She displaced the ewer from the basin and substituted the brass can. She covered the can with a white towel, uncovered the soap dish, and disappeared, closing the door as softly as if it and the doorpost were padded with velvet. Perfect establishment!

Sabre washed his hands and went down. Mabel was in the morning room, seated at the centre table where the flowers had been and where now was her embroidery basket. She was embroidering, an art which, in common with all the domestic arts, she performed to perfection. "Bagshaw's late?" said Sabre.

Mabel glanced at the clock. Her gesture above her busy needle was pretty.

"Well, he wasn't absolutely sure about coming. I thought we wouldn't wait. Ah, there he is."

Sabre thought, "Good. That business is over. Nothing in it. Only Mabel's way."

Sounds in the hall. "In the morning room," came Low Jinks's voice. "Lunch ... wash your hands, sir?"

There was only one person in all England who, arriving at Crawshaws, would not have been gently but firmly enfolded by the machine-like order of its perfect administration and been led in and introduced with rites proper to the occasion. But that one person was the Reverend Cyril Boom Bagshaw, and he now strolled across the threshold and into the room.

VI

He strolled in. He wore a well-made suit of dark grey flannel, brown brogue shoes and a soft collar with a black tie tied in a sailor's knot. He disliked clerical dress and he rarely wore it. He was dark. His good-looking face bore habitually a rather sulky expression as though he were a little bored or dissatisfied. You would never have thought, to look at him, that he was a clergyman, or, as he would have said, a priest, and in not thinking that you would have paid him the compliment that pleased him most. This was not because Mr. Boom Bagshaw lacked earnestness in his calling, for he was enormously in earnest, but because he disliked and despised the conventional habits and manners and appearance of the clergy and, in any case, intensely disliked being one of a class. For the same reasons he wore a monocle; not because the vision of his right eye was defective but because no clergyman wears a monocle. It is not done by the priesthood and that is why the Reverend Cyril Boom Bagshaw did it.

He strolled negligently into the morning room, his hands in his trouser pockets, the skirt of his jacket rumpled on his wrists. He gave the impression of having been strolling about the house all day and of now strolling in here for want of a better room to stroll into. He nodded negligently to Sabre, "Hullo, Sabre." He smiled negligently at Mabel and seated himself negligently on the edge of the table, still with his hands in his pockets. He swung one leg negligently and negligently remarked, "Good morning, Mrs. Sabre. Embroidery?"

Sabre had the immediate and convinced feeling that the negligent and reverend gentleman was not in his house but that he was permitted to be in the house of the negligent and reverend gentleman. And this was the feeling that the negligent and reverend gentleman invariably gave to his hosts, whoever they might be; likewise to his congregations. Indeed it was said by a profane person (who fortunately does not enter this history) that the Deity entered Mr. Boom Bagshaw's church on the same terms, and accepted them.

As he sat negligently swinging his leg he frequently strained his chin upwards and outwards, rather as if his collar were tight (but it was neatly loose), or as if he were performing an exercise for stretching the muscles of his neck. This was a habit of his.

VII

A silver entree dish was placed before Mabel, another before Sabre. Low Jinks removed her mistress's cover and Mr. Boom Bagshaw pushed aside a flower vase to obtain a view.

"I don't eat salmon," he remarked. The vase was now between himself and Sabre. He again moved it, "Or cutlets."

Mabel exclaimed, "Oh, dear! Now I got this salmon in specially from Tidborough."

"I'll have some of that ham," said Mr. Boom Bagshaw; and he arose sulkily and strolled to the sideboard where he rather sulkily cut from a ham in thick wedges. The house was clearly his house.

He addressed himself to Mabel. "Now in a very few weeks you'll no longer have to get things from Tidborough, Mrs. Sabre—salmon or anything else. The shops in Market Square are going the minute they're complete. I got a couple of fishmongers only yesterday."

He spoke as if he had shot a brace of fishmongers and slung them over his shoulder and flung them into Market Square. Market Square was that portion of the Garden Home designed for the shopping centre.

"Two!" said Mabel.

"Two. I encourage competition. No one is going to sleep in the Garden Home."

"What will all the bedrooms be used for then?" Sabre inquired.

Mr. Boom Bagshaw, who was eating his ham with a fork only, holding it at its extremity in the tips of his fingers and occasionally flipping a piece of ham into his mouth and swallowing it without visible mastication, flipped in another morsel and with his right hand moved three more vases which stood between himself and Sabre. He moved each deliberately and set it down with a slight thump, rather as if it were a chessman.

He directed the fork at Sabre and after an impressive moment spoke:

"You know, Sabre, I don't think you're quite alive to what it is that is growing up about you. Flippancy is out of place. I abominate flippancy." ("Well, dash it, it's my house!" Sabre thought.) "This Garden Home is not a speculation. It's not a fad. It's not a joke. What is it? You're thinking it's a damned nuisance. You're right. It is a damned nuisance—"

Sabre began, "Well—"

"Now, listen, Sabre. It is a damned nuisance; and I put it to you that, when a toad is discovered embedded in a solid mass of coal or stone, that coal or stone, when it was slowly forming about that toad, was a damned nuisance to the toad."

Sabre asked, "Well, am I going to be discovered embedded—"

"Now, listen, Sabre. Another man in my place would say he did not intend to be personal. I do intend to be personal. I always am personal. I say that this Garden Home is springing up about you and that you are not realising what is happening. This Garden Home is going to enshrine life as it should be lived. More. It is going to make life be lived as it should he lived. Some one said to me the other day—the Duchess of Wearmouth; I was staying at Wearmouth Castle—that the Garden Home is going to be a sanctuary. I said 'Bah!' like that—'Bah!' I said, 'Every town, every city, every village is a sanctuary; and asleep in its sanctuary; and dead to life in its sanctuary; and dead to Christ in its sanctuary.' I said, 'The Garden Home is not going to be a sanctuary, nor yet a sepulchre, nor yet a tomb. It is going to be a symbol, a signal, a shout.' More ham."

He paused, pushed his plate to one side more as if it had bitten him than as if he desired more ham to be placed upon it, and looked around the room before him, sulkily, and exercising his chin.

Sabre had a vision of dense crowds of bishops in lawn sleeves, duchesses in Gainsborough hats, and herds of intensely fashionable rank and file applauding vigorously. He could almost hear the applause. But how to deal with this man he never knew. He always felt he was about fourteen when Mr. Boom Bagshaw thus addressed him. He therefore said, "Great!" and Mabel murmured, "How splendid!"

VIII

But Sabre's thought was—and it remained with him throughout the meal, acutely illustrated by the impressive monologues which Mr. Boom Bagshaw addressed to Mabel, and by her radiant responses—his thought was, "I simply can't get on with this chap—or with any of Mabel's crowd. They all make me feel like a kid. I can't answer them when they talk. They say things I've got ideas about but I never can explain my ideas to them. I never can argue my ideas with them. They've all got convictions and I believe I haven't any convictions. I've only got instincts and these convictions come down on instincts like a hammer on an egg."

Mr. Boom Bagshaw was saying, "And we shall have no poor in the Garden Home. No ugly streets. No mean surroundings. Uplift. Everywhere uplift."

There slipped out of Sabre aloud, "There you are. That's the kind of thing."

Mr. Boom Bagshaw, as if to disclose without fear precisely where he was, dismantled from between them the hedge of flowers which he had replaced and looked sulkily across. "What kind of thing?"

Sabre had a vision of himself advancing an egg for Mr. Bagshaw's hammer. "About having no poor in the Garden Home. Isn't there something about the poor being always with us?"

"Certainly there is."

"In the Bible?"

"In the Bible. Do you know to whom it was addressed?"

Sabre admitted that he didn't.

"To Judas Iscariot." (Smash went the egg!)

Sabre said feebly—he could not handle his arguments—"Well, anyway, 'always with us'—there you are. If you're going to create a place where life is going to be lived as it should be lived, I don't see how you're going to shut the poor out of it. Aren't they a part of life? They've got as much right to get away from mean streets and ugly surroundings as we have—and a jolly sight more need. Always with us. It doesn't matter tuppence whom it was said to."

"It happens," pronounced Mr. Boom Bagshaw, "to matter a great deal more than tuppence. It happens to knock the bottom clean out of your argument. It was addressed to the Iscariot because the Iscariot was trying to do just what you are trying to do. He was trying to make duty to the poor an excuse for grudging service to Christ. Now, listen, Sabre. If people thought a little less about their duty towards the poor and a little more about their duty towards themselves, they would be in a great deal fitter state to help their fellow creatures, poor or rich. That is what the Garden Home is to do for those who live in it, and that is what the Garden Home is going to do."

He stabbed sharply with the butt of a dessert knife on the dessert plate which had just been placed before him. The plate split neatly into two exact halves. He gazed at them sulkily, put them aside, drew another plate before him, and remarked to Mabel:

"You know we are moving into the vicarage to-morrow? We are giving an At Home to-morrow week. You will come."

The plural pronoun included his mother. He was intensely celibate.

IX

The day ended in a blazing row.

In the afternoon Mr. Boom Bagshaw carried off Mabel to view the progress of the Garden Home. While they dallied over coffee at the luncheon table, Sabre was fidgeting for Bagshaw to be gone. Mabel, operating dexterously behind the blue flame of a spirit lamp, Low Jinks hovering around in well-trained acolyte performances, said, "Now I rather pride myself on my Turkish coffee, Mr. Boom Bagshaw."

