They walked on a little way in silence; then Sanderstead continued:

“I’m sure the first thing you wished to do on coming back to us in this—er—remarkable way was to see him, and for that reason I’m grateful to you for deferring the matter at my request.”

Charles did not think there was any particular cause for gratitude.

He said:  “Tell me frankly how things are.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.  In a man of his age, and suffering from his complaint, complete recovery can’t exactly be counted on—but we can all hope for some partial improvement that will enable him to—to—face a situation which will undoubtedly give him a great deal of pleasure once the initial shock has been— er—overcome.”

Charles was beginning to feel irritated.  “You don’t have to break things gently with ME, Sanderstead.  What you’re hinting at, I take it, is that my father shouldn’t learn of my existence till he’s a good deal better than he is at present.”

“Well—er—perhaps—“

“To save you the trouble of arguing the point, I may as well tell you I entirely agree and I’m willing to wait as long as you think fit.”

“I don’t know how to express my appreciation—“

“You don’t have to.  Naturally I’d like to see my father, but if you say he’s not well enough, that settles it.  After all this time I daresay we can both wait a bit longer.”

They did not talk much after that.  Charles was aware he had rumpled the doctor’s feelings by not living up to the conventional pattern of a dutiful son; but he began to feel increasingly that he could not live up to any conventional pattern, still less could he be “himself,” whatever that was; all he could do was to cover his inner numbness with a façade of slightly cynical objectivity.  It was the only attitude that didn’t seem a complete misfit.

A further problem arose later in the morning, but Sheldon broached it, and somehow he found it easier to talk to HIM.

“Dr. Sanderstead tells me you’ve agreed to his suggestion that for

the time being—“

“Yes, I agreed.”

“I’m afraid that opens up another matter, sir.  Now that the servants know—which of course is inevitable—I don’t see how we can prevent the story from leaking out.”

“I don’t suppose you can, nor do I see why you should.  I’m not breaking any local by-laws by being alive, am I?”

“It isn’t that, Mr. Charles, but your father sometimes asks to see a paper, and I’m afraid that once the story gets around it’ll attract quite a considerable amount of attention.”

“Headlines, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wouldn’t like that for my own sake, let alone my father’s.”

“It would doubtless be very unpleasant.  A young man from the Daily Post was on the telephone just now.”

“ALREADY?  Well, if they think they’re going to make a national hero of me, they’re damn well mistaken.  I won’t see ANYBODY.”

“I’m afraid that might not help, sir.  It’s their job to get the news and they usually manage it somehow or other.”

“Well, what do you suggest?”

“I was thinking that if somebody were to explain the matter personally on the telephone, giving the facts and using Mr.

Rainier’s state of health as ground for the request—“

“You mean get in touch with all the editors?”

“No, not the editors, sir—the owners.  You see, Mr. Rainier has a

large newspaper interest himself, and that makes for a certain—“

“Owns a paper, does he?  I never knew that.”

“It was acquired since your time, sir.  The Evening Record.”

“Well, if you think it’ll do any good, let’s try.  Who do you think should do the talking—George or Chet?  Better Chet, I’d say.”

“Well, yes, Mr. Chetwynd would perhaps explain it more convincingly

than Mr. George.  But what I really had in mind—“

“Yes?”

“Lord Borrell has stayed here several times, sir—bringing his

valet, a very intelligent man named Jackson.  So I thought perhaps

if I were to telephone Jackson—“

An hour later Chet came up to Charles with a beaming smile.

“Everything fixed, old boy.  Sheldon wangled it through Borrell of the International Press—there won’t be a word anywhere.  Censorship at source.  Borrell was puzzled at first, but eventually he said he’d pass the word round.  All of which saves me a job, God bless.”

So the story, which became one for curious gossip throughout the local countryside as well as in many a London club, was never hinted at by Fleet Street.  The only real difficulty was with the editor of the Stourton and District Advertiser, a man of independent mind who did not see why he should not offer as news an item of local interest that was undoubtedly true and did not libel anybody.  A personal visit by Chetwynd to the landlord of the premises in which the Advertiser housed its printing plant was necessary before the whole matter could be satisfactorily cleared up.

Charles spent the morning in a wearying and, he knew, rather foolish attempt to play down the congratulations.  Every servant who had known him from earlier days sought him out to say a few halting, but demonstrably sincere words.  It rather surprised as well as pleased him to realize that he had been remembered so well; but the continual smiling and handshaking became a bore.  There were new faces too, recent additions to the Stourton staff, whom he caught staring at him round corners and from doorways.  They all knew his story by now and wished to see the hero of it; the whole thing was doubtless more exciting than a novel because more personal in their lives, something to save up for relatives when they wrote the weekly letter or took their next day off.

Once, on his way through the house, he passed the room on the first floor where his father lay ill.  It was closed, of course, but the door of an adjoining room was open, and through it he could see two young nurses chatting volubly over cups of tea.  They stared as he went by, and from that he knew that they too had heard and were excited over the news.

When he appeared at lunch, he found Sanderstead and Truslove in the midst of what was evidently a sharp argument.  Truslove was the family solicitor, a sallow sharp-faced man in his late fifties.  During the little hiatus of deferential how-d’ye-dos and handshaking, the doctor and the lawyer continued to glare at each other as if eager to make an end of the truce.  It came as soon as Charles said:  “Don’t let me interrupt your talk.”

“What I was saying, Mr. Charles,” resumed Truslove, eager for an ally, “is that the problem has a legal as well as a medical side.  Naturally one would prefer to spare your father any kind of shock, but can we be certain that he himself would wish to be spared—when the alternatives are what they are?”

“All I can say,” Sanderstead growled, “is that in his present state a shock might kill him.”

“But we have Mr. Charles to think about,” urged Truslove; which made Charles interject:  “Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t bother about ME.”

“Very natural of you to say that, Mr. Charles, but as a lawyer I’m bound to take a somewhat stricter viewpoint.  There’s the question of the WILL.”  He spoke the word reverentially, allowing it to sink in before continuing:  “None of us should forget that we’re dealing with an estate of very considerable value.  We should bear in mind what would be your father’s wishes if he were to know that you were so—so happily restored to us.”

“We should also bear in mind that he’s a very sick man,” retorted Sanderstead.

“Precisely—and all the more reason that his desire, which I am

sure would be to make certain adjustment necessary for the fair and

equal division—“

Charles drummed his fingers on the table.  “I get your point, Truslove, but I’m really not interested in that side of it.”

“But it’s my duty, Mr. Charles—my duty to your father and to the

family quite as much as to you.  If I feel morally sure that a

client of mine—“

Sanderstead interrupted:  “If changing his will is what you’re thinking about, he could no more do that than address a board meeting!  And that’s apart from the question of shock!”

“Isn’t it possible that a shock caused by good news might give him sudden strength—just enough to do what he would feel at once to be necessary?”

“Thanks for the interesting theory, Truslove.  When you want any advice about law, just come to ME.”

Charles intervened with a slightly acid smile.  “I don’t know why you two should quarrel.  You may be right, either of you—but suppose I claim the casting vote?  I don’t want to see my father if there’s any chance the shock might be bad for him, and I don’t give a damn whether I’m in or out of his will. . . .  Now are you both satisfied?”

But of course they were not, and throughout lunch, which was a heavy affair with nobody quite knowing what to talk about, he was aware that the two men were engrossed in meditations of further argument.

During the afternoon he tried for a little quiet in the library, but Chet found him there and seemed anxious to express HIS point of view.  “You see, old chap, I can understand how Truslove feels.  Legally you’re—well, I won’t say DEAD exactly—but not normally alive.  He’s bound to look at things from that angle.  What I mean is, if anything were to happen to the old man—let’s hope it won’t, but you never can tell—you wouldn’t get a look in.  Now that’s not fair to you, especially as there’s plenty for everybody, God bless.

That’s why I think Truslove’s right—surely there must be a way of

breaking good news gently—Sheldon, for instance—“

“Yes, we all think of Sheldon in emergencies.  But I do hope, Chet,

you won’t press the matter.  Truslove tells me there’ll be no

difficulty about my resuming the income we all had from Mother—“

“But good God, man, you can’t live on five hundred a year!”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Quite a number of people seem to manage on it.”

“But—my dear chap—WHERE?  What would you DO?”

“Don’t know exactly.  But I daresay I should find something.”

“Of course if you fancied a salaried job in one of the firms—“

“I rather feel that most jobs in firms wouldn’t appeal to me.”

“You wouldn’t have to take it very seriously.”

“Then it would probably appeal to me even less. . . .  But we don’t have to decide it now, do we?”

“No, of course not.  Have a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“I think I will.  Tell you the truth, all this is just about

wearing me down.  Gave me an appetite at first, but now I feel sort

of—“

“You mean all the fuss connected with my return?”

“Oh, not YOUR fault, old chap.  After all, what else could you do?  But you know what families are like—and wives.  Argue a man off his head.”

“But what could there have been any argument about?”

“Well, Truslove and Sanderstead—like cat and dog all day.  Personally, as I told you, I back Truslove—but Lydia—well, she’s never seen you before—she can’t help feeling there’s something a bit fishy about it—and of course, old chap, you must admit you haven’t explained everything down to the last detail.”

“I’m aware of that.  If the last detail were available, I should be very glad to know it myself.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, though.  Far more things in heaven and earth than—than something or other—know what I mean?  I accept your statement ABSOLUTELY.”

“But I haven’t made any statement.”

“Well, at breakfast you did—you said you were all right—NORMAL, I mean.  And I’m prepared to take your word for it whatever anyone else thinks.”

“Meaning that your wife believes I’m a fake?”

“A fake or else . . .  Well, if she does, she’s wrong, that’s all I can tell her.”

“I hope you won’t bother to.”

“Nice of you to put it that way, but still . . . Sure you won’t have a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Cheerio, then.  God bless. . . .”

 

 

By evening he had decided to leave.  It was not that anyone had been unkind to him—quite the contrary, but he felt that he was causing a disturbance, and the disturbance disturbed him just as much as the others.  He had given Truslove and Sanderstead his decision; it merely irritated him that they continued to wrangle.  “The fact is, Sheldon, my remaining here is just an added complication at the moment, affording no pleasure either to myself or anyone else—so I’ll just fold my tent and silently steal away.  But I won’t go far and I’ll leave you my address so that you can get in touch with me if there’s any need—if, for instance, Sanderstead decides my father’s well enough to see me.  Don’t tell Truslove where I am—I don’t want any messages from HIM—and as for what you say to the others, I simply leave it to you, except that I’d rather they didn’t take my departure as a sign of either disgust or—er—abdication. . . .  Perhaps you could think of something casual enough?  And while I’m in Brighton I’ll warm your heart by buying a few good suits of clothes.”

“BRIGHTON, sir?”

“Yes, I always did like Brighton.  I’ll be all right alone—don’t worry.  If you could pack a bag for me, and get hold of a little pocket-money from the family vault or archives or wherever it’s kept—I suppose the hardest thing is to find any spare cash in a rich man’s house. . . .”

“I can advance it, sir, with pleasure.”

“Good . . . and put a few books in the bag, some of my old college books if you can find them.”

“Maybe you oughtn’t to overtax your mind, sir?”

“On the contrary, I feel rather inclined to treat my mind as one

does a clock when it won’t go—give it a shake-up and see what

happens. . . .  Oh, and one other thing—I’d prefer to have the car

drive me to Scoresby for the train.  I’m so tired of shaking hands

with people, and most of the station staff at Fiveoaks—“

“I understand.”  Sheldon hesitated a moment and then said:  “You

really ARE going to Brighton?  I mean, you’re not—er—thinking of—

er—“

Charles laughed.  “Not a bit of it, Sheldon.  Put detectives on me if you like.  And to show you it’s all open and aboveboard, you can send a wire booking a room for me at the Berners Hotel.”

“BERNERS?  I don’t think that’s one of the—“

“I know, but I looked it up in the back of the railway guide and it’s in Regency Square—where my mother and Miss Ponsonby used to rent a house for the summer when I was a small boy.”

 

 

So much for sentiment; actually when he got there he found the Berners Hotel in Regency Square not quite comfortable enough, and moved to a better one the next day, notifying Sheldon of the change.  It teased him to realize that though he did not care for grandeur and did not insist on luxury, he yet inclined to a certain standard in hotels—a standard above that of the clothes in which he had arrived at Stourton.  He wished he hadn’t told the Liverpool tailor to throw away his original torn and rain-sodden suit; it might have afforded some clue to the mystery.  He pondered over it intermittently, but the effort merely tired him and brought nearer to the surface an always submerged sadness, that sense of bewildering, pain-drenched loss.  He was afraid of that, and found relief in recollecting earlier clear-seen days of childhood and boyhood, the pre-war years during which he had grown up to be—as Miss Ponsonby would have said (only a governess could say such a thing outright)--an English gentleman.

Sheldon had packed a few books, chosen almost at random; a further selection, more carefully made, arrived from Stourton two days later.  They included several he remembered studying in preparation for Cambridge—Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  Good meaty reading, a little tough in places, suitable for whole mornings on the Promenade in one of the glass shelters; equally suitable for wet days in the hotel lounge.  One morning, walking along the cliffs towards Rottingdean, he met an elderly man with a dog; interest in a wreck on the beach below drew them into a conversation which presently veered to books and politics.  For three successive mornings afterwards he took the same walk, met the same man, and continued the same conversation, each time more interestingly; but on the fourth morning the man didn’t appear, nor on any subsequent morning when Charles took the same walk.  He didn’t particularly mind; indeed, it almost comforted him to think of such mutual contacts as possible without the foolish establishment of names and identities.

Sheldon wrote to him regularly, giving him news of Stourton, but there wasn’t much to relate: Mr. Rainier kept about the same;

Sanderstead and Truslove were still quarrelling; while the family chafed more restively, finding Stourton rather dull to do nothing in, and wondering how long they must wait before they could decently decide to return to their respective homes.  Not, of course, that they wanted the old man to die, but they clearly felt they shouldn’t have been sent for so soon; on top of which Charles’s return had somehow disturbed their equilibrium, for if there is one thing more mentally upsetting to a family than death, it must be (on account of its rarity) resurrection.  All of which Charles either deduced from or read between the lines of Sheldon’s direct reportage of facts—such as that Truslove had had an unsatisfactory interview with Dr. Astley, that Chet’s wife was no longer on speaking terms with Bridget, that Chet had taken to spending most of his time practising shots in the billiard-room, that the local vicar had paid a discreet visit hoping to see Charles, and that the weather was still fine, but the barometer beginning to fall.

