“And I’d give a pound to see you walk there,” said the driver, already in his seat.
He threw in the clutch and with a cheery “Good night” passed the extravagantly encountered pair.
“They say miracles don’t happen, but one has happened now,” said Olivia breathlessly. “If you hadn’t come out of space——”
“Do tell me something about it,” he asked.
“But don’t you know?”
“You said that profit-merchant had insulted you and that was enough for me.”
“Oh, my God! I’m so ashamed!” she cried, with a wild, pretty gesture of her hands. “What will you think of me?”
Mad words rushed through his brain, but before they found utterance he gripped himself. He had, once more, his hands on the controls.
“What I think of you, Miss Gale, it would be wiser not to say. I should like to hear what has occurred. But, pardon me,” he said abruptly, noticing her curious, uneven step, and glancing down instinctively at her feet, “what has become of your shoe?”
“My slipper—why, of course——” She halted, suddenly aware of the loss. “I must have left it in the cab. I stuck up my foot and reached for it and broke the window with the heel. I also think I hit him in the face.”
“It seems as though he was down and out before I came up,” said Triona.
“If you hadn’t I don’t [know] how I should have carried on,” she confessed.
They walked down the wide, empty street. The moon shone high above them, the girl in her elegance, the man in his loose grey flannels and soft felt hat, an incongruous couple, save for their common air of alert youth. And while they walked she rapidly told her story. She had been to Percy’s with the usual crowd, Lydia Dawlish her nominal chaperone. The man, Edwin Mavenna, a city friend of Sydney Rooke, whom she had met a half a dozen times, had offered to drive her home in his waiting taxi. Tired, dependent for transport on Rooke and Lydia, who desired a further hour of the night club’s dismal jocundity, and angry with Bobby Quinton, who seemed to think that her ear had no other function than to listen to tales of sentimenti-financial woe, she had accepted. Half-way home she had begun to regret; three-quarters of the way she had been frightened. As they turned into Victoria Street she had managed to free her arm and wield the victorious slipper.
“I’ll never go to that abominable place again as long as I live,” she cried.
“I should, if I were you,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“I’d go once or twice, at any rate. To show yourself independent of it. To prove to yourself that you’re not frightened of it.”
“But I am frightened of it. On the outside it’s as respectable as Medlow Parish Church on Sunday. But below the surface there’s all sorts of hideousness—and I’m frightened.”
“You’re not,” said he. “Things may startle you, infuriate you, put you off your equilibrium; but they don’t frighten you. They didn’t this evening. I’ve seen too many people frightened in my time not to know. You’re not that sort.”
They had reached the door of the Mansions. She smiled at him, her gaiety returning.
“You’re as comforting and consoling a Knight Errant as one could wish to meet. The damsel in distress is greatly beholden to you. But how the—whatever you like—you managed to time the rescue is beyond my comprehension.”
“The stars guided me,” he replied, with an upward sweep of the hand. “Mortals have striven to comprehend them for thousands of years—but without success. I started out to wander about this great city—I often do for hours—I’m a born wanderer—with the vagabond’s aimlessness and trust in chance, or in the stars—and this time the stars brought me where it was decreed that I should be.”
While he was speaking she had opened the door with her latchkey and now stood, shimmering white in the gloom of the entrance. She held out her hand.
“I’m afraid I’ve been too much occupied in trying not to seem frightened and silly to thank you decently for what you’ve done. But I am grateful. You don’t know how grateful. I’ll have to tell you some other time.”
“To-morrow?” he asked eagerly.
She hesitated for a moment. “Yes, to-morrow,” she replied softly. “I shall be in all day. Goodnight.”
After the swift handshake the door closed on the enraptured young man, and the hard, characterless street, down which he seemed to dance, became transformed into a moonlit glade of fairyland.
It was four o’clock in the morning when he entered his back-bedroom at the Vanloo Hotel. But he did not sleep. He had no desire for sleep—youth resenting the veil drawn across a consciousness so exquisitely alive. Sleep, when the stars in their courses were fighting for him? Impossible, preposterous! Let him rather live, again and again, over the night’s crowded adventure. Every detail of it set his pulses throbbing. The mere glorious first recognition of her was the thrill of a lifetime. He constructed and reconstructed the immortal picture. The moonlit, silent street, its high, decorous buildings marked by the feeble gas lamps melting into an indeterminate vanishing point. The clear-cut scene. The taxi-cab. The three human figures. The stunted driver. The massive, dark man, in silk hat which reflected the moonlight, in black overcoat thrown open, revealing a patch of white shirt and waistcoat; the slender, quivering, white form draped in white fur, white gossamer, white what-not, crowned with dark glory of eyes and hair. The masculine in him exulted in his physical strength and skill—in the clean, straight, elementary yet scientific left-hander that got the hulking swine between the eyes and sent him reeling and sprawling and asking for no more punishment. And then—oh, it was a great thing to command, to impose his will. To walk in triumph off with the wonderful lady of his dreams. To feel, as she thanked him, that here was something definite that he had done for her, something with a touch of the romantic, the heroic, which, in its trivial way, justified belief in the incidents of his adventurous career which he had so modestly, yet so vividly described in the book that had brought him fame.
On this point of justification he was peculiarly sensitive. Various Englishmen, soldiers sent out on secret missions to the fringes of the areas of his activities, had questioned many of his statements, both in the book and in descriptive articles which he had written for newspapers and other periodicals, and asked for proofs. And he had replied, most cogently, that the sphere of the Russian Secret Service in which he was employed was, of necessity, beyond the ken of the secret service of any other Power in Europe, and that official proofs were lost in the social and political disintegration of Russia. One man, a great man, speaking with unquestionable authority, silenced the horde of cavillers as far as events prior to 1917 were concerned. But there were still some who barked annoyingly at his heels. Proofs, of course, he had none to give. How can a man give proofs when he is cast up, practically naked, on the coast of England? He must be believed or not. And it was the haunting terror of this sensitive boy of genius, whose face and eyes bore the ineffaceable marks of suffering, that he should lose the credit which he had gained.
