Put Out More Flags

Evelyn Waugh

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS

First published in 1942

Dedicatory Letter to

MAJOR RANDOLPH CHURCHILL,

4th Hussars, Member of Parliament

Dear Randolph, I am afraid that these pages may not be altogether acceptable to your ardent and sanguine nature. They deal, mostly, with a race of ghosts, the survivors of the world we both knew ten years ago, which you have outflown in the empyrean of strenuous politics, but where my imagination still fondly lingers. I find more food for thought in the follies of Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk than in the sagacity of the Higher Command These characters are no longer contemporary in sympathy; they were forgotten even before the war; but they lived on delightfully in holes and corners and, like everyone else, they have been disturbed in their habits by the rough intrusion of current history. Here they are in that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time “the Great Bore War.”

So please accept them with the sincere regards of

Your affectionate friend,

THE AUTHOR

“A man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical tone, in order to strengthen his spirit…and a drunk military man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendour.

CHINESE SAGE, quoted and

translated by Lin Yutang in

THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.

“A little injustice in the heart can be drowned by wine; but a great injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword.”

EPIGRAMS OF CHANG CH’AO; quoted

and translated by Lin Yutang in

THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.

The military operation described in Chapter III is wholly imaginary.

No existing unit of His Majesty’s Forces is represented there, or anywhere, directly or indirectly. No character is derived from any living man or woman.

chapter 1 AUTUMN

In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War — days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of “peace” — and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal. They were his sister, his mother and his mistress.

Barbara Sothill was at Malfrey; in recent years she had thought of her brother as seldom as circumstances allowed her, but on that historic September morning, as she walked to the village, he predominated over a multitude of worries.

She and Freddy had just heard the Prime Minister’s speech, broadcast by wireless. “It is an evil thing we are fighting,” he had said and as Barbara turned her back on the house where, for the most part, the eight years of her marriage had been spent, she felt personally challenged and threatened, as though, already, the mild, autumnal sky were dark with circling enemies and their shadows were trespassing on the sunlit lawns.

There was something female and voluptuous in the beauty of Malfrey; other lovely houses maintained a virginal modesty or a manly defiance, but Malfrey had no secret from the heavens; it had been built more than two hundred years ago in days of victory and ostentation and lay, spread out, sumptuously at ease, splendid, defenceless and provocative — a Cleopatra among houses; across the sea, Barbara felt, a small and envious mind, a meanly ascetic mind, a creature of the conifers, was plotting the destruction of her home. It was for Malfrey that she loved her prosaic and slightly absurd husband; for Malfrey, too, that she had abandoned Basil and with him the part of herself which, in the atrophy endemic to all fruitful marriages, she had let waste and die.

It was half a mile to the village down the lime avenue. Barbara walked because, just as she was getting into the car, Freddy had stopped her saying, “No petrol now for gadding about.”

Freddy was in uniform, acutely uncomfortable in ten-year-old trousers. He had been to report at the yeomanry headquarters the day before, and was home for two nights collecting his kit, which, in the two years since he was last at camp, had been misused in charades and picnics and dispersed about the house in a dozen improbable places. His pistol, in particular, had been a trouble. He had had the whole household hunting it, saying fretfully, “It’s all very well but I can get court-martialled for this,” until, at length, the nursery-maid found it at the back of the toy cupboard. Barbara was now on her way to look for his binoculars which she remembered vaguely having lent to the scoutmaster.

The road under the limes led straight to the village; the park gates of elaborately wrought iron swung on rusticated stone piers, and the two lodges, formed one side of the village green; opposite them stood the church; on the other sides, two inns, the vicarage, the shop and a row of grey cottages; three massive chestnuts grew from the roughly rectangular grass plot in the centre. It was a “beauty spot,” justly but reluctantly famous, too much frequented of late by walkers but still, through Freddy’s local influence, free of charabancs; a bus stopped three times a day on weekdays, four times on Tuesdays when the market was held in the neighbouring town, and to accommodate passengers Freddy had that year placed an oak seat under the chestnuts.

It was here that Barbara’s thoughts were brought up sharply by an unfamiliar spectacle: six dejected women sat in a row staring fixedly at the closed doors of the Sothill Arms. For a moment Barbara was puzzled; then she remembered. These were Birmingham women. Fifty families had arrived at Malfrey late on Friday evening, thirsty, hot, bewildered and resentful after a day in train and bus. Barbara had chosen the five saddest families for herself and dispersed the rest in the village and farms.

Punctually next day the head housemaid, a veteran of old Mrs. Sothill’s regime, had given notice of leaving. “I don’t know how we shall do without you,” said Barbara.

“It’s my legs, madam. I’m not strong enough for the work. I could just manage as things were, but now with children all over the place…”

“You know we can’t expect things to be easy in wartime. We must expect to make sacrifices. This is our war work.”

But the woman was obdurate. “There’s my married sister at Bristol,” she said. “Her husband was on the Reserve. I ought to go and help her now he’s called up.”

An hour later the remaining three housemaids had appeared with prim expressions of face.

“Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes. They say they are taking on girls at Brakemore’s.”

“You’ll find it terribly hard work, you know.”

“Oh, it’s not the work, madam. It’s the Birmingham women. The way they leave their rooms.”

“It’s all very strange for them at first. We must do all we can to help. As soon as they settle down and get used to our ways…” But she saw it was hopeless while she spoke.

“They say they want girls at Brakemore’s,” said the maids.

In the kitchen Mrs. Elphinstone was loyal. “But I can’t answer for the girls,” she said. “They seem to think war is an excuse for a lark.”

It was the kitchen-maids, anyway, and not Mrs. Elphinstone, thought Barbara, who had to cope with the extra meals…

Benson was sound. The Birmingham women caused him no trouble. But James would be leaving for the Army within a few weeks. It’s going to be a difficult winter, thought Barbara.

These women, huddled on the green, were not Barbara’s guests, but she saw on their faces the same look of frustration and defiance. Dutifully, rather than prudently, she approached the group and asked if they were comfortable. She spoke to them in general and each felt shy of answering; they looked away from her sullenly towards a locked inn. Oh dear, thought Barbara, I suppose they wonder what business it is of mine.

“I live up there,” she said, indicating the gates. “I’ve been arranging your billets.”

“Oh have you?” said one of the mothers. “Then perhaps you can tell us how long we’ve got to stop.”

“That’s right,” said another.

“D’you know,” said Barbara, “I don’t believe anyone has troubled to think about that. They’ve all been too busy getting you away.”

“They got no right to do it,” said the first mother. “You can’t keep us here compulsory.”

“But surely you don’t want to have your children bombed, do you?”

“We won’t stay where we’re not wanted.”

“That’s right,” said the yes-woman.

“But of course you’re wanted.”

“Yes, like the stomach-ache.”

“That’s right.”

For some minutes Barbara reasoned with the fugitives until she felt that her only achievement had been to transfer to herself all the odium which more properly belonged to Hitler. Then she went on her way to the scoutmaster’s, where, before she could retrieve the binoculars, she had to listen to the story of the Birmingham schoolmistress, billeted on him, who refused to help wash up.

As she crossed the green on her homeward journey, the mothers looked away from her.

“I hope the children are enjoying themselves a little,” she said, determined not to be cut in her own village.

“They’re down at the school. Teacher’s making them play games.”

“The park’s always open you know, if any of you care to go inside.”

“We had a park where we came from. With a band Sundays.”

“Well I’m afraid I can’t offer a band. But it’s thought rather pretty, particularly down by the lake. Do take the children in if you feel like it.”

When she had left the chief mother said: “What’s she? Some kind of inspector, I suppose, with her airs and graces. The idea of inviting us into the park. You’d think the place belonged to her the way she goes on.”

Presently the two inns opened their doors and the scandalized village watched a procession of mothers assemble from cottage, farm and mansion and make for the bar parlours.

Luncheon decided him; Freddy went upstairs immediately he left the dining-room and changed into civilian clothes. “Think I’ll get my maid to put me into something loose,” he had said in the voice he used for making jokes. It was this kind of joke Barbara had learned to recognize during her happy eight years in his company.

Freddy was large, masculine, prematurely bald and superficially cheerful; at heart he was misanthropic and gifted with that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich; his indolence was qualified with enough basic bad temper to ensure the respect of those about him. He took in most people, but not his wife or his wife’s family.

Not only did he have a special expression of face for making jokes; he had one for use when discussing his brother-in-law Basil. It should have conveyed lofty disapproval tempered by respect for Barbara’s loyalty; in fact it suggested sulkiness and guilt.

The Seal children, for no reason that was apparent to the rest of the world, had always held the rest of the world in scorn. Freddy did not like Tony; he found him supercilious and effeminate, but he was prepared to concede to him certain superiorities; no one doubted that there was a brilliant career ahead of him in diplomacy. The time would come when they would all be very proud of Tony. But Basil from his earliest days had been a source of embarrassment and reproach. On his own terms Freddy might have been willing to welcome a black sheep in the Seal family, someone who was “never mentioned,” to whom he might, every now and then, magnanimously unknown to anyone except Barbara, extend a helping hand; someone, even, in whom he might profess to see more good than the rest of the world. Such a kinsman might very considerably have redressed the balance of Freddy’s self-esteem. But, as Freddy found as soon as he came to know the Seals intimately, Basil, so far from being never mentioned, formed the subject of nearly half their conversation. At that time they were ever ready to discuss with relish his latest outrage, ever hopeful of some splendid success for him in the immediate future, ever contemptuous of the disapproval of the rest of the world. And Basil himself regarded Freddy pitilessly, with eyes which, during his courtship and the first years of marriage, he had recognized in Barbara herself.

For there was a disconcerting resemblance between Basil and Barbara; she, too, was farouche in a softer and deadlier manner, and the charm which held him breathless flashed in gross and acquisitive shape in Basil. Maternity and the tranquil splendour of Malfrey had wrought changes in her; it was very rarely, now, that the wild little animal in her came above ground; but it was there, in its earth, and from time to time he was aware of it, peeping out, after long absences; a pair of glowing eyes at the twist in the tunnel watching him as an enemy.

Barbara herself pretended to no illusions about Basil. Years of disappointment and betrayal had convinced her, in the reasoning part of her, that he was no good. They had played pirates together in the nursery and the game was over. Basil played pirates alone. She apostatized from her faith in him almost with formality, and yet, as a cult will survive centuries after its myths have been exposed and its sources of faith tainted, there was still deep in her that early piety, scarcely discernible now in a little residue of superstition, so that this morning when her world seemed rocking about her, she turned back to Basil. Thus, when earthquake strikes a modern city and the pavements gape, the sewers buckle up and the great buildings tremble and topple, men in bowler hats and natty, ready-made suitings, born of generations of literates and rationalists, will suddenly revert to the magic of the forest and cross their fingers to avert the avalanche of concrete.

Three times during luncheon Barbara had spoken of Basil and now, as she and Freddy walked arm-in-arm on the terrace, she said: “I believe it’s what he’s been waiting for all these years.”

“Who, waiting for what?”

“Basil, for the war.”

“Oh…Well, I suppose in a way we all have really…the gardens are going to be a problem. I suppose we could get some of the men exemption on the grounds that they’re engaged in agriculture, but it hardly seems playing the game.”

It was Freddy’s last day at Malfrey and he did not want to spoil it by talking of Basil. It was true that the yeomanry were not ten miles away; it was true, also, that they were unlikely to move for a very long time; they had recently been mechanized, in the sense that they had had their horses removed; few of them had ever seen a tank; he would be back and forwards continually during the coming months; he meant to shoot the pheasants; but although this was no final leave-taking he felt entitled to more sentiment than Barbara was showing.

“Freddy, don’t be bloody.” She kicked him sharply on the ankle for she had found, early in married life, that Freddy liked her to swear and kick in private. “You know exactly what I mean. Basil’s needed a war. He’s not meant for peace.”

“That’s true enough. The wonder is he’s kept out of prison. If he’d been born in a different class he wouldn’t have.”

Barbara suddenly chuckled. “D’you remember how he took Mother’s emeralds, the time he went to Azania? But then you see that would never have happened if there’d been a war of our own for him to go to. He’s always been mixed up in fighting.”

“If you call living in a gin palace in La Paz and seeing generals shoot one another…”

“And Spain.”

“Journalist and gun runner.”

“He’s always been a soldier manqué.”

“Well, he hasn’t done much about it. While he’s been gadding about the rest of us have been training as territorials and yeomanry.”

“Darling, a fat lot of training you’ve done.”

“If there’d been more like us and fewer like Basil there’d never have been a war. You can’t blame Ribbentrop for thinking us decadent when he saw people like Basil about. I don’t suppose they’ll have much use for him in the Army. He’s thirty-six. He might get some sort of job connected with censorship. He seems to know a lot of languages.”

“You’ll see,” said Barbara. “Basil will be covered with medals while your silly old yeomanry are still messing in a Trust House and waiting for your tanks.”

There were duck on the lake and she let Freddy talk about them. She led him down his favourite paths. There was a Gothic pavilion where by long habit Freddy often became amorous; he did become amorous. And all the time she thought of Basil. She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern in a mud-bogged trench, standing-to at dawn, his eyes on his wrist watch, waiting for zero hour; she saw him as Compton Mackenzie, spider in a web of Balkan intrigue, undermining a monarchy among olive trees and sculptured marble; she saw him as T. E. Lawrence and Rupert Brooke.

Freddy, assuaged, reverted to sport. “I won’t ask any of the regiment over for the early shoots,” he said. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t let some of them have a bang at the cocks round about Christmas.”

Lady Seal was at her home in London. She had taken fewer precautions against air raids than most of her friends. Her most valuable possession, her small Carpaccio, had been sent to safe-keeping at Malfrey; the miniatures and Limoges enamels were at the bank; the Sevres was packed in crates and put below-stairs. Otherwise there was no change in her drawing-room. The ponderous old curtains needed no unsightly strips of black paper to help them keep in the light

The windows were open now on the balcony. Lady Seal sat in an elegant rosewood chair gazing out across the square. She had just heard the Prime Minister’s speech. Her butler approached from the end of the room.

“Shall I remove the radio, my lady?”

“Yes, by all means. He spoke very well, very well indeed.”

“It’s all very sad, my lady.”

“Very sad for the Germans, Anderson.”

It was quite true, thought Lady Seal; Neville Chamberlain had spoken surprisingly well. She had never liked him very much, neither him nor his brother — if anything she had preferred the brother — but they were uncomfortable, drab fellows both of them. However, he had spoken very creditably that morning, as though at last he were fully alive to his responsibilities. She would ask him to luncheon. But perhaps he would be busy; the most improbable people were busy in wartime, she remembered.

Her mind went back to the other war, which until that morning had been The War. No one very near to her had fought. Christopher had been too old, Tony just too young; her brother Edward had begun by commanding a brigade — they thought the world of him at the Staff College — but, inexplicably, his career had come to very little; he was still brigadier in 1918, at Dar-as-Salaam. But the war had been a sad time; so many friends in mourning and Christopher fretful about the coalition. It had been a bitter thing for them all: accepting Lloyd George; but Christopher had patriotically made the sacrifice with the rest of them; probably only she knew how much he had felt it. The worst time had been after the armistice, when peerages were sold like groceries and the peace terms were bungled. Christopher had always said they would have to pay for it in the long run.

The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air raid sirens sang out over London.

“That was the warning, my lady.”

“Yes, Anderson, I heard it.”

“Will you be coming downstairs?”

“No, not yet at any rate. Get all the servants down and see they are quiet.”

“Will you require your respirator, my lady?”

“I don’t suppose so. From what Sir Joseph tells me the danger of gas is very slight. In any case I daresay this is only a practice. Leave it on the table.”

“Will that be all, my lady?”

“That’s all. See that the maids don’t get nervous.”

Lady Seal stepped onto the balcony and looked up into the clear sky. They’ll get more than they bargain for if they try and attack us, she thought. High time that man was taught a lesson. He’s made nothing but trouble for years. She returned to her chair thinking, Anyway I never made a fuss of that vulgar man von Ribbentrop. I wouldn’t have him inside the house, even when that goose Emma Granchester was plaguing us all to be friendly to him. I hope she feels foolish this morning.

Lady Seal waited with composure for the bombardment to begin. She had told Anderson it was probably only a practice. That was what one told servants; otherwise they might panic — not Anderson but the maids. But in her heart Lady Seal was sure that the attack was coming; it would be just like the Germans, always blustering and showing off and pretending to be efficient. The history Lady Seal had learned in the schoolroom had been a simple tale of the maintenance of right against the superior forces of evil, and the battle honours of her country rang musically in her ears — Crecy, Agincourt, Cadiz, Blenheim, Gibraltar, Inkerman, Ypres. England had fought many and various enemies with many and various allies, often on quite recondite pretexts, but always justly, chivalrously, and with ultimate success. Often, in Paris, Lady Seal had been proud that her people had never fallen to the habit of naming streets after their feats of arms; that was suitable enough for the shortlived and purely professional triumphs of the French, but to put those great manifestations of divine rectitude which were the victories of England to the use, for their postal addresses, of milliners and chiropodists, would have been a baseness to which even the radicals had not stooped. The steel engravings of her schoolroom lived before her eyes, like tableaux at a charity fete — Sidney at Zutphen, Wolfe at Quebec, Nelson at Trafalgar (Wellington, only, at Waterloo was excluded from the pageant by reason of the proximity of Blücher, pushing himself forward with typical Prussian effrontery to share the glory which the other had won); and to this tremendous assembly (not unlike, in Lady Seal’s mind, those massed groups of wealth and respectability portrayed on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes and hung with their key plans in lobbies and billiard rooms) was added that morning a single new and rather improbable figure, Basil Seal.

murgatroyd The last war had cost her little; nothing, indeed, except a considerable holding of foreign investments and her brother Edward’s reputation as a strategist. Now she had a son to offer her country. Tony had weak eyes and a career, Freddy was no blood of hers and was not cast in a heroic mould, but Basil — her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years, whose wild oats refused to correspond with those of his Uncle Edward — Basil, who had stolen her emeralds and made Mrs. Lyne distressingly conspicuous —Basil, his peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last was entering on his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a decent regiment.

At last, while she was still musing, the sirens sounded the All Clear.

Sir Joseph Mainwaring was lunching with Lady Seal that day. It was an arrangement made early in the preceding week before either of them knew that the day they were choosing was one which would be marked in the world’s calendars until the end of history. He arrived punctually, as he always did; as he had done, times out of number, in the long years of their friendship.

Sir Joseph was not a church-going man except when he was staying at one of the very rare, very august houses where it was still the practice; on this Sunday morning, however, it would not have been fantastic to describe his spirit as inflamed by something nearly akin to religious awe. It would be fantastic to describe him as purged, and yet there had been something delicately purgative in the experiences of the morning and there was an unfamiliar buoyancy in his bearing as though he had been at somebody’s Eno’s. He felt ten years younger.

Lady Seal devoted to this old booby a deep, personal fondness which was rare among his numerous friends and a reliance which was incomprehensible but quite common.

