The Heat of the Day (26 page)

could have been arrested as a traitor." Roderick, turning to her with knitted brows, pondered; then said: "But was he going to be?" "That night? I don't actually know. That was what he thought." "But why _should__ they arrest him as a--as what you said?" "Because it had all been proved," she said, remorselessly turning to study her son's face. "Oh," said Roderick formally. Changing colour slowly with amazement he added: "Yes, I see. " They walked till they were out of hearing of the wireless music, she crumpling her handkerchief absently in her hand. "He must have been pretty brave?" he queried, looking at her for confirmation. "The other way round, he might have got a V. G., quite likely?... In a way, I rather wish I had known." She said nothing. "Because I never have known anybody like that.... He was on the other side in this war?" "Yes." "He never did seem to me to be living anywhere very particular," said Roderick. "You don't think if you had married him it would have given him more of a stake in the country?" She uttered a sound not unlike a laugh. A party of girls and soldiers swinging in loose formation along the path towards them could but stare: Roderick, head up, cheeks red still, outfaced the party until it had divided, swerved off left and right on to the grass and been left behind. Then: "I suppose," he went on, "everything I try saying must sound ridiculous--no, must _be__ ridiculous? You see, really I haven't got anything that I _can__ say. I am so sorry, Mother; because there must be something." "No, I don't think there is. In which case, I had no right to tell you. One has no right to tell anybody anything as to which there's nothing to be said: Robert felt that. But you did ask me why he was on the roof." "Perhaps I should not have asked? It was what I wanted to know." "No, I'm glad you asked.--Because of course there is something to be said. There must be. There's _something__ to be said." "I know," said Roderick, knitting his brows again. "But by me? Why me? After all, who am I?" "The only person I can tell." Having come to the end of the path, back again to the point where it branched from the bye-road to the station, they halted. Stella looked across at the agglomeration of buildings which somehow made up this town or village, having no other character than that of being near Roderick's camp. "I cannot help expecting something from you: I must." She left it at that, she thought, as one was free to leave any helpless remark. Roderick, however, drew a deep anxious breath, at the same time disengaging his arm from hers. "I wish I were God," he said. "Instead of which I am so awfully young--that's my disadvantage. The only hope would have been my having happened to say some inspired thing, but now there hasn't been that I shall be no good for about another fifty years--because all I can do now is try and work this out, which could easily take my lifetime; and by that time you'd be dead. I couldn't bear to think of you waiting on and on and on for something, something that in a flash would give what Robert did and what happened enormous meaning like there is in a play of Shakespeare's--but, must you? If there's something that _is__ to be said, won't it say itself? Or mayn't you come to imagine it has been said, even without your knowing what exactly it was?... Or are you telling me, then asking me, because I _am__ young, and so ought to last on later into time? You want me to be posterity? But then, Robert's dying of what he did will not always be there, won't last like a book or picture: by the time one is able to understand it it will be gone, it just won't be there to be judged. Because, I suppose art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting?... Mother, today I would say anything to comfort you; I do wish I had enough experience--if I could even only see the thing as a whole, like God!... As it is, I expect really you know what is best yourself." "I expect I do; I know I ought to; I must.--But the thing was, you were an outside person." "You do really think I am a person?" asked Roderick. They walked down the bye-road into the main street, turning in the direction of the café.