Mr. Bagshaw, who appeared to pride himself at least as much on his characteristics, replied by sulkily looking at his watch; and a moment later by sulkily taking a cup, rather as if he were a schoolboy bidden to take lemonade when mannishly desirous of shandygaff, and sulkily remarking, "I must go."

Sabre fidgeted to see the words put into action. He wanted Bagshaw to be off. He wanted to resume his sudden intention of remedying his normal relations with Mabel and the afternoon promised better than the intention had thus far seen. That niggling over the unexpectedness of his return,—well, of course it was unexpected and upsetting of her household routine; but the unexpectedness was over and the letter incident over, and Mabel, thanks to her guest, delightfully mooded. Good, therefore, for the afternoon. When the dickens was this chap going?

Then Bagshaw, rising sulkily, "Well, you'd better come up and have a look round."

And Mabel, animatedly, "I'd like to"; and to Sabre, "You won't care to come, Mark."

Sabre said, "No, I won't."

X

Throughout dinner—Mabel returned only just in time to get ready for dinner—Sabre examined with dispassionate interest the exercise of trying to say certain words and being unable to say them. They conversed desultorily; in their usual habit. He told himself that he was speaking several hundred "other" words; but the intractable words that he desired to utter would not be framed. He counted them on his fingers under the table. Only seven: "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" Only seven. He could not say them. The incident they brought up rankled. He had come home to take a day off with her. She knew he was there at the luncheon table to take a day off with her. It had interested her so little, she had been so entirely indifferent to it, that she had not even expressed a wish he should so much as attend her on the inspection with Bagshaw. The more he thought of it the worse it rankled. She knew he was at home to be with her and she had deliberately walked off and left him.... "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" No. Not much. He couldn't. He visualised the impossible seven written on the tablecloth. He saw them in script; he saw them in print; he imagined them written by a finger on the wall. Say them—no.

Mabel left him sitting at the table with a cigarette. There came suddenly to his assistance in the fight with the stubborn seven, abreast of the thoughts in the office that had brought him home, a realisation of her situation such as he had had that first night together in the house, eight years before; there she was in the morning room, alone. She had given up her father's home for his home—and there she was: a happy afternoon behind her and no one to discuss it with. Just because he could not say, "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?"

He thought, "I'm hateful." He got up vigorously and strode into the morning room: "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" His voice was bright and interested.

She was reading a magazine. She did not raise her eyes front the page. "Eh? Oh, very nice. Delightful."

"Tell us about it."

"What? Oh ... yes." Her mind was in the magazine. She read on a moment. Then she laid the magazine on her lap and looked up. "The Garden Home? Yes—oh, yes. It was charming. It's simply springing up. You ought to have come."

He stretched himself in a big chair opposite her. He laughed. "Well, dash it, I like that. You didn't exactly implore me to."

She yawned. "Oh, well. I knew you wouldn't care about it." She yawned again, "Oh dear. I'm tired. We must have walked miles, to and fro." She put down her hands to take up her magazine again. She clearly was not interested by his interest. But he thought, "Well, of course she's not. For her it's like eating something after it's got cold. Dinner was the time."

He said, "I expect you did—walk miles. Bagshaw all over it, I bet."

She did what he called "tighten herself." "Well, naturally, he's pleased—enthusiastic. He's done more than any one else to keep the idea going."

Sabre laughed. "I should say so! Marvellous person! What's he going to do about not wearing clerical dress when he has to wear gaiters?"

"What do you mean—gaiters?"

Signs of flying up. What on earth for? "Why, when he's a bishop. Don't you—"

She flew up. "I suppose that's some sneer!"

"Sneer! Rot. I mean it. A chap like Bagshaw's not going to be a parish priest all his life. He's out to be a bishop and he'll be a bishop. If he changed his mind and wanted to be a Judge or a Cabinet Minister, he'd be a Judge or a Cabinet Minister. He's that sort."

"I knew you were sneering."

"Mabel, don't be silly. I'm not sneering. Bagshaw's a clever—"

"You say he's 'that sort.' That's a sneer." She put her hands on the arms of her chair and raised herself to sit upright. She spoke with extraordinary intensity. "Nearly everything you say to me or to my friends is a sneer. There's always something behind what you say. Other people notice it—"

"Other people."

"Yes. Other people. They say you're sarcastic. That's just a polite way—"

He said, "Oh, come now, Mabel. Not sarcastic. I swear no one thinks I'm sarcastic. I promise you Bagshaw doesn't. Bagshaw thinks I'm a fool. A complete fool. Look at lunch!"

She caught him up. She was really angry. "Yes. Look at lunch. That's just what I mean. Any one that comes to the house, any of my friends, anything they say you must always take differently, always argue about. That's what I call sneering—"

He, flatly, "Well, that isn't sneering. Let's drop it."

She had no intention of dropping it. "It is sneering. They don't know it is. But I know it is."

XI

He had the feeling that his anger would arise responsive to hers, as one beast calling defiance to another, if this continued. And he did not want it to arise. He had sometimes thought of anger as a savage beast chained within a man. It had helped him to control rising ill-temper. He thought of it now: of her anger. He had a vision of it prowling, as a dark beast among caves, challenging into the night. He wished to retain the vision. His own anger, prowling also, would not respond while he retained the picture. It was prowling. It was suspicious. It would be mute while he watched it. While he watched it....

He pulled himself sharply to his feet.

"Well, well,", he said. "It's not meant to be sneering. Let's call it my unfortunate manner."

He stood before her, half-smiling, his hands in his pockets, looking down at her.

She said, "Perhaps you're different with your friends. I hope you are. With your friends."

He caught a glint in her eye as she repeated the words. Its meaning did not occur to him.

He bantered, "Oh, I'm not as bad as all that. And anyway, the friends are all the same friends. This place isn't so big."

Then that quick glint of her eye was explained—the flash before the discharge.

"Perhaps your friends are just coming back," she said. "Lady Tybar."

The vision of his dark anger broke away. Mute while he watched it, immediately it lifted its head and answered her own. "Look here—" he began; and stopped. "Look here," he said more quietly, "don't begin that absurd business again."

"I don't think it is absurd."

"No, you called it 'funny.'"

She drew in her feet as if to arise. "Yes, and I think it's funny. All of it. I think you've been funny all day to-day. Coming back like that!"

"I told you why I came back. To have a day off with you. Funny day off it's been! You're right there!"

"Yes, it has been a funny day off."

He thought, "My God, this bickering! Why don't I get out of the room?"

"Come back for a day off with me! It's a funny thing you came back just in time to get that letter! Before it was delivered! There! Now you know!"

He was purely amazed. He thought, and his amazement was such that, characteristically, his anger left him; he thought, "Well, of all the—!"

But she otherwise interpreted his astonishment. She thought she had made an advantage and she pressed it. "Perhaps you knew it was coming?"

"How on earth could I have known it was coming?"

She seemed to pause, to be considering. "She might have told you. You might have seen her."

He said, "As it happens, I did see her. Not three hours before I came back."

She seemed disappointed. She said, "I know you did. We met Lord Tybar."

And he thought, "Good lord! She was trying to catch me."

She went on, "You never told me you'd met them. Wasn't that funny?"

"If you'd just think a little you'd see there was nothing funny about it. You found the letter so amazingly funny that, to tell you the truth, I'd had about enough of the Tybars. And I've had about enough of them."

"I daresay you have—with me. Perhaps you'll tell me this—would you have told me about the letter if I hadn't seen you get it?"

He thought before he answered and he answered out of his thoughts. He said slowly, "I—don't—believe—I—would. I wouldn't. I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought it—funny."

XII

No answer he could have made could have more exasperated her. "I—don't—believe—I—would." Deliberation! Something incomprehensible to her going on in his mind, and as a result of it a statement that no one on earth (she felt) but he would have made. Any one else would have said boldly, blusteringly, "Of course I would have told you about the letter." She would have liked that. She would have disbelieved it and she could have said, and enjoyed saying, she disbelieved it. Or any one else would have said furiously, "No, I'm damned if I'd have shown you the letter." She would have liked that. It would have affirmed her suspicions that there was "something in it"; and she wished her suspicions to be affirmed. It would have been something definite. Something justifiably incentive of anger, of resentment, of jealousy. Something she could understand.

For she did not understand her husband. That was her grievance against him. She never had understood him. That den incident in the very earliest days of their marriage had been an intimation of a way of looking at things that to her was entirely and exasperatingly inexplicable; and since then, increasingly year by year, her understanding had failed to follow him. He had retired farther and farther into himself. He lived in his mind, and she could by no means penetrate into his mind. His ideas about things, his attitude towards things, were wholly and exasperatingly incomprehensible to her.

"It's like," she had once complained to her father, "it's like having a foreigner in the house."

Things, in her expression, "went on" in his mind, and she could not understand what went on in his mind, and it exasperated her to know they were going on and that she could not understand them.

"I—don't—believe—I—would." Characteristic, typical expression of those processes of his mind that she could not understand! And then the reason: "I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought it—funny."

And, exasperation on exasperation's head, he was right. She did think it funny; and by his very reply—for she knew him well enough, so exasperatingly well, to know that this was complete sincerity, complete truth—he proved to her that it was not really funny but merely something she could not understand. Robbery of her fancy, her hope that it was something definite against him, something justifiably incentive of resentment, of jealousy!

It was as if he had said, "You can't understand a letter like this. There's nothing in it to understand. And that's just what you can't understand. Look here, you see my head. I'm in there. You can't come in. You don't know how to. I can't tell you how to. Nobody could tell you. And you wouldn't know what to make of it if you did get in."

