Put Out More Flags

After the successful engagement at North Grappling, Basil took Doris into the nearest town and fed her liberally on fried fish and chipped potatoes; afterwards he took her to the cinema, allowed her to hold his hand in a fierce and sticky grasp throughout the length of two deeply sentimental films, and brought her back to Malfrey in a state of entranced docility.

“You don’t like blondes, do you?” she asked anxiously in the car.

“Yes, very much.”

“More than brunettes?”

“I’m not particular.”

“They say like goes to like. She’s dark.”

“Who?”

“Her you call your sister.”

“Doris, you must get this idea out of your head. Mrs. Sothill is my sister.”

“You aren’t sweet on her?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you do like blondes,” said Doris sadly.

Next day she disappeared alone into the village, returned mysteriously with a small parcel, and remained hidden all the morning in the bachelors’ wing. Just before luncheon she appeared in the orangery with her head in a towel.

“I wanted you to see,” she said, and uncovered a damp mop of hair which was in part pale yellow, in part its original black, and in part mottled in every intervening shade.

“Good heavens, child,” said Barbara. “What have you done?”

Doris looked only at Basil. “D’you like it? I’ll give it another go this afternoon.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Basil. “I’d leave it just as it is.”

“You like it?”

“I think it’s fine.”

“Not too streaky?”

“Not a bit too streaky.”

If anything had been needed to complete the horror of Doris’ appearance, that morning’s work had done it.

Basil studied the address book with care. “Finding a new home for the Connollies,” he said.

“Basil, we must do something to that poor child’s head before we pass her on.”

“Not a bit of it. It suits her. What d’you know of the Graces, of the Old Rectory, Adderford?”

“It’s a pretty little house. He’s a painter.”

“Bohemian?”

“Not the least. Very refined. Portraits of children in water-colour and pastel.”

“Pastel? He sounds suitable.”

“She’s rather delicate I believe.”

“Perfect.”

The Connollies stayed two days at the Old Rectory and earned twenty pounds.

London was full again. Those who had left in a hurry returned; those who had made arrangements to go after the first air raid remained. Margot Metroland shut her home and moved to the Ritz; opened her home and moved back; decided that after all she really preferred the Ritz and shut her home, this time, though she did not know it, for ever. No servant ever folded back the shutters from the long windows; they remained barred until, later in the year, they were blown into Curzon Street; the furniture was still under dust sheets when it was splintered and burned.

Sir Joseph Mainwaring was appointed to a position of trust and dignity. He was often to be seen with generals now, and sometimes with an admiral. “Our first war aim,” he said, “is to keep Italy out of the war until she is strong enough to come in on our side.” He summed up the situation at home by saying, “One takes one’s gas-mask to one’s office but not to one’s club.”

Lady Seal had not troubled him again about Basil. “He’s at Malfrey, helping Barbara with her evacués,” she said. “The Army is very full just at present. Things will be much easier when we have had some casualties.”

Sir Joseph nodded but at heart he was sceptical. There were not going to be many casualties. Why, he had been talking to a very interesting fellow at the Beefsteak who knew a German Professor of History; this Professor was now in England; they thought a great deal of him at the Foreign Office; he said there were fifty million Germans “ready to declare peace tomorrow on our own terms.” It was just a question of outing those fellows in the Government. Sir Joseph had seen many Governments outed. It was quite easy in wartime — they had outed Asquith quite easily and he was a far better fellow than Lloyd George, who succeeded him. Then they outed Lloyd George and then they outed Macdonald. Christopher Seal knew how to do it. He’d soon out Hitler if he were alive and a German.

Poppet Green was in London with her friends.

“Ambrose has turned fascist,” she said.

“Not really?”

“He’s working for the Government in the Ministry of Information and they’ve bribed him to start a new paper.”

“Is it a fascist paper?”

“You bet it is.”

“I heard it was to be called the Ivory Tower.”

“That’s fascist if you like.”

“Escapist.”

“Trotskyist.”

“Ambrose never had the proletarian outlook. I can’t think why we put up with him as we did. Parsnip always said…”

Peter Pastmaster came into Bratt’s wearing battledress and, on his shoulder, the name of a regiment to which he had not formerly belonged.

“Hullo. Why on earth are you dressed like that?”

Peter smirked as only a soldier can when he knows a secret. “Oh, no particular reason.”

“Have they thrown you out of the regiment?”

“I’m seconded, temporarily, for special duty.”

“You’re the sixth chap I’ve seen in disguise this morning.”

“That’s the idea — security, you know.”

“What’s it all about?”

“You’ll hear in time, I expect,” said Peter with boundless smugness.

They went to the bar.

“Good morning, my lord,” said Macdougal, the barman. “I see you’re off to Finland too. Quite a number of our gentlemen are going tonight.”

Angela Lyne was back in London; the affairs of the hospital were in order, her son was at his private school, transported at the outbreak of war from the East coast to the middle of Dartmoor. She sat at the place she called “home” listening to wireless news from Germany.

This place was a service flat and as smart and noncommittal as herself, a set of five large rooms high up in the mansard floor of a brand-new block in Grosvenor Square. The decorators had been at work there while she was in France; the style was what passes for Empire in the fashionable world. Next year, had there been no war, she would have had it done over again during August.

That morning she had spent an hour with her brokers giving precise, prudent directions for the disposition of her fortune; she had lunched alone, listening to the radio from Europe; after luncheon she had gone alone to the cinema in Curzon Street. It was darkening when she left the cinema and quite dark now outside, beyond the heavy crimson draperies which hung in a dozen opulent loops and folds, girded with gold cord, fringed with gold at the hem, over the new black shutters. Soon she would go out to dine with Margot at the Ritz. Peter was off somewhere and Margot was trying to get a party together for him.

She mixed herself a large cocktail; the principal ingredients were vodka and Calvados; the decorators had left an electric shaker on the Pompeian side-table. It was their habit to litter the house where they worked with expensive trifles of this sort; parsimonious clients sent them back; the vaguer sort believed them to be presents for which they had forgotten to thank anyone, used them, broke them and paid for them a year later when the bills came in. Angela liked gadgets. She switched on the electric shaker and, when her drink was mixed, took the glass with her to the bathroom and drank it slowly in her bath.

Angela never drank cocktails except in private; there was something about them which bore, so faintly as to be discernible to no one but herself, a suggestion of good fellowship and good cheer; an infinitely small invitation to familiarity — derived perhaps from the days of Prohibition, when gin had ceased to be Hogarthian and had become chic; an aura of naughtiness, of felony compounded; a memory of her father’s friends who sometimes had raised their glasses to her, of a man in a ship who had said “Á tes beaux yeux.” And so Angela, who hated human contact on any but her own terms, never drank cocktails except in solitude. Lately all her days seemed to be spent alone.

Steam from the bath formed in a mist, and later in great beads of water, on the side of the glass. She finished her cocktail and felt the fumes rise inside her. She lay for a long time in the water, scarcely thinking, scarcely feeling anything except the warm water round her and the spirit within her. She called for her maid, from next door, to bring her a cigarette; smoked it slowly to the end; called for an ash tray and then for a towel. Presently she was ready to face the darkness, and the intense cold, and Margot Metroland’s dinner party.

She noticed in the last intense scrutiny before her mirrors that her mouth was beginning to droop a little at the corners. It was not the disappointed pout that she knew in so many of her friends; it was as the droop you sometimes saw in death masks, when the jaw had been set and the face had stiffened in lines which told those waiting round the bed that the will to live was gone.

At dinner she drank Vichy water and talked like a man. She said that France was no good any more and Peter used a phrase that was just coming into vogue, accusing her of being “fifth column.” They went on to dance at the Suivi. She danced and drank her Vichy water and talked sharply and well like a very clever man. She was wearing a new pair of ear-rings — an arrow set with a ruby point, the shaft a thin bar of emerald that seemed to transfix the lobe; she had designed them for herself and had called for them that morning on her way home from seeing her man of business. The girls in the party noticed Angela’s ear-rings; they noticed everything about her clothes; she was the best-dressed woman there, as she usually was, wherever she went.

She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square alone. Since the war there was no liftman on duty after midnight. She shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day or night. She mixed herself a large whisky and water and turned on the radio. Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another whisky and water.

Her maid lived out and had been told not to wait up. When she came in the morning she found Mrs. Lyne in bed but awake; the clothes she had worn the evening before had been carefully hung up, not broadcast about the carpet as they used sometimes to be. “I shan’t be getting up this morning, Grainger,” she said. “Bring the radio here and the newspapers.”

Later she had her bath, returned to bed, took two tablets of Dial and slept, gently, until it was time to fit the black plywood screens into the window frames and hide them behind the velvet draperies.

“What about Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge of the Malt House, Grantley Green?”

Basil was, choosing his objectives from the extreme quarters of the Malfrey billeting area. He had struck east and north. Grantley Green lay south where the land of spur and valley fell away and flattened out into a plain of cider orchards and market gardens.

“They’re very old, I think,” said Barbara. “I hardly know them. Come to think of it, I heard something about Mr. Prettyman-Partridge the other day. I can’t remember what.”

“Pretty house? Nice things in it?”

“As far as I remember.”

“People of regular habits? Fond of quiet?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“They’ll do.”

Basil bent over the map tracing the road to Grantley Green which he would take next day.

He found the Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green. The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in “good hands.” Basil noted the china with approval — large, black Wedgewood urns — valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well-loved. When the door opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn and a cedar tree laden with snow.

The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was dressed in a tweed suit and woollen jumper as though for country exercise, but the soft, fur-lined boots showed that she was spending the morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.

“Miss Prettyman-Partridge?”

“No. Please don’t say you’ve come to sell something. It’s terribly cold standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it.”

“I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge.”

“They’re dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer. Is that all, please? I don’t want to be rude but I must shut the door or freeze.”

So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. “May I come in?”

“Oh dear,” said this splendid girl, leading him into the room with the Wedgewood urns. “Is it something to buy or forms to fill in or just a subscription? If it’s the first two I can’t help because my husband’s away with the yeomanry; if it’s a subscription I’ve got some money upstairs. I’ve been told to give the same as Mrs. Andrews, the doctor’s wife. If you haven’t been to her yet, come back when you find what she’s good for.”

Everything in the room was new; that is to say the paint was new and the carpets and the curtains, and the furniture had been newly put in position. There was a very large settee in front of the fireplace whose cushions, upholstered in toile-de-Jouy, still bore the impress of that fine young woman; she had been lying there when Basil rang the bell. He knew that if he put his hand in the round concavity where her hip had rested, it would still be warm; and that further cushion had been tucked under her arm. The book she had been reading was on the lambskin hearth-rug. Basil could reconstruct the position, exactly, where she had been sprawling with the languor of extreme youth.

The girl seemed to sense an impertinence in Basil’s scrutiny. “Anyway,” she said. “Why aren’t you in khaki?”

“Work of national importance,” said Basil. “I am the district billeting offer. I’m looking for a suitable home for three evacuated children.”

“Well, I hope you don’t call this suitable. I ask you. I can’t even look after Bill’s sheepdog. I can’t even look after myself very well. What should I do with three children?”

“These are rather exceptional children.”

“They’d have to be. Anyway I’m not having any thank you. There was a funny little woman called Harkness came to call here yesterday. I “do think people might let up on calling in wartime, don’t you? She told me the most gruesome things about some children that were sent to her. They had to bribe the man, literally bribe him with money, to get the brutes moved.”

“These are the same children.”

“Well for God’s sake, why pick on me?”

Her great eyes held him dazzled, like a rabbit before the headlights of a car. It was a delicious sensation.

“Well, actually, I picked on the Prettyman-Partridges…I don’t even know your name.”

“I don’t know yours.”

“Basil Seal.”

“Basil Seal?” There was a sudden interest in her voice. “How very funny.”

“Why funny?”

“Only that I used to hear a lot about you once. Weren’t you a friend of a girl called Mary Nichols?”

“Was I?” Was he? Mary Nichols? Mary Nichols?

“Well, she used to talk a lot about you. She was much older than me. I used to think her wonderful when I was sixteen. You met her in a ship coming from Copenhagen.”

“I daresay. I’ve been to Copenhagen.”

The girl was looking at him now with a keen and not wholly flattering attention. “So you’re Basil Seal,” she said. “Well I never…”

Four years ago in South Kensington, at Mary Nichols’ home, there was a little back sitting-room on the first floor which was Mary’s room. Here Mary entertained her girl friends to tea. Here she had come, day after day, to sit before the gas fire and eat Fullers’ walnut cake and hear the details of Mary’s Experience. “But aren’t you going to see him again?” she asked. “No, it was something so beautiful, so complete in itself—” Mary had steeped herself in romantic literature since her Experience. “I don’t want to spoil it.” “I don’t think he sounds half good enough for you, darling.” “He’s absolutely different. You mustn’t think of him as one of the young men one meets at dances…” The girl did not go to dances yet, and Mary knew it. Mary’s tales of the young men she met at dances had been very moving, but not as moving as this tale of Basil Seal. The name had become graven on her mind.

And Basil, still standing, searched his memory. Mary Nichols? Copenhagen? No, it registered nothing. It was very consoling, he thought, the way in which an act of kindness, in the fullness of time, returns to bless the benefactor. One gives a jolly-up to a girl in a ship. She goes her way, he goes his. He forgets; he has so many benefactions of the kind to his credit. But she remembers and then one day, when it is least expected, Fate drops into his lap the ripe fruit of his reward, this luscious creature waiting for him, all unaware, in the Malt House, Grantley Green.

“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink — on the strength of Mary Nichols?”

“I don’t think there’s anything in the house. Bill’s away you see. He’s got some wine downstairs in the cellar, but the door’s locked.”

“I expect we could open it.”

“Oh! I wouldn’t do that. Bill would be furious.”

“Well, I don’t suppose he’ll be best pleased to come home on leave and find the Connolly family hacking up his home. By the way, you haven’t seen them yet; they’re outside in the car; I’ll bring them in.”

“Please don’t!” There was genuine distress and appeal in those blue cow-eyes.

“Well, take a look at them through the window.”

She went and looked. “Good God,” said the girl. “Mrs. Harkness wasn’t far wrong. I thought she was laying it on thick.”

“It cost her thirty pounds to get rid of them.”

“Oh, but I haven’t got anything like that” — again the distress and appeal in her wide blue eyes. “Bill makes me an allowance out of his pay. It comes in monthly. It’s practically all I’ve got.”

“I’ll take payment in kind,” said Basil.

“You mean the sherry?”

“I’d like a glass of sherry very much,” said Basil.

When they got to work with the crowbar on the cellar door, it was clear that this high-spirited girl thoroughly enjoyed herself: It was a pathetic little cellar: a poor man’s treasury. Half a dozen bottles of hock, a bin of port, a dozen or two of claret. “Mostly wedding presents,” explained the girl. Basil found some sherry and they took it up to the light.

“I’ve no maid now,” she explained. “A woman comes in once a week.”

They found glasses in the pantry and a corkscrew in the dining-room.

“Is it any good?” she asked anxiously, while Basil tasted the wine.

“Delicious.”

“I’m so glad. Bill knows about wine. I don’t.”

So they began to talk about Bill, who was married in July to this lovely creature, who had a good job in an architect’s office in the near-by town, had settled at Grantley Green in August, and in September had gone to join the yeomanry as a trooper…

Two hours later Basil left the Malt House and returned to his car. It was evidence of the compelling property of love that the Connolly children were still in their seats.

“Gawd, mister, you haven’t half been a time,” said Doris. “We’re fair froze. Do we get out here?”

“No.”

“We aren’t going to muck up this house?”

“No, Doris, not this time. You’re coming back with me.”

Doris sighed blissfully. “I don’t care how froze we are if we can come back with you,” she said.

When they returned to Malfrey, and Barbara once more found the children back in the bachelors’ wing, her face fell. “Oh, Basil,” she said. “You’ve failed me.”

“Well, not exactly. The Prettyman-Partridges are dead.”

“I knew there was something about them. But you’ve been a long time.”

“I met a friend. At least the friend of a friend. A very nice girl. I think you ought to do something about her.”

“What’s her name?”

“D’you know, I never discovered. But her husband’s called Bill. He joined Freddy’s regiment as a trooper.”

“Who’s she a friend of?”

“Mary Nichols.”

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“Old friend of mine. Honestly, Babs, you’ll like this girl.”

“Well, ask her to dinner.” Barbara was not enthusiastic; she had known too many of Basil’s girls.

“I have. The trouble is she hasn’t got a car. D’you mind if I go and fetch her?”

“Darling, we simply haven’t the petrol.”

“We can use the special allowance.”

“Darling, I can’t. This has nothing to do with billeting.”

“Believe it or not Babs, it has.”

The frost broke; the snow melted away; Colony Bog, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Common and all the little polygons of gorse and bush which lay between the high roads of Surrey — patches of rank land marked on the signposts W.D., marked on the maps as numbered training areas — reappeared from their brief period of comeliness.

“We can get on with the tactical training,” said the C.O.

For three weeks there were platoon schemes and company schemes. Captain Mayfield consumed his leisure devising ways of transforming into battlefields the few acres of close, soggy territory at his disposal. For the troops these schemes only varied according to the distance of the training area from camp, and the distance that had to be traversed before the Cease Fire. Then for three days in succession the C.O. was seen to go out with the Adjutant in the Humber Snipe, each carrying a map case. “We’re putting on a battalion exercise,” said Captain Mayfield. It was all one to his troops. “It’s our first battalion exercise. It’s absolutely essential that every man in the company shall be in the picture all the time.”

Alastair was gradually learning the new languages. There was the simple tongue, the unchanging reiteration of obscenity, spoken by his fellow soldiers. That took little learning. There was also the language spoken by his officers, which from time to time was addressed to him. The first time that Captain Mayfield had asked him, “Are you in the picture, Trumpington?” he supposed him to mean, was he personally conspicuous? He crouched at the time, waterlogged to the knees, in a ditch; he had, at the suggestion of Mr. Smallwood — the platoon commander —ornamented his steel helmet with bracken. “No, sir,” he had said, stoutly.

Captain Mayfield had seemed rather gratified than not by the confession. “Put these men in the picture, Smallwood,” he said, and there had followed a tedious and barely credible narrative about the unprovoked aggression of Southland against Northland (who was not party to the Geneva gas protocol), about How support batteries, A.F.V.’s and F.D.L.’s.

Alastair learned, too, that all schemes ended in a “shambles,” which did not mean, as he had feared, a slaughter, but a brief restoration of individual freedom of movement, when everyone wandered where he would, while Mr. Smallwood blew his whistle and Captain Mayfield shouted, “Mr. Smallwood, will you kindly get your platoon to hell out of here and fall them in on the road.”

On the day of the battalion scheme they marched out of camp as a battalion. Alastair had been made mortar-man in Mr. Smallwood’s platoon. It was a gamble, the chances of which were hotly debated. At the moment there were no mortars and he was given instead a light and easily manageable counterfeit of wood which was slung on the back of his haversack, relieving him of a rifle. At present it was money for old rope, but a day would come, spoken of as “When we get over 1098”; in that dire event he would be worse off than the riflemen. Two other men in the platoon had rashly put in to be antitank men; contrary to all expectations antitank rifles had suddenly arrived. One of these men had prudently gone sick on the eve of the exercise; the other went sick after it.