“There’s only ourselves, Jo,” she said as she greeted him. “The Granchesters were coming but he had to go and see the King.”

“Nothing could be more delightful. Yes, I think we shall all be busy again now. I don’t know exactly what I shall be doing yet. I shall know better after I’ve been to Downing Street tomorrow morning. I imagine it will be some advisory capacity to the War Cabinet. It’s nice to feel in the centre of things again, takes one back ten years. Stirring times, Cynthia, stirring times.”

“It’s one of the things I wanted to see Emma Granchester about. There must be so many committees we ought to start. Last war it was Belgian refugees. I suppose it will be Poles this time. It’s a great pity it isn’t people who talk a language one knows.”

“No; no Belgians this time. It will be a different war in many ways. An economic war of attrition, that is how I see it. Of course we had to have all this A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) and shelters and so on. The radicals were making copy out of it. But I think we can take it there won’t be any air raids, not on London at any rate. Perhaps there may be an attempt on the seaports, but I was having a most interesting talk yesterday to Eddie Beste-Bingham at the Beefsteak; we’ve got a most valuable invention called R.D.F. That’ll keep ‘em off.”

“Dear Jo, you always know the most encouraging things. What is R.D.F.?”

“I’m not absolutely clear about that. It’s very secret.”

“Poor Barbara has evacuees at Malfrey.”

“What a shocking business! Dear, dreaming Malfrey. Think of a Birmingham board school in that exquisite Grinling Gibbons salon! It’s all a lot of nonsense, Cynthia. You know I’m the last man to prophesy rashly, but I think we can take one thing as axiomatic. There will be no air attack on London. The Germans will never attempt the Maginot Line. The French will hold on for ever, if needs be, and the German air bases are too far away for them to be able to attack us. If they do, we’ll R.D.F. them out of the skies.”

“Jo,” said Lady Seal, when they were alone with the coffee. “I want to talk to you about Basil.”

How often in the last twenty years had Sir Joseph heard those heavy words, uttered with so many intonations in so wide a variety of moods, but always, without fail, the prelude, not, perhaps, to boredom, but to a lowering of the interest and warmth of their converse! It was only in these material conferences that Cynthia Seal became less than the perfect companion, only then that, instead of giving, she demanded, as it were, a small sumptuary duty upon the riches of her friendship.

Had he been so minded Sir Joseph could have drawn a graph of the frequency and intensity of these discussions. There had been the steady rise from nursery through school to the university, when he had been called on to applaud each new phase of Basil’s precocious development. In those days he had accepted Basil at his face value as an exceptionally brilliant and beautiful youth in danger of being spoiled. Then, towards the end of Basil’s second year at Balliol, had come a series of small seismic disturbances, when Cynthia Seal was alternately mutely puzzled or eloquently distressed; then the first disaster, rapidly followed by Christopher’s death. From then onwards for fifteen years the line had dipped and soared dizzily as Basil’s iniquities rose on the crest or fell into the trough of notoriety, but with the passing years there had been a welcome decline in the mean level; it was at least six months since he had heard the boy’s name.

“Ah,” he said, “Basil, eh?” trying to divine from his hostess’s manner whether he was required to be judicial, compassionate or congratulatory.

“You’ve so often been helpful in the past.”

“I’ve tried,” said Sir Joseph, recalling momentarily his long record of failures on Basil’s behalf. “Plenty of good in the boy.”

“I feel so much happier about him since this morning, Jo. Sometimes, lately, I’ve begun to doubt whether we shall ever find the proper place for Basil. He’s been a square peg in so many round holes. But this war seems to take the responsibility off our hands. There’s room for everyone in wartime, every man. It’s always been Basil’s individuality that’s been wrong. You’ve said that often, Jo. In wartime individuality doesn’t matter any more. There are just men, aren’t there?”

“Yes,” said Sir Joseph doubtfully. “Yes, Basil’s individuality has always been rather strong, you know. He must be thirty-five or thirty-six now. That’s rather old for starting as a soldier.”

“Nonsense, Jo. Men of forty-five and fifty enlisted in the ranks in the last war and died as gallantly as anyone else. Now I want you to see the Lieutenant-Colonels of the foot guard regiments and see where he will fit in best…”

In her time Cynthia Seal had made many formidable demands on Basil’s behalf. This, which she was now asking with such an assumption of ease, seemed to Sir Joseph one of the most vexatious. But he was an old and loyal friend and a man of affairs, moreover, well-practised, by a lifetime of public service, in the evasion of duty. “Of course, my dear Cynthia, I can’t promise any results…”

Angela Lyne was returning by train from the South of France. It was the time when, normally, she went to Venice, but this year, with international politics tediously on every tongue, she had lingered at Cannes until and beyond the last moment. The French and Italians whom she met had said war was impossible; they said it with assurance before the Russian pact, with double assurance after it. The English said there would be war, but not immediately. Only the Americans knew what was coming, and exactly when. Now she was travelling in unwonted discomfort through a nation moving to action under the dour precepts “Il faut en finir” and “Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts.”

It was a weary journey; the train was already eight hours late; the restaurant car had disappeared during the night at Avignon. Angela was obliged to share a two-berth sleeper with her maid and counted herself lucky to have got one at all; several of her acquaintances had stayed behind, waiting for things to get better; at the moment no reservations were guaranteed and the French seemed to have put off their politeness and packed it in moth-balls for the duration of hostilities.

Angela had a glass of Vichy water on the table before her. She sipped, gazing out at the passing landscape, every mile of which gave some evidence of the changing life of the country; hunger and the bad night she had spent raised her a hair’s breadth above reality, and her mind, usually so swift and orderly, fell into pace with the train — now rocking in haste, now, barely moving, seeming to grope its way from point to point.

A stranger passing the open door of her compartment might well have speculated on her nationality and place in the world and supposed her to be American, the buyer perhaps for some important New York dress shop — whose present abstraction was due to the worries of wartime transport for her “collection.” She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract; nothing which she wore, nothing it might be supposed in the pigskin jewel-case above her head, had been chosen by or for a man. Her smartness was individual; she was plainly not one of those who scrambled to buy the latest gadget in the few breathless weeks between its first appearance and the inundation of the cheap markets of the world with its imitations; her person was a record and criticism of succeeding fashions, written, as it were, year after year, in one clear and characteristic fist. Had the curious fellow passenger stared longer — as he was free to do without offence, so absorbed was Angela in her own thoughts — he would have checked in his hunt when he came to study his subject’s face. All her properties — the luggage heaped above and around her, the set of her hair, her shoes, her finger-nails, the barely perceptible aura of scent that surrounded her, the Vichy water and the paper-bound volume of Balzac on the table before her — all these things spoke of what (had she been, as she seemed, American) she would have called her “personality.” But the face was mute. It might have been carved in jade, it was so smooth and cool and conventionally removed from the human. A stranger might have watched her for mile after mile, as a spy or a lover or a newspaper reporter will loiter in the street before a closed house, and see no chink of light, hear no whisper of movement behind the shuttered facade, and in direct proportion to his discernment, he would have gone on his way down the corridor baffled and disturbed. Had he been told the bare facts about this seemingly cosmopolitan, passionless, barren, civilized woman, he might have despaired of ever again forming his judgment of a fellow being; for Angela Lyne was Scottish, the only child of a Glasgow millionaire — a jovial, rascally millionaire who had started life in a street gang — she was the wife of a dilettante architect, the mother of a single robust and unattractive son (the dead spit, it was said, of his grandfather), and her life had so foundered on passion that this golden daughter of fortune was rarely spoken of by her friends without the qualifying epithet of “poor” Angela Lyne.

Only in one respect would the casual observer have hit upon the truth. Angela’s appearance was not designed for man. It is sometimes disputed — and opinions canvassed in popular papers to decide the question — whether woman, alone on a desert island, would concern herself with clothes; Angela, as far as she herself was concerned, disposed of the question finally. For seven years she had been on a desert island; her appearance had become a hobby and distraction, a pursuit entirely self-regarding and self-rewarding; she watched herself moving in the mirrors of the civilized world as a prisoner will watch the antics of a rat which he has domesticated to the dungeon. (In the case of her husband grottoes took the place of fashion. He had six of them now, bought in various parts of Europe — some from Naples, some from Southern Germany — and painfully transported, stone by stone, to Hampshire.)

For seven years, ever since she was twenty-five and two years married to her dandy-aesthete, “poor” Angela Lyne had been in love with Basil Seal. It was one of those affairs which, beginning light-heartedly as an adventure and accepted light-heartedly by their friends as an amusing scandal, seemed somehow petrified by a Gorgon glance and endowed with an intolerable permanence; as though in a world of capricious and fleeting alliances, the ironic Fates had decided to set up a standing, frightful example of the natural qualities of man and woman, of their basic aptitude to fuse together; a label on the packing case “These chemicals are dangerous” — an admonitory notice, like the shattered motorcars erected sometimes at dangerous turns in the road; so that the least censorious were chilled by the spectacle and recoiled saying, “Really, you know, there’s something rather squalid about those two.”

It was a relationship which their friends usually described as “morbid,” by which they meant that sensuality played a small part in it, for Basil was only attracted to very silly girls and it was by quite other bonds that he and Angela were fettered together.

Cedric Lyne, pottering disconsolately in his baroque solitudes and watching with dismay the progress of his blustering son, used to tell himself, with the minimum of discernment, that a béguin like that could not possibly last. For Angela there seemed no hope of release. Nothing, she felt in despair, would ever part them but death. Even the flavour of the Vichy water brought thoughts of Basil as she remembered the countless nights in the last seven years when she had sat late with him, while he got drunk and talked more and more wildly, and she sipping her water waited her turn to strike, hard and fierce, at his conceit, until as he got more drunk he became superior to her attacks and talked her down and eventually came stupidly away.

She turned to the window as the train slackened to walking pace, passing truck after truck of soldiers. Il faut en finir, Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts. A hard-boiled people, the French. Two nights ago at Cannes, an American had been talking about the mutinous regiments decimated in the last war. “It’s a pity they haven’t got anyone like old Petain to command them this time,” he had said.

The villa at Cannes was shut now and the key was with the gardener. Perhaps she would never go back. This year she remembered it only as the place where she had waited in vain for Basil. He had telegraphed “International situation forbids joy-riding.” She had sent him the money for his journey but there had been no answer. The gardener would make a good thing out of the vegetables. A hard-boiled people, the French; Angela wondered why that was thought to be a good thing; she had always had a revulsion from hard-boiled eggs, even at picnics in the nursery — hard-boiled; overcooked; over-praised for their cooking. When people professed a love of France, they meant a love of eating; the ancients located the deeper emotions in the bowels. She had heard a commercial traveller in the Channel packet welcome Dover and English food: “I can’t stomach that French messed-up stuff.” A commonplace criticism, thought Angela, that applied to French culture for the last two generations — “messed-up stuff,” stale ingredients from Spain and America and Russia and Germany, disguised in a sauce of white wine from Algeria. France died with her monarchy. You could not even eat well, now, except in the provinces. It all came back to eating. “What’s eating you?”…Basil claimed to have eaten a girl once in Africa; he had been eating Angela now for seven years. Like the Spartan boy and the fox … Spartans at Thermopylae, combing their hair before the battle; Angela had never understood that, because Alcibiades had cut off his hair in order to make himself acceptable. What did the Spartans think about hair really? Basil would have to cut his hair when he went into the Army. Basil the Athenian would have to sit at the public tables of Sparta, clipped blue at the neck where before his dark hair had hung untidily to his collar. Basil in the pass at Thermopylae…

Angela’s maid returned from gossiping with the conductor. “He says he doesn’t think the sleeping cars will go any further than Dijon. We shall have to change into day coaches. Isn’t it wicked, madam, when we’ve paid?”

“Well, we’re at war now. I expect there’ll be a lot to put up with.”

“Will Mr. Seal be in the Army?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“He will look different, won’t he, madam?”

“Very different.”

They were both silent, and in the silence Angela knew, by an intuition which defied any possible doubt, exactly what her maid was thinking. She was thinking, “Supposing Mr. Seal gets himself killed. Best thing really for all concerned.”

…Flaxman Greeks reclining in death among the rocks of Thermopylae; riddled scarecrows sprawling across the wire of no man’s land…Till death us do part…Through the haphazard trail of phrase and association, a single, unifying thought recurred, like the sentry posts at the side of the line, monotonously in Angela’s mind. Death. “Death the Friend” of the sixteenth-century woodcuts, who released the captive and bathed the wounds of the fallen; Death in frock coat and whiskers, the discreet undertaker, spreading his sable pall over all that was rotten and unsightly; Death the macabre paramour in whose embrace all earthly loves were forgotten; Death for Basil, that Angela might live again…that was what she was thinking as she sipped her Vichy water, but no one, seeing the calm and pensive mask of her face, could ever possibly have guessed.

Rupert Brooke, Old Bill, the Unknown Soldier — thus three fond women saw him, but Basil breakfasting late in Poppet Green’s studio fell short and wide of all these ideals. He was not at his best that morning, both by reason of his heavy drinking with Poppet’s friends the night before and the loss of face he was now suffering with Poppet in his attempts to explain his assertion that there would be no war. He had told them this the night before, not as a speculation, but as a fact known only to himself and a half a dozen leading Germans; the Prussian military clique, he had told them, were allowing the Nazis to gamble just as long as their bluff was not called; he had had this, he said, direct from von Fritsch. The Army had broken the Nazi Party in the July purge of 1936; they had let Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Ribbentrop remain as puppets just as long as they proved valuable. The Army, like all Armies, was intensely pacifist; as soon as it became clear that Hitler was heading for war, he would be shot. Basil had expounded this theme not once but many times, over the table of the Charlotte Street restaurant, and because Poppet’s friends did not know Basil, and were unused to people who claimed acquaintance with the great, Poppet had basked in vicarious esteem. Basil was little used to being heard with respect and was correspondingly resentful at being reproached with his own words.

“Well,” Poppet was saying crossly, from the gas stove. “When does the Army step in and shoot Hitler?”

She was a remarkably silly girl, and, as such, had commanded Basil’s immediate attention when they met, three weeks earlier, with Ambrose Silk. With her Basil had spent the time he had promised to Angela at Cannes; on her he had spent the twenty pounds Angela had sent him for the journey. Even now, when her fatuous face pouted in derision, she found a soft place in Basil’s heart.

Evidence of her silliness abounded in the canvases, finished and unfinished, which crowded the studio. Eighty years ago her subjects would have been knights in armour, ladies in wimples and distress; fifty years ago “nocturnes”; twenty years ago Pierrots and willow trees; now, in 1939, they were bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass, seaweed, shells and funguses, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley-sugar.

“My dear,” Ambrose had said, “you can positively hear her imagination creaking as she does them, like a pair of old, old corsets, my dear, on a harridan.”

“They’ll destroy London. What shall I do?” asked Poppet plaintively. “Where can I go? It’s the end of my painting. I’ve a good mind to follow Parsnip and Pimpernell” (two great poets of her acquaintance who had recently gone to New York).

“You’ll be in more danger crossing the Atlantic than staying in London,” said Basil. “There won’t be any air raids on London.”

“For God’s sake don’t say that.” Even as she spoke the sirens wailed. Poppet stood paralyzed with horror. “Oh God,” she said. “You’ve done it. They’ve come.”

“Faultless timing,” said Basil cheerfully. ‘That’s always been Hitler’s strong point.”

Poppet began to dress in an ineffectual fever of reproach. “You said there wouldn’t be a war. You said the bombers would never come. Now we shall all be killed and you just sit there talking and talking.”

“You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surréaliste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions — limbs and things lying about in odd places you know.”

“I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d been to church. I was brought up in a convent. I wanted to be a nun once. I wish I was a nun. I’m going to be killed. Oh, I wish I was a nun. Where’s my gas-mask? I shall go mad if I don’t find my gas-mask.”

Basil lay back on the divan and watched her with fascination. This is how he liked to see women behave in moments of alarm. He rejoiced, always, in the spectacle of women at a disadvantage: thus he would watch, in the asparagus season, a dribble of melted butter on a woman’s chin, marring her beauty and making her ridiculous, while she would still talk and smile and turn her head, not knowing how she appeared to him.

“Now do make up your mind what you’re frightened of,” he urged. “If you’re going to be bombed with high explosive run down to the shelter; if you’re going to be gassed, shut the skylight and stay up here. In any case I shouldn’t bother about that respirator. If they use anything it’ll be arsenical smoke and it’s no use against that. You’ll find arsenical smoke quite painless at first. You won’t know you’ve been gassed for a couple of days; then it’ll be too late. In fact for all we know we’re being gassed at this moment. If they fly high enough and let the wind carry the stuff they may be twenty miles away. The symptoms when they do appear are rather revolting…”

But Poppet was gone, helter-skelter, downstairs, making little moaning noises as she went.

Basil dressed and, only pausing to paint in a ginger moustache across Poppet’s head of Aphrodite, strolled out into the streets.

The normal emptiness of Sunday in South Kensington was made complete that morning by the air raid scare. A man in a tin helmet shouted at Basil from the opposite pavement, “Take cover, there. Yes, it’s you I’m talking to.”

Basil crossed over to him and said in a low tone, “M.I.9.”

“Eh?”

“M.I.9.”

“I don’t quite twig.”

“But you ought to twig,” said Basil severely. “Surely you realize that members of M.I.9 are free to go everywhere at all times?”

“Sorry, I’m sure,” said the warden. “I was only took on yesterday. What a lark getting a raid second time on!” As he spoke the sirens sounded the All Clear. “What a sell!” said the warden.

It seemed to Basil that this fellow was altogether too cheerful for a public servant in the first hours of war; the gas scare had been wasted on Poppet; in her panic she had barely listened; it was worthy of a more receptive audience. “Cheer up,” he said. “You may be breathing arsenical smoke at this moment. Watch your urine in a couple of days’ time.”

“Coo. I say, what did you say you was?”

“M.I.9.”

“Is that to do with gas?”

“It’s to do with almost everything. Good morning.”

He turned to walk on but the warden followed. “Wouldn’t we smell it or nothing?”

“No.”

“Or cough or anything?”

“No.”

“And you think they’ve dropped it, just in that minute, and gone away leaving us all for dead?”

“My dear fellow, I don’t think so. It’s your job as a warden to find out.”

“Coo.”

That’ll teach him to shout at me in the street, thought Basil.

After the All Clear various friends of Poppet’s came together in her studio.

“I wasn’t the least frightened. I was so surprised at my own courage I felt quite giddy.”

“I wasn’t frightened, I just felt glum.”

“I felt positively glad. After all we’ve all said for years that the present order of things was doomed, haven’t we? I mean it’s always been the choice for us between concentration camp and being blown up, hasn’t it? I just sat thinking how much I preferred being blown up to being beaten with rubber truncheons.”

“I was frightened,” said Poppet.

“Dear Poppet, you always have the healthiest reactions. Erchman really did wonders for you.”

“Well I’m not sure they were so healthy this time. D’you know, I found myself actually praying.”

“I say, did you? That’s bad.”

“Better see Erchman again.”

