his wife? He was quite detached about it, as if his mind was projected out to consider himself as a widower. He said, ‘you know, Sara, if my wife died tomorrow I can’t see myself broken-hearted. We get on very well; we’re good lovers and good companions, but if she died, I’d remember her very well, and be sure that grief was a waste of time.’ ”

“Isn’t it caddish—”

“Of course, conventionally so! But laws were not made for honest men, or conventions for people who are truly sure of their feelings. My dinner-partner and I happened to blend in one of those rare moments—”

“Men always talk to you like that, Sara.”

“Because I’m interested, and not shocked, and this man had been in the last war and he hated humbug. He said any man who had been brought up to a daily bath, and then had to be deloused, can always call a spade a spade, but we agreed that honesty was a strong luxury, and few people could bear it because they were so very ‘naice.’ I think I’m tough. The only thing I can’t bear is a man who makes large spitting noises, and I often reflect on the volume of men’s throats. I think it goes with big business. Other than that I have no antipathies, and I don’t die if there’s a hair in the soup. A too fastidious person can never enjoy love—”

“Murray was very fastidious.”

“Of course, in certain essentials, but every now and then he gave vent to forthright opinion that delighted me. In many ways he was realist, and like my dinner-partner he knew he’d be lousy if he had to go to war, and he would expect me to love him through everything. So life being as it is, what’s the use of exquisite delicacy— What’ll I wear to the lunch, Nor?”

“Something dark,” murmured Nora, “it’s a dull day.”

      *      *      *      

“Eat this,” commanded Doctor Mann, passing Sara a bowl with a tablespoon standing in a greyish mixture that seemed to suck it in.

Sara received the bowl sitting on a chromium-plated chair with an amazing sense of spring. Outside the sun shone, illuminating the glitter of porcelain, the glass case of instruments, and the white dress of a nurse, whose feminine curves were subdued behind starch. She looked like a modern priestess waiting to pass the sacrificial knife when the victim had partaken of the bowl. As Sara tugged at the spoon, she was reminded of decorators, stepladders, and pails of white-wash in dismantled rooms.

“Eat it,” ordered the doctor, who apparently did not think it necessary to explain any of the processes of his tests.

“Do I eat it all?” she asked incredulously.

“Every bit,” he snapped.

Tentatively she tasted, feeling the mixture flat and gritty on her tongue, as if the ceiling had been dissolved in a pudding bowl.

“It’s a little nauseating,” she said pleasantly.

“If you bring that up, you’ll have to eat some more.”

“Oh,” she said gulping the first mouthful and deciding it should stay down. Opening her mouth to its widest capacity, she began to eat, amused that she could accommodate the tablespoon so easily. The doctor and nurse watched her closely, upsetting her social sense and making her conscious of the discourtesy of eating alone. When the bowl was empty she actually saw a gleam of approval in the doctor’s eyes. But she was not in a mood for applause.

“What now?” she asked coldly.

“This,” he said waving the nurse forward with a half-pint of milk in a large tumbler. She thought it might wash the grit from her mouth, until she saw the nurse stir up a residue of fine powder. “Now,” ordered Doctor Mann, as it spun to the top. Resignedly she drank to the bottom of the glass, and it left her with a childish wish to wipe her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Very good! Now Miss Fletcher will bring you to the X-ray room.”

He examined her light summer dress with its broad belt. “Take off that belt! It has a metal buckle, and if you wear corsets, remove them too.”

He was gone through a door, leaving her to peel off her girdle under the Nurse’s disinterested eye. She felt strange with the partial disrobing, and stood seeking a place for the silk and elastic trifle, but the nurse seized it, tossing it aside.

“This way please!”

Sara started after her, annoyed with the sleek run of her stockings down her legs. She had to go hippity-hop like a child, making an undignified entrance in a room suggestive of the Inquisition. There was a long steel table, a steel screen, while strange wires, dynamos and other superstructures were suspended overhead. Instantly the light went off, and she found herself blinking under a spit and spark darting venomously near the ceiling. When they were quite satisfied Doctor Mann seemed to snatch, and thrust her in front of the screen. In the dark he swooped to the vicinity of her abdomen, while the nurse loomed out like the white figure of the Chief Inquisitor. Detached and disinterested in her human heart and nerves, they acted as if it was their job to twist and turn, torture and burn, and for that reason they would be most efficient.

“Fine, fine,” said Doctor Mann. “Now get up on the table.”

The light came on again and they all blinked. Sara walked to the table still impeded by the run of silk down her legs. The table was high, and it was a long time since she had done any mountaineering.

“Get up, get up,” he said, as if he expected her to leap. She stood firm, prepared to fight for the last remnants of her dignity.

“I can’t get up,” she said disdainfully. “Bring me something to stand on.”

The nurse crackled at the audacity of a patient giving orders, but she brought a block, suggestive of the heads of Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn.

Sara stepped up, and lay down on a steel table, to be strapped at once so tightly, that breathing was seriously inconvenienced. When a flat object was slammed down on her stomach, she knew he wanted pictures of the white-wash. Imagination rocked towards some wild Inferno—utter darkness—prone and helplessly strapped—the spit and hiss on the inky ceiling—the relentless hands—the severity of voices—the mass of machinery—the Iron Maiden—

“Fine, fine,” said Doctor Mann, hauling back the strap to loosen it, and momentarily suffocating her. “Now come back to the surgery.” In his zeal for tests he was inclined to hurry her.

“Now,” he said indicating a stool, where he sat beside her grasping her bare arm and seeking a vein with a glimmer in his gimlet eyes. The nurse handed a needle to which was attached a small phial. Calmly, Sara endured the entry of the needle, and sickeningly she watched the phial fill up with her blood. There came an icy recession from her head, an instinct to retch, and a dizzy swirl to some black place.

“Put your head between your knees,” he commanded, while an unloving hand aided the suggestion, but she retained enough consciousness to know he got his quota of blood before he released her. When he saw her face he permitted a dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia, mixing it himself with such energy that the potion was inclined to slop over. Sara drank with a wry face. On top of the white-wash, she could think of more appetising potions.

“Now that’s all for this morning. Be here again tomorrow! Get this prescription filled and sleep on your right side—”

“How shall I ensure sleeping on my right side?” she asked smoothly.

“Do your best,” he said dismissingly. “Now go to the hospital where I made an appointment for Electro Cardiograph— Ask for—”

In a daze Sara listened to a volley of directions, feeling that her life was completely out of her own hands.

      *      *      *      

Sara rapped at a door and was told to enter. She had walked a long hospital corridor with bored indifference, but now her feet were rooted to the threshold.

An Electro-electric— There was nothing in the room but the chair! It was how she remembered an account of an American execution! In this room stood the chair and one nurse occupied with rolling some charts. The one curling under her hands looked like a child’s drawing of a range of mountains, with an occasional ascent to a higher peak. Was this a chart of the human heart? But she had no eyes for anything but the chair. There it stood in relentless austerity, with incredibly sinister straps dangling from arms and legs.

But the nurse was smiling, coming forward with every intention of making it easy.

“Come in, dear, come in.”

Sara held her legs from retreat, and strolled forward as nonchalantly as possible.

“Sit down, dear,” said the nurse at once. Nurses seemed to vary. Unlike Doctor Mann’s hard-boiled surgery piece, this one had a come-to-mother voice, and had evidently developed her manner on the premise that all patients would be witless.

“Where shall I sit?” asked Sara coolly, though she had a distinct feeling of possessing no knees.

“In the chair, of course, dear. That’s what you came for.”

“Yes, in the chair,” she agreed.

She sat down, and her hands and wrists met the coil of straps waiting to fasten her in. The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast, going to the chair with a few simple privileges! She was defrauded, with an empty stomach and nothing but a promise of volts to fill it up. At least the current was not on yet. No, she remembered, the switch was concealed, and operated by some prearranged signal from the warden. Soon the current would come on and she would spring against the straps like a thing. What had she done? She had kidnapped the millionaire’s baby or strangled Murray to death? Where was the chaplain to give her the last rites? Where were the reporters to see how she died? No, she was not ready yet. The nurse had only fastened her wrists, but there was implacability in the way she arranged her body to suit the chair. Then she looked up with an apologetic shrug.

“I’m sorry, dear, I want the bare knee—this little wet sponge— Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”

Without yea or nay, Sara’s stockings were lowered for the second time that morning. They ran down with a dry thin sensation, promptly obliterated by the damp feel of the sponge. Yes, she thought despairingly, water is a better conductor! The nurse looked her over and gave her a few pats. Then she happened to meet Sara’s eyes, making her stare for an arrested moment.

“What big eyes you’ve got! I believe you’re frightened, dear. Don’t worry. It only takes a few minutes and then it’s over. It won’t hurt.”

So it would not be instantaneous! Sara’s imagination boiled again as she watched the nurse walk towards the switch with outstretched hand. She strained, taut as a captive-spring that must leap when the current came on. Almost the thing they called life became jolted out of her so that she could see what it really was, and for a second she felt she understood dementia. Then the click was over and the nurse had turned round. She was alive, and nothing had torn through her body like a ravisher of life. She relaxed, feeling her hands grow moist with sweat, and she reacted with a wish to throw herself down and howl like a tormented child, but by biting her lips she sat still until the nurse chose to unstrap her.

“There, dear, it’s all over. Nothing to it!”

Weak with reaction Sara bent to her stockings. “No,” she whispered mentally, “nothing to anything, if we only knew what we faced.”

She had an instinct to give vent to a few full-flavoured oaths. As it was she swept out, and gave tongue to the waiting Nora. But though her friend was concerned, and amused at Sara’s wild similes, she was implacable in her attitude that they were adopting the right course. Sara was cornered and bound to her tests, and not even Nora would acknowledge that because the human body reflected the mind, Sara’s was protesting the most fevered walk of its life.

CHAPTER NINE

Nora and Bob drove Sara through the town towards Doctor Mann’s nursing-home. The way was noisy, through the rattle of a street huddled on a waterfront. Sounds of summer, and gutter children shrilling through their last waking moments, fell on the air. In the remnants of a long twilight, Sara picked out some motley of a seaport town. There was a French sailor with a pompom on his hat, Assyrian families lolling on doorsteps, and shadowy glimpses of Chinamen ironing in shirts. Everywhere there were girls making a raucous parade, walking slowly or fast, with a provocative flick of flimsy skirts.

“Filthy street,” shuddered Nora, with a native’s abhorrence of the worst part of a town.

“Oh, I love it,” said Sara. “It’s a big-town street. So many faces! Slant-eyed and sloe-eyed!”

“Den of iniquity,” growled Bob. “What’s she going to hospital for anyway?”

“I wonder myself,” answered Sara. “I haven’t had a pain since I started the tests.”

Nora’s voice was reproachful. “She’s going to be put right once and for all. She’s not been at all well, and that faint—”

“Looks all right to me,” said Bob obtusely, turning his car from the crowded street, towards an elevated section of the town. “Is she going to be there long?”

“Two days and two nights,” said Sara flippantly. “Tomorrow that Torquemada wants to see how much oxygen I draw in—”

“Basal Metabolism,” elucidated Nora.

“What’s that?” asked Bob in a horrified tone.

“A test to see if I have endocrine insufficiency,” said Sara, in a voice strongly reminding of Doctor Mann. “You’d better come in with me, Bob, my sweet. I’m sure you’ve got a pituitary imbalance. You’re much too big.”

Bob grunted and drew up at a big square house on a street once exclusively residential, and now holding Doctor Mann’s nursing-home. It had a bleak front with blinds well down, showing mere seams of light.

“Will I go in with you, Sara?” asked Nora tentatively.

Sara stepped out. “No thanks, Nor, I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Bob,” she said as he followed with a neat dressing-case. While Sara rang a bell, he stood looking down at her in the shadowy light.

“Anything I can do, Sara?” he asked pulling his tie rather helplessly.

“No, my sweet,” she said soothingly. “It’s just a lot of nonsense—”

“Nora’s nonsense,” he said in a worried voice. “I told her she had no business to persuade you— She’s got used to deciding for Rosamund and Jennifer—”

“And now you and me,” smiled Sara. “Put your foot down, Bob,” she suggested knowing it was the last thing that could occur. “Oh, good-evening, I’m Mrs. Colville—”

“Come inside, Madam,” invited a maid, shutting Bob out as if she was quite accustomed to parting patient and superfluous escort.

Ushered into a small office, Sara was received by Doctor Mann’s matron.

“You’re Mrs. Colville? In for Basal Metabolism and examination?”

“Yes,” Sara agreed with eyes riveted on the loveless looking nurse in front of her. The matron was a medicated woman, bleak with withered flesh. Sara wondered if she had ever been touched with a gracious hand. Ankles, wrists, and neck elongated in the same stringy way. Dark hair was streaked with grey, and eyes blackened Sara with a hue of watered-ink. She had a long intruding nose, fashioned to precede her like Paul Pry on the spy, and her voice was small and cold as an ice-bag.

“You understand you’re not to get out of bed on any account before the Basal Metabolism? It’s necessary to have the body utterly rested. You’ll ring for anything you want. After a quiet night—”

“Yes,” said Sara pleasantly, “I understand.”

“Then come this way.” The matron pussy-footed ahead, walking like a woman afraid of her heels. As they went Sara met smells, cosy and fused, but she managed to separate antiseptic, ether, and an aftermath of cooking. Dimmed lights made the hall look drab, and the staircase which they mounted appeared to be scrubbed to the boards. As they reached the top someone began to cough. It was more than a cough; it was a strangle, beginning somewhere in the pit of a tired old stomach, and gurgling past lungs until it reached a throat where it remained for another strangle. The sounds were loose, horrible, suggestive of mucus round a death-rattle, until old breath mustered for a desperate clearance. Then as the owner of the cough began to spit, Sara’s face puckered with distaste and she wanted to put her fingers in her ears and run out into the night. The one thing that could make her quail completely was here in monstrous proportions! This spitting was epic, crescendoing to a peak of strangulation, until it exploded from lips lost to all sense of restraint. Then there was a slow scrape, as if a pan was being painstakingly shoved along a porcelain table.

“What is it?” she gasped, following the matron into a bright bare room.

“What is what?” asked the cold small voice.

“That awful cough!”

The eyes like watered ink considered the patient for Basal Metabolism.

“Does he cough?” she asked, as if listening for a sound that was not there. “You must mean old Mr. Morley. He’s been in for ten months. Broken leg that did not set—age and ether pneumonia, but he’s much better. His cough is much better. But he’s eighty-four—”

“Better?” questioned Sara incredulously.

“We don’t notice it,” said the matron aloofly. “Shall I ring for the night-nurse to assist you?”

“No thank you, it’s not at all necessary.”

“You must ring for anything you want, when you’re once in bed. To be quite rested for the Basal Metabolism—”

“Yes, I understand,” she said ready to agree to anything. The cough had begun again, more desperately than before, and horror-stricken she knew she was anchored beside it. It came in three stages. First the horrible rack imprisoned in the body, then the throat strangle, and the final wild expectoration. The matron pussy-footed out, as if her intense quietude must assure rest to all who slept beneath the roof. Softly, Sara closed the door, wishing she could climb up and shut the transom as well. Old Mr. Morley was making the scrape with the pan, and there was a sound of collapse and weary groans. “Oh my, oh my, oh my!” he kept saying, when enough breath was returned to his lungs. It was childish and pitiful, and a mute rebellion to senile life.

There was nothing in the room but two skeleton chairs, a dressing-table, and the spindle-iron of a hospital bed. She knew they were high, but this one looked as if Rosamund and Jennifer could walk underneath and not bump their heads. Springing up on the hard mattress, she dangled her feet like a child. It was very pristine, with two hard white lights seeming designed to illumine every skin spot, and to aggravate insomnia. She sat erect, assailed with emptiness and a strange bare loneliness, accentuated by the impersonal atmosphere and the echoes of the old man’s monstrous cough. She felt projected to a hard cold place, where disinterested vassals struggled with the life-force, while repudiating the warmth that went with it. They delivered babies, with no thought of the love-tangle of a man and a woman, and they detained breath from final peace, when it had become a violation of living. It was no place to think of Murray, except in a cold white way, with acceptance of the hard edge of separation. Then she saw a piece of beauty in the room, in the picture of a baby smiling from smooth dimpled flesh, with a stay of waving arms and legs. Doctor Mann took maternity as well, and some imagination, other than his own, must have hung it there to bridge the agonised wait of labour. The baby was vital, springing with life, illustrating the fruit of perfect union. Sara dropped her face in her hands and sat rigid, but there was nothing the old man could not violate. The cough began again, and now she felt she could follow the stages as if she had learned them by heart. Rack, strangle, spit, and then the scrape of the pan. The weary, “oh my, oh my,” was an extra, expelled only when there was enough breath left in the body.

Sara went to bed and began her quiet night, diving under the clothes whenever the cough began. Between lulls she tried to read, having supplied herself with a weighty volume on Italy in the Golden Age, and a very up to date murder. In the cell-like room the Renaissance march was too brilliant. What could these bare walls know of frescoes, or Michelangelo lying on his back for four years, to paint a ceiling? Neither was the sport of the Borgias appropriate, or their preoccupation with the coupling of mares and stallions. She sampled the murder, but the victim had been ‘rubbed out’ and the dialogue was full of strange American slang that seemed foreign to her ear. When she reached a throat cut from ear to ear, she tossed the book aside. She could only follow the sleuth when the murder was tidy, with one neat bullet hole. She sighed and manicured her nails most unnecessarily, and examined her eyebrows in a magnifying-mirror, without finding a solitary hair to tweeze. She combed her curls, and found it was only two o’clock. During a paroxysm from the old man, she fancied she heard a knock, but she was under the clothes, and would not dream of coming up until the last spit was over. When she emerged she saw a nurse looking down.

“Oh, you’re not asleep,” she said reproachfully.

Complaints died on Sara’s lips. The nurse was nice, young, gentle, with a small shadowed face that came from turning night into day. Her eyes were big and brown, and held a backwash of the miseries that she tended. Sara smiled, without rancour for the dreadful old man.

“No, I’m not asleep. How do you go to sleep here? I was under the clothes so I couldn’t hear the old man cough.”

In that respect the nurse was as questioning as the matron.

“I don’t hear it,” she said, “you get used to it.”

“After how long?” asked Sara, with some interest.

“A few weeks,” said the nurse vaguely. “You must go to sleep. You have Basal Metabolism in the morning, and it’s essential to be rested.”

“All right,” said Sara, “I’ll take a luminal.”

“Did the doctor leave an order?”

“I don’t know,” said Sara carelessly, “but there’s some in my bag. Pass me—”

“Oh I couldn’t, dear,” said the nurse in a shocked voice. “Unless the doctor left an order. I’ll see if you like—”

“But he gave them to me a few days ago,” protested Sara a little impatiently.

“But he left no order here,” the nurse said, gently firm, “but I’ll ring him up—”

“No, don’t bother,” sighed Sara. It was worse than the Civil Service. Someone must make a memorandum of it.

“I’ll come back, and rub your head,” said the nurse with great humanity. “I can’t stay now, there’s a woman with hemorrhage, and a man with a tube—”

Sara dismissed her with a gracious smile. “Don’t bother about me then. I’m really not sick. Only a little tired—”

“But you must go to sleep,” persisted a voice as if it was entirely responsible.

“All right,” said Sara, putting out her light. “Good-night, and thank you very much.”

The nurse withdrew with a sacramental hush, taking infinite time to prevent Sara from hearing a peep from the knob. It would have been impressive had not the old man accompanied it with his shattering routine. Sara wanted to laugh, and for a moment she was inclined to get out of bed and help herself liberally to sedative. But in some ways she was grooved in an acceptance that made her lie sleepless, light, and drained, like a ghost of a woman held back from insensibility by the rack and rattle of a suffering old man. She knew a completely white night, and she saw the seams round the blind glimmer with light. Tired and tense, she could not relax, braced as she was for the dreadful assaults of coughing. When at last she hovered near the top layer of sleep, the nurse arrived to wash her.

“Oh,” she accused, “you haven’t slept! I know by your face.”

“No,” said Sara remotely, disinclined for conversation. In a prone line she endured the nurse’s ministrations, restraining a wish to snatch the washcloth and give herself a good hard scrub. The gentle hand of the nurse made the bed-bath the lightest lick and a promise, but an alcohol rub woke her completely, and she lay on hearing the place wake with a sick fretful breath, overlaid with the impersonal efficiency of quick-stepping nurses.

      *      *      *      

She was made to feel most unpopular with her doctor. He was mechanical enough in his surgery, but when he entered with the starched satellites, he seemed ringed around aloofly as a planet. That pompous hospital parade, necessitating someone to pass this, and another to hold that, with nurses answering the sharp queries of the master mind! It gave the illusion of the patient rendered suddenly witless, and incapable of answering for himself. And the matron’s watered-ink eyes and Paul Pry nose, defying Sara to say she hadn’t slept through any fault of the home! Yet they all knew she hadn’t slept, as someone had made a memorandum of it for them all to read. Mutely they reproached her for foolishness, and there was not a face to admit she was a moderately rested woman until she was condemned to sleep opposite an old man wheezing and rattling towards the grave. Their ears had been immunised and they did not hear. That it had left some effect on her Basal Metabolism was evident. When a machine was wheeled in, like a giant tea-service on a waggon, one of the satellites put a clip on her nose, while Doctor Mann put a bit between her teeth and commanded her to breathe. Her shallow intake of oxygen was clearly displeasing to them all, making them gather up their apparatus indicating she was very minus in her glands. Doctor Mann glared from above another glittering white collar and said he would take her Metabolism again tomorrow morning. He further said she was in poor shape and needed a complete rest. Large hands indicated the walls of his home, suggesting hospitality wide open to her, should she have the sense to co-operate. Sara lowered her lashes with palpable dismissal, and they left her, smeared with the stigma of nerves.

