Part Four

BETWEEN 1921 AND 1938 much happened in the world; America had the biggest boom and then the biggest slump in history; England went on the gold standard and then off again; Germany rose from defeat to power and then from power to arrogance; flying became a commonplace and radio the fifth estate; people changed from being bored with the last war to being scared of the next—with one short interval of cynical, clinical absorption.

And those were the years during which, in Browdley, the Mill Street Housing Scheme was progressing unit by unit.

One afternoon in the first week of October, 1938, the Mayor of Browdley presided at official ceremonies to mark the scheme’s completion. It had taken a long time, with many intervals of delay and inaction, but at last it was finished, and clusters of cheerful little red-brick semi-detached cottages covered the entire area of what had once been slums. George Boswell himself was also cheerful; in his early fifties he wore both his years and his mayoralty well; except for gray hair he had not changed much, it was remarked, since the day so long before when the foundation stone had been laid upon the first unit.

“Remember that day, George?” someone buttonholed him afterwards. “You had Lord Thingumbob here, and my wife slipped on the way home and busted her ankle—that’s how it sticks in my mind.”

This ancient mishap seemed to amuse the husband more than it did the Mayor, whose face momentarily clouded over as he answered: “Aye, I remember that day.”

“And so you should, after the fight you’ve had. Seventeen years, George, and without a Council majority till lately, so that you couldn’t vote ’em down, you just had to wear ’em out…Well, it’s all over now, and a big job well done.”

“Aye, but there’s plenty more to do.”

The cloud then lifted, and the Mayor was seen to be enjoying the triumph he deserved. True, there was no noble lord on hand this time, but there was to have been a personage of equal if not superior importance, none other than a Cabinet Minister—and everyone knew that his absence was not George’s fault, but Hitler’s. George did not like Hitler—for other reasons than that; but now that the Pact of Munich had been signed he could not help seeing a certain symbolism in what had happened—the removal of the threat of war by a last-minute miracle so that the final ceremonies of the Mill Street Housing Scheme could take place as planned. And a further touch: the very same workmen who had erected the flags and platform had been taken right off the job of building an air-raid shelter under the Town Hall. George mentioned this in his speech, and again in a Guardian editorial that concluded:—

We people of Browdley—quiet folks who ask for nothing more than to do our work in peace and live our lives in decency—we do not profess to understand the complicated geographic, ethnographic, and historical problem of the Sudetenland which has come so close to plunging a whole continent into the infinite disaster of war. We cannot be sure even now that the settlement just reached will be administered fairly to all parties, or whether, in certain phases of the negotiations, the threat of the sword did not prevail over the scales of justice. What we do know, by and large, is that at the eleventh hour a decision has been made that every honest citizen of every country will endorse in principle—because it is AGAINST WAR. Let every man of Browdley whose death sentence has thus been commuted, let every woman of Browdley, who will not now face sorrow and bereavement, let every child of Browdley who will grow up to inherit a happier world—let them face anew THE TASKS OF PEACE AND RECONSTRUCTION.

After the ceremonies George walked home across the town and had tea alone in his study—the same study, though enlarged by a bay window built over the garden, as well as by inclusion of a book-lined alcove that had formerly been part of the lobby. For George’s library was now more certainly than ever the largest private one in Browdley, the years having just about doubled its contents.

Everything else was much the same, including Annie, and the printing office, and Will Spivey. When George handed in his Munich editorial, the old fellow, a little crustier but otherwise unchanged by the years, read it through, grunted, and said at length: “Do you want this as well as the one about the new sewage scheme?”

“No,” answered George. “Instead of.”

“What’ll I do with the sewage one then?”

“Keep it till next week.”

But by the next morning George’s slight misgiving about Munich had thriven, and he took the opportunity to cut out that final sentence. Instead he wrote:—

…For the rest, we must wait and see whether Hitler’s word is to be trusted. If his desire for “peace in our time” is as sincere as our own, we should expect to see some corresponding reduction in German armaments, and until we have evidence of this we can only continue, however reluctantly, the process of bringing our own armaments up to a minimum safety level. THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL DO THIS WE DO NOT DOUBT.

George’s optimism had merely swerved in another direction.

Like most Englishmen, he was shocked rather than surprised when war came. Nineteen thirty-eight had been the year of hypnosis, the sleepwalk into tragedy, but the first half of 1939 brought a brand of disillusionment that made the actual outbreak of hostilities almost an anticlimax. After that there was so much to be done, and so little time for self-scrutiny that George was spared the full chagrin of awakening; like all mayors of towns, he found his office had become practically a branch of the national government, with his own tasks and personal responsibilities greatly increased. He shouldered them with gusto from before dawn till often past midnight while England slowly dissolved into a new era—slowly, it seemed, because it had been natural to expect change and catastrophe overnight. When no bombs fell on London, and when all continued to be quiet along the Western Front, a curious hangover of illusion recurred; it was a “phony” war, said some; perhaps it was not even a war at all. One morning at his editorial desk, aware of this unreality and not knowing how else to handle it, George indulged in a little spree of optimism. After all, he reflected, the good citizens of Browdley deserved a pick-me-up; they had done wonders in response to all his war-emergency appeals, had enlisted splendidly for air-raid protection and civilian defense, and were resolutely creating a strong Home Front while across the Channel hundreds of their sons were already facing the enemy, but so far, thank heaven, not being killed by him. It was astonishing, compared with the First World War, how few casualties there were along that Western Front. And thinking things out, George composed the following:—

We have now been at war for almost six months, and though it would be premature to offer ourselves any congratulations, nevertheless we may justifiably wonder whether the Germans are able to do so either. True, their tanks and mechanized armies have scored victories over the farm carts and cavalry of Poland, but at the cost of overrunning that country they have brought against them a factor which, with memories of a quarter of a century ago, must chill the blood of even the most ardent Nazi—namely, THE FULL FIGHTING STRENGTH OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE. For today that strength is assembled, not in a line of half-flooded trenches hastily improvised, but along the mightiest system of steel and concrete fortifications ever constructed by man—THE MAGINOT LINE. No wonder that the Nazi Juggernaut has satisfied itself with triumphs elsewhere. No wonder that (as some people are whispering, almost as if there were a mystery about it)—“nothing is happening” on the Western Front. If nothing is happening, then surely that is the measure of our victory, and of the enemy’s defeat. For that is precisely what the Maginot Line was built for—in order THAT NOTHING SHOULD HAPPEN.

George thought this rather good, for it rationalized something that had begun to puzzle even himself slightly—that so-called phony war. But of course the Maginot Line was the clue. A high military officer had shown him some photographs of it—after which the whole business became no puzzle at all.

A pity the general public couldn’t clear their minds in the same way, but naturally the photographs were secret; and it was to substitute for them, in a sense, that George had felt impelled to write his editorial.

Perhaps as a result of this, he wrote fewer editorials after the war ceased to be phony. For one thing, he was overworked, and if he ever found himself with an hour to spare he preferred to drop in at St. Patrick’s to see Father Wendover, who had long been his best friend. As George had somehow suspected from the first, Wendover was not only agile-minded but considerably sympathetic to George’s work in the town. He had always held what were considered “advanced” ideas for a priest, with the result that he more often had to defend himself for being one than for having them; and that, he claimed, was as good for him as for his opponents.

Such controversies had flourished in peacetime, and George had often joined in them; during the war, however, and especially after the Norwegian fiasco and the French collapse, nothing seemed to matter but the bare facts of life and death, disaster and survival, enemy and friend. And George found Wendover congenial because, beneath the surface of the proud ecclesiastic, there lay a deep humility which, in a curious way, matched his own. Thus it was to Wendover that George took his thoughts during the difficult days of 1940, and there was one day, just after Dunkirk, when he brought over some notes of a speech he was due to make to a local patriotic organization. He wanted to know what Wendover thought about it

And the latter, while he was listening, smiled slightly. Here was George Boswell, Mayor of Browdley—this decent, hardworking, well-meaning, quite talented fellow—a good citizen and a stouthearted friend—a man whose powers of leadership were considerable and might have been greater had he not been so personally likable, and had he not liked to be so likable—here was George Boswell, with the Germans poised along the European coast line from Narvik to Bordeaux, thinking it really mattered what he said to a few hundred people gathered together in Browdley Co-operative Hall. But then, as an honest man, Wendover had to admit that a similar comment might have been made on his own sermons at such a time…for were George’s speeches of any less practical importance? So he listened patiently and said, at the end: “Not bad, George—not bad at all. Cheerful, anyhow.”

“You mean it’s too cheerful?”

“Well, you always were an optimist, weren’t you?” Then he smiled, but it was rather a grim, troubled smile. “You know, George, I don’t want to discourage you, but things do look pretty bad. We’ve lost our army and all its equipment, and we’ve about one plane for every ten the Germans have, and the Channel’s only a ditch nowadays…”

George’s eyes widened with a sort of bewilderment, “Aye, I’ve thought of all that myself. I’ve even wondered—some-times—if they’ve got a chance.”

“You mean to invade us?”

“Aye.”

“They might have. Recognizing the fact shouldn’t alter our resolve to fight to the last man. On the contrary, it’s the basis of it.”

George swallowed hard, then said, after a pause of gloomy thoughtfulness: “So it boils down to this—we might even lose the bloody war?”

“I think we’d be fools to assume that it’s impossible. But of course I don’t say we shall. I’m only speaking the thoughts that came into my mind while I was listening to you—perhaps because you have been wrong before when you’ve made such gallant prophecies.”

George suddenly stuffed the notes of his speech into his pocket. “Then by God I’ll be wrong again!” he almost shouted. “After all, as you say, I’ve got no reputation to lose. Aye, and I’ll not do it by halves either! I’ll tell folks that Hitler’s on the verge of his first great defeat, and that whatever else the Germans succeed in, they’ll never lick England!”

So George did this, and it was among his most quotable prophetic utterances. It was certainly the only one he had ever conquered a qualm about, and one of the very few that proved completely correct.

But as the summer months passed and the air assaults that had been expected a year before began now upon London and the large provincial cities, it became clear that this was not like the First World War, when every rostrum and pulpit had resounded to the call of a somewhat romantic patriotism. George could remember the mayor of that day orating in Browdley market square about the injustices of poor little Belgium, and thereafter luring recruits from the audience as a revivalist preacher extracts penitents. Thank goodness we don’t have that to do, thought George more than once as he began his work on those fateful autumn days; and besides, it wasn’t poor little Belgium any more, but poor little England—yet was there any Englishman who wouldn’t somehow resent that phrase? Why, even poor little Browdley didn’t seem to suit. Indeed, as George went about his wartime business in the town, visiting factories and homes and organizations, it seemed to him it had never been less “poor,” in any sense of the word. And it wasn’t so little either. One day, in company with other local mayors, he was taken up in an R.A.F. plane (his first flight), and when he stared down from three thousand feet upon the roofs of the town, he couldn’t, help exclaiming: “Why, it looks like a city!” To which an Air Force officer replied: “Let’s hope it doesn’t, or it’ll be put on the blitz list.” For Browdley had so far escaped, though bombs had fallen in the neighborhood at several places.

And there were other curious things about the war—for instance, that even with all the new food-rationing restrictions, many Browdley families were being better fed than in peacetime, because they now had full employment and money to spend. And the children in the schools, so the Medical Officer reported, were actually healthier than ever before in the history of the town.

It was nervous tension that weighed most heavily during that first terrible year of the real war—the loss of sleep through air-raid warnings even if the raiders did not come or merely passed over; the extra hours of work without holidays, the ten-hour shifts plus overtime of men and women desperately striving to repair the losses at Dunkirk; the irritations of tired folk waiting in long lines for buses to and from their factories; the continual wear and tear on older persons and those of weaker fiber. But on others the tensions, hardships, occasional dangers, and ever-present awareness of possible danger, seemed to have a toughening effect; many men who had worked all day found they were no worse off attending Home Guard drills in the evenings or patrolling the streets as air-raid wardens than they would have been in the pubs and cinemas of their peacetime choice. And in this George discovered (to his surprise, for he had never taken deliberate exercise and had rarely given his physical condition a thought) that he belonged to the tougher breed. He was fortunate. There was even pleasure to him, after a hard day of mainly sedentary work, in transferring mind and body to physical tasks of air-raid defense, in the long walks up and down familiar pavements, in chats with passers-by, in hours afforded for private thinking, in the chance of comradeship with men he would otherwise have missed getting to know. Not that he ever romanticized about it; he was ready to admit that any fun he derived from what, in a sane world, would be a waste of time was due to the fact that so far there had been no actual raids; if there were, he did not expect to enjoy them any more than the next man. But for all that, there were good moments, supreme moments, and if there were bad ones ahead, he would take them too, as and when they came, sharing them with his fellow citizens as straightforwardly as he shared with them so many cups of hot, strong, sugary tea.

A few things gave him emotions in which pleasure, if it could be called that, came from an ironic appreciation of events. For instance, that the old Channing Mill in Mill Street had at last found a use; its unwanted machinery was junked for scrap metal, while its large ground floor, leveled off, served as a headquarters and mess room for the air-raid wardens.

And also that Richard Felsby’s land, which the old man had decided too late to give the town for a municipal park, had been compulsorily requisitioned for the drills and maneuverings of the Home Guard.

But no use could be found for Stoneclough. It remained a derelict in even greater solitude now that there were no holidays to tempt Browdley folks on hikes and picnics.

