The Stars Look Down

ONE

The final session of the formal Inquiry, held under Section 83 of the Coal Mines Act, into the causes and circumstances of the Neptune disaster, was drawing to a close. The Town Hall in Lamb Street was crammed to suffocation, crowds waited outside, a sense of tension filtered with the afternoon sunshine through the high leaded windows into the steamy atmosphere of the court. Upon the bench sat the Commissioner, the Rt. Hon. Henry Drummond, K.C., supported by the Technical Assessor, the Deputy Chief Inspector of Mines. In the body of the hall were the Divisional Inspector and Mr. Jennings, the local Inspector, both representing the Mines Department; Mr. Lynton Roscoe, K.C., instructed by Mr. John Bannerman, solicitor, Tynecastle, acting for Richard Barras of the Neptune Colliery; Harry Nugent, M.P., and Jim Dudgeon on behalf of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain; Tom Heddon on behalf of the Sleescale Miners’ Lodge; Mr. William Snagg, solicitor, Tynecastle, representing the dependants of the deceased; and Colonel Gascoigne, watching the case on behalf of Lord Kell, owner of Royalties. Occupying the front seats were Barras, Arthur, Armstrong, Hudspeth and the officials of the Neptune. Three rows of witnesses came next, with David, Jack Reedy, Harry Ogle and some men from the Terraces placed immediately behind Nugent. Then followed the relatives of the dead men, mostly women, rigged out in cheap black, a few bare-headed and in shawls, all faintly bewildered, uncomprehending and over-awed. The rest of the hall was packed with miners and townspeople, not an inch of space remained.

Following the customary official practice, a certain period of time had been allowed to elapse between the calamity and the subsequent investigation. But now, for six full days, since July 27th, 1914, the court had been in session, the hall humming with voices, fifty-four witnesses called and recalled, fifteen thousand questions asked and answered, words flying to and fro, angry, persuasive, bitter, hundreds of thousands of words. There was Heddon, with his hot violence, losing the thread of his argument, being sharply called to order: Jim Dudgeon, genial and ungrammatical, supporting Nugent’s calm logic; Colonel Gasgoigne with his technicalities of bench-marks, ordinance datum and geological formation; Lynton Roscoe, practised in the art of oratory, master of gesture and smoothly turned periods.

But it was all drawing to a close now, quickly drawing to a close. Lynton Roscoe, K.C., was at this moment on his feet, a portly, imposing figure, heavy jowled, with long upper lip and a florid port-wine colouring. Since two o’clock he had been re-examining witnesses and now, with a full dramatic gesture, he turned to the Commissioner. A silence.

The Commissioner: Have you an application to make, Mr. Roscoe?

Lynton Roscoe: It is the question of Mr. Richard Barras, sir. I think it would bring matters to a fitting conclusion if for the last time I recalled him.

The Commissioner: By all means then, Mr. Roscoe.

Richard Barras was called. He left his seat immediately and entered the witness-box, where he stood upright, his reserve gone, a faint flush on his high cheek-bones, his head inclined forward as though eager to answer every question with the utmost candour. Arthur, stooping in his seat, kept his eyes upon the floor, shielding his face so that it remained invisible.

Lynton Roscoe: Mr. Richard Barras, I am sorry to trouble you again, sir, but there are certain points which I wish to emphasise. I think you have told us that you are the owner of the Neptune Colliery, a mining engineer of some thirty-five years’ standing?

Barras: That is so.

Lynton Roscoe: Inevitably, your experience in mining engineering has been wide?

Barras: Yes, I think I may say that.

Lynton Roscoe: Once again, Mr. Barras (slowly), had you any idea when you started to strip the Dyke that you were in any way near the water-logged workings of the Old Neptune pit?

Barras: I had no idea.

Lynton Roscoe: I take it, Mr. Barras, in plain language that there are only two ways of getting to know your whereabouts underground. The one is by boring and the other Is by resort to records, in short a plan?

Barras: Quite.

Lynton Roscoe (persuasively): But a bore, after all, will only tell you what is in its own track. And you may have very large faults. In fact boring will often teach little or nothing?

Barras: Not in a case such as this.

Lynton Roscoe: Precisely. And as for the other method. Had you any record, or plan, or tracing of these Old Neptune workings?

Barras: No.

Lynton Roscoe: Such a plan, if it ever existed, must in these early days of mining, when records were not treated with the respect due to them, have been mislaid or destroyed. It was never in your possession?

Barras: Never.

Lynton Roscoe: You had, then, no knowledge of the impending peril. (Dramatically) And in the light of logic and reason, you were as much a victim of the disaster as those unhappy men who perished. (Turning to the Commissioner) That, sir, is the point I thought fit to re-emphasise. I have no wish to trouble Mr. Barras further.

The Commissioner: Thank you, Mr. Barras, I am much obliged.

Barras stepped out of the box, head well up, as if inviting the inspection of every eye. So admirable was his bearing that an involuntary murmur of applause came from the sides of the court. There was genuine sympathy for Richard. His conduct during the Inquiry had been commented on most favourably and, coming on top of his efforts during the rescue operations, had raised him almost to popularity.

As Barras sat down beside Arthur, Harry Nugent, M.P., rose quietly. Nugent was a quiet man with an air of purpose and stability and an eye that was luminous and direct He was tall, rather emaciated, with a bony cadaverous face and a fine brow across which a few thin strands of hair were streaked. Unprepossessing at first sight there was a warmth, a quiet sincerity about Nugent which wore down the prejudice created by his appearance. For the last five years he had represented the Tyneside borough of Edgely, he was recognised as a rising force in the Labour Movement and some of his adherents spoke of him as the future leader of the Party. He faced the Commissioner, stooping slightly as he spoke.

Harry Nugent: Since my friend has recalled his principal witness, Mr. Chairman, have I your permission to put David Fenwick in the box again?

The Commissioner: If you feel that any useful purpose will be served.

The name of David Fenwick was called. David got up and moved quickly to the front, his expression controlled and serious. For these last six days he had been in and out of the witness-box, questioned and cross-questioned, threatened, flattered, ridiculed and cajoled, but all the time holding grimly to his point. He took the Book and was sworn.

Harry Nugent: Once again, Mr. Fenwick, about your father, Robert Fenwick, who lost his life in the disaster….

David: Yes.

Harry Nugent: Do you reaffirm that while working in Scupper Flats he expressed alarm about the possibility of an inrush?

David: Yes, he spoke of it several times.

Harry Nugent: To you?

David: Yes, to me.

Harry Nugent: Now, please, Mr. Fenwick, did you attach any importance to what your father said?

David: Yes, I did, I was worried. In fact, as I’ve told you, I went so far as to speak to Mr. Barras himself.

Harry Nugent: You actually took this matter to Mr. Barras himself?

David: Yes.

Harry Nugent: And what was his attitude?

David: He refused to listen to me.

Lynton Roscoe (rising): Sir, I protest. Mr. Nugent, not only in connection with this witness but with other witnesses, has laboured this matter beyond all bounds. I find it quite impossible to leave it where it is.

The Commissioner: Mr. Roscoe, you will have full opportunity to cross-examine this witness again if you so desire. (Turning to Nugent) But I suggest, Mr. Nugent, that we have nothing more to learn from this witness.

Harry Nugent: I have no more to say, Mr. Chairman. I have merely drawn your attention again to the possibility that the disaster might have been avoided.

Nugent sat down. But Lynton Roscoe sprang to his feet again and with a pompous gesture stopped David as he made to leave the box.

Lynton Roscoe: One moment, sir. Where did this alleged conversation take place?

David: On the Wansbeck stream. We were fishing.

Lynton Roscoe (incredulously): Do you really ask us to believe that your father, although in mortal fear of death, went calmly to amuse himself by fishing? (Sardonic pause.) Mr. Fenwick, let us be frank. Was your father an educated man?

David: He was an intelligent man.

Lynton Roscoe: Come, come, sir, confine yourself to my questions. Was he educated, I ask you?

David: Not in the restricted sense of the word.

Lynton Roscoe: I take it, sir, despite your unwillingness to admit the fact, that he was not educated. He had, for instance, no knowledge of the science of mining engineering? Answer me, yes, or no.

David: No.

Lynton Roscoe: Have you such knowledge?

David: No.

Lynton Roscoe (sarcastically): You follow the teaching profession, I understand?

David (hotly): What has my teaching got to do with the Neptune disaster?

Lynton Roscoe: That is exactly the question I propose to ask you, sir. You are a junior teacher in a County Council School without even, I believe, the qualification of the B.A. degree. You have admitted your complete ignorance of the science of mining engineering. And yet—

David: I—

Lynton Roscoe: One moment, sir. (Thumping the table.) Had you or had you not any authority from the men to act in this matter?

David: No.

Lynton Roscoe: Then how did you expect Mr. Barras to do other than ignore your presumptuous interference?

David: Was it presumptuous to try to save the lives of these hundred men?

Lynton Roscoe: Don’t be insolent, sir.

David: Insolence doesn’t belong exclusively to you.

The Commissioner (interposing): I think, Mr. Lynton Roscoe, as I remarked before, we have already exhausted the usefulness of this witness.

Lynton Roscoe (throwing out his hand): But, sir—

The Commissioner: I think it may close this matter if I state, without prejudice, that I impute no motives to Mr. Richard Barras other than the very highest.

Lynton Roscoe (smiling and bowing): I respectfully thank you, sir.

The Commissioner: Do you wish to address me further, Mr. Lynton Roscoe?

Mr. Lynton Roscoe: If you please, sir, merely to affirm the facts shortly. We may congratulate ourselves that the issue arising out of the disaster is so clear. The absence of any plan, drawing or sketch which demonstrated the Old Neptune workings is beyond doubt. These old workings, as I have shown, were abandoned in 1808 at a time long before there was any legislative provision requiring the filing of plans or the lodging of information regarding the abandonment of a pit, and when, as you may imagine, the keeping of records, indeed the conduct of mining in general, was primitive in the extreme. We are, by your leave, sir, not responsible for that! The evidence is that Mr. Richard Barras was a trusted employer and that he controlled the operations in Scupper Flats in the best and highest tradition of the industry. He did not know of the impending peril.

I cannot believe that Mr. Nugent, in the course of his cross-examination of the witness Fenwick, really implied that certain of the men who had lost their lives in the disaster had previously expressed their apprehension at water flowing into Scupper Flats.

I ask you, sir, having considered Fenwick’s evidence, on the matter of his father’s communications to him, to say that there is not one fragment of foundation for such a monstrous suggestion. At best it is a casual conversation; we have the sworn evidence of every responsible official of the colliery that not one of the workmen or local inhabitants expressed any fears or misgivings to them.

The witness Fenwick has insisted, with an acrimony which we deplore, upon his interview with Mr. Richard Barras on the night of the 13th April previous. But, sir, what importance could the manager of any colliery attach to such an irrelevant and impertinent approach as that made by Fenwick on the night in question? Had some responsible and competent person, say Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Hudspeth or some other official raised this query the case would have been altogether different. But an outsider, speaking in such uninformed and ambiguous terms of danger and water and wetness in the pit? The Neptune, sir, was essentially a wet pit and the amount of water flowing therein conveyed no possible indication of the approaching inrush.

In a word, sir, we have fully established that the management had no knowledge of the fact that they were in immediate proximity to old waterlogged workings. There was no plan, owing to a defect in the legislation previous to 1872. That, sir, is the crux of the situation. And there, with your permission, I leave it with you.

The Commissioner: Thank you, Mr. Roscoe, for your admirable and lucid summary of the case. I am not sure, Mr. Nugent, whether you wished to address me.

Harry Nugent rose slowly to his feet.

Harry Nugent: Mr. Chairman, I have little more to say at present. Later, I intend to raise the whole question of the legislation affecting wet mines in the House of Commons. This is not the first inrush of water that has taken place. We have had similar cases, lack of opportunity to see necessary plans and a large loss of life. I must repeat how serious this question is. If we are going to get safety in mines it is high time something was done about it. We are all familiar with cases where colliery owners are careless, I might even say worse than careless, underground when they get near a boundary, particularly if it presents prospects of desirable coal. It is an irregularity inseparable from the system of private ownership. Even in our good years in the mines of this country we averaged killing four men every day, 365 days of the year. Think of it, sir, a man killed every six hours, a man injured every three minutes. We have been accused of acrimony in this case. I want you to understand that I concern myself less with this local issue than with the general issue of safety in mines. We are forced to use these accidents to agitate for better conditions and more favourable legislation, for it is only when these accidents happen that we get a little sympathy. The so-called progress in the coal industry, instead of resulting in the diminution of the death and accident rates, has resulted in their increase. And we honestly believe that so long as the economic system of private ownership exists this waste of human life will continue. That, sir, is all I have to say at present.

The Commissioner (briefly): Then I have now to declare this Inquiry closed. I should like, however, to express my indebtedness to all who have taken part in the investigation. I wish also to convey my sympathy to the bereaved families, particularly towards those of the ten men whose bodies have not yet been recovered from the pit. In conclusion, I want to congratulate Mr. Richard Barras on his heroic efforts on behalf of the entombed men and to place immediately on record that, from the evidence heard before me, he leaves this court without a stain on his character.

A murmur, a great sigh of relaxed tension filled the court. As the Commissioner rose, there was a clatter of chairs, a rapid hum of talk. The double doors at the back were thrown open, the court began to empty quickly. When Barras and Arthur reached the steps outside, Colonel Gascoigne and a number of others pressed forward in congratulation. Actually a faint cheer was raised. More people crowded round, eager to shake hands. Bareheaded, slightly flushed, holding himself erect, Barras stood on the topmost step with Arthur, still deadly pale, behind him. He seemed in no hurry to move from the glare of publicity. He looked about him, an eager, vindicated expression on his face, readily accepting any hand held out to him. Something emotional in his attitude flowed towards the waiting men. Another cheer went up and another, louder than before. Deeply gratified, Barras began to move slowly down the steps, still hatless, accompanied by Gascoigne, Lynton Roscoe, Bannerman, Armstrong, Jennings and, last of all, by Arthur. The crowd parted deferentially before this imposing group. Barras led the way across the pavement, head well up, his eye eagerly picking out known faces, acknowledging salutations, dropping a grave word here and there, feeling the popular sentiment veering towards him, a man leaving the court without a stain on his character, unsmirched by the mud flung at him, those last words ringing in his ears: “Your truly heroic efforts on behalf of the entombed men.” The party’s progress towards the Law became something of a triumph.

Inside the hall David remained motionless in his seat, hearing the cheers, the heavy movement of feet outside, staring at the blank sweating walls, the flies buzzing on the dirty window panes. Deliberately he held himself in check. No use to give way, no use at all.

A touch on the shoulder made him turn slowly. Harry Nugent stood beside him in the deserted hall. Nugent said kindly:

“Well, it’s all over.”

“Yes.”

Studying David’s impassive face, Nugent sat down beside him.

“You didn’t expect anything else, did you?”

“Well, yes.” David seemed to reflect seriously. “Yes, I expected justice. I know he was to blame. He ought to have been punished. Instead of that they compliment him, cheer him, let him go.”

“You mustn’t take it too hard.”

“I’m not thinking about myself. Why should I? Nothing has happened to me. It’s the others.”

A faint smile came upon Nugent’s lips. It was a very friendly smile. Throughout the Inquiry he had seen a lot of David, and he was strongly drawn to him.

“We haven’t done so badly,” he meditated. “Now we’ll be able to force the Mines Department to act over this question of abandoned waterlogged mines. We’ve been waiting on the chance for years. That’s the main issue. Can you see it that way?”

David raised his head, stubbornly fighting the emptiness within him, the ache of defeat.

“Yes, I see that,” he muttered.

The look in David’s eyes moved Nugent suddenly from his serenity. He slipped his arm round David’s shoulders.

“I know how you feel, lad, but don’t fret. You did well. Your evidence helped us more than you believe.”

“I did nothing. I wanted to, but I didn’t. All my life I’ve been talking about doing something…”

“And so you will. Give yourself a chance. I’m going to keep in touch with you. I’ll see what can be done. And in the meantime keep your pecker up.” He rose, glancing towards the door where Heddon stood in conversation with Jim Dudgeon, awaiting him. “Listen, David. Be at the station at six to-night. I’ll have another word with you then.”

He nodded encouragingly and walked over to Heddon and Dudgeon. The three moved off towards the temporary lodge office in Cowpen Street.

A moment later David rose and reached for his hat. He walked out of the hall and down Freehold Street. He was completely fagged. With typical intensity he had concentrated everything on the Inquiry, for six days he had not been near the school. And the result was this. He hunched his shoulders doggedly, taking hold of himself again. This was no time for the luxury of going to pieces, for petty spite and hysteria.

Along Freehold Street he went, across the road, and into Lamb Street. But there, opposite the Scut, a man called after him. It was Ramage. The butcher wore a dirty blue linen coat with an enormous blue and white apron belted round his middle. He had just come up from his slaughter-house where he had been down at the killing, the backs of his hands were mottled with dried blood. The warm afternoon sun set a haze of red about him.

“Hey, Fenwick, here a minute!”

David stopped but did not speak. Ramage eased his thick neck away from his collar, then stuffed both hands in his leather belt, and lay back, studying David.

“So y’ve finished your day’s work at the Town Hall?” he declared with heavy sarcasm. “No wonder y’look proud of yourself. God Almighty, y’ve been a credit to Sleescale this past week. Standin’ up to argue with Lynton like y’ were bloody lawyer.” His sneer grew. He was evidently posted in the last details of the Inquiry. “But if I were in your shoes I wouldn’t look so set up about it. Maybe y’ll find this business has cost more’n ye bargained for.”

David waited, facing Ramage. He knew something was coming. There was a pause, then Ramage abandoned his sarcasm, his brows drew down in that bullying way.

“What the hell d’ye think y’ve been up to, leaving the school without permission, these last six days? D’ye think ye own the bloody place…”

“I went to the Inquiry because I had to.”

“Y’ didn’t have to. Y’ went out of downright spite. Y’ went to sling muck at one of the leadin’ men in the town, a public man like myself, a man who got ye the job what ye never deserved. Y’ve turned round and bit the hand that fed ye. But, by God, y’re goin’ to regret it.”

“I’m the best judge of that,” David said curtly and he made to go.

“Wait a minute,” Ramage bawled, “I’ve not done with ye. I’ve always thought ye were a trouble maker like your father afore ye. Y’re nothing but a rank rotten socialist. We’ve no use for your kind teachin’ in our schools. Y’re goin’ to be chucked out.”

A pause. David considered Ramage.

“You can’t put me out.”

“Oh, can’t I? Can’t I though?” Triumph blared into Ramage’s snarl. “Y’ might like to know we called a meetin’ of the School Board last night to consider y’re conduct an’ agreed unanimous to demand your resignation.”

“What”

“No whats about it. Ye’ll get your notice from Strother in the morning. He wants a man what’s gotten a B.A. t’is name; not a half-baked pitman like yourself.” For a full minute Ramage indulged himself in the delicious satisfaction of watching David’s face, then, with a sardonic grin fixed on his meaty lips, he swung round and barged his way into his shop.

David walked along Lamb Street, head down, eyes on the pavement. He let himself into his house, went into the kitchen and began automatically to make himself some tea. Jenny was in Tynecastle at her mother’s, he had sent her there this last week to spare her the worry of the Inquiry. He sat down at the table, stirring his cup, round and round, not even tasting the tea. So they were trying to sack him. He knew at once that Ramage meant every word he had spoken. He could fight, of course, appeal to the Northern Teachers’ Association. But what would be the use? His face hardened. No, let them do what they liked. He would talk to Nugent at six, he wanted to be out of this blind alley of teaching, he wanted to do something. O God, he did want to justify himself, to do something at last.

At quarter to six he left the house and set out for the station. But he had not gone more than half-way when he heard a commotion at the head of the street and, looking up, he saw two news-boys tearing down the hill with their billheads wildly fluttering. He stopped and bought a paper, all the rumours and latent fears which the Inquiry had overlaid flashing into the foreground of his mind. And there across the front page sprawled the headline: British Ultimatum Expires Midnight.

TWO

Towards one o’clock on the second Saturday of September, 1914, Arthur came home from the Neptune to the Law. Normal conditions prevailed at the pit again, work had recommenced, the whole tragic business of the disaster appeared buried and forgotten. But Arthur’s face expressed no satisfaction. He walked up the Avenue like a tired man. He entered the grounds of the Law and, as he had expected and dreaded, the new car had arrived. Bartley, who had been to Tynecastle for a month’s tuition, had brought the new car down himself and it was drawn up in the drive in front of the Law, a landaulet, all smooth maroon enamel and shiny brass. Barras stood beside the new car and as Arthur passed he called out:

“Look, Arthur, here she is at last!”

Arthur stopped. He was in his pit suit. He stared heavily at the car and he said at length:

“So I see.”

“I have so much to do I must have a car,” Barras explained. “It was quite ridiculous not to have seen that before. Bartley tells me she runs magnificently. We’ll run in to Tynecastle this evening and try her out.”

Arthur appeared to be thinking. He said:

“I’m sorry… I can’t come.”

Barras laughed. The laugh, like the car, was new. He said:

“Nonsense. We’re spending the evening with the Todds. I’ve arranged for us all to have dinner at the Central.”

Arthur stopped staring at the car and stared at his father instead. Barras’s face was not flushed but it gave the impression of being flushed: the eyes and the lips were fuller than they had been, the small eyes behind the strong lenses in particular had a protruding look. He seemed restless and vaguely excited, perhaps the arrival of the new car had excited him.

“I didn’t know you were in the habit of giving dinners at the Central,” Arthur said.

“I’m not,” Barras answered with a sudden irritation. “But this is an occasion. Alan is going to the front with his battalion. We are all proud of him. Besides I haven’t seen Todd for some time now. I want to look him up.”

Arthur thought for another minute, then he asked:

“You haven’t seen Todd since we had the disaster at the pit?”

“No, I haven’t,” Barras replied shortly.

There was a pause.

“It always struck me as odd, father, that you didn’t ask Todd to come over and support you at the Inquiry.”

Barras turned sharply.

“Support! What do you mean, support? The findings were pretty satisfactory, weren’t they?”

“Satisfactory?”

“That’s what I said,” Barras snapped. He took out his handkerchief and flicked a fine spot of dust from the radiator. “Are you coming to Tynecastle or not?”

With his eyes on the ground Arthur said:

“Yes, I’ll come, father.”

There was a silence, then the gong sounded. Arthur followed his father in to lunch, Barras walking a little faster than usual. To Arthur it seemed almost as though he were hurrying; lately his father’s walk had briskened to a point where it simulated haste.

“A remarkably fine car,” Barras informed the table, looking down towards Aunt Carrie. “You must come for a spin one of these days, Caroline.”

Aunt Caroline coloured with pleasure but before she could answer Barras had picked up the paper, a special edition which Bartley had brought down from Tynecastle. Rapidly scanning the centre page he said with sudden satisfaction:

“Aha! Here is some news for you. And good news, too.” His pupils dilated slightly. “A serious repulse for the Germans on the Marne. Heavy losses. Enfiladed by our machine-gun fire. Enormous losses. Estimated at four thousand killed and wounded.”

It struck Arthur that his father seized upon these losses, upon the slaughter of these four thousand men with a queer unconscious avidity. A faint shiver passed over him.

“Why, yes,” he said in an unnatural tone, “it is enormous. Four thousand men. That’s about forty times the number we lost in the Neptune.”

Dead silence. Barras lowered his paper. He fixed his protruding eyes upon Arthur. Then in a high voice he said:

“You have an odd sense of values, to mention our misfortune at the pit in the same breath as this. If you don’t give over brooding about what is done with and forgotten you’ll become morbid. You must take yourself in hand. Don’t you realise we are facing a national emergency?” He frowned and resumed his paper.

There was another silence. Arthur choked down the rest of his lunch and immediately went upstairs. He sat down on the edge of his bed and stared moodily out of the window. What was happening to him? It was true enough, no doubt, what his father said. He was becoming morbid, horribly morbid, but he could not help it. One hundred and five men had been killed in the Neptune pit. He could not forget them. These men lived with him, ate with him, walked with him, worked with him. They peopled his dreams. He could not forget them. All this carnage, as his father named it, this horrible carnage, this slaughter of thousands of men by shells, bullets, bombs and shrapnel seemed merely to intensify and swell his morbid introspection. The war was nothing by itself. It was the echo, the profound reverberation of the Neptune disaster. It was at once a new horror and the same horror. The war victims were the pit victims. The war was the Neptune disaster magnified to gigantic size, a deepening of the first flood, a spreading of the morass in which was sunk the beautiful ideal of the preciousness of human life.

Arthur moved uneasily. Lately his own thoughts terrified him. He felt his mind a delicate flask in which terrific thoughts were agitated and convulsed like chemicals which might coalesce and suddenly explode. He felt himself unable to withstand the action and reaction of these chemically active thoughts.

What terrified him most of all was his attitude towards his father. He loved his father, he had always loved and admired his father. And yet he found himself repeatedly at his father’s elbow, watching, criticising, observing carefully and adding one observation to another like a detective spying upon God. He wanted with all his soul to abandon this unholy espionage. But he could not: the change in his father made it impossible. He knew his father to be changed. He knew it. And he was afraid.

He sat on his bed thinking for a long time. Then he lay back and closed his eyes. He felt tired suddenly as though he must have sleep. It was late afternoon when he awoke. As he recollected himself he sighed and got up and began to dress.

At six o’clock he went downstairs and found his father waiting for him in the hall. As Arthur approached Barras looked at his watch significantly, lately he had acquired a perfect mannerism with his watch, flicking it open and frowning at the dial like a man pressed for time. Indeed time seemed to have acquired a new significance for Barras now, as though every moment must be utilised.

“I was afraid you were going to be late.” And without waiting for an answer he led the way to the car.

When Arthur got into the car with his father and they glided off in the direction of Tynecastle he felt less despondent. It was, after all, rather pleasant to be going out like this. He hadn’t seen Hetty for ages, his spirits rose at the thought of seeing her. The car behaved beautifully too, he was not insensible to the gracious springing, the smooth flow of movement. He glanced sideways at his father. Barras was seated upright with a pleased expression on his face, an intent expression, like a child with a new toy.

They drove into Tynecastle. The streets were crowded, reflecting a certain movement and unrest which seemed to gratify Barras. At the Central Hotel the head porter opened the door of the car with a kind of flourish head porters reserve for expensive cars. Barras nodded to the hotel porter. The porter saluted Barras.

They went into the lounge, which was crowded and rather restless like the streets. Many of the men were in uniform. Barras let his eye rest upon the men in uniform with approval.

Then Hetty signalled them gaily from a corner of the lounge, a good corner by the fireplace, and Alan her brother stood up as Barras and Arthur came over. The first thing Barras said was:

“Where is your father?”

Alan smiled. He looked very well in his second lieutenant’s uniform and very light-hearted because he was already a few drinks to the good.

“Father’s got the old complaint. A touch of the jaundice, Sent his regrets.”

Barras looked put out, his face fell.

A distinct silence followed; but Barras quickly recovered himself. He smiled vaguely at Hetty. In a moment the four of them went in to dinner.

In the restaurant Barras picked up his napkin and let his eyes go round the room, which was filled with people and gaiety. Most of the gayest people were in khaki. He said:

“This is very pleasant. I’ve had a certain amount of strain lately. I’m glad to have some recreation for a change.”

“You’re glad it’s all settled,” Alan said, looking at Barras rather knowingly.

Barras said shortly:

“Yes.”

“They’re just a lot of twisters,” Alan went on. “They’d twist you if they got the chance. I know that Heddon, he’s a swine. He’s paid to be a swine, but he is a natural-born swine as well!”

“Alan!” Hetty protested, with her little pout.

“I know, Hetty, I know,” Alan said airily. “I’ve had to do with men. You’ve got to get them down or else they’ll get you down. It’s self-preservation.”

Covertly, Arthur looked at his father. Something of the old frozen expression was back on Barras’s face. He seemed trying to adapt himself to a new outlook. With a definite attempt to turn the conversation he said:

“You leave on Monday, Alan?”

“That’s right.”

“And glad to get into it, I suppose?”

“Certainly,” Alan agreed loudly. “It’s a regular lark.” The wine waiter came over. Barras took the red-covered list and meditated over it. Yet he was not so much debating with the wine list as debating with himself. But at length he took a decision.

“I think we ought to have a little celebration. After all this is an occasion.” He ordered champagne and the waiter bowed himself away.

Hetty looked pleased. She had always been slightly in awe of Barras, his formality and aloof dignity had somehow intimidated her. But to-night he was surprising, with his sudden exciting hospitality. She smiled at him, the sweetest, respectful smile.

“This is nice,” she murmured. She fingered her beads with one hand and the stem of her full wine-glass with the other. She turned to Arthur: “Don’t you think Alan suits his uniform beautifully?”

Arthur forced a smile:

“Alan would look well in anything.”

“Oh, no, but seriously, Arthur, don’t you think the uniform sets him off?”

Arthur said with stiff lips:

“Yes.”

“It’s the very devil answering salutes,” Alan remarked complacently. “Wait till you get into the Women’s Emergency Corps, Hetty, you’ll know all about it.”

Hetty took another tiny sip of her champagne. She reflected, her pretty head atilt.

“You’d look simply gorgeous in uniform yourself, Arthur.”

Arthur went absolutely cold inside. He said:

“I don’t see myself in uniform, somehow.”

“You’re slim you see, Arthur, you’ve really got a good figure for a Sam Browne. And your colouring, too. You’d be marvellous in khaki.”

They all looked at Arthur. Alan said:

“It’s a fact, Arthur. You’d have knocked ’em good and proper. You ought to have been coming out with me.”

For no reason that he could determine, Arthur felt himself trembling. His nerves were overstrung, he saw the whole evening as abnormal and abominable. Why was his father here, sitting in this crowded hotel drinking champagne, sanctioning Alan Todd’s patriotic bluster, so restless and unlike himself?

“D’you hear, Arthur?” Alan said. “You and I ought to be in the show together.”

Arthur compelled himself to speak. He struggled to speak lightly.

“I expect the show will get on without me, Alan. I’m not very keen on it to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, Arthur!” Hetty said, disappointed. Because she regarded Arthur as her own property she liked him always to show up well, to shine, as she phrased it. And this last remark of Arthur’s was not a very shining one. She screwed up her vivacious little face, fascinating and disapproving. “That’s a ridiculous way to talk, Arthur. Why, anyone that didn’t know you would imagine you were scared.”

“Nonsense, Hetty,” Barras said indulgently. “Arthur just hasn’t had time to think it out. One of these days you may see him making a dash for the nearest recruiting office.”

“Oh, I know!” Hetty said, warmly casting down those ingenuous eyes, a little sorry for having spoken.

Arthur said nothing. He sat with his eyes on his plate. He refused champagne. He refused dessert. He let the others talk on without him.

An orchestra struck up at the far end of the room where there was a clear space of floor waxed and ready for dancing. The orchestra played “God save the King” very loudly, and everyone stood up with a loud clatter of chairs and there was loud and prolonged cheering at the end, then the orchestra began not so loudly to play dance music. They always had dancing at the Central on Saturday nights.

Hetty smiled across at Arthur: they were both good dancers, they loved dancing together. Hetty had often been told what a charming couple she and Arthur made when dancing together. She waited for him to ask her to dance. But he sat there with his eyes glumly fixed on his plate, and he did not ask Hetty.

His moodiness became quite obvious at last and Alan, always ready to oblige, leaned across to Hetty.

“Care to take the old war-horse for a walk, Hetty?”

Hetty smiled with more than her usual vivacity. Alan was a bad dancer, a heavy dancer, he did not like dancing, and it was not the least pleasure for Hetty to dance with him. But Hetty pretended that she was pleased; she got up, and she and Alan danced together.

While they were dancing Barras said:

“She is a nice little thing, Hetty. So modest and yet so full of spirits.” He spoke pleasantly, more restfully; since his dinner and the champagne he seemed more quiescent.

Arthur did not answer; out of the corner of his eye he watched Hetty and Alan dancing and he tried hard to overcome his incomprehensible mood.

When Hetty and Alan came back, he did, for politeness’ sake, ask her to dance. He asked her stiffly, still chilled and hurt inside. It was wonderful dancing with Hetty, she was soft in his arms and the perfume that was herself seemed to flow into him with every movement of her body, yet because it was so wonderful he swore perversely he would dance this one dance and no more.

Afterwards Hetty sat beating time to the music with her neat slippered foot, until at last she could bear it no longer. With that fetching expression of vivacious distress:

“Is nobody going to dance tonight?”

Arthur said quickly:

“I’m tired.”

There was a silence. Suddenly Barras said:

“If I were any use to you, Hetty, I’m at your disposal. But I’m afraid I don’t know any of these new steps.”

She stared at him doubtfully, rather taken aback.

“But it’s quite easy,” she said. “You simply walk.”

He had the new smile, the vague, rather pleased, smile upon his face.

“Well, if you are not afraid, by all means let us try.” He rose and offered her his arm.

Arthur sat perfectly rigid. With a set face he stared at the figures of his father and Hetty moving slowly in each other’s arms at the end of the room. His father had always treated Hetty with a patronising aloofness and Hetty had always been timid and deferential to his father. And now they were dancing together. He distinctly saw Hetty smile, her uplifted flirtatious smile, the smile of a woman who is flattered by the attention she is receiving.

Then he heard Alan speak to him, asking him to go out, and mechanically he rose and went out with Alan. Now Alan was certainly not sober. He glowed. In the lavatory he faced Arthur, wavering slightly on his feet.

“Your old man’s loosened up a treat to-night, Arthur; I wouldn’t have believed it; given the old war-horse a marvellous send off.”

He turned on both taps so that they ran at full strength into the basin, then he swung round to Arthur again. He said with great confidence:

“Y’know, Arthur, my old man was pretty sick at your old man for not asking him over to back him up at the Inquiry. Never said much, but I know, the old war-horse knows, Arthur.”

Arthur stared at Alan uneasily.

“No need to worry, you know, Arthur.” Alan waved a hand with wise and friendly confidence. “Not the slightest need to worry, Arthur. All between friends you know, all between the best of old friends.”

Arthur continued to stare at Alan. He was speechless. A great confusion of doubt and uncertainty and fear rushed over him.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked at length.

Suddenly the lavatory basin overflowed and all the water came gushing over the floor, flowing, flowing over the floor.

Arthur’s eyes turned to the flooding water dazedly. The water in the Neptune pit had flooded like that, flooded through those tortuous and secret channels of the mine, drowning the men in horror and darkness.

His whole body was shaken by a spasm. He thought passionately: I mean to discover the truth. If it kills me I will discover the truth.

THREE

In the car on the way home Arthur waited until they were clear of the traffic of Tynecastle, then as they hummed along the straight stretch of silent road between Kenton and Sleescale he said quickly:

“There’s something I want to ask you, father.”

Barras was silent for a moment; he sat in his corner supported by the soft upholstery, his features masked by the interior dimness of the car.

“Well,” he said, unwillingly. “What is it you want?”

Barras’s tone was completely discouraging but Arthur was beyond discouragement now.

“It’s about the disaster.”

Barras made a movement of displeasure, almost of repugnance. Arthur felt rather than saw the gesture. There was a silence, then he heard his father say:

“Why must you keep on with that subject? It’s extremely distasteful to me. I’ve had a pleasant evening. I enjoyed dancing with Hetty, I’d no idea I should master these steps so well. I don’t want to be bothered with something which is completely settled and forgotten.”

Arthur answered in a burning voice.

“I haven’t forgotten it, father. I can’t forget it.”

Barras sat quite still for a moment.

“Arthur, I wish to God you would give this over.” He spoke with a certain restraint as though forcing this restraint upon a rising impatience; the result was the injection of a gloomy kindness into his words. “Don’t think I haven’t seen it coming. I have. Now listen to me and try to be reasonable. You’re on my side of the affair, aren’t you? My interests are your interests. You’re nearly twenty-two now. You’ll be my partner in the Neptune very shortly. Whenever this war is over I intend to see to it. When every living soul has forgotten about the disaster don’t you think it’s madness for you to keep harping on it?”

Arthur felt sick. In reminding him of his interest in the Neptune it was as if his father had offered him a bribe. His voice trembled.

“I don’t look on it as madness. I want to know the truth.”

Barras lost his self-control.

“The truth,” he exclaimed. “Haven’t we had an Inquiry? Eleven days of it, with everything investigated and settled. You know I was exonerated. There’s the truth for you. What more do you want?”

“The Inquiry was an official inquiry. It’s very easy to suppress facts at that kind of Inquiry.”

“What facts?” Barras burst out. “Have you gone out of your mind?”

Arthur stared straight in front of him through the glass partition at the stiff outlines of Bartley’s back.

“Didn’t you know all the time that you were taking a risk, father?”

“We’ve got to take risks,” Barras answered angrily. “Every one of us. In mining it’s a case of risks and risks and more risks, day in and day out. You can’t get away from them.”

But Arthur was not to be turned aside.

“Didn’t Adam Todd warn you before you started stripping coal from the Dyke?” he asked stonily. “You remember that day you went to see him. Didn’t he tell you there was a danger? And yet you went on in spite of him.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Barras almost shouted. “It’s my place to make the decisions. The Neptune is my pit and I’ve got to run it my own way. Nobody has the right to interfere. I run it the best way I can.”

“The best way for whom?”

Barras struggled violently for self-control.

“Do you think the Neptune is a Benevolent Institute? I want to show a profit, don’t I?”

“That’s it, father,” Arthur said tonelessly. “You wanted to make a profit, an enormous profit. If you had pumped the water out of the Old Neptune workings before you started to strip that coal there would have been no danger. But the expense of dewatering the old workings would have swallowed up your profit. The expense, the thought of spending all that money in pumping out waste water was too much for you. So you decided to take the chance, the risk, to ignore the waste water and send all these men into danger.”

“That’s enough,” Barras said harshly. “I won’t have you talk to me like that.” The lights of a passing vehicle momentarily illuminated his face, which was congested, the forehead flushed, the eyes indignant and inflamed. Then all was darkness in the car again. Arthur clung tremblingly to the seat of the car, his lips pale, his whole being rent by an incredible dismay.

Once again he felt that strange unrest behind his father’s words, the sense of hurry, of evasion; it impressed him dully as an act of flight. He remained silent while the car swung into the drive of the Law and drew up before the front porch. He followed Barras into the house and in the high, bright vestibule they faced each other. There was a singular expression on Barras’s face as he stood with one hand upon the carved banister preparatory to ascending the stairs.

“You’ve had a great deal to say lately, a very great deal. But don’t you think it would fit you better if you tried to do something for a change?”

“I don’t understand you, father.”

Over his shoulder, Barras said:

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that you might be fighting for your country?” Then he turned and heavily went upstairs.

Arthur stood with his head thrown back watching the retreating figure of his father. His pale, upturned face was contorted. He felt finally that his love for his father was dead, he felt that out of the ashes there was arising something sinister and terrible.

FOUR

Earlier on that same Saturday night Sammy walked down the Avenue with Annie Macer. Every Saturday night for years Sammy and Annie had taken this walk. It was part of the courtship of Sammy and Annie Macer.

About seven o’clock every Saturday night Sammy and Annie met at the corner of Quay Street. Usually Annie was there first, strolling up and down in her thick woollen stockings and well-brushed shoes, strolling quietly up and down, waiting, waiting for Sammy. Sammy always was the late one. Sammy would arrive about ten past seven, dressed in his good blue suit, very newly shaved about the chin and very shiny about his nobby forehead.

“I’m late, Annie,” Sammy would remark, smiling. He never expressed regret for being late, never dreamed of it; Annie, indeed, would have felt it very out of place if Sammy had said that he was sorry he had kept her waiting.

They had set out for their walk “up the Avenue.” Not arm in arm, there was nothing like that in the courtship of Sam and Annie, no holding of hands, or squeezing, or kissing, none of the more exuberant manifestations of affection. Sam and Annie were steadies. Sam respected Annie. In the darkest part of the Avenue Sam might quietly and sensibly encircle Annie’s waist as they strolled along. No more than that. Sammy and Annie just walked out.

Annie knew that Sammy’s mother “objected” to her. But she knew that Sammy loved her. That was enough. After they had walked up the Avenue they would come back to the town, Sammy nodding to acquaintances “How do, Ned,” “How again, Tom,” back along Lamb Street and into Mrs. Wept’s pie-shop where the bell went ping and the loose glass pane in the door rattled every time they went in. Standing in Mrs. Wept’s dark little pie-shop they would each eat a hot pie with gravy and share a big bottle of lemonade. Annie preferred ginger ale but Sam’s favourite drink was the lemonade and this meant, of course, that Annie always insisted on lemonade. Sometimes Sammy had two pies, if he was flush after a good week’s hewing, for Mrs. Wept’s pies were the last word. But Annie refused, Annie knew a woman’s place, Annie never had more than one. She would suck the gravy from her fingers while Sam made inroads upon the second pie. Then they would have a chat, maybe, with Mrs. Wept and stroll back to Quay Corner where they stood for a while watching the brisk Saturday night movement in the street before they said good night. And as he walked up the Terraces Sammy would think what a grand evening it had been and what a fine girl Annie was and how lucky he was to be walking her out.

But to-night as Sam and Annie came down the Avenue it was plain that something had gone wrong between them. Annie’s expression was subdued while Sammy, with a harassed look, seemed to struggle to explain himself.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” kicking moodily at a stone which lay in his way. “I didn’t think you’d take it that sore, lass.”

In a low voice Annie said:

“It’s all right, Sammy, I’m not minding that much. It’s quite all right.” Whatever Sammy did was always all right with Annie; but her face, seen palely in that dark avenue of trees, was troubled.

Sammy took a kick at another stone.

“I couldn’t stand the pit no longer, honest I couldn’t, Annie. Goin’ down every day thinkin’ on dad and Hughie lyin’ inbye there, it’s more nor I could stand. The pit’ll never be the same to me, Annie, never, it won’t, till dad and Hughie gets brought out.”

“I see that, Sammy,” Annie agreed.

“Mind you, I’m not exactly wantin’ to go,” Sammy worried on. “I don’t hold with all this ruddy buglin’ and flag flappin’. I’m just makin’ it the excuse. I’ve just got to get out that pit. Anything’s better’n the pit now, anything.”

“That’s right, Sammy,” Annie reassured him. “I see what you mean.”

Annie saw perfectly that Sammy, a fine hewer who liked, and was needed in, his job, would never be going to the war but for the disaster in the Neptune. But the sadness in Annie’s acquiescence set Sammy more at cross-purposes than ever.

“Ah, Annie,” he exclaimed with sudden feeling. “I wish’t this thing had never happened on us in the Neptune. As I was bringin’ out my tools at the end of the shift the day, that’s just what I kept thinkin’. There’s our Davey, now. I’m proper put down ower what it’s done to him. I’m worrit, lass, at how he’s took it.” He went on with sudden heat: “It wasna fair the way they sacked him out of the school. Ramage done it, mind ye, he’s always had his knife in wor lot. But God, it was shameful, Annie.”

“He’ll get work some other place, Sammy.”

But Sammy shook his head.

“He’s done wi’ the schoolmasterin’, lass. He’s got in wi’ Harry Nugent someways. Harry took a heap of notice of Davey when he was up, something’ll come out of that, I’m thinkin’.” He sighed. “But there’s a proper change come ower him, lass.”

Annie made no reply: she was thinking of the change which had come over Sammy too.

They walked along the Avenue without speaking. It was now almost dark, but as they passed the Law, the moon sailed out from a bank of cloud, and threw a cold hard light upon the house which sat there square and squat, with a self-complacency almost malignant. Beside the big white gate, under one of the tall beeches which flanked it, two figures stood together — the one a young fellow in uniform, the other a bareheaded girl.

Sammy turned to Annie as they reached the end of the Avenue.

“Did you see that?” he said. “Dan Teasdale and Grace Barras.”

“Ay, I saw them, Sammy.”

“I’m thinkin’ it wouldn’t do for Barras to see them there.”

“No, Sammy.”