The old man apparently saved the full vigour of his cough for the night. By day he seemed capable of distraction with a softly tuned wireless. Listening, Sara sensed he was very sorry for himself by his prolonged session with an hour for shut-ins. There was a monotone of prayer, and hymns full of nostalgia for the New Jerusalem. There were occasional world-uniting ones like “Abide with Me,” remindful of many things—old scenes, dead faces, and the uplifting of the spirit. Behind closed eyes, she saw a march of dead faces, and ached with her knowledge of unreplying lips. She had the richness of good memory, but in the world of affairs it made her feel like flotsam, inconsequential and unpossessed. How would Murray feel when he came to eventide, and could he hear this hymn without a wild rush of the spirit? Under her lids she felt the spring of tears, but they did not get beyond a control permitting no more than a mist of outward sorrow. Across the hall came a soothing talk on resignation, and the old man protested out loud, “oh my, oh my, oh my!” He was eighty-four and unresigned to the evening of his life. Resignation, the last despair of the wretched? Yes, that was true. It implied lingering in the shadows, and not swinging out for a touch of the sun. She had no wish for that. Life was sweet, brother, and who would wish to die? Feet spoke of the palliation of work, and she longed to be well and rested, and back at her typewriter again. Her witless parade was over, and the time had come to gather up her strands, and direct them to her own volition. What hysteria had rushed her into a Clinic from Doctor Mann, just because Nora thought it was wise? It was the attitude of going with the crowd without mind of her own. Then a hand on the dials caught a note of Big Ben and she was swamped with nostalgia for London. It was her home! Could Murray keep her out of England just because she might meet him face to face with Noel and his wife? Could she take it—

Then Nora came with a fresh face, behind a sheaf of flowers, and it was just as Sara had anticipated. She asked for a vase, and began arranging the flowers herself. Sara was still sufficiently collected to tell her about her restful night, and the disgrace of her Basal Metabolism. When the old man obligingly put on a show, Nora stood holding a flower like a baton.

“Did that go on all night?” she asked with her lips curling back from her teeth.

“That’s a mild example,” said Sara, with the same expression.

“But it’s awful, and you’re—”

“Allergic to spitting,” said Sara adapting herself to hospital talk. “I suppose if I took up my bed and walked, Doctor Mann would refuse to deliver your next baby.”

“There are other doctors,” said Nora nobly, but her voice indicated a fear of irregularity.

Sara shrugged under lace-covered shoulders. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m committed, and after tomorrow he’ll put a diagnosis together, which I know very well, and I’ll pay his bill and won’t do as he says! Go out, Nor, and get me a few murders, like a good girl, but don’t bring any slit throats. I’ve nothing to read. The Golden Age is too brilliant, and I’ve come to a spot where Michelangelo is painting the Expulsion from Eden.”

Nora went willingly, and returned with an assortment of murder by gun, rapier and weed-killer. Resignedly Sara passed the afternoon with a glamorous crook, so full of magnetism, that a gunman’s Moll stole into his bedroom and scraped his comb for a lock of his hair. Then she was ‘rubbed out’ for infidelity, because her gunman lover believed in sin.

At five Bob and Nora arrived together, and without greeting Bob stood looking at Sara’s shadowed face. Something he saw, made him weight the narrow bed and put his arms around her.

“God, Sara, what have they been doing to you?”

It was not unusual for Bob to be affectionate with her, and she permitted herself the comfort of arms. Nora smiled, as if she would willingly concede all the balm he could contribute. Sara sighed and cuddled against him, as sorry for herself as the old man.

“I couldn’t sleep, Bob. The old man coughed all night.”

“God, that’s awful,” he said with immense sympathy. For something he had never known he rocked her in his arms as he might Jennifer or Rosamund. “Can I get you anything, Sara? Would you like a chocolate?”

Sara chuckled with relieving humour. A chocolate was Bob’s idea of palliation for women and children in distress.

“Fool,” said Nora with calm affection. “Sara, the last time he brought me chocolates was when I had an abscessed tooth and couldn’t open my mouth for a sip of milk. Bob was so sorry he bought nut and hard centres to tempt me.”

“Poor Bob,” said Sara giving him a little pat. Large, good-natured and insensate, he loosened one hand to pull his tie. Light goading attacks always came when the two of them were together.

      *      *      *      

They had taken away Sara’s books, and the toilet implements that made her tops. Stripped of a glamorous bed-jacket, she lay still under the hard lines of hospital covers. The night was down, soft and full of sound, but all of its edges were blurred. Even the rack of the old man had ceased to be amplified through the transom. With a luminal and hot milk inside her, she waited for a dark drop to oblivion, but she seemed to have reached a point where the mild sedative had little effect. Her head felt as if it had been scooped out in the centre, leaving a skull, covered with a tight scalp, and eyes controlled by a mechanical device for the rise and fall of her lids. She had a sense of being one of Rosamund’s dolls, carried to a strange place and abandoned to lie glassily still. Then from outside came the scrape of tires, the sound of a car braked in agitation and an assault on the doorbell demanding the facilities within. There was a sense of people entering, with loud voices, overlaid with the reproving wush-wush whispers of the matron’s ice-bag voice. With ears down, Sara crowded into her pillow, but the surge mounted, coming upstairs with an assortment of light and heavy feet. The sound of water began and the clatter of a hospital working in the night. A man talked at the top of his voice, until he was cowed by the matron’s bleak dismissing whispers. Somebody rushed down the stairs, dashed out, and started a car with the inept touch of a mind somewhere else. Then, as if not to be left out of so much activity the old man began to rattle and spit, announcing his still senile presence. Determinedly, Sara stayed apart, sunk in the wish to sleep. Murray could enter now, and she could only stare, and leave him untouched. Then she remembered his deep sense of fatherhood, his capacity to oust the lover, and rock her sweetly to sleep. A great sigh that was almost a sob was drawn in, until it was expelled with a restless turn of her head. As if her woman’s plaint had reached another, response came in a long low moan, coiling through the hall, through the transom, like a wandering lament. Taut under the clothes, she questioned what suffering such a sound entailed? With raised head she listened, until she heard it again, louder, plaintive, more expressive of pain, and large body-distress. It held the weird plaint of pigeons, nesting in the eaves. It began with a wish towards stifling, crescendoing with a repudiation of restraint. Some elemental had invaded the hospital, moaning with lower life.

Sara sat up and buried her face in her hands. She thought of a test Doctor Mann did not know about—“tormentum insomnia” and the art of driving the accused through corridors until dementia came through loss of sleep. The moans returned, so fraught with misery that she had to know the cause. Very softly she turned on her light and tinkled the bell on her bedside table, but it was some time before the night-nurse appeared.

“What is it?” she asked, as if the nurse must say without elaboration. Then she knew herself without being told. As if the sounds did not speak for themselves. She had been an uncomprehending fool.

“A confinement,” said the nurse at once. “We weren’t expecting her for a few days, but now it’s on. You must go to sleep, dear. Don’t let your luminal lose its effect.”

Nurse and patient regarded each other, with the moans lamenting through the half-open door.

“How can I sleep?” asked Sara with simple wonder.

The nurse looked accepting. “Some cry and some don’t. This is going to be hard. I think the baby is too big.”

“Oh,” said Sara pitifully, “take the picture in for her to look at.”

“Lie down, dear,” said the nurse soothingly, with a quick glance into Sara’s face. A firm hand covered her up. “I must go,” she said in response to another moan. “There’s not much interval between the pains.”

“Where’s the father?” asked Sara faintly.

“Matron sent him home. They’re always in the way, and needing a drop of brandy.”

Sara smiled, thinking of Murray in such a vigil. He’d be the last man to think of brandy.

“Is the doctor here?”

“No,” smiled the nurse, “of course not. She’s got a long way to go first. We won’t call him until the last stage. Now go to sleep, or Doctor Mann will be so cross.”

“I want to go to sleep,” said Sara almost wildly. But the nurse had gone, to a place where her hands could be of more use.

Sara became a proxy for the woman’s labour. Identification did not come through mere sympathy with pain. She was too tough to let her body become a blotting-paper of concern for suffering she would willingly endure herself. Neither did she expend herself wilfully in going all the way to the birth, although it was indisputable she had the baby with the unknown woman, becoming racked with the animal moans and the final long crescendoes. By the grace of God she might have been on the way to the same experience herself. And not once did she dwell on the repudiated motherhood of the first heedless days of her marriage. There was nothing to regret in that. She and Colin had been vassals to youth, with energy saved for themselves and the world of varied things. Bruce could not give her a child, and she had not craved. Now she was an adult woman who had found her mate, and she was bemused with wish-fulfilment. As the night advanced it became her baby, and a wild question to know where Murray could be. She must call him back, plead, reproach, possess, use any method that would return him to her side. He must share this with her. Where was he? “Stands he or sits he? Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?” A clap of laughter added more outrage to the night, and shocked by unrestraint she clamped a hand over her mouth, with eyes fixed on the door. But no one rushed towards her unseemly laugh. It had coincided too well with the woman’s screech and the old man’s cough. Then she became awed with the life-force and its relentless thrust towards breath. Its separateness held her, impelling her to seek Murray, and tell him children were individuals, apart from parents giving birth. Mothers could die and be discarded, as long as life went on. Something, somebody would succour it, if it was left desolate and fatherless. Parents could not possess. Where was Murray? He must know this. It was his greatest need.

With feet half out of bed she was prepared to seek him when she was reminded of her surroundings by the old man’s cough. Approaching death and approaching birth! One racked and rattled, as the other impelled those tearing screams. She rocked in countless time until the cries became louder, with the echoes of the last joining the beginning of another. A door opened and a muted voice spoke into the telephone. Almost at once there was a sound of vigorous feet, entering as if it were high noon. Doctor Mann had come and they were all shut up with the woman’s hopes. But as yet they did not extend alleviation. The cries went mounting up and up until the peaks were snapped off, and flattened back to throttled groans. At last one rose with pointed noise, until something pushed it finally back. Fumes of chloroform coiled through Sara’s transom, seeming to anaesthetize the very air. Silence dropped like a sooty fall so deep it made a mystery. Even the old man went mute, tranced by the spasm of ultimate birth. Its vassals worked like the wordless dead offering no sound to the night. It was four o’clock and time for day, but blackness settled, before light woke bird and beast. Sara waited, feeling as futureless as the old man, until shock came in the cackling lament of incipient breath. Curious and cutting, it was an ejection, fusing with the resumption of the old man’s cough.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my!” he sighed, while Sara grasped the last remnants of restraint which told her civilised people did not howl out loud in the middle of the night. She held her head in her hands, compressing the yelping screams in her head. Beyond time she barely heard the nurse enter.

“Oh my,” she said, unconsciously echoing the old man. “Mrs. Colville, this is dreadful! I must tell the doctor before he goes.”

Sara did not care. She was spent, spilling over, and yet with the fullness went emptiness, and a scalp too small for her head. She knew she must sleep or shout. Without hesitation she stepped out of bed and fumbled in her bag for another luminal. As she gulped she saw her own face staring from a mirror, like a woman whose veins had been opened by Dracula. She shuddered, feeling as drained and witless as she looked. “The original hag,” she muttered, creeping back, and huddling under the covers as if they must lend her warmth. The sip of water over the luminal made an icy trickle inside her. Now she must sleep, but her lids felt pinned back unable to scrape past her gritty eyes. How long she stared she did not know. Time, consciousness and the personal equation had become a large bewilderment. Then her door opened and she was accused on a heavy breath of chloroform.

“The nurse says you’ve been awake for two nights. This is ridiculous. I didn’t think you were a neurotic woman when I saw you first.”

Sara stared at the man speaking a language she did not know. Her mind had no place for him so he slid off, but he seemed to have some dominion over her body in the way he grasped her arm and left a sharp definite prick. Impossible to tell him she’d taken another luminal!

“There, that’ll settle you,” he said grimly and he went out, with the night-nurse creeping unobtrusively on his heels.

Not to think, not to think— Like Flecker’s ghosts she was ‘cold, cold,’ with dry attenuated body and strained creaking head. What was left of thought had become aloof, astringent, blurring towards darkness, out of which a child loomed with big umbered eyes and lips speaking in exhausted whispers.

“Sara!”

“Christina,” she moaned, “take me to your black sun.”

But she could not stay in that known corner of darkness. She continued to drop until she reached a vertical world round a shore, suggesting topple, and a headlong plunge into turgid sea. Now she was the one living being in that world, stumbling along a cliff, clinging to crag and bare skeleton trees leaning out of root, permitting her to see the rise and swell of bodies floating on the water. It was a drowned world and the water was over their heads. Time-sense was awful, icily immense, condemning her to an infinity of stumble and topple. She must get out of it, slip, slide, cling, topple and go down, down— Now the abyss had changed to a great amphitheatre with a vertical gallery rising round a core of darkness, and she was the only spectator, pressing back to keep herself from headlong plunge. Ahead there was light, and she saw it was a dais, holding tall dreadful men in white robes with gleaming mitres on their heads. On both sides they graded down from a central figure whose mitred head was the highest of all. It was—yes, it was—it was the glory of God.

“Murray,” she called out loud, but she could not look for him because of topple. The dais rose like a shaft of white ascension, and music surrounded it, clear, impersonal as the iciest chant. It was the glory of God, and God had on a high hat! Then came a sense of floating, bringing a moment of vast relief, but it was merely temporary. She was sitting on the edge of a star, and the world was black at her feet. Christina loomed out again, making her ask, “what’s it like, Christina, now that it’s really black?”

She thought Christina was about to answer when she heard a clippity-clop, and Murray came riding by in an apocalyptical way, leaping off, as the horse flew by leaving a flash of hot breath. She stopped cowering now that he was there.

“Oh,” she said in great liberation, “so there was a God after all?”

“Was there?” he said with his nice indulgence.

“Murray, I’ve been very frightened,” she complained.

“Have you?” he said, taking her in his arms. “I want to kiss you very much. We click.”

She was dazzled with a blinding light, like Saul on his way to Damascus.

“Oh,” she said in a Paul-like voice. “Now I know! Women love and men click.”

“Don’t talk rot, my dear. Kiss me. We must live every moment we can. There’s nothing beyond—”

“No,” she cried. Wildly she freed her hands clamping them round his neck, pressing them deep, deep, deeper into his windpipe. When he was quite still she looked at his face dead on her breast. Pure and fine with the lips of a boy, life dripped from his eyes. Heart-broken she gathered him near, kissing him with the small delicate kisses of possession. Then she smoothed his hair, rocking him in her arms, but she cried and cried, and wished she had a pot of Basil to keep him in. When she was quite sodden she was startled to hear a sound of wings flapping nearer and nearer. Peering out from the star she saw two large-bodied constables drop down beside her.

“Ah,” said one triumphantly, “I thought there was something going on here. Dead, is he?”

“Stone,” said the other laconically, peering down at the man on her breast. “Blow for the homicide-squad. What did you kill him for, lady?”

“I killed him,” she sobbed, “because—”

“I know, I know! You needn’t tell me. You killed him because you loved him.”

“I did not,” she said in the grand manner. “I killed him because we clicked.”

“Clicked? Ha, that’s a good one! Come on, now—anything you say—”

“I’m quite ready,” she said sitting still, and holding her lover more closely. “Would you be kind enough to tell me what the capital punishment is in this place? I hope it’s not the electric-chair—”

Both the constables goggled until one found breath.

“Capital punishment? That’s a good one. There’s no capital punishment for things like this.”

“Then why are you taking me?” she asked in a dazed voice.

“It’s your glands, lady. You wouldn’t murder if your glands were right. You come quietly now and we’ll give you over to the glandular-squad.”

Her sense of topple was back, and Murray was sliding from her arms. She made a wild grab after him leaning over the dark abyss, but great hands seized her on either side, dragging her as if she had lost the use of her legs, walking her towards a grey cloud from which a mist rose, wetting her face like fog. Flick, flick, flick! It was a winter day with a cold sleety fall, continually cutting her flesh. She wore no hat and icy water fell on her head creeping round her shoulders like a trickle of snakes. Why did she walk in this ungainly way? She was not afraid, yet try as she would she could only cringe like a galley-slave. It was degrading to face things without natural pride. Strange, the officers were so different. One held her in a vice that was almost sadistic, and she knew the fingers were angry. A voice seemed to bellow in her ear, making her shrink to the comfort of the other side. There she could sense some large soothing body, emanating deep placidity. It also had a voice, slow and lazy, with an invitation to relaxation. Now she was lifted, held high, lowered, until she bumped with a wild body-leap like the end of a falling-dream. Somebody was wiping the rain from her face and chest.

The old man coughed and the baby cried—

      *      *      *      

“There, she’s all right now,” said a sergeant-major voice. “That’s all I can do. I’ll see her later, Mrs. Hervey.”

“Are you sure she’s all right, Doctor Mann? She looks very white.”

“Quite all right. We walked her in time.”

The door shut with finality on further conversation. There was an intake of breath from two people, waiting until somebody was out of earshot.

“Is she all right, Nora?”

“He says so, Bob! Oh, how awful, how awful, this dreadful place! She might just as well have gone to the Zoo. She’s drowned, poor Sara, and how wildly he walked her—”

“I’ll say so! Heartless brute! Can’t imagine what you see in him.”

“You would, Bob, if you were having a baby. If I had a bedside manner at that time I’d raise the roof, but with Doctor Mann one doesn’t.”

“All right, darling, all right, but Sara wasn’t having a baby.”

Nora’s voice was both defensive and apprehensive. “I know, Bob, but I was so worried about her. She’s lost pounds and I thought a good rest—”

“Rest! She looks dead to me.”

Sara laughed weakly, but with definite indications of life.

“I’m not dead, Bob. I’m just toppling—”

Nora’s large-boned hands gathered up the drained white ones lying on the spread.

“Don’t talk, Sara.”

“Nor, I’ve been in such awful places—”

“Yes, yes, I know. I’m going to take you home. Annie has a hot-water bottle in your bed—”

“Yes, get me out. I must sleep some more.”

“Yes, I intend to. In a minute they want you to drink some black coffee, will you?”

“I suppose so. Can you stand up to the matron and Doctor Mann?”

“Of course,” said Nora serenely. “Bob will.”

There was an agonised protest in the lazy voice. “Don’t you think, darling—”

“No, I don’t, Bob,” said his wife pleasantly. “Go and find the doctor and the matron, and say I’m taking Sara home this morning, and if she can’t drive in a car, order an ambulance. Tell him to come and see her at the Cottage. Above all, say our minds are made up. Be decisive!”

Sara had to open her eyes though it was a gigantic effort. At the foot of the narrow bed in front of the picture of the baby, stood Bob, making an agonised squirm inside his collar. Everything about him said he was a man of peace, and decision was the quality he used least.

“Poor Bob,” she whispered through pale lips. “Be decisive! It’s quite easy. Try bawling like he does, and remember you’re bigger than he is.”

“That’s a help,” he said smiling with large humanity, but moving with a step that was anything but decisive. With his hand on the knob of the door he turned round, searching his wife’s face for a look of clemency.

“Go on, dear,” she said encouragingly in her mother’s voice for her children.

The matron’s entrance expedited his departure. With her watered-ink eyes turned to black ice she said frigidly, “we wish to change the patient into dry things, and give her some black coffee—”

Bob went, like a large goaded creature, pulverised between Scylla and Charybdis.

      *      *      *      

An hour later Sara lay back waiting for the ambulance, while Nora sat by the window mute in the morning sun. Sara was pale with a curious sleek fall of hair, drowned out of curl. Her eyes were musing, as if the life-force so incontinently besieged was being quietly savoured. For some time she had not spoken, lying like a person treading on the tail of dream. Nora made no attempt to speak unless she demanded it. The friends were shut up, dismissed by Doctor Mann with an expression that indicated he had no time for it all. His last look at Sara regretted her for a promising patient gone wrong. Nora had been tactful, speaking serenely, and he left with diminishing edges. It was useless to explain the effects of his nursing-home on Sara. To him, it would be just a senile cough and a confinement, two minor events she should have slept through.

“He’s not too bad,” said Sara. “It was funny the difference I felt in my two sides. I was lopsided between the drag of Doctor Mann and the consideration of Bob. I felt the sense of a friend before I knew it belonged to life.”

Nora looked pleased, and contrite. “I’m so glad, Sara, it’s all my fault really—”

“If you say that again, Nor, I’ll take the rest of the luminal. I’m going back to England.”

“Are you?” asked Nora with some surprise.

“Yes, quite definitely. I must get to the end of it.”

“It will upset him—”

“Yes,” said Sara remotely, “but we’re schooled people. Women have grown so accustomed to providing comfort for a man that it’s crept into our outlook. I shall walk full tilt into it. Places are important, and I can’t let him defraud me of England. Somebody said a blade of grass was a blade of grass anywhere. That’s not true. English grass is special grass.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Nora suddenly.

“You, Nor?” said Sara lifting her head with greater vitality. “How can you leave the children and Bob?”

Nora turned from the window and faced her friend with a look that indicated special confidence.

“Sara, last night Bob was worried about you, and it made him unusually serious. We had an intimate evening—and it ended by his saying he wanted another baby, a son—Jennifer is two, and he asked if I would agree—”

“Oh,” said Sara on a note fraught with many emotions. “What did you say?”

“Last night I wasn’t sure. I tried to tell Bob how a woman feels these days with so much war talk, and the thought that a boy’s first bonnet might be a gas-mask—”

“Yes,” said Sara with gathering interest, “and a bomb falling on the cradle you’ve taken so much trouble to prepare—”

“Yes,” said Nora sombrely. “I tried to show Bob the degradation of motherhood in Italy and Germany, fecundity just to make an army, but he wouldn’t see. He was local, and said he didn’t want to do without a son, just because the world was crazy—”

“M’mm,” said Sara expressively.

“I said I’d think about it, but he was nice enough to say, if I’d like a trip before I start he’d love to give it to me—”

“So, you’re coming with me! How lovely, Nor! If I had to choose it’s what I’d take.”

Nora looked eager with spots of anticipation reddening her cheeks.

“I haven’t been away for a long time. So many of the girls must be married. I’d like to see them again, and find out how they feel about children. They’re nearer destruction than we are.”

“Yes,” said Sara thoughtfully, indrawn with her own ideas. Then she smiled, with life flowing back to her eyes. “We’ll get together with the other women, and start a Crusade to Geneva and say we’ll put our foot down on babies until the men make the world fit to live in—”

“Would it do any good, Sara?”