George was an exceedingly busy man. Not only was his printing business getting all the work it could handle, but his position as Mayor counted for more and more as the national and local governments of the country became closely integrated. For the first time in his life he had the feeling that he really represented the town, not merely his own party on the Town Council; and it was a satisfactory feeling, especially as his tasks were far too numerous to permit him to luxuriate in it. He was not a luxuriator, anyhow. And when he came home after a fourteen-hour spell of work, it was rarely with time left over to indulge a mood. He did not even read in his study most nights, but made himself a cup of tea and went immediately to bed and to sleep.

The ordeal of the great cities continued. Night after night the wail of sirens and thudding of gunfire wakened Browdley, and sometimes a wide glow on one of the horizons gave a clue as to which of the greater near-by cities were being attacked. One night there came an emergency call for help from Mulcaster, and George accompanied several truckloads of Browdley men in a top-speed drive to the stricken area. Till then all his fire fighting and similar work had been a rehearsal; but that night, from soon after midnight till long past dawn, he knew what the real thing was, and of course, like all real things, it was different. Crawling into smoking ruins while bombs were still falling in the neighborhood, giving first aid to the injured before a doctor could arrive, he directed his squad of co-workers under conditions which, despite all the training they had had, were in a dreadful and profound sense novel.

A youngish doctor asked him when the raid was over: “Been in this sort of thing before?”

George shook his head.

“I’d have thought you had, from the way you handled those stretchers.”

“Oh, I’ve done that before.”

“The last war?”

“Aye.”

“How would you compare it—this sort of thing—and that?”

George answered irritably: “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you could.”

The men returned to Browdley with scorched and blackened faces, minor injuries, and a grim weariness of soul which, after sleep, changed to bitterness, determination, cheerfulness, even ribaldry—so strange is the alchemy of experience on men of differing make-up.

On George, after that first irritable outburst (which he later regretted as being needlessly melodramatic and quite out of character), the principal effect was a decision to do something which, at any previous time, would have been an acknowledgement of defeat, but which now, the way he could look at it, seemed more like victory over himself. He gave up the Guardian. He did not even try to sell it; he abandoned it. For years it had never more than just paid its way, and sometimes not even that; but the real issue, in George’s mind, was not financial at all. He suddenly realized that the paper had been costing too much in human effort, including his own, that could better be devoted elsewhere.

“It’s one thing with another,” he explained to Wendover. “Will Spivey’s getting old—it’s all he can do to manage the job printing—I’ll have to keep that going, of course—it’s my living. And then there’ve been newsprint difficulties, and you can’t get paper boys any more, and I’ve just lost another man to the Army…And besides all that, I haven’t the time myself nowadays. If we should get a big raid on Browdley one of these nights, we’d all have our hands full. I know what I’m talking about, after what I saw in Mulcaster. Because I’d be responsible for things here, in a sort of way. There’s a lot more work in being Mayor than there used to be.”

“And I haven’t heard any complaints about how you’re doing it, George.”

“I’ll do it better, though, when the paper’s off my hands.”

“You’re sure you won’t regret not being an editor any more?”

“Editor?” George grinned. “What did I edit? Births, marriages, funerals, meetings, whist drives, church bazaars. The Advertiser’ll do that just as well—and one paper’s enough in a town of this size. Most folks always did prefer the Advertiser, anyway.”

“But you used to write your own stuff in the Guardian sometimes.”

“Aye, and there you come to another reason why I’m giving it up. D’you remember when I came to talk to you about that speech I made just after Dunkirk?”

“You mean the one in which you prophesied that Hitler would never lick us? Yes, I remember. And I’m beginning to think you were right.”

“For once. But as you said, I’d been pretty wrong before. I’m glad you said that because it made me think about it, and I never realized how wrong I actually had been till the other day I got out the back files of the Guardian and reread some of my old editorials. By God, they were wrong. After Locarno, for instance, I wrote about France and Germany finally burying the hatchet, and after Munich I said that even though the settlement wasn’t perfect, at any rate it might keep the peace of Europe for a generation…and only a few months ago I was blabbing that the Germans couldn’t break through in the west because of the Maginot Line…Mind you, I was always perfectly sincere at the time, but that only makes it worse. Seems to me, Harry, I’m just not cut out to deal with world affairs.”

“You’ve been as right as a good many of the politicians.”

“Aye, and that’s no compliment. Maybe it was a good thing I never got to Westminster—I’d have been just another fool with a bigger platform to spout from…And another thing occurred to me—I was thinking about it last night on warden’s duty—and it’s this—that the nearer I stay to Browdley the more use I am and the fewer mistakes I make. Look round the place—I have done some good things—not many, not enough—but they’re here, such as they are, and I don’t have to try to forget ’em same as I do the stuff I used to put in the paper…Look at the Mill Street Housing Scheme, and the new Council School, and the Municipal Hospital, and the electric power station the Government took over. Aye, and the sewage farm, if you like—that’s mine too—remember what a fight I had over it? Those things are real, Harry—they exist—they’re something attempted, something done. They’re what I’ve been right about, whereas Czechoslovakia’s something I’ve been wrong about. So give me Browdley.”

“You’ve got Browdley, George.”

“Aye, and it’s got me. Till the war’s over, anyhow.”

“And afterwards, perhaps.”

“Don’t be too sure. There’s young chaps coming along as’ll make me a back number someday, but they’re in uniform now, most of ’em…‘Vote for Boswell and Your Children’s

Future’—that was my old election slogan. I hope nobody else remembers it. I’d rather be remembered for the lavatories I put in the market square. Because they’re good lavatories, as lavatories go. Whereas the children’s future that I talked so much about…”

Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t oversimplify it. And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”

“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of ’em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the same mistakes.”

“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”

George thought a moment, then came out with one of those, devastatingly sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what Livia once said.”

He did not often mention her now, and when he did the name slipped out casually, by accident, giving him neither embarrassment nor a pang. So much time can do.

But the remark gave Wendover the cue to ask: “By the way, heard anything of her lately?”

“No, I suppose she’s still out there.”

And then, after a silence, the subject was changed.

Even in Browdley by now the affair was almost forgotten, and George could assess with some impartiality the extent to which it had damaged his career. Probably it had lost him his chance at the general election of 1923, though his subsequent failure at two other Parliamentary elections might well have happened in any case. Undoubtedly the divorce had alienated some of his early supporters, especially when (due to the legal technique of such things in those days) it had been made to seem that he himself was the guilty party. Many of his friends knew this to be untrue, but a few did not, and it was always a matter liable to be brought up by an unscrupulous opponent, like the old accusation that he had put his wife on the municipal payroll. But time had had its main effect, not so much in dulling memories, but in changing the moral viewpoints even of those who imagined theirs to be least changeable, so that the whole idea of divorce, which had been a shocking topic in the twenties, was now, in the forties, rather a stale one. George knew that a great many young people in the town neither knew nor would have been much interested in the details that had so scandalized their parents.

Those details included Livia’s remarriage, at the earliest legal date, to the Honorable Jeffrey Winslow, who had given up a diplomatic career to take some job in Malaya. Except that Lord Winslow died in 1925 and left a large fortune, some of which must have gone to the younger son, George knew nothing more. The Winslow name did not get into the general news, and George did not read the kind of papers in which, if anywhere, it would still appear. But when Singapore fell, early in 1942, he could not suppress a recurrent preoccupation, hardly to be called anxiety; it made him ask the direct question if ever he met anyone likely to know the answer and unlikely to know of his own personal relationship. “I think they must have got away,” he was told once, on fairly high authority. It satisfied him to believe that the fairly high authority had not said this merely because it was the easiest thing to say.

Those years, 1941 and 1942, contained long intervals of time during which it might almost have been said that nothing was happening in Browdley while so much was happening in the rest of the world. But that, of course, was an illusion; everything was happening, but in a continuous melting flow of social and economic change; the war, as it went on, had become more like an atmosphere to be breathed with every breath than a series of events to be separately experienced. Even air raids and the threat of them dropped to a minimum, while apathy, tiredness, and simple human wear-and-tear offered problems far harder to tackle. But there were cheerful days among the dark ones, days when the Mayor of Browdley looked round his little world and saw that it was—well, not good, but better than it might have been. And worse, naturally, than it should have been. Sometimes his almost incurable optimism remounted, reaching the same flash point at which it always exploded into indignation against those old Victorian mill masters with no thought in their minds but profit, and the jerry-builders who had aided and abetted them in nothing less than the creation of Browdley itself. Yet out of that shameless grab for fortunes now mostly lost had come a place where men could have stalwart dreams. George realized this when—a little doubtfully, for he thought it might be regarded as almost frivolous in wartime—he arranged for an exhibition of postwar rehousing plans in the Town Hall—architects’ sketches (optimism on paper) of what could be done with Browdley if only the war were won and the tragedy of peacetime unemployment were not repeated. And by God, he thought, it wouldn’t be repeated—not if he had anything to do with it; and at that he wandered off in mind into a stimulating postwar crusade.

One day he was visiting a large hospital near Mulcaster on official business; as chairman of a regional welfare association it fell to him to organize co-operation between the hospital authorities and various local citizen groups. He was good at this kind of organizing, and he was good because he was human; with a proper disregard of red tape he combined a flair for sidetracking well-meaning cranks and busybodies that was the admiration of all who saw it in operation. Indeed, by this stage of the war he had won for himself a local importance that had become almost as regional as many of the associations and committees on which he served. More and more frequently, within a radius that took in Mulcaster and other large cities, his name would be mentioned with a touch of legendary allusiveness; somebody or other somewhere, puzzled momentarily about something, would say to someone else: “I’ll, tell you what, let’s see if we can get hold of old George…” And if then the question came: “Who’s he?”—the answer would be: “Just the Mayor of Browdley, but pretty good at this sort of thing”—the implication being that George’s official position gave only a small hint of the kind of service he could render. And if a further question were asked: “Where’s Browdley?”—the answer to that might well be the devastating truth: “Oh, one of those awful little manufacturing towns—the kind that were nearly bankrupt before the war and are now booming like blazes.”

After a meeting of the hospital board George was taken over the premises, and here too he was good; he knew how to say cheery words to soldiers without either mawkishness or patronage. And if any of the men were from Browdley or district he would make a point of drawing them into neighborly gossip about local affairs. It was noticeable then that his accent became somewhat more “Browdley” than usual, as if how as well as what he spoke made instinctive communion with those whose roots were his own.

On this occasion his tour of the wards was to be followed by tea in the head surgeon’s room; and on the way there, waiting with his nurse escort for an elevator, he happened to glance at a list of names attached to a notice board near by. One of them was “Winslow.” It gave him a slow and delayed shock that did not affect the naturalness of his question; she answered that the list was of patients occupying private rooms along an adjacent corridor—all of them serious cases and most of them war casualties. He did not question her further, but a few moments later, meeting the head surgeon and others of the hospital staff, he found himself too preoccupied to join in general conversation; the name was already echoing disconcertingly in his mind—Winslow…Winslow…Not such a common name, yet not so uncommon either. Surely it would be too much of a coincidence—and yet those coincidences did happen. At least it was worth inquiry.

So he asked, forgetting to care whether any of those present knew anything of his own personal affairs: “I noticed a name on my way here…a patient in one of the private rooms…Winslow…”

“Winslow?”

“Aye, Winslow.”

Someone said: “Oh yes…rather badly smashed up, poor chap. You know him?”

“Er—no…But I…I know of him—that is, if he belongs to the same family. Is he—er—related to Lord Winslow?”

The head surgeon thought he might be. Somebody else said he was. The head surgeon then said: “You can see him if you want. He’s not too bad.”

“Oh no, no—I wasn’t thinking of that.”

But afterwards, while he was trying to talk about something else altogether, George wondered if he had been thinking of that. For the idea, once in his head, engaged those sympathies of his that were always eager for a quixotic gesture. Years before, he had come near to hating the man who had taken Livia from him—hating him because as well as in spite of the generosity with which he, George, had treated them both. But now there was no hate or near-hate left, but only a wry curiosity, plus the warmth George felt for any man broken by the war. Would it not be worth while to clinch this attitude by a few words of well-wishing? Could it possibly do any harm? Might it not, if it had any effect at all, do good?

When he was about to leave he said that perhaps he would visit that fellow Winslow after all.

“Certainly…Briggs here will take you over.” The head surgeon singled out a young colleague who responded with respectful alacrity. “Don’t stay too long, though.”

“Oh no, only a few minutes. Not even that if you think it might—”

The surgeon smiled. “It won’t. You’re too modest, Boswell.” But he added quietly to Briggs: “Better go in first, though, and see how he is.”

As George accompanied the young man across lawns and courtyards to the block in which Winslow’s room was situated, they discussed the weather, the big raid on Mulcaster (history by now), the widening circle of war all over the world, and the difficulties of obtaining whisky and cigarettes that had lately become so acute that George had begun to feel almost ashamed of his own total exemption from such common hardships. But they provided a theme for conversation, and only when Briggs left him in the corridor did his thoughts recur to the nearer urgency, and then with a certain qualm. Was he doing a wise or a foolish thing, or merely an unnecessary one? While he was still wondering, Briggs emerged, his face youth- fully flushed as he stammered: “I’m afraid, sir, he—I mean, if you could perhaps come round again some other time—”

“Why, of course…Not convenient, is that it?”

“That’s it.” But the assent to such a vague explanation was so eager that George went on: “Is he asleep? Or isn’t he feeling good?”