Chapter 17

THERE can occur in lives a subsidence of the under soil--so that, without the surface having been visibly broken, gradients alter, uprights cant a little out of the straight. A group of persons, of souls--perhaps not conscious, till now, of so much as being in the same neighbourhood--may thus be affected by one happening. In this case, few outward changes followed on Robert's end--Stella moved across London into another flat, off Victoria Street; Harrison vanished from London; as against which Mrs. Kelway and Ernestine refused the offer for Holme Dene and stayed where they were. Roderick, having bestirred himself, obtained his commission in the autumn of 1943. Always working away at the same small factory, Louie lived on at Chilcombe Street under the surveyance of Connie--who, as Civil Defence, found herself returned to the foreground by the renewal of enemy air attacks on London early in 1944. Internally, tensions shifted. After the night climax in Weymouth Street, Harrison made no move to contact Stella, and she did not know how to contact him: their extraordinary relationship having ended in mid air, she found she missed it--Harrison became the one living person she would have given anything to see. Ultimately, it was _his__ silent absence which left her with absolutely nothing. She never, then, _was__ to know what had happened? For, with regard to Robert the silence from behind the scenes never broke: what was most to be noted about his death was its expediency--the country was spared a demoralising story; everything now could be, and was, hushed up. His death remained, officially, what the coroner found it--misadventure, outcome of a crazy midnight escapade on a roof; to which identification, in the popular mind, of any part of London W. I. with "Mayfair" gave colour, odour, scandalous likeliness. From Stella, as the woman friend in the luxury flat, was extracted the cogent parts of the inquest evidence. Having replied to questions as to the position of the ladder, the skylight, etc., she answered others. "He was determined to leave by the roof," she stated. "He had the idea that someone he did not name to me had followed us and was in the street waiting to make trouble.... I imagine that either he did not wish to give the person the satisfaction of an interview, or that he thought a quarrel outside my door might make embarrassments for me.... Yes, I have other men friends, I suppose.... I beg your pardon; I mean yes, I have other men friends.... No, there had never been any incident of that kind.... No, I cannot tell you whom Captain Kelway may have had in mind: I have no idea. It might have been someone who had been trying to pick a quarrel with him for some other reason.... No, I cannot suggest any other reason, but one never knows.... For two years.--Two years and two months: we met in September 1940.... Yes, we saw one another frequently.... Yes, I have always tried to keep some drink in my flat, never to run quite out of it: one needs it.... Yes, naturally,--I beg your pardon, I mean yes.... No, never heavily.... I'm afraid I cannot say; I have no idea how much other people do drink.... No, I don't think I remember any quarrels.... No, not that night more than any other.... We were talking about the war.... Late? I suppose it was; I suppose we did not notice how time was passing; the war is a very interesting subject.... Yes, I did notice that Captain Kelway was in an excitable state. Possibly that was because we had been talking about the war; he had been taken off the active service list since Dunkirk.... I cannot say, I'm afraid; I did not notice.... No, I do not remember drinking more heavily than usual.... As far as I know, absolutely clear: I remember everything.... Is it unusual? I have a good memory.... Off and on: I should say that the idea of there being somebody in the street outside gained on him as the evening went on.... As the night went on, then.... Yes, I suggested I should go down and see, but he would not let me.... I cannot say. He had never struck me as being subject to hallucinations or delusions at any other time.... There may or may not have been: I have no idea. All I can say is, there was nobody in the street when I went down later--unless you count his body.... No, I had not heard anything: I simply went down.... I went down and opened the street door.... I say, I simply went down. No, nothing made me: I simply thought I would go downstairs and look out of the door. I don't know why: why does one do anything?... I beg your pardon.... No, I don't know how long after: I didn't look at the clock. Two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes: I don't know.... Before that? Simply waiting about.... No, not for anything in particular.... Very well, then I was not waiting. When he had gone I was simply there in the room.... Yes, of course I knew he was doing a dangerous thing. For a man with a stiff knee it was a particularly dangerous thing to do.... On