Sara closed her eyes, diminishing the life in her face, but underneath her lips held a smile.

“No, I’m afraid not! Men still need wars to show how brave they are!”

The door was flung open. “The ambulance! Mrs. Colville can get ready to go.”

Sara sat up whispering to her friend.

“Ready to go, Nor! England and anything, even the spirit of change.”

CHAPTER ONE

Ceaseless chopping and changing of wind had crazed mid-ocean. The waves tumbled round in confused derangement, anticipating the unrest of the Equinox. In a deck cabin of a small liner Sara and Nora slept on rising and subsiding beds. As the ship wallowed, shivering with sea-ague, Nora sat up with a nose protesting against the stuffiness of the cabin. Behind drawn chintz curtains the ports were sealed, making her look longingly from the bell to Sara’s face turned into a pillow. Considering the peace of one calm eyelid, she sighed, speechless with resignation.

“Don’t be a martyr,” mumbled a very drowsy voice. “Ring and get the ports open before I die of miasma.”

“Oh, you’re awake,” said Nora brightly.

“No, of course not. I’m doped with poppies and mandragora to while away the sea. Fool! Ring the bell.”

“With pleasure,” said Nora agreeably, and they both peered above the bedclothes until a steward appeared to receive two simultaneous orders. After a sound of clattering and unscrewing, the air rushed in like a presence.

“Oh,” said Nora on a long inhale, “may we keep them open now?”

“It’s not very safe, Madam. There’s a choppy sea and they were ordered closed last night.”

“We’ll tell you if the sea comes in,” said Sara with obliging dismissal. The steward rattled the hook on the door, gazing backward in doubt.

“He’ll probably be put in irons for insubordination, but unlike Gonzalo, I’d rather die a wet death than stifle. Look out, Nor, and see the sea.”

Nora knelt up, craning her neck.

“White horses and a nasty wet sky. Lowering, as they say. There’s one promising streak but at present it looks very grey—”

“Thank you, darling. Make that the last verse.”

Sara drew herself up, taking a distasteful survey of her surroundings. Luggage was restless, flowers were tipsy, and through a half-open bathroom door she could see toothbrushes travelling irritably on a glass-shelf.

“M’mmm,” she sighed disconsolately, “another day like a chunk of infinity.”

“How do you feel?” asked Nora with the blithe well-being that could see the ship turn over in serene body comfort. Sara regarded her with baleful brown eyes.

“Like lily of the lousy liver! I’ve lived with better things than the feel of myself at this moment. I had no idea you could be quite so hearty at sea.”

“Nonsense, you’re quite well,” rebuked Nora. “You’ve had a bath every day. No bad sailor could possibly bath every day.”

“They could,” said Sara plaintively. “It’s the English in me, the small bit Daddy contributed.”

“And,” continued Nora inexorably, “no poor sailor could put on a pale makeup and recline in wanton bed-jackets.”

“They could,” protested Sara again. “It’s the tyranny of the age, the beauty-cult strong in death. I do it for the Captain. He’s the same one I came out with and he’s visited me every day, and he says he loves my little overcoats.”

Nora laughed at the strong word for Sara’s diaphanous garments.

“Don’t make him soft then. He’s better with his mind on his oilskins.”

“He’s not,” contradicted Sara waving a long hand, “he goes back to the Bridge the better for my jackets. Poor lamb, he looks so wistful and admiring, that I was induced to ask what Mrs. Captain wore, and he said winsey, and by a few revealing gestures I was led to believe they were up to the neck and down to the wrists. He’s a Scot, and they live in the Highlands so perhaps it’s responsible for the winsey. Every man wants something else, Nor. There he sits every morning all brass buttons and rings, and stares at my jackets. He says his wife meets him at the station after every trip, and though she does that, she’s quite undemonstrative. (His word, Nor, not mine. I never heard of it.) But he doesn’t want it either. He has longing for Mrs. Captain to fling her arms around his neck and give him a loud land-welcoming. I didn’t like to explain that a woman who faces his return in winsey could never be as abandoned as that, so I ventured to suggest that his next gift from foreign parts—”

“Sara, you’re a scandal. The one thing men can’t be with you is silent.”

“Nor, don’t be foolish. Men’s silence is a mythical honour, like the man who promised his wife he wouldn’t drink whiskey, so he drank gin, as if he was attending a Hallelujah breakfast. I talk a lot, but I’ve never told the story of my life to anyone but Murray, but in the outposts of Empire I’ve collected a thousand and one tales—so much confession is mere bragging—”

“No doubt! What about breakfast?”

Nora was out of bed lurching a little with the pitch and toss of the ship, but she smiled contentedly at Sara, waking in character and talkative to the day. Since sailing most of her time had been spent withdrawn, contemplative, reading and laying down her book to stare out with wide unseeing eyes. All over her lay depletion and the frail look of a woman whose flame lacked oil. Now in spite of the weather she had an exuberance and vivid eye investigating the promise of a day.

Through the bathroom door Nora’s voice came sloppily through her toothbrush.

“Order breakfast, Sara. I’ll have grapefruit, four slices of bacon, toast and marmalade, and tea.”

“Very well,” moaned Sara, “though the very words suggest the tin-can.”

Ringing the bell she lay contentedly back with her hands folded on the sheet.

“I shall nibble dry toast with furry teeth. I can only make one great effort on a day like this.”

“You rang, Madam?”

The stewardess stood making hard starched lines in front of Sara’s smiling eyes.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Bane.”

“Good-morning, Madam. I hope you’re better today.”

“Brighter,” said Sara amiably, giving the orders for breakfast.

“Very good, Madam,” said the stewardess, adding with detached interest, “I hope you’ll be able to get up a little today. Perhaps a dry Martini—”

Her voice trailed away like the long retreat of a bolster. Sara stared at the place where she had stood with considering eyes. After a few thoughtful moments she called through the bathroom door.

“Nor, the stewardess interests me. Imagine spending years discussing the rival merits of seasick food. Her voice is an art, a miracle of automatic interest. It’s commiserating on a nice dry potato, convalescent on a chicken sandwich and positively giddy on a bottle of dry champagne to round you off. Now she thinks I’ve progressed to a Martini. She’s a widow with three sons and she took her first trip to China, seasick herself, where she learned to hate mankind, carrying trays to people much better than herself.”

After an interval of splashing and the sound of rushing taps, Nora emerged from the bathroom, returning to bed.

“Sara, are you going to hold me up in London, asking every Tom, Dick and Harry his life story?”

“No,” answered Sara in a more sombre voice. “My life story is there, but England itself makes me happy. How I love it! I can understand Wordsworth falling from physical love to fall in love with England, I could quite easily be the lapsed soul weeping in the evening dew. And that terrible yearn to the quality no man can number—”

“Sara!”

“What?” she asked, dismissing England with a jolt.

“Sometimes when I see you with men I think you’re quite bad. But sometimes when I hear you talk, I think you’re more than they want. Men must be ordinary.”

“Yes, I won’t argue,” said Sara with a great lack of personal resentment. “When I was in the nursing-home with my glands and the sport of the Borgias—you remember it, Nor?”

“Beast! Yes, I’ll never forget it. You were saying?”

“I wasn’t, Leonardo da Vinci was! He said, empty animal men should be mere sacks, with simple openings for in and out.”

“Well,” ejaculated Nora, “wouldn’t it make them too useful on washing-day? Imagine stuffing the linen into your husband-sack!”

“Your breakfast, Madam,” murmured Mrs. Bane entering to deposit a tray on Nora’s lap. “And yours, Madam! I’ll take it,” she said to another white figure in the background.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bane. No, I won’t sit up. I’ll lie on my back and nibble.”

The rattle of the hook gave them privacy again.

“Nor, was I more than Murray wanted?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Nora unexpectedly callous.

“Well perhaps you’re right,” agreed Sara with seafaring resignation. “It doesn’t matter so much when I’m livery. Perhaps I did talk on, but he seemed to like it. He said he’d always let me chatter. You’re so good, Nor, so patient too. Let’s set up in London and be misunderstood.”

“Then we would be misunderstood! Heavens, I’ve got juice in my eye. Who’d wear the collar and tie?”

“Oh you, Nor,” said Sara with fond concession. “You’re so tailored. I’ll be whatever the other one is. I find England itchy. Shall I ever forget the cold of Colin’s place? I was always conscious of the raw red dawn of barons. I hope you won’t spend too much money on woolies.”

“Not I,” said Nora serenely. “I’m going to buy the hats Bob would love on a tart, and wear eye-shadow and mascara.”

“Sad,” murmured Sara. “The fall of a good wife! But it’s a waste of time, Nor. You can paint your nails, and blacken your eyes, and you’ll still look like Mary dreaming of Joseph.”

Above a lifted spoon Nora’s face looked rebellious.

“I suppose so, but I’ll do my best. I’m so tired of having men tell me I remind them of their mothers.”

“Uplifting though!”

“Doubtless! Are you going to get up today?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve no capacity on the sea. It’s a bad prop even for Venus.”

“Rubbish! She’s always floating on it in a seashell.”

“That doesn’t say she would be love-sick on it. Lots of days she couldn’t stretch out. What’s in a birth? I knew a girl once who was born at the feet of a bell-boy just as the mother was getting into a lift.”

“I wonder how the children are?” Nora’s cup was suspended, while her eyes became glazed with inner question. Sara frowned at her abstraction.

“They’re all right,” she said vehemently. “All right, I tell you.”

“Yes, but I don’t know,” she mused. “Jennifer had a cold. I wonder if I could send a wireless—”

“Don’t be a fool,” snapped Sara. “Haven’t you got a trained nurse for them, and your own mother to drop in and see them every day?”

“Yes, but I’m not there myself.”

Nora continued to gaze backward like a maternal Lot’s wife straining towards Rosamund and Jennifer, and in her eyes lay gathering self-reproach that she could leave her children. Pushing away her tray Sara spoke with some savagery.

“Must parents be always like that? Must you see personal threat in every vehicle on four wheels? Do you think every germ follows a dotted line, earmarked for your children? You don’t enjoy them half as much as I do, and in spite of your brave words the night Murray left, you’re acting as if they were a bit of luggage you’d left behind.”

“Well, aren’t they?” asked Nora with an equable return to her surroundings.

“No, they’re not. They’re individuals. I could adopt them and bring them up with much more ease. You parents with your fussy possessions!”

“Possibly, my dear. You’ve got the detachment we can all give to the other woman’s babies.”

“You couldn’t be like that if you loved Bob best. No child of mine could come first.”

“Well,” said Sara softly, “I think there’s an answer to that.”

Sara stared sombrely from her pillow, and with the unevenness of mood that she had displayed for some time her voice trailed on her words.

“Yes, and I know it. I was not first. Murray loved Noel more than me.”

“Yes, I’m sure he did,” said Nora with shattering honesty. “He was enchanted with you and away from the things that remind a man of his common responsibilities.”

“But we took Noel with us wherever we went. Only once or twice I could oust him. Then we were encompassed, isolated, enclosed like two people in a tower. I can see it a bit like our schooldays when the world was the school with a wall round it, until one of the girls got a cable with bad news. Then she would be called into the head’s room and we’d be frightened and awed, feeling she’d gone far away from us.”

“Yes,” said Nora picking up the theme at once, “and we’d see her packed and sent off, all tear-stained and red, and we knew there were things outside the school that could upset her.”

Mutual silence held them as they turned over common memories, and the wet bleakness of a bad sea-day made them grave and thoughtful. Sara spoke first shivering with unrest.

“This trip, Nor! Another trip after death. Ever since we sailed I’ve been thinking of the ones I took after Colin and Bruce, and I get confused, thinking Murray is dead too. I’m very death-conscious, Nor, and more so since the nursing-home.”

“It’s because you’re so life-conscious. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Sara stared with the intent look she always gave when Nora said something arresting.

“Like Katherine Mansfield! She knew it was useless to moan, ‘put me on shore again.’ ”

Nora pushed her own tray far down the bed and cuddled under the clothes.

“Have you thought what Murray may be like when you meet again?”

“Need you ask!”

“You might find him very different. You might be pushed to some remote place at the back of his mind.”

“A hateful position,” said Sara rebelliously.

“Yes, but you may be there as he’s back with Noel. You were not the usual triangle. You were the child, the father, and the mistress! I don’t believe the poor wife counted.”

“Yes, go on,” said Sara respectfully.

Nora spoke slowly, feeling for her words.

“I’m no analyst, Sara, but I think he had a slight inferiority complex from not having enjoyed the advantages that were his birthright. It made him harder. He’s a mixed up man.”

“All people are complicated,” said Sara irritably, “in spite of Leonardo’s sacks. If one dared take stock of the disorder inside one human head people would be demented, so they don’t. They run around putting salt on the tail of another escape. Bah—Murray rides himself into a lather to forget what he did to me. I wouldn’t live it again—”

“You wouldn’t live Murray over again?” asked Nora incredulously.

“Not with the belittling parting. No, no, I’d rather go on eyes front. It was a dreadful finish.” She shivered, speaking with passion and pain. “I can forgive him at any time, but my love might not be able to.”

“Well,” said Nora reflectively. “I’m surprised at that, Sara. There’s another effect you haven’t thought of.”

“What?” she questioned as if happy to have her thinking done for her.

“Absence may have made you infinitely more valuable.”

Sara disturbed the bedclothes with a wild motion.

“In spite of Noel?” she asked incredulously.

“In spite of Noel. Lie back and don’t look so hunted. You’re really quite modest about your effect. Absence does many unexpected things.”

“Yes,” she agreed, with her usual ability to quote the right word. “ ‘L’absence est à l’amour ce qu’est au feu le vent. Il étient le petit, il illume le grand.’ ”

“Heavens, say it again! I have no French relations.”

Sara obliged, speaking the words with slow deliberation.

“Yes, I understand,” said Nora with palpable pleasure in her own ability. “Il y a longtemps depuis j’ai parlé— I believe it will be the wind to the big fire.”

“I was prepared for anything but that,” admitted Sara ingenuously.

“We’ll see soon.”

“How soon?” asked Sara with deep suspicion. “I wouldn’t make the smallest move to see him. What happens out of the blue is fate and London is big. I shall leave it to time.”

“You will not,” said Nora impressively. “You’ll see him very soon. I didn’t tell you before, because Bob only told me the day we sailed, and when you chose to withdraw to some place where the sea-gulls fed you—”

“Ravens.”

“Let’s not quibble about a bird, Sara. The point is Bob wrote to John.”

“He did?” almost screamed Sara.

“Yes, he actually picked up the pen himself. He was very sweet, poor Bob, but you know what a man is like when his wife is travelling alone.”

Sara was diverted.

“Yes, I do indeed. They get so pompous about the passport and the letter of credit. Bruce was a terror. He was at his happiest with an account-book, but is there anything more destroying to a meal than seeing it entered in a book? But I was a poor wife to Bruce so I often made a mistake to soothe him. Then he’d spend evenings looking for one of my erring pennies, and when he found it, my dear, proud Cortez was nothing to him, silent on a peak! His favourite dismissal to me was, ‘my dear Sara, can’t you see I’m immersed in memoranda,’ and he always faced me better flapping a few bills in his hand, but I grew wiley and waited until there was nothing near but the Encyclopedia, and no man could flap that between his thumb and first finger. I always won then.”

“No doubt. I have a few methods myself. Bob is useless at accounts but he’s sure I’ll be overdrawn, so there must be somebody near to lend me a shilling, and as John was the most recent Englishman in his mind, and they’d played a few rounds together, he thought—”

“But Bob couldn’t know where we’d be,” interrupted Sara.

“No, of course not, but he gave the address of the Bank, and said I’d drop a line on arrival.”

“Oh, dear God,” beseeched Sara, “and will the three of them arrive as one happy family? Murray will, if Bob has written. He has a reciprocal idea of friendship, and if Bob has extended his golf and his salt, he will extend his too. I’m a definite complication there. You must go your own way, Nor, and let me go mine. Very casually I shall be out when he arrives.”

“I thought you were going to walk straight into it?”

“Was I? I was very valiant when there was an ocean between us. It’s not Murray I mind. I could cope with him at any moment, but I’d hate to see him with his wife and Noel. I’d feel like the child seeing the Christmas tree with his nose outside the window.”

“Well, they can’t arrive until I write,” said Nora soothingly, “though I’d like to see him very much.”

“And you must,” insisted Sara. “He’d be becoming in front of headwaiters.”

“Where will we be?”

“That’s what I was going to ask. We must wire from Liverpool. I want you to be my guest for two weeks, Nor.”

“Oh no, Sara.”

“Oh yes, Nora. Let’s not quibble about a fortnight. I’m going to be utterly free for that time. If I announce my arrival I’ll have to go to Scotland, and remember whether I’m a relict of Colin, or relict of Bruce, and the way I feel now will make it very confusing when I feel so much relict of Murray. Bruce has such boring relations and his missionary sister is sure to be overwrought about the far East. She disapproves of me thoroughly, because I won’t enthuse over the unveiling of Moslem women. I agreed to subscribe to the unveiling, but I said if I’d been born in Purdah I would have been saved so much. There would be so little competition that one would be bound to love the Maharajah or Sultan. It’s a nice way to keep women satisfied with men. She was horrified, wanting everything free, and we had quite a tussle about it. I said women would never be free. They were bound hand and soul to biology and the same urge would hold them, long after all other freedom had been conceded. She always ends an argument by flouncing, and I always produce a flouncing-effect. Colin’s people are much nicer and we get on very well, but I do all the adapting, and that’s exhausting too. For a fortnight I shall roam like the wild ass of the desert before I go over to the backgrounds. Actually I’m happier with the French relations. They have a charming naturalism and are not ashamed to stand and stare if they see, and they weep in the cinema if the picture is sad. It makes me feel English with restraint. I think we’ll stay on Piccadilly if that suits you?”

“My dear, I’m so happy to be here I’d rest my bones in Bloomsbury.”

“Yes, I believe un-English people love England best, because of contrast. It’s such a tempered country. Which end of Piccadilly I don’t know. I like the Park end until I think of the Circus.”

“There’s always the centre,” suggested Nora with happy co-operation.

“Not so open. I’ll wire for a small suite—”

“Darling, have you come into money? We can do without a suite.”

“We must see our friends,” said Sara innocently, “and I’d hate them to phone from the desk and say, ‘Moddom must keep her door open.’ ”

“But the bed is nearly always behind the door.”

“English concession, Nor. It goes with territorial expansion.”

“Fool! How Murray must miss you.”

Sara raised her black brows. “The inference is he’s lost without his fool.”

“He needed foolishness. Bob further told me—”

Sara sat up with sudden energy. “Nor, I could kill you. Why haven’t you told me before?”

“Lie down. Bob was hobnobbing with some of John’s company magnates and they had heard from him. He has given up his town house.”

“Why?” asked Sara crisply.

Nora shrugged under the bedclothes. “Some unforeseen development, but as Bob didn’t know he wasn’t prepared to guess.”

Sara stared musingly at the floor but it explained nothing but the rise and fall of the sea.

“I wish the sea would lie down,” she said uneasily. “What’s an unforeseen development, Nor? Please don’t get up today. It’s so bleak and I’m tired of my own company. Oh, yes, Mrs. Bane, you may take the trays, and please fill my hot-water bottle. The wind has an edge.”

“Yes, it’s a dirty day,” agreed the soft detached voice. “Shall I draw your bath, Madam?”

“Not just yet, thank you. Perhaps Mrs. Hervey—”

“Yes, now,” said Nora with contented equilibrium. “Many people up today, Mrs. Bane?”

“Not at present, Madam, but it’s clearing a bit. I’ll dispose of the trays and come back.”

“Thank you! Sara, I’ll stay in bed until dinner time. Then I must get up for my four of Bridge. The Admiral will be disappointed if he has to break another woman in.”

“Retired?”

“Of course, and he’s been fishing ever since on five continents. He talks of dry-fly—”

“I’m useless with fisherfolk,” said Sara dismissingly, “though I did learn to appreciate pink belly-spots for Colin’s sake, and I thought a salmon had nice svelte lines, but a nasty look in his eye. Is the Bridge good?”

“No, very captious, but it passes the time.”

“Is he nice?”

“Well, if you talk about fish, and let him play all the hands you’ll be quite a success. He’s full of information about spawning, roe and buck-salmon, tail swishing, and the leaping of waterfalls. The roe lays and the buck milts—”

“Admirals are technical men. Any other nice male things out there?”

“A few tweedy Englishmen, and sultry looking foreigners, and one very nice man with a marvellous profile and a disappointingly bald head. I had a cocktail with him, but most times I splice the main-brace with the Admiral. He finds me a good listener.”

“We’ll drink all day and forget the sea.”

“Doctor Mann told you to avoid spirits.”

“Yes, darling, but I didn’t hear. Imagine going from port to port without a drink. Besides if I get tiddly I have the little package of bicarbonate he ultimately prescribed. After all those tests—”

Under the bedclothes Sara began to laugh with silent mirth.

“But you’re better,” said Nora defensively. “You look more rested.”

“Yes, I’ve had a lot of bed. It was just misery and going on and on until I was ready to drop. Now I’m quieter, I’d love to be in a little cottage in the Chilterns, somewhere near Ewelme. It has the loveliest Church and Alms House flowing down-hill, and there’s a recumbent Duchess, poor thing, whose skeleton is indelicately visible if you lie on your stomach and peer. I was against such exposure, but I looked just the same.”

“M’mmm! Murray’s place is in Oxfordshire.”

“What of it?” flamed Sara. “England is big enough for us both, I hope. Besides he’s all closed in with beechwoods and he can’t look over the gate for me, because he spoke of an avenue of Lombardy poplars. However if you think we can’t be in the same county together, I’ll go to Hampshire or Bucks. It will be lovely in the autumn, and I may be able to write again if I can think of something besides Murray. Work would be the best thing I could find. You can come and stay with me, and we’ll tramp over the hills together.”

Nora stepped out of bed and looked down at Sara with some regret.

“Sorry, my dear, but I’m a mother, and this is just an interlude before more motherhood. All right, Mrs. Bane, I’m ready for the bath.”

For a moment she poised on the uneven floor looking down at Sara.

