Knight Without Armour

PART V

From the “Golden Arrow” at Victoria there stepped a man whom the porters, even on that plutocratic platform, singled out, attracted not so much by a leather handbag plastered with foreign hotel-labels as by a certain unanalysable but highly significant quietness of manner. And the voice was equally quiet. “Taxi—yes, and there are a trunk and two large suit-cases in the van. The name is Fothergill.” To the driver a few moments later he said merely: “The Cecil.” It was the only hotel he could remember from the London of his youth.

They gave him a lofty bedroom overlooking the dazzling semicircle of the Embankment, and he spent the first few minutes gazing down at the trams and the electric advertisements across the river. He was a little tired after the journey, and a little thrilled by the sensation of being in London again. He changed, though not into evening clothes, and dined in the grill-room, chatting desultorily with the waiter. Then he smoked a cigar in the lounge and went up to his room rather early. In bed with a novel, he heard Big Ben chime several successive quarters; then he switched off the light and tried to believe that this small, comfortable, well-carpeted, and entirely characterless hotel bedroom was somehow different from all the dozens of similar ones he had occupied in other cities.

In the morning he breakfasted in bed, enjoyed a long hot bath, made himself affable with the hotel-porter, and strode out into the cheerful, sunny streets. There were so many little odd jobs to do—some of which he had been saving up for a long time. He saw his lawyer, and made an appointment to see a Harley Street doctor later on in the week. He called at a firm of publishers and heard that his book Rubber and the Rubber Industry had crept into a second edition. The publisher asked him to dinner the following evening; he accepted. Then he bought some tics and handkerchiefs and a hat of rather more English style than the one he was wearing. By that time, as it was noon and he was in the Strand, he stepped down to Romano’s Bar for a glass of sherry and exchanged a few words with the dark-haired girl who served him. He liked, when he could, to obtain the intimacy of talking to people without the bother of knowing them, and that, of course, was always more easily accomplished with one’s so-called inferiors. The barmaid at Romano’s was a type he liked—pretty, alert, friendly, and fundamentally virtuous. He asked her what were the best shows to see, and she gave him the names of several which he imagined he would be sure to detest exceedingly. Then she asked if this were his first visit to London, and he rather enjoyed answering: “My first for twenty-three years. I used to live here.” Afterwards he lunched at Rule’s in Maiden Lane—the first place he found that seemed to him very little changed since the old days. In the afternoon he took a ’bus to the Marble Arch and walked through the September sunshine to Hyde Park Corner and the Green Park, just in time for tea at Rumpelmayer’s. And after that there was nothing to do but return to the Cecil, change into dinner clothes, and begin the journey out to Surbiton.

“There is a good electric service from Waterloo,” she had written in her letter to him, and the sentence echoed in his mind with fatuous profundity all the time he was fixing his collar and tie in front of the bedroom mirror. It was strange to be visiting a person whom you had not seen for twenty-three years. It had been on impulse that he had written to her, and he was not sure, even now, that the impulse had been wise. She had married, of course, a second time—that was something. She had even a nineteen- year-old daughter. And, if one chanced to think of it, she had the vote—that vote for which in the past she had clamoured so much. She would be forty-eight—his own age. Her letter had really told him very little except that her name was now Newburn, that she would be delighted to see him, and that there was that good electric service from Waterloo.

When he arrived at Surbiton station an hour later he declined a cab and enquired the way from a policeman. The walk through placid suburban roads gave him a chance to meditate, to savour in full the rich unusualness of the situation. He lit a cigarette, stopped a moment to watch some boys playing with a dog, kicked a few pieces of orange-peel into the gutter with an automatic instinct for tidiness; it was past seven before he found the house. It looked smaller than he had expected (for, after all, hadn’t she inherited the bulk of old Jergwin’s fortune?); just a detached suburban villa with sham gables and a pretentious curved pathway between the garden-gate and the porch. The maid who opened the door to his ring took his hat and coat and showed him into a drawing-room tastefully if rather depressingly furnished. He stood with his back to the fire-grate and continued to wonder what she would look like.

She came in with her daughter. She was rather thin and pale and eager, and the daughter was a large-limbed athletic-looking girl who moved about the room as if it were a hockey-pitch.

“Isn’t it romantic, Ainsley, for you to have come back after all these years?”

He found himself shaking hands and being presented to the girl. “I suppose it is,” he answered, smiling. Rather to his astonishment he felt perfectly calm. He began to chatter pointlessly about the journey. “Found nay way quite easily—as you said, the service is very good. Didn’t think I’d be here half so quickly. You must be pretty far out of town, though—twenty miles, I should guess.”

“Twelve,” the girl corrected.

They began to discuss Surbiton. Then the maid brought in complicated and rather sugary cocktails. They continued to discuss Surbiton. By that time he was beginning to anticipate the arrival of Mr. Newburn with almost passionate eagerness, and was rather surprised when they adjourned to the dining-room without waiting for the gentleman. “Is Mr. Newburn away?” he asked, noticing that places were only laid for three. The girl answered, with outright simplicity: “Father died two years ago.”

Well, that was that, and there was nothing for it but to look sympathetic and change the subject. So, to avoid at all costs the resumption of the Surbiton discussion, he began to talk about Paris, Vienna, and other cities he had lived in during recent years. The girl said: “Mother told me you were in Russia during the Revolution. Do tell us about it!” He smiled and answered: “Well, ell, you know, there was a revolution and a lot of shooting and trouble of most kinds—I don’t know that I can remember much more.” She then said: “I suppose you saw Lenin and Trotsky?”—and he replied: “No, never—and neither of them. I’m rather a fraud, don’t you think?”

Then Philippa chatted about various causes and enterprises she was connected with; they ranged from a hospital for crippled children and a birth- control clinic to Esperanto and Dalcroze eurhythmics. He listened tolerantly, but shook his head when she offered to show him authentic photographs of slum children suffering from rickets. “I’ll willingly subscribe to them,” he said, “but I never care to have my feelings harrowed after a good dinner.” The girl choked with laughter. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I think they’re horrible photographs, and mother will show them to everybody.” Philippa replied: “I show them because they are so horrible—people ought to realise the horrible things that go on in the world.” He felt suddenly sorry for her then, and said: “It’s a splendid cause, I’m sure, and I didn’t mean to make fun. You will let me send you a cheque, won’t you?”

But he soon perceived that his compassion had been unnecessary. She was tough; she was thick-skinned; she was obviously used to all kinds of gibes. When she told him that it was her habit to stand at street-corners lecturing about birth-control, he felt that he need no longer be afraid of hurting her feelings. He was more sorry, then, for the girl; she was such an ordinary, straightforward, averagely decent girl.

They took coffee in the drawing-room, and when they were comfortably smoking, Philippa suddenly said: “My husband isn’t really dead—my daughter had to tell you that because the maid was there and that is what we tell her. The truth is, he left me.”

“Really?”