Water bottles were filled, haversack rations were packed in mess-tins, and, on account of Northland’s frank obduracy at Geneva, gas respirators frustrated the aim of the designers of the equipment to leave the man’s chest unencumbered. Thus they marched out and after ten minutes, at the command to march at ease, they began singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” “We’ll Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and “The Quartermaster’s Store.” Presently the order came back to march tactically. They knew all about that; it meant stumbling along in the ditch; singing stopped; the man with the antitank rifle swore monotonously. Then the order came back, “Gas”; they put on their respirators and the man with the antitank rifle suffered in silence.

“Gas Clear. Don’t put the respirators back in the haversacks. Leave them out a minute to dry.” They marched eight miles or so and then turned off the main road into a lane and eventually halted. It was now eleven o’clock.

“This is the battalion assembly position,” announced Captain Mayfield. “The C.O. has just gone forward with his recce group to make his recce.”

It was as though he were announcing to a crowd of pilgrims, “This is the Vatican. The Pope has just gone into the Sistine Chapel.”

“It makes things much more interesting,” said Mr. Smallwood rather apologetically, “if you try and understand what is going on. Yes, carry on smoking.”

The company settled itself on the side of the road and began eating its haversack rations.

“I say, you know,” said Mr. Smallwood. “There’ll be a halt for dinner.”

They ate, mostly in silence.

“Soon the C.O. will send for his O group,” announced Captain Mayfield.

Presently a runner appeared, not running but walking rather slowly, and led Captain Mayfield away.

“The C.O. has sent for his O group,” said Mr. Smallwood. “Captain Brown is now in command.”

Captain Brown announced: “The C.O. has given out his orders. He is now establishing advanced Battalion H.Q. The company commanders are now making their recces. Soon they will send for their O groups.”

“Can’t think what they want us here for at all,” said the man with the antitank rifle.

Three-quarters of an hour passed and then an orderly arrived with a written message for Captain Brown. He said to the three platoon commanders: “You’re to meet the company commander at the third E in ‘Bee Garden.’ I’m bringing the company on to the B in Bee.”

Mr. Smallwood and his orderly and his batman left platoon headquarters and drifted off uncertainly into the scrub.

“Get the company fallen in, Sergeant-Major.”

Captain Brown was not quite happy about his position; they tacked along behind him across the common; several times they halted while Captain Brown worried over the map. At last he said, “This is the company assembly position. The company commander is now giving out orders to his O group.”

At this moment, just as the men were beginning to settle down, Captain Mayfield appeared. “Where the hell are those platoon commanders?” he asked. “And what is the company doing here? I said the B in Bee, this is the E in Garden.”

A discussion followed, inaudible to Alastair except for an occasional phrase, “ring contour,” “track junction” and again and again “Well, the map’s wrong.” Captain Brown seemed to get the better of the argument; at any rate Captain Mayfield went away in search of his O group and left the company in possession.

Half an hour passed. Captain Brown felt impelled to explain the delay.

“The platoon commanders are making their recces,” he said.

Presently the C.O. arrived. “Is this C Company?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what’s happening? You ought to be on the start line by now.” Then since it was clearly no use attacking Captain Brown about that, he said in a way Captain Brown had learned to dread: “I must have missed your sentries coming along. Just put me in the picture, will you, of your local defence?”

“Well, sir, we’ve just halted here…”

The C.O. led Captain Brown away.

“He’s getting a rocket,” said the antitank man. It was the first moment of satisfaction he had known that day.

Captain Brown came back looking shaken and began posting air look-outs and gas sentries with feverish activity. While he was in the middle of it the platoon orderlies came back to lead the platoons to assembly positions. Alastair advanced with the platoon another half mile. Then they halted. Mr. Smallwood appeared and collected the section-commanders round him. The C.O. was there too, listening to Mr. Smallwood’s orders. When they were finished he said, “I don’t think you mentioned the R.A.P., did you, Smallwood?”

“R.A.P. sir? No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t know where it is.”

The C.O. led Mr. Smallwood out of hearing of his platoon.

“Now he’s getting a rocket,” said the antitank man with glee.

The section-commanders came back to their men. Mr. Smallwood’s orders had been full of detail; start line, zero hour, boundaries inclusive and exclusive, objectives, supporting fire. “It’s like this,” said Corporal Deacon. “They’re over there and we’re here. So then we go for un.”

Another half-hour passed. Captain Mayfield appeared. “For Christ’s sake, Smallwood, you ought to be halfway up the ridge by this time.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Smallwood. “Sorry. Come on. Forward.”

The platoon collected its equipment and toiled into action up the opposing slope. Major Bush, the second-in-command, appeared before them. They fired their blanks at him with enthusiasm. “Got him,” said the man next to Alastair.

“You’re coming under heavy fire,” said the Major. “Most of you are casualties.”

“He’s a casualty himself.”

“Well, what are you going to do, Smallwood?”

“Get down, sir.”

“Well get down.”

“Get down,” ordered Mr. Smallwood.

“What are you going to do now?”

Mr. Smallwood looked round desperately for inspiration. “Put down smoke, sir.”

“Well, put down smoke.”

“Put down smoke,” said Mr. Smallwood to Alastair.

The Major went on his way to confuse the platoon on their flank.

“Come on,” said Mr. Smallwood. “We’ve got to get up this infernal hill sometime. We might as well do it now.”

It was shorter than it looked; they were up in twenty minutes and at the summit there was a prolonged shambles. Bit by bit the whole battalion appeared from different quarters. C Company was collected and fallen in; then they were fallen out to eat their dinners. No one had any dinner left, so they lay on their backs and smoked.

Marching home the C.O. said, “Not so bad for a first attempt.”

“Not so bad, Colonel,” said Major Bush.

“Bit slow off the mark.”

“A bit sticky.”

“Smallwood didn’t do too well.”

“He was very slow off the mark.”

“Well, I think we learned some lessons. The men were interested. You could see that.”

It was dark by the time the battalion reached camp. They marched to attention passing the guardroom, split into companies, and halted on the company parade grounds.

“All rifles to be pulled through before supper,” said Captain Mayfield. “Platoon sergeants collect empties. Foot inspection by platoons.” Then he dismissed the company.

Alastair had time to slip away to the telephone box and summon Sonia before Mr. Mayfield came round the hut examining the feet with an electric torch. He pulled on a clean pair of socks, pushed his boots under his palliasse and put on a pair of shoes; then he was ready. Sonia was outside the guardroom, waiting for him in the car. “Darling, you smell very sweaty,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

“I put down smoke,” said Alastair proudly. “The whole advance was held up until I put down smoke.”

“Darling, you are clever. I’ve got a tinned beefsteak and kidney pudding for dinner.”

After dinner Alastair settled in a chair. “Don’t let me go to sleep,” he said. “I must be in by midnight.”

“I’ll wake you.”

“I wonder if a real battle is much like that,” said Alastair just before he dropped off.

Peter Pastmaster’s expedition never sailed. He resumed his former uniform and his former habits. His regiment was in barracks in London; his mother was still at the Ritz; most of his friends were still to be found round the bar at Bratt’s. With time on his hands and the prospect of action, for a few days imminent, now postponed, but always present as the basis of any future plans, Peter began to suffer from pangs of dynastic conscience. He was thirty-three years old. He might pop off any day. “Mama,” he said, “d’you think I ought to marry?”

“Who?”

“Anyone.”

“I don’t see that you can say anyone ought to marry anyone.”

“Darling, don’t confuse me. What I mean is supposing I get killed.”

“I don’t see a great deal in it for the poor girl,” said Margot.

“I mean I should like to have a son.”

“Well then you had better marry, darling. D’you know any girls?”

“I don’t think I do.”

“I don’t think I do either, come to think of it. I believe Emma Granchester’s second girl is very pretty — try her. There are probably lots of others. I’ll make enquiries.”

So Peter, little accustomed to their society, began, awkwardly at first, taking out a series of very young and very eligible girls; he quickly gained confidence; it was easy as falling off a log. Soon there were a dozen mothers who were old-fashioned enough to be pleasurably excited at the prospect of finding in their son-in-law all the Victorian excellencies of an old title, a new fortune, and a shapely leg in blue overalls.

“Peter,” Margot said to him one day. “D’you ever give yourself time from debutantes to see old friends? What’s become of Angela? I never see her now.”

“I suppose she’s gone back to the country.”

“Not with Basil?”

“No, not with Basil.”

But she was living still above the block of flats in Grosvenor Square. Below, layer upon layer of rich men and women came and went about their business, layer below layer down to street level; below that again, underground, the management were adapting the basement to serve as an air raid shelter. Angela seldom went beyond her door, except once or twice a week to visit the cinema; she always went alone. She had taken to wearing spectacles of smoked glass; she wore them indoors, as well as out; she wore them in the subdued, concealed lighting of her drawing-room, as she sat hour after hour with the radio standing by the decanter and glass at her elbow; she wore them when she looked at herself in the mirror. Only Grainger, her maid, knew what was the matter with Mrs. Lyne, and she only knew the shell of it. Grainger knew the number of bottles, empty and full, in the little pantry; she saw Mrs. Lyne’s face when the blackout was taken down in the morning. (She never had to wake Mrs. Lyne nowadays; her eyes were always open when the maid came to call her; sometimes Mrs. Lyne was up and sitting in her chair; sometimes she lay in bed, staring ahead, waiting to be called.) She knew the trays of food that came up from the restaurant and went back, as often as not, untasted. All this Grainger knew and, being a dull sensible girl, she kept her own counsel; but, being a dull and sensible girl, she was spared the knowledge of what went on in Mrs. Lyne’s mind.

So the snows vanished and the weeks of winter melted away with them; presently, oblivious of the hazards of war, the swallows returned to their ancestral building grounds.

chapter 3 SPRING

Two events decided Basil to return to London. First, the yeomanry moved back to the country under canvas. Freddy telephoned to Barbara:—

“Good news,” he said; “we’re coming home.”

“Freddy, how splendid,” said Barbara, her spirits falling a little. “When?”

“I arrive tomorrow. I’m bringing Jack Cathcart; he’s our second-in-command now. We’re going to lay out a camp. We’ll stay at Malfrey while we’re doing it.”

“Lovely,” said Barbara.

“We’ll be bringing servants, so we’ll be self-supporting as far as that goes. There’ll be a couple of sergeants. Benson can look after them. And I say, Barbara, what do you say to having the camp in the park?”

“Oh no, Freddy, for God’s sake.”

“We could open up the saloon and have the mess there. I could live in. You’d have to have old Colonel Sproggin and probably Cathcart, too, but you wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

“Please, Freddy, don’t decide anything in a hurry.”

“Well I have practically decided. See you tomorrow. I say, is Basil still with you?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see him getting on terribly well with Cathcart. Couldn’t you give him a gentle hint?”

Barbara hung up sadly and went to make arrangements for Freddy’s and Major Cathcart’s reception.

Basil was at Grantley Green. He returned to Malfrey after dinner, to find Barbara still up.

“Darling, you’ve got to go away.”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Freddy’s coming home.”

“Oh damn Freddy; who cares for him? Bill’s coming home.”

“What does she say?”

“Believe it or not, she’s as pleased as Punch.”

“Ungrateful beast,” said Barbara; and, after a pause, “You never wrote that book either.”

“No, but we’ve had a lovely time, haven’t we, Babs? Quite like the old days.”

“I suppose you’ll want some money.”

“I could always do with some more, but as it happens I’m quite rich at the moment.”

“Basil, how?”

“One thing and another. I tell you what I will do before I go. I’ll get the Connollies off your hands again. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting them rather in the last few weeks.”

That led to the second deciding event.

On his way to and from Grantley Green, Basil had noticed a pretty stucco house standing in paddock and orchard, which seemed exactly suited to harbour the Connollies. He had asked Barbara about it, but she could tell him nothing. Basil was getting lax and confident now in his methods, and no longer bothered himself with much research before choosing his victims. The stucco house was marked down and next day he packed the Connollies into the car and drove over to do his business.

It was ten in the morning but he found the proprietor at breakfast. He did not appear to be quite the type that Basil was used to deal with. He was younger than the G.P.O. list. A game leg, stuck awkwardly askew, explained why he was not in uniform. He had got this injury in a motor race, he explained later to Basil. He had ginger hair and a ginger moustache and malevolent pinkish eyes. His name was Mr. Todhunter.

He was eating kidneys and eggs and sausages and bacon and an overcooked chop; his tea-pot stood on the hob. He looked like a drawing by Leech for a book by Surtees.

“Well,” he said, cautious but affable. “I know about you. You’re Mrs. Sothill’s brother at Malfrey. I don’t know Mrs. Sothill but I know all about her. I don’t know Captain Sothill but I know about him. What can I do for you?”

“I’m the billeting officer for this district,” said Basil.

“Indeed. I’m interested to meet you. Go on. You don’t mind my eating, I’m sure.”

Feeling a little less confident than usual, Basil went through his now stereotyped preface:…Getting harder to find billets, particularly since the anti-aircraft battery had come to South Grappling and put their men in the cottages there

important to stop the backwash to the towns…bad impression if the bigger houses seemed not to be doing their share… natural reluctance to employ compulsory powers but these powers were there, if necessary…three children who had caused some difficulty elsewhere…

Mr. Todhunter finished his breakfast, stood with his back to the fire and began to fill his pipe. “And what if I don’t want these hard cases of yours?” he said. “What if I’d sooner pay the fine?”

Basil embarked on the second part of his recitation:…Official allowance barely covered cost of food…serious hardship to poor families…poor people valued their household gods even more than the rich … possible to find a cottage where a few pounds would make all the difference between dead loss and a small and welcome profit…

Mr. Todhunter heard him in silence. At last he said, “So that’s how you do it. Thank you. That was most instructive, very instructive indeed. I liked the bit about household gods.”

Basil began to realize that he was dealing with a fellow of broad and rather dangerous sympathies; someone like himself. “In more cultured circles I say Lares et Penates.”

“Household gods is good enough. Household gods is very good indeed. What d’you generally count on raising?”

“Five pounds is the worst, thirty-five the best I’ve had so far.”

“So far? Do you hope to carry on long with this trade?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something. D’you know who’s billeting officer in this district? I am. Mrs. Sothill’s district ends at the main road. You’re muscling in on my territory when you come past the crossing. Now what have you got to say for yourself?”

“D’you mean to say that Grantley Green is yours?”

“Certainly.”

“How damned funny.”

“Why funny?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Basil. “But it is — exquisitely funny.”

“So I’ll ask you to keep to your own side of the road in future. Not that I’m ungrateful for your visit. It’s given me some interesting ideas. I always felt there was money in this racket somehow, but I could never quite see my way to get it. Now I know. I’ll remember about the household gods.”

“Wait a minute,” said Basil. “It isn’t quite as easy as all that, you know. It isn’t just a matter of having the idea; you have to have the Connollies too. You don’t understand it, and I don’t understand it, but the fact remains that quite a number of otherwise sane human beings are perfectly ready to take children in; they like them; it makes them feel virtuous; they like the little pattering feet about the house — I know it sounds screwy but it’s the truth. I’ve seen it again and again.”

“So have I,” said Mr. Todhunter. “There’s no sense in it, but it’s a fact — they make household gods of them.”

“Now the Connollies are something quite special; no one could make a household god of them. Come and have a look.”

He and Mr. Todhunter went out into the circle of gravel in front of the porch, where Basil had left the car.

“Doris,” he said. “Come out and meet Mr. Todhunter. Bring Micky and Marlene too.”

The three frightful children stood in a line to be inspected.

“Take that scarf off your head, Doris. Show him your hair.”

In spite of himself Mr. Todhunter could not disguise the fact that he was profoundly moved. “Yes,” he said. “I give you that. They are special. If it’s not a rude question, what did you pay for them?”

“I got them free. But I’ve put a lot of money into them since —fried fish and cinemas.”

“How did you get the girl’s hair that way?”

“She did it herself,” said Basil, “for love.”

“They certainly are special,” repeated Mr. Todhunter with awe.

“You haven’t seen anything yet. You should see them in action.”

“I can imagine it,” said Mr. Todhunter. “Well, what d’you want for them?”

“Five pounds a leg and that’s cheap, because I’m thinking of closing down the business anyhow.”

Mr. Todhunter was not a man to haggle when he was on a good thing. “Done,” he said.

Basil addressed the Connollies. “Well, children, this is your new headquarters.”

“Are we to “muck ‘em about?” asked Doris.

“That’s up to Mr. Todhunter. I’m handing you over to him now. You’ll he working for him in future.”

“Ain’t we never going to be with you again?” asked Doris.

“Never again, Doris. But you’ll find you like Mr. Todhunter just as much. He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

“Not as handsome as you.”

“No, perhaps not, but he’s got a fine little red moustache, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, it’s a lovely moustache,” Doris conceded; she looked from her old to her new master, critically. “But he’s shorter than you.”

“Dammit, girl,” said Basil impatiently. “Don’t you realize there’s a war on? We’ve all got to make sacrifices. There’s many a little girl would be very grateful for Mr. Todhunter. Look at his fine red nob.”

“Yes, it is red.”

Mr. Todhunter tired of the comparison and stumped indoors to fetch his cheque-book.

“Can’t we muck his house up, just a bit?” said Micky wistfully.

“Yes, I don’t see why not, just a bit.”

“Mister,” said Doris, near tears. “Kiss me once before you go.”

“No. Mr. Todhunter wouldn’t like it. He’s terribly jealous.”

“Is he?” she said lightening. “I love jealous men.”

When Basil left her, her fervent, volatile affections were already plainly engaged with her new host. Marlene remained passive throughout the interview; she had few gifts, poor child, and those she was allowed to employ only on rare occasions. “Mayn’t I be sick here, Doris? Just once?”

“Not here, ducky. Wait till the gentleman billets you.”

“Will that be long?”

“No,” said Mr. Todhunter decisively, “not long.”

So the scourge of the Malfrey area moved south into the apple-growing country and the market gardens; and all over the park at Malfrey, dispersed irregularly under the great elms, tents sprang up; and the yeomanry officers set up their mess in the Grinling Gibbons saloon; and Barbara had Colonel Sproggin and Major Cathcart to live in the house; and Freddy made an agreeable sum of money out of the arrangement; and Bill spent many blissful uxorious hours in the Malt House, Grantley Green (he was quite satisfied with the explanation he was given about the cellar door). And Basil returned to London.

He decided to pay one of his rare, and usually rather brief, visits to his mother. He found her busy and optimistic, serving on half a dozen benevolent committees connected with comforts for the troops, seeing her friends regularly. The defeat of Finland had shocked her, but she found it a compensation that Russia was at last disclosed in the true light. She welcomed Basil to the house, heard his news of Barbara and gave him news of Tony. “I want to have a little talk with you sometime,” she said, after half an hour’s gossip.

