Looking back on that second afternoon in Richmond Park, Dinny never knew whether she had betrayed herself before he said so abruptly:
“If you believe in it, Dinny, will you marry me?”
It had so taken her breath away that she sat growing paler and paler, then colour came to her face with a rush.
“I’m wondering why you ask me. You know nothing of me.”
“You’re like the East. One loves it at first sight, or not at all, and one never knows it any better.”
Dinny shook her head: “Oh! I am not mysterious.”
“I should never get to the end of you; no more than of one of those figures over the staircase in the Louvre. Please answer me, Dinny.”
She put her hand in his, nodded, and said: “That must be a record.”
At once his lips were on hers, and when they left her lips she fainted.
This was without exception the most singular action of her life so far, and, coming to almost at once, she said so.
“It’s the sweetest thing you could have done.”
If she had thought his face strange before, what was it now? The lips, generally contemptuous, were parted and quivering, the eyes, fixed on her, glowed; he put up his hand and thrust back his hair, so that she noticed for the first time a scar at the top of his forehead. Sun, moon, stars, and all the works of God stood still while they were looking each into the other’s face.
At last she said:
“The whole thing is most irregular. There’s been no courtship; not even a seduction.”
He laughed and put his arm around her. Dinny whispered:
“‘Thus the two young people sat wrapped in their beatitude.’ My poor mother!”
“Is she a nice woman?”
“A darling. Luckily she’s fond of father.”
“What is your father like?”
“The nicest General I know.”
“Mine is a hermit. You won’t have to realise him. My brother is an ass. My mother ran away when I was three, and I have no sisters. It’s going to be hard for you, with a nomadic, unsatisfactory brute like me.”
“‘Where thou goest, I go.’ We seem to be visible to that old gentleman over there. He’ll write to the papers about the awful sights to be seen in Richmond Park.”
“Never mind!”
“I don’t. There’s only one first hour. And I was beginning to think I should never have it.”
“Never been in love?”
She shook her head.
“How wonderful! When shall it be, Dinny?”
“Don’t you think our families ought first to know?”
“I suppose so. They won’t want you to marry me.”
“Certainly you are my social superior, young sir.”
“One can’t be superior to a family that goes back to the twelfth century. We only go back to the fourteenth. A wanderer and a writer of bitter verse. They’ll know I shall want to cart you off to the East. Besides, I only have fifteen hundred a year, and practically no expectations.”
“Fifteen hundred a year! Father may be able to spare me two — he’s doing it for Clare.”
“Well, thank God there’ll be no obstacle from your fortune.”
Dinny turned to him, and there was a touching confidence in her eyes.
“Wilfrid, I heard something about your having turned Moslem. That wouldn’t matter to me.”
“It would matter to them.”
His face had become drawn and dark. She clasped his hand tight in both of hers.
“Was that poem ‘The Leopard’ about yourself?”
He tried to draw his hand away.
“Was it?”
“Yes. Out in Darfur. Fanatical Arabs. I recanted to save my skin. Now you can chuck me.” Exerting all her strength, Dinny pulled his hand to her heart.
“What you did or didn’t do is nothing. You are YOU!” To her dismay and yet relief, he fell on his knees and buried his face in her lap.
“Darling!” she said. Protective tenderness almost annulled the wilder, sweeter feeling in her.
“Does anyone know of that but me?”
“It’s known in the bazaars that I’ve turned Moslem, but it’s supposed of my free will.”
“I know there are things you would die for, Wilfrid, and that’s enough. Kiss me!”
The afternoon drew on while they sat there. The shadows of the oak trees splayed up to their log; the crisp edge of the sunlight receded over the young fern: some deer passed, moving slowly towards water. The sky, of a clear bright blue, with white promising clouds, began to have the evening look; a sappy scent of fern fronds and horse chestnut bloom crept in slow whiffs; and dew began to fall. The sane and heavy air, the grass so green, the blue distance, the branching, ungraceful solidity of the oak trees, made a trysting hour as English as lovers ever loved in.
“I shall break into cockney if we sit here much longer,” said Dinny, at last; “besides, dear heart, ‘fast falls the dewy eve.’” . . .
Late that evening in the drawing-room at Mount Street her aunt said suddenly:
“Lawrence, look at Dinny! Dinny, you’re in love.”
“You take me flat aback, Aunt Em. I am.”
“Who is it?”
“Wilfrid Desert.”
“I used to tell Michael that young man would get into trouble. Does he love you too?”
“He is good enough to say so.”
“Oh! dear. I WILL have some lemonade. Which of you proposed?”
“As a fact, he did.”
“His brother has no issue, they say.”
“For heaven’s sake, Aunt Em!”
“Why not? Kiss me!”
But Dinny was regarding her uncle across her aunt’s shoulder.
He had said nothing.
Later, he stopped her as she was following out.
“Are your eyes open, Dinny?”
“Yes, this is the ninth day.”
“I won’t come the heavy uncle; but you know the drawbacks?”
“His religion; Fleur; the East? What else?”
Sir Lawrence shrugged his thin shoulders.
“That business with Fleur sticks in my gizzard, as old Forsyte would have said. One who could do that to the man he has led to the altar can’t have much sense of loyalty.”
Colour rose in her cheeks.
“Don’t be angry, my dear, we’re all too fond of you.”
“He’s been quite frank about everything, Uncle.”
Sir Lawrence sighed.
“Then there’s no more to be said, I suppose. But I beg you to look forward before it’s irrevocable. There’s a species of china which it’s almost impossible to mend. And I think you’re made of it.”
Dinny smiled and went up to her room, and instantly she began to look back.
The difficulty of imagining the physical intoxication of love was gone. To open one’s soul to another seemed no longer impossible. Love stories she had read, love affairs she had watched, all seemed savourless compared with her own. And she had only known him nine days, except for that glimpse ten years ago! Had she had what was called a complex all this time? Or was love always sudden like this? A wild flower seeding on a wild wind?
Long she sat half dressed, her hands clasped between her knees, her head drooping, steeped in the narcotic of remembrance, and with a strange feeling that all the lovers in the world were sitting within her on that bed bought at Pullbred’s in the Tottenham Court Road.
Condaford resented this business of love, and was, with a fine rain, as if sorrowing for the loss of its two daughters.
Dinny found her father and mother elaborately ‘making no bones’ over the loss of Clare, and only hoped they would continue the motion in her own case. Feeling, as she said, ‘very towny,’ she prepared for the ordeal of disclosure by waterproofing herself and going for a tramp. Hubert and Jean were expected in time for dinner, and she wished to kill all her birds with one stone. The rain on her face, the sappy fragrance, the call of the cuckoos, and that state of tree when each has leaves in different stage of opening, freshened her body but brought a little ache to her heart. Entering a covert, she walked along a ride. The trees were beech and ash, with here and there an English yew, the soil being chalky. A woodpecker’s constant tap was the only sound, for the rain was not yet heavy enough for leaf-dripping to have started. Since babyhood she had been abroad but three times — to Italy, to Paris, to the Pyrenees, and had always come home more in love with England and Condaford than ever. Henceforth her path would lie she knew not where; there would, no doubt, be sand, fig-trees, figures by wells, flat roofs, voices calling the Muezzin, eyes looking through veils. But surely Wilfrid would feel the charm of Condaford and not mind if they spent time there now and then. His father lived in a show place, half shut up and never shown, which gave everyone the blues. And that, apart from London and Eton, was all he seemed to know of England, for he had been four years away in the war and eight years away in the East.
