At breakfast he compared notes and found that her emotions had been similar only as far as a doubt as to whether he could really have meant what he said enough to go on meaning it; he assured her laughingly that he had and did, and immediately happiness blazed across the rolls and honey between them as they planned the trivial details of the day.  The future was still fantastic to talk about, even to think about, and they agreed for the time being not to give themselves the even heavier task of explaining it to others.  No one expected him in London before the end of the month (the Rainier board meeting was on the thirtieth), and no one knew she was not still in Provence, except Roland and his crowd, who did not count.  Jill was in the Aegean, cruising among the antiquities but taking (one suspected) very little notice of them.  He and Kitty could have at least two weeks in Switzerland before returning to announce the astonishing news to the family and to the world.  Of course they could send the news by letter, but somehow to pull the lever that would release all the commotion even at a distance required a certain fortitude; they decided to enjoy those two weeks first of all.

And so began an interlude that might have been in another world, and almost was.  They stayed for the first week in Interlaken, making it a centre for mountain trips into the high Oberland.  The weather improved after the last big snowfall of the year; the sun dried the drenched meadows, so that they were able to walk by the lakeside to Giessbach, and up the Lauterbrunnen Valley as far as the lower slopes of the Roththal.  It was pleasant to see the industrious Swiss polishing up their ballrooms and cocktail bars and funicular railways in readiness for what was to come; but pleasanter still to tramp along the cleared roadways in face of the sun and snow.  During the second week they discovered the hotel on the two-mile-high Jungfraujoch, where there was nothing to do but talk and absorb the physical atmosphere of being above and beyond the earth.  They liked it enough to stay there till the last day before the necessary return to England.

That last day came, and with it the descent to natural levels—a curious deflation of mood that was easy to interpret as sadness at leaving a place where they had been so happy.  Throughout the long rail journey through Berne and Basle to Boulogne the mood persisted— seemed impossible to shake off, being perhaps a physical effect of the changed altitude, they both agreed.  They reached London amidst driving rain and had dinner in a restaurant near Victoria Station, saying all the time and over and over again how wonderful it had been in Switzerland and how sorry they were to have returned.  The Rainier board meeting was four days away, and it was understood that no announcement of future plans should be hinted at to anyone until then.

The board meeting came, and with it all the commotion.  He had not guessed how considerable it would be.  He had suspected that the family would not be altogether pleased, but he hadn’t realized they would have so many reasons for being displeased.  He soon found that they regarded his year’s absence from Rainier’s as a form of abdication amounting almost to desertion—in spite of the fact that they had long been jealous of what they called his “domineering” over the firm’s affairs.  Then also, those who had hoped their children would inherit his personal fortune strongly resented his marriage to anybody at all; he hadn’t anticipated that, even remotely.  And finally, all except Jill (and in one sense even including Jill) were manifestly and desperately jealous of his choice.  Only Chet seemed to have any genuine tolerance of the idea— a tolerance not quite reaching the point of enthusiasm.  He had so long joked about the need for Charles to “hurry up” that now Charles WAS hurrying up he could not withhold somewhat rueful good wishes.

The party at Stourton to celebrate the engagement was not a successful affair.

Then, in June, quite suddenly, Chet died after a heart attack, and plans for the marriage in July were postponed till autumn; it would have been impossible, in any event, to leave England during all the legal complications that ensued.

The marriage was finally fixed for October.  Charles took Kitty to dine at Kettner’s again one night in late September, and for some reason the same mood came upon them as during the journey back from Switzerland five months before.  She suggested that, on his side, it was due to news in the evening paper—a big stock-market crash in New York, with inevitable repercussions in London.

He was too honest with her to accept that as a reason.  “I’m not a speculator.  Rainier’s dropped five shillings today, I notice, but it doesn’t affect me or the firm—they can go down ten times as much before it’ll begin to worry me.  Matter of fact, everything’s been pushed too high lately, especially in America.  I could make a lot of money now if I backed my opinion.”

“What opinion?”

“That the fall will go much further.”

“How would you make money by backing your opinion?”

“Selling short, as they call it.  That means—“

“I know—I learnt all about it at Kirby when we used to gamble in Rainier shares.  Remember?”

“You must have lost everything.”

“Nearly everything.  About thirty-two pounds all together.”  She laughed.  “Well, why DON’T you sell short?”

“I will, if it amuses you.  But I’d have no other reason.”

“Yes, do it—to amuse me.  Please, Charles.”

“Then there’s two things I have to do at the office tomorrow morning.”  He took out his notebook and made a pretence of writing something down.  “Sell short to amuse Kitty.  Also get Miss Hanslett to send out the wedding invitations.”

“Who’s Miss Hanslett?”

“My new secretary.  You saw her last time you called.”

“Oh, that quiet girl?”

“I suppose she’s quiet.  I certainly wouldn’t want her to be noisy.”

“Darling, how soon can we leave—afterwards?”

“You mean for our world tour?  Maybe next month.  It’ll be too late for the Danube, though, this year.  We’d better do the Amazon first.  Or the Nile.”

“No, not the Nile—Jill’s there.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Looking at the tombs, I suppose, and having a good time.”

But the laugh they rallied themselves into failed to shift the mood that made him, as soon as dinner was over, confess that he felt tired and would prefer an early night in bed.  He dropped her at Jill’s new house in St. John’s Wood, where she was living with a cook-housekeeper, and kept the taxi for his own journey to Smith Square.  But his apartment seemed so inexplicably cheerless that after a drink and an attempt to feel sleepy, he called another cab and drove round the West End till he found a film that looked tolerable enough for whiling away the rest of the evening.  He stayed in the cinema less than an hour, his restlessness increasing all the time, so that at last he walked out and paced up and down the thronged pavements till past midnight, longing suddenly for the sun and snow of the Jungfraujoch, yet knowing that it was only a mirage of what he would still long for if by some miracle he were to be transplanted there.

Usually when he could not sleep he was quite satisfied to stay up reading, often until dawn; but that night he felt he would be far too restless to concentrate on any book, so he bought tablets and took several on his return to Smith Square.  They gave him a heavy unrefreshing sleep, from which he woke about noon to find a pencilled letter from Kitty at his bedside.  It had been delivered by hand early that morning, and contained, in effect, the breaking of their engagement and an announcement that she was leaving immediately to join her stepmother in Luxor.

 

 

PART THREE

 

The first gray smudge was peering over the hills and it seemed that we both saw it together.

“Well, we’ve talked all night—and for the second time.  Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

“No. . . .  You were telling me about that letter, the one Kitty left for you.  Didn’t it give any reasons?”

“Plenty.  But I really think we’d better go to bed if we’re to be in any decent condition tomorrow.  The crowd will soon be on us, worse luck.”

“Then why do you have them here?”

“That’s part of another story.  Well, I must have a nightcap, even if it IS morning.  Have one with me?”

We went down to the library, feeling our way in the dim dawn shadows without switching on any of the house lights.  Meanwhile he continued:  “I’d show you that letter if I had it here, but it’s locked up in my safe in the City.  I admit I’m sentimental about it— a little puzzled also.  It’s the last word I ever had from her, except picture postcards from all kinds of places.  What happened to her afterwards is what she said would happen—except that it didn’t last for long.  She married a man she met in Egypt—she was quite happy—and he was a man I liked when I met him, but I didn’t meet him till after she was dead.  He had plantations in the F.M.S.  and she went out with him there and died of malaria within six months.”

He bent over the decanter, his shape and movements ghostly against the gray pallor from the windows.  The moon had gone down, and it was darker than at midnight.

“And then?” I said.

He handed me a drink and raised his own.

“The rest,” he declaimed half-mockingly, “is a simple saga of success.  I flung myself into business with renewed but disciplined abandon: I sold short and made more money out of the slump than I’d ever done out of ordinary trading; I accepted directorships in other companies and became what they call ‘a figure in the City’—I even assumed the burden of two other family heritages, by taking over Stourton and by allowing myself to stand for my father’s old Parliamentary seat of West Lythamshire.  And a few years later, my affairs having more than survived the storms of 1931 and the doldrums of 1932, I married a lady who had become quite indispensable to me in this struggle for fresh fame and fortune—

Miss Hanslett, the quiet girl.  That again turned out to be an astonishing success.  You never know what these quiet girls can do.  From being quiet, she became one of the busiest and cleverest of London’s hostesses—and the miracle is, she’s STILL quiet—you’d hardly know the machine’s running at all.”

“So different from Miss Hobbs—but that, I suppose, is because you chose her yourself.”

“Or else SHE chose HERSELF.  She was just a girl in the general office first of all, until one evening I was working late and she invaded my private office to ask outright if she could work for me personally.  Said she knew the other girl was leaving and she was certain she’d be better than anyone else.  After that I simply had to give her either the sack or the job.”

“Anyhow, YOU made the right choice there.”

He laughed.  “Oh yes, and I soon knew it.  She was everything she promised.  I’ve nothing but praise for her.  I’d never have made so much money or acquired such style in after-dinner oratory but for her.  She’s intensely loyal, tremendously ambitious for me, and personally charming.  I love her more than most men love their wives.  She’s guided my career—in fact she’s almost made a personally conducted tour of it.  I never do anything, in politics or business, without seeking her advice.  She runs Stourton and Kenmore like a pair of clocks—she doesn’t care if I’m in or out to lunch or dinner, or if I go to India or South America for six months or merely to Brighton for a week-end.  She’s everything a man like me could wish for in a wife—always provided—“  He paused and took a drink, then added:  “Always provided he’s completely satisfied to be a man like me.”

“And aren’t you?”

He took my arm.  “Let’s save up something for another night.  I’m going to bed, and after all this, I really think I shall sleep.  Tell Sheldon not to wake me till the guests begin to arrive.”

The guests began to arrive in groups during the following afternoon, but I did not see Rainier till tea-time, when he appeared on the terrace to greet the assembly; and from then throughout the week-end I had no chance to talk with him alone.  Nor with Woburn either, for that young man, after initial shyness, turned into a considerable social success.  Observing him from time to time I felt there was a certain scientific detachment in his obvious effort to make good at his first fashionable house-party (he had told me it was his first, and that he had never mixed in that class of society before); it was as if he were exploring himself, discovering his own powers; experimenting with the careless flatteries, the insincere attentions that make up the small change of such occasions; finding that he could do it just as well as people born to it, perhaps even a little better after practice.  He was clearly a very adaptable and cool-headed young man, and the whole party was a good deal pleasanter for his being always at hand to pass interesting conversational cues, to make up a bridge four, to play a not offensively good game of tennis, and to dance with otherwise unpartnered matrons.  One could almost read in his face the question, too wondering to be smug:  Is this all there is to it?

Mrs. Rainier was the perfect hostess as usual, and I should have been lost in admiration at everything she did had it not been a repetition on a larger scale of what she habitually did at Kenmore.  All, in fact, was as gay and brilliant and smooth-running as usual, but something else was not QUITE as usual—and I don’t know how to describe it except as a faint suspicion that the world was already swollen with destiny and that Stourton was no longer the world—a whiff of misgiving too delicate to analyse, as when, in the ballroom of an ocean liner, some change of tempo in the engines far below communicates itself to the revellers for a phantom second and then is lost behind the rhythms of the orchestra.

The simile was Rainier’s as we drove back to London on Monday evening, leaving Woburn and Mrs. Rainier at Stourton.  Within a few weeks the same misgiving, many times magnified, had become a headline commonplace; trenches were being dug in the London parks; the curve of the September crisis rose to its monstrous peak.  Rainier lived at his Club during those fateful days and we were both kept busy at all hours transcribing reports, telephoning officials, and listening to the latest radio bulletins.  Diplomatic machinery had swung into the feverish gear of guesswork and divination:  Was Hitler bluffing?  What sort of country was this new Germany?  Would Russia support the Czechs?  When would the bombers come over?  Every chatterer could claim an audience; journalists back from Europe were heard more eagerly than ambassadors; the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance with politicians and crystal-gazers.  And behind this mystery came fear, fear of a kind that had brought earlier peoples to their knees before eclipses and comets—fear of the unknown, based on an awareness that the known was no longer impregnable.  The utter destruction of civilization, which had seemed a fantastic thing to our grandfathers, had become a commonplace of schoolboys’ essays, village debating societies, and after-dinner small talk; for the first time in human history a sophisticated society faced its own extinction not theoretically in the future, but by physical death perhaps tomorrow.  There was a dreadful acceptance of doom in all our eyes as we sat around, in restaurants and at conference tables and beside innumerable radios, listening and talking and drinking, the only three things to do that one could go on doing— paralysed as we were into a belief that it was too late to act, and clinging to a last desperate hope that somehow the negation of an act might serve as well.

That negation was performed, if performed is the word; talking, listening, and drinking then merged into a sigh of exhausted relief, and only a few Cassandra voices, among whom was Rainier’s, murmured that no miracle had really happened at all.  But national hysteria urged that it had, and that one must not say otherwise, even if it hadn’t.  Anyhow, the crisis passed, the rains of autumn soaked into half-dug trenches, and as the days shortened and darkened the Kenmore lamplight glowed again in the faces of diseuses and diplomats—Sir Somebody This and the Maharanee of That, the successful novelist and the Wimbledon winner, delegates from somewhere-or-other to the something-or-other conference, as well as visiting Americans who thought they were experiencing a real pea-souper fog because the sun of a November midday had turned red over the roofs.

I went to a good many of those lunches, and somehow, I don’t remember exactly when, it became a recognized thing that I should have a place at all of them unless my duties with Rainier called me elsewhere.

Often they did.  Many days during that strange, almost somnambulist winter of 1938-1939 I sat in the Gallery of the House of Commons, listening to dull debates and hearing Big Ben chime the quarters till I saw Rainier get up and push his way through the swing doors with that casualness which is among the specialties of House procedure—a form of self-removal that implies neither rudeness nor even indifference to the speech in progress.  Then he would dictate letters in a Committee Room, or order tea, or we might stroll along the usually empty Terrace, watching the last spears of sunset fade from the windows of St. Thomas’s Hospital, or staring over the parapet at a train of coal barges on their way upstream.  It was at such moments that I came to know him most intimately, and to feel, more from his presence than from words, that the years he no longer talked about were still haunting; that he was still, as two women had said, vainly searching for something and never at rest.  Yet outwardly, and to others, there were few signs of it.  Indeed, the disfavour into which he fell as a result of his attitude towards official policy seemed to come rather as a release than as a suppression.  It was not that he blamed the government for what had happened at Munich; such blame, he said, when history assessed it, would doubtless be spread over many years and many personages, of which the men of 1938 were but last in a tragic line.  He did, however, blame those who had stepped out of panic only to sink back into hypnosis.  “These are the last days,” he said to me once.  “We are like people in a trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical power to press down.  We should be arming now, if we had sense,--arming day and night and seven days of the week,--for if the Munich pact had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle.  And we are doing NOTHING—caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation.  We don’t realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years.”

Such talk, during the winter of 1938-1939, was heresy in a country that permitted heresy, but could not regard it as in good taste.  People began to remark, in advance of any argument about him, that they LIKED Rainier—this also was a bad sign in a society where likings are rarely expressed except by way of fair-minded prelude to disparagement.  And one reflected that there had always been something against his chances of attaining high office—something expressed by his political enemies when they praised him as “brilliant,” and by his political friends when they doubted if he were altogether “safe.”  Such doubts were now running high.

In the City, however, safety and brilliance were not held as incompatibles by gatherings of grateful shareholders at annual meetings in the Rainier Building.  Here also it was my duty to accompany him, handing out appropriate documents and keeping his memory jogged against forgetfulness of such things as—“You will be glad to know that during the past year we have opened a new factory at West Bromwich where we are now manufacturing a model especially designed for the Colonies.”  He made such announcements with a solemnity in which only I, perhaps, detected any ironic note; similarly there seemed to me a touch of disdain in his bent for handling complicated masses of figures, a touch that did not detract from the enormous confidence reposed in him by enriched but usually mystified investors.  Nor was that confidence misplaced.  Once I said to him:  “Leaving sentiment out of it, you haven’t done so badly.  You saved the family inheritance, you rescued the money of hundreds of outsiders, and you kept intact the jobs of a whole army of workpeople.  You did, in fact, everything you set out to do.”

“There’s only one thing more important,” he answered, “and that is, after you’ve done what you set out to do, to feel that it’s been worth doing.”

That was the day when he took me down to the sub-basement of the Rainier Building to show me the result of certain constructional work that had been in progress there for several weeks.  “I’ve allowed it to be supposed that these are new storage vaults,” he told me, as we entered the first of a series of empty catacombs, “but actually I had another thought in mind—and one that it would be too bad to thrust on a group of happy dividend collectors.  But the fact is—and entirely at my own personal expense—I’ve made this place bombproof.  So you see, SOMETHING’S been worth doing.” He walked me round like an estate agent.  “Comfort, as well as safety,--there’s an independent heating plant,--because it’s no good saving people from high explosive just to have them die of influenza.  And another reason—the greatest man of the twentieth century may have to be born in a place like this, so let’s make it as decent as we can for him.  A steel and concrete Manger—sixty feet below ground . . . that’s why I’ve had to keep it a big secret, because you couldn’t expect the investing public to swallow THAT.”