Basil, had he not been inured to his mother’s euphemisms, might have supposed that a little talk was precisely what she had just had; but he knew what a little talk meant; it meant a discussion of his “future.”

“Have you arranged anything for tonight?”

“No, Mother, not yet.”

“Then we will dine in. Just the two of us.”

And that night after dinner she said, “Basil, I never thought I should have to say this to you. I’ve been pleased, of course, that you were able to be of help to Barbara with her evacués, but now that you have returned to London, I must tell you that I do not think it is man’s work. At a time like this you ought to be fighting.”

“But Mother, as far as I know, no one’s fighting much at the moment.”

“Don’t quibble, dear, you know what I mean.”

“Well, I went to see that colonel when you asked me to.”

“Yes. Sir Joseph explained that to me. They only want very young officers in the Guards. But he says that there are a number of other excellent regiments that offer a far better career. General Gordon was a Sapper, and I believe quite a number of the generals in this war were originally only Gunners. I don’t want you just lounging about London in uniform like your friend Peter Pastmaster. He seems to spend his whole time with girls. That goose Emma Granchester is seriously thinking of him for Molly. So is Etty Flintshire and so is poor Mrs. Van Atrobus for their daughters. I don’t know what they’re thinking of. I knew his poor father. Margot led him a terrible dance. That was long before she married Metroland of course — before he was called Metroland, in fact. No,” said Lady Seal, abruptly checking herself in the flow of reminiscence. “I want to see you doing something important. Now Sir Joseph has got me one of the forms you fill in to become an officer. It is called the Supplementary Reserve. Before you go to bed I want you to sign it. Then we’ll see about getting it sent to the proper quarter. I’m sure that everything will be much easier now that that disgraceful Mr. Belisha has been outed.”

“But you know, Mother, I don’t really fancy myself much as a subaltern.”

“No, dear,” said Lady Seal decisively, “and if you had gone into the Army when you left Oxford you would be a major by now. Promotion is very quick in wartime because so many people get killed. I’m sure once you’re in, they’ll find great use for you. But you must begin somewhere. I remember Lord Kitchener told me that even he was once a subaltern.”

Thus it was that Basil found himself again in danger of being started on a career. “Don’t worry,” said Peter. “No one ever gets taken off the Supplementary Reserve.” But Basil did worry. He had a rooted distrust of official forms. He felt that at any moment a telegram might summon him to present himself at some remote barracks, where he would spend the war, like Alastair’s Mr. Smallwood, teaching fieldcraft to thirty militiamen. It was not thus that he had welcomed the war as the ne’er-do-well’s opportunity. He fretted about it for three days and then decided to pay a visit to the War Office.

He went there without any particular object in view, impelled by the belief that somewhere in that large organization was a goose who would lay eggs for him. In the first days of the war, when he was seeking to interest the authorities in the annexation of Liberia, he had more than once sought an entrance. Perhaps, he felt now, he had pitched a little too high. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a busy man. This time he would advance humbly.

The maelstrom which in early September had eddied round the vestibule of the building seemed to have subsided very little. There was a similar — perhaps, he reflected sadly, an identical — crowd of officers of all ranks attempting to gain admission. Among them he saw a single civilian figure, whom he recognized from his visit to the Ministry of Information.

“Hullo,” he said. “Still hawking bombs?”

The little lunatic with the suitcase greeted him with great friendliness. “They won’t pay any attention. It’s a most unsatisfactory office,” he said. “They won’t let me in. I was sent on here from the Admiralty.”

“Have you tried the Air Ministry?”

“Why, bless you, it was them sent me to the Ministry of Information. I’ve tried them all. I will say for the Ministry of Information they were uncommon civil. Not at all like they are here. At the M. of I. they were never too busy to see one. The only thing was, I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere.”

“Come along,” said Basil. “We’ll get in.”

Veterans of the Ashanti and the Zulu campaigns guarded the entrance. Basil watched them stop a full general. “If you’ll fill in a form, sir, please, one of the boys will take you up to the Department.” They were a match for anyone in uniform but Basil and the bagman were a more uncertain quantity; a full general was just a full general, but a civilian might be anyone.

“Your passes, gentlemen, please.”

“That’s all right, Sergeant,” said Basil. “I’ll vouch for this man.”

“Yes sir, but who are you, sir?”

“You ought to know by this time. M.I.9. We don’t carry passes or give our names in my department.”

“Very good, sir; beg pardon, sir. D’you know the way or shall I send a boy up with you?”

“Of course I know my way,” said Basil sharply, “and you might take a look at this man. He won’t give his name or show a pass, but I expect you’ll see him here often.”

“Very good, sir.”

The two civilians passed through the seething military into the calm of the corridors beyond.

“I’m sure I’m very obliged,” said the man with the suitcase; “where shall I go now?”

“The whole place lies open to you,” said Basil. “Take your time. Go where you like. I think if I were you I should start with the Chaplain General.”

“Where’s he?”

“Up there,” said Basil vaguely. “Up there and straight on.

The little man thanked him gravely, trotted off down the corridor with the irregular, ill-co-ordinated steps of the insane, and was lost to view up the bend in the staircase. Not wishing to compromise himself further by his act of charity, Basil took the opposing turning. A fine vista lay before him of twenty or more closed doors, any one of which might open upon prosperity and adventure. He strolled down the passage in a leisurely but purposeful manner; thus, he thought, an important agent might go to keep an appointment; thus, in fact, Soapy Sponge might have walked in the gallery of Jawleyford Court.

It was a vista full of potentiality; but lacking, at the moment, in ornament — a vista of linoleum and sombre dado; the light came solely from the far end, so that a figure approaching appeared in silhouette, and in somewhat indistinct silhouette; a figure now approached and it was not until she was within a few yards of Basil that he realized that here was the enrichment which the austere architectural scheme demanded: a girl dressed in uniform with a lance-corporal’s stripe on her arm — with a face of transparent, ethereal silliness which struck deep into Basil’s heart. The classical image might have been sober fact, so swift and silent and piercing was the dart of pleasure. He turned in his tracks and followed the lance-corporal down the lane of linoleum, which seemed, momentarily, as buoyant as the carpet of a cinema or theatre.

The lance-corporal led him a long way; she stopped from time to time to exchange greetings with passers-by, showing to all ranks from full general to second-class scout the same cheerful affection; she was clearly a popular girl in these parts. At length she turned into a door marked ADDIS; Basil followed her in. There was another lance-corporal — male — in the room.

The lance-corporal sat behind a typewriter; he had a white, pimply face, large spectacles, and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He did not look up. The female lance-corporal smiled and said, “So now you know where I live. Drop in any time you’re passing.”

“What is ADDIS?” asked Basil.

“It’s Colonel Plum.”

“What’s Colonel Plum?”

“He’s a perfect lamb. Go and take a peek at him if you like. He’s in there.” She nodded towards a glass door marked KEEP OUT.

“Assistant Deputy Director Internal Security,” said the male lance-corporal without looking up from his typing.

“I think I’d like to come and work in this office,” said Basil.

“Yes, everyone says that. It was the same when I was in Pensions.”

“I might take his job.”

“You’re welcome,” said the male lance-corporal sourly. “Suspects, suspects, suspects, all day long — all with foreign names, none of them ever shot.”

A loud voice from beyond the glass door broke into the conversation. “Susie, you slut, come here.”

“That’s him, the angel. Just take a peek while the door’s open. He’s got the sweetest little moustache.”

Basil peered round the corner and caught a glimpse of a lean, military face and, as Susie had said, the sweetest little moustache. The Colonel caught a glimpse of Basil.

“Who the devil’s that?”

“I don’t know,” said Susie lightly. “He just followed me in.”

“Come here you,” said the Colonel. “Who are you and what d’you want in my office?”

“Well,” said Basil, “what the lance-corporal says is strictly true. I just followed her in. But since I’m here I can give you some valuable information.”

“If you can you’re unique in this outfit. What is it?”

Until now the word “Colonel” for Basil had connoted an elderly rock-gardener on Barbara’s G.P.O. list. This formidable man of his own age was another kettle of fish. Here was a second Todhunter. What could he possibly tell him which would pass for valuable information?

“Can I speak freely before the lance-corporal?” he asked, playing for time.

“Yes, of course. She doesn’t understand a word of any language.”

Inspiration came. “There’s a lunatic loose in the War Office,” Basil said.

“Of course there is. There are some hundreds of them. Is that all you came to tell me?”

“He’s got a suitcase full of bombs.”

“Well, I hope he finds his way to the Intelligence Branch. I don’t suppose you know his name? No; well, make out a card for him, Susie, with a serial number, and index him under SUSPECTS. If his bombs go off we shall know where he is; if they don’t it doesn’t matter. These fellows usually do more harm to themselves than to anyone else. Run along, Susie, and shut the door. I want to talk to Mr. Seal.”

Basil was shaken. When the door shut he said, “Have we met before?”

“You bet we have. Djibouti 1936, St. Jean de Luz 1937, Prague 1938. You wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t dressed up like this then.”

“Were you a journalist?”

Vaguely at the back of Basil’s mind was the recollection of an unobtrusive, discreet face among a hundred unobtrusive, discreet faces that had passed in and out of his ken from time to time. During the past ten years he had usually managed to find himself, on one pretext or another, on the outer fringe of contemporary history — in that half-world there were numerous slightly sinister figures whose orbits crossed and recrossed, ubiquitous men and women camp-followers of diplomacy and the press; among those shades he dimly remembered seeing Colonel Plum.

“Sometimes. We got drunk together once at the Basque-bar, the night you fought the United Press correspondent.”

“As far as I remember he won.”

“You bet he did. I took you back to your hotel. What are you doing now besides making passes at Susie?”

“I thought of doing counter-espionage.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Plum. “Most people who come here seem to have thought of that. Hallo —” he added as a dull detonation shook the room slightly — “that sounds as if your man has had a success with his bombs. That was a straight tip, anyway. I daresay you’d be no worse in the job than anyone else.”

Here it was at last, the scene that Basil had so often rehearsed; the scene, very slightly adapted by a later hand, in order to bring it up to date, from the adventure stories of his youth. Here was the lean, masterful man, who had followed Basil’s career saying, “One day his country will have a use for him…”

“What are your contacts?”

What were his contacts? Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Angela Lyne, Margot Metroland, Peter Pastmaster, Barbara, the bride of Grantley Green, Mr. Todhunter, Poppet Green — Poppet Green; there was his chicken.

“I know some very dangerous Communists,” said Basil.

“I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about Communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for Communists.”

“As it happens,” said Basil with dignity, “I came here to serve my country. I don’t particularly want money.”

“The devil you don’t? Well, what do you want, then? You can’t have Susie. I had the hell of a fight to get her away from the old brute in charge of Pensions.”

“We can fight that out later. What I really want most at the moment is a uniform.”

“Good God! Why?”

“My mother is threatening to make me a platoon commander.”

Colonel Plum accepted this somewhat surprising statement with apparent understanding. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a uniform. For one thing you’ll have to call me ‘sir’ and if there’s any funny stuff with the female staff I can take disciplinary action. For another thing it’s the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war. I think I can fix that.”

“What’ll my rank be?”

“Second Lieutenant, Crosse and Blackwell’s regiment”

“Crosse and Blackwell?”

“General Service List.”

“I say, can’t you do anything better than that?”

“Not for watching Communists. Catch a fascist for me and I’ll think about making you a Captain of Marines.” At this moment the telephone bell rang. “Yes, ADDIS speaking…oh, yes, the bomb…yes, we know all about that…the Chaplain General? I say, that’s bad…oh, only the Deputy Assistant Chaplain General and you think he’ll recover. Well what’s all the fuss about?…Yes, we know all about the man in this branch. We’ve had him indexed a long time. He’s nuts — yes, N for nuts, U for uncle, nuts, you’ve got it. No I don’t want to see him. Lock him up. There must be plenty of padded cells in this building, I should imagine.”

News of the attempt to assassinate the Chaplain General reached the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information late in the afternoon, just when they were preparing to pack up for the day. It threw them into a fever of activity.

“Really,” said Ambrose pettishly. “You fellows get all the fun. I shall be most embarrassed when I have to explain this to the editor of the Godless Sunday at Home.”

Lady Seal was greatly shocked.

“Poor man,” she said, “I understand that his eyebrows have completely gone. It must have been Russians.”

For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought; I should have liked to show her my uniform.

Angela counted the rings: five, six, seven; then there was silence in the flat; silence except for the radio which said “…dastardly attempt which has shocked the conscience of the civilized world. Messages of sympathy continue to pour into the Chaplain General’s office from the religious leaders of four continents…”

She switched over to Germany, where a rasping, contemptuous voice spoke of “Churchill’s attempt to make a second Athenia by bombing the military bishop.”

She switched on to France where a man of letters gave his impressions of a visit to the Maginot Line. Angela filled her glass from the bottle at her elbow. Her distrust of France was becoming an obsession with her now. It kept her awake at night and haunted her dreams by day —long, tedious dreams born of barbituric; dreams which had no element of fantasy or surprise; utterly real, drab dreams which, like waking life, held no promise of delight. She often spoke aloud to herself nowadays — living, as she did, so much alone; it was thus that lonely old women spoke, passing in the street with bags of rubbish in their hands, squatting, telling their rubbish. Angela was like an old woman squatting in a doorway picking over her day’s gleaning of rubbish, talking to herself while she sorted the scraps of garbage. She had seen and heard old women like that, often, at the end of the day, in the side streets near the theatres.

Now she said to herself as loudly as though to someone sitting opposite on the white Empire day-bed: “Maginot Line —Angela Lyne —both lines of least resistance,” and laughed at her joke until the tears came and suddenly she found herself weeping in earnest.

Then she took a pull at herself. This wouldn’t do at all. She had better go out to the cinema.

Peter Pastmaster was taking a girl out that evening. He looked very elegant and old-fashioned in his blue patrol jacket and tight overall trousers. He and the girl dined at a new restaurant in Jermyn Street.

She was Lady Mary Meadowes, Lord Granchester’s second daughter. In his quest for a wife Peter had narrowed the field to three —Molly Meadowes; Sarah, Lord Flintshire’s daughter; and Betty, daughter of the Duchess of Stayle. Since he was marrying for old-fashioned, dynastic reasons, he proposed to make an old-fashioned, dynastic choice from among the survivors of Whig oligarchy. He really could see very little difference between the three girls; in fact he sometimes caused offence by addressing them absent-mindedly by the wrong names. None of them carried a pound of superfluous flesh; they all had an enthusiasm for the works of Mr. Ernest Hemingway; all had pet dogs of rather similar peculiarities. They had all found that the way to keep Peter amused was to get him to brag about his past iniquities.

During dinner he told Molly about the time when Basil Seal had stood for Parliament and he and Sonia and Alastair had done him dirt in his constituency. She laughed dutifully at the incident of Sonia throwing a potato at the mayor.

“Some of the papers got it wrong and said it was a bun,” he explained.

“What a lovely time you all seem to have had,” said Lady Mary wistfully.

“All past and done with,” said Peter primly.

“Is it? I do hope not.”

Peter looked at her with a new interest. Sarah and Betty had taken this tale as though it were one of highwaymen — something infinitely old-fashioned and picturesque.

Afterwards they walked to the cinema next door.

The vestibule was in darkness except for a faint blue light in the box office. Out of the darkness the voice of the commissionaire announced: “No three and sixes. Plenty of room in the five and nines. Five and nines this way. Don’t block up the gangway, please.”

There was some kind of disturbance going on at the guichet. A woman was peering stupidly at the blue light and saying “I don’t want five and nines. I want one three and sixpenny.”

“No three and sixes. Only five and nines.”

“But you don’t understand. It isn’t the price. The five and nines are too far away. I want to be near, in the three and sixpennies.”

“No three and sixes. Five and nines,” said the girl in the blue light.

“Come on, lady, make up your mind,” said a soldier, waiting.

“She’s got a look of Mrs. Cedric Lyne,” said Molly.

“Why,” said Peter, “it is Angela. What on earth’s the matter with her?”

She had now bought her ticket and moved away from the window, trying to read what was on it in the half light and saying peevishly, “I told them it was too far away. I can’t see if I’m far away. I said three and sixpence.”

She held the ticket close up to her eyes, trying to read it; she did not notice the step, stumbled and sat down. Peter hurried forward.

“Angela, are you all right? Have you hurt yourself?”

“Perfectly all right,” said Angela, sitting quietly in the twilight. “Not hurt at all thank you.”

“Well, for God’s sake get up.”

Angela squinnied up at him from the step.

“Peter,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you. Too far away to recognize anyone in the five and ninepennies. How are you?”

“Angela, do get up.”

He held out his hand to help her up. She shook it cordially. “How’s Margot?” she said affably. “Haven’t seen her lately. I’ve been so busy. Well that’s not quite true. As a matter of fact I’ve not been altogether well.”

A crowd was beginning to assemble in the twilight. From the darkness beyond came the voice of the commissionaire, policemanlike, saying, “What’s going on here?”

“Pick her up, you coot,” said Molly Meadowes.

Peter got behind Angela, put his arms round her and picked her up. She was not heavy.

“Ups-a-daisy,” said Angela, making to sit down again.

Peter held her firm; he was glad of the darkness; this was no position for an officer of the Household Cavalry in uniform.

“A lady has fainted,” said Molly in a clear, authoritative voice. “Please don’t crowd round her,” and to the commissionaire, “Call a cab.”

Angela was silent in the taxi.

“I say,” said Peter, “I can’t apologize enough for letting you in for this.”

“My dear man,” said Molly, “don’t be ridiculous. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.”

“I can’t think what’s the matter with her,” he said.

“Can’t you?”

When they reached Grosvenor Square, Angela got out of the taxi and looked about her, puzzled. “I thought we were going to the cinema,” she said. “Wasn’t it good?”

“It was full.”

“I remember,” said Angela, nodding vigorously. “Five and nines.” Then she sat down again on the pavement.

“Look here,” said Peter to Lady Mary Meadowes. “You take the taxi back to the cinema. Leave my ticket at the box-office. I’ll join you in half an hour. I think I’d better see Angela home and get hold of a doctor.”

“Bumbles,” said Molly. “I’m coming up too.”

Outside her door Angela suddenly rallied, found her key, opened the flat and walked steadily in. Grainger was still up.

“You need not have stayed in,” said Angela. “I told you I shouldn’t want you.”

“I was worried. You shouldn’t have gone out like that,” and then seeing Peter, “Oh, good evening, my lord.”

Angela turned and saw Peter, as though for the first time. “Hullo, Peter,” she said. “Come in.” She fixed Molly with eyes that seemed to focus with difficulty. “You know,” she said, “I’m sure I know you quite well, but I can’t remember your name.”

“Molly Meadowes” said Peter. “We just came to see you home. We must be going along now. Grainger, Mrs. Lyne isn’t at all well. I think you ought to get her doctor.”

“Molly Meadowes. My dear, I used to stay at Granchester when you were in the nursery. How old that sounds. You’re very pretty, Molly, and you’re wearing a lovely dress. Come in, both of you.”