One morning at breakfast, while he was in the midst of reading Sheldon’s latest assurance that things were still about the same, a page-boy brought a wire informing him at a glance that things were no longer the same at all.  His father had died suddenly a few hours before.

He packed his bag and left for Stourton by the next train, arriving at Fiveoaks towards late afternoon.  There he acknowledged the greetings of several of the station staff (noting with relief that the sensation value of his own existence had considerably diminished), and hurried into the waiting car.  This time the skies were darkening as the moment of the “view” appeared, but the great house still made its bow impressively.

Sheldon was waiting at the open door to receive him; within the house, in the deliberately half-lit hall, Chet stood holding a whiskey and soda.

“Hello, old chap.  Had a good time?  Sheldon says you’ve been dosing yourself with sea air—don’t blame you. . . .  Turned chilly these last few hours—what about a drink?”

Charles said he would have one, so Chet marched him into the dining-room, where the liquor was kept.  “You know, I once went to see a man in London—somewhere in Campden Hill, I think it was—sort of artist’s studio—but the chap had built a regular bar, like a pub, at one end of his dining-room—awfully good idea, don’t you think? . . .  Well, God bless.”

Charles asked for details of his father’s death and received them; then, alone, he went upstairs and entered the room where the old man lay.  The numbness in his heart almost stirred; he touched the dead hand, feeling a little dead himself as he did so.  Then he went downstairs to meet the others of the family, among them three recent arrivals, Jill with Kitty, and Julian.  Jill was a heavily built, smartly dressed woman in her late forties, the eldest of the family and the widow of a civil servant who had left her with a daughter by an earlier marriage of his own.  Kitty was fourteen and generally described, even by those who did not dislike her, as “a bit of a handful.”  Julian, back from Cannes, where he had been spending the winter, gave Charles a languid salutation and a remark evidently well prepared in advance.  “How charming to see you again, Charles!  I understand that when you regained your memory you found yourself in Liverpool on a wet day!  Your only consolation must have been that it wasn’t Manchester!”

Epigrams of this kind had established Julian’s reputation as the family wit, but they lacked spontaneity and his opening remark in any conversation was generally on a level, however disputable, to which he did not afterwards attain.  In appearance he was tall, lean, and handsome in a rather saturnine, over-elegant way; he lived most of his life in fashionable resorts where he played a little tennis, indulged in little friendships, and painted little pictures of scenery which his friends said were “not so bad.”

So now they were all gathered together, the Rainier family, in descending order of age, as follows: Jill, Chetwynd, George, Julia, Charles, Julian, and Bridget.  It was a stale family joke to say that they were seven.  Like many families who have dispersed, they found conversation hard except in exchanges of news about their own affairs—troubles with servants, new houses, business squabbles, and so on.  During the difficult interval between death and the funeral it was Sheldon who took control like some well-built machine slipping into a particularly silent but effective gear.  Charles was grateful for this, and especially, too, that Sheldon had arranged a quiet room for him, his old turret room, in which he could rest and read a good deal of the time.  He was aware that all the family viewed him with curiosity and some with suspicion, and that intimacy with any of them would probably lead to questions about himself that he could not answer.

A minor but on the whole welcome diversion was caused by the revelation that during the last twelve months of his life old Mr.  Rainier had been having his biography written.  The author was a young and unknown man named Seabury, who had apparently made a business of persuading rich men that posterity would regret the absence of any definitive story of their lives.  Rainier, usually a shrewd detector of flattery, had in this case succumbed, so that the book had been commissioned, a sum paid to Seabury there and then, and a further sum promised “on completion” and “if approved.” When the old man’s state of health became serious, Seabury had evidently begun to fear for the balance of his payment, and so had hurried his manuscript into final shape, hoping perhaps to impress the assembled relatives by a certain fulsomeness of treatment that might be considered additionally appropriate in the circumstances.

The manuscript, neatly typed and with a covering letter, was brought to Stourton by special messenger on the evening before the funeral; Sheldon accepted it and placed it on the hall table;

Charles, passing by an hour later, opened it at random.  He happened to light on a description of Cowderton, where the Rainier steelworks were situated, and read:--

 

But what has been sacrificed in the sylvan peace of its surroundings has been gained in the town’s prevalent atmosphere of optimism and prosperity; and for these gifts, connected so visibly with the firm of Rainier, Cowderton must thank the dreams of a lad who was himself born in the heart of rural England.

 

Charles smiled slightly and did not read any more.  He felt that the book, if it were all in such a vein, would probably have pleased his father, while at the same time affording him the additional pleasure of not being taken in by it.

Others of the family, however, got hold of the manuscript and read enough of it to decide it was rather good, though of course they had to be a little patronizing about a mere writer, especially an unknown one, while at the same time nourishing the secret wonderment of all healthy-minded Philistines that the act of writing can be protracted throughout three hundred pages.  But the manuscript’s chief value lay in its usefulness as a subject for conversation during the rather hard-going lunch-party that assembled towards half-past two the following afternoon.  Those who had just seen old Mr. Rainier’s remains lowered into their final resting-place in Stourton Churchyard were relaxing after the strain of the ordeal while steeling themselves for another—the reading of the will; and there, at the table, with all the secrets in his pocket, sat Truslove, somehow larger now than life, munching saddle of mutton in full awareness that his moment was about to arrive, and striking the exact professional balance between serious-mindedness and good-humour—prepared to respond to a joke if one were offered, or to commiserate with a tear if one were let fall.

It seemed to be a family convention—unwritten, unspoken, even in a sense not consciously thought about—that Sheldon was one of them at such moments, and that as soon as the other servants had left the dining-room his own remaining presence need impose no censorship.  Chetwynd had been talking business optimism with Truslove.  “What we’ve got to do now, old chap, is to plan for peace as efficiently as we planned for war, because there’s going to be no limit to what British industry can do in the future—why, only during the last few weeks one of our war factories turned to making motor-cycles—we’re snowed under with orders already, simply can’t cope with them.”  This was vaguely pleasant news to the family, though business was always tiresome—and yet, what else was there to talk about?  Then somebody thought of the biography, and George asked Sheldon his opinion of it.

“I looked it over, sir, and it seemed quite respectably written.”

“Respectably—or respectfully?” put in Julian, staking out his epigram rather faster than usual.

“Both, I think, sir.”

Sheldon smiled, and then all of them, except Charles, began to laugh, as if suddenly realizing that there was no reason why they shouldn’t.  In the midst of the laughter Chetwynd glanced across the table and caught a ready eye.  “How about an adjournment to the library, Truslove?”

Half an hour later the secrets were known, and there was nothing very startling about them.  The bulk of Henry Rainier’s fortune, amounting after payment of death duties to over one million eight hundred thousand pounds, was divided equally between six of the children enumerated by name, except that Chetwynd, because of seniority and closer contacts with the industrial firms, took over a few additional controlling interests.  Stourton was also left to him, as well as the town house in London.  A few heirlooms went to various members of the family; there were bequests to servants and a few small gifts to charity.  Charles, of course, was not mentioned.

The whole revelation was so unspectacular that when Truslove had folded up the will and replaced it in his pocket there was a general feeling of relief and anticlimax.  Any faint fears the family might have entertained (and there always are such faint fears where money is concerned) could now be disbanded; they were all going to stay comfortably rich for the rest of their lives— even richer than most of them had anticipated.

Sheldon had not been present during the actual will-reading, but when he next entered Chetwynd was the first to address him, almost jauntily:  “Well, Sheldon, he remembered you.  You get a thousand.”

“That was very generous of Mr. Rainier.”

“And if you take my advice you’ll put it back in the firm— wonderful chance to double or treble it. . . .  However, we can discuss that later.  By the way, I’m taking it for granted you’ll stay with me here?”

“I shall be very pleased to do so, Mr. Chetwynd.”

Chet, it was clear, was already seeing himself an Industrial Magnate, Master of Stourton, and Supreme Arbiter of Family Affairs.  There was a touch of childishness in his attitude that prevented it from being wholly unpleasant.  Having made his gesture, he now turned to Truslove, whose eye still watchfully waited.  “Now, old chap, before we close the meeting, I think you’ve something else to say.”

Truslove rose, cleared his throat, and began by remarking that it was perhaps appropriate at such a moment to turn from a sad event to one which, by being almost contemporaneous, had undoubtedly served to balance pleasure against pain, gain against loss.  Indeed, had the late Mr. Rainier been permitted to learn of it, who knows but what . . .  However, they knew his views about THAT, and the differences that had arisen between himself and Dr.  Sanderstead; death had put an end to them, so it was perhaps unnecessary to refer to them again.  What he did feel was undoubtedly what they all felt—a desire to welcome Mr. Charles to their midst and to assure him of their unbounded joy at the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him.  “We don’t pretend to understand exactly how it happened, Mr. Charles, but a very famous hymn informs us that God moves in a mysterious way.”  A little titter all around the room.  “And if our congratulations may have seemed either belated or lacking in expression, I am sure you will make allowances at this troubled time.”

Charles bowed slightly.  He did not think their congratulations either belated or lacking in expression—indeed, his chief complaint was that there had been so many of them so many times repeated.

The lawyer continued:  “Now I come to a matter nearer to my own province, and one that I must deal with directly and briefly.  It has seemed both to Mr. Chetwynd, as the future head of the family concerns, and to myself, as representing in some sense the wishes which I feel would have been those of the late Mr. Rainier, a man whom it was my privilege to know for over forty years, and whose probable intentions I can therefore speak of with some justification . . .”

And so on.  What had happened, clearly, was that Truslove, having lost his battle with the doctors, had talked the family into an equity settlement—each of them agreeing to sacrifice a seventh part of his or her bequest in order that Charles should acquire an equal share.  Dressed up in legal jargon, and with a good deal of smooth talk about “justice” and “common fairness,” the matter took ten minutes to enunciate, during which time Charles sat back in his chair, glancing first at one face and then at another, feeling that nothing could have been less enthusiastic than (except for Chet’s and Bridget’s) their occasional smiles of approval.  Chet was expansive, like Santa Claus basking in an expected popularity;

Bridget was sweet and ready with a smile, as always.  But the others were grimly resigned to doing their duty in the most trying possible circumstances—each of them saying goodbye to forty thousand pounds with a glassy determination and a stiff upper lip.  They were like boys at a good English school curbing their natural inclinations in favour of what had been successfully represented to them as “the thing to do.”  Truslove must have given them a headmasterly pi-jaw, explaining just where their duty lay and how inevitably they must make up their minds to perform it; Chet had probably backed him up out of sheer grandiloquence—“Damn it all, we MUST give the fellow a square deal”; begun under such auspices the campaign could not have failed.  But when Charles looked at George, and Julia, and Jill, and Julian, and Lydia, he knew they were all desperately compelling themselves to swallow something unpleasant and get it over; which gave him a key to the mood in which he felt most of them regarded him: he was just a piece of bad luck, like the income tax or a horse that comes in last.

Suddenly he found himself on his feet and addressing them; it was almost as if he heard his own voice, spoken by another person.  “I’m sure I thank you all very much, and you too, Truslove.  The proposal you’ve outlined is extremely generous—TOO generous, in fact.  I’m a person of simple tastes—I need very little to live comfortably on—in fact the small income I already have is ample.  So I’m afraid I can’t accept your offer, though I do once again thank you for making it.”

He looked round their faces again, noting the sudden amazement and relief in the eyes of some of them—especially Chet’s wife, Lydia.  Clearly they had never contemplated the possibility of his refusing.  That began to amuse him, and then he wondered whether his refusal had not been partly motivated by a curiosity to see how they would take it.  He really hadn’t any definite inclination, either to have the money or not; but his lack of desire for it himself was certainly not balanced by any particular wish that they should be enriched.

Truslove and Chetwynd were on their feet with an instant chorus of objections.  Truslove’s were doubtless sincere—after all, he had nothing to lose.  But Chet—was it possible that HIS protests were waging sham war against an imperceptible hope that had dawned in him, a hope quite shamelessly reflected in the eyes of his wife?  Was he seeking to employ just a featherweight too little persuasion to succeed?  Charles did not believe that Chet would have attempted this balancing act if left to himself, but there was Lydia by his side, and he was undoubtedly afraid of her.  Nevertheless he kept up the protesting, and Charles kept up the refusal; the whole family then began to argue about it, with more vehement generosity now that they felt the issue was already decided; but they made the mistake of keeping it up too long, for Charles suddenly grew tired and exclaimed:  “All right then, if you all insist, I’ll agree to take it.”

Truslove beamed on what he imagined to be his own victory; Chet, after a second’s hesitation, came across the room and shook Charles by the hand.  “Fine, old chap. . . .  Now we’re all set and Truslove can do the rest.”  But the others could only stare in renewed astonishment as they forced deadly smiles into the supervening silence.

There were papers they all had to sign; then Charles escaped upstairs.  His room was the one he had slept in as a boy, though it had since been refurnished more opulently; it expanded at one corner into a sort of turret, windowed for three-fourths of the circle, and from this viewpoint the vista of gardens and skyline was beautiful even towards dusk on a gray day.  He was staring at it when Kitty entered.  “Oh, Uncle Charles, I MUST show you this— it’s in today’s Times. . . .”  She held out the paper, folded at the column of obituary appreciations.  The item she pointed to ended as follows:--

 

A lifelong individualist, there was never any wavering in his political and economic outlook, while his contributions to the cause of Free Trade, both financially and by utterance, were continual and ungrudging.  A man whose character more easily won him the respect of his foes than the applause of the multitude, he rightly concentrated on an industrial rather than a political career, and though his representation of West Lythamshire in the Conservative interest had been in the strictest sense uneventful, his influence behind the political scene was never entirely withdrawn, nor did his advice go long unsought.

