“GO?  Not yet, surely—wait till the others come—don’t like to be left alone, Smithy.”

“I’m sorry, but I really must go now.”

Then Ponderby raised his head and stared.

“Right you are, then . . . but, good God, what’s the matter?  Been in a fight or something?”

“I’ve got to go.  Good night, Ponderby.”

“Nighty night, Smithy.  And don’t think I’ll ever forget what you’ve done.”

You won’t and neither will anyone else, Smith reflected, picking up his bag and hat in the lobby and walking out of the house.  Nobody saw him.  The night was warm and dark.  He wondered why Ponderby had asked if he had been in a fight, and at the first shop window he stopped and tried to catch his reflection in the glass.  He smiled—he had forgotten to comb his hair; it showed even under his hat, rumpled as if—well, yes, as if he had been in a fight.  That was easy to repair, since he carried a pocket comb, and at the same time he took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his forehead.  Then he did more than smile, he actually laughed, because of the colour of the handkerchief afterwards.  He had forgotten to clean off the makeup.  All the way across Fulverton, then, he must have been looking like that—if anyone had seen him, but nobody had—until Ponderby.  Oh yes, there was the man with the gun—but it had been very dark just there, under the viaduct.  He wiped off the makeup and threw the handkerchief over a fence.

He knew they would go to Fulverton Station first of all, especially for the night train to London; but he was not such a fool as to do anything so obvious.  There was a station about twelve miles away, on a different line—Crosby Magna it was called; if he walked throughout the night he would be near the place by dawn and could take the first train wherever it went.  He did not feel particularly tired; the whiskey had fortified him, and a certain rising exultation as he left the outskirts of Fulverton kept him tramping at a steady three miles an hour.  It must be just about the close of the second performance by now; they would be taking curtain calls, then chattering in the dressing-rooms, looking forward to the usual Saturday supper at the lodging-house.  A decent crowd; he had been happy with them.  He began to look back upon that life with a certain historic detachment; it was all over, and it would have had to be over soon, anyway, for a reason that now, for the first time, he admitted to himself.  He had been growing too fond of that girl; gradually but insidiously the feeling had been growing in him, so that soon the only freedom he could have found would have been either away from her or with her altogether; it would soon have become impossible to keep on seeing her continually and meaninglessly in trains, dining-rooms, theatre back-stages: impossible much longer to have suppressed the anxieties he had already begun to feel about all the chance contacts of their daily lives—whether she would be in or out at a certain hour, or would happen to sit next to him here or there, or who the man was who met and talked with her so long after the show.  Such things had not mattered to him at first, partly because he had been so humble about himself—why should she bother about him at all, what had he to offer?  She loved life, she loved people—be honest about it, she loved men.  He had even, at first, experienced a sardonic pleasure in seeing her warm to the chance encounters that fill the spare moments of stage life—his look, as he said good-night to her when he was going home to bed and she to a party somewhere, had often contained the message—Have a good time, you’ve done all you can for me, the rest I must do myself; so thank you again and good luck.

That was his message to her now, as he walked from Fulverton to Crosby Magna and heard the chime of midnight from a distant clock.  But he knew that it could not have been so had he stayed with the company, so that actually his leaving was well timed, an escape from bondage that would soon have become intolerable.

He reached Crosby Magna towards dawn—a small deserted country station on a single line.  There was a time-table pasted up from which he discovered that the first train was a local to Fellingham at ten minutes past five.  He had over an hour to wait, and spent it leaning against his bag on the station platform.  He felt rather drowsy; it was pleasant to rest there, with the sunrise on his face.  Presently he realized that a man was staring down at him.

“Waiting for the train, sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s due in now.  I’ll get you a ticket.  Where to, sir?”

“Er . . . Fellingham . . . single . . .”

He dragged himself to his feet and followed the man into the small booking-hall.

“Fellingham, there you are, sir.  Not travelling with the company this time?”

“WHAT?”

“Couldn’t help recognizing you, sir—I was at the theatre in Fulverton last night.  Very funny indeed you was, sir—funniest bit in the whole show.  Well, here’s your train, sir.”

He insisted on carrying Smith’s bag and choosing a compartment for him, though the train was practically empty.  It was, indeed, one of those trains that seem to exist for no reason at all except to wander through the English countryside at hours when no one wants to travel, stopping here and there at places where no one could possibly have any business, especially on a Sunday morning, and all with an air of utter vagrancy, like that of cattle browsing or a woman polishing her nails—a halt here for several minutes, then an interval of movement, even a burst of speed, then a slow-down to hardly a pace at all, and so on.  Fellingham was only forty-odd miles from Crosby Magna, but the journey, according to the time-table, would take over two hours.  But it was pleasant enough to look out of the window on field and farmstead in the early morning, the lonely roads disappearing into a hazy distance, a stop for the guard to throw out a parcel to a man who stood by a crossing gate waiting for it, long manoeuvres of shunting in and out of sidings to detach various empty wagons.  No sound when the train stopped save that of the brakes creaking off the wheels and the breeze rippling the grasses in near-by fields.  Whenever he put his head out of the window at a station, another head, red-haired and a boy’s, was leaning out three coaches in front, and this somehow began to suggest that he and the boy were alone on the train—final survivors of something or else first pioneers of something else.

Presently the horizon began to show a long, low-lying cloud, but a few further miles revealed it as a line of hills—rather high hills, they looked, but he knew they could not be, because there were no high hills in that part of England.

Of course he would not go all the way to Fellingham; that would make the trail too easy, especially after the porter at Crosby Magna had recognized him—unfortunate, that had been.  He would get out at some intermediate station and make his way elsewhere across country.

The train had stopped again by the time the hills became clear—a station called Worling.  He thought this would do as well as any other, and was just about to jump down to the platform when his bag flew open, spilling some of the contents on to the compartment floor; by the time he had them repacked the train was off again.  But it did not really matter; one place was as good as another.

The train cantered on, like horses now more than cattle, steadily, at a good pace, as if anxious to reach some friendly stable; the track wound more closely into the uplands and soon entered a long shallow valley under a ridge that rose rather steeply at one point into two rounded summits; you could not tell which was the higher, but neither was very high—maybe seven or eight hundred feet, with a saucer-shaped hollow between.  Just under the hill the roofs of a village showed amongst the trees, but the train turned capriciously away from it, choosing to stop at a station called Rolyott that was nothing but a shed in the middle of fields.  He got out there, handing his ticket to the solitary porter, who stared at it for a moment and then said something about Fellingham being three stations further on; Smith smiled and said that was all right, and as the train moved off again the red-headed boy who was always looking out of the window saw him smiling and smiled back.  That made him feel suddenly cheerful.  And besides, the air was warm, blended with scents of hay and flowers, and the tree-hidden village looked tempting even at the end of a long road; he set out, walking briskly.  A few hundred yards from the station, withdrawn into a hedge so that no one could see it save by search or chance, a broken signpost pointed to the ground, and he had to climb through nettles to decipher its stained and weather-worn letters:  “To Beachings Over, 1 Mile.”

He walked on, murmuring the name to himself, as he always did with names—Beachings Over, Beachings Over; and then Beachings Over came into view—a group of gray old cottages fronting a stream over which slabs of stone made bridges.  There was a square-towered church as well, a public-house called for some undiscoverable reason the “Reindeer”—a ledge in the stream where the water sparkled as it curled over green reeds.  And beyond the village rose the sunlit ridge—one hill now quite clearly higher than the other, but only a little higher, and between them that gentle turfy hollow.

He crossed one of the stone bridges.  A man coming out of a house stared with friendly curiosity and said “Good morning.”  A fluff of wind blew a line of hollyhocks towards him.  An old man was clipping a yew hedge along the vicarage wall.  A sheep-dog stirred in the shade and opened a cautious eye as he passed.  He felt:

This is home; if they will let me stay here, I shall be at peace.  He turned off the road by a path towards an open field that climbed steeply.  Near at hand was a cottage, with a buxom elderly woman tending the garden.  “There’ll be a nice view from the top this morning,” she said knowingly as he came near.  “Five counties they say you can see, on a clear day.”  He smiled and then she said:

“Leave your bag here if you like—it’ll be quite safe.”

“Good idea. . . .  Thanks very much.  And could I—perhaps—trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Water if you like, sir, but cider if you prefer.”

“Well, yes, indeed, if it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all, sir—I’ll just have to go round to the stillage.”

“STILLAGE?”

“That’s where we keep it, sir, being that cool off the stone, you’ll be surprised.”

She came back with a pint-sized mug, which he drained gratefully.

“Glad you’re enjoying it, sir—it’s good cider, that I do say, though I brewed it myself.”

He wondered if he should offer to pay her, but she saw his look of hesitation and added with swift tact:  “Don’t you worry, sir— you’re very welcome.  Maybe when you’ve climbed up and down again you’ll feel like some cold beef and pickles and a nice raspberry tart—we serve meals, you know, all day on Sundays.”

“You get many visitors?”

“Hardly a one, but we’re ready for ‘em if they come.  Gentleman once told me this was the prettiest village in all England.”

“Certainly it might be. . . .  Well, thank you again—perhaps I will want that meal.”

He resumed the climb, feeling glowingly free after the drink and without his bag.  The sky was dappled with clouds like sails, the smell of earth and grass rose in a hot sweetness.  He walked steadily, stopping only to look back when a chime floated upwards from the church tower; Beachings Over, its gardens and roofs, lay in the fold of the valley as if planted there.  He climbed on till the ridge was close at hand, beyond the next field and the next stone wall, the two hills curving against the sky.  After a little time he reached the saddle between, and there, hidden till the last moment, lay a pool of blue water, blown into ripples under passing cloud shadows.  It looked so cool he took his clothes off and bathed—there in sight of all the five counties, so it amused him to think.  Then he lay in the sun till he was dry, feeling the warmth of sun and cider soaking into every nerve.  Presently he dressed, found a shady spot under a tree, and closed his eyes.

The sun on his face woke him; it had moved round the sky but was near the horizon and no longer hot.  His glance followed the curve of the hill and came to rest on the already graying pool; he was surprised to see a girl there, perched on a jutting rock and paddling her feet.  He watched her for a moment, quietly fitting the picture into his mind before recognition came, and with it a curious mounting anger because he suddenly knew why it was he had grown so desperately in love with her; it was because she had made him so, because she followed him about everywhere, because, from the moment of their first meeting, she had never let him go— despite all acting and casual behaviour and false appearances.  And she had followed him even to Beachings Over.

Aware that he was watching her, she turned and then came towards him, high-stepping barefoot over the grass.

“Smithy—you’re really awake?  Why did you run off like that?  Were you ill?  What’s been the matter? . . .  The woman at the cottage said you were here—said you’d left your bag, so you’d have to come down, but I didn’t want to wait, and yet I have waited—hours— while you’ve been asleep. . . .”

“I’m—I’m—sorry.”

“For keeping me waiting?  It’s MY fault—I could have wakened you any time, but you looked so tired and you hadn’t shaved—I guessed you’d been out all night somewhere.”

“But I’m so terribly sorry—no, not for that—for what happened

before then—at the theatre—“

“Oh, THAT?  Darling, you shouldn’t ever have taken it on, but it didn’t matter—got the biggest laugh in the whole show—Margie even said he’d change the part if Ponderby could do it that way, but he was afraid he couldn’t.  Anyhow, he’s going to keep in the bit where the door-knob comes off—that’s good for a laugh any time.”

“But do they think I did it DELIBERATELY?”

“I told them you did—I swore you fixed the whole thing with Ponderby just for a gag; Ponderby said you had too, I made him— they all thought it was marvellous, but then they think you ARE marvellous, anyhow.”

“MARVELLOUS?”

“Well, you know—unpredictable.  One of those shy ones who suddenly blaze out and startle everybody and then go shy again.  What’ll you do next?  Maybe fly the Atlantic like those two fellows.  Maybe murder somebody or elope with a duchess.  It’s all part of being a gentleman.  You’re privileged—like the boys on Boat Race Night.”

“Paula—why do you talk like that?”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”  She bent over him.  “There’s such an indefinable je ne sais quoi about you, darling.”

“What did you follow me here for?”

“To bring you back, of course.”

“But I’m not coming back.”

“Oh, it’s only Sunday evening—there’s no show-till six tomorrow night in Polesby—you don’t have to make up your mind till tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’m not coming back.  I CAN’T go back.  Don’t you realize how I

felt—“

“I know—don’t try to tell me—I saw you on the stage and I was the only person who knew for certain you weren’t acting—because I’d seen you like that before, in the shop at Melbury.  Remember?”

He said grimly:  “It wouldn’t be very easy to forget—any more than last night.”

“Except that you’re not BOUND to go on the stage, ever again, so what does it matter?  Whereas at Melbury you were like that all the time—except with me.”

“Yes, except with you.”

“Maybe there’s something about me too—so far as you’re concerned.”

He moved restlessly.  “There was something then, but there’s a barrier between us now, compared with how we were in those days.”

“There’s only this between us, Smithy—I remember when you needed me, and I’m sure I’m not going to hang around when you don’t need me any more.  But I thought you might need me today—that’s why I’m here.”

“_I_ feel just the opposite—you were so generous when I DID need you I’ve hated to feel you could still do things out of pity as you’re doing now.”

“That’s not just the opposite—it’s the same.”

“It’s why I’ve kept away from you, anyhow, because I CAN do without you, I know I can, I MUST.”

“Oh God, don’t boast.  I can do without you too, for that matter.  Let’s be independent as hell.  Let’s each fly in different directions and wonder why for the rest of our lives.”  She began to pull on her stockings.  “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Now you mention it.”

“Let’s go down.  The woman at the cottage said she could give us—“

He interrupted, laughing:  “I know.  Cold beef and pickles and raspberry tart.”