the contrary: I made every attempt to stop him.... Yes; but what could I do?... I've already said so--I have already described him as being in an excitable state.... No other occasion in particular; but I suppose everybody is in an excitable state sometimes?... By excitable state I mean that he was not taking anything else into consideration.... The darkness, the steepness of the roofs, the different heights of the houses, and, as I have said, his knee.... No, I cannot remember whether he was carrying an electric torch: he did not usually.... Yes, I'm sorry; I agree that that is important. I must withdraw my statement that I remember everything.... "When I found him? What did I think had happened? What I still think--that he had lost his footing.... Yes, I should describe myself as agitated. "Yes, since 1940, September 1940.... As much as one comes to know about the circumstances of a friend's life in two years, I suppose.... I am not clear what you mean by 'matters of a confidential nature.' Naturally we did not discuss his work: I did not expect that.... Not secretive about his personal affairs, no. He did not give me the impression of having anything to hide.... No, I should not have thought him likely to have enemies; he was not quarrelsome.... I agree: it does seem strange. I have no idea why. No, he did not explain. He simply said there was somebody at the door.... No, he was not exhibiting signs of fear. I imagine that where he was concerned he would have preferred to go down and settle the matter, but that he did not want to make scenes and trouble at that late hour outside my house.... Of course; that would have been best, but it did not occur to him.... I cannot remember whether it occurred to me. There was no reason why he should not have remained quietly in my flat until whoever it was, or whoever he thought it was, had gone. I can only say that he did not wish to.... Possibly. Any argument is agitating.... Only in so far as I was trying to argue him out of what he was doing. It was not a quarrel.... Yes, I should agree in calling it the decision of a man in an excitable state.... No, never. Captain Kelway's behaviour never at any time struck me as abnormal. That night it could have been called abnormal in being unlike itself. Normally he would have been the last person to do an ill-judged thing.... "Yes, for some months. In fact he had not long been out of hospital when I met him.... Only for his knee. No, there had been no question of psychiatric treatment.... I noticed nothing. I suppose one cannot say what might be the delayed effects of strain or shock.... No, he gave me no reason to think he had money troubles.... I've already said, he never gave me the impression of having anything of any Kind on his mind.... I don't quite understand that question--am I to take it you want to know whether I think he went out on to the roof with the intention of taking his own life?... I'm sorry: I thought that was what you did mean.... I do not know what his intentions were. He may have hoped to find a fire escape down the back of one of the other houses; he may have expected to be able to open the skylight of another house and make his way down through that house, and so out.... I should say he regarded the whole thing as a good idea, a joke, and a way of outwitting the person trying to make trouble.... Very well: the person he imagined to be there trying to make trouble.... No, I did not. I have already told you that I did not.... When he had gone, I remained in my flat till I went downstairs. I went downstairs, opened the door, went out into the street. I then saw he had fallen.... I cannot remember.... Thank you." She left the coroner's court with one kind of reputation, that of being a good witness. The afternoon of the Sunday of the bell-ringing had been devoted by Louie to an exhaustive reading of the Sunday papers--tossed in at her door by Connie, the worse for wear, on the latter's way up to the top of the house to sleep. One paper gave a short report of the inquest; two others, however, featured extensive pieces on it. Louie saw Stella's name, re-read her address, and received, in an unbearable flash, the import of that street in which _she__ had that morning stood. For a moment she wondered whether it might not be Harrison who had fallen, under another name. The ill-fated officer's behaviour, as emerging from the accounts here, seemed to her in its rabid suspiciousness, its unloving ruthlessness and its queerness, to have been that of Harrison exactly--so much so that Louie toured every sensation that, in her, surrounded Harrison's being dead. Its being imperative to pity the dead made her recollect his fruitless frenzy of thought, all alone at the concert that first day. Again she took up the paper--no, but Harrison had _not__ a stiff knee! No, every joint of his flexed with an uninteresting smoothness: the side-slip or jerk or jamming was in his manner--which was, she saw, as hastily she returned