‘For me to discover England to him,’ she thought; ‘for him to discover the East to me.’
A gale of last November had brought down some beech trees. Looking at their wide flat roots exposed, Dinny remembered Fleur saying that selling timber was the only way to meet death duties. But Dad was only sixty-two! Jean’s cheeks the night of their arrival, when Aunt Em quoted the ‘multiply exceedingly.’ A child coming! Surely a son. Jean was the sort to have sons. Another generation of Cherrells in direct line! If Wilfrid and she had a child! What then? One could not wander about with babes. A tremor of insecurity went through her. The future, how uncharted! A squirrel crossed close to her still figure and scampered up a trunk. Smiling, she watched it, lithe, red, bushy-tailed. Thank God, Wilfrid cared for animals! ‘When to God’s fondouk the donkeys are taken.’ Condaford, its bird life, woods and streams, mullions, magnolias, fantails, pastures green, surely he would like it! But her father and mother, Hubert and Jean; would he like them? Would they like him? They would not — too unshackled, too fitful, and too bitter; all that was best in him he hid away, as if ashamed of it; and his yearning for beauty they would not understand! And his change of religion, even though they would not know what he had told her, would seem to them strange and disconcerting!
Condaford Grange had neither butler nor electric light, and Dinny chose the moment when the maids had set decanters and dessert on the polished chestnut wood, lit by candles.
“Sorry to be personal,” she said, quite suddenly; “but I’m engaged.”
No one answered. Each of those four was accustomed to say and think — not always the same thing — that Dinny was the ideal person to marry, so none was happier for the thought that she was going to be married. Then Jean said:
“To whom, Dinny?”
“Wilfrid Desert, the second son of Lord Mullyon — he was Michael’s best man.”
“Oh! but —!”
Dinny was looking hard at the other three. Her father’s face was impassive, as was natural, for he did not know the young man from Adam; her mother’s gentle features wore a fluttered and enquiring look; Hubert’s an air as if he were biting back vexation.
Then Lady Cherrell said: “But, Dinny, when did you meet him?”
“Only ten days ago, but I’ve seen him every day since. I’m afraid it’s a first-sight case like yours, Hubert. We remembered each other from Michael’s wedding.”
Hubert looked at his plate. “You know he’s become a Moslem, or so they say in Khartoum.”
Dinny nodded.
“What!” said the General.
“That’s the story, sir.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen him. He’s been a lot about in the East.”
On the point of saying: ‘One might just as well be Moslem as Christian, if one’s not a believer,’ Dinny stopped. It was scarcely a testimonial to character.
“I can’t understand a man changing his religion,” said the General bluntly.
“There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm,” murmured Dinny.
“My dear, how can there be when we don’t know him?”
“No, of course, Mother. May I ask him down? He CAN support a wife; and Aunt Em says his brother has no issue.”
“Dinny!” said the General.
“I’m not serious, darling.”
“What is serious,” said Hubert, “is that he seems to be a sort of Bedouin — always wandering about.”
“Two can wander about, Hubert.”
“You’ve always said you hate to be away from Condaford.”
“I remember when you said you couldn’t see anything in marriage, Hubert. And I’m sure both you and Father said that at one time, Mother. Have any of you said it since?”
“Cat!”
With that simple word Jean closed the scene.
But at bedtime in her mother’s room, Dinny said:
“May I ask Wilfrid down, then?”
“Of course, when you like. We shall be only too anxious to see him.”
“I know it’s a shock, Mother, coming so soon after Clare; still, you did expect me to go some time.”
Lady Cherrell sighed: “I suppose so.”
“I forgot to say that he’s a poet, a real one.”
“A poet?” repeated her mother, as if this had put the finishing touch to her disquiet.
“There are quite a lot in Westminster Abbey. But don’t worry, HE’LL never be there.”
“Difference in religion is serious, Dinny, especially when it comes to children.”
“Why, Mother? No child has any religion worth speaking of till it’s grown up, and then it can choose for itself. Besides, by the time my children, if I have any, are grown up, the question will be academic.”
“Dinny!”
“It’s nearly so even now, except in ultra-religious circles. Ordinary people’s religion becomes more and more just ethical.”
“I don’t know enough about it to say, and I don’t think you do.”
“Mother, dear, stroke my head.”
“Oh! Dinny, I do hope you’ve chosen wisely.”
“Darling, it chose me.”
That she perceived was not the way to reassure her mother, but as she did not know one, she took her good-night kiss and went away.
In her room she sat down and wrote:
“Condaford Grange: Friday.
“DARLING,
“This is positively and absolutely my first love-letter, so you see I don’t know how to express myself. I think I will just say ‘I love you’ and leave it at that. I have spread the good tidings. They have, of course, left everyone guessing, and anxious to see you as soon as possible. When will you come? Once you are here the whole thing will seem to me less like a very real and very lovely dream. This is quite a simple place. Whether we should live in style if we could, I can’t say. But three maids, a groom-chauffeur, and two gardeners are all our staff. I believe you will like my mother, and I don’t believe you will get on very well with my father or brother, though I expect his wife Jean will tickle your poetic fancy, she’s such a vivid creature. Condaford itself I’m sure you’ll love. It has the real ‘old’ feeling. We can go riding; and I want to walk and talk with you and show you my pet nooks and corners. I hope the sun will shine, as you love it so much. For me almost any sort of day does down here; and absolutely any will do if I can be with you. The room you will have is away by itself and supernaturally quiet; you go up to it by five twisty steps, and it’s called the priest’s room, because Anthony Charwell, brother of the Gilbert who owned Condaford under Elizabeth, was walled up there and fed from a basket let down nightly to his window. He was a conspicuous Catholic priest, and Gilbert was a Protestant, but he put his brother first, as any decent body would. When he’d been there three months they took the wall down one night, and got him across country all the way south to the Beaulieu river and ‘aboard the lugger.’ The wall was put up again to save appearances and only done away with by my great-grandfather, who was the last of us to have any money to speak of. It seemed to prey on his nerves, so he got rid of it. They still speak of him in the village, probably because he drove four-inhand. There’s a bath-room at the bottom of the twisty steps. The window was enlarged, of course and the view’s jolly from it, especially now, at lilac and apple-blossom time. My own room, if it interests you to know, is somewhat cloistral and narrow, but it looks straight over the lawns to the hill-rise and the woods beyond. I’ve had it ever since I was seven, and I wouldn’t change for anything, until you’re making me
‘brooches and toys for my delight
Of birds’ song at morning and starshine at night.’
