You Can't Be Too Careful

I. Species Homo Tewler

I am telling the simple life story of one individual Londoner, and I am pledged not to stray from a plain objective narrative; nevertheless it has already been necessary to supplement this record of acts and deeds by statements of a more general nature, to place the story definitely” in its historical perspective. Just as if you are making a deposition about murder on the high seas you have, if possible, to indicate the latitude and longitude of the ship. It has been necessary, for instance, to indicate the rôle of the feudal and Christian traditions, if the story is to be read understandingly by an enlightened American or Russian or Chinese reader, or to have any value for that posterity to which, under the restrictions of the present paper shortage, it is mainly addressed. And now furthermore in one brief but concentrated section we must broaden our reference wider still and show not merely Tewler in terms of terrestrial latitude and longitude but Tewler in relation to the starry universe, to space and time and ideals...

We have already called attention to the general nature of the Metamorphosis through which Edward Albert passed out of his tadpole stage. We must expand a little more on that, because it explains why his love life, as we may call it, was widely different in its nature from the simple, concentrated, exciting and even beautiful romanticism, which the literature of our present social order is preserving for the inspiration of posterity.

In the plays and novels of that now rapidly vanishing past, from which, like people who have been salvaged from a severely bombed city, we are emerging stunned and uncertain; in that literature, I say, the characters are definitely described as being “in love with” so and so. This being “in love” is a specific concentration of desire and affection upon the “object”, who is always of the opposite sex, and it excludes all other interests. The character “falls” into it, It is presented as the common quality of all the humanity that is fit to print. A rake is a person in whom this state of mind is less enduring than usual, but when he is in it, he is in it as simply and entirely as a really good man. And most villains are made villains through scorned and unrequited love. The tragedies of life are when A is in love with B and B on the contrary loves G or anyhow does not return A’s love. The dark side of love comes up when B, for mercenary reasons, pretends to be in love with A. And further B may love C unknowingly when believing himself or herself to be in love with A. Moreover, there was a process, exactly parallel to religious conversion, when B “learnt to love” A, or gradually fell out of love with A and into love with C. Around this primary system of adult loves were grouped equally firm and invariable loves—of mothers, of sons and daughters.

Just as hardly anyone in that idealistic past, believed his religion, which was really far too complex and artificial for any human brain to understand and believe, but only liked to believe he .believed it, so the worthy generation into which Edward Albert was born liked to believe it had a simple, explicable, and generally acceptable “love life.” In each case there was a fundamental falsification of reality. The story our progenitors told was not how they were actually behaving. It was just how they wanted to believe they behaved. But why did they all, Edward Albert included, distort reality like that?

The normal human being, you may have observed, has a passion for autobiography. You have it yourself. If you deny it indignantly, that means merely that you have it in its more passive form. I have told you something that you resent because it does not tally with the story about yourself that you tell yourself. This passion becomes oppressively manifests for instance, in fellow-travellers on ships, whose minds have been relaxed by a flux of strangers at leisure, and it is particularly evident in general conversation in America. At bottom every American seems to be in a state of wonder at his own high and profound motivation, and as anxious to make himself believe it all as to convince you.

And this is natural enough, and was to be expected, because the riddles of human conduct are far more difficult than those of any other animal. The onrush of social life has come to this lonely-spirited ape, for that is what we still are fundamentally, at headlong speed, through a conspiracy of inventions and devices, in a few thousand generations, and he has found himself involved with an ever-expanding multitude of fellow-citizens, whom he is disposed to fear and to hate and to get the better of in almost equal measure.

This is no mere theorising, or it would be quite out of place here. This is simply a repetition in general terms of the case of Edward Albert Tewler as it has been put before you in the preceding two books, unobtrusively for the most part, but with an outbreak of explicitness in Book the Second, Chapter Three. It is the case of Homo Tewler > which includes all of us—Homo sapiens existing as yet only in the dreamlands of aspiration. This poor uncomfortable creature is continually doing its best to make a plausibly consistent story of its behaviour both to itself and the social world about it, and to be guided by that legend so as to escape an open breach with its environment. The urgency we are under to pull ourselves together and make an acceptable account of ourselves finds its outlet in these yarns about religious experience and consistent love that we force upon one another at every opportunity.

So it has been since the ancestral Tewler (Pithecanthropus Tewler) found himself coming down from his nice safe tree nests to the agoraphobia of the ground level and, with the most strenuous suppressions of his primary instincts, living in ever-expanding communities. He wants intensely to say,

“You can rely on me to do this. It is quite impossible for me to do that. But since I am a Moslem you cannot expect me to do that! No healthy Englishman would dream of...”

He says such things to himself, and will hear of no other possibility of conduct outside their scope. The last thing he will do is to admit our common, essential and unavoidable incoherence. He fences himself about with taboos and customs and creeds, and the more energetic sort of people, themselves believing, have been only too ready to assist their weaker brethren and strengthen their own faith, by guiding and controlling them. This is right and lovely, and as for that? Oh! you’d never do that! The sage, the teacher, the priest, the guru, have kept their fingers pointing steadily away from fact towards the ideal.

And as long as the circumstances of the life of Homo Tewler have not changed too rapidly for these guides to accomodate themselves to the new conditions, his societies have been able to get along by clinging to this or that particular compromise with truth, which provided an effective method of co-operation. The co-operation might be imperfect, but it rubbed along.

For long ages Homo Tewler managed to pretend that his private imaginations and the more unpleasant realities of his behaviour were not actually there at all, that the misbehaviours of his fellow-creatures were “abnormalities” and lapses which he did not share—“Oh, quite impossible!”—or that they were due to diabolical possession of an exceptional tort. It was only with the advent of psychoanalysis that a complex tangle of fancies and dreams that he had hitherto denied and smuggled away, was dragged out shamefacedly as his “sub-conscious” into an almost too vivid light of day.

“What’s all this?” asked the psychoanalyst, “I’m really surprised at you,” like a conjuror taking a rabbit out of the good man’s hair. We all had a sub-conscious, he declared. Every one of us. All. But—we began to remember things we had been in the habit of dismissing from our minds. It was most disconcerting.

Freud and his psychoanalysts suffered from the disadvantages of a classical education, and in their researches into the concealments of their troubled patients, they found remarkable reminders of the sonorous taboo tragedies of the Greeks. Impressed by the irrational freaks of adverse incidents, and unable to believe the dreadful truth that Nature, pursuing a course as yet undeciphered, cares not a dam for her individual offspring, Homo Tewler has always pitted his poor cunning against the Indifference, in the hope of finding lucky and unlucky observances that will compel It to behave and misbehave. Magic was primitive science in practice, and its observance was Taboos. Taboos still rule our minds. We break a Taboo and nothing we believe will arrest the consequences. It is Fate. Scarcely anything will persuade us that Fate doesn’t care a rap about it, that the calm of the Indifference is unruffled. We keep on fussing. You mustn’t marry your mother-in-law, even if you don’t know she is your mother-in-law, or look, like Ham, at your parent’s ill-adjusted dress. Oh! it’s just awful for you if you do. If you meet a black cat or three magpies, cross yourself or go home and hide. But these scholar-psychiatrists chose to elevate their Greek classics to a sort of history of the human imagination, and invented (Jung chiefly) a great Oedipus complex, a lesser Electra complex and all the rest of the psychoanalysts’ Classical Walpurgis Night, to systematise our mental chaos. With these Fate dramas they entangled the Hebrew idea of original sin, which also manifestly arose out of a legend of a broken taboo and a curse. (You can’t be too careful.) Adler, as we shall see later, with his “inferiority complex”, came much nearer to the main reality of human imperatives.

A little less of the classics and a trifle more of biology, and the psychoanalysts would have understood that this “sense of sin” of theirs is neither more nor less than the natural discomfort of an imperfectly adapted animal to its environment. It has no more to do with some profound universal conviction of transgression than a coat that is tight under the arms or the wrong spectacles. Now that the environment of Homo Tewler has begun to change at a pace and to an extent that would have been absolutely incredible fifty years ago, a ruthless urgency calls upon him to adapt his mind and his way of living to these vast demands and become Homo sapiens indeed, before utter disaster overwhelms him. Can he? And will he? He is much more likely to give way to storms of taboo terrorism, to mutilate and prostrate himself, to seek to propitiate the offended fetishes by violent persecutions, to revert to inquisitions and witch smellings....

At this point the Censor intervenes and objects that if this goes on, our story will cease to be a specific monograph upon Edward Albert Tewler and will become a general dissertation upon human life, which is precisely, says the Censor, what I undertook to avoid. I would dispute that, were I not afraid that the reader would take sides with the Censor, In the Introduction....

But there is no need to wrangle. What I have said I have said. I will revert now to our “specimen” of Homo Tewler var. Anglicanus and tell how he lived into the opening phase of our world catastrophe and what he said and did then. I will do my utmost henceforth to stick still more closely to the record of his individual acts and experiences.

Yet I must admit here that I join with Mrs Richard Tewler in deploring the inaudibility of Mrs Humbelay. If only we could have heard those lost trailers of hers, we might have benefited greatly from her unlimited store of obscure and occasionally, what many people might be disposed to consider, obscene wisdom. I could have quoted her and that would have been indisputable story-telling....

It has to be recorded then that Edward Albert never in the whole course of his life really loved or felt honest, generous friendship for any human being such as the codes of our literary tradition require. That demands an amount of deliberate mental synthesis of which his early education and upbringing had already rendered him incapable. How he worked out his own conception of an acceptable religious life has been told. He became a moderate Christian after the fashion of the majority of his fellow-countrymen, occasionally he went to church, some Anglican church, but he rarely did so unless there was nowhere else to go or he had some personal incentive, and he thought about his religion as little as he could. There it was, like a passport put away in a safe, and you did not bother about it until there was a call for it. Then out it came. “Pass Christian!” (“Them Atheists will look a bit silly!”) His sexual development was more confused and complicated than his religious history, it had become entangled with a number of factors in the metamorphosis which were essentially independent of sexual reproduction, and to that greater complex we must now address ourselves.

II. Purity by Terror

Among the claims made for that ideal life lived in the imaginations of the good folk of the Edwardian age was its Purity. Most people were supposed to be more or less pure, and in the case of the autobiographical type this was stressed very aggressively. I remember being told, on our second day’s acquaintance on a liner, by a proud and happy mother, apropos of a rather lumpish son of seventeen or eighteen who may or may not have been just out of earshot, “That boy is still as pure as the driven snow.” (I don’t think I saw his face.) But they kept up the make-believe so widely that mostly they did believe that the majority of the people about them who seemed to be leading pure lives were in fact leading pure lives. You have witnessed Mrs Tewler’s struggle to keep our hero pure. And here I recall my never to be sufficiently lamented Mrs Humbelay and how she was saying something about forgetting one’s dreams and imaginations, when she so unhappily went under the threshold of audibility and was lost to us.

Those people who still seek and profess purity in our harder world must murder and banish memories to a wonderful extent. True that almost all animals forget sexual experiences very readily. That is understandable of animals, who have their transitory annual rutting, because otherwise the creatures would always be in a state of unseasonable excitement. But man is an unseasonable creature and he does not naturally forget so completely. Consider all our pastors and teachers, and particularly consider the case of Mr Myame, His passion for Purity, for the complete suppression of any thought of an approach to a sexual act, in himself and others, assumed an undeniable frightfulness.

The English-speaking world has altered so rapidly that it is already difficult to believe that before the World War of 1914-18, The Times would rather have died of shame than have admitted such words as syphilis or venereal disease to the massive chastity of its columns, and that when that unforgettable heroine, Ettie Rout, came from New Zealand to distribute precautionary packets to the Anzac soldiers, telling them to control themselves if they could but use the packet if they couldn’t, the blushing military authorities, men no doubt leading exceptionally holy lives, who imagined that these unpleasant contagions, now rapidly fading out of existence in our franker world, were God’s vindictive device to punish impurity in his creatures, did their best to back up their God and suppress her. And Mr Myame, forgetting to his utmost ability, forgetting it may be altogether, or remembering only dimly as one is haunted by a horrible dream, fought as stoutly as the Blimpest of Colonel Blimps in the same losing fight against reality.

So, in accordance with the wishes of the late Mrs Tewler and after a noiseless vigil in the Joseph Hart dormitory, followed by a close inspection of Edward Albert’s bed clothes, he called the young man into his study and handed him a serious-looking volume. It was only a few days before Edward Albert became an adder. Mr Myame gave him the book and he charged his account for it. Whether he would have done so after the great shock is an idle speculation. “I want you to read this very very carefully indeed, Tewler,” he said.

“There are things in this.... It is high time you knew them.”

Mr Myame paused. “It’s a book for your very private reading. I should be careful not to leave it about or let it fall into the hands of your younger schoolfellows.”

The book was entitled Dr Scaber’s What a Young Man Should Know. It had been, it said in a brief preface, a guide and help to many generations of struggling souls, so that it was at latest Victorian. It had revealed the facts of life frankly and helpfully to them and saved them from terrible dangers. There was no indication of what sort of Doctorate Dr Scaber held, nor indeed any biographical material whatever. Edward Albert read, at first with curiosity and then with a deepening dismay. “Gaw!” he whispered to himself. “You can’t be too careful. If only I’d known.”

The little book told of the stupendous dangers and horrors of the vicious life in either its social or solitary aspect. The latter it pursued with even greater vehemence than the former. On the heels of those who departed in the least from the path of perfect purity stalked the most frightful forms of suffering and decay, rotting bodies, racking pains, ebbing strength, attenuation, a peculiar expression of face, impotence, imbecility, idiocy, madness. A cold perspiration bedewed the reader’s brow.

He had completely forgotten when the thing began with him. It had crept upon him between sleeping and waking.

Now, with a gathering urgency, Nature was at work in Edward Albert, in her own clumsy way inciting him to acts conducive to reproduction. The life cycle of Homo, we have already remarked, is far more primitive than that of most other land animals; among other remote ancestral aspects still traceable in his life, the spawning impulse, like the urgencies of creatures who live in warm tropical seas, recurs mensually and not annually. In that briefer rhythm these creatures are stirred up to seek relief for their accumulating milt or spawn. Nature is a sloven, she never cleans up completely after her advances, and so we abound in vestigial structures, and our beings are haunted by the ghosts of rhythms that served her in the past. In the Hominida the ghost of the lunar cycle has materialised again. The solar rut guides us to St Valentine’s Day and the merry merry springtime, but the lunar rut also has revived and is still effective with us. It causes a recurrent uneasiness, we are distraught and nervous, it breaks down control by night and we dream. In some manner relief comes to us and must come. Since man is no longer a tropical amphibian, this necessity for “relief” rarely coincides with the phases of his more elaborate social life. “You might,” deliberated Mrs Humbelay, “call it a side issue. And yet it’s hardly that, is it? But what there is to make all this fuss about....”

“If I pray,” stipulated Edward Albert in his distress. But he was beginning to lose whatever confidence he had ever had in the efficacy of prayer. There is often such a whimsicality in His answers, that you cannot be too careful how you invoke Him. All through his teens Edward Albert’s mind had black storms of anxiety. Dr Scaber’s shadow lay across his mind. He had, it seems, committed that Sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no forgiveness. Dr Scaber said as much.

Since most of the people in the world about him were maintaining the same silences and concealments as himself, he felt his case was a dark, exceptional one. His dreams, his almost involuntary derelictions were his own peculiar guilty secret. It was not until he was past the age of eighteen that the accumulating effect of chance jests and rude remarks from various acquaintances, led to a dawning realisation that his peculiar uncleanness was neither so rare nor perhaps so heinous as he had supposed. But he was ashamed of it with a slowly fading shame to the very end of his career.

It took still longer for him to realise that there could be any sort of impurity about the female of the species Homo Tewler. He%would have gratified that mother on the liner by his fantastic ignorance about women. He was as pure as her own dear boy. He never imagined that girls and women too had desires or fantasies—until the crisis of “his first married life of which you will be told in due course. The poor dears in those dim religious days, a third of a century ago, were being kept more blankly ignorant about themselves—until terrific things happened to them—than their brothers. They too peeped and wondered and had their justifiable terrors.

Yet all the time, urged on by implacable Nature, and stimulated rather than repelled by the enormity imposed upon the whole business by the good Dr Scaber, Edward Albert was meanly and furtively trying to know, doing his utmost to know, about It. And also not to let anyone know that he was trying to know. He had extremely little curiosity about women except as the media of It. It was It he was after.

III. Peeping and Prying

Peeping Tom worked dutifully and regularly in his North London Leaseholds office. In his loose fragments of time, before social relationships began to complicate things, he would more or less consciously obey the urge of Nature to be up and doing about It. He wandered, and almost always he wandered towards the parts of London where there were pictures in windows, where there were undraped statues, where strange women walked about in a provocative way and even said “Ducky” to you. But Dr Scaber had put him wise about them. You can get those awful diseases from a kiss, from a split lip.

Until his legacy he could not afford to go to the movies very much and they were mostly heroic and adventurous then, there was kissing, almost too much of it, you joined with other lads of spirit to echo the sounds on the back of your hand, but you never got to anything—anything really instructive.

Gradually he discovered the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum. They were open on Sunday afternoons. You could wander about whistling softly. You could look sideways. You could be bolder and look straight. Lots of people looked straight without a blush. It was remarkable how nude and yet how coldly uninformative a statue or a picture could be.

Then there was window peeping. His bedroom commanded the windows of the attics of a row of houses giving on Euston Road. There every night people went to bed, and particularly a young woman who, with a certain disregard of her possible visibility, undressed completely in front of a small mirror. By putting out his own light and standing in the dark, he could see her bright pink illuminated body gradually emerging from her clothes. He could see her arms and torso as she combed her hair. By standing on his chair he could see quite a lot of her, but never enough. She yawned. There was just one moment before she pulled her nightgown over her head, and then out went the light.

Still the mystery remained.

Women seemed always to be showing more and more of themselves in those years of relaxation—but never quite, enough. But sometimes you seemed to see through their clothes. One evening he was sitting in the drawing-room, studying the lingerie advertisements in an illustrated papers, and suddenly he looked up. There was Miss Pooley sitting with her back to him at the writing table. Her soft round neck was revealed by the boyish way her blonde hair was cut and her dress displayed her clear skin down to the dip between?, her shoulder blades, and there were the lines of her body as plain as plain, and her bare elbow, and one leg was thrust back....

He could scarcely believe his eyes. There was the top of her stocking and above that three inches of bare smooth shining Miss Pooley before the tight skirt began.

His reaction was extraordinary. He wanted to kill Miss Pooley, He wanted to leap upon her and beat her about and kill her. He had a savage feeling that in some way he was being cheated by her. He couldn’t get up for various minor reasons until she went away. Then he threw the illustrated paper aside and retired precipitately to the secrecy of his own room.

IV. Assertion

This insane urgency of our mad Mother Nature to make us seek “relief” was not by any means all that was happening to Homo Tewler in his metamorphosis. A number of other things, and some of them even more fundamental than this insistence upon unintelligent futile orgasms, were also breaking out in his changing personality.

The tadpole Homo Tewler is an abject timid thing, a thing of flight and refuge, but with the metamorphosis into an adult specimen of the Primates, quite a new series of later acquisitions break into the gathering personality. The apes, including the Hominida, left the monkeys and lemurs at an early stage and developed along a line of their own, into ego-centred combative creatures with a disposition to own all the universe within sight. Reluctantly Homo in his various species, has been forced into an uncongenial social life in the brief course of a million years or so. Yet still his fundamental nature remains. Still he wants to feel successful, masterful, lord and owner of all he surveys, and if he can feel so, he will.

That is something much more persistently present than hunger or lust, which are impulses that can be sated and suppressed for a time. But Homo craves for self-assertion and reassurances from the sprouting of his whiskers to his death rattle. It is his natural resistance to the social envelopment that has happened to him, and which continues to restrain his anarchistic disposition. He never forgets about himself, never just grazes on like a sheep or nibbles like a rabbit.

It is unavoidable, and even if the breed of Homo Tewler rises presently to a point where it may indeed merit this name it has usurped so prematurely, Homo sapiens, this conflict, the moral conflict, the need for education, for being trimmed to fit into social life which is the cause of all religion, will still be in it. It may be controlled, propitiated, diverted and sublimated, but it will be there. We must not indulge in prophecies and speculation. In this book we are not concerned with that possible but improbable animal, Homo sapiens, who may rise indeed in revolt against old Mother Nature and try to wrest his destiny out of her hands. But we are dealing with an animal living far below the intellectual level of any such Satanic revolt. We are concerned with our specimen of Homo Tewler and his individual impulse to exist as emphatically as he could in society as he found it.

That amiable philosopher, Adler, dealing with problems of education and general behaviour rather than with sexual aberrations, thrust much of the Freud-Jung psychology into a minor role, and concentrated upon what he called the “inferiority complex.” But he seems to have thought of it as something to a large extent curable, whereas in truth, with all the social Hominida, up to and including every living specimen of Homo Tewler, great or little or bond or free, it is an integral part of their make-up.

“I exist,” says this innate complex, “but do I exist importantly enough? Are these creatures about me getting the better of me, pushing in front of me? This I must not and cannot stand. Do they realise my existence?” This is something over and above every other urgency. It can blend with and pervade the sexual complex. Dogs, other social animals, betray an inferiority complex, but to nothing like the same extent as Homo. Edward Albert’s hatred of his college teachers and lecturers was one of its manifestations. He detested concerts because he had to sit still while the performers, as he put it, “showed off.” He detested most of the people at a concert because they affected a discriminating taste for music and so got away with it. They were Beastly Prigs and so the wound was healed. Few conductors realise the little spots of hatred scattered through the audiences they dominate. Singers particularly, Edward Albert loathed. He would have produced horrible parodies of the sounds they made had he dared. The dear old British B.B.C. at its virtuous outset tried to give the English Tewlers improving doses of classical music. The Tewlers in their millions protested with passion. What Edward Albert wanted was slave music that ministered to him, so that he could take possession of it, drum with his fingers, jig with his feet, vocalise as it went on, get up and caper, stamp on it. That was a bit of all right.