Peter frowned at Molly, but she went into the flat.

“Help yourself to something to drink, Peter,” said Angela. She sat down in her armchair by the radio. “My dear,” she said to Molly. “I don’t think you’ve seen my flat. I had it done up by David Lennox just before the war. David Lennox. People say unkind things about David Lennox… Well, you can’t blame them…” Her mind was becoming confused again. She made a resolute attempt to regain control of herself. “That’s a portrait of me by John. Ten years ago; nearly done when I was married. Those are my books…my dear, I’m afraid I’m rather distraite this evening. You must forgive me,” and, so saying, she fell into a heavy sleep.

Peter looked about him helplessly. Molly said to Grainger, “Had we better get her to bed?”

“When she wakes up. I shall be here. I can manage.”

“Sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Well then, Peter, we’d better get back to our film.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “I’m awfully sorry for bringing you here.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” said Molly.

Peter was still puzzled by the whole business.

“Grainger,” he said. “Had Mrs. Lyne been out this evening? To a party or anything?”

“Oh, no, my lord. She’s been in all day.”

“Alone?”

“Quite alone, my lord.”

“Extraordinary thing. Well come on, Molly. Good night, Grainger. Take care of Mrs. Lyne. I think she ought to see a doctor.”

“I’ll take care of her,” said Grainger.

They went down in the lift together, in silence, each full of thought. When they reached the hall Peter said, “Well, that was rum.”

“Very rum.”

“You know,” said Peter, “if it had been anyone else but Angela, I should have thought she was tight.”

“Darling, she was plastered.”

“Are you sure?”

“My dear, stinko paralytico.”

“Well, I don’t know what to think. It certainly looked like it. But Angela…besides her maid said she hadn’t been out all the evening. I mean to say people don’t get tight alone.”

Suddenly Molly put her arms round Peter’s neck and kissed him warmly. “Bless you,” she said. “Now we’ll go to that cinema.”

It was the first time anyone had ever kissed Peter like that. He was so surprised that in the taxi he made no attempt to follow it up; so surprised that he thought about nothing else all through the film. “God Save the King” brought him back to reality with a jolt. He was still pensive while he led Molly to supper. It was hysteria, he decided; the girl was naturally upset at the scene they had been through. She’s probably frightfully embarrassed about it now; best not to refer to it.

But Molly was not prepared to let the matter drop.

“Oysters,” she said. “Only a dozen. Nothing else,” and then, though the waiter was still beside her, “Were you surprised when I kissed you just now?”

“No,” said Peter hastily, “certainly not. Not at all.”

“Not at all? You mean to say you expected me to?”

“No, no. Of course not. You know what I mean.”

“I certainly don’t. I think it’s very conceited of you not to be surprised. Do you always have this effect on girls, or is it just the uniform?”

“Molly, don’t be a beast. If you must know, I was surprised.”

“And shocked?”

“No, just surprised.”

“Yes,” said Molly, seeing it was not kind to tease him any more. “I was surprised, too. I’ve been wondering about it in the cinema.”

“So have I,” said Peter.

“That’s how I like you,” said Molly, as though she were a photographer catching a happy expression. She saw the likeness herself and added, “Hold it.”

“Really, Molly, I don’t understand you a bit tonight.”

“Oh but you must, really you must, Peter. I’m sure you were a fascinating little boy.”

“Come to think of it, I believe I was.”

“You mustn’t ever try playing the old rip again, Peter. Not with me, at any rate. Now don’t pretend you don’t understand that. I like you puzzled, Peter, but not absolutely cretinous. You know, I nearly despaired of you tonight. You would go on bucking about what a gay dog you’d been. I thought I could never go through with it.”

“Through with what?”

“Marrying you. Mother’s terribly keen I should, though I can’t think why. I should have thought from her point of view you were about the end. But no, nothing else would do but that I must marry you. So I’ve tried to be good and I’ve let you bound away about the good old days till I thought I should have to pour something on your head. Thought I couldn’t bear it any more and I’d decided to tell Mother it was off. Then we met Mrs. Lyne and everything was all right.”

“It seemed awfully awkward to me.”

“Of course it did. You looked like a little boy at his private school when his father has come to the sports in the wrong kind of hat. An adorable little boy.”

“Well,” said Peter, “I suppose as long as you’re satisfied…”

“Yes, I think ‘satisfied’ is the word. You’ll do. And Sarah and Betty’ll be as sick as cats.”

“How did you decide?” asked Margot, when Peter told her of his engagement.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I did. Molly decided.”

“Yes, that’s usually the way. Now I suppose I shall have to do something friendly about that ass Emma Granchester.”

“I really know Lady Metroland very little,” said Lady Granchester. “But I suppose now I must invite her to luncheon. I’m afraid she’s far too smart for us.” And by “smart” Lady Granchester meant nothing at all complimentary.

But the mothers met and decided on an immediate marriage.

The news of Peter’s engagement was not unexpected and, even had it come as a surprise, would have been eclipsed in interest by the story of Angela Lyne’s uncharacteristic behaviour at the cinema. Peter and Molly, before parting that night, had resolved to tell no one of the incident; a renunciation from which each made certain implicit reservations. Peter told Margot because he thought she ought to do something about it, Basil because he was still dubious about the true explanation of the mystery and thought that Basil, if anyone could, would throw light on it, and three members of Bratt’s because he happened to run into them at the bar next morning when his mind was still full of the matter. Molly told her two sisters and Lady Sarah from long habit, because whenever she promised secrecy in any matter she meant, even at the time, to tell these three. These initiates in their turn told their cronies until it was widely known that the temperate, cynical, aloof, impeccably dressed, sharply dignified Mrs. Lyne — Mrs. Lyne who never “went out” in a general sense but lived in a rarefied and enviable coterie — Mrs. Lyne whose conversation was that of a highly intelligent man, who always cleverly kept out of the gossip columns and picture papers, who for fifteen years had set a high and wholly individual standard of all that Americans meant by “poise”; this almost proverbial lady had been picked up by Peter in the gutter where she had been thrown struggling by two bouncers from the cinema where she had created a drunken disturbance.

It could scarcely have been more surprising had it been Mrs. Stitch herself. It was indeed barely credible and many refused to believe it. Drugs possibly, they conceded, but Drink was out of the question. What Parsnip and Pimpernell were to the intelligentsia, Mrs. Lyne and the bottle became to the fashionable world: topic number one.

They were still topic number one three weeks later at Peter’s wedding. Basil persuaded Angela to come to the little party with which Lady Granchester honoured the occasion.

He had gone round to see her when Peter told him the news; not immediately, but within twenty-four hours of hearing it. He found her up and dressed, but indefinably raffish in appearance; her make-up was haphazard and rather garish, like a later Utrillo.

“Angela, you look awful.”

“Yes, darling, I feel awful. You’re in the Army!”

“No, the War Office.”

She began talking intensely and rather wildly about the French. Presently she said, “I must leave you for a minute,” and went into her bedroom. She came back half a minute later with an abstracted, little smile; the inwardly happy smile of a tired old nun — almost. There was a difference.

“Angela,” said Basil, “if you want a drink you might drink fair with a chap.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

Basil was shocked. There had never been any humbug about Angela before, none where he was concerned anyway.

“Oh, come off it,” he said.

Angela came off it. She began to weep.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Basil.

He went into her bedroom and helped himself to whisky from the bottle by the bed.

“Peter was here the other evening with some girl. I suppose they’ve told everyone.”

“He told me. Why don’t you switch to rum? It’s much better for you.”

“Is it? I don’t think I’ve ever tasted it. Should I like it?”

“I’ll send you some round. When did you start on this bat?”

There was no humbug about Angela now. “Oh, weeks ago.”

“It’s not a bit like you.”

“Isn’t it, Basil? Isn’t it?”

“You were always bloody to me when I had a bat.”

“Yes, I suppose I was. I’m sorry. But then you see I was in love with you.”

“Was?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Fill up the glasses, Basil.”

“That’s the girl.”

“‘Was’ is wrong. I do love you, Basil.”

“Of course you do. Is that how you take it?” he asked, respectfully.

“That’s how I take it.”

“Good and strong.”

“Good and strong.”

“But I think we’d be better suited to rum.”

“Doesn’t it smell rather?”

“I don’t see it matters.”

“Don’t want to smell.”

“Whisky smells.”

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s nice drinking with you, Basil.”

“Of course it’s nice. I think it’s pretty mean of you to drink without me as you’ve been doing.”

“I’m not mean.”

“You usen’t to be. But you have been lately, haven’t you? Drinking by yourself.”

“Yes, that was mean.”

“Now listen, next time you want to go on a bat, let me know. Just ring ‘me up and I’ll come round. Then we can drink together.”

“But I want to so often, Basil.”

“Well, I’ll come round often. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“That’s the girl.”

The rum was a failure, but in general the new arrangement worked well. Angela drank a good deal less and Basil a good deal more than they had done for the last few weeks and both were happier as a result.

Margot tackled Basil on the matter. “What’s the matter with her?” she asked.

“She doesn’t like the war.”

“Well, no one does.”

“Don’t they? I can’t think why not. Anyway why shouldn’t the girl have a drink?”

“You don’t think we ought to get her into a home?”

“Good God no.”

“But she sees nobody.”

“She sees me.”

“Yes, but…”

“Honestly, Margot, Angela’s fine. A little break like this is what she’s been needing all these years. I’ll make her come to the wedding if you like and you can see for yourself.”

So Angela came to the wedding. She and Basil did not make the church but they came to the little party at Lady Granchester’s house afterwards, and stole the scene. Molly had had her moment of prominence; she had had her double line of troopers and her arch of cavalry sabres; she had had her veil of old lace. In spite of the war it was a pretty wedding. But at her mother’s house all eyes were on Mrs. Lyne. Even Lady Anchorage and the Duchess of Stayle could not dissemble their interest.

“My dear, there she is.”

There she was, incomparably dressed, standing by Basil, talking gravely to Sonia; she wore dark glasses; otherwise there was nothing unusual about her. A footman brought a tray of champagne. “Is there such a thing as a cup of tea?” she said. “Without cream or sugar.”

Molly and Peter stood at one end of the long drawing-room, Angela at the other. As the guests filed past the bride and bridegroom and came into the straight, you could see them come to the alert at the sight of Angela and draw one another’s attention to her. Her own coterie formed round her and she talked like a highly intelligent man. When the last of the guests had shaken hands with them — they were comparatively few —Molly and Peter joined the group at the far end.

“Molly, you are the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” said Angela. “I’m afraid I was a bore the other night.”

A silly girl would have been embarrassed and said, “No, not at all.” Molly said, “Not a bore. You were rather odd.”

“Yes,” said Angela. ” ‘Odd’ is the word. I’m not always like that, you know.”

“May Peter and I come and see you again? He’s only got a week, you know, and then we shall be in London.”

“That’s an unusually good girl Peter’s picked for himself,” said Angela to Basil when they were alone after the party at her flat. “You ought to marry someone like that.”

“I could never marry anyone, except, I suppose, you.”

“No, I don’t believe you could, Basil.”

When their glasses were filled she said, “I seem to be getting to the age when I enjoy weddings. I liked that girl this afternoon. D’you know who was here this morning? Cedric.”

“How very odd.”

“It was rather touching really. He came to say good-bye. He’s off tomorrow. He couldn’t say where, but I guess it’s Norway. I never thought of him as a soldier, somehow, but he used to be one till he married me — a very bad one I believe. Poor Cedric, he’s had a raw deal.”

“He’s not done so badly. He’s enjoyed himself messing about with grottoes. And he’s had Nigel.”

“He brought Nigel this morning. They gave him a day away from school to say good-bye. You never knew Cedric when I married him. He was most romantic — genuinely. I’d never met anyone like him. Father’s friends were all hard-boiled and rich — men like Metroland and Copper. They were the only people I ever saw. And then I met Cedric who was poor and very, very soft-boiled and tall and willowy and very unhappy in a boring smart regiment because he only cared about Russian ballet and baroque architecture. He had the most charming manner and he was always laughing up his sleeve about people like my father and his officers in the regiment. Poor Cedric, it used to be such fun finding things to give him. I bought him an octopus once and we had a case made for its tank, carved with dolphins and covered with silver leaf.”

“It wouldn’t have lasted, even if I hadn’t come along.”

“No, it wouldn’t have lasted. I’m afraid the visit this morning was rather a disappointment to him. He’d planned it all in an attitude of high tragedy, and, my dear, I had such a hangover I had to keep my eyes shut nearly all the time he was here. He’s worried about what will happen to the house if he gets killed.”

“Why should he get killed?”

“Why, indeed? Except that he was always such a bad soldier. You know, when the war started I quite made up my mind you were for it.”

“So did my mother. But I’m taking care of that. Which reminds me I ought to go and see Colonel Plum again. He’ll be getting restive. I’ll go along now.”

“Will he be there?”

“He never leaves. A very conscientious officer.”

Susie was there, too, waiting till the Colonel was free to take her out to dinner. At the sight of the office, some of Basil’s elation began to fade away. Basil’s job at the War Office looked as if it were going the way of all the others; once secured, it had few attractions for him. Susie was proving a disappointment; in spite of continued remonstrance, she still seemed to prefer Colonel Plum.

“Good evening, handsome,” she said. “Plummy has been asking for you.”

Basil went through the door marked KEEP OUT.

“Good evening, Colonel.”

“You can call me ‘sir.’”

“None of the best regiments call their commanding officers ‘sir.’”

“You’re not in one of the best regiments. You’re General Service. What have you been doing all day?”

“You don’t think it will improve the tone of the Department if I called you ‘Colonel,’ sir?”

“I do not. Where have you been and what have you been doing?”

“You think I’ve been drinking, don’t you?”

“I bloody well know you have.”

“But you don’t know the reason. You wouldn’t understand if I told you. I’ve been drinking out of chivalry. That doesn’t make any sense to you, does it?”

“No.”

“I thought it wouldn’t. Coarse-grained, sir. If they put on my grave, ‘He drank out of chivalry’ it would simply be the sober truth. But you wouldn’t understand. What’s more you think I’ve been idle, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Well, sir, that’s where you’re wrong. I have been following up a very interesting trail. I hope to have some valuable information very soon.”

“What have you got up to date?”

“You wouldn’t sooner wait until I can give you the whole case cut-and-dried?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m on to a very dangerous woman who calls herself Green. Among her intimates she’s known as ‘Poppet.’ She pretends to be a painter, but you have only to look at her work to realize it is a cloak for other activities. Her studio is the meeting place for a Communist cell. She has an agent in the United States named Parsnip; he has the alias of Pimpernell; he puts it about that he is a poet, two poets in fact, but there again, the work betrays him. Would you like me to quote some Parsnip to you?”

“No.”

“I have reason to believe that Green is the head of an underground organization by which young men of military age are smuggled out of the country. Those are the lines I have been working on. What d’you think of them?”

“Rotten.”

“I was afraid you might say that. It’s your own fault. Give me time and I would have had a better story.”

“Now you can do some work. Here’s a list of thirty-three addresses of suspected fascists. Check them up.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Shan’t I keep track of the woman Green?”

“Not in office hours.”

“I can’t think what you see in your Plum,” said Basil when he regained the outer office. “It must simply be snobbery.”

“It’s not: it’s love. The officer in the Pensions office was a full Colonel, so there.”

“I expect you’ll be reduced to subalterns, yet. And by the way, Lance-Corporal, you can call me ‘sir.’”

Susie giggled. “I believe you’re drunk,” she said.

“Drunk with chivalry,” said Basil.

That evening Cedric Lyne left to rejoin his regiment. The forty-eight hours of embarkation leave were over and although he had chosen to start an hour earlier rather than travel by the special train, it was only with difficulty that he found a carriage free from brother officers who had made the same choice. They were going to the North to embark at dawn next-day and sail straight into action.

The first-class carriage was quite full, four a side, and the racks piled high with baggage. Black funnel-shaped shields cast the light onto the passengers’ laps; their faces in the surrounding darkness were indistinguishable; a naval paymaster-commander slept peacefully in one corner; two civilians strained their eyes over the evening papers; the other four were soldiers. Cedric sat between two soldiers, stared at the shadowy luggage above the civilians’ heads, and ruminated, chewing the last, bitter essence from the events of the last two days.

Because he was thirty-five years of age, and spoke French and was built rather for grace than smartness, they had made Cedric battalion Intelligence officer. He kept the war diary and on wet days was often borrowed by the company commanders to lecture on map reading, security, and the order of battle of a German infantry division. These were Cedric’s three lectures. When they were exhausted he was sent on a gas course and after that on a course on interpretation of air photographs. On exercise he stuck pins in a map and kept a file of field messages.

“There really isn’t very much you can do until we get into action,” said his commanding officer. “You might ring up the photographers in Aldershot about taking that regimental group.”

They put him in charge of the Officers’ Mess and made his visits there hideous with complaints.

“We’re out of Kümmel again, Cedric.”

“Surely there’s some perfectly simple way of keeping the soup hot, Lyne.”

“If officers will take the papers to their quarters, the only answer is to order more papers.”

“The Stilton has been allowed to go dry again.”

That had been his life; but Nigel did not know this. For Nigel, at eight years of age, his father was a man at arms and a hero. When they were given embarkation leave, Cedric telephoned to Nigel’s head-master and the child met him at their station in the country. Pride in his father and pleasure at an unforeseen holiday made their night at home an enthralling experience for Nigel. The home was given over to empty wards and an idle hospital staff. Cedric and his son stayed in the farm where, before she left, Angela had fitted up a few rooms with furniture from the house. Nigel was full of questions; why Cedric’s buttons were differently arranged from the fathers’ and brothers’ buttons of most of the fellows; what was the difference between a Bren and a Vickers; how much faster were our fighters than the Germans’; whether Hitler had fits, as one fellow said, and, if so, did he froth at the mouth and roll his eyes as the girl at the lodge had once done?

That evening, Cedric took a long farewell of his water garden. It was for the water principally that he and Angela had chosen the place, ten years ago, when they were first engaged. It rose in a clear and copious spring in the hillside above the house and fell in a series of natural cascades to join the considerable stream which flowed more solemnly through the park. He and Angela had eaten a picnic lunch by the spring and looked down on the symmetrical, rectangular building below.

“It’ll do,” said Angela. “I’ll offer them fifteen thousand.”

It never embarrassed Cedric to be married to a rich woman. He had not married for money in any gross sense, but he loved the rare and beautiful things which money could buy, and Angela’s great fortune made her trebly rare and beautiful in his eyes.