At all hazards he must allow no doubts to arise in the mind of Olivia. To fight them down he would do all manner of extravagant things. He regretted the pusillanimous tameness of his late opponent. If the man had only picked himself up and given battle! If only there had been half a dozen abductors or insulters instead of one! His spirits (at seven o’clock) sank at the logical conclusion that the conventional conditions of post-war civilized life afforded a meagre probability of the recurrence of such another opportunity. He had the temperament of those whose hunger is only whetted by triumph, to whom attainment only gives vision of new heights. When, after tossing sleepless in his bed, he rose and dressed at nine, he had decided that, in knocking down a mere mass of unresisting flesh, he had played a part almost inglorious, such as any stay-at-homeembusquécould have played. By not one jot or tittle did his act advance the credibility of his story. And on his story alone could he found his hopes of finding favour in her marvellous eyes. Of the touch of genius that inspired his literary work he thought little. At this stage of his career he was filled with an incredulous wonder at his possession of a knack which converted a page of scribble into a cheque upon a bank. His writing meant money. Not money, wealth, on the grand scale; but money to keep him as a modest gentleman on the social grade to which he had attained, and to save him from the detested livery of the chauffeur. The story which he was telling in the new book was but a means to this end. The story which he had told was life itself. Nay, now it was more: it was love itself; it was a girl who was more than life.
He called at the Victoria Street flat at twelve o’clock. The austere Myra looked on him disapprovingly. Tea-time was the visiting time for stray young men, and even then she conveyed to them the impression that she let them in on sufferance.
“What name?” she asked.
“Mr. Triona.”
“Miss Gale is in, sir,” she admitted grudgingly, having received explicit orders from Olivia, “but she is dressing and I don’t know whether she can see you.”
“Will you tell Miss Gale that I am entirely at her service, and if it’s inconvenient for her to see me now I’ll call later.”
Myra left him standing in the little vestibule and gave the message to Olivia, who, fully dressed, was polishing her nails in her bedroom.
“You’re the most impossible woman on earth,” Olivia declared, turning on her. “Is that the way you would treat a man who had delivered you from a dragon?”
“I don’t hold with men and I don’t hold with dragons,” replied Myra unmoved. “The next time you’ll be wanting me to fall over a dragon who has delivered you from a man!”
Olivia scarcely listened to the retort. She flew out and carried the waiting Triona into the sitting-room.
“I’m so sorry. My maid’s a terror. She bites and doesn’t bark. But I guarantee her non-venomous. How good of you to come so early.”
“I was anxious,” said Triona.
“About what?”
“Last night must have been a shock.”
“Of course it was,” she laughed; “but not enough to keep me all day long in fainting fits with doctors and smelling-bottles.”
“I hope you slept all right.”
“No,” she replied frankly. “That I didn’t do. The adventure was a bit too exciting. Besides——”
“Besides what?”
“It came into my head to make up my moral balance sheet. Figures of arithmetic always send me to sleep; but figures of—well, of that kind of thing, don’t you know—keep me broad awake.”
Olivia’s dark, eager face was of the kind that shows the traces of fatigue in faint shadows under the eyes. He swiftly noted them and cried out:
“You’re dead tired. It’s damnable.” He rose, suddenly angry. “You ought to go to bed at once. Your maid was right. I had no business to come at this hour and disturb you.”
“If you hadn’t come,” said Olivia, inwardly glowing at the tribute paid by the indignant youth, “I should have imagined that you looked on last night’s affair as a trumpery incident in the day’s work and went to bed and forgot all about it.”
“That’s impossible,” said he. “I, too, haven’t slept a wink.”
She met and held his eyes longer than she, or anyone else, had held them. Then, half angrily, she felt her cheeks grow hot and red.
“For you, who have faced death a hundred times, last night, as I’ve just said, must be even dull. What was it to the night when you—you know—the sentry—when you were unarmed and you fought with him and you killed him with his own bayonet?”
He snapped his fingers and smiled. “That was unimportant. Whether I lived or died didn’t matter to anybody. It didn’t matter much to me. It was sheer animal instinct. But last night it was you. And that makes a universe of difference.”
Olivia rose, and, with a “You’re not smoking,” offered him a box of cigarettes.
“Yes,” she said, when he had lighted it, with fingers trembling ever so slightly as they held the match, “I suppose a woman does make a difference. We’re always in the way, somehow. Women and children first. Why they don’t throw us overboard at once and let the really useful people save themselves, I could never make out.”
His air of dismay was that of a devotee listening to a saint blaspheme. Her laughter rippled, music to his ears.
“Do you know what I should like to do? Get out of London for a few hours and fill my lungs with air. Richmond Park, for instance.”
“I, too.” He sighed. “If only I had a car!”
“There are such things as motor-buses.”
He sprang to delighted feet. His divinity on a bus top! It was like the Paphian goddess condescending from her dove-drawn chariot to the joggle of a four-wheeler cab.
“Would you really go on one?”
She would. She would start forthwith. The time only to put on a hat. She left him to his heart-beats of happiness, presently to re-appear, hatted, gloved, and smiling.
“You’re quite sure you would like to come? Your work?”
“My work needs the open air as much as I do,” said he.
They went forth, boy and girl on a jaunt, and side by side on the top of the omnibus they gave themselves up to the laughter of the pure sunshine. At Richmond they lunched, for youth must be fed, and afterwards went through the streets of the old town, and stood on the bridge watching the exquisite curve of the river embosomed in the very newest of new greenery, and let its loveliness sink into their hearts. Then they wandered deep into the Park and found a tree from beneath which they could see the deer browsing in the shade; and there they sat, happy in their freedom and isolation. What they said, most of the time, was no great matter. Of the two, perhaps she talked the more; for he had said:
“I am so tired of talking about myself. I have been obliged to, so that it has become a professional habit. And what there is to be known about me, you know. But you—you who have lived such a different life from mine—I know so little of you. In fact, I’ve known nothing of English women such as you. You’re a mystery. Tell me about yourself.”
So she had begun:
“Well, I was born—I shan’t tell you the year—of poor but honest parents——”
And then, led on by his eager sympathy and his intimate knowledge of her home, she had abandoned the jesting note and talked simply and frankly of her secluded and eventless life. With feminine guile, and with last night’s newborn mistrust of men, she set a little trap.
“Did you ever go into my mother’s room?”
“I don’t think so. Perhaps that was the one—the best bedroom—which Olifant always kept locked.”
She felt ashamed of her unworthy suspicion; glad at the loyal keeping of a promise, to the extent of not allowing a visitor even a peep inside the forbidden chamber.
“I think Blaise Olifant is one of the finest types England breeds,” she said warmly.
There was a touch of jealous fear in his swift glance; but he replied with equal warmth:
“You needn’t tell me that. Brave, modest, of sensitive honour—Ah! A man with a mind so cultivated that he seems to know nothing until you talk with him, and then you find that he knows everything. I love him.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“Why? Do you admire him so much?”