“I said we’d have it.”

“You’re right about that.”

He helped her to her feet and they stared about them for a moment.

“Smithy, how DID you manage to find such a heavenly place?”

“As so many things happen—pure chance.  My bag flew open as I was going to get out of the train somewhere else.  How did you find I was here?”

“Darling, it was so EASY.  I asked at Fulverton Station, and they

said you hadn’t been there, so of course I thought of Crosby Magna—“

“OF COURSE?  Why of course?”

“Well, it was pretty obvious you’d think it WASN’T so obvious—and then the porter there remembered you, and the guard remembered you’d walked towards the village, and the woman at the cottage said you were up here staring at the five counties,--it IS five, isn’t it?--everybody remembered you, old boy.  You aren’t terribly good at making people forget you.”

“They certainly won’t forget my performance last night.”

“Back again on the same old subject?  I told you they all thought it was marvellous.”

“Then why did they think I didn’t stay for the second show?”

“I told them it was because you suddenly got scared of how Margie would take it—I said it was just like you, to put on a gag like that and then get scared about it.”

“Seems to me you thought of EVERYTHING.”

They began the descent amidst the gathering twilight, striding down upon Beachings Over as from the sky.  A curl of blue smoke rose from the huddle of roofs, the church bell was ringing for evening service.  Something in the calm of that darkening panorama kept them silent till they were within sight of the cottage; then she said:  “Oh, by the way—I told the woman you were my husband.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d have thought it queer for me to be chasing up a hill after any man who wasn’t.”

“Is there anything ELSE you’ve told anybody about me?”

“There isn’t yet, Smithy, but there might have to be.  I’m always ready.”

She took his arm as he unlatched the gate that led through an avenue of hollyhocks to the cottage.  It was small and four-square, with windows on either side of the front door; at one side of the porch a board announced “Good Accommodation for Cyclists.”  The woman who had given him the cider led them smilingly into a room that opened off the flagged lobby; it was evidently the parlour, crowded with old-fashioned furniture, pictures, and photographs.  A yellow piano with a fretwork front lined with faded silk occupied most of one wall; an oval mahogany table stood in the centre.  The single window was tightly closed, yet the room smelt fresh and pleasant.  He opened the piano and struck a few of the yellow keys; the strings twanged almost inaudibly.  Inside the closed space of the room they felt embarrassed to begin a conversation, especially while the woman kept chattering in and out as she prepared the table.  She told them her name was Mrs. Deventer and that her husband had been a sailor, so badly injured at Jutland, poor man, it was a mercy he died.  “But there, there, that’s all over now and never no more, as the saying is. . . .  You’ll take some nice ripe tomatoes with your beef, perhaps, sir?  And how about a drop of something to drink?--there’s my own cider, but if you’d prefer anything else my girl can run over to the Reindeer and fetch it. . . .  ‘Tain’t far, you know—nothing’s very far in the village—that’s what I always feel when I go into Chelt’nam— that’s our nearest town, you know—I go there oncet a year, or maybe twice—it’s a wonderful place, but my, it does so make you tired walking through all them streets—we ain’t got only the one street here, and that’s plenty when you’re gettin’ old. . . .”

She talked and talked, bringing in everything she could think of till the table was crowded with tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, a huge loaf of bread, a pot of tea in case they wanted it, and a jar of chutney, her own special make.  At length there could not possibly be anything else to bring in, and she left them reluctantly, with a slow smile from the doorway.

He said:  “Well?”

“Well, Smithy?”

“You look thoughtful, that’s all.”

“Darling, I was just wondering what you had against me.”

But the door opened again—Mrs. Deventer bringing in a lighted lamp.  “I thought you’d maybe want it.  Longest day of the year, round about, but it still gets dark. . . .  Maybe you’ll be stayin’ the night?  You’ve missed the last train either way by now, I suppose you know that.  Of course there’s rooms at the Reindeer, but mine’s as good, I always say, and cheaper too.”

The yellow lamplight glowed between their faces after she had gone.

“Possessive woman,” he remarked.  “MY cider, MY girl, MY chutney, MY rooms.”

“Room, she SAID.  Didn’t you see the notice outside—‘Good Accommodation for Cyclists’?  But I don’t suppose one has to be a cyclist.”

He said, after a pause:  “I don’t know why you should wonder about me like that.  How could I have anything against you?  Except for the same reason that I couldn’t.”

“Too subtle, darling, unless you tell me what the reason is.”

“I love you.”

Her voice leapt to the reply:  “Smithy, you DO?  You do REALLY?  I’ve loved you ever since I first set eyes on you—as soon as I saw you in that shop I thought—there’s my man.  Because I’m possessive too—MY man, MY chutney, MY room—all mine.”  And suddenly she took his hand and leaned down with her cheek close to it.  “I could have killed you, though, while you lay on top of that hill, fast asleep.  KILLED you. . . .  Oh, God, I’m so happy. . . .  What’s the name of this place?”

“Beachings Over.”

“Beachings Over. . . .  I’ll get US from THAT—for ever.  Remember the game you used to play with names?”

Later, in a room so consecrated to cyclism that even the pictures were of groups of pioneer free-wheelers, he asked her if—when he had fully recovered—if he did fully recover, of course—and if he found a job that could support them both—if and when all those things happened—would she marry him?

She said she would, of course, but without the delay.  “I think it’s only two weeks they make you wait.”

“But—“  He seemed bewildered by her having stolen, as usual, the initiative.  Then he said, slowly and with difficulty:  “I’m not RIGHT yet.  I’m not even as near to it as I thought I was.  For half an hour last night I felt the return of everything bad again— black—terrifying.  I’m better now, but less confident.”

She said she didn’t mind, she would look after him, because she had just as much confidence as ever.

“And there’s another thing—“

“ANOTHER, Smithy?”  She was trying to mock him out of his mood.

“Wouldn’t they ask me a lot of questions at the registry office?”

“You mean questions about yourself that you couldn’t answer?”

“Yes.”

“They might ask you one question I never have—and that is if you’ve been married before.”

“Of course I haven’t.”

“How can you be certain, old boy, with that awful memory of yours?”

He pondered to himself—yes, how COULD he be certain?  He hadn’t any logical answer, and yet he felt fairly certain.  When people had visited him in those hospitals, relatives of missing men who hoped he might turn out to be someone belonging to them, HE had similar hopes, but only of finding a home, parents—never a wife.  Did that prove anything?

She watched the look on his face, then added with a laugh:  “Don’t worry—I’ll take a chance on it if you will.”

Eventually it was agreed that they should go to Polesby the next day, announce their plans to the company, and ask for a few weeks’ holiday.  She was sure Margesson would agree, if they approached him fairly and squarely; he liked both of them, and the slack season was on.  They rose early and took a walk to the end of the village, discussing a future of which Beachings Over seemed already to have become a part.  “Oh, Smithy, isn’t it beautiful?  I didn’t see it like this yesterday—I was so worried about finding you—but it’s just the sort of place I’ve always dreamed of.  I know that’s sentimental—but stage people are—they love the sweet little cottage idea, though most of them would be bored to death if they ever got one—mercifully they don’t, as a rule—they either die in the poorhouse or save enough to buy a pub on the Brighton Road. . . .”

She chattered on, and soon it was time to walk back to the cottage for Mrs. Deventer’s excellent breakfast, pay their bill, and assure her they would return soon for a longer stay.  The old lady was delighted, keeping up the farewell greetings all the way down the avenue of hollyhocks to the front gate.  By the time they passed the post-office the morning papers were just being unloaded; Smith bought one and scanned the front page during the mile-long tramp to the railway station.  Mostly about Brown and Alcock, he told her, summarizing the newly announced details of the first Atlantic flight in history.  Not till they were settled in the train did she glance at the paper herself.  Then, after a few moments’ desultory reading, she looked up with a suddenly changed expression.

“SMITHY!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t want it to come as a shock to you, but there’s something here that looks as if—“ she hesitated and then gave a short laugh—

“as if they can’t come up to you . . . for being crazy.”

“Who can’t?”

“Brown and Alcock.”

“But I don’t know what you mean.”

“Better read this—and don’t let it upset you—probably it’s not anything serious.”

She handed him the paper, pointing to a small paragraph on an inside page.  It was headed “Assault under Viaduct—Fulverton Man Injured,” and ran:--

 

That he was assaulted by an unknown man was the story told to the Fulverton police last night by Thomas Atwill, railway policeman, who was found unconscious under the Marshall Street viaduct at a late hour.  Taken to the Cottage Hospital, Atwill stated that he had been on plain-clothes duty to prevent pedestrians from using the footpath under the viaduct, it being necessary to do this for one day each year in order to preserve the company’s legal title to the right of way.  Shortly after nine o’clock a man endeavoured to break through the temporary barrier erected for this purpose, and when Atwill sought to remonstrate with him, he received a severe blow on the head.  Describing his assailant as young, rather tall, and clean-shaven, Atwill said he was a gentleman, not a “rough.” The police are investigating the unexplained disappearance of a member of a local theatrical touring company.

 

He put aside the paper, stared at her for a moment, then let his head fall slowly into his hands.  When he looked up he was very pale.  The train was stopping at Worling, where a crowd of farm workers waited on the platform.  She had only time to say:

“Darling, if anyone gets in, don’t look like that.”

Nobody got in, and his controlled features relaxed.

“Oh, Smithy . . . you don’t remember?”

“I remember jumping over—it wasn’t a barrier—just a rope.  And if I hit the fellow, it was accidental—a push that made him fall, maybe with his head on the pavement—I didn’t look back, I was running.”  He added, leaning forward with both hands on her knees:

“I do want you to know that I’m not a homicidal maniac rushing about committing crimes and then forgetting about them.  When I said that last night for half an hour I felt the return of all the bad things, I meant things in my own mind—fears that I had to fight down . . . but they were in my own mind, and I DID fight them down, I NEVER lost control.  I want you to believe that—no matter who else disbelieves it.”

“I believe it, Smithy.  But there are—as you say—people who wouldn’t.”

“I know that.”

“We mustn’t go to Polesby.”

“_I_ mustn’t.  YOU can.  You’re in no danger—on your own.”  He cried out, with sharp bitterness:  “Perhaps you’ll stay clear of me after this.”

Ignoring that, she said:  “Probably the man isn’t seriously injured

if he recovered consciousness so soon—“

“You don’t need to comfort me.”

“But it’s true—the whole thing’ll blow over if he’s not badly hurt— and also if we don’t go to Polesby.  London’s a better idea.  If we change at Saxham we can get a London train from there.  We’ll find somewhere to stay—where no one will know who we are.  London’s the best place for that.  We both have enough money to last for a time.”

“But what about you—your job?  They’ll expect you at Polesby tonight.  They’ll know we’re together.”

“They’d be fools not to know that, anyway.  I swore I’d never come back unless I brought you with me. . . .  Darling, don’t look so anxious.  I believe you.  This is just bad luck—it somehow doesn’t count. . . .”  She took his troubled head in her arms and rocked it gently against her.  “I can’t help laughing, though, at one thing.”  She picked up the paper and re-read, crooningly, as to a child:  “’Atwill said he was a gentleman, not a rough.’  That’s you all over, Smithy—I always said so.”

They left the train at Saxham, but had just missed the best London train of the day; four hours to wait for the next.  The interval was pleasantly spent in strolling about the ancient town.  The second London train came in late, and they were told to change again at Santley Junction—“but it all helps,” she said, “if anyone were trying to follow us.”  They reached Santley towards dusk and had to cross a platform crowded with waiting passengers.  When the next train came in, also late, it was already so full that only tussling and scrimmaging could make further room; but eventually this was accomplished and they found themselves in a compartment occupied by an uncountable number of shouting children, all in nominal charge of an elderly, shabby, but bright-eyed clergyman who gestured apologies for his own inability to subdue the din.  “It’s been their great day,” he explained, forcing a way for the newcomers.  Then he helped them, quite unnecessarily, to put up their bags and parcels on the rack, adding with a smile:  “Not hostile—only heedless.”  As soon as the train re-started the children shouted with renewed abandon, leaning out of the windows, jumping on the seats, breaking into song choruses that were taken up by other children in adjacent compartments until the whole train, nearing London, became one long pandemonium streaking through suburb after suburb, over bridges across blazing highways, through smoke-filled tunnels, past rows of back gardens from which shirt-sleeved householders watering their flowers looked up to wave good-humouredly, alongside commons where lovers did not stir as the sudden crescendo engulfed them.  At short range, however, it was harder to ignore, a sheer wall of sound behind which three adults, lips to ear and then ear to lips, could only contrive an intermittent mouthing of words.

“It’s their annual outing,” said the parson, still feeling some need to apologize.  “We aim at discipline but—“  He gave a little wrinkled smile.

Smith nodded, and Paula, from the other side, whispered loudly in his ear:  “If this bothers you, let’s get out at the next station and find another compartment.”

“No, no, it’s all right.”

And later, from the parson:  “I hope you don’t find their high spirits too exhausting.”

“THEY don’t, evidently,” she answered.

“I know—amazing, isn’t it?  Don’t believe I ever shouted like that when I was a boy.  TERRIFIC!”

“Good thing you keep a sense of humour about it.”

“Oh yes.  I don’t mind the row so much, but I’m scared when they lean out like that—I’ve warned them over and over again but I can’t make them listen.”

Smith suddenly intervened:  “Do you think I could?  Perhaps coming from someone else—a stranger? . . .  Now, boys, supposing you stand away from those windows!”

The different voice, pitched over the wall of sound, somehow reached its goal; the swarming clusters turned, sharply disconcerted, nonplussed, ready for rebellion but sensing control; then the different voice continued, releasing them a little:

“That’s right, sit down—plenty of room for all of us.  What about another song?”

