VI

THE QUEST

The Muelle de Flores was nearly empty, for it was a restaurant that earned its profits at lunch, not dinner—or at any rate not dinner in the cool spring nights of November. Toby chose a table sheltered from the wind by a glass veranda, with a clear view across the bay of Valparaiso to the cloudy Andes. It pleased him to think that a mountainous pink and white mass, streaked with black, might be Aconcagua. He was moderately sure it was not, for in the failing light the mass upon the horizon looked too immoderately high to be attached to earth. But so did all the Andean giants. Since he was fascinated by high peaks and the imagined sight of one was as good as a cocktail, he decided that it was indeed Aconcagua and not a cloud.

It was a propitious day, a day worthy of some quiet personal celebration. Brazil was done. The Argentine was done. Chile was done. And what a fortnight his Chilean visit had been! The exquisite wines; the cheap currency; the women of Santiago, more lovely even than their nearest competitors, the women of New York and Bucharest. Santiago had produced a flood of orders. What business there was in Valparaiso he had done in two fast-moving days. He was ready to make plans for the romantic journey up the Pacific Coast.

This little restaurant jutting out into the bay looked a good spot in which to rejoice that one was alive. The spicy and faint scents of the kitchen were a fine aperitif, and the tables and boxes of flowers had evidently been arranged by a master hand. He suspected the waiter rather than the proprietor. The man was making out a bill at the other end of the terrace. He had the manner—except that he was rather too young—of one of those devoted old servitors of the public, solidly fixed as the coffee urn, with regular customers and knowing their tastes in cookery, politics and newspapers. He wore a black suit and a black bow tie at the collar of his white silk shirt. His clothes, except for the white apron, might equally well have been worn by any Spaniard in mourning for a close relative. The flaring nostrils, the thin lips, the ironical eyes, the burnt orange of the prominent cheekbones guaranteed a past less conventional than the present. Toby, examining him closely, caught the waiter’s eye and smiled. He came over to greet the new client. On a genial impulse Toby rose to greet him as if he had been the maître d’hôtel of a fashionable restaurant.

“Manuel Vargas, para servirle,” said the waiter, acknowledging the courtesy by introducing himself in the Spanish manner.

“Toby Manning, a su disposición.”

Manuel replied in English. They spoke each other’s language for a few embarrassed seconds. The Spaniard, having the more persistent politeness, won.

“What would you like?” he asked, offering the menu.

“A good sole and a bottle of white.”

“Not hungry?”

“Yes, reasonably. But I’m a bit off meat.”

“That’s natural,” said Manuel, smiling. “Your English meat is so good that it spoils you for meat abroad.”

“Our grills are passable, I admit. But the splendid English roasts are a myth. Have you, frankly, ever eaten a good roast in any restaurant anywhere?”

“There was a gigot in Amsterdam once,” said Manuel thoughtfully, “but I was very young and perhaps I didn’t know.”

“I’ve been spoiled by Argentine meat, not English,” Toby went on. “I’ve just come from Argentina. Is there a mixed grill in the world as perfect for example as the España’s in Buenos Aires? And there are a dozen restaurants just as good.”

“You’re right,” Manuel replied. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you a mixed grill that would compete. But if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll give you an Argentine churrasco and guarantee it crisp and juicy.”

“You’re very bold,” said Toby sceptically.

“Don’t pay for it if you don’t like it.”

“I shall like it. What do we put in front of it?”

“I suppose,” said Manuel, “that it is too much to hope that you are fond of little eels in casserole—angulas bilbaínas? ”

“It isn’t too much to hope, then, that the Muelle de Flores knows how to do them? I warn you I have lived in Bilbao.”

“So have I,” replied Manuel shortly. “And before the angulas I suggest a Mexican enchilada just to open the appetite. A very small one, naturally—the cheese tasty, and the peppers too hot for an Englishman, right for a Spaniard and not hot enough for a Mexican.”

“How would a very dry sherry—a manzanilla, if you have one—go with it?”

“I’ve never tried. I am perhaps too conventional. But I think you are right and they will marry themselves very nicely. The bars of Madrid wouldn’t hesitate to serve you enchiladas with sherry if they knew what they were.”

“Good! And a half of Chilean Rhine with the angulas. And with the churrasco? ”

“I have a Mendoza red—seven years in bottle. I have put a French label on it—an apparent dishonesty, I admit. But our customers would never pay the price that wine deserves if I did not. But please forget the label. I promise you the wine is good.”

Toby Manning leant back in his chair, pleasantly anticipating the imperial offerings of Spain and her colonies. Meanwhile he watched the pelicans diving for fish in Valparaiso Harbour and dreamily wished that he knew more of natural history. The pelicans had such odd shapes for diving birds. They hit the water like shells, sending up columns of spray twelve feet high. The pelican, he thought, must have spent its first million years waddling about the foreshore and hunting for worms. But that efficient bill was too good for worms; so perfect an instrument demanded a fuller employment. The pelican had found it; but that its breast might be protected from those terrific and probably painful belly flops into the water, some further modification of its structure was still necessary.

His thoughts played over Manuel Vargas. The waiter was also an animal in the course of development. His aristocratic ease, his assumption that the customer was every bit as good as himself, suggested that he too had given up paddling for diving. His menial employment made it probable that he was not yet adjusted to it. Toby sympathised with Manuel Vargas, waiter. He remembered a period when he too would have been glad of a waiter’s job or any other. God!—the purposeless, unending stream of one’s life that meandered from birth up to the present. Or was it no stream at all, but a lake, all parts of it coexistent in time? There was certainly no point at which one could say: this is the present; but only points at which memory selected more or less events. Toby amused himself by reckoning how far back the present went before it could honestly, if at all, be called the past.

He was born in Bath in the year 1900. His father was a solicitor with a moderate but highly respectable practice among the retired civil servants, army officers and Anglo-Indians of the town; his mother, to whom it was a continual comfort that the Mannings were listed in the local directory under the heading “resident gentry” rather than the less distinguished “general,” was the daughter of a small Bristol manufacturer. Both were fair and florid Anglo-Saxons, but their family trees were rooted so deep in the west country that neither was surprised when their only son appeared with the straight black hair, the long head and dusky violet-grey eyes of the pre-Celtic Mediterranean race—a common enough sport in the west of England and usually, in the year 1900, ascribed to a variety of romantic and improbable causes. Mrs Manning threw out guarded hints that an ancestress of hers had yielded—how delicately, and but once only, and that out of sheer feminine pity—to a shipwrecked grandee of the Spanish Armada.

His mother, jealously possessive, dressed her growing son in quaint sailor suits with long trousers, in summer of starched white duck that scratched him, for the other nine months of the year of heavy serge that stifled his activity. She took him to dancing classes where he was the only boy among twenty little girls, and made him show off his new-learned tricks at tea parties. Her guests, fluffy and conventional wives of Bath, declared him sweet, as they did also Mrs Manning’s pug dog who performed no less obediently with a lump of sugar on his nose. At the time these were merely minor tribulations to Toby and the pug dog. Both were utterly happy. Both adored Mrs Manning. Nor indeed could any woman so blandly unconscious of offence be blamed because Toby talked loudly to himself and the pug dog, its natural instincts upset, died of mistaking cascara pills for comfits.

A very saint of gentleness, Mr Manning gave way on all occasions to the demands of his wife. Since she was a correct provincial woman living on second-hand emotions and codes of behaviour, her husband had sunk into the stagnant waters of unreality and was unable either to act on his own ideas or to accept hers. Outside his office he was lost, and looked to his son for the companionship that he was too melancholy to find elsewhere. The relationship between the man and the small boy was thus a real seeking for each other’s spirit and healthy for both. It saved Mr Manning from loneliness; it corrected Toby’s tendency to dream.