I almost think that little ‘Stevenson’ is my favourite poem; so you see, in spite of my homing tendency, I must have a streak of the wanderer in me. Dad, by the way, has a great feeling for Nature, likes beasts and birds and trees. I think most soldiers do — it’s rather odd. But, of course, their love is on the precise and knowledgeable rather than the aesthetic side. Any dreaminess they incline to look on as ‘a bit barmy.’ I have been wondering whether to put my copies of your poems under their noses. On the whole I don’t think; they might take you too seriously. There is always something about a person more ingratiating than his writings. I don’t expect to sleep much to-night, for this is the first day that I haven’t seen you since the world began. Goodnight, my dear, be blessed and take my kiss.
“Your Dinny.
“P.S.— I have looked you out the photo where I approximate most to the angels, or rather where my nose turns up least — to send tomorrow. In the meantime here are two snaps. And when, sir, do I get some of you?
“D.”
And that was the end of this to her far from perfect day.
Sir Lawrence Mont, recently elected to Burton’s Club whereon he had resigned from the Aeroplane, retaining besides only ‘Snooks’ (so-called), The Coffee House and the Parthen?um, was accustomed to remark that, allowing himself another ten years of life, it would cost him twelve shillings and sixpence every time he went into any of them.
He entered Burton’s, however, on the afternoon after Dinny had told him of her engagement, took up a list of the members, and turned to D. ‘Hon. Wilfrid Desert.’ Quite natural, seeing the Club’s pretension to the monopoly of travellers. “Does Mr. Desert ever come in here?” he said to the porter.
“Yes, Sir Lawrence, he’s been in this last week; before that I don’t remember him for years.”
“Usually abroad. When does he come in as a rule?”
“For dinner, mostly, Sir Lawrence.”
“I see. Is Mr. Muskham in?”
The porter shook his head. “Newmarket today, Sir Lawrence.”
“Oh! Ah! How on earth you remember everything!”
“Matter of ‘abit, Sir Lawrence.”
“Wish I had it.” Hanging up his hat, he stood for a moment before the tape in the hall. Unemployment and taxation going up all the time, and more money to spend on cars and sports than ever. A pretty little problem! He then sought the Library as the room where he was least likely to see anybody; and the first body he saw was that of Jack Muskham, who was talking, in a voice hushed to the level of the locality, to a thin dark little man in a corner.
‘That,’ thought Sir Lawrence, cryptically, ‘explains to me why I never find a lost collar-stud. My friend the porter was so certain Jack would be at Newmarket, and not under that chest of drawers, that he took him for someone else when he came in.’
Reaching down a volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights, he rang for tea. He was attending to neither when the two in the corner rose and came up to him.
“Don’t get up, Lawrence,” said Jack Muskham with some languor; “Telfourd Yule, my cousin Sir Lawrence Mont.”
“I’ve read thrillers of yours, Mr. Yule,” said Sir Lawrence, and thought: ‘Queer-looking little cuss!’
The thin, dark, smallish man, with a face rather like a monkey’s, grinned. “Truth whips fiction out of the field,” he said.
“Yule,” said Jack Muskham, with his air of superiority to space and time, “has been out in Arabia, going into the question of how to corkscrew a really pure-strain Arab mare or two out of them for use here. It’s always baffled us, you know. Stallions, yes; mares never. It’s much the same now in Nejd as when Palgrave wrote. Still, we think we’ve got a rise. The owner of the best strain wants an aeroplane, and if we throw in a billiard table we believe he’ll part with at least one daughter of the sun.”
“Good God!” said Sir Lawrence. “By what base means? We’re all Jesuits, Jack!”
“Yule has seen some queer things out there. By the way, there’s one I want to talk about. May we sit down?”
He stretched his long body out in a long chair, and the dark little man perched himself on another, with his black twinkling eyes fixed on Sir Lawrence, who had come to uneasy attention without knowing why.
“When,” said Jack Muskham, “Yule here was in the Arabian desert, he heard a vague yarn among some Bedouins about an Englishman having been held up somewhere by Arabs and forced to become a Moslem. He had rather a row with them, saying no Englishman would do that. But when he was back in Egypt he went flying into the Libyan desert, met another lot of Bedouins coming from the south, and came on precisely the same yarn, only more detailed, because they said it happened in Darfur, and they even had the man’s name — Desert. Then, when he was up in Khartoum, Yule found it was common talk that young Desert had changed his religion. Naturally he put two and two together. But there’s all the difference in the world, of course, between voluntarily swapping religions and doing it at the pistol’s point. An Englishman who does that lets down the lot of us.”
Sir Lawrence, who during this recital had tried every motion for his monocle with which he was acquainted, dropped it and said: “But, my dear Jack, if a man is rash enough to become a Mohammedan in a Mohammedan country, do you suppose for a minute that gossip won’t say he was forced to?”
Yule, who had wriggled on to the very verge of his chair, said:
“I thought that; but the second account was extremely positive. Even to the month and the name of the Sheikh who forced the recantation; and I found that Mr. Desert had in fact returned from Darfur soon after the month mentioned. There may be nothing in it; but whether there is or not, I needn’t tell you that an undenied story of that kind grows by telling and does a lot of harm, not only to the man himself, but to our prestige. There seems to me a sort of obligation on one to let Mr. Desert know what the Bedawi are spreading about him.”
“Well, he’s over here,” said Sir Lawrence, gravely.
“I know,” said Jack Muskham, “I saw him the other day, and he’s a member of this Club.”
Through Sir Lawrence were passing waves of infinite dismay. What a sequel to Dinny’s ill-starred announcement! To his ironic, detached personality, capricious in its likings, Dinny was precious. She embroidered in a queer way his plain-washed feelings about women; as a young man he might even have been in love with her, instead of being merely her uncle by marriage. During this silence he was fully conscious that both the other two were thoroughly uncomfortable. And the knowledge of their disquiet deepened the significance of the matter in an odd way.
At last he said: “Desert was my boy’s best man. I’d like to talk to Michael about it, Jack. Mr. Yule will say nothing further at present, I hope.”
“Not on your life,” said Yule. “I hope to God there’s nothing in it. I like his verse.”
“And you, Jack?”
“I don’t care for the look of him; but I’d refuse to believe that of an Englishman till it was plainer than the nose on my face, which is saying a good bit. You and I must be getting on, Yule, if we’re to catch that train to Royston.”
This speech of Jack Muskham’s further disturbed Sir Lawrence, left alone in his chair. It seemed so entirely to preclude leniency of judgment among the ‘pukka sahibs’ if the worst were true.
At last he rose, found a small volume, sat down again and turned its pages. The volume was Sir Alfred Lyall’s Verses Written in India, and he looked for the poem called ‘Theology in Extremis.’
He read it through, restored the volume, and stood rubbing his chin. Written, of course, more than forty years ago, and yet doubtful if its sentiments were changed by an iota! There was that poem, too, by Doyle, about the Corporal in the Buffs who, brought before a Chinese General and told to ‘kow-tow’ or die, said: ‘We don’t do that sort of thing in the Buffs,’ and died. Well! That was the standard even today, among people of any caste or with any tradition. The war had thrown up innumerable instances. Could young Desert really have betrayed the tradition? It seemed improbable. And yet, in spite of his excellent war record, might there be a streak of yellow in him? Or was it, rather, that at times a flow of revolting bitterness carried him on to complete cynicism, so that he flouted almost for the joy of flouting?