From further along the train came the chorus of “Keep the Home Fires Burning”; they joined in it, one by one, a gradual deafening surrender, while the stations flashed by more frequently and the suburbs merged into the slums.  She whispered in his ear exultantly:  “Smithy, how marvellous!  And to think I was afraid they were bothering you!”

The parson was also pleased.  “I really am extremely obliged to you, sir.”

“Not at all.”

“ASTONISHING!”

“Just as much to me, I assure you.  I didn’t know I could deal with ‘em.”

“You must have a knack. . . .  I haven’t any—with children.

You’re going to London?”

“Yes.”

“In a great hurry when you arrive?”

“Not particularly.”

“I wonder whether you could spare, then—say five minutes?  I always have trouble with them at railway stations, and the Mission’s only across the street.  If you would . . .”

“Certainly—if I can.  The magic may not work the second time.”

“Let’s have faith that it will.”

At the terminus it was as if the whole train burst open, a human explosion on to the platform, yells and bangings of doors while the parson watched Smith bring gradual order out of the chaos.  Then began the slow marshalling of two hundred youngsters into line, their realization that a new personality was in command, and their acceptance of the inevitable—truculent at first, then indifferent, finally quite cheerful.  But the operation took considerably more than five minutes; it was over a quarter of an hour before the children had all been escorted through the busy station precincts to a side street whence they could be safely dismissed to their homes.

The parson stood beaming on the pavement.  “I really cannot express my gratitude.  I hope you haven’t been too much delayed.”

“Oh no.”

“You mean you had no plans for—the evening?”

“Well—er—nothing special.”

“Then I wonder—if you REALLY have nothing else to do—it would

give me great pleasure if you’d both dine with me—“

It was Paula who answered, in the instant way in which she decided everything:  “Why, yes, we’d be glad.”

The parson wrinkled another smile and began fumbling his way through a passage running by the side of the Mission building into an unkempt garden; beyond it stood a large ugly soot-black three-story house.  He unlocked the front door, admitting them into a lofty hall-way totally unfurnished down to the bare boards of the floor.  “I don’t think names are at all important,” he said, ushering them further into a room, “but mine is Blampied.”

“Smith,” said Paula.

He offered them chairs, following their glances round the room with a perverse pride.  “Isn’t this a terrible house?  It was built in 1846, when parsons were supposed to live in style.  Twenty rooms—I only use five.  Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, this, and my housekeeper’s.  This is the best.  We live in squalor punctuated by small simple meals of excellent quality—onion soup tonight, if you happen to like it.”

Meanwhile an elderly gaunt-faced woman was preparing the table, showing neither surprise nor any other emotion at the presence of guests, and needing no instructions from the parson.  Presently the three were sitting down before big bowls of the soup; there was nothing else but cheese, he warned them, but they could have more soup if they wanted.  It was so good that they did, and asked for it with enthusiasm.  Meanwhile the parson chattered on, a cordial, increasingly inquisitive host.

“You two people have much further to go?”

Smith said:  “No, not very far.”

“You live here in London?”

“Er . . . yes.”

“Don’t let me keep you, but don’t go till you want to.”

She said:  “Oh, there’s plenty of time.”  It was as if she were reluctant to leave.

“Yes, the buses and trams run late.  I expect you can get to your home that way.”

“I—I think so.”

“You only THINK so?”

“Matter of fact, we haven’t got a home—yet.  We’ve got to look for one.”

Smith flashed her a warning glance, but she went on:  “I don’t suppose it’ll be very hard.”

The parson’s curiosity seemed to become less rather than more as he responded:  “If it’s the slightest help to you, please stay here for the night.  My housekeeper can find you bedding, and there are fifteen rooms to choose from.”

“That’s awfully kind of you, but—“

“Just as you please, of course.  Only I thought your husband looked tired.”

“He’s not my husband—yet.”

The parson smiled.  “To be sure . . . but after all—fifteen rooms?

Enough—one would think.”

Then suddenly she said:  “Maybe, as you’ve got a sense of humour,

you can help us. . . .  We want to get married, but it has to be

quiet—we don’t want anyone to know—“

“Runaway?”

“Yes, that’s it . . . maybe you know of a registry office somewhere near?”

“There’s an office nearly across the street, but for sheer quietness, why don’t you allow me to marry you in my own church?  Hardly anyone ever comes to any of the services—it would be the most unnoticed marriage I could possibly imagine. . . .”

 

 

So they were married at St. Clement’s, Vale Street, London, N.W., and as they left the church after the ceremony newsboys were racing down the street offering extra editions—“Peace Treaty Signed at Versailles.”  It was June 28, 1919.  The bridegroom bought one of the papers on his way with his bride to their home further along Vale Street—a tall Victorian house that possessed the initial advantage of being owned by a deaf old woman who lived in the basement and offered the higher floors for rent.  She had agreed to let them have two big furnished rooms, plus bath and kitchenette, for a pound a week; there was also an oblong walled garden they could share with other tenants, but of course they never did.  After several weeks of living in the house they still hadn’t said more than “Good morning” and “Good evening” to the people who occupied the floors above and below; and an especially odd thing was that the man who lived above was a policeman.

But they were happy.  It was strange, in a way; they had hardly any money and so far no jobs, and they were half scared of every knock on the door, because a daily visit to the newsroom of the free library revealed that the police were still probing what had already attained some small renown as “the Fulverton case.”  The victim was said to be “still improving,” but that began to seem almost ominous, since anything short of recovery showed how seriously he had been hurt; and one morning there was an even worse sound in the news item:  “Hospital authorities at Fulverton report no change in the condition of Thomas Atwill, who is still suffering from head injuries as a result of an assault by an unknown man under a railway viaduct three weeks ago.”

The unknown man felt sincere remorse over the fate of the innocent Atwill, but even that could not dim the joys of a partnership that was half fun, half fear, so that every falling asleep was like an unspoken prayer for safety and every waking up a miracle of survival.  Sometimes they would hear the policeman clumping down the stairs and back again in his heavy boots, and she would run to the window to look out and come back saying—“It’s all right, Smithy—it’s there—go to sleep.”  That was a joke between them, because they had once agreed that nothing in the world could be more reassuring than a London policeman, half dressed, going downstairs at midnight to put out an empty milk-bottle on a front doorstep—a symbol that no harm would come, that God was somewhere over the policeman’s roof and theirs.

They felt their chief danger might come from a chance recognition in the streets, and for this reason they avoided the better-known parts of London where country visitors might be expected to sight-see; they also kept indoors most of the day, discovering almost with surprise how quickly the time passed and how little the restrictions bothered them, provided they were together.  They would do most of their shopping late at night, economy combining then with prudence, for just before closing time in those unfashionable districts the butcher and greengrocer and fishmonger would sell off cheap what was left of their day’s supplies.  While she was bargaining Smith would often stop to listen to some street-corner orator haranguing the multitude—the multitude consisting, as a rule, of a few apathetic onlookers, working-men with one hand round the bowl of a pipe and the other in a trouser pocket.  “The typical English attitude,” Blampied commented afterwards, “good-humoured, tolerant, vaguely sceptical—sceptical just as much of the truth as of lies.  What a lot it will take to move men like that, but when they DO move—IF they ever move—what a cataclysm!”

They were beginning to feel a friendly intimacy with the parson, all the friendlier because his attitude was such a quaint mixture of particular inquisitiveness and general incuriosity.  He could put the most intimate questions—once he asked:  “Are you and your wife so united that you could use the same toothbrush?”  Yet he never mentioned or fished for information about Smith’s background or parentage, until one day, when they were having dinner with him as they had come to do rather often, he suddenly asked:  “What shall I say if somebody traces you here and questions me about you?”

They stared at him with such disconcerted blankness that he added:

“Didn’t you say it was a runaway marriage?”

They knew him so well by then that they did not particularly mind having betrayed themselves by the startled stare; and the fact that his later remark gave them an easy cue for evasion tempted them all the more to tell him nothing but the truth.  Paula looked across the table to Smith, caught and exchanged a glance, then began:

“Yes, it was certainly runaway, but probably not the kind you’re imagining.  We aren’t likely to be troubled by objecting parents.  Mine are both dead, and his are . . .”  She looked again at Smith.

Blampied nodded, as if satisfied, but Smith addressed him with a smile:  “There wouldn’t be much point in deceiving you, would there?”

“Depends what you want me to do.  If you want me to lie about you to others, at least you must tell me the truth about yourself.”

“That sounds a rather unusual standpoint—for a clergyman.”

“Perhaps I’m a rather unusual clergyman.”

“Well, here’s an unusual story.”

“Good . . . go ahead.”

Smith then spoke briefly of his war injury and resultant lack of memory.  He called it a LACK now, not LOSS—“because I don’t FEEL any loss.  It doesn’t really bother me any more—there are days and nights when I never even think about it . . . but there it is, all the same.  Perhaps I ought to have told you when you married us.”

“Why?”

“Well, signing my name in the register.  Smith may not be the true one.”

The parson, sitting at the head of the table, half rose and extended his arms over their shoulders.  “But it was YOU I married,” he said, “not your names.”

“So it doesn’t matter?”

“Not a bit.  And it’s perfectly legal and binding.  Is that all you have on your conscience?”

“Not quite all.”  Encouraged by a further look from Paula, Smith went on to relate the incongruous mishap to Thomas Atwill under the railway viaduct.  Blampied listened with increasing interest; once or twice his face twisted into a smile; they were so accustomed to his taking the oddest possible view of things that it did not surprise, although it considerably relieved them when at the end of the recital he began to laugh.  “It’s the idea of a RAILWAY COMPANY having a right of way that tickles me!  Know anything about rights of way?”

This seemed a side issue, but most of Blampied’s conversations avoided anything in the direct line of argument.  Smith said no, not very much.

“They’re trying to close them all over England.  You must come with

me sometime on one of my crusades.  I make a nuisance of myself on

village greens every now and again—just by way of a holiday from

London.  I inform the villagers of their ancient heritage—the

commons and the pastures and the paths across the fields that the

landlords have stolen and will go on stealing, whenever they get

the chance.  A clerical predecessor of mine, John Ball by name,

made a similar nuisance of himself six hundred years ago or

thereabouts—but I think he must have been much more of an

oratorical spellbinder.”  He added, coming back to the point, “So

THAT’S why you two children are in hiding?  You’re afraid that if

anything should happen to Thomas Atwill—“

“Oh, he’ll get better all right,” Paula intervened hastily, “but even when he does it could be troublesome if we were traced because— because—“  She looked across the table, adding:  “We’ve told you so much we may as well finish—don’t you think so, Smithy?”

Smith said:  “I mentioned that the war injury affected my memory.  It also—at one time—had other effects.  They sent me to Melbury— the big hospital for shell-shock cases.  I was on their dangerous list.”

“You mean liable to die?”

“Well, no—liable to live—but dangerously.”

Again Blampied laughed.  “I see.  I really begin to see.”

They both joined him in laughing, glad to ease their embarrassment by so doing.  Then the parson came behind Smith, putting his arm affectionately round the young man’s shoulders.  “You needn’t worry.  The reputation of crank and misfit gives me a certain freedom of reply.  If, for instance, I’m asked if I know anyone named Smith, and I say I never heard the name before, it’ll merely give rise to an extra legend. . . .”

 

 

The more they came to know Blampied the more they realized his remarkableness and the less they felt they completely understood him.  At their first meeting in the train he had seemed just the timid, unworldly parson of fiction, almost of caricature, bearing his cross in the form of Mission boys he could not control and summer outings he must have loathed.  Later he showed himself more perplexingly as a mixture of ascetic and gourmet—only onion soup for dinner, but how good it had to be.  Later still, when he described “crusades” that had sometimes led to rough-and-tumble fights on village greens and once at least to his own imprisonment, he almost became the conventionally unconventional “fighting parson.”  And beyond that, but by no means finally, there was the visionary, the mystic.  It was not easy to analyse or estimate the sum-total, and many persons with whom he came into contact had long since given up the task as either hopeless or unprofitable.  But one could not meet and talk to him for ten minutes, in any one of his moods, without an impression of stature—mental, moral, psychic, or perhaps some blending of all three.  And he had also (as Smith found out when he came to work for him) an astoundingly various collection of intimate friends.