Then she launched into a detailed account of the catastrophe of her second marriage. The man had been a labour organiser, and he had run off with a girl secretary. He had also speculated with his wife’s money and lost most of it. It was all a rather pathetic story, taking so long to tell that by the time it was nearly over he was having to look at his watch and make hints about a return train. Then followed the usual conventionalities. It had been a most charming evening, he assured her—delightful to have seen her again. She urged him to stay the night, but he said he thought he wouldn’t—all his things at his hotel, and so on. She said she hoped they would meet again soon. She told him that she ran a little informal literary circle that met on alternate Wednesdays in her drawing-room. “We read each other papers, you know—not necessarily on literary subjects—sometimes we get strangers to talk to us—Mr. Wimpole, for instance, gave us a most fascinating chat about old English silver last week. I was wondering, you see, whether you would care to tell us a few of your experiences in Russia; if you would, I am sure—”

But he replied, smiling and shaking his head: “My dear Philippa, none of my Russian experiences were nearly so dreadful as the one you are suggesting.” The girl again laughed. “I’m afraid I’ll have to refuse—that sort of thing really isn’t in my line at all.”

It was raining and the girl went to the telephone to ring for a taxi. While she was away, Philippa contrived a word or two tęte-ŕ- tęte; she said: “You know, Ainsley, I do hope you’ll soon he conning again and then you must arrange to stay at least for a week-end. I dare-say ’you’ve found it rather odd, meeting me and my daughter together like this—there have been restraints, I know—lots of things I haven’t cared to tell you in front of her. And perhaps you too—what have you been doing, really, since I saw you last? We must meet again soon and tell each other everything.” Hearing the girl approaching, she added: “Anyway, now that you’re intending to make a home in England, we shall simply insist on getting to know you.”

But he was not intending to make a home in England, he reflected a few moments later, as he sat in the corner of the cab.

In his hotel bedroom that night he felt a slow and rather comfortable disappointment soaking into him. Subconsciously he knew he had been expectant over this meeting with Philippa; now he realised, not without relief, that all such expectancy had vanished. It wasn’t only she who had failed him, but he who had failed himself. He didn’t want to know anybody in that eager, confidential way; he had no energy for it; he would rather chat with a stranger in a train whom he would never sec again. It had been a mistake to go to Surbiton; perhaps it had been a mistake even to come to England.

The next morning, after he had talked to the girl in Romano’s Bar- about some theatres he was intending to visit, she said: “You seem to go about a lot by yourself. Haven’t you any friends?”

“Not in London,” he replied. “A few people the other side of the world—mostly Chinamen. That’s all.” He liked to see her eyebrows arch in astonishment.

“I say! Fancy being friends with Chinamen! But you must know somebody in London, if you used to live here?”

“A few business acquaintances, but I don’t count them. Oh, and two people in Surbiton. I went to see them last night, but I don’t suppose I shall go again.”

“Why not? Weren’t they nice to you?”

“Oh yes. Rather nicer, perhaps, than I was to them.”

“Then why—”

He laughed. “Never mind. I hardly know myself. But you can fill me up another glass of sherry and have one with me.”

“Righto, and thanks, though mine’s a gin, if you don’t mind…Well, here’s luck to you, anyway.”

Once he toyed with the idea of asking her out to some theatre or music- hall, but he decided, on reflection and without any sort of snobbishness, that the perfection of their relationship depended on the counter between.

He staved in London over a week, and on the whole he enjoyed himself. He dined at his publisher’s town house and met there a man on the staff of The Times who promptly commissioned from him a series of articles on the future of the rubber industry. It gratified and perhaps slightly surprised him to realise that his book had become, in its own field, something of a classic.

He also vent to theatres, cinemas, exhibitions; he walked in the parks; he listened to the open-air speakers near the Marble Arch; he lunched and dined in any hotel or restaurant that chanced to catch his eye; he sat in the Embankment gardens and pencilled drafts of his Times articles; he had casual and agreeable chats with policemen and bus-conductors. Philippa wrote to him, inviting him to Surbiton for any week-end he liked and he wrote back thanking her, but fearing that his arrangements would so soon be taking him temporarily out of London that he could not settle anything just yet. He enclosed, however, five guineas for her slum children, and hoped she would forgive him.

Then one morning he went to Harley Street to be examined and overhauled by a specialist. He went quite calmly and came away equally so. It was about noon, and he took a taxi back to the hotel, where he found a letter awaiting him—one he had been expecting. After reading it through he said to the bureau-clerk: “I shall be leaving to-morrow.” Then he stepped out into the sunshine and walked across the Strand to Romano’s Bar. The dark-haired girl placed his sherry before him with a smile. “Here again,” she said. “You’re becoming one of our regulars.”

“Not for long, I’m afraid,” he answered. “I’m off to-morrow.”

“Where?”

“Ireland.”

“Business?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Going for long?”

“Don’t know, really.”

“It’s queer, seems to me, the way you don’t know anybody and don’t seem to know even things about yourself. Fact is, I’m beginning to think you must be a queer one altogether.”

He laughed. “I had a queer sort of adventure this morning, anyway. Went to a doctor and was told I ought to give up smoking and drinking, go to bed early every night, and avoid all excitements. What would you do, now, if your doctor told you that about yourself?”

“I don’t suppose I’d take any notice of it.”

“Quite right, and I don’t suppose I shall either.”

“Go on!” she laughed. “You don’t look ill! I don’t believe you went to any doctor at all—you’re just having me on!”

“Honestly, I’m not. It’s as true as those Chinese friends of mine.”

He joked with her for a little longer and then went to lunch at Simpson’s. Afterwards he returned to the hotel, wrote a few letters, and began to pack his bags in readiness for the morrow. Then he went out for a stroll; he walked up to Covent Garden Market, where there were always interesting scenes, and then westward towards Charing Cross Road, where he liked to look at the bookshops. But he felt himself becoming very tired long before he reached this goal, so he turned into the familiar Maiden Lane for a drink and a rest at Rule’s. But it wanted a quarter of an hour to opening time, he discovered, when he reached the closed door, and as his tiredness increased, he entered the little Catholic church almost opposite and sat down amidst the cool and grateful dusk.

He felt refreshed after a few minutes and began to walk round the church, examining the mural tablets; in doing so, without looking where he was going, he almost collided with a young priest who was also walking round. Apologies were exchanged, and conversation followed. The priest, it appeared, was not attached to the church; he was merely a sightseer, like Fothergill himself. He was from Lancashire, he said, on a business visit to London; when he had time to spare he liked going into churches—“a sort of ’busman’s holiday,” he added, with a laugh. He was a very cheerful, friendly person, and Fothergill, who liked casual encounters with strangers, talked to him for some time in the porch of the church as they went out. Then it suddenly occurred to both of them that there was no absolute need to cut short a conversation that had begun so promisingly; they walked down Bedford Street to the Strand, still talking, and with no very definite objective. The priest, whose name was Farington, said he was going to have a meal somewhere and take a night train back to Lancashire; Fothergill said he was also going to have dinner. Farington then said that he usually took a snack at Lyon’s Corner House, near Charing Cross; Fothergill said, all right, that would do for him too. So they dined together inexpensively and rather uncomfortably, surrounded by marble and gilt and the blare of a too strident orchestra.