As befitted one of his generation, the solicitor read and wrote the classical languages with ease. More surprisingly, he also read and wrote French, Spanish and Italian, and delighted to find in his books passages that would be intelligible to his son, either translating as he read or retelling the story as the two tramped over the Somerset hills. When Toby went off to his preparatory school at the age of nine he had a long ungainly stride, due to keeping step with his father, and a broad background of general knowledge.

The school was a grey manor house on the wind-swept Isle of Purbeck and no place for a romantic and innocent child, since he was bound to retain intact both innocence and romanticism. It was too close to a boy’s heaven to be truly preparatory to life. In spring, armed with murderous axes and billhooks, they were allowed to descend upon the woods like a lodge of beavers, building themselves houses of brushwood and damming the streams. In summer they swam naked among the rock ledges and caves of the Purbeck coast and their bellies ran blood from the shallow painless scratches of the limpet shells. In winter, and at any time when rain kept them indoors, they roller-skated at reckless speed around the schoolroom and, squatting together like bobsleigh teams, down the long stone corridor and hairpin bend that led to the dining hall. There were never any accidents. It was as if O’Connor, headmaster and proprietor of the school, were as extensive in spirit as in body and could stretch out a protecting arm, even in absence, over his little ones.

O’Connor treated his sixty charges as the cheerful barbarians they were. He was a born teacher and impatient with all theories of education; indeed he had only to be told a theory in order to do exactly the opposite. He stormed at his boys in great gargantuan phrases which they loved even as they trembled. He beat them frequently and would march from dormitory or schoolroom to his study with a struggling boy, midway between tears and laughter, under each arm. He was unreasonable, uproarious, tender and efficient as a first-class gamekeeper with a litter of spaniel pups.

A bigoted conservative, O’Connor was a believer in democracy so long as it did not disturb the powers and privileges of the oligarchs, and an enthusiastic amateur of international affairs. His boys knew how and why the Balkan Wars were fought and where and why the new frontiers ran. They had the Agadir crisis at their fingertips. They could give a clear account of the balance of power in Europe and the aims of the three continental empires. Toby had just time to feel himself a European before nationalism destroyed Europe, and to behave as a conscious part of the well-ordered Edwardian world.

On July 31st, 1914, Toby waited on Dorchester station for the train that would take him to join his parents for their annual summer holiday at Lyme Regis. He had that morning left O’Connor’s for good. He was not sad, for the golden day shimmering over the rich Dorset landscape promised well for the eight idle weeks before him, and he was proud of the initiation to manhood which the mere act of leaving his preparatory school implied. The frieze of posters around the station bookstall was alarming: “TSAR’S APPEAL TO THE KAISER. FRANCE MOBILISES. GRAVE WARNING TO GERMANY. ANOTHER BALKAN SCARE?” Toby paced the platform gravely as befitted a citizen of a vast and to him unchallengeable empire for the governing of which he had begun, in embryo, his training. He was excited but could not imagine war. He had been brought up on one war scare after another, and against all of them the common sense of statesmen had prevailed. Restlessly he left the station and began to explore the streets of Dorchester. He deliberately missed his connection, ordered himself some lunch in a restaurant and took an afternoon train to Lyme Regis. It was a gesture of freedom, very belated but, as Toby’s personal revolutions were always to be, final and absolute once accepted.

At the end of September Toby entered Chesterfield, a public school in the midlands of comparatively modern foundation but already famous for the muscularity of its bishops and the piety of its soldiers. He did his best to like the place; he did not mind the strict discipline; he prided himself on being an obedient fag; he tolerated his housemaster and venerated the four prefects who governed the house of fifty boys with kindly, rough justice and only brought tears to his eyes when four years later he entered all their names in the final list of “Killed in Action.” He found it difficult, however, to adjust himself to the lack of liberty and missed any sort of intelligent communing with his fellows. During his last term at O’Connor’s he had begun to discuss abstract subjects with his fellows as they strolled homewards from the sea over the short, turf of the Dorset cliffs, and once with another solemn thirteen-year-old had considered the possibility that there might be no God. At Chesterfield the small boys had apparently no interest in such speculations and certainly no time for them; it was the guiding principle of the school that the housemaster should know how every one of them was occupied at any given moment of the day. Their thinking was supposed to be done in the form room.

After a year and a half at Chesterfield Toby was disliked by his fellows as a prig, by his form masters as a slack young idiot who refused to use his brains, and by Mr Thrupp, his housemaster, for these and two other reasons: that, though he had been sulkily confirmed, he refused to attend Holy Communion; and that even Chesterfield had not yet devised a way of compelling him to do so. The only comforting report that Mr Manning had ever received on his son was from a French master who, after dutifully recording Toby’s inattention, added “appears to take great pains with his pronunciation.”

He hated to be an outcast but helplessly accepted his position. Slow on his feet and clumsy, he was little use at games, the short cut to respect. Since there was no manifestation of intellectual life, such as a debating or dramatic society, that longer route was also denied to him. In an agony of inferiority he analysed the make-up of his community through the first half of the summer term 1916, and observed that there was yet another path to the respect of his fellows. Mr Thrupp might drool through his huge moustache a fortnightly pi-jaw on evil communications—“or what you boys call dirty talk”—but evidently the resplendent young second-lieutenants who visited their old school and produced loud guffaws in the studies of those whom they delighted to honour did not agree with him. It was necessary to have some knowledge of the workings of sex and to use them as a basis for conversation.

Toby’s sexual education had been sadly neglected. When he was eight Mrs Manning had delivered an incoherent lecture on the behaviour of flowers, which left him only with a vague sense of distaste caught from the repressions of his mother. Before he left O’Connor’s that magnificent man, following his usual practice, had summoned him to his study and asked him whether he knew the facts of life. He had answered out of his supreme innocence that he did, thereby missing a highly original explanation of them. His housemaster when preparing him for confirmation made the same enquiry and Toby gave the same reply—this time aware of his ignorance but consciously loathing the man’s approach to any subject of importance.

He asked the essential questions of a friend, and humbly received the answers, scornful, coarse, but perfectly accurate. They enabled him to coördinate his disjointed knowledge and gave meaning to various uncomprehended jests that were slowly rotting in the game bag of his memory. He recounted one of them to a group of his fellows at the first opportunity—they were lying on the grass watching an interminable cricket match—and was greeted by stares of surprise and then by most satisfying laughter. By evening it was all over the house that Manning had told a dirty joke, and by the end of the term he had half a dozen intimate friends and was known as not at all a bad sort of fellow after all. Mr Thrupp was quick to notice the subtle change in the attitude of his house to Toby, and added to a sound report: “I notice a general improvement in his morality, and believe that he is beginning to be fit for responsibility.”

In 1917 Toby was promoted to the Sixth Form, and assumed the duties and privileges of a prefect. He was considered by the small boys under him as a just but disreputable god who had strayed unaccountably into their Olympus, and by his contemporaries as an easy-going fellow without proper pride in his house or school, to be tolerated for the sake of his loyalty and impropriety. Mr Thrupp regarded him with misgiving, for he was obviously a disturbing influence and most annoyingly without the regular paedo-eroticism to which the regular safeguards might be applied; he also felt that any boy who took so much interest in the languages of foreigners was un-English and unreliable. The headmaster of Chesterfield, who thought Toby brilliant, which he was not, and deserving more latitude, which he did, reserved judgment and hoped for the best.