“Have one for me, Nor, will you, and I’ll leave it all my money?”

“Very sorry, Sara my dear, but if I had quints, I still couldn’t do it.”

“No, I suppose not,” she said quietly, and Nora found herself gazing at the back of a loosened tumble of light-brown hair.

There was a muted air in the lounge as Nora played Bridge. Being dummy often she had ample time for observation. The Admiral, she thought, was a chivalrous partner for a woman, having an old-world courtesy that forbade her the exertion of playing a hand. As well as slaving single-handed for the score, he took a long time over the playing of each card. The other woman was an American, inclined to be tenacious of her rights, but inwardly Nora felt the Admiral regarded her corrections as international impertinence. In the waiting intervals while one of his wind-bitten fingers poised over a card she would say ‘touched’ in a voice that demolished indecision, making his hand leap back or drop with a thud. Contact or distance established, he would protest with aristocratic testiness that he was merely ‘arranging.’ The other man had the tournament temperament. In decision he looked for an umpire, and Nora was soothed by his public-school voice conceding to the Admiral, and making the rights of the American sound ill-bred. He asked nothing for himself, going down and up with equal abasement. Nervous, thought Nora, looking at his ten bitten fingers impartially gnawed. What was in his life to make him so nervous? She would give Sara half an hour to find out. Had he tried wearing gloves at night or dipping his fingers in bitter almond? No, Rosamund had not reached the nail-biting stage as yet, though she did chew her gloves in winter.

“Touched,” snapped the American.

“Perfectly ridiculous rule, but as it’s the only card—”

“Then why are you hesitating?” she asked with a reasonable appeal to common sense.

“I was calculating,” he said impressively. “Partner, I was just realising we’re going down five.”

Something in his announcement challenged Nora to remember he had been taught to play the game without any vulgar thought of victory.

“Hard luck,” said his opponent with deferential regret.

“Over-bidding,” said the American with crisp truth.

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” murmured Nora contentedly. She cared little. They were merely playing twopence a hundred and there was always plenty of money at the beginning of a trip. She would choose a more considerate partner going home. She would have preferred him to make his mistakes a little more quickly. Undoubtedly he was a selfish old man, but flagships left omnipotent effects, annihilating the remembrance of more co-operative days. She was convinced he would require a whole salmon pool to himself. Another rod would put him in a frenzy. What a strange collection of people could be lumped together with only a few planks and plates between them and the bottom of the ocean. Suppose the ship went down? Sara had not been up for boat-drill! Did she know how to tie the little knots? Yes, Sara had travelled a great deal. She hoped Bob would marry very quickly again and give the children a good mother. She should have left a few written directions. Unconsciously her eyes strained to the writing tables where many people scribbled with a concentrated withdrawal from the sea. Some friends or relations would receive unexpectedly long letters.

“Well,” said the Admiral in exasperation, “you’ve got the King and I placed it—”

“Yes, I had the King.” Nora gave a bare glancing to scooping fingers and returned to her survey.

There was the motley crowd sunk in deep chairs, sitting with a queasy air as if sudden motion might unbalance a recent dinner. From a corner half concealed by palms, an unperturbed man played delicate Chopin with a muted touch that suggested he was soothing himself rather than the passengers. Men sipped or gulped drinks, and a few women toyed with liqueurs. Children who should have been in bed, fidgeted with hands belonging to land distraction. From the covered-in-deck came the sound of a fox-trot mingling with the Chopin. Evidently persevering youth still tried to dance up-hill and down-dale. The floor of the lounge maintained an uneasy rise and fall, as if a tormented mammoth was imprisoned underneath the carpet. Lounge-stewards stood around momentarily tranced from men’s requirements.

“Down five! Doubled, invulnerable, nine hundred,” announced the American in a clarion cry of victory.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the Admiral. “Your deal, partner. I rather expected you to have more than you did, and the finesse did not come off—”

“Unfortunate,” soothed Nora, dealing tidily and sorting with efficiency.

“One no trump!”

“Two hearts!”

The Admiral made a sound like an exasperated tut-tut. “Much too quick,” he said, sorting with deliberation, but the man with the ten bitten fingernails was displaying them like a coarse fan behind his cards.

Dreadful, thought Nora, looking quickly away. Their table was at the far end, and she could see the lounge in its entirety. There was that nice man with the impressive profile and disappointingly bald head, who sat reading with absorption. The book looked ponderous and respectable, but she no longer trusted appearances since she had discovered a man in a train reading the secret pleasures of the Grand Siècle behind the cooling cover of a Conrad sea-scape. His profile suggested classical antiquity, but he was probably enjoying an omnibus crime.

“Ah, partner, you said?”

“One no trump,” she prompted gently.

“Two hearts, I said.”

“One no trump, two hearts? Let me see, let me see! Little slam in clubs.”

“No,” said the other man with petrified brevity.

“No bid,” murmured Nora with serene resignation.

“Double!”

It was inevitable. Nora laid down her hand which the Admiral fingered, and then put on his glasses as if he might see more.

“Not very much, partner.”

“She only went one no trump,” said the American defensively.

Requiring no support Nora deserted them again, entertaining her eyes with an opulent-looking woman with a moist red mouth that looked as if it might have been conceived by Venus and Bacchus. In the absence of male escort she looked stranded, staring at the back of the nice man’s book. Nora was pleased to see he continued reading, unprovoked. Women like that fascinated her. They looked rootless, as if they had no link with ordinary things. Impossible to imagine those rich hot-looking lips ordering meals or planning a children’s routine. What did they mean to men? Men were simple about women. Sara had more tang and humour—Heavens, there was Sara, resurrected and very mondaine. Nora watched her slow entrance, and the trail of her long black skirt. She looked arresting, but quite unprovocative, walking like a woman disdaining scrutiny. Ennui or returned interest in living must have induced her to make a toilet, with careful hair framed by the collar of a short white coat. The lone woman stared appraisingly at such a surprise, after five days at sea. On a small liner every face was familiar by now, and Nora could sense the mass interest of general boredom. Friendships had been made and discarded and Sara came as some one refreshing and new. But she advanced, unaware, towards a chair to the right of the reading man. She was just passing him when the ship gave a lurch lowering her almost into his lap. Even from a distance, Nora could hear the gay laugh, and quick unembarrassed apology. In a second the man was on his feet, steadying her, and giving her the full benefit of his aid to a chair. Well, thought Nora, how typical of Sara to fall into a man’s lap at once! She might not be born under auspicious stars, but she sat directly under eventful ones. Impossible to imagine her stagnating. Her greatest need now was a new interest or the resumption of an old one. Murray—Nora shrugged. He was the nicest of men in spite of his incomprehensible conduct, yet what security could result from irregular relationships? Heavens, the two were chatting together like old friends! How quickly Sara transmitted a feeling of grace and ease, making a man feel comfortably well-met! Yet she was not in the least eager, as she sat fitting a cigarette into a long holder. There was something about a holder, and a long hand, that made a woman look slightly insolent, especially when she possessed her own heart to the point of indifference to other men. Attention always came when a woman was least forthcoming. They seemed to know when she was sensually aloof. Awful! The man was taking a leather case from his breast-pocket and showing Sara a picture. What an odious habit men had of exhibiting snapshots!

“Who’s that tall woman who just came in?” asked the American with an adequate air of using her eyes for two things. “She looks—”

“She’s my roommate,” said Nora quickly.

“She looks all black eyes,” said the American firmly. “Is her hair dyed? Clever of her to keep it light.”

“No,” said Nora startled to indignant protest. Then she shrugged internally. What could it possibly matter if a shipboard acquaintance thought Sara dyed her hair?

The Admiral squirmed round to examine the focus of interest.

“M’mm,” he said expertly. “Very good-looking woman. Does she play Bridge?”

“Not this trip,” said Nora refusing for Sara.

“Well—”

Philosophically he returned to his Bridge, dismissing even a good-looking woman who could not partner his activities. This time he only went down four, and the game was resumed on the same lines. Between intervals Nora followed Sara’s new friendship. Now they were sipping a drink, and Sara was listening with frank interest. Yes, she could talk a great deal, but she could be an excellent listener as well. People who wrote were like that. They had had itching ears for an unusual remark, recording it later, quite callously in a notebook—Heavens, they were going out on deck! Well, the man must think Sara was frail! There was definite solicitude in the way he cupped her elbow with his large hand. Nora smiled to herself. Sara’s exit might be tender and supported, but it was aided by a venomous stab from the eyes of the woman with the hot-looking mouth. She had sat and the man had read! Sara had entered in cool elegance and fallen invitingly into his lap. Men were strange— Nora felt a slight urge to sympathise with the woman. Then she averted her eyes. No woman could be up to any good with a mouth like that. Wives must stand for something!

      *      *      *      

With oily eyebrows interrogating the face of a travelling clock Nora soothed her face with cleansing-cream. It was midnight and time for Sara’s return, but Nora’s shoulders deprecated extremes, as she wondered what could be prolonging a deck-promenade? Through the lounge-windows the last sight of Sara had come in fugitive gleams of hair, flanked by male black and white. Reaching for a face tissue she heard the unmistakable quick light steps in the alley-way.

“Well, you are thorough! You liked being up after all.”

Sara dropped on the bed with evident relief from motion.

“My dear, I was nearly seduced behind the funnel.”

“Well, were you?” asked Nora with more interest than surprise.

“Certainly not! How apart the sea is! It’s such a forgetting of land-lives. My dear, I nearly fell into the lap of that man with the classical nose and bald head.”

“So I saw, and I didn’t think there was anything inhospitable about his lap. But when I get home I’m going to tell Bob if I ever see him handing out snapshots of his wife and children I’ll divorce him at once.”

“Very good grounds,” said Sara fervently, “if the Judge could understand. But there’s certain showmanship about it—here’s my background, but if—one of the points of male honour a woman rarely understands! But this man had no living snapshot! She was dead, with old-fashioned hair. Such a ghoulish story, Nor! My mind went into Catherine-wheels wondering if I could use it, and yet most unsuitably I wanted to laugh, if one could laugh at Theban horror. I don’t like to think I’m irreverent. But I trust the laugh was induced because he said I resembled his exploded wife.”

“Good Lord,” said Nora jolted to profanity. “How did she explode?”

“Quite horribly, but dramatically,” said Sara with tense contemplation. “He’s from the Treasury, expert on double-taxation or some such thing.”

“Never mind that. It’s probably double duty on hats.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, he went out to Canada for outpost work, and arrived in Halifax with a brand-new wife, very young and dewy—”

“Like you, Sara?”

“His resemblance, not mine, Nor! I’m not responsible for a man’s doting eye, but at this stage I should be most uncomfortable with dew. They had just arrived when the town blew up.”

“I know, a ship of T.N.T. caught on fire. It’s history.”

“No doubt! He seemed a little boastful about the explosion, said it was the best explosion in the world. People were literally splashed against walls, lifted in the air with their clothes blown off, tossed anywhere, on roofs, church spires or any uncomfortable spot, even with clothes! The lifted ones nearly all lived, and it sounded so remarkable that I felt myself yearning for my notebook. What a story! Think of meeting on a church spire! Boy gets hurled! Girl gets hurled!”

“Clothes get hurled!”

“Well, I’d have to be delicate about that, but a row of dots is incidental, and it gives scope to the reader’s bad mind. I was wondering if I could make a theme, and I’m afraid he mistook my interest personally, because I heard his voice getting emotional when he coupled his wife and me. It appears the poor thing was staying on the shore facing the ship, while he was in the business section only half blown up. Such a ghoulish picture he painted as he walked round trying to find her! Stepping over bodies, dead cats and dogs, birds splotched on pavements, odd ears and eyes—”

“Stop,” protested Nora. “I’ll be sick.”

“It’s what he said. I was just thinking of the story,” mused Sara.

“Yes, go on with less detail.”

“When he got to the devastated section, he knew there would be many people unheard of again. Then a great storm came, and fire, but he went on searching until he was sure his wife was amongst the missing.”

“Oh, poor thing,” exclaimed Nora, with a mouth wry from distaste and the drag of a paper-tissue. “But exploding is quick. That was a blessing!”

“Yes,” said Sara broodingly, “if she had exploded completely, but he found her foot!”

“Her foot! Good gracious, how awful, how terrible!”

“Yes, when I heard about the foot I stopped dead by the funnel, positively writing the story in my mind, and of course the sea kept rolling us together. It was an intimate deck, and even when we were standing still we seemed to be continually parting and meeting. I just looked at him, and I think I was such an attentive audience that he went into enormous detail, when all the time my mind was longing to ask, how did he recognise her foot? Was it a large tramping foot, or a little foot? Did it have polished toenails, or maybe one tiny little corn? And did he have a funeral for the foot? And could a man raise a tombstone, sacred to the memory of a foot? In view of the hallowed subject I restrained myself from asking, but in the struggle for moderation he said his wife had eyes just like mine, and I was so thankful he didn’t say a foot, that I let him take my hand and his was shaking—”

“Well! Through speaking of his wife, no doubt?”

“Through lumping us together I think.”

“Poor man! How long did you say since she exploded?”

“Oh, umpteen years, but he’s mourned ever since.”

“In his fashion.”

“Nor, you almost sniffed,” said Sara reproachfully. “I was feeling so grateful to him for rousing my writing instinct, and his profile looked so classical, that suddenly it seemed like having a few drinks and finding temporary oblivion. Fortunately I remembered that drunkards have hangovers, and with the thought, I saw his bald head bending to kiss my hand, and the two together gave me such an urge for Murray, that I’m afraid I left somewhat hurriedly with a scant womanly pat. No, for the rest of the voyage I shall stay in bed. It’s all so bogus and witless. I don’t seem to know where I’m going, but this much I know, if I could begin to work I wouldn’t feel possessed any more.” She stood up, removing her short coat and swaying towards the wardrobe. “Why can’t I work, Nor?”

“You will, Sara. It will come.”

“It never will,” she said fiercely. “I’ll just go on spilling myself because I’m too restless to settle.”

“No, you won’t,” said Nora with conviction. “You’ll gestate a book. I used to feel like that when Rosamund was coming. I felt she’d never appear and I used to get so irritated when my grandmother kept saying, ‘when the apple is ripe it will fall.’ I hope you don’t when I’m bromidic.”

“Not in the least. You’re like balm. You and Murray have the composure I need so badly, and the atmosphere that reduces the fever of living.”

“Possibly,” laughed Nora, “and you wake us both up. I’ll wager his nice twinkle is duller now.”

“I hope so,” said Sara vehemently. “We laughed together so well. To laugh with the man you love is the very warmth of living, but congenial work diminishes the importance of everything. If I could say my prayers now I’d pray for an urge to work.”

“There’s lots of stories on ships. Did you see the woman with the jammy mouth?”

“Yes, she looked like one of the unemployed.”

“There’s the man with the ten bitten fingernails.”

“You can have him, Nor,” said Sara with her voice muffled under her dress. “But if I could find my notebook I’d record the story of the exploded wife.”

CHAPTER TWO

They found London could diminish the importance of personal problems. In spite of its big face it had a calming hand for human fever and fret. To stand in the core of it and rush on, was to trail with its past in long sweepy garments. Levelling, Sara said, to realise the robust hearts that had given way to avid generations. From the moment of their smutty emergence from Euston she breathed the air of profounder living, agreeing to be led around at visiting caprice, while she gathered back the feeling of residing. The isolation of the sea and the confines of the ship bequeathed a zestful freedom to their feet. They were barely installed in a small suite at the Circus end of Piccadilly when Nora evinced a compact energy towards seeing, buying and tasting. She sat for some time at the telephone making contacts. Then began the recording of a programme in a small book, with regard to an economy of hours. She was a woman of responsibility with a rare stretch of time that did not include it, and she was not in London to fritter. Sara lent benign co-operation, and with their comprehending companionship she was almost persuaded there were no ragged holes in her heart. Towards her own responsibilities she acted as if she was at the other end of the world. Murray became a truce, and the cessation of his name went on for five full days. In the initial stage Nora had no reason to go to her Bank and the fact of being Sara’s guest further postponed the day.

“Such a save of money, Sara,” she said gratefully.

“Not if you spend as you’re going,” Sara reminded her. “You’ve wasted a lot on cocktails. I had no idea you were such a drunkard.”

“It’s only that I want to drink at every bar in London.”

“You’ll have to stay a year then.”

“I mean the glamorous ones, Sara, not the pubs. I know it’s bad for you, but you’re so headstrong—”

“Very,” she admitted in a malleable voice. “But I’m loyal in my fashion. I always order a Doctor.”

“I’ve had a different one every time,” said Nora with serene relish. “I’ll stop when I go home. I never drink when I’m pregnant.”

She was in a zestful mood, going round like the angel who was tired of Heaven. Energy impelled her through orgies of shopping, where she would have attacks of conscience over buying for herself or the children. Sara found she could be worn out very easily, and after one extreme exhaustion she compromised by attending Nora morning and evening, letting her wander at will in the afternoon. That became her time for school friends while Sara lay on her bed looking for the black heart of sleep that rarely came. But London had modified her visual possession of Murray. Behind her lids she could see other scenes, other people, instead of the Cottage and one unassailable face. The difference permitted her to lie supine, and await Nora’s return, wondering whether she would come eager, interested, or disappointed in the contacts she was renewing after a long time. One friend had become a barrister taking her to lunch in the Middle Temple. From the woman’s angle she found that impressive, but the girl discussed briefs instead of babies. Another high-spirited girl was subdued by marriage into the Army, and inside the walls of the ‘Naval and Military’ she spoke of India, heat, Hills, and the fear that one day she would walk ahead of the wrong wife. Nora returned with a vague conviction that the British Army was delicately balanced on female precedence. Another girl rollicked up from the country and ate cream-cakes with unchanged relish.

“Imagine!” reported Nora in supreme wonder: “Muriel ate four cakes! At our age! I’ve been writing to her every Christmas, and all that’s happened to her is the Girl Guides and the Vicar.”

“Isn’t that something?” asked Sara reasonably. “You can begin with Adam and find religion hasn’t changed a man’s nature.”

“I mean Church work with the Vicar,” said Nora scandalised.

“Disappointing!”

“Very! I think this year she will go on the Christmas-card list.”

Sara laughed. “Never mind, Nor. You’re going to Olive Nickson for a cocktail. She has a mondaine address.”

“She has two babies, and she’s asked us to dinner on Tuesday, the same day we’re lunching with Margot Hilton. She particularly wants you to be there.”

“I liked her,” said Sara in a retrospective voice. “I kept in touch with her for a year, but you know what it’s like. Is she married?”

“No, she works. A very good job, she says.”

“M’mmm, not much progress,” smiled Sara. “A lot of women are not doing their duty by the race. What’s in the little parcel, Nor? Can’t I let you out for half a day without some—”

“Just another bit of junk-jewellery,” confessed Nora displaying a barbaric necklace. “I have an urge to be fantastic when I know my genre is tailored.”

“It will make you look like a Byzantine Madonna.”

“The children? I wonder what they’re doing now—”

“That will do,” said Sara firmly. “We’re on holiday. Just school-girls together, and we haven’t been to Covent Garden in the morning. The children are dismissed, the poor sweets.”

This time Nora could not complain. Sara was giving the same detachment to her own problems, and had not pined, or mentioned Murray once, though both knew he was on a mental leash. It went on until Tuesday morning when Nora began a day by upsetting the contents of her bag with a hunted hand.

“It’s not possible,” she said, as if some presto had gone on over night. “There’s a mere half-crown, and that looks a bit rubbed. How expensive things are—”

“I knew it,” said Sara at once. “We’ll meet him today or I never had a premonition in my life. I dreamt about him last night. I saw him go through a door with his wife, and shut it between us.”

“Well, it’s the Bank,” agreed Nora. “He must have thought it strange I didn’t write after Bob’s letter. I’ll go to the City as soon as I’m dressed—”

“Isn’t there a West End branch?”

“If there is I can’t use it. Bob told me to go to the City, and carefully instructed me not to draw any more than twenty pounds at a time, in case I lost my bag, but it will save a taxi-fare if I draw forty. You’ll have to lend me ten shillings, Sara.”

“Help yourself,” said an absent-minded voice. “I’m glad I made my hair appointment. I’m having a few permanent curls, Nor. Yesterday I thought I was looking rather beautiful, when all the unexpected glimpses of myself showed a few wisps that would try Venus. I’ll meet you at one-fifteen.”

“Yes,” said Nora thoughtfully. “In Jermyn Street. It’s been nice and uncomplicated but—”

“We’ll see him today,” said Sara in a voice of utter conviction. “I’m sure of it. My dreams are always significant.”

It was one-thirty when Sara strolled into a cocktail corner of a restaurant in Jermyn Street, where she found Nora and Margot Hilton with glasses empty to an olive. One probing glance at the former showed an absorption in ‘do you remember’ and ‘what happened to her’ conversation. The moment held Nora completely, and any reference to the Bank would have to await another hour. Sara gave way, even to inward patience, feeling the cool well-being of a woman who has passed a whole morning in a beauty parlour. Margot gratified a quick survey, seeming like a poised edition of a well-remembered girl.

“Margot!”

“Sara!”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Too long, Margot, but I’ve been out of England a great deal, and you know how it is in London.”

Ordinarily Sara would not have made excuses, but there was something to regret in the loss of this cordial contact. A light delicate voice sounded comprehending.

“I do indeed. Friendships at fever heat recede to the school. Nora has been telling me things. What’s her husband like?”

“Tall and big,” said Sara in a flattering voice for Bob. “A lot of man.”

“Lazy as a dog,” said Nora with contented unconcern.

“And her children? She says she doesn’t show snapshots any more.”

“No,” smiled Sara. “We think it’s a male habit. Her children are angels. You’ll find them in Florentine galleries.”

“Well, so much can happen—all those writing vows we made. What about a drink? I’ve reserved a table.”

“She won’t have one,” refused Nora from the core of a motherly mood. “She looks too cool and curled to be stimulated.”

Sara laughed, permitting herself to be led towards a table in a crowded dining-room which flashed with silver dishes, and tiny flames brooded over by the black bend of waiters.