Yet Fothergill enjoyed it. He liked Farington. He liked Farington’s type of mind—intellectual, sincere, interested in all kinds of matters outside the scope of religion, worldly to those who saw only the surface, spiritual to those who guessed deeper. He was emphatically not the kind of man to insist on rendering to God the things which were Caesar’s. During the meal Fothergill chanced to mention something about rubber plantations, and Farington said immediately: “I say, didn’t you tell me your name was Fothergill? I wonder, now you’re talking about rubber, whether you’re the Fothergill who used to be at Kuala Simur?”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s odd. It means I know quite a lot about you—Father Richmond and I are great friends—we were at Ware together.”

“Really? Oh yes, I remember him very well. Where is he now?”

“Still at Kuala Simur. He had a great opinion of you—especially after that small-pox epidemic.”

“Oh, that wasn’t much.”

Farington laughed. “It’s too conventional to say that, surely? I wish you could sec some of Richmond’s letters about you, anyway—he almost hero-worshipped.”

“I hope not.”

“He did. His great dream, I think, was to convert you some day.”

“Well, he didn’t come far short of doing so.”

“Oh?”

“We used to argue a good deal about religion and so on—and I used to joke with him and say I should end by becoming a Catholic. At least, perhaps he thought I was joking, but all the time, in a sort of way, I meant it. Then my brother died and all the rubber estates fell to me, and I got suddenly fed up with everything and sold out. That just happened to be right at the top of the rubber boom in ’twenty-five, which is why I’m more or less a rich man now. I sold out to an Anglo-Dutch syndicate, packed up, and pottered about Europe from then till now. The syndicate, incidentally, paid me about five times what the place is worth to- day.”

“That must have been very good for your bank account.”

“Better than for my soul, perhaps, eh? To come back to that, the rather curious thing is that all the time I was at Kuala Simur I felt a sort of conversion going on—if you can call it that—I know of course that nothing really counts until you’re definitely over the line. Probably if I’d had much more to do with your friend Richmond, whom I liked exceedingly, he’d have pushed me over.”

“I wish that had happened.”

“Oh well, I pushed myself over a year later, so perhaps it didn’t matter.”

“So you are a Catholic?”

“I was received into the Church in Vienna three years ago. I’m not sure that I’m entitled to call myself a Catholic now, though. Slackness, I suppose. All very unsatisfactory from your point of view, I’m afraid.”

“And from yours too, surely?”

“Well, perhaps—perhaps.”

They talked on for some time, and Fothergill found it strangely and refreshingly easy to be intimate with the young man. Farington’s train was due to leave at midnight, and towards nine o’clock Fothergill suggested that they should adjourn to his hotel for a smoke. They walked along the crowded Strand to the Cecil and were soon snugly in the lounge. There and then conversation developed as if all barriers had suddenly been destroyed. Fothergill said: “You know, Farington, there was one thing I never told Richmond and that was the whole truth about my life.”

“I know. He used to grumble about that in his letters to me. He said he was sure you had some mysterious and grisly past which you never breathed a word about to anybody.”

“Really? He guessed that? How curious!”

“Well, we priests aren’t such simpletons, you know.”

Fothergill laughed. “I’ll bet he never guessed the sort of past it had been, though. I daresay I’d have told him if I hadn’t known him so well. As a matter of fact, I knew he liked me and I liked him to like me, and I didn’t want to see my stock going down with a bump…You see, I seem to have broken so many of the commandments.”

“Most of us have.”

“Yes, but I’ve gone rather the whole hog. I’ve killed men, for instance.”

“If you walked out now into the Strand you could find hundreds of middle-aged fellows who’ve done that.”

“Oh, the war—yes, but my affairs weren’t in the war—at least, hardly. One of them was pretty cold-blooded murder. And then there are other matters, too. I never married, but I lived with a woman—once.”

“That, again, is nothing very unusual.”

“I daresay not, but if my soul depended on it, I couldn’t say I was sorry. It’s the one thing in my life which I feel was fully and definitely right.”

“Of course, without knowing the circumstances—”

“If You’ve time, and if you think you wouldn’t be bored, I’ll tell You how it all happened.”

“I wish you would.”

“Splendid.” And he began at the day he left England twenty- three years before. About three-quarters of an hour later, when he came hoarsely to an end, Farington said: “Well, that’s really a most astonishing story. How relieved you must be to have told it to somebody!”

“Yes, that’s just what I’m feeling. Relieved and rather tired.”

“Not too tired to continue our chat for another half-hour or so. I hope?”

“Provided you do most of the talking.”

“Oh, I’ll engage to do that.” He kept his word, and the conversation continued until it was absolutely necessary for him to leave to catch the train. Fortunately his bag was at the station, so that he could proceed there directly. Fothergill, strangely eager despite his tiredness, accompanied him in the taxi, and their talk lasted until the moment the train began to move. “We probably shan’t meet again,” Fothergill said, as they shook hands, “but I shall never forget how—how reasonable you have been. Does that sound a rather tepid word in the circumstances?”

“Not at all. Just the right one, I should like to think. Though there’s no reason why we shouldn’t meet sometime—you have my address—it’s only a train-ride out of Manchester.”

“I hate tram-rides and I’m sure I should hate Manchester.” He laughed excitedly, and was aware of the silliness of the remark. He added, more soberly: “In my old age I’m beginning to attach great value to comfort—just comfort.”

“Old age, man—nonsense! You’re not fifty yet!”

“One is made old, not by one’s years, but by what one has lived through. That’s sententious enough, surely—another sign of age.” The train began to move. “I shan’t forget, however. Good-bye.”

“I must make the most, then, of your rubber articles in The Times. Good-bye then.” They laughed distantly at each other as the train gathered speed.

He drove back to the hotel with all his senses warmed and glowing. On what trifles everything depended—if he had not made for Rule’s that evening and been those few minutes too early!

In a corner seat of a first-class compartment on the Irish Mail the next morning, he had leisure to think everything over. So much had happened the day before. But the interview with the Harley Street man hadn’t surprised him; he had been suspecting something of the sort for several months, and wasn’t worrying; there was no pain—at worst a sort of tiredness. He would take a few but not all the precautions he had been recommended, and leave the rest to Fate.

He opened a small attaché-case on the seat beside him and took out letters and papers. The proofs of his first Times article—how well it looked—’by Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill, author of Rubber and the Rubber Industry’! He seemed to be staring appreciatively at the work of another person—the hardworking, painstaking person who had spent five years in Kuala Simur. Five years of self- discipline and orderliness, with the little rubber trees all in line across the hillside to typify a certain inner domestication of his own soul. He had liked the plantation work; it had given him grooves just when most of all he had wanted grooves. To save himself he had plunged into rubber-growing with a fervour that had startled everybody, especially poor William; he had worked, read, written, thought, and lived rubber for five years. And the result, by an ironic twist of fortune, had come to be two things he had never known before—a status and a private income.

