'No, please. It must be you. There's a reason.... Well, if you can't hear my confession, may I tell you something in private, and get your advice?'

'Of course,' I said.

'Now, at once, if you've time.... It's very urgent.'

I had time, and we went into the vestry.

She sat down, and I waited for her to speak. She wasn't nervous, or embarrassed, as most people are in these interviews. Two things occurred to me about her; one was that she was, in a way, too far through, too mentally agitated, to be embarrassed; the other was that she was, quite unconsciously, posing a little, behaving as the heroine of one of her mother's novels might have behaved. One knows the situation in fiction—the desperate girl appealing out of her misery to the Christian priest for help. So many women have this touch of melodrama, this sense of a situation.... I believed that she was, as she sat there, in these two conditions simultaneously, exactly as I was simultaneously analysing her and wanting to be of what service I could.

She leant forward across the vestry table, locking and unlocking her hands.

'This is quite private, isn't it,' she said. 'As private as if...?'

'Quite,' I told her.

She drew a long, shivering breath, and leant her forehead on her clasped hands.

'You know,' she said, so low that I had to bend forward to catch it, 'what people are saying—what my people suspect about—about Oliver Hobart's death.'

'Yes, I know.'

'Well—it wasn't Mr. Gideon.'

'You know that?' I said quickly. And a great relief flooded me. I hadn't known, until that moment, because I had driven it under, how large a part of my brain believed that Gideon had perhaps done this thing.

'Yes,' she whispered. 'I know it ... Because I know—I know—who did it.'

In that moment I felt that I knew too, and that Gideon knew, and that I ought to have guessed all along.

I said nothing, but waited for the girl's next word, if she had a next word to say. It wasn't for me to question her.

And then, quite suddenly, she gave a little moan of misery and broke into passionate tears.

I waited for a moment, then I got up and poured her out a glass of water. It must have been pretty bad for her. It must have been pretty bad all this time, I thought, knowing this thing about her sister.

She drank the water, and became quieter.

'Do you want to tell me any more?' I asked her, presently.

'Oh, I do, I do. But it's so difficult ... I don't know how to tell you.... Oh, God ... It was I that killed him!'

'Yes?' I said, after a moment, gently, and without apparent surprise. One learns in parish work not to start, however much one may be startled. I merely added a legitimate inquiry. 'Why was that?'

She gulped. 'I want to tell you everything. I want to.'

I was sure she did. She had reached the familiar pouring-out stage. It was obviously going to be a relief to her to spread herself on the subject. I am pretty well used to being told everything, and at times a good deal more, and have learnt to discount much of it. I looked away from her and prepared to listen, and to give my mind to sifting, if I could, the fact from the fancy in her story. This is a special art, and one which all parsons do well to learn. I have heard my vicar on the subject of women's confessions.

'Women—women. Some of them will invent any crime—give themselves away with both hands—merely to make themselves interesting. Poor things, they don't realise how tedious sin is. One has to be on one's guard the whole time, with that kind.'

I deduced that Clare Potter might possibly be that kind. So I listened carefully, at first neither believing nor disbelieving.

'It's difficult to tell you,' she began, in a pathetic, unsteady voice. 'It hurts, rather ...'

'No, I think not,' I corrected her. 'It's a relief, isn't it?'

She stared at me for a moment, then went on, 'Yes, I want to tell. But it hurts, all the same.'

I let her have it her own way; I couldn't press the point. She really thought it did hurt. I perceived that she had, like so many people, a confused mind.

'Go on,' I said.

'I must begin a long way back.... You see, before Oliver fell in love with Jane, he ... he cared a little for me. He really did, Mr. Juke. And he made me care for him.' Her voice dropped to a whisper.

This was truth. I felt no doubt as to that.

'Then ... then Jane came, and took him away from me. He fell in love with her ... I thought my heart would break.'

I didn't protest against the phrase, or ask her to explain it, because she was unhappy. But I wish people wouldn't use it, because I don't know, and they don't know, what they mean by it. 'I thought I should be very unhappy,' is that the meaning? No, because they are already that. 'I thought my heart—the physical organ—would be injuriously affected to the point of rupture.' No; I do not believe that is what they mean. Frankly, I do not know. There should be a dictionary of the phrases in common use.

However, it would have been pedantic and unkind to ask Miss Potter, who could probably explain no phrases, to explain this.

She went on, crying a little again.

'I couldn't stop caring for him all at once. How could I? I suppose you'll despise me, Mr. Juke, but I just couldn't help going on loving him. It's once and for ever with me. Oh, I expect you think it was shameful of me!'

'Shameful? To love? No, why? It's human nature. You had bad luck, that's all.'

'Oh, I did.... Well, there it was, you see. He was married to Jane, and I cared for him so much that I could hardly bear to go to the house and see them together.... Oh, it wasn't my fault; he made me care, indeed he did. I'd never have begun for myself, I'm not that sort of girl, I never was, I know some girls do it, but I never could have. I suppose I'm too proud or something.'

She paused, but I made no comment. I never comment on the pride of which I am so often informed by those who possess it.

She resumed, 'Well, it went on and on, and I didn't seem to get to feel any better about it. And I hated Jane. Oh, I know that was wicked, of course.'

As she knew it, I again made no comment.

'And sometimes I think I hated him, when he thought of nothing but her and never at all of me.... Well, sometimes there was trouble between them, because Jane would do things and go about with people he didn't like. And especially Mr. Gideon. We none of us like Mr. Gideon at home, you know; we think he's awful. He's so rude, and has such silly opinions, and is so conceited and unkind. He's been awfully rude to father's papers always. And that horrid article he had in his silly paper about what he called 'Potterite Fiction,' mostly about mother's books—did you read it?'

'Yes. But Gideon didn't write it, you know. It was some one else.'

'Oh, well, it was in his paper, anyhow. And he thought it.... And, anyhow, what are books, to hurt people's feelings about?'

(A laudable sentiment, and one which should be illuminated as a text on the writing table of every reviewer.)

'Oh, of course I know he's a friend of yours,' she added. 'That's really why I came to you.... But we none of us like him at home. And Oliver couldn't stick him. And he begged Jane not to have anything more to do with him, but she would. She wrote in his paper, and she was always seeing him. And Oliver got more and more disgusted about it, and I couldn't bear to see him unhappy.'

'No?' I questioned.

She paused, checked by the interruption. Then, after a moment, she said, 'I suppose you mean I was glad really, because it came between them.... Well, I don't know.... Perhaps I was, then.... Well, wouldn't any one be?'

'Most people,' I agreed. 'Yes?'

She went on a little less fluently, of which I was glad. Fluency and accuracy are a bad pair. I would rather people stumbled and stammered out their stories than poured them.

'And I think he thought—Oliver thought—he began to suspect—that Mr. Gideon was—you know—in love with Jane. And I thought so too. And he thought Jane was careless about not discouraging him, and seeing so much of him and all. But I thought she was worse than that, and encouraged him, and didn't care.... Jane was always dreadfully selfish, you know....'

'And ... that evening?' I prompted her, as she paused.

'Well, that evening,' she shuddered a little, and went on quickly. 'I'd been dining with a friend, and I was to sleep at Jane's. I got there soon after ten, and no one was in, so I went to my room to take my things off. Then I heard Jane come in, with Mr. Gideon. They went upstairs to the drawing-room, and I heard them talking there. My door was a little open, and I heard what they said. And he said ...'

'Perhaps,' I suggested, 'you'd better not tell me what they said, since they thought they were alone. What do you think?'

'Oh, very well. There's no harm. I thought I'd better tell you everything. But as you like.' She was a little disappointed, but picked herself up and continued.

'Well, then I heard Oliver coming upstairs, and he stopped at the drawing-room door for a moment before they saw him, I think, because he didn't speak quite at once. Then he said, "Good evening," and they said, "Hallo," and they all began to be nasty—in their voices, you know. He said he'd obviously come home before he was expected, and then Jane went upstairs, pretending nothing was the matter—Jane never bothers about anything—and I heard Mr. Gideon come up to Oliver and ask him what he meant by that. And they talked just outside my door, and they were very disagreeable, but I suppose you don't want me to tell you what they said, so I won't. Anyhow it wasn't much, only Oliver gave Mr. Gideon to understand he wasn't to come there any more, and Mr. Gideon said he certainly had no intention of doing so. Oh, yes, and he said, "Damn you" rather loud. And then he went downstairs and left the house. I heard the door shut after him, then I came out of my room, and there was Oliver standing at the top of the stairs, looking as if he didn't see anything. He didn't seem to see me, even. I couldn't bear it, he was so white and angry and thinking of nothing but Jane, who wasn't worth thinking about, because she didn't care.... And then ... I lost my head. I think I was mad ... I'd felt awfully queer for a long time.... I couldn't bear it any more, his being unhappy about Jane and not even seeing me. I went up to him and said, "Oliver, I'm glad you've got rid of that horrid man."

'He stared at me and still didn't seem to see me. That somehow made me furious. I said, "Jane's much too fond of him.... She's always with him now.... They spent this evening together, you know, and came home together."

'Then he seemed to wake up, and he looked at me with a look I hadn't ever seen before, and it was as if the world was at an end, because I saw he hated me for saying that. And he said, "Kindly let my affairs and Jane's alone," in a horrible, sharp, cold voice. I couldn't bear it. It seemed to kill something in me; my love for him, perhaps. I went first cold then hot, and I was crazy with anger; I pushed him back out of the way to let me pass—I pushed him suddenly, and so hard that he lost his balance.... Oh, you know the rest.... He was standing at the top of those awful stairs—why are people allowed to make stairs like that?—and he reeled and fell backwards.... Oh, dear, oh, dear, and you know the rest....'