“Unless he’s in a concentration camp.”

“We shall all be in concentration camps.”

“If anyone so much as mentions concentration camps again,” said Ambrose Silk, “I shall go frankly haywire.” (“He had an unhappy love affair in Munich,” one of Poppet’s friends explained to another, “then they found he was half-Jewish and the Brown Shirt was shut away.”) “Let’s look at Poppet’s pictures and forget the war. Now that,” he said, pausing before the Aphrodite, “that I consider good. I consider it good, Poppet. The moustache…it shows you have crossed one of the artistic rubicons and feel strong enough to be facetious. Like those wonderfully dramatic old chestnuts in Parsnip’s Guernica Revisited. You’re growing up, Poppet, my dear.”

“I wonder if it’s the effect of that old adventurer of hers.”

“Poor Basil, it’s sad enough for him to be an enfant terrible at the age of thirty-six; but to be regarded by the younger generation as a kind of dilapidated Bulldog Drummond…”

Ambrose Silk was older than Poppet and her friends; he was, in fact, a contemporary of Basil’s, with whom he had maintained a shadowy, mutually derisive acquaintance since they were undergraduates. In those days, the mid-twenties at Oxford, when the last of the ex-service men had gone down and the first of the puritanical, politically minded had either not come up or, at any rate, had not made himself noticed, in those days of broad trousers and high-necked jumpers and cars parked nightly outside the Spread Eagle at Thame, there had been few subdivisions; a certain spiritual extravagance in the quest for pleasure had been the sole common bond between friends, who in subsequent years had drifted far apart, beyond hailing distance, on the wider seas. Ambrose, in those days, had ridden ridiculously and ignominiously in the Christ Church Grind, and Peter Pastmaster had gone to a palais de danse in Reading dressed as a woman. Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, absorbed in immature experiments into the question of how far various lewd debutantes would go with him, still had time when tippling his port at Mickleham to hear, without disapproval, Ambrose’s recitals of unrequited love for a rowing blue. Nowadays Ambrose saw few of his old friends except Basil. He fancied that he had been dropped and sometimes in moments of vainglory, to the right audience, represented himself as a martyr to Art; as one who made no concessions to Mammon. “I can’t come all the way with you,” he said once to Parsnip and Pimpernell when they explained that only by becoming proletarian (an expression to which they attached no pedantic suggestion of childbearing; they meant that he should employ himself in some ill-paid, unskilled labour of a mechanical kind) could he hope to be a valuable writer, “I can’t come all the way with you, dear Parsnip and Pimpernell. But at least you know I have never sold myself to the upper class.” In this mood he saw himself as a figure in a dream, walking down an endless fashionable street; every door stood open and the waiting footmen cried, “Come in and join us; flatter our masters and we will feed you,” but Ambrose always marched straight ahead unheeding. “I belong, hopelessly, to the age of the ivory tower,” he said.

It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted. Poppet and her friends looked on him as a survival from the Yellow Book. The more conscientiously he strove to put himself in the movement and to ally himself with the dour young proletarians of the new decade, the more antiquated did he seem to them. His very appearance, with the swagger and flash of the young Disraeli, made him a conspicuous figure among them. Basil with his natural shabbiness was less incongruous.

Ambrose knew this, and repeated the phrase “old adventurer” with relish.

Alastair and Sonia Trumpington changed house, on an average, once a year, ostensibly for motives of economy, and were now in Chester Street. Wherever they went they carried with them their own inalienable, inimitable disorder. Ten years ago, without any effort or desire on their part, merely by pleasing themselves in their own way, they had lived in the full blaze of fashionable notoriety; to-day without regret, without in fact being aware of the change, they formed a forgotten cove, where the wreckage of the “roaring twenties,” long tossed on the high seas, lay beached, dry and battered, barely worth the attention of the most assiduous beachcomber. Sonia would sometimes remark how odd it was that the papers nowadays never seemed to mention anyone one had ever heard of; they had been such a bore once, never leaving one alone.

Basil, when he was in England, was a constant visitor. It was really, Alastair said, in order to keep him from coming to stay that they had to live in such painfully cramped quarters.

Wherever they lived Basil developed a homing instinct towards them; an aptitude which, in their swift moves from house to house, often caused consternation to subsequent tenants, who, before he had had time to form new patterns of behaviour, would quite often wake in the night to hear Basil swarming up the drainpipes and looming tipsily in the bedroom window, or, in the morning, to find him recumbent and insensible in the area. Now, on this catastrophic morning, Basil found himself orientated to them as surely as though he were in wine, and he arrived on their new doorstep without conscious thought of direction. He went upstairs immediately, for, wherever they lived, it was always in Sonia’s bedroom, as though it were the scene of an unending convalescence, that the heart of the household beat.

Basil had attended Sonia’s levees (and there were three or four levees daily for, whenever she was at home, she was in bed) off and on for nearly ten years, since the days of her first, dazzling loveliness, when, almost alone among the chaste and daring brides of London, she had admitted mixed company to her bathroom. It was an innovation, or rather the revival of a more golden age, which, like everything Sonia did, was conceived without any desire for notoriety; she enjoyed company, she enjoyed her bath. There were usually three or four breathless and giddy young men, in those days, gulping Black Velvet in the steam, pretending to take their reception as a matter of common occurrence.

Basil saw little change in her beauty now and none in the rich confusion of letters, newspapers, half-opened parcels and half-empty bottles, puppies, flowers and fruit which surrounded the bed where she sat sewing (for it was one of the vagaries of her character to cover acres of silk, yearly, with exquisite embroidery).

“Darling Basil, have you come to be blown up with us? Where’s your horrible girl friend?”

“She took fright.”

“She was a beast, darling, one of your very worst. Look at Peter. Isn’t it all crazy?” Peter Pastmaster sat at the foot of her bed in uniform. Once, for reasons he had now forgotten, he had served, briefly, in the cavalry; the harvest of that early sowing had ripened, suddenly, overnight. “Won’t it be too ridiculous, starting all over again, lunching with young men on guard?”

“Not young, Sonia. You should see us. The average age of the subalterns is about forty, the Colonel finished the last war as a brigadier, and our troopers are all either weatherbeaten old commissionaires or fifteen-stone valets.”

Alastair came in from the bathroom. “How’s the art-tart?” He opened bottles and began mixing stout and champagne in a deep jug. “Blackers?” They had always drunk this sour and invigorating draught.

“Tell us all about the war,” said Sonia.

“Well —” Basil began.

“No, darling, I didn’t mean that. Not all. Not about who’s going to win or why we are fighting. Tell us what everyone is going to do about it. From what Margot tells me the last war was absolute heaven. Alastair wants to go for a soldier.”

“Conscription has rather taken the gilt off that particular gingerbread,” said Basil. “Besides, this isn’t going to be a soldier’s war.”

“Poor Peter,” said Sonia, as though she were talking to one of the puppies. “It isn’t going to be your war, sweetheart.”

“Suits me,” said Peter,

“I expect Basil will have the most tremendous adventures. He always did in peace-time. Goodness knows what he’ll do in war.”

“There are too many people in on the racket,” said Basil.

“Poor sweet, I don’t believe any of you are nearly as excited about it as I am.”

The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical solution, for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory. Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable; on that all agreed. But Parsnip’s art flourished best in England, even an embattled England, while Pimpernell’s needed the peaceful and fecund soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the dissolution of partnership.

“I don’t say that Pimpernell is the better poet,” said Ambrose. “All I say is that I personally find him the more nutritious; so I personally think they are right to go.”

“But I’ve always felt that Parsnip is so much more dependent on environment.”

“I know what you mean, Poppet, but I don’t agree…Aren’t you thinking only of Guernica Revisited and forgetting the Christopher Sequence…”

Thus the aesthetic wrangle might have run its familiar course, but there was in the studio that morning a cross, redheaded girl in spectacles from the London School of Economics; she believed in a People’s Total War; an uncompromising girl whom none of them liked; a suspect of Trotskyism.

“What I don’t see,” she said (and what this girl did not see was usually a very conspicuous embarrassment to Poppet’s friends), “what I don’t see is how these two can claim to be contemporary if they run away from the biggest event in contemporary history. They were contemporary enough about Spain when no one threatened to come and bomb them.”

It was an awkward question; one that in military parlance was called “a swift one.” At any moment, it was felt in the studio, this indecent girl would use the word “escapism”; and, in the silence which followed her outburst, while everyone in turn meditated and rejected a possible retort, she did, in fact, produce the unforgivable charge. “It’s just sheer escapism,” she said.

The word startled the studio, like the cry of “Cheat” in a card-room.

“That’s a foul thing to say, Julia.”

“Well, what’s the answer?”…

The answer, thought Ambrose; he knew an answer or two. There was plenty that he had learned from his new friends, that he could quote to them. He could say that the war in Spain was “contemporary” because it was a class war; the present conflict, since Russia had declared herself neutral, was merely a phase in capitalist disintegration; that would have satisfied, or at least silenced, the redheaded girl. But that was not really the answer. He sought for comforting historical analogies but every example which occurred to him was on the side of the redhead. She knew them too, he thought, and would quote them with all her post-graduate glibness — Socrates marching to the sea with Xenophon, Virgil sanctifying Roman military rule, Horace singing the sweetness of dying for one’s country, the troubadours riding to war, Cervantes in the galleys at Lepanto, Milton working himself blind in the public service, even George IV, for whom Ambrose had a reverence which others devoted to Charles I, believed he had fought at Waterloo. All these, and a host of other courageous contemporary figures, rose in Ambrose’s mind. Cezanne had deserted in 1870, but Cezanne in the practical affairs of life was a singularly unattractive figure; moreover, he was a painter whom Ambrose found insufferably boring. There was no answer to be found on those lines.

“You’re just sentimental,” said Poppet, “like a spinster getting tearful at the sound of a military band.”

“Well, they have military bands in Russia, don’t they? I expect plenty of spinsters get tearful in the Red Square when they march past Lenin’s tomb.”

You can always stump them with Russia, thought Ambrose; they can always stump each other. It’s the dead end of all discussion.

“The question is: Would they write any better for being in danger?” said one.

“Would they help the People’s Cause?” said another.

It was the old argument, gathering speed again after the rude girl’s interruption. Ambrose gazed sadly at the jaundiced, mustachioed Aphrodite. What was he doing, he asked himself, in this galley?

Sonia was trying to telephone to Margot, to invite themselves all to luncheon.

“An odious man says that only official calls are being taken this morning.”

“Say you’re M.I.9,” said Basil.

“I’m M.I.9

What can that mean? Darling, I believe it’s going to work…It has worked…Margot, this is Sonia…I’m dying to see you, too….”

Aphrodite gazed back at him, blind, as though sculptured in butter; Parsnip and Pimpernell, Red Square and Brown House, thus the discussion raged. What had all this to do with him?

Art and Love had led him to this inhospitable room.

Love for a long succession of louts—rugger blues, all-in wrestlers, naval ratings; tender, hopeless love that had been rewarded at the best by an occasional episode of rough sensuality, followed, in sober light, with contempt, abuse and rapacity.

A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised — these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he could frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself. Was it thus that the rich passions of Greece and Arabia and the Renaissance had worn themselves out? Did they simper when Leonardo passed and imitate with mincing grace the warriors of Sparta? Was there a snigger across the sand outside the tents of Saladin? They burned the Knights Templars at the stake; their loves, at least, were monstrous and formidable, a thing to call down destruction from heaven if man neglected his duty of cruelty and repression. Beddoes had died in solitude, by his own hand; Wilde had been driven into the shadows, tipsy and garrulous, but, to the end, a figure of tragedy looming big in his own twilight. But Ambrose, thought Ambrose, what of him? Born after his time, in an age which made a type of him, a figure of farce; like mothers-in-law and kippers, the century’s contribution to the national store of comic objects; akin with the chorus boys who tittered under the lamps of Shaftesbury Avenue…And Hans, who at last, after so long a pilgrimage, had seemed to promise rest, Hans so simple and affectionate, like a sturdy young terrier, Hans lay in the unknown horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.

The huge, yellow face with scrawled moustaches offered Ambrose no comfort.

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”

“No, Tom,” they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t a conscience.”

“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”

“…Peter’s here and Basil. We’re all feeling very gay and warlike. May we come to luncheon? Basil says there’s bound to be an enormous air raid tonight so it may be the last time we shall ever see each other…what’s that? Yes, I told you I’m (What am I, Basil?) — I’m M.I.9. (There’s a ridiculous woman on the line saying, ‘Is this a private call?’)…Well, Margot, then we’ll all come round to you. That’ll be heaven…Hello, hello…I do believe that damned woman has cut us off.”

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. Nature in the raw is seldom mild: red in tooth and claw; matelots in Toulon smelling of wine and garlic, with tough brown necks, cigarettes stuck to the lower lip, lapsing into unintelligible contemptuous argot.

Art: this was where Art had brought him, to this studio, to these coarse and tedious youngsters, to that preposterous yellow face among the boiled sweets.

It had been a primrose path in the days of Diaghilev; at Eton he had collected Lovat-Fraser Rhyme-sheets; at Oxford he had recited “In Memoriam” through a megaphone to an accompaniment hummed on combs and tissue paper; in Paris he had frequented Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein; he had written and published his first book there, a study of Montparnasse Negroes that had been banned in England by Sir William Joynson-Hicks. That way the primrose path led gently downhill to the world of fashionable photographers, stage sets for Cochrane, Cedric Lyne and his Neapolitan grottoes.

He had made his decision then, turned aside from the primrose path; had deliberately chosen the austere and the heroic; it was the year of the American slump, a season of heroic decisions, when Paul had tried to enter a monastery and David had succeeded in throwing himself under a train. Ambrose had gone to Germany, lived in a workmen’s quarter, found Hans, begun a book — a grim, abstruse, interminable book, a penance for past frivolity; the unfinished manuscript lay somewhere in an old suitcase in Central Europe; and Hans was behind barbed wire; or worse, perhaps, had given in — as, with his simple easygoing acceptance of things, was all too likely; was back among the Brown Shirts, a man with a mark against his name, never again to be trusted, but good enough for the firing line, good enough to be jostled into battle.

The redheaded girl was asking inconvenient questions again. “But Tom,” she was saying. “Surely if it was a good thing to share the life of the worker in a canned fruit factory, why isn’t it a good thing to serve with him in the Army?”

“Julia’s just the type who used to go about distributing white feathers.”

“If it comes to that, why the hell not?” said Julia.

Ars longa, thought Ambrose, a short life but a grey one.

Alastair plugged his electric razor into the lamp on Sonia’s writing table and shaved in the bedroom, so as not to miss what was going on. He had once in the past seen Peter in full dress uniform at a Court Ball and had felt sorry for him because it meant that he could not come on afterwards to a night club; this was the first time he had seen him in khaki and he was jealous as a schoolboy. There was still a great deal of the schoolboy about Alastair; he enjoyed winter sports and sailing and squash racquets and the chaff round the bar at Bratt’s; he observed certain immature taboos of dress, such as wearing a bowler hat in London until after Goodwood Week; he had a firm, personal sense of schoolboy honour. He felt these prejudices to be peculiar to himself; none of them made him at all censorious of anyone else; he accepted Basil’s outrageous disregard for them without question. He kept his sense of honour as he might have kept an expensive and unusual pet; as, indeed, once, for a disastrous month, Sonia had kept a small kangaroo named Molly. He knew himself to be eccentric, in his own way, as Ambrose Silk. For a year, at the age of twenty-one, he had been Margot Metroland’s lover; it was an apprenticeship many of his friends had served; they had forgotten about it now, but at the time all their acquaintances knew about it; but never, even to Sonia, had Alastair alluded to the fact. Since marriage he had been unfaithful to Sonia for a week every year, during Bratt’s Club golf tournament at Le Touquet, usually with the wife of a fellow member. He did this without any scruple because he believed Bratt’s Week to be in some way excluded from the normal life of loyalties and obligations; a Saturnalia when the laws did not run. At all other times he was a devoted husband.

Alastair had never come nearer to military service than in being senior private in the Corps at Eton; during the General Strike he had driven about the poorer quarters of London in a closed van to break up seditious meetings and had clubbed several unoffending citizens; that was his sole contribution to domestic politics, for he had lived, in spite of his many moves, in uncontested constituencies. But he had always held it as axiomatic that, should anything as preposterous and antiquated as a large-scale war occur, he would take a modest but vigorous part. He had no illusions about his abilities, but believed, justly, that he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King’s enemies to shoot at. It came as a shock to him now, to find his country at war and himself in pyjamas, spending his normal Sunday noon with a jug of Black Velvet and some chance visitors. Peter’s uniform added to his uneasiness. It was as though he had been taken in adultery at Christmas or found in mid-June on the steps of Bratt’s in a soft hat.

He studied Peter, with the rapt attention of a small boy, taking in every detail of his uniform, the riding boots, Sam Browne belt, the enamelled stars of rank, and felt disappointed but, in a way, relieved, that there was no sword; he could not have borne it if Peter had had a sword.

“I know I look awful,” Peter said. “The Adjutant left me in no doubt on that subject.”

“You look sweet,” said Sonia.

“I heard they had stopped wearing cross straps on the Sam Browne,” said Alastair.

“Yes, but technically we still carry swords.”

Technically. Peter had a sword, technically.

“Darling, do you think that if we went past Buckingham Palace the sentries would salute?”

“It’s quite possible. I don’t think Belisha has quite succeeded in putting it down yet.”

“We’ll go there at once. I’ll dress. Can’t wait to see them.”

So they walked from Chester Street to Buckingham Palace; Sonia and Peter in front, Alastair and Basil a pace or two behind. The sentries saluted and Sonia pinched Peter as he acknowledge it. Alastair said to Basil:

“I suppose we’ll be doing that soon.”

“They don’t want volunteers in this war, Alastair. They’ll call people up when they want them without any recruiting marches or popular songs. They haven’t the equipment for the men in training now.”

“Who do you mean by ‘they’?”

“Hore-Belisha.”

“Who cares what he wants?” said Alastair. For him there was no “they.” England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington, was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words; not into words, anyway, which Basil would not make ridiculous, so he walked on in silence behind Peter’s martial figure until Sonia decided to take a cab.

“I know what I want,” said Basil. “I want to be one of those people one beard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war.”

Although it was common for Freddy Sothill and Sir Joseph Mainwaring, and various others who from time to time were enlisted to help solve the recurrent problem of Basil’s future, to speak of him in terms they normally reserved for the mining community of South Wales, as feckless and unemployable, the getting of jobs, of one kind and another, had, in fact, played a large part in his life; for it was the explanation and excuse of most of Basil’s vagaries that he had never had any money of his own. Tony and Barbara by their father’s will each enjoyed a reasonable fortune, but Sir Christopher Seal had died shortly after the first of Basil’s major disgraces. If it were conceivable that one who held the office of Chief Whip for a quarter of a century could be shocked at any spectacle of human depravity, it might have been thought that shame hastened his end, so fast did one event follow upon the other. Be that as it may, it was on his death-bed that Sir Christopher, in true melodramatic style, disinherited his younger son, leaving his future entirely in his mother’s hands.

Lady Seal’s most devoted friend — and she had many — would not have credited her with more than human discretion, and some quite preternatural power would have been needed to deal with Basil’s first steps in adult life. The system she decided on was, at the best, unimaginative and, like many such schemes, was suggested to her by Sir Joseph Mainwaring; it consisted, in his words, of “giving the boy his bread and butter and letting him find the jam.” Removed from the realm of metaphor to plain English, this meant allowing Basil Ł400 a year, conditional on his good behaviour, and expecting him to supplement it by his own exertions if he wished for a more ample way of life.

The arrangement proved disastrous from the first. Four times in the last ten years Lady Seal had paid Basil’s debts; once on condition of his living at home with her; once on condition of his living somewhere, anywhere, abroad; once on condition of his marrying; once on condition of his refraining from marriage. Twice he had been cut off with a penny; twice taken back to favour; once he had been set up in chambers in the Temple with an allowance of a thousand a year; several times, a large lump sum of capital had been dangled before his eyes as the reward of his giving himself seriously to commerce; once he had been on the verge of becoming the recipient of a sisal farm in Kenya. Throughout all these changes of fortune Sir Joseph Mainwaring had acted the part of political agent to a recalcitrant stipendiary sultan, in a way which embittered every benevolence and minimized the value of every gift he brought. In the intervals of neglect and independence, Basil had fended for himself and had successively held all the jobs which were open to young men of his qualifications. He had never had much difficulty in getting jobs; the trouble had always been in keeping them, for he regarded a potential employer as his opponent in a game of skill. All Basil’s resource and energy went into hoodwinking him into surrender; once he had received his confidence he lost interest. Thus English girls will put themselves to endless exertion to secure a husband and, once married, will think their labour at an end.

Basil had been leader writer on the Daily Beast, he had served in the personal entourage of Lord Monomark, he had sold champagne on commission, composed dialogue for the cinema and given the first of what was intended to be a series of talks for the B.B.C. Sinking lower in the social scale he had been press agent for a female contortionist and had once conducted a party of tourists to the Italian lakes. (He dined out for some time on the story of that tour, which had, after a crescendo of minor vexations, culminated in Basil’s making a bundle of all the tickets and all the passports and sinking them in Lake Garda. He had then travelled home alone by an early train, leaving fifty penniless Britons, none of whom spoke a word of any foreign language, to the care of whatever deity takes charge of forsaken strangers; for all Basil knew, they were still there.)

From time to time he disappeared from the civilized area and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence — of having worked for the secret police in Bolivia and advised the Emperor of Azania on the modernization of his country. Basil was in the habit, as it were, of conducting his own campaigns, issuing his own ultimatums, disseminating his own propaganda, erecting about himself his own blackout; he was an obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians. He was used, in his own life, to a system of push, appeasement, agitation and blackmail, which, except that it had no more distinct aim than his own immediate amusement, ran parallel to Nazi diplomacy. Like Nazi diplomacy it postulated for success a peace-loving, orderly and honourable world in which to operate. In the new, busy, secretive, chaotic world which developed during the first days of the war, Basil, for the first time in his life, felt himself at a disadvantage. It was like being in Latin America at a time of upheaval and, instead of being an Englishman, being oneself a Latin-American.

The end of September found Basil in a somewhat fretful mood. The air raid scare seemed to be over for the time, and those who had voluntarily fled from London were beginning to return, pretending that they had only been to the country to see that everything was all right there. The women and children of the poor, too, were flocking home to their evacuated streets. The newspapers said that the Poles were holding out; that their cavalry was penetrating deep into Germany; that the enemy was already short of motor oil; that Saarbrucken would fall to the French within a day or two; air raid wardens roamed the remote hamlets of the kingdom, persecuting yokels who walked home from the inn with glowing pipes. Londoners, who were slow to acquire the habit of the domestic hearth, groped their way in darkness from one place of amusement to another, learning their destination by feeling the buttons on the commissionaires’ uniforms; revolving black-glass doors gave access to a fairyland; it was as though, when children, they had been led blindfold into the room with the lighted Christmas tree. The casualty list of street accidents became formidable, and there were terrifying tales of footpads who leaped on the shoulders of old gentlemen on the very steps of their clubs, or beat them to jelly on Hay Hill.

Everyone whom Basil met was busy getting a job. Some consciously or unconsciously had taken out an insurance policy against unemployment by joining some military unit in the past; there were those like Peter, who in early youth had gratified a parental whim by spending a few expensive years in the regular Army, and those like Freddy who had gone into the yeomanry as they sat on the Bench and the county council as part of the normal obligations of rural life. These were now in uniform with their problems solved. In later months, as they sat idle in the Middle East, they were to think enviously of those who had made a more deliberate and judicious choice of service, but at the moment their minds were enviably at rest. The remainder were possessed with a passion to enroll in some form of public service, however uncongenial. Some formed ambulance parties and sat long hours at their posts waiting for air raid victims; some became firemen, some minor civil servants. None of these honourable occupations made much appeal to Basil.

He was exactly the type of man who, if English life had run as it did in books of adventure, should at this turn in world affairs have been sent for. He should have been led to an obscure address in Maida Vale and there presented to a lean, scarred man with hard grey eyes — one of the men behind the scenes; one of the men whose names were unknown to the public and the newspapers, who passed unnoticed in the street, a name known only to the inner circle of the Cabinet and to the heads of the secret police of the world… “Sit down, Seal. We’ve followed your movements with interest ever since that affair in La Paz in ‘32. You’re a rascal, but I’m inclined to think you’re the kind of rascal the country needs at this moment. I take it you’re game for anything?”

“I’m game.”

“That’s what I expected you to say. These are your orders. You will go to Uxbridge aerodrome at 4:30 this afternoon, where a man will meet you and give you your passport. You will travel under the name of Blenkinsop. You are a tobacco grower from Latakia. A civil aeroplane will take you by various stages to Smyrna, where you will register at the Miramar Hotel and await orders. Is that clear?…”

It was clear, and Basil, whose life up to the present had been more like an adventure story than most people’s, did half expect some such summons. None came. Instead he was invited to luncheon by Sir Joseph Mainwaring at the Travellers’ Club.

Basil’s luncheons at the Travellers’ with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions, the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of Freddy’s Last Cheque — each would provide both theme and title for a work of popular fiction.

Hitherto these feasts had taken place ŕ deux in a secluded corner. The Luncheon of the Commission in the Guards was altogether a more honourable affair and its purpose was to introduce Basil to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bombardiers — an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly believed to have a liking for him.

The Lieutenant-Colonel did not know Sir Joseph well and was surprised and slightly, alarmed by the invitation, for his distrust was based not, as might have been expected, on any just estimate of his capabilities, but, paradoxically, on the fear of him as a politician and man of affairs. All politicians were, to the Lieutenant-Colonel, not so much boobies as bogies. He saw them all, even Sir Joseph, as figures of Renaissance subtlety and intrigue. It was by being in with them that the great professional advances were achieved; but it was by falling foul of them that one fell into ignominy. For a simple soldier — and if ever anyone did, the Lieutenant-Colonel qualified for that honourable title — the only safe course was to avoid men like Sir Joseph. When met with, they should be treated with bluff and uncompromising reserve. Sir Joseph thus found himself, through his loyal friendship with Cynthia Seal, in the equivocal position of introducing, with a view to his advancement, a man for whom he had a deep-seated horror to a man who had something of the same emotion towards himself. It was not a concurrence which, on the face of it, seemed hopeful of good results.

Basil, like “Lord Monmouth,” “never condescended to the artifice of the toilet,” and the Lieutenant-Colonel studied him with distaste. Together the ill-assorted trio went to their table.

Soldier and statesman spread their napkins on their knees and in the interest of ordering their luncheon allowed a silence to fall between them into which Basil cheerfully plunged.

“We ought to do something about Liberia, Colonel,” he said.

The Colonel turned on him the outraged gaze with which a good regimental soldier always regards the discussion of war in its larger aspects.

“I expect those whose business it is have the question in hand,” he said.

“Don’t you believe it,” said Basil. “I don’t expect they’ve given it a thought,” and for some twenty minutes he explained why and how Liberia should be immediately annexed.

The two older men ate in silence. At length a chance reference to Russia gave Sir Joseph the chance to interpose an opinion.

“I always distrust prophecy in any form,” he said. “But there is one thing of which I am certain. Russia will come in against us before the end of the year. That will put Italy and Japan on our side. Then it is simply a question of time before our blockade makes itself felt. All kinds of things that you and I have never heard of, like manganese and bauxite, will win the war for us.”

“And infantry.”

“And infantry.”

“Teach a man to march and shoot. Give him the right type of officer. Leave the rest to him.”

This seemed to Basil a suitable moment to introduce his own problems. “What do you think is the right type of officer?”

“The officer-type.”

“It’s an odd thing,” Basil began, “that people always expect the upper class to be good leaders of men. That was all right in the old days when most of them were brought up with tenantry to look after. But now three-quarters of your officer-type live in towns. I haven’t any tenantry.”

The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at Basil with detestation. “No, no. I suppose not.”

“Well, have you any tenantry?”

“I? No. My brother sold the old place years ago.”

“Well, there you are.”

It was crystal-clear to Sir Joseph, and faintly perceptible to Basil, that the Lieutenant-Colonel did not take this well.

“Seal was for a time Conservative candidate down in the West,” said Sir Joseph, anxious to remove one possible source of prejudice.

“Some pretty funny people have been calling themselves Conservatives in the last year or two. Cause of half the trouble if you ask me.” Then, feeling he might have been impolite, he added graciously: “No offence to you. Daresay you were all right. Don’t know anything about you.”

Basil’s political candidature was not an episode to be enlarged upon. Sir Joseph turned the conversation. “Of course the French will have to make some concessions to bring Italy in. Give up Djibouti or something like that.”

“Why the devil should they?” asked the Lieutenant-Colonel petulantly. “Who wants Italy in?”

“To counterbalance Russia.”

“How? Why? Where? I don’t see it at all.”

“Nor do I,” said Basil.

Threatened with support from so unwelcome a quarter, the Lieutenant-Colonel immediately abandoned his position. “Oh, don’t you?” he said. “Well, I’ve no doubt Mainwaring knows best. His job is to know these things.”

Warmed by these words Sir Joseph proceeded for the rest of luncheon to suggest some of the concessions which he thought France might reasonably make to Italy — Tunisia, French Somaliland, the Suez Canal. “Corsica, Nice, Savoy?” asked Basil. Sir Joseph thought not.

Rather than ally himself with Basil the Lieutenant-Colonel listened to these proposals to dismember an ally in silence and fury. He had not wanted to come out to luncheon. It would be absurd to say that he was busy, but he was busier than he had ever been in his life before and he looked on the two hours or so which he allowed himself in the middle of the day as a time for general recuperation. He liked to spend them among people to whom he could relate all that he had done in the morning; to people who would appreciate the importance and rarity of such work; either that, or with a handsome woman. He left the Travellers’ as early as he decently could and returned to his mess. His mind was painfully agitated by all he had heard and particularly by the presence of that seedy-looking young radical whose name he had not caught. That at least, he thought, he might have hoped to be spared at Sir Joseph’s table.

“Well, Jo, is everything arranged?”

“Nothing is exactly arranged yet, Cynthia, but I’ve set the ball rolling.”

“I hope Basil made a good impression.”

“I hope he did, too. I’m afraid he said some rather unfortunate things.”

“Oh dear. Well, what is the next step?”

Sir Joseph would have liked to say that there was no next step in that direction; that the best Basil could hope for was oblivion; perhaps in a month or so, when the luncheon was forgotten… “It’s up to Basil now, Cynthia. I have introduced him. He must follow it up himself if he really wants to get into that regiment. But I have been wondering, since you first mentioned the matter, do you really think it is quite suitable…”

“I’m told he could not do better,” said Lady Seal proudly.

“No, that is so. In one way he could not do better.”

“Then he shall follow up the introduction,” said that unimaginative mother.

The Lieutenant-Colonel was simmering quietly in his office; an officer — not a young officer but a mature reservist — had just been to see him without gloves, wearing suede shoes; the consequent outburst had been a great relief; the simmering was an expression of content, a kind of mental purr; it was a mood which his subordinates recognized as a good mood. He was feeling that as long as there was someone like himself at the head of the regiment, nothing much could go wrong with it (a feeling which, oddly enough, was shared by the delinquent officer). To the Lieutenant-Colonel, in this mood, it was announced that a civilian gentleman, Mr. Seal, wanted to see him. The name was unfamiliar; so, for the moment, was Basil’s appearance, for Angela had been at pains and expense to fit him up suitably for the interview. His hair was newly cut, he wore a stiff white collar, a bowler hat, a thin gold watch-chain and other marks of respectability, and he carried a new umbrella. Angela had also schooled him in the first words of his interview. “I know you are very busy, Colonel, but I hoped you would spare me a few minutes to ask your advice…”

All this went fairly well. “Want to go into the Army?” said the Lieutenant-Colonel. “Well I suppose we must expect a lot of people coming in from outside nowadays. Lot of new battalions being formed, even in the Brigade. I presume you’ll join the infantry. No point in going into the cavalry nowadays. All these machines. Might just as well be an engine driver and have done with it. There’s a lot of damn fool talk about this being a mechanized war and an air war and a commercial war. All wars are infantry wars. Always have been.”

“Yes, it was infantry I was thinking of.”

“Quite right. I hear some of the line regiments are very short of officers. I don’t imagine you want to go through the ranks, ha! ha! There’s been a lot of nonsense about that lately. Not that it would do any harm to some of the young gentlemen I’ve seen about the place. But for a fellow of your age the thing to do is to join the Supplementary Reserve, put down the regiment you want to join — there are a number of line regiments who do very useful work in their way — and get the commanding officer to apply for you.”

“Exactly, sir, that’s what I came to see you about. I was hoping that you —”

“That I…?” Slowly to that slow mind there came the realization that Basil, this dissolute-looking young man who had so grossly upset his lunch interval the day before, this radical who had impugned the efficiency of the officer-type, was actually proposing to join the Bombardier Guards.

“I’ve always felt,” said Basil, “that if I had to join the foot guards, I’d soonest join yours. You aren’t as stuffy as the Grenadiers and you haven’t got any of those bogus regional connections like the Scots and Irish and Welsh.”

Had there been no other cause of offence; had Basil come to him with the most prepossessing appearance, the most glittering sporting record, a manner in which deference to age was most perfectly allied with social equality, had he been lord of a thousand loyal tenants, had he been the nephew of the Colonel-in-chief, the use by a civilian of such words as “stuffy” and “bogus” about the Brigade of Guards would have damned him utterly.

“So what I suggest,” Basil continued, “is that I sign up for this Supplementary Reserve and put you down as my choice of regiment. Will that be O.K.?”

The Lieutenant-Colonel found his voice; it was not a voice of which he had full control; it might have been the voice of a man who had been suspended for a few seconds from a gibbet and then cut down. He fingered his collar as though, indeed, expecting to find the hangman’s noose there. He said: “That would not be O.K. We do not take our officers from the Supplementary Reserve.”

“Well how do I join you?”

“I’m afraid I must have misled you in some way. I have no vacancy for you in the regiment. I’m looking for platoon commanders. As it is I’ve got six or seven ensigns of over thirty. Can you imagine yourself leading a platoon in action?”

“Well, as a matter of fact I can, but that’s the last thing I want. In fact that’s why I want to keep away from the line regiments. After all there is always a number of interesting staff jobs going for anyone in the Guards, isn’t there? What I thought of doing was to sign up with you and then look round for something more interesting. I should be frightfully bored with regimental life you know, but everyone tells me it’s a great help to start in a decent regiment.”

The noose tightened about the Lieutenant-Colonel’s throat. He could not speak. It was with a scarcely human croak and an eloquent gesture of the hand that he indicated that the interview was over.

In the office it quickly became known that he was in one of his bad moods again.

Basil went back to Angela.

“How did it go, darling?”

“Not well. Not well at all.”

“Oh dear, and you looked so particularly presentable.”

“Yes; it can’t have been that. And I was tremendously polite. Said all the right things. I expect that old snake Jo Mainwaring has been making mischief again.”

“When we say that Parsnip can’t write in wartime Europe, surely we mean that he can’t write as he has written up till now. Mightn’t it be better for him to stay here, even if it meant holding up production for a year or so, so that he can develop?”

“Oh, I don’t think Parsnip and Pimpernell can develop. I mean an organ doesn’t develop; it just goes on playing different pieces of music but remains the same. I feel Parsnip and Pimpernell have perfected themselves as an instrument.”

“Then suppose Parsnip were to develop and Pimpernell didn’t. Or suppose they developed in different directions. What would happen then?”

“Yes, what would happen then?”

“Why does it take two to write a poem?” asked the redheaded girl.

“Now Julia, don’t short-circuit the argument.”

“I should have thought poetry was a one-man job. Part-time work at that.”

“But Julia, you’ll admit you don’t know very much about poetry, dear.”

“That’s exactly why I’m asking.”

“Don’t pay any attention, Tom. She doesn’t really want to know. She’s only being tiresome.”

They were lunching at a restaurant in Charlotte Street; there were too many of them for the table; when you put out your hand for your glass and your neighbour at the same time put out his knife for the butter, he gave you a greasy cuff; too many for the menu, a single sheet of purple handwriting that was passed from hand to hand with indifference and indecision; too many for the waiter, who forgot their various orders; there were only six of them but it was too many for Ambrose. The talk was a series of assertions and interjections. Ambrose lived in and for conversation; he rejoiced in the whole intricate art of it — the timing and striking, the proper juxtaposition of narrative and comment, the bursts of spontaneous parody, the allusion one would recognize and one would not, the changes of alliance, the betrayals, the diplomatic revolutions, the waxing and waning of dictatorships that could happen in an hour’s session about a table. But could it happen? Was that, too, most exquisite and exacting of the arts, part of the buried world of Diaghilev?

For months, now, he had seen no one except Poppet Green and her friends, and now, since Angela Lyne’s return, Basil had dropped out of the group as abruptly as he had entered it, leaving Ambrose strangely forlorn.

Why, he wondered, do real intellectuals always prefer the company of rakes to that of their fellows? Basil is a Philistine and a crook; on occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming Workers’ State; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the Communists tell me of an earth full of leisured and contented factory hands. I don’t see Basil getting past the gate of either. Religion is acceptable in its destructive phase: the desert monks carving up that humbug Hypatia, the anarchist gangs roasting the monks in Spain. Hellfire sermons in the chapels; soap-box orators screaming their envy of the rich. Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a heaven that it shows itself cloddish. But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic. Am I baptized into this modern world? At least I haven’t taken a new name. All the rest of the Left Wing writers have adopted plebeian monosyllables

Ambrose was irredeemably bourgeois. Parsnip often said so. Damn Parsnip, damn Pimpernel! Do these atrocious young people never discuss anything else?

They were disputing the bill now, and forgetting what he or she had eaten; passing the menu from hand to hand to verify the prices.