With a strong mental effort Sir Lawrence tried to place himself in a like dilemma. Not being a believer, his success was limited to the thought: ‘I should immensely dislike being dictated to in such a matter.’ Aware that this was inadequate, he went down to the hall, shut himself up in a box, and rang up Michael’s house. Then, feeling that if he lingered in the Club he might run into Desert himself, he took a cab to South Square.
Michael had just come in from the House; they met in the hall; and, with the instinct that Fleur, however acute, was not a fit person to share this particular consultation, Sir Lawrence demanded to be taken to his son’s study. He commenced by announcing Dinny’s engagement, which Michael heard with as strange a mixture of gratification and disquietude as could be seen on human visage.
“What a little cat, keeping it so dark!” he said. “Fleur did say something about her being too limpid just now; but I never thought! One’s got so used to Dinny being single. To Wilfrid, too? Well, I hope the old son has exhausted the East.”
“There’s this question of his religion,” said Sir Lawrence gravely.
“I don’t know why that should matter much; Dinny’s not fervent. But I never thought Wilfrid cared enough to change his. It rather staggered me.”
“There’s a story.”
When his father had finished, Michael’s ears stood out and his face looked haggard.
“You know him better than anyone,” Sir Lawrence concluded: “What do you think?”
“I hate to say it, but it might be true. It might even be natural for HIM; but no one would ever understand why. This is pretty ghastly, Dad, with Dinny involved.”
“Before we fash ourselves, my dear, we must find out if it’s true. Could you go to him?”
“In old days — easily.”
Sir Lawrence nodded. “Yes, I know all about that, but it’s a long time ago.”
Michael smiled faintly. “I never knew whether you spotted that, but I rather thought so. I’ve seen very little of Wilfrid since he went East. Still, I could —” He stopped, and added: “If it IS true, he must have told Dinny. He couldn’t ask her to marry him with that untold.”
Sir Lawrence shrugged. “If yellow in one way, why not in the other?”
“Wilfrid is one of the most perverse, complex, unintelligible natures one could come across. To judge him by ordinary standards is a wash-out. But if he HAS told Dinny, she’ll never tell us.”
And they stared at each other.
“Mind you,” said Michael, “there’s a streak of the heroic in him. It comes out in the wrong places. That’s why he’s a poet.”
Sir Lawrence began twisting at an eyebrow, always a sign that he had reached decision.
“The thing’s got to be faced; it’s not in human nature for a sleeping dog like that to be allowed to lie. I don’t care about young Desert —”
“I do,” said Michael.
“It’s Dinny I’m thinking of.”
“So am I. But there again, Dad, Dinny will do what she will do, and you needn’t think we can deflect her.”
“It’s one of the most unpleasant things,” said Sir Lawrence slowly, “that I’ve ever come across. Well, my boy, are you going to see him, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it,” said Michael, and sighed.
“Will he tell you the truth?”
“Yes. Won’t you stay to dinner?”
Sir Lawrence shook his head.
“Daren’t face Fleur with this on my mind. Needless to say, no one ought to know until you’ve seen him, not even she.”
“No. Dinny still with you?”
“She’s gone back to Condaford.”
“Her people!” and Michael whistled.
Her people! The thought remained with him all through a dinner during which Fleur discussed the future of Kit. She was in favour of his going to Harrow, because Michael and his father had been at Winchester. He was down for both, and the matter had not yet been decided.
“All your mother’s people,” she said, “were at Harrow. Winchester seems to me so superior and dry. And they never get any notoriety. If you hadn’t been at Winchester you’d have been a pet of the newspapers by now.”
“D’you want Kit to have notoriety?”
“Yes, the nice sort, of course, like your Uncle Hilary. You know, Michael, Bart’s a dear, but I prefer the Cherrell side of your family.”
“Well, I was wondering,” said Michael, “whether the Cherrel’s weren’t too straight-necked and servicey for anything,”
“Yes, they’re that, but they’ve got a quirk in them, and they look like gentlemen.”
“I believe,” said Michael, “that you really want Kit to go to Harrow because they play at Lords.”
Fleur straightened her own neck.
“Well, I do. I should have chosen Eton, only it’s so obvious, and I hate light blue.”
“Well,” said Michael, “I’m prejudiced in favour of my own school, so the choice is up to you. A school that produced Uncle Adrian will do for me, anyway.”
“No school produced your Uncle Adrian, dear,” said Fleur; “he’s pal?olithic. The Cherrells are the oldest strain in Kit’s make-up, anyway, and I should like to breed to it, as Mr. Jack Muskham would say. Which reminds me that when I saw him at Clare’s wedding he wanted us to come down and see his stud farm at Royston. I should like to. He’s like an advertisement for shooting capes — divine shoes and marvellous control of his facial muscles.”
Michael nodded.
“Jack’s an example of so much stamp on the coin that there’s hardly any coin behind it.”
“Don’t you believe it, my dear. There’s plenty of metal at the back.”
“The ‘pukka sahib,’” said Michael. “I never can make up my mind whether that article is to the good or to the bad. The Cherrells are the best type of it, because there’s no manner to them as there is to Jack; but even with them I always have the feeling of too much in heaven and earth that isn’t dreamed of in their philosophy.”
“We can’t all have divine sympathy, Michael.”
Michael looked at her fixedly. He decided against malicious intent and went on: “I never know where understanding and tolerance ought to end.”
“That’s where men are inferior to us. We wait for the mark to fix itself; we trust our nerves. Men don’t, poor things. Luckily you’ve a streak of woman in you, Michael. Give me a kiss. Mind Coaker, he’s very sudden. It’s decided, then: Kit goes to Harrow.”
“If there’s a Harrow to go to by the time he’s of age.”
“Don’t be foolish. No constellations are more fixed than the public schools. Look at the way they flourished on the war.”
“They won’t flourish on the next war.”
“There mustn’t be one, then.”
“Under ‘pukka sahibism’ it couldn’t be avoided.”
“My dear, you don’t suppose that keeping our word and all that was not just varnish? We simply feared German preponderance.”
Michael rumpled his hair.
“It was a good instance, anyway, of what I said about there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of by the ‘pukka sahib’; yes, and of many situations that he’s not adequate to handle.”
Fleur yawned.
“We badly want a new dinner service, Michael.”
After dinner Michael set forth, without saying where he was going. Since the death of his father-inlaw, and the disclosure then made to him about Fleur and John Forsyte, his relations with her had been the same, with a slight but deep difference. He was no longer a tied but a free agent in his own house. Not a word had ever been spoken between them on a matter now nearly four years old, nor had there been in his mind any doubt about her since; the infidelity was scotched and buried. But, though outwardly the same, he was inwardly emancipated, and she knew it. In this matter of Wilfrid, for instance, his father’s warning had not been needed. He would not have told her of it, anyway. Not because he did not trust her discretion — he could always trust that — but because he secretly felt that in a matter such as this he would not get any real help from her.
