* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

This eBook was produced by: Mardi Desjardins, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available by HathiTrust.

Griselda met the June day with the radiance it deserved. From her bedroom window she could see a meadow full of buttercups, flung like a tossed cloak towards the sky. Their intricate embroidery shone back at the astonishing sun, their closed petals opening and half opening in riotous abandon.

Griselda was a practical young woman, and not even splendour could interrupt routine. Still she gave the buttercups due attention and noticed how the dew-drops glistened on a veil of St. Anne’s lace, by the hedge, before she laid the breakfast table.

Above the noise of the Hoover, which she wielded with easy skill, she could hear the peacock cries of her children greeting the new day.

It was impossible to say which she loved most, Eileen or Sam; and quite difficult to know whether they preferred their mother to the farmer’s daughter, a systemless benevolent nannie, whom they could barely afford, but whose beneficent presence resulted in a great deal of ease all round. The children knew that they loved their mother best but they paid her out for the strength of this emotion by behaving worse with her than with Geraldine. Both women and children respected while they adored Andrew. The house was run with that sparkling cleanliness which is more of an art than a science yet which requires both.

Griselda as she fed the cat and picked up the newspaper thought theirs was a nearly perfect marriage.

In the seven years they had lived together, their faults had had time to come to the surface and fight it out with their virtues. They shared the same jokes, liked the same games and trusted each other’s integrity. They knew too where the ice lay thin over each other’s weaknesses.

Andrew was impatient and over-conscientious. He expected too much from those about him and was grudging with his praise. Perhaps Griselda was not conscientious enough, and praised too readily. Andrew was one of a small band of picked men designing war planes.

“My work,” he told Griselda, when they were first married, “is highly technical and can only be properly understood by other experts—it would waste your time, as well as bore you to talk about it—which is just as well perhaps since it can’t be talked about.”

However, Griselda knew well enough when Andrew was stuck in a design, or when it flowed easily. She could read her husband as a trained nurse reads a thermometer. A flick of the wrist, and the reading is done without the patient knowing what the temperature was; but the nurse acts according to the temperature.

Two magpies strutted their watchful way across the lawn. Their bodies glistened white as new-fallen snow below their highly polished black wings. They flicked their long tail-feathers delicately as a mannequin flicks her train. ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth,’ Griselda said to herself with satisfaction. These solid and successful birds could well spare her a little of their unmerited good fortune.

Andrew came downstairs, two or three steps at a time, singing at the top of a happy tuneless voice. The song was ‘Lilac Time’ and he always made it sound cheerful, when it was meant to be nostalgic if not thoroughly sad.

Bacon, mushrooms, coffee, toast and cream off the milk, all the cream there was though he didn’t know it, awaited him.

Everything was exactly as usual, even the headlines in the paper, a crisis was on but that simply meant the shortening of something or other; and as for the Russians—momentarily Picasso’s dove was in the ascendant.

Griselda had been too young for more than a year’s preparatory war training, but Andrew had been through the whole of the War of 1939—two years Coastal Command and three as a drop pilot for the French Resistance.

Andrew had seen so much danger and lost so many friends from it in horrifying ways that he hated to talk about war at all. “I don’t know whether I’m more ashamed to forget or to remember,” he once told Griselda. “If I forget I feel a Hell Hound—and when I remember I know I haven’t the slightest right to be here at all. Best not to bother about those crazy years—I got so sick of danger.”

Griselda knew that it had been other people’s danger that Andrew chiefly minded, since an airman does not win a D.F.C. with a bar to it for pure cowardice.

“I’m glad I’m not political,” Andrew said as his eye ran over the headlines. “These chaps must get tired of each other’s lies even if they don’t get tired of their own.”

“But you don’t tell lies, Darling,” Griselda said, smiling. “I don’t believe you know how!”

“I’m glad I don’t need to tell them to you,” Andrew replied with unaccustomed gravity.

Perhaps it was because he had never needed to tell lies to Griselda that he kissed her twice before leaving, once his usual goodbye kiss, and once ‘for luck’ he told her, after he had run upstairs to get something he had forgotten and found Griselda still hovering in the doorway.

In the five minutes it took to whisk the breakfast things out into the kitchen, Griselda took up her second life; she ceased to be a wife and became a mother.

She continued to be a mother, with short intervals for cooking purposes, until four o’clock in the afternoon; then the telephone bell rang and Griselda heard Sally Hackett’s voice. Sally Hackett was Andrew’s discreet and capable secretary. Griselda was not even faintly jealous of her. Still she realized that Sally Hackett thought nearly as much of Andrew as she herself thought of him, and this fact slightly annoyed her. The care of two devoted women, she sometimes felt, was more than enough for any man. Something was wrong with Sally’s voice to-day; it was carefully not agitated instead of just carefully polite.

“Did Wing-Co. have anything important to do to-day?” Sally asked. “He hasn’t turned up, so I just wondered. He usually lets me know. He didn’t leave a message for me I suppose? There are just one or two things I want to consult him on before I go home.”

“Of course not!” Griselda exclaimed. “I’d have sent on any message—besides he went straight to the field as usual. He’d have told me if he hadn’t been going. Perhaps someone put him on an outside job, before he got to the office.”

“It’s probably perfectly simple,” Sally replied with exaggerated ease. “I thought I’d just make sure. Perhaps someone has slipped handing me on a message. Group-Captain’s off duty to-day. That’s when things like this happen. May I ring off now and ring you up again to let you know?”

“But wait!” Griselda cried, now more alarmed than annoyed. “That couldn’t happen! He took his car, he was going to the office. Oughtn’t we to ring up the police and find out if there’s been a road accident?”

“No, I think not,” Sally replied, with the firm offhand cheerfulness of one who knows what may happen better than the person who is the most afraid. “I must report Wing-Co.’s absence here first. They’ll find out about road accidents if necessary, quicker than you could. But I’m sure you’d have heard before now—or we would. Probably one of our people wanted him to try out something, somewhere else.” She rang off.

“If only,” Griselda thought, “she wouldn’t call him ‘Wing-Co.’ and talk about ‘somewhere else’ as if he were the man in the iron mask!” Then she noticed the silence. Sally had seemed in a hurry. Sally knew her stuff. If she thought there was a hurry, then there was a hurry.

Griselda sat down near the telephone. She rarely sat down in the daytime, and she knew the children wanted her for tea. She called up to Gerry that they must begin without her; and reminded herself that there had been two magpies on the lawn.

There was another, somehow less reassuring thing that she now remembered. When she had been dusting Andrew’s dressing-table she couldn’t find the snapshot of herself he loved best, and always kept there in a flat leather case. He would be annoyed when he found it missing. It was a hideous snapshot of her taken in a high wind, with the sun in her eyes and her hair blowing every which-way; still Andrew loved it. She must look behind the radiator directly she got upstairs again.

Sally was a precise and quick telephonist, but it was a quarter of an hour before she rang up again; and eternity can make itself at home in a quarter of an hour.

“There hasn’t been any accident,” Sally said in a voice that was now smooth and under complete control. “Nor anything to call Wing-Co. off this end. Has he telephoned you yet?” Griselda’s voice felt as if something unexpectedly heavy had fallen on it. “No! no!” she said. “And you see Andrew always does if he has to be late!” There was quite a long silence after Griselda spoke and then Sally said in a different kind of voice as if she was repeating somebody’s actual words, “Major Hoskins would like to see you. He’ll be with you in half an hour. Will that be convenient?”

Griselda said “Oh yes!” because what else could she say? Major Hoskins was the airdrome’s security officer. A tall, lean, kindly man, who looked much younger and simpler than he really was.

They both liked him. He came to dinner quite often, and played a subtle game of bridge, and a hard game of tennis. Still at tennis Andrew usually beat him.

Major Hoskins was generally unsmiling so that when he arrived, and he must have driven rather fast to arrive so soon, he looked no graver than usual. He saw by Griselda’s face that Andrew had not yet telephoned.

“Tiresome about Andrew,” he said, “but he’s sure to ring up soon.” Then they sat down, and lit cigarettes and Major Hoskins poured himself out a whisky and soda. Griselda only took orange juice, but this evening she felt that she could have got drunk quite easily on orange juice.

Everything in the house and garden was extraordinarily quiet, except for a blackbird who persisted in believing that the sun was not going down and whistling to rouse it from its retreat towards the West.

“We thought,” Major Hoskins explained, choosing his words rather carefully, “that we’d better run through a few possibilities with you, to see if we could come on why Andrew has shot off like this into the blue. Particularly since we all know how considerate and punctual he always is—a rackety fellow wouldn’t be on one’s mind so much. Andrew usually lets you know what he’s up to, doesn’t he?”

“Always,” Griselda said. “He’s never not telephoned if he’s had to be ten minutes late; and he’s always said where he’s going.”

“You mustn’t be anxious,” Major Hoskins said gently. “There are things that may have happened which would explain his silence. A job like Andrew’s isn’t quite the same as other jobs; and everybody wants him, you see. We’ve only got one pilot who happens to be our best designer at the same time that he is our best flyer. Something may have called Andrew off without time to explain. However we do know now for certain that no plane is unaccounted for. So he can’t have gone awfully far in a few hours, or crashed.

“I expect you know all his near friends’ and relations’ telephone numbers, don’t you? I think we ought to get on to them next, don’t you?”

“But of course I know them,” Griselda said a little defensively, “they’re all in this book on the writing-table. We’ve been married seven years and we’ve always shared everything!” Her voice shook for the first time. They weren’t sharing what was going on in the room now.

It was a room so full of Andrew that she found herself wondering why she wasn’t offering Major Hoskins another whisky and soda. “I know, I know,” Major Hoskins said softy. “Yours just happens to be the best kind of marriage and that’s what makes this situation a shade on the odd side. Most men’s going off without telling their wives where or when they’d be back isn’t a subject for surprise or anxiety. I wonder if there’s anyone among his relatives or friends whom you don’t like——”

“Do you mean women?” Griselda asked, her chestnut eyebrows arching above her clear eyes. Hazel eyes seldom flash but they can look, Major Hoskins thought, uncommonly large when they hold tears that are not going to be allowed to fall.

“We’ve discounted that kind of woman already,” he said with a brief smile. “But there might be someone—a man more likely, or a woman of course, in a spot of bother, and Andrew might have felt he ought to be quiet about it, and just help such a person without mentioning it. Did he take anything unusual with him?” Griselda was no fool. She opened the drawer in Andrew’s desk, and handed Major Hoskins his passport.

“He’s not taken any money either,” she said, “I mean more than usual. Here’s the house-keeping money which is all we’ve got—unless he drew some at the bank this morning.”

“Don’t bother about that!” Major Hoskins said kindly, omitting to say that he had already bothered about it.

“If any friend of Andrew’s was in trouble,” Griselda said with great distinctness, tears in her eyes burned away by anger, “Andrew would have told me.” Major Hoskins was silent for a moment. “Of course he’d have a false passport,” he thought, “and he could draw money from London, if he got to London. We hadn’t time to put a call through in banking hours. Besides probably he’d have been given money en route.” Griselda interrupted his thoughts.

“Major Hoskins,” she said, “Andrew would never have disappeared of his own accord without telling Sally Hackett or myself—more probably both. He must be in some dreadful danger! Someone must have attacked him! I don’t know what his work is but you do. You must find him. He’s so—so terribly reliable, if he’s in danger he won’t just get out of it, he’ll try to stop it being dangerous!”

“Yes—that’s what I’ve always thought of him myself,” Major Hoskins said with a deep kindness that Griselda knew was kindness and nothing else. “It’s his friends I’m worried about. There might be a person Andrew thought was a friend who wasn’t. I’ll get on to these addresses to-night—all of them except your mother and his, those I’ll leave to you. Say as little as possible to them—just ask if they have had a message from Andrew, or when they heard last, and say you are expecting him to ring up any minute. Let them think we all think he’s been called off on a job. Is there anyone else you’d rather telephone to yourself?” Griselda shook her head. She had taken a dislike to the telephone.

“There isn’t anyone?” Major Hoskins repeated, “anyone you have the least uncertainty about? A black sheep of the family—or a former friend with an old grudge?” Griselda frowned impatiently.

“Oh no,” she said, “we’re not like that, we’re just ordinary people, without black sheep or grudges, or even awfully heavy unpaid bills. What kind of other uncertainties are there?”

“I suppose the uncertainty I mean,” Major Hoskins said with a sort of plunging carefulness, as if he must leap but knew exactly where he would land, “is about politics. Have you and Andrew any remarkably Leftist friends? I know you’re both good conservatives yourselves but sometimes one’s friends go rather far the other way. We’re a free-ish country, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have even Communist friends. Still there are pockets in which it’s safest not to find oneself. I’m not the Gestapo,” he added gently. “But we’ve got to find Andrew and as quickly as we can.” After that everything was easy for Griselda. Their interview ceased to be a duel and became a reinforcement. There was nothing she need keep back; and she gave Major Hoskins all she could think might help him. She answered every one of his questions fully and told him every incident she could remember of their easy, simple life together: its joys and its sorrows that seemed like joys now, their money affairs, complicated as everybody’s money affairs now are; but on what the tax collector left out of Andrew’s twelve hundred a year and Griselda’s tiny two hundred a year nailed to it, they had just managed. There was Gerry for the children, and the car for Andrew, the rent, help in the garden, and fifty pounds a year for Andrew’s mother who lived on a very small pension. When you came right down to it at the moment they only owed twenty pounds and could pay that back next quarter day.

“Did he ever speak to you about his work?” Major Hoskins asked her. Griselda shook her head. “No,” she said, “in a way he didn’t—not what he was actually doing. Only what happens to one of us happens to both. From the first we’ve had that kind of marriage, and now it’s more than it was. We both believed in the same way about his work, so that it was really mine as much as his—if you can understand?” Major Hoskins nodded. A confidence that had nothing to do with words but went far beyond them was the kind of confidence that he himself believed in. He thought to himself, “the woman’s damned straight and damned innocent. I thought so before but now I’m sure of it—and probably Andrew’s the same.”

“There are only holidays that I still want to ask you about,” he said after a pause; “you went abroad for them usually didn’t you? When Andrew was fighting for the French Resistance he was mixed up with a lot of them, and among them they represented every shade of opinion. They were all fighting Nazis together; and they fought close and hard, and stuck to each other like leeches. Do you remember on any of your holidays meeting any pals of his who were Communists?” Griselda instantly remembered Jean Paul Corvoisier. His name was on the tip of her tongue but before she spoke it, she heard Andrew’s voice saying: “Never speak of him. He might be in danger anytime. It’s none of our business, and I’d rather kill myself than murder him. He’s saved my life many a time at the risk of his own.” Griselda had only seen Jean Paul once at Aix-en-Provence, that lovely, sleepy, close-shuttered town, on a golden September day.

Jean Paul had met them at a little sanded restaurant under an enormous plane tree with a striped trunk. They had eaten a wonderful omelet together, and drunk a fiery delicious wine.

Griselda could never forget his quick restless eyes and gunman’s face. Yet he had smiled when he looked at them as if the sun shone out of a frozen sky. She had thought to herself, “he mightn’t like me—but he likes Andrew’s happiness!” Major Hoskins’ friendly but watchful eyes saw no change in hers.

“Perhaps, when he was fighting he knew quite a lot of Communists,” she said consideringly. “But it’s as you say, he hates to talk of that time. Once he said ‘A Communist pal isn’t quite a real pal, because he’ll sacrifice you for his cause—a real pal won’t because he hasn’t any cause beyond being a pal.’ Still he may have had some special Communist buddy. The only one I remember was Gustave Lambert, who died of T.B. in Switzerland. We went to see him before he died, and two De Gaulle-ist men—brothers, Henri and Eduard Thibaud who send us cards every New Year.”

“You never met, nor heard him speak of Jean Paul Corvoisier?” Major Hoskins asked her. Griselda slowly shook her head. Major Hoskins got up to go. “Look here, Griselda,” he told her very kindly indeed, “you mustn’t mind if I come to see you again very soon, even after this long talk. I may have to ask you the same questions. Memory plays odd tricks and you have to coax it, as you have sometimes to coax a child with an uncertain vocabulary to tell you where the pain is. The same questions can bring out more and more each time. It won’t be because I don’t believe you. I may have to bring a friend of mine as well, who may know better how to guess what has happened.”

“Then something has happened!” Griselda said to herself. “I can’t pretend any more! Something has happened to Andrew and I don’t know what!”

“How could I mind?” she asked Major Hoskins. “You’re all I’ve got to help bring Andrew back!”

“I won’t say ‘don’t worry’,” Major Hoskins said, patting her shoulder, “because you must worry; but try to remember two rather reassuring things. We both believe in Andrew. We know he’s intelligent, tough and resourceful. We shan’t be the only ones who are trying to get him back—he’ll be trying to get himself back. And he’s on an island. Islands aren’t easy to get taken off from, or to hide people in, who don’t want to be hidden. In a few hours probably we shall get news of his car.”

“It’s torture I’m afraid of!” Griselda whispered. “What they’ll do to him because he’ll stand it! You see I know he would stand it!”

“What he has to stand, we must stand for him,” Major Hoskins said quietly. “But I don’t think they’ll do that. People don’t give their best brains to torturers. They want him for what he is—they won’t want to break him up.”

It was not till Major Hoskins had gone that Griselda felt lonely.

She rang up both the mothers and tried to make them believe there was nothing terrifying in Andrew’s disappearance. Her own mother believed it—or said that she did—because she was Griselda’s mother, but Andrew’s mother, who had lived fifty years in England and was still implacably French, believed nothing and accused everybody. She rang up the War Office at midnight, and they were very polite about it and gave her someone who could speak French to calm her down. They appeared never to have heard of Andrew but were quite sure he would ring up himself in the morning.

Griselda spent the night differently. She was learning how to think.

When she was alone in her room she made a further search for the snapshot; but it was not behind the radiator or anywhere at all. She looked for an hour, and in the same places over and over again as if she were playing with a poltergeist.

She and Andrew both believed in God but not acutely. They had accepted Him as they accepted weather or their own breathing. You took all these things for granted unless they went wrong. Now Griselda prayed. She said the Lord’s Prayer twice—the first time she did not think about the words at all till she came to “deliver us from evil” and then she asked herself what evil was? Was it to accept the next world war as inevitable, or to try to stop it? War, Andrew often said, was criminal—out of date—and besides the mess at the time left worse ones behind it. Still Andrew would fight the next war as he had fought before. Or was he now fighting? And in what way? Was it conceivable that he would try to stop war by the means the spy, Klaus Fuchs, had used? Quite inconceivable—Andrew had often said pacifists were woolly lambs who called wolves into the folds. Then how would he try to do it?

How would Jean Paul Corvoisier try to do it? She tried to remember that day four years ago, when she fell asleep in the garden after lunch to the sound of rapid French she could not understand, and woke two hours later to find Andrew looking down at her, and Jean Paul gone. So they had the rest of the perfect day to themselves after all. She couldn’t go to sleep now so she tried saying the Lord’s Prayer over again and this time she stopped almost at once at the “Thy will be done”—“except about Andrew!” she found herself saying. Of course God would only expect Andrew to be saved by the truth—even if it didn’t save him—God would expect the truth from Griselda as well as from Andrew. Why shouldn’t she tell Major Hoskins about Jean Paul, the missing photograph and the second kiss? Yet these small incidents grew larger as the night wore on. Danger was not as simple as it had looked before Andrew was in it. Major Hoskins was not just their kind old friend reassuring her by his promises to find Andrew. Suppose Andrew didn’t want to be found? Millions and millions of people’s lives might now depend on whether Andrew was found or not—on whether Griselda told the truth or not. What was sacred? What happened if you broke your private honour to save your lover’s life? There was a picture she and Andrew had looked at in Rome called “Sacred and Profane Love” by Titian. Sacred Love was supposed to be a woman with her clothes on—but there was a woman with her clothes off in the picture, and both Griselda and Andrew had come to the conclusion that she looked more sacred.

“Andrew!” she whispered out into the silent empty garden, where in the dawn the pale flowers stared back at her accusingly. There was one thing he had told her about the Resistance under torture: the best plan was to say nothing at all from first to last. Just to keep your mind on death. Sooner or later you’d die and it was the only safe thing to think about. You mustn’t ever let your mind slink towards life. If you want to live you’re done; you’re sure to tell something. If you long to die you can hold on quite a long time.

“He wanted to come back,” Griselda said to the unresponsive roses, “or he wouldn’t have kissed me twice—and if he hadn’t thought he was going to come back he’d not have taken the snapshot, because he’s not sentimental; it wouldn’t have been much use to him tied up for life in Russia. Besides I know he didn’t like Russia, why should he? It’s a police state; he always hated being interfered with or doing what he was told unless it was sensible. Whatever he went for it wasn’t to help them—perhaps it was to save us. But then why doesn’t Major Hoskins know? Andrew went without a word to anyone but me—if you can call the kiss and the snapshot words. Then he doesn’t mean me to repeat them. I want to, but I shan’t! I shan’t tell Major Hoskins about Jean Paul, though I meant to; he wouldn’t have minded my forgetting what happened four years ago. It might help him, and I want to help him; but only if I could be sure it would be what Andrew wants. ‘Thy will be done’ meant whatever God wanted. That’s why I wouldn’t say it. And now I must do whatever Andrew would want, and I’ve thought and thought, and perhaps because I believe in Andrew and love Andrew it’s the same as asking God to do His own will, to take my part in it. I hadn’t thought of that. Of course God can do what He likes, but what He wants is our will in it. Perhaps that makes it safer.”

She slid down on her knees and prayed again. “Thy will be done,” she said with great plainness, though she did not know what was the Will she only knew she must put her heart in. She only knew that love and faith were the strongest arguments she had to use, and that she must give way to nothing else.

The first light moved very gently over the silvery grass, as if the sudden loud voice of a thrush leading the dawn chorus had suddenly released it. Colour flowed over the flowers like a returning tide.

Griselda got up stiffly. Her body moved as an old woman’s body moves. “I needn’t be young and beautiful,” she reminded herself, “unless Andrew comes back.” The children’s voices did not hurt her much, but when they asked her “Where’s Daddy?” it hurt her. Gerry took the children straight down to the beach after breakfast, so that she was quite alone when Major Hoskins and a much older man called Colonel Pattison called at eleven o’clock. Their conversation was full of long and uncomfortable pauses; and Griselda believed that Colonel Pattison meant them to be uncomfortable.

Finally he asked her politely if she would mind coming up to London for a couple of nights. It wasn’t, Griselda saw, going to be much use minding, so she went. She was asked to call at quite an ordinary house in a row; and taken at once to a room that looked like a doctor’s waiting-room. There was a long table in the middle of it, with magazines on it, and dull pictures round the walls.

Jean Paul Corvoisier was sitting at the table; leaner than ever, with even more hunted eyes. They met hers with no recognition. Griselda sat straight down because her legs were wobbling under her so uncertainly that she could not have remained standing up. She gave Jean Paul a polite glance such as any lady would give to a stranger. They sat there in silence for what may have been five minutes, and then as if at a signal Jean Paul Corvoisier got up, and went out of the room.

Later they asked her if she had known who the man was. Griselda said, “No, ought I to have known?” with perfect naturalness. It may have been the wrong answer but if it were they showed no surprise. They just went on asking her questions. Soon after Major Hoskins came in and took her out to lunch. He told her Andrew’s car was found empty in the New Forest with no signs of a struggle. That meant nothing, he explained, for Andrew might have been taken or lured out of it anywhere else. He was kinder than ever, and over and over again Griselda just didn’t tell him everything.

She still couldn’t be sure what the right thing was—she was only sure of Andrew’s silence and his love—and God’s love which was also silence.

“If I knew——” she murmured once to Major Hoskins, “if only I knew——”

He said, “That’s what we’re all saying, but just exactly what do you mean, Griselda, when you say ‘if only I knew’?”

“Only where he is!” she whispered back. He saw her off afterwards on the Cornish Riviera Express, to her home.

“She loves him, she’s kicked blind and she’s perfectly innocent,” Major Hoskins told his chief, “and if she’s innocent ten to one he is—a man can keep quite a lot of things from his wife, but not his fundamental integrity; it’s what she lives on, and she knows whether it’s been tampered with or not.”

“We haven’t a scrap of evidence, either way,” his chief said wearily. “He’s taken nothing; but he is of course everything he knows. Whether they keep him with, or against his will, we’ve lost him; and if he comes back what are we to do with him? Put him on the same job and risk it? Think what we risk. And yet, as you say, all the evidence, every scrap we have of it, points to his innocence! But Hoskins I can’t forget the old story of Samson and Delilah! She must have looked all right too!”

“As far as we know in that story,” Major Hoskins reminded him, “Delilah wasn’t in love with Samson. She only pretended to be, she worked for the Philistines!”

“That’s just the damnedest part of it,” his chief said irefully. “This time Delilah is in love with Samson, and how do we know that we aren’t the Philistines?”

One moment Carol Endicott was edging her way on skis, in what she proudly felt was a workmanlike manner past a small ravine, the next she found herself lying on her back in a hole full of snow, one ski twisted in a bush higher than her head, and one ankle unaccountably loose beneath her, so that her foot seemed to be turning round to look at her reproachfully. A mere mouthful of snow had dislodged itself under Carol’s light weight and unobtrusively bundled both itself and her into the bottom of the ravine, but it had sufficed to work this sudden miracle.

For a moment Carol felt more guilty than hurt.

“I won’t shout at once, till I see if I can’t get out by myself,” she thought defensively. “Bob would think me such a little idiot to fall in here, and he’d be rather proud of me if I found my own way out.” Many skiers have accidents, Carol reassured herself by thinking, and there was only one rôle for a young English girl to play in any accident and that was the rôle of an unruffled heroine.

The worst of having married a man who was a champion skier was that he was liable to think rather scornfully of an untrained wife, and also liable to be on top of a mountain when his wife fell into a ravine at the bottom. In this case, Carol told herself mournfully, it wasn’t even the same mountain.

But the fiery pain in her ankle did not die down, it became every instant more savage, and as Carol found that wriggle as she might, she could do nothing to dislodge the foot in the tree, nor make the injured one change its reproachful eye, she rightly came to the conclusion that she had broken her ankle, and had better be helped out of the ravine. She gave a playful, ladylike shout, but there was no answer. Adolf Schieffregger should be on the look-out for accidents like this, but as a matter of fact, he had warned the school against the edges of ravines only the day before, and to-day he had not been watching Carol, who had from the first rather lagged behind the rest of them. Her first shout only reached the top of the ravine, and the school were by now out of sight.

Schieffregger had counted his flock several times over already, and having now succeeded in shepherding them into a circle of diminutive foothills, that, while reminding his pupils of the Matterhorn, seemed to him the merest child’s play, he had sat down on his wind-jacket and was proceeding to take an afternoon snack. No one heard anything more of Carol, although one lady said afterwards she had heard someone yodelling in the distance, as she supposed, for fun. Silence closed over Carol like a shell. The sky above the ravine was a firm intense blue. It seemed to fit over it like a lid.

The first thing to do in an avalanche, Bob had told Carol, was to get rid of your skis, but how could she get rid of hers, when she couldn’t reach the foot in the tree, and something warned her on no account to touch the other one? It was no use giving you rules for accidents, Carol thought, when the accidents themselves prevented you from carrying them out.

All she could do was to lie and look at the grim blue lid above her, or the odd and sometimes beautiful studies of the snow heaped on the bushes. She thought less pleasantly of these, when one of them hurled its entire contents without a hint of warning upon her upturned face. When Carol had shaken it off, she started shouting again and this time she found herself shouting in a much less ladylike way.

She was two miles away from the little town of Sauerfeld, but there might be farms well within reach, even if none of the school could still hear her.

Carol went on shouting at short intervals and with determination; but nothing happened. It was a cold day and the sun had begun to go down. When once it had gone, there would be a very sharp drop of temperature indeed.

Carol didn’t mean to be unkind to Bob, but she began to think that he had overlooked the main duty of a husband. Before the next half hour was over, still not meaning to be unkind to Bob, Carol had gone very far down the road of marital vituperation, without its having done her any particular good. What was the use of beating an unresponsive image in your mind while the real Bob was gliding, with innocent exhilaration, over far-away mountains?

The pathos of Bob’s situation slowly began to dawn upon Carol. She did not dare, somehow or other, to think about the pathos of her own. Poor Bob, so much older than she was—so brave, so reckless, so extremely competent, and having already had to face tragedy so many times! For Bob had lost both his sons by a previous marriage, each in a disaster, and probably neither of these clumsy fatalities would have occurred if their father had been there to deal with them. One son had been swept away by an avalanche, and the other killed on a motor cycle. What had drawn Bob to Carol had been her strange likeness to his youngest boy. Lying there slowly freezing in the trap of snow, Carol saw again the light leap into Bob’s eyes at their first meeting.

He had caught sight of her across the floor of a Bauern Stube. She was dancing; and the party of skiers, to which Bob belonged, had come in for a drink on their way home.

Carol hadn’t met Bob before, though like everyone else in Sauerfeld she knew him well by sight.

When those fierce, delighted eyes challenged her across the Stube, Carol had smiled back.

She had hardly been conscious of the invitation her eyes had held, but Bob had been conscious of it. He had crossed the room, in two swift strides, and taken her straight out of her partner’s arms; nor had he let her go again till far on into the night.

Ah, if she could only feel once more the close hard grip of his arms! Bob danced magnificently, as he did everything else. Carol tried to swallow a lump in her throat that seemed to be growing larger and larger. They had been wonderfully happy, even if he was twenty years older than she, and even if people had been horrible to them about Bob’s first wife. All the busybodies of Sauerfeld taking sides and behaving as if a perfectly ordinary undisputed divorce was a sort of crime.

Carol herself had never come into the case at all, and had been properly married to Bob. After the decree had been pronounced, even her own parents though tiresome about the marriage at first had accepted it without a qualm; and yet people behaved as if Carol and Bob ought to leave Sauerfeld, just because that aggravating woman insisted on remaining there.

The first Mrs. Endicott was also a first-class skier, but there were other places here in Tyrol, where she could keep her tops of mountains to herself. Fortunately she didn’t dance, and hadn’t a café habit, so they weren’t obliged to meet often. Still with only one village street, Carol had got to know the lean, tall, muscular figure uncomfortably well by sight.

Carol started shivering; was it only the cold that made her flesh creep and her teeth chatter or was it the memory of those light eyes in the lined leathery face that never moved, when the first Mrs. Endicott passed Carol in the street? They were like pools of glacier water, those hard eyes, so blue, so still, so cold!

People said freezing to death was easy, but those who said so couldn’t really have tried it. Carol wasn’t comfortably sleepy, she was agonisingly awake. She felt as if the cold had invisible claws and was slowly pinching her to death between them. It had been a long time before the thought of death had reached Carol’s conscious mind, but she began to think about it now. The pain in her ankle was furious, it was a grinding demoralising pain, stabbing at every nerve.

Carol still shouted at intervals, using her strength to its fullest limit; in between her shouts, she cried, till the tears froze her eyelashes together and made her stiffened cheeks immovable.

Carol began to feel confused. She lost the sense of where she was, or what was happening to her. The blue shadows between the trees took odd shapes, and once she was almost sure she saw a wolf with burning eyes.

She tried to fix her mind on Bob again. She couldn’t remember their love, she could only remember the sorrow she had seen in his eyes for his dead sons. Once Bob had said to her, “Your hair is just like Ted’s.”

“I won’t fail him,” Carol roused herself to cry fiercely. “He shan’t have to go through it again. Not a third time!” She drew the last remaining strength of her body into one desperate call.

Was it an echo that answered her? “I suppose one can have mirages in one’s ears too,” Carol told herself tremblingly, but the echo gave her courage to shout back; and then clearly, far more clearly than her own shout, Carol heard the answering voice. It was coming nearer her, it wasn’t only in her brain, it was close by, the snow above the top of the ravine rustled under someone’s feet. She saw a figure standing against the sky line, a tall dark shadow, that might be Bob himself. The figure took off its skis and tied them together. The next movements, the small rustling sounds stretched time until it seemed to split. Very little of Carol was still conscious, her eyes were half filmed over, and she couldn’t move her chin to shout again. But the rustling grew steadily louder, the figure needed no guidance, it was descending in carefully directed plunges. There was light enough left for Carol to see that weatherbeaten face and to look into those glacier eyes.

It was not Bob who had come to her rescue after all; it was Bob’s wife, the first Mrs. Endicott. But had she come to her rescue? The clear eyes looked strangely into Carol’s, they flickered as if the spirit behind them was unsure of its own purposes.

“Now she will kill me,” Carol thought, roused to fresh terror. “Or worse still just leave me here to die. She has a right to leave me. I made Bob leave her.”

Love had swept them off their feet; how often Carol had fallen back on that consoling cliché. But there is always the question of where one’s feet are first. Like the ravine, for instance; a foot or two further from the edge would have made all the difference to the loosened snow.

“He didn’t want to leave her at first,” Carol reminded herself. “He said, ‘I oughtn’t to see you again. I’m married,’ and Carol had answered ‘Does that matter’.”

“You seem to have got yourself into a pretty pickle,” the first Mrs. Endicott said in a clear, cheerful voice. “That ankle’s broken, isn’t it? Well, we’ll get the other foot out of the tree first anyhow.”

Apparently she was going to save Carol. She freed the one foot from its precarious position, quickly and neatly snapping it out of its ski, then she dealt as neatly but much more carefully with the injured foot. She drew out a big pocket knife, split one of her sticks and cut the boot open, firmly binding the ankle between two pieces of stick with a ski binder. It hurt a good deal, but the ankle no longer felt so wickedly uncertain, and being set free to swell relieved the sharpest agony.

“There is only one thing to do now,” the unemotional clipped voice remarked, “and that is for you to get on my back. I shall crouch close to you, you must roll towards me and put your arms round my neck. I can hold the bad leg steady, the other you must use to grip with. I shall have to have one hand free to climb out by.”

But how could she get on to this creature’s back, Carol asked herself querulously, how could she be supposed to move herself at all? She was wedged into something far more adhesive than mere earth. She couldn’t get out; and by this time she had begun to doubt if she even wanted to! Wouldn’t it be better to lie still and not be rescued? She had forgotten Bob; and this restless energetic figure rustling about so close to her seemed merely a new danger.

The straight back reared itself closer; at any rate Carol was glad she hadn’t got to look into those inhuman eyes again; it was bad enough to see the line of neck between the cap and the wind-coat.

“Now roll towards me,” the tranquilly authoritative voice suggested. “You’ll feel freer when you’ve once moved. I’ll give you a hoist.”

Without her own volition, Carol’s arm closed about the solid throat, the snow loosened its hold upon her with a queer rending sigh.

Her whole body tore itself upward. She was no longer on the ground, she was swinging in the moveless air.

The blue lid of the sky moved upwards, but the sides of the ravine stared white and cold above them pitilessly high, punctuated with black tree stems.

Up they crawled somehow, in a series of heaves and pauses. What it felt like to the first Mrs. Endicott Carol had no idea.

She moved forward, with the weight of Carol on her back, through the deep snow in a series of crab-like movements, with the help of pine stems and under-bush. Probably she left all emotions about it to Carol. She just moved. When she saw she could get a firm grip above her, and that the snow was capable of holding under her feet, she swung herself up and waited to make a fresh plan for the next plunge.

It was difficult to judge the depth of the snow, but on an upward slope it did not vary greatly. The first Mrs. Endicott just managed to keep the injured leg from the side of the trees, and the frozen girl on her back; that was all she had set out to do; if the snow held they would get to the top; the frost was on their side, nor did it occur to her to ask what she would do if the snow loosened.

They reached the top of the ravine in safety, and as soon as she had recovered enough breath to speak she said to Carol:

“I’m going to slip you off on your good side into the snow. You’ll be all right; and I’ve got to put my skis on.”

A gasping voice cried, “You won’t leave me?”

Mrs. Endicott, putting on her skis, with her back turned to Carol said: “No, certainly not,” conclusively, rather than kindly. Then she stood up looking taller and leaner than ever. She seemed always to be looking down on Carol from a great height with those enigmatic eyes. They did not express either scorn or pity. They expressed nothing.

“Now,” Mrs. Endicott said briskly. “I’ve got to hold you in front of me on my skis; you’ll face me, with your hands on my hips. Take a good grip. I’ll tie this leg to the other so that it won’t dangle. All you’ve got to do is to hold on. We shall move rather fast but don’t be afraid. I’m rather a steady skier, and it’s the easiest possible slope. There’s a farm halfway down. Put all your weight on that good foot.”

Carol found herself swung up again, facing her enemy.

It was terrible to have to look into that steady face, but somehow or other the question of enmity seemed to have dropped.

Carol was being held, like a frozen bird, between those firm warm hands.

They were off. It was a real flight, fantastic, swift and terrible. Yet it had a thrilling quality that made it akin to ecstasy.

Carol felt nothing but the air, she saw nothing but the white flicker of snow under the driving blades.

The only firmness in a flying world was in the hands that held her.

“I can’t stand any more,” Carol said to herself. “This is the end. I shall just have to drop.”

The pace slackened.

A châlet shot up close to them in the colourless light.

“Drop if you like now,” said the first Mrs. Endicott.

When Carol came round she found herself lying on a mattress, at some distance from a big stove in a shadowy kitchen. She did not want to be any nearer the stove for she was pricking and burning all over, as if she were being eaten alive by an army of ants.

A tub of snow stood close to the mattress and the first Mrs. Endicott was kneeling beside her cruelly, but deftly, rubbing the snow by turns over Carol’s face, ears, hands and feet.

“Nothing has come off,” her hard cheerful voice proclaimed. “It’s all surface frost bite, and you’ll be none the worse for it in the end.”

At intervals the awful rubbing ceased, and Carol found her head held firmly against a shoulder as unyielding as a wooden board, while hot Glühwein was poured into the corner of her stiffened mouth.

Nothing else was alive in the room but a cat preoccupied with its own comfort, and wholly indifferent to their strange activities. Carol had no idea how long Mrs. Endicott had been rubbing her, or how much Glühwein she had swallowed, but warmth began to come back to her in slow returning tides.

There was very little light in the room, and no sound but the heavy beat of a grandfather clock on the wall.

“There was only an old crone here, but I managed to get her going,” Mrs. Endicott explained apologetically. “I didn’t think she’d be much good to you so I sent her off to the village. She’ll take her time over it, but she knows what to do. I’ve sent for guides and a stretcher and Colonel Endicott if he is in the village. Probably the guides will know where he is.” She spoke the name of her late husband as if she had never heard it before.

After she had said it she carried the tub of snow out of doors, and when she came back, there was for the moment nothing more for her to do, so she sat down behind Carol at some distance from the mattress.

All Carol’s moral and personal thoughts had fogged off into the complete simplicity of her needs, but now very slowly and uncomfortably they began to clear themselves into her mind again.

This woman, sitting so quietly in the shadowy room, was Bob’s first wife.

“I didn’t know you were like this,” Carol said at last defensively, when she could no longer stand the loneliness of her thoughts. “You see—Bob never told me what you were like. He never told me anything at all about you—or about your life together. Never—anything.”

“Why should he?” the quiet voice replied. “There was nothing to tell that concerned you. Our life was over. I should not have expected him to speak of me.”

This hurt Carol more than she could have anticipated; but not wholly for herself. It hurt her for Bob, it seemed to make him a sort of outcast, and it hurt Carol worst of all for this other woman of whom it was natural for Bob not to speak.

“Then you really,” Carol began again, sorting out her words with difficulty, “I mean you really had a life together? It wasn’t, as I had always supposed, that you just didn’t hit if off? I’d supposed—I’d hoped—that you didn’t care.”

The silence shut itself against Carol as if it had an active quality.

“I think,” Carol began again after a long pause, “it’s only fair——! I think I ought to tell you something. I don’t believe Bob would have liked me if I hadn’t somehow or other reminded him of his son Ted.”

There was a still longer silence after this, but it was less hostile.

At length the still figure moved. “Yes, I had noticed that,” said the first Mrs. Endicott.

“Perhaps,” Carol went on, encouraged by even this slight response, “perhaps it’s been a disappointment to him that I haven’t been more like you are. I’ve noticed that he goes off more and more on these long ski tours—that was why I was trying to learn. I wish you’d tell me something—something to help me with him. He’s more like you really than he is like me. I don’t mean it’s only those twenty years—he’s more like!”

“You can hardly expect me to give you a recipe for keeping husbands,” the first Mrs. Endicott answered with a grim half-amused chuckle, “since I’ve so signally failed to keep my own.”

Carol turned this over in her mind for a long time. The savage pain of the bites was growing less, even her ankle only throbbed in massive discomfort, but the pain in her mind had grown more acute.

“Why did you stay here?” Carol burst out at last. “It’s made it so terribly hard. I don’t mean only for us—though I’ve sometimes thought it’s why Bob hates ever to be in the valley. But for yourself! It must be so terribly cruel for you to go on living here alone—where you used to be together. Why do you do it? Why don’t you go away somewhere else—where you’d never have to see us—never have to think about us any more?”

It seemed at first as if the first Mrs. Endicott was not going to answer any more of Carol’s questions, but at last she said stiffly:

“It was my home. One has a certain feeling for any place where one has watched the seasons change through the years. I have always lived a great deal in the open air; one can here, you know, winter or summer. The people here too, suit me . . .”

She stopped, but Carol did not think she had finished, and after a long pause, she said reluctantly as if the words were being dragged out of her, “My boys liked the place too.”

Carol was silent, but she was only thinking over how she could best put together—not an excuse, but a sort of reason for Bob’s having left the first Mrs. Endicott.

“Don’t you think,” she pleaded at last, “that it was really loving them that made Bob like me? It’s the same thing, isn’t it, perhaps that makes him go off so, all alone to the top of mountains? Don’t you think he’s wanting all the time—and perhaps only wanting—to escape from the memory of having lost them? Not to have to think about them any more?”

Mrs. Endicott got up, went to the door and opened it, looking out for a long time into the clearness of the night, swept clean by frost and sown thick with stars.

“I thought I heard them coming,” she said at last, turning back to Carol. “One hears a long way off in this clear air. I am sorry I had no morphia with me. I was not on a tour, or of course I should have had. You are a brave girl, otherwise I could have been no use to you. As to what you say, I have sometimes thought it might be partly true. He needed to escape from his grief, whereas to me it was a sort of companion. ‘Here I and sorrow sit’—I suppose it was like that. After twenty years of marriage you will find a certain integration takes place—and it is difficult for one person not to affect, and even to invade, the personality of the other.

“I have thought over what you have said. I can’t be of any further use to you I am afraid except to tell you that I believe it is worth while to assist this—this integration to take place. One cannot foresee the chances of life, but they are unlikely to be as adverse to you as they were to us. Besides even in our case I think—I think what took place between us was worth while.”

“Tell me this—just tell me this one thing more,” Carol entreated, “before they come. Why did you help me? I thought when you saw me first—your eyes looked—couldn’t you have killed me?”

“Quite easily,” the first Mrs. Endicott said drily.

Once more she rose and went to the door. This time Carol too heard far away the click of nailed boots upon the icy path. Mrs. Endicott left the door ajar so that no time need be lost in carrying in the stretcher, then she moved back behind Carol’s mattress to where the light would not fall upon her face.

“The reason I didn’t kill you,” she said quietly, “was because you were another human being—and an injured one. Now I could add another reason. You are a good girl in your way. I think that you may help Bob if you are true to him.”

Carol heard her husband’s voice. He came in with that great swinging stride she loved, but as he reached her side, he was brought up short by the sight of the figure standing behind her.

“Katherine!” he exclaimed.

He said the first Mrs. Endicott’s name in a most curious way, as if he knew that he belonged to her and wondered what she was going to do about it. She did nothing.

Carol was not again aware of her, except as an unstumbling presence, walking in rhythm with the guide who helped her carry the feet of the stretcher.

When they reached Sauerfeld and stopped at the door of the hotel, a crowd gathered round them. Without either Carol or Bob having seen what happened, the first Mrs. Endicott exchanged her burden with an onlooker, and slipped away unnoticed.