“No…he’s no worse…and he’s not asleep…”

“Then what?”

“Well, sir, to be frank, he—he said he—er—he’d rather not—er—”

“Didn’t want to see me, eh? Well, that’s all right. Don’t bother about it.”

“It’s a mood they get into sometimes. They feel so low they just don’t feel like having visitors at all.”

George said he perfectly understood, and then, to cover an embarrassment that was more the young doctor’s than his own, added: “I’m glad it isn’t because he’s worse.”

“No…he’s getting on as well as can be expected.”

They walked away together, again discussing topics of general interest. At the hospital gate George said: “You did give him my name, I suppose?”

“Oh yes. I also said you were the Mayor of Browdley, but—but—”

“But it made no difference, eh? Well, why should it?”

George laughed, and then they both went on laughing as they shook hands.

But by the time he reached Browdley he could not see much of a joke in the situation, nor did he feel his usual zest for tackling the pile of clerical work on his desk. So he walked across the town to St. Patrick’s clergy house. Wendover was in, and George, on impulse, told him all about his visit to the hospital and his discovery of Winslow there. This led to a longer talk about Livia than George had had for years with anyone, and also to a franker expression of Wendover’s personal attitudes than George had yet encountered, despite his many years of close friendship with the priest.

“You see, George, I never felt it my duty to discuss your affairs—especially as you never told me much about them.”

“Aye, I never felt like it—which is no reflection on you, of course. And I wouldn’t say you’ve missed much. I’ll bet you find it hard listening to stuff about other people’s private lives.”

“Even if I did, it would still be part of my job. Another part is to offer advice.”

“And that’s even harder, I should think.”

“Well, you know, a priest has one advantage—so many things are decided for him by authority. Take divorce, for instance. The view of my Church is very simple—we think it’s wrong, and therefore we’re against it.”

“Aye, I know. And that makes me guilty of compounding a felony because I made it as easy as I could for the two of them? Isn’t that how you’d look at it—and at me?”

Wendover gazed at George very steadily for a moment before saying: “Do you really want my opinion of you?”

“Mightn’t be a bad moment to get it out of you.”

“All right. I have it ready. Nothing new, either—I’ve had it for years. I think you’re much more like a Christian than many people who come to my Church.”

“Quite a compliment.”

“Less than you think.”

It certainly failed to please George as most compliments did; indeed, for some reason it made him feel uncomfortable. He said, almost truculently, after a pause: “I’d do the same again if I had to. You can’t hold a woman if she’d rather be with someone else. And anyway, twenty-odd years is a long time to go on bearing a grudge. That’s what puzzles me—why should he bear a grudge?…Well, maybe I can guess. I can remember a few things Livia once told him.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“Do you mean against you?”

George nodded.

“Why should you think that possible?”

And then, for the first time, after an almost quarter-century interval, George disclosed to another human being the events of that memorable day, September the first, 1921—the day of the foundation-stone laying at which Lord Winslow had officiated, and after which the two had had their long conversation in George’s study.

When he had finished Wendover made no reply at first, though he did not seem particularly surprised. And George, with his usual revulsion of feeling in favor of someone he had lately been criticizing, hastened to continue: “Mind you, don’t get too bad an impression. If I’ve given you that, then—”

“No, George—and I don’t rely on impressions. You’ve only told me that she lied, and that she may have been unfaithful while she was still legally your wife—”

“Aye, it sounds bad enough. But the funny thing is, she had her good points.”

“It would be very funny indeed if she hadn’t.”

George caught the note in the other’s voice. “I know—you probably think I don’t blame her enough. But after all, she was my choice—and when she was only nineteen, don’t forget. Might have been my own fault for not making her happy too. Maybe she’s been really happy with this other chap. I’ve nothing against either of ’em. And if he’s ill or crippled, if there were anything I could do—though I don’t suppose there is…Well, I took the first step today and got snubbed for it, and that’s about the whole story. So with all this off my chest, I’ll now go home and try to work.”

Wendover accompanied him to the street door. “Snubs are unimportant, George.”

“Of course—and I’ve got a hide like an elephant for ’em. I’d call it my secret weapon, only it’s no secret.”

“It never was. Most of the saints had it.”

George grinned. “Oh, get along with you. Don’t you go calling me names!”

“All right—I won’t. I can’t teach you much, but perhaps there is one thing—a piece of advice that Christians need sometimes. While you’re trying so hard to be fair to everybody, remember to include yourself. That’s all.”

“I suppose the truth is, I get a bigger kick out of being fair to the other fellow. So there’s no credit in it.”

“Was I offering you any?”

George’s grin turned to a laugh. “Good night, Harry. Thanks for listening to me. That’s the help I really needed, because there’s nothing I can do if Winslow feels the way he does. Nothing at all…Good night.”

“Good night, George.”

George walked slowly across the dark town. From St. Patrick’s to Market Street was about a mile; it took him past the library and the Town Hall and the main shopping length of Shawgate. The night was moonless and cloudy—almost pitch-dark, therefore, in the blackout; but to George this made for no more than a little groping, and in the groping there was a sudden awareness of his whole life, shaped by and shaping those familiar streets and walls. It was as if, at the moment that things half-forgotten were coming back to trouble and confuse, the town rallied invisibly to his aid, assuring him that what he had done so far had not been in vain, and that what he had yet to do could be limitless within the same limits. That these were circumscribed, even narrow by some standards, was evident; but there was gain to match that loss—the gain of warm personal contacts, the “How do, Tom” and “Good night, Mr. Mayor” that he would not by now have exchanged for empire. And tonight, as he received and answered the greetings that his known footsteps drew from passers-by, he felt upon his heart the touch of benediction. These were his people, from whom he had sprung, and whom he would serve to the end, because he believed in them and in the destiny of their kind to make this world, if it can ever be, a happier place.

Comforted, he reached his house, entered the study, and turned over the papers on his desk, driving himself to concentration. He still felt disturbed by the day’s curious incident, but somehow not as hurt as he had been or might have been. Presently he carried papers over to his armchair, and settled himself in comfort. They were the minutes of the last Council meeting and required his approval. The dry official phraseology merely emphasized the part of his life that had gone on for so many years; and would continue to do so—whether or not, whether or not. Like the rhythm of train wheels that go uphill and down dale, through cities and across country …whether or not. But that again, the blessed rhythm and routine of work he knew so well, led deeper into springs of comfort already found along the dark pavements; and soon a measure of tranquility was on him. He read every item of the minutes carefully, corrected a few, initialed others, then soon after midnight went to bed and slept dreamlessly till dawn, when the early morning buses wakened him as they started up in the garage just beyond the garden—Livia’s garden, as he still thought of it. Then he got up, went back to his desk, and dug deeper into the pile of work there; and at eight, when Annie brought in the morning mail and some tea, he was still working.

Among the envelopes was one that bore the Mulcaster postmark. Like so many that reached him it was addressed merely to “The Mayor, Browdley,” but the handwriting looked like a child’s. Inside he found a note scribbled in pencil with the heading “Hospital,” and so briefly worded that he hardly grasped what it was all about till he had read it over twice. Just—“I don’t know what there is about mayors that got my goat this afternoon, but next time, if you want to see me, drop in.” And signed with the initial “W.”

The note chilled George with its contrast of childish script and adult irony. Presently he surmised that the look of childishness might have come from writing with the left hand—doubtless an effort, yet not too great for the extra words that hurt and were probably meant to.

Nevertheless, he caught the nine-five to Mulcaster.

At the hospital the nurse on duty told him he could see the patient “now” if he wanted. He asked, because of her peculiar emphasis on the word: “What made him change his mind?”

“Well, I think it was because of what Dr. Briggs and I both said.” She blushed as she explained further: “We said you were awfully nice and that everybody liked you.”

George’s smile was a little ghastly, as if he had heard what might be his own epitaph. He answered: “Thanks for the testimonial…All right, I’ll see him. That’s what I’ve come for. Does he have many visitors?”

“None, so far. He’s only been here a fortnight.”

All this as they walked along the corridor. She opened the door and George followed her. The room was cheerfully bleak, and contained bed, side table, two small chairs, and a table in front of the window surmounted by a large bowl of roses. The shape of a human being was recognizable on the bed, but the face was so swathed in bandages that nothing could be seen of it, while the legs, similarly swathed, were held in an up-slanting position by an assembly of slings and frames. George was appalled, but the nurse began cheerfully: “Well…here’s Mr. Boswell again.”

George waited for her to go out, but she stayed, fussing around with the pillow and drawing a chair to the bedside, so he said the only possible thing, which was “Good morning.”

From the bed came a curious muffled voice returning the greeting.

“You’ll have to stoop a little to him, then you’ll hear better…His words get all tied up with the bandages.”

The voice grunted, and George placed his chair closer.

“There’s only one rule,” she added, finally moving to the door. “You mustn’t smoke.”

“I don’t smoke,” George answered.

When the door had closed on her George heard what might have been a sigh from the bed and then the question, abruptly: “Has she gone?”

“Aye,” said George.

“She’s a good nurse, though.”

“I can believe it.” And then after a pause: “I got your note this morning. It’s a bit quick to have taken you at your word, but I thought—”

“Oh, not at all. And don’t be impressed by all these bandages and contraptions. I’m not as much of a wreck as I look.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re getting on all right.”

“Yes, they seem to be patching me up. Would you mind giving me a tablet out of that bottle on the side table?”

George did so. He saw that the left hand was comparatively usable, though the skin was pink and shriveled.

“Thanks…they’re only throat lozenges.”

“I hope talking doesn’t bother you. I won’t stay long. I just wanted to bring you my good wishes.”

“Thanks…I can listen, anyway.”

But George for once found himself without chatter. He said, stammering somewhat: “There isn’t much else I have to say—except that I’m sorry we meet for the first time under these somewhat awkward circumstances. I used to know your father—slightly. I met him—once—several years before his death—”

“What?” The exclamation was so sharp that it discounted the enforced motionlessness of the body. And a rush of words continued: “What do you mean? His death! Have you heard anything? Who told you that? Have they been trying to keep it from me?”

George realized there was a misunderstanding somewhere, though he could not yet tell what. For a moment the wild thought seized him that this Winslow might not be of the same Winslow family at all. He said: “I’m sorry if I’m making a mistake. I was referring to Lord Winslow—the one who used to be Secretary of Housing—”

A strange muffled sound came from the bed, uninterpretable except as one of relief, though the words that followed were still tense with excitement: “You certainly have got it all balled up, Mr. Mayor…That was my grandfather.”

George described the rest of the interview to Wendover the same evening. “Aye, it was my mistake all right, but even when I realized it I didn’t realize everything else immediately, because he kept on asking me about his father—did I know anything, had there been any news, and so on—and of course I could only repeat what I’d heard from the man in London—that they’d both got out of Singapore in time. But then he told me they hadn’t been in Singapore at all, but in Hong Kong, where his father had a job.

“I didn’t stay long after that. I could see I’d put him in a nervous mood, and I felt it was my fault, in a way, for not verifying things beforehand. And I was a bit excited myself, because it was hard to realize that he must be Livia’s boy—and not more than twenty-two, if that…Charles, he told me his name was…I could have talked better to his father, if it had been him, but with the boy I felt tongue-tied…because as he went on talking it became clear to me that he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was—or rather who I had been in his mother’s life.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“No, Harry, I didn’t.”

“He must have thought it odd that you should take all that trouble to visit him.”

“Aye, and he said so, before I left. He got quite cordial—in a nervous sort of way. He tried to apologize for having refused to see me the day before—he blamed what he called the superstition that provincial mayors are pompous old bores—‘I wonder why people think so,’ he said, and although it was a backhanded compliment, I knew he was meaning it all right. So I answered: ‘Probably because many of ’em are’—and we had a good laugh. Or rather, he couldn’t laugh, but I knew it was the same as if he was laughing…I promised to visit him again. He made a point of asking me to, if ever I was in that part of the world.”

“Don’t you intend to tell him?”

“Not just yet. I don’t see that it can matter much—to him. Or if it did, it wouldn’t help. You see he needs help. His nerves are all to pieces and he’s pretty low-spirited about things in general—I gathered that. Maybe I can cheer him up…and if he finds me a nuisance—then it’ll be easier for him to tell me so if he thinks I’m only the Mayor of Browdley.”

Wendover smiled. “You’d make a good Jesuit, George. You can find more reasons for doing what you want to do…”

George visited the Mulcaster hospital every week or so from then on. Not all the visits were on account of Winslow; some would have had to be made on official business in any case. But he found himself looking forward to them all, and not grudging the length of the journey, which meant less sleep, for it was in the nature of his own work that hardly any of it could be postponed, shortened, or abandoned. And gradually, as the youth continued to improve, there came to George the intense pleasure of noting definite improvements each time—the slow removal of bandages; the first time the cradles and slings were discarded; the first step from the bed to a wheel chair; and most of all, the lifting of the mind from despondency. All this took months, and the visits, though regular, could not last long. The Mayor of Browdley was curiously shy during the early ones—almost desperately afraid of intruding where he might not be really as welcome as it appeared—reluctant, it would seem, to believe that the invitations to come again were genuine. It was unlike George, who was so used to being liked, to have such diffidence; and yet there was in him all the uncertainty of a man in whom the touch of bravado masks only a deep humility and an awareness of personal inadequacy.

