Mrs. Rylands read over her husband’s letter and re-read her husband’s letter a very great deal before she set herself to answer it. In many ways he had astonished her. His lucidity struck her as extraordinary. It was not as if he was learning to express himself; it was as if he had been released from some paralysing inhibition. Evidently he had been reading enormously as well as talking, and particularly he had been saturating himself in the wisdom of Mr. Sempack. At times he passed from pure colloquialism to phrases and ideas that instantly recalled Mr. Sempack’s utterances. Perhaps it was better that he should learn to write from Mr. Sempack than from a schoolmaster, even though it was an Eton schoolmaster. The spirit of all he said was quite after her own heart. How could she ever have doubted that there was all this and more also beneath his darkness and his quiet?
To her his vision of affairs seemed fresh and powerful and broad. How much he knew that he had never spoken of before! His implicit knowledge of the sequence and meaning of strikes and Royal Commissions made her feel not only ignorant but unobservant. She must have read of all these things at the time — or failed to read of them. And she had led debates at Somerville and passed muster as a girl with an exceptional grasp of social questions!
Well, she must read again and read better. She had thought — before all her thoughts were submerged in her personal passion for him — of some such fellowship as this that was now beginning between them. In discovering Philip anew she was being restored to herself. He wrote of his futility, but in every page she found him feeling his way to action. Futility! She turned over that self-revealing sheet with the word “Organisation” upon it. Half his dreams he had not told her yet because as yet they were untellable.
She turned the sheets over again and again. He was a stronger beast than she was: it showed in every line. His handwriting had a certain weakness or immaturity; he spelt wildly ever and again, but these were such little things beside his steadfast march to judgments. He saw and thought and said it plain. “He’s a man,” she said and fell to thinking of what virility meant.
Comparatively she was all receptiveness. She perceived for the first time that there was initiative even in thought. For example, the things he said about Lord Edensoke were exactly the things she had always been disposed to think but she reflected with a startled and edified observation that she had never actually thought them. It was not merely that there was virility and decisiveness in action, there was virility and decisiveness even in mental recognition. To judge was an act. Always her judgments were timid and slow. He crouched and watched and leapt and behold! there was fact in his grip. Her role was circumspection until the lead was given her. And behind his judgments even in this first letter there was the suggestion of action gathering.
That afternoon and later and the next day she wrote him her own first real letter in reply to his. The conclusion of his came so near to the matter of Mr. Sempack’s last talk that she thought she could do no better than write a description of that gentleman’s return to Casa Terragena and of how he had argued with himself and her about the relations of thought to activity. She got all that she felt pretty clear. She hoped that he would look up Philip in London, for she was quite sure they would both be ready to meet again and exchange ideas amidst that conflict of witless realities. She tried to be very simple and earnest about Mr. Sempack and his views, but when she told of him and Lady Catherine, the humourist and novelist latent in every intelligent woman, found release. She thought she would write about his new tie and then she decided not to write about his new tie and finally she wrote about it rather amusingly at some length. And afterwards she was inclined to regret having written about that new tie. She felt she ought never to have noted his new tie. But the letter had gone before this last decision was made.
At the end of her letter she found herself beginning afresh after Philip’s own manner.
“About what you say of getting together, of organisation, of sane organisation, I find my mind almost too excited to write. It is work in that way that has to be done now. Manifestly, ‘Fascists of the Light’ is a great phrase. Who would have thought of you my dear dear Man as a maker of phrases? Before we have done, perhaps we shall make many things. You and I, I hope, but I begin to see it will be mainly you. I am torn my dearest between the desire to do and a fear of vain gestures that we cannot justify. I send my heart to you. I wish I had you here just for a moment to kiss your ear and put my cheek against yours. I wish I could put my arm across your broad shoulders. I am very well, I am flourishing here, my dear Man. I glow. I grow. I am a water melon in the sun. A wonderful nurse from Ulster comes to-morrow. Stella Binny is bringing her. It is early to bring her yet, but she is free and must be secured. McManus her name is. In a little while, I gather, Casa Terragena will belong to Mrs. McManus and Bombaccio will do her reverence. Stella has given up Theosophy now, by the bye, and is a fully fledged R.C. She was ‘received’ in Rome. Much fuss over her, to judge by her letters. They always make a fuss at first. We shan’t argue much. She will just drop the McManus and pass on. Four long weeks more, my dear. When all this is over I will work for you, with you and for you, my dear. Philip, my darling, my Man, I love you and that is the beginning and the end and beginning over again of all I have to say to you.”
Mrs. Rylands was agreeably interested in Mrs. McManus.
Stella Binny had never quite seemed to exist and now this Mrs. McManus intensified that quality. Stella arrived just like anyone, exactly like anyone. She might have been an item in big figures in statistics; visitor 3792, normal. But Mrs. McManus was exceptionally real. The only other thing that was equally real in her presence was the expectation of Mrs. Rylands. She stuck out from Stella in the car; and her one entirely masculine valise, painted with broad bands of white and blue, made all the rest of the joint luggage a mere et-cetera.
She was strong and rather tall, she got into a nurse’s costume straight away upon her arrival, she presented a decided profile, a healthy complexion and lightish hair just shot with grey. It was not faded hair, it was either light brown or it was silver; it never hesitated. On her lips rested a smile and a look of modest assurance. One perceived at once that she knew every possible thing there was to be known about obstetrics and that it rather amused her. Partly that smile of hers was due to the fact that she had very fine large teeth and her lips had stood no nonsense with them and had agreed to meet pleasantly but firmly outside them. Her eyes were observant, ready and disposed (within reason) to be kind. Her speech was pervaded by a quality that made it rather more definite in outline and rather clearer in statement than normal English. Mrs. Rylands referred it to Ulster. She felt that this was confirmed when Mrs. McManus took an early opportunity to mention that she was a “Prodestant.” Nowadays Protestants who call themselves Protestants are only to be found in Ulster and the backwoods of America. Mrs. McManus evidently did not come from the backwoods of America; her accent would have been entirely different if she had.
“Almost all my work is done in Italy and the south of France in Catholic families, and I shouldn’t get half of it if I wasn’t known to be a Prodestant out and out,” she explained. “It gives them confidence. You see ——”
Her expression conveyed an intense desire to be just and exact. “You can’t make a really thorough nurse out of a Roman Catholic woman. It’s known. There’s holy, devoted women among these Roman Catholic nurses, mind you. I’m not denying it. Some of them are saints, real saints. It is a privilege to meet them. But what you want in a nurse is not a saint; it is a nurse. They aren’t nurses, first and foremost and all the time. They’re worried about this holiness of theirs. That’s where they fall short. They fuss about with their souls, confessing and all that, taking themselves out and looking at themselves, and it distracts them. It takes them off their work. How can you think about what you are doing when all the time you are asking yourself, ‘Am I behaving properly?’ and keeping your mind off evil thoughts. Keeping their minds off evil thoughts indeed! Why! a real nurse like me just thinks of what she happens to be doing and lets her mind rip. The unholy things have come into my mind right under the nose of the doctor you’d hardly believe, Mrs. Rylands. And gone clean out of it again. Whereas one of them Roman Catholics would be all for laying hold of it and keeping it and carrying it off to tell her confessor afterwards like as if she’d laid an egg. And meanwhile with all that much of trouble in her, she’d be bound to do something wrong. Holy they certainly are I allow. But holiness is a full time job, Mrs. Rylands, and it only leaves enough over for nursing as will make a reasonably good amateur. And amateurs they are. So I keep to it I’m a Prodestant just to show I’m not that sort. Which is as much as to say if I don’t nurse well I’m damned, and there’s no excuses.
“And then all that purity of theirs! It takes a Prodestant to wash all over every day,” said Mrs. McManus. “These Catholics — they’d get ideas or something. There’s nuns haven’t washed all over for years. And think all the better of themselves for it.
“And that’s all about it,” said Mrs. McManus, suddenly as if winding up her dissertation.
“There’s your friend Miss Binny,” she resumed. “A nicer lady I’ve never met. And she’s just eaten up with this idea of being converted to Catholicism and all that. It’s wonderful what she gives to it. They say she’s visited nearly every image and picture there is in Italy where there’s a Stella Maris, that being one of the Virgin-Marys they have. In a Rolls-Royce car. I’ve no doubt it comforted her greatly, if she happened to be wanting comfort, and anyhow it was a grand occupation for her. Not having anything better to do. Catholic she is, like new paint. But would she have brought a Roman Catholic nurse along to you? She would not.”
“That’s very extraordinary,” said Mrs. Rylands, considering it. “I never thought of that.”
“Naturally,” said Mrs. McManus. “It’s only now that any occasion has arisen.”
Her opinions upon the state of affairs in Italy were equally clear cut and novel to Mrs. Rylands. “These Fascists,” she said, “are making a great to-do here — with their Mussolini and their black shirts and all that. Giving castor oil to respectable people and frightening them and beating them about and generally misbehaving themselves. They’ll do a great mischief to Italy. They’re just boys. There’s not a Fascist in Italy would dare to stand up to a really formidable woman, who knew her own mind about them. There’s suffragettes we had in London would tear them to bits. But they get taken seriously here, as if they were grown-up people. It’s dreadful the precociousness of boys here. I could tell you things would astonish you. It’s not having proper public schools makes these Fascists. We’ll never get them in England, try though they may.”
She reflected. “Those public schools of ours in England are by all accounts mere sinks of iniquity. If you believe the half you’re told. And what better place could you send a growing boy to, seeing what divils boys are? And there they can work it off and get rid of it and take it out of each other. Whereas these young Fascists don’t ever grow up to proper ideas even about cutting their hair.”
“But don’t they run the country?” asked Mrs. Rylands. “Don’t they at least keep the trains punctual?”