When Carol found herself at last alone with her husband, soothed by morphia, safer and warmer than she had ever felt in her life she pressed her head against his shoulder and began to cry.

“Bob,” she whispered through her easy tears, for it was quite impossible to feel very unhappy when she was so perfectly comfortable. “Bob, oughtn’t you to go back to her?”

Her husband lay stretched out beside her on the bed; he stared down at her golden head in the crook of his shoulder.

“That’s nonsense,” he said in an odd thick voice, “there’s nothing to go back to. Besides, Katherine wouldn’t take me. I broke up everything.”

“But did you, did you really?” Carol protested, forcing him to meet her eyes. “When you said ‘Katherine’ I thought it sounded as if you still belonged to her.”

“Well—yes,” her husband admitted, speaking as if each word he uttered hurt him with a separate hurt, “in a sense I suppose I do belong to her. It’s difficult to explain. You can’t go through—all that—and get rid of it in a moment. Besides we suited each other. We both had strong wills and we fought a lot—but we respected each other—it was a real marriage! What there was of it is hers now—not mine any more. I lost it; but I haven’t lost the feeling that I’m hers still—if she wanted me. What I’ve lost is her. She hasn’t lost me! Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Carol whispered. “I hate to—but I see it—I see it—because of knowing her. If I’d known her before—well then—it couldn’t—any of it—have happened. But—but it has happened! Bob, I am yours!”

“You are mine,” he said, holding her closer, “and as far as I am concerned you always will be mine. Still if I’d come on a man—that you had chucked me for—freezing to death in a ravine, I’d have let him freeze!”

“You mean—she loved you best? Better than I do? Better than you love me—or ever loved her? Is that what you mean, Bob?” Carol persisted, her lips against his throat.

He gave a long hopeless sigh, half sob, half laughter.

“I’m damned if I do know altogether what I mean,” he admitted, “but if I didn’t believe we could find together whatever it was I lost when I lost Katherine—if I didn’t believe you’d help me to find it—well then—lying here with you in my arms—I’d envy Katherine out there all alone!”

When Stella Amory finished reading her letter, she felt as if the world had rolled up into a ball and slid under her feet. At last it was controllable and her own. Even if she were disfigured by bandits, motor accidents, or Polo, she was magnificently insured; and she would know that she had not failed. The name that signed her letter was the seal of her victory; but this final pledge of success had not reached her easily. Only an hour ago, Stella had lain back in her black and white marble bath gazing, sick with suspense and irritation, at an extraordinarily good group of magpies painted in full flight across the ceiling. She had said to herself bitterly that she had better take wing, like the magpies, for she had failed. Hollywood was too wild and babyish for her skilled attack; she wasn’t the actress she had fancied; and even her beauty, subtle and economical, would always fail “to come across” in a society that only knew it was being pleased when it was knocked down, by the size and certainty of its cold-hearted plate-faced baby-dolls!

A baby-doll, Stella surely was not! She had very dark straight hair, gleaming with a satin smoothness—hair so black that it made a striking frame for the ivory whiteness of her heart-shaped face. Her mouth was a clear-cut bow, under the shortest of upper lips; and her eyes were gorgeous. They smouldered, blazed, sparkled or melted at will. That is to say at Stella’s will, not at anybody else’s. Stella had a very strong will in a perfect state of preservation. She knew all about her eyes and very nearly—but not quite—all about her will. Her will had often got in the way of other people before now; and they had had to change their way, because of it; but it had never—up till now—got in Stella’s way. Still, as Stella read the letter through again, inviting her to dinner, the signature “John Edgar Cohen” struck an uneasy chord in her memory.

What had she heard about Cohen, besides the fact that everybody—except perhaps a stray Hottentot or Fiji Islander—knew “John Edgar” was the greatest Film Magnate in Hollywood? Suddenly Stella remembered with a pang of disgust: No girl could safely visit him alone! He was sex mad and sex bad—a brute that had always had his own way, and took it remorselessly against all resistance. If he asked a girl to dinner alone, he meant business—that is to say his business; you could have the part he had up his sleeve for you, if you paid him his price in return.

Many girls had paid it and been made world-famous accordingly; a few girls—perhaps fewer than they made out—had refused to go to dinner with John Edgar, and had put down their subsequent lack of success entirely to this refusal. Naturally John Edgar disliked having his invitations refused, and John Edgar’s dislikes in Hollywood had much the same menacing insistence as Mussolini’s dislikes were said to have in Rome. Nobody—not even other Film Magnates, who delighted in annoying each other—wanted to annoy John Edgar; or if they felt such a want they were careful to keep it anonymous.

Of course, stars who had already become the inhabitants of Olympus weren’t expected to put themselves out, even for John Edgar. These female lights of the globe could evade—if they ever received—such invitations. If John Edgar wanted Garbo or Dietrich for his films, the negotiations were such as befitted cousinly monarchs; his emissaries called upon their agents, and all that John Edgar asked was to know the figure at which the agents were content to halt.

Such stars—moving about in clouds of glory—could afford to live their lives as they chose. They had to obey the exacting laws of their calling, but beyond their obedience to art, they need acknowledge no living master.

Not so the lesser stars such as Stella Amory. Stella could be made an Olympian by a word—but the word had not yet been spoken.

She had only had one great success to her credit, although she was reasonably sure of others—if she were given the chance.

Even one other success, if it were sufficiently spectacular, would be enough; and if John Edgar bestirred himself, Stella knew this would be the final swing on to Mount Olympus.

Once there, Stella realized that she would be safe for ever. She was twenty-three years old, and still looked sixteen; on her passport and in the newspapers she was eighteen; and she knew how to stay eighteen. She had wits; but in spite of her wits, Stella did not know how to take that final step onto Olympus, without John Edgar.

Some girls give themselves willingly to their chosen lovers, and occasionally there are to be found girls who give themselves willingly to almost any lover; but Stella belonged to neither of these categories. She had never given herself willingly or unwillingly to any man. She didn’t mind being loved respectfully at a distance—with the usual offerings.

She was quite willing to let herself be looked at, and to smile and accept pleasantly what she was offered. Hitherto this had been her fullest response to the passions she had roused.

Her figure was perfect—the Medician Venus after a slight dieting régime could have equalled but not excelled Stella’s lithe curved body. Stella’s feet and hands, her wrists and ankles were considered, even in Hollywood, to be the best on the market. But in spite of Polo and water tennis, in spite of morning rides and evening dancing, Stella would be no match for brute strength, if she were pitted against it.

John Edgar was no paunch-made slouch of a middle-aged man. He was twenty-nine, and played Polo too.

“If I take a knife,” Stella said to herself wistfully, “I might not be able to use it! and if I did use it—he’d be almost certain to resent it! What shall I do?”

She did the first thing any star does in any real difficulty, she rang up her agent, Mr. Nathaniel Brown. He had the sense to be in, and was a good listener.

Stella made herself understood, but she avoided names; one has to be careful with telephones in Hollywood. Mr. Nathaniel Brown was more careful still—he had to be careful both with the telephone and with Stella—for one has to be careful with stars also—in or out of Hollywood.

“She thinks she’s God Almighty,” Nathaniel Brown sadly told himself, “and so in a sense, she is! If she came off that purity perch, she might be no good at all, or she might be a durned sight better than she is now—it’s a toss-up which—and it’s a Hell of a business risking the toss she’d take!”

After a prolonged, intelligent, flattering pause, Nathaniel made up that indurated piece of elastic which he called his mind.

“If I were you,” he said with a judicious blend of firmness and appeal, “I’d risk nothing! You can say you have another engagement and suggest a morning visit with your agent. He’ll know what that means all right. It’s usually done with this particular gentleman if the lady—— Well, it’s quite often done! and he doesn’t mind too much! What he’d really mind would be being crossed on the spot as it were in—er—in a personal way—you know what I mean, don’t you?”

Stella said “Perfectly” in a cool assured voice; “but on the other hand,” she suggested, “if he doesn’t see—if he isn’t pleased, I mean—couldn’t he let the offer go—to another girl?”

“He could do all of that,” Nathaniel regretfully agreed, “and don’t think I underestimate what the loss might be—it’s a tough problem! I mean it’s a horrible business—but as your agent, I’ve got to safeguard you as well as your future—in a sense you are your future! If you get upset, those millions would give us the go-by anyway—I mean I wouldn’t for the world have you insulted—and that being so—I should refuse the invitation!”

It wasn’t good enough! Nathaniel sadly told himself. Stella was as proud as a peacock and might scratch John’s eyes out. Better let her keep her poise. Tactfully pushed about, to the heads of other studios—who hated John Edgar—this purity stunt might get the girl in good. There wasn’t any too much of it round Hollywood. Stella rang off. “Safety first!” Stella told herself contemptuously. “Of course agents have to say that! Otherwise they wouldn’t be agents! Only the creative spirit is prepared to take risks—or knows how to take them! At least—one must find out as one goes—but God how I hate men!”

Nevertheless it was a man to whom Stella turned next—for she did not consider Nathaniel Brown to be a man—merely a restrictive pen on a contract.

She rang up a very well-known and extremely good-natured male star.

“Will you come round, David?” Stella demanded. “I’m in a frightful jam!” They were both English, but they’d learned what “jam” meant in Hollywood, and David said that he’d be with Stella in under half an hour.

When he came round, in an enormous silver-plated Hispaniola, he asked Stella sympathetically if it were gangsters; for he was under Police protection himself, and he didn’t like it. “In one sense it isn’t, and in another sense it is,” Stella explained. “It’s John Edgar Cohen—asking me to dinner.”

“Absolutely, Stella,” David (whose real name would be a give-away) murmured, “absolutely gangsters! Force is his middle name, I’m told, and dirt his nature! Well, what are you going to do about it? I’d be worse than useless, wouldn’t I, as an escort—sort of gilded insult—suggesting me to him?”

“Oh yes—I can’t suggest you,” Stella agreed mournfully, “and I don’t see that I can possibly refuse to go—one has to get on somehow—and I know the cat he’ll give the part to—if I refuse! but I have an idea! How would it be if you suggested yourself, right after dinner? You could ring up, from just round the corner, having driven up in your car—detectives and all. If he is somebody—so are you! They’d have to say you were on the phone asking for me—and if I said, ‘Oh, all right, David—I will later!’ you’d know I was seeing my way safely through it—and just go on waiting outside till I came. I shouldn’t stay long in any case; and if I said: ‘It’s just what I expected—and I’d rather not!’ somehow or other you’d come inside!”

“Rather!” David said and smiled. He had a very nice smile on the screen or off it, a warm-hearted, amused, real smile—that his teeth were extraordinarily good was an agreeable accident—but the feeling behind the smile was no accident—it was a part of David. “That’s O-Kay with me,” he added, “if you don’t get rattled!—but we’d better fix our times carefully and see that our watches match. I’ll be there, whenever you say, and stay as long as you wish. And if you should have to say you’d rather not—you can count on my getting inside!”

Stella nodded in a business-like way. She had a business-like feeling about David. He had always pleased her; and that he liked her was one of her best Hollywood assets—perhaps Stella did not know herself quite how good a one; but she had found it work on several previous occasions. Still she had never taken the trouble to find out how much David liked her. She knew he had a wife, whom he didn’t live with and yet didn’t get rid of. So Stella supposed that David couldn’t like her very seriously. He had made no other suggestion; but then they were both English, so that they knew from the start, the laconic system of Taboos common to these expressionless islanders. David had once murmured to Stella after a particularly pleasant dinner-dance, “Nothing doing?” with a rising inflection; and Stella had repeated the same two words with a falling inflection.

They were even better friends, after this little incident, and may have been said to know each other far more intimately than the most blatantly exposed of Hollywood lovers.

Having made her decision, Stella accepted John Edgar’s dinner invitation with courteous brevity, and sent it by hand to his studio. No one was supposed to know John Edgar’s private address, since for his own protection, as well as that of his guests, John Edgar always sent his own car to bring people to dinner. He had two gunmen on the front of the car, who knew their business, and liked their salaries.

Stella dressed with great care, and after a pause for reflection—extremely well—even for a Hollywood star. She wore flame colour and black velvet; and not too much of either. She had a cabochon ruby set in a thin platinum chain round her throat. She felt a pulse beat under it, and for a moment glancing at herself, in one of the long mirrors that lined her bedroom, she thought that the ruby was alive. It seemed to move with a spirit of its own.

Stella wasn’t exactly frightened but she was excited. She had made no definite plan for the evening. She meant to please John Edgar enough for her purpose and not enough for his. She rubbed her cheeks, and bit her lips—beyond a little invisible powder, she used no makeup at all. She flung a black velvet cloak about her shoulders, and ran downstairs, remembering with a sense of reassurance, David’s kindly smile.

It was a help to her, but she knew that most of her help must come from herself.

She was going into danger, as she went on the screen at the shooting moment—the difference was that there were no camera men, and whatever was going to happen, would really happen.

The drive was long; the great car ran with a silken smoothness that concealed its speed. The stars hung huge, and ominously light, out of the cloudless blue bowl of the sky. A moon rose slowly higher and higher—her slender shape secure and inviolable—though there seemed nothing in the vast emptiness through which she moved, to hold her as she climbed.

Stella was not sentimental but her eyes followed the slim curve of the young moon with envy. No one pursued or attacked that shining form—unattended and unmenaced, the young moon kept her shining course.

John Edgar Cohen met Stella in his huge semi-Tudor hall. He was exactly what she had expected. Coarse, stupid, unpleasantly intimate—without sense or consideration. Nor had he any manners to make up for his lack of morals. A good tailor had done what he could for John Edgar, but no tailor, however good, could have added distinction to a surface so incapable of taking it.

John Edgar was a healthy not wholly shapeless animal who had had the sense to take plenty of exercise; that was all that could reasonably be said for him.

At dinner, Stella ate and drank what was necessary for the sake of politeness; she knew it was a superb dinner but she tasted nothing. All her wits were absorbed in the effort to be as charming as she dared, in a manner that would keep her host at a controllable distance.

Perhaps Mae West could have managed the situation better than Stella managed it.

It is probable that this wise lady would have guessed one thing that entirely escaped Stella’s notice. Mae West would have known that John Edgar Cohen was bored. He was bored, but he concealed it from Stella, because he was a man of business and knew his business better than Stella knew her business of being a woman. His big teeth flashed—his hot eyes roved, his clumsy fingers pawed and clutched; but his senses remained unappeased and unappeasable.

When he rang a bell beneath the table, it was not only, as Stella supposed, a signal for the coffee, it was also a signal for the Producer of the film John Edgar was considering to appear with the coffee. A signal that came much sooner than Max Eberhart had had any reason to expect it would come. He was a smaller, better mannered and more intelligent human being than his master, and Stella hoped that she did not show her wild relief at his entrance.

In spite however of her efforts, the sparkle in her eyes became freer, her lovely lips less fixed, she unbent and was—for the first time that evening—beautiful.

The two men understood each other perfectly; and their secret signals to each other proclaimed their satisfaction. Stella had failed as a woman, but as a star she had succeeded. “How the Hell the public can like a girl as cold as a fish and as hard as a lamp-post—beats me!” John Edgar told himself, “but she’s a good-looker I’ll say—and after all on a screen what more do you get?”

After dinner John Edgar led the way to his library, filled with books he never had either the time, or the inclination, to read. They had begun to talk with the freedom and keenness of people who knew their jobs and depended on each other for collaboration. It was a good talk and Stella never missed a cue; but a curious feeling began to take possession of her—the relief she had felt at the entrance of Max Eberhart wore off—and in its place she felt conscious of a numbing sense of disappointment. She knew now that there was nothing left to fear—the fight hadn’t come off—was that what was the matter? Surely she hadn’t wanted that horrible trial of wits against violence? And yet a quite peculiar and dreadful feeling—of having missed fire—shut down upon her roused senses. She was as inviolable now as the climbing moon—couldn’t she be satisfied with that? But she hadn’t been put to the test—and why hadn’t she? There could be only one reason for John Edgar Cohen not taking what he wanted, and that reason would be that he didn’t want it! Stella had not annoyed him—for there he was, sitting opposite her—relaxed and yet intent—with a satisfied smile on his thick, coarse lips.

He was saying to himself: “This girl will do! She’s a money breeder!” She would do for what he’d planned as business; but she hadn’t fulfilled that other part of his plan—for pleasure. Not that she’d refused it! She’d just—as he’d seen in a flash, in the hall—been cast all wrong. He’d tried to jolly her up at dinner, but she ate like a bird and drank next to nothing, and her eyes gave him no more response than a shirt stud.

She wasn’t frightened—that would have been one kind of fun—and she wasn’t friendly, that would have been the other—— You’d got to have some kind—though God knew that John Edgar wasn’t too particular, once the girl was the top of her class and on the spot at the right moment—still she’d got to have a kind of draw to her, and Stella hadn’t any—she was just an icy little eel—a thing you couldn’t get hold of—too brittle—too chilly—too slippery——! She hadn’t, John Edgar comfortably concluded, any guts—that was what was the matter with her. She was nice enough in a way, of course, and pretty enough to take the part on the screen—now she was talking business she’d brightened up considerably.

After all, it didn’t matter—there were good and plenty of the right sort of girls handy. John Edgar didn’t blame the poor kid, he even felt a pang of compunction, for perhaps she’d hoped to please him. Too bad if she’d felt that way and he hadn’t! But the telephone from good old David was quite a godsend, whichever way you looked at it. John Edgar gave Stella the switch and listened, while she said in rather a flat little voice, “Oh, is that you, David? If you’re there—oh yes. I forgot! No! it’s quite all right! I’ll ask him. I expect he’s frightfully busy—and perhaps wouldn’t mind too much—if I did——”

John Edgar chipped in gallantly. “Well yes,” he admitted, trying not to seem as pleased as he felt at having the girl taken off his hands so neatly. “Of course, if he’s there in his car—but it’s been wonderful meeting you quietly this way! and, Miss Amory—I may call you Stella, mayn’t I—the part’s all right, isn’t it? She’ll do, won’t she, Max?” and Max who was there to say “Yes” if he saw it was “Yes”—or “No” if he saw it was “No”—said “Yes” with considerable emphasis, because he knew that the girl could act on the screen a damned sight better than she could act off it.

“There’s something about those cameras!” he said to himself, “after all!”

Stella stood in front of the telephone, staring down at it in a queer way—and then she lifted her smouldering, deep, inscrutable eyes to John Edgar’s face; they flickered for a moment over his whole body—from his head, to his big flat feet, in their highly polished pumps. She felt a strange trembling feeling, as if something had jarred through every nerve in her body, and as if every nerve in her spirit had shared in the shock. Cast off mistresses, Stella thought, must feel the same numb, paralysed feeling that she felt now—but they had been cast off—they knew that once at least they had had in them the power to attract. Stella would have died rather than yield to John Edgar—but to feel as if she were already dead—when she hadn’t been asked to resist—wasn’t that even worse? What would a diamond feel like, if a jeweller—a judge of diamonds—took it for glass, and threw it into the nearest dustbin? Stella almost stumbled out of the pitilessly light hall into the friendly darkness of David’s car.

David was alone, except for the armed detectives in front. Stella flung herself into his startled arms. “David!” she sobbed, “David!” He was horribly concerned.

“What has he done to you?” he demanded, stiff with rage. “Let me get out! Let me once get hold of him!”

“No! Oh no! It’s not what you think!” Stella gasped. “It’s something quite different only—worse!”

He gave a half rueful laugh. “I suppose you mean he’s chucked you for the part,” he said. “After all—from his point of view—I don’t see what else you expected!”

Stella was silent for so long that David felt sure he was right; but he was surprised at the firmness with which she still clung to him.

“No,” she murmured at last, with half a sob and half an attempt at laughter. “It’s funnier than that, David—what he chucked me for wasn’t the part—I’ve got that! It’s just being what I am—what I can’t help being—he chucked me because—he just didn’t want me!”

David, more puzzled than ever now, switched on the light so that he could see her face.

“How could that brute want a woman in any way that wasn’t an insult? If he’s left you alone and you’ve got the part, what more do you want?” he asked almost savagely.

Stella’s face was undistorted by her tears; the eyes he looked down into shone with a curious new light—a light he had looked for often before—and never seen. They gazed up at him, fringed by their long natural lashes—as if they wanted him to read what they said and to make no mistake about it.

“By God,” David muttered, “d’you mean it this time? Do you really mean it, Stella?”

“Switch off that light!” Stella Amory said firmly and distinctly. After all it was as near as she could get to really meaning it.

Norman Graham Adams adored his mother with a controlled exasperation.

On the occasion of a summons after his weekly visit he saw that she was up to something, and realized that whatever she was up to would probably take place.

Only once had Angela’s dynamic powers, her skilful subterfuges, backed by her preserved and delicate beauty, not got the better of her only son, and that was when—over her dead body almost—he had insisted on marrying Vivien. Even her doctor, an intelligent scientist, had expected Angela to die. But Angela had not died. She was even present at the wedding, and everyone, except Norman, thought her a far more beautiful and attractive figure than that of the young bride.

It was not only that his mother knew she was right—she so often was right. Even when a near miss—like Norman’s marriage—took the place of a direct hit, the mountains of concealing spray, and the shock of the explosion, shook Norman’s judgment awry.

He began to feel his judgment shake under him now when Angela said in her gentlest and most caressing voice:

“Dearest, a most wonderful thing has happened. Your cousin Henrietta has decided to come and live with me! You’ve been so beautiful to me always, feeling my loneliness as if it were your own, and giving up so much of your precious time to me! Dear Vivien too, has been most generous in sharing you with me—my real daughter as I always tell people, not my daughter-in-law. Well, now your minds can be at rest! Vivien is sure to take to Henrietta, and I know you love your cousin already nearly as much as I do!”

There was a pause. Norman did love Henrietta, but not, he knew, for the things his mother saw in her. Norman could talk to Henrietta. She not only was often wrong, but she accepted fallibility as the human lot. She even sometimes gloried in it.

Both women were rich as well as respectable. Angela was austerely religious, an Anglo-Catholic, fervent in her love for her Church, and taking part in all its activities; while Henrietta was broader-minded, and relaxed about this world and the next. She attended her much more indefinite church, but not if it rained or she had too many letters to write. Henrietta was, however, as enthusiastic about her human affections as Angela was, though a strong flavour of common sense sustained her against disillusion, and prevented her feelings from carrying her—or the objects of her affections—off their feet.

The two elderly women were not only cousins, they had been school mates, and were lifelong friends. Both springing from old Southern families, they had wisely married Northerners with great business capacities. Each was a famous hostess, Angela in Washington, D.C., Henrietta in Rome. No one knew how much either of them had loved their husbands; but while both were meticulously faithful wives and became equally faithful widows, Angela had found no difficulty at all in not looking beyond her marriage vows, while Henrietta, though far less beautiful, had been considerably tempted. Angela’s husband had died in early middle life, but not before he had amassed a considerable fortune. Henrietta had lived a cup and ball existence between poverty and riches. Her husband both lost and won fortunes. He was a mercurial, neurotic man, always on the verge of physical or mental breakdowns; and he finished by blowing his brains out during the great Depression.

Henrietta was no worse off, however, since, in one of his more prosperous moments, she had persuaded her husband to settle a fortune upon her and his children, and had not allowed him subsequently to touch it.

Henrietta’s three daughters, Norman now reminded himself, wouldn’t be in the way, since they were all satisfactorily married, and off Henrietta’s fond, but capable, hands.

“But Mother,” Norman ventured at last, after so long a pause that his mother raised faintly reproachful eyebrows, “are you quite sure you want Henrietta to live with you? I know what tremendous friends you have always been, and you’re both of you such wonderful house-keepers, but this—well, this’ll be your house, not cousin Henrietta’s!”

“My dearest boy, all that I possess,” his mother incorrectly told him, “I have always been willing to share! Henrietta will have her own rooms, of course, and I shall keep mine; she would not wish it otherwise. She has her Italian maid, Beppina, and fortunately my Marie Céleste is quite fond of her. Henrietta and I will entertain by turns. I don’t suppose she will find Alphonse less good a cook than her Luigi; besides, she wasn’t going to bring Luigi over; her other servants—so heartless of them, though rather convenient as it happens—prefer to remain in Rome; but she will bring her car and Alfredo. I have always thought that we Anglo-Saxons should study the art of living together as practised by the French. French families manage beautifully, all the in-laws under the same roof, leading their own lives, sometimes of course very regrettably—double ones—but the French are not, I think, as naturally moral as we are! I know this idea didn’t appeal to your dear Vivien, so I never even suggested it to her, for ourselves. But Henrietta and I spend months together every year and there has never been the edge of a leaf’s difference between us. All this trouble about Hitler—in spite of dear Mr. Chamberlain’s wonderful good sense—does make it seem far wiser for Henrietta to give up Europe for the next few years. Most sensibly she invested her money on this side, so even if there is a war there will be no financial difficulty. Of course I know Mussolini is quite different from Hitler. Henrietta has found him most considerate. He likes having well-off Americans living in Italy, and now that the trains . . .”

“Yes, Mother, I know all about the trains being on time,” Norman impatiently broke in, “but that doesn’t stop the whole country being turned into an arsenal; even the peasant girls wear tanks embroidered on their handkerchiefs, and little boys are put in black, and trained to death and murder from six years old!”

“But you hardly ever see a beggar, dear,” his mother reminded him; “think of that in Italy; and so much more hygenic; and then that dreadful Mafia society is completely wiped out!”

“Supplanted,” murmured Norman beneath his breath; aloud he said, “Well, darling, of course if it’s all settled I can only say that I shall be delighted to see Henrietta; and it is true that I hate to think of you living all alone in this big house.”

Norman glanced round at the spacious, temperate room in which his mother spent the greater part of her well-organized life. It would be a wonderful room to loot, but it was somehow, he felt, hardly a room to share. The furniture was French of the best period; a pale, harmonious Aubusson spread its flowered pattern under his mother’s feet. There was a small Turner and a delicious Corot on the walls. A glass table with a shaded lamp behind it, in exactly the right place, held vases beautifully decorated with autumn leaves and richly contrasted dahlias; while in front of them stood a low trough full of dark, sweet-scented violets. His mother arranged flowers so that each one seemed to be exactly where it chose, and yet mysteriously to partake of the fastidious and determined personality that had placed it there. Norman reminded himself that his mother never attempted a skill that she had not acquired, and might be trusted not to take a path which she could not safely follow.

Still, when he reached home, he said to his wife:

“I can’t help thinking they may find it a little difficult. They’re both so extraordinarily unselfish and good, and yet in a sense they’ve always had their own way about everything!”

His wife looked at him, feeling his thoughts—as wives often feel—should be accepted for the emotion behind them rather than from their content.

“Well,” she said consideringly, “I know they’re both angelic, and that in Jacob’s dream angels ascended and descended their ladder without tripping each other up. Still I can’t help also remembering that when Jacob actually met an angel, the angel gave him such a kick that it left him lame for the rest of his life. I don’t know what Henrietta is like, of course; but your mother manages everything so perfectly that whenever I stayed with her there wasn’t a thing in the house I could do to help her! I could only stand and gasp, and capable people get awfully tired of gasping at what other capable people have done.”

“I don’t see that they need to get in each other’s way,” Norman said a little doubtfully—for he too had done a good deal of gasping. “Rich people in large houses can easily get away from each other. Besides, they’ve both got cars and their own chauffeurs. Don’t crab it from the start, Vivien. I’m nervous enough about it as it is!”

“My good boy, they won’t need my claws with which to crab it,” his wife told him. “There’s one thing, however, you may reassure yourself about—angels have wings!”

No claws, however, were visible; from the moment of Henrietta’s arrival, the household moved effortlessly on shining wheels. No voice was raised, no wills perceptibly clashed. Angela behaved with a tact and generosity equalled if not surpassed by the gracious receptivity of Henrietta. Henrietta actually preferred the rooms that Angela had hoped she would choose.

Beppina and Marie Céleste were old friends; and both Latins. They got on well together. Each had her own chauffeur devoted to her, and sought, with varying success, to take away the other’s admirer. Quarrels flared up at intervals between them, but they were ephemeral and dramatic episodes soon pushed aside, when it became necessary to combine in ferocity and concealed venom against an Anglo-Saxon household. The two maids drew enormous wages, and both their mistresses were considerate and generous to them, so that neither of them wished to be more seriously upset than they could easily manage.

Henrietta already knew and admired most of Angela’s friends, and a series of inspired parties, exquisitely arranged by Angela, introduced her to the rest. Henrietta had European friends of her own in the Diplomatic Corps, whom she introduced to Angela, but Henrietta gave rather smaller and more intimate parties.

Politically they were of one mind, and though they always voted Republican in spite of their Southern blood, because their incomes suggested it, they were not averse to well-selected Democrats as visitors, especially if one of them happened to be the President of the United States—and a Roosevelt. Judges of the Supreme Court and leaders of the learned professions were always welcome. Bishops were often to be found at their dinner-parties; and since they were—or thought they were—intellectual, the two ladies frequently entertained the best-known writers, artists and musicians; but not film stars.

Both friends were first-rate bridge players. Angela was perhaps the more brilliant, but she was apt to outbid her partner; while Henrietta, playing with less speed and imagination, always played her partner’s game with unvarying steadiness and exactitude.

Angela was the more strict as to what she read and would see acted; nor would she entertain anyone beneath her roof, however celebrated, who had been divorced more than once. She never invited twice a woman who made up in public, or a man who drank more than he could comfortably carry. Henrietta was considerably more lax, but she had her own sitting room, and seemed quite content with the stricter guests provided for her by Angela.

Henrietta thought Angela perfect, and said so to all Angela’s friends. She had always loved Norman as if he were her own son, and she now found—but did not say that she had found—it equally easy to love Vivien as if she were her own daughter.

Before their first meeting, Angela had carefully prepared Henrietta for Vivien.

“You know, darling,” she said, “we mothers of sons must accept the ultimate sacrifice. We must give the core of our hearts to other women! I know that in a sense daughters are just as dear, but perhaps the sacrifice is less complete. I sometimes think men take more from women than women take from men—if you know what I mean—and give less. I always say—and of course feel—that I have never wholly lost Norman through his rather premature marriage: instead I have gained a daughter! Dear Vivien—as you will find—has noble intrinsic qualities. She would never, I feel sure, do anything actually base; but she sounds the modern note; she speaks—well, I can’t but deplore the whole tone of her conversation—staccato—raw—and though I hope not to Norman, unpleasantly open as regards sex. Still, she is a good girl, home-loving, and retains some of our older loyalties. I think you will grow to like her.”

Henrietta found any period for growth unnecessary. She took to Vivien immediately; and her affection was warmly reciprocated.

It had been arranged that on her first visit to Norman and Vivien, Henrietta should go alone; and when she returned she said at once that she thought Norman looked splendid—handsomer than ever.

“Ah, my darling boy is handsome!” replied his mother with a long sigh, partly of justified triumph, but partly of regret, for what she had herself created must now be shared.

It may once or twice have penetrated the thick cloud that hung between what Angela meant to think and what she actually thought, “If he thinks the world of Vivien—as of course I wish him to think—what must he think of me?” For Norman had certainly chosen a wife as different from his mother as possible.

Fortunately the impact of Henrietta had no disintegrating effect upon Angela’s greatest intimacies. Henrietta loved all three of them exactly as Angela had hoped she would. She loved Angela far the most, Norman the next best; and Vivien quite enough.

The only thing that Angela noticed, not wholly with approval, was that Henrietta never repeated a single thing that any one of them said to her about the other.

It was six months before there was the slightest sign of a shadow upon their clear horizon. Norman discovered the shadow where he had least expected to find it. Twice a year he checked his mother’s meticulously kept and hitherto economical accounts. He had supposed the double household would lessen her expenses and prove for both ladies a distinct economy. Henrietta had been lavishly generous in giving her share towards the household’s expenses; but for the first time in her life Mrs. Graham Adams had been living beyond her income. When Norman went into the items of her expenditure, comparing them with Henrietta’s scrupulously kept accounts, which she had also obligingly placed before him, he could not avoid the conclusion that the extravagance was entirely his mother’s. Whenever Henrietta gave one of her small, intimate parties, his mother, within a few days, gave a considerably larger one. His mother exactly doubled all Henrietta’s lavish charities. Her wine bill had gone up in quality as well as quantity. She bought far more, and far more expensive, flowers. Even her clothes were, for a woman of sixty-eight, an exorbitant item. Before Henrietta came, Angela had spent less than half the sum on her wardrobe, and yet managed to appear one of the best-dressed women in Washington. She had a solid and not old-fashioned car. Why had she had to buy a new one since her cousin’s arrival?

Henrietta’s bills were modest, and left a suitable balance in the bank. Yet Henrietta, even after she had made over—on their marriages—more than half her capital to her daughters, still possessed a larger fortune than Angela’s.

Something would have to be done about it. Norman could cover his mother’s present over-draft, but she would have to be more careful, and retrench for the next few months. He made up his mind to be very firm, and went into the library to have it out with her.

It was an early winter afternoon. The sun still lingered, and its last pale light mingled with the bright flames of the open wood fire. His mother was alone, and lying down. She wore a rest gown of gleaming lilac satin, with delicate flowered lace at her throat and wrists. French or Belgian princesses might have woven the filmy lace centuries ago. Her silvery white hair rose in orderly waves above eyes, so pure, so blue, so tender, that as they fixed themselves upon her son, he knew that he was not going to be able to say anything strict to her about her extravagance. If she had to be careful, it was not about money that most care was needed. Her cheeks were still the colour of apple blossom—she never touched them with rouge though she took considerable care of her complexion. Did he imagine it?—or was her cheek dry and burning beneath his lips?

He looked at his mother with unusual solicitude and saw that Vivien had been right when she had said to him, “Your mother was always slim, but she’s thin now, with an edge to it.”

“Darling,” he asked her, “are you quite well?”

“Oh, yes, dearest,” his mother said with a cheerful inexactitude. “Perfectly well—only resting.”

Something in the sound of her controlled voice—its very timbre had effort behind it—frightened Norman.

He said, “Look here—let me see your engagement book!”

His mother evaded his demand, but in the end gave way to him. Every moment of sixteen hours out of the twenty-four was accounted for. Even the eight hours supposed to be in bed were not, Norman felt sure, devoted only to sleep. She read; she prayed; she made plans; and these activities did not come into her engagement book.

“This won’t do at all, darling,” he said sternly. “Henrietta is five years younger than you are. She is twenty years stronger and always has been; and she’s twice as rich. Somebody has got to go slow in this household—and that somebody has got to be you!”

Angela was enchanted with her son’s anxiety; and intended to add to it; but she began by saying that he mustn’t worry and that she would do whatever he wanted. Wasn’t she lying down now, just because she was going out to dinner, and to a play after it?

“Have I been terribly extravagant?” she added.

Norman instantly realized that whatever he told her, or asked of her, wouldn’t work out as he wanted; but that she would spend in every direction to the verge and over it—of disaster. So he said nothing more to her about the accounts. He decided instead to speak privately to Henrietta.

Henrietta was aghast at Angela’s spiritual and financial extravagance. She insisted on secretly making good the financial side of Angela’s increased efforts, but found that she could do nothing to relax Angela’s spiritual and social expenditure. She vainly urged fewer parties and less bridge. She offered to take on half—or the whole—of Angela’s committees; but with inflexible gentleness Angela clung to them all.

“Why,” she demanded of her son, “should poor Henrietta have no social life because I am not so strong as she is? It is nonsense! Besides, I enjoy our parties! I will rest a little longer in the afternoons. As for my charities, my dear boy, you must expect me to give rather more than Henrietta since I have lived in Washington all my life! No! No! Silly old Dr. Sandilands is an alarmist, and you and Vivien must put up with me for a great many years longer! My life has been enriched by Henrietta’s presence. I certainly do not intend to limit hers by lessening my own energies! What we do together is only half as tiring as what I had to do alone.”

Nevertheless, Angela grew weaker, and a mysterious rise of temperature haunted her evening hours.

“These heroic women,” Dr. Sandilands told Norman impatiently, “are as bad as the lazy ones. My whole practice consists of women who do things they needn’t or women who won’t do things they need! I know your mother’s a saint, and wants to do everything for everybody. She just doesn’t know it’s a sort of spiritual cheating. She grabs at other people’s duties, and they lose the limelight they might have earned if she hadn’t snatched them. You can’t see her head for her halo. But let’s try the other one; she looks to me to have more common sense!”

At first Henrietta renewed her offers to do more all round; but when she saw that this would merely flog Angela’s nerves to a swifter race, she offered to do less. Should she not close down on her social and philanthropic life and spend considerably less? But looking at her, while she offered it, Dr. Sandilands came to the conclusion that Henrietta would find these withdrawals hard, if not impossible.

“She’d do an awful lot of something else behind closed doors,” he told Norman in private, “and sooner or later your mother would catch on, and do the same on a higher scale—and boy!—I’d back your mother to reach the doors of heaven and get through first, leaving every saint in Christendom panting behind her!”

“Well, what are we going to do about it?” Norman demanded. “I’m not going to have my mother killed by Henrietta’s energies—exposed or muffled.”

Dr. Sandilands did not have one of the best private practices in Washington for nothing. After a pause he said,

“This tie between your mother and her cousin is a beautiful friendship. That’s what they call it and that’s what it is to them. We can’t blow it up. I shall have to go about separating them in a very careful way—no visible dynamite—no back-chat. All rich women occasionally send for a doctor. When Mrs. Whitlock next has something the matter with her, I shall know what to do. You tell your intelligent wife to watch out for any possible symptoms in your cousin, and then send for me!”

Within two weeks, Henrietta had a bilious attack. It was a slight one, and came on after having had a rich, but delicious cup of coffee with whipped cream over it, given her by Vivien during a morning call. The coffee may have had something in it besides cream. Dr. Sandilands called within twenty-four hours, and told Henrietta that she must go away for a change.

“It’s absolutely necessary,” he said with cheerful firmness. “The condition of your heart requires it. Nothing beyond a change is indicated. Washington winters affect some people unfavourably. The climate is humid—winter or summer—and then we get these violent changes. Spring one day—and look at that snow outside to-day—probably spring again to-morrow. But what happens to the circulation with a heart like yours? It’s thoroughly upset now—only functional, of course—but you need six weeks of Palm Springs; otherwise you’d find these bilious attacks would recur—and you might have quite a nasty illness!”

Henrietta was a brave woman, but no-one, however brave, likes the thought of prolonged and frequent bilious attacks.

At first Henrietta said she couldn’t leave Angela just when Angela needed her most; but, as Dr. Sandilands pointed out, a second invalid in the house would not be of much use to Angela. She could well afford a nurse, and she already had Marie Céleste. Henrietta then said that Angela must decide; but she was privately rather surprised by Angela’s decision. No-one could have expressed more sympathy, or more regret than Angela’s, over her friend’s departure; but she fully accepted the necessity. Dr. Sandilands was less surprised. He knew that no chronically delicate person cares to have a second invalid under the same roof. This dislike may take many obscure forms, including that of the first invalid’s clinging to the new invalid, and bringing upon herself a more serious type of illness; but helped by a commonsense medical adviser, one of the forms this situation takes may result in getting rid of the second invalid.

At last Henrietta let herself be persuaded to go to Palm Springs, accompanied by Beppina, and driven by Alfredo in her own extremely comfortable car.

“If you are the least bit worse,” Henrietta told Angela, “I shall come straight back!”

But strangely enough Angela did not become worse. In a week she was markedly better; in two, her temperature dropped; in three, she gave a party.

The servants, who had all relaxed during her illness, except for little trays carried upstairs, knew they could relax no more.

Henrietta decided that she would stay another month at Palm Springs, where she was enjoying herself very much, and doing rather more than usual with impunity. Beppina and Alfredo definitely preferred the hotel at Palm Springs to Angela’s household at Washington. Being Italian and devoted to their mistress, they found a good many ways of letting their preference leak into Henrietta’s mind. Henrietta never knew that she was influenced by her servants: she thought she had the best servants in the world, who carried out her every wish; and she was right; but Beppina and Alfredo took care that some of these wishes should be their own.

At the end of two months, just as Angela had written asking her to come back in time for the cherry blossoms—so tenderly offered to America by the Japanese at the time the Americans had least cause to like them—one of Henrietta’s married daughters asked her mother to go with her to Reno. Even after her divorce at Reno, Dorothea, beautiful, distracted, and much admired by a man who intended to be her second husband, clung to her mother.

Henrietta too felt that there oughtn’t to be any hurry about this second marriage, and took her daughter to San Francisco for the summer.

Six months separated the two households. Angela wrote again imploring Henrietta to return; and Henrietta—no longer able to delay Dorothea’s second marital experiment—warmly agreed. But before the date was fixed, Henrietta received a mysterious letter from Vivien.

The first page of the letter said how much she and Norman appreciated all Henrietta had done for Angela. Henrietta was not surprised at this appreciation. She had done a good deal for Angela one way or another; and she meant to do still more. The next page, however, was rather surprising, because it tried to explain why it would be best, in spite of what Henrietta had done, and was prepared to do, for Angela, for Henrietta not to return to Washington.

“I am almost afraid to explain what I have to say—because even you might not understand it—dear Henrietta, whom we both love so much! But Mother isn’t as strong as she was before you came—she’s been so wonderfully happy with you—but it makes her do too much. She has to live—or seems to have to live—more than her own life. She spends more of herself—it isn’t only what she has, it’s what she is! She just runs on and on until she drops—only she won’t drop! Norman and I have tried to show her she needn’t; in a sense it isn’t you at all, but it’s what—because you’re there—she suddenly sees she must do; and if you weren’t there, she wouldn’t! Angela wants you to return awfully; it’s Dr. Sandilands who says he thinks it would be bad for her. That’s the real reason—not your heart at all—that he wanted you to go away. She’ll be terribly upset not to have you come back. But she’ll be more upset, we think, without knowing why—if you do!

“Can you forgive me for writing this?—And not think I’m just a beast of a daughter-in-law who doesn’t see how lovely her mother-in-law is? Do please try to understand. It’s been very hard to explain—and all the harder that we’re terribly fond of you, and want you to come back for ourselves.”

Henrietta read this letter three times. The first time she was simply incredulous, and extremely angry with Vivien. The second time she was less angry, less incredulous, and just a little amused. The third time she was not angry at all; but she found that she had ceased to be amused: she was even crying a little. It was all so silly and so sad. For she and Angela had been quite extraordinarily happy in Washington together, with their long past joined on to their solid present, and their assured futures, entirely in their own extremely capable hands—except, of course, for the will of God.

Henrietta was very simple in her indefinite religion and extremely sincere about it; and if it was the will of God for her to part with Angela—as it seemed to be—she quickly decided that they must part without the slightest injury to their lifelong friendship.

She wrote an affectionate and reassuring letter to Vivien, without mentioning her mother-in-law at all, but explaining with sympathetic regret that the San Francisco doctor had confirmed Dr. Sandilands’ opinion. She’d taken a large flat and found a wonderful Chinese cook, and supposed she’d have to stay where she was.

When Angela was told of Henrietta’s decision, she was shaken—not angry, but deeply, deeply shaken. The whole household, and Norman’s too, was shaken by Angela’s grief. Dr. Sandilands was more than shaken; he was—and for no explicable reason—dismissed.

Angela wrote to Henrietta that she was heartbroken; but as summers in Washington were impossible, and she could easily let her sea-side cottage in Maine, she would now spend her summers with Henrietta instead. They would join their households for at least four months of the year in California. She would bring Marie Céleste, and her chauffeur with the car, and be glad to share the expense of the new Chinese cook.

Henrietta thought about this letter, a good deal longer than she had thought about Vivien’s; then she acted.

She wrote to Angela that it was a glorious plan and that they must certainly carry it out, when she got back from Europe. Unfortunately, her second daughter’s marriage now sounded unstable; after all that they had believed about the solidity of English husbands, Maude’s husband had turned out to be regrettably volatile. In spite of dear Mr. Chamberlain’s wisdom, too, the European war had begun—but Henrietta thought in a very quiet way, which needn’t interfere with her taking a return ticket on the Queen Mary.

Angela still felt more deeply grieved. She even remarked rather tartly that she thought Henrietta had been too supine about her daughters’ marriages. She had not arranged for the right sort of men to appear at the psychological moment; nor had she used pressure. Young girls always lost their heads without pressure.

In the spring of 1940 the European War became far more disturbing to everybody all round; but Henrietta had got back to California before the bombing became serious.

In June the date was fixed for Angela’s long visit; but Henrietta made no more plans to circumvent it. Somebody else sent Norman a telegram to stop Angela’s journey, since Henrietta had very simply and easily died, a week before Angela was expected.

Dr. Sandilands had been unconsciously correct in his diagnosis. Her daughter wrote that Henrietta had always known that she had a damaged heart, but it hadn’t prevented her from living exactly the kind of life that she wanted to live. She had only thought it much better not to mention it.

Angela never recovered from her grief at losing Henrietta; but she lived for the next ten years in rather better health than she had ever known.

Old Lady Cynthia Templeton hadn’t a great deal of money. She was the sister of an Earl, and her husband had been a famous general; but she possessed, besides her widow’s pension, and a small allowance paid to her from the family estates, a remarkably fine diadem of rubies presented to her husband by a grateful Maharajah for timely services. When she died her pension went back to the State; her allowance to the family; but she could do what she pleased with the rubies. Lady Cynthia had been a famous beauty in her day; and now she lived at Bournemouth, and went about in a bath-chair.

The worst of it was that although being a truthful person—she was perfectly willing to acknowledge the date of her birth—she had never ceased to feel young.

She felt a great deal younger, for instance, than her favourite son, Marmaduke, who was fifty-five, bald and stout; and although she still preferred Marmaduke to any of her other children, she owed him a grudge for encasing the slim, romantic boy she had once loved, in rolls of fat. Lady Cynthia sometimes felt nearly as young as her grandson Eustace, Marmaduke’s second son, who was twenty-two, slim and cheerfully reckless, and not likely to get any fatter.

Lady Cynthia lived in a goodish flat on the East cliff, overlooking the pale sea and a few timid, protected pines. She kept a first-rate cook, and a maid whom she had not liked for forty years.

“If I got a maid I did like,” Lady Cynthia often said, “she’d leave me in a fortnight to get married. You can go from bad to worse at my age, but seldom from good (if you have anything good) to better!”

This morning was a case in point; why did Marmaduke drag up the question of her rubies again?

On her lap lay Marmaduke’s weekly letter, for he was a faithful and devoted son, and had no idea whatever that his mother resented his physical appearance.

“Your grandson Eustace,” Marmaduke had written, “will probably turn up for luncheon. He wants to marry one of those painted tomboys, who think they’re going to be film stars. Please don’t leave him your rubies, because I expect that’s what he’s after. Francis, my eldest boy, is worth two of him.”

That might be, Lady Cynthia thought, but it all depended on what you meant by “worth”. Francis was one of those pushing, pleasant fellows who get on with everyone so long as they’re not crossed. Once cross him and he’d go soft, like the inferior type of hot-water bottle, in which you couldn’t see a hole, but before you knew where you were it had leaked all over you. Eustace, on the other hand, wouldn’t be any pleasanter or unpleasanter whether you agreed with him or not. He kept intact, even if his inside was boiling.

“All the same, I shan’t give Eustace my rubies yet,” Lady Cynthia told herself, “or even let him know he’s going to get them. He must wait till I’m dead and that’ll give him time to get over the girl, if she’s the kind that ought to be got over.”

Lady Cynthia ordered a really magnificent luncheon with champagne, if Eustace arrived at a reasonable hour, and with hock if he didn’t. She was not going to reward unpunctuality even in a favourite grandson.

“If I were to promise him the rubies now,” she told herself, “he might stop coming to see me—he’d hate feeling grateful, and he looks so absurdly like Adrian that it amuses me to have him in the room. It would be still more amusing if he knew that he was the grandson of the fastest devil in the Fleet, and not that pious old stick Mortimer they married me to, directly I got out of the schoolroom. But nobody living knows that, though I’ve no doubt my sour old Adams has her suspicions. But they can’t be more! I covered my tracks too well, and if she’d known anything definite, she’d have blackmailed me ages ago. In my time, if a woman of position got off the rails, she oiled them well first, and slipped back again without noise or nonsense!

“I consider I did a great deal for Adrian—more than I ever did for any other man, risking that weekend in Paris, and that night in June, when Mortimer was on manoeuvres! It’s true I wouldn’t go away with him, and give up my home and my nursery—I had borne Mortimer two sons, and a mother can’t be unfaithful to her children, but I did everything else; and how difficult it was to do it, nobody could dream nowadays—with all these motor-cars, and modern conveniences! He needn’t have shot himself because I told him I couldn’t go on with it, or fling my cap over the windmill and start afresh! Though I will say he managed it nicely—getting over a fence with a loaded rook rifle and leaving no message—obliging, tactful man Adrian—in spite of being such a devil, and dear Marmaduke exactly like him, though very dull and middle-aged now—as those obliging, tactful men get—if nothing else goes wrong with them. His boy Eustace is the very spit of Adrian as I first knew him—the sort you can trust as a friend for anything but safety—a merry eye and a straight tongue, and no doubt the morals of a monkey! I’m sorry to disappoint Marmaduke, but Francis is exactly like his mother—same long teeth and psalm-singing innards—and I certainly shan’t leave him my rubies.”

Having come to this decision, Lady Cynthia told Adams to draw her chair nearer the window and pull back the curtains, so that she could watch the faint sparkle of the summer sun upon the pale blue sea.

The sea was as blue as it was at all likely to get at Bournemouth, and the sun as sparkling; so that she soon spread the Times on her knees, and read the Daily Mail.

Eustace came a few seconds before Lady Cynthia had decided to countermand the champagne.

“You can’t say I scorched,” he explained to his grandmother, “but I wanted to get here in time, so I did an easy seventy, and never touched a thing!”

“I don’t know what policemen are for,” his grandmother said severely, “you ought to be hanged for driving at such a pace! Anything over thirty is sheer murder on these crowded roads—what about my bath-chair?”

“You oughtn’t to have a bath-chair,” Eustace said, gazing at her with his dancing eyes, and the grin of a fellow-buccaneer. “You know you like to put on pace as much as I do!”

“Liking is one thing,” his grandmother retorted; “murdering other people with what you like is quite another!” And then time melted away from her, and the sparkling blue eyes she looked into were—for an instant—Adrian’s.

Lady Cynthia had forgotten a good many things in her long life, but those eyes that looked as if the sun had leapt on a blue wave and broken into light, she had not forgotten.

Eustace said nothing about the motive of his visit during luncheon; but afterwards, when Adams wheeled his grandmother back into her place by the window, he began to fidget about the room as if he had something on his mind.

Lady Cynthia watched him with amusement. He had Adrian’s funny little way of tossing his head back restively, like a spirited pony; and Adrian’s thin hands, with long agile fingers. When he moved it was all of a piece, and lightly as an animal moves, not interrupted by self-consciousness.

His grandmother had never made these seasons of uncertainty easy for her lover, nor did she intend to make them easy for her grandson. Let him find his own way of asking favours he hadn’t the least right to expect.

She watched Eustace with the same tantalizing, ironic smile with which she used to watch her lover, trying to control what she knew was uncontrollable. Her lips were withered now, and the power she exerted over her grandson was quite a different power; but she was still exerting it and exerting it in much the same way.

“I wish I’d known grandpapa,” Eustace suddenly observed, standing beneath a formal portrait of General Sir Mortimer Templeton, with a fine row of medals across his chest, and the composed features of a man who has never come out into the open about any of his feelings. “He must have been no end of an old chap—though I must say he doesn’t look it—he’s so nipped up, if you know what I mean, but I suppose you didn’t win all those what-nots for nothing. I often ask father what he was really like!”

“Do you?” his grandmother asked a little drily. “What does your father tell you when you ask him?”

“He says,” Eustace replied, “that he’s damned if he knows. He always thought a lot more about you than his father! That’s rather odd, you know. I like my mother all right, but when it comes to thinking—well, I think a lot more about my old man, and what’s more I know a lot more about him—even without thinking; we’re run off the same mould, I suppose—and yet the odd thing is, we aren’t particularly like either you or grandpapa to look at!”

“Your mother,” his grandmother observed dispassionately, “is a Marriott. You certainly didn’t take after her side of the family. I suppose children sometimes hark back further still—or else develop on lines of their own. You’re certainly not a Templeton.”

“No—and Father isn’t either,” her grandson agreed, shooting a curious glance at her.

“Well, Marmaduke has changed a good deal,” Lady Cynthia said evasively. “As a young man he was extraordinarily different from what he is now. Sometimes I forget who he is when I look at him now! But I don’t forget who you are, Eustace.”

The tall, swift-moving young creature swung round with his dreadful physical ease, so that he could look down into her bright, expressionless eyes; but she knew that however strong and formidable he was, he would never find anything there that she did not intend him to find. Behind his young strength there lay only ardour and ignorance.

“Father likes Francis best,” Eustace said with blunt ferocity, “and I suppose you do too?”

“Your brother Francis,” said his grandmother, “is, I hear, universally popular, and with good reason. He never comes late to luncheon; he never spills cigarette ash on carpets; nor have I ever known him ask an awkward or impertinent question.”

“Still, I’m not so awfully sure you like him best,” Eustace murmured, his eyes still on her face. “It’s no use beating about the bush, is it, Grannie—— Which of us is to have your rubies?”

“I may give them in trust for a cats’ home,” his grandmother replied ruthlessly. “I’m not obliged to cast my jewels—pearls or rubies—before my grandsons! As far as that goes, why shouldn’t I leave them to your father himself?—he’s my own son, and a remarkably good one!”

“One of your sons,” Eustace corrected her, cocking a wicked eyebrow.

“One of my sons,” his grandmother repeated smoothly. “As the other two married heiresses and have only produced daughters, I shall leave them nothing. I don’t like modern girls. Tadpoles, that’s what they are. They may grow legs and croak by and by; but I don’t think much of their tails at present; nor any of their other self-exposures!”

“Oh, come, Grannie,” Eustace expostulated. “What’s the difference between girls now, and girls in your day? You seem to be able to swallow men all right, whatever generation we belong to!”

“Young men,” his grandmother told him, “are exactly the same as they always were. I find no difference in them whatever—except superficially. They wear softer collars, and no hats; and they say to us what they used only say to each other, but fundamentally they think, act and behave as young men always did. But girls are completely different—they’re not like any women I ever knew, and they’re certainly not like anything I once was myself. They are less skilled, for one thing! Oh, I know they have more activities—but I mean less skilled for life!”

“I’ve often wondered what you were like, Grannie,” Eustace murmured ingratiatingly. “You must have been—from all accounts—a perfect stunner!”

Behind the enigmatic brightness of the old lady’s eyes, she hid a heart that beat as rapidly as a young girl’s. She felt indeed, the same fluttered tenderness for her grandson that she had felt sixty years ago for Adrian. But though she felt this quivering gentleness, she would not show it; nor indeed had she ever shown it, at all convincingly, to her lover.

“I was like any other young woman of my time,” she said with her usual dry conciseness, “outwardly civil always; and obedient when I had to be; and that was a good deal oftener than happens to young people nowadays. I used what powers I had within the limitations of the world I lived in. There were a great many limitations, and it was necessary to use my powers extremely skilfully, unless I was to be deprived of them altogether. Your present-day girls have no such powers, since they have never needed to learn the skill that we possessed. Poor little rough-and-tumble things—they will not make much out of their lives, for skill in behaviour is just as necessary as it used to be, both for men and women!”

“I suppose you mean I haven’t any?” Eustace asked, flushing suddenly, for behind his cast-iron manner he was, as his grandmother very well knew, extremely sensitive to criticism. “I oughtn’t to have asked you about those rubies right out like that, ought I?”

His grandmother looked up at him and smiled, but she said nothing.

He stuck his hands into his pockets and swayed to and fro, until he made her stiff old bones ache to look at him.

“If you want to leave them to Francis,” he explained, “in a way I don’t care a damn, of course! But in another way I do, because I’ve always thought you rather liked me. But anyhow, I think you ought to have a dog! That’s one of the things I came here to-day about. I don’t know whether you realize it—but any burglar worth his salt could swarm up that pipe outside the window as easy as winking, and then what would you do about it?”

“Thank you,” said his grandmother, “for your kind suggestion, but I dislike creatures that make sudden noises, smell and have to be given exercise; and when I meet a burglar I shall probably know what steps to take, as I have known in other disagreeable circumstances.”

“Well, that’s that!” said Eustace with a long sharp sigh, and then he suddenly laughed. “I believe you hate men, the way you hate dogs!” he declared. “Was that the real difference between girls in your day and girls now? For girls do, you know, rather like us now!”

His grandmother reflected upon this question. She thought it rather intelligent. Had man ceased to be an enemy to woman?

“It may have been one of our differences,” she admitted. “Unattractive girls certainly feared men; but I do not think I feared them. I merely took care to know how to deal with them—but perhaps that is one of the lighter forms of hate! Still I think I may say that I loved your grandfather.”

“Oh well, you married him, of course!” Eustace agreed rather confusedly.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say “No—I loved him better than that: I took every risk for him—security; prosperity; honour—life itself—for Mortimer was a murderous old brute; and if he’d known I was unfaithful to him I believe he would have killed me. I did everything for Adrian except break up my home, but it wasn’t enough—I see that now. Short of giving everything is never enough!”

But she bit back her words. She hadn’t to justify herself at this time of day—and against this stripling—for having been a shade too respectable. Words were useless things. She could not change Eustace’s plans by explaining that his father was a bastard. Besides, it would be unladylike to startle your grandson with such a fact so late in the day, and not very fair to Marmaduke. Instead, Lady Cynthia gave her grandson her small, parched hand that looked like a claw, and had once been so beautiful; and she felt strangely touched when he bent his fair head suddenly over it, and kissed it. That was like Adrian too, so gentle in his ways, so straight and hard in his clear actions!

Eustace had the grace to go away too, without having asked her anything more about the rubies.

Lady Cynthia always went to bed at nine, after a light supper. She had a bell by her side that rang loudly into her maid’s room at the end of the passage, and that seemed to her protection enough. “If I’m too ill to ring the bell,” she told her children, “I shall be dying, and I certainly don’t wish Adams fussing about my death-bed; she’s quite ghoulish enough as it is!”

One night, a few months after Eustace’s visit, Lady Cynthia woke with a start, to see what appeared to be a glow-worm playing its uncertain light above the floor.

Lady Cynthia watched it with some interest. Glow-worms are uncommon at any time in Bournemouth; and she reminded herself that on a late Autumn night they would be very exceptional indeed. Therefore she turned on the lamp by her bedside, and saw, as she had expected to see, a burglar, and not a glow-worm.

The burglar was a weedy little man, but he looked quite large enough to frighten a frail old lady over eighty; nor did a dirty white mask make him look more ingratiating. He shuffled swiftly towards the bed on rubber-soled shoes and “sprang—at her throat” as a newspaper reporter would doubtless have described it. Lady Cynthia rang her alarm bell and sat bolt upright before he had time to reach her.

She had thought about burglars’ throats—perhaps more often than this particular burglar had thought about the throats of old ladies.

Lady Cynthia had run a hospital during the war, and she knew the exact spot where pressure on throats is most objectionable. She got hold of the burglar’s throat while he was still fumbling for hers; and started hooting.

An old woman seldom has breath to shriek, but she can hoot very terribly, with a noise that has the shrill and dire persistence of a railway whistle.

While Lady Cynthia hooted, she rammed her thumbs more and more surely into the burglar’s wind-pipe. The burglar was thirty-five, and active for his age; but he was terrified.

Lady Cynthia was eighty-three, and lived in a wheeled chair, but her mind was on other things besides self-preservation. She thought of Eustace and the rubies. She had always wanted Eustace to have those rubies. It was like giving something to Adrian, and it had occurred to her sometimes lately that she had not given Adrian quite enough.

The burglar could very soon have dispatched her if he had not lost his head; but Lady Cynthia went on pressing and hooting as if she was enjoying herself, and this was too much for the burglar. He gave up trying to reach her throat in a wild endeavour to get those hook-like claws out of his own.

At last, choked and half stupefied, he dragged himself clear, and staggered to the window, only to fall into the attentive arms of two policemen below.

“No, Adams—no doctor and no fuss!” Lady Cynthia ordered, when she had found her false teeth and got rid of the policeman. “Certainly you will not sleep on the couch in my room to-night. What do you think burglars are—cobras returning to avenge their lost mates? I am probably safer to-night than I have ever been before, or ever will be again. Please go to bed at once, and Cook too! Tell her I will have a boiled egg for breakfast as well as my usual toast. This violent exercise in the night has given me quite an appetite. No! there is no need whatever for you to send a telegram to any of my children. What they see in the newspapers to-morrow will do nicely; and cost me nothing.”

But after she had sent both servants away, Lady Cynthia did not go to sleep for a long time. She had very nearly been obliged to part with something that she had wanted to hold on to. This was not a thing that had often happened to her. Supposing, she thought, that the burglar had been a slightly stronger and more intelligent man—then Eustace would never have got those rubies! Nor would he ever have known that she wanted him to have them—for like many selfish and superstitious people, Lady Cynthia had a horror of making wills; and had put off any legal expression of her wishes after death, for an indefinite occasion. What was it that that funny boy Eustace had said—something surely that she’d heard before—in one of those intense, and acid-dropping moments of life—when words have the whole motive power of a heart behind them—and bite forever into the memory?

“I rather thought you liked me——” Those words were like the ones Adrian had uttered, in the more emotional tone of a less humble age, the last time Lady Cynthia had seen him, before he killed himself. “Cynthia—I thought you loved me!” Eustace and Adrian had meant the same thing—they thought she hadn’t given them what they had had a right to expect. If that burglar had got the rubies, Lady Cynthia told herself with the ruthlessness with which she would have told anyone else, it would have served her right. What Eustace did with the rubies was his own affair—if she cared for the boy, she must trust him. If she had cared for Adrian she would have trusted him, beyond the satisfying of her own instincts, into what he had explained to her was his vital need. He had wanted her life, and he had wanted to give her his. Well—she hadn’t given it to him.

The next morning Lady Cynthia sent the rubies to her grandson Eustace.

“He might have to wait for them for a long time,” she told herself apologetically, for in the evening she half repented of her softness. “I seem to be tougher than I had supposed, but how do I know that that painted tomboy of a girl he thinks himself in love with, won’t look very nice in them?”

Colin Ramsey gazed sardonically at his three best friends, who were trying to make themselves inconspicuously reassuring in his consulting room.

They had to tell him that his wife was dying. Well, he knew Sylvia was dying; and they knew he knew it. That was why he had sent for them. He wasn’t going to take the responsibility of having Sylvia die behind their backs. You have to live with yourself after, as well as before, you take a decision.

Lord Henderson, who was the Head of their profession, looked sour with depression. He did not like defeat and it was staring him in the face. His mouth was set in a grim line, and his marked eyebrows pushed up—almost into his thick grizzled hair. He couldn’t forget that Colin had saved his wife’s life ten years ago; and he wanted desperately to do him the same service. But his was a different kind of wife and you couldn’t tell what was going on behind the hard bright sparkle of Colin’s eyes. They were like an Irish terrier’s, full of reckless pugnacity and cynical amusement. There were only two things that Henderson knew for certain about his friend Colin. He knew that Colin was extraordinarily intelligent and that he was generous. Colin had never grudged Henderson any of his honours. Indeed he believed that Henderson had earned them. Was he not a decent, cool-headed, skilled physician? Perhaps there were others—Colin himself for instance—who were even more primed with intelligence; but there is always the element of luck in public celebrity. The right man must also be on the right spot at the right time. Henderson tried to remind himself of his own importance in the face of failure. The other fellows were more involved in Sylvia’s case than he was. He had only been called in after they had given up hope. As an act of courtesy he could let them give their opinions first.

Sir Brian Bursely, brisk and tense as a whippet, was the surgeon who had operated on Sylvia twelve years ago; and made her an invalid for life. Not that he put it to himself like that of course. Surgeons forget their failures. He was a brilliant surgeon; but even brilliant surgeons run into snags, and do not always run out of them. It was partly her own fault. She had let her trouble go on too long without advice; but she was a brave woman and a very charming one. Sir Brian had a warm spot in his heart for Sylvia. She had never reproached him for the partial failure of her operation. Nor had Colin. Sir Brian had an even warmer spot in his heart for Colin. He recognized that Colin had the eye, mind and emergency wits of a first-rate surgeon; but unfortunately he hadn’t had the stamina. That was the worst of T.B. If Sylvia hadn’t had money, Colin wouldn’t have been alive now—let alone capable of running a large, and highly remunerative, West End practice. She had picked him up at Davos, and married him out of hand.

Sir Brian invited Colin to take a share in all his most tricky operations, and he spent an evening with them both at least once every six months. He was a bachelor; and he thought their married life was ideal.

Leslie Despard, staring at his feet with his head bent towards his knees, was the one of Colin’s colleagues who knew Sylvia best. He was her regular doctor, a good, dependable fellow, not at the top of his profession but not far off it. He was Colin’s best friend and a great admirer and friend of Sylvia’s, or he wouldn’t have been her doctor. Perhaps, Colin sometimes thought, Leslie was more than a friend of Sylvia’s—but not too much more. Sylvia was nobody’s lover. Did Leslie know, Colin asked himself, how little of a wife Sylvia had ever been?

“We don’t have to tell you,” Leslie began lamely, raising his head and looking unhappily at the other two; “you can see for yourself, Colin, that there isn’t much more we can do.”

“I’m afraid her case is inoperable,” Sir Brian put in, quickly rallying to the charge. “I would have liked to try again if your wife were less critically ill or under the climacteric; but as it is—it would be madness. I’m sure you agree with me? I hate to say it but there’s nothing more I can suggest. Perhaps Henderson here still has something up his sleeve.” He nearly said ‘some palliative’, for he despised physicians, but there’s no use jabbing at a man on top of the tree even if you hate his guts.

“I didn’t think there was a chance,” Colin agreed equably, “but I had to make sure.” His conscience was clear now. He had longed for freedom; but he had not willed it; he had even taken steps to ensure the opposite of what he longed for.

“I’m very glad indeed you sent for me,” Sir Brian said, with relieved cordiality. “I’ll have to be off now. Don’t tell her I’m not coming again! Better let her think there’s something more I might do—if she really needed it! She’s such an intelligent woman—don’t want to let her down more than I can help. I needn’t say what I feel for you!” But he said it, while Colin took him to the door. Perhaps Sir Brian said a little more than he felt, because he had been let off cheaply by both of them. Colin shook his hand warmly without answering him. There might be, he thought, quite half a dozen men who would miss those clever little dinners Sylvia gave; and that immaculately dressed hostess with sympathetic eyes, and an aureole of glittering silver hair. Sylvia was both flattering and intelligent to every man she met. She seldom had women at her dinners—because they see through another woman’s flattery, and don’t like her intelligence. Sylvia was apt to be irritable and malicious with other women—but to men she was smooth as cream. “Very like cream,” Colin said to himself as he closed the door on his brisk colleague. She made you sick if you had too much of her—sicker and sicker as the years passed. A month after their honeymoon Colin had realized that the woman who had enthralled him was a cold-hearted sham. They were both Catholics so there wasn’t much he could do about it. Sylvia couldn’t admit a flaw or laugh at a failure—in herself. She had to be perfect and anyone who did not take her at her own valuation became automatically her enemy. Colin had been her bitterest enemy for fifteen years. She had had no place to hide in from his biting Irish wit, his raw pugnacity—and worst of all, his cold integrity. When she lied, he had found her out; after he found her out he showed her up. Yet Colin never forgot that Sylvia had once saved him. She had met him when she was a widow over forty and he was twenty-five. Colin knew that he had got to die or get well as soon as possible; and he had not had the money to do either within the time allotted to him.

If Sylvia had not appeared when she did—and enthralled him (he wouldn’t have touched her or her money if she hadn’t enthralled him) he would have been down and out. Still, he had given her her quid pro quo. What Sylvia had wanted in return for her favours was a young, devoted husband, attractive into the bargain, for she disliked men who were weak or plain, and a man capable of looking after her if she needed it.

Colin had only found out how much Sylvia needed it after they were married, nor did he find it out immediately then, since Sylvia would not have him as her doctor. She said it wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She had kept Colin guessing for the next three years what was the matter with her; but he was a good guesser and at the end of the time he knew.

Leslie Despard had always held his tongue about his patient, even to her husband; but, while just as devoted to Sylvia as she expected Colin to be, Leslie was not her husband. Still, even Leslie was not quite the relief he might have been to Sylvia, because he was fond of Colin and wouldn’t hear a word said against him.

Sylvia had not really wanted to be operated on; but Colin had insisted. If the operation was a success she would be well; and even after he had found out what she was like, Colin had wanted Sylvia to get well. Colin thought that Sylvia wanted to get well too; but that was another of his mistakes. By then Sylvia had made up her mind to be an invalid for life—a suffering, heroic invalid. An invalid’s was the rôle which enabled Sylvia to be as bad a wife as she liked, with a good conscience; but she had to be more heroic than she meant to be, because after the operation her chronic discomfort was greater than anything she had planned.

Sylvia was intrinsically dishonest and venomously selfish; but she was really ill. That, Colin told himself, walking across the striped black and white marble hall, and thinking how money improved the look of things, must be conceded to Sylvia. No one could possibly have wanted to suffer as much as Sylvia had had to suffer. She had chosen the hard way.

When Colin re-entered his consulting room, Lord Henderson was looking at his favourite drawing—a Whistler—a girl model leaning against a table in the rest hour. “If ever you want to part with that——!” Henderson said appreciatively. Colin’s eyes danced derisively. “Not likely,” he said. “I like youth without its clothes on. I’ve never had any youth—my own or anybody else’s.” Henderson looked lightly shocked, for he remembered suddenly that Sylvia was considerably older than her husband, and that they had had no children. Henderson himself had several. “I shall have to leave you with Despard now,” he said in his resonant, incisive voice. “Talk over everything with him. I’ve made what small suggestions I can. I suppose we all agree as to the diagnosis—acute gastritis from chronic poisoning of the intestines. It was bound to come sooner or later—it is astonishing how long—you and Despard between you—have staved it off. Your wife too—she has always shown great courage; but there is a moment when even courage—hers or your own—can’t keep a person alive any longer. I haven’t forgotten what you did for my Susan—believe me I would give a fortune to be able to save Sylvia!” “And I,” Colin thought, “would give a fortune to lose her. Only now I don’t need to—I can get out! I can go to Betty and give her the life I hadn’t dared believe we should either of us ever have! I can have a home and children—and be a whole man at last.” “Thanks!” Colin said briefly to Lord Henderson, but he spoke less curtly than he had spoken to Sir Brian, who had after all muffed that earlier operation, and the grasp of his hand was even warmer. “Don’t blame yourself Henderson. Your wife was an easier case. She was much younger; and pneumonia is a pretty straightforward illness.” “She was blue from the waist up when you took her over,” Henderson reminded him. “It was next door to a miracle that you pulled her through.”

Colin frowned irritably as he watched his friend getting into his silver-plated shining car and being driven off by a semi-liveried chauffeur.

Colin drove himself, he was an expert driver and enjoyed it; still there were times when he was too tired to enjoy it. He didn’t want to be reminded either of how he’d brought Susan round; that was his business but it wasn’t his business what Leslie—plus Henderson’s brains—tried out on Sylvia now.

Leslie came across the room to meet him. He’d been up half the night with Sylvia, and Colin had taken the other half; but there wouldn’t be much more of it for either of them. Colin thought there might be twenty-four hours; and Leslie thought there might be another forty-eight. Colin poured out a stiff whisky and soda for his friend and a much weaker one for himself. He couldn’t afford to drink strong stimulants—he needed them too much. “What were Henderson’s suggestions?” he asked drily. “Well—to tell you the truth,” Leslie admitted, “he hadn’t any. He just told me to make it as easy for her as possible. I meant to do that anyway. I knew you’d wish it—it’s just a question of shortening the time to spare her.” “Of course I wish it—if it’s hopeless!” Colin said with his back turned to his friend. “I suppose you’re damned sure it is hopeless—both you and Henderson—Brian doesn’t count. You know she’s fought through a good many of these attacks before?”

“But not with a pulse like she has now,” Leslie objected. “I can’t stop the vomiting. There’s no more fight in her Colin! She’s just slipping away!” “Damned unpleasant form of slipping too!” Colin said turning round suddenly, his eyes blazing truculently. “If that’s all you two could think up—better leave her to me!” Leslie forced himself to answer this nervous outburst without hostility. “My dear fellow,” he said, “of course I’ll leave her to you if you wish it—she’s your wife.” “And you know,” Colin thought to himself, “you must know—how little of a wife!” But he didn’t say it. He said instead, quite gently, “Of course not—what responsibility there still is—we’ll share.” He glanced about the room, feeling the freedom of his life expand, and seeing Betty’s beautiful young face. He had plenty to offer her. Twenty years’ virility—and he could count on his spirits—the good spirits he had kept in cold storage all these years. Betty and he might fight sometimes, but they wouldn’t have a dull moment. These modern girls knew how to love. They weren’t afraid of it—they enjoyed it. They took what they’d asked for.

All his starved, impoverished senses—without hope or laughter—fought in him for release.

The door was open at last. He had only to pass through it into Paradise. “I must go up to her,” he said abruptly. “She’s all there still—she’ll be waiting to know what we think of her chances! It won’t take me long to give her the usual dope. Lord—what a mercy a lie is—in the right place!” “Let me do all that for you,” Leslie pleaded in a shaking voice; “you’re too unhappy! I don’t talk as much as you do; I’m not excited—better let me take a shot at it. We don’t want her to be frightened at the last!”

Colin laughed. “My dear chap,” he said, “you’d give the show away! I don’t want to be rude—but look at your face in the glass! You’re a lot more unhappy than I am! After all—you forget—I’m her husband!” Leslie frowned angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t say bitter things like that now,” he said, “as if you didn’t—as if it wasn’t—Sylvia’s always been devoted to you!”

“Devotion,” Colin said slowly, “funny word that is! I’ve always wondered what it really meant. Dogs devoted to you—servants devoted to you—patients devoted to you—wives devoted to you! I can just believe in the dogs—though I think they’re balmy. After all, they’re prepared to prove what they wag about—the others seldom are! Do you remember Oscar Wilde’s epigram, ‘What do I mean by a devoted friend? Why a friend who’s devoted to me of course.’ However, I know how you feel. It’s easier to be nice about people when they’re dead than when they’re alive—and you think I ought to begin now—and be nice about Sylvia? But you forget I’ve never learned to say ‘die’! It isn’t in my vocabulary. No patient of mine is going to die—till they are actually dead. Sit here till I come back and don’t be alarmed. She’ll not learn from me anything to discourage her! You can go up afterwards and see for yourself.” Leslie nodded. He was done in, and the whisky letting down his tension relaxed him beyond the power to insist.

Colin took the stairs like a boy. “In a month,” he said to himself, “I’ll join Betty somewhere in the Swiss Alps—marriage can wait, but we needn’t. Thank God she’s got no personal bosh about her!” With a little shiver of disgust he entered the light, lonely room which had never been his as well as Sylvia’s. She had been more intimate—all these years—with her maid than with him.

Sylvia was lying very low on the soft pillows: but before she had seen the doctors she had had her face made up; no doubt under her orders. She looked nearly as well as she usually looked, except for that grey, unconquerable shadow spreading from her eyes to her lips, the shadow that comes just before the end. She knew Colin’s quick decisive steps and opened her eyes. For a moment there was a lull in her horrifying symptoms.

He knelt beside the bed, so that she could see, and take in, what he had to say with less effort. The eyes that met his were panic-stricken. “Good news, on the whole,” he told her casually. “We don’t think this pain will last much longer—no need for any operation either. We think you’re past the peak of this attack. Just take it easy.” Her eyes, accusatory and mistrustful, rested on his face, but the panic faded out of them. In her curious, self-preservative way, Sylvia believed in her husband.

“Colin—I’m not better!” she murmured. “Do they—do you—think I can be—this time?”

“Why not?” Colin demanded pugnaciously. “You always do get over these attacks, don’t you? I know this is a particularly nasty one. Still you’ll be feeling better soon! You’ve got the nerve to get through something tougher than this! Women are tough, aren’t they, nurse?” “Put her under—and keep her under!” he said to himself. “Why not? Leslie will see to it. Why should she be tortured? If she were my patient I’d give her nothing—no stimulants—no sedatives—sips of water every now and then—and one good morphia injection every night to quiet her nerves. Let her heart fight it out, with none of the jerking to and fro between stimulants and sedatives and no nourishment to push it about with gases. But thank God—she’s not my patient!”

The pain caught her again. “Help me! Help me!” Sylvia cried out. “Leslie’ll help you,” Colin said rising to his feet and beckoning to the nurse to come forward, before the vomiting shook her. “He’ll come straight up to you now! I’ll send him.” “No!” Sylvia cried. “Oh no, Colin—you!” He stood for a moment with his back to her and his hand on the door handle. It was as if his body was being dragged back by ropes to her bedside.

Beyond the door was freedom, safety, happiness. To turn back was to plunge into the old tasteless, remorseless slavery. Hadn’t he had enough of it? Surely any debt he had ever owed her was paid by now?

He turned back and went up to the bed, bending to let her tortured eyes fix themselves upon his fighting face. She read in it her safety. But it was not Sylvia Colin had turned back to save—it was life itself.

“I’ll stay now, nurse,” he said; “you go down and tell Dr. Despard I’ve taken over the case.”

When Anna Peck came up from the deep drug of sleep, common to the old, she felt as if she had passed through drowning and no longer had any use for straws or struggles. There she simply was, gently pushed around by an element she need no longer fight.

She knew that she was still alive, and actually awake, in spite of the fact that to find herself in Lord Despensier’s old Manor house, and to be told that it was to be her home for the rest of her life, was far more like a dream than reality.

Anna Peck had once, more than fifty years ago, worked there, in the humblest of capacities as a ’tweeny maid as it used to be called, doing all the roughest of their work for the much grander servants above her, being cheeked by everybody and never being able to cheek anyone back, not even the Odd man, who was a great deal older than she was, and nearly worn out at forty. Yet she had a great deal in common with the Odd man, for there was hardly anything he couldn’t do for the highly prized superior servants, with little thanks and no reward; while Anna did nearly as much for the house and parlour maids with even less thanks and no reward; so that she and the Odd man were completely at one in their cheerless anonymity—like the prisoners in a concentration camp.

Yet now, Anna was actually sleeping in the oak-panelled dining room, with two other old women, where she had once made—for the highest of the land, as she used to tell herself romantically—a glorious early morning fire.

The wood in those days was prime, the chimney wide and well cleaned, and once Anna had laid the logs and paper, so that there was room enough in between for the draught to drive through, she could safely place those big diamond-shining lumps of coal—Derby coal they called it—on her fragile edifice, scratch a solid Bryant & May’s match across the sole of her foot, a match that gave her plenty of time to touch off paper and sticks while never singeing her finger tips, and then sitting back on her heels she could watch, fascinated, the single shaft of scarlet shoot up the chimney.

“It’s a pity They can’t see it,” she would sometimes say to herself, “while it’s all of a piece.” Then she would throw back the heavy shutters, opening the windows and letting in the crisp frost from the silvery lawn.

The lawn was still there, below the terrace, stretching away, green and velvety, till the well-set trees swallowed it.

In Anna’s day—for somehow seventeen was her day more than seventy-six—there were richer flower beds. It seemed that in late September dahlias, early chrysanthemums, michaelmas daisies and, obediently neat, purple and pink asters knew their business better. They bloomed with an air of not having to count their pennies and even letting their pounds look after themselves. But of course They had nine gardeners then, working all the time, not two job gardeners coming in late and going early, a little too young to know what they were up to, or too old to do what they did know.

The dining room was the same as the lawn; it was both like, and completely unlike, the old reality. How could Anna have imagined long ago three cheap iron wash stands with enamel basins confronting three single soldier-like beds, on which lay Anna, a ’tweeny maid, Fanny Price, who had never even been in a great House in any capacity, and, worst of all, Gladys Hoskins, a factory girl all her life, and if not a communist, one of those who haven’t a good word to say for anyone who was anything but a communist.

By-and-by Nurse would bring Anna her breakfast in bed, for Anna had been very ill lately, and one of the things that the Institution provided was a nurse, who actually looked after people who had never been looked after before,—and if they were like Anna could hardly get used to the feeling.

For sixty years out of seventy-six Anna had had to do all the looking after there was, for everybody; and on the whole, except when her first husband turned bad and beat her every Saturday night, Anna had liked looking after people.

In the hall, just outside the dining room door, still hung her Ladyship’s portrait—the one of her when she was first married and was pretending for some reason or other not to be grand. She was sitting on a garden seat, a ribboned hat on her lap and a white summer dress shining round her pink and white beauty like a cloud; she was gazing wistfully into the great green park, across the terrace, as if she foresaw some of the things that were going to crash down upon her home and take her family out into the small, tough, and for Lady Susan, empty world. But the crash had not come in her long, golden day. She had kept all her grandeur—for what it was worth—until she died.

Lady Susan had lived grand and died grand, with nothing to be wistful about, Anna thought a little resentfully; for Lady Susan had never once spoken to her ’tweeny maid during the ten years Anna had lived under her roof. Perhaps she had never even seen her; so that the portrait and its memory wasn’t one of those that Anna took a special pride in. It was Miss Sybil whom Anna, so passionately, so curiously, and so proudly remembered with love and longing every day of her life.

Miss Sybil had been only seven years old when Anna first came to the Manor, so there hadn’t been more than ten years between them. She was the youngest of the Despensier family, a child born when Lady Susan thought there shouldn’t have been any more children, particularly not girls; and a new nursery had to be started up specially for her. Miss Sybil was never fond of her nursery; she was a tomboy, and wild; she ran like light across the lawn and hid in the tops of trees. Miss Sybil’s eyes were a sharp, bright blue, and her hair an uncurled mop the colour of buttercups. Her legs were long and thin, and Anna thought far too much of them showed. She was always in the stables, and every horse was her friend, and acted towards her as if her tender age gave her special privileges. Even the most uncertain horses never kicked when Miss Sybil ran under their legs, nor bit the fine, tiny hand held flat with an apple or carrot on it, under a fastidious nose.

There was nothing but horses on this Island then, and the best—a whole stable full of them—belonged to Lord Despensier.

Anna’s first husband was one of the stable grooms, and she thought at the time a wonderfully nice one. On her Sunday afternoon out, they would walk to the cliff’s edge, and watch the great waves break and roar in and out of the stubborn red rocks, or fumble in ravelled foam, too far for the sound to reach any onlooker, round the forlorn lighthouses that were cut off from the main land half the winter long. There were six lighthouses, on or just off the Island, and if you knew the cliffs well enough, and the light was clear, you might see all six at one time.

When Miss Sybil wasn’t under the horses’ legs or in the tops of trees, she was climbing cliffs and rocks. She sailed her own boat and nearly drowned herself times out of number. She was a dare-devil in the sea or out of it; and even when her thick buttercup hair was wound round her neat small head in coils, and her skirts were dropped to her feet, you couldn’t quite tell what she’d been up to. She and her Ladyship had the most terrible rows; but they spoke in such quiet voices that not the most eagerly eavesdropping of the parlourmaids ever caught a word of it—they only knew that the air had turned to ice, and the eyes of Lady Susan looked like a winter sea.

“They may say what they like, but Miss Sybil is as much a beauty as any of them,” Mrs. Maples, the housekeeper, had announced after one of those silent snowstorms; “not even her Ladyship herself can match her, and if she finds fault with Miss Sybil—there’s faults Miss Sybil can throw back at her Ladyship which should shut her Ladyship’s mouth if anything could. Without even mentioning what they are—for that’s the way great ladies do things; it comes out of their eyes more than off their tongues!”

Beauty or no beauty, faults or no faults, Miss Sybil was the only daughter of the Despensiers who never married. She’d gone to England, like the rest of them, but being so much the youngest she’d come much earlier into the war-torn, new world.

Anna saw a vision of a young girl laughing, on the front seat of a four-in-hand, driving away from the great shallow steps in a blaze of light. Ladies had sloping shoulders in those days, long narrow waists, and skirts down to their feet. Miss Sybil’s skin was fine as a baby’s, and the loveliest sea-shell pink; and her eyes sparkled as if diamonds had got into them. There wasn’t one of Horrocks’ prize sweet peas as trim and fine as Lady Sybil was, and the other young ladies—all five of them—were pretty too, though far less lively. Gentlemen used to snatch off their satin slippers at the great dances, and filling them with champagne, jump on the table to drink their healths. It didn’t matter spoiling satin slippers or drinking champagne by the bottle then, for they had enough of everything, and time enough to enjoy all they had. Work, what Anna called work, never came near them, not the back-breaking, knee-aching work that kept you in bread and margarine and tea—and if you had a lot of children or a bad husband, that was about all you could afford to keep you going. But now, where were They—her People, as Anna still called them—while she waited in their old dining room as idly as they had once waited for breakfast to be brought to them?

If she hadn’t married Jim, at the end of her ten years she might have been head housemaid before she left.

She never saw any of the Family again except Miss Sybil—that once; but when she married they gave her ten pounds, her linen, and a whole set of china, for far more meals than she was likely to have—what they called a combined dinner, tea and breakfast set, as if meals came regular like manna from Heaven, to anyone who wanted them. Anna always cut every bit about Them out of the papers, whenever They were mentioned, and when their photographs got into magazines she felt far prouder than if they had been her own. Their illnesses, Their parties, Their marriages, were Anna’s News, though probably not one of them remembered her name except Miss Sybil.

Miss Sybil turned up, the time Jim had nearly killed Anna, and her baby. She’d taken them straight off the Island herself in her own boat, to a rather tamer, smaller Island on the other side of the Casquets, where she found Anna a job with friends of hers. Miss Sybil had sold a great emerald ring she always wore, and put the money in the bank in Anna’s name, before she left her. It was two hundred pounds, and it saw Anna through all her emergencies till her boy Alfred died at ten years old from diphtheria, and money no longer mattered.

Anna hadn’t seen Miss Sybil for forty years, nor written; and yet Miss Sybil had given her a Founder’s nomination so that after Anna’s terrible operation, when there was so much took away that there was hardly enough left for Anna to go on scrubbing, the Despensiers’ old family lawyer put his finger on Anna, even under a different name and half-starving on the other side of the Island; for Anna’s second husband had been dead by then—and no great loss either, a widower, not cruel like Jim had been, teetotal but mean, and left all he could away from Anna to his step-daughter in England, whom Anna had never seen and didn’t want to see; but Mr. Dogart had picked Anna up, like a winkle on a pin, and simply told her that she was to be one of the first twelve old ladies to live in the Manor House and be taken proper care of till she died.

Well, Anna had had a year of it and she wasn’t one to grumble. The two old women with whom she shared the dining room might have been worse. She didn’t hold with Fanny Price, her coarse talk and her dirty ways, nor with Gladys and her politics. Gladys was what people now called a Leftist—when Anna was young they used to be called dirty radicals, though Anna had to admit that most of them were fairly clean even then.

Gladys, though far less technically dirty than Fanny, had ways Anna liked even less. She seemed to like a man called Stalin better than the Royal Family, though he wasn’t even an Englishman. Gladys Hoskins was a bitter old woman. Life hadn’t agreed with her, as it had with Fanny and Anna, in spite of their handicaps.

Gladys had married young, and her children were so superior, they wouldn’t hardly speak to her. Her married daughter spoke just like the Ladies on the Radio, ever so nicely, so that if you didn’t know—as Anna did—how real ladies talked, you would have thought she was real. Fanny had never married. Gladys always wanted to live her own life, and in the end she had felt lonely. She’d never cooked a meal on anything except a gas ring, and although she wasn’t a drunkard, or they wouldn’t of course have accepted her at the Manor House, drink was what she wanted when she could get it.

Nurse brought her breakfast in to Anna on a nice tray: cornflakes, a poached egg, tea and toast.

“Now you eat every bit of it,” she said in kind, unthinking cheerfulness, “and then if you like you can get up: but you needn’t make your bed unless you want to make it, and please no housework of any kind at present; sitting in the sun is what you need for a bit. You’re not one of the lazy ones, and pneumonia is still quite an illness.”

Anna thanked her, and was pleased to hear her illness given a name. So that was what it had been—pneumonia! Jim had died of pneumonia plus delirium tremens, though that had been the larger part of it. The doctor had said Jim hadn’t the ghost of a chance from the first. But the Jim that died then was only one Jim—and the Jim that Anna now preferred to forget. There had been another Jim, a figure bathed in glory that sat with her long ago on the edge of cliffs, drinking in the wiry sweetness of heather and watching the silver lightings of seagulls’ wings. Jim’s arm round her waist had felt the greatest security the world could ever hold.

Who would have thought that arm could be raised against her, Saturday night after Saturday night, for ten years? She’d stood it ten years, and might have stood it longer but for little Alfie. He was the only one of her children who had lived beyond babyhood, but those first five years with a drunken father hadn’t been the right thing for a child.

Still, she was glad now that when she heard Jim was dying she had gone back to him and nursed him till he died. Nothing else in her long life seemed to have mattered much—perhaps it never did after forty. She’d enjoyed her life, but it had dulled down, and now there was this—this strange dream, and she couldn’t help thinking more of the lovely breakfast nurse had brought her than of anything in between.

Gladys and Fanny wouldn’t be back to make their beds and dust for an hour or two. They took their time over the kitchen breakfast, and had to help with the washing up afterwards.

Anna too wasn’t in any hurry. She ate everything on her tray, making a mental note that the cornflakes weren’t so crisp as they should have been—kept in a carton, probably, not a tin. Then she got up, fetching hot water from the bathroom tap, and washing herself a little uncomfortably because it didn’t seem right to wash in Their dining room. She kept remembering how beautiful the silver dishes had looked over the little waiting flames of spirit lamps, at least three in a row on the side-board; and boiled eggs never more than a day old under their woollen caps, not to mention the vast pink ham behind them; and hanging just above the side-board that lovely picture of dead birds and spaniels. Prayers before breakfast, coming in grand like a procession, caps and aprons shining, not a hair out of place; Mrs. Maples first, then the butler, Lady Susan’s maid just behind him, with eyes black as sloes that ran round in her head and seemed to see everything—even what wasn’t there. The cook came after her, and then his Lordship’s valet. There was an argument about that, because the valet thought he ought to come in front of Cook, and Cook wouldn’t. But his Lordship said—valets could be made and cooks couldn’t, they were just born, and he wasn’t going to part with Cook—unless she stopped cooking in that particular born way—whatever that meant. There were the three footmen, the parlour maid and the head housemaid; after her came the two under housemaids; and last of all—the Odd man and Anna. But the Odd man and Anna didn’t always appear, because there might be things that had to be done while Prayers were going on, and they were the people who counted least in processions; and most in getting things done.

There were fourteen of them in the Servants’ Hall altogether, and not more than enough really for all there was to do and the way it had to be done, everything sparkling and on the dotted line, as they say nowadays—never a minute late. The Family were considerate, but they had their wishes, quite apart from the guests who had to be specially catered for—but in the end usually paid for it by extensive tips. There were ten spare rooms with dressing rooms, and one or two even had sitting rooms attached to them. It seemed indecent to hang your wash-rag to-day where one of the grandest guests might have been kneeling, even perhaps where his Lordship himself had knelt, saying his prayers fifty years ago.

The sun poured in just the same, and there was still the scent of wet bracken coming in at the windows.

Anna decided to make her bed after all, for she liked her own way of making it best, although she never quite agreed with Fanny that it was far better to fry your own kipper on a gas ring and eat it hot, than having it provided for you. Anna had for so long had to bear the carrying out of other people’s wishes and meeting emergencies that had nothing really to do with her, that she quite liked the change of being provided for now, and doing nothing about it, not even if the house burned down: but it wouldn’t, not that pink and grey granite.

How quiet it used to be, in the large shining room full of sunshine, the gleam on silver and polished wood, before the prayer bell rang, and the butler came to take a last look over, and see if Anna had forgotten any of his duties.

The old ladies didn’t have prayers. On Sundays there was a church only five minutes’ walk from the gates, and a clergyman visited them regularly. Anna liked his visits. She liked the silly things he said. He was very learned and found it difficult to talk to old women, who had all their lives learned quite different things. The old women didn’t know anything about the third century or who Tertullian was; but of all the old women he liked best to talk to Anna, because she smiled and listened, and quite evidently enjoyed hearing the sound of his voice. He wouldn’t come to-day; but the ’Bus people would.

They came twice a week during the season, crowds and crowds of them. They weren’t allowed to see all over the house, nor bother the old women.

But they were shown the great hall, the drawing room, and the china room, and one of the old ladies’ bedrooms—generally Anna’s oak-panelled one, on the ground floor, just to check up on the way the Institution was handled.

Most of the old women loved having the ’Bus people pour in, though some of them grumbled. Still, even the grumblers didn’t let anything in the visitors escape them. There wasn’t one they didn’t sum up; and they spent the rest of the day discussing and disposing of their visitors.

But Anna didn’t like so many people coming up at you, goggling like goldfish in a bowl—as if you might be a crumb, and then, finding you weren’t, swishing off again, disappointed. She was always glad when the last ’bus drove off and silence settled down again, or nearly silence.

To-day Nurse said to Anna, “Why not take a nice stroll in the garden?” So Anna took it, but it was painful to her to see the Park all messed up with tents, and boy scouts, and nothing secluded or guarded any more.

She could remember, when you went into the old Park—for the servants were allowed to go there on their afternoons off—there was very seldom anyone from the great House, only big golden pheasants shooting off like rockets, and a quiet game-keeper or two, taking a look round with a watchful dog at his heels. How lovely it had been under the great cared-for trees, how sweet the bracken smelt, and how the birds sang!

When Anna came in, she found a good lunch ready, meat and vegs., and a jam roll. For once nobody grumbled. They all rested between two and three o’clock, before tidying up for the ’Bus people.

Anna and Fanny took their sewing into the drawing room early, because they wanted to find a corner where they wouldn’t be over-run.

They heard the churning engine far away, and the brief blast at the gates; and there they were, the usual stream, led by a boisterous ’bus driver primed with vulgar patter, a little smear of fact heated up with a lot of nonsense. Anna never listened to him; and some of the ’bus people didn’t either if they could help it. There was a honeymoon couple trying to pretend that anything mattered besides their being together, and not succeeding very well; but Anna liked to see the sparkle on the wave reaching up to the peak of happiness, and knowing nothing at all about the trough into which it must fall on the other side. There were three stout ladies who looked critically at each other for taking up so much room; a quiet man with spectacles, who might be a murderer for anything you knew to the contrary, but quite probably wasn’t; two youths who giggled at their secret wit; and a man who looked like a schoolmaster, and who obviously preferred his own questions to the ’bus man’s answers; and half a dozen younger women who, Anna thought, cared for nothing at all, except their own hair and finger nails. Last of all came an old woman, one of the active kind, not very well dressed, who might know a lot about gardening.

She seemed more interested in the House than the others; for, paying no attention to the ’bus man, she moved into every nook and corner, and stood by each window in turn, almost as if she had expected to find it there.

She moved very quietly, but so decisively that Anna began to watch her. She put down her sewing. Surely the eyes of this old lady—for Anna thought she really was a lady—were most startlingly blue, and that starved profile looked better made than most people’s features, as if an artist had had something to do with this old lady’s bones. Her hair was iron grey and not particularly neat. She could have done with a new perm, if indeed she had ever had an old one. Anna began to feel a little breathless. It was the way the old lady carried her head, as if lions—if there had been any lions—wouldn’t have mattered to her.

It couldn’t be—but was it—after forty years—Miss Sybil? The keen blue eyes met Anna’s, lingered, rested on her with sudden recognition, and then the unforgettable voice said:

“Well Anna—it is you, isn’t it?—only a little thinner?”

Anna tottered to her feet, her knees wobbled under her. It was forty years since she’d curtsied, but she curtsied now, though she knew that Gladys would laugh at her for doing it.

“Miss Sybil!” she whispered.

Somehow or other, with that unexpected touch often to be found in those who have no time for unreal emotions, but know exactly how to deal with real ones, Fanny melted away, and left the chair by Anna’s empty for Miss Sybil. Miss Sybil sat down on it, saying with a brief, ironic smile:

“I’m not supposed to sit down here, am I? I belong to the ’bus and the ’bus man told us not to sit down! But I will for a moment whatever the ’bus man does to me. You’ve been ill, Anna, I hear. What a pity! I hope they look after you properly. Do you like living here again? I’ve often wondered, but I didn’t know quite what else to suggest. I do my own work now, so I couldn’t ask you to come to me. You don’t have as much to do here, I hope, as you used to?”

For a moment Anna did not know what to say; her lips trembled so that she could not speak; at last she murmured:

“I can’t somehow feel it’s right, Miss Sybil—if you know what I mean—but I’m just as grateful. I hadn’t anywhere else to go. I ought to have written to you when little Alfie died; we did manage wonderful for years on that ring—that was before I came back to the Island and married Mr. Peck;—but I didn’t know where you were, and it seemed so long.”

“It was long,” Miss Sybil said gently, “but I heard about little Alfie, and I was told of Jim’s death too, and how you came back and nursed him. I wonder why you did, Anna, when he’d been such a brute to you and little Alfie? Don’t tell me if you’d rather not, but I’ve often wondered.”

“There isn’t anything I’d rather not tell you, Miss Sybil,” Anna said, her heart beating in her throat like a bird that tries to get out of a closed room. “But you see, it’s funny how in my mind he wasn’t that Jim any more—not the one that was so cruel. That night he half-murdered us and you took us away—it was as if he’d got killed himself in my mind. I didn’t think about him again, only when little Alfie was dead, and I heard Jim was dying, I thought I might as well go back and nurse him. He’d been my husband, after all—the man of my choice—no matter what he’d done with himself since. So I went back and he was quite a stranger to me—but I was never sorry.”

“Yes, I see,” Miss Sybil said. “It could have been easier, if you thought of it like that; and the next man—Mr. Peck—was that marriage a success? I always hoped it would be.”

“Well, it was—and it wasn’t,” Anna told her, the bird in her throat easing down a bit. “It just didn’t seem to make any real difference. I had a home of my own—and I liked that; and I helped him with his shop. I did my duty by him; and I was surprised when he left all he had—even the vegetables that was on order but paid for by the month—to that daughter of his in England; but then I suppose he felt she had belonged to him, and in a sense I hadn’t. I was over forty when I married him, and I never had any more children. He didn’t want them, and no more did I by that time. He knew I was a good worker and could get plenty of jobs. I had a room to myself in Mrs. Pretty’s house, if you remember it, next the churchyard, with a tidy bit of garden round it. Mrs. Pretty had been Katy Flint when she was a child, and we’d gone to school together, so we always had plenty to talk about right to the end, when she died sudden of an auntirism, I think it’s called, and her daughter turned me out. If you hadn’t thought of this Home, Miss Sybil, I don’t know quite what would have happened to me, I don’t really! If it wouldn’t be making too bold, Miss Sybil, what’s been happening to you—all these years?”

“Oh, my life,” Miss Sybil said, looking about her with an amused, detached air, as if her life was hardly more important than the great life-sized porcelain peacocks which still stood, one on each side of the Adam mantelpiece; “my life,” Miss Sybil said smilingly, “was very dull compared to yours, Anna! For a time we had a house in London; all my sisters married off—rather well too, considering; and then a flat; and finally, when everyone was dead or married, I took a cottage in the country and grew flowers and vegetables for a hotel. I had a nice Alsatian dog, and one of my own cats, to live with me, and did quite well in a small way; and then there was the war, of course, and I quite enjoyed being a Wren in Scotland, with a lot going on, one way and another. And since then—I’ve rather lain low. I’ve got a niece, too, whom I’m quite fond of. I should like to go abroad every year for a holiday, but I can’t quite run to it. So here I am instead—looking you up for a change!”

A very loud, rude voice broke into their corner.

“Here, Lady, you aren’t supposed to stop and talk to the inmates. The ’bus is due to be off, and it would have served you right if I’d taken off without you!”

“So it would!” Miss Sybil said, in that good-natured and yet haughty voice of hers, that suddenly made the ’bus man feel a little foolish. “You’re quite right, my good man. Go and look after your ’bus and I’ll be along directly.”

Anna’s breath failed her again, and the tears came into her eyes. She didn’t like the ’bus man to speak to Miss Sybil like that under her own roof, and as if she hadn’t a right to it. Miss Sybil didn’t seem to mind. She smiled down at Anna, and took her hands in both of hers.

“Now, you look after yourself Anna,” she said, “and don’t be afraid of anything, because you’ll be all right here for the rest of your life. I’ll see to that. Besides, I’m quite sure you know by now—as well as I do—that there isn’t anything to be afraid of!”

And then Miss Sybil was gone. That old swift, competent stride of hers took her through the hall, and down the shallow steps, and into the ’bus, just as the ’bus man had started it, meaning to go off without her from spite; but Miss Sybil swung herself on to the moving ’bus and took the last seat there was, as if it didn’t matter about anybody’s temper.

“And to her it doesn’t,” Anna said to herself proudly, “not the ’bus driver, nor Hitler himself, nor not being married, and never having had a child that died but still belonged to you, dead or alive.”

The big House didn’t really matter to Miss Sybil, nor all the splendid things—perhaps not even the memories of the grandeur, the shining hours and the great parties; but Miss Sybil remembered the names of the horses—Anna felt sure—and she had remembered Anna.

After all, Anna thought to herself, and said a little later to Gladys and Fanny over the tea-table, “A real lady, like my Miss Sybil, is just the same whatever happens. Nor I don’t mind so much now our all sleeping in that big room where she used to eat her breakfast.”

I had spent five and a half years in the R.A.F., starting at nineteen. I was quite an old man at twenty-four. First I was a Spitfire pilot, and by luck or cunning survived the Battle of Britain; and after the Americans came in, and the invasion scare was over, I became a Wing Commander in Bomber Command. My youngest brother, David, was killed early on. I had won a whole row of medals and letters after my name; but they felt like a sort of impertinence after I’d lost David. Not that medals and a lot of the alphabet would have been of any use to David if he’d won them; actually he hadn’t the time; but I might have felt less bogus.

Danger was now right off my map. Yet all the symptoms of fear plus what you might call guilt remained. I don’t know whether I was brave or not in Operations; but I was a coward all right now—a banged door set me shivering.

All that I’d looked forward to with rapture when the war was over tasted as flat as wine out of a corked bottle. I couldn’t get the feel of fear out of my mind. My homecoming was ghastly. You read a lot of stuff about unhappy homes. I suppose no-one writes about the happy ones. Ours had happened to be one of them. I thought a lot of my old man; and as for my mother—I didn’t think about her so much as find her turning up in all I did, or wanted to do. It wasn’t that she was possessive: she simply understood all that one didn’t want to tell her, as well as what one did—and never made a fuss about it. Then there were my three sisters, all good sports; and David.

Naturally when I got back they kept pretending how happy they were, and acted as if they’d forgotten David; and yet the whole house was empty because of him. We kept listening for that extra voice that wasn’t there.

My mother’s heart was broken. I am her eldest, and have always been her most intimate child, just as David was my father’s; yet my mother now behaved as if it were the other way round. I believe this is a trick good mothers have when they lose a less loved son and keep the other: but it’s rather hard on the kept one.

As for my father, it didn’t bear thinking of what David’s death had done to him. He had shrunk to half his size and twice his age; and I knew whenever he looked at me, he couldn’t help wanting me to be David.

I was thankful when my leave was up and I was given a cushy job—a sort of plum for a good boy.

I was being ‘lent’ to the U.S.A. for a get-together we were having on guided missiles. I was to sail from Sweden on a luxury liner, one of the first used for civilian traffic since the war was over.

Before I started I went to see a psychiatrist to find out why I was always frightened, and why the point had gone out of everything.

He was a kind old boy. He patted me on the back, and told me not to drink myself into pink elephants, nor get tied up with a girl or a cause, till I’d stopped being frightened.

“Never make plans while you’re unhappy,” he said. “They always turn out wrong. You see, you’re angry with your unhappiness. Perhaps, too, you were envious of your brother David. That guilt feeling might be envy as well as grief! Oh!—I know you and your brother were devoted to each other; but devotion can have jealousy in it as well as admiration. You love what you can’t be—and you don’t like to think you can’t! Nothing to be done about it—just time—some other tie perhaps closer than a brother—and then you will, as we say, ‘get over it’. As for that fear of yours—that’s simpler still. For five and a half years you’ve not only been afraid too often—but you’ve never given way to fear. That’s how heroes are made.

“In a fog, you airmen fly on your instruments, don’t you? Yet all the time you know there’s Fate—chance—life (whatever you like to call it)—liable to butt in at any moment and make haywire of science. I should remember, if I were you, that there’s always this Force acting for you or against you all the time. But to know when to let it—or when to fight it—that’s man’s predicament! It’s what he grows on—and I wouldn’t take it away from you if I could!”

There was a lot to chew on in what the old boy said—and nothing like a sea voyage for chewing.

Gottenburg was a shadow of a town wrapped in icy darkness. It was mid-winter, and snowing, when I went on board; and I walked right into a sort of garden with palms in it; and the whole place was summer warm. That ship was so spotless it sparkled; and crammed with unbelievable luxuries. Very few of the passengers, except Swedes, had ever seen such food for five years.

I went straight to the Purser, and asked him to get me out of an invitation to sit at the captain’s table. I knew there would be a V.I.P. there, and a lot of talk about the war. The Purser was a good sort of character—he had been torpedoed twice, and knew the wear and tear of those wolf-packed seas. He said he’d square the captain and put me at a Swedish table. There’d be a Dutch couple sitting there as well, the quiet kind; and a Norwegian girl who had fought in the Resistance and got quite a record—Glamour Puss to look at, but tied up to Axel Sorenson, the Swedish millionaire, who sat at the head of our table. Then there was a German Jewish couple, friends of Sorenson’s; the man had been in Dachau two and a half years, while the Nazis tortured his fortune out of him. He’d got his wife out safely first—or Sorenson had—so she’d merely had both her parents murdered in a gas chamber. The Purser didn’t think any of them would want to talk much about the war: they’d had enough of it.

The ship sailed at tea-time; and the first miracle took place.

The tea-table ran straight across the dining salon, and it was covered with every conceivable sweetmeat and savoury that the mind of man has ever invented. Lovely, light, luscious cakes, all the colours of the rainbow. The cream inside them was basic cream; the butter and eggs they were made with came direct from cows and hens. You were given a silver slice and a plate, and let loose. You can’t imagine what all these things tasted like after five and a half years of wolfing sordid, faked food, just to keep alive.

Mind you, in the R.A.F. we’d had enough food; but not even a trained cook can make good food out of bad fats; and of course trained cooks never came near us.

I saw one woman turn away from that loaded table and cry; and it wasn’t greed either. She was crying because of what her children had missed for five years out of their childhood.

In my cabin, I had some good types. Two Presbyterian pastors, who, beyond saying their prayers in season and out of season, were fine shipmates, cleaned up after themselves and took turns in helping me, and another chap, with the one Drunk we had to put to bed nightly. It was a rough sea all the way over—and what Drunks can’t do to themselves in a state room, when everything movable is on the move and four other chaps have to sleep with them, no acrobat could rival.

The other character sat at my table. He was the one the Purser had told me had been in Dachau. His name was Felix Hofmeyer. I thought he was about fifty-eight, but it turned out to be twenty-eight. You could say anything to him in any language. He was one of those sardonic, deeply civilized, wildly intelligent Jews that you used to find in Vienna, before the Germans and the Russians turned the whole city into a trembling cemetery.

I never once heard Felix laugh; but he smiled quite a lot, and was extraordinarily nice to his peevish little wife, who sat between Sorenson and me at table. She was rather exotic looking—skin rose and gold, with velvety brown eyes, and eyelashes longer than they stick on at Hollywood, but perfectly natural. As for her figure, she hadn’t left out any of the curves the Medici Venus shows off; and I thought, though a trifle too full, her shape would last for a year or two. She never looked at her husband except to ask for something; and was wholly absorbed in trying to attract the attention of the huge Swede Sorenson who sat beside her. Sorenson looked like a Viking who had been idle for too long a time on shore. Otherwise I rather liked his merry blue eyes and hearty ways. They put everybody at their ease; and he was extraordinarily generous, ordering the best French wines and insisting on our sharing them with him. He told us he had just recovered from an attack of cirrhosis of the liver which was the last, his doctor told him, he would ever recover from—so he’d better mind his steps. Wine wouldn’t do him any harm, but brandy had been his mainstay.

He made a great joke of his drinking, and a very handsome girl, who I suspected was Miss Norwegian Resistance, joked with him. There was no doubt whatever about her looks; she wasn’t just pretty like Frau Hofmeyer, she was a Gorgeous. Her eyes were a deep battle-ship blue, rather like that stuff they call lapis lazuli. She had a thin, beautifully moulded face—nose, chin, brows—as if an artist had been working, not from them, but on them. Every time she moved, she moved right, as if she didn’t know any other way of moving. Yet she was a restless girl with something harsh about her, in spite of her beauty. She suggested to Sorenson, in German, that since neither she, nor the Dutch couple, nor I, could speak Swedish—while all the Swedes talked German as their second language—we had better stick to it. However, the Dutch lady, who sat on one side of me, said that if she heard another word of German spoken she would have to get up and leave the table.

“We will speak English,” she said. “The Hofmeyers speak it; naturally, educated Swedes all speak it; my husband and I also. Mrs. Marsdon, our Norwegian friend, has just married an American; since she is to live in America when she joins her husband, it will be very good for her to follow our example. I think that she will find that she already knows enough to speak it.”

There was a queer silence when the Dutch lady stopped speaking. The Norwegian girl looked across the table at me, with what seemed an unnecessary amount of defiance.

“I have been married a week,” she told us, “then my husband, he is ordered to sail for America. It is six months later before the authorities allow me to join him. No-one learns much English in a week!”

“You might well have spent the six months mastering English,” the Dutch lady suggested, “since you are to speak it for the rest of your life.”

The girl turned those giglamps of hers on Sorenson. “I did not talk much with my husband,” she said harshly. “I danced; and when I danced with Americans—or Swedes—or even some English naval men—then I spoke German—and why not speak German? In Europe it is still a language; it has not gone out with the Nazis! These Germans—sixty-five million Germans—they still exist!”

The Dutch lady was old, white-haired and very dignified. She had a quiet and rather pleasant voice.

“If,” she said slowly and with great distinctness, “I had not been told that you belonged to the Norwegian Resistance, I should spit in your face.”

This startled me rather, but it didn’t seem to startle the rest of them; they looked rather approving. The Norwegian girl shrugged her shoulders and laughed. Fortunately Sorenson’s wine turned up just then, and we were all treated to it. This mellowed the atmosphere.

The Swedes, besides Sorenson himself, were all beautifully turned out, in full evening dress, and were wonderfully polite and kind.

I couldn’t have found nicer people as table companions; and I felt rather ashamed of myself, because they were intelligent as well as kind, and yet I found I wasn’t interested in their conversation. They never—the whole way over—spoke of the war, and no one again mentioned Germans—they might have dropped out of the map of Europe. Yet I couldn’t help feeling there was something timid and a trifle dull about their conversation. They weren’t obviously avoiding anything, but there was a feeling that some element in themselves was perhaps missing. I couldn’t see why this should be so, because war is insensate anyway, and a mockery of all that is human in us; so that to talk with neutral people, who had for six years been living in a decent, kindly, civilized state ought to have been a Godsend. Look what they might have created while we were destroying everything we could pitch a bomb at! And yet, what had they created?

I went to bed early that first night and found Hofmeyer alone in our state room—so I asked him my question.

“But it is quite natural,” he replied, “for neutrals to be dull! What were they doing those six long years while you were fighting Nazis? My dear fellow! they were trembling in their shoes, and making money while they trembled. Why should you expect to find their conversation interesting? Once I made a very great fortune myself, but now I have ceased to think that money—even making it—is in itself entertaining if you have chosen safety while those you love are in danger. Why should you feel creative? Personally I do not appreciate danger, but it is a thing you have to share, if others are involved in it. Still, the part played by small and harmless countries, who were neutral, must not be underestimated. How glad we were of them when we were being hunted by the Nazis, and how much more glad we might all have been—had the Nazis themselves been hunted a little earlier by more powerful countries who were our friends!”

Then the pastors came in and began saying their prayers, and we had to stop talking.

It was a long time before I got to sleep, thinking of the war, and what had come out of it—and what had been lost in it. I was haunted too, by that great wreck of a Viking Sorenson—and that strange Norwegian girl, with her incredible blue eyes and odd desire to speak the tongue of her enemies.

It was a pretty rough voyage, and the Dutch couple, the Norwegian girl, Sorenson, Hofmeyer and myself were the only people who survived at our table. We got quite matey, talking about America mostly, and how life over there—with those types—different in a way from any of us—was going to strike us, when we got there.

Sorenson knew America well—and I’d had my training in the deep South. We told Mrs. Marsdon a lot about it—how quick and kind Americans were—and how with all their intelligence and quickness they could be natural and direct as children—and full of laughter. It was a comfortable country to live in—we told her—once you had got used to the pace, and had accepted the kindness. She listened avidly, her great eyes moving from one to the other of us, as if she couldn’t take in enough.

“But it is the conventions,” she said at last. “It is their conventions that make me afraid. Because even in my own country I have never practised conventions. You tell me how these people live—but why should I live like them? What kind of a home can I make—with strangers?”

“Nonsense,” Sorenson told her kindly. “Your own home is a very good one. You can make one like it! Besides, you can ski, swim, and dance like an angel. What more do you want to know? Such things are international!”

“And I can drink like a fish,” she reminded him. “Don’t leave that out, Axel! Also I can milk reindeer—but I don’t know what good those great skills will do me!”

Then she suddenly turned on me. “You——!” she said, “what can you do—to amuse these people—who want to laugh—and with whom we are going to live? Can you also entertain them?”

I don’t know what put it into my head, but there was hardly anyone else in the dining salon that wild night—only the stewards and ourselves—so I started singing, just for fun, we always thought it funny during the war, “Lilli Marlene” with our own words to it—not, of course, the most improper verses, but some that were a bit rough on the Germans. When I stopped, Ingrid Marsdon leaned across the table and hissed at me like a fury.

“Do you know why you British are hated, as no one else is hated—all over the world? By Europeans, by Americans, by Asians and Africans—all of us hate you? It’s because you haven’t the slightest right to despise other people—and yet you do! What right have you to take the German army’s song—to mock them with it? It’s your contempt that will be the end of you—and I hope I live to see it!”

I don’t know whether I was the more astonished at her wonderful flow of English—a language she had said she didn’t know—or at her rage; but there was nothing to be done about either.

It was quite true that I did despise her. I despised her for being an unfaithful bride, and I despised her still more for being a damned selfish lover. She knew drinking was death to Axel Sorenson—and yet she spurred him on to do it. We all knew she went with him to his state room after dinner, and drank Pernod.

All I said in answer to her diatribe was—“People can earn contempt.”

But it wasn’t all the Dutch lady had to say. Mevreow De la Haye was by now a staunch friend of mine, and from the start she’d never cottoned to Mrs. Marsdon. She leaned forward now and said the one word “Rotterdam”! It went off like a cannon ball into the large, empty, swinging room. Then she said it again more quietly, but even more terrifyingly.

“That is what we Dutch think of when we hear the word ‘German’ mentioned! A neutral country—a Sunday morning—twenty-five thousand dead! And when you have things to say against the English that are not nice—do not say them in our presence! For them—we starved; for them—we were gladly bombed; and with them, at Arnhem, and elsewhere—we died! We have not forgotten that through the English—Liberty and Peace came back to Holland—nor who took Peace and Liberty away from us; and I tell you this, Ingrid Marsdon, we shall never forget either our friends or our enemies!”

It was quite an oration, and I thought it would finish the business. But Ingrid Marsdon must have been fighting drunk by now, for she suddenly started up afresh and told us a rather incoherent and pointless story about a girl she knew—a Norwegian—who had chummed up with Nazis during the Occupation, and why shouldn’t she? She’d been treated grandly by them—she’d found them all they ought to be and more—generous—chivalrous—good comrades. Why speak as if the best people in Europe had suddenly become the worst?—just because they had the misfortune to have Hitler for a Leader! Besides, the war was over now—Hitler was presumably dead—why not be sensible and settle down together as friends?

Poor old Sorenson got as white as his table napkin, and kept signalling her to stop. We all knew that Norway wasn’t a country where nice girls chummed up with Nazis during the war—and we couldn’t help guessing that this friend of Ingrid’s might have been herself.

“People,” Mevreow de la Haye said in a voice cold with menace, “working in the Norwegian Resistance did not usually like Germans very much. If such a one existed he went by the name of spy—and when it was discovered that he existed, you would know, Mevreow, what happened to him? He was blotted out. Such friendships as you describe were nothing but betrayals—those who made them were never innocent! If they did not betray their own countrymen, they betrayed Jews! You think a people who murdered six million Jews are civilized?”

I was glad little Mrs. Hofmeyer was too sea-sick to be there; but Hofmeyer still sat beside me. I turned towards him impulsively, but it was as if he had left his clothes on the chair, and was no longer in the room. There was no intelligence at all in his intelligent face.

Sorenson said urgently, “Ingrid, you’ve had one over the eight. That story of yours is all nonsense! You never had any such friend! Please go to your state room at once and lie down. The rest of us will forget all about the rubbish you have been talking to-night and only remember your record.”

It was painful to look at them. Their eyes met and fought: they were so much in love, and so bitterly hurt with each other. They were a splendid-looking couple. The girl wanted him to admire her—and God knows he wanted to—but it just wouldn’t work. I suppose on the whole she wanted to lose him even less than he wanted to lose her—for suddenly she gave in. She got up, swaying a little—but incredibly little, with such a sea on—and with perfect balance she made her way to the door. With that sea on it was a masterpiece of physical agility.

Sorenson sighed heavily; then he pulled himself together, and said in his beautiful, careful English, “I ask you most earnestly to forget all Mrs. Marsdon has said to-night. It is against what we know to be true of her. She has lived under a terrible strain for many years. Now this hasty marriage with a man of another race—almost a stranger to her—the new life ahead, in an unknown country—it has all upset her judgment. I take the blame on myself, for it was with me she drank before dinner. I gave her a cocktail too many on an empty stomach. It is not impossible, is it, for shipmates to forget unconsidered words? We at this table have become friends. Let us remain so until this voyage is over!”

We were all very sorry for him. Hofmeyer got up and melted away while I was trying to answer for the rest of us.

Later on I found Hofmeyer leaning over the rails—and watching the long uneven lines of giant rollers streaming in, a deep oily black, with blown white fringes.

“I thought I’d just come along,” I said a little awkwardly, “and look you up. I didn’t want to stay down there any longer—either with Sorenson or the Dutch people—and certainly not with both of them together. Do you believe—it was another girl—in Mrs. Marsdon’s story?”

“Oh no,” Hofmeyer said quietly. “How could I? Besides, I always knew Mrs. Marsdon had been a spy. We Jews smell these things. Her father was a fine patriot, like most Norwegians, but her mother had been a German—there was that excuse for her. Mrs. Marsdon made an ideal German agent: even the Resistance did not find her out; but in the end she was suspected—that is why she married the American. It would not have been safe for her to remain in Norway.”

“Sorenson can’t know,” I objected. “He couldn’t be in love with her if he’d guessed. Why! you and your wife are his best friends!”

Hofmeyer patiently corrected me. “But he is a neutral. A neutral does not look at things as a man looks at them who fights for his country—or has had to flee for his life, because he is not even allowed to fight for it! Many Jews loved Germany—I loved it—it was, so I thought, my country. I was to have died at Dachau—and Sorenson saw that I didn’t. He saved my wife also from ever having to go to camp. I stayed on to look after my shipping interests for the sake of Germany—that was how I got caught. So you see, I know how hard it is for a neutral—and how much harder for a good German—not to be a Nazi! Even in your great freedom-loving country, were there no Nazis? Are there not Nazis still? Beware that they do not take the helm, and run your country on the rocks as Hitler did Germany!”

I knew what he meant. It was not that any of us were pro-Hitler—it was our top-dog attitude—it was what the girl had meant when she said we were hated because we despised others.

“That poor girl,” he went on after a pause, “she is very frightened. I am always afraid she may do something silly—or worse! Sorenson is very much in love with her; but he falls out of love quite easily as well as into it; and besides he has a good wife, to whom in the long run he will return. Like many drunks, he has an absurd fear that one day he may by accident—although he is so rich—find himself with not enough money to have a jag. So he carries about with him a huge sum in dollars.

“This he has promised—at different times—to Mrs. Marsdon, and to myself. One moment the money is to start me on my own in business, so that my wife and I can keep a separate establishment and not be forced to live with relations, whom my wife hates. The next moment, he promises the same sum to Ingrid, so that she may feel independent—immediately—of this American stranger, whom she has married. To-night she risked losing that money. He does not like to be reminded of what she did in the war.

“Now let us go down and see what has happened to Sorenson. He won’t know what to do with the girl—or without her!”

He sighed again very heavily. He must have wanted that money pretty badly for himself; but he loved his friend more than the money.

The sea had risen a lot in the last few hours. It was a dirty night—with lumps of dark water lunging up against the ship’s sides. The crew were putting a life line across the deck. The sea swallowed our tracks almost before we had made them. I thought I had never seen so short a wake before—a mere strip of lather—blown off into the dark.

Sorenson had the bridal suite, but even Sorenson on so crowded a ship had to share it with a couple of Swedish diplomats. They were tactful men, however, and never went to bed till after midnight, because they knew that the girl was there with Sorenson.

We knocked at the door, but no one answered. It was unlocked, so after knocking once more we walked in. The girl had got Sorenson by the shoulders and was shaking him. He was a huge fellow, and when he was fit must have been pretty strong; but now he dangled under her hands like a rag doll.

There was an empty Pernod bottle on the table, and I suppose he’d been drinking again after the heavy dinner, and the row. Anyhow he was dead, and we saw him slip face downwards through her arms onto the table. When she saw that he was dead—while she was still shaking him—she started screaming. I slapped her face, first one side and then the other—and the noise stopped like a tap turned off. She slumped into a chair, and stared at Sorenson. I think she couldn’t believe that they couldn’t go on quarrelling—where they’d left off.

Like most people who trust to the use of force—she was wholly at a loss when it didn’t work. The pity of it was that she could have got what she wanted without it; and only without it. The wallet with the money was in his pocket, and now we were there to see that she didn’t steal it.

Hofmeyer stooped over his dead friend, put his hand in his pocket, drew out the note case, and counted the money. There were $12,000 in it. He left $2,000 inside; and put the wallet back again. He gave the girl the other ten.

“You wanted that money,” he said quietly, “and now you have got it. His wife won’t need it.”

I had a feeling as if I were suddenly set free. All my fears left me, and I knew that I would never have them in the same way again. It was like a surgical operation. What had released me was Hofmeyer’s sense of values. He wanted the money all right but it was no real defence to him. He was defended by his sense of what was right.

Although we were being knocked about violently, the ship had suddenly gone quiet. I guessed why: the engines had been stopped so as not to send her under. It was as if the noises of the sea and the cries of the wind attacking the battered ship were going on in another dimension.

“Better get the Captain—and don’t tell anyone else,” Hofmeyer said to me.

I managed somehow to get to the bridge; I found myself crawling up a wall one moment, and shot down a precipice the next.

“I can’t go off the bridge,” the Captain said when I’d told him. “You bring the other two up to my deck cabin. When you’re assembled, I’ll join you. Send the doctor first to Sorenson’s state room—he’ll know what to do.”

When we got to the Captain’s cabin we stood in a row holding on to a table which was fixed to the floor. So was the rest of the furniture; nothing was flying about or flapping in that beautifully neat small room. The Captain stood opposite us. His eyes were slate grey, and hadn’t any eyelashes. They were set shallow on either side of a big, long nose; and they looked colder than polar ice. He had been a friend of Sorenson’s.

The Captain didn’t ask Ingrid to sit down, but after staring at us collectively, he turned his eyes full on her.

“I’d like your story first of what happened in Sorenson’s state room to-night,” he told her. “These gentlemen can tell me theirs later.”

It was an awkward moment for Ingrid. She was cold sober by now, and had had time to make up before she left Sorenson’s cabin. She must have felt like a Delilah who has the whole outfit of goods on her—including the scissors—and then finds Samson’s hair won’t cut.

At last she said defiantly, “Axel Sorenson was my lover—you all know that! It is true we had quarrelled at dinner—about a nothing—about how little I think of Englishmen, if you want to know! I left the table—but I went to his state room and waited for him. I was not too angry to make it up. He came in—and we made it up. He ordered Pernod. I am not his nurse—I drank it with him. I put my hands on his shoulders—I was about to kiss him—then these men came in. I felt him falling through my hands. They must have seen him fall. That is all I have to tell you!”

It was curiously nearer the facts than I had expected. Still, she had left out the truth: she wasn’t going to kiss him—she was going to kill him. She had to have the money, and we knew by the look on her face that he had refused to give it to her. She was, I believe, sincerely in love with him. Perhaps, now she had the money safely tucked away in her brassière, it was the way she thought it had happened, as she told it. Crooked thoughts follow crooked acts very closely.

“Was that the impression you got?” the Captain asked, turning to me.

“We saw him fall,” I admitted. “The girl had her hands on his shoulders.”

I couldn’t say less than that, and I didn’t want to say more for her. I felt my gorge rise as I looked at her.

“You’d been drinking with him,” the Captain said to the girl. “The doctor reported it to me—after he had told you that drinking brandy would be fatal to Sorenson. There is no doubt that you killed him by drinking with him. You have said that he was your lover, though you are the bride of a young American officer who is expecting you when we land in two days’ time. Do you feel no responsibility for betraying one man and killing another?”

She glanced at him, with the fury of a cornered cat.

“I didn’t kill him!” she spat back. “I wanted him alive! This man I married is new to me—his country is new to me! Sorenson was not new to me—he was my friend—my lover! Do you not see that of course I wanted him in America as well as on this ship? It is not my fault that he dies from a disease he caused himself!” She looked wildly from one to the other of us and began to sob.

The Captain turned his back on her.

“Now, gentlemen, what’s to be done?” he asked us. “There’s got to be some story for that American husband—or else it’ll be all over the ship—and not the best side uppermost! It happens that only you two, the doctor and myself know that Mrs. Marsdon was in Sorenson’s state room when he died. What am I to say to this week-old husband? Shall I let him—and everyone else—think that Sorenson was a drunk, who had to take what was coming to him? I don’t suppose we’re any of us sentimentalists. We needn’t consider Mrs. Marsdon at all. She has shown no consideration for others: if I hesitate to tell her husband where she was found—and what part she played in Sorenson’s death—it will not be for her sake that I hesitate!”

I knew what the Captain felt. He didn’t want to let her off, any more than I did. I knew that she’d gone out of her way to kill a man who was in love with her, and that she was going to pick his pocket when he was dead. Why should she be handed over, untarnished, to a live man in order to pick his?

“Wing Commander Palethorpe,” the Captain barked at me, “do you want this woman to take her punishment or do you prefer to let her off?”

She met my eyes—and she knew I wanted to punish her; but then I met Hofmeyer’s, and before I could speak he had spoken.

“Sorenson was her friend,” he said gently. “He was also my friend, Captain Johnston. I think he would prefer to see his wishes followed now that he is dead. Commander, I ask you to let her go, without punishment.”

There was a long pause before I found myself saying, “All right—I’ll say nothing!”

The Captain looked both disappointed and relieved—relieved that he had not got to disillusion a young American bridegroom; and disappointed to let the girl get off scot free. He opened the door for her, and said, “Be careful crossing the deck! Stick to the life lines. There is a heavy sea on.”

The engines were going again, dead slow, but they were moving. The squall had passed, and the rain was beating down the sea.

We watched her take the stairs from the Captain’s bridge to the boat deck—like a swallow. She did not touch the life line. The wind was still screaming like a lunatic going off the deep end, but there was much less motion. She seemed quite safe alone; and none of us wanted to be with her.

I heard the Captain shouting down to warn her, before I saw it coming.

It was one of those fluke waves, that the sea throws up after a storm. It rose up out of the welter of the sea higher and higher, hanging above the ship like a wall; then it spilt itself over the side—still green and unbroken—moving loiteringly across the deck. Nothing could have stopped it—but we thought she could escape it.

She was close to the companion-way—when she sensed something was wrong, and turned to see what it was. She moved quickly then—the searchlight showed the panic in her face—but she moved the wrong way—straight into the path of the wave.

The wave took her—over the ship’s rail into the darkness, beyond sight or sound, out of reach of man’s help or his condemnation.

The odd part of it was that none of us had ever seen her move in a wrong way before.

Love at first sight is as real as the lover. No-one but a mountebank need laugh at it.

Marlowe, who presumably knew a thing or two about love, makes a fairly big claim for it when he writes:

And I think he was justified. Marlowe didn’t, of course, say that such love is always permanent; or that it isn’t often preposterous; but if you’ve once had it, and then had to put up with the other kind (brought about reasonably by proximity, suitability and all the other gadgets of what we call civilized life), you will appreciate the difference. If not—try a candle in the dark, after flood-lighting.

When I got off the rocks (a rather difficult bit of climbing with Tre Croce as a base) I had to put up with a much grander hotel than any decent climber wants because it happened to be handy for my next peak—and it was there I first saw her.

Perhaps I was in the right state for a tumble—all screwed up with excitement after a successful climb. I’d had the two Bauers, father and son, with me; and Braunschweizer—the best guides in the district.

Christian Bauer had given us all a turn by slipping straight over a five hundred foot drop. We were roped, and the rope held, though it was cut to its last strand before we got him up. It was a near-run thing for all of us, since we were in an awkward place for a hold. I never heard such language as old Bauer had ready when he knew the boy was safe!

What with having got my peak, helped save the boy, and one thing or another, I felt on top of the world. I had all my gear on: ice-axe, coiled rope, boots with clamps, etc., and meant to sneak off to my room unseen, while the hotel guests were all at dinner. Guests of their kind run strict to time over their meals as a rule, but owing to the spot of trouble between Christian and the precipice, I got in a shade too late. There they all sat, staring at me, in the lounge-hall drinking their after-dinner coffee and liqueurs.

The girl sat between two of the worst skunks I ever came across; but I didn’t notice them at first. I only saw the girl. I’m fifty odd now, and I was thirty then, but I can see her exactly as I saw her when I stood spell-bound in my heavy kit, wishing to heaven I’d stayed with the Bauers in the last hut; and thankful to God I hadn’t! What would be the use of describing her—my dream-mind isn’t yours, and my idea of flesh and blood isn’t either. No merely pretty girl has a chance with me—they all have that nothing-for-something air that puts a man off completely.

This girl was beautiful as a child is beautiful with a sort of innocent, staggering, helpless beauty.

She sat between a woman, who I guessed was her mother, and one of those bits of human refuse you see in continental resorts just before they’re kicked out of a hotel. No doubt he’d been a man once; but he’d lied, cringed, drunk and swindled his way into something a good deal lighter and more unclean than a monkey. The mother had a sort of congealed prettiness of her own; but her character had cut through it like a knife through butter. She was on the make; and that is all she’d ever been on, or ever would be on. The curious part of it is that I always knew the girl was all right. She’d had to share the objects her mother had pushed in front of her—money, fashion-plateishness, sex pre-occupation—anything and everything that’s described by that curious phrase, “getting on in the world”; but her mother’s vices had dropped off her as water slides off a duck’s back. In the eyes that looked for one long fatal instant into mine, there were only kindness and generosity.

What she wanted at that moment, I think, though I never knew her well enough to ask, was to see that I got something to eat and drink. I suppose I looked done in; but it wasn’t the climb that had done me in—it was seeing those two filthy tykes—one on each side of her.

The man was beyond all shame, and I should think the only emotion he had left was the instant’s satisfaction when he’d made a successful deal.

I don’t think he even preferred making love to the girl to making love to her mother.

It was the mother who preferred it; and as she was prepared to pay the piper, he let her call the tune. No doubt she thought in her raw cupidity that she had got hold of something good. The man was a Hungarian Count—quite a genuine one—from a family that had made history but was unlikely to go on making it. The mother and daughter were American. I share no prejudice against these two countries. These creatures were not in the least typical of their countries; they were merely typical of human nature at its worst.

The woman had money, so that she was free from any crimes that can be excused by any lack of it. She lived no doubt morally respectably as well. Her heart was far too hard, and her senses too cold with vanity, for the crimes of passion; but in those qualities ascribed to nails, pigs and peacocks, she was rich indeed.

She was so hard that even the feeling she had for her only child was a sort of hardness; so greedy that any skilled crook could fool her; and so vain that there was no sin she couldn’t commit and believe it a virtue.

I’m not exaggerating what these two monsters were like. No nice people—except the girl they intended to ruin—ever had, or ever would have, anything to do with them.

I met the girl’s eyes—fell hopelessly in love with her; and went straight upstairs to my room.

I already guessed what her companions were like, and I hadn’t the slightest intention of making her acquaintance. However, the weather went to pieces overnight and I had to wait, somewhere, till it cleared.

The mother, who seemed impermeable to the ordinary snub (she might have noticed if you knocked her down, but nothing more subtle in the way of discouragement appeared to reach her), insisted on talking to me. The conversation was her own, but by the time she had left me, she had extracted from me that I was neither rich nor titled. She asserted then that as I was an Eton master I probably knew people who were both, and could introduce her to them; and she demanded (since she had also heard that I was a famous mountaineer) that I should take them on a little climb if the weather cleared sufficiently. I need not say that the word “No!” was the only one that passed my lips, and I had just said “No!” for the last time and with all the emphasis with which a moderately successful schoolmaster has learned to say it, when the girl came up; and looked at me again.

I daresay I could have stood the look if she hadn’t trembled. She said, “I know we oughtn’t to ask you—but if we might just go up a little of the way with you . . . it’s such a pity, isn’t it—never to climb a mountain, when you stay right under them all summer long?”

Her voice was another miracle. I never heard who her father was, but he might have been Caruso.

If she had never climbed, she wouldn’t, I knew, go far; and as for her mother and Graf Bialyin, they’d manage the regulation half hour beyond the Hotel premises such guests always limit themselves to, and that would be their finish. I said a sort of “Yes—if they’d be punctual——” I didn’t expect to see them again as I started at three next morning. The girl said, “Oh, thank you!” as if I’d given her the Kingdom of Heaven.

I looked at her feet. In themselves they were rather pretty feet. She wore a sort of strapped sandal with heels five inches high. I didn’t make any comment on them, for the sooner I got rid of them all, the better.

I explained to Bauer that they wanted to start with us, and might get as far as the first hut—if they started at all. Bauer didn’t seem to understand what was the object of my even letting them start; however, he gave in when I said I couldn’t very well help it but that I would give him my word they wouldn’t reach the rocks. Up to the first hut it was as safe as going to Church on Sunday.

That evening it began to clear. At three a.m. there was a sort of light—a clarity more than a colour. The stars had gone pale, but the sickle moon hadn’t. She was a bright honey colour and hung above the peak I meant to climb; so close she might have been a part of it.

To my surprise, they all three turned up. After the first easy slope, Bialyin caved in; and he and the mother decided to go back. They said it was cold, and scolded each other about it, and would have scolded us had they dared. Bialyin had already resorted to his flask. We were all enchanted to get rid of them—except the girl. She said, “But I’m not tired! I’m going on!” I looked at her feet again. I must say I felt rather touched. Could you believe it—she’d gone out and bought climbing boots! Where she’d picked them up from I can’t think; she even had clamps for the rocks.

Her mother and Bialyin made a fuss, but I saw then how they held the girl; they gave in to any whims of hers that didn’t affect their own purposes. I suppose they’d talked me over and come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t do much harm. I certainly wasn’t very encouraging to the girl. All I said was, “Well, in spite of those boots, the first hut is all you can possibly get to. We’ll have to leave you there while we do our peak. We shall only come back to sleep; and start again to-morrow for a further peak. However, if you like, Bauer’s son Christian can stay with you to-day and take you back to the hotel to-morrow morning. His father, my friend, Pomeroy, and myself are doing the further peak alone.”

It was rather hard on Christian, but old Joseph was obdurate; he wasn’t going to let him have the fun of that still unclimbed needle, because of the precipice affair.

Mrs. Schultz (did I say the girl’s name was Virginia Schultz) didn’t think this was at all proper. She went apart to discuss it with Bialyin, and he reassured her. Guides, he explained, were always proper—that was their profession. They were “Schwindel frei” in every sense of the word. We should all sleep in bunks in one room. Virginia would have very little of our company as we wouldn’t return from to-day’s peak till dusk, and were to be off again at three a.m. to-morrow.

I didn’t hear all they said of course. I think Bialyin made a joke about my lovemaking qualities for they both looked at me and laughed. They were still on the path, and all they had to do was to turn round and walk down it. The wonder was that they’d taken the trouble to get up at all. Going to bed at three in the morning was more in their line than getting up at it. But they were a queer couple of rascals—each one playing off his wits against the other; and I daresay they had thought they could get the better of each other—or of me—over it, somehow.

When I told the girl, after they’d gone, that I’d been rather surprised at their turning up at such an early hour, she said, “Oh, well, Mother thought it would be fun to read a paper on mountain-climbing at her club when she gets home. She’s going to be photographed with an ice-axe and ropes. It’s all been arranged at the Hotel.”

Virginia did not seem surprised at this arrangement and when I said, “What about you—are you going to have your picture taken with a mountain peak you’ll see, with luck if it’s clear—but never climb?”

She only said, “I didn’t bring my Kodak, did you?”

She had a gentle simplicity that made you feel ashamed of trying to score off her. The guides liked her and that said a good deal for you can imagine what it was like getting her even as far as the first hut. There was practically no climbing to speak of; an awkward drop or two, and a little easy rock scramble was all there was to it. We roped her over the drops and gave her a hand across the rocks; and once I carried her over the top of a waterfall. She showed pluck, and did whatever she was told.

Pomeroy was very decent about wasting a couple of hours, for that was what it amounted to. We ran a decided risk from falling stones later on, in the gullies, after the sun was up. We should have crossed them in shadow; though by that time we’d left the girl safe at the hut, so it didn’t matter. It was a marvellous day and in spite of a few rocks falling, we managed to get our peak.

We got back at dusk. I wondered what the girl and Christian had been up to all these hours. It seemed she’d brought a lot of stuff in the rucksack she’d insisted on bringing along (Christian had had to carry it as well as his own), and she’d managed somehow or other with an improvised stone oven, to cook us a splendid dinner.

I didn’t dream she’d had it in her to do that. I should have supposed that turning on taps and pressing buttons was the extent of her domestic powers, but it seemed she could cook very well indeed; and she had. The dinner was the surprise of our lives; and naturally the guides liked her even better.

The hut was on a small rock platform, and when you stood outside it, if it was clear you could see most of the Dolomites. Before we turned in, Virginia joined me for a moment. She said, “I never knew the storrs were like this before!” She was referring to the constellations in the sky; but how could one have married a girl who called them the “storrs”—as if they were parts of the Army and Navy!

I didn’t say anything; and for a time she didn’t. Then she began again in that voice that was like velvet and warmed the cockles of your heart: “We could see you for quite a long time,” she said, “—through the telescope. I wondered which was you; but I knew one of them was.”

“You had a long day,” I murmured for I had to say something; “I hope you weren’t too bored?”

I don’t think she knew what the word “bored” meant—they probably have some other word for it over there—but after a pause, she said, “I had a wonderful day! Sort of just sitting round looking at those peaks. And I picked some ‘flares’—didn’t you see! I put them on the table in the hut, but I shall take them down with me to-morrow. Christian was heaps of fun. He taught me to yodel and he found me an Edelweiss. And then I cooked.”

Such silly words to remember for years!

We turned in after that. She was still asleep when we crept out before the dawn; and I never expected to see her again.

The first twenty-four hours after I’d left her, I saw nothing else. Then for a fortnight I was subject to what you might call spasms of her; then it all dulled down and I only thought of her once a week or so—if that—and not unpleasantly . . . rather as a man might think of some big chance in his career—a chance that would have been a hell of a lot of trouble if he’d taken it. He’d make the same choice no doubt if he had to live it again; but he can’t help wondering sometimes what it would have been like to have chosen differently.

Four years later I’d quite got over it, and married Dolly. She has made me a splendid wife and we have three good healthy children. After our eldest was born, Dolly made me go abroad again for my summer climbing—before she was fit to come with me—and that was how I saw Virginia again, and knew how indestructible it had been.

It wasn’t in the Dolomites at all. It was at St. Beatenberg, above Spiez. I like it better than Interlaken. You know the view one has, there, of the Mönch, the Jungfrau and the Eiger—across the lake of Thun?

I’d fixed up my first climb and got my favourite guides over from Interlaken, so my mind was free. I went out on my balcony to smoke a pipe and look across the lake at my three old friends; and what they did with the sunset. Below me some women were having tea on the terrace—what the Germans call “a Kaffee Klatch”.

In that clear air every sound carries, and Mrs. Schultz didn’t care who heard her either. She was telling the world.

When I knew it was Mrs. Schultz’s voice—and it didn’t take me long to recognize it—I quite shamelessly listened in. I have often heard of the solidarity of men; but in my opinion it never comes near the solidarity of women. They’ll take a common point of view even when they actively dislike the person who’s setting it forth. These women were all sympathising with Mrs. Schultz; they felt exactly what she did.

It was, of course, a most distressing story. Mrs. Schultz began with a description of Graf Bialyin that I believed to be accurate. She laid the black paint on pretty thoroughly. According to her, the worst gangster in Sing Sing (if that is where they put gangsters in America—when they catch them) was a white and woolly lamb compared with Bialyin. Still, I think she did him no more than justice.

Virginia had married Bialyin. Her mother didn’t say whose idea the marriage was. She contented herself with stating the fact.

As soon after the Altar as was conveniently possible, Bialyin had betrayed Virginia. He not only took all her money but beat her for not having more. He took her to expensive hotels, and as soon as he thought they’d had enough of his company without being paid for it, he would abscond—leaving Virginia and what luggage they had, behind. Once she’d had to walk from Salzburg to Innsbruck, penniless and begging. No doubt he had counted upon her making other arrangements. He not only proposed to Virginia to sell herself, and hand him over part at least of the proceeds, but he beat her because she disliked this expedient. Perhaps she didn’t go on disliking it. That didn’t come out in her mother’s story. But I don’t see what else she could have done. She wasn’t the sort of woman that other women help.

However, what had happened to Virginia, though painful no doubt, was—her mother implied—hardly the point, and not to be considered seriously in the light of Bialyin’s conduct to his mother-in-law. And this was where I joined issue; the rest of her audience (all three women carried away by the grief of a mother) ignored the sufferings of Virginia.

Virginia (almost by now a criminal too) had asked her mother for money; and at first her mother had sent it to her—had even sent it to them both—until she discovered that she was simply being milked like a cow by a heartless and unscrupulous brigand. Her daughter too—brazenly refusing to go back to her mother where she could have been, as she always had been, perfectly safe and happy—stuck to this infamous rascal. She shared in his villainy even, and went on trying to get more and more money out of her mother by trading on her pity.

What did he, or—by this time—“they”, do with the money? Bialyin drank; gambled; lived for, and with, other women! Why did Virginia, if she had a heart—if she had even a mangled scrap of self-respect left—not leave him? The Idiot-Girl (this expression was her mother’s) said she would not because he was her husband, and—would you believe it—sometimes very funny. (Virginia was right. Bialyin had a pretty wit. I had heard and enjoyed one or two specimens of it myself. Rascal for rascal, I preferred Bialyin to Mrs. Schultz; but then, I wasn’t a woman!)

Mrs. Schultz had told her daughter where husbands get off; or if they wouldn’t get off of their own accord—where they should be compelled to get off. Did the girl agree? Up to now she hadn’t. But it appeared that at last Mrs. Schultz had got a cable to say she would go back to her mother on receipt of the money for the voyage. Can you believe it—Mrs. Schultz had sent the money, and Virginia had kept it; or if not kept it, worse still—handed it over to Bialyin. Well, Mrs. Schultz had had enough of that of course. This time she’d come over herself and was going to take the girl back to-morrow with her; that is to say, she was going to take her back if the girl were willing to come.

Had her coming been Virginia’s own idea, the most intelligent and least sympathetic of her tea-party companions asked.

Strictly speaking, Mrs. Schultz admitted—“No”! It was the result of an ultimatum of her own. The child was her only child—the only being on earth that belonged to her . . . her husband having long ago absconded. No, he wasn’t exactly dead—only dead to his wife and child. The money—what little money there was—belonged fortunately to Mrs. Schultz herself.

She assured the still sympathetic ladies that she had a mother’s heart (she certainly hadn’t any other kind), and what she’d said to Virginia had been, “I’ll never send you another penny as long as I live, or leave you any when I die, unless you give that blackguard up and come back home with me for good!”

Virginia had agreed. She was, in fact, here in the village of Spiez—with Bialyin; but she was still evasive, or she wouldn’t be with him. And he had dared to suggest the terms of surrender. He’d said Virginia would go back with her mother—for a hundred pounds to be paid over to him.

After all that had gone before—another hundred pounds!—what did these dear ladies think she’d better do? It wasn’t only the money, it was—Mrs. Schultz said quavering into tears—the principle of the thing that was so outrageous! Mrs. Schultz was for holding out; and so were the other ladies.

It appeared that Virginia this time had only the clothes she stood up in, and was barefoot. It did not look as if Virginia could hold out for long.

I did not wait to hear how this conversation ended. I had not enjoyed my pipe and I put it away and went down the hill into the village.

I guessed that I should find Bialyin in the lowest wine shop in the place. It was not very low, as Spiez is a respectable place; but Virginia was sitting on a wall outside it. Her mother for once hadn’t lied. Her daughter was actually barefoot. Her cotton dress needed washing; nor was her hair in curl. Otherwise she was just as beautiful as ever; and when her eyes met mine I saw that whatever demands her husband had made upon her—and she had yielded to—Virginia was just as innocent.

When she saw me, she looked frightened for a moment. (At least I suppose it was fright. Probably thinking of Bialyin had made me look rather grim.)

Then she suddenly smiled—not that odious smile of pretty women wanting to nail you—but a helpless touching smile, as if she were just too pleased to do anything else.

“This time,” she said, “I haven’t got any boots to climb in!”

Then Bialyin came outside, quite drunk; but not too drunk to bargain. He put a high price on his wife, since he wouldn’t for a long time believe that I was buying her—not for my own purposes—but to return her to her mother.

Virginia took no part whatever in the ridiculous transaction. She merely sat on the wall and watched the sunset over the lake of Thun.

“He’s gone!” I said, when I came back to her at last.

I couldn’t see her expression very well because it had grown dusk, but I knew that she was looking at me . . . “and you’re free!” I added a little awkwardly.

“Oh, no, I’m not,” she said with gentle irony. “I’m not free—I must go back to my mother now.”

Well—what could I do! I was married to Dolly, who had just had a child. Even if there hadn’t been Dolly and the child, do you think Virginia sounds the sort of wife for an Eton master? I don’t mean anything snobbish, and I don’t care a damn what adventures she had had to pass through for the sake of her husband; I believed her to be—and do still believe her to be—as pure as a convent full of Saint Teresas.

I only mean that I shouldn’t have dared to take her on! Virginia would have turned anyone into a bully—she was so cruelly innocent; and the one who loved her best would have been (perhaps he was!) the worst bully of them all. But she had her revenge, for she was a prisoner who has never let her captor go.

Terror drove through Millicent Dawson’s heart and into her trembling hands, as they grasped the steering wheel of Gracie’s car. Terror not so much of the Police, though it was funny how she thought of them with a sharp extra pang, but of the rage that would spring up to-morrow in the small town in which she had played so large a part, when they found out what she had done.

Wasn’t she a patron of the Women’s Institute, a member of the Legion committee, President of the Dramatic Club and a leading soprano in St. Peter’s choir? Millicent had a strong supporting voice even if she couldn’t sing.

It was difficult to keep the small car on the road at all against the November gale. What with the rain lashing the windscreen and the tears pouring down her cheeks, she could hardly see at all. In that strange and formidable country, the back of her mind, the storm raged more wildly still. If the Police knew what Millicent had done she would be “wanted” by them in a way that she had never been wanted by them before, when she had graciously agreed to open their annual ball by dancing with the chief Inspector. Probably Benny could stop Jacob from prosecuting; but that was about all. Nothing else could be saved, neither her mother’s dismal future nor Gracie’s broken heart.

There had been no definite farewell between Millicent and Gracie. After Gracie had at last shaken off the swarm of lies that sprang out of Millicent’s maimed confession, like a swarm of bees refusing to settle, even to their own advantage, Millicent had given way all of a sudden to Gracie’s skilled, headmistress probing, and shouted out, “You fool! Can’t you see—I’m a thief!”

The terrible spasm of pain that had crossed Gracie’s face had ended the conversation. Millicent had always known how much Gracie loved her; but she had never known till then how much Gracie hated sin. It was a relief, when Gracie got up quietly and said that she was going to church; it was a special Advent Evensong—and she would know better what to say about their future when she came back. Millicent knew that Gracie would come back from church primed with absolution; but it was not absolution that Millicent wanted, it was to be admired as Gracie had admired her yesterday. Millicent had gone straight upstairs and flung all she possessed into a couple of suitcases. When Gracie returned from church, she would find that Millicent had taken her car and the ten pounds she was saving for the rates and taxes; but she wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

Millicent hadn’t had time to make plans. She could of course drive straight to the nearest cliff only a few miles away, and plunge, car and all, onto the rocks beneath. But healthy women of forty with ten pounds in their pockets seldom think long of suicide. No, Millicent told herself, taking advantage of a lull in the storm to dry her eyes and ease the weight on her arms, she wouldn’t be so unkind or so silly; for what would then become of Gracie’s ten pounds and the car? Eventually Millicent meant to return these to Gracie, seven times over. Gracie would always believe the best of Millicent; and she would be right to believe it—for Millicent had given her the best she had. But what was it that she really had?—Millicent asked herself for the first time. There was the Millicent who had let her mother down—though that didn’t seem to have surprised her mother as much as it had surprised Millicent. There was also the Millicent who had cheated her enemy Jacob and her friend Benny, and pocketed cash due to the firm. There was the Millicent who had fooled the whole town, or at any rate the greater part of it; and there was what everyone would say about her when they found out. The “I-told-you-so’s” might be more frequent, but couldn’t be more painful than the “I-never-would-have-believed-it-of-her”; and to which party did Millicent herself really belong? Wasn’t she an actively kind-hearted woman? Hadn’t she done an ounce of harm for a pound of good? Hadn’t she once swum against a strong out-going tide to save a child’s life and brought it back in spite of the undertow, while all the time the panic-stricken lump of a child was trying to drag her down? Wasn’t she always stopping Gracie’s car to give people a lift up hills? Perhaps legally Millicent deserved prison; but look at the amount of money her intelligent optimism had brought in for the firm she had cheated. Hadn’t she persuaded them to buy up beauty spots and build bungalows all over the cliffs, that were snapped up for princely sums, before the concrete was dry? Granted that she had taken a hidden slice off the sales; but was that enough to set Benny sobbing over his desk, and turn Jacob into a denunciatory Hebrew prophet? Jacob’s very words hissed past her in the darkness; but they hadn’t made half the impression that Gracie’s just saying “Oh no! no!” had made upon Millicent. Fortunately Millicent hadn’t had to explain anything to her mother, who had simply said: “Oh!—so that was where the money came from—I often wondered.” Her mother would just have to join her sister Harriet, who kept a boarding house at Hastings, and go on working. The Firm could stand their losses; whereas if they prosecuted heaven knows what it would run them into, nor what credit might leak away from them in the process. After all, even to the best-run firms, a confidential secretary in the dock might prove a dangerous surprise packet. If Benhams made Millicent look a crook, she told herself reassuringly, she could make them both look fools—especially Benny, who had practically asked her to cook his books, because he didn’t want to be bothered to keep them. Jacob was different; nobody working in his department would have got away with anything; but Jacob would have to cover up Benny’s tracks, however little he wanted to spare Millicent. Besides, there was Benny’s home life to be considered. It hadn’t crashed down under Millicent; but she could poke it down if they pushed her.

Millicent might have married quite often when she was young. She could look back on a series of short explosions in which passion used will, and will used passion, indiscriminately; but they had always ended before white satin and wedding bells, in noise and fury. Millicent had found it both more peaceful and more profitable to have a mild occasional fling with the married Benny, who didn’t want to break up his home.

Millicent’s friendship with Gracie was on a far higher plane. Millicent often said that it had changed her whole life; but perhaps it had changed her life rather less than it had changed Gracie’s.

Millicent retrieved the car from a swirling ditch and drove on over a shallow torrent. She had toned down for Gracie: she had become better educated; her tastes had improved; and she had despised her mother more, although that hadn’t prevented them both from being very good to her, taking her regularly to church and back in the car, and giving her Sunday dinners. Still, Mrs. Dawson lived by herself in a cottage thoughtfully provided for her on easy terms by Benny.

Few housemates, Millicent reminded herself, quarrelled less than she and Gracie, or enjoyed themselves more. Their natures were exactly opposite, and their tastes matched often enough to involve no great sacrifice on either side. The main difference between them was that religion supported Gracie, and that her own natural exuberance supported Millicent. Each shared gratefully a little of their separate support; and retreated into themselves when they felt the support of the other becoming a threat.

Millicent went regularly to church and rationed her impulse for cocktails; while Gracie took far more physical exercise, and laughed so often that her digestion had improved ever since Millicent had come to live with her. Even now their love was intact. Neither had betrayed the other, yet it would never be “glad, confident morning” again! They were separated and must remain separated. It was all very well for Gracie to say: “I know you have to go now, Darling, because of the town: they always find out everything, and it might be terrible for you if you stayed. But by to-morrow morning we’ll have thought out some plan, and when you’ve made good—as I know you will——” only the barest hint of a minatory tone had seeped through these words, the tone of a headmistress when she sees crime looming up before her and must check it or die; “and then I could join you for a holiday somewhere abroad like we used to.” If Gracie could have said, “It’s my fault as much as yours!”—but how could she? It wasn’t. It was only Millicent’s fault. She had wanted the money; seen her way to getting it; and taken it. She couldn’t see through both her tears and the rain lashing the windscreen; if there had been anything else on the road she’d have run into it blind, but there was nothing.

She drove straight on through the storm till the dawn broke, then Millicent turned into a lay-in, made up her face, and looked at the nearest signpost. It said, “Bristol twenty miles”. So she had come quite a distance, and in the wrong direction, for she had meant to drive to Exeter, send the car back by train, and go on herself to London. The moor was behind her, swallowed in a blanket of mist. It was a mercy she hadn’t, while crossing it, run into a pony. Millicent knew no one in Bristol; but if she hadn’t any plans now, a hot bath and a good breakfast might start her mind working. Millicent thought that it would work much better in an expensive hotel than in a cheap one; so she drove up to the Grand Hotel, took a good room with a bath, re-made her face, and ate an enormous breakfast, talking to a friendly head waiter while she ate. It was the waiter who put the idea into her head. He happened to mention that he had sailed by freighter from Avonmouth to the West Indies. A steward’s job was not a bad one; and there were tips as well as wages.

Forty-eight hours later Millicent, engaged as its stewardess, stood on the deck of the Amaryllis, an old fruit boat of no particular reputation, but carrying passengers of the less expensive sort.

There weren’t many women, Millicent told herself, who were capable of rushing such an opportunity, snatching it by the forelock after a rough night like hers, and getting away with it. Fortune had been on Millicent’s side, for at the moment she appeared at the office of the ship’s line, they were hunting for a stewardess to sail by the next boat. Millicent seemed like an answer to prayer to the ship’s doctor, who depended a good deal upon an active stewardess; but the Captain hesitated, since he did not believe in answers to prayer without earthly references. He had given Millicent a bleak look before he reluctantly gave way to the doctor’s pressure. The over-steadiness of Millicent’s round blue eyes reminded him unpleasantly of a man who had once stolen his overcoat. Millicent could afford to linger on deck, for she knew that all her passengers were either asleep or else being sick into the receptacles that she had thoughtfully provided for them.

The sea was rough. The ship plunged like a nervous horse, not certain whether it wanted to go backwards or forwards. A faint yet persevering light shone over Ireland. Sometimes it was dowsed by the seas; but just as Millicent despaired of seeing it again, it flickered out above a thin line of land. Mysteriously it reminded Millicent of Gracie. Was it a message? Long ago and half flippantly Millicent had asked Gracie, “Is there a trick about prayer, because if there is I’d like to know how to use it?” Gracie hadn’t been angry, but she had been silent and looked puzzled; then at last she had said, “It seems to me you have to have been praying for a long time before you find out.” “That there is a trick?” Millicent pressed, anxious to make the best of both worlds if possible. Gracie shook her head. “No,” she said, “that there isn’t! Sometimes you hope there is—but there isn’t. There isn’t any trick at all about prayer.”

The little light flickered for the last time; and then went out. Now there was nothing left but the loud windy sky.

Long rows of black waves shouldered themselves away from the ship’s side. The dim travelling lights of the ship itself showed them to Millicent. None of them got really away from what was drawing them on, or pulling them back; and each in turn broke on the edge of darkness, throwing backwards, as it broke, a pattern of lace as white as hawthorn buds.

“Well, anyhow,” Millicent said to herself defensively, “I sent Gracie back the car by train even if she has to pay for it C.O.D., and I could have got a tidy lot of money for myself by selling it!” Slowly a feeling of relief began to steal over Millicent. She couldn’t feel relieved about Gracie, so she stopped thinking about her; but she could feel relieved about everything else. No one, not even her mother, knew where she was or what she was going to do. No one on the ship knew who she was nor what she had done. She had escaped seeing her own face in the glass of adversity.

Just as Millicent was about to go down below, the doctor joined her.

“Ah, there you are, stewardess,” he said. “I wanted a few words with you.”

Millicent was delighted. She wanted a few words with anyone who would take her mind still further away from the world that had once belonged to her.

“We’ve got a very difficult case on board,” the doctor said in a low cautious voice. “She happens to be important as well as ill. That’s to say her husband belongs to one of the oldest Planter families on the Island, and still owns a very fine piece of property. It will be worth your while to look after her thoroughly, even if she is troublesome—and she may be troublesome. She wouldn’t be on this boat at all unless they wanted her condition kept dark among the kind of people she’d be likely to know on the Island. So you see there’s a need for great discretion.”

Millicent nodded. She had not overlooked the only expensively dressed woman who had come on board. As Millicent passed her, she had caught a whiff of the best scent money could buy trying to get the better of the best gin.

“I’ll do all I can for her, sir,” Millicent said readily, “and carry out all your orders.”

“Well, that’s my main difficulty,” the doctor told her. “I can give you certain directions, of course, but you’ll have to use your own judgment. Mrs. Carstairs actually has a very bad lung condition, bronchial tubes blocked, lower as well as upper, blood pressure too high, and heart not standing up to it. They tell me you’ve been trained as a Red Cross nurse during the war. Well—you wouldn’t be doing wrong if you were to confiscate any alcohol you can get hold of. It’s slow poison for her, and she takes a lot. You can’t stop her going to the bar: for some unknown reason she’s a good sailor so she can get about; but you can get rid of it in her state room. Do all you can, though, to spare her every effort, and cheer her up if possible. I’ve an idea that she doesn’t want to get back to Jamaica—that’s what’s so unfortunate. Send for me of course if you want me.”

Millicent said that she would; but she thought it better not to tell the doctor that she already knew rather more about Mrs. Carstairs than he did.

From the moment she’d heard Mrs. Carstairs say to the important-looking man on whose arm she was leaning, “Charles, are all those wonderful nylons for me?” Millicent had thought it best to step into the next-door state room and listen to what she could hear of their conversation. There was only a curtain drawn across the doorway; and they hadn’t seen Millicent’s feet.

“And look at my flowers! Are you sure that none of those attractive women that you were so sweet to on the Island during your last leave is not to have a single pair of nylons?”

“You know perfectly well there’s never been another woman—on the Island or off it! I’m polite because it’s my job to be polite!” the heavier voice—Millicent thought it might be a General’s—answered.

“Ah! but you forget,” the husky little voice went on mockingly, “you forget ‘the married Lady’! How I sympathise with Cleopatra! You won’t break up your home for me—and I’m Tom’s wife, not yours, aren’t I? You’ve made that perfectly plain to me. You think the world of Tom—you’re brothers in arms—and only half the world of me; and I’m like Cleopatra—I want a whole world, and all of Mark Antony for company!”

The General—if he was a General—made an inaudible reply. There was a long pause before the woman’s voice, still mocking but more tender, went on.

“But of course I love you, poor Charles, and I feel just what you feel really about Tom. He’s been tremendously sweet to me always—even when it wasn’t—easy. I promised I’d give up gin if he’d let me go back to England. But you were in England, you see—so it wasn’t any use giving up anything. Too little of Heaven not to make it Hell! And now you won’t be in Jamaica—so it’ll be all Hell! You don’t know what it feels like to be a thief crucified between two Christs—and to know that you are responsible for the crosses!”

Millicent, suddenly called away, heard no more; but the phrase had haunted her. “A thief between two Christs!” She felt quite sorry for the expensive lady, who hadn’t liked being so expensive.

The doctor went below with “Well—do what you can for her!” and Millicent followed.

Millicent had a very busy time of it for the first few days of the voyage. Nobody knew where their things were, nor where to put the things they found when they had found them. Every time they themselves moved, their state room or the passage they were in moved too, but in a different direction. The word “inanimate” applied to objects failed as a definition. All objects became animate. Suitcases rushed at passengers’ legs—books flew unaided across state rooms. The Amaryllis both pitched and rolled, but you could not count upon her doing these two actions alternately; she often did them simultaneously; you just had to get used to her.

There wasn’t a state room—and there were twenty of them—where there wasn’t something to be done for someone, sometimes very quickly; or where Millicent didn’t have to soothe, explain or remonstrate with somebody. She found that she had a perfect stewardess’s manner. “No, it’s not rough,” she told impatient or fearful travellers, “it’s just the Atlantic, and if it doesn’t get better soon, you will; but if I were you and still felt queer, I’d eat something!—say, iced ginger ale and a ham sandwich—not anything rich or fried—something that’ll come up or go down without much trouble. That’s the way to start a sea voyage—believe you me!” and they did believe her.

She was specially successful with the delicate wife of a missionary, the mother of a baby of three months, and an active little girl of four, who had golden curls and took the last ounce out of them. The mother was devastatingly sick, and the infant, a hearty specimen, shrieked his heart out if his bottle was overdue.

Millicent disliked children, but she knew how to deal with their material wants. She started by picking the baby out of his mother’s arms just as she was about to be sick all over him.

“There’s the basin—use it; then lie flat, and stay flat. I’ll look after the children,” she said, firmly but kindly, to the shuddering girl. The baby, instinctively realising that he could neither attract or distress Millicent, wisely stopped yelling. There was no situation for the moment of which he could take advantage; but he felt a sense of security. Millicent knew how to hold him.

She propped him safely between two stiff pillows, where he could conveniently watch his bottle being prepared for him. While the milk heated, she picked up the little girl, who had done everything for the last half hour which a little girl shouldn’t, and was now crying for her doll and her Teddy Bear, which had not yet been unpacked. Millicent laid her across her knees and gave her two stinging smacks across her little pink bottom; then she swung her into an upper berth.

“You can fall out if you like,” she told her. “No one will pick you up if you do, and you will bump your head good and proper—but you won’t kill yourself!”

Millicent neatly snatched the hot milk off the spirit lamp at the right moment, held the baby in the crook of her arm, his bullet head against her comfortable breast, and fed him with precision. The baby sucked at the bottle and stared at the light on the ceiling above his head as if they were one and the same thing. Restoring him, sustained and somnolent, between his pillows, Millicent searched in a badly packed suitcase till she discovered a Teddy Bear and a doll. These she tucked firmly into the berth with Janet.

“Once you throw them down—they’ll stay down!” she told her. “Remember!”

Peace reigned.

“If you feel you are going to be sick again,” Millicent told the exhausted young mother, “ring for me. But I don’t think you will be if you lie still. The baby is much better off where he is, and as for the little girl, if you hear as much as a squeak out of her, you let me know. She’ll soon find out what that means!”

It was past midnight before Millicent thought of going to sleep herself. She looked in on Mrs. Carstairs again, on her way to her state room, and found her sobbing in her sleep. “But better sob in her sleep,” Millicent thought, “than wake up and find out what she was sobbing about!” The room was full of the flowers Millicent had arranged for Mrs. Carstairs before her arrival. Friesias of half a dozen different delicate shades sweetened the air. There were red roses, difficult to keep alive, but Millicent knew how to doctor their stalks and put salt or aspirin into the water. Anemones like goblin jewels burning purple, scarlet, pink and blue; and chrysanthemums, very stately and not too like sofa cushions—yellow and white. Millicent carried them all out into a bathroom where she could pack them safely, with fiddles borrowed from the Purser, against the wall. She asked him, worried still over sorting out his tables for the next day, if she might open the porthole, as Mrs. Carstairs breathed so badly, but he said, “Better not—she might get slapped by a wave! That wouldn’t do her any good, would it?” Millicent said, “No, it wouldn’t”; and helped him for a time with suggestions about how to keep the over-genial away from the sour-faced Pussies; and how, if there were highbrows, to avoid putting them with lowbrows—and of course picking out all the most important people to sit at the Captain’s table whether they got on or not. When this was safely over, she returned to Sybil Carstairs’ state room and set to work to unpack her two white vellum suitcases. Fortunes, Millicent thought, must have been spent on their contents. It wasn’t only Mrs. Carstairs’ clothes that thrilled Millicent, exquisite in colour, form and fabric as they were; it was all the finely polished, sparkling implements of beauty that accompanied them—transparent tortoiseshell boxes, clamped with gold; brushes and combs, so clean, a hair from a human head might never have touched them. All that Mrs. Carstairs possessed had the same shining quality as if she could never have been subject to the flaws and indelicacies of raw nature or inexpensive art. Yet there was the gin, concealed in scent bottles fixed into the satin pockets of suitcases—one flask even lay hidden in a hot-water bottle, under an azure angora cover with a zip fastener.

Millicent decided on leaving that one where it was, after emptying half its contents and refilling it with water; but she threw all the rest of the gin away. “That’ll give her something to think about,” Millicent told herself. “She won’t be quite sure what she’s done with it herself, poor thing, or what’s been done for her—and she’ll be too proud to ask.”

Millicent put away all Mrs. Carstairs’ things very carefully and neatly. Mrs. Carstairs had the best double state room on the ship, so there was plenty of room. Why did she want gin? Millicent asked herself, when she had everything else? Was she afraid of that husband she had said to Charles was “so terribly kind to her?” Afraid of him in that queer way that Millicent had been afraid of Gracie?—so that though Millicent had had to do what she wanted, she would rather have died than let Gracie know that she wanted it?

What had Mrs. Carstairs meant by saying “a thief between two Christ’s”?

Mrs. Carstairs was still asleep but restless; her battered lungs, shaken by all that sobbing, made every breath she drew sound like an exhausted runner’s.

“She’ll die soon,” Millicent told herself, “but perhaps not as soon as she wants to die.”

Millicent decided to spend her nights on the couch in Mrs. Carstairs’ state room. Next day she would rope in a useful girl missionary she had come across, who could help her with all the others, but she would look after Mrs. Carstairs herself. Curiously enough Mrs. Carstairs liked Millicent. She had never before met so much support on so cheerful and lively a scale. There was a blessed absence of criticism in Millicent, joined to an outspokenness of advice that gave Sybil Carstairs a new kind of confidence. Millicent never said “Don’t drink gin”; she said, “If I were you, I’d never start drinking till five o’clock in the afternoon when your stomach has something inside it. You’ll find you can keep your head better!”—and Sybil took her advice, and profited by it. She never got up till five o’clock in the afternoon, when Millicent helped her dress and established her in the smoking room, where Mrs. Carstairs stayed till the bar was shut; then Millicent helped her back to bed, unless Sybil had already passed out and remembered nothing about it, or not until that bad hour before the dawn, when she woke and remembered everything.

For the first four days, life went as a ship’s life does on a rough sea. Millicent felt extraordinarily free and important under her new sense of responsibility; and when she thought about Gracie at all it was to say to herself, “Why!—she’d be as pleased as punch now if she could see me! I daresay she’d think it was an answer to prayer!” But on the whole Millicent thought very little about Gracie and a very great deal about Mrs. Carstairs. Wasn’t this a situation in which she might cash in?

On the fourth night Millicent woke suddenly. It was impossible to say what waked her—not a sound, for there had been no sound. But was there perhaps an absence of sound? What had happened to that thick, jerky breathing? Had it stopped? Millicent clicked on the light and leapt onto the swaying floor. She saw that the berth opposite to her was empty. The bright, rolling passage too was empty. But wasn’t there a flash of something white between her and the companion-way door?

Millicent knew how to move fast on boats; she was up the stairs and out onto the slippery deck nearly as quickly as the stumbling figure of Sybil Carstairs groping towards the ship’s rail. But she was not quite quick enough. Sybil might not have managed to negotiate the rail if the wind had not caught her, just before Millicent reached her, and swept her over into the roaring darkness. “Knocked her brains out against the side of the ship!” Millicent thought scornfully, while she used to the full her brazen carrying voice to shout “Man overboard!”

Millicent stood on the top of the rail watching till a wave rose to its full height beneath her. Then she took a perfect outward-swinging dive into it. She was shocked, but not surprised, by the icy impact of the water as it closed over her.

A strong scissor crawl soon brought her up for a snatch of air before she went down again, swimming hard away from the ship’s side. “There go my best pyjamas!” Millicent said to herself mournfully. Twice as Millicent came up to breathe, a wave slapped her across the face, and she had to submerge and try again; but she never opened her mouth till she knew there was air to breathe, and shut it promptly the moment there wasn’t. Dense blackness roared over her, and she swam blind in an empty sea, till the searchlight picked her up. Now she was being followed inch by inch, and she knew that if she could keep going long enough, she would be picked up. But the waves were still at her like a crowd of angry savages beating her down. The cold ate into her bones like frost. Millicent forgot what she was looking for, until, as she rose out of the trough of a wave, something white flickered above her that looked more solid than foam. Millicent swam harder, and snatched as she passed it, at what might be only a foam head. She trod water, for the foam head felt solid under her hand. “That’s her nightgown!” flashed through Millicent’s mind. “Real lace, it ought to hold!” There was no doubt now that Sybil was in the nightdress. Fortunately she was unconscious, and made no resistance. She must have fallen, flat on the water, with the sense knocked out of her and her mouth shut, the moment she struck it—or she would have gone down.

Millicent immersed herself deeply enough to keep Sybil’s head above water, and only rose herself at longer and longer intervals to catch her breath. Swimming under the weight of water was a funny feeling; Millicent kept on, till an iron band began dragging across her chest, then almost automatically she shot up to breathe again, feeling the heavy pull of the body above her, till once more she slid down under the sea and kept going.

It did not matter where the ship was now: it only mattered to go on breathing, while she still held on to the weight that tore at her shoulders. “This is the last kick in me!” Millicent told herself, promptly giving another kick. Something not a wave hit her violently. Perhaps it was a shark? If it was a shark, it must be eating Sybil first, for the weight suddenly lifted from her shoulders, and Millicent was able to give a deep delighted breath. Men’s voices shouted in her ears, a light shone down into her eyes, hands dragged at her armpits, and suddenly she found solid boards beneath her. Millicent flung half the Atlantic, which she had inadvertently swallowed, back where it belonged before she looked round her. What was left of Sybil was being ignorantly mishandled by anxious sailors.

“Here, you bloody fools!—just leave her to me!” Millicent shouted, gulped at a flask held out to her, and swallowed raw brandy as if it were lemonade. Fire spread slowly through her numb limbs.

She worked gently and yet firmly over the ice-cold body beneath her large, powerful hands. Light poured down upon them, nearer and more steadily now, from a dark cliff rising solidly above them. Up and down, in and out, Millicent pressed the inelastic limbs in the saturated piece of frozen flesh that she still hoped was a human being. Every bone that Millicent possessed set up a separate agony of resistance. Yet she worked on.

It was a comfort to hear men shouting and cursing all round her. A canvas jacket with straps on it dangled over their heads. When Sybil’s inert body was at last dragged from her hands, Millicent began to feel frightened for the first time. What were the men in the boat up to? Had she too got to be dangled in the air and knocked against the ship’s side? Long after Millicent was wrapped in warm blankets and surrounded by hot-water bottles, her body shuddered and her teeth chattered as if they didn’t belong to her. Boiling-hot tea was what finally brought her round; and then she was able to feel gratified on hearing that Sybil was still alive.

Millicent fell fast asleep in the middle of joking with the boatswain who was in charge of her about the complete absence of her satin pyjamas. The waves had seemed to prefer them to Sybil’s lace nightgown.

When at last she woke, she found herself alone in her own state room, with a little wintry sunshine gleaming at her through a porthole.

A sharp knock at her door was followed promptly by the Captain. He looked down at Millicent for a long, curiously friendly moment before he spoke.

“Well! your sort don’t need any references—not with me, they don’t!” he said gruffly. After he had spoken, the Captain turned his back on her, walking out of her state room with even more promptitude than he had entered it.

Millicent felt as if Gracie had been in the same room with her. A moment of sheer, profound happiness shot through her; and what put an edge to it was hunger. She foresaw the splendid meal she was going to eat; and very soon she actually ate it. Two plates full of bacon and eggs, accompanied by the cook’s strongest black coffee laced with his best tinned cream. Nothing had really changed. But look what prospects stretched before her!

She was still a thief; but quite apart from nobody knowing it, Millicent felt an inner security as if she had earned the right to be happy.

The doctor came in soon afterwards. Did Millicent, he asked, know how to administer oxygen? With pneumonia, which Mrs. Carstairs now had, everything depended on nursing. He would need Millicent’s help immediately, although he had roped in the missionary girl who could be counted on for the donkey work.

“Fortunately,” he added, “the passengers don’t know what happened. They were either asleep or being sick, and the Captain said it was a wave.”

“But could a wave——” Millicent began remembering how far away even the tallest wave had seemed from the dark cliff above her.

“Not strictly speaking, it couldn’t,” the doctor admitted. “It wasn’t rough enough for more than a little spray to fly over. But they all think waves can do anything! We don’t want to harp on the suicide angle. The idea is that she went up for a breath of air, and you followed her. Then the wave caught her—and you, with your indomitable courage—plunged after her!”

Millicent agreed. Something had taken her over the rail and kept her kicking, and it might just as well be called indomitable courage as anything else; but she couldn’t help wondering rather nervously what Mrs. Carstairs would call it.

She heard, as soon as Sybil came round five days later from her long semi-conscious struggle, and found herself alone with Millicent.

“What the devil made you pull me out of the sea?” she gasped. “Didn’t you know it was damned impertinent—when I wanted to drown?”

“Well, I don’t know what made me go in after you, I’m sure!” Millicent said huffily. “It wasn’t nice at all in that cold sea—and I lost my best pyjamas! A prize I won at a whist drive, they were—black satin with scarlet facings—you know, the ones you said suited me!”

Sybil gave a little choking chuckle. “So I did,” she admitted, “I remember now! No, it wasn’t ‘nice’ that sea—but you must have known I didn’t want to go back to my husband!”

“There’s lots of pleasanter ways of not going back to husbands than by drowning,” Millicent told her with severity, “and you’ve got a lot more to help you than ever I had when I coaxed my way on this ship, in spite of that sour-faced puss of a captain, without a friend or a reference. You’ve got money—you’ve got a husband—and you’ve got Charles.”

“Charles!” murmured Sybil with astonishment. “Whatever do you know about ‘Charles’?”

Millicent looked offended rather than embarrassed.

“As a matter of fact,” she said with great dignity, “I happened, while doing my duty as a stewardess, making up the berths next door, to overhear part of your talk with your gentleman friend. You called him ‘Charles’.”

Sybil stared at her for a long startled moment before she began to laugh again.

“That really is funny!” she gasped, “but you mustn’t get things wrong about my husband, no matter what you heard. Charles is quite terribly respectable, and Tom—that’s my husband—is as kind as he can be. I’d love to see him again if I didn’t know I’d disappoint him by being so ill. I had promised, you see, to get better in England—but I didn’t. It’s all rather more awkward than you’d gathered. I haven’t ‘got’ Charles—he has a home and children; and Tom—well, very soon Tom isn’t going to have anything!”

Millicent frowned. “I daresay you could live if you wanted to,” she said stiffly. “I’m not what people call a good woman myself, but if I had a good husband and a good lover, I’d choose one or the other of them and stick to him! And as for that gin—I’d give it up, I would really!

“I don’t say when things get me down I don’t drown my sorrows myself sometimes, and I like a good binge with a friend once in a long while—just for the Hell of it! But I’m no toper. I can leave it alone if I like, and after what I’ve seen of you—I’m going to leave it alone!”

“Well—I know it’s disgusting,” Sybil admitted. “Once I had D.T. and I might have it again; but that wasn’t enough to stop me. Still, I shan’t try the Atlantic Ocean again! What is it got you down—men?”

“No,” Millicent said consideringly, “not men—money—only men enough, for what I was after!”

Sybil Carstairs’ eyes opened wide with astonishment.

“Money!” she murmured. “Why! I’ve never given money a thought. But then, I suppose I’ve never had to!”

“That’s it,” Millicent told her. “Once without it, you have to! All these things you’ve got round you—jewels and scents and clothes and all your expensive gadgets—they don’t grow on trees. Believe you me, they take some getting!”

“Did you—er—steal things?” Sybil asked her.

Millicent looked, and felt, deeply shocked.

“No, I never!” she hastily explained, reverting to an earlier type of speech that Gracie had more or less successfully eradicated. “I cooked—books.”

Sybil looked puzzled. “Cooked—books?” she repeated.

“Well—yes—in a manner of speaking,” Millicent explained. “I just didn’t put in all the money that was coming in. I kept a slice of it. After all, I’d earned it! The way I looked at it was that it was my fair share of profits. Jacob and Benny were as stingy as stoats: neither would dream of going fair shares with a woman. Benny would cough up for a fox fur or a pair of earrings once in a while, since he had a fancy for me. But stealing, Mrs. Carstairs, is a thing I’d never do! It’s not what I call work for a lady!”

“I see exactly what you mean!” Sybil said with her charming smile; “too intelligent a job for most ladies! You’d have to know the ropes, wouldn’t you?”

Then she fell asleep again, still smiling. She seemed to have forgotten all about Charles and her husband.

Millicent eyed her warily. It was quite true that it had not occurred to Millicent to steal any of Sybil’s things; but she had thought it worth her while to find out all she could about Sybil. She knew that Sybil was rich as well as her husband, and that the highest circles of the Island, in which she had once moved, now no longer approved of her. She must be very lonely; and she had not long to live. Why should not Millicent profit by her loneliness and be left some substantial reward? If not by Sybil herself, then by her husband? Millicent’s swift mind rose to a still more glittering height. Why not win over the husband altogether, and become in course of time—the second Mrs. Carstairs of Cliff Manor? Such things do happen to broken-hearted widowers. A beautiful home, an anxious, lonely man—an immense debt of gratitude! It was a situation that a woman with a little self-confidence and a gift for exploitation could hardly resist. Why should she resist it, Millicent asked herself defiantly? Sybil tolerated her—she rather more than tolerated her; she already leaned on her for support. Why should Millicent refuse Sybil her support?

On the landing day Millicent was up at dawn and out on deck before the passengers had opened an eyelid. Millicent looked at the first tropical island she had ever seen. It lay a low vivid green patch close pressed against the horizon. High lonely waves broke over its empty beach. A wall of sun-lit spray sprang into the golden air. It was difficult to tell which was more solid, the air or the spray.

The prow of the ship pushed slowly on against dense yellow seaweed thick as cloth of gold. Strange birds flew through the blue vaporous air. “It would be downright beautiful—if Gracie were here!” Millicent said to herself.

There was a tall man standing on the prow of the pilot boat now approaching the ship, and looking rather like Charles.

The doctor hurried up to Millicent and said, “Mrs. Carstairs insists on coming up to meet her husband on deck. It’s madness, of course—she can scarcely stand—but I can’t stop her. Will you go down and help her up—while I explain matters to him?”

Sybil was fully dressed. She had tried what gin could do to help her; and it wasn’t very much. Millicent half led, half carried her onto the deck; but when she saw her husband, Sybil broke away from her and tried to run to him. He caught her just before she fell. For an unendurable moment they stood clinging to each other. Millicent couldn’t hear what they said—if they said anything; but she caught a glimpse of Tom’s face as he looked at his wife. It was exactly the same look as Gracie’s, when she knew what Millicent had done—shocked—incredulous—ashamed.

Millicent had meant to come forward at the right moment, and be introduced to Tom. But she knew now that there would never be a right moment for that introduction. She turned and went straight downstairs. Cash in, of course she would Millicent told herself—but not on Tom and Sybil Carstairs. Their way without her might be no less tragic, but at least there would be no more cheating. They knew what they had to face, and would face it together.

“I couldn’t have saved her from that gin if I’d tried—and I couldn’t have borne not to save her,” Millicent told herself defensively; but she knew that it was herself, whom she would not have saved.

The Chief suddenly popped up the companion-way and said, “The Captain told me to see you, Miss, and ask if you’d like to sign on proper. Not just for the voyage, but permanent. He says he’d be satisfied if you are. You’ll find the papers at the ship’s office in Kingston waiting for you.”

Millicent drew a deep breath. She didn’t mind cashing in on the Captain. There would be no gratitude, no luxury, no enormous possible plum to seize out of a bright uncertain future. It would be a job of work, and Millicent would be expected to perform it just as well as if she hadn’t saved Sybil Carstairs’ life.

“Yes,” she said to the Chief, “yes, sir, please tell the Captain I’d like to sign on.”

Then she went to her state room. She found an envelope addressed to herself, enclosing a cheque for a hundred pounds, with a warm invitation to come and stay with Sybil Carstairs for as long as she liked.

“I’ll take the hundred pounds,” Millicent said to herself resolutely, “but I won’t go and stay with them. I think I’ll have a binge with the Purser instead, send Gracie back her ten pounds—and buy some clothes with the rest.”

Doctor and Mrs. August Meissener, who was also a doctor, were highly fortunate people. It might be said of them in the late 40’s of this insecure century that they had everything in the world that they needed.

They had the sense to leave Germany in 1933, not only with their persons intact, but with some of their—not very extensive—property. They were skilled in a profession essential to all countries, and had a rough working knowledge of the English tongue.

Ultimately they landed upon a West Indian Island where their services were immediately utilized. Lisa was given a hospital appointment in an overladen maternity hospital, her husband in a few years’ time acquired a lucrative practice. They had no colour—or indeed any other—prejudice; both were respected; and August was beloved.

When the war broke out six years later they were not even interned: rather they were looked on as Hitler’s chosen victims, and therefore the strongest of allies.

They bought a spacious and beautiful tropical bungalow within its own grounds and each possessed a car. Three competent, if autocratic, Island servants saw to their comfort. Barnabas James looked after their garden, washed the cars, and ran errands. He could neither read nor write, but he was more than contented with extremely small wages (higher than most of the Island’s servants got) and which included an out-house in the garden, where he slept and kept his own chickens. He adored August, who never understood a word he said but treated him with the slow, patient good humour he had found to be advisable in dealing with all his patients, whatever their race or colour. August knew that dark illiterate people can be just as intelligent in their own way as white half educated ones: they can take in as much, and give out more. He therefore got on extremely well with all his servants. Theodora the cook, and Isabel the housemaid, saw that he had whatever he wanted, even when it gave them a good deal of trouble to provide it, whereas they were never able to do adequately or on time anything, however simple, that their mistress ordered.

They did not understand or want to understand Lisa, who was at once sensitive, impatient, deeply kind at heart, and sharply brusque in manner. Lisa was conscientious, but beneath her punctilious execution of her duties she forced herself to hold down a startlingly rebellious spirit. She stared at her servants with gloomy, impenetrable eyes, and expressed her wishes with an insistence that hid her intense dislike of giving orders at all.

Lisa had very few personal wants, except for punctual meals and hot water; but she fiercely resented dogs and cats being treated with anything short of an exaggerated tenderness. Her servants did not like her, but they realized that they were exceptionally blessed in their situation with these foreigners who knew nothing of the Island prices, left their home early and seldom returned before nightfall, and were far too busy to notice what happened to food left over from a previous meal.

Besides living in great comfort and prosperity in a perfect climate, the Meisseners had the ineffable good fortune of a happy married life. They had been married for twenty-five years; and while they had discovered and increased the many irritating faults that they had found in each other, there was literally no one else whose company they preferred. August, a large-hearted man with expansive tastes, had not been strictly faithful in a physical sense to Lisa; and Lisa, with perhaps too rigid a critical faculty, had not been strictly faithful in a spiritual sense to August. Still, in losing August Lisa would herself have been completely lost. She did not know her way about life without him. He was her way of life; whereas should Lisa die, August, though he would have felt no further joy of a companionable nature, would have gone on living and even contributing to life his easy faithful skill.

They were both overworked, but having good sound German constitutions they could stand it. They ate heartily and generally slept eight hours out of the twenty-four. It would have been difficult to find in any country, at any time, a more fortunate couple.

They had only lost their country, their speech, their lifelong relationships, their hopes and their habits, at a time when none of these things could ever be replaced. Lisa was the more acutely unhappy of the two. She was not a beautiful or gracious woman, and although she could afford to dress well, and sometimes did, she took very little care of an appearance that had never been attractive, except to August.

She had a dark sallow complexion, an angular figure, heavy scowling brows, and eyes which only shone into beauty when she was interested, and as she was very seldom interested in her new life, very few of her acquaintances knew how vivid and entertaining a face Lisa possessed. Her work at the hospital frightened her and filled her with an agony of pity and indignation.

She could not bear to handle, in dangerously unhygienic conditions, the mental and physical wrecks who came under her care—in order to produce fresh life; so that although she did her work as well as possible, no one gave her any credit for it.

August too was conscientious, but he lived life better than Lisa did, what he ate and drank pleased him more, and people aggravated him a good deal less.

Nature provided him with padding over his sensitive nerves, and besides the innate toughness of a persecuted race, August possessed a controlled indifference to stupidity.

He knew that he was intelligent. There were few other doctors on the Island with anything like his qualifications and he did not care in the least that nobody else had enough intelligence to realize the fact. But Lisa suffered for him. She cared bitterly with all her wild, intractable heart. She suffered every time she looked at anyone who did not realize how clever August was. She hated men who considered themselves mentally or socially his superiors. She loathed and despised women who had the temerity to imagine that money or their local standing put them in a world above their slow speaking, quiet doctor, whose skill gave him the power over life and death.

The Island itself, with its moments of incredible beauty, revolted Lisa.

One evening she came home earlier than usual, and put on a rest gown of white silk printed with large and wavering red flowers. Lisa was tall, and for once her dress suited and fitted her. She brushed her hair more vigorously than usual, and did not drag it back so ruthlessly from her face.

It was a wonderful night full of the aloof mysterious presence of cool and glittering stars.

The poinsettia hedge surrounding their flat space of lawn, drenched in moonlight, sharpened its scarlet javelins as if it were day. Lisa suddenly remembered, as she stood on the verandah gazing up at the stars, that it was Christmas eve. “Impossible!” she said, turning towards the kitchen. She would order the lovely little cocktail spreads that August enjoyed. Of course she was far too late. They ought to have been made hours ago. Either she ought to give up her work at the hospital or give up the idea of being a good housewife.

She went into the kitchen quarters profoundly dissatisfied with herself and afraid of Theodora.

The kitchen was open to all the winds of heaven. It was in a quarter of the bungalow surrounded by its own verandah, and contained an Aga, that most brilliant ally of even an indifferent cook, as well as a well cleaned white tiled sink. “Thank God!” Lisa said to herself, “after ten years I’ve managed to get the place clean!” but she forgot to thank Theodora, who hated to keep it clean, and surreptitiously tried to hide a bucket of refuse which she had been told to empty into the dust bin outside the kitchen door after every meal. “Please prepare cocktail snacks for the master!” Lisa told her in her ignorant, arrogant way. “He should be back soon!” Theodora nodded briefly. She had already prepared them, hours ago, and though she would have been gratified to have talked over, with any intelligent mistress, exactly how she had prepared them, she knew that such a conversation would have been thrown away on the woman before her. “How can she bring babies into the world,” Theodora asked herself sardonically, “when she doesn’t know she can’t produce a cocktail snack in a few minutes?”

Lisa stood there uncertainly, looking about her as if she knew she ought to find fault, but didn’t know where to begin. “How is that thumb you burned the other day? I had better take a look at it,” she said at length. “It’s inconceivable to me—if you put your hands carefully into that big oven using the thick oven cloth I have given you—why you should ever burn your hands! There is nothing unexpected about an Aga—no flames and no surprises. It works like a good child!” Theodora sniffed loudly. She had had six children and knew that none of them worked, even when good, without surprises. “There is no thumb looking needed, missus,” she explained. “I took him to the master before he went out and he done him so he burn no more.”

Lisa sighed in a relieved desultory way. She had not wanted to look at Theodora’s thumb, but she felt a little deposed in her rôle as housewife by August having attended to it first. Suddenly she perceived the bucket and said sharply, “Take that refuse out at once! You know you are not allowed to keep the bucket in the kitchen once you have washed up! It attracts flies!” Theodora never washed up once. She washed each utensil after using it—more at one time, less at another; she could not bear ever to be parted from her bucket till night released them both from further labours. Theodora, gingerly pushing forward an invisible foot, kicked the bucket, which heeled over on to the kitchen floor.

It gave her a great deal of trouble to clear it up, but it was sufficient satisfaction to pay for her trouble to see how thoroughly the incident had annoyed her mistress. Exasperated, with all her nerves jangling, Lisa went back into the high, wide living room, with its coloured concrete floor, and its tall french windows, letting in the splendour of the night. It wasn’t a room at all, she thought to herself, it was simply a space pinched out of the prowling sinister unknown. She heard August’s car, with a pang of relief. She did not lose her exasperation when he came up the steps, but something in her heart met it and turned away her irritation from the rather ponderous being who, at the sight of her standing there to greet him, became smilingly indifferent to his own fatigue. “Here’s your drink!” Lisa said, putting down the tray she carried close to a long verandah chair. “It’s fresh from the fridge—a Tom Collins. Take it before you go and wash.”

August took the long glass, dimmed with ice, tenderly in his outstretched hand. A touch of mint was folded over the rim, and a fresh lime floated in the sparkling soda. His eyes, far sunk into his head with fatigue, told her it was just what he needed. Isabel, in starched white linen, came in with a silver tray decorated with hibiscus blossoms on which were laid out, with delicate zeal, six different kinds of pastries and carefully blended spreads. “Fairyland!” August murmured, smiling from one woman to the other. It was an economical smile, for it pleased them both equally and made it unnecessary to say anything more. Isabel vanished as noiselessly as she had come, and Lisa, wishing she wasn’t forty-six, stood in her awkward girlish way between him and the moonlit night.

“You look as perfect as the night,” her husband said gently, “and nobody on this Island mixes a Tom Collins half as well as you do!” “I learned how in California,” Lisa said in her dry harsh voice, “where you can only learn how to make money, cocktails and indecent jokes!” “My dear,” August said, “surely you learned such jokes before? I can remember my pleased astonishment when you made them on our honeymoon!” “Oh those jokes!” Lisa told him, collecting her own drink and returning to an immense lounge chair, where she was speedily joined by a dachshund and a terrier, “those were Jewish jokes; they may have been indecent but they were witty. In California you learn how to be indecent without being witty.”

“Yet I remember thinking, when we reached California,” August reminded her, “that we had got out of Hell into Heaven!” “So we had,” Lisa agreed, sipping at her cocktail, “but what a Heaven—if we hadn’t had such a Hell!”

They said nothing for a time. Each understood the other perfectly, and followed without difficulty the roving of each other’s mind. “What a comfort it is to live with a woman who likes the same drinks—and the same jokes—that you do!” August murmured at last; but Lisa noticed that his heavy hand trembled as he put down his glass. “I wonder if you realize,” she said, “that to-morrow is Christmas Day. That ridiculous fake festival is going to shake the whole place up again! The servants want a holiday—the dogs will be frightened out of their wits by fireworks and crackers—and we shall have to go somewhere or provide our own meals. What on earth are we going to do this year to celebrate an unpleasant event which may not even have taken place over two thousand years ago?”

“It might not have been unpleasant if it had taken place,” August observed mildly. “The birth of a remarkable man—for the stories told of him certainly prove him to have been remarkable—need have done us no particular harm had it not been for the mismanaged crucifixion! I must confess—for after all we share the blame with Pilate—that it is not the way to get rid of people who rub us up the wrong way by their good ideas. Personally I should have made Jesus an important Rabbi and given him the pick of synagogues to preach in. A little well paid routine drives the devil out of most reformers. Remember Goethe—how little fire was left in him after Schiller died and he became a court official! I don’t say that Goethe did no important work afterwards, but on what a different level! He thought in numbers and the numbers came—but before it wasn’t numbers merely that he thought in: he snatched living coals off the altars of the gods, without so much as burning his finger tips!”

“Yes, that’s perfectly true,” Lisa agreed, “but it doesn’t answer what I asked you, which is, what are we going to do for Christmas? I get two days’ holiday—and you can make two for yourself. Where—and on what—shall we spend them?”

“Except for one or two necessary visits I can make myself free,” August admitted without pleasurable excitement, “for a day or two, no doubt. To tell the truth, I haven’t been near the shops lately, and I hadn’t noticed what date we were up against. What do you yourself suggest, my dear Lisa? I suppose we can afford to do what we like for forty-eight hours, if we can succeed in liking it. Would you care for a luxury hotel and a good deal of bathing in a comparatively clean pool—or the sea itself? There’s a great deal to be said for swimming in the Caribbean if you can keep your mind off sharks and stinging jelly fish.” “That’s just it!” Lisa said with fierce gloom. “There isn’t anything to suggest. I simply can’t tolerate staying in any hotel surrounded by fire crackers and Holy Nights sung at you by every species of crook. You know very well how holy the nights are at Montego Bay or Kingston, and having illuminated Christmas trees plastered all round one isn’t going to make them any holier. But what else is there? Last year we went to the Blue Mountains and sat in a dark fog without enough light to read by, drinking bad rum. The year before we went to Montego Bay to share that damned butcher’s shop—playing on the beach—people so rich—so dull—so useless and bad-tempered—it made us sick to look at them! What else is there to do? Stay at home—when there isn’t any home—and without servants to cook for us? There isn’t anywhere I want to be in except Europe!”

“Perhaps,” August said reflectively, “we’d better fly to Europe on our next long holiday and see what it looks like for ourselves. It might lay that particular ghost. You see, my dear, it wouldn’t be the same Europe. When my old friend Czernin wrote that highly intelligent book in 1938, ‘Europe—going—going—gone!’ he voiced a profound truth.

“Europe is gone. If you were to go back you would only find a graveyard, where the ghosts have not ceased to tremble.” Lisa was crying now, noiselessly, and without relief even from her tears. “Yes, I know,” she whispered, “but can’t you suggest some refuge—some way out from having to face their horribly decorated Christmas trees, those hollow carols they don’t even believe in themselves—that—that fun they expect us to enjoy with them that’s too cruel even to laugh at? Isn’t there any escape?” August thought for a moment, then he said in quite a different voice, as if he had shaken off both his fatigue and his humour:

“Look here, Lisa, wouldn’t it be better, happier perhaps but certainly healthier, just to face it? To stay here—in our own house even if it isn’t a home—and behave exactly as we used to behave long ago in Germany, in our beloved Munich? After all, we weren’t so terribly young when we left, our tastes have not radically changed since, nor have we ceased to believe in what we once believed in. We were neither Jewish nor Christian—we were just Scientists, who believed in treating every man as we wished to be treated; and we still believe in it. Have you anything better to suggest than our staying at home and behaving as we used to behave? We can give the servants their holiday in turn so as to have decent food, and manage the rest for ourselves.” “But,” Lisa began at last, “we had our own people there—our own kind of life!” August looked at her steadily from the depth of his sombre eyes. “Yes, they are dead,” he said quietly, “my parents in a gas chamber—yours, having the means handy, were sensible enough to take their own lives privately, without public exposure. Our friends, too—some were killed and some were killed and tortured. No doubt we have both been over their ends many times, though they themselves, you should remember, only once, and that once is once forever. Mortality is the most blessed of all human institutions, and one which we shall all enjoy, sooner or later. Remembering what they suffered is our share—we shall not forget it. It is what we pay for being such—such lucky people!” August broke down suddenly and sobbed with his head in his hands.

Lisa and the dogs rushed to him simultaneously. Lisa knelt on the cold floor with her arms around him, and the dogs whined and licked whatever part of him they could reach. “You see! You see!” Lisa whispered. “We mustn’t try—we mustn’t think—of what’s past!” August flung his head back and smiled at her, through his tears. “That did me good!” he said. “I’m not an Anglo-Saxon: I like tears in their place and when they clear off quickly. I admit I was tired, and tears are a fatigue product. But you—you to-night, my dear Lisa—look so lovely and so young. I am always reassured to remember that you are eleven years younger than I am! Now, looking at you, I am quite myself again, and I really mean what I said. But I am a stupid old man and have no memory. Tell me, what did we do—when we were young—at Christmas? Tell me, my darling, how exactly did we spend our two days’ holiday?”

Lisa sat back on her heels, the dachshund curled up on her lap, the terrier wedged himself with skill between his master and mistress. The Siamese cat leapt lightly on to her master’s knees, managing to slap the terrier’s face as she passed him. When the animals were comfortable again, Lisa began to speak, with pauses, a little uncertainly, but so that both of them could see in sharp images the little pictures that shone behind her words. “When we were first married,” she said, “we’d both just got really into our professions. We couldn’t afford children at once, but we thought about them—and meanwhile there wasn’t any hurry. We’d got that half flat, in a home with a garden, in Möser Strasse—you remember the squirrels and how we used to feed them at breakfast? Well, of course, in the winter, when the trees were covered with snow and the winds came down from the mountains, we had our skis ready, and took our food every Sunday to the nearest slopes. But at Christmas we had—after our dinner with the parents—two whole nights and days on the Zugspitze; heaps of our friends went with us. Sometimes in my dreams I can smell the snow and wake up crying! But before we went on Christmas eve—that’s to-morrow—we had to go to the Tiergarten and see the wild animals and the brilliant birds. I suppose it was fun and a change from the sick people in the hospitals. Some of them looked and behaved so like our colleagues—especially the monkeys.

“How cold it used to be, August, but you bought me a lovely musquash coat, not extravagant but so warm, and after the animals we found that snow path under the trees, to where that exaggerated star shone above the pines. I know we didn’t believe in anything, but anyhow we went down that path with all the other people that were streaming along it—how well they did such things in our München—the star hung over a life-sized Krippe. The virgin and child were painted wooden figures of course, but there was a real manger filled with hay and real animals!—a donkey, a pair of oxen and several sheep. Do you remember a nice Austrian who looked after them—he must have been a Wiener he was so polite, saying, ‘Moment!’ to the camel when he tried to eat the hay out of the manger?”

“Yes, I remember!” said August, but he did not tell Lisa that he had prayed that she should bear him a child. Fortunately of course she hadn’t, for the unrest began: no Jew’s life was secure; and afterwards when they’d got to America and found their feet again, it was too late. They had to pass their examinations over again in a strange tongue. Such things take time. “Since father was a Rabbi,” Lisa went on, “we had our family dinner on Christmas eve; and afterwards we had music. My mother played like a professional, you remember, on the piano, and I played the violin, my brother Ernst the ’cello, and you—you played the flute, August!” “Yes,” he agreed, smiling, “I played it, very badly indeed, for I had no time to practise—but you said it sounded like a nightingale.”

“Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs without Words’ do sound like nightingales by moonlight, and you played like an angel! And then we went home along those gay laughing streets, tingling with cold—and you remember the courtyard at the Hof, and the forty foot tree—how real a tree—in the snow and with the snow falling, and the invisible choir that sang behind the tree through open windows; and then all of a sudden it was midnight and from the tower of the Hof, the trumpets played—right up against the stairs—only trumpets—don’t let’s remember what they played!” For a while they were both silent, her hand pressed against his knees. “Yes!” he said at last, “but even better let us remember the next day—Christmas day—and how, our throats scalded with coffee, we ran to catch the train; it was crowded but we got in, fourth class of course, and everyone had skis and was laughing! We sang, jolted about, and sitting every girl on her fellow’s lap. ‘Ach du lieber Augustin!’—and there’s one thing that you’ve overlooked—just before that evening reunion, you would always insist on an oblation. We’d do something you said that we didn’t like, just to make sure of everything else going right. We would visit the most unpleasant person we knew and give him a cyclamen. It was, of course, the only flower we could afford, but we picked a nice one in a pot and carried it ourselves to its repulsive goal!” “Fancy your remembering that!” Lisa said with a sudden smile. “I’d quite forgotten that idea I’d had about the oblation. It is quite true that even then I was afraid of losing our happiness.” “I remember it,” August said slowly, “best of all! Partly because it was just like you to think of being specially nice to the most disagreeable person we knew, and partly because, of all the things we did at Christmas time, it is the only one we can be quite sure of being able to do now. If we can’t have any snow sports, or music, or our relations, we can at least pay a call on somebody thoroughly disagreeable! Shall we not pay a call on that exceptionally gruff and insolent British Colonel Ferguson, who has angina, so it’s some excuse for him, up towards the gap? I know that you hate the English more than you hate any other nationality, and I dislike military men, especially this one. He has plenty of pluck—the pain he gets is ferocious—but I don’t know that it entirely clears him for treating me as his boot-boy. I doubt if we could choose a better specimen for our oblation.”

“Mein Gott!” exclaimed Lisa, between laughter and tears, “what a horrible joke we shall make of this Christmas!” But she decided that it couldn’t be a worse joke than the other Christmases when they had tried to enjoy themselves.

It was a difficult matter to procure a cyclamen, since this hardy and self-contained flower resents the exaggerations of a West Indian climate; but the combined efforts of three devoted servants (fortunately, August had asked for the cyclamen) brought about a successful conclusion of their search. Barnabas, Theodora and Isabel had personal contacts covering different sections of the Island, and for the last several years these contacts had been pleasantly maintained by constant depredations from the Meissener household; consequently a white cyclamen was forthcoming late on Christmas day and at great expense, although Lisa disappointedly observed that it was quite unlike the constipated edition of cyclamen to be found in Alpine countries.

This exquisite plant had rushed out in a peculiarly prolific and exuberant manner, so that its assembled blossoms, immaculately white and preened as if for flight, resembled a company of lightly tethered doves.

The pot containing the cyclamen was arranged securely in the back of the car, and on the way up the mountain side August reminded Lisa of the very stiff welcome they might expect to receive from Colonel Ferguson at the top. He was a man who never liked what he had not expected to happen: and he would certainly not have expected a call on Christmas day, unsolicited, from his doctor. “He didn’t even choose me as a doctor,” August explained to Lisa, “I was thrust upon him late at night in the middle of one of his sharpest attacks by a terrified servant. The Colonel wouldn’t be in the land of the living now had I not been trapped nearby over a tedious confinement case, in a pause between twins. As soon as I’d released him from his agony he blinked at me accusingly, and asked if I were a German. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘not exactly, but I should be a German if a certain Austrian house-painter had had the good fortune not to be born.’ He pulled himself sufficiently together to say in a sneering voice, ‘Then you’re a Jew!’ ‘Not even that,’ I told him, ‘since a Jewish carpenter managed to get crucified two thousand years ago, and shook my faith in the religion of my fathers. His fellow Jews should, I think, have supported him, for he was an enlightened human being—the best kind of a Jew; and there is little doubt that any well-trained civil servant in the Roman Empire would have crucified Jesus sooner or later without any intervention from his own people. This time, however, you are nearer the mark, for both my parents were orthodox Jews—and that was enough for Hitler.’ ‘All right,’ the Colonel said, ‘you win! Come again.’ So he became, you might say, in spite of himself, my regular patient.”

The British Colonel’s house hung on an island of land above the plain. It was not very far from a spectacular waterfall, which he could hear quite plainly tossing itself over a precipice. Neither its extravagant beauty nor its melody gave the Colonel any particular pleasure, but he enjoyed devising a clever system of extracting water from it for his garden; since the Colonel had been in the Royal Engineers, he made a very good job of it.

The house was closed, but a chink of light gleamed through remarkably solid shutters.

The Colonel, having dismissed his servants for an evening’s merry-making, was sitting over his fire reading a good detective novel in the sympathetic company of his slightly stertorous bull dog, Caesar. At the sound of an approaching car, Caesar cocked an indignant but accurate ear; and the Colonel gave vent to a resentful oath.

Looking like an incarnate scowl and only after the bell had rung twice, the Colonel marched to the door, while Caesar lumbering along beside him emitted the exact sound felt by his master. The Colonel flung open the door, and shouted into the darkness, “If you have come to sing carols, I shan’t even give you money not to sing them: go away at once or you’ll get bitten by my dog!” From the light thrown from within he then perceived that he was speaking to his doctor and to a woman, who presumably was his doctor’s wife. The Colonel lowered his voice, but it was not in a pleasant tone that he observed, “Sorry, I’m sure—but I have no recollection of having sent for you!” August said nothing: he merely smiled in a serene and genial manner, feeling quite sure he wouldn’t have time to speak before Lisa swept in before him. He was carrying the cyclamen, and he held it so that the light from the door fell upon it.

“It was my fault we called,” Lisa explained in her low, husky voice that was not without charm. “My husband told me that you had a wonderful garden, but he thought you might not have northern flowers, so we managed to get hold of this cyclamen. You probably know that as soon as it stops flowering, if you re-plant it in a shady place with enough water, it’ll bloom again next year.” “Very unlikely indeed!” barked the Colonel with his accustomed veracity. “Still, it is a very fine specimen, and I’m much obliged to you. Won’t you come in?” Besides being the most disagreeable Englishman on the Island, the Colonel had been brought up as a gentleman; therefore, since his visitors had put him under an obligation, he felt forced to offer them his hospitality. His voice supplied the frost missing from the climate.

Caesar did everything he could to help his master express hostility short of biting his visitors. The hand upon his collar warned him where to stop, but not until he had put forth an extraordinarily good demonstration of what non-belligerency means to a devoted bull dog. “Won’t you sit down?” the Colonel added, when they had edged past Caesar. He hoped they wouldn’t; but when they did, with a curt order to Caesar not to extend his hostility, the Colonel went to fetch the whisky. “This oblation begins well!” Lisa observed to August, glancing round her appreciatively. “One would suppose the Queen Victoria was not yet dead.”

The shabby chairs on which they sat were more comfortable than they looked. Dead birds and stuffed animals in glass cases took up most of the room. A lion skin decorated the floor. The head of a gigantic moose glared down at them from a wall. There was an open fireplace, and the clean and glowing flames shot up the chimney in a column of fire like the sacrificial flame of an ancient sacrifice.

In spite of his tropical surroundings the Colonel had succeeded in putting the outdoor world in its place. There were no french windows. Verandahs were not indicated. The solid shutters were tightly shut behind stodgy mustard-coloured curtains.

Caesar stood stiffly upon the lion skin in front of the fire. He continued to make a deep churning sound within his massive chest expressive of intense distaste, and showed no signs of relaxation until his master returned, when, with a resounding flop, he disposed his heavy body straight across the hearth; but even then he kept one bloodshot eye firmly fixed upon the intruders. “I hope you don’t like rum,” the Colonel observed on his return; “whisky is good enough for me, and I confine myself to it.”

It was extremely good whisky, and the Colonel became more affable as he saw the use to which his visitors put the substantial portions he had poured out for them. If he had to have guests he liked them to appreciate his whisky. They talked too, quite intelligently, about Island plants; and did not mention his health or Christmas, subjects of which he had had quite enough.

It was obvious that they knew considerably less than the Colonel did about the Island and its vegetation; and this was satisfactory: although had they not been regrettably supine, they could have got about more.

“That’s really why I live here,” the Colonel unbent sufficiently to inform them. “I can’t do much myself, but I send a man to look for the sort of things I want. I draw them quite plainly and tell him exactly where to go for them, and of course he has his machete and can cut his way through anything; yet nine times out of ten he comes back with something totally different, which I could have got for myself—just outside my door. Natives of this Island have all gone to pot. It’s what comes of education and having their own way. Climate isn’t what it’s cracked up to be either; and the amount of mixed blood, turning up when you least expect it, is simply appalling.”

“This,” Lisa’s sardonic eyes said to August, “is getting better and better!” August looked vague, which was his way of hiding that he felt uncomfortable. He was not spiteful and therefore, Lisa thought, lost what little zest there is in social life.

The Colonel was beginning to enjoy himself. Not meeting with any active opposition on the racial question, he closed it with a resounding and all embracing insult to any nation but his own; and started off upon dead lions. He told his visitors a long and circumstantial history of the lion under their feet, with graphic accuracy; but his own part in the hunt was studiously understated. The shot which closed the lion’s career might have been self-propelled. From South Africa the Colonel took them by easy stages back to Europe, where he wound up with blind unconsciousness of his hearers’ sensitivity in the Bavarian Highlands.

“On my leaves,” he said, “and between wars, you know, I was keen on ski-ing. I particularly liked those mountains. Perhaps you skied once yourself?” “I skied—yes!” August admitted, “in fact we both did when we were young. We happened to live in Munich.”

It was on the tip of Lisa’s tongue to tell the Colonel that August had been a champion skier, but seeing that her husband’s eyebrows were rising towards his hair, she desisted. Lisa knew that this was a sign of pain, and of pain which August preferred to bear in silence, and alone.

“There was a funny little place I used to stay at,” the Colonel went on, “amazingly clean though primitive—I believe it became quite fashionable later on under the Nazis—called Obersdorf.”

The vast snow spaces of the Zugspitze shot up again before the longing eyes of August and Lisa. They saw the blue-shadowed runs, and the black fir trees below, looking like the burnt ends of matches; they heard the silken crunch of fresh powdered snow beneath their ski-blades. The echo of a yodeller’s voice leaping across space, from peak to peak, rang once again in the soundless music of their memories.

“I got a present from my son this morning,” the Colonel went on, admitting these fellow sportsmen so far into his confidence as to betray the fact that he had a son. “He’s quite a dab at photography. He’s in the Army of Occupation at present. Dullest possible job and made worse by the disparity there is now between Germans. Some of the nicest of them—if you can call any German nice—turn out to have been Nazis.” Lisa smiled politely. This was better and better, she thought. The Colonel had insulted them twice to the core; and he was more than oblivious of the fact: he quite obviously meant to be friendly. Nevertheless they were Germans and they were not Nazis. This disparity, which he mentioned so lightly, had all but cost them their lives, and had poisoned every drop of their blood.

The sacrificial flame died into grey ash. Caesar at last closed the protective rear-guard of his bloodshot eye. The Colonel found his boy’s present and held it up to the light. It was a magnificent photograph: you could almost see the shadows on the snow, and draw in the fragrance of the pine-soaked air. There was a slight roughness on the snow surface, where a load had lately fallen from a burdened tree; and soaring up in naked purity was the peak of the Zugspitze.

They looked at the photograph in silence and for a long time. All three of them were moved at its recaptured splendour. The Colonel thought of his lost strength, and the feats of skill and endurance he had modestly achieved while he possessed it. Perhaps he even remembered without antagonism those jolly evenings in mountain huts with German guides and fellow skiers, singing simple songs the sense of which, although the words escaped him, he had taken in at the time.

Lisa walked away from the table, and turning her back on the Colonel sat down by Caesar, who, without visible transition, found himself enjoying her unobtrusive presence.

August still stood looking down at the photograph. His whole being was dissolved in memory. There was hardly a yard of this mountain that he did not know, by sight, or touch; by risk or in triumph. For ten years of his youth and twenty of his maturity he had spent his every hour of freedom on its slopes or in its neighbourhood. He knew it—as the saying is—by heart.

Lisa too had loved it, but differently. She had been a nervous skier, a denizen of the lower slopes. Lisa loved the mountain for its beauty, and because it made her proud and happy to be loved by a man who had conquered all its dangers. Now her pride was broken, and she saw no more beauty; but she still loved.

“That’s all over, of course—for me at any rate,” the Colonel said, feeling that the pause was, even for a person who liked pauses, quite long enough. “But if you two were once skiers, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go back there for a holiday, you know. Mustn’t give way to age, while you’re still healthy, and there are quite easy slopes all about there. Seems a pity for the whole thing to be broken up—or left entirely to the young ones.” The Colonel felt that he had gone quite sympathetically into a delicate subject, and with considerable tact. He had carefully not said by whom—or even what “the whole thing” was that had been broken up.

“Yes,” August said in his thick, uneven English, “one might say a pity!” and then his self control gave way, and the burning lava of his emotions became irretrievably visible.

“I know that mountain too,” he said, breathing heavily, “it was not only a pastime—this ski-ing! It was something deeper—something more personal—it was brotherhood.

“People did not say, as they helped each other in danger, or as they shared each other’s prowess: ‘This is a German!’ ‘This is a Jew!’ ‘This is an Englishman!’ They said: ‘This fellow can ski!’ or ‘This fellow is in danger, how can we get him out of it?’ This was a great skill—but also a great fellowship. It brought together people’s hearts and lives. It melted into music in the evenings in the huts. We ate and drank the same food. We sang together the same songs, and we slept—as all men sleep whose spirits and whose bodies have been used to the utmost—without enmity!

“Women too took part in this free mountain life. They were treated with chivalry for their womanhood. None dare molest or insult them.

“It was our code as sportsmen to accept and protect them. They became for us part of the beauty we drank in with the air, and saw upon the distant peaks.

“It is easy to fall in love upon mountains, but it is not easy to be base. What we had—we shared. We did not try to possess it for ourselves—alone!”

Meeting the Colonel’s shocked astonished gaze, August turned shamefacedly away from the photograph. “Ski-ing is a good pastime,” he said apologetically. “It was for us—who loved mountains—civilization put into practice. But the body cannot express everything. It seems that with all of us civilization had not gone quite deep enough.”

“Too highbrow,” the Colonel said to himself, “but some sense in what the fellow says all the same!” He paused sufficiently long to let his excitable visitor cool down, then he replied gravely, “Short of shooting—ski-ing is in my opinion the best sport in the world!” The Colonel managed to put into his voice some of the sympathy and fellow feeling he would rather have died than express in words; and August turned back once more to look at the photograph. His youth ran in his blood. He saw himself as a child with his father, on skis for the first time. He felt the ecstasy and astonishment of his first flight. He remembered his father’s pride and kindness. Shocks and disasters skimmed past him, which he knew now had built up his solid strength and skill. “You took what came,” he said, half to himself and half aloud to the Colonel, “and your wits and your muscles leapt to meet it.” It wasn’t only a mountain that August’s eyes stared at—the Zugspitze slowly vanished. It was Europe he was looking at now; its rich inheritance, its long-acted-upon traditions, all that man had thought and loved and built out of himself, passed once more through August’s awakened senses. He lifted his eyes, and met the bewildered Colonel’s. “It doesn’t matter,” August said thickly, “that we can’t go back—either of us! It’s with us still! It’s in us! We are Europe!” and he turned blindly towards Lisa, who got up from the lion skin to meet him, with strangely shining eyes.

The Colonel, of course, did not know what to make of this strange emotional outburst, but it stirred him. In the strong clasp of his hand as he said farewell to his surprising visitors, he gave back to August what he had received from him; and standing on the doorstep to see them off under the stars—accompanied by Caesar, who had not only ceased to growl, but was actually wagging his short stump of a tail—the Colonel urged both his visitors to come again.

“You made such friends,” Lisa said, half admiringly and half grudgingly, as the door clicked mildly behind their host, “that you spoiled the whole thing. After he had been perfectly impossible too! I don’t call that an oblation! You started something up. He actually wants to see us again!”

August patted her shoulder, before he drove off. “An oblation,” he said slowly, “in my opinion is the pouring away of something precious, in order to show gratitude for what is still in the cup. We are not only protecting ourselves by doing it—we are giving something we know that we possess. We possess Europe. I didn’t know until I had begun to pour that our old cups still held their ancient wine. With your help, Lisa, and by the inspiration you have always been to me, I now propose to pour away the rest!”

Sylvia Elliot could not help feeling a little uneasy, for fear the age she had reached might be overlooked by the Stapletons, her father’s and mother’s friends, whom she was going to visit for the first time alone.

It would be dreadful if Uncle Edward and Aunt Molly (their titles were purely honorary) were to think of Sylvia as still a child. Last night she had overheard her parents speaking of the visit in rather a strange way. Her mother had said, “I feel a little worried about Sylvia’s visit. Ought we to let her go on their yacht, at her age, without us? It might be dangerous now. Edward’s so fascinating!” And her father had replied, “Nonsense—it’s all right with Molly there! Besides she’s only a child still.” When they heard her at the door, they turned purple and burst into conversation about the cat. “Only a child” was of course what Sylvia wasn’t. She was—as well as a child—a human being, a woman, an immortal soul, and a young wild animal; and she already knew that Edward was fascinating.

The Stapletons were much better off than their friends, the Elliots, and they had no children of their own. Sylvia owed them her first pantomime, countless surprises and adventures, sumptuous Christmas and birthday presents besides occasional shared holidays and excursions. Aunt Molly had given Sylvia her first evening dress, not a full evening dress yet, of course, but something exquisite and expensive that had made Sylvia feel extraordinarily light-footed and at home in the world. Uncle Edward had taught her how to watch birds on cliff edges, and how to sail a boat and swim. Sylvia knew, she sometimes thought better than anyone in the world, how wild and shy—ardent and swift—Uncle Edward was. How like a deer in his love of solitude and his distaste for man! She thought him like a knight for chivalry and like a god in his sudden and often inexplicable rages.

She knew how beauty touched him, how material things irked and irritated him; and yet how practical he could be with ropes and sails, how easily he adapted himself to waves and how obedient he was to every whisper of the wind. He was not hostile or afraid of any element except the clumsy human one.

Everything in a child’s heart, Edward understood. He saw pain hovering, before it had time to strike, and paved the way for the spirit’s swift release. He had a way of bringing out a child’s courage by taking it for granted.

He did not use too many words; he showed Sylvia how to acquire new skills by working them out with her. He was never lavish of praise but his eyes stimulated and enhanced everything Sylvia looked at.

Uncle Edward was very strong, but no-one would have suspected it. He concealed his strength like an art. He was a small man, slender as a reed and intensely active.

His physical prowess sprang from passionate ambition, but he had disciplined his fiery spirit by intensive training. Competition egged Edward on but he was always at his best when he was free to act alone. Sylvia never thought of Uncle Edward as vain; she only knew that grown-up people could hurt him too easily. Edward’s high-pitched laughter was unlike her father’s. It did not come to him frequently and he laughed oftenest at things which Sylvia did not understand. She might sometimes have thought Uncle Edward unkind if he had not so hated cruelty in others. His anger was quick as a flame; it was roused by anything bullying, vulgar or bad mannered. His own manners were exquisite, but they did not include uncovenanted mercies.

Aunt Molly was quite different. She was always the same, good-tempered, placid and reliable. She was capable of giving a child all the attention it needed while leaving it free to carry on its own concerns. Sylvia was always glad when Aunt Molly was present because things functioned so much more easily. They turned up when you least expected to find them; food appeared when you were hungry, rest when you were tired; but what Aunt Molly did, and the way she did it, was never at all spectacular. Aunt Molly’s activities took place without illusion, in an external world. With Uncle Edward, Sylvia lived in a glamorous, mysterious universe, full of pleasant shocks and exultant revelations. From its high inaccessible ramparts, they could just see Aunt Molly far below them, the inhabitant of a restricted, alien star.

Uncle Edward’s new yacht was called “Miranda”. She was white as a lily with a vivid blue line beneath her shining rails. Even before Sylvia reached the jetty’s edge, she knew that lovely, tossing snowflake of a boat must be Miranda.

It was unfortunate that the sun should have chosen to set just behind Sylvia, so that as she stood on the rough edge of the stone jetty, she looked like one of Mezzo da Forli’s young and eager angels.

As Uncle Edward rowed towards her in a microscopic dinghy, he thought to himself, “The child’s grown up!” but that was only one of the things Edward thought.

He was a man who took rapid and deep impressions. He never forgot what Sylvia looked like, grasping her new suitcase in her hand, in a green jersey suit the colour of jade, leaning a little forward, while the wind blew her corn-coloured hair in a mist above her smiling, troubled eyes.

Edward made no mistakes. He took her suitcase and swung her into the tiny rocking boat as if she were a queen, and while he rowed her steadily towards the Miranda over a pink topaz sea, he smiled the trouble out of her eyes.

The water had been satin smooth all day long, and that queer Cornish blue that is never satisfied without being green as well; but at sunset the rose-red sun had set its own reflection on the sea floor, and a little wind broke its smooth surface with tiny pink ripples.

The horizon was a clear, unearthly blue, barred by clouds of rose colour and gold.

It seemed a pity for the oars to break the pattern of the topaz ripples, and for the boat to move away from the golden shore. An ice-white moon rose in her single immensity above the last, bright clouds.

It was not necessary to speak or look at each other, because the faint chuckle of the water in the prow, the far sounds from the shore, the silent splendour of the climbing moon, communicated to them all that they wanted to say about their reunion. They had always enjoyed being together, and now they were together in a different way as if all the beauty of the universe had decided to take a hand in it.

Uncle Edward knew what was happening to them, but Sylvia only thought—as Miranda had thought in Shakespeare’s mind—that this was a new-born world and full of strange delights.

It took ten minutes to row from the jetty to the yacht; but it took a life time to forget it.

Aunt Molly looked down at them over the rails and said, “Oh, there you are dear! Your train must have been on time. Edward, are you going to catch the breeze and sail now, or have supper first? I can get it ready in twenty minutes.” Uncle Edward replied, “We’d better sail now,” without looking at Aunt Molly. The anchor came up with cheerful zest. Miranda took the seas kindly, running before the breeze with a thrifty steady ease, as if she had learned, but did not intend to publish, the secrets of the sea.

Aunt Molly disappeared below. Sylvia liked to think she was there, and then to forget all about her. There was no music like Uncle Edward’s voice giving his quiet orders. His words were no more personal than the wind, or the taste of salt on Sylvia’s lips. Her conscience was without a flaw. There was no problem on her mind more severe than how not to make a clumsy or uncalled for movement.

A mother kittiwake, very dapper and self-assured, with her brood of fine young kittiwakes spread out in a fan behind her, swam within a few yards of the Miranda. The kittiwakes, intent upon the unflurried business of their first long swim, were unaware of their large neighbour, or perhaps they simply thought her another unobtrusive kittiwake learning her business upon the easy sea.

Miranda’s motion was smoother than flight, her filled sails leaned low to the water, till Sylvia felt as if the little friendly waves were part of her own being.

Sometimes, but not often, Sylvia’s eyes met Edward’s and they smiled at each other, a grave smile, because they both felt as if they were carrying in a goblet something precious, that might spill if their hands shook or they were careless with it.

Sylvia felt relieved as the slow light left the sky and darkness moved like a weight between them. Their hushed voices came softly through the light air, like the voices of disembodied spirits.

“You’d better take it in turn, to come down to supper, or I’ll hand Edward’s up,” Aunt Molly’s voice told them. “It’s going on for ten o’clock, and I suppose, Edward, you’ll put in somewhere soon.”

“There’s a full moon,” Edward answered rather sharply; “give me something on a plate, the breeze is too good to lose. I’m making for Fowey. I’m not hungry—anything will do. We’ll get in by midnight.”

“Well you can’t keep the child up till then,” Aunt Molly said rather crossly. “She’s travelled half across England already. Now, Sylvia, come down and have your supper and then you can go to bed when you like.” Aunt Molly actually spoke as if Sylvia could want to go to bed. Her voice was not sharp, but it was determined. She had cooked a good supper and she meant to have it eaten in a reasonable manner, uninfluenced by moonlight. Sylvia, every nerve in acute resistance, went down and ate it. Beautifully grilled fresh herrings and brisk golden potatoes vanished like magic. No-one made better coffee than Aunt Molly, even in Vienna. It tasted exactly as it smelt, and was a clear shining brown with never a hint of grey. It was no use pretending, even against her will, that Sylvia did not enjoy her supper. Aunt Molly was as kind as usual. She was an effortless person, and like the mother kittiwake her case came from the perfection of her skill. Kettles and frying pans leapt to meet her. Taps always turned for her. Hot water ran like magic, when and where Aunt Molly wanted it to run. Tin openers sliced their way with exquisite celerity round unjagged tops of tins. People too found life uncomplicated and with no pitfalls in Aunt Molly’s presence. They did not have to get cross about politics or religion, and if subjects arose that might become personally painful, Aunt Molly suddenly showed you a reassuring exit.

But to-night something difficult and even painful had got into the little salon, and there seemed no way out of it. Aunt Molly, who had never appeared to have wants that interfered in any way with other people’s freedom, now very definitely wanted Sylvia, after she’d helped washing up, to go to bed. She didn’t even seem to like Sylvia going on deck to fetch down Uncle Edward’s empty plate. He had eaten everything sent up to him after all. “You’ll come right up again, won’t you?” he had asked Sylvia. “It’s going to be—it is a glorious run into Fowey! There’s a granite church by the harbour, with a tower that springs out of it—hundreds and hundreds of years old—you’d think the whole thing—cliff and tower and town rising out of the sea—came from a fairy tale.”

“I—I think I’d like to go on deck again,” Sylvia timidly suggested to this new Aunt Molly. “There’s a wonderful full moon, aren’t you coming too?”

“Same old moon,” Aunt Molly said rather morosely. “No, I shan’t come up. When you do come down, Sylvia, you’re to share the state room with me. Uncle Edward is sleeping on the lounge here in the salon. I’ll make up a bed for him—or he may go ashore.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia. “But I thought——!” And then she wished she hadn’t spoken, for Aunt Molly gave her a queer look and said nothing. Why wasn’t Uncle Edward as usual sharing the state room with Aunt Molly? And what had gone wrong with looking at people?

Sylvia wanted so terribly to join Uncle Edward on deck that she felt she would die if Aunt Molly tried to stop her; and yet when Aunt Molly—beyond that one strange look—didn’t try to stop her, she felt a new kind of pain that got into the way of her sense of release.

A moment later, she was surrounded by the silvery darkness; and the beauty of the night opened to let her in. Uncle Edward’s hand touched hers; he said, “Sit here,” in a queer hushed voice. The shadowy sail rose above their heads, a heron flying in from the sea with wings just darker than the darkness flew close past them. A silver stream of light poured across the sea, from the shore’s edge to the horizon. The light touched each ripple it fell on, stilling it into immobility. “I can’t—I simply can’t go down to bed!” Sylvia said to herself. “I must stay up here in this lovely light with Uncle Edward and the sea.”

“Uncle Edward, may I stay till we get into Fowey?” she found herself asking.

“You must stay up here!” Uncle Edward said with passionate firmness. Happiness rose like a wave in Sylvia’s heart, but now it was a menaced thing. She no longer felt as if she were part of the calm, untroubled seas, and Uncle Edward the single sharer of a rapturous star. She could not forget the trouble in Aunt Molly’s eyes, yet if she went down to Aunt Molly, the moon might just as well go down too; and both she and Uncle Edward would be left in darkness.

Suddenly she knew what had happened. If the night had been remorselessly wet, and the air had cut like a knife, and nothing was left but danger and discomfort, she would have been just as happy if Uncle Edward was with her. It was Edward who made the world and all that was in it tingle in her blood. He was all the power and glory of the world and she was all of his. It was a tremendous—an awe-inspiring discovery—and Sylvia was glad of the darkness in which to hide it. Probably, she thought, Uncle Edward didn’t know, and she would never tell him.

The wind had freshened. Miranda flew on her way. Sometimes the spray flung itself out of a small limpid wave’s back against Sylvia’s face, with a sharp cold splash. But she liked the feeling. It made her nerves stronger to hide her secret. Edward’s mind and hands were with Miranda, leading her swiftly and securely across the short abrupt movements of the rising sea, but his blood was with Sylvia. Her presence rested warm against his heart.

Aunt Molly’s voice sounded with terrible distinctness close to Sylvia’s ear.

“I think you should come down now and go to bed, it’s past midnight.”

“Why can’t you leave the child where she is, she’s doing no harm!” Edward exclaimed with startling bitterness.

There was a silence that seemed to check the little laughing sounds of the water against the boat’s side. Then Aunt Molly said with inflexible steadiness,

“I don’t think Sylvia is doing any harm, Edward; but I do think she should come downstairs and go to bed. She has had quite enough of this—moonlight!”

Sylvia went downstairs to bed. Aunt Molly said no more to her; but her silence spoke. The way she put on her bedroom slippers and handed Sylvia an extra piece of soap were eloquent. Her kind, wise eyes met Sylvia’s in a new way, and made Sylvia wish that she wasn’t quite so grown up. She knew now why Aunt Molly was upset and why Uncle Edward had been upset, too.

If you are having an exquisite experience—if another human being is pouring into you the deepest power of beauty and delight, and you are interrupted by however kind a person, you feel mortally injured. No-one can recall eternity into the brittle hands of time. “The stately pleasure dome of ice,” melts quickly into a puddle. The spell between Edward and Sylvia was broken—nor had it helped Aunt Molly to break it. On the contrary, Sylvia thought, Aunt Molly looked as if breaking it had done her an irrevocable harm. She was not the same Aunt Molly any more.

Sylvia had never wanted anything in the world so much as to sail on through the silvery darkness, silent with rapture—into the little harbour of Fowey. She had longed to see the granite tower rise from the sea-city’s edge close to the deep water, where they could drop anchor and sleep in peace; and now she could not share in sailing Miranda to her anchorage, nor was there any peace for them to sleep in.

However, long before Miranda reached Fowey, Sylvia, who was a very healthy child, had fallen fast asleep. Only Aunt Molly lay awake staring into the darkness, and on deck Uncle Edward, cold with anger and frustration, sailed Miranda as if there was no beauty left in sky or sea.

When Sylvia woke she thought, “This is my holiday—everything else must be a nightmare. This pain I feel is just what you wake up with after a bad dinner—it can’t be real!” But she put on reality with her clothes and shared it with Aunt Molly at the breakfast table.

Aunt Molly, when their state room was in order, went on shore to market; and Sylvia, against every wish of her heart, went with her. It is not easy to do the opposite of what another person thinks right when you yourself are not quite sure that it is not wrong; and if you are still a child it is nearly impossible. Yet it was not as a happy obedient child that Sylvia went ashore with Aunt Molly, but as a rebellious sinner—a rebellious and frustrated sinner—who hasn’t had the strength of mind to fight for his heart’s desire.

Fowey, that enchanting, ridiculous, perpendicular flight of houses leaping down a cliff to the sea’s edge, had lost its fantastic charm.

It was just another place where Uncle Edward wasn’t.

They met for lunch at a small perched restaurant, overlooking town and sea.

Usually these natural separations and reunions, with treasures bought and experiences unshared, were delightful and graphic hours. No-one could make drama out of nothing as cleverly as Uncle Edward could make it, and no-one could give the experiences of another a more generous welcome than Aunt Molly; but to-day there was almost no conversation at all.

Edward looked as if someone had pulled a tight mask over his face and shut out all its light and laughter; and Aunt Molly, though she saw that everybody had enough to eat, saw nothing else.

They sailed with the tide, and though Uncle Edward and Sylvia were together on deck all the afternoon, the magic had withdrawn.

The thorny, half choked joy between them found no natural vent. Yet slowly, by an unseen alchemy, the pain—not so much their own as Aunt Molly’s—lessened. They began to believe that one day they might enjoy themselves again. Then it was tea-time and the very cups and saucers ranged themselves against them. The inanimate was obviously on the side of Aunt Molly. Every lump of sugar had an aggressive look; and it was agonizing to eat their favourite buns and drink kindly remembered cream.

Aunt Molly sat on deck after tea; but the wind constantly shifted and Aunt Molly had to shift with it. She was in constant difficulties with the changing sails and Uncle Edward spoke rather sharply to get her out of the way. Aunt Molly, who was sewing, disliked constant movement, and even more disliked being spoken to sharply, so that everything felt upset, and everybody seemed to be getting in the way of everybody else.

Finally Aunt Molly went down below and stayed there, though there was a sunset so extraordinarily beautiful that it might have been used as a drop curtain for the Day of Judgment.

Miranda nosed her way over the bar and into an estuary, between wooded banks, where foxgloves grew as high as a tall man’s head and the air tasted of honeysuckle. When they had anchored Aunt Molly came up on deck, carrying a small suitcase, her eyes impervious to foxgloves. She said very quietly to Edward,

“I am going ashore here, Edward—this time for good. I’ve had enough of it,” then she turned to Sylvia. “Sylvia,” she said, “I want you to come with me. I am very sorry to spoil your weekend like this, but when you are older, you will understand why I have had to do it. We will telephone your parents, and you can spend the rest of your holiday with them.”

“But I can’t,” Sylvia heard herself saying in a strange, strained voice. “I can’t—just leave Uncle Edward like this. I really can’t, Aunt Molly!”

Uncle Edward spoke then, in a voice Sylvia had never heard him use before, heavy with disenchantment and the churned up deposits of a bad conscience.

“Certainly go for good if you wish to, Molly. I can’t think of anything I should like better; but try to remember that you are speaking to—and before—a child! A good child, who is having a treat we both promised her. If you go—she stays! You can put what construction you like on her staying. I am certain her parents will understand and approve of my keeping her. Don’t be frightened, Sylvia! You will have to learn sooner or later that married people often disagree!”

Aunt Molly said nothing at all. She looked once more at Sylvia with kind, tired eyes. Her lips moved as if she were going to speak; but she thought better of it and made instead a queer little gesture, as if she were beckoning to a child to follow her out of some sudden physical danger. But the only danger that Sylvia could recognize at the moment was the shocking danger of leaving Uncle Edward alone.

Aunt Molly capably descended the tiny ladder into the dinghy and rowed herself ashore.

Uncle Edward did nothing to help her. He sat with his back to her looking out to sea. When Aunt Molly got ashore, she found a sailor and sent him back with the dinghy. Sylvia waved to her and Aunt Molly, pausing at the edge of the jetty, waved back. Sylvia felt desperately unhappy but not quite so unhappy as she would have felt if she had left Uncle Edward.

What worried her most was whether she would be able to cook properly for him and keep the kitchenette and salon as they should be kept. How dreadful if Uncle Edward were to find her wholly inadequate! Hadn’t she better start cleaning at once, although everything looked perfect, so as not to be taken by surprise?

As soon as Aunt Molly had sent back the dinghy, Uncle Edward raised anchor and put out to sea. There was a strong breeze blowing, and sailing Miranda into its teeth was no light matter. It took all the strength and emergency wits which Edward possessed. It sweated all the anger out of him, so that at sunset when the wind fell, his heart sang like a boy’s. Nothing troubled him any more, even his deep self pity receded. He was a released school boy instead of a deserted husband. No-one could tell him what he ought to do any more, nor even expect him to do it, without telling. Molly had reached the age of suspicion, jealousy, absurd resentments and exactions. She was without power or glory. It was really better for her to go and sulk ashore for a bit. She’d get over it, as she’d got over his brief enchantments for other women. This child, “half angel and half bird”, was perfectly safe under his protection. The sense of his own cock-sure nobility filled him with eager vigour. He would respect Sylvia’s innocence with all the strength of a Galahad.

Edward knew that he was attractive to women. He was always chivalrous in his dealings with them, provided they gave him complete freedom and did not expect—when his ardour had begun to cool—anything beyond polite oblivion. But he had never loved so young a girl before; it was as if he guarded his own childhood in the reverence and tenderness he felt for Sylvia. For years she had been schooled in his ways and led along the secret paths of his imagination and now suddenly she had blossomed into a being containing all that he had given her, and yet spontaneously dowered with gifts he had never even foreseen. He could keep his head, he told himself, and control his feelings, but could she control hers? She did not even know what her feelings were, and if she did know would she feel ashamed?

At present the sea required all their skill, so that neither of them had a faculty unused or a sense unstimulated. They were beyond good and evil; drunk with air and light; released alike from memory or anticipation while Miranda made her way into well-earned security. They dropped anchor off shore in a sheltered cove, and both her skipper and his mate plunged into sleep.

It was not till Sylvia woke next morning that she became aware of something wrong. The little state room still shone spotlessly clean and fresh—as Aunt Molly had left it—but Aunt Molly had left it. That was what was wrong with it. No amount of freedom and beauty, not even the sweet heady joy of hearing Uncle Edward preparing breakfast for them both next door could do away with this dire sense of loss. There was, however, no sign of any sense of loss in Edward. The eyes that met hers across the breakfast table danced with joy. Bacon and scrambled eggs leaping straight from the pan tasted as they had never tasted before.

Edward had not minded cooking them, nor did he rebuke Sylvia for having overslept herself.

Nothing she could do—not even keeping him waiting—could be wrong. His manner to her turned her into a queen. On deck, under his easy and concise orders, Sylvia became an extension of his mind and power; but hard at the core of her heart burned her sense of loss.

When Uncle Edward had set Miranda skimming on her way, he drew out his pouch, and having filled and lit the first perfect pipe of the day, he gave Sylvia the opportunity she was waiting for. She forced out the question which was slowly invading her whole consciousness.

“What made Aunt Molly leave us, Uncle Edward?”

The sea was calm, Edward’s eyes were looking for a wind, and he took his time before they turned back to the grave beauty of the waiting child.

“It’s this way,” he said slowly, trying to reassure her with his intimate, intoxicating gaze, between the puffs of his now glowing pipe. “Love between a man and a woman is an uncertain quantity. You can love a woman, and yet not be in love with her. Loving a wife is an obligation and it’s within a man’s power—but being in love with her is not. Love comes into your being like a tidal wave. It simply happens to you. Sometimes it withdraws like a wave—till there isn’t such a thing as a pool left—and every bit of your heart is as dry as sea weed beyond the wave’s reach.

“Unfortunately it isn’t always the same person that makes your heart come alive again. You’re, as it were, at the mercy of the elements.

“You’ve seen your Aunt Molly and me so often that perhaps you’ve taken for granted you knew all about us, and that everything had been settled for us long ago at the altar—and stayed settled—as I believe it honestly has for your father and mother.

“There are such marriages, but believe me, darling, they’re rare! Ours—Molly’s and mine—is the more usual sort. We rub along and have flares up.

“I am not a person who has ever been settled; you might call me a natural nomad. I have a perpetual hankering for the camel’s bell, and for whatever happens to be on the other side of a hill. I do my best to be stable—children, perhaps, would have settled me—but every now and then the elements rush in and get the better of me!”

“But where,” Sylvia silently asked herself, “does Aunt Molly come into all this? She isn’t at all like a wave—nor am I really.” Perhaps Uncle Edward read her unspoken thoughts for he let his pipe grow cold.

“Well,” he demanded a little irritably. “Why are you so grim about it? Have we done anything you think wrong? We sailed together just as we planned. Your parents consented to your coming?” It is very easy to silence a child; but it is extremely difficult to fool one. Sylvia was not fooled.

“I still don’t know,” she said at last, her voice on the edge of shaking, “quite why Aunt Molly left us. What did she think was wrong, Uncle Edward—that’s what’s puzzling me?”

“Simply that I find you enchanting!” Uncle Edward said gently, “and can’t—at this stage of the game, be enchanted by her! I don’t think it’s wrong for me to be enchanted. I am not going to do anything about it. I simply feel as if you were the light on a wave, while every moment here alone together releases and revives me. If this is wrong I am content to pay for it. I shan’t let you pay a penny and I’ll deliver you back to your parents safe and sound. It’s in the bond and unlike Shylock—I’d give a pound of my flesh quite willingly—to keep it!”

Sylvia had an uncomfortable feeling that there was something a little unfair about Shylock and the pound of flesh, she couldn’t quite remember what, but she had never thought that anybody came quite well out of the Merchant of Venice. Two large tears hung on her eyelashes. Who was Portia—she or Aunt Molly? And had Portia really carried out her lovely speech about mercy—when it came to Shylock?

“Darling,” Uncle Edward said in the tenderest voice she’d ever heard him use, “must you cry? I’ve got a most lovely plan in my mind if you like being with me, and I think you do.”

“Oh, I do!” Sylvia wholeheartedly exclaimed, glad that there was one thing of which she could feel perfectly sure. “It’s heaven to be with you and Miranda! I like it terribly!”

“Well, then, why not stay two more days? We’ll reach Torquay to-night and I race Miranda to-morrow. I’ll take you back the day after instead of to-night. Would your school mistress be furiously angry if you turned up two days late?”

“It’s the kind of thing they think fearfully wrong when you’re at school,” Sylvia explained. “Everyone would be in a frightful wax. Actually I’ve got my school cert. They couldn’t take that away from me!”

She watched Uncle Edward’s face, so young-looking, so keen, so full of his intense and active dreams. She thought what utter bliss it would be to race with him and Miranda. School shrank and faded before this living joy. What harm could it do? Aunt Molly wouldn’t mind more—because she wasn’t there to mind. It was not as if Aunt Molly had wanted to race Miranda either; on the contrary, she disliked racing, she wouldn’t even watch Miranda and Uncle Edward racing. Besides if Sylvia was really enchanting to Uncle Edward, must she not enchant? And if she did not do what Uncle Edward wanted would he still feel that she was like light on a wave?

It was the kind of question that Aunt Molly might have answered easily had she been there. She would have known if the price for this felicity might not prove too high. Joy can be beyond one’s means, and at sixteen no one is quite sure of her spiritual income. Sylvia could not refuse; but some instinct made her say hesitatingly,

“Could we telephone Mummy and Daddy first—to make sure?”

“Have you their telephone number?” Uncle Edward asked a little coldly. “I haven’t. Your mother gave it to Molly. They’re spending their weekend with the Clarkes, aren’t they?”

“I know where the Clarkes live,” Sylvia inadequately offered, “but I didn’t ask about their telephone—I somehow thought——”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Uncle Edward said much more pleasantly. “A wire will do just as well—and we can get an answer at Torquay, after the race. I’ll go ashore now and be back in half an hour. We mustn’t waste this breeze. You can just make everything shipshape and I’ll pick up some more food on my way back. I’m quite sure your parents will understand perfectly. They’ll want you to have the fun!”

They would want her to have fun, Sylvia thought as she washed the breakfast things, but would they want her to have quite so much fun? This miracle of fascination being thrown in seemed to alter the equation.

Uncle Edward would certainly not tell them what had really happened. He would not say he was in love with her; and none of them knew—not even Uncle Edward—that long ago before she was thirteen, she had been in love with Uncle Edward; indeed, she could not imagine being anything else. She loved Aunt Molly, too, but that hadn’t prevented anything, it had only made her feel sorry.

When Uncle Edward came back everything was in perfect order, and Sylvia was sitting on deck in shorts and a yellow sweater, the colour of her hair.

The wind was fresh, and they put out to sea against the edge of danger. The waves ran at Miranda’s heels, slid up her side with a cold hiss, and let her go again. They raced on till late in the afternoon without hunger; the situation with all its problems was lost in horizon blue. They fed on air and on each other’s company. They talked in snatches about the race, about Miranda and her capacities, and what they would do when they reached Torquay. Sylvia had never raced before and Edward explained his tactics to her and showed her exactly what he wanted her to do, should Miranda or the sea require it.

Sylvia drank in his instructions as if they were part of the sunny air. They did not reach Torquay till close on midnight, but there was only a thin darkness through which the red and yellow lights of many other yachts shone with misty splendour.

The lights on the bay’s dark floor lifted and tilted towards their fellow lights, the stars. The town was hidden. It was easy to believe there was no earth and that Miranda hung free between sea and sky.

Sylvia knew that Edward had moved nearer to her before his hands touched her; and with a little contented sigh she leaned her head against his heart. The short night slipped from them like a fragment of eternity—it had no beginning and no sudden end. Only as the light pushed the cliffs into the air, and the pale houses between them became visible, Uncle Edward let her slip out of his arms. Houses have families in them, Sylvia thought, fathers and mothers and children.

“I ought to have sent you to bed,” Uncle Edward said with a touch of remorse. “Go—and get a sleep now before breakfast. I’ll wake you when the time comes.”

Sylvia went down to the little state room. She felt she was heavy eyed and plain; and very heavy hearted; but when she woke the sun was golden, the sky was blue and small waves slapped against Miranda’s side, inviting her to try her skill against them. Uncle Edward went ashore in the best of spirits, to make his last arrangements for the race and find out all the latest instructions. He came back just like the usual Uncle Edward—at his best and freest—brimming over with facts and excitement—a happy boy with a boat; and Sylvia was in his boat and should have been happy, too. But she could not forget those strange hours of darkness and deep communion which might never have taken place.

The course was difficult, and there was not so much sea-room as Edward liked for manoeuvring, but he knew what he could do with Miranda, under favourable and unfavourable conditions. A good stiff off shore breeze was blowing. Edward crowded sail on Miranda with reckless daring, and taking every inch of canvas she could carry, she ran for all she was worth. Edward might have been a greyhound coursing a hare, so swiftly he matched his paces to the wind’s changing speed. His eager voice rang through the singing air and Sylvia strained every nerve to meet it. Perhaps Uncle Edward put too much canvas on Miranda, perhaps Sylvia was a shade less precise and admirable in her swift obedience to his wishes than the day before—but a steadier, less enterprising yacht won the race. Uncle Edward came in second; and he wouldn’t believe it. He lost his head and his temper. He behaved as Uncle Edward at his worst often behaved, like a very spoilt and wilful child.

It was agony to Sylvia to see Edward behave so badly. It did not make her feel as if she loved him any less, but it made her feel as if the world had come to pieces in her hands.

Yesterday she had ruled Edward’s world and it had behaved exactly as she wanted it to behave—but to-day she was an unsuccessful marionette; and the earth was nothing but a dirty hot uncomfortable place, full of insults and rebuffs.

Uncle Edward, distracted and turbulent, refused to accept the judge’s decision and shouted that he meant to appeal.

And what was it all about, Sylvia asked herself, what did the racing matter? They had sailed Miranda on a gorgeous summer sea—she had been beautifully handled and had responded beautifully. She came in second out of twenty yachts, and the two who had sailed on her were lovers. Would not these facts alone make any day glorious? There was no more reason, Sylvia thought to herself, for Uncle Edward to be cross to-day than to have been cross yesterday. There was too great a gulf between the things Uncle Edward wanted to have happen and the things that did happen; and his dismay at any check to his will was so great that he could never find a bridge to cross it. Before they returned to Miranda a fresh outrage shook Edward’s stability.

He had not expected, nor had Sylvia expected, to find her parents close to the harbour’s edge.

Sylvia’s parents both looked very odd indeed, so odd that Sylvia stopped short for a moment, uncertain if they weren’t perhaps somebody else’s parents. Her mother looked incredibly older and her father looked like Uncle Edward, furiously angry. Sylvia could not remember ever having seen her father angry before, whereas she had often seen Uncle Edward angry, and trembled under it. She trembled now but not in the same way. When Uncle Edward was angry it was a dramatic spectacle and he meant somebody else to suffer for it; but Sylvia was dimly conscious that the person who suffered most under her father’s unspectacular anger was her father himself; all he said now was,

“Edward, I want to talk to you and I’d rather talk to you alone.”

They went off together in a jerky fashion as if they had been pushed off; and neither of them looked at Sylvia before they went.

This left Sylvia and her queerly changed mother face to face. Her mother’s lips trembled but she didn’t say anything. She simply looked at Sylvia as if her eyes were part of Sylvia’s face.

“Mummy,” Sylvia began uncertainly. “Why, Mummy—what’s the matter?”

Her mother ignored the question. She took Sylvia in her arms and kissed her; then she said in almost her natural voice,

“Well, I suppose we’ll have to get tea at our hotel. It isn’t far. Molly knew about the race. She thought you might be here, but we weren’t sure. We weren’t sure about anything.”

“But didn’t you get Uncle Edward’s wire?” Sylvia demanded as they turned and walked arm in arm away from the sea.

“No,” said her mother, “did he send one? But why didn’t he telephone—then we could have——”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he sent one,” Sylvia declared, suddenly feeling a little less sure. “Only Aunt Molly had your telephone number so we could only wire! He thought—we thought—it was only two days more—if I went back to school to-morrow instead of yesterday—then we could race Miranda together. It was wonderful, Mummy—it was really—and we nearly won.”

“You very nearly capsized,” her mother said sternly. “I can assure you, it wasn’t fun to watch. On the top of everything else! What did you suppose Miss Bretherton could think? They took flashlight photographs of all the yachtsmen—and they’re sure to be in the papers to-morrow!”

“I thought she’d be in an awful wax at my being so late for school, but I thought you’d make it all right somehow.” Sylvia murmured, “I don’t see that the photographs can matter. She likes photographs in newspapers; she’s always trying to get them taken of the school when we have sports. After all, Mummy, I’ve known girls late before.”

“Not in quite the same way, or for such—such unfortunate reasons,” her mother said in an ominous voice.

They had reached the hotel by now, and her mother took her straight upstairs to a private sitting room. This was such an unheard of extravagance that Sylvia realized something or other must be awfully wrong. Besides, when mothers as easy and comfortable as her own use words like “unfortunate” they mean something very unpleasant indeed.

Mrs. Elliot took off her hat. As she was still under forty she very seldom wore one, so that this in itself was a symbolic and menacing action.

“You see,” she said, sitting down on a small stiff sofa, after a long, uncomfortable pause, “Aunt Molly of course only told us; but Miss Bretherton has a sister living at Fowey. She saw you sail alone with Uncle Edward from Fowey, and met Aunt Molly at the station looking very queer, so she thought something had happened and telephoned her sister. Miss Bretherton has asked us not to send you back.”

Sylvia stared into her mother’s large, unhappy eyes with an astonishment as great as her horror.

“I don’t see the sense of it,” she said slowly. “I’m only two days late!”

“You were alone with Uncle Edward—and—and Aunt Molly had left him. She had quite definitely—and I think very wrongly—left you both alone together.”

“Yes, I know,” Sylvia admitted. “I’m terribly sorry about that, Mummy, I don’t know why Aunt Molly did go! At least perhaps I do know now—but I didn’t then! She seemed to think I ought to go with her—but I couldn’t—I had one more free day and night—and Uncle Edward didn’t want me to go—oh, Mummy!”

Her mother opened her arms to her, but Sylvia remembering Uncle Edward’s arms, drew back.

“No,” she said, “not yet. I can’t! I do know now I ought to have gone with Aunt Molly but I—I just didn’t then!”

“I believe that,” her mother said eagerly. “Darling, I believe everything! You see, I know Edward, but nobody else will—not even your father—at least he’ll always think Edward infamous for taking you! You see, after all Edward is his best friend—and Aunt Molly is mine—and it’s all so mixed up!

“I didn’t want you to know before, but Aunt Molly threatened him with a divorce quite lately—about another woman. There always have been other women! Edward didn’t want one—so she forgave him again—if you can call it forgiveness—and they were taking this trip as a sort of reconciliation. They’d specially asked to have you in order to make it easier. You see, they’re both of them most awfully fond of you!”

“It would have been quite all right if you’d told me,” Sylvia said stiffly; “after all I’m not a child.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time. They looked very much alike, and it may be that they were feeling very much alike. At last Sylvia said,

“Mummy, what is father doing with Uncle Edward? You said he wouldn’t believe that Uncle Edward meant no harm. Will he quarrel with him so that none of us can be friends any more?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Elliot admitted. “I’m afraid he must. He won’t think you’ve done anything at all dreadful, though of course you should have left with Aunt Molly—but he’ll never forgive Edward. I don’t myself see that he can.”

Sylvia sighed, as if she found her heart was weaker than the world’s estimate—which she must accept—and could not share. She had to think of Aunt Molly; not only of Aunt Molly as her mother thought of her, or as Aunt Molly thought of herself, but as Uncle Edward thought of her—a person once utterly loved and lovely—and now inimical to all his dreams. It seemed to Sylvia rather ruthless to give up being friends all round simply because Aunt Molly—under whatever provocation—had walked off a boat.

She said after a long pause,

“You don’t feel like that, do you—so dreadfully unforgiving?”

Her mother looked past her out of the window with unseeing eyes. “I suppose he can’t help it!” she said, half to herself. “It’s such a temptation. He’s so charming! But after all it’s happened—it’s nearly happened twice!” Her mother’s eyes of blue candour, exactly like her own, met Sylvia’s.

“What’s nearly happened twice, Mummy?” Sylvia demanded.

Her mother drew a deep breath. “It was my fault, the first time,” she explained. “I was so terribly happy with your father—and Edward, well he was even more fascinating young than he is now—and less—well less incredible. I meant just to be friends with your father’s best friend—but I went too far—one always does with Edward—and hurt your father and myself very much! He forgave both of us—and I quite got over it—he knew—your father I mean—that the feeling I had for Edward wasn’t real. Like foam on a wave. It isn’t the wave itself! Yet it looks lovely dancing in the air! Your father is a very generous man, he forgave us both—but this time—with you—he can’t forgive.”

Sylvia gave a little moan of relief. She hadn’t been a little fool after all—a gullible child taken in by a middle-aged rake—even a person as wise and sensible as her mother could find Edward too fascinating. Gratitude and relief filled her heart to the brim.

“You felt just the same—I’m so glad, Mummy!” she unexpectedly murmured.

“Of course there was Molly,” her mother went on with pitiless sincerity, building up her daughter’s courage by tearing down her own dignity; “that ought to have stopped me, if nothing else did—I don’t know why—but it didn’t. And I loved your father, all the time I was—I suppose, crucifying him with my vanity. It was Edward really who knew better than to go on with it. That’s why I knew you were all right. Edward wouldn’t be quite base—it isn’t in him. I quite got over feeling fascinated, and Molly has been and is our best friend all these years. She’d never let anybody down. I daresay you’ll feel like that now—after this!”

“You’ll have to give her up!” Sylvia relentlessly reminded her.

“That doesn’t matter,” her mother said quickly. “Nothing matters but you. Aunt Molly will understand that—she’s so fond of you. We’ll all get over Uncle Edward now.”

Sylvia took this remark in silence, then she said, “Before I agree to give up Uncle Edward—really and truly to give him up—I must see Aunt Molly. I must see her now, before Daddy comes back. Where is she?”

Her mother looked alarmed. “Oh my dear!” she pleaded. “How can you go and see her! She wouldn’t like it! She’s in the hotel opposite; but she’s going away to-night. She only came, just to make sure—you were—we found you here! You see it was her idea that you mightn’t go back to school—but would be racing in Miranda. I was just going to send a note over to say we’ve found you. Your father wouldn’t a bit like your going to see her!”

“That’s why I must go now,” Sylvia said with decision. “He’d try to stop me—and I can’t be stopped! I must see her. It’s not Uncle Edward now, it’s her!”

Her mother thought this over in silence. Perhaps she too had gone through this last ordeal and knew its value, for she said at last, “Well, if it will help you, Darling, I suppose you must. Shall I come too?”

Sylvia shook her head. She longed for the support of her mother’s presence, but she knew this particular thing must be done without support. She must separate herself—as love had separated her already from her family—and act alone. She had belonged to her parents all her life as only a single child can belong to parents; then for a few brief hours she had seemed to belong wholly to Uncle Edward. Now she belonged—once and for all—to herself.

She crossed the road, and a clerk at a desk between tall potted palms directed her to Aunt Molly’s room. It was a very small hotel bedroom, a cross between a nun’s cell and a workhouse cubicle. Sylvia thought it was the sort of room you might say your prayers in if you had a God you didn’t like.

There was only one small hard chair by the window, and Aunt Molly sat in it, stopping a ladder in a nylon stocking.

She stared at Sylvia in a curious, blind way as if she had never seen her before, and said: “What is it you want?”

Sylvia glanced at the edge of the bed, but it was too far off, so she sat on the floor in front of Aunt Molly instead. She still liked sitting on floors, and it seemed in a queer way to bridge the gulf between her and Aunt Molly. Aunt Molly said in a much gentler voice, “I’m sorry there isn’t another chair—but you know what single rooms in potty hotels are like?”

Sylvia remembered that although Uncle Edward was very rich, Aunt Molly had very little money of her own, and probably wouldn’t—if she left him—take any from Uncle Edward. So she would have to live in potty little hotel bedrooms for the rest of her life.

“I came to tell you,” Sylvia began, in a voice that ran away from her, and broke in the middle of its flight, “that I’m very sorry about what happened on the Miranda—I ought to have got off with you. I know why now—but I didn’t then.”

“That was what I told your mother,” Aunt Molly said, wetting the foot of her ladder with a licked finger-tip. “I knew that you didn’t understand. I said to myself, ‘If she’d understood she wouldn’t have waved.’ I ought to have explained better but I was never much good at explanations. I don’t really see the sense of them usually—either people see things for themselves or they don’t. Your father is very angry with me—he thinks I ought to have stayed. I daresay I ought, but I felt like that poor inadequate Hagar in the desert, who left Ishmael to die of thirst. ‘Let me not see the death of the child!’ It’s a cowardly attitude, but there’s this to be said for me—Edward would have behaved much worse if I’d stayed. Leaving him alone with you put him on his honour; after all, Edward has his honour—such as it is!”

“But of course he has honour, Aunt Molly!” Sylvia said reproachfully. “He behaved beautifully. It’s not his fault if I liked him too much. I mean—how can people help being fascinating?”

“They can help it all right,” Aunt Molly said grimly, “if they have any other business and attend to it properly. Fascination should be on the side—but it’s Edward’s main dish. But you’ll get over Edward—it’s your father I’m sorriest for! They were capital friends. Men of his age don’t make new ones.”

“Daddy has mother—and he has me,” Sylvia said in a low firm voice, “but what has Edward got? Where do you think he is now, Aunt Molly, if Daddy has finished quarrelling with him?”

Aunt Molly laid down her nylon. “If you really want to know,” she said at last, “and since Edward doesn’t know any other sympathetic women in Torquay, he’ll probably be sitting in some pub—fascinating a bar-maid!”

If she had meant to shock Sylvia she was not disappointed; but she hadn’t meant to shock her in the way in which Sylvia was shocked. Colour rushed over the child’s white cheeks and her blue eyes flashed fire.

“You see, Aunt Molly,” Sylvia said accusingly, “how dreadful it is to leave Uncle Edward alone! He oughtn’t to have to rely on bar-maids!”

“I consider bar-maids,” Aunt Molly replied tersely, “a very high type of human being—cheerful, courageous, and hard-working girls, accustomed to making the best of men instead of the worst. Besides, it’s much more fun for Edward to seduce a bar-maid whom he’s fascinated than to come home to a wife—whom he’s already seduced—and can’t fascinate! You simply don’t know our Edward!”

Sylvia shook her head. She might not know Aunt Molly’s Edward. She knew her own, and it was for him that she was responsible. She spoke with grave certainty.

“No—he wouldn’t really like bar-maids. Not for long anyway. He might feel he had to fascinate one, just to keep up his courage. You see, Aunt Molly, Uncle Edward needs to be a success! I saw that over the race—he felt he had to win! It’s a pity that he feels that way but it can’t be helped. He simply mustn’t be left to bar-maids!”

“Then what do you propose to do about it?” Aunt Molly asked. “I’m finished with him.”

“If you won’t go back to him, I must,” Sylvia said quietly. “I’ve been thinking it over. I’m quite willing to do what everyone thinks is right and not see Uncle Edward again. I’ll promise and keep it. But only if you’ll look after him and stay with him yourself, Aunt Molly—always! Somebody must. Somebody who won’t let him down—so I think it had better be either you or me. Other women might get tired of being nice to him. After all he is Uncle Edward isn’t he? And we—we love him? I don’t see that you can stop loving people because they have to behave the way they are—do you?”

For a long time Aunt Molly said nothing at all. She just sat there staring over Sylvia’s head, at a rose the size of a cabbage on the wallpaper. Then she got up slowly, and said, “All right, child. I’ll go and find him.” And Sylvia got up from the floor, dusted her knees, and went back to tea with her parents.

Madame Lambertin drew a slim, shining compact out of a daintily equipped bag, and with a few deft touches made up her unalluring features. Her hard, shrewd, heavily lined and rather tragic face now looked as attractive as any woman’s of fifty, who had never been a beauty, could expect to look.

Her life lay about her in ruins; but Madame Lambertin had achieved many of those minor victories which are still left to a woman of courage and intelligence, after the worst has happened to her. She did everything she was capable of doing well; and she enjoyed her food.

She replaced her compact without spilling a grain of powder and cast a familiar, slightly derisive glance at her two companions.

The three ladies were sitting at a table in one of the best less expensive restaurants in Paris.

The quality of the food about to be cooked was exposed to the eye of the beholder, as were the methods of cooking it; and both were never less than spectacularly appetising.

On the fourth side of the low-ceilinged, shining room, stood the chef, a bridal vision in spotless white; while in front of him rotated a spit upon which a golden brown chicken and an infantile pig effortlessly circled.

The implements of his art were spread within his reach, and in his hand he held a silvery secateur of incredible sharpness with which he sliced chickens from end to end in equal parts. “Quels drôles de gens!” he murmured to his assistant, as he glanced across the room at Madame Lambertin and her two companions.

The mountain of flesh who sat between the two elderly ladies had long glossy black curls falling over her shoulders, and was perhaps more than twenty years younger than either of her companions.

She had once been the Beauty of the Quarter. Everyone had known “Lili la Belle”; and everyone still knew Lili—but they knew her now as a monster.

“I find myself asking,” the chef murmured, “which of them pays for her? Or is it one of those strange cases in which both contribute, and neither wholly profits?” And he made a decisive gesture towards his assistant to remove the chicken.

Women have been lost on mountains before now; but Lili was a woman who had been lost in a mountain of her own flesh.

All her features were submerged; the lovely apple blossom of her cheeks had turned a greyish yellow. Her cheeks themselves had risen like puffy omelettes, and engulfed the once enchanting rosebud of a mouth; the dainty, tiptilted nose had sunk into a nondescript lump, half hidden in a deep ravine; her chin, so like a rounded peach, had spread itself into innumerable shapeless folds.

The texture of a flower, the glow of a fruit, the slender resiliency of a young willow—where were they now?

Like the peasant girl in a fairy-story, Lili had gone for a walk in the foothills; a door had opened—and she was seen no more.

It was a case of Lesbianism, of course, the Quarter had long ago decided, but how odd that this extraordinary American woman should have been so cleverly hooked by Madame Lambertin, just at the moment when the latter had decided to settle into private life, and had so successfully arranged for her eleven other well-chosen daughters, decent male protectors, each an excellent bargain both for herself and the girl. Why had Madame Lambertin retained Lili; and if Madame Lambertin had retained her for herself—why did the American lady foot the bill?

The American lady, too, was not at all the type for such arrangements. She looked as if she came from Boston and had been spiritually nurtured upon the puritanical prejudices with which the Plymouth Fathers had originally landed upon the rock.

The snap Madame Lambertin gave to her bag acted as a signal.

The head waiter sprang to attention. He had served the three ladies a meal of which he personally approved for a hot day in July: iced marmite, roast Spring chicken accompanied by new potatoes and fresh green peas, rounded off by a cardinal of chilled fruits. This dish was the chef’s masterpiece. It consisted of a well-constructed heap of raspberries, surrounded by peaches, bathed in a fruit sauce that seemed to enter into each separate raspberry and peach, extracting its flavour while not in any way lessening the taste of the individual fruit. Cream out of a large brown earthen pot could be eaten with it in any quantity, at an extra charge.

Lili had taken enough for three ordinary appetites. The head waiter now hid the bill, quite as lavish as the generosity of the meal, in the folds of a spotless napkin, and laid it reverently before the American lady.

She drew out her purse and paid it, an easy seven thousand francs, with a mere glance at the total.

Madame Franchard was spare, flat and vigorous; and it was all, the head waiter thought, that could ever have been said for her, from a visual point of view.

She was dressed in expensive and well-designed French clothes directed not to draw attention to the faults of a woman’s appearance, but to make the best of any incidental advantages that she might have managed to retain. Unfortunately, Madame Franchard had never had any of these advantages. She had had to fall back on her intellect. Perhaps this was why she talked continuously while her two companions said practically nothing. After paying her bill and appropriately, but not extravagantly, recognising the merits of the head waiter, she gave a fatuous smile at the replete and contented Lili, and hurried out to find a taxi. A taxi, of course, was necessary. It would have benefited no one to walk far after such a meal—and been frankly impossible for Lili. “If she pays why should she run?” the chef asked himself.

Madame Franchard did not glance at Madame Lambertin. If she could avoid it she never looked at her. She probably guessed, without seeing it, the sardonic smile with which Madame Lambertin followed her hasty retreat. Whenever Madame Franchard left Lili alone with Madame Lambertin she felt that it was in the nature of a retreat.

Madame Lambertin with a derisive remark, unfortunately unheard by anyone but Lili, rose to her feet, without hurry.

She was less expensively dressed than either of her companions but she looked as if she had never had to adjust herself to her clothes since her clothes had long ago adjusted themselves to her. While they did not suggest fashion, they did nothing to violate it. They simply attracted no notice whatever; and yet, as the eye roved over her well-kept figure, it felt satisfied.

Madame Lambertin stopped at the Comptoir to chat agreeably with Madame for a moment; then she gave a well turned compliment to the chef himself, and finally turning to the head waiter, who held the door open for her, she said, with the conspiratorial fervour of a fellow expert, “You were right, François, that ’49 Volnay was the wine for the occasion; it was cheap at the price. Do not waste it on foreigners if you can help it.”

It was with the utmost difficulty that Madame Lambertin, Madame Franchard, the chauffeur and the head waiter, managed to insert Lili into the taxi. Madame Franchard had to reduce herself to the thinness of a sheathed knife to squeeze in beside her; and Madame Lambertin took her seat in quiet comfort outside, next to the driver. She could now think in peace—for to Madame Lambertin the wild plunge of a Paris taxi into the whirlpool of the city’s traffic was a sort of peace. Her life might not have more than an instant’s purchase; but the driver would be no trouble to her since he was neither her husband nor her lover. Nor was her life of any particular pleasure to her. It was only one of the many things Madame Lambertin had grown used to and turned, if possible, to some slight advantage.

At sixteen, her widowed mother had married her to a wicked old man with a good deal of money. Even at that tender age, Madame Lambertin had had enough skill to deflect a considerable amount of this money into the needy coffers of her own family; and when her husband died fifteen years later, he actually left her the bulk of his fortune.

Madame Lambertin was then at the age Lili was now. She had been slender; not too plain; childless; an advantageous match; and, God knows, intelligent.

Far too intelligent, she told herself, to marry again. Nevertheless, she was but human. Her fortune was intact. Without risking anything, she might surely take a lover? However, thirty-six is not a very good age to choose a first lover. Any man that comes along, handsome, young, who regards you with dancing eyes full of anticipated pleasure, may tempt you—if you are an older woman without experience—to share his pleasures. Madame Lambertin had fallen into Nature’s delayed trap. Having been given a bad husband, she now chose a worse lover.

In two years, he had dissipated the nice little fortune extracted from her late husband. To show for it, Madame Lambertin had a few dresses that were too young for her, no jewels because these her lover took with him, a broken heart and an unimpaired intelligence. In fact, her lover had in some ways improved Madame Lambertin’s intelligence. She now knew exactly what to think of good-looking young men who want to take their pleasure without putting anything down.

Gathering the ruins of her fortune together, Madame Lambertin started a highly select and discreet house, and invited twelve young, carefully chosen girls, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, to share it with her. She put each of the young girls into a good way of business, while herself profiting regularly and highly by their successes. No young or old man, while visiting her clients, ever got away without having put down exactly what Madame Lambertin thought his entertainment had been worth.

Lili was an exception to the business side of Madame’s carefully regulated life. She had picked her up from the streets in mid-winter—a little starving waif, perhaps twelve years old, and had nursed and fed her into becoming the flower of her flock. Madame Lambertin had been able to add considerably to her fortune by this act of charity. Nevertheless, it was not wholly a business transaction; charity had entered into it, and could not be altogether dissolved from the partnership.

Then the Germans came. They were, under orders, “très correcte”. This was what French collaborators invariably called them. Madame Lambertin went out of her way to use this expression about them, in season and out of season; but she was no collaborator. “The Germans have the mentality of Pigs,” Madame told her girls in private. “Wild Pigs—no one is safe with them—they are not even safe with themselves. But, fortunately, Pigs can be stupid as well as wild. Frankly, we must outwit these sales cochons, until the Allies win the war. They will certainly win it because of the Americans. These people are very advanced, and in the end they will win everything. Do you agree to help me outwit the Germans for as long as the war lasts?” All twelve had agreed; and so great had been Madame Lambertin’s power over her girls, and the practical value of the system under which they lived, that not one of them betrayed her.

Madame Lambertin went immediately to the German Headquarters of her district, and insisted upon seeing the General in command.

To him she made no secret of her admiration for Hitler, or of the excellent services she was prepared to carry out for the highest, and only the highest, of his officers. All her girls, she told him, were healthy and attractive girls. The General must accept her invitation to dinner and see her well chosen little family for himself. Actually Madame had arranged for the chef of the Sucking Pig to cook the dinner. It was superb—though neither of them ever referred to it afterwards.

The evening was a perfect success. Each girl played her part in the best spirit.

Lili, who was too stupid to play a part, simply sat there and looked innocent; and, by doing so, created the greatest success of the evening.

Beforehand, Madame Lambertin had related to them the story of Judith and Holofernes, with touching skill.

Judith, she had explained, was not only a heroine, but a sacred one. Her story was to be found in the Bible. No emphasis was laid on what had presumably taken place before Holofernes conveniently fell asleep and had his head cut off by Judith; but it was a rôle the girls perfectly understood though they were not to carry it out in its completeness. The German officers would in their turn fall asleep, never dreaming that the beds they were sleeping in were occupied both before and after by R.A.F. officers or hunted Jews.

Naturally, the house was occasionally searched; but there were no other bedrooms than those of the girls themselves. During the search the prisoners, their clothes in their hands, were disposed of behind winebins in the cellar or a false partition in the attic. The discreet old house had, in addition, useful shrubberies; and there were doors into two different streets.

When the war was over Madame Lambertin had been worn out, and even the girls were a little tired. But none of them were impoverished, and each carried a private certificate, signed by a succession of prisoners, to hand to the Resistance.

But, Madame now remembered, floating through the rapids of the Place de la Concorde, it was then—at the very moment of her just triumph, when she was about to be presented to General de Gaulle himself, that she had discovered the change in Lili. Her favourite daughter had been transformed from an apple blossom into a hippopotamus. “Mon Dieu!” she gasped. “Mon Dieu! What can be done with you—my poor Lili?” And Madame Lambertin waved her hands madly in the air to describe the desperately enlarged canvas which had created the problem. With death a hand’s breadth away, and her mind concentrated upon supplies, evasions and escapes, Madame Lambertin had overlooked what had taken place—under her very eyes. Lili, much sought after by the highest of German officers, had consistently overeaten for six years unchecked.

It was indeed difficult—it had proved impossible for Madame Lambertin to find a new career for Lili.

Lili had always been formidably stupid, and her increasing weight seemed to have added to her intellectual vacuity. Yet it was out of the mouth of this babe and suckling that wisdom had eventually dawned.

“You must not distress yourself, Madame,” Lili had explained with ingenuous humility. “I have found an American!”

“But impossible—an American,” Madame had at first replied. “They have not come to Europe to buy mountains! My poor Lili, you could not even enter the door of a stateroom to voyage to the United States! And if you went by aeroplane—your American would have to pay for the entire machine!”

“It is not a man,” Lili replied complacently, “it is a woman. She wants me very much. She will pay anything, and will not require me to go to America. She prefers Paris. I met her in the Luxemburg Gardens a few weeks ago. We talk there after Mass every Sunday. She, too, is a good Catholic. I know very well that it is an idiosyncrasy to want me as I am now, and I shall not like to leave you; but I have made quite a good arrangement. We are to take—all three together—every Sunday—our déjeuner at the Sucking Pig; and if Madame will allow me—I am to return with her to her apartment alone for a goûter. More than this—the American is extremely rich—and very lonely. She married a French Industrialist—himself a man of fortune, who is now dead. She does not wish ever to return to America. She says that people in Boston are very critical as to how other people live. They may drink or change husbands and wives frequently, but never anything else. She speaks French surprisingly well. Her husband insisted that she should learn it; and it seems, too, that she has lived here forty years. Still she has not quite the right voice for it I find. At the end of her sentences something happens. Still Madame will understand her perfectly—even I can understand her, though as she speaks a great deal, I do not listen very much. But I know that she will leave me money when she dies. Naturally, I then asked her how old she was. She is already sixty-five, and so active that I think she might fall dead at any moment.”

Madame Lambertin had stared at Lili with blank incredulity for at least thirty seconds before answering her.

“But—but——” she stammered at last, hardly knowing how to make any objection to such a profitable plan, nor what objection to make, if any, and yet feeling a deep inexplicable aversion to it. “You do not realize, my poor child—such a woman intends to corrupt you!”

“But Madame knows,” Lili answered gently, “that I am already corrupt. Besides I ask you, Madame, what can it matter what a man does with you—or what a woman—both are human?”

“It is altogether different, and most unnatural,” Madame said reprovingly, “and I don’t like it. I have always looked on you as a child—even as a dear child. I meant to make the best arrangement possible for you with some good and prosperous client—but for that—I see alas! that it is too late.”

“But that I know very well indeed, Madame,” Lili had explained. “And I also have for you a very great affection. That is why I have arranged this contract, and I do not think even you—could make a better one. It is all written down and signed. I had Madame’s own lawyer draw it up, even about the weekly lunch at the Sucking Pig is in it. Every Sunday this American has to pay for the three of us—up to the price of two thousand francs a head—naturally, wine excluded; I thought this would allow for the rise in prices. Surely, Madame, you must see its advantages?”

Madame Lambertin had been obliged to confess that she saw the advantages; she did not press the fact that she also saw the disadvantages.

She was just about to retire to a convenient, small, but most expensive flat on the Right Bank of the Seine. She did not want a human mountain in it, without skill or occupation.

Yet Madame Lambertin felt very uncomfortable about Lili’s self-chosen future. After all, she was responsible for what had once been Lili la Belle—one of Nature’s brief masterpieces—and Madame Lambertin had never been one to take her responsibilities lightly, however oddly she might have chosen them.

Every girl she had had under her protection had bettered herself by it. Besides, both she and Lili were good Catholics.

“My dear child,” she said, after a long pause for thought, “what does your priest say in this matter?”

“Oh, him!” Lili responded lightly. “He was more than satisfied. I simply told him that I was retiring, as well as Madame, to live with a kind American lady. He thinks I might very easily have fallen into mortal sin—the kind of life I was leading. Many of our clients were married men—were they not?”

“It was purely the affair of our clients whether they were married or not!” Madame Lambertin replied reprovingly. “You were not married! Besides, I have always told you girls that you should never try to find out any of your client’s circumstances. It is a great mistake to know more than you need to know about anyone—it can be used against you. Or you might even be tempted to make use of what you know yourself—and that would become a crime—and involve the Police.

“Take what you have earned without asking questions, has always been the motto of our house—and I will see that you get it. And has not our house always been a prosperous and happy one?”

Lili had replied enthusiastically that it had; yet Madame Lambertin realized that somehow or other their talk had concluded in Lili’s plan having been accepted by both of them.

Five years had now passed, Madame Lambertin reminded herself as they edged through the whirlpool of the Place de la Concorde, and still this plan of Lili’s jogged on, incontestably remunerative, and disreputable. Boring, too; though with prices ever soaring, a good meal once a week was not to be sneezed at.

The massive torrent of the Champs-Elysées swept them in like a vacuum cleaner a particle of dust; and beyond the Arch they halted at her tree-shaded door.

Madame Lambertin was very fond of her secluded fashionable dwelling; but she knew that she must very soon leave it. Everything had changed—and not for the better—since the end of that cursèd—one-footed—inconclusive war. One might have thought that the end of the Nazis would be something—but was it? Germany was, of course, doing better than ever; and everything else had shifted. The core of Paris was sold out to the Americans.

Sitting a few hours later alone with Lili, who had now fairly recovered from the Sucking Pig, Madame Lambertin retold her new difficulties, over a light and dainty goûter. “I have decided,” she finished a little plaintively, “to return to the Left Bank. You remember the Concierge of the Little Garden houses—next to the Santé Prison? She was a good friend of ours once, and she has told me one will soon be free. They were lived in by artists—but if people like myself suffer—think what such birds of the air must now have to face! I have heard that these poor people live on one croissant a day—and that a stale one! You can, however, come to see me there as well as here—it is only a slightly longer drive. My dear child, I have long wanted to ask you—what have these five years meant to you? Has this plan—that I so disapproved of—but for your sake accepted—can we say it has succeeded?”

To Madame Lambertin’s intense surprise, a slowly gathering, enormous tear splashed on to the petit-four Lili was lifting to her lips. Lili drew out a square of real lace handkerchief and gently wiped the tear off, before disposing of the rest of the cake.

“I cannot say that it has altogether answered,” she said slowly and reflectively. “I have no deprivations, of course, but I had thought that this plan would make me rich—and there I was wrong. I have not become rich. I am only one of the belongings of someone else who is rich. What Madame Franchard wanted—I think she has got. I have not cheated her. I have been a thing that was alive and answerable to her will. No one else wanted me so there has been no competition. Only on Sundays when I come to you—I feel a little bit alive! Madame must not misunderstand me—I eat, sleep and dress in very great luxury, but it is not a luxury that I have earned; and there are no times off! In the old days—I had my duties like everyone else—but when I had done them—I could go to the Circus. If I wanted a fruit tart I went and bought it. They tasted sweeter those fruit tarts—though perhaps they were not made with such fine materials on the Left Bank. Madame Franchard does not in any way injure or abuse me—am I not her property? But always she chooses for me. And I must do whatever she wants! Mostly it is only to listen when she talks—but think—she can talk all day—there is no-one to stop her—and about nothing but her own insides! You would not believe the amount of medicines this lady uses—and keeps changing—only to make her insides act—when all she needs is to be less nervous and leave them alone! Every week we discuss a new diet—and each diet has the same result—that what should work never does work. In my opinion, her restless activities alone prevent it. She makes efforts all the time—though there is, of course, with that income nothing to make efforts about. Of course, I encourage her to make these efforts. She may make one too many, I say to comfort myself—and then, Madame, we are saved! You can remain where you are—and I can perhaps in some way join you by taking a larger room under the same roof.

“I know that you never cared to be so near the Santé Prison. You said yourself—those bells—and sometimes cries—made you feel exasperated! To be near to many people locked up for their sins—is a poor location. As it is, I watch Madame Franchard every morning—while, if it is near enough to me—I turn on the gramophone. It is not credible how, at her age, she indulges in acrobatics. She stands on the tiled floor of our huge saffron-coloured bathroom and I lie on the bed drinking my chocolate—watching her. She has no discretion, and will never have a door shut—so that I see her every movement whether I wish to see it or not. She bends forward till her fingers touch the floor—and then backward till her head disappears from sight! Soon—I say to myself—an apoplexy will be the result of such indulgences! But, Madame—five years is a very long time to wait—and there has been no such result!”

“Do not think too much about her death,” Madame Lambertin advised. “It is not a healthy subject and reacts upon one. Besides, these spare acrobatic women, I have often noticed, invariably live a long time. It is as if Death itself did not take a very great fancy to them!”

Yet Lili was proved once more to be in the right. Only a month later the floor of Madame Franchard’s bathroom had become a little slippery—perhaps a piece of soap had fallen on it—and while doing her acrobatics Madame Franchard fell backwards and broke her neck.

But what was the dismay of Lili and Madame Lambertin to discover that, with incredible duplicity, Madame Franchard had cheated them, after all! She had not left her fortune to Lili. The French husband’s money went direct to his family; and all that more splendid fortune, in American dollars, to a young person in Sioux City, a niece of Madame Franchard’s, called Desdemona Birdseye.

Perhaps Madame Franchard had really intended to alter her will in Lili’s favour; but, like all women who talk a great deal about what they are going to do, she very seldom did it. Besides, the idea of death had always been very disagreeable to Madame Franchard; and making a new will would have unpleasantly reminded her of a disagreeable fact. Nothing is inevitable to a rich person, except death; and no-one, however rich, has yet found a way of avoiding it.

“She was a depraved person,” Madame Lambertin told Lili gloomily. “We were wrong to suppose that she would carry out any of her undertakings.”

Nothing went better than the gloomiest of Madame Lambertin’s expectations.

The artists’ house in the Boulevard Arago turned out extremely damp, and the gallery round the studio impossible for Lili even to climb up—let alone sleep in. The concierge was no longer so friendly.

The inflation increased, invisibly and steadily, like the damp. The price of living went up so high that there was barely enough for one of them to eat sufficiently; and never, of course, any thought of a meal at the Sucking Pig. The door of that shining establishment of friendly critics appeared closed for ever.

Finally Madame Lambertin saw the necessity of going to live with her brother, the priest in the Provinces. She had never been there even to visit him; but she knew exactly what it was like. Her brother made himself appallingly clear on the subject of Lili.

“The child you have seen fit to adopt,” he wrote, “and to bring up in a life of sin, must never darken my doors.”

It was useless to point out to him that, without those early sins of Lili, he might never have had a door to be darkened by her. Madame Lambertin’s household earnings had been most generously disposed of in the direction of her relatives; and one does not become the curé, in a good Provincial district, for nothing.

“It is a pity that he writes such rubbish,” Madame Lambertin explained to Lili. “For one thing, there would be no facility for sin in his household—a narrow box of a priest’s house, facing the street. No room for a good stove—every place that should have been a room turned into a passage.

“Nevertheless, that is where I must go to live, Lili, and you must not. But there is no great hurry about it. I have kept a little pear for the thirst! I shall remain another six months in Paris making arrangements for you.”

The arrangements Madame Lambertin made for Lili were by no means bad. She first consulted a modern young doctor, a specialist in diets. After discovering that Lili was thirty-eight, and not sixty-eight, as he had first supposed, he agreed to take her in hand; and Madame agreed to remain in order to see that Lili profited by his orders.

A miracle occurred to Lili’s figure. She was still grossly stout; but she could now move and, if move, work. The old concierge, who had not a bad heart as concierges go, found Lili a job with two ladies who lived in one of the garden studios. Immediately Lili’s figure admitted the engagement, Madame Lambertin paid a high price to her old friend, the chef of the Sucking Pig, who agreed to give Lili an hour’s cooking lesson three times a week.

Her future was now assured. Lili became an excellent cook and could earn enough to keep herself without extravagance.

Every week she continued to lose two pounds and, to her astonishment, an unaccustomed energy rose up within her.

Madame Lambertin retired regretfully to the Provinces. She arranged the ménage of her brother to perfection. He not only became much better off than he had ever been, but he no longer ate merely to sustain life. Madame Lambertin cooked for them both, and they ate for fun. Even fast days began to appeal to him.

The only quarrel the priest had with his sister was her excessive predilection for the game of Bridge.

Madame Lambertin never cheated at Bridge, but she had played a great deal in Paris with good players and for high stakes. In time she had learned how to play a very good careful game. When she had good cards she won more, and when she had bad cards she lost less than any of the Provincial ladies with whom she played. When her brother objected that all his richest and most prized parishioners lost to her, she merely lifted her shoulders, and said, “Let them learn to play better! Bridge is like religion, my good brother—you must learn the hard way—only by practising can you attain either. In the long run, they should profit—as the Religious do—by playing with a better player than themselves.”

Neither Lili nor Madame was wholly at ease. Lili longed for the support, the cool efficient prodding of Madame, that could always keep her daughters up to the mark. Nor was Madame Lambertin without regrets for Lili. If Lili found it hard to work regularly and to abstain from overeating without the sharp reprimands of Madame Lambertin, Madame Lambertin, in her turn, felt strangely deflated without the placid kindness of Lili, her ready agreement, and her boring, but somehow soothing, presence. Neither time nor absence broke the bond between them.

Madame Lambertin even missed annoying and outwitting the late Madame Franchard, nor was there any way left in which she could pay her out for having, in the long run, outwitted both Madame Lambertin and Lili.

Once every year Lili went shopping to buy a New Year’s card—the most brilliant and expensive she could find, to send to her old protectress.

“You will ruin yourself by such follies,” the concierge told her. “If you must send her a card—why not a cheap one? Little Madame Lambertin cares if you remember her or not! I respected her, since she paid all her bills punctually and was a woman of orderly habits—so that you knew when she would be in, and when out, but she had a heart of stone: and I never knew her want anything but money.”

“But that is what we all want most, isn’t it?” Lili replied with her usual stupidity. “Madame taught me how to earn it—and I will never forget her kindness.” Of course, the concierge was annoyed and did Lili a bad turn the moment she could think of one.

One day when Lili was feeling particularly low and tired, for you cannot lose five or six stone in weight and always feel resilient, she received a black-edged envelope. The black was so deep that the address was quite cramped, still the letter was plainly enough for Lili.

Madame Lambertin had died.

Naturally she had left, as any good Frenchwoman would, the remains of her own and her husband’s fortunes to her family; but it appeared that Madame Lambertin had amassed through the years—and actually with this dubious purpose always in view—a handsome sum of money—practically another fortune—and had left it legally and incontestably to Lili.

It was her Bridge earnings; and Madame Lambertin had felt free to do with these what she wanted.

Lili hurried to share her good news with the concierge, and was surprised at the little pleasure evinced by her old friend—in spite of the fact that Lili pointed out to her that this miraculous windfall would enable them to go every Sunday to the Sucking Pig for a déjeuner just as perfect as those Madame Lambertin and Madame Franchard used to share with her.

“All I can say is,” the concierge replied coldly, returning the lawyer’s letter to her, “you were wiser than I was about those New Year cards.”

Lili always found it difficult to understand the exact meaning of what was said to her unless it referred directly to material objects, but something came through to her from the concierge’s spite; her eyes became suddenly more lively than the concierge had ever seen them. It was as if something deep within was quite determined to come out of them.

“But no! But no!” Lili stammered. “It was not the New Year cards—there was always something more than that—between Madame and myself!”

Father Anthony walked along a deeply rutted, red dust road with a light heart. Above him stretched an unfathomable blue dome without a cloud. The air of the early morning danced in golden light and tasted as if it came from a new and stainless world.

Father Anthony was in no hurry for he lived in Eternity and not in time; and he believed that even time was more God’s business than man’s and could be used with elasticity.

Nothing moved except himself in the vast airy uplands. The little Kopjes with their tall grasses seemed asleep. Nor was there any sound but the faint murmur of the grasses shaken together by the wind.

Father Anthony enjoyed silence because he found it the best time for listening. When he was with people he enjoyed noise, but that was a different kind of enjoyment, and came from his thinking that people liked the noise they made, whereas the silence was something they had not made, and did not listen to if they could help it. Yet he felt that he could often reach nearest to the mystery that is in all human hearts when he was alone with silence.

Father Anthony was a sound, healthy, freshly coloured creature with twinkling eyes and an obviously good digestion. He agreed with nearly everything so that it was hardly surprising that nearly everything agreed with him. He made friends with everybody, except a few cold clergymen who thought it was shocking to be at home in a world that God had made; and Boer farmers who were furious because Father Anthony expected them to love their neighbours as themselves—and even thought this exasperating statement should include black men.

Father Anthony was a South African by birth and this made it particularly irritating, since he was in a position to understand African questions and should, the Boer farmers felt, have accepted Boer prejudices, in a way that was invariably prejudicial to all races except that of the Boer farmers.

Nevertheless they often found themselves strangely drawn to such a friendly and cheerful human being, and many Boer farmers put Father Anthony up for the night, because his parish was six hundred square miles, and this is rather far even for a Marathon runner to take in his stride.

It was true that his friends had given Father Anthony a battered tin lizzie that had once been a Ford; but this priceless possession Father Anthony kept for long distances or special emergencies. Once an old man had breathed his last tired breath in it; and once a healthy baby greeted his new-born world with a cry within its friendly shelter, while his young mother and Father Anthony, between them, confronted for the first time the intricate gateway of birth. Father Anthony regarded his car as an ally rather than as a possession.

This morning he had ten miles to walk before he reached his favourite school, for their annual prize-giving. Besides cheaper and less special prizes somebody had given him ten shillings to bestow in a lump upon the best all-round scholar of the year. Father Anthony had seldom been able to give such a large sum of money away to one of his scholars before, and this added to his cheerfulness.

He loved all his school children, good or bad, but, being a sensible man, a satisfactory child who took the trouble to work hard gave him greater pleasure than an unsatisfactory one who neglected opportunity. Whatever happened he meant to see that this particular child, who was exceptionally intelligent and hard-working and came from a very poor and insecure Kraal, had his chance.

“Perhaps after I am dead,” Father Anthony thought, walking briskly towards the purple hills, “and if political freedom is won for his people, he may even become a Prime Minister or a bishop, or perhaps just a very good man trusted by all who know him. He will not hate the white man then, who after all gave him his education; perhaps he may even respect him, although I must confess some of us make that rather a problem.”

Father Anthony forgot bad people as often as he could; but for all his kind and smiling eyes there was no bonnier fighter to be found within or without the great continent which was his home, where the rights of his Zulu people were disregarded. “Dark!” he said to himself impatiently. “Africa! Such nonsense; it is a land of Light, and was meant for laughter!” And he began to think of the Zulus themselves, and of all their pleasant and occasionally unpleasant ways.

Father Anthony could think and talk in Zulu. He knew how to make that soft chuckle of a drawn cork, and slip it into the liquid rhythm of their speech, just as the Zulus themselves used it.

Suddenly two gigantic figures broke the empty landscape into life. Working by the roadside were two huge Zulus. Their picks swung high above their big shoulders and bit deep into the iron-hard earth as their arms fell. Their dark powerful bodies shone in the golden air, beautiful with that rich light which shines in Giorgione’s pictures.

When Father Anthony reached them, they had stopped working and had begun to laugh. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” they shouted, as if the blood deep within their powerful bodies laughed with them. Their white teeth glistened and their dark eyes gleamed with mirth.

Father Anthony stopped to share their joke; it was not a refined joke, and many people would have been shocked with Father Anthony for sharing it. But what Father Anthony saw in their joke was their happiness; and this he could enjoy with them whatever caused it.

The Zulus would have stopped laughing at the sight of any other white man, but Father Anthony they accepted as one of themselves. Sometimes he slept in their Kraals. He healed them when they were sick. He taught their children; and when they were in trouble, it was quite as safe to go to him as to one of their own Witch doctors, in fact safer, because Witch doctors were expensive and Father Anthony’s advice cost nothing at all. So they all three sat down together in the shade of a convenient rock to share their jokes and to exchange what other news there was.

Father Anthony told them about the boy who had won the prize. The boy was not personally known to them but they were interested because they had children of their own, who might one day do as well.

Father Anthony urged them to send all their children to the nearest school, before the Farmers could take them away at eleven years old to work on their farms and shut them away from any further knowledge.

Father Anthony had some sandwiches and cold tea in his rucksack, and as his mother knew he would be certain to meet with friends, she had put in enough for three hungry men.

Time is never of any great importance in South Africa, so they sat and chatted together about the cattle and their Baas for a long time and even sang a hymn before they parted. Both Zulus had voices like Paul Robeson’s and once they started singing they found it very difficult to leave off.

When Father Anthony at last tore himself away they were still singing at the top of their deep rolling voices, and he felt carried forward on great waves of sound and good fellowship.

When they stopped singing, one said to the other, “A pity he is not a black man like one of us! He would make a good leader for our people. We need such a voice and the great ones could no longer say—as they all say now of him—‘He is one of us and has no right to speak for those black dogs.’ ” But the other Zulu said, “Perhaps it is better that he is white after all, because at least we can believe when we see and talk to him that not all white men have hearts like hornets.”

It was noon before Father Anthony reached the school. It was built on the top of a round-shaped green hill, close to a little church. They were both roofed with corrugated iron; and a good deal of noise was produced inside. To-day the school house was decorated in honour of the prize-giving. Jacaranda flowers of every shade of lilac to purple hung from the rafters, and hibiscus cups—scarlet and dawn-pink, yellow and apricot, were spread wherever flowers could go.

There was hardly room for the teacher and the children because there were so many flowers.

There was a delicate glow on the children’s dark velvety bodies, like the bloom on a bunch of purple grapes, except when they were so ill-nourished that not even the sun could make them shine as they were meant to shine. Most of the children wore gay cotton frocks; and if they were very young they wore very little but their skins, though every child had a cravat of beads round his neck in a pattern of many colours.

The children learned quite a lot of things at the school, how to count with beans and even how to count without them. They learned to sing hymns and even how to read and write; but what they liked best to learn was how to make baskets—beautiful baskets of white, green and purple stripes, woven so closely and so smoothly that they looked as if the colours were poured into each other, and yet so separate that none of them did more than touch the stripe next to it, every colour remaining clear, within its own steady line.

It was a great joy to a child to make his own basket, round and smooth, deep and very light, with beautifully shaped handles, fitting neatly from side to side.

A good basket, strong and closely woven, would last a lifetime and could command a good price at the market.

There were fifty boys and girls collected in the school, some of them from far-distant Kraals. They all knew that to be educated was an important thing and might lead to much money, and consequently there would be enough to eat for everybody in the Kraal; even for everyone’s dog. They spent all of the day that they could spare at the School House, and the Government provided one penny and three farthings a child for their midday meal if they were black, and six pence per child if they were white and had plenty to eat at home. Yet Father Anthony and the teacher between them somehow contrived that once a day each child black or white should have just enough to eat. The miracle of the loaves and fishes was no secret in South Africa to those who love children; but the mystery of why white children should be supposed to need more food than dark ones has never yet been solved.

Usually when Father Anthony came to the school the children fell upon him in a cataract and there was such an outcry that only the sudden sight of a fox in a hunting country could equal it. But to-day the shouts of joy were in a lower key and he was at once conscious that the Zulu teacher’s eyes were full of grief. “Something bad has happened!” Father Anthony told himself, “and every child has it on his conscience, because a child or any other intelligent animal knows that when a thing is wrong it has happened to everybody and each must take his share.” But he did not at once ask what was wrong. He waited for the day’s ceremony to take place. He heard all that the teacher had prepared for him to hear. There was much to show him, the best of all the year’s efforts, and every child had to be a little noticed in its turn. The last and most exciting thing was to show Father Anthony the baskets, for it was when the baskets had been shown that the prizes were to be given.

The baskets were kept hidden behind a curtain until the last possible moment, then the curtain was drawn aside by the youngest and eldest child, and there the baskets stood, ranged in careful rows, each in its place, white as almond, green as grass and purple as the mountain shadows.

But to-day when the curtain was drawn back instead of that long satisfied “aah!” of happy children sending their hearts out with their breath, to meet all the joy of the moment, there was a strange, cold silence. The silence spread from child to child, and the accumulated weight of it blotted out all the joy. Then the teacher rose from her seat and spoke. The eyes of all the children turned upon Father Anthony, filled with the same grief. “A sad thing has happened,” she began. “Tommy, from the furthest Kraal, is our best scholar of the year. The children all think so—and I think so. He comes every day to school, many miles, and is never late. His heart goes faster even than his feet. He works with all his might and listens with all his ears. He weaved our finest basket; but we cannot show it to you. It was so closely woven that you could not have pierced it with the point of a needle, and very bright with colours. It was one, with its handles, so that drawing them together you held a perfect basket. You might say it lived a life of its own. Yesterday Tommy asked if he might carry it to his Kraal to show his grandfather the chief and all his family, and we gave leave. He ran with it on his head across the big grazing meadow, which all the children from the south cross daily. There are no crops on it. The Baas met him, and in a terrible voice that was overheard by many of us he asked what Tommy meant by daring to cross his land.

“There was no voice left in Tommy, for he had been running fast with joy, and now fear froze him. So a rabbit stands when a Mamba’s eyes first fix him. At last he whispered: ‘But, Baas, this way we come and go to school daily.’ ‘Never do it again!’ the Baas shouted, ‘or I take the hide off you! You must go round the hill: never cross my land if you must go to this school’—a bad word which I will not say he called our school! Well—the Baas knew that this way round the hill adds two miles to the child’s four. Then he roared, ‘And that basket on your head! Who does that belong to?’ Perhaps a little pride warmed Tommy’s heart for his voice came back to him, and we heard him say quite plainly, ‘It is my basket—and I made it.’

“ ‘It is a lie! You never made it! It cannot be your basket!’ the Baas shouted and he snatched the basket from Tommy’s head. He gave nothing for Tommy’s basket. He took it in his big hands and Tommy, feeling great anger swelling up in this man’s bad heart, and knowing that his treasure was gone, ran home to his Kraal as if a lion were behind him.

“His father has sent us a message that Tommy will never return to the school, so that although this is our Feast day, we are all sad!”

Father Anthony looked from the teacher to the children and back again at the baskets which were he thought very good baskets. He could well imagine how wonderful Tommy’s basket must have been, for all to know that it was finer than theirs.

Father Anthony’s heart was so heavy that for a long time he was as silent as the children. Then he said, “Before nightfall, I will go to Tommy’s Kraal and I will speak to his grandfather the chief, and to his father and mother—and to Tommy himself about this dreadful thing that has happened; and Tommy shall have his prize. For he made such a basket and you have all seen it, and your Teacher has seen it, and whether it is here or not, it is a pride to the whole school.

“So now we will give away the other prizes; and then we will have our Feast.” Father Anthony said nothing at all about the Baas because he thought unless you could do something to make a disagreeable thing less disagreeable, it was better not to mention it.

He gave the children a marvellous cake his mother had made for them covered with white sugar icing; but the biggest slice with a fine piece of icing was wrapped up very carefully in glistening white paper, to be taken to Tommy.

The children were quite happy after this, and danced and sang as if there was nothing left but sunshine; but the teacher and Father Anthony sat together on the steps of the empty school and talked about the Baas.

“This thing he has done,” the teacher said, “has taken the heart out of a child and left behind it only panic and suspicion. It can never be forgotten. As Tommy grows up he will say to himself, ‘A white man can steal from a black man but from a white man a black man can take nothing—not even justice—for it is not there to be taken.’ ”

Father Anthony sighed deeply. “Next week is Christmas Day,” he said after a long pause. “It is usual since the Baas has allowed us to build our school on his lands to send him some little gift made with our hands. We have to think of the school. We have to think of Tommy’s Kraal, and of the greater evil that might come upon his people if we further anger the Baas. A man with a bad conscience is easily roused to add a great wrong to a little one. If indeed there is such a thing as a little wrong! Do you think that in spite of what has happened the school could bring itself to send him a basket? It might be this would remind him that he has not paid for Tommy’s basket; perhaps he might even return it, or do some other piece of kindness?”

“No,” said the teacher very firmly. “The school will have no more dealings with him. It does not want kindness out of unkindness. No child in the school nor I myself could bear to give him a present! The heart would go one way—the hand another.” Father Anthony looked still more miserable. He could well understand what the teacher felt. His own heart burned for shame and pity, so that it had no room for anger; but he would have felt anger if he had not felt so much shame and pity.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “But do you not think—remembering that the Baas’s wife is quite a different person from him, and has often sent us gifts, that she treats well those who work for her—perhaps at Christmas we might give her a basket? Once she had a child and lost it. Now she has no child.”

The teacher thought this over very carefully, then she said a little reluctantly, “Yes, I think the children might understand this—and then there would be no wrong done to our Tommy by sending the wife of the Baas a basket. If you really wish it, I will see that it is done, but I will not send a child up there to be insulted. I will take it myself.” “If it is the wish of the school—then I also wish it,” Father Anthony said firmly, “and as for taking the basket, nothing could be easier; since the wife of the Baas is always at church on Christmas Day, I myself will give it to her after the service at the church door with my blessing and the good wishes of the school.” Father Anthony joined the children’s festivities but he could not enjoy himself even in their joy, for his heart burned within him for this defrauded child.

As soon as the Feast was over and the children had scattered to their Kraals, Father Anthony walked through the great meadow where Tommy had been robbed; and on another four miles to the foot of the purple hills.

Everyone in Tommy’s Kraal had a sullen look and gave Father Anthony only hostile glances as he stood at the gate. Even the women turned their backs on him and spat into the dust, because all their hearts were sore for Tommy, who had returned home like one whom a lion hunts—and without his basket.

“If this man,” the chief told Father Anthony severely, “had given the child something in exchange, we might have overlooked his harshness. But this Baas is a bad man. He once tricked us out of our best land. When our cattle were stolen, he offered to hunt the thief for us on horseback and return our cattle; and we agreed to give him land for this—for we had no horses and without our cattle we die, whatever we are standing on.

“The cattle he brought back to us were poor cattle—not our own—and he took in exchange more and better land than we had promised him—claiming a contract.

“Such things we have to make with words that the wind carries away since we can neither read nor write. The courts are white men’s courts and will not believe our word against a white man’s. Now in the same manner this same Baas has taken the work of our child’s hands without payment and put fear into him where once there was courage. An animal that a wild beast has once shaken fights no more. What becomes of a man child’s spirit when fear enters into it, instead of pride? This child’s heart was like a stream with the sun on it, now it is like the dry course of a river where no water is. The white man has done this cruel thing to a brave child. What have you come to say to us about it?”

Father Anthony stood before the chief, who was a foot taller than he was, and looked into his eyes as if they were the same height.

“It is true what you say, O chief!” he agreed quietly, “and my heart is as heavy for it as if this evil thing had happened to my own son. I take the shame because this act was a base one—added to many base ones—and this man calls himself a Christian and so despises Christ—for very surely if Jesus walked here upon this earth, He would whip such a man out of His presence. Perhaps even now Christ stings this bad man’s conscience and takes the taste from his food. It may be that it was from envy that the Baas dealt so harshly with another man’s child. He has none of his own. I do not say this to excuse his act but that we should not forget how envy can darken a man’s heart so that he moves blindly—as a man in a dust storm.”

“Nevertheless the wrong is done,” said the chief, though there was less bitterness in his eyes. “The child’s soul is sick. He lies in his mother’s hut and cries. He will not again return to a school from which he has learned to run away from a man. Why, even a wild dog respects a young dog in his first year and fights only with one who is full grown!” Father Anthony made no denial, but after a pause he said, “Now if you will grant me leave, I should like to speak with the child. I have brought with me the prize he has won for being the best scholar of the year, and for making the finest basket.” When the chief saw that the prize was ten shillings he sent for Tommy.

Tommy came very slowly from his mother’s hut, with his head bowed. He did not look up at Father Anthony, nor want to take the ten shillings; but this his grandfather took for him; and left him alone with Father Anthony, outside the gate of the Kraal.

It was the sunset hour and far away they could see the cattle moving home in a cloud of red and golden dust. Above them in the still blue air, a hawk wheeled and hovered. He was far above their heads but the shadow of his great wings struck a dark pattern on the shining earth.

“Tommy,” Father Anthony said, “with your hands and with your heart you made the best basket in the school, and it was not without strength and great willingness that you became the year’s best scholar. I have heard all that has happened to you from your teacher and from the children, and I have come to thank you for your good work and to give you the prize which you have truly won.”

But Tommy still hung his head and stared down at the shifting wing shadows on the dust; and his hands fell listlessly at his sides from hunched shoulders, as if they had never made anything.

Father Anthony looked up at the hawk. He remembered how he had once watched such a bird chase a dove into the shelter of the hills. When the dove had found refuge in a gorge too narrow for the hawk to wield his wide pinions, the hawk flew up so high outside the entrance of the gorge, that he cast no shadow, and was lost to sight in the high emptiness of the sky, so that at last the dove believing itself safe flew out once more into the free air; and then the hawk fell like a stone upon its neck and broke it. At last Tommy lifted his eyes and saw the hawk motionlessly balancing upon the empty air. “Such things happen,” Father Anthony said gently, “on this hard earth’s crust. Little birds cannot do much against great birds. They must fly away. But Tommy, a boy is not a bird. He is the beginning of a man. His heart is stronger than a hawk’s wings. He must never let fear be his master, or break his skill. It was your hands made the best basket and your heart that shortened the way to school. Come back again to your comrades, and work and play with all your might. The Baas took your basket but he could not take the skill by which you made it; and since your comrades respect and miss you, he could not rob you of your courage either.”

Tommy still said nothing, but now he lifted his head and even his eyes to Father Anthony. He saw the glistening white paper, and watched Father Anthony unwrapping a piece of cake with sugar icing on it. “This is your Feast cake,” Father Anthony told him. “My mother made it for the School Festival and the children wished you to have the largest slice. I think it is a good cake. Will you eat it?” “Yes,” Tommy said, and he held out his hand for the cake.

The great light of the day drew itself together and sank behind the purple hills. It was too late for Father Anthony to walk home, so the chief invited him to sleep in the Kraal. Tommy’s mother prepared a hut for him close to the great gateway, and gave him a clean grass mat to sleep on.

For a long time Father Anthony could not sleep. He could hear the shift and stir of the cattle in the Kraal’s centre and their last calls to each other, and from hut to hut men and women shouted and were still. Sometimes beyond the walls a jackal cried like a child, and once the dry earth shook with a lion’s petrifying roar.

The stars became larger and nearer, and hour by hour they shone with a deeper gold.

A great silence came out of the sky and put the Kraal to sleep. Father Anthony prayed. For a short time he prayed for Tommy and for a long time he prayed for the Baas who had robbed a child. He prayed that the earth might be delivered from the wrongs man does to his brother man. It was a long night but it was too short for Father Anthony’s prayer; he fell asleep long before he had reached the end of it.

When he woke, he found himself surrounded by the soft light of a pink and golden dawn. He thought he must be in Heaven for he heard a voice like an angel’s singing. But it was not an angel but Tommy sitting in the branches of a slender pepper tree, imprisoned in its feathery green, and as he sang his hands were busy weaving a new basket.

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.

[The end of Walls of Glass by Phyllis Bottome]