“When you’ve decided what it is, tell me.”

“Ambrose’s bill is always the largest,” said the redheaded girl.

“Dear Julia, please don’t tell me that I could have fed a worker’s family for a week. I still feel definitely peckish, my dear. I am sure workers eat ever so much more.”

“D’you know the index figure for a family of four?”

“No,” said Ambrose wistfully, “no, I don’t know the index figure. Please don’t tell me. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I like to think of it as dramatically small.” (Why do I talk like this? — nodding and fluttering my eyelids, as though with a repressed giggle; why can I not speak like a man? Mine is the brazen voice of Apuleius’ ass, turning its own words to ridicule.)

The party left the restaurant and its members stood in an untidy group on the pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. “I’ll tell your sergeant-major on you,” he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for me? Will it make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

He crossed Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, walking without any particular object except to take the air. It was not until he was under its shadow and saw the vast bulk of London University insulting the autumnal sky that he remembered that here was the Ministry of Information and that his publisher, Mr. Geoffrey Bentley, was working there at the head of some newly formed department. Ambrose decided to pay him a call.

It was far from easy to gain admission; only once in his life, when he had had an appointment in a cinema studio in the outer suburbs, had Ambrose met such formidable obstruction. All the secrets of all the services might have been hidden in that gross mass of masonry. Not until Mr. Bentley had been summoned to the gate to identify him was Ambrose allowed to pass.

“We have to be very careful,” said Mr. Bentley.

“Why?”

“Far too many people get in as it is. You’ve no conception how many. It adds terribly to our work.”

“What is your work, Geoffrey?”

“Well mostly it consists of sending people who want to see me on to someone they don’t want to see. I’ve never liked authors — except of course,” he added, “my personal friends. I’d no idea there were so many of them. I suppose, now I come to think of it, that explains why there are so many books. And I’ve never liked books—except of course books by personal friends.”

They rose in a lift and walked down a wide corridor, passing on the way Basil, who was talking a foreign language which sounded like a series of expectorations to a sallow man in a tarboosh.

“That’s not one of my personal friends,” said Mr. Bentley bitterly.

“Does he work here?”

“I don’t suppose so. No one works in the Near East Department. They just lounge about talking.”

“The tradition of the bazaar.”

“The tradition of the Civil Service. This is my little room.”

They came to the door of what had once been a chemical laboratory, and entered. There was a white porcelain sink in the corner into which a tap dripped monotonously. In the centre of the oilcloth floor stood a card table and two folding chairs. In his own office Mr. Bentley sat under a ceiling painted by Angelica Kauffmann, amid carefully chosen pieces of Empire furniture. “We have to rough it, you see,” he said. “I brought those to make it look more human.”

“Those” were a pair of marble busts by Nollekens; they failed, in Ambrose’s opinion, to add humanity to Mr. Bentley’s room.

“You don’t like them? You remember them in Bedford Square.”

“I like them very much. I remember them well, but don’t you think, dear Geoffrey, that here they are just a weeny bit macabre?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bentley sadly. “Yes. I know what you mean. They’re really here to annoy the civil servants.”

“Do they?”

“To a frenzy. Look at this.” He showed Ambrose a long typewritten memorandum which was headed Furniture, Supplementary to Official Requirements, Undesirability of. “I sent back this.” He showed a still longer message headed Art, Objets d’, Conducive to Spiritual Repose, Absence of in the quarters of advisory staff. “Today I got this. Flowers, Framed Photographs and Other Minor Ornaments. Massive Marble and Mahogany, Decorative features of, Distinction between. Quite alliterative with rage, you see. There for the moment the matter rests, but as you see, it’s uphill work to get anything done.”

“I suppose it would make no difference if you explained that Nolleykins had inspired the greatest biography in the English language.”

“None, I should think.”

“What terrible people to work with! You are brave, Geoffrey. I couldn’t do it.”

“But, bless my soul, Ambrose, isn’t that what you came about?”

“No. I came to see you.”

“Yes, everyone comes to see me, but they all come hoping to be taken on in the Ministry. You’d better join now you’re here.”

“No. No.”

“You might do worse you know. We all abuse the old M. of I., but there are a number of quite human people here already, and we are gradually pushing more in every day. You might do much worse.”

“I don’t want to do anything. I think this whole war’s crazy.”

“You might write a book for us then. I’m getting out a very nice little series on ‘What We Are Fighting For.’ I’ve signed up a retired admiral, a Church of England curate, an unemployed docker, a Negro solicitor from the Gold Coast, and a nose-and-throat specialist from Harley Street. The original idea was to have a symposium in one volume, but I’ve had to enlarge the idea a little. All our authors had such very different ideas it might have been a little confusing. We could fit you in very nicely. ‘I used to think war crazy.’ It’s a new line.”

“But I do think war crazy still.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bentley, his momentary enthusiasm waning. “I know what you mean.”

The door opened and a drab precise little man entered. “I beg your pardon,” he said coldly. “I didn’t expect to find you working.”

“This is Ambrose Silk. I expect you know his work.”

“No.”

“No? He is considering doing a book in our ‘Why We Are at War’ Series. This is Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers, our departmental Assistant Director.”

“If you’ll excuse me a minute, I came about memorandum RQ/1082/B4. The Director is very worried.”

“Was that Documents, Confidential, Destruction by fire of?”

“No. No. Marble, Decorative features.”

“Massive Marble and Mahogany?”

“Yes. Mahogany has no application to your sub-department. That has reference to a prie-dieu in the Religious Department. The Church of England advisor has been hearing confessions there and the Director is very concerned. No, it’s these effigies.”

“You refer to my Nolleykinses?”

“These great statues. They won’t do, Bentley, you know, they really won’t do.”

“Won’t do for what?” said.Mr. Bentley bellicosely.

“They won’t do for the departmental Director. He says, very properly, that portraits of sentimental association…”

“These are full of the tenderest association for me.”

“Of relatives…”

“These are family portraits.”

“Really, Bentley. Surely that is George III?”

“A distant kinsman,” said Mr. Bentley blandly, “on my mother’s side.”

“And Mrs. Siddons?”

“A slightly closer kinswoman, on my father’s side.”

“Oh,” said Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers. “Ah. I didn’t realize…I’ll explain that to the Director. But I’m sure,” he said suspiciously, “that such a contingency was definitely excluded from the Director’s mind.”

“Flummoxed,” said Mr. Bentley, as the door closed behind Sir Philip. “Completely flummoxed. I’m glad you were there to see my little encounter. But you see what we have to contend with. And now to your affairs. I wonder where we can fit you into our little household.”

“I don’t want to be fitted in.”

“You would be a great asset. Perhaps the Religious Department. I don’t think atheism is properly represented there.”

The head of Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers appeared round the door. “Could you tell me, please, how you are related to George III? Forgive my asking, but the Director is bound to want to know.”

“The Duke of Clarence’s natural daughter Henrietta married Gervase Wilbraham of Acton — at that time, I need not remind you, a rural district. His daughter Gertrude married my maternal grandfather who was, not that it matters, three times Mayor of Chippenham. A man of substantial fortune — all, alas, now dissipated…Flummoxed again, I think,” he added as the door closed.

“Was that true?”

“That my grandfather was Mayor of Chippenham? Profoundly true.”

“About Henrietta?”

“It has always been believed in the family,” said Mr. Bentley.

In another cell of that great hive, Basil was explaining a plan for the annexation of Liberia. “The German planters there outnumber the British by about fourteen to one. They’re organized as a Nazi unit; they’ve been importing arms through Japan and they are simply waiting for the signal from Berlin to take over the government of the state. With Monrovia in enemy hands, with submarines based there, our West Coast trade route is cut. Then all the Germans have to do is to shut the Suez Canal, which they can do from Massawa whenever they like, and the Mediterranean is lost. Liberia is our one weak spot in West Africa. We’ve got to get in first. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, yes, but I don’t know why you come to me about it.”

“You’ll have to handle all the preliminary propaganda there and the explanations in America afterwards.”

“But why me? This is the Near East Department. You ought to see Mr. Pauling.”

“Mr. Pauling sent me to you.”

“Did he? I wonder why. I’ll ask him.” The unhappy official took up the telephone and after being successively connected with Films, the shadow cabinet of the Czecho-Slovaks and the A.R.P. section, said: “Pauling. I have a man called Seal here. He says you sent him.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Well you sent me that frightful Turk this morning.”

“He was child’s play to this.”

“Well, let it be a lesson to you not to send me any more Turks.”

“You wait and see what I send you…Yes,” turning to Basil, “Pauling made a mistake. Your business is really his. It’s a most interesting scheme. Wish I could do more for you. I’ll tell you who, I think, would like to hear about it — Digby-Smith; he handles propaganda and subversive activities in enemy territory, and, as you say, Liberia is to all intents and purposes enemy territory.”

The door opened and there entered a beaming, bearded, hair-bunned figure in a long Black robe; a gold cross swung from his neck; a brimless top-hat crowned his venerable head.

“I am the Archimandrite Antonios,” he said. “I am coming in please?”

“Come in, Your Beatitude; please sit down.”

“I have been telling how I was expulsed from Sofia. They said I must be telling you.”

“You have been to our Religious Department?”

“I have been telling your office clergymen about my expulsing. The Bulgar peoples say it was for fornications, but it was for politics. They are not expulsing from Sofia for fornications unless there is politics too. So now I am the ally of the British peoples since the Bulgar people say it was for fornications.”

“Yes, yes, I quite understand, but that is not really the business of this department.”

“You are not dealing with the business of the Bulgar peoples?”

“Well, yes, but I think your case opens up a wider issue altogether. You must go and see Mr. Pauling. I’ll give you someone to show the way. He deals especially with cases like yours.”

“So? You have here a Department of Fornications?”

“Yes, you might call it that.”

“I find that good. In Sofia is not having any such department.”

His Beatitude was sent on his way. “Now you want to see Digby-Smith, don’t you?”

“Do I?”

“Yes, he’ll be most interested in Liberia.”

Another messenger came; Basil was led away. In the corridor they were stopped by a small, scrubby man carrying a suitcase.

“Pardon me, can you put me right for the Near East?”

“There,” said Basil, “in there. But you won’t get much sense out of him.”

“Oh, he’s bound to be interested in what I’ve got here. Everyone is. They’re bombs. You could blow the roof off the whole of this building with what I got here,” said this lunatic. “I’ve been carting ‘em from room to room ever since the blinking war began and often I think it wouldn’t be a bad plan if they did go off sudden.”

“Who sent you to the Near East?”

“Chap called Smith, Digby-Smith. Very interested in my bombs he was.”

“Have you been to Pauling, yet?”

“Pauling? Yes, I was with him yesterday. Very interested he was in my bombs. I tell you everyone is. It was him said I ought to show them to Digby-Smith.”

Mr. Bentley talked at length about the difficulties and impossibilities of bureaucratic life. “If it was not for the journalists and the civil servants,” he said, “everything would be perfectly easy. They seem to think the whole Ministry exists for their convenience. Strictly, of course, I

shouldn’t have anything to do with the journalists — I deal with books here — but they always seem to shove them onto me when they get impatient. Not only journalists; there was a man here this morning with a suitcase full of bombs.”

“Geoffrey,” said Ambrose at length. “Tell me, would you say I was pretty well known as a Left Wing writer?”

“Of course my dear fellow, very well known.”

“As a Left Wing writer?”

“Of course very Left Wing.”

“Well known, I mean, outside the Left Wing itself.”

“Yes, certainly. Why?”

“I was only wondering.”

They were now interrupted for some minutes by an American war correspondent who wanted Mr. Bentley to verify the story of a Polish submarine which was said to have arrived at Scapa; to give him a pass to go there and see for himself; to provide him with a Polish interpreter; to explain why in hell that little runt Pappenhacker of the Hearst press had been told of this submarine and not himself.

“Oh dear„” said Mr. Bentley. “Why have they sent you to me?”

“It seems I’m registered with you and not with the Press Bureau.”

This proved to be true. As the author of Nazi Destiny, a work of popular history that had sold prodigiously on both sides of the Atlantic, this man had been entered as a “man of letters” instead of as a journalist.

“You mustn’t mind,” said Mr. Bentley. “In this country we think much more of men of letters than we do of journalists.”

“Does being a man of letters get me to Scapa?”

“Well, no.”

“Does it get me a Polish interpreter?”

“No.”

“To hell with being a man of letters.”

“I’ll get you transferred,” said Mr. Bentley. “The Press Bureau is the place for you.”

“There’s a snooty young man at that bureau looks at me as if I was something the cat brought in,” complained the author of Nazi Destiny.

“He won’t once you’re registered with him. I wonder, since you’re here, if you’d like to write a book for us.”

“No.”

“No? Well I hope you get to Scapa all right… He won’t, you know,” added Mr. Bentley as the door closed. “You may be absolutely confident that he’ll never get there. Did you ever read his book? It was exceedingly silly. He said Hitler was secretly married to a Jewess. I don’t know what he’d say if we let him go to Scapa.”

“What do you think he’ll say if you don’t?”

“Something very offensive I’ve no doubt. But we shan’t be responsible. At least, I wonder, shall we?”

“Geoffrey, when you say well known as a Left Wing writer, do you suppose that if the fascists got into power here, I should be on their black list?”

“Yes, certainly, my dear fellow.”

“They did frightful things to the Left Wing intellectuals in Spain.”

“Yes.”

“And in Poland, now.”

“So the Press Department tells me.”

“I see.”

The Archimandrite dropped in for a few moments. He expressed great willingness to write a book about Axis intrigues in Sofia.

“You think you can help bring Bulgaria in on our side?” asked Mr. Bentley.

“I am spitting the face of the Bulgar peoples,” said His Beatitude.

“I believe he’d write a very good autobiography,” said Mr. Bentley, when the prelate left them. “In the days of peace I should have signed him up for one.”

“Geoffrey, you were serious when you said that I should be on the black list of Left Wing intellectuals?”

“Quite serious. You’re right at the top. You and Parsnip and Pimpernell.”

Ambrose winced at the mention of those two familiar names. “They’re all right,” he said. “They’re in the United States.”

Basil and Ambrose met as they left the Ministry. Together they loitered for a minute to watch a brisk little scene between the author of Nazi Destiny and the policeman on the gates; it appeared that in a fit of nervous irritation the American had torn up the slip of paper which had admitted him to the building; now they would not let him leave.

“I’m sorry for him in a way,” said Ambrose. “It’s not a place I’d care to spend the rest of the war in.”

“They wanted me to take a job there,” said Basil, lying.

“They wanted me to,” said Ambrose.

They walked together through the sombre streets of Bloomsbury. “How’s Poppet?” said Basil at length.

“She’s cheered up wonderfully since you left. Painting away like a mowing machine.”

“I must look her up again sometime. I’ve been busy lately. Angela’s back. Where are we going to?”

“I don’t know, I’ve nowhere to go.”

“I’ve nowhere to go.”

An evening chill was beginning to breathe down the street.

“I nearly joined the Bombardier Guards a week or two ago,” said Basil.

“I once had a great friend who was a corporal in the Bombardiers.”

“We’d better go and see Sonia and Alastair.”

“I haven’t been near them for years.”

“Come on.” Basil wanted someone to pay for the cab.

But when they reached the little house in Chester Street they found Sonia alone and packing. “Alastair’s gone off,” she said. “He’s joined the Army — in the ranks. They said he was too old for a commission.”

“My dear, how very 1914.”

“I’m just off to join him. He’s near Brookwood.”

“You’ll be beautifully near the Necropolis,” said Ambrose. “It’s the most enjoyable place. Three public houses, my dear, inside the cemetery, right among the graves. I asked the barmaid if the funeral parties got very tipsy and she said, ‘No. It’s when they come back to visit the graves. They seem to need something then.’ And did you know the Corps of Commissionaires have a special burial place? Perhaps if Alastair is a very good soldier they might make him an honorary member…” Ambrose chattered on. Sonia packed. Basil looked about for bottles. “Nothing to drink.”

“All packed, darling. I’m sorry. We might go out somewhere.”

They went out, later, when the packing was done, into the blackout to a bar. Other friends came to join them.

“No one seems interested in my scheme to annex Liberia.”

“No imagination. They won’t take suggestions from outsiders. You know, Sonia, this war is developing into a kind of club enclosure on a race-course. If you aren’t wearing the right badge they won’t let you in.”

“I think that’s rather what Alastair felt.”

“It’s going to be a long war. There’s plenty of time. I shall wait until there’s something amusing to do.”

“I don’t believe it’s going to be that kind of war.”

This is all that anyone talks about, thought Ambrose; jobs and the kind of war it is going to be. War in the air, war of attrition, tank war, war of nerves, war of propaganda, war of defence in depth, war of movement, peoples’ war, total war, indivisible war, war infinite, war incomprehensible, war of essence without accidents or attributes, metaphysical war, war in time-space, war eternal…all war is nonsense, thought Ambrose. I don’t care about their war. It’s got nothing to do with me. But if, thought Ambrose, I were one of these people, if I were not a cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy, if I were not all that the Nazis mean when they talk about “degenerates,” if I were not a single, sane individual, if I were part of a herd, one of these people, normal and responsible for the welfare of my herd, Gawd strike me pink, thought Ambrose, I wouldn’t sit around discussing what kind of war it was going to be. I’d make it my kind of war. I’d set about killing and stampeding the other herd as fast and as hard as I could. Lord love a duck, thought Ambrose, there wouldn’t be any animals nosing about for suitable jobs in my herd.

“Bertie’s hoping to help control petrol in the Shetland Isles.”

“Algernon’s off to Syria on the most secret kind of mission.”

“Poor John hasn’t got anything yet.”

Cor chase my Aunt Fanny round a mulberry bush, thought Ambrose; what a herd.

So the leaves fell and the blackout grew earlier and earlier, and autumn became winter.

chapter 2 WINTER

Winter set in hard. Poland was defeated; east and west the prisoners rolled away to slavery. English infantry cut trees and dug trenches along the Belgian frontier. Parties of distinguished visitors went to the Maginot Line and returned, as though from a shrine, with souvenir-medals. Belisha was turned out; the radical papers began a clamour for his return and then suddenly shut up. Russia invaded Finland and the papers were full of tales of white-robed armies scouting through the forests. English soldiers on leave brought back reports of the skill and daring of Nazi patrols and of how much better the blackout was managed in Paris. A number of people were saying quietly and firmly that Chamberlain must go. The French said the English were not taking the war seriously, and the Ministry of Information said the French were taking it very seriously indeed. Sergeant instructors complained of the shortage of training stores. How could one teach the three rules of aiming without aiming discs?

The leaves fell in the avenue at Malfrey, and this year, where once there had been a dozen men to sweep them, there were now four, and two boys. Freddy was engaged in what he called “drawing in his horns a bit.” The Grinling Gibbons saloon and the drawing-rooms and galleries round it were shut up and shut off, carpets rolled, furniture sheeted, chandeliers bagged, windows shuttered and barred; hall and staircase stood empty and dark. Barbara lived in the little octagonal parlour which opened on the parterre; she moved the nursery over to the bedrooms next to hers; what had once been known as “the bachelors’ wing” in the Victorian days, when bachelors were hardy fellows who could put up with collegiate and barrack simplicity, was given over to the evacués. Freddy came over for the four good shoots which the estate provided; he made his guests stay out this year, one at the farm, three at the bailiff’s house, two at the Sothill Arms. Now, at the end of the season, he had some of the regiment over to shoot off the cocks; bags were small and consisted mostly of hens.