“It isn’t that,” she parried. “It’s on your account. One man’s generous praise of another does one’s heart good.” She threw out her arms as though to embrace the rolling park of infinite sward and majestic trees. “I love big things,” she said.
Whereupon Alexis Triona thanked his stars for having led him along the true path.
Who can say that, in after years, these twain, when they shall have grown old and have gone through whatever furnaces Fate—either personal destiny or the Fate of Social Institutions—may prepare for them, will not retain imperishable memories of the idyll of that sweet spring day? There they sat, youth spiritually communing with youth; the girl urged by feminine instinct to love him for the dangers he had passed; the young man aflame with her beauty, her charm, her dryad elusiveness. Here, for him, was yet another aspect of her, free, unseizable in the woodland setting. And for her, another aspect of him, the simple, clean-cut Englishman, divested of vague and disquieting Russian citizenship, the perfect companion, responsive to every chord struck by the spirit of the magic afternoon. In the years to come, who can say that they will not remember this sweet and delicate adventure of their souls creeping forth in trembling reconnaissance one of the other? Perhaps it will be a more precious memory to the woman than to the man. Men do not lay things up in lavender as women do.
If he had spoken, declared his passion in lover’s set terms, perhaps her heart might have been caught by the glamour of it all, and she might have surrendered to his kisses, and they might have journeyed back to London in a state of unreprehensible yet commonplace beatitude. And the memory would possibly have been marked by a white stone rising stark in an airless distance. But he did not speak, held back by a rare reverence of her maidenhood and her perfect trust; and in her heart flowered gratitude for his sensitiveness to environment. So easy for a maladroit touch to mar the perfection of an exquisite hour of blue mist and mystery. So, again, who knows but that in the years to come the memory will be marked by a fragrance, a shimmer of leaves, a haze over green sward, incorporated impalpably with the dear ghost of an immortal day?
They returned on the top of the omnibus, rather late, and on the way they spoke little. Now and then he glanced sideways at her and met her eyes and caught her smile, and felt content. At the terminus of the omnibus route, in the raging, busy precincts of the stations of Victoria, they alighted. He walked with her to her door in Victoria Street.
“Your words have been singing in my ears,” said he: “ ‘I love big things.’ To me, to-day has seemed a big thing.”
“And I’ve loved it,” she replied.
“True?”
“True.”
She sped up to her room somewhat dazed, conscious of need to keep her balance. So much had happened in the last four-and-twenty hours. The shudder of the night had still horrified her flesh when she drew the young man out into the wide daylight and the open air; and now it had passed away, as though it had never been, and a new quivering of youth, taking its place, ran like laughter through her bodily frame and her heart and her mind.
“H’m. Your outing seems to have done you good,” said the impassive Myra, letting her in.
“My first day’s escape from a fœtid prison,” she said.
“I suppose you know what you’re talking about,” said Myra.
Olivia laughed and threw her arm round Myra’s lean shoulders.
“Of course I do.”
“He ain’t much to look at.”
Olivia, flushing, turned on her.
“I never knew a more abominable woman.”
“Then you’re lucky,” retorted Myra, and faded away into her kitchen.
Olivia, mirthful, uplifted, danced, as it were, into the sitting-room and began to pull off her gloves. Suddenly her glance fell on a letter lying on her writing table. She frowned slightly as she opened it, and as she read the frown grew deeper. It was from Bobby Quinton. What his dearest of dear ladies would think of him he left on the joint knees of the gods and of his dearest lady—but—but the wolves were at his heels. He had thrown them all that he possessed—fur coat, watch and chain, diamond studs, and, having gulped them all, they were still in fierce pursuit. In a fortnight would he have ample funds to satisfy them. But now he was at bay. He apologized for the mixture of metaphor. But still, there he wasaux abois. Fifty pounds, just for a fortnight. Could the dearest of dear ladies see her way——-?
She went to her desk and wrote out a cheque which she enclosed in an envelope. To save her soul alive she could not have written Bobby Quinton an accompanying line.
HERE, all in a rush of twenty-four hours, was a glut of incident for a young woman out for adventure. Triona had only made his effect on the romantically feminine within Olivia by his triumphant rescue. As to that he need have no misgivings. So once did Andromeda see young Perseus, calm and assured, deliver her from the monster. Triona’s felling of Mavenna appealed to the lingering savage woman fiercely conscious of wrong avenged; but his immediate and careless mastery of the situation struck civilized chords. She could see him dominating the sheepskin-clad tribe in the Urals (seeThrough Blood and Snow) until he established their independence in their mountain fastness. She could see him, masterful, resourceful, escaping from the Bolshevik prison and making his resistless way across a hostile continent. She could also appreciate, after this wonder-day at Richmond, the suppleness of his simple charm which won him food and shelter where food scarcely existed and shelter to a stranger was a matter of shooting or a bashing in of heads.
As for Mavenna, her flesh still shuddered at the memory of those few moments of insult. What he said she could scarcely remember. The inextricable clutch of his great arms around her body and the detestable kisses eclipsed mere words. Unwittingly his hug had compressed her throat so that she could not scream. There had been nothing for it but the slipper unhooked by the free arm, and the doughty heel. Had she won through alone to her room, she would have collapsed—so she assured herself—from sickening horror. But the Deliverer had been there, as in a legend of Greece or Broceliande, and had saved her from the madness of the nymph terror stricken by Satyrs. The two extravagances had, in a way, counteracted each other, setting her, by the morning, in a normal equilibrium. She had tried to explain the phenomenon by referring to her having spent the night in striking a moral balance-sheet. And then had come the day, the wonderful day, in which the Deliverer had proved himself the perfect, gentle Knight. Can it be wondered that her brain swam with him?
She went the next morning to Lydia’s hat shop, and, in the little room which Sydney Brooke had called her cubby hole, a nine-foot-square boudoir office, reeking with Lydia’s scent and with Heaven knows what scandals and vulgarities and vanities of post-war London, she poured out her tale of outrage. After listening with indulgent patience, Lydia remarked judicially:
“I told you, my dear child, when you came to London, that the first lesson you had to learn was to take care of yourself.”
Olivia flashed. She had taken care of herself well enough. But that brute Mavenna—what about him?
“Everybody knows Mavenna,” replied Lydia. “No girl in her senses would have trusted herself alone with him.”
“And, with that reputation, he’s a friend of yours and Sydney’s?”