Toby’s inner life at this period was entirely dominated by his passionate delight in two discoveries: that literature which was supposed to be great was really great; and that young females took as much interest in their bodies as he did. He went his own way, fitting a clandestine personal life into the communal pattern of the school. The wooded hills that surrounded Chesterfield were the scenes of his truest development. There he read, for thus he could smoke while finding his father in Anatole France’s Monsieur Bergeret or contrasting the philosophy of Chesterfield with that of Schopenhauer; there he picked up the girls of the neighbouring county town and gained understanding of a class different from his own while satisfying his hunger for their still innocent but warm embraces. The only official activity which he took seriously was the Officers’ Training Corps. Since he was certain to be commanding a platoon in France within a year, the drills and field days seemed to him the most practical and immediate duties of his education.

Toby would have been called up in December 1918. Now that the armistice had deprived him of the whole apparent object of his existence, he was compelled to spend two more terms at school before going up to Oxford. It seemed reasonable that his father should disapprove of his idling away nine months in Bath, and Toby, since Chesterfield had omitted to teach him to plan his own life, had no alternative suggestion to offer. Returning to school, he became a conscious rebel, unashamed of his lawlessness.

Punishment followed on insolence, not swiftly but with due and decent warnings that he ignored. In the Easter term Mr Thrupp, prowling at midnight through his boys’ studies in the hope of discovering cigarettes, obscene literature or cribs to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, was filled with pleasurable indignation at finding a bottle of whisky, a quarter full, hidden too casually behind his head prefect’s books. The headmaster, who had surprisingly preserved scholarship and humanity through forty years of various public schools, pointed out that if Manning had left Chesterfield in December he would be consuming a great deal more than three-quarters of a bottle of whisky in six weeks. He was content to depose Toby from the Upper to the Middle Sixth—a mere gesture of disapproval—and Mr Thrupp blew the remains of his breakfast egg off his moustache and consoled his own dignity by delivering to the culprit three pompous lectures on intemperance.

At the beginning of the summer term he fell from the ruling classes of Chesterfield to a mere member of the proletariat. He was caught by a young master talking to a girl in the woods; a very grave offence. Had he been recognised five minutes earlier he would undoubtedly have been expelled with ignominy; but he had fortunately thrown his coat and cap into a bush and the only visible part of him carried no school colours. The master did not realise that the boy saying an apparently tender farewell was identical with the upper half of that pastoral idyll from which he had hastily looked away.

Nemesis fell on him three weeks later when Mr Thrupp, enraged at an overlong and unexpected occupation of his private lavatory, broke down the door and discovered his head prefect. Though he looked innocent enough, the aroma of pipe smoke was damning evidence against him. It was bad luck, for Toby had used the place for many terms as a smoking den whenever he knew that his housemaster was safely engaged in school.

The fuming Thrupp incontinently sent off a telegram to Mr Manning:—

“your son smoking pipe my watergloset must request you instantly withdraw him,” in which his desire for economy led to some ambiguity. Mr Manning, horrified at Toby’s crescendo of misdeeds and unwilling to believe that the final blow had fallen, tried to persuade himself of several meanings to the telegram. Toby, he suggested, had only been guilty of a boyish prank in smoking out Thrupp’s waste pipes with some unpleasant chemical. They possibly needed it and, as a lawyer’s son, Toby would have a sturdy resentment of nuisances. In protest at Thrupp’s rebuke, he ventured to submit, Toby had locked himself in and refused to withdraw without his father’s consent.

Mrs Manning, however, refused to allow her husband any illusions. Her intellectual equipment was close to that of Mr Thrupp and her understanding of him instinctive. She dressed herself appealingly, caught the first train to Chesterfield and appeared in the guise of a shattered mother puddled with tears. Thrupp, a connoisseur of fine attitudes, was deeply moved, but adamant. The headmaster murmured unhappily that periods of unrest inevitably succeeded great wars, and, terrified lest she should fall on her knees in his study, agreed to save Toby the stigma of official expulsion and to permit him to return home as indisposed.

The adult Toby judged that on the whole he should be grateful to Chesterfield. It had developed his body into a reliable machine of great endurance and rapid recovery from strain, and it had not actually prevented him from developing his mind. Most valuable legacy of all, he was able to comfort himself at the worst periods of his life with the thought that Chesterfield had been a more deadly imprisonment than any combination of adverse circumstances.

His three years at Oxford seemed on looking back to have been an eventless period of paradise. He did no work whatever and attended no lectures. During vacation, however, he found little to do in Bath but read, and covered most of the literature prescribed and much that was not. To the amazement of friends who had shared the undisturbed current of his idle hours, he took a First in Modern Languages.

The lists of his year were crowded with men of intelligence equal to his own, who had also taken honours in the less monastic school of war. He had not a chance of entering the government services into which he would normally and unthinkingly have passed. Toby had never pictured himself in business—indeed he had hardly considered at all the means by which he would ultimately support himself. It was an unimportant point. Both he and his father assumed that something fitting would turn up. His mother, incurably romantic, hoped for him either a brilliant career in the Foreign Office or picturesque blackguardism in the colonies. It was a grievous disappointment to her when he became a bank clerk. She explained to her cronies that Toby had gone in for International Finance, and for once was not very far from the truth.

The Danube & Ottoman Trading Corporation Ltd. offered to train him at their Vienna office for a managership, and gave him the excellent salary of £500 a year. It was a magnificent opportunity. The Danube & Ottoman believed, as a matter of faith rather than reason, that the little countries with neither exports, gold nor buying power would be able to take the place of the great economic federations of pre-war history, and poured out capital through their branches into the new states of Europe and the Levant.

Toby started his business life a wealthy man. He arrived while the Austrian exchange was still in chaos, when men and women on fixed salaries were starving and all but the hardiest of the leisured class were dead. There was none but the foreigner to keep alive what remained of luxury in Vienna. For the first month he lived cautiously, being uncertain how far his salary would go. Then Irma von Karlskreuz taught him how rich he really was.

He was placed next to her at a lunch at the Consulate. It was a charity lunch; that is to say, there were two elderly and well-connected governesses, an incredibly respectful and patriotic Londoner in a wig and threadbare frock coat who had been, Toby gathered, a dental mechanic or photographer at the court of Franz Josef, and Irma. She was treated with a slightly snobbish deference, but it was evident that she had been invited for the first, and probably the last time on the strength of some letter of introduction.

She ate casually in small mouthfuls, answering Toby’s conversation with eyes and smile rather than words. Her face was given character by a long and tender space between nose and mouth, beneath which the lips were set like an inverted bow, thin and wide, with very sensitive corners that perfectly expressed pleasure and melancholy by their tiny movements. Her grey eyes were dark-circled. When his arm touched hers, he could feel her trembling. A girl, he thought, under the stress of some unbearable emotion.

He was fascinated by her. She was about eighteen, dressed in cheap blue serge that she had cut close to her figure, hoping that the slim, ethereal body within would give some suggestion of elegance to its wretched covering. It was evident that the consul’s wife felt that her guest would have presented a more seemly appearance had she worn corset and brassière; but Irma had little on which to hang either of those garments, and aesthetically no need of them. Already late for his afternoon’s session at the bank, Toby took a taxi and gave her a lift as far as the Kohlmarkt. Greatly daring—for the emancipation of the unmarried girl had not progressed very far in the Austrian families that he knew—he suggested a dance-tea on the following Saturday afternoon.

“I should love it,” Irma said, “but—”

“May I call on your mother?” Toby added hastily. “She would perhaps come too?”

Irma laughed.