 

“Uncle Charles, what does it mean?”

“It’s just something—that somebody’s written.”

“But I can’t understand it—at least, I can understand some of the words, but they don’t seem to mean anything.  It’s about HIM, isn’t it?”

He answered then, forgetting whom he was addressing:  “It’s a charming letter about my father from a man who probably knew him slightly and disliked him intensely.”

“Why did he dislike him?”

He tried to undo the remark.  “Stupid of me to say that—maybe he didn’t dislike him at all. . . .  Run along—haven’t you had tea?”

When he had been her age there had been a schoolroom high tea, with Miss Ponsonby dispensing bread and jam and cakes.

“They’re serving it now on the terrace.  Aren’t you coming down?”

Self-possessed little thing; not quite spoilt yet.

“I’ll probably miss tea today.”

“Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“Did it upset you, going to the funeral?”

“Funerals are always rather upsetting.”

She still stood by, as if she wanted to be friendly.  Suddenly she said:  “Julian’s very funny, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s quite the humorist of the family.”

“He’s going back to Cannes tonight.”

“Oh, is he?”

“Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

“A cigarette?  Well—“

“I do smoke, you know—most of the girls at Kirby do as soon as they get into the sixth.”  She had taken a cigarette out of her bag and was already lighting it.  “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not particularly.”

“I knew you wouldn’t.  You don’t give a damn about anything.”

“Do they also say ‘damn’ in the sixth?”

“No—that’s what Mother said to Uncle Chet about you.”

“I see. . . .  Well . . .”

“But I’ve got to stay here now till I finish it. . . .  Don’t you think Sheldon’s rather marvellous?”

“Not only rather, but quite.”

“I think he’s the one who really ought to write a book about Grandfather.”

“Not a bad idea—why don’t you tell him?”

“I did, but he only smiled.  He’s so nice to everybody, isn’t he?  We had a wonderful Christmas party here last year, before Grandfather was ill—we had charades and one of them was his name—

SHELL, you know, and then DONE—but of course everybody guessed it— it was far too easy.  Then we had Buffalo—BUFF, the colour, and then a Frenchman answering the telephone—and then the whole word BUFFALO in America. . . .  No, it wasn’t Christmas, it was New Year, because Bridget and I had an argument about who had the darkest hair to let the New Year in with . . . but I did it.”

“You would, I’m sure.”

“Will Uncle Chet have any New Year’s party this year?”

“I shouldn’t think so. . . .  Here’s an ash-tray.”

“What I really came for was to say good-bye.  Mother wants to get away this evening.”  She held out her hand.

“Good-bye, Kitty—nice of you to come up.”

He led her to the door.  Then:--

“Uncle Charles, is it true you don’t remember a thing that’s happened to you for over two years?”

“Perfectly true.”

“But how marvellous.  Then ANYTHING might have happened to you?”

He laughed at that and patted her on the shoulder.  “Yes, and forgetfulness may have its points.  For instance, I daresay you’d rather I forgot that you smoked a cigarette—or don’t you mind?”

“Perhaps I’m like you—I don’t give a damn,” she answered, scampering out of the room.  “Good-bye, Uncle Charles!”

When she had gone he decided he had behaved pretty badly, encouraging her to smoke and swear; there was some imp of mischief in him that drove him to such things, except that “imp” and “mischief” were far too cheerful words for it.

Dinner, a little later, proved another difficult meal.  Julian, Jill, and Kitty had already left; others were planning a departure the following day.  Julia and her husband had agreed to stay over the New Year, “helping” Chet and Lydia.  Lydia said:  “Jill and Julian were anxious to say good-bye to you, Charles, but they felt you mightn’t want to be disturbed, especially as Kitty said you weren’t coming down for tea.”

He smiled and said he perfectly understood.  Chet talked business again with Truslove, who was staying the night; Chet also drank too much and said that British business was headed for the biggest boom in history, by Jove, always provided the government would keep off their backs.  Which led to politics and the family constituency of West Lythamshire:  “I’m no politician, old chap, but still if the local association were to make the suggestion . . . of course it’s too early yet even to think of it.”

But Chet evidently WAS thinking of it, readying himself for the doing of his duty, wherever it might lead him.

The following morning, when George and his wife had left immediately after breakfast, taking Bridget with them, Charles suddenly decided to return to London with Truslove, who had a car.  They drove away together, amidst noisy farewells from Chet and a few quiet words from Sheldon as the latter stowed away the bags.

“Do you propose to stay in London, Mr. Charles?”

“I’ll let you know, Sheldon.  I’ll be all right, anyway.”

“I hope so.”

During the journey through Reading and Maidenhead he told Truslove he had been quite sincere in his original refusal of the equity settlement, and had only agreed to it because it was what the family said they wanted, so if they now cared to go back on the decision; it would still be all right with him.

Truslove, of course, replied that that was out of the question.  “In fact, Mr. Charles, you seem to have given this matter far too little thought.  A quarter of a million pounds is not to be treated lightly.”

“That’s just the point.  I don’t know HOW to treat it.”

Truslove assured him, entirely without irony, that there would be no trouble attaching to the inheritance.  “The bulk of it’s invested in shares of the company—you’ll merely receive the regular dividends.”

“That leads me to what I wanted to say.  I’d rather not be connected with the family business at all.  I’m not a business man.  If I HAVE to have the money, I’d like to sell the shares immediately and invest the proceeds in government stock.”

“But, Mr. Charles, I—I really don’t advise—“

“Why not?  Isn’t it possible to do that?”

“POSSIBLE, of course—the shares command a very ready market.  But I couldn’t ADVISE it—not as things are.”

“That’s odd—I always thought you lawyers had a passion for government stocks.  Aren’t they supposed to be safer than anything else?  What about consols?”

Truslove seemed disturbed at the prospect of having to assess the relative merits of consols and Rainier ordinaries.  “Naturally I’ve nothing against government securities—no one CAN have, and I should be the first to advise such prudence in investment, but for . . . well, perhaps I may let you into a secret—of course the whole matter’s very technical and hasn’t been settled yet, but it was on the cards when your father passed away and I think events will go forward a little quicker now . . . it’s a question of refloating the entire group of Rainier companies on terms that would of course be very favourable to present holders.  I can’t give you any details, but you’ll realize why it would be unwise to dispose of anything at the present moment.”

“Still, I’d rather you sell.  I’m not interested in speculation and share movements.  I really mean what I say, so don’t wait for me to change my mind.”

“Of course if you give me direct instructions, I can’t refuse.  But you realize that, in addition to any question of capital value, the income from government stocks will be very much less?”

“I don’t mind that, either.  I’ll probably live very well on a fraction of it.  Matter of fact, you might as well know my plans.  I’m going to Cambridge.”

“Cambridge?”

“I was going to go there, you know, when war broke out—I’d already taken the entrance examination.  Not a bad idea to go on where you left off, especially if you can’t think of anything else to do.”

 

                    *    *    *    *    *

 

His rooms at St. Swithin’s overlooked the river and the Backs, and from the first January day when he settled in, he felt peace surrounding him.  It was not that he himself was at peace—often the contrary; but he always felt the rooms and the college weighing WITH him, as it were, in the silent pressures of his mind.  His rooms were rather austerely furnished when he took possession; he made them less so by books, pictures, and a couple of easy-chairs, yet they still remained—as Herring, his gyp, remarked—a READING gentleman’s rooms.  After half a century of experience as a college servant, Herring counted himself fortunate whenever a newcomer to his staircase entered that category.

Charles had visited Cambridge for a week during his last term at Netherton; he had then put up in back-street lodgings while taking the Little-go, which had left him no time to make acquaintances or get much impression of the place except that he thought he was going to like it.  He was glad of this now, for it meant that no one remembered him and that his past life was neither known nor inquired about.  To be a younger son of a rich industrialist counted for nothing among dons and fellow undergraduates; that he had served in the war merely placed him among the vast majority; and that he made few friends and liked to be left alone was, after all, the not unusual characteristic of reading gentlemen.

He told his Senior Tutor, a harassed little man named Bragg, that he would like to take history; and a further interview with Werneth, the history don, decided him to try for the tripos instead of an ordinary degree.  So he acquired the necessary books, began to attend recommended lectures, and dined in Hall for the required nights each week—which is about all a Cambridge life need consist of structurally, until the scaffolding is removed later and one sees how much else there must have been.

Sheldon sent him news from Stourton fairly often, generally to say there wasn’t any news.  Still reading, however, between the lines, Charles gathered that Chet and Lydia were failing to evolve a well-controlled household, and that Sheldon was less comfortable than in the earlier days of despotism.  Truslove also wrote, reporting progress in his own sphere; transfers of property took time, and it was March before the lawyer could notify him that he no longer possessed any financial interest in the Rainier enterprises.  The shares had been sold for seventy shillings (fifteen more than the price at Christmas), and the purchaser had been none other than Chetwynd, who had apparently been glad to add to his own already large holding.  Truslove added that he regarded the price as satisfactory, though he still thought the sale unwise in view of a probably much higher price eventually.

Charles wrote back that he was perfectly satisfied, and that if his “unwise” action had been the means of obliging Chet, so much the better.  Just about then came the Easter vacation; he did not visit Stourton or see any of the family, but spent the three weeks in an unplanned trip around northern France, visiting Chartres, Lisieux, Caen, and Rouen.  Returning to London the day before the Cambridge summer term began, he bought an evening paper at Victoria Station and glanced through what had come to be the almost usual news of famine and revolution somewhere or other on the Continent; not till late at night, in his hotel room, did he happen to notice a headline on the financial page—“Rainier’s Still Soaring: Reported Terms of Bonus.”  He read that the shares had topped five pounds and that there was talk of an issue of new stock to existing shareholders in the proportion of two for one.  It wasn’t all very clear to him, for he never studied the financial columns and did not understand their jargon; but he realized that, from the point of view of immediate profit, Truslove and Chet had been right, and he himself wrong; which didn’t trouble him at all.  He was almost glad for his own sake, as well as Chet’s, for he would have had no use for the extra money, whereas Chet enjoyed both spending and the chance to say “I told you so, old chap.”  In fact he felt so entirely unregretful about what had happened that he sent both Chet and Truslove short notes of congratulation.

The next day he went to Cambridge and completely lost track of financial news amidst the many more interesting pursuits of term-time.  He still did not make friends easily, but he joined the “Heretics” and sometimes attended the weekly debating sessions over the fish shop in Petty Cury; he also came to know the occupant of the rooms next to his on the same staircase—a high-caste Hindoo named Pal who was a mathematician and perhaps also a genius.  Pal claimed to feel numerals emotionally and to find them as recognizable as human faces; Charles took him first as an oddity, then as a personality, later as a friend.  He formed a habit of having coffee in Pal’s rooms once or twice a week.

As summer came, he did most of his reading on the river, generally on the Upper Cam at Grantchester, and sometimes he would portage the canoe across the roadway to the deep tranquil reach beyond the Old Mill.  One morning, having done this, he turned to the right, along a tributary; the going was difficult, for he had to slide over sunken logs and push away branches that trailed in the water, but after an arduous yard-by-yard struggle he was suddenly able to paddle into a dark pool overhung with willows; and there, as he rested, a feeling of discovery came over him, as if it were the Congo or the Amazon instead of a little English stream; he felt strangely happy and stayed there all day till it was time to return for tea at the Orchard, which was the Grantchester resort patronized by undergraduates.  He was on friendly terms with the old lady there who served strawberries and cream under the apple trees, and when he showed his scratched arms and said where he had been, she answered very casually:  “Oh, you must have been up the Bourne—Rupert Brooke used to say how beautiful it was there—HE got his arms scratched too.”  Somehow the whole incident, with its hint of something seen by no human eye between Brooke’s and his own (highly unlikely, but tempting to contemplate), gave him a curious pleasure which he felt he would spoil by ever going there again; so he never did.

He got on well with lecturers and tutors, and soon acquired one of those intangible reputations, breathed in whispers across High Tables, that rest on anything except past achievement; he lived retiringly and took hardly any part in University activities, yet it had already become expected that he would do well.  Werneth had even consented to his taking the first part of the history tripos in July—after two terms of preparation for an examination for which most students took three, and some even six.  “But you have a good background of knowledge,” he told Charles, adding with a smile:  “And also a good memory.”

On an impulse he could not check quickly enough Charles answered:

“It’s odd you should compliment me on my memory, because—“  And then he told Werneth about his war injury, and the strange gap of years which he had christened in his own mind the Dark Corridor.

Werneth listened with an abstract attention beyond the range of mere inquisitiveness.  After the brief account was finished, he tore a sheet of paper from a pad on his desk and drew a large rectangle.  “Not exactly my province, as a historian, but nevertheless quite a teasing problem, Rainier.  Your life, from what you say, appears to be divided into three parts—like Caesar’s Gaul?”

“Or like Regent Street,” Charles interjected, beginning to be amused.

“Or like a Victorian novel,” capped Werneth, delightedly.

“Or like an artichoke,” recapped Charles.

That put them both in a highly agreeable mood.  “Let us call the parts A, B, and C,” resumed Werneth, drawing verticals across the rectangle and lettering the segments.  “A is your life before the war injury; B is your life between that injury and the moment in Liverpool last December 27 when, according to your statement, you suddenly remembered your name and identity; C is your life since then.  Now it is demonstrably true that during Period C—that is to say, at the present time—you enjoy a normally clear recollection of both Period C and Period A, but not of Period B.  Am I right?”

“Perfectly.”

“And it must also be inferentially clear that during Period B you could not have had any recollection at all of Period A?”

“Naturally not.”

“Thank you. . . .  There’s only one thing more I should like to ask— and that is if I might send this diagram to my friend Dr. Freeman, of St. Jude’s, along with a brief résumé of the facts which it illustrates?”

When Charles hesitated before replying Werneth added:  “I won’t mention your name if you’d prefer not.”

Charles then consented.  The matter was not referred to at his next meeting with Werneth, but some weeks later the history don asked Charles to stay behind after a lecture.  “As I expected, my friend Freeman found my notes on your case extremely teasing.  In fact he’d very much like to meet you if you haven’t any objection.  You probably know his reputation as a philosopher and psychologist.”