Exasperating. Insufferable. Insupportable!

She could not express her feelings in words. She expressed them in action. She arose violently and left the room. The whole of her emotions she put into the slam of the door behind her. The ornaments shivered. A cup sprang off a bracket and dashed itself to pieces on the floor.

XIII

Sabre regarded the broken cup much as Sir Isaac Newton presumably regarded the fallen apple. He "worked back" from the cup through the events of the day, and through the events of the day returned to the cup. It interested him to find that the fragments on the floor were as logical a result of the movements of the day as they would have been of getting the small hand axe out of the woodshed, aiming a blow at the cup, and hitting the cup.

He thought, "I started to break that cup when I rustled the newspaper at breakfast. I went on when I suddenly came back and got into that niggling business over why I had come back. Went on when I walked off to my room after that letter business. Practically took up the axe when I couldn't say, 'Well, how's the Garden Home going on?' at dinner. And smashed it when I chaffed about Bagshaw an hour ago. Rum business! Rotten business."

That was the day's epitaph. But for the murder of the cup he found—gone to bed and lying awake—a culprit other than himself. He thought, "It was meeting Nona made me come home like that. But if that had been the first time I'd ever met Nona I shouldn't have returned. So it goes back further than that. Nine—ten years. The day she married Tybar. If she hadn't married Tybar she'd have married me. The cup wouldn't have been broken. Nona broke that cup."



CHAPTER IV

I

These events were on a Monday. On the following Thursday Nona came to see him at his office.

She was announced through the speaking-tube on his desk:

"Lady Tybar to see you, sir."

Nona! But he was not really surprised. He had taken no notice of her letter. He had wanted to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not been. When two days passed and still he prevented himself from going, he began to have the feeling—somehow—that she would come to see him. It was the third day and she was here, downstairs.

"Ask her to come up," he said.

She came in. She wore (as Sabre saw it) "a pale-blue sort of thing" and "a sort of black hat." He had considered it as an odd thing, in his thoughts of her since their meeting, that, though he could always have some kind of notion what other women were wearing, he never could remember any detail of Nona's dress.

But it was her face he always looked at.

She stood still immediately she was across the threshold and the door closed behind her. She was smiling as though she felt herself to be up to some lark. "Hullo, Marko. Don't you hate me for coming in here like this?"

"It's jolly surprising."

"That's another way of saying it. Now if you'd said it was surprisingly jolly! Well, shake hands, Marko, and pretend you're glad."

He laughed and put out his hand. But she delayed response; she first slipped off the gauntlets she was wearing and then gave him her hand. "There!" she said.

"There!" It was as though she had now done something she much wanted to do; as one says "There!" on at last sitting down after much fatigue.

She tossed her gauntlets on to a chair. She walked past him towards the window. "You got my letter?"

"Yes."

Her face was averted. Her voice had not the bantering note with which she had spoken at her entry.

"You never answered it."

"Well, I'd just seen you—just before I got it."

She was looking out of the window. "Why haven't you been up?"

"Oh—I don't know. I was coming."

"Well, I had to come," she said.

He made no reply. He could think of none to make.

II

She turned sharply away from the window and came towards him, radiant again, as at her entry. And in her first bantering tone, "I know you hate it," she smiled, resuming her first suggestion, "me coming here, like this. It makes you feel uncomfortable. You always feel uncomfortable when you see me, Marko. I'd like to know what you thought when they told you I was here—"

He started to speak.

She went on, "No, I wouldn't. I'd like to know just what you were doing before they told you. Tell me that, Marko."

"I believe I wasn't doing anything. Just thinking."

"Well, I like you best when you're thinking. You puzzle, don't you, Marko? You've got a funny old head. I believe you live in your old head, you know. Puzzling things. Clever beast! I wish I could live in mine." And she gave a note of laughter.

"Where do you live, Nona?"

"I don't live. I just go on"—she paused—"flotsam."

Strange word to use, strangely spoken!

It seemed to Sabre to drop with a strange, detached effect into the conversation between them. His habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and from the word dropped into it ripples that came to his feet upon his margin of the pool and to her feet upon hers.

III

He took the word away from its personal application. "I believe that's rather what I was thinking about when you came, Nona. About how we just go on—flotsam. Don't you know on a river where it's tidal, or on the seashore at the turn, the mass of stuff you see there, driftwood and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily, brought in and left there—from somewhere; and then presently the tide begins to take it and it's drawn off and moves away and goes—somewhere. Arrives and floats and goes. That's mysterious, Nona?"

She said swiftly, as though she were stirred, "Oh, Marko, yes, that's mysterious. Do you know sometimes I've seen drift like that, and I've felt—oh, I don't know. But I've put out a stick and drawn in a piece of wood just as the stuff was moving off, just to save it being carried away into—well, into that, you know."

"Have you, Nona?"

She answered, "Do you think that's what life is, Marko?"

"It's not unlike," he said. And he added, "Except about some one coming along with a stick and drawing a bit into safety. I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for—"

He suddenly realised that he was back precisely at the thoughts his mind had taken up on the morning he had met her. But with a degree more of illumination. Two feelings came into his mind, the second hard upon the other and overriding it, as a fierce horseman might catch and override one pursued. He said, "It's rather jolly to have some one that can see ideas like that." And then the overriding, and he said with astonishing roughness, "But you—you aren't flotsam! How can you be flotsam—the life you've—taken?"

And, lo, if he had struck her, and she been bound, defenceless, and with her eyes entreating not to be struck again, she could not deeper have entreated him than in the glance she fleeted from her eyes, the quiver of her lids that first released, then veiled it.

It stopped his words. It caught his throat.

IV

He got up quickly. "I say, Nona, never mind about thinking. I'll tell you what's been doing. Rotten. Happened just after I met you the other day."

"The dust on these roads!" she said. She touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "What, Marko?"

"Well, old Fortune promised to take me into partnership about an age ago."

"Marko, he ought to have done it an age ago. What's there rotten about that?" Her voice and her air were as gay as when she had entered.

"The rotten thing is that he's turned it down. At least practically has. He—" He told her of the Twyning and Fortune incident. "Pretty rotten of old Fortune, don't you think?"

"Old fiend!" said Nona. "Old trout!"

Sabre laughed. "Good word, trout. The men here all say he's like a whale. They call him Jonah," and he told her why.

She laughed gaily. "Marko! How disgusting you are! But I'm sorry. I am. Poor old Marko.... Of course it doesn't matter a horse-radish what an old trout like that thinks about your work, but it does matter, doesn't it? I know how you feel. They had an author man at a place we were staying at the other day—Maurice Ash—and he told me that although he says it doesn't matter, and knows it doesn't matter, when an absolutely trivial person says something riling about any of his stuff, still it does matter. He said a thing you've produced out of yourself you can't bear to have slighted—not by the butcher. Gladys Occleve made us laugh. Maurice Ash said to her, 'It's like a mother's child. Look here, you're a countess,' he said to her. 'You oughtn't to mind what a butcher thinks of your children; but supposing the butcher said your infant Henry was a stupid little brat; what would you do?' Gladys said she'd dash a best end of the neck straight into his face."

Sabre laughed. "Yes, that's the feeling. But of course, all these books"—he indicated the shelves—"aren't mine, not my children, more like my adopted children."

She declared it was the same thing. "More so, in a way. You've invented them, haven't you, called them out of the vasty deep sort of thing and brought them up in the way they should go. I do think it's rather fine, Marko."

She was at the shelves, scanning the books. Her fond, her almost tender sympathy made him, too, feel that it was rather fine. Her light words in her high, clear tone voiced exactly his feelings towards the books. Talking with her was, in the reception and return of his thoughts, nearer to reading a book that delighted him than to anything else with which he could compare it. There was the same interchange of ideas, not necessarily expressed; the same creation and play of fancy, imagined, not stated.

Her hands were moving about the volumes, pulling out a book here and there; she mused the titles. "'Greek Unseens—Prose'; 'Greek Unseens—Verse'; 'Latin Unseens—Verse.' Marvellous person, Marko! 'The Shell Algebra'; 'The Shell Latin Grammar'; 'The Shell English Literature': 'The Shell Modern Geography.' That's a series 'The Shell,' eh? I do call that a good idea. 'The Six Terms Chemistry'; 'The Six Terms Geology.'"

"Yes, that's another series," he said. He was standing beside her. Delightful this! His pride in his work thrilled anew. "You see the idea of the thing. Gives the boy the feeling of something definite to get through in a definite time."

She was reading one of the prefaces, signed with his initials. "Yes, that's ever so good. I see what you've written here, '...avoiding the formidable and unattractive wilderness that a new textbook commonly presents to the pupil's mind.' I call that jolly good, Marko. I call it all awfully good. Fancy you sitting in here and thinking out all those ideas. Or do you think them out at home? Do you talk them out with Mabel?"

He thought of Mabel's expression. "Those lesson books." He lied. "Oh, yes. Pretty often."

"Show me which was the first one of all—the one you began with."

He showed her. "Fancy!" She handled it. "How fearfully proud of it you must have been, Marko. And Mabel; wasn't she proud? The very first!" She called it "Dear thing" and returned it to its place with a little pat, as of affection.

He turned away. "Oh, well, that's enough," he said.

V

She moved about the room, touching things, looking at things.

"Show me something else. Is that where the old trout basks? Can he hear us? I'm glad I've seen your room, Marko. I shall imagine you puzzling in here."

Touching things, looking at things.... He thought the room would always look different—after this. He felt strangely disturbed. He could with difficulty reply to her. His mind threw back, in its habit, to some dim occasion when he had felt in some degree as he was feeling now. When? Certainly he had felt it before. When?