He turned over a few letters. One from his publisher, enclosing a cheque for six months’ royalties and suggesting a small ‘popular’ book in a half-crown series to be called just ’Rubber’—something rather chatty and not too technical—could he do it?…It would be rather interesting to try, at any rate…A letter from Philippa, thanking him for his subscription to her slum children, and hoping he would manage a visit soon—he could come any time he liked and stay as long as he liked—“both Sybil and I are looking forward so much to seeing you again.”

He would never, in all probability, see either of them again.

A letter from a firm of enquiry agents in New York City, dated several months back and addressed to him in Paris: “With reference to your recent enquiry, we regret that up to the present we have found it impossible to obtain any information. We are, however, continuing to investigate, and will report to you immediately should any development occur.”

Another letter, some weeks later: “Re Mary Denver, we are at last able to report progress. It appears that the child was adopted by a family named Consett, of Red Springs, Colorado, middle-class people of English descent, moderately well-off. Mr. Consett died in 1927. We have had difficulty in tracing the rest of the family since then. They left Red Springs, and are believed to have gone to Philadelphia. We are continuing our enquiries.” A third letter, dated three weeks back:

“We are now able to inform you that Mrs. Consett and daughter crossed the Atlantic in November of last year and spent Christmas at Algiers. Our European representative, to whom we have cabled instructions, will take the matter in hand as from there.” A fourth letter, from this European representative, conveying the information that the Consetts had left Algiers with the intention of touring in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Pretty vague, that, but a fifth letter had narrowed it down to ‘England and Ireland,’ and a sixth letter—the one that had arrived only the day before—had stated, with admirable definiteness: “I understand that Mrs. and Miss Consett left Stratford-on-Avon on Tuesday last and crossed to Ireland. They are now believed to be staying at the Shelburne Hotel, Dublin.”

He gathered the letters into a pile and took them into the dining-car with him when he went to lunch. He was on the right-hand side of the train, whence he could see the North Wales coast, blue sea and sandy shore, streaming past the window like a cinema-film. Crowds of holiday-makers, pierrot entertainers, bathers bobbing up and down in the water, a sudden jangle of goods-yard, a station, a tunnel, the sea and shore again, deserted for an odd half-mile or so; then bungalows, boardinghouses, a promenade, a bandstand, bathing-huts, crowds, a jangle of goods-yard, a station—on, on, beyond the soup to the fish and the underdone roast beef of that very English and mediocre train-lunch.

He arrived in Dublin at seven that night, and drove straight to the Shelburne. The Consetts, he learned from the hotel porter, had gone on to Killarney two days before. “Americans, sir. See Killarney and die—you know the kind of thing? After that, I expect they’ll be rushing to kiss the Blarney Stone.”

He stayed at the Shelburne for the night and caught the morning express to Killarney. The porter at the Shelburne had given him the names of some of the more likely hotels, and it was easy to drive from one to another making enquiries. At a third asking he discovered that the Consetts had left that morning for Carrigole, Co. Cork, where they were almost bound to be staying at Roone’s Hotel.

There was no railway to Carrigole, so he hired a car to drive him the forty-odd miles over the hills. It was a marvellous summer afternoon, just beginning to fade into the soft glow of evening; by the time he reached the top of the pass and the driver pointed out Carrigole harbour in the distance, all the world seemed melting into a rarefied purple dusk. After the metropolitan bustle of Dublin and the stage-Irishry of Killarney, this, he felt, was the real Ireland, and immediately, in a way he hardly understood, he felt kinship with it. Successive days of travel had increased his fatigue, but the calm, tranquil mountain-air was uplifting him, giving him satisfaction, almost buoyancy.

It was dark when he reached Roone’s, and the yellow oil-lamps were lit in the tiled hall and under the built-out verandah. Somehow by instinct, as he took his first step into that cool interior, lie knew that he would have to go no further, and for that reason he did not ask about the Consetts when he booked a room. All that would come later; he must give himself the pleasure of doing everything sweetly and with due proportion. “May I have dinner?” he enquired, and was directed to a room whose windows, ranging from floor to ceiling along one side, showed the still darkly glowing harbour with the mountains brooding over it as in some ancient, kindly conspiracy.

The room was fairly full, but he had a table to himself, and the dinner was good. The faces of others glowed yellow-brown in the lamplight; the night was full of talking and laughing, the bark of a dog, the hoot of cars entering the drive; yet permeating it all, in a queer way, there was silence—silence such as seemed to rise out of the very earth and sea to meet the sky.

He chatted to the waiter; it was his first visit to Carrigole, he explained, or, for that matter, to Ireland at all. “You seem pretty full—the height of the season, I daresay?”

“Just a little past it, sir. We get a lot of American tourists in July and August, but most of them are beginning to go back by now.”

“Ah yes. I suppose, though, a few of the people here now are Americans?”

“Oh yes, quite a number. Most of them come on from Killarney and stay here a night or so on their way to Cork.”

He did not enquire further, but that evening, after dinner, the problem became merely one of identification. For he was asked to sign the hotel register, and as he wrote “A.J. Fothergill—London—British” he glanced up the column of names and read in plain round handwriting a few inches above—“Mrs. and Miss Consett, Philadelphia.”

He lit a cigar and took coffee in the lounge and wondered who they might be among the faces that passed him by. It would be simple, of course, to enquire directly, to approach them with equal directness, to introduce himself remarkably and dramatically, to talk till midnight about the exceeding singularity of the fate that had linked, then sundered, and now linked again his life and the girl’s. Yet he shrank from it; his mind was sore from drama, aching for some quieter contact, for something at first and perhaps always remote. He wanted everything to be peaceful, gradual, even if it were additionally intricate; he wanted to preserve some path of secret retreat, so that at any moment, if he grew too tired, he could escape into forgotten anonymity. Yet, on the other hand, there was an urgency in the matter that he could not avoid, for the Consetts might not be staving at Carrigole for long, and he could not undertake to follow them all over the world.

Chance came to his aid. The post arrived at Roone’s rather late; he saw the bundle of letters brought in by the cyclist-postman and handed across the counter to Mrs. Roone, who began to sort them. A cluster of people gathered around, and suddenly he heard a girl’s voice asking if there were anything for Mrs. Consett.

There was, and she took a letter, studying its envelope as she walked away across the tiled hall to a table under the verandah where a woman sat reading a magazine.

For a moment he did not look at either of them; all had happened so calmly and comfortably. Then he suddenly knew that his heart was beating very fast. That would never do. He must see them; he must know what they were like. He got up and strolled deliberately by, puffing at his cigar and appearing to stare through the windows at nothing. The woman was plump, cheerful, talkative, fairly attractive; but the girl was less ordinary. She was quiet, rather well- featured, with calm brown eyes that were looking at him before his dared to look at her. That was curious, he thought, that she should have stared first.

He went to bed, slept well, and was down early for breakfast. The Consetts came in later, but to a table at the other end of the room. During the meal the waiter asked him if he would care to join an excursion to visit an ancient hermitage some score miles away over the hills. “It is quite interesting sir,” he recommended, “and if you have nothing else in mind, it would make a pleasant trip.”