 

 

But we liked the City—“the City of Meticulous Nonsense,” he called it once, after an annual meeting at which somebody had used the adjective in praise of his own attention to the firm’s affairs.  “METICULOUS,” he echoed, afterwards, “really meaning TIMID—and how right that it should nowadays be used as a compliment, since so many of the most complimented people nowadays deserve it!  Meticulous little people attending meticulous meetings, passing meticulous votes of thanks for meticulous behaviour!”

One rainy Saturday we waited several minutes while the homeward rush-hour crowd swarmed in front of the car, taking no notice of the horn until a man, just an ordinary mackintoshed fellow with (I remember) a piece of garden trellis under his arm, called out:

“’Ere, give the bloke a chawnce!”—whereat the crowd, heeding just as casually as they had been heedless before, made way for us to pass.  There was no resentment in their faces because we had an expensive car or because we kept them waiting a few seconds longer in the rain, no social significance in the appeal to give the bloke a chance, no indication of who the bloke was—I or Rainier or the chauffeur.  The very absence of all these things was English, Rainier said—something offhand but good-humoured, free but obedient, careless but never heartless.

“But tell that,” he added, “to the Indians in Amritsar, to the Chinese who read the notice in a Shanghai park, ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,’ to the tribesmen in Irak, to the peasant in County Cork, to the . . .”  But then he laughed.  “God, how we’re hated!  It isn’t so much because we really deserve it.  Even at the bottom of the charge-sheet I could quote Santayana’s remark that the world never had sweeter masters.  SWEET—a curious adjective—and yet there IS a sweetness in the English character, something that’s almost perfect when it’s just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard.  No, we’re not hated altogether by logic.  It’s more because the world is TIRED of us—BORED with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale.  I suppose the world grew tired of the Romans like that, till at last the barbarians were excused for barbarism more readily than the Caesars were forgiven for being tough.  There come such moments in the lives of nations, as of persons, when they just can’t do anything right, and the world turns on them with the awful ferocity of a first-night audience rejecting, not so much a play it doesn’t want, as a playwright it doesn’t want any more. . . .  But wait till they’ve experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted.  A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history. . . .”

I remember that afternoon particularly because as we were waiting for the traffic lights in Whitehall we saw Nixon at the kerbside vainly signalling a taxi and Rainier had the car stopped to offer him a lift.  Bound for Victoria to catch a train, he chattered all the time during the short drive, finally and quite casually remarking:  “Oh, you remember that fellow Ransome who took us to tea at his house in Browdley that day when his wife wasn’t there?”

Rainier looked up sharply.

“Rather sad business,” Nixon continued.  “She’d gone out to buy a cake, as Ransome thought—must have been hurrying back, because she was carrying it as she ran into the bus . . . killed instantly . . . poor chap was in a terrible state, so I heard.  Only been married about a year.”

We drove on in silence after dropping Nixon in the station yard;

Rainier’s face was strained, tense, as if he had suffered a personal blow.  Half-way to Kenmore he tapped on the window and ordered the chauffeur to turn and drive back.  “Let’s hear somebody play the piano,” he said.  “That’s the best cure for the mood I’m in.”

We drove to the West End, while I searched the Telegraph for recital announcements.  The only one I could find was of the first and only appearance in London of Casimir Navoida, who would give a mixed programme of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Ravel at the Selsdon Hall.  I had never heard of Navoida, and the fact that Rainier hadn’t either lent no optimism to my expectations.  We found a photograph on the rain-sodden posters outside the Hall—the conventionally sombre, heavy-lidded profile brooding over the keys.  That too was not encouraging, nor was the obviously “paper” audience of only a few score.  Nor, for that matter, were the explanatory notes in the printed programme—composed, Rainier grimly suggested, by some schoolgirl in a mood of bibulous Schwärmerei.  With less distaste we read a paragraph about the performer, though even that was vague enough—merely mentioning a Continental reputation, tuition under Leschetizky (misspelt), a prix-de-somewhere, and an ancient press-agent anecdote beginning—

“One morning, at the So-and-so Conservatoire . . .”  Then the door at the rear of the platform opened and this fellow Navoida walked to the piano, gave a hinge-like bow to half-hearted applause, and began.  He did not look much like his photograph, though a description could not have omitted the same points—the gloomy profile, wrinkled nape, and upflung hair.  We listened with tolerance, soon aware that his playing was not exactly bad.  When the interval came I noticed a woman in the seat beyond Rainier’s fumbling for a dropped programme; presently he stooped and retrieved it for her.  She thanked him with a foreign accent and added:  “You think he plays well?”

Rainier answered:  “He might be good if he weren’t out of practice.”

“You are a critic?”

“Only to myself.”

“You are not on one of the newspapers?”

“Oh dear, no.”

She seemed both relieved and disappointed.  “I thought you might be.  I suppose they ARE here.”

Rainier looked round and included me in the conversation by saying:

“Notice anybody?  I don’t . . .  I’m afraid Saturday afternoon’s a bad time in London.”

Then Navoida came on again and played the Chopin group.  At the next interval she said:  “You are quite right.  He is out of practice.  He played cards till four this morning.”

Rainier laughed.  “Stupid of him, surely?”

“Oh, he doesn’t care.  He lost much money, also.  If only people

would realize that he CAN play so much better than this—“

“Why SHOULD they?  If he chooses to drink and gamble the night

before a concert—“

“Oh no, not DRINK.  He NEVER drinks.”

“No?”

“But gambling is in his blood.  It is in the blood of all the Navoidas.  If he travels by autobus he will bet on how many people get in at each stop.”

Rainier looked slightly interested.  “How do you know all this about him?”

She had just time to reply, as the piano began again:  “I am his wife.”

I could judge that throughout the Brahms Sonata Rainier was feeling somewhat embarrassed at having discussed the pianist so frankly, but when the next interval came she gave him no time to apologize.  “Oh, I could KILL him for being so bad!  The foolish boy. . . .

Maybe it was a mistake to come to England at all.”

Rainier answered:  “Oh, no need to feel that.  But your husband’s concert agent ought to have chosen a better day for a first appearance.  Londoners like to get away to the country at week-ends.”

“Even when it rains?”

“My goodness, we never bother about rain.”

“Ach, yes, your London climate . . . when it is not rain, it is fog. . . .  I understand.”

I winked at him, apropos of this foreign belief that English weather is the worst in the world; it is not, Rainier had once said, but the convention is useful in that it enables an Englishman to appear modest by conceding something that, whether true or false, is of little consequence.  All the time that Madame Navoida was bemoaning London rain and fog I was glancing at her sideways and judging her to be forty-five or so—younger, at any rate in looks, than her husband.  The light in the concert hall was not particularly kind, and her make-up had either been put on hurriedly or else had got blurred by raindrops; her eyes were brown and rather small, but her forehead had a generous width that somehow compensated; it was an interesting face.

During the Ravel I whispered this to Rainier and received his reply:  “I don’t give a damn about her face.  And I don’t give a damn about this Ravel either.  I only know she amuses me and I’m more cheerful than I was an hour ago. . . .”

For the next few minutes I heard the two of them in whispered conversation; then he turned to me.  “They’re Hungarians, but she lived for a long time in Singapore—hence the English.  She also speaks French and German—besides, of course, Hungarian.  Writes poetry in all four, so she’d have you believe.  Also worships Romance with a capital R.  Reads Dekobra and D’ Annunzio, but prefers Dekobra—so do I, for that matter. . . .  Altogether rather like a female spy in a magazine story—every minute I expect her to say ‘Hein’ and produce a bundle of stolen treaties out of her corsage.  And she says such delicious things—like—‘Ach, your English climate—‘ and that bit about gambling being in the blood of all the Navoidas. . . .  I’m trying to think of something half as good as what she’ll say next—remember that game we used to play?”

That was one of the fooleries we would sometimes indulge in during our morning car journeys to the City.  There was a certain newspaper shop at a street corner in Pimlico, and outside it, every Tuesday, appeared a picture poster advertising that week’s issue of a publication called Judy’s Paper; and this poster always showed an evening-clothed couple in some highly dramatic situation, captioned by such a sentence as “He refused her a ring” or “She lied to save him.”  Most Tuesdays, before we reached the shop, Rainier and I would try to invent something even triter than what we should presently discover, but we never succeeded, so hard is it for the sophisticated mind to think in the natural idiom of the ingenuous.  But it made an amusing diversion, for all that.

After further whispering he turned to me excitedly.  “She’s SAID it!  I KNEW she would!  She’s just told me that we English are so COLD!”  At that moment Navoida finished the Ravel and Rainier was able to answer her amidst the applause.  I heard him say:  “Madame, we are NOT cold—it’s merely that we have to be warmed up, especially on wet Saturdays.  So I beg you to make allowances for us during the rest of your stay here.”

“We are leaving tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Casimir has a concert in Ostend on Wednesday.”

“You’d better take care of him there.  It’s a great place for gambling.”

“Oh, that will be all right.  We shall go to the Casino and have champagne and Casimir will be lucky—he always is at roulette.  It is cards he is no good at—especially poker.”  (She pronounced it “pokker.”)  “When I saw him playing poker with some Americans at the hotel last night, I knew he would be a bad boy today.”

“I thought you said he didn’t drink?”

“Only champagne.  But of course it is so expensive in England.  When we were in Singapore we drank nothing but Heidsieck all the time.  A bottle every meal.  It prevented him from being dysenteric.”

“Probably it also prevented him from being Paderewski.”

“You mean it is not good for him?  But consider—if it pleases him, is he not entitled to it?  What is the life of a concert artist nowadays?  Nobody cares—there is no musical life as it used to be— in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Wien.  Only in America they pay an artist well, but I do not want him to go there again.”

“Why not?”

She whispered something in Rainier’s ear and then added:  “Of course I forgave him afterwards.  He was faithful according to his fashion.”

Rainier let out a shout of sheer glee.  “What’s that?  WHAT?”

She repeated the sentence.  “Do you not know the poem by one of your English poets, Ernest Dowson?”  And she began to recite the whole thing from beginning to end, while Casimir, in whom I was beginning to feel a deeper interest after these varied revelations, appeared on the platform to play the Chopin “Black Key Study” as an encore, muffing the final octaves and finishing on a triumphantly wrong note in the bass.  “Perhaps you would now like to meet him?” she concluded.

So we trooped round to the little room at the back of the platform where a few mournfully mackintoshed women were loitering while the pianist scrawled his signature across their programmes in a mood of equal mournfulness.  The entrance of Madame Navoida brought a touch of life to these proceedings, and I noticed then a certain vital quality that made her still an attractive woman, despite sagging lines and the bizarre make-up.  As soon as the autograph-seekers left she approached Casimir as one making a stage entrance, kissed him resoundingly on both cheeks, and cried:  “Casimir, mon cher, tu étais magnifique!”  Then, for a moment, she gabbled something incomprehensible and turned to Rainier.  “He speaks Hungarian best.  I have to tell him he is wonderful now, but soon I shall tell him he was awful—ATROCIOUS!  Poor boy, he is always tired after a concert—please excuse him.  He says he has a headache.”

Rainier answered:  “That’s too bad!  I was about to suggest that you both had dinner with us somewhere—that is, if you had nothing else to do.”

Her face lit up.  “Oh, but we should be ENCHANTED!  It is so kind

of you.  I am sure his headache will get better.  But there is one

thing I must tell you beforehand—he will not dress.  Not even a

smoking.  Only for the casinos where they will not admit him

otherwise—and then he curses all the time.  So if you do not mind—“

“Not at all.  We probably wouldn’t dress ourselves, anyway.”

“Then he will be delighted.”  She turned to her husband.  “Casimir, this is—“  And of course another turn.  “But I do not know your name?”

I had guessed it would come to that, and I remembered that moment on Armistice Day when all Rainier’s pleasure had disappeared at the enforced disclosure of his identity.  I wondered if it would be different with foreigners to whom his name would almost certainly be unknown.

But he answered, with a sort of gleeful solemnity:  “Lord Frederic Verisopht—and this”—with a bow to me—“is Sir Mulberry Hawk. . . .”

 

 

Having arranged to meet them at seven at Poldini’s we spent the interval at Rainier’s club, where his spirits soared fantastically.  When I reminded him of an engagement to speak that evening at the Annual Dinner of the Gladstone Society he told me to wire them a cancellation on account of urgent political business.  “That’s all very well,” I answered, “but then somebody will see us dining at Poldini’s with a couple who look like a rather seedy croupier and a soubrette out of a pre-war musical comedy.”

He laughed.  “Not if we do what nobody else does nowadays—engage a private room.”

“And what was the idea of introducing me as Sir Somebody or other?”

“To find out whether she reads Dickens.  YOU evidently don’t. . . .  Well, that was PARTLY the reason.  The other was to give her a thrill.  I’m sure titles do.  Poldini’s will too—it’s got that air of having seen better and more romantic days.  I rarely go there, so the waiters don’t know me, and I’ve never been in one of their private rooms since my uncle took me when I was twelve years old.  That’s a story in itself.  I don’t think I ever told you about him— he was a charming and very shortsighted archdeacon, and the only one out of my large collection of uncles whom I really liked.  He liked me too, I think—we often used to spend a day together.  One evening during the Christmas holidays, we felt hungry after a matinée of Jack and the Beanstalk, so as we were walking to the nearest Underground station he said, ‘Let’s go in here for a snack’— and it was Poldini’s.  I think he mistook it for some sort of cheap but respectable tea-shop—anyhow, we walked in, all among the pretty ladies and the young men-about-town; we were the cynosure of every eye, as novelists in those days used to write—because it wasn’t at all the kind of place a Church of England dignitary would normally take his schoolboy nephew to, and my uncle, with his white hair and flashing eyes (the drops he had to put in them made them flash), must have looked rather like Hall Caine’s Christian about to create a disturbance. . . .  Anyhow, old Poldini,--he’s dead now,--scenting something funny about us, pretended all his tables were booked and asked if we’d mind dining upstairs—so up we went, my uncle blinking his way aloft without a word of protest, and presently Poldini showed us into a cosy little room furnished in blue and gold, with a very thick carpet and a convenient chaise-longue against the wall and gilt cupids swarming in a suggestive manner all over the ceiling—in fact, Poldini took charge of us completely, recommending à la carte dishes and serving them himself, and as the meal progressed my uncle grew more and more surprised and delighted—still under the impression it was an A.B.C. or some such place; and when the bill came I snatched it up and said I’d stand treat, and he said, ‘My boy, that’s very generous of you’—and by God, it was, for it took all the money he’d just given me as a Christmas present.  But I never let him know, and to the end of his life he always used to tell people he’d never enjoyed a better meal than at that eating-house off the Strand . . . EATING-HOUSE, mind you!”  He took a long breath and added:  “So that’s where we’ll dine tonight—among the ghosts of the past—a couple of milords entertaining the toast of the town— and rather battered toast, if you’ll pardon two bad puns at once.”

When I look back on that evening I remember chiefly, of course, the incident that crowned it; but I can see now that the entire masquerade was somehow Rainier’s last and rather preposterous effort to tease a way into self-knowledge, and that the climax, though completely accidental, was yet a fitting end to the attempt.  I realized also, even if never before, how near he was to some catastrophic breakdown—partly from overwork, but chiefly from the fret of things that could not be forgotten because they had never been remembered.  And all that day, ever since meeting Nixon, the fret had strengthened behind an increasing randomness of acts and words.

We drove to Poldini’s through the rain, and were glad to find the place reasonably unchanged—still with its private rooms upstairs, little used by a generation that no longer needs such an apparatus of seduction, and therefore slightly melancholy until gardenias and ice-buckets revived a more festive spirit.  Then, with some commotion, the Navoidas arrived, the pianist rather pale and glum in a long overcoat with an astrakhan collar, and Madame very florid and voluble with heavy gold bangles and ancient but good-quality furs, obviously bewitched (but by no means ill-at-ease) at the prospect of dining intimately with English nobility.  We soon discovered that both of them were equally accomplished champagne-bibbers, but whereas Madame grew livelier and gayer with every glass, her husband sank after the first half-dozen into a settled gloom from which he could only stir himself at intervals to murmur to the waiter a demand for “trouts”—for there had been some confusion over his order, due perhaps to the waiter’s reluctance to believe that anyone in 1939 would ask for truites bleues in addition to Beluga caviare, steak tartare, and English rosbif.  But all that too, and to Rainier’s feverish delight, was in the halcyon tradition—the age of monstrous dinners and fashionable appendicitis, the one most often the result of the others.