“The roads in Italy are a disgrace to civilisation,” said Mrs. McManus. “I’ve had to bump my ladies over them. Let them mend their roads,” and so swept Fascist efficiency away.
“All you hear of Italy is this Mr. Mussolini’s propaganda,” she expanded. “He’s a great propaganding advertising sort of man. He’s the voice of Italy and he’s drowned all the other voices. Everyone has been so shut up and so beaten and arrested and all that by these young divils that had a word to say against them, that now they don’t even know the truth themselves. How can you possibly know anything about yourself if you won’t hear a word about yourself unless it’s praise? Well, that’s where they are,” said Mrs. McManus. “At bottom ——” She sighed. “The trouble with a country like Italy is that there’s no sensible women about to keep the young men in order. And speak plainly and simply to them about their goings on. They’re just mere females and Catholics, these Italian women, and that’s all there is to it.
“Would you believe it,” said Mrs. McManus, “I was stopped by some of them young Fascists on the Pincio one day and told to go back from the walk I was taking. Up to some bedevilment they were. I wouldn’t go back and I didn’t go back. I just stood where I was and looked them in the eye and told them what I thought of them. Quietly. And what I’d like to do to them if I was their mothers. In English of course. After a bit they began to look sheepish and glance sideways at one another and shrug their shoulders and in the end they let me go my way. Of course I used English. It’s always the best thing, especially with these foreigners here, to talk to them in English, if you happen to get into any sort of dispute with them. They’re conceited people and they don’t like to feel ignorant, and talking to them in English makes them feel ignorant. It puts them in the inferior position. If you talk to them in their own language you’re apt to make mistakes and that sets them off despising you. Whereas if you talk in English they despise themselves and you get the upper hand of them. Exactly like talking quietly to dogs. Never lower yourself by talking to a foreigner in his own tongue. Never seem to try to understand him. Behave as though he ought to be ashamed not to understand every word you are saying to him. You have him at your mercy.”
That, too, impressed Mrs. Rylands as a striking point of view. She made a note of it for future consideration.
Mrs. McManus professed an admiration for Casa Terragena and the gardens that was transparently a concession.
“They must have cost a terrible deal of money,” she said, as if she wished that to be taken for praise. “Dragging these flowers from all the ends of the earth to make them grow here together! The industry of it! The ways of man! Hardly a thing on earth nowadays stays where God put it.”
“If God did put it,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“A manner of speaking,” said Mrs. McManus. “There’s that big lovely purple spike thing you say came from Australia. No, I’ll not attempt to learn the name of it. Such things cumber the mind. It’s standing up there like a regiment among the rocks with all its bells open, ranks and ranks of it — waiting for insects that are all round the world away. No one ever brought over the insects it was made for. You may say it is botany and science bringing it here, but I can’t help feeling it’s taking advantage of a flower that hadn’t the power to help itself. It’s making all the summer one long First of April for it bringing it here. Day after day, more of these bells. Open for nothing.
“It’s like calling Caller Herrin’ in the wilderness of the moon,” said Mrs. McManus.
Mrs. Rylands saw her lovely garden from a new angle.
“Hundreds and hundreds of workmen it must have taken from first to last. I wonder what they thought they were doing when they made it. Anyhow — it’s a very good place, what with the sea breezes, for you to be having your baby in.”
Mrs. McManus went off at a tangent. “That butler of yours is a fine looking fellow and well set up. I doubt if Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has finer moustaches. It’s a mercy he’s so wrapped up in himself. He’d be a Holy Terror with the maids if he wasn’t.”
Perfectly true. But no one had ever remarked it before.
She regretted Philip wasn’t available. “I’m no friend to separating husband and wife when there’s a baby coming. Some people nowadays have a perfect fad for keeping them apart, just as though they were animals. But men are not animals in such respects and wives need to be comforted. Of course if he had to go back for the coal strike there’s nothing more to be said. It’s a pity.”
She explained that she did not propose to walk about with her patient more than was necessary. “You’ve got your thoughts,” she said, “and I have mine. I see you’re carrying a little green book about to write in. I needn’t chew the newspaper to make talk for you, thank goodness. The work I’ve had to do at times! But you don’t want that. I’ll hover. I’ll just hover. You’ll find I’ll always be near and just out of sight — if ever you call. I’ve been trained to hover for years.”
“You’ll find it very quiet here,” said Mrs. Rylands. “There’s very little to do.”
“I’ll never want for something to do while there’s a cross-word puzzle to be found in the paper. Wonderful the uses men can find for things like words!”
“If you’d like to run in to Monte Carlo for an afternoon or so soon the car is quite at your service. There’s really no need even to hover for a bit.”
“Do you see me breaking the bank?” said Mrs. McManus.
“Shops.”
“There again,” said Mrs. McManus.
“There’s English services in Mentone on Sunday. You must go for that.”
“I will not,” said Mrs. McManus.
“But as a Protestant ——!”
“I’m no friend to extravagance in any shape or form. When I’m in England I go to the English church and when I’m in Scotland I’m whatever sort of Presbyterian is nearest, but going to English Church services in a country of this sort is like fox hunting in Piccadilly, I’d be ashamed to be seen going there, prayer-book and all.”
An irrational impulse to make Mrs. McManus help with the little green book came to Mrs. Rylands. “But isn’t God everywhere?” she asked.
“I was not speaking of God.”
“But you are a Protestant.”
“I am that.”
“But Protestants believe in God.”
“Protestants protest against Roman Catholics. And well they may.”
“But you believe in God?”
“That is a matter, Mrs. Rylands, Strictly between Himself and me.”
But the large clear obiter dicta of Mrs. McManus, those hard opaque ideas like great chunks of white quartz, were no more than an incidental entertainment for Mrs. Rylands. The main thread of her mental existence now was her discussion with her little green leather book, and with Philip, the discussion of her universe and what had to be done about it. For five days Philip sent nothing to her but three cards, not postcards but correspondence cards in envelopes from his clubs, saying he was “writing a screed” and adding endearments. Then in close succession came two bales of written matter, hard upon the sudden and quite surprising announcement in the French and English-Parisian papers that the general strike in England had collapsed.
These “screeds” were very much in the manner of his former communication. Some lavender-tinted sheets from Honeywood House testified to a night spent at his Aunt Rowena’s at Barnes. But there were no more drawings; he was getting too deeply moved for that sort of relief. There was not the same streak of amused observation, and there was an accumulating gravity. He reasoned more. The opening portion was a storm of indignation against the British Gazette, the government control of broadcasting and the general suppression of opinion in the country. That was very much in his old line. He had taken the trouble to copy out a passage from the government proclamation of Friday and print and underline certain words. ”ALL RANKS of the armed forces of the crown are notified that ANY ACTION they may find it necessary to take in an honest endeavour to aid the civil power will receive both now AND AFTERWARDS the full support of the Government.” Something had happened, Mrs. Rylands noted! He had spelt “government” right! And an anticipatory glance over the pages in her hand showed that he was going on spelling it right. To these quoted words Philip had added in a handwriting that was distorted with rage, rather thicker and less distinct: “in other words, ‘Shoot and club if you get half a chance and the Home Office is with you. You will be helped now and let off afterwards.’ This is publicly asking for violence in the most peaceful social crisis the world has ever seen. I told you the government wanted to have a fight and this proves it. But this isn’t the worst. . . . ”
He went on to tell of how the Bishop of Oxford, the Masters of Balliol and University and a number of leading churchmen had called upon the government to reopen negotiations and how the Archbishop of Canterbury had attempted in vain to get a movement afoot in the country to arrest the struggle and revive negotiations. The Archbishop had preached on this on Sunday and had tried to mobilise the pulpits throughout the country. He had found himself treated as a rebel sympathiser and choked off. The British Gazette had suppressed the report of this church intervention and the government had prohibited its publication by the British Broadcasting Company. “They want this fight. They want to get to violence,” wrote Philip, with his pen driving hard into the paper, and proceeded to denounce “Winston’s garbled reports of Parliament. Anything against them is either put in a day late or left out altogether. People like Oxford and Grey are cut to rags. Cook said of the negotiations, days ago, ‘It is hopeless,’ and the dirty rag quoted this as though he said it of the strike. And we have a cant that these Harrovians are real public school boys and understand fair play!”
It was funny to find the faithful Etonian breaking off in this way to gird at Harrow and make it responsible for the most unteachable of its sons.
It seemed Philip had been in the House of Commons on Friday and heard a discussion between Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Thomas that more than confirmed his suspicions that the petty Daily Mail strike and the consequent break was a foreseen excuse, meanly and eagerly snatched at by the government. Then came a rumour, current at the time but with no foundation in fact, that the King (or according to another version the Prince of Wales) had wanted to say something reconciling and had been advised against such a step. “Jix as Mussolini,” commented Philip, quite convinced of the story. He stormed vividly but briefly at the broadcasting programmes and the talk in the clubs. Came a blank half-sheet, just like one of those silences in some great piece of music before the introduction of a new theme and then, on a new page and very distinctly: “I have had a damned row with Uncle Robert.”
This was the motive of the next part of Philip’s composition, written more evenly and more consecutively than anything he had done before, the Largo so to speak. He expanded and developed and varied his jangling sense of Uncle Robert, and gathered it altogether into a measured and sustained denunciation. He set out to convey with a quite unconscious vigour, his deep astonishment, his widening perplexity and his gathering resentment that anything of the nature of Lord Edensoke should exist in the world, let alone in such close and authoritative proximity to himself. At times his discourse might have borne the heading “The Young Man discusses the Older Sort of Human Male.”
“He’s damned,” he repeated. “I never realised before that anyone could go about this world without any stink or fuss, so completely and utterly dead and damned as he is.” He jumped into capitals to say his worthy uncle was a “Bad Man, nerve and muscle, blood and bone.” He declared that it was impossible to understand the general strike, the coal strike, the outlook in England, the outlook for all the world until Lord Edensoke had been anatomised and analysed. And forthwith he set about the business.
Philip made it quite clear that up to his early conversations with his uncle after his return to England, he had supposed Lord Edensoke to be animated by much the same motives as himself, namely by a strong if vague passion to see the world orderly and growing happier, by a real wish to have the Empire secure, beneficent and proud, by a desire to justify wealth by great services, and that he was prepared to give time and face losses that the course of human affairs should go according to his ideas of what was fine and right. These had always been Philip’s own assumptions, albeit rather dormant ones. But ——
“He doesn’t care a rap for the Empire as an Empire,” wrote the amazed nephew. “He sees it simply as a not too secure roof over a lot of the family investments.” Lord Edensoke’s sense of public duty did not exist. He despised his social class. His loyalty to the King amounted to a firm assurance that he diverted public attention from the real rulers of the country. People liked the monarchy; it saved public issues from the dangerous nakedness they had in America. “Otherwise if he thought there was a dividend to be got out of it, he would boil the king in oil.” He didn’t believe in social order, in any sort of responsibility that a policeman and a law court could not check. Frankly, in his heart, he saw himself to be a brigand, carrying an enviable load through a world wherein nothing better than brigandage was possible. Law was a convenient convention among the robbers and you respected it just so far as it would be discreditable or dangerous to break the rules.
Came an illuminating anecdote. At dinner Lord Edensoke had shown a certain weariness of Philip’s political and social crudities. By way of getting to more interesting things he had opened a fresh topic with “By the bye, Philip, have you any loose balances about? I think I could make a good use of them.”
He had proceeded to explain to Philip’s incredulity that the general strike was bound to collapse as soon as the scared and incapable labour leaders saw an excuse for letting it down that would save their faces with their followers, and that then the miners would be left locked out exactly as if there had been no general strike — but with “diminished public support.” “That fellow Cook” could be relied upon to keep them out and to irritate the public against them. His lordship did his best to disabuse Philip’s mind of the idea that there would be any settlement for some time. “You mean you won’t settle anyhow?” Philip had said. Lord Edensoke’s reply had been a faint smile and a gesture of the hand. So, as Rylands and Cokeson would have thousands of trucks unemployed, and easily handed over to other uses, the thing to do was to buy foreign coal now, and release and distribute it later when the community at large came to realise all that Lord Edensoke knew. Coal would come back to fancy prices — higher than ‘21. “There’s a speculative element, of course,” he had said. “The miners may collapse,” but as he saw it, there was, saving that possibility, anything from twenty-five to a hundred and fifty per cent. to be made in the course of the next few months upon anything Philip chose to bring in to this promising operation.
Philip ended his account of this conversation in wild indignation. “We are the coal-owners of Great Britain,” he fumed, “and this is how we do our duty by the country that trusts us, honours us, makes peers of us! We starve the miner and strangle industry — and we make ‘anything from twenty-five to a hundred and fifty per cent.’ out of a deal in foreign coal. Naturally we do nothing to bring about a settlement. Naturally we are for the Constitution and all that, which lets us do such things.” Philip’s narrative wasn’t very clear, but this was the point it would seem at which the “damned row with Uncle Robert” occurred.
Respect for the head of the family made its final protest and fled. It was Philip’s last dinner with his senior partner. He seemed to have talked, according to his uncle’s judgment, “sheer Bolshevism.” It was doubtful if they got to their cigars. Philip returned to the Reform Club and spent the rest of a long evening consuming the Club notepaper at a furious pace.
Details of the final breach did not appear because Philip swept on to a close, unloving investigation of his uncle’s soul.
“I seem to have been thinking of him most of the time since,” he said.
What did Lord Edensoke think he was up to, Philip enquired. Clearly he did not suppose he was living for anything outside himself. He had no religion, no superstition even. He had a use for religion, but that was a different matter. For him religion was a formality that kept people in order. It was good that inferior and discontented people should be obliged to sacrifice to the God of Things as they Are. It set up a code of outer decency and determined a system of restraints. Nor had he any patriotism. The British Empire in his eyes was a fine machine for utilising the racial instincts of the serviceable British peoples for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of invested capital throughout the world. If they did not, as a general rule, get very much out of it in spite of their serviceableness that was their affair. They could congratulate themselves that their money was on a gold standard even if they had none, and they had the glory of ruling India if even they were never allowed to go there. He liked the English climate and avoided it during most of the winter. It was a good climate for work and Courtney Wishart in its great park just over the hills from Edensoke was a stately and enviable home, one of those estates that made England a land fit for heroes to die for. He had no passion for science. The spirit that devotes whole lives to the exquisite unravelling of reality was incomprehensible to him. He preferred his reality ravelled. It was better for business operations. He betrayed no passion for any sort of beautiful things. He would never collect pictures nor make a garden unless he wanted to beat someone else at it or sell it at a profit. He loved no one in the world — Philip would tell her a little later of his uncle’s loves. In brief he lived simply for himself, for satisfactions directly related to himself as the centre of it all and for nothing else whatever.
One of his great satisfactions was winning a game. He was not, Philip thought, avaricious simply but he liked to get, because that was besting the other fellow. His business was his great game. He liked to feel his aptitude, his wariness, to foresee, and realise and let other people realise the shrewd precision of his anticipations. He played other games for recreation. He was reported to be a beastly bridge player, very good but spiteful and envious even of his partner. He played in the afternoons at the Lessington after lunch and Philip said rumour had it that several other members of that great club would go into hiding and get the club servants to report for them, not venturing near the card-room, until Edensoke was seated at his game. He played golf bitterly well. Physically he was as good as Geoffry, the same sure eye and accurate movements. He had been a memorable bat at cricket and still made a devastating show at tennis. And he was a wonderful shot. Business kept him from much shooting, but he loved a day now and then, when he could take his place among the guns and kill and kill. He would stand, with those thin lips of his pressed together, while the scared birds came rocketing over him, wings whirring, hearts beating fast. He showed them. But he had no blood lust. On the whole he would rather play against a man than merely triumph over birds and silly things that probably did not feel humiliated even when they were shot. Besting people and feeling that the other fellow realises or will presently find out that he has been bested was subtler and far more gratifying. “You know that scanty laugh of his,” wrote Philip, “rather like a neigh. The loser gets it.” Just now he was besting the miners. “The more he gets them down the better he will be pleased.” The profits were a secondary consideration, important only like scoring above the line.
He loved no one. “I don’t think I have ever talked to you about Aunt Sydney,” said Philip, and proceeded to explain the domestic infelicities of his uncle. She had been a brilliant beautiful girl but poor, one of the “needy Needhams.” Uncle Robert would never have married a rich and independent wife because it would have been difficult to best her and hard to try. He had kept Aunt Sydney down for a time and she had been almost treacherously subservient until she had got him well committed to infidelity with a secretary, and had enticed him into provable cruelty. She had been a patient Grisel who had eavesdropped, stolen letters and bided her time. A lover, well hidden, gave her sage counsel. Then she had held her husband up with the threat of a discreditable divorce. Uncle Robert had no stomach for being “talked about all over London.” It was one of his essential satisfactions to be respected and high and unapproachable, and he must have had some bad hours over the affair. “We all rather like Aunt Sydney on that account,” wrote Philip.
She arranged a separation of mutual toleration and wore her lover upon her sleeve in full view of her baffled spouse. He became “Burdock, the chap Lady Edensoke keeps,” her watchful and not always comfortable shadow.
Lord Edensoke tried to make this seem to be his own design and flaunted it with various conspicuous, expensive and rather discordant ladies for some years to show everybody just how things were. Then he reverted to his more congenial pursuit of discovering, seducing, exalting and throwing over, very young and needy beauties from the middle classes. He coveted them, bested them, got them, hated them because so plainly he had bought them, and threw them over with well established expensive habits and a contemptible income. “He sets about it like a cat,” wrote Philip. “I have seen him on the platform at a Mansion House meeting, fixing some pretty girl in the audience like an old cat spotting a nestling in a bush. He sets about it very quietly and cleverly. He has all sorts of secretarial jobs to offer, and I believe there is a friendly West End dressmaker. He can even seem to be influential round about one or two theatres if a girl has ambitions of that sort. He gets them and makes them submit to this and that, and they become afraid of him. They realise they are unsafe. He can turn them back to poverty and the streets, so easily. When he has got them thoroughly afraid of him, then I suppose he feels like God. In the end, it does not matter how they propitiate. Go they must. In his life, there must have been a score of these —romances.”
Thus Philip, relentlessly. These were the interests and amusements of Lord Edensoke, the satisfactions that kept him alive and made the life he lived worth while, the besting of men, the abasement of women, the sense of conquest assured by the big balance, the big house, the many servants, the champagne you couldn’t buy in the open market, the special cigars, the salutation of common men, the whispered “That’s Edensoke,” the rare visits to the House of Lords. What other reality was there? These were the things that kept the look of quiet self-approval on those thin lips and assured the great coal-owner that he had the better of the sentimentalists and weaklings about him, that he could rank himself above these other men who wasted their time upon ideas and causes, who kept faith beyond the letter of their bargains, and sacrificed and restrained themselves for their friends and their associates, their wives and their women-kind. “My dear,” wrote Philip, rising to the full gravity of his Largo, “this is the analysis of Uncle Robert. These are his ends and all that he is! For the first time in my life I have looked at him squarely and this is what he is. And it is a hideous life. It is a hideous life and yet it comes so close to me that it is a life I too might drift into living.
“This is a common way of living among our kind of people now. Edensoke is no rare creature. There are more Edensokes than know they are [_sic_]. Edensokes with variations. There are hundreds of him now among the rich, and thousands and thousands as one goes down the scale to the merely prosperous. Some are a little different about their womenfolk and buy them dearer and make more of a show with them. Many are sillier — I admit he has a good brain. Lots are too cowardly for ‘romances’ and leave the women alone — but not so many as there used to be. Most have fads and hobbies that give them a little distinction, but all are equally damned. You and I could write down a score of names in five minutes. Not one that wouldn’t rejoice to be in that deal over the foreign coal, if they knew of it and knew how to get into it. Not one, that wouldn’t feel bested to hear of a coal miner with a decent bathroom, a Morris car and a shelf of books. The government and the bunch behind the government, abounds in his quality. Soames Forsyte again! — how near old Galsworthy has come to him. The living damned.
“And in a world of men like this,” Philip culminated, “we are waiting about for old Sempack’s millennium to come of its own accord!”
Mrs. Rylands paused at the end of the sheet. The portrait of the contemporary successful man, for all the jerkiness of its strokes, struck her as devastatingly true. There was not a thing Philip was telling her about Lord Edensoke that seemed altogether new to her. Even the bilked mistresses she had known of, by intuition. And as certainly had she known, and yet never quite dared to know, that this was the quality of many men, of many powers, of much of the power in the world. The world into which she and Philip were now launching another human soul.
That too had to be reasoned out with the green leather book.
“What puts the sting into the problem of Uncle Robert,” Philip continued, “is the fact that he is after all, blood of my blood and bone of my bone. When he isn’t looking like an elderly shop-soiled version of Geoffry coming home late, he is looking like me in thirty years time. The personal question for me is, whether he is the truth about me stripped of a lot of illusion and rainbow stuff and Wordsworthian ‘clouds of glory’ and such, or whether I am still in possession of something — I don’t know — some sort of cleanness and decency, that he has lost. Which I need not lose. I’m all for alternative two, and if so, then the most important thing in the world for us is to know what has dried this up in Uncle Robert.
“I’m going to write something difficult, dear wife confessor. I can’t help being clumsy here and it will sound priggish to the square of pi. But I see it like this. There is something in me that for want of a better word I might call religious. There is something else, unless it is the same thing, that holds me to you. Not just sex and your dearness, they hold me, but something else as well that makes me put not you, but something about you, over and before myself — before ourselves.” (Marginal note: “I just can’t get away from all these ambiguous somethings but I think you will see what I mean. When a man can manage his ‘ones’ and his ‘somethings’ and his other pronouns then I suppose he has really learnt to write.") This has to do with nobleness and good faith. This is in me but not so very strong, and I thank whatever powers there be that I met you. This wants help to keep alive, and you help it to keep alive, have helped and will help it tremendously. It may be illusion but that does not matter so long as it remains bright and alive. Lots of people keep it alive through religion, church I mean and all that, but nowadays that hasn’t kept up, religion hasn’t, and a lot of us can’t make that use of it. Of any current sort of religion I mean. And it can go altogether. I have this in me, whatever it is, and so has Geoffry and so perhaps had Uncle Robert. I am more like Geoffry than you like to think and he is more like me. He didn’t have my luck in getting you and having you thinking of fine things beside me, and before and always he has had the worse of that sort of luck and he is shyer than I am and more secretive. I’ve seen what I am talking about shrink in him, but I’ve watched it and it is there. I don’t suppose there is any religion now strong enough to get him — or any sort of woman to pick him up. I don’t know. Still something lingers. It makes him uncomfortable and he is disposed to hate it and try to sneer at it until it is dead altogether. And by the same reasoning Edensoke started like this. There was a time when he thought of doing fine things and having something in his life lovelier than scoring points in a game. He had the illusion, or if you like, because practically it is the same, he had the sacred flame, whatever it is, flickering about in him. I expect Aunt Sydney made a tough start for him. He hadn’t my luck. Suppose when they two were young he had found out suddenly that she loved him — more even than her pride. Suppose something had happened like what happened to me. Infusion of blood saves lives, but being loved like that is infusion of soul. Shy men bury their hearts like that fellow in the Testament who buried his talent. And when you dig them up again, there’s nothing. Hearts must have air, have breathed upon them the breath of life. As you did. The flame is hard to light again. Now that there is no religion really, one is left to nothing but love.
“I’m writing all this just anyhow and God knows what you will make of this hotch-potch of ideas. I’ve got to cut it short and finish.
“It is one o’clock, my dear, closing time for a respectable club and I must turn out from here and walk back to South Street to bed. Not a taxi to be got.”
This first letter had been sealed down after this effort and then reopened to insert a sheet of South Street notepaper and on this was scrawled: “I open this letter again to tell you that Catherine Fossingdean has killed a man. I did not even know she was in England. I thought she was still with you. But she seems to have scuttled home directly the General Strike was begun. You know she is mixed up with the comic-opera fellow Fearon-Owen who stars it in the British Fascisti world. I can’t imagine her taste for him. Looks to me like the sort of fellow one doesn’t play cards with. Got his knighthood out of organising some exhibition. One of those splendid old English families that sold carpets in Constantinople three generations ago and was known as Feronian or some such name with a nose to it. Anyhow he’s true-blue British now. Bull-dog-breed to the marrow. union Jack all over him. And a terrific down on the lazy good-for-nothing British working man. Who really is British, blood and bone. In some irregular way this glory of our island race has got his fingers well into an emergency organisation of automobilists, for scattering Winston’s British Gazette up and down the country, and suchlike public services. And he seems to have handed over a motor-car to Lady Catherine for moonlight rushes to the midlands.
“You know how she drives. Foot down and damn the man round the corner. Giving her a car to drive is almost as criminal as shooting blind down a crowded street. She got her man near Rugby. Two young fellows she got, but the other was only slightly injured. This one was killed dead. Tramping for a job, poor devil. And she drove on! She drove on, because she was a patriotic heroine battling against Bolshevism and all that, for God and King and Fearon-Owen and the British Gazette, particularly Fearon-Owen and the British Gazette. War is war. Nothing will be done to her. That’s all. Philip.”
Philip’s other letter was much slenderer and had been posted only one day after its precursor. It opened with his amazed account of the collapse of the General Strike. “Everything has happened as Uncle Robert foretold, and so far I am proved a fool,” it began.
He went on to express a quite extravagant contempt for the leaders of the Labour Party who had “neither the grit to prevent the General Strike nor the grit to keep on with it.” It was clear that he had a little lost his equanimity over the struggle and that his criticisms of selfish toryism had tilted him heavily towards the side of the strikers in the struggle. And he was intensely annoyed to find his uncle’s estimate of the situation so completely confirmed. The time had come to call out the second line, stop light and power and food distribution and bring matters to a crisis, and there was little reason to suppose that most of the men of the second line would not have stood by their unions.
But it would have meant the beginning of real violence and a grimmer phase of the struggle and the trade union leaders were tired, frightened and consciously second-rate men. They were far more terrified by the possibilities of victory than by the certainty of defeat. They had snatched at the opportunity offered by a new memorandum by “that Kosher Liberal, Herbert Samuel”—“Tut tut!” said Mrs. Rylands; “but this is real bad temper, Philip!"— which nobody had accepted or promised to stand by, and unconditionally, trusting the whole future of the men they stood for, to a government that could publish the British Gazette, they had called the strike off. They had given in and repented like naughty children “and here we are — with men being victimised right and left and the miners in the cart! Nothing has been done, nothing has been settled. The railway workers are eating humble pie and the red ties of the Southern railway guards are to be replaced by blue ones. (Probably Jix thought of that.) The miners have already refused to accept Samuel’s memorandum, and Uncle Robert’s little deal is almost the only hopeful thing in the situation. He gets his laugh out of it sure enough.”
Even the writing showed Philip in a phase of anti-climax. He was irritated, perplexed.
“Is all life a comedy of fools? Am I taking myself too seriously and all that? Here is a crisis in the history of one of the greatest, most intelligent, best educated countries in the world, and it is an imbecile crisis! It does nothing. It states nothing. It does not even clear up how things are. By great good luck it did not lead to bloodshed or bitterness — except among the miners. Who aren’t supposed to count. And Catherine’s kill of course. There was no plan in it and no idea to it. It was a little different in form and it altered the look of the streets; but otherwise it was just in the vein of affairs as they go on month by month and year by year, coming to no point, signifying nothing. Burbling along. Just, as you say old Sempack said, just Carnival. Where are we going? — all the hundreds of millions that we are on this earth? Is this all and has it always been such drifting as this? Are the shapes of history like the shapes of clouds, fancies of Polonius the historian? Now we expand and increase and now we falter and fail. Boom years and dark ages until the stars grow tired of us and shy some half-brick of a planet out of space to end the whole silly business.
“I cannot believe that, and so I come back to old Sempack again with his story of all this world of ours being no more than the prelude to a real civilisation. Hitch your mind to that idea and you can make your life mean something. Or seem to mean something. There is no other way, now that the religions have left us, to make a life mean anything at all. But then, are we getting on with the prelude? How are we to get on with the prelude? How are we to get by Uncle Robert? How are we to get by Winston and Amery? How are we to get by all these posturing, vague-minded, labour politicians? My dear, I set out writing these letters to you to tell you how my mind was going on and what I was finding out to do. And in this letter anyhow I have to tell you that my mind isn’t going on and that I am lost and don’t know what to do. It is as if a squirrel in a rotating cage reported progress. I wish I had old Sempack here, just to put him through it. Is he anything more than a big bony grey squirrel spinning in a cage of his own? The great crisis came and the great crisis went, and it has left me like a jelly-fish stranded on a beach.
“The only people in all this tangle of affairs who seem to have any live faith in them and any real go are — don’t be too startled — the Communist Party. I’ve had glimpses of one or two of them. And the stuff they teach and profess seems to me the most dead-alive collection of half-truths and false assumptions it is possible to imagine. For everyone who isn’t a Communist they have some stupid nickname or other, and their first most fundamental belief is that nobody who owns any property or directs any sort of business, can be other than deliberately wicked. Everything has to be sabotaged and then everything will come right. They don’t work for one greatly organised world in the common interest, not for a moment. Their millennium is a featureless level of common people, and it is to be brought about by a paradox called the dictatorship of the proletariat. And yet they have an enthusiasm. They can work. They can take risks and sacrifice themselves — quite horrible risks they will face. While we ——”
He had pulled up in mid sentence. The second fascicle began as abruptly as the first ended.
“I have just been to see Sempack at Charing Cross Hospital. I had no idea that he too had come back to England. I thought he was doing a walking tour in the Alpes Maritimes. But it seems that he was knocked down by a bus in the Strand this morning. They got through to me by telephone when he recovered consciousness and I went to see him at once. There is some question whether the bus skidded, but none that the great man, with his nose in the air and his thoughts in the year 4000, overlooked it as he stepped off the kerb. He wasn’t killed or smashed, thank goodness, but he had a shock and very bad contusions and a small bone broken in his fore-arm, and for two hours he seems to have been insensible. He was very glad to see me and talked very pleasantly — of you and the garden among other things. Voice unabated. I could not have imagined they could have packed him into an ordinary hospital bed, but they had. There are no complications. He will be out of hospital to-morrow and I shall take him to South Street and see that he is sent off properly and in a fit condition to his own house near Swanage. Perhaps I will take him down. I like him and it might be good to talk things over with him. But what can he be doing in London? He wasn’t at all clear about that. Has everybody come to London? Shall I next have to bail you out at Bow Street or identify the body of Bombaccio recovered from the Thames?”
It was queer to turn one’s mind back from the social battles and eventfulness of distant England to life in the great garden. Here Mr. Sempack was still a large figure of thought and Lady Catherine simply lovely and florid and absurd. It seemed as though it could be only little marionette copies of them of which Philip told, Sempack bandaged in hospital and Lady Catherine become rather horribly strident, with blood upon her mudguards. She had killed a young man. She was such a fool that she would not greatly care, any more than such women cared for the killing of pheasants. That young man would simply become part of the decoration of her life like the dead and dying soldiers one sees in the corners of heroic portraits of great conquerors. And Philip away there. But also he was a voice here, his letters made him a voice very near to his musing reader. In his letters there were also little phrases, little reminders, that even an intimate novel cannot quote. These touched and caressed her. He seemed to be Philip close at hand telling of the Philip who went about England in a state of peevish indignation, accumulating rebellion against cold and capable Uncle Robert and all that Uncle Robert stood for in life. And while the problems of this struggle in the homeland passed processionally before her mind, she had also in the foreground, great handsome chunks of the wisdom of Mrs. McManus and alternatively the religion of Stella Binny.
With Stella Binny Mrs. Rylands discussed theology. The green leather book had been planned on generous lines to open with metaphysical and religious ideas. Stella had just been received in the Catholic Church and had arrived in a phase of shy proselytism. So naturally both ladies converged on a common preoccupation.
But if they converged they never met. When at last Stella took her unremarkable departure for England and Mrs. Rylands could think over all that had passed between them as one whole, she was impressed by that failure to meet, more than by anything else in their arguments and comparisons. In some quite untraceable way the idea of God as of a great being comprehending the universe and pervading every fibre of her existence had crept into her mind during the past month or so. It was as if He had always been there in her mind and yet as if He was only now becoming near and perceptible. So long as she had been in her first phase of love for Philip she had hardly given this presence a thought; now in the new phase that was developing, the presence presided. It was something profoundly still, something absolutely permanent, which embraced all her life and Philip and everything in her consciousness out to the uttermost star. But when she set herself to compare this gathering apprehension of God with Stella’s happy lucidities about her new faith, she found herself looking into a mental world that had not an idea nor a meaning in common with her own.
Indeed her impression was that Stella’s religion, so far from being of the same nature as her own, was nothing more than a huge furniture store of screens, hangings, painted windows, curtains and walls, ornaments and bric-à-brac, to banish and hide this one thing that constituted her own whole faith. This cosmic certitude, this simplicity beneath diversity, this absolute reassurance amidst perplexity and confusion, this profound intimacy, had nothing in common with the docketed Incomprehensible of Stella’s pious activities, who was locked away in some steel safe of dogmas, far away from the music and decorations. Stella became defensive and elusive directly Mrs. Rylands spoke of God. She gave her to understand that the Mysteries of the Being of God were unthinkable things, an affair for specialists, to be entrusted to specialists and left to specialists, like the mysteries discussed by Mr. Einstein. The good Roman Catholic hurried past them with a bowed head and averted eyes to deal with other things.
But Mrs. Rylands had not the slightest desire to deal with these other things. She found them not merely unattractive; she found them tiresome and even in some aspects repulsive. She had no taste for bric-à-brac in the soul. She wanted God herself. Belonging to a Church whose Holy Father conceivably stood in the presence of God, was no satisfaction to her. She herself wanted to stand in the presence of God. So far as Stella could be argued with upon this question, she argued with her about the Mass. “It brings one near. It is the ultimate nearness,” said Stella, dropping her voice to a whisper. “It would take me a billion miles away,” said Mrs. Rylands. She was naughty about the Mass and did her best to shock her friend. “I don’t want to eat God,” she blasphemed. “I want to know him.” She said that invoking the spirit by colours and garments and music reminded her of the hiving of swarming bees. She objected scornfully to the necessary priest. “God is hard enough to realise,” she said, “without the intervention of a shaven individual in petticoats — however symbolic his petticoats and his shaven face may be.” She recalled some crumbs of erudition that had fallen from the table of the parental vicarage and cited parallelisms between the old Egyptian religions and religious procedure and the Catholic faith and practice. She hunted out controversial material from the Encyclop?dia Britannica. And from more destructive sources.
The miscellaneous literary accumulations of Casa Terragena included several volumes about Catholic mysticism, and among others one or two books by Saint Teresa and the Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude with many details of her extremely physical kissings and caressings with her “adorable lover.” There was also Houtin’s account of the marvellous experiences of the sainted Abbess of Solesmes, who died so recently as 1909. Mrs. Rylands had dipped in these strange records and now she returned to them for ammunition. She read the blushing Stella how every Christmas Eve, the latter lady and her spiritual daughters gave the breast, with a great physical excitement, to the infant Jesus, and how her spiritual sons were afterwards rewarded by derivative ecstasies when their sisters described to them “the chaste emotions of this virginal milking.”
“Where, my dear,” cried Cynthia, “is God, the Wonderful, the Everlasting, in ecstasies like that?”
Stella was ill instructed as yet in the new faith she had embraced. But she had learnt the lesson of confidence in the authorities into whose hands she had given herself. “All this can be explained. . . . It is a special side of the faith.”
Mrs. Rylands propounding fresh perplexities had suddenly become aware that there was distress in her friend’s voice, in her eyes, in her flushed face. Things had appeared in a changed light. Stella was large and very blonde, a creature so gentle that abruptly, as the tears showed in her eyes and the note of fear betrayed itself in her voice, her little hostess had seen herself like a fierce little rationalist ferret, tackling this white rabbit of faith. Surely she had not been discussing great religious ideas at all. How could one discuss such things with Stella? She had simply been spoiling a new toy that had been making her friend very happy. “Oh Stella dear! Forgive my troubling you with my elementary doubts,” she had said. “I am very crude and ignorant. I know it, my dear. Of course there must be explanations.”
Stella dissolved in gratitude.
“Of course there are explanations. If only you could talk to men like Cardinal Amontillado, you would realise how explicable all these things are. They make it so clear. But I’m not clever nor trained.”
“I was just asking,” Mrs. Rylands had apologised.
“Some things of course are simply given us to try our faith,” Stella had said.
And Mrs. Rylands had changed the subject with the happy discovery of two pretty little birds flirting in a rose-brake.
Now however that Stella had gone Mrs. Rylands could look back on all their disputations and utter her matured and final verdict upon the great system that had embraced and taken possession of her friend. And it has to be recorded that the matured and final verdict of Mrs. Rylands upon Roman Catholic Christianity, its orders and subjugations, its gifts and consolations, its saints and mysteries and marvels and the enduring miracle of its existence, was delivered in one single word: Rubbish. “Rubbish,” she said — aloud and distinctly as though she had hearers. She said it aloud as she walked in the darkness of her garden after dinner. As one might rehearse a one word part. Mrs. McManus no doubt was hovering, but she could hover so skilfully and tactfully that it seemed to Mrs. Rylands that she was entirely by herself.
With this word given out to the night Mrs. Rylands asserted her tested and inalterable Protestantism, her resolution to keep the idea of God clean from all traces of primordial rites, of sublimated sensuality and wrappings of complication, and her relations with God simple and direct. God might be invisible, indescribable, veiled so deep in mystery as to be altogether undiscoverable, but at any rate He should not be caricatured in mysticism, worshipped in effigy and made the mouthpiece of authority. Better the Atheist who says there is nothing than the Catholic who says there is such stuff as altars are made of.
And with that word of dismissal Mrs. Rylands ceased to think about Roman Catholicism and fell into a deep meditation upon the mystery and majesty of her God.
Her God, that Being was; the frame and substance of her universe of which and by which all its things were made; the mighty essential reassurance of her particular mind. He was everywhere, but for her His seat was in her spirit and His centre was her heart. He had come as imperceptibly as a dawn and her life had ceased to be an?mic and dispersed and purposeless with His coming. Everything was suffused with tone and beauty because of Him. He had dawned upon her not as a dawn of light, for she knew no more than she had ever known, but as a dawn of courage. She perceived she could have as soon called him “Courage” as called him “God.” The courage of the earth and skies. A courage mighty beyond thinking and yet friendly and near. No Name he had, nor need for a name; no prayers nor method of approach. His utmost worship was a wordless quiet. But in such stillness and black clearness as this night gave, under the laced loveliness of the star-entangling branches, he seemed to be very close indeed to her.
Dreaming, drenched in worship and the sense of communion, Mrs. Rylands walked in her garden. The familiar paths just intimated themselves in the obscurity sufficiently to guide her steps. One serene planet high in the blue heaven was the most definite thing in that world of shadows and obscurity.
The little white figure came to rest and stood quite motionless upon the bridge where Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan had discovered the flamboyant quality of the gorge, but to-night, now that the moon rose late, all that ascendant clamour of lines was veiled under one universal curtain of velvet shadow. Far, far above, minute cascades caught a faint glimmer from the depth of the sky, and plunged into an abyss of darkness.
For a long time she remained there and her soul knelt and was comforted.
At last she stirred and went slowly down a slanting path that led towards the Via Aurelia, a path that in its windings up and down and round about, gave little glimpses between the trees now of Ventimiglia and now of the stars.
The serenity of the night was broken.
Distant shouts ugly with anger and the crack of a pistol.
She stopped still and returned to the world of fact. The silence recovered, but now it was pervaded by uneasiness and clustering multiplying interrogations. What was it? The path she was on wound down among rocks and pines below the tennis court to where the work-sheds of the gardens showed dimly, near the old Roman road. The noise had come out of the blackness in which the road was hidden.
Suddenly again — voices!
And then little phantom beams of light, minute pale patches of illumination amidst the black trees. These flicked into existence and as immediately vanished again. There were people down there, a number of men with electric flash lamps, looking for something, pursuing something, calling to one another. As they moved nearer they passed out of sight below the black bulks of the garden houses, leaving nothing but faint intermittent exudations of light beyond the edges of the walls.
Then something appeared very much nearer, a crouching shape on the path below, moving, coming towards her, beast or man. A man with stumbling steps, running. He was so near now that she heard his sobbing breathing, and he had not seen her! In another moment he had pulled up, face to face with her, a middle-sized, stoutish man who stopped short and swayed and staggered. He put up his hand to his forehead. Her appearance, blocking his path, seemed the culmination of dismay for him. “Santo Dio!” he choked with a gesture of despair.
“Coming!” came the voice of Mrs. McManus out of the air.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Rylands, though already she knew she was in the presence of the Terror.
“I Fascisti m’inseguono! Non ne posso pi?. . . . Mi vogliono ammaazzare?” gasped the fugitive and tried to turn and point, and failed and stumbled and fell down before her on hands and knees. He coughed and retched. She thought he was going to be sick. He did not attempt to get up again.
“Coraggio!” said Mrs. Rylands, rallying her Italian, and took his shoulder and made an ineffective effort to raise him to his feet.
She thought very quickly. This man had to be saved. She was on his side. It did not matter who he was. She knew Fascismo. No man was to be chased and manhandled in the garden of Terragena. The pursuers were still beating about down in the black gully of the sunken road. They had not as yet discovered the little stone steps that came into the garden near the bridge, up which their victim must have stolen. He had got some moments’ grace. But he was spent, spent and pitifully wheezing and weeping. He was sitting now on the path with one hand pressed to his labouring chest. He could make no use of his respite to get away.
He must hide. Could he be hidden? She surveyed the ground about her very swiftly. She remembered something that had happened just here, a caprice of her own. A little way back ——
Mrs. McManus was beside her with her hand on her shoulder.
“Them Fascists,” she remarked, with a complete grasp of the situation. “Is he badly hurt?”
“Help him up,” whispered Mrs. Rylands. “Listen! Just a few yards back. Behind the seat. There is a hole between the rocks, where the romarin hangs down. One can be hidden there. I hid there once from Philip. Push him in. Oh! Oh! What is the Italian for hide? But he will know French. ‘Faut cacher. Un trou. Tout preso!’”
“Inglese!” said the fugitive, helped to his feet and peering closely at their dim faces as he clung to the stalwart arm of Mrs. McManus. “Hide! Yes hide. Mes poumons.”
“You help him there. I will delay them,” said Mrs. Rylands, “if they come.”
She showed the way to Mrs. McManus in eager whispers.
“Come,” said Mrs. McManus.
The two dim figures, unsteady and undignified, retreated. The man seemed helplessly passive and obedient, and Mrs. McManus handled him with professional decision.
Mrs. Rylands turned her attention to the hunt again. It was still noisy down there in the trench of the road. It was just as well, for Mrs. McManus seeking the hiding-place and having to reassure her charge kept up a very audible monologue, and a considerable rustle of bushes and snapping of sticks were unavoidable. “But where the divil is it?” she asked.
The rustle and disturbance grew louder and ended in a crashing thud. “Ugh!” she cried very loudly and suddenly ceased to talk.
“Damn!” she said after a moment, spent apparently in effort. Mrs. Rylands saw only vaguely but it seemed that Mrs. McManus was bending down, busily occupied with something. What had happened? Had she found the proper hiding-place?
Mrs. Rylands abandoned her idea of standing sentinel and flitted up the path.
“He’s fainted,” said Mrs. McManus on her knees. “Or worse. We’ll have to drag him in. Let me do it. Can you show me exactly where this hole of yours is? It’s all so dark.”
For a minute, a long minute, Mrs. Rylands could not find it. “Here!” she cried at last. “Here! To the right.”
More crackling of branches. Loose stones rolled over and started off, as if to spread the alarm, down the slanting path. The two women spoke in whispers but the noises they made seemed to be terrific. It was wonderful that the Fascists had not discovered them minutes ago. How heavy a man can be!
A Fascist down below was yelping like a young dog. “Ecco! Ecco! E passato di qui!” He had discovered the steps.
“Come on with you!” said Mrs. McManus stumbling amidst the rocks and gave a conclusive tug.
“Pull that rosemary down on his boots,” said Mrs. Rylands. “I can see the gleam of them from here.”
When she looked down the path again, the noiseless beams of the flash lamps were scrutinising the white walls of the garden house. The Fascists, some or all of them, had come up into the garden. A group of four heads was defined for an instant against the pale illumination of the wall.
“We’d better go down towards them slowly,” said Mrs. McManus. “And if you should happen to be feeling a little upset by all the hubbub they’ve made, well, don’t conceal it.”
“They’ve three paths to choose from at the corner of the sheds,” said Mrs. Rylands. “The main one goes up to the house.”
“So they’ll send only a scout or so this way.”
“But this way leads to the frontier.”
Abruptly they were facing the scrutiny of the bright oval eye of a hand-lamp; its holder a shock-headed blackness. “Perche questa battaglia nello mio giardino?” said Mrs. Rylands in her best Italian, blinking and shrinking.
“Mi scusino, signore!” A boyish not unpleasant voice.
“Pardon me indeed,” came the indignation of Mrs. McManus. “What are you after in this garden, troubling an invalid lady in the night and all?”
“Troppo di — what’s light? it blinds me,” Mrs. Rylands complained, and the white oval breach of the darkness vanished. “Che volete?”
The young man said something about the flight of a traitor.
“Don’t bandy Italian with him,” advised Mrs. McManus.
“You can speak French perhaps; Parlate Franchese?” said Mrs. Rylands and so got the conversation on a linguistic level.
The young man’s French was adequate. That traitor to Italy, Vinciguerra, she learnt, had been trying to escape out of his native country in order to injure her abroad. He had been watched and nearly caught in Ventimiglia two days ago, but he had got away. Now he was making his dash for liberty. He had fled through this garden. He had run along the Via Aurelia and come up the steps by the little bridge. The young man was desolated to invade the lady’s garden or cause her any inconvenience but the fault was with the traitor Vinciguerra. Had she by any chance seen or heard a man passing through her domain?
Mrs Rylands found herself lying with the utmost conviction. No one had passed this way. But she had seen someone hurrying up the central path to the house — perhaps five minutes ago.
“It would be about five minutes ago.”
She had thought it was one of the gardeners, she said. In the darkness the young man made an almost invisible but evidently very profound bow. And turned back to his friends. “I must sit down,” said Mrs. Rylands still in French and taking the arm of Mrs. McManus, wheeled her round. “Sit on that seat,” she explained.
“Sit right on him,” said Mrs. McManus. “Exactly.”
At the same time the trees about them were suffused by an orange glow, that increased in a series of gradations. The two women halted. Looking up the hill they saw Casa Terragena, which had been slumbering in the night, growing visible and vivid, as Bombaccio and his minions put on the lights. Evidently they had become aware of the uproar and were illuminating the house preparatory to sallying forth in search of their mistress. The framework and wire netting of the tennis enclosure became vividly black and clear against the clear brightness of the hall. A rapid consultation occurred at the garden sheds and then the whole body of Fascists went up towards the marble steps below the terrace. The voice of Bombaccio could be heard like the challenge of a sentinel, and replies, less distinct, in a number of voices.
“So it’s Signor Vinciguerra we’ve got,” said Mrs. Rylands speaking very softly. “He used to be a minister.”
“I’ll go back to him. I wish I had some brandy for him.”
“We’ll go back together,” said Mrs. Rylands. “If they make for the French frontier they may pass back along this path.”
They returned to the hiding-place. “Sit you down,” said Mrs. McManus, and groped under the bushes towards the cleft in the rocks. She fumbled and produced a flash lamp of her own. Mrs. Rylands for the first time in her life saw the face of a horribly frightened man. He was crouched together in the hole with not a spark of fight left in him. His hand clutched his mouth.
“Sicuro,” said Mrs. McManus with surprising linguistic ability. “Restate acqui.”
“Put out that light,” said the fugitive in English. ”Please put out that light.”
Darkness supervened with a click.
“Stay here until the way is clear,” said Mrs. McManus.
“Sure,” said Signor Vinciguerra.
“The garden is full of them,” she said.
Inaudible reply.
She rearranged the trailing rosemary and returned cautiously to the bench. She sat down by her charge in silence.
“He must stay here until the way is clear,” she said, and paused and added reflectively —“And then ——?”
A silent mutual contemplation.
“What are we going to do with him?” said Mrs. Rylands in a low voice, glancing over her shoulder at the faint sound of a boot shifting its pose on the rock behind her.
Mrs. McManus also peered at their invisible protégé. “It’s a very great responsibility to have thrust upon two peaceful women just as they are taking the air before bedtime. I hardly know what to advise. . . . We can’t leave him there.”
“We can’t leave him there.”
“He’s done.”
“He’s done.”
Mrs. Rylands contemplated the situation with immense gravity for some moments. Then she was seized with a violent and almost uncontrollable impulse to laugh at the amazing change of mood and tempo ten minutes could effect. But she felt that the fugitive would never understand if she gave way to it. Extreme seriousness returned to her.
The temperament and training alike of Mrs. Rylands disposed her to shirk this startling charge that fate had thrust upon her. Never in all her life before had she been in a position in which she could not turn to someone else to relieve her of danger or inconvenience. Her disposition now was to summon Bombaccio and the servants, tell them to order the Fascists out of the garden and take Signor Vinciguerra, give him refreshments, make him comfortable for the night and send him over the frontier in safety by the accepted route for fugitives, whatever that route happened to be, to-morrow. She realised the absurdity of this even as it came into her consciousness. She had no knowledge of Bombaccio’s political views and still less of his susceptibility and the susceptibility of his minions to the Terror. This time she couldn’t call upon Bombaccio. Even if he proved willing to help, it would not she perceived be fair to him to make him a party to the adventure. He and the rest of the Casa Terragena household were in Italy and had to go on living in Italy under a Fascist government. She was, the fact came up to her quite startlingly, doing something against the government under which she was living. For the first time in her life, the powers of social order and control would not be on her side.
The way of the lady, born safe and invincibly assured, would not do here. She who had always been quietly and surely respected and authoritative!
And if Casa Terragena was caught out at so directly an anti-Fascist exploit as this, what would be its worth to the Rylands family for the next few years?
Startling to think that the proper course before her, consistent with all the rest of her life, consistent with the lives of all the respectable people in the world, would be to go in and go to bed and just leave that frightened man in the hole to his fate, his probably highly disagreeable fate.
This thing was no mere adventure. It was a challenge, the supreme challenge of her life. She must risk herself, risk her home, risk failure and humiliating discovery. If she saved or did her utmost to save this man, she broke with limitations that had restricted and protected all her life thus far.
She clenched her hands together very tightly, for her fibre was nervous timid stuff. Then for an instant, one brief instant, her sense of her God who had been so near a quarter of an hour ago, returned to her. Wordlessly, in a breathing moment she prayed. She stepped across the boundary and transcended State and government.
“We must save that man,” she said.
No moral doubts about Mrs. McManus. “I’m thinking how. It’s no light matter, M’am.”
Mrs. Rylands stood up, with her heart beating fast and her head quite clear. She looked towards the house.
“I don’t think they will come back by this path. They believed us that there is no one this way. They will take the way by the lily pond to the bridge across the gorge. They are sure to go west in order to block the escape to the French frontier. They will scatter up and down the rocks and spend the night there. I hope none of them catch cold. I think they have started already. I heard — something. Listen. Look up there; that’s a flashlight. Along the path above us. Bombaccio is showing them — or one of the men. Very well. Now ——”
She weighed her words. “There is only one place to put him where he will be safe from gardeners, servants, everyone. Except perhaps Frant. . . . Mr. Philip’s bedroom. Locked up — next to my little sitting-room. We can turn the key on the service stairs.”
“We could do that.”
“It is all we can do.”
“But to get him there!”
“If he could walk in — in your hood and cloak. That cloak of yours with a hood. We can get the men out of the way. Listen. I am going to be very, very, very frightened. Hysterical. You are afraid for me. Very well, you go in and get Bombaccio to bring brandy here. He’ll want brandy badly enough. Brandy and one glass; no tray. Take it off the tray and bring it yourself. And get your cloak and bring wraps for me. Oh! — and bring a pair of your shoes and stockings among the wraps. What? Yes — for him. I will be sitting here, terrified. ‘Take those men away!’ I shall repeat over and over. I shall be in terror at the idea of more people coming into the gardens from above. I shall be dreadfully shaken. You won’t answer for the consequences if I see another strange man. . . . Will Bombaccio believe that?”
“Men will believe anything of that sort,” said Mrs. McManus.
“Suppose he hangs about — sympathetically.”
“No man ever yet hung about an ailing woman if he had any chance or excuse of getting away from her.”
“Insist that he goes up to stop people at the gates and takes the men-servants with him. You cannot bear to think of his going alone and — unless I’m mistaken in him, he won’t bear to think of his going alone.”
“He shall take them.”
“Have as many lights as possible put out. Say they upset me. Tell the women not to be frightened on any account. Then they will be. It’s just one very, very desperate man, tell them. Tell them to keep together and keep to their own quarters. Then when it’s all clear he puts on your shoes and stockings and cloak and we just walk into the house and up to my room.”
“If you’d been in the Civil War in Ireland, you couldn’t have made a better plan,” said Mrs. McManus.
“There’s Frant? She’ll be sitting up for me. She’s the weak point.”
“That maid of yours can hold her tongue,” said Mrs. McManus, “I’ve got great confidence in her. I’ve heard Bombaccio trying to get things out of her. I’ll just drop her a hint not to be surprised at anything she sees and keep mum. Maybe she’ll have to be told about it. Later. But she’s English and keeps herself to herself. You can risk Miss Frant.”
“And Miss Fenimore?”
“She’ll be in bed perhaps. Or maybe botanising.” Mrs. McManus reflected. “We’ll have to take the chances of that Miss Fenimore.”
“The rest of it will work?”
“Please God.”
The two women peered at each other in the darkness.
It was alarming but exciting. They felt a great friendship for each other. “If you could look a bit dishevelled and sickish,” said Mrs. McManus. “Instead of looking all braced up like a little fighting cock.”
She reflected. “And when he’s in that room ——? But one thing at a time.”
She departed towards the house almost jauntily. Mrs. Rylands, tingling not unpleasantly, returned to her seat. Seven years perhaps in a Fascist prison. But that would make a stir in England. The government of course was much too hand-in-glove with Mussolini to insist on her liberation. And yet Rylands stood for something in England. . . . Why think of such things?
There was a faint rustling and a painful grunting.
“Have they gone?” came a voice out of the blackness behind her.
She answered in a loud whisper: “Not yet. Have patience. We are going to hide you in the house.”
Then she stood up and bent down towards the unseen refugee. “You prefer to speak English or French?” she asked and began to sketch out his part in her plan in French. But he insisted on English. “In America five years,” he said. He asked various questions. “I shall sleep in a bed,” he noted with marked satisfaction. “I have not slept in a bed for four nights. Possibly I may wash and shave? Yes?”
The plan worked. Presently came the brandy and Mrs. McManus. Much hurrying movement and quick whispers. He had to have his shoes and stockings put on him like a baby. But the brandy heartened him.
There were heart stopping moments. As Mrs. Rylands turned the corner of the landing with her cloaked and hooded refugee beside her and holding to her arm, Miss Fenimore came out of the little downstairs sitting-room with a book in her hand. “Going to bed?” said Miss Fenimore, yawning. “Good ni!”
“Good night, dear,” said Mrs. Rylands and pushed her companion on.
“Good night, Mrs. McManus,” cried Miss Fenimore.
“Put the sitting-room lights out, dear,” said Mrs. Rylands instantly, with great presence of mind. And then as Signor Vinciguerra stumbled up the next flight of steps she whispered: “The door to the left and we are safe!”
Frant was in the ante-room immersed in a book and didn’t even look up as they passed across it.
Mrs. McManus too had her disconcerting moment. Following discreetly, she discovered Miss Fenimore, just too late, in the sitting-room entrance. “I never did!” cried Miss Fenimore. “Why! I said good night to you on the staircase just a moment ago?”
“There’s no harm in saying it again,” said Mrs. McManus.
“But you went upstairs?”
“And came down again.”
“It’s not half a minute.”
“I’m that quick,” said Mrs. McManus, and left her still wondering.
“It’s like second sight or having one of those doppelgangers,” said Miss Fenimore. “I just went into the sitting-room to switch off the light. I hardly did more than turn round. Hasn’t there been some sort of trouble in the garden?”
“I heard a noise. Shouting and running it was,” said Mrs. McManus. “We’ll have to ask Bombaccio to-morrow. Good night to you,” and she disappeared above the landing.
Alone with her God so to speak, Mrs. McManus made a hideous grimace at the invisible Miss Fenimore.
She found Mrs. Rylands in her husband’s room, having her hands kissed effusively by a weeping dishevelled middle-aged man with a four days’ beard. He had discarded the nurse’s cloak and her much too tight shoes, but he still wore her stockings pulled over the ends of his trousers so that up to the waist he looked like a brigand and above that, a tramp. “Brave and kind,” he sobbed over and over again. “I was at my ooltimate garsp.” Mrs. McManus became aware that Frant had followed from the ante-room attracted by the rich sounds of the kissing and praise. “Miss Frant,” said Mrs. McManus closing the door on her, “We’ll have to trouble you with a secret. Look at him there! A great political senator he was, and see what they have made of him! A friend of Mr. Rylands. He was being hunted to his death by them Black Shirts and we’ve got to hide him from them. None of the servants must know. They aren’t safe, not a single one of them. They may be Black Shirts themselves for all we know. We’ll have to hide him and get him out of this country somehow or Murder it will be.”
Frant’s thin face expressed understanding and solicitude. She was a white-faced, wisp-haired woman with much potential excitement in her small bright blue eyes. “Have you locked the valet’s door beyond the bathroom?” she asked pallidly aglow. “I’ll see nobody comes in from the passage.”
One might have imagined that the rescue of fugitives was a part of her normal duties.
Mrs. McManus skilfully but tactfully disengaged Mrs. Rylands’ hands from the gratitude of Signer Vinciguerra. “The great thing here is Silence,” she whispered, shaking him kindly but impressively. “There’s Fascists maybe in the rooms above and Fascists maybe downstairs and they’re almost certain to be listening outside the window. If you’ll just sit down in that chair and collect yourself quietly I’ll give you some biscuits and a trifle more brandy.”
Signor Vinciguerra was wax in her hands.
Mrs. Rylands, disembarrassed, was free to make a general survey of the situation. She put two towels in the bathroom and found Philip’s shaving things and a sponge. From the wardrobe she got a dressing-gown and in the chest of drawers were pyjamas. The man seemed to be famished. Miss Frant could get some sandwiches without remark. Or bovril. Bovril would be better. Unless Signor Vinciguerra made too much noise or talked too loudly in his sleep he could with reasonable luck be safe here for some days. Philip’s room opened into the little sitting-room that gave on the balcony and into which her own bedroom opened on the other side. No one was likely to go into it. Signor Vinciguerra could lock himself in and answer only to an agreed-on tap. She could profess to be ill until definite action was called for and Miss Frant could make up a bed for Mrs. McManus on the couch in the ante-room, barring all intrusion of the maids. Food could be brought up; not much but sufficient to keep the good man going. And so having provided for the temporary security of Signor Vinciguerra the next problem was how to get rid of him.
He was left to his toilet in Philip’s apartment. Miss Frant, after a whispered consultation with Mrs. McManus in the ante-chamber, went downstairs to order and wait for a large cup of bovril and toast and learn how things in general were going on. Mrs. Rylands drifted to the balcony and discovered the old moon creeping up the sky above the eastward promontory, picking out the palm fronds and patterning the darkness of the garden.
Extraordinary! It was long past her customary bedtime and everything was most improper for a woman in her condition, and yet instead of feeling distressed, fatigued and dismayed, she was elated. It was, to be frank with herself, a great lark. It would be something to tell Philip. It was still extremely dangerous and it might become at any time horrible and tragic, but it no longer appeared a monstrous and unnatural experience. She believed that on the whole she was likely to succeed in this adventure. Things so far had gone amazingly well. If one kept one’s head they might still go well. The frontier was not half an hour’s walk away. Being outside the law, fighting the established system of things, was after all nothing so very overwhelming.
Problem: to get him away.
That was going to be an anxious business.
There in sight were the lights of Mentone, France, freedom and security. The real Civilisation. And against that a dark headland, the edge of captive Italy. Where to-night the Fascists would be watching. Where always perhaps there were watchers, now that Italy was a prison.
Such a very middle-aged man he was!
In romances and plays a fugitive was at least able to run. Most fugitives in fiction were high-grade amateur runners. One thought of a young handsome white face, with a streak of hair across it and perhaps blood, a white shirt torn open — a tenor part. If only this were so now, one might give him a rest, smuggle him down to the beach to-morrow night and set him off to swim across that dark crescent of water, to sanctuary. What could it be altogether? Four miles? Five miles? Or put him in the bathing boat. But that might be difficult. At times there were searchlights. Odd there were none just now! Perhaps that put swimming or a boat out of court even for heroes. A really good swimmer might dive as the light swept by. Or one could have packed him off up the gorge to clamber into the hills and escape by precipitous leaping and climbing. But for that a Douglas Fairbanks would be needed. Her mind struggled against an overbearing gravitation towards the prosaic conclusion, that the most suitable role for Signor Vinciguerra would be that of a monthly nurse, into which he had fallen already. In that guise she could see herself taking him across the frontier with the utmost ease in the well-known and trusted Terragena car, and she could imagine no other way that was not preposterously impracticable.
It seemed incredibly late, later than any night had ever been before; but Mrs. Rylands was in no mood for sleep. She sat in her little sitting-room, dimly lit by one shaded light, and listened to the rambling astonishing talk of Signor Vinciguerra. He had bathed himself and washed and shaved and emerged to efface the first impression he had made of something worn out, physically over-fed and under-trained and mentally abased. In Philip’s pyjamas, slippers and dressing-gown, he looked now a quite intelligent and credible Italian gentleman. He consumed his bovril and toast with restrained eagerness. He talked English with a sort of fluent looseness and the only faults in his manners were a slight excess of politeness and an understandable jumpiness.
Mrs. McManus sat in a corner of the room, almost swallowed up in shadow, and she took only a small share in the conversation. At any time she might pounce and dismiss the talkers to their slumbers. Frant, after much useful reconnoitring, had gone to bed. Bombaccio and his minions had come back to the house, not too excessively excited, and gone to bed also, quite unsuspiciously. The Fascists it seemed had put a cordon round the garden and purposed to beat its thickets by daylight. Apparently they had an idea that in the morning Vinciguerra might either be caught exhausted or found dead within its walls. Mrs. Rylands determined to mobilise all her garden staff to make a fuss at the least signs of trampling or beating down her plants and flowers, while she herself telephoned complaints to the Ventimiglia police. It would look better to make a fuss than remain suspiciously meek under their invasion.
The respited quarry of the Fascists talked in weary undertones.
“To an Englishwoman it must be incredible. A man hunted like a beast! And for why? The simplest criticisms. Italy has embarked upon a course that can have only one end, National tragedy. Twice I have been beaten. Once in Rome in full daylight in the Piazza della Colonna. Once in the little town where formerly I was mayor. Left on the ground. I was carried home. Then my house watched by sentinels, day and night. Followed whenever I went abroad. It became intolerable. I could not breathe.”
He shook his head. “I fled.”
For some moments he stared in silence at his memories.
“Imagine! Your Bertrand Russell. Or your George Trevelyan, that fearless friend of Italy and Freedom. Men of that sort. Chased and beaten. Because they will not flatter. Because they will not bow down. To a charlatan!”
He said the last word in a whisper and glanced about him as he said it. He grimaced his loathing.
“We were in Civilisation. We were in a free country. And suddenly this night fell upon us. Truly — I learnt it in English at school — the price of freedom is eternal vigilance!
“This whole country is one great prison. A prison with punishments and tortures. For everyone who thinks. For everyone who speaks out. I made no plots. I went out of politics after the election of 1924. But I wrote and said Italy becomes over-populous. She must restrain her population or make war and war will be her destruction. I persisted that these facts should be kept before the Italian mind. . . . That was enough.
“Italy perhaps has never advanced since the Risorgimento. She seemed to do so after her unification, but possibly she did not. Only you Anglo-Saxons have won your way to real freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of speech and proposal. Slowly, by centuries, surely, you have won it. Perhaps the French too. Germany I doubt. You have your great public men, respected, influential, no matter the government. Your Shaw, your Gilbert Murray, your Sempack; Americans like Nicholas Murray Butler, Upton Sinclair, Arthur Brisbane. Free to speak plainly. Bold as lions. Free — above the State. But in Italy — that actor, that destroyer, that cannibal silences us all! Performs his follies. Puts us all to indignities and vile submissions. I can’t tell you the half of things submitted. The shame of it! For Italy! The shame for every soul in Italy!
“I am a comfortable man. Not everything in my life has been well. I have been used to the life — eh, the life of a man of the world. Prosperity. Indulgence perhaps. But I had rather be this hunted thing I am than any man who keeps his peace with State and Vatican and lives now in Rome prospering. Yes — even here. In danger. Wounded and Dead perhaps, dear Madam, if it were not for you.”
His voice died away.
“But is there no movement for freedom in Italy?” asked Mrs. Rylands.
“We took freedom for granted. We took progress and justice for granted. We did not organise for freedom and progress then, and now we cannot. No. All things in life, good things or bad things, rest on strength. Strength and opportunity. If you have things that you desire it is because you willed well enough to have it so. There was no liberal will in Italy but only scattered self-seeking men. Politicians were divided. Intellectual men, not very cordial, not banded together, not ready to die for freedom, one for all and all for one. Rather pleased to see a rival put down. No sense of a danger in common. When I was young and read your Herbert Spencer and your liberal thinkers and writers I said the great time, the great civilisation, will come of itself. Nothing comes of itself except weeds and confusion. We did not reckon with the hatred of dull people for things that are great and fair. We did not realise the strength of stupidity to call a halt to every hope we held. We thought there were no powers of darkness left. And now —— Now —— . . . Progress has been taken unawares! Progress has been waylaid and murdered.
“But at least the freedom and progress of the English-speaking world is safe. Italy will not always be as she is now.”
“Nothing is safe in life. Now I know. What has happened in Italy may happen all over the world. The malignant, the haters of new things and fine things, the morally limited, the violent and intense, the men who work the State against us, are everywhere. Why did we not see it? Man civilises slowly, slowly. Eternal vigilance is the price of civilisation.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Rylands, “I begin to see — things I never suspected before, about me and supporting me. One may trust to servants and policemen — and custom. And live in a dream.”
Signor Vinciguerra assented by a gesture.
Came a pause.
The little travelling clock upon the table pinged one single stroke and Mrs. McManus stirred. “One o’clock in the morning!” said Mrs. McManus, and rose masterfully. “You’ll be wanting your rest, Signor Vinciguerra. There is much to be done yet before you are safe in France.”