Lydia shrugged her plump shoulders.
“Really, my dear, if one exacted certificates of lamb-like innocence, signed by a high celestial official, before you admitted anyone into the circle of your acquaintance, you might as well go and live on a desert island.”
“But this man’s a beast and you’ve known it all along!” cried Olivia.
“Only in one way.”
“But—my God! Isn’t that enough?” Olivia stood, racked with disgust and amazement, over her mild-eyed, philosophic friend. “What would you have done if you had been in my place?”
“I could never have been in your place,” said Lydia. “I should have been too wise.”
“How?”
“The knowledge of men, my dear, is the beginning of wisdom.”
“And I ought to have known?”
“Of course. At any rate, you’ll know in the future.”
“I shall. You may be dead certain I shall,” declared Olivia, in her anger and excitement seizing a puckered and pleated cushion from the divan by which she stood. “And if even I—−-”
“Don’t, darling; you’ll tear it,” said Lydia calmly.
Olivia heaved the cushion back impatiently.
“What I want to know is this. Are you and Sydney going to remain friends with Mavenna?”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to,” replied Lydia. “Mavenna and Sydney are in all sorts of big things together.”
“Well, when next you see him, Lydia, look well into his face and ask him what he thinks of the heel of my slipper and Mr. Triona’s fist. He’s not only a beast. He’s a worm. When I think of him picking himself up, after being knocked down by a man half his size——” She laughed a bit hysterically. “Oh—the creature is outside the pale!”
Lydia shook her fair head. “I’m sorry for you, my dear. But he’s inside all right.”
“Then I’m not going to be inside with him!” cried Olivia.
And, like a little dark dust storm, she swirled out of the office and, through the shop, into the freedom and spaciousness of the streets. And that, for Olivia, was the end of night clubs and dancing as a serious aim in life, and a host of other vanities.
A few mornings afterwards Lydia sailed into the flat and greeted Olivia as though nothing had happened. She seemed to base her philosophy of life on obliteration of the past, yesterday being as dead as a winter’s day of sixty years ago. Would Olivia lunch with Sydney and herself at some riverside club? Sydney, having collected Mauregard, would be calling for them with the car. The day was fine and warm; the prospect of the cool lawn reaching down to the plashing river allured, and she liked Mauregard. Besides, she had begun to take a humorous view of Lydia. She consented. Lydia began to talk of her wedding, fixed for the middle of July, of the clothes that she had and the clothes that she hadn’t—the ratio of the former to the latter being that of a loin-cloth to the stock of Selfridge’s. When she was serious minded, Lydia always expressed herself in terms of raiment.
“And you’ll have to get some things, too, as you’re going to be bridesmaid.”
“Am I?” asked Olivia, this being the first she had heard of it. “And who’s going to be best man—Mavenna?”
Lydia looked aghast. So might a band of primitive Christians have received a suggestion of inviting the ghost of Pontius Pilate to a commemorative supper.
“My dear child, you don’t suppose we’re going to ask that horror to the wedding?”
“The other day,” Olivia remarked drily, “I understood that you and Sydney loved him dearly.”
Lydia sighed. “I’m beginning to believe that you’ll never understand anything.”
So the breach, if breach there were, was healed. Olivia, relating the matter to Triona at their next meeting, qualified Lydia’s attitude as one of callous magnanimity.
Meanwhile her intimacy with the young man began to ripen.
One evening Janet Philimore invited her to dine at the Russian circle of a great womans’ club, which was entertaining Triona at dinner. This was the first time she had seen him in his character of modest lion; the first time, too, she had been in a company of women groping, however clumsily, after ideals in unsyncopated time. The thin girl next to her, pretty enough, thought Olivia, if only she had used a powder puff to mitigate the over-assertiveness of a greasy skin, and had given less the impression of having let out her hair to a bird for nesting purposes, and had only seized the vital importance of colour—the untrue greeny daffodil of her frock not being the best for a sallow complexion—the girl next to her, Agnes Blenkiron, started a hectic conversation by enquiring what she was going to do in Baby Week. The more ignorant Olivia professed herself to be of babies and their antecedents, especially the latter, the more indignantly explicit became Miss Blenkiron. Olivia listened until she had creepy sensations around the roots of her hair and put up an instinctive hand to assure herself that it was not standing on end. Miss Blenkiron talked feminist physiology, psychology, sociological therapeutics, until Olivia’s brain reeled. Over and over again she tried to turn to her hostess, who fortunately had a pleasant male and middle-aged neighbour, but the fair lady, without mercy, had her in thrall. She learned that all the two or three thousand members of the club were instinct with these theories and their aims. She struggled to free herself from the spell.
“I thought we were here to talk about Russia,” she ventured.
“But we are talking about Russia.” Miss Blenkiron shed on her the lambency of her pale blue eyes. “The future of the human race lies in the hands of the millions of Russian babies lying in the bodies of millions of Russian women just waiting to be born.”
A flash of the devil saved Olivia from madness.
“That’s a gigantic conception,” she said.
“It is,” Miss Blenkiron agreed, unhumorously, and continued her work of propaganda, so that by the time the speeches began Olivia found herself committed to the strenuous toil of a lifetime as a member of she knew not what societies. The only clear memory she retained was that of a tea engagement some Sunday in a North London garden city where Miss Blenkiron and her brother frugally entertained the advanced thinkers of the day.
In spite of the sense of release from something vampiric, when the speeches hushed general conversation, she recognized that the strange talk had been revealing and stimulating, and she brought a quickened intelligence to the comprehension of the gathering. To all these women the present state of the upheaved world was of vast significance. In Lydia’s galley no one cared a pin about it, save Sydney Rooke, who cursed it for its interference with his income. But here, as was clearly conveyed in the opening remarks of the chairwoman, a novelist of distinction, every one was intellectually concerned with its infinite complexity of aspect. To them, the guest of the evening, emerging as he had done from the dizzying profundities of the whirlpool, was a figure of uncanny interest.
“It’s the first-hand knowledge of men like him that is vital,” Miss Blenkiron whispered when the chairwoman sat down. “I should so much like to meet him.”
“Would you?” said Olivia. “That’s easily managed. He’s a great friend of mine.”
And she was subridently conscious of having acquired vast and sudden merit in her neighbour’s eyes.
Triona pleased her beyond expectation. The function, so ordinary to public-dinner-going London, was new to her. She magnified the strain that commonplace, even though sincere, adulation could put upon a guest of honour. She felt a twinge of apprehension when he stood up, in his loose boyish way, and brushing his brown hair from his temples, began to speak. But in a moment or two all such feelings vanished. He spoke to this assembly of a hundred, mostly women, much as, in moments of enthusiasm, he would speak to her. And, indeed, often catching her eye, he did speak to her, subtly and flatteringly bringing her to his side. Her heart beat a bit faster when, glancing around and seeing every one hanging on his words, she realized that she alone, of all this little multitude, held a golden key to the mystery of the real man. There he talked, with the familiar sway of the shoulders, and, when seeking for a phrase, with the nervous plucking of his lips; talked in his nervous, picturesque fashion, now and then with a touch of the poet, consistently modest, only alluding to personal experience to illustrate a point or to give verisimilitude to a jest. He developed his feminist theme logically, dramatically, proving beyond argument that the future of civilization lay in the hands of the women of the civilized world.
He had a great success. Woman, although she knows it perfectly well, loves to be told what she wants and the way to get it: she will never follow the way, of course, having a tortuous, thorny, and enticing way of her own; but that doesn’t matter. The principle, the end, that is the thing: it justifies any amazing means. He sat down amid enthusiastic applause. Flushed, he sought Olivia’s distant gaze and smiled. Then she felt, thrillingly, that he had been speaking for her, for her alone, and her eyes brightened and flashed him a proud message.
She met him a while later in the thronged drawing-room of the club, rather a shy and embarrassed young man, heading a distinct course toward her through a swarm of kind yet predatory ladies. She admired the simple craftsmanship of his approach.
“How are you going to get home?” he asked.
The adorable carelessness of twenty shrugged its shoulders.
“I don’t know. The Lord will provide.”
“If you can’t find a taxi, will you walk?”
The question implied a hope, so obvious that she laughed gaily.
“There are buses also and tubes.”
“In which you can’t travel alone at this time of night.”
She scoffed: “Oh, can’t I?” But his manifest fear that she should encounter satyrs in train or omnibus pleased her greatly.
“Father’s dining at his club close by and is calling for me. He will see that you get home safely,” said Janet Philimore.
“It’s miles out of your way, dear,” said Olivia. “I’ll put myself in the hands of Mr. Triona.”
So, taxis being unfindable, they walked together through the warm London night to Victoria Street. It was then that he spoke of his work, the novel just completed. Of all opinions on earth, hers was the one he most valued. If only he could read it to her and have the priceless benefit of her judgment. Secretly flattered, she modestly depreciated, however, her critical powers. He persisted, attributing to her unsuspected qualities of artistic perception. At last, not reluctantly, she yielded. He could begin the next evening.
The reading took some days. Olivia, new to creative work, marvelled exceedingly at the magic of the artist’s invention. The personages of the drama, imaginary he said, lived as real beings. She regarded their creation as uncanny.
“But how do you know she felt like that?”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I can’t conceive her feeling otherwise.”
Yet, for all her wonder, she brought her swift intelligence to the task of criticism. Not since her mother’s illness had she taken anything so seriously. She lived in the book, walking meanwhile through an unreal world. Her golden words, on the other hand, the young man captured eagerly and set down in the margin of the manuscript. Half-way through the reading, they were on terms of Christian names. Minds so absorbed in an artistic pursuit grew impatient of absurd formalities of address. They slipped almost imperceptibly into the Olivia and Alexis habit. At the end they pulled themselves up rather sharply, with blank looks at an immediate future bereft of common interest.
“I’ll have to begin another, right away, so that you can be with me from the very start,” he said.
“Have you an idea?”
“Not yet.”
“When will you have one?”
He didn’t know. What man spent with the creative effort of a novel has the vitality to beget another right away? He feels that the very last drop of all that he has known and suffered and enjoyed has been used to the making of the book. For the making of another nothing is left.
“I suppose I’ll have to lie fallow for a week or so,” said the young optimist.
“And as soon as things begin to sprout you’ll let me know?” asked Olivia, forgetful that before harvest there must be seed time.
He promised; went home and cudgelled tired brains; also cudgelled, for different reasons, an untired and restless soul.
Let him make good, not ephemerally as the picturesque narrator of personal adventure, but definitely, with this novel as the creative artist—the fervent passion of his life—and he would establish himself in her eyes, in her mind, in her heart; so that treading solid ground, he could say to her: “This is what I am, and for what I am, take me. All that has gone before was but a crude foundation. I had to take such rubbish and rubble as I could find to hand.” But until then, let him regard her as a divinity beyond his reach, rendering her service and worship, but forbearing to soil her white robe with a touch as yet unhallowed.
Many a time, they could have read no more that day. Just one swift movement, glance or cry on the part of the man, and the pulses of youth would have throbbed wildly together. He knew it. The knowledge was at once his Heaven and his Hell. A less sensitive human being would not have appreciated the quivering and vital equipoise. Many a time he parted from her with the farewell of comradely intimacy on his lips, and when the lift had deposited him on the street level his heart had been like lead and his legs as water, so that he stumbled out into the lamp-lit dark of night like a paralytic or a drunken man.
And that which was good in him warred fiercely against temptations more sordid. As far as he knew, she was a woman of fortune. So did her dress, her habit of life, her old comfort-filled Medlow home, proclaim her. Of her social standing as the daughter of Stephen Gale who bawled out bids for yelts and rams in the Medlow market place, he knew or understood very little. Her fortune was a fact. His own, the few hundreds which he had gained byThrough Blood and Snow, was rapidly disappearing. The failure of the new book meant starvation or reversion to Cherbury Mews. Married to a woman with money he could snap his fingers at crust or livery. . . . For the time he conquered.
The end of the reading coincided more or less with Midsummer quarter-day. Bills from every kind of coverer or adorner of the feminine human frame fell upon her like a shower of autumn leaves. She sat at her small writing desk, jotted down the amounts, and added them up with a much sucked pencil point. The total was incredible. With fear at her heart she rushed round to her bank for a note of her balance. It had woefully decreased since January. Payment of all these bills would deplete it still more woefully. The rent of “The Towers” and the diminishing income on the deposit account were trivial items set against her expenditure. She summoned Myra.
“We’re heading for bankruptcy.”
“Any fool could see that,” said Myra.
“What are we going to do?”
“Live like Christians instead of heathens,” replied Myra. “If you would come to Chapel with me one Sunday night you could be taught how.”
Here Myra failed. She belonged to a Primitive Non-Conformist Communion whose austere creed and drab ceremonial had furnished occasion for Olivia’s teasing wit since childhood. Heathendom, ever divorced from Lydian pleasures, presented infinitely more reasons for existence than Myra’s Calvinism.
“It seems funny that a dear old thing like you can revel in the idea of Eternal Punishment.”
“I haven’t got much else to revel in, have I?” said Myra grimly.
“I suppose that’s true,” said Olivia thoughtfully. “But it isn’t my fault, is it? If you had wanted to revel, mother and I would have been the last people to prevent you. Why not begin now? Go and have a debauch at the pictures.”
“You began by talking of bankruptcy,” said Myra.
“And you prescribed little Bethel. I’d sooner go broke.”
“You’ll have your own way, as usual,” said Myra.
“And if I go broke, what’ll you do?” asked Olivia, unregenerately enjoying the conversation.
“I suppose I’ll have to put you together again,” replied Myra, with no sign of emotion on her angular, withered face.
Olivia leaped from her chair.
“I’m a beast.”
“That can’t be,” said Myra, “seeing that it was I as brought you up.”
That was the end of the argument. Olivia recognized in Myra every useful quality save that of the financier. She dismissed Myra from her counsels. But the state of her budget cost her a sleepless night or two. At the present rate of expenditure a couple of years would see her penniless. For the first time since her emancipation from Medlow fetters she had the feeling of signing her own death-warrant on every cheque. Heroic resolves were born of these days of depression.
As a climax to her worries, came Bobby Quinton, one afternoon. What had he done to offend his dearest of ladies? Why had she stopped the dancing lessons? Why did Percy’s see her no more?
“I’m fed up with Percy’s and the whole gang,” said Olivia.
“Not including me, surely?” cried the young man, with a dog’s appeal in his melting brown eyes.
She was kind. At first, she had not the heart to pack him off to the froth and scum of social life to which he belonged. He had the charm of unsuccessful youth so pathetic in woman’s eyes.
“If you are,” said he, “I’m done for. I’ve no one to look to but you, in the wide world.”
Here was responsibility for the safety of a human soul. Olivia gave him sound advice, repeating many an old argument and feeling enjoyably maternal. But when Bobby grew hysterical, and, with mutation of sex, quoted the Indian Love Lyrics and professed himself prepared to die beneath her chariot wheels, and threatened to do so if she disregarded his burning passion, she admonished him after the manner of twentieth-century maidenhood.
“My good Bobby, don’t be an ass.”
But Bobby persisted in being an ass, with the zeal of the dement. He became the fervent lover of the cinquecento Bandello—and, with his dark eyes and hair, looked the part. Imploring he knelt at the feet of the divinity.
“That’s all very well, my dear boy,” said Olivia, unmoved by his rhapsody, “all very nice and all very beautiful. But what do you want me to do?”
Of course he wanted her to marry him, there and then: to raise him from the Hell he was in to the Heaven where she had her pure habitation. With her he could do great things. He guaranteed splendid achievements.
“Before a woman marries a man,” said Olivia, “she rather wants an achievement or two on account.”
“Then you don’t love me, you don’t trust me?” exclaimed the infatuated young man, ruffling his sleek black hair.
“I can’t say that I do,” replied Olivia, growing weary. “If you tell me what sort of fascination you possess, I’ll give it due consideration.”
“Then I may as well go away and blow my brains out,” he cried tragically.
“You might better go and use such brains as you have in doing a man’s work,” retorted Olivia.
He reproached her mournfully.
“How unkind you are.”
“If you came here as a window-cleaner or a lift porter I might be kinder. You’re quite a nice boy,” she went on after a pause, “otherwise I shouldn’t have anything to do with you. But you haven’t begun to learn the elements of life. You’re utterly devoid of the sense of duty or responsibility. Like the criminal, you know. Oh, don’t get angry. I’m talking to you for your good. Pretending to teach idle women worthless dancing isn’t a career for a man. It’s contemptible. Every man—especially nowadays—ought to pull his weight in the world. The war’s not over. The real war is only just beginning. Instead of pulling your weight you think it’s your right to sit on a cushion, a passenger—or a Pekie dog—and let other people pull you.”
“You don’t understand——”
“Oh, yes I do. One has to live, and at first we take any old means to hand. But you’ve been going on at this for a couple of years and haven’t tried to get out of it. You like it, Bobby——”
“I loathe it.”
“You don’t,” she went on remorselessly, with her newly acquired knowledge of what a man’s life could be. “All you loathe is the work—especially when it doesn’t bring you in as much money as you want. You hate work.”
Resentment gradually growing out of amusement at his presumptuous proposal had wrought her to a pitch of virtuous indignation. Here was this young man, of cultivated manners, intelligent, able-bodied, attractive, rejecting any kind of mission in existence, and——
“Look here, Bobby,” she said, rising from her chair by the tea-table and dominating him with a little gesture, “don’t get up. You sit there. You’ve asked me to marry you, because you think I’m rich. Hold your tongue,” she flashed, as he was about to speak. “I’ll take all the love and that sort of thing for granted. But if I was poor you wouldn’t have thought of it. At the back of your mind you imagine that if I married you, we could lead a life of Percy’s and the Savoy and Monte Carlo and the South Sea Islands, and you needn’t do another stroke of work all your life long.”
He leaned forward in his chair protesting eagerly that it wasn’t true. He would marry her to-morrow were she penniless. She had his salvation soul and body in her hands. He hungered for work; but the coils of his present life had a strangle-hold on him. Suddenly he rose and advanced a step towards her.
“Listen, Olivia. If you won’t marry me, will you help me in other ways? I’m desperate. You think you know something about the world. But you don’t. I’m up against it. It may mean prison. For the love of God lend me a couple of hundred pounds.”
The ugly word prison sent a stab through her heart; but immediately afterwards the common-sense of her Gale ancestry told her either that he was lying, or, if it were true, that he deserved it. She asked coldly:
“What have you been doing?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “You must trust me.”
“But I don’t and that is why I can’t lend you two hundred pounds.”
“You refuse?”
His soft voice became a snarl and his lip curled unpleasantly back beneath the little silky moustache.
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t know how you dare, after all the encouragement you’ve given me.”
She stared at him aghast. “Encouragement?”
“Yes. Didn’t you make me dance attendance on you at Brighton? Haven’t you brought me here over and over again? You’ve behaved damnably to me. You’ve made me waste my time. I’ve turned other women who would have only been too glad——”
In horror, she flew to the door and threw it open.
“Go,” she said.
And speeding across the hall she threw open the flat door.
“Go,” she said again.
She crossed the landing and rang the lift bell and returned to the hall, where he met her and threw himself on his knees and looked up at her with wild, hunted eyes.
“Forgive me, Olivia. For God’s sake forgive me. I was mad. I didn’t know what I was saying. Shut that door and I’ll tell you everything.”
But Olivia passed him by into the sitting-room, and stood with her back against the door until she heard the clash of the lift gates and the retreating footsteps of Bobby Quinton.
A short while ago she had nearly quarrelled with Mauregard because, in a wordy dissertation on the modern young men who lived on women, he instanced Bobby as possibly coming within the category. Now she knew that Mauregard was right. She felt sick. Also deadly ashamed of her superior attitude of well-meant reprimand. She burned with the consciousness of tongue in cheek while he listened. Well, that was the end of the Lydian galley.
She did not recover till the next afternoon, when Triona called to take her to the Blenkirons’ Sunday intellectual symposium in Fielder’s Park. She welcomed him impulsively with both hands outstretched, as a justification of her faith in mankind.
“You can’t tell how glad I am to see you.”
“And you,” said he, kissing first one hand and then the other, “can’t tell how good I think God is to me.”
HEbrought great news. Not only had his publishers thought well of the novel and offered him good terms, including a substantial advance, but they professed themselves able to place it serially in England for a goodly sum. They had also shown him the figures of the half-yearly returns on American sales ofThrough Blood and Snowwhich transcended his dreams of opulence.
“I had forgotten America,” he said naïvely.
“You’re nothing, if not original,” she laughed. “That’s what I like about you.”
He insisted on the wild extravagance of a taxi to the garden city. All that money he declared had gone to his head. He felt the glorious intoxication of wealth. When they were about to turn off the safe highway into devious garden-city paths, he said:
“Let us change our minds and go straight on to John o’ Groats.”
“All right. Let us. We’re on the right road.”
He swerved towards her. “Would you? Really?”
She opened her bag and took out her purse.
“I’ve got fifteen and sevenpence. How much have you?”
“About three pounds ten.”
She sighed. “This unromantic taxi man would charge us at least five pounds to take us there.”
“We can turn back and fill our pockets at the bank.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“I never before realized the blight of the British Sabbath.”
“So we’re condemned to Fielder’s Park.”
“But one of these days we’ll go, you and I together, to John o’ Groats—as far as we can and then——”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll take a ship and sail and sail until we come to the Fortunate Isles.”
“You’ll let Myra come too?” said Olivia, deliciously anxious to keep to the playful side of an inevitable road.
“Of course. We’ll find her a husband. The cabin-boy.Pour mousse un chérubin.”
“And when we get to the Fortunate Isles, what should we do there?”
“We shall fill our souls with sunlight, so that we could use it when we came back to our work in this dark and threatening modern world.”
The girl’s heart leapt at the reply.
“I’ll go up to John o’ Groats with you whenever you like,” she said.
But the taxi, at that moment drawing up before the detached toy villa, whose “Everdene” painted on the green garden gate proclaimed the home of the Blenkirons, inhibited Triona’s reply.
They found within an unbeautiful assemblage of humans inextricably mingled with crumbling cake and sloppy cups of tea and cigarette smoke. Agnes, shining with heat and hospitality, gave them effusive welcome and, extricating her brother from a distant welter, introduced him to the newcomers. He was a flabby-faced young man with a back-thatch of short rufous hair surmounting a bald forehead. By his ears grew little patches of side whiskers. He wore an old unbuttoned Norfolk jacket and a red tie in a soft collar without an under pin. He greeted them with an enveloping clammy hand.
“So good of you to come, Miss Gale. So glad to meet you, Mr. Triona. We have heard so much about you. You will find us here all very earnest in our endeavour to find a Solution—for never has human problem been so intricate that a Solution has not been discovered.”
“What’s the problem?” asked Olivia.
“Why, my dear lady, there’s only one. The Way Out—or, if you have faith—The Way In.” He caught a lean, thin-bearded man by the arm. “Dawkins, let me introduce you to Miss Gale. Mr. Dawkins is ourrapporteur.”
“You haven’t any tea,” said Dawkins rebukingly, as though bidden to a marriage feast she had no wedding garment. “Come with me.”
He frayed her a passage through the chattering swarm that over-filled the little bow-windowed sitting-room and provided her with what seemed to be the tepid symbols of the brotherhood.
“What did you think of Roger’s article in this week’sSignal?”
“Who is Roger, and what isThe Signal?” Olivia asked simply.
Dawkins stared at her for a second and then, deliberately turning, wormed his path away.
Olivia’s gasp of surprise was followed by a gurgle of laughter which shook her lifted cup so that it spilled. The sight of a stained skirt drew from her a sharp exclamation of dismay. Agnes Blenkiron disengaging herself from the cluster round the tea-table came to the rescue. What was the matter? Olivia explained.
“Oh, my dear,” said Agnes, “I ought to have told you. It’s my fault. Dawkins is such a touchy old thing. Roger, of course, is my brother—didn’t you know? AndThe Signalis our weekly. Dawkins is the editor.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Olivia, “but ought I to readThe Signal?”
“Why, of course,” replied Agnes Blenkiron intensely. “Everybody ought to read it. It’s the only periodical that matters in London.”
Olivia felt the remorse of those convicted of an unpardonable crime.
“I’ll get a copy to-morrow at the bookstall at Victoria Station.”
Agnes smiled in her haggard way. “My dear, an organ likeThe Signaldoesn’t lie on the bookstalls, likeComic CutsorThe Fortnightly Review. It’s posted to private subscribers, or it’s given away at meetings.”
“Who pays for the printing of it?” asked the practical Olivia, who had learned from Triona something of the wild leap in cost of printed matter.
“Aubrey Dawkins finds the money. He gets it in the City. He has given up his heart and soul toThe Signal.”
“I’ve made an enemy for life,” said Olivia penitently.
Miss Blenkiron reassured her. “Oh, no you haven’t. We haven’t time for enemy making here. Our business is too important.”
Olivia in a maze asked:
“What is your business?”
“Why, my dear child, the Social Revolution. Didn’t you know?”
“Not a bit,” said Olivia.
She learned many astonishing things that afternoon, as she was swayed about from introduction to introduction among the eagerly disputing groups. Hitherto she had thought, with little comprehension, of the world-spread social unrest. Strikes angered her because they interfered with necessary reconstruction and only set the working classes in a vicious circle chasing high wages and being chased in their turn by high prices. At other demands she shuddered, dimly dreading the advent of Bolshevism. And there she left it. She had imagined that revolutionary doctrines were preached to factory hands either secretly by rat-faced agents, or by brass-throated, bull-necked demagogues. That they should be accepted as a common faith by a crowd of people much resembling a fairly well-to-do suburban church congregation stirred her surprise and even dismay.
“I don’t see how intelligent folk can hold such views,” she said to Roger Blenkiron, who had been defending the Russian Soviet system as a philosophic experiment in government.
He smiled indulgently. “Doesn’t the fault lie rather in you, dear lady, than in the intelligent folk?”
“Would that argument stand,” she replied, “if you had been maintaining that the earth was flat and stood still in space?”
“No. The roundness and motion of the earth are ascertained physical facts. But—I speak with the greatest deference—can you assert it to be a scientific fact that a community of human beings area prioriincapable of managing their own affairs on a basis of social equality?”
“Of course I can,” Olivia declared, to the gentle amusement of standers-by. “Human nature won’t allow it. With inequalities of brain and character social equality is impossible.”
“Dear Lady”—she hated the apostrophe as he said it and the lift of the eyebrows which caused an upward ripple that was lost in the far reaches of his bald forehead. “Dear Lady,” said he, “in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot you can find every grade of human intellect, from the inbred young aristocrat who is that much removed”—he flicked a finger nail—“from a congenital idiot to the acute-brained statesman; every grade of human character from the lowest of moral defectives to the highest that the present civilization can produce. And yet they are all on a social equality. And why? They started life on a common plane. The same phenomenon exists in a mass-meeting of working-men—in any assemblage of human beings of a particular class who have started life on a common plane. Now, don’t you see, that if we abolished all these series of planes and established only one plane, social equality would be inevitable?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do it.”
“Ah! That’s another question. Think of what the task is. To make a clean sweep of false principles to which mankind has subscribed for—what do I know—say—eight thousand years. It can’t be done in a day. Not even in a generation. If you wish to render a pestilence-stricken area habitable, you must destroy and burn for miles around before you can rebuild. Extend the area to a country—to the surface of the civilized globe. That’s the philosophic theory of what is vulgarly called Bolshevism. Let us lay waste the whole plague-stricken fabric of our civilization, so that the world may arise, a new Phœnix, under our children’s hands.”
“You have put the matter to Miss Gale with your usual cogency, my dear Roger,” said Dawkins, who had joined the group. “Perhaps now she may take a less flippant view of our activities.”
He smiled, evidently meaning to include the neophyte in the sphere of his kind indulgence. But Olivia flushed at the rudeness of his words.
Triona who, hidden from Olivia by the standing group, had been stuffed into a sedentary and penitential corner with two assertive women and an earnest young Marxian gasfitter, and had, nevertheless, kept an alert ear on the neighbouring conversation, suddenly appeared once more to her rescue.
“Pardon me, sir,” said he, “but to one who has gone through, as I have done, the Bolshevist horrors which you advocate so complacently, it’s your view that hardly seems serious.”
“Atrocities, my dear friend,” said the seer-like Dawkins, “are proverbially exaggerated.”
“There’s a fellow like you mentioned in the Bible,” retorted Triona.
“I have always admired Didymus for his scientific mind,” said Dawkins.
Triona pulled up his trouser leg and exposed his ankle. “That’s the mark of fetters. There was a chain and a twelve pound shot at the end of it.”
“Doubtless you displeased the authorities,” said Dawkins blandly. “Oh, I’ve read your book, Mr. Triona. But before judging I should like to hear the other side.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Blenkiron,” said Triona, growing white about the nostrils, to his host who stood by in a detached sort of manner, with his hands on his hips, “I’ve unconsciously abused your hospitality.”
Blenkiron protested cheerfully. “Not a bit, my dear fellow. We pride ourselves on our broad mindedness. If you preached reactionary Anglicanism here you would be listened to with respect and interest. On the other hand, we expect the same consideration to be shown to the apostles—if you will pardon the word—of our advanced thought. Your experiences were, beyond doubt, very terrible. But we admit the necessity of a reign of terror. We shall have it in this country within the next ten years. Possibly—probably—all of us here and all the little gods we cling to will be swept away like the late Russian aristocracy andintelligentsia. But suppose we are all—Dawkins, my sister, and myself—prepared to suffer martyrdom for the sake of humanity, what would you have to say against us? Nay—you can be quite frank. Words cannot hurt us.”
“I should say you ought to be tied up in Bedlam,” said Triona.
“Do you agree with that, Miss Gale?” said Roger Blenkiron, turning on her suddenly.
She reflected for a moment. Then she replied: “If you can prove beyond question that in fifty years’ time you will create a more beautiful world, there’s something in your theories. If you can’t, you all ought to be shot.”
He laughed and held out his hand. “That’s straight from the shoulder. That’s what we like to hear. Shake hands on it.” He drew a little book from his pocket and scribbled a memorandum. “You’re on the free-list ofThe Signal. I think Agnes has your address. You’ll find in it overwhelming proof. Perhaps, Mr. Triona, too, would like——”
But Triona shook his head. “As a technical alien perhaps it would be inadvisable for me to be in receipt of revolutionary literature.”
“I quite understand,” smiled Blenkiron, returning the book to his pocket.
Dawkins melted away. Other guests took leave of their host. Triona and Olivia, making a suffocating course towards the door, were checked by Agnes Blenkiron who was eager to introduce them to Tom Pyefinch who, during the war had suffered, at the hands of a capitalist government, the tortures of the hero too brave to fight.
“Oh, no, no,” cried Olivia horrified.
Agnes did not hear. But Pyefinch, a pallid young man with a scrubby black moustache, was too greatly occupied with his immediate circle to catch his hostess’s eye. From his profane lips Olivia learned that patriotism was the most blatant of superstitions: that the attitude of the fly preening itself over its cesspool was that of the depraved and mindless being who could take pride in being an Englishman. He was not peculiarly hard on England. All other countries were the mere sewerages of the nationalities that inhabited them. The high ideals supposed to crystallize a nation’s life were but factitious and illusory, propagated by poets and other decadents in the pay of capitalists: in reality, patriotism only meant the common cause of the peoples floundering each in its separate sewer. . . .
Mere rats, he declared, changing his metaphor. That was why he and every other intelligent man in the country refused to join in the rat fight which was the late war.