“No! I was only going to say that I’m not very strong. I should be better later in the day.”

“Let’s dine together then,” he suggested.

Irma nodded.

“And don’t dress,” she said. “And let’s go somewhere quiet.”

Toby decided on a cellar restaurant behind the cathedral, where the proprietor, a bald-headed Hungarian Jew gnawed by continual dyspepsia, was initiating him into the mysteries of food and drink and taking a vicarious pleasure in Toby’s virginal enjoyment of delicacies that he no longer dared to eat himself. Toby’s proposal was caviare, blue trout and roast hazel hen. Bernstein asked if his guest would be hungry.

“I don’t know,” said Toby. “She doesn’t look as if she could eat a lot.”

“It is as well to suppose that everyone is hungry,” replied Bernstein. “May I advise you?”

“I wish you would.”

“Then no caviare. I will make you a little dish of eggs—I will choose how after I have seen the lady. Then your trout and hazel hen and a châteaubriand to follow.”

“Dear God!” said Toby. “It’s a little maiden.”

“Little maidens have big stomachs. And it is better that we should be found prepared than wanting. You will see.”

Irma ate her way through the menu steadily, and with the same disinterested, small mouthfuls. Again she let Toby do the talking, but answered him now with gay laughter as well as the smiles that had already conquered him. She left the wine in her glass untouched until the arrival of a steak that had the proportions of a small joint: then sipped her claret and attacked the meat with an appearance of natural good appetite.

“It’s good,” she said.

“I’m glad. I was so afraid you wouldn’t like the place.”

“I love it. It’s a dear place,” Irma answered decisively with her mouth full, and choked.

“Don’t put in such a big piece!” he laughed.

“Why shouldn’t I now?”

“I don’t know why you shouldn’t,” said Toby, “if you want to, now or any other time.”

“Don’t you? Haven’t you seen people eat when they are hungry?”

“Of course I have.”

“I wonder. I mean, when they are really hungry. They tear their food. It’s ugly—horrible! And I won’t do it! I won’t do it!”

“But were you hungry?”

“I’d had nothing to eat but cabbage soup for a week before that lunch where I met you. It was so hard to be decent.”

“My God! That’s why you trembled!” Toby exclaimed.

“Did I tremble?”

“Yes. I never dreamed you were hungry.”

“Really? You mean it?” asked Irma anxiously, as if he had paid an unconscious compliment to her beauty rather than her self-control. “And to-night too? I was just as hungry.”

“There wasn’t a sign of it. But why didn’t you tell me?”

Irma smiled at him and made no reply.

“Well, I suppose I should be as proud myself,” said Toby.

“No. I think you’d be much franker about it. After all, it’s easier for a man.”

“But you’re not alone in Vienna?”

“Yes. I live with an uncle and aunt, but they don’t count. I mean—I have always lived with uncles and aunts.”

Irma began to talk of herself. She was basking in a sense of well-being. Her body rested after its heavy meal and the few drops of generous wine as if in the relaxation of sleep, while her mind sought for companionship. Any shock of personalities would have instantly driven it into hiding, but of this Toby was aware. He was tender when he spoke and his eyes showed his interest in her, but he instinctively avoided any expression of pity with its inevitable hint of patronage.

Irma responded eagerly to his English detachment. She was used to young men who had the cynicism of despair or carried into their conversation the misery of continual self-analysis. With them she could not talk, for she too was devoured by uncertainties; with Toby, positive but alive, she could. She told him how her father had committed suicide before the war, having sold his last estate and lost the proceeds at baccarat. Her mother, nursing in a war hospital, had died of typhus, a victim of the untrumpeted battle fought to keep the lice of gallant little Serbia south of the Danube. Then Irma had gone to the house of her youngest uncle, a professor of economics at Heidelberg and the only member of her distinguished family to live within his income and to earn it. She had passed the war in Germany and returned to Vienna in 1920, invited by a feckless pair of relations who had a vast flat in the Schmerlingplatz and a firm conviction that they could avoid the continual fall of the exchange by the scientific backing of horses. By 1922 they still had a roof over their heads and such food as could be obtained by the sale of the last bits of furniture. Irma, her uncle and her aunt occasionally did odd jobs of translation or house-work for their friends, but could not find steady employment; it was not to be found, even by the more efficient. They were not yet desperate, but becoming physically weak.

Toby and Irma went on to a theatre, to a cabaret, and to a quiet and comfortable suite in an hotel. After they had danced together, neither doubted how the evening would end. They did not want to be parted and there was no reason why they should be. Irma’s uncle and aunt were not, she said, inquisitive about each other nor about her. All three went their own way, using the enormous empty flat as general headquarters.

They awoke most happily to the Sunday morning, laughing at the red and gold bedstead, the dead leaves that danced against the window, the tangle of golden-brown hair with which, awaking a little before dawn, she had bound them both together. Irma was pitiably thin—a wraith of a girl, but so exquisitely proportioned that the too prominent bones merely emphasised her structural beauty. She was shy in daylight; not that she had any false modesty, but that she remembered what her body had been—a regret that could easily be charmed away by the insistent enthusiasm of a lover. Her skin had but one blemish: her thighs were pitted and scarred by healed wounds. Toby asked her the cause. After a month of Central Europe he had no fear that such a question would embarrass her. The curses of Job were no matter for shame when everybody had known what it was to go unwashed and to eat whatever they could compel their stomach muscles to keep down.

“Ulcers,” Irma answered. “Plenty of children had them in Germany during the war. It was the bad feeding.”

“But didn’t you get enough to eat even then?” asked Toby, forgetting that every day for four years the papers had joyfully prophesied the imminent collapse of the enemy through starvation.

“But of course not,” she replied wonderingly. “Didn’t you know?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I did.”

“You ought to. It won the war for you.”

“What did?”

“The blockade.”

“It worked? I thought that was just a government lie.”

“Of course it worked. It didn’t hurt grown-ups so much, but people couldn’t go on seeing their children die. They couldn’t get enough fats or milk or anything. My dear, I was always, always hungry. And when I was thirteen I got these ulcers. They wouldn’t heal.”

“God!” Toby exclaimed. “And we talked of atrocities!”

He turned away from her and burst into tears. It was as if all the bitternesses of the war, the lies and taboos and legends, on which, in spite of himself, he had been brought up, had suddenly overwhelmed him. He realised the iniquity of Europeans with that same agony with which in terrible and private moments of remorse he had realised his own. The storm of emotion swept over him while Irma, deeply caring and vaguely understanding, held him close to her naked side and murmured comfort.

For the sake of the uncle and aunt and the Danube & Ottoman, Irma and Toby did not set up house together, but took a tiny corner flat, looking west down the long vista of the canal, where they spent together as many evenings and nights as could discreetly be managed. Toby found that he could afford all the few luxuries that they could use. His first evening with Irma, for example, had cost him a little under a pound, including dinner, theatre, a champagne cabaret and the hotel bill. Thereafter whatever amusements they wanted, they had. His chief care was not economy but to avoid offending Irma.

Money she would not take. Presents had to be inexpensive and amusing. A few clothes she accepted: underclothes, since it was Toby who would appreciate them; a frock, so long as he pretended that it had just caught his eye in a shop and he had bought it because he liked it. She kept him away from the uncle and aunt, preferring frankly not to mix her two lives. She would accept gifts for them such as a ham, a dozen of wine, a brace of birds or an entire cheese, but would refuse a leg of mutton, an account at the dairy or a ton of coal. Toby finally worked out the principle. Gifts that one landowner might reasonably send to another she would take home. Gifts that might be given by a landowner to a poorer dependent she would not. What lies she told them he never knew.