With the zest of a woman savouring meals she could not anticipate Nora sighed over the moderation of sinuous friends eating salads. Her more ample capacity demanded a mushroom omelette, and Sara was amused to see her face bend angelically towards a half-pint tankard of beer. She had an urge to stay herself with bromide for the prospect she felt was ahead. Between the three of them it was inevitable the years should be demolished, and school-girl candour evoked again.

“You write, Sara?”

“I muddle,” she admitted amiably.

“Interesting from you, Sara. They say when a woman writes, life has hurt her biologically.”

“They can say the same thing when she works,” answered Sara neatly. “An office desk is not exactly a cradle for your babes.”

“No,” admitted Margot with a slight laugh. “But I’m cured of the mother-urge. And I suppose your books are a substitution for children?”

The easy question with its unwitting wound turned Nora’s eyes anxiously in Sara’s direction, but there was no sign that the words could have been arrows.

“Brain children, I suppose,” she admitted.

“Why are you cured of the mother-urge?” asked Nora quickly.

Margot suspended a fork above a decorative looking salad. “Well, for one thing I’m not married which is important, but other than that a visit to the cinema with flashes from China and Spain makes me very contented with my lot.”

This time Sara gave Nora’s face some consideration, but unexpectedly it held no shadow.

“But you see, Margot, you and Sara did not begin to have children. Once you start there’s a feeling you want the baby back again. They leave your arms so quickly to investigate the world, that you get attached to the lovely dependable time.”

“Self-indulgence,” smiled Margot with delicate accusation. “Like following a pleasant appetite. I can see it in you, Nora, but in spite of your Madonna suggestion I’m still happy with my lot.”

“And your lot?” asked Sara with sweet insolence.

Margot stared, while Sara gave deliberate scrutiny to clear blue eyes, red mouth with full under-lip, fair groomed hair under a brief hat and a small-boned wrist and hand curved over a plate. Margot sustained the appraisement with slight feminine challenge.

“Just a working girl, Sara,” she said appeasingly.

“Perhaps, Margot dear, but you’re so calm and rested. I find you much too radiant to believe in your life without love. You look as if you needed neither money nor love from home.”

Margot tilted her face, laughing with a display of small white teeth.

“Now I know you’re here again. You’re going to put me on the spot. You were always the worst extractor at school. I remember you claimed all our wretched little secrets.”

“Tell us,” said Sara beguilingly. “I’d like to know why you look so shimmering.”

“You’re sure I do?” she questioned casually.

“Quite sure,” said Sara emphatically.

“You may as well tell her,” suggested Nora. “She applies the balm but it draws like a poultice.”

Margot gave them both embracing scrutiny, ending with a shrug of slender shoulders.

“I don’t think I mind telling you in the least. I’ve been a man’s mistress for seven years, and I feel like his wife.”

“Oh, the poor wife,” said Nora spontaneously.

“But how genuine,” said Sara. “It’s longer than a lot of marriages.”

“No, and yes, to you both. I merely took what the wife did not have. You can’t take what a woman hasn’t got.”

“No,” said Sara with acute interest. “Would it be intrusion to ask for the story?”

“Oh no, of course not,” drawled Margot in Sara’s own beguiling voice. “Having got the core of the story why the sudden delicacy?”

“Absurd, isn’t it?” agreed Sara. “Just go on, Margot, and we’ll see ourselves back on Beachy Head.”

“Well—once I kept it exclusively guarded, but now I feel quite indifferent about shouting it from the steps of the Albert Memorial—”

“Not the Albert Memorial,” repudiated Sara quickly. “They stood for homes and horsehair, and the solidity of England. Shout it from some other shrine, the places of hallowed ironies, wars to end wars—”

“Sara, your eyes look fierce, but I know what you mean. There is no security any more. It’s just eight air minutes from the Channel to the dome of St. Paul’s. The world is crazy. I wish women would revolt. They simply must not go on putting up with the threat to the children they so carefully rear—”

“Men still need wars to show how brave they are,” said Nora as if she was quoting some one.

“Who said that?” asked Margot with quick interest.

“I did,” acknowledged Sara, “perhaps in an acrid moment. But as a women’s revolt is too distant a possibility, may we have a more period story?”

“I’ll make the omelette last a long time so the waiter won’t hover,” said Nora with gentle encouragement. Instinctively three backs bent slightly inward, as if to make a circle, but Margot began talking with nonchalance that might be relating the most casual event.

“It’s hard to know where to start, but after I came home from a year in Paris I was expected to settle in the country. Very charming and pleasant, but it was not my cup of tea. Through sheer restlessness I became engaged to a boy I had known for years, the sort of uniform boy England is full of, but when we were not doing active things, I found the time with him very long. I have to admit he had some physical tyranny over me, and love-making seemed to be our one resort to conversation. Mentally I was very droopy and bored, and just to show how good the relationship was, I went the whole way for one debauched week-end. I broke the engagement coming home, and I’m sorry to say he thought I was the complete courtesan, but one couldn’t look ahead, seeing nothing but occasional physical appeasement. One must have conversation and stimulation—”

“Yes, one must. It’s very wilting otherwise,” agreed Sara quickly, but Nora kept silent. Conversation was not the greatest asset from Bob.

“I told my father how I felt and he was the real Heaven-born parent. He said my allowance was for life—unless—”

“There was no money for anyone any more.”

“Yes, Sara, that’s what he meant. Then he gave me a letter to a man in town, who in turn sent me to an international firm who wanted a girl for some special work, and as I’d travelled a lot I got the job. I was hardly there before I met the Managing-Director— Well, it’s useless to be superlative about things like that but I knew at once he was what I wanted. So did he—and—”

“What?” pressed two voices.

“Well,” said Margot slowly, “we just dined, but when we were alone we fell into each other’s arms. I think when the right feeling is there it’s never delayed.”

“No,” said Sara quietly.

“But were you lovers at once?” asked Nora ingenuously.

“Oh no,” Margot smiled. “I had to learn first he was married to a mother-woman—”

“Oh!” ejaculated Sara. “I’m sorry. Go on!”

“For Brian it is absolutely necessary to be first with a woman, but after marriage he became a means to motherhood, and when three children had arrived, she moved out of his room to be with the children.”

“But if the children are sufficient why wouldn’t she divorce him?” asked Sara slowly.

Margot shrugged. “She’s an Anglo-Catholic and she consulted her Vicar and he wouldn’t permit it, but she said if Brian would not upset her, she would not upset him. I think she was relieved. From the first evening I told Brian about my unhappy engagement, as I felt I could hold nothing back—”

“I know,” sighed Sara. “No attitudes, just plain raw candour.”

“Exactly! Sara, have lunch with me some day?”

“Glad to,” she smiled. “Go on!”

“Well, Brian and I kept meeting, rather tensely, and he said the time had come when I must make up my mind whether we would be lovers, and he further said with supreme honesty, he would not have it that way, if I had not gone the whole way—”

“Ah!” said Nora significantly.

“He was right,” said Sara. “Margot would not be confused by the unknown, or see the physical relation out of proportion.”

“Exactly, but it meant giving up the thought of marriage,” said Margot. “So I tried doing without him for quite a while and I felt like half a woman. Then we met, and he said he would wait for me in his flat that evening, and he also made me promise him not to drink one drop of anything, and to come or stay, through the emotions of my heart, and the sobriety of my mind.”

“Nice man,” said Sara approvingly.

“I didn’t eat a mouthful all day, and it was such a long evening, but I went to a party, and I believe I looked at my watch a hundred times. By eleven everybody was a little drunk, and I felt so fastidious and sober. There was not a word said that did not spring from false stimulation, and I felt so unsatisfied, when there was Brian waiting for me with real things. Suddenly I left them without a word, got a taxi and drove straight to his flat, crazy in case he’d given me up. I walked up the stairs, instead of taking the lift, and when I crept down his corridor I could see him before he saw me. He was sitting with his watch in his hand surrounded by evening papers, but not one of them had been unfolded. I knew then if the papers had been well-read I would have gone out. But you know what a man is like with his papers, and the very look of those flat ones told me how much I meant to him, so I walked right in, and he just stood up and sighed as if he was terribly tired, and—and—”

“The rest in silence,” said Sara giving a big sigh herself.

“Not quite,” said Margot with a gay laugh. “The first thing I knew I was terribly hungry, and he fed me. I believe I ate the biggest meal of my life.”

“Margot! How I love little details like that. In a big moment to be able to turn to a ham and an egg— It was delightful of you to tell me.”

“And he doesn’t support me, beyond the normal courtesies a man gives a woman, but he does remember a lot of special days that demand a present and I let him, but in spite of my intimacy with the head, I have to be back at the office in twenty minutes. What about a sweet?” she said making a sign to a waiter.

The rest of the lunch went into eager question and answer, and mutual memories of school.

“What should we remember most?” said Sara in a voice that made the other two give a quick start. Over the years came the identical tone of their head-mistress.

“Sara, shut up,” laughed Margot. “I just feel guilty about Brian.”

Sara smiled with pinched austerity. “Is my face like a tight boot, Margot?”

“Well, not exactly, but—”

“Then tell me what I taught you, dear?”

“My dear Sara,” she drawled. “If I save my best for one or two, it’s a question of how much best I’ve really got.”

“Right, first time. Nora, what must you remember?”

Nora recited like a meek child. “I must remember that though I respond very well to a first-class call, there are many second-class calls of equal importance. What about yourself?”

Sara gave a rueful shrug. “I must cultivate restraint and a greater sense of reticence. There are many things in life that are better passed by— Bah,” she said in light dismissal. “Margot, must you go?”

“Yes, I must.”

“My lunch,” said Nora firmly, “I’ve been to the Bank.”

Bank! Sara jerked round as if galvanized to memory. Then she pulled herself together for a cordial farewell of Margot, and a promise of future contacts. Both of them watched her walk off on slender beautiful legs, carrying her like a woman sure of her way.

“Nor, you’ve got news! Margot made me forget. Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, just a second— There! I want to go back to the hotel. I must change my shoes. My feet hurt.”

Outside Sara steered Nora across the street. “We can get into Piccadilly here, Nor. What did you find?”

“There were two notes. One there ever since we arrived, and another written yesterday from his Club to ask why I hadn’t written, and if I received this in time, would I lunch at one-fifteen at the Savoy, as his wife would be in town all day. The first was written from Hill Street and he gave three telephone numbers. I felt I’d been very casual—”

“Yes, what did you do?”

“I telephoned the office, and asked to speak to him, and, my dear, I felt I’d asked for God—”

“He was in conference, I suppose, selecting a titbit with oil on it.”

“Well, he was somewhere. But I got his personal secretary and she was not so high-hat. Apparently he had instructed her if I called, he was to be informed at once.”

“Well, be prepared,” said Sara impressed. “He must have been waiting.”

“After a cold delay—”

“You spoke to him,” said Sara seizing Nora’s arm.

“No, I didn’t. You’re pinching me, and my feet hurt. He sent a message to say he regretted extremely that he couldn’t speak at that moment, but could he expect me to lunch, and could he send his car to call for me. I sent a message back to say I was just as extremely sorry, but I was lunching with Mrs. Colville. Mrs. Colville! I repeated it in a loud voice so the girl would make no mistake. Then I left our address and said I hoped we would meet very shortly.”

“Today,” said Sara fatefully. “I’m sure of it. What will I do? Cross here, Nor. You’re hobbling.”

“It’s the new shoes. Do you think I could put on my golf-shoes and go for a walk? I know you won’t lie down this afternoon.”

“No, I won’t, and you can’t wear brogues with those clothes. You can change, and we’ll walk through Piccadilly, down Constitution Hill, across the Mall and back again. It’s a nice soft afternoon. My new curls have taken away my inferiority complex.”

Nora’s aching feet sent Sara charitably to the desk to get their key. She returned with a slip for Nora.

“Telephone, Nor,” she almost hissed, steering her limping friend towards the lift. Nora stared at the slip without comment, until they were walking down a corridor.

“Mr. Blair called at two-thirty, and left a message to say he would drop round, if possible, this afternoon.”

“We’re going for a walk,” said Sara as if she was on her way. “I’m going, Nor. Nothing would induce me to sit in a chair and wait for, ‘if possible.’ ”

“I’m going too,” said Nora soothingly. “He couldn’t arrive before five so we may be back by that time.”

“I’ll have an extra bath if they come, and you can say I’m immersed in soap, water, memoranda or anything,” ordered Sara imperiously.

“That’s too noisy. We could hear the splashing.”

“Change your shoes,” ordered Sara. “And we’ll go right out.”

      *      *      *      

In spite of Sara’s urgency it was five o’clock before they started to walk. Nora had found parcels, and insisted on trying on a dress, making the room drift with tissue-paper. Then she had to give loving survey to two winter coats for the children, tidy up and change her clothes again. By that time they needed tea, which Sara drank walking around the room with frequent glances at her watch. When they were outside she raised her head as if the suite had been oppressive.

“It’s bigger breath out here. I believe I’m getting claustrophobia.”

“Yes, perhaps. Bob gets it on Sundays when I suggest taking Rosamund to church. It can always be cured on the golf-course. How nice it smells. So many whiffs. Where’s Hill Street, Sara? He’s got a flat.”

“Let me see. It’s off Berkeley Square.”

“And Berkeley Square? I’m only sure of the long streets.”

“From this end, Berkeley Square carries on after Berkeley Street. Next to Dover Street.”

“Darling, you’re walking like a jittery mare, and your eyes look wild. That restraint you mentioned at lunch! Even if he pops up he can’t bite you in the middle of Piccadilly.”

“Fool,” said Sara with a relaxing laugh. “Wasn’t Margot astonishing, and didn’t she look glowing? Love is so becoming to the face. I’ve felt plain since Murray left.”

“Well, you don’t look it,” said Nora encouragingly.

“Yes, but it’s what’s behind your face that gives you confidence, Nor. I was so sure of myself during that lovely time.”

“Margot is very sure of herself. As a wife I’m against it, but I can’t help thinking the way of transgressors is pleasant. Did you notice she said they’d been to Egypt together, strictly in international interests?”

“Love is very international.”

“Here’s Albemarle Street. What’s next?”

“Why?”

“You’ve made me full of omen.”

“Perhaps he won’t drop round now since you mentioned me in a nice loud voice.”

“He telephoned after. I think it’s magnificent to be able to drop round with his wife.”

“My dear, prophets, priests and kings get used to expediency. If Murray did not want to see me, he would arrange at once to run over to Africa to look at a kopje. When his mind is made up he won’t quibble about a wife. Conduct never follows a guide book. Men are odd, and women know them better than men. I thought Colin and Bruce were sad judges of their own kind, but I didn’t tell them so. For the real recesses of man, find the woman who’s seen him without his collar.”

“Well, it makes me think the best data on your husband doesn’t come from his wife. Murray is coming to see me. I have to be coddled because I fed him in the outposts of Empire.”

“Let’s go for a bus ride. I’d like to be high up.”

“No, we’ll walk,” decided Nora looking idly into the traffic. It had halted in square bulk, with engines panting towards another spurt. Behind a pair of buses she saw an opulent looking town car, driven by a flinty-looking chauffeur buttoned neatly to the neck. Her eyes were dismissing it for something else, when she gave a shocked start. Instinctively her voice gave warning.

“Sara, pull yourself together.”

“Why,” she gasped, with rapid signs of disintegration.

“It is, it is! There’s only one face like that, and it has a woman beside it.”

“A woman?” faltered Sara.

“His wife! Remember it too! He sees us. He’s speaking through a tube to the chauffeur. I said, pull yourself together and don’t blush.”

“I wouldn’t dream of such a thing,” she said with intense haughtiness. “He can’t park here. There’s no place.”

Now the car was behind them and Nora looked back.

“Yes, there is, a short way back. He’s getting out. We must go back. Take it easy.”

“Yes, I will. Thank you, Nor.”

With a calm manner Nora retraced several steps, and Sara followed with a wildly beating heart. Her lower lip was trembling but the sharp prospect of Murray’s wife challenged all her social fortitude. She was just behind Nora, when she saw the light on his fair hair and heard his gentle accusing voice.

“Nora! I was just dropping by on the off-chance— Why didn’t you send me a line? Nearly a week—”

“John, I’ve been so busy shopping, and I was terribly sorry about the lunch today, but Sara—”

“Yes, Sara,” he said with supreme quietude, turning easily and taking her gloved hand advancing with automatic courtesy. Momentarily she sustained the full recognition of his eyes as he seemed to take her hand home.

“How do you do,” she said naturally.

“Sara, how are you? You must meet my wife. Elsa, this is Mrs. Colville.”

Jolt in Sara was quickly suppressed as she marvelled at the possession that could introduce his mistress to his wife with easy reminders of “hands across the sea.” Hospitality and eaten bread warmed his voice as if he was remembering with appreciation, and this was a casual ‘well met.’ At once she knew he was deeper toned, like a man who had broken a mask for a contained simplicity of manner, but the reassurance of ease did not lie in his face. He was thinner, and the warmth of welcome stayed in his beautiful voice. Eyes and mouth were sombre, and his skin had a stinted look. With her hand retaining the feel of his grip, and her eyes giving and taking one quick survey, she found herself bending inside the shadowed interior of the car shaking hands with calm civility. It was shattering to meet his wife face to face, as if she was accepting the most ordinary introduction, when every nerve vibrated inside, but she knew she must suppress everything for sheer interest in the moment. Emotions could cry out later when perception was spent, and the time for seeing had passed. She could meet slow-moving brown eyes and hear a reticent voice acclaiming her with aloof charm. After the most ordinary comments she stepped back to offer the field to Nora, and in a second it seemed she was standing by his long black bonnet staring into his face. Now that he was not speaking his face looked as wintry as the evening he had taken her through that ghostly dance. Under his hooded lids his eyes were tentative, and his delicate nostrils looked insufficient channels for air. All the prepared speeches born of conversations that never come to pass, scattered like mental chaff. She was assailed with a familiar wish to lighten a threatening moment.

“How are you, Sara?” he asked again.

“Well, Murray,” she said almost childishly, and she saw him start because of a name he could not have heard since he saw her. There was a short pause that promised to stiffen into a minute. With the sudden ductile softness that had often spilled on his steel she said lightly, “what a lovely lot of car, Murray.”

A breath was expelled through his nose, and greater ease came into his face.

“I’m glad you like it. Would you and Nora have any use for it? It’s often lying up. I could send it round for shopping—”

“Oh no, thank you,” she said reproachfully. “They might see it at the desk and put our bill up.”

A slow smile travelled over his face. “Well, I have another, much more moderate, in fact quite disreputable—”

“That would be worse,” she repudiated in the same tone. “Then they might think we wouldn’t pay at all. Nora is spending much too fast as it is.”

“She looks very fit,” he said giving a fleeting look to Nora in profile bending towards his wife.

“Yes,” she agreed. “She’s quite giddy. Don’t you see how abandoned her hat is? She had to buy something like that, and she was furious because the girl kept offering her haloes, but she tried on hat after hat, and still looked like an angel. The poor girl was in despair, and after a good hour made a most unsalesmanlike comment, ‘Moddom,’ she said, ‘a hat can only do so much for a face.’ ”

There was a genuine spontaneous laugh.

“And your writing?” he questioned, asking something she dreaded.

“I’m on holiday with Nora,” she said vaguely, “And Noel—”

As if he had not heard he moved towards Nora asking her plans, and reminding his wife they could not stay where they were. Mrs. Blair’s quiet eyes seemed to fasten on him waiting for a lead.

“We must arrange something,” he said in gentle command. “I wish we could stay now, but we must be off. Perhaps you could come to us for the week-end?”

“Yes,” corroborated his wife with adequate grace. “That would be pleasant, if you wouldn’t find it too quiet. We’re very quiet just now—”

“I could pick you up at noon, Saturday. Could you manage it?” he said looking at them both.

How unlike him to interrupt his wife and ignore her question about Noel! It would not be unusual in other men, but he always permitted a woman to get to the end of her sentence. Could he possibly think I would go for a week-end, thought Sara. But he could hardly extend an invitation to Nora without including her. He trusts me to deal with it.

Answering for herself Nora did not even glance her way.

“I’d like it very much, but I don’t know about Sara. She’s always full of engagements. I rarely see her,” she added with beautiful mendacity. Sara stepped forward speaking for herself.

“It would have been delightful, Mrs. Blair, but I’m going to some relatives. I’m delighted about Nora. I was dreading leaving her.”

“I’m sorry,” said the reticent voice, that sounded as if no wrack of living, or exuberant rise had ever sent it down or up. “It will be a nice change for John. We’re very quiet. My son—”

“We must be off, Elsa,” interrupted Murray with decision. “I’ll telephone Nora, and tell her the time I will call.”

“Yes, John. You make the arrangements, dear.”

Under a social smile Sara went wry, but the routine of containment permitted her to wait while they went through an interchange of civilities, and she accepted another grip from Murray’s hand. This time she did not meet his eyes. Her own seemed to be darting away, before her feet could feel release. Thankfully she felt herself strolling forward leaving the flinty-looking chauffeur to dispose of his master beside his wife. With a light glaze they walked on as if they must get well out of earshot before they spoke.

“Well,” breathed Nora, “the palms of my hands are wet.”

“I can’t walk any more,” said Sara tensely, and before Nora could protest she was sitting beside Sara ordering a taxi-driver to drive through all the open places.

“The Park, the Mall, the Embankment,” she said vaguely. Then she dropped back stripping off her gloves as if she needed air.

“It’s over. Heavens, how ordinary! Was I adequate, Nor?”

“Cool as a cucumber. Perhaps two red spots in your cheeks, but she would think that was your natural complexion.”

“I hope so indeed.”

“He didn’t show a sign in his manner. Now I know why he’s so successful. He doesn’t give away a thing.”

“He’s changed. Simpler. Not even on guard. His lofty brow seems a little humbled.”

“I noticed that. Like a person giving way to great naturalness. I’ve seen it in artificial people who go very simple when somebody dies.”

“Something levelling,” said Sara thoughtfully. “A place where you can be quite unselfconscious.”

“She told me,” said Nora significantly, “that John must have been working very hard on his last trip. He came back looking tired out.”

“Did he, poor sweet. I hope he was tottering,” said Sara affectionately.

