II

WHEN Parkyns opened the door she said very quickly: ‘My lord is here. He came at six o’clock.’

‘Oh I am glad!’ exclaimed Sunflower. Now she would be able to tell him about Alice Hester at once. ‘Where is he?’

‘He is at dinner, Madam, and—’

But Sunflower threw down her gloves and bag on the hall-table, and ran right into the dining-room, which was silted up with late twilight. As she came from behind the draught-screen at the door Essington rose out of the tall chair at the head of the table, which was where she sat as a rule. She could not see his face; on the settee behind him burned the three candles that were as yet the only light in the room. She went to him, holding out her arms and crying, ‘Oh, darling! I’ve seen something so wonderful today! I went to the Assize Court in Packbury, and there was an old woman of seventy who had committed bigamy—’

But he kept silence, lowering his head a little, in the way which always meant that she had done something stupid and that he was not going to help her out of it. There was the sound of another chair being pushed backward. Why, there were two other people in the room. A broad-browed, middle-aged woman with straight black hair and an earthy skin looked up at her over the edge of a wineglass with a curious expression into which Sunflower stared for a moment; it was like the expression that might be exchanged between two servants waiting at table on a troublesome master. And at the foot of the table stood a little man with fox-coloured hair and a very big mouth, and queer eyes the colour of bad weather.

She put out her hand and exclaimed foolishly, ‘Oh, it’s you!’

He answered in a kind voice, very deep for such a little man, ‘Yes, it’s me.’ His hand was tiny, but very broad and strong.

She forgot her moment’s misgiving at Essington’s silence in happy wonder that after all these years she should meet this man again, this day of all days. It was odd that she had been thinking of him this very afternoon. It did seem as if life was suddenly revealing its own pattern. She would have liked to say, ‘Well, this is a small world, isn’t it!’ but Essington had impressed on her that, for some reason which she could not fully understand, the use of this and some other equally harmless phrases was far less permissible than the use of really bad language.

But Essington said: ‘You don’t know this gentleman. This is Mr Francis Pitt.’

Laughingly she protested, ‘But I do know Mr Pitt. We—sort of met years ago.’

A tremor ran through Essington. He seemed about to be angry in a different way. ‘What’s this?’ he spoke to Francis Pitt. ‘I thought you said you had never met?’

The little man gave a low chuckle. ‘Hardly met. We passed each other on the stairs when I was going down and Miss Fassendyll was coming up to the office of a War Charity, of which I was a Grand Panjandrum, a God knows what, and for which she did some real work.’ The chuckle ran right through his gruff speech, making it seem the very voice of kindly strength. She thought of the policeman who had found her crying in Hammersmith Broadway when silly old Grandaunt Annie had taken her out and lost her; he had bought her some pear drops and carried her all the way home. ‘I remember my eyes nearly fell out of my head, and evidently Miss Fassendyll remembers that too.’

She began to say, ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t that!’ but Essington had gone back to being angry in his first manner. ‘Dear Sunflower is as vague about the nature of an introduction as she is about everything else,’ he said; and then, suddenly remembering the sallow woman, waved his hand at her, ‘Miss Pitt, this is Miss Fassendyll.’ The sallow woman smiled and held out a hand so big and broad that it seemed odd that it should be smooth and white, in a manner at once genial and perfunctory, as if she wanted to be nice but was holding herself in readiness to climb a tree if hostilities became more acute. And then Essington went on: ‘I’ve been here since five. I told you I would be back here at tea-time on Monday. It’s half past eight now.’ His voice cracked. ‘I wrote a note from Evescote to say that I’d asked Miss Pitt and her brother to dine tonight. Of course you haven’t got it. We’re eating a scratch dinner that isn’t fit for a pig.’

His words failed him. His hand danced over the comminated table like something stung.

‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed.

‘Well, what does it mean? Where have you been? Who have you been with?’

She wet her lips. ‘I’ve been … at Packbury. Harrowby had to do something to the car. I went and listened to some cases. The time passed.’

‘It did,’ said Essington, ‘It did.’

‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. But really you didn’t say you were coming today. You said you were staying down at Evescote till Tuesday.’

‘I did not.’

‘But you wrote it.’ She tried to laugh. ‘Truly you did.’ She knew the way of dignity was to be silent; she knew that to defend herself was to crawl in the dust in the way of these strangers. But she was afraid that if she did not speak he would strike her. For she knew, as certainly as she knew that she would eventually die, that he would some day strike her. ‘Look, the letter’s up there on the mantelshelf, slipped into the mirror.’ Recollection of how gay she had been when she put it there, of how she had been moved to do so by her pride in one of his dear minor gifts, made her choke with a sense of trampled happiness. ‘I put it up there because your writing was so pretty.’

His eyes found the blue-grey envelope, beautiful as a Chinese print with the exquisite web of his serene and delicate handwriting. His head ducked. It was apparent that he remembered. But in a moment he recovered himself. ‘My God! How you love leaving letters about!’ he said.

‘There’s nothing in it but “Evescote” and your initials,’ she mumbled. She was shivering, partly because of her humiliation, partly because she was afraid that he had gone mad. There was a magical and ventriloquous quality about his rage. It was as if the voice that seemed to come out of his mouth came really from some lonely, bewitched and baying beast, far out in a desert. There was a silence, so she murmured, ‘I’ll go and tidy.’

‘You will not,’ said Essington. ‘You will sit down. Then Mr Pitt can sit down. Then I can sit down. Where’s Parkyns? She ought to be here. My God, your wayward, woodland charm shows nowhere more strongly than in your domestic arrangements.’ He stamped on the electric bell till Parkyns came in; she too was shivering. She had, Sunflower now realised, been shivering when she opened the door. ‘Take your mistress’s coat and hat. And bring in the soup.’

‘I don’t want any,’ said Sunflower. ‘I’ll start where you are.’

‘Oh, no. Oh, no. You’re going to see the kind of dinner we had. We’ll wait.’

‘Ah, now,’ objected Francis Pitt, ‘the dinner’s been grand,’ and his sallow sister broke into a corroborating murmur.

They all sat down. Sunflower felt half-asleep. The misery that filled her mind was not Essington’s behaviour, which was so awful that it was raised to a kind of remoteness, like some calamity read of in the newspapers, but the way she looked. She had cried a little in the car, thinking of Alice Hester, and had not troubled to powder; and her hat had been a close one. It was horrid, because Francis Pitt was the sort of man who cared about people being well-groomed. Though his sister was plainly indifferent to those things, since her thick eyebrows were not plucked, she had been drilled into quite a good black dress of the Handley-Seymour sort. And he himself, though his red-brown hair straggled over his ears in bearish disorder, was dressed even more carefully than Essington. He had pretty studs.

She put up her hand to see what she could do with her hair, but Essington said, ‘Don’t fuss! Don’t fuss!’ and added, ‘Parkyns, turn on all the lights.’

But Parkyns was very nice. She brought Sunflower only a very little soup and hardly any fish. And meanwhile, Francis Pitt leaned forward, chuckling again, and said, ‘You’ll not be able to guess what I’ve been doing today.’ Sunflower liked the way he laughed on no particular cue, but just on general principles. Essington never laughed except at the exact point of something that was certifiably funny. The little man’s way took her back to contacts of her youth: when one went on a visit to Cousin Gladys who was married to the stationmaster at Redhill. She opened the front door, and there was laughter. Then she kissed Mummie and you, and there was laughter. Then one went upstairs. ‘This is your room’; more laughter. ‘Oh, it’s ever so nice’; more laughter. ‘Well, I’ll be downstairs getting the tea, and you’ll come down when you’re ready’; more laughter, senseless and kindly. Those were easy days.

‘What was that?’ asked Essington. She was amazed at his interest. He must really respect the little man.

He chuckled again. ‘I went down to my old school in South London and gave the little boys some good advice. I hope to God they don’t follow it, or I shall have a grave responsibility on my soul. For I didn’t dare tell them the truth about the way I made my money, and maybe what I told them they won’t find quite so useful.’

‘What school was that?’

‘Oh, a rotten private school down at Dulwich. I have no pleasant memories of it, God knows, but the old man who runs it came up to my office. At first I nearly had him thrown out, but he spun a hard luck yarn, and said it would help the school pick up if I came down, and so in the end I said I would.’ She thought what a kind man he was; but there flashed across her mind a suspicion that the up-and-down lilt of his voice conveyed so perfectly the ruminations of a stern but good-natured man because it was meant to do so. Deliberately she put the thought away. There was something about his voice, something rich and appetising like the smell of good food cooking, that made her want to like him.

‘Lord, those suburban dumps,’ said Essington. ‘Silly old men and bitter young ones in dusty gowns, an art room with a plaster-cast of the Discobolos, a laboratory with half a dozen test-tubes and miserable little boarders who are mostly the children of licensed victuallers who’ve sent them away from home because of the pub atmosphere, and more miserable little day-boys who are sent there because their parents are snobs and won’t send them to the elementary school though they can’t afford a better one.’

‘That was me,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘My father was a Wesleyan minister.’

‘Ah, you’re like me, an example of what a pious home can do.’ They both laughed, that laughter by which men courteously give each other to understand that they are quite sure that they have the more picturesque irregularities in common. ‘My father was vicar of Brodip in Norfolk. Eight of us there were.’ The note that came into his voice when he spoke of his childhood always broke her heart. It was whining, ungracious, greedy, pathetic: the complaint of a child born with raw nerve-ends into a crowded nursery. Rage ceased to burn in her throat. She would have liked to slip her hand into his under the table, but of course she did not dare. Under her brows she looked at the others to see if they were liking him enough, for she was afraid they must have been prejudiced by his rudeness when she came in. Francis Pitt’s eyes slid away from her. Miss Pitt, eating salted almonds, gave her that curious fellow-servant look.

‘Six of us there were,’ said Francis Pitt. He sat curiously in his chair, his broad shoulders jutting forward, as a lion would sit if he were made to eat at table.

‘Lord, how they could! How they could!’

‘Well, we got through.’

‘We had to pay.’

‘Had you to pay much? I thought things had come easily with you.’

‘Easily! Oh, my God!’ He stirred irritably in his seat. ‘I got a Balliol scholarship from my grammar school and couldn’t take it because my people hadn’t any money. You know how badly one takes things when one is young. I don’t feel life’s made up to me for that. I had to go to London University, and eke out a scholarship by teaching in one of those private schools. Out at Sydenham it was. A mean little den. Then I got my degree, and I taught at Blagdon. There wasn’t anything very good going for me, because I was no good at games. Then I started doing journalism, and read law. I was called to the Middle Temple in ’91, and I went into Brandram’s chambers. When I was forty I stood for Burdsend. That was a by-election. In 1906. Then in 1910 Brandram died and left me all his money. He was a widower, you know, and his boy had died at Oxford. Strained his heart in that running tomfoolery. The money seemed a good thing at the time. It made it possible for me to give up the Bar and go in for politics as a career. Now I’m sorry the old man wasted his money on me.’

‘It’s been no waste,’ said Francis Pitt. With his deep voice and a gesture of his spatulate hands he made his deference to the older man seem a charming abnegation of his strength’s right to dominate.

‘It has. It’s been utter waste. The old man left me his money partly because he was fond of me, but more because he thought I’d do something for Liberalism. He was a great Liberal. God, if he could see how little I’ve been able to do for Liberalism; and what the Liberal Party is today.’

‘I suppose it would break the old-timer’s heart,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘Now what do you suppose has happened to us? What does it all mean? It seems to me sometimes when I sit in the House and look round at us that we’re not only a beaten party, we’re a guilty party, and we know it. We feel we’ve brought it on ourselves. What was it we did? Was it, do you think, that we stuck to Bryce Atkin after the war, when people’s minds were clearer and they could see the little villain’s quality, and we lost all our moral prestige through having such a leader?’

Sunflower felt unaccountably disappointed at hearing that he too was in politics. But the evening was settling down into the kind of thing that Essington liked. She sat with her head down, doggedly thinking of Alice Hester.