When Freddy came on leave, the central heating was lit; at other times an intense cold settled into the house; it was a system which had to be all or nothing; it would not warm Barbara’s corner alone but had to circulate, ticking and guggling, through furlongs of piping, consuming cartloads of coke daily. “Lucky we’ve got plenty of wood,” said Freddy; damp green logs were brought in from the park to smoke tepidly on the hearths. Barbara used to creep into the orangery to warm herself. “Must keep the heat up there,” said Freddy. “Got some very rare stuff in it. Man from Kew said some of the best in the country.” So Barbara had her writing table put there, and sat, absurdly, among tropical vegetation while outside, beyond the colonnade, the ground froze hard and the trees stood out white against the leaden sky.

Then, two days before Christmas, Freddy’s regiment was moved to another part of the country. He had friends with a commodious house in the immediate neighbourhood, where he spent his weekends, so the pipes were never heated and the chill in the house, instead of being a mere negation of warmth, became something positive and overwhelming. Soon after Christmas there was a great fall of snow and with the snow came Basil.

He came, as usual, unannounced. Barbara, embowered in palm and fern, looked up from her letter-writing to see him standing in the glass door. She ran to kiss him with a cry of delight. “Darling, how very nice. Have you come to stay?”

“Yes, Mother said you were alone.”

“I don’t know where we’ll put you. Things are very odd here. You haven’t brought anyone else, have you?” It was one of Freddy’s chief complaints that Basil usually came not only uninvited but attended by undesirable friends.

“No, no one. There isn’t anyone nowadays. I’ve come to write a book.”

“Oh, Basil. I am sorry. Is it as bad as that?” There was much that needed no saying between brother and sister. For years now, whenever things were very bad with Basil, he had begun writing a book. It was as near surrender as he ever came and the fact that these books — two novels, a book of travel, a biography, a work of contemporary history —never got beyond the first ten thousand words was testimony to the resilience of his character.

“A book on strategy,” said Basil. “I’m sick of trying to get ideas into the heads of the people in power. The only thing is to appeal over their heads to the thinking public. Chiefly, it is the case for the annexation of Liberia, but I shall touch on several other vital places as well. The difficulty will be to get it out in time to have any influence.”

“Mother said you were joining the Bombardier Guards.”

“Yes. Nothing came of it. They say they want younger men. It’s a typical Army paradox. They say we are too old now and that they will call us up in two years’ time. I shall bring that out in my book. The only logical policy is to kill off the old first, while there’s still some kick in them. I shan’t deal only with strategy. I shall outline a general policy for the nation.”

“Well it’s very nice to see you, anyway. I’ve been lonely.”

“I’ve been lonely.”

“What’s happened to everyone?”

“You mean Angela. She’s gone home.”

“Home?”

“That house we used to call Cedric’s Folly. It’s hers really of course. Cedric’s gone back to the Army. It’s scarcely credible but apparently he was a dashing young subaltern once. So there was the house and the Lyne hooligan and the Government moving in to make it a hospital, so Angela had to go back to see to things. It’s full of beds and nurses and doctors waiting for air raid victims and a woman in the village got appendicitis and she had to be taken forty miles to be operated on because she wasn’t an air raid victim and she died on the way. So Angela is carrying on a campaign about it and I shouldn’t he surprised if she doesn’t get something done. She seems to have made up her mind I ought to be killed. Mother’s the same. It’s funny. In the old days when from time to time there really were people gunning for me, no one cared a hoot. Now that I’m living in enforced safety and idleness, they seem to think it rather disgraceful,”

“No new girls?”

“There was one called Poppet Green. You wouldn’t have liked her. I’ve been having a very dull time. Alastair is a private at Brookwood. I went down to see them. He and Sonia have got a terrible villa on a golf course where he goes whenever he’s off duty. He says the worst thing about his training is the entertainments. They get detailed to go twice a week and the sergeant always picks on Alastair. He makes the same joke each time: ‘We’ll send the playboy.’ Otherwise it’s all very matey and soft, Alastair says… Peter has joined a very secret corps to go and fight in the Arctic. They had a long holiday doing winter sports in the Alps. I don’t suppose you’d remember Ambrose Silk. He’s starting a new magazine to keep culture alive.”

“Poor Basil. Well I hope you don’t have to write the book for long.” There was so much between brother and sister that did not need saying.

That evening Basil began his book; that is to say he lay on the rug before the column of smoke which rose from the grate of the octagonal parlour, and typed out a list of possible titles.

A Word to the Unwise.

Prolegomenon to Destruction.

Berlin or Cheltenham; the Choice for the General Staff.

Policy or Generalship; Some Questions Put by a Civilian to Vex the Professional Soldiers.

Policy or Professionalism.

The Gentle Art of Victory.

The Lost Art of Victory.

How to Win the War in Six Months; a Simple Lesson Book for Ambitious Soldiers.

They all looked pretty good to him and looking at the list Basil was struck anew, as he had been constantly struck during the preceding four months, with surprise that anyone of his ability should be unemployed at a time like the present. It makes one despair of winning, he thought.

Barbara sat beside him reading. She heard him sigh and put out a sisterly hand to touch his hair. “It’s terribly cold,” she said. “I wonder if it would be any good trying to blackout the orangery. Then we could sit there in the evenings.”

Suddenly there was a knock on the door and there entered a muffled, middle-aged woman; she wore fur gloves and carried an electric torch, dutifully dimmed with tissue paper; her nose was very red, her eyes were watering and she stamped snow off high rubber boots. It was Mrs. Fremlin of the Hollies. Nothing but bad news would have brought her out on a night like this. “I came straight in,” she said superfluously. “Didn’t want to stand waiting outside. Got some bad news. The Connollies are back.”

It was indeed bad news. In the few hours that he had been at Malfrey, Basil had heard a great deal about the Connollies.

“Oh God,” said Barbara. “Where are they?”

“Here, outside in the lobby.”

Evacuation to Malfrey had followed much the same course as it had in other parts of the country and had not only kept Barbara, as billeting officer, constantly busy, but had transformed her, in four months, from one of the most popular women in the countryside into a figure of terror. When her car was seen approaching, people fled through covered lines of retreat, through side doors and stable yards, into the snow, anywhere to avoid her persuasive, “But surely you could manage one more. He’s a boy this time and a very well-behaved little fellow” — for the urban authorities maintained a steady flow of refugees well in excess of the stream of returning malcontents. Few survived of the original party who had sat glumly on the village green on the first morning of war. Some had gone back immediately; others more reluctantly in response to ugly rumours of their husbands’ goings on; one had turned out to be a fraud, who, herself childless, had kidnapped a baby from a waiting perambulator in order to secure her passage to safety, so impressed had she been by the propaganda of the local officials. It was mostly children now who assembled, less glumly, on the village green, and showed the agricultural community how another part of the world lived. They were tolerated now as one of the troubles of the time. Some had even endeared themselves to their hosts. But everyone, when evacués were spoken of, implicitly excluded for all generalities the family of Connolly.

These had appeared as an act of God apparently without human agency; their names did not appear on any list; they carried no credentials; no one was responsible for them. They were found lurking under the seats of a carriage when the train was emptied on the evening of the first influx. They had been dragged out and stood on the platform where everyone denied knowledge of them, and since they could not be left there, they were included in the party that was being sent by bus to Malfrey village. From that moment they were on the list; they had been given official existence and their destiny was inextricably involved with that of Malfrey.

Nothing was ever discovered about the Connollies’ parentage. When they could be threatened or cajoled into speaking of their antecedents they spoke, with distaste, of an “Auntie.” To this woman, it seemed, the war had come as a Godsent release. She had taken her dependents to the railway station, propelled them into the crowd of milling adolescence, and hastily covered her tracks by decamping from home. Enquiry by the police in the street where the Connollies professed to have lived produced no other information than that the woman had been there and was not there any longer. She owed a little for milk; otherwise she had left no memorial on that rather unimpressionable district.

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large mouth and dark pig’s eyes. There was something of the Eskimo about her head but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for housebreaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents, which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom. Barbara took one look at them, looked again to see that her weary eyes were not playing tricks with her, and consigned them to the Mudges of Upper Lamstock, a tough farming family on a remote homestead.

Within a week Mr. Mudge was at the park, with the three children in the back of his milk truck. “It’s not for myself, Mrs. Sothill; I’m out and about all day and in the evenings I’m sleepy, and being with animals so much I don’t take on so. But it’s my old woman. She do take on and she won’t stand for it. She’ve locked herself in upstairs and she won’t come down till they’ve gone and when she do say that she means of it, Mrs. Sothill. We’re willing to do anything in reason to help the war, but these brats aren’t to be borne and that’s flat.”

“Oh dear, Mr. Mudge, which of them is giving trouble?”

“Why it’s all of ‘em, ma’am. There’s the boy was the best of ‘em at first though you can’t understand what he do say, speaking as they do where he come from. Nasty, unfriendly ways he had but he didn’t do much that you could call harm not till he’d seen me kill the goose. I took him out to watch to cheer him up like, and uncommon interested he was and I thought I’ll make a country lad of you yet. I gave him the head to play with and he seemed quite pleased. Then no sooner was I off down to the root field, than blessed if he didn’t get hold of a knife and when I came back supper-time there was six of my ducks dead and the old cat. Yes, mum, blessed if he hadn’t had the head off of our old yellow cat. Then the little un, she’s a dirty girl begging your pardon, mum. It’s not only her wetting the bed; she’ve wetted everywhere, chairs, floor and not only wetting, mum. Never seem to have been taught to be in a house where she comes from.”

“But doesn’t the elder girl do anything to help?”

“If you ask me, mum, she’s the worst of the lot. My old woman would stick it but for her, but it’s that Doris makes her take on like she do. Soft about the men, she is, mum. Why she even comes making up to me and I’m getting on to be her grandf’er. She won’t leave our Willie alone not for a minute, and he’s a bashful boy our Willie and he can’t get on with the work, her always coming after him. So there it is, mum. I’m sorry not to oblige but I’ve promised my old woman I won’t come back with ‘em and I dusn’t go back on what I’ve said.”

Mr. Mudge was the first of a succession of hosts. The longest that the Connollies stayed, in any place was ten days; the shortest was an hour and a quarter. In six weeks they had become a legend far beyond the parish. When influential old men at the Turf in London put their heads together and said, “The whole scheme has been a mistake. I was hearing last night some examples of the way some of the evacués are behaving…” the chances were that the scandal originated with the Connollies. They were cited in the House of Commons; there were paragraphs about them in official reports.

Barbara tried separating them, but in their first night apart Doris climbed out of her window and was lost for two days, to be found in a barn eight miles away, stupefied with cider; she gave no coherent account of her adventure. On the same evening Micky bit the wife of the roadman on whom he was quartered, so that the district nurse had to be called in; while Marlene had a species of seizure which aroused unfulfilled hopes that she might be dead. Everyone agreed that the only place for the Connollies was “an institution”; and at last, just before Christmas, after formalities complicated by the obscurity of their origins, to an institution they were sent; and Malfrey settled back to entertain its guests with a Christmas tree and a conjuror, with an air of relief which could be sensed for miles around. It was as though the All Clear had sounded after a night of terror. And now the Connollies were back.

“What’s happened, Mrs. Fremlin? Surely the Home can’t send them away.”

“It’s being evacuated. All the children are being sent back to the places they came from. Malfrey was the only address they had for the Connollies, so here they are. The Welfare Woman brought them to the Parish Hall. I was there with the Guides so I said I’d bring them up to you.”

“They might have warned us.”

“I expect they thought that if we had time we should try and stop them coming.”

“How right they were. Have the Connollies been fed?”

“I think so. At any rate Marlene was terribly sick in the car.”

“I’m dying to see these Connollies,” said Basil.

“You shall,” said his sister grimly.

But they were not in the lobby where they had been left. Barbara rang the bell. “Benson, you remember the Connolly children?”

“Vividly, madam.”

“They’re back.”

“Here, madam?”

“Here. Somewhere in the house. You’d better institute a search.”

“Very good, madam. And when they are found, they will be going away immediately?”

“Not immediately. They’ll have to stay here tonight. We’ll find somewhere for them in the village tomorrow.”

Benson hesitated. “It won’t be easy, madam.”

“It won’t be, Benson.”

He hesitated again; thought better of whatever he meant to say, and merely added: “I will start the search, madam.”

“I know what that means,” said Barbara as the man left them. “Benson is yellow.”

The Connollies were found at last and assembled. Doris had been in Barbara’s bedroom trying out her make-up, Micky in the library tearing up a folio, Marlene grovelling under the pantry sink eating the remains of the dogs’ dinners. When they were together again, in the lobby, Basil inspected them. Their appearance exceeded anything he had been led to expect. They were led away to the bachelors’ wing and put together into a large bedroom.

“Shall we lock the door?”

“It would be no good. If they want to get out, they will.”

“Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?” said Benson.

When Barbara returned she said, “Benson is yellow. He can’t take it.”

“Wants to leave?”

“It’s him or the Connollies, he says. I can’t blame him. Freddy will never forgive me if I let him go.”

“Babs, you’re blubbing.”

“Who wouldn’t?” said Barbara, pulling out a handkerchief and weeping in earnest. “I ask you, who wouldn’t?”

“Don’t be a chump,” said Basil, relapsing, as he often did with Barbara, into the language of the schoolroom. “I’ll fix it for you.”

“Swank. Chump yourself. Double chump.”

“Double chump with knobs on.”

“Darling Basil, it is nice to have you back. I do believe if anyone could fix it, you could.”

“Freddy couldn’t, could he?”

“Freddy isn’t here.”

“I’m cleverer than Freddy. Babs, say I’m cleverer than Freddy.”

“I’m cleverer than Freddy. Sucks to you.”

“Babs, say you love me more than Freddy.”

“You love me more than Freddy. Double sucks.”

“Say I, Barbara, love you, Basil, more than him, Freddy.”

“I won’t. I don’t… Beast, you’re hurting.”

“Say it.”

“Basil stop at once or I shall call Miss Penfold.” They were back twenty years, in the schoolroom again. “Miss Penfold, Miss Penfold, Basil’s pulling my hair.”

They scuffled on the sofa. Suddenly a voice said, ” ‘Ere, Missus.” It was Doris. “Missus!”

Barbara stood up, panting and dishevelled. “Well, Doris, what is it?”

“Marlene’s queer again.”

“Oh dear. I’ll come up. Run along.” Doris looked languishingly at Basil. ” ‘Aving a lark, eh?” she said. “I like a lark.”

“Run along, Doris. You’ll get cold.”

“I ain’t cold. Pull my hair if you like, mister.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Basil.

“Dessay I shall. I dream a lot of funny things. Go on, mister, pull it. Hard. I don’t mind.” She offered her bobbed head to Basil and then with a giggle ran out of the room.

“You see,” said Barbara. “A problem child.”

When Marlene had been treated for her queerness, Barbara came back to say good night.

“I’ll stay up a bit and work on this book.”

“All right, darling. Good night,” She bent over the back of the sofa and kissed the top of his head.

“Not blubbing any more?”

“No, not blubbing.”

He looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back; it was the same smile. They saw themselves, each in the other’s eyes. There’s no one like Basil, thought Barbara, seeing herself — no one like him, when he’s nice.

Next morning Basil was called by Benson, who was the only manservant indoors since Freddy had drawn in his horns. (He had taken his valet with him to the yeomanry and supported him now, in a very much lower standard of comfort, at the King’s expense.) Lying in bed and watching the man put out his clothes, Basil reflected that he still owed him a small sum of money from his last visit.

“Benson, what’s this about your leaving?”

“I was cross last night, Mr. Basil. I couldn’t ever leave Malfrey, and Mrs. Sothill ought to know that. Not with the Captain away, too.”

“Mrs. Sothill was very upset.”

“So was I, Mr. Basil. You don’t know what those Connollies are. They’re not human.”

“We’ll find a billet for them.”

“No one will take the Connollies in these parts. Not if they were given a hundred pounds.”

“I have an idea I owe you some money.”

“You do, Mr. Basil. Twelve pound ten.”

“As much as that? Time I paid it back.”

“It is.”

“I will, Benson.”

“I hope so, sir, I’m sure.”

Basil went to his bath pondering. No one will take the Connollies in these parts. Not for a hundred pounds. Not for a hundred pounds.

Since the war began Barbara had taken to breakfasting downstairs in the mistaken belief that it caused less trouble. Instead of the wicker bed-table tray, a table had to be laid in the small dining-room, the fire had to be lit there two hours earlier, silver dishes had to be cleaned and the wicks trimmed under them. It was an innovation deplored by all.

Basil found her crouched over the fire with her cup of coffee; she turned her curly black head and smiled; both of them had the same devastating combination of dark hair and clear blue eyes. Narcissus greeted Narcissus from the watery depths as Basil kissed her.

“Spoony,” she said.

“I’ve squared Benson for you.”

“Darling, how clever of you.”

“I had to give the old boy a fiver.”

“Liar.”

“All right, don’t believe me then.”

“I don’t, knowing Benson and knowing you. I remember last time you stayed here I had to pay him over ten pounds that you’d borrowed.”

“You paid him?”

“Yes. I was afraid he’d ask Freddy.”

“The old double-crosser. Anyway he’s staying.”

“Yes; thinking it over I knew he would. I don’t know why I took it so hard last night. I think it was the shock of seeing the Connollies.”

“We must get them settled to-day.”

“It’s hopeless. No one will take them.”

“You’ve got powers of coercion.”

“Yes, but I can’t possibly use them.”

“I can,” said Basil. “I shall enjoy it.”

After breakfast they moved from the little dining-room to the little parlour. The corridor, though it was one of the by-ways of the house, had a sumptuous cornice and a high, coved ceiling; the door cases were enriched with classic pediments in whose broken entablatures stood busts of philosophers and composers. Other busts stood at regular intervals on marble pedestals. Everything in Malfrey was splendid and harmonious; everything except Doris, who, that morning, lurked in their path rubbing herself on a pilaster like a cow on a stump.

“Hullo,” she said.

“Hullo, Doris. Where are Micky and Marlene?”

“Outside. They’re all right. They’ve found the snowman the others made and they’re mucking him up.”

“Run along and join them.”

“I want to stay here with you — and him.”

“I bet you do,” said Basil. “No such luck, I’m going to find you a nice billet miles and miles away.”

“I want to stay with you.”

“You go and help muck up the snowman.”

“That’s a kid’s game. I’m not a kid. Mister, why wouldn’t you pull my hair last night? Was it because you thought I had nits? I haven’t any more. The nurse combed them all out at the institution and put oil on. That’s why it’s a bit greasy.”

“I don’t pull girls’ hair.”

