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Title: Put Out More Flags
Author: Waugh, Evelyn [Arthur Evelyn St John] (1903-1966)
Date of first publication:
   1967 [this version, with new preface];
   1942 [original version]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Chapman & Hall, 1971
Date first posted: 4 March 2019
Date last updated: 4 March 2019
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1598

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Mark Akrigg, Cindy Beyer
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net



PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.
We have also added a table of contents.






PUT OUT MORE FLAGS

by Evelyn Waugh





    To Randolph Churchill




TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface
  Chapter I. Autumn
  Chapter II. Winter
  Chapter III. Spring
  Epilogue. Summer




PUT OUT MORE FLAGS




PREFACE


This is the only book I have written purely for pleasure. It is none the
better for that, but it gives me an affectionate regard for it when I
recall the happy circumstances of its composition. It was the summer of
1941. For two years of military service I had been entirely divorced
from writing. After the fall of Crete the Commandos in the Middle East
were disbanded, and officers and men returned to their regiments. I
found myself in a comfortable liner, full below decks with Italian
prisoners, returning to the United Kingdom by the long route round the
Cape, which then, for fear of enemy attack, followed the Westerly
course. I was returning to my wife and children. I had comfort and
leisure and negligible duties, a large cabin with a table and a pile of
army stationery. I wrote all day, and the book was finished in a month.

The characters about whom I had written in the previous decade came to
life for me. I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last
heard of them, and I followed them with no preconceived plan, not
knowing where I should find them from one page to the next.

I may add that I had no personal knowledge of the Ministry of
Information and relied on gossip for my caricature. I did, in the first
weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from
'evacuees'.


E. W.
_Combe Florey 1966_




    'A man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical
    tone, in order to strengthen his spirit... and a drunk military
    man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase
    his military splendour.'

        Chinese Sage, _quoted and translated by Lin Yutang in the_
        IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.


    'A little injustice in the heart can be drowned by wine; but a great
    injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword.'

        Epigrams of Chang Ch'ao, quoted and translated by Lin Yutang in
        the IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.




CHAPTER I
AUTUMN


In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War--days of
surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last
days of peace--and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally
resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first
and mainly of Basil Seal. They were his sister, his mother and his
mistress.

****

Barbara Sothill was at Malfrey; in recent years she had thought of her
brother as seldom as circumstances allowed her, but on that historic
September morning, as she walked to the village, he predominated over a
multitude of worries.

She and Freddy had just heard the Prime Minister's speech, broadcast by
wireless. 'It is an evil thing we are fighting,' he had said and as
Barbara turned her back on the house where, for the most part, the eight
years of her marriage had been spent, she felt personally challenged and
threatened, as though, already, the mild, autumnal sky were dark with
circling enemy and their shadows were trespassing on the sunlit lawns.

There was something female and voluptuous in the beauty of Malfrey;
other lovely houses maintained a virginal modesty or a manly defiance,
but Malfrey had no secret from the heavens; it had been built more than
two hundred years ago in days of victory and ostentation and lay, spread
out, sumptuously at ease, splendid, defenceless and provocative; a
Cleopatra among houses; across the sea, Barbara felt, a small and
envious mind, a meanly ascetic mind, a creature of the conifers, was
plotting the destruction of her home. It was for Malfrey that she loved
her prosaic and slightly absurd husband; for Malfrey, too, that she had
abandoned Basil and with him the part of herself which, in the atrophy
endemic to all fruitful marriages, she had let waste and die.

It was half a mile to the village down the lime avenue. Barbara walked
because, just as she was getting into the car, Freddy had stopped her
saying, 'No petrol now for gadding about.'

Freddy was in uniform, acutely uncomfortable in ten-year-old trousers.
He had been to report at the yeomanry headquarters the day before, and
was home for two nights collecting his kit, which, in the two years
since he was last at camp, had been misused in charades and picnics and
dispersed about the house in a dozen improbable places. His pistol, in
particular, had been a trouble. He had had the whole household hunting
it, saying fretfully, 'It's all very well, but I can get
court-martialled for this,' until, at length, the nursery-maid found it
at the back of the toy cupboard. Barbara was now on her way to look for
his binoculars which she remembered vaguely having lent to the
scoutmaster.

The road under the limes led straight to the village; the park gates, of
elaborately wrought-iron swung on rusticated stone piers, and the two
lodges formed a side of the village green; opposite them stood the
church, on either side two inns, the vicarage, the shop and a row of
grey cottages; three massive chestnuts grew from the roughly rectangular
grass plot in the centre. It was a Beauty Spot, justly but reluctantly
famous, too much frequented of late by walkers but still, through
Freddy's local influence, free of charabancs; a bus stopped three times
a day on weekdays, four times on Tuesdays when the market was held in
the neighbouring town, and to accommodate passengers Freddy had that
year placed an oak seat under the chestnuts.

It was here that Barbara's thoughts were brought up sharply by an
unfamiliar spectacle; six dejected women sat in a row staring fixedly at
the closed doors of the Sothill Arms. For a moment Barbara was puzzled;
then she remembered. These were Birmingham women. Fifty families had
arrived at Malfrey late on Friday evening, thirsty, hot, bewildered and
resentful after a day in train and bus. Barbara had chosen the five
saddest families for herself and dispersed the rest in the village and
farms.

Punctually next day the head housemaid, a veteran of old Mrs Sothill's
regime, had given notice of leaving. 'I don't know how we shall do
without you,' said Barbara.

'It's my legs, madam. I'm not strong enough for the work. I could just
manage as things were, but now with children all over the place...'

'You know we can't expect things to be easy in war time. We must expect
to make sacrifices. This is our war work.'

But the woman was obdurate. 'There's my married sister at Bristol,' she
said. 'Her husband was on the reserve. I ought to go and help her now
he's called up.'

An hour later the remaining three housemaids had appeared with prim
expressions of face.

'Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make
aeroplanes. They say they are taking on girls at Brakemore's.'

'You'll find it terribly hard work, you know.'

'Oh, it's not the work, madam. It's the Birmingham women. The way they
leave their rooms.'

'It's all very strange for them at first. We must do all we can to help.
As soon as they settle down and get used to our ways...' but she saw
it was hopeless while she spoke.

'They say they want girls at Brakemore's,' said the maids.

In the kitchen Mrs Elphinstone was loyal. 'But I can't answer for the
girls,' she said. 'They seem to think war is an excuse for a lark.'

It was the kitchen-maids, anyway, and not Mrs Elphinstone, thought
Barbara, who had to cope with the extra meals...

Benson was sound. The Birmingham women caused _him_ no trouble. But
James would be leaving for the army within a few weeks. It's going to be
a difficult winter, thought Barbara.

These women, huddled on the green, were not Barbara's guests but she saw
on their faces the same look of frustration and defiance. Dutifully,
rather than prudently, she approached the group and asked if they were
comfortable. She spoke to them in general and each felt shy of
answering; they looked away from her sullenly towards the locked inn. Oh
dear, thought Barbara, I suppose they wonder what business it is of
mine.

'I live up there,' she said, indicating the gates. 'I've been arranging
your billets.'

'Oh, have you?' said one of the mothers. 'Then perhaps you can tell us
how long we've got to stop.'

'That's right,' said another.

'D'you know,' said Barbara, 'I don't believe anyone has troubled to
think about that. They've all been too busy getting you away.'

'They got no right to do it,' said the first mother. 'You can't keep us
here compulsory.'

'But surely you don't _want_ to have your children bombed, do you?'

'We won't stay where we're not wanted.'

'That's right,' said the yes-woman.

'But of _course_ you're wanted.'

'Yes, like the stomach-ache.'

'That's right.'

For some minutes Barbara reasoned with the fugitives until she felt that
her only achievement had been to transfer to herself all the odium which
more properly belonged to Hitler. Then she went on her way to the
scoutmaster's, where, before she could retrieve the binoculars, she had
to listen to the story of the Birmingham schoolmistress, billeted on
him, who refused to help wash up.

As she crossed the green on her homeward journey, the mothers looked
away from her.

'I hope the children are enjoying themselves a little,' she said,
determined not to be cut in her own village.

'They're down at the school. Teacher's making them play games.'

'The park's always open you know, if any one of you care to go inside.'

'We had a park where we came from. With a band Sundays.'

'Well, I'm afraid I can't offer a band. But it's thought rather pretty,
particularly down by the lake. Do take the children in if you feel like
it.'

When she had left the chief mother said: 'What's she? Some kind of
inspector, I suppose, with her airs and graces. The idea of inviting us
into the park. You'd think the place belonged to her the way she goes
on.'

Presently the two inns opened their doors and the scandalized village
watched a procession of mothers assemble from cottage, farm and mansion
and make for the bar parlours.

****

Luncheon decided him; Freddy went upstairs immediately he left the
dining-room and changed into civilian clothes. 'Think I'll get my maid
to put me into something loose,' he said in the voice he used for making
jokes. It was this kind of joke Barbara had learned to recognize during
her happy eight years in his company.

Freddy was large, masculine, prematurely bald and superficially
cheerful; at heart he was misanthropic and gifted with that sly, sharp
instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich;
his indolence was qualified with enough basic bad temper to ensure the
respect of those about him. He took in most people, but not his wife or
his wife's family.

Not only did he have a special expression of face for making jokes; he
had one for use when discussing his brother-in-law Basil. It should have
conveyed lofty disapproval tempered by respect for Barbara's loyalty; in
fact it suggested sulkiness and guilt.

The Seal children, for no reason that was apparent to the rest of the
world, had always held the rest of the world in scorn. Freddy did not
like Tony; he found him supercilious and effeminate, but he was prepared
to concede to him certain superiorities; no one doubted that there was a
brilliant career ahead of him in diplomacy. The time would come when
they would all be very proud of Tony. But Basil from his earliest days
had been a source of embarrassment and reproach. On his own terms Freddy
might have been willing to welcome a black sheep in the Seal family,
someone who was 'never mentioned', to whom he might, every now and then,
magnanimously unknown to anyone except Barbara, extend a helping hand;
someone, even, in whom he might profess to see more good than the rest
of the world. Such a kinsman might very considerably have redressed the
balance of Freddy's self-esteem. But, as Freddy found as soon as he came
to know the Seals intimately, Basil, so far from being never mentioned,
formed the subject of nearly half their conversation. At that time they
were ever ready to discuss with relish his latest outrage, ever hopeful
of some splendid success for him in the immediate future, ever
contemptuous of the disapproval of the rest of the world. And Basil
himself regarded Freddy pitilessly, with eyes which, during his
courtship and the first years of marriage, he had recognized in Barbara
herself.

For there was a disconcerting resemblance between Basil and Barbara;
she, too, was _farouche_ in a softer and deadlier manner, and the charm
which held him breathless, flashed in gross and acquisitive shape in
Basil. Maternity and the tranquil splendour of Malfrey had wrought
changes in her; it was very rarely, now, that the wild little animal in
her came above ground; but it was there, in its earth and from time to
time he was aware of it, peeping out, after long absences; a pair of
glowing eyes at the twist in the tunnel watching him as an enemy.

Barbara herself pretended to no illusions about Basil. Years of
disappointment and betrayal had convinced her, in the reasoning part of
her, that he was no good. They had played pirates together in the
nursery and the game was over. Basil played pirates alone. She
apostatized from her faith in him almost with formality, and yet, as a
cult will survive centuries after its myths have been exposed and its
sources of faith tainted, there was still deep in her that early piety,
scarcely discernible now in a little residue of superstition, so that
this morning when her world seemed rocking about her, she turned back to
Basil. Thus, when earthquake strikes a modern city and the pavements
gape, the sewers buckle up and the great buildings tremble and topple,
men in bowler hats and natty, ready-made suitings, born of generations
of literates and rationalists, will suddenly revert to the magic of the
forest and cross their fingers to avert the avalanche of concrete.

Three times during luncheon Barbara had spoken of Basil and now, as she
and Freddy walked arm in arm on the terrace she said, 'I believe it's
what he's been waiting for all these years.'

'Who, waiting for what?'

'Basil, for the war.'

'Oh... Well, I suppose in a way we all have really... the gardens
are going to be a problem. I suppose we could get some of the men
exemption on the grounds that they're engaged in agriculture, but it
hardly seems playing the game.'

It was Freddy's last day at Malfrey and he did not want to spoil it by
talking of Basil. It was true that the yeomanry were not ten miles away;
it was true, also, that they were unlikely to move for a very long time;
they had recently been mechanized, in the sense that they had had their
horses removed; few of them had ever seen a tank; he would be back and
forwards continually during the coming months; he meant to shoot the
pheasants; but although this was no final leave taking he felt entitled
to more sentiment than Barbara was showing.

'Freddy, don't be bloody.' She kicked him sharply on the ankle for she
had found, early in married life, that Freddy liked her to swear and
kick in private. 'You know exactly what I mean. Basil's _needed_ a war.
He's not meant for peace.'

'That's true enough. The wonder is he's kept out of prison. If he'd been
born in a different class he wouldn't have.'

Barbara suddenly chuckled. 'D'you remember how he took mother's
emeralds, the time he went to Azania? But then you see that would never
have happened if there'd been a war of our own for him to go to. He's
always been mixed up in fighting.'

'If you call living in a gin palace in La Paz and seeing generals shoot
one another...'

'And Spain.'

'Journalist and gun runner.'

'He's always been a soldier _manqu_.'

'Well, he hasn't done much about it. While he's been gadding about the
rest of us have been training as territorials and yeomanry.'

'Darling, a fat lot of training you've done.'

'If there'd been more like us and fewer like Basil there'd never have
been a war. You can't blame Ribbentrop for thinking us decadent when he
saw people like Basil about. I don't suppose they'll have much use for
him in the army. He's thirty-six. He might get some sort of job
connected with censorship. He seems to know a lot of languages.'

'You see,' said Barbara. 'Basil will be covered with medals while your
silly old yeomanry are still messing in a Trust House and waiting for
your tanks.'

There were duck on the lake and she let Freddy talk about them. She led
him down his favourite paths. There was a Gothic pavilion where by long
habit Freddy often became amorous; he did become amorous. And all the
time she thought of Basil. She thought of him in terms of the war books
she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern in
a mud-bogged trench, standing to at dawn, his eyes on his wrist watch,
waiting for zero hour; she saw him as Compton Mackenzie, spider in a web
of Balkan intrigue, undermining a monarchy among olive trees and
sculptured marble; she saw him as T. E. Lawrence and Rupert Brooke.

Freddy, assuaged, reverted to sport. 'I won't ask any of the regiment
over for the early shoots,' he said. 'But I don't see why we shouldn't
let some of them have a bang at the cocks round about Christmas.'


[2]

Lady Seal was at her home in London. She had taken fewer precautions
against air raids than most of her friends. Her most valuable
possession, her small Carpaccio, had been sent to safe keeping at
Malfrey; the miniatures and Limoges enamels were at the bank; the Svres
was packed in crates and put below stairs. Otherwise there was no change
in her drawing-room. The ponderous old curtains needed no unsightly
strips of black paper to help them keep in the light.

The windows were open now on the balcony. Lady Seal sat in an elegant
rosewood chair gazing out across the square. She had just heard the
Prime Minister's speech. Her butler approached from the end of the room.

'Shall I remove the radio, my lady?'

'Yes, by all means. He spoke very well, very well indeed.'

'It's all very sad, my lady.'

'Very sad for the Germans, Anderson.'

It was quite true, thought Lady Seal; Neville Chamberlain had spoken
surprisingly well. She had never liked him very much, neither him nor
his brother--if anything she had preferred the brother--but they were
uncomfortable, drab fellows both of them. However, he had spoken very
creditably that morning, as though at last he were fully alive to his
responsibilities. She would ask him to luncheon. But perhaps he would be
busy; the most improbable people were busy in war time, she remembered.

Her mind went back to the other war, that until that morning had been
The War. No one very near to her had fought. Christopher had been too
old, Tony just too young; her brother Edward had begun by commanding a
brigade--they thought the world of him at the Staff College--but,
inexplicably, his career had come to very little; he was still brigadier
in 1918, at Dar-es-Salaam. But the war had been a sad time; so many
friends in mourning and Christopher fretful about the coalition. It had
been a bitter thing for them all, accepting Lloyd George, but
Christopher had patriotically made the sacrifice with the rest of them;
probably only she knew how much he had felt it. The worst time had been
after the armistice, when peerages were sold like groceries and the
peace terms were bungled. Christopher had always said they would have to
pay for it in the long run.

The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over
London.

'That was the warning, my lady.'

'Yes, Anderson, I heard it.'

'Will you be coming downstairs?'

'No, not yet at any rate. Get all the servants down and see they are
quiet.'

'Will you require your respirator, my lady?'

'I don't suppose so. From what Sir Joseph tells me the danger of gas is
very slight. In any case I daresay this is only a practice. Leave it on
the table.'

'Will that be all, my lady?'

'That's all. See that the maids don't get nervous.'

Lady Seal stepped on to the balcony and looked up into the clear sky.
They'll get more than they bargain for if they try and attack _us_, she
thought. High time that man was taught a lesson. He's made nothing but
trouble for years. She returned to her chair thinking. Anyway _I_ never
made a fuss of that vulgar man von Ribbentrop. I wouldn't have him
inside the house, even when that goose Emma Granchester was plaguing us
all to be friendly to him. I hope she feels foolish this morning.

Lady Seal waited with composure for the bombardment to begin. She had
told Anderson it was probably only a practice. That was what one told
servants; otherwise they might panic--not Anderson but the maids. But in
her heart Lady Seal was sure that the attack was coming; it would be
just like the Germans, always blustering and showing off and pretending
to be efficient. The history Lady Seal had learned in the schoolroom had
been a simple tale of the maintenance of right against the superior
forces of evil and the battle honours of her country rang musically in
her ears--Crecy, Agincourt, Cadiz, Blenheim, Gibraltar, Inkermann,
Ypres. England had fought many and various enemies with many and various
allies, often on quite recondite pretexts, but always justly,
chivalrously, and with ultimate success. Often, in Paris, Lady Seal had
been proud that her people had never fallen to the habit of naming
streets after their feats of arms; that was suitable enough for the
short-lived and purely professional triumphs of the French, but to put
those great manifestations of divine rectitude which were the victories
of England to the use, for their postal addresses, of milliners and
chiropodists, would have been a baseness to which even the radicals had
not stooped. The steel engravings of her schoolroom lived before her
eyes, like tableaux at a charity fte--Sydney at Zutphen, Wolfe at
Quebec, Nelson at Trafalgar (Wellington, only, at Waterloo was excluded
from the pageant by reason of the proximity of Blcher, pushing himself
forward with typical Prussian effrontery to share the glory which the
other had won) and to this tremendous assembly (not unlike in Lady
Seal's mind those massed groups of wealth and respectability portrayed
on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes and hung with their key plans in lobbies
and billiard rooms) was added that morning a single new and rather
improbable figure, Basil Seal.

The last war had cost her little; nothing, indeed, except a considerable
holding of foreign investments and her brother Edward's reputation as a
strategist. Now she had a son to offer her country. Tony had weak eyes
and a career, Freddy was no blood of hers and was not cast in a heroic
mould, but Basil, her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing
Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so
many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years, whose wild oats refused to
correspond with those of his Uncle Edward; Basil who had stolen her
emeralds and made Mrs Lyne distressingly conspicuous; Basil, his
peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last was entering on
his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a
decent regiment.

At last, while she was still musing, the sirens sounded the All Clear.

****

Sir Joseph Mainwaring was lunching with Lady Seal that day. It was an
arrangement made early in the preceding week before either of them knew
that the day they were choosing was one which would be marked in the
world's calendars until the end of history. He arrived punctually, as he
always did; as he had done, times out of number, in the long years of
their friendship.

Sir Joseph was not a church-going man except when he was staying at one
of the very rare, very august houses where it was still the practice; on
this Sunday morning, however, it would not have been fantastic to
describe his spirit as inflamed by something nearly akin to religious
awe. It _would_ be fantastic to describe him as purged, and yet there
had been something delicately purgative in the experiences of the
morning and there was an unfamiliar buoyancy in his bearing as though he
had been at somebody's Eno's. He felt ten years younger.

Lady Seal devoted to this old booby a deep, personal fondness which was
rare among his numerous friends and a reliance which was
incomprehensible but quite common.

'There's only ourselves, Jo,' she said as she greeted him. 'The
Granchesters were coming but he had to go and see the King.'

'Nothing could be more delightful. Yes, I think we shall all be busy
again now. I don't know exactly what I shall be doing yet. I shall know
better after I've been to Downing Street to-morrow morning. I imagine it
will be some advisory capacity to the War Cabinet. It's nice to feel in
the centre of things again, takes one back ten years. Stirring times,
Cynthia, stirring times.'

'It's one of the things I wanted to see Emma Granchester about. There
must be so many committees we ought to start. Last war it was Belgian
refugees. I suppose it will be Poles this time. It's a great pity it
isn't people who talk a language one knows.'

'No, no Belgians this time. It will be a different war in many ways. An
economic war of attrition, that is how I see it. Of course we had to
have all this A.R.P. and shelters and so on. The radicals were making
copy out of it. But I think we can take it there won't be any air raids,
not on London at any rate. Perhaps there may be an attempt on the
seaports, but I was having a most interesting talk yesterday to Eddie
Beste-Bingham at the Beefsteak; we've got a most valuable invention
called R.D.F. That'll keep 'em off.'

'Dear Jo, you always know the most encouraging things. What is R.D.F.?'

'I'm not absolutely clear about that. It's very secret.'

'Poor Barbara has evacuees at Malfrey.'

'What a shocking business! Dear, dreaming Malfrey. Think of a Birmingham
board school in that exquisite Grinling Gibbons saloon. It's all a lot
of nonsense, Cynthia. You know I'm the last man to prophesy rashly, but
I think we can take one thing as axiomatic. There will be no air attack
on London. The Germans will never attempt the Maginot line. The French
will hold on for ever, if needs be, and the German air-bases are too far
away for them to be able to attack us. If they do, we'll R.D.F. them out
of the skies.'

'Jo,' said Lady Seal, when they were alone with the coffee. 'I want to
talk to you about Basil.'

How often in the last twenty years had Sir Joseph heard those heavy
words, uttered with so many intonations in so wide a variety of moods,
but always, without fail, the prelude, not, perhaps to boredom, but to a
lowering of the interest and warmth of their converse! It was only in
these maternal conferences that Cynthia Seal became less than the
perfect companion, only then that, instead of giving, she demanded, as
it were, a small sumptuary duty upon the riches of her friendship.

Had he been so minded Sir Joseph could have drawn a graph of the
frequency and intensity of these discussions. There had been the steady
rise from nursery, through school to the university, when he had been
called on to applaud each new phase of Basil's precocious development.
In those days he had accepted Basil at his face value as an
exceptionally brilliant and beautiful youth in danger of being spoiled.
Then, towards the end of Basil's second year at Balliol had come a
series of small seismic disturbances, when Cynthia Seal was alternately
mutely puzzled or eloquently distressed; then the first disaster,
rapidly followed by Christopher's death. From then onwards for fifteen
years the line had dipped and soared dizzily as Basil's iniquities rose
on the crest or fell into the trough of notoriety, but with the passing
years there had been a welcome decline in the mean level; it was at
least six months since he had heard the boy's name.

'Ah,' he said. 'Basil, eh,' trying to divine from his hostess's manner
whether he was required to be judicial, compassionate or congratulatory.

'You've so often been helpful in the past.'

'I've tried,' said Sir Joseph recalling momentarily his long record of
failures on Basil's behalf. 'Plenty of good in the boy.'

'I feel so much happier about him since this morning, Jo. Sometimes,
lately, I've begun to doubt whether we shall ever find the proper place
for Basil. He's been a square peg in so many round holes. But this war
seems to take the responsibility off our hands. There's room for
everyone in war time, every _man_. It's always been Basil's
_individuality_ that's been wrong. You've said that often, Jo. In war
time individuality doesn't matter any more. There are just _men_, aren't
there?'

'Yes,' said Sir Joseph doubtfully. 'Yes. Basil's individuality has
always been rather strong, you know. He must be thirty-five or
thirty-six now. That's rather old for starting as a soldier.'

'Nonsense, Jo. Men of forty-five and fifty enlisted in the ranks in the
last war and died as gallantly as anyone else. Now I want you to see the
Lieutenant-Colonels of the foot guard regiments and see where he will
fit in best...'

In her time Cynthia Seal had made many formidable demands on Basil's
behalf. This, which she was now asking with such an assumption of ease,
seemed to Sir Joseph one of the most vexatious. But he was an old and
loyal friend and a man of affairs, moreover, well practised by a
lifetime of public service, in the evasion of duty. 'Of course, my dear
Cynthia, I can't promise any results...'


[3]

Angela Lyne was returning by train from the South of France. It was the
time when, normally, she went to Venice, but this year, with
international politics tediously on every tongue, she had lingered at
Cannes until and beyond the last moment. The French and Italians whom
she met had said war was impossible; they said it with assurance before
the Russian pact, with double assurance after it. The English said there
would be war, but not immediately. Only the Americans knew what was
coming, and exactly when. Now she was travelling in unwonted discomfort
through a nation moving to action under the dour precepts, '_il faut en
finir' and 'nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts_'.

It was a weary journey; the train was already eight hours late; the
restaurant car had disappeared during the night at Avignon. Angela was
obliged to share a two-berth sleeper with her maid and counted herself
lucky to have got one at all; several of her acquaintances had stayed
behind, waiting for things to get better; at the moment no reservations
were guaranteed and the French seemed to have put off their politeness
and packed it in moth-ball for the duration of hostilities.

Angela had a glass of Vichy water on the table before her. She sipped,
gazing out at the passing landscape every mile of which gave some
evidence of the changing life of the country; hunger and the bad night
she had spent, raised her a hair's breadth above reality and her mind,
usually so swift and orderly, fell into pace with the train, now rocking
in haste, now, barely moving, seeming to grope its way from point to
point.

A stranger passing the open door of her compartment might well have
speculated on her nationality and place in the world and supposed her to
be American, the buyer perhaps for some important New York dress shop
whose present abstraction was due to the worries of war time transport
for her 'collection'. She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as
one who dressed to inform rather than to attract; nothing which she
wore, nothing it might be supposed in the pigskin jewel-case above her
head, had been chosen by or for a man. Her smartness was individual; she
was plainly not one of those who scrambled to buy the latest gadget in
the few breathless weeks between its first appearance and the inundation
of the cheap markets of the world with its imitations; her person was a
record and criticism of succeeding fashions, written as it were, year
after year, in one clear and characteristic fist. Had the curious fellow
passenger stared longer--as he was free to do without offence, so
absorbed was Angela in her own thoughts--he would have been checked in
his hunt when he came to study his subject's face. All her
properties--the luggage heaped above and around her, the set of her
hair, her shoes, her finger-nails, the barely perceptible aura of scent
that surrounded her, the Vichy water and the paper-bound volume of
Balzac on the table before her--all these things spoke of what (had she
been, as she seemed, American) she would have called her 'personality'.
But the face was mute. It might have been carved in jade, it was so
smooth and cool and conventionally removed from the human. A stranger
might have watched her for mile after mile, as a spy or a lover or a
newspaper reporter will loiter in the street before a closed house, and
see no chink of light, hear no whisper of movement behind the shuttered
faade, and in direct proportion to his discernment, he would have gone
on his way down the corridor baffled and disturbed. Had he been told the
bare facts about this seemingly cosmopolitan, passionless, barren,
civilized woman, he might have despaired of ever again forming his
judgment of a fellow being; for Angela Lyne was Scottish, the only child
of a Glasgow millionaire--a jovial, rascally millionaire who had started
life in a street gang--she was the wife of a dilettante architect, the
mother of a single robust and unattractive son, the dead spit, it was
said, of his grandfather, and her life had so foundered on passion that
this golden daughter of fortune was rarely spoken of by her friends
without the qualifying epithet of 'poor' Angela Lyne.

Only in one respect would the casual observer have hit upon the truth.
Angela's appearance was not designed for man. It is sometimes
disputed--and opinions canvassed in popular papers to decide the
question--whether woman, alone on a desert island, would concern herself
with clothes; Angela, as far as she herself was concerned, disposed of
the question finally. For seven years she had been on a desert island;
her appearance had become a hobby and distraction, a pursuit entirely
self-regarding and self-rewarding; she watched herself moving in the
mirrors of the civilized world as a prisoner will watch the antics of a
rat, whom he has domesticated to the dungeon. (In the case of her
husband grottoes took the place of fashion. He had six of them now,
bought in various parts of Europe, some from Naples, some from Southern
Germany, and painfully transported, stone by stone, to Hampshire.)

For seven years, ever since she was twenty-five and two years married to
her dandy-aesthete, 'poor' Angela Lyne had been in love with Basil Seal.
It was one of those affairs which, beginning lightheartedly as an
adventure and accepted lightheartedly by their friends as an amusing
scandal, seemed somehow petrified by a Gorgon glance and endowed with an
intolerable permanence; as though in a world of capricious and fleeting
alliances, the ironic Fates had decided to set up a standing, frightful
example of the natural qualities of man and woman, of their basic
aptitude to fuse together; a label on the packing-case, 'These chemicals
are dangerous'--an admonitory notice, like the shattered motor-cars
erected sometimes at dangerous turns in the road, so that the least
censorious were chilled by the spectacle and recoiled saying, 'Really,
you know, there's something rather squalid about those two.'

It was a relationship which their friends usually described as 'morbid'
by which they meant that sensuality played a small part in it, for Basil
was only attracted to very silly girls and it was by quite other bonds
that he and Angela were fettered together.

Cedric Lyne pottering disconsolately in his baroque solitudes and
watching with dismay the progress of his blustering son, used to tell
himself, with the minimum of discernment, that a _bguin_ like that
could not possibly last. For Angela there seemed no hope of release.
Nothing, she felt in despair, would ever part them but death. Even the
flavour of the Vichy water brought thoughts of Basil as she remembered
the countless nights in the last seven years when she had sat late with
him, while he got drunk and talked more and more wildly, and she sipping
her water waited her turn to strike, hard and fierce, at his conceit,
until as he got more drunk he became superior to her attacks and talked
her down and eventually came stupidly away.

She turned to the window as the train slackened to walking pace, passing
truck after truck of soldiers. '_Il faut en finir', 'Nous gagnerons
parce que nous sommes les plus forts_'. A hard-boiled people, the
French. Two nights ago at Cannes, an American had been talking about the
mutinous regiments decimated in the last war. 'It's a pity they haven't
got anyone like old Ptain to command them this time,' he had said.

The villa at Cannes was shut now and the key was with the gardener.
Perhaps she would never go back. This year she remembered it only as the
place where she had waited in vain for Basil. He had telegraphed:
'International situation forbids joy riding.' She had sent him the money
for his journey but there had been no answer. The gardener would make a
good thing out of the vegetables. A hard-boiled people, the French;
Angela wondered why that was thought to be a good thing; she had always
had a revulsion from hard-boiled eggs, even at picnics in the nursery;
hard-boiled; over-cooked; over-praised for their cooking. When people
professed a love of France, they meant love of eating; the ancients
located the deeper emotions in the bowels. She had heard a commercial
traveller in the channel packet welcome Dover and English food. 'I can't
stomach that French messed-up stuff.' A commonplace criticism, thought
Angela, that applied to French culture for the last two
generations--'messed-up stuff', stale ingredients from Spain and America
and Russia and Germany, disguised in a sauce of white wine from Algeria.
France died with her monarchy. You could not even eat well, now, except
in the provinces. It all came back to eating. 'What's eating you?'...
Basil claimed to have eaten a girl once in Africa; he had been eating
Angela now for seven years. Like the Spartan boy and the fox...
Spartans at Thermopylae, combing their hair before the battle; Angela
had never understood that, because Alcibiades had cut off his hair in
order to make himself acceptable. What did the Spartans think about hair
really? Basil would have to cut his hair when he went into the army.
Basil the Athenian would have to sit at the public tables of Sparta,
clipped blue at the neck where before his dark hair had hung untidily to
his collar. Basil in the pass at Thermopylae...

Angela's maid returned from gossiping with the conductor. 'He says he
doesn't think the sleeping cars will go any farther than Dijon. We shall
have to change into day coaches. Isn't it wicked, madam, when we've
paid?'

'Well, we're at war now. I expect there'll be a lot to put up with.'

'Will Mr Seal be in the army?'

'I shouldn't be surprised.'

'He will look different, won't he, madam?'

'Very different.'

They were both silent, and in the silence Angela knew, by an intuition
which defied any possible doubt, exactly what her maid was thinking. She
was thinking: 'Supposing Mr Seal gets himself killed. Best thing really
for all concerned.'

...Flaxman Greeks reclining in death among the rocks of Thermopylae;
riddled scarecrows sprawling across the wire of no-man's land... Till
death us do part... Through the haphazard trail of phrase and
association, a single, unifying thought recurred, like the sentry posts
at the side of the line, monotonously in Angela's mind. Death. 'Death
the Friend' of the sixteenth-century wood-cuts, who released the captive
and bathed the wounds of the fallen; Death in frock coat and whiskers,
the discreet undertaker, spreading his sable pall over all that was
rotten and unsightly; Death the macabre paramour in whose embrace all
earthly loves were forgotten; Death for Basil, that Angela might live
again... that was what she was thinking as she sipped her Vichy water
but no one, seeing the calm and pensive mask of her face, could ever
possibly have guessed.


[4]

Rupert Brooke, Old Bill, the Unknown Soldier--thus three fond women saw
him, but Basil breakfasting late in Poppet Green's studio fell short and
wide of all these ideals. He was not at his best that morning, both by
reason of his heavy drinking with Poppet's friends the night before and
the loss of face he was now suffering with Poppet in his attempts to
explain his assertion that there would be no war. He had told them this
the night before, not as a speculation, but as a fact known only to
himself and half a dozen leading Germans; the Prussian military clique,
he had told them, were allowing the Nazis to gamble just as long as
their bluff was not called; he had had this, he said, direct from von
Fritsch. The army had broken the Nazi Party in the July purge of 1936;
they had let Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Ribbentrop remain as
puppets just as long as they proved valuable. The army, like all armies,
was intensely pacifist; as soon as it became clear that Hitler was
heading for war, he would be shot. Basil had expounded this theme not
once but many times, over the table of the Charlotte Street restaurant,
and because Poppet's friends did not know Basil, and were unused to
people who claimed acquaintance with the great, Poppet had basked in
vicarious esteem. Basil was little used to being heard with respect and
was correspondingly resentful at being reproached with his own words.

'Well,' Poppet was saying crossly, from the gas stove. 'When do the army
step in and shoot Hitler?'

She was a remarkably silly girl, and, as such, had commanded Basil's
immediate attention when they met, three weeks earlier, with Ambrose
Silk. With her Basil had spent the time he had promised to Angela at
Cannes; on her he had spent the twenty pounds Angela had sent him for
the journey. Even now when her fatuous face pouted in derision she found
a soft place in Basil's heart.

Evidence of her silliness abounded in the canvases, finished and
unfinished, which crowded the studio. Eighty years ago her subjects
would have been knights in armour; ladies in wimples and distress; fifty
years ago 'nocturnes'; twenty years ago pierrots and willow trees; now,
in 1939, they were bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass,
seaweed, shells and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in
the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge,
accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised
against a background of bull's-eyes and barley-sugar.

'My dear,' Ambrose had said, 'you can positively hear her imagination
_creaking_, as she does them, like a pair of old, old _corsets_, my
dear, on a _harridan_.'

'They'll destroy London. What shall I do?' asked Poppet plaintively.
'Where can I go? It's the end of my painting. I've a good mind to follow
Parsnip and Pimpernell' (two great poets of her acquaintance who had
recently fled to New York).

'You'll be in more danger crossing the Atlantic than staying in London,'
said Basil. 'There won't be any air raids on London.'

'For God's sake don't say that.' Even as she spoke the sirens wailed.
Poppet stood paralysed with horror. 'Oh God,' she said. 'You've done it.
They've come.'

'Faultless timing,' said Basil cheerfully. 'That's always been Hitler's
strong point.'

Poppet began to dress in an ineffectual fever of reproach. 'You _said_
there wouldn't be a war. You _said_ the bombers would never come. Now we
shall all be killed and you just sit there talking and talking.'

'You know I should have thought an air-raid was just the thing for a
surraliste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions--limbs and
things lying about in odd places you know.'

'I wish I'd never met you. I wish I'd been to church. I was brought up
in a convent. I wanted to be a nun once. I wish I was a nun. I'm going
to be killed. Oh, I wish I was a nun. Where's my gas-mask? I shall go
mad if I don't find my gas-mask.'

Basil lay back on the divan and watched her with fascination. This was
how he liked to see women behave in moments of alarm. He rejoiced,
always, in the spectacle of women at a disadvantage: thus he would
watch, in the asparagus season, a dribble of melted butter on a woman's
chin, marring her beauty and making her ridiculous, while she would
still talk and smile and turn her head, not knowing how she appeared to
him.

'Now do make up your mind what you're frightened of,' he urged. 'If
you're going to be bombed with high explosive run down to the shelter;
if you're going to be gassed, shut the skylight and stay up here. In any
case I shouldn't bother about that respirator. If they use anything
it'll be arsenical smoke and it's no use against that. You'll find
arsenical smoke quite painless at first. You won't know you've been
gassed for a couple of days; then it'll be too late. In fact for all we
know we're being gassed at this moment. If they fly high enough and let
the wind carry the stuff they may be twenty miles away. The symptoms,
when they do appear, are rather revolting...'

But Poppet was gone, helter-skelter downstairs, making little moaning
noises as she went.

Basil dressed and, only pausing to paint in a ginger moustache across
Poppet's head of Aphrodite, strolled out into the streets.

The normal emptiness of Sunday in South Kensington was made complete
that morning by the air-raid scare. A man in a tin helmet shouted at
Basil from the opposite pavement, 'Take cover there. Yes, it's you I'm
talking to.'

Basil crossed over to him and said in a low tone, 'M.I.13.'

'Eh?'

'M.I.13.'

'I don't quite twig.'

'But you _ought_ to twig,' said Basil severely. 'Surely you realize that
members of M.I.13 are free to go everywhere at all times?'

'Sorry, I'm sure,' said the warden. 'I was only took on yesterday. What
a lark getting a raid second time on!' As he spoke the sirens sounded
the All Clear. 'What a sell!' said the warden.

It seemed to Basil that this fellow was altogether too cheerful for a
public servant in the first hours of war; the gas scare had been wasted
on Poppet; in her panic she had barely listened; it was worthy of a more
receptive audience. 'Cheer up,' he said. 'You may be breathing arsenical
smoke at this moment. Watch your urine in a couple of days' time.'

'Coo. I say, what did you say you was?'

'M.I.13.'

'Is that to do with gas?'

'It's to do with almost everything. Good morning.'

He turned to walk on but the warden followed. 'Wouldn't we smell it or
nothing?'

'No.'

'Or cough or anything?'

'No.'

'And you think they've dropped it, just in that minute and gone away
leaving us all for dead?'

'My dear fellow, _I_ don't think so. It's your job as a warden to find
out.'

'Coo.'

That'll teach him to shout at me in the street, thought Basil.

****

After the All Clear various friends of Poppet's came together in her
studio.

'I wasn't _the least_ frightened. I was so surprised at my own courage I
felt quite giddy.'

'I wasn't _frightened_, I just felt glum.'

'_I_ felt positively glad. After all we've all said for years that the
present order of things was doomed, haven't we? I mean it's always been
the choice for _us_ between concentration camp and being blown up,
hasn't it? I just sat thinking how much I preferred being blown up to
being beaten with rubber truncheons.'

'_I_ was frightened,' said Poppet.

'Dear Poppet, you always have the _healthiest_ reactions. Erchman really
did wonders for you.'

'Well, I'm not so sure they _were_ so healthy this time. D'you know, I
found myself actually _praying_.'

'I say, did you? That's bad.'

'Better see Erchman again.'

'Unless he's in a concentration camp.'

'We shall all be in concentration camps.'

'If anyone so much as mentions concentration camps again,' said Ambrose
Silk, 'I shall go frankly hay wire.' ('He had an unhappy love affair in
Munich,' one of Poppet's friends explained to another, 'then they found
he was half Jewish and the Brown Shirt was shut away.') 'Let's look at
Poppet's pictures and forget the war. Now _that_,' he said, pausing
before the Aphrodite, '_that_ I consider _good_. I consider it _good_,
Poppet. The moustache... it shows you have crossed one of the
artistic Rubicons and feel strong enough to be facetious. Like those
wonderfully dramatic old _chestnuts_ in Parsnip's _Guernica Revisited_.
You're growing up Poppet, my dear.'

'I wonder if it's the effect of that old adventurer of hers.'

'Poor Basil, it's sad enough for him to be an _enfant terrible_ at the
age of thirty-six; but to be regarded by the younger generation as a
kind of dilapidated Bull Dog Drummond...'

Ambrose Silk was older than Poppet and her friends; he was, in fact, a
contemporary of Basil's, with whom he had maintained a shadowy, mutually
derisive acquaintance since they were undergraduates. In those days, the
mid '20's at Oxford, when the last of the ex-service men had gone down
and the first of the puritanical, politically minded had either not come
up or, at any rate, had not made himself noticed, in those days of broad
trousers and high-necked jumpers and cars parked nightly outside the
Spread Eagle at Thame, there had been few sub-divisions; a certain
spiritual extravagance in the quest for pleasure had been the sole
common bond between friends who in subsequent years had drifted far
apart, beyond hailing distance, on the wider seas. Ambrose, in those
days, had ridden ridiculously and ignominiously in the Christ Church
Grind, and Peter Pastmaster had gone to a Palais de Danse in Reading
dressed as a woman. Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington absorbed in immature
experiments into the question of how far various lewd debutantes would
go with him, still had time when tippling his port at Mickleham to hear,
without disapproval, Ambrose's recitals of unrequited love for a rowing
blue. Nowadays Ambrose saw few of his old friends except Basil. He
fancied that he had been dropped and sometimes in moments of vainglory,
to the right audience, represented himself as a martyr to Art; as one
who made no concessions to Mammon. 'I can't come all the way with you,'
he said once to Parsnip and Pimpernell when they explained that only by
becoming proletarian (an expression to which they attached no pedantic
suggestion of childbearing; they meant that he should employ himself in
some ill-paid, unskilled labour of a mechanical kind) could he hope to
be a valuable writer, 'I can't come all the way with you, dear Parsnip
and Pimpernell. But at least you know I have never sold myself to the
upper-class.' In this mood he saw himself as a figure in a dream,
walking down an endless fashionable street; every door stood open and
the waiting footmen cried, 'Come in and join us; flatter our masters and
we will feed you,' but Ambrose always marched straight ahead unheeding.
'I belong, hopelessly, to the age of the ivory tower,' he said.

It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone
except those with whom he most consorted. Poppet and her friends looked
on him as a survival from the Yellow Book. The more conscientiously he
strove to put himself in the movement and to ally himself with the dour
young proletarians of the new decade, the more antiquated did he seem to
them. His very appearance, with the swagger and flash of the young
Disraeli, made him a conspicuous figure among them. Basil with his
natural shabbiness was less incongruous.

Ambrose knew this, and repeated the phrase 'old adventurer' with relish.


[5]

Alastair and Sonia Trumpington changed house, on an average, once a
year, ostensibly for motives of economy, and were now in Chester Street.
Wherever they went they carried with them their own inalienable,
inimitable disorder. Ten years ago, without any effort or desire on
their part, merely by pleasing themselves in their own way, they had
lived in the full blaze of fashionable notoriety; to-day without regret,
without in fact being aware of the change, they formed a forgotten cove,
where the wreckage of the roaring-twenties, long tossed on the high
seas, lay beached, dry and battered, barely worth the attention of the
most assiduous beachcomber. Sonia would sometimes remark how odd it was
that the papers nowadays never seemed to mention anyone one had ever
heard of; they had been such a bore once, never leaving one alone.

Basil, when he was in England, was a constant visitor. It was really,
Alastair said, in order to keep him from coming to stay, that they had
to live in such painfully cramped quarters.

Wherever they lived Basil developed a homing instinct towards them, an
aptitude which, in their swift moves from house to house, often caused
consternation to subsequent tenants, who, before he had had time to form
new patterns of behaviour, would quite often wake in the night to hear
Basil swarming up the drain pipes and looming tipsily in the bedroom
window, or, in the morning, to find him recumbent and insensible in the
area. Now, on this catastrophic morning, Basil found himself orientated
to them as surely as though he were in wine, and he arrived on their new
doorstep without conscious thought of direction. He went upstairs
immediately for, wherever they lived, it was always in Sonia's bedroom,
as though it were the scene of an unending convalescence, that the heart
of the household beat.

Basil had attended Sonia's levees (and there were three or four levees
daily for, whenever she was at home, she was in bed) off and on for
nearly ten years, since the days of her first, dazzling loveliness,
when, almost alone among the chaste and daring brides of London, she had
admitted mixed company to her bathroom. It was an innovation, or rather
the revival of a more golden age, which, like everything Sonia did, was
conceived without any desire for notoriety; she enjoyed company, she
enjoyed her bath. There were usually three or four breathless and giddy
young men, in those days, gulping Black Velvet in the steam, pretending
to take their reception as a matter of common occurrence.

Basil saw little change in her beauty now and none in the rich confusion
of letters, newspapers, half-opened parcels and half-empty bottles,
puppies, flowers and fruit which surrounded the bed where she sat sewing
(for it was one of the vagaries of her character to cover acres of silk,
yearly, with exquisite embroidery).

'Darling Basil, have you come to be blown up with us? Where's your
horrible girl friend?'

'She took fright.'

'She was a beast, darling, one of your very worst. Look at Peter. Isn't
it all crazy?' Peter Pastmaster sat at the foot of her bed in uniform.
Once, for reasons he had now forgotten, he had served, briefly, in the
cavalry; the harvest of that early sowing had ripened, suddenly
overnight. 'Won't it be too ridiculous, starting all over again,
lunching with young men on guard.'

'Not young, Sonia. You should see us. The average age of the subalterns
is about forty, the colonel finished the last war as a brigadier, and
our troopers are all either weatherbeaten old commissionaires or fifteen
stone valets.'

Alastair came in from the bathroom. 'How's the art tart?' He opened
bottles and began mixing stout and champagne in a deep jug. 'Blackers?'
They had always drunk this sour and invigorating draught.

'Tell us all about the war,' said Sonia.

'Well--' Basil began.

'No, darling, I didn't mean that. Not _all_. Not about who's going to
win or why we are fighting. Tell us what everyone is going to do about
it. From what Margot tells me the last war was absolute heaven. Alastair
wants to go for a soldier.'

'Conscription has rather taken the gilt off that particular
gingerbread,' said Basil. 'Besides, this isn't going to be a soldier's
war.'

'Poor Peter,' said Sonia, as though she was talking to one of the
puppies. 'It isn't going to be your war, sweetheart.'

'Suits me,' said Peter.

'I expect Basil will have the most tremendous adventures. He always did
in peace time. Goodness knows what he'll do in war.'

'There are too many people in on the racket,' said Basil.

'Poor sweet, I don't believe any of you are nearly as excited about it
as I am.'

****

The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great
Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her
friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein
question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical
solution for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory.
Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable;
on that all agreed. But Parsnip's art flourished best in England, even
an embattled England, while Pimpernell's needed the peaceful and fecund
soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many
believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the
dissolution of partnership.

'I don't say that Pimpernell is the _better_ poet,' said Ambrose. 'All I
say is that I _personally_ find him the more nutritious; so I
_personally_ think they are right to go.'

'But I've always felt that Parsnip is so much more dependent on
environment.'

'I know what you mean, Poppet, but I don't agree... Aren't you
thinking only of _Guernica Revisited_ and forgetting the Christopher
Sequence...'

Thus the aesthetic wrangle might have run its familiar course, but there
was in the studio that morning a cross, red-headed girl in spectacles
from the London School of Economics; she believed in a People's Total
War; an uncompromising girl whom none of them liked; a suspect of
Trotskyism.

'What I don't see,' she said (and what this girl did not see was usually
a very conspicuous embarrassment to Poppet's friends)--'What I don't see
is how these two can claim to be _Contemporary_ if they run away from
the biggest event in contemporary history. They were contemporary enough
about Spain when no one threatened to come and bomb _them_.'

It was an awkward question; one that in military parlance was called 'a
swift one'. At any moment, it was felt in the studio, this indecent girl
would use the word 'escapism'; and, in the silence which followed her
outburst, while everyone in turn meditated and rejected a possible
retort, she did, in fact, produce the unforgivable charge. 'It's just
sheer escapism,' she said.

The word startled the studio, like the cry of 'Cheat' in a card-room.

'That's a foul thing to say, Julia.'

'Well, what's the answer?'...

The answer, thought Ambrose, he knew an answer or two. There was plenty
that he had learned from his new friends, that he could quote to them.
He could say that the war in Spain was 'contemporary' because it was a
class war; the present conflict, since Russia had declared herself
neutral, was merely a phase in capitalist disintegration; that would
have satisfied, or at least silenced, the red-headed girl. But that was
not really the answer. He sought for comforting historical analogies but
every example which occurred to him was on the side of the red-head. She
knew them too, he thought, and would quote them with all her
post-graduate glibness--Socrates marching to the sea with Xenophon,
Virgil sanctifying Roman military rule, Horace singing the sweetness of
dying for one's country, the troubadours riding to war, Cervantes in the
galleys at Lepanto, Milton working himself blind in the public service,
even George IV, for whom Ambrose had a reverence which others devoted to
Charles I, believed he had fought at Waterloo. All these, and a host of
other courageous contemporary figures rose in Ambrose's mind, Czanne
had deserted in 1870, but Czanne in the practical affairs of life was a
singularly unattractive figure; moreover, he was a painter whom Ambrose
found insufferably boring. There was no answer to be found on those
lines.

'You're just sentimental,' said Poppet, 'like a spinster getting tearful
at the sound of a military band.'

'Well, they have military bands in Russia, don't they? I expect plenty
of spinsters get tearful in the Red Square when they march past Lenin's
tomb.'

You can always stump them with Russia, thought Ambrose; they can always
stump each other. It's the dead end of all discussion.

'The question is, would they write any better for being in danger?' said
one.

'Would they help the People's Cause?' said another.

It was the old argument, gathering speed again after the rude girl's
interruption. Ambrose gazed sadly at the jaundiced, mustachioed
Aphrodite. What was he doing, he asked, himself, in this galley.

****

Sonia was trying to telephone to Margot, to invite themselves all to
luncheon.

'An odious man says that only official calls are being taken this
morning.'

'Say you're M.I.13,' said Basil.

'I'm M.I.13.... What can that mean? Darling, I believe it's going to
work... It _has_ worked... Margot, this is Sonia... I'm dying
to see you too...'

****

Aphrodite gazed back at him, blind, as though sculptured in butter;
Parsnip and Pimpernell, Red Square and Brown House, thus the discussion
raged. What was all this to do with him?

Art and Love had led him to this inhospitable room.

Love for a long succession of louts--rugger blues, all-in wrestlers,
naval ratings; tender, hopeless love that had been rewarded at the best
by an occasional episode of rough sensuality, followed, in sober light,
with contempt, abuse and rapacity.

A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant,
humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene
felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he
despised--these had been his, and now they were the current exchange of
comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he could
frequent without fear of ridicule and there he was surrounded, as though
by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of
himself. Was it thus that the rich passions of Greece and Arabia and the
Renaissance had worn themselves out? Did they simper when Leonardo
passed and imitate with mincing grace the warriors of Sparta; was there
a snigger across the sand outside the tents of Saladin? They burned the
Knights Templar at the stake; their loves, at least, were monstrous and
formidable, a thing to call down destruction from heaven if man
neglected his duty of cruelty and repression. Beddoes had died in
solitude, by his own hand; Wilde had been driven into the shadows, tipsy
and garrulous, but, to the end, a figure of tragedy looming big in his
own twilight. But Ambrose, thought Ambrose, what of him? born after his
time, in an age which made a type of him, a figure of farce; like
mothers-in-law and kippers, the century's contribution to the national
store of comic objects; akin with the chorus boys who tittered under the
lamps of Shaftesbury Avenue. And Hans, who at last, after so long a
pilgrimage, had seemed to promise rest, Hans so simple and affectionate,
like a sturdy young terrier, Hans lay in the unknown horrors of a Nazi
concentration camp.

The huge, yellow face with scrawled moustaches offered Ambrose no
comfort.

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be
called up in the near future. 'I don't know what to do about it,' he
said. 'Of course, I could always plead conscientious objections, but I
haven't got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we've stood
for if I said I had a conscience.'

'No, Tom,' they said to comfort him. 'We know you haven't a conscience.'

'But then,' said the perplexed young man, 'if I haven't got a
conscience, why in God's name should I mind so much saying that I have?'

****

'...Peter's here and Basil. We're all feeling very gay and warlike.
May we come to luncheon? Basil says there's bound to be an enormous
air-raid to-night so it may be the last time we shall ever see each
other.... What's that? Yes, I told you I'm (What am I, Basil?) I'm
M.I.13. (There's a ridiculous woman on the line saying is this a private
call?)... Well, Margot, then we'll all come round to you. That'll be
heaven... hello, _hello_, I do believe that damned woman has cut us
off.'

****

_Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art._ Nature in the raw is seldom
mild; red in tooth and claw; matelots in Toulon smelling of wine and
garlic, with tough brown necks, cigarettes stuck to the lower lip,
lapsing into unintelligible, contemptuous argot.

Art: this was where Art had brought him, to this studio, to these coarse
and tedious youngsters, to that preposterous yellow face among the
boiled sweets.

It had been a primrose path in the days of Diaghilev; at Eton he had
collected Lovat-Frazer rhyme sheets; at Oxford he had recited _In
Memoriam_ through a megaphone to an accompaniment hummed on combs and
tissue paper; in Paris he had frequented Jean Cocteau and Gertrude
Stein; he had written and published his first book there, a study of
Mont Parnasse negroes that had been banned in England by Sir William
Joynson-Hicks. That way the primrose path led gently downhill to the
world of fashionable photographers, stage sets for Cochrane, Cedric Lyne
and his Neapolitan grottoes.

He had made his decision then, turned aside from the primrose path, had
deliberately chosen the austere and the heroic; it was the year of the
American slump, a season of heroic decisions, when Paul had tried to
enter a monastery and David had succeeded in throwing himself under a
train. Ambrose had gone to Germany, lived in a workman's quarter, found
Hans, begun a book, a grim, abstruse, interminable book, a penance for
past frivolity; the unfinished manuscript lay somewhere in an old
suitcase in Central Europe, and Hans was behind barbed wire; or worse,
perhaps, had given in, as with his simple, easy-going acceptance of
things, was all too likely, was back among the Brown Shirts, a man with
a mark against his name, never again to be trusted, but good enough for
the firing line, good enough to be jostled into battle.

The red-headed girl was asking inconvenient questions again. 'But Tom,'
she was saying. 'Surely if it was a good thing to share the life of the
worker in a canned fruit factory, why isn't it a good thing to serve
with him in the army?'

'Julia's just the type who used to go about distributing white
feathers.'

'If it comes to that, why the hell not?' said Julia.

_Ars longa_, thought Ambrose, a short life but a grey one.

****

Alastair plugged his electric razor into the lamp on Sonia's writing
table and shaved in the bedroom, so as not to miss what was going on. He
had once in the past seen Peter in full dress uniform at a Court Ball
and had felt sorry for him because it meant that he could not come on
afterwards to a night club; this was the first time he had seen him in
khaki and he was jealous as a schoolboy. There was still a great deal of
the schoolboy about Alastair; he enjoyed winter sports and sailing and
squash racquets and the chaff round the bar at Bratt's; he observed
certain immature taboos of dress, such as wearing a bowler hat in London
until after Goodwood week; he had a firm, personal sense of schoolboy
honour. He felt these prejudices to be peculiar to himself; none of them
made him at all censorious of anyone else; he accepted Basil's
outrageous disregard for them without question. He kept his sense of
honour as he might have kept an expensive and unusual pet; as, indeed,
once, for a disastrous month, Sonia had kept a small kangaroo named
Molly. He knew himself to be as eccentric, in his own way, as Ambrose
Silk. For a year, at the age of twenty-one, he had been Margot
Metroland's lover; it was an apprenticeship many of his friends had
served; they had forgotten about it now, but at the time all their
acquaintances knew about it; but never, even to Sonia, had Alastair
alluded to the fact. Since marriage he had been unfaithful to Sonia for
a week every year, during Bratt's Club golf tournament at Le Touquet,
usually with the wife of a fellow member. He did this without any
scruple because he believed Bratt's week to be in some way excluded from
the normal life of loyalties and obligations; a Saturnalia when the laws
did not run. At all other times he was a devoted husband.

Alastair had never come nearer to military service than in being senior
private in the Corps at Eton; during the General Strike he had driven
about the poorer quarters of London in a closed van to break up
seditious meetings and had clubbed several unoffending citizens; that
was his sole contribution to domestic politics, for he had lived, in
spite of his many moves, in uncontested constituencies. But he had
always held it as axiomatic that, should anything as preposterous and
antiquated as a large-scale war occur, he would take a modest but
vigorous part. He had no illusions about his abilities, but believed,
justly, that he would make as good a target as anyone else for the
King's enemies to shoot at. It came as a shock to him now, to find his
country at war and himself in pyjamas, spending his normal Sunday noon
with a jug of Black Velvet and some chance visitors. Peter's uniform
added to his uneasiness. It was as though he had been taken in adultery
at Christmas or found in mid-June on the steps of Bratt's in a soft hat.

He studied Peter, with the rapt attention of a small boy, taking in
every detail of his uniform, the riding boots, Sam Browne belt, the
enamelled stars of rank, and felt disappointed but, in a way, relieved,
that there was no sword; he could not have borne it if Peter had had a
sword.

'I know I look awful,' Peter said. 'The adjutant left me in no doubt on
that subject.'

'You look sweet,' said Sonia.

'I heard they had stopped wearing cross straps on the Sam Browne,' said
Alastair.

'Yes, but technically _we_ still carry swords.'

_Technically_. Peter _had_ a sword, technically.

'Darling, do you think that if we went past Buckingham Palace the
sentries will salute?'

'It's quite possible. I don't think Belisha has quite succeeded in
putting it down yet.'

'We'll go there at once. I'll dress. Can't wait to see them.'

So they walked from Chester Street to Buckingham Palace; Sonia and Peter
in front, Alastair and Basil a pace or two behind. The sentries saluted
and Sonia pinched Peter as he acknowledged it. Alastair said to Basil:

'I suppose we'll be doing that soon.'

'They don't want volunteers in this war, Alastair. They'll call people
up when they want them without any recruiting marches or popular songs.
They haven't the equipment for the men in training now.'

'Who do you mean by "they"?'

'Hore-Belisha.'

'Who cares what _he_ wants?' said Alastair. For him there was no 'they'.
England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington, was at war. It was not the
business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But
he could not put this into words; not into words, anyway, which Basil
would not make ridiculous, so he walked on in silence behind Peter's
martial figure until Sonia decided to take a cab.

'I know what I want,' said Basil. 'I want to be one of those people one
heard about in 1919; the hard-faced men who did well out of the war.'


[6]

Although it was common for Freddy Sothill, Sir Joseph Mainwaring and
various others who from time to time were enlisted to help solve the
recurrent problem of Basil's future, to speak of him in terms they
normally reserved for the mining community of South Wales, as feckless
and unemployable, the getting of jobs, of one kind and another, had, in
fact, played a large part in his life, for it was the explanation and
excuse of most of Basil's vagaries that he had never had any money of
his own. Tony and Barbara by their father's will each enjoyed a
reasonable fortune, but Sir Christopher Seal had died shortly after the
first of Basil's major disgraces. If it were conceivable that one who
held the office of Chief Whip for a quarter of a century could be
shocked at any spectacle of human depravity, it might have been thought
that shame hastened his end, so fast did one event follow upon the
other. Be that as it may, it was on his death-bed that Sir Christopher,
in true melodramatic style, disinherited his younger son, leaving his
future entirely in his mother's hands.

Lady Seal's most devoted friend--and she had many--would not have
credited her with more than human discretion, and some quite
preternatural power would have been needed to deal with Basil's first
steps in adult life. The system she decided on was, at the best,
unimaginative and, like many such schemes, was suggested to her by Sir
Joseph Mainwaring; it consisted, in his words, of 'giving the boy his
bread and butter and letting him find the jam'. Removed from the realm
of metaphor to plain English, this meant allowing Basil 400 a year,
conditional on his good behaviour, and expecting him to supplement it by
his own exertions if he wished for a more ample way of life.

The arrangement proved disastrous from the first. Four times in the last
ten years Lady Seal had paid Basil's debts; once on condition of his
living at home with her; once on condition of his living somewhere,
anywhere, abroad; once on condition of his marrying; once on condition
of refraining from his marriage. Twice he had been cut off with a penny;
twice taken back to favour; once he had been set up in chambers in the
Temple with an allowance of a thousand a year; several times a large
lump sum of capital had been dangled before his eyes as the reward of
his giving himself seriously to commerce; once he had been on the verge
of becoming the recipient of a sisal farm in Kenya. Throughout all these
changes of fortune Sir Joseph Mainwaring had acted the part of political
agent to a recalcitrant stipendiary sultan, in a way which embittered
every benevolence and minimized the value of every gift he brought. In
the intervals of neglect and independence, Basil had fended for himself
and had successively held all the jobs which were open to young men of
his qualifications. He had never had much difficulty in getting jobs;
the trouble had always been in keeping them, for he regarded a potential
employer as his opponent in a game of skill. All Basil's resource and
energy went into hoodwinking him into surrender; once he had received
his confidence he lost interest. Thus English girls will put themselves
to endless exertion to secure a husband and, once married, will think
their labour at an end.

Basil had been leader writer on the _Daily Beast_, he had served in the
personal entourage of Lord Monomark, he had sold champagne on
commission, composed dialogue for the Cinema and given the first of what
was intended to be a series of talks for the B.B.C. Sinking lower in the
social scale he had been press agent for a female contortionist and had
once conducted a party of tourists to the Italian lakes; (he dined out
for some time on the story of that tour which had, after a crescendo of
minor vexations, culminated in Basil making a bundle of all the tickets
and all the passports and sinking them in Lake Guarda. He had then
travelled home alone by an early train, leaving fifty penniless Britons,
none of whom spoke a word of any foreign language, to the care of
whatever deity takes charge of forsaken strangers; for all Basil knew,
they were still there.)

From time to time he disappeared from the civilized area and returned
with tales to which no one attached much credence--of having worked for
the secret police in Bolivia and advised the Emperor of Azania on the
modernization of his country. Basil was in the habit, as it were, of
conducting his own campaigns, issuing his own ultimatums, disseminating
his own propaganda, erecting about himself his own blackout; he was an
obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians. He was
used, in his own life, to a system of push, appeasement, agitation and
blackmail, which, except that it had no more distinct aim than his own
immediate amusement, ran parallel to Nazi diplomacy.

Like Nazi diplomacy it postulated for success a peace-loving, orderly
and honourable world in which to operate. In the new, busy, secretive,
chaotic world which developed during the first days of the war, Basil,
for the first time in his life, felt himself at a disadvantage. It was
like being in Latin America at a time of upheaval and, instead of being
an Englishman, being oneself a Latin American.

The end of September found Basil in a somewhat fretful mood. The
air-raid scare seemed to be over for the time and those who had
voluntarily fled from London were beginning to return, pretending that
they had only been to the country to see that everything was all right
there. The women and children of the poor, too, were flocking home to
their evacuated streets. The newspapers said that the Poles were holding
out; that their cavalry was penetrating deep into Germany; that the
enemy was already short of motor oil; that Saarbrucken would fall to the
French within a day or two; air-raid wardens roamed the remote hamlets
of the kingdom, persecuting yokels who walked home from the inn with
glowing pipes. Londoners who were slow to acquire the habit of the
domestic hearth, groped their way in darkness from one place of
amusement to another, learning their destination by feeling the buttons
on the commissionaires' uniforms; revolving, black glass doors gave
access to a fairy land; it was as though, when children, they had been
led blindfold into the room with the lighted Christmas tree. The
casualty list of street accidents became formidable and there were
terrifying tales of footpads who leaped on the shoulders of old
gentlemen on the very steps of their clubs, or beat them to jelly on Hay
Hill.

Everyone whom Basil met was busy getting a job. Some consciously or
unconsciously had taken out an insurance policy against unemployment by
joining some military unit in the past; there were those like Peter, who
in early youth had gratified a parental whim by spending a few expensive
years in the regular army, and those like Freddy who had gone into the
yeomanry as they sat on the Bench and the county council as part of the
normal obligations of rural life. These were now in uniform with their
problems solved. In later months, as they sat idle in the Middle East,
they were to think enviously of those who had made a more deliberate and
judicious choice of service, but at the moment their minds were enviably
at rest. The remainder were possessed with a passion to enrol in some
form of public service, however uncongenial. Some formed ambulance
parties and sat long hours at their posts waiting for air-raid victims;
some became firemen, some minor civil servants. None of these honourable
occupations made much appeal to Basil.

He was exactly the type of man who, if English life had run as it did in
books of adventure, should at this turn in world affairs have been sent
for. He should have been led to an obscure address in Maida Vale and
there presented to a lean, scarred man with hard grey eyes; one of the
men behind the scenes; one of the men whose names were unknown to the
public and the newspapers, who passed unnoticed in the street, a name
known only to the inner circle of the Cabinet and to the XXX heads of
the secret police of the world... 'Sit down, Seal. We've followed
your movements with interest ever since that affair in La Paz in '32.
You're a rascal, but I'm inclined to think you're the kind of rascal the
country needs at this moment. I take it you're game for anything?'

'I'm game.'

'That's what I expected you to say. These are your orders. You will go
to Uxbridge aerodrome at 4.30 this afternoon where a man will meet you
and give you your passport. You will travel under the name of
Blenkinsop. You are a tobacco grower from Latakia. A civil aeroplane
will take you by various stages to Smyrna where you will register at the
Miramar Hotel and await orders. Is that clear...?'

It was clear, and Basil, whose life up to the present had been more like
an adventure story than most people's, did half expect some such
summons. None came. Instead he was invited to luncheon by Sir Joseph
Mainwaring at the Travellers' Club.

Basil's luncheons at the Travellers' with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for
years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been
the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his
political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions,
the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of
the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of
Freddy's Last Cheque--each would provide both theme and title for a work
of popular fiction.

Hitherto these feasts had taken place _ deux_ in a secluded corner. The
Luncheon of the Commission in the Guards was altogether a more
honourable affair and its purpose was to introduce Basil to the
Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bombadiers--an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly
believed to have a liking for him.

The Lieutenant-Colonel did not know Sir Joseph well and was surprised
and slightly alarmed by the invitation, for his distrust was based not,
as might have been expected, on any just estimate of his capabilities,
but, paradoxically, on the fear of him as a politician and man of
affairs. All politicians were, to the Lieutenant-Colonel, not so much
boobies as bogies. He saw them all, even Sir Joseph, as figures of
renaissance subtlety and intrigue. It was by being in with them that the
great professional advances were achieved; but it was by falling foul of
them that one fell into ignominy. For a simple soldier--and if ever
anyone did, the Lieutenant-Colonel qualified for that honourable
title--the only safe course was to avoid men like Sir Joseph. When met
with, they should be treated with bluff and uncompromising reserve. Sir
Joseph thus found himself, through his loyal friendship with Cynthia
Seal, in the equivocal position of introducing, with a view to his
advancement, a man for whom he had a deep seated horror to a man who had
something of the same emotion towards himself. It was not a concurrence
which, on the face of it, seemed hopeful of good results.

Basil, like 'Lord Monmouth', 'never condescended to the artifice of the
toilet', and the Lieutenant-Colonel studied him with distaste. Together
the ill-assorted trio went to their table.

Soldier and statesman spread their napkins on their knees and in the
interest of ordering their luncheon allowed a silence to fall between
them into which Basil cheerfully plunged.

'We ought to do something about Liberia, Colonel,' he said.

The Lieutenant-Colonel turned on him the outraged gaze with which a good
regimental soldier always regards the discussion of war in its larger
aspects.

'I expect those whose business it is have the question in hand,' he
said.

'Don't you believe it,' said Basil. 'I don't expect they've given it a
thought,' and for some twenty minutes he explained why and how Liberia
should be immediately annexed.

The two elder men ate in silence. At length a chance reference to Russia
gave Sir Joseph the chance to interpose an opinion.

'I always distrust prophecy in any form,' he said. 'But there is one
thing of which I am certain. Russia will come in against us before the
end of the year. That will put Italy and Japan on our side. Then it is
simply a question of time before our blockade makes itself felt. All
kinds of things that you and I have never heard of, like manganese and
bauxite, will win the war for us.'

'And infantry.'

'_And_ infantry.'

'Teach a man to march and shoot. Give him the right type of officer.
Leave the rest to him.'

This seemed to Basil a suitable moment to introduce his own problems.
'What do you think is the right type of officer?'

'The officer-type.'

'It's an odd thing,' Basil began, 'that people always expect the
upper-class to be good leaders of men. That was all right in the old
days when most of them were brought up with tenantry to look after. But
now three-quarters of your officer-type live in towns. _I_ haven't any
tenantry.'

The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at Basil with detestation. 'No, no. I
suppose not.'

'Well, have _you_ any tenantry?'

'_I?_ No. My brother sold the old place years ago.'

'Well, there you are.'

It was crystal-clear to Sir Joseph and faintly perceptible to Basil,
that the Lieutenant-Colonel did not take this well.

'Seal was for a time conservative candidate down in the West,' said Sir
Joseph, anxious to remove one possible source of prejudice.

'Some pretty funny people have been calling themselves conservatives in
the last year or two. Cause of half the trouble if you ask me.' Then,
feeling he might have been impolite, he added graciously: 'No offence to
you. Daresay you were all right. Don't know anything about you.'

Basil's political candidature was not an episode to be enlarged upon.
Sir Joseph turned the conversation. 'Of course, the French will have to
make some concessions to bring Italy in. Give up Djibouti or something
like that.'

'Why the devil should they?' asked the Lieutenant-Colonel petulantly.
'Who wants Italy in?'

'To counterbalance Russia.'

'How? Why? Where? I don't see it at all.'

'Nor do I,' said Basil.

Threatened with support from so unwelcome a quarter, the
Lieutenant-Colonel immediately abandoned his position. 'Oh, don't you?'
he said. 'Well, I've no doubt Mainwaring knows best. His job to know
these things.'

Warmed by these words Sir Joseph proceeded for the rest of luncheon to
suggest some of the concessions which he thought France might reasonably
make to Italy--Tunisia, French Somaliland, the Suez Canal. 'Corsica,
Nice, Savoy?' asked Basil. Sir Joseph thought not.

Rather than ally himself with Basil the Lieutenant-Colonel listened to
these proposals to dismember an ally in silence and fury. He had not
wanted to come out to luncheon. It would be absurd to say that he was
busy, but he was busier than he had ever been in his life before and he
looked on the two hours or so which he allowed himself in the middle of
the day as time for general recuperation. He liked to spend them among
people to whom he could relate all that he had done in the morning; to
people who would appreciate the importance and rarity of such work;
either that, or with a handsome woman. He left the Travellers' as early
as he decently could and returned to his mess. His mind was painfully
agitated by all he had heard and particularly by the presence of that
seedy-looking young radical whose name he had not caught. That at least,
he thought, he might have hoped to be spared at Sir Joseph's table.

****

'Well, Jo, is everything arranged?'

'Nothing is exactly _arranged_ yet, Cynthia, but I've set the ball
rolling.'

'I hope Basil made a good impression.'

'I hope he did, too. I'm afraid he said some rather unfortunate things.'

'Oh dear. Well, what is the next step?'

Sir Joseph would have liked to say that there was no next step in that
direction; that the best Basil could hope for was oblivion; perhaps in
a month or so, when the luncheon was forgotten... 'It's up to Basil
now, Cynthia. I have introduced him. He must follow it up himself if
he really wants to get into that regiment. But I have been wondering
since you first mentioned the matter, do you really think it is quite
suitable...'

'I'm told he could not do better,' said Lady Seal proudly.

'No, that is so. In one way he could not do better.'

'Then he shall follow up the introduction,' said that unimaginative
mother.

****

The Lieutenant-Colonel was simmering quietly in his office; an
officer--not a young officer but a mature reservist--had just been to
see him without gloves, wearing sude shoes; the consequent outburst had
been a great relief; the simmering was an expression of content, a kind
of mental purr; it was a mood which his subordinates recognized as a
good mood. He was feeling that as long as there was someone like himself
at the head of the regiment, nothing much could go wrong with it (a
feeling which, oddly enough, was shared by the delinquent officer). To
the Lieutenant-Colonel in this mood, it was announced that a civilian
gentleman, Mr Seal, wanted to see him. The name was unfamiliar; so, for
the moment was Basil's appearance, for Angela had been at pains and
expense to fit him up suitably for the interview. His hair was newly
cut, he wore a stiff white collar, a bowler hat, a thin gold watch-chain
and other marks of respectability and he carried a new umbrella. Angela
had also schooled him in the first words of his interview. 'I know you
are very busy, Colonel, but I hoped you would spare me a few minutes to
ask your advice...'

All this went fairly well. 'Want to go into the army?' said the
Lieutenant-Colonel. 'Well, I suppose we must expect a lot of people
coming in from outside nowadays. Lot of new battalions being formed,
even in the Brigade. I presume you'll join the infantry. No point in
going into the cavalry nowadays. All these machines. Might just as well
be an engine driver and have done with it. There's a lot of damn fool
talk about this being a mechanical war and an air war and a commercial
war. All wars are infantry wars. Always have been.'

'Yes, it was infantry I was thinking of.'

'Quite right. I hear some of the line regiments are very short of
officers. I don't imagine you want to go through the ranks, ha! ha!
There's been a lot of nonsense about that lately. Not that it would do
any harm to some of the young gentlemen I've seen about the place. But
for a fellow of your age the thing to do is to join the Supplementary
Reserve, put down the regiment you want to join--there are a number of
line regiments who do very useful work in their way, and get the
commanding officer to apply for you.'

'Exactly, sir, that's what I came to see you about. I was hoping that
_you_--'

'That _I_...?' Slowly to that slow mind there came the realization
that Basil, this dissolute-looking young man who had so grossly upset
his lunch interval the day before, this radical who had impugned the
efficiency of the officer-type, was actually proposing to join the
Bombadier Guards.

'I've always felt,' said Basil, 'that if I had to join the Foot Guards,
I'd soonest join yours. You aren't as stuffy as the Grenadiers and you
haven't got any of those bogus regional connections like the Scots and
Irish and Welsh.'

Had there been no other cause of offence; had Basil come to him with the
most prepossessing appearance, the most glittering sporting record, a
manner in which deference to age was most perfectly allied with social
equality, had he been lord of a thousand loyal tenants, had he been the
nephew of the Colonel-in-Chief, the use by a civilian of such words as
'stuffy' and 'bogus' about the Brigade of Guards would have damned him
utterly.

'So what I suggest,' Basil continued, 'is that I sign up for this
Supplementary Reserve and put you down as my choice of regiment. Will
that be O.K.?'

The Lieutenant-Colonel found his voice; it was not a voice of which he
had full control; it might have been the voice of a man who had been
suspended for a few seconds from a gibbet and then cut down. He fingered
his collar as though, indeed, expecting to find the hangman's noose
there. He said: 'That would _not_ be O.K. We do not take our officers
from the Supplementary Reserve.'

'Well how _do_ I join you?'

'I'm afraid I must have misled you in some way. I have no vacancy for
you in the regiment. I'm looking for platoon commanders. As it is I've
got six or seven ensigns of over thirty. Can you imagine yourself
leading a platoon in action?'

'Well, as a matter of fact I can, but that's the last thing I want. In
fact that's why I want to keep away from the line regiments. After all
there is always a number of interesting staff jobs going for anyone in
the Guards, isn't there? What I thought of doing was to sign up with you
and then look round for something more interesting. I should be
frightfully bored with regimental life you know, but everyone tells me
it's a great help to start in a decent regiment.'

The noose tightened about the Lieutenant-Colonel's throat. He could not
speak. It was with a scarcely human croak and an eloquent gesture of the
hand that he indicated that the interview was over.

In the office it quickly became known that he was in one of his bad
moods again.

Basil went back to Angela.

'How did it go, darling?'

'Not well. Not well at all.'

'Oh dear, and you looked so particularly presentable.'

'Yes; it can't have been that. And I was tremendously polite. Said all
the right things. I expect that old snake Jo Mainwaring has been making
mischief again.'


[7]

'When we say that Parsnip can't write in war time Europe, surely we mean
that he can't write as he has written up till now? Mightn't it be better
for him to stay here, even if it meant holding up production for a year
or so, so that he can _develop_?'

'Oh, I don't think Parsnip and Pimpernell _can_ develop. I mean an organ
doesn't _develop_; it just goes on playing different pieces of music but
remains the same. I feel Parsnip and Pimpernell have perfected
themselves as an instrument.'

'Then suppose Parsnip were to develop and Pimpernell didn't. Or suppose
they developed in different directions. What would happen then?'

'Yes, what would happen then?'

'Why does it take two to write a poem?' asked the red-headed girl.

'Now Julia, don't short circuit the argument.'

'I should have thought poetry was a one-man job. Part-time work at
that.'

'But Julia, you'll admit you don't know very much about poetry, dear.'

'That's exactly why I'm asking.'

'Don't pay any attention, Tom. She doesn't really want to know. She's
only being tiresome.'

They were lunching at a restaurant in Charlotte Street; there were too
many of them for the table; when you put out your hand for your glass
and your neighbour at the same time put out his knife for the butter, he
gave you a greasy cuff; too many for the menu; a single sheet of purple
handwriting that was passed from hand to hand with indifference and
indecision; too many for the waiter, who forgot their various orders;
there were only six of them but it was too many for Ambrose. The talk
was a series of assertions and interjections. Ambrose lived in and for
conversation; he rejoiced in the whole intricate art of it--the timing
and striking the proper juxtaposition of narrative and comment, the
bursts of spontaneous parody, the allusion one would recognize and one
would not, the changes of alliance, the betrayals, the diplomatic
revolutions, the waxing and waning of dictatorships that could happen in
an hour's session about a table. But could it happen? Was that, too,
most exquisite and exacting of arts, part of the buried world of
Diaghilev?

For months, now, he had seen no one except Poppet Green and her friends,
and now, since Angela Lyne's return, Basil had dropped out of the group
as abruptly as he had entered it, leaving Ambrose strangely forlorn.

Why, he wondered, do real intellectuals always prefer the company of
rakes to that of their fellows. Basil is a philistine and a crook; on
occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave
embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming
workers' state; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It
is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise
which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the
communists tell me of an earth full of leisured and contented factory
hands. I don't see Basil getting past the gate of either. Religion is
acceptable in its destructive phase; the desert monks carving up that
humbug Hypatia; the anarchist gangs roasting the monks in Spain.
Hellfire sermons in the chapels; soap-box orators screaming their envy
of the rich. Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough when
it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven
that it shows itself cloddish. But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has
natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal
order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo
for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic. Am I
baptized into this modern world? At least I haven't taken a new name.
All the rest of the left wing writers have adopted plebeian
monosyllables. Ambrose is irredeemably bourgeois. Parsnip often said so.
Damn Parsnip, damn Pimpernell. Do these atrocious young people never
discuss anything else?

They were disputing the bill now, and forgetting what he or she had
eaten; passing the menu from hand to hand to verify the prices.

'When you've decided what it is, tell me.'

'Ambrose's bill is always the largest,' said the red-headed girl.

'Dear Julia, please don't tell me that I could have fed a worker's
family for a week. I still feel definitely _peckish_, my dear. I am sure
workers eat ever so much more.'

'D'you _know_ the index figure for a family of four?'

'No,' said Ambrose wistfully, 'no, I don't know the index figure. Please
don't tell me. It wouldn't surprise me in the least. I like to think of
it as dramatically small.' (Why do I talk like this? nodding and
fluttering my eyelids, as though with a repressed giggle; why can I not
speak like a man? Mine is the brazen voice of Apuleius's ass, turning
its own words to ridicule.)

The party left the restaurant and stood in an untidy group on the
pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what
direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried
away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers
outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. 'I'll tell your
sergeant-major of you,' he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced
down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should
like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing
aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for _me_? Will it
make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be
less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering
a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

He crossed Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, walking without any
particular object except to take the air. It was not until he was under
its shadow and saw the vast bulk of London University insulting the
autumnal sky, that he remembered that here was the Ministry of
Information and that his publisher, Mr Geoffrey Bentley, was working
there at the head of some newly-formed department. Ambrose decided to
pay him a call.

It was far from easy to gain admission; only once in his life, when he
had had an appointment in a cinema studio in the outer suburbs, had
Ambrose met such formidable obstruction. All the secrets of all the
services might have been hidden in that gross mass of masonry. Not until
Mr Bentley had been summoned to the gate to identify him, was Ambrose
allowed to pass.

'We have to be very careful,' said Mr Bentley.

'Why?'

'Far too many people get in as it is. You've no conception how many. It
adds terribly to our work.'

'What is your work, Geoffrey?'

'Well mostly it consists of sending people who want to see me on to
someone they don't want to see. I've never liked authors--except of
course,' he added, 'my personal friends. I'd no idea there were so many
of them. I suppose, now I come to think of it, that explains why there
are so many books. And I've never liked books--except, of course, books
by personal friends.'

They rose in a lift and walked down a wide corridor, passing on the way
Basil who was talking a foreign language which sounded like a series of
expectorations to a sallow man in a taboosh.

'That's _not_ one of my personal friends,' said Mr Bentley bitterly.

'Does he work here?'

'I don't suppose so. No one works in the Near East department. They just
lounge about talking.'

'The tradition of the bazaar.'

'The tradition of the Civil Service. This is my little room.'

They came to the door of what had once been a chemical laboratory, and
entered. There was a white porcelain sink in the corner into which a tap
dripped monotonously. In the centre of the oil-cloth floor stood a card
table and two folding chairs. In his own office Mr Bentley sat under a
ceiling painted by Angela Kaufmann, amid carefully chosen pieces of
empire furniture. 'We have to rough it, you see,' he said. 'I brought
those to make it look more human.'

'Those' were a pair of marble busts by Nollekens; they failed, in
Ambrose's opinion, to add humanity to Mr Bentley's room.

'You don't like them? You remember them in Bedford Square?'

'I like them very much. I remember them well, but don't you think, dear
Geoffrey, that here they are just a weeny bit macabre?'

'Yes,' said Mr Bentley sadly. 'Yes, I know what you mean. They're really
here to annoy the civil servants.'

'Do they?'

'To a frenzy. Look at this.' He showed Ambrose a long typewritten
memorandum which was headed _Furniture, Supplementary to Official
Requirements, Undesirability of_. 'I sent back this.' He showed a still
longer message headed _Art, Objets d', conducive to spiritual repose,
Absence of in the quarters of advisory staff_. 'To-day I got this.'
_Flowers, Framed Photographs and other minor ornaments, Massive marble
and mahogany, Decorative features of, Distinction between._ 'Quite
alliterative with rage, you see. There, for the moment, the matter
rests, but as you see, it's uphill work to get anything done.'

'I suppose it would make no difference if you explained that Nollekens
had inspired the greatest biography in the English language.'

'None I should think.'

'What terrible people to work with. You are _brave_, Geoffrey. I
couldn't do it.'

'But, bless my soul, Ambrose, isn't that what you came about?'

'No. I came to see you.'

'Yes, everyone comes to see me, but they all come hoping to be taken on
in the Ministry. You'd better join now you're here.'

'No. No.'

'You might do worse you know. We all abuse the old M. of I., but there
are a number of quite human people here already, and we are gradually
pushing more in every day. You might do much worse.'

'I don't want to do _anything_. I think this whole war's crazy.'

'You might write a book for us then. I'm getting out a very nice little
series on "What We are Fighting For". I've signed up a retired admiral,
a Church of England curate, an unemployed docker, a negro solicitor from
the Gold Coast, and a nose and throat specialist from Harley Street. The
original idea was to have a symposium in one volume, but I've had to
enlarge the idea a little. All our authors had such very different ideas
it might have been a little confusing. We could fit you in very nicely.
"I used to think war crazy." It's a new line.'

'But I _do_ think war crazy _still_.'

'Yes,' said Mr Bentley, his momentary enthusiasm waning. 'I know what
you mean.'

The door opened and a drab, precise little man entered. 'I beg your
pardon,' he said coldly. 'I didn't expect to find _you_ working.'

'This is Ambrose Silk. I expect you know his work.'

'No.'

'No? He is considering doing a book in our "Why we are at War" series.
This is Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers, our departmental assistant
director.'

'If you'll excuse me a minute, I came about memorandum RQ/1082/B4. The
director is very worried.'

'Was that _Documents, Confidential, destruction by fire of_?'

'No. No. Marble decorative features.'

'Massive marble and mahogany?'

'Yes. Mahogany has no application to your sub-department. That has
reference to a _prie-dieu_ in the religious department. The Church of
England advisor has been hearing confessions there and the director is
very concerned. No, it's these effigies.'

'You refer to my Nollekenses.'

'These great statues. They won't do, Bentley, you know, they really
won't do.'

'Won't do for what?' said Mr Bentley bellicosely.

'They won't do for the departmental director. He says, very properly,
that portraits of sentimental association...'

'These are full of the tenderest association for me.'

'Of relatives...'

'These are family portraits.'

'Really, Bentley. Surely that is George III?'

'A distant kinsman,' said Mr Bentley blandly, 'on my mother's side.'

'And Mrs Siddons?'

'A slightly closer kinswoman, on my father's side.'

'Oh,' said Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers. 'Ah. I didn't realize... I'll
explain that to the director. But I'm sure,' he said suspiciously, 'that
such a contingency was definitely excluded from the director's mind.'

'Flummoxed,' said Mr Bentley, as the door closed behind Sir Philip.
'Completely flummoxed. I'm glad you were there to see my little
encounter. But you see what we have to contend with. And now to your
affairs. I wonder where we can fit you in to our little household.'

'I don't want to be fitted in.'

'You would be a great asset. Perhaps the religious department. I don't
think atheism is properly represented there.'

The head of Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers appeared round the door. 'Could
you tell me, please, _how_ you are related to George III? Forgive my
asking, but the director is bound to want to know.'

'The Duke of Clarence's natural daughter Henrietta married Gervase
Wilbraham of Acton--at that time, I need not remind you, a rural
district. His daughter Gertrude married my maternal grandfather who was,
not that it matters, three times mayor of Chippenham. A man of
substantial fortune, all, alas, now dissipated... Flummoxed again, I
think,' he added as the door closed.

'Was that true?'

'That my grandfather was mayor of Chippenham? Profoundly true.'

'About Henrietta?'

'It has always been believed in the family,' said Mr Bentley.

****

In another cell of that great hive Basil was explaining a plan for the
annexation of Liberia. 'The German planters there outnumber the British
by about fourteen to one. They're organized as a Nazi unit; they've been
importing arms through Japan and they are simply waiting for the signal
from Berlin to take over the government of the state. With Monrovia in
enemy hands, with submarines based there, our West Coast trade route is
cut. Then all the Germans have to do is to shut the Suez Canal, which
they can do from Massawa whenever they like, and the Mediterranean is
lost. Liberia is our one weak spot in West Africa. We've got to get in
first. Don't you see?'

'Yes, yes, but I don't know why you come to me about it.'

'You'll have to handle all the preliminary propaganda there and the
explanations in America afterwards.'

'But why _me_? This is the Near East Department. You ought to see Mr
Pauling.'

'Mr Pauling sent me to you.'

'Did he? I wonder why. I'll ask him.' The unhappy official took up the
telephone and after being successively connected with Films, the shadow
cabinet of the Czecho-Slovaks and the A.R.P. section, said: 'Pauling. I
have a man called Seal here. He says you sent him.'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Well you sent me that frightful Turk this morning.'

'He was child's play to this.'

'Well, let it be a lesson to you not to send me any more Turks.'

'You wait and see what I send you... Yes,' turning to Basil, 'Pauling
made a mistake. Your business is really his. It's a most interesting
scheme. Wish I could do more for you. I'll tell you who, I think, would
like to hear about it--Digby-Smith; he handles propaganda and subversive
activities in enemy territory, and, as you say, Liberia is to all
intents and purposes enemy territory.'

The door opened and there entered a beaming, bearded, hair-bunned figure
in a long black robe; a gold cross swung from his neck; a brimless
top-hat crowned his venerable head.

'I am the Archimandrite Antonios,' he said. 'I am coming in please?'

'Come in, Your Beatitude; please sit down.'

'I have been telling how I was expulsed from Sofia. They said I must be
telling you.'

'You have been to our religious department?'

'I have been telling your office clergymen about my expulsing. The
Bulgar peoples say it was for fornications, but it was for politics.
They are not expulsing from Sofia for fornications unless there is
politics too. So now I am the ally of the British peoples since the
Bulgar peoples say it was for fornications.'

'Yes, yes, I quite understand, but that is not really the business of
this department.'

'You are not dealing with the business of the Bulgar peoples?'

'Well, yes, but I think your case opens up a wider issue altogether. You
must go and see Mr Pauling. I'll give you someone to show the way. He
deals especially with cases like yours.'

'So? You have here a department of fornications?'

'Yes, you might call it that.'

'I find that good. In Sofia is not having any such department.'

His Beatitude was sent on his way. 'Now you want to see Digby-Smith,
don't you?'

'Do I?'

'Yes, he'll be _most_ interested in Liberia.'

Another messenger came; Basil was led away. In the corridor they were
stopped by a small, scrubby man carrying a suitcase.

'Pardon me, can you put me right for the Near East?'

'There,' said Basil, 'in there. But you won't get much sense out of
him.'

'Oh, he's bound to be interested in what I've got here. Everyone is.
They're bombs. You could blow the roof off the whole of this building
with what I got here,' said the lunatic. 'I've been carting 'em from
room to room ever since the blinking war began and often I think it
wouldn't be a bad plan if they did go off sudden.'

'Who sent you to the Near East?'

'Chap called Smith, Digby-Smith. Very interested in my bombs he was.'

'Have you been to Pauling, yet?'

'Pauling? Yes, I was with him yesterday. Very interested he was in my
bombs. I tell you everyone is. It was him said I ought to show them to
Digby-Smith.'

****

Mr Bentley talked at length about the difficulties and impossibilities
of bureaucratic life. 'If it was not for the journalists and the civil
servants,' he said, 'everything would be perfectly easy. They seem to
think the whole Ministry exists for their convenience. Strictly, of
course, I shouldn't have anything to do with the journalists--I deal
with books here--but they always seem to shove them on to me when they
get impatient. Not only journalists; there was a man here this morning
with a suitcase full of bombs.'

'Geoffrey,' said Ambrose at length. 'Tell me, would you say I was pretty
well known as a left wing writer?'

'Of course my dear fellow, very well known.'

'As a _left_ wing writer.'

'Of course _very_ left wing.'

'Well known, I mean, outside the left wing itself?'

'Yes, certainly. Why?'

'I was only wondering.'

They were now interrupted for some minutes by an American war
correspondent who wanted Mr Bentley to verify the story of a Polish
submarine which was said to have arrived at Scapa; to give him a pass to
go there and see for himself; to provide him with a Polish interpreter;
to explain why in hell that little runt Pappenhacker of the Hearst press
had been told of this submarine and not himself.

'Oh dear,' said Mr Bentley. 'Why have they sent you to me?'

'It seems I'm registered with you and not with the press bureau.'

This proved to be true. As the author of _Nazi Destiny_, a work of
popular history that had sold prodigiously on both sides of the
Atlantic, this man had been entered as a 'man of letters' instead of as
a journalist.

'You mustn't mind,' said Mr Bentley. 'In this country we think much more
of men-of-letters than we do of journalists.'

'Does being a man-of-letters get me to Scapa?'

'Well, no.'

'Does it get me a Polish interpreter?'

'No.'

'To Hell with being a man-of-letters.'

'I'll get you transferred,' said Mr Bentley. 'The press bureau is the
place for you.'

'There's a snooty young man at that bureau looks at me as if I was
something the cat brought in,' complained the author of _Nazi Destiny_.

'He won't once you're registered with him. I wonder, since you're here,
if you'd like to write a book for us.'

'No.'

'No? Well I hope you get to Scapa all right... He won't you know,'
added Mr Bentley as the door closed. 'You may be absolutely confident
that he'll never get there. Did you ever read his book? It was
exceedingly silly. He said Hitler was secretly married to a Jewess. I
don't know what he'd say if we let him go to Scapa.'

'What do you think he'll say if you don't?'

'Something very offensive I've no doubt. But we shan't be responsible.
At least, I wonder, shall we?'

'Geoffrey, when you say well known as a left wing writer, do you suppose
that if the fascists got into power here, I should be on their black
list?'

'Yes, certainly, my dear fellow.'

'They did frightful things to Left Wing Intellectuals in Spain.'

'Yes.'

'And in Poland, now.'

'So the press department tell me.'

'I see.'

The Archimandrite dropped in for a few moments. He expressed great
willingness to write a book about Axis intrigues in Sofia.

'You think you can help bring Bulgaria in on our side?' asked Mr
Bentley.

'I am spitting in the face of the Bulgar peoples,' said His Beatitude.

'I believe he'd write a very good autobiography,' said Mr Bentley, when
the prelate left them. 'In the days of peace I should have signed him up
for one.'

'Geoffrey, you were serious when you said that I should be on the black
list of Left Wing Intellectuals?'

'Quite serious. You're right at the top. You and Parsnip and
Pimpernell.'

Ambrose winced at the mention of these two familiar names. '_They're_
all right,' he said. '_They're_ in the United States.'

****

Basil and Ambrose met as they left the Ministry. Together they loitered
for a minute to watch a brisk little scene between the author of _Nazi
Destiny_ and the policeman on the gate; it appeared that in a fit of
nervous irritation the American had torn up the slip of paper which had
admitted him to the building; now they would not let him leave.

'I'm sorry for him in a way,' said Ambrose. 'It's not a place I'd care
to spend the rest of the war in.'

'They wanted me to take a job there,' said Basil, lying.

'They wanted _me_ to,' said Ambrose.

They walked together through the sombre streets of Bloomsbury. 'How's
Poppet?' said Basil at length.

'She's cheered up wonderfully since you left. Painting away like a
mowing machine.'

'I must look her up again sometime. I've been busy lately. Angela's
back. Where are we going to?'

'I don't know. I've nowhere to go.'

'_I've_ nowhere to go.'

An evening chill was beginning to breathe down the street.

'I nearly joined the Bombadier Guards a week or two ago,' said Basil.

'I once had a _great_ friend who was a corporal in the Bombadiers.'

'We'd better go and see Sonia and Alastair.'

'I haven't been near them for years.'

'Come on.' Basil wanted someone to pay for the cab.

But when they reached the little house in Chester Street they found
Sonia alone and packing. 'Alastair's gone off,' she said. 'He's joined
the army--in the ranks. They said he was too old for a commission.'

'My dear, how very 1914.'

'I'm just off to join him. He's near Brookwood.'

'You'll be beautifully near the Necropolis,' said Ambrose. 'It's the
most enjoyable place. Three public houses, my dear, inside the cemetery,
right among the graves. I asked the barmaid if the funeral parties got
very tipsy and she said, "No. It's when they come back to visit the
graves. They seem to need something then". And did you know the Corps of
Commissionaires have a special burial place? Perhaps if Alastair is a
very good soldier they might make him an honorary member...' Ambrose
chattered on. Sonia packed. Basil looked about for bottles. 'Nothing to
drink.'

'All packed, darling. I'm sorry. We might go out somewhere.'

They went out, later, when the packing was done, into the blackout to a
bar. Other friends came to join them.

'No one seems interested in my scheme to annex Liberia.'

'Beasts.'

'No imagination. They won't take suggestions from outsiders. You know,
Sonia, this war is developing into a kind of club enclosure on a
racecourse. If you aren't wearing the right badge they won't let you
in.'

'I think that's rather what Alastair felt.'

'It's going to be a long war. There's plenty of time. I shall wait until
there's something amusing to do.'

'I don't believe it's going to be that kind of war.'

This is all that anyone talks about, thought Ambrose; jobs and the kind
of war it is going to be. War in the air, war of attrition, tank war,
war of nerves, war of propaganda, war of defence in depth, war of
movement, people's war, total war, indivisible war, war infinite, war
incomprehensible, war of essence without accidents or attributes,
metaphysical war, war in time-space, war eternal... all war is
nonsense, thought Ambrose. I don't care about their war. It's got
nothing on me. But if, thought Ambrose, I was one of these people, if I
were not a cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy, if I were not all that the Nazis
mean when they talk about 'degenerates', if I were not a single, sane
individual, if I were part of a herd, one of these people, normal and
responsible for the welfare of my herd, Gawd strike me pink, thought
Ambrose, I wouldn't sit around discussing what kind of war it was going
to be. I'd make it my kind of war. I'd set about killing and stampeding
the other herd as fast and as hard as I could. Lord love a duck, thought
Ambrose, there wouldn't be any animals nosing about for suitable jobs in
_my_ herd.

'Bertie's hoping to help control petrol in the Shetland Isles.'

'Algernon's off to Syria on the most secret kind of mission.'

'Poor John hasn't got anything yet.'

Cor chase my Aunt Fanny round a mulberry bush, thought Ambrose, what a
herd.

So the leaves fell and the blackout grew earlier and earlier, and autumn
became winter.




CHAPTER II
WINTER


Winter set in hard. Poland was defeated; east and west the prisoners
rolled away to slavery. English infantry cut trees and dug trenches
along the Belgian frontier. Parties of distinguished visitors went to
the Maginot Line and returned, as though from a shrine, with
souvenir-medals. Belisha was turned out; the radical papers began a
clamour for his return and then suddenly shut up. Russia invaded Finland
and the papers were full of tales of white robed armies scouting through
the forests. English soldiers on leave brought back reports of the skill
and daring of Nazi patrols and of how much better the blackout was
managed in Paris. A number of people were saying quietly and firmly that
Chamberlain must go. The French said the English were not taking the war
seriously, and the Ministry of Information said the French were taking
it very seriously indeed. Sergeant instructors complained of the
shortage of training stores. How could one teach the three rules of
aiming without aiming discs?

The leaves fell in the avenue at Malfrey, and this year, where once
there had been a dozen men to sweep them, there were now four and two
boys. Freddy was engaged in what he called 'drawing in his horns a bit'.
The Grinling Gibbons saloon and the drawing-rooms and galleries round it
were shut up and shut off, carpets rolled, furniture sheeted,
chandeliers bagged, windows shuttered and barred, hall and staircase
stood empty and dark. Barbara lived in the little octagonal parlour
which opened on the parterre; she moved the nursery over to the bedrooms
next to hers; what had once been known as 'the bachelors' wing' in the
Victorian days when bachelors were hardy fellows who could put up with
collegiate and barrack simplicity, was given over to the evacuees.
Freddy came over for the four good shoots which the estate provided; he
made his guests stay out this year, one at the farm, three at the
bailiff's house, two at the Sothill Arms. Now, at the end of the season,
he had some of the regiment over to shoot off the cocks; bags were small
and consisted mostly of hens.

When Freddy came on leave the central heating was lit; at other times an
intense cold settled into the house; it was a system which had to be all
or nothing; it would not warm Barbara's corner alone but had to
circulate, ticking and guggling, through furlongs of piping, consuming
cartloads of coke daily. 'Lucky we've got plenty of wood,' said Freddy;
damp green logs were brought in from the park to smoke tepidly on the
hearths. Barbara used to creep into the orangery to warm herself. 'Must
keep the heat up there,' said Freddy. 'Got some very rare stuff in it.
Man from Kew said some of the best in the country.' So Barbara had her
writing table put there, and sat, absurdly, among tropical vegetation
while outside, beyond the colonnade, the ground froze hard and the trees
stood out white against the leaden sky.

Then, two days before Christmas, Freddy's regiment was moved to another
part of the country. He had friends with a commodious house in the
immediate neighbourhood, where he spent his week-ends, so the pipes were
never heated and the chill in the house, instead of being a mere
negation of warmth, became something positive and overwhelming. Soon
after Christmas there was a great fall of snow and with the snow came
Basil.

He came, as usual, unannounced. Barbara, embowered in palm and fern,
looked up from her letter-writing to see him standing in the glass door.
She ran to kiss him with a cry of delight. 'Darling, how very nice. Have
you come to stay?'

'Yes, Mother said you were alone.'

'I don't know where we'll put you. Things are very odd here. You haven't
brought anyone else, have you?' It was one of Freddy's chief complaints
that Basil usually came not only uninvited but attended by undesirable
friends.

'No, no one. There isn't anyone nowadays. I've come to write a book.'

'Oh, Basil. I am sorry. Is it as bad as that?' There was much that
needed no saying between brother and sister. For years now, whenever
things were very bad with Basil, he had begun writing a book. It was as
near surrender as he ever came and the fact that these books--two
novels, a book of travel, a biography, a work of contemporary
history--never got beyond the first ten thousand words was testimony to
the resilience of his character.

'A book on strategy,' said Basil. 'I'm sick of trying to get ideas into
the heads of the people in power. The only thing is to appeal over their
heads to the thinking public. Chiefly, it is the case for the annexation
of Liberia, but I shall touch on several other vital places as well. The
difficulty will be to get it out in time to have any influence.'

'Mother said you were joining the Bombadier Guards.'

'Yes. Nothing came of it. They say they want younger men. It's a typical
army paradox. They say we are too old now and that they will call us up
in two years' time. I shall bring that out in my book. The only logical
policy is to kill off the old first, while there's still some kick in
them. I shan't deal only with strategy. I shall outline a general policy
for the nation.'

'Well, it's very nice to see you, anyway. I've been lonely.'

'_I've_ been lonely.'

'What's happened to everyone?'

'You mean Angela. She's gone home.'

'Home?'

'That house we used to call Cedric's folly. It's hers really, of course.
Cedric's gone back to the army. It's scarcely credible but apparently he
was a dashing young subaltern once. So there was the house and the Lyne
hooligan and the government moving in to make it a hospital, so Angela
had to go back and see to things. It's full of beds and nurses and
doctors waiting for air-raid victims and a woman in the village got
appendicitis and she had to be taken forty miles to be operated on
because she wasn't an air-raid victim and she died on the way. So Angela
is carrying on a campaign about it and I should be surprised if she
doesn't get something done. She seems to have made up her mind I ought
to be killed. Mother's the same. It's funny. In the old days when from
time to time there really were people gunning for me, no one cared a
hoot. Now that I'm living in enforced safety and idleness, they seem to
think it rather disgraceful.'

'No new girls?'

'There was one called Poppet Green. You wouldn't have liked her. I've
been having a very dull time. Alastair is a private at Brookwood. I went
down to see them. He and Sonia have got a horrible villa on a golf
course where he goes whenever he's off duty. He says the worst thing
about his training is the entertainments. They get detailed to go twice
a week and the sergeant always picks on Alastair. He makes the same joke
each time. "We'll send the play-boy." Otherwise it's all very matey and
soft, Alastair says. Peter has joined a very secret corps to go and
fight in the Arctic. They had a long holiday doing winter sports in the
Alps. I don't suppose you'd remember Ambrose Silk. He's starting a new
magazine to keep culture alive.'

'Poor Basil. Well, I hope you don't have to write the book for long.'
There was so much between brother and sister that did not need saying.

****

That evening Basil began his book; that is to say he lay on the rug
before the column of smoke which rose from the grate of the octagonal
parlour, and typed out a list of possible titles.

_A Word to the Unwise._

_Prolegomenon to Destruction._

_Berlin or Cheltenham; the Choice for the General Staff._

_Policy or Generalship; some questions put by a Civilian to vex the
Professional Soldiers._

_Policy or Professionalism._

_The Gentle Art of Victory._

_The Lost Art of Victory._

_How to Win the War in Six Months; a simple lesson book for ambitious
soldiers._

They all looked pretty good to him and looking at the list Basil was
struck anew, as he had been constantly struck during the preceding four
months, with surprise that anyone of his ability should be unemployed at
a time like the present. It makes one despair of winning, he thought.

Barbara sat beside him reading. She heard him sigh and put out a
sisterly hand to touch his hair. 'It's terribly cold,' she said. 'I
wonder if it would be any good trying to blackout the orangery. Then we
could sit there in the evenings.'

Suddenly there was a knock on the door and there entered a muffled,
middle-aged woman; she wore fur gloves and carried an electric torch,
dutifully dimmed with tissue paper; her nose was very red, her eyes were
watering and she stamped snow off high rubber boots. It was Mrs Fremlin
of the Hollies. Nothing but bad news would have brought her out on a
night like this. 'I came straight in,' she said superfluously. 'Didn't
want to stand waiting outside. Got some bad news. The Connollies are
back.'

It was indeed bad news. In the few hours that he had been at Malfrey,
Basil had heard a great deal about the Connollies.

'Oh God,' said Barbara. 'Where are they?'

'Here, outside in the lobby.'

****

Evacuation to Malfrey had followed much the same course as it had in
other parts of the country and had not only kept Barbara, as billeting
officer, constantly busy, but had transformed her, in four months, from
one of the most popular women in the countryside into a figure of
terror. When her car was seen approaching people fled through covered
lines of retreat, through side doors and stable yards, into the snow,
anywhere to avoid her persuasive, 'But surely you could manage _one_
more. He's a boy this time and a very well-behaved little fellow,' for
the urban authorities maintained a steady flow of refugees well in
excess of the stream of returning malcontents. Few survived of the
original party who had sat glumly on the village green on the first
morning of the war. Some had gone back immediately; others more
reluctantly in response to ugly rumours of their husbands' goings on;
one had turned out to be a fraud, who, herself childless, had kidnapped
a baby from a waiting perambulator in order to secure her passage to
safety, so impressed had she been by the propaganda of the local
officials. It was mostly children now who assembled, less glumly, on the
village green, and showed the agricultural community how another part of
the world lived. They were tolerated now as one of the troubles of the
time. Some had even endeared themselves to their hosts. But everyone,
when evacuees were spoken of, implicitly excluded from all generalities
the family of Connolly.

These had appeared as an act of God apparently without human agency;
their names did not appear on any list; they carried no credentials; no
one was responsible for them. They were found lurking under the seats of
a carriage when the train was emptied on the evening of the first
influx. They had been dragged out and stood on the platform where
everyone denied knowledge of them, and since they could not be left
there, they were included in the party that was being sent by bus to
Malfrey village. From that moment they were on a list; they had been
given official existence and their destiny was inextricably involved
with that of Malfrey.

Nothing was ever discovered about the Connollies' parentage. When they
could be threatened or cajoled into speaking of their antecedents they
spoke, with distaste, of an 'Auntie'. To this woman, it seemed, the war
had come as a God-sent release. She had taken her dependants to the
railway station, propelled them into the crowd of milling adolescence,
and hastily covered her tracks by decamping from home. Enquiry by the
police in the street where the Connollies professed to have lived,
produced no other information than that the woman had been there and was
not there any longer. She owed a little for milk; otherwise she had left
no memorial on that rather unimpressionable district.

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts
anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to
have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor
who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large
mouth and dark pig's eyes. There was something of the Esquimaux about
her head, but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than
is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust
prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed
to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for
house-breaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a
child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky's violent
denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of
unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her
parents which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An
appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same
inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work
wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish
Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a
family as could be found in the kingdom. Barbara took one look at them,
looked again to see that her weary eyes were not playing tricks with
her, and consigned them to the Mudges of Upper Lamstock, a tough farming
family on a remote homestead.

Within a week Mr Mudge was at the Park, with the three children in the
back of his milk truck. 'It's not for myself, Mrs Sothill; I'm out and
about all day and in the evenings I'm sleepy, and being with animals so
much I don't take on so. But it's my old woman. She _do_ take on and she
won't stand for it. She've locked herself in upstairs and she won't come
down till they've gone, and when she do say that she means of it, Mrs
Sothill. We're willing to do anything in reason to help the war, but
these brats aren't to be borne and that's flat.'

'Oh dear, Mr Mudge, which of them is giving trouble?'

'Why it's all of 'em, m'am. There's the boy was the best of 'em at first
though you can't understand what he do say, speaking as they do where he
come from. Nasty, unfriendly ways he had but he didn't do much that you
could call harm not till he'd seen me kill the goose. I took him out to
watch to cheer him up like, and uncommon interested he was, and I
thought I'll make a country lad of you yet. I gave him the head to play
with and he seemed quite pleased. Then no sooner was I off down to the
root field, than blessed if he didn't get hold of a knife and when I
came back supper time there was six of my ducks dead and the old cat.
Yes, mum, blessed if he hadn't had the head off of our old yellow cat.
Then the little un, she's a dirty girl, begging your pardon, mum. It's
not only her wetting the bed; she've wetted everywhere, chairs, floor
and not only wetting, mum. Never seem to have been taught to be in a
house where she comes from.'

'But doesn't the elder girl do anything to help?'

'If you ask me, mum, she's the worst of the lot. My old woman would
stick it but for her, but it's that Doris makes her take on like she do.
Soft about the men, she is, mum. Why she even comes making up to me and
I'm getting on to be her grandfer. She won't leave our Willie alone not
for a minute, and he's a bashful boy our Willie and he can't get on with
the work, her always coming after him. So there it is, mum. I'm sorry
not to oblige but I've promised my old woman I won't come back with 'em
and I dusn't go back on what I've said.'

Mr Mudge was the first of a succession of hosts. The longest that
the Connollies stayed in any place was ten days; the shortest was an
hour and a quarter. In six weeks they had become a legend far beyond
the parish. When influential old men at the Turf in London put their
heads together and said, 'The whole scheme has been a mistake. I was
hearing last night some examples of the way some of the evacuees are
behaving...' the chances were that the scandal originated with the
Connollies. They were cited in the House of Commons; there were
paragraphs about them in official reports.

Barbara tried separating them, but in their first night apart Doris
climbed out of her window and was lost for two days, to be found in a
barn eight miles away, stupefied with cider; she gave no coherent
account of her adventure. On the same evening Micky bit the wife of the
roadman on whom he was quartered, so that the district nurse had to be
called in; while Marlene had a species of seizure which aroused
unfulfilled hopes that she might be dead. Everyone agreed that the only
place for the Connollies was 'an institution' and at last, just before
Christmas, after formalities complicated by the obscurity of their
origins, to an institution they were sent, and Malfrey settled back to
entertain its guests with a Christmas tree and a conjurer, with an air
of relief which could be sensed for miles around. It was as though the
All Clear had sounded after a night of terror. And now the Connollies
were back.

'What's happened, Mrs Fremlin? Surely the Home _can't_ send them away.'

'It's been evacuated. All the children are being sent back to the places
they came from. Malfrey was the only address they had for the
Connollies, so here they are. The Welfare Woman brought them to the
Parish Hall. I was there with the Guides so I said I'd bring them up to
you.'

'They might have warned us.'

'I expect they thought that if we had time we should try and stop them
coming.'

'How right they were. Have the Connollies been fed?'

'I think so. At any rate Marlene was terribly sick in the car.'

'I'm dying to see these Connollies,' said Basil.

'You shall,' said his sister grimly.

But they were not in the lobby where they had been left. Barbara rang
the bell. 'Benson, you remember the Connolly children?'

'Vividly, madam.'

'They're back.'

'Here, madam?'

'Here. Somewhere in the house. You'd better institute a search.'

'Very good, madam. And when they are found, they will be going away
immediately?'

'Not immediately. They'll have to stay here to-night. We'll find
somewhere for them in the village to-morrow.'

Benson hesitated. 'It won't be easy, madam.'

'It won't be, Benson.'

He hesitated again; thought better of whatever he meant to say, and
merely added: 'I will start the search, madam.'

'I know what that means,' said Barbara as the man left them. 'Benson is
yellow.'

The Connollies were found at last and assembled. Doris had been in
Barbara's bedroom trying out her make-up, Micky in the library tearing
up a folio, Marlene grovelling under the pantry sink eating the remains
of the dogs' dinners. When they were together again, in the lobby, Basil
inspected them. Their appearance exceeded anything he had been led to
expect. They were led away to the bachelors' wing and put together into
a large bedroom.

'Shall we lock the door?'

'It would be no good. If they want to get out they will.'

'Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Benson.

When Barbara returned she said, 'Benson _is_ yellow. He can't take it.'

'Wants to leave?'

'It's him or the Connollies, he says. I can't blame him. Freddy will
never forgive me if I let him go.'

'Babs, you're blubbing.'

'Who wouldn't?' said Barbara, pulling out a handkerchief and weeping in
earnest. 'I ask you, who wouldn't?'

'Don't be a chump,' said Basil, relapsing, as he often did with Barbara,
into the language of the schoolroom. 'I'll fix it for you.'

'Swank. Chump yourself. Double chump.'

'Double chump with nobs on.'

'Darling Basil, it is nice to have you back. I do believe if anyone
could fix it, you could.'

'Freddy couldn't, could he?'

'Freddy isn't here.'

'I'm cleverer than Freddy. Babs, say I'm cleverer than Freddy.'

'I'm cleverer than Freddy. Sucks to you.'

'Babs, say you love me more than Freddy.'

'You love me more than Freddy. Double sucks.'

'Say I, Barbara, love you, Basil, more than him Freddy.'

'I won't. I don't... Beast, you're hurting.'

'Say it.'

'Basil stop at once or I shall call Miss Penfold.'

They were back twenty years, in the schoolroom again. 'Miss Penfold,
Miss Penfold, Basil's pulling my hair.'

They scuffled on the sofa. Suddenly a voice said, ''Ere, Mrs.' It was
Doris. 'Mrs.'

Barbara stood up, panting and dishevelled. 'Well, Doris, what is it?'

'Marlene's queer again.'

'Oh dear. I'll come up. Run along.'

Doris looked languishingly at Basil. ''Aving a lark, eh?' she said. 'I
like a lark.'

'Run along, Doris. You'll get cold.'

'I ain't cold. Pull my hair if you like, Mister.'

'I wouldn't dream of it,' said Basil.

'Dessay I shall. I dream a lot of funny things. Go on Mister, pull it.
Hard. I don't mind.' She offered her bobbed head to Basil and then with
a giggle ran out of the room.

'You see,' said Barbara. 'A problem child.'

When Marlene had been treated for her queerness, Barbara came back to
say good night.

'I'll stay up a bit and work on this book.'

'All right, darling. Good night.' She bent over the back of the sofa and
kissed the top of his head.

'Not blubbing any more?'

'No, not blubbing.'

He looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back; it was the same smile.
They saw themselves, each in the other's eyes. There's no one like
Basil, thought Barbara, seeing herself, no one like him, when he's nice.


[2]

Next morning Basil was called by Benson, who was the only manservant
indoors since Freddy drew in his horns. (He had taken his valet with him
to the yeomanry and supported him now, in a very much lower standard of
comfort, at the King's expense.) Lying in bed and watching the man put
out his clothes, Basil reflected that he still owed him a small sum of
money from his last visit.

'Benson, what's this about your leaving?'

'I was cross last night, Mr Basil. I couldn't ever leave Malfrey and Mrs
Sothill ought to know that. Not with the Captain away, too.'

'Mrs Sothill was very upset.'

'So was I, Mr Basil. You don't know what those Connollies are. They're
not human.'

'We'll find a billet for them.'

'No one will take the Connollies in these parts. Not if they were given
a hundred pounds.'

'I have an idea I owe you some money.'

'You do, Mr Basil. Twelve pound ten.'

'As much as that? Time I paid it back.'

'It is.'

'I will, Benson.'

'I hope so, sir, I'm sure.'

Basil went to his bath pondering. No one will take the Connollies in
these parts. Not for a hundred pounds. Not for a hundred pounds.

****

Since the war began Barbara had taken to breakfasting downstairs in the
mistaken belief that it caused less trouble. Instead of the wicker
bed-table tray, a table had to be laid in the small dining-room, the
fire had to be lit there two hours earlier, silver dishes had to be
cleaned and the wicks trimmed under them. It was an innovation deplored
by all.

Basil found her crouched over the fire with her cup of coffee; she
turned her curly black head and smiled; both of them had the same
devastating combination of dark hair and clear blue eyes. Narcissus
greeted Narcissus from the watery depths as Basil kissed her.

'Spooney,' she said.

'I've squared Benson for you.'

'Darling, how clever of you.'

'I had to give the old boy a fiver.'

'Liar.'

'All right, don't believe me then.'

'I don't, knowing Benson and knowing you. I remember last time you
stayed here I had to pay him over ten pounds that you'd borrowed.'

'You paid him?'

'Yes. I was afraid he'd ask Freddy.'

'The old double-crosser. Anyway he's staying.'

'Yes; thinking it over I knew he would. I don't know why I took it so
hard last night. I think it was the shock of seeing the Connollies.'

'We must get them settled to-day.'

'It's hopeless. No one will take them.'

'You've got powers of coercion.'

'Yes, but I can't possibly use them.'

'_I_ can,' said Basil. 'I shall enjoy it.'

****

After breakfast they moved from the little dining-room to the little
parlour. The corridor, though it was one of the by-ways of the house,
had a sumptuous cornice and a high, coved ceiling; the door cases were
enriched with classic pediments in whose broken entablature stood busts
of philosophers and composers. Other busts stood at regular intervals on
marble pedestals. Everything in Malfrey was splendid and harmonious;
everything except Doris who, that morning, lurked in their path rubbing
herself on a pilaster like a cow on a stump.

'Hullo,' she said.

'Hullo, Doris. Where are Micky and Marlene?'

'Outside. They're all right. They've found the snow man the others made
and they're mucking him up.'

'Run along and join them.'

'I want to stay here with you--and _him_.'

'I bet you do,' said Basil. 'No such luck. I'm going to find you a nice
billet miles and miles away.'

'I want to stay with you.'

'You go and help muck-up the snow man.'

'That's a kid's game. I'm not a kid. Mister, why wouldn't you pull my
hair last night? Was it because you thought I had nits? I haven't any
more. The nurse combed them all out at the institution and put oil on.
That's why it's a bit greasy.'

'I don't pull girls' hair.'

'You do. I saw you. You pulled _hers_... he's your boy, isn't he?'
she said, turning to Barbara.

'He's my brother, Doris.'

'Ah,' she said, her pig eyes dark with the wisdom of the slums, 'but you
fancy him, don't you? I saw.'

'She really is an atrocious child,' said Barbara.


[3]

Basil set about the problem of finding a home for the Connollies with
zeal and method. He settled himself at a table with an ordinance map,
the local newspaper and the little red leather covered address book
which had been one of old Mrs Sothill's legacies to Barbara; in this
book were registered all her more well-to-do neighbours for a radius of
twenty miles, the majority of whom were marked with the initials G.P.O.
which stood for Garden Party Only. Barbara had done her best to keep
this invaluable work of reference up to date, and had from time to time
crossed out those who had died or left the district and added the names
of newcomers.

Presently Basil said, 'What about the Harknesses of Old Mill House,
North Grappling?'

'Middle-aged people. He retired from some sort of job abroad. I think
she's musical. Why?'

'They're advertising for boarders.' He pushed the paper across to her,
where she read, in the _Accommodation_ column: _Paying guests accepted
in lovely modernized fifteenth-century mill. Ideal surroundings for
elderly or artistic people wishing to avoid war worries. All home
produce. Secluded old-world gardens. 6 gns. weekly. Highest references
given and expected. Harkness, Old Mill House, North Grappling._

'How about that for the Connollies?'

'Basil, you can't.'

'Can't I just? I'll get to work on them at once. Do they allow you extra
petrol for your billeting work?'

'Yes, but...'

'That's grand. I'll take the Connollies over there this morning. D'you
know, this is the first piece of serious war work I've done so far?'

Normally, whenever the car left the garage there was a stampede of
evacuees to the running boards crying, 'Give us a ride'. This morning,
however, seeing the three forbidding Connollies in the back seat, the
other children fell back silently. They were not allowed by their
mothers to play with the Connollies.

'Mister, why can't I sit in front with you?'

'You've got to keep the other two in order.'

'They'll be good.'

'That's what you think.'

'They'll be good if I tell them, Mister.'

'Then why aren't they?'

''Cos I tell 'em to be bad. In fun you know. Where are we going?'

'I'm finding a new home for you, Doris.'

'Away from you?'

'Far away from me.'

'Mister, listen. Micky ain't bad really nor Marlene isn't silly. Are you
Marlene?'

'Not very silly,' said Marlene.

'She can be clean if she wants to be, if I tell her. See here, Mister,
play fair. You let us stay with you and I'll see the kids behave
themselves.'

'And what about you, Doris?'

'I don't have to behave. I'm not a kid. Is it on?'

'It is not.'

'You going to take us away?'

'You bet I am.'

'Then just you wait and see what we give them where we're going.'

'I shan't wait and see,' said Basil, 'but I've no doubt I shall hear
about it in good time.'

****

North Grappling was ten miles distant, a stone-built village of uneven
stone tile roofs none of which was less than a century old. It lay off
the main road in a fold of the hills; a stream ran through it following
the line of its single street and crossing it under two old stone
bridges. At the upper end of the street stood the church, which declared
by its size and rich decoration that in the centuries since it was
built, while the rest of the world was growing, North Grappling had
shrunk; at the lower end, below the second bridge, stood Old Mill House.
It was just such a home of ancient peace as a man might dream of who was
forced to earn his living under a fiercer sky. Mr Harkness had in fact
dreamed of it, year in, year out, as he toiled in his office at
Singapore, or reclined after work on the club verandah, surrounded by
gross vegetation and rude colours. He bought it from his father's legacy
while on leave, when he was still a young man, meaning to retire there
when the time came, and his years of waiting had been haunted by only
one fear; that he would return to find the place 'developed', new red
roofs among the grey and a tarmac road down the uneven street. But
modernity spared North Grappling; he returned to find the place just as
he had first come upon it, on a walking tour, late in the evening with
the stones still warm from the afternoon sun and the scent of the
gillyflowers sweet and fresh on the breeze.

This morning, half lost in snow, the stones which in summer seemed grey,
were a golden brown, and the pleached limes, which in their leaf hid the
low front, now revealed the mullions and dripstones, the sun-dial above
the long, centre window, and the stone hood of the door carved in the
shape of a scallop shell. Basil stopped the car by the bridge.

'Jesus,' said Doris. 'You aren't going to leave us here.'

'Sit tight,' said Basil. 'You'll know soon enough.'

He threw a rug over the radiator of the car, opened the little iron gate
and walked up the flagged path, grimly, a figure of doom. The low,
winter sun cast his shadow before him, ominously, against the door which
Mr Harkness had had painted apple-green. The gnarled trunk of a wistaria
rose from beside the door-jamb and twisted its naked length between the
lines of the windows. Basil glanced once over his shoulder to see that
his young passengers were invisible and then put his hand to the iron
bell. He heard it ring melodiously not far away, and presently the door
was opened by a maid dressed in apple-green, with an apron of sprigged
muslin and a starched white cap that was in effect part Dutch, part
conventual, and wholly ludicrous. This figure of fancy led Basil up a
step, down a step and into a living-room, where he was left long enough
to observe the decorations. The floor was covered in coarse rush matting
and in places by bright Balkan rugs. On the walls were Thornton's flower
prints (with the exception of his masterpiece, _The Night-Blowing
Cereus_), samplers and old maps. The most prominent objects of furniture
were a grand piano and a harp. There were also some tables and chairs of
raw-looking beech. From an open hearth peat smoke billowed periodically
into the room, causing Basil's eyes to water. It was just such a room as
Basil had imagined from the advertisement, and Mr and Mrs Harkness were
just such a couple. Mrs Harkness wore a hand-woven woollen garment, her
eyes were large and poetic, her nose long and red with the frost, her
hair nondescript in colour and haphazard in arrangement. Her husband had
done all that a man can, to disguise the effects of twenty years of club
and bungalow life in the Far East. He had grown a little pointed beard;
he wore a homespun suit of knickerbockers in the style of the pioneers
of bicycling; he wore a cameo ring round his loose silk tie, yet there
was something in his bearing which still suggested the dapper figure in
white ducks who had stood his round of pink gins, evening after evening,
to other dapper white figures, and had dined twice a year at Government
House.

They entered from the garden door. Basil half expected Mr Harkness to
say 'take a pew', and clap his hands for the gin. Instead they stood
looking at him with enquiry and some slight distaste.

'My name is Seal. I came about your advertisement in the _Courier_.'

'Our advertisement. Ah yes,' said Mr Harkness vaguely. 'It was just an
idea we had. We felt a little ashamed here, with so much space and
beauty; the place is a little large for our requirements these days. We
did think that perhaps if we heard of a few people like ourselves--the
same simple tastes--we might, er, join forces as it were during the
present difficult times. As a matter of fact we have one newcomer with
us already. I don't think we _really_ want to take anyone else, do we
Agnes?'

'It was just an idle thought,' said Mrs Harkness. 'A green thought in a
green place.'

'This is not a Guest House, you know. We take in paying guests. Quite a
different thing.'

Basil understood their difficulties with a keenness of perception that
was rare to him. 'It's not for myself that I was enquiring,' he said.

'Ah, that's different. I daresay we might take in one or two more if
they were, if they were _really_...'

Mrs Harkness helped him out. 'If we were sure they were the kind of
people who would be happy here.'

'Exactly. It is essentially a _happy_ house.'

It was like his housemaster at school. 'We are essentially a keen House,
Seal. We may not win many cups but at least we try.'

'I can see it is,' he said gallantly.

'I expect you'd like to look round. It looks quite a little place from
the road, but is surprisingly large, really, when you come to count up
the rooms.'

A hundred years ago the pastures round North Grappling had all been
corn-growing land and the mill had served a wide area. Long before the
Harknesses' time it had fallen into disuse and, in the 'eighties, had
been turned into a dwelling house by a disciple of William Morris. The
stream had been diverted, the old mill pool drained and levelled and
made into a sunken garden. The rooms that had held the grindstones and
machinery, and the long lofts where the grain had been stored, had been
tactfully floored and plastered and partitioned. Mrs Harkness pointed
out all the features with maternal pride.

'Are your friends who were thinking of coming here artistic people?'

'No, I don't think you could call them that.'

'They don't write?'

'No, I don't think so.'

'I've always thought this would be an ideal place for someone who wanted
to write. May I ask, what _are_ your friends?'

'Well, I suppose you might call them evacuees.'

Mr and Mrs Harkness laughed pleasantly at the little joke. 'Townsfolk in
search of sanctuary, eh?'

'Exactly.'

'Well, they will find it here, eh, Agnes?'

They were back in the living-room. Mrs Harkness laid her hand on the
gilded neck of the harp and looked out across the sunken garden with a
dreamy look in her large grey eyes. Thus she had looked out across the
Malaya golf course, dreaming of home.

'I like to think of this beautiful old house still being of use in the
world. After all it was built for _use_. Hundreds of years ago it gave
bread to the people. Then with the change of the times it was left
forlorn and derelict. Then it became a home, but it was still out of the
world, shut off from the life of the people. And now at last it comes
into its own again. Fulfilling a _need_. You may think me fanciful,' she
said, remote and whimsical, 'but in the last few weeks I feel sometimes
I can see the old house smiling to itself and hear the old timbers
whispering, "They thought we were no use. They thought we were old
stick-in-the-muds. But they can't get on without us, all these busy
go-ahead people. They come back to us when they're in trouble."'

'Agnes was always a poet,' said Mr Harkness. 'I have had to be the
practical housewife. You saw our terms in the advertisement?'

'Yes.'

'They may have seemed to you a little heavy, but you must understand
that our guests live exactly as we do ourselves. We live simply but we
like our comfort. Fires,' he said, backing slightly from the belch of
aromatic smoke which issued into the room as he spoke, 'the garden,' he
said, indicating the frozen and buried enclosure outside the windows.
'In the summer we take our meals under the old mulberry tree. Music.
Every week we have chamber music. There are certain _imponderabilia_ at
the Old Mill which, to be crude, have their market value. I _don't_
think,' he said coyly, 'I _don't_ think that in the circumstances'--and
the circumstances Basil felt sure were meant to include a good fat slice
of Mrs Harkness's poetic imagination--'six guineas is too much to ask.'

The moment for which Basil had been waiting was come. This was the time
for the grenade he had been nursing ever since he opened the little,
wrought-iron gate and put his hand to the wrought-iron bell-pull. 'We
pay eight shillings and sixpence a week,' he said. That was the safety
pin; the lever flew up, the spring struck home; within the serrated
metal shell the primer spat and, invisibly, flame crept up the
finger's-length of fuse. Count seven slowly, then throw. One, two three,
four...

'Eight shillings and sixpence?' said Mr Harkness. 'I'm afraid there's
been some misunderstanding.'

Five, six, _seven_. Here it comes. Bang! 'Perhaps I should have told you
at once. I am the billeting officer. I've three children for you in the
car outside.'

It was magnificent. It was war. Basil was something of a specialist in
shocks. He could not recall a better.

After the first tremendous silence there were three stages of Harkness
reaction; the indignant appeal to reason and justice, then the humble
appeal to mercy, then the frigid and dignified acceptance of the
inevitable.

First:

'I shall telephone to Mrs Sothill.... I shall go and see the County
authorities.... I shall write to the Board of Education and the Lord
Lieutenant. This is perfectly ridiculous; there must be a hundred
cottagers who would be _glad_ to take these children in.'

'Not _these_ children,' said Basil. 'Besides, you know, this is a war
for democracy. It looks awfully bad if the rich seem to be shirking
their responsibilities.'

'_Rich._ It's only because we find it so hard to make both ends meet
that we take paying guests at all.'

'Besides this is a _most_ unsuitable place for children. They might fall
into the stream and be drowned. There's no school within four miles...'

Secondly:

'We're not as young as we were. After living so long in the East the
English winter is very difficult. Any additional burden...'

'Mr Seal, you've seen for yourself this lovely old house and the kind of
life we live here. Don't you _feel_ that there is something _different_
here, something precious that could so easily be killed.'

'It's just this kind of influence these children need,' said Basil
cheerfully. 'They're rather short on culture at the moment.'

Thirdly:

A hostility as cold as the winter hillside above the village. Basil led
the Connollies up the flagged path, through the apple-green door, into
the passage which smelled of peat smoke and pot-pourri. 'I'm afraid they
haven't any luggage,' he said. 'This is Doris, this is Micky, and
that--that is little Marlene. I expect after a day or two you'll wonder
how you ever got on without them. We meet that over and over again in
our work; people who are a little shy of children to begin with, and
soon want to adopt them permanently. Good-bye kids, have a good time.
Good-bye, Mrs Harkness. We shall drop in from time to time just to see
that everything is all right.'

And Basil drove back through the naked lanes with a deep interior warmth
which defied the gathering blizzard.

That night there was an enormous fall of snow, telephone wires were
down, the lane to North Grappling became impassable, and for eight days
the Old Mill was cut off physically, as for so long it had been cut in
spirit, from all contact with the modern world.


[4]

Barbara and Basil sat in the orangery after luncheon. The smoke from
Basil's cigar hung on the humid air, a blue line of cloud, motionless,
breast high between the paved floor and the exotic foliage overhead. He
was reading aloud to his sister.

'So much for the supply services,' he said, laying down the last sheet
of manuscript. The book had prospered during the past week.

Barbara awoke, so gently that she might never have been asleep. 'Very
good,' she said. 'First-class.'

'It ought to wake them up,' said Basil.

'It ought,' said Barbara, on whom the work had so different an effect.
Then she added irrelevantly, 'I hear they've dug the way through to
North Grappling this morning.'

'There was providence in that fall of snow. It's let the Connollies and
the Harknesses get properly to grips. Otherwise, I feel, one or other
side might have despaired.'

'I daresay we shall hear something of the Harknesses shortly.'

And immediately, as though they were on the stage, Benson came to the
door and announced that Mr Harkness was in the little parlour.

'I _must_ see him,' said Barbara.

'Certainly not,' said Basil. 'This is my war effort,' and followed
Benson into the house.

He had expected some change in Mr Harkness but not so marked a change as
he now saw. The man was barely recognizable. It was as though the crust
of tropical respectability that had survived below the homespun and
tie-ring surface had been crushed to powder; the man was abject. The
clothes were the same. It must be imagination which gave that trim beard
a raffish look, imagination fired by the haunted look in the man's eyes.

Basil on his travels had once visited a prison in Transjordan where an
ingenious system of punishment had been devised. The institution served
the double purpose of penitentiary and lunatic asylum. One of the madmen
was a tough old Arab of peculiar ferocity who could be subdued by one
thing only--the steady gaze of the human eye. Bat an eyelid, and he was
at you. Refractory convicts were taken to this man's cell and shut in
with him for periods of anything up to forty-eight hours according to
the gravity of their offences. Day and night the madman lurked in his
corner with his eyes fixed, fascinated, on those of the delinquent. The
heat of midday was his best opportunity; then even the wariest convict
sometimes allowed his weary eyelids to droop and in that moment he was
across the floor, tooth and nail, in a savage attack. Basil had seen a
gigantic felon led out after a two days' session. There was something in
Mr Harkness' eyes that brought the scene back vividly to him.

'I am afraid my sister's away,' said Basil.

Whatever hope had ever been in Mr Harkness' breast died when he saw his
old enemy. 'You are Mrs Sothill's brother?'

'Yes; we are thought rather alike. I'm helping her here now that my
brother-in-law's away. Is there anything I can do?'

'No,' he said brokenly. 'No. It doesn't matter. I'd hoped to see Mrs
Sothill. When will she be back?'

'You can never tell,' said Basil. 'Most irresponsible in some ways. Goes
off for months at a time. But this time she has me to watch out for her.
Was it about your evacuees you wanted to see her? She was _very_ glad to
hear they had been happily settled. It meant she could go away with a
clear conscience. That particular family had been something of an
anxiety, if you understand me.'

Mr Harkness sat down uninvited. He sat on a gilt chair in that bright
little room, like a figure of death. He seemed disposed neither to speak
nor move.

'Mrs Harkness well?' said Basil affably.

'Prostrate.'

'And your paying guest?'

'She left this morning--as soon as the road was cleared. Our two maids
went with her.'

'I hope Doris is making herself useful about the house.'

At the mention of that name Mr Harkness broke. He came clean. 'Mr Seal,
I can't stand it. We neither of us can. We've come to the end. You must
take those children away.'

'You surely wouldn't suggest sending them back to Birmingham to be
bombed?'

This was an argument which Barbara often employed with good effect. As
soon as Basil spoke he realized it was a false step. Suffering had
purged Mr Harkness of all hypocrisy. For the first time something like a
smile twisted his lips.

'There is nothing would delight me more,' he said.

'Tut, tut. You do yourself an injustice. Anyway it is against the law. I
should like to help you. What can you suggest?'

'I thought of giving them weed-killer,' said Mr Harkness wistfully.

'Yes,' said Basil, 'that would be one way. Do you think Marlene could
keep it down?'

'Or hanging.'

'Come, come, Mr Harkness, this is mere wishful thinking. We must be more
practical.'

'Everything I've thought of has had Death in it; ours or theirs.'

'I'm sure there must be a way,' said Basil, and then delicately,
watching Mr Harkness while he spoke for any expression of distrust or
resentment, he outlined a scheme which had come to him, vaguely, when he
first saw the Connollies, and had grown more precise during the past
week. 'The difficulty about billeting on the poor,' he said, 'is that
the allowance barely covers what the children eat. Of course, where they
are nice, affectionate children people are often glad enough to have
them. But one wouldn't call the Connollies nice or affectionate,'--Mr
Harkness groaned. 'They are destructive, too. Well I needn't tell you
that. The fact is that it would be inflicting a very considerable
hardship--a _financial_ hardship--to put them in a cottage. Now if the
meagre allowance paid by the Government were _supplemented_--do you
follow me?'

'You mean I might _pay_ someone to take them. Of course I will,
anything--at least almost anything. How much shall I offer? How shall I
set about it?'

'Leave it to me,' said Basil, suddenly dropping his urbane manner.
'What's it worth to you to have those children moved?'

Mr Harkness hesitated; with the quickening of hope came a stir of
self-possession. One does not work in the East without acquiring a nose
for a deal. 'I should think a pound a week would make all the difference
to a poor family,' he said.

'How about a lump sum? People--poor people that is--will often be
dazzled by the offer of a lump sum who wouldn't consider an allowance.'

'Twenty-five pounds.'

'Come, Mr Harkness, that's what you proposed paying over six months. The
war is going to last longer than that.'

'Thirty. I can't go higher than thirty.'

He was not a rich man, Basil reflected; very likely thirty was all he
could afford. 'I daresay I could find someone to take them for that,' he
said. 'Of course, you realize that this is all highly irregular.'

'Oh, I realize that.' Did he? Basil wondered; perhaps he did. 'Will you
fetch those children to-day?'

'To-day?'

'Without fail.' Mr Harkness seemed to be dictating terms now. 'The
cheque will be waiting for you. I will make it out to bearer.'

****

'What a long time you've been,' said Barbara. 'Have you pacified him?'

'I've got to find a new home for the Connollies.'

'Basil, you've let him off!'

'He was so pathetic. I softened.'

'Basil, how very unlike you.'

'I must get to work with that address book again. We shall have to have
the Connollies here for the night. I'll find them a new home in the
morning.'

He drove over to North Grappling in the twilight. On either side of the
lane the new-dug snow was heaped high, leaving a narrow, passable track.
The three Connollies were standing outside the apple-green door waiting
for him.

'The man with the beard said to give you this,' said Doris.

It was an envelope containing a cheque; nothing more. Neither Harkness
appeared to see them off.

'Mister, am I glad to see you again!' said Doris.

'Jump in,' said Basil.

'May I come in front with you?'

'Yes, jump in.'

'Really? No kidding?'

'Come on, it's cold.' Doris got in beside Basil. 'You're here on
sufferance.'

'What does that mean?'

'You can sit here as long as you behave yourself, and as long as Micky
and Marlene do too. Understand?'

'Hear that, you brats?' said Doris with sudden authority. 'Behave, or
I'll tan yer arses for yer. They'll be all right, Mister, if I tell
'em.'

They were all right.

'Doris, I think it's a very good game of yours making the kids be a
nuisance, but we're going to play it my way in future. When you come to
the house where I live you're to behave, always. See? I may take you to
other houses from time to time. There you can usually be as bad as you
like, but not until I give the word. See?'

'O.K. partner. Give us a cig.'

'I'm beginning to like you, Doris.'

'_I love you_,' said Doris with excruciating warmth, leaning back and
blowing a cloud of smoke over the solemn children in the back. 'I love
you more than anyone I ever seen.'

****

'Their week with the Harknesses seems to have had an extraordinary
effect on the children,' said Barbara after dinner that night. 'I can't
understand it.'

'Mr Harkness said there were _imponderabilia_ at Mill House. Perhaps
it's that.'

'Basil, you're up to something. I wish I knew what it was.'

Basil turned on her his innocent blue eyes, as blue as hers and as
innocent; they held no hint of mischief. 'Just war work, Babs,' he said.

'Slimy snake.'

'I'm not.'

'Crawly spider.' They were back in the schoolroom, in the world where
once they had played pirates. 'Artful monkey,' said Barbara, very
fondly.


[5]

Companies paraded at quarter past eight; immediately after inspection
men were fallen out for the company commanders' orderly room; that gave
time to sift out the genuine requests from the spurious, deal with minor
offences, have the charge sheets made out properly and the names entered
in the guard report of serious defaulters for the C.O.

'Private Tatton charged with losing by neglect one respirator, anti-gas,
value 18_s._ 6_d._'

Private Tatton fell into a rambling account of having left his
respirator in the NAAFI and going back for it ten minutes later, having
found it gone.

'Case remanded for the commanding officer.' Captain Mayfield could not
give a punishment involving loss of pay.

'Case remanded for the commanding officer. About turn. As you were. I
didn't say anything about saluting. About turn. Quick march.'

Captain Mayfield turned to the 'IN' basket on his table.

'O.C.T.U. candidates,' said the company sergeant-major.

'Who have we got? The adjutant doesn't take nil returns.'

'Well, sir, there's Brodie.'

Brodie was a weedy solicitor who had appeared with the last draft.

'Really, sergeant-major, I can't see Brodie making much of an officer.'

'He's not much good in the company, sir, and he's a man of very superior
education.'

'Well put him down for one. What about Sergeant Harris?'

'Not suitable, sir.'

'He's a man of excellent character, fine disciplinarian, knows his stuff
backwards, the men will follow him anywhere.'

'Yessir.'

'Well, what have you got against him?'

'Nothing against him, sir. But we can't get on without Sergeant Harris
in the company football.'

'No. Well, who do you suggest?'

'There's our baronet, sir.' The sergeant-major said this with a smile.
Alastair's position in the ranks was a slight embarrassment to Captain
Mayfield but it was a good joke to the sergeant-major.

'Trumpington? All right, I'll see him and Brodie right away.'

The orderly brought them. The sergeant-major marched them in singly.
'Quick march. Halt. Salute. Brodie, sir.'

'Brodie. They want the names of two men from this company as O.C.T.U.
candidates. I'm putting your name in. Of course the C.O. makes the
decision. I don't say you _will_ go to an O.C.T.U. I take it you would
have no objection if the C.O. approves.'

'None, sir, if you really think I should make a good officer.'

'I don't suppose you'll make a _good_ officer. They're very rare. But I
daresay you'll make an officer of some kind.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'And as long as you're in my company you won't come into my office with
a fountain pen sticking out of your pocket.'

'Sorry, sir.'

'Not so much talk,' said the sergeant-major.

'All right, that's all, sergeant-major.'

'About turn. Quick march. As you were. Swing the right arm forward as
you step out.'

'I believe we'll have to give him a couple of stripes before we can get
rid of him. I'll see the adjutant about that.'

Alastair was marched in. He had changed little since he joined the army.
Perhaps there was a slight shifting of bulk from waist line to chest,
but it was barely perceptible under the loose battledress.

Captain Mayfield addressed him in precisely the same words as he had
used to Brodie.

'Yes, sir.'

'You don't want to take a commission?'

'No, sir.'

'That's very unusual, Trumpington. Any particular reason?'

'I believe a lot of people felt like that in the last war.'

'So I've heard. And a very wasteful business it was. Well if you won't,
I can't make you. Afraid of responsibility, eh?'

Alastair made no answer. Captain Mayfield nodded and the sergeant-major
marched him out.

'What d'you make of that?' asked Captain Mayfield.

'I've known men who think it's _safer_ to stay in the ranks.'

'Shouldn't think that's the case with Trumpington. He's a volunteer,
over age to have been called up.'

'Very rum, sir.'

'Very rum, sergeant-major.'

****

Alastair took his time about returning to his platoon. At this time of
the morning they were doing P.T. It was the one part of the routine he
really hated. He lurked behind the cookhouse until his watch told him
that they would have finished. When he reported back the platoon were
putting on their jackets, panting and sticky. He fell in and marched
with them to the dining hut, where it was stuffy and fairly warm, to
hear a lecture on hygiene from the medical officer. It dealt with the
danger of flies; the medical officer described with appalling detail the
journey of the fly from the latrine to the sugar basin; how its hairy
feet carried the germs of dysentery; how it softened its food with
contaminated saliva before it ate; how it excreted while it fed. This
lecture always went down well. 'Of course,' he added rather lamely,
'this may not seem very important at the moment,' snow lay heavy on
every side of them, 'but if we go to the East...'

When the lecture was finished the company fell out for twenty minutes;
they smoked and ate chocolate and exchanged gossip, qualifying every
noun, verb or adjective with the single, unvarying obscenity which
punctuated all their speech like a hiccup; they stamped their feet and
chaffed their hands.

'What did the ---- company commander want?'

'He wanted to send me to a ---- O.C.T.U.,' said Alastair.

'Well some ---- are ---- lucky. When are you off?'

'I'm staying here.'

'Don't you want to be a ---- officer?'

'Not ---- likely,' said Alastair.

****

When people asked Alastair, as they quite often did, why he did not put
in for a commission, he sometimes said, 'Snobbery. I don't want to meet
the officers on social terms'; sometimes he said, 'Laziness. They work
too hard in war time'; sometimes he said, 'The whole thing's so crazy
one might as well go the whole hog.' To Sonia he said, 'We've had a
pretty easy life up to now. It's probably quite good for one to have a
change sometimes.' That was the nearest he ever came to expressing the
nebulous satisfaction which lay at the back of his mind. Sonia
understood it, but left it undefined. Once, much later, she said to
Basil, 'I believe I know what Alastair felt all that first winter of the
war. It sounds awfully unlike him, but he was a much odder character
than anyone knew. You remember that man who used to dress as an Arab and
then went into the air force as a private because he thought the British
Government had let the Arabs down. I forget his name but there were lots
of books about him. Well, I believe Alastair felt like that. You see
he'd never done anything for the country and though we were always broke
we had lots of money really and lots of fun. I believe he thought that
perhaps if we hadn't had so much fun perhaps there wouldn't have been
any war. Though how he could blame himself for Hitler I never quite
saw.... At least I do now in a way,' she added. 'He went into the
ranks as a kind of penance or whatever it's called that religious people
are always supposed to do.'

It was a penance whose austerities such as they were, admitted of
relaxation. After the stand-easy they fell in for platoon training.
Alastair's platoon commander was away that morning. He was sitting on a
Court of Enquiry. For three hours he and two other officers heard
evidence, and recorded it at length, on the loss of a swill tub from
H.Q. lines. At length it was clear either that there was a conspiracy of
perjury on the part of all the witnesses, or that the tub had
disappeared by some supernatural means independent of human agency; the
Court therefore entered a verdict that no negligence was attributable to
anyone in the matter and recommended that the loss be made good out of
public funds. The President said, 'I don't expect the C.O. will approve
that verdict. He'll send the papers back for fresh evidence to be
taken.'

Meanwhile the platoon, left in charge of the sergeant, split up into
sections and practised immediate action on the Bren gun.

'Gun fires two rounds and stops again. What do you look at now,
Trumpington?'

'Gas regulator'... Off with the magazine. Press, pull back, press.
'Number Two gun clear.'

'What's he forgotten?'

A chorus, 'Butt strap.'

One man said, 'Barrel locking nut.' He had said it once, one splendid
day, when asked a question, and he had been right when everyone else was
stumped, and he had been commended. So now he always said it, like a
gambler obstinately backing the same colour against a long run of bad
luck; it was bound to turn up again one day.

The corporal ignored him. 'Quite right, he's forgotten the butt strap.
Down again, Trumpington.'

It was Saturday. Work ended at twelve o'clock; as the platoon commander
was away, they knocked off ten minutes earlier and got all the gear
stowed so that as soon as the call was sounded off on the bugle they
could run straight for their quarters. Alastair had his leave pass for
reveille on Monday. He had no need to fetch luggage. He kept everything
he needed at home. Sonia was waiting in the car outside the guard-room;
they did not go away for week-ends but spent them, mostly in bed, in the
furnished house which they had taken nearby.

'I was pretty good with the Bren this morning,' said Alastair. 'Only one
mistake.'

'Darling, you are clever.'

'And I managed to shirk P.T.'

They had packed up ten minutes early too; altogether it had been a very
satisfactory morning. And now he could look forward to a day and a half
of privacy and leisure.

'I've been shopping in Woking,' said Sonia, 'and I've got all kinds of
delicious food and all the weekly papers. There's a film there we might
go and see.'

'We might,' said Alastair doubtfully. 'It will probably be full of a lot
of ---- soldiers.'

'Darling, I've never before heard words like that spoken. I thought they
only came in print, in novels.'

Alastair had a bath and changed into tweeds. (It was chiefly in order
that he might wear civilian clothes that he stayed indoors during
week-ends; for that and the cold outside and the ubiquitous military.)
Then he took a whisky and soda and watched Sonia cooking; they had fried
eggs, sausages, bacon and cold plum pudding; after luncheon he lit a
large cigar; it was snowing again, piling up round the steel framed
windows, shutting out the view of the golf course; there was a huge fire
and at tea time they toasted crumpets.

'There's all this evening, and all to-morrow,' said Sonia. 'Isn't it
lovely. You know, Alastair, you and I always seem to manage to have fun,
don't we, wherever we are.'

This was February 1940, in that strangely cosy interlude between peace
and war, when there was leave every week-end and plenty to eat and drink
and plenty to smoke, when France stood firm on the Maginot Line and the
Finns stood firm in Finland, and everyone said what a cruel winter they
must be having in Germany. During one of these week-ends Sonia conceived
a child.


[6]

As Mr Bentley had foretold, it was not long before Ambrose found himself
enrolled on the staff of the Ministry of Information. He was in fact one
of the reforms introduced at the first of the many purges. Questions had
been asked about the Ministry in the House of Commons; the Press,
hampered in so much else, was free to exploit its own grievances.
Redress was promised and after a week of intrigue the new appointments
were made. Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers went to the folk-dancing
department; Mr Pauling went to wood-cuts and weaving; Mr Digby-Smith was
given the Arctic circle; Mr Bentley himself, after a dizzy period in
which, for a day, he directed a film about postmen, for another day
filed press-cuttings from Istanbul, and for the rest of the week
supervised the staff catering, found himself at length back beside his
busts in charge of the men of letters. Thirty or forty officials retired
thankfully into competitive commercial life, and forty or fifty new men
and women appeared to take their place; among them, he never quite knew
how, Ambrose. The Press, though sceptical of good results, congratulated
the public upon maintaining a system of government in which the will of
the people was given such speedy effect. _The lesson of the muddle at
the Ministry of Information--for muddle there undoubtedly was--is not
that such things occur under a democracy, but that they are susceptible
to remedy, they wrote; the wind of democratic criticism has blown, clear
and fresh, through the departments of the Ministry; charges have been
frankly made and frankly answered. Our enemies may ponder this portent._

Ambrose's post as sole representative of Atheism in the religious
department was not, at this stage of the war, one of great importance.
He was in no position, had he wished it, to introduce statuary into his
quarters. He had for his use a single table and a single chair. He
shared a room and a secretary with a fanatical young Roman Catholic
layman who never tired of exposing discrepancies between _Mein Kampf_
and the encyclical _Quadragesima Anno_, a bland Nonconformist minister,
and a Church of England clergyman who had been brought in to succeed the
importer of the mahogany _prie-dieu_. 'We must reorientate ourselves to
Geneva,' this cleric said; 'the first false step was taken when the
Lytton report was shelved.' He argued long and gently, the Roman
Catholic argued long and fiercely, while the Nonconformist sat as a
bemused umpire between them. Ambrose's task consisted in representing to
British and colonial atheists that Nazism was at heart agnostic with a
strong tinge of religious superstition; he envied the lot of his
colleagues who had at their finger-tips long authentic summaries of
suppressed Sunday Schools, persecuted monks, and pagan Nordic rites. His
was uphill work; he served a small and critical public; but whenever he
discovered in the pile of foreign newspapers which passed from desk to
desk any reference to German church-going, he circulated it to the two
or three magazines devoted to his cause. He counted up the number of
times the word 'God' appeared in Hitler's speeches and found the sum
impressive; he wrote a pointed little article to show that Jew-baiting
was religious in origin. He did his best, but time lay heavy on his
hands and, more and more, as the winter wore on, he found himself
slipping away from his rancorous colleagues, to the more human
companionship of Mr Bentley.

The great press of talent in search of occupation which had thronged the
Ministry during its first weeks, had now dropped to a mere handful; the
door-keeper was schooled to detect and deter the job seekers. No one
wanted another reorganization for some time to come. Mr Bentley's office
became an enclave of culture in a barbaric world. It was here that the
Ivory Tower was first discussed.

'Art for Art's sake, Geoffrey. Back to the lily and the lotus, away from
these dusty young _immortelles_, these dandelions sprouting on the
vacant lot.'

'A kind of Yellow Book,' suggested Mr Bentley sympathetically.

Ambrose turned sharply from his contemplation of Mrs Siddons.
'_Geoffrey_. How _can_ you be so unkind?'

'My dear Ambrose...'

'That's just what they'll call it.'

'Who will?'

'Parsnip,' said Ambrose with venom, 'Pimpernell, Poppet and Tom. They'll
say we're deserting the workers' cause.'

'I'm not aware that I ever joined it,' said Mr Bentley. 'I claim to be
one of the very few living liberals.'

'We've allowed ourselves to be dominated by economists.'

'_I_ haven't.'

'For years now we've allowed ourselves to think of nothing but concrete
mixers and tractors.'

'_I_ haven't,' said Mr Bentley crossly. 'I've thought a great deal about
Nollekens.'

'Well,' said Ambrose, 'I've had enough. _Il faut en finir_,' and added,
'_nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts_.'

Later he said, 'I was never a party member.'

'Party?'

'Communist party. I was what they call in their horrible jargon, a
fellow traveller.'

'Ah.'

'Geoffrey, they do the most brutal things, don't they, to communists who
try to leave the party?'

'So I've heard.'

'Geoffrey, you don't think they'd do that to fellow travellers, do you?'

'I don't expect so.'

'But they _might_?'

'Oh yes, they _might_.'

'Oh dear.'

Later he said, 'You know, Geoffrey, even in fascist countries they have
underground organizations. Do you think the underground organizations
would get hold of us?'

'Who?'

'The fellow travellers.'

'Really it's too ridiculous to talk like this of fellow travellers and
the underground. It sounds like strap hangers on the Bakerloo railway.'

'It's all very well for you to laugh. You were never one of them.'

'But my dear Ambrose, why should these political friends of yours mind
so very much if you produce a purely artistic paper.'

'I heard of a 'cellist in America. He's been a member of the party and
he accepted an invitation to play at an anniversary breakfast of the
Colonial Dames. It was during the Scottsbors trials when feeling was
running high. They tied him to a lamp-post and covered him with tar and
set him on fire.'

'The Colonial Dames did?'

'No, no, the communists.'

After a long pause he said, 'But Russia's doing very badly in Finland.'

'Yes.'

'If only we knew what was going to happen.'

He returned pensively to the religious department.

'This is more in your line than mine,' said the Catholic representative,
handing him a cutting from a Swiss paper.

It said that Storm Troopers had attended a requiem mass in Salzburg.
Ambrose clipped it to a piece of paper and wrote '_Copies_ to _Free
Thought_, the _Atheist Advertiser_ and to _Godless Sunday at Home_';
then he placed it in his basket marked OUT. Two yards distant the
Nonconformist minister was checking statistics about the popularity of
beer-gardens among Nazi officials. The Church of England clergyman was
making the most of some rather scrappy Dutch information about cruelty
to animals in Bremen. There was no foundation here for an ivory tower,
thought Ambrose, no cloud to garland its summit, and his thoughts began
to soar lark-like into a tempera, fourteenth-century sky; into a heaven
of flat blank, blue and white clouds cross-hatched with gold leaf on
their sunward edges; a vast altitude painted with shaving soap on a
panel of lapis lazuli; he stood on a high, sugary pinnacle, on a new
Tower of Babel; like a muezzin calling his message to a world of domes
and clouds; beneath him, between him and the absurd little figures
bobbing and bending on their striped praying mats, lay fathoms of clear
air where doves sported with the butterflies.


[7]

Most of Mrs Sothill's Garden-Party-Only list were people of late middle
age who, on retirement from work in the cities or abroad, had bought the
smaller manor houses and the larger rectories; houses that once had been
supported on the rent of a thousand acres and a dozen cottages, now went
with a paddock and a walled garden and their life subsisted on pensions
and savings. To these modest landholders the rural character of the
neighbourhood was a matter of particular jealousy; magnates like Freddy
would eagerly sell off outlying farms for development. It was the G.P.O.
list who suffered and protested. A narrow corner could not be widened or
a tree lopped to clear the telegraph wires without it being noted and
regretted in those sunny morning-rooms. These were benevolent,
companionable people; their carefully limited families were 'out in the
world' and came to them only for occasional visits. Their daughters had
flats and jobs and lives of their own in London; their sons were
self-supporting in the services and in business. The tribute of Empire
flowed gently into the agricultural countryside, tithe barns were
converted into village halls, the boy scouts had a new bell tent and the
district nurse a motor-car; the old box pews were taken out of the
churches, the galleries demolished, the Royal Arms and the ten
commandments moved from behind the altar and replaced with screens of
blue damask supported at the four corners with gilt Sarum angels; the
lawns were close mown, fertilized and weeded, and from their splendid
surface rose clumps of pampas grass and yucca; year in, year out, gloved
hands grubbed in the rockeries, gloved hands snipped in the herbaceous
border; baskets of bass stood beside trays of visiting-cards on the hall
tables. Now in the dead depths of winter when ice stood thick on the
lily ponds, and the kitchen gardens at night were a litter of sacking,
these good people fed the birds daily with the crumbs from the
dining-room table and saw to it that no old person in the village went
short of coal.