“She’s quiet, a little shy.”

“Quite! Her clothes are good. No makeup, just a little powder. Tidy shingle when most women are upswept. Her fox had all the right points. One glove was off. Smooth uncomprehending hand, rather matriarchal. She’s never been blasted. Just the type to prowl round the garden and stay snug and secure in a Place.”

“Well, you saw more than I did. I thought she was a bit bovine.”

“Yes, a baby a year. Should have litters.”

“Cows don’t have litters, though I have seen a calf with two heads—”

“Murray wouldn’t be satisfied with an extra head. What lovely lies we told! I didn’t know you were so talented. A week-end, Nor? I shall wait until you get back. Murray wouldn’t speak of Noel. Why? Was the subject indelicate before his wife and his mistress? Think of it, Nor. I’ve seen it in plays, and heard about it in real life, but it’s so different when you do it yourself. We talked of the mild September, when we have so much in common. We might have discussed our beds. How do I feel in the mild September? I don’t know. There I stood making him laugh, when I should have acted like a wounded Duchess or sobbed on the bonnet of his Rolls. Nothing is ever as you think it will be. Men never give you the right cues. His poor bleak face! I love the tilt of his chin. Who was the king who never smiled again?”

“I don’t know. His son was drowned or something.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least. No matter who’s drowned I can always make him laugh. I recognised the suit, and I was thinking of the times its sleeves had been round me. Why didn’t I turn round and say, ‘let’s not pretend any more. He’s more mine than yours. Ask the man to take you to your lawyer and let’s get on with it.’ It’s so simple.”

“Doubtless,” said Nora dryly, “if she didn’t have an initial stroke, she could quite easily say, ‘my dear Mrs. Colville, I’m his wife and the mother of his son—’ ”

“But I could count on her having no repartee,” said Sara heartlessly. “The poor sweet—”

“Who? Elsa?”

“No, damn you! He looked thinner, as if he’d been eating the stalled ox where no love is. But I love him thin—all men should be thin—”

“Why?”

“Don’t be a fool. Let’s get out of here. I want to go for a walk. Taxi—”

“Drive on,” commanded Nora, pulling Sara back with a firm hand. “You’ve just snatched me from the pavement when we started for a walk, and you’re not going to play Jack-in-the-box with me at my time of life. And you needn’t look as if the taxi had a nice long hall you could tramp through. Taxis are not built that way.”

Sara laughed sitting back with disarming docility, muting tension and excitability from her body.

“Be quiet and relax,” said Nora persuasively.

Sara sighed sending restlessness back to her spirit. Moving themselves the passing world seemed to move faster. A bulk of machinery closed up many, but crowds scurried by with varied steps, treading eagerly, anxiously, painfully or creeping with age and infirmity. She saw urbane people emanating background, and others obviously rushing towards responsibilities insufficiently met. She saw gigmania girls, suggesting evanescence, and the life-all-love of the peacock-moth. She saw it achingly, protestingly with eyes searching for a meaning. She saw it as a witless stream of life where people blurred muddlement with haste.

“It’s quite right,” she said broodingly. “ ‘Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.’ ”

“What?” asked Nora in startled voice.

“It was Wordsworth, I think. Look out, Nor. What’s it all about anyway? In a few decades every foot will have reached final inactivity. Sometimes living seems the very height of foolishness. When I hear people laying down the law about it I want to say, ‘who said?’ I can understand the trees springing out of the earth, but houses stuck up, people running up and down inside, scurrying out, concerned with the next ten minutes when they’re really rushing from the cradle to the grave. If we stopped a few of them, how deep would their thoughts be? Worry about money and bills, and the illness that was not on the budget. But there’s the red heart of life, the Ichor blood of living, and if that went, how stale the world would be. All red emotions belong to the upspring of growth, and the contemplative few that glimpse the shortness of life won’t look at people any more. They look at the sky and ponder on their next mansion, or lift their eyes to the everlasting hills, when there are no everlasting hills. I was through a small earthquake once, and I shall never forget that moment of a toppling world, but my earthquake was small, and later I talked to a woman who had been through a gigantic one in Japan. I asked her how she felt, and she burst right out crying. She said she had been brought up to believe in the everlasting hills, and she saw them come down. If you took me to the stake now I couldn’t say what I believed, but of course if I saw the faggots I’d find it convenient to believe in anything. Bah, just scurry—and you turn over a flat stone, and find ants more orderly than men. The only peace lies in London’s little churches. They’re musty, like the calm Sundays that go on and on—”

“What a nice long speech, Sara. Yes, we’re in the Park. I wonder if there’s a vacant tub. I’m sure you feel better now, so we’ll go back. We’re dining with Olive Nickson and conversation like that would kill her.”

“Possibly,” said Sara with great indifference. “Because she has an economical ice-cube in every department of her living. She always had. Did you discuss the problem of children with her?”

“No, I did not. She’s so well-bred that I feel good form alone will avert every disaster.”

“England is full of people like that. In some houses I feel they’ve all taken elocution and are acting a part, but it’s soothing. I like the illusion of security. I think I’ll go back to the land and dig in a garden. The Olive Nicksons bore me, but I suppose it’s because I’m polyandrist, and not respectable emotionally.”

“She’s most disappointing, because she’s not real. She’s so formal that her servants positively back out of the room.”

“Probably got holes in the heels of their stockings.”

“And her children are turned over body and soul to nurses. What fun are children like that?”

“What indeed? Then in spite of Margot you’re undismayed?”

“Quite! Besides I’ve taken the trip, and that’s consent. I’ve heard of a book, ‘Sex at Choice.’ If I can find it, I’ll buy it, so there won’t be any mistake. My last purchase will be a maternity dress—”

“Oh, Nor, it sounds so businesslike,” laughed Sara. “American women are rather like that. ‘Yes, dear little Junior, he is rather sweet. He was conceived at eleven-thirty on Independence Day.’ How lovely it looks, but it’s full of a rich death. Dear, dear Murray! In spite of his self-possession he looked so bleak. I can still make him laugh though.”

“And you got the last look. I was hoping his wife wouldn’t see it.”

“What did it say?” she asked swiftly.

“I thought it looked a bit fond. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if he loved you now, as you loved him.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Sara. “Loved? I love him, don’t I?”

“If you say so, Sara,” Nora answered serenely. “We must get back. Taxi! Taxi!”

Nora leaned forward ordering the driver to take them back to their hotel.

“My taxi,” answered Sara. “I must go and see my lawyer this week.”

CHAPTER THREE

Sara stepped from a bus at Piccadilly Circus and paused for a survey, sniffing the hot breath of petrol belching on her ankles. It rose to her nose as a rich savour appeasing her appetite for London. The day was luminous with a spent sun cooled by the gentle intrusion of autumn. Impersonal happiness was soothing, making her step light and her eyes conscious of the outer facets of living. She breathed deeply, noting the red bulk of buses, the dark spurt and halt of taxis, the scurry of people, and the general urgency of a week-end. Everybody had a quicker step, emphasising the leisured sense of her stroll. It was reassuring to discover large segments of living curving rich and round. She moved forward, idly glimpsing the sheen of things in shop-windows, and reacting pleasantly to their challenge. Acquisitiveness could be intensified because of lustrous barriers.

She would be alone until Monday morning. It was twelve forty-five and Nora was sure to be gone. As the thought came as a certainty it was raised for further consideration. By the curb stood Murray’s car and the materialisation of his flinty-looking chauffeur. For a brief second she looked westward, wondering if she would continue her stroll and return to an empty suite. But that would be deliberate retreat when she wished to advance. Having found he could not keep her out of England, how much less could he expel her from her own quarters? Her renewed step was confident, but urgent as the rest of London’s scurry. It was impossible to stroll towards uncertainty. She must rush, valiantly, to what?

In the hotel lobby people drooped with pre-lunch inertia, and some had a foot-sore look in their faces. Others appeared fresh, sitting forward with the slight tilt indicating waiting. Many drank in the bar, over dishes of olives, and the tawny stiffness of potato chips. Bars interested her enormously. There was always a drinker and a drinkee, and it was ceaseless intrigue to ponder over their relationship to each other. Now observation was fleeting. She trod towards the clang of a lift and found herself going up.

“Four, please,” she said so firmly that she was interrogated with mild English stares for so much decision. Sara smiled to herself, treading the soft carpet of a corridor. Nothing had diminished the adventure of her blood, and at that moment the thought of meeting Murray made no jagged disturbance in the light ripple of her mind. The suite door was ajar, permitting a sudden entrance.

“Hullo,” she said with easy friendliness, making them both start in her direction. Momentarily she thought they were surprised in serious conversation, thwarting a casual greeting. Nora looked distressed, gazing from him to her with intense question. But Sara did not wish to linger in analysis. She felt contained and confident, and nothing in her could decide whether she wished to lighten Murray’s grave face for love of the man, or to test her power over him.

“Hullo,” she said again, to their continued silence. “I thought you’d be on Great Roads by this time.”

He smiled, receiving her hand in a firm grip. Sara felt her own curl agreeably under his fingers. “No, we seem to have lingered. How are you, Sara? You look very well today, but a little thinner, I think.”

“Perhaps. I didn’t sail very well,” she said, lightly flippant. “And how are you? A little grimmer, I think.”

“Quite all right,” he said with some formality. “What time are you leaving town?”

Sara sat down drawing off her gloves with great leisure. “I’m not leaving,” she said blandly. “I’m going to do just what I like until Nor comes back.”

“But you said,” he began, stopping himself abruptly, with a tacit admission that she could say what she liked in relation to his invitation.

“She was thinking of going to Scotland,” said Nora kindly.

“I was not,” she contradicted with easy candour. “You know I have no intention of going until our two weeks are up.”

“What have you been doing this morning?” asked Nora with reproachful haste.

“I had a delightful morning in all but one place, and I bought a cocker spaniel.”

“What, a dog!” ejaculated Nora sitting down and further delaying her host. As yet she was hatless and quite unready for immediate departure.

“Yes, a cocker spaniel is a dog, I hope.”

“But what are you going to do with him?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said inconsequentially, “and I almost bought a cat to mitigate the fatuity of the spaniel. I’m sure people keep dogs just to enjoy uncritical love, but cats keep you in sight of your size. The Persian I yearned over made me feel less than the dust.”

“I hope so indeed,” said Nora fervently, “the poor little dog!”

“Not at all,” said Sara coolly. “We’re great friends already. Our eyes met through a window, and he was so black and beautiful, and you know the odd way spaniels lie down that he induced me to go in and see him. And I found he was over distemper, that he was exalted on the distaff side, and after an intimate talk on diet and worms I bought him, in spite of the fact that he licked my face, and chewed my glove, but I was in a benign mood and didn’t mind putting it back full of spaniel-spit—”

“Where is he now?” asked Murray sitting down with every appearance of leisure.

“Murray, he’s very happy, I hope. I sent him back to the kennels as a boarder, and when I decide where I’m going—”

“Talk to John while I put on my hat,” interrupted Nora, going through the bedroom door and shutting it firmly. Sara suspected her of leaving them alone, assured by her evident ease, and Murray’s unhurried relaxation. She felt a sharp pang. Her effect was working extremely well, and she thought regretfully he was still her most attentive audience, with eyes washing gently over her. It seemed incredible that a great gulf yawned between them.

“You can’t take him travelling with you, Sara,” he reminded her.

“I know that,” she said gravely, “so perhaps he’ll induce me to buy an English roof. I had to have something kind and uncritical after an interview with my lawyer.”

“Was he difficult, my dear?” he asked, as if such an attitude was an incredulity towards her.

To her complete chagrin she felt herself flushing under the intimacy of his voice. It had the effect of making her sweep heedlessly on, determined to maintain the light flippancy of her mood.

“He was indeed. He simply can’t understand my uneven spending, and he explained so pompously that he had diverted something shaky in South America, to North America, and the way he said it made me feel I should clap. Perhaps it was a valorous deed, a bit of V.C. finance—”

“It could be,” he said with a genuine laugh.

“Then perhaps I didn’t appreciate him enough,” she smiled. “But I couldn’t, when he asked me again, if I was going to continue paying excessive storage charge on my knives and forks. That question is a Litany every time I return. Then he drew my attention to the nothing I spent in January, compared to the quarter’s income I spent in May, and what was the use of telling him that no woman could spend the same in January as she did when the almond blossom was out?”

“A very unskilful lawyer, my dear,” he agreed sympathetically. “I know many. Would you like one with more imagination?”

“No, thank you, Murray,” she said directly to his intent eyes. “I expect he’s very good for me. But that’s really why I bought the spaniel. After I felt more stabilised I spent half an hour in a Bond Street Gallery looking at Dada pictures. When I felt sanity slipping, a very nice man spoke to me and asked me if I was interested. I said I was demented, and he laughed and gave me some information on Psychic-Discharge Expressionism, and admitted he was bored to sobs watching those abortions. I was intensely relieved when he said his feet hurt, so we sat down, and in exchange for Psychic-Discharge, I told him some dry boracic powder rubbed on his feet would see him through the Dada period. He was very grateful, and told me a lot about the picture-world and we had a slight argument. He said the moderns couldn’t draw, and I said like the Americans, they had something—”

She stopped momentarily, scanning a very familiar man following her with happy humour. She felt the increased colour of her own cheeks and the glow of her own eyes, and in the slight hesitation she met the oncoming wave of definite desire towards her. Hurriedly she let words splash over intensity.

“He did not agree with me, but remained very amiable and took me into another room where an exhibition was in readiness for next week, and there was the most achingly beautiful picture which I positively yearned to possess, but it was a mere thousand guineas. Imagine my lawyer’s face—”

“Let me buy it for you, Sara,” he suggested with quiet spontaneity.

For a brief second she felt a surge of resentment, giving her a feeling of Richard, glaring with eyes like slits, but the emotion had no duration in view of the uncomplicated expression of his face. It was the capitulation of an affectionate father towards a child’s expensive caprice.

“Thank you very much, Murray,” she curbed herself to say, “but I’m sorry I must refuse. In spite of the spaniel I don’t know where I’ll be, and the picture is big.”

“Just as you say, Sara. So you came to England after all.”

“Yes, I came to England,” she agreed without defiance or emphasis.

“It’s what I hoped would happen,” he said holding her eyes very gravely.

Her simmer dropped to a graver level and her voice came startled and incredulous. “You wanted me to come to England?”

“It’s what I’ve been waiting for, something I knew must happen.”

The conviction of his voice in contrast to past uncertainty disconcerted her. She was not as confident as she thought.

“But how strange,” she said speaking with a witless sense of direction. “It’s ironical. It makes me feel as I did once when I was a child, and first learned the meaning of irony. I had a pair of gloves I loved so much I used to smooth them every night before I got into bed. The first spring day I wore them, I lost one glove. I nearly broke my heart, but I hunted for days, until the time came when I knew one glove was no good so I threw it away. The next day the other came back.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked grimly. “It sounds as if you might be telling me something—”

“I don’t know, I really don’t know,” she said with rapidly slipping security. “Perhaps I’m just remembering the queer ironies of time. Your wanting me to come when you didn’t last June. There’s nothing to say about anything, Murray. Let’s leave it alone.”

“There’s a good deal to say, Sara. Change is not the thing I expected to find in myself—”

“No,” she agreed with a brief laugh, “once your mind is made up—”

“A man’s mind!” He laughed with short scorn. “It works very well when he owns his heart—Sara,” he asked with unexpected irrelevance, “what was the subject of the thousand guinea picture?”

It was then she realised how dangerous its subject would be.

“Oh, just something vital and beautiful,” she said with casual dismissal.

“Yes, but what was vital and beautiful?” His voice held gathering firmness to press her.

“Just a garden,” she said crisply.

He regarded her unbelievingly. “It’s not like you to be swept away by a garden. Was that all of the picture? What gallery was it in?”

“My dear Murray! Must you put me on the mat for a brief whim—”

“Yes. Tell me why you craved the picture. I insist.”

“You insist,” she said on a rising inflection. “Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know all my caprices, though I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

“You have mentioned it. Go on and tell me.”

She sat bolt upright, meeting and sending a wave of contention.

“As you’re really so curious, it was the picture of a child playing in a garden, and it made me think of ‘Dear Brutus,’ and the man who went into the enchanted wood and found his child. Do you know the play?”

“Very well,” he said crushingly.

“Do you? So do I. But this child did not look like a dream child. It was extremely convincing, full of arms and legs, and the garden looked growing. I found myself laughing, feeling all the questions it wanted to ask and the places it wanted to go. I’ve never seen a picture so full of motion, health and exuberance. Why, Murray—” she gasped.

For such a composed man his chair had become a springboard expelling him to the window, from which he stared, giving her no chance to see anything but his lean back and uplifted head showing the repression of hard emotion.

“Murray,” she said again, but there was no answer. This time her softness met no reply. She was left regarding his taut back which she could ponder about as she willed. Silence was a definite presence through which she heard Nora make an unidentified thud in the next room.

“Then, Murray,” she asked in a clear voice, “you have minded about us?”

“Terribly,” he said with ejected quiet that was more potent than a fervour of words.

Sara sat hearing the room vibrate with hard syllables. Where could they walk now in an inconsequential world without meeting some rich haunt? What lived of that ardent elemental quality that had swept her towards him? It had been adult, she knew, something deeper than the transient flares of youth. It was green afternoon with the glare of noon sweetly sequestered. Yet he had rung down the curtain to full night, turning her out on the most witless walk of her life. Noel, the cause of his expediency? He had not spoken of Noel once. Impetuously she rose and advanced towards his unhappy back.

“Murray, now I insist. Turn round and talk to me. We always spoke the truth didn’t we?”

“Did we?” he asked turning on his heel to face her. “I didn’t, because I didn’t recognise the truth.”

But Sara was shocked at a face in full bereavement, with control making a bitter mask.

“Murray, are you looking like that for us? Can’t you even see the bitter-sweet? Or is it something else—Noel—why won’t you speak of Noel?”

“Is Nora ready?” he asked bleakly. “It’s time we were on our way. We have to stop for lunch.”

“Evasion, I won’t have it,” she said grasping his arm and jolting her blood with the familiar feel of his bones. “Tell me, please, Murray. You struck me down with Noel—”

“Yes, I know I did.”

He was on the verge of some elemental betrayal, looking more primal than she had thought possible. She had a feeling he might seize her with hard hands, or collapse towards her uncertain arms. She looked momentarily at the door that might bring Nora at any moment.

“Murray,” she whispered with gentle reason. “Just tell me. Is there anything wrong beside us?”

“Yes.”

“Then what, my dear?” she said with a simplicity that won.

“Noel,” he said in a flat emotionless voice, “has been in bed ever since I received the cable that morning. I was telling Nora when you came in. After measles he developed rheumatic fever and it didn’t stay in the joints. It went to his heart. He’s an invalid—”

“No,” she protested sharply, backing away as if he must be lying.

“Yes, an invalid,” he said in a voice that penetrated her ear very well.

“Oh—”

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, John,” said Nora opening the door and placing a dressing-case on the floor. “Oh, Sara, John, I’ll—”

“No, you won’t,” said Sara incoherently, and he backed her up with a quiet rally.

“We must go, Nora. I’ll ring for a boy to take your things.”

But Nora was searching Sara’s face, and in sight of it she gave a repudiating look at her dressing-case. Her definite expression of week-end postponement made Sara sweep forward, and wrap an arm lightly round her shoulders.

“Good-bye, Nor, until Monday. Have a nice time!”

Before either could reply she was through the bedroom door closing it with definite dismissal.

Long before the outer door had closed on them, the sensualist in her was dead. Her slowing pulse would not savour London that week-end. Eyes were turned in on herself, while outer sound came in a modified spurt and halt. Murray with an invalid son? Noel as an invalid with a bad heart? Hearts were uncertain things. They could stop with awful suddenness, or last like a creaking door. Unseeingly she gazed at the characteristic pattern of a hotel carpet, and saw nothing but Murray with an invalid son. It was the most unexpected jolt when she thought jolting was over, and it suggested a reorientation of values. An invalid? He had spoken the word as a man might, discovering black blood in his son. What did he think now of perpetuity through Noel? What was the state of his mind if she must judge by the state of his face? Topple, she thought, thinking of the desperate insecurity of her hospital dreams. Compassion invaded her, and she wanted to comfort him generously. Compassion? What sort of substitution was that? She had felt warm compassion for the spaniel, sadly shut up in a shop. Now she was thinking with her brain as well as her heart. At last the two had divided, when before they had overlain each other in a rich muddle. Her brain felt curiously uninvaded as if she could be a thinking woman again, and not a mass of enchanted vibration. Yet he was dear, dear, and she could not get past him until her tormented summer ghost was laid and she emerged as autumnal woman.

It was time for tea before she remembered lunch, and dinnertime before she could move to consider eating. She was glad to stay in the stillness preceding restlessness, dreading a return of worried blood. Very tentatively she rose, bathing and dressing, quiet in an introvert world. In the same glaze she went down to dinner and to the solicitude of a waiter she waved the menu away. “Something easy to eat,” she said, vaguely, “I leave it to you.”

“Yes, Madam,” murmured a deferential foreign voice. “Madam is bereaved, just a little—”

Sara murmured instant assent. What she had a little of she did not know, but it came very tenderly. Bereaved, she thought, knowing her dress was black, but other women could wear black and not be accused of mourning. Widowhood was growing over her clothes. That was morbid, she thought distastefully. Reaction made her smile at the waiter as if she would convince him of her undistressed state. But his manner was set. In the way he placed his dishes around her, he was gentle, sustaining, tendering the easiest of funeral-baked meats. She sighed, leaving him with an expressive tip for good intentions.

She trailed back to the suite feeling the loneliness of hotel rooms. Solitude would be different if she had her own things around her. There was no Beethoven to accompany her thoughts, and the doomlike Fifth Symphony she would inevitably choose that evening. She must do something or become invaded with Noel’s heart and his father’s face. It was too late to go out, but the time had come to link herself with old associations. She stared at the telephone and toyed with the idea of ringing long-distance and announcing herself for Scotland next week. That was impossible. She would be a bad guest in her unstabilised mood. But she could be ready with plans when Nora started off on her round of visits. Determinedly she sat down and began to write, telling her people, her in-laws by Colin and Bruce that she was back in England again. She read a note over and found it flat and full of dejection. It would have to do. When there was a neat pile, she stared at it in aversion sensing the reception of such colourless tone. Then she stood up and began to walk, and smoke, invaded, possessed, environed with the tearing spirit of uncertainty. If she knew the end? It was the difference from dying and death. When the remains were laid there was nothing to do but come back from the cemetery.

      *      *      *      

It was after lunch on Sunday when she went out muted in every sense. “I’m creeping,” she thought, “like Christina, as I did once before. Why can’t I do something about her?” Thought streaked like a projectile with words that established a theme. “I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted there—” It had come! There was her theme, her sublimated child. She brought up on her toes in the middle of Whitehall, laughing grimly, thinking of Margot’s words. She could write about Christina because she had been hurt biologically. She walked on in full spate of body and mind, until she flagged again. “Think of having a child you could not pray for?” Murray could not pray for Noel. Could she do it herself? In the sudden freshness of the Embankment, and the mystery of sky over the manifestations of man’s achievements, she felt she could. But there was only one prayer for mankind, that he should have guts to endure his cramp in the face of the gigantic universe.

She had come to Millbank and there was the Tate Gallery. It was as good a place as any to sequester her slow grave being. It felt cool inside, and calm with the achievements of many tormented people. Nothing held her eye, and she walked on through avenues of colour. Then she paused feeling the enervation of fatigue, and found herself staring at the Watts collection. When the subjects penetrated her vision she turned away. She was not interested in his fantasy. Her eyes deserted the walls for the sculptures. There in front of her eyes was the most achingly beautiful marble of two children with limbs of childlike perfection. In a second she had reached it, feeling the lure of rounded legs and arms. She looked hastily around. Was it against the rules to touch? Tentatively she ringed an ankle with her bare hand, feeling the cold of the marble child. She gave the children a pat and walked away, out into the subdued warmth of the afternoon. She took a taxi to the Park feeling she wanted to see some width from the natural world.

      *      *      *      

There was nothing nascent in the Park but the babies. The trees looked tired and the grass looked old. Leaves fell down in exhaustion and the earth received them, as yet unready to clot them for its use. The sun shone with more silver than gold. Autumn hung like a ghost with such a gentle wither that the two seasons fused in birth and death. Flowers solaced summer, flaunting wreathlike beds on the tired earth. She felt impelled to sit down and be one with the vanishing season. Action suspended, she seemed to hear the down-flow of the day. Trees pulling sap back to their roots, and a large florescence being called to rest. She thought of blossom, the lilac, the laburnums, and the heart in her slowed at this new portal. It opened towards dimmer light, and places where it was colder to go. Autumn might be as good as summer but it was something else. It curved over the earth as a natural span, but her eyes brooded for Noel’s untimely autumn. It was the knell of his summer and his high disturbance of growth. It ushered in Murray’s winter. If he had other children— She rose quickly and walked on, lingering on the Serpentine Bridge, staring at the water, the birds, and the gentle weep of the trees. But the droop in her spirit crept back in her feet making her sit down again. For a second she smiled fleetingly to herself. She was remembering Mrs. MacCurdle once telling her that her idea of a holiday was to sit, and sit and sit.

      *      *      *      

She was still in bed when she heard Nora enter with quicker instructions than usual for the disposal of her luggage, and the sound of a door shutting definitely on disturbance. As if she brought solution, Sara sat up in bed.

“Nor, I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Sara, you haven’t slept a wink. I know by your face.”

“Never mind my face. Begin at the beginning.”

Nora was taking off her hat, and disposing of a loose coat. “I knew what a jolt you’d get when you heard about Noel, and when I walked out and saw your faces, like—”

“Yes, yes, but get on with it.”

“And John was so grim, and didn’t eat a bite of lunch, when I was really hungry. I felt positively vulgar. We went by Henley through the loveliest country for about forty miles—”

“Yes, I’ll take all that for granted.”

“Such a divine place, with woods and dark lanes, gardener’s cottage, and smooth lawns—”

“I know, I know! Rolled and watered for four hundred years, and clipped yew—”

“And a nice square house with a terrace. You must let me tell it my own way, Sara.”

“Very well,” she agreed, lying back in resignation, “but don’t act as if you were selling me the place!”

Nora laughed and sat down between the two beds.

“When we drove up the avenue of poplars in sight of the house with beechwoods behind—”

“Nor,” said Sara threateningly, “if you mention a tree again I’ll scream.”

“She met us,” said Nora serenely.

“Did he kiss her?”

“No, he did not, but he was very nice and courteous, ‘here we are, my dear,’ sort of thing, and then he went off at once to see Noel and I didn’t see him until dinnertime.”

“When did you see Noel?”

“Not until after tea on Sunday, so you can let me get through Saturday without so many interruptions. After a little chat and a survey of my quarters, with the most gorgeous view from the window—”

“Over the tops of the beech,” said Sara mockingly.

“We went for a walk round the place, and talked gardens. Then we had tea, and I felt like Judas taking notes to tell you everything—”

“Never mind your finer feelings,” commanded Sara. “There’s a bit of Judas in us all. Why should one bother to get beyond a disciple?”

“It is a little ambitious,” admitted Nora reflectively.

“What did you talk about?” prompted Sara.

“Gardens I told you, what grows in hers and what grows in mine. She’s as vague about the Colonies as a child, and wouldn’t ask questions in case they were the wrong ones. She’s not a traveller. Then we talked servants, how hard it is to get them, and how little they do when we do get them, and how many privileges they require for the pain of living in the country. Then we wandered to children’s food, a subject I can manage very well. I think we got on, but she’s a quiet unintimate woman and it was rather formal conversation. She was a governess child, Sara, and never went to boarding school. I should say she has led a very sheltered life, surrounded by ample means and lovely Chilterns. Also by nature she is reserved and has a hangover from an internal operation—”

“Pelvic, I suppose. Such a mess the body can be!”

“She didn’t say. She’s not the type to discuss clinical details, and the gas-pains—”

“What a pity! They’re so uniting and much more useful than the weather. As a conversational gambit it’s picked up so often.”

“Doubtless, but she would think it revealing.”

“Would she talk obstetrics, Nor? You’re quite good at that yourself,” grinned Sara. “With Rosamund I was—”

“She didn’t,” said Nora dismissingly.

“And Murray can share so much.”

“He has little chance then, I’d say. She seems to have limited range. At dinner there was another man, a Major Wyatt, Indian complexion with yellow eyeballs. We played some feeble Bridge, and she’s quite slow at that, and the game is over for her when her Aces and Kings are played. The rest she gets are a surprise. John is a lamb towards her—”

“M’mm, nice man,” said Sara affectionately. “But what are they like together? You can always sense the atmosphere of a husband and wife.”

“They’re courteous, modulated all the time. I thought of you, screaming, just to raise your voice. Only people who don’t care about each other can live as politely as that. They have no powerful effect on each other. Not even an edge in their voices, and the most devoted couple can’t be together, even before strangers, without showing some sign of love or exasperation. Even in this modulated country there’s something about that English, ‘really, darling, must you,’ that’s as exasperated as a good Colonial snap. Once or twice I surprised a doglike look in her eyes when she looked at him—”

“He’s nice to look at,” said Sara graciously, “my fond eyes doted often.”

“She thinks he’s thin and run down, and needs feeding up, and my dear, his meals might be the meals of a Trappist monk. She has a much better appetite and seems to enjoy her food in a slow way. But she seems quite unlighted, like a woman who has never spilled herself, or had a good marital debauch—”

“Yet Murray is the complete lover.”

“A man can be devil and saint,” said Nora vaguely. “You know what I mean, Sara.”

“Quite, darling. I won’t bother to sort you. Yes, it takes two to be in love. That finished Saturday, and so to bed.”

“Yes, I had the most heavenly room—”

“Sunday!” commanded Sara.

“Sunday. In the morning John rode, and then came back and drove me to a golf course. Such a beautiful course, with the smoothest fairway and very few natural hazards. I have to admit we had a nice time, and a drink at the Club where we met a few golfing people. We were late for lunch but she was quite unperturbed. Do you want to know what we had for lunch—”

“No. After?”

“John went to Noel, and we went for a drive, but my dear, she knew the names of all the villages but had never poked, and didn’t seem to have any curiosity about them. I’m sure she could pass St. Paul’s every day and not go in, but she’s nice, nice—” Nora frowned like a woman giving anxious loyalty to eaten-bread.

“Yes, then you went to see Noel,” said Sara unfeelingly.

“After tea, and we found John reading to him and they seemed very happy together. They are real companions, and he’s at his best, you know, natural with gentle humour and a twinkle—”

“Yes, yes, like he was with me. What is the boy like?”

“Charming,” said Nora fervently, “a boy with very pleasant manners in spite of John’s idolatry.”

“But Murray couldn’t bear a spoiled child.”

“He’s like him with his lovely curved mouth and soft manner, and her colouring. There’s a hospital-nurse, and he’s on a bed with wheels to follow the sun around, and John sleeps in a room next to him when he’s not in town. And in spite of Noel being as he is, he doesn’t show a sign of it in his manner. I loved him, and promised to send him some stamps. He can play a few games lying on his back, and fit in the bits of a jigsaw puzzle, but they read to him in turns. And I have to say, Sara, that they are much more like husband and wife when they’re with Noel, and they don’t fuss over things, like his little Cairn jumping on the bed with dirty paws, and there was a white kitten asleep—”

“A cat and a dog,” said Sara eagerly. Nothing could have presented Noel as effectively as Nora’s last information. “Oh, the poor little boy. Oh, poor Murray, and yet every time he goes into his room he breaks his heart.”

“But he doesn’t show it. He seems quite absorbed. He’s really a born father, Sara, of the nicest quality, and I should say to have a child of a woman he really loved is a happiness—”

She paused gazing at Sara with grave contemplation.

“Yes?” asked Sara with a deep-toned voice.

“Is a happiness he’s just beginning to glimpse.”

“Oh no, Nor, oh no, he mustn’t now, and what makes you think so?” asked Sara sitting up with great anxiety.

“It’s just a thought, Sara. We left Mrs. Blair to read to Noel, and we went out into the beechwoods. I’m afraid we talked about you.”

“Well, I suppose it was inevitable,” said Sara a little tartly.

“It came about quite naturally. I was admiring the sweep of country and he suddenly murmured that Sara would like water. Then he looked at me and asked quite casually if I knew about you and him, and I said I did, at once. It made it so much simpler, and then with that constraint gone I rather expected him to give vent to what you call free unbuttoned speech, but he didn’t. He began to tell me about the doctors they had had for Noel. They all say the same, that he must rest for several months, and then live half a life. And Murray had him down for Public School and had such plans for him. I felt so sorry for him. He’s a great father—”

“No,” contradicted Sara, “he would have been a great father if he had had a lot of children, but with one he became a fanatical father.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right. And he’s too sensitive to be just a progenitor.”

“Much,” said Sara at once. “I should have liked to be in the open with him, and make a life. For weal or woe I feel he belongs to me. You often hear of woman’s love being compounded of much maternal element. Murray is the male counterpart of that—a lover with much of the paternal. But, Nor, what could make you think he visualises a child of love rather than just of marriage?”

“Something he said,” said Nora slowly.

“Yes, but what?” she pressed tensely.

“It took me some time to put it together. You’ve told me so much, and June seems a long way back. He asked me how you really were, and if you had been to a doctor, and he suggested I use my influence—”

“Don’t waste your time,” said Sara firmly. “I haven’t any intention of saving myself up in a hospital. Was that all?”

“No, he insisted you were more finely drawn, and kept on, until I reminded him he sounded like an anxious parent. I’m afraid I was a little tactless and I said, ‘John, you’ll always be a parent first.’ He looked at me in that intent way and he said, ‘Sara asked me a question after the first time at your house, and I wouldn’t answer it, but I could now.’ Then I remembered—”

“Yes, yes,” said Sara rather wildly, “I asked him if the doctor came out of the room and demanded his decision between the mother and child, what would he say, and he looked positively hunted, and I knew quite well he’d save the baby.”

“I doubt if he would now, Sara, if the mother was yourself. On Thursday we are dining, and going to a show. She never spends a night in town, but he does quite frequently.”

“That’s all right, Nor. It will be nice for you. We’ve had a lot of women.”

“Would you go out with him?”

“No,” she said violently. “I don’t know.”

“I think he’s aching to see you, Sara, but I suppose you’ll both go round like stricken martyrs—”

“We will not,” said Sara getting out of bed, as if the executioner had called her name and she must put on a show. “What are we doing today?”

“A lot,” said Nora reaching for her bag and extracting a little book. “We’re going to be very busy until Friday, and that, Sara dear, ends lovely days for me. I wish I knew where you will be when I’m gone.”

“I’ll know very soon, Nor, in fact my mind is nearly made up. You’ll be in town a week before you sail, and I’ll arrange to be back and go to Liverpool with you.”

“Will you, Sara? That’s more than I dared hope for. Murray offered his car to drive me up. Would the feel of his springs upset you?”

Sara laughed. “Not if I could lean against them in peace, and feel the emergence of some deep good friendship.”

“You’d be satisfied with Murray’s friendship?” asked Nora with deep incredulity.

“Infinitely soothed,” said Sara slipping her feet into satin mules. “I spilled myself over him, but what you’ve told me about Noel has helped me to see a little further. I never realised him properly until you mentioned the dog and the cat. Now I see him as a sick child, and not an enemy.”

“Well,” said Nora shaking her head. “Life is full of funny little straws. You see Noel because I mentioned the dog and the cat. Margot would not have been a mistress if the man had been reading the evening papers when she arrived. You never know the real reason for anything.”

Momentarily Sara sat down on the bed. “That’s so true. I just said I saw Noel as a child for the first time, and I know his father must not be disturbed. It sounds noble, full of renunciation, and I’m not at all sure I don’t feel that way because my heart has modified. The weaker instinct brings reticent behaviour. The human heart—” She shrugged, with a rueful laugh. “The world will really end when some one explains its vagaries. But there’s writing, music—”

“You’re over it?” challenged Nora.

Sara shook her head, standing up again. “Nobody is ever over as much as that, but I’m not halted by one thing any more, and better than Margot, I know a wife and a mistress are two different relationships. I feel some day we’ll meet—”

“You will,” said Nora. “Now we must hurry. You promised to take me to a good corset woman. I was never comfortable when the children were coming.”

“Very well,” agreed Sara with a slight laugh, “and at the same time I may buy my own child’s first dress. A thousand sheets of paper and a narrow blue typing-ribbon.”

“You have something?”

“Yes, Christina, and a title, ‘Dark Sunshine’— The words stay in my head, from a lovely quotation,” she said vaguely, going swiftly through the bathroom door.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sara stood gazing anxiously at the face of a clock. It was five minutes to seven, and Nora had not returned, in spite of the fact that she was dining with Murray and going to a show. Seven o’clock! He was calling for her at seven o’clock. What was keeping Nora? Sara stood for some time investigating one channel of thought after another. Simultaneous with her frown, she seemed to sense the opulent halt of his car at their hotel door. With her usual reaction to disquiet she walked into the sitting-room, rustling a flowered taffeta housecoat, like a gust of dry leaves on the floor. The sound she was anticipating came in the sharp disturbance of the telephone.

“Yes?” she said on a light staccato inflection.

“Mr. Blair calling for Mrs. Hervey, Madam.”

Sara’s eyes hunted the room as if it must produce Nora.

“Tell him to come up,” she said in a more composed voice.

Replacing the receiver she stood straight, stilling her coat in unbroken lines from neck to hem. The taffeta was tawny with brown and yellow, and a comb pulled carelessly through her hair had loosened it for an evening with herself. Waiting with uplifted chin her eyes gazed out, full of unsolved question. A gentle knock woke her to motion, impelling her forward in a straightforward walk with a wide scud of her coat. She had a feeling of snatching at the door, opening it to any issue. Momentarily they stared at each other and she saw his golden head above black, while her inconsequential mind said his skin held tattletale grey.

“How do you do, Sara?”

“Come in, Murray. I’m afraid Nora is not here yet.”

She turned back into the room, whirling widely away to a table where her fingers found a cigarette which she tapped lightly on her palm. The automatic courtesy of providing a light brought him straight beside her.

“Thank you,” she said over a long inhale. “Will you sit down and wait, Murray? Have a cigarette yourself? Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you,” he said, making no attempt to do anything but gaze at her with troubled consideration. Looking at him fatefully she knew he had something to say, and he was going to say it as long as Nora stayed out. There was no mask. His face was exposed as if he was beyond wishes for further frontiers. With an unquantitative feeling she sat down, and for a person with fidget in her blood, she sat very still, looking up from the corner of a deep lounge. It was something like the morning when she had faced him with a towel round her head.

“Sit down, Murray,” she said almost in command, inducing him to lay aside his things and sit at the other end of the lounge, but while her composure was a mood, his was characteristic. “I’m sorry about Nora, and I don’t know what’s keeping her. She left early this morning to spend a day with a school friend at Bourne End. She took an early train from Paddington, and intended to be back by six.”

“Which Bourne End?” he asked with a bare courtesy of lip-service to Nora’s movements.

“Bucks. I was asked too, but I can’t share Nora’s interest in school-friends. Adult years are dividing and I prefer to leave them as a different phase of living. It’s disappointing to find change—”

“Yes,” he said in terse agreement, as his mouth went wry with acknowledgement.

Sensitive to him she saw his thought, but she had only one way in a large issue, and she must speak with the bareness of candour. All over him was a slower approach to the same end, giving her a strong perception that he had come a long way to a place where he would offer her the first self-confessed knowledge of himself.

“Will Nora be back?”

“Yes, of course,” she said astonished. “She must be delayed.” The fringe of revelation made her speak with accustomed lack of reticence towards him. “Nora came over for a trip before deciding to have another baby. She had a neurosis about war talk and was afraid it might be born under a bomb. Now she finds England so modulated that she’s sure it must be all right. In fact she was soothed with the beechwoods at your place, and the smooth look of the hills. You see, Murray, England has no blasted fields and trees, and it looks deceptively safe. So, Nora is going home to start another baby.”

“I’m glad. She’s very lucky with her beautiful children,” he said with gentle appreciation of the absent Nora. “It will have to go, Sara, in spite of war and destruction.”

“Yes,” she said, with acid in her voice. “Women will know it’s wrong to provide man-power for destruction, even while they clutch their men, fearing they might go off without leaving something of themselves.”

“That’s what you did to me, Sara.”

“Yes. That’s what I did,” she admitted, automatically grinding out a half-smoked cigarette.

“And I was like a lout who was given something precious to cherish and dropped it with a crash on the floor.”

“Murray,” she exclaimed startled at the bitter disgust of his voice.

“I must talk to you, Sara.”

“Yes, I thought you must.”

Then as a prelude to conversation, there was a long silence while she sat under the familiar intimacy of his eyes and watched them go over her, question her hands that could never leave him untouched, and the mouth that had always met him with a rush of flesh. Too aware not to follow his thoughts she was prepared for his brooding remark.

“It’s strange to be near you and not feel your touch.”

“Restraint comes, Murray.”

“Yes, Sara, when spontaneity goes.”

He continued to look like a man staring at the cover of a book he feared to open.

“Murray,” she said with sincere grace, “I was too shocked to tell you on Saturday, but I ache for you about Noel. I know how you must feel, that he’s threatened, that he has only half a life—”

“Don’t give me your pity, Sara,” he said tersely.

“Oh, I must, Murray,” she pleaded bending towards him. “Please let me be sorry. Sunday when I was alone, I found myself praying for him, for the three of us—”

“For the three of us. Yes, the three of us.” Expression was loosed in him under the influence of her compassionate voice. “My poor son! It’s like a scourge to see him lying there day after day when he should be running around. I wish I could give him my health. Every child should be allowed his natural heritage. I look at ragged urchins, and know I’d be as poor as their fathers, if Noel could have the run of their legs and arms.”

She sat impotent in the revelation of his aching fatherhood.

“But he’ll get better, Murray,” she whispered insistently.

“Yes, I suppose. Restored to half a life. The doctors say it’s possible with care in six months, but he can’t go to school. He’ll have to have a tutor. And he won’t be able to play games. And still they say we must be careful not to deny him too much activity in case he loses confidence in himself.”

Such antithetical advice appeared to be a source of bewilderment. He was a healthy man, lost in the direction of an invalid son.

Forgetting all sense of personal issue Sara rushed into alleviating speech.

“But, Murray, doctors are changing about hearts. They say nearly all hearts have murmurs and it’s not as dangerous as it seems. It is so, because I remember Daddy joking about one of his cousins. He had rheumatic fever just like Noel, and he was brought up with, ‘don’t do that,’ and ‘don’t do this,’ but one day their house caught on fire and everybody was running around to save the furniture, and the heart-case ran too, delighted with the first good run of his life. And, Murray, he carried out pictures and furniture, and nearly lifted the piano single-handed, and when they had time to notice, they waited for him to drop dead, but he didn’t do anything of the kind, and after that he did just what he liked and went on lifting pianos, and died a long time after, of gall-bladder.”

The warm reassuring speech had the effect of ousting the bleak worry for Noel. His face became broken and tender, as his hands gestured towards her, hovering and dropping.

“How very like you, my darling, but I’m afraid the doctors are not wrong in this. I’ve had too many.”

Sara went mute. That Murray loved her deeply and completely was evinced in his voice and his face. He was regarding her with the heart-breaking tenderness of a man in sight of a cherished woman. She swallowed dryly, looking down at her hands.

“What does his mother say?”

“Very little. She’s got him back, as if he were a baby again.”

“Oh,” she said pitifully. “Don’t you talk about it to her, Murray?”

“I can’t, Sara. I don’t know my wife very well. If she has any strong feelings I don’t know about them. I think she loves me according to her capacity.”

“Yes, you said that before. Does she know how you feel?”

“No, we are reticent.”

“I see. Poor, poor Noel, I wish he could be a whole little boy again. If I could do it for you, Murray, I would.”