Irma, well fed, was utterly lovely. Her waist remained so slim that she could lie back in his elbow crooked at a right angle. The long line of her hips started from a curve instead of a ridge. Her breasts, set curiously low upon the cage of her ribs, no longer allowed his lips to feel the bone beneath them. When he was not in the bank, Toby saw no one but her. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He lived in and for his desire for her, and thanked his parents and even compulsory games for a constitution that was equal to all demands he made on it. Passion, accompanied by every refinement that the two highly civilised children could contrive, should have paid a price of jealousy and hysterical quarrels, but it did not. Both of them were too glad to live from day to day. Irma had known little peace and little beauty. She was so content with what she had that she did not worry, as would a woman who had ever experienced a settled life, whether the peace was merely temporary.

After two months Irma had reason to believe that she was pregnant. Both of them refused to take it for granted until the calendar again confirmed that it was highly probable. Toby begged her to marry him and bear the child. He could not conceive that he would ever tire of her, and it seemed sacrilege that the body he so loved should go through objectless pain. But Irma insisted on an abortion. It was, she said, no world into which to bring children. She was as much in love with Toby as he with her, but children and marriage seemed to her to mean the end of a dream, a return to the reality of aunts and uncles and the atmosphere of pride and desperation and scraping garbage-cans for to-morrow’s meal. In vain Toby swore that it would mean nothing of the sort, that he had no objection to being drawn into the lives of her relatives nor to helping them; if she morbidly felt that there could be no true life for her in Vienna, then they would go somewhere else; the Danube & Ottoman would transfer him to Rumania or Albania or any of their less desirable posts. But he had to give way to her.

It was the end of the affair. Had either of them foreseen that they would lose the splendour of their passion, they would have married unquestioningly; but now it was too late. Irma, so sensitive to pleasure, had no less exquisitely tasted pain; she was afraid. Believing that marriage would recapture their bliss, Toby insisted and argued. She defended herself by telling him that she did not love him. Her agony of tears convinced him that it was a lie, or at any rate a neurotic underestimate of love, but he could not shake her. Since the workings of her passion were temporarily upset, she would not trust her instincts and was thrown back upon her traditions. They were no help. She had been brought up to believe that marriage was an alliance between two families, which might or might not be romantic but most certainly depended on the desire for children and the willingness to take a long view of life. She had neither. It was not that she could not face twenty years with Toby. She could not face the thought of twenty years at all. To make plans imprisoned one in that world where plans were brought to nothing.

The lack of harmony between them was exaggerated by their isolation. When Irma received a letter from a maiden aunt in Prague, asking her to come and act as her companion, she accepted. Czechoslovakia was already the only state of Balkanised Europe to be showing signs of normal life, and at least there was some promise of escape from poverty. With the hardness of blank misery, she said good-bye to Toby and left. He could not, in after years, blame himself for having let her go. To handle her needed a firmness, even a brutality, that was beyond the experience of a boy of twenty-two caught up in the emotional conflicts of a highly intelligent mistress.

He found forgetfulness in working resentfully, then eagerly, at the routine of the office. Up till then he had been written off as a failure; he had taken no interest in learning his job, nor had he been at all a social asset to the bank. His superiors had already reminded him that he was paid a large salary in order to be well and frequently seen in diplomatic and business circles, and to pick up friends and information. Their surprised appreciation of his new efficiency showed him in what little esteem he had been held. Toby was ashamed and set himself to master his trade with all the desolate energy released by the disappearance of Irma.

He had carried with him to Vienna the magnificently imperial idea that in any business which employed Englishmen they were at the head by divine right and absolute merit. To find the chiefs of departments of several nationalities was a shock. He obeyed them, since obedience to authority was second nature to him as to most men of his upbringing; but it was a year before he could clearly admit to himself that the only manager who could answer questions limpidly and intelligently was a Frenchman, that the most considerate was an Austrian, that for speed, courage and readiness to take any and every responsibility the head of the Foreign Exchange department, a Polish Jew, was a model for empire builders, and that two at least of the half-dozen stolid English bankers were chiefly remarkable for their waspish jealousy of the rest.

During the next three years his tentative cosmopolitanism became a reality. He had no homesickness for England. He spent there no more than a week of each leave, cursing his relative poverty and the climate, and the rest within the bounds of the old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire. He cultivated an air of solidity which made his very real discretion appear genuine even to the conventional. He called punctiliously on the diplomats and the Austrian politicians, passed round teacups at his legation, and developed his head for liquor to such a point that he could fortify himself against boredom at public dinners and yet keep his wit within bounds. He steadied; he was responsible; he did in fact become that sound citizen which Chesterfield had endeavoured to make him. In his own eyes as well as those of society Toby was the correct young banker that he appeared to be.

His ambition was to be on the board of the Danube & Ottoman in his late forties and meanwhile to be respected for his dignity and common sense. He began to think of settling down and imagined himself, with a good deal of satisfaction, in a home of his own with a cool cellar, a good cook and a wife who would preside over his hospitality and share his bed with orderly enthusiasm. His prospects were brilliant and his salary now £750 a year; he could take his pick of eligible daughters. Their mothers, however, found him unreasonably difficult for a bachelor at the impressionable age of twenty-five. His standard was too high. Irma and after her a procession of Russian, Transylvanian and Croat émigrés had taught him to use great gentleness towards women, and he was continually hoping that a child in her teens would respond to it with the same instant appreciation as some lovely and unhappy creature in her thirties. But a girl with the world at her feet had more need of a playmate than a young man of disconcerting cleverness. The marriageable daughters were inclined to find Toby conceited without seeing the reason for the conceit.

When Valérie de Courcelles, the daughter of a French trade delegate, came straight from an expensive Touraine convent to join her parents, Toby fell in love with her. She was a type completely new to him, an innocent little pink and white beauty to whom her mother would undoubtedly have to speak seriously on the eve of her marriage; a survival from the pre-war world possible only in France. Yet she was not bad company. She spoke English and Italian and could prattle pleasantly on art, literature or politics without making a fool of herself. Toby adored her and became unreal in her presence. He did not desire nor expect her to understand him.

His attentions were received cordially enough by her parents and Valérie was quite ready to fall in love with him as soon as her mother said the word go. M. de Courcelles invited him to dinner and brought out his best Armagnac when Madame and Mademoiselle had left them alone with the cigars. He talked with infinite delicacy, and as if discussing a hypothetical third person, of the qualities he would expect in a son-in-law. They were precisely those which Toby had. It was very flattering and the Armagnac was very good. M. de Courcelles passed the bottle and droned on in a pleasantly modulated voice, developing his theories as to an intimate friend of the older generation. The cigar ash on his well-filled waistcoat and his round, untroubled face with its long grey moustache suggested to Toby a placid and civilised Mr Thrupp. Order, M. Manning would understand, was what the world needed. There was a lack of respect for the very foundations of the state and for those whom a Wise Providence had set in authority over it. The ties of decent family life were being loosened. It was the duty of all sane men to support that most steadying of influences, the Church. He would expect his son-in-law—in the improbable case of his being a foreigner baptized in one of the so-called reformed churches—to become a Roman Catholic.

Toby had the utmost respect for the Church. He considered it the last stronghold of paganism in Europe, and as such to be jealously preserved. He had no objection to becoming a catholic, believing that there was some purpose in the world and that all forms of life need not necessarily be solid and visible. As much as that could be fitted into Catholic allegories or any others. But M. de Courcelles, who for all his liking of Toby had an obstinate distrust of le perfide Albion, made it plain in later interviews that he expected Toby to be converted first and to propose to Valérie afterwards. This was a nuisance. To be received into the Church after the announcement of the engagement but before the marriage was reasonable; it could be taken in one’s stride as easily as buying the ring or furnishing the house. But to be bothered, even discreetly, by a lot of priests when the reward was not yet certain seemed too public and serious a business. It could not be considered a mere convention. It would be swearing to a faith that he did not hold.