“Are most of the others going?”

“Practically everybody, sir, except the fishing gentlemen.”

“I don’t want to have a lot of walking to do.”

“There is hardly any—you just drive right there by car.”

“All right, I daresay I’ll go.”

It was a chance, he realised, and perhaps a better one than many others.

Four large five-seater touring-cars were drawn up outside the hotel. The excursionists arranged themselves as they chose, usually, of course, manoeuvring to be with their friends. It was natural that he should wait rather diffidently until most had taken positions, and that, as an odd man, he should be fitted into the back seat of one of the cars with two other persons. Partly by luck and partly by his own contrivance, those two compulsory fellow- passengers were the Consetts. He was at one side of the car, Mrs. Consett at the other; the girl sat in between them. The driver and a large picnic-hamper shared the seat in front.

The convoy set off at eleven o’clock through lanes full of wildflowers and spattered with sunshine from a dappled sky. The harbour, reaching out into the long narrow inlet, gleamed like a sword-blade; the hills were purple-grey and a little hazy in the distance. He passed some merely polite remark about the weather, and the girl answered him in the same key. But the woman, seizing the opportunity, began to talk. She talked in a strong, copious stream, with never-flagging zest and ever-increasing emphasis. Wasn’t Ireland lovely?—had he visited Killarney?—had he been on the lake and un to the Gap of Dunloe? They had—a most beautiful and romantic excursion, but the flies had been a nuisance during the picnic-lunch, and the food from the hotel had been just awful. It was a curious thing, but the hotels over this side seemed to have no idea…etc., etc.

He listened, occasionally venturing some remark. He said, in response to questioning, that he had never been to America, but had travelled a little in Europe. That opened further flood-gates. He received a full and detailed account of the Consett odyssey from the very day it had begun at Philadelphia. Paris, Interlaken, the Rhine, Münich, Innsbruck, Rome, Algiers, Seville (for Easter), Biarritz, Lourdes, Chartres, Ostend, the battlefields, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Stratford-on-Avon, Dublin…how much they had seen, even if how little! They had loved it all, of course, and Mrs. Consett added, across the girl, as it were: “Mary is just eighteen, you see, and it is such an impressionable age, I think, and I do so want her to see the world when she is young, because later on, you know, one can never be sure of getting such chances—in America so many women live narrow, self- centred lives after they marry—they think they’re seeing the world if they spend a week in New York. My own brothers and sisters, for instance, who live in Colorado, have never travelled further than Los Angeles, and even I never saw Europe till Mary and I landed last fail. And now, though I’m terribly ashamed to think of what I’d missed for so long, Vet I’m just glad to now that Mary’s seeing all these marvellous places at an age when everything means most—the Coliseum at Rome, for instance, and Westminster Abbey, and Shakespeare’s dear little house, and those quaint little jaunting-cars they have at Killarney—have you been on them? We had a most amusing driver to take us—so amusingly Irish—I quite intended to make notes of some of his remarks when I got back to the hotel, but I was just too tired after the long drive, and it was such a beautiful drive—rather like parts of Virginia…” And so on, and so on.

They reached the hermitage about noon; it was a collection of ruins on an island off the shore of a lake—the latter overshadowed by gloomy mountains and reached by a narrow, twisting road over a high pass. The island was still a place of pilgrimage, and many of the arched cells in which the hermits had lived were littered with tawdry votive offerings—beads, buttons, lead-pencils, pieces of ribbon—a quaint miscellany for the rains and winds to disintegrate. The tourists made the usual vague inspection and turned with relief to the more exciting business of finding a place for lunch. Fothergill still remained with the Consetts; indeed, rather to his private amusement, he realised that it would have been difficult to be rid of them in any case. Mrs. Consett had by that time given him the almost complete history of her family and was engaged on a minute explanation of the way in which her husband had made money out of steam-laundries. From that, as the picnic-lunch progressed, she passed on to a sententious discussion of family life in general and of the upbringing of children in particular. At this point a sudden commotion amongst the rest of the party gave the girl an excuse to move away, for which Fothergill did not blame her, though it left him rather unhappily at the mercy of Mrs. Consett. Soon, however, an opportunity arose for himself also; the men of the party began to pack up the hampers and carry them to the cars. He attached himself to their enterprise for a sufficiently reasonable time, and then strolled off on his own, deliberately oblivious of the fact that Mrs. Consett was waiting for him to resume his rôle of listener. He walked towards the lake and across the causeway to the island—a curious place, of interest to him because, with its childlike testimonies of faith, it reminded him of things he had seen in Russia. Was it too fanciful, he wondered, to imagine a spiritual kinship between the countries? He was thus reflecting when he saw the open doors of a small modern chapel built amidst a grove of trees; and inside the building, which was scarcely bigger than the room of a small house, he caught sight of the girl. She heard his footsteps and turned round, smiling slightly.

“I didn’t notice this place when we first went round,” he remarked, approaching.

“Neither did I. It’s really so tiny, isn’t it?—quite the tiniest I’ve ever seen. And isn’t it terribly ugly?”

It was—garishly so in a style which again reminded him of Russia. The comparison was so much on his mind that without any ulterior motive he added: “I’ve seen the same sort of thing abroad—especially in Russia. Simple people always love crude colours and too much ornament.”

She seized on that one vital word. “You know Russia, then?”

“Fairly well. I used to live there.”

“Did you like it?”

“Very much, in some ways.”

“I wish mother and I could have gone there, but I suppose it isn’t really safe for tourists yet.”

“I daresay it would be safe enough, but I should think it would hardly be comfortable.”

“Oh, then it wouldn’t do at all.” She laughed in a way which Fothergill liked instantly and exceedingly—a deep fresh laugh as from some spring-like fountain of humour. “Mother hates hotels where you don’t get a private bathroom next to your bedroom.”

“She can’t be very keen on Roone’s, then.”

“I don’t think she is, but I just love it. I’d hate to find everything exactly like the Plaza at New York. Besides, I don’t think it really matters if you miss the morning bath once now and again.”

“No, I don’t think it really does.” And they smiled at each other, sharing their first confidence.

As they left the chapel he was surprised to see her genuflect; so she was a Catholic, then. That set him thinking of the profound reasonableness of Catholics in holding their faith in reverence while at the same time being free to call one of their churches ugly if it were ugly; and that, in turn, set him thinking of the reasonableness of Father Farington, and of that long conversation in London before he left…

She was saying: “What is your name, by the way?”

“Fothergill.”

“Ours is Consett. I don’t know whether you knew.”

“I did, as a matter of fact. I overheard you asking for letters last night.”

“Oh, did you? That must have been before you passed us on the verandah, then? I noticed you particularly because—I daresay you’ll smile at this—you looked what in America we should call ‘typically English.’”

“‘Typically English,’ eh?” And for the first time for some years he was thoroughly astonished. To be called that, of all things!

She said: “The quiet way, I suppose, that Englishmen have—a sort of look of being rather bored by everything, though really they’re not bored at all. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said it, though—you don’t look very complimented.”

He smiled. “’Would you be complimented if I were to describe you as ’typically American?”

She paused a moment and then gave him a look of amused candour. “That’s rather clever of you, because I wouldn’t. And, anyhow, in my own case—” She stopped hurriedly, and he said, holding open the wicket-gate for her to pass from the island on to the causeway: “Yes, what were you about to say?”

“I was really going to say that I’m not an American at all.”

“Oh?”

There was rather a long interval .until she went on: “It’s queer to be telling you all this after knowing you for about five minutes—I don’t know what mother would think. But, as it happens, you once lived in Russia, so perhaps that’s an excuse. I’m Russian.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. I came over with the refugees in 1919. That sounds a bit like coming over with the Pilgrim Fathers, doesn’t it, but it’s really not quite so illustrious. There were just a few hundred refugee orphans who were allowed into America before the government woke up and decided it didn’t want any more of them. They were all adopted into families in various parts of the country. I was six when I came over.”

“That makes you how old now?”

“Just eighteen.”

“I don’t suppose you remember much of your life in Russia.”

“Hardly anything. Sometimes I dream of things which I think might have something to do with it. I wonder if that’s possible?”

“It might be.”

“Here comes mother to meet us. I think I’d better tell her how much I’ve told you.”

The confession was made, and Mrs. Consett, after hearing all the circumstances, bestowed her magnanimous approval. It enabled her to continue the conversation with Fothergill on rather more intimate lines, and this she did all the way during the drive back to Roone’s. “So curious that we should all be learning about one another so quickly, isn’t it? But there, I always think that one should take all the chances one can of making friends wherever one goes—I’m sure Mary and I have already met some charming people during our trip—there was a most delightful man in the hotel at Naples—a Swiss—only a commercial traveller, I surmised—but still, who are we to be snobbish? I’m sure I never try to conceal the fact that my husband made his money out of other people’s washing. But this Swiss man, as I was saying, was such a pleasant companion—he went to Pompeii with us to see those wonderful Roman ruins—and lie was most helpful, too, when we wanted to buy anything in the shops. I should think he saved us quite a lot of money, for, as you know, the Italians think every American must be a millionaire, though, as a matter of fact, we’re not really very well- off—we’ve been saving up for this trip for quite a time, haven’t we, Mary?” And so on.

When they all reached Roone’s again it was quite settled that they should arrange with the waiter to have a larger table, so that they could take meals together. They dined that night, the three of them, by the side of the large window, through which the harbour burned with little dark specks on it that were the row-boats bringing the fishermen ashore by dusk. After the out- door air and the long drive over the mountains he felt tired, yet in a way that gave him a certain rich serenity, breaking only into fitful astonishment that she should be there, that he should have found and spoken with her after so many years. But it was she herself who astonished him most of all. The lamplight touched the ivory white of her face with a glow of amber, and there were five lamps, hung on chains from the ceiling, making islands of light in the huge dark room. Her eyes were like pools that might have been in a forest, and the creamy sweep of her neck against that background reminded him of some old brown Vandyke painting. Contentment closed over him as he looked at her; Mrs. Consett’s continual talking echoed in his ears, yet somehow was not heard; all about the room was chatter, rising to the roof and hovering there, yet to him it was no more than a murmur—as if, he thought fantastically, some monster choir at an immense distance were intoning Latin genitive plurals.

So began a week of purest holiday. The Consetts, it appeared, had no definite plans; they just stayed in one place as long as they liked, and Roone’s was apparently suiting them, despite the lack of private bathrooms. The weather, too, held out in a blaze of splendour just beginning to be autumnal; every morning when Fothergill rose and saw through his window the grey-green mountains across the harbour he felt a surge of happiness that reminded him, not of his own childhood, but of some remoter and more marvellously recollected childhood of the world. Then after breakfast came plans for the day—delightful arguments in the verandah-lounge, while Mrs. Roone was packing sandwiches for them, and Roone was tapping the barometer and prophesying fine weather. It was always Mrs. Consett who seemed to make the plans, yet always Fothergill who did the real work of organising—finding the route on road-maps, seeing that food was sufficient, arranging terms with motor-drivers. Then they would set out under the long avenue of just fading leaves, swing down the winding hill through the village, and up the further hill to the mountains. He felt the years falling away from him as he rose into that zestful air, and when they halted for picnic- lunch at some lonely vantage-point, with the valleys like clouds beneath them, he was a child again in his enjoyment. He loved the fire-making routine—the collecting of sticks on the hillsides, with the girl but calling distance away from him, and her mother dozing in the car a hundred feet below; the finding of large stones to build a hearth; the careful watching till the kettle boiled at last. Once, tempted by a glorious sunset, they stayed late round a fire they had made at tea-time and talked till the flames seemed to bring all the darkness suddenly over their heads. As she stirred the fire to a last blaze before they left it, the girl remarked on the heat of the big stones, and he said: “If I were going to camp here for the night I should wrap one of those stones in a piece of blanket and use it instead of a hot- water bottle. That’s always a good dodge if you’re sleeping out.”

“Have you ever slept out?”

“Oh, often.”

“You seem to have done all kinds of things.”

“Many kinds of things, perhaps.”

“I wish you’d tell some of your adventures.”

“I might, some time.”

Yet he continually put it off. Partly, of course, because it was always easier to do so; Mrs. Consett’s chatter was a strong current that could be swum against, but it was far less trouble to relax and let it carry one along. And partly, too, because he felt a curious reluctance to break the tranquillity of those simple days, and what tranquillity or simplicity could remain after he had told his entire story?

He had, in fact, few chances of talking to the girl alone, and he could not, he felt, tell her the final secret—her own identity—at any other time.

One night, after dinner, someone brought a gramophone into the tiled hall and put on dance records. The girl asked him if he danced and he replied, smiling: “I’m afraid I don’t—I never learned, and I’m too old now.” She said: “I’ll teach you, then,” and as other couples were by that time moving from their seats, he replied, with sudden decision: “Will you? All right.” He found it easy; she was a good pilot, and he himself had a sure sense of rhythm. “As if you were too old to learn,” she whispered, reproachfully, as they drifted in amidst the lamp-lit shadows. “I don’t think you’re really too old for anything.”

“Although I’m nearly three times your own age?”

“That doesn’t matter. You don’t feel old, do you? And if anyone saw you when you were making a fire for a picnic, they’d think you were only a boy.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was watching you this afternoon. You were enjoying it, weren’t you?”

“Absolutely, I admit.”

“So was I. I don’t think I’ve ever got to know anybody so quickly as I have you. It seems rather an awful thing to say, but sometimes—sometimes I wish mother wasn’t quite so—so everywhere—and always; she’s a dear, but she does chatter terribly, doesn’t she?”

“Just as well, perhaps, because I’m not much of a talker myself.”

“Neither am I, yet I’d rather like to give ourselves a chance. By the way, were you once a rubber planter out in the Malay States?”

“Sumatra, it was. But how did you know?”

“Oh, mother seems to have been finding out all about you. She happened to see an article in the London Times, and thought it must be you, from the name and initials. Then someone else told her—some people staying here, but I think they’ve gone now—that you’d been a planter out there and had made heaps of money.”

“It depends how much you mean by heaps.”

She laughed. “Personally, I’m not very curious, but mother seems to think you’re a millionaire travelling incognito, or something of that sort.”

He laughed also. “You can contradict the rumour,” he assured leer.

They went on dancing. They danced, in fact, with hardly a pause until nearly midnight, and when they finally rejoined Mrs. Consett he said, with eyes and cheeks glowing: “Your daughter is a most charming teacher. I hope we haven’t been allowing the lesson to last too long?”

“Oh, not at all—not at all.” Indeed, she seemed quite pleased.

He was tired that night when he went to bed, but it was the sort of tiredness to be expected after a day on the mountains and an evening of fox- trots. Curiously, in a way, he felt much better since he had begun the more strenuous life of Roone’s; it seemed to tire him far less to scramble up a mountain in search of fuel for a picnic-fire than to take leisurely strolls along city pavements.

The girl and he had more time together during the second week; there were occasions when Mrs. Consett professed fatigue and said she would write letters in the lounge while they, if they cared, took a walk. Roone’s was growing emptier; the eight months’ season of slack business was approaching and the first gales of autumn had already laid bare the trees in the woods. As an offset to the general exodus of visitors, a light cruiser came to anchor in Carrigole Bay for a few days’ visit. Most of the officers and men carne ashore to Roone’s; bluejackets swarmed into the public bar, while the hall and the long verandah terraces were filled with shouting and laughing naval officers. Every night they kept up their merriment to a late hour, and most of the day a group of them hung about the counter in the hall, chatting and joking with the Roones.

One morning Fothergill and the girl made the ascent of the Baragh, a steep, cone-shaped peak that rose a thousand feet at the back of the hotel. An hour of scrambling through heather brought them to the summit, whence could be seen the roofs of Carrigole and the long bay stretching westward into the sunlit sea.

NOW, he felt, as he sat on a rough stone with the sweep of sea and mountain all around him and the girl seated on another stone somewhat below,—now was just his chance. He could talk without interruption; he could begin at the beginning and tell all that was to be told.

Yet he didn’t even begin to tell. Another thought carne to him—that in all the world she was probably the only person he would ever meet who had ever known Daly—the sole surviving contact with all in his own life that had mattered most. And that dark passion of his, subdued for years, spilled over now in a little tender flood of affection for the girl.

Suddenly she said: “Do you remember I told you I sometimes had dreams that might have something to do with the time before I left Russia?”

He nodded.

“I had a dream of that sort last night. Too queer to be remembered, really, but the queerest part was that you were mixed up in it somehow.”

“I was?”

“Yes. We seemed to be going somewhere all the time—just one place after another—and at night we slept out in the open and used hot stones for water-bottles.” She laughed. “Isn’t it curious the way everything gets mixed up in dreams?”

The chance to tell her was again full on him, yet once again he forbore. He was still wrestling with memories of those old and epic days. He said, abruptly: “Are you happy in America? What do you do there? Tell me the kind of life you have.”

She looked amused. “I rather thought mother had told you everything you ever wanted to hear about our home life. As a matter of fact, we really do have a good time and get on splendidly together. We play a little bridge and tennis (though we’re both very bad), and we just have money enough to travel now and again and go to theatres and have friends to stay with us. I shall have to earn my own living, of course, for which I’m rather glad—I think it’s a mistake to do nothing but idle about and wait to be married by somebody.”

“Don’t you wish you’d been born rich, or high up in the world—a princess, say?”

“I wouldn’t mind if I’d been born rich, though I don’t suppose it would have made me any happier. And as for being a princess, when I feel romantic I sometimes try to kid myself that I am one—after all, nobody knows who I really am, do they?”

“I suppose not.”

“Though I daresay I wouldn’t really like it if I were. It must be very tiresome having to be important all the time. It would stop me from doing things like this, wouldn’t it?”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Scrambling up a mountain with you.”

He laughed—a sudden almost boyish laugh that startled the mountain silences. “Yes, you’re right. You’re happier as you are, no doubt.”

“I know I am. Oh, it has been such fun, travelling all over Europe ever since nearly a year ago, and the strange thing is, it all somehow seems to have been leading up to this. I mean this—here—now—just this.” She looked at him quickly and then stared far across the distance to the furthest horizon. “I like these mountains ever so much better than the Swiss ones, don’t you? I suppose it’s heresy to say so, but the Alps rather remind me of wedding-cake.”

And all the time and all the way down as they descended he was thinking of something else—of gilded salons and baroque antechambers, of consulates and embassies and chancelleries, of faded uniforms and tarnished orders, of intrigues and plottings and counter-plottings, of Paris cafés where Russian émigrés passed their days on a treadmill of futile anticipation, of Riviera hotels where the very waiters were princes and expected extra tips for so being, of dark and secret assassinations, of frontiers stiff with bayonets, of men in Moscow council-rooms ruthless, logical, and aware. That madly spinning world lay so close, and it was in his power to thrust her into the very vortex of it.

That night he took out of a sealed envelope certain curiously-marked papers. They were twelve years old; time and a fumigating oven had considerably faded them. He looked them through and then replaced them in the envelope. It was late, past midnight; the sailors had returned to their ship; even the Roones had gone to bed, and the lamps in the corridor were all out. He groped his way downstairs and found the drawing-room. There were the remains of a fire just faintly red in the grate; he knelt on the hearth-rug and fanned the embers till they glowed into flame. Then he placed the envelope on the top and watched it burn with all its contents. He waited till the last inch was turned to ashes and he could break and scatter them with the poker. Then he went back to his room and to bed.

But he did not sleep too well. If one problem had been settled, another remained; if he had not traced her in order to tell her who she was, why had he traced her at all? What need was there to stay at Roone’s any longer? And so, bewitching and insidious, came again the memory of the past; she was a shadow, an echo, reminding him that he was still young, and that the Harley Street man might have made a mistake. And the idea came to him that he might tell her some day, not about her own identity, which did not matter, but about himself and Daly.

The next morning began a chaotic interlude of travel; he wired to his London lawyer and the two arranged a half-way meeting at the railway hotel at Fishguard. The dignified elderly solicitor, obviously flustered by such hectic arrangements, scratched away for an hour in a private sitting-room; then Fothergill signed; and two hotel servants acted as witnesses and were suitably rewarded. The lawyer saw his client off on the Rosslare boat and parted from him full of misgivings. “It is not for me to offer criticism, Mr. Fothergill,” he said, accepting a drink in the saloon before the gangways were lowered, “but I do hope you have given all this your most careful consideration.” Fothergill assured him that he had, and added: “Anyhow, I hope I’m not going to die just yet—it’s only a precaution.” To which the lawyer replied: “I must say I think you’re looking very much better than when I saw you in London,” and Fothergill answered: “My dear chap, I really don’t think I ever felt better in my life. It’s the Irish climate—it seems to suit me.”