And at Doober’s all the time, Edward Albert and all his kindred Tewlers without a solitary exception, each after his or her manner, sustained a continuous unconfessed struggle to assert themselves. There were differences in finesse and that was all. And the uneasy peace of the establishment was maintained by a continual give and take of resolute pretension and insincere mutual acquiescence.

Thackeray was a novelist with a strange impulse towards truth-telling, and he wrote for a public that had to be propitiated and could be propitiated by the bare-faced flattery of inviting them to share his amusement at the foibles of other people. His Book of Snobs, broadened out, embraced his unsuspecting public and himself and all mankind, and showed our universal effort to escape from insignificance.

[But here a reader protests, quite a nice contented reader, with a twinkle in her eye. “Not quite universal,” she pleads. “There are people of good breeding who can be absolutely unpretentious. I admit the struggle. Nowadays one sees it all about one. In a time of shifting values, when no one knows his place, there is a vast amount of pushing and pretending. Some of it is quite ridiculous. I can’t help being amused. I laugh to myself. But so far as I am concerned, none of these things make the slightest difference to me. I can assure you. I’m just simply myself with everyone.”

To which the only possible reply is: “Exactly, Madam.”]

The development of self-assertion in Edward Albert’s mind throughout his teens was by no means confined to such simply negative reactions as his hatred of lecturers, classical music and singers. He was giving increased attention to the effectiveness of his personal appearance. He meditated suits, with a sub-purple glow, shirts, handkerchiefs and ties to correspond. Suppose, he thought, he got some gold cuff links, real gold, and just let his hand lie on the table.... They’d see.

Old Mr Blake, the erudite Frankincense, the young Indian, continued for the most part to treat him as an invisible man, but the women, he felt, noticed all these things. He was discovering a new use for women. They were interested in and affected by the clothing of the male. A new suit, a new cut of collar, a fresh tie—they saw it directly you came into the room. They looked at each other. He caught them at it. Thump was friendly, but he missed Edward Albert’s finer points.

Our hero was steadily becoming more unobjective and more autobiographical in his mind. When he went for a walk nowadays he found a new interest in the reflection of himself in oblique shop windows. He hardly ever looked at people. He looked for people who were looking at him. Sometimes he carried it off all right, but sometimes doubt would seize him and he would find himself uncertain about his steps and his hands became an encumbrance. Then he felt he would like to go home at once and change his clothes,

In spite of these incidental failures he would plan fresh aggressions. He had a vision of coming into the dining-room at seven-thirty sharp, eating his dinner in a tremendous hurry and departing headlong—in faultless evening dress—to some high and unknown destination! That would make them think. He carne near to ordering that evening dress merely for the sake of that reverie,

But in truth Doober’s was far too occupied with its own individual schemes of aggression to notice the mental stresses and turmoil of our hero. They thought of him, when they thought of him at all, merely as a gawky, growing young man with a rather convulsive, guilty manner if spoken to suddenly, a definitely Cockney accent, and an odd taste in dress.

V. The Thump Tragedy

Now while these things were happening within our accumulating young man as Nature expanded and consolidated him, familiar faces were disappearing from Scartmore House and new ones replacing them, and he was growing into a more and more definitely recognised member of Mrs Doober’s happy family. He watched the new arrivals with an increasing interest in his effect upon them, and he made advances to them instead of waiting to be accosted.

The Belgians went. They had found some sort of employment in the Congo Free State. Mr Frankincense took some tremendous honours in London University and went off, covered with glory, to become the Principal of a college in India where Indian young gentlemen studied to pass the degree examinations of London University. The seditious laugh of the long, lean Indian was heard no longer in the boarding-house, and old Mr Blake, having accumulated enough money to acquire an annuity, retired to a small boarding-house at Southsea where he devoted himself to composing a solidly libellous book to be published under the title of Professors, so-called, and Performances. It was to demonstrate the important rôle he had played in the development of physical science during the past forty years, for which he had

“never received the slightest credit. His departure was accelerated by the tragic death of Mr Harold Thump.

“It will never be the same place without him,” said old Mr Blake. “Sometimes we differed a bit in a friendly way, but it was all give and take. A fellow of infinite jest.”

But I have still to tell you of that tragedy. It was a great shock for Doober’s.

Mr Harold Thump, blythe after convivialities, had attempted, it seemed, to slide down the banisters of a restaurant staircase, instead of descending it in an ordinary dull manner. The banisters, which were elegant and elderly, had given way at the second bend and sent him spinning head over heels into an open service lift, which he had descended in a crumpled state to break his neck at the bottom. His last recorded words were, “Hey, boys, look here!”

It was all over in a minute. “We thought he was walking down behind us,” said the Boys in question, scared now and sober. “We heard him singing a bar or so, and then he seems to have taken it into his head to do it. He just flew by us.”

“Like him,” said Mrs Thump, tearlessly hearing the particulars.

It was a stupendous shock. Not only Mr Blake but the whole of Scartmore House was profoundly moved and hushed by this distressing event. The obliteration of so habitually audible an individual left the whole establishment for a while a self-conscious auditory vacuum. Most of the boarders seemed to have discovered for the first time that they also made sounds, and to have been cowed by the discovery. They spoke in whispers or undertones as if the departed was actually there lying in state instead of being away in a mortuary.

Respect restrained all unseemly playfulness. No games except chess went on, and that in silence. On,e was checked and mated by mouth-reading. And light and colour also were muted down. The small widow lady with mittens who had, so to speak, replaced the friend of Lady Tweedman, put aside the brilliant blazer she had been knitting, and started a black comforter, and the thoughtful man of thirty-five who had taken the room of Mr Frankincense openly read his Bible. Gawpy for her part tidied up the hall with extraordinary care and kept the blinds drawn at breakfast time in spite of the waste of gas. Doober’s couldn’t have shown more respect if it had been the King.

The dinner table conversation, except for an insincere Appreciation of the lovely weather and some brightness and hopefulness about the tulips in Regent’s Park and the Royal Academy, which was better than ever in spite of the war, turned almost entirely on the virtues and personal charm of the deceased.

Some boarder would chew mournfully, meditating the while, and then break out. “He”—they never named him—

“He was always so wonderful at Christmas. Christmas always seemed to brighten Him up. Like Dickens. Do you remember the time He gave us all with His snapdragon? He would have it done properly with the lights down, flaming away, and how he upset a lot of it on the carpet? Blue flames they were. Just like a big impatient Boy.”

“But we stamped it out all right,” said Mrs Doober.

“And it really did no harm. On that old carpet. How we laughed!”

“If he’d only been more serious he would have been a great actor—a great comedy actor.”

“He reminded me of Beerbohm Tree. The same big humorous personality. If he’d had the same chances, he might have had his own great Theatre.”

“He was as sensitive as a child. Easily discouraged. That was his weakness. He hated to push. In this world you must push. But he wouldn’t compete. And he’d sacrifice anything for a joke. You might say he sacrificed himself.”

“A great man lost. Yet it never seemed to worry him. Buoyant he was—right up to the end.”

Edward Albert thought out his special contribution to the chorus. “I’ll miss him dreadfully. He was so kind and sorta friendly like.”

“It must have been a great experience to have known Him when He was young and still full of hope and promise.”

The remark seemed aimed at Mrs Thump. She answered in her deliberate colourless way. “Yes. He was full of promise—then.”

“A born playboy. He was nobody’s enemy but his own.”

“And it had to be paid for, of course,” said Mrs Thump, and said no more.

The chorus was resumed. Edward Albert repeated his bit.

The only person who seemed to be backward in this heaping up of posthumous wreaths was Mrs Thump. At first that was ascribed to the depth of her sorrow. She had no words for it. Then it was whispered that she was going to have Him cremated, not handsomely buried in a large tomb, and that she was going away from London.

Cremation was a new idea to Edward Albert. It touched a vein of queer imagination in him. “It can’t be nice being cremated,” he said. “And where are you at the Resurrection? Just a jar or sumpthink.”

“This will be a shock to your literary work,” said old Mr Blake to the widow, finding her sitting alone in meditation.

She considered him. She spoke quite calmly, but with an effect of relieving her mind of something that had been there too long. “No harm now in telling you that I don’t do literary work. He put that about. Amour propre. He had his pride, you know. He just hated to think I was a pirate dressmaker working myself to the bone with a roomful of hussies. That’s what I am, you know, He was sensitive—in that way. That’s all over now, and his feelings can’t be hurt any more.”

“I thought—” began old Mr Blake.

“No. I guess you guessed. Now I can go off to Torquay and run a decent business. I’ve always had a feeling for Torquay.”

“Why couldn’t you have done that before?”

“Because it wouldn’t have paid enough, and He would have insisted on mixed bathing when He was tight and getting into trouble in the water, and also, you know, He’d have had to have a season ticket to run up to London.”

She sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged her shoulders. “But why talk about these things now?”

Old Mr Blake turned that over in his mind and remarked afterwards to Edward Albert, since at the moment there was no one else to make his remark to: “That Mrs Thump is a pretty hard woman. Pretty hard. Very likely he didn’t succeed because she discouraged him. If only she’d believed in him more and shown it.”

“I don’t think she ought to have him cremated,” said Edward Albert. “I will say that....”

The more old Mr Blake thought over his relations to Harold Thump, the more they were transmuted from something very like hostility to profound understanding and affection. How good we can be to the dead! How easily and unwittingly they become our allies! We can quote things they never said in praise of us. Old Mr Blake knew what it was to be frustrated and pushed aside by inferior people—only too well. Harold Thump too, if he had had his proper opportunities and his proper support might have been a really very great man. But that hard woman had been too much for him.

A misogyny natural to old bachelors certainly influenced this judgment, which first he tried out on Edward Albert and then on other suitable listeners. Before she departed, Mrs Thump was under a shadow. It was felt that she had failed in her wifely duty and even perhaps deliberately dragged down this great man and had never really understood.

A certain callousness in her, to give it no harsher word, enabled her to disregard the one or two attempts that were made to convey these ideas to her.

After the cremation, Gawpy allowed the house to relax. Harold Thump became an exhausted topic almost at once. Mr Blake kept a faint glow of disapproval alight about Mrs Thump, until first she and then he departed. Nobody talked about the Thumps any more after that, and by degrees Doober’s was filled by a new generation of boarders that knew not Harold. New jokes arose and established themselves and prevailed; new voices bellowed in the bathroom....

So it was that the Thumps and Mr Blake followed Mr Frankincense and the others out of Edward Albert’s World and were replaced by others to whom he could present a firmer countenance.

VI. Mr Chamble Pewter

Mr Chamble Pewter, the man of thirty-five who had taken the room of Mr Frankincense, was a great reader of books. He liked old ripe rich books, and whenever he heard talk of a new book, it was his practice, he said, to read an old one. Reading and talking about reading, constituted his particular form of self-assertion. The current world might go its own way and invariably that way was despicable; and while Edward Albert dreamt of impressing Doober’s by departing to unknown entertainment in “faultless evening dress”, Mr Chamble Pewter got the same desired effect by producing a “well-thumbed” Horace. The flowering of Bloomsbury was yet to come, and he had still to face the arrogance of a movement that was at once congenial and contemporary. So what he said and did about Mr T.S. Eliot and Mr Aldous Huxley, is unfortunately outside the range of this story.

Edward Albert was as impressed by this book-reading as he was meant to be, and he was gratified to find Mr Chamble Pewter not unwilling to talk to him. It was necessary to Mr Chamble Pewter to talk to some one; he could not talk at large and contentiously because that would have been vulgar, but he found Edward Albert extremely docile. Edward Albert did not always get the drift of what Mr Chamble Pewter said, but since they talked in undertones it was effective to sit and nod as though you did. “I am afraid,” Mr Chamble Pewter would admit after some particularly dark saying,

“I must plead guilty to a sense of humour. I don’t know how I could get along in this absurd world without it.”

Sometimes it seemed to Edward Albert that this sense of humour was very closely akin to that useful sceptical phrase, “I don’t find,” which was spreading through the world, but he was not sure enough of the parallelism ever to use it to Mr Chamble Pewter.

One particular target for Mr Chamble Pewter’s confidential asides was a blond young American student full of enthusiasm for what the sound conservative instincts of Edward Albert and Mr Chamble Pewter convinced them were the meretricious and unstable inventions and discoveries of modern science. His form of self-assertion was informative. His formula was, “You haven’t an idea!” For a time you could hardly open your mouth at Doober’s without his saying,

“Oh, but that’s all changed now.” Did one talk of music? He announced that for the first time pure sounds could be produced, that new and wonderful instruments would presently replace the traditional orchestras. In a little while the “old music” would sound smudgy and limited, pitiful. We should listen to the records in amazement. There would have to be a complete re-orchestration of any of the old music that was worth while.... Did one talk of the cinema, which genteel people were beginning to recognise might be in its vulgar way, funny, what with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford? At once our young man was talking of the sound and colour and solidity which were presently to invade the films. “Utter absurdity!” whispered Mr Chamble Pewter. “They never know when to stop. Laughable, it is.”

Then about flying? He talked of planes that would fly the Atlantic, carry gigantic bombs to Berlin, go to the very top of the air, go round the world in less than twenty-four hours, and then where will you be? Chamble Pewter caught Edward Albert’s eye. “And the moon?” he whispered. Particularly foolish sounded the young man’s talk upon those mad notions of psychoanalysis, relativity and the new missing links between men and the apes.

“A saucer full of rusty scraps of bone,” said Mr Chamble Pewter. “And so, good-bye to God!”

“The young American seemed to scent the evasive antagonism of Mr Chamble Pewter and trailed his coat. At last he provoked a skirmish and got the worst of it.

He was going on in his exasperating way, spoiling their dinners and trampling over their minds with some pretended find of another “human ancestor” from Rhodesia. “But surely,” remarked Mr Chamble Pewter in that mild, destructive voice of his, “you are being a little old-fashioned. This talk about human ancestors. Isn’t it what we used to call Darwinism and all that?”

“None the worse for that,” said the young American.

“But you are always being so very modern. Forgive me if I smile—I have rather a sense of humour—but surely you know Darwinism was completely exploded years and years ago?”

“First I’ve heard of that,” said the young American, rather taken aback.

“We’re none of us omniscient—even the youngest of us,” said Mr Chamble Pewter.

“But how do you mean exploded?”

“What everybody means by exploded. Blown to pieces. Nothing left of him.”

“But who exploded him?”

“Surely you know that! But I suppose we all have our limitations. Some professor at Montpellier—I forget his name—something about the birds and reptiles. A complete exposure. You should look into it. These disputes have never interested me very much, I must confess. But there it is.

“But you don’t mean to tell me that,” the young man began. “No decent zoologist has done anything to question die fact of organic evolution and the survival or extinction of species by natural selection since Darwin broached the idea. Of course in minor details, in accounting for variations, for instance....”

Mr Chamble Pewter retained an expression of serene derision. “Since first I heard of it, I have never doubted for a moment that this idea of Evolution was utterly absurd. So why haggle about details?”

“Did you examine the evidence?”

“No,” said Mr Chamble Pewter. The young American seemed to be at a loss for breath.

“I may be old-feshioned and all that,” said Mr Chamble Pewter in the pause,” but I happen to prefer the Bible story of a creation, to Mr Darwin’s curious idea that a large ape came down a tree, went bald all over and wandered about until he met a female gorilla to whom, by some strange accident, the same impulse had occurred, a very very remarkable coincidence if you come to think of it, and that together they started the human race. I find that improbable to the pitch of absurdity.”

“It is. It’s a caricature. But have you ever looked into the evidence? Do you know how the case really stands?”

“Why should I? I believe with most rational people that this world was Created, and man and woman came straight from the hand of God, made in his image. How else could the world come about? How did it begin? We have age-long traditions, that great literature we call the Bible. I ask you plainly. Do you deny the Creation? That is to say, do you deny the Creator?”

The young man felt the chill of unpopularity about him.

“I deny the Creation,” he said.

“Then you deny your Creator?”

“Well if you must have it—yes.”

A breath of reprobation ruffled the gathering.

“But you mustn’t say that!” said the little lady in mittens. “You really mustn’t say that.”

“No, you can’t say that,” said Edward Albert decisively.

Mrs Doober murmured ambiguously as became her position, and even her down-trodden and practically negligible niece was faintly audible in reprobation.

“Forgive me if I smile,” said Mr Chamble Pewter. “But I have this confounded sense of humour of mine. I suppose it’s really a sense of proportion. But now I’m speaking out, let me say plainly that you scientific people would be insufferable if your ideas had anything like the importance you claim for them. Imagine it. Think of the churches, the cathedrals, the countless good works, the martrydoms, the saints, the vast legacy of art and beauty, the music drawing its inspiration from the divine fount, for all music to begin with was religious, the institution of family life, purity, love, chivalry, kingship, loyalty, the crusades, Benedictine, Chartreuse, the wines of France, hospitals, charities, the whole rich fabric of Christian life. Strip it from us and what is there left of us? You would leave us shivering in the void. Yes, Sir, the void. A world of mechanical apes. Because a few crazy old gentlemen have found some bones and had fancies about them. And they don’t agree even among themselves. Take that queer paper Nature and what do you find? Science perpetually contradicting itself....”

“But—!” The young American had attempted to cut in once or twice upon the flow of eloquence. But every time the new little lady boarder with the mittens had intervened with infinite gentleness and infinite insolence. “Do please let him finish first,” she said. “Please.”

“Tell me when you’ve finished,” said the altogether too modern young man.

“It’s a question of whether you are finished,” said Mr Chamble Pewter, and ceased abruptly.

And this arrogant young man had nothing to say. He had asserted himself over Doober’s too confidently, and now he found Doober’s solid against him. Not a soul had he captured. Even the blonde Miss Pooley, who had seemed at times to listen to him with interest, gave no sign. “Well,” he said. “I never met such ignorance. Here are ideas that are revolutionising the whole human outlook, and you not only don’t know a Thing about them, but you don’t want to know a Thing about them.”

Mr Chamble Pewter drank his coffee and regarded the young American with a quizzical expression. He put down his cup. “Yes,” he said. “We don’t want to know a Thing about them.”

“I give it up,” said the young American. Mr Chamble Pewter shrugged his shoulders and a profound silence ensued.

“Such a lovely black cat jumped on to my window-sill just before dinner,” said the little widow lady with the mittens, relieving the tension.

“Black Toms are said to be very lucky,” said Mrs Doober.

The arsenal of modern ideas got up slowly and thoughtfully and departed to his own room. The discussion was not resumed.

Later Mrs Doober heard him go out and slam the door behind him as loudly as it could be slammed, and she knew from years of experience that he was going out to find another boarding-house.

[Oh! If only people wouldn’t get into these arguments! It had happened before several times. And he was punctual in payment, quiet, gave no trouble.]

It was wonderful to Edward Albert. He was overcome by a wave of discipleship. It was just what he would have said and done himself—if it had occurred to him to say or do anything of the sort. He tried to memorise some of Mr Chamble Pewter’s best strokes before they faded from his mind, so that he could use them later. But he never achieved anything like the polish they had. Throughout this narrative you will hear Edward Albert making frequent use of such destructive comments as “Bawls” or “Dam-rot” or “piffle before the wind”, or “I suppose that’s all right for you”, or “What’s the evidence for that?”

“You can’t put that over me”, and so on. He even got to “Forgive me if my sense of humour prevents my swallowing that sort of rot.”

These were the outer defences of a more and more deeply entrenched ignorance. His instinct had always been to hate novel ideas, more particularly ideas that perplexed him or challenged his prepossessions. But previously he has been inclined to fear them. Now he despised them as impotent. In all this he was being thoroughly English. The Armistice celebrations had filled the soul of Homo Tewler Anglicanus with an immense reassurance. For yet another quarter of a century the educational mandarinate of the victorious Allies protected itself behind a Chinese Wall of self-satisfaction, and the growing body of modern knowledge, having no sense of humour, spluttered indignantly and in vain. As we have heard it .splutter. But you can’t be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a to-morrow rather like to-day. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar to-morrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts....

Try not to notice these jolts.

“It is no good meeting trouble halfway,”

VII. They Come—They Go

So it was that Doober’s changed continually and remained always the same, as manhood dawned murkily upon our Edward Albert. Doober’s, until he was wrenched out of it by circumstances beyond his control, was the foundation of his world. But outside it a number of other human encounters were streaming past him, making suggestions to him and deflecting his ideas about life. The staff he worked with at North London Leaseholds was a purely male one, and his general pose towards his colleagues was of someone “a bit superior” who condescended rather than was compelled to earn. He felt he dressed better than they did. He made a certain mystery of his place of residence; he had more pocket money; most of them still lived in and paid in to their homes. But if he offended them they controlled their resentment at his airs, and he found it more agreeable to go with them to the restaurant they frequented for lunch than to sit alone. And there they met “the girls—”

The girls were still cheaper human material than the clerical staff; they functioned in another department with envelopes and postal responses of various sorts. And they mixed very cheerfully with, the boys at the lunch-time rendezvous. There was a certain process called getting away with a nice boy, and there was a natural response in the adolescing male. A mutual possessiveness was established, which, in those days of underpaid femininity, meant taking your girl out in the evening to a café gossip or a cinema or even a music hall, and paying for her. It was only in the latter stages of the first World War that anything like economic equality dawned on young women. And the North London Leaseholds girls found a certain stand-offishness in Edward Albert provocative rather than annoying, and he responded with a certain excitement. This was far easier and simpler and less sustained than the relationships at Doober’s. He discovered “flirting”, that mutual stimulation of egotism.