She was sobbing bitterly now.

'Yes, yes,' I said, 'I know the rest,' and I said no more for a time.

I was puzzled. That she had truly repeated what had passed between her and Hobart I believed. But whether she had pushed him, or whether he had lost his own balance, seemed to me still an open question. I had to consider two things—how best to help this girl, and how to get Gideon out of the mess as quickly and as quietly as possible. For both these things I had to get at the truth—if I could.

'Now, look here,' I said presently, 'is this story you've told me wholly true? Did it actually happen precisely like that? Please think for a moment and then tell me.'

But she didn't think, not even for a moment.

'Oh,' she sobbed, 'true! Why should I say it if it wasn't?'

Why indeed? I began to enumerate some possible reasons—an inaccurate habit of mind, a sensational imagination (both these misfortunes being hereditary), an egotistic craving for attention, even unfavourable attention—it might be any of these things, or all. But I hadn't got far before she broke in, 'Oh, God. I've not had a moment's peace since ... I loved him, and I killed him.... I let them think it was an accident.... It was as if I was gagged, I couldn't speak. And after a bit, when it had all settled down, there didn't seem to be any reason why I should say anything.... I never thought, truly I never thought, that they'd ever suspect some one else.... And then, a little while ago, I heard mother saying something, to some one about Mr. Gideon, and last night Katherine Varick came and told Jane people were saying it everywhere. And this morning there was that piece in the Haste. ... Oh! what shall I do?'

'You don't really,' I said, 'feel any doubt about that. Do you?'

She lifted her wet, puckered face and stared at me, and I saw that, for the moment at least, she was not thinking of herself at all, but only of her tragedy and her problem.

'You mean,' she whispered, 'that I must tell ...'

'It's rather obvious, isn't it,' I said gently, because I was horribly sorry for her. 'You must tell the truth, whatever it is.'

'And be tried for murder—or manslaughter? Appear in the docks?' she quavered, her frightened brown eyes large and round.

'I don't think it would come to that. All you have to do is to tell your parents. Your father is responsible for the stuff in the papers, and your mother, I gather, for the spreading of the story personally. Your confession to them would stop that. They would withdraw, retract what they have said, and say publicly that they were mistaken, that the evidence they thought they had, had been proved false. Then it would be generally assumed again that the thing was an accident, and the talk would die down. No one need ever know but your parents and myself. I am bound, and they would choose, not to repeat it to any one.'

'Not to Jane?' she questioned.

'Well, what does Jane think at present? Does she suspect?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. Jane's been rather queer all day.... I've sometimes thought she suspected something. Only if she did, I believe she'd have told me. Jane doesn't consider people's feelings, you know; she'd say anything, however awful.... Only she's deep, too. Not like me. I must have things out; she'll keep them dark, sometimes.... No, I don't know what Jane thinks, really I don't.'

I didn't know either. Another thing I didn't know was what Gideon thought. They might both suspect Clare, and this might have tied Gideon's hands; he might have shrunk from defending himself at the expense of a frightened, unhappy girl and Jane's sister.

But this wasn't my business.

'Well,' I said, 'you may find you have to tell Jane. Perhaps, in a way, you owe it to Jane to tell her. But the essential thing is that you should tell your parents. That's quite necessary, of course. And you should do it at once—this evening, directly you get home. Every minute lost makes the thing worse. I think you should catch the next train back to Potter's Bar. You see, what you say may affect what is in to-morrow morning's papers. This thing has to be stopped at once, before further damage is done.'

She looked at me palely, her hands twisting convulsively in and out of each other. I saw her, for all her seven or eight-and-twenty years, as a weak, frightened child, ignorant, like a child, of the mischief she was doing to others, concerned, like a child, with her own troubles and fears and the burden on her own conscience. I was inclined now to believe in that push.

'Oh,' she whimpered, 'I daren't.... All this time I've said nothing.... How can I, now? It's too awful ... too difficult ...'

I looked at her in silence.

'What's your proposal, then?' I asked her. I may have sounded hard and unkind, but I didn't feel so; I was immensely sorry for her. Only, I believe a certain amount of hard practicality is the only wholesome treatment to apply to emotional and wordy people. One has to make them face facts, put everything in terms of action. If she had come to me for advice, she should have it. If she had come to me merely to get relief by unburdening her tortured conscience, she should find the burden doubled unless she took the only possible way out.

She looked this way and that, with scared, hunted eyes.

'I thought perhaps ... they might be made to think it was an accident ...'

'How?'

'Well, you see, I could tell them that he'd left the house—Mr. Gideon, I mean—before Oliver ... fell. That would be true. I could say I heard Mr. Gideon go, and heard Oliver fall afterwards. That's what I thought I'd say. Then he'd be cleared, wouldn't he?'

'Why haven't you,' I asked, 'said this already, directly you knew that Gideon was suspected?'

'I—I didn't like,' she faltered. 'I wanted to ask some one's advice. I wanted to know what you thought.'

'I've told you,' I answered her, 'what I think. It's more than thinking. I know. You've got to tell them the exact truth whatever it is. There's really no question about it. You couldn't go to them with a half true story ... could you?'

'I don't know,' she sighed, pinching her fingers together nervously.

'You do know. It would be impossible. You couldn't lie about a thing like that. You've got to tell the truth.... Not all you've told me, if you don't want to—but simply that you pushed him, in impatience, not meaning to hurt him, and that he fell. It's quite simple really, if you do it at once. It won't be if you leave it until the thing has gone further and Gideon is perhaps arrested. You'd have to tell the public the story then. Now it's easy.... No, I beg your pardon, it's not easy; I know that. It's very hard. But there it is: it's got to be done, and done at once.'

She listened in silence, drooping and huddled together. I was reminded pitifully of some soft little animal, caught in a trap and paralysed with fear.

'Oh,' she gasped, 'I must, I must, I know I must. But it's difficult ...'

I'm not going to repeat the things I said. They were the usual truisms, and one has to say them. I had accepted her story now: it seemed simpler. The complex part of the business was that at one moment I was simply persuading a frightened and reluctant girl to do the straight and decent and difficult thing, and at the next I was wasting words on an egotist (we're all that, after all) who was subconsciously enjoying the situation and wanting to prolong it. One feels the difference always, and it is that duplicity of aim in seekers after advice that occasionally makes one cruel and hard, because it seems the only profitable method.

It must have been ten minutes before I wrung out of her a faltering but definite, 'I'll do it.'

Then I stood up. There was no more time to be wasted.

'What train can you get?' I asked her.

'I don't know.... The 7.30, perhaps.' She rose, too, her little wet crumpled handkerchief still in her hand. I saw she had something else to say.

'I've been so miserable ...'

'Well, of course.'

'It's been on my mind so ...'

What things people of this type give themselves the trouble of saying!

'Well, it will be off your mind now,' I suggested.

'Will it? But it will still be there—the awful thing I did. I ought to confess it, oughtn't I, and get absolution? I do make my confession, you know, but I've never told this, not properly. I know I ought to have done, but I couldn't get it out ever—I put it so that the priest couldn't understand. I suppose it was awfully mean and cowardly of me, and I ought to confess it properly.'

But I couldn't go into that question, not being entirely sure even now what she ought to confess. I merely said, 'Well, why make confessions at all if you don't make them properly?'

She only gave her little soft quivering sigh. It was too difficult a question for her to answer. And, after all, a foolish one to ask. Why do we do all the hundreds of things that we don't do properly? Reasons are many and motives mixed.

I walked with her to the King's Cross bus and saw her into it. We shook hands as we parted, and hers was hot and clinging. I saw that she was all tense and strung up.

'Good-bye,' she whispered. 'And thank you ever so much for being so good to me. I'll do what you told me to-night. If it kills me, I will.'

'That's good,' I returned. 'But it won't kill you, you know.'

I smiled at her as she got on to the bus, and she smiled pitifully back.

5

I walked back to my rooms. I felt rather tired, and had a queer feeling of having hammered away on something soft and yielding and yet unbreakable, like putty. I felt sick at having been so hard, and sick too that she was so soft. Sick of words, and phrases, and facile emotions, and situations, and insincerities, and Potterisms—and yet with an odd tide of hope surging through the sickness, because of human nature, which is so mixed that natural cowards will sometimes take a steep and hard way where they might take an easy one, and because we all, in the middle of our egotism and vanity and self-seeking, are often sorry for what we have done. Really sorry, beneath all the cheap penitence which leads nowhere. So sorry that we sometimes cannot bear it any more, and will break up our own lives to make amends....

And if, at the same time, we watch our sorrow and our amends, and see it as drama and as interesting—well, after all, it is drama and it is interesting, so why not? We can't all be clear and steely unsentimentalists like Katherine Varick.

One has to learn to bear sentimentalism. In parishes (which are the world) one has to endure it, accept it. It is part of the general muddle and mess.

6

I got a Daily Haste next morning early, together with the Pink Pictorial, the illustrated Pinkerton daily. I looked through them quickly. There was no reference to the Hobart Mystery. I was relieved. Clare Potter had kept her word, then—or anyhow had said enough to clear Gideon (I wasn't going further than that about her; I had done my utmost to make her do the straight thing in the straight way, and must leave the rest to her), and the Pinkertons were withdrawing. They would have, later, to withdraw more definitely than by mere abstaining from further accusation (I intended to see to that, if no one else did), but this was a beginning. It was, no doubt, all that Pinkerton had been able to arrange last night over the telephone.