‘Oh, no,’ answered Essington. ‘We all knew Bryce Atkin’s quality quite well long before the peace, and even long before the war, for that matter. In point of fact that gave him, and us, our chance in the war. Of course he’s obviously a cocotte, God bless him, with his obviously hireable charm and his taste for rich men and those queer perorations of his in which he shows off his Nonconformist quality in a way which isn’t decent, like a girl lifting up her skirt to show her ankles. But it’s one of the superstitions of the mob that there’s no sicknurse like Nell Gwynn if she turns her hand to it. Haven’t you read again and again in second-rate novels of the great-hearted cocotte who nurses the penniless stranger through typhoid or whatnot? That’s why England trusted herself to Bryce Atkin in the war. No, he’s never done us as much harm as Oppenshaw.’

‘Oh, Oppenshaw!’

‘He is our real curse. I often dream of his silly, handsome old face, all curves and whirls of chins and dimples, and soft, soft, soft. It’s like a giant nose done in butter for a Grocers’ Exhibition. Oh, they both did their bit in dragging us down. But it was the fault of all of us. For we all stood by while those two with their passion for fiddling negotiation made the Party take the first step downhill. That was before the war. Let me see, you weren’t in the House then, were you?’

‘No. I got in for Braystoke in 1919. I only came to England from California in 1913.’

‘Ah. Our paths crossed. You went in as I came out. Well, I wish you better luck than I had.’

They raised their glasses to each other. That was a gesture of friendship; and she knew that Essington’s fretful sincerity about even the smallest things in life would not have let him make it had he not meant it. But by throwing the two into the same attitude of bowed head and lifted hand it exhibited them as so different that with a sinking of the heart she feared that they would not remain friends very long; that Francis Pitt might not come to the house very often. Essington sat high in his chair, like some great cat with delicate bones, a puma or a cheetah, with his lean sloping shoulders, and his small poised head, that was broad across the square brow and narrowed suddenly below the wide cheekbones to the little, fine, snapping jaw, over which the silver moustache stuck out like feelers. His eyes were like a cat’s, limpid as water, but secretively set; and he had that feline look of having been moulded out of a plastic substance by long, sweeping fingers. He would have been beautiful to look at had he not been disfigured by the expression that the world thought to be sourness, but that she knew to be tortured sweetness. His face was tragic with qualities which life had infected with their opposites: kindliness that because of the million objections which had been raised to his plans for being kind was now chiefly impatience; sensitiveness that because of the wounds inflicted on it had become brutally insensitive in its own defence. She cried out to herself, obstinately, ‘I will go on loving him, I will go on loving him.’

But Francis Pitt was a being of a different kind; it seemed, of a different time. With his ape’s mouth, his over-large head, and his over-broad shoulders he had an air of having been created before the human structure had added to itself such refinements as beauty and shapeliness. Yet he had as much of a body as a man needs. He looked enormously strong, and as if he could go through anything. Captain Scott. Gold prospectors. Seekers for the source of tropical rivers. She saw them all, on the snow, on the lye-frosted sand, in the green oven of the forest, with his troglodyte body, his unperishable face that also, like his body, rejected certain human novelties. There was there no such tangle of transmuted sweetness and kindliness and sensitiveness as there was in Essington. He seemed to have been created before the human soul had split itself up into these subdivisions. The only modern thing in his face, the only thing which would have been surprising in the death’s-head of a mummy found crouching in a grave dug in a place now desert but not so a million years ago, was a certain whimsicality, a certain puckishness, which spoke of an intention to break up life whenever it seemed to be settling down into a form that encouraged these recent psychological inventions. Yet he had surely as much of a nature as a man needs. She tried to put into words what she guessed about it, but since it was his essential quality that he belonged to an age when words were not yet important she could not do it, and simply saw images. He made her think of an iron spade with clods of earth still clinging to it. Suddenly a gust of pleasure at his presence passed over her, and it seemed to her as if she were in a high place, where the air was very clear. Woods ran down to a lake, the green fire of young leaves crackling among the treetops; the milder mirrored woods ran out into the lake, the leaves’ fire quenched to a paste of green jewels. She stood among rocks by the water. Something like the fire of the leaves crackled all round her; and within her the mirrored woods were troubled, they were fluted into ribs of thick glass. There was coming a canoe that was driven forward to her, to the fire that crackled round her and in her, by a man with strong arms, with broad shoulders, who cried to her across the water, a round-mouthed cry without words; who was this man.

It was silly to have daydreams when one was grown-up. Under the table she rubbed her hands, which felt as if they were charged with electricity.

‘Better luck!’ repeated Essington, as he set down his glass.

‘And what better luck can you have than to be a great man?’ asked Francis Pitt.

She looked at Essington with real interest as to what his answer would be. But he made none, though he acknowledged the implied compliment with a little ironic bow. She turned towards Francis Pitt, hoping he would press his question; but he was thinking of nothing but the turtle savoury he was eating, and it was apparent that he had never expected an answer. She supposed it was typical of her stupidity that she had not seen that it was just one of those questions that men ask for the sake of asking, in political speeches and in newspaper articles: like ‘Shall we let Germany?’, as it used to be, or as it was now, ‘Shall we let France?’ But suddenly she rebelled against that customary way of looking at it. It was they who were stupid not to see that the question did need an answer. Most people thought it was good luck to be great. But here was Essington, who was great, and it had been no luck for him. He was miserable. It was of no value to him that the dinner was really very good. It was of no value to him that she had made the room so pretty with its apple-green walls and its black lacquer furniture faintly inscribed with golden beauty. The loveliest thing in it, the dark bush starred with white flowers that stood on the settle behind the windows, he never looked at, though he knew all about it, and when she had brought it home, having bought it because she thought it lovely, he had been able to tell her exactly when it had been made and in what part of China. And it was of no value to him that she was sitting there ready to be nice to him. He knew what she was, how much she loved him, but it did not seem to matter. He looked peevishly past all these offers of satisfaction to a future that was to be reformed half for its own sake and half as an insult to the hated present. That was the fault of his greatness; it was because he had to roll in such fierce grips with his times in his effort to dominate them that he loathed them. It was the fault of his greatness too that he minded it all so much. He could not take anything easily because the knowledge of his power and his responsibility pulled his head stiff and high like an invisible bearing-rein. It had been no luck at all for him. Look at the querulous beauty of his long fingers, for ever restless, now kneading the stem of his wineglass, as if he hoped to change its shape, which could not be done! There must be better luck than his. What was it then that a man ought to try to be? She turned to Francis Pitt, who, she thought, might know. But again his eyes slid away from hers. She looked across the table at Miss Pitt, wondering whether she had come by observation of her male to any understanding of what men were up to; but Miss Pitt’s eyes were on her brother’s empty plate, and she took advantage of the silence of the two men to ask, with such nervous hurry as might be shown by somebody who had been allowed by the police to cross a street just before a royal procession came along, what the name of this exceedingly nice savoury might be.

‘No,’ Essington began again, ‘the rot began before the war. With our weakness in dealing with the Ulster Rebels. We made it plain that we thought of expediency before principle. That was Oppenshaw, of course. But we should have stood up to him. It meant so much. I myself believe that Germany would never have started the war at the time she did if she hadn’t been encouraged to think that we were in a state of anarchy by the Ulster business. And it would have cost us so little to keep order. We need not have shot one of the leaders. We need only have told them we would shoot them.’

‘Now, is that true?’ asked Francis Pitt, slowly. ‘I thought that whatever we might say of them they were at least men of courage. What about Canterton? Wasn’t he very resolute on the matter?’

‘That drunken lout! If anybody ever knocked the cigar out of his mouth he’d fall to pieces. Nobody has ever tried it, because he fulfils a certain deep human need. Every man wants to believe that it is possible for some human being, even if it isn’t himself, to drink eight bottles of champagne a day and suffer no ill effects. Canterton’s magnificent physique makes him look as if he could. It isn’t till you get to know him that you realise that you see that drink has changed his soul to a stench of vulgarity. Oh, he’d have run all right.’

‘But Barstow, now? He surely …’

‘No. A coward. He hates the Catholic Irish because way back in the eighties he had to go round Ireland prosecuting for the Crown in the Crimes Act Special Courts, and they frightened him sick. He’s never forgiven them for that. He’s been a brave man because he’s gone on in spite of his funk. But one can be a coward and a brave man at the same time, and he was so much of a coward that he couldn’t have faced hanging for treason. Dodging assassination is different. It is exciting; you can do it on your nerves. But a cell and the drop—that can’t be done on the nerves. He would never have seen it through. Look at the way that long after the whole business was settled he had to have corps of detectives to guard his house down in Sussex. Absurd. Preposterous.’

‘Is it true,’ asked Francis Pitt, ‘that you were the man in the Cabinet who refused all protection of any sort?’

Sunflower, forgetting she was in disgrace, cried out, ‘Yes! He never had one detective and Bryce Atkin always had five!’

Francis Pitt laughed outright; and Essington looked at her with his head on one side like a cat that is not sure whether to smack a beloved kitten.

‘Well, I’ve had my question answered,’ said Francis Pitt, smiling at her. ‘I don’t doubt the truth of what I’ve heard. It came, by the way, from Hurrell.’

‘From Hurrell?’ Essington jerked back his head as if he were a nervous high-bred animal and someone had held food under his nose which he wanted to see before he swallowed it. The name recalled to her one of those quarrels of his, when secretaries stood outside his door, saying to each other, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t post it till the morning. Hold it back somehow. You can’t send out a thing like that. He’ll probably feel better in the morning, you know …’ He went on, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were likely to hear much good of me from that quarter.’

‘There you’re very much mistaken,’ said Francis Pitt, shaking his great head impressively. ‘He has a tremendous admiration for you, a tremendous admiration.’

‘He hadn’t at one time.’

‘Ah, but that’s a long time ago, and many things have changed since then. I think you’d find yourself seeing pretty well eye-to-eye with him now.’

‘Mm …’

‘No, I mean this. Often and often he has said to me that you were the one man who could have saved the Liberal Party. He ranks you far higher than himself.’

‘So he might,’ said Essington; and they all laughed.

‘You don’t think much of Hurrell?’ asked Francis Pitt, meditatively. ‘Ah, he’s a fine man. I met him a week after I landed from America in 1913 in search of my real career, and he’s been my best friend ever since. I know him through and through, and I don’t think there ever was a much finer man.’

She saw the little man in California, riding a horse on warm white dust, drawing rein, and looking over his shoulder. It was like this large little man that what had caught his eye was nothing less than another continent. She saw him dismount; and later get into a tall American train, as she had seen people doing on the movies. In the blacks and greys of photography she saw him sitting reading a newspaper; she saw the negro porter bending over him; she saw him looking at the women; she saw him eating in the restaurant car; she saw him going down the steep steps and taking a stroll in the clean open air. She saw him doing these things all across the continent; and the effect was like the clenching of a fist. She saw him on shipboard, swathed up to his ugly face on a deck-chair, watching the taut line where sea and sky dip up and down behind the swaying rails; the fist was clenched to hit. She saw him in England, in some open but urban place, its dingy background stained by those dingy and splendid towers of St Stephen’s, which are as if London’s dreams had wished her fog into shapes of magnificent governances, which have so strange an effect on Englishmen. She saw him walking up to Hurrell, whom she remembered having met, a stooping dull-eyed man on whom intellectuality seemed to be acting like some form of pulmonary weakness; one could imagine his nights much troubled by short dry thoughts. In front of him Francis Pitt came to a halt, as once he had come to a halt in front of her. But he did not hurry away from this man as he had hurried away from her. The fist unclenched, it became a hand held out, held up, like a child’s.

It was queer that speaking so baldly he made one think of all these things. It was because his voice was full of character, though his words had none. In this also he was the opposite of Essington, whose voice was without character. Because of his rage at not having been at Balliol he spoke exactly like all men who have been at Balliol; though if he had been at Balliol he would without doubt have disgustedly schooled himself to speak as if he had never seen Oxford. Except for that accent his speech was nearly without attributes. It was silver-bright and unsigned, like a scalpel, a mental instrument as that is a surgical instrument; kept in the locked cabinet of silence when it was not required for real work, never treated as a toy. That was so hard on him, for when he was tired in the garrulous way, and felt the need of just letting his tongue run on and on, as everybody does sometimes, he was ashamed of it, and insisted on thinking, so that his words would be justified by their meaning. His poor head, his poor head. But of course it was obviously more sensible to put one’s meaning into as many words as it needed and say them clearly than to let it blow, pungent but vague like a breath of spice, on a booming wind of deep-voiced sentences. This too made her feel that Essington represented a more recent, more edited kind of man than the other. The difference between them seemed to her to be in itself a thrilling drama. She suddenly felt very gay, and began to drink her wine.