It was surprising that they should have met at all. Cedric had been for years in his regiment, kept there by his father, who gave him an allowance, which he could ill spare, on that condition alone. It was that or an office for Cedric, and despite the tedious company, there was just enough pageantry about peace-time soldiering to keep his imagination engaged. Cedric was accomplished; he was a beautiful horseman but hated the rigours of fox-hunting; he was a very fine shot and because that formed a single tenuous bond with his brother officers and because it was agreeable to do anything pre-eminently well, he, accepted invitations to pheasant-shooting in houses where, when they were not at the coverts, he felt lost and lonely. Angela’s father had a celebrated shoot in Norfolk; he had also, Cedric was told, a collection of French impressionists. Thither that autumn ten years ago Cedric had gone and had found the pictures too obvious and the birds too tame and the party tedious beyond description, except for Angela, past her debutante days, aloof now and living in a cool and mysterious solitude of her own creation. She had resisted at first every attempt on the defences she had built up against a noisy world and then, quite suddenly, she had accepted Cedric as being like herself a stranger in these parts, as being, unlike herself, full of understanding of another, more splendid, attainable world outside. Angela’s father thought Cedric a poor fellow, settled vast sums on them, and let them go their own way.

And this was the way they had gone. Cedric stood by the spring, enshrined, now, in a little temple. The architrave was covered with stalactites, the dome was set with real shells and the clear water bubbled out from the feet of a Triton. Cedric and Angela had bought this temple on their honeymoon at a deserted villa in the hills behind Naples.

Below in the hillside lay the cave which Cedric had bought the summer that Angela had refused to come with him to Salzburg; the summer when she met Basil. The lonely and humiliating years after that summer each had its monument.

“Daddy, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m just looking at the grottoes.”

“But you’ve seen them thousands of times. They’re always the same.”

Always the same; joys for ever; not like men and women with their loves and hates.

“Daddy, there’s an aeroplane. Is it a Hurricane?”

“No, Nigel, a Spitfire.”

“How d’you tell the difference?”

Then, on an impulse, he had said, “Nigel, shall we go to London and see Mummy?”

“We might see ‘The Lion Has Wings’ too. The fellows say it’s awfully decent.”

“All right, Nigel, we’ll see both.”

So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. “Let’s surprise her,” said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer — “My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.”

“I am coming round to see Mrs. Lyne.”

“She isn’t very well this morning.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is she able to see people?”

“Yes, I think so, sir. I’ll ask…yes, madam will be very pleased to see you and Master Nigel.”

They had not met for three years, since they had discussed the question of divorce. Cedric understood exactly what Angela had felt about that; it was curious, he reflected, how some people were shy of divorce because of their love of society; they did not want there to be any occasion when their presence might be an embarrassment, they wanted to keep their tickets for the Ascot enclosure. With Angela reluctance came from precisely the opposite motives; she could not brook any intrusion of her privacy; she did not want to answer questions in court or allow the daily paper a single item of information about herself. “It’s not as though you wanted to marry anyone else, Cedric.”

“You don’t think the present arrangement makes me look rather foolish?”

“Cedric, what’s come over you? You used not to talk like that.”

So he had given way and that year had spanned the stream with a bridge in the Chinese Taste, taken direct from Batty Langley.

In the five minutes of waiting before Grainger took him into Angela’s bedroom, he studied David Lennox’s grisailles with distaste.

“Are they old, Daddy?”

“No, Nigel, they’re not old.”

“They’re awfully feeble.”

“They are.” (Regency…This was the age of Waterloo and highwaymen and duelling and slavery and revivalist preaching and Nelson having his arm off with no anesthetic but rum, and Botany Bay — and this is what they make of it.)

“Well, I prefer the pictures at home, even if they are old. Is that Mummy?”

“Yes.”

“Is that old?”

“Older than you, Nigel.”

Cedric turned from the portrait of Angela. What a nuisance John had been about the sittings! It was her father who had insisted on their going to him.

“Is it finished?”

“Yes. It was very hard to make the man finish it, though.”

“It hardly looks finished now, does it, Daddy? It’s all sploshy.”

Then Grainger opened the door. “Come in, Cedric,” Angela called from her bed.

Angela was wearing dark glasses. Her make-up things lay on the quilt before her, with which she had been hastily doing her face. Nigel might have asked if it was finished; it was sploshy, like the John portrait.

“I had no idea you were ill,” said Cedric stiffly.

“I’m not really. Nigel, haven’t you got a kiss for Mummy?”

“Why are you wearing those glasses?”

“My eyes are tired, darling.”

“Tired of what?”

“Cedric,” said Angela petulantly, “for God’s sake don’t let him be a bore. Go with Miss Grainger into the next room, darling.”

“Oh, all right,” said Nigel. “Don’t be long, Daddy.”

“You and he seem to be buddies these days.”

“Yes, it’s the uniform.”

“Funny your being in the Army again.”

“I’m off tonight, abroad.”

“France?”

“I don’t think so. I mustn’t tell about it. That’s why I came to see you.”

“About not talking about not going to France?” said Angela in something of her old teasing way.

Cedric began to talk about the house; he hoped Angela would keep on to it, even if anything happened to him; he thought he saw some glimmerings of taste in the boy; he might grow to appreciate it later. Angela was inattentive and answered absently.

“I’m afraid I’m tiring you.”

“Well, I’m not feeling terribly well to-day. Did you want to see me about anything special?”

“No I don’t think so. Just to say good-bye.”

“Daddy,” came a voice from the next room. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Oh dear, I wish I could do something about it. I feel there’s something I ought to do. It’s quite an occasion really, isn’t it? I’m not being beastly, Cedric, I really mean it. I think it’s sweet of you to come. I only wish I felt up to doing something about it.”

“Daddy, come on. We want to get to Bassett and Lowkes before lunch.”

“Take care of yourself,” said Angela.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Why will you all ask questions?”

And that had been the end of the visit. At Bassett and Lowkes, Nigel had chosen a model of a Blenheim bomber. “The fellows will be jealous,” he said.

After luncheon they went to see “The Lion Has Wings,” and then it was time to put Nigel into the train back to school. “It’s been absolutely ripping, Daddy,” he said.

“Has it really?”

“The rippingest two days I ever spent.”

So after these ripping days Cedric sat in the half-dark, with the pool of light falling on the unread book on his knees, returning to duty.

Basil went to the Café Royal to keep his watch on “the woman Green.” He found her sitting among her cronies and was greeted with tepid affection.

“So you’re in the Army, now,” she said.

“No, the great uniformed bureaucracy. How are all the Reds?”

“Very well thank you, watching your imperialists making a mess of your war.” p>

“Been to many Communist meetings lately?”

“Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“You sound like a police spy.”

“That’s the very last impression I want to make,” and, changing the subject hastily, added, “Seen Ambrose lately?”

“He’s over there now, the lousy fascist.”

Basil looked where she indicated and saw Ambrose at a table by the rail of the opposing gallery, sitting with a little, middle-aged man of nondescript appearance.

“Did you say ‘fascist’?”

“Didn’t you know? He’s gone to the Ministry of Information and he’s bringing out a fascist paper next month.”

“This is very interesting,” said Basil. “Tell me some more.”

Ambrose sat, upright and poised, with one hand on the stem of his glass and one resting stylishly on the balustrade. There was no particular feature of his clothes which could be mentioned as conspicuous; he wore a dark, smooth suit that fitted perhaps a little closely at waist and wrists, a shirt of plain, cream-coloured silk; a dark, white spotted bow tie; his sleek black hair was not unduly long (he went to the same barber as Alastair and Peter); his pale Semitic face gave no hint of special care, and yet it always embarrassed Mr. Bentley somewhat to be seen with him in public. Sitting there, gesticulating very slightly as he talked, wagging his head very slightly, raising his voice occasionally in a suddenly stressed uncommon epithet or in a fragment of slang absurdly embedded in his precise and literary diction, giggling between words now and then as something which he had intended to say changed shape and became unexpectedly comic in the telling —Ambrose, like this, caused time to slip back to an earlier age than his own youth or Mr. Bentley’s, when amid a more splendid decor of red plush and gilt caryatides fin-de-sičcle young worshippers crowded to the tables of Oscar and Aubrey.

Mr. Bentley smoothed his sparse grey hairs and fidgeted with his tie and looked about anxiously for fear he was observed.

The Café Royal, perhaps because of its distant associations with Oscar and Aubrey, was one of the places where Ambrose preened himself, spread his feathers and felt free to take wing. He had left his persecution mania downstairs with his hat and umbrella. He defied the universe.

“The decline of England, my dear Geoffrey,” he said, “dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. No, I’m not talking about distressed areas, but about distressed souls, my dear. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood. The golden aura of the golden age. Think of it, Geoffrey, there are children now coming to manhood who never saw a London fog. We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog. We had a foggy habit of life and a rich, obscure, choking literature. The great catch in the throat of English lyric poetry is just fog, my dear, on the vocal cords. And out of the fog we could rule the world; we were a Voice, like the Voice on Sinai smiling through the clouds. Primitive peoples always choose a God who speaks from a cloud. Then my dear Geoffrey,” said Ambrose, wagging an accusing finger and fixing Mr. Bentley with a black accusing eye, as though the poor publisher were personally responsible for the whole thing, “then, some busybody invents electricity or oil fuel or whatever it is they use nowadays. The fog lifts, the world sees us as we are, and worse still we see ourselves as we are. It was a carnival ball, my dear, which when the guests unmasked at midnight was found to be composed entirely of impostors. Such a rumpus, my dear.”

Ambrose drained his glass with a swagger, surveyed the cafe haughtily and saw Basil, who was making his way towards them.

“We are talking of Fogs,” said Mr. Bentley.

“They’re eaten hollow with Communism,” said Basil, introducing himself in the part of agent provocateur. “You can’t stop a rot that’s been going on twenty years by imprisoning a handful of deputies, Half the thinking men in France have begun looking to Germany as their real ally.”

“Please Basil, don’t start politics. Anyway we were talking of Fogs, not Frogs.”

“Oh, Fogs.” Basil attempted to tell of a foggy adventure of his own, sailing a yawl round Bear Island, but Ambrose was elated tonight and in no mood for these loose leaves of Conrad drifting in the high wind of his talk. “We must return to the Present,” he said prophetically.

“Oh dear,” said Mr. Bentley. “Why?”

“Everyone is either looking back or forward. Those with reverence and good taste, like you, my dear Geoffrey, look back to an Augustan Age; those with generous hearts and healthy lives and the taste of the devil, like Poppet Green over there, look forward to a Marxian Jerusalem. We must accept the Present.”

“You would say, wouldn’t you,” said Basil, persevering, “that Hitler was a figure of the Present?”

“I regard him as a page for Punch,” said Ambrose. “To the Chinese scholar the military hero was the lowest of human types, the subject for ribaldry. We must return to Chinese scholarship.”

“It’s a terribly difficult language, I believe,” said Mr. Bentley.

“I knew a Chink in Valparaiso…” began Basil; but Ambrose was now in full gallop.

“European scholarship has never lost its monastic character,” he said. “Chinese scholarship deals with taste and wisdom, not with the memorizing of facts. In China the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. European culture has become conventual; we must make it coenobitic.”

“I knew a hermit in the Ogaden Desert once…”

“Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms. The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed, occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves and floated downstream.”

“I read a lot of Chinese poetry once,” said Mr. Bentley, “in the translation, of course. I became fascinated by it. I would read of a sage who, as you say, lived frugally and idyllically. He had a cottage and a garden and a view. Each flower had its proper mood and phase of the climate; he would smell the jasmine after recovering from the toothache and the lotus when drinking tea with a monk. There was a little clearing where the full moon cast no shadow, where his concubine would sit and sing to him when he got drunk. Every aspect of this little garden corresponded to some personal mood of the most tender and refined sort. It was quite intoxicating to read.”

“It is.”

“This sage had no tame dog, but he had a cat and a mother. Every morning he greeted his mother on his knees and every evening, in winter, he put charcoal under her mattress and himself drew the bed-curtains. It sounded the most exquisite existence.”

“It was.”

“And then,” said Mr. Bentley, “I found a copy of the Daily Mirror in a railway carriage and I read an article there by Godfrey Winn about his cottage and his flowers and his moods, and for the life of me, Ambrose, I couldn’t see the difference between that young gentleman and Yuan Ts’e-tsung.”

It was cruel of Mr. Bentley to say this, but it may be argued for him that he had listened to Ambrose for three hours and now that Basil had joined their table he wanted to go home to bed.

The interruption deflated Ambrose and allowed Basil to say, “These scholars of yours, Ambrose — they didn’t care if their empire was invaded?”

“Not a hoot, my dear, not a tinker’s hoot.”

“And you’re starting a paper to encourage this sort of scholarship.”

Basil sat back and ordered a drink, as an advocate in a film will relax, saying in triumph, “Mr. District Attorney, your witness.”

There were four hours of darkness to go when Cedric arrived at the port of embarkation. There was a glimmer of light in some of the offices along the quayside, but the quay itself and the ship were in complete darkness; the top-hamper was just discernible as a darker mass against the dark sky. An E.S.O. told Cedric to leave his gear on the quay. The advanced working party were handling that. He left his valise and carried his suitcase up the gangway; at the head an invisible figure directed him to the first-class quarters forward. He found his C.O. in the saloon.

“Hullo, Lyne. You’re back already. Lucky. Billy Allgood broke his collar-bone on leave and isn’t coming with us. You’d better take charge of the embarkation. There’s a hell of a lot to do. Some blasted Highlanders have come to the wrong ship and are all over our troop decks. Had any dinner?”

“I got some oysters in London before starting.”

“Very wise. I tried to get something kept hot. Told them we should all be coming on board hungry, but they’re still working peace-time routine here. This is all I could raise.”

He pointed to a large, silvery tray where, disposed on a napkin, lay a dozen lozenges of toast covered with sardines, slivers of cheese and little glazed pieces of tongue. This was the tray that was always brought to the first-class saloon at ten o’clock at night.

“Come back when you’ve found your cabin.”

Cedric found his cabin, perfectly in order, complete with three towels of different sizes and the photograph of a moustached man putting on his life jacket in the correct manner. He left his suitcase and returned to the C.O.

“Our men will be coming on board in an hour and a half. I don’t know what the devil these Highlanders are doing. Find out and clear them off.”

“Very good, Colonel.”

Cedric plunged down again into the darkness and found the E.S.O. They studied the embarkation orders with the aid of a dimmed torch. There was no doubt about it; the Highlanders were in the wrong ship. This was the Duchess of Cumberland; they should be in the Duchess of Clarence. “But the Clarence isn’t here,” said the E.S.O. “I daresay they were told to go to the Cumberland by someone.”

“By whom?”

“Not by me, old man,” said the E.S.O.

Cedric went on board and looked for the C.O. of the Highlanders and found him at length in his cabin asleep in his battledress.

“These are my orders,” said the Highland Colonel, taking a sheaf of typewritten sheets from the pocket on his thigh. They were already tattered and smeared by constant reference. “‘Duchess of Cumberland. Embark 2300 hrs. with full 1098 stores.’ That’s plain enough.”

“But our men come on board in an hour.”

“Can’t help you, I’m afraid. These are my orders.”

He was not going to discuss the matter with a subaltern. Cedric fetched his C.O. Colonel to Colonel, they talked the thing out and decided to clear the after troop-decks. Cedric was sent to wake the Highland duty officer. He found the duty Sergeant. Together they went aft to the troop-decks.

There were dim lights along the ceiling — electric bulbs recently daubed with blue paint, not yet scratched clear by the troops. Equipment and kit-bags lay about the deck in heaps; there were Bren gun boxes and ammunition and the huge coffin-shaped chests of the antitank rifles.

“Oughtn’t that to be stored in the armoury?” asked Cedric.

“Not unless you want to get it pinched.”

Amid the heaps of stores half a battalion lay huddled in blankets. Very few of them, on this first night, had slung hammocks. These lay with the other gear, adding to the piles.

“We’ll never get them moved tonight.”

“We’ve got to try,” said Cedric.

Very slowly the inert mass was got into movement. They began collecting their own gear and swearing monotonously. Working parties began man-handling the stores. They had to go up the ladders onto the main deck, forward through the darkness and down the forward hatches.

Presently a voice from the top of the ladder said, “Is Lyne down there?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been told to bring my company to this troop-deck.”

“They’ll have to wait.”

“They’re coming on board now.”

“Well for God’s sake stop them.”

“But isn’t this D deck?”

“Yes.”

“Then this is where we are to come to. Who the hell are all these men?”

Cedric went up the ladder and to the head of the gangway. A stream of heavily laden men of his regiment were toiling up. “Go back,” ordered Cedric.

“Who the hell’s that?” asked a voice from the darkness.

“Lyne. Take your men back to the quay. They can’t come on board yet.”

“Oh but they’ve got to. D’you realize half of them’ve had nothing to eat since midday?”

“There’s nothing to eat here till breakfast.”

“Oh, but, I say, what rot. The R.T.O. at Euston said he’d telegraph through and have a hot meal ready on arrival. Where’s the Colonel?”

The line of soldiers on the gangway turned about and began a slow descent. When the last of them was on the quay, invisible in the darkness, their officer came on board.

“You seem to have made a pretty good muck-up,” he said.

The deck was full of the other regiment carrying stores.

“There’s a man there smoking,” shouted a ship’s officer from above. “Put that cigarette out.”

Matches began to spurt up on the quay. “Put those cigarettes out, down there.”

“––-y well traveling all the ––-ing day. No ––-ing

supper. ––-ed about on the ––-ing quay. Now a ––-

won’t let me have a ––-ing smoke. I’m ––-ing––-ed

with being ––-ed about by these––-ers.”

A dark figure passed Cedric muttering desperately: “Nominal rolls in triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate. Why the devil can’t they tell us beforehand they want nominal rolls in triplicate?”

Another dark figure, whom Cedric recognized as the E.S.O

“I say, the men are supposed to strip down their equipment and pack it in green sea-bags before embarking.”

“Oh,” said Cedric.

“They don’t seem to have done it.”

“Oh.”

“It upsets all the storage arrangements if they don’t.”

“Oh.”

An orderly came up. “Mr. Lyne, sir, will you go and see the C.O.?”

Cedric went.

“Look here Lyne, aren’t those infernal Scotsmen out of our troop-deck yet? I ordered that deck to be clear two hours ago. I thought you were looking after that.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. They’re getting a move on now.”

“I should bloody well hope so. And look here, half our men have had nothing to eat all day. Go up to the purser and see what you can rout out for them. And find out on the bridge exactly what the sailing orders are. When the troops come on board see that everyone knows where everything is. We don’t want anything lost. We may be in action before the end of the week. I hear these Highlanders lost a lot of kit on the way up. We don’t want them making up deficiencies at our expense.”

“Very good, sir.”

As he went out on deck the ghostly figure brushed past him in the darkness muttering in tones that seemed to echo from another and even worse world, “Nominal rolls in triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate…”

At seven o’clock the Colonel said, “For God’s sake someone take over from Lyne. He seems to have lain down on the job.”

Cedric went to his cabin; he was unspeakably tired; all the events and emotions of the last forty-eight hours were lost in the single longing for sleep; he took off his belt and his shoes and lay on his bunk. Within a quarter of a minute he was unconscious; within five minutes he was awakened by a steward placing a tray by his side; it contained tea, an apple, a thin slice of brown bread and butter. That was how the day always began on this ship, whether she was cruising to the midnight sun or the West Indies. An hour later another steward passed by, striking a musical gong with a little hammer. That was the second stage of the day in this ship. He passed, tinkling prettily, through the first-class quarters, threading his path delicately between valises and kit-bags. Unshaven, ill-tempered officers, who had not been asleep all night, scowled at him as he passed. Nine months ago the ship had been in the Mediterranean and a hundred cultured spinsters had welcomed his music. It was all one to him.