Most of these friends lived abroad, so that occasions for personal meetings were rare; but he corresponded, regularly and voluminously, and it was this task that had lately made him aware of failing eyesight, and so of the need for someone to help him with it.  Smith gladly volunteered, and it became a habit that two or three mornings a week Blampied would dictate slowly while the other took down in a longhand that soon developed into a private shorthand, marked by curious abbreviations and a general meaninglessness to the outsider.  Afterwards, at his leisure, Smith would rewrite or type the letters in full.  They went to most of the corners of the world—a hotelkeeper in Yokohama, a university professor in Idaho, a train conductor on the Orient Express, an Austrian soldier lying wounded in a hospital in Salzburg, an editor in Liverpool, a rubber planter in Johore, a woman head of an advertising agency in Brisbane . . . these were a few out of the twenty-odd.  All, it appeared, were people whom Blampied had met at one time or another.  “I used to travel a good deal, before the war put an end to it, and now, I fear, I have neither the zest nor the money to resume.  But for a few shillings’ worth of stamps each week, I can almost achieve the same object. . . .  This morning, for instance, I shall write to M’sieur Gaston Auriac, Rue Henri Quatre, Antananarivo, Madagascar.  We met only once—on a steamer between Capetown and Durban, but we talked for long enough to make the discovery of each other.  Maybe you were surprised when I asked you whether you and Paula could use the same toothbrush?  You see, I have never married, so I don’t know whether physical oneness goes as far as that—but I do know that in the realm of mental and spiritual things there can be a similar oneness—the knowledge that yours and mine are no longer yours and mine, but OURS for every possible use.  And this awareness, once acknowledged by both parties, lasts for ever.  Gaston and I may disagree about this and that, but because our thought processes are in the same world, there’s a sense in which we can use each other’s minds.  We’re both impervious to sentimentality and mob optimism, and both of us also, if I may so express it, are accustomed to think proudly. . . .  We found that out during our three-hour talk seven years ago, and though we have never met since, we both know that it must still be true, despite all the changes that have taken place in the world about us. . . .  Just now, we’re in the midst of an argument as to the right way to treat Germany now the war’s over.  Gaston thinks the Allied armies should have pushed on to Berlin, even at the cost of an extra year of fighting, and then have broken Germany into fragments, acting with ruthless severity on the lines of delenda est Carthago. . . .  I, on the other hand, would have offered terms of simply astounding generosity—lifting the blockade the day after the Armistice, forbearing to ask for meaningless and uncollectable reparations, and inviting all the defeated countries into an immediate conference on equal terms to discuss the disarmament and rehabilitation of Europe.  As you can imagine, we’re enjoying as violent a discussion as the somewhat intermittent mails to Madagascar will permit.  But the point is: both of us are still thinking proudly.  Gaston is no frenzied sadist wishing to destroy for the sake of destroying; I am no milk-and-water humanitarian yearning over a defeated enemy merely because he is defeated and has been an enemy.  Both of us have the same aim in view—the cure of the thousand-year-old European disease; both methods have succeeded at various times throughout history—his, I admit, more often than mine.  Either might succeed today.  But what will NOT succeed, and what we both know will not succeed, is the unhappy mean between the two—the half-way compromise between sentiment and vengeance—the policy of SAFE men playing for SAFETY.”  He added, smiling:  “So you see, Mr. Smith, why it did not shock me the other day to hear that you had been classed at one time as a dangerous man.  All my friends are dangerous men.”

Smith came to enjoy the work of transcribing these letters, and sometimes also he helped with Church and Mission activities, especially those for which Blampied had little ability, such as children’s organizations.  He found that his experience on the train had been no fluke, but the result of an apparently inborn aptitude for handling youngsters.  Even the most stubborn, and from the worst slum homes, responded to his instinctive offering of ease and discipline; in fact it was the most stubborn who liked him and whom he liked the most.  He began holding classes in the Mission building, classes that did not invade the religious field (which he did not feel either the inclination or the authority to enter), but touched it variously and from neglected angles—classes on civics, on local history, on London and English traditions.  He was so happy over all this that it came to him with a sense of retrospective discovery that he must LIKE children—not sentimentally, but with a simple, almost casual affection.  “You’d have made a good schoolmaster,” Blampied once said, and then, when Smith replied he wasn’t sure he’d care to spend all his time with children, the other added:  “Exactly.  Good schoolmasters don’t.  Anyhow, you can help to make up for the fact that I’m a bad parson.”

“Do you really think you are?”

“Oh yes.  Ask anybody round here.  People don’t take to me.  I haven’t an ounce of crowd magnetism.  And then I’m lazy.  Only physically, I think, but then that’s the only kind of laziness most people recognize.”

“I think you’re old enough, if you don’t mind my saying so, to be forgiven a certain amount of physical laziness.”

“Yes, but I’m not lazy in the forgivable ways.  If I went to Lord’s

to watch the cricket they’d think I was a sweet old clergyman who

deserved his afternoon off, but as I’m only lazy enough sometimes

to go without a shave—“

Smith laughed, knowing what he meant, for while it could not be said that the parson neglected his professional duties, it was certainly true that he made no effort to make himself either a worldly success or a beloved failure—the two classifications that claim a roughly equal number of adherents among the clergy.  Nor, despite the fact that he inclined to High Church fashions, did he join the fanatical brotherhood of those who systematically disobey their bishops; his own disobediences were personal, casual, almost careless—wherefore his bishop disliked him all the more.  So did various influential parishioners to whom he refused to toady; while the poor, to whom he also refused to toady, rewarded him with a vast but genial indifference.  A few devoted lay workers ran the adjacent Mission, but they were not devoted to HIM, and when they pushed on him such tasks as the supervision of the annual outing it was with the knowledge and hope that he would have a bad time.  Nor did they care for his church services, which they thought cold and formal; they realized, correctly, that he was not the kind of cleric to “drag the people in,” and from time to time they plotted, more or less openly, to have him supplanted by some energetic slum parson who would unite both Church and Mission into a single buzzing hive.  But it is by no means easy to dislodge a parson of the Church of England, and Blampied had suffered no more than a gradual reduction of dues and stipend during his twelve years of office.

He was, in fact, though he hardly realized it because his wants were so few, very close to the poverty line.  He wore the shabbiest clothes; he lived on the simplest and cheapest of foods, though always well cooked; he paid cash to tradespeople, but owed large sums to local authorities for taxes and bills of various kinds.  About a month after his first meeting with Smith, his housekeeper fell suddenly ill and died within a few days; he was a good deal upset by that, but admitted that it had saved him from having to get rid of her, since he could no longer afford the few weekly shillings for her part-time services.  It was then he suggested to Smith and Paula that they should move into the house and live rent-free in return for similar help; they were glad to consent, since their own money was rapidly dwindling.

Out of the unused fifteen they chose two large attic rooms with a view over roof-tops northward as far as Hampstead and Highgate, and it was fun to begin buying the bare necessities of furniture and utensils, searching the Caledonian Market for broken-down chairs that could be repaired and re-upholstered, discarded shop fittings usable as bookshelves, an old school desk that showed mahogany under its coating of ink and dirt.  Gradually the rooms became a home, and the entirely vacant floor beneath encouraged a kinship with roofs and sky rather than with the walls and pavements of the streets.

Towards the end of September Blampied received a quarterly payment which he chose to devote to a crusading holiday rather than to paying arrears of his borough council rates; having invited Smith and Paula to join the expedition, he took them for a week into rural Oxfordshire “making trouble wherever we go,” as the parson put it, though that was an exaggeration.  The question of country footpaths was, he admitted, his King Charles’s Head—every man, he added, should have some small matter to which he attaches undue importance, always provided that he realizes the undueness.  Realizing it all the time, Blampied would puzzle over ancient maps in bar parlours, inquiring from villagers whether it was still possible to make the diagonal way across the fields from Planter’s End to Marsh Hollow, and generally receiving the answer that no one ever did—it was much quicker to go round by the road, and so on.  “I reckon you could if you tried, mister, but you’d ‘ave a rare time gettin’ through them nettles.”  A few more pints of beer would perhaps elicit the information that “I remember when I was a kid I used to go to school that way, but ‘twouldn’t be no help now, not with the new school where it is.”  Yet those, as the parson emphasized, drinking his beer as copiously as the rest, were the paths their forefathers had trod, the secret short cuts across hill and valley, the ways by which the local man could escape or intercept while the armed stranger tramped along the high roads.  All of which failed to carry much weight with the Oxfordshire men of 1919, many of whom, as armed strangers, had tramped the high roads of other countries.  They obviously regarded the parson as an oddity, but being country people they knew that men, like trees and unlike suburban houses, were never exactly the same, and this idea of unsameness as the pattern of life meant that (as Blampied put it) they didn’t think there was anything VERY odd in anyone being a LITTLE odd.

Several times the parson spoke on village greens to small, curious, unenthusiastic audiences, most of whom melted away when he suggested that there and then they should march over the ancient ground, breaking down any barriers that might have been erected during the past century or so; but in one village there was a more active response, due to the fact that the closing of a certain path had been recent and resented.  It was then that Blampied showed a certain childlike pugnacity; he clearly derived enormous enjoyment from leading a crowd of perhaps fifty persons, many of them youngsters out for a lark, through Hilltop Farm and up Long Meadow to the gap in the hedge that was now laced with fresh barbed wire.  Smith found he could best be useful in preventing the children from destroying crops or tearing their clothes; he thought the whole expedition a trifle silly but pleasingly novel.  Actually this particular onslaught had quite an exciting finish; the owner of the property, a certain General Sir Richard Hawkesley Wych-Furlough, suddenly appeared on the scene, backed by a menacing array of servants and gamekeepers.  Everything pointed to a battle, but all that finally developed was a long and wordy argument between the General and the parson, culminating in retirement by both sides and a final shout from the General:  “What the hell’s it got to do with YOU, anyway?  You don’t live here!”

“And that,” as Blampied said afterwards, “from a man who used to be Governor of so many islands he could only visit a few of them once a year—so that any islander might have met his administrative decisions with the same retort—‘What’s it got to do with YOU?  You don’t live here!’”

The notion continued to please him as he added:  “I was a missionary on one of those islands—till I quarrelled with the bosses.  I always quarrel with bosses. . . .”

 

 

Gradually Smith and Paula began to piece together Blampied’s history.  Born of a wealthy family whom he had long ago given up no less emphatically than they had him, he had originally entered the Church as a respectable and sanctioned form of eccentricity for younger sons.  Later, even more eccentrically and with a good deal more sincerity, he had served as a missionary in the South Seas until his employers discovered him to be not only heretical, but a bad compiler of reports.  After that he had come home to edit a religious magazine, resigning only when plunging circulation led to its bankruptcy.  For a time after that he had dabbled in politics, joining the early Fabians, with whom he never quarrelled at all, but from whom he became estranged by a widening gulf of mutual exasperation.  “The truth is, Smith,” he confessed, “I never could get along with all the Risers-to-Second-That and the On-a-Point-of-Orderers.  If I were God, I’d say—Let there be Light.  But as I’m not God, I’d rather spend my time plotting for Him in the dark than in holding committee meetings in a man-made blaze of publicity!”

He formed the habit of talking with the two of them for an hour or

so most evenings, especially as summer lagged behind and coal began

to burn in a million London grates.  To roof-dwellers it was a

rather dirty but strangely comforting transition—the touch of

smoke-laden fog drifting up from the river, the smell of

smouldering heaps in parks and gardens, the chill that seemed the

perfect answer to a fire, as the fire was to the chill.  For

London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most

autumnal—its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and

October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed

themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone.  There was a

charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about

muttering, “The nights are drawing in,” as if it were a spell to

invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter.  Indeed no

phrase, he once said, better expressed the feeling of curtained

enclosure, of almost stupefying cosiness, that blankets London

throughout the dark months—a sort of spiritual central heating, warm and sometimes weepy, but not depressing—a Dickensian, never a Proustian fug.

Those were the happy days when Smith began to write.  As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.  He turned out countless articles and sketches that gave him pleasure only because they contained a germ of what was in his mind; but he was never fully satisfied with them himself and consequently never more than slightly disappointed when editors promptly returned them.  He did not grasp that, because he was a person of no importance, nobody wanted to read his opinions at all.  Presently, by sheer accident, he wrote something that fitted a formula; it was promptly accepted and—even more important for him at the time—paid for.

After he had worked all morning he would often set out in the afternoon with Paula on a planless excursion decided by some chance-met bus; or sometimes they would tramp haphazardly first to the left, then to the right, mile after mile, searching for books or furniture in old, gas-lit shops, and returning late at night through the narrow defiles of the City.  They liked the City, the City with a capital C, and especially at dusk, when all the tea-shops filled with men, a curious democracy within a plutocracy— silk-hatted stockbrokers buying twopenny cups while at the same table two-pounds-a-week clerks drank similar cups and talked of wireless or motor bicycles or their suburban back gardens.  And afterwards, as Paula took his arm on the pavement outside, they would be caught in the human current sweeping along Old Broad Street in a single eastward stream, then crossing Liverpool Street like a flood tide into the vast station delta.  He loved to see those people, so purposeful and yet so gentle, so free and yet so disciplined, hurrying towards the little moving boxes that would carry them home to secret suburbs—secret because they were so unknown to one another, so that a bus shuttling all day between Putney and Homerton gave one a mystical curiosity about all the people in Homerton who had never seen Putney, and all the people in Putney for whom Homerton was as strange as—perhaps stranger than—

Paris or New York.  There was something fantastic, too, in that morning and evening migration, huger in man-miles than any movement of the hordes of Tamerlane, something that might well be incomprehensible to the urban masses of the future, schooled to garden cities and decentralization.  But there could never be such romance as in the pull of steam through the Bishopsgate tunnels, or faces that stared in friendly indifference as trains raced parallel out of Waterloo.

He wrote of such things, and he wrote as he saw—a little naïvely, as if things had never been seen before—like the line drawings of a child, with something of the same piercing simplicity.  It probably helped him, as Blampied said, to have forgotten so much about himself, because into that absence came an awareness far beyond the personal reach—the idea of the past as something to be apprehended in vision rather than explored in memory.  He wrote, too, of the countryside as he had seen it: of the men in the pubs with their red faces shy over mugs of beer—old couples outside their cottages on summer evenings, silent and close, yet in that silence and closeness telling all there is in the world—a pedlar unlatching a gate with slow steps towards a lonely house—farm workers at midday, asleep under trees—a little road over the hill, curving here and there for no reason at all . . . scene after scene, as a child turns pages in a loved picture book, yet behind the apocalyptic wonderment of it all there was something to which talks with Blampied had added shape and quality—the vision of a new England rooted far back in the old, drawing its strength from a thousand years instead of its weaknesses from a hundred.

“Follow that vision,” Blampied once said.  “Follow it wherever it leads.  Think it out.  Write it down.  I’d say PREACH it if the word hadn’t been debased by so many of my own profession.”

“I couldn’t preach, anyhow.  No more public appearances for me after the last one.”

“But preaching doesn’t need a pulpit.  All it needs is what you have—a faith.”

“Is yours the same faith?”