He walked, ‘Wilfrid’s in love,’ he thought, ‘so he ought to be in by ten, unless he’s got an attack of verse; but even then you can’t write poetry in this traffic or in a club, the atmosphere stops the flow.’ He crossed Pall Mall and threaded the maze of narrow streets dedicated to unattached manhood till he came to Piccadilly, quiet before its storm of after-theatre traffic. Passing up a side street devoted to those male ministering angels — tailors, bookmakers and moneylenders — he rounded into Cork Street. It was ten o’clock exactly when he paused before the well-remembered house. Opposite was the gallery where he had first met Fleur, and he stood for a moment almost dizzy from past feelings. For three years, before Wilfrid’s queer infatuation for Fleur had broken it all up, he had been Wilfrid’s fidus Achates. ‘Regular David and Jonathan stunt,’ he thought, and all his old feelings came welling up as he ascended the stairs.
The monastic visage of the henchman Stack relaxed at sight of him.
“Mr. Mont? Pleasure to see you, sir.”
“And how are you, Stack?”
“A little older, sir; otherwise in fine shape, thank you. Mr. Desert IS in.”
Michael resigned his hat, and entered.
Wilfrid, lying on the divan in a dark dressing-gown, sat up.
“Hallo!”
“How are you, Wilfrid?”
“Stack! Drinks!”
“Congratulations, old man!”
“I met her first at your wedding, you know.”
“Ten years ago, nearly. You’ve plucked the flower of our family, Wilfrid; we’re all in love with Dinny.”
“I won’t talk about her, but I think the more.”
“Any verse, old man?”
“Yes, a booklet going in tomorrow, same publisher. Remember the first?”
“Don’t I? My only scoop.”
“This is better. There’s one that IS a poem.”
Stack re-entered with a tray.
“Help yourself, Michael.”
Michael poured out a little brandy and diluted it but slightly. Then with a cigarette he sat down.
“When’s it to be?”
“Registrar’s, as soon as possible.”
“Oh! And then?”
“Dinny wants to show me England. While there’s any sun I suppose we shall hang around.”
“Going back to Syria?”
Desert wriggled on his cushions.
“I don’t know: further afield, perhaps — she’ll say.”
Michael looked at his feet, beside which on the Persian rug some cigarette ash had fallen.
“Old man,” he said.
“Well?”
“D’you know a bird called Telfourd Yule?”
“His name — writer of sorts.”
“He’s just come back from Arabia and the Soudan; he brought a yarn with him.” Without raising his eyes, he was conscious that Wilfrid was sitting upright.
“It concerns you; and it’s queer and damaging. He thinks you ought to know.”
“Well?”
Michael uttered an involuntary sigh.
“Shortly: The Bedouin are saying that your conversion to Islam was at the pistol’s point. He was told the yarn in Arabia, and again in the Libyan desert, with the name of the Sheikh, and the place in Darfur, and the Englishman’s name.” And, still without looking up, he knew that Wilfrid’s eyes were fixed on him, and that there was sweat on his forehead.
“Well?”
“He wanted you to know, so he told my dad at the Club this afternoon, and Bart told me. I said I’d see you about it. Forgive me.”
Then, in the silence, Michael raised his eyes. What a strange, beautiful, tortured, compelling face!
“Nothing to forgive; it’s true.”
“My dear old man!” The words burst from Michael, but no others would follow.
Desert got up, went to a drawer and took out a manuscript.
“Here, read this!”
During the twenty minutes Michael took to read the poem, there was not a sound, except from the sheets being turned. Michael put them down at last.
“Magnificent!”
“Yes, but YOU’D never have done it.”
“I haven’t an idea what I should have done.”
“Oh, yes, you have. You’d never have let sophistication and God knows what stifle your first instinct, as I did. My first instinct was to say: ‘Shoot and be damned,’ and I wish to God I’d kept to it, then I shouldn’t be here. The queer thing is, if he’d threatened torture I’d have stood out. Yet I’d much rather be killed than tortured.”
“Torture’s caddish.”
“Fanatics aren’t cads. I’d have sent him to hell, but he really hated shooting me; he begged me — stood there with the pistol and begged me not to make him. His brother’s a friend of mine. Fanaticism’s a rum thing! He stood there ready to loose off, begging me. Damned human. I can see his eyes. He was under a vow. I never saw a man so relieved.”
“There’s nothing of that in the poem,” said Michael.
“Being sorry for your executioner is hardly an excuse. I’m not proud of it, especially when it saved my life. Besides, I don’t know if that WAS the reason. Religion, if you haven’t got it, is a fake. To walk out into everlasting dark for the sake of a fake! If I must die I want a reality to die for.”
“You don’t think,” said Michael miserably, “that you’d be justified in denying the thing?”
“I’ll deny nothing. If it’s come out, I’ll stand by it.”
“Does Dinny know?”
“Yes. She’s read the poem. I didn’t mean to tell her, but I did. She behaved as people don’t. Marvellous!”
“Yes. I’m not sure that you oughtn’t to deny it for her sake.”
“No, but I ought to give her up.”
“She would have something to say about that. If Dinny’s in love, it’s over head and ears, Wilfrid.”
“Same here!”
Overcome by the bleakness of the situation, Michael got up and helped himself to more brandy.
“Exactly!” said Desert, following him with his eyes. “Imagine if the Press gets hold of it!” and he laughed.
“I gather,” said Michael, with a spurt of cheerfulness, “that it was only in the desert both times that Yule heard the story.”
“What’s in the desert today is in the bazaars tomorrow. It’s no use, I shall have to face the music.”
Michael put a hand on his shoulder. “Count on me, anyway. I suppose the bold way is the only way. But I feel all you’re up against.”
“Yellow. Labelled: ‘Yellow’— might give any show away. And they’ll be right.”
“Rot!” said Michael.
Wilfrid went on without heeding: “And yet my whole soul revolts against dying for a gesture that I don’t believe in. Legends and superstitions — I hate the lot. I’d sooner die to give them a death-blow than to keep them alive. If a man tried to force me to torture an animal, to hang another man, to violate a woman, of course I’d die rather than do it. But why the hell should I die to gratify those whom I despise for believing outworn creeds that have been responsible for more misery in the world than any other mortal thing? Why? Eh?”
Michael had recoiled before the passion in this outburst, and was standing miserable and glum.
“Symbol,” he muttered.
“Symbol! For conduct that’s worth standing for, honesty, humanity, courage, I hope I’d stand; I went through with the war, anyway; but why should I stand for what I look on as dead wood?”
“It simply mustn’t come out,” said Michael violently. “I loathe the idea of a lot of swabs looking down their noses at you.”
Wilfrid shrugged. “I look down my nose at myself, I assure you. Never stifle your instinct, Michael.”
“But what are you going to DO?”
“What does it matter what I do? Things will be as they will be. Nobody will understand, or side with me if they did understand. Why should they? I don’t even side with myself.”
“I think lots of people might nowadays.”
“The sort I wouldn’t be seen dead with. No, I’m outcast.”
“And Dinny?”
“I’ll settle that with her.”
Michael took up his hat.
“If there’s anything I can do, count on me. Good night, old man!”
“Good night, and thanks!”
Michael was out of the street before any thinking power returned to him. Wilfrid had been caught, as it were, in a snare! One could see how his rebellious contempt for convention and its types had blinded him to the normal view. But one could not dissociate this or that from the general image of an Englishman: betrayal of one feature would be looked on as betrayal of the whole. As for that queer touch of compassion for his would-be executioner, who would see that who didn’t know Wilfrid? The affair was bitter and tragic. The ‘yellow’ label would be stuck on indiscriminately for all eyes to see.
‘Of course,’ thought Michael, ‘he’ll have his supporters — egomaniacs, and Bolshies, and that’ll make him feel worse than ever.’ Nothing was more galling than to be backed up by people you didn’t understand, and who didn’t understand you. And how was support like that going to help Dinny, more detached from it even than Wilfrid? The whole thing was —!
And with that blunt reflection he crossed Bond Street and went down Hay Hill into Berkeley Square. If he did not see his father before he went home, he would not sleep.
At Mount Street his mother and father were receiving a special pale negus, warranted to cause slumber, from the hands of Blore.
“Catherine?” said Lady Mont: “Measles?”
“No, Mother; I want to have a talk with Dad.”
“About that young man — changin’ his religion. He always gave me a pain — defyin’ the lightnin’, and that.”
Michael stared. “It IS about Wilfrid.”
“Em,” said Sir Lawrence, “this is dead private. Well, Michael?”
“The story’s true; he doesn’t and won’t deny it. Dinny knows.”
“What story?” asked Lady Mont.
“He recanted to some fanatical Arabs on pain of death.”
“What a bore!”
Michael thought swiftly: ‘My God! If only everyone would take that view!’
“D’you mean, then,” said Sir Lawrence, gravely, “that I’ve got to tell Yule there’s no defence?”
Michael nodded.
“But if so, dear boy, it won’t stop there.”
“No, but he’s reckless.”
“The lightnin’,” said Lady Mont, suddenly.
“Exactly, Mother. He’s written a poem on it, and a jolly good one it is. He’s sending it in a new volume to his publisher tomorrow. But, Dad, at any rate, get Yule and Jack Muskham to keep their mouths shut. After all, what business is it of theirs?”
Sir Lawrence shrugged the thin shoulders which at seventy-two were only beginning to suggest age.
“There are two questions, Michael, and so far as I can see they’re quite separate. The first is how to muzzle club gossip. The second concerns Dinny and her people. You say Dinny knows; but her people don’t, except ourselves; and as she didn’t tell us, she won’t tell them. Now that’s not fair. And it’s not wise,” he went on without waiting for an answer, “because this thing’s dead certain to come out later, and they’d never forgive Desert for marrying her without letting them know. I wouldn’t myself, it’s too serious.”
“Agitatin’,” murmured Lady Mont. “Ask Adrian.”
“Better Hilary,” said Sir Lawrence.
Michael broke in: “That second question, Dad, seems to me entirely up to Dinny. She must be told that the story’s in the wind, then either she or Wilfrid will let her people know.”
“If only she’d let him drop her! Surely he can’t want to go on with it, with this story going about?”
“I don’t see Dinny droppin’ him,” murmured Lady Mont. “She’s been too long pickin’ him up. Love’s young dream.”
“Wilfrid said he knew he ought to give her up. Oh! damn!”
“Come back to question one, then, Michael. I can try, but I’m very doubtful, especially if this poem is coming out. What is it, a justification?”
“Or explanation.”
“Bitter and rebellious, like his early stuff?”
Michael nodded.
“Well, they might keep quiet out of charity, but they’ll never stomach that sort of attitude, if I know Jack Muskham. He hates the bravado of modern scepticism like poison.”
“We can’t tell what’s going to happen in any direction, but it seems to me we ought all to play hard for delay.”
“Hope the Hermit,” murmured Lady Mont. “Good night, dear boy; I’m goin’ up. Mind the dog — he’s not been out.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can,” said Sir Lawrence.
Michael received his mother’s kiss, wrung his father’s hand, and went.
He walked home, uneasy and sore at heart, for this concerned two people of whom he was very fond, and he could see no issue that was not full of suffering to both. And continually there came back to him the thought: ‘What should I have done in Wilfrid’s place?’ And he concluded, as he walked, that no man could tell what he would do if he were in the shoes of another man. And so, in the spring wind of a night not devoid of beauty, he came to South Square and let himself in.
Wilfred sat in his rooms with two letters before him, one that he had just written to Dinny, and one that he had just received from her. He stared at the snapshots and tried to think clearly, and since he had been trying to think clearly ever since Michael’s visit of the previous evening, he was the less successful. Why had he chosen this particular moment to fall really in love, to feel that he had found the one person with whom he could bear to think of permanent companionship? He had never intended to marry, he had never supposed he would feel towards women anything but a transient urge that soon died in satisfaction. Even at the height of his infatuation with Fleur he had never supposed it would last. On the whole he was as profoundly sceptical about women as about religion, patriotism, or the qualities popularly attributed to the Englishman. He had thought himself armoured in scepticism, but in his armour was a joint so weak that he had received a fatal thrust. With bitter amusement he perceived that the profound loneliness left by that experience in Darfur had started in him an involuntary craving for spiritual companionship of which Dinny had, as involuntarily, availed herself. The thing that should have kept them apart had brought them together.
After Michael had left he had spent half the night going over and over it, and always coming back to the crude thought that, when all was said and done, he would be set down as a coward. And yet, but for Dinny, would even that matter? What did he care for society and its opinion? What did he care for England and the English? Even if they had prestige, was it deserved, any more than the prestige of any other country? The war had shown all countries and their inhabitants to be pretty much alike, capable of the same heroisms, basenesses, endurance, and absurdities. The war had shown mob feeling in every country to be equally narrow, void of discrimination, and generally contemptible. He was a wanderer by nature, and even if England and the nearer East were closed to him, the world was wide, the sun shone in many places, the stars wheeled over one, books could be read, women had beauty, flowers scent, tobacco its flavour, music its moving power, coffee its fragrance, horses and dogs and birds were the same seductive creatures, and thought and feeling brought an urge to rhythmic expression, almost wherever one went. Save for Dinny he could strike his tent and move out, and let tongues wag behind him! And now he couldn’t! Or could he? Was he not, indeed, in honour bound to? How could he saddle her with a mate at whom fingers were pointed? If she had inspired him with flaming desire, it would have been much simpler; they could have had their fling and parted, and no one the worse. But he had a very different feeling for her. She was like a well of sweet water met with in a desert; a flower with a scent coming up among the dry vegetation of the wilderness. She gave him the reverent longing that some tunes and pictures inspire; roused the same ache of pleasure as the scent of new-mown grass. She was a cool refreshment to a spirit sun-dried, wind-dried, and dark. Was he to give her up because of this damned business?
In the morning when he woke the same confused struggle of feeling had gone on. He had spent the afternoon writing her a letter, and had barely finished it when her first love-letter came. And he sat now with the two before him.
‘I can’t send this,’ he thought suddenly; ‘it goes over and over and gets nowhere. Rotten!’ He tore it up, and read her letter a third time.
‘Impossible!’ he thought; ‘to go down there! God and the King and the rest of it. Impossible!’ And seizing a piece of paper, he wrote:
“Cork Street: Saturday.
“Bless you for your letter. Come up here to lunch Monday. We must talk.— WILFRID.”
Having sent Stack out with this missive, he felt a little more at peace . . . .
Dinny did not receive this note till Monday morning, and was the more relieved to get it. The last two days had been spent by her in avoiding any mention of Wilfrid, listening to Hubert and Jean’s account of their life in the Soudan, walking and inspecting the state of trees with her father, copying his income-tax return, and going to church with him and her mother. The tacit silence about her engagement was very characteristic of a family whose members were mutually devoted and accustomed to spare each other’s feelings; it was all the more ominous.
After reading Wilfrid’s note she said to herself blankly: ‘For a love-letter it’s not a love-letter.’ And she said to her mother:
“Wilfrid’s shy of coming, dear. I must go up and talk to him. If I can, I will bring him down with me. If I can’t, I’ll try and arrange for you to see him at Mount Street. He’s lived alone so much that seeing people is a real strain.”
Lady Cherrell’s answer was a sigh, but it meant more to Dinny than words; she took her mother’s hand and said: “Cheer up, Mother dear. It’s something that I’m happy, isn’t it?”
“That would be everything, Dinny.”
Dinny was too conscious of implications in the ‘would be’ to answer.
She walked to the station, reached London at noon, and set out for Cork Street across the Park. The day was fine, the sun shone; spring was established to the full, with lilac and with tulips, young green of plane-tree leaves, songs of birds, and the freshness of the grass. But though she looked in tune, she suffered from presentiment. Why she should feel so, going to a private lunch with her lover, she could not have explained. There could be but few people in all the great town at such an hour of day with prospect before them so closely joyful; but Dinny was not deceived: all was not well — she knew it. Being before her time, she stopped at Mount Street to titivate. According to Blore, Sir Lawrence was out, but his lady in. Dinny left the message that she might be in to tea.
Passing the pleasant smell at the corner of Burlington Street, she had that peculiar feeling, experienced by all at times, of having once been someone else which accounts for so much belief in the transmigration of souls.
‘It only means,’ she thought, ‘something I’ve forgotten. Oh! here’s the turning!’ And her heart began to beat.
She was nearly breathless when Stack opened the door to her. “Lunch will be ready in five minutes, miss.” His eyes, dark, prominent above his jutting nose, and yet reflective, and the curly benevolence of his lips always gave her the impression that he was confessing her before she had anything to confess. He opened the inner door, shut it behind her, and she was in Wilfrid’s arms. That was a complete refutation of presentiment; the longest and most satisfactory moment of the sort she had yet experienced. So long that she was afraid he would not let her go in time. At last she said gently:
“Lunch has already been in a minute, darling, according to Stack.”
“Stack has tact.”
Not until after lunch, when they were alone once more with coffee, did discomfiture come with the suddenness of a thunderclap in a clear sky.
“That business has come out, Dinny.”
What! That? THAT! She mastered the rush of her dismay.
“How?”
“A man called Telfourd Yule has brought the story back with him. They talk of it among the tribes. It’ll be in the bazaars by now, in the London clubs tomorrow. I shall be in Coventry in a few weeks’ time. Nothing can stop a thing like that.”
Without a word Dinny got up, pressed his head against her shoulder, then sat down beside him on the divan.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” he said gently.
“That this makes any difference? No, I don’t. The only difference could have been when you told me yourself. That made none. How can this, then?”
“How can I marry you?”
“That sort of thing is only in books, Wilfrid. WE won’t have linkéd misery long drawn out.”
“False heroics are not in my line either; but I don’t think you see yet.”
“I do. Now you can stand up straight again, and those who can’t understand — well, they don’t matter.”
“Then don’t your people matter?”
“Yes, they matter.”
“But you don’t suppose for a minute that they’ll understand?”
“I shall make them.”
“My poor dear!”
It struck her, ominously, how quiet and gentle he was being. He went on:
“I don’t know your people, but if they’re the sort you’ve described — charm ye never so wisely, they won’t rise. They can’t, it’s against their root convictions.”
“They’re fond of me.”
“That will make it all the more impossible for them to see you tied to me.”
Dinny drew away a little and sat with her chin on her hands. Then, without looking at him, she said:
“Do you want to get rid of me, Wilfrid?”
“Dinny!”
“Yes, but do you?”
He drew her into his arms. Presently she said:
“I see. Then if you don’t, you must leave this to me. And anyway it’s no good going to meet trouble. It isn’t known yet in London. We’ll wait until it is. I know you won’t marry me till then, so I MUST wait. After that it will be a clear issue, but you mustn’t be heroic then, Wilfrid, because it’ll hurt me too much — too much.” She clutched him suddenly; and he stayed silent.
With her cheek to his she said quietly:
“Do you want me to be everything to you before you marry me? If so, I can.”
“Dinny!”
“Very forward, isn’t it?”
“No! But we’ll wait. You make me feel too reverent.”
She sighed. “Perhaps it’s best.”
Presently she said: “Will you leave it to me to tell my people everything or not?”
“I will leave anything to you.”
“And if I want you to meet any one of them, will you?”
Wilfrid nodded.
“I won’t ask you to come to Condaford — yet. That’s all settled, then. Now tell me exactly how you heard about this.”
When he had finished, she said reflectively:
“Michael and Uncle Lawrence. That will make it easier. Now, darling, I’m going. It’ll be good for Stack, and I want to think. I can only think when I’m insulated from you.”
“Angel!”
She took his head between her hands. “Don’t be tragic, and I won’t either. Could we go joy-riding on Thursday? Good! Foch at noon! I’m far from an angel, I’m your love.”
She went dizzily down the stairs, now that she was alone, terribly conscious of the ordeal before them. She turned suddenly towards Oxford Street. ‘I’ll go and see Uncle Adrian,’ she thought.
Adrian’s thoughts at his Museum had been troubled of late by the claim of the Gobi desert to be the cradle of Homo Sapiens. The idea had been patented and put on the market, and it bid fair to have its day. He was reflecting on the changeability of anthropological fashions, when Dinny was announced.
“Ah! Dinny! I’ve been in the Gobi desert all the afternoon, and was just thinking of a nice cup of ‘hot’ tea. What do you say?”
“China tea always gives me an ‘ick feeling, Uncle.”
“We don’t go in for so-called luxuries. My duenna here makes good old Dover tea with leaves in it, and we have the homely bun.”
“Perfect! I came to tell you that I’ve given my young heart.”
Adrian stared.
“It’s really rather a terrible tale, so can I take off my hat?”
“My dear,” said Adrian, “take off anything. Have tea first. Here it is.”
While she was having tea Adrian regarded her with a rueful smile, caught, as it were, between his moustache and goatee. Since the tragic Ferse affair she had been more than ever his idea of a niece; and he perceived that she was really troubled.