It was this unfamiliar world that Basil contemplated in the
leather-bound pages of Mrs Sothill's address book. He contemplated it as
a marauder might look down from the hills into the fat pastures below;
as Hannibal's infantry had looked down from the snow-line as the first
elephants tried the etched footholds which led to the Lombardy plains
below them and went lurching and trumpeting over the edge.

After the successful engagement at North Grappling, Basil took Doris
into the nearest town and fed her liberally on fried fish and chipped
potatoes; afterwards he took her to the cinema, allowed her to hold his
hand in a fierce and sticky grasp throughout the length of two deeply
sentimental films and brought her back to Malfrey in a state of
entranced docility.

'You don't like blondes, do you?' she asked anxiously in the car.

'Yes, very much.'

'More than brunettes?'

'I'm not particular.'

'They say like goes to like. _She's_ dark.'

'Who?'

'Her you call your sister.'

'Doris, you must get this idea out of your head. Mrs Sothill _is_ my
sister.'

'You aren't sweet on her.'

'Certainly not.'

'Then you _do_ like blondes,' said Doris sadly.

Next day she disappeared alone into the village, returned mysteriously
with a small parcel, and remained hidden all the morning in the
bachelors' wing. Just before luncheon she appeared in the orangery with
her head in a towel.

'I wanted you to see,' she said, and uncovered a damp mop of hair which
was in part yellow, in part its original black, and in part mottled in
every intervening shade.

'Good heavens, child,' said Barbara. 'What have you done?'

Doris looked only at Basil. 'D'you like it? I'll give it another go this
afternoon.'

'I wouldn't,' said Basil. 'I'd leave it just as it is.'

'You like it?'

'I think it's fine.'

'Not too streaky?'

'Not a bit too streaky.'

If anything had been needed to complete the horror of Doris's
appearance, that morning's work had done it.

****

Basil studied the address book with care. 'Finding a new home for the
Connollies,' he said.

'Basil, we must do something to that poor child's head before we pass
her on.'

'Not a bit of it. It suits her. What d'you know of the Graces of the Old
Rectory, Adderford?'

'It's a pretty little house. He's a painter.'

'Bohemian?'

'Not the least. Very refined. Portraits of children in water-colour and
pastel.'

'Pastel? He sounds suitable.'

'She's rather delicate I believe.'

'Perfect.'

The Connollies stayed two days at the Old Rectory and earned twenty
pounds.


[8]

London was full again. Those who had left in a hurry returned; those who
had made arrangements to go after the first air-raid remained. Margot
Metroland shut her home and moved to the Ritz; opened her home and moved
back; decided that after all she really preferred the Ritz and shut her
home, this time, though she did not know it, for ever. No servant ever
folded back the shutters from the long windows; they remained barred
until late in the year when they were blown into Curzon Street; the
furniture was still under dust sheets when it was splintered and burned.

****

Sir Joseph Mainwaring was appointed to a position of trust and dignity.
He was often to be seen with Generals now and sometimes with an Admiral.
'Our first war aim,' he said, 'is to keep Italy out of the war until she
is strong enough to come in on our side.' He summed up the situation at
home by saying, 'One takes one's gas-mask to one's office but _not_ to
one's club.'

Lady Seal had not troubled him again about Basil. 'He's at Malfrey,
helping Barbara with her evacuees,' she said. 'The army is very full
just at present. Things will be much easier when we have had some
casualties.'

Sir Joseph nodded but at heart he was sceptical. There were not going to
be many casualties. Why, he had been talking to a very interesting
fellow at the Beefsteak who knew a German Professor of History; this
Professor was now in England; they thought a great deal of him at the
Foreign Office; he said there were fifty million Germans ready to
declare peace to-morrow on our own terms. It was just a question of
outing those fellows in the government. Sir Joseph had seen many
governments outed. It was quite easy in war time--they had outed Asquith
quite easily and he was a far better fellow than Lloyd George who
succeeded him. Then they outed Lloyd George and then they outed
MacDonald. Christopher Seal knew how to do it. He'd soon out Hitler if
he were alive and a German.

****

Poppet Green was in London with her friends.

'Ambrose has turned fascist,' she said.

'Not really?'

'He's working for the Government in the Ministry of Information and
they've bribed him to start a new paper.'

'Is it a fascist paper?'

'You bet it is.'

'I heard it was to be called the _Ivory Tower_.'

'That's fascist if you like.'

'Escapist.'

'Trotskyist.'

'Ambrose never had the proletarian outlook. I can't think why we put up
with him as we did. Parsnip always said...'

****

Peter Pastmaster came into Bratt's wearing battledress and, on his
shoulder, the name of a regiment to which he had not formerly belonged.

'Hullo. Why on earth are you dressed like that?'

Peter smirked as only a soldier can when he knows a secret. 'Oh, no
particular reason.'

'Have they thrown you out of the regiment?'

'I'm seconded, temporarily, for special duty.'

'You're the sixth chap I've seen in disguise this morning.'

'That's the idea--security, you know.'

'What's it all about?'

'You'll hear in time, I expect,' said Peter with boundless smugness.

They went to the bar.

'Good morning, my lord,' said MacDougal, the barman. 'I see you're off
to Finland too. Quite a number of our gentlemen are going to-night.'

****

Angela Lyne was back in London; the affairs of the hospital were in
order, her son was at his private school, transported at the outbreak of
war from the East coast to the middle of Dartmoor. She sat at the place
she called 'home' listening to wireless news from Germany.

This place was a service flat and as smart and non-committal as herself,
a set of five large rooms high up in the mansard floor of a brand new
block in Grosvenor Square. The decorators had been at work there while
she was in France; the style was what passes for Empire in the
fashionable world. Next year, had there been no war, she would have had
it done over again during August.

That morning she had spent an hour with her brokers giving precise,
prudent directions for the disposition of her fortune; she had lunched
alone, listening to the radio from Europe, after luncheon she had gone
alone to the cinema in Curzon Street. It was darkening when she left the
cinema and quite dark now outside, beyond the heavy crimson draperies
which hung in a dozen opulent loops and folds, girded with gold cord,
fringed with gold at the hem, over the new black shutters. Soon she
would go out to dine with Margot at the Ritz. Peter was off somewhere
and Margot was trying to get a party together for him.

She mixed herself a large cocktail, the principal ingredients were vodka
and calvados; the decorators had left an electric shaker on the Pompeian
side table. It was their habit to litter the houses where they worked
with expensive trifles of this sort; parsimonious clients sent them
back; the vaguer sort believed them to be presents for which they had
forgotten to thank anyone, used them, broke them and paid for them a
year later when the bills came in. Angela liked gadgets. She switched on
the electric shaker and, when her drink was mixed, took the glass with
her to the bathroom and drank it slowly in her bath.

Angela never drank cocktails except in private; there was something
about them which bore, so faintly as to be discernible to no one but
herself, a suggestion of good fellowship and good cheer; an infinitely
small invitation to familiarity, derived perhaps from the days of
prohibition when gin had ceased to be Hogarthian and had become chic; an
aura of naughtiness, of felony compounded; a memory of her father's
friends who sometimes had raised their glasses to her, of a man in a
ship who had said '_ tes beaux yeux_'. And so Angela, who hated human
contact on any but her own terms, never drank cocktails except in
solitude. Lately all her days seemed to be spent alone.

Steam from the bath formed in a mist, and later in great beads of water,
on the side of the glass. She finished her cocktail and felt the fumes
rise inside her. She lay for a long time in the water, scarcely
thinking, scarcely feeling anything except the warm water round her and
the spirit within her. She called for her maid, from next door, to bring
her a cigarette, smoked it slowly to the end, called for an ash tray and
then for a towel. Presently she was ready to face the darkness, and the
intense cold, and Margot Metroland's dinner party. She noticed in the
last intense scrutiny before her mirrors that her mouth was beginning to
droop a little at the corners. It was not the disappointed pout that she
knew in so many of her friends; it was as the droop you sometimes saw in
death masks, when the jaw had been set and the face had stiffened in
lines which told those waiting round the bed that the will to live was
gone.

At dinner she drank Vichy water and talked like a man. She said that
France was no good any more and Peter used a phrase that was just coming
into vogue, accusing her of being 'fifth column'. They went on to dance
at the Suivi. She danced and drank her Vichy water and talked sharply
and well like a very clever man. She was wearing a new pair of
ear-rings--an arrow set with a ruby point, the shaft a thin bar of
emerald that seemed to transfix the lobe; she had designed them for
herself and had called for them that morning on her way home from seeing
her man of business. The girls in the party noticed Angela's ear-rings;
they noticed everything about her clothes; she was the best-dressed
woman there, as she usually was wherever she went.

She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square
alone. Since the war there was no lift-man on duty after midnight. She
shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to
the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the
grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel
basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day
or night. She mixed herself a large whisky and water and turned on the
radio.

Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in
foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she
got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another
whisky and water.

Her maid lived out and had been told not to wait up. When she came in
the morning she found Mrs Lyne in bed but awake; the clothes she had
worn the evening before had been carefully hung up, not broadcast about
the carpet as they used sometimes to be. 'I shan't be getting up this
morning, Grainger,' she said. 'Bring the radio here and the newspapers.'

Later she had her bath, returned to bed, took two tablets of Dial and
slept, gently, until it was time to fit the black, ply-wood screens into
the window frames and hide them behind the velvet draperies.


[9]

'What about Mr and Mrs Prettyman-Partridge of the Malt House, Grantley
Green?'

Basil was choosing his objectives from the extreme quarters of the
Malfrey billeting area. He had struck East and North. Grantley Green lay
South where the land of spur and valley fell away and flattened out into
a plain of cider orchards and market gardens.

'They're very old, I think,' said Barbara. 'I hardly know them. Come to
think of it, I heard something about Mr Prettyman-Partridge the other
day. I can't remember what.'

'Pretty house? Nice things in it?'

'As far as I remember.'

'People of regular habits? Fond of quiet?'

'Yes, I suppose so.'

'They'll do.'

Basil bent over the map tracing the road to Grantley Green which he
would take the next day.

He found the Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in
the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It
had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green.
The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in 'good
hands'. Basil noted the china with approval--large, black Wedgewood
urns--valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well loved. When the door
opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn
and a cedar tree laden with snow.

The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair
and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was
dressed in a tweed suit and woollen jumper as though for country
exercise, but the soft, fur-lined boots showed that she was spending the
morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round
and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she
was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably
proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter
of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white
and rose.

'Miss Prettyman-Partridge?'

'No. Please don't say you've come to sell something. It's terribly cold
standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it.'

'I want to see Mr and Mrs Prettyman-Partridge.'

'They're dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer.
Is that all, please; I don't want to be rude but I must shut the door or
freeze.'

So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. 'May I come
in?'

'Oh dear,' said this splendid girl, leading him into the room with the
Wedgewood urns. 'Is it something to buy or forms to fill in or just a
subscription? If it's the first two I can't help because my husband's
away with the yeomanry; if it's a subscription I've got some money
upstairs. I've been told to give the same as Mrs Andrews, the doctor's
wife. If you haven't been to her yet, come back when you find what she's
good for.'

Everything in the room was new; that is to say the paint was new and the
carpets and the curtains, and the furniture had been newly put in
position. There was a very large settee in front of the fireplace whose
cushions, upholstered in _toile-de-Jouy_ still bore the impress of that
fine young woman; she had been lying there when Basil rang the bell. He
knew that if he put his hand in the round concavity where her hip had
rested, it would still be warm; and that further cushion had been tucked
under her arm. The book she had been reading was on the lambskin
hearth-rug. Basil could reconstruct the position, exactly, where she had
been sprawling with the languor of extreme youth.

The girl seemed to sense an impertinence in Basil's scrutiny. 'Anyway,'
she said. 'Why aren't you in khaki?'

'Work of national importance,' said Basil. 'I am the district billeting
officer. I'm looking for a suitable home for three evacuated children.'

'Well, I hope you don't call this suitable. I ask you. I can't even look
after Bill's sheepdog. I can't even look after myself very well. What
should I do with three children?'

'These are rather exceptional children.'

'They'd have to be. Anyway I'm not having any thank you. There was a
funny little woman called Harkness came to call here yesterday. I do
think people might let up on calling in war time, don't you? She told me
the most gruesome things about some children that were sent to her. They
had to bribe the man, literally bribe him with money, to get the brutes
moved.'

'These are the same children.'

'Well, for God's sake, why pick on me?'

Her great eyes held him dazzled, like a rabbit before the headlights of
a car. It was a delicious sensation. 'Well, actually, I picked on the
Prettyman-Partridges.... I don't even know your name.'

'I don't know yours.'

'Basil Seal.'

'Basil Seal?' There was a sudden interest in her voice. 'How very
funny.'

'Why funny?'

'Only that I used to hear a lot about you once. Weren't you a friend of
a girl called Mary Nichols?'

'Was I?' Was he? Mary Nichols? Mary Nichols?

'Well she used to talk a lot about you. She was much older than me. I
used to think her wonderful when I was sixteen. You met her in a ship
coming from Copenhagen.'

'I daresay. I've been to Copenhagen.'

The girl was looking at him now with a keen and not wholly flattering
attention. 'So you're Basil Seal,' she said. 'Well, I never...'

Four years ago in South Kensington, at Mary Nichols' home there was a
little back sitting-room on the first floor which was Mary's room. Here
Mary entertained her girl friends to tea. Here she had come, day after
day, to sit before the gas fire and eat Fuller's walnut cake and hear
the details of Mary's Experience. 'But aren't you going to see him
again?' she asked. 'No, it was something so beautiful, so complete in
itself'--Mary had steeped herself in romantic literature since her
Experience. 'I don't want to spoil it.' 'I don't think he sounds half
good enough for you, darling.' 'He's absolutely _different_. You mustn't
think of him as one of the young men one meets at dances...' The girl
did not go to dances yet, and Mary knew it. Mary's tales of the young
men she met at dances had been very moving, but not as moving as this
tale of Basil Seal. The name had become graven on her mind.

And Basil, still standing, searched his memory. Mary Nichols?
Copenhagen? No, it registered nothing. It was very consoling, he
thought, the way in which an act of kindness, in the fullness of time,
returns to bless the benefactor. One gives a jolly-up to a girl in a
ship. She goes her way, he goes his. He forgets; he has so many
benefactions of the kind to his credit. But she remembers and then one
day, when it is least expected, Fate drops into his lap the ripe fruit
of his reward, this luscious creature waiting for him, all unaware, in
the Malt House, Grantley Green.

'Aren't you going to offer me a drink--on the strength of Mary Nichols.'

'I don't think there's anything in the house. Bill's away you see. He's
got some wine downstairs in the cellar, but the door's locked.'

'I expect we could open it.'

'Oh! I wouldn't do that. Bill would be furious.'

'Well, I don't suppose he'll be best pleased to come home on leave and
find the Connolly family hacking up his home. By the way, you haven't
seen them yet; they're outside in the car; I'll bring them in.'

'_Please_ don't!' There was genuine distress and appeal in those blue
cow-eyes.

'Well, take a look at them through the window.'

She went and looked. 'Good God,' said the girl. 'Mrs Harkness wasn't far
wrong. I thought she was laying it on thick.'

'It cost her thirty pounds to get rid of them.'

'Oh, but I haven't got anything like that'--again the distress and
appeal in her wide blue eyes. 'Bill makes me an allowance out of his
pay. It comes in monthly. It's practically all I've got.'

'I'll take payment in kind,' said Basil.

'You mean the sherry?'

'I'd like a glass of sherry very much,' said Basil.

When they got to work with the crowbar on the cellar door, it was clear
that this high-spirited girl thoroughly enjoyed herself. It was a
pathetic little cellar; a poor man's treasury. Half a dozen bottles of
hock, a bin of port, a dozen or two of claret. 'Mostly wedding
presents,' explained the girl. Basil found some sherry and they took it
up to the light.

'I've no maid now,' she explained. 'A woman comes in once a week.'

They found glasses in the pantry and a corkscrew in the dining-room.

'Is it any good?' she said anxiously, while Basil tasted the wine.

'Delicious.'

'I'm so glad. Bill knows about wine. I don't.'

So they began to talk about Bill, who was married in July to this lovely
creature, who had a good job in an architect's office in the nearby
town, had settled at Grantley Green in August, and in September had gone
to join the yeomanry as a trooper....

****

Two hours later Basil left the Malt House and returned to his car. It
was evidence of the compelling property of love that the Connolly
children were still in their seats.

'Gawd, Mister, you haven't half been a time,' said Doris. 'We're fair
froze. Do we get out here?'

'No.'

'We aren't going to muck-up this house?'

'No, Doris, not this time. You're coming back with me.'

Doris sighed blissfully. 'I don't care how froze we are if we can come
back with you,' she said.

When they returned to Malfrey, and Barbara once more found the children
back in the bachelors' wing, her face fell. 'Oh, Basil,' she said.
'You've failed me.'

'Well not exactly. The Prettyman-Partridges are dead.'

'I knew there was something about them. But you've been a long time.'

'I met a friend. At least the friend of a friend. A very nice girl. I
think you ought to do something about her.'

'What's her name?'

'D'you know, I never discovered. But her husband's called Bill. He
joined Freddy's regiment as a trooper.'

'Who's she a friend of?'

'Mary Nichols.'

'I've never heard of her.'

'Old friend of mine. Honestly, Babs, you'll like this girl.'

'Well, ask her to dinner.' Barbara was not enthusiastic; she had known
too many of Basil's girls.

'I have. The trouble is she hasn't got a car. D'you mind if I go and
fetch her?'

'Darling, we simply haven't the petrol.'

'We can use the special allowance.'

'Darling, I _can't._ This has nothing to do with billeting.'

'Believe it or not Babs, it has.'


[10]

The frost broke; the snow melted away; Colony Bog, Bagshot Heath,
Chobham Common and all the little polygons of gorse and bush which lay
between the high roads of Surrey, patches of rank land marked on the
signposts W.D., marked on the maps as numbered training areas,
reappeared from their brief period of comeliness.

'We can get on with tactical training,' said the C.O.

For three weeks there were platoon schemes and company schemes. Captain
Mayfield consumed his leisure devising ways of transforming into
battlefields the few acres of close, soggy territory at his disposal.
For the troops these schemes only varied according to the distance of
the training area from camp, and the distance that had to be traversed
before the cease-fire. Then for three days in succession the C.O. was
seen to go out with the adjutant in the Humber snipe, each carrying a
map case. 'We're putting on a battalion exercise,' said Captain
Mayfield. It was all one to his troops. 'It's our first battalion
exercise. It's absolutely essential that every man in the company shall
be in the picture all the time.'

Alastair was gradually learning the new languages. There was the simple
tongue, the unchanging reiteration of obscenity, spoken by his fellow
soldiers. That took little learning. There was also the language spoken
by his officers, which from time to time was addressed to him. The first
time that Captain Mayfield had asked him, 'Are you in the picture,
Trumpington?' he supposed him to mean, was he personally conspicuous. He
crouched at the time water-logged to the knees, in a ditch; he had, at
the suggestion of Mr Smallwood--the platoon commander--ornamented his
steel helmet with bracken. 'No, sir,' he had said, stoutly.

Captain Mayfield had seemed rather gratified than not by the confession.
'Put these men in the picture, Smallwood,' he said, and there had
followed a tedious and barely credible narrative about the unprovoked
aggression of Southland against Northland (who was not party to the
Geneva gas protocol), about How to support batteries, A.F.V's and
F.D.L.s.

Alastair learned, too, that all schemes ended in a 'shambles' which did
not mean, as he had feared, a slaughter, but a brief restoration of
individual freedom of movement, when everyone wandered where he would,
while Mr Smallwood blew his whistle and Captain Mayfield shouted, 'Mr
Smallwood, will you kindly get your platoon to hell out of here and fall
them in on the road.'

On the day of the battalion scheme they marched out of camp as a
battalion. Alastair had been made mortar-man in Mr Smallwood's platoon.
It was a gamble, the chances of which were hotly debated. At the moment
there were no mortars and he was given instead a light and easily
manageable counterfeit of wood which was slung on the back of his
haversack, relieving him of a rifle. At present it was money for old
rope, but a day would come, spoken of as 'when we get our 1098'; in that
dire event he would be worse off than the riflemen. Two other men in the
platoon had rashly put in to be anti-tank men; contrary to all
expectations anti-tank rifles had suddenly arrived. One of these men had
prudently gone sick on the eve of the exercise; the other went sick
after it.

Water-bottles were filled, haversack rations were packed in mess-tins,
and, on account of Northland's frank obduracy at Geneva, gas respirators
frustrated the aim of the designers of the equipment to leave the man's
chest unencumbered. Thus they marched out and after ten minutes, at the
command to march at ease, they began singing 'Roll out the Barrel',
'We'll hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line' and 'The
Quartermaster's Store'. Presently the order came back to march
tactically. They knew all about that; it meant stumbling along in the
ditch; singing stopped; the man with the anti-tank rifle swore
monotonously. Then the order came back 'Gas'; they put on their
respirators and the man with the anti-tank rifle suffered in silence.

'Gas clear. _Don't_ put the respirators back in the haversacks. Leave
them out a minute to dry.'

They marched eight miles or so and then turned off the main road into a
lane and eventually halted. It was now eleven o'clock.

'This is the battalion assembly position,' announced Captain Mayfield.
'The C.O. has just gone forward with his recce group to make his recce.'

It was as though he were announcing to a crowd of pilgrims, 'This is the
Vatican. The Pope has just gone into the Sistine Chapel.'

'It makes things much more interesting,' said Mr Smallwood rather
apologetically, 'if you try and understand what is going on. Yes, carry
on smoking.'

The company settled itself on the side of the road and began eating its
haversack rations.

'I say, you know,' said Mr Smallwood. 'There'll be a halt for dinner.'

They ate, mostly in silence.

'Soon the C.O. will send for his O group,' announced Captain Mayfield.

Presently a runner appeared, not running but walking rather slowly, and
led Captain Mayfield away.

'The C.O. _has_ sent for his O group,' said Mr Smallwood. 'Captain Brown
is now in command.'

Captain Brown announced, 'The C.O. has given out his orders. He is now
establishing advanced Battalion H.Q. The company commanders are now
making their recces. Soon _they_ will send _for their_ O groups.'

'Can't think what they want _us_ here for at all,' said the man with the
anti-tank rifle.

Three-quarters of an hour passed and then an orderly arrived with a
written message for Captain Brown. He said to the three platoon
commanders, 'You're to meet the company commander at the third E in "Bee
Garden". I'm bringing the company on to the B in Bee.'

Mr Smallwood and his orderly and his batman left platoon headquarters
and drifted off uncertainly into the scrub.

'Get the company fallen in, sergeant-major.'

Captain Brown was not quite happy about his position; they tacked along
behind him across the common; several times they halted while Captain
Brown worried over the map. At last he said, 'This is the company
assembly position. The company commander is now giving out orders to his
O group.'

At this moment, just as the men were beginning to settle down, Captain
Mayfield appeared. 'Where the hell are those platoon commanders?' he
asked. 'And what is the company doing here? I said the B in Bee, this is
the E in Garden.'

A discussion followed, inaudible to Alastair except for an occasional
phrase, 'ring contour', 'track junction' and again and again 'well the
map's wrong'. Captain Brown seemed to get the better of the argument; at
any rate Captain Mayfield went away in search of his O group and left
the company in possession.

Half an hour passed. Captain Brown felt compelled to explain the delay.

'The platoon commanders are making their recces,' he said.

Presently the C.O. arrived. 'Is this C company?' he asked.

'Yes, sir.'

'Well what's happening? You ought to be on the start line by now.' Then
since it was clearly no use attacking Captain Brown about that, he said
in a way Captain Brown had learned to dread. 'I must have missed your
sentries coming along. Just put me in the picture, will you, of your
local defence.'

'Well, sir, we've just halted here...'

The C.O. led Captain Brown away.

'He's getting a rocket,' said the anti-tank man. It was the first moment
of satisfaction he had known that day.

Captain Brown came back looking shaken and began posting air look-outs
and gas sentries with feverish activity. While he was in the middle of
it the platoon orderlies came back to lead the platoons to assembly
positions. Alastair advanced with the platoon another half mile. Then
they halted. Mr Smallwood appeared and collected the section-commanders
round him. The C.O. was there too, listening to Mr Smallwood's orders.
When they were finished he said, 'I don't think you mentioned the
R.A.P., did you, Smallwood?'

'R.A.P. sir. No, sir, I'm afraid I don't know where it is.'

The C.O. led Mr Smallwood out of hearing of his platoon.

'Now _he's_ getting a rocket,' said the anti-tank man with glee.

The section-commanders came back to their men. Mr Smallwood's orders had
been full of detail; start line, zero hour, boundaries inclusive and
exclusive, objectives, supporting fire. 'It's like this,' said Corporal
Deacon. 'They're over there and we're here. So then we go for un.'

Another half hour passed. Captain Mayfield appeared. 'For Christ's sake,
Smallwood, you ought to be half-way up the ridge by this time.'

'Oh,' said Mr Smallwood. 'Sorry. Come on. Forward.'

The platoon collected its equipment and toiled into action up the
opposing slope. Major Bush, the second-in-command, appeared before them.
They fired their blanks at him with enthusiasm. 'Got him,' said the man
next to Alastair.

'You're coming under heavy fire,' said the Major. 'Most of you are
casualties.'

'He's a casualty himself.'

'Well, what are you going to do, Smallwood?'

'Get down, sir.'

'Well _get_ down.'

'Get down,' ordered Mr Smallwood.

'What are you going to do now?'

Mr Smallwood looked round desperately for inspiration. 'Put down smoke,
sir.'

'Well, _put_ down smoke.'

'Put down smoke,' said Mr Smallwood to Alastair.

The Major went on his way to confuse the platoon on their flank.

'Come on,' said Mr Smallwood. 'We've got to get up this infernal hill
sometime. We might as well do it now.'

It was shorter than it looked; they were up in twenty minutes and at the
summit there was a prolonged shambles. Bit by bit the whole battalion
appeared from different quarters. C company was collected and fallen in;
then they were fallen out to eat their dinners. No one had any dinner
left, so they lay on their backs and smoked.

****

Marching home the C.O. said, 'Not so bad for a first attempt.'

'Not so bad, Colonel,' said Major Bush.

'Bit slow off the mark.'

'A bit sticky.'

'Smallwood didn't do too well.'

'He was very slow off the mark.'

'Well, I think we learned some lessons. The men were interested. You
could see that.'

It was dark by the time the battalion reached camp. They marched to
attention passing the guard-room, split into companies, and halted on
the company parade-ground.

'All rifles to be pulled through before supper,' said Captain Mayfield.
'Platoon sergeants collect empties. Foot inspection by platoons.' Then
he dismissed the company.

Alastair had time to slip away to the telephone box and summon Sonia
before Mr Mayfield came round the hut examining the feet with an
electric torch. He pulled on a clean pair of socks, pushed his boots
under his palliasse and put on a pair of shoes; then he was ready. Sonia
was outside the guard-room, waiting for him in the car. 'Darling, you
smell very sweaty,' she said. 'What have you been doing?'

'I put down smoke,' said Alastair proudly. 'The whole advance was held
up until I put down smoke.'

'Darling, you _are_ clever. I've got a tinned beefsteak and kidney
pudding for dinner.'

After dinner Alastair settled in a chair. 'Don't let me go to sleep,' he
said. 'I must be in by midnight.'

'I'll wake you.'

'I wonder if a real battle is much like that,' said Alastair just before
he dropped off.

****

Peter Pastmaster's expedition never sailed. He resumed his former
uniform and his former habits. His regiment was in barracks in London;
his mother was still at the Ritz; most of his friends were still to be
found round the bar at Bratt's. With time on his hands and the prospect
of action, for a few days imminent now postponed, but always present as
the basis of any future plans, Peter began to suffer from pangs of
dynastic conscience. He was thirty-three years old. He might pop off any
day. 'Mama,' he said, 'd'you think I ought to marry?'

'Who?'

'Anyone.'

'I don't see that you can say anyone _ought_ to marry _anyone_.'

'Darling, don't confuse me. What I mean is supposing I get killed.'

'I don't see a great deal in it for the poor girl,' said Margot.

'I mean I should like to have a son.'

'Well then you had better marry, darling. D'you know any girls?'

'I don't think I do.'

'I don't think I do either, come to think of it. I believe Emma
Granchester's second girl is very pretty--try her. There are probably
lots of others. I'll make enquiries.'

So Peter, little accustomed to their society began, awkwardly at first,
taking out a series of very young and very eligible girls; he quickly
gained confidence; it was easy as falling off a log. Soon there were a
dozen mothers who were old-fashioned enough to be pleasurably excited at
the prospect of finding in their son-in-law all the Victorian
excellences of an old title, a new fortune, and a shapely leg in blue
overalls.

'Peter,' Margot said to him one day. 'D'you ever give yourself time from
debutantes to see old friends? What's become of Angela? I never see her
now.'

'I suppose she's gone back to the country.'

'Not with Basil?'

'No, not with Basil.'

But she was living still above the block of flats in Grosvenor Square.
Below, layer upon layer of rich men and women came and went about their
business, layer below layer down to street level; below that again,
underground, the management were adapting the basement to serve as an
air-raid shelter. Angela seldom went beyond her door, except once or
twice a week to visit the cinema; she always went alone. She had taken
to wearing spectacles of smoked glass; she wore them indoors, as well as
out; she wore them in the subdued, concealed lighting of her
drawing-room, as she sat hour after hour with the radio standing by the
decanter and glass at her elbow; she wore them when she looked at
herself in the mirror. Only Grainger, her maid, knew what was the matter
with Mrs Lyne, and she only knew the shell of it. Grainger knew the
number of bottles, empty and full, in the little pantry; she saw Mrs
Lyne's face when the blackout was taken down in the morning. (She never
had to wake Mrs Lyne nowadays; her eyes were always open when the maid
came to call her; sometimes Mrs Lyne was up and sitting in her chair;
sometimes she lay in bed, staring ahead, waiting to be called.) She knew
the trays of food that came up from the restaurant and went back, as
often as not, untasted. All this Grainger knew and, being a dull
sensible girl, she kept her own counsel; but, being a dull and sensible
girl, she was spared the knowledge of what went on in Mrs Lyne's mind.

****

So the snows vanished and the weeks of winter melted away with them;
presently, oblivious of the hazards of war, the swallows returned to
their ancestral building grounds.




CHAPTER III
SPRING


Two events decided Basil to return to London. First, the yeomanry moved
back to the country under canvas. Freddy telephoned to Barbara:

'Good news,' he said, 'we're coming home.'

'Freddy, how splendid,' said Barbara, her spirits falling a little.
'When?'

'I arrive to-morrow. I'm bringing Jack Cathcart; he's our
second-in-command now. We're going to lay out a camp. We'll stay at
Malfrey while we're doing it.'

'Lovely,' said Barbara.

'We'll be bringing servants, so we'll be self-supporting as far as that
goes. There'll be a couple of sergeants. Benson can look after them. And
I say, Barbara, what do you say to having the camp in the Park?'

'Oh no, Freddy, for God's sake.'

'We could open up the saloon and have the mess there. I could live in.
You'd have to have old Colonel Sproggin and probably Cathcart, too, but
you wouldn't mind that, would you?'

'Please, Freddy, don't decide anything in a hurry.'

'Well I have practically decided. See you to-morrow. I say, is Basil
still with you?'

'Yes.'

'I can't see him getting on terribly well with Cathcart. Couldn't you
give him a gentle hint?'

Barbara hung up sadly and went to make arrangements for Freddy's and
Major Cathcart's reception.

Basil was at Grantley Green. He returned to Malfrey after dinner, to
find Barbara still up.

'Darling, you've got to go away.'

'Yes, how did you know?'

'Freddy's coming home.'

'Oh damn Freddy; who cares for him? _Bill's_ coming home.'

'What does she say?'

'Believe it or not, she's as pleased as Punch.'

'Ungrateful beast,' said Barbara, and, after a pause, 'You never wrote
that book either.'

'No, but we've had a lovely time, haven't we, Babs. Quite like the old
days.'

'I suppose you'll want some money.'

'I could always do with some more, but as it happens I'm quite rich at
the moment.'

'Basil, how?'

'One thing and another. I tell you what I will do before I go. I'll get
the Connollies off your hands again. I'm afraid I've been neglecting
them rather in the last few weeks.'

That led to the second deciding event.

On his way to and from Grantley Green, Basil had noticed a pretty stucco
house standing in paddock and orchard, which seemed exactly suited to
harbour the Connollies. He had asked Barbara about it, but she could
tell him nothing. Basil was getting lax and, confident now in his
methods, no longer bothered himself with much research before choosing
his victims. The stucco house was marked down and next day he packed the
Connollies into the car and drove over to do his business.

It was ten in the morning but he found the proprietor at breakfast. He
did not appear to be quite the type that Basil was used to deal with. He
was younger than the G.P.O. list. A game leg, stuck awkwardly askew,
explained why he was not in uniform. He had got this injury in a motor
race, he explained later to Basil. He had ginger hair and a ginger
moustache and malevolent pinkish eyes. His name was Mr Todhunter.

He was eating kidneys and eggs and sausages and bacon and an over-cooked
chop; his teapot stood on the hob. He looked like a drawing by Leach for
a book by Surtees.

'Well,' he said, cautious but affable. 'I know about you. You're Mrs
Sothill's brother at Malfrey. I don't know Mrs Sothill but I know all
about her. I don't know Captain Sothill but I know all about him. What
can I do for you?'

'I'm the billeting officer for this district,' said Basil.

'_Indeed._ I'm interested to meet you. Go on. You don't mind my eating,
I'm sure.'

Feeling a little less confident than usual, Basil went through his now
stereotyped preface. '...Getting harder to find billets, particularly
since the anti-aircraft battery had come to South Grappling and put
their men in the cottages there... important to stop the backwash to
the towns... bad impression if the bigger houses seemed not to be
doing their share... natural reluctance to employ compulsory powers
but these powers _were_ there, if necessary... three children who had
caused some difficulty elsewhere...'

Mr Todhunter finished his breakfast, stood with his back to the fire and
began to fill his pipe. 'And what if I don't want these hard cases of
yours,' he said. 'What if I'd sooner pay the fine?'

Basil embarked on the second part of his recitation. '...official
allowance barely covered cost of food... serious hardship to poor
families... poor people valued their household gods even more than
the rich... possible to find a cottage where a few pounds would make
all the difference between dead loss and a small and welcome profit...'

Mr Todhunter heard him in silence. At last he said, 'So _that's_ how you
do it. Thank you. That was most instructive, very instructive indeed. I
liked the bit about household gods.'

Basil began to realize that he was dealing with a fellow of broad and
rather dangerous sympathies; someone like himself. 'In more cultured
circles I say Lares et Penates.'

'Household gods is good enough. Household gods is very good indeed. What
d'you generally count on raising?'

'Five pounds is the worst, thirty-five the best I've had so far.'

'So far? Do you hope to carry on long with this trade?'

'I don't see why not.'

'Don't you? Well I'll tell you something. D'you know who's billeting
officer in this district? I am. Mrs Sothill's district ends at the main
road. You're muscling in on my territory when you come past the
crossing. Now what have you got to say for yourself?'

'D'you mean to say that Grantley Green is yours?'

'Certainly.'

'How damned funny.'

'Why funny?'

'I can't tell you,' said Basil. 'But it _is_--exquisitely--funny.'

'So I'll ask you to keep to your own side of the road in future. Not
that I'm ungrateful for your visit. It's given me some interesting
ideas. I always felt there was money in this racket somehow, but I could
never quite see my way to get it. Now I know. I'll remember about the
household gods.'

'Wait a minute,' said Basil. 'It isn't quite as easy as all that you
know. It isn't just a matter of having the idea; you have to have the
Connollies too. You don't understand it, and I don't understand it, but
the fact remains that quite a number of otherwise sane human beings are
perfectly ready to take children in; they like them; it makes them feel
virtuous; they like the little pattering feet about the house--I know it
sounds screwy but it's the truth. I've seen it again and again.'

'So have I,' said Mr Todhunter. 'There's no sense in it, but it's a
fact--they make household gods of them.'

'Now the Connollies are something quite special; no one could make a
household god of them. Come and have a look.'

He and Mr Todhunter went out into the circle of gravel in front of the
porch where Basil had left the car.

'Doris,' he said. 'Come out and meet Mr Todhunter. Bring Micky and
Marlene too.'

The three frightful children stood in a line to be inspected.

'Take that scarf off your head, Doris. Show him your hair.'

In spite of himself Mr Todhunter could not disguise the fact that he was
profoundly moved. 'Yes,' he said. 'I give you that. They _are_ special.
If it's not a rude question, what did you pay for them?'

'I got them free. But I've put a lot of money into them since--fried
fish and cinemas.'

'How did you get the girl's hair that way?'

'She did it herself,' said Basil, 'for love.'

'They certainly are special,' repeated Mr Todhunter with awe.

'You haven't seen anything yet. You should see them in action.'

'I can imagine it,' said Mr Todhunter. 'Well, what d'you want for them?'

'Five pounds a leg and that's cheap, because I'm thinking of closing
down the business anyhow.'

Mr Todhunter was not a man to haggle when he was on a good thing.
'Done,' he said.

Basil addressed the Connollies. 'Well, children, this is your new
headquarters.'

'Are we to muck 'em about?' asked Doris.

'That's up to Mr Todhunter. I'm handing you over to him now. You'll be
working for him in future.'

'Ain't we never going to be with you again?' asked Doris.

'Never again, Doris. But you'll find you like Mr Todhunter just as much.
He's very handsome, isn't he?'

'Not as handsome as you.'

'No, perhaps not, but he's got a fine little red moustache, hasn't he?'

'Yes, it's a lovely moustache,' Doris conceded; she looked from her old
to her new master critically. 'But he's shorter than you.'

'Dammit, girl,' said Basil impatiently. 'Don't you realize there's a war
on. We've all got to make sacrifices. There's many a little girl would
be very grateful for Mr Todhunter. Look at his fine red nob.'

'Yes, it _is_ red.'

Mr Todhunter tired of the comparison and stumped indoors to fetch his
cheque book.

'Can't we muck his house up, just a bit?' said Micky wistfully.

'Yes, I don't see why not, just a bit.'

'Mister,' said Doris, near tears. 'Kiss me once before you go.'

'No. Mr Todhunter wouldn't like it. He's terribly jealous.'

'Is he?' she said lightening. 'I love jealous men.'

When Basil left her, her fervent, volatile affections were already
plainly engaged with her new host. Marlene remained passive throughout
the interview; she had few gifts, poor child, and those she was allowed
to employ only on rare occasions. 'Mayn't I be sick here, Doris? Just
once?'

'Not here, ducky. Wait till the gentleman billets you.'

'Will that be long?'

'No,' said Mr Todhunter decisively, 'not long.'

So the scourge of the Malfrey area moved South into the apple-growing
country and the market gardens; and all over the park at Malfrey,
dispersed irregularly under the great elms, tents sprang up; and the
yeomanry officers set up their mess in the Grinling Gibbons saloon; and
Barbara had Colonel Sproggin and Major Cathcart to live in the house;
and Freddy made an agreeable sum of money out of the arrangement; and
Bill spent many blissful uxorious hours in the Malt House, Grantley
Green (he was quite satisfied with the explanation he was given about
the cellar door). And Basil returned to London.