“Barras!” Sammy jerked his head aside and spat. “He’s come out of the sheugh all right. But I’ll not work for him no more, no, not if he came and begged us.”

Silence continued between Annie and Sammy as they walked towards Mrs. Wept’s shop. Annie was bearing up, but the thought that Sammy was going to the war paralysed her; anyone but Annie would have refused to go to the shop. Yet Annie felt that Sammy wanted to go, so Annie went and struggled gamely with her pie. To-night Sammy had only one pie and he left half a tumbler of his lemonade.

As they stood at the corner of Quay Street Sammy said, with an effort at his old smile:

“Don’t take on, Annie, lass. The pit hasn’t done that much for me after all. Maybe the war’ll do a bit more.”

“Maybe,” Annie said: and with a sudden catch in her breath: “I’ll see you to-morrow, Sammy. I’ll see you for sure before you go.”

Sammy nodded his head, still holding his smile, then he exclaimed:

“Give us a kiss, lass, to show you’re not angry wi’ us.”

Annie kissed Sammy, then she turned away for fear Sammy should see the tears that were in her eyes. Holding her head down she walked rapidly towards her home.

Sammy climbed the Terraces slowly. He was a fool, he knew he was a fool to be leaving Annie and his good job for a war that did not interest him. And yet he couldn’t help himself. The disaster had done something to him — ay, just like it had to David. Where he was going didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was getting out of the pit.

When he reached Inkerman his mother was sitting up for him as usual in her own hard, straight-backed chair by the window and the minute he came in she rose to get him some hot cocoa.

She gave him his cocoa, and, standing by the grate where she had just put the steaming kettle, she watched him, her hands folded beneath her breast, elbows rather gaunt, eyes sombre and loving.

“Will I cut you a piece of cake, son?”

He had sat down rather wearily at the table with his cap pushed back on his head and now he raised his eyes and looked at her.

She had altered. Though she did not fight within herself against the disaster but received it sombrely with the calm fatality of a woman who has always known and accepted the danger of the pit, the calamity at the Neptune had left its mark on Martha too. The lines on her face were deeper and her cheeks more fallen in, one grey strand made a curious streak on the black of her tight-drawn hair, there was a little pattern of furrows graven upon her brow. But she still held herself erect without effort. Her vitality seemed inexhaustible.

Sammy hated to have to tell his mother; but there was no other way; and as he was without subtlety he spoke directly.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve joined up.”

She went an ashen grey. Her face and her lips turned as grey as the grey strand of her hair; and her hand flew instinctively to her throat. A sudden wildness came into her eyes.

“You don’t mean”—she stopped, but at last she brought herself to say it—“the army?”

He nodded moodily:

“The Fifth Fusiliers. I fetched my tools outbye this afternoon. The draft leaves for camp on Monday.”

“On Monday,” she stammered, in that same tone of wild and incredulous dismay.

Still looking at him she sat down upon a chair. She sat down very carefully, her hand still pressed to her throat. She seemed shrunken, crushed into that chair by what he had told her; but still she refused to believe it. In a low voice she said:

“They’ll not take you. They want the miners back here at home. They can’t possibly take a good man like you.”

He avoided her beseeching eyes.

“They have taken me.”

The words extinguished her. There was a long silence, then almost in a whisper she asked:

“What way did you have to do a thing like that, Sammy? Oh, what way did you have to do it?”

He answered doggedly:

“I cannot help it, mother, I cannot go on any longer we the pit.”

FIVE

It was about five o’clock on the following Tuesday evening and though still light the streets were quiet as David walked along Lamb Lane and entered his house. In the narrow hall he stopped, his first glance towards the little electro-plated tray upon which Jenny, with her deathless sense of etiquette, always placed his mail. One letter lay upon the tray. He picked it up and his dark face brightened.

He went into the kitchen, where he sat down by the small fire and began to take off his boots, unlacing them with one hand and staring at the letter in the other.

Jenny brought him his slippers. That was unusual, but lately Jenny had been most unusual, worried and almost timid, looking after him in small ways, as though subdued by his sombre uncommunicativeness.

He thanked Jenny with a look. He could smell the sweet odour of port on her breath but he refrained from speaking, he had spoken so often and he was tired of words. She took very little, she explained, just a glass when she felt low. The disgrace — her own word — of his dismissal from New Bethel Street had naturally predisposed her to lowness.

He opened the letter and read it slowly and carefully, then he rested it on his knee and gazed into the fire. His face was fixed and unimpassioned and mature. In those six months since the disaster he seemed to have grown older by a good ten years.

Jenny moved about the kitchen pretending to be busy but glancing at him furtively from time to time, as if curious to know what was in the letter. She felt that deep currents were working secretly within David’s mind; she did not fully understand; a look, almost of fear, was in her eyes.

“Is it anything important?” she asked at length. She could not help asking, the words slipped out.

“It’s from Nugent,” he answered.

She stared at him blankly, then her features sharpened with temper. She distrusted this sudden and spontaneous friendship with Harry Nugent which had sprung from the disaster at the Neptune; it struck her almost as an alliance; she felt excluded and was jealous.

“I thought it was about a job, I’m about sick of you going idle.”

He roused himself and looked at her.

“In a way it is about a job, Jenny. It’s the answer to a letter I wrote Harry Nugent last week. He’s joining the ambulance corps, going out to France as a stretcher-bearer, and I’ve decided that the only thing to do is to go with him.”

Jenny gasped — her reaction was unbelievably intense. She turned quite green, a ghastly colour, her whole body wilted. She looked cowed. He thought for a moment she was going to be sick, she had lately had some queer bouts of sickness, and he jumped up and went over to her.

“Don’t worry, Jenny,” he said. “There isn’t the slightest reason to worry.”

“But why must you go?” she quavered in that odd frightened voice. “Why have you got to let this Nugent drag you in? You don’t believe in it, there isn’t any need for you to go.”

He was moved by her concern; lately he had resigned himself to the conviction that Jenny’s love for him was not what it had been. And he hardly knew how to answer her. It was true that he had no patriotism. The political machinery which had produced the war was linked in his mind with the economic machinery which had produced the disaster in the Neptune. Behind each he saw that insatiable lust for power, for possessions; the quenchless self-interest of man. But although he had no patriotism he felt he could not keep out of the war. This was exactly Nugent’s feeling too. It was awful to be in the war but it was more awful not to be in the war. He need not go to the war to kill. He could go to the war to save. To stand aside palely while humanity lay locked in the anguished struggle was to proclaim himself a fraud for ever. It was like standing upon the pit-bank of the Neptune watching the cage descend filled with men upon whose foreheads was the predestined seal of the disaster, standing aside and saying, you are in the cage, my brothers, but I will not enter with you because the terror and the danger which await you should never have arisen.

He put out his hand and stroked her cheek.

“It’s difficult to explain, Jenny. You know what I’ve told you… since the disaster… since I got the sack from the school… I’m chucking the B.A., teaching, everything. I’m going to make a complete break and join the Federation. Well, while this war is on there’s not much chance to do what I want to do at home. It’s a case of marking time. Besides, Sammy has gone and Harry Nugent is going. It’s the only thing.”

“Oh no, David,” she whimpered. “You can’t go.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said soothingly. “There’s no need to worry about that.”

“No, you can’t, you can’t leave me now, you can’t desert me at a time like this.” She created the picture of herself forsaken, not only by him, but by everyone she had trusted.

“But, Jenny—”

“You can’t leave me now.” She was quite beside herself, her words came all in a rush. “You’re my husband, you can’t desert me. Don’t you see I’m going… that we’re going to have a baby.”

There was a complete silence. Her news staggered him, not for an instant had he suspected it. Then she began to cry, letting her head droop while the tears simply ran out of her eyes, to cry as she always cried when she had offended him. He could not bear to see her cry like this; he flung his arm round her.

“Don’t cry, Jenny, for God’s sake don’t cry. I’m glad, I’m terribly glad; you know I’ve always wanted this to happen. You took me by surprise there for a minute. That was all. Don’t cry. Jenny, please, don’t cry like that, as if it was your fault.”

She sniffed and sobbed on his chest, snuggling up to him. The colour came back into her face, she looked relieved now that she had told him. She said:

“You won’t leave me now, will you, David, not until our baby’s born at any rate?”

There was something almost pitiful in Jenny’s eagerness to share the baby with him; but he did not see it.

“Of course not, Jenny.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

He sat down and took her on his knee. She still kept her head against his chest as though afraid to let him read her eyes.

“The idea,” he said gently, “crying like that. Surely you knew I’d be pleased. Why on earth didn’t you tell me before?”

“I thought you might be angry. You had that much to worry you and you’re different lately. I don’t mind telling you you’ve frightened me.”

He said mildly:

“I don’t want to frighten you, Jenny.”

“You won’t go then, will you, David? You won’t leave me till it’s all over?”

He took her chin gently in his fingers and raised her tear-stained face to his. Looking into her eyes he said:

“I’ll not think about the army until you’re all right, Jenny.” He paused, holding her glance firmly in his. She looked vaguely frightened again, ready to shrink, to start, to weep. Then he said: “But will you promise to give over drinking that confounded port, Jenny?”

There was no quarrel. A sudden final relief swept over her and she burst into tears.

“Oh yes, David, I promise,” she wailed. “I really do promise, I swear to you I’ll be good. You’re the best husband in the world, David, and I’m a silly, stupid, wicked thing. But oh, David…”

He held her closely, soothing her, his tenderness strengthened and renewed. Amongst all the troubled darkness of his mind he felt a shaft of light strike hopefully. He had a vision of new life rising out of death. Jenny’s son and his; and in his blindness he was happy.

Suddenly there came a ring at the bell. Jenny raised her head, flushed now and relieved, her mood altered with almost childish facility.

“Who can it be?” she queried interestedly. They were not used to front-door callers at such an hour. But before she could surmise the bell rang again. She rose smartly and hurried to answer it.

She was back in a minute, quite excited and impressed.

“It’s Mr. Arthur Barras,” she announced. “I showed him in the parlour. Can you think of it, David, young Mr. Barras himself? He’s asked to see you.”

The fixed look returned to David’s face, his eyes hardened.

“What does he want?”

“He didn’t say. I didn’t think to ask him, naturally. But imagine him calling at our house. Oh, goodness, if I’d only known I’d have had a fire going in the front room.”

There was a silence. The social occasion did not seem to strike David as important. He rose from his chair and went slowly to the door.

Arthur was walking up and down in the parlour in a state of acute nervous tension and as David entered he started quite visibly. He looked at David for an instant with wide, rather staring eyes and then came hurriedly forward.

“I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,” he said, “but I simply had to come.” With a sudden gesture, he sank into a chair and covered his eyes with his hand. “I know how you feel. I don’t blame you a bit. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had refused to see me. But I had to come, I’m in such a state I had to see you. I’ve always liked you and looked up to you, David. I feel that you’re the only one who can help me.”

David sat down quietly at the table opposite Arthur. The contrast between them was singularly pathetic: the one rent by a painful agitation, the other firmly controlled with strength and forbearance in his face.

“What do you want?” David asked.

Arthur uncovered his eyes abruptly and fixed them on David with a desperate intentness.

“The truth, that’s what I want. I can’t rest, I can’t sleep, I can’t be still until I get it. I want to know if my father is to blame for the disaster. I must know, I must. You’ve got to help me.”

David averted his gaze, struck by that strange recurrent pity which Arthur seemed always destined to evoke in him.

“What can I do?” he asked in a low voice. “I said all I had to say at the Inquiry. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“They can reopen the Inquiry.”

“What would be the use?”

An exclamation broke from Arthur, a sound lost in bitterness, between a laugh and a sob.

“Justice,” Arthur exclaimed wildly. “Ordinary decency and justice. Think of these men killed, cut off suddenly, dying horribly. Think of the suffering among their wives and children. O God! it won’t bear thinking of. If my father is to blame it’s too brutal and horrible to think it should all be glossed over and forgotten.”

David got up and went to the window. He wanted to give Arthur the chance to collect himself. Presently he said:

“I felt exactly that way too at first. Worse, perhaps… hatred… a terrible hatred. But I’ve tried to get over it. It’s not easy. It’s human nature to have these violent reactions. When a man throws a bomb at you, your first reaction is to pick it up and throw it back. I talked all this out with Nugent when he was here. I wish you’d met Nugent, Arthur, he’s the sanest man I know. But throwing back the bomb isn’t a bit of good. It’s far better to ignore the man who threw the bomb and concentrate on the organisation which made it. It’s no good looking for individual punishment over this Neptune disaster when the whole economic system behind the disaster is to blame. Do you see what I mean, Arthur? It’s no good lopping off a branch when the disease is at the very roots of the tree.”

“Does that mean you are going to do nothing?” Arthur asked desperately. The words seemed to stick in his throat. “Nothing? Absolutely nothing?”

David shook his head, his features rigid and saddened.

“I’m going to try to do something,” he said slowly. “Once we get rid of the war. I can’t tell you, I can’t say. But, believe me, I am going to try.”

A long silence fell. Arthur passed his hand across his eyes with that nervous, bewildered gesture. Perspiration was beaded on his brow. He stood up to go.

“So you won’t help me?” he said in a suppressed voice.

David held out his hand.

“Give it up, Arthur,” he said in a sincere and affectionate tone. “Don’t let it become an obsession with you. You’ll hurt yourself most of all. Forget about it.”

Arthur flushed violently, his thin boyish face looked faltering and afraid.

“I can’t,” he said in that same tormented voice, “I can’t forget about it.”

He left the room and went into the tiny hall. David opened the front door. Outside it was raining. Without looking at David, Arthur said good-bye, and plunged into the wet darkness. David stood for a moment upon the doorstep of his house listening to the rapid footsteps dying down the lane. Then all that he heard was the slow patter of the rain.

SIX

Arthur did not reach the Law until after seven. In the tumult and disorder of his mind he wished to be alone, he hoped that supper would be over. But supper was not over. Everyone was seated at table as he went in.

Barras was jubilant, he had been to Tynecastle and brought home the news of another victory. It was the battle of Loos, fought on September 26th, and the British forces on the Western front had won a glorious victory at the cost of only 15,000 men. The Tynecastle Argus computed the enemy losses at 19,000 killed and wounded, 7,000 prisoners and 125 guns captured. The Northern Star went a little better with 21,000 enemy killed and wounded and 3,000 prisoners.

Barras glowed with an excited satisfaction. As he ate his cutlets he read the communiqué aloud from the Northern Star in a firm official voice. Barras had never taken an evening paper before. The Times had always satisfied him, but now he was never without an evening Argus or Star, or both. With the paper in his hand he jumped up from the table, and went over to the opposite wall where a big-scale map hung all pricked out with the flags of the allied armies. Consulting the paper carefully Barras moved half a dozen of the tiny Union Jacks. He moved the tiny Union Jacks forward.

Watching his father covertly Arthur was seized by a terrifying thought. Barras, the flag-mover, was the genetic impulse behind the war. In his jubilation over the gain of a few hundred yards of torn-up trenches he was guilty, in essence, of the deaths of thousands of men.

When he had moved the flags Barras studied the map intently. He was heart and soul in the war now, he had lost himself in the war, he was a patriot, he lived in a whirl of forgetfulness. He was on six committees already, and had been nominated for the Northern Refugee Council. The telephone rang all day long. The car tore up and down the road to Tynecastle. Coal was coming out Five Quarter and Globe Seams and selling magnificently at forty shillings a ton pit-head price.

Barras came back to the table. As he sat down he stole a look at Hilda and Grace and Arthur as though to discover whether they had observed his generalship with the flags, then in obvious satisfaction he resumed his paper. His odd preoccupation and detachment were gone; the arteries of his temples stood out a little and showed the beat of his pulse. His air was vaguely restless, almost feverish; he was like a patient who insists on being about in defiance of his doctor’s orders, a patient whose metabolism is accentuated and every function accelerated. As he read the paper he drummed incessantly with his fingers upon the table. The drumming sound was not unlike the sound of quick jowling in the pit.

For a few minutes everything was silence but for that quick jowling of Barras’s fingers; then it happened, the incredible thing. Barras read a small item in the news twice over. Then he raised his head.

“Lord Kell has most kindly offered his London house as a temporary hospital for the wounded. The work of conversion will be completed in a month. They are asking already for volunteer nurses. Lord Kell has expressed the wish that all V.A.D. nurses should be if possible from the North.” Barras paused. He looked at Hilda and at Grace with that bland intentness. “How would you like to go?”

Arthur sat rooted in his chair. His father, the rock of family unity, the immovable rock upon which all Hilda’s pleading had previously broken in vain. Arthur went very pale. His eyes darted towards Hilda almost in apprehension.

Hilda had coloured deeply, violently. She seemed unable to believe her ears. She said:

“Do you mean that, father?”

Blandly intent, Barras said:

“Do I usually mean what I say, Hilda?”

The wave of colour receded from Hilda’s face as swiftly as it had come. She looked at Grace, large-eyed and eager beside her. Her voice trembled with joy.

“I think we should both like to go, father.”

“Very well!” Barras briskly resumed his paper. It was settled.

A quick glance between Hilda and Grace. Hilda said:

“When may we expect to go, father?”

From behind the paper:

“Shortly, I should imagine. Probably next week. I am seeing Councillor Leach at Tynecastle to-morrow. I shall speak to him and make the necessary arrangements.” A pause, then significantly: “I shall feel happy that at least you, Hilda, and Grace are doing your country’s work.”

Arthur felt the perspiration break out on his palms. He wanted to rise and walk out of the room but he was unable to rise. His eyes remained fixed upon his plate. The sense of sickness which agitation always brought came upon him now.

Hilda and Grace went out, he could hear them flying upstairs to discuss the miracle. Aunt Carrie was already upstairs attending to his mother. Once again he made the effort to rise, but his legs refused to move. He sat paralysed, bound by the current of animosity which flowed towards him from behind the paper. He waited.

As he had expected, his father lowered the paper. His father said:

“I am very pleased at the eagerness of your sisters to serve their country.”

Arthur winced. A whole ocean of emotion boiled and surged within him. Once it had been love. Now it was fear, suspicion, hatred. How had the change occurred? He knew and yet he did not know, he was tired from the tension of the day, his brain felt thick and stupid. He answered heavily:

“Hilda and Grace only want to get away from here.”

The mottled flush spread over Barras’s forehead. In rather a high tone he said:

“Indeed! And why should they?”

Arthur replied listlessly; he seemed not to care now what he said:

“They can’t stand it here any longer. Hilda has always hated it here but now Grace hates it too. Ever since the disaster. I heard them talking the other day. They said how much you had changed. Hilda said you were living in a fever.”

Barras seemed to allow the words to slip over him. It was a faculty he had lately developed of shutting out any issue which might be likely to disturb him, the supreme faculty of judicial inhibition; to Arthur it seemed like Pilate when he washed his hands. He paused, then said in a measured voice:

“Your attitude is worrying me, Arthur. You are very different.”

“It’s you who are different.”

“It isn’t only I who am worried. I saw Hetty to-night at the Central Organisation offices. She is extremely worried and unhappy about you.”

“I can’t help Hetty,” Arthur said with that same listless bitterness.

Barras’s dignity increased.

“Alan has been mentioned in dispatches. They have just had the news, Hetty told me to-day. He is recommended for the M.C.”

“I can’t help Alan either,” Arthur answered.

The duskiness on Barras’s brow spread behind his ears and into the loose tissue of his neck. The vessels in his temples thickened and throbbed. He said loudly:

“Have you no wish to fight for your country?”

“I don’t want to fight for anything,” Arthur answered in a stifled tone. “I don’t want to kill anybody. There’s been enough killing already. We started off pretty well in the Neptune. That’s sickened me against killing.” His voice rose suddenly, shrill, hysterical. “Do you understand? If that hadn’t happened I might have run out like the rest of them with a gun, run out looking nice and pretty in my uniform, run out looking for a man to kill. But it has happened. I saw these men killed and I’m not satisfied. I’ve had time to think, you see. I’ve had time to think. I’ve had time to think….” He broke off, his breath coming quickly. He dared not look at his father, but he felt his father looking at him.

There was a long heavy silence. Then Barras performed the usual gesture, a measured movement towards his left-hand waistcoat pocket, an impressive inspection of his watch. Arthur heard the click as the watch was shut and the significance of the action bore down upon him as pathological and alarming. His father had an appointment in Tynecastle, another committee meeting, another and yet another, his father whose habit it had been never to go out, who used to sit listening to Handel in the quiet of his own home, his father, who had sent all these men down the Neptune to die.

“I hope you understand,” Barras said, rising from the table, “that you are not indispensable to me at the Neptune. Turn that over in your mind. It may help you to do your duty.” Then he went out and shut the door. In two minutes Arthur heard the purr of the car as it slid away down the drive.

Arthur’s lip trembled, his whole body trembled again as a rush of stubborn weakness flooded him.

“He won’t,” he shouted suddenly to the empty room. “He won’t!”

SEVEN

Towards the end of September, abruptly and extremely early in the morning, Joe Gowlan had quitted Sleescale. Though he said neither why nor where Joe had his own good reasons for going. He returned, by a discreet route, to Yarrow and set out for Platt Lane.

Trudging along the Lane on that damp autumn morning he became aware of an unusual activity at Millington’s. Above the high paling he saw a long corrugated shed in course of erection and a lorry, backed into the yard, discharging heavy equipment. Cautiously, he applied his eye to a knot hole in the fence. Holy Gee, there was a do on right enough! Two new lathes going into the machine-shop, a drilling machine, new moulds and trays, men hauling and heaving, Potterfield the foreman shouting merry hell, Irving tearing out of the drawing office with a bunch of papers in his fist. With a thoughtful air Joe straightened up and stepped into the offices.

He had to cool his heels interminably in the Inquiry Room before gaining admittance to Millington’s office but neither the delay nor the reluctant eye of Fuller the head clerk damped him. He went in firmly.

“It’s Joe Gowlan, Mr. Stanley.” He smiled — deferential yet confident. “Maybe you don’t remember me. You promised you might have an opening for me when I came back.”

Stanley, who sat in his shirt-sleeves before a littered table, raised his head and glanced at Joe. Stanley was plumper about the face and his waist line had increased, he was a trifle paler, too, his hair beginning to recede from his forehead, he had a flabby and irritable look. He frowned now: he recollected Joe at once, yet he was rather puzzled; remembrance associated Joe with dungarees and a certain amount of grime. He said perplexedly:

“Why, yes, Gowlan, of course. But are you after a job now?”

“Well, yes, sir.” Joe’s smile though still deferential was quite irresistible and despite himself Stanley smiled slightly in sympathy. “I’ve been doing pretty well, mind you, but I wanted a change and I’ve always felt I’d like to come back to you.”

“I see,” Stanley declared drily. “Unfortunately we don’t want puddlers here now. And what about the army? A stout young fellow like you ought to be at the front.”

Joe’s brightness dissolved into an expression of disconsolate regret. He had anticipated this difficulty and he had no intention ever of being at the front. Without hesitation he answered:

“They’ve rejected me twice, sir. It’s no use. It’s my knee, a cartilage or something, must have jiggered up when I was boxing.”

Stanley had no reason to believe that Joe was lying. There was a pause, then he inquired:

“What have you been doing with yourself since you were here?”

Without blinking an eyelash Joe said modestly:

“I’ve been on construction work in Sheffield. I was foreman of the job. I had thirty-odd men under me. But I’ve never right settled down since I left Millington’s. I’ve always felt you might give me an opening here like you promised.”

Another pause. Millington picked up a ruler and began to twiddle it fretfully. He was in a perfect jam of work and schedules and contracts. Suddenly an idea struck him. He welcomed it. Like most dull men in a position of responsibility he flattered himself upon what he called his ability to make quick decisions. He felt himself making a quick decision now. He looked up abruptly, rather patronising, very much on his dignity.

“We’ve rather changed things here. Did you know that?”

“No, Mr. Stanley.”

Millington inspected the ruler with a kind of fagged triumph.

“We’re making munitions,” he announced impressively. “Hand grenades, shrapnel, eighteen-pounder shells.” Fagged or not, there was good reason for Stanley’s air of triumph. For Millington’s was on the map at last. During those last years trade had languished painfully, old markets waning and new difficult to find. A good many hands had been sacked and the social club had turned slightly less social than before. For all Stanley’s hearty efforts it looked as though Millington’s might finally have to close down.

But immediately upon the outbreak of war old Mr. Clegg had wheezed his way to Stanley. Old Clegg was very asthmatic now, very old, done up and worried but, on this occasion, quite heaven inspired.

“It’s all up with us short of one thing,” Clegg put it with brutal bluntness. “There’s a war on now and we might as well try to sell our tubs and shackle-bolts in Greenland. But they’ll need munitions, tons and tons of them, more than all the arsenals in kingdom come can give them. We’ve got to chance it, Mr. Stanley, and turn over quick. If we don’t we’ll shut down in six months. For the love of God talk it over with me, Mr. Stanley?”

They talked it over, old Clegg wheezing and puffing his project into Stanley’s startled ears. Their present plant with some additions would be adequate. They had the foundry, the machine-shop, four furnaces, and one cupola, nothing, of course, which lent itself to the manufacture of the larger implements of war, but they could concentrate on the small material, shrapnel, shrapnel bullets, hand grenades, and small shells. That’s the stuff, Clegg observed with emotion, the stuff to show the profit and win the war.

That final argument, firing Stanley’s patriotism, had tipped the scale. He had adopted Clegg’s idea, realised all his resources, put in six new melting-pots and another cupola. Millington’s had begun to make munitions and, for the first time in five years, to make, simply to coin money, as though they minted sovereigns instead of shrapnel. It was ridiculously easy, the simplicity of the process took Stanley’s breath away. A Government department met his advance with a feverish acceptance, asking for half a million Mills bombs and offering £3,500 per ten thousand. Shrapnel was demanded urgently, insistently, one, two, three hundred tons a week. Already Stanley had a sheaf of contracts in hand; he was fitting eighteen-pounder shell moulds and heavy lathes; and the filling factories were clamouring, shrieking for material faster than he could turn it out.

This was the situation which caused Stanley to fix his eyes importantly on Joe. He made a brisk, decisive movement.

“It looks as though you’d turned up at the right moment, Gowlan. I’m short-handed, chiefly through enlistment, for I never stop a man who wants to go. Hughes, the foundry foreman, has just gone and I need somebody in his place. Mr. Clegg isn’t fit to deal with that himself. He’s been seedy lately; in fact I’m doing part of his work myself. But in the shop I need a foreman, I can’t be three places at once, and I’ve half a mind to try you out there. Six pounds a week and a month’s trial. What do you say to it?”

Joe’s eyes glistened, the offer was far better than he had expected; he could scarcely conceal his eagerness.

“I say, yes, Mr. Stanley,” he blurted out. “Just give me the chance to show you what I can do.”

The enthusiasm behind Joe’s words seemed to gratify Millington.

“Come along, then.” He rose. “I’ll turn you over to Clegg.”

They found Clegg in the melting-shed superintending the installation of new moulds. He looked a sick man, stooping over a stick, his grey moustache clotted with rheum. He had no recollection of Joe, but at Stanley’s request he led him into the foundry. From his previous experience one glance assured Joe of his own competence to deal with the work. There were six pots in all and the process was extremely simple: pig and lead mixed with twelve per cent. antimony for hardening, fired underneath, then into the moulds. While old Clegg rambled on Joe made pretence of attentive listening, but all the time his alert eye was darting round, taking in the forty-odd men who worked in the red glare, feeding the pots, serving the moulds, breaking up, tubbing away the cast grenades that looked like small unripe pineapples. A walk over, he kept thinking to himself, I know it backwards already.

“It’s a matter of handling the men,” Mr. Stanley observed. He had followed them into the shop. “To keep the output up.”

With quiet efficiency Joe said:

“You can trust me, Mr. Stanley. I’ll get down to it all right.”

Mr. Stanley nodded and walked off with Clegg.

There and then Joe set himself, in his own phrase, to get down to it. From the start he let it be seen that he was the boss. Though he had never before held a position of authority he felt himself eminently adapted to the part; he had no diffidence, no qualms, he was breezy and expansive. He threw himself into the work, was here, there, everywhere, superintending the mixing, the firing, the moulds, with a ready word of praise and a healthy line of blasphemy.

At the end of the first month the shop output indicated a distinct rise and Millington was pleased. He congratulated himself upon his own decision and called Joe to his office to compliment him personally and confirm his appointment. Joe certainly spared no pains in making himself useful. Millington never came into the shop but Joe hung on to his sleeve, pointing out something that was being done, advancing a suggestion, coming forward with a new idea, all bustle and efficiency. In Joe’s own phrase, he soaped Stanley a treat and Stanley, who was temperamentally inclined to become bothered and confused by a sudden rush of work, began to think of Joe as a real stout fellow.

Joe spent his evenings quietly. For a moment he had entertained the thought of taking up his lodgings again with the Sunleys. But only for a moment. There were many reasons why Joe did not wish to return to Scottswood Road to be mixed up with his old associations again. He had an idea that at last he was on a good thing: Millington’s was humming, money dancing in, the air full of excitement and change. On the recommendation of Sim Porterfield, the machine-shop foreman, he took a room at 4 Beech Road, Yarrow, with Mrs. Calder, a decent elderly woman, a member of Penuel, very dried and sinewy, who from her age, respectability and the shine on her linoleum, could not possibly tamper with Joe’s virtue and so upset his prospects.

As the months went on Joe concentrated more and more on the main chance. And the more he concentrated the more his eye drifted in the direction of the machine-shop and Sim Porterfield. Sim was a short silent sallow-faced man with a small black beard, a pious acrimonious wife and a passion for the game of quoits. His taciturnity gave him the reputation of “a thinker,” he was a member of the Yarrow Fabian Society, he plodded again and again with ponderous lack of understanding through the works of Karl Marx. He was not popular with the men nor with Stanley who half suspected Sim of being “a socialist.” Yet he was a kindly man, it was he who had engaged Joe on that memorable afternoon seven years before and given him his first chance at Millington’s.

Natural, then, that Joe should pal up with Sim, endure his heavy comradeship, forgo the lighter pleasures of Saturday afternoon to accompany him to the quoit ground and heave metal rings into squashy clay. More natural still that Joe should spend a lot of time studying Sim, genially figuring things out as to how Sim might be undermined. The trouble was Sim’s steadiness. He never drank more than a pint, had no time for women and never pinched so much as a one-inch nut from the shop. Joe began to think he would never manage to get Sim in wrong, until one evening, leaving the works in the gathering dusk a stranger furtively thrust some pamphlets into his hand before vanishing down Platt Lane. Joe glanced indifferently at the sticky handbills under the nearest street lamp: Comrades! Workers of the World! Down with War! Don’t let the war-mongers put a gun in your hands and send you to kill a German worker. How do they treat you when you strike for a living wage? They can’t fight this war without you. Stop it now! The German worker doesn’t want to fight any more than you. Don’t let them send you out for cannon fodder. Munition workers, down tools! British armaments are being sold to Germany by the capitalists. Down with Capitalism! Down with War!…

Joe recognised the literature and was about to throw it into the gutter when all at once a thought struck him. He folded the sheets tenderly and placed them in his pocket-book. Smiling slightly, he walked off towards his lodgings.

On the following day he was extra affable, slipped in and out of the machine-shop, lunched with the shirt-sleeved Sim in the corner of the canteen, then, suddenly serious, advanced upon the office and demanded to see Millington. He was closeted with Stanley quite a time.

At six o’clock that evening, when the hooter blared, and the men, struggling into their jackets, milled out of the machine-shop, Stanley and Clegg and Joe stood by the door. Millington’s face was ablaze with indignation. As Sim came past he thrust out an arm and stopped him.

“Porterfield, you’ve been spreading sedition in my Works.”

“What?” Sim said stupidly. Everybody turned to stare.

“Don’t deny it.” Outrage quivered in Stanley’s voice. “I know all about it. You and your damned Marx. I ought to have suspected you before.”

“I’ve done nowt, sir,” gasped Sim.

“You’re a barefaced liar,” shouted Stanley. “You’ve been seen distributing pamphlets! And what’s that in your inside pocket?” He plucked a sheaf of papers out of Sim’s open jacket. “Look, is that nowt? Seditious poison! And in my works! You’re sacked on the spot. Call and get your money from Mr. Dobbie and don’t show your pro-German face near Millington’s again.”

“But, listen, Mr. Millington…” cried Sim wildly.

No use. Stanley’s back was turned, he was stalking off with Joe and Clegg. Sim stared stupidly at one of the pamphlets on the floor, picked it up, like a man in a dream, to read. Five minutes later as he stumbled out of the works a crowd of men were awaiting him at the gates. An angry shout went up. Somebody yelled: “Here’s the bloody pro-German! Here’s the bastard, lads. We’ll give him hell!”

They closed in on Sim.

“Let us be,” he panted, his ridiculous little beard cocked defiantly. “I tell you I ain’t done nowt.” By way of answer a steel bolt caught him on the ear. He struck out with his fists blindly. But a heavy kick caught him in the groin. He sank to his knees in a red haze of pain. “Pro-German! Dirty swine!” fading into the red dark haze. A last violent stab of pain as an iron-bound boot bashed against his ribs, Then blackness.

Three weeks later Joe called to see Sim who lay in bed, his right leg in splints, his ribs in plaster, a dazed expression imprinted on his face. “Christ Almighty, Sim,” Joe almost blubbered, “I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m all to bits over it. And to think they’ve gone and given me your job as well. O Christ, Sim, why did you do it?”

Before he went Joe thoughtfully left a clipping from the Yarrow News: British Workers’ Lesson to a Skunk. At the end of which was the line: “Mr. Joseph Gowlan now occupies the post of combined superintendent of the foundry and machine-shop at the Millington Munitions Works.” Sim read it woodenly through his narrow spectacles, then woodenly picked up the book beside his bed. But he did not really understand Marx.

After this Joe’s stock was high with Millington and his prestige at the works immense. Then came that memorable Monday morning when Stanley arrived late, rather put out by a telephone message that Clegg was laid up and would not be in to business. Joe was already in the office, ostensibly for the purpose of going over his check sheets with Stanley.

Stanley, however, seemed rushed, in one of his moods of irritability under pressure when he gave the impression of supporting enormous enterprises entirely upon his own shoulders. He fussed in with his overcoat flapping and his scarf undone and as he hung up the scarf and pulled off his gloves he called through to Fuller to send in Dobbie, the Cashier. Then, feeling in the side pocket of his overcoat he paused, and made a gesture of impatience.

“Damn it all,” turning to Joe, “I’ve forgotten my counterfoils.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Take the car like a good chap and run up to Hilltop for them. Ask Laura, Mrs. Millington I mean, or ask one of the maids for the long envelope I left in the breakfast-room — on the table, I think, or perhaps it was in the hall. Go on, quick, now, before Dodds gets away.”

Joe hastened to comply. He went out of the office and into the yard where Millington’s car stood drawn up with the engine still running. He explained the matter to Dodds and in a minute they were on their way to Hilltop.

The morning was cold and fine with a crisp exhilaration in the air. Joe sat beside Dodds in the front seat and the wind of the car’s passage whipped a fine colour into his cheek. He had a swelling sensation of his own fitness, of his rising importance in the world. When the car reached Hilltop, about two miles from the works, and ran into the semicircular drive of Millington’s house, a large modem villa with an outlook towards the golf-course, he jumped out, ran up the front steps and pressed the bell.

A neat maid let him in. He smiled in a brotherly fashion to the maid — Joe never neglected anybody.

“I’m from the works,” he announced, “to see Mrs. Millington.”

The maid showed him into the lounge where he stood up by a fine coal fire and waited carefully. Though the chairs were deep and looked easy to sit in, Joe felt that it would be safer for him to stand. He liked the lounge, it was comfortable and different, there was a single picture on one of the walls and no more. But it was, reflected Joe, a classy bit of work. And he had enough knowledge to understand that the furniture was antique.

Then Laura entered. She descended the stairs slowly looking cool and trim in a dove-grey dress with white cuffs and collar. With an air of complete detachment, she gave him a rapid, impersonal glance and said:

“Yes?”

In spite of his assurance Joe felt intimidated. He stammered:

“I came for some papers. Mr. Millington left them on the breakfast table.”

“Oh yes.” She stood half-looking at him with a kind of curiosity and he blushed to the roots of his hair, not knowing what to do, conscious that he was being scrutinised, weighed up and judged. Although he cursed his unusual embarrassment, it stood him in good stead, for suddenly she smiled faintly, the smile of a bored woman responding to a momentary whim.

“Haven’t I seen you before somewhere?” she asked.

“I had the pleasure of dancing with you once, Mrs. Millington,” he gabbled. “At the social.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I do remember now.”

He gave a deferential laugh; he was recovering himself.

“I haven’t forgotten, at any rate, Mrs. Millington. That was something I couldn’t forget.”

She continued considering him with a certain interest. He really looked extraordinarily handsome standing there in his neat blue suit with that fine colour in his cheeks, his strong white teeth showing in a smile, his curly hair and dark brown eyes.

“Stanley spoke about you the other day,” she said reflectively. “You’re doing well.” A pause. “You’re the one the young lady jilted.” She smiled her cool faintly amused smile. “Or was it the other way round?”

He looked down hurriedly, feeling that she saw through him and was making fun of him.

“It’s finished with, anyhow,” he blurted out.

She did not answer for a minute.

“Well, I’ll get you the papers.” She moved towards the door but on the way out she paused in her impersonal way. “Would you like a drink?”

“I don’t usually touch it,” he answered. “Not in the morning. I want to get on, you see.”

As if she had not heard she took the decanter which stood on the top of the walnut cocktail cabinet and mixed him a whisky and soda. Then she went out of the room.

He was sipping the whisky and soda when she returned. She handed him the papers, remarking:

“So you want to get on?”

“Well, naturally, Mrs. Millington,” he answered with eager deference.

There was a silence while she stared in a bored fashion into the fire. He watched her dumbly. She was not beautiful. She had a very pale face with faint blue shadows under her eyes and the whites of her eyes were not clear. She had ordinary black hair. Her figure was not remarkable. It was quite a good figure but it was not remarkable. Her ankles were not slim and her hips were inclined to be full. But she was extremely smart, not smart in the ordinary sense, but impeccably smart. Her dress was in remarkable taste, her hair and hands beautifully kept. In that same dumb admiration Joe grasped that Laura was a fastidious woman, he could not help thinking how wonderful her underwear must be.

But he had finished his whisky now and could make no further pretext for delay. He put his glass down upon the mantelpiece and said:

“Well, I must get back to the works.”

She did not speak. She looked up from the fire and once again she smiled her cool, faintly ironic smile, held out a cool, firm hand. He shook hands, terribly deferential and polite — his own hands were well kept too — and the next minute he was out of the house.

He took his seat in the car with his head in a whirl. He did not know, he could not be sure, but he had the wild, impossible notion that he had made some sort of impression on Laura Millington. The idea was crazy, perhaps, but he felt it nevertheless and a tremendous exultation surged inside his chest. He was perfectly aware that he was extremely attractive to women; he could not walk down the street without being conscious of admiring glances flung towards him. Laura had said nothing, done nothing, her behaviour was altogether restrained and cold; yet Joe knew women; and he had seen something too firmly controlled, a flicker under the bored indifference in Laura’s eye. Joe, who had not one moral scruple in his whole composition, gloated inwardly. If only it were true? He had always wanted a lady to take a fancy to him. Often in Grainger Street, strolling as one of the common crowd, he would observe some car draw up and a smartly dressed, disdainful woman pass quickly across the pavement into an expensive shop leaving a peculiar exasperating perfume and the insufferable sense of her inaccessibility. In the past that had always goaded Joe, made him ram his hands in his pockets and, powerfully aware of his own virility, swear to have a woman like that, a lady, some day. By God, he would! Tarts were all right, but a real lady was different. And at the thought he would drift along with the herd again, shouldering his way forward, lip thrust out, pausing perhaps outside a window where gossamer lingerie was displayed. That was what they wore and his imagination, rejecting the cotton crudities available to him, soared towards a future time when he could command the full subtleties of his desire.

All this recurred to Joe as he drove back to the works; he could hardly sit still for sheer excitement. He kept looking at himself in the driving mirror and admiring himself, running his hand over the glossy, natural wave in his hair. At the office he handed over the papers to Stanley and went into the melting-shop in a perfect glow.

But as the days passed and nothing, absolutely nothing, happened, Joe’s complacency began to shrink. He waited for some sign, some vague indication of Laura’s interest. But for all the interest Laura evinced he might never have existed. He began to think he had been mistaken; then he was convinced he had been mistaken. He became surly and ill-tempered, took his spite out on the men in the melting-shop, and ended up with a wild night spent in the company of a blatant and unknown young female whose dirty toe-nails eventually disgusted him Three months passed and then, one frosty afternoon in late November, while Joe happened to be in consultation with Stanley over some defective moulds, Laura dropped into the office. She had her own car outside and had called to drive Stanley into Tynecastle. She entered quietly, a soft silver fox fur enhancing the pale oval of her face, and Joe’s heart took one enormous bound.

Stanley glanced up from his papers with a slight irritation. During that autumn Stanley’s tendency to irritation had increased; in the steam-heated office he looked pale, wilted and moist. “Sheer overwork,” he would protest in a voice of grievance. “Think of it, I haven’t had Clegg inside the office in six weeks.” Actually, having given birth to the idea of conversion to munitions — as though the process of delivery had been too much for his enfeebled constitution — old Mr. Clegg had taken to his bed and the doctor had reported that his lying-in would be prolonged. There was, in fact, a possibility that he would not get up again. This worried Stanley. Lately, Millington had run a little to seed and he was liable to impulsive bemoanings of his waist band, his lack of condition and his inability to get his regular bi-weekly golf. His tone on these occasions was the tone of a man who has just lost his collar stud and indicts the entire household.

“I’ll be ready in a minute, Laura,” he grunted. “You know Gowlan, don’t you? Joe Gowlan. Only man besides myself who works in this place.”

Joe hardly dared to raise his eyes. He blundered out some formal remark and, as soon as he could, gathered up his papers and left the office.

Stanley yawned and threw down his pen.

“I’m tired, Laura,” he said, “damned tired. Too many gin and Its last night and not enough sleep. I’ve been like a washed-out rag all day. God! when I think how fit I used to be. I’m missing my golf I tell you. I must start my cold showers in the morning again. I’d like to have time to get really fit. I’m sick of this driving on. Money pouring in, but what the dickens of good is it? Clegg’s still laid up, you know. I can’t put up with it much longer. I shall have to pension him off and get a new man, a new works manager.”

“Of course you must,” she agreed.

He stifled another yawn, his expression peevish.

“So damned difficult, getting a good man. They’re all booked up or at the front, lucky devils. I must advertise though. I’ll do it Monday.”

Laura smoothed her soft fur with her pale flexible fingers as though enjoying the feel of its voluptuous silkiness.

“Why don’t you give this man Gowlan a trial?” she remarked idly.

Stanley stared at her in amazement.

“Gowlan!” he exclaimed with a short laugh. “Joe Gowlan, my works manager! That shows how little you savvy about business, my dear. Gowlan was a workman himself not so long ago. Why, the thing’s ridiculous.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” she remarked indifferently. “I don’t understand.” She turned towards the door. But he did not follow.

“Clegg’s job is a damned responsible post. It means looking after the whole show when I’m not here. It’s idiotic to think Gowlan could handle it.” He rubbed his chin indecisively. “And yet I don’t know. He is a damned capable fellow. He’s helped me no end of ways these last three months. He’s popular with the men and smart, yes, straight as a die, too. Think how he put me up to that swine Porterfield. Hang it all, Laura, I don’t know but what there might be some sense in the idea after all.”

She looked at her tiny wrist watch, worn on the outside of her glove.

“Oh, never mind your idea, Stanley, it really is time we were going.”

“No, but listen, Laura. I honestly believe this solves my difficulty. There’s a war on, you know, and that’s when men do get promotion. I believe I might do worse than try Gowlan in the job.”

“You must do exactly as you think best.”