him to life, chronic. No, he limped no more than he had ever loved. She could not forget the calculated padding un-eager evenness of his walk that evening, after he and she left the concert. It was that bodily monotony of him which, coupled with his recalcitrance, could not but get on any woman's nerves. All the same, she could not break some connection between the man one night sitting at the table and the man the next night falling from the roof. For Louie, subsidence came about through her now knowing Stella not to be virtuous. Virtue became less possible now it was shown impossible by Stella, less to be desired because Stella had not desired it enough. Why Louie should have attached her own floating wish to a face watched for an hour cannot be said: there must be faces which attract aspiration just as others focus sensuous dreams--what else had happened originally in the case of Harrison? Louie had felt herself to be in a presence. For her, therefore, now it was Stella who had fallen into the street. It was the blanks in Louie's vocabulary which operated inwardly on her soul; most strongly she felt the undertow of what she could not name. Humble and ambiguous, she was as unable to name virtue as she had been, until that sudden view of Harrison's companion, to envisage it. Two words she _had__, "refinement," "respectability," were for her somewhere on the periphery. In search of what should make for completeness and cast out fear she indistinctly saw virtue as the inverse of sex: at the same time, somehow, it had distress, of one kind or another, as its sublime prerogative.--Had not Louie herself felt a distress in Stella, owing to Harrison? Now she looked back she saw, yes, there _had__ also been fear, nay, terror--but, the qualitative pureness of the terror had made it seem to her pure morally. During their dark walk home Stella _had__ given the impression of being a soul astray--but how, it had seemed for the period of illusion, should she not be? What, indeed, was there for her? She could not but be out of her sphere here, nonplussed, a wanderer from some better star. It had been much to find in the world one creature too good for the world. She had not been too good. Here, and not in one paper only, was where it said about her, the bottles, the lover, the luxury West End flat. She had had other men friends; there nearly had been a fight. It all only came to a matter of expensiveness; there was no refinement. A nicer look and a nicer voice, but there she was with someone she was not married to--who had he not run out on the roof, tight, would be still there. She had seemed so respectable--respectable as one of those lost Seale faces--but there she had stood in court, telling them all. That was that; simply that again. There was nobody to admire: there _was__ no alternative. No unextinguished watch-light remained, after all, burning in any window, however far away. In hopes of what, then, was one led on, led on? How long, looking back on it, it had lasted--that dogged, timid, unfaithfully-followed hope! The November Sunday faded, as it had begun, in mist--Louie came over gooseflesh, scrambled up from the rug and put on the kettle. She was nursing her teacup in her hands when Connie, still gummed up with afternoon sleep,-marched in towards her over the sheets of newspaper, the Officer's Midnight Prank headlines scattered over the floor. "_Careful__," cried Louie, hauntedly turning, "do be!" Connie, later, twitched up one sheet to re-read it, sucking a tooth. However, nothing connected Louie's refined new friend of the other evening with the dubious heroine of this tragedy--no name had then been spoken: now no name could be. Oh, if Connie had guessed she was being held out on!... Nor was this first secret to be the last--for the long-term effects on Louie of Stella's fall were kept hidden, throughout the time to follow, with unexpected care. Louie's dropping back again into vagrant habits remained unknown. No such very great degree of dissimulation turned out to be, after all, necessary; for it happened that Connie relaxed her vigilance--a friend who had been aggravating her for some time began to be more bother than he was worth. Not so much the friend as an uncharacteristic and nagging inability to decide just how much any man _was__ worth seized upon Connie, throwing her into moodi-ness, keeping her late abroad when she was not at the post, and confining her talk, when she did as of old look in, to a dire obsessional monologue. Connie had no longer an eye to spare. Also there went on, throughout that winter, being never a word as to hopes of leave from Tom, no longer in India now owing to being required in North Africa. 1942, still with no Second Front, ran out: nothing more than a sort of grinding change of gear for the upgrade was to be felt till the next war year steadied into its course. Cryptic were new 1943 block calendars. February, the Germans capitulated at Stalingrad; March, the Eighth Army broke through the
Mareth Line. North African spring teemed with pursuits and astronomic surrenders, with a victoriousness hard, still, not to associate with the enemy. July, the Sicilian landings; the Russian opening of their great leafy Orel summer drive. Mussolini out. September, Italians out, but leaving Italy to it. Landings, beach-heads, Russian tanks lurching across the screens in London; November, Italian rivers, however, being crossed by us in strength. Winter known to have come by the Germans having their winter line shattered. Mussolini back. Pictures, less to be relished than had been hoped, of Berlin learning how it had been for London. The Big Three photographed smiling at Teheran. The idea of the European Fortress. The day after Christmas we sank the _Scharnhorst__, and upon the Russians having advanced up to sixty miles in five days in the Kiev salient, at the same time widening a breach to a front of a hundred and eighty miles, 1943 expired. War's being global meant it ran off the edges of maps; it was uncontainable. What was being done, for instance, against the Japanese was heard of but never grasped in London. There were too many theatres of war. 1944 was the year in which there could not but be the Second Front. General Smuts called it the Year of Destiny; the bombers continued to carry on preparatory work. As early as January we broke the Gustav Line; the Russians announced the lifting of the blockade of Leningrad. February, in Italy we encircled ten enemy divisions, but the Germans opened up against Anzio beach-head, which held. The wiping-out of Monte Cassino caused an uncertain breath to be drawn in cinemas: all this was going to be necessary, and more. Reflections were cut short by the renewal of air attacks on London--a five-night February season to be known as the Little Blitz. During that week, Roderick was at Mount Morris, having got permission to view for the first time, and arrange for the administration of, his property. In mufti, he had arrived in the damp' of a late-winter evening, alone. Work kept his mother in London: he was sorry and not sorry, she not sorry. Donovan, who had been listening for the hackney car, had stood holding a lamp in the high doorway at the top of the steps: he preceded his master into the hall, set down the lamp on the table and made a speech. Roderick, having listened less to the words than their echo through this house of his own, replied. Later, alone in the library, his first act had been to read the instructions printed by Cousin Francis on the cards stuck round the picture over the fire. He waited for Donovan to return in order to ask him: "Who is 'Lady C.'?" "That used to be Lady Condie." "What, dead now, is she?--In that case," Roderick said, "we shan't be getting any more messages from _her__." He plucked from the picture that particular card, tore it across and dropped it into the fire. "_Did__ the river rise, this winter?" he went on. "Did it get into the Lower Lodge?" "Not so far," admitted Donovan. "But it could. Mr. Morris always had a scheme for removing the Lodge to some place else.--Wasn't it funny, sir, them taking away Montgomery from the Eighth Army?" But Roderick was back to reading the cards. "What's become of the dogs which used to be the puppies? My mother said nothing about them. They weren't put down, I hope?" "No, sir; the instructions would have been a pity; they were breedy little dogs--I put them out through the country. I could get you a pup out of one of them any time. It was only the old big dog the master shot before he went off to England.--Would there be any thought of bringing the master back?" "I don't see why not," said Roderick, struck, "eventually. His bones ought to be here. But of course the whole thing was a muddle--I was never let know what was going on." Donovan stepped back and held open the door wider, to enable Mary to enter with the large supper tray. Roderick absently eyed the younger of the two girls of whom his mother had spoken. "I wish it were not so late!" he exclaimed suddenly. "I wish I could see--_is__ it going to be a very dark night? I want to go out and get the hang of everything--so far, I hardly realise I have arrived. Not that this is not a very nice room, of course," he added, respectfully looking up at the ceiling. "Larger and higher, if anything, than I had imagined. But it's baffling not to know what goes on outside it.--_Is__ it a very dark night?" "I should say, middling. You ought to be able to see your hand before you. Then will I not bar the door?" "You never need bar the door: I shall see to that." Mary, who had been studying Roderick without speaking, gave a final touch to the tray, then left the room: Donovan, though prepared to follow his daughter, spoke once more. "There's a more deceptive drop from here to the river than you might think," he said, though even so with detachment. "I even heard how once a carriage and pair of horses pitched over it in the darkness before we had the parapet--and again there's a rocky drop from the Alpine Walk, if you should be thinking of going that way. The rest of it might be slippery but it's harmless.--However, sir, from all I hear you should have come out of a wary training. They'd want you to be precise for a war of this kind." "Oh, I shall know where I am once I get going," said Roderick, confidently pulling a chair up to the tray, raising lids and beginning to eat supper. "I've been told what's there: I must just make sure that it _is" Coming in late that night he bolted, barred and chained up the door behind him, piously but with an inexpert clatter--the little lamp like a holy lamp the Donovans had left burning for him on the hall chest meanwhile magnifying his shadow. He had forgotten to ask, and they had been too deeply stirred to remember to show him, in which of the rooms upstairs he was to sleep; he had therefore to investigate, opening door after door. The darkness was nothing to him but a veil between himself and tomorrow, and his nostrils sifted out nothing but an enticing newness from the plastery smells. The house, where he was concerned, might have come into being only just in time to be here tonight; he remembered his mother's saying he must have been conceived here, but only perfunctorily did he wonder in which room. Drawn into one at last by a glow of embers and the sight of his bag put down at the foot of an opened bed, he looked no further: a row of bootjacks along the top of a press, straps on a hook and a parade of linament-bottles along the chimneypiece told him he was succeeding to Cousin Francis. The master's bedroom had crimson hangings and paper, against which what looked like mahogany temples stood. Whistling, Roderick began to throw his things out of his bag. But he had come in full of the outdoors, which welled up in him when, having put out the lamp, he laid down his head on the old man's pillow. Forms, having made themselves known through no particular sense, forms whose existence he was not to doubt again, loomed and dwelled within him. He had felt all round him height? weighed down upon by night, mysterious declivities, the breath through the unmoving air of moving water. Something more than silence there had been to be heard, though in the trees' leafless tops there was not even the rustle of a sleepy rook, and though throughout the relaxed woods not a bough grated or twig snapped. The invisible openness of the fields gave out not less stillness than the fern-rotted hollows; he had come to the humid stoniness of the garden wall, steadied himself on the unequal metalling of the cart tracks, put his hand on gates, struck out a twang from wire, established by touch the vital differing unhumanity of rocks, corrugated iron, tree trunks. He had from all points turned and returned to trace the elusive river-glimmer below him. Dark ate the outlines of the house as it ate the outlines of the hills and drank from the broken distances of the valley. The air had been night itself, re-imprinted by every one of his movements upon his face and hands--and still, now that he was indoors and gone to bed, impregnating every part of the body it had not sensibly touched. He could not sleep during this memory of the air. It had not been cold: the coming of winter to a stop had been most felt in the absolute nullness of tonight. It could be that Nature had withdrawn, leaving everything to be nothing but the identity of Mount Morris. The place had concentrated upon Roderick its being: this was the hour of the never-before--gone were virgin dreams with anything they had had of himself in them, anything they had had of the picturesque, sweet, easy, strident. He was left possessed, oppressed and in awe. He heard the pulse in his temple beating into the pillow; he was followed by the sound of his own footsteps over his own land. The consummation woke in him, for the first time, the concept and fearful idea of death, his. Ahead were his five days more here; ahead again was the possibility of his not coming back. He had not till tonight envisaged not coming back from war. Striking a match, he admired the time it burned. Then he heaved himself higher in the high bed, bracing his shoulders against the sharp-scrolled bedhead, arms folded, in order to set himself to consider the idea of succession. The antipatheticness to him of any abstract thought sent him away from that to his three fathers--the defeated Victor, the determining Cousin Francis, the unadmitted stepfather Robert: there was a confluence in him, at the moment, of the unequal three. How had _they__ made out? Had there not been a prematurity about each of their three deaths, not least the obstinate old man's? Or, _had__ they each, when it had come to a point, laid down what had become impossible to finish? Accept, as against that, that nothing might _be__ possible to finish--who would, indeed, aspire to be the final man? It was a matter of continuing--but what, what? As to that, there