Essington said acidly: ‘Hurrell wasn’t with me at Versailles, you know.’

‘No. I know he wasn’t. He saw the whole business very differently from the way you did. He thought that to get out when you did was to be a quitter. He had an idea that he could do better if he stayed inside and tried to mould things nearer to what you and he both hoped for. You see, compromise is a very strange thing in Hurrell. Remember he was brought up in a Jesuit school. That leaves a mark on a man. It’s left a very deep mark on Hurrell. With him it’s always compromise, compromise, compromise. That’s made him a good thing in my life. I’m too forthright. I go for what I want, and I must have all I want. Hurrell has taught me to water that down, to take what I can get. But, mind you, he carries the thing too far with himself. I admire him more than any other living man, but I see all his faults, and I know that’s the chief of them. But he knows it too. And particularly he knows that he was wrong and you were right about Versailles. He feels very strongly that he should have come out with you. He knows he did no good by staying in with Bryce Atkin. And he owns it publicly now. He was saying so last Sunday when we were all down at Tenby’s for the weekend. Tenby was greatly impressed.’

‘Mm …’

‘Ah, you don’t believe me. But I tell you Hurrell is with you on this. I should say he’d be willing to be with you on many other points than this.’

‘He’s never made a sign,’ said Essington.

‘That’s Hurrell’s way. He’s a terribly proud man. I know him through and through. A lot goes on inside that quiet man you’d never suspect. He’s so proud that it’s an agony to him to have to climb down. But I think he would do if he met you. I’m sure he would. Indeed I know he would. Now, would you meet him and see if I’m not right? Would you and Miss Fassendyll come over to my house one night this week and dine with Etta and me and Hurrell? Just us five?’

It was as if he had produced a white rabbit from his sleeve. His talk was retrospectively recognisable as conjurer’s patter.

‘Well …’ said Essington. He made a little purring sound of embarrassment; and wagged his forefinger at Pitt. ‘Vamp!’ he said solemnly. ‘Vamp!’ And he put back his head and laughed silently behind his silver feelers.

Francis Pitt chuckled without real merriment. It was plain that he could not make out whether Essington was really amused or was hiding behind laughter a harsh annoyance that he should have been forced to say whether or not he wanted to meet Hurrell. Essington did not help him. He raised his glass to his lips and drank his port between gusts of silent laughter. Pitt shot a look of hostility at his sister, as if she were somehow to blame for all this; and turned to Sunflower, saying with heavy courtesy, ‘Well, what does Miss Fassendyll say? Won’t you persuade Lord Essington?’

She was confused by him. The courtesy in his voice was so very heavy. It was as if he stood on the steps of a throne, and she were kneeling to him, and he bent down to do her honour, and cast about her a rich cloak, too rich a cloak, so rich that its weight crushed her. But in the centre of his hard grey gaze there was something that was as if he had not bent down at all, as if he had no intention of doing her honour; as if he were standing level with her, and meant her to take whatever he gave her. She turned aside and looked at Essington, as years before, when she had first sat at meals with Essington, she used to turn aside and look at the thought of Chiswick: the streets; the people; her mother’s house; her sisters and brothers; the comparatively simple and unpatterned life she had left behind her. But immediately she forgot Francis Pitt, for she saw what was the matter with Essington. He had put down his glass, and now that he felt himself free from the other man’s attention he looked like a child who has heard that if he likes he will be given a certain treat, who longs for that treat more than anything else in the world, but who is prevented by some infantile point of dignity from showing that he longs for it. Of course, he wanted to make it up with Hurrell. It was always like this a year or two after his quarrels, if they were with anybody whom he had known for a long time. If they were with people whom he had met during the last few years, since this curious lack of interest in personality had come upon him, of course he parted with them with no emotion save relief at having eliminated one of those innumerable human annoyances that seemed to his mad nerves to be crowding in and in on his tired middle-age. But about old friends he felt just as if he were an ordinary person. You would not have thought so at the time, for these quarrels were not just a mere matter of having a few words. There was always one of his ideas behind them, and that meant that he went about blue-white like one of the revival preachers that used to come to Chapel now and again, and whipped himself to go on with the thing long after he would naturally have lost interest in it. There wasn’t any bright side to them at all, for he got none of the relief that Father used to get by swearing about the place, since he held himself taut all the time lest he should say anything unfair. He seemed to dread being unfair as other people dreaded being sent to prison: for him there wasn’t anything worse. But deep down he minded his quarrels in the ordinary way as well. She would see signs of that first some months after it was all over, when a name came up in conversation and Essington pursed his mouth behind his silver feelers and said, with a bruise on his voice, ‘Woodruff? Oh, we don’t see anything of each other now; not since the Amritsar business’; as, tonight, he had said, ‘Hurrell? I wouldn’t have thought you were likely to learn much good of me from that quarter.’ And then with luck, a year or two later, there would happen a night when she came back from the theatre and found him sitting in his armchair by the fire in the little library, that was so pretty with the birds-of-paradise chintz, drinking his weak whisky-and-water and looking chubby. ‘Well, how did it go tonight? That’s good. You’re getting on, you know. This is a long way the best thing you’ve ever done. There’s quite a quality about your acting now. But what a pretty thing you are! The best part of your prettiness never shows in the theatre. In a little room like this you’re astounding. Come here and let me kiss your silly old neck. Well. I’ve had a good evening too. A dinner at the Jacobsons’. Ooh! Such a rich house. Lots of footmen nine feet tall. And I think there was a pearl in my soup. Very good talk, though. And who do you think was there? Old Woodruff. I haven’t seen him since the Amritsar business. He was very friendly. He asked after you. We are the most official pair of sinners that ever were. I’m dining with him on Thursday, just ourselves. Hm. What about going to bed?’ He wanted it to be like that with Hurrell, whom she remembered now he had known not very well, but for a long time. He had told her once that they had sat together for the same examination at some very early stage in their careers, and had gone off in company at the lunch-hour and eaten bread and cheese in a public house, united by the link, which was not alluded to then and never had been since, that they were both wearing suits of clothes which they had outgrown to a ridiculous degree. It occurred to her that this must have happened years before she was born. This somehow brought tears to her eyes. It was as if she saw him sitting alone among long shadows.

She must see to it that he met Hurrell; but she must not give away that he wanted to, for he was ashamed of these ordinary emotions, as one would have thought he would have been ashamed of his bad temper and injustice, and as he was not. So she looked at Etta and Francis Pitt, as if she thought them very interesting and charming people, though at that moment she was not thinking about them at all; she seemed as if she were going to say something, but bit it back, and then could not help herself, and said naïvely, as if begging him to let her go to this nice party, ‘We could go, couldn’t we?’ It was queer how she could act better off the stage than on it; she supposed it was because the motive was stronger. She couldn’t be expected to want to please an audience of people she didn’t know as much as she would want to please Essington.

‘There you see,’ said Francis Pitt, ‘Miss Fassendyll wants you to do it. That settles it. You’re coming to meet Hurrell.’

‘These women,’ protested Essington, ‘these women know nothing of the stern moral passion of our sex. I quarrelled with Hurrell on a matter of high moral principle, my dear.’ He looked happier already.

‘And you’ll make it up with him on my Mumm 1901, which is a darn sight better,’ said Francis Pitt, with that strange, deep, over-acted chuckle. ‘I’m all with the women on this and many other matters. Nix on moral passion for me. Now, when will you come up? Etta, when are we free? Well, we needn’t bother about that. It’s for you to say.’

‘Next week, you said, didn’t you? Monday … Tuesday …’ He seemed to reflect deeply, though nowadays he had not so very many engagements; and finally suggested, in a burst, ‘Look here, what about this Friday? As a matter of fact it would suit me better than next week, just as it happens.’

‘This Friday? That’s fine. At half past eight. I count on you for that.’

Etta murmured, ‘What about the Dartreys?’

Pitt made a sweeping, advertising gesture. ‘Put them off! I know now what I want to do on Friday evening!’ He drank deeply, and brought down the glass smartly on the table. ‘Ah, this’ll help Hurrell to throw off his cold.’

‘Has he a cold?’ asked Essington. She could see that now he was letting himself be eager for news of Hurrell.

‘If you asked him tonight he’d tell you he was dying of one. He’s an old woman about himself, God bless him. He’s gone off to bed this evening with a face as long as a fiddle because he’s got an ordinary cold on his chest.’ Again he chuckled, and twirled the stem of his glass between his thick fingers. For a moment he seemed to Sunflower like a tired actor who is getting through the evening on his technique; but that was absurd, for vitality was plainly the thing that he had got. He was the most self-possessed and male person she had ever met.

‘Well, I think he really is ill,’ said Etta obstinately, re-starting a discussion.

‘Fiddlesticks! I’m often as ill as that,’ her brother interrupted, rather suddenly. A greyness passed over his face. His features seemed to fall, so that he looked much older, and his eyelids flickered. It seemed to Sunflower that he might have had quite a lot to think about during dinner. But he said, ‘Essington, I’m going to ask for some more of your very good port. We must drink to the success of your meeting with Hurrell. May you make it up and—’ he wagged his head portentously, ‘may great things come of your meeting.’

Essington filled his own glass too, though ordinarily he drank no more than a sip of port. They raised their glasses solemnly. It was funny the way that men have special ways of being ridiculous that they agree not to consider ridiculous, like the silly clothes they wear at Eton, and going to cricket matches as if they mattered.

‘Here, the women are standing out of this!’ cried Francis Pitt. ‘They must drink this health too!’

‘Oh, yes, indeed they must!’ echoed Essington, and poured port into Miss Etta’s glass with something of the other man’s swaggering breadth of gesture, which came so unnaturally to him that for an instant the wine shone above the rim like a bevelled jewel, threw down a tawny veil that draped its calm self, safely contained within the bowl, and clung to the flutings of the stem and became a bright blister on the walnut wood; while the wine left behind shivered, and was again a flawless bevelled jewel above the rim. That pleased Sunflower because it was a pretty thing in itself, and because of the funny little rivalry between the two men that had made it happen. She felt like a mother who, sitting on a beach, watches her son follow some stronger, more conventionally boyish boy over the rocks in some game; she does not mind that hers seems the weaker and comparatively spiritless because she is sure he knows a trick worth two of that; this man was all very well but he was not her Essington, with his honesty, his courage, his wonderful cleverness, and his dear way of looking like a great big lovely cat. She felt very warmly, closely, married to him tonight and plotted how she might move her chair closer to Essington and slip her hand into his under the corner of the table. She smiled at Francis Pitt, as he poured out her port, with the unveiled candour which one can show to a stranger who has no power over one, who will not be able to use it to one’s hurt.

‘To the meeting with Hurrell,’ said Francis Pitt heavily; and they all drank, all of them, even Essington, laughing a little. As they set down their glasses Francis Pitt, assuming the character of a strong man exasperated to distraction and humbly anxious for help from those whom he knew to be cleverer, grumbled, ‘And truly I do hope to God you two get talking to some purpose. Something must happen to lift us all out of this mess and if you two can’t do it no one can …’ He was obviously trying to flatter Essington. But it struck her that the obviousness of it was intentional; he knew that though Essington would be pleased to hear someone expressing sincere admiration for him he would be still more pleased that an important man thought it worth while to flatter him. That was clever, but it was male, it was superficial. It was true, of course, but it was beside the point. Essington was going to do as he wished, and meet Hurrell and forgive him, but not for anything that had to do with importance or recognition or getting back into power; simply because he wanted to make it up with an old friend. She looked at him adoringly and wished that she might rub her cheek against his and nuzzle up to him. She would as soon as these people had gone. Sometimes it had seemed to her as if she stayed with him only out of habit, as if the pang she felt whenever she determined to leave him were only such as she might feel if she were obliged to move out of a house after a long tenancy. But now she knew she thought such things only because she was tired. She stayed with him because he was full of sweetness, she did not leave him because that would be to abandon the whole of life that was good. And it would get better and better, there would be more and more evenings like this, as he grew older and less vehement. Then floated before her, and seemed to make a pattern, images of herself, of Essington, this contentment not transitory on his face, of the garage proprietor and his hideous beloved wife; of Alice Hester. She breathed a long, hopeful sigh.