“Good Lord, Laura, as if I ever did anything else. But, honestly, I’m rather keen on this now. How would it do to ask him up to supper some night and see how he strikes us?”

“Just as you wish. But we must go now or we’ll be late.”

Stanley stood for a moment with his brow corrugated in thought, then suddenly he clapped on his bowler and reached for his coat. He followed Laura down the corridor and on the way across the yard he shouted to the machine-shop for Joe.

Joe advanced slowly and Stanley, straightening himself inside the coat, remarked offhandedly:

“By the way, Joe, I nearly forgot. I want you to come up and have supper with us some night. How about to-morrow? That suit you all right?”

Joe stood incapable of speech.

“Yes,” he stammered at last, “that would suit me perfectly.”

“It’s settled then,” Stanley declared. “Half-past seven in case I forget.”

Joe nodded. He was conscious of Laura’s dark eyes inspecting him non-committally over Stanley’s shoulder. Then they both turned and walked off.

He gazed after them with a violently beating heart. He wanted to whoop for joy. At last! At last! He had been right after all. In a sweat of triumph he returned to his work.

That night when he went home he could not be still. He had to tell someone, it was impossible to contain this delicious exultation within himself. A strange desire seized him, a temptation, and he could not resist it. He took a tram across the bridge to Tynecastle and carried his gloating along to Scottswood Road.

He strolled in upon the Sunleys with a casual air while they sat at supper, Alfred, Ada, Clarry and Phyllis — Sally was not there, she was with a concert party which had just left for France — and their welcome caused him to feel even more magnificent.

“Well, I declare,” Ada kept repeating. “It’s a regular treat to see you again.”

He accepted his old chair by the fire and let her send out for some cold ham and give him a second supper — he called it a snack — and while he ate her sandwiches he informed them all of his success at Millington’s. Reaching for the mustard he added carelessly: “As a matter of fact, I’m having supper with Stanley and Mrs. Millington at Hilltop tomorrow night.”

Their astounded admiration gave him a glorious thrill. Joe was a natural boaster, particularly when the audience was receptive, and now he boasted to his heart’s content. He expatiated on the beauty and nobility of his calling. Somebody, he announced through a large mouthful of ham, had got to make the bullets, bombs and shells for the boys at the front. There was a future in munitions, too. He had heard only the other day that they were going to put up a line of sheds at Wirtley on the waste ground at the top of Yarrow Hill, filling sheds, and quite near the foundry too. Mr. Stanley had said they would soon be employing hundreds of girls there, filling the shells with T.N.T. Mr. Stanley had got the news from London straight. Joe looked at Clarry and Phyllis in a friendly way. He said:

“Why don’t you two get in on that? They’ll be paying you three times what you get at Slattery’s and the work’s a pinch.”

Ada looked interested. She said:

“Is that a fact, Joe?”

Joe said largely:

“Certainly it’s a fact What do you take me for? I know, don’t I? I know!”

Ada pondered flabbily in her rocker. House painting in Tynecastle in those early days of the war was inclined to be slack; there was not as much money coming into the house as Ada would have liked, certainly Clarry’s and Phyllis’s money was very small. She said:

“I wish you’d let me know if you hear anything further, Joe.”

Ada had always had a weakness, a soft maternal tenderness towards Joe. To-night she thought he looked wonderfully handsome — quite the gentleman, sort of dashing and alive. Ada sighed; she had always wanted to have Joe her son-in-law; it was pitiful the chance Jenny had thrown away now that things had turned out so well for Joe.

When Clarry and Phyllis had gone out and Alf was busy with his pigeons in the back, Ada looked across at Joe and breathed very sadly and confidentially:

“You haven’t heard about Jenny?”

“No,” Joe said. And taking out his case he busied himself in lighting a cigarette.

Ada sighed.

“She’s expecting next month, yes, I’ve got to go through and see to her myself. At the beginning of December.”

The smoke from his cigarette got into Joe’s throat. He coughed and choked and got quite red in the face. After a pause he said:

“You mean there’s going to be an addition?”

Ada nodded mournfully.

“It’s just about the limit, poor Jenny, and he will have it he’s going in the army. And after that Gawd knows what’ll happen. He’s got the chuck from the teaching. Can you beat it? I always said she threw herself away that time, Joe. And now to think she’s been and went and let herself get caught.”

Joe’s cough convulsed him again.

“Well, well. These things do happen, I suppose.”

After that Ada became more confidential with Joe. They had a pleasant intimate talk in the half darkness of the room. At the end of it when Joe had to go Ada was greatly consoled, she felt that Joe’s visit had done her a power of good.

Joe walked back to Beech Road, Yarrow, with a curious expression on his face. Thank God he’d got out of Sleescale when he did! He was unusually agreeable to his withered landlady that night, spoke to her kindly and seemed generally to congratulate her that she was old and ugly and daughterless.

The next day came and Joe could think of nothing but his engagement in the evening. When he had finished work he slipped into Grigg’s the barber’s at the foot of Beech Road and had a shave, very close, and a hair-trim. Then he went home to his lodgings and took a bath. He sat on the edge of the bath quite naked, whistling softly and doing his nails. To-night he was determined to be at his best.

When he had bathed he padded into his bed-sitting-room, dressed extra carefully in his very best suit, a light grey with a faint pin stripe, a pattern copied from a suit he had once seen a heavy swell wearing in a musical comedy at the Empire. He had ambitions for a dinner suit, terrible tearing ambitions for a dinner suit, but he knew that the time for the dinner suit was not yet. Still, even in the ordinary grey he looked splendid, chin tenderly smooth, hair brilliantined, eye bright and vital, his thin watch-chain girded high on his waistcoat, a paste-pearl stud in his tie. He smiled at his scintillating reflection in the mirror, tried a bow and a few positions of careless elegance; then his smile became a grin and he thought to himself: “You’re in amongst it at last, my boy, just you watch yourself and there’s nothing can stop you.”

He became grave again and as he walked up the road to Hilltop he rehearsed the right note, deferential yet manly; his expression as he went up the steps, ready to conquer, was masterly.

The same neat maid, Bessie, showed him into the lounge where Laura stood alone with her bare arm resting on the mantelpiece and one slipper extended to the fire. She was dressed very plainly in black and she made a marvellously effective picture with the firelight warming her pale face and glinting on her beautiful polished nails. Joe suddenly had a thrilling admiration for her. She’s great, he thought to himself, by gum she’s it; and, gripped by a most familiar tenseness of his middle, yet with a touching humility on his face, he advanced and greeted her.

Then an awkward pause occurred. He rubbed his hands, smoothed his hair, straightened his tie and smiled.

“It’s been cold to-day, terrible cold for the time of year. Seems to be freezing outside to-night.”

She extended her other slipper to the fire, then she said:

“Is it?”

He felt snubbed; she thrilled and overawed him; he had never known anyone like her in his life. He persevered:

“It certainly is good of you to ask me up to-night. It’s a real honour, I assure you. When Mr. Stanley gave me the invitation you could have knocked me down with a feather.”

Laura looked at him with that unsmiling smile, taking in his flashy chain, fake pearl, his deadly emanation of hair-oil. Then, as though wishing him free of such atrocities, she looked away She said to the fire:

“Stanley will be down in a moment.”

Damped, he could not make her out. He would have given everything he had to know absolutely and completely the nature of her real self and how he stood with her.

But he did not know and he was half afraid of her. To begin with she was undoubtedly a lady. Not “ladylike” in Jenny’s silly sense — he could have laughed when he remembered Jenny’s shallow gentility, the crooking of the little finger, the bowing, the “so good of you” and “after you please” nonsense. No, Laura was not like that, Laura had real class. She did not have to try; in Joe’s memorable phrase, she was already it.

She had a curious indifference, too, which pleased and fascinated him. He felt that she would never insist; if she did not agree she would simply let the matter drop and keep her own opinion with that queer unsmiling smile. It was as though Laura had a secret, mocking self. He suspected that she was extremely unconventional within herself, that she probably disagreed utterly with the set ideas of life. Yet she was not unconventional outwardly; she was extremely fastidious in her person and her taste in dress was quietly perfect. Nevertheless he could not help the feeling that she was contemptuous of convention; he had a crazy half-formed intuition that she despised everybody — including herself.

His thoughts were interrupted by Stanley’s entry: Stanley came in breezily, shook hands with Joe and clapped him on the back, too obviously trying to put him at his ease.

“Glad to see you in my house, Gowlan. We don’t stand on ceremony here, so make yourself at home.” He planted his feet apart in the middle of the hearthrug, exposing his back to the heat of the fire, and exclaimed: “What about it though, Laura? What about the rum ration for the troops?”

Laura went over to the walnut cabinet where a shaker stood with glasses and some ice. They each had a dry martini; then Joe and Millington had a second; and Millington, who drank his quickly, had a third.

“I get outside too many of these, Gowlan,” he remarked, smacking his lips. “Don’t get enough exercise, either. I want to get thoroughly fit one of these days, get my old form back, exercises, aha! Harden myself up like I used to be at St. Bede’s.” He flexed his biceps and felt it with a frown.

To cheer himself up Stanley had another drink and they went in to supper.

“It’s very curious,” Stanley lamented, spreading his napkin and addressing himself to his cold chicken, “how soon you can get out of condition. Business is all very well, making money and chaining yourself to an office, but hang it all health is the best wealth. Shakespeare or somebody said that, didn’t they?”

“Emerson, wasn’t it?” suggested Laura, with her eyes on Joe.

Joe did not answer. His library at his lodgings consisted of a tom paper-backed edition of Saucy Stories from the French, and Mrs. Calder’s Bible, planted encouragingly in front of the glass case of waxed fruit, out of which Joe, on Sunday afternoons when feeling especially pious, would read what he termed the dirty bits.

“I wish I could have joined the army,” Stanley meditated complainingly. He had the dull man’s habit of worrying a subject to death. “That’s the place to get you really into shape.”

A short silence. Stanley crumbled his roll in a momentary discontent. Interspersed with his breeziness he was much given to these bouts of grumbling, the peevish regret of a man who sees himself approaching baldness and middle age. But Stanley had always been liable to impulsive dissatisfactions with his present lot in life. Six months ago he had longed to make money and re-establish the position of the firm; yet now that he had done it his sense of unfulfilment still persisted.

Stanley continued to monopolise the conversation. Laura spoke very little and Joe, though his assurance was increasing, made only an occasional and careful observation, agreeing with some remark which Stanley had made. Occasionally, while Stanley discoursed upon bridge or golf, once especially when he was detailing at some length the manner in which he had played a particular hole, Joe’s eyes encountered Laura’s across the table and the deliberate blankness of her gaze gave him a secret chagrin. He wondered what her feelings were for Stanley. She had been married to him for seven years now. She had no children. She was always extremely nice to Stanley, listening to everything he said, or was she listening? Had she no feelings at all under that cold indifference? Was she merely icy? Or what in the name of heaven was it? Stanley, he knew, had been crazy about her at the start, their honeymoon had lasted for six weeks or longer, but now Stanley was not quite so crazy. He was a little less of the dashing Don Juan. Often, in Joe’s phrase, he looked all washed out.

After the sweet, Laura left them, Joe blundering in an access of politeness to the door to open it for her. Then Stanley selected a cigar, lit up, and pushed across the box to Joe magnanimously.

“Help yourself, Gowlan,” he said. “You’ll find these all right.”

Joe took a cigar with a look of humility and gratitude. Secretly he was irked by Millington’s condescending air. Just wait a bit, he thought into himself, and I’ll show him something. But in the meantime he was all deference. He lit his cigar without removing the band.

A longish silence followed while Stanley, with his legs stretched under the table and his stomach at ease, pulled at his cigar and stared at Joe.

“You know, Gowlan,” he announced at length, “I like you.”

Joe smiled modestly and wondered what the hell was coming.

“I’m a liberal man,” Stanley went on expansively — he had drunk half a bottle of Sauterne on top of the cocktails and was inclined to be expansive. “And it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to me what a man is so long as he’s decent. He can be a duke’s son or a dustman’s son, I don’t care, it’s all the same to me so long as he’s straight. Do you get me?”

“Why, yes, I get you, Mr. Stanley.”

“Well, look here, Joe,” Millington continued, “I’ll go a bit further since you understand what I’m after. I’ve been watching you pretty closely this last month or two and I’ve been pretty pleased with what I’ve seen.” He broke off, switching the cigar round his mouth, inspecting Joe. Then he said slowly: “Clegg’s finito, that’s point number one. Point number two, I’ve got an idea, Gowlan, that I’m going to try you out as my new works manager.”

Joe nearly swooned.

“Manager!” he whispered feebly.

Millington smiled.

“I’m offering you Clegg’s job now. It’s up to you to see if you can hold it.”

Joe’s emotion was so great the room swam before him. He had scented something in the wind but nothing, oh, nothing like this. He went white as mutton fat and dropped his cigar on to his plate.

“Why, Mr. Stanley,” he gasped. He didn’t have to act this time, he was natural and convincing. “Why, Mr. Stanley…”

“That all right, Joe. Just take it easy. I’m sorry if I caught you unexpected. But there’s a war on, see. That’s when the unexpected happens. You’ll soon pick up the ropes. I’ve an idea you’ll not let me down.”

A wave of exhilaration swept over Joe. Clegg’s job… him!.. works manager at Millington’s!

“You see, I trust you, Joe,” Millington explained cordially. “And I’m prepared to back my judgment. That’s why I’m offering you the job.”

At that moment the telephone rang in the lounge and before Joe could speak again Laura entered.

“It’s for you, Stanley,” she declared. “Major Jenkins wants you.”

Stanley excused himself and went out to the telephone.

There was a silence. Joe could feel Laura there, he could feel her standing by the doorway, opposite him, near him, looking at him. A terrific elation throbbed in him, he felt strong, intoxicated, gloriously alive. He lifted his eyes and faced her. But she avoided his gaze and said quite curtly:

“There’s coffee in the lounge before you go!”

He did not answer. He could not speak. As they stood there, in this fashion, the sound of Stanley’s voice at the telephone came into the room.

EIGHT

The time of Jenny’s confinement drew near and Jenny’s behaviour was in every way exemplary. Since that Tuesday afternoon when she had told David, Jenny had been “a changed woman.” She had her little querulous moments of course — who in her condition would not? — and what she called her “fancies,” the sudden desire at awkward moments for strange and exotic forms of nourishment — more simply denoted as “something tasty.” A craving for ginger snaps for instance, since she had “gone off” bread, or a pickled onion, or soft herring roes on toast. Ada, her mother, had always had her fancies and Jenny felt herself fully within her rights in having her fancies too.

She was making a fetching outfit for the little baby girl — she was sure it would be a girl, she did want a little girlie so, to dress up nicely, boys were horrid! — and she sat night after night on the opposite side of the fire from David in the most domestic manner stitching and crocheting and fashioning the garments from the directions given in Mab’s Home Notes and the Chickabiddy’s Journal. Dreamily she planned the future of the little one. She was to be an actress, a great actress, or better still a great singer, a prima donna in Grand Opera. Her mother’s talent would unfold in her and she would have triumph upon triumph at Covent Garden with great men and bouquets scattered at her feet, while Jenny from a box would gaze tenderly and understandingly upon the success which might have been hers too, if only she had been given her chance. There were temptations here though, great temptations, and at that Jenny’s brow would crease. The scene became changed suddenly and she saw a nun, an Anglican nun, pale and spiritual with a hidden sorrow in her heart and the stage and the world cast behind her, passing through the cloister of a great convent and entering the dim chapel. Service began, the organ sounded, and the nun’s voice pealed out in all its lovely purity. Tears came to Jenny’s eyes and her sad romantic fancy took even more tragic flights. There would be no little girl after all, no prima donna, no nun. She herself was going to die, she felt it in her heart, it was absurd to imagine she would ever have the strength to have a baby, and she had always had the premonition of dying young. She remembered that Lily Blades, a girl in the Millinery at Slattery’s who was something wonderful at fortunes, had once seen a terrible illness in her tea-cup. She saw herself dying in David’s arms while with riven and anguished countenance he implored her not to leave him. A great bowl of white roses stood by the bedside and the doctor, though a hard man, stood in the background in an agony of distress.

Real tears flowed down Jenny’s cheeks and David, looking up suddenly, exclaimed:

“Good Lord, Jenny! What on earth’s the matter?”

“It’s nothing, David,” she sighed with a pale, angelic smile. “I’m really quite happy. Quite, quite happy.”

After this she decided she must have a cat because it was domestic and human and cheerful about the house. She asked everyone she knew to get her a kitten; everyone, simply everyone must search high and low to get her a kitten, and when Harry, the butcher’s boy, brought her a little tabby she was delighted. Later when Murchison’s van man brought her another kitten and Mrs. Wept on the following day sent round yet another, she was less ecstatic. It was impossible to return the two kittens in the face of her widespread appeal, and they were not very clean about the house. She had in the end to drown them, it hurt her terribly, the little helpless darlings, yet what could a girl do? However, she took a lot of trouble in thinking out a name for the survivor. She called it Pretty.

Then she began to take up her music again. She sat at the piano through the day practising and trying out her voice and she learned two lullabies. She wanted to be more accomplished. At this stage her attitude expressed a secret remorse: she was not good enough for David, she should have been better in every way, more talented, more intellectual. She wanted to be able to talk to David, to have discussions, real discussions upon the subjects which interested him, all about things that mattered, social and economic and political problems. With this in mind she dipped into his books once or twice to elevate her intellectual plane and bring grist to the mills of philosophical discussion. But the books were not very encouraging and in the end she was obliged to give them up.

Still, if she could not be clever she could be good. Ah, yes, she could be good. She purchased a little volume entitled Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home and she read it devotedly. She read it like a child learning a lesson, her lips moving slightly over the words, the book resting in her lap on top of the crochet work. After one particularly sunny half-hour she fastened her swimming eyes on David and exclaimed emotionally:

“I’m just a silly little thing, David. But I’m not bad really. It says here we all make mistakes but we can lift ourselves up again. I’m not bad, am I, David, I’m not really bad?”

He assured her patiently that she was not bad.

She looked at him for a moment, then said with a sudden gush:

“Oh, David, you’re the best man that ever was. Really you are, David, the best in all the world.”

Never before had Jenny seemed to him so much a child. She was a child. It was simply ridiculous that she should be having a baby. He was gentle with her. Often at nights when they lay in bed together and she would start, troubled and frightened in her sleep, and cling to him, he could feel her swollen body and the infant moving within her. Tenderness came over him and he soothed her through these midnight whimperings.

He had asked Jenny if she would like Martha, his own mother, to look after the house and nurse her while she was lying-in and Jenny, with her new submissiveness, had agreed. But when Martha came down to make arrangements that one interview proved the reconciliation to be impossible. Martha met David on his way home. Her colour was high. “I can’t do it,” she declared in a contained voice. “It’s no use at all. The less I have to do with her the better. I cannot stand her and she cannot stand me. So that must just be the end of it.” She walked off before he could reply.

So it was arranged for Ada Sunley to come through from Tynecastle. Ada arrived on the 2nd of December, a wet and windy day, stepping heavily out of the train with a small yellow suit-case made secure with cord. David met her at the station, carried the suit-case to Lamb Lane. Ada’s mood was very offhand, she did not seem particularly pleased to come, at least she did not seem pleased with David. She was reserved and rather cold towards him and inclined to be cross at the household’s limitations; she was not an hour in the house before she sent him out to buy a bedpan. Her preparations, her fussings and bustlings were tremendous. Shorn of the comfort of her own slatternly back room, prised from the indolent ease of her favourite rocker, she assumed an unnatural activity, the terrible waddling activity of the fat woman. She was assiduous towards Jenny, assiduous and pitying. “Come away, my poor lamb,” she seemed to say. “At least you have your mother beside you.”

Ada’s tongue was particularly active. She gave Jenny all the news. Sally had finished up unexpectedly on her winter pantomime tour, the show had suddenly come to grief, it wasn’t any good, and Sally was out of work again and looking for an engagement. Sally never seemed to be doing anything else but looking for an engagement, Ada added ruefully. There was some talk of concerts being organised for the wounded soldiers and Sally might be asked to take part in those, but it would be voluntary work without a penny piece of pay. Ada deplored equally Sally’s inability to earn a decent settled wage and the stupid ambition which drove her to continue with the whole hopeless business of the stage. She wished to heaven that Sally had never chucked the Telephone Exchange.

By a gradual process of approach Ada arrived at the topic of Joe. They were in the kitchen together, Jenny and Ada, on the day following Ada’s arrival and Ada was making Jenny a cup of tea. With a very casual air Ada remarked:

“By the bye, you didn’t know that Joe had been to see us?”

Jenny, who was reclining upon the sofa, stiffened suddenly and her pale languorous face sealed up like an oyster. There was a silence, then she said in a frozen voice:

“I don’t know anything about Joe Gowlan and I don’t care either. I despise him.”

Ada carefully adjusted the cosy on the tea-pot.

“He did come though, Jenny, dropped in as nice as you please, and dropped in once or twice since, he has. You needn’t run him down because you missed him, Jenny. That was your mistake, my lady. He’s a nice fellow, if it’s the last word I say. He’s going to get Phyllis and Clarry into the munitions when it goes up at Wirtley. He’s back again at Millington’s and doing wonderful.”

“I tell you I don’t want to hear about Joe Gowlan,” Jenny exclaimed in a tense voice. “If you want to know, I loathe and detest the very sound of his name.”

But Ada, seating herself at the table and placing her plump hands on the cosy as though to warm them, went on, maddeningly:

“You can’t think how wonderful he’s got on. He’s the head of the department, works clean and everything, dresses a perfect treat. Why, Jenny, the last time he come in he told us he was going up to supper at the Millingtons’ house. Up to their house on Hilltop, Jenny, can you beat that? I’m telling you, my lady, you made a big mistake when you let Joe slip through your fingers. He’s the man I’d have liked to see my son-in-law.”

Jenny’s face was very white, she clenched her fists tight, her voice turned shrill.

“I won’t have you speak that way, mother. I won’t have you mention Joe in the same breath as David. Joe’s an absolute rotter and David’s the best man that ever lived.”

She stared at Ada challengingly. But this time Jenny could not dominate her mother. Her condition made her weak physically; and spiritually she was in a state of curious compromise. Ada had an excellent chance to make Jenny “lie down to her for once” and Ada took that chance.

“Huh!” she declared with a toss of her head. “What a way to talk. You would never think you had played about with him to hear you.”

Jenny’s eyes fell. She shivered slightly and was silent.

At that moment the door opened and David entered. He had just returned from the Harbour Board offices where he had been given temporary clerical work. Ada turned towards him with a little condescending smile. But before she could speak Jenny, upon the sofa, gave a dolorous cry and clapped her hand to her side.

“Oh dear,” she whispered. “I’ve got a pain.”

Ada hesitated, contemplating her daughter between resentment and doubt.

“You can’t,” she said at last. “It’s a week before your time.”

“Oh yes, I can,” Jenny answered in a breathless voice. “I know I can, See, here it is again.”

“Well I never,” Ada declared. “I believe it is.” Sympathy rushed over her. “My poor lamb!” She knelt down and put her hand on Jenny’s stomach. “Yes indeed it is, well, well, did you ever?” And then to David as though the whole situation were completely altered, and he, in some mysterious manner, to blame: “Go on. Fetch the doctor. Don’t stand there looking at her.”

With a quick look at Jenny David went for Dr. Scott, whom he found taking his evening surgery. Scott was an elderly red-faced bony man, very offhand and laconic, with a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting in the middle of a conversation. He was in every way extremely unprofessional. He always wore riding-breeches and a long check jacket with enormous pockets stuffed full of everything: pipe, pills, half a bandage, some blue raisins, two empty thermometer cases, a pocket lance never sterilised, and a gum elastic catheter which whipped across the room whenever he pulled out his musty handkerchief. But in spite of his oddity, untidiness and complete lack of asepsis he was an excellent doctor.

Yet he seemed to attach little urgency to Jenny’s first pain. He hawked, spat and nodded:

“I’ll look round in an hour.” Then he called out through the open door into his waiting-room: “Next, please.”

David was upset because Scott did not come at once. He returned home to find that Jenny and Ada had both gone upstairs. He waited restlessly for Scott’s arrival.

Yet when the doctor appeared at seven o’clock, though Jenny’s pains were much worse, he assured David that he could do nothing in the meantime. David understood that a first confinement was always a protracted business and he asked the doctor if Jenny would have to suffer long. Staring into the kitchen fire a minute before spitting into it Scott replied:

“I don’t think she’ll be that long, mind ye. I’ll look back before twelve!”

It was hard to wait until twelve. Jenny’s pains became rapid and severe. She seemed to have no strength and no spirit to endure the pains. She was by turns peevish, anguished, hysterical, exhausted. The bedroom on which she had expended such care and thought, with the befrilled cot in one corner and the new muslin curtains on the windows, and the pretty lace doyleys set upon the dressing-table became littered and disordered. It was bad enough when Ada upset the kettle, but the climax came with a faint mewing which set Jenny screaming and revealed the fact that “Pretty” was below the bed.

Then Jenny gave up. Though Ada told her she must walk about, she lay across her bed sprawling, holding her stomach, weeping on a huddle of twisted bed-clothes. She forgot all about the Chickabiddy’s Journal and Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home. She got completely out of hand, lying on her back across that disordered bed with her legs apart, her night-dress drawn up, her hair tumbled about her pale thin face, her brow streaming with sweat. From time to time she closed her eyes and screamed. “Oh dear God,” she screamed, “ah, ah, ah, there it is again, oh my God my back, ah, ah, ah, oh mother give me a drink that water there it’s worse quick dear God, mother.” It was not quite so romantic as Jenny had imagined.

Scott came at twelve sharp and went straight upstairs. The door slammed upon Scott, Ada and the screeching Jenny. There was more screeching, the heavy tramp of Scott’s boots, then silence.

Chloroform, thank God, David thought. He sat hunched up in a chair in the kitchen before the nearly out fire. He had suffered every pain with Jenny and now the chloroform silence brought him an almost agonised relief. Human suffering always affected him profoundly and Jenny’s suffering seemed the epitome of all inevitable human pain. He thought of her with tenderness. He forgot all the quarrels and disputes and bickerings that had occurred between them. He forgot her pettiness, her petulance and her vanities. He began to consider the child and once again the child appeared to him as a symbol — a new life rising from amongst the dead. He had a vision of the battlefields where the dead lay in attitudes stranger even than they had lain within the pit. Soon he would be there, in France, on these battlefields. Nugent had written to him from the front where he was serving as a stretcher bearer in an ambulance unit attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers. By joining up at the same headquarters at Tynecastle, he also would get out with the Fusiliers and he hoped his unit would be near to Nugent’s.

A moaning came from the room overhead and then a singing, Jenny’s voice singing. He heard it quite plainly, a verse from one of her old sentimental songs, but the words came curiously ribald and slurred. That was another effect of the chloroform. It made people sing as though they were drunk.

Then again there was silence, a very long silence broken by the sudden coming of another voice, a thin new voice, not Jenny’s or Ada’s or Scott’s voice, but an altogether new voice which cried and piped like a little flute. The sound of that thin voice emerging from the pain and the shouting and the dark succeeding silence struck into David’s heart. Again the symbol: out of the chaos the new dawn. He sat perfectly still, his hands clasped together, his head uplifted, a strange presentiment in his eyes.

Half an hour later Scott clumped down the stairs and entered the kitchen. His face wore that tired and distasteful look which confinements often bring to the faces of overworked and disillusioned doctors. He fumbled in his pocket for a blue raisin. Scott always declared that he carried about these blue raisins to give to children; they were a marvellous cure for worms, he said. But Scott really liked the blue raisins himself and that was why he carried them about.

He found a blue raisin and began to chew it. He said in a non-committal way:

“Well, the little article’s arrived.”

David did not speak. He swallowed; nodded his head.

“A boy,” Scott said with a sort of automatic response, trying to infuse enthusiasm into his words, but failing.

“Is Jenny all right?”

“Oh, your wife’s quite comfortable, perfectly comfortable.” Scott paused and threw a very queer look at David. “The baby’s inclined to be delicate though. He’ll need a bit of attention one way and another.”

He threw another queerly suspicious look at David, but he said no more. He was a coarse old man with a low-class country and colliery practice. But he was not coarse now. He looked merely fatigued with life which, at a moment such as this, seemed to him terrible and incomprehensible. Stretching his arms above his head he yawned. He nodded to David and he spat into the fire that had gone out. Then he went out himself.

David stood in the centre of the empty kitchen for a few moments before going upstairs. He knocked at the bedroom door and entered. He wanted to be beside Jenny and the child. But Jenny was overcome, completely overcome, not yet fully recovered from the anæsthetic and inclined to be hysterical as well. Ada, too, was bustling and cross, fussing him out of the room at once. He had to leave it at that and return downstairs. He made his bed on the parlour sofa. The house was completely silent before he slept.

But next morning he saw the baby. While he sat at his breakfast of cocoa and bread Ada brought the baby down quite proudly as though she had done it all herself. The baby was freshly washed and powdered and dressed up in a lace-trimmed Carricoat, from the Chickabiddy’s set, which draped its tiny body most importantly. But for all its important trimmings the baby was very ugly and puny. It had black hair and blinking eyes and a flat pushed-in watery little nose and was pale and sickly and small. The baby was so ugly and small that David’s heart melted into fresh tenderness. He put down the cup of cocoa and took the baby on his knee. The feel of the baby upon his knee was absurd and wonderful. The baby’s eyes blinked timidly towards his. There was an apology in the timid blinking of the baby’s eyes.

“There, now, there!” Ada took up the baby again and dandled it up and down. “Your father’s clumsy with the pet!”

She had the stupid convention that no man was capable of holding a baby without serious consequences to the baby. Strangely enough the baby had been good as gold on David’s knee. But now it began to cry and was still crying when Ada carried it from the room.

David went out to his clerking thinking about the baby and when he returned at the end of his day’s work he was still thinking about the baby. He had begun to be fond of the small, ugly baby.

It was perfectly clear that the baby was delicate. Jenny admitted it herself and in course of time adopted a neatly descriptive phrase which she used in the presence of visitors. Looking compassionately towards the baby she would remark all in one breath: “Poor little mite, he’s not very robust, the doctor says!”

Powders were prescribed by Dr. Scott for the baby with an ointment to rub in and Jenny, after a few initial protests, fed the baby herself. The doctor insisted on that, too.

Already the memory of her confinement — considered at the time to be excruciating and unforgettable — had become dimmed and Jenny was brightening up, recovering from her disappointment that the baby was not a girl. She wanted to call the baby David. She implored David very prettily to let her call the baby after him.

“He’s yours, David,” she remarked with a naive logic. She faced him with her clear, beautiful eyes and smiled. “It’s only right he should have your name.”

But David wanted the baby to have the name of Robert: his dead father and his living son both Robert. And Jenny, after countering with several other names, notably Hector, Archibald and Victor, which she thought superior in point of sound and importance, very meekly gave in. She wanted to please David in every possible way. So the baby became Robert.

Three weeks passed. Ada went back to Tynecastle. Jenny was able to leave her room and recline languidly upon the sofa downstairs. Yet she found the duty of nursing Robert a tax on her in many ways. As her strength returned and her life approached the normal the resolutions formed by her romantic imagination gradually seemed less attractive. Robert, from being a dear little mite, had now become a dear little nuisance. She was pleased to let David give Robert his medicine and to bath Robert when she felt tired. And yet in a way Jenny was queerly resentful of David’s interest in the child.

“You do love me best, don’t you, David?” she exclaimed one evening. “You don’t love him better than you love me?”

“Of course not, Jenny.” He laughed at her as he knelt with rolled-up shirt-sleeves beside the tin bath where Robert lay in the soapy water.

She did not reply. And, still watching them, the look of discontent deepened upon her face.

Indeed, as the New Year approached Jenny became increasingly discontented and restless. Everything seemed wrong, nothing right. She wanted David to go to the front and yet she did not want him to go. She was proud one minute and afraid the next. To distract her mind she took to reading a great many paper-backed novelettes, Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home having been mislaid. She had forgotten about her music now, never touched the piano and never sang her lullabies. She studied her reflection in the glass for long periods on end to reassure herself that her looks and her figure had not suffered. Once again she felt she had no friends. She was out of things, life was passing over her. She was missing everything. It was very trying and upsetting for Jenny, she might as well be dead. The weather was wet, too, and though she was able to get about now it was useless to go out in the rain. Besides, Robert had to be fed every four hours and that naturally interfered with any decent outing she might make up her mind to take.

But on New Year’s Eve the rain ceased and the sun came out and Jenny felt that she could stand it no longer. She really must have a little jaunt. She must, she must. It was years, hundreds of years since she had had a little jaunt. She would go and see her mother at Tynecastle. Her face brightened at the decision, she rushed upstairs, dressed herself nicely and came down. It was four o’clock. She fed Robert, put him in his cot and scribbled a hurried note for David saying she would be back at eight.

David was quite glad when he returned and found Jenny’s note, pleased to think that Jenny was having an outing and pleased in some singular way to have Robert to himself.

Robert was asleep in his cot in the corner beside the kitchen range. David took off his boots and walked about in his socks in order not to make a noise. He got his tea and enjoyed his tea in Robert’s company. Then he took a book and sat down to read beside the cot. The book was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and David was interested in Nietzsche. But David looked more frequently at Robert than at Nietzsche.

At half-past seven Robert woke up and got ready to be fed. He lay perfectly quietly on his back, looking up at the much-befrilled ceiling of his cot. What a queer view of the world he must have, thought David.

For a good half-hour Robert kept on contentedly taking his queer view of the world, meanwhile staving off his appetite with his thumb. But in the end the thumb was not satisfactory and after a few preliminary whimperings Robert began to cry. David lifted Robert out of his cot and soothed him. That was successful for a little while, then Robert began to cry again.

Anxiously David looked at the clock. Half-past eight: Jenny must have missed her train and the next did not arrive till ten! It struck David how utterly dependent Robert was upon Jenny.

He did the best he could. He saw that Robert was uncomfortable and wet, and though he had not much experience with napkins he took Robert’s napkin off. Robert seemed pleased and by way of gratitude when David lifted him aloft again he clutched hard at David’s hair.

David laughed and Robert laughed too. He seemed hungry, but otherwise much relieved. David put Robert down on the hearthrug and Robert sprawled and kicked before the fire. He seemed altogether a healthier baby these last few weeks, he was fatter, his rash had gone and he did not snuffle so much. But now he was extremely hungry, he cried a good deal again as it came towards ten o’clock.

With a rising indignation at Jenny’s lateness David got down on his hands and knees and began to talk to Robert, to try to soothe and reassure him. At that moment the door swung open and Jenny came in. She was in tremendous spirits. She had been to the pictures with Clarry and had her glass of port. She stood in the doorway with one hand on her hip and a broad smile on her red lips, then all at once she began to laugh; she was convulsed with laughter at the picture made by David and Robert on the hearthrug.

David drew his lips together.

“Don’t laugh like that,” he said sharply.

“I can’t help it,” she giggled. “It’s something… something just come in my head.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said hurriedly. “Just a kind of joke.” There was a short pause. He got to his feet and lifted the child.

“Robert’s hungry,” he said, still angry and indignant. “Can’t you see he wants his feed?”

She came forward rather unsteadily.

“Here, then,” she said, “I’m the one that can see to that, amn’t I?”

She took Robert from him and sat down with a bump on the sofa. Perhaps two glasses of port gave a certain generosity to her movements. David watched her grimly. She ripped open her blouse. Her big full breasts protruded like udders, veined and white and fat, the milk was already dripping from them. As Robert nestled to one breast and sucked the milk spurted from the other. Flushed and happy Jenny smiled, rocking sensuously back and forward on the sofa, careless of the dripping milk.

But David turned away. He felt suddenly revolted. He made a pretence of stirring up the fire, then he faced her again.

“Remember!” he said in a low, serious tone, “I expect you to look after Robert when I’m away!”

“I will, David,” she gushed. “Oh, you know I will.”

He left for Tynecastle the following day and from there he was drafted straight away to camp at Catterick. Three months later, on the 5th of April, he went with the field ambulance unit attached to the fifth battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers to France.

NINE

On that second Sunday of September, 1915, Hetty’s car drew up briskly on the gravel drive of the Law. As he stood at the dining-room window with his hands in his pockets Arthur watched Hetty get out, very smart in her khaki, and advance towards the front door.

Arthur had known that Hetty was coming to the Law today. Impossible not to know of Hetty’s coming. Aunt Carrie had mentioned it, his mother had mentioned it, and at lunch, on Saturday, Barras had looked down the table and remarked with unusual significance:

“Hetty will be here for tea to-morrow. She has asked the day off specially.”

Arthur had not answered. Did they take him for a fool? It was too obvious; that “specially” had a grim humour all its own.

During these last eight months Hetty had been frequently at the Law. Hetty, as one of the first to join the Women’s Emergency Corps, had now secured a commission in the W.V.R., executive headquarters, Tynecastle. She was often useful to Barras in his activities, dashing between Tynecastle and Sleescale in her two-seater runabout, bringing official papers for his signature. But on this Sunday Arthur was fully aware that Hetty’s duties would not be official. Hetty was having a day off to be sweetly unofficial. He saw it plainly and for all his bitterness he could have laughed.

She came into the room. And at the sight of him there, by the window, she smiled brightly and extended her hands with a little twitter of pleasure.

“You’ve been looking out for me,” she said. “How nice of you, Arthur.”

She was extremely bright; but he had anticipated that. He did not smile back. He said flatly:

“Yes, I expected you.”

His tone might perhaps have warned her, but she was not dismayed.

“Where are the others?” she asked lightly.

“They’ve all disappeared,” he said. “They’re all conveniently out of the way so that we can be alone.”

She laughed reprovingly:

“You sound as if you didn’t want us to be alone. But I know you don’t mean to be unkind. I know you better than you do yourself. Come on, now, what shall we do? Shall we go for a walk?”

He coloured slightly and looked away from her. But in a moment he said:

“All right, then, Hetty, let’s go for a walk.”

He got his hat and coat and they set out on the walk they usually took together, though they had not taken it for some months now, the walk through Sluice Dene. The autumn day was calm, the dene was full of russet colour, the bracken crackled under their feet. They walked in silence. When they reached the end of the dene they sat down on the high root of an oak tree which a subsidence had unearthed. It was their usual seat. Below, the town lay subdued in the Sunday quiet and the sea stretched out beyond, shimmering away into the distance and merging with the sky. The headstocks of the Neptune rose up black and high against the clear background of sea and sky. Arthur stared at the headstocks, the gallows headstocks of the Neptune pit.

And presently, having tucked her skirt round her trim legs with seductive modesty, Hetty followed his gaze.

“Arthur,” she exclaimed. “Why do you look at the pit like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “Business is good. Coal selling at fifty shillings a ton.”

“It isn’t that,” she said with an impulse of curiosity. “I do wish you’d tell me, Arthur. You’ve been so queer lately, so unlike yourself. Do tell me, dear, and perhaps I can help you.”

He turned to Hetty, a warmth penetrating through his bitterness. He had an impulse to tell her, unburden himself of the awful weight that pressed upon him and crushed his very soul. He said in a low voice:

“I can’t forget the disaster at the Neptune.”

She was staggered, but she concealed it. She said as she might have humoured a troubled child:

“In what way, Arthur dear?”

“I believe the disaster could have been prevented.”

She stared at his melancholy face, exasperated, feeling that she must get to the bottom of this irritating enigma.

“Something is really worrying you, Arthur dear. If you could only tell me?”

He looked at her. He said slowly:

“I believe the lives of all these men were thrown away, Hetty.” He broke off. What was the use? She would never understand.

Yet she had a vague glimpse of the morbid obsession that burned in his mind. She took his hand. She humoured him. She said gently:

“Even if it were so, Arthur, don’t you think the best way is to forget about it? It’s so long ago now. And only a hundred men. What’s that compared with the thousands and thousands of brave fellows who have been killed in the war? That’s what you’ve got to remember now, Arthur dear. There’s a war on now. A world war, and that’s a very different affair from the tiny disaster in the pit.”

“It is not different,” he said, pressing his hand against his brow. “It’s the same thing exactly. I can’t see it any other way. I can’t separate them in my mind. The men at the front are being killed just like the men in the pit, needlessly, horribly. The disaster and the war mean exactly the same thing to me. They’ve become united in one great mass murder.”

Hetty took the situation in hand. She abandoned the tortuous labyrinths into which he was leading her and took the short cut home. She was, in a way, quite fond of Arthur. She was practical, prided herself on being practical. And she meant to be kind.

“I’m so glad you’ve told me, Arthur,” she said briskly. “You’ve been worrying yourself sick and all about nothing. I’ve seen you were queer lately, but I hadn’t the least idea, I thought, well, I didn’t know what to think.”

He stared at her glumly.

“What did you think?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “I thought maybe you were, well, that you didn’t want to go to the war.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“But I meant, Arthur dear, I meant afraid to go.”

“Perhaps I am afraid,” he said dully. “I may be a coward for all I know.”

“Nonsense!” she said decisively and patted his hand. “You’ve got yourself into a perfect state of nerves. The very bravest of people get like that. Why, Alan told me before he went over the top and got his M.C. he was in a complete blue funk. Now you listen to me, my dear. You’ve been thinking and worrying far too much. You want a little action for a change. It’s high time I was taking you in hand.”

Her look became inquiring. She smiled, very sweet and sure of herself, aware of her sex, her attraction, her poise.

“Now listen to me, you dear silly boy. Do you remember, Arthur, that week-end at Tynecastle when you wanted us to be engaged and I said we were both too young?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I remember that day. I shan’t forget it in a hurry.”

She raised her dark-pupilled eyes towards him intimately, and began to stroke his hand. “Well… it would be different if you were in the army, Arthur dear.”

He stiffened. It had come at last, what he dreaded, come under the odious pretence of tenderness. But she did not notice the sudden aversion that held him rigid and speechless. She was carried away by her own feeling, which was not love but the sense of immolating herself. She came nearer to him and murmured:

“You know I’m fond of you, Arthur. Ever since we were little. Why don’t we get engaged and stop all these stupid misunderstandings. You’re worrying your father, worrying everybody, including poor little me. You’d be so much happier in the army, I’m sure of it. We’d both be happier, we’d have a wonderful time.”

He still said nothing, but as she lifted her face, a little flushed now, with her smooth blonde hair fluffed appealingly about her cheeks, he answered stiffly:

“I’ve no doubt it would be wonderful. Unfortunately I’ve made up my mind not to join the army.”

“Oh no, Arthur,” she cried. “You can’t really mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

Her first reaction was dismay. She said hurriedly:

“But, listen, Arthur. Please do listen. It isn’t going to be a matter of choice. It’s not going to be so easy as you think. They’ll be bringing in conscription soon. I know. I heard it at headquarters. Everybody between eighteen and forty-one who’s not exempt. And I don’t think you’d be exempt. Your father, he’d have to say if you were entitled to a badge.”

“Let my father do what he likes,” he answered in a low and bitter voice, “I can see you’ve been talking about me, all right.”

“Oh, please,” she begged. “For my sake. Please, please.”

“I can’t,” he said in a tone of dead finality.

Her face went a vivid red with shame. The shame was partly for him but chiefly for herself. She snatched her hand away from him. To give herself time she pretended to arrange her hair, her back towards him, then she said in quite a different voice:

“I hope you understand that this is pretty horrible for me, to be virtually engaged to a man who refuses to do the one decent thing that’s asked of him.”

“I’m sorry, Hetty,” he said in a low voice, “but, don’t you see—”

“Be quiet,” she cut in furiously, “I’ve never been so insulted in my life. Never. It’s… it’s impossible. Don’t think I’m so much gone on you as all that. I only did it for your father. He’s a real man, not a feeble attempt like you. It can’t go on, of course. I can’t have anything more to do with you.”

“Very well,” he said, almost inaudibly.

The satisfaction of hurting him was now almost as great as had been her previous satisfaction of surrender. She bit her lip fiercely.