They talked of many things, from hospital gossip to world affairs, with no plan or aim in the talking; and this, perhaps, was as good a way to get to know each other as if either had deliberately tried. George was often tempted to lead the subject to Livia, but always forbore; he had an odd feeling of conscience about it—that his own concealment of identity could only be justified so long as he did not take such advantages. Sometimes, however, information slipped out without any probing. Charles liked to talk about the family home in Berkshire, the big centuries-old house that belonged now to his uncle, the inheritor of the title—“and thank heaven it does—my father never wanted it, and neither do I, though it’s a lovely old place to visit.” He spoke affectionately of both parents, but seemed to have spent comparatively little time with them since he was very young. “But that’s the way it is when your people are overseas. They pack you off to school in England and you hardly see them for years at a stretch, and then when you do they’re almost strangers. It was better for a while after 1934, when Dad gave up his job and they went to live in Ireland, near Galway. It was a sort of farm, and I used to stay there during the school holidays. Mother made a good farmer—she had a knack for anything to do with crops or animals. She could squeeze warbles on a cow, and that’s a thing you can’t do without being sick unless you really love farming.”

George didn’t inquire what squeezing warbles was.

“And yet she could be the great lady too—doing the society stuff if ever she felt like it. I’ve often thought she’d have made a damn fine actress…And when she made up her mind about something, nothing on earth or under heaven would stop her…My God, the wires she pulled to get out to Hong Kong after the war started.”

“I thought you said he’d given up the job.”

“He had, but he didn’t much like farming, and after a year or so he went abroad again—for an oil company. Mother didn’t like it, but she followed him, and I didn’t see either of them again till ’thirty-nine, when they came home on six months’ leave. They were still in London in September, and Father offered his services to the Government, but they told him he couldn’t do better than go back to his job with the oil company. So he did—alone at first, because of the war and because Mother was mad with him for wanting to go back at all—but of course she soon followed as before. She always followed him everywhere, though I guess they neither of them expected to end up in a Jap prison camp.”

“End up?”

“Well no, I didn’t mean that. Oh God, I hope not.”

“You don’t really know what happened?”

“Not a thing—except that they were in Hong Kong when the Japs took over. That’s definite. All the rest is rumor.”

George caught the sudden tremor in his voice, and made haste to change the subject.

Once—and for the first time since the initial interview and misunderstanding—they mentioned the former Lord Winslow. “I don’t really remember him,” Charles said. “I think he disapproved of Dad’s marriage, or something of the sort. But from all accounts he was a very distinguished piece of Stilton in his way.”

George was not quite sure what this meant; besides, he was thinking of the phrase “something of the sort” and wondering how much, or little, it concealed. “A great authority on housing,” he remarked safely.

“So are you, aren’t you?”

George smiled. “I was one of six kids brought up in four rooms. Not a bad way to become a practical authority.”

“I should think it was also a pretty good education for your father.”

“Well, no—because he wasn’t interested in earthly houses so much as in heavenly mansions.” George chuckled.

“A good thing his son didn’t take after him, then. I hear you’ve done rather well for that town of yours.”

“Not so badly. I reckon Browdley’s five per cent better than it might have been if I’d never been born.”

“That’s modest of you.”

“Nay, I’d call it swelled head. Takes a lot for one man by himself to make five per cent of difference to anything.”

“Same in flying. The idea of the lone hero soaring into the blue on a mission of his own is a bit outmoded.”

“Aye, it’s all teamwork nowadays.” George added hastily: “Not that I’m much of an expert on military affairs.”

“Is anybody? What about all the so-called experts who’ve been wrong? About the Maginot Line, for instance?”

George sighed. “I was wrong about that too, without being an expert.”

“I suppose you were fooled by the last war—superiority of defense over attack, and so on?”

“To some extent. I couldn’t help remembering the Somme.”

“You were there?”

“Er…yes.”

“What were you in—the poor bloody infantry?”

“No.”

“Artillery? Sappers?”

“No…I…er…I wasn’t in the armed forces at all.”

“War correspondent? You’re still in the newspaper business, aren’t you?”

“I was—in a small way—until recently.”

Charles laughed. “I won’t be fobbed off with a mystery! What were you in the last war, for God’s sake?”

George then answered the question that he had not been asked for a long time, and never went out of his way to encounter, but which, when it was put directly, he always answered with equal directness. “I was a conscientious objector,” he said.

There was a little silence for a moment—not an awkward one, but a necessary measuring point in the progress of an intimacy. And this was the moment that made George sure he was liked and not merely tolerated by the youth whose less injured hand moved slowly across the arm of the wheel chair towards him.

“Conchy in the last war, eh?” The hand reached out. “Shake, then. Because that’s what I might be in the next—if they have a next.”

George took the wrinkled burned-red hand, though he thought it an ironic occasion to have first done so. Presently Charles went on: “What happened? You had a bad time?”

“Well,” answered George, a little dazed at the extent to which they were talking as if they had known each other all their lives. “I was on the Somme, as I said, and that was a pretty bad time. My brother—one of my brothers—and I—were in the same Ambulance Unit. He was killed.”

“Driving an ambulance?”

“No. We were both stretcher-bearers.”

“Not exactly the safest job on earth.”

“No.”

“But you came through all right?”

“I was gassed—not very badly, but it led to pneumonia and a medical discharge. Probably saved my life in the long run.”

Charles said, with a touch of pathos: “What did it feel like—after that? When you were out of hospital, I mean, but still not well enough to do things normally? How did you get used to things again?”

“I didn’t, because the things I’d been used to before the war were things I didn’t intend to get used to again—ever…But of course in your case it’s different.”

“I don’t know that it is, particularly…But tell me about how you got started again. In business, wasn’t it? A newspaper?”

“Aye, but it sounds too important when you put it that way. Just a bankrupt small-town weekly. Nobody’s bargain, they practically threw it at me, but I thought it would help me in local politics.”

“And it did?”

George nodded. “I was lucky. One of those handy by-elections cropped up, and there I was—the youngest town Councillor Browdley had ever had.”

“How old were you then?”

“Let me see…it was April ’seventeen when they let me out of hospital, and the election was in the September following. I’d be thirty-one.”

“You didn’t lose any time.” Charles thought for a moment, then added: “Wasn’t it against you to have been a conscientious objector?”

“Quite a bit. The other side used it for all they were worth, but Browdley’s got a mind of its own in local matters—even in wartime.” George chuckled. “I was for lowering the fares on municipal buses before eight in the morning. That got all the factory workers.”

Charles smiled. “You weren’t a pacifist in the election, then?”

“I was if anybody asked me, but I used most of my eloquence on the bus fares.”

“The war must have been on your mind, though.”

“Aye, it was—just as it still is.”

After another pause Charles said thoughtfully: “So you think it’s wrong to take human life under any circumstances?”

“I did then.”

“You mean you don’t think so any more?”

“That’s about it. I’m not so sure of a lot of things as I was in those days. I don’t hate war any less, but the problem doesn’t look so simple for an individual to make up his mind about. Seems to me there are times when life’s less important than a few other things, and those are the times when taking it—and giving it—are the only things we can do. It’s the price we have to pay if we can’t get what we want any cheaper.”

“And what is it that we want?”

“I don’t know what you want, but if I had a boy I’d want a better world for him than either your generation or mine has had.”

“A world fit for heroes to live in, eh?”

“Nay, I’d rather call it a world fit for ordinary folks to be heroic in…And I can’t see it coming unless we win this war. I don’t see it necessarily coming even if we do win it…But there’s a chance if we do.”

“Quite a change in your attitude from last time.”

“Aye—but that doesn’t mean I regret what I did then. Seems to me I was right for a reason I couldn’t have foreseen. Doesn’t what’s happening now prove it? What good did that first war do—all the misery and butchery I saw on the Somme? What was it for? To save freedom? There was less in the world afterwards. To crush Germany? Germany was strong again within a generation. To fix Europe once and for all? Europe got unfixed again worse than ever…”

“I’ll tell you one thing it did, Mr. Boswell—it gave some of you chaps who survived it twenty years of a damned good time. It gave you twenty years of movies and dog racing and charabanc outings and stock-market gambles and holidays on the Continent and comfortable living—twenty years of the kind of fun we may not have, even if we do survive.”

George answered: “I didn’t have twenty years of fun. I had twenty years of trying to improve a little town called Browdley—trying to put up a few schools and pull down a few slums—trying to make some headway against the greed and selfishness of those old Victorian shysters who ran the place for half a century like a slave barracks…”

“And what does that prove? Merely that we all get saddled with old debts. You had the Victorian mess to deal with—I’ve got yours.”

“Mine?”

“Who else’s? You surely don’t claim that you used those twenty years successfully? The last war mightn’t have been so worthless unless you’d made it so…” Charles added, smiling: “Not that I mean anything personal, of course. You risked your life, same as I have, and then you came home and did what seemed to you worth doing. But it wasn’t worth doing—because the main thing wasn’t right. And the main thing was the peace. Why weren’t you a conscientious objector to that?”

George answered gravely: “Aye, you’ve a right to ask. I’m quite ready to take blame for plenty that I did—and plenty that I didn’t do. I can see now, like a lot of folks, that I was living in a fool’s paradise—if by any stretch of imagination you can call Browdley any sort of paradise. Maybe if I’d had a better education—”

“Depends on what you call a better education.”

“I daresay I’d call yours one. What was it—Eton and Oxford?”

“No. Charterhouse and Cambridge…and also Berlin.”

“What? You were educated in Berlin?”

“Not in Berlin—over Berlin.” And then the boy laughed rather wildly. “Sorry. I’ve been waiting to work that off on somebody, but you were the first to give me a cue.”

George smiled. “I see what you mean.”

“You ought to. After all, you were at the University of the Somme yourself.”

“Aye, but don’t let’s be overdramatic. War doesn’t teach anybody much—except to hate it. If you hate it beyond a certain point you go out of your mind, so if you don’t want to do that you have to forget it somehow or other, and I suppose that’s mostly what I and millions of others did.” George paused a moment before taking a further plunge in intimacy: “And that’s what you’ll do too, my lad, unless you’re the exception that proves the rule. Maybe you are. But if you aren’t…well, there’s a maternity ward next door for you to think of. Aren’t you afraid that someday all those kids will blame you as you’re blaming me—not personally, but as a generation?”

“A damned hard question, and the answer is yes, I am afraid. I’m scared stiff…and I’m not hopeful. But what the hell can I do? Lads of my age, as you call them, have the war to win first, before we can bother with anything else. Give us a chance to do one thing at a time, for Christ’s sake.”

“Give us a chance, then, too—even if it’s only a chance to help you. Some of us still have one foot out of the grave.”

The door opened and the nurse entered. She had heard the raised voices and the laughter sound as she walked along the corridor, and now she was in time to catch George’s last sentence. It must have seemed to her a strange conjunction, justifying the acerbity with which she approached the wheel chair, whipped out a thermometer, and said to George: “You mustn’t make him laugh, Mr. Boswell—it would be very bad for the new skin. And you really have talked to him enough, I think…if you don’t mind…”

It was true; it was the longest time George had yet stayed. “I understand,” he said, smiling to both of them.

Charles then asked the nurse if she would fetch him some more of the lozenges.

She went out exclaiming: “My goodness, Lieutenant, have you used them up already?”

“Seems like it, Nurse.” Then, when the door closed, he turned quietly to George. “Just a moment—before you go. I wanted to say this, but we got talking about so many other things…I’ve had the tip they mean to transfer me somewhere else—for facial surgery and what not. Probably before you come again…so if they do, and I send you my new address, would you—would you have the time—to—to write to me—occasionally?”

George laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Aye,” he answered. “I will that.” The long argument had given him such mental stimulation that now emotion came to him with an impact; after those four words he was speechless, stricken at the sudden thought of an end to the visits.

The nurse came hurrying back with a fresh bottle of lozenges, then spied one still half-full on the table beside the bed. “Well, I do declare—you didn’t finish the others after all! He’s so absent-minded, Mr. Boswell…Aren’t you, Lieutenant?”

George stammered his good-byes, and wondered as he left the hospital what was the matter with him to have used up so much time in talking politics. Of course it was the mere zest of a debate that had led him on, exhilarating him as it always did—recalling the remark once made by a teetotal friend that drink would have been wasted on George, since a good hard-hitting argument produced on him the same effects, even to the hangover the next day, when he wondered what he had said in the heat of the moment that might have given offense, or that he didn’t exactly mean.

But now his emotions were of a different kind. Sadness grew in him all the way back to Browdley, coupled with and finally outweighed by a breathless satisfaction that the boy had asked him to write. Of course he would write.

Winslow was transferred during the following week to a hospital in the South of England, where specialists were reputed to work miracles with skin and cartilage; but it was not of this that he wrote in his first letter to George. He wrote:—

DEAR MR. BOSWELL—Just a line to let you know my new address. I expect to be here several months, as the work they do here takes time—and patience too, I expect, by all concerned. The men call it the beauty shop. But the main thing I have to tell you is about my mother. I’ve had news that she is among those to be repatriated from a Jap prison camp. The Foreign Office sent me word a few hours ago, and though they couldn’t give me any information as to how she is, or about my father at all, it certainly is great news that she is actually out of enemy hands and on the first stage of her way home. They don’t expect her to arrive for at least six or eight weeks, as the ship is slow and has to take a roundabout route. By that time I hope to be well enough myself to meet her—though the doctors here only smile when I say it. I’m a bit stubborn, though, when I set my mind on anything, which is a quality I inherit from her. Incidentally, I’d like you to meet her, because I’m sure she’ll want to thank you personally for your great kindness to me while I was at Mulcaster…

When George took this over to Wendover the latter read it through and turned on his friend a somewhat quizzical expression. “Well, George,” he commented at length, “it settles one thing.”