“You do. I saw you. You pulled hers. He’s your boy, isn’t he?” she said, turning to Barbara.

“He’s my brother, Doris.”

“Ah,” she said, her pig eyes dark with the wisdom of the slums, “but you fancy him, don’t you? I saw.”

“She really is an atrocious child,” said Barbara,

Basil set about the problem of finding a home for the Connollies with zeal and method. He settled himself at a table with an ordnance map, the local newspaper and the little red-leather-covered address book which had been one of old Mrs. Sothill’s legacies to Barbara; in this book were registered all her more well-to-do neighbours for a radius of twenty miles, the majority of whom were marked with the initials G.P.O. — which stood for Garden Party Only. Barbara had done her best to keep this invaluable work of reference up to date and had from time to time crossed out those who had died or left the district, and added the names of newcomers.

Presently Basil said, “What about the Harknesses of Old Mill House, North Grappling?”

“Middle-aged people. He retired from some sort of a job abroad. I think she’s musical. Why?”

“They’re advertising for boarders.” He pushed the paper across to her, where she read, in the Accommodation column:—

Paying Guests accepted in lovely modernized fifteenth century mill. Ideal surroundings for elderly or artistic people wishing to avoid war worries. All home produce. Secluded old world gardens. 6 gns weekly. Highest references given and expected. Harkness, Old Mill House, North Grappling.

“How about that for the Connollies?”

“Basil, you can’t.”

“Can’t I just. I’ll get to work on them at once. Do they allow you extra petrol for your billeting work?”

“Yes, but…”

“That’s grand. I’ll take the Connollies over there this morning. D’you know, this is the first piece of serious war work I’ve done so far?”

Normally, whenever the car left the garage there was a stampede of evacués to the running boards crying “Give us a ride.” This morning, however, seeing the three forbidding Connollies in the back seat, the other children fell back silently. They were not allowed by their mothers to play with the Connollies.

“Mister, why can’t I sit in front with you?”

“You’ve got to keep the other two in order.”

“They’ll be good.”

“That’s what you think.”

“They’ll be good if I tell them, mister.”

“Then why aren’t they?”

“Cos I tell ‘em to be bad. In fun you know. Where are we going?”

“I’m finding a new home for you, Doris.”

“Away from you?”

“Far away from me.”

“Mister, listen. Micky ain’t bad really nor Marlene isn’t silly. Are you, Marlene?”

“Not very silly,” said Marlene.

“She can be clean if she wants to be, if I tell her. See here, mister, play fair. You let us stay with you and I’ll see the kids behave themselves.”

“And what about you, Doris?”

“I don’t have to behave. I’m not a kid. Is it on?”

“It is not.”

“You going to take us away?”

“You bet I am.”

“Then just you wait and see what we give them where we’re going.”

“I shan’t wait and see,” said Basil, “but I’ve no doubt I shall hear about it in good time.”

North Grappling was ten miles distant, a stone-built village of uneven stone-tile roofs none of which was less than a century old. It lay off the main road in a fold of the hills; a stream ran through it following the line of its single street and crossing it under two old stone bridges. At the upper end of the street stood the church, which declared by its size and rich decoration that in the centuries since it was built, while the rest of the world was growing, North Grappling had shrunk; at the lower end, below the second bridge, stood Old Mill House. It was just such a home of ancient peace as a man might dream of who was forced to earn his living under a fiercer sky. Mr. Harkness had in fact dreamed of, it, year in, year out, as he toiled in his office at Singapore, or reclined after work on the club verandah, surrounded by gross vegetation and rude colours. He bought it from his father’s legacy while on leave, when he was still a young man, meaning to retire there when the time came, and his years of waiting had been haunted by only one fear: that he would return to find the place “developed,” new red roofs among the grey and a tarmac road down the uneven streets. But modernity spared North Grappling; he returned to find the place just as he had first come upon it, on a walking tour, late in the evening with the stones still warm from the afternoon sun and the scent of the gillyflowers sweet and fresh on the breeze.

This morning, half lost in snow, the stones, which in summer seemed grey, were a golden brown; and the pleached limes, which in their leaf hid the low front of the Old Mill, now revealed the mullions and drip-stones, the sundial above the long, centre window, and the stone hood of the door carved in the shape of a scallop-shell. Basil stopped the car by the bridge.

“Jesus,” said Doris. “You aren’t going to leave us here?”

“Sit tight,” said Basil. “You’ll know soon enough.” He threw a rug over the radiator of the car, opened the little iron gate and walked up the flagged path grimly, a figure of doom. The low winter sun cast his shadow before him, ominously, against the door which Mr. Harkness had had painted apple green. The gnarled trunk of a wistaria rose from beside the door-jamb and twisted its naked length between the lines of the windows. Basil glanced once over his shoulder to see that his young passengers were invisible and then put his hand to the iron bell. He heard it ring melodiously, not far away, and presently the door was opened by a maid dressed in apple green, with an apron of sprigged muslin and a starched white cap that was in effect part Dutch, part conventual, and wholly ludicrous. This figure of fancy led Basil up a step, down a step and into a living-room where he was left long enough to observe the decorations. The floor was covered in coarse rush matting and in places by bright Balkan rugs. On the walls were Thornton’s flower prints (with the exception of his masterpiece, “The Night-Flowering Cereus”), samplers and old maps. The most prominent objects of furniture were a grand piano and a harp. There were also some tables and chairs of raw-looking beech. From an open hearth peat smoke billowed periodically into the room, causing Basil’s eyes to water. It was just such a room as Basil had imagined from the advertisement and Mr. and Mrs. Harkness were just such a couple. Mrs. Harkness wore a hand-woven woollen garment, her eyes were large and poetic, her nose long and red with the frost, her hair nondescript in colour and haphazard in arrangement. Her husband had done all that a man can to disguise the effects of twenty years of club and bungalow life in the Far East. He had grown a little pointed beard; he wore a homespun suit of knickerbockers in the style of the pioneers of bicycling; he wore a cameo ring round his loose silk tie, yet there was something in his bearing which still suggested the dapper figure in white ducks who had stood his round of pink gins, evening after evening, to other dapper white figures, and had dined twice a year at Government House.

They entered from the garden door. Basil half expected Mr. Harkness to say “take a pew” and clap his hands for the gin. Instead they stood looking at him with enquiry and some slight distaste.

“My name is Seal. I came about your advertisement in the Courier.”

“Our advertisement. Ah yes,” said Mr. Harkness vaguely. “It was just an idea we had. We felt a little ashamed here, with so much space and beauty; the place is a little large for our requirements these days. We did think that perhaps if we heard of a few people like ourselves — the same simple tastes — we might, er, join forces as it were during the present difficult times. As a matter of fact we have one newcomer with us already. I don’t think we really want to take anyone else, do we, Agnes?”

“It was just an idle thought,” said Mrs. Harkness. “A green thought in a green place.”

“This is not a Guest House, you know. We take in paying guests. Quite a different thing.”

Basil understood their difficulties with a keenness of perception that was rare to him. “It’s not for myself that I was enquiring,” he said.

“Ah, that’s different. I daresay we might take in one or two more if they were, if they were really…”

Mrs. Harkness helped him out. “If we were sure they were the kind of people who would be happy here.”

“Exactly. It is essentially a happy house.”

(It was like his housemaster at school. “We are essentially a keen House, Seal. We may not win many cups but at least we try.”)

“I can see it is,” he said gallantly.

“I expect you’d like to look round. It looks quite a little place from the road but is surprisingly large, really, when you come to count up the rooms.”

A hundred years ago the pastures round North Grappling had all been corn-growing land and the mill had served a wide area. Long before the Harknesses’ time it had fallen into disuse and, in the eighties, had been turned into a dwelling house by a disciple of William Morris. The stream had been diverted, the old mill pool drained and levelled and made into a sunken garden. The rooms that had held the grindstones and machinery, and the long lofts where the grain had been stored, had been tactfully floored and plastered and partitioned. Mrs. Harkness pointed out all the features with maternal pride.

“Are your friends who were thinking of coming here artistic people?”

“No, I don’t think you could call them that.”

“They don’t write?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve always thought this would be an ideal place for someone who wanted to write. May I ask, what are your friends?”

“Well, I suppose you might call them evacuees.”

Mr. and Mrs. Harkness laughed pleasantly at the little joke. “Townsfolk in search of sanctuary, eh?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, they will find it here, eh, Agnes?”

They were back in the living-room. Mrs. Harkness laid her hand on the gilded neck of the harp and looked out across the sunken garden with a dreamy look in her large grey eyes. Thus she had looked out across the Malaya golf course, dreaming of home.

“I like to think of this beautiful old house still being of use in the world. After all it was built for use. Hundreds of years ago it gave bread to the people. Then with the change of the times it was left forlorn and derelict. Then it became a home, but it was still out of the world, shut off from the life of the people. And now at last it comes into its own again. Fulfilling a need. You may think me fanciful,” she said, remote and whimsical, “but in the last few weeks I feel sometimes I can see the old house smiling to itself and hear the old timbers whispering, ‘They thought we were no use. They thought we were old stickin-the-muds. But they can’t get on without us, all these busy go-ahead people. They come back to us when they’re in trouble.’”

“Agnes was always a poet,” said Mr. Harkness. “I have had to be the practical housewife. You saw our terms in the advertisement?”

“Yes.”

“They may have seemed to you a little heavy, but you must understand that our guests live exactly as we do ourselves. We live simply but we like our comfort. Fires,” he said, backing slightly from the belch of aromatic smoke which issued into the room as he spoke. “The garden,” he said, indicating the frozen and buried enclosure outside the windows. “In the summer we take our meals under the old mulberry tree. Music. Every week we have chamber music. There are certain imponderabilia at the Old Mill which, to be crude, have their market value. I don’t think,” he said coyly, “I don’t think that in the circumstances” — and the circumstances, Basil felt, surely were meant to include a good fat slice of Mrs. Harkness’s poetic imagination — “six guineas is too much to ask,”

The moment for which Basil had been waiting was come. This was the time for the grenade he had been nursing ever since he opened the little, wrought-iron gate and put his hand to the wrought-iron bell-pull. “We pay eight shillings and sixpence a week,” he said. That was the safety pin; the lever flew up, the spring struck home; within the serrated metal shell the primer spat and, invisibly, flame crept up the finger’s-length of fuse. Count seven slowly, then throw. One, two, three, four …

“Eight shillings?” said Mr. Harkness. “I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding.”

Five, six, seven. Here it comes. Bang! “Perhaps I should have told you at once. I am the billeting officer. I’ve three children for you in the car outside.”

It was magnificent. It was war. Basil was something of a specialist in shocks. He could not recall a better.

After the first tremendous silence there were three stages of Harkness reaction: the indignant appeal to reason and justice, then the humble appeal to mercy, then the frigid and dignified acceptance of the inevitable.

First:—

“I shall telephone to Mrs. Sothill…I shall go and see the County authorities…I shall write to the Board of Education and the Lord Lieutenant. This is perfectly ridiculous; there must be a hundred cottagers who would be glad to take these children in.”

“Not these children,” said Basil. “Besides, you know, this is a war for democracy. It looks awfully bad if the rich seem to be shirking their responsibilities.”

“Rich. It’s only because we find it so hard to make both ends meet that we take paying guests at all.”

“Besides this is a most unsuitable place for children. They might fall into the stream and be drowned. There’s no school within four miles…”

Second:—

“We’re not as young as we were. After living so long in the East the English winter is very difficult. Any additional burden …”

“Mr. Seal, you’ve seen for yourself this lovely old house and the kind of life we live here. Don’t you feel that there is something different here, something precious that could so easily be killed?”

“It’s just this kind of influence these children need,” said Basil cheerfully. “They’re rather short on culture at the moment.”

Third:—

A hostility as cold as the winter hillside above the village. Basil led the Connollies up the flagged path, through the apple-green door, into the passage which smelled of peat smoke and pot-pourri. “I’m afraid they haven’t any luggage,” he said. “This is Doris, this is Micky, and that — that is little Marlene. I expect after a day or two you’ll wonder how you ever got on without them. We meet that over and over again in our work; people who are a little shy of children to begin with, and soon want to adopt them permanently. Good-bye, kids, have a good time. Good-bye,

Mrs. Harkness. We shall drop in from time to time just to see that everything is all right.”

And Basil drove back through the naked lanes with a deep interior warmth which defied the gathering blizzard.

That night there was an enormous fall of snow, telephone wires were down, the lane to North Grappling became impassable, and for eight days the Old Mill was cut off physically, as for so long it had been cut in spirit, from all contact with the modern world.

Barbara and Basil sat in the orangery after luncheon. The smoke from Basil’s cigar hung on the humid air, a blue line of cloud, motionless, breast-high between the paved floor and the exotic foliage overhead. He was reading aloud to his sister.

“So much for the supply services,” he said, laying down the last sheet of manuscript. The book had prospered during the past week.

Barbara awoke, so gently that she might never have been asleep. “Very good,” she said. “First-class.”

“It ought to wake them up,” said Basil.

“It ought,” said Barbara, on whom the work had so different an effect. Then she added irrelevantly, “I hear they’ve dug the way through to North Grappling this morning.”

“There was providence in that fall of snow. It’s let the Connollies and the Harknesses get properly to grips. Otherwise, I feel, one or other side might have despaired.”

“I daresay we shall hear something of the Harknesses shortly.”

And immediately, as though they were on the stage, Benson came to the door and announced that Mr. Harkness was in the little parlour.

“I must see him,” said Barbara.

“Certainly not,” said Basil — “This is my war effort,” and followed Benson into the house.

He had expected some change in Mr. Harkness but not so marked a change as he now saw. The man was barely recognizable. It was as though the crust of tropical respectability that had survived below the homespun and tiering surface had been crushed to powder; the man was abject. The clothes were the same. It must be imagination which gave that trim beard a raffish look, imagination fired by the haunted look in the man’s eyes.

Basil on his travels had once visited a prison in Trans-Jordan where an ingenious system of punishment had been devised. The institution served the double purpose of penitentiary and lunatic asylum. One of the madmen was a tough old Arab of peculiar ferocity who could be subdued by one thing only — the steady gaze of the human eye. Bat an eyelid, and he was at you. Refractory convicts were taken to this man’s cell and shut in with him for periods of anything up to forty-eight hours according to the gravity of their offences. Day and night the madman lurked in his corner with his eyes fixed, fascinated, on those of the delinquent. The heat of midday was his best opportunity; then even the wariest convict sometimes allowed his weary eyelids to droop and in that moment he was across the floor, tooth and nail, in a savage attack. Basil had seen a gigantic felon led out after a two days’ session. There was something in Mr. Harkness’ eyes that brought the scene back vividly to him.

“I am afraid my sister’s away,” said Basil. Whatever hope had ever been in Mr. Harkness’ breast died when he saw his old enemy. “You are Mrs. Sothill’s brother?”

“Yes; we are thought rather alike. I’m helping her here now that my brother-in-law’s away. Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” he said brokenly. “No. It doesn’t matter. I’d hoped to see Mrs. Sothill. When will she be back?”

“You can never tell,” said Basil. “Most irresponsible in some ways. Goes off for months at a time. But this time she has me to watch out for her. Was it about your evacués you wanted to see her? She was very glad to hear they had been happily settled. It meant she could go away with a

clear conscience. That particular family had been something of an anxiety, if you understand me.”

Mr. Harkness sat down uninvited. He sat on a gilt chair in that bright little room like a figure of death. He seemed disposed neither to speak nor to move.

“Mrs. Harkness well?” said Basil affably.

“Prostrate.”

“And your paying guest?”

“She left this morning — as soon as the road was cleared. Our two maids went with her.”

“I hope Doris is making herself useful about the house.”

At the mention of that name Mr. Harkness broke. He came clean. “Mr. Seal, I can’t stand it. We neither of us can. We’ve come to the end. You must take those children away.”

“You surely wouldn’t suggest sending them back to Birmingham to be bombed?”

This was an argument which Barbara often employed with good effect. As soon as Basil spoke he realized it was a false step. Suffering had purged Mr. Harkness of all hypocrisy. For the first time something like a smile twisted his lips.

“There is nothing would delight me more,” he said.

“Tut, tut. You do yourself an injustice. Anyway it is against the law. I should like to help you. What can you suggest?”

“I thought of giving them weed-killer,” said Mr. Harkness wistfully.

“Yes,” said Basil, “that would be one way. Do you think Marlene could keep it down?”

“Or hanging.”

“Come, come, Mr. Harkness, this is mere wishful thinking. We must be more practical.”

“Everything I’ve thought of has had death in it; ours or theirs.”

“I’m sure there must be a way,” said Basil, and then, delicately, watching Mr. Harkness while he spoke for any expression of distrust or resentment, he outlined a scheme which had come to him, vaguely, when he first saw the Connollies, and had grown more precise during the past week. “The difficulty about billeting on the poor,” he said, “is that the allowance barely covers what the children eat. Of course where they are nice, affectionate children people are often glad enough to have them. But one wouldn’t call the Connollies nice or affectionate —” Mr. Harkness groaned. “They are destructive, too. Well I needn’t tell you that. The fact is that it would be inflicting a very considerable hardship — a financial hardship — to put them in a cottage. Now if the meagre allowance paid by the Government were supplemented — do you follow me?”

“You mean I might pay someone to take them. Of course I will, anything — at least almost anything. How much shall I offer? How shall I set about it?”

“Leave it to me,” said Basil, suddenly dropping his urbane manner. “What’s it worth to you to have those children moved?”

Mr. Harkness hesitated; with the quickening of hope came a stir of self-possession. One does not work in the East without acquiring a nose for a deal. “I should think a pound a week would make all the difference to a poor family,” he said.

“How about a lump sum? People — poor people that is — will often be dazzled by the offer of a lump sum who wouldn’t consider an allowance.”

“Twenty-five pounds.”

“Come, Mr. Harkness, that’s what you proposed paying over six months. The war is going to last longer than that.”

“Thirty. I can’t go higher than thirty.”

He was not a rich man, Basil reflected; very likely thirty was all he could afford. “I daresay I could find someone to take them for that,” he said. “Of course you realize that this is all highly irregular.”

“Oh, I realize that.” Did he? Basil wondered; perhaps he did. “Will you fetch those children to-day?”

“Today?”

“Without fail.” Mr. Harkness seemed to be dictating terms now. “The cheque will be waiting for you. I will make it out to bearer.”

“What a long time you’ve been,” said Barbara. “Have you pacified him?”

“I’ve got to find a new home for the Connollies.”

“Basil, you’ve let him off!”

“He was so pathetic. I softened.”

“Basil, how very unlike you.”

“I must get to work with that address book again. We shall have to have the Connollies here for the night. I’ll find them a new home in the morning.”

He drove over to North Grappling in the twilight. On either side of the lane the new-dug snow was heaped high, leaving a narrow, passable track. The three Connollies were standing outside the apple-green door waiting for him. “The man with the beard said to give you this,” said Doris. It was an envelope containing a cheque; nothing more. Neither Harkness appeared to see them off.