“There’s only one conclusion I can come to, only one conclusion anybody can come to. You’re afraid, that’s what you are.” She paused and threw the word at him. “You’re a coward, a miserable coward.”

He went very pale. She waited for him to speak but he did not and with a gesture of suppressed contempt she got up.

He got up too. They walked back to the Law in complete silence. He opened the front door for her, but once inside the house he went straight up to his room, leaving her in the hall. She stood with her head in the air, her eyes swimming with temper and self-pity, then abruptly she turned and went into the dining-room.

Barras was there. He was alone, studying the beflagged map upon the wall, and he turned at the sight of her, rubbing his hands together, rather effusive in his welcome.

“Well, Hetty,” he exclaimed. “Anything to report?”

All the way home Hetty had borne up well. But that bland kindness in Barras’s face quite broke her down. She burst into tears.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” she sobbed. “I’m so horribly upset.”

Barras came over. He looked down at her and on an impulse slipped an arm round her thin, enticing shoulders.

“Why, my poor little Hetty, what’s the matter?” he inquired protectively.

Overcome, she could not tell him, but she clung to him as to a refuge in a storm. He held her in his arm, soothing her. She had a queer feeling that he was taking care of her, saving her from Arthur, and a sense of his vitality and strength stole upon her. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to this strange new sense of his protection.

TEN

For six months following his appointment as works manager Joe found plenty to occupy him. He arrived early at Platt Lane and left late; he was always on the spot when he was wanted; he created the impression of boundless energy and enthusiasm. At the start he went cautiously. With natural astuteness he saw that Fuller the chief clerk, Irving head of the drawing room and Dobbie the cashier had not taken kindly to his promotion. They were elderly men prepared to resent the authority of a young man of twenty-seven who had risen so rapidly from nothing. Dobbie in particular, a dried-up, angular adding machine, with pince-nez balanced on a beak of a nose and a high peakless collar like a parson’s, was sour as vinegar. But Joe was careful. He knew that his time would come. And in the meantime he continued to ingratiate himself with Millington.

Nothing was too much trouble for Joe. He had a way of relieving Stanley of small unpleasant duties which in course of time produced an extension of his own. In March he suggested the Saturday morning conference between Millington and himself at which all the important business of the week came to be discussed. At the end of the same month he pressed for six additional melting-pots and advanced the idea that women be engaged upon the extra traying work. He put Vic Oliver in charge of the machine-shop, and old Sam Doubleday in the foundry; and both Oliver and Doubleday were in his pocket. In April Mr. Clegg died and Joe sent an enormous wreath to his funeral.

Gradually Joe came to stand very near Millington and to know the intricacies of the business. The profits the works were making staggered Joe. The Mills bombs alone, for which the Government paid Stanley 7s. 6d. the piece, cost on an average about 9d. And they were turning them out by the tens of thousands. God Almighty, thought Joe; and the itching in his hands was terrible. His salary, now seven-fifty per annum, became as nothing. He redoubled his efforts. Stanley and he became intimate; often lunched together in the office on sandwiches and beer; went out occasionally to Stanley’s club — the County, and to the lounge of the Central Hotel. It actually came about that Joe accompanied Millington to the first meeting of the Local Munitions Committee. This all happened adroitly and smoothly. When Stanley was away the responsibility seemed to descend upon Joe’s broad shoulders perfectly naturally and rightly. “See Mr. Gowan about it” became a recognised phrase of Stanley’s when he wanted to escape the tedium of an irritating interview. In this way Joe began to make important contacts, even to do a certain amount of the buying: scrap, lead, and particularly antimony. The price of antimony went as high as £25 per long ton. And over the price of antimony Joe first fell in with Mawson.

Jim Mawson was a large man with a double chin and a small, comprehensive, carefully hooded eye. His beginnings were even more obscure than Joe’s, which caused Joe to regard him favourably from the outset. He described himself broadly as a merchant and contractor. The nucleus of his business was centred in a large depot on Malmo wharf where his original sign, now almost obliterated, read as follows: Jim Mawson, Iron and Metals, Old Rope, Canvas, Hair and Tallow, Rubber Waste, Rabbit Skins, Rags, Bones, &c., Wholesale and General Contractor and Merchant. But Mawson’s activities went further than that; he was in the new Wirtley “hutting” contract; he was active on the Tynecastle Exchange; he was one of the men who were taking advantage of the war; known as a warm man, he was growing richer every day. One especial side-line of Mawson’s particularly tickled Joe, when he came to hear of it, and struck him as typical of Mawson’s cleverness. Already the paper shortage had hit Tynecastle, and Jim Mawson, well aware of the situation, had engaged a squad of girls — young shawlies from the Malmo slums — who went out regularly at five every morning and cleared the paper out of half the garbage bins in the city. They collected paper and cardboard — cardboard was the best — and each of the drabs got two and six a week, which was more, Jim said, than they deserved. As for Jim, the price he got was stupendous. But it was the idea that appealed to Joe: what “a knock out” to make “a packet” out of garbage!

Joe really felt himself blood brother to Jim Mawson; he was not obliged to disguise his motives in Mawson’s company; and he had an idea that Mawson was drawn to him in much the same way. After their preliminary talk on the subject of antimony Mawson invited Joe to his house in Peters Place, a large untidy mansion — a mortgage which Mawson had foreclosed upon and moved into — full of ponderous yellow furniture, slovenly stair-carpet and dirt. There Joe met Mrs. Mawson, who was frizzy-haired and elderly and shrewd, and took pride in the fact that she had once owned a pawnshop. Joe exerted himself with Ma Mawson, he greeted her with jovial deference, bending over her be-ringed shop-soiled hand as though he could have licked it. Supper consisted of a ferocious beef-steak and onions served out of the pan, and several bottles of stout, and after supper Mawson slipped Joe a quiet tip on the Exchange. Speaking out of the corner of his mouth, sitting placid and laconic in a big leather armchair, Mawson said: “Hm. Might buy yourself a few Franks’ Ordinary. They wassent worth a damn afore the war. They make the mouldiest biscuits outa chokey. Y’wouldn’t give them to a dog. But they’re goin’ great in the trenches. They’re coming out with a fifteen per cent divvy. Better get in afore the dividend gets out.”

Buying on margin Joe cleared three hundred pounds on Mawson’s tip and, rejoicing, he visioned the future in Mawson’s co-operation. This was only the beginning, too. The war was going on for a long time yet and it was going to be the making of him. It was the most wonderful war he had ever seen; he hoped it would go on for ever.

Only one flaw marred the splendour of Joe’s prospects — Laura. Whenever Joe thought of Laura, and that was often, his brow registered a puzzled and frustrated frown. He could not, simply could not fathom her. He was convinced that in some subtle way he owed his present position to Laura; indeed he owed her more than his position. Unconsciously he found himself taking hints from Laura, puzzling things out and modelling himself to her standard, wondering how she would like this… or that. He was still ignorant, but he did not do badly. The brilliantine was stopped, that strongly scented hair dressing which had made one eyebrow of Laura’s faintly lift; the brown boots were worn only with the brown suit; the ties became less florid; the watch chain now stretched between the bottom pockets of his waistcoat; the bunch of near-gold seals and the imitation pearl had been flung, one dark evening, into the Tyne. And in matters of more intimate detail this unseen influence of Laura prevailed. For instance, after one look at the bathroom at Hilltop with its bath-salts, crystals, toilet ammonia, loofah and spray, Joe had gone straight to the chemists and resolutely bought himself a tooth-brush.

But the trouble was that Laura remained so wickedly inaccessible. They met frequently, but always in Stanley’s company. He wanted to be alone with her, he would have given largely to charity to be alone with her, but he was afraid to make the first move. He was not completely sure; he was terrified of making a horrible mistake, of losing his wonderful position and his more wonderful prospects. He did not dare.

At nights he sat in his room thinking about her, wanting her, conjuring up her image, wondering what she was doing at that especial moment: taking a bath, doing her hair, pulling on her long silk stockings. Once the situation so fevered him, he jumped up and rushed out to the nearest telephone box. With a bumping heart he rang her number; but it was Stanley’s voice which answered from the other end; and in a cold panic Joe dropped back the receiver and slunk back to his room.

It was maddening. He felt towards Laura as towards the first sexual experience of his life: she represented something strange and new, something he wanted to find out. But he could not find out. She remained, thus far, an enigma. He tried terribly hard to probe into her character and occasionally vague glimmerings of understanding came to him. He suspected, to begin with, that Laura was tired to death of Stanley’s gush, of his bouts of moody grumbling, and of his patriotism, which had lately become intense. She was bored to tears with his public-school spirit, high ideals and the special brand of baby talk which Stanley preserved for their moments of endearment. “How is my little kittikins?” he had once heard Stanley murmur and he could have sworn that Laura stiffened. Yet Laura was loyal to Stanley — that, Joe repeated, was the curse of it.

Joe had a great deal of vanity. He saw himself as a fine handsome dashing fellow. But did Laura see him that way?

Laura was interested in him. She seemed to recognise his possibilities, to take a sort of mocking interest in him. She had no illusions regarding his morality. Her unsmiling smile met all his protestations of good faith and high ideals; yet when, skilfully, he approached her on the opposite tack the result was quite disastrous. On one occasion at tea he had made a slightly vulgar joke. Stanley had laughed boisteroulsy, but Laura had turned blank, completely blank and frigid. Joe had blushed as he had never blushed before, the shame of it had nearly killed him. She was a queer one, Laura. She was not a type. She was herself.

The question of war-work illuminated Laura’s queerness pretty well. All the ladies in Yarrow were crazy about war-work, there was a rash of uniforms and a perfect epidemic of corps, committees and guilds. Hetty, Laura’s sister in Tynecastle, was never out of her khaki. But Laura would have none of it. She went only to the canteen at the new munition sheds at Wirtley because, as she put it ironically to Joe, she liked to see the beasts fed. She served coffee and sandwiches to the munition workers there, but no more than that. Laura kept to herself, and Joe, to his infinite exasperation, could not get near her.

June came and this state of affairs still went on. Then, on the 16th of the month, Stanley gave Joe the second staggering surprise of his life. It was a quarter-past twelve and Millington, who had been out all the forenoon, put his head round the door of Joe’s office and said:

“I want to see you, Gowlan. Come into my office.”

The serious quality in Stanley’s tone startled Joe. With a slightly guilty air he got up and walked into the private office where Stanley flung himself into a chair and began restlessly to shuffle some papers on his desk. Stanley had been very restless lately. He was a curious fellow. As far as could be made out he was extremely ordinary; spiritually he was full of clichés; he had the ordinary cut and dried ideas and he liked to do the ordinary things. He was fond of bridge and golf; he liked a good detective story or yams which dealt with buried treasure; he believed that one Britisher was better than any five foreigners; in peace time he never missed the Motor Show; he was a bore, too; he told the same stories over and over again; he would talk for hours on how, in his last year at St. Bede’s, the first fifteen had beaten Giggleswick. But through all this ran a curious strain of discontent, a buried complex of escape. He would arrive at the office, on a Monday morning, with a listless droop to his mouth, and his manner seemed to say, oh lord, must I still go on with this!

His business was flourishing and, at the beginning, that had sent the mercury soaring to the sky. He wanted to make money; and it had been ripping watching profits flow in at the rate of a round £1,000 a week. But now “money wasn’t everything.” His discontent grew when the Ministry of Munitions came into existence. Then Millington’s became part of the official scheme; they were sub-contracted to the new Hutton filling sheds at Wirtley; the pioneer work was finished; everything was set, ordered and official; there was altogether less for Stanley to do; a sort of lull set in; and though he had grumblingly demanded ease, he did not like it when it came.

He began to feel troubled. Bands in particular began to trouble Stanley. Whenever a band went down the street blaring Tipperary or Good-byee, a faint flush would come to Stanley’s cheek, his eyes would kindle, his back straighten. But when the band was gone and the music stilled and the tramp of marching men an echo merely in his heart, Stanley would sigh and let his figure slump.

The notices worried him too. Yarrow had responded well to the call for men and a great many windows of the Yarrow houses bore the notice: A MAN has gone from this house to fight for King and Country. The MAN was in out-size letters and Millington had always prided himself on being an out-size man.

As for the posters, that stem look on Kitchener’s face and the finger, which pointed at him and would not let him alone, oh, when passing those posters Stanley fumed and fretted and flushed, and clenched his pipe between his teeth, and wondered how long he would be able to endure it.

It was not the pointing finger, however, but the Old St. Bedean’s Dinner which had brought Stanley to a head. The dinner had taken place at Dilley’s Rooms in Tynecastle upon the previous evening. And now Millington looked across his desk at Joe and announced gravely:

“Joe, there’s a great adventure taking place in France, and I’m missing it!”

Joe did not understand, his main feeling was relief that Stanley had not uncovered his antimony deals.

“I think you ought to know,” Stanley went on, his voice rising, a little hysterical, “I’ve made up my mind to join the army.”

An electric silence. The shock was so great that Joe became completely unnerved. He paled and blurted out:

“But you can’t. What about here?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Stanley said, pushing it away from him and speaking rapidly. “You can take it from me, I’m going. Last night convinced me. The dinner last night. My God, how I ever got through it I can’t imagine. Would you believe it — everyone but myself in uniform. All my pals in uniform and me there in civilians. I felt an absolute outsider. They all looked at me, you know — how’s the profiteer? — that sort of thing. Hampson, who was in my form, a regular decent fellow, cut me absolutely dead. He’s a major in the Public Schools Battalion now. And there was Robbins, a little worm who wasn’t even in the second eleven, he’s a captain now with a couple of wound stripes. I tell you I can’t stand it, Gowlan. I’ve got to get into it.”

Joe took a trembling breath, trying to collect his scattered wits. He could not yet believe it, the thing was too good to be true.

“You’re doing work of national importance. They’ll never let you go.”

“They’ll have to let me go,” Stanley barked. “This place runs itself now. The contracts are automatic. Dobbie handles the accounts, and there’s you — you know it all backwards, Joe.”

Joe lowered his eyes quickly.

“Well,” he muttered, “that’s true enough.”

Stanley jumped up and began to march up and down the office.

“I’m not a spiritually-minded chap, I suppose, but I will say I’ve felt uplifted since I decided to answer the call. The spirit of St. George for England lives still, you know. It isn’t dead, you know, it isn’t really. We’re fighting for the right. What decent fellow could sit down under it, these air raids and submarine attacks, and innocent women raped, and shelling hospitals and babies even — O God, even to read it in the papers makes a man’s blood boil.”

“I know how you feel,” Joe said with his eyes on the floor. “It’s the devil. If I didn’t have this old knee of mine…” The knee, it may be remembered, was a complaint which Joe had discovered by visiting an obscure surgery in Commercial Road and planking down seven and six for a certificate, and it made Joe limp horribly whenever the air was military.

But Stanley, marching up and down, was solely occupied with Stanley.

“I’m qualified for a commission, you know. I was three years in the corps at St. Bede’s. It’ll take a few weeks to make my arrangements, then I’ll get into uniform with the Public Schools Battalion.”

Another silence.

“I see,” Joe said slowly; he cleared his throat. “Mrs. Millington won’t like this.”

“No, naturally, she doesn’t want me to go.” Stanley laughed and clapped Joe on the back. “Cheer up, there’s a good fellow. It’s decent of you to be upset, but the bally old war won’t last long once I get into it.” He broke off, glanced at his watch. “Now look here, I’ve got to run down and meet Major Hampson for lunch. If I’m not back by three you might look over to Rutley’s and see them about these last grenades. Old John Rutley made the appointment, but you can tell him all there is to it.”

“All right,” Joe said sadly. “I’ll go.”

So Joe went over to Rutley’s and met old John in a tiresome and involved discussion upon blow-hole castings while Stanley tore down excitedly to have lunch with Hampson. At five o’clock when Stanley, several drinks to the good, lay back in a club chair convulsed by one of Hampson’s stories about a certain mademoiselle in a certain estaminet, Joe was shaking hands in a firm but deferential fashion with Rutley himself, while the old man thought, with grim approval, there’s a young fellow who knows what he’s about.

That night Joe went posting round to Mawson’s with the news. Mawson was silent for a long time, sitting upright in his chair, clasping his stomach with both hands, his high bald forehead creased, his small eyes fixed thoughtfully on Joe.

“Well,” he reflected. “This is goin’ to be helpful.”

In spite of himself Joe grinned.

“You and me’s goin’ to do well out of this, Joe,” Mawson said unemotionally, then raising his voice he bawled: “Mother, fetch me and Joe a bottle of Scotch.”

They finished the bottle between them, but towards midnight when Joe walked home the thrilling intoxication in his blood was not due to whisky. He was drunk with the sense of his opportunity, the chance of power, money, everything. He was in it at last, as Jim had said, absolutely set right up to the ear-holes in it, in with the big men, he only had to watch himself to be big himself, bloody big. O Christ, wasn’t it great! A great place, Tynecastle, wonderful air, wonderful streets, wonderful buildings — there was an idea now, property, he’d have property, a hell of a lot, some day. What a wonderful night it was. Look at the moon shining on that white place over there. What was it? Public lavatory, eh? Never mind — wonderful public lavatory! At the corner of Grainger Street a tart spoke to him.

“You little bitch,” said Joe kindly, “get out!” He strode on, laughing, wide awake, exultant. Better than that, he thought, much better than that. He gloated upon Laura, her fastidiousness, her aloof charms. To hell with tarts. Women like Laura were different, see, different. His idyllic fancy took him far with Laura that night, especially when he reached his lodgings and went to bed.

But next morning he was at Platt Lane upon the tick of nine, fresh as a daisy and more deferentially alert towards Stanley than ever. There was an astonishing number of things to be gone into. Joe was thoroughness itself: nothing escaped him.

“Good lord, Joe,” Stanley exclaimed, yawning, after they had been hard at it for a couple of hours. “You’re a regular tartar. I’d no idea you’d got such an eye for detail.”

He patted Joe on the shoulder gaily. “I appreciate it immensely. But in the meantime I’m going out to have a spot with Hampson. See you later.”

There was a queer look on Joe’s face as he watched Stanley’s figure disappear briskly through the office door.

The days passed, the final arrangements were completed, and at last the afternoon of Stanley’s departure for Aider-shot arrived. He had arranged to drive over to Carnton Junction and join the express direct, instead of taking a slow local from Yarrow. As a special sign of his regard he had asked Joe to come with Laura to the station to see him off.

It was a wet afternoon. Joe arrived too early at Hilltop, he had to wait ten minutes in the lounge before Laura came in. She wore a plain blue costume and a dark soft fur which gave her pale skin that queer luminous quality which always excited him. He jumped up from his chair, but she walked slowly to the window as though she did not notice him. There was a silence. He watched her.

“I’m sorry he’s going,” he said at last.

She turned and considered him with that secret look which always puzzled him. He felt that she was sad, perhaps angry too; she didn’t want Stanley to go; no, she didn’t want him to go.

Here Stanley entered breezily, as if a row of medals were already on his chest. He rubbed his hands cheerfully.

“Filthy day, isn’t it? Well, the wetter the day the better the deed, eh, Joe? Ha! Ha! Now what about the rum ration for the troops, Laura?”

Laura rang the bell and Bessie brought in a tray of sandwiches and tea. Stanley was dreadfully hearty. He chaffed Bessie out of her long face, mixed himself a whisky and soda, and walked up and down the room munching sandwiches and talking.

“Good sandwiches, these, Laura. Don’t suppose I’ll be getting this kind of stomach-fodder in a week or two. You’ll need to send me some parcels, Laura. A fellow was saying last night that they absobloomingutely look forward to getting parcels. Varies the jolly old bully beef and plum and apple.” Stanley laughed. He could now say plum and apple without a blush. He could laugh, really laugh at the Bairnsfather cartoons. He crowed: “Hampson, old dodger that he is—” another laugh, “was telling me of a scheme they have for making Irish stew in a ration tin. Some of the batmen are wonderful. Wonder what my luck will be. Did you see the Bystander this week? Good it was, oh, damned good!” Then he began to be patriotic again. Swinging up and down the room he talked glowingly of what the Major had told him — counter-attacks, gas-masks, pill boxes. Very lights, the musketry handbook, number nines and British pluck.

While Stanley talked Laura sat by the window, her almost sad profile outlined by the dripping laurel bush beyond. She was listening loyally to Stanley’s patriotism. Suddenly Stanley slapped down his tumbler.

“Well, we better get along now. Mustn’t miss the old joy waggon.” He glanced out of the window. “Better put your mac on, old girl, looks like more rain.”

“I don’t think I’ll mind,” Laura answered. She stood up, arresting all Stanley’s fussing by the perfect immobility of her manner. “Have you everything in the car?”

“You bet,” Stanley said, leading the way to the door.

They got into the car, not the office car, but Stanley’s own, an open sports model now two years old, which stood with the hood up in front of the porch. Stanley jabbed at the starter with his thumb, threw in the gear and they drove off.

The road ran uphill through the outskirts of Hillbrow, left the last isolated villa behind and stretched out across open country towards the moor. Stanley drove in a kind of exhilaration, using his cut-out on all the corners.

“Goes like an aeroplane, doesn’t she?” he threw out high-spiritedly. “Almost wish I’d joined the Flying Corps.”

“Look out you don’t skid,” Joe said, “the roads are pretty greasy.”

Stanley laughed again. Joe, alone in the back seat, kept his eyes on Laura’s calm profile in front. Her composure was both baffling and fascinating: Stanley driving like a mug, and she not turning a hair. She didn’t want to come to a sticky end yet, did she? He didn’t, at any rate not yet, by God, no!

They flashed past the old St. Bede’s Church, which stood grey and gauntly weatherbeaten, surrounded by a few flat, lichened tombstones, isolated and open on the edge of the moor.

“Wonderful old building,” Stanley said, jerking his head, “Ever been in, Joe?”

“No.”

“Got some wonderful oak pews. Some time you ought to have a look at them.”

They began to slip downhill, through Cadder village and a few outlying farms. Twenty minutes later they reached Carnton Junction. The express was late and after seeing to his baggage Stanley began to walk slowly up and down the platform with Laura. Joe, pretending to make affable conversation with the porter, watched them jealously from the corner of his eye. Damn it, he thought, oh, damn it all, I believe she’s in love with him after all.

A sharp whistle and the thunder of the approaching train.

“Here she is, sir,” the porter said. “Only four minutes behind her time.”

Stanley came hurrying over.

“Well, Joe, here we are at last. Yes, porter, a first smoker, facing the engine if you can. You’ll write to me, old man. I can leave everything to you. Yes, yes, that’s all right, splendid, splendid. I know you’ll do everything.” He shook hands with Joe — Joe’s grip was manly and prolonged — kissed Laura good-bye, then jumped into his compartment. Stanley was to the core a sentimentalist and now that the moment of departure had come he was deeply affected. He hung out of the window, feeling himself every inch a man going to the front, facing his wife and his friend. Quick tears glistened in his eyes but he smiled them away.

“Take care of Laura, Joe.”

“You bet, Mr. Stanley.”

“Don’t forget to write.”

“No fear!”

There came a pause; the train did not move. The pause lengthened awkwardly.

“It looks like more rain,” Stanley said, filling in the gap. Another hollow pause. The train started forward. Stanley shouted:

“Well, we’re off! Good-bye, Laura. Good-bye, old man.”

The train shuddered and stopped. Stanley frowned, looking up the line.

“Must be taking in water. We’ll be a few minutes yet.”

Immediately the train started again, pulled away smoothly and began to gather speed.

“Well! Good-bye, good-bye.”

This time Stanley was away. Joe and Laura stood on the platform until the last carriage was out of sight, Joe waving heartily, Laura not waving at all. She was paler than usual and there was a suspicious moisture in her eyes. Joe saw this. They turned to the car in silence.

When they came out from the cover of the station and reached the car it was raining again. Laura went towards the back seat but, with an air of solicitude, Joe put out his hand:

“You’ll get all the rain in there, Mrs. Millington. It’s coming on heavy.”

She hesitated, then without speaking she got into the front seat. He nodded, as though she had done a most reasonable and sensible thing, then climbed in and took the wheel.

He drove slowly, partly because of the rain blurring the windscreen, but chiefly because he wanted to prolong the journey. Though his attitude was respectful, openly deferential, he was bursting with the knowledge of his position: Stanley tearing off to God knows where, every minute getting farther and farther away, Laura in the car with him, here, now. Cautiously, he glanced at her. She sat at the extreme end of the seat, staring straight in front of her; he could feel that every fibre of her was resentful, defensively alert. He thought how careful he must be, no gentle pressure of his knee against hers, a different technique, weeks perhaps or months of strategy, he must be slow, cautious as hell. He had the queer feeling that she almost hated him.

Suddenly he said, in a voice of mild regret:

“I don’t think you like me very much, Mrs. Millington.”

Silence; he kept his eyes on the road.

“I haven’t thought about it a great deal,” she answered rather scornfully.

“Oh, I know.” A deprecating laugh. “I didn’t mean anything. I only thought, you’d helped me at the start a bit, at the works you know, and lately you’d… oh, I don’t know…”

“Would you mind driving a little faster,” she said. “I’ve got to be at the canteen by six.”

“Why, certainly, Mrs. Millington.” He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, increasing the car’s speed, causing the rain to shoot round the windscreen. “I was only hoping you’d let me do anything for you I can. Mr. Stanley’s gone. A great chap Stanley.” He sighed. “He’s certainly given me my chance. I’d do anything for him, anything.”

As he spoke the rain began to fall in torrents. They were on the open moor now, and the wind was high. The car, sheltered only by its thin hood, quite unprotected by side screens, caught the full force of the driving rain.

“I say,” Joe cried, “you’re getting drenched.”

Laura turned up the collar of her costume.

“I’m all right.”

“But you’re not. Look, you’re getting soaked, absolutely soaked. We’ll stop a minute. We must take shelter. It’s a perfect cloudburst.”

It actually was a deluge and Laura, without her mackintosh, began to get extremely wet. It was obvious that in a few minutes she must be drenched to her skin. Still, she did not speak. Joe, however, sighting the old church upon their left, suddenly swerved the car towards it and drew up with a jerk.

“Quick,” he urged. “In here. This is awful, simply awful.” He took her arm, impelling her from the car by the very unexpectedness of his action, running with her up the short path into the dripping portico of the old church. The door was open. “In here,” Joe cried. “If you don’t you’ll catch your death of cold. This is awful, awful.” They went in.

It was a small place, warm after the biting wind and rather dark, impregnated with a faint scent of candle grease and incense. The altar was dimly visible and upon it a large brass crucifix and, remaining from the previous Sunday’s service, two globular brass vases holding white flowers. The atmosphere was quiet and still, belonging to another world, different. The drumming of the rain upon the leaded roof intensified the warm silence.

Gazing about him curiously, Joe walked up the aisle, subconsciously noting the heavy carved pews to which Stanley had referred.

“Damn funny old place, but it’s dry anyway.” Then, his voice solicitous, “We won’t have to wait long till it goes off. I’ll get you back in time for the canteen.”

He turned and saw, suddenly, that she was shivering, standing against one of the benches with her hands pressed together.

“Oh dear,” he said in that beautiful tone of self-reproach. “I’ve let you in for it. Your jacket’s soaking. Let me help you off with it.”

“No,” she said, “I’m all right.” She kept her eyes averted, biting her lip fiercely. He sensed vaguely some struggle within her, deep, unknown.

“But you must, Mrs. Millington,” he said with that same regretful, reassuring kindness, and he put his hand on the lapel of her jacket.

“No, no,” she stammered. “I’m all right, I tell you. I don’t like it here. We ought never to have come. The rain…” She broke off, struggled quickly out of the jacket herself. She was breathing quickly, he saw the rise and fall of her breasts under the white silk blouse which, dampened in places, adhered to her skin. Her composure seemed gone, torn from her by the dim secrecy of the place, the drumming rain, the silence. Her eyes fluttered about in frightened glances. He stared at her dumbly, uncomprehendingly. She shivered again. Then all at once he understood. A suffocating heat flushed over him. He took a step forward.

“Laura,” he gasped. “Laura.”

“No, no,” she panted. “I want to go, I want…” As she spoke his arms went round her. They clasped each other wildly, their lips seeking each other’s. She gave a moan. Even before her mouth opened to his he knew that she was mad about him, had been fighting it all these months. A wild intoxication mounted in him. Linked together they moved to the foremost pew, cushioned and wide as any bed. Their hands moved together, her lips were moist with desire. The rain drummed upon the roof and the darkness of the church reddened and enclosed them. When it came, her cry of physical exaltation rose before the altar. The figure on the cross looked down on them.

ELEVEN

When the Derby Scheme came into force the situation between Arthur and his father had become intolerable, it was a state of unconcealed hostility. Arthur’s name was on the National Register, yet although he received his papers under the new Scheme he did not attest. His failure to attest produced no immediate comment. At the Law, by coming in late for all his meals, he avoided Barras as far as he was able, while at the Neptune he spent most of his time underground, arriving early and getting inbye with Hudspeth before Barras reached the pit. But in spite of his precautions it was impossible to escape the inevitable encounters, full of animosity and strain and conflict. When he entered the office, dirty and tired at the end of the day, Barras pretended to ignore him in great flurry of business, conveying to Arthur the unmistakable sense of how little he was needed at the pit. And then, lifting his head from a mass of papers, Barras would appear suddenly to discover Arthur and frown as though to say: “Oh, you’re there, still there?” And when Arthur turned away in silence Barras would follow him with his eyes, fuming, drumming his fingers rapidly upon the desk, wearing that flushed look of injury and high displeasure.

Arthur saw that his father hated having him about the pit. Towards the beginning of January he was forced to complain about the quality of the new timber props in Five Quarter Seam. Barras flared instantly.

“Mind your own business and leave me to mind mine. When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.”

Arthur made no reply. He knew that the props were inferior, some of them quite perished at the base. He was appalled at the quality of the material his father was using. With mounting prices and feverish production money flowed into the Neptune. Yet, despite the lesson of the disaster, nothing was being spent to ensure better and safer conditions in the pit.

That same evening the Tynecastle Argus announced in double headlines that the Military Service Act had become law.

When he read the news Barras could not conceal his satisfaction.

“That’ll shake the shirkers up a bit,” he announced from the head of the table. “It’s high time we had a comb out. There are too many of them tucked away in their funk holes.” He gave a short triumphant laugh. “This’ll give them something to think about.”

It was supper, one of the rare occasions when Arthur was present; and although Barras addressed his remarks to Aunt Carrie the sting in them was for Arthur.

“It’s quite scandalous, Caroline,” he went on loudly, “the number of able-bodied young men who ought to be fighting for their country. They’ve got out of it so far by digging themselves into jobs where they’re not wanted. They’ve refused to take the hint, don’t you see, to join the army. Well, upon my soul, it’s high time they were kicked into it.”

“Yes, Richard,” Aunt Carrie murmured, with a trembling glance towards Arthur, who kept his eyes fixed upon his plate.

“I knew it was coming of course,” Barras continued in the same tone. “And I’ve no doubt I shall have a hand in the working of it. Between ourselves I’ve been approached to sit on the local Tribunal.”

“The Tribunal, Richard?” Aunt Carrie faltered.

“Yes, indeed,” Richard declared, studiously avoiding Arthur’s eye. “And I shan’t stand any nonsense, I assure you. This is serious at last and the sooner everyone realises it the better. I was discussing it with Hetty only the other day. She feels pretty strongly that it’s high time the slackers were wakened up. And weeded out.”

Arthur raised his eyes slowly and looked at his father. Barras was dressed in a new grey suit and he wore a flower in his buttonhole. Lately he had ordered himself a number of new suits, much smarter than his usual style — Arthur suspected him of having changed his tailor in Tynecastle — and he had taken to wearing a buttonhole regularly, a pink carnation usually, picked from the new plants in the conservatory. His appearance was exaggeratedly spruce, his eye bright, he had an intent, oddly excited air.

“You wait and see, Caroline,” he laughed, with immense satisfaction, “what a rush to the colours when the tribunals get busy!”

There was a silence while Aunt Carrie, in an access of distress, fluttered her glance from one to the other. Then Barras looked at his watch; the usual gesture. “Well,” he remarked in a conscious tone, “I must get along now, Caroline. Don’t let anyone trouble to stay up for me. I shall be late I expect. I’m taking Hetty to the King’s. Must carry on in spite of the war. It’s ‘The Maid of the Mountains,’ very good I’m told, the full London company. Hetty is tremendously keen to see it.” He rose, fingering the flower in his buttonhole. Then, ignoring Arthur, but with a brisk nod to Caroline, he strode out of the room.

Arthur remained seated at the table, perfectly still and silent. He was well aware that Hetty and his father went about together a great deal: the new suits, the buttonhole, the spurious veneer of youth were all indicative of that fact. It had begun in an attitude of reparation — Arthur had treated Hetty shamefully, and the obligation of “making it up to Hetty” had devolved upon Barras. Yet Arthur suspected that the relationship had progressed beyond the bounds of mere amendment. He did not know. He sighed heavily at his own thoughts. That sigh made Aunt Carrie stir uneasily.

“You’ve eaten scarcely anything to-night, Arthur,” she murmured. “Why don’t you have some of this trifle?”

“I’m not hungry, Aunt Carrie.”

“But it’s so good, my dear,” she remonstrated in her troubled voice. He shook his head silently, seeing her through his pain. He had a sudden impulse to unburden himself to her, to pour out the whole affliction that lay upon his mind. But he restrained himself, he saw clearly that it would be purposeless. Aunt Carrie was kind, she loved him in her own way, yet her timidity, her awe of his father, rendered her incapable of helping him.

He got up from the table and went out of the dining-room. In the hall he stood with head bent, undecided. At a moment such as this his gentle nature thirsted for sympathy. If only Hetty had been here… a lump came into his throat… he felt lost and helpless. Turning, he went slowly upstairs. And then, as he passed his mother’s room, he stopped suddenly. With a spontaneous gesture he put his hand upon the door knob and entered the room.

“How are you to-night, mother?” he asked.

She looked round sharply, propped up on her pillows, her pale fat face both querulous and questioning.

“I have a headache,” she answered. “And you gave me such a start opening the door so sharp.”

“I’m sorry, mother.” He sat down quietly on the edge of the bed.

“Oh no, Arthur,” she protested. “Not there, my dear, I can’t bear anyone sitting on my bed, not with this headache, it worries me so.”

He stood up again, flushing slightly.

“I’m sorry, mother,” he said once more. He made himself see her point of view, refusing to let himself be hurt. She was his mother. Out of subliminal depths a memory of early tenderness affected him, a vague sensation of her bending over him, her lace gown open and drooping upon him, enclosing and protecting him. Now he yielded to that childish recollection and, craving her loving kindness, he exclaimed in a broken voice:

“Mother, will you let me talk something over with you?”

She considered him querulously.

“I have such a headache.”

“It won’t take long. Oh, I do want your advice.”

“No, no, Arthur,” she protested, closing her eyes as though his eagerness startled her. “Really, I can’t. Some other time perhaps. My head does ache so frightfully.”

He drew back, silenced, his whole expression altered by the rebuff.

“What is it, do you think, Arthur,” she went on with closed eyes, “that keeps on giving me these headaches? I’ve been wondering if it’s the gun-fire in France, the vibrations, you know, travelling through the air. Of course I can’t hear the firing, that I do fully understand, but it has occurred to me that the vibrations might set up something. Naturally that wouldn’t explain my backache and that has been quite bad lately, too. Tell me, Arthur, do you think the gun-fire has any influence?”

“I don’t know, mother,” he answered heavily and paused, collecting himself. “I should hardly think it could affect your back.”

“Mind you, I’m not complaining too much about my back. The liniment Dr. Lewis has given me helps it tremendously. Aconite, belladonna and chloroform. I read the prescription, three deadly poisons. Isn’t it strange that poison should be so beneficial externally? But what was I saying? Oh yes, the vibrations. I was reading in the paper only the other day that they were responsible for the heavy rain we’ve been having lately. That seems to prove my point. It shows that they are, well, about. And Dr. Lewis tells me there is a distinct condition known as gun headache. Of course the root cause of the whole thing is nerve exhaustion. That’s always been my trouble, Arthur dear, sheer nerve exhaustion.”

“Yes, mother,” he agreed in a low voice.

There was another slight pause, then she began to talk again. For half an hour she talked of her own condition, then raising her hand suddenly to her head she begged him to leave the room as he was tiring her. He obeyed in silence. Fifteen minutes later as he came back along the corridor he heard the loud sound of her snoring.

The sense of being isolated in his own trouble grew upon Arthur as the days passed, the sense of being cut off from the other people, almost of being outcast. Instinctively he began to curtail the sphere of his activities. He went out only to his work, and even there he caught strange glances directed towards him — from Armstrong and Hudspeth, from certain of the men. In the streets on his way to and from the Neptune abuse was frequently shouted after him. His differences with his father were common knowledge and were attributed to his refusal to join up. Barras had not hesitated to define his views openly; his firm and patriotic attitude was applauded on all sides; he was considered to be doing a fine thing in refusing to allow his natural feeling to interfere with his sense of what was due in this great national emergency. It paralysed Arthur to realise that the whole town was watching the conflict between his father and himself.

During February things steadily got worse, then in the middle of March the Sleescale Tribunal came into action. The Tribunal was made up of five members, James Ramage, Bates the draper, old Murchison, the Rev. Enoch Low of New Bethel Street Chapel and Richard Barras, who, by a unanimous vote, was elected Chairman. Besides these five there was the Military Representative, Captain Douglas from Tynecastle Barracks, a standing Counsel on behalf of the Army authorities. Rutter, the clerk to the Sleescale Town Council, acted as clerk to the Tribunal.

With a strained and painful interest Arthur watched the early activities of the Tribunal. He was not long in doubt of its severity; case after case was refused exemption. Douglas was a hardened autocrat, he had a way of browbeating applicants, then looking up and declaring summarily: “I want that man”; Ramage and his father were both swollen with unbridled patriotism; the others were of little account. The line taken was extreme. The Tribunal argued that since the applicant had to prove an objection to combatant service it was only from combatant service they could exempt him. Combatant service became the vital issue; and the alternative to service was prison.

As the days passed Arthur’s indignation rose passionately against the arbitrary methods of the Tribunal. With a pale suppressed face he observed his father return from the administration of justice. Barras’s mood was invariably elated, and for Arthur’s benefit he often described to Caroline the choicer incidents of the session. On the last day of March Barras came home in exactly this fashion, late for tea, but in an even greater flow of spirits than usual. Ostentatiously disregarding Arthur he sat down and helped himself largely to hot buttered toast. Then he led off with the case which had most engaged him that afternoon: a young divinity student claiming exemption on religious grounds.

“Do you know what Ramage’s first question was?” he remarked with his mouth full of soft toast. “He asked him if he ever took a bath.” He paused in his mastication to laugh triumphantly. “But Douglas went one better than that. Douglas gave me a side look, then he barked at him: ‘Do you know that a man who refuses military duty is liable to be shot?’ That got him all right. You should have seen him crumple up. He agreed to join up. He’ll be in France in three months.” He laughed again.

Arthur could stand it no longer. He jumped up from the table, pale to the lips.

“You think it’s amusing, don’t you? You like to feel you’ve shoved a gun into his hands against his will. You’re glad you’ve forced him to go out and shoot, kill, murder somebody in France. Kill or be killed. What a lovely motto. You ought to have it made into a banner and hung above your seat at the Tribunal. It suits you. I tell you it suits you. But I’ve got some respect for human life if you haven’t. You won’t frighten me into killing. You won’t, you won’t.” Panting, Arthur broke off. With a hopeless gesture he swung round and made for the door, but as he did so Barras stopped him.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You and I have got to have a talk.”

Arthur turned; he heard Aunt Carrie catch her breath.

There was a pause.

“Very well,” Arthur said in a suppressed voice. He came back and sat down again.

Barras helped himself to more toast and ate steadily with his eyes in front of him. Aunt Carrie had turned a sickly grey. She endured the silence for a few moments in a palpitating agony; then she could bear it no longer. She excused herself in a trembling voice, rose hurriedly and went out of the room.

Barras finished his tea, wiped his mouth with a restless movement, then fixed Arthur with that full, injected eye.

“It’s just this,” he said in a contained tone. “For the last time, are you going to join the army?”

Arthur returned his father’s look; his face was very pale but quite determined. He answered:

“No.”

A pause.

“I’d like to make it quite clear that I don’t need you at the Neptune.”

“Very well.”

“Doesn’t that help you to change your mind?”

“No.”

Renewed pause.

“In that case, Barras said, “you might as well know that your case will come up before the Tribunal on Tuesday of next week.”

A sickening sense of apprehension rushed over Arthur. His eyes fell. In his secret heart he had not expected his father to go as far as this. Though he had no official position at the Neptune he had imagined himself outside the scope of the present Act.

“It’s about time you realised that being my son isn’t going to protect you,” Barras went on heavily. “You’re a young, fit man. You have no excuse. My views are well known. I’m not going to have you hide behind my back any longer.”

“You imagine you can force me into the army that way,” Arthur said in a shaking voice.

“I do. And it’s the best thing that could happen to you.”

“You’re quite mistaken.” Arthur felt himself trembling violently inside. “You think I’m afraid to go before the Tribunal?”

Barras gave his short laugh.

“Exactly!”

“Then you’re wrong. I’ll go. I’ll go.”

The blood rose to Barras’s brow.

“In that case you’ll be dealt with like any ordinary shirker. I’ve talked it over with Captain Douglas. There’ll be no preferential treatment. My mind is made up. You’ll have to go to the army just the same.”

There was a silence.

“What are you trying to do to me?” Arthur asked in a low tone.

“I’m trying to make you do your duty.” Barras rose abruptly. He stood for a moment by the sideboard, erect, with his chest thrown out. “Get into Tynecastle to-morrow and join up. For your own sake. Join up before you’re made to. That’s my last word.” And he walked out of the room.

Arthur remained seated at the table. He still felt himself trembling and he leaned his elbow upon the table, supporting his head upon his hand.

Aunt Carrie, stealing back into the room ten minutes later, found him in this attitude. She came forward and slipped her arm round his bowed shoulders.

“Oh, Arthur,” she whispered, “it’ll never do to go against your father. You must be reasonable. Oh, for your own sake you must.”

He did not answer but continued to stare palely in front of him.

“You see, Arthur dear,” Aunt Carrie went on appealingly, “there’s some things you can’t stand out against. No one understands that better than me. You’ve just got to give in whether you like it or not. I’m so fond of you, Arthur. I can’t see you ruin your whole life. You must do what your father wants, Arthur.”

“I won’t,” he said, as though to himself.

“Oh no, Arthur,” she pleaded, “don’t go on like that. Please, please. I’m afraid something awful will happen. And think of the disgrace, the terrible disgrace. Oh, promise me you’ll do what your father wants.”

“No,” he whispered, “I must go through with it in my own way.” Rising, he gave her the pitiful semblance of a smile and went up to his own room.

Next morning he received his summons to appear before the Tribunal. Barras, who was present when the post came in, observed him with a sidelong scrutiny as he opened the thin buff envelope. But if he expected Arthur to speak he was disappointed. Arthur put the letter in his pocket and walked out of the room. He was aware that his father had calculated upon his submission. And he was equally determined that he would not submit. His nature was not strong but now a form of exaltation gave him strength.

The intervening days went by and the morning of Tuesday arrived. The time of Arthur’s summons was ten o’clock and the place Old Bethel Street School. The Tribunal had been set up in the hall of the old school where there was ample accommodation for the court and a gallery at the back to accommodate the public. At the top of the hall was a raised platform with a table at which the five members sat. Rutter the clerk occupied one end of the table and Captain Douglas, Military Representative, the other. A large Union Jack hung upon the wall behind, and beneath it was a disused blackboard, a few left-over chalks, and a ledge bearing a chipped water-bottle covered by a tumbler.

Arthur reached Old Bethel Street School at exactly five minutes to ten. Roddam, the sergeant on duty, informed him that his case was first on the list, and with a brusque sign led him through the swing door into the court.