It would have interested me to have been present at that interview between Clare and her parents. I should like to have seen Pinkerton provided by his innocent little daughter with the sensation of his life, and Leila Yorke, the author of Falsely Accused forced to realise her own abominable mischief-making; forced also to realise that her messages from the other side had been as lacking in accuracy as, unfortunately, messages from this side, too, so often are. I hoped the affair Hobart would be a lesson to both Pinkertons. But, like most of the lessons set before us in this life, I feared it would be a lesson unlearnt.

Anyhow, Pinkerton was prompt and business like in his methods. His evening paper contained a paragraph to this effect:—

'DEATH OF MR HOBART

'NOW CONSIDERED ACCIDENTAL

'FOUL PLAY NOT SUSPECTED

'The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the sudden death of Mr. Oliver Hobart, the late editor of the Daily Haste, have resulted in conclusive evidence that the tragedy was due to Mr. Hobart's accidental stumbling and falling. His fall, which was audible to the other inmates of the house, took place after the departure of Mr. Arthur Gideon, with whom he had been talking. A statement to this effect has been made by Miss Clare Potter, who was staying in the house at the time, and who was at the time of the inquest too much prostrated by the shock to give evidence.'

It was a retraction all right, and all that could be expected of the Pinkerton Press. In its decision and emphasis I read scare.

I didn't give much more thought just then to the business. I was pretty busy with meetings and committees, and with rehearsals of A New Way to pay Old Debts, which we were playing to the parish in a week. I had stage-managed it at Oxford once, and had got some of the same people together, and it was going pretty well but needed a good deal of attention. I had, too, to go away from town for a day or two, on some business connected with the Church Congress. Church Congresses keep an incredible number of people busy about them beforehand; besides all the management of committees and programmes and side-shows, there is the management of all the people of divergent views who won't meet each other, such as Mr. George Lansbury and Mr. Athelstan Riley. (Not that this delicate task fell to me; I was only concerned with Life and Liberty.)

On the day after I came back I met Jane at the club, after lunch. She came over and sat down by me.

'Hallo,' she said. 'Have you been seeing the Haste?'

'I have. It's been more interesting lately than my own paper.'

'Yes.... So Arthur's acquitted without a stain on his character. Poor mother's rather sick about it. She thought she'd had a Message, you know. That frightful Ayres woman had a vision in a glass ball of Arthur knocking Oliver downstairs. I expect you heard. Every one did.... Mother went round to see her about it the other day, but she still sticks to it. Poor mother doesn't know what to make of it. Either the ball lied, or the Ayres woman lied, or Clare is lying. She's forced to the conclusion that it was the Ayres. So they've had words. I expect they'll make it up before long. But at present there's rather a slump in Other Side business.... And she wrote a letter of apology to Arthur. Father made her, he was so afraid Arthur would bring a libel action.'

'Why didn't he?' I asked, wondering, first, how much of the truth either Arthur or Jane had suspected all this time, and, secondly, how much they now knew.

Jane looked at me with her guarded, considering glance.

'Well,' she said, 'I don't mind your knowing. You'd better not let on to him that I told you, though; he mightn't like it. The fact is, Arthur thought I'd done it. He thought it was because my manner was so queer, as if I was trying to hush it up. I was. You see, I thought Arthur had done it. It seemed so awfully likely. Because, I left them quarrelling. And Arthur's got an awfully bad temper. And his manner was so queer. We never talked it out, till two days ago; we avoided talking to each other at all, almost, after the first. But on that first morning, when he came round to see me, we somehow succeeded in diddling one another, because we were each so anxious to shield the other and hush it all up.... Clare might have saved us both quite a lot of worrying if she'd spoken out at once and said it was ... an accident.'

Jane's voice was so unemotional, her face and manner so calm, that she is a very dark horse sometimes. I couldn't tell for certain whether she had nearly instead of 'an accident' said 'her,' or whether she had spoken in good faith. I couldn't tell how much she knew, or had been told, or guessed.

I said, 'I suppose she didn't realise till lately that any one was likely to be suspected,' and Jane acquiesced.

'Clare's funny,' she said, after a moment.

'People are,' I generalised.

'She has a muddled mind,' said Jane.

'People often have.'

'You never know,' said Jane thoughtfully, 'how much to believe of what she says.'

'No? I dare say she doesn't quite know herself.'

'She does not,' said Jane. 'Poor old Clare.'

We necessarily left it at that, since Jane didn't, of course, mean to tell me what story Clare had told of that evening's happenings, and I couldn't tell Jane the one Clare had told me. I didn't imagine I should ever be wiser than I was now on the subject, and it certainly wasn't my business any more.

When I met Clare Potter by chance, a week or two later, on the steps of the National Gallery with another girl, she flushed, bowed, and passed me quickly. That was natural enough, after our last interview.

Queer, that those two girls should be sisters. They were an interesting study to me. Clare, shallow, credulous, weak in the intelligence, conventional, emotional, sensitive, of the eternal type of orthodox and timid woman, with profound powers of passion, and that touch of melodrama, that sense of a situation, which might lead her along strange paths.... And Jane, level-headed, clear-brained, hard, calm, straight-thinking, cynical, an egotist to her finger-tips, knowing what she wanted and going for it, tough in the conscience, and ignorant of love except in its crudest form of desire for the people and things which ministered to her personal happiness....

It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism—the intellectual and moral. Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and exploiting. Their attitude towards truth (that bugbear of Potterism) was typical; Clare couldn't see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly, and would reject it without hesitation if it suited her book. Clare was like her mother, only with better, simpler stuff in her; Jane was rather like her father in her shrewd native wit, only, while he was vulgar in his mind, she was only vulgar in her soul.

Of one thing I was sure: they would both be, on the whole, satisfied with life, Jane because she would get what she wanted, Clare because she would be content with little. Clare would inevitably marry; as inevitably, she would love her husband and her children, and come to regard her passion for Oliver Hobart and its tragic sequel as a romantic episode of girlhood, a sort of sowing of wild oats before the real business of life began. And Jane would, I presumed, ultimately marry Gideon, who was too good for her, altogether too fine and too good. For Gideon was direct and keen and passionate, and loved and hated cleanly, and thought finely and acutely. Gideon wasn't greedy; he took life and its pleasures and triumphs and amusements in his stride, as part of the day's work; he didn't seek them out for their own sakes. Gideon lived for causes and beliefs and ideals. He was temperamentally Christian, though he didn't happen to believe Christian dogma. He had his alloy, like other people, of ambition and selfishness, but so much less than, for instance, I have, that it is absurd that he should be the agnostic and I the professing Christian.

7

The Christian Church. Sometimes one feels that it is a fantasy, the flaming ideal one has for it. One thinks of it as a fire, a sword, an army with banners marching against dragons; one doesn't see how such power can be withstood, be the dragons never so strong. And then one looks round and sees it instead as a frail organisation of the lame, the halt, and the blind, a tepid organisation of the satisfied, the bourgeois, the conventionally genteel, a helpless organisation of the ignorant, the half-witted, the stupid; an organisation full to the brim of cant, humbug, timid orthodoxy, unreality, self-content, and all kinds of Potterism—and one doesn't see how it can overcome anything whatever.

What is the truth? Where, between these two poles, does the actual church stand? Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from between them, touching now one, now the other? A Potterite church—yes; because we are most of us Potterites. An anti-Potterite church—yes, again; because at its heart is something sharp and clean and fine and direct, like a sword, which will not let us be contented Potterites, but which is for ever goading us out of ourselves, pricking us out of our trivial satisfactions and our egotistic discontents.

I suppose the fact is that the Church can only work on the material it finds, and do a little here and a little there. It would be a sword in the hands of such men as Gideon; on the other hand, it can't do much with the Clare Potters. The real thing frightens them if ever they see it; the sham thing they mould to their own liking, till it is no more than a comfortable shelter from the storms of life. It is the world's Potters who have taken the Church and spoilt it, degraded it to the poor dull thing it is. It is the Potterism in all of us which at every turn checks and drags it down. Personally, I can forgive Potterism everything but that.

What is one to do about it?



PART VI:

TOLD BY R.M.



CHAPTER I

THE END OF A POTTER MELODRAMA

1

While Clare talked to Juke in the vestry, Jane talked to her parents at Potter's Bar. She was trying to make them drop their campaign against Gideon. But she had no success. Lady Pinkerton said, 'The claims of Truth are inexorable. Truth is a hard god to follow, and often demands the sacrifice of one's personal feelings.' Lord Pinkerton said, 'I think, now the thing has gone so far, it had better be thoroughly sifted. If Gideon is innocent, it is only due to him. If he is guilty, it is due to the public. You must remember that he edits a paper which has a certain circulation; small, no doubt, but still, a circulation. He is not altogether like a private and irresponsible person.'

Lady Pinkerton remarked that we are none of us that, we all owe a duty to society, and so forth.

Then Clare came in, just as they had finished dinner. She would not have any. Her face was red and swollen with crying. She said she had something to tell them at once, that would not keep a moment. Mr. Gideon mustn't be suspected any more of having killed Oliver, for she had done it herself, after Mr. Gideon had left the house.