After breakfast the Colonel saw all his officers in the smoking-room. “We’ve got to get everything out of the ship,” he said. “It’s got to be loaded tactically. We shan’t be sailing until tonight anyway. I’ve just seen the Captain and he says he isn’t fuelled yet. Also we’re overloaded and he insists on our putting two hundred men ashore. Also, there’s a field hospital coming on board this morning, that we’ve got to find room for. There is also Field Security Police, Field Force Institute, N.A.A.F.I., two Pay Corps officers, four chaplains, a veterinary surgeon, a press photographer, a naval beach party, some Marine anti-aircraft gunners, an air support liaison unit — whatever that is — and a detachment of Sappers to be accommodated. All ranks are confined to the ship. There will be no communication of any kind with the shore. Duty company will find sentries for the post and telephone boxes on the quay. That’s all, gentlemen.”

Everyone said, “Lyne made a nonsense of the embarkation.”

When Mr. Bentley, in the first flush of patriotic zeal, left publishing and took service with the Ministry of Information, it was agreed between him and the senior partner that his room should be kept for his use and that he should come in whenever he could to keep an eye on his interests. Mr. Rampole, the senior partner, would see to the routine of the office.

Rampole and Bentley was not a large or a very prosperous firm; it owed its continued existence largely to the fact that both partners had a reasonable income derived from other sources. Mr. Bentley was a publisher because ever since he was a boy, he had had a liking for books; he thought them a Good Thing; the more of them the merrier. Wider acquaintance had not increased his liking for authors, whom he found as a class avaricious, egotistical, jealous and ungrateful, but he had always the hope that one day one of these disagreeable people would turn out to be a messiah of genius. And he liked the books themselves; he liked to see in the window of the office the dozen bright covers which were that season’s new titles; he liked the sense of vicarious authorship which this spectacle gave him. Not so old Rampole. Mr. Bentley often wondered why his senior partner had ever taken to publishing and why, once disillusioned, he persisted in it. Old Rampole deplored the propagation of books. “It won’t do,” he always said whenever Mr. Bentley produced a new author, “no one ever reads first novels.”

Once or twice a year old Rampole himself introduced an author, always with well-justified forecasts of the book’s failure. “Terrible thing,” he would say. “Met old So-and-so at the club. Got button-holed. Fellow’s just retired from Malay States. Written his reminiscences. We shall have to do them for him. No getting out of it now. One comfort, he won’t ever write another book.”

That was one superiority he had over Mr. Bentley which he was fond of airing. His authors never came back for more, like Mr. Bentley’s young friends.

The idea of the Ivory Tower was naturally repugnant to old Rampole. “I’ve never known a literary review succeed yet,” he said.

He had a certain grudging regard for Ambrose because he was one of the few writers on their list who were incontestably profitable. Other writers always involved an argument, Mr. Bentley having an ingenious way of explaining over-advances and overhead charges and stock in hand in such a way that he seemed to prove that obvious failures had indeed succeeded. But Ambrose’s books sold fifteen thousand copies. He didn’t like the fellow but he had to concede him a certain knack of writing. It shocked him that Ambrose should be so blind to his own interests as to propose such a scheme.

“Has the fellow got money?” he asked Mr. Bentley privately.

“Very little, I think.”

“Then what is he thinking of? What’s he after?”

To Ambrose he said, “But a literary review, now of all times!”

“Now is the time of all times,” said Ambrose. “Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t. Costs are up and going higher. Can’t get paper. Who’ll want to read this magazine anyway? It isn’t a woman’s paper. It isn’t, as I see it, a man’s. It isn’t even topical. Who’s going to advertise in it?”

“I wasn’t thinking of having advertisements. I thought of making it something like the old Yellow Book.”

“Well, that was a failure,” said old Rampole triumphantly, “in the end.”

But presently he gave his consent. He always gave his consent in the end to all Mr. Bentley’s suggestions. That was the secret of their long partnership. He had registered his protest. No one could blame him. It was all Bentley’s doing. Often he had opposed Mr. Bentley’s projects out of habit, on the widest grounds that publication of any kind was undesirable. In the case of the Ivory Tower he stood on firm ground and knew it. It gave him positive satisfaction to detect his partner in such indefensible folly. So Mr. Bentley’s room, which was the most ornamental in the fine old building which they used as their offices, became the editorial room of Ambrose’s paper.

There was not, at this stage, much editorial work to be done.

“There’s one criticism I foresee,” said Mr. Bentley, studying the proof sheets: “the entire issue seems to be composed by yourself.”

“No one’s to guess that,” said Ambrose. “If you like we’ll put some pseudonyms in.” Ambrose had always rather specialized in manifestoes. He had written one at school; he had written a dozen at the University; once, in the late twenties, he and his friends Hat and Malpractice had even issued the invitation to a party in the form of a manifesto. It was one of his many reasons for shunning Communism — that its manifesto had been written for it, once and for all, by somebody else. Surrounded, as he believed himself to be, by enemies of all kinds, Ambrose found it exhilarating from time to time to trumpet his defiance. The first number of the Ivory Tower somewhat belied the serenity and seclusion which it claimed, for Ambrose had a blow for every possible windmill.

“The Minstrel Boys, or Ivory Tower v. Manhattan Skyscraper” defined once and for all Ambrose’s attitude in the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy. “Hermit or Choirmaster” was an expansion of Ambrose’s theme at the Café Royal: “Culture must be coenobitic not conventual.” He struck ferocious unprovoked blows at those who held that literature was of value to the community. Mr. J. B. Priestley came in for much personal abuse in these pages. There followed “The Bakelite Tower,” an onslaught on David Lennox and the decorative school of fashionable artists. “Majors and Mandarins” followed, where was defined the proper degrees of contempt and abhorrence due to the military, and among the military Ambrose included by name all statesmen of an energetic and warlike disposition.

“It’s all very controversial,” said Mr. Bentley sadly. “When you first told me about it, I thought you meant it to be a purely artistic paper.”

“We must show people where we stand,” said Ambrose. “Art will follow — anyway, there’s ‘Monument to a Spartan.’”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bentley. “There’s that.”

“It covers fifty pages, my dear. All Pure Art.”

He said this with a facetious, shop assistant’s intonation as though he were saying “All Pure Silk”; he said it as though it were a joke, but in his heart he believed — and he knew Mr. Bentley understood him in this sense — he was speaking the simple truth. It was all pure art.

He had written it two years ago on his return from Munich after his parting with Hans. It was the story of Hans. Now, after the passage of two years, he could not read it without tears. To publish it was a symbolic action of the laying down of an emotional burden he had carried too long.

“Monument to a Spartan” described Hans, as Ambrose had loved him, in every mood; Hans immature, the provincial petit-bourgeois youth floundering and groping in the gloom of Teutonic adolescence, unsuccessful in his examinations, world-weary, brooding about suicide among the conifers, uncritical of direct authority, unreconciled to the order of the universe; Hans affectionate, sentimental, roughly sensual, guilty; above all Hans guilty, haunted by the taboos of the forest; Hans credulous, giving his simple and generous acceptance to all the nonsense of Nazi leaders; Hans reverent to those absurd instructors who harangued the youth camps, resentful at the injustices of man to man, at the plots of the Jews and the encirclement of his country, at the blockade and disarmament; Hans loving his comrades, finding in a deep tribal emotion an escape from the guilt of personal love, Hans singing with his Hitler youth comrades, cutting trees with them, making roads, still loving his old friend, puzzled that he could not fit the old love into the scheme of the new; Hans growing a little older, joining the Brown Shirts, lapped in a kind of benighted chivalry, bemused in a twilight where the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like Wagnerian heroes; Hans faithful to his old friend, like a woodcutter’s boy in a fairy tale who sees the whole forest peopled with the great ones of another world and, rubbing his eyes, returns at evening to his hut and his fireside. The Wagnerians shone in Ambrose’s story as they did in Hans’s eyes. He austerely denied himself any hint of satire. The blustering, cranky, boneheaded party men were all heroes and philosophers. All this Ambrose had recorded with great delicacy and precision at a time when his heart was consumed by the final tragedy. Hans’s Storm Troop comrades discover that his friend is a Jew; they have resented this friend before because in their gross minds they know him to represent something personal and private in a world where only the mob and the hunting pack have the right to live. So the mob and the hunting pack fall on Hans’s friendship. With a mercy they are far from feeling they save Hans from facing the implications of his discovery. For him, alone, it would have been the great climacteric of his retarded adolescence; the discovery that his own, personal conviction conflicted with the factitious convictions drummed into him by the crooks and humbugs he took for his guides. But the hunting pack and the mob left Hans no time to devise his own, intense punishment; that at least was spared him in the swift and savage onslaught; that was left to Ambrose returning by train to England.

It was a story which a popular writer would have spun out to 150,000 words; Ambrose missed nothing; it was all there, delicately and precisely, in fifty pages of the Ivory Tower.

“Quite frankly, Geoffrey, I regard this as a major work of art.”

“Yes, Ambrose, I know you do. So do I. I only wish we were publishing it without all the controversial stuff.”

“Not controversial, Geoffrey. We invite acceptance, not argument. We are showing our credentials and laissez-passer. That’s all.”

“Old Rampole won’t like it,” said Mr. Bentley.

“We won’t let old Rampole see it,” said Ambrose.

“I’m on to a very good thing, Colonel.”

“Will you kindly address me as ‘sir’ in this office?”

“You wouldn’t prefer to be called ‘chief?”

“You’ll call me ‘sir’ or get out of that uniform.”

“It’s funny,” said Basil. “I should much sooner be called ‘chief.’ In fact that’s what Susie does call me. However, sir, may I tell you about my discovery?”

When Basil had told him, Colonel Plum said: “That’s all right as far as it goes. We can’t take any action, of course. This fellow Silk is a well-known writer, working in the Ministry of Information.” p>

“He’s a most dangerous type. I know him well. He was living in Munich before the war — never out of the Brown House.”

“That’s as may be, but this isn’t Spain. We can’t go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a cafe. I’ve no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can’t be done.”

“But this paper he’s starting.”

“Yes, that’s another matter. But Rampole and Bentley are a perfectly respectable little firm. I can’t apply for a search warrant until I’ve got something to go on. We’ve got pretty wide powers, but we have to be careful how we use them. We’ll keep an eye on this paper and if it seems dangerous we’ll stop it. Meanwhile get to work. Here’s an anonymous denunciation of a retired admiral in South Kensington. There won’t be anything in it. See what the police know about him.”

“Don’t we ever investigate night clubs? I’m sure they’re bursting with enemy agents.”

Susie said, “I do. You don’t.”

A quiet day at the Ministry of Information…The more energetic neutral correspondents had mostly left the country by now, finding Axis sources a happier hunting-ground for front-page news. The Ministry could get on with its work undisturbed. That afternoon a film was showing in the Ministry theatre; it dealt with otter-hunting and was designed to impress neutral countries with the pastoral beauty of English life. The Religious Department were all keen film-goers. Basil found the room empty. On Ambrose’s table lay two sets of galley-proofs of the new magazine. Basil pocketed one of them. There was also a passport; Basil took it up with interest. He had never seen an Irish one before. It was made out for a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University. The photograph showed a cadaverous face of indeterminate age. Father Flanagan was in his leisure from higher education the correspondent of an Irish newspaper. He wanted to visit the Maginot Line during his vacation and after numerous disappointments had found his way to the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information, where the Roman Catholic director had promised to try and get him a visa. Basil took this too; an additional passport often came in useful. Then he sauntered away.

He took the proofs home and read until dinner, marking a passage here and there as material to his brief. The style throughout was homogeneous but the authors’ names were multiform. Ambrose rather let himself go on names: “Hucklebury Squib,” “Bartholomew Grass,” “Tom Barebones-Abraham.” Only “Monument to a Spartan” bore Ambrose’s own name. Later that evening Basil sought Ambrose where he was sure to find him, at the Café Royal.

“I’ve been reading your magazine,” he said.

“So it was you. I thought one of those nasty Jesuits had stolen it. They’re always flapping in and out the Department like jackdaws. Geoffrey Bentley was in a great stew about it. He doesn’t want old Rampole to see a copy until the thing’s out.”

“Why should the Jesuits want to show your magazine to old Rampole?”

“They’re up to any mischief. What d’you think of it?”

“Well,” said Basil, “I think you might have made it a bit stronger. You know what you want to do is to shock people a bit. That’s the way to put a new magazine across. You can’t shock people nowadays with sex, of course; I don’t mean that. But suppose you had a little poem in praise of Himmler — something like that?”

“I don’t believe that would be a good idea; besides as far as I know no one has written a poem like that.”

“I daresay I could rake one up for you.”

“No,” said Ambrose. “What did you think of ‘Monument to a Spartan’?”

“All the first part is first-rate. I suppose they made you put on that ending?”

“Who?”

“The Ministry of Information.”

“They’ve had nothing to do with it.”

“Haven’t they? Well, of course, you know best. I can only say how it reads to an outsider. What I felt was: Here is a first-class work of art; something no one but you could have written. And then, suddenly, it degenerates into mere propaganda. Jolly good propaganda, of course; I wish half the stuff your Ministry turns out was as good — but propaganda. An atrocity story — the sort of stuff American journalists turn out by the ream. It glares a bit, you know, Ambrose. Still, of course, we all have to make sacrifices in wartime. Don’t think I don’t respect you for it. But artistically, Ambrose, it’s shocking.”

“Is it?” said Ambrose, dismayed. “Is that how it reads?”

“Leaps to the eye, old boy. Still it ought to give you a leg up in the Department.”

“Basil,” said Ambrose solemnly, “if I thought that was how people would take it, I’d scrap the whole thing.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t do that. The first forty-five pages are grand. Why don’t you leave it like that, with Hans still full of his illusions marching into Poland?”

“I might.”

“And you could bring Himmler in, just at the end in a kind of apotheosis of Nazism.”

“No.”

“Well, Himmler isn’t necessary. Just leave Hans in the first exhilaration of victory.”

“I’ll think about it… D’you really mean that intelligent readers would think I was writing propaganda?”

“They couldn’t think anything else, old boy, could they?”

A week later, by the simple process of going to Rampole and Bentley’s office and asking for one, Basil obtained an advance copy of the new magazine. He turned eagerly to the last page and found that “Monument to a Spartan” now ended as he had suggested; he read it again with relish; to anyone ignorant of Ambrose’s private history it bore one plain character — the triumphant paean of Hitler youth; Doctor Ley himself might have been the author. Basil took the magazine with him to the War Office; before approaching Colonel Plum he marked with a red chalk the “Monument to a Spartan” and passages in the preceding articles which cast particular ridicule upon the Army and the War Cabinet and which urged on the artist the duty of non-resistance to violence. Then he laid it on Colonel Plum’s desk.

“I think, sir, you promised to make me a Captain of Marines if I caught a fascist.”

“It was a figurative expression.”

“Meaning what?”

“That you might have done something to excuse your presence in my office. What have you got there?”

“Documentary evidence. A fifth column nest.”

“Well, put it down. I’ll have a look at it when I’ve time.”

It was not Colonel Plum’s habit to show enthusiasm before subordinates, but as soon as Basil was gone he began reading the marked passages with close attention. Presently he called for Basil.

“I believe you’re on to something here,” he said. “I’m taking this round to Scotland Yard. Who are these men Squib, Grass and Barebones-Abraham?”

“Don’t you think they sound like pseudonyms?”

“Nonsense. When a man chooses an alias he calls himself Smith or Brown.”

“Have it your own way, sir. I shall be interested to see them in the dock.”

“There won’t be any dock. We shall get this bunch under a special warrant.”

“Shall I come round to Scotland Yard with you?”

“No.”

“Just for that I won’t introduce him to Barebones-Abraham,” said Basil when the Colonel was gone.

“Have we really caught some fifth column at last?” asked Susie.

“I don’t know about ‘we’; I have.”

“Will they be shot?”

“Not all of them I should think.”

“Seems a shame really,” said Susie. “I expect they’re only a bit touched.”

In the pleasure of setting his trap, Basil had not looked forward to its consequences. When Colonel Plum returned to his office two hours later, things seemed to have gone far beyond Basil’s control. “They’re pleased as Punch at Scotland Yard,” he said. “Handing out some very handsome bouquets. The whole thing is buttoned-up. We’ve taken out a special warrant for authors, publishers and printers, but I don’t think we need worry the printers much. Tomorrow morning the man Silk will be arrested at the Ministry of Information; simultaneously Rampole and Bentley’s will be surrounded and entered, all copies of the paper and all correspondence seized. All the office staff will be held pending investigation. What we need now is a description of the men Grass, Squibb and Barebones-Abraham. You might get on to that. I’m going round to see the Home Secretary now.”

There was, at first hearing, a lot about this speech which displeased Basil, and more still when he began to turn the thing over in his mind. In the first place Colonel Plum seemed to be getting all the credit and all the fun. It was he himself, Basil felt, who should be going to see the Home Secretary; he should have been to Scotland Yard to make arrangements for the morrow’s raid; he should have had the handsome bouquets of which Colonel Plum had spoken. It was not for this that he had planned the betrayal of an old friend. Colonel Plum was putting on altogether too much dog.

In the second place the sensation of being on the side of the law was novel to Basil and not the least agreeable. Police raids, for Basil, had in the past always meant escaping over the tiles or through the area; it made him ashamed to hear these things spoken of with tolerance and familiarity.

In the third place he was not absolutely happy in his mind about what Ambrose might say. Even though he was to be deprived of the right of public trial, there would presumably be some kind of investigation at which he would be allowed to give an account of himself. Basil’s share in editing “Monument to a Spartan” was, he felt, better kept as a good story to tell in the right company at the right time — not to be made the subject of official and semi-legal enquiry.

And in the fourth place Basil had from long association an appreciable softness of disposition towards Ambrose. Other things being equal, he wished him well rather than ill.

These considerations, in that order of importance, worked in Basil’s mind.

Ambrose’s flat lay in the neighborhood of the Ministry of Information; it was the top floor of a large Bloomsbury mansion; where the marble stairs changed to deal, Ambrose ascended into what had once been the servants’ bedrooms; it was an attic and, so-called, satisfied the ascetic promptings which had affected Ambrose in the year of the great slump. There was, however, little else about the flat to suggest hardship. He had the flair of his race for comfort and for enviable possessions. There were expensive continental editions of works on architecture, there were deep armchairs, an object like an ostrich egg sculptured by Brancusi, a gramophone with a prodigious horn, and a library of records — these and countless other features made the living-room dear to him. It is true that the bath was served only by a gas-burning apparatus which at the best gave a niggardly trickle of warm water and, at the worst, exploded in a cloud of poisonous vapours, but apparatus of this kind is the hallmark of the higher intellectuals all the world over. Ambrose’s bedroom compensated for the dangers and discomforts of the bathroom. In this flat he was served by a motherly old Cockney who teased him at intervals for not marrying.