He was at Roone’s again by the afternoon of the next day, with Mrs. Consett immensely curious about his lightning dash to England. “Business,” he told her, and she was satisfactorily impressed; her idea of the successful business man was perfectly in accord with such fantastic journeys on mysterious errands.

Back at Roone’s he yielded again to the spell of magic possibility. Could he tell her about their earlier meeting when she was but a child; could he thus make fast to his own life this new and charming fragrance that might otherwise fade away?

So he perplexed himself, but that Saturday night as he saw her talking to a young naval sub-lieutenant he came to sudden decision. He saw her smiling at the pink-checked and handsome boy; he heard their laughter together; then they danced, and all at once, as he watched them, he felt old again and knew that he was old; and when Mrs. Consett began her usual chatter, he felt: We are a couple of old folks, watching the youngsters amuse themselves…

But half an hour later she came up to him, having left her partner, and said: “Don’t you want to dance tonight, Mr. Fothergill? I suppose you’re tired after the journey?” And he was up in a moment, ready to whirl through the world with her, old or young.

She said, as they danced: “That was a nice boy, if he wasn’t so silly.”

“I thought he looked a very attractive young fellow.”

“Yes—but silly. I suppose most girls like it and I’m the exception. I never could get on very well with boys of that age.”

“That age, indeed? I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s half a dozen years older than you.”

“Yes, I know—it’s strange, isn’t it? Perhaps the silliness is in me, after all.”

“In you?”

“Why not? Probably I’m old for my years. I’ve a sort of theory that I aged a good deal before I was six and that now I’m anything between thirty and forty.”

“That would put you nearer me.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it?”

Her calm, friendly eyes were looking up at him, and he had to exert every atom of will-power to prevent himself from yielding to the call of so rich a memory. His brain reeled and eddied; he began to speak, but found his voice so grotesque and uncertain that he broke off and tried to fix himself into some kind of temporary coherence; he heard her saying: “I don’t think you’re dancing very well to-night—you look as if your mind’s on something else all the time.”

“As a matter of fact, it just is.”

“Shall we stop, then? I don’t mind. Perhaps you feel tired?”

“I never felt less tired in my life. What I’d just like now is to go out and climb the Baragh.”

“Really? Do you mean it—really?”

He hadn’t at first, but he did then, suddenly. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, we could, couldn’t we? It’s bright moonlight and we know the way. It’s quite early—we should be back before the others begin clearing off to bed. I love doing odd things that most people would think quite mad.”

They slipped out through the verandah and began, hatless and coatless, the steep scramble through the woods, drenched with dew, and then up the rough, boulder-strewn borcen to the summit. They climbed too swiftly and breathlessly for speech, and all the way he was dizzily making up his mind for all the things he would say when they reached the topmost ridge. He imagined himself telling her: “Dear child, you are all that means anything in my life, and I want to tell you how and why—I want you to know how I missed my way in life, over and over again, yet found in the end something that was worth it all. You see, I want us always to be friends—great friends—you and I, not just as if we were chance travellers and had taken to each other. Much more than that. And it’s all so strange that I want you to try to understand.” And other confessions equally wild and enchanting. But when lie stood finally on that moonlit peak, with the sky a blue-black sea all around him, he could not think of anything to say at all. She stood so still and close to him, thrilling with rapture at the view, pointing down excitedly to the tiny winking lights of the cruiser, and then swinging round to peer into the silver dimness of the valley on the other side. “I shall never, never forget this as long as I live,” she whispered. “It’s far more wonderful than in the day-time when we climbed before.”

Then suddenly he realised why, or perhaps one reason why, he was not speaking. He was in pain. He felt as if a bar of white-hot steel were bending round his body and being tightened. Yet he hardly felt the pain, even though he knew it was there; it was as if the moonlight and the thoughts that swam in his mind were anaesthetising him. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but could only hear himself gasping; and lie felt, beyond the knowledge of pain, an impotent fury with his body for spoiling such a moment. He smiled a twisted smile; he had been too venturesome, too defiant; he had climbed too fast. And all at once, just then, the thought came to him: Supposing I were to drop dead, up here—poor child, what a shock it would be for her, and what a lot of damned unpleasant fuss for her afterward…

“You are tired,” she said, staring at him intently. “Shall we go down?”

He nodded slowly and hoped she did not see the tears that were filling his eyes.

They began the descent, and after a few yards she took his arm and helped him over the rough places. Half-way down he felt better; the pain was beginning to leave him. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry? For what? I enjoyed it ever so much, but it tired you, I could see—we mustn’t do such mad things again.”

“Except that I like mace things just as much as you do.”

She smiled, and he smiled back, and with her arm still linked in his he felt a marvellous happiness enveloping him, especially now that the pain was subsiding with every second.

“I’m not so bad for my age,” he added. “I suppose I oughtn’t to expect to be able to skip up and down mountains like an eighteen-year-old.”

“Your age?” she said quietly. “I never think of it, or of mine either. What does it matter?”

He laughed, then; he was so happy; and now that the pain had all gone he could believe it had been no more than a fit of breathlessness after the climb—a warning, no doubt, that he must avoid such strenuous risks in future. His only big regret was that he had missed the chance of telling her what had been in his mind, but it was too late now—the lights of the hotel were already glimmering through the trees. As they entered along the verandah he said: “I really am sorry for being such an old crock—sorry on my own account, anyway, because I’d rather wanted to have a particular talk with you about something.”

“Had you? And you’d stage-managed it for the top of a mountain in moonlight—how thrilling! But it will do somewhere else, surely?”

He laughed. “Of course. The question is when rather than where.”

“Why not to-morrow morning? We could go out on the harbour in the motor-boat—mother wouldn’t come with us—she hates sailing.”

“Good idea. That’ll do fine.”

“Directly after Mass, then. I think they’ll be having it in the hotel to-morrow—I heard Roone saying something about it. That’ll save the walk down to the village and we can have a longer time on the water.”

“Splendid.”

“And I’m so thrilled to wonder what you have to tell me.”

“Are you?” He looked at her with piercing eagerness; yet he could not, could not read what was in her mind.

But later, after she had said good-night and gone to bed, his mood of perplexity changed. Beyond a certain natural fatigue he felt himself no worse for the mountain adventure, but to brace himself after the strain he did what he had not often done at Roone’s—he went into the bar for a night-cap. The Roones were there with a few naval men and a fishing youth in plus-fours; they tried to get him into conversation, but he said little and stayed only for a few minutes. The fact was, he could not even think of anything but the talk he would have on the morrow.

Then he took his candle (Roone’s was old-fashioned enough for that) and went to his room on the first floor. He would get up early, he decided, and go to Mass—his first for so long—too long. He saw the moon and the clear sky through the window, promising another fine day. He saw the cruiser’s masthead light shimmering softly over the harbour. He undressed and got into bed and closed his eyes—the whisky had made him drowsy—and suddenly, falling asleep, he felt most magnificently and boyishly certain of everything, and especially that he had loved, in all the possible ways of love.

THE END