They did not believe her at first. She was hysterical, and they all knew Clare. But she grew more circumstantial about it, till they began to believe it. After all, they reasoned, it explained her having been so completely knocked over by the catastrophe.

Jane asked her why she had done it. She said she had only meant to push him away from her, and he had fallen.

Lady Pinkerton said, 'Push him away, my dear! Then was he ...'

Was he too close, she meant. Clare cried and did not answer. Lady Pinkerton concluded that Oliver had been trying to kiss Clare, and that Clare had repulsed him. Jane knew that Lady Pinkerton thought this, and so did Clare. Jane thought 'Clare means us to think that. That doesn't mean it's true. Clare hasn't got what Arthur calls a grip on facts.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'This is very painful, my dears; very painful indeed. Jane, my dear ...'

He meant that Jane was to go away, because it was even more painful for her than for the others. But Jane didn't go. It wasn't painful for Jane really. She felt hard and cold, and as if nothing mattered. She was angry with Clare for crying instead of explaining what had happened.

Lady Pinkerton said, passing her hand over her forehead in the tired way she had and shutting her eyes, 'My dear, you are over-wrought. You don't know what you are saying. You will be able to tell us more clearly in the morning.'

But Clare said they must believe her now, and Lord Pinkerton must telephone up to the Haste and have the stuff about the Hobart Mystery stopped.

'My poor child,' said Lady Pinkerton, 'what has made you suddenly, so long after, tell us this terrible story?'

Clare sobbed that she hadn't been able to bear it on her mind any more, and also that she hadn't known till lately that Gideon was suspected.

Lord and Lady Pinkerton looked at each other, wondering what to believe, then at Jane, wishing she was gone, so that they could ask Clare more about it. Jane said, 'Don't mind me. I don't mind hearing about it.' Jane meant to stay. She thought that if she was gone they would persuade Clare she had dreamed it all and that it had been really Gideon after all.

Jane asked Clare why she had pushed Oliver, thinking that she ought to explain, and not cry. But still Clare only cried, and at last said she couldn't ever tell any one. Lady Pinkerton turned pink, and Lord Pinkerton walked up and down and said, 'Tut tut,' and it was more obvious than ever what Clare meant.

She added, 'But I never meant, indeed I never meant, to hurt him. He just fell back, and ...'

'Was killed,' Jane finished for her. Jane thought Clare was like their mother in trying to avoid plain words for disagreeable things.

Clare cried and cried. 'Oh,' she said, 'I've not had a happy moment since,' which was as nearly true as these excessive statements ever are.

Lady Pinkerton tried to calm her, and said, 'My poor, dear child, you don't know what you are saying. You must go to bed now, and tell us in the morning, when you are more yourself.'

Clare didn't go to bed until Lord Pinkerton had promised to ring up the Haste. Then she went, with Lady Pinkerton, who was crying too now, because she was beginning to believe the story.

2

Jane didn't know what she believed. She didn't believe what Clare had implied—that Oliver had tried to kiss her. Because Oliver hadn't been like that; it wasn't the sort of thing he did. Jane thought it caddish of Clare to have tried to make them think that of him. But she might, Jane thought, have been angry with him about something else; she might have pushed him.... Or she might not; she might be imagining or inventing the whole thing. You never knew, with Clare.

If it was true, Jane thought, she had been a fool about Arthur. But, if he hadn't done it, why had he been so queer? Why had he avoided her, and been so odd and ashamed from the first morning on?

Perhaps, thought Jane, he had suspected Clare.

She would see him to-morrow morning, and ask him.

3

Jane saw Gideon next day. She rang him up, and he came over to Hampstead after tea.

It was the first time Jane had seen him alone for more than a month. He looked thin and ill.

Jane loved him. She had loved him through everything. He might have killed Oliver; it made no difference to her caring for him.

But she hoped he hadn't.

He came into the drawing-room. Jane remembered that other night, when Oliver—poor Oliver—had been vexed to find him there. Poor Oliver. Poor Oliver. But Jane couldn't really care. Not really, only gently, and in a way that didn't hurt. Not as if Gideon were dead and shut away from everything. Not as if she herself were.

Jane didn't pretend. As Lady Pinkerton would say, the claims of Truth were inexorable.

Gideon came in quickly, looking grave and worried, as if he had something on his mind.

Jane said, 'Arthur, please tell me. Did you knock Oliver down that night?'

He stood and stared at her, looking astonished and startled.

Then he said, slowly, 'Oh, I see. You mean, am I going to admit that I did, when I am accused.... If there's no other way out, I am.... It will be all right, Jane,' he said very gently. 'You needn't be afraid.'

Jane didn't understand him.

'Then you did it,' she said, and sat down. She felt sick, and her head swam.

Gideon stood over her, tall and stooping, biting the nail of his middle finger.

'You see,' Jane said, 'I'd begun to hope last night that you hadn't done it after all.'

'What are you talking about?' he asked.

Jane said, 'Clare told us that it happened—that he fell—after you had left the house. So I hoped she might be speaking the truth, and that you hadn't done it after all. But if you did, we must go on thinking of ways out.'

'If—I—did,' Gideon said after her slowly. 'You know I didn't, Jane. Why are you talking like this? What's the use, when I know, and you know, and you know that I know, the truth about it? It can do no good.'

He was, for the first time, stern and angry with her.

'The truth?' Jane said. 'I wish you'd tell it me, Arthur.'

The truth. If Gideon told her anything, it would be the truth, she knew. He wasn't like Clare, who couldn't.

But he only looked at her oddly, and didn't speak. Jane looked back into his eyes, trying to read his mind, and so for a moment he stared down at her and she stared up at him.

Jane perceived that he had not done it. Had he, then, guessed all this time that Clare had, and been trying to shield her?

Then, slowly, his face, which had been frowning and tense, changed and broke up.

'Good God!' he said. 'Tell me the truth, Jane. It was you, wasn't it?'

Then Jane understood.

She said, 'You thought it was me.... And I thought it was you! Is it me you've been so ashamed of all this time then, not yourself?'

'Yes,' he said, still staring at her. 'Of course.... It wasn't you, then.... And you thought it was me?... But how could you think that, Jane? I'd have told; I wouldn't have been such a silly fool as to sneak away and say nothing. You might have known that. You must have had a pretty poor opinion of me, to think I'd do that.... Good lord, how you must have loathed me all this time!'

'No, I haven't. Have you loathed me, then?'

He said quickly, 'That's different,' but he didn't explain why.

After a moment he said, 'It was just an accident then, after all.'

'Yes ... Clare was talking to him when he fell.... She's only just told about it, because you were being suspected. But I never know whether to believe Clare; she's such a gumph. I had to ask you.... What made you suspect me, by the way?'

'Your manner, that first morning. You dragged me into the dining-room, do you remember, and talked about how they all thought it was an accident, and no one would guess if we were careful, and I wasn't to say anything. What else was I to think? It was really your own fault.'

Jane said, 'Well, anyhow, we're quits. We've both spent six weeks thinking each other murderers. Now we'll stop.... I don't wonder you fought shy of me, Arthur.'

He looked at her curiously.

'Didn't you fight shy of me, then? You can hardly have wanted to see much of me in the circumstances.'

'I didn't, of course. It was awful. Besides, you were so queer and disagreeable. I thought it was a guilty conscience, but really I suppose it was disgust.'

'Not disgust. No. Not that.' He seemed to be balancing the word 'disgust' in his mind, considering it, then rejecting it. 'But,' he said, 'it would have been difficult to pretend nothing had happened, wouldn't it.... I didn't blame you, you know, for the thing itself. I knew it must have been an accident—that you never meant ... what happened.... Well, anyhow, that's all over. It's been pretty ghastly. Let's forget it.... What Potterish minds you and I must have, Jane, to have built up such a sensational melodrama out of an ordinary accident. I think Lord Pinkerton would find me useful on one of his papers; I'm wasted on the Fact. You and I; the two least likely people in the world for such fancies, you'd think—except Katherine. By the way, Katherine half thought I'd done it, you know. So did Jukie.'

'I'm inclined now to think that K thought I had, that evening she came to see me. She was rather sick with me for letting you be accused.'

'A regular Potter melodrama,' said Gideon. 'It might be in one of your mother's novels or your father's papers. That just shows, Jane, how infectious a thing Potterism is. It invades the least likely homes, and upsets the least likely lives. Horrible, catching disease.'

Gideon was walking up and down the room in his restless way, playing with the things on the tables. He stopped suddenly, and looked at Jane.

'Jane,' he said, 'we won't, you and I, have any more secrets and concealments between us. They're rotten things. Next time it occurs to you that I've committed a crime, ask me if it is so. And I'll do the same to you, at whatever risk of being offensive. We'll begin now by telling each other what we feel.... You know I love you, my dear.'

Oh, yes, Jane knew that. She said, 'I suppose I do, Arthur.'

He said, 'Then what about it? Do you ...' and she said, 'Rather, of course I do.'

Then they kissed each other, and settled to get married next May or June. The baby was coming in January.

'You'll have to put up with baby, you know, Arthur,' Jane said.

'Of course, poor little kid. I rather like them. It's rough luck on it not having a father of its own. I'll try to be decent to it.'