“You have your vision of England, I have mine of the world—but your England will fit into my world.”  He added, after a pause:

“Does that sound arrogant?  Maybe.  We mustn’t be afraid of a secret arrogance.  After all, we are spies of God, mapping out territory lost to the enemy when faith was lost.”  His eyes twinkled as he touched his collar.  “It isn’t THIS, you know, that makes me say so.  Religion’s only one of the things that can die without faith.  Take another, for the sake of something you may feel I’m more impartial about—take the League of Nations.  It’s sickening now of that deadliest of modern diseases—popular approval without private faith; it will die because it demanded a crusade and we gave it a press campaign, because it’s worth our passion and we deluge it with votes of confidence and acts of indifference.  It might have sprung alive out of the soul of a saint; it could only be stillborn out of a clause in a treaty.  It should have been preached until we were all aflame with it; instead of which it’s been flattered and fawned upon till most of us are already bored with it.  Sometimes I’ve even thought we should have given it ritual—a gesture to be made whenever the name’s mentioned, like the sign of the Cross for the faithful, or—for the faithless—blowing out the match after the second man’s cigarette.” As if reminded by that he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it as he continued:  “This is a good moment to say how much I hope you’ll stay with me here—both of you.  That is, if you’re happy.”

“We’re very happy.  But I have to think of how to make a living.”

“Life’s more important than a living.  So many people who make a living are making death, not life.  Don’t ever join them.  They’re the grave-diggers of our civilization—the safe men, the compromisers, the money-makers, the muddlers-through.  Politics is full of them, so is business, so is the Church.  They’re popular, successful—some of them work hard, others are slack, but all of them can tell a good story.  Never were such charming grave-diggers in the world’s history—and part of their charm is that they don’t know what they are, just as they don’t know what WE are, either.  They set us down as cranks, oddities, social outsiders, harmless freaks who can’t be lured by riches or placated by compliments.  But a time may come when we, the dangerous men, shall either be killed or made kings—because a time may also come when it won’t be enough to love England as a tired business man loves a nap after lunch.  We may be called upon to love her as the Irish love Ireland— darkly, bitterly, and with a hatred for some who have loved her less and themselves more.”

After another of their talks he told Smith of a friend of his in Liverpool, editor of a provincial paper with a small but influential circulation.  Apparently Blampied, unknown to Smith, had sent some of his literary work for this man to see; and now had come a request to see not only more of the work, but the writer of it.  “So I hope you’ll pay him a visit, because whatever project he has in mind, or even if he hasn’t one at all, I know you’ll like him personally.”

“Another dangerous man?” Smith queried.

Blampied nodded with an answering smile.

Smith was eager to go as soon as possible; after further communication an appointment was made for just after Christmas.  Paula and he spent the intervening week in a glow of anticipation, culminating in a Christmas dinner in their own attic room, with Blampied as a guest.  They decorated the place like children and found him like a third child in his own enjoyment of the meal and the occasion.  Later in the evening he gave them, to their complete astonishment, an almost professional display of conjuring tricks; after which Paula offered some of her stage impersonations, including one of a very prim Victorian wife trying to convey to her equally prim Victorian husband the fact that she rather thought she was going to have a child.  Towards midnight, when Blampied had drunk a last toast with them and gone down to his rooms below, they sat on the hearth-rug in the firelight happily reviewing the events of the evening, and presently Smith remarked that her impersonation of the Victorian wife was new to him—he didn’t remember her ever doing it on the stage, but he thought it would have gone very well if she had.

“But it wasn’t written then,” she answered.  “I write all my own sketches—I always did—and I wrote this one last night when you were downstairs talking to Blampied.  I suppose it was on my mind— the subject, I mean—because I’m in the same position, except that I’m not going to be prim about it.”

He took her into his arms quietly, sexlessly, as they sat before the fire.  Those were the happy hours.

The next day, as if their happiness were not enough, Blampied brought them news of another kind.  It was now many weeks since they had last seen any mention of the Fulverton case, and though they felt easier about it they still opened newspapers with a qualm.  But that morning Blampied had been searching old papers for something he wished to trace and by sheer accident had come across something else.  “It seems that your Thomas Atwill left hospital more than a month ago, and though of course that doesn’t mean the case is closed, I daresay the news will be a load off your mind.”

It so definitely was that the idea occurred to them to celebrate by doing things they had been nervous of for so long—a regular evening out.  They asked Blampied to join them, but he excused himself on the score of work; before they left the house, however, he shook hands with Smith and wished him a pleasant trip, for it had been arranged that he should leave that night for Liverpool.  Even though it would only be for a few days, the impending separation added spice to the evening.  They went first to the Holborn Empire to see Little Tich, then for supper to an Italian restaurant in Soho.  When they emerged, still with a couple of hours until train time, he saw a hansom cab swinging along Coventry Street, temptingly out of place on a cold December night, but for that very reason he waved to it, telling the man to take them anywhere, just for the ride.  Under the windy sky the blaze of Christmas still sparkled in the shops as they drove away, jingling north and west along Regent Street, through Hanover Square and past Selfridge’s to Baker Street, with ghosts of Londoners stepping out of their tall houses (“And if I mistake not, my dear Watson, here is our client just arriving”), bidding them godspeed into the future; and because they both had faith in that future they were drenched in a sort of wild ecstasy, and had the cabby drive them round and round Regent’s Park while they talked and laughed and whistled to the parrots every time they passed the Zoo.

Those were the happy moments.

Later, on the platform at Euston, walking up and down beside the

train, she said she wished she were going with him, though she knew

they couldn’t afford it, the little money he was beginning to make

by writing wasn’t nearly enough for such unnecessary jaunts.  “I

know that, darling, but I still wish I were going with you, and if

you were just to say the word, like the crazy man you are, I’d rush

to the booking-office and buy a ticket—which would be stupid.  I

don’t really mean it, Smithy—I’m only joking, of course.  But I’m

part of you—I’ll only be half alive while you’re away—we belong

to the same world, as Blampied says about his friends—“

“I know that too.  There’s something RIGHT about us—about our being together here.  And Blampied wants us to stay.”

“I’d like to stay too.  I love that old ugly house.”

“So do I.  And d’you know, I don’t WANT to remember anything now— anything I’ve ever forgotten.  It would be so—so unimportant.  My life began with you, and my future goes on with you—there’s nothing else, Paula.”

“Oh, what a lovely thing to tell me!  And by the way, HE said he hoped you wouldn’t remember.”

“Blampied?”

“Yes.  He’s devoted to you.”

“I should be proud to think so, because I’m equally devoted to him.”  He kissed her laughingly.  “Must we spend these last few seconds talking of someone else?”

“But he isn’t altogether someone else.  He’s part of us—part of our happiness—don’t you feel that?”

“Darling, I do—and I also love you!”

“I love you too.  ALWAYS.”

“The whistle’s going—I’d better get inside.  Good-bye, Paula.”

“Good-bye, old boy.”

“That’s the first time you’ve said ‘old boy’ for weeks!”

“I know, I’m dropping it.  Now I’m not a touring-company actress I don’t have to talk like one.  I can impersonate anybody, you know— even the wife of a writer on a secret errand to an editor in Liverpool. . . .”  The train began to move.  “Oh, DARLING—come back soon!”

“I will!  Good-bye!”

He reached Liverpool in the early morning.  It was raining, and in hurrying across a slippery street he stumbled and fell.

 

 

PART FIVE

 

Rainier began to tell me most of this during the drive back from Melbury that night; a few minor details, obtained afterwards from other sources, I have since fitted in.  We drove to his Club, because Mrs. Rainier was at Stourton; after perfunctory greetings to a few members in the lobby he ordered drinks to be sent up to the suite he usually lived in when Kenmore was not in use.

He had talked rapidly during the car journey, but now, in quieter surroundings, he seemed to accept more calmly the fact that there was much to tell that he could at last quite easily recall.  Once, when I thought he was growing tired and might remember more if he rested for a while, he brushed the suggestion aside.  “You see, I want to tell you all I can in case I ever forget it again, and if I do, you must remind me—you MUST—understand?”  I promised, and he continued:  “Not that I think I shall—it’s too clear in my mind ever to be lost again.  I could find Blampied’s old house in Vale Street now if I tried—Number 73, I think it was—or maybe 75--that much I HAVE forgotten, but I suppose I can’t expect memory to come back without the normal wear-and-tear of years.  Or can I?  Has it been in a sort of cold storage, with every detail kept fresh?”

We laughed, glad of an excuse to do so, and I said it raised an interesting point which I wasn’t expert enough to decide.  He then resumed:  “Because I actually FEEL as if it all happened only the other day, instead of twenty years ago.  That house of Blampied’s, for instance—it had four dreadful bay windows, one on each side of the front door and two others immediately above in the room that wasn’t occupied—the attics hadn’t got any bay windows.  There was a pretty grim sort of basement, too, where the housekeeper lived— she didn’t have to, she chose it because she was crazy enough to like it.  She was a queer woman altogether—God knows where Blampied picked her up or how long she’d been with him, but he cried when she died, and looked after her cat—which was also a queer animal, an enormous tabby—spent most of its life sleeping, probably because of its weight—it had won a prize as the biggest cat north of the Thames.”  He added, smiling:  “I daresay you think I’m inventing this—that there aren’t prizes for big cats.  But some newspaper ran a competition as a stunt—two first prizes, for North and South London—and Blampied’s housekeeper’s cat won one of them.”

No, I thought—you’re not inventing; you’re just enjoying yourself rather indiscriminately, as a child frolics in the sand when he first reaches the seashore; I could see how, in the first flush of recollection, the mere placement of the past, the assembling of details one after the other, was giving him an intense pleasure, and one by no means discountenanced by his use of words like “grim” and “dreadful.”

He went on like that for some time, going back over his story, picking out details here and there for random intricate examination; and carefully avoiding the issue that was foremost in my thoughts.  Then, once again, I saw that we had talked till dawn and well past it, for there was already a pale edge to the window.  I switched off his bedroom light and pulled the curtains; far below us the early morning trams were curving along the Embankment.  We watched the scene for a moment; then he touched my arm affectionately.  “Time for an adjournment, I think.  I know what’s in your mind, it’s in mine, too, but it’s too big to grasp—I’m collecting the small things first.  You’ve been good to listen to me.  What have we on Monday?”

My thoughts were so far away I could not give an immediate answer, though of course I knew.  He laughed at my hesitation, saying he hoped I should not lose my memory just because he had regained his.  By then I had remembered and could tell him:  “Anglo-American Cement—ten-thirty at the Cannon Street Hotel.”  To which he replied, almost gaily:  “The perfect closure to all our conversation. . . .”

“Don’t you want me for anything tomorrow?”

“No, I’ll sleep most of the day . . . at least I hope so. . . .

Good night.”

 

 

If this is a difficult story to tell, it may be pleaded in partial defence that the human mind is a difficult territory to explore, and that the world it inhabits does not always fit snugly into any other world.  I must admit that I found the fitting a hard one as, some thirty-six hours later, I watched the sunlight stream through stained-glass windows to dazzle the faces of Anglo-American Cement shareholders.  From the report afterwards sent out with the dividend I find that Rainier spoke as follows:--

“You will be glad to know that our sales have continued to increase throughout the year, after a somewhat slow beginning, and that prospects of continued improvement are encouraging.  The government’s national defence preparations during the September crisis of last year led to additional consumption of cement throughout the country, and this, at prices we were able to obtain, resulted in generally satisfactory business.  During the year we opened a new plant at Nottingham which we expect to enhance production very considerably during the coming year.  Your directors are constantly watchful for any opportunities of further economies, either by technical developments or by the absorption of competing companies, and with these aims in view, it is proposed, in addition to the usual dividend of 10 per cent, to issue new shares at forty-two shillings and sixpence in the proportion of one to five held by existing shareholders.”  (Loud applause.)

We had had no chance for private conversation on our way to the meeting, for the secretary of the company had driven with us; and afterwards there was a directors’ hotel lunch that did not disperse until almost three o’clock.  As I went to retrieve our hats at the cloak-room I overheard comments on how Rainier had been in grand form, looking so much better; wonderful year it had been; wonderful the way he’d pulled the Anglo-American out of its earlier doldrums— remember when the shares were down to five bob?--nice packet anyone could have made who’d helped himself in those days—well, maybe Rainier did, why not?--after all, he’d had faith in himself, faith in the business, faith in the country—that’s what was wanted, pity more people didn’t have it.

Later, as we were driving away, I repeated the compliments to Rainier, thinking they might please him.  He shook his head sombrely.  “Don’t call it faith.  I haven’t had FAITH in anything for years.  That artist fellow, Kitty’s young man, told me that when he was drunk—and he was right.  Faith is something deeper, more passionate, less derisive, more tranquil than anything I’ve ever felt in board-rooms and offices—that’s why peace won’t come to me now. . .  God, I’m tired.”

“Why don’t you go home and rest?”

He stared at me ironically.  “So simple, isn’t it?  Just go home and rest.  Like a child. . . .  Or like an old man.  The trouble is, I’m neither.  Or else both.”  He suddenly patted my arm.  “Sorry—don’t take any notice of my bad temper.”

“I don’t think you’re bad-tempered.”

“By the way,” he said smiling, “I’ve just thought of something— it’s a queer coincidence, don’t you think?--two of my best friends I first met quite accidentally on trains . . . Blampied and yourself. . . .”

“I’m pleased you should class me with him.”

“Why not?  He talked to me—you listen to me—even when I want to

talk all night.  That’s another thing I ought to apologize for—“

“Not at all—in fact if it helps you now to go on talking—to

continue the recollections—“

“I don’t think I’ve much more to say, unless there’s anything you’d particularly like to know?”

There were many things I wanted to know, but for the present I felt

I could only mention one of them.  “Those articles you wrote, some

of which were published—“

“Yes?”

“What papers did they appear in?”

“The Northern Evening Post took two or three—the worst.  The others—don’t know what happened to them.  Maybe they fell in the gutter when the car hit me.”

“You were carrying them—THEN?”

“Yes, I was on my way to see the editor.”

“A pity you hadn’t taken copies.”

“It was before the days I bothered about carbon paper.  You see, I never behaved like a full-dress author.  I used Blampied’s typewriter because he had one, but I didn’t card-index anything or call the room where I worked a study or self-consciously burn any midnight oil.  Matter of fact, I was in bed by ten on most nights, and I wrote if and when I felt like it.  I never thought of the word ‘inspiration’ as having anything to do with me—it was a continual vision of life that mattered more than words in print, but if I did get into print I had more ambition to be alive for half a day in a local paper than to be embalmed for ever between covers on a library shelf.”

“All the same, though, those articles might have been collected in book form.”

“Blampied thought of that, and Paula and I once made a choice of what we thought were the best—but I wasn’t very keen on the idea, and it certainly wasn’t likely any publisher would have been either.  I remember it chiefly because the evening we were choosing them Blampied came in and found us huddled together on the floor with the typed pages surrounding us.  He asked, ‘What are you two planning—the book or your future?’—and Paula laughed and answered ‘Both.’”

We had entered Palace Yard, passing the saluting policeman and a swarm of newsboys carrying posters about Hitler.  As we left the car a few seconds later Rainier added:  “It’s odd to reflect, isn’t it, that at that very moment a few hundred miles away a man whom we had never heard of was also planning a book—and our future.”

We crossed the pavement and entered the Gothic doorway; the House, as always, seemed restful, almost soporific, on a summer afternoon.

“And you’ve never written anything like those articles since?” I queried, after a pause.

“I’ve been too busy, Sir Hawk, as the lady called you, and possibly also my prose style isn’t what it used to be.  I did write one book, though—or perhaps Sherlock would have called it a monograph— the title was Constructive Monetary Policy and an International Cartel—I hope you’ve never heard of it.”

I said I had not only heard of it but read it.

“Then I hope you didn’t buy it when it first came out, because I came across it the other day on a barrow in the Farringdon Road, marked ‘Choice’ and going for fourpence.”

I smiled, recognizing the familiar self-ridicule by which he worked himself out of his moods.  We walked on through cool corridors to the Terrace and found a table.  As nearly always, a breeze blew over the parapet, bringing tangs of the sea and of wharves, a London mixture that added the right flavour to tea and buttered toast and the special edition of the Evening Standard.  More bother about Danzig; Hitler had made another speech.  Some Members came along, stopped at our table to exchange a few words of greeting; one, of them, seeing the headlines, exclaimed:  “Why don’t they let him have it, then maybe we’ll all get some peace?”—but another retorted indignantly:  “My dear fellow, we CAN’T let him have any more, that’s just the point, we’ve GOT to make a stand—eh, Rainier?”  Rainier said:  “We’ve got to have peace and we’ve got to make a stand—that’s exactly the policy of the government.”  They passed on, uncertain whether he had been serious or cynical (and that uncertainty, now I come to think of it, was part of the reason why he hadn’t climbed the higher rungs of the Parliamentary ladder).

He looked so suddenly exhausted after they had gone that I asked if he had been able to sleep at all during the previous day and night.

“Not much.  A few hours yesterday morning after you left.  The rest of the day I devoted to an investigation.”

“Oh?”

“I went to Vale Street to look for Blampied’s old house.  It’s disappeared—been pulled down to make room for one of those huge municipal housing schemes.  All that part of London seems to be changed—and it’s certainly no loss, except in memories.  I couldn’t even find anybody who REMEMBERED Blampied.”

“That’s not very surprising.”

“Why not?”  He stared at me sharply, then added:  “D’you mean you don’t believe he ever existed?”

“Oh, he existed all right.  But he died such a long time ago.”

“When?”

“In 1920.”

“Good God!  Within a year—of—of my—leaving—like that.”

“Not only within a year.  Within a month.  JANUARY 1920.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I also spent part of yesterday investigating.  I searched the obituaries in newspaper files and found this.”  I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had copied out the following from the Daily Gazette of January 17, 1920:--

 

We regret to announce the death at the age of seventy-four of the Reverend John Sylvester Blampied, for many years Rector of St.  Clement’s Church, Vale Street, North London.  Pneumonia following a chill ended a career that had often attracted public attention— particularly in connection with the preservation of ancient footpaths, a cause of which Mr. Blampied had been a valiant if sometimes tempestuous champion.  His death took place in Liverpool, and funeral services will be held at St. Clement’s on Friday.

 

Rainier stared at the paragraph long enough to read it several times, then handed it back.  His face was very pale.  “LIVERPOOL?  What was he doing there?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“I—I think I can guess.  He’d gone to look for me.”

“We don’t KNOW that.”

“But isn’t it probable?”

“It’s—it’s possible.  But you couldn’t help it.  You couldn’t help finding out who you were.”

“I can’t help comparing what I found with what I lost!”

“You didn’t lose permanently.  You’ve got it all back now.”

“But too late.”  He waved his arm with sudden comprehensive emphasis.  “ISN’T it too late?  I’m down to ask a question in the House shortly, but not THAT question, yet it’s the only one worth asking or answering . . . isn’t EVERYTHING too late?  I should have stayed in that London attic.  There were things to do in those days if one had vision to do them, but now there’s neither time nor vision, but only this whiff of putrefying too-lateness.  It was almost too late even then, except that by a sort of miracle there came a gap in long-gathering clouds—an incredibly last chance—a golden shaft along which England might have climbed back to glory.”

“Less lyrically, you mean you’d like to set the clock back?”

“Yes, set it back, and set it right, and then wind it up, because it’s been running down ever since Englishmen were more interested in the price of things on the market than what they could grow in their own gardens.”

“I see.  A back-to-the-land movement?”

“Back anywhere away from the unrealness of counting able-bodied men as a national burden just because they’re listed as unemployed, and figures in bank ledgers as assets just because they’re supposed to represent riches.  Back anywhere from the mood in which poor men beg me for jobs in Rainier factories and rich men for tips about Rainier shares.”

“All the same, though—and you’ve often said it yourself—the

Rainier firm gives steady employment to thousands—“

“I know, I know.  But I know too that the way that made Rainiers rich was the opposite of the way to make England strong.”

“Yet if war comes, won’t the riches of Rainier have been of some

benefit?  After all, the new steelworks you were able to build two

years ago, and the mass-production motor plant—“

“True—and what a desolate irony!  But only HALF true, because

strength is only half in tanks and steel.  The other half is faith,

wisdom—“

A House servant approached and said something in his ear; he answered, consulting his watch:  “Oh yes.  I’ll come at once.” Then he added to me:  “It’s time for that question.”

We left the table and walked through the Smoking Room to the Lobby; then we separated, he to enter the Chamber, I to watch and listen from the Strangers’ Gallery.

Again, as earlier at the Cement meeting, I was in no mood for correct secretarial concentration; from where I sat the main thing that impressed me was his strained pallor on rising to speak; in the green-yellow glow that came on as dusk fell his face took on a curious transparency, as if some secret hidden self were flooding outwards and upwards.  But that, I knew, was a mere trick of artificial light; the House of Commons illumination flatters in such a way, often gilding with spirituality a scene which is not, in itself, VERY remarkable—a few Members going through the formality which would later entitle them to boast of having “raised the matter in the House,” than which, except for writing letters to The Times, fortunate generations of Englishmen were never called upon to do more.  That afternoon the benches were thinly populated, nothing important was expected, and I find from newspaper reports that the following took place:--

 

Mr. Charles Rainier (Conservative: West Lythamshire) asked whether a consignment of trade catalogues dispatched by a business firm in his constituency had been confiscated by the port authorities at Balos Blanca, and whether this was not contrary to Section 19 of the recent Trade Convention signed at Amazillo.

The Right Honourable Sir George Smith-Jordan (Conservative:

Houghley), replying for the Government, said he had been informed by His Majesty’s Consul at Balos Blanca that the reported confiscation had been only partial and temporary, affecting a certain section of the catalogues about which there appeared to have been some linguistic misunderstanding, and that the greater part of the consignment had since been delivered to the addressees.  As to whether the action of the port authorities had or had not been an infringement of any clause of the Amazillo Trade Convention, he was not in a position to say until further information had been received.

Mr. Jack Wells (Labour: Mawlington) asked whether, having regard to the general unsatisfactoriness of the incident, His Majesty’s Government would consider the omission of Balos Blanca from the scheduled list of ports of call during the proposed Good-Will Tour of the British Trade Delegation in 1940.

The Right Honourable Sir George Smith-Jordan: No, sir.

 

Immediately after that, Rainier picked up his papers and walked out, leaving the Mother of Parliaments to struggle along with barely more than a quorum till after the dinner hour.  Meanwhile I left the Gallery, in which a small crowd of provincial and foreign visitors had been defiantly concealing their disappointment at the proceedings below, and met him in the Lobby; he was gossiping with strangers, but behind the façade of casualness I saw how haggard he looked, his face restlessly twitching in and out of smiles.  Seeing me approach he made a sign for me to wait while he detached himself from the crowd—they were constituents, he explained later, and constituents had to be humoured, especially when one’s majority had been only twelve last time.  “They’re so proud because they heard me ask about that catalogue business—they have a touching belief that a question in Parliament pulls invisible wires, sets invisible forces in motion, works invisible miracles all over the world.”

Passing through the Smoking Room again on the way to the Terrace we saw the name “McAlister” on the notice-board that announced current speakers; Rainier smiled and said that was fine—McAlister always gave one a chance to stroll for half an hour with the certainty of not missing anything.  “By the way, I’m dining at the Historians’ Club, so I don’t think I’ll need you for the rest of the evening.”

“Are you down to speak?”

“I’m not on the programme, but I daresay I’ll be asked.”

“You don’t have to go if you’d rather not.  I can make up some excuse.”

“What’s the idea—encouraging me to shirk?”

“I thought—perhaps—you might be feeling rather exhausted.”

“Not a bit of it NOW.  I’m game for more than a speech at a Club dinner.  You’d be surprised if you knew what’s in my mind.”

We stepped into the cool evening air and began walking towards Westminster Bridge.  He had given me a cue to say what I had been planning most of the day.

“My advice would be to put the whole thing OUT of your mind, now that it’s happened at last, and there isn’t a gap any longer.  You ought to be satisfied.”

“SATISFIED?”  He swung round on me.  “When you say that I wonder if— if you quite realize—what it all amounts to?”

“Oh yes, I do.  It means that so far as there was ever anything abnormal in your life, you’re now completely cured.”

We came near the Bridge, a blaze of illumination from lines of trams, and in that light I saw such anguish in his eyes that I could only repeat, with an emphasis that somehow drained away as the words were spoken:  “Utterly and completely cured.”

“You don’t REALLY think that’s all it amounts to?  You must know there’s only one thing that matters—only one thing left for me to do.”

“And that is?”

“I must find her.”

So there it was squarely before us, the issue that had of course been in my mind, that I had done a pathetic best to make him shirk by conscientiously shirking it myself.  We walked a little way in silence.

“After all these years,” I said at length, “it doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I must try.”

“It was up to her, surely, to look for you—yet apparently she never did.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  I don’t care.  And besides—there’s my son.

She was going to have a child.”

“But even a return of memory can’t prove it was a boy.”

He smiled.  “No, but I hope so.  I’ve always wanted a boy.  He’d be eighteen now.  I must find him . . . both of them.”

“And if by chance—not that I think there IS much chance—but just for the sake of argument—if you SHOULD happen to succeed, what then?”

He answered with a certain impregnable simplicity:  “Then I should be happy again.”

“Possibly, but apart from your own personal happiness . . .  Look here, why not think it over—not now—but later—calmly—when you’re alone?”

“I’m calm now, and it doesn’t particularly help me to be alone when I think.  I was thinking it over very clearly all the time I was asking that question in the House.”

“Yes, I could see you were—but that doesn’t meet my point, which

is that you haven’t—you can’t have—reckoned with all the

complications—“

“COMPLICATIONS?  You’ll be telling me next I ought to consult old Truslove!”

“Actually I wasn’t thinking of legal complications at all, though they doubtless exist.  It’s other kinds you’d find most disagreeable—newspaper publicity, gossip and scandal that wouldn’t do you any good politically.”

“I think I’ve had enough good done to me politically.”

“And then of course there’s your wife.  Whatever your private feelings are, and of course it’s none of my business, you ought at least to consider HER position.”

“Anything I ought to do now is nothing compared with what I ought to have done before.”

“But that’s in the past—IRREVOCABLE.”

“No, not if she and I can find each other again.”

“It seems to me we’re talking about different persons.”

“Oh, I see.”

We walked on for another spell of silence.  Then I said:  “But you don’t even know that the . . . the other woman’s ALIVE?”

He was silent for a while.  “DO you?” I pressed.

“No, that’s true.”  Then suddenly:  “But if she is, and I can find her, then nothing on earth will stop me—neither publicity, nor politics, nor . . .”  He turned to me abruptly.  “I don’t want to be dramatic.  Let’s leave that to the journalists who’ll have the job of making a nine days’ wonder of it.”

“Maybe they won’t.  Maybe they’ll have more important news, the way events are going.”

As we turned into the Smoking Room the board showed that McAlister was still speaking.  A group of Members at one of the tables greeted Rainier chaffingly and asked him to join them; as if relieved to be rid of the argument he gave me a nod of friendly farewell and sat down with them, completely master of himself so far as voice and manner were concerned.  But I heard one of them say, just as I was entering the corridor:  “You look pretty washed-out, Rainier—what’s the matter?  Hitler getting on your nerves?”

I went back to my rooms in Bedford Square and spent the evening with the latest editions of the papers.  But I could not keep my mind on the fast-developing European crisis; my thoughts were full of Rainier and his story; I mused upon his whole life as I now knew it: childhood at Stourton, with the despotic father and adored mother; schooldays; then the war, the hospitals, the brief unmemoried idyll; then the return to the routine struggle that had brought him wealth, power, and a measure of fame.  I could not but feel his personal drama near to me as I turned on the radio for the larger drama of our times, for that too had reached a moment of desperate retrospect.

About midnight I strolled into Tottenham Court Road and watched the crowd pouring out of theatres and restaurants; when I returned there was a letter pushed under the door.  It was from Rainier, enclosing another letter.  He wrote:--

 

I said I would let you see that last note Kitty wrote me; here it is, and whatever it means to you, to me, re-reading it just now, it meant as much more as you can possibly imagine.  Yrs. C. R.

 

The letter from Kitty, dated September 30, 1929, was as follows:--

 

MY DEAR CHARLES,

I’m writing this in a hurry, but after thinking things out as slowly and carefully as even you could—in fact I’ve been gathering together many thoughts I began to have the moment we left the Jungfraujoch last April, in the train and on the boat, and then again off and on ever since, and especially in the restaurant tonight—Dearest, it wasn’t the weather or the altitude or the stock market—it was our own hearts sinking a little, and I’m going to face that frankly, because I doubt if you ever would or could.  I can’t marry you, Charles dear—that’s what it amounts to.  We’ve had marvellous times, we’d still go on having them, we have so much in common, the same way of seeing things, the same kind of craziness (though you keep yours in check more than I do)--you could make me perfectly happy if only I were selfish enough not to care or stupid enough not to notice that at some point in the final argument you waver and turn away.  So here’s my decision—No, darling, while it’s still not quite too late; and here are my plans—

I’m leaving London immediately, I’ll have gone before you read this—I shall probably join Jill (wherever she is, Luxor, I think)-- not tragically, but in a mood to see what fun I can find—and I usually can.  I’m sending this by special messenger because I want it to reach you before you go to the office, so that you won’t send out those invitations and then have to cancel them—as for selling short to amuse me, it wouldn’t amuse me, I’m afraid, but if you think it would amuse you, why don’t you do it?  Dear Charles, I want you to be happy, to be amused, to do things because you desire them, not because you’re urged or tempted; I wish we could be and do all we talked of on the mountain, but the fact is, I’m not the one for you, though God knows the mistake was excusable for both of us, because I’m NEARLY the one—I claim that much and it’s something to go on being proud of.  But “nearly” isn’t enough for a lifetime—it would be too hard to strain after the hidden difference.  And there’s something else that may sound utterly absurd, but let me say it—sometimes, especially when we’ve been closest, I’ve had a curious feeling that I REMIND YOU OF SOMEONE ELSE—someone you may have met or may yet meet—because with that strange memory of yours, the tenses get mixed up—or don’t they?  But Charles, because I AM so nearly the one, and because I love you more than anyone I shall ever marry, will you forgive me for this upset and stay friends?--K.

 

I went to his City office the following morning and waited till after ten o’clock (he usually arrived at nine); then I rang up his Club and was told he had left very early, giving no forwarding address.  It was a day of such important engagements that I went over to the Club immediately, hoping to find out more than they would tell me over the telephone.

The porter, who knew me, said he had left about six, by car.

“Hanson was with him then?”

“No, sir, he drove alone.  It wasn’t his usual car—quite a small one, a brown two-seater.”

“But he hasn’t got a two-seater.”

“Well, he went away in one—that’s all I can tell you, sir.  I think it was an Austin, but I’m not sure.”

“And he left no message for me?”

“No, sir—no message for anybody, except that he’d be away till he got back.  That was his phrase.  He seemed in a very cheerful mood.  I thought maybe he had some good news, but it don’t look like it from today’s papers.”

“Well, I expect I’ll hear from him—it’s all right.”  I went away as if I thought it really was, because I was anxious not to start gossip at the Club.  Then I went back to the City office and pretended the mystery was cleared up—he’d had to go away for a few days on an important political errand; I telephoned to cancel all his appointments for the day, giving the same story, except that to those in the political world I made out it was a business errand.  There were certain advantages in belonging to two worlds.  I wondered if I should hear from him, by either wire or telephone, as the day proceeded, but no message came, and in the late afternoon I drove to Stourton.  There were several cars outside the main entrance, but none was a brown two-seater; I hadn’t really expected it.  Woburn met me on the threshold.  “What are YOU doing here?” he greeted me, as if he owned the place.

“What are YOU doing here, for that matter?  Still on the catalogue?”

“No, I’ve finished that and several more since.  I’m just a guest.”

“Well, that’s very nice.”

“There’s going to be a big party this week-end.”

There was, and that was what I had come about.  “Where’s Mrs.

Rainier?”

“On the terrace—dispensing cocktails and small talk with her usual glassy proficiency.  Just a local crowd—they’ll go soon.”

“Let’s join them.”

I realized then, as soon as I saw her in the distance, how keenly my sympathies had been enlisted for a woman whose glassiest proficiency could hardly help her much in the situation that was now so rapidly developing.  As we shook hands she seemed to me rather like a pathetic tight-rope walker doing her tricks in confident unawareness that the rope was about to be cut.

The crowd were mostly neighbours whom I had met before, but there was one fresh face—Sir William Somebody, whom I knew to be a retired diplomat who lived on his pension in a farmhouse rented from the Rainiers.  Mrs. Rainier introduced me with the remark that perhaps, having just driven from London, I could give him the latest news.  “Sir William thinks the situation’s far worse than people realize.”

I passed on what news there was; then a girl called Cynthia exclaimed:  “We mustn’t miss the wireless bulletin.  Hasn’t he been making another speech today?”  (It had come to the point where an unrelated “he” could only refer to Hitler.)

“Just words, nothing but words,” someone else muttered.

“Better than actions, anyhow.”

Mrs. Rainier intervened lazily:  “Oh, I’m not so sure of that as I used to be.  I mean, when you’re waiting for something to happen, and rather dreading it . . .”  She went on:  “Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you’re certain it’s the wrong road and you tell them, but they won’t listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?”

“A parable, darling.  Please interpret.”

She seemed embarrassed by being the focus of attention—which was unusual of her.  “No, thanks, Cynthia.  That’s been enough words for ME.”  She laughed and came round with the cocktail-shaker, refilling the glasses, including her own.

Sir William resumed:  “Well, if he DOES march into Poland, we shall fight.”  Then suddenly he pointed to the great avenue of elms for which Stourton was famous.  “Look at those trees—planted two centuries ago, deliberately, by someone who thought of a time when someone else would see them like this.  Who could do such a thing today?”  Nobody informed him, and after a pause to deposit an olive stone in an ash-tray he went on:  “The most we do is to bury things under foundation-stones so that future civilizations can dig into our ruins and wonder.”

We all laughed, because after a few drinks what can one do but laugh; then in ones and twos the party dispersed and drove away in its cars.  I went to the library and turned on the radio for the news bulletin; Hitler’s speech had been just another threat to march.  Somehow one didn’t believe he would; there had been crises before, ending up in a deal; so that one had the half-cynical suspicion that both sides were secretly arranging another deal and that the wordy warfare was just shadow-boxing, face-saving, anything but a prelude to the guns.  While I was listening Sheldon entered to announce that dinner would be almost immediately, and that Mrs. Rainier had said “not dress.”

“Good—since I haven’t brought anything.”

“I think Mrs. Rainier anticipated that.”

“Very thoughtful of her.”

“You left Mr. Rainier in the City?”

“Er . . . yes.”

“Then you’ll be going back in the morning?”

“I expect so.”

He nodded and went to the door, then turned and asked:  “What’s going to happen, do you think?”

“Can’t tell yet, but it looks pretty serious.”

He said, still standing in the doorway:  “I mean what’s going to happen to Mr. Rainier?”

He went on, facing my stare:  “You said he’s in the City.”

“I didn’t say that.  I said I left him there.”

“Don’t you know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that rather peculiar?”

“Many things are peculiar, Sheldon.”

“Are you worried about him? . . .  You must excuse me, I have a special reason for asking.”

“I’m sure you have.  It might even be the same reason I have for not answering.”

He came back into the room.  “Mr. Harrison . . . has he gone away to look for somebody?”

“I really don’t think I can discuss—“  Then something in his glance made me add:  “But supposing he had—then what?”

He smiled his slow slanting smile.  “Then you don’t need to worry.”

“I didn’t say I was worrying at all.  But why don’t I need to?”

“Because he won’t succeed in finding the person he’s looking for.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he never has succeeded.”

He left me then, and a few minutes later the dinner-gong sounded.  When I joined Mrs. Rainier in the dining-room, with Sheldon standing at the sideboard, I had a feeling they had been exchanging glances if not words about me, but I could not say much during dinner, on account of Woburn’s presence.  As if by tacit agreement we left him most of the talking, which he kept up very agreeably throughout the meal—he was really a very adaptable young man, you would have thought him born and bred at Stourton, except that most of those who had been were so much less smoothly articulate.  I was wondering how I could shake him off afterwards, but Mrs. Rainier did it for me, saying outright that she expected I had some business to talk over, so if Woburn would excuse us . . .

“Do you mind if we have a fire?” she asked, as soon as we were alone in the drawing-room.  I helped her to remove the heavy screen, saying something about the night being cold for the eve of September.

“It isn’t that,” she answered, kneeling on the hearth-rug.  “But it makes a more cheerful background when so many uncheerful things are happening.”

Looking at her then, I realized for the first time how much more she was than merely vivacious and attractive; her face had a beauty that poured into it from within—a secret, serene radiance.  She went on, stooping to the fire:  “You’ve saved me the trouble of calling at the office tomorrow—I wanted to ask about something.”

“Good job you didn’t, because I’m not sure Mr. Rainier will be there.”

“Oh?  He’s gone away somewhere?”

“Yes.”  I remembered him saying she was never surprised at any of his movements.  “And as I don’t know when exactly he’ll be coming back, I was wondering about the week-end plans.”

“The political situation’s so serious I doubt if we’d have had the party anyway.  Yes, let’s cancel it.”

“That’s what I was going to suggest.”

“Nice of you, but why didn’t you telephone?”  She added hastily:

“Not that I’m not pleased to see you—I always am—but it gave you the journey.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind.  I’m equally pleased to see YOU.”

She laughed.  “Now we’ve had the exchange of compliments—“

She didn’t know what else to say, I could see that; and after a pause I resumed:  “What was it you wanted to ask about if you had called at the office?”

“Oh yes, maybe you can tell me just as well.  Why did you and Charles drive out to Melbury the other night?”

The sheer unexpectedness of the question nonplussed me for a moment.  In the meantime she went on:  “And don’t blame Hanson—he wasn’t to know he’d overheard such a tremendous secret!”  She was laughing.

“Oh, not—er—exactly a secret.”

“Well, a mystery.”

I said to gain time:  “And you were going to pay a special visit just to ask that?”

“Yes, indeed—I’ve been terribly curious ever since I heard about it.”

“Then it’s my turn to say why didn’t you telephone?”

“Perhaps because I wanted to see your faces when I asked you—it’s so much harder to hide something that way!”  She laughed again.  “Won’t you let me in on the puzzle?  Melbury’s such an odd place for anyone to make a trip to.”

It suddenly occurred to me that she had to know, and now was the chance to tell her.  I said:  “Mr. Rainier was once in a hospital at Melbury.”

In the blaze of fresh firelight I could see the laughter drain away from her face and a sudden pallor enter it; but in another second she was smiling again.

“Well, it seems a queer reason for driving somewhere in pouring rain in the middle of the night.  For that matter Charles was at other hospitals too—he was pretty badly hurt in the war, you know.  It even affected his memory for a time.  I never knew quite how much you had gathered about all that—“  She was striving to seem very casual.

“Just the main facts, that’s all.”

“He told you them himself?”

“Yes.”

The smile remained as if fixed to her face.  “Oh, I’m so glad, because it shows how close you must have been to him as a friend.  He doesn’t often talk about it to anybody.  And to me he NEVER talks about it.”

“Never?”

“No, never.  Isn’t that strange?  But then he’s so little with me— and mostly we have business or politics to talk about.  Our marriage is a very happy one, but it’s never been—well, CLOSE is perhaps the word.  We’ve never even had a close quarrel.”

“But you love him?”

“Well, what do you think?  I adore him—most women do.  Haven’t you noticed that?  All his life he could always have had any pretty woman he wanted.”

“So it isn’t surprising that he GOT the pretty woman he wanted.”

“More compliments? . . .  Oh, but you should have seen the girl he was engaged to when I first became his secretary.  I WAS his secretary—you knew that too, I suppose?  She was much prettier than me, AND younger.  Kitty, her name was.  She married somebody else and died—I can’t think why—I mean why she married somebody else, not why she died—she died of malaria—I suppose there’s no reason at all for that, except mosquitoes.  I think they’d have been very happy—she and Charles, I mean, not the mosquitoes—but she’d have tried to make him give up the business.  I know that, because she told me.”

I could catch a note of hysteria subdued behind her forced facetiousness; I said, as calmly as I could:  “You knew her well, then?”

“Only by talking to her while she used to wait in the office for Charles.”

“Tell me—if it isn’t impertinent to ask—were you also in love with him then?”

She laughed.  “Of course.  Right from the first moment I set eyes on him. . . .  But that didn’t make me jealous of Kitty—only a bit envious, perhaps.  I wonder how it would have worked out—Charles without all the business and politics.  Of course he found out later I was the one to help him in that, and so I have—I’ve done my best to give him everything he wants—success—his ambitions . . .  and yet sometimes lately I’ve thought . . . well, like my parable.”

“Parable?”

“Cynthia called it that during cocktails, don’t you remember?  About going somewhere with someone and having doubts about it being the right road, but there’s nothing you can do but plod along until the other person begins to doubt.  And then, of course, if you admit that you had doubts all the time, as likely as not he turns on you and says—well, why didn’t you warn me?”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“Because he wouldn’t have taken any notice if I had.  In fact he might not even have married me—and I WANTED him to marry me.  After Kitty died he threw himself into business more than ever— which gave me my chance—oh, I admit I was quite designing about it.  So was he.  He found how good I was—what a valuable merger it would be.  He was always clever about mergers. . . .”

“Did that entirely satisfy you?”

“No, but I thought it might lead to something that would—to the REAL closeness.  But it’s hard to get close when so many things are in the way. . . .  May I have a light?”  She was reaching for a cigarette on the side table and I could see that her hand was trembling.  She added, as I held the match:  “Do you want a drink in exchange?”

“I think I’d rather wait till later.”

“Later?  Well, how long do you expect to sit up and talk parables?”

I said then:  “Mrs. Rainier, I think I’d better tell you more about the visit to Melbury.”

“Oh yes, the mystery—do PLEASE tell me everything!  What did you find there?”

She was smiling as I began to tell her, and the smile grew faint as I proceeded, then appeared again in time for the end.  I told her all that was important for her to know—the fact of his earlier marriage, his life during those brief months immediately afterwards, and how that life had come to an abrupt finish.  I did not try to make it easier for her by a gingerly approach to the problem, or by minimizing its complexities.  And I told her how he had reacted to the recent return of memory—his first excitement, then his calmer determination and bitter regret for the years between.  Finally I told her that though it seemed to me highly unlikely that after two decades he would succeed in tracing someone who hadn’t apparently succeeded in the much easier task of tracing him during the same interval, and though the gap of years gave legal as well as every other kind of sanction to what had happened since, she must be prepared for the faint possibility; and that if it happened the publicity would be neither pleasant for her nor helpful to his position.

“He must know that too.”

“Yes, but in his present mood he doesn’t care.”

“Oh, HE DOESN’T CARE?”  She said that so softly, so gently, still smiling.  I tried to think of something to express the wave of sympathy that overcame me; in the end I could only give her my silence.  Presently she touched my hand and said:  “Thank you for telling me all this.”

“I must say you take it very well.”

“Did you expect me to make a scene?”

“No, but . . . when I try to imagine your feelings . . .”

“I don’t feel anything yet, at least not much, but I keep on thinking of what you said—that HE DOESN’T CARE!”

“I know it’s terrible, but—“

“Oh, no, it’s WONDERFUL!  He’d throw over everything—his future— his ambitions—EVERYTHING—if he could find her!”

“In his present mood he thinks so.”

“Don’t keep saying ‘in his present mood.’  Maybe his present mood is himself, and all the other moods were false. . . .  How do we know?”

“There’s one thing we do know—that people are remembered as they were last seen—and twenty years is a long time.”

She turned to me with brightly shining eyes.

“How sad that is, and how true.”

“And from your point of view—how fortunate.”

“Oh no, no—I wish she were still as he remembers her.  I wish there WERE such a miracle.  If all of us could go back twenty years—how different the world would be!  I want him to be happy, I always have. . . .  Now will you have your drink?”

“If you will too.”

She went over to the table and mixed them; I could see she was glad of something to do.  Stooping over the glasses she continued:  “I suppose he told you a great deal more than you’ve told me?”

“Only details.”

“Ah, but the details—those are what I want to hear.  Did he remember things very clearly?”

“Yes.”

“Places and people?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me some of them.”

I hesitated, again catching the note of hysteria in her voice; she added:  “It doesn’t hurt me—as much as you think.  Tell me some of them. . . .  You say he met her first at Melbury?”

“Yes—on that first Armistice Day.”

“And they were married in London?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he propose to her?  Did he tell you that?”

“A village in the country somewhere—I think it was called Beachings Over.”

“Beachings Over . . . an odd name.”

“England is full of them.”

“I know—like Nether Wallop and Shallow Bowells. . . .”  She turned round with my drink.  “And war coming to them all again.  Do you think there’s still a chance of avoiding it?”

“There’s always a chance of postponing it.”

“No—we’ve had enough of that.”

“I think so too.”

“But we’re not ready yet, are we?”

“We’re terribly unready.  We missed our ways years ago and found a wide, comfortable road, fine for sleep-walkers, but it had the major drawback of wandering just anywhere, at random.”

“Charles always thought that, but as a rich man it wasn’t easy for him to say so.  Being rich tied his hands and stopped his mouth and took up his time—so that the wasted years wasted him too. . . .”

“I think he’s begun to realize that.”

“Yes, he’s sure of something at last. . . .  Another drink?”

“No, thanks.”

A long pause.  “There’s nothing we can do about it now, is there?”

“Are you talking about—er—the country—or—er—“

“Both, in a way.”

“I think one can make up for lost time, but one can’t salvage it.

That’s why HIS quest is so hopeless.”

Her voice softened.  “So you think that’s where he’s gone—to look for her?”

“It’s possible. . . .  But to look for her as she WAS, and that’s impossible.”

The hysteria touched her voice again.  “Tell me another detail—no

matter how small or trivial—please tell me—“

“I think you’re needlessly upsetting yourself.”

“No, it isn’t upsetting—it’s—it’s almost helping me in a way—

tell me something—“

“I’d rather not, and besides, it’s hard to think—“

“Oh, but you said he talked all night and you’ve only talked for an hour so far.  There must be hundreds of things—names of places or incidents that happened here or there—or how she looked. . . .”

“Well . . . let me see . . .”

“How DID she look?  Did he remember her well?”

“He seemed to, though he never described her exactly—but he did say—I believe he said when they first met she was wearing a little fur hat like a fez. . . .  Or no, I may have mixed things up—that was Kitty when she stepped out of the train at Interlaken.”

“Interlaken?”

“They had a holiday there—he and Kitty.”

“I know.  And SHE was wearing a little fur hat like a fez?  Or the other one?  Or both, maybe—but wouldn’t that be rather improbable?”

“Yes, of course.  I’m sorry—it was like me to choose a detail I’d get confused over.”

She put her hand in mine.  “It doesn’t matter.  You’ve been very kind.  I wish I’d known you better—and earlier.  Thank you again.”

“You understand that I’m anxious to help BOTH of you?”

“Yes, I understand.  But I don’t know how you can.”

“Anyhow, there’s a sort of chilly comfort in thinking how unimportant all one’s personal affairs are these days.”

She got up and began walking to the door.  “Yes, but when that sort of comfort has chilled one quite thoroughly, the warmth comes—the feeling that nothing matters EXCEPT personal feelings . . . the what-if-the-world-should-end-tonight mood.”

We shook hands at the doorway, and there she added, smiling:

“Perhaps our world IS ending tonight. . . .”

 

                    *    *    *    *    *

 

I stayed in the drawing-room a little while after she had gone; then I thought it would be only civil to find Woburn.  He was in the library, listening to the radio.  “Still nothing definite.  You know, if there’s a war, I want to get in the Air Force.”  We had another drink and talked for about an hour before going upstairs.

I had asked Sheldon to call me at seven; he did so, bringing in a cup of tea.  “I thought you’d wish to know the news—it just came over the wireless.”  Then he told me.

I got up hurriedly.  It was a perfect late-summer morning, cool and fresh, with a haze of mist over the hills.  Woburn had brought a small radio into the breakfast room; we hardly exchanged a greeting, but sat in front of the instrument, listening as the first reports came through.  Presently Mrs. Rainier entered, stood in the doorway to hear a few sentences, then joined us with the same kind of whispered perfunctory good-morning.  The bulletin ended with a promise of more news soon, then merged into music.

That was how we had breakfast on that first morning of the second war—to the beat of a dance band and with the sunlight streaming through the windows of Stourton.

After breakfast we heard the news repeated, and found the strain almost intolerable.  We strayed about the gardens, the three of us, then came back to the radio again; this time there were a few extra items, reports of half the world’s grim awakening.

The newspapers came, but they were already old—printed hours before.

I telephoned the City office, and had to wait twenty minutes before the line was clear.

Then Woburn, after wandering restlessly in and out of rooms, said he would take a long walk.  I think he would have liked either Mrs.  Rainier or myself or both of us to suggest accompanying him, but we stayed each other with a glance.  “He’s a nice boy,” she said, when he had gone.

“Yes, very.”

“Does Charles like him?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I always hoped he would.  I feel we’ve almost adopted him, in one sense.”

“I sometimes think he feels that too.”

“I’d like him to feel that . . . I once had a child, a boy, but he died. . . .”

“I never knew that.”

“Charles would have made a good father, don’t you think?”

“Yes . . . he must have been terribly disappointed.”

“What will Woburn do now?”

“He said he’d join the Air Force.”

She moved restlessly to the radio, where the music had suddenly stopped.  Another news item: the Germans had crossed the Polish frontiers at many places; the war machine was already clanking into gear.

“I can’t stand this—I half wish now we’d gone with him for the walk.  Don’t leave me alone here—you don’t have to return to the City, do you?”

“No, not yet, anyhow.  I just rang up the office.  They haven’t had any news or message.”

“Oh . . . let’s go somewhere then.  I’ll drive you.  There’s nothing else to do—we’ll go mad if we sit over the radio all day.”

We took her car, which was an open sports Bentley, and set out.  The Stourton parkland had never looked more wonderful; it was as if it had the mood to spread its beauty as a last temptation to remain at peace, or, failing that, as a last spendthrift offering to a thankless world.  We passed quickly, then threaded the winding gravel roads over the estate to an exit I had not known of before— it opened on to the road to Faringdon.  Through the still misty morning we raced westward and northward; but at Lechlade the sun was bright and the clock showed ten minutes past ten.  A few miles beyond Burford the country rolled into uplands, and presently we left the main road altogether, slowing for tree-hidden corners and streams that crossed the lanes in wide sandy shallows, till at last in the distance we saw a rim of green against the blue.

“Perhaps it will be a simpler England after the war,” was one of the things she said.

“You’re already thinking of AFTER the war?”

“Of course.  The NEXT Armistice Day, whenever it comes.”

“It’ll be a different England, that’s very certain.  Not so rich, and not so snobbish—but maybe we can do without some of the riches and all the snobbery.”

She nodded:  “Maybe we can do without Stourton—and Bentleys.”

“And two-for-one bonus issues.”

“And guinea biographies like the one somebody once wrote about Charles’s father.”

“And parties for His Excellency to meet the winners of the Ladies’ Doubles.”

She laughed.  “And champagne when you’ve already had enough champagne.”

“How CAN we be so absurd—on a day like this?”

“Maybe it isn’t so absurd.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Oh, just somewhere in England, as the war bulletins may say one of these days.”

We drove on, mile after mile, till at a turn of the road the hills ahead of us sharpened into a ridge and at the same turn also there was a signpost which made me cry out, with a sudden catch of breath:  “Did you see THAT?”

“I know.  I wanted to come here.”

“But—you shouldn’t—it’s only torturing yourself—“

“No, no.  I promise I won’t be upset—see, I’m quite calm.”

“But all this probing of the past—“

“That’s where the future will take us, maybe—back to the past.  A simpler England.  Old England.”

And then we came upon the gray cottages fronting the stream, the square-towered church, the ledge in the stream where the water sparkled.  We parked our car by the church and walked along the street.  A postman late on his morning rounds stared with friendly curiosity at us and the car, then said “Good morning.”  A fluff of wind blew tall hollyhocks towards us.  Somebody was clipping a hedge; an old dog loitered into a fresh patch of shade.  Little things—but I shall remember them long after much else has been forgotten.

There seemed no special significance anywhere, no sign that a war had begun.

But as we neared the post-office I caught sight of something that to me was most significant of all—a small brown two-seater car.  I walked over to it; a man saw me examining the licence.  “If you’re looking for the tall gentleman,” he came over to say, “I think he took a walk up the hill.”

I turned to Mrs. Rainier.  “CHARLES?” was all she whispered.

“Might be.  It meets the Club porter’s description and it was hired from a London firm.”

We turned off the main road by a path crossing an open field towards the hill; as we were climbing the chime of three quarters came up to us, blown faint by the breeze.  The slope was too steep for much talk, but when we came within a few yards of the ridge she halted to gain breath, gazing down over the village.

“Looks as if it has never changed.”

“I don’t suppose it has, much, in a thousand years.”

“That makes twenty seem only yesterday.”

“If we meet him, what are you going to say?”

“I don’t know.  I can’t know—before I see him.”

“He’ll wonder why on earth we’ve come HERE, of all places.”

“Then we’ll ask him why on earth HE’S here.  Perhaps we’ll both have to pretend we came to look at the five counties.”

She resumed the climb, and in another moment we could see that the summit dipped again to a further summit, perhaps higher, and that in the hollow between lay a little pond.  There was a man lying beside it with arms outstretched, as if he had flung himself there after the climb.  He did not move as we approached, but presently we saw smoke curling from a cigarette between his fingers.

“He’s not asleep,” I said.  “He’s just resting.”

I saw her eyes and the way her lips trembled; something suddenly occurred to me.  “By the way, how did you know there were FIVE counties?”

But she didn’t answer; already she was rushing down the slope.  He saw her in time to rise to his feet; she stopped then, several yards away, and for a few seconds both were staring at each other, hard and still and silent.  Then he whispered something I couldn’t hear; but I knew in a flash that the gap was closed, that the random years were at an end, that the past and the future would join.  She knew this too, for she ran into his arms calling out:

“Oh, Smithy—Smithy—it may not be too late!”