Marriage was something remote and incredible for all these youngsters, so that one “paid attention” and professed all sorts of amorous feelings with the completest immunity from any sort of fulfilment. It was a play of self-assertion, remote from any thought of that It, which distressed his dreams and secrecies.

He had a number of shadow love affairs, with Erne and Laura and Molly Brown, the only one whose surname he acquired, and several whose Christian names slipped his memory. The shadow took on a certain substance with Molly Brown. He took her one sunny Sunday to Rickmansworth for a country walk, and they got some ham and beer at an inn. Then they wandered into a patch of woodland and sat down in the shade of some bracken. They looked at one another in a mood of ignorant desire. “Let’s smoke,” she said.

“If anyone sees us,” he said.

“Nobody’s seeing us,” she said, and they smoked and regarded one another.

“Well?” she said, when the smoking was done. They heard a burst of giggling and little squeals in the adjacent bushes. “Her chap’s tickling her!” she said. Edward Albert took no further action.

She sprawled back leisurely and regarded him.

“Kiss me, Teddy!” she said, and she kissed him! She kissed rather nicely. “Like that?” she asked, and they kissed again. “Put your arm round me. No, so.... Let’s cuddle up close.”

He cuddled tepidly.

“My, I wish it was dark. Then we could cuddle. Couldn’t we stay till alter dark and cuddle?”

“Oo. I dunno. P’raps we’re trespassing here. Someone might come along and see us.”

“People won’t mind us just cuddling. They all do it here. Some of them do more than that.”

He mumbled a reply. He was trembling violently. Her kisses and her embrace had set him alight. He wanted to hug her violently, and also he wanted to run away. He was acutely aware of his visibility and with the stir of his senses all the secretive factors in his sensuality were aroused. She kissed him a third time and his self-control exploded. His grip tightened upon her; he held her beneath him, and hugged, hugged actively, breathing hard, until suddenly he was satisfied, and sat up as suddenly and pushed her away from him. She had been struggling against his onslaught.

“Lemme go,” she whispered fiercely “Starp it, I tell you!”

She rolled away from him and sat up also. Her hat had come off, her hair was disordered, her skirts pushed up to her knees, and her expression ruffled. Both of them were flushed and out of breath and surprised.

The tickling had ceased apparently; nobody was audible; the only sound was the breeze among the bracken.

She looked about them. “My word,” she said, in an undertone, “you do hug.”

“I—I liked it, Molly.”

“I didn’t. You were rough. Look at my hair!” She adjusted her crumpled frock and edged still further away from him, “You’ll have to help look for my hair-pins. “You seemed just to go right off your nut.”

“Well, you made me.”

“I like that.”

“You led me on.”

“I’ll take jolly good care I don’t lead you on again, my boy. You were rough. You were rough.”

“Just a bit of fun like, Molly. I didn’t mean anything.”

“Look at my ’at!”

Another young couple in search of retirement rustled through the undergrowth twenty yards away.

“Suppose they’d come by just now,” said Molly with three pins in her mouth, remodelling her hat.

“Well they didn’t anyhow,” said Edward Albert, becoming snappy.

“If they ’ad—”

“Why ’arp on it?” he snarled.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in an atmosphere of mute reproach. They went home long before dusk, and she decided to leave him and go to church with her mother.

“Right O,” said he, instead of the usual tender good night.

He retired thoughtfully to Scartmore House. He reflected that the path of true love never had run smooth.

He knew he was in love with Molly because otherwise why should he have wanted her so much and given way like that?

He wanted to hug again, already, and he dreaded hugging her again. But the next time they met she seemed to have forgotten her urgency and he was disappointed. They sat on a seat by the road on Hampstead Heath, making no further allusion to hugging, and he went on with his favourite impersonation of a mysterious bastard. “I don’t know who my father was or what he was. I’ve been sort of made away with....”

The difficulty of the story was to keep it so as to avoid any suggestion of Great Expectations. For you cannot be too careful. She seemed to listen with a jaded interest, and when he suggested she should give him a kiss she gave him a peck on the cheek. “Let’s go for a ramble into these bushes,” he suggested. She shook her head.

“Just a little bit of spooning,” he pleaded.

“You don’t know where to stop. I don’t like—what you did. You know. Sunday.”

Their next meeting was more hopeful. He took her to a cinema and they sat holding hands side by side in quite their old fashion. Afterwards they got some lemon squash and a sandwich in the new little ham and beef shop, and they had a little tiff about the magic of Rudolph Valentino, which was healed when she accepted Edward Albert’s contention that there was something un-English about Rudolph and admitted that for her own part she couldn’t imagine how any Englishwoman could feel “that way” about any foreigner. “I’d almost as soon a Chinese. But then of course she was half-Mexican.”

That was all right. They met again. But she kept him at arm’s length, and both were much too tongue-tied to explore the difficult question of what “going too far” might mean.

The warmth of his physical interest in her cooled.... That was one significant incident in his sentimental education. He tried to find a stimulus in one or two of the other girls, but there wasn’t much doing with them. His feelings towards her were invaded by a streak of possessive, dislike. She had led him on. He brooded, resentfully on that idea. She had let him and then she hadn’t let him any more. For a time they went about together largely, though they did not realise it, to keep up appearances with the rest of the boys and girls. Once or twice he was .stirred to a competitive attempt at resumption by the realisation that she was going around with another fellow. She was “nice.” to him, but more and more evasive....

“Well anyhow,” soliloquised the disillusioned Edward Albert, “he won’t get much.”

At the Imperial College of Commercial Science Edward Albert made very few, personal contacts of any sort. There were a few possible young women about he thought he might have flirted with, but he couldn’t contrive any method of accosting them, and the chief other factor in the evocation of Edward Albert’s manhood, was such intercourse as he had with his old schoolfellows who still remained in the neighbourhood of Camden Town.

The school was there still. Once or twice he caught a glimpse of Mr Myame in the offing, but escaped his hirsute disapproval by dodging down a side street. One boy whose name he forgot met him one day and told him that the old man had forbidden the school to speak to him. “He said you were an evil companion. What was it all about? D’jer get a girl into trouble?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Edward Albert, and nursed that gratifying suspicion. “It was sumpthing pretty awful,” he said.

Blond Bert Bloxham with the dissimilar aunt was still in the neighbourhood, though Nuts MacBryde of the warts had drifted to Clapham. Bert’s looks had never been much to boast about, and he was more than ever like a large hairy onion. But he too was in a state of feverish sexual awakening. He too was on the rack between the insanity of Nature cranking away at one end and the insanity of the social order cranking away at the other.

He began at once with reminiscences of the Hidden Hand.

“I still got that stable,” he said, “and it’s safer than ever. The O. girl’s so heavy now, she’d break the ladder if she tried it. I got some photographs there—oh, hot stuff. Show you everything. I got ’em off a man in the Strand late one night when I was doing a prowl. I’ll show you them.”

He paused. “Ever ’ad a woman yet, Tewler?.... Yes, I ’ave.” (Description.) “And I don’t care ’ow many more I ’ave. But them street walkers. You can’t be too careful. You know they don’t wash themselves. They smell. Puts you off it.” (Rough account of Precautions to take,)

“But never mind about that. That’s by the way. I got my plans. What I’m going to ’ave is a little love nest, my boy, a little love nest of my own. Up the ladder we go, eh? What price ankles? You’re going to show more than that, my gel. And ’ere we are playing Adam and Eve together. Ever played Adam and Eve, Tewler?

“Leastways that’s what I’m going to do,” said Bert, “when I get hold of a girl I fancy. And they ain’t ’ard nowadays, not like before the war. Girls ain’t the same. Nothing’s $he same. And if ever you get anybody. Old friends we are. I’ll make it as safe for you up there, o. boy. Safe as ’ouses....”

That was the sort of chance the fickle Molly had thrown away. What did she want really? Bother her! Forget her.

Adam and Eve indeed! Catch her! Catch her taking off a blessed thing! With her everlasting “Starp it.”

Presently Edward Albert found himself actually flirting in Doober’s and being competed for, actually competed for, by two energetic and interesting young women only five or six years older than himself. They were overripe virgins and they too suffered from the tortures of suppression the social order inflicted upon them. Nature urged them on and they didn’t know, they didn’t know, and an infinite futility was expected of them. What outlook had they? Older men would fall for any cheeky kid of sixteen first, and there didn’t seem to be any young men left. Such a lot of young men had being killed. What were left were Nancy boys. They were mostly objectors to war and love alike. They seemed to have turned their backs on life altogether. But here was something at once male and ostensibly harmless, that had missed all that.

The attentions of these young women seemed to him much more formidable and much more interesting than those of the Leasehold office girls, particularly after Molly let him down. He talked to them with an intermittent nervous laugh as a sort of declaration of insincerity. He didn’t dare think of kissing or hugging them or anything of that sort, he didn’t know how they’d take it, but he said the boldest things to them. Much worse than what he said to the North London Leaseholds girls, who’d snap your head off at almost anything.

They began it. They certainly began it. They wanted to win his calf love and reduce him to adoration, slavery, timid offerings, and the running of errands, which is what adolescents are for. Easier than men but not so dangerous as men. Either could have managed it, no doubt, but not both. One was a remarkable dark young woman who had been in France for some months, and had become temporarily Frenchified by that experience. Her name was Evangeline Birkenhead, she was interested apparently in the glove trade, but^in what precise capacity was never revealed. She was destined to play a much ampler rôle in Edward Albert’s life than he anticipated, and we shall have much to tell about her. She spoke French which sounded like the real thing, faster than the Belgians but only in flashes, and Miss Pooley, whose style was much more deliberate, seemed to listen first with incredulous perplexity and then with an ill-concealed delight. She would manoeuvre, Edward Albert noted, to sit within earshot of Evangeline.

Evangeline’s rival, Miss Blame, was a blonde young woman, a fluffy bleached blonde, soft-spoken and almost inarticulate, but with extremely significant, desirous eyes. She listened and looked at Edward Albert. She had a way of putting her hands on him, on his shoulders, even on his hands on the chair arm, and they were extremely soft hands. She would whisper, a warm zephyr against his cheek, She drew him out. She asked what his ambitions were.

“Jerst to go on looking at you,” said Edward Albert gallantly.

“But tell me about yourself. What do you think of Miss Birkenhead? She’s awfully clever, don’t you think?

“Clever is as clever does,” said Edward Albert darkly.

“You’re a bit in love with her?”

“’Ow could I be?”

Interrogative purr.

“’Cos I’m devoted” said the wicked flirt, and refrained from clinching matters by crooning, “to yew.”

And when Evangeline taxed him with sitting about with that Blame girl and asked what he could possibly find to talk about with her, “I jest don’t notice where I sit, when you’re about,” said Young Artfulness. “I jest don’t. And as for talking! Well, I ask you.”

Great fun! A safe game, and a harmless one, it seemed to him, not realising how vulnerable he was presently to become.

Yet the thought of marriage was already in his mind as he returned from Edinburgh in that luxurious first-class carriage, to London. He realised now that a way was opening to alleviate the fears and desires that were devastating his mind. He would look round and find a nice little wife. A thrill of anticipation followed the thought. You couldn’t be too careful, of course. A nice, healthy, simple, pure-minded girl. There were endless girls you wouldn’t dream of marrying, designing hussies, hot stuff you couldn’t trust round the corner.

And there It would be, safe at home and always handy. Just whenever you liked. No risk of entanglements; no risk of those horrible diseases, no more horrible phases of unsatisfied lust and shame. And that little wife, that smiling, yielding little wife. Church of England preferably. She’d have to be religious, otherwise you never knew, he whistled softly in his characteristic way as the reverie unfolded. They wouldn’t have a lot of children to bother them and spoil her figure. Dear old Bert had put him wise about that. And imagine it! Running up against Nuts or Bert, for example, with the little lady dressed up to the nines. “Ellow me to introduce you to Mrs Tewler!” he’d say. He’d buy her things. He’d surprise her by giving her all sorts of things. She’d just love it. “Look what I brought you now,” he’d say. Love’s young dream.

In all of this he was reckoning without Evangeline Birkenhead. He never gave her a thought until he went in to dinner that evening. “You back!” she said, and “Come over here next me and tell me about it.”

He hurried across the room to her with a provocative mixture of irony and reverence. He wasn’t going to tell anyone exactly why he had gone away or what had happened to him. He was just going to be mysterious and have a fine time with the two of them.

But Mrs Doober had been talking already. Mr Doober had been consulted when first that letter came from Edinburgh, even before Mr Whittaker.

VIII. Evangeline Birkenhead

The time has come to tell more about this Miss Evangeline Birkenhead....

There must be a Buchmanite strain in me. I know of no other writer so anxious to share his troubles and limitations with his readers.

For example: here is a grave technical difficulty. I doubt whether in an English novel I am justified in assuming that either I or the reader knows French; a Frenchman might know it. But Miss Birkenhead at this phase in her career had a curious disposition to use French under the most unexpected circumstances—and I do not feel that either I or the reader has the right to set up as a judge of the sort of French she spoke or to pretend to translate what she was saying. So the proper thing to do here seems to be to report as exactly as possible what she said, to note several occasions when it seemed to produce reactions other than those she had anticipated, and to say no more about it. And if most of what she said remains incomprehensible, then the effect on the reader will be virtually the effect on Edward Albert, and he after all is our story.

Evangeline’s particular form of self-assertion, when she joined the Doober community, was to talk with extreme enthusiasm of dear Paree. She was just back after a sojourn there of half a year; she was homesick to return thither; she was doubtful if she could until her holidays came round, and London looked all the darker to her in contrast to the clouds of continental brilliance she trailed. She appeared in the boarding-house almost simultaneously with Miss Blame, whose form of self-assertion was visual rather than-verbal.

Evangeline was dark and sallow, with thin arched eyebrows and a hungry enterprising hazel eye, and there was that cachet about her costume which only the great establishments of the Louvre and the Grands Boulevards can confer. Never had anything so visibly French sat at Mrs Doober’s table.

She told the story of her Great Adventure to the little group at her end of the table, to Edward Albert and Miss Blame, who responded with sympathetic murmurs, and the young Dutchman from the room opposite Edward Albert’s, who was trying to learn English, who listened attentively and with a vacant amiable smile, never quite seeming to understand, and the little widow in mittens who would listen to anything consistent with morality and nod her head approvingly, and Miss Pooley who was at first a trifle aloof and then began to listen with something almost like relish, and Gawpy whose business it was to take an interest in everybody, and Mrs Doober who usually sat out of earshot but listened so to speak with a wary eye and smiled when it looked as though Evangeline was entertaining her hearers.

But Mr Chamble Pewter found nothing in Evangeline to appeal to his sense of humour and edged away up the table past Mrs Doober to deplore the delinquency of the times with an elderly vegetarian who was an expert at book-binding and slightly deaf, who expressed strong views about tinned foods and cancer, and otherwise kept very much to himself....

“I’d always wanted to go to Paris,” said Evangeline explaining herself, “even as a schoolgirl. I loved French at school. I only did it for a year just at the end, but I.got the school prize. It was all about dear Paree with lovely coloured pictures. I used to say, if ever I get married, I’ll insist on Paree for my honeymoon. And then lo and behold early this year I learnt to my amazement I was to be sent to France, free gratis and for nothing for six months—gratuitment. Would I mind going? Mind! Que voulez- vous?”

“Who wouldn’t?” said Gawpy, manifestly sharing the rapture.

“Laissez faires sont laissez faires,” said Evangeline. “It wasn’t all sightseeing by any means and it wasn’t all learning French, But the war had put all our business out of joint and somebody extra was wanted, and they picked on me. Just a week’s notice, one week, and there I was—a lovely crossing—saying Adieu to the white cliffs of Albion. And then, behold me! Down the gangway and everybody about me shouting and screaming French. To begin with I seemed to forget every word I’d ever learnt of it.”

Edward Albert nodded understandingly.

“It’s surch a brilliant language. There isn’t a word in it that hasn’t a double entente. Stodgy old English, bourgeois to the finger tips, walks. French jumps about. Gay! Pierreust, you might say....

“Nimble it is and always a little bit naughty. Esprit it has and a je ne sais quoi—oh, how do they say it?—ah!—élan vital! So quick, so polite. You say to a common taxi driver, ‘Cocher! Pouvez-vous me prendre?’ and he laughs and says, ‘Mais volontier mam’selle, toujours a vôtre service.’ Fancy our London cabbies saying anything like that!

“There was a gentleman we did business with. He took quite an interest in me and taught me a lot, one way and another. No, don’t you go imagining things! He was quite an old gentleman, and he was half-English, but all the same he didn’t mind being seen about with some one who wasn’t his grand-daughter. Comprenez? Pas de tout. Pas de deux. Which is it? I forget.

“We got on beautifully together. I used to call him my faux pa and he simply loved that. He would repeat it to everyone who came in.

“He had a flat au bordel rivière—on the Seine, you know. Just above one of those mouche piers—where the steamboats come. There was an office there where we worked, and he would take me out to lunch and get me to talk French and encourage me. He would laugh and say ‘Go on. The way to speak French is to speak it.’

“I used to say ‘Am I speaking French?’ and he used to say ‘Not quite French yet, cherry’—he used to call me cherry, ‘my dear’ you know—quite in a fatherly way. ‘It’s not French yet,’ he would say, ‘but it’s very good Entente Cordial. It’s the best Entente Cordial I’ve ever met yet. I wouldn’t miss a word of it.’ He used to call it Entente Cordial because he said it was quite a pick-me-up to talk it as I did. Oh! We had surch fun.’”

So Evangeline unfolded herself and from the first appreciated the appreciation in Edward Albert’s admiring eyes. He was, as I have said, the nearest thing to a negotiable male in the establishment just then, for it was soon plain that the young Dutchman who was learning English had convinced himself that so far as Evangeline was concerned understanding was hopeless. She did her best, but what can you do with a man who answers your brightest remarks with the irrelevance of the deaf?

One day Edward Albert found a half sheet of notepaper lying on the floor near the writing desk in the snuggery. It was in Miss Pooley’s handwriting, but he did not know that and he brought it to Evangeline in all good faith.

“This yours?” he asked. “It seems to be French.”

It was headed Menu Malaprop and it ran as follows:

Evangeline read it and flushed darkly.

“Beast!” she said, with more temper than she had ever before betrayed to Edward Albert. “She talks French like a High School grammar. Well, I learnt mine by ear, and she learnt hers with that bulging forehead of hers.... I suppose she thinks this funny.”

She hesitated and then crumpled the little document into a ball in her fist.

“Didn’t seem funny to me,” said Edward Albert loyally. “But then I don’t know the language.... Shall I chuck that in the fire for you?”

IX. Entangled

“You’ve been away more than a week. What have you been doing up there in Scotland? They make a great mystery of it.”

So it was she began on that fateful evening of his return. She spoke in an intimate undertone. Miss Blame had dined and gone upstairs and Miss Pooley was out. The Dutchman was rapt in thought about the English Subjunctive Mood, and quite unheeding a talk that plainly was not addressed to him. “Eef you were,” he was whispering over and over again, “Eef you was. Yess.” She had waited for Edward Albert and now behind this barrier she had him to herself.

“Jerst business affairs,” he told her. “Fact is—quite unexpected—I been left an estate—in Scotland.”

“An estate!”

“Property anyhow. No idea I had any relations up there. Right out of the blue. There’s things have been kep’ from me. I been sort of made away with. I always felt it—kind of mystery. I been seeing lawyers and agents and all that,”

“And is it murch, Teddy? I hope it won’t take you away from here. I should miss you.”

“Well, I’ll be pretty well off. Naturally I ain’t made any plans. It’s all so sudden. I don’t want to go away from here—and ye. You all,” he corrected, feeling that after all others might be listening. “Leastways not till I got somewhere to go.”

She nodded. “What does it all come to?”

His discretion gave way to his desire to be impressive.

“Some fousands,” he said, “anyhow.”

“Independence.”

“All that,” he said.

“Lucky Teddy! You can go where you like; you can do what you please.”

“I’m going to look round me a bit first. You know I’m not even going to give up my—business job. Not for a bit. Just for something to do, I’ll keep it. I’d feel kind of lost. You see, you can’t be too careful. All this money; it’s come like a dream. Suppose I wake up to-morrow and find it was a dream.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can understand that at first. But you’ll find it real. You’ll find all the world before you.”

“I suppose if you was me you’d go right off to that gay Paree of yours?”

“I wonder. I might not, because you see then I could do it at any time, Teddy. I might want to stay here a bit. Just as you might. I might feel I was tearing myself away from something I cared for and wanted to go on seeing, We’re very much alike, Teddy, you and me, in a lot of things.”

“I never thought of that.”

“But we are, you know.”

“P’raps we are. Only you’re kind of cleverer.... She was so intent on their mutual business that she had completely forgotten her enthusiasm for French. She was just her pre-Parisian self, and hardly a word of Entente Cordial escaped her.