To this flat Basil came very late that night. He had delayed his arrival on purely artistic grounds. Colonel Plum might deny him the excitements of Scotland Yard and the Home Office, but there should be every circumstance of melodrama here. Basil knocked and rang for some time before he made himself heard. Then Ambrose came to the door in a dressing-gown.

“Oh God,” he said. “I suppose you’re drunk” — for no friend of Basil’s who maintained a fixed abode in London could ever consider himself immune from his occasional nocturnal visits.

“Let me in. We haven’t a moment to spare.” Basil spoke in a whisper. “The police will be here at any moment.”

Slightly dazed with sleep, Ambrose admitted him. There are those for whom the word “police” holds no terror. Ambrose was not of them. All his life he had been an outlaw and the days in Munich were still fresh in his memory, when friends disappeared suddenly in the night, leaving no address.

“I’ve brought you this,” said Basil, “and this and this.” He gave Ambrose a clerical collar, a black clerical vest ornamented with a double line of jet buttons, and an Irish passport. “You are Father Flanagan returning to Dublin University. Once in Ireland you’ll be safe.”

“But surely there’s no train at this time.”

“There’s one at eight. You mustn’t be found here. You can sit in the waiting-room at Euston till it comes in. Have you got a breviary?”

“Of course not.”

“Then read a racing paper. I suppose you’ve got dark suit.”

It was significant both of Basil’s fine urgency of manner, and of Ambrose’s constitutionally guilty disposition, that he was already clothed as a clergyman before he said, “But what have I done? Why are they after me?”

“Your magazine. It’s being suppressed. They’re rounding up everyone connected with it.”

Ambrose asked no more. He accepted the fact as a pauper accepts the condition of being perpetually “moved on.” It was something inalienable from his state; the artist’s birthright.

“How did you hear about it?”

“In the War Office.”

“What am I to do about all this?” asked Ambrose helplessly. “The flat, and the furniture, and my books, and Mrs. Carver?”

“I tell you what. If you like I’ll move in and take care of it for you until it’s safe to come back.”

“Would you really, Basil?” said Ambrose, touched. “You’re being very kind.”

For some time now Basil had felt himself unfairly handicapped in his pursuit of Susie by the fact of his living with his mother. He had not thought of this solution. It had come providentially, with rapid and exemplary justice all too rare in life; goodness was being rewarded quite beyond his expectations, if not beyond his deserts.

“I’m afraid the geyser is rather a bore,” said Ambrose apologetically.

They were not far from Euston Station. Packing was the work of a quarter of an hour.

“But, Basil, I must have some clothes.”

“You are an Irish priest. What d’you think the Customs are going to say when they open a trunk full of Charvet ties and crepe-de-Chine pyjamas?”

Ambrose was allowed one suitcase.

“I’ll look after all this for you,” said Basil, surveying the oriental profusion of expensive underclothes which filled the many drawers and presses of the bedroom. “You’ll have to walk to the station, you know.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Taxi might be traced. Can’t take any chances.”

The suitcase had seemed small enough when Basil first selected it as the most priestly of the rather too smart receptacles in Ambrose’s box-room; it seemed enormous as they trudged northward through the dark streets of Bloomsbury. At last they reached the classic columns of the railway terminus. It is not a cheerful place at the best of times, striking a chill in the heart of the gayest holiday-maker. Now in wartime, before dawn on a cold spring morning, it seemed the entrance to a sepulchre.

“I’ll leave you here,” said Basil. “Keep out of sight until the train is in. If anyone speaks to you, tell your beads.”

“I haven’t any beads.”

“Then contemplate. Go into an ecstasy. But don’t open your mouth or you’re done.”

“I’ll write to you when I get to Ireland.”

“Better not,” said Basil, cheerfully.

He turned away and was immediately lost in the darkness. Ambrose entered the station. A few soldiers slept on benches, surrounded by their kit and equipment. Ambrose found a corner darker, even, than the general gloom. Here, on a packing-case that seemed by its smell to contain fish of a sort, he sat waiting for dawn; black hat perched over his eyes, black overcoat wrapped close about his knees, mournful, black eyes open, staring into the blackness. From the fishy freight below him water oozed slowly onto the pavement making a little pool, as though of tears.

Mr. Rampole was not, as many of his club acquaintances supposed, a bachelor, but a widower of long standing. He lived in a small but substantial house at Hampstead and there maintained in servitude a spinster daughter. On this fateful morning his daughter saw him off from the front gate as had been her habit years without number, at precisely 8:45. Mr. Rampole paused in the flagged path to comment on the buds which were breaking everywhere in the little garden.

Look well at those buds, old Rampole; you will not see the full leaf.

“I’ll be back at six,” he said.

Presumptuous Rampole, who shall tell what the day will bring forth? Not his daughter, who returned, unmoved by the separation, to eat a second slice of toast in the dining-room; not old Rampole, who strode at a good pace towards the Hampstead Underground.

He showed his season ticket to the man at the lift.

“I shall have to get it renewed the day after-to-morrrow,” he said affably, and tied a knot in the corner of his large white handkerchief to remind him of the fact.

There is no need for that knot, old Rampole; you will never again travel in the Hampstead Underground.

He opened his morning paper as he had done, five days a week, years without number. He turned first to the Deaths, then to the correspondence, then, reluctantly, to the news of the day.

Never again, old Rampole, never again.

The police raid on the Ministry of Information, like so many similar enterprises, fell flat. First, the plain-clothes men had the utmost difficulty in getting past the gate-keeper.

“Is Mr. Silk expecting you?”

“We hope not.”

“Then you can’t see him.”

When finally they were identified and allowed to pass, there was a confused episode in the Religious Department, where they found only the nonconformist minister, whom, too zealously, they proceeded to handcuff. It was explained that Ambrose was unaccountably absent from duty that morning. Two constables were left to await his arrival. All through the day they sat there, casting a gloom over the Religious Department. The plain-clothes men proceeded to Mr. Bentley’s room, where they were received with great frankness and charm.

Mr. Bentley answered all their questions in a manner befitting an honest citizen. Yes, he knew Ambrose Silk both as a colleague at the Ministry and, formerly, as one of their authors at Rampole’s. No, he had almost nothing to do with publishing these days; he was too busy with all this (an explanatory gesture which embraced the dripping sink, the Nollekens busts and the page of arabesques beside the telephone). Mr. Rampole was in entire charge of the publishing firm. Yes, he thought he had heard of some magazine which Silk was starting. The Ivory Tower? Was that the name? Very likely. No, he had no copy. Was it already out? Mr. Bentley had formed the impression that it was not yet ready for publication. The contributors? Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass, Tom Barebones-Abraham? Mr. Bentley thought he had heard the names; he might have met them in literary circles in the old days. He had the idea that Barebones-Abraham was rather below normal height, corpulent, bald — yes, Mr. Bentley was quite sure he was bald as an egg; he spoke with a stammer and dragged his left leg as he walked. Hucklebury Squib was a very tall young man — easily recognizable, for he had lost the lobe of his left ear in extraordinary circumstances when sailing before the mast; he had a front tooth missing and wore gold ear-rings.

The plain-clothes men recorded these details in shorthand. This was the sort of witness they liked, circumstantial, precise, unhesitating.

When it came to Bartholomew Grass, Mr. Bentley’s invention flagged. He had never seen the man. He rather thought it might be the pseudonym for a woman.

“Thank you, Mr. Bentley,” said the chief of the plain-clothes men. “I don’t think we need trouble you any more. If we want you I suppose we can always find you here.”

“Always,” said Mr. Bentley sweetly. “I often, whimsically, refer to this little table as my grindstone. I keep my nose to it. We live in arduous times, Inspector.”

A posse of police went to Ambrose’s flat, where all they got was a piece of his housekeeper’s mind.

“Our man’s got away,” they reported when they returned to their superiors.

Colonel Plum, the Inspector of Police and Basil were summoned late that afternoon to the office of the Director of Internal Security.

“I can’t congratulate you,” he said, “on the way this case has been handled. I’m not blaming you, Inspector, or you, Seal,” and he fixed Colonel Plum with a look of detestation. “We were clearly onto a very dangerous set of men and you let four out of five slip through your fingers. I’ve no doubt that at this moment they are sitting in a German submarine, laughing at us.”

“We’ve got Rampole, sir,” said Colonel Plum. “I’m inclined to think he’s the ringleader.”

“I’m inclined to think he’s an old booby.”

“He has behaved in the most hostile and defiant manner throughout. He refuses to give any particulars about any of his accomplices.”

“He threw a telephone directory at one of our men,” said the Inspector, “and used the following expressions about them: ‘nincompoops,’ ‘jacks-in-office…’ “

“Yes, yes, I have the report. Rampole is obviously a violent and thoroughly unreasonable type. It won’t do him any harm to cool his heels for the rest of the war. But he’s not the ringleader. This fellow Barebones-Abraham is the man I want and you haven’t been able to find a trace of him.”

“We’ve got his description.”

“A fat lot of good that is when he’s halfway back to Germany. No, the whole thing has been grossly mismanaged. The Home Secretary takes a very poor view of it. Somebody talked and I mean to find out who.”

When the interview, painfully protracted, came to an end, the Director told Basil to remain behind.

“Seal,” he said, “I understand you were the first man to get onto this gang. Have you any idea how they were warned?”

“You put me in a very difficult position, sir.”

“Come, come, my boy, this is no time for petty loyalties when your country’s future is at stake.”

“Well, sir, I’ve felt for some time that there’s been too much feminine influence in our Department. Have you seen Colonel Plum’s secretary?”

“Hokey-pokey, eh?”

“You could call it that, sir.”

“Enemy agent, eh?”

“Oh no, sir. Have a look at her.”

The Director sent for Susie. When she had gone he said, “No, not an enemy agent.”

“Certainly not, sir, but a frivolous, talkative girl. Colonel Plum’s intimacy…”

“Yes, I quite understand. You did perfectly right to tell me.”

“What did he want, sending for me like that and just staring?” asked Susie.

“I think I’ve arranged a promotion for you.”

“Ooh, you are sweet.”

“I’m just moving into a new flat.”

“Lucky you,” said Susie.

“I wish you’d come and advise me about the decorations. I’m no good at that kind of thing.”

“Oh no?” said Susie in a voice she had learned at the cinema. “And what would Colonel Plum say?”

“Colonel Plum won’t have anything to say. You’re rising far above ADDIS.”

“Ooh.”

Next morning Susie received an official intimation that she was to move to the Director’s office.

“Lucky you,” said Basil.

She had admired all Ambrose’s decorations except the Brancusi sculpture. That had been put away, out of sight, in the box-room.

At Brixton Gaol Mr. Rampole enjoyed many privileges that were not accorded to common criminals. There was a table in his cell and a tolerably comfortable chair. He was allowed, at his own expense, some additions to prison fare. He might smoke. The Times was delivered to him every morning and for the first time in his life he accumulated a small library. Mr. Bentley from time to time brought him papers for which his signature was required. In every way his life was much easier than it would have been in similar circumstances in any other country.

But Mr. Rampole was not content. There was an obnoxious young man next to him who, when they met at exercise, said, “Heil Mosley,” and at night attempted to tap out messages of encouragement in Morse. Moreover Mr. Rampole missed his club and his home at Hampstead. In spite of a multitude of indulgences he faced the summer without enthusiasm.

In a soft, green valley where a stream ran through close-cropped, spongy pasture and the grass grew down below the stream’s edge, and merged there with the water-weed — where a road ran between grass verges and tumbled walls, and the grass merged into moss which spread upwards and over the tumbled stones of the walls, outwards over the pocked metalling and deep ruts of the road; where the ruins of a police barracks, built to command the road through the valley, burnt in the Troubles, had once been white, then black, and now were one green with the grass and the moss and the water-weed; where the smoke of burned turf drifted down from the cabin chimneys and joined the mist that rose from the damp, green earth; where the prints of ass and pig, goose and calf and horse, mingled indifferently with those of barefoot children; where the soft, resentful voices rose and fell in the smoky cabins, merging with the music of the stream and the treading and shifting and munching of the beasts at pasture; where mist and smoke never lifted and the sun never fell direct, and evening came slowly in infinite gradations of shadow; where the priest came seldom because of the rough road and the long climb home to the head of the valley, and no one except the priest ever came from one month’s end to another — there stood an inn which was frequented in bygone days by fishermen. Here in the summer nights when their sport was over, they had sat long over their whisky and their pipes —professional gentlemen from Dublin and retired military men from England. No one fished the stream now and the few trout that remained were taken by ingenious and illicit means without respect for season or ownership. No one came to stay; sometimes a couple on a walking tour, once or twice a party of motorists, paused for supper, hesitated, discussed the matter and then regretfully pushed on to the next village. Here Ambrose came, perched on an outside-car, from the railway station over the hill six miles distant.

He had discarded his clerical disguise, but there was something about his melancholy air and his precision of speech which made the landlord, who had never had contact before with an intellectual Jew, put him down as a “spoilt priest.” He had heard about this inn from a garrulous fellow in the packet-boat; it was kept by a distant connection of this man’s wife’s, and though he had not himself visited the place, he never lost an opportunity of putting in a good word for it.

Here Ambrose settled, in the only bedroom whose windows were unbroken. Here he intended to write a book, to take up again the broken fragments of his artistic life. He spread foolscap paper on the dining-room table; and the soft, moist air settled on it and permeated it so that when, on the third day, he sat down to make a start, the ink spread and the lines ran together, leaving what might have been a brush stroke of indigo paint where there should have been a sentence of prose. Ambrose laid down the pen, and because the floor sloped where the house had settled, it rolled down the table, and down the floor-boards and under the mahogany sideboard, and lay there among napkin rings and small coins and corks and the sweepings of half a century. And Ambrose wandered out into the mist and the twilight, stepping soundlessly on the soft green turf.

In London Basil set Susie to work. She wanted to be taken out in the evenings too often and in too expensive a style. He set her to work with needle and silk and embroidery scissors, picking off the AS from the monograms on Ambrose’s crepe-de-Chine underclothes and substituting a B.

Like horses in a riding school, line ahead to the leading mark, changing the rein, circling to the leading mark on the opposite wall, changing rein again, line ahead again, orderly and regular and graceful, the aeroplanes manoeuvred in the sharp sunlight. The engines sang in the morning sky, the little black bombs tumbled out, turning over in the air, drifting behind the machines, breaking in silent upheavals of rock and dust which were already subsiding when the sound of the explosions shook the hillside where Cedric Lyne sat with his binoculars, trying to mark their fall.

There was no sign of spring in this country. Everywhere the land lay frozen and dead, deep snow in the hills, thin ice in the valleys; the buds on the thorn were hard and small and black.

“I think they’ve found A Company, Colonel,” said Cedric.

Battalion Headquarters were in a cave in the side of the hill — a shallow cave made by a single great rock which held up the accumulations of smaller stone which in years had slid down from above and settled round it. The Colonel and the Adjutant and Cedric had room to sit here; they had arrived by night and had watched dawn break over the hills. Immediately below them the road led farther inland, climbing the opposing heights in a series of bends and tunnels. At their feet, between them and the opposite escarpment, the land lay frozen and level. The reserve company was concealed there. The Headquarter troops formed a small protective perimeter round the cave. Twenty yards away under another rock two signallers lay with a portable wireless set.

“Ack, Beer, Charley, Don…Hullo Lulu, Koko calling; acknowledge my signal; Lulu to Koko — over.”

They had marched forward all the preceding night. When they arrived at the cave Cedric had first been hot and sweaty, then, after they halted in the chill of dawn, cold and sweaty. Now with the sun streaming down on them he was warm and dry and a little sleepy.

The enemy were somewhere beyond the farther hills. They were expected to appear late that afternoon.

“That’s what they’ll do,” said the Colonel. “Make their assault in the last hour of daylight so as to avoid a counterattack. Well, we can hold them for ever on this front. I wish I felt sure of our left flank.”

“The Loamshires are falling back there. They ought to be in position now,” said the Adjutant.

“I know. But where are they? They ought to have sent over.”

“All this air activity in front means they’ll come this way,” said the Adjutant.

“I hope so.”

The high school finished its exercise, took up formation in arrow shape and disappeared droning over the hills. Presently a reconnaissance plane appeared and flew backwards and forwards overhead, searching the ground like an old woman after a lost coin.

“Tell those bloody fools to keep their faces down,” said the Colonel.

When the aeroplane had passed he lit his pipe and stood in the mouth of the cave looking anxiously to his left.

“Can you see anything that looks like the Loamshires?”

“Nothing, Colonel.”

“The enemy may have cut in across them yesterday evening. That’s what I’m afraid of. Can’t get brigade?” he said to the signalling Corporal.

“No answer from brigade, sir. We keep trying. Hullo Lulu, Koko calling, acknowledge my signal, acknowledge my signal; Koko to Lulu —over…”

“I’ve a good mind to push D Company over on that flank.”

“It’s outside our boundary.”

“Damn the boundary.”

“We’d be left without a reserve if they come straight down the road.”

“I know, that’s what’s worrying me.”

An orderly came up with a message. The Colonel read it and passed it to Cedric to file. “C Company’s in position. That’s all our forward companies reported. We’ll go round and have a look at them.”

Cedric and the Colonel went forward, leaving the Adjutant in the cave. They visited the company Headquarters and asked a few routine questions. It was a simple defensive scheme, three companies up, one in reserve in the rear. It was suitable ground for defence. Unless the enemy had infantry tanks — and all the reports said he had not — the road could be held as long as ammunition and rations lasted.

“Made a water recce?”

“Yes, Colonel, there’s a good spring on the other side of those rocks. We’re refilling bottles by relays now.”

“That’s right.”

A Company had been bombed, but without casualties, except for a few cuts from splintered rock. They were unshaken by the experience, rapidly digging dummy trenches at a distance from their positions to draw the fire when the aeroplanes returned. The Colonel returned from his rounds in a cheerful mood; the regiment was doing all right. If the flanks held they were sitting pretty.

“We’re through to Lulu, sir,” said the signalling Corporal.

The Colonel reported to brigade Headquarters that he was in position; air activity; no casualties; no sign of enemy troops. “I’ve no contact on the left flank…Yes, I know it’s beyond the brigade boundary…I know the Loamshires ought to be there. But are they? Our…Yes, but that flank’s completely in the air, if they don’t turn up…”

It was now midday. Battalion Headquarters ate some luncheon —biscuits and chocolate; the Adjutant had a flask of whisky. No one was hungry, but they drank their bottles empty and sent the orderlies to refill them at the spring B Company had found. When the men came back the Colonel said, “I’m not happy about the left flank. Lyne, go across and see where those bloody Loamshires are.”

