III

IT made her feel hot and cold all over to think of meeting Francis Pitt again after the fool she had made of herself the other evening at dinner, but it did not really matter because there was bubbling up in her causeless joy. She slipped her hand into Essington’s and began to hum, beating time with their linked hands, and looking out of the limousine windows at St John’s Wood, and liking it all. She liked the neat little stone houses, their whiteness tinted two colours by the evening, bluish with shadow on one side of the road and peachy with reflected sunset on the other and she liked the green pluminess of the spring rising above the garden walls. She liked the young men and girls walking along in light things and carrying tennis rackets, though they made her feel lonely, which was queer, as she was with Essington. It was odd to think that it was only a few hours since she had felt like killing herself because of that tiresome thing that had happened at rehearsal. Well, she didn’t care if they did start telling another funny story about her. Let them. She raised Essington’s knuckles to her lips, but his hand stiffened, and he drew it away.

‘What have you got on, Sunflower?’ he asked with querulousness.

‘That kind of Greek thing I got from Louise Conlanger. You know, the green one.’ She held back her cloak so that he could see it.

‘Mm …’ He looked away, pursed his lips behind his silver feelers, then came back to it. ‘Isn’t it rather … mm … dressed up for a quiet little dinner like tonight?’

‘Dressed up? Gracious, no. It’s what I wore the other night when we went and dined with old Lord Barrogh, and you said how just right it was for that sort of thing. That’s why I put it on tonight.’

‘Oh, I dare say it’s all right. I dare say it’s all right.’ After a pause he added plaintively, ‘Be a quiet little Sunflower tonight, won’t she? Not go peacocking about too much and looking too beautiful. Hang up her little ‘Reserved’ card. I’ve been hearing things about our little host.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s evidently apt to be tiresome with women. Mechanically and promiscuously attentive. There have been several great affairs. One with a musical comedy actress, I forget her name. Anyway she weighed a lot, and it was all passionate.’

‘You mean Dolores Methuen. Well, that must have been a good time ago. For years now she’s looked like somebody’s rich aunt.’

‘Then there was something mysterious with Lady Juliet Lynn. Nobody knows quite what happened but for some years a good deal of money passed.’

‘I used to see a lot of her at one time,’ said Sunflower. ‘Charity matinées and that. She did a lot of war-work posing as the Madonna. She’s very lovely. For a titled person.’

‘And there have been others,’ Essington went on, ‘the little creature’s evidently an ardent woman-hunter. I thought I’d better tell you so that you could be careful.’

‘Who else have there been?’

‘I really don’t remember. One of the Nelly sisters, I think; and that tiresome young woman with protruding eyes whose husband was one of my supporters over Versailles, Mrs Lovatt, and Veronica Fawcett. Oh, a long list.’

‘Well, let’s be thankful that he seems to have spared the royal family as yet,’ said Sunflower crossly. ‘Who told you all this?’

‘Young Bramley. He’s reliable as a rule.’

‘Yes, he is,’ she agreed. ‘Still, we all know how these things are. You ought to know if anyone does how women crowd round men who’ve got famous. That Mrs Holtby been ringing you up today again?’

‘As a matter of fact she did,’ Essington admitted with an elaborate air of nonchalance. ‘But it was only about her pet crank.’

‘Ah, she may say it’s the suffering of Transylvanian Magyars under Roumania that’s worrying her,’ said Sunflower, darkly, ‘but if she goes on ringing up you’ll find it’s the same old thing she’s after.’

She sank back in her seat, for the streets now seemed not so attractive as those through which they had passed earlier. But when the car had climbed Church Street and the ground began to fall away from each side of the road, her causeless joy had its way with her, and she pulled at his hand again, crying out, ‘Look what a pretty place! Why, you can see right down into the middle of London that side, and it’s all a goldy haze. And look at the other side. Why, there’s real country quite close. Is this Hampstead Heath? Why haven’t we come here before? Oh, did you see that dog running along and everybody getting out of its way? There were lots of people making their dogs swim in that pond we passed a second ago. I wish you liked dogs, I would so love one. But you hated little Li Hung Chang, you did.’ She remembered the last time he had spoken of the Pekinese, and there was a second’s silence. But the place and her mood carried her on, ‘Look, there’s a sort of Monkey’s Parade, like what we used to have down Hammersmith Broadway and Chiswick High Street, all the boys and girls walking up and down. Oh, I do think it’s lovely that almost everybody looks nice when they’re young anyway!’

‘Silly little Sunflower, who loves her kind.’

‘Well, what else is there to love?’

‘Me.’

There fell between them one of those moments of embarrassment which happened always, ever since they had had that dreadful quarrel, whenever love was mentioned. It was invariably he who spoke of it now, whereas before it had been more common on her lips; and she could never think how to answer him, but found herself smiling insincerely. To hurry by the moment she said, seeing that the car had stopped outside a public-house, and the chauffeur was asking his way. ‘Mr Pitt does seem to live in an out-of-the-way place for a busy man.’

‘It’s likely to be rather an odd corner. I’m prepared for anything. I have a sort of idea that though our little friend’s personality seems so strong to us, it doesn’t seem so to him. He probably feels that if he went and lived in an ordinary row of houses he wouldn’t be noticed. This out-of-the-way house may be some queer attempt to rivet distinction on himself, to find a style. I don’t mean to advertise himself. It’s very likely to himself that he’s most anxious to make himself clear.’

‘I dare say,’ murmured Sunflower. But surely Essington was not being as clever as usual, for if there was one thing certain about Francis Pitt it was that he was strong and settled and definite. It was abundance of these qualities that made him able to be so protective.

‘Well, I may have been wrong,’ said Essington, a few moments later, as the car turned off the deep headlong swoop of the North End Road past wrought iron gates into an avenue of chestnut trees, which confused the seasons as trees of that sort do, being bright with white candles celebrating spring, but casting beneath them a shadow damp with the rich, rotting airs of autumn, in which the downward thrusting spears of sunshine seem to be forged of the strong light of midsummer. ‘I may be wrong. This looks as if the little scoundrel had found quite a good Georgian house lying about unwatched. No, by God, I wasn’t wrong Sunflower, did you ever see anything so odd? Isn’t it queer?’ he exclaimed exultantly, ‘Isn’t it queer?”

She exclaimed, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and pressed defensively first to one window and then to the other, but there was no denying the queerness of the place. On what seemed, from the tall old trees and the unconfused blossoming of the land, to have been a park, someone had dropped a suburban garden. Wherever there were a few yards on the flat the gardener had put something trim and mean. In a glade of silver birches that at this hour, sunset-flushed, looked like nymphs, there was laid a star-shaped flower-bed planted with geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelias; at the foot of one great cedar there was a clock-golf green, and at the foot of another a clump of pampas-grass; and here and there, at the summit of knolls on whose sides grew flame-coloured azaleas, were plaster urns containing aloes and yuccas. There had evidently been some curious catastrophe here at some time or another; and its traces had not been removed but instead heavily ornamented. After two hundred yards or so the drive passed between two sections of a ruined brick wall, which was so thickly covered with rock-plants, that Sunflower pointed them out to Essington and said, laughing nervously, ‘Oh, someone feels over a seedman’s catalogue as I do over a shoe-shop—wants to buy the lot! That’ll be Miss Pitt! Women do buy like that, don’t they!’ And beyond it were signs of the same thing, for there was a garden which had probably been enclosed and levelled at the same time that the trees outside had been planted, but which now had a surface broken by all sorts of irregularities. There was a turf-lined, terraced pit which might have been a sunken garden; there were low banks on which had grown hedges at some time; there were grooves that marked the draining of an obliterated path; and over all these was flung an extravagance of star-shaped, circular and rhomboidal flower-beds containing bedded-out plants in acid tints, mauve petunias, magenta begonias, which the powerful oblique shafts of evening sunshine made so bright that they soured the mouth.

‘Oh, isn’t it awful!’ she giggled, and lifted up her arm in front of the window so that the folds of her cloak should prevent Essington from looking through it; but he looked out from his own side, and there was at any rate no keeping the house from him. And that, she found as the car stopped at the base of a wide flight of clipped stone steps with lace-work stucco banisters, and a footman opened the door, was worst of all. It was a villa of the sort that edge Wimbledon Common or Putney Heath, faced with a grey mixture of cement and sand the colour of cold porridge, and surmounted with a useless Italianate tower; but monstrously swollen beyond the size ordinary in its type. She felt curiously reluctant to climb the steps. There was something about the distension of the house and its hideousness that was a condemnation of everybody who had anything to do with it. ‘Somebody’s been proud,’ she thought, looking up at it; and she remembered the pig-face of the grocer her mother dealt with in Chiswick, who had inherited a little fortune and spent most of it building such a corpulent villa as this. One could imagine that it had been built by a man so brutishly stupid that when he was left a legacy that increased his income threefold he could think of nothing better to do than to get himself a house exactly like the one he was living in but three times as big. That accounted for the building of it; but there was no conceivable explanation why anyone who had the money to live there should not live somewhere else. It must, she feared, be another manifestation of that obvious male principle of unreason which made Essington prefer to live with her unpleasantly rather than pleasantly, which made him punish her for revealing intimacies to strangers by going on and on revealing to them things more intimate still …

Suddenly it seemed to her as if from all the windows of the three storeys, within their frames of heavy grey moulding, there looked that darkness, radiant yet black, like the eyes of blind men, which shines out of empty houses. She plucked at Essington’s coat-sleeve and said, under her breath, ‘Oh, Ess, I wish we hadn’t come.’

He suggested eagerly, ‘Well, if you stagger and faint, my dear, I don’t see what I can do but take you home.’

She hesitated. ‘But you want to meet Hurrell.’

‘I think, Sunflower, that tonight I’d rather take you home than see Hurrell.’ He spoke significantly, deferentially, humbly; as if there were a hidden meaning in his words, a meaning dependent on the enormous value which he set on her, and as if he dare not explain it save at her express request, since he was conscious he had done things which would justify her in forbidding him to speak any more of his love for her. His eyes were blinking.

Touched and puzzled, because she could see no reason for such a rush of emotion at this particular moment, she would have said, ‘Why, what is it, lovie?’ but just then her eye, roving over the house as over some sleeping enemy out of whose presence she was tiptoeing, caught sight of the butler standing by the open door at the top of the stone staircase, and perceived that something here was odd. His face wore a faintly appalled expression, which he was not attempting to conceal under the solemnity of his official bearing, but which he was actually presenting to the arriving visitors as if, for the time being, it were part of his official bearing. She glanced quickly at the footman who was standing beside him and saw on his face a younger version of the same expression: he looked strained and sullen, as if the sky of his youth would have been clear enough if other people had not exercised an unfair privilege and shadowed it with the clouds of their misfortunes. She exclaimed, ‘Ess, I believe there’s some trouble in this house. Let’s go and see if we can do anything!’ and started up the steps. Essington, left behind, uttered a faint wheeze of expostulation. She felt his reluctance like a noose cast round her, dragging her back, but she squared her shoulders and went on, for she felt she must have her way in this; and at the door she found him panting level with her.

The butler told them portentously, ‘Mr Pitt and Miss Pitt are detained with Sir Robert Cornelliss, but they will not be long,’ and stooped forward, as if to expand this statement with some further courtesy, some further ominousness, when his mouth fell open and he looked over his shoulder with an expression Sunflower identified as that which crosses the face of an actor when he sees a cat strolling in the wings during his big silent scene and is not sure whether the audience sees it or not. He seemed to be hearing some sound that they did not. Slowly, looking before them as if they were royalty but not doing it with ease, he led them into the amber shadows of a hall which was so impersonally furnished with large leather armchairs and sofas and the heads and skins of big game, that it might have been part of a club. After a certain point he seemed disconcerted that they were following him, and coming to a halt in front of an armchair in the middle of the room, he made exasperated gestures at the footman, who was standing in the doorway absorbedly watching his progress as one might watch a sportsman performing a difficult technical feat. Suddenly the footman understood what was expected of him, started forward jerkily and took their things, and began to head them off towards a door in the wall opposite to that towards which the butler had been leading them. Essington, who, when people behaved inexplicably always fancied that they were behaving insolently, gave a click of annoyance; and when, just as the footman opened the door, they heard a loud grunt which apparently proceeded from the butler, he spun round and glared at the man, who endured his gaze, but swallowed hard.

Sunflower giggled outright. And that the butler could not bear. He stepped aside and disclosed, lying asleep in the armchair he was shielding, a very tall man. His handsome, oblong face was blotched and scarlet; his large, oblong limbs were flung out in the stark yet loose abandonment of drunkenness. As they looked at him he belched.

Sunflower whispered, ‘Ugh! Who can he be?’

Essington could not answer for a minute, so violently was he trembling, ‘That is my successor in office, Lord Canterton.’

The four stood in silence for a minute, looking down on the drunkard, feeling drawn together by a community of decent feeling.

Essington murmured passionately, ‘When he was lord chancellor I have seen him so on the woolsack … The … the shame of it.’

She slipped her hand into his. ‘Never mind, dear, never mind. You’re well out of politics if this sort is getting in. You mustn’t get so worked up … dear …’ But she realised that she must move him on, for the situation was becoming horrid because the other two men were servants. The butler was looking as if he could have explained to them the presence of the drunkard in a way that would lift the suspicion of disorder from this house whose honour was his own, but could not because they were his master’s guests and he knew his place; his Scotch, sentimental face was waterlogged with self-pity and enjoyment of the martyrdom of his solid worth and natural dignity at the hands of social convention. ‘He isn’t half,’ she thought acidly, ‘enjoying himself.’ And the footman was smiling wetly and meanly, as if it amused him to see his betters shamed by one of their own kind. She wanted to cry out to him, ‘You and me are the same class, so I’ve a right to talk to you! You shouldn’t take their money if you feel like that about them!’ Rage flared in her at the look of his great healthy body with its broad shoulders and thick thighs, his handsome face, with its sound flesh and lips full of blood. Things had come to a pretty pass when strong men like this were content to put on funny clothes and wait on men they could have knocked down with a single drive of the fist and make it worse by sniggering at them behind their backs. Oddly she found herself thinking of her chauffeur Harrowby and including him in her anger, though he was nice as nice could be and never would laugh at anybody. In the background of her rage she saw the lights of Chiswick High Street and the Saturday night crowds ruddy-faced under the naphtha flares, and there was anguish in her vision of it. Some understanding about life she had found in those early days when she went with her mother and father among these crowds, which consisted of nothing but mothers and fathers and children, had been violated. She was none the better for her journey from those parts. At the end had been deception, abandonment. Irrational fury made her tremble as Essington was trembling. Ah, the poor dear! He would need a lot of quieting down, for Parliament was his church, a public man a priest to him. She said, ‘Take me away, that man makes me sick,’ and shepherded him through the door.

It was a pity that there were a man and a woman waiting in the library but they did not look as if they would intrude, for they belonged to the smart and jaunty type whom Essington loathed and who usually loathed Essington at sight. The man, who, standing by the vast circular mahogany table in the middle of the room, was pouring himself a drink from a curiously large cocktail shaker, looked at them over his shoulder with brilliant grey eyes that flickered like the tongue of an asp, and then turned away his head. The woman, who was bright with the marmalade tints of the weatherbeaten blonde, was sitting back in a leather armchair by a distant window, her eyes shut, though she held a glass on her knee; her small green felt hat was lying on the floor between her feet. Sunflower wondered who they were; they had the look of being News. She did not like the way they seemed to be at home in Francis Pitt’s house. They were in day-clothes, so it did not seem likely that they were stopping to dinner. She was glad of that. It really was a nuisance, these people being there, for there were all sorts of odd things in the room that might have taken Essington’s mind off Canterton. The same hand that had overdressed the ruined wall outside with saxifrages had filled the room with an astonishing excess of flowers. There were a dozen bowls of red and white roses on the big central table and on the massive writing-desk, and on the three or four funny little round tables with tops of inlaid coloured marble were vases filled a little too full with crucifixion lilies; and at the four corners of the bookshelves, which wove a hideous pattern round the room out of the solid blocks of harsh colours and grainy textures made by poorly bound complete sets, stood brass jars from which grew flaming azaleas. ‘It’s as if a railway waiting-room had gone gay,’ she thought, feeling cold, because she had to admit that there was something deeply wrong about the room. Like the house itself, it cast discredit on everybody who had anything to do with it, but more heavily on the man who lived there now than on the man who built it. This man lived in a better age, he had the money to live anywhere, he liked flowers. How could he bear this room? That perversity, that preference for the unpleasant rather than the pleasant …

She must say something to Essington, who was still trembling. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ she murmured. ‘Furnished in the year one, I should say. And the pictures—!’ She rested her hands on the hideous brawn-like marble of the mantelpiece, which was almost entirely covered from end to end with vases of the scarlet-spotted lilies, and looked up at the picture hanging above it. It was a Victorian historical tableau, representing one young woman in Saxon costume handing a crucifix to another similarly clad. Hopefully she asked, for he liked making jokes about that sort of thing, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

‘Oh, that’s St Walburga giving the rood to St Editha.’

‘What’s she doing that for?’

He gazed at her severely. ‘That’s a rude question,’ he said with an air of rebuke.

She tittered delightedly. ‘Oh, you are …’ He would be better in no time.

The footman came to them with cocktails. As they turned to refuse they found that the man who had been drinking at the table had come up behind them, and was standing there holding out his hand. He was a hard and glittering creature, with his steely eyes bright among wrinkles that were there not because he was old but because his expression was contracted on too tight a spring, his nutcracker chin, hard and smooth as a metal-casting, his hair that was turning aluminium at the temple, his sporting suit that was the colour of an armoured car. At the sight of his smile they knew only the modified reassurance of those who come on a dangerous animal in one of its rare genial moods. Essington made no move towards taking his hand, so he raised the glass he was holding in his other with a hail-alligator-well-met expression, and said, ‘Ah, you don’t know me, Lord Essington, but I feel I know you. I’m Sir John Murphy. Jack Murphy to my friends, I hope, to you.’

He bowed extravagantly from the hips. ‘He talks Irish like we used to on the stage before the Irish players came,’ thought Sunflower. ‘I often think it was a pity they came. It was easier and what did it matter.’

He continued with pomp. ‘I feel warm things towards you, Lord Essington, for honour came to me at your hands. I received my baronetcy from the government of which you were a member.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ Essington’s voice had gone thin and high and polite, as it always did when he was going to be really rude.

‘Ah, but I did.’ He slapped his chest. ‘I’m Sir John Murphy, Jack Murphy to my friends. And your government gave me my baronetcy.’

Essington said, ‘No.’

‘Ah, but yes. You great men grow forgetful, you have so many—’

‘Didn’t you say you were Sir John Murphy?’

‘That’s who I—’

‘Of the firm of Murphy & Brace in the City?’

‘Yes, that’s—’

Essington gently shook his head. His voice had become a mild squeak. ‘Then you certainly didn’t get a baronetcy from any government of which I was a member.’ He wheeled about and faced the mantelpiece.

‘Ah, sure, you may be right!’ cried Sir John Murphy to his back, with undiminished cordiality. ‘Indeed, I know you’re right! You went out in the spring, and I got my baronetcy in the autumn! What a memory you’ve got!’ He threw back his head unnecessarily far, drained his glass, and exclaimed apparently without irony, ‘Now, I’ll always be flattered that although the men you’ve known who’ve got titles in the last few years must run into thousands, I might say millions, considering your great position, you remembered when I got my baronetcy.’ He pressed between Essington and Sunflower and tried to find a place for his empty glass between the vases on the mantelpiece, muttering contemptuously, ‘Flowers, flowers, Pitt is mad on flowers.’ It occurred to Sunflower that he spoke as if he did not like Francis Pitt. They could not be close friends, then. She was glad.

Having found a place for his glass he started work on her. He flashed his eyes at her and raised the corners of his mouth in an expression of lustfulness, that was evidently, from a certain mechanical quality about it, part of the etiquette he always observed when meeting a lady. ‘And for different reasons I feel as if I knew this charming friend of yours here!’ He did not seem abashed when the introduction he waited for did not come. She gazed at him in amazement and perceived suddenly that he was drunk. The curious, flickering, restless impression he gave was due to a constant succession of fine muscular adjustments he was making to compensate for the waves of unsteadiness that passed over him; all the time he was shifting his weight from one foot to another, or laying a finger ever so lightly on the mantelpiece, or resting his knee against an armchair. With his slim, jockeyish body he was riding his intoxication as if it were a horse. She thought that perhaps his condition was the cause of his indifference to rebuff; but also it seemed to her that there was an adamantine core to him, which would never get drunk no matter how sodden the rest of him might be, which was inaccessible to ordinary notions of honour and dignity as it was to drunkenness, which might not improbably decide after experiment that the most disarming way to take an insult was buffoonery. She felt a flash of pride in Essington. She wished she could get away from this horrid man, but he was standing right in front of her, thrusting out his nutcracker chin under one of his too tightly sprung smiles, and speaking unctuously into her face. ‘I’ve no hesitation in telling you to your face that I’m right pleased to meet the woman who’s known as the most beautiful woman in the world, for I don’t expect that a true woman, and I can see that you are a true woman, will be ashamed of being known that way. ‘Tis not human to be ashamed of your distinction. I’ll not conceal from you that I’m proud of mine. It’s the fashion to laugh at titles nowadays, but I’m proud of mine. Yes, I’m proud of my baronetcy. And, dear lady, will you tell me that I have no right to be? I’m one of the only two baronets in whose patent of nobility it is written that the honour was conferred because of “exceptional services”—“exceptional services”, mark you, “rendered to England in time of war.” What man’s going to be ashamed of that, I ask you, dear lady? Proud I was to serve my country, though I’m Irish. Old Irish, we are, though for a generation or two the family has been settled in Liverpool. Twelve of us there were,’ he said, beaming at her with a face suddenly grown soft in contemplation of the domestic virtues, ‘and all double-jointed.’

He lifted up his hands, which had more character than most hands, since they were exquisitely shaped, dark brown with sunburn, grained and horny like shagreen, and adorned, even over-dressed, with gleaming rose-pink nails; and, awed by his inconsequence as one is bound to be by any quality when carried to an infinite degree, they watched him while he bent back each finger with a loud crack. Fortunately he lost interest at the middle finger of his second hand, and basked again in the sun of sentiment. ‘Yes, twelve of us there were, and I’ve given all of them that grew up, for I lost a dear little sister, sweet little Bridget, when she was twelve years old, God rest the little angel, I was saying I’d given all the others enough to rub along on, yes, enough to rub along on. I’ve not been forgetful. Only the week before last I gave my dear old mother one of the largest hotels in Paris. Nobody can say I haven’t been a good son to my old mother, ever since I struck it lucky in California.’ He turned about and faced Essington, putting on the unnatural ecstasy of a man in an advertisement. ‘There’s where I met our good friend Francis. Ah, he’s a fine fellow, our Francis! I can tell you that. We had our rough times together when we were finding our feet out there, and I saw the worst and the best of him, and let me tell you the worst of him is better than the most of us, and the best is something that brings tears to my eyes. And, by God, he is loyal to his friends.’ Shaking his head tenderly, he lifted his glass from the mantelpiece, found that a drop had collected in the bottom of it, gulped it, and remarked absently, ‘Yes, I’ve always been a good son to my old mother.’ His eyes roved towards Sunflower, his face, which seemed beginning to fall to pieces, pulled itself up into that polite and mechanical look of lustfulness, and he said to Essington in a flattering manner, ‘Ah, I’m like you. I like a woman who looks like a woman …’

Essington’s long hands motioned her to go at once. She turned and went towards the window. Sir John called after her. ‘Yes, go and say a word to my little daughter Billie. Get her to show you the diamond ring her father’s given her for her birthday. I have five beautiful daughters—Billie, Rhoda, Fay, Myrtle, and—ah, I was forgetting—and my little Fay. And I grudge them nothing …’

As her father spoke her name the girl in the chair opened her speedwell blue eyes and lifted her tousled golden hair, so Sunflower had to go to her. She sat down beside her in a higher chair and murmured a greeting. She was all of a tremble. She hadn’t liked Sir John Murphy at all. He might think he was paying compliments, but it was like having your face licked.

The girl did not return her greeting, but looked at her for a minute in a hard, rather hostile way before she spoke. ‘I’ve seen you at the Embassy sometimes with Maxine Tempest at lunch.’

‘Why, yes, we do go sometimes,’ said Sunflower. ‘She’s my best friend. She’s a sweet girl.’

‘Hm,’ said the girl, disagreeably and portentously. Sunflower saw that she too was drunk. Her golden head was nodding, her blue eyes were vacillating, like buttercups and speedwells swung by the stream in a flooded water-meadow.

Sunflower exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ She wished she could have got the girl some coffee. It was difficult in someone else’s house.

The girl said, as if making conversation with a bore: ‘We’ve been out seeing Ted Dawkins training at his quarters at St Albans.’ As Sunflower looked enquiringly she explained irritably, ‘Oh, the heavyweight! He’s fighting Larodier at Olympia on the third of June. I thought everybody knew that!’ She flung herself back into the chair, and shut her eyes again. ‘I’ve got such a head,’ she grumbled. ‘Dawkins’ manager gave us a new long drink of his. The Tired Tart’s Refresher, it’s called. Filthy stuff.’

‘I’ve got an aspirin in my bag,’ said Sunflower.

It didn’t seem right that the poor thing should wash it down with another cocktail from the vast shaker, which her own father must have left at her elbow. Sunflower looked for help towards the two men, but Sir John was describing with gestures how he had once saved someone’s life with a lasso, and Essington was looking at him with the expression of a cat which sees a bird too wet and muddy for its fastidious claws to kill. She looked back at the girl and found her staring shakily at Essington with a tipsy, exaggerated smile of contempt. For a minute she closed her eyes, but opened them again and said, as if she must find a vent for her scorn, ‘I’ve seen you with him too.’ She jerked her head at Essington. ‘At the Berkeley and places. I suppose you think he’s wonderful.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Well, you should have heard Canterton this afternoon while we were at St Albans. Showing him up. Saying what rot all this business about the League of Nations was. Nature red in tooth and claw. Oh, he was brilliant …’

She drained her glass, drew her hand across her mouth, which had become loose, leaned forward, and tapped Sunflower on the knee. ‘Now, there is a really great man, Canterton!’

‘I’m sure,’ said Sunflower.

‘Marvellous memory. Read everything. The other night he sat in the Embassy reciting Keats till three in the morning. Made me cry. Far the best speaker they’ve ever had in Parliament. Making a most marvellous success of his ministry.’ She glared at Sunflower, trying to make her little flower-like face as much like a bulldog’s muzzle as possible. ‘Essington’s a failure.’

‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ said Sunflower, ‘it all depends on the way you look at it.’

But the girl had dropped back into her chair again and closed her eyes. ‘My head does hurt,’ she grumbled.

‘I’ve another aspirin, if you’d like it.’

‘It’s no use,’ refused the girl crossly. ‘I wish I could be sick, but I never can.’

On the other side of the room Sir John cried, ‘Ah, my dear Francis!’

So she had been right when she had guessed outside that something awful had happened in this house. He had been shocked, shocked right out of that thorough clumsy neatness, which she suddenly perceived, now that she was faced with its absence, to be piteous and lovable, since it was a defence he had built between his odd appearance and the world. His fox-coloured hair was wild about his ears; his shirt-front was bulging so that his queer lion body looked more top-heavy than ever; even his features seemed not so tidy as they had been, for his mouth was gaping in amazement. It was as if a violent emotion had been thrown over him like a jugful of water. There must be something terrible, something terrible. When he tried to give all these people he found in his room a general greeting he could not lift his face into a smile, for the strong anguish in him had moulded it into a heavy mask, a massive symbol. He was uglier than ever, the poor dear, for he was thrusting out his lower lip and stiffening his upper, like a child trying not to cry, and this made the creases between his nose and his mouth prodigiously heavy, like folds in a rhinoceros’s hide. That look he had had of vigilant, missionary mockery, watching life lest it crystallised into seriousness and had to be set moving again with laughter, had gone as completely as his neatness. His defences had failed, he wore instead the astonished look of a captive who right up to the moment of capture had believed in his luck. It had been his intention to have his life lit only by such flames as the azaleas that were set in the four corners of the room, and there had come on him this fire that had burned him till his flesh was ashen. Puck might have looked like this if he had stayed out in open country too long after dawn, been snared by mortals, christened though he kicked, and forcibly acquainted with human grief. At his sorrow something came alive in her. She got up to go across the room and comfort him.

She stopped because he had seen her. He had seen her and he had been enormously interested. His interest ran through him like an electric shock, jerking his chin up from his shirt-front, lifting his loose eyelids. He looked straight at her, and it was as if he had shoved in front of her for her signature a printed statement that she had risen to come and comfort, because he wanted to keep forever a record of her kindness to him. Helplessly she looked back at him, and it was as if she had signed that statement, and would never be able to go back on it now. Well, she was not ashamed. If a person was in trouble you wanted to do what you could for them. Nevertheless she began to blush. It was the second time that she had blushed in his company, one of her awful blushes which could be seen a mile off, which ended by travelling right down over her shoulders. She drooped her head and felt a fool, lifted it again and smiled as foolishly at the top of the walls, at the bowls of roses on the bookshelves. But of course he did something kind about it and stopped looking at her immediately, and busied himself with greeting Essington and Sir John. Of course she had been wrong in her moment of resentful feeling that though it was subtlety he had been displaying he had forced her to take notice of the display with a compulsive gesture that was the very opposite of subtle, that was bullying and detective. Really he was the soul of protectiveness. He gave her quite a lot of time to get right before he ranged the men one on each side of him with an authoritative gesture of his pawlike hands and crossed the room towards the women.