When they went up stairs she put her arm through his, a thing she had never done before. “Come into the corner,”

she said, “I must talk some more to you about all this. Down there at table with all those people peeping and listening, one couldn’t let oneself go. But no I murst, I murst talk to you, Teddy, my dear. I’m so happy to see you so happy and I’m so afraid for you and the things that may happen to you. It will be wonderful for you to get away from all this. Do what you choose. Lead a life of your own. And so dangerous. I envy you, Teddy boy, I envy you. I could cry over you.”

Her intense sincerity evoked a reciprocal sincerity in him, Presently he was exposing himself to her as he rarely exposed himself even to himself. They sat close together so that the breath of their common desire mingled. She had dressed herself carefully and thinly, and he could feel her soft arm against his shoulder and her hand rested lightly on his knee.

“Of course you know I’m not what you might call educated—not ’ighly educated. I often think if I could get someone

to help me a bit—And now—Particularly....”

“Couldn’t I perhaps—help you?”

“You’d ’elp me?”

“I’d love to.”

“Me? You with your travel and all that, and the books you’ve read and knowing French as you do, I’d seem common....”

She looked at him steadily for a moment. “You’re the most lovable modest man I’ve ever known, my dearest. A woman wants to give. I tell you I’d love to do—anything—for you. To give myself wholly. Can I?”

He lost his last trace of coquettishness.

“You know I’ve always said I loved you. Always. I mean it.”

“You love me?”

A heavily charged silence ensued. She was speaking so closely that he could feel the beating of her heart. There was a glow in her eyes. He trembled. He wanted to kiss her. But this was no place for kisses. Maybe someone was peeping at them round an evening paper or out of a corner. You could never be sure at Doober’s. Never.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“Love,” she answered.

They were silent for an intense moment.

“You mean it?”

“Strike me dead.”

There was another yet longer pause. Then she looked at her wrist watch. “Time I was in bed,” she said. “I’ve to be at business at nine to-morrow, my dear. Back at the old grind.”

“Not for long,” he said. “Not now.”

And with that it seemed everything was said.

She stood up and smiled.

He stood up smiling back at her.

He went upstairs after her, not caring now who saw them. For he’d got her. None of your “Starp it” kids this time. This meant everything. Miss Blame in a distant corner affected to be reading. Outside her room Evangeline stopped short and shot a hasty glance upstairs and down. Not a soul in sight and nobody listening. She took both his hands in hers and held them for a moment, looking at him possessively. Then she dropped them, and slowly, deliberately, drew his head to hers and kissed him. It was a long thirsty kiss; it was the kiss of a bright-minded young woman who had given some thought to the matter, it wandered a little and then closed down, and with it the last memory of Molly’s kissing vanished from his mind. “And so,” she said at last in a low whisper, “Good night, my lover. Je fainu, je fadon.”

He hesitated. “Good night,” he said almost interrogatively.

“Good night,” she said.

He went on up to his own room. He looked back over the banisters but her door had closed noiselessly behind her....

He lay awake for a very long time in a state of intense excitement. Reverie and desire danced a wild fandango in his cranium. He went to bed and got up again. He walked about his room in his pyjamas. He went to his door, listened a long time, opened it softly and peered downstairs,

“Evangeline,” he whispered very softly, heard the young Dutchman opposite snoring, and retired precipitately into his room again.

There he stripped himself and contemplated himself as well as he could in his little looking-glass. The salt cellars over his collar bones, he decided, were not as hollow as they used to be.

He meditated.

Finally he got into bed and embraced his bolster with passionate tenderness. “Evangeline,” he whispered to it.

“Oh, my dear Evangeline. Say you love me. Keep on saying you love me. Keep—keep on.”

And so at last he was able to sleep.

X. Engaged

“But, my dear, we can’t be married from the same address. That would never do. There’s People to consider. My people anyhow.”

Edward Albert did not see that at first. His mind was concentrated upon the achievement of Evangeline and It, and the intervening events that must precede this consummation did not interest him at all, until she made them interest him. He saw no reason why they should not anticipate marriage at Doober’s, and he had a vague idea that it was possible to go to the nearest registry office and accomplish marriage there and then. These things had never entered his circle of ideas before his return from Edinburgh,

“But if one’s in love one wants each other. I tell you I want you, Evangeline. Dreadfully. I can’t tell you. I can’t hold myself....”

“Darling, I’m as impatient as you are. More I think. But we murst not create a scandal. We murst not. How will it look in the Times, Marriages—of the same address? Pas possible, Chéri. Je m’enfiche de tout celà.”

She regarded him. “You look like a sulky baby, you darling!.... Diddums. Diddums keep um waiting? I could kiss you right away now. I shall it you don’t mind.”

“Aw! Don’t torment me,” said Edward Albert and edged away from her.

They had been engaged three days and they were sitting in the pretty lower garden of Regent’s Park. The fact of the engagement had been conveyed to Mrs Doober for tactful release to the boarders, and apart from a humorous grimace on the part of Mr Chamble Pewter and a rather pointed discourse delivered by Miss Blame in a corner of the drawing-room to the little old lady in mittens and Mr Doober’s niece on the subject of gold-diggers and kidnappers, which may or may not have been intended for Edward Albert’s ears, the social disturbance was slight. Mrs Doober behaved generously although she was losing two regular and solvent clients, and she gave Edward Albert an excellent and quite unsolicited testimonial. “So quiet and well-bred,” she specified.

Gawpy told Evangeline she was a lucky girl no end and Edward Albert that he was a lucky man no end, and confided to them that she was still waiting for fur knight to come and rescue her from the enchanted castle.

Edward Albert, after a slight hesitation, had ended his clerkship with North London Leaseholds, but Evangeline found it flatteringly difficult to sever her business connection.

“They jurst don’t know where anything is, if I’m not there,”

she said, and it was arranged for her to keep on upon a half-time arrangement until she had trained a successor. The training she gave was considerably weakened by her overwhelming impulse to talk all the time to her trainee about her matrimonial anticipations.

She had revealed a very considerable amount of administrative self-confidence from the very outset of their new relationship. Edward Albert’s worldly inexperience and his extreme preoccupation appealed to the latent mother in her. Every side of her womanhood was aroused.

She had decided that a comfortable apartment, a whole floor at least (“ Our home, darling ”) was to be found in one of the Bloomsbury Squares. “We’ll go and begin looking for it the afternoon after to-morrow. Surch fun!”

“I suppose we got to do all this,” he said. She managed the hunt for a home very capably. She talked to house agents and lodging-house proprietors. She did all the talking. He affected a masterful dignity, but inwardly he resented her leadership. But his desire for her subdued him. He had something of the expectant meekness of a dog in love.

They found what she wanted just out of Torrington Square, not simply a floor but the upper part of a house, two reception rooms, two good bedrooms and two other rooms that might also be bedrooms or anything else you liked, a pantry kitchen, a larder, a box-room and a bathroom! He was secretly dismayed at the difficulty he would have in living in such a lot of rooms at once, but she was delighted. The rent was very reasonable and she had never expected so much social expansion.

The rent was low because the meek incapable little lady who owned the house and lived in the lower half of it had hitherto let the upper half unfurnished. Then, seized by a spirit of enterprise, she had decided to furnish the rooms on the hire purchase system and do for the new occupants. An artist gentleman had moved in with a wife and such a lot of lovely pictures, and he had bought a piano on the hire purchase system. It had seemed a most satisfactory arrangement for some days. Then everything had begun not to work. There was trouble about the servants doing for the additional people, the little lady explained in tones of mild indignation. Her cook had given notice and her other servant had walked out on her, the cook was downstairs at that very moment still being most disagreeable, and the artist gentleman, after ringing his bell until the battery was exhausted, had departed with his wife and his pictures in a taxi-cab, leaving the piano on her hands and his bills unpaid. “There he was, a great big man, and when I asked him what I could do about it all, he just said, ‘You can sue me,’ and made a nasty face at me. And he didn’t even think to leave his address, so how could I sue him?”

The situation appealed to the quick business instincts of Evangeline. She surveyed the none too amply furnished rooms. “The piano’s gone,” she remarked.

“They took it yesterday. Where the plaster is knocked off the staircase wall. If only we could come to some arrangement. I should be so glad. But I can’t do for you, I really can’t do for you. It’s the servants. Since the war—Servants aren’t what they were. Days out and Sunday afternoons. But everything’s very convenient up here. You could have a nice respectable woman of your own to do for you. Then there wouldn’t be the strain.”

Evangeline’s ready mind expanded at once to include a servant of her own. Doing for her, under her orders. A real servant one could put in a cap and apron! Who would answer the door. And a still more brilliant idea followed. When there was occasion for a special dinner, she might borrow the downstairs cook and pay her something extra.

“Not too much,” said Evangeline, “but enough to make things easy. And if I have to do a bit of cooking myself, it won’t be the first time I’ve fayd the cuisine.”

Before she had done with the incapable little lady the rooms were not so. much taken as captured, and captured at a rental that was less than most of the mere apartments they had looked at hitherto.

“My husband—he’ll be my husband in a few weeks and then I’ll come here to look after him for good,” said Evangeline, “we’ll take over the hire purchase agreement, and we’ll have to get in a few things of our own, pictures and so on, to make the place homey. We’ll get along all right.”

The incapable little lady said incoherent things about taking up references which Evangeline swept aside. “But I’ll have to write something down. Business, you know. There’s your names and everything,” said the incapable little lady, and after having looked about for a pen and ink that had probably never been there, departed to get writing materials from the lower regions. Evangeline ushered her out competently, watched her descend, made sure the door was closed, and turned upon her lover, an Evangeline transfigured.

She had taken off her business face like a mask and she was all bright excitement. “You darling patient thing!” she said. “Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it all perfect?”

She threw her hands up in the air, pirouetted round towards him and finished by kissing him, vigorously. He gripped her responsively. “Not now!” she said, disengaging his arms, “She’s coming back.”

They stood regarding each other. “You done it pretty well,” he said.

“I’m glad my lord approves.”

That was quite the tone to take. “You do set about this sort of business pretty well,” he repeated.

The incapable little lady returned and took down their names and the proposed date of entry and what she called “references.” Evangeline gave two addresses that were strange to Edward Albert, and one—if he heard aright—was Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard? Then came a pause.

“We’ll just look round a bit,” said Evangeline, dismissing her. “There’s just one or two things I want to measure.”

The incapable little lady withdrew, because there was manifestly nothing else for her to do, and again Evangeline was transfigured.

“Mr Edward Albert Tewler at Home,” she said, bowing.

“Evadne darling.”

“And about our wedding. We’re going to have a real, proper wedding. None of your jump over a broomstick registry office affair. Voice that breathed o’er Eden and all of it. And you looking lovely in a silk hat and light grey trousers. You’ll have, you know, white slips to your waistcoat.”

“Gaw!” said Edward Albert, flattered and attracted but very much scared.

“And orange blossom for me.”

“But won’t it be an expense?”

“I’m afraid you’ll think me terribly old-fashioned, but then I’ve got other people to consider. Isn’t it queer you don’t know anything about my people yet? Not a thing. You never even asked. I’ve got a father and a godfather and cousins galore.”

“I aren’t going to marry all them,” said the bridegroom.

“I’ll protect you, Teddy. But there they are. We’ve got to humour them. My father he’s a policeman—oh, not an ordinary policeman. He’s at Scotland Yard. He’s a C.I.D. Inspector Birkenhead. He’s never had a big case yet, but some day he’ll get his chance, he says. Very, very exact. Nothing escapes him. He’s a bit stiff in his way—very proper-minded. You see my mother left him and he never quite got over it. If he knew—If he thought we were going to anticipate—!”

“Nobody need know, need they?”

“Heaven help us if he does. So you see it’s got to be as I say, A proper wedding and someone to give me away.”

“Oo’s going to give you away? Oo’s got the right to give you away?”

“Darling, I think we ought to go and see a proper wedding somewhere. Then you’ll see how it’s done. We’ve jurst got to have a best man to hop about and do everything for us. Rice and orange blossom and everything de rigor. I’ve thought of all that. There’s my cousins the Chasers. There’s Millie, who used to go to school with me. She married young Chaser. Pip Chaser. He’s a Card, as Arnold Bennett would say—a regular Card. Smart! He’s manager to a big West End undertaker and he can get carriages and horses for nothing from the stables. Carriages, Teddy! But no black gloves and funeral baked meats for us! Old Mr Chaser is my godfather; he sells champagne—special non-vintage champagne for balls and night-clubs and weddings and things like that, a sort of champagne he gets made for him. It doesn’t fizz so much but it’s just as good. Better, he thinks. And he’s always promised that he would stand me my wedding breakfast when the great day came.”

She reflected. “I won’t have any of the people from the business. No. I’ve done with that. They liked me of course, as soon as I get clear of it all, it’s good-bye for good. I don’t want anyone hurt....”

“Some things are better ended for good and all....”

She reflected. “No,” she said, as if she closed a door, “I told about Doober’s. Mrs Doober? Dear old Gawpy. that’s all. That half-wit niece might come to the arch....”

Edward Albert contemplated his future in a mood of triumphant assertion. Somehow he wanted Bert and Nuts to be there, astonished, and some of the chaps and girls in North London Leaseholds—overwhelmed. And somehow, somewhere, he imagined a triumphant whisper to Bert, I’ve ’ad ’er already. She’s all right, my boy.”

Hubris, I suppose the classical gentlemen would call it. The wedding dream unfolded. He learnt how the bride would slip away and put on her going-away dress. And he’d change too. They’d throw old slippers for luck.

“Then off we go. Shall it be gay Paree? I’ve always had a yearn. Someday, when you have learnt French too, we might have a teeny, weeny, little venire it terre in Paris....”

Edward Albert suddenly put his foot down.

“Not to Paris we don’t go. You’d start flirting again with that faux pa of yours. No fear.”

“Jealous! I like you to be jealous,” said Evadne Evangeline. “If you saw him. So old. Debonair, I admit, but in the last stage....”

“Anyhow if you don’t like that, there’s all the world to choose from. Let’s go to Boulogne perhaps or down to Torquay or Bournemouth to a room, our room with the sun shining in on us! Think of it.”

He thought of it.

They went about to shops. Evadne was the most discriminating of shoppers. The gentlemen in black coats bowed obsequiously and rubbed their hands together. And she would turn to Edward Albert and consult him. They bought furniture. They bought a lovely soft fur rug “for our little pink toes”, she whispered, “a sauté lit.” And pictures, for the artist gentleman had taken away all his pictures.

She recognised one she was, looking for with a cry of, “Enfant saoul!” It was a beautiful steel engraving of a tall lover, holding his new-won lady to him and pressing her fingers to his lips in the serene first moment of complete possession.

“I think it serch a lovely picture!” said Evadne Evangeline.

She feasted her eyes on it adoringly. “Darling,” she whispered, when the salesman was out of earshot, “I’m counting the days. I’m counting the hours. To that.”

In this fashion was our Edward Albert installed in his new home, and, at the propitious moment, Evangeline came, as she had promised him and herself, to give herself to him.

XI. Trap for Innocents

So, drawn by genuine passionate desire, our two heirs to the Wisdom of the Ages came to the cardinal moment of their sexual lives.

And here I find that for one brief chapter at least there has to be a change of key in this veracious narrative.

Hitherto this record of the acts and sayings of Edward Albert has been a simple unemotional record of the facts of the case. and if at times a certain realisation of the immanent absurdity of his life has betrayed itself, it has, I hope, been kept for the most part below the level of derision. But what has to be told now of this young couple is something so pitiful that I find myself taking sides with them against the circumstances that brought them to this pass.

They were both, and Edward Albert more especially, profoundly ignorant of the essentials of sex. That beneficent writer, Mrs Marie Stopes, was already at large in the world about this time, but her instructions in the conditions of connubial happiness had still to penetrate to their class. She was still some years from becoming a sly music-hall joke. Edward Albert knew; indeed he had exaggerated ideas; of venereal disease, clumsy “precautions” and the repulsive aspects of the overwhelming desire for “It”, but the only idea he attached to Maidenhead was that it was a town on the road to Reading with a pretty bridge overlooking Skindle’s Hotel with a very attractive but rather high-class riverside lawn. And Evangeline for her part thought a loving maiden yielded with delight. Something happened, she knew, but she thought it was something happy.

He hardly waited to kiss her. There was a rapid struggle. She felt herself gripped and assailed with insane energy.

“Oh! oh! oh!” she groaned in crescendo. “Stop! Ow-woo-woohoo. Oooh!” The climax of the unendurable passed. Her body went limp.

Then Edward Albert was sitting up with an expression of horror on his face. “Gaw!” he was saying. “You got some disease? It’s blood!”

He dashed for the bathroom.

He came back to discover Evangeline sitting up in a storm of pain, disappointment and fear.

“You pig,” she said. “You fool. You selfish young fool. You ignoramus! What have you done to me?... Look at that dirty precaution of yours there. Look at it!”

Her pointing beringed finger trembled.

“Gaw, I forgot all about it!”

“And about me. And about everything. You foul, disgusting young hog.”

“Well, ’ow was I to know? And anyhow ’ow about me? What have you done to me?”

“I wish to God I could give you worse than I’ve got. If I could strike you dead this minute I’d strike you dead. Get out of my way.”

“Where you going? What you going to do?”

“Go, Dress. Wash. So far as I can wash. Get away out of sight of you. So as not to be sick.”

She dressed swiftly, going to and fro and flinging insults at him. He sat on the soiled and devastated bed considering the situation.

“But wait a bit!” he said. “You can’t go like this?”

“If this comes to anything—oh! if it comes to anything—oh! I’ll do my best to kill you.”

“But you can’t leave me here—”

“I’ll kill you and I’ll kill myself. I swear it. I swear it.”

“You can’t leave me here in this place like this.”

He followed her into the drawing-room and made to intercept her. And here is a queer thing to tell. Twenty minutes before she had been entirely powerless in his grip and yet now as he intervened between her and the door, she could face him with an expression of blazing hate, anger and contempt that was itself a blow. “Fool!” she spat out at his face. She clenched her fists, held them up to her ears, and suddenly shot them forward at his face with such force that she sent him spinning.

He span round and sprawled anyhow....

The door slammed on her and he found himself naked and entangled in an overturned chair on the floor of his new home and almost directly beneath that tender and beautiful picture, Enfin seul.

Poor little beasts! That was the dismal joke our Tewler civilisation played upon two of its children—for no reason at all. For sheer want of reason. It wrapped them about and misled them—to this,...

Evangeline wandered out into the square, ruffled, and distraught, and unspeakably uncomfortable. She hesitated, called a taxi and fled to her cousin, Millie Chaser, to tell her all about it, for she felt she had to tell someone about it all or burst. Then she returned to Scartmore House and went supperless to bed. Edward Albert dressed slowly and still more slowly reassembled his scattered mentality.

He tried to simplify and concentrate it in hatred of her. He shouted a string of foul names at her. “She-devil”, was the mildest thing he could think of to call her. “You come back, you foul bitch! If I get you here again I’ll show you.”

He was affecting this fury and at the same time he was already desiring her again. It was exasperating, but he felt he had hardly begun upon her.

She had left red marks on both his cheeks. He examined them in the bathroom mirror with some consternation. Both would be bad bruises unless he sponged them with cold water, and one had the skin broken and was oozing blood.

“She took me by surprise.... Them rings of hers.

“Changed into a devil.... Hog, am I?—selfish young hog? Fool, eh? Did she mean it all or only some?.... So that’s where we stand....

“I was a fool to let her go!...

“She’d have torn the ’ouse down....

“Wonder where she’s gone to.

“Pretty fool I shall look if she goes back to her old job. If everything’s all right.... She might do it.”

XII. Mr Pip Chaser

In spite of this mental turmoil Edward Albert slept profoundly that night, and the next morning he woke still extremely perplexed but refreshed and feeling much more able to cope with this difficult world. As he had nothing better to do he went for a walk in Regent’s Park and sat down almost on the very seat on which he had discussed his future with Evangeline eight or nine days before. And regardless of the tragedy of the previous day he found himself regretting her acutely.

For nearly two weeks she had subjected him to a regime of unprecedented mental massage, she had anointed him with flattery and endearment, and abruptly he was exposed to this cold and disillusioning world again. And the affair of yesterday was taking on a new appearance. Whatever happened he’d had it and done it. He was a, man. He no longer peeped and peered at the girls and women going by. Their last secret was his. He looked at them appraisingly. But none of them, he realised, was quite like Evangeline. And the very violence aid extravagance of his reaction against her made him feel he had by no means finished with her.

What was to be done about it? Walk about a bit. Have a look at the shops down Regent Street. Get a snack somewhere. Wait for something to happen.

In the afternoon he had an unanticipated visitor.

He answered the door expecting only some tradesman’s call, and discovered a short but upstanding young man in a jauntily cocked bowler hat, an extremely neat black jacket, cheerful herring-bone trousers, and a bright bow tie that harmonised beautifully with a blue shirt and collar and matched exactly with the corner of a handkerchief that projected from the breast-pocket. The face was also up-’ standing, so to speak, clean-shaven, with alert brown eyes, a pug nose and a large oblique mouth ready to smile. A pink carnation in his button hole enhanced his cheerfulness. By Edward Albert’s standards this was an excessively well-dressed person. He opened the door wider.

The visitor neighed. He produced a loud clear lingering key. Then he spoke. “Mr Tewler?” he said.

“You want to see me?” said Edward Albert.

“Guessed it in one,” said the visitor. “May I come in?”

Edward Albert stood aside to admit him.

“I didn’t catch your name,” he said. “If it’s business—”

He remembered some recent instructions of Evangeline.

“If you ’appen to have a card....”

“And why not a card?” said the visitor, “Why not? I think, why—yes” He produced a neat black leather pocket-book adorned with a silver monogram, and extracted a card.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said.