Presently, after the popping of the fourth magnum, Madame grew sentimental and talked of her romantic adventures in all parts of the world—a recital garnished with copious quotations from the poets, of whom she knew so many in various languages that I began to think it really must be a passion with her quite as genuine as that for Heidsieck; she liked amorous poetry best, and there was something perhaps a little charming in the way she obviously did not know which was too hackneyed to quote, so that from a worn-out tag of Shakespeare she would swerve into a line from Emily Brontë or Beddoes.  A few words she wrongly pronounced or did not understand; she would then ask us to correct her, quite simply and with an absence of self-consciousness that made almost piquant her theatrical gestures and overstudied rhythms.  Suddenly I realized, in the mood of half-maudlin pity that comes after a few drinks yet is none the less percipient, that she was a sadly disappointed woman, getting little out of later life that she really craved for, without a home, a wanderer between hotels and casinos, listening to the same old Brahms and Beethoven in half-empty concert halls, tied for the rest of her days to a flabby maestro, yet alive in her illusion that the world was still gay and chivalrous as a novelette.

After Rainier had called for more cognac he asked if she had any ideas for spending the rest of the evening, because he’d be glad to go on to a show if she fancied any particular play.  She answered, with enthusiasm:  “Oh yes, it is so kind of you—there is one place I have always wanted to go because I have heard so much about it— your famous old English music-hall!”

Rainier said how unfortunate that was, because the famous old English music-hall no longer existed; there were only assortments of vaudeville turns and dance bands.

“Then perhaps we could go to see Berty Lowe.”

“Berty Lowe?”

“A man at the hotel told me this morning he was acting in London somewhere, and I should like to see him because I once knew an Englishman in Budapest who used to do imitations of him.  He always said Berty Lowe was the greatest comedian of the famous old English music-hall.”

Rainier had asked the waiter for an evening paper and was now

glancing down the list.  “Yes, he used to be quite funny, but I

haven’t heard of him in London for years—he’s a bit passé, you

know . . . well, he’s not at the Coliseum or the Holborn Empire

. . . that rather limits the possibilities . . . wait a minute,

though—‘Berty Lowe in Salute the Flag Twice Nightly at the Banford

Hippodrome’—“

She clapped her hands ecstatically.  “Oh, I should love to go there!”

“But it’s miles away in the suburbs—“ he was beginning, but suddenly then I could see the mere caprice of the idea seize hold of him; to drive out to Banford to see Berty Lowe at the local Hippodrome was in the right key of fantasy for such an evening.  He handed me the paper.  “They call it a riot of rip-roaring rib-tickling—doesn’t that sound awful?  Wish you’d ring ‘em up and book a box for four at the second house.”

“Salute the Flag,” echoed Madame, with hands clasped.  “Oh, I know I am going to love it if it is about soldiers.  The Englishman I knew in Budapest was a soldier.  It was during the war, but he wasn’t interned at first, because the Hungarians always liked the English, but when he began to send me flowers every day with little notes hidden in them—written in English, of course—the police arrested him for espionage, but when they translated the notes—oh, mon dieu, you should have seen their faces—and HIS—and MINE— because, you see, he was crazily in love with me—CRAZILY—not a bit like an Englishman!  Oh, how I wish I had made them give me back those notes. . . .  Casimir, of course, was mad with jealousy.”

Casimir, no longer capable of being mad with jealousy, looked up as a dog will on hearing his name mentioned, then shook his head with a bemused belch over his unfinished crêpes Suzette.

I went out to telephone.

An hour later we were sitting on four very uncomfortable cane chairs as the curtain rose on Salute the Flag.  It had been a mistake, I could see, to have engaged a box; the orchestra seats would have been much more comfortable, and further away from certain plush hangings which, on being merely touched, shook out clouds of dubious-looking dust.  I gathered from the way we were escorted to our seats, and also from the fact that the other boxes were empty, that our arrival had created a little stir; it would be odd, I thought, but perhaps not absolutely catastrophic, if some member of the audience were to recognize Rainier.  However, no one did, despite the fact that some of the actors played at us outrageously—even, by the end of the show, making jokes about “the gentleman in the box who’s fast asleep.”  It was true; Casimir was fast asleep.  Madame awakened him several times, but he slumped forward again almost immediately; soon she gave it up as a bad job.

As for the play, it had been (I guessed) an originally serious melodrama on a wartime theme, dating probably from 1914 or 1915; its villains had then been Germans of impossible villainy and its heroes English soldiers of equally impossible saintliness.  A quarter of a century of lucrative adaptation, however, had merged both the villainy and the saintliness into a common mood of broad comedy burlesque; such patriotic speeches as remained were spoken now only to be laughed at, while the hero’s first appearance was in the always comic uniform of a scoutmaster.

But Madame was puzzled.  During the intermission she said:  “I cannot understand why they laugh at some of the lines.  When the recruiting sergeant made that speech about the British Empire, what was funny about it?”

“It’s just our English sense of humour,” Rainier explained.  “We think recruiting sergeants ARE funny.  We think long speeches are also funny.  The British Empire has its funny side too.  So put them all together and you can’t help making an Englishman laugh.”

“But it was a PATRIOTIC speech!”

“Englishmen think them the funniest of all.”

“But in Austria, if anyone laughed at a patriotic speech there would be a riot and the man would be arrested.”

“That just proves something I have long suspected—that Austria isn’t England.”

“You know Austria?”

“I once spent a few days in Vienna on business.”

“Ah, you should have stayed longer and gone to the Semmering and then to Pressburg down the Danube in a steamboat.”

“Curious you should mention it, but that was one of my boyhood ambitions.  But in a canoe, not a steamboat.”

“Oh, but that would be more wonderful still!  Why did you not do it?”

“Because when I first wanted to, I hadn’t enough money—then later, when I had enough money, I hadn’t the time . . . and today, whatever I have, there isn’t any Austria.”

“Ah, yes, it is so sad.  But let us not think about it—see, the curtain rises!”

She said that so much like a musical-comedy cue that I almost expected to see her jump down to the stage and begin a song.  However, Salute the Flag was doubtless better entertainment.  It continued to be equally hilarious during its second half, though Berty Lowe, as the heavily moustached German general, was actually less funny than some of the smaller parts; there was one especially that had the audience holding their sides—when an English subaltern entered his colonel’s tent (the colonel being a German spy in disguise) to exclaim, between chattering teeth and amidst paroxysms of stammering—“The enemy advances—give the order to attack, or, by heaven, sir, I will myself!”  As a rule I do not care for jokes based on any physical defect, but I must admit that this particular player brought the house down by some of the most ludicrous facial contortions I have ever seen—the whole episode being topped by the final gag of a door-knob coming off and rolling across the stage when he banged his exit.

It was difficult to keep up or down to such a level, but the play romped on with a good deal of vulgar gusto until the last scene, evidently the dramatic high-spot of the original play, when the heroine, threatened by the villain with a revolver, cried:  “You cannot fire on helpless womankind!”—whereat another woman, of suggestive male appearance and elephantine proportions, invaded the stage from the wings brandishing weapons of all kinds from tomahawk to Mills bomb.  Crude, undoubtedly; but the Banford audience loved it, and were still laughing throughout the perfunctory finale in which all the cast rushed on to the stage to chase off the villain and line up for a closing chorus.

As we left the theatre I saw that Rainier’s mood had changed.  He almost bundled Madame and her husband into the car, and spoke very little during the ride back to London; she chattered to me for a while, but Rainier’s moods had a queer way of enforcing their atmosphere upon others, and she also was somewhat subdued by the time we reached their hotel in Russell Square and set the two of them down on the pavement.

“Good-bye, my lord,” she said to Rainier, evidently remembering her manners but not the name.  But she remembered mine.  “Good-bye, Sir Hawk.”

Casimir nodded grumpily as she took his arm to help him up the hotel steps.  The last we saw was her effort to get him through the revolving door.  It should have been funny, but perhaps we had had enough laughter for one evening; it wasn’t funny, therefore, it was somehow rather sad.

“Of course she’s ruined him,” Rainier commented, as we drove away towards Chelsea.

“What makes you think that?”

“His playing.  I could tell he was good once.”

“Well, he’s ruined her too.  She can’t get much fun out of life, watching over him wherever they go.  Incidentally, I think she was rather shocked by our rough island humour.”

“Probably it was too unsanitary and not sexy enough for her.”

“And then that fellow’s stammer.  I suppose on the Vienna stage you couldn’t have an officer stammering—only a private.”

“God, yes—that stammer . . . they kept it in—and the door-knob coming off as well. . . .  But the gag at the end was new.”

“Sounds as if you’ve seen the show before.”

He was thoughtful.  “Yes, I think I have.”

“Not surprising.  It’s been played up and down everywhere for years.”

“But more than that—more than SEEING it before—I—I—“  He turned to me with a curious abrupt eagerness.  “Do you mind if we drive around for a while before going home?”

“Of course not. . . .  But what’s happened?  You look—“  I stopped, but he cut in sharply:  “Yes, TELL me—what’s the matter with me—HOW do I look?”

I said, meeting his eyes and speaking with as little excitement as I could:  “You look as you did when I first saw you staring at a mountain because you thought you recognized it—through the train windows that Armistice Day.”

“ARMISTICE DAY,” he repeated.  Then he added, quietly, almost casually:  “I was in hospital . . . I mean on that first Armistice Day—the first one of all.  The REAL one.”  He suddenly clutched my sleeve.  “Yes, I remember—I was at Melbury!”

I said nothing, anxious not to break any thread of recollection he was about to unravel, and afraid of the tension in my voice were I to speak at all.

“There were so many hospitals,” he went on.  “I was at Sennelager first—then Hanover.  Then they exchanged the shell-shock and t.b.  cases through Switzerland.  So back home—Birmingham for a time— then Hastings—and another place near Manchester . . . then Melbury.  That was the last of them. . . .  I’d like to go to Melbury.”

I still couldn’t answer; I was afraid of breaking some kind of spell.  He seemed to read this into my silence, for he went on, in a kindly voice:  “Do you mind?  Or are you very tired?”

“No, I’m not tired.”  My voice was all right, but I was still apprehensive, and more so than ever when I realized he wanted to go to Melbury that very night, immediately.  I added something about Hanson being probably tired, even if we weren’t—after all he’d driven us to Banford and back, and to ask him now to make another excursion into the distant suburbs . . .

“Yes, of course—glad you thought of it.”  He was always considerate to servants.  “We’ll drop him here and send him home by taxi.  Then I’ll drive—or perhaps you’d better if you think I’ve had too much to drink.”  He was already reaching for the speaking-tube, and had given the new instructions before I could think of anything else to say at all, much less frame an objection.  Hanson pulled up at the kerb, showing no more curiosity than a good servant should.  But it was still pouring with rain, and he must have thought it odd to choose such a night for a pleasure drive.

Rainier moved next to me in the chauffeur’s seat; as I drove off he said he hoped I knew the way.

“Through Stepney and Stratford, isn’t it?”

“Don’t ask me—I’ve never been there since—since the morning I left.”

“You remember it was a MORNING?”

He turned to me excitedly.  “Did I say morning?  Yes, it WAS . . .

and if I can only SEE the place again—“

“You won’t see much tonight, I’m afraid.”

“I didn’t see much last time, either—it was too foggy.  God— that’s something else. . . .  Just let me talk on anyhow.  Don’t feel you have to answer—I know it’s hard to drive these juggernauts on a wet night—why does my wife always buy such monsters?--and we have four of them.”

“Nothing to stop you buying a small car yourself if you wanted.”

“But I’m not interested in buying cars.”

I laughed and said:  “Well, you can’t have it both ways.  If you’re not interested in cars, you can’t blame Mrs. Rainier for buying the kind she thinks is suitable for a rich man who isn’t interested in cars.”

“True, true. . . .”  The side issue had lowered the tension.

We drove through the almost deserted City, past Aldgate and along the wide, brilliant, rococo Mile End Road.  It was midnight as we crossed Bow Bridge, five minutes past as we reached the fork of the road in Stratford Broadway; I had to drive slowly because of the slippery tram-rails.  Once I stopped to inquire from some men drinking at a coffee-stall; they waved us on into the deepening hinterland of the suburbs.  The slums here lost their sinister picturesqueness, became more and more drably respectable: long vistas of lamplit roads, with here and there a block of elementary schools rising like a fortress over the rooftops, and at every shopping centre the same names in a different order—Woolworth, Maypole, Sainsbury, Home and Colonial, Lyons.  We passed an old-fashioned church with a new-fashioned sign outside it, proclaiming the subject of next Sunday’s sermon—“Why Does God Permit War?”— and that set Rainier improvising on the kind of sermon it would be—

“very cheerful and chummy, proving that God isn’t such a bad sort when you get to know Him”; and then abruptly, in the tangential way so characteristic when he was inwardly excited, he talked again of his favourite uncle the archdeacon.  “HE never preached a sermon on ‘Why Does God Permit War?’  To begin with, I don’t suppose he ever thought about it, and if he had, he’d probably have answered ‘Why shouldn’t He?’  He took it for granted that the Deity minded His own business, and that ‘God’s in His Heaven’ was just Browning’s way of putting it.  All this craze for bringing Him down to earth and appealing to Him at every turn would have struck my uncle as weak-kneed as well as in appallingly bad taste.  And yet, in his way, and on the outskirts of Cheltenham, he lived an almost saintly life.  He would never kill insects that strayed into the house, but would trap them in match-boxes and set them free in the garden.  He approved of hunting, though, and thought the smearing of a girl’s face with fox blood after her first ride to hounds was a rather charming custom.  All in all, I don’t suppose he was any more inconsistent than the modern parson who tries to combine Saint Francis, Lenin, and Freud into one all-embracing muddle.”

We drove on through Leytonstone; there the tram-lines ended and we could put on a little speed.  It was just after one o’clock when we reached the market square in the centre of Melbury; I pulled up and looked to him for further instructions.  He was peering through the window and after a moment I wound the window down on my side.  The rain had increased to the dimensions of a storm, and a solitary policeman sheltering under a shop awning called out to us:

“Looking for somewhere?”

Rainier turned at the sound of the stranger’s voice.

“Yes, the hospital,” he answered.  “Where’s the hospital?”

“You mean the new one or the old one, sir?”

“The old one, I think.”  Then in a sudden rush:  “It’s on a hill— has big gates and a high wall all round it.”

The policeman looked puzzled.  “That don’t sound much like either of ‘em.”  Then, as I was about to thank him and drive off, he came towards the car, leaned in, and said, with a glance across me to Rainier:  “You wouldn’t be meanin’ the ASYLUM, would you, sir?”

 

 

PART FOUR

 

He was so tired of stammering out to a succession of doctors all he knew about himself that eventually he jotted it down on a single sheet of notepaper for them to refer to at will.  He had recently been transferred to Melbury from another military hospital, and the change had somewhat upset him, because it meant beginning everything all over again—contacts with new doctors, nurses, and patients, the effort to find another corner of existence where people would presently leave him alone.  Besides, he didn’t like the place—it was too big, too crowded, and altogether too permanent-looking.  Overworked psychiatrists gave him treatments that were supposed to have done well in similar cases, but perhaps it was part of his own case that he didn’t feel any similar cases existed, though he admitted there were many worse ones; he also felt that the doctors—grand fellows all of them, he had no specific complaints—aimed at raising a statistical average of success rather than his own individual cure.

That particular morning in November he began the regulation mile along the cinder paths, glad that the fog had kept most of his fellow victims indoors.  Only alone did his various symptoms ever approach vanishing point, and amidst the fog this sense of aloneness was intensified so reassuringly that as he continued to walk he began to feel a curious vacuum of sensation that might almost be called contentment.  Walking was part of the encouraged regimen at Melbury; extensive grounds surrounded by a fifteen-foot spiked wall permitted it, while an army greatcoat kept the cold air from penetrating his thinnish hospital uniform.

Suddenly, as he neared the main entrance where the name had been painted over (though it was still readable in burnt letters on brooms and garden tools—“Property of the So-and-so County Asylum”)-- suddenly, as the heavily scrolled ironwork of the gates loomed through the fog, a siren screamed across the emptiness beyond—a factory siren, already familiar at certain hours, but this was not one of them, nor did the sound stay on the single level note, but began soaring up and down in wild flurries.  A few seconds later another siren chimed in, and then a third; by that time he was near enough to the gates to see two uniformed porters rush hatless out of the lodge, shouting excitedly as they raced up the shrouded driveway.  For the moment—and he realized it without any answering excitement—there was no one left on guard, no one to stop him as he passed through the lodge into the outer world, no one to notice him as he walked down the lane towards the town.  Behind his mute acceptance of things done to him, there was a slow-burning inclination to do things for himself, an inclination fanned now into the faint beginnings of initiative; but they were only faint, he had no will for any struggle, and if anyone ran after him to say “Come back” he would go back.

Nobody ran after him.  The lane turned into the main road at the tram terminus; a small crowd was already gathering there in groups, chattering, laughing, greeting each newcomer with eager questions.  Nor had the sirens stopped; they were louder now, and joined by tram bells, train whistles, a strange awakening murmur out of the distance.  He walked on, still downhill, edging into the roadway to avoid people, glad that the fog was thickening as he descended.  Soon he was aware of some approaching vortex of commotion, of crowds ahead that might cover all the roadway and envelop him completely; he felt as well as heard them, and a nagging pinpoint of uneasiness expanded until, to relieve it even momentarily, he turned into a shop at the corner of a street.