Again Charles was reluctant, and again consented on the understanding that his name was not to be divulged; so the curious meeting took place in Werneth’s rooms.  The eminent authority talked to Charles for over an hour in a completely detached and anonymous way, stating as his opinion that Period B would probably return, though there could be no certainty about it or prophecy as to the time required.  Charles had several further interviews with Freeman, and began to take a certain pleasure in consulting an expert thus obliquely; he thought it typical of the amenities of Cambridge civilization that such a plan could have been worked out to suit him.  At the same time he came to like Freeman personally, so that when his own identity became later revealed through an accident, it did not bother him much.

Charles took a First Class in the first part of the history tripos, which was quite a brilliant achievement in the circumstances.  After consultations with Bragg and Werneth, he decided to switch over to economics during the following year—an effective piece of specialization, for he had already gone a certain way in economic history.  He was increasingly interested in the background of knowledge and theory behind the lives of men, and the astounding clumsiness of world behaviour compared with the powers of the planning mind.  To use Werneth’s favourite word, he found the paradox teasing.

During the Long Vacation he stayed in Cambridge, putting in mornings and evenings of study interspersed with afternoons on the river or walks to Granchester through the meadows; he liked Cambridge during vacation time—the quieter streets, the air of perpetual Sunday, the August sunlight bleaching the blinds in many a shop that would not pull them up until term-time.  Most of the bookshops remained open, however, and there were a few good concerts.  The two months passed very quickly.

Sheldon wrote to him every week, but with no news except of domestic trouble at Stourton—an outbreak of petty thefts due (Charles could judge) to Chet’s refusal to back up Sheldon in some earlier trouble with one of the gardeners.  Now that it was too late, Chet seemed to be handling the matter rather unfortunately, dealing out wholesale dismissals to servants who had given years of service, and leaving a staff both too small and too disgruntled to work well.  Chet also wrote, giving his side of the question, casting doubts on Sheldon’s efficiency, and asking how Charles, as one of the family, would feel about selling the place.  Charles replied instantly that Chet should sell by all means; Stourton was far too big for any modern uses, and family sentiment should not weigh against common sense.  Chet did not reply to that, but a few weeks later, at Cambridge, Charles heard from Truslove that Stourton was on the market, but wouldn’t be easy to sell “in these days.”

Then one Saturday, returning to his rooms from a lecture, he found Kitty sprawled on a sofa and Herring teetering doubtfully in the pantry.  “Hello, Uncle Charles,” she cried loudly, and then added in a whisper:  “That’s for HIS benefit.  He didn’t believe me—I could see that.”

“But why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Charles began, trying to infuse a note of mild pleasure into his astonishment.

“Because you’d probably have told me not to,” she answered promptly.

He admitted he probably would, and then asked why she HAD come.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Is it?  But—well, many happy returns—but—“

“Uncle Chet promised me a big party at Stourton, but he cancelled it at the last moment because he said Aunt Lydia wasn’t very well, and as I’d already got leave of absence from Kirby I didn’t feel I could WASTE the week-end.”

“But you’re not intending to stay here for the whole week-end, are you?”

“Oh yes, I’ve taken a room at the Bull.  Surprising what a girl can do by herself these days.”

“But if they find out—at Kirby—“

“That I’ve been visiting one uncle instead of another?  Will it matter?  And I don’t really care if they DO find out—I’m tired of school anyway.  I’d like to go to Newnham.”

“Anything wrong with Somerville at Oxford?”

“Oh, how you’d loathe to have me anywhere around, wouldn’t you?”

He began to laugh and suggested taking her to lunch.

“Can’t I have lunch here—in the college?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s better than the little German at our school who pretends to be French and gives us art lessons—he gets in an awful temper and then says, ‘In one word I vill not have it.’”

They lunched at Buol’s, in King’s Parade, and afterwards he said:

“Now, young lady, having invited yourself here, you’ll have to take the consequences.  My usual way of spending an afternoon is to punt up the river, and I don’t care how dull you find it, it’s either that or off you go on your own.”

“But I don’t mind at all—I can punt awfully well.”

“You won’t get the chance—I’LL do the punting.”

But she lazed quite happily during the hour-long journey, chatting all the time about school, life, the family, herself, and himself.  “It’s made a great difference, you passing that examination, Uncle Charles.  I believe the family had an idea you were a bit queer till you did that—now they still think you’re queer, but a marvel too.  You’ve quite pushed Uncle Julian off the shelf as the one in the family with brains.”

He made no comment; the effort of digging the pole in and out of the river-bed gave him an easy excuse for silence.  He didn’t dislike Kitty, indeed there were certain qualities in her—or perhaps there was only one quality—that definitely attracted him.

She went on:  “Of course the family don’t really RESPECT brains— they just have a scared feeling that brains might come in handy some day.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know—just the general atmosphere before Mother went away.  She’s at Cannes, you know—staying with Uncle Julian.”

They had tea at the Orchard and then returned to her hotel for dinner.  “I’m glad you’re showing up with me here,” she said, as they entered the lobby, he in cap and gown as prescribed by University regulations for all undergraduates after dark.  “It lets them know I’m respectable even if I AM only fifteen. . . .  By the way, how old are YOU?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you FEEL twenty-six?”

“Sometimes I feel ninety-six—so I try not to bother about how I feel.”

“Are you HAPPY?”

“Oh, happy enough.”

“Can you remember ever being TERRIBLY happy?”

He pondered.  “Once when I was a small boy and Sheldon visited us at Brighton for some reason, and HE took me for a walk along the Promenade instead of Miss Ponsonby.”  He laughed.  “Such a thrill.”

She laughed also.  “And I was happiest once when I’d had a toothache and it began to stop.  Before it FINISHED stopping.  I really enjoyed the last bit of the pain.”

“Morbid creature.”

“But pain is part of love, isn’t it?”

He was studying the menu.  “At the moment I’m rather more concerned with the question of steak versus lamb chops.”

“You WOULD say that, but you don’t really mean it. . . .  Oh, and another time I was happy was Armistice Night, at school.  So wonderful, to think the war was all over, wasn’t it?  Like waking up on end-of-term morning and realizing it’s really come.  But somehow everything’s been a bit of a let-down since, don’t you think?  I mean, if you stop now and say to yourself, the war’s over, the war’s over, it can’t keep on making you happy as it did that first night, can it?”

“I’ve practically decided on steak.  What about you?”

“Uncle Charles, are you sorry I came here to see you?”

“Well, I’m a little puzzled about what to do with you tomorrow.”

“I’d like to do whatever you were going to do.”

“That’s well meant, but I don’t think it would work.  I intended to read most of the day and go to a concert in the afternoon.”

“I’d love the concert.”

“I don’t expect you would.  Beethoven Quartets make no attempt to be popular.”

“Neither do you, Uncle Charles, but I don’t mind.”

He smiled, appreciating the repartee whilst resolute to make no concessions throughout the rest of the evening and the following day; he would teach her to play truant from school and fasten herself on him like that.  After a long and, he hoped, exhausting walk on Sunday morning, he took her to the concert in the afternoon, and in the evening saw her off on the train with much relief and a touch of wry amusement.

“Uncle Charles, you’ve been so SWEET to me.”

“I haven’t been aware of it.”

“Would you really mind if I were to come to Newnham?”

“It isn’t in my power to stop you.  But don’t imagine you’d see much of me—the Newnham rules wouldn’t allow it, for one thing.”

“Do you think Newnham would be good for me?”

“Another question is would you be good for Newnham?”

“Won’t you be serious a moment?  I wish you’d write to Mother and tell her it would be good for me.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I could do that.  It’s for her and you to decide.”

“She says she doesn’t think she can afford it these days.”

“Not AFFORD it?  Surely—“  But that, after all, wasn’t his business either.  If Jill thought she could afford expensive cruises and winterings abroad, and yet decided to economize on her daughter’s education—well, it still remained outside his province.

The girl added, as the train came in:  “It’s because trade’s not so good, or something.  I think that’s really why Uncle Chet cancelled my party, not because of Aunt Lydia.”  She mimicked Chet as she added:  “Time for economies, old chap.”

“I don’t think you really know anything about it.  After all, a

party wouldn’t cost—“

“I know, but Uncle Chet wouldn’t think of that.  There’s nobody worse than a scared optimist.”  She gave him a look, then added:

“I suppose you think I heard somebody say that?  Well, I didn’t—I thought it out myself.  I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool at all.  But I don’t see how you can know much about financial matters.”

“Oh, can’t I?  Uncle Chet used to rave so much about Rainier shares whenever I saw him that I and a lot of other girls at Kirby clubbed together and bought some.  We look at the price every morning.”

He said sternly:  “I think you’re very foolish.  You and your friends should have something better to spend your time on—and perhaps your money, too. . . .  Good-bye.”

The train was moving.  “Good-bye, Uncle Charles.”

Returning to St. Swithin’s in the mellow October twilight he pondered on that phrase “in these days.”  Truslove had used it in connection with the possible sale of Stourton, and now Jill also, about the expense of sending Kitty to college.  Always popular as an excuse for action or inaction, and uttered by Englishmen in 1918 and 1919 with a hint of victorious pride, it had lately—during 1920--turned downwards from the highest notes.  There was nothing gloomy yet, nothing in the nature of a dirge; just an allegro simmering down to andante among business men and stockbrokers.  Trade, of course, had been so outrageously and preposterously good that there was nothing for the curve to do except flatten; the wild boom on the markets could not continue indefinitely.  Charles looked up Rainier shares in The Times when he got back to his rooms; he found they stood at four pounds after having been higher— which, allowing for the bonus, really meant that the shares he had sold to Chet for seventy shillings were now more than twice the price.  Chet shouldn’t worry—and yet, according to Kitty, he WAS worrying—doubtless because there had been a small fall from the peak.  Her comment had been shrewd—nobody like a scared optimist.

The next morning at breakfast his thoughts were enough on the subject for him to glance at the later financial news, which informed him by headline that Rainier’s had announced an interim dividend of 10 per cent, as against 15 the previous year.  It seemed to him good enough, and nothing for anyone to worry about, but by evening as he walked along Petty Cury the newsboys were carrying placards, “Slump on ‘Change” and “Rainier Jolts Markets.” He found that the reduced dividend had tipped over prices rather as an extra brick on a child’s toy tower will send half of it toppling.  Rainier’s had fallen thirty shillings during the day’s trading, and other leading shares proportionately.  It had been something that sensational journalism delighted to call a “Black Monday.”

Still he did not think there was anything much to worry about.  The theoretical study of economics was far removed from the practical guesswork of Throgmorton Street, and his reading of Marshall and Pigou had given him no insight into the psychology of speculation.  For a week afterwards he ignored the financial pages, being temperamentally as well as personally disinterested in them; not till he received an alarming letter from Sheldon did he search the financial lists again to discover that in the interval Rainier ordinaries had continued their fall from two pounds ten to seventeen shillings.  And even then his first thought was a severely logical one—that they were either worth more than that, or else had never been worth the higher prices at all.

Sheldon wrote that Chet was terribly worried, had been having long consultations with bank and Stock Exchange people, and had stayed all night in his City office on several occasions.  Charles could not understand that; what had bank or Stock Exchange people got to do with the firm?  Surely the Rainier business was principally carried on at Cowderton and other places, not in the City of London; and as for the falling price of the shares, what did it matter what the price of something was, if you didn’t have either to buy or to sell?  He replied to Sheldon somewhat on these lines, half wishing he could write a similar note to Chet, but as Chet had not approached him, he did not care to offer comment or advice.

But towards the beginning of December a letter from Chet did arrive; and it was, when one reached the last page, an appeal for a loan.  He didn’t say how much, but no sum, it appeared, would be either too small or too great; he left the choice to Charles with a touch of his vague expansiveness, assuring him that it was a merely temporary convenience and would soon be repaid.  Charles was puzzled, unable to imagine how much Chet needed—surely it couldn’t be a small sum, a few hundreds, and if it were a matter of thousands, what could he possibly want it for?  He felt he had a right to inquire, and did so.  Back came a franker, longer, and much more desperate appeal, again saving its pith until the last page, wherein Chet admitted he had been speculating heavily in the shares of the firm, borrowing from banks in order to do so.  At first the result had been highly successful; his own constant buying on a rising market had given him huge profits, and with those (uncashed, of course) as security he had borrowed and purchased more.  Then the inevitable had happened.  Chet didn’t put it in this way; he seemed to think that a conjunction of bad trade, falling share prices, and a request by the bank for him to begin repayment of loans was some malign coincidence instead of a series of causes and effects.  If only Charles could help him out with ten or twelve thousand—he’d pay interest, let’s call it a short-term investment, old chap, the badness of trade could only be exceptional, Rainier shares were destined to far higher levels eventually—hadn’t they once been “talked” to twenty pounds?  And Chet added that he hated making such a request, and only did so because there was much more at stake than his own personal affairs;

Rainier’s was a family concern, there were Julian and Jill and Bridget and Julia and all the others to think about.  If he threw his own shares on the market, it would make for a further fall in the price, and that would be bad for the firm itself and so affect the stability of the family property and livelihood.

The letter arrived on a Friday; Charles answered it that same evening, enclosing a cheque for as large a round figure as he happened to have on hand, and promising more in a few days.  But by the following morning the affairs of Rainier’s had already broken out of the financial columns and were invading the news pages of all the daily papers.  Apparently the shares had crashed in the “Street” after the Stock Exchange closed the previous evening, the final price being a very nominal half-crown.  Accompanying the collapse were wild rumours—some of them, according to a discreet reporter, “of a serious nature.”

That sent him to Bragg to ask for leave of absence; he then wired

Sheldon and left immediately for Stourton, reaching the house in

the late afternoon.  From the cars outside he guessed there was a

family conclave before Sheldon told him who had arrived.  He found

them assembled in the library, already in the midst of stormy

argument.  Bridget, who was near the door, said “Hello, Charlie,”

but the others were too preoccupied to hear this, even to see him

at first.  It was curious to note the utter disintegration of

formal manners in face of such a crisis; to watch a favoured few,

long accustomed to regard the family business as a rock of ages

cleft for them, suddenly contemplating phenomena so normal in most

people’s lives—the uncertainties of the future.  Charles stayed

close to the door, reluctant to intervene; so far as he could make

out, the family had been heckling Chet for some time, for his

temper was considerably frayed, and at one question he suddenly

lost it and shouted:  “Look here, I’m not going to shoulder the

blame for everything!  You were all damned glad to leave things in

my hands as long as you thought they were going well—“

“As long as we thought you knew what you were up to—we never

guessed you were monkeying like this—“

“God damn it, Jill—what did YOU ever do except draw dividends and spend ‘em on Riviera gigolos?”

“How DARE you say that!”

“Well, if you can suggest there’s been anything crooked in the way

I’ve—“

Jill was on the verge of hysteria.  “I know my life isn’t stuffy

and narrow-minded like yours—but did I have to travel all the way

here just to be insulted?  Julian knows what a lie it is—he LIVES

there—he’s been at Cannes all the season except when we went to

Aix for a month—Julian, I appeal to you—are you going to stay

here and allow things like this to be said—JULIAN—“

George interposed feebly:  “Steady now, steady—both of you.”

Julia said, with cold common sense:  “I think we might as well stick to the point, which isn’t Jill’s morals, but our money.”

Jill was still screaming:  “Julian can tell you—JULIAN—“

Everybody stared at Julian, who couldn’t think of a sufficiently clever remark and was consequently silent.  Meanwhile Chet’s anger rose to white heat.  “Look at ME—don’t look at Julian!  I haven’t had a decent sleep for weeks, while you’ve all been gallivanting about in Cannes or Aix or God knows where!  LOOK at me!  I’ve put on ten years—that’s what they say at the office!” And he added, pathetically:  “To say nothing of it giving Lydia a breakdown.”

It was also pathetic that he should have asked them to look at him, for his claim was a clear exaggeration; he certainly looked tired— perhaps also in need of a Turkish bath and a shave; but his hair had failed to turn white after any number of sleepless nights.  He was still expansive, even in self-pity.  Charles felt suddenly sorry for him, as much because as in spite of this.

Julian, having now thought of something, intervened in his sly, high-pitched voice:  “I’m afraid it wasn’t your looks we were all relying on, Chet . . .”

Then Julia, glancing towards the door, spotted Charles.  “Ah, here’s the mystery man arrived!  Hello, darling!  How wise you were to sell Rainier’s at three pounds ten and buy War Loan, you shrewd man!  Come to gloat over us?”

It was the interpretation Charles had feared.  He stepped forward, nodded slightly to the general assembly.  “You’re quite wrong, Julia. . . .  How are you, Chet?”

Chet, on the verge of tears after his outburst, put out his hand rather as a dog extends an interceding paw; he murmured abjectly:

“Hello, old chap—God bless.  Caught us all at a bad moment. . . .

And thanks for your letter—damn nice of you, but I’m afraid it’s a

bit late—a sort of tide in the affairs of men, you know—“

Charles, not fully aware what Chet was talking about, answered for want of anything else to say:  “I should have come earlier, but I just missed a train.”

“You missed Chet’s news, too,” Jill cried, still half-hysterical.  “Such SPLENDID news!  I’ve been travelling all night to hear it—so has Julian—would somebody mind repeating it for Charles’s benefit?”

“I’LL tell him,” Julia interrupted, venomously.  “We’re all on the rocks, and Chet’s just the most wonderful financier in the world!”

“Except,” added Julian, “a certain undergraduate who thoughtfully added a quarter of a million to Chet’s bank loan by demanding cash.”

Charles swung round on him.  “What on earth do you mean by that?”

“Well, you sold your stuff to Chet, didn’t you?”

“He wanted to buy—I didn’t ask him to.”

“But he paid you in cash.”

“Naturally—what else?”

“Well, where d’you suppose he found the cash?  In his pocket?”

“You mean he had to borrow from the bank to pay me?”  Charles then turned on Chet.  “Is this true?”

“’Fraid it is, Charlie.  After all, you WANTED the cash.”

“Well, YOU wanted the shares.”

“Wasn’t exactly that I wanted ‘em, old chap, but I had to take ‘em.”

“But—I don’t see that—surely I could have sold them to someone else?”

“Not at that price.  You try dumping sixty thousand on the market and see what happens.  I had to take ‘em to keep the price firm.  Isn’t that right, Truslove?”

Charles peered beyond the faces; Truslove was standing in the shadows, fingering the embroidery at the back of a chair; leaning forward he answered:  “That was your motive, undoubtedly, Mr.

Chetwynd.  But I think we can hardly blame Mr. Charles for—“

“Is it a matter for blaming anybody?” Charles interrupted, with

tightened lips.  “I can only say that I—I—“

And then he stopped.  What COULD he say?  That he was sorry?  That had he known Chet was having to borrow he would have insisted on selling in the market?  That if he could have forecast a crisis like this, he would have held on to his shares, just to be one of the family in adversity?  None of these things was true, except the first.  He said, lamely:  “I feel at a disadvantage—not having known of these things before.”

“Well, whose fault was that?” Jill shouted at him.

“My own, I’m perfectly well aware.  I took no interest in them.”

“It doesn’t cost you anything to admit it now, does it?”

There was such bitterness in her voice that he stared with astonishment.  “I—I don’t know what you mean, Jill.”

“Oh, don’t put on that Cambridge air—we’re not all fools!  And we

haven’t all got queer memories either!  If you want my opinion, you

can have it—you’re morally liable to return that cash—“

Truslove stepped forward with unexpected sprightliness.  “I must

say I consider that a most unfair and prejudiced remark—“

Jill screamed on:  “I said MORALLY, Truslove, not LEGALLY!  Isn’t that the way you argued us all into the equity settlement with Charles after Father died?  We didn’t HAVE to do it then!  He doesn’t HAVE to do it now!  But what he OUGHT is another matter!”

Nobody said anything to that, but Julian stroked his chin thoughtfully, while Julia stared across at Jill with darkly shining eyes.  It was as if the family were at last converging on a more satisfying emotion than that of blaming Chet, who, after all, was only one of themselves.  But Charles was different.  He took in their various glances, accepting—even had he never done so before— the position of utter outsider.  His own glance hardened as he answered quietly:  “I’m still rather hazy about what’s happened.  Can’t I talk to somebody:--alone, for preference, and without all this shouting?  How about you, Chet? . . .  Or you, Julian?”  Chet shifted weakly; Julian did not stir.  “Truslove, then?”

The room was silent as he and the lawyer passed through the French windows on to the terrace.  They did not speak till they were well away from the house, half-way to the new and expensive tennis-courts that Chet had had installed just before he decided to sell Stourton if he could.  Truslove began by saying how distressed he was at such a scene, as well as at the events leading up to it; in all his experience with the family, over forty years . . .  Charles cut him short.  “I don’t think this is an occasion for sentiment, Truslove.”

“But perhaps, Mr. Charles, you’ll allow me to say that I warned Mr.  Chetwynd a great many times during recent months, but in vain—he fancied he had the Midas touch—there was no arguing with him. . . .  I only wish he had more of your own level-headedness.”

“No compliments either, please.  I want facts, that’s all.  First, is the firm bankrupt?”

“That’s hard to say, Mr. Charles.  Many a firm would be bankrupt if

its creditors all jumped at the same moment, and that’s just what

often happens when things begin to go wrong.  I daresay the firm’s

still making profits, but there are loans of various kinds and if

they’re called in just now, as they may be with the shares down to

half a crown—“

“Is that a fair price for what they’re worth?”

“Well, there again it’s hard to say—always hard to separate price from worth.”

“What will happen if the loans are called in?”

“The company will have to look for new money—if it can find any.”

“And if it can’t?”

“Then, of course, there’d be nothing for it but a receivership, or at any rate some sort of arrangement with creditors.”

“May I ask you, though you needn’t answer if you don’t want—did Chet speculate with any of the firm’s money?”

“Again, it’s hard to draw a line between speculation and legitimate business practice.  Mr. Chetwynd bought rather large quantities of raw materials, thinking prices would continue to rise.  In that he made the same mistake as a great many very shrewd and reputable people.”

“Will HE be forced into bankruptcy?”

“A good deal depends on what happens to the firm.  If it weathers the storm the bank would probably give him a chance—subject, of course, to mortgaging Stourton and cutting down personal expenses to the bone.  That applies to the others also.”

“I see. . . .  Now may I ask you one final question?  You were saying just now that the firm will need new money.  You know how much I have myself.  Would such a sum be any use in weathering the storm, as you put it?”

“That also is hard to say, Mr. Charles.  I hardly care to advise

you in—“

“I’m not asking for advice.  I want to know how much the firm needs, so that I can judge whether it’s even possible for me to save the situation at all.”

“I—I can’t say, Mr. Charles.  The whole matter’s very complicated.  We should have to see accountants, and find out certain things from the banks—it’s quite impossible for me to make an estimate offhand.”

“Well, thanks for telling me all you can.  Perhaps we could return by the side gate—I’d like to escape any more of the family wrangle if it’s still in progress. . . .”

He drove away from Stourton an hour later, without seeing the family again; but he left a note for Chet with Sheldon, saying he would get in touch within a day or two.  After a dash across London he was just in time to catch the last train from Liverpool Street and be in his rooms at St. Swithin’s by midnight.  He had already decided to help if his help could do any vital amount of good.  He couldn’t exactly say why he had come to this decision; it certainly wasn’t any sense of the moral obligation that Jill had tried to thrust on him.  And he didn’t think it could be any sentimental feeling about the family, whom (except for Chet and Bridget) he didn’t particularly like, and whose decline to the status of those who had to earn their own living would not wring from him a tear.  If sentiment touched him at all it was more for Sheldon and other servants whom he knew, as well as for the thousands of Rainier employees whom he didn’t know, but whom he could imagine in their little houses sleeping peacefully without knowledge that their future was being shaped by one man’s decision in a Cambridge college room.  That aspect of the thing was fantastic, but it was true, nevertheless.  But perhaps strongest of all the arguments was the fact that the money didn’t matter to him; even the income from it was more than he could ever spend; if he could put it to some act, however debatable, at least it would not be useless, as it was and always would be in his possession.  For his own personal future had already begun to mould itself; he would probably stay at Cambridge after obtaining a degree.  Werneth had once hinted at a fellowship, and if this should happen, he would be enabled to live frugally but quite comfortably on his own earnings.

End of term came a couple of days later; he returned to London and took a room at a hotel.  Having conveyed his conditional decision to Chet and to Truslove, he had now only to discover if his money had any chance to perform the necessary miracle.  This meant interviews in City offices with bank officials and chartered accountants, long scrutinies of balance-sheets and many wearisome hours in the Rainier Building, demanding documents and statements that took so long to unearth and were frequently so confusing that he soon realized how far Chet’s slackness had percolated downwards into all departments.

One of the accountants took him aside after an interview.  “It’s no business of mine, Mr. Rainier, but I know something of the situation and what you’re thinking of doing, and my advice to you would be to keep out of it—don’t send good money after bad!”

“Thanks for the tip,” Charles answered, with no other comment.

During the next two weeks it became a matter of some absorption to him to discover exactly what Chet had been up to.  So far he hadn’t detected any actual crookedness—only the grossest negligence and the most preposterous—well, EXPANSIVENESS was perhaps again the word.  Chet had not only bought shares at absurd prices and in absurd quantities; he had done the same with office desks, with electric lamps, even with pen nibs.  A small change, apparently fancied by him, in the firm’s style of notepaper heading had condemned enormous stacks of the original kind to waste-paper.  An ugly marble mantelpiece in Chet’s private office had cost six hundred pounds.  And so far as Charles could judge from his somewhat anomalous position of privileged outsider, every department was staffed by well-paid sycophants whose most pressing daily task was to convince their immediate superior that they were indispensable.

By Christmas Charles had almost reached the same opinion as the accountant—that it would be folly to send good money after bad.  Even a total repayment of loans would not alone suffice to lift the firm from the trough of depression into which the entire trade of the country was rapidly sinking; nothing could save an enterprise of such complexity but completely centralized and economical control.  Without that a cash loan could only stave off the inevitable for a few months.

On one of those oddly unbusinesslike days between Christmas and the New Year he lunched with Chet and Truslove in Chet’s office and told them this.  “I must be frank, Chet.  I’ve spent a fortnight looking into every corner I could find, and I’m not much of an optimist as a result.  It isn’t only new MONEY that the firm needs, it’s new—well, new other things.”

Chet nodded with an air of magnanimous comprehension.  “You’re probably right, old chap.  How about a new boss?  Suppose I were to swap round with George on the board?”  Charles smiled gently.  “I know my faults,” Chet ran on.  “I’m a fair-weather pilot—good when everything’s on the up-and-up.  Nobody can act and think bigger when times are right for it.  But these days you want a chap who can act and think SMALL.  That’s what put George in my mind.”

Charles was quite willing to subscribe to a theory that left Chet holding all the laurels, but he felt he had to say more.  “I’m afraid it isn’t just a matter of changing the pilot.  You’ve got to change a good deal of the ship.  And you also may have to change the voyage—or perhaps even lie up in harbour for a time and make no voyages at all.”

“Just a figure of speech, old chap—don’t press it too far.”

“All right, I won’t . . . but take this lunch as an example.  Although I’m a guest, you’ll perhaps forgive me for saying it’s a pretty bad lunch.  And I know where it comes from—the canteen, as they call it, downstairs.  And I’ve seen the prices on the menu, so I know your canteen is either badly managed or a swindle or both.”

“Well, maybe—but surely it’s not so important—“

“It’s one thing with another.  The whole place wants reorganizing from top to bottom, and I can’t exactly see George as the new broom.”

“Well, let’s assume you’re right—but the more urgent issue still remains.  The banks don’t give a damn whether the canteen serves good food or not.  They just won’t wait for their money.  What do YOU say, Truslove?”

Truslove temporized as usual.  “I think we owe Mr. Charles a deep debt of gratitude for devoting two weeks of his Christmas vacation to making this inquiry.  I’m sure everything he has said is very valuable.”