He remembered. It was a Saturday in the first month of his first term at Tidborough School when his father had come over to see him. The loneliness of newness was still upon him. He had been affected almost to tears by being with some one whose mind was open, as it were, for him to jump into: some one to whom he could open his mind, unseal the home thoughts, unlock the timid tongue. He had talked how he had talked! He had felt bursting to talk; and only talking could ease the feeling; and how it had eased! Yes, this was the same again. He did not want her to go. He wanted to talk—how he wanted to talk!—to tell, unseal, unlock, expose.

He said, "I tell you what, Nona. I'll tell you something. I've an idea sometimes of cutting out from all this place and starting an educational publishing business on my own."

She was enormously interested. "Oh, Marko, if only you would!"

"Well, I think about it. I do. I can see a biggish thing in it. The Tidborough Press, I'd call it. Like the University Press, you know, Oxford and Cambridge. By Jove, it might go any distance, you know!"

"Oh, you must! You must!"

He began to pour out the tremendous and daring scheme.

VI

He talked animatedly,—these long pent up enthusiasms. She attended, rapt and gleaming-eyed, following him with most delicious "Yes—yes" and with little nods; and he suddenly became aware of how poignant to him was the sympathy of her interest,—and stopped. Thus to pour out, thus to be heard, was to experience the exquisite pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable pain, as when an anodyne steals through the veins of torture. He stopped. He could not bear it.

"Well, that's all," he said.

She declared, "It's splendid. How well you're doing, Marko. I knew you would." She paused. "Not that that matters," she said.

He asked her, "What do you mean—'not that that matters'?"

She made a little face at him. "Marko, you're not to snap me up like that. I've noticed it two or three times. I mean it doesn't matter what a man does. It's what he is that matters."

He laughed. "Well, that lets me down pretty badly if that's the estimate. I'm awful, you know."

She shook her head. "Oh, you're not so bad."

"You don't know me. I've been growing awful these years."

"Tell me how awful you are. Does Mabel think you're awful?"

"You ask her! I'm the most unsatisfactory sort of person it's possible to meet. Really."

"Go on; tell me, Marko. I like this."

"What, like hearing how unsatisfactory I am?"

"I like hearing you talk. You've got rather a nice voice—I used to tell you that, didn't I?—and I like hearing you stumbling about trying to explain your ideas. You've got ideas. You're rather an ideary person. Go on. Why are you unsatisfactory?"

How familiar her voice was on that note,—caressing, drawing him on.

He said, "I'll tell you, Nona. I'm unsatisfactory because I've got the most infernal habit of seeing things from about twenty points of view instead of one. For other people, that's the most irritating thing you can possibly imagine. I've no convictions; that's the trouble. I swing about from side to side. I always can see the other side of a case, and you know, that's absolutely fatal—"

She said gently, "Fatal to what, Marko?"

He was going to say, "To happiness"; but he looked at her and then looked away. "Well, to everything; to success. You can't possibly be successful if you haven't got convictions—what I call bald-headed convictions. That's what success is, Nona, the success of politicians and big men whose names are always in the papers. It's that: seeing a thing from only one point of view and going all out for it from that point of view. Convictions. Not mucking about all round a thing and seeing it from about twenty different sides like I do. You know, you can't possibly pull out this big, booming sort of stuff they call success if you're going to see anybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. Yes, and narrower than that, not convictions but conviction. Only one conviction—that you're right and that every one who thinks differently from you is wrong to blazes." He laughed. "And I'm dashed if I ever think I'm right, let alone conviction of it. I can always see the bits of right on the other side of the argument. That's me. Dash me!"

She said, "Go on, Marko. I like this."

"Well, that's all there is to it, Nona. These conviction chaps, these booming politicians and honours-list chaps, these Bagshaw chaps—you know Bagshaw?—they go like a cannon ball. They go like hell and smash through and stick when they get there. My sort's like the footballs you see down at the school punt-about. Wherever there's a punt I feel it and respond to it. My sort's out to be kicked—" He laughed again. "But I couldn't be any other sort."

She said, "I'm glad you couldn't be, Marko. You're just the same as you used to be. I'm glad you're the same."

He did not reply.

VII

She sat briskly forward in the big armchair in which she faced him, making of the motion a movement as though throwing aside a turn the conversation had taken. "Well, go on, Marko. Go on talking. I'm not going to let you stop talking yet. I love that about how people get success nowadays. It's jolly true. I never thought of it before. Yes, you're still a terribly thinky person, Marko. Go on. Think some more. Out loud."

Caressing—drawing him on—just as of old.

He said thoughtfully, "I tell you a thing I often think a lot about, Nona. You being here like this puts it in my mind. Conventions."

She smiled teasingly. "Ah, poor Marko. I knew you'd simply hate it, my coming in like this. Does it seem terribly unconventional, improper, to you, shut up with me in your office?"

He shook his head. "It seems very nice. That's all it seems. But it does bring into my mind that you're the sort of person that doesn't think tuppence about what's usually done or what's not usually done; and that reminded me of things I've thought about conventions. Look here, Nona, this really is rather interesting—"

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Just so he used to bring ideas to her; just so, with "Yes—yes," she used to receive them.

But he went on. "Why, convention, you know, it's the most mysterious, extraordinary thing. It's a code society has built up to protect itself and to govern itself, and when you go into it it's the most marvellous code that ever was invented. All sorts of things that the law doesn't give, and couldn't give, our conventions shove in on us in the most amazing way. And all probably originated by a lot of Mother Grundy-ish old women, that's what's so extraordinary. You know, if all the greatest legal minds of all the ages had laid themselves out to make a social code they could never have got anywhere near the rules the people have built up for themselves. And that's what I like, Nona—that's what I think so interesting and the best thing in life: the things the people do for themselves without any State interference. That's what I'd encourage all I knew how if I were a politician—"

He broke off. "I say, aren't I the limit, gassing away like this? I hardly ever get off nowadays and when I do!—Why don't you stop me?"

She made a little gesture deprecatory of his suggestion. "Because I like to hear you. I like to watch your funny old face when you're on one of your ideas. It gets red underneath, Marko, and the red slowly comes up. Funny old face! Go on. I want to hear this because I'm going to disagree with you, I think. I think conventions, most of them, are odious, hateful, Marko. I hate them."

VIII

He had been strangely affected by the words of her interruptions: a contraction in the throat,—a twitching about the eyes.... But he was able, and glad that he was able to catch eagerly at her opinion. "Yes, yes, I know, odious, hateful, and much more than that, cruel—conventions can be as cruel, as cruel as hell. I was just coming to that. But they're all absolutely rightly based, Nona. That's the baffling and the maddening part of them. That's what interests me in them. In their application they're often unutterably wrong, cruel, hideously cruel and unjust, but when you examine them, even at their cruellest, you can't help seeing that fundamentally they're absolutely right and reasonable and necessary. Look, take quite a silly example. There's a convention against going to church in any but your best clothes. It's easy to conceive wrongness in the application of it. It's easy to conceive a person wanting to go to church and likely to benefit by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it—the idea of presenting yourself decently at worship, as before princes. That makes you laugh—"

"It doesn't, Marko. I can see much worse things just on the same principle."

He said pleasedly, "Of course you can, can't you? Look at all this stuff there's been in the papers lately about what they call the problem of the unmarried mother. Now there's a brute of a case for you: a girl gets into trouble and while she sticks to her baby she's made an outcast; every door is shut to her; her own people will have nothing to do with her; no one will take her in—so long as she's got the baby with her. That's convention and you can imagine cases where it's cruel beyond words. But it's no good cursing society about it. You can't help seeing that the convention is fundamentally right and essential. Where on earth would you be if girls with babies could find homes as easily as girls without babies?" He smiled. "You'd have babies pouring out all over the place. See it?"

She nodded. "I do think that's interesting, Marko. I think that's most awfully interesting. Yes, cruel and hateful and preposterous, many of them, but all fundamentally right. I think that's absorbing. I shall look out for conventions now, and when they annoy me most I'll think out what they're based on. I will!"

"Well, it's not a bad idea," he said. "It helps in all sorts of ways to think things out as they happen to you. You don't realise what a mysterious business life is till you begin to do that; and once you begin to feel the mysteriousness of it there's not much can upset you. You get the feeling that you're part of an enormous, mysterious game, and you just wonder what the last move means. Eh?"

She did not answer.

Presently she said, "Yes, you do still think things, Marko. You haven't changed a bit, you know. You're just the same."

He smiled. "Oh, well, it's only two years, you know—less than two years since you went away."

"I wasn't thinking of two years."

"How many years were you thinking of?"

"Ten."

They just sat there.

IX

The insistent shrieking of a motor siren in the street below began to penetrate their silence. When it came to Sabre's consciousness he had somehow the feeling that it had been going on a very long time. He jumped to his feet. The siren had the obscene and terrific note of a gigantic hen in delirium. "What the devil's that?"

She received his question with the blank look of one whose mind had no idea of the question's reason. The strangled gurgle and shriek from without informed her in paroxysms of hideous sound. With a motion of her body, as of one shaking off dreams, she threw away the be-musement in which she had sat. She screwed up her face in torture. "Oh, wow! Isn't it too awful! That's Tony. In the car. I told him I'd look in here." She glanced at the clock. "Marko; it's one o'clock. I've been here two mortal hours!"

The gigantic hen screamed in delirious death agony.