The inside was dark, as he had hoped, revealing only vague shapes of counter, shelves, and merchandise; it seemed to be a small neglected general store, smelling of its own shabbiness.  The opening door had tinkled a bell, and presently, as his eyes grew used to the dimness, he saw an old woman watching from behind the counter—thin-faced, gray-haired, rather baleful.  He tried to ask for cigarettes and began to stammer.  He always did when he talked to others, though he could chatter to himself without much trouble— that was one of the points he had noted for the doctors, though he suspected they didn’t believe him, and of course it was something he couldn’t prove.  Just now, with all the extra excitement, his stammer was worse than ever—not a mere tongue-tie, but a nervous tic that convulsed his entire head and face.  He stood there, trembling and straining for speech, at last managing to explode a word; the woman said nothing in answer, but after a long scrutiny began sidling away.  He relaxed when she had gone, hoping she would just return with the cigarettes and not oblige him to say more, wondering if she would think it odd if he stayed to smoke one of them in the shop.  Anyhow, it was good to be alone again.  Then suddenly he realized he was not alone.  A girl had entered, or else had been there all the time and he hadn’t noticed; she too was waiting at the counter, but now she turned to him and began urgently whispering.  “She’s gone to fetch somebody—she knows where you’re from.”

He stared hard, trying to isolate her face from the surrounding shadows.

“You ARE, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“She knows you’re not supposed to be out.”

He nodded again.

“Not that I’d blame anybody for anything today.  The war’s over— you know that?  Isn’t it wonderful . . . ?  And you certainly don’t LOOK as if you’d do any harm.”  She smiled to soften the phrase.

He shook his head and smiled back.

“Well, if you HAVE given them the slip, I wouldn’t stay here, old boy, that’s all.”

He smiled again, a little bewildered; somebody was talking to him normally, casually, yet personally too.  It was a pleasant experience, he wished it could go on longer, but then he heard the old woman’s footsteps returning from some inner room behind the shop; with a final smile he summoned enough energy to walk away.  A few seconds later he stood on the pavement, blinking to the light, aware of the prevalent atmosphere as something pungent, an air he could not breathe, a spice too hot for his palate.  Shouts were now merging into a steady sequence of cheers, and through the pale fog he saw a tram approach, clanging continuously as it discharged a load of yelling school-children.  He turned away from the clamour into a side street where two rows of small houses reached upwards like flying buttresses astride a hill; presently he came to a house with a dingy brass plate outside—“H. T. Sheldrake, Teacher of Music.”  He spoke the name, Sheldrake, to himself—he always tested names like this, hoping that some day one of them would fit snugly into an empty groove in his mind.  No, not Sheldrake.  There was the sound of a piano playing scales; he listened, calming himself somewhat, till the playing stopped and shrill voices began.  That made him move on up the hill, but he felt tired after a short distance and held to a railing for support.  Just then the same girl caught up with him.

“What’s the matter?”

He smiled.

“I followed you.  Thought you looked a bit off-colour.”

He shook his head valiantly, observing her now for the first time.  She was dressed in a long mackintosh and a little fur hat, like a fez, under which brown straight hair framed a face of such friendly eagerness that he suddenly felt it did not matter if she saw and heard his struggles for speech; rather that than have her think him worse than he was.  He wanted to say:  You should see some of the other fellows up there—what’s wrong with me is NOTHING—just a stammer and not being able to remember things.

While he was planning to say all this she took his arm.  “Lean on me if you like.  And talk or not, whichever you want.  Don’t be nervous.”

After that he decided to say merely that he was not really ill, but only tired after walking further than usual; he began bracing himself to make the effort, smiling beforehand to console her for the ordeal of watching and listening.  Then a curious thing happened; it was like taking a rush at a door to break through when all the time the door was neither locked nor even latched.  He just opened his mouth and found that he could speak.  Not perfectly, of course, but almost as easily as if he were talking to himself.  It made him gasp with an astonishment so overwhelming that for the moment he expected her to share it.

“Did you hear THAT?  I wasn’t so bad THEN, was I?”

“Of course you weren’t.  Didn’t I tell you not to be nervous?”

“But you don’t know what a job I have, as a rule.”

“Oh yes, I do.  I heard you in the shop.  But that old woman would scare anybody.  Where d’you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, this street doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“I was just—walking.”

“But weren’t you trying to get away?”

“Not—not exactly.  I hadn’t any real plans.  I just came out because—well, because there was nobody at the gate.”

“Do they look after you all right?”

“Oh yes.”

“I’ve heard they’re a bit rough with some.”

“Not with me.”

“All the same, you don’t really LIKE the place?”

“Not—not very much.”

“Then you oughtn’t to be in it, surely?”

“There’s nowhere else, until I get all right again.”

“How can you get all right again when you’re not happy in a place?”

He had often asked himself the same question, but he answered, parrying the idea:  “Perhaps I wouldn’t be very happy anywhere— just now.”

“But the war’s over—doesn’t that make any difference?”  She came near to abrupt tears, then dashed a hand to her eyes and began to laugh.  “Silly, that’s what I am—everybody’s gone silly today.  Seems an awful morning to end the war on, doesn’t it?--I mean, you’d almost think the sun ought to shine—blue skies—like a picture. . . .”  She almost cried again.  “Shall we stroll down?”

She gripped his arm as they slowly descended the hill.  His walk was pretty good, and he was suddenly proud of it—just the faintest shuffle, nobody would notice.  When they reached the piano-teacher’s house he hesitated.  “I’d rather not get mixed up with the crowd—if you don’t mind.”

“Righto—we’ll keep well away.”  She added:  “So you don’t like crowds?”

“Not very much.”

“Or hospitals?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“Well, that’s fine.  If I keep on trying I’ll really get to know you.”

They both laughed; then she said:  “There’s a place where we could get some hot coffee, if you like THAT.”

The Coronation Café was a cheap little place along the Bockley Road, patronized mostly by tramway men on duty who stopped their vehicles outside and dashed in with empty jugs, leaving them to be filled in readiness for the return trip.  All day long these swift visitations continued, with barely time for an exchange of words across the counter.  But today, the eleventh of November, 1918, drivers and conductors chatted boisterously as if they were in no hurry at all, and passed cheery remarks to the couple who sat at the marble-topped table in the window alcove.  They could see the man was a soldier by his greatcoat, and it was a good day for saying cheery things to soldiers.  “Wonder ‘ow long it’ll take to git the rest of you boys ‘ome, mate?” . . . “Maybe they’ll march ‘em to Berlin now and shoot the Old Kaiser.” . . . “Seems queer to ‘ave the war end up like this—right on the dot, as you might say.” . . . “Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a rumour, like them Russians comin’ through.” . . . “But it’s all in the papers, see— it sez the Germans ‘ave signed a what’s-a-name—means PEACE, don’t it?”  All this and much else in snatches of news and comment.  The proprietor always answered: “You’re right there, mister”—“That’s just what I always said meself,” or, if the remark had been especially emphatic:  “You ‘it the nail straight on the ‘ead that time, mister.”  Towards noon the fog grew very thick indeed and drivers reported crowds still increasing at the busy centres; workpeople had been sent home from offices and factories, as well as children from all the schools.  Then the trams stopped running, impeded by fog and crowds equally, and as there were no more customers at the Coronation Café the proprietor set to work behind his counter, polishing a large tea-urn till it glowed in the gloom like a copper sun.  Presently he came over to the table.  He was a little man, pale-faced, bald, with watery eyes and a drooping moustache.

“Wouldn’t you two like a bite o’ somethin’?”

The girl looked to her companion, saw him frame a word and then begin to struggle with it; she intervened quickly:  “Sounds a good idea.  What have you got?”

“Eggs, that’s about all.  ‘Ow d’yer like ‘em—soft or ‘ard?”

Again she looked across the table before answering.  “Oh, middling’ll do.”

“That’s the ticket.  That’s ‘ow I like ‘em meself.  And two more coffees?”

“Righto.”

“Keep yer warmed-up a day like this.  War’s over, they say, but anybody can die of pewmonia.”

“That’s a fact, so bring those coffees quick.”

He went away chuckling; then the girl leaned across the table and said:  “Don’t look so scared.  He won’t bite.”

“I know.  But I’m always like that with strangers—at first.  And besides—I don’t think I’ve enough money.”

“Well, who cares about that?  I have.”

“But—“

“Now don’t start being the gentleman.  You were telling me about yourself when that fellow came up.  Go on with the story.”  He stared at her rather blankly till she added:  “Unless you’d rather not.  Your mind’s on something else, I can see.”

“I’d just noticed that sign outside.”  He pointed through the window to a board overhanging the pavement above the café doorway— the words “Good Pull-Up for Carmen” were dimly readable through the fog.  “CARMEN,” he muttered.  “That gives me something—why, yes . . . MELBA.”

“MELBA?  Oh, you mean the opera?”  She began to laugh.  “And Melba gives me peaches.  What IS this—a game?”

“Sort of.  I have to keep on doing it, one of the doctors says— part of his treatment.  You see, I’ve lost my memory about certain things.  It’s like being blind and having to feel around for shapes and sizes.”

“I’m terribly sorry.  I didn’t realize, or I wouldn’t have laughed.”

“Oh, that’s all right—I’d rather you laugh.  I wish everybody would laugh. . . .  Now what was it you were asking me before?”

“Well, I was wondering why you had to be in a hospital at all, but now of course I understand.”

“Yes—till I get thoroughly better.  I daresay I will—eventually.”

“And then your memory’ll come back?”

“That’s what they think.”

“But in the meantime what are you going to do?”

“Just wait around till it happens, I suppose.”

“Isn’t there some way of tracing any of your relatives and friends?

Advertising for them, or something like that?”

“They’ve tried.  Some people did come to see me at the hospital once, but—I wasn’t their son.”

“I’ll bet they were disappointed.  You’d make a nice son for somebody.”

“Well, I was disappointed too.  I’d like to have belonged to them— to have had a home somewhere.”

He then gave her some of the facts he had written out for the doctors—that he had been blown up by a shell during 1917, and that when he recovered consciousness he was in a German hospital somewhere, unidentified and unidentifiable.  Later there had been an exchange of wounded and shell-shocked prisoners through Switzerland, and by this means the problem had been passed on to the English—but with no more success.  He had been a pretty bad case at first, with loss of speech and muscular co-ordination, but those things had gradually returned—perhaps the memory would follow later.  Altogether he had spent over a year in various hospitals, of which he liked the one at Melbury least of all.  “Mind you,” he added, seizing the chance to say what he thought of saying before, “I’m miles better than some of the others.  You’d think so too if you saw them.”

“And that’s why YOU shouldn’t see them at all.  Doesn’t exactly help you, does it?”

“No, but I suppose all the hospitals are so crowded—there’s no chance to separate us properly.”

The proprietor, coming up with the coffee and eggs, saw them break off their conversation suddenly.  “Gettin’ a bit dark in ‘ere—I’ll give yer a light,” he murmured, to satisfy a dawning curiosity.  Standing on a bench he pulled the chain under a single incandescent burner in the middle of the ceiling; it sent a pale greenish glow over their faces.  He stared at them both.  “You don’t look so chirpy, mite.  Feelin’ bad?”

“He’s just tired, that’s all.”  And then, to get the fellow out:

“Bring a packet of cigarettes, will you?”

When he had gone she leaned across.  “That’s what you were trying to ask for in the shop, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but I didn’t really need them.”

“Oh, come, I know what you need more than you do yourself.  Don’t be scared of that little chap—he means all right.”

The proprietor returned to their table with the cigarettes.  “Looks to me as if ‘e might ‘ave the flu, miss.  Lots o’ flu abart ‘ere.  Dyin’ like flies, they was, up at the ‘orspital a few weeks ago.”

When he had gone again she comforted:  “There now, don’t worry.  If you don’t like it here, let’s eat and then we’ll be off.”

“It isn’t that I don’t like it, only—only I’d rather them not come after me, that’s all.”

“Why should they?”

“He mentioned the hospital.  He knows I’m from there, just as you did when you first saw me.  It’s in my face—the way I look at people.  I haven’t a chance—even if I knew where to go.  They come round the wards every night at six.  If I get back by then there’ll be no trouble.”

“You really mean to go back?”

“There’s nothing else to do.”  He smiled wanly.  “You’ve been very kind to bring me here.”

“Oh, don’t talk like that.”

“But you have.  I’m grateful.  Maybe I’ll be more satisfied now, because I shall know I’m not really well enough to be on my own—

YET.”

They ate in silence for a few moments after that; then she went up to the counter and paid the bill.  “One and tenpence, miss.  Can’t make it any more or I would.  An’ if I were you, I’d get your pal ‘ome pretty quick.  ‘E don’t look as if ‘e ought to be aht, an’ that’s a fact.”

A moment later the fog was curling round them in swathes, fanning the sound of cheers over distant invisible roofs.  She took his arm again as they walked to the next corner, then turned through quiet residential roads away from the centre of the town.  But at one place jubilant householders were dancing round a bonfire, and to avoid passing through the blaze of light they made a second detour, along alleys that twisted more and more confusingly till, with a sudden rush of sound, they were back in the main street, caught in a madder, wilder throng.  Already the war had been over for several hours, and the first shock of exultation was yielding to a hysteria that disguised an anticlimax.  The war was over . . . but now what?  The dead were still dead; no miracle of human signature could restore limbs and sight and sanity; the grinding hardships of those four years could not be wiped out by a headline.  Emotions were numb, were to remain half-numbed for a decade, and relief that might have eased them could come no nearer than a fret to the nerves.  A few things were done, symbolically; men climbed street-lamps to tear away the shades that had darkened them since the first air raids in human history; shop windows suddenly blazed out with new globes in long-empty sockets.  The traffic centre at Melbury was like a hundred others in and around London that day; the crowds, the noise, the light, the fog.  Beyond a certain limit of expression there was nothing to say, nothing much even to do; yet the urge to say and to do was self-torturing.  So, as the day and the night wore on, throngs were swayed by sharp caprices— hoisting shoulder-high some chance-passing soldier on leave, smashing the windows of tradesmen rumoured to have profiteered, making a fire of hoardings that proclaimed slogans for winning the now-extinct war, booing the harassed police who tried to keep such fires in check.  From cheers to jeers, from applause to anger, were but a finger touch of difference in the play of events on taut nerves.

Presently a girl summoning help for a soldier in hospital uniform who had fainted provided a new thrill—compassion; within a few seconds the crowd was entirely swept by it, pressing in on the two donors with cries of pity, indignation, and advice to do this and that.

“Give ‘im air!  Keep back there!  Pick ‘im up and carry ‘im inside—

I got some whiskey—give the poor chap a nip. . . .  No, ‘e shouldn’t ‘ave no alco’ol, not without a doctor. . . .  Phone the ‘orspital, they’ll send an amberlance. . . .  Christ, I wouldn’t let ‘im go there if ‘e was my boy—they kill ‘em, that’s what they do up there.”

Presently a few men carried the soldier from the pavement into a grocery, whose owner nervously unbarred his front door to repeated knockings.  Inside the shop the stream of advice would have continued indefinitely, but for the girl, who kept saying she would take him home.

“Better ‘ave a doctor first, miss.”

“I’ll get a doctor when he’s home.”

“Where’s ‘e live?”

“Not far away.”

“Wounded badly, was ‘e?”

“No, he’s all right—just fainted, that’s all.  See, he’s coming

round now—if I can get him home—“

“Your ‘usband, lidy?”

“That make any difference?”

“Come to think of it, I seem to ‘ave seen your face before.”

“Maybe you have, old boy, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stand any of

your lip.  Come on now, and give me a hand.  If I could get a cab—“

“Not much chance o’ that, miss, not on a night like this.”

But the shopkeeper, anxious to get them all off his premises, whispered to her, while the others were still arguing the point:

“I’ve got a van and my son’ll drive you.  Think your friend can walk to it?”

“Oh yes, I’m certain he can.  Let’s try.”

It proved to be a large van, smelling of miscellaneous foods and soaps; its driver was a thin youth who easily made room for them on the front seat.  After he had inched his way out of the yard he lit a cigarette and began proudly:  “You ain’t supposed to drive these vans till you’re eighteen, but Dad don’t tell nobody.  Where to, miss?”

“D’you know the Owl—the other side of Bockley?”

“You bet I do.  Biffer’s place?”

“That’s it.  But stop in the lane just before you get there.”

“Right you are.  Won’t arf be a journey though, in this fog.  ‘Ow’s the patient?”

“Fine.  You keep your eye on the road.”

“That’s all right.  I could drive round ‘ere blindfold.  Aren’t you on at the Empire this week?”

“If there’s any show at all.  They said there wouldn’t be tonight.”

“I saw the show in Bockley last week.  Jolly good.”

“Think so?  I thought it was rotten.  Look where you’re driving.”

“Sorry.”

“Good of you to take us, anyhow, even if we do get killed on the way.”

“Don’t mention it.  Be in the army meself next year.”

“Not now the war’s over, will you?”

“Won’t they ‘ave me because of that?”  He looked puzzled and rather disappointed.

“Maybe they will—if you live that long.”

“Pretty quick, ain’t you, miss?  Reminds me of that scene you ‘ad in the play, when you kept tellin’ orf that fat old gent with the moustaches.  I could ‘ave larfed.”

“Why the devil didn’t you then?  You were supposed to.”

“My dad’ll stare when I tell ‘im it was Paula Ridgeway.  ‘E didn’t recognize you.  Went to the show same as I did, only ‘e don’t see so well lately.”

They drove on, slowly, gropingly, chattering meanwhile, avoiding the main streets as far as possible, and especially the road junctions and shopping centres where crowds were likely.  Melbury and Bockley were adjacent suburbs, completely built over in a crisscross of residential roads that afforded an infinity of routes; but once beyond Bockley the rows of identical houses came to an end with the abruptness of an army halted, and the wider highways narrowed and twisted into lanes.  They pulled up eventually at the side of a hedge.

“’Ere y’are, miss.  The Owl’s just rahnd the corner.  Sure I can’t tike yer no further?”

“This’ll do fine.  We can walk now.”

He helped them out.  “Sure you know where y’are?”

“Yes—and thanks.”  She was fishing in her bag for a coin when he stopped her.  “No, miss—you send me a signed picture of yourself, that’s what I’d rather ‘ave. . . .  ‘Is nibs feelin’ better?  That’s good.  Well, it’s bin a pleasure.  Good luck to both of you.

Good night, miss.”

She waved to him and he drove off, leaving them alone.

“Where are we going?”

“Home—at least it’ll do for one.”

“But—I—I have to get back to the hospital!”

“We’ll see about that tomorrow.”

“But this place—I don’t understand—“

“It’s the Owl Hotel if you like the word.  Call it a pub to be on the safe side.  I know the landlord.”

“Will he mind?”

“The odds are he won’t even know, old boy, not in the state he’ll be in tonight.”

She guided him a little way along the lane, then through a side gate into a garden where the shapes of trees loomed up at regular intervals.  “Lovely here when the summer comes—they serve teas and there’s a view.”

“What name was it he called you?”

“Paula Ridgeway.  It’s not my real name, though.  What’s yours?”

“Smith—but that’s not real either.”

“You don’t remember your real name?”

He shook his head.

“Well, Smith’s good enough.  Come on, Smithy.”

As they found their way along a path, the silent blanket of fog was pierced by a murmur and then by a paleness ahead, the two presently merging into a vague impression of the Owl on this night of November the eleventh, 1918.  A two-storied, ivy-clustered, steep-roofed building, ablaze with light from every downstairs room, and already packed with shouting celebrants of victory; a friendly pub, traditional without being self-consciously old-world.  Established in the forties, when neighbouring Bockley was a small country town, it had kept its character throughout an age that had seen the vast obliterating spread of the suburbs and the advent of motor traffic; it had kept, too, the sacred partitions between “private” and “public” bars—divisions rooted in the mythology of London life, and still acceptable because they no longer signify any snobbish separation, but merely an etiquette of occasion, dress, and a penny difference in the price of a pint of beer.  Even the end of a great war could not shatter this etiquette; but with the sacred partitions still between, the patrons of both bars found community in songs that were roared in unison above the shouting and laughter and clatter of glasses.  They were not especially patriotic songs; most were from the music-halls of the nineties, a few were catchy hits from the recent West End revues.  But by far the most popular of all was “Knees Up, Mother Brown,” a roaring chorus that set the whole crowd stamping into the beer-soaked sawdust.

On the threshold of the Owl Smith felt a renewal of nervousness, especially as the girl’s entry was the signal for shouts of welcome from within.  She pushed him into a chair in an unlighted corner of the lobby.  “Stay there, Smithy—I won’t be long.”  A group of men pressed out of the bar towards her, dragging her back with them; he could hear their greetings, and her own in answer.  He sat there, waiting, trying to collect his thoughts, to come to terms with the strange sequence of events that had brought him to a noisy public-house in company with a girl who was something on the stage.  A few people passed without noticing him; that was reassuring, but he suspected it was only because they were drunk.  He decided that if anyone spoke to him he would pretend to be drunk also, and with the safeguarding decision once made the waiting became easier.  He watched the door into the bar, expecting her to emerge amidst a corresponding roar of farewells, but when she did come, it was quietly, silently, and from another direction.  “I managed to get away, old boy, and believe me it wasn’t easy.  Come on—let’s go before they find us.”

She led him through another door close by, and up a back staircase to the first floor, turning along a corridor flanked by many rooms; she opened one of them and put a match to a gas-jet just inside.

It showed up a square simple apartment, containing an iron bed and

heavy Victorian furniture.  He stared around, then began to

protest:  “But how can I stay here?  I can’t afford—“

“Listen, Smithy—the war stopped this morning.  If that’s possible, anything else ought to be.  And you’ve got to stay somewhere.”  She began to laugh.  “You’re safe here—nobody’s going to bother you.  I told you I know the man who runs this place—Biffer Briggs—used to be a prize-fighter, but don’t let that frighten you. . . .  It’s cold, though—wish there was a fire.”

She suddenly knelt at his feet and began to unlace his boots.

Again he protested.

“Well, you MUST take your boots off—that’s only civil, on a clean bed.  I’ll come up again soon and bring you some tea.”

He took off his boots as soon as she had gone, but the effort tired him more than he could have imagined.  The day’s strains and stresses had utterly exhausted him, in fact; he almost wished he were back at the hospital, because that at least promised the likelihood of a known routine, whereas here, in this strange place . . . but he fell asleep amidst his uneasiness.  When he woke he saw her standing in front of him, carrying a cup of tea.  She placed the cup on the side table, then fixed the blankets here and there to cover him more warmly.  She was about to tiptoe away when he reached out his hand in a wordless gesture of thanks.

“Awake, Smithy?”

“Have I been asleep?”

“I should think you have.  Four solid hours, and this is the third cup of tea I’ve made for you, just in case. . . .  God, I’m tired— tell you what, old boy, I’ve had just about enough of it downstairs.”

“It’s late, I suppose.”

“One A.M. and they’re still hard at it.”

“Do you live here?”

“Not me—I just know the Biffer, that’s all.  I reckon EVERYBODY’S living here tonight, though.  Hope the noise won’t keep you awake— it’ll probably go on till morning.”

“I shan’t mind.”

“You sleep well?”

“Sometimes.”

“Lie awake thinking about things?”

“Sometimes.”

“About who you are and all that?”

“Sometimes.”

Her voice softened with curiosity as she looked down at him.  “Drink it up, Smithy.  What does it feel like—to think of the time before—before you can remember?”

“Like trying to remember before I was born.”

She gave his hand an answering touch.  “Well, you’re born again now.  So’s everybody.  So’s the whole world.  That’s the way to look at it.  That’s why there’s all this singing and shouting.  That’s why I’m drunk.”

“Are you?”

“Well, not really with drinks, though I have had a few.  It’s just the thought of it all being over—I’ve seen so many nice boys like yourself, having a good time one week and then by the next . . .  Oh, well, mustn’t talk about THAT—better not talk any more about anything; you’re too sleepy, and so am I.  How about making a bit of room?”

Without undressing, except to slip off her shoes, she lifted the blankets and lay down beside him.  He felt her nearness slowly, luxuriously, a relaxation of every nerve.  “Tell you what, old boy, I’m just like a mother tonight, so cuddle up close as you like and keep warm . . .  Good night, Smithy.”

“Good night.”

“And Paula’s the name, in case you’ve forgotten that as well.”

But he felt no need to answer, except by a deeper tranquillity he drew from her, feeling that she was offering it.  The crowd were still singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” in the bars below.  It sounded new to him, both words and tune, and he wondered if it were something else he had forgotten.  He did not know that no one anywhere had heard it before—that in some curious telepathic way it sprang up all over London on Armistice Night, in countless squares and streets and pubs; the living improvisation of a race to whom victory had come, not with the trumpet notes of a Siegfried, but as a common earth touch—a warm bawdy link with the mobs of the past, the other victorious Englands of Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer.

Presently, as he lay listening, he fell asleep in her arms.

 

 

In the morning he had a temperature of 103.  He didn’t know it; all he felt was a warm, almost cosy ache of all his limbs, as well as a trance-like vagueness of mind.  She didn’t know it either, but his flushed face and incoherent speech made her telephone for a doctor.  A majority of the other occupants of the Owl on that first morning of Peace were also flushed and incoherent, though from a different cause.  The Biffer himself, sprawling, dishevelled, and half undressed, snored loudly on a sofa in the little room behind the private bar; Frank, the bar-tender, boastful of never having touched a drop, languished in sober but melancholy stupor on the bench in the public bar, watching the maids sweep sawdust and broken glasses into heaps.  Other persons, including a second bar-tender, a waiter, and several dilatory patrons who had either declined or been unable to go home, were not only fast asleep in various rooms and corridors, but likely to remain so till many more hours were past.  It had been a night in the history of the Owl, as of the world.

The only doctor who heeded the call proved, on arrival, to be extremely bad-tempered.  As she met him in the lobby he took a sharp look round, eyeing distastefully the prostrate figures visible through doorways.  “Daresay you know how busy I am—three Bockley doctors down with the flu—I’m trying to do the work of five men myself, so I hope you haven’t brought me here for nothing.  I know Briggs—known him for years—he drinks too much and I’ve told him he’ll die of it—what more can I do?  A man has a right to die as well as live the way he chooses—anyhow, a doctor can’t stop him.”  By this time she had led him upstairs and into the bedroom.  He walked across to the bed, took one look, and swung round angrily.  “What’s the idea?  Who is he?”

“He’s been a soldier.  He’s ill.”

“But I thought it was Briggs. . . .  You had no right to drag me out here—who ARE you?”

“A friend of the Biffer—like yourself.”

“Well, I’ve no time for new cases.”

“But he’s ILL.  Can’t you see that?”

“How much did he drink?”

“Nothing.  It isn’t that.”

“How do you know?”

“I was with him.”

“You’re his wife?”

“No.”

“Well, what IS he to you?  And what’s he doing here?  You call me away from my regular patients—you tell me it’s urgent—I hurry here because Briggs is an old friend—“  But by this time he had drawn back the blankets.  “Why, God bless my soul, the man’s in his uniform. . . .”

“I told you—he’s been a soldier.”

“He’s still a soldier—he belongs to a hospital.”

“Aren’t you going to help him at all?”

“Can’t interfere in a military case—all I can do is notify the

authorities.  What’s the fellow’s name? . . .  Ah, here it is—“

“But he’s TERRIBLY ill.”

“He’ll be sent for.”

“But you can’t leave him like this!”

“You don’t need to instruct me in my duty.”

Smith half heard all this as he lay on the bed, his mind tremulous with fever and his body drenched in perspiration; he heard the door close and then saw her face coming towards him out of a mist.

“I bungled that, Smithy.  I’m afraid the old boy’s gone back to tell ‘em you’re here.”

He smiled.  He didn’t care.  She seemed to read that in his face.  She went on:  “Yes, you think it doesn’t matter, you’d just as soon go back—but WOULD you, when you once got there?  You don’t really WANT to be in a hospital again. . . .  Or DO you?”

He smiled again, more faintly.  He was too ill to speak.

“Well, if you die, it’ll be pretty hard to explain you being here, but if you weren’t going to die I wouldn’t be so pleased at having let you go.  So you’d just better stay here and not die, Smithy.”

He kept smiling as if the whole thing increasingly amused him.

Thus it happened that when, towards twilight, the doctor revisited the Owl, striding into the lobby in an even greater hurry and temper than before, she met him there with answers rehearsed and ready.

“Well, young lady, I’ve made arrangements about that man.  The Melbury Hospital will send an ambulance this evening.”

“But he’s gone!”

“WHAT?”

She repeated:  “He’s gone.”

The doctor flushed and seemed on the verge of an outburst, then suddenly began to cough.  She thought he looked rather ill himself.  When he could regain breath he said more quietly:  “You’d better do some explaining.  Where has he gone?  How did he get away?”

She offered him a chair.  “Maybe he wasn’t so ill.  Perhaps he was just drunk, as you said.”

“Nonsense!  He’s a shell-shock case, if you know what that is—has delusions that people are against him.  Men like that can be dangerous—might have a crazy fit or something.”  He began to cough again.  “Now come on, don’t waste any more of my time.  Tell me where he is.”

She was facing him steadily when all at once his coughing became worse; he struggled with it for a while and then gasped:  “Where’s Briggs?  Let me talk to HIM about this.”

“He’s out.”

“Well, I’ll call again later when I’ve finished my round.”  He seemed to have a renewal of both energy and anger as he stalked out of the room, for he shouted from the doorway:  “It’s all a pack of lies you’ve been telling—I know that much!”

But he did not call back later when he had finished his round.  In fact he never did finish his round.  He collapsed over the wheel of his car half an hour later, summoning just enough final strength to pull up by the roadside.  It was a lonely road and they did not find him till he was dead.  The flu of 1918 was like that.

Later in the evening a military ambulance drove up to the Owl and drove away again after a few minutes.  The Biffer was emphatic in his assurance that there must have been some mistake—nobody on his premises was ill.  But he called the driver and the two attendants into the private bar and hospitably stood them drinks.

The flu had other victims: Biffer Briggs himself, Frank the bar-tender, Annie the maid; they recovered.  But an old man named Tom who for decades had odd-jobbed in the Owl garden died quietly, like ten millions more throughout Europe; indeed the war during all its years had not taken so many.  But because the larger claims were made without horror they were surrendered without concern, and the Owl was far less perturbed when three-fourths of its occupants were ill and near to death than on a night some months before when a German air raider had dropped a solitary bomb in a meadow miles away.

Meanwhile Lloyd George was organizing his khaki election; the world grew loud with promises; the ex-Kaiser was to be hanged; the losers must pay the whole cost of the war; the armies of the victors were all to come home and find work waiting for them; the new world was to be one of peace and plenty for Englishmen.  Among all the promises a few things were real and immediate: a vote for the women, and gratuities to the men as they put off their uniforms— sums in cash that ranged from the field-marshal’s fortune to the private soldier’s pittance.  The morning these were announced Paula took the newspaper upstairs along with the breakfast tray, but said nothing till she was holding a thermometer to the light.  “Well, Smithy, you’re down to nearly normal, so I reckon I can tell you the other good news—the government owes you some money.”  She read him the details and added: “So stop worrying—you’ll be able to pay for everything soon.”

“But in the meantime?”

“NOW what’s bothering you?”

“I hate to seem inquisitive, but—I mean—you—you probably aren’t

so well off as—as to be able to afford—to help me—“

“Darling, I’m not well off at all, but helping you isn’t bankrupting me, either.  And why should you hate to seem inquisitive?”

She sat on the bed waving the thermometer happily.  “I’m afraid you’re too much of a gentleman, old boy.  After all, you don’t know WHAT you are, do you?  Maybe you’re a lord or an earl or something.  Can’t you remember going to Eton?  You talked a good bit lately while you were in a delirium, but it was all war stuff—not very helpful.  You’ve been pretty bad, incidentally—know that?  This morning’s the first time you’ve dropped below a hundred.”  She poured out a cup of tea.  “All the others caught it too—good job I didn’t.”

“You’ve been living here?”

“Living and life-saving.  The flu closed the theatre so I’d have had nothing else to do, anyway.”

“I still don’t see how you can afford to help me like this.”

“Darling, I’ll let you into a secret—I’m not paying for your room, but if it makes you feel better, you can turn over anything you like as soon as the government gives you the money.”

“That’s another trouble.  I can’t be demobilized till I’m officially discharged from hospital.”

“Well, hurry up and get better, then they’ll discharge you quick enough.”

“But—in the meantime—don’t you see?--I can’t HIDE—like this—in somebody else’s house!”

“But you don’t have to hide.  I’ve talked to the Biffer about you already.”

“You mean he knows I’m here—and where I come from?”

“Yes, and he doesn’t mind.  Doesn’t give a damn, in fact.  I knew I could fix it.”

“But—why does he think you’re doing all this for me?”

“Well, why do YOU think I am?”  She laughed.  “It’s just a hobby of mine.  Now listen to this—it’s the Biffer’s idea, not mine.  He says for the time being—when you’ve got over this flu and are strong enough—why don’t you do a bit in the garden same as old Tom used to?  If you LIKE, that is.  Might be good for you to have a quiet job in the fresh air—you wouldn’t have to talk to people much.  And it’s lovely here when the summer comes.”

Something flicked against his memory.  “You said that once before.”

“Did I?”

“The night we came here—as we walked through the garden in the fog.  You said—‘It’s lovely here when the summer comes.’”

“Well, it certainly is, but I don’t remember saying it.  And you’re the one who’s supposed to forget things!”

“That’s why I’m always trying to remember them—things that have happened before.”

The Biffer’s not minding was a mild way of expressing his willingness to co-operate.  He was, in truth, delighted to join in any outwitting of authority, which he visualized as the same malign power that had placed so many restrictions on his wartime management of the Owl.  Jovial, obese, and somewhat thick-witted after the hundreds of collisions his skull had withstood in years gone by, he remained the product of an early education that had taught him to read printed words with difficulty and to believe them with ease; so that he did indeed believe the things he could read with least difficulty—which included the sporting pages of the daily papers, Old Moore’s predictions, and “powerful articles” by the more down-writing journalists of the day.  He had a few fierce hatreds (for such things as red tape, government interference, and Mrs. Grundy) and a few equally fierce affections, such as for Horatio Bottomley, “good old Teddy” (meaning the late King Edward the Seventh), and Oxford in the Boat Race.  He took pride in the oft-repeated claim that “there ain’t a more gentlemanly House than the Owl in all London,” and that it should shelter a victim of the things he most hated added zest to a naturally generous impulse.  “Pack of Burercratic busybodies,” he exclaimed, during his first meeting with the victim.  “Just let ‘em come ‘ere, that’s all.  I’ve still got strength to give ‘em what I gave the Gunner!”  What he had given the Gunner (at Shoreditch on May 17, 1902) was a straight left in the fourteenth round—this being the peak of his career, and one which, in money and fame, he had never afterwards approached.  But he had bought the Owl with the money, and the fame, carefully husbanded too, had survived pretty well within a ten-mile radius of his own brass-bound beer engines.

So Smith began to work in the garden of the Owl; and in the meantime President Wilson crossed the Atlantic to be cheered as a new Messiah in the streets of London, Rome, and Paris; English, French, and American troops held the Rhine bridgeheads; the first trains crept again through the defiles of the Brenner; and in the great cities of central and eastern Europe revolution and famine stalked together.

It was the Biffer’s second-favourite boast that from the garden of the Owl you could see “the Palace” on a clear day—the Alexandra Palace, that was, seven miles west across the Lea Valley; in the other direction the trees of Epping Forest made a darkly etched panorama that grew brown, and then suddenly green, as spring advanced.  There was only preparatory gardening to be done until that time, but then the grass grew long in a single week and a line of daffodils flowered in every window-box.  Hardly anyone visited the garden during the daytime, and by evening, when a few already preferred to take their drinks out of doors, Smith was in bed and asleep, except on Sundays, when Paula would generally pay a visit if her show were playing in or near London.

Of course he knew she didn’t come to see him only, but chiefly the Biffer and the crowd in the bar, who all seemed to be her friends and greeted her with vociferous cordiality; naturally she spent a good deal of the time with them, and it wasn’t easy to get away for a solitary chat with a semi-invalid.  She managed it, though, as a rule, meeting him in the garden and walking with him along the Forest paths as far as the big beech trees.  He enjoyed such walks, because it was dark and he still shrank from meeting people; but he also shrank from the thought that he might be dragging her away from much livelier company in the bar.  He tried to tell her this.

“Don’t you worry, Smithy.  I won’t let you bore me.”

“But you have such a good time with the crowd.”

“I know—that’s because I like people.  Can’t help it.  But don’t think so little of yourself—you’re included.  Gives me plenty of fun to see you getting better like this, week by week.”

“Yes, I think I AM getting better.”

“You only THINK you are?”

“I still don’t like to talk to people, though.”  He tried to explain.  “It isn’t so much fear of them as a sort of uneasiness— as if I really oughtn’t to be alive, and everybody knows it and wonders why I still am.  I know that’s foolish, but it isn’t enough to know—I’ve got to FEEL, before I can free myself.”

“You will, Smithy.  You’ll suddenly feel you’re free as air one of these days.”

“If I do, I’ll have you to thank—chiefly.  You’ve given me so much of your time.”

“Oh God, don’t start being grateful.  Listen, I’ll tell you something.  If you oughtn’t to be here, neither should I, and I wouldn’t be, but for luck.  A house I was living in was hit by a bomb—I was asleep in one room and two people were killed in the next.  I wasn’t going to tell you that—thought it might upset you to be reminded of the war, but now maybe it’ll cheer you up to think we’re both like that.  They did their best to finish us off, Smithy, but we managed to trick ‘em somehow or other.  That’s the way to feel, and it’s easier now the war’s over and there’s a future.”

“I’d like to feel that, if I could.”

“You will.  You’ll go on getting better, and then one night I’ll see you in the front row of the stalls, watching the show.”

“Yes, I’d like to see you act.”

“Oh, don’t come for that reason.  I don’t act—I’m just a comic.”

“I WILL come, when I’m better.”

“That’s a promise, now!”

There wasn’t only the question of his reluctance to meet strangers.  Any prospective employer, no matter how sympathetic, would ask for details of his history, his army discharge papers and so on, and if it came out that he’d escaped from a mental hospital, the authorities would certainly send him back there, at least for tests and observation, and if he WERE sent back, even for a short time, he felt terribly certain he would get worse again.  There was nothing for it but to stay where he was and be thankful for such a sanctuary; it was really an astounding piece of good fortune ever to have found it.  So he stayed, pottering about the Owl garden and gradually returning to the world of ordinary awareness.  There came a day when he could open a newspaper and face whatever catastrophe the turn of a page might reveal; another day when he could pick up an exciting novel without perilously identifying himself with one or other of the characters.  He was recovering.

Sometimes while he was busy in the garden the landlord, puffing and sweating in his shirt-sleeves, would bring out a couple of pints of beer.  He took a naïve, childlike interest in his protégé.  “Easy does it, mate—don’t work your head off.  Seen the paper?  They ‘aven’t ‘anged the old Kaiser yet, but it looks like they’ll do for this chap Landru—supposed to have murdered twenty women—what d’you think of that?”

Smith didn’t have to answer much, because the Biffer was always glad to talk, especially about his favourite diversion, which was a word competition in a well-known weekly paper.  He usually sent in several entries; they consisted of some supposedly apt comment on a selected phrase.  The prize-winning comment generally had wit, or at least a double meaning; but the Biffer could never grasp that, and his hard-wrought efforts were invariably trite, and just as invariably failed to score.  But every night in the private bar he would discuss them with his regular customers, and in the daytime he was glad enough to add the new gardener to his list of consultants.  The latter, encouraged to take a rest from work and study the weekly contest, soon developed an inkling of what might stand a chance, and from time to time made suggestions that the Biffer dutifully incorporated into his own efforts.  Suddenly one of them won a prize of a hundred pounds, and never since his epic fight with the Gunner had anything happened to give the Biffer a greater feeling of elation.  His first response was to insist on an equal split, paid over there and then in five-pound notes, for he believed (more truly than he realized) that the gardener’s emendation might have helped.  But that was not all.  In the Owl bar that same evening, under stress of many drinks and congratulations, he could not withhold credit as well as cash from his collaborator.  “Quiet well-spoken sort of chap—stammers a bit— been shell-shocked in the war.  Matter of fact, they ‘ad ‘im locked up in that big guv’ment hospital at Melbury till the poor chap got away.  I reckon that’s a fine joke on them guv’ment busybodies—a feller they make out is off ‘is chump goes and thinks up something that wins a hundred quid!”  And the more the Biffer contemplated this extremely ironic circumstance, the more he repeated and elaborated it over a period of several hours and before changing audiences.

A few evenings later Smith was tidying up in the greenhouse; but it was a Sunday and there had not been much to do.  It was hardly time for Paula to come yet, even if she did come; he knew she was at Selchester that week—perhaps it was too far away.  The uncertainty as to whether she would come or not made a curious little fret inside him; it didn’t matter so much if she wasn’t coming provided he hadn’t looked forward to it in advance.  That brought him to a realization of how much he did look forward to her visits.  Of course, now that he was getting better he didn’t expect to see her so much; she had been kind while he was ill, he mustn’t trade on that.  And another thing was curious—his memory of the night she had brought him to the Owl, every word she had said, little intimacies of physical presence, details that swung like lamps amidst the background of fever and delirium.  He could hardly believe that certain things had happened at all, that she had so comforted him throughout that long night of Armistice.  There had been no other nights like that, there never would be, neither in his life nor in the world’s.  He could not expect it; and it was natural that their relationship, begun in such a wild vacuum of despair and ecstasy, should by now have become a more normal one.

Suddenly the greenhouse door opened and she stood there in the sunlight, breathless.  “Oh, Smithy, you’ve got to go—immediately!

Drop those things and don’t stay here a moment longer.  I’ll pack

your bag—I’ll find where everything is—meet me in the Forest by

the beech trees in half an hour!  But go NOW—don’t waste any time—“

“But what’s the matter?  What on earth’s happened?”

“Two men from Melbury Hospital talking to Biffer in the bar.

They’ve come for you.”

“For ME?”  He stared at her, bewildered at first, then enraged and indignant.  “They want to take me BACK?  They STILL want to get me?”

She ran to him, holding him, trying to stop his cries.  “Don’t shout—and don’t argue—just go as I tell you!”  She pulled him out of the greenhouse and across the garden to the side gate.  “Wait for me—you know where—I shan’t be long.”

They met again, under the trees.  He was calmer; he had waited, smoking cigarettes and thinking things out.  The day had been hot and pockets of warm air lingered amidst the fast-cooling shades.  The Forest was very beautiful, and something in him was beginning to respond to beauty, as to anger and indignation also.  He sprang to eagerness as he saw her approach, carrying bags and parcels.  They stood still for a moment, while she regained her breath.  “It’s all right—nobody saw you—we’re safe so far.  The men have gone—the Biffer got mad and said he’d give ‘em what he gave the Gunner.”  She laughed.  “But of course that wouldn’t help—they’ve got the law on their side—the law and the doctors. . . .  I didn’t say much to Biffer.  He means well, but as soon as he’s had a few drinks he tells all he knows, which isn’t much as a rule, but it’s too much just now.  So he’d better not know about us till he finds out.”

“US?”

“Well, of course.  We’re going together, aren’t we?”

“But how can—I mean—“

“Are you being the little gentleman again?”

“It’s not that, but isn’t it time—“

“Listen, Smithy, I’m only trying to help you—“

“I know that, but it’s time I began helping myself.”

“What a moment to think of it!”

“It isn’t that I’m not grateful, but—“

“I know, you feel independent.  Well, go on your own then, but where will it take you?  You haven’t an idea.  One place is as good as another, what’s wrong with Selchester then?  I’m there for the week and after I’ve gone you can do as you like. . . .  You’ve got those ten fivers in your pocket, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then hand over half to me.”

He did so, willingly and seriously; she took them with a laugh.

“Thanks, Smithy—you’ll feel better now.”

 

 

They reached Selchester late at night, after a confused journey by various trains and buses; but all the way he had been aware of a barrier rising between them, so that at Selchester Station she summoned a cab and did not suggest that he accompany her.  “You’ll be all right, Smithy—the town’s full of pubs and lodgings—I reckon you’d rather choose one yourself.  I lodge with the company, of course.  Well, good night—you’re safe here if you look after yourself, and you will, won’t you?”  She leaned up and gave him a sudden kiss—the first she had ever given him, but he knew it meant less than her hand touch the first time they had met.  “Good night, old boy,” she repeated.

“Good night, Paula.”

When her cab turned the corner and he was left alone with the crowd of strangers in the station yard, he felt suddenly, hopelessly lost.  It was a sensation of sheer panic for the moment, but he conquered it—as if he had seen a loathed insect and shudderingly ground it with his heel.  He walked into a near-by hotel and engaged a cheap room under the name of Smith.  They gave him a very small attic with dormer windows and a view over the railway goods yard; throughout the night he kept waking up with a start whenever express trains screamed by, but somehow he did not mind that kind of panic; it was the inner kind that paralysed him—or rather, could not quite paralyse him any more, since he had fought it, alone and so terribly, after she had gone.  How comforting, as well as fearful, that word ALONE was; he wanted aloneness, because it was the hardest training ground for the kind of strength he also wanted; and yet, once he had that strength, he knew he would not wish to be alone.  And he knew, too, that his feeling for Paula was no longer an eagerness to submit, like a child; but something positive, strong enough to demand equality, if there were ever to be any further relationship between them at all.  He knew there probably could not be.  That warm outpouring pity had saved his life, but he could only keep his life from now on by refusing it.  Lying awake that night in the Station Hotel, he made up his mind that he would not try to see her in Selchester that week; she would be busy, no doubt, with rehearsals and performances; and he, too, ought to be busy—looking for a job if the town offered any, and if not, deciding where else to go.

For five days he walked about Selchester alone.  He visited the Cathedral, sat for hours in the Close under the trees, spent an afternoon in a very dull municipal museum, watched the trains in and out of the railway station, read the papers in the free library.  None of these pursuits involved conversation, and—except to waitresses and the maid at the hotel—he did not utter a word for anyone to hear.  Sometimes, however, during walks in the surrounding country, he talked to himself a little—not from eccentricity, but to reassure himself of the power of speech.  There were a few factories also that he scouted around, wondering if he should ask for a job, but sooner or later he always found a door with a notice “No Hands Wanted.”  He knew that subconsciously he was glad, because he still feared the ordeal of cross-examination by strangers.

One rainy afternoon he sat in the refreshment room at the railway station, drinking a third cup of tea that he did not want and staring at an old magazine that he was not reading.  Curious how one had to simulate some normal activity or purpose in life, even if one hadn’t one, or especially if one had a secret one; in a town café he could not have stayed so long without attracting attention, but at the station it was merely supposed he was waiting for a train.  Trains were things people waited hours for; one did not, unless one were peculiar, wait hours for a desire to clarify itself.  But that was what HE was waiting for.  It was Saturday; he had been in Selchester almost a week.  He had a definite desire to go to the theatre and see the show, but he could not decide until he felt certain what his desire signified.  If it were weakness, an urge to go back on his pledge to himself, he would not give way; he could endure plenty more of the aloneness, it would not break him.  But, on the other hand, supposing it were not weakness but strength— supposing it meant that he could now walk into a theatre as normally as into a library or museum, could face the crowd and the lights and the excitement without a qualm?

He had walked past the theatre several times and had judged the kind of show it was from bills and photographs; nothing very uplifting, but probably good entertainment, and it would be interesting to see what she was capable of.  Thus, he made his desire seem casual, normal, almost unimportant, until suddenly he decided he was strong and not weak enough to go.  He got up and walked briskly to the counter to pay for the tea.  “Gettin’ tired of waitin’?” remarked the girl, with mild interest.  “The Winton train’s late today.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling.  “I think I’ll get a breath of fresh air.”

He left the station and walked through the rain to the centre of the city, feeling more and more confident.

It was an odd thing, this loss of memory; he could not remember personal things about himself, yet he had a background of experience that gave him a certain maturity of judgment.  He had probably been to many theatres before, just as he had probably been to schools and received a decent education.  There were things he knew that he could only have picked up from school books, other things that he could only have learned from some forgotten event.  It was as if his memory existed, but was submerged; as if he could lower a net and drag something up, but only blindfold, haphazardly, without the power of selection.  He could not stare into the past; he could only grope.  But by some kind of queer compensation, his eyes for the present were preternaturally bright; like a child’s eyes, naïve, ingenuous, questioning.

In such a mood he sat in the third row at the first house of the Selchester Hippodrome that night and looked upon a show called Salute the Flag, described on the programme as “a stirring heart-gripping drama, pulsating with patriotism and lit by flashes of sparkling comedy.”  Actually it was a hangover from wartime, having begun in 1914 as a straight melodrama with no comedy at all, but with many rousing speeches that audiences in those days had liked to cheer.  Then, as the war progressed and the popular mood changed from that of Rupert Brooke to that of Horatio Bottomley, the patriotic harangues were shortened to make room for the writing in of a comic part, which speedily became such a success that by 1918 the show had developed into a series of clowning episodes behind which the dramatic structure of what had once been a very bad play appeared only intermittently.  Nobody knew the authorship of the original, or of any of the later accretions; successive actors had added a gag here and a gag there; every now and then the show became too long, and the parts left out were naturally those that elicited neither laughs nor cheers, no matter how essential they were to the original plot.  But nobody minded that—least of all the audiences who paid their ninepences and shillings in the few remaining small-town English theatres that had so far escaped conversion into cinema houses.  Salute the Flag had certainly helped to preserve the very existence of such a minority; it had also made a great deal of money for a great many people.  Probably, in the aggregate, it had been more profitable than many a better-known and well-advertised West End success.

Smith found it endurable, even before the moment when Paula appeared.  Her part in the play was trivial, that of an impudent girl at a hotel desk who got people’s bedrooms mixed up, but in one of the other scenes she stepped out of the part for a few impersonations in front of the drop-curtain; he thought them pretty good, not from any definite competence to judge, but because of the warm vitality that came over the footlights with them, her own rich personality, full of giving—even to a twice-nightly audience.  Evidently the audience too were aware of this, for they cheered uproariously, despite the likelihood that few had seen the originals, which included Gerald du Maurier, Gladys Cooper, Mrs.  Pat Campbell, and the ex-Kaiser.  They cheered so much that she came on again to give an impression of a society woman telephoning her lover, all smiles and simperings, in the midst of grumbling at her maid, all scowls and snarls—a bit of broad unsubtle farce that demanded, however, a sure technique of changed accents and facial expressions.  She did not appear again till the final scene in the last act, when the heroine, a nurse, unfolded a huge and rather dirty flag in front of her, and with the words “You kennot fahr on helpless womankind” defied the villain, who wore the uniform of a German army officer, until such time as the entire rest of the company rushed on to the stage to hustle him off under arrest and to bring down the curtain with the singing of a patriotic chorus.  Smith was half-way down the aisle on his way out of the theatre when an usher touched him on the arm.  “Excuse me, sir, one of the artists would like you to go behind, if you’d care to.  She says you’d know who it was.”