As Arthur entered the court an excited hum went up. He lifted his head and saw that the gallery was packed with people; he made out men from the pit, Harry Ogle, Joe Kinch, Jake Wicks the new check-weigher, and a score of others. There were a great many women, too, women from the Terraces and the town, Hannah Brace, Mrs. Reedy, old Susan Calder, Mrs. Wept. The reporters’ bench was full. Two cameramen stood together against a window. Arthur dropped his eyes quickly, painfully aware of the sensation his case was creating. His nervousness, already extreme, became intensified. He sat down in the chair assigned to him in the middle of the hall and began in an agitated manner to fumble with his handkerchief. His sensitive nature shrank at all times from the glare of publicity. And now he was in the centre of the glare. He shivered slightly. It was the intensity of his weakness which had brought him here, which held him fast in the determination to go on. But he had no hardihood. He was acutely aware of his position, of the mass hostility of the crowd, and he suffered abominably. He felt like a common criminal.

Here, another buzz of sound broke out in the gallery and was immediately subdued. The members of the Tribunal filed in from a side door accompanied by Rutter and Captain Douglas, a stocky figure with a reddish, pock-marked face. Roddam, from behind Arthur, said “Stand!” and Arthur stood. Then he raised his head and his eyes, as though magnetised, fell upon his father now in the act of seating himself in the high official chair. Arthur stared at his father as at a judge. He could not withdraw his eyes, he existed in a web of unreality, a hypnotised suspense.

Barras leaned across the table to Captain Douglas. They had a lengthy conference, then Douglas nodded his head with an approving look, squared his shoulders and rapped sharply with his knuckles on the table.

The last whispers of conversation in the gallery and body of the hall died out and a tense silence succeeded. Douglas let his gun-metal eyes travel slowly round, embracing the audience, the press reporters and Arthur in one firm and comprehensive glance, then he faced his colleagues at the table. He spoke loudly so that everyone could hear.

“This is a particularly painful case,” he said, “in so far as it concerns the son of our esteemed chairman who has already done such yeoman service on this Tribunal here. The facts are clear. This young man, Arthur Barras, holds a redundant position at the Neptune pit and is eligible for combatant service. I need not repeat what you already know. But before we open the case I must affirm my personal admiration for Mr. Barras senior, who with wholehearted courage and patriotism has not shirked his duty in the face of his own natural feelings. I think I am right in saying that we all respect and honour him for what he has done.” Here a burst of applause broke out in the court. No effort was made to restrain it and when it had ended Douglas continued: “Speaking in my capacity as representative of the military authorities I should like to advance the statement that we on our side are prepared to come half-way over this unhappy and distressing case. The applicant has only to accept his liability for combatant service and he will receive every consideration in the matter of regimental draft and training.”

He looked across the court at Arthur with his hard inquiring stare. Arthur moistened his dry lips. He saw that an answer was expected of him. Gathering himself, he said:

“I refuse combatant service.”

“But come now, you can’t be serious?”

“I am serious.”

There was an imperceptible pause, a further heightening of the tension. Douglas exchanged a quick glance with Barras as though expressing his inability to do more and James Ramage, thrusting his head forward pugnaciously, demanded:

“Why do you refuse to fight?” The examination had begun.

Arthur turned his eyes upon the thick-necked butcher whose low brow and small deep-set eyes seemed to commingle the attributes of bull and pig. He answered in an almost inaudible voice:

“I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“Speak up,” shouted Ramage. “You couldn’t hear that below a bowl.”

Huskily, Arthur repeated: “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“But why?” Ramage persisted. He had killed a great many live things in his time. He could not understand this puzzling mentality.

“It’s against my conscience.”

A pause. Then Ramage said coarsely:

“Ah, too much conscience is bad for anybody.”

The Rev. Enoch Low hurriedly interposed. He was a tall thin cadaverous man with pinched nostrils and a poor stipend. James Ramage, the main adherent of his church, paid half that stipend and the Rev. Low could always be depended on to support Ramage and cover up his little pleasantries.

“Come now,” he addressed Arthur. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? There’s nothing in the Christian religion which prevents lawful killing in the service of your country.”

“There’s no such thing as lawful killing.”

The Rev. Low cocked his bony head.

“What do you mean?”

Arthur answered rapidly:

“I haven’t got any religion very much, not religion in your sense. But you talk about Christianity, the religion of Christ. Well, I can’t imagine Jesus Christ taking a bayonet in His hands and sticking it into the stomach of a German soldier or an English soldier either for that matter. I can’t imagine Jesus Christ sitting behind an English machine gun or a German machine gun mowing down dozens of perfectly guiltless men.”

The Rev. Low coloured with horror. He looked unutterably shocked.

“That’s blasphemy,” he muttered, turning to Ramage.

But Murchison would not allow the argument to lapse. The snuffy little grocer wanted to show his knowledge of Holy Writ. Bending forward, rather slyly, as though weighing a bare half pound of ham:

“Don’t you know that Jesus Christ said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?”

The Rev. Low looked more uncomfortable still.

“No,” cried Arthur, “He never said that.”

“He did, I tell you,” Murchison bellowed, “it’s in the Book.” He lay back, victorious, in his chair.

Bates the draper now interposed. He had one stock question, a question he never failed to put, and now he felt the time was ripe for it. Caressing his long drooping moustache he asked:

“If a German attacked your mother what would you do?”

Arthur made a hopeless gesture; he did not answer.

With another tug at his moustache Bates repeated:

“If a German attacked your mother what would you do?”

Arthur bit his trembling underlip.

“How can I explain what’s in my mind by answering a question like that! Perhaps they’re asking it in Germany, too. Don’t you see? About our soldiers.”

“Would you rather kill the German or let the German kill your mother?” Bates persisted ponderously.

Arthur gave it up. He did not answer and Bates, with an air of childish triumph, looked round at his colleagues.

There was a silence. Everyone at the table now seemed to wait on Barras. And Barras seemed to wait upon himself. He cleared his throat abruptly. His eye was bright and there was a slight flush on his high cheek-bones. He stared fixedly over the top of Arthur’s head.

“Do you refuse to admit the necessity of this great national emergency, this tremendous world conflict which demands sacrifices from us all?”

As his father spoke Arthur felt himself trembling again and a sense of his own weakness bound him pitifully. He longed for calmness and courage, for the power to express himself with resolution and eloquence. But instead his lips quivered, he could only stammer:

“I can’t admit the necessity for herding men together to slaughter one another nor the necessity for starving women and children all over Europe. Especially when no one really knows what it is all for.”

Barras’s flush deepened:

“This war is being fought to end war.”

“That’s what has always been said,” Arthur exclaimed with a rising inflexion in his voice. “It’ll be said in the same way to make people kill one another when the next war comes along.”

Ramage moved restlessly. He picked up the pen in front of him and began to stab it into the table. He was used to a more forceful method in the Tribunal and this digression exasperated him.

“Stop the shilly-shally,” he threw out an irritable aside, “and let’s get on with the job.”

Barras, who in the past had always affected to despise Ramage, gave no sign of resenting the interruption. His expression remained statuesque. He began to drum with his fingers on the table.

“What is your real reason for refusing to join the army?”

“I’ve told you,” Arthur answered with a quick intake of his breath.

“Good God!” Ramage interjected again. “What is he talking about? What’s he talking round corners for? Let him speak plain or keep his mouth shut.”

“Explain yourself,” the Rev. Low said to Arthur with a sort of patronising pity.

“I can’t say any more than I have said,” Arthur replied in a suppressed voice. “I object to the unjust and unnecessary sacrifice of human life. I’ll be no party to it either in the war or out of it.” As he said these last words, Arthur kept his eyes fixed upon his father’s face.

“Good God,” Ramage groaned again. “What a bloody awful state of mind to be in.”

But here an interruption occurred. In the gallery a woman stood up, small, very matter of fact and composed. It was Mrs. Wept, and in a clear voice she called out: “He’s quite right and all the lot of you are wrong. Thou shalt not kill. Remember that and the war’ll end tomorrow.”

Immediately there was an uproar, a storm of protest. Several voices shouted:

“Shame!”

“Shut up!”

“Put her out!”

Mrs. Wept was surrounded, pushed towards the door and bundled violently from the court.

When order was restored, Captain Douglas rapped loudly on the table.

“Another interruption like that and I’ll order the court to be cleared.”

He turned to his colleagues. A moment arose in every case when it became necessary to concentrate the digressive forces of the committee and bring the situation rapidly to a head. And here matters had clearly gone too far. Douglas had listened to Arthur with ill-concealed contempt. He was a dominating type, severe and illiterate, promoted after years of non-commissioned service, with a hard face, a tough hide and the proved mentality of the barrack square. He addressed Arthur curtly.

“Let’s take this another way if you don’t mind. You say you object to serve. But have you considered the alternative?”

Arthur went very pale, conscious of the dark current of animosity flowing from Douglas to himself.

“That won’t alter my attitude.”

“Quite so! But for all that you don’t want to be locked up for two or three years.”

Dead silence in court. Arthur felt the fascinated attention of the crowd upon him. He thought, I am not really here, in this horrible position. He said at last in a laboured voice:

“I don’t want to be locked up any more than most soldiers want to go to the trenches.” Douglas’s eye hardened. In a louder voice he declared:

“They go because they think it is their duty.”

“I may think it my duty to go to prison.”

A faint sigh went up from the crowd in the gallery. Douglas glanced upwards angrily; then he slewed round towards Barras. He shrugged his shoulders and at the same time flung his papers on the desk with a final gesture as if to say: “I’m sorry, but this is hopeless.”

Barras sat up very stiff and rigid in his chair. He passed his hand carefully across his brow. He appeared to listen to the low discussion which now went on amongst his colleagues round about him. Then he said formally:

“I see you are all of the same opinion as myself.” And he held up his hand for silence.

A minute’s interval occurred, then, in that same dead silence, still staring over Arthur’s head, Barras pronounced the verdict.

“The Tribunal have carefully considered your case,” he declared, using the precise, the habitual formula. “And they find that they cannot grant you any exemption.”

There was an immediate outburst of applause, loud prolonged cheers, which Rutter, the clerk, did not order to be suppressed. From the gallery a woman called out:

“Well done, Mr. Barras. Well done, sir.” Captain Douglas leaned across the table and offered his hand. The other members of the Tribunal did likewise. Barras shook hands with them all, his air impressive yet vaguely remote, his glance directed towards the gallery from where the applause and the woman’s voice had come.

Arthur remained standing in the centre of the court, his features drawn and colourless, his head drooping. He seemed waiting for something to happen. He had an agonised sense of anti-climax. He raised his head as though endeavouring to catch his father’s eye. A shiver went over him. Then he turned and walked out of the court.

That evening it was late when Barras returned. In the hall he encountered Arthur. He paused and in that curious manner, half mortified and half bewildered, he suddenly said:

“You can appeal if you wish. You know you can appeal.”

Arthur looked steadily at his father. He felt himself calm now.

“You’ve driven me into this,” Arthur said. “I shan’t appeal. I shall go through with it.”

There was a pause.

“Very well,” Barras said, almost plaintively. “It’s on your own head.” He turned and went into the dining-room.

As Arthur went upstairs he was dimly conscious of the sound of Aunt Carrie weeping.

That night there was great excitement in the town. Barras’s action had caused a tremendous sensation. Patriotism rose to fever heat and a crowd of people marched down Freehold Street, waving flags and singing Tipperary. They broke the windows of Mrs. Wept’s house, then marched on Hans Messuer’s shop. For some time now old Hans had been suspect as an alien and in this access of patriotic zeal the suspicion was confirmed. His shop was wrecked, plate-glass window smashed, bottles broken, curtains slit, the red and blue striped pole — pride of old Messuer’s heart — snapped into bits. Hans, risen from his bed in a panic, was assaulted, and left senseless on the floor.

Two days later Arthur was arrested and taken to Tynecastle Barracks. It happened with perfect quietness and order. He was in the machine now, everything moved smoothly and independent of his own volition. At the Barracks he refused to accept uniform. He was immediately court-martialled, sentenced to two years’ hard labour and ordered to be removed to Benton Prison.

As he came out of this second court he wondered how it had all happened. And he had a queer memory of his father’s face: flushed, confused, vaguely bewildered.

TWELVE

The Black Maria stopped with a jerk outside Benton Prison and there was the sounds of bolts being withdrawn. Arthur sat up in his dark little stall, still trying dazedly to realise that he was here, inside this prison van.

The van jerked forward again and jerked to a stop. Then the door of the van was unlocked and thrown open, letting in a sudden rush of cool night air. From beyond the door a warder’s voice cried:

“Out.”

Arthur and four others rose from their narrow partitioned stalls and got out. It had been a long cramped journey from Tynecastle to Benton but now they were at the end of that journey and in the courtyard of the prison. The night was heavy and overcast and it was raining heavily, puddles of water lay in the depressions of the asphalt. Arthur looked about him hurriedly: high grey walls with a sharp castellated coping, row upon row of iron-barred clefts, warders in glistening oilskins, silence and a shapeless darkness relieved only by a weak blur of yellow from the light above the archway. The five prisoners stood in the streaming rain, then one of the warders shouted a command and they were marched through another door into a small whitewashed room, the brightness of which was dazzling to the eyes after that outer darkness. An officer sat at a table in this bare bright room with a number of papers and a register in front of him. He was an elderly man with a bald, shiny head.

The warder of the prison van went up to the officer and spoke to him. While they talked Arthur looked at the four prisoners who had accompanied him in the van. The first two were small scrubby men with black ties and long quakerish faces so oddly alike it was obvious that they were brothers. The third man had a weak despondent chin and gold-rimmed pince-nez, he looked like a down-at-heel clerk and, in common with the two brothers, seemed harmless and ill at ease. The fourth man was big and unshaven and dirty, he was the only one who did not appear surprised or distressed to find himself here.

The officer at the table stopped speaking to the warder of the van. He picked up his pen and called out:

“Line up there, will you?” He was the reception clerk of the prison. He began perfunctorily to read out the particulars of each man’s sentence and to enter it in the register with the name and occupation and religion and the amount of money each had come in with.

The dirty man was first and he had no money at all, not one red farthing. He was convicted of assault with violence, had no occupation and was due to serve three years’ hard labour. His name was Hicks. Arthur’s turn came next. Arthur had four pounds six shillings and tenpence halfpenny exactly. When the officer finished counting Arthur’s money he said sarcastically, addressing the neat pile of silver upon the notes:

“This Cuthbert is well-off.”

The two brothers and the down-at-heel clerk followed. They were all three of them conscientious objectors and the officer made a peevish remark under his breath, deploring the necessity for dealing with such swine.

When he had finished the entries he rose and unlocked an inner door. He jerked a silent command with his thumb and they filed into a long room with small cells on either side. The officer said:

“Strip.”

They stripped. The quaker brothers were upset at being obliged to undress before the others. They shed their clothes slowly and timidly and before arriving actually at the buff they stood for a moment in their drawers shivering self-consciously. Hicks must have thought them funny. Stripped stark naked Hicks revealed an enormous unclean hairy body covered in parts with reddish pustules. Standing with his legs planted well apart he grinned and made a ribald gesture towards the quakers.

“Come on, girls,” he said. “We’s all goin’ shrimpin’.”

“Shut up, you,” the officer said.

“Yes, sir,” said Hicks obsequiously. He walked over and stepped on to the scales.

They were all weighed and measured. When that was over Hicks, who clearly knew the ropes, led the way across the concrete floor to the bath. The bath was half full of dirty tepid water with a slight scum on the surface and the bath itself was dirty.

Arthur looked at Hicks who was already splashing his pustular body in the dirty bath. He turned to the officer and asked in a low voice:

“Do I have to go into the bath?”

The officer was gifted with a sense of humour. He said:

“Yes, dear.” Then he added: “No talking.” Arthur got into the bath.

After the dirty bath they were given their prison clothes. Arthur received a yellow flannel vest and pants, a pair of socks, and a very small khaki uniform stamped all over with black broad arrows. The trousers barely reached below his knees. As his eyes rested on the tight short tunic he thought dully, khaki at last.

An inner door opened and the doctor came in. The doctor was a round, reddish-faced man with a number of small gold fillings in his front teeth. He entered briskly with his stethoscope already dangling from his ears and he used it rapidly. He took one swift blank look at each man, stood away from him, perfectly machine-like and impersonal. He ordered Arthur to say ninety-nine, gave him a few swift taps, and asked him if he had ever had venereal disease. Then he passed on. Arthur did not blame the doctor for being quick. He thought, if I were the doctor here I should probably be quick too. Arthur forced himself to be fair. He had sworn to himself to be calm. It was the only way, a quiet acceptance of the inevitable. He had thought it out carefully on the previous night. He saw that otherwise he might easily go mad.

After the medical examination the bald officer went out with the doctor, leaving them in charge of a new warder who had silently come in and who now silently surveyed them. This warder was short and burly with a squat head and a forbidding way of holding himself. He had a short upper lip, very thin lips, and his broad deformed head seemed always to protrude, as in an attitude of watching. His name was Warder Collins.

When he had finished his silent scrutiny Warder Collins in a leisurely fashion gave them each a number and a cell number. Arthur’s number was 115 and his cell number 273. Then Warder Collins unlocked a heavy iron gate. He said:

“Step out now. March lively.”

They stepped out, and under the dispassionate eye of Warder Collins they marched in line into the main body of the prison.

The prison was built like a well, an enormous deep resounding well with cells all round, galleries of cells reaching in tiers to a great height. Every gallery was heavily barred so that the front of the combined galleries presented the appearance of an enormous cage. The air was cold and in spite of the smell of disinfectant had a cold earthy prison smell. The smell made Arthur shudder.

Warder Collins showed Arthur to Cell 273. It was in the third gallery. Arthur went into Cell 273. The cell was six feet by thirteen feet and extremely high. The walls were of brick painted a yellowish brown on the lower half and whitewashed on the upper. High up on one wall was a very small heavily barred window which was scarcely a window at all. Very little light came through even on bright sunny days. An armoured electric globe, operated from outside, gave a dim glow to the cell. The floor of the cell was of cement and on the cement floor stood an enamel jug and a utensil. The stench of hundreds of these utensils made the prison smell.

The bed was a board six feet long by two and a half feet broad with a blanket but no mattress. Above the bed was a ledge with an enamel mug, a plate and spoon and a tin knife. A slate and pencil were hung up above the ledge and propped up invitingly under the slate stood a small Bible.

Arthur turned from his inspection to find Warder Collins standing by the door, as if waiting for Arthur’s opinion of the cell. His lip was a little drawn back and his head thrust forward. When he saw that Arthur had nothing to say he swung round without a word and padded silently away.

As the door clanged, a heavy door with a small barred peep-hole, Arthur sat down on the edge of the board that was his bed. He was in prison. This was a prison cell and he was in the prison cell. He was not Arthur Barras now. He was number 115.

In spite of his resolution a cold dismay broke over him: it was worse, far worse than he had expected. Outside it was easy to talk glibly of prison when you had no idea what prison was like, but inside it was not so easy. Prison was a horrible place. He gazed round the small, dim shut-in cell. No, it was not going to be so easy after all.

At seven o’clock supper was served. This was an extra supper, a special supper for newcomers consisting of a bowl of watery porridge. Though it nauseated him, Arthur forced himself to eat the porridge. He ate standing and when he had finished he sat down again on the edge of his bed. He knew it was fatal to think. Yet he had nothing else to do. He could not see to read the Bible and there was nothing in particular he wished to write upon the slate.

He thought, why am I here? He was here because he refused to kill, because he refused to go out and lunge a bayonet into the body of another man in a desolate stretch of mud in France. It was not because he had committed murder that he was here but because he had refused to commit murder.

It was queer, it was quite amusing, but the more he thought of it the less amusing it became. Soon the sweating of his palms, the physical evidence of his neurosis, began. The sweat poured out of his palms until he thought it would never cease.

All at once, as he sat there, a sudden sound, a sort of howling, made him start. It came from the bottom of the prison well, the lowest gallery of all, from the solitary confinement cells, a brute noise, perfectly inhuman and uncontrolled. Arthur jumped up. His nerves quivered in sympathy, like the strings of a violin, to that horrible howling. He listened tensely. The howling rose to an unbearable crescendo. Then it stopped suddenly. It was shut off with an almost violent abruptness. The succeeding silence hummed with conjectures as to how the howling had been stopped.

Arthur began to pace up and down his cell. He paced quickly and gradually increased his pace. He kept waiting for the howling to begin again but it did not. He was almost running up and down the concrete floor of his cell when suddenly a bell clanged and the lights went out.

He stood stock still in the centre of his cell, then slowly he took off his arrow-stamped khaki in the darkness and lay down on the board bed. He could not sleep. He argued with himself that he could not expect to sleep, that he would in time get used to the hardness of his board. But meanwhile a great kaleidoscope of bitter thought whirled and flashed within his brain, like an enormous wheel whirling and swelling until it filled the cell. Faces and scenes whirled within the whirling wheel. His father, Hetty, Ramage, the Tribunal, the Neptune, the dead men in the Neptune, men stretched upon battlefields with dead protesting eyes, all mingled and whirling, faster, faster, whirling in the bitter wheel. He clung with sweating hands to the edge of his board supporting himself against this chaos, while the night passed.

At half-past five in the morning when it was still dark the prison bell rang. Arthur got up. He washed, dressed, folded his blanket and cleaned up the cell. He had barely finished when the key turned in the lock. The sound of the key turning in the lock of his cell was peculiar, a rasping squeak like two raw metals forced across each other unwillingly. It was a sound which grated into the marrow of the bones. Warder Collins threw some mail bags into the cell. He said:

“Stitch these.” The he slammed the door shut.

Arthur picked up the mail bags, coarse pieces of whitey-brown sacking. He did not know how to stitch them. He laid the bags down again. He sat staring at the shaped canvas bags until seven when the key sounded and his breakfast was handed in. The breakfast consisted of watery porridge and a chunk of brown bread.

After breakfast Warder Collins thrust his squat head round the door. He took a good look at the unsewn mail bags, then he looked at Arthur in a curious fashion. But he made no comment. He merely said, rather softly:

“Step out for exercise.”

Exercise took place in the prison yard. The yard was a square of greasy asphalt with enormous high walls and a raised platform at one end. On the platform a warder stood watching the circle of men as they shuffled round. He watched the men’s lips to see that they did not talk. From time to time he shouted: “No talking”; the old lags were such experts they could talk to one another without moving their lips.

In the middle of the yard was a lavatory, a circular band of metal supported on low pillars. As the men circled the yard they held up their hands to the warder asking permission to go to the lavatory. When they went to the lavatory their heads were seen above the metal band and their legs below. It was considered a great treat to be allowed to sit a long time in the lavatory, a privilege which the warder allowed only to his favourites.

Arthur shuffled round with the others. In the pale light of the early morning the circle of shuffling men was incomprehensible to reason, it became grotesque, like a circus of the insane. The faces of the men were debased, brooding, sullen, hopeless. Their bodies had the prison stench, their arms hung inhumanly.

Two places in front of him he made out Hicks who leered at him in recognition across his shoulder.

“D’y like a fag, sissy?” asked Hicks, making the words come back from the corner of his mouth.

“No talking,” shouted Warder Hall from his platform. “You, No. 514, no talking, there!”

Round and round, circling, circling, like the wheel in Arthur’s brain, circling round the obscene focus of the lavatory. Warder Hall was the ring master, his voice cracked like a whip.

“No talking. No talking.” The crazy merry-go-round of exercise.

At nine they went into the shop, a long bare workroom where the mail bags were stitched. Arthur was given more mail bags. Warder Beeby, the shop inspector, gave Arthur the mail bags, and observing his rawness, as he handed out the canvas he bent over and explained:

“See here, stupid, you rope them like this.” He pushed the big needle through two folds of the thick canvas, indicating, good-naturedly, the manner in which the stitches should be made. And he added, with not unfriendly irony: “If you rope a nice lot of mail bags you get cocoa at night. See, stupid? A nice hot bowl of oko!”

The kindness in Warder Beeby’s voice put a new heart into Arthur. He began to rope the mail bags. About a hundred men were roping mail bags. The man next to Arthur was old and grey-whiskered and he roped skilfully and quickly, making sure of his cocoa. Every time he threw down a mail bag he scratched himself under his armpit and threw a furtive look at Arthur. But he did not talk. If he talked he would lose his cocoa.

At twelve o’clock the bell rang again. They stopped work in the shop and filed back to the cells for dinner. The key sounded in Arthur’s cell. Dinner was skilly and bread and rancid margarine. After dinner Warder Collins slid back the peep-hole. His eye, seen through the peep-hole, seemed sinister and large. He said:

“You don’t come here to do nothing. Get on with these mail bags.”

Arthur got on with the mail bags. His hands were sore from pushing the heavy needle through the canvas and a blister had risen on his thumb. He worked in a reflex manner. He did not know what he was doing or why he was doing it; already his actions had become automatic, on and on, roping the mail bags. Once again the key sounded. Warder Collins came in with the supper, watery porridge and a chunk of bread. When he entered the cell he looked at the mail bags, then he looked at Arthur and his short upper lip drew back from his teeth. There was no doubt about it, for some reason Warder Collins had a down on Arthur. But he was in no hurry, he had a great many months in which to work and from long experience he knew how much more pleasure he got out of it by taking time. He merely said, reflectively:

“Haven’t you done no more nor that? We can’t have no scrim-shankin’ here.”

“I’m not used to it,” Arthur answered. Unconsciously he made his tone propitiating as if he realised the importance of being on the right side of Warder Collins. He raised his eyes, tired with close work, and it seemed as if Warder Collins had become enlarged. His head especially, his broad deformed head was fantastically enlarged and menacing. Arthur had to shade his eyes to look at Warder Collins.

“You better bloody well hurry up and get used to it.” Though he spoke ever so gently, Warder Collins brought his deformed head a little nearer. “Don’t think you’ve dodged out of the army to have a cushy job here. Get on with the bags till you hear the bell.”

Arthur got on with the bags until he heard the bell. He heard the bell at eight o’clock. The clanging of the bell filled the deep well of the prison with a great volume of sound, and Arthur knew that he had all night before him in which to be alone.

He sat on the edge of his board staring at the broad black arrows stamped on his khaki trousers and he started to trace the pattern of the arrows with his forefinger. Why did he have the arrows stamped upon him? He was covered with arrows; his entire body, enwrapped in a daze, in a blind stupor, was pierced by flights and flights of broad black arrows. He had a queer sense of having ceased to exist, a sense of spiritual annihilation. These arrows had killed him.

At nine o’clock the lights went out and after sitting stupidly for a minute in the darkness he fell back, dressed as he was, upon the board as though he had been stunned. He slept.

But he did not sleep long. Soon after midnight he was awakened by the howling which had disturbed him on the night before. But this time the howling went on and on, as if forgotten. It was wild and altogether lost. Arthur sprang up from the bed in the darkness. His sleep had recreated him. He was alive again, horribly and painfully alive, and he could not stand the howling nor the darkness nor the solitude. He lifted up his voice and shouted.

“Stop it, stop it, for God’s sake stop it,” and he began to pound the door of his cell with his closed fists. He shouted and pounded in a frenzy and in a minute he heard others shouting and pounding too. From the dark catacombs of the gallery rose a great sound of shouting and pounding. But no one took any notice and the great sound of shouting and pounding fell away gradually into the darkness and the silence.

Arthur stood for a moment with his cheek pressed against the cold shut grating of the door, his chest heaving, his arms outstretched. Then he tore himself away and began to pace the floor of his cell. There was no space in which to move yet he had to keep moving, it was impossible for him to be still. His hands remained clenched and he seemed to have no power to unclench his body. From time to time he flung himself upon the board but it was no use, the torment of his nerves would not let him alone. Only the pacing relieved him. He had to go on pacing.

He was still pacing when the key sounded. The sound of the key opened another day. He jumped at the sound, then he stood in the centre of his cell facing Warder Collins. He panted:

“I couldn’t sleep for that howling. I couldn’t sleep for it.”

“What a shame,” sneered Warder Collins.

“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. What is that howling?”

“No talking!”

“What is that howling? What is it?”

“No talking I tell you. It’s a bloke gone mad if you want to know, he’s under observation for mental. Shut up. No talking!” And Warder Collins went out.

Arthur pressed his brow into his hands, striving with all his force to control himself. His head drooped, his legs seemed incapable of supporting his body. He felt mortally ill. He could not eat the skilly which Warder Collins had left for him in the usual earthenware bowl. The smell of the skilly sickened him to death. He sat down on the board bed. He could not eat the skilly.

Suddenly the key sounded. Warder Collins came in and looked at Arthur and drew back his lip. He said:

“Why don’t you eat your breakfast?”

Arthur looked at him dully.

“I can’t.”

“Stand up when I address you.”

Arthur stood up.

“Eat your breakfast!”

“I can’t.”

Collins’s lip came back, very thin and blue.

“Not good enough for you, eh? Not fancy enough for Cuthbert? Eat your breakfast, Cuthbert.”

Arthur repeated dully:

“I can’t.”

Warder Collins stroked his chin softly. It was beginning to get good.

“Do you know what’ll happen to you?” he said. “You’ll be fed forcible if you don’t look out. You’ll have a tube forced down your gullet and your soup run into your stomach, see. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said with his eyes on the ground. “If I eat it I know I’ll be sick.”

“Pick up the bowl,” Collins ordered.

Arthur stooped and picked up the bowl. Warder Collins watched him do it. From the start Collins had taken a violent dislike to Arthur as being well-bred, educated and a gentleman. There was the other reason too. Collins explained the other reason slowly:

“I been lookin’ at you, Cuthbert. I don’t like Cuthberts. I sort of picked on you the minnet you came in. I got a son in the trenches, see. That explains a lot, see. It explains why you be goin’ to eat that breakfast. Eat your breakfast, Cuthbert.”

Arthur began to eat the skilly. He swallowed half of the watery mess, then in a laboured voice he said:

“I can’t.” And as he said it his inside revolted. He vomited over Warder Collins’s boots.

Warder Collins went livid. He thought Arthur had tried to vomit back the skilly over his boots. He forgot the technique of his sadism. Without any hesitation he hit Arthur a violent blow in the face.

Arthur turned bone white. He stared at Warder Collins with tormented eyes.

“You can’t do that,” he said, breathing painfully. “I’ll report you for striking me.”

“You will?” Warder Collins drew back his sneering lip as far as it would go. “Report that at the same time then.” He swung his fist hard and knocked Arthur down.

Arthur struck the concrete floor of the cell and lay still. He moaned weakly and at that sound Warder Collins, thinking of his son in the trenches, smiled grimly. He wiped his soiled boots on Arthur’s tunic, then, with his thin lip still drawn back, he walked out of the cell. The key sounded.

THIRTEEN

On the day that Arthur lay senseless in the puddle of skilly on the cement floor of his cell, Joe sat very sensibly before some oysters in the Central Hotel, Tynecastle. Amongst other things, Joe had recently discovered oysters. They were amazing, oysters were, amazing in every way, especially amazing in the number a man could eat. Joe could manage a dozen and a half quite easily when he was in the mood, and he was usually in the mood. And, by God, they were good — with a dash of Tabasco and a squeeze of lemon. The big fat ones were the best.

Even though certain food-stuffs, meat for instance and chicken, were rather more restricted, the people who knew their way about could always get oysters in season at the Central. For that matter Joe could get pretty well anything at the Central. He dropped in so often he was a known man there now, they all ran after him, and the head waiter, old Sue — his name was really Suchard but Joe had the hail-fellow-well-met habit of abbreviation — ran faster than any. “Why don’t you buy yourself some Crocker and Dicksons?” Joe had blandly suggested to old Sue some months before. “Ah, don’t look so frightened, I know you don’t speculate — a family man and all that, eh, Sue? — but this is different, you ought to buy yourself a hundred just for fun.” A week later Sue had been waiting for Joe at the entrance to the Grill Room, fawning with gratitude, almost genuflecting, showing him to the best table in the room. “Ah, that’s all right, Sue, don’t bother to say it. H’much d’you knock out of it? Sixty pounds. Keep you in cigars for a bit, eh, Sue? Ha, ha! That’s right, just you look after me, y’understand, and I’ll look after you.”

Money! — thought Joe, pronging the last oyster and letting it slide skilfully down his gullet — it certainly delivered the goods. While the waiter removed the pearly litter and brought his steak he surveyed the Grill Room genially. The Grill Room of the Central was a perfect health resort these days; even on Sundays it was bung full, the place where all the successful men gathered, the business men who were up to the elbow in the pie. Joe knew most of them, Bingham and Howard, both on the Munitions Council, Snagg the lawyer, Ingram, of Ingram Toogood the brewers, Wainwright the big noise on the Tynecastle Exchange, and Pennington, whose specialty was synthetic jam. Joe had deliberately set out to make contacts; the people with money, anyone who might be useful to him. Personal liking meant nothing, he cultivated only those who could advance him; but he was so hearty in his manner, such an excellent mixer that he passed, everywhere, as the best of good fellows.

Two men at the window caught his eye. He nodded and they waved to him in recognition. Joe smiled with a secret gratification. A clever pair, Bostock and Stokes — yes, they’d both cut their eye teeth all right. Bostock was boots, just in a small way of business before the war began, with a little hand-me-down factory in East Town. But in these last eighteen months Bostock had reached himself a handful of army contracts. It wasn’t the contracts, of course, though they were good enough. It was the boots. There wasn’t an inch of leather in Bostock’s boots. Not one bleeding inch. Bostock had let it out to Joe the other night at the County when Bostock was just the littlest bit screwed. It was some kind of bark Bostock put in his boots and the bark was guaranteed not to last. But what was the odds, Bostock had tearfully confided, the boots lasted out most of the poor devils that wore them. Pity! “O Gord, Sho, washn’t it a pity?” Bostock had blubbered suddenly into his cham in a passion of patriotic grief.

Stokes’s line was tailoring. In the last few months he had bought all the property over his shop and could now refer casually to “his factory.” He was the biggest patriot in the whole Crockerstown district; he was always talking of “the national necessity,” he made all his women work unpaid overtime, cribbed down their dinner hour, drove them often till 8 p.m. on Sundays. Even so, most of his work was “given out” to the surrounding tenements. He paid 7d. per pair of breeches, and 1s. 6d. the complete uniform. Khaki shirts he gave out at 2s. a dozen less 2¾d. a reel for the cotton. Soldiers’ trousers he farmed out to be finished at 1d. a pair, body belts at 8d. a dozen, needles and cotton provided by the women. And the profit? — Joe moistened his lips, hungrily. Take these body belts for instance: Joe knew for a fact that they were being bought from Stokes by somebody “higher up” at 18s. a dozen. And the total cost to Stokes was 2s. 10d.! God, it was marvellous. True enough, some socialist swine had worked it out that Stokes paid on an average 1d. an hour to his tenement out-workers and had raised the question of sweated labour in the Council. Bah! thought Joe. Sweated labour be damned! These women fought to get the work, didn’t they? There were plenty of them too — just take a look at the draggled mob that made up the margarine queues, for instance! And besides, wasn’t there a war on?

Joe’s experience was that there was nothing like a war for helping a man to throw his weight about. At least Joe put it down to the war. At Millington’s he had thrown his weight about to some tune, they were all scared of him now, Morgan, Irvine, even that old stickler Dobbie. Joe smiled. He lay back in his chair and carefully peeled the band off a light Havana cigar. Stokes and Bostock might smoke their cigars with the band on, the blinking profiteers, but he knew one better than that. Joe’s smile became dreamy. But suddenly he sat up, alert and welcoming, at the sight of Jim Mawson approaching. He had been expecting Mawson, who always took his Sunday dinner at home, to drop in about two.

Jim edged along quietly through the crowded room and sat down at Joe’s table. His heavy, hooded eyes lifted towards Joe who nodded silently in return: the greeting of two men who knew their way about. A pause while Mawson surveyed the restaurant with boredom.

“Whisky, Jim?” asked Joe at length.

Jim shook his head and yawned. Another pause. “How’s things upbye?”

“Not so dusty.” Joe pulled a slip from his waistcoat pocket in leisurely fashion. “Output last week was 200 tons shrapnel, 10,000 Mills grenades, 1,000 whizz bangs, you know, stick bombs, and 1,500 eighteen-pounders.”

“Christ,” said Jim, reaching without emotion for a toothpick out of the little glass dish, “you’ll finish the bloody war all by your bloody little self, Joe, if you’re not careful.”

Joe grinned cautiously. “Don’t you fret, Jim. Some of these shells wouldn’t finish a coco-nut. God, I never saw so many blow-hole castings as we got last week. It’s that last pig you delivered, Jim. Shocking. Half of them come out like Gruyère cheeses. Duds. We had to clay up the holes and slash on two coats of paint.”

“Ah,” Jim sighed. “Won’t carry true, eh?”

“Not on your bloody life, Jim, they’ll about go round corners if they clear the muzzle.”

“Pity,” agreed Jim, working overtime with the toothpick. Then, “How much can you take this week?” he asked.

Cocking his head Joe affected to consider: “You better send me 150 tons.”

Mawson nodded.

“And look here, Jim,” went on Joe, “invoice it as 350 this week. I’m sick of piking at an extra hundred.”

Jim’s enigmatic eye inquired, is it safe?

“We don’t want to go too quick,” he said at last, thoughtfully. “There’s Dobbie.”

“Ah, what about him? If the invoice comes in he doesn’t know what the hell we’re using in the foundry. So long as his bloody figures add up right he thinks he’s got the whole issue taped.” Perhaps Joe spoke a little violently: his early tentative efforts to corrupt Dobbie, the angular, pince-nezed, finicking cashier, had proved singularly unsuccessful. Fortunately Dobbie, if interfering, was easy to hoodwink. His whole being was bound up in the scrupulosity of his returns. But he knew nothing of the practical side. For months past Joe had been conducting these amusing little deals with Mawson. To-day, for instance, he had ordered 150 tons of scrap iron, but the invoice which he would initial as correct would be for 350 tons. Dobbie would pay for 350 tons and Mawson and Joe would split even on 200 tons at £7 a ton. A trifling matter of £1,400 profit. Only a side, issue perhaps, in the combined activities of Jim and Joe. But for all that enough to make them mildly grateful for the boon of war.

Business satisfactorily concluded, Mawson lay back in his chair holding his stomach tenderly. A silence.

“Here’s them two — comin’ over,” he declared at length.

Stokes and Bostock had risen and now came over and stood by their table. Both were flushed by food and drink, happy yet important. Stokes offered his cigar case to Joe and Mawson. As Joe put away his half-smoked Havana and bent selectively over the gold-bound crocodile case, Stokes said with quite an unnecessary wink:

“You don’t have to smell them, they cost me half-a-dollar apiece.”

“It’s no bloody joke, these prices,” Bostock said with great solemnity. He had only had four brandies. He swayed slightly but he was superbly grave. “Do you know that one bloody egg costs fivepence?”

“You can afford it,” Joe said.

“I don’t eat eggs myself,” Bostock said. “Bilious things eggs, and besides I’m too busy. I’m buying myself a bloody big house in Kenton, and the wife wants it and the daughter. Ah, wimen, wimen. But what I mean is, how in hell is the war going on if an egg costs fivepence?”

Cutting his cigar, Mawson said:

“You can insure that risk. I’ve done it myself. Fifteen per cent. against the war ending this year. It’s worth it.”

Bostock argued very soberly:

“I’m talking about eggs, Jim.”

Stokes winked at Joe. He said:

“Why does a hen cross the road?”

Bostock looked at Stokes. He said very solemnly:

“B — s.”

“B — s yourself,” Stokes answered, steadying himself lovingly against Bostock’s shoulder.

Instinctively Joe and Mawson exchanged a quick glance of contempt: Stokes and Bostock could not carry their money, they were braggers, they would not last the pace, one of these days they would go up in a puff of smoke. Joe’s self-esteem was immensely flattered by this silent interchange of understanding between Mawson and himself. He began almost to despise Stokes and Bostock, he was above them now, above them both. He caressed his cigar opulently between his lips and let out a cool derisive puff.

“Wha’ y’ doin’ this afternoon, Jim?” Stokes benignantly inquired of Mawson.

Mawson looked inquiringly at Joe.

“The County, I suppose.”

“Tha’ suits us,” said Bostock. “Le’s all go roun’ th’ Club.”

Joe and Mawson rose and they strolled in a bunch to the door of the Grill. A woman commissionaire revolved the door obsequiously to these four triumphant males, magnificently fed and clothed, masters of the universe. They made an impressive group on the steps of the Central Grill, Joe a little behind, adjusting his blue silk scarf.

Mawson turned, intimately:

“Come on, Joe, we may as well. We’ll have a four at pool.”

Joe inspected his neat platinum wrist watch with an air of regret.

“Sorry, Jim, I’ve got business.”

Bostock neighed with laughter, wagging a fat forefinger:

“It’s a skirt, it’s a lady called Brown.”

Joe shook his head.

“Business,” he said suavely.

“’S war work,” Stokes suggested with a ribald leer. “’S war work wish a wack.”

They inspected him with envy.

“Cheerio, then,” Bostock said. “Na poo, toodeloo, good-bye-ee.”

Mawson, Bostock and Stokes went off to the Club. Joe watched them go, then he stepped on to the pavement and crossed briskly to where his car stood parked. He started the engine and set out for Wirtley: he had promised to pick up Laura at the canteen. Driving thoughtfully through the quiet Sunday streets, his head filled with Mawson’s scheme, by money, business, shells, steel, and his belly with rich food and drink, he found himself comfortably aware of the afternoon before him. He smiled: a glossy self-satisfied smile. She was all right, Laura, he owed a bit to her. She’d shown him so many things, from how to tie his new dress tie to where to find the little self-contained flat which he had now occupied for six months. She’d improved him. Well, it pleased her, didn’t it, to do things for him, like getting him put up for the County and, by an equally discreet approach, invited to the Howards’, the Penningtons’, even to Mrs. John Rutley’s house. She was completely gone on him. His smile deepened. He understood Laura perfectly now. He had always flattered himself that he knew women: the frightened ones, the cold ones — these were the commonest — the “pretenders”; but never before had he met a type like Laura. No wonder she hadn’t been able to hold out against him, or rather against herself.

As he slid into the square below Wirtley Munition Works — for obvious reasons they always met here — Laura turned the corner, walking smartly. Her punctuality pleased him. He lifted his hat and, not getting out of the car, held the door open for her. She got in and, without a word, he drove off towards his flat.

For some minutes they did not speak, the silence of complete familiarity. He liked having her beside him; she was a damned well-turned-out woman; these navy costumes always suited her. His feeling for her now was that of a husband still quite fond of his wife. Naturally there was not so much excitement now, the very consciousness of her attachment to him took the edge off his appetite.

“Where did you lunch?” she asked at length.

“The Central.” He answered casually. “What about you?”

“I had a bacon sandwich at the canteen.”

He laughed graciously: he knew her interest did not lie in food.

“Aren’t you fed up with that place yet?” he said. “Standing serving swill to the canaries?”

“No.” She deliberated. “I like to think I still have some decent instincts in me.”

He laughed again, dropped the subject, and they began to talk of ordinary things until they reached the far end of Northern Road where, in a quiet crescent behind the main thoroughfare, Joe’s flat was situated. It was actually the lower half of a subdivided house, with high-ceilinged rooms, fireplaces and mouldings in the Adams style and a discreet sense of space accentuated by open gardens fore and aft. Laura had furnished it for him in decided taste — Laura had a flair for that sort of thing. It was easily run. A woman came in the forenoons to do for him, and as it lay a full five miles from Yarrow it was, from the point of their intimacy, absolutely safe. To those who saw Laura come and go she passed, in the nicest possible way, as Joe’s sister.

Joe opened the door with his latch-key and went in with Laura. He switched on the electric heater in the living-room and, sitting down, began to take off his shoes. Laura poured herself a glass of milk and stood drinking it with her eyes upon his back.

“Have a whisky and soda,” she suggested.

“No, I don’t feel like it.” He picked up the Sunday paper which lay on the table and opened it at the financial column.