“Aye, I’ve got to tell him.”

Wendover nodded. “And quickly too. You don’t want him writing to her about you.”

“I don’t see how he could.”

“There might be some port of call where he could send air mail.”

“That’s so. Anyhow, I agree with you. Spill the beans and get it over. Might even have been better to tell him in the first place.”

“One of the penalties of being too subtle, George. I could never quite make out what your aim was—or still is, for that matter.”

“My aim?”

“Yes—in regard to the boy.”

George answered: “I haven’t got an aim—except that I’d like to help him because I like him. I never realized how much I like him till now that I can’t see him. And I don’t think it’s because he’s Livia’s boy—it’s because I like him. He’s a fine young chap—and a brain too…But I suppose it’ll be an impossible situation when Livia gets back.”

“It might be. You’ll have to take that chance. But take it now—by telling him.”

“Aye, I will. I’ll write tonight.”

George wrote a short letter containing the simple fact, and received in reply by return the following:—

DEAR MR. BOSWELL—What a hell of a surprise! I’ll admit you could have knocked me down with a feather, as they say. I’m a bit puzzled why you didn’t tell me earlier, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. Of course I’d known that my mother was previously married, but I was never told any of the details. Frankly, the whole thing makes no difference to me, but of course it may to her when she gets here. I don’t want to worry her, because from what I hear and can guess, she must have had a pretty bad time…

George wrote back, and they both kept up the correspondence without ever referring to the personal matter again; nor did the youth even mention his mother, or the progress of her homeward journey across the world. George could not but feel that a barrier—temporarily, at any rate—had come between them, and there returned to him his earlier shyness, diffidence, and reluctance to believe that Charles really wanted to continue the friendship. Then one day he read that the ship containing some hundreds of women and children repatriated from Japanese prison camps had put into an English harbor. It was his turn to write, but he put it off, thinking that even out of turn he could expect a letter from the boy about his mother—telling of her arrival, condition, and attitude. When such a letter did not come he eventually wrote briefly and rather meaninglessly about nothing in particular, but to that letter he received no answer, and when, after writing again, there was still no answer, he could reach only one conclusion.

“I’m not surprised,” he told Wendover. “He probably thought it as good a way as any other to close an episode.”

“That’s a rather tragic interpretation, George.”

“I don’t think so. I wanted to help him, nothing more—and now Livia’s back, perhaps he doesn’t need help. Or at any rate, perhaps I’m no longer one who can help him.”

“I hope it isn’t going to worry you.”

“No.” George’s answer was decisive. “Give me something to do and I’ll worry over it. But when I can do nothing…”

But George did worry, nevertheless, if that was an adequate word for the quiet intrusion of thoughts about the boy into every momentarily unoccupied fragment of his time and mind. Those fragments, however, were few on account of increasing pressure of official work. There was, for instance, Browdley’s annual budget which, as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he must prepare for annual presentation. More urgent still was a general tightening up of air-raid precautions and civilian defense, for which London had issued specific instructions, believing that northern England’s long period of relative freedom from enemy air attacks might be coming to an end. There were also meetings and conferences on other matters—with the Medical Officer about a chicken-pox outbreak, with local union officials and plant-management committees, with regional groups in charge of War Loan drives, charitable funds, and so on. Least arduous of all—indeed, a kind of optional luxury in which George frankly indulged himself amidst all the urgent necessities—was an interview with an idealist town planner whose vision of a new Browdley included wide boulevards, American-style apartment houses, and glass-walled factories.

George almost forgot his personal affairs as he turned over the nicely water-colored drawings and marveled at large green blobs representing trees that could not possibly grow to such a size in less than twenty years. But there was an even more fundamental anachronism. “Do you realize,” he said, a trifle impishly, “that your plan would mean pulling down practically the whole town?”

“That was rather the idea,” came the quiet reply.

George laughed. “I see. And it might be a good one except that if you once did pull the place down I can’t really imagine why anyone should want to rebuild it at all. It’s really only here because it’s here, so to say. A century ago they needed coal for the cotton mills, so they had to build the cotton mills near the coal—but now they don’t need the coal so much, in normal times, or the cotton mills either. I doubt if they’d put up half of these towns if they had the chance to begin all over again.”

“I know what you mean, sir. Growth and then decay. It happens with towns as with human beings.”

“With countries, too, and empires.”

“And down to the smallest villages. There’s a place near here called Stoneclough—”

George started at the sound of the mispronounced word. “Cluff—they call it. You’ve been there?”

“Yes, I just happened along—by accident. Very interesting. Seems to be completely uninhabited, including the big house at the top of the hill.”

“Aye—there’s nobody at Stoneclough any more.”

“I took some photographs—thought of working it up into an article—the Forsaken Village, or some such title. But I doubt if it would be of enough general interest till after the war.”

“And maybe not then,” George answered, moodily. But he liked all such contacts with enthusiasts in their own special fields. As a contrast, it fell to him the same week to visit the Parliamentary Member for Browdley, none other than that same Wetherall (now Sir Samuel) who had defeated him in the 1919 by-election, again in the general election of 1923, and had represented the town in the House of Commons ever since. An old man now; and like most former enemies, he had made his peace with George. The political truce since the war began had brought them even closer, so that George was genuinely sorry to hear that Wetherall was ill. They spent an afternoon together in the manufacturer’s house just outside Browdley, talking over old times and old squabbles. Wetherall was still rich, still worried about taxes, still unaware that anything had happened to make the world vitally different since he was a boy. His solution for the problems of the postwar cotton trade was that all Indians should wear their shirts a few inches longer, and he couldn’t understand how the Japs could possibly have taken Singapore after the place had cost the British taxpayer so much money to fortify. Capping it all, he persisted in believing that George had changed during the years into someone much more like himself; it gave him satisfaction to say (as if to justify his own liking for the Mayor)—“Ah, you’re not such a firebrand as you used to be. You’ve seen a bit of reason these last few years.”

George, reflecting what he had seen—the blitz raid on Mulcaster, for instance—hardly thought he would call it reason. But why argue with an old fellow who looked as if only his illusions could nourish him precariously for a few more years at most?

Wetherall went on: “Just as well I’ve kept you out of Parliament till you’ve grown sensible, George. You’ll not do so bad when your time comes.”

“Why…what…what, makes you say that?”

“George, you old twister, don’t pretend it never entered your mind before! Listen—and this is in confidence—I probably won’t stand at the next election. God knows when that’ll be—after the war or after I kick the bucket, whichever comes first. But I’m telling you this so you’ll be ready.”

George was suddenly aware of the peculiar truth that it hadn’t been on his mind, not for quite a time, and that it revisited him now as an almost strange idea, with all kinds of new angles and aspects to be considered. He said, sincerely enough: “I’m sorry you’re thinking of giving up, Sam. Over twenty years for the same constituency must be pretty near the record…”

“Yes, and it’s meant a lot of hard work, one way and another, but I don’t grudge anything I’ve done for the town, any more than you do, George. After all, it’s Browdley that made me what I am.”

George thought that was very possible.

“So when they sent me to Parliament I made up my mind I’d do the best I could for them.”

George thought that was very possible also, since during the entire period of his membership of the House, Wetherall had made only two speeches. One was about the local sewage scheme, which George had persuaded him to be for; the other was against the revision of the Anglican Prayer Book, which nothing could persuade him to be anything but against.

George said cheerfully: “Well, Sam—don’t give up yet. And I wish you’d try to fix things with the Ministry about our Children’s Home. We ought to get an extra grant for that, what with all the kids from the bombed areas we’ve taken in…”

Sometimes the cheerfulness sagged a little and George saw the future in a hard bleak flash of momentary disillusionment; but even then he was prone to diagnose his mood as due to overwork, and therefore not to be taken too seriously. The cure was usually a good night’s sleep or a chat with Wendover. The priest’s help was all the more tonic because of the fixity of their disagreements, and also because (as George once laughingly confessed) he was far too modest to suppose that he could exercise any influence in reverse; but Wendover, with equal banter, wouldn’t even concede that this was modesty. “It’s your instinct for self-preservation, George. We authoritarians keep you going. How would you know your opinions were free unless you had ours to attack?…But I’ll suggest this—that before the century ends, it may not be freedom that the world values, so much as order. Order out of chaos. A new world, George, with an old discipline.”

“Aye, but suppose that road leads to Moscow, not to Rome—what would you chaps do then?”

“I should follow my Church, of course. But why assume that the two roads are ultimately so far apart? One thing I do know—that if the Church so decided, it would be very easy for a Catholic to change his mind about Communism, just as Moscow could doubtless make terms with Rome for as good a reason as Constantine ever had…And what a tremendous bond that is in a chaotic world—two major disciplined forces that know their own power to enforce a decision!”

“You’ve forgotten the Standard Oil Company. That makes three.”

“Let’s say, then, forces that can command not only obedience, but willing sacrifice.”

“Which lets in Hitler. He could command all that at first. But in the end he was defeated by free men.”

“Only when they themselves learned to organize, obey, and sacrifice. And as soon as they forget that lesson there’ll be other Hitlers.”

“Aye, and as soon as we forget we’re free we’ll have Hitlers in our own ranks.”

“There’s danger in whatever we do, George…But don’t misunderstand me…I’m not pleading a cause.”

“Well, I am—and millions are fighting for it too! Today’s my future—like theirs—and what happens by the end of the century doesn’t give us much comfort—”

“Nor me either. It’s merely that I’m content to let wiser men shape events that can’t yet be properly foreseen. Whereas you have to settle the whole destiny of mankind here and now to satisfy an itching conscience. Quite a handicap!”

“I’d do better if I didn’t think for myself, is that what you mean? Maybe I would—depends on who did the thinking for me. But I want to choose who…see? And that’s democracy—even for a little fellow.”

“You’re not a little fellow, George. You’re a very shrewd dictator who made up his mind years ago to have his own way in Browdley—and you have had it, against a big majority who’ve been either against your ideas or indifferent to them—and the methods by which you’ve succeeded have been slyness, smartness, blarney, importunity, intrigue, compromise, a certain amount of downright trickery, and a vast amount of personal charm! But you prefer to call it democracy!”

By the time they reached that kind of point in argument George was usually in a good humor and his normal cheerfulness renewed.

He never realized the majestic and in some ways rather terrifying alchemy of English life so much as when he attended official conferences in London. He had been attending them for years, until now they were something rather like routine, but he always remembered his first one—when, as a young man just elected to the Browdley Council, he had been sent as its delegate to a consultation with high officials of one of the Whitehall ministries. Because the government in power was of the opposite political party to his own he had expected to be frostily received and was full of carefully rehearsed truculence that evaporated at the first calm, polite, and curiously impersonal meeting with people whom he had thought of as his enemies. But it had left him baffled afterwards. “Talk about raising the standard of revolution!” he had reported, when he got back to Browdley. “It was hard enough to make anyone raise a couple of eyebrows!” Was it possible that London did not know what a potentially dangerous man he was? Or did not care? Or both knew and cared, yet was imbued with some classic spirit that would only return cool civility for warm antagonism? After he had attended half a dozen more such conferences, George’s bafflement lessened, not because he had entirely solved the problem, but because he had come to terms with it; it was as peculiar, yet could seem as normal, as the normally peculiar smell of the London tubes.

By now, of course, he was not baffled at all. Whenever he visited the ministries on business he met important men who knew him, who called him George, who took him to lunch and kidded him good-humoredly about his being teetotal.

The war years had only continued, with some intensification, the natural process of all the years; and when, as sometimes happened, George spent half a day at the House of Commons, he found himself surrounded by a platoon of ex-firebrands who held official positions. “Too bad you aren’t here, George,” he had often been told. “You’d have been at least an undersecretary by now.”

“But then I wouldn’t have been Mayor of Browdley,” answered George, seeking to console himself from force of habit, yet no longer really needing to. He liked London; but to be a stranger to it, even a familiar stranger, kept him alive to that same majestic and rather terrifying alchemy of English life, as slow and sure and relentless almost as the grinding of the mills of God.

That it had helped to save England after Dunkirk and during the blitz autumn of 1940, George thought very probable.

For then its virtue had shown like good bones under the flesh—especially its abiding combination of firmness and benignity, so that the same machine of government could jail a baronet for a rationing offense and organize the distribution to small children of Mickey Mouse gas masks. Nothing was too small, and no one too great, to be beyond the range of that cool-headed but never cold-hearted survey. And George, administering Browdley, had tried to generate something of that dual mood in microcosm.

And yet…whenever he went to London he felt the strength of Browdley in him, rebelling against certain things.

One morning, walking briskly along Whitehall after a meeting with officials, George ran into a man named Sprigge whom he had first met years before on the Terrace of the House of Commons. George was pleased to be remembered, and willingly accepted the other’s invitation to have lunch at a near-by club. They talked about the war and politics; Sprigge said that since their previous meeting he had lived a good deal in China and the Malay States, getting out just in time after Pearl Harbor. It was natural then for George to ask, with an air of casualness, if he had ever come across the Winslows.

“You mean Jeff Winslow, brother of Lord Winslow?”

“Aye, that’s him.”