That would be queer, thought Jane, Arthur being decent to Oliver's kid; a boy, perhaps, with Oliver's face and Oliver's mind. Poor little kid: but Jane would love it, and Arthur would be decent to it, and its grandparents would spoil it; it would be their favourite, if any more came. They wouldn't like the others, because they would be Gideon's. They might look like little Yids. Perhaps there wouldn't be any others. Jane wasn't keen. They were all right when they were there—jolly little comics, all slippy in their baths, like eels—but they were an unspeakable nuisance while on the way. A rotten system.

4

All next day Jane felt like stopping people in the streets and shouting at them, 'Arthur didn't do it. Nor did I. It was only that silly ass, Clare, or else it was an accident.' For even now Jane wasn't sure which she thought.

But the only person to whom she really said it was Katherine. One told Katherine things, because she was as deep and as quiet as the grave. Also, if Jane hadn't told her what Clare had said, she would have gone on thinking it was Jane, and Jane didn't like that. Jane did not care to give Katherine more reasons for making her feel cheap than necessary. She would always think Jane cheap, anyhow, because Jane only cared about having a good time, and Katherine thought one should care chiefly about one's job. Jane supposed she was cheap, but didn't much care. She felt she would rather be herself. She had a better time, and would have a better time still before she had done; better than Johnny, with the rubbishy books he was writing and making his firm bring out for him and feeling so pleased with. Jane knew she could write better stuff than Johnny could, any day. And her books would be in addition to Gideon, and babies, and other amusing things.

Jane told Katherine Clare's story. Katherine said, 'H'm. Perhaps. I wonder. It's as likely as not all bumkum that she pushed him. She was probably talking to him when he fell, and got worked up about it later. The Potter press and Leila Yorke touch. However, you never know. Quite a light push might do it. Those stairs of yours are awful. I really advise you to be careful, Jane.'

'You thought I'd done it, didn't you, old thing?'

'For a bit, I did. For a bit I thought it was Arthur. So did Jukie. You never know. Any one might push any one else. Even Clare may have.'

'You must have thought I was a pretty mean little beast, to let Arthur be suspected without owning up.'

'I did,' Katherine admitted. 'Selfish ...'

She was looking at Jane in her considering way. Her bright blue eyes seemed always to go straight through what she was looking at, like X-rays. When she looked at Jane now, she seemed somehow to be seeing in her not only the present but the past. It was as if she remembered, and was making Jane remember, all kinds of old things Jane had done. Things she had done at Oxford; things she had done since; things Katherine neither blamed nor condemned, but just took into consideration when thinking what sort of a person Jane was. You had the same feeling with Katherine that you had sometimes with Juke, of being analysed and understood all through. You couldn't diddle either of them into thinking you any nicer than you were. Jane didn't want to. It was more restful just to be taken for what one was. Oliver had been always idealising her. Gideon didn't do that; he knew her too well. Only he didn't bother much about what she was, not being either a priest or a scientific chemist, but a man in love.

'By the way,' said Katherine, 'are you and Arthur going to get married?'

Jane told her in May or June.

Katherine, who was lighting a cigarette, looked at Jane without smiling. The flame of the match shone into her face, and it was white and cold and quiet.

'She doesn't think I'm good enough for Arthur,' Jane thought. And anyhow, K didn't, Jane knew, think much of marriage at all. Most women, if you said you were going to get married, assumed it was a good thing. They caught hold of you and kissed you. If you were a man, other men slapped you on the back, or shook hands or something. They all thought, or pretended to think, it was a fine thing you were doing. They didn't really think so always. Behind their eyes you could often see them thinking other things about it—wondering if you would like it, or why you chose that one, and if it was because you preferred him or her to any one else or because you couldn't get any one else. Or they would be pitying you for stopping being a bachelor or spinster and having to grow up and settle down and support a wife or manage servants and babies. But all that was behind; they didn't show it; they would say, 'Good for you, old thing,' and kiss you or shake your hand.

Katherine did neither to Jane. She hadn't when it was Oliver Hobart, because she hadn't thought it a suitable marriage. She didn't, now it was Arthur Gideon, perhaps for the same reason. She didn't talk about it. She talked about something else.



CHAPTER II

ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED

1

The fine weather ended. Early October had been warm, full of golden light, with clear, still evenings. Later the wind blustered, and it was cold. Sometimes Jane felt sick; that was the baby. But not often. She went about all right, and she was writing—journalism and a novel. She thought she would perhaps send it in for a prize novel competition in the spring, only she felt no certainty of pleasing the three judges, all so very dissimilar. Jane's work was a novel about a girl at school and college and thereafter. Perhaps it would be the first of a trilogy; perhaps it would not. The important thing was that it should be well reviewed. How did one work that? You could never tell. Some things were well reviewed, others weren't. Partly luck it was, thought Jane. Novels were better treated usually than they deserved. Verse about as well as it deserved, which, however, wasn't, as a rule, saying very much. Some kinds of book were unkindly used—anthologies of contemporary verse, for instance. Someone would unselfishly go to the trouble of collecting some of the recent poetical output which he or she personally preferred and binding it up in a pleasant portable volume, and you would think all that readers had to do was to read what they liked in it, if anything, and leave out the rest and be grateful. Instead, it would be slated by reviewers, and compared to the Royal Academy, and to a literary signpost pointing the wrong way, and other opprobrious things; as if an anthology could point to anything but the taste of the compiler, which of course could not be expected to agree with any one else's; tastes never do. The thing was, thought Jane, to hit the public taste with the right thing at the right moment. Another thing was to do better than Johnny. That should be possible, because Jane was better than Johnny; had always been. Only there was this baby, which made her feel ill before it came, and would need care and attention afterwards. It wasn't fair. If Johnny married and had a baby it wouldn't get in his way, only in its mamma's. It was a handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing. You had got round that by taking it off and climbing in knickerbockers, but you couldn't get round a baby. And Jane wanted the baby too.

'I suppose I want everything,' said Jane.

Johnny wanted everything too. He got a lot. He got love. He was polygamous by nature, and usually had more than one girl on hand. That autumn he had two. One was Nancy Sharpe, the violinist. They were always about together. People who didn't know either of them well, thought they would get engaged. But neither of them wanted that. The other girl was a different kind: the lovely, painted, music-hall kind you don't meet. No one thought Johnny would marry her, of course. They merely passed the time for one another.

Jane wondered if the equivalent man would pass the time for her. She didn't think so. She thought she would get bored with never talking about anything interesting. And it must, she thought, be pretty beastly having to kiss people who used cheap scent and painted their lips. One would be afraid the red stuff would come off. In fact, it surely would. Didn't men mind—clean men, like Johnny? Men are so different, thought Jane. Johnny was the same at Oxford. He would flirt with girls in tea-shops. Jane had never wanted to flirt with the waiters in restaurants. Men were perhaps less critical; or perhaps they wanted different qualities in those with whom they flirted; or perhaps it was that their amatory instinct, when pronounced at all, was much stronger than women's, and flowed out on to any object at hand when they were in the mood. Also, they certainly grew up earlier. At Oxford and Cambridge girls weren't, for the most part, grown-up enough to be thinking about that kind of thing at all. It came on later, with most of them. But men of that age were, quite a lot of them, mature enough to flirt with the girls in Buol's.

Jane discussed it with Gideon one evening. Gideon said, 'Men usually have, as a rule, more sex feeling than women, that's all. Naturally. They need more, to carry them through all the business of making marriage proposals and keeping up homes, and so on. Women often have very little. That's why they're often better at friendship than men are. A woman can be a man's friend all their lives, but a man, in nine cases out of ten, will either get tired of it or want more. Women have a tremendous gift for friendship. Their friendships with other women are usually much more devoted and more faithful than a man's with other men. Most men, though of course not all, want sex in their lives at some time or other. Hundreds of women are quite happy without it. They're quite often nearly sexless. Very few men are that.'

Jane said, 'There are plenty of women like Clare, whom one can't think of apart from sex. No friendship would ever satisfy her. If she isn't a wife and mother she'll be starved. She'll marry, of course.'

'Yes,' Gideon agreed. 'There are plenty of women like that. And when a woman is like that, she's much more dependent on love and marriage than any man is, because she usually has fewer other things in her life. But there are women also like Katherine.'

'Oh, Katherine. K isn't even dependent on friendship. She only wants her work. K isn't typical.'

'No; she isn't typical. She isn't a channel for the life force, like most of us. She's too independent; she won't let herself be used in that way.'

'Am I a channel for the life force?' thought Jane. 'I suppose so. Hence Oliver and baby. Is Arthur? I suppose so. Hence his wanting to marry me.'

2

Jane told her family that she was going to marry Gideon. Lady Pinkerton said, 'It's extraordinary to me that you can think of it, Jane, after all that has happened. Surely, my child, the fact that it was the last thing Oliver would wish should have some weight with you. Whatever plane he may be on now, he must be disturbed by such news as this. Besides, dear child, it is far too soon. You should wait at least a year before taking such a step. And Arthur Gideon! Not only a Jew, Jane, and not only a man of such very unfortunate political principles, but one who has never attempted to conceal his spiteful hostility both to father's papers and my books. But perhaps, as I believe you agree with him in despising both of these, that may be an extra bond between you. Only you must see that it will make family life extremely awkward.'

Of course it would. But family lives nearly always are awkward, Jane thought; it is one of the things about them.

Lady Pinkerton added, having suddenly remembered it, 'Besides, my dear, he drinks; you told me so yourself.'

Jane said, if she had, she had lied, doubtless for some good reason now forgotten by her. He didn't drink, not in the excessive sense of that word obviously intended by Lady Pinkerton. Lady Pinkerton was unconvinced; she still was sure he drank in that sense.