It made Essington turn to her as if he had not really noticed her before. ‘Well, Sunflower,’ he said kindly, ‘What was it that kept you in Packbury, you time-wasting, appointment-shattering young woman? Whatever it was, it’s done you good. You look splendid.’

‘She does indeed,’ affirmed Francis Pitt, settling his grey eyes on her; and Etta made a little enthusiastic murmur. Essington continued to look at her, and shifted the flowers from the centre of the table, so that no spray should veil their picture of her. They were all smiling tenderly, as if she were a child sent into the dining room to show off a new party-frock. She smiled back mistily, uncertain how to take their admiration without seeming either vain or ungrateful; it was a problem she had had to face a million times in her life and there was no solution to it. She never felt right. But this time she did not really mind. She was glad that she was thought beautiful by this man who had set in motion everything that Essington wanted to happen, and his sister who seemed so fond of him. To speed on the still faintly embarrassing moment she said shyly, ‘Well, I went down to Clussingford for the weekend.’

‘Old Lady Lambert and Sunflower have a curious friendship,’ Essington told the others. ‘She suspects the poor child of some interesting vice. Someday Sunflower will accidentally reveal the purity of her nature and a car will be ordered to take her to the station.’ It wasn’t as funny as he could be, but he had only said it because he was enormously proud that famous old Lady Lambert had taken her up, and wanted them to know about it. He really was ridiculously fond of her, and after ten years too.

‘And on Sunday afternoon Mr Justice Sandbury took me to look at those white cows—’

‘Haven’t I heard of somebody else doing that before?’

‘I dare say. He’s the tenth old man who’s shown me those white cows.’

‘And the plainer women are allowed to stay at home and go to sleep on the terrace. It’s a hard world, Sunflower.’

They all laughed teasingly at her, mocking her tenderly for her beauty. It was nice. They knew she was stupid, but did not mind. This was a lovely hour. Everything was going well. She had no troubles, really.

‘Well, anyway,’ she went on, when she had stopped giggling, ‘he asked me to stop at Packbury on my way back on Monday. So when I did get there, and the car chose that very place to break down—’

Essington made a petulant noise. ‘Harrowby is no good.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t his fault.’ She put back her head and laughed silently at the dear, silly old thing, for he was scowling and knocking the ash off his cigar and did not see her. It was part of his passion for her, one aspect of his desire to be not only all she loved in the world but all she knew of the world, that he always took a dislike to any of her servants, men or women, as soon as they had been with her long enough to mean anything to her. Actually he would not have let her discharge them except for some misbehaviour, for his sense of justice knew absolutely no exception, save sometimes herself; but he grumbled all the time as if he wanted her to do it. Funny cross old thing that loved her so. When they were alone again she would ruffle up his thick eyebrows and his silver feelers. ‘Well, anyway it seemed a way of passing the time, so I went. And it was interesting.’

‘Was it? How?’

She grew self-conscious all of a sudden. ‘Oh, it just was,’ she said weakly, and drooped her head, and bit a salted almond and stared downwards at her empty coffee-cup.

‘I loathed going on circuit when I was at the Bar,’ said Essington. ‘You see then what this earth breeds. But then I don’t love humanity. Sunflower does. She would not press the button that meant annihilation for us all, the foolish creature. But tell us, what was it that interested you?’

‘Oh, just the people.’ She tried to leave it at that, but they worried her for details. Essington wanted her to show off, to let the others see that she was his possession, the most beautiful woman in England but a nice human being as well. And Francis Pitt also wanted her to show off, so that he could flatter Essington by conceding these points. Men were funny! She could not help laughing, and that made them more insistent, which was awkward. And Francis Pitt suddenly made it more awkward by asking, ‘Didn’t I hear you say something as you came into the room about an old woman who was tried for bigamy?’

She blushed. ‘Oh—that was nothing.’

‘What was the story?’ Essington pursued.

‘Oh nothing, nothing …’

‘Tell me, Sunflower!’ He was half-angry. He really wanted to know, because he had seen her blush, and he wanted to know what had made her blush. It hurt him because she was keeping something that had moved her a secret from him. His face was catspawed with growing suspicion and discontent. If she did not tell him he would in a moment or two become capable of something outrageous that would not only express his irritation but would bring the whole occasion to an end, like an angry child twitching a tablecloth by the corner and bringing down the meal it had looked forward to, the favourite food on the favourite plate, crashing to the floor. He might offend them so that the invitation to see Hurrell would fall through. Well, she would have to do as he wished, though she could not tell the story as she had wanted to in front of these two people. But she would say those things after they had gone; she knew that as soon as the door had closed on them he would take her in his arms. And these were such very nice people that she could say nearly all she felt in front of them. In any case she must stop him getting cross, so she began: ‘Well, that was rather interesting, I thought. She was an old woman of seventy, called—’ she looked down and parted hesitatingly with the name for told secrets lose a little of their virtue, ‘Alice Hester.’

‘That is a very beautiful name,’ commented Francis Pitt in his heavy way that was like spoken leaded type.

She had wanted someone to say that. ‘Isn’t it?’ she said, and their eyes met. He was such an understanding person that she wished she might take him aside and tell him the story by himself.

‘Well, go on,’ said Essington.

‘Oh, it isn’t anything really. But anyway she was married years and years ago, fifty years ago, I suppose, to a man she didn’t like, a farm labourer down in Essex, and she wasn’t happy, though she had lots of children. And one night her husband turned her out of doors, and the children too. And then a ploughman came, and took them all to a barn where they slept. And in the morning he brought them two loaves and some water.’ Her voice became weak and ashamed, as if she were a child who had been made to repeat a story out of the Gospel to strangers. She turned to Francis Pitt and said, tittering: ‘That last bit sounds like something out of the Bible, doesn’t it?’

The look on his face struck her dumb. She would have liked to run from the table. It was an odd inquisitive look, as if she had given herself away in some phrase and he was thirsty to follow it up. Ordinarily she would not have minded that at all, for of course she liked people to know all about her. But this was an expression that no one ought to wear when they were thinking of another human being. So might a burglar look, when his fingers had found the right combination and the safe was swinging open, and all that remained to do was to lift out the swag. Defensively she put up her hand to cover her mouth.

‘Go on,’ said Francis Pitt, ‘go on.’

How could she have made such a mistake? In his soft gaze there was nothing but an immense kindliness and protectiveness, and a certain wistfulness. He had simply wanted to hear her story. Of course that would be all, for as a matter of fact she had not dropped any particularly intimate phrases. Probably the beauty of Alice Hester’s destiny was so great that it got through even her halting words, just as Shakespeare gets through bad acting. And he was probably in need of help. Though he was so strong he had not that varnished look that happy people have.

‘Go on,’ said Etta Pitt, too.

‘Well, when she went back to her cottage her husband was gone. And she was there, with all her children. And the ploughman fell in love with her, and brought her over to Packbury, because his uncle had found work for them. And then—’ it was awkward to have to take her eyes away from Pitt’s and probably silly to feel that she ought to, ‘they had a real baby. I mean a baby of their own. And they were awfully happy, and he went on always being good to her, and they got quite old. And then he got ill and the doctors said he’d have to go into a hospital and have an operation. And he told her that there was only one thing he wanted to do before he died, and that was to marry her.’

She remembered the look in the old woman’s eyes as she had repeated the dead man’s words. She stopped her story and said querulously: ‘I want something to drink. Give me some water.’

Francis Pitt filled her glass. When she had drunk he said again, ‘Go on … Go on.’

Plainly he really needed to know. She turned to him as she went on with the story. ‘Alice Hester knew she oughtn’t to do it, for her sister over in Essex had told her that her first husband was in the workhouse there. But she saw that her man really wanted to marry her, so she made up her mind to do it. But there was a horrid boy living in the house, a kind of idiot, and he overheard them, and she knew it. All the same she didn’t stop things, because she knew the old man really wanted to marry her before he died. She just went on with all the plans, and finally the day came for their marriage. And all the way to the registrar’s office she heard the boy whistling just behind them. But still the old man wanted it so badly she went through with it. And then the man went to hospital and died. The funny thing was that she did not seem to mind that very much. I don’t mean that she didn’t feel it but it didn’t seem to break her up. I suppose nothing can really hurt one if you’ve got lots of children and know that everything will go on …’

She drooped her head, looked down on the bright wood of the table, and was lost in a dream of an impregnable kingdom of satisfaction; till a movement from Essington recalled her.

‘Well, the boy talked, and the police heard about it, and she was arrested. They let her off. Mr Sandbury was ever so nice. But she had to stand in the dock. Though she looked lovely. And you could see nothing mattered to her really, because of the children, and because it had given him pleasure to be married to her before he died. That’s all.’

For a moment there was silence. She sat turning the rings on her fingers and looking into the dark corner of the room, until, partly that by speaking she might keep back her tears and partly lest she should in her stupid way have left out the point of the story as she had done with Harrowby, she said hoarsely, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that he wanted to marry her after all those years, and that she went to all that trouble to do for him what he wanted?’

There was a stir and murmur from them all. Francis Pitt said deeply: ‘Yes, it’s a wonderful story. A wonderful story.’

Essington asked in a shrill, complaining voice: ‘Did she tell you all this as a coherent story?’

Her lips quivering, she nodded.

‘You sometimes get a witness that can tell a coherent story. The general run of them … My God …’

Francis Pitt asked: ‘Did she show any embarrassment at getting up in court, in front of all these people, and owning to having lived with this man?’

She shook her head.

‘Ah, women are sensible,’ he said, ruminatively. ‘They don’t believe in these things.’

She understood that he was telling her that he honoured her: that he thought that she had done right in living with Essington without being married. Without looking directly at him, because her eyes were wet, she smiled in his direction. But suddenly there came an acid spurt from Essington.

‘Don’t they?’

She whirled about in astonishment, and he gave her a second helping of spite. ‘Some seem to!’ he flicked at her. She was puzzled, not only because she could not understand what his words meant, but because she had thought that he was bound to be in a good mood, since usually he was glad when she said anything that interested people. But it was evident that something had made him terribly angry. Perhaps he was jealous because she had been telling her story to Francis Pitt. Often he was silly like that. She smiled into his eyes but he glared through her. Still, she would get him round.

He said, to the company in general: ‘Queer, the range of the scale of humanity. Think what that woman’s life must have been. With seven or eight children.’

‘Ten, it was,’ said Sunflower. ‘Eleven, counting the real one. The best one, I mean. The one she had with the man she liked.’

He did not look at her. ‘Eleven. My God. This would all be about fifty years ago. She must have had to do it all on twelve or thirteen shillings a week. What a miserable life of hunger and squalor …’

‘Oh no! She was quite happy,’ said Sunflower.

‘The vast range in the scale of humanity. Only fifty years from now, only fifty miles from London. Only fifty years and fifty miles from Sunflower …’ His glance dwelt on her benevolently. She must have been right in her guess at the cause of his rage, for he was not angry with her any more now that she had stopped talking to Francis Pitt. ‘Pampered little Sunflower!’ he purred. ‘Think of the difference between you and that poor wretch …’

‘Oh, but you don’t understand!’ objected Sunflower. Since he seemed to be melting she wanted to keep the conversation on these lines till she was quite sure he was placated; for in spite of the sweetness of his tone she felt that there was still something a little wrong. Though of course it would come right in a minute or two. ‘Alice Hester wasn’t a bit unhappy. She didn’t stand up there complaining of all that happened. I’ve told it you all wrong if I’ve made you think that. She’d loved it all. She was awfully happy.’

‘Sentimental Sunflower.’ Caressingly his voice lingered on the syllables, he shook his head at her ever so playfully. ‘Of course she couldn’t be happy. Unless she was just an animal.’

‘She wasn’t a bit an animal. She was lovely.’

‘Then her life must have been one long misery. Think of having child after child in those conditions. Think of the way it went on, year in, year out. The last child must have been the last straw. What drudgery …’

‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She was amazed that Essington, who was generally so right about human motives, should be wrong about anything so self-evident as this. Since she knew that he wanted above all things to know the truth about everything, she felt pleased and proud at being able to tell him something true that he had not known before. Importantly, a little fussily, like a dog racing after its master with something he has dropped safe in its mouth, she put it before him. ‘It was that child she specially liked having! She loved having it. You see, she loved the ploughman …’

It struck her how oddly, beautifully solvent the love of Alice Hester and that man had been. Town love, the love of the kind of people she knew, the people who were News, had the alarming slippery quality of sudden wealth. Either a man liked a woman because she fitted in with some notion of womanhood he had always held, which made the affair like inheriting money; or he liked her because she surprised him by being something that he had no notion womanhood could be, which was like taking a chance on the stock exchange. One does not feel confident that either the legatee or the speculator will stay rich, since he will have gained no technique in getting his money that will help him to keep it; and for a like reason these sudden lovers did not keep their love. It was well known that Alan Campbell would go crazy over any girl with real ash-blonde hair and an old-fashioned look that came into his chorus; he was one of those men who like women to do nothing else but that and yet insist on them looking as if they wouldn’t on any account do it, which was silly and must make it so confusing for a girl. It was well known, too, that Lord Dunnottar would go crazy over any headliner he met, whether she was an actress or a singer or a dancer; they said he had stood in front of the Nelly sisters, who were identical twins, with his tongue out, not knowing where to begin. Well, she had known of seven girls who had gone with Campbell to what, being an American, he called Cannes-france; and Dunnottar had a standing agreement with the telephone people to change his number every six weeks. She thought of the Embassy Club where she had seen these men with their women; the sallow light reflected from the purple and green walls made all the women pale and alike, as if they were orphans in some funny kind of institution that dressed its charges in fantastic clothes but made them live meanly and monotonously all the same. She shivered, as she sometimes did when it occurred to her that lots of people were starving and that if she had ill luck she might starve too.

But Alice Hester and her man were not like that. What they had had, had lasted their time and more, because of the way they earned it. When peasants make money out of the land, by giving the field what it demands of seeds and strength through all weathers, by reaping all day long though the noon is like a hard thumb of light pressed down on the earth, by driving the wagons to market at sunrise and being craftier than the crafty middlemen until sundown, one does not fear that they will let that money slip through their fingers. Essington had taught her that, telling her why France was reluctant to pay her debts; he would not be unfair even to militarist France. Dear Essington, how he helped her to understand things; even, so miraculously clever was he, to understand Alice Hester, whom he would not trouble to understand. For Alice Hester and her man had earned their love as peasants earn their money; by slow industrious kindness, by the stern will of sweetness not to let itself be soured by hardship, by the patient and wily dodging of circumstances that seem like a rabbit trap for all lovely things. Love earned like that would not let itself be spent too quickly. It must have been slow in its pace, that love, like a runner who knows that he has to run too far to dare to run too fast. Slowly, slowly it had come to them. Sunflower could see, could feel, Alice Hester standing in that Essex lane, with her baby warm on her breast and the others dark, whimpering little things nuzzling and pulling round her skirts. Nothing anywhere was kind. The blackness all about her put out thorny hands; wild things on night errands through the fields made little unchristened cries; the air, so much more tangible than by day, caught on her face like a cold veil; the earth underfoot was cut into cake-hard ruts that might bring her small ones down stumbling. ‘Oh, Mammy, I want to go back to my lil bed.’ ‘Mammy, why was Daddy so bothered at us?’ The poor little things … She would be able to take them on in one moment, when she had got her breath again after that run down the garden; and when she had fought down the tears that gushed up from the immense desolation that filled her heart at being alone with her children, at having to be a mother without a father to help her. ‘Oh, lovies, quiet all. We mustn’t disturb the folks over the road. They’ll have to wake early and go to work.’ Then came the sound of a window-sash slowly thrown up in the cottage, and she braced herself to move for the woman of that cottage was not kind, and had a good man, and she did not feel strong enough yet to face her and own how bad her man had been. ‘Hush, lovies, hush! You’ve wakened ’em! Come away, we’ll go and lie down by the haystack.’ So she had gathered them together, and made Jimmie take little Louisa’s hand lest she fell in the rut, and bade Mary take care of Tommy, and had picked up Annie to sprawl on her shoulder, though she was all weighed down with her baby, who was so big for his age, and then cried almost petulantly, since she did not want to talk to that woman, ‘Hurry, lovies!’ for she had heard the cottage door bang. But Annie had been too heavy for her, and she had had to pause to set her down for a minute, and then Jimmie had cried, ‘Mammy, there’s someone coming after us!’ and she had turned, and seen the bobbing lantern.

Slowly, slowly, the lantern had bobbed along the lane. Slowly the kind voice had spoken. ‘Why, Mrs Bullen …’ ‘Oh, ‘tis Mr Stallibrass …’

Slowly he had lifted Annie up in his arms.

Those were the first of kindnesses that were always slow, and therefore certified to have been really meant. When he first told her that he wanted her it must have been with a slow, ashamed drooping of the eyelids, by speech dammed more and more by shyness till there was a heartbeat between every word, and at the end only by deep breaths so delayed that after each one it seemed as though the next would never come. That must have been lovely, for it told her that this was no sudden hunger that would die in sudden satisfaction, but a desire that during its long growth had become part of his nature like his need for air. One would be out of scale with such a lover if one gave him just that silly ridiculous brief thing which town lovers like. One would want to answer him by some slower motion of the body, some motion that would last not minutes, but hours, days, weeks, months, that would end as protractedly in some worthily vast convulsion, lasting not seconds, like the climax of the other, but minutes, hours, perhaps a day, perhaps a day and night. The difference in time would change that culmination perilously, would change it from pleasure into pain. But it would still keep its character of ecstasy.

She cried out, ‘But don’t you see that if she and the ploughman loved each other so much, they’d have to have a child! They couldn’t have borne not to!’

Immediately she saw that more had happened to the moment than she meant. Etta had lost her downcast, servant-like expression and was looking straight at her; and Francis Pitt had let his cigar sprawl in his coffee-saucer. They were both pointing at her with that gun-muzzle attention that an audience gives to a really great actress in her big scene. She could not think why they were staring at her like that. With exasperation she supposed that she was looking more beautiful than usual. It was tiresome, because they had listened to what she had said, so that if they agreed with her they could back her up.

But Essington laughed, so loudly that they all turned to him.

‘I must explain to you exactly what has happened,’ he said to Etta and Francis Pitt. ‘Sunflower has a rival called Maxine Tempest—’

‘A rival!’ exclaimed Sunflower. ‘Why, she’s my best friend.’

‘Exactly. As actresses have greatest friends,’ said Essington.

‘But—’ began Sunflower, and was quelled by a patient lift of his eyebrows which conveyed that she was committing the unforgivable offence and spoiling one of his stories, which everybody knows is a dreadful thing for a stupid woman to do to a clever man. She folded her hands, looked down on them, and waited.

‘They were in the chorus of “Farandole” together. Sweet children of eighteen. It was then that I met Sunflower.’ He laid a slight humorous emphasis on the ‘then’ which made it more than a mere statement of time. It was as if he had said, you know how attractive girls of eighteen are, to men of our sort; well, that’s how I got involved. And then came a little good-natured laugh, as if to add, and really you know, I’m not sorry; she’s a good creature, and, you know, I do get extraordinarily fond of people. ‘Well, Sunflower is the more comely of the two, but Maxine is decorative enough in her way. And she has perhaps a leetle more understanding of the essentials of her art than dear Sunflower has ever acquired.’ He looked at her sideways, with that playfulness. ‘Well, ever since “Farandole” there has been a continuous rivalry between the two. Not on the stage, which in their lives, as in the lives of so many young actresses, has never been allowed to assume a disproportionate importance. But in the photographer’s studio. In the Sketch and the Tatler. Once, but not so much recently, on picture postcards. There is a kind of war of pictorial accessories between them that has gone on for years. Maxine has rather the more inventive photographer. He it was who first put Maxine with tulle round her shoulders looking up at a branch of apple blossom. Immediately dear Sunflower put some tulle round her shoulders and looked competitively up at another bigger and better bunch of apple-blossom. And she won, bless her, at a canter. Those were your very best days, my dear. Then Maxine bought a dog. A horrid little dog. A kind of angry powder-puff. This she held up against her face, thus making an agreeable contrast. Then Sunflower went out and bought another little dog, a worse little dog, a more awful little dog. And she held it up beside her lovelier face, thus making an even more agreeable contrast. So Maxine had to find another line, and this time it led her into the kitchen. She was photographed there baking a cake. But Sunflower, though an undomesticated creature, was not to be beaten. Immediately she was photographed making a pie—probably out of the discarded dog—’

The others laughed. She did not, for she knew what this rising tide of geniality usually meant. She sat with her shoulders lifted, as if she expected a lash to fall on them.

‘I forget the next stage. Ah, there was gardening. You should have seen Sunflower standing on the edge of a pond with a watering-can, watering—watering—watering—’ his falsetto laughter climbed higher and higher, it seemed as if the tears would roll down his puckered cheeks, ‘watering a water-lily …’

Sunflower protested, ‘But we knew that was funny. It was only to use up the last plate. The print was published by mistake.’ But no one seemed to hear her.

He went on, his face turned away from her. ‘But at last the time came when Maxine got Sunflower beaten. Such a shame! A year or two ago Maxine took to herself a husband. Some sort of actor thing. And the consequence is that now Maxine is photographed with an infant daughter. A preposterous child with a photographic face, the sort of ad hoc baby an actress would have. And that, you see, Sunflower can’t match. And poor Sunflower’s so cross.’ At last he looked at her directly, with a smile that would have been easy and rallying if it had not been taut and twitching. ‘Poor Sunflower, she’s always complaining about it …’ His voice cracked.

She lifted her chin and smiled vaguely at something above Etta’s head. Perhaps now that he had said this in front of people, whatever it was that made things happen would let her off that other moment, which she had dreaded for so long, when he would strike her. Only, if she had been permitted to choose, she would have chosen the other. It would not have been quite so awful.

But her smile gave out. It crinkled to something else on her face. She looked round for help, at first to Essington, which was silly, considering it was against him she needed help, but one has those funny instincts, when one has been living with a man for ten years; and then to Francis Pitt. He made no sign of seeing. His heavy, greyish lids were drooped, and if it had not been for the pursing of his great mouth she might have thought he had fallen into a bearish gloom and had not heard Essington’s last words. But suddenly and stealthily he laid down his cigar, set his hands on the arms of his chair, and pressed it backwards for a fraction of an inch. Why, of course, she could get up and go. But she always had a queer, obedient feeling that whatever Essington was doing to her she ought to stay until he had quite finished.

She met Etta’s eyes, and rose. Essington’s hand, trembling, closed the door a little too quickly after them.

The drawing room upstairs really did look rather pretty. She need not be ashamed to take anybody into it. It was always good to come back to the three Ming figures up there on the mantelpiece, the two calm old men with staves who had been on a long journey and brought back peace, the princess whose face looked bland and royal because of her smooth flesh, her little bones. In the grey bowls between the figures the servants had put red roses past their prime; as she had taught them; for she fancied it went well with the agelessness of the old men and the lady, who were seven hundred years old, who were younger than any day past its morning, to hear the wordless lisp of a dropping petal now and then, like the beat of a clock that was truer than an ordinary clock, since it was irregular, and time goes by sometimes fast and sometimes slowly. Between the pale green curtains of the three long windows showed the blossomy branches of the pear tree in the garden below, thrusting through the interstices of the balcony railing, like the muzzles of white furry animals trying to climb out of the London night, where there was only the temporal beauty of the spring, into this quiet Chinese room, where lovely things were continuing for ever. It seemed a shame when one had a nice place like this not to be able to sit down and enjoy it.

‘What a lovely room,’ said Etta. ‘I do like your wallpaper.’

‘It is nice, isn’t it. It’s eighteenth-century Chinese. We found rolls and rolls of it in an Italian villa we once had, never been put up on anything, so we bought the lot.’

‘That was a piece of luck. Did you like Italy?’

‘I did. Awfully. But he got tired of it in a week or two. He always does get tired of places quite soon.’ It was best, she supposed, to talk of him quite naturally.

‘So does Francis. Every year he thinks he’s going to like Deauville, and he never does after the first two or three days. Then I have to find a new place after we’ve taken a villa for the whole season.’

‘That is tiresome, isn’t it.’ She would have liked to draw Miss Pitt’s attention to the three figures, but she did not feel she could venture on long sentences yet. So she continued to look at the wallpaper through a changing lens of tears. ‘I always like that little man coming down the steps of the temple. And look. It’s the same little man looking out of the sort of sedan chair. In the procession. And there he is again having his tea in the garden.’

‘So he is.’

‘I like the grey willows going down all wooshy into the water. It all looks so nice and quiet, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, nice and quiet.’

They continued to look at the wallpaper until Sunflower cried out. ‘Oh, I feel so cold. Aren’t you awfully cold? Would you like a fire?’

Then, seeing the open window, she felt a fool. Of course it was nearly summer. It was only because she was in a state that she was shivering.

But Etta said, as if she had not noticed anything odd, ‘Well, yes, I should, if it’s only a matter of turning a switch. The evening has turned a little chilly, hasn’t it?’

They settled down on each side of the fireplace, stretching out their fingers to the warmth.

‘Fancy having a fire in May!’ said Sunflower. Her voice would shake about, ‘Look, my hands are quite blue. I must have caught cold in the car.’

‘Yes, I remember thinking you looked cold when you came in.’

‘It was an open car,’ Sunflower went on, calculating that one could not see out of the window from the dining room table. ‘And there was a wind. Quite a cold wind. I do think the summers are colder than they used to be.’

‘Oh, there’s no doubt that the climate is worse than it was when we were children.’

‘Oh, yes, it must be. Why, Mother never would have a fire lit in the house after the thirty-first of March and before the first of October. Except when some of us children were ill, of course.’

‘That was a rule my mother made too.’

‘Funny all the rules they had. Changing one’s woollies on the first of May.’ She sighed. ‘Woollies were comfortable, though, weren’t they, when it was cold. It’s funny to think how one couldn’t wear them now. It would seem worse than wrong, somehow, wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t if you want to,’ said Etta encouragingly.

‘Oh, no. I couldn’t. You see, I can’t exactly act, I’m just what they call a box-office draw, and it would spoil it. People wouldn’t know, of course, but it’s what really artistic producers call atmosphere, which means what you can’t see. Oh, I’m still so cold. I’m still so cold …’ She leaned forward to the heater. It seemed as if she would have to press her hands down on the red bar itself before she could get rid of that numbness, that feeling of blueness close to the bone. Perhaps, after all, it would make things better if she did say something about him.

‘He’s very tired, you know.’

Etta nodded understandingly. ‘Oh, I know. Francis has what he calls reactions, sometimes.’

‘I suppose it’s all the work they do. He works terribly hard, you know.’

‘Yes, so does Francis. And they are different from us.’

‘Oh, yes, of course they’re different.’

They lowered their voices, like nurses talking of their patients at the door of a ward.

‘Does Lord Essington sleep badly?’

‘N-no … I can’t say I’ve much to worry about so far as his sleeping goes. Only after he’s eaten duck. I’m always telling him he oughtn’t to eat duck. But he always says it’s something else.’

‘I know. Francis is like that over white port. But he doesn’t sleep at the best of times. He really is a very, very bad sleeper.’

‘Oh, that is dreadful. It upsets them so, and they can’t stand it. They haven’t got patience like us …’ Her jaw dropped. She brought back her hands to her lap. It struck her that from force of habit she was speaking as if she had forgiven him; and this time she had not forgiven him. At last the thing was finished. She wished that she did not have to face him again; not because she was afraid of what he would do or say, but just because she did not want ever to see him or think of him again. It would be difficult to keep her attention on him. She would have to face the other man again, too. She remembered what she must look like.

‘Would you like to go upstairs?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to tidy. I must look a sight.’

‘Yes. I think we’ll have time,’ murmured Etta.

‘We’ve got to have time,’ said Sunflower.

But when they went out on the landing Essington’s voice called up plaintively from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Sunflower! Sunflower! You know I like sitting in the library after dinner.’

From force of habit Sunflower went down three steps. Then it seemed silly not to go on. Etta did not seem to have expected her to do anything else.

When they went into the library Essington was searching for something among the bookshelves, and Francis Pitt was standing on the hearthrug. He laid a heavy look on her, pushed a chair towards her, and as she settled in it leaned over her and said, ‘Are you comfortable?’ in a way that would have been suitable only if he had made the chair for her birthday with his own hands. But it was wicked to laugh at him, for spreading it on thick, because he was doing it just to show her he liked her. After he had seen to his sister’s comfort, not so portentously, he moved to the other side of the fireplace and came to a standstill, smoking his cigar and watching Essington at his hunt among the books. That was convenient, for now she could take a good look at him. It was funny, how like a lion standing on its hind legs he was. He was lion-colour, with his earthy skin and his tawny hair, and the deep lines running from his nose to his chin were like the folds in an animal’s hide. His broad but tiny hands and feet, which she perceived with amazement and delight to be smaller than her own, bore the same proportion to his thick, bulky-shouldered body that a lion’s paws do to its carcase. Though he was so short one could imagine him wrestling with wild beasts, rolling about in the dust with them, till the growling stopped …

That was what had been in the prow of the canoe he had driven over the waters to her with a round-mouthed, wordless cry: a conquered beast; a slaughtered deer. As the boat came nearer she could see the little head propped up against the birch-bark side, its silken, leaf-shaped ears limp as in docility, its melting eyes set in the saying of that mild, last word that all the dead say, be they beast or human. She would have felt compunction that so lovely a thing should have died before its time had she not felt pride that he had killed it; and had not someone standing by her side, whose voice she loved to hear, sent up a round-mouthed cry that meant that they rejoiced to see food. She wished that she could stay longer in her day-dream, so that the canoe could come to the shore, so that she could learn who the other one was, so that she could understand that feeling of crackling, heatless fire which was in the green forest-boughs, which was around her, which was within her. But she was called back by Essington’s fretting voice: ‘I never can find anything in this house …’ Absentmindedly she asked, ‘What are you looking for?’ ‘Oh, don’t fuss me, don’t fuss me,’ he wailed, and Francis Pitt, with a quickness that showed he had been waiting for a chance to protect her, cut in: ‘Have you never thought of going over to the Labour Party, Essington?’

Forgetting her, he wheeled round. ‘Go over to the Party that hasn’t made up its mind whether it stands for free trade or protection? No…!’

For a moment after Francis Pitt had gone he dragged their thoughts with him.

‘What nice people,’ said Sunflower; and Essington purred, ‘Yes, the little creature has real charm. But a wicked little creature. They say his financial record in California is shady beyond description. I remember we had qualms of letting him have a seat. And he came here tonight with guile, with guile. He and Hurrell are thinking of trying to pull the Liberal Party together by dropping Bryce Atkin overboard. They want me to come in. But also the little devil has thought of ratting to the Labour Party.’ He chuckled. ‘An evil little bottle-imp.’

Then their eyes met.

He fixed her with the menacing, justice-invested stare of the outraged schoolmaster; but she lifted her chin as she had never done before when he had been angry with her. For a second he looked astonished and then seemed to doubt whether he really wanted a quarrel, after all. He turned away and began going round the bookshelves, whistling and putting back into place the books he had disarranged; and at length remarked nonchalantly, ‘Quite a good little evening. We must ask them again.’

She cleared her throat and said unsteadily: ‘No.’

He swung round with an affectation of surprise. ‘But I thought you said you liked them?’

‘Oh, yes. I liked them all right,’ she said. ‘But there isn’t going to be any more we. It’s over. It’s finished. I don’t want to live with you any more. I don’t want ever to see you again.’

He put his long fine hand to his forehead and sighed before speaking patiently. ‘Ah, Sunflower. I could wish that you wouldn’t always start this sort of thing late at night, when I’m tired out. You have a marvellous instinct for choosing the worst possible moments for making a scene.’

‘But I’m not making a scene. I’m just telling you I want you to go away.’ She thought of her pretty bed upstairs, with its flat, round, lavender-scented pillow that it was nice to rub your face into, and the embroidered handkerchief linen sheets she had brought back from Switzerland, looking so nice against the apple-green quilt; and tears of vexation came into her eyes. It was absurd to have a lovely Chinese room and not be able to sit in it, to have a comfortable bedroom and not be able to go to bed in it. ‘He’s like having a pipe-burst in every room,’ she thought, and told him wearily: ‘I want you to go away. And never come back again. I’m finished.’

For a minute he did not answer but stood raising himself on the balls of his feet and lifting his head, as if to try the air with his silver feelers. ‘Very well, Sunflower,’ he agreed at length. ‘I think the time has come when this is the best thing for us to do.’ He rose, he fell, he rose again, on those neat, narrow, long feet. ‘For me, I haven’t been happy for the last—oh, the last four years.’

She said, ‘Right,’ and to herself she said, ‘It’s three years since I nursed him through that breakdown, and had that awful time with him at Madeira. Seems funny that that doesn’t mean anything to him. But he’s always kind of taken a pride in not saying thank you. I wonder if anywhere inside him he knows what’s been done for him. Somehow it would be nice if he did even though we’re not going on. But what’s the odds. It’s finished.’

He breathed, ‘Aha! so that’s settled!’ and crossed the room to the table just behind her, where there were syphons and whisky. There was a fizzing, and his voice passed over her head, purring and benedictory: ‘Yes, I think we are very wise to look things in the face and get clear. Without any bitterness. Without any recriminations. In good temper.’

‘That’s all right,’ she assented, through a yawn. ‘Is it really going to be as easy as this?’

For a while he drank in silence, and then remarked casually, ‘I’ll stay here tonight all the same, if you don’t mind. Of course I shan’t bother you. But I told Brooks I shouldn’t want him any more. And … mm … you know how I hate taxis.’

She could have laughed, it was so exactly like him. He would not go away that night, because she had asked him to go then; but he would go away in the morning, and not come back, and persuade himself that this had altered the situation in some way that gave him the advantage over her. After a little it would seem to him that it was he who had ended it, not her. She smiled drowsily, and asked herself, ‘Do I really want it to be as easy as this?’ and was horrified, as if she had put out a hand to touch some burning substance and found it cold in death, to find that she did want it to be as easy as this.

There was more fizzing. Then his voice soared again. ‘We must remain friends, of course, Sunflower. We’ve had a very pleasant time together in some ways, and there are all sorts of memories that will link us together.’

‘Yes, all sorts.’

‘You must always look on me as a friend, you know, Sunflower. Always come to me for anything you want.’

He was trying to be nice. ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said.

Slowly he sauntered to the other armchair and pushed it forward till it faced her; and settled in it with his glass of whisky. ‘Yes, little Sunflower,’ he went on, between the sips. ‘I’ll always be glad to help you. For, though I welcome this break in a way—not that there hasn’t been a great deal, oh, a very great deal indeed, that’s been very delightful between us, but I’m old, I find myself growing more and more incapable of adapting myself to a different type of mind—’ he stopped and gazed thoughtfully into the distance.

‘He’s thinking of replacing me with one of those political widows with pearl dog-collars who get both volumes of the dull books out of the Times Book Club at once,’ reflected Sunflower. ‘Well, I don’t care. But I wish he’d get on with it. It makes me all shaky to sit and talk like this after I’ve turned him down, even though he is taking it so well. And I would like to go to my own bed.’

‘Still, there’s a very real friendship and liking between us, and I’d like to be all the use to you I can. And you know, Sunflower, you may need me, for I’m not sure you’ll find life on your own so easy as you think you will … Mm …’ Again he gazed into the distance, until he took another sip, to hearten him after the disquieting vision he had seen. ‘I wish I were surer about you in certain ways. There’s your work …’

‘That’ll go on for a few years, I dare say,’ she said.

He set down his glass, sat back in his chair, again looked into space at some lugubrious foreboding. At length he agreed, ‘Yes, I suppose it will,’ and, as if to encourage himself, took another drink.

‘It’s a pity I had to act,’ said Sunflower, miserably. ‘I’ve never really fancied it.’

‘Yes,’ he mused, ‘it’s a pity, Sunflower. Yet I don’t quite know where you would have fitted in better, what your real métier can have been …’ He dismissed the unprofitable speculation, mournfully drank again, set down his glass, and said, with the air of one putting a good face on a sad situation, ‘Well, as you say, that’ll probably last for a few years. These new people are pretty good, of course. Perdita Godly and all these youngsters. But you’ve got your footing. I think Phillips is genuinely grateful to you for the luck you’ve brought him. He’ll probably be loyal to you for quite a long time. Oh yes, you’re all right, Sunflower.’ He sipped again, his eyes set kindly and pensively on her over the rim of his glass. ‘But, mind you, you’ve got to start being careful. You’re a little fatter than you were when we first met, my dear. You eat a good deal, you know.’

‘I didn’t eat much tonight.’

‘No. But it isn’t dinner that matters, in point of fact. It’s tea that does it. Crumpets, cakes, sweet biscuits, all these little things. That’s what gives the slight thickness round the jaw that just takes away the … But you’re all right, dear, at present.’

‘Well, I ought to be,’ said Sunflower, shortly, ‘for I don’t have any tea. And I’m fit to drop.’ She raised her finger and ran it round her jaw. Surely it was not so bad. Perhaps, it was a bit heavy. Of course she did weigh a lot compared to all this new lot who were as thin as paper-knives. Still theirs was the type that seemed to be liked nowadays, so maybe being perfect in her type was as bad as being fat. Oh, now that he had started her worrying she probably wouldn’t sleep for hours, and she was aching with tiredness. ‘Now I’m going to bed.’

He apparently had not heard her, for he went on thoughtfully. ‘But anyway that doesn’t matter. It isn’t in physical type that they’ve beaten you. It’s in intelligence. You’re—’ he made a sad grimace into his glass, and gulped the last of his drink, ‘slow, Sunflower, slow!’ It was extraordinary how she had never quite got the hang of his moods. Of course he had all the time, from the moment she had told him to go away, been frenzied with rage against her. ‘My God, the way you kept on coming back and back to it tonight! The way you kept on making a fool of yourself—and me again and again!’

As soon as she had seen that he was angry she had resolved not to answer him back, no matter what he said; but when he reminded her of what had happened at dinner she began to blush again, and the pain of the blunt pricking where the blood swept over her breasts made her cry out, ‘Oh! Oh! I never did! It was you made a fool of me!’

He looked at her with eyes narrowed by hate. She cried, ‘I don’t know what you mean! It was you! I didn’t say a thing!’

Softly he said, ‘Are you so densely, so cretinously stupid that you didn’t see that you were giving away the most intimate details of our private life to Pitt and his sister?’

This was something more than mere blind malignity. He was showing that mixture of hatred of her folly and gloating delight in the fresh evidence he had collected concerning it which usually meant that she had done something really silly. Shivering she said, ‘Whatever do you mean? I wish you’d tell me right out.’

‘Why, that imbecile story you’d dragged home from the Assize Court—’ his gaze suddenly grew wild and hard with a different, madder accusation. ‘Sunflower!’

‘Yes!’

‘How did you come to be at that court? Had you fixed up the whole thing beforehand? Had you arranged with Sandbury to be down at Clussingford when he was there?’

She gaped. ‘Why, I never saw the old man before!’

He clapped his hands over his ears. ‘My God, that Cockney whine! I thought I’d cured you of … And I wonder, I wonder. Sunflower. I’m not sure about you. You can manage that pure, hurt look wonderfully. But I’m not sure about you. I was looking at your letters before you came in. There are two bills from dressmakers. Big bills. What do you want with all those clothes if it isn’t to attract other men?’

‘I’ve told you a hundred times I have to dress because I’m on the stage. You wouldn’t think it had anything to do with acting but it has. And you know I’m all right! Tell me what I did tonight. Why shouldn’t I have told that story about Alice Hester? You don’t mean that either of them had been in trouble for bigamy—or anything—’

‘Oh, God above! You fool! You unspeakable fool! Didn’t you realise the way you told it gave away that you wanted children, that you were perpetually worrying me to give you a child! You went on and on at it, you wouldn’t leave it alone. When one thought the thing was safely thrown out of doors you reappeared at the window with the thing in your mouth.’

She had risen and was standing quite still, with her clenched hands covering her mouth and her round eyes on him.

‘Don’t you understand even now? You kept on saying, “She wasn’t happy though she had lots of children.” “I suppose if you’ve got lots of children nothing can hurt you.” “She couldn’t have borne not to have a child.” If you had told them in a crude sentence exactly what you wanted you couldn’t have been more indecent. And the Pitts are nice people. They were out to be nice to you. When I asked Francis Pitt to dine here tonight he suggested himself that he should bring his sister. Said she admired you very much and that they quite understood this wasn’t the same as any other irregular mnage. I should think they went away regretting it. I’ve never had such a ghastly time in my life. And now, to round off the evening you start this nonsense about leaving me. I would have thought you’d done enough, after this appalling exhibition. Oh, my God, can’t you say something? Need you stand there looking half-witted?’

She drew a shuddering breath. ‘I don’t see there’s anything I can say. I suppose that must have been it. There certainly was something that made them look at me. I’m sorry.’

‘This isn’t a thing sorrow can wipe out. It was the last straw, to have the thing dragged up in public, when I’m sick of being pestered about it in private.’

‘Oh, Ess,’ she said, ‘I haven’t pestered you. I’ve hardly ever spoken of it … except … except when I’ve liked you very much. And you’ve spoken of it then as much as me. You know I’ve never asked you for that … by daylight. Oh, I didn’t think you’d ever bring that up against me. It doesn’t seem the sort of thing that ought to come back to me like this …’ She bit her knuckles.

He pointed a finger at her and waggled it from side to side. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

She stared. ‘What?’

‘That thing you’re doing to your hands. A silly false movement. No effect. That’s how you let down the big scene in “Leonora". No, Sunflower, you shouldn’t have been an actress.’ He moved towards the table, where the whisky and syphons were, making her feel as he passed her by an exasperated flutter of his fine hands, that it was a piece of intolerable clumsiness for her to be standing where she was. He poured out a glass of soda-water only. Even at this moment he was not forgetful of his austere rule never to drink more than one glass of weak whisky-and-soda after dinner. Having refreshed himself, he went on. ‘Yes, I’m inclined to think that if I took you seriously and got out it would be the best thing. I’m sick of this constant suggestion that I’ve wasted your life, that I’m an old man who’s eaten up your youth, that as soon as I got out of politics I should have deserted my poor loyal little Ethel and married you and given you children. I’m bored to death with that story, Sunflower.’

Amazed she asked, ‘But whenever did I say all that? You know I never did. Let’s not quarrel, let’s be friends, like you said we ought to be. I’ve never said such things. I’ve never thought them. I’ve always seen it as I did at the beginning. You’re the cleverest man in the world, and I was of no use to you, and I didn’t believe it made any difference whether a clergyman said things over you or not, so of course I didn’t hold back. I knew it wouldn’t be all jam, and it hasn’t been, but I haven’t ever brought it up against you. Oh, you know I haven’t.’

Meeting her eyes he looked away from her, said ‘Mm’ into his silver feelers, and admitted, ‘Well, perhaps you’ve never said it in so many words. Still the feeling—’ again he waved his long hands, ‘is about. Perhaps,’ he suggested in a stronger tone, ‘you said it without meaning to, as you did tonight.’

The shame of what she had done came over her again. ‘Oh, I am stupid,’ she said. ‘I do say silly things.’ She began to cry.

‘Oh God, now you’re crying!’ exclaimed Essington, as if in surprise and despair. ‘Haven’t you any consideration? Now, Sunflower, dear, try and hold yourself up. I’m always holding you up, and I … I can’t go on with it. I’m tired. And I’m old. Some people might think it was time I had a little peace. Now do pull yourself together …’

But she had already stopped crying. She was looking at him with a deep furrow between her brows. He wailed, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t look so silly,’ but she continued to gaze at him thoughtfully. ‘I don’t understand what you feel about me,’ she said. ‘You say you love me. But you don’t. If you loved me you’d want always to be kind to me and look after me. When I was silly and stupid you’d do something to stop me from going on. You wouldn’t do what you did tonight, and stand by while I blundered into it, and then push me further in. And it’s all like that. I believe you hate me. If things are bad with me you always make me worse. You know perfectly well I loathe being an actress and that I have to be one and there’s no getting out of it now, and all the time you go telling me how bad I am as if I didn’t know it. I’ve never told you of trouble I’ve had at rehearsals without your looking pained and saying I must have made a fool of myself. I’ve never had bad notices after a first night without you coming and sitting on my bed and picking out the worst ones in a thoughtful kind of way and saying what a pity it all was. Not that that’s what I mind, for most of it is true, though any fool feels nowadays that when he hasn’t got anything else to be funny about there’s always my acting. What I mind is that you sort of say to me all the time, “Yes, you are a bad actress, and maybe if you keep on like this maybe I’ll get rid of you.” It is as if when you come here tired out I was to taunt you for having been bested by that nasty little Bryce Atkin at Versailles and say that maybe I wouldn’t have you here any more because of it. Which I wouldn’t ever do. Now if you loved me you’d say that however I failed on the stage you’d always love me. But you don’t because you hate me. It’s meat and drink to you to see me miserable. About this marriage business, you’ve set me thinking. You know I haven’t ever talked about it like you said I did, but now I’m wondering. You say you live like this with me because you don’t believe in marriage, but you do. You really think it’s good of another woman to come and see you because I’m living with you without being married. If you think that then it’s wrong of you to live with me. But I’m not at all sure if you don’t live with me like this just because it puts me all the time into positions I hate. Staying with me at hotels where people look at me. Like Madeira. While you were in politics you couldn’t afford to do that, you just made me cry here, but the minute you were free you rushed at this public thing. And yet it isn’t as if I bored you and you wanted to get rid of me. You never leave me alone. I haven’t had six weeks on end away from you in twelve years. You just like being with me to hurt me. And yet … and yet … it’s me you like making love to. Oh,’ she gasped, shaking her head in horror. ‘That—that’s what’s so awful. It’s dreadful. It isn’t natural.’

She stared at him earnestly until, beneath his silver feelers, his lips pursed, and she put out a defensive hand. ‘Ah,’ she interrupted, ‘You’ve thought of something clever that’ll make me feel like cat’s meat. Well, what’s the good of that? I am cat’s meat, I suppose. But I’m not going to listen to this one. I know it all.’

As she laid her hand on the door-knob she looked over her shoulder, fearful at her own rebellion. He was wearing the utterly amazed and shocked expression that a bowler in a county match might wear if a batsman suddenly walked off the pitch in the middle of play. ‘Ah, it’s a game to him,’ she thought. ‘But, oh, he is looking like a cat. A great, fine handsome cat. It was when he looked like that we used to make up that fairy story about him being King of the Cats and me the Blue Persian Princess. That was a jolly story. Such funny things he thought of …’ But something in her that was feeling old and desperate cried out, ‘You can’t give up what’s left of your life for a fairy story.’ She slammed the door between them.

She ran upstairs, and went into her bedroom, locked the door, sat down in front of her dressing-table, shook her head at the disordered image in the mirror, and said, ‘He’s mad, he’s mad.’ Well, it was all over now. The funny thing was that she felt lonely. She would have liked to go and ring someone up and tell them all about it, but there was nobody she knew well enough except Maxine, and most likely she and her husband would be in bed by this time; and she always felt that George was a bit jealous of Maxine being so fond of her. Of course, if Marty Lomax had been alive, she would have gone straight to the telephone and said, ‘Mayfair 287169,’ and then, ‘Is that you, Marty? Well, it’s happened like you wanted it to. I’m free,’ and he would have answered something slow, something that would have caused her to feel unruffled and full of consequence, and made arrangements to come and see her at some hour on the next day, after which she would never have needed to bother about anything. Marty had been a dear. Alice Hester’s ploughman must have been just like him. She put her hand into the back of the drawer under her mirror and took out the little box in which she kept her most private things: the wreath of violets she had worn in ‘Farandole’, which for some years afterwards she had believed had brought her luck; a photograph of her brother Maurice as a baby; a photograph of herself and Maxine at the first theatrical garden party at which they had been asked to take a stall; and Marty’s letter, the only one he had ever written to her.

Hotel Splendide,
Cannes.

Darling Sunflower,

     I wish you were here.

Measles has broken out in the hotel. I am awfully sorry for the girl who got them first. I danced with her the day before she got ill.

There is all the usual crowd here. I went up to the Carlton yesterday and saw Fitz playing. He asked after you. He is a good sort.

How old is Irene Temple? I have a bet on it.

I wish you were here. Do remember that any time you cut off I am ready for you. If you wired I would come right back. Or if you think there would be a fuss in London we could meet and get married in Paris. There is a way of doing it that is as simple as it is in London. Metcalfe and Doris did it. I wish you would.

The ponies are all right. I think I shall sell Trefoil to Garside after all. I don’t really like her. Never did. So Garside might as well have her.

Roger Westcott is coming tomorrow. His brother is here, and his sister, who married Brixham. I like them all.

I wish you were here.

Much love,

Yours ever,

   Marty.

Well, Marty was dead. She kissed the letter, put it back in the little box and shut the drawer. There was nobody now who would care whether she left Essington or not. Since he had come out of politics he had made her live such a secluded life that she knew hardly anybody except the people in the theatre. Or it might be that she was getting old and fat, and people were not bothering about her as much as they used to do. After all there were lots of women under thirty.

She looked hard at her reflection in the mirror. Her thoughts rambled on. ‘How big I am. I would make two of Perdita Godly. Perhaps it’s because I’m so big that I do clumsy things like that tonight. Oh, how silly I am. As if being big in your body could make you clumsy in your mind.’ But for all that she felt at the back of her mind a sense that she was unhappy because of something to do with her body; something that, if it was not grossness, had a like contrast with the standards of the world, something that at any rate was in the nature of excess. Puzzled, she continued to gaze at herself. The two lights on each side of the mirror made her bare arms gleam, and she found herself saying aloud, in accents unaccountably tinged with bitterness, ‘I could have scrubbed floors pretty well.’ Surely she could not really be regretting that life had not sent her an opportunity of scrubbing floors. It was dreadful to be so stupid that you did not know even what you were thinking. The word ‘bankruptcy’ which came into her head whenever she thought of her relationship with Essington came once again, and she rose and went quickly into her bathroom and turned on her bath. She stripped off her clothes and sat on the edge of the bath, brushing her hair, for she did not want to ring for Luttrell. After all, there were still all sorts of things that people could not spoil by making scenes. She had made this a lovely bathroom; she looked round at its walls that were marbled blue and green like a breaking wave, at the empire dressing-table with the gold legs fine as a high-bred animal, the mirror borne by eagles who seemed to be taking an ecstatic respite from lectern work (but that was Essington’s joke); at the array on the broad shelves of bubble-tinted Venetian glass jars and bowls holding the lotions and powders and salts which she hardly ever used, but kept as an assurance to some unformulated power that she was humble, that she knew time was passing. Whatever happened, this was pretty. And through the open door she could look back at her bedroom, at the curtains of rich stuff drawn in solemn folds, and the waiting bed, with the dim lamp beside it. That would always be a good place to sleep. Indeed, she was clever about choosing things. There was perfection everywhere, in the gold hairbrush in her hand, in the Molyneux dress which lay across the chair, in the chemise and knickers beside it, which were of very thick white crpe-de-chine bound with apple-green, almost as good as any she had got. She looked at them benignly until she was surprised to find herself throwing the brush at them and crying out, ‘Well, what’s the good of them! I can’t eat ’em, can I?’ Suddenly the room seemed flimsy as a Chinese lantern. She stood up, waiting for the feeling of solidity to come back to her. The fact was she was so tired she was light-headed. That was it.

She lay in the bath for a little while, thinking of Alice Hester, and sometimes whimpering Essington’s name. Then the wedge of vibrant, light-blue summer night that thrust downwards at the top of the two green taffeta window curtains began to torment her. She felt that she ought to go out into the night and do something that would bring her peace. There must be something somewhere that would bring her peace; and she must find it all at once because time was going so fast. This was all nonsense, of course, but she was quite light-headed. Still it made her so restless that she had to get out and dry herself. She was glad she had such nice fleecy bath towels. She did love good linen. If Marty and she had married they would have taken one of those houses that are advertised at the beginning of Country Life, and she would have had to buy heaps and heaps of linen for it. She would have liked that. Marty would have left it all to her, he wasn’t fussy about that sort of thing. Now, Francis Pitt wouldn’t be a bit like that. He’d be most particular, and he’d want everything to be marked with a rather heavy monogram, probably black on white.

She suddenly dropped her towel and stared at the picture of her nakedness held by the eagles. It occurred to her for the first time that now she had quarrelled with Essington she would not be going with him to see Francis Pitt on Friday. With tears in her eyes, with water in her mouth, she remembered the pungent promise of satisfaction there had been about him, which had reminded her before of the smell of food when one was hungry. It was as if a curtain had dropped between her and a conjuror when he was in the very middle of his tricks. She could see him standing there behind the dropped curtain, his vast mouth open on some unfinished turn of his patter, one curious little paw-hand arrested in the middle of a charlatanish gesture, prevented from making for her again that materialisation of spring more actual than the real spring, from concentrating within the trick top-hat he held in his other hand a tiny vision of those lakeside woods crackling with the green fire which crackled too within her body when she thought of it. It could not be borne that this should be the last time she ever saw him. But though he had given her assurances all through the evening that he felt the extremes of kindliness, admiration, and protectiveness for her, he had given her none that he wished to see her again. Though he had spoken of their coming visit to his house with pleasure, it was obvious that it was Essington who was the important guest in his view, though he might be the less liked. He would never think of asking her by herself. Well, she must ring up Etta, and get near him that way. But that would not do, for he would see through it. And as they were sure to have thought her coarse and awful because of the way she had talked at dinner she must be careful not to frighten them. There was nothing to do but let the matter rest. Very probably she would never see him again. She went back to her bedroom and pulled out the little drawer under the mirror again, and sat for a long time looking down with hurt eyes at the box which held Marty’s letter, as if this disappointment were a violation of some promise written in that large, round hand.

There was no use worrying about people. That side of life always seemed to go wrong. The thing was to think of one’s work. She must try to be more like Brenda Burton, who, when she talked of her life, talked not of her husband and children but of the hundred and fifty Shakespearean parts she had played, investing the achievement with a sort of athletic pride, so that one imagined her being covered with grease by her trainers before she started, and followed by a tug throughout, and fed with Oxo through a tube. It was high time she really began to work hard at acting. Which reminded her, there was a book on the table by her bed she had got out of the London Library specially because it was about acting and it was by that man A. B. Walkley whose notice of her Rosalind had made Essington laugh so much; and she hadn’t looked at it yet. She climbed in between the sheets and lay for a minute with closed eyes; and saw the wheeling faces of Alice Hester, of the hideous and beloved girl, of Essington, of Harrowby, of Marty Lomax, of Francis Pitt, whom she would not see again. They would not make a pattern, yet she felt they should. She sat bolt upright, and took up the book. The tip of her tongue began to protrude, as it always did when she read very earnestly.

This question of temperament is interesting enough to warrant closer examination. Every stage character consists of two parts, one determinate (call it a) indicated by the text, the stage directions, and nothing else, the other (x) vague and varying, representing the rest of the character, as it is behind the scenes and was before the curtain went up. The reader of the play forms a mental image of x by deductions from a, and so gets his conception of the whole character of x and a. I may say in passing, that the vice of academic criticism of Shakespeare in this country, as in Germany, is to discuss a x as an actual person, forgetting or ignoring that a is the only part of the character for which we have the poet’s warranty and that x is merely our own surmise. But that is ‘another story’. The point here is that, while we all have to give a value to x, we none of us give the same value, since no two imaginations coincide. That is why the student of Shakespeare is always disconcerted when first he sees a favourite play either illustrated in a picture or performed on the stage. This, he says, is all very well, but it is not my Romeo or my Cordelia. Now the actor’s business with a is comparatively simple. He has to speak the words and do the things set down for him. It is with x that his real difficulties begin; for in place of our vague, floating notion of the character as a whole he has to offer us his own real person and temperament. Here the acting side of him is in the long run far less important than what the man naturally is. For it is, of course, flagrantly untrue, though often spoken of as true, that an actor can divest himself of his own personality and put on the personality of someone else. Just as an author is always really identical with his work (‘for after all’, as Walter Bagshot said, ‘we know that authors don’t keep tame steam engines to write their books’) so the actor’s histrionic is always part and parcel of his real everyday self. You may so paint wrinkles on your brow, so modulate your voice and order your bearing as to pass, behind the footlights, for a mad old King of Britain, but the fact remains that you are Mr Brunn, a taxpayer of today, with an address in the London postal directory, and a pretty taste in claret and cigars. This fact will for ever prevent you from absolutely realising x. It may even do so in some obvious physical way. (‘His weak, white, genteel hands, and the shape of his stomach,’ said Tolstoy on his visit to Siegfried, ‘betrayed the actor.’) But even though your disguise be perfect, the fact that the soul within you is not the soul of Lear—or rather the soul of Shakespeare as projected in Lear—but the soul of Mr Brunn must forever mark off a measurable distance between x and your impersonation. The measure of that difference is, inversely, the measure of your success in the part. On the other hand, your reality (the Mr Brunn in you) while it prevents you from fully and satisfactorily representing x—that is to say, coinciding with the spectator’s mental image of your part—will give you the great advantage over that pale image of definiteness and substance. What is lost in harmony and perfect propriety of conception is gained in precision and intensity of effect—provided always that your personality is not absolutely at variance with the spectator’s conception. You are able to offer him a real man for an imaginary one.

Her hand sought the switch; there was darkness.
She wished she could marry someone really nice.

She said, ‘I will not open. I will not open.’ Then it crossed her mind, ‘He may be ill.’

But he was not ill, only dabbled with tears. They stared at each other desolately across the threshold. The lit staircase above them creaked as if a knot of ghosts were leaning over the banisters to watch them.

He turned his face to the doorpost and burst into a fit of noisy weeping.

Well, he could not stay like that all night, she supposed. ‘Oh, lovie, don’t get into such a state,’ she begged him. ‘You’ll have such a headache in the morning if you go on like this, you know you will. Where’s your hankie?’

He felt about in his rumpled pyjamas, in his flapping dressing-gown. ‘Lost it,’ he said, and choked.

‘Come in and I’ll find you one,’ she told him wearily. The sudden wrench of her awakening had made her feel sick.

He stood beside her, shaken by whimpering breaths, while she sat down in front of her dressing-table and searched for one of the nice big soft hankies she kept for his colds. Suddenly he cast himself down on his knees and buried his head in her lap, sobbing, ‘Sunflower, Sunflower, forgive me for being such a brute to you! Why do you let me do such awful things to you, why do you let me say these dreadful things! You don’t look after me, Sunflower. A woman ought to look after her man, keep him safe when he goes mad and wicked. Oh, Sunflower, Sunflower …’

Turning, she smoothed his disordered crest of grey hairs, and let him have his cry out. Her eyes wandered to the clock. It was half past three; she probably would not get to sleep again for hours, as she would have to quiet him down; and the rehearsal was called at eleven.

Nothing came alive in her at his weeping.