She studied him for a moment in silence, finishing her milk. For a few minutes she pottered about the room, straightening things up, as if waiting for him to speak, then she went unobtrusively into the bedroom next door. He heard her moving about, taking off her things and, lowering his paper, he grinned faintly. They went to bed every Sunday afternoon, quietly and decently, as people go to church, but lately since his own desire was less acute it had amused him to “kid Laura on a bit.” Now he waited a full half-hour, pretending to read, before, with an obvious yawn, he went into the bedroom.

She lay upon her back in his bed in a plain white nightdress of beautiful material and cut, her hair charmingly arranged, her clothes neatly folded upon a chair, a faint perfume of her, like an evocation, in the room. He had to admit that she had class. A week ago he had taken a little flutter with a munitionette from the Wirtley Works — gone home with her to her room in fact — oh, a nice enough girl, no doubt, her ginger colouring had appealed to him after Laura’s bushy darkness, but somehow her flashy nightdress, the poor sheets upon the bed had disgusted him. Yes, there was no question but that Laura had educated him: clearly the best way to learn manners was to sleep with a well-bred woman.

He undressed slowly, aware that Laura was watching him, taking a long time to arrange his keys, gold cigarette case and loose silver upon the chest of drawers. He even stood in his underwear, deliberately counting his money before he came over and sat upon the edge of the bed.

“Were you working out how much you’d give me?” she inquired in her controlled voice.

He broke into a roar of laughter, glad in a way to get rid of his simmering amusement in one explosive burst.

“As a matter of fact, Joe,” she went on in that same ironic manner, “I’ve just been thinking that I’m the one who’s done most of the giving. Cigarette case, watch, cuff links, all these little presents, the use of the car too. You even wangled this furniture out of me. Oh, I know you’re always going to give me the cheque and I don’t give a hang whether you do. I hope to God I’m not petty. It’s just that I wonder often whether you realise what I’ve done for you one way and another.”

He felt his biceps in high good humour.

“Well,” he said, “you did it because you wanted to.”

“So that’s the way you look at it?” She paused. “When I think how it began. That morning you came up about the counterfoils. A silly weak moment. And now this.”

“Ah,” he grinned sheepishly, “it’d have been the same in any case. You know you’re mad about me.”

“What a pretty way to put it. You know, Joe, I honestly believe you don’t care for me at all. You’ve simply used me, used me for all you were worth, used me to get on…”

“And haven’t I been some use to you?”

A silence.

“You’re an adept,” she said slowly, “at making me hate myself.”

“Ah, don’t say that now, Laura,” he protested. And, throwing off his singlet, he slipped into bed beside her. She gave a sigh that was almost a moan, as at her own weakness, her own desire, then turned upon her side, yielding herself to him.

They slept for about an hour afterwards, Joe rather restlessly. It always irked him that she clung to him after his own desire was satisfied. In their early days together it had gratified his vanity to demonstrate his own virility to her, to contrast his own fine body with Stanley’s obvious flabbiness. But now he was tired of that: he had no intention of depleting his physical resources for her. When she opened her eyes and looked at him he sustained her gaze across the pillow with a slightly mocking stare.

“Don’t you love me any more, Joe?” she asked.

“You know I do.”

She sighed: her eyes fell.

“Oh dear,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. You can be hateful when you choose. Sometimes you make me feel horrible.” A pause. “I am horrible, I daresay, but I can’t help it.”

He continued to look at her, conscious of that inward chuckle which had affected him all day. He had reached the subtlety of deriving a curious satisfaction from the play of emotion upon her face; he watched especially in their moments of climax, obtaining a sense of his importance as the mitigator of this inner turmoil. Yes, he was “the boss,” as he put it, right enough. He was still fond of her, of course, but it was good for her to feel her dependence on him once in a while. Now, since he saw she was in the mood for tenderness, he affected a playful briskness.

“I think we ought to have our tea,” he said. “I’m parched.”

He had begun to grin, when suddenly the telephone rang. Still grinning, he leaned across her and picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” he said. “Yes, this is Mr. Gowlan. Yes, Morgan…. Yes…. I don’t know, no I haven’t the least idea…. What!” Joe’s voice altered slightly. There was a longish pause. “Is that so…. Good God, you don’t say so… came to the office did it…. Yes, Morgan…. Yes, of course… I’ll be over shortly Yes, I’ll be over myself.”

Joe hung up the receiver, came back slowly to his own side of the bed. A silence followed.

“What was it?” Laura asked.

“Well—” Joe cleared his throat. “You see…”

“Well, what?”

He hesitated, picking at the edging of the sheet.

“A wire’s just come to the office.”

Laura raised herself in the bed. All at once she said:

“Is it Stanley?”

“It’s nothing,” Joe said hurriedly. “He’s absolutely all right. It’s only shell-shock.”

“Shell-shock,” Laura said. Her lips went quite pale.

“That’s all,” he answered. “Not a thing more.”

Laura pressed her hand against her brow.

“O God,” she said in an extinguished voice. “I knew something like this would happen, I knew it. I knew it.”

“But it’s nothing,” he repeated. “Don’t upset yourself. He isn’t scratched. He only got buried by a shell and they’ve sent him home to get over it. He’s not even wounded. I tell you, it’s nothing.” He tried to take her hand but she snatched it away.

“Leave me.” She burst into tears. “Leave me alone…”

“But he isn’t even wounded…”

She turned from him violently, jumped out of bed, and, sobbing, pulled off her nightdress. Naked, her white body bent, she fumbled at the chair, began to huddle on her clothes.

“But, Laura,” he said, protestingly. He had never seen her cry before.

“Be quiet,” she cried, “anything you say can only make it worse. You’ve done something to me. You’ve made me hate myself. And now Stanley… O God…”

Flinging on her jacket, she snatched up her hat and ran, bareheaded and sobbing, from the room.

He remained upon his elbow for a minute, then with a shrug of his bare shoulders he reached out towards the bedside table, yawned, and lit himself a cigarette.

FOURTEEN

It was the spring of 1916, nearly fourteen months since Hilda and Grace had come to nurse in London, and Hilda was happier than she had ever been. The disturbing changes in her father, all the painful echoes of the Neptune disaster, the whole grim business of Arthur’s imprisonment, as related in Aunt Carrie’s woeful letters, affected her very little. When Grace came to her, weeping: “Oh, Hilda, we must do something about Arthur. We can’t stay here and let this happen,” Hilda snapped: “What can we do? Nothing. Except keep out of it.” Whenever Grace attempted to broach the subject Hilda cut her short in this brusque fashion.

Lord Kell’s house was in Belgrave Square, a large mansion which had been stripped — except for the beautiful cut-glass chandeliers, a few pictures and some tapestry panels — and converted into an adequate hospital, for which purpose it was admirably suited. Six of the rooms were enormous, each as big as an average ballroom, with high ceilings and polished oak floors, and these became the wards. The big conservatory at the back was transformed to an operating theatre; and it was here that Hilda had her happiest moments.

Hilda had got on wonderfully at Belgrave Square; in six months she had at her finger ends as much as the average nurse acquires in a three years’ training. Already Miss Gibbs, the matron, had her eye upon Hilda as something quite out of the ordinary. Miss Gibbs had commended Hilda and moved Hilda to the theatre. In the theatre Hilda’s qualities seemed exactly right. Dark, self-contained and precise, Hilda functioned in that theatre with forbidding and unerring accuracy. Hilda’s spare-time studying had been extensive but it was her instinct, her temperament which made her so pluperfect. You looked at Hilda and saw that it was impossible for her to blunder. Mr. Ness looked at Hilda several times during her first week in the theatre, his quick darting glance, when Hilda had anticipated something which he required. Ness was the honorary, a short blunt gingery man who sweated offensively while he worked, but a wonder at abdominal surgery. Later, he suggested quietly to Miss Gibbs that Hilda might shortly be useful as his theatre sister.

When Hilda was told of Ness’s interest in her work she showed no elation — the signal honour, as Miss Gibbs euphoniously named it, left Hilda quite unmoved. She had a little thrill of inward satisfaction, quickly suppressed, but she was not overcome. Success had firmed Hilda’s predetermination and set her ambition higher than before. When she stood by Ness watching him make his incisions, sutures and anastomoses, she did not fix her mind upon the time when as theatre sister she would intimately assist him in this work. No, she watched Ness operate and fixed her mind upon the day when she herself would operate. That was Hilda’s ambition, she had always wanted to be a doctor — a surgeon. Always. She was a little late in beginning, perhaps, but she was still young, only twenty-five. And since her miraculous emancipation from the Law Hilda had sworn to herself that nothing would stop her in achieving her goal. In the meantime Hilda was happy — she had an end in view, she had her work, and she had Grace.

Grace had not achieved Hilda’s crashing success, indeed Grace was not a success at all. Untidy, unpunctual, inaccurate — poor Grace had none of the qualities essential to success. While Hilda rose like a rocket to the giddy heights of the operating theatre, Grace remained scrubbing floors and basins in the basement. Grace didn’t mind. Grace was perfectly contented: so contented that she had twice been before Miss Gibbs’ for giving tea to patients’ wives in the ward kitchen and once for smuggling Gold Flake in to a sergeant disciplined for swearing at the ward sister. Grace, as Miss Gibbs did not hesitate to say, was incompetent, hopelessly incompetent — Grace would never be anything, Miss Gibbs said, unless she mended her ways.

But these ways were Grace; and nobody but Miss Gibbs and Hilda seemed to want Grace to mend them. Grace was a great favourite with the other nurses. At the nurses’ home, a house in Sloane Street, quarter of a mile away, there was always someone in Grace’s untidy little cubby hole begging or giving a cigarette, or a Bystander, or a gramophone record, or one of the make-believe chocolates that the war had produced. Or asking Grace out to tea or to the pictures, or to meet a brother home on leave.

Hilda hated this. No one came to Hilda’s austerely tidy room and Hilda did not want anyone to come: no one except Grace. Yes, Hilda wanted Grace, wanted Grace all to herself and with all her heart. She froze the friendly visiting, nipped Grace’s friendships in the bud.

“Why,” she scornfully remarked one morning towards the end of March, “must you go out with that Montgomerie creature?”

“Old Monty’s not a bad sort, Hilda,” Grace answered apologetically, “we only went to the Kardomah.”

“The woman’s impossible!” said Hilda jealously. “You must come out with me on your next half-holiday. I’ll arrange it.”

Hilda arranged most things for Grace, continued, in her possessive love, to dictate to Grace. And Grace — artless, simple and sweet-natured as ever — submitted cheerfully.

But Grace would not submit to Hilda about the letters. Grace did not argue, she did not contradict. On this point she simply refused to submit to Hilda. And these letters worried Hilda to death. Every week and sometimes twice a week the letters came from France, with the field postmark and the same handwriting, a man’s handwriting. Hilda saw that Grace was in close correspondence with someone at the front and at last Hilda could bear it no longer. One April evening, as she walked through the darkened streets to the home with Grace, Hilda said:

“You had another letter, to-day, another letter from France?”

Staring hard at the pavement in front of her Grace said:

“Yes.”

Because she was upset, Hilda’s manner became colder and more forbidding.

“Who is it writes to you?”

At first Grace did not answer. She flushed quickly in the darkness. But she did answer — there was never evasion or artifice about Grace.

“It’s Dan Teasdale.”

“Dan Teasdale.” Hilda’s voice was both shocked and scornful. “You mean Teasdale, Teasdale the baker’s son?”

Grace said very simply:

“Yes.”

“Good heavens!” Hilda burst out. “You don’t mean to say — well, in all my life I never heard anything so sickeningly idiotic—”

“Why is it idiotic?”

“Why?” Hilda sneered. “Why, indeed? Don’t you think it rather cheap to work up a romance with a baker’s lout?”

Grace was very pale now, and her voice extremely quiet.

“You can say unkind things, Hilda,” she said. “Dan Teasdale has nothing to be ashamed of He writes me the nicest letters I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t think there’s anything cheap about that.”

“You don’t,” Hilda said scathingly. “Well, I do. And I won’t have you behaving like an infatuated school-girl. Too many silly women have thrown themselves away already. Their war heroes! — oh, it’s disgusting, disgusting. You’ve got to stop these letters.”

Grace shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Hilda.”

“You’ve got to, I tell you.”

Grace shook her head again.

“I won’t,” she said. Tears stood in Grace’s eyes but there was a queer finality in her voice which knocked the rage right out of Hilda and really frightened her.

Hilda said no more that evening: but she took up an attitude and tried to coerce Grace by that attitude. She froze Grace, spoke to her cuttingly, generally ignored her with a sort of scornful contempt. This lasted for a fortnight and the letters still came.

Then in a secret panic Hilda suddenly changed. She unbent completely, apologised to Grace, petted and wheedled Grace and took Grace out to the Kardomah, a café greatly favoured by the nurses, for the nicest tea that money and Hilda’s influence with the proprietress could procure. For a whole week Hilda spoiled Grace and Grace received the spoiling as submissively as she had received the scolding. Then Hilda tried once again to persuade Grace to give up writing to Dan. No use, no use at all, Grace would not give up writing to Dan.

Hilda watched the letters, these abominable interminable letters, she went down early every morning to inspect the letter rack, in a kind of hatred. And then, one morning in June she noticed with a start that the postmark of the letter just arrived was Loughborough.

She stopped Grace after breakfast. In a controlled voice she asked:

“Is he wounded?”

“Yes.” Grace kept her eyes averted.

“Seriously?”

“No.”

“In hospital?”

“Yes!”

A secret relief flooded Hilda, deep down within herself she was overwhelmed by relief — Loughborough was a long way off, a very long way off. Since the wound was not serious Dan would soon be back in France. But her lip curled. She sneered:

“He really ought to have been brought here, of course. That’s how it happens in the best penny-farthing romances.”

Grace turned away quickly. Yet before she could go Hilda went on:

“So lovely for him to come out of the anæsthetic and find you by his bedside ready to fling your arms round his neck.”

The quivering in Hilda’s voice showed how much it hurt Hilda to say that — it hurt her horribly. Yet she had to say it. She was inflamed with jealousy.

Grace did not answer Hilda. She went into the ward carrying Dan’s letter in the pocket of her apron. She read it several times while she was on duty.

Dan had been in the big push in at the Somme, had been wounded in the left forearm and wrist. He would be well almost immediately, he wrote, his arm did not hurt him in the slightest, it was just that he could not use his hand.

Dan’s letters became irregular about the end of July, but on the evening of the very last day of the month as Grace walked down Sloane Street, she saw someone in uniform standing with his arm in a sling exactly opposite the home. She was alone and walking rather slowly for she was tired, saddened by the thought of Arthur, of all the changes at home in Sleescale. For once everything seemed wrong. Miss Gibbs had given her another lecture for untidiness, and she was upset at not hearing from Dan — it was amazing how much she had come to depend on these letters of Dan’s. At the sight of that figure in uniform she stopped, not very sure. And then all at once she was sure. Her heart leaped within her breast. It was Dan. He crossed the street and saluted her.

“Dan! I thought… yes, I thought it was you.” The pleasure she felt at seeing him shone in her face; she did not feel tired now but, forgetting all about being tired and sad, she held out her hand.

Not speaking, he shook hands shyly. His shyness of her amounted almost to a disease, he seemed afraid almost to look at her. Grace had never seen anyone afraid of her before, it was so ridiculous she wanted to laugh and cry at once. Quickly, before she should do anything so stupid as that, she said:

“Have you been waiting, Dan? Didn’t you go into the home?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t want to be worrying you. I thought I might see you for a minute as you went in.”

“A minute!” She smiled again; suddenly she looked at his wounded arm.

“How is your arm?”

“They’ve had some trouble with the wrist… the tendons,” he said. “I’m sent up here for orthopædic treatment at the Langham clinic. Electricity and one of these new exercise machines. Six weeks’ treatment before I can go back.”

“Six weeks!”

Her gasp of pleasure almost reassured him. He said awkwardly:

“I was wondering if you, that’s to say if you wouldn’t mind… if you hadn’t anything better to do…”

“No,” she said with a little rush, “I wouldn’t mind. And I’ve got nothing better to do.” She paused, gazing at him with bright eyes. Her hair stuck out comically from her nurse’s cap; there was a distinct smut on her cheek. “I’ve got two hours off to-morrow. Shall we have tea?”

He laughed, his eyes still on the ground:

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“I know, I know, it’s awful, I’ve invited myself,” she ran on, “but oh, Dan, it’s too marvellous for words. There’s hundreds of things we can do in six weeks.” She broke off. “There isn’t any other girl you’ve been writing to you want to take around?”

He lifted his eyes in such concern that now it was her turn to laugh. She laughed happily. It was splendid seeing Dan again. Dan had always been the most marvellous companion, from those very early days when he had given her a drive on the van up the Avenue and made her pick a most beautiful cream bun out of the basket. The same Dan who had made whistles for her out of willow shoots, and shown her the golden wren’s nest in Sluice Dene and brought her harvest plaits from Avory’s farm. And for all his second-lieutenant’s uniform and his arm in a sling Dan wasn’t a bit changed from these good old days. He ought, she knew, to have come back from the front very curt and commanding, completely reorganised inside and out. But Dan, like herself, would never be reorganised: he was the same shy, humble Dan. Grace did not dream that she was in love with Dan but she did know that she had not been so happy since she left the Law. She held out her hand.

“To-morrow at three, Dan. Wait for me outside. And don’t come too near or you’ll get Mary Jane the sack.” She ran up the steps before he could reply.

They met next day at three and they went to the new Harris’s in Oxford Street for tea. They talked and talked. Dan, when he got over his shyness, was the most interesting talker — that, at least, was what Grace thought — and he on his side wanted her to talk, was eager to listen to what she said, which struck Grace as unusual and pleasant. Encouraged, she poured out to him all her worries about Arthur and her father. He heard her in silence, sympathetically.

“Things haven’t been right at home since the disaster, Dan,” she concluded, her eyes earnest and sad. “I can’t think of it as the same place. Somehow I can’t think that I’ll ever go back.”

He nodded his head.

“I understand, Grace.”

She gazed at him earnestly: “You won’t go back to the Neptune, will you, Dan? Oh, I’d hate to think of you going back to that awful pit.”

“Well,” he answered, “I think I’ve had enough. You see, I’ve had time to think it over. I never liked it, I daresay, but — oh, what’s the use of saying it again? It’s been said so many times before, you know, the disaster and everything.” He paused. “If I get through the war I want to go farming.”

“Yes, Dan,” she said.

They went on talking. They talked so long that the waitress came twice to demand haughtily if they required anything further.

Afterwards they took a walk through the Park; they went round the Serpentine, then back by Hyde Park Corner. Five o’clock came before they realised it. Outside the Nurses’ Home Grace paused. She said:

“If I haven’t been a complete nuisance, Dan, perhaps we can go out again?”

Grace and Dan began to go out regularly. They went to the oddest places and they enjoyed themselves — oh, how they enjoyed themselves! They walked on the Chelsea Embankment, took the steamboat to Putney and the bus to Richmond, they found out queer little tea shops, they had macaroni and minestrone in Soho — it was all banal and beautiful, it had happened a million times before and yet it had never happened to Grace and Dan.

But one evening as they came back from a walk in Kensington Gardens they ran directly into Hilda, outside the Home. Hilda knew all about Grace’s expeditions with Dan and Hilda though burning to speak had kept herself cuttingly aloof. But now Hilda stopped. She smiled freezingly at Dan and said:

“Good evening.”

It was like a blow in the face; Dan answered:

“Good evening, Miss Barras.”

There was a pause, then Hilda said:

“You seem to be making the most of the war, Mr. Teasdale.”

Grace exclaimed hotly:

“Dan got himself wounded if that’s what you mean.”

“No,” Hilda said in that same insufferable patronising tone. “I didn’t quite mean that.”

Dan coloured. He looked straight into Hilda’s eyes. An uncomfortable silence fell, then Hilda spoke again.

“It’ll be such a relief when it’s over. Then we can all get back to where we belong.”

Her meaning was unmistakable. Dan looked very unhappy. He said good night quickly, shook hands without looking at Grace and walked off down the street.

Inside the Home, Hilda turned contemptuously to Grace:

“Do you remember when we played happy families, Grace? Master Bun the Baker’s son?” And with her lips fixed in that cold and bitter smile she began leisurely to climb the stairs.

But Grace ran after her and caught her fiercely by the arm:

“If you dare to speak like that to me again,” she panted, “or to Dan either, I’ll never have anything more to do with you as long as I live.”

The eyes of Grace and Hilda met in a long and burning look. It was Hilda’s eyes that fell.

The next outing which Dan and Grace had arranged was on the Thursday of Dan’s last week and it was to be their last. Dan’s wrist was well now, he had left off the sling and he was due to rejoin his battalion on the following Monday.

They went to Kew Gardens. Dan had been eager to see the Gardens; he had a passion for gardens, and they had saved up Kew for their final jaunt. But it did not look like being brilliantly successful. To begin with the day was dull and threatening and Hilda had upset them both. Dan was silent and Grace was sad. Grace was very sad. There was not the slightest doubt about it now, Grace knew that she loved Dan, and the thought that Dan was going back to France without knowing that she loved him nearly broke Grace’s heart. Dan couldn’t care for her, naturally. He looked upon her as a friend. Who on earth could love her? She was silly and careless and untidy and not even pretty. An intolerable ache rose up in Grace’s throat as she walked silently beside the silent Dan.

They went to look at the water-fowl on the little lake just above the bluebell wood. They were beautiful ducks and Dan said they were beautiful ducks. He added gloomily:

“If ever I get the chance I’d like to raise ducks like these.”

Grace said:

“Yes, Dan,” which was as much as Grace felt like saying.

They stood together, two rather forlorn figures by the water’s edge, watching the gaily plumaged birds. Suddenly the rain came on, a heavy shower.

“Oh dear,” Grace said.

“We’ll have to run,” said Dan. “It’s going to pour.” They dashed for shelter; they dashed for shelter to the orchid house. At an ordinary time there would have been a world of fun in that dash for shelter but there was no fun in it now. No fun at all.

Grace had her blue uniform coat but Dan had none and his tunic got wet through. When they reached the orchid house and had got their breath again Grace turned to Dan. Her brow creased in concern.

“Your tunic’s soaked, Dan.” She looked round: they were quite alone. “You can’t possibly keep it on. Let me dry it for you on the pipes.”

Dan opened his mouth to refuse, then closed it again. Without a word he slipped off his tunic and handed it to Grace. He had always done what Grace told him and he did so now. Then, as Grace took the tunic an old gardener came up the other side of the orchid house. He had seen them run for shelter. He nodded to Dan and smiled at Grace.

“Come round here and dry it, nurse. There’s better pipes over here.”

Grace thanked the gardener and followed him round to a little recess where there was a coil of warm pipes. She shook Dan’s tunic and laid it inside out on the warm pipes. Then she looked at herself in the little square of mirror which the gardener kept above the pipes. The wind had blown about her hair, she was untidier than ever; heavens, she thought wretchedly, I’m a fright; no wonder Dan hates the sight of me.

She waited until Dan’s tunic dried, half listening, out of politeness, to the gardener, who was old and garrulous and who kept coming and going and talking — chiefly about the difficulty in getting fuel for heating. When the tunic was dry she took it back to Dan. He was staring out at the rain. He turned dismally:

“It’s going to be a wet week-end.”

She said:

“Yes, it looks like it.”

Then, stretching out her arms, she held out the tunic, meaning to help him into it. He looked at her quite wildly as with open arms, all disconsolate and windblown, she stood before him. He looked and looked and all at once something like a groan broke from him.

“I love you, Grace, I love you,” he cried and they were in each other’s arms.

The tunic lay on the ground. Her heart beat madly, madly with happiness.

“Oh, Dan,” she whispered.

“I must tell you, Grace, I must, I must, I can’t help it…” he kept on repeating his excuses to her.

Her heart still beat madly, madly with happiness; her eyes were swimming with tears; but strength and calmness were in her now.

“Do you really love me, Dan?”

“Oh, Grace…”

She looked up at him.

“When do you go back, Dan?”

A pause.

“Monday.”

“What day is to-day, Dan?”

“Why, it’s Thursday, Grace.”

She considered him tranquilly.

“Let’s get married on Saturday, Dan,” she said.

Dan went perfectly white. He gazed down at her and his whole soul was in his eyes.

“Grace,” he whispered.

“Dan!”

The old gardener, playing at Peeping Tom behind the orchids, forgot all about the coal shortage and nearly had a heart attack.

They were married on Saturday. Grace fought Miss Gibbs for a week-end off. That was their honeymoon. They spent it at Brighton. As Dan had predicted, it was a wet week-end, a very wet week-end, it rained all the time, but the rain made no difference to Grace and Dan.

FIFTEEN

Late that August afternoon the cage rose slowly from the Paradise and Barras, accompanied by Armstrong and Hudspeth, stepped out into the pit yard. Barras wore his pit clothes: dark Norfolk jacket and breeches, round leather skullcap, a stout stick in his hand; and he stood for a moment outside the offices talking to Armstrong and Hudspeth, conscious of the glances of the banksmen, rather like an actor taking an important curtain.

“I think,” he said, as though deliberating, “you’d better give it to the papers. The Argus, anyway. They’ll be glad to know.”

“Certainly, Mr. Barras,” said Armstrong. “I’ll ring them to-morrow for sure.”

“Let them have full particulars of the estimated cost of the new roadway.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Oh, and by the bye, Armstrong, you might let them know that my main reasons for this step are patriotic. Once we are into the Paradise again we shall double our output.”

Barras nodded and turned away towards the yard gates; then, aware of the simple dignity conferred by his underground suit, he walked through the town towards the Law. Every few yards he was obliged to raise his hand, acknowledging nods, greetings, respectful salutes. He was now incredibly popular. His patriotic activities were enormous. Strangely, Arthur’s imprisonment had intensified these activities. At first Barras had faced this staggering result of his persuasive methods with a catch of dismay. But readjustment came swiftly. His imagination, choked by the hurrying succession of his own affairs, admitted no disturbing images of his son, existing and suffering in prison. He took his stand, openly admitting the fact of Arthur’s imprisonment, going out of his way to refer to it publicly with a kind of upright regret.

Everyone agreed that Barras had behaved magnificently. The case was widely reported — the Argus giving it in a double column under the caption “Spartan Father,” the Sunday Echo featuring a special article, “Hats off to a Patriot”; it had created a tremendous sensation, not only in Sleescale, but in Tynecastle itself. Barras moved in a perfect blaze of glory which was far from being distasteful to him. Upon several occasions when dining at the Central with Hetty he observed himself being pointed out, and he could not repress a thrill of gratification. He went about a great deal now, basked in the general approval. He had arrived at that state of mind when the whole procedure of his existence was deliberately extroverted. In the beginning the reaction had been defensive; but now it was deliberate. He had no private moments of reflection, quiet introspection or self-examination. No time, no time! His figure, breathless and a little flushed, seemed to throw the words backwards across his shoulders, hurrying, hurrying away. He was engrossed by the external, increasingly absorbed by his public performance, diverted only by the limelight, by noise, cheers and crowds.

His activities upon the Tribunal were redoubled. It became almost an impossibility for even the most genuine cases to secure exemption when Barras took his seat upon that arbitrary bench. Drumming impatiently upon the table, he would appear to listen to incoherent arguments and agitated protestations with an affectation of impartiality. Yet he was not attentive to the logic of the case; his decision was already taken. No exemption.

As time went on and the inveteracy of his decisions began to pall he briskened his methods and, speeding the cases one upon the other, began to pride himself on the numbers he could dispose of in each session. Upon the evenings of such successful days he would return home with a warm satisfaction and the sense of having earned the approbation of his fellow men.

Yet, as he walked up Cowpen Street, at this moment an even deeper satisfaction was imprinted on his face. The arrangement he had concluded at the Neptune to-day gave him a glowing sense of self-approval. For months past he had deplored the enforced closure of the Paradise, but he could not bring himself to face the heavy expense of driving a new roadway through the flood-undermined whinstone. Now, however, by judicious representations in the proper quarter he could offset the cost of the necessary roadway against subsequent deliveries to the Government of Paradise coal. The road was paid for before it was begun. Nothing need interfere with the fascinating accumulation of his wartime profits. Pit-head prices had risen a further ten shillings a ton and at the Neptune he was making money faster than he could ever have believed. Deep in the very centre of his being the secret knowledge of his own substance enraptured Barras, sustained him like a drug.

He was not a miser, but had simply an awareness of his money. He would spend money — indeed it gratified him, almost childishly, to reflect that in this respect five pounds meant as little to him as fivepence. And his present excitement demanded a kind of petty cash expenditure, that life with such potentialities laid open should not pass him by uneventfully. He had developed a new acquisitiveness. Already he had carried out striking changes at the Law. New furniture and carpets, a new gramophone, the car, a number of luxurious easy chairs, a special water softener, the old American organ removed and an electric pianola substituted. It was significant that he bought no more pictures. This belonged to his earlier phase of more constrained acquisitiveness and though the sense of his art “treasures” still brought him comfort — as instanced by his frequent complacent remark, “I have a fortune locked up in my pictures!”—he did not augment his collection during these war years. His indulgence was more showy, spontaneous and erratic. He would buy upon a whim; he developed a craze for “picking up a bargain”; he became a constant frequenter of the Tynecastle Arcade, where junk and curio shops abounded, and he never returned from such expeditions without triumphantly bringing home some purchase.

The presents he made to Hetty were expressive of the same momentum. Not the simplicities of his previous paternal devotion, not sweets, perfumes or a beribboned box of handkerchiefs, but presents upon a different psychological scale.

Here he smiled consciously. Almost insensibly he had come to regard Hetty as the normal relaxation to his strenuous endeavours. Hetty had always pleased him. Even in those early days when as a little girl of twelve she would skip astride his knee, to demand a clear gum — one of the pastilles he carried in his waistcoat pocket — he had experienced a curious reaction to Hetty. Her soapy, well-washed scent had filled his nostrils and he had reflected that Hetty would make a sweet little wife for Arthur. But now, in the face of Arthur’s contemptible behaviour, this was wholly changed. The change had begun on that Sunday when Hetty, bursting into tears, had allowed Barras to comfort her in the dining-room of the Law. From that moment Barras began “to make up” for Arthur’s deficiencies. Ostensibly the motive was sympathy: Hetty had to be compensated, taken out of herself and, when the final catastrophe of Arthur’s imprisonment occurred, made to forget. All this attuned with Barras’s mood, and now with this new restlessness urging him forward, the process was intensified. He smartened himself visibly, changed his tailor, wore silk ties and socks, acquired the habit of dropping in to Stirrocks near Grainger Street for a face massage, and a vibro-electric treatment for his hair. Gradually he began to take Hetty about with a certain conscious gallantry. To-night she was accompanying him to the King’s Theatre to see the new review Zig Zag.

A sense of anticipation tingled in Barras as he walked up the drive of the Law and let himself into his house. He went straight upstairs and took a bath, lying full length in the steaming water, conscious of his own virility. Then he dressed carefully and came down to pick himself a buttonhole.

In the conservatory he found Aunt Carrie, who had just finished a half-hour’s rubbing of Harriet’s back, and was now on her way to cut some asparagus in the kitchen garden. Aunt Carrie had made the kitchen garden her especial care during these war years, even extending her activities to poultry and ducks, so that while meatless days and restricted meals became the general rule, while many stood in queues for hours on end to purchase a few pounds of potatoes, or a scrap of meat or an ounce or two of margarine, there was always an abundance of excellent food on dear Richard’s table.

As Richard entered, Aunt Carrie raised her eyes. She murmured:

“You’ve had a hard day, Richard.”

He studied her with unusual indulgence.

“I’ve decided to cut the new roadway into Paradise, Caroline.”

“Oh, Richard,” she fluttered at the favour of his confidence, “that’s good, isn’t it?”

“We shall be able to bring out those ten men,” he said gravely. “That pleases me, Caroline.”

“Yes, Richard.”

“There must be a public funeral. I’ll arrange it. A token of respect.”

Aunt Carrie inclined her head. A pause. She moved towards the door.

“I was going to cut some asparagus for your dinner. The first of the season.” And she waited eagerly: Richard had always praised her for the excellence of her asparagus.

He nodded.

“By the bye, leave out some sandwiches to-night, Caroline. I may be late coming back. I’m taking Hetty to the theatre.”

Aunt Carrie coloured and her heart sank from her faded tussore blouse right into her old cracked gardening boots. She answered in a tremulous voice:

“Yes, Richard.” Then she went out to the garden.

But she cut her asparagus with an uneasy mind. Coming on top of Arthur’s misfortune — it was like Aunt Carrie to soften his prison sentence to this ambiguity — the situation between Hetty and Richard distressed her frightfully. Richard, of course, was beyond reproach. But Aunt Carrie was not so sure about Hetty now; she viewed with misgiving these recent presents; at times Aunt Carrie almost hated Hetty.

All that evening Aunt Carrie worried and worried and would not go to bed until Richard should return.

It was, in fact, nearly eleven when Barras came back to the Law. And Hetty came with him. He had suggested that they take the cool drive together, after the heat of the theatre. Bartley would drive her home later.

They entered the drawing-room in good spirits.

“I can’t stay, you know,” Hetty declared brightly. She took the cigarette he offered her and perched on the arm of a chair, her legs crossed, one neat ankle swinging.

“You’ll have a sandwich?” he suggested with a sheepish smile. And he went into the dining-room to find the tray Aunt Carrie had prepared.

There was no doubt about it, he was reluctant to let her go. He did not ask himself why. He had always held himself a moral man, mechanically content to satisfy his physical needs at the legitimate fount of love upstairs. But since the disaster he was different. The state of tension in which he lived had accelerated his functions, infused a fever through his blood. He was experiencing the Indian summer of his ductless glands. Sometimes the sense of his own physical well-being was extraordinary. It is true that once or twice he had experienced a sharp attack of giddiness, almost of vertigo, which had made him reel and clutch at the nearest article of furniture to save himself from falling. But this, he knew, was nothing, nothing whatever; he had never felt better in his life.

He went back into the drawing-room.

“Here you are, my dear.”

She accepted a chicken sandwich in silence.

“You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” he observed, after several side glances towards her small, appealing profile.

“Am I?” she answered, averting her eyes.

The fixed admiration in his face made her suddenly uneasy. It was impossible not to realise the change in him. For some weeks past, indeed, his manner, attentions and repeated presents had suggested the possibility of a climax approaching, and this did not suit Hetty at all. She did not like it. She wanted to keep on receiving the advantages without giving anything in exchange. To begin with, Hetty was, in her own phrase, a good girl. Actually she had no morality; she was pure by design, saved from sin by the marketable value of her virginity. Her fixed idea was to make a good match, a marriage which would give her money and position, and to this end she knew perfectly how important it was to maintain her maiden state. This was easy, for though her effect was aphrodisiac, in herself she had no sexual impulses — Laura, her sister, had received the double supply. At the outset Barras’s attentions had flattered and soothed her. Arthur’s imprisonment had fallen as a dreadful blow upon her vanity, removing Arthur at one stroke from her pleasant plannings for the future. She could never marry him now, never, never. It was natural for her to accept Barras’s sympathy; the mere fact of being seen with him in public helped tremendously to “save her face”; they were united against a weakling who had wretchedly let them down.

The drawing-room was lit by several of the new shaded lamps, which cast soft pools of light upon the carpet and left the ceiling mysterious and dark.

“How pretty!” she exclaimed, arising and moving towards the shades and fingering their fringes. Then she turned brightly.

“Why don’t you smoke a cigar?”

She had the idea that he would be safer if engaged with a cigar.

“I don’t want a cigar,” he replied ponderously, his eyes dwelling on her face.

She laughed lightly, as if he had made a joke, and remarked:

“I’ll have another cigarette then.”

When he had lit her cigarette she moved over to the gramophone and set Violet Lorraine to sing: If you were the only girl in the world.

“I’m having tea with Dick Purves and his sister at Dilley’s to-morrow,” she remarked inconsequently.

His face altered. He had now reached the stage of jealousy; he detested this young Purves. Flight-Lieutenant Dick Purves, the comparatively undistinguished companion of Hetty’s childhood, was now the hero of the hour. During the last air raid upon the North-East counties he had flown solo above the wind-driven Zeppelin and released the bomb out of the high darkness which had brought down the dirigible in flames. Tynecastle had gone mad about Dick Purves; it was rumoured he was to have the V.C., and in the meantime he had only to show himself in a restaurant to be greeted by wild demonstrations of hero-worship.

All this recurred to Barras and he said quite sulkily:

“You seem to do a good deal of running after this Purves fellow.”

“Oh no,” she protested. “You know I don’t. It’s just that he’s so much in demand just now. You know what I mean. Everyone’ll be looking at our table and envying us. It makes the party quite exciting.”

He moved impatiently, seeing the vapidly handsome youth with his baby blue eyes, the flaxen hair parted in the middle and plastered smooth as wax upon his head, the conceited smile playing about his lips as he smoked his cigarette and continually looked round in search of admiration. He smothered his irritation with difficulty. He had returned to the settee, flushed and breathing rather thickly. And in a moment he said:

“Come and sit here, Hetty.”

“I like moving about,” she replied airily, “after sitting in the theatre.”

“But I want you to sit beside me.”

A pause. She saw that it was impossible to refuse without seriously offending him, and unwillingly she came over and sat down on the far corner of the settee.

“You’re bullying me to-night,” she said.

“Am I?”

She nodded her head archly, at least, she tried to be arch again, but it was not very successful. She was too conscious of his presence beside her, his congested face, thick-set shoulders, even the fleshy creases of his waistcoat.

“You like the bracelet I gave you?” he asked at length, fingering the thin platinum strip on her wrist.

“Oh yes,” she said quickly. “You spoil me, really you do.”

“I’m a pretty rich man,” he said. “I can give you a number of things.” He was extremely clumsy and inexperienced: his emotion mastered him, almost choked him.

“You’ve always been kind to me,” she said, casting down her eyes.

He reached up to take her hand, but just then the gramophone stopped, and with the sense of being saved she jumped up and went to the machine.

“I’ll play the other side,” she remarked, and started the record.

He watched her heavily from under his brows with that fixed and vaguely ogling smile. His breathing was more difficult than ever, his under lip protruded.

“It’s pretty, that,” she went on, “terribly smart and catchy.”

She snapped her fingers to the time, resolved not to be led back to the settee again, moving about to the rhythm of the music. But as she passed him, he stretched out suddenly, caught her thin wrist and drew her on to his knees.

It happened so spontaneously, both of them were taken by surprise. She did not know whether or not to scream. She did not struggle. She simply stared at him.

And then, while they remained in this attitude, the door opened behind them suddenly, and Aunt Carrie entered the room. The unusual noise so late at night had caused her to come down, but at the spectacle upon the settee she paused as though turned suddenly to stone. Her eyes dilated with horror. She went absolutely grey. It was the most awful moment of her life. For one dreadful instant she felt she was going to faint, but with a supreme effort she recovered herself, and swinging round she almost fell out of the room. Then, like a haunted spirit, she fled and went stumbling upstairs.

Neither Barras nor Hetty had observed the incident. Barras was blind to all but Hetty, her nearness, her perfume, the pressure of her thin hip bones upon his thighs.

“Hetty,” he said thickly, “you know that I’m fond of you.”

His words brought her out of that queer, trance-like state.

“Don’t,” she said, “please don’t hold me like that.”

He relaxed his hold and put his palm upon her knee.

“Oh no,” she cried, resisting vigorously. “You mustn’t do that. I don’t like it.”

“But, Hetty—” he panted.

“No, no,” she cut him short. “I’m not that kind of girl, not that kind of girl at all.”

She hated him suddenly for putting her in this position, for spoiling everything, ending his protection and his presents by this horrible anti-climax. She hated his heavy, congested face, the lines under his eyes, his fleshy nose. She thought, with sudden contrast, of Purves’ clear-cut, youthful features, and she cried:

“Let me go, will you. Let me go, or I’ll scream.”

He answered by pressing her to him and burying his mouth into her neck. She did not scream, but she tore herself free, like a little cat, and banged her hand against his cheek. Then she jumped up, adjusting her dress and her hair, and spat out the words:

“You’re a horrid, beastly old man. You’re worse than your wretched son. I hate you. Don’t you know I’m a good girl. I’m a good girl, I tell you, a good girl. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’ll never look at you again as long as I live.”

He rose up excitedly, trying to speak, but before he had time she dashed out of the room and left him there. He stood for a moment, with his hand outstretched, as if still trying to detain her. His heart was hammering in his side, his brain dazed, his ears buzzing. He had a crushed sense of prostration, of his age, which had defeated his attempt to ravish her. He remained upon his feet, swaying slightly in the empty, softly lighted room, almost overcome by an attack of vertigo. He thought for a second that he was going to have a stroke. Then he raised his hand to his bursting head and sank down limply upon the settee.

SIXTEEN

Meanwhile, seated in the darkness of her own room Aunt Carrie heard the sound of the car setting out for Tynecastle with Hetty. She saw the two soft beams of the headlights slide terrifyingly round the room and in the darkness and the silence which succeeded she trembled wretchedly. What Aunt Carrie had seen in the drawing-room tore at the very roots of her most sacred belief. To think that Richard—Richard! Aunt Carrie’s trembling increased; she shook in all her limbs with a simply pitiful agitation and the two huge tears which had formed in her eyes were shaken from her eyes by the palsied shaking of her inclined head. Oh dear, of dear, thought Aunt Carrie in a paroxysm of grief.

Aunt Carrie’s belief was Richard. For fifteen years she had served Richard with hand and foot and soul. She had served Richard at a distance but that had not prevented her from adoring Richard and locking her adoration jealously in the centre of her being. No other man existed for Aunt Carrie. True, she had at one time entertained an affection for the memory of the late Prince Albert whom she rightly regarded as a good man, but it was a pale moon beside the sun of her adoration for Richard. Aunt Carrie existed for that sun, basked in it, warmed her whole cramped life at it. And now after fifteen years of sunshine, after fifteen years of putting out his slippers, arranging his meals, sorting his laundry, cutting his asparagus, filling his hot-water bottle, religiously keeping the moth out of his woollen underwear, knitting his socks, stockings and scarves — after fifteen years of slavish heavenly servitude Aunt Carrie had seen Richard fondling Hetty Todd upon his knee. In an access of pity and pain Aunt Carrie buried her shaking head in her shaking hands and sobbed bitterly.

Suddenly, while she sat weeping and overcome, she heard Harriet’s stick. Whenever Harriet wanted attention she lifted the walking-stick which lay beside her bed and thumped on the wall for Aunt Carrie to come in. It was the recognised procedure and Aunt Carrie knew at this moment that Harriet was thumping for her medicine. But she had not the heart to go in. She could not move for the thought of Richard, this new Richard, this poor Richard, both terrifying and terrible.

Aunt Carrie did not understand that the new Richard was an exfoliation of the old Richard; she did not dream that these new propensities which shocked her were sprouting from the old propensities. She fancied Richard, poor Richard, the victim of some strange calamity. She had no knowledge of what the calamity might be. She simply saw a god turned clown, an archangel become a satyr, and her heart was broken. She cried and cried. Richard with Hetty Todd upon his knee. She cried and cried and could not bear it.

Then with a start she was once again aware of Harriet’s knocking. Harriet had been knocking for a full five minutes now and though dimly conscious of that knocking Aunt Carrie had not moved to answer the summons. She could not go in to Harriet with blind and swollen eyes and trembling hands and this insufferable choking in her breast revealing the obvious fact that something was seriously wrong. And yet she must go. Harriet must have her medicine. If Harriet did not have her medicine she would go on knocking louder and louder and bring the house down and there might be some fresh and terrible development which would finish Aunt Carrie for good and all.

Mastering her sobbing as best she could Aunt Carrie wiped her blind and swollen eyes and went fumbling along the corridor to Harriet’s room. It was dark in the corridor for it was a dark night and Aunt Carrie in her agitation had not switched on the electric light at the head of the stairs. Harriet’s room was dark too, a dim darkness which the green glow of the bedside lamp did little to dispel. Because of her headaches Harriet was averse to a glare and now Aunt Carrie was tremblingly glad of that fact because the dim darkness hid her tear-stained face. She did not offer to switch on the light.