Toby worried over the question for weeks. He told himself that it was utterly ridiculous for a worldly and ambitious banker to refuse to pay lip service to any creed that suited him, especially when he had none of his own. Yet conscience rose up and called it treachery. Treachery to what, he asked himself, and could find no answer. He was behaving like a high-minded martyr for no reason at all. He was perfectly aware that if Irma had asked him to become a Catholic or Hindu or Seventh-Day Adventist he would have done so. Irma herself had been an ideal to which all others were subordinate. Valérie was not. He began to question his love for her, and could only see that it was strong enough to hurt but not strong enough to be a spiritual end in itself. He questioned his ambitions—the cellar, the cook and even the board of the Danube & Ottoman. It was inexplicable that the man he imagined himself to be should jib at taking a practical move towards the wife and future that he wanted.

He could only conclude that he was not the man he imagined. What then did he want? If comfort, good living, an assured future, cheerful friends of all nationalities and a solid background were not enough to satisfy him, he might as well, he said, be a blasted poet. He began to refuse invitations and to avoid his club. He disappeared from Valérie’s family and circle. When he and de Courcelles met, they expressed their regret by warm handshakes and trite remarks tenderly spoken, like two friends at a funeral who think it improper to let their full affection for each other be seen. The habit of vain introspection steadily grew on him; and, since he was an easy-going and unconstipated character, discontent seemed to him a serious evil and not the normal state of the majority of mankind. Not knowing in the least what he wanted, but disgusted with what he had, he threw up his job and returned to England.

Toby had, as he then thought, an anxious month, for his contemporaries were scattered over the face of the earth and after four years abroad it took time to re-establish connections in the world of influence. He accepted the first post offered to him, though it carried little more than half the salary he had earned with the Danube & Ottoman and led him right away from the normal occupations of men of his education. He became a banana salesman.

The international selling organisation of Payne & Edwards Ltd. was staffed by men drawn from all the fruit markets of western Europe; plain, hard-drinking, early-rising souls bound together by an esprit de corps that any army might have envied. Their loyalty was not so much to Payne & Edwards as to the fruit. Warehouses might be full, wholesalers panicky, dockers on strike or ships’ holds overheated, but still they fought for the inexorably ripening bananas, bullying railways, cajoling retailers and manipulating prices with a daring that Payne & Edwards never discouraged even when a gamble was lost. All that the firm asked was that a branch manager should love his fruit, speak something resembling the language of his market fluently and profanely, and account for his cash and his bunches by a complex mass of papers.

Toby learned the elements of the trade at Paris. He was refreshed by the honesty of it and the loyalty between man and man and branch and branch, all of them in close communication and willing to come to the rescue if his market should collapse under some unfortunate manager. The Danube & Ottoman was wont to drive on its majestic course through a mist of petty intrigue, and he had observed that most of its managers, whenever their honesty could not be called in question, would put their own interests before those of the bank. It was a shock to be hurled straight from Viennese drawing rooms into the fruit-huckstering roar of Les Halles, but a shock as stimulating as a cold bath.

When they had trained him, Payne & Edwards sent him to preach the gospel of cheap bananas in Madrid. Spain was the only country left in western Europe where they were still the food of the wealthy. Toby was far from falling in love with the country at first sight. Madrid was damnably expensive to a man just out of France where the pound was worth 220 francs, and 40 francs would buy the best meal in civilisation with wines to match. Moreover the dirt and poverty in the market of the Plaza de la Cebada prejudiced him against the people. He was in the mood to describe them as dagos.

After six seventy-hour weeks on end, he spent a day at Toledo to report on its prospects as a banana market. An hour was enough to prove that it had none. His first idle day stretched its welcome length before him. He wandered in and out of the Cathedral and strolled at random, relaxed and humorous, through the packed lanes of the city, savouring the heard speech, the scents, the buying and selling, rather than any static beauty. For the first time he realised that he was in a country that had an intensely individual civilisation of its own. It was not backward, in the sense that Balkan capitals were backward, for it did not seek to imitate the normal pattern of continental life. It was as separate from the rest of Europe as England. The donkeys, the tiny shops, the handicrafts, the taverns, the narrow street, the Roman house built around the life of its own patio, were not evidence of ignorance; they were signs of a continuous and agreeable civilisation that suited Spain. A Roman gentleman, he felt, could have lived in Toledo and adjusted himself in a day to such modern conveniences as electric light and the automobile.

Toby lunched in a wine shop, for he had already learned that in Spain the more expensive the restaurant, the worse the food. Across the tablecloth, spotted by wine, oil and flies, was a pock-marked cattle drover busily stuffing cocido down his bull neck. He was, he said, a friend to all Englishmen, for he had done his service in the Spanish navy and his ship had spent a day at Posmoz—did the caballero know Posmoz? Toby, guessing at Portsmouth, did. And the Englishmen had made him drunk—but of a stupendous drunkenness! Vaya! And he had never met another Englishman since. In his village they only saw women, with cameras and soldiers’ boots.

Toby called for more wine and settled down. The drover was witty and intelligent as a prosperous West Country farmer, but had a deal more independence in his views. He was a socialist—in so far as he had no use for the Church or the Monarchy and wished his country to be governed by the common sense of Castilian small holders—but he had a sporting admiration for the courage of Don Alfonso and the humour of Primo de Rivera. He hoped they would get out before tempers were lost.

The drover rose from the table at three, pleading a long ride back to the village. Toby sat another half hour with his thoughts and the jug of Valdepeñas before calling for the bill. It was paid; nor would the waiter accept even a tip from him. The drover had unobtrusively settled the score, as honour demanded, for the stranger within his gates.

He had three hours to pass before his train. Crossing the gorge of the Tagus, he climbed up the hillside beyond. The arid ranges approached Toledo like brown and forbidding waves, with dusty villages hiding in the curves of their crests from the bitter winds of the plateau. The sun was low, painting purple and rose on yellow with the garishness, if any one second of the changing colour could have been caught, of bedroom lithographs at two for sixpence. The sun vanished into clouds and the hills turned olive green, embracing golden Toledo in their midst.

He was conscious of an odd sense of declared destiny. This was his country, his people; collective object of a love more tender than his love for England because demanding, like some generous and difficult woman, an effort of understanding. Reason insisted that the finding of his destiny in Spain was ridiculous and an idea conceived in wine, but his imagination soared, as if set free by the music of a great symphony, over the hills where had thudded the tramp of martyrs to Christ and Mohammed, and still echoed those visionary trumpets that had called a thousand Quixotes to Morocco and Mexico, to Rome and to Moscow.

To live and prosper in Spain—that might be his only destiny. Yet he had no desire to spend his life in so tiny a peninsula of the world. Had he, he wondered, entered upon a stern peninsula of the spirit? He understood at last the reason for his discontent in Vienna. He had been so intent on success that he had lived on a single plane of society, adjusting himself, as blindly as any communist, to the conventions of one class only, mixing and drinking with a variety of men, yet not convinced that he had much in common with any but the prosperous. He had tacitly assumed that the man with money was a more useful member of society than the man with none. There had been a sense of caste in his head, whether or not it showed in his acts.