Within a deep black edge it announced its purport:

The visitor watched his host’s face for a moment and then gave way to a brief cackle of laughter. “Not on business this time, Edward Albert, not on business. Purely social. It’s the only card I have on me. You see I’m Pip Chaser at your service. Pip, Pip Chaser. I’m, hey, Evangeline’s first cousin by marriage and my wife is her bosom friend. Old schoolfellows. You may have heard her speak of Millie—her dear Millie. Always dear. And her godfather, my revered parent. Nice chap he is—provided you don’t call him Old Gooseberry. We marry from his place. Wedding breakfast and all that. I have to be Best Man. See? Came about the arrangements.”

He removed his hat and revealed an upstanding tussock of hair. He seemed to find some difficulty about placing his hat. He held it in his hand until a suitable place could be found. “You ought to have a hatstand, Edward Albert,” he said. “Hats and umbrellas. There.” He pointed his hat to indicate the exact place. “You must get one and put it there. And now for a talk. Nice little place this looks. Well lit.”

Edward Albert opened the door to the drawing-room.

“Would you like me to make you some tea?” he asked.

“I can.”

“Whisky is, hey, better,” said Mr Chaser.

“I don’t ’appen to have any whisky.”

“Oh, but you must get a bottle of whisky in the pantry and all that. And cocktail stuff, gin, vermouth, lime juice, the, hey, requisites. What is home without a shaker? Don’t worry about tea. We’ll settle our business and go out for what is called, I believe, a quick one. I should have rung you up this morning, but you’ve got no telephone yet. You must get a telephone. And take my advice, don’t put it out there in the hall for everyone to hear. In a corner near your desk. Bed-room extension perhaps. We’ll fix places for that later. I—hey. I couldn’t come this morning because I had two Blessed Ones to plant out at Woking. I had to get out of my—hey—sables.”

He placed his hat with care and precision exactly in the middle of the table and seated himself gracefully with an arm over the back of his chair. Edward Albert found him admirable. He tried to imitate his ease and left him to open the conversation.

Mr Chaser reflected. Instead of coming to business, he embarked upon a monologue.

“This undertaking business of mine, Edward Albert, is—hey—it isn’t all gloom. Don’t think it. It’s—hey—amusing. Something tonic in putting ’em under and going off yourself. Lot of nonsense talked about grief and lost dear ones and all that. If there hasn’t been a quarrel of some sort, about the will or something, they’re, they’re—hey—just pulling long faces. Pulling ’em, Sir. Because they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t pulled. They’re—hey—survivors again; they’ve got the better of another Departed. I want to go round and slap them on the back and tell ’em to—hey—laugh it off. Sometimes they do. I’ve seen a whole funeral in a fit of giggles. Little dog or something. Our business, of course, is to put a grave face on it; that’s what we’re paid for, so to speak. Put a grave face on it. See?”

“Grave face on it,” said Edward Albert. “Good. Yes, that’s good.”

Mr Pip meditated, neighed at unusual length and went off at a tangent.

“In America, you know, they call undertakers Morticians. Over there they mess about with the body in a way the Christian West Enders we cater for wouldn’t stand for a moment. Not for a moment. They make it up and dress it up and have a sort of lying-in-state, when friends call and leave cards. Not our line. It’s done here in London by foreigners of sorts, but not by us. No.”

He paused as though his monologue was running out. He smiled at Edward Albert most engagingly. He admitted he didn’t know why he was talking of funerals. He could tell Edward Albert stories by the hour, but what they had to talk about was something more serious. If ever he wrote a book, he said, and he’d often thought of writing a book, he’d do one called The Hearse with the Silver Lining. Only it might interfere with business....

“It might do that,” said Edward Albert judicially.

“Well, we’ve business on hand and we have to come to it.”

What was he going to say now? “Yeers,” said Edward Albert guardedly, and sat up.

“A wedding, a wedding—key—is something really serious. Serious. It just starts a lot of things and a funeral ends everything. It goes on. And on—key. Now my cousin by marriage, Evangeline, says you’re a fatherless orphan, so to speak. You haven’t been anywhere and done anything yet. World is all before you. All sorts of matters, great and small, you’ve got to be put wise about. That’s where this Best Man comes in. I don’t mind telling you that, for many reasons, you’re lucky to have me as your Best Man. I—hey—happen to be one of the best Best Men in London. Expert at it. I’ve—hey—guided scores—well, six or seven—to their doom. Anything you want to know, anything you have to do.”

Still he seemed to be postponing something. He stood up, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and walked about the room with one eye on Edward Albert.

“Nice little place you have here. Quite a nice little place. Broken a chair already! Hire purchase stuff. By the time you’ve bought it you’ll have replaced most of it. And you’ve got that old picture; Enfin seul. Leighton, isn’t it?”

“About this wedding of ours,” began Edward Albert. Young Chaser came round on his heel and stood attentive

“What about it?”

“Fact is, Mr Philip—”

“Pip to you my boy—Pip, Pip.”

“But about all this. Fact is—I ought to tell you—we’ve had a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“My wife did say something of the sort while I was shedding my sad rags and putting on these—hey—innocently glad ones. Some storm in a tea-cup. Don’t think about it. Don’t—hey—think about it. These little disturbances will occur. Before a wedding there’s more often trouble than not. Much more often than not. The engagement has been postponed. You see it in The Times. That’s where the undertaker scores. No going back in his business. Death certificate all in order before we think of touching you.”

“What did Mrs Chaser say?”

“Nothing much. Some little rumpus. You’ve offended Evangeline in some way.”

“We sort of.” [Difficult to convey.] “Just kind of didn’t hit things off.”

Pip looked at his protégé and perceived he was blushing deeply. He looked younger and sillier than ever.

“I wasn’t born yesterday, my boy,” said Pip Chaser.

“Say no more about it. Think no more about it. The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow. You’d be only too glad to see her coming in now? Admit it. You’ve got to let the woman have her own way about—hey—certain matters, particularly at first. Agree to that and back she’ll come. Right away. Agree, eh? Nothing more to be said. Right!”

He reported the state of affairs to his wife. “I thought it was that,” he said, when she had supplied details. “I don’t remember you and I had any particular trouble....”

“Ton were born knowing,” said Millie Chaser. “And you’ve never left off clucking since. I’ll tell her. She’s upstairs now....”

“He wants you to come back,” said Millie

Evangeline had been reading The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight. She put it on one side with an affectation of regret....

“Does he say he’s sorry? He’s got to say he’s sorry.”

“He does.”

“Let’s be clear about things. That boy’s a positive danger. I’m half way to hating him and if he isn’t careful about it, I shall. I’m going to have a separate room. I’m going to—I’m going to have a voice in disposing of myself. Always. After what’s happened I simply murst, Millie.”

“Pip says he knows he’s been an idiot and he’s absolutely sheepish.”

“Sheepish? H’m. What sort of sheep? He’s got to be a lamb if we’re to get on together.”

“Then you’ll go back and have a talk to him?”

Edward Albert was out when she returned. He had gone out to order some whisky and siphons. The incapable little lady let her in without comment. So that he found her in possession when he returned.

He had told himself that when he got her back to their home he would do thus and thus with her, but when he found himself face to face with her, suddenly all that masterful knocking about he had contemplated became improbable.

“Well?” she said.

He felt danger in her eye.

He made a step towards her. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “I been wanting you back.”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop a minute, Teddy. Keep off. Listen. Keep your hands off me. If you think I’m going to let a clumsy kid like you manhandle me again!”

Something flashed on the table.

“What’s that?”

“That, my dear, is the bread knife. If you start a scuffle, anything may happen. And who will know which of us began it? See? I mean it, Teddy.”

She read fear in his expressive face and knew that for the moment at least she had won the upper hand. A fair residuum of affectionate proprietorship mingled with her contempt for him. And in her awakened body now there was desire.

“Listen,” she said. “I murst remind you that you arc a youngster, fix years younger than me. It’s painful but I murst. You don’t know things, you don’t understand things. That’s not your fault and it isn’t mine. It happens to be so. In ten years. time it won’t matter about your being younger, but it does now. You’ll be the master then right enough. No doubt. See? But you do as I say now and it will be the better for both of us.”

“What’s all this ‘doing as you say’ mean?”

“Behaving like a lover and not like a beastly uncontrollable little animal. That’s what I mean.”

“But how?”

“You don’t know and you murst trust me to show you.”

“I s’pose I got to do what you say. But what do you want me to do?”

“Be the modest lover you were at the beginning.”

“Am I to live on my bended knees?”

“You do as I say and you can come to bed with me now.”

“Eh?”

“I mean it.” And suddenly this astonishing creature came round the table to him, put her arm about him, drew him to her, and kissed him. He responded automatically. She drew him towards her room....

“We don’t know yet if the worst has happened, so you murst take care, Teddy....”

He was still marvelling wordlessly at the ways of women when she left the house.

“Changeable,” he reflected. “Don’t know her own mind ten minutes together. All love and kisses, cut and come again, and then—pushed away—you’d ’ardly think we’d ever made love.”

She said very little about the wedding day for another week or so, and then she informed him abruptly that the sooner they married the better.

“What’s the sudden hurry?” asked Edward Albert.

“Fate accompli. I know now we’ve got to many and that’s all about it.”

“That means a kid,” said Edward Albert, who had been thinking things over for some days. And the more he had thought them over the less he had liked them.

“That means a kid,” he repeated.

“It means, as you say, a kid.”

“And you—all spoilt. Nurses and sickness. All the ’ouse upset and then the kid—nya, nya, nya.”

“And what else did you expect?”

“I ’oped we’d be able to go on going on as we ’ave been going on. For a bit anyhow.”

“I’ve felt you ’oped—hoped that. Well, we can’t.”

She watched his crestfallen face. “Just for one careless moment, Teddy. What a lesson for you! You can’t be too careful.”

But Edward Albert wasn’t going to admit responsibility.

“I been W,” he said. “If ever a man was W, I been W. From the moment I got that blarsted money. I wish I’d never set eyes on it. Or you.”

She shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. What was there for her to say?

XIII. Wedding Deferred

Why did Mr Philip Chaser neigh as well as employ ordinary human speech? It was a matter for speculation among his large circle of friends and acquaintances. Was he born neighing, did he learn to neigh, or was neighing thrust upon him? Even his dear Millie had no exact knowledge in the matter. When she met and married him, it had already become an essential part of his personality.

There may have been an early stammer and a cure for stammering. Hold your breath for a time, inhale and then speak; the stammer went, and the neigh remained in its place. Observers found it was not an invariable feature of his discourse. He could forget to do it in moments of lively interest. He used it to capture attention. At social gatherings, used loudly, it was as good as the toast-master’s “Pray silence for—so and so.” And it gave him a rallying pause. It arrested interruption while he recovered a train of thought and it warned that something good was coming. He just did it; he never said anything about it. He had a profoundly secretive side to him.

We imagine a number of things about language and most of them are absurd. We imagine we are speaking plainly and clearly and we never do anything of the sort. We do not hear the sounds we make. We think we think and express ourselves. It is our universal delusion. The speech of Homo Tewler, Homo sub-sapiens is still incapable of expressing reality, and his thought at its clearest is a net of misfitting symbols, analogies and metaphors, by which he hopes to ensnare the truth to his desires. If you will listen attentively, if you will read attentively, you will find everyone has protective and habitual mannerisms, makes the most transitory attempts at real expression and lapses into the tricks and devices of—say—something far more natural, a struggle for self-assertion.

It is only in the past few years that the sciences of Signifies and Semantics have opened men’s eyes to the immense inaccuracies and question-begging of language. People talk of pure English, perfect French, faultless German. This possible impeccability is an academic delusion. Only a schoolmaster can really believe in it. Every language changes from day to day and from hour to hour. I am told by those who are better able to judge that Evangeline’s transitory French was far from perfect, gradually it decayed in her memory and passed out of her mind, but it differed only in degree and not in kind from everyman’s French, including this, that and the other sort of Frenchman. Some day ingenious people may devise ways of bringing language which is not only the expression but the instrument of thought, nearer to verifiable reality—in the days when we Tewlers are breaking towards sapiens. But that is not yet.

Meanwhile Speech is mainly our weapon for self-assertion, and from that point of view there is nothing better in this story than Pip Chaser’s long, aggressive, commanding and yet apparently impersonal key. How feeble beside it was Edward Albert’s “Er—mean t’say.” How spurious those long records of empty phrasing with which the public speaker holds his audience in a state of passive nothingness while he recovers the straying argument that has slipped away from his wits!

The last thing a speaker or writer can perceive is his own limitation, and with that the critical hearer and reader must deal. In this story, subject to that qualification, there is a sustained attempt to render life, and particularly one specimen life and group of lives, as starkly as possible, and every individual is shown as truthfully as the writer’s ability permits. And they all, in addition to a general laxness, have their peculiar phrasing and mannerisms and patches of verbal shoddy. Every one of them and everyone you know.

So hey for the merry merry Best Man!

He spent the eve of the appointed day in a vigorous rehearsal of Edward Albert. He had thrown himself into the task with an ever-growing enthusiasm. He found something delightful in our hero which was evidently lost upon the rest of the world. And he loved management. He was born knowing, as his wife said, he had never once looked back from that bright start, and he had an extraordinary detailed knowledge of where and when and how to buy the smartest things at the lowest price for every occasion.

“We’ll have this right to the last button, Teddy. We’ll get photographers from the society papers outside the church. I know a man.... How are they to know who we are and who we aren’t?.... Oh, you’ll be all right, if you don’t give way in the middle. Like—hey—shutting a knife, I mean.”

He paraded himself and Edward Albeit up and down the bedroom. He took his arm and spun him round to the looking-glass. “Look at us! Pip and Tewler, arrayed for the altar, What’s a funeral to this sort of thing? I ask you,”

“You know I didn’t count on all this.”

“Exactly. That’s where I come in. Now then, my orphan child, that speech—Just once more. Now then, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’”

He was very proud of the speech he had composed for his pupil. “None of your Unaccustomed-as—I-am-to-public-speaking stuff for us. No. Something simple, neat and natural. Stand up to the table, so. Now then.”

Edward Albert posed himself at the table. “Lays and gentlemen,” he said and paused. “And you, my dear Evangeline—”

“Good!”

“Er. I never made a speech in my life. P’raps I never shall And now. My heart’s too full. Go. bless you all.”

“Excellent! Touching! Then you sit down. My revered Pop—he doesn’t mind being called Pop; it’s Old Gooseberry he can’t stand—my Pop, I say, will blow his cork out and spout all over us for a bit. After all it’s his breakfast. And then kisses. Millie will kiss you. Various women will kiss you—attaboy—I’ll pull you out of it, and so to the station and Tender Torquay.”

“You’ll see us off?”

“To the end.... And now let me help you to spread out the wedding garments. Your blue suit will be on the Pop Premises.... Have I forgotten anything? Not me. What would have happened to this blessed wedding without my savoir faire transcends the imagination—transcends it, I tell you, simply transcends it.”

Edward. Albert sneezed.

“Where’s your dressing gown? Every man in your position ought to have a wadded dressing gown.”

“I bin shivering all day. I think I got a cold,”

“That’s where that whisky comes in, my boy. Lemon? No lemon! You ought always to have a lemon. Get into bed. I’ll get you some boiling water and then I’ll tuck you up. Best man indeed! I’m your nurse and your valet Say your evening prayer. Go on. Ladies and gentlemen and you, my dear Evangeline, I never made a speech in my life. Go on,... Good! Now for the whisky, oh Lamb made ready for the Sacrifice....

“I’ll leave it here beside you. And so to sleep, my Benedict, Sleep well.”

But that was exactly what Edward Albert could not do. A great horror of darkness and self-disgust came upon him.

Something about Pip, something about everybody’s behaviour, told him he was being made a fool of. He had been in Evangeline’s arms again that afternoon and he was in a phase of nervous exhaustion. He had been excited and then told he was no good. Always she was saying he was unsatisfactory. Nice thing to tell a fellow. And egging him on again. And here he was to be dressed up like a fool.... He wouldn’t stand it. He would not stand it. He would be damned if he stood it. He was a free man in a free country. Smash up the whole thing he would even now, and be damned to their wedding breakfast!

He got out of bed. He sneezed violently. He’d smash that hat anyhow. But face to face with that immaculate hat, his heart failed him. It found the cringing snob in him. He crept back into bed and sat up for a time looking at it. But in an hour he was raving again and repeating his invincible objection to marrying. He’d been led into it. He’d been W. It wasn’t what he’d meant....

Mr Pip, dressed as the ideal best man, was a little late and impatient. He had a white gardenia in his button hole and he carried another, with its stem in silver paper, for his victim. He rang for ten minutes almost continuously; he banged and kicked the door, and he was at last admitted by Edward Albert in pyjamas. The bridegroom’s eyes were red, swollen and half-closed, he said nothing, and he scuttled back hastily to bed.

“What on earth’s this?” demanded Mr Pip, round-eyed.

Edward Albert rolled over away from him and became a bunch of bedclothes.

“I can’t do it, o’ fellow,” he wheezed hoarsely. “I got a frightful cold. You got to manage without me,”

“Say that again,” cried Pip, incredulous but delighted.

“Say that again.”

Edward Albeit said it again but lower and more wheezily.

“You got to manage without me!” echoed Pip. “Oh lovely! Oh perfect! Of all the larks!”

He cackled with laughter. He danced about the room. He waved his arms about. “I can see them. I can see them all. Managing without him!” He aimed two tremendous punches at the roll of bedclothes that was the bridegroom and then went off to the pantry in search of whisky.

He came back with a glass of whisky and soda in his hand and put it down on the night table to enable him to punch the defaulter some more. “Oh Lord! what are we to do?” he said. “You, hey, toad.”

“Bring ’em all here,” he tried. “Get the parson and the bride and everyone here. Not legal. Get an ambulance and take you there. What’s the time? Past eleven. You can’t marry after twelve. Get you up now and dress you by force? Get up!”

He tried to strip off the bedclothes but Edward Albert had wrapped them too tightly round himself.

“I tell you I won’t” he shouted. “I can’t and I won’t. I won’t. I changed my mind.”

Pip desisted.

“Ever had the pleasure of meeting Inspector Birkenhead, Tewler?” he asked.

“Don’ wan’ meet ’im.”

“You will.”

Then Pip had his brightest idea. “I know. You’ve got a temperature of 105, Tewler, and I’m going to telephone. They’ll send for a doctor—who’ll expose you. And then? I don’t know. God help you I Why the hell haven’t you had a telephone put in here? As I told you. I’ll have to go out to a call office.”

When the flat had ceased to reverberate with Pip’s presence, Edward Albert rolled up into a vertical position, a sort of cocoon of bedclothes surmounted by a rueful face and a disorder of hair, and finished Pip’s whisky and soda.

“I never thought of that old father,” he whispered, and his face was white with premonition.

XIV. Fizz Pop

Inspector Birkenhead looked like the quintessence of all those Scotland Yard Inspectors who have figured in that vast and ever-growing field of literature, detective stories. He was indeed the only begetter of a great family. His position at Scotland Yard brought him into immediate contact with all the journalists, writers, curious persons and so forth who came in ever-increasing volume to study the type. He was Scotland Yard’s first line of defence, and the first to break cover from the thickets upon the encircled criminal. Subtler minds up-stairs remained hidden from the public eye and the public imagination. Criminals never saw them, knew nothing about them. Camera men never got hold of them. Between them and the amateur detective, a great gulf, in the shape of Inspector Birkenhead, was fixed. Edward Albert had met him already in a dozen stories under a dozen names.

The Inspector was a big heavy man, big enough indeed to be a lot of people. Edward Albert watched him place a chair for himself in the middle of the room and adjust himself firmly to its creaking accommodation, rest his hands upon his thighs and stick out his elbows. “Edward Albert Tewler, I believe.” he said.

There is no hiding things from these detectives,

“Yes,” said Edward Albert and the word half choked him.

His mouth was dry with fear.

He glanced in hope of some moral support from Pip, but Pip appeared to be lost in admiration of Enfin seul.

“I’m told you engaged to marry my daughter and that at the very last moment when everything was prepared for the ceremony, you insulted her and everybody by absenting yourself, absenting yourself without leave, from the ceremony. Have I been correctly informed?”

“I really did ’ave a temperature, Sir. Over 104 it was. Five degrees above normal.”

“Nothing to what you’ll have some day,” said the Inspector prosaically.

“But Mr Chaser here knows—Reely, Sir.”

“We won’t argue about that. We won’t trouble Mr Chaser about that. I should say by the look of you she was well out of a thoroughly silly marriage, if it wasn’t—”

The Inspector stopped, unable to continue for a time. His face was suffused, His mouth closed grimly and he appeared to be inhaling intensely. His eyes protruded. He seemed to be swelling. He must have been full of very highly compressed air. It looked as though he might explode at any moment, but as a matter of fact he was exercising self-control.

Mr Pip Chaser had stopped looking at the picture and had come round to a position from which to observe the Inspector better. Even his expression of expectant amusement was mitigated by a touch, of awe. There was, if one may say so, a. sort of humming silence of apprehension throughout the room. What became: of all that air it is idle to speculate. It disappears from tills story. When the Inspector spoke his voice was calm and stern. He deflated imperceptibly.

“My daughter, if she is my daughter, was her mother’s child. That woman.—That woman brought disgrace upon my name. A wanton. A loose woman. And now.... Once again. No, I cannot have that sort of thing happen over again.”

“But I mean to marry her, Sir. I’m going to marry her.”

“You’d better. If you don’t—” And speaking as always, with the quiet dignity of a man accustomed to the use of studiously irreproachable language, he used these by no means irreproachable words: “I’ll bloody-well knock your silly block off for you! You understand me, Sir?”

“Yessir,” said Edward Albert.

“But then how are we going to do it? The mischief is done. Here’s everything disarranged and out of order. All her friends will know and talk. Well, Mr Chaser, you’ve a way of arranging things, she says, she says you can arrange Anything; and you know all these people better than I do. How you can arrange this now passes my imagination. What’s to be done?”

“Well,” said Pip. “If you ask me——”

He came forward and stood for a moment with his mouth wide open, scratching his jaws, “Hey”, he said, slowly and extensively. “Nothing irreparable has happened. First there’s this lie about the temperature.”

Edward Albert murmured a protest.

“Lie?” said the Inspector, looked hard at Edward Albert, and said no more.

“Pure lie,” said Pip, “I invented it and I ought to know. He hadn’t a temperature. He had—hey—cold feet.... Still, we ought to keep that up. And the sooner Evangeline shows anxiety about it, the better. We can say she’s been round already, in a dreadful state of mind. Oh, I know that’s not true, but—hey—we can say it. And then we can say there was a misunderstanding about the date. And I lost the ring and got confused. Blame it on to me. That’s what Best Men are for. Any old story, and the more stories there are, the better. We contradict vaguely. We say to this man, ‘the fact of the matter is this’, and we say to that man, ‘the fact of the matter is that’. So everybody knows more than everybody else and we escape in the confusion. Just—hey—common sense, all that. The facts are bad. As you know, Sir, as your criminals know, the worse the facts are the more they have to be jumbled up. We aren’t going to have to be sifting the evidence, Sir, thank goodness. And the sooner we get the whole thing over, the better.”

“There I agree,” said the Inspector. “I stand by that firmly.”

“I’ll get busy,” said Puck-Pip. “I’ll do it.”

“But if there’s any more shilly-shally—”

“Block,” said Pip compactly, and turned to his client.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

Edward Albert nodded acquiescence. The Inspector stood up slowly and towered over his prospective son-in-law. He shook not so much a finger as the whole terror of Scotland Yard at him.

“That girl is going to be decently and properly married whether she likes it or not, whether you like it or not, whoever likes it or don’t like it”—he hesitated—“or not. Not twice will I have the honour of my family trailed in the mud. You marry her and you treat her properly. She’s got the temper of a vixen, I admit, but all the same she’s an educated young lady, and don’t you forget it. She’s a young lady and you’re no gentleman....”

He ceased to address Edward Albert. He soliloquised, looking over Pip’s head.

“I’ve often thought if perhaps I’d spanked her at times Or somebody had spanked her. I couldn’t have spanked her.... But there I was without a woman to care for her.... It’s no good crying over spilt milk. As a little kid.... If only she could have stayed always as a little kid.... She was such a bright little kid.”

The lament of the father through the ages....

So in a confusion of explanations the wedding feast was restored to the calendar and in due course Edward Albert found himself standing with Evangeline before a clergyman of venerable appearance and rapid enunciation. Pip stood behind Edward Albert like a ventriloquist behind his dummy, and three small bridesmaids of unknown provenance upheld Evangeline’s train. In a front pew stood Inspector Birkenhead, meticulously observant, and evidently resolved to knock the bridegroom’s sanguinary block off at the slightest hint of hanky-panky.

The elderly clergyman went off at headlong speed.

“Debloved getggether ’n sigh Gard ’n face congation join togeth man this wum ho’ matmony onble sta stuted Gard time man’s ’sincy.... dained remdy gainsin void forncation....fever after holdis peace.”

More of that....

Then suddenly Edward Albert found he was bring addressed. The quick-firing clergyman was saying, “Wilt have this Worn thy wed wife.... keep th’only unt her—s’long both sha’ live?”

“Eh?” said Edward Albert, trying to get it clear.

“Say ‘I will’”—from Pip.

“I will.”

He turned on Evangeline who answered very clearly;

“I will.”

“Who giv’ s’wom mad this man?”

Rapid exchange of glances between the Inspector and Pip. Assenting noise from the Inspector and something very like

“O.K.” from Mr Chaser, who reached over smartly and put Evangeline’s hand in the priest’s. There was a slight fumble and the priest, with an impatient tug, joined the two right hands as he proceeded. He was already well away with

“Peat after me. Was name?”

“Edward Albert Tewler, Sir.”

“I, Edward Albert Tewler, take thee, was name?”

“Evangeline Birkenhead.”

“Vangline Birk’ned to wed wife...”

Things drew to a climax.

“Whe’s ring?” Senile impatience manifested. But young Chaser was fully up to his duties. “Here, Sir. Yes, Sir, all correct.”

“On her finger.”

“Fourth finger—you chump,” from Pip in an audible whisper, and found it for him. “Don’t drop it.”

“Teat aft me. ...This ring Ivy wed.

“Kneel,” hissed Pip, with a slight but helpful kick.

And so the beautiful old ceremony drew to its end. Prayers and responses were mumbled by Edward Albert out of a prayer-book suddenly handed to him. There was more lightning discourse and then Edward Albert was walking down the aisle, with Evangeline clinging firmly to his arm, to the supply organist’s interpretation of the Wedding March from Lohengrin.

“Splendid,” whispered Pip. “Splendid. I’m proud of you. Chin up!”

So far as he had any feeling left in him, Edward Albert was proud of himself.

A crowd of strange faces outside. Damn! He’d forgotten to let Leaseholds know. He’d forgotten to tell Bert. Pip was handing him his hat and helping him into the first carriage. It was a black-lined carriage, but the coal-black horses were mitigated by abundant white rosettes. .

Edward Albert exhaled noisily. Evangeline remained perfectly still.

“Hey!” said Pip, realising that something had to be said about it: “That was—magnificent. Magnificent!”

“The flowers were beautiful,” said Evangeline.

“Pop,” said Pip.

Then they were going into the house of Pop Chaser. It was, Edward Albert realised, a stylish house, and it was doing itself in the best style. He had never seen such a lot of flowers except at a flower show before. And there were special maids in uniform caps and aprons to take hats and coats and things. A very young gentleman friend of the family dressed like a cadet shop-walker, acted as usher. The bridesmaids reappeared as sisterlets of Pip’s. There was a roomful of people. “Reception,” said Pip. “Smile at ’em. That’s better. This way.”

Mrs Doober was saying something, then an unknown lady in an autobiographical mood was thrust aside. Then a big fat chap was kissing the bride with remarkable gusto. He disentangled himself and displayed a broad flushed face rather like Pip’s, but stuffed with intercalary matter, and he was white-haired. “And so this is the lucky man, eh?

“Congratulations, my boy. “Con-gratulations. You carry off my family treasure and I congratulate you. Well, s’long as she’s happy....”

He held out a capacious hand.

Edward Albert was at a loss for words. He allowed his hand to be shaken.

“You’re welcome,” said Pop Chaser. “And you’ve got the sunshine on your wedding.”

“I ’ave got that,” said Edward Albert.

“I didn’t come to the church in person,” said Pop Chaser, “but I was there in spirit.”

“Your lovely flowers,” said Evangeline.

“And my lovely Son, eh?”

“I must say it’s a perfectly lovely wedding. Isn’t it, Teddy dear?”

“I’m enjoying it all right,” said Edward Albert.

“Aah!” said Mr Chaser, and held out his large hand to a vigorously dressed plump lady. “So glad you’ve come. Your flowers and my champagne....”

Evangeline pulled her spouse aside.

“He’s doing it all splendidly. Isn’t he, darling? You ought to thank him. Perhaps if you put a sentence in your speech—just at the end.”

Edward Albert looked alarmed. “What d’you think? Feel I can’t sit down without a word of thanks?”

“Generosity and Hospitality,” whispered Evangeline,

“Perfect. You’re a dear.”

They were separated again.

Everything was moving very fast, after the fashion of wedding breakfasts. The dining-room was full of flowers again and champagne bottles had been liberally distributed about the board. A great clatter of knives and forks began. Corks popped and tongues were unloosed. But Edward Albert could not eat. His lips moved. “Lays and gem’n and you my dear Evangeline. I never made a speech’n my life,” He drank off the bubbling glass beside him and felt a rush of small needles to his nose. But it seemed to give him heart and confidence. Someone refilled his glass. “Not too much,” said Pip, close at hand and alert.

Nearer and nearer crept the moment.

“Ori,” he said, and stood up.

“Lays and gem’n, me dear Vanger. Nevangeline. You Nevangeline.” Pause.

Prompter: “Never made a speech in my life.”

Rapidly, “Ne-ma-speech m’life. Who?....

“Now harsh too full. Go bless y’awl.”

Loud and sustained applause. “Siddown,” said Pip, but the bridegroom remained standing. His eye was fixed on the bride,

“Feel I carn sit down vout a word thanks. Pop. Pop Goose—”

Pip had bit him violently on the back and was standing up beside him.

“Hey” he neighed out at the top of his voice. “Magnificent speech. Magnificent. Excellent.” He forced Edward Albert down into his chair. He waved a glass of champagne dangerously, and spilt some down Edward Albert’s vest

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the bride and bridegroom. Our love to them, our good wishes. Hip, Hip, Hurrah.”

Confused applause followed. There seemed to be some hesitation. Glasses were held towards Edward Albert and Evangeline. Old Mr Chaser was addressing his son in protesting tones. “Stick to the programme, Pip,” he was saying. “Where are we? What’s come over you? You ’aven’t got drunk, my boy, by any chance, ’ave you?”

“Sorry, Pop! Drunk with happiness. Hey, Happiness.”

A pause. Then old Chaser rose-to his feet prepared for oratory. Some great danger—no one but Pip was quite clear what it was—had threatened the festival—and passed,

“Ladies and gen’men, Mr Tewler and my dear girl,” said old Chaser, “it gives me great pleasure to-day, to welcome and entertain you here to-day at the nuptials, the nuptials, of one who is and will be I hope always dear to us all, my dear, bright, clever, good god-child Evangeline. I feel I am ’anding over to-day a very loving and precious Treasure to my young friend Tewler, our young friend Tewler....”

“Did I say something wrong?” whispered Edward Albert to his faithful dragoman.

“Did you say something wrong? Lucky I haven’t a weak heart or I’d be dead this moment.” He neighed pianissimo.

“Listen to the speaker. Go easy, that champagne.”

Edward Albert turned a face of deliberate attention to the speech.

“There have been things said and insinuated. The less said about that the better. There ’ave been misunderstandings and they ’ave, to put it plainly, been misunderstood. For all that and all that, all’s well that ends well. I am very ’appy to-day to see ’ere at my table a very great and distinguished figure in our London life, no less a man than the celebrated Inspector Birkenhead.” Applause. “He stands for all that keeps us from being robbed and murdered in our beds. But.... Unhappily, unhappily—”

Pause of expectation.

“I ’ave to report a new crime to ’im, a robbery.”

Sensation.

“’Is own daughter, Evangeline, is the criminal. She ’as stolen all our ’carts and—”

The rest of the sentence was lost in riotous applause and table-banging. Somebody broke a glass unreproved. The only word audible was the concluding word, “Torquay.” Pop Chaser was radiant with oratorical success, and Pip Chaser was slapping him on the back. Apparently the old man had either not heard Edward Albert’s little slip of the tongue or forgotten it, and Edward Albert himself began to doubt whether it had really occurred. He drained a new-filled beaded glass towards his host before Pip could prevent him....

XV. Man and Wife

“Courage!” said Pip, “Be—hey-good to her,” waving to the outgoing train. He slid out of sight past the windows and the young couple were off for their honeymoon....

Edward Albert had slumped into his seat. “Wish I knew who frew that last slipper,” he said. “All bruised I am. Someone must’ve delib’ratly buzzed it straight at my face. Ugh!”

He shut his eyes.

“Merried,” he said, and said no more.

She seated herself diametrically opposite to him.

For a time they sat in silence.

She was perplexed by a disconcerting little incident that had just occurred. A radiant railway official had taken them in charge, led them along the platform and ushered them to their reserved compartment. “Wish you all happiness,” he said, and stood waiting. Edward Albert looked in dull interrogation at his bride. “Wans a tip, I s’pose,” he said, fumbled in his pocket and produced sixpence. The man stared at the coin with a hostile expression and made no movement. Matters hung in suspense.

“All right Evangeline! My affair,” said Pip, and had drawn the resentful official out of the apartment and brightened his face on the platform.

“I suppose” (hiccup) “I can do what I like with my own money,” said Edward Albert answering her unspoken protest.

“But he expected more. Dressed up as we are! He looked so astonished and hurt. He didn’t like you, Teddy.”

“Well, I didn’t like ’is face either.”

He seemed to think the incident concluded. But this assertion that he meant to do what he liked with his own money came as a clear definition of a disposition already very plainly apparent. He had evidently been thinking things over and he had got one reality very clear in his mind. He had the power of the purse. He had insisted on paying himself for every incidental expense for which Pip had not provided already. (Pip’s bill was to come in later.) Evangeline studied his sulky face across the carriage. Edward Albert had never been drunk before and the temporary exhilaration of Old Gooseberry was apt to be followed by an uncomfortable obstinacy.

Her immediate disposition was to leave him alone. But for some days she had been anticipating this moment and preparing a little speech for him, that would re-adjust their relations on a saner basis. And that former resolution was still sufficiently strong to prevail over her discretion.

“Teddy,” she said, “Listen to me.”

He did not open his eyes. “Wassit?” he asked.

“Teddy, we’ve got to make the best of all this. I was a fool to fall in love with you in the first place—oh, yes, I was in love with you right enough—but I fell out quicker than I fell in. Kidnapping—she said. What was her name? Blame. Détournement des mineurs. Are you listening? Face things as they are. You’re young, Teddy, even for your years. And I’m a grown-up woman.”

“Don wan argue. Thing’s done s’done. Wish I knew who chucked that slipper.... Couldn’t have been old Pip.... Pip wount done thin’ like that.”

Nothing more to be said. She sat back, disregarding him. She felt intolerably sober. She wished she had let herself go like the rest of them with Veuve Gooseberry, She tried to reassemble her ideas. She had entered upon a new sort of life in which there would be no weekly pay day. She had never thought of that before and at the time the prospect scared her unduly....

She went out into the corridor and contemplated the flying landscape. She looked over her shoulder and then resorted to the privacy of the lavatory. There she counted her available money. She had £2.11s.6d. Not much. And no more to come.

She returned to their apartment.

He had shifted. He was in the middle of the carriage now with his hands on the seat arms and he was making a queer noise between snoring and sobbing. He was partly asleep and wholly drunk. She stood for a long time regarding him.

“Tu n’as voulu,” Georges what is it?—Dindon?—Chose?” she whispered to herself. “He used to say that and laugh at me.”

And then, “What was that other one he used to laugh at? As a girl falls so shall she lie.... Nothing to laugh at now.”

Well, she was in a fix and somehow she would get out of it. When one looked at her antagonist, there was nothing really for aidable about him. She glanced at the panel of looking-glass above the back of the seat and she realised that her grey going-away dress suited her very well. She nodded to her reflection reassuringly.

She posed to herself, admiring and sympathising with, herself. She saw herself brilliant, generous^ passionate, unfortunate and still undaunted.

“I’ve got no right to hate him,” she said. “But it’s going to be hard not to. This money business. That’s something new. Evadne, my dear, you never dreamt of that. Somehow that must be put straight. Think it out. Put him to bed to-night and talk sense to him to-morrow.”

At Torquay Station she felt she had the situation well in hand. She got the porters tipped generously by saying, “His fee is half a crown,” and she settled handsomely with the cabdriver by the same device. “Thish Torquay don’t arf charge,” said her spouse.

“Nothing is dear if it’s good,” she said, partly to him and partly to the hotel porter.

And having pacified her lord and sent him to sleep, she lay awake beside him in a reverie.

Before her acutely wakeful mind passed a pageant of beautiful women down the ages who had had to give their bodies to dwarfed kings and ugly feudal lords, rich merchants, influential statesmen, millionaires, with far less desire than had served her turn. And all the women in this procession were strangely alike; reasonably tall, bright-eyed, with shadowy black hair and a dark warmth of skin; each indeed was her own dream-self in a thousand lovely costumes, sacrificial always but still proud and self-contained. One lady on a white horse, however, wore no costume at all, Lady Godiva. Venus the prey of Vulcan also, was scanty. Anne Boleyn was rich by contrast. A splendid figure was Esther, purified, anointed, and in robes of the utmost frankness and splendour, jingling like a sistrum, going into the King, conquering by her dark loveliness, conquering by submission. Always she submitted rather than gave, holding back a precious jewel of self-abandonment that was hers, her own unexplored essence. She controlled the brute for fine and generous ends.

Was this after all what wifehood amounted to?

For most women perhaps—yes.

Was there ever a true love between husband and wife? There was obligation in it and obligation kills love. There was an excessive proximity. You saw the creature too closely. The advantage of an amant was that you didn’t have to live with him.

There was someone she had been trying to forget, but the word amant translated itself into English and the desire for love flooded her being.... True love...

Her imaginative posturing came to an end. She stared hard at the darkness for some moments and then moaned weakly and began to weep and weep silently; “Oh my dear,” she whispered, “Oh my dear” She let herself weep, and it comforted her greatly.

The morning found her restored to her normal self and prepared even to enjoy Torquay. She had thought of all sorts of things that revolutionised the situation. She slipped out of bed and into a Parisian dressing-gown, went to look at the sea—lovely!—rang and demanded a “chocolate camplit” and explained that “M’sieu mangera Plutarch.” Then, recalled to Old England at the maid’s stare, she translated, “One chocolate and rolls and butter. My husband is still asleep.” He might, she reflected, have the monopoly of payment, but nothing here could prevent her giving orders.

She dressed and as she dressed she revised that speech she had composed in the train. She would say it all later in the day, when he was washed and penitent. There was an aftermath of penitence in that champagne. It was his first experience of getting drunk, and she knew there was a state called having a head and a mouth, when fallen humanity craves for a cool hand on its brow. She wished she knew more about pick-me-ups.

She would go down and find out in the bar.

All that worked out admirably. The barman was understanding and charming. She tried a cocktail he said he had invented, It cleared and invigorated the spirit. She did a very unusual thing for her. She had another.

In the afternoon she was able to deliver her little speech from under a sunshade that she held over her husband’s head in the hotel gardens, and win his depressed but unresisting agreement.

Should she say a word about the money? Not a word until they went back to London and she began housekeeping.

This they did precipitately when Edward Albert received the first week’s bill.

It was rather a big bill, but then they were having their honeymoon. To him it seemed unspeakably vast. By all his available means it was overwhelmingly vast. He examined it incredulously.

“Why do they call it the King’s Suite?”

“They flatter themselves they are doing us well.”

“Doing us well!” His face was white and damp -with perspiration. He was too appalled to shout. “Doing us!” he whispered.

“Wot’s this—this porter’s account? That’s that big busybody downstairs.”

“He paid for a few things I bought in the shops. It’s how they do in hotels.” She glanced at the bill. “That’s all quite correct,” she said.

“Hairdresser? Manicure?”

“Downstairs in the hotel.”

“Gordormighty!” said Edward Albert, using Nuts MacBryde’s once terrifying expletive without a qualm.

He reflected bitterly. “I seen advertisements in the newspapers about chaps who won’t be responsible for their wives’ debts.”

She offered no comment.

They returned to London third class and for the most pan in silence.

For some days the tension in Torrington Square was grim. No money was issued for housekeeping. Edward Albert went out to get meals at convenient public houses. But Evangeline ate and there were even fresh flowers. Returning from one of those outside repasts, he discovered his home very largely occupied by his father-in-law. The Inspector was talking sternly to his daughter as Edward Albert came in, and, after making a brief gesture that commanded his son-in-law to sit down and wait his turn, he continued his discourse.

“You get more like your mother every day—in looks and behaviour. But so far as I can I will stand between you and the sort of disgrace she brought upon herself. Why should you go on like this now? I’ve got to do what I can for you and see you’re not put upon. But this can’t go on. No.... And now, young man, what’s all this about the household accounts and not letting your wife have a penny?”

“S’my money,” said Edward Albert.

“Not if you owe it, young fellow my lad; not if you’re under an obligation. No. There’s such a thing as a reg’lar housekeeping allowance and she’s got to have it. To cover breakages and reasonable wear and tear as well as the tradesmen’s bills.”

“I can pay those,” said Edward Albert.

“You’d better settle the amount, whoever hands it out. And if she handles it then there won’t be any need for argument. And there’s such a thing as a fair dress allowance, per month or quarter, and no decent husband refuses it. And there’s her private petty cash for incidental things. You want to be a decent husband, Tewler, so far as it’s in you, and all that much, no gentleman can refuse. There ought to have been a proper marriage settlement before you rushed her into all this. Better late than never. The rest of your money is your own money to do exactly what you like with. So now how do we figure it out?”

“Aren’t I to have a voice—”

“No,” said the Inspector, calmly but dreadfully.

Something remotely like a gleam of humour appeared in the big man’s manner and even something in the nature of sympathy. “I’ve got no .reason,” he said, “to befriend you, young fellow, and you aren’t the sort of person anyone would naturally take a fancy to, but I do know something of this daughter of mine—and her mother—and the sooner you fix up this particular business, exactly and for your own protection, mind you, for your own protection, the more you’ll want to thank me later on. I suppose you’re ordering things from the tradespeople?” he said to Evangeline.

“Naturally,” said Evangeline.

“There you are!” said the Inspector.

Edward Albert could have eaten at home and saved all that much money.

So they figured it out and the Inspector wrote it all down in a clear round hand. “You’s better initial it,” he said, and waited.

Edward Albert initialled it.

The Inspector rose over him and patted his shoulder with a powerful hand. “You’ll both thank me for this” he said. He refused all refreshment and departed humming,

Edward Albert closed the door on him and returned to his domestic life. He sat down violently and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“That’s put the lid on. I might just as well be back in the boarding-house. My home. Gaw!”

Evangeline was disposed to be quite kind and generous about it all.

“I didn’t ask Father to come this time,” she said. “He just thought about it and came. I didn’t ask him to interfere.”

“Gaw,” said Edward Albert ambiguously.

“It’s just your inexperience, Teddy. Every decent husband has to do the same sort of thing.... It’s the way of things. My dear, you murst face reality. Why can’t we pull ourselves together and make the best of it? Even now.”

XVI. Rifted Lute

But it has to be admitted that neither she nor Teddy made whatever best of it was possible. Deep in his mind was an uncontrollable resentment against her; deep in hers, something bitterer, an uncontrollable resentment against herself. Her path in life was paved with good resolutions.

They cohabited, as the refined put it. It was like their meals together, a primary function ill done. There were phases of reconciliation; there were even days of companionship. They went to a few cinemas and music halls. They Attempted friendly jokes, but his sense of humour irritated her. There would be reasonless quarrels arising out of nothing at all, and she made them more often than he did. They had few visitors. Pip came in once or twice and Millie Chaser was a steadfast friend. One or two old school-fellows came to tea by invitation. In London there is no calling. Only the clergy call if you appear at church with some regularity or communicate. Evangeline was house-proud and proud to be among her own furniture. She would have liked more people. She had Mrs Doober and Gawpy to tea two or three times, and Mr Chaser brought round a stuffed owl he had bought in a moment of abstraction in a Strand auction room and decided was the very thing for the hall. Evangeline’s place of business sent them a wedding present of an ormolu clock. But none of her former colleagues ever appeared. There was some barrier there.

The weeks lengthened into months. Evangeline took to dressing-gowns and tea-gowns, kept indoors by day and went for walks round the squares after dark. They got to an agreement that the child should be born in a nursing home. Edward Albert was torn between the cost of the nursing home and a vision of innumerable polluted napkins hung out to dry conjured up by Evangeline and Millie. Towards, the end Evangeline became more erratic and fanciful and difficult to please. There was a streak of anger in her desire. And then a day came when she said, “No more of this,” and kept her word. She locked her door upon him. “It’s her condition,” he said. “Be all right when the kid’s born.”

But some flash of prophetic intuition whispered the incredible suggestion that that door was locked on him for good and all.

Long before that climax he was detesting his sexual servitude almost as much as he had detested the mitigated reliefs of his pre-marital days. He would have given money, real money, to have been able to refuse her capricious summons, her formalised lapse into amorousness, but he never could. But if for example he could say: “Thanks, but I don’t seem to fancy it. You see—I got something a bit better.”

That would be a slap in the face for her, anyhow. He indulged in reveries of unfaithfulness. Pick up a girl somewhere. Pick up a nice girl and lead a double life! He’d got all the time he needed to do that sort of thing now. You had to be careful, though. You had to look out for the gold-diggers. In reveries he could be unfaithful on a magnificent scale, but when it came to practical realisation, he found a thorny zareba between himself and external womankind. He was still haunted by the hygienic nightmares of Dr Scaber, and also you couldn’t make much of a score against Evangeline out of an affair with a street-walker. He would wander about for hours, with a vague dream of accosting some frail but credulous beauty. He would follow women about the streets, and sometimes they were evidently aware of it and amused. They would glance at him just sufficiently to keep him in tow. Several times he carried adventure to the point of standing beside one of them about one o’clock and saying, “How about a spot of lunch, eh?” Twice the invitation was” accepted, but in each case the lady had an urgent engagement in the afternoon, which in its way was as much a relief as a disappointment, for he didn’t know in the least where to take her Tor her seduction. A barmaid who would smile at him drew him like a magnet. Every barmaid has a clientele of smile-purchasers and undertone gossips, whether she wants it or not. For the name of the vague, sexually maundering Tewler is Legion.

There was a coming and going of servants in the little home. At Doober’s Edward Albert had regarded the incessantly changing slaveys with a profound terror mixed with an increasing desire. He had been wont to dream of his first glimpse of that sort of indecorum. Now, as master of the house, he could not fail to regard the various efforts of Evangeline to secure a satisfactory domestic as putting accessible females within reach of him. He had his eye on them and they felt his eye on them.

Evangeline went to a Servants’ Registry for her servants, and Servants. Registries do not make their money by bringing together domestic treasures and irreproachable employers.

One transaction of that sort and their fees are paid and there’s nothing doing any more with either client. On the other hand, an unsatisfactory servant or a tiresome mistress is back in the office in a month or so, and the turnover is resumed. Evangeline’s Registry had a small regiment of plausible but ultimately unsatisfying domestics and a number of amiable, prosperous-looking but temperamental mistresses, upon its books, and it couldn’t have carried on without them. Trouble arose because two girls objected rather markedly to having “that Mr Tewler” hanging about the house all day,

“You didn’t know what he might be up to. He’d follow you into a bedroom or anything.” Others didn’t like being single-handed with a mistress who never came into the kitchen for a friendly word, one objected to Mrs Tewler wanting chocolate or cocoa in bed, and so forth. And one woman refused to wear a cap and apron, and one had a sniff that Evangeline simply could not stand. This state of domestic instability seemed likely to become chronic until a friend of Millie Chaser’s produced the one possible person in a certain Mrs Butter.

There were explanations to be made about this Mrs Butter. She wasn’t to be called by her Christian name; she was to be Mrs Butter, and her title was to be housekeeper-general. These points conceded she was all complaisance.

“You see,” said Millie Chaser, “she just wants to be alone. She’s had a tragic time. She wants work, she says, to occupy her mind, and she does not want to have to talk to people. She has to make a living. She was an orphan or something and lived with an aunt who wanted her out of the way because she had daughters of her own. So when a fellow turned up and wanted to many her, she married him, and he turned out the most frightful blackguard. Frightful, my dear, Took her bit of property, every penny, drank, beat her. Actually beat her. Kicked her and beat her when she was going to have a child. She was taken to hospital. The poor little baby died in a month, he had injured it in some way, and she went out of her mind about it and tried to kill herself. When she began to recover, she found this husband of hers was in jail. He wasn’t her husband; he was a bigamist. He’d just married her to get hold of her poor little bit of money. But that disposed of him. She’s a sort of stunned woman. Very nice, very gentle.”

“And what’s her real name?”

“Still Butter. That was her maiden name and that’s why she’s Mrs and not Miss.”

Mrs Butter appeared in due course. She was young, younger than Evangeline, very plainly dressed in brown, pale, brown-haired, broad-faced and quietly good-looking, She surveyed the house and discussed her duties with her mistress.

Evangeline had been warned not to be too searching in her questions and so she talked about herself. “You see—there’s a baby coming.”

Mrs Butter winced but remained calm. “When?” she asked. Evangeline estimated.

“It will be well for you to have a married woman about,”

“It’s what I’ve wanted. It’s what I want dreadfully. How good of you, Mrs Butter, to see that. Just now I’m splendid, but sometimes—oh, I’m afraid.”

“Why we go through with it....” said Mrs Butter, and left her sentence incomplete.

“That’s what I ask myself.”

“If there was any pleasure to be found in it,” said Mrs Butter....

“On Sundays if you want to go to church—”

“I don’t go to church,” said Mrs Butter, and added, “It’s a mockery.”

“We don’t go so very much,” said Evangeline.

“You’d like me to move in—when? I’m quite free.”

Edward Albert discovered Mrs Butter after some days. She looked young and amenable and she regarded him with calm respect. But he had learnt that she was a woman and had begun. He watched her discreetly. He spent a week and a half trying to catch her eye. The atmosphere of the flat improved; things were put in their places; the rooms seemed brighter. Then Mrs Butter, surveying her handiwork in the drawing-room, remarked to Evangeline, “It would look better with a cat.”

They discussed pet animals. “They make things homey,” Mrs Butter thought. Dogs she did not like, they fawned upon you and tried to lick your face, but cats, nice cats, had dignity. They knew their place. “But they have a lot of kittens,” said Evangeline. “Not the cat I know,” said Mrs Butter. And presently a mitigated young Tom, glossy black with yellow eyes, reposed upon the Tewler hearthrug and blinked at Mrs Butter putting the buttered tea-cake on the brass trivet, which was another of her helpful suggestions.

One afternoon a little later she was kneeling in the same place, tickling the cat’s throat and fighting his claws. Her crouching figure looked very pleasantly feminine. Evangeline was in her own room lying down. Suddenly Mrs Butter found Edward Albert pressing himself against her. “Pussy, pussy,” he said.

She could feel his body trembling. He slid a caressing hand down her shoulder and the line of her hips. He gave her a pat and the beginning of a pinch.

She shook herself away from him and rose to her feet. She faced him, regarding him steadily. She did not appear to be in the least excited or angry.

She spoke calmly and almost as if she had had her little speech prepared for some days.

“I don’t want to seem wanting in respect, Mr Tewler, but if you do anything of that sort again I’ll smack you face hard and-march right out of this house. I’ve had enough jiggery-pokery from one man to last me a lifetime. I don’t want to be a bit disagreeable. I know what men are, they don’t seem able to help it, but the less I have to do with them the better. You keep your place and I’ll keep mine and we’ll get along nicely. I don’t want to make no upset here. I like the missus somehow and I’m sorry for her. Else I wouldn’t stay. She’s awake. That’s her little table bell.”

She stepped round him as one steps round something unpleasant on the carpet.

“Coming,” she cried to Evangeline.

Edward Albert attempted an ironical whistle, but Mrs Butter held her position, intacta. There was no mistaking her sincerity. He decided henceforth to treat her with cold disdain—and be damned to her!

He wished he knew some chaps, some really fast chaps, who would give him just the hints he needed for a real man’s life in London. He had heard of clubs but he did not know anyone who could introduce him to one. There you get together with fellows in the know....

That dream common to your Homo Tewler Anglicanus and Americanus of getting together with fellows in the know, of conniving together in clubs, was soon to spin fraternally in rotaries about the world, A great brotherly idea.

XVII. Henry Tewler Begins

Evangeline had a bad time in the nursing home. Bitter pangs rushed upon her, filled with violent futile effort, and receded. “Try now.”

“Bear down,” and so on. But at last with a feeble cackle, a new Tewler was born into the world, and presented in due course wiped and washed to his exhausted mother.

Evangeline regarded her offspring with a hostile eye, over the corner of the sheet. She made no movement to touch it. “I knew it would look like Aim,” she said. “I knew.”

The eye closed.

The nurse looked at her colleague. Both were slightly shocked.

“He’ll look prettier to-morrow,” said the nurse, Evangeline turned her head over to clear her mouth and spoke deliberately with her eyes shut. “I don’t care.... I don’t care how it looks,” she said. “Take the thing away. I’m glad—glad to be rid of it.”

Such was the welcome of Henry Tewler to the mystery of conscious existence.

XVIII. Tewler Defied

Evangeline came back from the maternity hospital in the charge of a protective, hygienic nurse with a hard, bright, pink-cheeked face and a naturally hostile and altogether too understanding eye, who seemed to enjoy saying: “You have to keep out of here, Mr Tewler. You can’t come near her for a bit. You can say ‘Good deavning’ from the door if you like. But we must take care of her still. She’s not out of her trouble yet.”

A month of enforced chastity passed and was followed by a second month. Master Henry Tewler ceased to look like a flayed monkey in the course of twenty-four hours and began to be attractive. He ceased to squint and produced real brown hair of very great fineness. He lost any personal resemblances and passed into that phase when babies can be freely exchanged and no one the wiser. He fattened under a carefully regimented bottle-feeding, for Evangeline was neither willing nor able to undertake that task. He gurgled and waved his arms about and won a smile from his mother and so became the household darling.

“He’s getting artful,” said the proud father. “Think he’s like me, nurse?”

“There’s something about the eyes,” the nurse admitted.

The nurse went at the end of the second month, and Mrs Butter, who more than anyone else was enslaved by Master Henry, insisted on becoming his nurse and protector. “It might be my own little lost mite come back to me,” she said. A new and slatternly “general” came in by the day to take over the domestic work.

Evangeline was up and about again now and cooking very competently. She was taking in the French costumes she had let out, and bringing them up to date with the help of Mode. She went for a walk round the squares, she went for a drive round Hyde Park in a cab, she went with Edward Albert to a cinema. And still there came no evening summons to Edward Albert. What did it mean?

He brought matters to a crisis. “You’re looking fine,” he said.

“I’m getting better.”

“You’re looking just right. I’d like to kiss you....”

She raised her eyebrows.

He came to the point.

“Ain’t it about time, Evadne; well—we did something?”

She had been rehearsing her part in this encounter for some time. But this opening line didn’t fit.

“We aren’t going to do something any more,” she said.

“But you’re my wife. You got to do your juty by me.”

She shook her head.

“But you got to.”

“All that’s been changed,” she said. “My body belongs to me and I do what I like with it. And as far as all that goes, I’ve done with you for ever, little man. For ever and ever and ever.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Nous verrons.”

“But—You’re mad. You’re flying in the face of the laws of Gord and man. You can’t mean it. No. And what are you going to do? Go without—You can’t stand that any more than I can. Less. Don’t talk rubbish. Why, you’re obliged to.”

“Nothing like trying,” she said.

“But you’re obliged every way. It’s against the law. I could sue you. There’s such a thing as Restitution of Connubial Rights. I’ve seen it in Lloyd’s News. Only the other day....”

“And what can that do for you, Mr Tewler? Aren’t you having your connubial rights now? Don’t I keep house for you, cook for you, cohabit as they say? But my body is my own, I tell you. My body is my own. Do you think the law can send a couple of policemen in here, to assist you in your—operations—overwhelm me and see that everything goes off satisfactorily? Do you imagine that?”

The word “policeman” had given him an Idea. “I’ll—I’ll write to your father. He won’t stand for this?”

“It’ll be a lovely letter, Teddy,” she mocked. “Will you show it to me?”

“You don’t mean all this,” he said. “This is one of your silly moods. I’ve ’ad to wait. I suppose I’ll ’ave to wait a bit more. But I’ve got to know you pretty well by now, my lady. You’ll come round. Don’t keep me too long. I warn you I may be unfaithful to you.”

Her face betrayed the obvious repartee she checked unspoken. “Two—,” she began, and stopped short.

He stood staring at her, struck by a new and still more detestable thought.

“Your body’s your own, you say,” he repeated slowly.

“You think you can do what you like with it. What dja mean by that? You tell me exactly what foolishness you got in your mind. You’ve got something behind this. Somebody....”

His face became as ugly as his thought.

She shrugged her shoulders and said not a word.

“I shall know. I shall find out. I’ll have you watched. .... If you think you can get away with that....”

She smiled radiantly, just to infuriate him. But she was aquiver with resolution.

“It’s these damned suffragettes. Them and their blasted Vote. Lot of screaming hags. New Woman and all that. Putting these ideers about against all Religion and Decency.... Damn ideers! Damn all ideers! Well, now I know where we are,”

“Now I know where I am. Eclairs—what is it?—cissement. My fault more than yours, but we’ve got to go through with it now.”

“I’ll see you go through with it,” said Edward Albert as grimly as he could. “I’ll get you. Mark my words. I’ll kick you out of here, my lady, into the gutter.”

“Kick, Mr Jusqu’au bootist. Kick.”

They became aware of Mrs Butter standing in the room and waiting to speak. They were suddenly both ashamed of themselves. “I’m going to bath Baby, Mam,” she said.

“He’s perfectly lovely to-night. He’s making a new noise with his little hand to his mouth. Just lovely.”

He followed Mrs Butter. Evangeline was disposed to follow and then decided to stare out of the window instead.

Now this was a very cardinal moment in the development of Homo Tewler Anglicanus. In this one specimen the type has unfolded, slowly but surely, and here we have it now with all its distinctive qualities displayed. In spite of serious initial disadvantages, Edward Albert had made good. We have traced his education in that peculiar blend of sexual modesty and enterprise that has made the Englishman the world’s lover; we have watched the natural awakening of his imperialism, have seen him become a cricket fan and a broad and intermittent but sincere Churchman; we have pursued his growing craving to become clubable and to get together with fellows in the know; and now here we have dawning that realisation of the extreme evil of “ideers” which more than anything else has made our England what it is to-day.

He became aware of “ideers” all about him, “ideers” of every sort, like a storm of hornets; ologies and isms beyond counting. You daren’t open a book or magazine now on account of them. Not that he did open books if he could help it, but Evangeline had taken to reading the queerest stuff, and he sometimes saw the titles or the List of Contents. New Women indeed! All his life henceforth, he realised, must be a fight against this malignant devastation of his complacency. They came in a multitude of forms and under a great variety of names, Feminism, Socialism (confiscate your mortgages and have wives in common and then where would you be?), Marxism, Communism (the same only worse), Collectivism, Pacificism, Internationalism, Scepticism, Atheism, Darwinism, Nationalisation, Vegetarianism, Trade Unionism, Biology, Sociology, Ethnology, Archaeology, Einstein, Bernard Shaw, Birth Control, Modernism, all that stuff; stuff you never heard of before, got up mostly by International Jews and long-haired highbrows of the utmost perversity, suggesting this, suggesting that, destroying your beliefs, making the working classes discontented, threatening your financial security, seducing women from the path of virtue and submission. Once he was aware of it, this buzzing of minds never seemed to cease. A hornet’s nest of Free Thinking and liberal thought called aloud for extirpation.

He snorted at them; he flapped his hate at them. The best way of dealing with any of them was to shout the word “Bawls” at them in a loud, crushing, masterful voice. If you got together with other fellows of the same mind and shouted “Bawls” in unison, it could be extremely reassuring. It seemed to drown the buzzing altogether. The battle of the Bawling and the Buzzing was surely over....

Then it began again.

XIX. Exit Evangeline

Matters hung in suspense for nearly a fortnight more after this very definitive quarrel. Plainly Mr and Mrs Tewler had come to a breaking-point, but except For a very definite wish to hurt each other, neither of them had very lucid ideas for the next phase in this antagonism. Edward Albert had that habit of indecision which the normal English training develops, and still he clung to some idea of a relapse on her part. She, for her part, had already made an indirect inquiry about her old business position and knew that she would be taken back there if she wanted it. She had been missed all the time. But that would reopen a relationship she had thought closed for ever. It wounded her pride to be dependent, on her husband any longer. She could go back to the old life and hold out, Edward Albert was not the only male upon the earth. Indeed no.

At the back of her mind she realised that it was she who had brought this unhappiness upon him, quite as much as upon herself. She hated him not only for his own sake but because it was her supreme blunder. It was hard to sustain her personal pride in the night against the gnawing realisation that she had snatched, that she had been a scheming fool. It was difficult to shift all that to his account. She would feel better about him if she could get square with him and then forget about him—forget about him altogether. But how was that to be done now? She had resisted any natural weakening towards the child, but it made a poor story for her if she did not do her duty by it. She had to feel there would be someone to care for it, and so she turned her thoughts and hopes towards Mrs Butter.

Matters were brought to a sudden crisis by an outbreak on the part of Edward Albert. In the dead of night the whole household was awakened by his beating and kicking at his wife’s locked door. “Let me in, you bitch,” he was shouting.

Mrs Butter appeared in a red flannel dressing-gown. “Go back to your bed, Mr Tewler. You’re waking the child.”

“Get out,” said Mr. Tewler; “I want my rights.”

“That’s as may be,” said Mrs Butter. “But this isn’t the time to demand them. One o’clock in the morning! And you’re waking the child.”

She overwhelmed him by her invincible sanity.

“Well, hasn’t a man rights?” he demanded.

“At a proper time,” said Mrs Butter, and stood expectant.

“Oh, what the Hell is a man to do?” he cried. “What the Hell is a man to do?”

He was sobbing.

“You go back to bed,” said Mrs Butter, almost kindly.

In the morning nothing was said at breakfast and Mr Tewler went out slamming the door behind him. Evangeline was busy for a time in her own room and then came into the....

[Part of text missing]

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, passion.”

“There may be feelings I don’t know.”

“There are,” said Evangeline. “There are.”

“Like men have?”

“Listen, Mrs Butter. There’s another man.... I want him in my arms and in my body. That shocks you? I meant it to. But living with your master shocks me. It’s prostitution. I’ve done with all this. I’m resolved to go. I shall go, anyhow. One thing has kept me. That. But now, if you will promise me to stay on with that poor little wretch.... I don’t know what he will do, but if he turns you out, I’ll find some place for you. You understand what I mean? I’ll give it to you....”

“You’re doing wrong,” said Mrs Butter, but there was no severity now in her condemnation.

“There is only one rule for those who are in love, Mrs Butter. Do it now.... I’m going to. My lord and master has gone,off in the sulks. I doubt if we shall see him back before one. I’m packing now. I’ve started. Are you going to help me?”

“And when he comes back, what am I to tell him?”

“Jurst anything you like, my dear. Anything you like. Will you help me? There’s those two new valises upstairs I had for Torquay. And there’s the older bag with the French labels.”

Mrs Butter made no further protest. She was indeed suddenly helpful. She thought of a hindering complication.

“There’s Janet.”