Upon Aunt Carrie’s entry Harriet quivered upon the bed where her pale, cow-like outlines were obscurely visible. She was trembling with temper and she bared her false teeth at Aunt Carrie with a click.

“Why didn’t you come, Caroline?” she cried. “I’ve been knocking for a good half-hour.”

Aunt Carrie stifled a big sob. Controlling her voice the best way she could she said:

“I’m sorry, Harriet dear, I can’t think what came over me. Shall I — shall I give you your medicine now?”

But Harriet was not going to let it go so easily as that. She lay there on her back in the bed in the dim darkness of the room surrounded by her bottles and her flat moon face was pale with passion and self-pity.

“It’s becoming a disgrace,” she said, “the way I’m neglected. I’m lying here with a splitting headache. I’m dying for my medicine and not a soul looks near me!”

Sad and shamefaced, her head bent, blinking her timid swollen eyes, Aunt Carrie gulped:

“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Harriet. Shall I give you your medicine now?”

“I should think so.”

“Yes, Harriet.” And hiding her face Aunt Carrie moved blindly to the little table, thinking, oh, dear goodness, let me give Harriet her medicine and get out of this room quickly before I break down completely.

“Your valerian, Harriet?” she asked.

“No,” Harriet said peevishly. “I want my old bromide tonight, the old aromatic bromide that Dr. Lewis gave me. I think that does best with me after all. On the shelf there at the corner.”

“Yes, Harriet.” Aunt Carrie turned obediently to the shelf and began to grope and fumble amongst the bottles. There were so many bottles too. “Where did you say, Harriet?”

“There,” Harriet snapped. “You’re a perfect fool to-night. There under your hand. I put it there myself the last time I was up. I remember perfectly.”

“This one?” Aunt Carrie knew she would break down again. Oh, dear goodness, she thought again, let me get out of here before I give way completely. “This one, Harriet?”

“No! The one next to it, that green bottle there. What on earth is the matter with you? Yes, that one, that’s right.”

Aunt Carrie lifted the bottle dazedly and went to the little table. Her hand shook so much she could hardly pick up the measuring glass.

“How much do you take, Harriet?”

“Two tablespoonfuls! Don’t you know that much? Can’t you even read?”

But Aunt Carrie could not read, Aunt Carrie was blind and dumb and desolate. Her movements were automatic, her mind far away in a grotesque and horrible land where Richard held Hetty Todd upon his knee. She could only do as she was told and then all that she wanted was to get back into her own room and give way to the floods of tears which welled within her. She fumbled out two tablespoonfuls of the medicine she thought Harriet had indicated. Dimly, through the dim darkness of the room, and the confusion of Harriet’s nagging, and the terrible desolation of her own heart, she thought the medicine had a queer smell. But it must be the saltness of her shed and unshed tears which made her think the medicine smelled queer, and Harriet was asking for the medicine and for her to hurry and not be a fool.

She advanced to the bed, drooping, her head averted, her hand outstretched. Harriet sat up and snatched the medicine glass crossly.

“You’ve been very stupid and slow to-night, Caroline,” she said sharply. “Just when you saw I was dying for my medicine.”

Closing her eyes tight in the way she had, Harriet swallowed the medicine at one ill-tempered gulp and for one second remained sitting upright with her eyes tight closed and the medicine glass in her hand. Then she opened her eyes and screamed.

“It’s not the medicine.” She screamed and the glass fell out of her hand.

Aunt Carrie’s tears were frozen with horror. For half a second she stood petrified, then she rushed to the switch and turned on the full illumination of the room. She dived for the bottle. A shrill cry came from her like a frightened rabbit. The bottle said liniment. She had given Harriet a poisonous liniment. She screamed, louder than Harriet.

Harriet was clutching her stomach and writhing on the bed. For the first time since she took to her bed Harriet knew real pain. She was in agony. Her face was a greenish white and her lips all puffed and burned by the liniment.

“Water,” she gasped feebly, clutching with both hands now, clutching at her fat white stomach. “It’s burning on fire.”

Swooning with horror Aunt Carrie fled to the water bottle on the wash-basin and tore back with a tumbler of water. But the water would not go down. Harriet could not drink the water; it ran out of her puffed useless mouth all over the nice clean bed-clothes.

Harriet did not seem to realise that the water was wetting her in all the wrong places.

“Water,” she still gasped feebly. “It’s burning on fire.” But however much she tried, she could not drink the water to put out the fire.

A glimmer of reason now pierced Aunt Carrie’s panic and, clattering the tumbler upon the commode, she bolted out of the room to fetch a doctor. Along the corridor she raced and down the stairs, her long bunioned feet performing a miracle of speed, and in the back vestibule she brushed into Ann who was on her way upstairs to bed.

Aunt Carrie clutched at Ann.

“The doctor,” she moaned. “Telephone for the doctor, any of them, to come at once, quick, quick, the doctor.”

Ann took one look at Aunt Carrie. She was a sensible woman, habitually taciturn, and realising that something dreadful and serious had occurred she did not stop to ask any questions. She went instantly to the telephone and very capably rang up Dr. Lewis who promised to come immediately. Ann thought for a moment, then, in case there should be some unavoidable delay, she rang up Dr. Proctor, her own doctor, and asked him to come as well.

Meanwhile Aunt Carrie had darted to the pantry in search of whiting. She had the belief that whiting was an antidote of value. And, returning with the packet of whiting in her hand, she suddenly observed Richard emerge from the drawing-room. He came slowly, disturbed from his own meditation by the unusual flurry, and supporting himself against the lintel of the door he said heavily:

“What is the matter?”

“It’s Harriet,” she gasped, holding the whiting so tightly In her agitation that a thin white stream poured out of the corner of the packet.

“Harriet?” he repeated dully.

She could not wait, she could not endure it; she turned with another cry, and fled upstairs. He followed slowly.

Harriet was still stretched upon her bed under the bright glare, lying amongst her rows and rows of bottles. She had stopped moaning now. She lay sideways and twisted up and her puffed-up mouth was fallen open. A gummy mucus had formed on her blackened lips.

Occasionally Harriet’s legs gave a little twitch and with that twitch Harriet’s breath came back to her in one quick snore. Sick with terror at that quick infrequent snore, Aunt Carrie mixed the whiting in a frenzy of haste and endeavoured to get some of it past Harriet’s swollen lips. She was still trying to do this when Richard entered the room. He stood staring at Harriet, quite stunned.

“Why, Harriet,” he said in a thickened voice.

Harriet answered by puking back some of Aunt Carrie’s whiting.

Richard came forward in a kind of stupor.

“Harriet,” he mumbled again in a besotted sort of way.

He was interrupted by the abrupt entry of Dr. Lewis who walked in cheerfully with his black gladstone bag. But when Dr. Lewis saw Harriet his cheerfulness dropped from him. His manner altered completely and in a subdued tone he asked Aunt Carrie to ’phone for Dr. Scott to come immediately. Aunt Carrie ran to do this at once. Richard retreated to the alcove by the window where, like some strange figure of destiny, he stood silent, watching.

Dr. Scott came with great dispatch and Dr. Proctor, who had walked up from Sleescale, arrived at exactly the same time. The three doctors put their heads together over Harriet. They did a great many things to Harriet. They injected Harriet with little syringes and lifted Harriet’s unresistant eyelids and pumped at Harriet’s stomach. They pumped and pumped at Harriet’s stomach and got the most extraordinary amount out of Harriet’s stomach. They all saw what a good dinner Harriet had eaten — it was incredible the quantity of asparagus she had put away. But Harriet did not see. Harriet, being dead, would not see any more.

At last, after a final attempt at resuscitation, the doctors were obliged to give it up and, wiping his forehead, Dr. Lewis advanced towards Richard who still stood rigidly in the window alcove.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Barras, sir.” He looked genuinely distressed. “I am afraid we can do no more.”

Barras did not speak. Dr. Lewis, looking at him, saw the hard pounding of his temporal arteries, the dusky suffusion of his brow, and mingling with his sympathy came the instinctive thought that Barras’s blood pressure must be high. “We have done everything possible,” he added.

“Yes,” Richard said in a strange voice.

Another wave of sympathy rushed over Dr. Lewis. He gazed at Barras with sorrow in his eyes. He did not know of course that he was, to all intents, looking at Harriet’s murderer.

SEVENTEEN

Even Hilda was distressed. For weeks after Grace and she had returned to hospital from attending their mother’s funeral at Sleescale she remained taciturn and brooding. Now she admitted the abnormal atmosphere at the Law. Because she was worried she snapped at the patients, was rude to Ness, went through her work with a tireless efficiency. And towards Grace she was again possessive, jealously affectionate.

It was the end of their half-day off and they were walking slowly along Regent Street, making for Oxford Circus to take a bus from Knightsbridge. Hilda, concluding a bitter diatribe on the humiliating complications of family life, glanced towards Grace sarcastically:

“You’re always on about wanting to straighten things out. Now’s your chance to go back home and try it.”

“Well,” Grace said quietly, “I wouldn’t be much use now.”

“How do you mean?”

Here their bus swung into the kerb.

Grace waited until they had taken their seats. Then, the minute they sat down she broke the news that she was going to have a baby.

Hilda flushed horribly. She looked as if she were going to be ill. She remained absolutely still while the woman conductor came and took their fares; then in a low, wounded voice she said:

“As if it wasn’t bad enough getting married. As if we hadn’t had enough trouble lately. You’re a fool, Grace, a ghastly little fool.”

“I don’t think I’m a fool,” Grace answered.

“Well, I do,” Hilda jerked out, very pale now and bitter. “War babies aren’t amusing.”

“I never said they were, Hilda, only mine might be.”

“Just a silly little fool,” Hilda hissed, staring hard in front of her. “Losing your head with that Teasdale and now this. You’ll have to leave the hospital. It’s sickening. I’ll have nothing to do with it. I’ve kept out of the family complications up till now and I’ll keep out of this. Oh, it’s so silly, it’s so beastly ordinary, it’s what silly ordinary beastly little nurses are doing all over the country. Having war babies to war heroes! O God, it’s… it’s disgusting. I’ll have nothing to do with it, nothing; you can go away and have your beastly infant by yourself.”

Grace said nothing. Grace had a simple way of saying nothing when to say nothing was the best answer in the world. She and Hilda had never really come together again since her marriage with Dan. And now this! That Grace, whom she had petted and protected, dear little Grace, who had slept in her arms, should be having a baby, a war baby, shocked and nauseated Hilda and made her swear that she would keep herself clear of the whole disgusting affair. Tears stood in Hilda’s eyes as she rose stiffly at Harrod’s and marched out of the bus.

So Grace had to make her own arrangements. Next morning she went to see Miss Gibbs. Traditionally, Miss Gibbs should have been kind, but, like Hilda, Miss Gibbs was not kind. Miss Gibbs said, with a glint of teeth and temper:

“I’m sick and tired of this sort of thing, Nurse Barras. What do you think we have you here for — to nurse the wounded or propagate the race? We’ve taken the trouble to train you and educate you to a certain usefulness. This is how you repay us! I’m afraid I’m not very satisfied with you, Nurse Barras. You are not the success your sister has been. She doesn’t turn round and say she’ll have a baby. She stops in the theatre doing her job. This last month you’ve been three times reprimanded for carelessness and talking in the corridors. And now you come with this story. Things are very difficult. I am not pleased. That will do.”

Grace felt almost as if she were not married at all, Hilda and Miss Gibbs had made it sound so indecent. But Grace was not easily cast down. Grace was simple and artless and careless, the most unassertive person in the world, but she had a quiet way of keeping up her heart even although, as Miss Gibbs said, things were difficult.

In her individual way Grace went ahead with her plans. Since her mother’s funeral her dread of returning to the Law had increased. She wrote to Aunt Carrie and Aunt Carrie’s reply, full of suppressed fears and pious premonitions, and ending with a fluttering postscript, twice underlined, made Grace feel that she could not go home.

She thought a little over Aunt Carrie’s letter, then she decided what she would do. Somehow it was easy for Grace to make a decision; matters which would have worried Hilda for a fortnight never worried Grace at all, she hardly seemed to consider them but just made up her mind. Grace had the capacity of making molehills out of mountains. It was because she never thought about herself.

On the first Saturday of January when she had a whole day off from the hospital, Grace took the train into Sussex. She had an idea that she would like Sussex, that it would be warm and sunny there, different from the inhospitable bleakness of the North. She did not know a great deal about Sussex but one of the nurses had once spent a holiday at Winrush, near Parnham Junction, and she gave Grace the name of the woman, Mrs. Case, with whom she had stayed.

The train bowled Grace down into Sussex and bowled her out on the platform of Parnham Junction. It was rather uninspiring, the junction, a few corrugated sheds, empty cattle pens and stacks of dented milk cans. But Grace was not put down.

She spied a signpost on which was written the word Winrush, and as the distance marked down was only a mile she set out to walk to Winrush.

The day was windy and fresh and green. There was a most beautiful smell of moist earth in the wind mixed up with the salty smell of the sea. It struck her with a kind of pain that, when the world could be so lovely a place as this, the war should go on, mutilating the face of nature, wrecking beauty, destroying men. Her young brow clouded as she walked along. But it cleared slightly when she came to Winrush. Grace felt that Winrush was wonderful the minute she walked into it. Winrush was a very small village, just one little street with the country at one end and the sea at the other. In the middle of that one little street was one little shop which bore a very home-made, very hand-painted notice: Mrs. Case — Grocery, Drapery, Chemistry. There was not much sign of chemistry, except for a packet of seidlitz powders in the window, but Grace liked that little shop very much and she looked in the window a long time making out all the things she had known in her youth. There was a sweet called Slim Jim, rather thin and rationed-looking to be sure, and another called Gob Stoppers, big beautiful red and white balls, which were built only to deceive, because you thought there was a nut inside and there wasn’t. Altogether Grace entertained herself a good deal at the window, then she took an impulsive breath and walked into the shop. She went into the shop so impulsively she stumbled and nearly fell, for it was dark in the shop and there was a step which she had not seen. As Grace fetched up with a bump against a barrel of nice seed potatoes, from behind the counter a voice said:

“Oh, my dear… that wicked old step.”

Clinging to the barrel Grace looked at the person who had called her my dear. She decided that it must be Mrs. Case. She said:

“I’m quite all right. I’m always clumsy. I hope I haven’t damaged the barrel.”

Mrs. Case said, with a little nod of approval at her own repartee:

“Oh, my dear, I hope you haven’t damaged yourself.”

Grace smiled; anyone would have smiled at Mrs. Case for Mrs. Case was such an oddity, a small old woman with bright beady eyes and a hump back. Mrs. Case’s hump oughtn’t to have been romantic — it was her spine which was deformed since she had suffered from Pott’s disease when a child — but somehow it was romantic; indeed her head was so sunk into her body and her eyes so bright and beady that Mrs. Case actually gave the comical impression of sitting upon her own shoulders like an old hen sitting upon eggs. A brown hen, of course, for Mrs. Case’s skin was all a warm wrinkled russet except under her nose where it was darker. The dark spot under Mrs. Case’s nose advanced the suggestion that Mrs. Case took snuff. And Mrs. Case did.

“I came in to see you about rooms,” Grace went on politely. “Nurse Montgomerie, a friend of mine, recommended me to come.”

“Oh yes.” Mrs. Case rubbed her hands together reflectively. “I remember her, she was a sparky one. Did you want the rooms for next summer?”

“Oh no. It would be the spring,” Grace said quickly; then she added: “You see, it’s rather different with me. You see. I’m going to have a baby.”

“I see,” Mrs. Case said after a longish time.

“You see, that makes it rather different.”

“Yes, my dear, I see. That do make it rather different. Oh, I do see that.”

Here Grace burst out laughing; there had been such a lot of seeing between Mrs. Case and herself and it was such a dark little shop. In a minute Mrs. Case laughed too but not altogether heartily. Then she said:

“You do seem fond of a joke, I will say. Have you any objection to my asking if you got your husband in the war or anywhere, my dear?”

Grace had no objection. Grace told Mrs. Case about Dan. Grace more or less explained herself and Mrs. Case looked friendly again and slightly relieved. She said:

“I did know to be sure, my dear, I can tell a face when I see one. But people have got to be careful what with these Germans and the price of butter. Perhaps you’d like me to show you the rooms, my dear.”

The rooms were splendid; at least, that was what Grace thought. There were two of them, connecting, and on the second floor. The floors were uneven and the ceilings given to unexpected bulges; you had to duck your head pretty sharp as you went over to the bed, and the sitting-room was unquestionably not a room to stand in, but they were very clean, these rooms, with fresh darned muslin curtains, a handsome picture of Queen Victoria’s coronation, a case of birds’ eggs collected by Mrs. Case’s nephew, an enlargement of Mrs. Case’s husband who had worked on the railway and died of a floating kidney, and a lovely view of the garden. It was a long garden with an orchard of cherry trees and Grace saw them as they would be in spring, all trembling upon the edge of blossom. There were cows in the field beyond and a line of elms. Grace stood at the window and one tiny tear came into her eye — it was all so beautiful, it hurt her a little and made her think of Dan.

She turned to Mrs. Case:

“I’d like to take the rooms if you would let me have them.”

Pleased, Mrs. Case nodded.

“You come down, my dear, and have a cup of tea and we’ll talk it over.”

They went downstairs, Grace and Mrs. Case — Mrs. Case holding to the banister because she had a limp — and they had several cups of tea and talked it over. Mrs. Case was free from now onwards and Mrs. Case was never grasping.

“If I said fifteen shillings a week,” remarked Mrs. Case, her head to one side like an inquiring bird, “considering the circumstances, my dear, would that be asking too much?”

“No indeed,” said Grace, and the matter was settled without a word of argument.

They continued to talk in growing understanding. Mrs. Case was a mine of useful information. There was a telephone in the village, at old Mr. Purcell’s farm, and he would surely oblige them with the use of it. And Fittlehampton was only three miles away and there were numbers of estimable doctors in Fittlehampton. It was a long, long conversation between Grace and Mrs. Case, and though in the end it involved confidences as to how the late Mr. Case’s kidney had floated him to glory, it was extremely warm and satisfactory.

Later, as she caught the four-ten from Parnham Junction, Grace felt extraordinarily happy and uplifted. Grace was not clever. Hilda and Miss Gibbs might contend that Grace was careless and stupid and easy-going. Hilda and Miss Gibbs would have recommended Grace to a competent maternity hospital replete with water-beds and douche cans; they would have thought her mad had they seen her setting out for Parnham Junction and pressing her slightly snub nose against the pane of Mrs. Case’s shop window.

When she returned to the Home Grace felt so happy she wanted to make it up with Hilda. Glowing, she went into Hilda’s room. Standing on the threshold, her cheeks brightened by the fresh night air, her eyes full of confidence and hope, she said:

“I’ve fixed up, Hilda. I’ve found the most lovely spot in Sussex.”

“Really!” Hilda said coldly. She burned to know where Grace had been and what she had arranged but she was too hurt and proud to show it.

Gradually the glow died out of Grace’s face.

“Shall I tell you about it?” she asked doubtfully.

“Some other time,” Hilda said, picking up a magazine and beginning to turn the pages.

Grace turned and went out of the room. The instant the door closed Hilda jumped up to follow her. But Hilda did not follow her — it was against Hilda’s nature to follow anyone. She remained frowning, motionless, with a look of pain upon her pale face, then she flung the magazine violently into the corner of the room. That same night there was an air raid over London and when there was a raid Grace usually came to Hilda’s room and crept into bed beside her. But to-night, though Hilda waited and longed for Grace to come, Grace did not come.

Time drew on. Whenever she had her half-day Grace went round buying little things that might be useful to her or which, perhaps, might not. She had a great deal of enjoyment that way, especially in the cheap department stores. Dan wrote twice a week. He hoped he could get leave in time for the great event. He would beg, borrow or steal leave, he would desert and swim the Channel — it all depended, of course, even the swimming of the Channel, on whether there was going to be an offensive.

Dan’s letters were more of a comfort to Grace than ever. She still hoped that Hilda would be friends again. But on her very last day at the hospital when she climbed up to Hilda’s room to say good-bye, Hilda was in the theatre. Grace had to go and leave it at that. She felt sad leaving it that way.

EIGHTEEN

On the sixteenth of April, 1917, Stanley Millington returned to Tynecastle. All those intervening weeks Laura had been down at Sawbridge in Warwickshire where Stanley was in the special hospital for functional war neuroses. Joe had heard nothing until he learned indirectly at the office of the telegram to Hilltop announcing their return. Actually, he had not had a line from Laura since that evening when she had rushed from the flat in tears. But the fact that he had received no invitation to be present did not deter Joe from attending at the station. Oh dear, no. Joe had a splendid combination of brazen nerve and rhinoceros hide which enabled him to carry off the most delicate situation. Besides, he knew they would expect him — why not? He was quite ready to overlook that last scene Laura had made and genuinely prepared to demonstrate his warm admiration for Stanley’s heroism and his delight in Stanley’s recovery. He drove to the station to meet Stanley full of welcome and sympathy and the manly affection of one good fellow for another.

But when the train got in, one look at Stanley took the beam out of Joe’s smile.

“Hello, Stanley,” he said, with guarded enthusiasm.

Stanley allowed himself to be shaken hands with.

“I got buried by a shell,” he said.

Joe darted a glance at Laura’s set face. The platform was very crowded, people pushing past them, porters struggling with luggage, and Stanley standing stiffly there seemed to be in everybody’s way. Avoiding Joe’s eyes, Laura took Stanley’s arm and led him to the barrier. On the way to the barrier Stanley confided in Joe again.

“I got buried by a shell.”

They got into the car. All the way from Central Station to Hilltop Joe sat in the car looking sideways at Stanley, yet trying not to look sideways and saying to himself, Good God, could you ever believe it!

He hoped Stanley wouldn’t say it again.

But Stanley said it again. For the third time Stanley said:

“I got buried by a shell!”

Looking sideways, yet trying not to look sideways, Joe said:

“That’s right, Stanley, you got buried by a shell.”

Stanley said nothing. He sat on the edge of the back seat as though cut out of wood. His eyes were away in front of him. His face was quite blank, all his plump body seemed to have melted away from him. He held on to the side of the car with both hands. Mr. Stanley, our Mr. Stanley, held on.

“We’re nearly there now,” Joe said encouragingly. He had thought that Stanley was all right, absolutely unscratched and good as new. But this was Stanley, this was Stanley here. Joe had to keep telling himself to believe it. This… here… this. He took a furtive glance towards Laura. She sat with that expressionless look, supporting Stanley with her arm.

The car drew up at Hilltop and Joe jumped out. He was terribly solicitous and helpful.

“This way, now. Watch the step. Careful now.”

Mr. Stanley was careful. Holding on, he got out of the car and stood himself on the pavement. He was extremely careful. He kept his head very still as if he wanted to be careful of his head. He looked like a man with a bad stiff neck until you saw that all his body was stiff. The movements of his body were effected by a series of little impulses. The movements were not quite co-ordinated. They were like the movements of a very nearly perfect mechanical man.

Joe said:

“Will I give you a hand?”

Stanley did not answer — he had a way of not answering — but in a minute he said:

“The legs work pretty well but it’s the head. I’ve been in hospital. I got buried by a shell!”

While Laura remained at the gate giving the chauffeur instructions about the luggage, Joe led Stanley into the house. Bessie, the parlourmaid, stood on the doorstep, waiting to let them in. Bessie’s eyes dropped out of her head at the sight of Mr. Stanley. Joe exclaimed very heartily;

“Here’s Mr. Stanley back then, Bessie.”

Taking no notice of Bessie at all, Stanley walked straight into the lounge and sat down on the edge of a chair. The house did not belong to him and he did not belong to the house. He fingered his waistcoat buttons, then he looked at Bessie. This time he must have noticed Bessie for he explained himself to her.

Without any warning whatever Bessie burst into tears.

Joe took off Mr. Stanley’s cap.

“There!” he said kindly. “He’ll feel better when he’s had his lunch, eh, Bessie?” He smiled at Bessie, she was a nice girl Bessie was, he had always treated Bessie nice.

Bessie went out to see about the lunch. Joe could hear her weeping in the kitchen, weeping and telling the cook.

Stanley looked round the lounge. To look round the lounge he did not turn his head, he turned his body very slowly and carefully upon the edge of the chair. As he did so Laura came in.

“It’s fine to see you back, Stan,” Joe said, rubbing his hands together heartily. “Isn’t it. Mrs. Millington?”

“Yes.” Laura went over to Stanley. From her face the strain was almost unsupportable.

“Would you like to come upstairs now?” she said.

But Stanley answered, no. He hadn’t much interest in Laura. In fact he seemed in some queer way to resent Laura’s interest in him. He kept looking round the lounge. His eyes were curious, and there was a curious undercurrent in his eyes. They seemed darker, his eyes, with a film of darkness, and below the film the undercurrent played. When the undercurrent played near the surface Stanley’s face came nearest to emotion. It was difficult to make out the emotion for it came to the surface so suddenly and darted so suddenly away. But it was a horrible emotion. It was fear, no particular fear, simply fear. Stanley was not afraid of anything. He was just afraid. He finished looking round the lounge. He remarked:

“We had a good journey.”

“Fine, fine!”

“Except for the noise.”

“The noise, Stanley?”

“The wheels. In the tunnels.”

What the hell, thought Joe.

“I got—”

“That’s right,” Joe said quickly. The gong sounded softly. “Come on and have your lunch. He’ll feel better when he’s had his lunch, won’t he, Mrs. Millington? Nothing like a spot of lunch for pulling a man together.”

“I’ve got to lie down after lunch,” Stanley said. “That’s one of the things the doctors told me. They made me promise before I came away.”

They went in to lunch. Laura paused pointedly in the doorway of the dining-room.

“Haven’t you got to be at the works?” she asked him in a flat voice, not looking at Joe.

“Not a bit of it,” said Joe heartily. “Things are going grand there.”

“I think perhaps Stanley would rather you left him now?”

A flutter of irritation came over Stanley.

“No, no. Let Joe stop on.”

A short silence; Joe smiled genially; Laura moved reluctantly away. They sat down to lunch.

When he had finished his soup, to show he had not forgotten his instructions, Stanley remarked again to Joe:

“I’ve got to lie down after lunch, that’s one of the things they told me. And when I get up I’ve got to do my knitting.”

Joe’s mouth fell open — it’s not funny, he thought, O God, no, it’s not funny. In an awed voice he said:

“Your knitting?”

Laura made a movement of pain, as though to interpose. But Mr. Stanley went on, explaining himself; he seemed happiest when explaining himself:

“My knitting helps the head. In the hospital I learned to do my knitting after I got buried by the shell.”

Joe removed his eyes hurriedly from Stanley’s face. Knitting, he thought… knitting. He thought back. He kind of remembered Stanley, and Mr. Stanley’s remarks in this same room a year before. The topping fellow who wanted a smack at the Fritzes, don’t you know, for St. George and England, the full-blooded Briton who wished he’d joined the Flying Corps… great adventure, what? Very lights, Public Schools Battalion, number nines… our Mr. Stanley, who thought war simply marvellous. Christ, thought Joe, I wonder what he thinks about it now; and all of a sudden Joe wanted to laugh.

But at that moment Stanley very nearly began to cry.

“I can’t,” he whimpered, “I can’t.”

Laura intervened in a low voice, bending forward:

“What’s wrong, dear?”

Stanley’s face twitched under its frozen mask.

“I can’t close the mustard-pot.” He was trying to close the mustard-pot and he could not do it. He was beginning to shake all over because he could not close the mustard-pot.

Joe jumped up.

“Here,” he said, “let me do it for you.” He shifted the spoon so that the lid of the mustard-pot could close and while he was about it he took his napkin and wiped the gravy off Stanley’s chin. Then he sat down.

All at once Laura seemed to give way. She rose abruptly. In a shaking voice she excused herself.

“I must see to something.” With her head averted she went out.

Silence for a few minutes while Joe turned things over carefully in his mind. At length he said:

“You know it’s great to see you back, Stan, old man. We’re making a lot of money at the works these days. Last month was marvellous.”

Stanley said, yes.

“That Dobbie fellow we have in the office isn’t worth a damn though, Stanley. Seein’ you’re back now we ought to get rid of him.”

Stanley said, yes.

“In fact I was thinkin’ myself I could give him his notice at the end of this month. Does that seem to be all right with you, Stanley?”

Stanley said, yes. Then Stanley got up from the table very stiff and sudden, although Joe had not nearly finished his dessert. He said:

“I’ve got to go to bed.”

“Certainly, Stan, old man,” Joe agreed blandly. “You’ll do whatever you like.” In an access of helpfulness Joe jumped up and took Stanley’s arm. Laura was waiting at the foot of the stairs, a small damp handkerchief clenched tightly in her hand. She made to take Stanley’s arm but Joe was not to be dispossessed. And Stanley himself appeared to lean on Joe, to depend upon him. He said peevishly:

“Leave me, Laura.” Joe helped him upstairs to his room and helped him to undress.

Stanley stripped sheer skin and bone. Stripped, Stanley was less like a mechanical man, and more like a mechanical corpse. He seemed ready for his bed but before he got into bed he went through a quiet little ritual. He got down and looked under the bed then he got up and looked under the pillows. He looked inside the two cupboards and behind the curtains of both windows. Then he climbed into bed. He lay flat upon his back with his hands and legs stretched out straight. His dead, wide-open eyes stared towards the ceiling. Joe tiptoed from the room.

In the lounge at the foot of the stairs Laura was waiting on Joe with red and swollen eyes. She faced him determinedly, biting her lower lip that way he knew so well.

“I’ve just one thing to say.” She spoke with difficulty, her breast rising and falling quickly. “And that’s to ask you to keep away from this house.”

“Now, don’t, Laura,” he remonstrated mildly. “You’re in a spot of trouble with Stan and you want all the help you can get.”

“You call it help!”

“Why not?” he reasoned soothingly. “There’s nobody more upset than me, nobody in all the world, but we’ve got to discuss things.” He shook his head sensibly. “Stanley’s finished as far as the front is concerned. I’m thinking about the works…”

“You would,” she said bitterly.

“I mean,” he threw out his hand with the air of a man who has been wronged. “Oh, damn it all, Laura, give us some credit. I want to help you both. I want to get Stanley down to the works, interest him in things again, give him all the hand I can.”

“If I didn’t know you I’d think you meant it.”

“But I do mean it. After all, we’ve got to help one another over this. Honest to God, Laura. I’ll do what I can.”

There was a silence, her swollen eyes remained fixed upon his face; her breath came quicker, agonised.

“I don’t believe you’ll do anything,” she choked. “And I hate you for what you’ve done… almost as much as I hate myself.” She spun round and walked rapidly out of the lounge.

He remained where he was, caressing his chin gently with his hand; then he smiled into himself and left the house. He came back next morning, though, bustling in about eleven to keep his promise to take Stanley to the works. Laura had gone out but Stanley was up and dressed, seated upon the edge of a chair in the lounge playing the gramophone to himself. The gramophone was all right, of course, but the music, the music Stanley was playing, set Joe’s teeth on edge. Joe protested:

“Why don’t you play something lively, Stanley? Something out of the Bing Boys, what?”

“I like this,” Stanley said, putting the same record on again. “It’s the only one I like. I’ve been playing it all morning.”

Puzzled, Joe endured the record once more. The combination of the record and Stanley listening to the record was horrible. Then Joe walked over and looked at it. Marche Funèbre, Chopin. Joe swung round.

“Holy smoke, Stanley, what d’you want with this stuff? Come on now, brace up, I’ve got the car at the door and we’re all set. We’re going down to the works.”

They drove quietly to the works and went straight into the melting-shop. Joe had arranged it beforehand. All the Union Jacks were hung and a big banner, which Joe had raked out of an old locker, stretched across the shop — WELCOME. When Stanley walked into the shop with Joe everybody stopped work and gave him a rousing cheer. A great many women were in the shop now, Joe found them much cheaper and quicker than the older men, and these women cheered wildly. Stanley faced the cheering women, the women in the overalls, the women who were making shrapnel bullets for the shells. He looked as if he did not quite know what to do before all these women, he seemed more than ever to belong to nowhere. In an undertone Joe suggested:

“Say something, Stanley, say anything you like.” And he held up his hand for silence.

Mr. Stanley faced the women. He said:

“I got buried by a shell. I’ve been in hospital.”

There was another cheer and under cover of the cheer Joe prompted swiftly:

“Say you’re glad the output is going up and you hope they’ll keep on working like they’re doing.”

Mr. Stanley repeated in a high voice:

“I’m glad the output is going up and I hope you’ll keep on working like you’re doing.”

Another cheer, a loud long cheer. Then Joe took the matter in hand. He raised his hand again for silence. He thrust his hat well back on his head, put his thumb in his arm-hole and beamed on them. He said:

“You’re all delighted to see Mr. Stanley and so am I. Mr. Stanley isn’t going to talk about what he’s done so I’ll do a little of the talking instead. I’m not going to say much because you’ve got work to do for your country, work that must be done, and you can’t knock off to listen to anybody; but I’m going to say this: I’m going to say to his face here that we’re proud of Mr. Stanley. I’m proud to be associated with him in business and I know you’re proud to work for him. We’ve been making plans, Mr. Stanley and me, and he says he hopes you’ll all continue to do your bit here just the same as he’s done his bit in France. You’ve got to work, you understand, work like hell to keep the output up. Now that’s all, but before you go back to work I want us all to sing the National Anthem and then lift the roof off with a cheer for Mr. Stanley.”

A silence fell, then — very feelingly, because of the women’s voices — they sang God Save the King. It was extremely moving, there were tears in Joe’s eyes.

When they had asked God to save their king they cheered Mr. Stanley, they cheered Joe, they cheered mostly everybody. Then in a mood of almost religious fervour they went back to the shrapnel, the Mills bomb and the eighteen-pounder shells.

Joe and Stanley started along the corridor towards the office. But they did not get very far. Half-way down the passage there stood an enormous shell. Joe had not made that shell although Joe would greatly have liked to make such a shell as that. The shell was a present to Joe from John Rutley, old Rutley of Yarrow, who sat with him on the Munitions Committee. Rutley’s had an enormous plant and turned out enormous shells and Joe was extremely proud of that beautiful seventeen-inch shell which indicated many things, not the least being that John Rutley was, so to speak, a friend of Joe’s. The shell had been mounted by Joe upon a fine polished wood base and now it stood, shining and gigantic, pointing its snout heavenwards in a kind of silent ecstasy.

It was the shell which stopped Stanley. He stared at the big shining shell with those frozen eyes.

Joe clapped the snout of the shell affectionately.

“She’s a beauty, eh? I call her Katie!”

Mr. Stanley did not speak but the dark light played and played beneath the film upon his eyes.

“I wish we were making the big stuff,” Joe remarked. “There’s a hell of a lot of money in big stuff too. Oh well, come on in the office now. I’ve got Morgan and Dobbie there and we’re going to talk to them.”

But Mr. Stanley did not come on, he could not get past the shell. He stared and stared at the shell. It was a shell like this which had blown him up. His soul shrank and shuddered before that shell.

“Come on, man,” Joe said impatiently. “Don’t you know they’re waiting on you?”

“I want to go home.” His voice sounded very odd and he began to drag himself backwards stiffly from the shell.

Christ, thought Joe, he’s at it again. He took Stanley’s arm to help him past the shell. But Stanley could not get past the shell. The skin of his forehead twitched, and in his eyes the buried agony of fear came leaping, leaping underneath the film. He gasped:

“Let me go. I want to go home.”

“You’re all right, Stanley,” Joe said. “Take it easy, now, you’re all right. It won’t bite you, it isn’t even filled. Be sensible, Stanley, man.”

But Stanley could not be sensible. All Stanley’s splendid sense had got blown out of Stanley by a shell like this in France. Stanley’s whole face was twitching now, a rapid twitching, and the fear behind his eyes was horrible to see.

“I’ve got to go home.” Hardly able to say it now. Under the dead cold face worked an unbelievable agony and excitement.

Joe gave a groan of resignation.

“All right, then, you’ll go home, Stanley. Don’t make a song about it.” Joe didn’t want a scene at the works, good God, not when everything had gone off so well. Still holding Stanley’s arm Joe walked Stanley very nicely down the shop. Joe’s smile indicated that everything was perfectly in order. Mr. Stanley was not quite fit yet, just out of hospital you see, oh yes, just that!

The car drove off to Hilltop with Stanley sitting upright on the back seat, and Joe, with a last friendly, reassuring smile, returned to his own office. He shut himself in his office and lit a cigar. He smoked the cigar thoughtfully. It was a good cigar, but Joe did not think about the cigar. He thought about Stanley.

There was no doubt about it, Stanley was washed out. The minute he had clapped eyes on Stanley at the station he had seen it; this shell-shock was a bigger thing than he had ever imagined. Stanley was going to be months and months before he got back to normal. If he ever did get back. In the meantime Joe would have to take Millington’s in hand more than ever. And that was hardly fair on Joe unless Joe got a little more out of Millington’s than he had been getting. Hardly fair. Joe carefully inspected the glowing end of his cigar, calculating shrewdly. About two thousand a year he was pulling down at the moment, all in, as Jim Mawson would have put it. But that was nothing, nothing at all. There was the future to think about. And God, what a chance this was to consolidate his future, to get in, big, oh, bigger than ever. Joe sighed ever so gently. There would have to be some sort of readjustment… that was the word… in Millington’s. Yes, that was it, that was the exact idea.

Moistening his lips Joe reached for the telephone. He rang up Jim Mawson. Never before had he been so glad to know Mawson, to feel sure of his co-operation. A clever fellow Jim, who knew exactly how to set about a thing and steer just the right side of trouble.

“Hello, Jim, that you, ole man?” Joe took pains to put the case justly to Mawson. And sympathetically, too. “It would break your heart to see the poor fellow, Jim. He’s perfectly sensible and all that, as sane as you and me, but it’s his nerves. Shell-shock, you understand. Yes, certainly, shell-shock, that’s right, Jim, you’ve got me.”

A pause while Mawson’s voice came back over the wire. Then Joe said:

“To-morrow night at your house then, Jim. Certainly, I know there’s no hurry. Certainly I know Snagg, I met him at Bostock’s, didn’t he handle that contract case? Yes, certainly, oh, what the hell, Jim, what do you think I am… now listen, oh, all right, not on the ’phone… certainly… how’s the wife?… that’s grand, Jim, that certainly is grand, all right, ole man, so long for the meantime.”

Joe hung up the receiver; but only for a minute. His big hand reached out again, he rang Laura at Hilltop, his voice quiet, sympathetic, reasonable:

“I must talk to you, Laura, honestly I must. Ah, what’s the use going on that way, Laura. Surely I know how you feel about it, I don’t blame you, but we’re only human, aren’t we, and we’ve got to make the best of it. Yes, yes, call me anything you like, I daresay I deserve it, but for God’s sake let’s get things straight. I’ve got to see you, there’s no getting away from it. What! All right, all right, Laura, I can’t force you to meet me, if you won’t come, you won’t… but I’ll be at the flat all evening in case you should change your mind….” He continued talking for a couple of minutes before he realised that she had hung up at the other end. Then he smirked, replaced the receiver and fell joyously upon his work.

That night he went without his usual dinner at the County and got home by six o’clock. Whistling, he built up the fire, helped himself to whisky and a cold mutton pie, then washed and brushed himself, slipped on his new checked dressing-gown and sat down to read the paper and wait.

From time to time his eyes strayed towards the clock. Occasionally the sound of a car in the crescent outside made him straighten expectantly in his chair. As the hand of the clock moved round, a frown began to mar the smooth handsomeness of his brow, but at nine o’clock the sharp ring of the door bell sent him eagerly to his feet.

Laura entered with a kind of nervous violence. She wore a raincoat and an old brown hat that fitted closely on her head. There were splashes on her shoes; he had the feeling that she had walked all the way from Hilltop. She was very pale.

“I came, you see,” she declared with bitter hostility, her hands thrust in her raincoat pockets, her whole figure braced. “Now what have you got to say?”

He did not attempt even to approach her. He kept his eyes on the floor.

“I’m glad you came, Laura.”

“Well?” she queried in that same suppressed voice. “You’d better say it quickly. I can’t wait long.”

“Sit down,” he said in a brotherly voice. “We can’t talk like this. You’re tired, you look absolutely all in.” Tactfully he turned away and began to stir the fire into a fresh blaze. She watched him with a cold irony, then with a sigh of fatigue she let herself sink into a chair. She said bitterly:

“I haven’t had a minute’s peace since I left this wretched room.”

“I know.” He sat back in his own chair, chastened, staring into the fire. “But we couldn’t foresee this, Laura, how could we?”

“Every time I look at him,” a sob rose in her throat. “Every minute of the day. He can’t bear me now. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? He seems to hate to have me near him. He’s got to go to Bournemouth, to a rest home there. He actually asked me not to come with him. It serves me right, it serves me right. O God, how I loathe and detest myself.”

He made a mutter of sympathy.

“Don’t,” she cried. “I loathe and detest you too.”

“Stanley doesn’t need to know anything about us,” he reasoned. “Not one single thing.”

“I should hope not.” She turned on him with savage irony. “You don’t propose to tell him, do you?”

“Oh no,” he answered in a queer voice. He got up and went to the sideboard where he mixed a stiff whisky and soda. “Not if you stand in with me. Laura. Here, you better try this. You look absolutely done.”

She accepted the tumbler mechanically, still staring at him.

“How do you mean, stand in with you?”

“Well, we got to be friends, Laura.” He took a sip at his own drink, meditating sombrely. “Friends all round, that’s my motto, I’ve always been a friendly sort of chap. You see it would be pretty awkward if there was a burst up. It wouldn’t do Stanley any good, or any of us for that matter. Stanley needs me in the business now, I’ve all sorts of ideas for expanding, amalgamating. Why, only the other day I was talking to Jim Mawson of Tynecastle. You know Mawson — one of the best business men in Tynecastle. Well, if Mawson and Stanley and myself got together, you’ve no idea how we could reorganise the foundry. We’d make a perfect gold mine out the place.”

“I see,” she whispered, “I see what you want. You’re sick of me in any case. And now you want to use me, use all that’s happened between us—”

“For God’s sake, Laura, have a heart. This is absolutely on the level! We’ll have a company, there’s pots of money in it for all of us.”

“Money! You think of nothing but money. You’re contemptible.”

“I’m only human, Laura. We’re all only human. That’s why I fell in love with you.”

“Don’t!” she said fiercely.

A silence came; she drank her whisky. It restored her. Joe at least was practical in what he did. She took a look at him, hating him. For all these weeks she had hated him, visualizing his loudness, his vulgarity, his insatiable egoism, his physical grossness. And yet he wasn’t really gross, she had to admit it despite herself. He was handsome, extraordinarily handsome. His figure was beautifully muscled, he had the most winning brown eyes. And she had taught him so much, how to dress, to groom himself: in a sense she had created him.

“Are you still angry with me, Laura?” he asked humbly.

“I’m not even thinking about you.” A pause. Rudely, she held out her empty glass. “Here, get me another of these. I think I deserve it.”

He hurried to obey. He sighed.

“I’ve thought about you a lot in these last weeks. I’ve missed you.”

She gave a short laugh, swallowing her drink as though it was bitter.

“You’re lying. You’ve got off with someone else while I was away. While I’ve been nursing a man who loathes me, a man who’s been blown up and dried up, you’ve been sleeping with some other woman. Come on, now, own up, speak the truth.”

“I am speaking the truth,” he lied earnestly.

“I don’t believe you,” she said; but for all that her heart gave a sudden throb. She added: “In any case it doesn’t matter. I’m myself again, thank God. I don’t care if you have a hundred women. I’m going to devote myself to Stanley now.”

“I know, Laura,” he said. “Just let’s be friends.” He reached over to take her empty glass but instead he took her hand.

“How dare you, how dare you.” She snatched her hand away. Her eyes filled with tears, she began all at once to cry.