“Knew him well, my dear chap. Often dined at his house. Good parties he used to give—not so starchy as the really official ones, because, as he used to say, he wasn’t really official. You see, he was attached to the Sultan of Somewhere-or-other, and that made a difference. The lady next to you at dinner might be an Italian spy or an Egyptian princess or a Japanese snake-charmer—used to be fun finding out…Was he a friend of yours—Winslow?”

George answered: “Not—er—exactly, but I knew his father slightly—and I’ve also met his son.”

“And as a result of that you’re sort of interested in the middleman, eh?”

“That’s it,” George agreed. And then, to steer the conversation very gently: “I remember his father expected so much of his career.”

“Well, he was a brilliant fellow—no doubt about that.” Sprigge paused, then added: “Wasted, though, the way things turned out.”

“Wasted?”

“Perhaps that’s too strong a word. But he’d have done well in the regular Diplomatic if he’d stayed in it…and also if…well, anyhow, perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t. Not altogether his fault.”

George said nothing.

“Of course I’m only repeating things I’ve heard—but there was said to have been some scandal about his wife—an earlier divorce or something. And then other matters…later…well, one shouldn’t gossip.”

“Did you meet the boy?”

Sprigge shook his head. “He was at school in England. I suppose he’s of age now to be in the fighting somewhere.”

“Aye,” said George thoughtfully. He would have liked Sprigge to go on chattering, but just then a fellow club member said “hello” in passing and Sprigge insisted on making an introduction—Henry Millbay, the name was, which to George seemed familiar though he could not exactly place it. Millbay shook hands, declined a drink, and regarded George with a certain friendly shrewdness while, to restart the conversation, Sprigge went on: “We were just talking about Jeff Winslow—the one who was in Malaya…Boswell knows the family…Ever meet him out there, Millbay?”

Millbay shook his head, and the subject was dropped.

Half an hour later, after talk that would have been more agreeable had he not been thinking of other things all the time, George remembered an appointment and took his leave; but in the club lobby, as he was retrieving his hat and coat, Millbay overtook him. “I’m a busy man too,” he commented, with just the slightest derogatory implication that Sprigge was less so. “Wonder if we’re going in the same direction?”

They found they were not; nevertheless Millbay kept George chatting for several minutes on the pavement outside. Presently he said: “I didn’t want to talk much in front of Sprigge, who’s the biggest male gossip in London, but he said you knew the Winslows—Jeff Winslow…”

“I didn’t actually know him,” George answered.

Millbay’s glance quickened. “Oh, you mean you knew her?”

George experienced again, and for the first time in years, that old sensation of a fist grasping his insides. “Aye, but a long while ago.”

“Rather remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“She’s just home from a Jap prison camp in Hong Kong. I saw her the other day.” Something in George’s face made Millbay add: “Part of my job, you know, to interview repatriates. The idea is to get information about the enemy. They all knew plenty, but it was mostly horrors…Of course her story was particularly interesting to me because I’d known her and her husband before the war…Remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“Even if I hadn’t known that already I’d have thought so after interviewing some of the other women. They said she looked after English and American children in the prison camp. Seems to have been so bloody fearless that even the Japs let her have her own way as often as not. Anyhow, she got the kids extra food and medicines when nobody else could.”

“What about her husband?”

“She didn’t know. Nobody knows. After the first few months the Japs took to separating the men from the women and shipped the men to another camp—some said in Japan itself. Incidentally, she needn’t have been interned in the first place—there was a chance for some of the women to get away, but she insisted on staying with Jeff. At the Foreign Office we’re still pressing inquiries about him, but so far without luck, and it’s hard to be optimistic.”

George then asked, so softly that he had to repeat the question: “Do you know anything about the boy?”

“He was in the R.A.F. and got smashed in one of the Berlin raids. I think he’s discharged now, and up at Cambridge. The mother’s staying at the family place in the country.” Millbay paused as if to give George time to realize where the conversation stood again, but George, though realizing it, said nothing. Presently Millbay smiled and added: “I’ve told you a lot—now you tell me something. What do you think of her?”

“Of…her?”

“Yes. Of Livia Winslow.”

The utterance of the name made George stammer: “I—I thought she was what you called her—remarkable.”

“Did you know her at all well?”

“Aye, pretty well…but years ago, as I said.”

“Then maybe you can answer one specific question: was she—er—when you knew her—politically—er—reliable?”

“Politically reliable? What’s that?”

“Rather vague, I admit…but perhaps elastic enough to describe something a diplomat’s wife should be. After all, Jeff had to handle fairly important matters—important, I mean, to British policy.”

“And you’re asking me if she always agreed with that policy? How on earth do I know? But I can tell you this much—I don’t always agree with it, and if that’s become a crime lately, by all means put me down on your black list.”

George had reacted normally to a familiar stimulus, and Millbay reacted normally to that type of reaction, with which he was equally familiar. He smiled. “We’re not as stupid as all that, Boswell, even at the Foreign Office. And our black list is largely a gray list—or should I use the phrase ‘neutral tints’?” He paused a moment, then asked quietly: “Did you know her when she was in Ireland?”

“No.” George caught the alertness of Millbay’s glance and countered it with a more humorous alertness of his own. Suddenly he laughed. “Look here…what are you driving at? Are you a detective or something?”

Millbay also laughed. “I might be the ‘something.’ To tell you the truth, I’m just a government official who once wrote a few novels.” George then knew where he had seen Millbay’s name, and also why he had not clearly remembered it; he was not much of a novel reader. Millbay continued: “Perhaps that’s why I’m handed all these wartime psychological problems. They’re quite interesting, though, as a rule…Take this woman we’ve been talking about—from all accounts she’s top-notch for sheer physical and mental courage against appalling odds. Yet all that—and every novelist knows it—doesn’t guarantee that she couldn’t be a complete bitch in other ways. Did you, incidentally, ever discuss Hitler with her?”

“Good God, no—the time I knew her was years before Hitler was even heard of. You’re not suspecting her of being a Nazi spy, are you?”

Millbay laughed again. “Stolen treaties tucked away in the corsage, eh?…Hardly…So you don’t think she’d have made a good spy?”

George answered: “From my judgment she’d make the worst spy in the world.”

“What makes you say that?”

George answered: “Of course it’s long ago that I knew her, but people don’t change their whole nature. What I mean is—if they’re…well, outspoken…not always too tactful…”

Millbay touched George’s arm with a half-affectionate gesture. “Thank you for confirming my own private opinion. I never did believe there was anything really wrong with her in that way—especially on the basis of the incident that gave rise to most of the talk…You heard about it, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so. What was it?”

“Some big dinner party in Batavia, with a crowd of officials, attachés, Army people, and so on. I was told about it by several who were there. Before the war of course—1932 or 1933. Conversation turned on Hitler, and most of what was said was unflattering—especially from the viewpoint of the career diplomat. Suddenly Livia said—‘Isn’t it odd that people who profess to follow a religion founded by a carpenter are so ready to sneer at someone for having once been a house painter?’ Quite a sensation! Of course she was tabbed as pro-Hitler after that, but I really don’t think she had to be. I think she could have meant exactly what she said…Because it is odd, when you reckon it up. With all the perfectly sound reasons the democracies have for hating that man, they choose to sneer at him because he once followed a trade. How do house painters feel about it, I wonder? If I knew any, I’d ask ’em.”

“I do know some, so I will ask ’em.”

“And then tell me? Well, anyhow, you can imagine that sort of remark didn’t do her husband any good professionally.”

“Aye, I can see that.”

They were still at the curbside, but a government car had driven up and the chauffeur was waiting. Millbay said hastily: “Sorry there hasn’t been more time to talk. Always interesting to compare notes about people one knows…Incidentally, if you’re free tonight, why don’t you dine with me? Then we’d have more time.”

George was free and accepted, though not without a misgiving that grew and crystallized during the afternoon into a determination to pursue a certain course of action if Millbay should make it necessary. Before they were halfway through the meal, at a service flat in Smith Square, Millbay had made it necessary. They had discussed general topics at first, but then Millbay had continued: “You know, Boswell, I’m still a bit curious about Livia Winslow. She always rather fascinated me, in a sort of way, and to meet someone else who knew her…well, I suppose it’s the novelist in me cropping up again, even though it’s years since I last published anything. And I certainly don’t intend to publish anything you tell me, so don’t worry.”

“Anything I tell you?”

“Yes—if you feel like it. I wish you would.”

“About what?”

“About Livia…that is, of course, unless you’d rather not discuss her.”

George then said what he had made up his mind to say if this situation should arise. He said: “I don’t mind discussing her, but I’d better tell you something in advance. I was once married to her.”

“Good God! You don’t say?”

Till then George had felt slightly uncomfortable, but now, relaxed by his own candor, he could almost enjoy the other’s unbounded astonishment. He grinned across the table. “I dunno why I felt I had to tell you, but now I have done, I hope you’ll go ahead and give me any more news you have about her.”

“So you’re just as interested as I am?”

“Probably. That’s rather natural, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t kept in touch with her at all?”

“No—not since…” He left the sentence unfinished.

“And that was—when?”

“September first, 1921.”

“Well remembered, eh?”

George nodded.

Millbay gave him a slow, shrewd glance, then continued: “Jeffrey happens to be a friend of mine…Would you like me to talk about his marriage?”

“Aye—if you feel like it.”

“And you won’t mind if I’m frank?”

“We’d both be wasting our time if you weren’t, wouldn’t we?”

“Glad you think so. And in exchange will you give me your own frank opinion…afterwards?”

George smiled. “Nay, I’ll not promise that. Let’s hear your story first.”

I first met Jeffrey Winslow (Millbay said) in connection with the Kemalpan affair. I don’t suppose you heard much about that. It didn’t get publicized. Things like it are always apt to happen, and to happen with the same declension of eventfulness—that is to say, they begin excitingly—bloodshed in the jungle, perhaps—and end a year or so later with quiet voices pronouncing judgment across some departmental desk top in Whitehall. Mine was one of the quiet voices; I had all the papers relating to the affair before me, and I’d given several days to the most careful study of them. After all, you don’t squash a man’s career without good reasons, especially if he belongs to a family like the Winslows. I was as tactful as I could be. I rather liked the look of the fellow from the outset; he was neither truculent nor obsequious, and heaven knows he could have been either. He just sat at the other side of the desk—a little nervous, as was natural; he answered questions briefly and clearly, and there was a pleasant ring in his voice that I would have taken for sincerity had not the circumstances of the moment put doubts in my mind.

Of course the Kemalpan affair needs some explanation—that is, if you don’t already know about it. (George said he didn’t.) Oh well, I can put it in a few sentences. Kemalpan is a technically independent Sultanate that the British Government has a treaty with; Jeffrey Winslow was adviser to the Sultan on matters connected with imperial relations—somewhat of a nebulous job, but semi-diplomatic, with tentacles reaching into commercial and military spheres. Decidedly no plum—but not badly paid, and easy enough, as a rule, if you didn’t mind burying yourself in a place like Kemalpan. That, I should add, is the name of the capital city as well as of the state; the capital is inland, in the midst of jungle and rubber plantations; Winslow preferred to live with his wife at a settlement on the coast fifty miles away—healthier there, or so he reckoned. There’s a telegraph line between the coast and the capital, and a sort of rough trail that you can drive over in a Ford—but no good roads, no railway, and in those days no airline. These details are important in view of what happened. Also I should add that a small colony of British and Dutch rubber planters lived on their estates near the inland capital, and were on good terms with the Sultan, whose subjects they employed. The Sultan didn’t mind low wages for the tappers so long as he got a cut of the plantation profits—which he did, more or less, in the form of thoroughly legalized taxation. Quite a nice setup as long as it lasted, and it lasted throughout the twenties, when rubber rose to four shillings a pound; but later the fall to sixpence led to labor troubles, and by the mid-twenties these had reached danger point. All this is necessary to give the background to what happened in October ’34, when an insurrection in the capital threatened to depose the Sultan in favor of some native “leader” whom the planters called a Communist—it’s a conditioned reflex, you know. But it was true that the plantations couldn’t pay higher wages without going bankrupt, and equally true that the mob was in a mood to overthrow things if the Millennium didn’t appear overnight. The Sultan, who was a sly old debauchee with no real interest in life but graft and women, rapidly slipped into panic; meanwhile the planters with their wives and families moved in from outlying districts to seek protection in the royal palace—protection being a few hundred of the Sultan’s private army, poor in quality and doubtful in allegiance.

The crisis developed within a matter of hours, while the Winslows were at their home on the coast; Winslow wired the news to London, which was part of his job, and was told to await instructions. A day later those instructions were sent. He was told to assure the Sultan that the British Government would back him to the full in suppressing the revolt, and that therefore the capital must be held at all costs until such assistance was forthcoming…

Now this was the point. Those instructions were sent, and we had evidence later that they reached the coast settlement where Winslow lived; but he swore he never got them. Thus he didn’t give the Sultan any assurance of British help and the Sultan promptly gave in to the rebels. There followed a nasty little affray at the palace in which three white men and two white women were butchered. Well, that was the Kemalpan affair…nothing very remarkable, but thoroughly reprehensible from every official standpoint, and a year later we were still holding inquiries about it in Whitehall, still collecting more evidence that the instructions to Winslow had actually been transmitted and must have been received by him, though he still swore that they hadn’t.