[2]

He decided to pay one of his rare, and usually rather brief visits to
his mother. He found her busy and optimistic, serving on half a dozen
benevolent committees connected with comforts for the troops, seeing her
friends regularly. The defeat of Finland had shocked her, but she found
it a compensation that Russia was at last disclosed in the true light.
She welcomed Basil to the house, heard his news of Barbara and gave him
news of Tony. 'I want to have a little talk with you sometime,' she
said, after half an hour's gossip.

Basil, had he not been inured to his mother's euphemisms, might have
supposed that a little talk was precisely what she had just had; but he
knew what a little talk meant; it meant a discussion of his 'future'.

'Have you arranged anything for to-night?'

'No, mother, not yet.'

'Then we will dine in. Just the two of us.'

And that night after dinner she said, 'Basil, I never thought I should
have to say this to you. I've been pleased, of course, that you were
able to be of help to Barbara with her evacuees, but now that you have
returned to London, I must tell you that I do not think it is _man's_
work. At a time like this you ought to be _fighting_.'

'But mother as far as I know, no one's fighting much at the moment.'

'Don't quibble, dear, you know what I mean.'

'Well I went to see that colonel when you asked me to.'

'Yes. Sir Joseph explained that to me. They only want very young
officers in the Guards. But he says that there are a number of other
excellent regiments that offer a far better career. General Gordon was a
Sapper, and I believe quite a number of the generals in this war were
originally only gunners. I don't want you just lounging about London in
uniform like your friend Peter Pastmaster. He seems to spend his whole
time with girls. That goose Emma Granchester is seriously thinking of
him for Molly. So is Etty Flintshire and so is poor Mrs Van Atrobus for
_their_ daughters. I don't know what they're thinking of. I knew his
poor father. Margot led him a terrible dance. That was long before she
married Metroland of course--before he was called Metroland, in fact.
No,' said Lady Seal, abruptly checking herself in the flow of
reminiscence. 'I want to see you doing something _important_. Now Sir
Joseph has got me one of the forms you fill in to become an officer. It
is called the Supplementary Reserve. Before you go to bed I want you to
sign it. Then we'll see about getting it sent to the proper quarter. I'm
sure that everything will be much easier now that that disgraceful Mr
Belisha has been outed.'

'But you know, mother, I don't really fancy myself much as a subaltern.'

'No, dear,' said Lady Seal decisively, 'and if you had gone into the
army when you left Oxford you would be a major by now. Promotion is very
quick in war time because so many people get killed. I'm sure once
you're in, they'll find great use for you. But you must begin somewhere.
I remember Lord Kitchener told me that even he was once a subaltern.'

Thus it was that Basil found himself again in danger of being started on
a career. 'Don't worry,' said Peter. 'No one ever gets taken off the
Supplementary Reserve,' but Basil did worry. He had a rooted distrust of
official forms. He felt that at any moment a telegram might summon him
to present himself at some remote barracks, where he would spend the
war, like Alastair's Mr Smallwood, teaching field-craft to thirty
militiamen. It was not thus that he had welcomed the war as the
ne'er-do-well's opportunity. He fretted about it for three days and then
decided to pay a visit to the War Office.

He went there without any particular object in view, impelled by the
belief that somewhere in that large organization was a goose who would
lay eggs for him. In the first days of the war when he was seeking to
interest the authorities in the annexation of Liberia, he had more than
once sought an entrance. Perhaps, he felt now, he had pitched a little
too high. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a busy man. This
time he would advance humbly.

The maelstrom which in early September had eddied round the vestibule of
the building, seemed to have subsided very little. There was a
similar--perhaps, he reflected sadly, an identical--crowd of officers of
all ranks attempting to gain admission. Among them he saw a single
civilian figure whom he recognized from his visit to the Ministry of
Information.

'Hullo,' he said. 'Still hawking bombs?'

The little lunatic with the suitcase greeted him with great
friendliness. 'They won't pay any attention. It's a most unsatisfactory
office,' he said. 'They won't let me in. I was sent on here from the
Admiralty.'

'Have you tried the Air Ministry?'

'Why, bless you, it was them sent me to the Ministry of Information.
I've tried them all. I will say for the Ministry of Information they
were uncommon civil. Not at all like they are here. At the M. of I. they
were never too busy to see one. The only thing was, I felt I wasn't
getting anywhere.'

'Come along,' said Basil. 'We'll get in.'

Veterans of the Ashanti and the Zulu campaigns guarded the entrance.
Basil watched them stop a full general. 'If you'll fill in a form, sir,
please, one of the boys will take you up to the department.' They were a
match for anyone in uniform but Basil and the bagman were a more
uncertain quantity; a full general was just a full general, but a
civilian might be anyone.

'Your passes, gentlemen, please.'

'That's all right, sergeant,' said Basil. 'I'll vouch for this man.'

'Yes sir, but who are you, sir?'

'You ought to know by this time. M.I.13. We don't carry passes or give
our names in my department.'

'Very good, sir; beg pardon, sir. D'you know the way or shall I send a
boy up with you.'

'Of course I know my way,' said Basil sharply, 'and you might take a
look at this man. He won't give his name or show a pass, but I expect
you'll see him here often.'

'Very good, sir.'

The two civilians passed through the seething military into the calm of
the corridors beyond.

'I'm sure I'm very obliged,' said the man with the suitcase; 'where
shall I go now?'

'The whole place lies open to you,' said Basil. 'Take your time. Go
where you like. I think if I were you I should start with the Chaplain
General.'

'Where's he?'

'Up there,' said Basil vaguely. 'Up there and straight on.'

The little man thanked him gravely, trotted off down the corridor with
the irregular, ill co-ordinated steps of the insane, and was lost to
view up the bend in the staircase. Not wishing to compromise himself
further by his act of charity, Basil took the opposing turning. A fine
vista lay before him of twenty or more closed doors any one of which
might open upon prosperity and adventure. He strolled down the passage
in a leisurely but purposeful manner; thus, he thought, an important
agent might go to keep an appointment; thus, in fact, Soapy Sponge might
have walked in the gallery of Jawleyford Court.

It was a vista full of potentiality but lacking, at the moment, in
ornament--a vista of linoleum and sombre dado; the light came solely
from the far end, so that a figure approaching appeared in silhouette,
and in somewhat indistinct silhouette; a figure now approached and it
was not until she was within a few yards of Basil that he realized that
here was the enrichment which the austere architectural scheme demanded:
a girl dressed in uniform with a lance-corporal's stripe on her
arm--with a face of transparent, ethereal silliness which struck deep
into Basil's heart. The classical image might have been sober fact so
swift and silent and piercing was the dart of pleasure. He turned in his
tracks and followed the lance-corporal down the lane of linoleum which
seemed, momentarily, as buoyant as the carpet of a cinema or theatre.

The lance-corporal led him a long way; she stopped from time to time to
exchange greetings with passers-by, showing to all ranks from full
general to second-class scout the same cheerful affection; she was
clearly a popular girl in these parts. At length she turned into a door
marked ADDIS; Basil followed her in. There was another
lance-corporal--male--in the room.

This lance-corporal sat behind a typewriter; he had a white, pimply
face, large spectacles and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He
did not look up. The female lance-corporal smiled and said, 'So now you
know where I live. Drop in any time you're passing.'

'What is ADDIS?' asked Basil.

'It's Colonel Plum.'

'What's Colonel Plum?'

'He's a perfect lamb. Go and take a peer at him if you like. He's in
there.' She nodded towards a glass door marked KEEP OUT.

'Assistant Deputy Director Internal Security,' said the male
lance-corporal without looking up from his typing.

'I think I'd like to come and work in this office,' said Basil.

'Yes, everyone says that. It was the same when I was in pensions.'

'I might take _his_ job.'

'You're welcome,' said the male lance-corporal sourly. 'Suspects,
suspects, suspects all day long, all with foreign names, none of them
ever shot.'

A loud voice from behind the glass door broke into the conversation.
'Susie, you slut, come here.'

'That's him, the angel. Just take a peer while the door's open. He's got
the sweetest little moustache.'

Basil peered round the corner and caught a glimpse of a lean, military
face and, as Susie had said, the sweetest little moustache. The colonel
caught a glimpse of Basil.

'Who the devil's that?'

'I don't know,' said Susie lightly. 'He just followed me in.'

'Come here you,' said the Colonel. 'Who are you and what d'you want in
my office?'

'Well,' said Basil, 'what the lance-corporal says is strictly true. I
just followed her in. But since I'm here I can give you some valuable
information.'

'If you can you're unique in this outfit. What is it?'

Until now the word 'Colonel' for Basil had connoted an elderly
rock-gardener on Barbara's G.P.O. list. This formidable man of his own
age was another kettle of fish. Here was a second Todhunter. What could
he possibly tell him which would pass for valuable information?

'Can I speak freely before the lance-corporal?' he asked, playing for
time.

'Yes, of course. She doesn't understand a word of any language.'

Inspiration came. 'There's a lunatic loose in the War Office,' Basil
said.

'Of course there is. There are some hundreds of them. Is that all you
came to tell me?'

'He's got a suitcase full of bombs.'

'Well I hope he finds his way to the Intelligence Branch. I don't
suppose you know his name? No, well make out a card for him, Susie, with
a serial number and index him under suspects. If his bombs go off we
shall know where he is; if they don't it doesn't matter. These fellows
usually do more harm to themselves than to anyone else. Run along,
Susie, and shut the door. I want to talk to Mr Seal.'

Basil was shaken. When the door shut he said, 'Have we met before?'

'You bet we have. Djibouti 1936, St Jean de Luz 1937, Prague 1938. You
wouldn't remember me. I wasn't dressed up like this then.'

'Were you a journalist?'

Vaguely at the back of Basil's mind was the recollection of an
unobtrusive, discreet face among a hundred unobtrusive, discreet faces,
that had passed in and out of his ken from time to time. During the past
ten years he had usually managed to find himself, on one pretext or
another, on the outer fringe of contemporary history; in that half-world
there were numerous slightly sinister figures whose orbits crossed and
recrossed, ubiquitous men and women camp-followers of diplomacy and the
Press; among those shades he dimly remembered seeing Colonel Plum.

'Sometimes. We got drunk together once at the Bar Basque, the night you
fought the United Press correspondent.'

'As far as I remember he won.'

'You bet he did. I took you back to your hotel. What are you doing now
besides making passes at Susie?'

'I thought of doing counter-espionage.'

'Yes,' said Colonel Plum. 'Most people who come here seem to have
thought of that. Hallo--' he added as a dull detonation shook the room
slightly, 'that sounds as if your man has had a success with his bombs.
That was a straight tip, anyway. I daresay you'd be no worse in the job
than anyone else.'

Here it was at last, the scene that Basil had so often rehearsed, the
scene, very slightly adapted by a later hand, in order to bring it up to
date, from the adventure stories of his youth. Here was the lean,
masterful man who had followed Basil's career saying, 'One day his
country will have a use for him...'

'What are your contacts?'

What were his contacts? Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Angela Lyne,
Margot Metroland, Peter Pastmaster, Barbara, the bride of Grantley
Green, Mr Todhunter, Poppet Green--_Poppet Green_; there was his
chicken.

'I know some very dangerous communists,' said Basil.

'I wonder if they're on our files. We'll look in a minute. We aren't
doing much about communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of
them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of
course. I can't pay you much for communists.'

'As it happens,' said Basil with dignity, 'I came here to serve my
country. I don't particularly want money.'

'The devil you don't? What _do_ you want, then? You can't have Susie. I
had the hell of a fight to get her away from the old brute in charge of
pensions.'

'We can fight that out later. What I really want most at the moment is a
uniform.'

'Good God! Why?'

'My mother is threatening to make me a platoon commander.'

Colonel Plum accepted this somewhat surprising statement with apparent
understanding. 'Yes,' he said. 'There's a lot to be said for a uniform.
For one thing you'll have to call me "sir" and if there's any funny
stuff with the female staff I can take disciplinary action. For another
thing it's the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one
ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war. I think
I can fix that.'

'What'll my rank be?'

'Second-Lieutenant, Cross and Blackwell's regiment.'

'Cross and Blackwell?'

'General Service List.'

'I say, can't you do anything better than that?'

'Not for watching communists. Catch a fascist for me and I'll think
about making you a Captain of Marines.' At this moment the telephone
bell rang. 'Yes, ADDIS speaking... oh, yes, the bomb... yes, we
know all about that... the Chaplain General? I say that's bad...
oh, only the Deputy Assistant Chaplain General and you think he'll
recover. Well, what's all the fuss about?... Yes, we know all about
the man in this branch. We've had him indexed a long time. He's
nuts--yes, N for nuts, U for uncle, nuts, you've got it. No I don't want
to see him. Lock him up. There must be plenty of padded cells in this
building, I should imagine.'

****

News of the attempt to assassinate the Chaplain General reached the
religious department of the Ministry of Information late in the
afternoon, just when they were preparing to pack up for the day. It
threw them into a fever of activity.

'Really,' said Ambrose pettishly. 'You fellows get all the fun. I shall
be _most_ embarrassed when I have to explain this to the editor of
_Godless Sunday at Home_.'

****

Lady Seal was greatly shocked.

'Poor man,' she said, 'I understand that his eyebrows have completely
gone. It must have been Russians.'


[3]

For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call
through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six,
seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought. I should
have liked to show her my uniform.

****

Angela counted the rings, five, six, seven; then there was silence in
the flat; silence except for the radio which said, '...dastardly
attempt which has shocked the conscience of the civilized world.
Messages of sympathy continue to pour into the Chaplain General's office
from the religious leaders of four continents...'

She switched over to Germany where a rasping, contemptuous voice spoke
of 'Churchill's attempt to make a second _Athenia_ by bombing the
military bishop'.

She switched on to France where a man of letters gave his impressions of
a visit to the Maginot Line. Angela filled her glass from the bottle at
her elbow. Her distrust of France was becoming an obsession with her
now. It kept her awake at night and haunted her dreams by day; long,
tedious dreams born of barbituric, dreams which had no element of
fantasy or surprise, utterly real, drab dreams which, like waking life,
held no promise of delight. She often spoke aloud to herself nowadays,
living, as she did, so much alone; it was thus that lonely old women
spoke, passing in the street with bags of rubbish in their hands,
squatting, telling their rubbish. Angela was like an old woman squatting
in a doorway picking over her day's gleaning of rubbish, talking to
herself while she sorted the scraps of garbage. She had seen and heard
old women like that, often, at the end of the day, in the side streets
near the theatres.

Now she said to herself as loudly as though to someone sitting opposite
on the white Empire day-bed, 'Maginot Line--Angela Lyne--both lines of
least resistance' and laughed at her joke until the tears came and
suddenly she found herself weeping in earnest.

Then she took a pull at herself. This wouldn't do at all. She had better
go out to the cinema.

****

Peter Pastmaster was taking a girl out that evening. He looked very
elegant and old-fashioned in his blue patrol jacket and tight overall
trousers. He and the girl dined at a new restaurant in Jermyn Street.

She was Lady Mary Meadowes, Lord Granchester's second daughter. In his
quest for a wife Peter had narrowed the field to three--Molly Meadowes;
Sarah, Lord Flintshire's daughter; and Betty, daughter of the Duchess of
Stayle. Since he was marrying for old-fashioned dynastic reasons he
proposed to make an old-fashioned, dynastic choice from among the
survivors of Whig oligarchy. He really could see very little difference
between the three girls; in fact he sometimes caused offence by
addressing them absentmindedly by the wrong names. None of them carried
a pound of superfluous flesh; they all had an enthusiasm for the works
of Mr Ernest Hemingway; all had pet dogs of rather similar
peculiarities. They had all found that the way to keep Peter amused was
to get him to brag about his past iniquities.

During dinner he told Molly about the time when Basil Seal had stood for
Parliament and he and Sonia and Alastair had done him dirt in his
constituency. She laughed dutifully at the incident of Sonia throwing a
potato at the mayor.

'Some of the papers got it wrong and said it was a bun,' he explained.

'What a lovely time you all seem to have had,' said Lady Mary wistfully.

'All past and done with,' said Peter primly.

'Is it? I _do_ hope not.'

Peter looked at her with a new interest. Sarah and Betty had taken this
tale as though it were one of highwaymen; something infinitely
old-fashioned and picturesque.

Afterwards they walked to the cinema next door.

The vestibule was in darkness except for a faint blue light in the
box-office. Out of the darkness the voice of the commissionaire
announced 'No three and sixes. Plenty of room in the five and nines.
Five and nines this way. Don't block up the gangway please.'

There was some kind of disturbance going on at the guichet. A woman was
peering stupidly at the blue light and saying, 'I don't want five and
nines. I want one three and sixpenny.'

'No three and sixes. Only five and nines.'

'But you don't understand. It isn't the price. The five and nines are
too far away. I want to be _near_, in the three and sixpennies.'

'No three and sixes. Five and nines,' said the girl in the blue light.

'Come on, lady, make up your mind,' said a soldier, waiting.

'She's got a look of Mrs Cedric Lyne,' said Molly.

'Why,' said Peter, 'it _is_ Angela. What on earth's the matter with
her?'

She had now bought her ticket and moved away from the window, trying to
read what was on it in the half light and saying peevishly, 'I _told_
them it was too far away. I can't see if I'm far away. I _said_ three
and sixpence.'

She held the ticket close up to her eyes, trying to read it; she did not
notice the step, stumbled and sat down. Peter hurried forward.

'Angela, are you all right? Have you hurt yourself?'

'Perfectly all right,' said Angela, sitting quietly in the twilight.
'Not hurt at all thank you.'

'Well for God's sake get up.'

Angela squinnied up at him from the step.

'_Peter_,' she said, 'I didn't recognize you. Too far away to recognize
anyone in the five and ninepennies. _How_ are you?'

'Angela, do get up.'

He held out his hand to help her up. She shook it cordially. 'How's
Margot?' she said affably. 'Haven't seen her lately. I've been so busy.
Well, that's not quite true. As a matter of fact I've not been
altogether well.'

A crowd was beginning to assemble in the twilight. From the darkness
beyond the voice of the commissionaire, policemanlike, saying, 'What's
going on here?'

'Pick her up, you coot,' said Molly Meadowes.

Peter got behind Angela, put his arms round her and picked her up. She
was not heavy.

'Ups-a-daisy,' said Angela, making to sit down again.

Peter held her firm; he was glad of the darkness; this was no position
for an officer of the Household Cavalry in uniform.

'A lady has fainted,' said Molly in a clear, authoritative voice.
'Please don't crowd round her,' and to the commissionaire, 'Call a cab.'

Angela was silent in the taxi.

'I say,' said Peter, 'I can't apologize enough for letting you in for
this.'

'My dear man,' said Molly, 'don't be ridiculous. I'm thoroughly enjoying
it.'

'I can't think what's the matter with her,' he said.

'Can't you?'

When they reached Grosvenor Square, Angela got out of the taxi and
looked about her, puzzled. 'I thought we were going to the cinema,' she
said. 'Wasn't it good?'

'It was full.'

'I remember,' said Angela, nodding vigorously. 'Five and nines.' Then
she sat down again on the pavement.

'Look here,' said Peter to Lady Mary Meadowes. 'You take the taxi back
to the cinema. Leave my ticket at the box-office. I'll join you in half
an hour. I think I'd better see Angela home and get hold of a doctor.'

'Bumbles,' said Molly. 'I'm coming up too.'

Outside her door Angela suddenly rallied, found her key, opened the flat
and walked steadily in. Grainger was still up.

'You need not have stayed in,' said Angela. 'I told you I shouldn't want
you.'

'I was worried. You shouldn't have gone out like that,' and then seeing
Peter, 'Oh, good evening, my lord.'

Angela turned and saw Peter, as though for the first time. 'Hullo,
Peter,' she said. 'Come in.' She fixed Molly with eyes that seemed to
focus with difficulty. 'You know,' she said, 'I'm sure I know you quite
well, but I can't remember your name.'

'Molly Meadowes,' said Peter. 'We just came to see you home. We must be
going along now. Grainger, Mrs Lyne isn't at all well. I think you ought
to get her doctor.'

'Molly Meadowes. My dear, I used to stay at Granchester when you were in
the nursery. How old that sounds. You're very pretty, Molly, and you're
wearing a lovely dress. Come in, both of you.'

Peter frowned at Molly, but she went into the flat.

'Help yourself to something to drink, Peter,' said Angela. She sat down
in her armchair by the radio. 'My dear,' she said to Molly, 'I don't
think you've seen my flat. I had it done up by David Lennox just before
the war. David Lennox. People say unkind things about David Lennox...
well, you can't blame them...' her mind was becoming confused again.
She made a resolute attempt to regain control of herself. 'That's a
portrait of me by John. Ten years ago; nearly done when I was married.
Those are my books... my dear, I'm afraid I'm rather distraite this
evening. You must forgive me,' and, so saying, she fell into a heavy
sleep.

Peter looked about him helplessly. Molly said to Grainger, 'Had we
better get her to bed?'

'When she wakes up. I shall be here. I can manage.'

'Sure?'

'Quite sure.'

'Well then, Peter, we'd better get back to our film.'

'Yes,' said Peter. 'I'm awfully sorry for bringing you here.'

'I wouldn't have missed it for anything,' said Molly.

Peter was still puzzled by the whole business.

'Grainger,' he said. 'Had Mrs Lyne been out this evening? To a party or
anything?'

'Oh, no, my lord. She's been in all day.'

'Alone?'

'Quite alone, my lord.'

'Extraordinary thing. Well come on, Molly. Good night, Grainger. Take
care of Mrs Lyne. I think she ought to see a doctor.'

'I'll take care of her,' said Grainger.

They went down in the lift together, in silence, each full of thought.
When they reached the hall Peter said, 'Well, that was rum.'

'Very rum.'

'You know,' said Peter, 'if it had been anyone else but Angela, I should
have thought she was tight.'

'Darling, she was plastered.'

'Are you sure?'

'My dear, stinko paralytico.'

'Well, I don't know what to think. It certainly looked like it. But
_Angela_... besides her maid said she hadn't been out all the
evening. I mean to say people don't get tight alone.'

Suddenly Molly put her arms round Peter's neck and kissed him warmly.
'Bless you,' she said. 'Now we'll go to that cinema.'

****

It was the first time anyone had ever kissed Peter like that. He was so
surprised that in the taxi he made no attempt to follow it up; so
surprised that he thought about nothing else all through the film. 'God
Save the King' brought him back to reality with a jolt. He was still
pensive while he led Molly to supper. It was hysteria, he decided; the
girl was naturally upset at the scene they had been through. She's
probably frightfully embarrassed about it now; best not to refer to it.

But Molly was not prepared to let the matter drop.

'Oysters,' she said. 'Only a dozen. Nothing else,' and then, though the
waiter was still beside her, 'Were you surprised when I kissed you just
now.'

'No,' said Peter hastily, 'certainly not. Not at all.'

'Not at all? You mean to say you _expected_ me to?'

'No, no. Of course not. You know what I mean.'

'I certainly don't. I think it's very conceited of you not to be
surprised. Do you always have this effect on girls, or is it just the
uniform?'

'Molly, don't be a beast. If you must know, I _was_ surprised.'

'And shocked?'

'No, just surprised.'

'Yes,' said Molly, seeing it was not kind to tease him any more. 'I was
surprised, too. I've been wondering about it in the cinema.'

'So have I,' said Peter.

'_That's_ how I like you,' said Molly, as though she were a photographer
catching a happy expression. She saw the likeness herself and added,
'Hold it.'

'Really, Molly, I don't understand you a bit to-night.'

'Oh but you must, really you must Peter. I'm sure you were a fascinating
little boy.'

'Come to think of it, I believe I was.'

'You mustn't ever try playing the old rip again, Peter. Not with me, at
any rate. Now don't pretend you don't understand that. I like you
puzzled, Peter, but not _absolutely cretinous_. You know, I nearly
despaired of you to-night. You would go on bucking about what a gay dog
you'd been. I thought I could never go through with it.'

'Through with what?'

'Marrying you. Mother's terribly keen I should though I can't think why.
I should have thought from her point of view you were about the end. But
no, nothing else would do but that I must marry you. So I've tried to be
good and I've let you bound away about the good old days till I thought
I should have to pour something on your head. Thought I couldn't bear it
any more and I'd decided to tell mother it was off. Then we met Mrs Lyne
and everything was all right.'

'It seemed awfully awkward to me.'

'Of course it did. You looked like a little boy at his private school
when his father has come to the sports in the wrong kind of hat. An
adorable little boy.'

'Well,' said Peter, 'I suppose as long as you're satisfied...'

'Yes, I think "satisfied" is the word. You'll do. And Sarah and Betty'll
be as sick as cats.'

****

'How did you decide?' asked Margot, when Peter told her of his
engagement.

'Well, as a matter of fact, I don't think I did. Molly decided.'

'Yes, that's usually the way. Now I suppose I shall have to do something
friendly about that ass Emma Granchester.'

****

'I really know Lady Metroland very little,' said Lady Granchester. 'But,
I suppose now I must invite her to luncheon. I'm afraid she's far too
smart for us.' And by 'smart' Lady Granchester meant nothing at all
complimentary.

But the mothers met and decided on an immediate marriage.


[4]

The news of Peter's engagement was not unexpected and, even had it come
as a surprise, would have been eclipsed in interest by the story of
Angela Lyne's uncharacteristic behaviour at the cinema. Peter and Molly,
before parting that night, had resolved to tell no one of the incident;
a renunciation from which each made certain implicit reservations. Peter
told Margot because he thought she ought to do something about it, Basil
because he was still dubious about the true explanation of the mystery
and thought that Basil, if anyone could, would throw light on it, and
three members of Bratt's because he happened to run into them at the bar
next morning when his mind was still full of the matter. Molly told her
two sisters and Lady Sarah from long habit, because whenever she
promised secrecy in any matter she meant, even at the time, to tell
these three. These initiates in their turn told their cronies until it
was widely known that the temperate, cynical, aloof, impeccably dressed,
sharply dignified Mrs Lyne; Mrs Lyne who never 'went out' in a general
sense but lived in a rarefied and enviable coterie; Mrs Lyne whose
conversation was that of a highly intelligent man, who always cleverly
kept out of the gossip columns and picture papers, who for fifteen years
had set a high and wholly individual standard of all that Americans
meant by 'poise'; this almost proverbial lady had been picked up by
Peter in the gutter where she had been thrown struggling by two bouncers
from the cinema where she had created a drunken disturbance.

It could scarcely have been more surprising had it been Mrs Stitch
herself. It was indeed barely credible and many refused to believe it.
Drugs possibly, they conceded, but Drink was out of the question. What
Parsnip and Pimpernell were to the intelligentsia, Mrs Lyne and the
bottle became to the fashionable world; topic number one.

It was still topic number one three weeks later at Peter's wedding.
Basil persuaded Angela to come to the little party with which Lady
Granchester honoured the occasion.

He had gone round to see her when Peter told him the news; not
immediately but within twenty-four hours of hearing it. He found her up
and dressed, but indefinably raffish in appearance; her make-up was
haphazard and rather garish, like a later Utrillo.

'Angela you look awful.'

'Yes, darling, I feel awful. You're in the army?'

'No, the War Office.'

She began talking intensely and rather wildly about the French.
Presently she said, 'I must leave you for a minute', and went into her
bedroom. She came back half a minute later with an abstracted little
smile; the inwardly happy smile of a tired old nun--almost. There was a
difference.

'Angela,' said Basil, 'if you want a drink you might drink fair with a
chap.'

'I don't know what you mean,' she said.

Basil was shocked. There had never been any humbug about Angela before,
none where he was concerned anyway.

'Oh, come off it,' he said.

Angela came off it. She began to weep.

'Oh, for Christ's sake,' said Basil.

He went into her bedroom and helped himself to whisky from the bottle by
the bed.

'Peter was here the other evening with some girl. I suppose they've told
everyone.'

'He told _me_. Why don't you switch to rum? It's much better for you.'

'Is it? I don't think I've ever tasted it. Should I like it?'

'I'll send you some round. When did you start on this bat?'

There was no humbug about Angela now. 'Oh, weeks ago.'

'It's not a bit like you.'

'Isn't it, Basil? Isn't it?'

'You were always bloody to me when I had a bat.'

'Yes, I suppose I was. I'm sorry. But then you see I was in love with
you.'

'Was?'

'Oh, I don't know. Fill up the glasses, Basil.'

'That's the girl.'

'"Was" is wrong. I do love you, Basil.'

'Of course you do. Is that how you take it?' he asked, respectfully.

'That's how I take it.'

'Good and strong.'

'Good and strong.'

'But I think we'd be better suited to rum.'

'Doesn't it smell rather?'

'I don't see it matters.'

'Don't want to smell.'

'Whisky smells.'

'Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. It's nice drinking with you, Basil.'

'Of course it's nice. I think it's pretty mean of you to drink without
me as you've been doing.'

'I'm not mean.'

'You usen't to be. But you have been lately, haven't you? Drinking by
yourself.'

'Yes, that was mean.'

'Now listen, next time you want to go on a bat, let me know. Just ring
me up and I'll come round. Then we can drink together.'

'But I want to so often, Basil.'

'Well, I'll come round often. Promise me.'

'I promise.'

'That's the girl.'

The rum was a failure, but in general the new arrangement worked well.
Angela drank a good deal less and Basil a good deal more than they had
done for the last few weeks and both were happier as a result.

****

Margot tackled Basil on the matter. 'What's the matter with her?' she
asked.

'She doesn't like the war.'

'Well no one does.'

'Don't they? I can't think why not. Anyway why shouldn't the girl have a
drink?'

'You don't think we ought to get her into a home?'

'Good God no.'

'But she sees nobody.'

'She sees me.'

'Yes, but...'

'Honestly, Margot, Angela's fine. A little break like this is what she's
been needing all these years. I'll make her come to the wedding if you
like and you can see for yourself.'

So Angela came to the wedding. She and Basil did not make the church but
they came to the little party at Lady Granchester's house afterwards,
and stole the scene. Molly had had her moment of prominence; she had had
her double line of troopers and her arch of cavalry sabres; she had had
her veil of old lace. In spite of the war it was a pretty wedding. But
at her mother's house all eyes were on Mrs Lyne. Even Lady Anchorage and
the Duchess of Stayle could not dissemble their interest.

'My dear, _there she is_.'

There she was, incomparably dressed, standing by Basil, talking gravely
to Sonia; she wore dark glasses; otherwise there was nothing unusual
about her. A footman brought a tray of champagne. 'Is there such a thing
as a cup of tea?' she said, 'without cream or sugar.'

Molly and Peter stood at one end of the long drawing-room, Angela at the
other. As the guests filed past the bride and bridegroom and came into
the straight, you could see them come to the alert at the sight of
Angela and draw one another's attention to her. Her own coterie formed
round her and she talked like a highly intelligent man. When the last of
the guests had shaken hands with them--they were comparatively
few--Molly and Peter joined the group at the far end.

'Molly, you are the prettiest girl I've ever seen,' said Angela. 'I'm
afraid I was a bore the other night.'

A silly girl would have been embarrassed and said, 'No, not at all.'
Molly said, 'Not a _bore_. You were rather odd.'

'Yes,' said Angela. '"Odd" is the word. I'm not always like that, you
know.'

'May Peter and I come and see you again? He's only got a week, you know,
and then we shall be in London.'

****

'That's an unusually good girl Peter's picked for himself,' said Angela
to Basil when they were alone after the party at her flat. 'You ought to
marry someone like that.'

'I could never marry anyone, except, I suppose, you.'

'No, I don't believe you could, Basil.'

When their glasses were filled she said, 'I seem to be getting to the
age when I enjoy weddings. I liked that girl this afternoon. D'you know
who was here this morning? Cedric.'

'How very odd.'

'It was rather touching really. He came to say good-bye. He's off
to-morrow. He couldn't say where, but I guess it's Norway. I never
thought of him as a soldier, somehow, but he used to be one till he
married me--a very bad one I believe. Poor Cedric, he's had a raw deal.'

'He's not done so badly. He's enjoyed himself messing about with
grottoes. And he's had Nigel.'

'He brought Nigel this morning. They gave him a day away from school to
say good-bye. You never knew Cedric when I married him. He was most
romantic--genuinely. I'd never met anyone like him. Father's friends
were all hard-boiled and rich--men like Metroland and Copper. They were
the only people I ever saw. And then I met Cedric who was poor and very,
very soft-boiled and tall and willowy and very unhappy in a boring smart
regiment because he only cared about Russian ballet and baroque
architecture. He had the most charming manner and he was always laughing
up his sleeve about people like my father and his officers in the
regiment. Poor Cedric, it used to be such fun finding things to give
him. I bought him an octopus once and we had a case made for its tank,
carved with dolphins and covered with silver leaf.'

'It wouldn't have lasted, even if I hadn't come along.'

'No, it wouldn't have lasted. I'm afraid the visit this morning was
rather a disappointment to him. He'd planned it all in an attitude of
high tragedy, and, my dear, I had such a hangover I had to keep my eyes
shut nearly all the time he was here. He's worried about what will
happen to the house if he gets killed.'

'Why should he get killed?'

'Why, indeed? Except that he was always such a bad soldier. You know,
when the war started I quite made up my mind you were for it.'

'So did my mother. But I'm taking care of that. Which reminds me I ought
to go and see Colonel Plum, again. He'll be getting restive. I'll go
along now.'

'Will he be there?'

'He never leaves. A very conscientious officer.'

****

Susie was there, too, waiting till the Colonel was free to take her out
to dinner. At the sight of the office, some of Basil's elation began to
fade away. Basil's job at the War Office looked like going the way of
all the others; once secured, it had few attractions for him. Susie was
proving a disappointment; in spite of continued remonstrance, she still
seemed to prefer Colonel Plum.

'Good evening, handsome,' she said. 'Plummy has been asking for you.'

Basil went through the door marked KEEP OUT.

'Good evening, Colonel.'

'You can call me "sir".'

'None of the best regiments call their commanding officers "sir".'

'You're not in one of the best regiments. You're General Service. What
have you been doing all day?'

'You don't think it will improve the tone of the department if I called
you "Colonel", sir?'

'I do not. Where have you been and what have you been doing?'

'You think I've been drinking, don't you?'

'I bloody well know you have.'

'But you don't know the reason. You wouldn't understand if I told you.
I've been drinking out of chivalry. That doesn't make any sense to you,
does it?'

'No.'

'I thought it wouldn't. Coarse grained, sir. If they put on my grave,
"He drank out of chivalry", it would simply be the sober truth. But you
wouldn't understand. What's more you think I've been idle, don't you?'

'I do.'

'Well, sir, that's where you're wrong. I have been following up a very
interesting trail. I hope to have some valuable information very soon.'

'What have you got up to date?'

'You wouldn't sooner wait until I can give you the whole case cut and
dried?'

'No.'

'Well, I'm on to a very dangerous woman who calls herself Green. Among
her intimates she's known as 'Poppet'. She pretends to be a painter, but
you have only to look at her work to realize it is a cloak for other
activities. Her studio is the meeting place for a communist cell. She
has an agent in the United States named Parsnip; he has the alias of
Pimpernell; he puts it about that he is a poet, two poets in fact, but
there again, the work betrays him. Would you like me to quote some
Parsnip to you?'

'No.'

'I have reason to believe that Green is the head of an underground
organization by which young men of military age are smuggled out of the
country. Those are the lines I have been working on. What d'you think of
them?'

'Rotten.'

'I was afraid you might say that. It's your own fault. Give me time and
I would have had a better story.'

'Now you can do some work. Here's a list of thirty-three addresses of
suspected fascists. Check them up.'

'Now?'

'Now.'

'Shan't I keep track of the woman Green?'

'Not in office hours.'

'I can't think what you see in your Plum,' said Basil when he regained
the outer office. 'It must simply be snobbery.'

'It's not: it's love. The officer in the pensions office was a full
Colonel, so there.'

'I expect you'll be reduced to subalterns, yet. And by the way,
lance-corporal, you can call me "sir".'

Susie giggled. 'I believe you're drunk,' she said.

'Drunk with chivalry,' said Basil.

****

That evening Cedric Lyne left to rejoin his regiment. The forty-eight
hours embarkation leave were over and although he had chosen to start an
hour earlier rather than travel by the special train, it was only with
difficulty that he found a carriage free from brother officers who had
made the same choice. They were going to the North to embark at dawn
next day and sail straight into action.

The first-class carriage was quite full, four a side, and the racks
piled high with baggage. Black funnel-shaped shields cast the light on
to the passengers' laps; their faces in the surrounding darkness were
indistinguishable; a naval paymaster-commander slept peacefully in one
corner; two civilians strained their eyes over the evening papers; the
other four were soldiers. Cedric sat between two soldiers, stared at the
shadowy luggage above the civilians' heads, and ruminated, chewing the
last, bitter essence from the events of the last two days.

Because he was thirty-five years of age, and spoke French and was built
rather for grace than smartness, they had made Cedric battalion
intelligence officer. He kept the war diary, and on wet days was often
borrowed by the company commanders to lecture on map reading, security,
and the order of battle of a German infantry division. These were
Cedric's three lectures. When they were exhausted he was sent on a
gas-course and after that on a course of interpretation of air
photographs. On exercise he stuck pins in a map and kept a file of field
messages.

'There really isn't very much you can do until we get into action,' said
his commanding officer. 'You might ring up the photographers in
Aldershot about taking that regimental group.'

They put him in charge of the Officers' Mess and made his visits there
hideous with complaints.

'We're out of Kummel again, Cedric.'

'Surely there's some perfectly simple way of keeping the soup hot,
Lyne.'

'If officers _will_ take the papers to their quarters, the only answer
is to order more papers.'

'The Stilton has been allowed to go dry again.'

That had been his life; but Nigel did not know this. For Nigel, at eight
years of age, his father was a man-at-arms and a hero. When they were
given embarkation leave, Cedric telephoned to Nigel's headmaster and the
child met him at their station in the country. Pride in his father and
pleasure at an unforeseen holiday made their night at home an
enthralling experience for Nigel. The home was given over to empty wards
and an idle hospital staff. Cedric and his son stayed in the farm where,
before she left, Angela had fitted up a few rooms with furniture from
the house. Nigel was full of questions; why Cedric's buttons were
differently arranged from the fathers' and brothers' buttons of most of
the fellows; what was the difference between a Bren and a Vickers; how
much faster were our fighters than the Germans'; whether Hitler had
fits, as one fellow said, and, if so, did he froth at the mouth and roll
his eyes as the girl at the lodge had once done.

That evening, Cedric took a long farewell of his water garden. It was
for the water principally that he and Angela had chosen the place, ten
years ago, when they were first engaged. It rose in a clear and copious
spring in the hillside above the house and fell in a series of natural
cascades to join the considerable stream which flowed more solemnly
through the park. He and Angela had eaten a picnic lunch by this spring
and looked down on the symmetrical, rectangular building below.

'It'll do,' said Angela. 'I'll offer them fifteen thousand.'

It never embarrassed Cedric to be married to a rich woman. He had not
married for money in any gross sense, but he loved the rare and
beautiful things which money could buy, and Angela's great fortune made
her trebly rare and beautiful in his eyes.