He hesitated a moment, then answered:  “Why, of course.”

“This way, sir.”

He was led back towards the stage, stooping under the brass rail into the orchestra, stepping warily amidst music-stands and instruments, then stooping again to descend a narrow staircase leading under the stage into an arena of ropes and canvas.  The usher piloted him beyond all this into a corridor lined by doors; on one of them he tapped.  “The gentleman’s here, miss.”  A moment’s pause.  “I expect she’s dressing, sir—you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back.”

Again, after the usher had left him, he felt the beginnings of panic, but it was different now—an excitement that he fought only as much as he wanted to fight it.  And the door opened before he could either yield or conquer to any extent.

“Oh, Smithy—Smithy—you kept your promise!”

She dragged him into the room with both hands and closed the door.  It was a shabby little dressing-room, with one fierce light over a mirrored table littered with paints and cosmetics; playbills and an old calendar on the wall; clothes thrown across a chair; a mixture of smells—grease-paint, burnt hair, cigarettes, cheap perfume, lysol.  She wore a dressing-gown over the skimpy costume in which she was soon to appear again.

“I didn’t see you till the end—glad I didn’t—I’d have been so excited I’d have ruined the show.”

He said, smiling:  “I enjoyed it very much—especially your part.”

“Oh no, Smithy, you don’t have to say things like that. . . .  Tell me how you are!  Better, I can see—or you wouldn’t be here.  But what have you been doing with yourself all week?”

“Oh, just looking around.  Have to find some sort of a job, you know.”

“Any luck?”

“Not so far.  I somehow don’t feel Selchester’s a very good place to try.”

“We’re going on to Rochby next week.  More chance in a place like that, maybe.”

“I daresay I’ll get something somewhere.”

“And you FEEL better?”

“Oh yes—fine.”

The call-boy shouted through the door, “Five minutes, miss.”

“That means I’ve only got five minutes.”  She paused, then laughed.

“I do say intelligent things, don’t I?”

He laughed also.  “They keep you pretty busy—two shows a night.”

“Yes, but this is Saturday, thank heaven.  You’d be surprised what a rest Sunday is, even if you spend most of it in trains.”

“You leave in the morning?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“But it isn’t far.”

“About three hours.  We have a long wait at Bletchley.  Somehow that always happens.  I seem to have spent days of my life waiting at Bletchley.”

“I don’t think I know Bletchley.”

“Well, you haven’t missed much.  There’s nothing outside the station except a pub that never seems to be open.  Oh God, what are we talking about Bletchley for? . . .  I’ve got some money of yours, you know that?  Or did you forget?”

“No, but—“

“Well, I’d better give it back since I’m off in the morning.”  She began to fumble in her dress.  “I carry it about with me—doesn’t do to leave fivers lying loose.”

“Oh, but you mustn’t—“

“Well, you don’t think I’m going to KEEP it, do you?”

“I—I—never thought about it, but—“

“DID you think I was going to keep it?”

“Well—I don’t know—it would have been quite fair—after all,

you’d done so much—“

“Listen, you little gentleman—I kept it because I thought I’d have to help you again, and I thought you’d feel better if I was spending your own money!  But now you ARE better, thank God, and you don’t need my help, so here you are!”  She pushed the notes into his pocket.  “I’ve got to go on again in two minutes, so don’t make me angry!  You’ll need that cash if you’re looking for a job. . . .  What sort are you looking for?”

“Any kind, really—“

“Outdoor or indoor?”

“I’m not particular about that, provided—well, you know some of

the difficulties—“

“You’re scared they’ll ask you too many questions?  What you’d really like is for someone to stop you in the street and say—‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’ve been, and I don’t care either, but if you want a job, come with me.’  Isn’t that the idea?”

He laughed.  “Yes, that’s exactly the idea, if anyone would.”

“You wouldn’t mind what the job turned out to be, though?”

“I think I could do anything that I’d have even the faintest chance of getting.”

“Figures?  Keeping books?”

“Oh yes.”

“A bit of talk now and again—even to strangers—in that charming way you have?”

“I wouldn’t CHOOSE that sort of job, but of course—“

“You mean you’re still bothered about meeting people?”

He hesitated.  She went on:  “Well, leave that out.  What about a bit of carpentry mixed up with the bookkeeping?”

“Why carpentry?”

“Why not? . . .  Back at the intelligent conversation, aren’t we?” The call-boy knocked again.  “Well . . . I suppose it’s got to be good-bye till we meet again—unless you want to see the show through twice—you’d be a fool if you did.”

“Perhaps I could meet you somewhere afterwards?”

“We always have supper together on Saturday nights—all the company, I mean—it’s a sort of regular custom, wherever we are.  Of course I could take you as my guest, but there’d be a crowd of strangers.”  Abruptly her manner changed.  “Smithy, would you really come?”

“Do you WANT me to come?”

“_I_ wouldn’t mind a bit, it’s what YOU want that matters.  You’re free as air now—that’s how you always hoped to be.  And they can be a rowdy gang sometimes.  So please yourself, I’m not inviting you anywhere any more . . . but if you ARE coming, say so now, then I can tell them.”

He felt suddenly bold, challenging, almost truculent.  “I’ll come, and I don’t care how rowdy they are.”

She flashed him a smile as she slipped off the dressing-gown and put final touches to her make-up.  “Number 19, Enderby Road—that’s near the cattle market—about eleven-thirty.  You don’t need to hang around here for me—just go straight to the house at the time.  I’ll come sharp—ahead of the others.  See you then.”

The rain had stopped; he took a long walk in the washed evening air, then sat on a seat in the Cathedral Close and smoked cigarettes till the chime of eleven.  He could not quell his nervousness at the thought of meeting so many strange people for the sort of evening party that was a weekly custom of theirs—that in itself made him an outsider.  He half wished he hadn’t said he would go, and it occurred to him that of course he didn’t have to— if he failed to turn up, that would be the end of it.  But the reflection, though tantalizing up to a point, had the stinging afterthought that he would then not see her again.

Enderby Road was a quiet cul-de-sac of Edwardian houses, most of them let to boarders; Number 19 looked no different from the others, but had a gas lamp outside the front gate.  He waited there, watching for her after the Cathedral clock chimed the half-hour; it was comforting to reflect that nobody knew him yet—he was just an anonymous man standing under a lamp-post.  Presently she turned the corner, her walk breaking into a scamper as she saw him.  “On time, Smithy—I mean YOU are, I’M not.  But I hurried to be ahead of the others—I didn’t even stop to clean off the make-up.”

She led him into the house.  “Wait in the hall while I go up and finish.”

He waited about ten minutes; the hall was dark and smelt of floor

polish with an added flavour—which he took practically the entire

time to detect—of pickled walnuts.  Near him stood a bamboo hall-

stand overloaded with hats and coats; the staircase disappeared

upwards into the gloom with thin strips of brass outlining the

ascent.  Voices came from a downstairs room.  He wondered what he

should say if anyone came out of one of the rooms and accosted him,

but when the thing happened it turned out to be no problem at all;

the voices stopped, a thin old man with a high domed forehead

suddenly emerged through one of the doors, collided with him,

murmured “Pardon,” and disappeared along the passage.  After a

moment, he returned, collided again, murmured “Pardon” again, and

re-entered the room.  Then the voices were resumed.

 

Soon after that she came down the stairs two at a time, to whisper excitedly:  “Now I’m ready.”

They entered the room, in which—despite the voices—there was only one person, the thin old dome-headed man; he was sitting at the dining-table with a large book open before him, propped against the cruet.  The domed head rose over the book as from behind a rampart.

“Mr. Lanvin—this is Mr. Smith.”

“A pleasure to meet you, my dear sir.”  He smiled, but did not offer to shake hands.  Then he closed the book slowly, and Smith could see it was a Braille edition.  Somehow that gave him peculiar confidence; Lanvin could not SEE him, could only judge him by his voice; so for the time being he had only one thing to concentrate on.

Lanvin was placing the book exactly in its place on a shelf; it was clear he knew by touch and feeling every inch of the geography of the room.  “So you are to join the weekly celebration, Mr. Smith?”

“That seems to be the idea.  I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?  I’m a guest like yourself, though I’ve been one before.  I warn you—they’re a noisy lot—though no noisier than I used to be in my young days.  If they weary you later on, come over and talk to me.”

Smith said he certainly would, and Mr. Lanvin began to talk about Shakespeare.  It seemed he had been reading The Merchant of Venice, taking the various parts in various voices.  “I used to be quite a good Shylock, though I say it myself—and of course it’s a fine acting part, and the trial scene has wonderful moments.  But taking it all in all, you know, it’s a bad play—a bad play.  Why do they always choose it for school use?  The pound of flesh—gruesome.  The Jewish villain—disgustingly anti-Semitic.  And a woman lawyer— stark feminism. . . .  Oh, a bad play, my dear sir.  You’re not a schoolmaster, by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Because if you were, I should like to . . . but never mind that.

Since my eyes compelled me to retire from the stage I’ve spent a

great deal of my time reading, and do you know, the Braille system

gives one a really new insight into literature.  You see, you can’t

skip—you have to read every word, and that gives you time to think

for yourself, to criticize, to revalue—“

Meanwhile the door had reopened and a heavily built, red-faced, pouchy-eyed man stood in the entrance, waiting till he was quite sure he had been seen before stepping further into the room.  Eventually he did so, exclaiming:  “Paula, my angel, so THIS is the friend you spoke of?”

She completed the introduction; the red-faced man’s name was Borley.  He lost no time in dominating the scene.  “Fine to have you with us, old chap.”  And then, dropping his voice to an almost secret parenthesis and leaning over the table with the gesture of one about to unveil something:  “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the food in English boarding-houses is always in inverse proportion to the size of the cruet.  The larger the cruet, that is, the worse the food.  Now this is a perfectly ENORMOUS cruet.”  He gave it a highly dramatic long-range scrutiny.  “You’d think it ought to light up or play music or something—it’s really more like a municipal bandstand than a receptacle for Mrs.  Gregory’s stale condiments.”

Just late enough to miss these remarks the landlady entered with a trayful of small meat pies.  Smith had to be introduced to her also, and it was Mr. Borley who made haste to do this.  “Mrs.  Gregory, I was just remarking on the quality of your food, and I perceive from yonder succulent morsels that all I have said will soon be amply demonstrated!”  Whereupon Mr. Borley delivered a portentous wink all round the room while Mrs. Gregory bounced the tray on the table without much response.  She looked so completely indifferent to the bogus compliment that Mr. Borley’s joke was somewhat dulled.  “Glad to serve you all,” she muttered.  “I do my best, as the saying goes—consequently is, I keep my reg’lars.”

“You not only keep us, Mrs. Gregory, but WE keep YOU—and proud to do it!”

She shuffled out of the room, leaving Mr. Borley to proffer the dish of pies with an air of controlled distaste.  “Well, the risk’s yours, Smithy.  Don’t mind if I call you Smithy, do you?  That’s what SHE calls you.”

Rather to his surprise, after all this, Smith found the pies excellent.  He said so to Mr. Borley, adding that he was even hungry enough to have another.

“Right you are, then—and fortified by your example I’ll even try one myself.”  Mr. Borley then began eating and hardly stopped throughout the entire rest of the evening.  He added, with his mouth full:  “But if you’re a hungry man, God help you at Mrs.  Beagle’s!”

Smith did not see how the food at Mrs. Beagle’s, whoever and wherever she was, could be any concern of his, but he had no time to explore the point because another member of the party had just arrived—a young man in tweeds, puffing at a pipe, almost like a magazine advertisement of either the tweeds or the pipe; he had a pink, over-handsome, rather weak face to which only premature dissipation had begun to lend some interest.  Once again Mr. Borley officiated at the introduction, and while he was still performing two other persons entered, one a pale thin girl with a large nose and spotty complexion, the other an elderly silver-haired man of such profoundly sorrowful appearance that the beholder could not keep back a first response of sympathy.  Mr. Borley had to summon all his technical powers to hold attention against such competition, but he did his best by shouting the further introductions.

The silver-haired man smiled and bowed, while the girl marched on Smith, delivered a crunching handshake, strode to the window, stared out for a moment as if deeply meditating, then swung round with husky intensity.  “Oh, Mr. Smith, hasn’t it been a wonderful day?  I’m SURE you’re a rain-lover like me!”

Smith felt somewhat cheered by a feeling that in this encounter all the others were standing round to see fair play, especially when the tweedy youth nudged him in the ribs.  “Don’t worry about her— she’s always like that.  Why Tommy married her nobody can imagine— not even Tommy any more . . . can you, Tommy?”

Here a sharp-nosed, jockey-sized man with bloodshot blue eyes and straw-coloured hair came across the room to be introduced, shook hands wordlessly and continued to do so while he glanced around with concentrated expressionlessness.  Presently, turning his eyes on Smith, he whispered:  “What made you first take an interest in slumming?”  He went on, before Smith could think of any reply:

“We’re just a low vulgar crowd.  Rogues and vagabonds, they called us in Shakespeare’s time—am I right, Lanvin?  We have no homes, we live in dingy lodging-houses in every middle-sized town in England, we know which landlady counts the potatoes, which theatre’s full of fleas, and which has a roof that leaks on the stage when it rains.  None of your high-class West End stuff for us—we lure the coppers, the orange peel, and the monkey-nuts, and we spend our one-day-a-week holiday chewing stale sandwiches in Sunday trains.”

Mrs. Gregory then came in with what was evidently the main dish—

quantities of fried fish, chip potatoes, and hot peas; meanwhile

Mr. Borley had been out and now reappeared carrying a crate of

bottled beer.  The party began to find places at the table while

the sorrowful-looking man, whose name was Margesson and whom one

would have expected to speak like an archbishop, boomed across the

table, quite unsorrowfully and with the zest and accent of an

auctioneer:  “Ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you that we shall

soon be at the mercy of Mrs. Beagle.”  Here followed a chorus of

groans and catcalls.  “So I’m not going to keep you from the really

serious business of the evening, which is to eat the last decent

meal we shall have for a week.  Before we begin, though, and

speaking as the senior member of this company,--bar Lanvin, who’s a

permanent resident,--may I offer you a welcome, Mr. Smith, and beg

you to take no further notice of that truncated nitwit Tommy

Belden, nor of that moon-faced stew-pan, Richard Borley, nor

of . . .”  He had an insult for each of them, culminating in the

arrival of a fat over-powdered woman with a large smile she bestowed

upon everyone from the doorway, whereupon Margesson turned on her

and exclaimed:  “Now, Miss Donovan, you old bag of bones, don’t

stand there ogling the men—come and meet our guest, Mr. Smith,

commonly called Smithy—“

And so it went on.  Not till weeks later, when he had got to know them as human beings, did he realize that they had behaved with extra extravagance that evening in order to put him at his ease, and that the insults were a convention in which they took particular pride—the more horrific and ingenious, the warmer the note of friendliness indicated.  A climax came when Margesson, at the end of dinner, rose to make an appeal on behalf of an actor whom they had formerly known and who had fallen on bad times.

Margesson’s speech began:  “Ladies and gentlemen, if such there

still are among this depraved and drink-sodden gathering—some of

you, even in your cups, may remember Dickie Mason, one of the

dirtiest dogs who ever trod the boards of a provincial hippodrome—“

The party lasted till after three in the morning, and was only then dissolved at the energetic request of Mrs. Gregory, who said the neighbours were being disturbed.  Towards the end of it, Margesson took Smith aside and said:  “Well?  Can you stand us?”

Smith answered with a laugh:  “I think so.  I’m having quite a good time, anyhow.”

“The train’s at ten tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, Paula told me.”

“Some people sleep late, that’s all.”

That seemed another odd remark, but he didn’t begin to grasp its significance till later on when several people shook hands or clapped him on the back with the remark:  “See you tomorrow, Smithy.”

Paula walked with him to the corner of the road.  He said: “I’m really glad I came—they’re a warm-hearted lot, and it’s nice of them to expect me to see them off in the morning.”

“I’d better tell you what else they expect.  They think you’re coming with us—to Rochby and all the other places.”

“But—“

“Now don’t begin to argue.  Maybe I’ve bungled again—you’ve only got to say so, and the whole idea’s dropped.  But there’s a job for you if you want it.  In fact it’s just about a hundred jobs rolled into one—you’ll find that out, if you take it on, and if you don’t like it or something better turns up, then you’re free to go like a shot.”

He said quietly:  “What did you tell them about me?”

“Just part of the truth.  I said you’d been ill, that you were better now, that you were a friend of mine, and that you wanted a job. . . .  But all that didn’t get it for you—don’t worry.”

“What did, then?”

She laughed in his face.  “I may as well go on telling the truth, even if you hate me for it.  I think it was probably because they could all see you were such a gentleman.”