“Tell her I’ve been called away suddenly.”

Mrs Butter brought the bags to the bedroom. Evangeline had already been folding her clothes. The packing went swiftly. When Henry Tewler demanded Mrs Butter’s presence, Janet in a state of helpful admiration came to assist her mistress. “Why! you’re going for quite a long visit,” she said. “You’re taking almost everything.”

“I may be away for months,” said Evangeline. “You never know.”

“You don’t, do you,” said Janet, and made no further comment.

“There’s the laundry,” she said presently.

“That can be sent after me. I’ll arrange all that.”

“Then you’re not going abroad or anything?”

“I’m not going abroad. So far as I know.”

“You don’t know exactly?”

“I don’t know exactly. Yet. It’s a very sudden call,”

The packing went on busily in a state of suppressed comment. Evangeline forgot nothing.

She gave Mrs Philip Chaser’s address to Mrs Butter and went to say good-bye to her son. He was very contentedly asleep. She knelt by the cot and betrayed very little emotion.

“Adieu,” she said. “Child of La Mère Inconnue.” She reflected profoundly. “Some day we may meet again. Who knows? Like ships that pass in the night.”

Janet went out to call a taxi.

Evangeline faced Mrs Butter for the last time. “After all,” she said, “what I am doing is quite the best that can happen to him.”

“Maybe that is true.”

“You will stick to your word?”

“I understand all I’ve undertook.”

Janet stood waiting with the hat box in her hand. All the rest of the luggage had gone down to the taxi.

There was a moment of hesitation. Evangeline would have liked to exchange kisses with Mrs Butter, but there was something in Mrs Butter’s bearing that dissuaded her.

“Anything, any message, I mean, or if you want anything, will reach me through that address. I shan’t be there, but they will send it on,”

“I quite understand,” said Mrs Butter.

There was nothing more to be said.

When Edward Albert came home at one o’clock he found Janet in a state of pleasant excitement awaiting him in the hall. “She’s gone, Sir,” she said. “Packed up everything she’s got and gone. Gone off, Sir.”

“Who’s gone?” asked Edward Albert, though he knew the answer.

“Mrs Tewler, Sir. She packed up everything she had and she’s gone off in a taxi-cab,”

“Where?” he asked, still outwardly calm.

“I tried to listen to the address she gave, but she saw that and she told the cabman just to drive into Gower Street first....” The girl’s face was bright with detective enthusiasm. The common human impulse to condemn and mob and pelt and pursue was all awake in her.

“Did you take the number of the taxi?”

“I didn’t think of that until it was too late, Sir.”

Mr Tewler sought Mrs Butter. “Why did you let that woman go?” he demanded.

“You mean your wife, Sir. I’m not her keeper, Sir.”

“Well, she’s gone. She shall never darken these doors again. Did she say where she’d gone?”

“She left this address. But she said she won’t be there. It’s just for sending on....”

Mr Tewler went to his wife’s room and regarded the ransacked wardrobe, the empty toilet table and the chest of drawers with all the drawers pulled out, in profound silence. Tissue paper was scattered on the floor. He thought she might have left a letter for him, but there was no letter. There ought to have been a letter. Still silent, he went to look at his son. Then he remarked: “Better ’ave somethin’ to eat, I suppose.” He was treating the inevitable as though it were the unexpected. After lunch he sat in a sort of coma in the drawing-room for a long time. Tea brightened him. “Got to do something about it,” he said. “What’ve I got to do about it? It’ll be a divorce right enough.... On the streets.”

He had contemplated rows, accusations, recriminations, repentances, adulteries discovered, flights, pursuits, divorces, but he had not contemplated Evangeline vanishing quietly into nothingness. He did not want to betray his extreme bewilderment,

He decided to go round to the Chasers and cast his perplexities on Pip.

XX. Divorce

Mr Philip Chaser elicited Edward Albert’s ideas about the business in hand. He drew them out one by one, offering very little comment. He had just become a member of the Junior Conservative Club in Whitehall Place, and thither with a certain worldly pride he had conducted Edward Albert. It seemed to both of them a far more suitable place for discussing the grave problem before them than Millie Chaser’s home. They sat in a quiet corner of the huge smoking-room and Mr Philip asked his questions like a solicitor preparing a case.

Finally he summed up. He neighed with unusual force and duration so that distant plotters in the smoking-room suspended their machinations and looked round apprehensively. “All this,” he said, “is going to cost you a lot of money. You think you are going to get damages, heavy damages, you say, but who is going to pay you damages and—hey—what are they going to pay damages for? All she’s done is to pack up and go. That’s no grounds for a divorce. You might get a legal separation, and so far as I know, that’s no comfort to anybody. I’ve never—hey—in the course of my life met a separated man or a separated woman. I absolutely don’t know, ab-so-lutely, where they go and what they do with themselves and each other. Yes, you think you can put detectives on to her to watch her and catch her out. As you don’t know where she’s gone.... Oh, I’m not going to tell you. I—hey—promised not to. You’ll have to find out where she is and where she goes, and you’ll have to have her caught in—what’s the word? flagrante delicto. Tedious and annoying. And meanwhile the law insists that you must lead a blameless life, absolutely blameless. You’re not rich enough to go abroad and live in a state of—hey—inaccessible sin, and there’s an excellent functionary called the King’s Proctor who has a small fund available for—hey—watching you to see you are blameless. For the better part of a year, Mr Teddy. In the interests of Justice, Religion and order, I understand. She can kick up her heels as much she likes, but you will just have to listen to your Private Enquiry Agent’s reports. You’ll find them—infuriating—absolutely infuriating.... You aren’t going to stand that! No? And what are you going to do about it?”

He laid a restraining hand upon Edward Albert’s arm

“Listen,” he said. “The only person who can make all this business reasonably cheap and easy is your wife. Suppose she has another man, if you go on dreaming of getting those damages out of him she’ll fight like the devil to see he doesn’t pay them. That’s only natural. Particularly as I suspect he’s a married man. But if she goes to some little country pub somewhere and sends you a confession and the bill, and tells you she hasn’t the remotest intention of giving you the man’s real name, there’s your evidence. Your Private Enquiry Agent will see to the evidence. And there you are.”

“But there’s eight or ten months I got to wait?”

“Ask the law. Ask the church. Ask the Divorce Law Association. Write to your Member of Parliament about it. The—hey—Apostle Paul said somewhere that it’s better to marry than to burn, but this way you can marry and burn at the same time. Not my fault, Teddy. I’m not responsible for fast—hey—arrangements.”

“You’d have arranged it better.”

“Hey—I can’t arrange everything. It’s a pity.”

“Gaw,” said Edward Albert. “I been a fool. I frown away my life.”

“I wouldn’t even say that. Suppose—hey—suppose it’s the world we live in, is the fool and not us, eh? Suppose it throws away our lives for us—however we dodge or however we behave?”

“I don’t understand that.”

“Come to think of it—hey—I don’t understand it myself Think it all over, Teddy. Millie and I will have a little heart-to-heart talk with the other side. Eh?”

Edward Albert nodded gloomily. “And I got to hold out for—from first to last for a year. While she—I can’t do it, Pip.”

“Well, don’t get caught. Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth,”

“I shall go mad one day and shoot her.”

“You won’t even get to buying a pistol.”

“I’ll kill myself,”

“You’ll live—for donkeys years.”

“Well, what do you advise?”

“The-e-e—” He prolonged the word into a neigh—“prostitute is the safety-valve of the respectable Christian life. That is all I can tell you. Be anonymous, be dark and discreet. The King’s Proctor will probably send his man to ask your wife to tell her anything she knows about you. If you keep on good terms with her—”

“Damn her!”

“Exactly. If you keep on good terms with her, damn her, she will send him empty away. And there you are!”

“And she has the laugh of me!”

“She’s much more likely to get sentimental about it, after it’s all over and she’s got what she wants, whatever it is she wants. Don’t—hey—rankle, Teddy. These uncontested divorces, they’re like something done in an office. They’re about as interesting as the births, marriages and deaths in a country newspaper. There’s nothing spicy to get into the papers. It’s when the evidence of misconduct warms up, what the maid saw through the keyhole and all that, or there’s a fighting cross-examination, that there’s a fuss. I—hey—don’t think either of you will have to go into court. I don’t think it’s necessary, but I may be wrong there. The case won’t last ten minutes....”

That omniscient young undertaker was right. The King’s Proctor gave no sign. The decree nisi was made absolute in due course. But by that time Edward Albert was already embarked upon a new and happier way of life.

XXI. Mrs Butter Takes Pity

One night Mrs Butter woke up to find the master in her room and his arms about her. “I carn’t sleep,” he said. “I carn’t sleep. I carn’t go on.”

She sat up sleepily. Her eyes were sticky with drowsiness and she opened them with an effort. Then she started and stared at his dim figure clinging to her, but she said not a word. There was a light in the passage but none in the room. Through her thin nightgown, he could feel her warm soft body and the delicate curves of her bosom. She exhaled a sweet warmth. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“I lie there and I keep thinking of you. I’ll kill myself.”

He was blubbering.

“I can’t endure life. I love you.”

She put her face close to his ear. “What do you want?” she breathed.

“I can’t stand it. You got to let me. You let me and I’ll marry you. I swear I’ll marry you the very moment I get free. Oh Mrs Butter. Mary!”

“But suppose we were to have a child.”

“Oh gaw!” he exclaimed, “Haven’t I learnt my lesson?”

“You’re sure this time?”

“Mary!”

“No. Don’t call me Mary yet. I want to be sure. What do you do?”

He spluttered and explained. She said hardly a word but she was attentive and there was no sort of response in her body to his embraces. This did not deter him in the least. She threw back the bedclothes.

“I suppose it had to come to this,” she said, and still held him back from her.

“Promise me one thing,” she said.

“Anything. Oh my dear! Oh my dear!”

“Yes; but this. You will let that boy be mine—really mine. You won’t turn against him because of her. You might, you know. You’ll never raise your hand against him. You’ll be good to him—always? Promise.”

“And don’t you care a little bit for me?”

“You can’t help yourself, Mr Tewler. I’m sorry for you. You’re such a young fellow. I feel like a mother to both of you.”

“And you call me Mr Tewler!”

“Yes. And you’ll call me Mrs Butter until the day we’re married. If we start using Christian names, servants will notice, people will talk; that girl Janet....”

So it was that Mrs Butter entrusted her body to Edward Albert....

“Oh good!” said the happy convertite. “Now I feel square with life again. Did you like that?”

“I don’t like anything of the sort. But I suppose a man has to do that sort of thing. It’s nature’s way. And now you go off to your bed, Mr Tewler, and have a good sleep, and don’t you say a word about this to me to-morrow; not a word, I see no sense in talking over such things. I hoped I’d done with it for good. And remember when Janet’s here, walls have ears, I’ve got to be careful. I’d get rid of her if I dared, but that might set her suspecting. Good night, Mr Tewler.”

“Just a kiss,” said her grateful lover.

She turned her cheek to him.

And when Edward Albert was safely in his room, Mrs Butter went to Master Henry Tewler and took him in her arms and hugged him and kissed him and sat still, and presently wept.

“What else was there to do, you poor little mite?” she whispered. “It had to be.”

XXII. Morningside Prospect

Edward Albert married Mrs Butter a month after the decree was made absolute. They were married in a Registry Office and Pip and Millie were witnesses. She would not be married in church. “That wouldn’t be right,” she said. “Not for us two. I’ve been married in church before thank you.”

And with this the frank record of our sample’s sex life comes to an end. Edward Albert Tewler had grown up by this time and arrived at man’s estate, and henceforth there was no more essential change for him in these matters. Many little things happened, they continue to happen to this day, in his sexual reactions, but they marked nothing novel in the rhythms of his being. His fundamental curiosities were allayed, and if he peeped now he peeped for satisfaction and not for knowledge. He had his flirtatious and knowing moments, he would smirk at anything attractively feminine, but henceforth his passions were on the whole satisfactorily assuaged. He allowed himself to forget many phases in his development that we have been able to recall. He hated the memory of Evangeline, but with a diminishing bitterness. She was a bad woman and he had got rid of her. His bitterer humiliations passed out of his memory except now and then in a dream. He reshaped his private autobiography until it seemed almost that Evangeline had divorced him. He had seen through her and got rid of her because he had fallen in love with a better woman.

By imperceptible degrees the simpler, stronger mind of the new Mrs Tewler came to dominate the general form of his life. It was she who broached the idea of going right out of London to live in the country. It was all very well, she said, to live in London if you were in society or business or anything like that, but why should they? They could live in some pleasant place, near the sea for instance, near some town but not in it, at half the cost. If they got a place near a golf links he could learn to play golf. There wasn’t much sense in hitting about an expensive little ball from place to place until you lost it, and then beginning all over again day after day, but men seemed to find something in it and some women even went so far in humouring them as to play the game with them, but she couldn’t imagine herself going as far as that. But it helped a man to get to know people and it took him out of himself, and Mrs Tewler No. 2 was very clear on the necessity of taking Edward Albert out of himself.

He might get a nice little car and learn to drive it. “Why not? Then he ought to look into his affairs more than he had been doing. He would be able to restore his overstrained resources by saving and finding suitable mortgages. He might get to friendly terms with his bank manager and find local opportunities. If they were to get near a big seaside town they would be able to run in and see cinemas and things, and there would be schools presently for Henry. And doctors.

All these possibilities floated into his mind from the second Mrs Tewler’s occasional remarks, and most of them he made his own, and expanded and reproduced for her always respectful approval. They sought a home according to her specifications and they found one near the golf links at Casing, twelve miles and a half from the borough boundary of Brighthampton on Sea. It stood in a row of kindred little villas, Morningside Prospect, fundamentally alike but varied by differences in their bow windows, gothic stone work, green slates or tiles, red brick or white roughcast, so that each had a certain individuality of its own.

Individuality, mitigated uniformity, was the ruling idea of the Casing Prospect Estate Company. Its leading director, seeking something a little different from the Avenues, Terraces, Roads, Gardens and Places that dominate building estate nomenclature, came one day on some mention of the Nevsky Prospekt and seized upon it with the decision of genius. Morningside Prospect faced the sunrise and its back gardens glowed in the afternoon. Sundown Prospect was back to back with it, separated from it by a great profusion of tamarisk and some wind-twisted pines. There was a Channel Prospect with a better view of the sea but rather windy and an Empire Prospect with no particular outlook; there was Brighthampton Prospect and St Andrews Prospect looking out on the links.

All the houses were as alike as pigs in a litter, but by the most sedulous exertions any exact repetition had been avoided. In only one instance had that directors imagination gone a little too far; he had found a stock of pseudo-Javanese figures, plinths and gateways, intended for a still-born Oriental Café” in Brighthampton which had failed to produce its capital; the stuff was offered at a knock-out price and he bought it up. Opportunity rather over-stimulated his imagination. He created Celestial Prospect, a name which many serious people thought either ominous or blasphemous, and with the idea of giving it a still more oriental flavour he turned all the little houses aslant, so that they were in echelon instead of line abreast. Celestial Prospect never let so well as its brothers. From the first it seemed to attract the wrong sort of people, people who brought banjos with them, women who wore trousers, people who lit up Chinese lanterns at night and had moonlight singsongs, flitters, tenants who kept the company’s agents alert at the end of every quarter. One man painted his Javanese plinths in a most objectionable manner. Happily Celestial was a good half mile away from Morningside, and for the Tewlers, there was no need to go that way; it was a mere intermittent nocturnal melodious disrespect not nearly so troublesome as the corncrakes beyond the links.

There was much in common among the tenants of Morningside Prospect. They were all living very easily. There were two types of them. There were two young couples who had come for the sun and air, one because the husband was tuberculous and one because the wife was so afflicted. They had “moans”; they never revealed what they were, and one of the husbands designed tessellated pavements in a geometrical manner that the world had so far failed to appreciate. The idea of a deep-seated and indefinite illness appealed to Edward Albert and as soon as he heard of his possible neighbours he told the agent that his health, too, wasn’t by any means as good as he liked. He had to take things easy for a time anyhow. “It’s something the doctor can’t quite make out,” he said. “But London’s no place for me.

“I get it there.” And he indicated the upper buttons of his waistcoat. “You can’t be too careful.”

Apart from these sun and air cases the tenants were quiet men of a certain maturity. They were “comfortably off.” Younger wives or unmarried sisters did for them, and there was a niece or so and a few children. Both types were agreed in eschewing strenuousness from all their living and doing, and everybody in the Prospect, except one man with a cork leg and the tessellationist, played golf.

The Prospect Club had only an eight hole course, but there were the Casing links halfway to Brighthampton and further along, close to the sea, the Brighthampton Borough links. So that the countryside was always dotted with little intent groups of baggy knickerbockered men and sympathetically attired women marching gravely with their instruments and attendants in the track of an elusive ball, occasionally overtaking it and pausing to do further execution upon it and then on again. Day after day and all round the earth the stern unsmiling golfers marched and smote and marched again, without haste or laughter. The game had been endemic in the east of Scotland for some centuries and had been supposed peculiar to Scotchmen. Then suddenly it had swept like a pestilence about the earth. No race, was found to be immune. It is calculated that the number of miles walked every day in the days of the Golf Age,.... But statistics will impair the severity of our narrative!

The elder tenants of Morningside Prospect, were, I have said, all very similar to one another. Yet they were not a band of brothers; they came from many different parts of the world. Men have speculated about the instinctive elements in the make-up of certain insects that enable them to find their way across immense distances to the rare and peculiar plant or animal upon which they may mate or feed or lay their eggs. It is a miracle of selection reminding us of that vision of Swedenborg’s where all the damned and blessed fly of their own accord to the particular places appointed for them, hellions of every sort to their hells and the blessed to their heavens. And the particular thing that had assembled all these worthy men in Morningside Prospect was the searing influence of Monday morning upon their souls.

From the ages of thirteen or fourteen onward they had all been working, year in and year out, at occupations that required their punctual appearance at a place of business at a specific hour on Monday morning and had fixed them rigidly to meal times and routines of punctuality always. They had taken perhaps a fortnight or less of holiday in the year, glorious days that made fifty Mondays in the year darker by contrast.

All through their lives they had toiled and dealt faithfully with their employers and behaved circumspectly, and saved money with one sole object in view, retirement. No living dangerously for them, no invention nor discovery, but retirement. For them, not having to go to work on Monday, not hurrying to the shop or office in the morning, had become the Supreme Good. Religious people talk of the Desecration of the Sabbath, but for these worthy souls, who had been the backbone of that ordered business world that is now crumbling down to irreparable ruin, the Desecration of the Week Day was the crowning triumph of life. They trampled upon their defeated fetters, at eleven o’clock in the morning, at three o’clock in the afternoon, with a feeling of peculiar blessedness. So, all over the world of the great decay, the exploiters of land, the building estates, built their Morningside Prospects, as moth hunters treacle for moths, and there these men who had retired, according to their means and dimensions, came and lived, and Mr and Mrs Tewler abode beside them.

They lived in Homestead, in Morningside Prospect, for the rest of their lives until an accident overtook and destroyed it in 1941. and they lived in considerable contentment A certain slovenliness of accent that had characterised Edward Albert’s English became rather more apparent, and he forgot all his Elementary French except Parlez-vous Français? used in a facetious manner. He had a nice little garden, too small and sandy for any real gardening but pleasant to potter about in. He would sometimes clip his hedge in front and mow an infinitesimal lawn with a miniature mowing machine. He read less and less. He found even detective stories difficult to follow. He tried to find what is called a “hobby”, but this was difficult. He affected amateur carpentry and bought a ready-made workshop, Villa Size No. 3; he christened this the Glory Hole, and thither he would retire for mysterious activities. He found fretwork attractive and he made a triple hanging bookshelf whose only faults were that it seemed to have no centre of gravity and there were no books in the house to put on it. It hung in his bed-room. He liked to look at it. He was, he admitted, never very good with his hands.

Both he and Mrs Tewler were fond of cats. The black cat from Torrington Square lived for eleven years and was supplemented and then succeeded by a number of other mitigated Toms. Edward Albert devoted himself to golf. His astigmatism was diagnosed for the first time by a fellow player who offered useful advice to him, and he went to an oculist and got a pair of spectacles that greatly improved his game. His drives never went far enough because he had a subconscious dread of going too far, but his putting was slow, careful and fairly good. Like most of his neighbours he was a sincere but not extravagant Christian, that is to say he believed no end and never went to church if he could help it. Mrs Tewler never went to church or expressed any pious or impious sentiment. Faith for her had proved a disappointment too deep for words. The church of Casing, the only one within a Sabbath day’s journey, was reputed to be “high”, not quite the flavour for Morningside Prospect, and there was a little parson who aroused suspicion by trotting about the churchyard and vicarage shyly but importantly in a biretta and soutane when any reasonable creature would be wearing thin flannel. At times Edward Albert was still aware that away beyond the limits of Morningside Prospect, ideers were buzzing and booming, but a mere whisper of “Bawls” dispelled any anxiety. Naturally he increased in girth and substance through the circling years.

Season succeeded season. Year after year the great Orion, with the Dog Star at his heels, marched in glory across the heavens and the signs of the Zodiac succeeded one another in due order In their presumably benevolent watch over mankind. Life in Morningside Prospect went on like a sleeping top within these vast rotations, or like a tremendous clock with Morningside Prospect at its centre, and if you had suggested to any of its tenants, young or old, that this reef of happy retirement was at the heart not so much of a time keeper as of a time bomb, you would have been regarded as the wildest, most unnecessary of Buzzers and you would have been told to stop talking Bawls until you desisted.