Spain was displaying for him the richness of humanity. His love of its literature had suddenly mated with his observation of its life. The Spaniards, except perhaps for a handful of grandees, had not this sense of caste. In spite of the Church, in spite of capitalism, they had never lost sight of the ideals of Islam. Dignity and discretion—the qualities, God help him, on which he had set the highest value!—they assumed to be the natural birth right of man, and advanced from this intense respect for the individual to sympathy with him. It was so hard for one Spaniard to be contemptuous of another that when two ideals clashed he was compelled to violence.

The Madrid office established, Toby was sent to carry his gospel of bananas throughout the centre and north of Spain. After months of trains and hotels, he made his headquarters at Bilbao and opened a new branch of Payne & Edwards. The life of the Basque port suited him. His friends were drawn from the docks, the railways and the markets; Basques and Riojanos of powerful physique and tireless energy. They considered themselves the true rulers of Spain, wore what they pleased and larded their clipped Spanish with magnificent oaths. Their character had been in part formed by the dry, velvety wine of Rioja. All the best was consumed in the Basque Provinces, the rest of Spain having to put up with what it could get. It gave a man appetite, made him generous, inspired him to song and drove him to vigorous action, frequently eccentric. It heightened his contempt for precept and his love of his fellows. Toby saw little of the Anglo-Saxon colony; they seemed by contrast to be ghosts twittering among the shades of their own respectability.

Again it was a woman that unsettled him. In Spain he missed the passing adventures that in Vienna he had come to consider as the natural right of man. Virgins were virgins and wives were faithful, and an intermediate class did not exist. He was compelled to choose between continence and prostitutes, and he disliked them both about equally. He was thus in a state to be unduly susceptible to any pretty face.

It was in September 1928 that on one of his weekly visits to San Sebastian Toby dropped into the Hotel María Cristina for tea. He loathed tea, especially Spanish tea, but wanted to look over the visitors. In a corner of the lounge was a girl of trim but astonishing beauty. A broad serene brow kept watch over classic features, saved from too standardised severity by an adorable mouth of which the fullness was rather in the upper lip than the lower; a crushed flower of a mouth, luscious, desirable, but neither sensual nor very sensitive. She looked at Toby with impersonal appreciation as if he had been a prize bull at a cattle show. She was unmistakeably born, bred and dressed in the United States.

He heard her ask the waiter for cigarettes and boldly presented one of his own meanwhile. She left him on his feet to pass the two minutes’ inspection that decency demanded and then asked him to sit down. It appeared that she had been decanted into the hotel by a tourist agency who assured her that San Sebastían had the glittering romance of Spain and the gaiety of cosmopolitan Europe on holiday. She found the casino closed, the vast hotels inhabited by a sprinkling of retired English colonels and their weather-beaten wives, and the beach a museum of the shapeless swimming suits of the nineties. Toby agreed that it was the dowdiest seaside resort outside England, but praised it as a little Basque town and the centre for other Basque towns lovelier than itself. To show her in what a fairyland she was, he took her to dine at Pasajes.

The water of the landlocked bay washed the foot of the terrace on which they sat. The lights of the fishing village and its anchored launches drew trails of gold across the narrow passage to the sea, gently broken by the Atlantic swell that humped itself through the windless night. Ruth Beverley sighed with content and surrendered herself to the deliciously childish sport of fishing for shellfish in the two white-tiled wells where the restaurant imprisoned them. The vine-covered parra that roofed the terrace formed a green arch of peace over her spirit.

Ruth was a perfect companion, appreciative and self-possessed. His compliments were graciously received; his advances smiled upon and no less graciously checked. He returned to Bilbao feeling extraordinarily satisfied with himself and giving her full credit for having produced that effect. He doubted whether he would ever seen her again. She had a curious faith in international tourist agencies and carefully followed the orders of their clerks, imagining that they possessed first-hand knowledge of the journeys that they recommended or discouraged.

Three days later she called him up at his office to say that she was in Bilbao and would like to be invited to lunch. They lazed away the afternoon on the smooth, deserted sands between Bilbao and Plencia, and returned, their bodies tingling with sun, salt and desire for each other, to Toby’s flat for an impromptu supper. The next morning Ruth sent to the hotel for her baggage and settled in the flat with the clear conscience of a woman who knew that there was not the remotest prospect of her liaison being discovered by anyone who mattered to her.

She was a new type to Toby. He had known women who gave themselves for love, for money, from curiosity and from a sense that they would be cowards if they didn’t. He had not known a woman to decide so frankly that a few weeks of his company was exactly what she wanted. In her presence, he was drunk on her beauty; out of it, he boasted to himself of his good fortune and was convinced that Ruth could never make him suffer. She seemed too straightforward and hygienic to drown an adorer in the dark flow of love. One could dip into romance and step out again at will.

Ruth was not as predatory as he supposed. She had had, at college and as a New York debutante, two affairs of some importance and three of none, and she had promised herself a really romantic sixth affair in Europe. It had not turned up; and she was exceedingly weary of the bankrupt counts, professional holiday makers and misunderstood compatriots who presented themselves for her attention. At their first dinner she had got from Toby the desired illusion of being entertained by a true European straight out of the shipping company’s advertisements. For half an hour she was disappointed that he was an Englishman. A Russian prince or an Austrian baron had been the chosen lover of her dreams. But it was soon evident that as a delicate flatterer of women Toby was fully up to specifications; and it was comforting to think that he earned his living just like any American.

The conscious intentions of her descent upon Bilbao were simply to see him again and visit in his company the coast that he so enthusiastically praised. That this bold move would probably end some evening in his bed she knew, but she had not the faintest idea that she would actually and at once go to live with him. That was the joint work of Toby and the ghost of Irma.

Being an eager and sociable girl, she was overwhelmingly bored during the eight or nine hours a day that Toby spent in his office or at the docks. His friends, blue-jowled men in overalls and rope sandals who spoke no English, were useless to her, and she agreed with him that she should not flash upon the Anglo-Saxon colony busy in making believe that they were in England or America. Boredom led her to an attack of homesickness. Her love, unrequited except by Toby’s pagan and admittedly beautiful desire for her, raised a puritanism that was never very far from the surface; she became unpleasantly aware that she was living in what her father would call sin. For three more weeks she brooded over herself and Toby and her loneliness, then fled for refuge to America, a huntress worried by her own pack of hounds.

That was that. Toby shook himself free with a sense of satisfaction, which endured just a day, a night and a day. Then he realised that twenty-nine years and experience of many women had not in the least protected him from falling in love but had merely blinded his power of self-analysis. He refused to send her pillowcase to the laundry, though the scent of her hair tortured him. He collected and hid in his desk an artificial flower, an empty powder box and all the heart-rending débris left behind by a feminine occupation of his chest of drawers. In vain he told himself that Ruth would never be faithful; in vain he swore that marriage was an unnecessary folly and that his sanitary Ruth was meant to be used and discarded like one of her own American paper cups. He wanted her body. He missed her companionship. His ears were hungry for the sweetly drawling voice uplifted at the end of each sentence, for the little double grunt that she spoke instead of “no,” for her talk, smooth as that of a well-trained hostess and full of humorous snap judgments of men and things. On the fourth day after she sailed he wrote to her to come back and marry him.

Her answering letter was as passionate as his own. She would marry him, but she would not go back. Let him come to the United States, the land of infinite prosperity where even office boys were making fortunes and a man with his brains and energy could be a millionaire in five years. Ruth had found her country very good to the taste. Eager to make up for the lack of solidity of her stay in Europe, she had plunged at her Country Club, her Junior League, her bridge, her horses and her school-friends; if only the divine Toby could be added to these pleasures, she had nothing more to ask.