She resumed, 'And Jewish babies! I wonder you can think of it, Jane. They may be a throw-back to a most degraded Russian-Jewish type. What brothers and sisters for the dear mite who is coming first! My dear, I do beg you to think this over long and seriously before committing yourself. You may live to repent it bitterly.'

Clare said, 'Jane! How can you—after ...'

After Oliver, she meant. She would never say his name; perhaps one doesn't like to when one has killed a man.

Jane thought, 'Why didn't I leave Oliver to Clare? She'd have suited him much better. I was stupid; I thought I wanted him. I did want him. But not in the way I want Arthur now. One wants so many things.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'You're making a big mistake, Babs. That fellow won't last. He's building on sand, as the Bible puts it—building on sand. I hear on good authority that the Fact can't go on many months longer, unless it changes its tone and methods considerably; it's got no chance of fighting its way as it is now. People don't want that kind of thing. They don't want anything the Gideon lot will give them. Gideon and his sort haven't got the goods. They're building on the sand of their own fancy, not on the rock of general human demand. I hear that that daily they talked of starting can't come off yet, either.... The chap's a bad investment, Babs.... And he despises me and my goods, you know. That'll be awkward.'

'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he doesn't approve of you.... He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.'

'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will people say? Besides, he's a Jew.'

Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too.

Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she wanted; it was Arthur.

Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought, and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp and hard into space.

But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole of him. She wondered if he loved her like that—if he turned hot and cold when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death.

'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop loving them.'

'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations.

Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it would last, at this pitch.



CHAPTER III

THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1

Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human beings, it was like its grandfather—a little Potter.

Lord Pinkerton was pleased.

'He shall carry on the papers,' he said, dandling it on his arm. 'Tootooloo, grandson!' He dug it softly in the ribs. He understood this baby. However many little Yids Jane might achieve in the future, there would be this little Potter to carry on his own dreams.

Clare came to see it. She was glad it wasn't like Oliver; Jane saw her being glad of that. She was beginning to fall in love with a young naval officer, but still she couldn't have seen Oliver in Jane's child without wincing.

Gideon came to see it. He laughed.

'Potter for ever,' he said.

He added. 'It's symbolic. Potters will be for ever, you know. They're so strong....'

The light from the foggy winter afternoon fell on his face as he sat by the window. He looked tired and perplexed. Strength, perpetuity, seemed things remote from him, belonging only to Potters. Anti-Potterism and the Weekly Fact were frail things of a day, rooted in a dream. So Gideon felt, on these days when the fog closed about him....

Jane looked at her son, the strange little animal, and thought not 'Potter for ever,' but 'me for ever,' as was natural, and as parents will think of their young, who will carry them down the ages in an ever more distant but never lost immortality, an atom of dust borne on the hurrying stream. Jane, who believed in no other personal immortality, found it in this little Potter in her arms. Holding him close, she loved him, in a curious, new, physical way. So this was motherhood, this queer, sensuous, cherishing love. It would have been a pity not to have known it; it was, after all, an emotion, more profound than most.

2

When Jane was well enough, she gave a party for Charles, as if he had been a new picture she had painted and wanted to show off. Her friends came and looked at him, and thought how clever of her to have had him, all complete and alive and jolly like that, a real baby. He was better than the books and things they wrote, because he was more alive, and would also last longer, with luck. Their books wouldn't have a run of four score years and ten or whatever it was; they'd be lucky if any one thought of them again in five years.

But partly Jane gave the party to show people that Charles didn't monopolise her, that she was well and active again, and ready for work and life. If she wasn't careful, she might come to be regarded as the mere mother, and dropped out.

Johnny said, grinning amiably at her and Charles, 'Ah, you're thinking that your masterpiece quite puts mine in the shade, aren't you, old thing.'

He had a novel just out. It was as good as most young men's first novels.

'I'm not sure,' said Jane, 'that Charles is my masterpiece. Wait till the other works appear, and I'll tell you.'

Johnny grinned more, supposing that she meant the little Yids.

'My books, I mean,' Jane added quickly.

'Oh, your books.'

'They're going to be better than yours, my dear,' said Jane. 'Wait and see.... But I dare say they won't be as good as this.' She appraised Charles with her eyes.

'But, oh, so much less trouble,' she added, swinging him up and down.

'I could have one as good as that,' said Johnny thoughtfully, 'with no trouble at all.'

'You'd have to work for it and keep it. And its mother. You wouldn't like that, you know.... Of course you ought to. It's your duty. Every young man who survives.... Daddy says so. You'd better do it, John. You're getting on, you know.'

Young men hate getting on. They hate it, really, more than young women do. Youth is of such immense value, in almost any career, but particularly to the young writer.

But Johnny only said, with apparent nonchalance, 'Twenty-seven is not very old.' He added, however, 'Anyhow, you're five minutes older, and I've published a book, if you have produced that thing.'

Johnny was frankly greedy about his book. He hung on reviews; he asked for it in bookshops, and expressed astonishment and contempt when they had not got it. And it was, after all, nothing to make a song about, Jane thought. It wasn't positively discreditable to its writer, like most novels, but it was a very normal book, by a very normal cleverish young man. Johnny wasn't sure that his publishers advertised it as much as was desirable.

Gideon came up to Jane and Charles. He had just arrived. He had three evening papers in his hand. His fellow passengers had left them in the train, and he had collected them. Jews often get their news that way.

Johnny saw his friend Miss Nancy Sharpe disengaged and looking lovely, and went to speak to her. He was really in love with her a little, though he didn't go as far as wanting to work for her and keep her. He was quite right; that is to go too far, when so much happiness is attainable short of it. Johnny wisely shunned desperate measures. So, to do her justice, did Miss Sharpe.

'Johnny's very elated,' said Jane to Gideon, looking after him. 'What do you think of his book, Arthur?'

Gideon said, 'I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish every one would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think—like in the Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.'

Jane shook her head.

'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.'

'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life isn't talking.'

'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded.

'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that; they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort. They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness isn't worth while.'

'You're morbid, Arthur.'

'Morbid? Diseased? I dare say. We most of us are. What's health, after all? No one knows.'

'I've done eighty thousand words of my novel, anyhow.'

'I'm sorry. Nearly all novels are too long. All you've got to say would go into forty thousand.'

'I don't write because I've got things to say. I haven't a message, like mother. I write because it amuses me. And because I like to be a novelist. It's done. And I like to be well spoken of—reasonably well, that is. It's all fun. Why not?'

'Oh, don't ask me why not. I can't preach sermons all the evening.'

He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of her because she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour, indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude.

Two girls came up to admire Charles. Jane said it was time she took him to bed, and they went up with her.

Gideon turned away. He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane's. He stood drinking coffee and watching people. You met most of them at the club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a drawing-room? There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan with their handsome faces and masses of black hair. Rosalind had a baby too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind's Manchester mother. And Charles was like Jane's Birmingham father. It was Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.

And there was Juke, with his white, amused face and heavy-lidded eyes that seemed always to see a long way, and Katherine Varick talking to a naval officer about periscopes (Jane kept in with some of the Admiralty), and Peacock, with whom Gideon had quarrelled two hours ago at the Fact office, and who was now in the middle of a group of writing young men, as usual. Gideon looked at him cynically. Peacock was letting himself be got at by a clique. Gideon would rather have seen him talking to the practical looking sailor about periscopes. Peacock would have to be watched. He had shown signs lately of colouring the Fact with prejudices. He was getting in with a push; he was dangerously in the movement. He was also leaning romancewards, and departing from the realm of pure truth. He had given credence to some strange travellers' tales of Foreign Office iniquities. As if that unfortunate and misguided body had not enough sins to its account without having melodramatic and uncharacteristic kidnappings and deeds of violence attributed to it. But Peacock had got in with those unhappy journalists and others who had been viewing Russia, and, barely escaping with their lives, had come back with nothing else, and least of all with that accurate habit of mind which would have qualified them as contributors to the Weekly Fact. It was not their fault (except for going to Russia), but Peacock should have had nothing to do with them.

Katherine Varick crossed the room to Gideon, with a faint smile.

'Hallo. Enjoying life?'

'Precisely that.'

'I say, what are you doing with the Fact?'

Gideon looked at her sourly.

'Oh, you've noticed it too. It's becoming quite pretty reading, isn't it. Less like a Blue Book.'

'Much less. I should say it was beginning to appeal to a wider circle. Is that the idea?'

'Don't ask me. Ask Peacock. Whatever the idea is, it's his, not mine.... But it's not a considered idea at all. It's merely a yielding to the (apparently) irresistible pressure of atmosphere.'

'I see. A truce with the Potter armies.'

'No. There's no such thing as a truce with them. It's the first steps of a retreat.'

He said it sharply and suddenly, in the way of a man who is, at the moment, making a discovery. He turned and looked across the room at Peacock, who was talking and talking, in his clever, keen, pleasant way, not in the least like a Blue Book.

'We're not like Blue Books,' Gideon muttered sadly. 'Hardly any one is. Unfortunate. Very unfortunate. What's one to do about it?'

'Lord Pinkerton would say, learn human nature as it is and build on it. Exploit its weaknesses, instead of tilting against them. Accept sentimentality and prejudice, and use them.'

'I am aware that he would.... What do you say, Katherine?'

'Nothing. What's the use? I'm one of the Blue Books—not a fair judge, therefore.'