“Mister, am I glad to see you again!” said Doris.

“Jump in,” said Basil.

“May I come in front with you?”

“Yes, jump in.”

“Really? No kidding?”

“Come on, it’s cold.” Doris got in beside Basil. “You’re here on sufferance.”

“What does that mean?”

“You can sit here as long as you behave yourself, and as long as Mickey and Marlene do too. Understand?”

“Hear that, you brats?” said Doris with sudden authority. “Behave, or I’ll tan yer arses for yer. They’ll be all right, mister, if I tell ‘em.”

They were all right.

“Doris, I think it’s a very good game of yours making the kids be a nuisance, but we’re going to play it my way in future. When you come to the house where I live you’re to behave, always. See? I may take you to other houses from time to time. There you can usually be as bad as you like, but not until I give the word. See?”

“O.K. partner. Give us a cig.”

“I’m beginning to like you, Doris.”

“I love you,” said Doris with excruciating warmth, leaning back and blowing a cloud of smoke over the solemn children in the back. “I love you more than anyone I ever seen.”

“Their week with the Harknesses seems to have had an extraordinary effect on the children,” said Barbara after dinner that night. “I can’t understand it.”

“Mr. Harkness said there were imponderabilia at Mill House. Perhaps it’s that.”

“Basil, you’re up to something. I wish I knew what it was.”

Basil turned on her his innocent blue eyes, as blue as hers and as innocent; they held no hint of mischief. “Just war work, Babs,” he said.

“Slimy snake.”

“I’m not.”

“Crawly spider.” They were back in the schoolroom, in the world where once they had played pirates. “Artful monkey,” said Barbara, very fondly.

Companies paraded at quarter-past eight; immediately after inspection men were fallen out for the company commanders’ orderly room; that gave time to sift out the genuine requests from the spurious, deal with minor offences, have the charge sheets made out properly and the names entered in the guard report of serious defaulters for the C.O.

“Private Tatton charged with losing by neglect one respirator, anti-gas, value 18/6.”

Private Tatton fell into a rambling account of having left this respirator in the N.A.A.F.I. and, going back for it ten minutes later, having found it gone.

“Case remanded for the commanding officer.” Captain Mayfield could not give a punishment involving loss of pay.

“Case remanded for the commanding officer. About turn. As you were. I didn’t say anything about saluting. About turn. Quick march.”

Captain Mayfield turned to the IN basket on his table.

“O.C.T.U. candidates,” said the Company Sergeant-Major.

“Who have we got? The Adjutant doesn’t take nil returns.”

“Well, sir, there’s Brodie.”

Brodie was a weedy solicitor who had appeared with the last draft.

“Really, Sergeant-Major, I can’t see Brodie making much of an officer.”

“He’s not much good in the company, sir, and he’s a man of very superior education.”

“Well put him down for one. What about Sergeant Harris?”

“Not suitable, sir.”

“He’s a man of excellent character, fine disciplinarian, knows his stuff backwards, the men will follow him anywhere.”

“Yessir.”

“Well what have you got against him?”

“Nothing against him, sir. But we can’t get on without Sergeant Harris in the company football.”

“No. Well, who do you suggest?”

“There’s our baronet, sir.” The Sergeant-Major said this with a smile. Alastair’s position in the ranks was a slight embarrassment to Captain Mayfield but it was a good joke to the Sergeant-Major.

“Trumpington? All right, I’ll see him and Brodie right away.”

The orderly brought them. The Sergeant-Major marched them in singly. “Quick march. Halt. Salute. Brodie, sir.”

“Brodie. They want the names of two men from this company as O.C.T.U. candidates. I’m putting your name in. Of course the C.O. makes the decision. I don’t say you will go to an O.C.T.U. I take it you would have no objection if the C.O. approves.”

“None, sir, if you really think I should make a good officer.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll make a good officer. They’re very rare. But I daresay you’ll make an officer of some kind.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And as long as you’re in my company you won’t come into my office with a fountain pen sticking out of your pocket.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Not so much talk,” said the Sergeant-Major.

“All right, that’s all, Sergeant-Major.”

“About turn. Quick march. As you were. Swing the right arm forward as you step out.”

“I believe we’ll have to give him a couple of stripes before we can get rid of him. I’ll see the Adjutant about that.”

Alastair was marched in. He had changed little since he joined the Army. Perhaps there was a slight shifting of bulk from waistline to chest, but it was barely perceptible under the loose battledress.

Captain Mayfield addressed him in precisely the same words as those he had used to Brodie.

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t want to take a commission?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s very unusual, Trumpington. Any particular reason?”

“I believe a lot of people felt like that in the last war.”

“So I’ve heard. And a very wasteful business it was. Well if you won’t, I can’t make you. Afraid of responsibility, eh?”

Alastair made no answer. Captain Mayfield nodded and the Sergeant-Major marched him out.

“What d’you make of that?” asked Captain Mayfield.

“I’ve known men who think its safer to stay in the ranks.”

“Shouldn’t think that’s the case with Trumpington. He’s a volunteer, over-age to have been called up.”

“Very rum, sir.”

“Very rum, Sergeant-Major.”

Alastair took his time about returning to his platoon. At this time of the morning they were doing P.T. It was the one part of the routine he really hated. He lurked behind the cookhouse until his watch told him that they would have finished. When he reported back the platoon were putting on their jackets, panting and sticky. He fell in and marched with them to the dining-hut, where it was stuffy and fairly warm, to hear a lecture on hygiene from the medical officer. It dealt with the danger of flies; the medical officer described with appalling detail the journey of the fly from the latrine to the sugar basin; how its hairy feet carried the germs of dysentery; how it softened its food with contaminated saliva before it ate; how it excreted while it fed. This lecture always went down well. “Of course,” he added rather lamely, “this may not seem very important at the moment” — snow lay heavy on every side of them — “but if we go to the East…”

When the lecture was finished the company fell out for twenty minutes; they smoked and ate chocolate and exchanged gossip; qualifying every noun, verb or adjective with the single, unvarying obscenity which punctuated all their speech like a hiccup; they stamped their feet and chafed their hands.

“What did the––company commander want?”

“He wanted to send me to a––O.C.T.U.,” said Alastair.

“Well some––are––lucky. When are you off?”

“I’m staying here.”

“Don’t you want to be a––officer?”

“Not––likely,” said Alastair.

When people asked Alastair, as they quite often did, why he did not put in for a commission, he sometimes said, “Snobbery. I don’t want to meet the officers on social terms”; sometimes he said, “Laziness. They work too hard in wartime”; sometimes he said, “The whole thing’s so crazy one might as well go the whole hog.” To Sonia he said, “We’ve had a pretty easy life up to now. It’s probably quite good for one to have a change sometimes.” That was the nearest he ever came to expressing the nebulous satisfaction which lay at the back of his mind. Sonia understood it, but left it undefined. Once, much later, she said to Basil, “I believe I know what Alastair felt all that first winter of the war. It sounds awfully unlike him, but he was a much odder character than anyone knew. You remember that man who used to dress as an Arab and then went into the Air Force as a private because the thought the British Government had let the Arabs down? I forget his name but there were lots of books about him…. Well, I believe Alastair felt like that. You see he’d never done anything for the country and though we were always broke we had lots of money really and lots of fun. I believe he thought that perhaps if we hadn’t had so much fun perhaps there wouldn’t have been any war. Though how he could blame himself for Hitler I never quite saw…At least I do now in a way,” she added. “He went into the ranks as a kind of penance or whatever it’s called, that religious people are always supposed to do.”

It was a penance whose austerities, such as they were, admitted of relaxation.

After the stand-easy they fell in for platoon training. Alastair’s platoon commander was away that morning. He was sitting on a Court of Enquiry. For three hours he and two other officers heard evidence, and recorded it at length, on the loss of a swill tub from H.Q. lines. At length it was clear that there was a conspiracy of perjury on the part of all the witnesses, or that the tub had disappeared by some supernatural means independent of human agency; the Court therefore entered a verdict that no negligence was attributable to anyone in the matter and recommended that the loss be made good out of public funds. The President said, “I don’t expect the C.O. will approve that verdict. He’ll send the papers back for fresh evidence to be taken.”

Meanwhile the platoon, left in charge of the Sergeant, split up into sections and practised immediate action on the Bren gun.

“Gun fires two rounds and stops again. What do you look at now, Trumpington?”

“Gas regulator.”…Off with the magazine. Press, pull back, press… “Number Two gun clear.”

“What’s he forgotten?”

A chorus, “Butt strap.”

One man said, “Barrel-locking nut.” He had said it once, one splendid day, when asked a question, and he had been right when everyone else was stumped, and he had been commended. So now he always said it, like a gambler obstinately backing the same colour against a long run of bad luck; it was bound to turn up again one day.

The Corporal ignored him. “Quite right, he’s forgotten the butt strap. Down again, Trumpington.”

It was Saturday. Work ended at twelve o’clock; as the platoon commander was away, they knocked off ten minutes earlier and got all the gear stowed so that as soon as the call was sounded off on the bugle they could run straight for their quarters. Alastair had his leave pass for reveille on Monday. He had no need to fetch luggage. He kept everything he needed at home. Sonia was waiting in the car outside the guardroom; they did not go away for weekends but spent them, mostly in bed, in the furnished house which they had taken near by.

“I was pretty good with the Bren this morning,” said Alastair. “Only one mistake.”

“Darling, you are clever.”

“And I managed to shirk P.T.”

They had packed up ten minutes early too; altogether it had been a very satisfactory morning. And now he could look forward to a day and a half of privacy and leisure.

“I’ve been shopping in Woking,” said Sonia, “and I’ve got all kinds of delicious food and all the weekly papers. There’s a film there we might go and see.”

“We might,” said Alastair doubtfully. “It will probably be full of a lot of––soldiers.”

“Darling, I’ve never before heard words like that spoken. I thought they only came in print, in novels.”

Alastair had a bath and changed into tweeds. (It was chiefly in order that he might wear civilian clothes that he stayed indoors during weekends; for that and the cold outside and the ubiquitous military.) Then he took a whisky-and-soda and watched Sonia cooking; they had fried eggs, sausages, bacon, and cold plum pudding; after luncheon he lit a large cigar; it was snowing again, piling up round the steel-framed windows, shutting out the view of the golf course; there was a huge fire and at tea-time they toasted crumpets.

“There’s all this evening, and all tomorrow,” said Sonia. “Isn’t it lovely? You know, Alastair, you and I always seem to manage to have fun, don’t we, wherever we are?”

This was February 1940, in that strangely cozy interlude between peace and war, when there was leave every weekend and plenty to eat and drink and plenty to smoke, when France stood firm on the Maginot Line and the Finns stood firm in Finland, and everyone said what a cruel winter they must be having in Germany. During one of these weekends Sonia conceived a child.

As Mr. Bentley had foretold, it was not long before Ambrose found himself enrolled on the staff of the Ministry of Information. He was in fact one of the reforms introduced at the first of the many purges. Questions had been asked about the Ministry in the House of Commons; the Press, hampered in so much else, was free to exploit its own grievances. Redress was promised and after a week of intrigue the new appointments were made. Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers went to the Folk-dancing Department; Mr. Pauling went to Woodcuts and Weaving; Mr. Digby-Smith was given the Arctic Circle; Mr. Bentley himself, after a dizzy period in which, for a day, he directed a film about postmen, for another day filed press-cuttings from Istanbul, and for the rest of the week supervised the staff catering, found himself at length back beside his busts in charge of the men of letters. Thirty or forty officials retired thankfully into competitive commercial life, and forty or fifty new men and women appeared to take their places; among them, he never quite knew how, Ambrose. The Press, though sceptical of good results, congratulated the public upon maintaining a system of government in which the will of the people was given such speedy effect. The lesson of the muddle at the Ministry of Information — for muddle there undoubtedly was — is not that such things occur under a democracy, but that they are susceptible to remedy, they wrote; the wind of democratic criticism has blown, clear and fresh, through the departments of the Ministry; charges have been frankly made and frankly answered. Our enemies may ponder this portent. Ambrose’s post as sole representative of Atheism in the Religious Department was not, at this stage of the war, one of great importance. He was in no position, had he wished it, to introduce statuary into his quarters. He had for his use a single table and a single chair. He shared a room and a secretary with a fanatical young Roman Catholic layman who never tired of exposing discrepancies between Mein Kampf and the encyclical Quadragesimo anno, a bland nonconformist minister, and a Church of England clergyman who had been brought in to succeed the importer of the mahogany prie-dieu. “We must reorientate ourselves to Geneva,” this cleric said; “the first false step was taken when the Lytton report was shelved.” He argued long and gently, the Roman Catholic argued long and fiercely, while the nonconformists sat as a bemused umpire between them. Ambrose’s task consisted in representing to British and colonial atheists that Nazism was at heart agnostic with a strong tinge of religious superstition; he envied the lot of his colleagues who had at their finger-tips long authentic summaries of suppressed Sunday Schools, persecuted monks, and pagan Nordic rites. His was uphill work; he served a small and critical public; but whenever he discovered in the pile of foreign newspapers which passed from desk to desk any reference to German church-going, he circulated it to the two or three magazines devoted to his cause. He counted up the number of times the word “God” appeared in Hitler’s speeches and found the sum impressive; he wrote a pointed little article to show that Jew-baiting was religious in origin. He did his best, but time lay heavy on his hands and, more and more, as the winter wore on, he found himself slipping away from his rancorous colleagues, to the more human companionship of Mr. Bentley.

The great press of talent in search of occupation which had thronged the Ministry during its first weeks had now dropped to a mere handful; the doorkeeper was schooled to detect and deter the job seekers. No one wanted another reorganization for some time to come. Mr. Bentley’s office became an enclave of culture in a barbaric world. It was here that the Ivory Tower was first discussed.

“Art for Art’s sake, Geoffrey. Back to the lily and the lotus, away from these dusty young immortelles, these dandelions sprouting on the vacant lot.”

“A kind of new Yellow Book,” suggested Mr. Bentley sympathetically.

Ambrose turned sharply from his contemplation of Mrs. Siddons. “Geoffrey. How can you be so unkind?”

“My dear Ambrose…”

“That’s just what they’ll call it.”

“Who will?”

“Parsnip,” said Ambrose with venom, “Pimpernell, Poppet and Tom. They’ll say we’re deserting the workers’ cause.”

“I’m not aware that I ever joined it,” said Mr. Bentley. “I claim to be one of the very few living Liberals.”

“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by economists.”

“I haven’t.”

“For years now we’ve allowed ourselves to think of nothing but concrete mixers and tractors.”

“I haven’t,” said Mr. Bentley crossly. “I’ve thought a great deal about Nolleykins.”

“Well,” said Ambrose, “I’ve had enough. Il faut en finir” — and added: “Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts.”

Later he said, “I was never a Party member.”

“Party?”

“Communist Party. I was what they call, in their horrible jargon, a fellow traveller.”

“Ah.”

“Geoffrey, they do the most brutal things, don’t they, to Communists who try to leave the Party?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Geoffrey, you don’t think they’d do that to fellow travellers, do you?”

“I don’t expect so.”

“But they might?”

“Oh yes, they might.”

“Oh dear.”

Later he said, “You know, Geoffrey, even in fascist countries they have underground organizations. Do you think the underground organizations would get hold of us?”

“Who?”

“The fellow travellers.”

“Really it’s too ridiculous to talk like this of fellow travellers and the underground. It sounds like strap-hangers on the Bakerloo railway.”

“It’s all very well for you to laugh. You were never one of them.”

“But my dear Ambrose, why should these political friends of yours mind so very much, if you produce a purely artistic paper?”

“I heard of a cellist in America. He’d been a member of the Party and he accepted an invitation to play at an anniversary breakfast of the Revolutionary Dames. It was during the Scottsboro trials when feeling was running high. They tied him to a lamppost and covered him with tar and set him on fire.”

“The Revolutionary Dames did?”

“No, no, the Communists.”

After a long pause he said:—

“But Russia’s doing very badly in Finland.”

“Yes.”

“If only we knew what was going to happen.”

He returned pensively to the Religious Department. “This is more in your line than mine,” said the Catholic representative, handing him a cutting from a Swiss paper.

It said that Storm Troopers had attended a Requiem Mass in Salzburg. Ambrose clipped it to a piece of paper and wrote “Copies to Free Thought, the Atheist Advertiser, and to Godless Sunday at Home”; then he placed it in his basket marked OUT. Two yards distant the nonconformist minister was checking statistics about the popularity of beer-gardens among Nazi officials. The Church of England clergyman was making the most of some rather scrappy Dutch information about cruelty to animals in Bremen. There was no foundation here for an ivory tower, thought Ambrose, no cloud to garland its summit, and his thoughts began to soar larklike into a tempera, fourteenth-century sky; into a heaven of flat, blank blue with white clouds, cross-hatched with gold leaf on their sunward edges; a vast altitude painted with shaving soap on a panel of lapis lazuli; he stood on a high, sugary pinnacle, on a new Tower of Babel; like a muezzin calling his message to a world of domes and clouds; beneath him, between him and the absurd little figures bobbing and bending on their striped praying mats, lay fathoms of clear air where doves sported with the butterflies.

Most of Mrs. Sothill’s Garden Party Only list were people of late middle age who, on retirement from work in the cities or abroad, had bought the smaller manor houses and the larger rectories; houses that once had been supported on the rent of a thousand acres and a dozen cottages now went with a paddock and a walled garden, and their life subsisted on unsupported pensions and savings. To these modest landholders the rural character of the neighborhood was a matter of particular jealousy. Magnates like Freddy would eagerly sell off outlying farms for development. It was the G.P.O. list who suffered and protested. A narrow corner could not be widened or a tree lopped to clear the telegraph wires without it being noted and regretted in those sunny morning-rooms. These were benevolent, companionable people; their carefully limited families were “out in the world” and came to them only for occasional visits. Their daughters had flats and jobs and lives of their own in London; their sons were self-supporting in the services and in business. The tribute of Empire flowed gently into the agricultural countryside, tithe barns were converted into village halls, the boy scouts had a new bell tent and the district nurse a motor car; the old box pews were taken out of the churches, the galleries demolished, the Royal Arms and the Ten Commandments moved from behind the altar and replaced with screens of blue damask supported at the four corners with gilt Sarum angels; the lawns were close-mown, fertilized and weeded, and from their splendid surface rose clumps of pampas grass and yucca; year in, year out, gloved hands grubbed in the rockeries, gloved hands snipped in the herbaceous borders; baskets of bass stood beside trays of visiting-cards on the hall tables. Now in the dead depths of winter when ice stood thick on the lily ponds, and the kitchen gardens at night were a litter of sacking, these good people fed the birds daily with the crumbs from the dining-room table and saw to it that no old person in the village went short of coal.

It was this unfamiliar world that Basil contemplated in the leather-bound pages of Mrs. Sothill’s address book. He contemplated it as a marauder might look down from the hills into the fat pastures below; as Hannibal’s infantry had looked down from the snow-line as the first elephants tried the etched footholds which led to the Lombardy plains below them and went lurching and trumpeting over the edge.