Again that hover of his hands, and Sara let him take one of hers and rest his forehead against it. Looking at his bent fair head she thought sorrowfully of the joyful children dancing after the Pied Piper to the cavern where the door in the mountainside shut fast. “All except one, and one was lame and could not dance the whole of the way.”

“Murray!”

“Yes, Sara?”

“Would your wife divorce you?”

Once such a question would have resulted in an upward lift of his chin and a repudiation of any disturbance of his settled way. Now he spoke as if he had considered it himself.

“I’d never ask it with Noel in the world. That would be quite impossible. But if he died—” He sat up speaking with relentless decision. “If Noel died I would ask my wife for a divorce as soon as I decently could. I could not live in an incomplete and childless marriage. Sara, let me try and say some things to you that have come to me during the last two months.”

“Yes, Murray, I won’t stop you.”

He dropped her hand and sat back, and she knew his lips were forming the words he had never uttered before.

“I haven’t your gift of words, neither have I ever been inclined to self-analysis. I’ve been too busy. You know I love you, don’t you?”

Sara felt her throat fill up and tears threaten her eyes.

“Yes, but you never said it before.”

“I realise that, my dear. I was poor in spirit and little in faith. I had to leave you to know how I felt about you.”

“Absence,” murmured Sara, recalling the wind to the big fire.

“Yes, absence. I did not know it could be such a rack. You’re very intuitive, Sara, and you must know I often held myself back because of my intense concern of your effect on Noel.”

“I know it very well, Murray. We always had him with us.”

“Not always,” he said gravely. “You were stronger than that. But when I heard he was ill, I thought of nothing else. I felt it was the result of my divided heart—”

“Oh, Murray,” she reproached gently, “the world is so big. You can’t love one thing alone.”

“I did, Sara, when I met you, but even with that it seems incredible that I could have left you so brutally. I did not intend to, but when you released me I accepted it at once. I won’t insult you by asking your forgiveness. You’re so generous it seems washed out. It’s the effect of my conduct that I dread, but I ask you to believe it was the blind selfishness of an uncomprehending man. When a man loses faith in himself—discovers loutishness—”

She opened her lips, about to say something mitigating to the self-disgust of his face. She shut them again. What was there to say? If there was anything he must say it himself.

“On the ship going home I saw myself. I was not a very experienced man. I was too busy, and when a man is concerned with his work he has little time to follow sign-posts. I married very young and I see now very temperately. I admit some continental experience but nothing more than a pleasant sensual effect a man can forget very quickly. I knew nothing of a love that could shake the earth under a man’s feet—”

“As much as that?” she asked with a swift stab from her eyes. It was strange that he could speak such strong words so quietly and with such unaltered body composure.

“As much as that,” he reiterated, hesitating in his slow choice of words. Then he made a slight deprecating appeal. “Sara, I am not very trusting. I’ve been absorbed in a world of big ventures, where manipulation, insincerity and continual vigilance is needed to keep the other companies from getting more out of it than I do. It’s a world that can easily make a man tone-deaf—”

“Yes,” she agreed with absorbing eyes. “You were sometimes suspicious of me.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But I was also incredulous of that genuine spontaneous love. I couldn’t believe you loved me—”

“But Murray,” she laughed ingenuously, “you’re a very attractive man.”

“Am I?” he asked in terse denial. “I feel like a village lout. At first you confused me, but I was too attracted not to follow you all the way. I was about to leave that dance, when there you were in front of my eyes. Of that evening I retain nothing but a sense of sweetness and an increased consciousness of living. After that it was too much of the present to link with past or future. I had to put the whole relationship behind me to see it for what it was. I took you with me, and in all those walks on the deck I could see you so strongly—”

“I know, I know, only too well! I had you too, in the most intense visual imagery.”

“Yes, I would expect you to find the right word for it. I could see your changing face, hear your special conversation, and the way we could laugh together. When I saw what a lout I must seem, and how callously I had left, especially after the morning when I could not save Jennifer—”

“I understood that, Murray,” she said firmly. “After the first jolt it seemed sense. It would have done a lot of damage if you’d rushed out of my door.”

He was characteristic in not being grateful for that reassurance. His way had been practical, unheroic in a censorious world.

“It was common sense, Sara, but I have to admit I thought of Noel before you.” His sombre eyes challenged her, as if he would be spiritually naked to her at last.

“I knew you did, Murray. I understood everything but your parting. It was so diminishing.”

“When Nora told me about your being in the nursing-home—”

“She shouldn’t have told you,” she said almost angrily. “I don’t want your pity either. Pity is limping—”

“You pitied me,” he reminded her gravely.

She gestured impotently, speaking towards the dim room, rather than the grey gloom of his face.

“It seems so dreary to be doing what we’re doing. We were so happy. How can we explain why we love? When I met you first at Daddy’s house you had some quality I loved. I’ve always wanted a greater depth than I’ve had. The natural world has it, and when we’re walking under the sun, or seeing a red sunset go down, the inner spirit says it’s natural to crave another richness. I’ve been a wife twice, and I knew the difference of my feelings towards you. Perhaps mutuality is a fugitive dream? Perhaps I’m too keyed about it? I feel sometimes like Katherine Mansfield, ‘I have four passions, nature, people, mystery, and the fourth no man can number!’ It’s the last passion that will always trip me up. If there are any answers to anything I don’t know them. Nora says I was more than you wanted—”

“More then, than I would acknowledge, Sara. Now I could use every bit of you and treasure it very well.”

She made a motion, as if she must rise and walk up and down the room, but he caught her by the wrist, drawing her back.

“No, sit down. It’s got to be faced.”

“Put on the light, Murray,” she said incoherently, and automatically he pulled the chain of a table-lamp which made a moon of light on the floor. Frustrated in body motion, deeper intensity went into her voice. “Yes, it’s got to be faced, but it’s the present we’re facing now, not the past, and it’s the difference between autumn and spring.”

“You don’t care for me any more, Sara? I’ve thought of nothing else since I saw you last, but your story of the gloves. You’ve stopped loving me? You couldn’t come into my arms—”

“Oh stop, Murray,” she commanded, looking at him with eyes that tried to bridge the difference in the thoughts of a man and a woman. “Your touch will always be very dear to me. It couldn’t be otherwise, having been what we were. No woman could think of it any other way, but tenderly. It’s the muted beauty we give to ‘precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.’ ”

“No, Sara, don’t say that! You’re talking as if you were a widow again.”

“Yes, that’s how I’m talking.”

He leaned forward gathering her hands in a hard clasp.

“Don’t you know what I want to ask you?”

“Don’t ask me,” she pleaded, pulling away from his clasp.

“I must. It’s useless to say I’d give all a man could, to turn the clock back to that night when you asked so sweetly—”

“No, Murray, not now,” said Sara in agony.

“Yes,” he said, inexorably candid, “I’m asking if there’s a hope of that? Noel being as he is, my love for you, the feeling that you’re my wife and child— You can’t have gone so far away from me, Sara? Say you will— We’ll be lovers again—children—”

Sara gave way to the pull of his hands but it was only her body that swayed forward, whispering her answer to his face.

“Then it was so very right! Now if I did it, it would be subduing myself to your wish, because I was aching for your unhappiness, and that would be death to the feelings I had before. Murray, at heart all women love respectability, goodness and protection, but there must be times in many of their lives when they ask what I asked, because of some deep exultation of utter mating. We seemed like perfect mutuality, some great urge that gave me the courage to snatch something for myself and go on alone and bring up a child without a male parent. All I can be now is the traditional female, the woman who is self-sacrificing, maternal, pitiful, giving way because of the needs of a man. That would kill me! I would be the complaisant wife when the ecstasy of wishing is over. I know nothing of the cause, I can only follow my heart, and know when it feels flat. Only the wide range of that first love could excuse the birth of a child out of bounds. Now,” she finished quietly, “I haven’t that capacity any more.”

“And I have it in a greater degree.”

Sara spoke with utter dreariness. “It’s the way of life, Murray.”

“That you should love me utterly three months ago, and that I should love you infinitely three months too late? I know I’ll love you as long as I live, Sara.”

“Oh, don’t, don’t! That’s what I said when I loved you first, and in this short time I’m showing the insufficiency of love.”

“But I wounded it almost to death, Sara, and you haven’t wounded me. This change in me! It makes me see how the fact of loving completely can swing a man towards some sense of the infinite—”

At his tone Sara crumpled and burst into desperate tears.

“I know that,” she sobbed. “It’s richer to love than be loved. If you feel that you won’t shut your heart to other things. You’ll be less unhappy about Noel, and love him less possessively. Oh, Murray, Murray—”

“My dear, my dear, don’t cry,” he said with his voice smothered in her hair. But she found it impossible to stop, having released the terrible tears she had controlled so long. She cried painfully, each sob like a desperate ‘why, why’ interrogating the dissonance of human relationships. He held her sustainingly and she came home to him with no pulse of body but freely abandoning herself to a mutuality of grief as deep as her own, but unweeping. His arms were saturated with a wish to comfort and she knew he had killed his own desires at once. At that moment he was the bones and essence of fatherhood.

“Don’t break your heart, my darling. A man never knows the end of his actions— I’ve done it to you—”

“No, you haven’t, Murray. We don’t do it to each other. It’s the disarray of living. Life fumbling through us. Don’t ever blame yourself. Then you did what you thought was best—”

“You’re a very great person, Sara.”

“I’m nothing of the sort,” she sobbed. “I’m just a woman.”

“It’s a great deal,” he said gravely to her hair. “I can’t turn the clock back to my great moment—”

“No, neither of us can do anything about it.”

“There, darling, don’t cry—”

“Yes, yes, please let me cry, Murray, I’ve wanted to for a long time.”

“Then cry as much as you wish, my dear.”

Relaxed, she cried for a long time drenching him with tears that acclaimed his new quality. Inwardly she knew she had never had him so completely, not even in the most ecstatic union. She knew all about the lover, but in relation to Noel, knowledge had often been curtailed. Now she felt he was presenting her with his son, his child of another woman. The flow of thought made the tears freer until she felt blinded with weighted lids. She closed her eyes and they seemed glued together with weariness.

“There, Sara, that’s enough! You’re exhausted. Let me wipe your face.”

When he held her back, a brief glimpse showed her a man drying her tears with the solicitude he might have given to Rosamund or Jennifer. She felt herself blurred and swollen but personal vanity might never have been.

“Oh, Murray, if Noel could be whole again—”

“Hush, my dear, we must leave it. I’ll do whatever human hands can. At least I have no bitterness now.”

“That’s so much,” she whispered. “I loved you, so I never felt sour about you.”

“I know. It’s like coming into a larger place.”

“Murray, that’s in the Bible, something about bringing them into a large place.”

“Is it, my dear? You mustn’t talk any more. Let me put you to bed and sit beside you.”

Her body acquiesced, although her mind told her it was a more romantic than practical myth that a man could carry a woman adequately to bed. But he was disciplined and strong, and she was light with fever and fret. She permitted herself to be lifted and carried to the other room.

“Which bed, my dear?”

“The one nearest the window.”

“There! This little light— You are undressed, darling. There’s only your gown and your slippers— Your dear feet, Sara—”

She found herself resting quietly against her pillows with an extra one borrowed from Nora’s bed. The storm of tears lessening, she felt herself drained but more coherent than she had been for many weeks. Holding his large handkerchief, she remained silent, dabbing occasionally at heavy musing eyes. Beside her he waited equally silent, watching her recovery with grave concerned face.

“I forbid you to worry about me, Sara,” he said gently. “I’m better off than you think, even now.”

“You can’t hinder that, Murray,” she answered quietly.

“Well, worry about me without pain to yourself.”

“I’ll do better, Murray. I’ll think about you very deeply.”

“Thank you, my dear. Will it be any comfort to you to know that my love is there for you? At any time I’ll do anything for you.”

“Thank you, Murray. It will be a rich thought when I get really down.”

“What will you do, Sara?” he asked with bleak composure that searched ahead for her future.

She looked at him with clarity emerging from chaos.

“I think I can write again, Murray. I’ve been fumbling with it ever since I came to England. I must stay in England. Today on an impulse I went to an agent about renting a little house in the country. I’d like to go to Ewelme or around there.”

He looked pleased, more content than he had that evening.

“That will be near me.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “England is what I need if I’m going to write again. There will be the long autumn, the lovely death of the woods, the hills, and I can go out and come in. Then in November I’ll have comfortable fires, and I’ll still go out and come in. I’ll have the cocker spaniel and a cat. I must have a cat.”

“Like Richard,” he suggested gently.

“Yes, like Richard,” she said giving him a warm smile. “I’ll be all right, Murray. There’s a deep note in autumn, like a rich knell, and the earth does a lot for me. And now, Murray, since this evening I know what I want to write. It’s quite clear to me now.”

“Tell me, Sara,” he said with immediate interest.

She looked at him with gathering contemplation.

“I want to write a book about a child.”

“Christina,” he said immediately.

“Yes, Murray,” she said in wonder. “How do you know?”

“You mentioned her once or twice.”

“Yes, Christina,” she said with an inward look. “It came to me on Sunday when I remembered some words by D. H. Lawrence, ‘I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted there amongst the dark sun-rays of death.’ Instantly I linked Christina and I knew it was a lead.”

“I’d like to think of your doing it, Sara. You’re so like a child yourself.”

Sara shook her head. “No, adults are often childish but never childlike.”

“Perhaps, darling. Tell me about Christina before I go.”

“It’s a wounded story, Murray,” she said gravely, “and you know how you were the night I told you about the nigger-mammy and the sky-holes.”

“I can bear it now, Sara. Perhaps the thought of other children—”

“Yes,” she said persuasively, “and think, Murray, how rich Noel is with your love and protection. Christina was dead before her parents acknowledged she was ill.”

“Tell me,” he commanded gently.

“She was the first child I ever knew. One of four, Ruskin, Swinburne, Dante-Gabriel and Christina. Her father was an artist and seemed to have a great love for pre-Raphaelites. Her mother was strange, stringy and full of cults, and when we knew them she didn’t believe in doctors.”

“I’ve heard of parents like that,” he said grimly.

“I used to play with Christina, and at first we would run our legs off and feel so happy and wild. Then she changed! She couldn’t keep up with me any more, and she seemed to get slower and slower, until she really crept. I remember her face like today. She had black silky hair, olive skin, and big umbered eyes like a stricken calf. Because she fascinated me I could creep with her, and sit quietly beside her when she had her headaches, and rocked with her head in her hands. Then her voice got tired, and used to crawl across words in a husky whisper, and the light hurt her eyes. That spring there was an apple tree, and when it was in blossom it dazzled her, and she looked so puckered, I got an umbrella and we sat together under the tree. After that she couldn’t eat any more, and one day she got sick in the street and I remember thinking what a pity it was to throw up a pink ice-cream—”

“Oh, Sara, you were the same then—”

“But then, Murray, dear, a pink ice-cream seemed so much more valuable than a white one. Poor, poor Christina! Daddy was so sorry for her he let her stay with me often, but she never slept! She would just lie staring, and whenever I woke up I could see her eyes like big black lamps, but she would tell me not to mind, and to go to sleep again. Once I couldn’t bear the black light of her eyes, and I called Daddy, and he got up and heated hot milk with two teaspoons of brandy, but still she didn’t sleep. Then I said, ‘Christina, don’t you mind not going to sleep?’ And she answered so slowly in her husky whisper. ‘No, I like the dark and the quiet of the night. The day hurts my head. Now I’m in the black sun and I can see and hear again.’ The way she said it, Murray, was like the quality no man can number, and I remember thinking then, there must be deep, deep things Christina knew about that I didn’t. She died about a month after, and her mother only let her stay in bed when she was too tired to stand up. They told me she mumbled, and often called my name. When she was dead, Daddy took me to see her in her coffin, and she looked so long, all stretched out like a grown-up person, but her head was on one side drowned in her hair. I didn’t cry, Murray, though Daddy had two big tears in his eyes, and I heard him saying bitter things about Christina’s father and mother. I couldn’t cry. I kept looking at her eyelashes, awfully long on her cheek, and I knew it was the first time I’d ever seen her eyes closed. How could I cry when I knew she was in the dark sunshine she liked so much? There’s so much to say about that family. There was a pair of dogs, Romeo and Juliet, and a pair of cats, Caruso and Melba, and two love-birds, which we were told were from the willow-plate. But in spite of the pairs, Christina’s mother drowned everything they had, and she could not even drown them properly. She was so bogus, and I hated her with the hot hate of thin knives. The year of the apple tree Romeo and Juliet had puppies, and she just let them go for a few days and then snatched them up and splashed them into a pail of water. When they stopped scrambling against the sides of the pail, she snatched them out and buried them under the apple tree. In the afternoon Christina and I were playing when we heard dreadful thin puppy-cries coming up from under the earth. Poor Christina, she couldn’t move very fast, but I was there quickly scraping at the earth, and it was moving with poor little blind puppies trying to live again. I picked them all up in my arms, and Murray, I can smell them now, all mixed up with earth, and they clung to my neck, but she came with her stringy face and toothy mouth, and snatched at them again, and re-drowned them—”

Everything seemed to make Sara cry that evening. Now she was dropping hot tears for the sears of childhood. He merely extended a hard warm hand, and she cried on it, talking to his palm.

“She was going to snatch them out again, but Christina and I made a ring round the bucket to see that they were really dead. And she went off, somewhere else. She was always going somewhere else. Then I threw myself down and cried until I was pulp. Christina didn’t. She just sat on the ground smoothing my head, and her face was so puckered with the light, and her voice so slow. ‘Sara,’ she said, ‘don’t mind so much. They’re in the black sun now, and I know it’s different there.’ Oh, Murray, Murray, when you’re broken-hearted about Noel, think of Christina walking around, dying on her feet with parents that couldn’t tell the difference between life and death. Think of Noel so comfortably ill with your love and protection—”

“Don’t, my dear,” he said in a wrung voice.

“Will you try, Murray?”

“Yes,” he said briefly.

“And if you could believe a little in the dark sunshine—”

But even then he could only be true to himself.

“The only dark sunshine I can believe in is my love for you and Noel. It seems part of the infinite.”

He had put her first which made the tears bigger than ever.

“It’s a good deal, Murray.”

“Sara, you’ll really be able to work now. I can recognise decision when I see it, and you’ll be able to write about that child because you feel her so keenly.”

“Yes,” she sobbed, “you must feel it to write it, and fling it out like an ejection.”

“Oh don’t cry so, my dear, you break my heart.” He bent over her in attempt to stem the liberated tears. Sara wrapped an arm around his neck kissing his cheek with drowned affection.

“Forgive me, Murray, but I knew when I started to cry I’d never stop.”

“Sara,” he questioned broodingly, “if I were free would you marry me?”

“Yes,” she sobbed at once. “This is like marriage. We cling together in spite of everything. We accept intimacy as a matter of course, and we’re trying to comfort each other.”

“Yes, you’re quite right. It’s the better union, my dear, and we can’t have it.”

“No, we can’t have it.”

For a long moment he lifted her up, holding her in his arms and she felt him kiss her with the same quality of flesh she had laid on his own face.

“Then there’s nothing left to do but get on with it.”

“Nothing,” she agreed fatefully. “Nothing is ever solved, Murray, and the only wisdom I know, is to leave it and remember the best.”

“I expect you’re right, my dear. Sara!”

“What, Murray?” she questioned gently of his cheek.

“Don’t deny me this. Let me send you the picture of the child?”

“Yes, thank you very much,” she agreed at once. “It will be my enchanted wood, but I’ll come out of it when I can be useful in the real world. I’ll take courses, and if a war comes I’ll be able to work in dangerous places, because I’m not grasping anything with hard hands, not even life.”

His arms tightened round her with a hint of possession, but he spoke with utter acceptance.

“You were right. There will be a war and now I know we must make another system. The most powerful men will be useless when it comes. The things we thought so important—money, land, power and keeping the under-dog in his place— What does it all amount to? Where is it leading us?”

“The things we set in motion ourselves, Murray,” she said, very softly. “The world brought its troubles on itself. We brought this on ourselves. Our acts are behind us propelling us along. But we can’t do anything about it now.”

“I can love you,” he said quietly. “It does me good.”

She gave a hard quick sob. “That’s the thing I’ll always remember. Now—”

“I’m going, my dear, leaving you with my love. Tell Nora—”

“I’m here,” said a very quiet voice over the opening of a door.

“Come in,” they both said together, and Nora stood looking at them while neither made a move to withdraw from the other’s touch.

“Nor, where have you been?”

“You stayed out on purpose,” suggested Murray with greater acumen.

“Yes,” she agreed with friendly compassionate eyes. “I knew you two must talk, so I took a later train.”

“It was good of you, Nora,” he said gratefully. “I’ll see you another evening if you will permit me.”

“Yes, John, any time before I sail.”

With definite decision he bent over Sara with hands and lips like a blessing. Nora stepped aside to let him go, and stood motionless until she heard the sound of the outer door.

“He’s gone, Sara.”

But Sara’s head was turned into the pillow and she cried again with tears that washed over irony, mutability and the fleeting melody of the human heart. This time it was Nora who sat quietly by.

“I knew you’d send him away, Sara, when you sorted your own heart,” she said without any explanation. “But isn’t it something that he’s a bigger man? Don’t cry about John. He’ll be steadfast.”

“Yes,” sobbed Sara, “but I’m crying because I couldn’t be a squaw-woman and give him what he wanted.”

Nora gazed soberly at the spilled brown head.

“It’s the price the modern woman pays, Sara, for the emancipation of something beyond her body.”

“Yes, Nor, yes! Something that holds us, that we’re only in sight of as yet, and we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Yes, Sara. Have you had your dinner?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll have something to eat. It’s not wise to cry on an empty stomach. People eat their dinners even on the day of a funeral.”

“Yes, I know,” agreed Sara acceptingly. “Dear Murray, he left his handkerchief.”

“You found you didn’t love him, Sara?”

“No,” said Sara, “I found I loved him like a forgiving wife and not as a mistress.”

“He’ll be like the memories of Colin and Bruce,” said Nora soothingly.

“No,” denied Sara with deep conviction. “I know beyond doubt I’m Murray’s widow.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of Novelty on Earth, by Margaret Duley]