ought to be access to the mindless knowledge locked up in the rocks, in the stayers-on. Meanwhile, the Fortress of Europe was waiting to be stormed by Roderick: everything, everything, everything had to turn on that--everything but the February nocturnal existence of this place, which would know other Februaries. Should Roderick not come back... Recollecting that he ought to make a will, he in his own mind mildly reproached his mother for her failure to prompt him. By a written will one made subject some other person--but he saw that what worked most on the world, on him, were the unapprehendable inner wills of the dead. Death could not estimate what it left behind it. Robert's had left grief--what more, if there had been anything more, Roderick's mother had not told him. Roderick reflected that, as things were, there would be nobody but his mother to be _his__ heir, either: he felt this with chagrin both for himself and her--between them, they should have come to something further than this. He began to mutiny--which took the form of striking match after match till he had succeeded in relighting the little lamp. That done, he was once more inside four walls: drawing down in the bed he immediately fell asleep. Next day was full of things to be seen and done. "As I've been telling O'Connell," he said to Donovan, "for the present all we can hope to do is, keep this place ticking over till I get back. After that, of course, it will definitely have to begin to pay: Mount Morris has got to be my living. To start with, I'll have to learn--go to one or another of those agricultural set-ups for two, three, four years. Everything's got to be done scientifically these days; one can't just go fluffing along as an amateur. And I ought to put in capital, if I'm to get returns." "That way, you could sink a terrible lot of money." "Not if one's organised. And I should never have a terrible lot of money _to__ sink," he added, looking at Donovan formidably. "Mr. Morris used to be the one for considering improvements. It was wonderful the things he was to do--he was showing me pictures of machinery, and there were fellows forever coming and going giving us demonstrations, until latterly the war came to be the greater interest.--We raised the boat for you, sir, but she isn't much; she's decayed." "What boat?" said Roderick, blank. He recovered himself and said: "Oh yes, of course; _the__ boat. Well, that's a pity, but never mind: thanks. What a lot of work. I can't see, I must say, why it was ever sunk." "Precautions. I should say Mr. Robertson had that effect." "Who was Mr. Robertson?" "You would never know. It could be he was keeping some sort of eye on this country. Those were suspicious times, before they turned aside the Germans," said Donovan, dispassionately feeding wood to the range--they were in the kitchen. Two chickens fled from the swinging foot of Roderick, who was seated on the edge of the table--both girls had melted out of the kitchen as he came in, leaving a candle burning beside a teapot. The face of either Hannah or Mary appeared from time to time in the darkness of the doorway, but then always footsteps were to be heard padding lightly away again down the stone passage. "There was nothing to show in the end of it all," said Donovan. "However, the master had a great time with ideas." "From what you tell me," said Roderick, "this Robertson must have been a silly man--I can't say I've ever heard of him, and I don't wonder. Intelligence my eye. What did he take the German Army for? It was really rather a good thing they never landed." Donovan listened, impartial, to the roar in the range. "A chap turned up at the funeral," went on Roderick, "but _his__ name was Harrison." "It could be: it was some name of that sort.--Did you hear anything from London?" Donovan asked, facing round sombrely and abruptly. "No. Why?" "They're bombing away again. Isn't the mistress in it?" "Yes. Why?" "You left her very exposed." "Yes, Donovan, yes. But she's always done what she's liked." "I should say she'd always done what she could. Whatever she went through, she's very gentle. All the same, it was a pity you couldn't prevail on her to wait here." "Wait here what for?" "The better times." "Oh." Harrison, back again, stood in the middle of a street, otherwise empty, illuminated by a chandelier flare. During the pulse of silence between the overhead throbbing and the bark of the guns, the flare made the street like a mirrored drawingroom. Above where Harrison stood, peering at something jotted on an envelope, white-green incandescence flowed from the lovely shapely symbol, which slowly descended as it died--the sky to the east reflected flamingo-pink nobody could have taken to be the dawn; the west was jagged with flames. Ostensibly the population of London was underground: now and then could be heard an importunate clanging of N. F. S. or ambulance bells; once or twice a private car shot past. Bombardment reopened upon Harrison