'No. You'd make no terms, ever.'

'I've never been tempted. One may have to make terms, sometimes.'

'I think not,' said Gideon. 'I think one never is obliged to make terms.'

'If the enemy is too strong?'

'Then one goes under. Gets out of it. That's not making terms.... Good-night; I'm going home. I hate parties, you know. So do you. Why do either of us go to them?'

'They take one's thoughts off,' said Katherine in her own mind. Her blue eyes contracted as she looked after him.

'He's failing; he's being hurt. He'll go under. He should have been a scientist or a scholar or a chemist, like me; something in which knowledge matters and people don't. People will break his heart.'

3

Gideon walked all the way back from Hampstead to his own rooms. It was a soft, damp night, full of little winds that blew into the city from February fields and muddy roads far off. There would be lambs in the fields.... Gideon suddenly wanted to get out of the town into that damp, dark country that circled it. There would be fewer people there; fewer minds crowded together, making a dense atmosphere that was impervious to the piercing, however sharp, of truth. All this dense mass of stupid, muddled, huddled minds.... What was to be done with it? Greedy minds, ignorant minds, sentimental, truthless minds....

He saw, as he passed a newspaper stand, placards in big black letters—'Bride's Suicide.' 'Divorce of Baronet.' Then, small and inconspicuous, hardly hoping for attention, 'Italy and the Adriatic.' For one person who would care about Italy and the Adriatic, there would, presumably, be a hundred who would care about the bride and the baronet. Presumably; else why the placards? Gideon honestly tried to bend his impersonal and political mind to understand it. He knew no such people, yet one had to believe they existed; people who really cared that a bride with whom they had no acquaintance (why a bride? Did that make her more interesting?) had taken her life; and that a baronet (also a perfect stranger) had had his marriage dissolved in a court of law. What quality did it indicate, this curious and inexplicable interest in these topics so tedious to himself and to most of his personal acquaintances? Was it a love of romance? But what romance was to be found in suicide or divorce? Romance Gideon knew; knew how it girdled the world, heard the beat of its steps in far forests, the whisper of its wings on dark seas.... It is there, not in divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it, then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least rudimentarily political brain to grasp them. The relations of human beings are natural, and only need the human heart for their understanding. That part of man's mind which has been, for some obscure reason, inaccurately called the heart, was enormously and disproportionately stronger than the rest of the mind, the thinking part.

'Light Caught Bending,' another placard remarked. That was more cheerful, though it was an idiotic way of putting a theory as to the curvature of space, but it was refreshing that, apparently, people were expected to be excited by that too. And, Gideon knew it, they were. Einstein's theory as to space and light would be discussed, with varying degrees of intelligence, most of them low, in many a cottage, many a club, many a train. There would be columns about it in the Sunday papers, with little Sunday remarks to the effect that the finiteness of space did not limit the infinity of God. Scientists have naif minds where God is concerned; they see him, if at all, in terms of space.

Anyhow, there it was. People were interested not only in divorce, suicide, and murder, but in light and space, undulations and gravitation. That was rather jolly, for that was true romance. It gave one more hope. Even though people might like their science in cheap and absurd tabloid form, they did like it. The Potter press exulted in scientific discoveries made easy, but it was better than not exulting in them at all. For these were things as they were, and therefore the things that mattered. This was the satisfying world of hard, difficult facts, without slush and without sentiment. This was the world where truth was sought for its own sake.

'When I see truth, do I seek truth Only that I may things denote, And, rich by striving, deck my youth As with a vain, unusual coat?'

Nearly every one in the ordinary world did that, if indeed they ever concerned themselves with truth at all. And some scientists too, perhaps, but not most. Scientists and scholars and explorers—they were the people. They were the world's students, the learners, the discoverers. They didn't talk till they knew....

Rain had begun to drizzle. At the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street there was a lit coffee-stall. A group clustered about it; a policeman drinking oxo, his waterproof cape shining with wet; two taxi-cab drivers having coffee and buns; a girl in an evening cloak, with a despatch case, eating biscuits.

Gideon passed by without stopping. A hand touched him on the arm, and a painted face looked up into his, murmuring something. Gideon, who had a particular dislike for paint on the human face, and, in general, for persons who looked and behaved like this person, looked away from her and scowled.

'I only wanted,' she explained, 'a cup of coffee ...' and he gave her sixpence, though he didn't believe her.

Horrible, these women were; ugly; dirty; loathsome; so that one wondered why on earth any one liked them (some people obviously did like them, or they wouldn't be there), and yet, detestable as they were, they were the outcome of facts. Possibly in them, and in the world's other ugly facts, Potterism and all truth-shirking found whatever justification it had. Sentimentalism spread a rosy veil over the ugliness, draping it decently. Making it, thought Gideon, how much worse; but making it such as Potterites could face unwincing.

The rain beat down. At its soft, chill touch Gideon's brain cooled and cooled, till he seemed to see everything in a cold, hard, crystal clarity. Life and death—how little they mattered. Life was paltry, and death its end. Yet when the world, the Potterish world, dealt with death it became something other than a mere end; it became a sensation, a problem, an episode in a melodrama. The question, when a man died, was always how and why. So, when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into a net of suspicion and melodrama—they all became for a time absurd actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant, with his greed for unadorned and unemotional precision.

Gideon sighed sharply as he turned into Oxford Street, Oxford Street was and is horrible. Everything a street should not be, even when it was down, and now it was up, which was far worse. If Gideon had not been unnerved by the painted person at the corner of Baker Street he would never have gone home this way, he would have gone along Marylebone and Euston Road. As it was, he got into a bus and rode unhappily to Gray's Inn Road, where he lived.

He sat up till three in the morning working out statistics for an article. Statistics, figures, were delightful. They were a rest. They mattered.

4

Two days later, at the Fact office, Peacock, turning over galley slips, said, 'This thing of yours on Esthonian food conditions looks like a government schedule. Couldn't you make it more attractive?'

'To whom?' asked Gideon.

'Well—the ordinary reader.'

'Oh, the ordinary reader. I meant it to be attractive to people who want information.'

'Well, but a little jam with the powder.... For instance, you draw no inference from your facts. It's dull. Why not round the thing off into a good article?'

'I can't round things. I don't like them round, either. I've given the facts, unearthed with considerable trouble and pains. No one else has. Isn't it enough?'

'Oh, it'll do.' Peacock's eyes glanced over the other proofs on his desk. 'We've got some good stuff this number.'

'Nice round articles—yes.' Gideon turned the slips over with his lean brown fingers carelessly. He picked one up.

'Hallo. I didn't know that chap was reviewing Coal and Wages.'

'Yes. He asked if he could.'

'Do you think he knows enough?'

'It's quite a good review. Read it.'

Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.'

'Only enough to give it colour.'

'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want intelligence and exact knowledge.'

'Oh, Clitherton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He knows his subject.'

'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?'

'Hinkson can't write for nuts.'

'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures or dates.'

'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put together.'

'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course, quite possible to be both.'

'Oh, quite. That's the idea of the Fact, after all.'

'Peacock, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't know enough for us.'

Peacock said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind. I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary.

Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification and correction of Clitherton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note of them. Unfortunately they weakened Clitherton's argument a little. Clitherton would have to modify it. Clitherton, a sweeping and wholesale person, would not like that.

Gideon was feeling annoyed with Clitherton, and annoyed with several others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with Peacock, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this, the Fact would soon be popular; it would find its way into the great soft silly heart of the public and there be damned.

He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian, fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others, writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful, patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting circle, on his blotting paper.



CHAPTER IV

RUNNING AWAY

1

A week later Gideon resigned his assistant editorship of the Fact. Peacock was, on the whole, relieved. Gideon had been getting too difficult of late. After some casting about among eager, outwardly indifferent possible successors, Peacock offered the job to Johnny Potter, who was swimming on the tide of his first novel, which had been what is called 'well spoken of' by the press, but who, at the same time, had the popular touch, was quite a competent journalist, was looking out for a job, and was young enough to do what he was told; that is to say, he was four or five years younger than Peacock. He had also a fervent enthusiasm for democratic principles and for Peacock's prose style (Gideon had been temperate in his admiration of both), and Peacock thought they would get on very well.

Jane was sulky, jealous, and contemptuous.

'Johnny. Why Johnny? He's not so good as lots of other people who would have liked the job. He's swanking so already that it makes me tired to be in the room with him, and now he'll be worse than ever. Oh, Arthur, it is rot, your chucking it. I've a jolly good mind not to marry you. I thought I was marrying the assistant editor of an important paper, not just a lazy old Jew without a job.'

She ruffled up his black, untidy hair with her hand as she sat on the arm of his chair; but she was really annoyed with him, as she had explained a week ago when he had told her.

2

He had walked in one evening and found her in Charles's bedroom, bathing him. Clare was there too, helping.

'Why do girls like washing babies?' Gideon speculated aloud. 'They nearly all do, don't they?'

'Well, I should just hope so,' Clare said. She was kneeling by the tin bath with her sleeves rolled up, holding a warmed towel. Her face was flushed from the fire, and her hair was loosened where Charles had caught his toe in it. She looked pretty and maternal, and looked up at Gideon with the kind of conventional, good-humoured scorn that girls and women put on when men talk of babies. They do it (one believes) partly because they feel it is a subject they know about, and partly to pander to men's desire that they should do it. It is part of the pretty play between the sexes. Jane never did it; she wasn't feminine enough. And Gideon did not want her to do it; he thought it silly.