"Oh, good heavens, that noise!" She stepped to the window and opened the casement. "Tony! That noise! Tony, for goodness' sake!"

An extravagantly long motor car was drawn against the curb. Lord Tybar, in a dust coat and a sleek bowler hat of silver grey, sat in the driver's seat. He was industriously and without cessation winding the handle of the siren. An uncommonly pretty woman sat beside him. She was massed in furs. In her ears she held the index finger of each hand, her elbows sticking out on each side of her head. Thus severally occupied, she and Lord Tybar made an unusual picture, and a not inconsiderable proportion of the youth and citizens of Tidborough stood round the front of the car and enjoyed the unusual picture that they made.

The spectators looked up at Nona's call; Lord Tybar ceased the handle and looked up with his engaging smile; the uncommonly pretty woman removed her fingers from her ears and also turned upwards her uncommonly pretty face.

"Hullo!" called Lord Tybar. "Did you happen to hear my sighs?"

"That appalling noise!" said Nona. "You ought to be prosecuted!"

"If you'd had it next to you!" piped the uncommonly pretty lady in an uncommonly pretty voice. "It's like a whole ship being seasick together."

"It's nothing of the kind," protested Lord Tybar. "It's the plaintive lament of a husband entreating his wife." He directed his eyes further backward. "Good morning, Mr. Fortune. Did you recognize my voice calling my wife? There were tears in it. Perhaps you didn't."

"Good lord," said Sabre, "there's old Fortune at his window. I'll come down with you, Nona."

As they went down he asked her, "Who's that with him in the car?"

"One of his friends. Staying with us."

Something in her voice made it—afterwards—occur to him as odd that she spoke of one of "his", not one of "our" friends, and did not mention her name.

"Well, the whole of Tidborough knows where you've been, Nona," Lord Tybar greeted them. "And a good place too." He addressed the lady by his side. "Puggo, look at those pulpits and things in the window. You never go to church. It'll do you good. That's a pulpit, that tall thing. They preach from that."

The lady remarked, "Thanks. I can remember it. At least I was married in a church, you know."

"And, of course," said Nona, "you always remember you're married, don't you?"

Sabre glanced quickly at her. Her tone cut across the frivolous exchanges with an acid note. So utterly unlike Nona!

And the thing was real, not imagined; and went further. The uncommonly pretty woman addressed as Puggo replied, "Oh, always. And so do you, don't you, dear?" and her uncommonly pretty eyes went in a quick glance from Nona's face to Sabre's, where they hovered the fraction of a moment, and thence to Lord Tybar's where also they hovered, and smiled.

And Lord Tybar, his small, handsome head slightly on one side, looked from one to another with precisely that mock in his glance that Sabre had noticed, and transiently wondered at, on the day he had met them riding.

Funny!

"But, Puggo, you don't know Sabre, do you?" Lord Tybar said. "Sabre, this is Mrs. Winfred. A woman of mystery. One mystery is how she ever won Fred and the other why she is called Puggo. There must be something pretty dark in her past to have got her a name like Puggo."

The woman of mystery shrugged her shoulders. "Of course Tony's simply a fool," she observed. "You know that, don't you, Mr. Sabre?"

"It's not her face," Lord Tybar continued. "You might think it's her figure the way she hides it up under all those furs on a day like this. But a pug's figure—"

Nona broke in. "I suppose we're going to start some time?"

"Will you come and sit here?" Puggo inquired, but without making any movement.

"No, I'll sit behind."

She got in. "Good-by, Marko." Her voice sounded tired. She gave Sabre her hand. "Jolly, the books," she said. "And our talk."

"Now throw yourself in front, any boy who wants to be killed," Lord Tybar called to the idlers. "No corpses to-day?" He let in the clutch. "Good-by, Sabre. Good-by, good-by." He waved his hand airily. The big car slid importantly up the street.

Sabre watched them pass out of sight. As the car turned out of The Precincts into High Street—a nasty corner—Lord Tybar, alone of the three, one hand on the steering wheel, half turned in his seat and twirled the silver-grey bowler in gay farewell.

Or mockery?

X

Through the day Sabre's thoughts, as a man sorting through many documents and coming upon and retaining one, fined down towards a picture of himself alone with Nona—alone with her, watching her beautiful face—and saying to her: "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona."

Fined down towards this picture, sifting the documents.

He thought, "Tybar—Tybar.—They're just alike in their way of saying things, Nona and Tybar. That bantering way they talk when they're together—when they're together. Tybar does, whoever he's with. Not Nona. Not with me. But with Tybar. She plays up to him when they're together. And he plays up to her. Everybody says how amusing they are. They're perfectly suited. They look so dashed handsome, the pair of them. And always that bantering talk. Nona chose deliberately between Tybar and me. I know she did. She loved me, till he came along. It's old. Ten years old. I can look at it. She chose deliberately. I can see her choosing: 'Tybar or Marko?—oh, dash it, Tybar.' And she chose right. She's just his mate. He's just her mate. They're a pair. That bantering, airy way of theirs together. That's just characteristic of the oneness of their characters. I couldn't put up that bantering sort of stuff. I never could. I'm a jolly sight too serious. And Nona knew it. She used to laugh at me about it. She still does. 'You puzzle, don't you, Marko?' she said this very morning."

He thought, "No, that wasn't laughing at me. Not that. No, it wasn't. Not that—nor any of it. What did she mean when she said 'There!' like that when she gave me her hand when she first came in? And took off her glove first. What did she mean when she said she had to come? 'Well, I had to come,' she said.—What did she mean when she said she was flotsam?—Flotsam! Why? Made me angry in my voice when I asked her. I said, 'How can you be flotsam?' And how the devil can she?—Nona, with Tybar, flotsam? But she said it. I said, 'How can you be flotsam, the life you've—taken?' I didn't mean to say 'taken' like that. I meant to have said 'the life you've got, you live.' But I meant taken, chosen. She did take it, deliberately. She chose between us. I might almost have heard her choose 'Marko or Tybar? Oh, dash it—Tybar.' I never reproached her, not by a look. I saw her point of view. My infernal failing, even then. Not by a look I ever reproached her. I thought I'd forgotten it, absolutely. But I haven't. It came out in that moment that I haven't. 'The life you've—taken!' I meant it to sting. Damn me, it did sting. That look she gave! As if I had struck her.—What rot! How could it sting her? How could she mind? Only if she regretted.—Is it likely?"

He thought, "But is she happy? Is it all what it appears between them? That remark she made to that woman and the extraordinary way she said it. 'You never forget you're married, do you?' Amazing thing to say, the way she said it. What did she mean? And that woman. She said something like, 'Nor you, do you?' and looked at me and then at Tybar. And Tybar looked—at Nona, at me, as if he'd got some joke, some mock...."

He thought, "What rot! She chose. She knew he was her sort. She knew I wasn't. She chose deliberately...."

Clearly, as it were yesterday, he remembered the day she had declared to him her choice. In the Cathedral cloisters. Walking together. And suddenly, in the midst of indifferent things, she told him, "I say, Marko, I'm going to marry Lord Tybar."

And his reply, the model of indifference. "Are you, Nona?"

Nothing else said of it between them. There would certainly have been more discussion if she had said she was going to buy a packet of hairpins. And his thought had immediately been, not this nor that nor the other of a hundred thoughts proper to a blow so stunning, but merely and immediately and precisely that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because he projected marriage with Nona, he had that very morning rejected settling down. He was not to marry her; therefore, yes, he would settle down. Amazing. He had not realised how amazing till now.

And catastrophic. Not till now had he realised to what catastrophe he then had plunged. He thought, "The fact was Nona touched things in me that helped me. Without her I just shut down—I just go about—longing, longing, and all shut up, day after day, year after year—all shut up. And now there's this—she's come back like this—"

He came upon the picture of himself alone with Nona—alone with her watching her beautiful face—and saying to her, "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona. Explain 'There!' with your glove off. Explain 'Flotsam.' Explain 'Well, I had to come.' Explain them, Nona—for God's sake."



CHAPTER V

I

But it was October before he asked her to explain them. The Tybars, as he learnt when next he met her, a week after her visit to the office, were only at Northrepps for a breathing space after their foreign tour. Through the summer they were going the usual social round, ending in Scotland. Back in October for the shooting, and wintering there through the hunting season.

So she told him; and he thought while she was speaking, "All right. I'll accept that. That helps to stop me asking her. If an opportunity occurs before she goes I'll ask her. I must. But if it doesn't occur I'll accept that. I won't make an opportunity."

It did not occur, and he abode by his resolution. He met her once or twice, always in other company. And she was always then particularly gay, particularly airy, particularly bantering. But answering her banter he once caught an expression behind her airiness. He thought, "It is a shield"; and he turned away abruptly from her. He could not bear it.

This was on the occasion of a little dinner party at Northrepps to which he had come with Mabel; Major Hopscotch Millet and one or two others were among the guests. Major Millet, who had been in particularly hopscotch, Ri—te O! form throughout the evening, was walking back, but Mabel invited him to accompany them in the ancient village fly. "Ri—te O!" said Major Millet with enormous enthusiasm.

Nona came with them to the door on their departure. Sabre was last down the steps. "Well, I shan't see you again till October," she said.

"No, till October." He no more than touched her hand and turned away. He had kept his resolution.

She was close behind him. He heard her give the tiniest little catch at her breath. She said, "Shall I write to you, Marko?"

He turned towards her. She was smiling as though it was a chaffing remark she had made. Her shield!

And he answered her from behind his own shield, "Oh, well, I'm bad at letters, you know."