 

 

Afterwards he realized the meaning behind the remark.  The other members of the company were NOT gentlemen, nor ladies either, in the restricted sense of the word.  They could act the part, successfully—even terrifically; no duke or baronet ever wore an opera cloak or swung a gold-knobbed cane with such superb nonchalance as Mr. Borley—indeed, it is extremely probable that many a duke and baronet never possessed an opera cloak, or swung a gold-knobbed cane at all.  And that, of course, was the point.  The gentlemen in Salute the Flag lived up to the ninepenny-seat idea of gentlemen; they were much realer than the real thing.  So also in speech and accent nobody could approach Paula for aristocratic hauteur: when, in her impersonation of a duchess, she exclaimed to a footman, “Do my bidding, idiot!” the blue blood became almost as translucent in her veins as in those of Mr. Borley when the latter addressed the German officer—“You contemptible hound—you unmitigated cur—you spawn of a degenerate autocracy!”

In private life, so far as members of a second-rate touring company could enjoy any, they tended to keep up the manners and moods of their professional parts, combining them with a loud geniality expressed by a profusion of “old boys” and hearty back-slappings; yet behind all that they well knew the difference between the real and the too real, and how the same difference was apt to be recognized by others.  Hence the usefulness of Smith.  He had a way with him, despite—or perhaps BECAUSE of—his shyness, diffidence, embarrassments, hesitations.  Where Mr. Borley’s loud and overconfident “Trust me till the end of the week, old chap” failed to impress a country tradesman, Smith could enter a shop where he wasn’t known and ask for what he wanted to be sent to his hotel without even mentioning payment.  And where even Mr. Margesson could not, with all his sorrowful glances, persuade a small-town editor to print as news a column of disguised and badly composed puffery, Smith could rewrite the stuff and have the newspapers eager for it.

No doubt it was for somewhat similar reasons that Nicholas Nickleby became a success with the company of Vincent Crummles—except, of course, that Nicholas graduated as an actor.  Smith did not aspire to that, but he speedily became almost everything else—advance press agent, scene-painter, bookkeeper, copy-writer, toucher-up of scenes that were either too long or too short or not wholly successful, general handy man, odd-jobber, negotiator, public representative, and private adviser.  He was always busy, yet never hurried; always pleasant, yet never effusive; always reserved, yet never disdainful.  In short, a perfect gentleman.

There certainly could not have been devised a more likely cure for all that remained of his mental and temperamental difficulties.  The constant meetings with strangers, the continual handling of new problems and thinking out of extempore solutions, the travelling from one town to another, the settlement in new lodgings—all combined to break down the pathological part of his shyness; yet shyness still remained, and with it there developed an almost ascetic enjoyment of certain things—of rainy hours on railway platforms with nothing to do but watch the manoeuvres of shunting in a goods yard, of reading the numbers on houses in a strange town late at night, knowing that one of them hid a passing and unimportant destiny.  His work also brought him into contact with average citizens of these many provincial towns—the barber, the tobacconist, the stationmaster, the shopkeepers who were given a couple of free seats in exchange for a playbill exhibited in their windows, the parson who sometimes preached a sermon attacking the show as indecent (good publicity if you could get it), sometimes the parson who came himself with his wife and children, but most often the parson who neither attacked nor patronized, but just passed by in the street with a preoccupied air, recognizing the smartly dressed strangers as “theatricals” and therefore in some vaguely opposite but no longer warring camp.  One of these clerics, with whom Smith got into conversation, commented that the Church and the theatre were now potential allies, being both sufferers from the same public indifference—“Your leaky roof and my leaky roof are the price paid for the new cathedrals of Mammon.” Whereupon he pointed across the street to a new cinema advertising a film which, so it turned out after further conversation, they had both of them recently enjoyed.

Smith saw a good deal of Paula during these busy days and even busier evenings, but somehow their relationship did not seem to progress to anything warmer or more intimate.  Outwardly he became just as friendly with a few of the others, especially with young Ponderby, the tweedy youth, whom he grew to like.  Ponderby was not much of an actor; his job depended entirely on the possessing of astoundingly conventional good looks.  In Salute the Flag all he had was a couple of lines; he rushed into the general’s headquarters with the cry, “The enemy are attacking!  Give the order to advance!”—whereupon the general, who was a spy in disguise, was supposed to look sinister while Ponderby backed towards the door, delivering his second line as an exit:  “Or if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!”  This was designed to bring a round of applause, and by careful attention to timing and movement Ponderby usually got one.  Margesson, who managed the company, was very strict about everyone getting his “round.”  There was a technique about such things: you stood in the doorway, hand on the door-knob, staring hard and throwing your voice up to the farthest corner of the gallery—if the “round” didn’t come, or came too sluggishly, you rattled the door-knob and repeated the final line with greater emphasis.

One Saturday, in the town of Fulverton, Ponderby spent the morning drinking in an attempt to destroy the effect of too much drinking the night before; by mid-afternoon, when he and Smith happened to be alone together in the lodging-house, it was clear that he could perform in the evening only with extreme hazard, if at all.  He had done this sort of thing several times before, so Smith neither believed nor disbelieved a story of bad news from home; but he felt some sympathy for the youth, especially as he knew this latest offence would probably cost him his job.  Ponderby knew this too, and as the hour approached for the first show he took quantities of aspirin and pick-me-ups, all of which only added to his symptoms of physical illness.  By six o’clock he was begging Smith to take over his part, as the only way by which Margesson might be placated; after all, provided the show wasn’t interfered with, Margesson might not care—the part was so small, and the clothes would fit too.  Smith was reluctant to agree; he didn’t feel he would be any good as an actor, even in the least possible part; but then Ponderby wasn’t good either, so that argument didn’t carry far.  And it was undoubtedly true that the part, though small, was structurally important, so that a last-minute cut would be extremely awkward; and Saturday, also, was the best night for Fulverton audiences.  Everything forced him to an eventual consent, subject to Margesson’s approval; but he still did not like the idea.

He went to the theatre earlier than usual and found Margesson in the midst of some trouble with scene-shifters; when he said that Ponderby was ill and he himself could take his part, Margesson merely answered in a hurry:  “Had too much to drink again, I suppose. . . .  All right then—mind you get your round.”

He did not have any chance to tell Paula about it, but the news that he was taking Ponderby’s part caused little surprise; he was such a handy man, and the part was only two lines—there seemed nothing very remarkable about the arrangement.

He was a trifle nervous as he changed into the uniform of a British second lieutenant, but not more so than he often was at times when people would never guess it.  Quite a natural nervousness too; he knew that many actors and public speakers were always like that, it was really abnormal not to be.  Something in the look of himself in the mirror struck a half-heard chord in his submerged memory; he did not come on till the middle of the last act, so he had time to smoke cigarettes and try to catch the chord again, but that was stupid; the more he stared at himself in the mirror, the less he could remember anything at all.  Then suddenly, with a frightening stab of panic, he asked himself what Ponderby’s lines were—he had never thought of memorizing them, because he assumed he knew them so well; he practically knew the whole show by heart, for that matter—they all did.  But now, when he sought to speak them to himself, what the devil were they?  He tried to visualize that part of the play: the general at his desk, twirling his moustaches and muttering “Hein” under his breath—that was to show he was a spy in disguise; then Ponderby rushing in—“The enemy are attacking!  Give the order to advance!”  Now why should a second lieutenant tell a general what to do?  Never mind—that was part of the play.  Anyhow, Ponderby backed across the stage—not too quick, though— give the general time to give some more twirls and look suspicious; then on the exit—“Or if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!”  That was it; and wait for the round. . . .  He said it all over again to himself:  “The enemy are attacking—give the order to advance—or, if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!”  Twenty words—the smallest part in the show.  Saying them over a third time, he heard the call-boy’s “Ready, sir.”

He went out into the wings, standing where he could see the general at his desk.  The general (little Tommy made up with comic moustaches) was rifling drawers with a terrific amount of noise (exactly as a spy wouldn’t do), glancing through piles of paper in search of a stolen treaty—even if it were there, he was going through them so fast that he couldn’t possibly find it; but that again had to be done or nobody would get the point—anything else was what Margesson called “this damsilly West End pansy-stuff where you come on the stage and light a cigarette with your back to the audience and call it acting.”  Smith stood there, waiting for the cue, which was the word “Hein.”  He felt a little queer; he was going to do something he had never done before; it would be awful if he did it badly, or didn’t get his round; the only comfort was that Ponderby did it pretty badly himself.

Suddenly he heard the general say “Hein.”  It electrified him, like a word spoken inside his own head; he felt his feet as items of luggage that didn’t belong to him as he marshalled them for the forward rush.  His first impression was of a dazzling brilliance and of the curious fact that there was no audience at all; then, as he stared to verify this, faces swam out of the darkness towards him: row upon row, stalls, boxes, circle, balcony, all were returning his stare from tens of thousands of eyes—quizzically, he thought at first, as if they were aware that this was the supreme moment of all drama and were anxious to compare his performance with previous ones by Irving, Coquelin, and Forbes-Robertson . . .  but then, with a flash of uneasiness, he saw malevolence too, as if they hated him for not being Irving, even for not being Ponderby.  He knew he had to conquer this uneasiness or it would conquer him, just as he knew he had to rush up to the general’s desk and say “The enemy are attacking—give the order to advance!”  He saw Tommy eyeing him watchfully—that was part of the play, but Tommy’s eye held an extra watchfulness, as if he were hating him too—for not being somebody else.

And then a very dreadful thing happened; he began to stammer.  It was the old, the tragic stammer—the one that made his face twist and twitch as if he were in a dentist’s chair; he stood there, facing the general, facing the audience, facing God, it almost seemed, and all he could do was wrestle with the words until they came, one after the other, each one fighting to the last.

The audience began to titter, and when he crossed the stage to struggle with the rest of the words they were already yelling with laughter.  “Or if y-y-you d-d-don’t, sir, then, b-b-by G-g-god, I w-w-will m-m-myself!”  The laughter rose to a shriek as he still stood there, waiting, trembling, with lips curving grotesquely and hand fumbling at the door; and when he finally rattled at the knob till it broke off and rolled across the stage into the footlights, the whole house burst into hilarious shouting while the lads in the gallery stamped their feet and whistled through two fingers for over a minute.

He got his “round” all right.

He left the stage in a daze, somehow finding himself in the wings, passing faces he knew without a word, yet noting for agonized recollection later that some looked anxious, others puzzled, a few were actually convulsed with laughter.  Alone at last in the dressing-room he closed the door, locked it, and for several minutes fought down an ancient resurrected hell of fear, mental darkness, and humiliation.  Several knocks came at the door, but he did not answer them.  Later, when the wave had passed over and he knew he was not drowned but merely swimming exhausted in an angry sea, he summoned enough energy to change his clothes.  By that time the play had reached the final scene in which all the company would later be on the stage—he waited for the cue, “You cannot fire on helpless womankind,” followed by the cheers and rough-and-tumble of the rescue party.  Back-stage would be deserted now; he unlocked his way into the corridor and escaped through the stage door into an alley by the side of the fire staircase.  As he turned the corner he could see a long queue already forming for the second performance, which reminded him that Ponderby’s part must be played by someone else in that; Margesson would have to arrange it; anyhow, that was a trifle to worry about, a mere pinhole of trouble compared with the abyss of despair that he himself was facing.

Of course he must leave; they would not wish him to stay; he could offer no explanation, because there was none that would not repeat his humiliation a hundredfold.

Hurrying across Fulverton that night, across the brightly lit Market Street full of shoppers, through the side roads where happy people lived, it seemed to him that someone was always following, footsteps that hastened under dark trees and dodged to avoid street-lamps; an illusion, perhaps, but one that stirred the nag and throb of countless remembered symptoms, till it was not so much the ignominy of what had happened that weighed him down as the awareness of how thinly the skin had grown across the scar, of how near his mind still was to the chaos from which it had barely emerged.  He hurried on—eager to pack his bag and be off, away from Fulverton and the troubled self he hoped to leave by the same act of movement; for surely place and self had some deep association, so that he could not now think of Melbury without . . .  and then the renascent fear in his soul took shape; they were STILL trying to get him back to Melbury—they had been trying all the time, while he, falsely confident during those few weeks of respite, had gone about with an increasing boldness until that very night of self-betrayal.  And such stupid, unnecessary self-betrayal before a thousand onlookers, among whom was one, perhaps, who did not laugh, but rose from his seat and quietly left the theatre, taking his stand on the pavement where he could watch every exit. . . .  Suddenly Smith began to run.  They should not get him— never again.  He stopped abruptly in the next patch of darkness, and surely enough the footsteps that had been following at a scamper then also stopped abruptly.  He ran on again, dodging traffic at a corner and almost colliding with several passers-by.  It was man to man, as yet—the enemy were attacking, give the order to advance!  He turned into the short cut that led directly to his lodgings—a paved passage-way under a railway viaduct.  Then he saw there was a rope stretched across the entrance and a man standing in front of it.

“Sorry, sir—can’t get by this way tonight.”

“But—I—what’s the idea?  Why not?”

“Can’t be helped, sir—it’s the law—one day a year we have to keep it closed, otherwise the railway company loses title.”

“But I must go—I’m in a hurry!”

“Now come on, sir, I’m only doing my duty—don’t give me no

trouble—“

Suddenly he realized that there was more than one enemy; this man was another; there were thousands of them, everywhere; they probably had the district surrounded already. . . .

“Come along, sir, act peaceable—“

“PEACEABLE?  Then why are you carrying that gun?”

“GUN?  Why, you’re off your chump—I’ve got no gun!  D’you mean this pipe?”

But he wasn’t taken in by that, any more than by the nonsense about the railway company and its title; he jumped the rope, hurling the fellow aside, and ran along the passage-way; in a couple of minutes he had reached the lodging-house, whereas it would have taken ten by the road.

He had hoped to have the place to himself, knowing that on Saturday nights most landladies did their week-end shopping.  But he had forgotten Ponderby, who shouted a slurred greeting from the sitting-room as he passed by to climb the stairs.  “Hello, Smithy—get along all right?  Knew you would—nothing to it—damn nice of you, though, to help me out. . . .”

He heard Ponderby staggering into the lobby and beginning to follow him upstairs, but the youth was very drunk and made long pauses at each step, continuing to shout meanwhile:  “Was Margie wild?  I’ll bet he would have been but for you.  Why don’t you come down and have a drink with me—you deserve it. . . .  Friend indeed and a friend in need—that’s what you are—no, I’M the friend in need and YOU’RE the . . . oh, well, never could understand the thing properly.  What’re you doing up there?  Not going to bed yet surely?  What time is it?  Maybe I’D better go to bed, then they’ll all know I’ve been ill. . . .  What’s that?  Can’t hear what you say. . . .”

Smith repeated:  “No, don’t come up, I’m coming down.”

“All right, Smithy—I’ll go down too and get you a little drink.

Must have a little drink—you deserve it.”

By this time Smith had packed; he was naturally a tidy person, and having to do so regularly had made him expert and the job almost automatic.  As he descended the stairs he felt calmer, readier to do battle with the forces arrayed against him; and that made him feel a little warm towards the weak healthy boy who never did battle at all, but just drank and debauched himself in a bored, zestless way.  He turned into the sitting-room, where Ponderby lay sprawled again on the sofa, head buried in the cushions.

“Hello, old boy—was just mixing you a drink when this awful headache came on again.  Don’t mind me—sit down and give me all the news.”

Smith did not sit down, but he took the tumbler, which was almost half full of neat whiskey, poured most of it back into the bottle, and sipped the remainder.  He did not usually drink, but he hoped now it might help to steady his nerves, might give him greater calmness for the journey, wherever that was to be.

“Tell me all the news, Smithy.  Don’t mind me—I’ve got an awful head, but I’m listening.”

Smith said there was no particular news to tell.

“Oh, I don’t mean the theatre—damn the theatre—I mean NEWS.  Heard the paper-boy in the street an hour ago—shouting something— went out and bought one—there it is—couldn’t read it, though—my eyes gave out on me.  What’s been happening in the world?”

Smith stooped to pick up the paper with momentary excitement; was it possible that already . . . no, of course not—an hour ago was actually before the thing happened, apart from the time it would take to make a report and get it printed.  He glanced at the headlines.  “Seems those two fellows have flown across the Atlantic—

Alcock and Brown.”

“Flown across the Atlantic?  That’s a damn silly thing to do—but I’ll tell you what, it’s better than being an actor.  Well, drink a toast to ‘em, old boy—what d’you say their names are?”

“Alcock and Brown.”

“Alcock, Brown, Smith, and Ponderby—drink to the lot of us.  Sounds like a lawyer’s office—that’s the job I used to have—in a lawyer’s office.  Damn good lawyers, too—wouldn’t touch anything dirty.  That’s why they got so they wouldn’t touch me.  Rude health like mine in a lawyer’s office—out of place, old boy—sheer bad taste—frightens the clients.  So one fine day I did a skedaddle from all that messuage.  Know what a messuage is?  Lawyer’s word. . . .”

Smith said he must go, if Ponderby would excuse him.