“But some of his cash would be more valuable still—don’t we agree, old chap?”

“That, I understand, is why Mr. Charles has met us here—to give us his decision.”

Both of them looked to Charles, who answered, rather hesitantly:

“I was hoping you’d see what I’m driving at without forcing me to a direct reply.  In my opinion a loan or even a gift wouldn’t help unless you completely reorganize the firm.  That’s all I can say.”

“You mean your answer’s a definite ‘no’?”

“If you insist on putting it that way, but you’ve heard my reasons.”

“Well, I’m damned.”  Chet stared gloomily at the tablecloth for a moment, while the waitress came in with coffee.  Transferring his stare to the cup, he suddenly turned on her with a vehemence that almost made her drop the tray.  “Call this COFFEE?  Take it back and bring something worth drinking.  And what’s the cause of the rotten meals we get here?  Send up the canteen manager to my office afterwards . . . and let me look at your hands!  Why . . . damn it, I won’t have this sort of thing—get your week’s wages and don’t come here again!”

Throughout all this Truslove and Charles had looked on uncomfortably.  As soon as the girl, too startled and upset to make any reply, had left the room, Charles said quietly:  “I’m not sure that was very fair of you, Chet.  She wasn’t responsible.”

“What more can I do?  Her hands—you should have seen them.”

“Yes, yes . . . I daresay.”

There was a long silence.  Then Chet exploded:--

“Well, have I done anything WRONG?  You talk about reorganization— what do you MEAN by it?  If it isn’t just a word, TELL me.  Unless it’s merely that you haven’t got the courage to say outright that you’re not going to risk your precious cash.  I’d respect you more for saying that than for hiding behind all this reorganization pi-jaw.”

(“Pi-jaw”—that was the word they used at Netherton for interviews with the head master.  It stirred in him a little instant pity for Chet.)

“I’m not hiding behind anything.”

“You mean you’d lend the money if we DID reorganize?”

Charles was silent a moment; Chet went on:  “That’s a fair question, isn’t it, Truslove?  Let him answer, then we’ll know where we stand.  Let’s have a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ for God’s sake.”

“Very well, then . . . probably I would.”

Chet beamed.  “Fine, old chap.  I take back any aspersions, God bless.  NOW all you’ve got to tell us is what you’d call reorganizing.  What have I got to do?  Or what’s anybody got to do?  And for that matter, who’s got to be the fellow to do it?”

“I—I can’t easily answer those questions, Chet.  I’m not a business expert.  It’s hardly possible for me to suggest a new board, new managers, new heads of departments—all out of the blue— in a couple of minutes.”

“You think we ought to have new ones—all of them?”

“I do.”

“You mean you’ve seen enough during these last two weeks to get an idea who’s not pulling his weight?”

“To some extent, yes.”

Then Chet, beaming again, played his trump card.  “Well, all I’ve got to say, old chap, is—come here and do the job yourself.”  He kept on beaming throughout their stare of immediate astonishment.

“Why not?  Lend the money, then come and look after it.  What could

give you a better safeguard?  You say you’re not a business man,

but you know enough to have found out what’s wrong—that’s a good

deal of the way to knowing what’s right.  Truslove, arrange a board

meeting or whatever there has to be and get it all fixed up.  I’ll

resign, and then—“

Charles got up from the table and strode to the window,

interrupting as he stared over the City rooftops.  “But I don’t

WANT such a job—can’t you understand that?  I’ve got my work at

Cambridge—“

“You could go back there afterwards—putting things straight mightn’t take you more than a few weeks, once you got down to it.”

“But I’ve no desire to get down to it!”

“Then it’s damnably selfish of you!  Worse than that, it’s nothing but hypocrisy the way you’ve led us on into thinking you’d help us!

First you make terms for getting us all out of a hole—then we

agree to the terms—then you go back on them—“

“But I never made such terms!  I never hinted at tackling a job like this myself!  I don’t even know that I could do it, anyhow.”

Chet shrugged his shoulder, turning round to the lawyer.  “Well, that’s his second ‘no’—I suppose we’ll just have to let the little tick go back to his study books.”

(“Tick”—the worst term of Netherton opprobrium, and one that Charles had never used, even at school, because he had always considered it childish.)  Afterwards, walking disconsolately along Cheapside and through Paternoster Row to Ludgate Hill and his hotel in the Strand, he felt he had considerably bungled the entire interview.  He should have said “no” from the first; then there would have had to be only one “no.”

 

 

Charles took over control of the Rainier firms in January 1921.  To do so he obtained a term’s leave of absence from St. Swithin’s, smiling at the tense in Bragg’s remark:  “You would have done very well here, you know.”

“WOULD have?  I still intend to.”

“Well, we shall see, we shall see.”

He practically lived in Chet’s office in Old Broad Street—no longer Chet’s, of course, but he refused to put his own name on the door.  At a special board meeting he had been appointed managing director with the consent of the bank creditors, to whom he had turned over his own government securities.  The bank men doubtless smiled over the arrangement, since it was one by which they could not possibly lose; while the family, faced with even a thousand-to-one chance, grabbed it gladly if not gratefully.  They could not get it out of their minds that Charles was somehow taking advantage of them, instead of they of him; but if (as Kitty had said) they had ever had a scared feeling that brains might come in handy some day, this was undoubtedly the day.  The scared feeling developed until they actually believed in him a little, but without reasoned conviction and certainly without affection—rather as if he were some kind of astrologer whose abracadabra might, after all, perform some miracle of market manipulation.  That, of course, was their only criterion of success; and it so happened that the mere closing of bear accounts sent up the price of Rainier shares from half a crown to six shillings within a month of his taking control, a rise that considerably helped his prestige though he made no attempt to claim any.  Less popular was his early insistence on economies in their personal lives, but after one or two suggestions had been badly taken, he contented himself with sending each member of the family a personal note, merely conveying advance information that the preference dividend that year would not be paid.  (The preference shares were all held by the family.)  Expected protests came in the form of a personal visit from Chet, telephone calls from Jill, Julia, and George, and a strong letter from Julian in Cannes.  He took no notice of any of them, his only concession being an offer to Jill to pay for Kitty’s college education, if she still wanted one.

Kitty came to his office to thank him.  “Sweet of you, Uncle Charles.  But of course you don’t mind my going to Newnham now you’re not at St. Swithin’s—isn’t that it?”

“Not altogether.  Besides, I hope I’ll be back there soon.”

“You mean you haven’t taken on this as a life-work?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“I hear you’re dismissing everybody.”

“Not EVERYBODY.”

“And nobody wants to buy Stourton.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Where do you live?”

“In a little apartment near the British Museum.”

“How appropriate!  Can I visit you there?”

“You wouldn’t find me in.  I work late most evenings.”

“Won’t you take me to lunch?”

“I was just going to ask you.  But there’s no TAKING—we have it here—on my desk.  And it’s pretty bad—though not so bad as it used to be.”

She chattered on about her personal affairs, the new and smaller house Jill and she had had to move into—a little suburban villa at Hendon, with only one maid—“and there’s a house further along the road where a little man kisses his wife on the doorstep every morning at three minutes past eight and comes running past our house to catch the eight-seven—just like you read about in the comic papers.”

“I’m glad you live so near a station.  It must be very convenient.”

“I know—you think I’m a snob.”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not quite certain.”

“You mean you haven’t made up your mind?”

“That would be too flattering to your sense of importance.”

“I believe you DO think about me, sometimes.”

“Obviously—that’s why it occurred to me you might go to college.”

“Uncle Charles . . . what’s going to happen to everybody . . .  whether they go to college or not?”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“I get terribly upset thinking about it sometimes.  The little man who runs for the train every day—I’m not really a snob about him, I think he’s wonderful, and it’s beautiful the way you can always tell the time by him, and the way he always catches the train—at least I hope he does, in case somebody like you goes round his firm dismissing everyone who’s late. . . .  Oh, but what’s going to happen, Uncle Charles—eventually?”

“You mean will he stop running?”

“Yes, or will the train stop running, or will he stop kissing his

wife, or will you stop being able to dismiss people?--I don’t know,

it all seems so fragile—the least touch—“

“I’ve had that feeling.”

“Oh, you HAVE?”  Then pleadingly:  “Don’t make a joke about too much to drink, or lobster for supper.  Please don’t make a joke.”

“I wasn’t going to.  There isn’t any joke.”

She said sombrely:  “I know that too, and I’m only seventeen.”

A tap came at the door and a young man entered with a sheaf of papers.  When he had gone Charles scanned them through, then apologized perfunctorily for having done so.  “But you see, Kitty, I’m terribly busy.”

“Perhaps I’d better leave you to it then?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”  He smiled, escorting her to the door and saying as she left him:  “I’m really glad you’re going to Newnham.  Write to me when you’re there and tell me what it’s like.”

Then he went back to his desk.  The papers included a list of names, over a hundred, of employees who would have to go that week.  He glanced down the list, initialed his approval of it, and passed on to another job.

(But what would happen to them?  And yet, on the other hand, what else could he do?)

By Easter he had made economies everywhere, yet the continuing malaise of trade kept up a tragic pace.  There were few positive signs that his job could be regarded as approaching an end, and it was small satisfaction to know that without his efforts the whole concern would have already foundered like a waterlogged ship.  As it was, the pumps were just a few gallons ahead of the still-encroaching ocean.  Even the very energies he devoted to the task, his frequent feelings of thanklessness and exasperation, fought for a continuance of effort; he was giving the job so much that he had to give it more, because “if you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you hate it and the part isn’t real.”  He wrote that in a letter to Kitty, explaining why he would have to postpone returning to Cambridge for another term.  He found he could write to her more freely than he could talk to her, and more freely than he could talk to anyone except Sheldon.

 

 

He was still at his desk in the Rainier office when Kitty left Newnham in 1924.  The desk was the same, one of Chet’s fantastic purchases that were really more economical to keep and use than to sell in exchange; but the office was different—no longer opulent in Old Broad Street within a few yards of the Stock Exchange, but tucked away in an old shabby building off St. Mary Axe.  Convenient, though—within easy reach of Mark Lane Station, and near enough to the river to get the smell of the tide and an occasional whiff of tobacco from the big bonding warehouses.

Much had happened since 1921.  He had pulled Rainier’s out of the depths into shallow water; there had even, during the second half of 1923 and first few months of 1924, been a few definite pointers to dry land.  The preference dividend was now being paid again, while the ordinary shares, dividendless and without sign of any, stood at twelve shillings and were occasionally given a run up to sixteen or seventeen.  Chet had a continuing order with a broker to sell a couple of thousand at the higher figure and buy back at the lower; it was the only speculation Charles would allow, but Chet derived a good deal of pleasure from it, imagining himself a titan of finance whenever he made the price of a new car.  Chet still lived at Stourton, though part of the place was closed up; it was really cheaper to live in a house one couldn’t sell than rent another.

The rest of the family had had to make similar economies, but the real pressure had been relaxed by the resumption of the preference dividend, and they were all comfortably off by any standards except those of the really rich.  Jill could afford once more her cruises and flirtations, with no handicaps to the latter except advancing middle age and none to the former save an increasing difficulty in finding new places to cruise to.  Julia and her husband lived in Cheltenham, playing golf and breeding Sealyhams; George and Vera preferred town life and had taken a newly built maisonnette in Hampstead.  Julian was at Cannes, doing nothing in particular with his usual slightly sinister elegance; once or twice a year he turned up in London, took Charles for lunch to the Reform Club, and worked off a few well-polished epigrams.  Bridget had married an officer in an Irish regiment and lived in a suburb of Belfast.  She had had one child, a boy, and was expecting another.  With George’s girl and Julia’s boy and girl, this made a problematical five as against seven of the previous generation, unless (as Chet put it) Charles hurried up.  They were not, however, at all anxious for Charles to hurry up; and as both Lydia and Jill were past the age when any amount of hurry might be expected to yield result, and as Vera was sickly and Julia (so she boasted) had nothing to do with her husband any more, the ratio really depended on Bridget—plus, of course, an outside chance from Charles.  Nobody even considered Julian in such a connection.

Much more, though, had happened between 1921 and 1924.  The ancient Irish problem had apparently been settled; a conference at Washington had arranged limitation of naval armaments between England, Japan, France, and the United States; someone had almost climbed Everest; the German mark had collapsed and French troops had entered the Ruhr; Mussolini was rebuilding Italy and had already bombarded Corfu; there had been an earthquake in Japan, there had almost been another war with Turkey, there was still a war in Morocco, and there was going to be an exhibition at Wembley.

By 1924 Charles also had changed a little.  It was not so much that he looked older—rather that he seemed to have reached the beginnings of a certain agelessness that might last indefinitely.  He kept himself fit with careful living and week-ends by the sea; faithful to memories, he had bought a small house in Portslade that was not too expensive to keep up in addition to his London apartment—no longer the one near the British Museum, but a service flat in Smith Square.  He worked long office hours, and had to make frequent journeys to Rainier factories throughout England; there were certain hotels where he always stayed, and to the staffs of these he was satisfyingly known as the kind of man who gave no trouble, drank little, tipped generously but not lavishly, and always appeared to be wearing the same perfectly neat but nondescript suit of clothes.  The fact that he was head of the Rainier firm merely added, if it added at all, to the respect they would have felt for such a man in any case.

In 1924 Charles was thirty and Kitty nineteen.  She had done well at Newnham, obtaining a second in the men’s tripos examination, but of course she could not take a degree.  On the day that she finally left the college she went direct from Liverpool Street Station to the Rainier offices, hoping Charles might be free for lunch; he was out, but found her still waiting in his private room on his return during the late afternoon.

“Oh, Uncle Charles, did you mind?  I felt I must call—I feel so sad, I don’t know what to do with my life—I’ve said good-bye to so many people there seems nobody left in the world but you!”

He laughed and telephoned for tea.  “I’m glad I never had the experience of leaving Cambridge knowing it would be for good.  It was only going to be for a term, and then two terms, and then a year . . .”

“And what now?  Don’t say you’ve given it up altogether.”

“It must have given me up, anyway.”

“But that’s so awful to think of.  You fitted Cambridge life, somehow.  Remember that day I came from Kirby and waited in your rooms at St. Swithin’s—just like this, except that the chair was more comfortable?”

“I don’t hold with too comfortable chairs in offices.”

“But you DO remember that day?”

“Yes—and so does Herring, I’m sure.”

“God, I always thought it was a shame to drag you from what you wanted to do to run a business, but I must say you’ve done it pretty well—even Mother admits that, but I’ll tell you something that’ll amuse you—just because YOU’VE done it she thinks it couldn’t have been so very hard and probably other people could have done it just as well.”

“Probably they could.  Anyhow, if it releases your mother from any embarrassment of gratitude, it’s a thought worth thinking.  Where is she now, by the way?”

“Somewhere in mid-Mediterranean, drinking cocktails.  Chet asked me down to Stourton for the week-end.  Why don’t you come?”

“To be quite frank, because when I do go there, I’m usually bored.”

“You mightn’t be if I were there too.”

He laughed and said he’d think about it, and after thinking about it several times during the next twenty-four hours he rang up Chet and said he was coming.  Chet was delighted.  Apparently Kitty was in the same room with him when the conversation took place, because he heard her excited voice in the background, then a scuffle to grab the instrument, and finally a torrent of enthusiasm which he cut short by asking to speak to Chet again.

He enjoyed himself at Stourton that week-end, and his lack of boredom was not entirely due to Kitty, for there was another guest, a man who had travelled in China and was interesting to listen to if difficult to talk to—a division of labour which suited Charles; and there were also local people, agreeable enough, who played tennis in the afternoons and stayed to dinner.  Actually he did not see much of Kitty, who seemed generally to be surrounded by handsome young men in white flannels, and when chances came to join her group he did not do so.  He wondered why he did not, and with a touch of quizzical self-scrutiny was prepared to diagnose even a twinge of jealousy; he would really have liked to, just for the chance to laugh at himself, but honestly he could not.  Naturally the girl liked people of her own age; but there was another sense in which he had to realize now how old as well as young she was; those youths treated her with such obvious worship, it would not be fair for him to come along with his usual offhand badinage as to a child, and so deflate her adult prestige.  And yet that was the only way he knew HOW to treat her—casually, unsparingly, never very politely.  Perhaps that made up the chief reason he kept out of her way.

As soon as the dinner guests had left on the Sunday evening, he began to make his own farewells, for he intended to drive off early in the morning to reach his office by nine.  Leaving Chet, Lydia, and Kitty in the drawing-room, he sidestepped into the library for something to read in bed.  It was a superb July night; he did not feel sleepy, yet he knew he must sleep—he had a busy day tomorrow.  One of the library windows was open to admit the warm breeze; there was a full moon, and the illumination, tricked by flapping curtains, played over the books like something alive and restless.  He was fumbling along the wall for a switch when he heard a sound behind him.  “Uncle Charles—don’t put on any lights.”  He turned round, startled.  She went on:  “Why have you been avoiding me?  And don’t say you haven’t.”

“Of course I won’t.  I have.  I know I have.  And this is why.  I can tell you very clearly, because I’ve been thinking it out myself.”

He made his point about her age, and the young men, and his own offhand manner.  When he had finished she said:  “It’s TOO clear, too INGENIOUS.”

“But don’t you think one’s subconscious mind does work ingeniously?”

“Maybe yours does.  I’ll bet it would.”

“You see, Kitty, you’re no longer a child.”

“Oh, God—for YOU to tell me that!”

Suddenly the wind dropped, the curtains ceased flapping, the moonlight seemed to focus in a stilled and breathless glare upon her face.  It was not exactly a beautiful face, but he knew at that moment it held something for him, touched a chord somewhere, very distantly.  He said, smiling:  “I’ll try to practise company manners for a future occasion.”

“No, NEVER do that.  Be yourself—as you were in all those letters.  And if you’d rather have the Cambridge life than run the firm, then give it up—before it’s too late!”

“NOW what are you talking about?”

“You—YOU—because I’m always thinking about you.  You’re not happy— you’re not REAL!  But those letters you wrote were real—when you felt crushed and hopeless and things had gone wrong all day, and you used to sit in your office when everyone had gone home and type them yourself, with all the mistakes. . . .  I suppose I’m being sentimental.  The little college girl, treasuring letters from the beloved uncle who saved the family from ruin. . . .  But haven’t you FINISHED that yet?  Haven’t you done enough for us?  You pulled the firm through the worst years—now trade’s improving, Chet says, so NOW’S your time to get free!  Don’t you realize that?  You still hanker after the other kind of life, don’t you—study, books, all that sort of thing?  When I came in just now and saw you in the moonlight peering along the shelves I could have cried.”

“I don’t see why.  I was only looking for the lights and hoping there was a detective novel I hadn’t read.”

“But—but don’t you want—Cambridge—any more?”

“I wonder, sometimes, if I do. . . .  To grow old in a cultured

groove, each year knowing more and more about less and less, as

they say about those specialist dons, till at last one’s mental

equipment becomes an infinitely long and narrow strip leading

nowhere in particular—“

“Like the Polish Corridor!”

He laughed.  “How do you think of such things?”

“My subconscious—like yours—ingenious.  But never mind that—what DO you want to do?”

“You talk as if I’d been complaining.  Far from it.  I’m quite satisfied to go on doing what I am.”

“Managing the firm, increasing the dividends, refloating the

companies, a regular Knight of the Prospectus, Saviour of the Mites

of Widows and Orphans—“

“Now you’re being sarcastic.”

“Can’t you think of anything you’ve ever wanted passionately and still—would like?”

He said after a pause:  “Yes, I can, but it’s rather trivial.  When I was at school I had a great ambition to paddle down the Danube in a canoe, but my father didn’t approve of the idea and wouldn’t let me have the money for it.”

“Oh, but that’s not trivial—it’s wonderful.  And you can afford it now all right.”

“The money, perhaps, but not the time.”

“You ought to MAKE the time.”

He laughed.  “If I can steal a quiet fortnight at Portslade I’ll be lucky this year.”  He took her arm and led her towards the door.

“And now, I’m afraid, since I have to leave so early in the

morning—“

“I know.  You want to look for a book.”  She suddenly took his hand and pressed it over the switch.  “Good night, Uncle Charles.”

As he went back to the shelves he heard her footsteps fading through the house—no longer a child, that was true, but she still scampered like one.  He searched for a while without finding anything he wanted to read.

 

 

Nineteen twenty-five was another improving year, the year of Locarno, the false dawn.  It was a year perhaps typical of the twenties in its wishful optimism backed by no growth of overtaking realism; another sixpence off the income tax, another attempt to harness a vague shape of things to come with the even vaguer shapes of things that had been.  For the public would not yet look squarely into that evil face (publishers were still refusing “war books”) and few also were those who feared the spectre might return.  The England hoped for by the majority of Englishmen was a harking back to certain frugalities of the past (lower and lower income tax, smaller and smaller government expenditure) in order to enjoy more and more the pleasures of the present; the Europe they dreamed of was a continent in which everybody placidly “saw reason,” while cultivating summer schools, youth hostels, and peasant-costume festivals in the best tradition of Hampstead Garden Suburb; in exchange for which the City would make loans, trade would thus be encouraged, and taxes fall still further.  Mixed up with this almost mystic materialism was the eager, frightened idealism of the Labour Party (both the eagerness and the fright came to a head a year later, in the General Strike); the spread of the belief that the League of Nations never would be much good but was probably better than nothing, a belief that effectively converted Geneva into a bore and anyone who talked too much about it into a nuisance.  Meanwhile a vast and paralysing absence of hostility gripped Englishmen from top to bottom of the social scale, not a toleration on principle but a muteness through indifference; they were not AGAINST the League of Nations, they were not AGAINST Russia, they were not AGAINST disarmament, or the Treaty of Versailles, or the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, or the working classes, or Mussolini—who had, after all, made the Italian trains run on time.  Their favourite gesture was to give credit to an opponent (“You’ll find a good many of those Labour chaps are quite decent fellows”); their favourite conclusion to an argument the opinion that, “Ah, well, these things’ll probably right themselves in time.”

And amidst such gestures and opinions the post-war England took physical shape and permitted itself limited expression.  By 1925 the main features were apparent: arterial roads along which the speculative builder was permitted to put up his £6oo houses and re-create the problem the roads themselves had been designed to solve; the week-end trek to the coasts and country through the bottle-necks of Croydon and Maidenhead; the blossoming of the huge motor coach, and the mushrooming of outer suburbs until London almost began where the sprawling coast towns left off—while in bookshops and theatres the rage was for Michael Arlen and Noel Coward, two men whose deft orchestrations of nerves without emotions, cynicism without satire, achieved a success that must have increased even their own disillusionment.

In this same year 1925 Rainier’s made a profit that could have paid a small dividend on the ordinary shares; but Charles chose not to do so, despite appeals and protests from the family.  And in that same year Lydia died of pneumonia, and Bridget had another baby, and Kitty got herself engaged to a young man named Walter Haversham, who preached Communism at London street corners and had been to Russia.  For six months she was swept by an enthusiasm which considerably shocked the family, but somehow did not especially disturb Charles.  He saw her once carrying a pictorial banner with Wal (they called him Wal) in a May Day procession; when he met her some weeks later he chaffed her gently about it, saying that workmen on banners always had enormous fists, whether for fraternization or for assault and battery he could never be quite certain—maybe both.  He smiled as he said it, but she suddenly flew into a rage, accusing him of being a coward who took refuge in cynicism from the serious issues of the world.  “And don’t tell me I’ve lost my sense of humour.  I have—I KNOW I have.  There isn’t any room for humour in the world as it is today.  And it’s that English sense of humour, which everybody boasts about, that really prevents things from being done.”

“You’re probably right.  But think of all the things that are better left undone.”

“The day will come when men may be KILLED for laughing.”

“And that will also be the day when men laugh at killing.”

She went out of his office, banging the door.  He did not see her again for several months—till after the General Strike in 1926.  One day she rang him up on the telephone.  “Uncle Charles, may I come and talk to you?”

“Of course.”  He was about to add an invitation to lunch when the receiver was banged down at the other end.  Two minutes later she came bounding into his office.

“I rang up from just outside.  I thought you might not want to see me after our last meeting.”

“I don’t think I should ever not want to see you.  What’s been happening to you all this while?”

“Not much.  But I’ve got my sense of humour back.”

“Where’s Wal?”

“He’s gone to Russia—for good.  You know, I really ADMIRE him.  He has the courage of what he believes, he’s going to become a Russian citizen if they let him.  He wanted me to go with him—as his wife, but I just couldn’t.  I’m weak—I couldn’t live in a little cubicle and learn a new language and wear rough clothes—I’d die of misery, even if I really loved him—which I’m beginning to doubt, now that he’s gone.  I saw him off at Tilbury and felt awful, and then I went into a little pub near the docks and a fellow was standing in the doorway, playing a mandolin and singing with his mouth all crooked,--you know the way they do,--and inside the bar there was a workman sitting over a glass of beer and looking up at the other man with a funny sort of adoring expression, same as you see people looking up at the Madonna in Catholic pictures, and presently he said to me, quite casual, as if he’d known me for years—‘Gawd, I wish I could do that’. . . and I wanted to laugh and cry together.  I know I’ll never leave England as long as I live, so here I am— and Wal’s in Moscow.”

 

 

Nineteen twenty-six went by, the year of the General Strike, and Germany’s admission to the League of Nations; of an Imperial Conference and trouble in Shanghai; of large Socialist gains in municipal polls throughout England, and of Hitler’s climb towards power in Germany.  Trade remained good; the stock market pushed up Rainier’s to twenty-five shillings in anticipation of a dividend which Charles again declined to pay.  Nineteen twenty-seven brought riots in Vienna and executions in Russia; while for once Englishmen found themselves suddenly and astonishingly AGAINST something—they were against the Revised Prayer Book, proposed by the Church Assembly and sent to the House of Commons to be voted on, according to the curious English custom by which a political majority decides the dogmatic beliefs of a religious minority.  And during the next year, 1928, the House of Commons again turned down the Revised Prayer Book, as if it tremendously mattered.  But this flurry of against-ness was soon exhausted, and Englishmen, including Members of Parliament, resumed their benevolence towards most things that continued to happen throughout the world.

And in that same year 1928 Bridget had another baby, her fourth, and Kitty got herself engaged again, to a young man named Roland Turner, who had advanced ideas about the “cinema,” and was understood to be working on a scenario or something or other that he hoped to sell for a fabulous price to somebody or other, but was otherwise romantically out of a job—romantically, because he wasn’t eligible for the dole yet managed to run a car.

“And I suppose if he DID draw the dole and COULDN’T run a car, that would be prosaic?” Charles queried, when she told him.

“You still think I’m a snob, don’t you?  But I’m not—it isn’t that at all—I’m just lost in amazement, because he always dresses well and goes to the best restaurants, and has a sweet little studio off Ebury Street—I don’t know WHERE he gets the money from, but I do wish you could find him something to do.”

“But I don’t want any scenarios today, thank you.”

“Not THAT, of course, but he can do all kinds of other things— write and paint, for instance—he does marvellous frescoes, at least they say the one he did was marvellous, but most of it came off during the damp weather. . . .  He can paint machinery, too.”

“Unfortunately we don’t paint our machinery.”

“Pictures of machinery, I mean—he did one for an exhibition, symbolizing something—but I’m sure he could do a serious one, if you wanted it.  Don’t you ever have illustrated catalogues?”

Charles smiled.  “Suppose you bring him to lunch?”

They met at the Savoy Grill; Roland Turner proved to be rather tall and thin (“lissom” was almost the word); his clothes were impeccable, with just a faintly artistic note in his silk bow tie; his manners were perfect and his choices of food delicate; even his talk was sufficiently intelligent and modulated to what Charles felt to be an exactly determined mean between independence and obsequiousness in the presence of Big Business.  Immediately after coffee the youth mentioned an afternoon appointment and decorously bowed himself out, leaving Kitty and Charles together.

Laughing, she said:  “He’s got no appointment, he’s just being tactful—giving me a chance to do the Don’t-you-think-he’s-wonderful stuff.”  She paused for a few seconds, then added:

“Well, DON’T you?”

“He’s a very personable young man, and if you like him, that’s the main thing.”

“PERSONABLE?  What exactly do you mean by that?”

“Attractive.”

“Are you sure it’s not something nice to say about someone you don’t care for?”

“Not at all.  I like him all right, and if there’s anything he could do that I wanted done, I’d be glad to give him the job.”

“He was wondering about Stourton—do you think I could take him down there to see Uncle Chet?”

“With what in mind?”

“You’re so suspicious, aren’t you?  Well, he has ideas about landscape gardening. . . .  Of course he knows Chet and you aren’t my real uncles.”

“I don’t see how he knows that, unless you told him, and I don’t see that it matters, anyway.”

“I had to tell him—indirectly.  You see, Mother discovered him first of all—in Mentone.  He was staying with somebody there and they danced a lot—Mother and him, I mean.  I think she rather fell for him, because when he came on to London she had him to stay at the house, with me as a sort of chaperon.  We weren’t attracted at all in the beginning, but I began to be awfully sorry for him when I saw how bored he was with Mother.  He has nice feelings, you know—

I don’t think he’d have found it easy to switch over if she’d REALLY been my mother.”

“I’m afraid the point is too subtle for me to grasp.”

“Well—like The Vortex, you know. . . .  Of course Mother was furious.”

“The whole situation must have amused you a good deal.”

“Well, it had its funny side. . . .  Of course his friends don’t like me—they never thought he’d pick up a girl.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Yes, I think I am. . . .  By the way, he’s having an exhibition of paintings at the Coventry Galleries—you WILL come, won’t you, and buy something?”

He promised he would, and went to the private view the following week.  He didn’t think much of the pictures, but his private view of Roland Turner was worth the journey—that suave young man, again impeccably dressed, saying the impeccably correct things about his own paintings to patrons who greeted him as they walked around, striking another exactly determined mean, Charles felt—this time between modesty and self-esteem.  To please Kitty he bought a picture for five guineas—a view of an English country house as Botticelli might have painted it if he had painted English country houses rather badly.

“It’s really very odd, Mr. Rainier,” said the young man, as Kitty proudly stuck the red star on the corner of the canvas, “but you’ve chosen the best thing I’ve ever done!”

“Very odd indeed,” Charles answered, “because I know almost nothing about painting.”

Afterwards he took them both to dinner at Kettner’s, encouraging them in a rather vulgar way to choose all the expensive items— caviare and quail and plenty of champagne.  Of course the young man was a poseur, but half-way through the meal he became aware that he himself was posing just as artificially as the Philistine industrialist and champagne uncle.  When Turner talked about Stourton (Kitty had evidently taken him there) and how wonderful it was to own such a place, Charles answered:  “Oh, it’s an awfully white elephant, really.  The house is uneconomical and the farms don’t pay.  If it were nearer London my brother could carve it up into building plots, but as it’s only England’s green and pleasant land nobody wants it and nobody can afford it and nobody will pay a decent price for anything that grows on it.”

“But it’s a privilege, all the same, to keep up these old family possessions.”

“It isn’t an old family possession—at least not of OUR family.  My father bought it cheap because the other family couldn’t afford it.”

“Well, he must have admired the place or he wouldn’t have wanted to buy it at any price.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  He liked buying things cheap.  He once bought a shipload of diseased sharkskins because they were cheap and he thought he could make a profit.”

“And did he?”

“You bet he did.”

“A business man, then?”

“Yes—like myself.  But rather more successful because he had a better eye for a bargain and also because he lived most of his life during a rising market.”

Turner gave a somewhat puzzled sigh.  “Well, well, I suppose that’s the system.”

“Except in Russia,” Kitty interposed.  Then brightly:  “Roland’s been to Russia too.”  She must have been remembering Wal.

With a slight awakening of interest as he also remembered Wal, Charles said:  “Oh, indeed?  And what made YOU go there, Mr.  Turner?”

“I wanted to see what it was like.”

“And what WAS it like?”

The young man smiled defensively.  “I don’t think I could answer that in a single sentence.”

“Many people do.  They say it’s all marvellous or else it’s all horrible.”

“I didn’t see all of it, Mr. Rainier, and I didn’t think what I did see was either.”

“So you don’t believe in the coming Revolution?”

“I daresay it’s coming, but I don’t particularly believe in it.” And he added, with a gulp of champagne:  “Just as you, Mr. Rainier, don’t particularly believe in capitalism, though you go on trying to make it work.”

“I wonder if that’s true.”

“The fact is, Mr. Rainier—perhaps we can both admit it after a few drinks—we neither of us believe in a damn thing.”

Afterwards Charles regretted the conversation and his own pose throughout it, but he remained vaguely troubled whenever he thought of Roland Turner and Kitty; he slightly disapproved of that young man, and felt avuncular in so doing.  He did not see them again that year, for they were abroad most of the time, and he himself had many other things to worry about.  By April of 1929 he was so exhausted from overwork that, after settling an especially troublesome labour dispute at the Cowderton works, he went to Switzerland for a holiday, despite the fact that it was not a good time of the year—past the snow season, and before the end of the thaw.  He stayed at Interlaken, in an almost empty hotel, and while he was there a letter came from Kitty, forwarded from an address in Provence through London.  He wondered what she was doing in Provence until he read that she was with Roland Turner, who was engaged in painting a portrait of an Indian rajah.  “He’s a very fat rajah,” she reported, “and he’s given Roland five hundred pounds to go on with, which I expect will be all he’ll get out of it, because the picture gets less and less like the rajah every sitting.”  Charles replied from Interlaken, expressing pleasure that her fiancé had found such profitable employment—to which he could not help adding that the fee was much higher than the Rainier firm could ever have paid for catalogue illustrations.  Two days later came a wire from Avignon: COMING TO INTERLAKEN DON’T GO AWAY EXPECT ME TEN TOMORROW MORNING.

During the intervening day he wondered at the possible cause of her visit, though capricious changes of plan were really nothing to wonder at where Kitty was concerned; the theory he considered likeliest was that the portrait commission had fallen through, and that she and Roland had decided to touch him, as it were, for a Swiss holiday.  (He had already discovered, from other sources, that Turner’s never-failing affluence was bound up with his never-failing debts and geared by his skill and charm in cadging.)  He did not mind, particularly; after all, he could always go back to London if the situation became tiresome.

It was a cold bright day when he waited on the Interlaken platform.  There was still a litter of shovelled snow in the gutters and against the railings, and the train came in white-roofed from fresh falls in the Simplon-Lötschberg.  She was dressed in a long mackintosh with a little fur hat, like a fez, and as she jumped from the train before it quite stopped, it was as if something in his heart jumped also before it quite stopped.

“Oh, Uncle Charles, I’m so happy—I was afraid you’d take fright and leave before I got here!  It seems ages since I saw you.  How ARE you?”

“I’m fine.”  (Breaking Miss Ponsonby’s old rule.)  “And it IS ages since you saw me—nearly a year.  Where’s Roland?”

“Not with me.  I’ve left him.  Take me somewhere for a drink—there was no diner on the train.”

In a deserted restaurant-café opposite the station she told him more about it.  “I found myself getting SILLY—saying silly things to all his silly crowd—there’s a regular colony of them wherever he goes.  But more than that—after all, I don’t mind so much saying silly things myself, but it got to the point where I didn’t notice when things THEY said were silly.  Softening of the brain—“ She tapped her head.  “I simply HAD to take it in time.  And I felt sorry for the poor old rajah.  He was pretty awful to look at, but at least he knew what’s what with women—which is more than most of Roland’s friends do.”

“So I rather imagined.”

“Of course YOU really fixed it—that night at Kettner’s.”

“_I_ fixed it?”

“I could see you didn’t like him.”

“On the contrary, I think I began to like him then—just slightly— and for the first time.  He has his wits about him.”

“He’d better have—they’re what he lives by.  But it’s no good denying it—you DON’T like him.  I could feel that.”

“Well, I’m not as keen on him as you are.”

“WERE.”

“Oh, is it WERE?  Well, in that case there couldn’t be a better reason for breaking off the engagement.”

“But it never pleased you to think of me marrying him.  Did it now?”

“Why should that matter to you?”

“Because it DOES matter!  I can’t bear to do things you don’t want, except when you don’t want them to my face—like forcing myself on you here, I don’t mind THAT—“  She suddenly lowered her head into her hands and looked up a few seconds later with eyes streaming.  “Can’t you see you’ve spoilt me for other men?”

“But, my dear—that’s ridiculous!”

She went on:  “I’m not asking for anything.  I can go back by the next train if you’d prefer it.  I’ll probably marry someone eventually and be quite happy, but it’ll have to be a man whom you like fairly well, and who doesn’t sneer because you do an honest job of work instead of battening on rich people.”

“Battening on poor people is more in my line—according to your former fiancé.”

“Poor Wal—I often wonder what’s happened to him—I really liked him more than Roland. . . .  By the way, I saw the papers—you’ve been having strikes at Cowderton, haven’t you?  Was it very serious?”

“While it lasted.  That’s really why I came out here—for a rest.”

“Oh God, why don’t you give the whole thing up?  You’ve got enough money, haven’t you?”

“For what?”

“To live on, for the rest of your life, at about a thousand a year.”

“Depends on several things—how long I live, how much a thousand a year will continue to be worth, and how long people will pay me anything at all for not working. . . .  But that’s not the whole point, in any case.”

“You mean you WANT to stay with the firm?  It’s still a game, as you said in one of those letters—a game you want to win even if it isn’t worth playing?  Haven’t you won enough? . . .  Or maybe it’s more than a game now—it’s become the life-work?”

He smiled.  “Perhaps it’s somewhere between the two—more than a game, but not quite a life-work yet.  You know, when I first took over the job it was with all kinds of reluctance—because I’d been more or less jockeyed into it by the family crying out to be saved.  Well, that was the idea, originally—to save ‘em and then be off quick, before they needed more saving.  Rainier’s was just something that kept the family going, and I didn’t respect it enormously for that.  But then, when I began to look into things personally, I found it kept a good many other families going.  Over three thousand, to be precise.”

“I see.  Responsibility.  Uncle Atlas.”

“You can laugh at me if you like, provided you believe me sincere.  I’m not a sentimentalist.  I don’t call the firm the House of Rainier, or myself a Captain of Industry, or any of that nonsense.

But there IS a responsibility, no use denying it, in owning a three-

thousand-family business.  If I can contrive a little security for

those people—“

“But there ISN’T any security—as you said yourself when I asked you about your thousand a year.  It’s an illusion put up by banks and insurance companies and lawyers and building societies and everybody who goes without what he wants today because he thinks he’ll enjoy it more later on.  Supposing some day we all find out there isn’t any ‘later on’?”

“Then, my dear, will come Wal’s revolution.”

“And we shall all make a grab for what we can get?”

“Provided there IS anything to get by then.  If the whole thing’s an illusion, then the rewards may fade equally.”

“Then you try to comfort those three thousand families by encouraging them to believe in a future that doesn’t exist?”

“They don’t believe in it.  Every street-corner speaker warns them not to at the top of his voice.  What I DO comfort them with, since you put it that way, is enough of a regular wage to buy food and pay their rent and smoke cigarettes and go to the local cinema.  That keeps them satisfied to go on waiting.”

“For the big grab?”

“Or for the discovery that there isn’t anything left to grab.”

“Which makes you one degree more cynical than they are.  They don’t believe in the security they accept because they’re looking to the revolution, but YOU don’t believe in either the security of the present or the revolution of the future!”

“Your other ex-fiancé put it even more simply, my dear, when he said I didn’t believe in a damn thing.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself very carefully and for a long time, and I still can’t find an answer.”

“Probably because you’ve been asking it TOO long and TOO carefully.  The answer to that sort of question ought to FLY out—like a child when he’s asked what he wants for his birthday—he always knows instantly without having to think—either a bicycle or a toy-train or something. . . .  Oh, I’m quite happy again now.  I don’t miss Roland a bit.  Just talking to you freely like this makes the difference, though you don’t talk to ME freely—there always seems a brake on—I can hardly believe you once sent me those letters.”

“Curious—I don’t remember much about them.  If you kept any, I’d

like to—“

“Oh, no, NEVER!  That would be a really awful thing to do!  And of course I know why you were so free in THEM—because you thought I was too young to understand.  I was only the vehicle—the letter-box, so to speak—where you posted them to another address.”

A gleam came into his eyes.  “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Well, what more could I have been in those days?  Letters to a schoolgirl. . . .  Of course I was crazy about you—always have been ever since that time at Stourton when I came up to your room and smoked a cigarette.  Remember? . . .  It might be fun if you loved me now—we’d have a good deal in common.  I sometimes wonder why you don’t.”

“In my slow and careful way I’ve been wondering that too—ever since you stepped off the train.”

“Well, why don’t you—just to be curious?”

“I haven’t said I don’t.”

“Oh NO!”

“Would it be so very incredible?”

“It would be FANTASTIC!”

“Then it IS fantastic.”

“Darling, you don’t mean—“  She seized his hand across the table.

“You’re not saying it just to be kind?”

“I don’t feel a bit kind.  I fed—well, let’s stick to fantastic.”

“But I—I—I don’t know what else to say for the moment.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

They sat in silence, his hand changing places over hers.  A train entered the station opposite; the tick of its electric engine was like a clock measuring the seconds.  Presently she said:  “There’s the oddest thing in my mind for us to do—if it’s all real and not a dream.  Let’s go down the Danube in a canoe, as you always wanted.”

“Yes, we’ll do that.  And up the Amazon too, if you like.”  His face was very pale.  “I’ll take a year off—from the firm and the City and the three thousand families and everything else.  Let someone else have his turn. . . .”

 

 

Back at his hotel that night he could hardly believe in the changed future; it was almost as if he had been another person during the day and was now perusing with amazement a report of what had happened to someone else.  He was not regretful—far from it—but a little bemused at so many decisions made all at once, somewhat startled that they must all have been his own, yet ready to accept them with a loyalty that might well become more enthusiastic when he had had a chance to think them over.