But their eyes met with no shields before them; and she was wounded, for he just caught her voice as he went down the steps, "Oh, Marko, do write to me!"

The Ri—te O voice of the Hopscotch. "Come on, Sabre, my boy! Come on! Come on!"

He got into the cab. Major Millet had taken the seat next Mabel. "Ri—te O, Cabby!" the Hopscotch hailed.

As the horse turned with the staggering motions proper to its burden of years and infirmity, Mabel inquired, "What was Lady Tybar talking to you about all that time?"

He said, "Oh, just saying good-by."

But he was thinking, "That's a fourth question: Why did you say, 'Oh, Marko, do write to me'? Or was that the answer to the other questions, although I never asked them?"

II

He did not write to her. But in October a ridiculous incident impelled afresh the urgent desire to ask her the questions: an incident no less absurd than the fact that in October Low Jinks knocked her knee.

Mabel spent two months of the summer on visits to friends. In August she was with her own people on their annual holiday at Buxton. There Sabre, who had a fortnight, joined her. It happened to be the fortnight of the croquet tournament, and it happened that Major Millet was also in Buxton. Curiously enough he had also been at Bournemouth, whence Mabel had just come from cousins, and they had played much croquet there together. It was projected as great fun to enter the Buxton tournament in partnership, and Sabre did not see a great deal of Mabel.

It was late September when they resumed life together at Penny Green. In their absence the light railway linking up the Garden Home with Tidborough and Chovensbury had been opened with enormous excitement and celebration; and Mabel became at once immersed in paying calls and joining the activities of the new and intensely active community.

Then Low Jinks knocked her knee.

The knee swelled and for two days Low Jinks had to keep her leg on a chair. It greatly annoyed Mabel to see Low Jinks sitting in the kitchen with her leg "stuck out on a chair." She told Sabre it was extraordinary how "that class of person" always got in such a horrible state from the most ridiculous trifles. "I suppose I knock my knee a dozen times a week, but my knee doesn't swell up and get disgusting. You're always reading in the paper about common people getting stung by wasps, or getting a scratch from a nail, and dying the next day. They must be in a horrible state. It always makes me feel quite sick."

Sabre laughed. "Well, I expect poor old Low Jinks feels pretty sick too."

"She enjoys it."

"What, sitting there with a knee like a muffin? I had a look at her just now. Don't you think she might have one of those magazines to read? She looks pretty sorry for herself."

Signs of "flying up." "You haven't given her a magazine, have you?"

"No—I haven't. But I told her I would after dinner."

"If you don't mind you won't. Rebecca has plenty to occupy her time. She can perfectly well clean the silver and things like that, and she has her sewing. She has upset the house quite enough with her leg stuck out on a chair all day without reading magazines."

And then in the extraordinary way in which discussions between them were suddenly lifted by Mabel on to unsuspected grievances against him, Sabre suddenly found himself confronted with, "You know how she hurt her knee, I suppose?"

He knew the tone. "No. My fault, was it?"

"Yes. As it happens, it was your fault—to do with you."

"Good lord! However did I manage to hurt Low Jinks's knee?"

"She did it bringing in your bicycle."

He thought, "Now what on earth is this leading up to?" During the weeks of his separation from Mabel, thinking often of Nona, he had caused himself to think from her to Mabel. His reasoning and reasonable habit of mind had made him, finding extraordinary rest in thought of Nona, accuse himself for finding none in thought of Mabel. She was his wife; he never could get away from the poignancy of that phrase. His wife—his responsibility towards her—the old thought, eight years old, of all she had given up in exchanging her own life for his life—and what was she getting? He set himself, on their reunion, always to remember the advantage he had over her: that he could reason out her attitude towards things; that she could not,—neither his attitude nor, what was more, her own.

Now. What was this leading up to? "She did it bringing in your bicycle." Puzzling sometimes over passages with Mabel that with mysterious and surprising suddenness had plunged into scenes, he had whimsically envisaged how he had been, as it were, led blindfolded to the edge of a precipice, and then, whizz! sent flying over on to the angry crags below.

Bantering protest sometimes averted the disaster. "Well, come now, Mabel, that's not my fault. That was your idea, making Low Jinks come out and meet me every evening as if the old bike was a foam-flecked steed. Wasn't it now?"

"Yes, but not in the dark."

Mysterious manoeuvring! But he felt he was approaching the edge. "In the dark?"

"Yes, not in the dark. What I mean is, I really cannot imagine why you must keep up your riding all through the winter. It was different when there was no other way. Now the railway is running I simply cannot imagine why you don't use it."

"Well, that's easy—because I like the ride."

"You can't possibly like riding back on these pitch dark nights, cold and often wet. That's absurd."

"Well, I like it a jolly sight better than fugging up in those carriages with all that gassing crowd of Garden Home fussers."

And immediately, whizz! he went over the edge.

"That's just it!" Mabel said. And he thought, "Ah!"

"That's just it. And of course you laugh. Why you can't be friendly with people like other men, I never can imagine. There're heaps of the nicest people up at the Garden Home, but from the first you've set yourself against them. Why you never like to make friends like other people!"

He did not answer.

They were at dinner. She made an elaborate business of reaching for the salt. "If you ask me, it's because you don't think they're good enough for you."

He thought, "That's to rouse me. I'm dashed if I'm going to be roused." He thought, "It's getting the devil, this. There's never a subject we start but we work up to something like this. We work on one another like acid on acid. In a minute she'll have another go at it, and then I shall fly off, and then there we'll be. It's my fault. She doesn't think out these things like I do. She just says what comes into her head, whereas I know perfectly well where we're driving to, so I'm really responsible. I rile her. I either rile her by saying something in trying not to fly off, or else I let myself go, and off I fly, and we're at it. Acid on acid. It's getting the devil, this. But I'm dashed if I'll fly off. It's up to me."

He tried in his mind for some matter that would change the subject. Extraordinary how hard it was to find a new topic when some other infernal thing hung in the air. It was like, in a nightmare, trying with leaden limbs to crawl away from danger.

And then she began:

She resumed precisely at the point where she had left off. While his mind had journeyed in review all around and about the relations between them, her mind had remained cumbrously at the thought of her last words. There, he told himself, was the whole difference between them. He was intellectually infinitely more agile (he did not put it higher than that) than she. She could not get away from things as he could. They remained in her mind and rankled there. To get impatient with her, to proceed from impatience to loss of temper, was flatly as cruel as to permit impatience and anger with one bedridden and therefore unable to join in robust exercises. He thought, "I'll not do it."

She said, actually repeating her last words, "Yes, if you ask me, it's because you don't think they're good enough for you. As it happens, there're all sorts of particularly nice men up there, only you never take the trouble to know them. And clever—the only thing you pretend to judge by; though what you can find clever in Mr. Fargus or those Perches goodness only knows. There're all sorts of Societies and Circles and Meetings up there that I should have thought were just what would have attracted you. But, no. You prefer that pottering Mr. Fargus with his childish riddles and even that young Perch without spirit enough to go half a yard without that everlasting old mother of his—"

It was longer and fiercer than he had expected. He intercepted. "I say, Mabel, what's the point of all this, exactly?"

"The point is that it makes it rather hard for me, the way you go on. I've made many, many friends up at the Garden Home. Do you suppose it doesn't seem funny to them that my husband is never to be seen, never comes near the place, never meets their husbands? Of course they must think it funny. I know I feel it very awkward."

He thought, "Girding! Sneering! Can't I get out of this?" Then he thought, "Dash it, man, it's only just her way. What is there in it?" He said, "Yes, but look here, Mabel, we started at my riding home in the dark—or rather at old Low Jinks's muffin knee. Let's work out the trouble about that."

"That's what I'm talking about. I think it's extraordinary of you to go riding by yourself all through the winter just to avoid people I'd like you to be friendly with. I ask you not to and you call it 'fugging up in railway carriages with them.' That was the elegant expression you used."

"Elegant." That was the word Nona had said she was going to have for her own.

He sat up in his chair. He was glad he had kept his mind detached all through this business. He was going to make an effort.

He said, "Well, listen, Mabel. I'll explain. This is me explaining. Behind this fork. I see what you mean. Perfectly well. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely rotten at meeting new people. I always have been. I never seem to have any conversation. They always think I'm just a fool—which, as a matter of fact, I always feel in a crowd. But apart from that. You've no idea how much I enjoy the bike ride. I wouldn't give it up for anything. I've tried to explain to you sometimes. It gets me away from things, and I like getting away from things. I feel—it's hard to explain a stupid thing like this—I feel as if I were lifted out of things and able to look at things from a sort of other-world point of view. It's jolly. Don't you remember I suggested to you, oh, years ago, when we were first—when we first came here, suggested you might ride in part of the way with me of a morning, and told you the idea of the thing? You didn't quite understand it—"

She pushed back her chair. "I don't understand it now," she said.

His eyes had been shining as they shone when he was interested or eager. He threw himself back in his seat. "Oh, well!"

She got up. She said in a very loud, very thin and edged voice, the little constrictions on either side of her nose extraordinarily deep:

"I never can understand any of your ideas, except that no one else ever seems to have them. Except your Fargus friends perhaps. I should keep them for them if I were you. Anyway, all I wanted to say I've said. All I wanted to say was that, if you persist in riding home in the dark, I really cannot allow Rebecca to go out and bring in your bicycle. After this leg of hers is over, if it ever is over, I really cannot allow it any more. That's all I wanted to say."

She left the room.