Toby had no desire whatever to make his life in the States. Wealth and success, assuming they were to be had, were meaningless if not on his own territory—by which he meant half Europe with London as its centre. To go to America without a job was distasteful to him, for he was accustomed to pour scorn on the immigrant—at any rate, of his own upbringing—who took the easiest route to making a living by deserting to a new land. He spent the best part of a year urging her to return; but to Ruth he seemed merely cautious. She could not understand how a man could cling to a banana office in Biscay when Eldorado and his beloved awaited him across the Atlantic. It was ridiculous, she wrote, to worry about money. Her father would give him a job in his office; he needed someone with experience of European banking.

Toby did worry, for he valued his independence. To trust to the goodwill of an unknown father-in-law was a blow to his pride and thoroughly unwise. In everything his love of Ruth and his vague, almost instinctive ambitions were opposed. He refused to admit it, and the difficulties only increased his idealisation of the girl. When letters and cables failed to move her, he gave Payne & Edwards three months’ notice and turned all his possessions into cash.

He sailed on a Spanish freighter in late August 1929. The captain was a friend of his and the food and wine excellent, but the appearance of the rusty Cabo Culebra discharging general cargo in an obscure Hoboken dock that stunk of bone manure alarmed Mrs Beverley—whose mental picture of a Spanish ship had been a stately galleon manned by bullfighters—and even drew a mild and laughing protest from Ruth. Toby realised that for a day at least he had better be more English than the English and give his public what it wanted. On their drive to Long Island he behaved as a model of cool correctitude. Mrs Beverley, who had intended to impress the new arrival with the immensities of New York, decided that he might think it vulgar boasting and merely pointed out the sights with a casual wave of the hand.

In her own country Ruth was very much the jeune fille. Toby loved her none the less for her discretion. Ruth’s parents, who, he observed, could deny her nothing, were naïvely thankful to find him so presentable. Her father was a spare, sandy little man, shy in mixed society, rowdy and cheerful with other men. Her mother was a capable and merry woman with iron-grey hair, the skin of a child and a beautifully dressed body which, though now angular, was still desirable; it was comforting to think that Ruth would look like Mrs Beverley at the age of fifty. They were a simple, hospitable couple, without pretence except that of attaining an ever more exclusive circle of society. Their white colonial house, prim and honest, permitted that pardonable affectation while forbidding any more serious.

Toby spent with them an idyllic autumn, amazed at the kindliness with which he was received. These Americans gave so much for so little; all they asked was that a man should be a regular fellow. This Toby defined as one who pretended to some knowledge of sport, could talk intelligently of ways and means of making money, was neither surly nor eccentric, took the United States seriously but not its government, and drank cheerfully to begin with, regardless of how he held his liquor later—an essential point of charity, for no one could guess beforehand what the effect of his host’s cocktails would be. Only once was his popularity in danger, when he suggested in the changing room of the golf club that the bold and predatory financiers of the nineteenth century would have begun to sell short. Toby was no economist but he had watched inflation in France, Germany and half a dozen lesser countries and knew the symptoms. He was met by a storm of protest—each one of his listeners privately considered himself a financial genius, engaged in laying the foundations of a great American fortune.

The Beverley Trust Company Inc. was a straightforward business for collecting, through local agents, the money which immigrants wished to remit to their families in Europe. Between the collection of the dollars and the purchase of the foreign exchange, Mr Beverley used the funds as cover for his marginal operations on Wall Street. He was quite unconscious of any wrongdoing and explained the principle to Toby with considerable pride in his own smartness. Bankers, he said, were not a bunch of hidebound conservatives in his country—no, sir! Toby politely agreed, and put off the unpleasant day when he would have to tell his prospective father-in-law that he would not enter the Beverley Trust Company. The difficulty was settled for him by the October crash. Mr Beverley held out for a fortnight by dint of sending all collections to his broker instead of abroad and then could stave off ruin no longer. Had he been a deliberate criminal he might have faced a term of imprisonment and preserved enough of his capital to live on; but he was convinced that he had only done his duty, and was utterly bewildered that an honest man could be so struck down by fate. Dramatic as a child, he pretended that he was going to throw himself out of the office window. Unfortunately he lost his balance and did so.

Toby did what he could to comfort Ruth and her mother. It was not much, for his position was difficult. Whatever kindness he showed, to whomever he gave his shoulder for their tears, he still remained as futile as an expensive lapdog running about the streets of a deserted city. As soon as he decently could, he took a cheap room in West Twelfth Street and began to look out for a job. He answered and inserted advertisements, but the only replies he received asked for capital as well as services. He called on half a dozen business houses likely to appreciate his experience and was most considerately interviewed. On every occasion he was certain that he had got a job, and realised only later that he had underestimated American politeness. It seemed impossible for the head of a business to say no when he meant no—so long as the applicant was well-dressed. Meanwhile his savings, severely depleted by social expenses before Beverley’s death, were vanishing.

Ruth, with the adaptability that was her birth right, had got herself employed as a salesgirl in her favourite hat shop, and had hired from a friend, at a nominal rent, a furnished apartment in the west nineties. She was impatient with Toby’s failure. For the first time she felt superior to him; and she was tired of feeling superior to men. It was absurd, she said, for Toby to complain that he could not find a job. America was still the land of opportunity though the stock market might have crashed. Even a high-school boy had only to walk into a shop or office and claim to be able to do whatever they wanted done. By insisting with sufficient assurance that one could jerk soda or work a calculating machine or write advertising, two weeks’ pay was certain before one was found out. And by passing from one employment to another a man was sure to find something he could do. Toby was quite incapable of following her advice; he had perhaps more positive qualities than the high-school boy, but not his brazen impudence.

Mrs Beverley was being looked after by a distant cousin until the Beverley estate, if any, should be cleared up. The cousin was obviously in decorous love with Ruth, and whenever Toby called at her apartment he found his rival in possession and earning deserved popularity with gifts of gin and ginger ale. He lived in an agony of jealousy, and it was the more pain since he could not fight. His rival was, he fairly admitted, a first-rater, a gentle soul in the late thirties who managed a prosperous string of filling stations and was neither mean nor ostentatious with his money. Meanwhile he himself was imprisoned in his poverty. It was ridiculous to make Ruth marry him when they had nothing but her earnings to live on. It was absurd to ask her to wait when every day only showed up his own inability to adjust himself to the civilisation in which she was born and bred. He was humiliated by his failure. True, he had fallen on a strange land in hard times, but that was no excuse. Let alone Ruth’s damned high-school boy, he knew that any one of his Spanish friends could have fished as well in troubled waters as in calm. He saw less and less of Ruth. Bitter shame kept him away from her. He felt her impatience and could not endure her pity.

By the beginning of December his money had gone and he was pawning his wardrobe for what it would fetch. The rent was a month behind—his landlady was unhurried, for she had not the faintest idea that he was completely broke—and he could not afford decent food. He lived on bananas and biscuits, a diet which, to his inexperienced belly, seemed to give the most nourishment for the least cost. All the while his desire for Ruth tortured him. He recalled their weeks in Spain and cursed his folly in leaving it, in leaving Vienna, in ever being such a fool as to step off the beaten track. He reviewed his restaurants and his careless living, and that ended in the vision of Ruth enjoying all the transports of all his women in the arms of another man. In the floating wreck of his emotions, so conflicting that they forced him to talk aloud as he walked on the street, there was but one solid left. It was his pride. He would not leave the country. He would not write to his father for money. If he were bound for the bottom of society, then, by God, he would go there.