It was two miles along a side track to the mouth of the next pass, where the Loamshires should be in defence. Cedric left his servant behind at Battalion Headquarters. It was against the rules, but he was weary of the weight of dependent soldiery which throughout the operations encumbered him and depressed his spirits. As he walked alone he was exhilarated with the sense of being one man, one pair of legs, one pair of eyes, one brain, sent on a single, intelligible task; one man alone could go freely anywhere on the earth’s surface; multiply him, put him in a drove and by each addition of his fellows you subtract something that is of value, make him so much less a man; this was the crazy mathematics of war. A reconnaissance plane came overhead. Cedric moved off the path but did not take cover, did not lie on his face or gaze into the earth and wonder if there was a rear gunner, as he would have done if he had been with Headquarters. The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry to be worth a bomb. No one had anything against the individual; as long as he was alone he was free and safe; there’s danger in numbers; divided we stand, united we fall, thought Cedric, striding happily towards the enemy, shaking from his boots all the frustration of corporate life. He did not know it but he was thinking exactly what Ambrose had thought when he announced that culture must cease to be conventual and become coenobitic.

He came to the place where the Loamshires should have been. There was no sign of them. There was no sign of any life, only rock and ice and beyond, in the hills, snow. The valley ran clear into the hills, parallel with the main road he had left. They may be holding it, higher up, he thought, where it narrows, and he set off up the stony track towards the mountains.

And there he found them; twenty of them under the command of a subaltern. They had mounted their guns to cover the track at its narrowest point and were lying, waiting for what the evening would bring. It was a ragged and weary party.

“I’m sorry I didn’t send across to you,” said the subaltern. “We were all in. I didn’t know where you were exactly and I hadn’t a man to spare.”

“What happened?”

“It was all rather a nonsense,” said the subaltern, in the classic phraseology of his trade which comprehends all human tragedy. “They bombed us all day yesterday and we had to go to ground. We made a mile or two between raids but it was sticky going. Then at just before sunset they came clean through us in armoured cars. I managed to get this party away. There may be a few others wandering about, but I rather doubt it. Luckily the Jerries decided to call it a day and settled down for a night’s rest. We marched all night and all to-day. We only arrived an hour ago.”

“Can you stop them here?”

“What d’you think?”

“No.”

“No, we can’t stop them. We may hold them up half an hour. They may think we’re the forward part of a battalion and decide to wait till tomorrow before they attack. It all depends what time they arrive. Is there any chance of your being able to relieve us?”

“Yes. I’ll get back right away.”

“We could do with a break,” said the subaltern.

Cedric ran most of the way to the cave. The Colonel heard his story grimly. “Armoured cars or tanks?”

“Armoured cars.”

“Well there’s a chance. Tell D Company to get on the move,” he said to the Adjutant. Then he reported to brigade Headquarters on the wireless what he had heard and what he was doing. It was half an hour before D Company was on its way. From the cave they could see them marching along the track where Cedric had walked so exuberantly. As they watched they saw the column a mile away halt, break up and deploy.

“We’re too late,” said the Colonel. “Here come the armoured cars.”

They had overrun the party of Loamshires and were spreading fanwise across the low plain. Cedric counted twenty of them; behind them an endless stream of lorries full of troops. At the first shot the lorries stopped and under cover of the armoured cars the infantry fell in on the ground, broke into open order and began their advance with parade-ground deliberation. With the cars came a squadron of bombers, flying low along the line of the track. Soon the whole battalion area was full of bursting bombs.

The Colonel was giving orders for the immediate withdrawal of the forward companies.

Cedric stood in the cave. It was curious, he thought, that he should have devoted so much of his life to caves.

“Lyne,” said the Colonel. “Go up to A Company and explain what’s happening. If they come in now from the rear the cars may jink round and give the other companies a chance to get out.”

Cedric set out across the little battlefield. All seemed quite unreal to him still.

The bombers were not aiming at any particular target; they were plastering the ground in front of their cars, between battalion Headquarters and the mouth of the valley where A Company were dug in. The noise was incessant and shattering. Still it did not seem real to Cedric. It was part of a crazy world where he was an interloper. It was nothing to do with him. A bomb came whistling down, it seemed from directly over his head. He fell on his face and it burst fifty yards away, bruising him with a shower of small stones.

“Thought they’d got him,” said the Colonel. “He’s up again.”

“He’s doing all right,” said the Adjutant.

The armoured cars were shooting it out with D Company. The infantry spread out in a long line from hillside to hillside and were moving steadily up. They were not firing yet; just tramping along behind the armoured cars abreast, an arm’s length apart. Behind them another wave was forming up. Cedric had to go across this front. The enemy were still out of effective rifle range from him, but spent bullets were singing round him among the rocks.

“He’ll never make it,” said the Colonel.

I suppose, thought Cedric, I’m being rather brave. How very peculiar. I’m not the least brave, really; it’s simply that the whole thing is so damned silly.

A Company were on the move now. As soon as they heard the firing, without waiting for orders, they were doing what the Colonel intended, edging up the opposing hillside among the boulders, getting into position where they could outflank the outflanking party. It did not matter now whether Cedric reached them. He never did; a bullet got him, killing him instantly while he was a quarter of a mile away.

chapter 4 SUMMER

Summer came and with it the swift sequence of historic events which left all the world dismayed and hardly credulous; all, that is to say, except Sir Joseph Mainwaring, whose courtly and ponderous form concealed a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity, which left him bobbing serenely on the great waves of history which splintered more solid natures to matchwood. Under the new administration he found himself translated to a sphere of public life where he could do no serious harm to anyone, and he accepted the change as a well-earned promotion. In the dark hours of German victory he always had some light anecdote; he believed and repeated everything he heard; he told how — he had it on the highest authority — the German infantry was composed of youths in their teens, who were intoxicated before the battle with dangerous drugs; “those who are not mown down by machine guns die within a week,” he said. He told, as vividly as if he had been there and seen it himself, of Dutch skies black with descending nuns, of market women who picked off British officers, sniping over their stalls with sub-machine-guns, of waiters who were caught on hotel roofs marking the rooms of generals with crosses as though on a holiday postcard. He believed, long after hope had been abandoned in more responsible quarters, that the French line was intact. “There is a little bulge,” he explained. “All we have to do is to pinch it out,” and he illustrated the action with his finger and thumb. He daily maintained that the enemy had outrun his supplies and was being lured on to destruction. Finally when it was plain, even to Sir Joseph, that in the space of a few days England had lost both the entire stores and equipment of her regular Army, and her only ally — that the enemy were less than twenty-five miles from her shores —that there were only a few battalions of fully armed, fully trained troops in the country — that she was committed to a war in the Mediterranean with a numerically superior enemy — that her cities lay open to air attack from fields closer to home than the extremities of her own islands; that her sea-routes were threatened from a dozen new bases — Sir Joseph said: “Seen in the proper perspective I regard this as a great and tangible success. Germany set out to destroy our Army and failed; we have demonstrated our invincibility to the world. Moreover, with the French off the stage, the last obstacle to our proper understanding with Italy is now removed. I never prophesy but I am confident that before the year is out they will have made a separate and permanent peace with us. The Germans have wasted their strength. They cannot possibly repair their losses. They have squandered the flower of their Army. They have enlarged their boundaries beyond all reason and given themselves an area larger than they can possibly hold down. The war has entered into a new and more glorious phase.”

And in this last statement, perhaps for the first time in his long and loquacious life. Sir Joseph approximated to reality; he had said a mouthful.

A new and more glorious phase: Alastair’s battalion found itself overnight converted from a unit in the early stages of training into first-line troops. Their 1098 stores arrived; a vast profusion of ironmongery which, to his pride, included Alastair’s mortar. It was a source of pride not free from compensating disadvantages. Now, when the platoon marched, Alastair’s pouches were filled with bombs and his back harnessed to the unnaturally heavy length of steel piping; the riflemen thought they had the laugh on him.

Parachute landings were looked for hourly. The duty company slept in their boots and stood-to at dawn and dusk. Men going out of camp carried charged rifles, steel helmets, anti-gas capes. Weekend leave ceased abruptly. Captain Mayfield began to take a censorious interest in the swill tubs; if there was any waste of food, he said, rations would be reduced. The C.O. said, “There is no such thing nowadays as working hours” and to show what he meant ordered a series of parades after tea. A training memorandum was issued which had the most formidable effect upon Mr. Smallwood; now, when the platoon returned exhausted from field exercises, Mr. Smallwood gave them twenty minutes arms drill before they dismissed; this was the “little bit extra” for which the memorandum called. The platoon referred to it as “––ing us about.”

Then with great suddenness the battalion got orders to move to an unknown destination. Everyone believed this meant foreign service and a great breath of exhilaration inflated the camp. Alastair met Sonia outside the guardroom.

“Can’t come out tonight. We’re moving. I don’t know where. I think we’re going into action.”

He gave her instructions about where she should go and what she should do while he was away. They now knew that she was to have a child.

There was a special order that no one was to come to the station to see the battalion off; no one in fact was supposed to know they were moving. To make secrecy absolute they entrained by night, disturbing the whole district with the tramp of feet and the roar of lorries going backwards and forwards between camp and station, moving their stores.

Troops in the train manage to achieve an aspect of peculiar raffishness; they leave camp in a state of ceremonial smartness; they parade on the platform as though on the barrack square; they are detailed to their coaches and there a process of transformation and decay sets in; coats are removed, horrible packages of food appear, dense clouds of smoke obscure the windows, in a few minutes the floor is deep in cigarette ends, lumps of bread and meat, waste paper; in repose the bodies assume attitudes of extreme abandon; some look like corpses that have been left too long unburied; others like the survivors of some Saturnalian debauch. Alasstair stood in the corridor most of the night, feeling that for the first time he had cut away from the old life.

Before dawn it was well known, in that strange jungle process by which news travels in the ranks, that they were not going into action but to “Coastal––ing Defence.”

The train travelled, as troop trains do, in a series of impetuous rushes between long delays. At length in the middle of the forenoon they arrived at their destination and marched through a little seaside town of round fronted stucco Early Victorian boarding-houses, an Edwardian bandstand, and a modern, concrete bathing pool, three feet deep, blue at the bottom, designed to keep children from the adventure and romance of the beach. (Here there were no shells or star-fish, no jelly-fish to be melted, no smooth pebbles of glass to be found, no bottles that might contain messages from shipwrecked sailors, no wave which, bigger than the rest, suddenly knocked you off your feet. The nurses might sit round this pool in absolute peace of mind.) Two miles out, through a suburb of bungalows and converted railway carriages, there was a camp prepared for them in the park of what, in recent years, had been an unsuccessful holiday club.

That night Alastair summoned Sonia by telephone and she came next day, taking rooms in the hotel. It was a simple and snug hotel and Alastair came there in the evenings when he was off duty. They tried to recapture the atmosphere of the winter and spring, of the days in Surrey when Alastair’s life as a soldier had been a novel and eccentric interruption of their domestic routine; but things were changed. The war had entered on a new and more glorious phase. The night in the train when he thought he was going to action stood between Alastair and the old days.

The battalion were charged with the defence of seven miles of inviting coastline, and they entered with relish into the work of destroying local amenities. They lined the sands with barbed wire and demolished the steps leading from esplanade to beach; they dug weapon pits in the corporation’s gardens, sandbagged the bow-windows of private houses and with the co-operation of some neighbouring sappers blocked the roads with dragons’-teeth and pill-boxes; they stopped and searched all cars passing through this area and harassed the inhabitants with demands to examine their identity cards. Mr. Smallwood sat up on the golf course every night for a week, with a loaded revolver, to investigate a light which was said to have been seen flashing there. Captain Mayfield discovered that telegraph posts are numbered with brass-headed nails and believed it to be the work of the fifth column; when mist came rolling in from the sea one evening, the Corporal in command of Alastair’s section reported an enemy smoke screen, and for miles round word of invasion was passed from post to post.

“I don’t believe you’re enjoying the Army any more,” said Sonia after three weeks of Coastal Defence.

“It isn’t that. I feel I could be doing something more useful.”

“But, darling, you told me your mortar was one of the key points of the defence.”

“So it is,” said Alastair loyally.

“So what?”

“So what?” Then Alastair said, “Sonia, would you think it bloody of me if I volunteered for special service?”

“Dangerous?”

“I don’t suppose so really. But very exciting. They’re getting up special parties for raiding. They go across to France and creep up behind Germans and cut their throats in the dark.” He was excited, turning a page in his life, as, more than twenty years ago lying on his stomach before the fire, with a bound volume of Chums, he used to turn over to the next instalment of the serial.

“It doesn’t seem much of a time to leave a girl,” said Sonia, “but I can see you want to.”

“They have special knives and Tommy-guns and knuckle dusters; they wear rope-soled shoes.”

“Bless you,” said Sonia.

“I heard about it from Peter Pastmaster. A man in his regiment is raising one. Peter’s got a troop in it. He says I can be one of his section commanders; they can fix me up with a commission apparently. They carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with. D’you mind very much if I accept?”

“No, darling. I couldn’t keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn’t. I see that.”

Angela had never considered the possibility of Cedric’s death. She received the news in an official telegram and for some days would speak to no one, not even to Basil, about the subject. When she mentioned it, she spoke from the middle rather than from the beginning or the end of her progression of thought.

“I knew we needed a death,” she said. “I never thought it was his.”

Basil said, “Do you want to marry me?”

“Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know.”

“That’s true.”

“You’d like to be rich, wouldn’t you?”

“Will anyone be rich after this war?”

“If anyone is, I shall be. If no one is, I don’t suppose it matters so much being poor.”

“I don’t know that I want to be rich,” said Basil, after a pause. “I’m not acquisitive, you know. I only enjoy the funnier side of getting money — not having it.”

“Anyway it’s not an important point. The thing is that we aren’t separable any more.”

“Let nothing unite us but death. You always thought I was going to die, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The dog it was that died…Anyway this is no time to be thinking of marrying. Look at Peter. He’s not been married six weeks and there he is joining a gang of desperadoes. What’s the sense of marrying with things as they are? I don’t see what there is to marriage, if it isn’t looking forward to a comfortable old age.”

“The only thing in wartime is not to think ahead. It’s like walking in the blackout with a shaded torch. You can just see as far as the step you’re taking.”

“I shall be a terrible husband.”

“Yes, darling, don’t I know it? But you see one can’t expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there’s one thing right the day is made.”

“That sounds like poor Ambrose, in his Chinese mood.”

Poor Ambrose had moved West. Only the wide, infested Atlantic lay between him and Parsnip. He had taken rooms in a little fishing town and the great waves pounded on the rocks below his windows. The days passed and he did absolutely nothing. The fall of France had no audible echo on that remote shore.

This is the country of Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wellington, Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, he thought; this is the people who once lent fire to an imperial race, whose genius flashed through two stupendous centuries of culture and success, who are now quietly receding into their own mists, turning their backs on the world of effort and action. Fortunate islanders, thought Ambrose, happy, drab escapists, who have seen the gold lace and the candlelight and left the banquet before dawn revealed stained table linen and a tipsy buffoon!

But he knew it was not for him; the dark, nomadic strain in his blood, the long heritage of wandering and speculation, allowed him no rest. Instead of Atlantic breakers he saw the camels swaying their heads resentfully against the lightening sky, as the caravan woke to another day’s stage in the pilgrimage.

Old Rampole sat in his comfortable cell and turned his book to catch the last, fading light of evening. He was absorbed and enchanted. At an age when most men are rather more concerned to preserve familiar joys than to seek for new, at, to be exact, the age of sixty-two, he had suddenly discovered the delights of light literature.

There was an author on the list of his firm of whom Mr. Bentley was slightly ashamed. She wrote under the name of Ruth Mountdragon, a pseudonym which hid the identity of a Mrs. Parker. Every year for seventeen years Mrs. Parker had written a novel dealing with the domestic adventures of a different family; radically different that is to say in name, exhibiting minor differences of composition and circumstance, but spiritually as indistinguishable as larches; they all had the quality of “charm”; once it was a colonel’s family of three girls in reduced circumstances on a chicken farm, once it was an affluent family on a cruise in the Adriatic, once a newly-married doctor in Hampstead; all the permutations and combinations of upper-middle-class life had been methodically exploited for seventeen years; but the charm was constant. Mrs. Parker’s public was not vast, but it was substantial; it lay, in literary appreciation, midway between the people who liked some books and disliked others, and the people who merely liked reading, inclining rather to the latter group. Mr. Rampole knew her name as one of the authors who were not positively deleterious to his pocket, and consequently when his new manner of life and the speculative tendencies which it fostered caused him to take up novel reading, he began on her. He was transported into a strange world of wholly delightful, estimable people whom he had rightly supposed not to exist. With each page a deeper contentment settled on the old publisher. He had already read ten books and looked forward eagerly to rereading them when he came to the end of the seventeenth. Mr. Bentley was even engaged to bring Mrs. Parker to visit him at a future, unspecified date. The prison chaplain was also an admirer of Mrs. Parker’s. Old Rampole gained great face from disclosing her real name. He half-promised to allow the chaplain to meet her. He was happier than he could remember ever having been.

Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful Colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratt’s Club.

“Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,” he said. “Let’s at least hang about with our own friends.”

“I’ve a letter from a man who says he’s a friend of yours. Basil Seal.”

“Does he want to join?”

“Yes. Is he all right?”

“Perfect,” said Peter. “A tough nut.”

“Right. I’ll put him down with Alastair Trumpington as your other subaltern.”

“No. For God’s sake don’t do that. But make him liaison officer.”

“You see, I know everything about you,” said Angela.

“There’s one thing you don’t know,” said Basil. “If you really want to be a widow again, we’d better marry quick. I don’t think I told you. I’m joining a new racket.”

“Basil, what?”

“Very secret.”

“But why?”

“Well you know things haven’t been quite the same at the War House lately. I don’t know quite why it is, but Colonel Plum doesn’t seem to love me as he did. I think he’s a bit jealous about the way I pulled off the Ivory Tower business. We’ve never really been matey since. Besides, you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”

“Basil’s left the War Office,” said Lady Seal.

“Yes,” said Sir Joseph, with sinking heart. Here it was again; the old business. The news from all over the world might be highly encouraging — and, poor booby, he believed it was; we might have a great new secret weapon — and, poor booby, he thought we had; he might himself enjoy a position of great trust and dignity — poor booby, he was going, that afternoon, to address a drawing-room meeting on the subject of “Hobbies for the A.T.S.” — but in spite of all this, Basil was always with him, a grim memento mori staring him out of countenance. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose he has.”

“He has joined a special corps d’elite that is being organized. They are going to do great things.”

“He has actually joined?”

“Oh, yes.”

“There’s nothing I can do to help him?”

“Dear Jo, always so kind. No. Basil has arranged it all himself. I expect that his excellent record at the War Office helped. It isn’t every boy who would settle to a life of official drudgery when everyone else was going out for excitement — like Emma’s silly girl in the fire brigade. No, he did his duty where he found it. And now he is getting his reward. I am not quite sure what they are going to do, but I know it is very dashing and may well have a decisive effect on the war.”

The grey moment was passed; Sir Joseph, who had not ceased smiling, now smiled with sincere happiness.

“There’s a new spirit abroad,” he said. “I see it on every side.”

And, poor booby, he was bang right.