It was surprising that they should have met at all. Cedric had been for
years in his regiment, kept there by his father who gave him an
allowance, which he could ill spare, on that condition alone. It was
that or an office for Cedric and despite the tedious company, there was
just enough pageantry about peace time soldiering to keep his
imagination engaged. Cedric was accomplished; he was a beautiful
horseman but hated the rigours of fox-hunting; he was a very fine shot,
and because that formed a single tenuous bond with his brother officers
and because it was agreeable to do anything pre-eminently well, he
accepted invitations to pheasant-shooting in houses where, when they
were not at the coverts, he felt lost and lonely. Angela's father had a
celebrated shoot in Norfolk; he had also, Cedric was told, a collection
of French impressionists. Thither that autumn ten years ago Cedric had
gone and had found the pictures too obvious and the birds too tame and
the party tedious beyond description, except for Angela, past her
debutante days, aloof now and living in a cool and mysterious solitude
of her own creation. She had resisted at first every attempt on the
defences she had built up against a noisy world and then, quite
suddenly, she had accepted Cedric as being like herself a stranger in
these parts, as being, unlike herself, full of understanding of another,
more splendid, attainable world outside. Angela's father thought Cedric
a poor fellow, settled vast sums on them, and let them go their own way.

And this was the way they had gone. Cedric stood by the spring,
enshrined, now, in a little temple. The architrave was covered with
stalactites, the dome was set with real shells and the clear water
bubbled out from the feet of a Triton. Cedric and Angela had bought this
temple on their honeymoon at a deserted villa in the hills behind
Naples.

Below in the hillside lay the cave which Cedric had bought the summer
that Angela had refused to come with him to Salzburg; the summer when
she met Basil. The lonely and humiliating years after that summer each
had its monument.

'Daddy, what are you waiting for?'

'I'm just looking at the grottoes.'

'But you've seen them thousands of times. They're always the same.'

Always the same; joys for ever; not like men and women with their loves
and hates.

'Daddy, there's an aeroplane. Is it a Hurricane?'

'No, Nigel, a Spitfire.'

'How d'you tell the difference?'

Then, on an impulse, he had said, 'Nigel, shall we go to London and see
mummy?'

'We might see "The Lion has Wings" too. The fellows say it's awfully
decent.'

'All right, Nigel, we'll see both.'

So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's
surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly
remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer--'My dear, it is _I_ who
am _surprised; you_ are _astounded_.'

'I am coming round to see Mrs Lyne.'

'She isn't very well this morning.'

'I'm sorry to hear that. Is she able to see people?'

'Yes, I think so, sir. I'll ask... yes, madam will be very pleased to
see you and Master Nigel.'

They had not met for three years, since they discussed the question of
divorce. Cedric understood exactly what Angela had felt about that; it
was curious, he reflected, how some people were shy of divorce because
of their love of society; they did not want there to be any occasion
when their presence might be an embarrassment, they wanted to keep their
tickets for the Ascot enclosure. With Angela reluctance came from
precisely the opposite motives; she could not brook any intrusion of her
privacy; she did not want to answer questions in court or allow the
daily paper a single item of information about herself. 'It's not as
though you wanted to marry anyone else, Cedric.'

'You don't think the present arrangement makes me look rather foolish?'

'Cedric, what's come over you? You used not to talk like that.'

So he had given way and that year had spanned the stream with a bridge
in the Chinese Taste, taken direct from Batty Langley.

In the five minutes of waiting before Grainger took him into Angela's
bedroom, he studied David Lennox's grisailles with distaste.

'Are they old, Daddy?'

'No, Nigel, they're not old.'

'They're awfully feeble.'

'They are.' Regency: this was the age of Waterloo and highwaymen and
duelling and slavery and revivalist preaching and Nelson having his arm
off with no anaesthetic but rum, and Botany Bay--and _this_ is what they
make of it.

'Well I prefer the pictures at home, even if they are old. Is that
mummy?'

'Yes.'

'Is that old?'

'Older than you, Nigel.'

Cedric turned from the portrait of Angela. What a nuisance John had been
about the sittings. It was her father who had insisted on their going to
him.

'Is it finished?'

'Yes. It was very hard to make the man finish it, though.'

'It hardly looks finished now, does it Daddy? It's all sploshy.'

Then Grainger opened the door. 'Come in, Cedric,' Angela called from her
bed.

Angela was wearing dark glasses. Her make-up things lay on the quilt
before her, with which she had been hastily doing her face. Nigel might
have asked if it was finished; it was sploshy, like the John portrait.

'I had no idea you were ill,' said Cedric stiffly.

'I'm not really. Nigel, haven't you got a kiss for mummy?'

'Why are you wearing those glasses?'

'My eyes are tired, darling.'

'Tired of what?'

'Cedric,' said Angela petulantly, 'for God's sake don't let him be a
bore. Go with Miss Grainger into the next room, darling.'

'Oh, all right,' said Nigel. 'Don't be long, Daddy.'

'You and he seem to be buddies these days.'

'Yes, it's the uniform.'

'Funny your being in the army again.'

'I'm off to-night, abroad.'

'France?'

'I don't think so. I mustn't tell about it. That's why I came to see
you.'

'About not talking about not going to France?' said Angela in something
of her old teasing way.

Cedric began to talk about the house; he hoped Angela would keep on to
it, even if anything happened to him; he thought he saw some glimmerings
of taste in the boy; he might grow to appreciate it later. Angela was
inattentive and answered absently.

'I'm afraid I'm tiring you.'

'Well, I'm not feeling terribly well to-day. Did you want to see me
about anything special?'

'No, I don't think so. Just to say good-bye.'

'Daddy,' came a voice from the next room. 'Aren't you coming?'

'Oh dear, I wish I could do something about it. I feel there's something
I ought to do. It's quite an occasion really, isn't it? I'm not being
beastly, Cedric, I really mean it. I think it's sweet of you to come. I
only wish I felt up to doing something about it.'

'Daddy, come on. We want to get to Bassett-Lowkes before lunch.'

'Take care of yourself,' said Angela.

'Why?'

'Oh, I don't know. Why will you all ask questions?'

And that had been the end of the visit. At Bassett-Lowkes, Nigel had
chosen a model of a Blenheim bomber. 'The fellows _will_ be jealous,' he
said.

After luncheon they went to see 'The Lion has Wings', and then it was
time to put Nigel into the train back to school. 'It's been absolutely
ripping, Daddy,' he said.

'Has it really?'

'The rippingest two days I ever spent.'

So after these ripping days Cedric sat in the half-dark, with the pool
of light falling on the unread book on his knees, returning to duty.

****

Basil went to the Caf Royal to keep his watch on 'the woman Green'. He
found her sitting among her cronies and was greeted with tepid
affection.

'So you're in the army, now,' she said.

'No, the great uniformed bureaucracy. How are all the Reds?'

'Very well thank you, watching your imperialists making a mess of your
war.'

'Been to many communist meetings lately?'

'Why?'

'Just wondering.'

'You sound like a police spy.'

'That's the very last impression I want to make,' and, changing the
subject hastily, added 'Seen Ambrose lately?'

'He's over there now, the lousy fascist.'

Basil looked where she indicated and saw Ambrose at a table by the rail
of the opposing gallery, sitting with a little, middle-aged man of
nondescript appearance.

'Did you say "fascist"?'

'Didn't you know? He's gone to the Ministry of Information and he's
bringing out a fascist paper next month.'

'This is very interesting,' said Basil. 'Tell me some more.'

****

Ambrose sat, upright and poised, with one hand on the stem of his glass
and one resting stylishly on the balustrade. There was no particular
feature of his clothes which could be mentioned as conspicuous; he wore
a dark, smooth suit that fitted perhaps a little closely at waist and
wrists, a shirt of plain, cream coloured silk; a dark, white spotted bow
tie; his sleek black hair was not unduly long (he went to the same
barber as Alastair and Peter); his pale Semitic face gave no hint of
special care and yet it always embarrassed Mr Bentley somewhat to be
seen with him in public. Sitting there gesticulating very slightly as he
talked, wagging his head very slightly, raising his voice occasionally
in a suddenly stressed uncommon epithet or in a fragment of slang
absurdly embedded in his precise and literary diction, giggling between
words now and then as something which he had intended to say changed
shape and became unexpectedly comic in the telling--Ambrose like this
caused time to slip back to an earlier age than his own youth or Mr
Bentley's, when amid a more splendid dcor of red plush and gilt
caryatides _fin-de-sicle_ young worshippers crowded to the tables of
Oscar and Aubrey.

Mr Bentley smoothed his sparse grey hairs and fidgeted with his tie and
looked about anxiously for fear he was observed.

The Caf Royal, perhaps because of its distant associations with Oscar
and Aubrey, was one of the places where Ambrose preened himself, spread
his feathers and felt free to take wing. He had left his persecution
mania downstairs with his hat and umbrella. He defied the universe.

'The decline of England, my dear Geoffrey,' he said, 'dates from the day
we abandoned coal fuel. No, I'm not talking about distressed areas, but
about distressed _souls_, my dear. We used to live in a fog, the
splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood. The golden aura
of the Golden Age. Think of it, Geoffrey, there are children now coming
to manhood who never saw a London fog. We designed a city which was
meant to be seen in a fog. We had a foggy habit of life and a rich,
obscure, choking literature. The great catch in the throat of English
lyric poetry is just _fog_, my dear, on the vocal chords. And out of the
fog we could rule the world; we were a Voice, like the Voice of Sinai
smiling through the clouds. Primitive peoples always choose a God who
speaks from a cloud. _Then_ my dear Geoffrey,' said Ambrose, wagging an
accusing finger and fixing Mr Bentley with a black accusing eye, as
though the poor publisher were personally responsible for the whole
thing, '_Then_, some busybody invents electricity or oil fuel or
whatever it is they use nowadays. The fog lifts, the world sees us as we
are, and worse still we see ourselves as we are. It was a carnival ball,
my dear, which when the guests unmasked at midnight, was found to be
composed entirely of impostors. Such a _rumpus_, my dear.'

Ambrose drained his glass with a swagger, surveyed the caf haughtily
and saw Basil, who was making his way towards them.

'We are talking of fogs,' said Mr Bentley.

'They're eaten hollow with communism,' said Basil, introducing himself
in the part of _agent provocateur_. 'You can't stop a rot that's been
going on twenty years by imprisoning a handful of deputies. Half the
thinking men in France have begun looking to Germany as their real
ally.'

'_Please_ Basil, don't start politics. Anyway, we were talking of Fogs,
not Frogs.'

'Oh Fogs.' Basil attempted to tell of a foggy adventure of his own,
sailing a yawl round Bear Island, but Ambrose was elated to-night and in
no mood for these loose leaves of Conrad drifting in the high wind of
his talk. 'We must return to the Present,' he said prophetically.

'Oh dear,' said Mr Bentley. 'Why?'

'Everyone is either looking back or forward. Those with reverence and
good taste, like you my dear Geoffrey, look back to an Augustan age;
those with generous hearts and healthy lives and the taste of the devil,
like Poppet Green over there, look forward to a Marxian Jerusalem. _We_
must accept the Present.'

'You would say, wouldn't you,' said Basil, persevering, 'that Hitler was
a figure of the present?'

'I regard him as a page for _Punch_,' said Ambrose. 'To the Chinese
scholar the military hero was the lowest of human types, the subject for
ribaldry. We must return to Chinese scholarship.'

'It's a terribly difficult language, I believe,' said Mr Bentley.

'I knew a Chink in Valparaiso...' began Basil; but Ambrose was now in
full gallop.

'European scholarship has never lost its monastic character,' he said.
'Chinese scholarship deals with taste and wisdom, not with the
memorizing of facts. In China the man whom we make a don sat for the
Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were
lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single
concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. European culture
has become conventual; we must make it hermetic.'

'I knew a hermit in the Ogaden desert once...'

'Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms.
The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed,
occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves
and floated down-stream.'

'I read a lot of Chinese poetry once,' said Mr Bentley, 'in the
translation, of course. I became fascinated by it. I would read of a
sage who, as you say, lived frugally and idyllically. He had a cottage
and a garden and a view. Each flower had its proper mood and phase of
the climate; he would smell the jasmine after recovering from the
toothache and the lotus when drinking tea with a monk. There was a
little clearing where the full moon cast no shadow, where his concubine
would sit and sing to him when he got drunk. Every aspect of this little
garden corresponded to some personal mood of the most tender and refined
sort. It was quite intoxicating to read.'

'It is.'

'This sage had no tame dog, but he had a cat and a mother. Every morning
he greeted his mother on his knees and every evening, in winter, he put
charcoal under her mattress and himself drew the bed-curtains. It
sounded the most exquisite existence.'

'It was.'

'And then,' said Mr Bentley, 'I found a copy of the _Daily Mirror_ in a
railway carriage and I read an article there by Godfrey Winn about his
cottage and his flowers and his moods, and for the life of me, Ambrose,
I couldn't see the difference between that young gentleman and Yuan
Ts'etsung.'

It was cruel of Mr Bentley to say this, but it may be argued for him
that he had listened to Ambrose for three hours and now that Basil had
joined their table he wanted to go home to bed.

The interruption deflated Ambrose and allowed Basil to say, 'These
scholars of yours, Ambrose--they didn't care if their empire was
invaded?'

'Not a hoot, my dear, not a _tinker's_ hoot.'

'And you're starting a paper to encourage this sort of scholarship.'

Basil sat back and ordered a drink, as an advocate in a film will relax,
saying in triumph, 'Mr District Attorney, _your_ witness.'

****

There were four hours of darkness to go when Cedric arrived at the port
of embarkation. There was a glimmer of light in some of the offices
along the quayside, but the quay itself and the ship were in complete
darkness; the top-hamper was just discernible as a darker mass against
the dark sky. An E.S.O. told Cedric to leave his gear on the quay. The
advanced working party were handling that. He left his valise and
carried his suitcase up the gangway; at the head an invisible figure
directed him to the first-class quarters forward. He found his C.O. in
the saloon.

'Hullo, Lyne. You're back already. Lucky. Billy Allgood broke his
collar-bone on leave and isn't coming with us. You'd better take charge
of the embarkation. There's a hell of a lot to do. Some blasted
Highlanders have come to the wrong ship and are all over our troop
decks. Had any dinner?'

'I got some oysters in London before starting.'

'Very wise. I tried to get something kept hot. Told them we should all
be coming on board hungry, but they're still working peace time routine
here. This is all I could raise.'

He pointed to a large, silvery tray where, disposed on a napkin, lay a
dozen lozenges of toast covered with sardines, slivers of cheese and
little glazed pieces of tongue. This was the tray that was always
brought to the first-class saloon at ten o'clock at night.

'Come back when you've found your cabin.'

Cedric found his cabin, perfectly in order, complete with three towels
of different sizes and the photograph of a mustachioed man putting on
his life-jacket in the correct manner. He left his suitcase and returned
to the C.O.

'Our men will be coming on board in an hour and a half. I don't know
what the devil these Highlanders are doing. Find out and clear them
off.'

'Very good, Colonel.'

Cedric plunged down again into the darkness and found the E.S.O. They
studied the embarkation orders with the aid of a dimmed torch. There was
no doubt about it; the Highlanders were in the wrong ship. This was the
_Duchess of Cumberland_; they should be in the _Duchess of Clarence_.
'But the _Clarence_ isn't here,' said the E.S.O. 'I daresay they were
told to go to the _Cumberland_ by someone.'

'By whom?'

'Not by me, old man,' said the E.S.O.

Cedric went on board and looked for the C.O. of the Highlanders and
found him at length in his cabin asleep in his battledress.

'These are my orders,' said the Highland Colonel, taking a sheaf of
typewritten sheets from the pocket on his thigh. They were already
tattered and smeared by constant reference. '_Duchess of Cumberland_.
Embark 2300 hrs. with full 1098 stores. That's plain enough.'

'But our men come on board in an hour.'

'Can't help you, I'm afraid. These are my orders.'

He was not going to discuss the matter with a subaltern. Cedric fetched
his C.O. Colonel to Colonel they talked the thing out and decided to
clear the after troop decks. Cedric was sent to wake the Highland duty
officer. He found the duty sergeant. Together they went aft to the troop
decks.

There were dim lights along the ceiling--electric bulbs recently daubed
with blue paint, not yet scratched clear by the troops. Equipment and
kit-bags lay about the deck in heaps; there were Bren gun boxes and
ammunition and the huge coffin-shaped chests of the anti-tank rifles.

'Oughtn't that to be stored in the armoury?' asked Cedric.

'Not unless you want to get it pinched.'

Amid the heaps of stores half a battalion lay huddled in blankets. Very
few of them, on this first night, had slung hammocks. These lay, with
the other gear, adding to the piles.

'We'll never get them moved to-night.'

'We've got to try,' said Cedric.

Very slowly the inert mass was got into movement. They began collecting
their own gear and swearing monotonously. Working parties began
man-handling the stores. They had to go up the ladders on to the main
deck, forward through the darkness and down the forward hatches.

Presently a voice from the top of the ladder said, 'Is Lyne down there?'

'Yes.'

'I've been told to bring my company to this troop deck.'

'They'll have to wait.'

'They're coming on board now.'

'Well for God's sake stop them.'

'But isn't this D deck?'

'Yes.'

'Then this is where we are to come to. Who the hell are all these men?'

Cedric went up the ladder and to the head of the gangway. A stream of
heavily-laden men of his regiment were toiling up. 'Go back,' ordered
Cedric.

'Who the hell's that?' asked a voice from the darkness.

'Lyne. Take your men back to the quay. They can't come on board yet.'

'Oh, but they've got to. D'you realize half of them've had nothing to
eat since midday?'

'There's nothing to eat here till breakfast.'

'Oh, but, I say, what rot. The R.T.O. at Euston said he'd telegraph
through and have a hot meal ready on arrival. Where's the Colonel?'

The line of soldiers on the gangway turned about and began a slow
descent. When the last of them was on the quay invisible in the
darkness, their officer came on board.

'You seem to have made a pretty good muck-up,' he said.

The deck was full of the other regiment carrying stores.

'There's a man there smoking,' shouted a ship's officer from above. 'Put
that cigarette out.'

Matches began to spurt up on the quay. 'Put those cigarettes out, down
there.'

'----y well travelling all the ----ing day. No ----ing supper. ----ed
about on the ----ing quay. Now a ---- won't let me have a ----ing smoke.
I'm ----ing ----ed with being ----ed about by these ----ers.'

A dark figure passed Cedric muttering desperately. 'Nominal rolls in
triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate. Why the devil can't they tell
us beforehand they want nominal rolls in triplicate?'

Another dark figure whom Cedric recognized as the E.S.O.

'I say, the men are supposed to strip down their equipment and pack it
in green sea bags before embarking.'

'Oh,' said Cedric.

'They don't seem to have done it.'

'Oh.'

'It upsets all the storage arrangements if they don't.'

'Oh.'

An orderly came up. 'Mr Lyne, sir, will you go and see the C.O.'

Cedric went.

'Look here Lyne, aren't those infernal Scotsmen out of our troop decks
yet? I ordered that deck to be clear two hours ago. I thought you were
looking after that.'

'I'm sorry, Colonel. They're getting a move on now.'

'I should bloody well hope so. And look here, half our men have had
nothing to eat all day. Go up to the purser and see what you can rout
out for them. And find out on the bridge exactly what the sailing orders
are. When the troops come on board see that everyone knows where
everything is. We don't want anything lost. We may be in action before
the end of the week. I hear these Highlanders lost a lot of kit on the
way up. We don't want them making up deficiencies at our expense.'

'Very good, sir.'

As he went out on deck the ghostly figure brushed past him in the
darkness muttering in tones that seemed to echo from another and even
worse world, 'Nominal rolls in triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate.'

At seven o'clock the Colonel said, 'For God's sake someone take over
from Lyne. He seems to have lain down on the job.'

Cedric went to his cabin; he was unspeakably tired; all the events and
emotions of the last forty-eight hours were lost in the single longing
for sleep; he took off his belt and his shoes and lay on his bunk.
Within a quarter of a minute he was unconscious; within five minutes he
was woken by the steward placing a tray by his side; it contained tea,
an apple, a thin slice of brown bread and butter. That was how the day
always began on this ship, whether she was cruising to the midnight sun
or West Indies. An hour later another steward passed by striking a
musical gong with a little hammer. That was the second stage of the day
in this ship. He passed, tinkling prettily, through the first-class
quarters, threading his path delicately between valises and kit-bags.
Unshaven, ill-tempered officers who had not been asleep all night,
scowled at him as he passed. Nine months ago the ship had been in the
Mediterranean and a hundred cultured spinsters had welcomed his music.
It was all one to him.

After breakfast the Colonel saw all his officers in the smoking-room.
'We've got to get everything out of the ship,' he said. 'It's got to be
loaded tactically. We shan't be sailing until to-night anyway. I've just
seen the Captain and he says he isn't fuelled yet. Also we're overloaded
and he insists on our putting two hundred men ashore. Also, there's a
field hospital coming on board this morning, that we've got to find room
for. There is also Field Security Police, Field Force Institute,
N.A.A.F.I., two Pay Corps officers, four chaplains, a veterinary
surgeon, a Press photographer, a naval beach party, some Marine
anti-aircraft gunners, an air support liaison unit--whatever that
is--and a detachment of Sappers to be accommodated. All ranks are
confined to the ship. There will be no communication of any kind with
the shore. Duty company will find sentries for the post and telephone
boxes on the quay. That's all, gentlemen.'

Everyone said, 'Lyne made a nonsense of the embarkation.'


[5]

When Mr Bentley, in the first flush of patriotic zeal, left publishing
and took service with the Ministry of Information, it was agreed between
him and the senior partner that his room should be kept for his use and
that he should come in whenever he could to keep an eye on his
interests. Mr Rampole, the senior partner, would see to the routine of
the office.

Rampole and Bentley was not a large or a very prosperous firm; it owed
its continued existence largely to the fact that both partners had a
reasonable income derived from other sources. Mr Bentley was a publisher
because ever since he was a boy, he had had a liking for books; he
thought them a Good Thing; the more of them the merrier. Wider
acquaintance had not increased his liking for authors whom he found as a
class avaricious, egotistical, jealous and ungrateful, but he had always
the hope that one day one of these disagreeable people would turn out to
be a messiah of genius. And he liked the books themselves; he liked to
see in the window of the office the dozen bright covers which were that
season's new titles; he liked the sense of vicarious authorship which
this spectacle gave him. Not so old Rampole. Mr Bentley often wondered
why his senior partner had ever taken to publishing and why, once
disillusioned, he persisted in it. Old Rampole deplored the propagation
of books. 'It won't do,' he always said whenever Mr Bentley produced a
new author, 'no one ever reads first novels.'

Once or twice a year old Rampole himself introduced an author, always
with well-justified forecasts of its failure. 'Terrible thing,' he would
say. 'Met old So-and-so at the club. Got button-holed. Fellow's just
retired from Malay States. Written his reminiscences. We shall have to
do them for him. No getting out of it now. One comfort he won't ever
write another book.'

That was one superiority he had over Mr Bentley which he was fond of
airing. His authors never came back for more, like Mr Bentley's young
friends.

The idea of the _Ivory Tower_ was naturally repugnant to old Rampole.
'I've never known a literary review succeed yet,' he said.

He had a certain grudging regard for Ambrose because he was one of the
few writers on their list who were incontestably profitable. Other
writers always involved an argument, Mr Bentley having an ingenious way
of explaining over advances and overhead charges and stock in hand in
such a way that he seemed to prove that obvious failures had indeed
succeeded. But Ambrose's books sold fifteen thousand copies. He didn't
like the fellow but he had to concede him a certain knack of writing. It
shocked him that Ambrose should be so blind to his own interests as to
propose such a scheme.

'Has the fellow got money?' he asked Mr Bentley privately.

'Very little, I think.'

'Then what is he thinking of? What's he _after_?'

To Ambrose he said, 'But a literary review, now of all times!'

'Now _is_ the time of all times,' said Ambrose. 'Don't you _see_?'

'No, I don't. Costs are up and going higher. Can't get paper. Who'll
want to read this magazine anyway? It isn't a woman's paper. It isn't,
as I see it, a man's. It isn't even topical. Who's going to advertise in
it?'

'I wasn't thinking of having advertisements. I thought of making it
something like the old Yellow Book.'

'Well that was a failure,' said old Rampole triumphantly, 'in the end.'

But presently he gave his consent. He always gave his consent in the end
to all Mr Bentley's suggestions. That was the secret of their long
partnership. He had registered his protest. No one could blame him. It
was all Bentley's doing. Often he had opposed Mr Bentley's projects out
of habit, on the widest grounds that publication of any kind was
undesirable. In the case of the _Ivory Tower_ he stood on firm ground
and knew it. It gave him positive satisfaction to detect his partner in
such indefensible folly. So Mr Bentley's room, which was the most
ornamental in the fine old building which they used as their offices,
became the editorial room of Ambrose's paper.

There was not, at this stage, much editorial work to be done.

'There's one criticism I foresee,' said Mr Bentley, studying the proof
sheets, 'the entire issue seems to be composed by yourself.'

'No one's to guess that,' said Ambrose. 'If you like we'll put some
pseudonyms in.' Ambrose had always rather specialized in manifestos. He
had written one at school; he had written a dozen at the University;
once, in the late twenties, he and his friends Hat and Malpractice had
even issued the invitation to a party in the form of a manifesto. It was
one of his many reasons for shunning communism that its manifesto had
been written for it, once and for all, by somebody else. Surrounded, as
he believed himself to be, by enemies of all kinds, Ambrose found it
exhilarating from time to time to trumpet his defiance. The first number
of the _Ivory Tower_ somewhat belied the serenity and seclusion which it
claimed, for Ambrose had a blow for every possible windmill.

_The Minstrel Boys or Ivory Tower v. Manhattan Skyscraper_ defined once
and for all Ambrose's attitude in the great Parsnip-Pimpernell
controversy. _Hermit or Choirmaster_ was an expansion of Ambrose's theme
at the Caf Royal. 'Culture must be cenobitic not conventual.' He struck
ferocious unprovoked blows at those who held that literature was of
value to the community. Mr J. B. Priestley came in for much personal
abuse in these pages. There followed _The Bakelite Tower_, an onslaught
on David Lennox and the decorative school of fashionable artists.
_Majors and Mandarins_ followed, where was defined the proper degrees of
contempt and abhorrence due to the military, and among the military
Ambrose included by name all statesmen of an energetic and warlike
disposition.

'It's all very controversial,' said Mr Bentley sadly. 'When you first
told me about it, I thought you meant it to be a purely artistic paper.'

'We must show people where we stand,' said Ambrose. 'Art will
follow--anyway there's _Monument to a Spartan_.'

'Yes,' said Mr Bentley. 'There's that.'

'It covers fifty pages, my dear. All pure Art.'

He said this with a facetious, shop assistant's intonation as though he
was saying, 'All Pure Silk'; he said it as though it were a joke, but in
his heart he believed--and he knew Mr Bentley understood him in this
sense--he was speaking the simple truth. It _was_ all pure art.

He had written it two years ago on his return from Munich after his
parting with Hans. It was the story of Hans. Now, after the passage of
two years, he could not read it without tears. To publish it was a
symbolic action of the laying down of an emotional burden he had carried
too long.

_Monument to a Spartan_ described Hans, as Ambrose had loved him, in
every mood; Hans immature, the provincial _petit-bourgeois_ youth
floundering and groping in the gloom of Teutonic adolescence,
unsuccessful in his examinations, world-weary, brooding about suicide
among the conifers, uncritical of direct authority, unreconciled to the
order of the universe; Hans affectionate, sentimental, roughly sensual,
guilty; above all, Hans guilty, haunted by the taboos of the forest;
Hans credulous, giving his simple and generous acceptance to all the
nonsense of Nazi leaders; Hans reverent to those absurd instructors who
harangued the youth camps, resentful at the injustices of man to man, at
the plots of the Jews and the encirclement of his country, at the
blockade and disarmament; Hans loving his comrades, finding in a deep
tribal emotion an escape from the guilt of personal love, Hans singing
with his Hitler Youth comrades, cutting trees with them, making roads,
still loving his old friend, puzzled that he could not fit the old love
into the scheme of the new; Hans growing a little older, joining the
Brown Shirts, lapped in a kind of benighted chivalry, bemused in a
twilight where the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like
Wagnerian heroes; Hans faithful to his old friend, like a woodcutter's
boy in a fairy-tale who sees the whole forest peopled with the great
ones of another world and, rubbing his eyes, returns at evening to his
hut and his fireside. The Wagnerians shone in Ambrose's story as they
did in Hans's eyes. He austerely denied himself any hint of satire. The
blustering, cranky, bone-headed party men were all heroes and
philosophers. All this Ambrose had recorded with great delicacy and
precision at a time when his heart was consumed by the final tragedy.
Hans's Storm Troop comrades discover that his friend is a Jew; they have
resented this friend before because in their gross minds they knew him
to represent something personal and private in a world where only the
mob and the hunting-pack had the right to live. So the mob and the
hunting-pack fall on Hans's friendship. With a mercy they are far from
feeling they save Hans from facing the implications of his discovery.
For him, alone, it would have been the great climacteric of his retarded
adolescence; the discovery that his own, personal conviction conflicted
with the factitious convictions drummed into him by the crooks and
humbugs he took for his guides. But the hunting-pack and the mob left
Hans no time to devise his own, intense punishment; that at least was
spared him in the swift and savage onslaught; that was left to Ambrose
returning by train to England.

It was a story which a popular writer would have spun out to 150,000
words; Ambrose missed nothing; it was all there, delicately and
precisely, in fifty pages of the _Ivory Tower_.

'Quite frankly, Geoffrey, I regard this as a major work of Art.'

'Yes, Ambrose, I know you do. So do I. I only wish we were publishing it
without all the controversial stuff.'

'Not controversial, Geoffrey. We invite acceptance, not argument. We are
showing our credentials and _laissez-passer_. That's all.'

'Old Rampole won't like it,' said Mr Bentley.

'We won't let old Rampole see it,' said Ambrose.

****

'I'm on to a very good thing, Colonel.'

'Will you kindly address me as "sir" in this office?'

'You wouldn't prefer to be called "chief"?'

'You'll call me "sir" or get out of that uniform.'

'It's funny,' said Basil. 'I should much sooner be called "chief". In
fact that's what Susie does call me. However, sir, may I tell you about
my discovery?'

When Basil had told him, Colonel Plum said, 'That's all right as far as
it goes. We can't take any action, of course. This fellow Silk is a
well-known writer, working in the Ministry of Information.'

'He's a most dangerous type. I know him well. He was living in Munich
before the war--never out of the Brown House.'

'That's as may be, but this isn't Spain. We can't go arresting people
for what they say in a private conversation in a caf. I've no doubt we
shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle
for freedom, it just can't be done.'

'But this paper he's starting.'

'Yes, that's another matter. But Rampole and Bentley are a perfectly
respectable little firm. I can't apply for a search warrant until I've
got something to go on. We've got pretty wide powers, but we have to be
careful how we use them. We'll keep an eye on this paper and if it seems
dangerous we'll stop it. Meanwhile, get to work. Here's an anonymous
denunciation of a retired admiral in South Kensington. There won't be
anything in it. See what the police know about him.'

'Don't we ever investigate night clubs? I'm sure they're bursting with
enemy agents.'

Susie said, 'I do. You don't.'

****

A quiet day at the Ministry of Information. The more energetic neutral
correspondents had mostly left the country by now, finding Axis sources
a happier hunting-ground for front page news. The Ministry could get on
with its work undisturbed. That afternoon a film was showing in the
Ministry theatre; it dealt with otter-hunting and was designed to
impress neutral countries with the pastoral beauty of English life. The
religious department were all keen film-goers. Basil found the room
empty. On Ambrose's table lay two sets of galley-proofs of the new
magazine. Basil pocketed one of them. There was also a passport; Basil
took it up with interest. He had never seen an Irish one before. It was
made out for a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University.
The photograph showed a cadaverous face of indeterminate age. Father
Flanagan was in his leisure from higher education the correspondent of
an Irish newspaper. He wanted to visit the Maginot Line during his
vacation and after numerous disappointments had found his way to the
religious department of the Ministry of Information, where the Roman
Catholic director had promised to try and get him a visa. Basil took
this too; an additional passport often came in useful. Then he sauntered
away.

He took the proofs home and read until dinner, marking a passage here
and there as material to his brief. The style throughout was homogeneous
but the authors' names were multiform. Ambrose rather let himself go on
names. 'Hucklebury Squib', 'Bartholomew Grass', 'Tom Barebones-Abraham'.
Only _Monument to a Spartan_ bore Ambrose's own name. Later that evening
Basil sought Ambrose where he was sure to find him, at the Caf Royal.

'I've been reading your magazine,' he said.

'So it _was_ you. I thought one of those nasty Jesuits had stolen it.
They're always flapping in and out the department like jackdaws.
Geoffrey Bentley was in a great stew about it. He doesn't want old
Rampole to see a copy until the thing's out.'

'Why should the Jesuits want to show your magazine to old Rampole?'

'They're up to any mischief. What d'you think of it?'

'Well,' said Basil, 'I think you might have made it a bit stronger. You
know what you want to do is to shock people a bit. That's the way to put
a new magazine across. You can't shock people nowadays with sex, of
course; I don't mean that. But suppose you had a little poem in praise
of Himmler--something like that?'

'I don't believe that would be a good idea; besides, as far as I know no
one has written a poem like that.'

'I daresay I could rake one up for you.'

'No,' said Ambrose. 'What did you think of _Monument to a Spartan_?'

'All the first part is first rate. I suppose they made you put on that
ending?'

'Who?'

'The Ministry of Information.'

'They've had nothing to do with it.'

'Haven't they? Well, of course, you know best. I can only say how it
reads to an outsider. What I felt was--here is a first-class work of
art; something no one but you could have written. And then, suddenly, it
degenerates into mere propaganda. Jolly good propaganda, of course; I
wish half the stuff your Ministry turns out was as good--but propaganda.
An atrocity story--the sort of stuff American journalists turn out by
the ream. It glares a bit, you know, Ambrose. Still, of course, we all
have to make sacrifices in war time. Don't think I don't respect you for
it. But artistically, Ambrose, it's shocking.'

'Is it?' said Ambrose, dismayed. 'Is that how it reads?'

'Leaps to the eye, old boy. Still it ought to give you a leg up in the
department.'

'Basil,' said Ambrose solemnly, 'if I thought that was how people would
take it, I'd scrap the whole thing.'

'Oh, I shouldn't do that. The first forty-five pages are grand. Why
don't you leave it like that, with Hans still full of his illusions,
marching into Poland?'

'I might.'

'And you could bring Himmler in, just at the end, in a kind of
apotheosis of Nazism.'

'No.'

'Well, Himmler isn't necessary. Just leave Hans in the first
exhilaration of victory.'

'I'll think about it.... D'you really mean that intelligent readers
would think I was writing propaganda?'

'They couldn't think anything else, old boy, could they?'

****

A week later by the simple process of going to Rampole and Bentley's
office and asking for one, Basil obtained an advance copy of the new
magazine. He turned eagerly to the last page and found that _Monument to
a Spartan_ now ended as he had suggested; he read it again with relish;
to anyone ignorant of Ambrose's private history it bore one plain
character--the triumphant paean of Hitler Youth; Doctor Ley himself
might have been the author. Basil took the magazine with him to the War
Office; before approaching Colonel Plum he marked with a red chalk the
_Monument to a Spartan_ and passages in the preceding articles which
cast particular ridicule upon the army and the War Cabinet and which
urged on the artist the duty of non-resistance to violence. Then he laid
it on Colonel Plum's desk.

'I think, sir, you promised to make me a Captain of Marines if I caught
a fascist.'

'It was a figurative expression.'

'Meaning what?'

'That you might have done something to excuse your presence in my
office. What have you got there?'

'Documentary evidence. A fifth column nest.'

'Well, put it down. I'll have a look at it when I've time.'

It was not Colonel Plum's habit to show enthusiasm before subordinates,
but as soon as Basil was gone he began reading the marked passages with
close attention. Presently he called for Basil.

'I believe you're on to something here,' he said. 'I'm taking this round
to Scotland Yard. Who are these men Squib, Grass and Barebones-Abraham?'

'Don't you think they sound like pseudonyms?'

'Nonsense. When a man chooses an alias he calls himself Smith or Brown.'

'Have it your own way, sir. I shall be interested to see them in the
dock.'

'There won't be any dock. We shall get this bunch under a special
warrant.'

'Shall I come round to Scotland Yard with you?'

'No.'

'Just for that I won't introduce him to Barebones-Abraham,' said Basil
when the Colonel was gone.

'Have we really caught some fifth column at last?' asked Susie.

'I don't know about "we"; _I_ have.'

'Will they be shot?'

'Not all of them I should think.'

'Seems a shame really,' said Susie. 'I expect they're only a bit
touched.'

In the pleasure of setting his trap, Basil had not looked forward to its
consequences. When Colonel Plum returned to his office two hours later,
things seemed to have gone far beyond Basil's control. 'They're pleased
as Punch at Scotland Yard,' he said. 'Handing out some very handsome
bouquets. The whole thing is buttoned up. We've taken out a special
warrant for authors, publishers and printers, but I don't think we need
worry the printers much. To-morrow morning the man Silk will be arrested
at the Ministry of Information; simultaneously Rampole and Bentley's
will be surrounded and entered, all copies of the paper and all
correspondence seized. All the office staff will be held pending
investigation. What we need now is a description of the men Grass, Squib
and Barebones-Abraham. You might get on to that. I'm going round to see
the Home Secretary now.'

There was, at first hearing, a lot about this speech which displeased
Basil, and more still when he began to turn the thing over in his mind.
In the first place Colonel Plum seemed to be getting all the credit and
all the fun. It was he himself, Basil felt, who should be going to see
the Home Secretary; _he_ should have been to Scotland Yard to make
arrangements for the morrow's raid; _he_ should have had the handsome
bouquets of which Colonel Plum had spoken. It was not for this that he
had planned the betrayal of an old friend. Colonel Plum was putting on
altogether too much dog.

In the second place the sensation of being on the side of the law was
novel to Basil and not the least agreeable. Police raids, for Basil, had
in the past always meant escaping over the tiles or through the area; it
made him ashamed to hear these things spoken of with tolerance and
familiarity.

In the third place he was not absolutely happy in his mind about what
Ambrose might say. Even though he was to be deprived of the right of
public trial, there would presumably be some kind of investigation at
which he would be allowed to give an account of himself. Basil's share
in editing _Monument to a Spartan_ was, he felt, better kept as a good
story to tell in the right company at the right time; not to be made the
subject of official and semi-legal enquiry.

And in the fourth place Basil had from long association an appreciable
softness of disposition towards Ambrose. Other things being equal, he
wished him well rather than ill.

These considerations, in that order of importance, worked in Basil's
mind.

****

Ambrose's flat lay in the neighbourhood of the Ministry of Information;
it was the top floor of a large Bloomsbury mansion; where the marble
stairs changed to deal, Ambrose ascended into what had once been the
servants' bedrooms; it was an attic and, so called, satisfied the
ascetic promptings which had affected Ambrose in the year of the great
slump. There was, however, little else about the flat to suggest
hardship. He had the flair of his race for comfort and for enviable
possessions. There were expensive continental editions of works on
architecture, there were deep armchairs, an object like an ostrich egg
sculptured by Brancusi, a gramophone with a prodigious horn and a
library of records--these and countless other features made the
living-room dear to him. It is true that the bath was served only by a
gas-burning apparatus which at the best gave a niggardly trickle of warm
water and, at the worst, exploded in a cloud of poisonous vapours, but
apparatus of this kind is the hall-mark of the higher intellectuals all
the world over. Ambrose's bedroom compensated for the dangers and
discomforts of the bathroom. In this flat he was served by a motherly
old Cockney who teased him at intervals for not marrying.

To this flat Basil came very late that night. He had delayed his arrival
on purely artistic grounds. Colonel Plum might deny him the excitements
of Scotland Yard and the Home Office, but there should be every
circumstance of melodrama here. Basil knocked and rang for some time
before he made himself heard. Then Ambrose came to the door in a
dressing-gown.

'Oh God,' he said, 'I suppose you're drunk,' for no friend of Basil's
who maintained a fixed abode in London could ever consider himself
immune from his occasional nocturnal visits.

'Let me in. We haven't a moment to spare.' Basil spoke in a whisper.
'The police will be here at any moment.'

Slightly dazed with sleep, Ambrose admitted him. There are those for
whom the word 'police' hold no terror. Ambrose was not of them. All his
life he had been an outlaw and the days in Munich were still fresh in
his memory when friends disappeared suddenly in the night, leaving no
address.

'I've brought you this,' said Basil, 'and this and this.' He gave
Ambrose a clerical collar, a black clerical vest ornamented with a
double line of jet buttons, and an Irish passport. 'You are Father
Flanagan returning to Dublin University. Once in Ireland you'll be
safe.'

'But surely there's no train at this time.'

'There's one at eight. You mustn't be found here. You can sit in the
waiting-room at Euston till it comes in. Have you got a breviary?'

'Of course not.'

'Then read a racing paper. I suppose you've got a dark suit.'

It was significant both of Basil's fine urgency of manner, and of
Ambrose's constitutionally guilty disposition, that he was already
clothed as a clergyman before he said, 'But what have I done? Why are
they after me?'

'Your magazine. It's being suppressed. They're rounding up everyone
connected with it.'

Ambrose asked no more. He accepted the fact as a pauper accepts the
condition of being perpetually 'moved on'. It was something inalienable
from his state; the artist's birthright.

'How did you hear about it?'

'In the War Office.'

'What am I to do about all this?' asked Ambrose helplessly. 'The flat,
and the furniture and my books and Mrs Carver.'

'I tell you what. If you like I'll move in and take care of it for you
until it's safe to come back.'

'Would you really, Basil?' said Ambrose, touched. 'You're being very
kind.'

For some time now Basil had felt himself unfairly handicapped in his
pursuit of Susie, by the fact of his living with his mother. He had not
thought of this solution. It had come providentially, with rapid and
exemplary justice all too rare in life; goodness was being rewarded
quite beyond his expectations, if not beyond his desserts.

'I'm afraid the geyser is rather a bore,' said Ambrose apologetically.

They were not far from Euston Station. Packing was the work of a quarter
of an hour.

'But, Basil, I _must_ have _some_ clothes.'

'You are an Irish priest. What d'you think the Customs are going to say
when they open a trunk full of Charvet ties and crpe-de-Chine pyjamas?'

Ambrose was allowed one suitcase.

'I'll look after all this for you,' said Basil, surveying the oriental
profusion of expensive underclothes which filled the many drawers and
presses of the bedroom. 'You'll have to walk to the station, you know.'

'Why, for God's sake?'

'Taxi might be traced. Can't take any chances.'

The suitcase had seemed small enough when Basil first selected it as the
most priestly of the rather too smart receptacles in Ambrose's box-room;
it seemed enormous as they trudged northward through the dark streets of
Bloomsbury. At last they reached the classic columns of the railway
terminus. It is not a cheerful place at the best of times, striking a
chill in the heart of the gayest holiday-maker. Now in war time, before
dawn on a cold Spring morning, it seemed the entrance to a sepulchre.

'I'll leave you here,' said Basil. 'Keep out of sight until the train is
in. If anyone speaks to you, tell your beads.'

'I haven't any beads.'

'Then contemplate. Go into an ecstasy. But don't open your mouth or
you're done.'

'I'll write to you when I get to Ireland.'

'Better not,' said Basil, cheerfully.

He turned away and was immediately lost in the darkness Ambrose entered
the station. A few soldiers slept on benches, surrounded by their kit
and equipment. Ambrose found a corner darker, even, than the general
gloom. Here, on a packing-case that seemed by its smell to contain fish
of a sort, he sat waiting for dawn; black hat perched over his eyes,
black overcoat wrapped close about his knees, mournful and black eyes
open, staring into the blackness. From the fishy freight below him water
oozed slowly on to the pavement making a little pool, as though of
tears.

****

Mr Rampole was not, as many of his club acquaintances supposed, a
bachelor, but a widower of long standing. He lived in a small but
substantial house at Hampstead and there maintained in servitude a
spinster daughter. On this fateful morning his daughter saw him off from
the front gate as had been her habit years without number, at precisely
8.45. Mr Rampole paused in the flagged path to comment on the buds which
were breaking everywhere in the little garden.

Look well at those buds, old Rampole; you will not see the full leaf.

'I'll be back at six,' he said.

Presumptuous Rampole, who shall tell what the day will bring forth? Not
his daughter, who returned unmoved by the separation, to eat a second
slice of toast in the dining-room; not old Rampole who strode at a good
pace towards the Hampstead Underground.

He showed his season ticket to the man at the lift.

'I shall have to get it renewed the day after to-morrow,' he said
affably, and tied a knot in the corner of his large white handkerchief
to remind him of the fact.

There is no need for that knot, old Rampole; you will never again travel
in the Hampstead Underground.

He opened his morning paper as he had done, five days a week, years
without number. He turned first to the Deaths, then to the
correspondence, then, reluctantly, to the news of the day.

Never again, old Rampole, never again.

****

The police raid on the Ministry of Information, like so many similar
enterprises, fell flat. First the plain clothes men had the utmost
difficulty in getting past the gate-keeper.

'Is Mr Silk expecting you?'

'We hope not.'

'Then you can't see him.'

When finally they were identified and allowed to pass, there was a
confused episode in the religious department where they found only the
Nonconformist minister, whom, too zealously, they proceeded to handcuff.
It was explained that Ambrose was unaccountably absent from duty that
morning. Two constables were left to await his arrival. All through the
day they sat there, casting a gloom over the religious department. The
plain clothes men proceeded to Mr Bentley's room where they were
received with great frankness and charm.

Mr Bentley answered all their questions in a manner befitting an honest
citizen. Yes, he knew Ambrose Silk both as a colleague at the Ministry
and, formerly, as one of their authors at Rampoles. No, he had almost
nothing to do with publishing these days; he was too busy with all this
(an explanatory gesture which embraced the dripping sink, the Nollekens
busts and the page of arabesques beside the telephone). Mr Rampole was
in entire charge of the publishing firm. Yes, he thought he had heard of
some magazine which Silk was starting. _The Ivory Tower?_ Was that the
name? Very likely. No, he had no copy. Was it already out? Mr Bentley
had formed the impression that it was not yet ready for publication. The
contributors? Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass, Tom
Barebones-Abraham? Mr Bentley thought he had heard the names; he might
have met them in literary circles in the old days. He had the idea that
Barebones-Abraham was rather below normal height, corpulent, bald--yes,
Mr Bentley was quite sure he was bald as an egg; he spoke with a stammer
and dragged his left leg as he walked. Hucklebury Squib was a very tall
young man; easily recognizable for he had lost the lobe of his left ear
in extraordinary circumstances when sailing before the mast; he had a
front tooth missing and wore a gold ear-ring.

The plain clothes men recorded these details in shorthand. This was the
sort of witness they liked, circumstantial, precise, unhesitating.

When it came to Bartholomew Grass, Mr Bentley's invention flagged. He
had never seen the man. He rather thought it might be the pseudonym for
a woman.

'Thank you, Mr Bentley,' said the chief of the plain clothes men. 'I
don't think we need trouble you any more. If we want you I suppose we
can always find you here.'

'Always,' said Mr Bentley sweetly. 'I often, whimsically, refer to this
little table as my grindstone. I keep my nose to it. We live in arduous
times, Inspector.'

A posse of police went to Ambrose's flat, where all they got was a piece
of his housekeeper's mind.

'Our man's got away,' they reported when they returned to their
superiors.

****

Colonel Plum, the Inspector of Police and Basil were summoned late that
afternoon to the office of the Director of Internal Security.

'I can't congratulate you,' he said, 'on the way this case has been
handled. I'm not blaming you, Inspector, or you, Seal,' and he fixed
Colonel Plum with a look of detestation. 'We were clearly on to a very
dangerous set of men and you let four out of five slip through your
fingers. I've no doubt that at this moment they are sitting in a German
submarine, laughing at us.'

'We've got Rampole, sir,' said Colonel Plum. 'I'm inclined to think he's
the ringleader.'

'I'm inclined to think he's an old booby.'

'He has behaved in the most hostile and defiant manner throughout. He
refuses to give any particulars about any of his accomplices.'

'He threw a telephone directory at one of our men,' said the Inspector,
'and used the following expressions about them: "nincompoops",
"jacks-in-office"...'

'Yes, yes, I have the report. Rampole is obviously a violent and
thoroughly unreasonable type. It won't do him any harm to cool his heels
for the rest of the war. But he's not the ringleader. This fellow
Barebones-Abraham is the man I want and you haven't been able to find a
trace of him.'

'We've got his description.'

'A fat lot of good that is when he's half-way back to Germany. No, the
whole thing has been grossly mismanaged. The Home Secretary takes a very
poor view of it. _Somebody talked_ and I mean to find out who.'

When the interview, painfully protracted, came to an end, the Director
told Basil to remain behind.

'Seal,' he said, 'I understand you were the first man to get onto this
gang. Have you any idea how they were warned?'

'You put me in a very difficult position, sir.'

'Come, come, my boy, this is no time for petty loyalties when your
country's future is at stake.'

'Well, sir, I've felt for some time that there's been too much feminine
influence in our department. Have you seen Colonel Plum's secretary?'

'Hokey-pokey, eh?'

'You could call it that, sir.'

'Enemy agent, eh?'

'Oh no, sir. Have a look at her.'

The Director sent for Susie. When she had gone he said, 'No, not an
enemy agent.'

'Certainly not, sir, but a frivolous, talkative girl. Colonel Plum's
intimacy...'

'Yes I quite understand. You did perfectly right to tell me.'

****

'What did he want, sending for me like that and just staring?' asked
Susie.

'I think I've arranged a promotion for you.'

'Ooh, you are sweet.'

'I'm just moving into a new flat.'

'Lucky you,' said Susie.

'I wish you'd come and advise me about the decorations. I'm no good at
that kind of thing.'

'Oh no?' said Susie in a voice she had learned at the cinema. 'And what
would Colonel Plum say?'

'Colonel Plum won't have anything to say. You're rising far above
ADDIS.'

'Ooh.'

Next morning Susie received an official intimation that she was to move
to the Director's office.

'Lucky you,' said Basil.

She had admired all Ambrose's decorations except the Brancusi sculpture.
That had been put away, out of sight, in the box-room.

****

At Brixton Gaol Mr Rampole enjoyed many privileges that were not
accorded to common criminals. There was a table in his cell and a
tolerably comfortable chair. He was allowed, at his own expense, some
additions to prison fare. He might smoke. _The Times_ was delivered to
him every morning and for the first time in his life he accumulated a
small library. Mr Bentley from time to time brought him papers for which
his signature was required. In every way his life was much easier than
it would have been in similar circumstances in any other country.

But Mr Rampole was not content. There was an obnoxious young man next to
him who, when they met at exercise, said, 'Heil Mosley,' and at night
attempted to tap out messages of encouragement in morse. Moreover Mr
Rampole missed his club and his home at Hampstead. In spite of a
multitude of indulgences he faced the summer without enthusiasm.

****

In a soft, green valley where a stream ran through close-cropped,
spongy, pasture and the grass grew down below the stream's edge and
merged there with the water-weeds; where a road ran between grass verges
and tumbled walls and the grass merged into moss which spread upwards
and over the tumbled stones of the walls, outwards over the pocked
metalling and deep ruts of the road; where the ruins of a police
barracks, built to command the road through the valley, burnt in the
troubles, had once been white, then black and now were one green with
the grass and the moss and the water-weed; where the smoke of burned
turf drifted down from the cabin chimneys and joined the mist that rose
from the damp, green earth; where the prints of ass and pig, goose and
calf and horse mingled indifferently with those of barefoot children;
where the soft, resentful voices rose and fell in the smoky cabins
merging with the music of the stream and the treading and shifting and
munching of the beasts at pasture; where mist and smoke never lifted and
the sun never fell direct, and evening came slowly in infinite
gradations of shadow; where the priest came seldom because of the rough
road and the long climb home to the head of the valley, and no one
except the priest ever came from one month's end to another, there stood
an inn which was frequented in by-gone days by fishermen. Here in the
summer nights when their sport was over they had sat long over their
whisky and their pipes--professional gentlemen from Dublin and retired
military men from England. No one fished the stream now and the few
trout that remained were taken by ingenious and illicit means without
respect for season or ownership. No one came to stay; sometimes a couple
on a walking tour, once or twice a party of motorists, paused for
supper, hesitated, discussed the matter and then regretfully pushed on
to the next village. Here Ambrose came, perched on an outside-car, from
the railway station over the hill six miles distant.

He had discarded his clerical disguise but there was something about his
melancholy air and his precision of speech which made the landlord, who
had never had contact before with an intellectual Jew, put him down as a
'spoilt priest'. He had heard about this inn from a garrulous fellow in
the packet-boat; it was kept by a distant connection of this man's wife,
and though he had not himself visited the place, he never lost an
opportunity of putting in a good word for it.

Here Ambrose settled, in the only bedroom whose windows were unbroken.
Here he intended to write a book, to take up again the broken fragments
of his artistic life. He spread foolscap paper on the dining-room table
and the soft, moist air settled on it and permeated it so that when, on
the third day, he sat down to make a start, the ink spread and the lines
ran together, leaving what might have been a brush stroke of indigo
paint where there should have been a sentence of prose. Ambrose laid
down the pen and because the floor sloped where the house had settled,
it rolled down the table, and down the floor-boards and under the
mahogany sideboard, and lay there among napkin rings and small coins and
corks and the sweepings of half a century. And Ambrose wandered out into
the mist and the twilight, stepping soundlessly on the soft, green turf.

****

In London Basil set Susie to work. She wanted to be taken out in the
evenings too often and in too expensive a style. He set her to work with
needle and silk and embroidery scissors, unpicking the As from the
monograms on Ambrose's crpe-de-chine underclothes and substituting in
their place a B.


[6]

Like horses in a riding school, line ahead to the leading mark, changing
the rein, circling to the leading mark on the opposite wall, changing
rein again, line ahead again, orderly and regular and graceful, the
aeroplanes manoeuvred in the sharp sunlight. The engines sang in the
morning sky, the little black bombs tumbled out, turning over in the
air, drifting behind the machines, breaking in silent upheavals of rock
and dust which were already subsiding when the sound of the explosions
shook the hillside where Cedric Lyne sat with his binoculars, trying to
mark their fall.

There was no sign of Spring in this country. Everywhere the land lay
frozen and dead, deep snow in the hills, thin ice in the valleys; the
buds on the thorn were hard and small and black.

'I think they've found A Company, Colonel,' said Cedric.

Battalion headquarters were in a cave in the side of the hill; a shallow
cave made by a single great rock which held up the accumulations of
smaller stone which in years had slid down from above and settled round
it. The Colonel and the adjutant and Cedric had room to sit here; they
had arrived by night and had watched dawn break over the hills.
Immediately below them the road led further inland, climbing the
opposing heights in a series of bends and tunnels. At their feet,
between them and the opposite escarpment, the land lay frozen and level.
The reserve company was concealed there. The headquarter troops formed a
small protective perimeter round the cave. Twenty yards away under
another rock two signallers lay with a portable wireless set.

'Ack, Beer, Charley, Don... Hullo Lulu, Koko calling; acknowledge my
signal; Lulu to Koko--over.'

They had marched forward all the preceding night. When they arrived at
the cave Cedric had first been hot and sweaty, then, after they halted
in the chill of dawn, cold and sweaty. Now with the sun streaming down
on them he was warm and dry and a little sleepy.

The enemy were somewhere beyond the further hills. They were expected to
appear late that afternoon.

'That's what they'll do,' said the Colonel. 'Make their assault in the
last hour of daylight so as to avoid a counter-attack. Well, we can hold
them for ever on this front. I wish I felt sure of our left flank.'

'The Loamshires are falling back there. They ought to be in position
now,' said the adjutant.

'I know. But where are they? They ought to have sent over.'

'All this air activity in front means they'll come this way,' said the
adjutant.

'I hope so.'

The high school finished its exercise, took up formation in arrow shape
and disappeared droning over the hills. Presently a reconnaissance plane
appeared and flew backwards and forwards overhead searching the ground
like an old woman after a lost coin.

'Tell those bloody fools to keep their faces down,' said the Colonel.

When the aeroplane had passed he lit his pipe and stood in the mouth of
the cave looking anxiously to his left.

'Can you see anything that looks like the Loamshires?'

'Nothing, Colonel.'

'The enemy may have cut in across them yesterday evening. That's what
I'm afraid of. Can't you get Brigade?' he said to the signalling
corporal.

'No answer from Brigade, sir. We keep trying. Hullo Lulu, Koko calling,
acknowledge my signal, acknowledge my signal; Koko to Lulu--over...'

'I've a good mind to push D Company over on that flank.'

'It's outside our boundary.'

'Damn the boundary.'

'We'd be left without a reserve if they come straight down the road.'

'I know, that's what's worrying me.'

An orderly came up with a message. The Colonel read it and passed it to
Cedric to file. 'C Company's in position. That's all our forward
companies reported. We'll go round and have a look at them.'

Cedric and the Colonel went forward, leaving the adjutant in the cave.
They visited the company headquarters and asked a few routine questions.
It was a simple defensive scheme, three companies up, one in reserve in
the rear. It was suitable ground for defence. Unless the enemy had
infantry tanks--and all the reports said he had not--the road could be
held as long as ammunition and rations lasted.

'Made a water recce?'

'Yes, Colonel, there's a good spring on the other side of those rocks.
We're refilling bottles by relays now.'

'That's right.'

A Company had been bombed, but without casualties, except for a few cuts
from splintered rock. They were unshaken by the experience, rapidly
digging dummy trenches at a distance from their positions to draw the
fire when the aeroplanes returned. The Colonel returned from his rounds
in a cheerful mood; the regiment was doing all right. If the flanks held
they were sitting pretty.

'We're through to Lulu, sir,' said the signalling corporal.

The Colonel reported to brigade headquarters that he was in position;
air activity; no casualties; no sign of enemy troops. 'I've no contact
on the left flank... yes, I know it's beyond the brigade boundary. I
know the Loamshires ought to be there. But _are_ they? our... Yes,
but that flank's completely in the air, if they don't turn up...'

It was now midday. Battalion headquarters ate some luncheon--biscuits
and chocolate; the adjutant had a flask of whisky. No one was hungry but
they drank their bottles empty and sent the orderlies to refill them at
the spring B Company had found. When the men came back the Colonel said,
'I'm not happy about the left flank. Lyne, go across and see where those
bloody Loamshires are.'

It was two miles along a side track to the mouth of the next pass, where
the Loamshires should be in defence. Cedric left his servant behind at
battalion headquarters. It was against the rules, but he was weary of
the weight of dependent soldiery which throughout the operations
encumbered him and depressed his spirits. As he walked alone he was
exhilarated with the sense of being one man, one pair of legs, one pair
of eyes, one brain, sent on a single, intelligible task; one man alone
could go freely anywhere on the earth's surface; multiply him, put him
in a drove and by each addition of his fellows you subtract something
that is of value, make him so much less a man; this was the crazy
mathematics of war. A reconnaissance plane came overhead. Cedric moved
off the path but did not take cover, did not lie on his face or gaze
into the earth and wonder if there was a rear gunner, as he would have
done if he had been with headquarters. The great weapons of modern war
did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target
worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry to be
worth a bomb. No one had anything against the individual; as long as he
was alone he was free and safe; there's danger in numbers; divided we
stand, united we fall, thought Cedric, striding happily towards the
enemy, shaking from his boots all the frustration of corporate life. He
did not know it but he was thinking exactly what Ambrose had thought
when he announced that culture must cease to be conventual and become
cenobitic.

He came to the place where the Loamshires should have been. There was no
sign of them. There was no sign of any life, only rock and ice and
beyond, in the hills, snow. The valley ran clear into the hills,
parallel with the main road he had left. They may be holding it, higher
up, he thought, where it narrows, and he set off up the stony track
towards the mountains.

And there he found them; twenty of them under the command of a
subaltern. They had mounted their guns to cover the track at its
narrowest point and were lying, waiting for what the evening would
bring. It was a ragged and weary party.

'I'm sorry I didn't send across to you,' said the subaltern. 'We were
all in. I didn't know where you were exactly and I hadn't a man to
spare.'

'What happened?'

'It was all rather a nonsense,' said the subaltern, in the classic
phraseology of his trade which comprehends all human tragedy. 'They
bombed us all day yesterday and we had to go to ground. We made a mile
or two between raids but it was sticky going. Then at just before sunset
they came clean through us in armoured cars. I managed to get this party
away. There may be a few others wandering about, but I rather doubt it.
Luckily the Jerries decided to call it a day and settled down for a
night's rest. We marched all night and all to-day. We only arrived an
hour ago.'

'Can you stop them here?'

'What d'you think?'

'No.'

'No, we can't stop them. We may hold them up half an hour. They may
think we're the forward part of a battalion and decide to wait till
to-morrow before they attack. It all depends what time they arrive. Is
there any chance of your being able to relieve us?'

'Yes. I'll get back right away.'

'We could do with a break,' said the subaltern.

Cedric ran most of the way to the cave. The Colonel heard his story
grimly.

'Armoured cars or tanks?'

'Armoured cars.'

'Well there's a chance. Tell D Company to get on the move,' he said to
the adjutant. Then he reported to brigade headquarters on the wireless
what he had heard and what he was doing. It was half an hour before D
Company was on its way. From the cave they could see them marching along
the track where Cedric had walked so exuberantly. As they watched they
saw the column a mile away halt, break up and deploy.

'We're too late,' said the Colonel. 'Here come the armoured cars.'

They had overrun the party of Loamshires and were spreading fanwise
across the low plain. Cedric counted twenty of them; behind them an
endless stream of lorries full of troops. At the first shot the lorries
stopped and under cover of the armoured cars the infantry fell in on the
ground, broke into open order and began their advance with parade-ground
deliberation. With the cars came a squadron of bombers, flying low along
the line of the track. Soon the whole battalion area was full of
bursting bombs.

The Colonel was giving orders for the immediate withdrawal of the
forward companies.

Cedric stood in the cave. It was curious, he thought, that he should
have devoted so much of his life to caves.

'Lyne,' said the Colonel. 'Go up to A Company and explain what's
happening. If they come in now from the rear the cars may jink round and
give the other companies a chance to get out.'

Cedric set out across the little battlefield. All seemed quite unreal to
him still.

The bombers were not aiming at any particular target; they were
plastering the ground in front of their cars, between battalion
headquarters and the mouth of the valley where A Company were dug in.
The noise was incessant and shattering. Still it did not seem real to
Cedric. It was part of a crazy world where he was an interloper. It was
nothing to do with him. A bomb came whistling down, it seemed from
directly over his head. He fell on his face and it burst fifty yards
away, bruising him with a shower of small stones.

'Thought they'd got him,' said the Colonel. 'He's up again.'

'He's doing all right,' said the adjutant.

The armoured cars were shooting it out with D Company. The infantry
spread out in a long line from hillside to hillside and were moving
steadily up. They were not firing yet; just tramping along behind the
armoured cars, abreast, at arm's length apart. Behind them another wave
was forming up. Cedric had to go across this front. The enemy were still
out of effective rifle range from him, but spent bullets were singing
round him among the rocks.

'He'll never make it,' said the Colonel.

I suppose, thought Cedric, I'm being rather brave. How very peculiar.
I'm not the least brave, really; it's simply that the whole thing is so
damned silly.

A Company were on the move now. As soon as they heard the firing,
without waiting for orders, they were doing what the Colonel intended,
edging up the opposing hillside among the boulders, getting into
position where they could out-flank the out-flanking party. It did not
matter now whether Cedric reached them. He never did; a bullet got him,
killing him instantly while he was a quarter of a mile away.




EPILOGUE
SUMMER


Summer came and with it the swift sequence of historic events which left
all the world dismayed and hardly credulous; all, that is to say, except
Sir Joseph Mainwaring whose courtly and ponderous form concealed a
peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity, which
left him bobbing serenely on the great waves of history which splintered
more solid nature to matchwood. Under the new administration he found
himself translated to a sphere of public life where he could do no
serious harm to anyone, and he accepted the change as a well-earned
promotion. In the dark hours of German victory he always had some light
anecdote; he believed and repeated everything he heard; he told how, he
had it on the highest authority, the German infantry was composed of
youths in their teens, who were intoxicated before the battle with
dangerous drugs; 'those who are not mown down by machine guns die within
a week,' he said. He told, as vividly as if he had been there and seen
it himself, of Dutch skies black with descending nuns, of market women
who picked off British officers, sniping over their stalls with
sub-machine guns, of waiters who were caught on hotel roofs marking the
rooms of generals with crosses as though on a holiday postcard. He
believed, long after hope had been abandoned in more responsible
quarters, that the French line was intact. 'There is a little bulge,' he
explained. 'All we have to do is to pinch it out,' and he illustrated
the action with his finger and thumb. He daily maintained that the enemy
had outrun his supplies and was being lured on to destruction. Finally
when it was plain, even to Sir Joseph, that in the space of a few days
England had lost both the entire stores and equipment of her regular
army and her only ally; that the enemy were less than twenty-five miles
from her shores; that there were only a few battalions of fully armed,
fully trained troops in the country; that she was committed to a war in
the Mediterranean with a numerically superior enemy; that her cities lay
open to air attack from fields closer to home than the extremities of
her own islands; that her sea-routes were threatened from a dozen new
bases, Sir Joseph said, 'Seen in the proper perspective I regard this as
a great and tangible success. Germany set out to destroy our army and
failed; we have demonstrated our invincibility to the world. Moreover,
with the French off the stage, the last obstacle to our proper
understanding with Italy is now removed. I never prophesy but I am
confident that before the year is out they will have made a separate and
permanent peace with us. The Germans have wasted their strength. They
cannot possibly repair their losses. They have squandered the flower of
their army. They have enlarged their boundaries beyond all reason and
given themselves an area larger than they can possibly hold down. The
war has entered into a new and more glorious phase.'

And in this last statement, perhaps for the first time in his long and
loquacious life, Sir Joseph approximated to reality; he had said a
mouthful.

****

A new and more glorious phase: Alastair's battalion found itself
overnight converted from a unit in the early stages of training into
first line troops. Their 1098 stores arrived; a vast profusion of
ironmongery which, to his pride, included Alastair's mortar. It was a
source of pride not free from compensating disadvantages. Now, when the
platoon marched, Alastair's pouches were filled with bombs and his back
harnessed to the unnaturally heavy length of steel piping; the riflemen
thought they had the laugh of him.

Parachute landings were looked for hourly. The duty company slept in
their boots and stood to at dawn and dusk. Men going out of camp carried
charged rifles, steel helmets, anti-gas capes. Week-end leave ceased
abruptly. Captain Mayfield began to take a censorious interest in the
swill tubs; if there was any waste of food, he said, rations would be
reduced. The C.O. said, 'There is no such thing nowadays as working
hours' and to show what he meant ordered a series of parades after tea.
A training memorandum was issued which had the most formidable effect
upon Mr Smallwood; now, when the platoon returned exhausted from field
exercises, Mr Smallwood gave them twenty minutes arms drill before they
dismissed; this was the 'little bit extra' for which the memorandum
called. The platoon referred to it as '----ing us about'.

Then with great suddenness the battalion got orders to move to an
unknown destination. Everyone believed this meant foreign service and a
great breath of exhilaration inflated the camp. Alastair met Sonia
outside the guard-room.

'Can't come out to-night. We're moving. I don't know where. I think
we're going into action.'

He gave her instructions about where she should go and what she should
do while he was away. They now knew that she was to have a child.

There was a special order that no one was to come to the station to see
the battalion off; no one in fact was supposed to know they were moving.
To make secrecy absolute they entrained by night, disturbing the whole
district with the tramp of feet and the roar of lorries going backwards
and forwards between camp and station, moving their stores.

Troops in the train manage to achieve an aspect of peculiar raffishness;
they leave camp in a state of ceremonial smartness; they parade on the
platform as though on the barrack square; they are detailed to their
coaches and there a process of transformation and decay sets in; coats
are removed, horrible packages of food appear, dense clouds of smoke
obscure the windows, in a few minutes the floor is deep in cigarette
ends, lumps of bread and meat, waste paper; in repose the bodies assume
attitudes of extreme abandon; some look like corpses that have been left
unburied; others like the survivors of some saturnalian debauch.
Alastair stood in the corridor most of the night, feeling that for the
first time he had cut away from the old life.

Before dawn it was well known, in that strange jungle process by which
news travels in the ranks, that they were not going into action but to
'coastal ----ing defence'.

The train travelled, as troop trains do, in a series of impetuous rushes
between long delays. At length in the middle of the forenoon they
arrived at their destination and marched through a little seaside town
of round-fronted stucco early Victorian boarding-houses, an Edwardian
bandstand, and a modern, concrete bathing pool, three foot deep, blue at
the bottom, designed to keep children from the adventure and romance of
the beach. (Here there were no shells or starfish, no jelly-fish to be
melted, no smooth pebbles of glass to be found, no bottles that might
contain messages from shipwrecked sailors, no waves which, bigger than
the rest, suddenly knocked you off your feet. The nurses might sit round
this pool in absolute peace of mind.) Two miles out, through a suburb of
bungalows and converted railway carriages, there was a camp prepared for
them in the park of what, in recent years, had been an unsuccessful
holiday club.

That night Alastair summoned Sonia by telephone and she came next day,
taking rooms in the hotel. It was a simple and snug hotel and Alastair
came there in the evenings when he was off duty. They tried to recapture
the atmosphere of the winter and spring, of the days in Surrey when
Alastair's life as a soldier had been a novel and eccentric interruption
of their domestic routine; but things were changed. The war had entered
on a new and more glorious phase. The night in the train when he thought
he was going into action stood between Alastair and the old days.

The battalion were charged with the defence of seven miles of inviting
coastline, and they entered with relish into the work of destroying
local amenities. They lined the sands with barbed wire and demolished
the steps leading from esplanade to beach; they dug weapon pits in the
corporation's gardens, sandbagged the bow-windows of private houses and
with the co-operation of some neighbouring sappers blocked the roads
with dragons'-teeth and pill boxes; they stopped and searched all cars
passing through this area and harassed the inhabitants with demands to
examine their identity cards. Mr Smallwood sat up on the golf course
every night for a week, with a loaded revolver, to investigate a light
which was said to have been seen flashing there. Captain Mayfield
discovered that telegraph posts are numbered with brass headed nails and
believed it to be the work of the fifth column; when mist came rolling
in from the sea one evening, the corporal in command of Alastair's
section reported an enemy smoke screen, and for miles round word of
invasion was passed from post to post.

'I don't believe you're enjoying the army any more,' said Sonia after
three weeks of coastal defence.

'It isn't that. I feel I could be doing something more useful.'

'But, darling, you told me your mortar was one of the key points of the
defence.'

'So it is,' said Alastair loyally.

'So what?'

'So what?' Then Alastair said, 'Sonia, would you think it bloody of me
if I volunteered for special service?'

'Dangerous?'

'I don't suppose so really. But very exciting. They're getting up
special parties for raiding. They go across to France and creep up
behind Germans and cut their throats in the dark.' He was excited,
turning a page in his life, as, more than twenty years ago lying on his
stomach before the fire, with a bound volume of _Chums_, he used to turn
over to the next instalment of the serial.

'It doesn't seem much of a time to leave a girl,' said Sonia, 'but I can
see you want to.'

'They have special knives and tommy-guns and knuckle dusters; they wear
rope-soled shoes.'

'Bless you,' said Sonia.

'I heard about it from Peter Pastmaster. A man in his regiment is
raising one. Peter's got a troop in it. He says I can be one of his
section-commanders; they can fix me up with a commission apparently.
They carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams
of their coats to escape with. D'you mind very much if I accept?'

'No, darling. I couldn't keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the
rope ladder I couldn't. I see that.'

****

Angela had never considered the possibility of Cedric's death. She
received the news in an official telegram and for some days would speak
to no one, not even to Basil, about the subject. When she mentioned it,
she spoke from the middle rather than from the beginning or the end of
her progression of thought.

'I knew we needed a death,' she said. 'I never thought it was his.'

Basil said, 'Do you want to marry me?'

'Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know.'

'That's true.'

'You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you?'

'Will anyone be rich after this war?'

'If anyone is, I shall be. If no one is, I don't suppose it matters so
much being poor.'

'I don't know that I want to be rich,' said Basil, after a pause. 'I'm
not acquisitive, you know. I only enjoy the funnier side of getting
money--not having it.'

'Anyway it's not an important point. The thing is that we aren't
separable any more.'

'Let nothing unite us but death. You always thought I was going to die,
didn't you?'

'Yes.'

'The dog it was that died... Anyway, this is no time to be thinking
of marrying. Look at Peter. He's not been married six weeks and there he
is joining a gang of desperadoes. What's the sense of marrying with
things as they are? I don't see what there is to marriage, if it isn't
looking forward to a comfortable old age.'

'The only thing in war time is not to think ahead. It's like walking in
the blackout with a shaded torch. You can just see as far as the step
you're taking.'

'I shall be a terrible husband.'

'Yes, darling, don't I know it? But you see one can't expect anything to
be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled
everything; from now on for all our lives, if there's one thing right
the day is made.'

'That sounds like poor Ambrose, in his Chinese mood.'

****

Poor Ambrose had moved west. Only the wide, infested Atlantic lay
between him and Parsnip. He had taken rooms in a little fishing town and
the great waves pounded on the rocks below his windows. The days passed
and he did absolutely nothing. The fall of France had no audible echo on
that remote shore.

This is the country of Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wellington, Wilde, T. E.
Lawrence, he thought; this is the people who once lent fire to an
imperial race, whose genius flashed through two stupendous centuries of
culture and success, who are now quietly receding into their own mists,
turning their backs on the world of effort and action. Fortunate
islanders, thought Ambrose, happy, drab escapists, who have seen the
gold lace and the candlelight and left the banquet before dawn revealed
stained table linen and a tipsy buffoon!

But he knew it was not for him; the dark, nomadic strain in his blood,
the long heritage of wandering and speculation allowed him no rest.
Instead of Atlantic breakers he saw the camels swaying their heads
resentfully against the lightening sky, as the caravan woke to another
day's stage in the pilgrimage.

****

Old Rampole sat in his comfortable cell and turned his book to catch the
last, fading light of evening. He was absorbed and enchanted. At an age
when most men are rather concerned to preserve familiar joys than to
seek for new, at, to be exact, the age of sixty-two, he had suddenly
discovered the delights of light literature.

There was an author on the list of his firm of whom Mr Bentley was
slightly ashamed. She wrote under the name of Ruth Mountdragon, a
pseudonym which hid the identity of a Mrs Parker. Every year for
seventeen years Mrs Parker had written a novel dealing with the domestic
adventures of a different family; radically different that is to say in
name, exhibiting minor differences of composition and circumstance, but
spiritually as indistinguishable as larches; they all had the quality of
'charm'; once it was a colonel's family of three girls in reduced
circumstances on a chicken farm, once it was an affluent family on a
cruise in the Adriatic, once a newly-married doctor in Hampstead; all
the permutations and combinations of upper middle-class life had been
methodically exploited for seventeen years; but the charm was constant.
Mrs Parker's public was not vast, but it was substantial; it lay, in
literary appreciation, mid-way between the people who liked some books
and disliked others, and the people who merely liked reading, inclining
rather to the latter group. Mr Rampole knew her name as one of the
authors who were not positively deleterious to his pocket, and
consequently when his new manner of life and the speculative tendencies
which it fostered, caused him to take up novel reading, he began on her.
He was transported into a strange world of wholly delightful, estimable
people whom he had rightly supposed not to exist. With each page a
deeper contentment settled on the old publisher. He had already read ten
books and looked forward eagerly to re-reading them when he came to the
end of the seventeenth. Mr Bentley was even engaged to bring Mrs Parker
to visit him at a future, unspecified date. The prison chaplain was also
an admirer of Mrs Parker's. Old Rampole gained great face from
disclosing her real name. He half-promised to allow the chaplain to meet
her. He was happier than he could remember ever having been.

****

Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were
drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratt's Club.

'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at
least hang about with our own friends.'

'I've a letter from a man who says he's a friend of yours. Basil Seal.'

'Does he want to join?'

'Yes. Is he all right?'

'Perfect,' said Peter. 'A tough nut.'

'Right. I'll put him down with Alastair Trumpington as your other
subaltern.'

'No. For God's sake don't do that. But make him liaison officer.'

****

'You see, I know everything about you,' said Angela.

'There's one thing you don't know,' said Basil. 'If you really want to
be a widow again, we'd better marry quick. I don't think I told you. I'm
joining a new racket.'

'Basil, what?'

'Very secret.'

'But why?'

'Well, you know things haven't been quite the same at the War House
lately. I don't know why it is, but Colonel Plum doesn't seem to love me
as he did. I think he's a bit jealous about the way I pulled off the
_Ivory Tower_ business. We've never really been matey since. Besides,
you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn't
any real war. It won't do now. There's only one serious occupation for a
chap now, that's killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy
it.'

****

'Basil's left the War Office,' said Lady Seal.

'Yes,' said Sir Joseph, with sinking heart. Here it was again; the old
business. The news from all over the world might be highly
encouraging--and, poor booby, he believed it was; we might have a great
new secret weapon--and poor booby, he thought we had; he might himself
enjoy a position of great trust and dignity--poor booby, he was going,
that afternoon, to address a drawing-room meeting on the subject of
hobbies for the A.T.S.--but in spite of all this, Basil was always with
him, a grim _memento mori_ staring him out of countenance. 'Yes,' he
said. 'I suppose he has.'

'He has joined a special corps d'lite that is being organized. They are
going to do great things.'

'He has actually joined?'

'Oh, yes.'

'There's nothing I can do to help him?'

'Dear Jo, always so kind. No. Basil has arranged it all himself. I
expect that his excellent record at the War Office helped. It isn't
every boy who would settle to a life of official drudgery when everyone
else was going out for excitement--like Emma's silly girl in the fire
brigade. No, he did his duty where he found it. And now he is getting
his reward. I am not quite sure what they are going to do, but I know it
is very dashing and may well have a decisive effect on the war.'

The grey moment was passed; Sir Joseph, who had not ceased smiling, now
smiled with sincere happiness.

'There's a new spirit abroad,' he said. 'I see it on every side.'

And, poor booby, he was bang right.


THE END






[End of Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh]