“Just friends, Laura,” he pleaded. “Just the best of pals.”

“How can you make me so unhappy. Haven’t I been through enough? I’m going… going.” She rose quite blindly and at the same moment his arms were round her, gently restraining, holding her with confident strength.

“You can’t go like this, Laura.”

“Leave me, leave me, for God’s sake leave me.” She tried to break away from him, weeping hysterically.

“Please, Laura, please.”

As she struggled she felt herself trembling. She felt the trembling of her body against his.

“Oh, how can you, Joe,” she cried. “How could you be so beastly to me.”

“Laura!” He kissed her.

“No, Joe, no,” she whispered weakly. But his lips again prevented her from speaking. Everything dissolved and fell away from her except the sense of his nearness. Reaction flooded her too. All those awful weeks at Sawbridge, her loneliness, Stanley’s peevishness — the deadly monotone of the machine man, whose sex lay buried in that shell-hole, somewhere in France. She closed her eyes. A shiver went over her. Joe didn’t really love her, he was merely using her, would throw her over. But it was no use for her to try. She felt him carrying her to the bedroom.

When she got back to Hilltop it was nearly ten o’clock and Mrs. John Rutley sat waiting in the lounge.

“Oh, my dear,” said Mrs. John, rising and taking both Laura’s hands in warm sympathy. “They told me you’d gone out to get some air but I simply had to wait. I’m so sorry about Stanley, my dear. I had to run down. You look so upset. And no wonder, as I was saying to John, you were always such a little pair of love-birds. But don’t you worry, my dear, you’ll soon get him right.”

Laura stared at the older woman. Her face broke into a distorted smile.

NINETEEN

Towards the middle of November 1917 Martha heard about Annie Macer. It was Hannah Brace who told Martha that sharp winter morning and Hannah Brace was distressed that such a misfortune should have come on a decent girl like Annie. She stood on the pavement of the Terrace, her blowsy hair gathered under a man’s peaked cap, her nose blue with cold, her figure sagging, the door-mat she had come out to shake dangling from her hand.

“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” she said, “when I saw Annie was that way!”

The dismay in Hannah’s good-natured face was not reflected in Martha’s. Her expression revealed nothing as, without waiting for the gossip which Hannah so obviously desired, she went into her own house and closed the door. But for all that a great rush of triumphant vindication overwhelmed her. She sat down at the table and rested her chin on her big knuckled fist and thought about what Hannah had just told her. A stem smile came upon her lips. She had always said, hadn’t she, that Annie was no good, and now it was proved that Annie was no good. She was right, she, Martha Fenwick was right.

Sammy was responsible, of course. Sammy had been out a great deal during his last leave; he had even, to her serious displeasure, stayed away from home an entire week-end. And this was the result. Yes, Sammy was responsible; but that was nothing. By Martha’s reasoning the man was never to blame. Martha was glad, yes, she admitted it to herself savagely, glad that things had turned out this way. Sammy would not respect Annie now. Never! Martha knew there was nothing a man hated worse than to get a girl in trouble. Besides Sammy was away, far out of the way in France. And when he came home she, Martha, would manage Sammy. She would manage Sammy away from Annie Macer. She knew how she’d do it, she knew exactly.

The first step, naturally, was to see that Hannah Brace was right. At eleven o’clock that same forenoon Martha put on her coat and walked slowly down Cowpen Street listening for the sound of Annie’s bell. At present the Macers were having a struggle; Pug had drifted into the army and old Macer, landlocked by mines and handicapped by increasing rheumatism, had to make the best of it by hand-lining off-shore for whiting. Annie helped him with the hand-lining, digging the lugs when the tide was out, putting her shoulder to the boat in the early morning, baiting the snecked steel hooks, setting with her father out beyond the harbour while the dawn broke gently over the grey water. Then, in the forenoon, when the town had wakened, Annie hawked the catch with a creel on her back and a little brass bell in her hand through the streets of Sleescale.

This forenoon Martha heard Annie’s bell at the foot of Cowpen Street. It was always an irritation to Martha, that bell of Annie’s, but to-day when Martha saw Annie she forgot all about the bell. One eagle glance from Martha’s eye deduced the fact that Hannah Brace was right. Annie was that way.

Along the street Martha went, slow and formidable, until she came abreast of Annie, who had laid down her creel on the pavement to serve Mrs. Dale of the Middlerig Dairy. Martha stood watching Annie while Annie took the clean gutted fish in her clean chapped hands and put them on the plate Mrs. Dale gave her. Martha had to admit that Annie was clean. Her weather-blown face was hard-scrubbed, her blue apron newly washed and stiff from ironing, her arms, bare to the elbow, pink and firm, her eyes clear as though they had been polished by the wind. This grudging admission of Annie’s cleanness made Martha more bitter. With her lips drawn in she stood waiting until Annie had finished with Mrs. Dale.

Annie straightened herself from the creel at last. She noticed Martha and her face lightened slowly, imperceptibly. Annie’s expression never changed quickly; it had a quiet, almost stolid repose, but now it did undoubtedly brighten. She thought Martha wanted her fish and that was an honour which Martha had never bestowed on Annie before. Annie smiled diffidently.

“I have nice whiting, Mrs. Fenwick,” she said. A pause while Annie reflected she might have been too forward. So she added: “They’re bigger than usual, anyway.”

Martha did not say anything, she continued to look at Annie.

Annie did not understand yet. With an easy movement of her fine body, she lifted the creel by its black leather strap and showed the catch to Martha.

“Dad and me got these at four this morning,” she said. “They take best with a mist on the water. I’ll put a couple on your step as I go past, there’s no need for you to carry them up.” It was a long speech for Annie, an extremely long speech; it was extremely long because Annie was extremely anxious to please.

Martha said nothing, but as Annie raised her eyes from the freshly caught fish, Martha gave Annie one insolent ice-bound look: the look knew everything, said everything, was significant of everything. Annie understood. Then Martha said:

“I don’t want your fish nor anything else you’re like to have.” Then she waited, tall, erect, formidable, waiting for Annie to answer her back. But Annie did not speak. Her eyes fell towards her creel, as if humiliated.

A cruel wave of triumph swept over Martha. She still waited until, seeing that Annie would not speak, she turned, with her head high in the air, and walked away.

Annie lifted her eyes and stood looking after Martha’s retreating figure. There was a nobility about Annie at that moment. Her open, weather-burnished face expressed neither shame nor confusion nor anger, but a kind of sorrow was mirrored there. She remained for a moment as though steeped in some profound regret, then she shouldered her basket and went up the street. Her bell rang out quiet and clear.

After that Martha went out of her way to humiliate Annie. She did not hesitate to “give Annie her character” in the Terraces. It was a strange reaction. Martha was never one for idle talk: as for scandal, she scorned and despised the mention of the word; but now she took a bitter pleasure in spreading the news of Annie’s trouble.

She made it her duty to encounter Annie as often as she could and she never passed without giving Annie that withering look. Nothing was said; but there was always that look. She discovered a favourite walk of Annie’s, a walk Annie took by herself in the evening, which was the only time she had a moment to herself, a walk which led along the shore and up the steep hill beyond the Snook. Martha, who never went beyond the Terraces of the town, began to take this walk too. Sometimes Annie was on the cliff first, staring out across the sea, and sometimes Martha was there first; but whatever the way of it Martha always gave Annie that silent look. Often Annie seemed to wish to speak to Martha, but Martha’s look froze all speech. For years she had suffered because of Annie; now Annie could suffer because of her!

Not that Martha gave a hint of the situation to Sammy; in her letters to Sammy Martha never said a word. She was too wise for that. She sent him more parcels than ever, most wonderful parcels she sent to Sammy; she made Sammy feel her worth. She had Sammy’s allowance every week on Sammy’s ring paper and that allowance enabled Martha to do what she wanted. She could never have got along without Sammy’s allowance.

The days and the weeks passed. Little enough was happening in Sleescale. At the Neptune they were well advanced with the new road into the Paradise. Jenny was still living in Tynecastle with her people and Martha never heard from her. Harry Ogle, son of old Tom Ogle, had been elected to the Town Council. Hans Messuer had been removed from the cottage hospital to an internment camp. Mrs. Wept kept her pie shop open on two days of the week. Jack Reedy had returned from the front with bad gas-poisoning. Letters from David arrived regularly, once a month. Life still went on.

And Annie Macer still went on hawking the fish which she and her father hand-lined in the early morning when the pale mist lay on the water. Everyone said it was a disgrace that Annie should go on hawking fish, but Annie could not very well do anything else. Annie’s brother, Pug, was not the kind to send allowances and hawking that fish was the livelihood of Annie and her dad. So Annie went on with it in spite of the disgrace.

But one day Annie did not go on with it. The day was the 22nd March and on that day Annie did not appear with her basket and her little bell. Martha looked for Annie in vain. And Martha thought with a savage thought, Is this her time, is she come to it at last?

It was not Annie’s time. In the evening Martha took the walk along the shore, past the Snook and up the cliff beyond. She took the walk partly from her newly formed habit and partly to see if Annie would be there. Annie was not there. And Martha stood erect and vigorous, looking down the path, thinking her savage thought that it was Annie’s time, that Annie had come to the bearing of her bastard at last.

But it was not Annie’s time. As Martha stood there she stiffened slightly, for at the foot of the cliff path she saw Annie, and Annie was coming up the path.

Annie came up the path slowly and Martha waited with her look ready, waited until Annie should come up. Tonight Annie took a long time. She climbed slowly, slowly as though labouring under a great burden. But at last she got to the top. Then Martha threw her look at Annie.

But Annie took no notice of the look. She paused before Martha, unusually pale and breathless from her climb and she stooped slightly as if tired, as though still she laboured under a great burden. She gazed at Martha, then she gazed out to the sea, as she always had done, gazing towards the place where Sammy might be. Then, as though she spoke the simplest fact:

“Sammy and me got married in August.”

Martha drew back as if she had been stung. Then she straightened herself.

“It’s a lie,” she said.

Still looking towards the place where Sammy might be, Annie said again, sadly, almost wearily:

“We were married, Sammy and me, his last leave in August.”

“It’s not true,” Martha said. “It can’t be true.” With a triumphant rush, “I’m getting Sammy’s allowance.”

Still looking towards the place where Sammy might be, Annie said:

“We wanted you to get the allowance, Sammy and me. We didn’t want it stopped on you.”

Martha was harsh and pale with anger. Her masterful pride throbbed in her. Between her clenched teeth she said:

“I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it.”

Slowly Annie withdrew her eyes from the place where Sammy might be. Her eyes were dry. A great shadow lay upon her face, she looked more than ever as though she laboured under a heavy burden. She handed Martha the telegram in her hand.

Martha took the telegram. The telegram was to Mrs. Annie Fenwick. The telegram said: Regret to inform you your husband Corporal Samuel Fenwick killed in action March 19th.

TWENTY

On the 24th of April, 1918, Arthur’s sentence expired and at nine o’clock of that day, dressed in his own clothes, he passed through the prison gates. He came out of the grey stone archway with his head down and walked cautiously away. It was a grey, dank morning, but to Arthur the sense of light and space was unbelievable. He could scarcely understand, his eyes blinked apprehensively. Why was there no cell, no wall to stop him? He walked faster, suddenly aware that the walls lay behind him now. He wanted to get away.

But soon he had to give over walking quickly; he wasn’t fit for that. He was like a man just out of hospital, very weak and easily tired, with a stoop and a sickly pallor ingrained into him. His hair was cropped close, too, right down to the bone — Warder Collins had seen to that a couple of days before, it was Collins’ last little joke — so that he looked as if he had been through an operation on his brain, a serious operation on his brain in that large hospital he had left behind.

It was this operation on his brain, no doubt, which made him glance nervously at everybody he met to see if they were looking at him. Were people looking at him? Were they looking? Were they?

He walked for about a mile until he came to the outskirts of Benton, then he went into a workman’s coffee-house: Good pull up for lorries was on the sign outside. He sat down, keeping his hat on to cover his shaven head, and his eyes on the table, and he ordered coffee and two poached eggs. He did not look at the man who served him, but he saw the man’s boots and dirty apron and yellow nicotined fingers. The man asked to be paid whenever he brought the coffee and poached eggs.

Bowed over the table with his hat on, Arthur drank the coffee and ate the poached eggs. The strong knife and fork felt clumsy in his hands after the tin cutlery of the prison, and his clothes sat loosely and awkwardly upon him. He had shrunk a little in the place back there. But he thought, I’m out. I’m out, he thought. Oh, thank God, I’m out.

The coffee and eggs made him feel better and he was able to look at the man on the way to the door and ask him for a packet of cigarettes.

The man had red hair and an expression of vulgar inquisitiveness.

“Twenty?”

Arthur nodded abruptly and put a shilling on the counter.

The red-haired man put on a confidential air.

“Been in long?” he asked.

Then Arthur knew that the man knew he had been in prison — probably most of the convicts stopped at this place on their release — and a wave of colour rushed into his sallow face. Without answering he walked out of the shop.

The first cigarette was not very good, it made him slightly giddy but it made him feel less conspicuous in the street. A little boy going to school saw him open the packet and ran after him asking for the cigarette card. Arthur fumbled eagerly for the card with his calloused and insensitive fingers and held it out. It helped him in some mysterious way to be spoken to by this little boy, to feel for an instant the warm contact of his hand. He felt himself suddenly more human.

At Benton terminus he took the tram to Tynecastle and in the tram he sat thinking with his eyes on the floor. When he had been in prison he could think of nothing but the outside. Now he was outside he could think of nothing but the prison. The good-bye of the governor, of the prison chaplain, rang in his ears: “I hope this has made a man of you.” The doctor’s inspection: “Pull up your shirt, let your trousers down.” Hicks’s final pleasantry over the shoulder at exercise: “Little bit of skirt to-night, Cuthbert?” Yes, he remembered. He remembered particularly the last satire of Warder Collins. Something had made him offer his hand to Collins when the warder had made the key sound for the last time. But Warder Collins had said:

“Not on your bloody life, Cuthbert,” and expectorated neatly into Arthur’s hand. As he thought about it Arthur instinctively wiped his palm against his trouser leg.

The tram blundered into Tynecastle, through crowded familiar streets, and finally stopped outside Central Station. Arthur got out of the tram and entered the station. He meant to buy a ticket for Sleescale, but when he got to the booking-office he hesitated. He could not bring himself to do it. He went up to a porter.

“When is the next train for Sleescale?”

“Eleven fifty-five.”

Arthur looked at the big clock above the bookstall. He had five minutes in which to take his ticket and catch the train. No, no, he couldn’t decide so quickly, he didn’t want to go home yet. He had been informed, at the time, of his mother’s death and now, with a queer self-deception, he tried to attribute his indecision to the fact that she was gone. He wavered away from the booking-office and stood before the bookstall, studying a placard. Big Push Begins. He liked the crowd about him, the bustle, movement, obscurity. As a girl brushed past him he remembered Hicks’s remark again: Little bit of skirt to-night, Cuthbert?

He reddened and turned away. To put off time he went into the refreshment-room and ordered a mug of tea and a roll. Why disguise the fact? He wanted to see Hetty. He was so weak, so tired, so sick with pain and longing, he wanted to be with her, to fall on his knees before her, put his arms about her. Hetty really loved him. She would understand, pity and console him. A melting tenderness consumed him, nothing else mattered, tears filled his eyes. He must, he must see Hetty.

Towards one o’clock he left the station and started to walk towards College Row. He took the slight incline slowly, partly because he was quite exhausted, but chiefly because he was afraid. The mere thought of seeing Hetty again drove the blood from his heart. When he reached No. 17 he was in a pale anguish of expectation. He stood on the opposite side of the street staring across at the Todds’ house. Now that he was here he shrank from going in, a host of unhappy thoughts deterred him. How pleased they would be to see him, walking in unexpectedly like this, straight from prison. No, he had not the courage to walk up these steps and ring the bell.

He hung about in an agony of indecision, longing with all his soul to see Hetty, hoping he might have the luck to find her leaving or entering the house. But there was no sign of Hetty. Towards three o’clock the faintness came over him again and he felt he must sit down. He turned towards the Town Moor, which lay at the top of College Row, making for one of the benches under the lime trees, telling himself he would return later and resume his watch. He crossed the road, his feet dragging languidly, and, at the corner, he walked straight into Laura Millington.

The unexpectedness of the meeting was quite startling; it made him catch his breath. At first Laura did not recognise him. Her face, wearing a look of preoccupation, almost of apathy, remained unchanged. She made to pass on. And then she knew him.

“Why, Arthur!” she gasped, “it’s you.”

His eyes remained upon the pavement.

“Yes,” he stammered, “it’s me.”

She gazed at him intently, her expression altered, shocked from its fixed melancholy.

“Have you been to see my father?”

He shook his head dumbly with eyes still averted. The hopelessness in his attitude gave her a renewed pang. Deeply touched, she came up to him and took his arm.

“You must come in,” she said. “I’m going there now. You look quite ill.”

“No,” he muttered, drawing away childishly, “they don’t want me.”

“But you must,” she insisted. And like a child he yielded and allowed her to lead him towards the house. He had the awful feeling that at any moment he might burst into tears.

She took a key from her bag, opened the door, and they went into the back sitting-room which he knew so well. The sight of his shaven head forced a gasp of pity from Laura’s lips. She took him by the shoulders and put him in a chair by the fire. He sat there with his prison pallor upon him and his clothes hanging on his drooping prison-shrunken frame while she hurried into the kitchen. There she said nothing to Minnie, the maid, but herself quickly brought him a tray with tea and hot buttered toast. She watched him with concern while he drank the tea and ate some of the toast.

“Finish it,” she said gently.

He obeyed. His intuition told him immediately that neither Hetty nor her father was in the house. Momentarily his mind detached itself from Hetty. He raised his head and for the first time looked at Laura.

“Thanks, Laura,” he said humbly.

She did not answer, but once again that quick sympathy flashed into her pale face as though a sudden gleam from the fire had illumined it. He could not help thinking how much older she looked; there were shadows under her eyes, she was dressed indifferently, her hair quite carelessly arranged. Through his daze, the change in her reached and astounded him.

“Is anything wrong, Laura? Why are you here, alone?”

This time a deep and painful emotion broke through the surface of her eyes.

“Nothing’s wrong.” She bent and stirred up the fire. “I’m staying with father this week. You see, I’m closing up the house at Hilltop, in the meantime.”

“Closing your house?”

She nodded, then added in a low voice:

“Stanley’s gone down to Bournemouth to a rest home; you probably didn’t know he’d been shell-shocked. I shall join him when I have settled things up here.”

He looked at her helplessly; his brain refused to operate.

“But the works, Laura?” he exclaimed at last.

“That’s been arranged,” she answered in a flat voice. “That’s the least of it, Arthur.”

He continued to look at her in a kind of wonder. This was not the Laura he had known. The fixed sadness in her face was quite startling, that droop to her mouth, ironic yet pained. A deep, mysterious instinct, born of his own suffering, made him sense a wounded spirit, behind this outer, indifferent crust. But he could not work it out just now, the insufferable fatigue bore down on him again. A long silence came between them.

“I’m sorry to be a trouble to you, Laura,” he said eventually.

“You’re no trouble.”

He hesitated, feeling she might now wish him to go.

“But now that I’m here, I thought — I thought I might as well wait and see Hetty.”

Another silence. He could feel her looking at him. Then she rose from the hearthrug where she had been kneeling, staring into the fire, and stood before him.

“Hetty isn’t here any more,” she said.

“What?”

“No,” she shook her head. “She’s down at Farnborough now — you see—” A pause. “You see, Arthur, that’s where Dick Purves is.”

“But what—” He broke off, a barb twisting in his heart.

“You don’t know,” Laura said in that same flat voice. “She married him in January.” Her eyes slipped from his, she put her hand on his shoulder. “It was a sudden affair; when they gave him the V.C., it was just immediately after your mother died, after the inquest. He got the V.C. for bringing down the Zeppelin. We never thought, Arthur… But Hetty just seemed to make up her mind. The wedding was in all the papers.”

He sat perfectly still, in a kind of graven stolidity.

“So Hetty’s married.”

“Yes, Arthur.”

“I never thought of that.” He swallowed and the spasm seemed to pass over his entire body. “I don’t suppose she’d have had anything to do with me in any case.”

Wisely, she made no attempt to console him. He made an effort in the chair.

“Well, I ought to be going now,” he said in an unsteady voice.

“No, don’t go yet, Arthur. You still look seedy.”

“The worst of it is… I feel it.” He got shakily to his feet. “O Lord, I do feel queer. My head’s full of feathers. How do I get to the station?” He raised his hand stupidly to his brow.

Laura took a step forward, intercepting him on his way to the door.

“You’re not going, Arthur. I can’t let you go. You’re not fit. You ought to be in bed.”

“You mean well, Laura,” he said thickly, swaying on his feet. “I mean well, too. We both mean well.” He laughed. “Only we can’t do anything.”

Resolution formed in her. She put her arm round him determinedly.

“Listen to me, Arthur, I refuse to send you out in such a state. You’re going to bed… here… now. Don’t say another word. I’ll explain to father whenever he comes in.” Supporting him she assisted him into the hall and up the stairs. She lit the gas fire in her bedroom, quietly but firmly helped him out of his clothes and into bed. When this was done she filled a hot water bottle and put it to his feet. She considered him anxiously: “How do you feel now?”

“Better,” he answered, without meaning it.

He lay curled up on his side, realising that he was in Hetty’s room, in Hetty’s bed. How amusing! — he was actually in dear little Hetty’s dear little bed. Nice bit of skirt tonight, eh, Cuthbert? He wanted to laugh but could not. Recollection twisted the barb in his heart again.

It was about five o’clock in the afternoon. The sun, breaking through the low clouds, came slantingly into the room, making the wallpaper glow. In the small back garden some young thrushes were whistling. It was very still and unreal, and the softness of Hetty’s bed was unreal, and Laura must have gone away and the unknown longing in his breast hurt him.

“Take this, Arthur. It’ll help you to sleep.”

Laura had returned. How good she was to him. Resting on his elbow he drank the bowl of hot soup she had brought him. She sat beside him on the edge of the bed, filling the silent room with her real presence. Her hands, holding the tray for him, were white and soft. He had never thought much about Laura before, never cared much for her; but now her kindness overwhelmed him. Out of sheer gratitude he cried: “Why do you bother about me, Laura?”

“I shouldn’t worry, Arthur, if I were you,” she said: “everything’ll come all right.”

She took the empty bowl and placed it upon the tray. She made to get up.

But he reached out and stayed her, like a child fearful of being left alone.

“Don’t leave me, Laura.”

“Very well.”

She sat down again, placed the tray on the bedside table. She began gently to stroke his forehead.

He sobbed, then started to cry brokenly. In complete abandonment he lay against her, his face pressed against her, against her soft body. The comfort of his face against her softness was unbelievable, an ease flowed like warm milk through his being.

“Laura,” he whispered, “Laura.”

A fire of indulgence blazed in her suddenly. His attitude, his need of comfort, the pressure of his head against the lower part of her body raised a wild tension in her. Staring rigidly across the room she saw her own face in the mirror. A quick revulsion took her. Not that, she thought fiercely, no, not that gift. She gazed down at Arthur again. Worn out, his sobs had stopped, he was already on the edge of sleep. His lips were open, his expression undefended, helpless, exposed. She saw the wounds plainly. There was something infinitely sad and wistful in the flaccid closure of his eyelids, the narrow foreshortening of his chin.

Outside, the thrushes ceased to sing and the dark beginnings of the night crept into the room. She still sat there, though he was asleep, supporting his head. The expression on her face was pathetic and beautiful.

TWENTY-ONE

For a fortnight Arthur lay ill at Todd’s, unable to get up. The doctor whom Laura brought had an alarming suspicion of aplastic anæmia. He was Dr. Dobbie from 1 College Row, an intimate of the Todd family, who knew Arthur’s history, and he behaved with kindness and discretion. He made several blood counts and treated Arthur with intra-muscular injections of manganese. But it was Laura rather than Dr. Dobbie who got Arthur well. There was some rare quality, a passionate selflessness, in the attention she gave him. She had closed the house at Hilltop and all her time she spent looking after Arthur, preparing his food, reading to him, or merely sitting in silent companionship by his bed. Strange behaviour for a woman naturally so indifferent, so apparently self-absorbed. It was perhaps an atonement, a clutching at this chance straw of expiation in the throbbing desire to prove that there was something of good in her. Because of this every step made by Arthur towards recovery, every single word of gratitude he spoke, made her happy. In tending his wounds she healed her own.

Her father did not interfere. It was not Todd’s nature to interfere. Besides, he was sorry for Arthur who had, so disastrously, swum against the stream. Twice a day he came into the room and stood awkwardly making conversation, pausing, clearing his throat, and, in an attempt at ease, balancing himself beside the bed first on one leg then on the other, like an elderly, rather dilapidated robin. The obviousness with which he sheered away from topics of danger: the Neptune, the war, Hetty, from anything which might be painful to Arthur, was touching and comic. And he always concluded, edging towards the door:

“There’s no hurry, my boy. Stop here as long as it suits you.”

Gradually Arthur improved, he left his room, then began to take short walks with Laura. They avoided the crowded places and went usually across the Town Moor, that high sweep of open park from which on a clear day the Otterburne Hills were visible. Though he was not yet aware of how much he owed to Laura, occasionally he would turn to her spontaneously.

“You’re decent to me, Laura.”

“It’s nothing,” she would invariably reply.

It was a fresh bright morning and they had seated themselves for a few minutes on a bench upon the highest part of the Moor.

“I don’t know what I’d have done without you,” he sighed; “slipped right under, I suppose. I mean morally, of course. You don’t know the temptation, Laura, just to let everything go.”

She did not reply.

“But somehow it feels as if you’d put me together again, made me something like a man. Now I feel I can face things. It isn’t fair though. I’ve had all the benefit. You get nothing.”

“You’d wonder,” she answered in a strange voice.

While the wind blew cleanly about him he studied her pale, chastely cut profile, the passive immobility of her figure.

“Do you know what you remind me of, Laura?” he said suddenly. “In a book at home, one of Raphael’s Madonnas.”

She coloured painfully, violently, her face suddenly distorted.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said harshly and, rising, she walked rapidly away. He stared after her, completely taken aback, then he got up and followed her.

As his strength came back he was able to think of his father, of Sleescale, and of his return. He must return, his manhood demanded it. Although procrastination and timidity were in his blood he had a serious intensity which gave him strength. Besides, prison had hardened him, increased that sense of injury and injustice which now activated his life.

One evening, towards the end of the third week, they were playing bezique together, as they often did after supper. He picked up his cards and, without warning, declared:

“I must get back to Sleescale soon, Laura.”

Nothing more was said. Now that he had announced his intention, he was tempted to delay the actual date of his departure. But on the morning of May 16th when he came down to breakfast, after Todd had left for the office, a paragraph in the Courier caught his eye. He stood by the table with the paper in his hand, his attitude arrested and motionless. The paragraph was quite small, six bare lines, lost in a mass of shrieking war news. But Arthur seemed to find it important. He sat down with his eyes still fixed upon these six bare lines.

“Is anything the matter?” Laura asked, watching his face.

There was a silence; then Arthur said:

“They’ve driven the new roadway into the Paradise. They went through to the dead-end three days ago. They’ve found the ten men and the inquest is to-morrow.”

The whole force of the disaster rushed over him again like a wave which has momentarily receded only to return with greater strength. His mind contracted under the impact. He said slowly, his eyes on the paper:

“They’ve even brought some of the relatives from France… for formal identification. I must go back, too. I’ll go today… this morning.”

Laura did not answer. She handed him his coffee. He drank it mechanically, confronted once again by the situation which had altered, and ruined, his life. The thing from which there was no escape. Now he must go back, must, must go back.

When he had finished breakfast he looked across at Laura. She interpreted that glance, the fixed idea which compelled him, and she nodded imperceptibly. He rose from the table, went into the hall and put on his hat and coat. He had nothing to pack. Laura accompanied him to the door.

“Promise me, Arthur,” she said in her unemotional voice, “you won’t do anything stupid.”

He shook his head. A silence. Then, impulsively, he took both her hands.

“I’m no good at thanking you, Laura. But you know how I feel. I’ll see you again. One day soon. Perhaps I can do something for you then.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed.

Her unresponsive manner left him rather helpless; he stood in the narrow hall as though he did not quite know what to do. He released her hands.

“Good-bye then, Laura.”

“Good-bye.”

He turned and walked into the street. A gusty wind holding a spatter of rain blew against him all the way down College Row, but he reached the station by twenty minutes past ten and took his ticket for Sleescale.

The 10.15 local was almost empty and he had a third-class compartment to himself. As the train puffed its way out of Tynecastle, through the interminable sequence of stations, past familiar landmarks, across the Canal Bridge, through Brent Tunnel and finally drew near to Sleescale, Arthur had a strange sense of at last returning to consciousness.

It was half-past eleven when he stepped out on the Sleescale platform. Another passenger was at that moment in the act of alighting from the rear end of the train, and as they both converged upon the ticket collector Arthur saw with a sudden constriction of his heart that it was David Fenwick. David recognised Arthur instantly, but he gave no sign, nor did he try to avoid him. They met and passed through the narrow passage to the street.

“You’ve come back about the inquest,” Arthur said, in a low voice. He had to speak.

David nodded silently. He walked along Freehold Street in his faded uniform and Arthur walked with him. A thin rain, driving in from the sea, met them at the corner. Together they began to climb Cowpen Street.

Arthur took a startled side glance at David, intimidated by his silence, the stem composure of his face. But in a moment David spoke, as if forcing himself to be tranquil and at ease.

“I’ve been back two days,” he said quietly. “My wife is living in Tynecastle with her own people. My little boy, too.”

“Yes,” Arthur murmured. He knew now why David was on the train. But he could find nothing more to say.

Again silence, until opposite Inkerman Terrace and his old home, David abruptly paused. Fighting that secret bitterness in his voice, he said:

“Come in here a minute, will you? There’s something I must show you.”

Mastered by an unknown emotion, overwhelming and intense, Arthur followed David along the broken pavement and into No. 23. They entered the front room. The blinds were drawn but in the dim light Arthur saw two coffins, still open, laid upon boards in the centre of the room. Arthur’s senses seethed within him like waves battling in a narrow sea. With a thudding heart he advanced towards the first coffin and his eyes met the dead eyes of Robert Fenwick. Robert’s body was four years old: the face perfectly saponified, waxy white in colour, the skin moulded on the shrunken bones, like an effigy. Recoiling, Arthur covered his eyes. He could not meet those dead eyes, the eyes of the victim, blank yet accusing. He wanted to retreat, shuddering, and yet he could not; he was numbed, helpless.

David spoke again, still fighting the bitterness in his tone.

“I found this,” he said, “on my father’s body. No one else has seen it.”

Slowly, Arthur uncovered his face. He stared at the paper in David’s hand, then with a sudden movement he took it, held it close to him. It was Robert’s letter; and Arthur read the letter. For one second he thought he was going to die.

“You see,” David exclaimed in a strained voice. “This makes things clear at last.”

Arthur kept staring at the letter. He had turned an earthy grey, he looked as if he might fall down.

“I don’t intend to take this any further,” David said in a tone of dead finality. “But it’s only right you ought to know.”

Arthur lifted his eyes from the letter and stared away through David. He put out his hand, supporting himself against the wall. The interior of the room spun round him. It was as though the cumulation of all his sufferings, his suspicions and his fears had struck him at one tremendous blow. He seemed at last to discover David. He folded the letter and handed it back to him. David restored the letter to his inside pocket. Then, in a cracked voice, Arthur said: “You can leave this to me. I’ll let my father know.” A shiver ran over him. Feeling that he must reach the outer air, he turned blindly and went out of the house.

He walked up to the Law through the heavy shower sweeping the bleak Avenue. But the rain pelted against him without effect. He walked in a kind of trance. The folded slip of paper which had lain for four years against the dead heart of Robert Fenwick had made everything plain to Arthur, everything which he had suspected and feared. Now he neither suspected nor feared. He knew.

An overwhelming surge of conviction broke over him: it was preordained that he should see this letter. The meaning of the letter enlarged and magnified itself and took upon itself many and unfathomable meanings, each diverse and beyond his present understanding but all leading to one common end. His father’s guilt. A sick rage blazed up in Arthur; he wanted to see his father.

He went to the steps of the Law and tugged at the bell. Aunt Carrie opened the door herself. She stood motionless, framed in the doorway, gazing at him with wide and startled eyes, then with a cry of thankfulness and pity she flung her arms round his neck.

“Oh, Arthur, my dear,” she sobbed. “I’m so glad to see you. I wondered… I didn’t know… oh, you’re not looking well, my poor boy, you’re looking simply dreadful, but oh, it’s wonderful you’ve come back.” Controlling herself with difficulty, she shepherded him into the hall, helped him out of his coat, took possession of his dripping hat, Little phrases of affection and pity kept breaking from her lips. Her delight that he should be home again was pathetic. She fluttered about him, her hands agitated, her pinched lips tremulous.

“You’ll take something now, Arthur dear, at once. A glass of milk, a biscuit, something, dear…”

“No thank you, Aunt Carrie.”

Outside the dining-room towards which she guided him, he paused:

“Is my father back yet?”

“Why no, Arthur,” Aunt Carrie stammered, discomposed by the strangeness of his manner.

“Will he be home for lunch?”

Aunt Carrie gave another little gasp. Her mouth pinched closer and turned down nervously at the corners.

“Yes, Arthur, of course. About one, he said. I know he’s got a great many arrangements to make this afternoon. About the funeral. Everything’s to be done most handsomely.”

He made no attempt to reply. He glanced about him, observing all the changes which had taken place since he had been away: the new furniture, the new carpets and curtains, the new electric fittings in the hall. He remembered his cell, his sufferings in prison, and a shudder of revulsion passed over him at this luxury, a hatred of his father which made him tremble in all his limbs. A nervous excitement, a kind of ecstasy such as he had never known took possession of him. He felt himself strong. He became aware of what he wanted to do and of an almost painful longing to do it. He turned to Aunt Carrie.

“I’ll go upstairs for a bit.”

“Yes, Arthur, yes,” she fluttered even more agitatedly. “Lunch is at one, such a nice lunch.” She hesitated, her voice a whisper of distress. “You won’t… you won’t upset your father, dear. He’s got so much on his hands, he’s… he’s a little irritable these days.”

“Irritable,” Arthur repeated. He seemed to try to fathom the meaning of the word. Then he moved away and went steadily upstairs. He did not go to his own room but to his father’s study, the room which, since his childhood days, had been sealed with a taboo, making it a sacred, forbidden room. Exactly in the centre of the room stood his father’s desk, a solid richly grained mahogany desk with beaded edges, heavy brass locks and handles, more sacred, more forbidden than the room. Hostility burned in Arthur’s face as he studied this desk. It stood there large and solid, impregnated with the personality of Barras, a thing hateful to Arthur, the symbol of everything which had destroyed him.

With a sudden gesture he picked up the poker which lay beside the fireplace and advanced on the desk. With deliberate violence he smashed open the lock and examined the contents of the top drawer. Then the next lock, the next drawer; one after another he went through the entire desk, rifling it systematically.

The desk was crammed with the evidence of his father’s wealth. Stock receipts, bills of exchange a list of outstanding mortgages. The leather-bound book, written in his father’s precise hand, enumerating properties and rentals. That other book with a tiny pasted label: My Pictures, the prices of each purchase marked plainly against the date. A third book holding the record of investments. Quickly, Arthur scanned the columns: everything sound, redeemable and in small parcels, at least two hundred thousand pounds in gilt-edged securities. In a fury Arthur hurled the book from him. Two hundred thousand pounds: the magnitude of the total, the loving neatness, the smug complacency that ran through the rows and rows of figures, maddened him. Money, money, money; money sweated and bled from the bodies of men. Men didn’t matter; it was money that mattered, money, money, money. Death, destruction, famine, war — all were as nothing so long as these sleek money bags were safe.

Arthur wrenched at another drawer. An avenging spirit worked within him now. He wanted more, more than the evidence of money. He had the fatal conviction that the plan, the Old Neptune plan, lay here. He knew his father: ingrained with the stigmata of acquisitiveness. Why had he never thought of this before? His father never destroyed documents or papers; it was a physical impossibility, an agony, to destroy documents or papers. If Robert Fenwick’s letter did not lie, the plan existed and the plan was here.

Drawer after drawer lay rifled on the floor. Then, in the last bottom drawer, a thin roll of parchment, very soiled and unimportant. Perfectly unimportant. A loud cry broke from Arthur’s lips. With a nervous flush he unrolled the plan, and, kneeling, examined it upon the floor. The plan demonstrated instantly that the old waste was clearly indicated, running parallel to the Dyke in its lower levels and approaching within a bare two feet of the Dyke. Arthur peered closer with his prison-dulled eyes. He made out tracings and calculations in his father’s hand. It was the final proof, the last iniquity.

He got up from his knees, slowly rolling up the plan. The whole structure of the colossal deceit arose before his tormented sight. He stood in the middle of the sacred room with the plan clenched tight in his hands, his eyes burning, his face still bearing the ingrained pallor of the prison. And as though conscious of himself, the prisoner, holding this evidence of his father’s guilt, as though amused by this paradox of human equity, his pale lips parted in a smile. A paroxysm of hysterical laughter convulsed him. He wanted to smash, burn, destroy; he wanted to wreck the room, tear down the pictures, kick out the windows. He wanted punishment, recompense, justice.

With a great effort he controlled himself, turned and went downstairs. In the hall he stood waiting, his eyes upon the front door. From time to time he looked towards the long case clock, hearing the slow inexorable rhythm of the passing seconds in a fever of impatience. But at last he started. At twenty-five minutes to one the car drove up from the station and there was the sound of bustling steps. The door swung open and his father entered the hall. An instant of complete immobility. The eyes of Arthur met his father’s eyes.

Arthur drew a quick sobbing breath. He hardly recognised his father. The change in Barras was incredible. Much heavier and stouter, the hard outlines of his figure softened and become flaccid, a pouching of the cheeks, a sagging of the abdomen, a roll of fat behind his collar, the old static immobility supplanted by a bustling activity. The hands were active, fumbling and fussing with a sheaf of newspapers; the eyes were active, darting hither and thither to see what could be seen; the mind was active, responding eagerly to all the diversions of life which were trivial and worthless. In one devastating flash it struck Arthur that the whole trend of this spurious activity was to acknowledge the present, to repudiate the past, to ignore the future; the end of a process of disintegration. He remained standing with his back to the staircase as his father came into the hall. There was a silence.

“So you’ve come back,” Barras said. “It’s an unexpected treat.”

Arthur did not speak. He watched Barras advance to the table and lay down his papers and a few small parcels which dangled from his fingers. Barras continued, shuffling and arranging the things upon the table:

“You know, of course, that the war is still on. My views have not changed. You know I don’t want any slackers here.”

In a suppressed tone Arthur said:

“I haven’t been slacking. I’ve been in prison.”

Barras gave a short exclamation, moving and re-moving the things upon the table.

“You chose to go there, didn’t you? And if you don’t alter your mind you’re liable to go back again. You see that, don’t you?”

Arthur answered:

“I’ve seen a great many things. Prison is a good place for seeing things.”

Barras gave over his arranging and darted a furtive glance at Arthur. He began to walk up and down the hall. He took out his beautiful gold watch and looked at that. He said with a flickering animosity:

“I’ve got an appointment after lunch. I have two meetings to-night. This is an extremely heavy day for me. I really have no time to waste on you, I’m far too busy.”

“Too busy winning the war, father? Is that what you mean?”

Barras’s face became confused. The arteries in his temple stood out suddenly.

“Yes! since you choose to put it like that, I have been doing my best to win the war.”

Arthur’s compressed lips twitched bitterly. A great wave of uncontrolled feeling rushed over him.

“No wonder you’re proud of yourself. You’re a patriot. Everyone admires you. You’re on committees, your name gets in the paper, you make speeches about glorious victories when thousands of men are lying butchered in the trenches. And all the time you’re coining money, thousands and thousands of pounds, sweating your men in the Neptune, shouting that it’s for King and Country when it’s really for yourself. That’s it, that’s it.” His voice climbed higher. “You don’t care about life or death. You only care about yourself.”

“At least I keep out of prison,” shouted Barras.

“Don’t be sure.” Arthur’s breath came chokingly. “It looks as if you might soon be there. I’m not going to serve any more of your sentence for you.”

Barras stopped his rapid pacing. His mouth dropped open.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed in a tone of utter amazement. “Are you mad?”

“No,” Arthur answered passionately, “I’m not mad, but I ought to be.”

Barras stared at Arthur, then with a shrug of his shoulders abandoned him as hopeless. He pulled out his watch again, using that restless gesture, and looked at it with his small injected eyes.

“I really must go,” he said, slurring his words together. “I have an important appointment after lunch.”

“Don’t go, father,” Arthur said. He stood there in a white heat of intensity, consumed by the terrible knowledge within him.

“What—” Barras drew up, red-faced, half-way to the stairs.

“Listen to me, father,” Arthur said in a burning voice. “I know all about the disaster now. Robert Fenwick wrote out a message before he died. I have that message. I know that you were to blame.”

Barras gave a very perceptible start. A sudden dread seemed to fall on him.

“What do you say?”

“You heard what I said.”

For the first time a look of guilt crept into Barras’s eyes.

“It’s a lie. I absolutely deny it.”

“You may deny it. But I have found the Old Neptune plan.”

Barras’s face became completely congested with blood, the vessels of his neck stood out duskily and thickly. He swayed for a moment and leaned instinctively against the hall table. He stammered:

“You’re mad. You’ve gone out of your mind. I won’t listen to you.”

“You should have destroyed the plan, father.”

All at once Barras lost control of himself. He shouted:

“What do you know about it? Why should I destroy anything? I’m not a criminal. I acted for the best. I won’t be bothered with it. It’s all finished. There’s a war on. I’ve got an appointment at two… a meeting.” He clutched at the banisters, breathing desperately, with that suffused and dusky face, trying to push past Arthur.

Arthur did not move.

“Go to your meeting then. But I know that you killed those men. And I’m going to see that they get justice.”

In that same panting, flushed voice, Barras went on:

“I have to pay the wages. I have to make the pit pay. I have to take chances just as they do. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. I acted for the best. It’s finished and done with. They can’t reopen the inquiry. I’ve got to have my lunch and get to my meeting at two.” He made that hasty, bustling gesture, feeling for his watch; he missed the pocket and forgot about it; he stared at Arthur, crumbling within himself.

Arthur’s soul sickened. This was his father and he had loved him. His voice was impersonal and devoid of feeling.

“In that case I shall forward the plan to the proper quarter. You can’t object to my doing that.”

Barras compressed his forehead with his hands, as though to still the pounding of his blood.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” he groaned with utter incoherence. “You forget that I have a meeting. An important meeting. I have got to wash, to lunch. At two.” He stared at Arthur in a bewildered, childish way. He made a convulsive gesture and found the watch. He considered the watch with that dusky querulous face, then he took a few rapid steps which carried him past Arthur and up the stairs.

Arthur remained standing in the hall, his features contracted, drawn. He felt empty and hopeless. He had come nerved for a fight, a desperate struggle to assert himself, to demand justice. And there had been no fight, no struggle, no justice. Now there would never be justice. He would not send the plan. It was too pitiful, this shell of what had once been a man, his father. Hunched against the banisters he felt crushed by the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of life. He sighed deeply, a sound wrung from his heart. Upstairs, he heard his father moving about: rapid and uneven movements, thumping footsteps. He heard water running. Then, as he turned to leave the house, all at once he heard a heavy fall.

He swung round, listening. No more sounds. Absolute stillness. He ran upstairs, Aunt Carrie was running too. They ran to the bathroom door and hammered on the door. There was no answer. Aunt Carrie let out a terrified shriek. Then Arthur took a rush and burst in the door.

Richard Barras lay on the floor, his face half covered in lather, the soap still clutched in his hand. He was conscious and breathing deeply. It was a stroke.