He began to fumble with extraordinary intensity in the pocket of his dinner jacket for his cigarette case. He could feel it, but his fingers seemed all thumbs. He got it out and it slipped through his fingers on to the table. His hands were shaking.



CHAPTER VI

I

A draper occupied the premises opposite Fortune, East and Sabre's. On the following afternoon, just before five o'clock, Sabre saw Nona alight from her car and go into the draper's. He put on his hat and coat and descended into the street. As he crossed the road she came out.

"Hullo, Marko!"

"Hullo. Well, there's evidently one woman in the world who can get out of a draper's in under an hour. You haven't been in a minute."

"Did you see me go in? As a matter of fact I didn't want anything. As a matter of fact, I was making up my mind—"

"Whether to come in and see me?"

She nodded.

"What about having some tea somewhere?"

"I think that's a good idea."

He suggested the Cloister Tea Rooms. She spoke to the chauffeur and accompanied him.

II

The Cloister Tea Rooms were above a pastry cook's on the first floor of one of the old houses in The Precincts. The irregularly shaped room provided several secluded: tables, and they took one in a remote corner. But their conversation would have suffered nothing in a more central and neighboured situation. Nona began some account of her summer visitations. Sabre spoke a little of local businesses: had she seen the new railway? Had he been round the Garden Home since her return? But the subjects were but skirmishers thrown out before dense armies of thoughts that massed behind; met, and trifled, and rode away. When pretence of dragging out the meal could no longer be maintained, Nona looked at her watch. "Well, I must be getting back. We haven't had a particularly enormous tea, but the chauffeur's had none."

Sabre said, "Yes, let's get out of this." It was as though the thing had been a strain.

He put her into the car. She was so very, very quiet. He said, "I've half a mind to drive up with you. I'd like a ride, and a walk back."

She said the car could run him back, or take him straight over to Penny Green. "Yes, come along up, Marko. They have rather fun in the billiard room after tea."

He got in and she shared with him the heavy fur rug. "Not that I want fun in the billiard room," he said.

She asked him lightly, "Pray what can we provide for you, then?"

"I just want to drive up with you."

III

It was only three miles to Northrepps. It seemed to Sabre an incredibly short time before a turn in the road fronted them with the park gates. And they had not spoken a word! He said, "By Jove, this car travels! I'll get down at the gates, Nona. I'm not coming in. I want the walk back."

She made no attempt to dissuade him. She leaned forward and called to the chauffeur; but as the car began to slow down, she gave a little catch of emotion and said, "Well, we have had a chatty drive. You'd better change your mind and come along up, Marko."

He disengaged the rug from about him. "No, I think I'll get out here." He turned towards her. "Look here, Nona. Get out here and walk up." He echoed the little sound of feeling she had given, pretended laughter. "It will do you good after that enormous tea."

She said something about the tea being too enormous for exertion.

The car drew up. He got out and turned to her. "Look here. Please do."

He saw the colour fade away upon her face. "What for?"

"To talk." It was all he could say.

She put away the rug and gave him her hand. Warm, and she said, "How dreadfully cold your hand is! Go on and get your tea, Jeffries. I'm going to walk up."

The man touched his cap. The car slid away and left them.

IV

They were within the gates. It had been a dull day. Evening stood mistily far up the long avenue of the drive and in the distances about the park on either hand. Among October's massing leaves, a small disquiet stirred. The leaves banked orderly between their parent trunks. Sabre noticed as a curious thing how, when they stirred, they only trembled in their massed formations, not broke their ranks, as if some live thing ran beneath them.

He said, "Do you know what this seems to me? It seems as though it was only yesterday, or this morning, that you came to see me at the office and we talked. Well, I want it to be only yesterday. I want to go on from there."

She said, "Yes."

He hardly could hear the word. He looked at her. She was as tall as he. Not least of the contributions to her beauty in his eyes was the slim grace of her stature. But her face was averted; and he wanted most terribly to see her face. "Stand a minute and look at me, Nona." He touched her arm. "I want to see your face."

She turned towards him and raised her eyes to his eyes. "Oh, what is it you want to say, Marko?"

There was that which glistened upon her lower lids; and about her mouth were trembling movements; and in her throat a pulse beating.

He said, "It's you I want to say something. I want you to explain some things. Some things you said. Nona, when you came into my room that day and shook hands you said, 'There!' when you gave me your hand. You took off your glove and said, 'There!' I want to know why you said 'There!' And you said, 'Well, I had to come.' And you said you were flotsam. And that night—when we'd been up to you—you said, 'Oh, Marko, do write to me.' I want you to explain what you meant."

She said, "Oh, how can you remember?"

He answered, "Because I remember, you must explain."

"Please let me sit down, Marko." She faltered a little laugh. "I can explain better sitting down."

A felled trunk had been placed against the trees facing towards the parkland. They went to it and he sat beside her. She sat upright but bending forward a little over her crossed knees, her hands clasped on them, looking before her across the park.

"No, you must look at me," he said.

She very slowly turned her body towards him. He thought her most beautiful and the expression of her beautiful face was most terrible to him in all his emotions.

V

She spoke very slowly; almost with a perceptible pause between each word. She said, "Well, I'll tell you. I said 'flotsam', didn't I? If I explain that—you know what flotsam is, Marko. Have you ever looked it up in the dictionary? The dictionary says it terribly. 'Goods shipwrecked and found floating on the sea.' I'm twenty-eight, Marko. I suppose that's not really very old. It seems a terrible age to me. You see, you judge age by what you are in contrast with what you were. If you're very happy I think it can't matter how old you are. If you look back to when you were happy and then come to the now when you're not, it seems a most terrible and tremendous gulf—and you see yourself just floating—drifting farther and farther away from the happy years and just being taken along, taken along, to God knows where, God knows to what." She put out the palms of her hands towards where misty evening banked sombrely across the park. "That's very frightening, Marko."

The live thing ran beneath the leaves banked at their feet. A stronger gust came in the air. A scattering of leaves clustered together and moved with sudden agitation across the sward before them; paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques, scattered upon the breeze.

"Those leaves!" she said. And as if she had not made the interjection she went on, "Most awfully frightening. Well, all the time there was you, Marko. You were always different from anybody I ever knew. Long ago I used to chaff you because you were so different. In those two years when we were away it got awful. In those two years I knew I was flotsam. One day—in India—I went and looked at it in the little dictionary in my writing case, and I knew I was. Do you know what I did? I crossed out flotsam in the dictionary and wrote Nona. There it was, and it was the most exact thing—'Nona: goods shipwrecked and found floating in the sea.' I meant to have torn out the page. I forgot. I left it there and Tony saw it."

Sabre said, "What did he say?" In all she had told him there was something omitted. He knew that his question approached the missing quantity. But she did not answer it.

She went on, "Well, there was you. And I began to want you most awfully. You were always such a dear, slow person; and I wanted that most awfully. You were so steady and good and you had such quiet old ideas about duty and rightness and things, and you thought about things so, and I wanted that most frightfully. You see, I'd known you all my life—well, that's how it was, Marko. That explains all the things you asked. I said 'There'; and I said I had to come; because I'd wanted it so much, so long. And I wanted you to write to me because I did want to go on having the help I had from you—"

He had desired her to look at him, but it was he who had turned away. He sat with his head between his hands, his elbows on his knees.

She repeated, with rather a plaintive note, as though in his pose she saw some pain she had caused him, "You see, I had known you all my life, Marko—"

He said, still looking upon the ground between his feet, "But you haven't explained anything. You've only told me. You haven't explained why."

She said with astounding simplicity, "Well, you see, Marko, I made a mistake. I made a most frightful mistake. I chose. I chose wrong. I ought to have married you, Marko."

And his words were a groan. "Nona—Nona—"



CHAPTER VII

I

He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.

He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden unbridling of his bridled passions, to grapple his mind back from its wild and passionate desires and from its amazed coursings upon the immense prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments, hopes, dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks upon the hunter's gaze, amazingly awarded from the hill, savannas boundless, new, unpathed,—from these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty, obligation, rectitude. He had not left them. But for that cry of her name wrung from him by sudden application of pain against whose shock he was not steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable disclosure. This which he now knew, these violent passions which now he felt, but lit for him more whitely the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried consciously to see his life and Mabel's from Mabel's point of view, now, when his mind threatened disloyalty to her, he must try. And would! The old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side, acted never so strongly upon him as when unkindness appeared to lie in his own attitude. Unkindness was unfairness and unfairness was above all qualities the quality he could not tolerate. And here was unfairness, open, monstrous, dishonourable.

Mabel should not feel it.

But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in his ears, "You have struck your tents. You are upon the march."

II

He approached the town. The school lay in this quarter and his way ran through its playing fields and its buildings. Nature in her moods much fashioned his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode his daily journey on his bicycle. He now carried his thoughts into her mood that stood about him.

Nature was to him in October, and not in spring, poignantly suggestive, deeply mysterious, in her intense and visible occupation. She was enormously busy; but she was serenely busy. She was stripping her house of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite certitude of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable assurance for spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again; and burst again,—in stout affairs of outposts in sheltered banks and secret nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and daffodil and primrose; in multitudinous clamour of all her buds in May; and last in her resistless tide and flood and avalanche of beauty to triumph and possession.

That was October's voice to him; that he apprehended and tingled to it, as the essence of its strange, heavy odours; secret of its veiling mists; whisper of its moisture-laden airs; song of its swollen ditches, brooks and runnels. It was not "Take down. It is done." It was "Take down. It is beginning."