A further point cropped up: the telegraph line from the coast to the inland capital had been cut, so that if Winslow had received his orders he could only have properly obeyed them by making the fifty-mile trip in person over the rough trail; and this, with most of the intervening country in the hands of the rebels, might not have been so safe. In fact, it might have been decidedly unsafe—which was why he couldn’t have relied on anyone else to do the job. So you see where all this is leading…and where it had already led on that foggy Friday in November ’35, when I first talked to the fellow in my office. Was his denial of having received instructions just the only thing he could think of as an excuse for having been scared? If that were the true interpretation, it added up to something rather serious.

You know, it’s a queer thing when you have to talk to a gentleman in the social sense who has somehow broken the code of a gentleman in the ethical sense. You can never quite come to grips with the situation. You fence and evade and know that he knows all the time what you’re really thinking. I never, for instance, came anywhere near hinting to Winslow that he might be both a liar and a coward, yet he must have known that that was the inevitable implication behind all the questioning. And presently it all boiled down to that simple question: Had he or had he not received those instructions? He stuck to it that he hadn’t, and he sounded convincing, but long experience has left me with the opinion that lies are, if anything, easier to tell convincingly than the truth. Besides, evidence that the instructions had reached him was almost watertight, so I had to accept it. But of course I did not say so. I said, quietly and politely: “Well, Winslow, we seem to have reached a deadlock. Maybe there’ll be some further evidence…if so, perhaps you’ll be good enough to come here again.”

He answered then, with a certain austere dignity which I liked (whether he were a liar and a coward or not): “Of course I will, but it’s nine months now since I was advised to come home on leave, and since then I’ve been kept waiting for the inquiry to finish. It’s rather a strain, in some ways. Besides, I should very much like to go back to my job.”

It was then my duty to tell him that there was little chance of his ever resuming that kind of job under government service. He took it very well. He said he was sorry—which I knew did not mean any kind of confession, but merely that the outcome was a blow to him. I said I was sorry too—and by that I did not mean that as a liar and a coward he deserved any special leniency, but merely that it grieved me, as a member of the so-called ruling class, to see another member acquitting himself out of style. You see what snobs we all are…Anyhow, I shook hands with him and wished him well and didn’t expect to see him again.

But I just couldn’t get the fellow out of my mind. He’d interested me—not only because the departure from tradition is always more interesting than the tradition itself, of which one gets a little bored when one is, as I am, a somewhat cynical conformist. I should be believed, no doubt, if I said that after talking to Winslow I paced up and down my office floor wondering if, in his place, I should have behaved any better. Yet actually I didn’t wonder at all, because I knew. I have fought in wars, and there have been several occasions on which I risked my life, not because I was brave, nor because I hated the enemy, but because risking my life was the thing to do in those particular circumstances, and all my training had been to make me act both accordingly and automatically. That’s one of the reasons why Winslow interested me—because his training had been, if anything, more traditional than mine. Who’s Who and Debrett were sufficient authorities for that. He’d been to a good public school and to Oxford, had then passed into the Diplomatic and been an attaché at the embassy in Vienna. Quite brilliant at Oxford, by the way, and with his family connections he must have been exactly the type for whom one would forecast a distinguished future. All of which added to the mystery—for why, if one came to think of it, should such a fellow ever fetch up at Kemalpan? That was decidedly not the thing to have done…and since it was unlikely that anybody would take Kemalpan from choice, what had forced him into it? Well, there were people I knew who could throw out a few hints. Our friend Sprigge is the expert there. Scandals, women, mésalliances, bad checks—he can usually tell you. In Winslow’s case it was a divorce—which in those prim days didn’t help anyone…and I needn’t say more about that to you.

I also discovered that Winslow had written a book of essays on moral philosophy that had attracted some attention in its field, and might have led to a useful subsidiary reputation had not his main career gone off at such a tangent. I was interested enough to get hold of the book. I found it a bit above my head, but I thought it showed signs of a first-class mind, and first-class minds are such rare things in our time and land that it becomes a crime, in my opinion, to frustrate, sidetrack, or otherwise stultify them. And his, at least, had been sidetracked at Kemalpan, for—apart from the career—there had been no succeeding books.

During the following months a trickle of further evidence came in, but none of it helpful to his case. A Chinese clerk reported that he had personally delivered the coded message from the telegraph station to Winslow’s bungalow, where he had handed it to a responsible servant; the servant said Winslow was out at the time, so he had placed it on his desk along with other messages and letters…The case also began to look blacker from another angle, for at the time the message was received it was known at the coast settlement that the lives of white refugees in the Sultan’s palace were endangered, so that if Winslow had been concerned with his own personal safety he must also have weighed it against the safety of others. About twenty, to be precise—including women and children. And to complete the indictment, it seemed reasonably probable that if he had managed to get the message through to the Sultan, the latter would have put up a defense instead of a surrender, and the five lives might have been saved. Altogether there was very little excuse for Winslow, and when, just about the time this later evidence came in, I got a letter from him in Ireland I was in a rather unsympathetic mood for considering it, especially as the first few sentences showed me he was asking the impossible. Briefly, he wanted a job. Not, of course, the same job in Kemalpan, or even that kind of job in that kind of place; yet, he argued, could not a decade of experience in the East, plus the knowledge of several obscure languages and dialects, be put to some use somehow and somewhere? What he hinted at was a job in some government office, where he could continue in the public service, however humbly.

I wrote back and told him how little chance he had. And a week later Mrs. Winslow herself came to see me.

It was another interesting meeting. I had heard of this Mrs. Winslow once before, in connection with her oft-quoted and misquoted remark about Hitler at the Batavia dinner party; I hadn’t disliked her for that (because it seemed to me she had probably been misunderstood), but it had given me an impression that she was a dangerous partner for a man of affairs. And now, when I saw her across my desk, I was immediately struck by a certain controlled intention in her whole look and attitude. She faced me as if she knew what she wanted and meant to get her own way at all costs. After a mere good-morning she plunged right in—couldn’t I possibly find her husband some desk job in Whitehall? Apparently my letter had been the final blow to his hopes, and she was afraid of a breakdown if he didn’t find some work where he felt he could be useful. And though she herself preferred to live in Ireland, she would not say no to London if Jeffrey had to be there. She talked of living in London as a sort of sacrifice she would make for her husband if the Government in return would do its part.

I told her flatly it was impossible, and when she stressed the personal angle I delicately hinted that government posts were not handed out to prevent breakdowns. The Kemalpan incident, I said, was of a kind that they must both recognize had called at least a halt to Jeffrey’s career. At that she began to protest and argue, but of course I wouldn’t go over all the details with her. “Even assuming some tragic mistake, one can do nothing about it now. Men’s careers have been ruined before by mistakes—it would be nothing new.”

“You look at it very coldly,” she said.

“I look at it very logically,” I answered. “The whole incident, affair, or whatever you call it, is closed now and can’t be reopened unless some totally new item of evidence should crop up. And that’s so unlikely that we can almost say it won’t happen.”

She then said quietly: “It can happen. That’s what I came here for—to tell you something. It was I who intercepted the cable. I decoded it, found out what it meant, then decided that Jeffrey shouldn’t ever see it. Of course he doesn’t know I did that, or that I’m admitting it now to you.”

She waited for me to show surprise, and perhaps I did, but it was not surprise at what she said so much as surprise that she should expect me to believe it. Naturally I didn’t. But it would have been equally unwise to dismiss the matter without further probing.

“What made you do such a thing?” I asked guardedly.

“I just had to,” she answered. “The telegraph line was cut, so I knew he’d want to take the message himself, and as the country was in the hands of the rebels I didn’t think he’d have much chance of getting through. And he might have got killed.”

“He might,” I agreed. “And five others did.”

She said nothing.

“Probably as a result of the message not being delivered.”

“I wouldn’t say probably. Possibly.”

“You knew the planters and their families were in danger when you intercepted the message?”

“Yes.”

“And you deliberately let them take their chance in order to ensure your husband’s personal safety?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think that rather indefensible?”

“I’m not defending it. I’m just saying it’s what I did. My husband was dearer to me than a crowd of people I didn’t know.”

“How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for such a reason?”

She didn’t answer.

I went on, with more sarcasm: “Or shall I put it this way—at what point would the lives of strangers, by sheer weight of numbers, tilt the balance against the life of the man you love?”

She answered: “Never.”

“So you’d sacrifice millions, if one can conceive of such a situation?”

She nodded.

She really was at this point beginning to surprise me. It’s rare that people, especially women, are willing to let a logical point be pressed home. I said, rather severely: “I’m glad to think you are probably unique in looking at things that way.”

“Oh, but I’m not,” she answered. “In wartime wouldn’t you press a button, if you could, to destroy a million of the enemy rather than lose a single life on your own side? Then why is my attitude so extraordinary?”

What was extraordinary, of course, was her argument, and it was one that didn’t seem to me profitable to continue. I was still disinclined to believe her confession, but I was clear in my mind as to the implications of the alternatives. Either she was lying to save her husband’s reputation—in which case one could possibly like her for it; or she had actually told the truth—in which case she was ruthless, unprincipled, and wholly the kind of wife whom a man in a responsible position should not have.

But in any case nothing could be done. Even if her confession were accepted at its face value it would not help Jeffrey to get his job back. The most it could do would be to win him a measure of half-incredulous sympathy.

I explained all this to her, and it seemed to me that she picked up the cue, as it were, and from then on made a bid for the sympathy. Jeffrey, she repeated, was on the verge of a breakdown. All he asked was some job, however small and ill-paid, just to give him the feeling—perhaps even the illusion—that he had not been dishonorably discharged. It had even come to the point, she said, that their marriage might founder if he could not get such a job; he was finding it hard to settle down in Ireland, and the book he was trying to write was not going well. This was the first I had heard about another book and I asked her for details. She said it was a book about the Far East—one he had long projected—something rather scholarly and definitive. She had been urging him to use up his time that way ever since he came home, and surely conditions in Ireland were ideal for authorship—a quiet place in the country, nothing else to do, and ample money to live on. “Really,” she added, “he’s quite well off—there’s no reason why he should worry about a career, or about writing books either, so far as that goes. The whole Kemalpan business wouldn’t matter if only he didn’t think it mattered.”

“Perhaps, though, the relatives of the people who were killed there might still think it mattered.”

“Oh, them. I wasn’t thinking about them.”

And she wasn’t. She was just thinking of herself and Jeffrey. That seemed to close the argument quite finally. I got up and made it clear that there was nothing more I could say or do.

During the next few weeks I found myself wondering even more compellingly about the Winslows. First, he had interested me, then she; but now my interest in each of them separately was more than redoubled in them both. What went on between such a pair? What sort of thing was their life together? If she had been lying on his behalf, it was possible that the appalling selfishness of her argument might not have been sincere. Or had she been telling the truth, as to both fact and attitude? To summarize it another way: if she were a liar, one liked her better and her husband less; but if she were not a liar, one disliked her intensely and felt sympathy for her husband. And I still could not properly make up my mind. I have rarely been so puzzled about anything. Then suddenly more evidence filtered through—I needn’t go into details, but it was a kind that weighed down one of the scales pretty conclusively. She had told the truth. She had intercepted the message. Which meant that Jeffrey himself was neither a liar nor a coward, but at worst a victim. The revelation swung me into a mood in which I recollected our meeting and how much, from first appearance, I had liked him. I remembered his quietness, his austere dignity, the simple unassumingness which, I knew, concealed a mind whose quality had been demonstrated. So on impulse I wrote him a friendly letter, saying nothing much except that I hoped he was getting on all right and that if he ever visited London he might find time to have lunch with me. To my surprise he answered by return and took the invitation with far more seriousness than I should have thought. He would have been so glad, he said, to come to London and see me (I hadn’t suggested that, by any means), but he was not very well and couldn’t get away…would I, however, visit him in Ireland—stay a week or two—there was good shooting, fishing, climbing, if that sort of thing appealed to me? He would be very happy, and please make it soon, because the late summer (and it was then August) was perhaps the best time of the year at Carrigole.

It happened that I had not had a holiday that year, and though the idea of visiting the Winslows seemed quite fantastic at first, I soon found myself thinking of reasons why I might take Jeffrey at his word. After all, I liked him; it might even be that if he were feeling low-spirited I could help him by talk and companionship. But I will not disguise that my overmastering motive was sheer curiosity. I wanted to find out what sort of people they both were, in their own home and with their own domestic problems. And at least it could do no harm to call on them if I happened to be holiday-making thereabouts.

So I looked up Carrigole on the map and found it was a dozen miles from Galway—a small place, not very accessible, in a district of lakes and mountains. And that’s why I asked you, Boswell, if you ever knew the Winslows in Ireland, because I should have liked your opinion of Carrigole.

It began to rain when I first came within sight of it. I had hired a car for the last stage of the trip and all the way I felt oddly excited about getting there. Actually I had never been in Ireland before, and crossing the country from Dublin it had occurred to me that even the trains were antique—and not contemptibly, as on so many out-dated railways all over the world, but honorably, with dignity, like good sound Victorian mahogany furniture. And when, at Galway, my train reached its destination, there was again the contrast with other railheads I had seen; for here was no mere petering out into obscurity, but a grand finale in stone—the massive quayside station, far too large and almost as quiet as a cathedral, shaking a granite fist into the sea.