'Why do you hope so?' asked Gideon. 'And why do girls like it?'

The first question was to Clare, the second to Jane, because he knew that Clare would not be able to answer it.

'The mites!' said Clare. 'Who wouldn't like it?'

Gideon sighed a little, Clare tried him. She had an amorphous mind. But Jane threw up at him, as she enveloped Charles in the towel, 'I'll try and think it out some time, Arthur. I haven't time now.... There's a reason all right.... The powder, Clare.'

Gideon watched the absurd drying and powdering process with gravity and interest, as if trying to discover its charm.

'Even Katherine enjoys it,' he said, still pondering. It was true. Katherine, who liked experimenting with chemicals, liked also washing babies. Possibly Katherine knew why, in both cases.

After Charles was in bed, his mother, his aunt, and his prospective stepfather had dinner. Clare, who was uncomfortable with Gideon, not liking him as a brother-in-law or indeed as anything else (besides not being sure how much Jane had told him about 'that awful night'), chattered to Jane about things of which she thought Gideon knew nothing—dances, plays, friends, family and Potters Bar gossip. Gideon became very silent. He and Clare touched nowhere. Clare flaunted the family papers in his face and Jane's. Lord Pinkerton was starting a new one, a weekly, and it promised to sell better than any other weekly on the market, but far better.

'Dad says the orders have been simply stunning. It's going to be a big thing. Simple, you know, and yet clever—like all dad's papers. David says' (David was the naval officer to whom Clare was now betrothed) 'there's no one with such a sense of what people want as dad has. Far more of it than Northcliffe, David says he has. Because, you know, Northcliffe sometimes annoys people—look at the line he took about us helping the Russians to fight each other. And making out in leaders, David says, that the Government is always wrong just because he doesn't like it. And drawing attention to the mistakes it makes, which no one would notice if they weren't rubbed in. David gets quite sick with him sometimes. He says the Pinkerton press never does that sort of thing, it's got too much tact, and lets well alone.'

'I'll, you mean, don't you, darling?' Jane interpolated.

Clare, who did, but did not know it, only said, 'David's got a tremendous admiration for it. He says it will last.'

'Oh, bother the paternal press,' Jane said. 'Give it a rest, old thing. It may be new to David, but it's stale to us. It's Arthur's turn to talk about his father's bank or something.'

But Arthur didn't talk. He only made bread pills, and the girls got on to the newest dance.

3

Clare went away after dinner. She never stayed long when Gideon was there. David didn't like Gideon, rightly thinking him a Sheeney.

'Sheeneys are at the bottom of Bolshevism, you know,' he told Clare. 'At the top too, for that matter. Dreadful fellows; quite dreadful. Why the dickens do you let Jane marry him?'

Clare shrugged her shoulders.

'Jane does what she likes. Dad and mother have begged and prayed her not to.... Besides, of course, even if he was all right, it's too soon....'

'Too soon? Ah, yes, of course. Poor Hobart, you mean. Quite. Much too soon.... A dreadful business, that. I don't blame her for trying to put it behind her, out of sight. But with a Sheeney. Well, chacun a son gout.' For David was tolerant, a live and let live man.

When Clare was gone, Jane said, 'Wake up, old man. You can talk now.... You and Clare are stupid about each other, by the way. You'll have to get over it some time. You're ill-mannered and she's a silly fool; but ill-mannered people and silly fools can rub along together, all right, if they try.'

'I don't mind Clare,' said Gideon, rousing himself. 'I wasn't thinking about her, to say the truth. I was thinking about something else.... I'm chucking the Fact, Jane.'

'How d'you mean, chucking the Fact' Jane lit a cigarette.

'What I say. I've resigned my job on it. I'm sick of it.'

'Oh, sick.... Every one's sick of work, naturally. It's what work is for.... Well, what are you doing next? Have you been offered a better job?'

'I've not been offered a job of any sort. And I shouldn't take it if I were—not at present. I'm sick of journalism.'

Jane took it calmly, lying back among the sofa cushions and smoking.

'I was afraid you were working up to this.... Of course, if you chuck the Fact you take away its last chance. It'll do a nose-dive now.'

'It's doing it anyhow. I can't stop it. But I'm jolly well not going to nose-dive with it. I'm clearing out.'

'You're giving up the fight, then. Caving in. Putting your hands up to Potterism.'

She was taunting him, in her cool, unmoved, leisurely tones.

'I'm clearing out,' he repeated, emphasising the phrase, and his black eyes seemed to look into distances. 'Running away, if you like. This thing's too strong for me to fight. I can't do it. Clare's quite right. It's tremendous. It will last. And the Pinkerton press only represents one tiny part of it. If the Pinkerton press were all, it would be fightable. But look at the Fact—a sworn enemy of everything the Pinkerton press stands for, politically, but fighting it with its own weapons—muddled thinking, sentimentality, prejudice, loose cant phrases. I tell you there'll hardly be a halfpenny to choose between the Pinkerton press and the Fact, by the time Peacock's done with it.... It's not Peacock's fault—except that he's weak. It's not the Syndicate's fault—except that they don't want to go on losing money for ever. It's the pressure of public demand and atmosphere. Atmosphere even more than demand. Human minds are delicate machines. How can they go on working truly and precisely and scientifically, with all this poisonous gas floating round them? Oh, well, I suppose there are a few minds still which do; even some journalists and politicians keep their heads; but what's the use against the pressure? To go in for journalism or for public life is to put oneself deliberately into the thick of the mess without being able to clean it up.'

'After all,' said Jane, more moderately, 'it's all a joke. Everything is. The world is.'

'A rotten bad joke.'

'You think things matter. You take anti-Potterism seriously, as some people take Potterism.'

'Things are serious. Things do matter,' said the Russian Jew.

Jane looked at him kindly. She was a year younger than he was, but felt five years older to-night.

'Well, what's the remedy then?'

He said, wearily, 'Oh, education, I suppose. Education. There's nothing else. Learning.' He said the word with affection, lingering on it, striking his hand on the sofa-back to emphasise it.

'Learning, learning, learning. There's nothing else.... We should drop all this talking and writing. All this confused, uneducated mass of self-expression. Self-expression, with no self worth expressing. That's just what we shouldn't do with our selves—express them. We should train them, educate them, teach them to think, see that they know something—know it exactly, with no blurred edges, no fogs. Be sure of our facts, and keep theories out of the system like poison. And when we say anything we should say it concisely and baldly, without eloquence and frills. Lord, how I loathe eloquence!'

'But you can't get away from it, darling. All right, don't mind me, I like it.... Well now, what are you going to do about it? Teach in a continuation school?'

'No,' he said, seriously. 'No. Though one might do worse. But I've got to get right away for a time—right out of it all. I've got to find things out before I do anything else.'

'Well, there are plenty of, things to find out here. No need to go away for that.'

He shook his head.

'Western Europe's so hopeless just now. So given over to muddle and lies. Besides, I can't trust myself, I shall talk if I stay. I'm not a strong silent man. I should find myself writing articles, or standing for Parliament, or something.'

'And very nice too. I've always said you ought to stand for Labour.'

'And I've sometimes agreed with you. But now I know I oughtn't. That's not the way. I'm not going to join in that mess. I'm not good enough to make it worth while. I should either get swamped by it, or I should get so angry that I should murder some one. No, I'm going right out of it all for a bit. I want to find out a little, if I can, about how things are in other countries. Central Europe. Russia. I shall go to Russia.'

'Russia! You'll come back and write about it. People do.'

'I shall not. No, I think I can avoid that—it's too obvious a temptation to tumble into with one's eyes shut.'

'"He travelled in Russia and never wrote of it." It would be a good epitaph.... But Arthur darling, is it wise, is it necessary, is it safe? Won't the Reds get you, or the Whites? Which would be worse, I wonder?'

'What should they want with me?'

'They'll think you're going to write about them, of course. That's why the Reds kidnapped Keeling, and the Whites W.T. Goode. They were quite right, too—except that they didn't go far enough and make a job of them. Suppose they've learnt wisdom by now, and make a job of you?'

'Well then, I shall be made a job of. Also a placard for our sensational press, which would be worse. One must take a few risks.... It will be interesting, you know, to be there. I shall visit my father's old home near Odessa. Possibly some of his people may be left round there. I shall find things out—what the conditions are, why things are happening as they are, how the people live. I think I shall be better able after that to find out what the state of things is here. One's too provincial, too much taken up with one's own corner. Political science is too universal a thing to learn in that way.'

'And when you've found out? What next?'

'There's no next. It will take me all my life even to begin to find out. I don't know where I shall be—in London, no doubt, mostly.'

'Do you mean, Arthur, that you're going to chuck work for good? Writing, I mean, or public work?'

'I hope so. I mean to. Oh, if ever, later on, I feel I have anything I want to say, I'll say it. But that won't be for years. First I'm going to learn.... You see, Jane, we can live all right. Thank goodness, I don't depend on what I earn.... You and I together—we'll learn a lot.'

'Oh, I'm going in for confused self-expression. I'm not taking any vows of silence. I'm going to write.'

'As you like. Every one's got to decide for themselves. It amuses you, I suppose.'

'Of course, it does. Why not? I love it. Not only writing, but being in the swim, making a kind of a name, doing what other people do. I'm not mother, who does but write because she must, and pipes but as the linnets do.'