To her he said heavily, ‘I am very glad you have not disappointed me,’ and then looked down on the girl who was stirring stupidly in the deep armchair, wanting to get up but having so much trouble shifting her glass from her right hand to her left that she could not give her mind to it. His eyebrows drew together and his lips tightened. He was evidently surprised and grieved to see that she was drunk. But he said kindly, as if to a child, ‘And how are you, Billie?’ Probably he did not know these horrid people at all well, but was just nice to them when they pushed in on him. She knew what it was. Often enough people she hardly knew pretended to be great friends of hers and rushed at her when they met, and really it was very hard to know what to do.

‘Me dear Francis!’ answered Sir John. ‘How goes it?’

‘Badly, Jack,’ answered Francis, shaking his head, ‘badly.’

‘Now isn’t that truly tragic, truly tragic!’ continued Sir John, happily and expansively. ‘I just had to come up and see how you were. I said to Billie, “I shan’t be able to eat my dinner till I know how Frank is,” and she believed me, for she knows her dad. It’s you I’m feeling for, my lad, more than him. Ah you’ve a great gift for friendship, Francis Pitt! And I always say so too. For I myself can stick up for my friends.’

‘That I know well!’ said Francis Pitt.

The girl blurted out, “S’pose it’s hopeless?’

There was sweat on his forehead. He moistened his lips before he answered patiently, ‘Why, yes, Billie, that’s what they say. It’s hopeless.’ He was evidently schooling himself to speak without expression, lest he should seem to be rebuking this poor tipsy child for the tactlessness that was caused by her condition.

‘Well, me dear boy,’ rattled on Sir John, his iron will keeping him to the matter of condolence, though his drunkenness was dissolving him into a confusion of glittering, unaimed smiles and springy, happy, wavering movements. ‘I’m sure nobody in God’s own world could be doing more for him than you are. Well I do know it. I was telling Thurston and Laidlaw so at lunch at the Savoy today, I was saying to them, “If there’s a way of saving him depend on it my old friend Francis Pitt will find it.” Yes, that’s what I said to them. I said, “I have known Francis Pitt since the old days in San Francisco, and let me tell you …” ’

There seemed no reason why conversation based on this formula should ever come to an end. Not knowing what had happened to him was making her feel faint. She would have turned aside from the group had she not been anxious to prove to him that though she had been so silly and impulsive the first time they met she was really as calm and collected as anybody who wasn’t on the stage, who wasn’t living with somebody they weren’t married to. So she stood smiling politely, though every moment made it less easy. It struck her that now Francis Pitt was speaking to Murphy his American accent became much more marked than it had been when he talked with her and Essington, and that made her realise sharply how little she knew of his past, and that lots of people, some of them quite horrid people like Murphy, had shared in it and would know more than she ever would even if she got to know him quite well and he told her everything. She was annoyed to notice that Murphy also was speaking with a stronger American accent than he had used before Francis Pitt had come. These two wrought upon each other, they gave each other responses, there was a real comradeship. That was dreadful, because Murphy was a really bad man. It was loathsome the way that as he was talking to Francis Pitt he kept on patting and pawing him with insincere gestures of affection which distressed the eye with their falsity as a note sung out of tune distresses the ear. They were exactly the kind of gestures that she had made when she first went on the stage, that Essington was always saying she still made, that she would perhaps make as often as he had pretended had she not remembered what old Frederick Turner had taught her. He had always said that no gesture was valid unless when it was exaggerated it led straight to the climax of the emotion it was meant to illustrate. If a gesture of hate were really appropriate it should, performed with violence, become the motion of a blow or a dagger-thrust or a strangle-hold, and a gesture of love should bring friends side by side or man and woman breast to breast. But if these movements of false goodfellowship had been exaggerated absolutely nothing would happen. The two men would simply have toppled to and fro like those Russian skittle-shaped dolls that are weighted with lead in their feet, if Sir John had put all his force into clapping his left hand on Francis Pitt’s shoulder and Francis Pitt had put all his into clapping his right hand on Sir John’s upper arm …

For Francis Pitt was doing it too. He was returning these false gestures in their own kind with adeptness, without repugnance. She shivered. It was as if behind her she had heard a whistling, a crazy whistling, that warned her that the enterprise on which she had come out was not safe.

A feeling of resistant doggedness came on her. She compressed her lips and to shift her thoughts she turned her head away from the two men. Her eyes fell on the girl in the armchair, who was pressing a little handkerchief against her lips and looking as if, though she was so sulky that she did not want to call anything by its right name, she would soon have to admit that she was feeling sick. Sunflower sent an imploring glance at Francis Pitt and found his eyes just shifting from her face. With deliberate, canny, good humour he said, ‘But true friend as you’ve been to me, Jack, I refuse to take on the burden of all your friendships. I see no reason at all why I should have your friend Canterton parked in my hall!’

The pleasantness was suddenly sponged off Murphy’s face. ‘And what’s wrong with Canterton?’

‘God knows, God knows!’ chuckled Francis Pitt. ‘Something that cost about twenty-seven shillings a bottle, I expect. Lanson ’11, I should think, if he’s been in your company for some hours. Anyway, Jack, it’s time you took him out of my hall.’

Drunkenness was at last dissolving the iron will’s determination to be currying. ‘I’d like to know since when Canterton stopped being good enough for you! Let me tell you he’s my friend, and I am loyal to my friends …’

Francis Pitt swung round so that his back was turned to Essington and Sunflower, but they could see from the thrust of his head and shoulders that he was ramming a steady stare into the other’s flushed, brawling face as he might have rammed a revolver muzzle. After a second he chuckled again, shifted his weight to one foot and said easily, ‘Yes, yes, I know well that Canterton’s a grand fellow, but just at the moment he seems to me not so good as I’ve seen him. So take him home, take him home.’

‘Sure, I’ll do that,’ responded Sir John, suddenly genial. ‘And I’m sorry it’s happened like this. ‘Tis his sense of the responsibilities that weigh too heavy on him at times and then he just helps himself over the stile, that’s what it is, he just helps himself over the stile. Let’s not forget that with all his weakness he’s a great man, a great man.’

‘Hurry along, Jack,’ said Francis Pitt, firmly. ‘The morals of my butler and my footman are going down by inches every time your friend snores.’

Sir John shook hands exhaustively with Essington, who emitted a faint, distasteful, mewing sound. ‘It’s been one of the best days of my life, and mind you I mean what I say and am no flatterer, that I first met the man whom by and large I admire as much as any man who’s alive today.’ With an air of having been brought up to behave politely to ladies when he was young and never having forgotten it, he was careful to reassume an expression of urgent concupiscence when saying goodbye to Sunflower. Then he called, ‘Come on, Billie!’ in a tone that dreadfully expressed the minimum to which the relationship between father and child could be cut down. There was a sort of loyalty in it, as if the grizzled wolf would fight for his cub against the rest of the pack, a sort of kindness, as if he would let her bury her fangs in one flank of the carcase of his kill; and there was nothing more. With such late human inventions as her honour he would not concern himself.

The girl stood up. The stubborn little golden moon of her face was preternaturally blank and stolid, and her body swayed to and fro like an inverted pendulum above her pony-like stance. She said contentiously to nobody, ‘I’m all right.’ They all, except her father, who was walking with a jockey’s springy tread to the door, watched her in agony. It seemed as if at any moment she would fall forward on the floor. Sunflower heard the breath hiss through Francis Pitt’s teeth as he moved forward to the rescue. He must be feeling awful. If you had these people carrying on like this in your house you would want to send everything away to the cleaners, they were so sort of dirty. And it was so dreadful for him that it had happened when he had got visitors, and one of them was Essington, whom he respected and would want to have everything nice for. She remembered how poor little Mummie had cried after she had the insurance manager’s wife who lived at the big house at the corner in to tea and Aunt Emma had come in in the middle smelling of whisky and asking riddles. It was lovely of Francis Pitt to be so patient with the girl, to take her arm so gently and say so kindly as he led her out of the room, ‘You must come some day soon and tell me what you think of the new hard court.’ And he looked over his shoulder with a most apologetic air when he passed Sir John, who had paused at the open door to shout, ‘And I shall expect you and Miss Fassendyll at me party next Wednesday. Number one hundred Carlton House Terrace! ‘Tis slightly larger than the other houses in the Terrace. I’m giving this party for the Rajah of Kuda Tala, who’s a very old friend of mine, and we’re going to have a grand time—I’m having the Embassy band to dance to and Tetrazzini and Pachmann and Chaliapin and Nora Bayes for a spot of music, and me secretary—Pearl La Salle—ah, she’s a fine woman—’ he waved a hand at Sunflower as if to explain what he meant, ‘she’s thought out a colossal scheme of floral decoration! There’s going to be nothing on our tables but the best champagne and nothing on the walls but the finest orchids! And in my house, let me tell you, we allow a magnum of champagne for each person! So goodbye to you till then! From now on, Lord Essington and Miss Fassendyll, I count you as among my friends!’

‘Oh, too good of you!’ wailed Essington; and at last Francis’s short bearish arm came round the door, plucked Sir John by the coat sleeve and turned the handle.

In the sudden peace Sunflower and Essington drew close together and slipped their hands into each other’s. They were both breathing deeply, as if they had been involved in a brawl.

‘Say what you like, it’s worse for a woman to get drunk than a man.’ She shuddered. Supposing it had been she whom Francis Pitt had seen flushed and staggering … She went on gravely, ‘I really oughtn’t to touch anything at all. You know, Ess, I had an aunt who used to take a drop too much, I did tell you that before we began.’

‘My dear, sweet, clean little Sunflower, I don’t think you need to be frightened,’ he said; and stopped to give her a tender kiss. ‘You don’t belong to the same breed of animal as Miss Billie, and the things that happen to her won’t happen to you. And don’t worry your dear muddled head about Aunt Emma. All this talk about heredity in these matters is bunkum. If Aunt Emma hadn’t lived in a dreary little warren like Chiswick—’

‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad,’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t hardly ever so bad as this …’

‘—she probably wouldn’t have had to get the colour and romance she wanted out of the whisky bottle. But these people! These people! Sunflower, that man’s a thief. He’s robbed decent people all over the world. There are men and women living on crusts in garrets because of his knaveries. And he spends his loot on this guzzling and swilling, this belching and reeling—’

‘Wasn’t it dreadful for poor Mr Pitt!’

‘But why does he have such people in his house? If he’s got friends like these it isn’t any sort of place for us. I wish we hadn’t come. You didn’t specially want to come, did you?’ He looked at her plaintively and searchingly. ‘You didn’t specially want to come, did you, Sunflower?’

She hesitated. ‘I did … rather. I … liked the look of Miss Pitt.’

‘Yes, yes!’ he assented heartily. ‘You two did seem to get on very well together, I remember noticing that. I dare say you’ll be able to pull off quite a jolly friendship with—’

‘Also,’ she added, ‘you wanted to see Mr Hurrell.’

‘Yes, of course, of course, that was really why we came. I wish to God he’d turn up.’ He looked at his watch and gave it an irritable shake, as he always did; for whatever hour it might be, he always wished it different. ‘Well, I don’t know that I particularly want to see him after all. I learned at Versailles that he isn’t as scrupulous as I am, but he’s even less scrupulous than I thought if he can bear to come here and be smacked and elbowed by the Hiccuping Wing of the Tory Party.’

Now that he was not standing right beside her she began to think of Francis Pitt’s face as it had looked when he first came into the room. After a moment she cried out to Essington, though he was still walking about speaking angrily of politics. ‘Who can it be that’s ill? It must be someone that he’s very fond of, he looked so awful. Who can it be?’

He said acrimoniously, ‘And in any case Hurrell was one of the cabinet who gave this rogue his baronetcy. Sunflower, it can’t be borne! Of course honours have always been bought—both parties have sold them by the score, by the hundreds!—but never till now to men who could not turn up at the accolade without special permission from the Governor of Portland Jail! That verminous little shyster got his baronetcy from Bryce Atkin’s coalition just after I left, and they gave it to him knowing what he was—’

‘You could see Mr Pitt didn’t think much of him, if you watched him closely,’ said Sunflower, nodding wisely.

‘They knew his whole record. Birtley came to me about it and I went to Bryce Atkin myself. He knew—’

‘It must be awful to have friends that you can’t very well turn from the door, can you, and yet know they’ll carry on like this. But I do wonder who’s ill. They said it was a he …’

‘I told Bryce Atkin the whole story with my own lips. And he used a lot of his filthy tobacconist’s girl-charm on me, and swore he’d do something about it. And the next week it was in the Birthday—’

There was a soft thud against the door, and it was opened with a sound of scuffling. No one came in and the handle rattled as if someone were making a counter-attempt to shut it again. A pretentious voice, foppishly powdered with a lisp, declaimed: ‘Let me get at Ethington. I want to talk to him. Abthurd that a man of hith talent shouldn’t be with uth … Thethe mad ideath, nothing in them. Nature red in tooth and claw. I could ecthplain it all to him in five minuteth …’ Pitt’s voice cut in, rough and humiliated, ‘For God’s sake, Canterton!’ and the door banged.

‘Oh, it’s a shame, it really is!’ said Sunflower. ‘When he’s got visitors, and there’s trouble in the house! If he were a woman he’d burst out crying. Why, of course he’s been crying. That’s why his face looks all funny … Oh …’

Essington sat down as if he had suddenly grown very tired. ‘Sunflower, I wish that drunkard Canterton hadn’t got my job.’ He spoke with a kind of noble peevishness that was at once complaining and selfless. ‘There are good people in that ministry, steady little people who’ve given their lives to building it up. People who always made me feel rather ashamed when I got any credit, as they’d done twice the work I ever did, and never got their names in the papers since they weren’t—’ he smiled up at her as if this were a joke that would perhaps strike her as funnier than he quite liked, ‘great like me. And now they’re under this fuddled oaf, and one day there will be such a mess. There’ll be some act of tipsy impudence—of quarrelsome instructions to one of the tipsy cads he has as secretaries—and there’ll be a row that’ll bring the sky down with the trade unions or whatever it is he’s lurched up against. Think of that lout butting into a delicate negotiation with the Triple Alliance, the pet plan of some spectacled little man who was ordinated to the job by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and has done nothing else all his good little life destroyed with a hiccup …’ He closed his eyes, took her young hand and held it to his forehead; and for a moment was silent. ‘Only … it’s his kind of man England seems to want nowadays … not mine …’

‘Oh, lovie, don’t fret, don’t fret,’ she said; and found something to say that might have comforted him, if she had not at once forgotten it, turning her head to listen if there were not the sounds of an automobile engine starting outside the drive.

He did not raise his wrinkled old lids. ‘And when his lot go out the country still won’t want us. They’ll call in the Labour Party … which isn’t a Party but a bazaar of ideas got up by a vegetarian mothers’ meeting … Bolshevism … anti-vaccination … lunacy reform … mm … the sad case of Comrade A. at Peckham … trivial special cases …’

‘They’ve gone,’ she said exultantly. A car had rolled down the drive. ‘He’ll be back in a moment.’ She drew away her hand.

He sat up, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘Anyway it all works out in dinner being preposterously late.’ He groped for the hand she had taken away, but started and exclaimed, ‘Sunflower, how beautiful you look! Such a lovely, tender, grave Sunflower it is tonight! And yet she’s wearing her little girl face too! Really, you don’t look a day older than you did when I first met you twelve years ago, only far, far lovelier. And you’ve such a glowing colour! You haven’t been putting things on your face, have you? No, it’s natural!’

She smiled at him, happily, shyly, turning the rings on her fingers.

‘Oh, such a beautiful Madonna Sunflower it is!’ he went on proudly. ‘What queer beasts women are! They put on different degrees of beauty as they might put on different dresses. Lately you’ve been just a handsome woman. I haven’t thought the kind of dresses women have to wear nowadays suited you particularly. But tonight you’re astonishing, you are a queen of beauty. And there’s no reason for it …’

She turned away from him, because Francis Pitt came back into the room.

All the commotion he had had to go through to get rid of these horrid people had left him more dishevelled than ever, with his tie slipping round to one side and his hair straggling right down over his ears, so that he looked like a flop-eared spaniel pup which had been rolling about in the dust with the other puppies. It was queer how he kept on making one think of some sort of an animal. It would be lovely to touch him, his body would be warm like an animal’s. If you found him lying asleep and woke him he would make funny whimpering little noises just as a puppy would. But there was more than that to him, he was far more than just dear and fubsy. As he crossed the room to them, his massive head down on his chest, his half-shut eyes just glinting grey under his heavy brows, force seemed to pour out of him. He was great, like Essington. And there was something pleasanter than greatness pouring out of him … She had heard the phrase, ‘A wind from the Spice Islands’ … It was like that, a rumour of things hot and sweet in the mouth, or gentle pungencies … He was a fragrance, and he was a time: the hour when people say, ‘The tide has turned, now we can start’, or, ‘It will not hurt any more’, the hour after which all things are fortunate and easy. She would be happier for days because of the little time she was going to have with him this evening, she would not mind Essington so much. It was so wonderful of him to do all this for a person when he was utterly miserable; he must be very miserable, for his face was all crumpled with crying, and though men did cry a lot, much more than you were warned beforehand, he wasn’t the sort that would cry easily. She wished she could put out her hands as he came near and take his grief from him. She saw it as a warm bundle, of a size that would be easy for her to carry in her arms.

With an encircling movement of his little paws he seemed to draw them together into a ring of intimacy that excluded everybody else in the world. He conveyed to them with a spent smile, that, though miserable, he was now enjoying the relative relief of being with people that he really liked; and he said very simply, ‘You folks must be dying for your dinner. I should have chased those rogues out long before you came but for—what’s happened here.’

Soothingly she asked what she felt he wanted to tell them. ‘Why, whatever’s happened?’

He looked down. His face worked.

‘Why … Hurrell’s dying.’

Essington exclaimed testily, ‘Hurrell! Hurrell dying! He can’t be dying! Why, he’s no older than I am!’

Francis Pitt said dexterously, ‘That’s the devil of it. He’s no age at all!’ and then turning to Sunflower and looking on the ground at her feet, he repeated, slowly and pitifully, ‘Yes, Hurrell’s dying!’

It seemed to hurt her hand that she could not lift it to stroke his ravaged face. She murmured, ‘Oh, I am so sorry! Then you won’t want us about. Hadn’t we better go away?’ It would be dreadful if he said yes. She did not want to go away from him.

His eyes shot up to hers, and he exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake, no! I have been looking forward to this all day!’ He gave her a deliberate, pressing glance that was a reminder of the other glance he had given her when she first came into the room, and held out one hand towards her, as if he would have liked to go on talking to her and wanted her to stay there so that he could get back to her at the first possible moment, while he turned to deal with Essington, who was complaining irritably, ‘But he can’t be dying! He wasn’t dying when you dined with us on Monday night!’ She watched him fiercely, wishing she could get the grief out of him by some simple, violent physical act, as one sucks poison out of a wound, while he answered grimly and patiently, ‘He is dying now, and he was dying then. Of a thing called galloping consumption which I daresay you thought, as I did, a handy device of the novelists. Which is rare enough in real life, which is nearly unknown in a man of his age. “Acute miliary tuberculosis”, the doctors call it. It got its teeth into him six weeks ago, when he got a chill speaking in a draughty marquee down at some damned women’s Liberal federation in Sussex. It will finish him, they say, in six weeks’ time. Of course he doesn’t know. We’ve kept it from him …’

She loved the way he loved his friend. She had to keep her lids lowered in case she cried too. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without him. I’ve known him ever since I came to London. I’ve lived by him ever since I came to London. I don’t know what I shall do …’ She wished that she could have pressed his dear hideous grief-ruddled face against the warm flesh at the base of her throat, not that she wanted to be familiar, but because that used to quiet Essington when he had his crying-fits after Versailles. Looking hard at him, partly in case she might read in his expression some way she might help him, and partly in order that she might remember him as completely as possible after they parted that night, she noticed that the brownish tints of his hair and skin were the colour of fireside shadows. Something at the back of her mind which had not been impressed by any of this scene, which was refusing to attach any serious importance to an emotion felt by a man about another man, seized on this note of warmth exultantly and prophesied that there would come a time when all this nonsense would be given up and the real business of living would begin, satisfyingly, nutritiously. Shocked, she forced herself back to her loyal duty of pity and distress. Pitching his voice deeper and deeper lest it should squeak up into tears, he was saying: ‘It was easy to move him out of his stuffy little hole of a flat in the Temple and get him out here. You see, he’s practically had a bedroom here for years. I used to keep him talking so late at nights, I hope to God it wasn’t bad for him …’ Now, Essington had hardly any close friends, and none that he loved like this. He was kept from it by the dreadful justice of his mind. It was really justice and not mere censoriousness, even now it was making him say very clearly and distinctly, so that the meaning disadvantageous to himself should not be missed, ‘It’s plucky of you to have him here. I … should have been afraid of the infection.’ But it kept him from friendship just as much as the meaner quality might have done, because it never let him pass through the first phase when you are silly about people, when you believe that they are perfect and want to be with them all the time, and get so fond of them that it doesn’t matter much when you find they’ve got their faults like anybody else. There had been a time when she’d been an idiot about Maxine, and would have told anybody that she was unselfish, though really old Maxi was dog-lazy and never did a stroke if she could put it on somebody else; but by the time she had found out that she had found also that you could tell old Maxi anything and she would understand and not say that you hadn’t any self-respect because you stayed with Essington though he was cruel to one; and anyway she had by then got so used to seeing Maxi’s face about that it had a special value like places that one has known all one’s life. She expected Francis Pitt had been silly about Hurrell like that when he first met him, and that it had worked out all right. He had pretended that the old man had got everything, and in the course of the pretence he had found out what he had got. But Essington could not go through such a process, for by merely looking at people he knew the truth about them. His eyes would close up from below like a cat’s, and he would purr a phrase which would record the bad in them without malice and the good in them without affection, and that was that. So he had no friends as she had Maxine, as Francis Pitt had Hurrell. Yet he was not unloving. If you got to know him, you could see that often he had an aching feeling in his heart like anybody else. He had wanted dreadfully to make up his misunderstanding with Hurrell, he was minding it that Hurrell was going to die. Querulously, he was now trying to alter that fact by talk. ‘But can’t anything be done for him? Is Cornelliss the best man, do you think? … Doctors are always such fools … Mind you, I was told thirty years ago that I had just six months to live …’ He was always like this when he heard that anybody was dying. Indeed he was always like this when he was faced with any evil which could not be brought to an end by being clever about it, or for that matter with any good which couldn’t be completely accounted for and controlled by reason. That was why he was so horrid to her, although he loved her. Their love wasn’t reasonable. It wasn’t logical that he should have grown really to care for a woman who was quite stupid, who couldn’t be of any real use to him except to make love to, so he was constantly examining this state of affairs with distrust and suspecting that he must be allowing himself to be governed by appetite and base emotion like the bad leaders who were responsible for most of the woes of the world. Also the situation arising out of their being in love vexed him because he had worked it all out cut and dried and everything in the garden should have been lovely. They lived together without being married because they did not believe in the institution of matrimony; they lived together openly enough for it to be generally known because it was wrong to be hypocritical; they did not live together quite publicly because that would have been to violate other people’s susceptibilities unnecessarily; they did not have children because it would have been difficult with servants and governesses. They ought to have been perfectly happy. It was unreasonable that she should mind what quite negligible people said about her; it was unreasonable she should mind doing without things that if she had had them would have caused endless trouble. It was his sense of her unreason that made him go bickering about her house—or was there another twist to it? Did he mind her unreasonably minding those things or did he mind the still more unreasonable way he minded her minding them? Did it not turn a sword in his heart when he saw her grieving, and was not his bickering half a squeal at his own pain and half a quarrel with the fate that had hurt his beloved woman and not at all the sheer callousness it pretended to be? She looked at his fine, fretful face and knew that she was right. Here, as always, his soreness was sweetness tortured into the likeness of the opposite. But she did not feel, as she always used to when she had found out some excuse for him, any flush of tenderness. It did not take away from her that feeling that she was caught in a trap, that she would die starving …

It was like food to be with Francis Pitt. He did not deny the death of his friend, though to admit it was anguish to him. The truth was wringing out of him in sullen phrases … ‘There is no hope. None at all. The only thing is to get him through it as easily as possible. There are little things one can do …’ He narrowed his eyes and lowered his head as if he talked of some way of cheating in a game, and that the other player might overhear. ‘Keeping him quiet at the time when the haemorrhages are most likely to come …’ She could see him standing by a campfire in defence of something that lay long and white and still, drawing himself to his full little height as death came down on them from the dark sky, his long arms crooked and his little paw hands stretched out flat in front of him ready to do things more cunning than direct blows, his eyes a little open so that he could watch his enemy but nearly closed so that his enemy should not see what he planned, his feet set dancing-light so that he could dodge and feint. The first men in the world must have looked like him. They too would have no need to be tall. For hunting and snaring it would be better if they were little …

The footman had said twice that dinner was ready, but they had not heard. She wished that they had. She wanted to see him doing something sensible like eating, building himself up instead of spending himself on this emotion about another man. And if he was sitting down at table people would not be bursting in on him, people that she did not know anything about, people who knew things about him she did not. After a minute she touched him on the sleeve and said timidly, ‘They’re saying dinner’s ready.’ He let her see by a slight tired movement of his head that he had heard her, that he longed to go to dinner but was too exhausted to deal with the technical problem of how to interrupt with politeness Essington’s description of how obstinate and incompetent and without ideas the government had found the medical profession when they were drafting the Insurance Act; and that he resigned it all to her. So she set them off by moving slowly to the door. It was nice, as dancing with him would have been, to feel him walking beside her, keeping time with her. She bowed her head and stooped so that he would notice as little as possible how much taller she was. From now on it was all going to be lovely. He would be settled in his chair at the table, a thick wide mahogany door would be shut on them, they would become involved in the undisturbable ritual of dinner. He would eat, he would feel better, they would be able to enjoy him, his queer earthy face, his queer rough voice, the force that flowed out of him.

But nothing nice ever happens easily. Out in the hall was Etta, looking very harassed and wearing one of those dark dresses that were quite good but made one feel depressed because they so obviously had been bought without any particular person in mind, and she was standing by a table where a greyhound sort of man with glittering pince-nez sat writing something with an attaché case open beside him. At the sight of him Francis Pitt drew a little away from her and moved closer to Essington and came to a halt, saying, ‘Ah, Cornelliss, I thought you had gone. You are good to us, giving us so much time. Miss Fassendyll, Lord Essington, this is Sir Robert Cornelliss, my doctor and my friend …’

Sunflower smiled vaguely at the doctor, and looked away from him at the clumsy Victorian furnishings, the gross carvings of the staircase banisters, the soup-like colourings of the woodwork and wallpaper. This was a mighty little gnome that had taken this mediocre house that was built to be the home of a butter-merchant with six plain daughters, and filled it with great people, a great drunkard, a great thief, a great man dying, a great man grieving for him, a great doctor …

Wistfully Francis Pitt enquired, ‘When ought you to hear from this Viennese chap who says he’s got this serum?’

Cornelliss answered, kindly but oddly without deference, ‘Tomorrow, sometime. But remember I don’t believe in it myself.’

A sudden scratching on the paper told of a pretentious signature. He gave what he had been writing to Miss Pitt and began to shut up his attaché case. Francis Pitt watched him with the attention that children give to the most purely mechanical proceedings of greatly respected adults. She wished she could have pulled him on by the hand.

Cornelliss stood up, but did not go. Sunflower looked at him to see why not, and found his eyes set on her face. She assumed an expression of blandness. Not even now could she bear to throw away that tedious triumph, though she felt sick with the frustration of her desire to see Francis Pitt seated at the table, fixed, eating, resting, sealed to her society.

Cornelliss said, ‘It is interesting to meet Miss Fassendyll after I have admired her so often on the stage.’

She shuddered. She had forgotten that she had to act. His eyes shifting to Essington, he continued, ‘I think you know my wife. She has spoken several times of having met you at bazaars and charity matinées and so on.’

‘Oh yes!’ She felt pleased. It was nice to think that dull people like this met other dull people and were happy together. ‘Lady Cornelliss. Why, of course! She’s wonderful. She gets on so well with all the princesses you have to have for those sort of things. But then when you come to think of it,’ she meditated, ‘she looks just like a princess. Why, she might be one of the royal family herself, to look at her …’

Francis Pitt made an involuntary grunt of amusement, and Cornelliss sharply turned his back on them while the footman put on his coat. She supposed she had said one of the stupid things that made Essington so angry. Well, she did not care, so long as it had cheered up Francis Pitt.

Cornelliss swung round again, and remained before them for an instant exhibiting the expression of one who sees a joke perfectly but must not see it because it would be bad form to do so. She did wonder what she had said. Then he picked up her eyes again for a second, let them go, and said to the company, ‘Goodbye. I shall be out in the morning about eleven.’ He made a sweeping bow; and when he was in the doorway, black against the blue dusk, he turned round and bowed again.

Harshly, violently, with the air of a man who throws something away from him for the sake of hearing it smash, Francis Pitt exclaimed, ‘That was for you, Miss Fassendyll! He cut that caper to show you that he’s a damn good figure for a man of fifty-three. My God, Etta, got on with it. These people will be thinking I asked them for breakfast tomorrow.’

The two women went on together, padding softly, talking in undertones, like temple servants.

‘This must mean an awful lot of work for you,’ said Sunflower sympathetically.

‘Oh, it’s beyond anything. If only he’d eat, I shall have him on my hands next. They encourage themselves to get upset, don’t they? And he won’t eat a thing.’

‘Well, you know, I found in the war that they’re apt to eat better if you cut out the little things. Soup and that. Just get straight to a nice piece of sole, or if they’re very tired, right on to the chicken. Then they start with what they like.’

‘I’ll try that…’

At last he was sitting at the head of his table. Surely nothing in the world could prevent them all being together for the next hour or so. Satisfied, she leaned back in her chair, smiling at the Victorian pattern of heavy gilt frames, thick bell-ropes, fringed damask curtains, and coarsely gleaming red woods that made the shadows of the dimly lit room seem like a sort of dust in the air, so close was the link in one’s mind between such furniture and dust. Now she understood why he lived in this queer house. That spurt of feeling in the hall gave away the secret. Francis Pitt had been shocked when Cornelliss had showed off in front of her, as a schoolboy would be if he caught out his father taking undignified trouble to catch the eye of a mere schoolgirl. He was thinking of Cornelliss as a child thinks of a grown-up. In fact he was one of those people who cannot realise that they are adult, who feel themselves as children playing truant from the nursery and fear they may be clapped back there at any time with punishments for all the damage they have done while trespassing in the grown-up world. Houses and furniture were things that grown-ups always control, so he had felt frightened about meddling with them; he had doubtless painful memories of a day when he had painted the grandfather clock with robin’s egg enamel. So rather than initiate a house he had taken this preposterous place, which had the sanction of having been arranged by a grown-up. Probably this childishness accounted too for the excess of flowers which here clotted to a sweet-scented extreme, covering the whole table save where the places were laid with a trough of many-coloured carnations. It must be the realisation of some childish promise that when he was grown-up he would never get mean as grown-ups are and unable to use their power to order as much as they want of the really good things in life; so might a little boy, left by accident in charge of his home, order twice as much ice-cream as his mother usually did. Wishing she could tease him about it all, she turned towards him with a smile; and was appalled by the sallow, tear-riddled gargoyle of his face. Again she had that fantasy of his grief as poison in a wound. She saw the wound as a dark fleck on his shoulder: she imagined dropping her lips to it and sucking, sucking, till he was whole. A tremor passed through her. He could not have seen her, for his eyes were nearly closed, but at that moment a tremor ran through him also. He hid his face with his hands as if to shut out something and grumbled behind that screen: ‘Thank God you people are here tonight …’

Essington raised his glass as soon as it was filled. ‘To poor dear Hurrell,’ he said. From the wistful cantankerousness of his voice she knew his eyes were wet. Mechanically she pointed out to herself that people didn’t know the feelings that he had.

Francis Pitt echoed deeply, ‘To our poor dear Hurrell.’ She dutifully participated in this queer male ceremony, and stared down on the tablecloth, trying to think of Hurrell, who oddly enough was now a vaguer personality in her mind than he had been this morning, although everybody had been talking about him for the last hour. She could not feel interested in him. As soon as was decent she lifted her eyes to Francis Pitt again, and was amazed to find that as he set down his glass his face wore the expression of one who embarks on a journey which he has often made before, which he has always liked, which he expects to find more delightful this time than ever. Immediately it faded, and his face became a mask of misery again. It was extraordinary that just for one second, in the midst of his grief, he should have felt such glee. It occurred to her that no doubt this was due to a result of early poverty that she had often noticed in herself. No doubt his parents, like hers, had been so poor that they could hardly ever ask people in for meals, and no doubt he, like she, felt therefore a perpetual delight in being able to have people in whenever he liked and have things nice for them. That was it, of course. But though Etta, poor Etta, was like that too in an ordinary way, she was evidently too tired to feel it tonight, for she was looking at Sunflower with an expression of pity. She must be thinking of what had happened with Essington the last time they met. Sunflower smiled at her to show that it was all right. Never in her life had she felt happier.

‘Well,’ said Francis Pitt, his face still puckered by laughter at Essington’s story about the Nationalist members and the Egyptian patriots. ‘If anybody had told me two hours ago that I should ever be as happy as I am now I should not have believed them.’

Leaning forward, he dipped his paw-hands into the trough of carnations and clumsily patted the flowers aside till he found a large white one. He shook the water from its stem with the prudent look of an animal and held it out to Sunflower. They all looked at her benevolently, pleased with her beauty. She remembered that it was just at this stage of the meal, when they were sitting over the coffee and brandy and cigars, that they had begun to make a fuss of her the other night. As a matter of fact that was nearly always the time when people took notice of her at a dinner.

‘She’d look nice with a pink one,’ suggested Etta.

‘Yes,’ purred Essington, quizzical and proud, ‘Sunflower can raise pink to her own dignity.’

Francis Pitt said levelly and casually but obstinately, ‘I’ve given her the flower I think she ought to have.’ As he spoke the door began to shake under bouts of delicate scratching, and he swung round in his chair shouting, ‘Hey, my beauties! Hey, my beauties! Frederick, let those dogs in!’

‘They’re his borzois,’ Etta explained to Essington and Sunflower; and added, as if complimenting them, ‘He hasn’t let them near him for the last three days.’

The door was thrown open and four great moonlight-coloured dogs came springing down the long dark room. Nooses of pale flowers cast by athletes might have parted the air swiftly like this, have landed on the ground as softly. They did not seem dogs of this world, for their barking sounded so hollow and echoing that they might have been coursing through the caverns of some magical landscape superimposed on the ordinary scene; and when they came near the brightness of the table their eyes changed from the points of blue radiance that had gleamed from their snake-flat heads in the dark to common affairs of lash and liquid iris, as if they had had to make some compromise of substance before they could enter the society of human beings. With the motion of wind-driven flames they leaped up and down round Francis Pitt, who cried out at them lovingly and cursingly, but did not look at them because he was pouring port into his empty champagne glass. ‘Ah, will you be quiet, you devils! Get down! Get down!’ One of them wrangled at his cuff with its teeth, and the brown stream of port swirled round the glass’s edge, made a blister of brightness on the mahogany table, and foundered on the peach-parings on his plate. ‘My God, my God, making a mess of your good home! Are you trying to make out to the visitors that you’ve never been taught manners?’ he grumbled, and slipped his elbow into the open jaws, jerked it up, and threw the long beast back on its haunches. It flung up its tape-thin muzzle, uttering coughs of lament, and he argued with it, cramming his hands down into the glass of port. ‘Try and have some sense, you fool dogs. How can I get drinks for you if you’re all over me like a pack of old women after a handsome curate? Give me time … Now then!’ He flung himself back in his chair, stretching out his wet hands level with his shoulders, and the tall dogs leapt up and licked his fingers. ‘Ah, my beauties, my beauties, my delights!’ He watched them with an expression of gratified cunning, as if he had won some advantage over them by pandering to their appetites, which was absurdly, lovably inappropriate to the innocent occasion. It was that he was the harmless kind of man who likes to be taken for worse than he is. ‘Ah, you know good port when you get it. When I die I’m going to leave these dogs all my port and they are going to drink every night to the glory of my soul.’ He snatched back his hands, wet them afresh while the dogs leapt and whimpered, and thrust out dripping fingers again. ‘Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they the finest dogs in the world? Two gentlemen and two ladies. Tamerlane and Jenghiz Khan the gentlemen’s names are, and the ladies are called Peggy Joyce and Jean Nash. No you’ll not get a drop more. You’ve had enough, you devils. I know that. I gave you more once upon a time and you blundered round my house in the most disgusting condition, each of you trying to rub off the second tail and the fifth leg you thought you’d got against my poor furniture. Oh, such ongoings, such ongoings.’ He gathered them all close to him, stacking their forepaws on his knees, rubbing his face against their frosted shoulders and the frail hoops of their ribs while they passed long pink flannel tongues over his hands and ears and neck and every bit of his bare flesh they could find, he and they all swaying to a rhythm of turbulent animal tenderness, keeping in time to it with grunting little noises.

It was a pity that Essington did not let himself go like this sometimes, doing things that certainly hadn’t any sense in them, but kept one human.

‘Yes, we’re fond of animals in this house,’ said Etta, though the dogs took no notice of her and she made no movement towards them.

‘Narrow, passionate faces,’ mused Essington. ‘A pity they can’t participate in human institutions. They would have a talent for patriotism …’

‘They are darlings,’ said Sunflower. ‘Do they have puppies?’

‘They do, they do, at God’s appointed times,’ Francis Pitt assured her, ‘and you shall have a puppy from the next litter. If you care about keeping dogs, that is.’

Sunflower and Essington met each other’s eyes and looked away.

Essington said acidly, ‘Yes, do give Sunflower a puppy. She likes dogs. She calls them doggies when she thinks I’m not listening.’

Nothing but laughter on his face, Francis Pitt was down bickering with his dogs again. ‘Jean, will you keep still while I turn your ears the right side out? Do you think the lady I named you for would come down to dinner at Deauville with both her ears outside in? Let me tell you that a good woman looks on her home as a perpetual Deauville. You keep that in mind or you’ll be losing your Jenghiz Khan and your Tamerlane to Peggy who’s the trimmer wench of you two, and keeps her ears as a girl should.’ Then, beating all four off, and holding his head back to dodge their muzzles, he called to Essington. ‘The reason I offered Miss Fassendyll a puppy is that she’s one of the very few women who continue to look beautiful when my dogs are in the room. Isn’t that true, Etta?’ His face was flushed with his scrimmage with the borzois and he spoke loudly to drown their barking; he was like a man reaching the top of a mountain and shouting with delight at the view. He did not pause to give Sunflower that hard gaze referring to the future with which most men follow up their compliments but passed straight into a fit of chuckling. ‘It’s a test I don’t pass myself. I’ve had that brought home to me. Etta, shall I show them that drawing of Goleath’s?’

‘Oh, that horrible thing …’

‘I think I’ll put myself in your hands, Essington, and let you see it. Etta, where is the thing? I thought it was hanging up somewhere in this room.’

‘No, indeed, it’s in the top drawer of the right-hand book-case. I took it down the other day when some people were coming to lunch. I couldn’t bear it any longer.’

‘God bless our loyal women,’ chuckled Francis Pitt, and heaved himself out of his chair. With the dogs ambling beside him he padded out of the bright zone round the table over to the mahogany dinosaurs of the furniture creations that towered in the shadow beyond, and stayed stooping in front of it for much longer than Essington, with his feline faculty for swift movement, would have needed to do. There was a curious quality about his movements whenever he did anything with his hands; it was not exactly clumsiness, rather was it as if he was not used to finding his paws split up into fingers and that the use of these finicking new instruments made it necessary for him to readjust the whole of his body which had been used to simpler motions. It somehow made one feel fierce with tenderness, like the stumbling of a child learning to walk. When he had found what he wanted he stayed for a moment with his back to them, looking down at it, then gave a guffaw. ‘My God! Am I as bad as that.’ He was laughing; but there was something in his tone which told that the little creature really minded being ugly quite a lot. But he was in high spirits again in a second, crossing the room with the picture held by a corner so that its frame nearly swung against the floor, and saying happily, greedily, as if he were tasting some gross, rich flavour of life, some trace of garlic in the universe: ‘Goleath is an ungrateful devil. God knows how much government money I got him for his war pictures, and how much of my own I’ve lent him, and how often I’ve saved him from jail and expulsion from France and suchlike calamities. Nevertheless he did this drawing to amuse my enemies more than me. Mercifully he showed it to me one day when he was drunk and I bought it off him then and there. Look at the damned thing!’ He put it down in front of Essington with a flourish. ‘Isn’t it awful?’

Sunflower went and stood at Essington’s shoulder.

‘That’s real wit in his line,’ said Essington; and laughed.

Sunflower went back to her seat. ‘Horrid,’ she said to Etta, who pulled up a chair and went and sat beside her.

‘Wit and beauty,’ gloated Francis Pitt. ‘And look at the lovely little writing round the edge. “The brute creation contrasted with man (made in His image)". It’s as exquisite as the drawing. But don’t I look a loathsome brute? Don’t I look a monster?’

‘Of course,’ said Sunflower to Etta, ‘I don’t ever see the sense of caricature, really. What’s the good of drawing people as they aren’t?’

‘In any case he’s very difficult to do,’ said Etta. ‘Even photographs. I’ve got lots, but he never takes well.’

‘Neither does he,’ said Sunflower.

‘They always leave out his character.’

‘So they do his, too.’

Patiently they watched the two men.

‘Yes, this is genius,’ muttered Essington. ‘Wit and beauty and ingenuity. Look at the way he’s given a gothic touch to the dog’s ears, setting up a suggestion of spirituality in the eye of the beholder. Ten to one he did that unconsciously, probably he doesn’t know to this day that he did it. That’s why in my hearts of hearts I loathe art. It’s done so blindly, so uncontrollably. It’s the best thing we’ve got, but we can’t yoke it to the world’s service.’

‘You certainly can’t yoke Goleath to the world’s service,’ chuckled Francis Pitt. He was very happy. He had liked Essington admiring what was evidently one of his cherished possessions; and now he was going to talk about Goleath, who was evidently one of his pet subjects. ‘Did you ever meet the fellow?’

‘Yes. He drew me during my brief visit to Versailles. We were all drawn then. Roughly speaking, anything that happened to a musical comedy star happened to us great statesmen then. I constantly had an impression a face cream was being named after me, but I may have been wrong …’

‘Didn’t he strike you as a horrible fellow?’

‘Odd, odd. I remember he told me some story of a widow in some French town who had refused to yield to his embraces till they had visited her late husband’s grave and prayed. The results of their embraces showed her to be a woman of a strong but rather unpleasant sense of humour. Not the sort of thing I should have told a stranger … No …’

‘That was Goleath all over. He has no shame in him.’ He set back his huge head and roared with laughter. ‘God, what a man! I’ll never forget what he did to me in Paris. Never. It led to a lot of trouble, some of which is going on still. I had a job in Paris, you know, and part of my duties was being polite to British subjects who were doing war-work there. Soothing duchesses who were running hospitals and thought they weren’t being appreciated, and assuring little men with glasses and independent means who were running billiard rooms that the British Empire was sensible of the sacrifices they were making in staying up two hours later than they used to at home in Bournemouth. And when we were winding up the thing I had to give a dinner party to the whole damned lot of them. By that time I was sick of my job. I wished that every one of them were at the bottom of the sea. And that very afternoon I was sitting in my office, feeling I’d go mad before I had done with it, and who should come in but Goleath. He wanted me, not for the first time, nor the last, to lend him some money. He’d met a negress whom he assured me was far more beautiful than the Venus de Milo and I didn’t feel competent to dispute the point with him and apparently she’d been exorbitant in her demands. So I gave him some money and, God forgive me, I asked him to my party.’ Choked with silent laughter, he strutted a few steps on the hearthrug with his feet wide apart and a proud expression of conscious wickedness gleaming in his eyes; he looked ragged and muddy and young: he seemed to be changing into the naughtiest boy in the district strutting at the street corner while the rest of the gang gape respectfully from against the paling. ‘And God and all His saints forgive me, I put him next to a duchess. I’d never fancied the woman, and she’d given me a lot of trouble, treating me as one of those low little men who make money. She’s the sort of duchess who gets her clothes where Queen Mary does, and she was a great big woman with masses of hair piled up under a tiara that was obviously made by the same man who built Euston station.’

‘It wasn’t the Duchess of Grantham, was it?’ asked Essington.

‘That’s the woman. Well, it all went quite all right till we got to the ice and then there was a yell. My God, there was a yell. And there was Goleath tearing down the duchess’s hair.’

‘Pitt, you are an excellent fellow,’ said Essington, ‘I have detested that woman for years. She was one of the Ulster lot. Gracious Englishwomen. Who came up to one all the time one was in office and bullied one as if one was an insolent footman because one wasn’t shooting some large class of God’s creatures without trial—trade unionists, the Irish Nationalists, Hindus …’

‘Well, this night she wanted to shoot Goleath without trial. You should have seen that woman with her tiara over one eye and Goleath going at her hair, not vindictively, you understand, but as if he was giving the negress a rough-house before they got friendly again. And there was such a shouting and such a hullaballoo as you never heard outside a low-class pub. Then suddenly Goleath stood up, looking like a king, and quieted them all with one wave of his hand, and said, very gravely and impressively, “I see that I have done wrong. I must apologise. My only excuse is that at present I am living with a woman who adores brutality.” And with that the devil went out and left me to settle up with the duchess. You can guess how easy it was for a man of my size, and my unfortunate air of not minding very much if things do go wrong so long as they’re funny, to placate that rearing carthorse of outraged virtue. But I smoothed her down all right, and lied like blazes, and said it was a secretary of mine who’d asked Goleath, and that I’d known nothing about it, and that my heart was broken, and finally I got her pretty quiet. So we finished our dinner, and then we all went into the ballroom and listened to music, the real right stuff that experts had got in for me. And all my Mutts and Jeffs were sitting like lambs drinking in some Italian woman when—yowp!’—his eyes were like eddies in the wicked grey Thames that flows under London bridges—‘Goleath had come back, and he’d come up behind some damned woman who’d taken two million colonial troops to hear organ recitals in the Invalides, or provided them with some such entertainment that would naturally appeal to colonial troops on leave, and he’d smacked her hard where one doesn’t smack ladies, though it’s convenient enough. He said he’d gone out into the streets and that suddenly he’d felt that we were all going to have a dull time, so he’d come back to make the party go. And, by God, it did. It went within the next half hour. We couldn’t get him out. He’s over six feet, you know, and as strong as a bull. So the rest of them went instead. There wasn’t a soul in the place by eleven o’clock barring me and the waiters. I didn’t mind. In a way it was the best party I ever gave. But I got hauled over the coals for it finely before I was done. Hurrell was furious—’

He stopped.

The glee went out of his face, it became again a mask of sullen misery. His eyes, old under his reddened lids, above the baggy pouches, passed from one to other of his listeners as if in resentment that they had seduced him into forgetting even for a little. He turned his back on them and walked draggingly into the shadows of the room, looking down as people do at funerals. There was a bell-rope hanging near the door. He felt for it as if he were blind, tugged it, and leaned back against the wall. Through the darkness they could see his face as a still patch of sallowness, not so high on the wall as one would expect. Essington began to say something in a high, nonchalant voice, but the words caught in his throat.

When the butler came in Francis Pitt said, ‘Frederick, will you ask Nurse Vyner if we can see Mr Hurrell now?’

‘She’s just been down to say that she’d be obliged if you’d come up as soon as possible, sir, so that Mr Hurrell won’t be kept awake too late.’

He came back to them, pouting out his lips as if he were trying to make a thick, solid mouth to stabilise his face, which was in danger of becoming muddled with tears. ‘Will you come, Essington?’ he asked humbly.

‘I should be very sorry if you did not let me,’ said Essington gently.

‘And you, Miss Fassendyll? He was saying today he’d never seen you, and that he’d like to.’

‘I’d love to see him.’

‘You’re sure you’re not afraid of infection?’

‘He’s used to horrid women!’ she thought savagely; and clenched her fists as there passed before her mind’s eye certain faceless women’s figures; and said aloud, ‘Thank you. I don’t ever catch anything.’

‘That’ll be good of you. You’re being very good to me, you two …’ Mumbling, he led them to the door and held it open for them. It was dreadful to pass so close to him and not be able to touch him, to see quite close by one’s shoulder his earthy, pudgy little face downcast to hide the working of his mouth, so that it looked all bulging forehead and angry eyes, and not be able to tell him that it didn’t matter if he did cry, everybody cried sometimes. ‘I’d better go first …’ It was as if his grief was a fluid interpenetrating his body and making it immensely heavy. Shuffling up the staircase in front of them, his hands in his trouser pockets, his head well down in his collar, he moved as if his limbs were leaden, he almost waddled. And in this part of the house he looked smaller than ever, for here things were even more monstrously swollen. All the way up the stairs hung subject pictures vaster than his others, with Saxon princesses and Dutch fisher-girls eight feet high, and gold frames thick as a ship’s cable; and on the landing the banisters became a kind of reredos, and at each side of the three stained glass windows were curtains which, had they fallen on a child, would have stifled it before it could beat its way out. The door at which he knocked with such a meek, tense bridling of his strength, towered up and up above his little crouching back.

He put his fingers to his lips. ‘Remember he doesn’t know … He hasn’t the least idea …’

As the nurse went out her cap was reflected half a dozen times in shining cliffs of mahogany. It wasn’t a homely room; and that broad bed must be dreadful for the servants to make; and it was heart-rendingly too broad for the man who lay in it. He made so little of a mound under the bedclothes that he must be nearly as spare as the rain-polished bones one sees lying on the turf on the Downs. Blue shadows lay like pennies on his closed eyelids, and on his high cheekbones was a flush like firelight seen through the hands. There was on his long Scotch face a look as if he were nourishing something within himself at the cost of a continual physical sacrifice. It was the same look that is on the face of a woman who is going to have a baby. Only there were these colours painted on his skin, like a plague sign daubed on a door, as warning that what he was cherishing within him was not life but a disease, that its birth would be a death.

He raised his blue lids and stared up with huge, brilliant eyes. Avariciously Francis Pitt bent over him to receive his gaze. After some seconds of stillness the man in bed gave a weak, sweet smile.

‘Well, Gordon, how are you?’ asked Francis Pitt. ‘Are you feeling any better?’

‘I’m feeling fine, thank you, Francis,’ answered the man in bed, with a slight Scotch accent. There was a little weariness mixed with his sweetness. It was apparent that Francis Pitt had asked him this question several times before during that day, and during the preceding day also.

‘I’ve brought some people to see you, Gordon.’ He spoke with exaggerated distinctness. Evidently his sense that his friend was every moment being borne further and further made him want to shout at him, as one would at someone who was moving physically away from one; and as that plainly could not be done in a sickroom he tried to get the same effect by speaking very clearly. It could be seen, from a little irritable twitch of the head on the pillow, that this puzzled and annoyed Hurrell, who however made no reference to it, but said with the same sweetness: ‘If it’s who I think it is, I’m glad.’

‘Yes, it’s the folks I spoke of, right enough. Here’s the famous Miss Fassendyll …’

He gave her one of those beautiful looks which men who have had nothing unworthy to do with women all their lives can give women when they are old; looks that are half holy memories. He was smiling at Sunflower, he was smiling at some girl who had looked lovely when the wind blew her full skirts round her at a street corner in a Lowland village fifty years before. He said, ‘It’s very good of a young lady like you, who must have such a quantity of gay engagements, to come and see an invalid.’

Remembering that he was out of office, and that Francis Pitt had said that he hated exile, she told him, ‘Oh, I wanted to! You see, you’re one of the few great men I’d never met.’

Gently he laughed and took away his hot, damp hand, and said, ‘Well, I’m afraid you must have found us a poor lot.’

‘But I wish you hadn’t been like this,’ she went on. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been bad.’

With that piercing sweetness he said, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing but a feverish chill of sorts. A kind of ague you might call it. I make the most of it, I’m afraid, because I’ve always enjoyed unusually good health, and now when a little real pain and discomfort comes my way I make a terrible fuss. And Francis here spoils me and encourages me to get good treatment by malingering. It’s no wonder that it’s got about that I’ve got galloping consumption.’ He gave a mild laugh. ‘That was how they put it in—Francis, what was the paper? I showed it to you the day before you made me come out here.’

‘The Chicago Standard was the fool thing’s name,’ said Francis Pitt heartily.

‘The silly things they put in papers!’ marvelled Sunflower, and stepped back.

‘And there’s someone else,’ said Francis Pitt.

‘My dear Hurrell …’ mewed Essington. She was proud of him. He was at his best in emergencies like that. Nobody could have told from his demeanour that there was any shadow on the occasion. He moved towards the bed with the slow grace of a cat, put his head on one side like a cat wondering if it is safe to jump on a stranger’s lap, and laid his hand on the quilt very lightly and tentatively, as a cat puts a paw through a railing towards a bird. ‘Tell me … am I your dear Essington?’ His tone suggested, ‘If not I shall run away and play by myself, it’s of no real consequence. But I should like …’

Hurrell’s fingers closed over the offered hand. Huskily he said, ‘You are my dear Essington … indeed. There’s a saying we have in Scotland … It sounds foolish in English … A sight for sore eyes …’

‘It certainly does sound wrong,’ said Essington querulously, dropping into an armchair by the bed. ‘Sore eyes … It reminds me of the days we were in opposition together and used to join forces to bully that ass Prester when he was at the Home Office. We used to allege that he exposed Russian immigrants to stricter eye tests than the other immigrants because they were free-spirited rebels against the Tsardom. I wonder now if that was true …’

‘Let not two politicians in the autumn of their days sit down and distress themselves by discussing how much of what they used to say was true,’ objected Hurrell, ‘particularly what they used to say when they were in opposition.’ He got back to what was evidently a little prepared speech. ‘But I couldn’t tell you you were a sicht for sair een, for I would never dare use Scottish dialect to you after an evening we spent at a play by a compatriot of mine called Sir James Barrie. Your comments were most unsympathetic. Do you not remember? We were taken in a party by Lucille Oppenshaw.’

‘How I detest that woman,’ said Essington. ‘We Liberals brought our own ruin on ourselves. We ought to have seen that no man was fit to lead a Party who had been fool enough to marry that woman. There were no sensuous inducements. That toasting-fork figure makes celibacy seem a life of riotous self-indulgence.’

Hurrell said ‘Tchk! Tchk!’ in a shocked, delighted way, and laughed into his pillow. Sunflower moved to a sofa that was set against the wall, facing the end of the bed. Francis Pitt was standing looking at the two men with a gratified yet wistful expression, as if he had arranged this meeting and was very glad that it was going off well, but that he had not wished it to go so well that they would both forget all about him. Presently he strolled over to his sister, who was sitting by a table near the sofa, and lounged over the back of a chair. Suddenly he caught sight of a bottle on the table and started up right, exclaiming in a vehement undertone: ‘But he’s still taking that French stuff! You know Cornelliss said he was to have the German brand! Oh, Etta, Etta!’

‘It’s only because the German brand hadn’t come when it was time for him to have his last dose. But very likely the German has come by now, and he can have it next time. I’ll see if you like.’

‘Go now, go now …’

To the closing door he said, but too late for her to hear, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ and went and sat down in an armchair on the other side of the bed.

Hurrell said: ‘I’ve often thought of that evening. The things you said. I missed you a lot after you left. I don’t know how often I’ve said to myself, when something ridiculous happened, “I wish Essington had been here. He’d have laughed at that, and maybe said one of his things!” Nobody else ever said things like you. I’ve always told people who’ve come in since you’ve left, “There was never such good company as Essington.’”

Francis Pitt jumped forward on his chair as if he expected to have to give corroboration of this; but this was not asked, and he sat back.

‘Yes, we were always good friends,’ said Essington, with an air of grudging the admission, of cantankerousness reluctantly giving way to amity.

Hurrell meditated: ‘It’s funny what a lot jokes count for in life. And just seeing the humour of things. Even if you hadn’t said those things the mere fact that we laughed at the same things meant …’ his voice faded away; and came back crisp and Scotch, ‘almost more than anything.’ It was apparent that though his mind did not know that he was dying his spirit had learned it, and was not afraid, but was calmly casting its accounts of what it had gained and lost in its sojourn on earth. He closed his eyes and was still for a minute. Then he said feebly, ‘There was something I saved for you … Something that I thought would make you laugh … Francis … What was it?’

Instantly Francis was on his feet, bending over the bed.

‘I know … The letter in that packet we were going over yesterday … The letter from St Audrie … I asked you to put it by for Essington …’

Francis Pitt went smartly to a writing table in the corner of the room, opened a drawer, took out a paper, and brought it back with the fussiness of a retriever bringing back its bird.

‘Read it out, Francis.’

With comic pomposity he read: ‘My dear Hurrell, I hear that Lord Longchester has called on you and has suggested that he should be given the power to raise the fourth Draconian Loan. This news has caused me to feel the greatest perturbation, as I can hardly imagine a less suitable person. He has gone from bad to worse ever since he left Eton. Some time ago he left the lady who is his wife and ran away with a woman. Recently he had to sell his place. I do not think that any Englishman of his class who sells his place after he has been left sufficient wealth whereby to maintain it is the kind of person who ought to be associated in any way with the operations, whether financial or otherwise, of the Empire. May I say that though the duty which has fallen to me of writing this letter is painful—and may I say that that duty has been made more painful than it need have been by my consciousness that I write in response to no enquiry on your part, but have to intrude unasked to avert a calamity that may be I know not how near final accomplishment—I consider that this occurrence should not be forgotten but should be kept in mind as a proof of how undesirable it is that Downing Street should permit itself to parley with approaches that should have been made to the Foreign Office. Yours sincerely, St Audrie.’

‘Oh, glorious, glorious! … What a man …’

‘And I had but told one of my secretaries to give this Longchester rogue a cup of tea and a bun.’

‘But do you remember the personal letter he wrote to the Postmaster General in our time? “The Marchioness of St Audrie was twice disturbed last night, once at 11.30 p.m. and once at 11.45 p.m., by persons ringing up her telephone number and enquiring, ‘Are you the Coliseum?’”

‘Oh, the man’s a wonder!’

While the two men laughed, Francis Pitt neatly folded the letter, took it over to the desk, and went back to his seat on the other side of the bed.

‘Oh, often and often I’ve wanted to hear what you would say about things like that. There was Mussolini.’

‘Yes, he came after my time. Of course you had to meet him over that League of Nations advertising business. What sort of wonder is he?’

Hurrell closed his eyes again, said in a very soft, very Scotch voice, ‘The man’s a lunatic,’ breathed deeply and nuzzled into his pillow as if he were going to sleep. Francis Pitt moved forward anxiously, and a fretfulness came over the sick man’s face. With a broken word and a flutter of his hand, as if he were trying to find some reason for the change and were too tired to achieve it, he summoned up some last resource of energy and rolled over so that he lay with his face to Essington and his back to Francis Pitt. There was a silence of some moments. Essington bent forward and covered his eyes with his hands. Francis Pitt sat cupping his podgy chin in his hands and staring at the back of Hurrell’s head, which was all he could see of him. A clock ticked, a flame drove, behind the maroon curtain and the navy-blue blind an owl smudged the night with its blurred cry.

Hurrell stirred in his bed. Both men sat up to attention. He was lying on his back staring at the ceiling.

Suddenly he said, ‘Man, your suit was smaller on you than mine was on me.’ His Scotch accent was quite broad. He said, ‘Your shirt!’

Essington’s laughter was almost weeping. ‘Hurrell, you flatter yourself!’

They looked at each other steadily. It occurred to Sunflower that they might have been brothers. But perhaps that was just because they were both the same age, because they were both old.

Francis Pitt wriggled on his seat and looked round the room. His eyes fell on Sunflower. He looked back at Hurrell who had put his hand on the quilt. He watched Essington, who, making the gesture as light as could be, torturing his eyebrows into a quizzical shape, laid his hand on it. He pulled himself out of his deep chair and went over to Sunflower.

‘Will you come and see my garden?’ he asked softly.

As they were going down the stone steps to the gravel he paused and laid a protective hand on her arm, ‘Are you cold? Would you like your cloak?’

Amazed by the idea that she could feel heat or cold when she was wholly absorbed in him, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, no!’

She saw that she had spoken with too much emphasis. He had lowered his eyelids and was compressing his lips, plainly he was filing the fact of her excitement for reference, and meant to examine it at leisure. Deep down in her she realised that her delight in him was shot with fear. Embarrassed, she ran down the last few steps and stood on the gravel, looking up at the stars.

He padded down after her, standing a little behind her, took a cigar out of his pocket and slowly, clumsily lit it.

‘That’s a clever thing to do, to ask a lady to see my garden, when it’s pitch dark and she can’t see a thing,’ he said, amiably but stiffly.

It was all falling so flat. She had wanted to be alone with him so that she could get to know him and be nice to him. But they had nothing to say to each other. He was in the grip of a queer mood. He seemed so penetrated with heavy grief that a sense of weight, of suffering under weight, hung round him, yet she had a suspicion that he was bathed in a sense of satisfaction at being there with her, a satisfaction so strong that if she had made a movement to go back into the house he would have stopped her with a vigorous gesture, a satisfaction so utterly unconcerned with her well-being that the gesture would have been definitely threatening. She hated this satisfaction men got out of people, which did not make them gay and caused them to feel cruel instead of grateful to those who gave it. Essington’s unsmiling, complaining glee in making a fool of her and scolding her for it afterwards was like that. Sharply she turned her head and looked at Francis Pitt. But at the sight of him she could believe nothing bad. He was a simple, loving, unhappy little man. She had been imagining these things. Living with Essington had spoiled her nerves. There was nothing wrong with the moment except that it was falling flat, she supposed because he wasn’t interested in her.

Weakly she murmured, ‘The moonlight looks nice on the flat top of that yew hedge. It might be frost.’

‘Ah,’ he said, brightening up because she had given him a line to follow, which showed how bored he must have been. ‘Come and see what lies behind it. That’s my paved garden. It’s very old, it belonged to the Tudor house that was on the site of this one till it got burned down about sixty years ago. The other gardens were burned with the house, and the old ass of a city merchant who built this house just planted his idea of a nice suburban garden all over the ruins of them. I dare say you noticed how queer it looked as you came down the drive. And I dare say you think the house is queer enough too.’ He gave one of those deep chuckles which were comic and endearing and piteous, since they were so obviously nervous prostration of the sort of maleness which has no nerves, so obviously timid attempts to avert criticism by pretending that this was the rugged strength which laughs when it is criticised. ‘Well, I like it. I like queer things. When we first came to England Etta buzzed round looking for somewhere to live and I got sick of it, and I could see the woman would spend the next two years finding a house, and then two years after that picking up bits of furniture, and that I’d have to go on living in hotels till she’d finished. So when we stumbled on this, with its crazy gardens and its Noah’s ark furniture, I said, “For God’s sake, let’s buy the thing, it’s somewhere to live and it’s too damn good a joke to let out of the family.” So here we are.’ Having reached the end of his defence, again he chuckled.

She walked beside him across the moonlit square of gravel, smiling to herself. It was funny the way he took his childish feeling of diffidence at doing such a grown-up thing as furnishing a house and represented it as the curt gesture of a strong silent man. To her face she held the flower which he had given her at dinner.

The passage through the yew hedge was cut aslant so that no vista of the garden within should be seen from without. There was a second when they could see nothing before or behind but walks of twiggy darkness. He gave a mutter of pleasure as if he liked being hidden, he dawdled as if he did not want to leave this cache.

She went on ahead of him into the garden. It was like a sampler worked by some grave little girl who liked quiet colours. There were the four tall hedges like a frame, and flagstones like the canvas that had to be sewn on, and yew beasts and plants whose flowers had now the hueless lustre of faded silk, set in four beds within box borders, all as neat as stitching. At the other end of the garden, in a vaulted alcove cut in the middle of the yew hedge, was a stone bench, dignified and melancholy, that was like the moral emblem worked at the foot of the sampler.

Francis Pitt, coming up behind her, said: ‘In here you’re shut right away from all the rest of the world. I come in here and sit on that seat when I’m feeling too miserable. I have sat there a lot … during the last few days …’

She made a little tender noise, but could find no words to say. She looked hard at the stone bench. She could see him sitting there, his bulging shirt-front gleaming in the moonlight, his martyred face tragicomic with strong shadows, his feet not quite reaching the ground. She could imagine herself running across the flagstones to him in the dress of some other age, in the full skirts of the eighteenth century, throwing herself down at his feet, drawing his head to her breast with bare arms, petting him and saying things that didn’t mean anything, that you couldn’t argue about, but that would make him feel better. It would be impossible to do it in ordinary clothes. If she did it in the dress she had on now it would look as if she were making love to him. She wished that when a person was in trouble one could get up a sort of masque about it, when all his friends would put on fancy dress to show that what they were doing was something separate from everyday life and did not have to be followed up in any way, and would make beautiful, stylised gestures to show what they really felt about him, and said lovely, vague things in poetry. But people never put on fancy dress in gardens except to do pastoral plays for charities (she wondered suddenly who ‘Our Dumb Friends’ were) and then it was usually ‘As You Like It’, which was a horrid dull play when you came to act it. You couldn’t believe that the people you saw going down to Kew on Sunday didn’t say warmer and kinder and more unexpected things to each other than Orlando and Rosalind did. It was queer how nothing connected with the stage, like fancy dress, ever could be made handy for anything that would be really useful, as running over the flagstones to him would be.

As it was, everything was falling flat, so flat.

She said timidly, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go back to the house and be with them?’

Like a sulky child he answered, ‘Well, they seemed to be getting on quite well without me, didn’t they?’

She looked at him in surprise, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, but go on, you understand all that, don’t you?’

‘Understand what?’

‘Well, what I mean to say is, you do see, don’t you, what’s happening when Mr Hurrell seems to think you a bit fussy, when he’s glad to see other people? You know, it’s like this, you’re looking after him with special care because you know he won’t get well, but he doesn’t know he isn’t going to get well, so naturally he thinks you’re fussy, and it gets on his nerves. But you can’t do anything about it. The only thing you could do would be to stop giving him special care, and goodness knows you can’t do that. It’s just a price you have to pay for feeling like that about people. You see, I know, because Mother was like that. Just an hour before she died, she said to me and my sister, quite cross, “I could get to sleep if you girls would leave me alone and not sit gawking at me like that.” And we just had to go. But, mind you, it didn’t mean anything, not really. She thought the world of us girls. They don’t mean anything by it, really they don’t …’

He looked at her searchingly, ‘Do you think it’s that?’

‘Oh, I’m sure it is.’

He dropped his head and stared down on the stones. ‘I believe you’re right,’ he said, in a voice as childish as that in which he had made his original complaint. Then he repeated in a harder, more adult voice, more strongly tinged with an American accent, ‘I believe you’re right.’ It was as if faith that what she had said was true had given him the strength to test it by reason, and that he felt more at ease using the tool of reason. ‘Why, yes. I believe that’s what it is.’

‘Well, don’t worry about it any more,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, I won’t,’ he said, ‘I know your explanation’s true. It’s got the turn to it that means it’s true. I’ve made my money by backing tips that had the same turn to them. Well, well, that’s how it is. I must just put up with it. It’s part of what I have to do for my old man.’ He took some puffs at his cigar. ‘Thank God you’ve told me this. You see, I’d been thinking that maybe I’d been boring him all these years and that he’d been too good-natured to let me see it …’

‘Oh, it wouldn’t be that!’ she exclaimed in wonder. Didn’t he know that everybody would be bound to like him?

‘It might have been, it might have been,’ he said, with an air of scrupulous fairness. ‘Yes, I’m glad you talked to me about this, because you see I know nothing about death. All my life I’ve been an extraordinarily lucky man, in every way. And I’ve never lost anyone I’ve been fond of. My father and mother are still alive down at Bath, and all my brothers and sisters are kicking about somewhere. So I don’t know a thing about people who are dying. And one hasn’t got a lead. Death is one of those special occasions in your life when people are apt to have the same special needs, however different they may be in ordinary life, and though it keeps on happening again and again, yet nothing about it ever gets out, no one knows what those special needs are. Now, one realises when one’s having a love-affair with a woman that she’s apt to have this and that emotion because of the situation.’

She was shaken by a tremor of disgust. He spoke in a level, matter-of-fact tone, and there was certainly nothing coarse in his words, yet for a second she felt outraged as if he had said something indecent. But she realised that was mad and silly of her.

‘She may be jealous then, though at any other time she’d be fair-minded enough. But one knows all that the first time one needs the knowledge, because all the time love’s being talked about, love’s being written about. But no one talks about death, no one writes about it. We’re all afraid of it.’ His voice was desolate, his voice was shuddering. ‘So when the damned thing comes on us we blunder about anyhow … unless a friendly soul comes along and will take the trouble to look closely at a stranger’s troubles and read the right meaning of them.’ He spoke gravely, and evidently under the influence of deep feeling. For a little while he puffed at his cigar in silence; and then said, suddenly, ‘God bless you, Miss Fassendyll.’

She had always been sure that people did in real life behave just as they did in plays that were considered quite bad.

He muttered, ‘I believe I shall sleep tonight.’ It was a measure of his need for rest, she supposed, that when he spoke of it his voice was charged with gruff voluptuousness, as if he meditated indulgence in some rich food, some heady wine.

It was queer and lovely that anything she had said should have been useful to him; and it had really been useful, he was not merely being polite. The new placidity of his movements, the unctions of his speech, showed that he had been reconciled to life in the last few moments. It had been left to her stupidity to serve his need because what he said was true, nothing was written about death, nobody talked about it. That was because men did most of the writing, and nearly all the talk that was listened to, and they always avoided as subjects things that could not be altered by argument. It hadn’t been a man who had given her the idea why dying people get cross with those who cared for them most. She and Lily and Mabel had been sitting, very sad about it, in the kitchen, when someone had come in, someone wearing an apron, someone whose name she had forgotten or never knew, just a neighbour who had popped in to see what she could do, and she had explained it to them. Her own mother had been like that too. There had been lots of women who had come in to see them, during those last few days, women wearing aprons, with unimportant names, and had told them all sorts of things that had helped through that time.

It occurred to Sunflower, with a sense of having been sold into a desolate country, that since she had left Chiswick and moved into the centre of London nobody had told her anything that would have been of use to Francis Pitt in his trouble. She felt a sense of guilt about this, as if she had broken a tradition, had done something like moving out of her place during a church service. She couldn’t have helped being an actress, so far as she could see. It had just happened to her. But all the same it didn’t seem right she should be one; not really right. And she felt that possibly he might have done something wrong of the same indefinable sort in becoming a very rich man and a politician. That might account for the faint sense she got now and then that he was not perfectly good. They should neither of them have been standing in this formal and enclosed garden, the air of which was melancholy. They should have been somewhere else, cosy and less tidy.

Because of his grief she felt a bodily pain, a bruise over the heart. Through the darkness and behind him, so that certainly he could not see her, she moved her hand as if to stroke his stooping shoulders. She could not even say anything, lest she should seem to be making capital out of his sorrow, to be using it as an avenue to intimacy with him. In any case she was nearly paralysed by stage-fright. She felt as if everything she did or said when she was with this man had to be weighed on very delicate scales, and if it were too light he would turn away, and if it were too heavy he would stand by and be courteous and gloomily decide not to see her any more. It was lovely to be with him, but it was torturing, exhausting.

He was looking at her as he smoked. Evidently he thought that as there was only moonlight she would not be able to see that he was doing it. She could not bear that for long, so she put up her hand in front of her face on the pretence of smoothing her hair. At that he took the cigar from his mouth, and said, not at all casually, but as if a long train of thought were coming to the surface, ‘What was that play you acted in where you went to a man’s rooms at night, wrapped in a great silver cloak?’ He spoke gloatingly; his little hands greedily described the way the silver folds had fallen. ‘You made a most beautiful picture. I have never forgotten it. Can you remember what I mean?’

‘Why,’ she answered in a little, weak voice. ‘I don’t know which that would be, I’m sure I’ve acted in such a lot of plays. It must have been some years ago if I went to a man’s rooms at night. Nowadays all that happens before the curtain goes up, and it isn’t considered specially interesting …’ She found it difficult to speak to him, but not because she was feeling the boredom and embarrassment that usually came on her when people praised her beauty. Instead she was feeling as if this was the first time that anyone had ever praised her beauty. It was as if an utterly new thing were happening to her, and had taken away her breath. She murmured, ‘Oh, I think I know … That would be “The Nightingale”. It was by Mr John Richard Smith, and he’s ever so old, so those sort of things go on happening in his plays …’

‘Well, whether he’s old or not, he wrote a play that had one wonderfully lovely scene,’ pronounced Francis Pitt solemnly, shaking his head for emphasis, ‘a wonderfully lovely scene …’ He went on smoking with an air of rumination, till with an abrupt, twitching movement, as if his high spirits had suddenly flared up, he threw his cigar high in the air over the flowerbeds and exclaimed in a voice full of good humour, ‘My God, why did I bring you into this gloomy old garden where I come and have the dumps! I’ve lots of other things here I needn’t be ashamed of! Come and see my chestnut walk.’

He was indeed very happy, far happier than she could ever have thought he would be while this trouble was hanging over him. They had to walk quite a little way, through the passage in the yew hedge, across the gravel in front of the house, which was the colour of india-rubber in the moonlight and had coarse blunt edges to all its copings and angles like the edges of hot water bottles, and up a winding path through a shrubbery of all those plants whose leaves set out to be shiny and are dull, laurel and rhododendra, but his mood held. He moved lightly and springily on his little feet and made broken, grunting, satisfied noises, and sometimes whistled tunelessly and exultantly through his teeth.

At the last turn of the path he stopped and said proudly, ‘Now!’

They were at the end of an avenue of chestnut trees, that drove along a flat terrace on the hillside to something too distant for anything to be known of it in this light save that it was high, and white, and stamped with the mould of human fancy: a statue, a fountain. Wide bays of brightness scalloped the pathway, for there were but half the number of trees on the valley side that there were on the side of the rising ground, so that at her elbow were wide windows of landscape, a landscape of vague radiant woods that seemed to be adhering to hills sticky with moonlight in the manner of treacle-caught moths, and of sky, the dark sky that is always a little strange to human eyes, since though it is more lawless than the land with its unmarshalled, moving clouds, it is by night more formal, pricked out with the patterns of the hard stars. There were floating here and there silver vapours that might have been passing over the world on some alchemic task of making beauty of what was not, a changing the character of what was beautiful to something rarer. The hideous house below them now served the eye, for its slate roofs looked like shining waters; and the candles on the unpartnered chestnut trees, lit by the full light of the moon, which the fine matt surface of the petals did not reflect, seemed to have the short, crumbling texture of snow.

‘Oh, it is lovely!’ breathed Sunflower.

He was innocently pleased, he was childishly proud of his possessions. ‘Ah, you must come and see it by day! It’s a fine view over to Harrow, and the candles on my chestnuts are at their best. Pink and white they are, the flowers we’re walking on.’ He ploughed them up with his feet, whistling as if it gave him a sense of luxury to be treading on fallen flowers.

‘I love them when they’re mixed,’ said Sunflower. ‘There was an avenue of them in a park where I lived when I was little. Strawberries and cream, we used to call the flowers on the ground.’

With gleeful, generous inconsequence he asked, ‘Do you like strawberries and cream? We might have had some tonight. My gardener forces them in some corner hereabouts, though God knows I have to go on my knees to get some of what I pay him to grow on my land with my money. But it’s a pity we didn’t have some for you tonight.’

‘It’s awfully kind of you, but they’re no good to me, ever. I like them, but they don’t like me—’

She bit her lip. This was one of the phrases that drove Essington into a frenzy. But Francis Pitt seemed not to be offended by it, for he went on happily, as if to talk of trivial things were a holiday. ‘Mm. Now I loathe asparagus, and we’re in the thick of the season now. How I hate those weeks every year when I have to sit in front of a plate that’s stocked with that anaemic, water-logged timber …’ No, he hadn’t minded her being common. It was a rest to be with a man who wasn’t porcupinish with different subtle sorts of fastidiousness. One could tell him anything. She remembered suddenly something that had been a lump in her throat ever since the morning because she couldn’t get it out of her system by telling somebody. In the automobile coming there she had felt quite sick because she didn’t dare say anything about it to Essington. She wondered if she could possibly tell Francis Pitt.

She paused, and stood looking over the moonlit landscape. He checked his walk and came to a halt beside her and asked, ‘Not cold, are you?’ with so obvious a desire to do everything he could for her, that she felt a rush of confidence, and began penitently, ‘I did make such a silly of myself today.’

‘How was that?’

‘Well, you see, I’m rehearsing a new play of Mr Trentham’s just now, and I’m playing a person who isn’t very well educated, not quite what you’d call a lady, really. Well, in the first act I have to say, “My husband’s uncle’s got mines in the Andes, not that I know where that is, I never was good at geography.” Well, that’s how I’ve always said it till today. But this morning Mr Childs, who’s our producer, stopped me while I was saying the line and said, “Miss Fassendyll, if I were you I should say Jography.” Well, naturally, when he said that, I thought I’d been saying it wrong and that it ought to be Jography. Well, I’m not the sort of person who pretends to know more than I do and never have, so I said, “Thank you very much, Mr Childs, and I’m sure I’m very sorry but I always thought it was Geography.” Well, you could have heard a pin drop, and then they all laughed, and what’s worse, they all stopped themselves. Well, wasn’t it awful of me?’

‘Awful of you? No, by God, it was not. It was awful of them. The fools, the silly little fools. Such a little thing to snigger about.’

‘Oh, but it was a dreadfully stupid mistake.’

‘But such a tiny mistake. It just shows what small minds people have. It’s a mistake anybody might have made. My God, the words in the dictionary I can’t pronounce …’

‘Really?’ she asked, very pleased. ‘Do you have trouble that way? Oh, but you aren’t stupid. You see, it isn’t just that I’m ignorant, I do such silly things. I suppose you heard about the interview I gave the Evening Mail when I first signed up to play in “As You Like It”?’

‘Not a word,’ he told her stoutly.

‘That was awful. I told the young man I was looking forward to it because it was the first time I’d acted in a Barrie play. Wasn’t it dreadful of me? And he went and put it in the papers, though he had stayed on and had his tea. I never heard the last of it. But really it wasn’t such an out of the way mistake to make, because Barrie did write a play called “Rosalind”. All the same, people laughed.’

‘The fools, the damned fools,’ he said with mounting indignation. ‘As if all that stuff mattered. But I hate to think of you exposed to all this spite and jealousy and meanness. I wish to God you weren’t on the stage.’

She began to move on along the avenue. ‘I don’t like it much,’ she murmured.

‘A woman like you,’ he said gravely, ‘ought to be at home, ought to be …’

He did not finish his sentence. They walked in silence, ploughing up the flowers, looking down at them. She felt ever so much better. How this little man understood things. He saw how horrid it was for her to be laughed at; he would realise how she felt when people talked about her and Essington. She felt a sense of gratitude and affection not only for him but for this place where so many lovely things were happening: where a great man was waiting sweetly for death, and this little man was loving him so warmly, and Etta was serving them both with such devotion, and where, when she had come in for an hour or two, they had cured her of a worry that would have choked her for days, just by being simple and kind. She stopped and leaned against a tree-trunk, and looked at the pale hills and the roof that was shining like water, so that she would never forget them, and this night.

‘It’s nice here,’ she said huskily.

He stood beside her, his feet wide apart and his shoulders hunched, a kind little Napoleon. ‘Yes, it’s nice.’

They stood in silence for a little while. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but not because she felt unhappy. It was part of the relaxation brought about by the place. Of late she had always had a few tears just under the surface and now that she was all loosened these flowed, but none took their place behind her eyes. She was utterly happy, utterly at peace.

Suddenly she felt very shy, and wondered if he were not thinking her odd, and boring, and silly. She began to move away.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said very softly. ‘That’s a London tree-trunk you’ve been leaning against. Most likely it’s left a mark on your frock. Turn round and let me see.’ She watched him over her shoulder while he peered at the silk. He was very careful not to touch her. There was a beautiful decorum, a respect for physical reserves, about all his movements, though they were so friendly and cherishing. ‘No, not a thing. I am glad. It’s a very lovely frock.’ He was speaking very, very softly and she answered him as they moved on in a whisper. A cloud was passing before the moon, and it seemed right that all other things should be muted like the light.

But suddenly she uttered a loud cry.

‘My flower! I’ve lost my flower!’

‘What flower?’

‘The flower you gave me at dinner! I’ve let it fall.’

‘But there are lots more in the house. I’ll give you another—’

‘That wouldn’t be the same! I want this one! Oh, I had it this very minute!’

She hurried back to the place where they had been standing and knelt down on the ground and scrabbled among the fallen flowers, the other flowers that were not valuable. He stooped over her but did not help her in her search. Almost at once she looked up into his face and called out happily, ‘Look, I’ve found it! I knew I had it when we were here!’ She rose to her feet and he straightened himself to his little lesser height. She stood smiling at him and twirling the flower in her fingers, wondering why he did not say he was glad that she had found it. It was lovely that he was so small, it gave him the charm of a child as well as a man. Yet in a queer way it had been nice when she had been kneeling and he had been standing. She would have liked not to have got up but to kneel in front of him and take his hands and kiss them. Then perhaps he might have bent down and kissed her on the lips. It came to her like a thunderclap that there was nothing that a man can do to a woman in the way of love which she did not wish him to do to her. She was in love with Francis Pitt. Pleasure swept over her, pricking the palms of her hands; and she seemed to have been promised the kind of peace she had always longed for, an end to the fretfulness of using the will, passivity. She felt as if she had become as stable, as immovable as one of the chestnut trees. But this passivity would be more passionate than any activity, for like a tree she had a root, force was driving down through her body into the earth. It would work there in the darkness, it would tear violently up through the soil again and victoriously come into the light. She thought of that moment at her mother’s funeral when the four dark figures stood beside the hole in the ground where there lay a black box holding the body which had caused them all. The ground, the ground, she had at last become part of the process that gets life out of the ground. She felt so grateful to him for somehow doing this for her that she could have licked his hands as the dogs had done.

It seemed to her inevitable that he should say something in his deep voice that would tell her what to do, that would bring her the beginning of her passivity. But he said nothing, standing turned sideways to her, his head down, his hand covering his mouth, till he was caught away from her by another of those rushes of good spirits. All of a sudden he was striding along in front of her with his hands in his pockets and a lift in his tread, crying out in a ringing, hearty tone, not so deep as his ordinary voice but more ordinary and jolly, ‘Well, we must go back to the house now! That nurse woman will have turned Essington out long ago! Poor Essington! Poor Essington!’ He flung his head back and laughed loudly. Sunflower wondered what sort of a woman the nurse might be that he found the thought of an encounter between her and Essington so exquisitely amusing.

Following him was a pleasure, but she looked over her shoulder regretfully. ‘What’s that … that white thing we were walking towards?’

‘A statue of love!’ he called gaily and perfunctorily. ‘I’ll take you there some other time! You’ll be coming here often, you know!’ He was hurrying, he might have been an excited boy who had found something wonderful in the garden and wanted to show it to the people at home. When they came to the steps down through the shrubbery and she had to go slowly, because she did not know the way, he showed what would have been impatience had it not been so utterly unclouded by anything like ill temper.

‘You do seem happy all of a sudden,’ she said as they crossed the gravel square. She had to say something. She felt as if a great bird were beating its wings within her breast.

‘I am happy. I am happy!’ he answered gravely. ‘How should I not be happy, when you have lifted a load off my mind? You have done that for me by what you said about Hurrell.’ Whistling softly, he ran up the steps to the front door. He liked her, at least he liked her.

On the threshold he came to a halt and laughed aloud.

Over his shoulder she saw Essington sitting in the hall alone, stretched out very low in an armchair, his face nearly hidden.

Francis Pitt strolled across the room, rubbing his hands, and stood looking down on him with an indulgent air. ‘So you’ve been turned out by that nurse woman.’

‘Yes. Yes. With a great show of efficiency and womanly spirit. Odd that the profession of attending the sick is so often taken up by the female equivalent of the more powerful and relentless type of prizefighter …’ He did not show them his face, but he sounded very tired and querulous. ‘Sunflower we must go home. I’m tired. And I have to do something tomorrow. I don’t remember what it is. Don’t you remember, Sunflower? I’m sure I told you.’

‘Well, you can go home,’ Francis Pitt told him good-humouredly. ‘Your car’s outside and your chauffeur’s standing by it, admiring the stars.’

‘Was he out there?’ asked Sunflower. She had noticed nothing.

‘We nearly fell over him,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘Have a drink before you go, Essington? Whisky? Or some brandy? The brandy’s the best thing I’ve got.’

‘No. No. Yes. I’d like some brandy. I feel cold.’

Francis Pitt went over to a tray on the table and poured out some brandy with steady easy movements. He was amazingly better than he had been when they had arrived; better even than he had been that first night at dinner at her house. He offered the glass to Sunflower.

‘No, I don’t touch it, ever,’ she said. Because he gave her a straight, deep look, she became uncertain that she was so very beautiful after all.

‘Yes, our Sunflower is very respectable. Sunflower has all the puritan prejudices of the lower middle classes,’ grumbled Essington, putting out his hand for the glass. She thought he needn’t have said it like that, particularly when they had had that talk about Billie Murphy before dinner. But when he was tired things seemed to slip his mind. ‘And when one gets the dear thing to drink she likes her wine sweet.’

‘God bless her, that’s one of the ways one knows a good woman,’ said Francis Pitt, pouring out soda-water for her and some brandy for himself. She settled down in an armchair, facing Essington across the hearth. Francis Pitt went and sat on the high padded kerb of the fender, his little legs drawn up under him, his feet hooked across the metal bars. Over the rim of his glass his narrowed gaze swung like a pendulum between the two. When he had finished drinking the corners of his mouth were turned up as if he had liked his brandy very much.

She wished that a magician would change her into a cat, so that she could come and live in this house without the question of love being raised; for of course nothing like that could ever happen, not the way they met. Though there wasn’t any use worrying over that, for if they hadn’t met this way they wouldn’t have met at all. If she were a cat he would lift her off chairs, saying funny, rough, loving things to her as he did to the borzois, and would give her bits of food in his fingers. Thinking of magic made her remember the name of a clairvoyant in South Molton Street that one of the girls at the theatre had been talking about. She would like to see if she was any good. But that would be sly, for she would not be able to tell Essington. There wasn’t anything he hated quite as much as clairvoyants and spiritualist mediums.

Abruptly Essington asked, ‘When will he die?’

He was miserable, miserable. She must pull herself together and take notice of him.

‘Six weeks,’ answered Francis Pitt.

Oh, God, he was so miserable, she had done nothing for him, she could not do anything for him, she could not even touch him.

‘Very good brandy,’ said Essington cantankerously.

‘Some more.’

‘No. No. I haven’t the capacity of your friend Canterton.’

‘Canterton is not my friend,’ said Francis Pitt. He spoke with a touch of stiffness. ‘He was brought along tonight by Jack Murphy, to whom I am bound by various ties of my misspent youth. But he’s no friend of mine, and I am sorry that you saw him here in that condition.’

‘Oh, don’t apologise for his condition. Indeed, I don’t think, and I’ve watched our friend Canterton ever since he came to the House, that I’ve ever seen him to such advantage before. I’ve seen him unable to walk, prostrate on the woolsack; I’ve seen him leaning on a table to support himself through one of those speeches that consist of sham eighteenth-century epigrams delivered in a bar-parlour voice. But I have never seen him absolutely speechless before. No, I don’t think I’ve ever before seen him to such an advantage.’

Francis Pitt was lifting his glass to his lips, but he lowered it. ‘My God, Essington,’ he said, ‘I would not like to have you for an enemy.’ He looked at the other man steadily for a minute, and then repeated, ‘No, I would not like to have you as my enemy.’ He lifted his glass and emptied it, then turned round and set it on the mantelpiece and stood looking down, as if he were considering something from a fresh point of view. She wondered what was troubling him now. It could plainly have nothing to do with the words he had repeated. As tired people do, he was simply taking a chance phrase he happened to find in his mouth and saying it over and over again, making it relevant by fitting it to the rhythm of his distress.

‘Sunflower,’ said Essington wearily, pulling himself out of the chair, ‘I want to go home.’

Francis Pitt wheeled round, walked slowly across the room, pressed the bell, and stood dusting his fingertips against each other, as if he had finished a delicate job.

‘Sunflower, little Sunflower, why are you crying?’

She would not say, she pressed her face against his shoulder so that it should not be found by the lances of light the street-lamps drove through the car window. .

‘Oh, little Sunflower, is it because you think I’m old like Hurrell and may die too? Oh, you silly little Sunflower, come close and be comforted!’

For a moment she stared into the darkness of his coat. But there was no way of being honest. She went on crying.