But my first glimpse of Carrigole was equally memorable—or perhaps the mood I was in gave me extra percipience—a kind of mystic awareness I am naturally distrustful of, but can’t deny exists, at certain rare times and places. I knew Ireland was supposed to be like that, and therefore I was perversely surprised to find it so. Through the rainswept windows of the car I saw blue smoke drifting over the roofs of whitewashed cottages, and beyond them a mountain rising into clouds that totally covered the summit. I gathered, from the map on my knee, that this must be Slieve Baragh, not much higher than a hill, yet as I saw it then for the first time it seemed in another world of measurement. Presently the car slowed down for the village, and here the swollen clouds dipped lower, bringing no raindrops but emptying silently; Slieve Baragh was now hidden behind a curtain that suggested Himalayan heights—and yet, I remembered again, it was not much of a mountain—a mere two thousand feet. I couldn’t help making other mental notes of the near and the practical—the uneven walls and mud-brown pavements, the butcher who called himself a “flesher” and the chemist’s shop magnificently styled a “Medical Hall.” I wound down the side window to catch the whiff of peat on the wet breeze as the car bumped over a bridge across a river—only a minor river, like the minor mountain, but turbulent now as it filled almost directly from the sky.

A mile or so past the village the Winslows’ house stood behind a drenched garden, and Jeffrey was waiting at the gate in the rain. He looked pale and worn, and there was intense nervousness in the way he greeted me.

I ought to describe the house; it was substantially built, thick-walled and small-windowed, in a style conditioned by roaring Atlantic gales for half the year, and political troubles for half a century. These indeed had left the house, with its most conspicuous attribute—a large, burnt-out wing, blackened and roofless, which provided a ready topic of conversation. “They tried to burn the whole place down in ’twenty-two,” Jeffrey explained. “Livy got it cheap because it hadn’t been lived in since then and needed so much repairing, but part of it’s beyond repair—it would be too large for us, anyway. We have a couple of servants and the boy when he’s home from school—that only makes five…”

By then we were in the square hall, from which the main rooms of the house opened on all sides, and it was there that Livia met me. Perhaps because of the dark afternoon it seemed to me that she appeared from nowhere, a sudden distillation of shadows. I was not surprised when she greeted me as a stranger, allowing Jeffrey to make the unnecessary introduction. I played up accordingly and thought it equally unnecessary when, a few minutes later in the bedroom I had been shown to, she closed the door behind her and said with a sort of conspiratory quietness: “Jeffrey still doesn’t know I came to see you in London.”

I nodded and said I would have surmised that he didn’t.

“And of course he doesn’t know anything else either.”

I knew what she meant, and I nodded to that also.

“I hope you won’t ever repeat what I told you in confidence,” she went on.

I said temporizingly and in the bland way which I have cultivated as part of my official equipment: “My dear Mrs. Winslow, I wasn’t aware that you were telling me anything in confidence, but as a matter of fact I don’t usually gossip.” I added, to change the subject: “It’s so kind of you to have me here, and I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Not at all,” she answered, with cold politeness. “You’re on your way to Limerick, aren’t you?”

That was as broad a hint as I needed, and clear proof of what I had already guessed—that she didn’t want me to stay, and that Jeffrey had invited me either without her knowledge or against her wishes. I had guessed this subconsciously enough to have wired my time of arrival too late for any cancellation of the invitation—and, as it happened, too late even for Jeffrey to meet me at Galway.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m on my way to Limerick.”

I had a bath, changed into drier tweeds, and went down to dinner. I met the boy then, Charles I think his name was—a youth of thirteen, at Charterhouse—tall, good-looking, shy, likable. Intelligent, too, as I discovered after a few casual remarks. He was piling turf on the old-fashioned fire as I entered, for it was chilly enough to have one, and that set us talking of turf and electricity, old and new, the Shannon hydroelectric scheme and the ancient Irish tongue that nobody spoke except illiterate peasants and modern schoolteachers. Livia then said: “We’re all half-mad with our opposites,” which seemed to end rather than clinch any discussion. She had a curious way of saying things that were never quite clear, yet never so meaningless as to be easy to ignore. Jeffrey noticed my interest in the boy and soon found a chance to tell me, like any other proud father, that Charlie was keen on music and by no means a bad piano player. We went on chatting desultorily throughout the meal; then the boy made a polite excuse and left us three adults together. I somehow had an impression that he got on better with his father than with Livia, accepting the shy approach more readily than the frontal assault; and it has amused me since to reflect that Livia ranged against the polite taboos of the English public-school system would be a unique example of an irresistible force meeting an immovable body.

After he had gone there was a change of atmosphere that became almost baleful; it had been tense before, but now it was menacing, a curious hostility between Jeffrey and Livia that was due, I could not help feeling, to my own presence. A sort of invisible cat crouching on the table top to spring at any of our throats at an unknown signal—if the metaphor isn’t too farfetched. In an attempt to ease the conversation into some harmless groove I said, unimportantly: “It’s probably not a good day to sight-see, but I did at least get a good whiff of Ireland as I drove over.”

Livia answered, as if she must dispute with me at all costs: “It is a good day to sight-see. Ireland’s a sad country, so you see it best when it looks sad, but the sadness is alive—it comes out of the earth—it isn’t like the dead sadness of London, especially the West End.”

“Oh come now,” I said facetiously. “The Café Royal at midnight hasn’t got much dead sadness.”

“Jeff and I love it here,” she went on, defensively, as if I had ever denied it. “That is, he could if he wanted to,” she added, as if Jeffrey had ever denied it.

“But what do you do all the time?” I asked, still facetiously.

“Livy looks after the farm,” Jeffrey answered. “She likes that sort of work, though it’s not very good land—far too stony, and the gales come in full of salt spray that sours the soil…I’ll take you round tomorrow.”

“Mr. Millbay won’t have time,” Livia said pointedly. “He’s got to leave for Limerick tomorrow.” She added: “Jeffrey’s busy too. He has to write his book.”

“If he can,” Jeffrey commented, with a note of ruefulness.

“He doesn’t concentrate enough,” she countered. They were both talking at each other, it seemed, with me as a needed yet somehow exacerbating audience.

The question of the book raised Jeffrey a notch higher in whatever emotion was being generated between them. “Livy,” he said, “appears to think that writing is just a simple matter of one page after another.”

“Well, isn’t it?” Livia asked, appealing to me.

I tried to lower the tension by asking Jeffrey how far the book had progressed.

Livia answered for him: “About a hundred pages, and it ought to be easy for him to finish because it’s all about Far Eastern affairs that he’s an expert on.”

Jeffrey said, still in the same mood of self-scarifying irony: “Livia thinks that with a record like mine people will be eager to accept me as an authority.”

I gathered that this had been argued between them before, since Livia retorted: “What does his record have to do with what he writes?…That’s what I always ask him.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Yes, that’s what she always asks me, and I think the answer is rather obvious. Wouldn’t you say so, Millbay?”

I didn’t want to get into such an argument, so I said nothing.

Livia went on, as if even my silence irritated her: “And what of his record, anyway? Who bothers about it except a few people in the Government?”

Jeffrey answered heavily: “I think Charlie would bother about it if he knew—and perhaps he does know, or can guess.”

“Charlie has no right to be ashamed of his father,” Livia retorted, and then she added, astoundingly: “My father spent twelve years in jail and I wasn’t ashamed of him.”

I hadn’t known about that, and mentally made up my mind to look into the matter when I got back to London. And of course I afterwards found who her father had been. But in the meantime I felt I had to be honest and side with Jeffrey about the book. He was undoubtedly right, and his Far Eastern opus, however good, might well fall under the curse of Kemalpan—the more so since, if it were very good indeed, it might even attract publicity to what would otherwise have been ignored or forgotten. I didn’t bring up that point, but my general support of Jeffrey’s attitude led to what I had feared—and that was the whole Kemalpan issue spouting up like a volcano. Jeffrey muttered gloomily that he wondered if it were worth while even to finish the book at all, what he really wanted was a job, something he could work at to prove himself more than a failure and an idler. A job, a job …to get away from the everlasting western gales and the stony soured soil and the clouds dripping over the mountain and nothing to do…nothing to do…

I could feel the tension mounting now like a physical wave through the shadows, and again to ease it I said: “You know, Jeffrey, there are jobs, if you really want one. It wouldn’t have to be in government service. Your Far Eastern experience would be a bargain for a good commercial firm, and it’s true, as you know, that a man can serve his country in, say, British-American Tobacco quite as valuably as in an embassy.”

I saw his eyes light up at that. “Do you think they’d even consider me?”

But then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. Livia got up from her chair and leaned across the table towards us with a gleam in her eyes that was of a very different kind. It gave her face a rather frightening radiance, emphasizing the curious profile of nose and forehead as she stared down at us like, I thought, the figurehead of a ship about to dive into a storm. “He’s not going!” she screamed, in a wild angry whisper. “He must stay here. This is the place for him…always…”

After that there was little I could say. The scene subsided, leaving us to stammer a few commonplaces about this and that; Livia seemed to realize she had said too much, or had somehow been caught off-guard.

We adjourned to the drawing room and sat up, the three of us, till it became clear that Jeffrey wanted to talk to me alone if there were any chance. Towards midnight I began yawning, to bring the thing to an issue, and Livia said it was time we all went to bed; whereupon Jeffrey announced that he and I would stay up and chat for a while. He said that with an air of challenge, and there was nothing much she could do about it except leave us together. Such a small victory, and yet, from his whole attitude, I gathered it was both a narrow and a crucial one.

When we were alone he asked me again about the possibility of a commercial job—had I meant what I said—did I really think there was a chance of it? Certainly, I answered, if that was what he really wanted, and I offered there and then to put in a good word for him. But the imminence of something practical and decisive seemed to reverse his mood and deflate his eagerness, so that I told him to think it over carefully; maybe he didn’t want to go as much as he thought he did. He answered, far too carefully: “I’d go like a shot but for Livy.”

Then he lapsed into a mumble of pitiful things about her—almost as if he had learned most of them by heart and were repeating them as much for his own benefit as for mine. She would be dead against his going abroad again; she had spent ten years in Malaya and that was understandably as much as she wanted; she loved Ireland and the farm; she worked so hard, was so good to him, they really got on all right together despite occasional bickerings…and so on.

And of course, knowing what I did, it antagonized me to the point of saying: “So you really mean you’ll stay here for the rest of your life just to please her?”

He answered: “Perhaps I ought to stay here. After all, she’s been very decent about the whole thing. The Kemalpan business, I mean. She’s never reproached me about it.”

That did the trick. Accustomed as I am to the severest verbal self-discipline I simply couldn’t keep back my answer. “By God,” I explained, “she damn well oughtn’t to, since she was the whole cause of it herself!”

Then I told him what I hadn’t promised Livia not to tell him, though I should have broken that promise anyway.

Of course he was appalled. He wouldn’t believe it at first, even when I said I had documents, depositions, and so on, that I could send or show him later. “Besides,” I said, “she confessed to it even before there was proof.” That appalled him also, and I had to tell him about her visit to my office. When he still seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the situation, I said: “You mean you don’t think she’s capable of it?”

He answered heavily: “She’s capable of anything.” And then he went on with a touch of anger: “Why did you tell me? Do you want me to think badly of her? After all, though what she did was quite dreadful, it only shows how much she loves me…in her way.”

“Certainly, if you think so,” I answered. “She shows she loves you by ruining your career—to say nothing of sacrificing the lives of five strangers. I didn’t intend to say all this when I came here, and I admit I acted on impulse in doing so, but now I’m rather glad I did.” I thought it was a good moment then to say good-night and tell him I’d be leaving in the morning early. “Perhaps there’s somewhere in the village I can hire a car to take me on to Limerick…” He said there was, and pulled himself together enough to telephone about it. Then he took me up to my room. At the door we shook hands and I repeated my offer to try to find him a commercial job if he wanted one. I also said that in any case I hoped he’d give me a ring if ever he were in London.

I slept badly and got up soon after dawn. The mists were over the mountain and a gale from the sea was already tearing them to shreds. I did not think Carrigole was a place I should like to stay in for long, much less to live in altogether. There was something elemental and primitive about it that would get on my nerves unless I could become elemental and primitive myself.

The car had already arrived and stood in the lane beyond the garden, but as I was crossing the latter from the house I saw Livia hurrying towards me from a side gate. She was dressed in a sort of waterproof smock, tied loosely at the waist; her head was almost hidden behind a low-brimmed sou’wester, and she wore also knee-high boots caked with mud. I don’t know why I remember such things, except that I was aware of a curious half-hypnotized tension that made me stir my mind over details to keep it from somehow freezing at her approach.

I was prepared for a scene, but there was none. “So you’re going now?” she greeted me.

I said I had thought it better to leave early, so as to reach Limerick by midday.

“Why yes, of course. Much better. I’m always up like this. There’s so much to be done on a farm.”

I said I was sure she was kept very busy.

“Of course Jeff’s still asleep,” she went on. “Nine’s early enough for him to start writing, don’t you think?” And then, with a bright smile; “What time would you begin writing if you were a writer?”

I answered, smiling back: “Any time I damn well felt like it—and I speak with authority because I am a writer.”

She didn’t seem to take offense—and yet I knew, from something in her eyes, that Jeffrey had told her I had told him everything, and that she hated me for it. And I had a feeling that to be hated by Livia Winslow was no mild experience.

She accompanied me to the car. “Jeff is really happy here,” she said, as if I were again denying the fact. “And no wonder, is it?” And then she added, in a phrase I remember because I wasn’t quite sure what it meant: “When I first saw this place I thought I had found where I was born in another world…”