Mankind, frail parasite of doubt, seeks ever for a sign, conceives no certainty but the enormous certitude of uncertainty. A sign! In death: "Take down, then; but leave me this—and this—for memory. Perhaps—who knows?—it may be true.... But leave me this for memory." In promise: "So be it, then—but give me some pledge, some proof, some sign." Not thus October. October spoke to Sabre of Nature's sublime imperviousness to doubt; of her enormous certainty, old as creation, based in the sure foundations of the world. "Take down. It is beginning."

Sabre used to think, "It gets you—terrifically. It's stupendous. It's too big to bear." He had this thought out of October: "You can't, can't walk along lanes or in woods in October and see all this mysterious business going on without knowing perfectly well that this astounding certainty must apply equally to human life. I'd wish the death of any one I loved to be in early autumn. No one can possibly doubt in early autumn. In winter, perhaps; and in spring and in summer you can know, cynically, it will pass. But in October—no. Impossible then. And not only death, Life. Life as one lives it. You can't, can't feel in autumn that in the lowest depths there is lower yet. You only can feel, know, that the thing will break, that there's an uplift at the bottom of it all. There must be."

III

Take down: it is beginning. The spirit and the message of the season (as they communicated themselves to him) began, as opiate among enfevered senses, to steal about his thoughts. Had anything happened? His feeling was rather that he was at the beginning of something; or at the end of something, which was the same thing. The place whereon he stood entered into his thoughts. He had left the main road and was skirting through the school precincts. He was crossing The Strip, historic sward whereon were played the First XV football matches. Impossible to be upon The Strip without peopling it again with the tremendous battles that had been here, the giants of football who here had made their fame and the school's fame; the crowded, tumultuous touch lines; the silent, tremendous combat in between. Memories came to him of his own two seasons in the XV; his own name from a thousand throats upon the wintry air. His muscles tautened as again he fought some certain of those enormous moments when the whole of life was bound up solely in the unspeakable necessity to win. Astounding trick of thought from what beset him! He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something vast, dark, threatening, unfathomable.

IV

Down the steep hill flanked by masters' houses. Twilight merging now into darkness. Boys passing in and out of the gateways. Past Telfer's which had been his own house. All this youth was preparing for life; all these houses eternally, generation after generation, pouring boys out into life as at Shotley iron foundry he had seen molten metal poured out of a cauldron. And every boy, poured out, imagined he was going to live his own life. O hapless delusion! Lo, as the same moulds awaited and confined the metal, so the same moulds awaited and confined the living stuff. Mysterious conventions, laws, labours; imperceptibly receiving; implacably binding and shaping. The last day he had come down the steps of Telfer's—jumped down—how distinctly he remembered it! It was his own life he was coming down, eagerly jumping down, into.—Well, here he was, passing those very steps, and whose life was he living? Mabel's? Old Fortune's? And to what end?

V

Whose life was Nona living?

He had asked her, "Tell me about you and Tybar."

With pitiable gentleness of voice she had approached that quantity which had been missing from her first statement of her position. And she had done tribute to her husband's parts with generosity, nay with pride. "Tony does everything better than any one else." She had said it on that occasion of their first reencounter; its burthen had been the opening of her recital of what else she had for him.

"Marko, I think Tony's the most wonderful person that ever was. He does everything that men do and he does everything best. And everybody admires him and everybody likes him. You've no idea. You've no idea how he wins everybody he meets. People will do anything for him. They love him. Well, you've only got to look at him, haven't you? Or hear him talk? I think there's never been any one so utterly captivating as Tony is to look at and to hear."

Most engagingly, with such words, she had presented him: one that passed through life airily, exquisitely; much fairy-gifted at his cradle with gifts of beauty, charm, preeminence in all he touched; knowing no care, knowing no difficulty, knowing no obstacle, or danger, or fear, or illness, or fatigue, or anything in life but gay and singing things, which touching, he made more bright, more tuneful yet; meeting no one, of whatever age or degree, but his charm was to that age or degree exactly touched; captivating all, leading all, by all desired in leadership. Fortune's darling!

"And, Marko," she at last had come to. "And Marko—this is the word—graceless. Utterly, utterly graceless. Without heart, Marko, without conscience, without morals, without the smallest scrap of an approach to any moral principle. Marko, that's an awful, a wicked, an abominable thing for a wife to say of her husband. But he wouldn't mind a bit my telling you. Not a bit. He'd love it. He'd laugh. He'd utterly love to know he had stung me so much. And he'd utterly love to know he'd driven me to tell you. He'd think—he'd love like anything to drive me to do awful things. He's tried—especially these two years. He'd love to be able to point a finger at me and laugh and say, 'Ah! Ha-ha! Ah!' You know, he hasn't got any feelings at all—love or hate or anything else; and it simply amuses him beyond anything to arouse feeling in anybody else. There have been women all the time we've been married and he simply amuses himself with them until he's tired of them, and until the next one takes his fancy, and he does it quite openly before me, in my house, and tells me what I can't see before my own eyes just for the love of seeing the suffering it gives me. You saw that Mrs. Winfred. He's done with her now. And he's as shameless about me with them as he is about them with me. And what he loves above all is the way I take it; and I can take it in no other way. You see I won't, I simply will not, Marko, let these women of his see—or let any one in the world suspect—that I—that I suffer. So when we are together before people I keep up the gay way we always show together. He loves it; it's delicious to him, because it's a game played over the torture underneath. And I won't do any other way, Marko. I will keep my face to the world—I won't have any one pity me."

"I pity you," he had said.

"Ah, you...."

VI

And he was suddenly shot into an encounter of extraordinary incongruity with his thoughts and of extraordinary intensity. A voice accosted him. He was astounded, as if suddenly awakened out of heavy sleep, to see to where he had come. He was in the narrow old ways of Tidborough Old Town, approaching The Precincts, by the ancient Corn Exchange. A keen-looking young man, particularly well set up and wearing nice tweeds, was accosting him. Sabre recognised Otway, captain and adjutant of the depot, up at the barracks, of the county regiment, one of the crack regiments, famous as "The Pinks."

Otway said, "Hullo, Sabre. How goes it? Are you going to this show to-morrow?"

He was pointing with his stick to a poster displayed against the Corn Exchange. Sabre read it. It announced that Field Marshal Lord Roberts was speaking there, under the auspices of the National Service League, on Home Defence—a Citizen Army.

"I hadn't thought about going," Sabre said. He wanted to get away.

Otway was staring at the poster as though he had never seen it before; but he had been staring at it when Sabre came along the street. "You ought to," Otway said. "You ought to hear old Bobs. Of course the little chap's all wrong."

He seemed to be talking to himself, staring at the poster, more than to Sabre. Sabre, despite his preoccupation, was surprised. "All wrong? Good lord, I should have thought you of all people—" And immediately a torrent of Otway was let loose upon him, bursting into his thoughts like a stone chucked through a study window.

Otway spun around in his keen, quick way to face him. "All wrong in the way he's putting his case, I mean. All these National Service chaps are. Home defence they talk about, nothing but Home Defence. It's like chucking sawdust into a fire—the fire being all the bloody fools who are opposed to military training. Any fool can knock the bottom out of this Home Defence business. The Blue Water fools are champions at it. They say the only defence against invasion is the Navy and that half a million spent on the Navy is worth untold millions chucked away on this 'Nation in Arms' shout. And they're damn right."

"Well, then?" said Sabre. "What's the argument? What's the harm in knocking the bottom out of—this?" he nodded towards the poster.

Otway spoke with astonishing intensity. "Why, good God alive, man, don't you see, we do want a nation in arms; we want it like hell. But we don't want it for here, at home; we want it to fight on the Continent. That's where we've got to fight,—out there. And that's where we're going to fight before we're many years older."

In his intensity he had extended his left hand and was beating his points into it with the handle of his stick. "See that?"

Sabre was not in the mood to see anything. He only wanted to be away.

"No, I'm dashed if I do. What are we going to fight on the Continent for—supposing we ever do have to fight anywhere?"

The stick hammered away again. "Because we've got obligations there. We've got to defend Belgium, for one. And if we hadn't—if we hadn't any obligations we'd pretty soon, we'd damn soon find them as soon as ever Germany breaks loose. That's what these National Service Johnnies ought to tell the people, that's what Bobs ought to tell them, that's what these blasted politicians ought to tell them: you don't want National Service to defend your perishing homes. The Navy's going to do that. You want it like hell because you've got to defend your lives—out there." He waved his stick towards "out there." "My God!" he said. He was consumed with the intensity of his own emotions. "My God!"

Despite himself, Sabre was impressed. The man would have impressed anybody. His eyes were extraordinarily penetrating. There actually were tiny little points of perspiration about his nose.

"I never thought about that," Sabre said doubtfully. "I never thought there were any obligations. I doubt any member of the Government would admit there were any."

"I know damn well they wouldn't," Otway declared. "And they'd be helped to deny it, or to evade it, by the howl of laughter there'd be in the Commons if any one had the guts to get up and ask if we had any obligations. There's no joke goes down like that sort of joke. Well—" His manner changed. He tucked his stick under his arm and took out a silver cigarette case. "Cigarette? Well—they'll laugh the other side of their chuckle heads one of these days."

Sabre took a cigarette. "You're pretty sure there's going to be a war, aren't you?"

The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. "Sure? My God, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure—you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields. We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes. Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'—not 'if we fight you'—'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows—every soldier who's keen—that it's going to be out there. In Europe." He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match. "Sabre, why the hell aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their shores when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their shores? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these bloody politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives? Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be damned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-snatcher all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times—that's what you're going to live and do in lean. Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire."