“No!” said Freddy firmly.
“Stories are stupid,” said Bertie. “Let’s sing. We’ll sing ‘Stille Nacht.’”
So all together, Aline Gurtner in her pretty contralto voice, and the three piping childish trebles sang, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” while Nanna turned down their beds, and made the night-nursery tidy.
“That was lovely,” said Bertie with complete conviction, at the end. “Now we’ll have ‘The Watch by the Rhine.’”
“No, darlings, not to-night,” said she. “I must go and dress, because Daddy and I are dining early, as he’s going to drive up to London afterwards.”
“To get his half a million pounds?” asked Jackie.
“Some of it, perhaps. Now, then, I shall say, ‘One, two, three,’ and see who’s in bed first.”
They counted with her, Bertie preferring to do it in German, and a wild scamper across the nursery followed.
But the concert apparently was not over yet, for as she went downstairs, she heard, obscuring the chorale that was rising from the lift, which was on its journey up, a trio rendering of “The Watch by the Rhine,” with curious intervals, but of unmistakable identity.... She felt that she must instantly begin to teach them “God Save the King.”
Two days later the English ultimatum was deliveredin Berlin, and the war of the world, the thought of which made Aline Gurtner so depressed, had begun. The same evening Mr. Waters had occasion to write a note to Mr. Jackson, and did not forget to date it at the top, “The Greek Calends.”
AS suddenly as the first wave from the wash of a great liner breaking on the shore of a tranquil sea, a billow of utter loneliness reared itself up and thundered over Helen Grote. It came without warning, for she had not been looking seawards.
Robin had just left her with a very troubled face, but with his determination absolutely unshaken. On the morning after the declaration of war he had come straight up to town from Cambridge, and had been given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. That had met with her entire approval, she loved to think that her son had been among the very first to answer to the call, even anticipating it. Then she had done her part, and had got a promise for him of a staff appointment, which implied useful and necessary work, would give scope to his excellent abilities, and, above all, would not plunge him after a few months of training into the fiery hell, which, having by now burned its way almost within gun-range of Paris, had at length been stayed, and the edges of it turned back upon itself. But there was other work to do in the service of the country, just as important, just as primarily essential as being plunged into that inferno of shot and shell,and this appointment, so entirely suitable to Robin’s capabilities, was his if he chose to take it: it would be offered him in answer to his grateful assent. Instead, he had given an ungrateful negative, and had left her in order to request that the offer might not be made him in any form that obliged him to accept it.
She had looked forward to this interview with the most delighted anticipations, for she knew what Robin’s feelings with regard to his duty were. He, personally, hated and loathed the idea of war, and all that military service implied. He was a peaceful, easy-going young gentleman, fond of friends, and cricket, and Cambridge and the sunshine of the secure and pleasant life into which he had been born. But the moment the call had come, he had responded to it, he had put everything else aside, habit, and inclination and security, and had been among the earliest to present himself, never contemplating it as possible to do anything else. Surely, then, he had done his part: he had said, “Here am I, take me,” and they had taken him. Now, as if in reward of that, had come this offer, which she had procured for him.... But at the back of her delighted anticipation of telling Robin about it, there had been a doubt lurking in the dark, which she trusted would never open its baleful mouth in discourse, but sit there dumb. Instead, the doubt had instantly leaped out into the light, and instead of being dumb, had expressed itself with great lucidity through Robin’s mouth.
“It’s awfully good of you,” he had said, “to take so much trouble, but don’t you see—I’m sure you do—that for me it would be mere shirking to take it? It’s a job which a fellow with four fingers on his hand could do. I’ve got five.”
Even while he spoke some instinct within her cordially agreed. But she did not intend to heed thatinstinct: she slammed the door on it. Mightn’t a mother avert a great peril from her only son?...
“Shirking, darling?” she said, still only faintly doubting his eventual acquiescence. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know much about war, any more than you do, but I’m sure it doesn’t merely consist in having men with guns and rifles. There have to be supplies, haven’t there, brought up? Armies have got to be fed; there must be lines of communication, there must be organization behind them, transport, intelligence.”
A little soft crease appeared between Robin’s eyebrows, which she knew. It appeared there when he was proposing to be obstinate about something, and familiarly it was known as the mule-face.
“Of course there must,” said he, just as if there wasn’t such a thing in the world as a mule.
“Well, then, don’t make the mule-face, Robin,” she said. “Listen to what I am saying. All that organization is the brain behind the mere mechanism. When you doubt about taking this appointment, it is the same as if you were not sure that you would not sooner be a puff of steam that came from an engine, than part of the intelligence of the man who drives it.”
For a moment the “mule-face” vanished, and Robin laughed with boyish appreciation.
“Oh, mother, you are clever!” he said. “That’s just like you.”
“My dear, I’m not clever in the least: it’s the plainest common sense.”
He shook his head.
“No, it was clever,” he said. “I am bound to admit the excellence of your simile. But you can’t convince people by similes.”
“You can if the simile is just,” she said, “and if people are logical.”
He got up, the creased forehead outlining itself again, and pulled at his sword strap and belt which were still not quite familiar, as if he was wearing some new sort of cuff or collar.
“Well, the simile is just, and I am logical,” he said. “If I choose to think, I see your logic. But as well as thinking, I feel. I don’t say that I choose to feel, but I have to feel. I wonder if you understand that.”
Suddenly she became aware of the immense change between the Robin of two months ago and the Robin who stood before her now. He was still the same Robin, too; the change, immense though it was, was not due to any new characteristic that had come to him: it was but the emergence and revelation of what she had known was there all along. The secure prosperity of his active, unreflective boyhood had but veiled it over as with thin ice: that bright, dazzling covering had caused a glitter on the surface, and you had not been able actually to see below it. But now that had melted and she could see into the deep water that lay so tranquilly beneath. Yet it was not that he had become a man: he was just as young as ever....
“Yes, darling,” she said, “but feeling is no guide. If we all did what we felt, the world would become a madhouse. It is the control of reason that keeps it sane.”
He looked at her with a sort of humorous interrogation.
“I wondered if you would say something of the sort,” he said. “You don’t believe it, you know, in so far as it applies to my choice now!”
She thought over her simile about the engine’s puffof steam and the engine’s driver. It seemed to her extremely apt.
“I do believe it,” she said. “It is mere common sense.”
“Then I’ll ask you another question. You would be very much relieved if I took this appointment. But shouldn’t I lose a little of your respect?”
She fancied she could quibble that away.
“Respect?” she said. “What a word to use. As if that had got anything to do with love!”
He laughed outright, and in the fashion that was so common with him, sat down on the arm of her chair.
“That’ll never do,” he said. “You must learn to respect me.”
“I do,” she said hurriedly, for the instinct on which she had slammed the door asserted itself. “I respected your joining up as you did. You did all you could do.”
“And hasn’t it got anything to do with love?” he asked.
She paused before replying and Robin went on:
“It’s not only your respect,” he said. “It’s the respect of everybody who is serious. They wouldn’t tell me I had lost their respect: they would only congratulate me on getting a staff-appointment. But what would Jim feel, or Badders, or Jelf?”
“But you told me that Mr. Jelf was a pacifist,” she said. “You said that he loved the Germans and hated the English.”
“That was all his way of talking. I haven’t told you what he’s done. He has not applied for a commission at all: he has joined as a private.”
She made another appeal.
“Robin, you are all I have got,” she said simply.
She looked up at him, and saw that the soft, firm crease still sat between his eyebrows.
“So don’t make the mule-face,” she added.
He shook his head.
“Can’t help it,” he said. “I’m going to be a mule: I—I must look like one.”
“Will you think it over then, first,” she asked, “before you do anything?”
“I have thought it over. Will you think it over? I know you agree with me really, but I can’t get at the part of you that agrees. It’s there, though.”
She knew that just as well as he did, but made no promise, and with a face troubled and yet determined he left her.
It was that which started the wave of loneliness far out on the sea, and she sat there idly, after he had gone, not yet aware of its approach, but only of the deadly, bored depression that had settled down on her, never lifting, since the day that she had driven down to Grote alone and late on a Saturday night in July. She no longer wanted to see him who should have been her companion then, though for a day or two after that, she would have forgiven even that monstrous letter of his revelation of himself, could her forgiveness have brought him back. And yet Robin had said that respect had something to do with love....
When he had said it she, or some part of her, had acquiesced, and yet when she read Kuhlmann’s letter, though there was no one in the world for whom she had so profound a contempt, she still longed for his presence. Was that, then, another sort of love, something possibly not less real, certainly not less insistent, but more animal, essentially lower? She had always hated seeing Robin and Kuhlmann together, and had rather laughed at herself for her sentimentality, her squeamishness. And then, by degrees almost imperceptible, any other feeling for the man who had so grossly insulted her, but mere contempt, had been distilled away, leaving just that sediment which unemotionally despised him.
But that draining away of the boiling, bubbling liquid which had filled her heart, had left it totally apathetic to all the myriad interests and diversions of her life. Even the tremendous impact of the breaking-out of war had failed to rouse her from it, her whole soul seemed drugged into a drowsy, depressed somnolence. She cared for nothing, and she disliked nothing, except only that which concerned Robin. The live tissues of the mind that record the emotions were not dead: she still wanted to want, wanted to enjoy, wanted to feel, but they lay as if under some opiate that deprived them of sensation.
The only thing that for these last days had in the least interested her was the obtaining for Robin the post that would keep him in town, doing work which undeniably must be done, dressed in khaki as every self-respecting young man was, with little red tabs on his shoulders and a red band on his cap to show that he was not merely a puff of steam from the engine, but part of the intelligence that directed it. All that was alive in her clung to the sound sense of the simile, which Robin himself had admitted.... But somewhere in the drowsed, drugged part of her mind some instinct within her despised that sound sense as completely as Robin himself despised it. He, too, had drawn the distinction between “thinking” and “feeling,” wondering if she understood. Good heavens, did she not understand? Was not three quarters of life a battle between thinking and feeling?
She was not one of those optimistic lunatics whotalked about the exposure of the enemy’s lengthening lines of communication, when day by day the tide of the black advance swept across the map towards Paris and the Channel ports, nor did she number herself with the large mass of folk who cheerfully maintained that the great steam-roller from the East was now giving forth encouraging hoots, as a signal for its starting on its relentless journey to Berlin. But at present, though not cheerful, shecaredabout the war as little as they, because she could not care about anything. It had broken out at a time when she was still stunned by the greatest emotional blow, delivered with every circumstance of insult and contempt, that she had ever experienced. It had taken away all her power of keen feeling, except as regards Robin. All but that slim passage between her emotions and life was choked with dead leaves.
She took up the morning paper, at which she had not yet cared to look. The black line had not moved either backwards or forwards, but there was a long list of casualties. She read it, and found that it contained notices of intimate bereavement for some half-dozen of her friends, to whom she must write a line of condolence. Then, in imagination, she saw herself reading some similar list, on a morning but a few months ahead, and finding it contained the beloved name concerning which she had already received communication from the War Office. At that the great wave of loneliness soared high above her and engulfed her.
On that day, so vivid at the moment to her imagination, that she felt that it was already actually here, there would be nothing whatever left for which she cared to live. She made no sentimental pictures of herself as a mother bereaved of her only son, or of the blow killing her, for a blow, in order to kill, has to strikesome vital place, and there was nothing vital in her to strike. She would just go on living, if that could be called life, which had not enough keenness of edge to it to be termed either happy or unhappy, until the dark door opened, or, as she had phrased it once to herself, the great fish gulped down the fly that floated, water-logged on the stream, and she went back into the nothingness out of which she came.
What had it all been about, this tedious story, which she had once read with such intense interest? Hitherto life had denied her nothing which she cared to take, and she had taken freely, grasping it by the armful, and sucking out of it the utmost of its sweetness. But henceforth life seemed to hold nothing that was worth taking; she no longer cared what it gave her or denied her, since “desire had failed.” No longer had she any part in it: all those who hitherto had been active with herself in its pageants and movements, seemed no longer to be alive, but to be mere marionettes, bobbing about in meaningless antics, while she had become the one spectator of the show, quite alone in this infinite array of empty benches....
By a violent effort she pulled herself together: she was meeting trouble before it came, in imagining what the world would be to her when there was Robin’s name in the daily list of casualties. She knew it was utterly unlike her to indulge in that sort of profitless speculation, but the billow of loneliness had for the moment completely submerged her, blotting out all else but the consciousness of itself. Now it had broken, and her head was above water again, and there was still a beach somewhere near, a shore to which she might struggle, and the engrained habit of life, the eager planning of the hours so as to fill them in a manner as diversifiedand entertaining as possible, came back to her a little, striking feeble pulses in the arteries of her emotions. Perhaps the apathy of these last weeks had been leading up to a crisis like that she had just passed through; perhaps now the worst was over, and some hint of recuperation and of returning vitality was coming back to her.
Yes, faintly but unmistakably she wanted to be interested in the world again, until such time as the great fish gulped her down. So few months ago, without egotism and conceit, there had been nobody she knew who had more than a fraction of the intensity of interest with which the world, just the human race, inspired her. All sorts and conditions of men held for her their own talisman: once she had bidden to dinner a black bishop, a lion tamer and a suffragette, and had passed an entrancing evening, in the effort to realize what was the fascination of converting cannibals, of cowing lions and of destroying works of art in order to show how fit you were to have a hand in the government of the country. None, literally none, had excelled her in the cult of mankind; never had there been a more ardent worshipper.
Then suddenly, owing in the main to an emotional shock, life had lost its coherence for her: instead of its being a clamour of entrancing topics, it had become a meaningless babble. On the top of that had come this detestable war. If she was to win her way back to the ranks of the living, to enable herself to realize the world again as something more than a mere congregation of marionettes watched drowsily by a single spectator, she must somehow escape from this paralyzing influence of the war, which was sapping the intelligence just as it was monopolizing the entire energies of bishop, lion-tamer and suffragette alike. Of the women sheknew there was scarcely one who was not knitting or sewing or learning to nurse: they were dead to every form of human interest except counting stitches, and to every pursuit except that of dropping them and beginning again with a pulled-out heap of crinkled wool.
Gracie Massingberd was a ringleader among these. She had taken possession of Ardingly House, and had established her Sewing and Knitting Society there. The ballroom was full of small tables round which sat little parties of her workers who made shirts all day and turned out yard after yard of woollen scarves. It seemed to give them a sense of doing something for their country, and there they sat and knitted and talked all day in a pessimistic manner about the war, hatching as in the warmth of an incubator a hundred rumours of peril and disaster. Helen had attended these gatherings for two or three days, but instead of finding an anodyne to her dull aching in manual employment, she merely found a physical and emotional atmosphere that were equally intolerable. These ladies ate sandwiches out of little paper packets at lunch-time, and consumed a good deal of tea, and Gracie moved among them with the air of a high-priestess. And all seemed to think that their personal discomfort, the sitting on high chairs and eating disgusting food, and turning out woollen scarves, somehow helped the war.
In the drawing-room next door was a depot for packing the fruits of their labours and old clothes of all sorts which were sent them in vast numbers. But after some three days in this rag and bone shop Helen had judged it better to retire, while, in case those woollen scarves were really of use to somebody, she left a standing order at a shop for a woollen scarf to be sent to Lady Massingberd’s depot every other day, with her compliments. She was delighted to supply them, provided she was not obliged to make them, and did so with a greater prodigality than that with which they would have materialized under her unaccustomed fingers. But she thought with a sort of contemptuous envy of the type of mind which can evolve an approving conscience out of knitting and lugubrious conversation. In her it only produced a longing for fresh air and an escape from the nightmare that it wove about her. If all that she could do was to knit scarves, and admire Gracie standing waist high in a rubbish heap of old shoes and darned trousers, she would sooner admire and wonder at Gracie’s notion of what she called “personal service” at a distance, and buy scarves that were much better made than any she could herself make.
All this for the past week or two had formed the drab curtain of loneliness and depression in front of which her life had been enacted. All the relief from it that she had got lay in her exertions to obtain a post for Robin which would give him some useful and necessary job and prevent his exposure to the grim Moloch that sat in flaming hunger along the battle-line in France. But this morning, when Robin had passed by with a shake of his head what she had procured for him, there had come this crisis of loneliness which, when it subsided again, left her not dully, drowsily aching any more, but had stabbed her, though with a piercing point, into some sort of vitality.
Hitherto, she had just let the hours go on guttering away to form days, the days accumulate into weeks, content that time should waste itself, provided only that it definitely ran away. But now that dull ache passed into a pain that awoke her, from which somehow it was necessary to escape: it was as if she had beendreaming of pain, and awoke in a sweat of anguish, encompassed by the added terror of the dark—dark, and the faint outline of Robin against it, as against a drawn blind behind which burns some remote and terrible conflagration. At all costs she must turn on, here in the room of her own heart, some light that would blot out and extinguish that lurid smouldering of flame from without.
But even this sharp anguish and the horror of the dark were welcome to her, since they brought to her again something of the poignancy of life and the desire to live. Into her benumbed self as into a benumbed limb there came the prickings of returning sensation: it was beginning to be usable again, capable of grasping and of feeling. But there was a certain change already perceptible to herself in the quality of the life that was beginning to flow through it.
Hitherto, pleasure-seeking, self-centred, self-indulgently extravagant though her life had been, it had yet had this redeeming feature that she delighted in the delights of others, glowed with their joys, and gave herself to their pleasures. Though she never had risen to that higher altruism which equally rejoices in being associated with the troubles and sorrows of those it loves, and mourns for those who mourn even more sincerely than it plays for those who dance, she had always taken pleasure in spending her time, her money and herself on the enjoyment of others, and had found her reward in such application. The gem-like brilliance of her life had ever been undimmed by the softer fires of pity and compassion: she had had no use for the failures and the ineffectives of this world. She was sorry—vaguely—for any who were not soaked in success, but they had never received from her more than a dropped “Poor thing,” and an averted gaze: peoplein pain and distress had much better go away and hide themselves, as she herself would undoubtedly have done in similar circumstances, and not bring their damping and depressing influence among those whose privilege it was to live in sunlight....
But now the quality of her reviving desire for life was changed infinitely for the worse: little as she had previously cared for the sorrows of others, now she found herself awaking to an equal indifference to their joys. The great point was to extract for oneself all that life could possibly hold of pleasurable experience, and no longer to find pleasure in giving it. Robin had rejected the fruits of her efforts for his well-being; another had returned her gift with outrageous contumely.
Here were the rewards of the well-wisher! And more paramount than ever was the necessity of turning the back on all that was painful and distressing. Life did not last long, nor was she desirous that it should, but while the burden of consciousness was there, it was the only sanity to make it as light a weight as possible. It would soon be removed altogether, and for that interval, reason and feeling alike advised the decking of it with ribands and flowers. It mattered not from where they came: the flowers could be plucked, if need be, from the wreaths left on graves. It was only necessary that they should hide the burden of life.
A more immediate necessity was to shut out from herself all that reminded her of this horror of war. She hated and deplored it, and already she saw it, in some future not far off, assuming an aspect much more intimately menacing. It was out of her power (already she had done her vain best) to avert that, and now the only possibility of avoiding that this awakening of hers should be but the awakening from stupor intonightmare lay in banishing from her mind and from her sight all that could recall to her the grim reality. It was in a sort of self-protection that she framed her House of Life afresh: pity had long been banished from it, and now she must veil the face of love.
She had lived far too cosmopolitan a life to have much sense of patriotism, if by patriotism is implied the blind preference for one country above the sum of all other countries. The roots of her culture were too widely planted to enable her to say, “It is from here my life comes, or from there.” Though in a very different sense to that in which John Wesley spoke, the world was her parish: she found that in all the enthusiasms of her life there had been no touchstone applied that would record a permanent nationality. Just as she had never cared for class, so she had never cared for blood. It only mattered that it beat, and in her roused a beat in answer.
London in these psychical circumstances had become impossible. Wherever you went, war in some form confronted you or pounced out on you screaming: whether in Robin’s khaki, or in Gracie’s knitting establishment, or in the headlines of a paper, or in the innumerable appeals that, still unopened, littered her table.
What sense of patriotism had Gracie until Germany announced her most reasonable intention of invading France by the shortest possible route? That was a mere matter of common sense: the politics of a nation were exactly those of an individual. Certainly Germany had promised not to do so, but so for that matter had every married woman (herself included) promised to love, honour and obey her husband. But what in each case did that promise mean? It only meant that for convenience of a contract of international or personal importance, you declared yourself ready to enter intoobligations without which no contract would have been possible. It fitted the facts for the moment, but if the facts changed, you acted as if you denied the authenticity of your signature. You felt like that then, or otherwise you would not have signed. But if you felt differently afterwards, if a question of national existence or of private happiness were at stake, naturally you said, “I feel so no longer.” Contracts only bound such as were willing to observe them. If a godfather vowed that his godchild renounced the devil and all his works, was he responsible, or for that matter was the unconscious godchild responsible, for the complete observance of that contract?
How did the jargon run? “The pomps and vanities of this wicked world and all the sinful lusts of the flesh.” All that had been renounced for her, very solemnly. Surely her poor godmother had not perjured herself in guaranteeing these things. She had only hoped for the best, just in the same way as Germany had done when she promised not to invade Belgium. She hoped the necessity might not arise for her doing so, just as H.R.H., who had been so pleasant a guest at Lady Gurtner’s party the other day, had hoped for the best in promising that Helen Grote should renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. For both an internal necessity had arisen: it had become a condition of life that the promises, written or spoken, should become waste paper or wasted breath. It was ridiculous to keep a promise that was made in other circumstances. And it was over this that England had gone to war, that Moloch’s fires were heated. And yet it was this, neither more nor less, that had turned Robin into that grave-gay boy who had preferred to face shot and shell rather than be sensible and stay at home, and live at ease like a few other fortunate contemporaries who had taken advantage of the facilities which influence had procured for them.
Well: she had done her best for him, and now she must look after herself a little, and learn to enjoy and to be alive again. It was no use, so she had lately ascertained, to care too much for other people; they left you and went after their own devices, and brought upon you this intolerable sense of loneliness and of absolute indifference to the manifold joys of the world. But in order to appreciate these she must put away from her the thought of the war, which spoiled every hour into which it was permitted to intrude. Her own individuality was the final court of appeal: she must satisfy its imperious need of banishing the things that wearied and distressed it. Surely there must be other people of intelligence, who, realizing their impotence to help or hinder, had got away from the ugliness of turmoil and the waste of profitless and anxious hours.
There was Aline Gurtner, for instance, with whom she was to have stayed in that week when first war knocked all plans on the head. She had put her visit off, promising, however, to propose herself as soon as she could manage to get away from London. Aline, with her amazing joy in life, would be just the sort of person who would not permit international complications to get between her and her pleasures. Helen would telegraph to her at once and propose a visit.
She hesitated a moment after her telegram was written before she rang the bell to order it to be sent, and stood looking out of the window on to the square that basked in the September sunlight. Some instinct within her lifted up a rebellious voice reminding her of tedious things like duty and the root from which duty sprang, not arid morality, but love....
At this moment there crossed the road two woundedsoldiers. One had his face bound round with bandages that crossed flat from cheek to cheek instead of projecting where his nose should be: the other, on crutches, trailed a dragging foot. Perhaps some day Robin would cross the square like that, or some day perhaps he would not cross it at all.... She turned back into the room with her written telegram in her hand, and rang the bell.
ALINE GURTNER had been more than pleased when she received Lady Grote’s telegram proposing a visit: she was entranced, for this was precisely the sort of person whom she most wanted in her house just now. During the past fortnight she had been trying to secure a gentle, cheerful trickle of visitors there, but refusals had come in rather disconcerting numbers. She could not get the tap to run. It was quite true, of course, that everyone was very busy, and that such an allegation as reason for regret might very likely be true, but she had begun to be vaguely uneasy that it was not going to be reserved for her to declare her sympathies and show an adoring England how intensely pro-English she was, but that her English friends were proceeding to demonstrate their own sympathies by omitting to flock to her biddings. As a matter of fact, her apprehensions were entirely ill-founded; such people as she had asked—they included members of the Government who really were not completely at leisure just now—had merely been too much occupied to spend perfectly idle days in the country. But the sequence of regrets had made her a little nervous. It was also unkind of people, who should have realized how beautifully she was behaving and how she feltthe war, not to crowd round her and comfort her and praise her and admire her.
She ran to announce to her husband this gratifying intelligence that Helen Grote proposed herself. Sir Hermann had successfully concluded the financial operations which he had planned on the night of Aline’s great party, when he gnawed his nails, while the drowsy world still slept to the imminence of war, and had netted even more than the half-million he had anticipated. Now, in the economicalbouleversementthat had occurred, when good businesses were tottering and sound credits upset, he was content to look serenely on, and wonder, as so often before, how it was that so many people seemed to make a point of being just too late when they decided on action. So many of his acquaintances, heads of firms in the city, had, on that Saturday when he was so busy, taken the day off as usual, put on knickerbockers and played golf. Now it was his turn for the knickerbockers, while they slaved all day in their offices trying to avert shipwreck, or if, as in so many cases, shipwreck had occurred, to pick up such bits of their cargoes as the storm washed ashore. Meantime the options in colliery shares and shipping which he had bought in England were maturing very satisfactorily, and he was quite happy to wait and observe this mellowing process with the same sense of well-earned leisure with which he had been strolling round the kitchen garden that morning, and observing the pears ripening on the red-brick walls. Some were ripe already, and he was eating one that he had picked when Aline came in.
“My dear, Helen Grote has proposed to come and stay with us,” she cried. “Is not that delightful of her?”
He did not care two straws whether Lady Grotecame or not, for when he was not at work he knew of no better mode of life than to be with Aline and the children. But the news evidently pleased Aline: she had not looked so radiant since the day when he had playfully come into her bedroom with all the sables on, and asked her if she liked his new suit. What a good joke that had been!
“I am very well satisfied to have my Aline and my imps,” said he, “but I am pleased that your friend will come.”
“Of course you are, darling,” said she. “It is just what I want. I will take care to send a little paragraph to theMorning Post. And I was writing only this morning to Mr. Boyton: I think I will telegraph instead, and ask him to come for the Sunday anyhow. I hope he will stop longer, and then you must take him out shooting. There is shooting in September, isn’t there?”
“And do you forget the fat partridges your Jaeger shot for you yesterday?” he asked.
As a matter of fact the keeper had shot them, but Sir Hermann had been out shooting, though without the success he so easily attained into other lines. He was dressed now in homespun and knickerbockers and stockings with a sort of frill round the tops which reminded the observer of the decoration of crackers.
“Are you going to shoot to-day?” she asked.
“No; cannot you see that I have my golfing clothes on? I have gaiters on when I shoot, and thick boots. I am going to see the bailiff now and after lunch I shall play golf. Upon my word, this English country life with plenty of exercise and good fruit like this from my own garden is just as beneficial to me as Marienbad. There is no longer a trace of acidity in all me! I am your sweet Hermann.”
Mr. Boyton, whether or no owing to the information that Lady Grote would be a fellow-guest, was delighted to reply favourably on the prepaid form his hostess provided him with, and the two arrived that evening, in an express that Sir Hermann had stopped for them at Ashmore Fen station. This was a privilege appertaining to the owner of Ashmore House, and it gave him considerable pleasure to exercise it, for it conveyed a sense of territorial rights. Aline went to the station to meet them (in the negligent country costume of a cotton dress and a tam-o’-shanter in which she occasionally hit the turf with a golf club), with the sables lying handy to put on in case she was chilly. True to her English policy, she was very voluble about the war, and her sympathies with regard to it.
“Dearest Helen,” she said, “it was too sweet of you to propose yourself; how-d’ye-do, Mr. Boyton, very pleased you were able to come. Have you brought a gun with you? No? Hermann will lend you one. And have you brought us the evening papers, Helen? We are so terribly out of the world here, just when one wants every moment to hear the latest possible news. I wish you had been able to bring Robin with you, but of course he is with his regiment now. How proud you must be of him. Sure you’ve got all your luggage out? because it will be whirled away to Lincoln if you haven’t, for the train doesn’t stop here unless Hermann sends an order. Oh, I must speak to the station master a moment. He had news yesterday that his son was killed, and I must tell him how sorry I am. Poor fellow, he was only eighteen! Is it not heart-breaking, though of course it’s wonderful to be young and fighting for your country.”
She bound up the broken-hearted with a few bright words, promised to send a brace of partridges to hiswife, thought how wonderful she was, and rejoined the others.
“Prepare yourself for a humdrum life, Helen,” she said—“oh, yes, just give me my fur coat, Mr. Boyton, for I have only got a cotton frock on; yes, nice aren’t they? Hermann gave me them the other day—for there’s no one here but Hermann and the children, and yet somehow I’m as busy as ever I was in town. One has to read every word of the papers now-a-days, and the news is a little more encouraging, isn’t it? You never saw anyone so depressed as Hermann and I were during the retreat: how thankful you must have been that Robin was not in that. Yes, now we’re in the avenue: there’s the house at the end. I declare I feel as if I had been born here, there’s such a sense of home about it. I long for the war to be over: do you think we shall all be happy again by Christmas? It was touch and go, was it not, whether Paris fell?”
This was not precisely the kind of diversion for which Helen Grote had sought refuge in the country, and she tried to stem this flow of patriotism.
“My dear, what wonderful sables!” she said. “You do have the most beautiful things. They’re Russian, I suppose.”
“Yes, and is it not wonderful the way the Russians are getting on? They’re pouring into Galicia, aren’t they? I see the papers call them the steam-roller pounding along to Berlin. Fancy seeing the Russian troops marching down the Unter den Linden. And what is your war-work being, Mr. Boyton?”
Mr. Boyton was, for the time being, much in the same state as Lady Grote, desiring merely, with such powers of purpose as were left in a stunned mind, to escape, as far as possible, from all thoughts and mention of the war. All his autumn plans had been upset:his carefully arranged September and October with their succession of country-house parties had collapsed like a card-house, and instead he was obliged to spend those months at home in Hampstead.
London, it is true, was very full, but all his friends were busy, like Lady Massingberd, over funds and associations and societies for purposes of providing luxuries or necessities for soldiers and sailors, and were not thinking of him at all, or giving him those little luncheon-parties and dinner-parties which were the light and decoration of his life. His engagement-book, and therefore his existence, was empty, and this eternal monotony of war-talk was bringing him sensibly nearer melancholia. He had accepted this invitation to Lady Gurtner’s with enthusiasm, thinking that this house, with its conflicting interests of blood, would at least be an oasis in the sea of windy patriots, and here was his hostess quite unable to get off the subject of the war, and expecting him to go out shooting with her husband. He hated and distrusted fire-arms, never knowing what they would do next; but Lady Gurtner, more English than the English, was expecting every man to be employed in war-work, and if he was too old to shoot Germans at the front, to occupy his leisure in shooting birds in the turnips. He answered her as with a playful touch of a cat’s velvet paw, in which the claws are conjectured though not quite visible.
“Dear lady,” he said, “my war-work at the moment is to keep an English citizen sane, that citizen being myself. I thought it would be the best possible treatment for me to come down to your delicious and sequestered glades. May we forget for a little that there is anything in the world beyond this adorable domain of yours? I even shrink from the thought of shooting:there is a hint of destruction and death connected with it. I should be exceedingly unlikely to destroy anything except perhaps a beater or two, but when, as I gather, we need men so badly, I should be sorry to do even that. Peace and plenty! Let us take that for our text.”
Oddly enough, the moment that he uttered sentiments which were so completely in accord with Helen Grote’s purpose in coming here, she felt herself disowning them as regards her own part, and disdaining them as regards his. It was really awful that a man should speak like that. Imagine Robin or her husband, who worked all day in the censor’s office, uttering these bloodless, boudoir sentiments! On the other hand, Aline’s war-talk was not a whit preferable, and it had been Aline’s war-talk that had provoked this polished little tirade. But whatever its demerits, it had the one merit of sincerity, whereas she had experienced a slight difficulty in accepting the complete genuineness of Aline’s rapture at the thought of the Russians marching down the avenues of Berlin. But there was no need for the moment of steering a fresh course, for they drew up at the great red-brick portico of the house. A big climbing-rose sprawled over it: bees hummed in the flower-beds, it basked in the serene afternoon sun.
The place, when the mortgage was foreclosed by Sir Hermann, had belonged to some cousins of Helen’s: there were early memories connected with its shabby distinction: the fragrance of long-forgotten things was wafted out of its cool portals.
“Ah, how delicious,” she said. “I quite share your feeling of being at home here, Aline. And here is Sir Hermann.”
He came out of the hall to meet them, dressed in hisgolfing clothes which Aline had so mistakenly supposed to be a shooting-suit. He carried a golf club over his shoulder in the manner of a gun, and his homespun pockets bulged with balls. He looked like a biting caricature of an English squire as seen on the stage of a Parisian music-hall. From the hall inside came the cries and laughter of the children, who were seated on a rug which Freddy pulled across the slippery marble floor. Bertie, who when excited always talked German, was starting him with an “Ein, zwei, drei”....
“Come and say how-do-you-do at once to Lady Grote,” called their mother, and the three jolly little boys ran out into the porch.
“Ah, my chicks,” said Lady Gurtner, “have you been having a nice game? And did I hear you talking German? For shame! Yes, the right hand, Jackie, and shake hands with Mr. Boyton, too. Let us go straight out through the house, Helen, and have tea in the garden, where it will be ready.”
“And you have brought fresh news and good, I hope, Lady Grote?” asked Sir Hermann, who was ignorant of Mr. Boyton’s pursuit of sanity. “What was the report from France this morning?”
Aline took his arm in hers.
“Now, Hermann,” she said, “we’ve settled to leave the war alone and pretend there’s nothing going on. Won’t that be nice? Look, Helen, I told you we had made an Italian hall. Does it not look deliciously cool on this hot day?”
“Cool, yes: cooling room,” said Boyton below his breath. The powerful resemblance to a Turkish bath could scarcely be missed.
Helen looked round, was stunned, and recovered.
“How perfectly gorgeous, dear Aline,” she said.“Perfectly gorgeous! I never saw anything so magnificent.”
This was quite true, it also convinced, and as it was no good getting anyone to sit down on the cunning hot-water pipes, since the central heating was not on, they went on past the cunning lift and through the most velvety drawing-room on to the lawn, where in a tent that flew a flag emblazoned with the Gurtner arms lately discovered by the Heralds’ College, tea was waiting.
There was a good deal of admiration that must be expended over the tidiness with which Freddy ate his bread and jam, and the neatness with which Bertie tucked his napkin in, and the propriety with which Jackie said his grace, but anyhow these were subjects right away from the war-zone. Gradually, thanks to the unconscious youth of the children, and the mellow stability of the house, the three hundred years old lawn, the ordered and secure serenity of trees and stretch of sun-hazed pastures, something of the peaceful outlook made feint of returning, and Mr. Boyton felt that the treatment suited the British citizen of whom he was in charge....
“And you will shoot with me to-morrow?” asked Sir Hermann suddenly, not knowing that sport as well as war was abhorrent to his guest’s mind. “I can show you some good sport among my turnips.”
For a moment Aline forgot her Englishness and spoke in German.
“Dearest, Mr. Boyton does not care for sport,” she said. “We will eat your partridges when you have killed them.”
For no very sound reason the “language of song” came as a slight shock to Helen Grote. She was perfectly well aware that the Gurtners spoke German toeach other as often as English, but she did not expect to hear it just now. It rather altered the values of the setting. She covered it up, not too hurriedly, but did not fail to see the frown of admonition which Sir Hermann gave his wife.
“Yes, Mr. Boyton is one of those who does not want to kill something just because it is a fine day,” she said.
That would not do: there was the mention of killing again.
“And how are your partridges doing, Sir Hermann?” she added.
The two men presently strolled away, for though Mr. Boyton would not shoot, Sir Hermann was quite determined that he should appreciate the pursuits of an English country gentleman like himself to the extent at any rate of looking at his Jersey cows and poking a pig in the back, and when he was gone, Aline supposed that the embargo on war-talk was removed and began again.
“It seems so odd to me,” she said, “that any Englishman can bear to be doing nothing at a time like this. I am delighted that Mr. Boyton could come, of course, but I fully expected to find that he was immersed in work of some sort. Hermann has been splendid. He gave fifty thousand pounds only yesterday to the Red Cross, and his subscriptions to the county funds—well, there is simply no counting them. I tell him he will reduce us all to beggary, but he says, ‘Well, so much the better. Who wants to be rich, when there is so great a need for money?’ And he’s going to change our name to Gardner, which is so English, is it not, and so much better represents all we feel!”
Somehow to Helen Grote these very proper sentimentswere worse than the war-talk she had come here to avoid. It was not exactly that she doubted the sincerity of Aline’s protestations, though she certainly protested rather too much; indeed she more felt the callousness of Aline, so largely German both by birth and association, being able to cut clean away from German sympathies. She could have understood her being torn in two by conflicting strains, she could have felt for her in a situation which surely must have been almost intolerable, but what she could not comprehend was the apparent absence of any such situation at all. Sheoughtto have been miserable: instead she was a happy savage John Bull.
Aline’s big blue eyes filled with the tears that lay less deep even than her words.
“And to think how happy and secure we all felt such a few weeks ago,” she said. “Do you remember that little party I gave with the German and French Ambassadors and Princess Eleanor, when Saalfeld conducted and Kuhlmann sang? How little any of us dreamed of the trouble that was coming.”
At that moment there suddenly leaped into Helen Grote’s mind, with a sense of significance, the sentence in Kuhlmann’s letter, “I need but say that I trust the hospitable Sir Gurtner’s judgment more than that of the German Ambassador.” It had never before occurred to her to correlate it, to feel any curiosity as to its place. But when Aline, referring to the night of the party so few hours before Kuhlmann’s departure, said that no one had dreamed of coming trouble she wondered to what this referred. Kuhlmann had certainly learned Sir Hermann’s view of the situation before he wrote that letter.
“But your husband guessed what was coming, didn’t he?” she asked. “He took a different view fromthat abominable old Ambassador, who thought we were going to let treaties be torn up, just as Germany chose, without stirring a finger?”
Aline remembered the interview she had had with her husband late that night, and his general injunction as to secrecy. By his private information with the aid of his own foresight he had sown a golden harvest while the world still slept, but surely it was impossible that this was matter of common knowledge. She saw she must be careful, a precaution that usually ends in being too careful.
“Ah, no, it came like a thunderclap to Hermann,” she said. “He was simply knocked down by it.”
Helen had not the slightest reason to make a mystery of her information.
“Yes, dear Aline,” she said. “All I meant was, when did the thunderclap come? Your party—how well I remember it—was on a Thursday, and Kuhlmann left for Germany on the Saturday, while we were still all drowsy and comfortable. But he left me a little note of adieu, and said in it that he had gone because he trusted Sir Hermann’s judgment more than the Ambassador’s.”
Aline in her desire to be careful was full of protestations.
“I had no idea of it at all,” she said volubly. “Hermann hadn’t given me the slightest clue that he was uneasy till we all knew that war was inevitable. How proud I was of being English when that splendid ultimatum went out that England would not tolerate the breaking of the treaty. But are you sure he said anything to Kuhlmann? I expect somebody else spoke to him: probably he got it mixed up and meant to say that he trusted the German Ambassador’s judgment more than Hermann’s.”
Instantly she saw that would not do, since now everyone was aware that the Ambassador had clung to the belief that England would not intervene, and from carefulness made things a shade worse.
“I remember he talked to us that night,” she said, “and was terribly pessimistic about the whole situation.”
Helen could not help remembering that only just now Aline had said that on that night nobody dreamed of trouble. There was clearly some little confusion somewhere, though not probably Kuhlmann’s, and she had not the smallest desire to investigate it. People get muddled over dates—she always did herself—and she attempted to slide off the topic. Little as she wanted to talk about the war at all, she thought she would make some violently anti-German remark, such as Aline would appreciate, in order to put the muddle away.
“It’s odd how little Germans can appreciate the psychology of honourable and civilized people,” she said. “The Ambassador, for instance, as I said, thought we were going to see a treaty torn up and not stir a finger.”
Now Aline was quite capable in the pursuit of her Englishness of making that identical remark herself, but when she heard it made by an Englishwoman she revolted against it.
“But it was life and death to Germany,” she said. “She had to invade Belgium! Her promise couldn’t be held to bind her. And they say that France really invaded Belgium first.”
The two were now thoroughly at cross-purposes. Helen Grote, in her private reflections that morning, had been equally loose in her conception of a promise, seeing therein only a temporary obligation to suit certain circumstances. But now when she heardthat doctrine stated she saw its abominable falsity. Even though the outcome of that for her intimately was that Robin must soon go out to uphold the sacredness of a promise, she repudiated with scorning her own conclusion of the morning. She got up.
“My dear Aline,” she said, “that is the sort of thing one is tempted to think, and is ashamed of having thought. Why the whole English case, which you and I feel in our bones, is based on the negative of that. As for people saying that France invaded Belgium first, that is what Berlin says to Potsdam, and Potsdam to Berlin. And how unspeakable those accounts of German atrocities in Belgium are. But don’t let us talk about it: I so longed in London to get away from it all. May we have a stroll round your delicious garden? How well I remember it.”
In spite of Helen Grote’s expressed desire to get away from the thought of the war, Aline could not let that remark about German atrocities pass unchallenged. Once again, as on the Sunday at Cambridge with Robin, she spoke before she knew she had spoken.
“Oh, those infamous lies,” she said. “The Germans are incapable of such brutality. It is wicked of the English papers to publish such things.”
“Anyhow, do not let us think about them,” said Helen. “Surely we can forget it all for a little in this home of peace. The rose-garden: do let me see your new rose-garden.”
The rose-garden served its purpose for a while, but as they came back, in the gathering dusk across the lawn, once again the topic intruded itself.
“I must go up and see the children,” said Aline, “before they go to bed. Every night they all sing a verse of ‘God save the King.’ Isn’t that darling of them?”
She omitted to state that this was a very recent practice, and perhaps she had better not have alluded to it at all, for the nursery windows were thrown wide open just above them, and, on the moment, the first few bars of the “Watch by the Rhine” came floating out in shrill childish trebles. It stopped quite suddenly and howls succeeded.
“I must run in,” said Aline. “Yes, darlings, Mummie is coming to you now,” she called out.
She hurried off; presently the howlings ceased, and the more orthodox strains were uplifted. It was ludicrous enough, but Helen felt it was just a shade uncomfortable also. She would have liked a clearer view of what was going on in poor Aline’s breast. She could have understood so well the frank admission of torn and shredded sympathies: what was harder to comprehend was this intense desire to appear wholly English. And Aline’s subsequent appearance and explanation did not really elucidate matters. As usual, when everything was not going precisely as she wished it, her eyes were bright and brimming.
“I must really get rid of the children’s nurse,” she said. “She scolded them for singing the ‘Watch by the Rhine,’ and called them horrid little Huns. You cannot expect children to know all that is going on.”
But again Helen found herself in some little perplexity of mind. Was Aline’s indignation with her children’s nurse entirely due to the fact of her having called them Huns? Or did the fact that she had, by implication, called the Germans “horrid Huns” have anything to do with it? She began to feel rather more interested in the analysis of Aline’s state of mind.
Though the party at dinner only consisted of the four of them, with the addition of the clergyman of the parishand his wife, who walked across the Park from the Rectory (Mrs. Tempest carrying her evening shoes in a whitey-brown paper parcel), there was a very elaborate menu, and both Sir Hermann and Aline continually showed their appreciation of the duties of territorial magnates.
Before the arrival of the guests Aline had explained to Lady Grote that the invitation had been sent and accepted before her telegram had arrived, and had further told her that Mrs. Tempest was a very well-connected woman, much as if Lady Grote was likely to consider it as a very extraordinary thing that she should be expected to sit next a mere parson. He was asked to shoot with Sir Hermann next day in place of Mr. Boyton, and Aline exhibited a great interest in the church decorations for the approaching harvest festival, promising fruit and flowers and, if she could find time, her own personal embellishment of the altar. She also repeatedly pressed on them both second helpings of the dishes, urging them to make a good dinner, and implying, as was perfectly true, that they did not usually find themselves in a position to eat so largely of rich and expensive food. Kind no doubt these intentions were, but there was mixed up in them a self-conscious knowledge of the kindness, and a condescension in bestowing it at all. Sir Hermann’s attitude was not less perfectly appropriate than hers, and after dinner, when his guest had been practically obliged to drink at least two more glasses of port than he wished, he insisted on his taking home with him another cigar, which he would be glad of to-morrow. The price of it was also mentioned.
A bridge-table was laid out in the drawing-room with two new packs of cards and sharpened pencils, and on the entry of the men Aline got up.
“Mrs. Tempest has been telling me,” she said, “that she much prefers to look on at Bridge than to play it, and that Mr. Tempest never plays for money. So shall the other four of us have a rubber? You sit and watch Lady Grote’s play, Mrs. Tempest, and you will, I am sure, learn something. And there’s a very comfortable chair for Mr. Tempest, and I daresay he hasn’t seen the evening paper yet. Shall we cut, Helen?”
Helen would have been as incapable of sitting down to play Bridge in her own house, while leaving two guests, the one to look at the evening paper, the other to observe her own play, as of suggesting that she herself should go to bed and leave the others to amuse themselves. She made a disclaimer as regards playing Bridge at all. But instantly her hostess’s face clouded.
“Oh, but Mr. Boyton likes his Bridge so much,” she said, “and so does Hermann. Hermann said this afternoon that we should be able to have a rubber after dinner, didn’t you, Hermann? And Mrs. Tempest will enjoy seeing you play so much.”
There was no possibility of making further indications, so thought Helen Grote, for if Aline had no inkling of the ill-breeding of such a scheme it was no use making hints. Besides, primarily she was here as a guest, and it was no part of a guest’s duties to teach her hostess manners. So with more directions from Aline to Mr. Tempest as to where he would find theSketchand theGraphicwhen he had finished the evening paper the rubber began. But Mrs. Tempest was not long allowed the pleasure and instruction of watching Helen play, for almost at once Aline summoned her to another chair where she could watch the brilliant manœuvres of herself. Then Mr. Tempest was called from his perusal of the evening paper.
“Sit here by me, Mr. Tempest,” she said, “and see how I play this hand. Mr. Boyton has gone two no-trumps, you see, and I have doubled. That is where I shall defeat him. Look, too, Mrs. Tempest: was I not right to double? Now watch!”
Aline was now quite happy. There were two people completely engaged in looking at her skill, and naturally admiring it, while her opponents were sitting paralysed under her long suit. She fined them, she made them bow down to her cleverness, and while she was yet in the heyday of her triumph, her husband, who with Mr. Boyton was playing against her, suddenly spoke in German.
“Then you have revoked, my dearest,” he said, as she was gathering up a trick.
“No, I haven’t,” said she; “and besides, Hermann, you had no right to say that, for you are dummy.”
She, too, had replied in German: he recovered the sense of locality first.
“Ah, that is so,” he said. “I am sorry, Mr. Boyton. But she did revoke.”
Her voice grew shrill and querulous.
“You have no right to say that,” she said. “I have followed in every trick. Have I not, Helen?”
Helen laughed.
“No, my dear, of course you have revoked,” she said. “Are we not lucky to have escaped the penalty by dummy pointing it out? That sort of luck never happens to me.”
“Everyone is against me,” said Aline.
“Ach, do not be a child, Aline,” said her husband. “Go on: we are all waiting for another revoke, which I shall leave to Mr. Boyton to discover.”
At once all Aline’s pleasure was spoiled. She knew perfectly well that she had revoked, and all the delightof having two people to look at her beautiful play, and two opponents to writhe under it, was instantly gone. She gathered up the cards at the end of the deal, and looked at her next hand, which she dealed herself in dead silence. She felt that she, at any rate, knew how to behave like a lady. Luckily Helen, on this occasion, knew how to behave like a lady too, and put down a magnificent hand in response to her own unchallenged spade.
About half way through Mrs. Tempest got up.
“I think my husband and I ought to be going,” she said.
Aline turned a convalescent face to her, and held out her left hand, without getting up.
“Good-night, then, Mrs. Tempest,” she said. “So pleased you were able to come. Good-night, Mr. Tempest. You are shooting with my husband to-morrow, aren’t you? Let us see, where were we? Good-night. Let me see the last trick, Hermann.”
“Nein: it is quitted.”
He pressed the electric button that was let into the edge of the table.
“Good-night,” he said. “It is your play, Aline.Auf Wiedersehen, Mr. Tempest. My servants will be in the hall.”
Helen and Mr. Boyton both rose to shake hands and the two guests left the room.
Aline gave a little sigh of relief.
“Such dear good people,” she said. “I felt sure you would not dislike meeting them, Helen, so I did not put them off. It will have been such a treat for them to come here and hear a talk of things outside their little Rectory. Let me see....”
Aline had announced that they kept country hourshere, and consequently when a rubber came to an end, about half-past twelve she swept the cards together and gave a great country yawn. She accompanied Helen up to her room, alluded to the Napoleon bed on the foot board of which was a cluster of golden bees, reminded her that in her bath-room next door was hot water perpetually on tap, as the hot-water furnace burned day and night, like the fire of the Vestal Virgins, and told her that there was always a manicurist in the house, in case she wanted his services, and a telephone to her maid’s room. That was a device of Hermann’s; he had gone into it himself, most carefully, and had arranged that each bed-room communicated by telephone with the corresponding number in the servants’ rooms, so that No. 3 in the guests’ part of the house rang up No. 3 in that part of the servants’ quarters which was reserved for the valets and maids of visitors. Mr. Boyton, so she had ascertained from her own maid, had not brought a man with him—was not that odd, but she supposed that Mr. Boyton only had parlour-maids—so the first footman had been sent to sleep in No. 5 (servants’ quarters) in case Mr. Boyton wanted anything. If your friends were kind enough to come and stay with you in the country, the least you could do was to make them comfortable. “So, good-night.... It was sweet of you to come.”
Helen began to wonder, when she was left alone, just how comfortable she had been all evening. She knew now that she could have a hot bath or a manicurist or her maid at a moment’s notice, but she had somehow taken all that sort of thing for granted. If you wanted anything of the sort, you had it; it happened. But she found that she had not taken for granted a quantity of things that had actually occurred. It had not seemed to her really possible that you could be rude to yourguests, or that you should take Bridge as anything else but a game, or that your children should sing the Watch by the Rhine as they were going to bed. These were all rather remarkable proceedings....
She did not trouble herself to disentangle them, when, after ringing for No. 3 servants’ quarters, her maid came in to brush her hair. But she had a general impression left on her mind that there was a great difference between friends and those who really were no more than acquaintances. Acquaintances gave you surprises—there was the root of it—friends never did. These surprises might in their very nature be pleasant or unpleasant; if they were pleasant, it was likely that the acquaintances, should they be equally satisfied with you, were on the high road towards friendship. But if these surprises were unpleasant....
She declined to pursue the subject, and spoke to her maid, who was being rather severe in her handling. Simpson had been her nursery-maid when she was a child, and now, austere and grey-haired, was as devoted to her still. At home there was another French young thing to supplement Simpson, but when Helen went on a quiet visit like this, it was always Simpson who attended her.
“What’s the matter, Sim?” she asked. “Why are you being so cross with my hair?”
“I beg your pardon, my lady,” said Simpson darkly.
“Well, then, I don’t give it you. What’s the matter? Don’t you like coming back to Ashmore again? Or have I kept you up too late?”
Simpson’s severe touch melted into its usual softness.
“Eh, now, Miss Helen,” she said, “don’t talk suchnonsense, my dear. As if I wasn’t pleased to sit up all night for you. But things have changed since you were here as a young lady: that’s what it is.”
“I suppose you haven’t got any nice young man to flirt with, Sim. There’s the butler: what’s the matter with him?”
“You and your jokes,” said Simpson, beaming.
“Well, there are worse things than jokes,” said she.
Simpson went on brushing in silence a little.
“I can’t think why you come to a house of Huns, Miss Helen,” she said at length. “That’s what they say about them down stairs. There’s the butler whom you joked about just now. And there’s the children’s nurse who’s been dismissed this very evening——”
Helen interrupted and got up.
“Stuff and nonsense, you old darling,” she said. “There, give me a kiss, and don’t listen to such rubbish.”
“Rubbish?” began Simpson.
“Yes, rubbish. A pack of rubbish like when you and I used to play ‘Beggar my Neighbour’ in the nursery. And will you call me at half-past eight? Sleep well.”
Helen did not follow her own advice to Simpson, and for a long time that night she did not sleep at all. On getting into the Napoleon bed, she reminded herself by way of suggestion towards sleep, that she was now far away from London, away out in the peaceful, somnolent fen-country, and that for miles upon miles round her stretched quiet pastures dotted over with farm-houses to which the news of the war had scarcely more significance than the report of a storm at sea. Here and there, as in the case of the station-master at Ashmore, someone might have suffered an intimate bereavement, but for the most part crops and cattleremained paramount as the topics of life. She had left the uneasy city where at every turn she was confronted by something that reminded her of all that she wished to forget and drew an insincere sigh of relief to think how far she was away from it all.