Lying back in the only easy chair, with her knees crossed and the tips of her fingers pressed together, she looked, he thought, ethereal, as if she might suddenly float, and his eyes rested with comfort on the cap of her chestnut hair. But his face grew perceptibly longer while she was telling him her tale, leaving nothing out. She stopped at last and added:
“Uncle, please don’t look like that!”
“Was I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Dinny, is it surprising?”
“I want your ‘reaction,’ as they call it, to what he did.” And she looked straight into his eyes.
“My personal reaction? Without knowing him — judgment reserved.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, you SHALL know him.”
Adrian nodded, and she said:
“Tell me the worst. What will the others who don’t know him think and do?”
“What was your own reaction, Dinny?”
“I knew him.”
“Only a week.”
“And ten years.”
“Oh! don’t tell me that a glimpse and three words at a wedding —”
“The grain of mustard-seed, dear. Besides, I’d read the poem, and knew from that all his feelings. He isn’t a believer; it must have seemed to him like some monstrous practical joke.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve read his verse — scepticism and love of beauty. His type blooms after long national efforts, when the individual’s been at a discount, and the State has exacted everything. Ego crops out and wants to kick the State and all its shibboleths. I understand all that. But — You’ve never been out of England, Dinny.”
“Only Italy, Paris, and the Pyrenees.”
“They don’t count. You’ve never been where England has to have a certain prestige. For Englishmen in such parts of the world it’s all for one and one for all.”
“I don’t think he realised that at the time, Uncle.”
Adrian looked at her, and shook his head.
“I still don’t,” said Dinny. “And thank God he didn’t, or I should never have known him. Ought one to sacrifice oneself for false values?”
“That’s not the point, my dear. In the East, where religion still means everything, you can’t exaggerate the importance attached to a change of faith. Nothing could so damage the Oriental’s idea of the Englishman as a recantation at the pistol’s point. The question before him was: Do I care enough for what is thought of my country and my people to die sooner than lower that conception? Forgive me, Dinny, but that was, brutally, the issue.”
She was silent for a minute and then said:
“I’m perfectly sure Wilfrid would have died sooner than do lots of things that would have lowered that conception; but he simply couldn’t admit that the Eastern conception of an Englishman ought to rest on whether he’s a Christian or not.”
“That’s special pleading; he not only renounced Christianity, he accepted Islam — one set of superstitions for another.”
“But, can’t you see, Uncle, the whole thing was a monstrous jest to him?”
“No, my dear, I don’t think I can.”
Dinny leaned back, and he thought how exhausted she looked.
“Well, if YOU can’t, no one else will. I mean no one of our sort, and that’s what I wanted to know.”
A bad ache started in Adrian’s midriff. “Dinny, there’s a fortnight of this behind you, and the rest of your life before you; you told me he’d give you up — for which I respect him. Now, doesn’t it need a wrench, if not for your sake — for his?”
Dinny smiled.
“Uncle, you’re so renowned for dropping your best pals when they’re in a mess. And you know so little about love! You only waited eighteen years. Aren’t you rather funny?”
“Admitted,” said Adrian. “I suppose the word ‘Uncle’ came over me. If I knew that Desert was likely to be as faithful as you, I should say: ‘Go to it and be damned in your own ways, bless you!’”
“Then you simply MUST see him.”
“Yes; but I’ve seen people seem so unalterably in love that they were divorced within the year. I knew a man so completely satisfied by his honeymoon that he took a mistress two months later.”
“We,” murmured Dinny, “are not of that devouring breed. Seeing so many people on the screen examining each other’s teeth has spiritualised me, I know.”
“Who has heard of this development?”
“Michael and Uncle Lawrence, possibly Aunt Em. I don’t know whether to tell them at Condaford.”
“Let me talk to Hilary. He’ll have another point of view; and it won’t be orthodox.”
“Oh! Yes, I don’t mind Uncle Hilary.” And she rose. “May I bring Wilfrid to see you, then?”
Adrian nodded, and, when she had gone, stood again in front of a map of Mongolia, where the Gobi desert seemed to bloom like the rose in comparison with the wilderness across which his favourite niece was moving.
Dinny stayed on at Mount Street for dinner to see Sir Lawrence. She was in his study when he came in, and said at once: “Uncle Lawrence, Aunt Em knows what you and Michael know, doesn’t she?”
“She does, Dinny. Why?”
“She’s been so discreet. I’ve told Uncle Adrian; he seems to think Wilfrid has lowered English prestige in the East. Just what is this English prestige? I thought we were looked on as a race of successful hypocrites. And in India as arrogant bullies.”
Sir Lawrence wriggled.
“You’re confusing national with individual reputation. The things are totally distinct. The individual Englishman in the East is looked up to as a man who isn’t to be rattled, who keeps his word, and sticks by his own breed.”
Dinny flushed. The implication was not lost on her.
“In the East,” Sir Lawrence went on, “the Englishman, or rather the Briton, because as often as not he’s a Scot or a Welshman or a North Irishman, is generally isolated: traveller, arch?ologist, soldier, official, civilian, planter, doctor, engineer, or missionary, he’s almost always head man of a small separate show; he maintains himself against odds on the strength of the Englishman’s reputation. If a single Englishman is found wanting, down goes the stock of all those other isolated Englishmen. People know that and recognise its importance. That’s what you’re up against, and it’s no use underestimating. You can’t expect Orientals, to whom religion means something, to understand that to some of us it means nothing. An Englishman to them is a believing Christian, and if he recants, he’s understood as recanting his most precious belief.”
Dinny said drily: “In fact, then, Wilfrid has no case in the eyes of our world.”
“In the eyes of the world that runs the Empire, I’m afraid — none, Dinny. Could it be otherwise? Unless there were complete mutual confidence between these isolated beings that none of them will submit to dictation, take a dare, or let the others down, the thing wouldn’t work at all. Now would it?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, you can take it from me. Michael has explained to me how Desert’s mind worked; and from the point of view of a disbeliever like myself, there’s a lot to be said. I should intensely dislike being wiped out over such an issue. But it wasn’t the real issue; and if you say: ‘He didn’t see that,’ then I’m afraid my answer is he didn’t because he has too much spiritual pride. And that won’t help him as a defence, because spiritual pride is anathema to the Services, and indeed to the world generally. It’s the quality, you remember, that got Lucifer into trouble.”
Dinny, who had listened with her eyes fixed on her uncle’s twisting features, said:
“It’s extraordinary the things one can do without.”
Sir Lawrence screwed in a puzzled eyeglass.
“Have you caught the jumping habit from your aunt?”
“If one can’t have the world’s approval, one can do without it.”
“‘The world well lost for love,’ sounds gallant, Dinny, but it’s been tried out and found wanting. Sacrifice on one side is the worst foundation for partnership, because the other side comes to resent it.”
“I don’t expect more happiness than most people get.”
“That’s not as much as I want for you, Dinny.”
“Dinner!” said Lady Mont, in the doorway: “Have you a vacuum, Dinny? They use those cleaners,” she went on, as they went towards the dining-room, “for horses now.”
“Why not for human beings,” murmured Dinny, “and clear out their fears and superstitions? Uncle wouldn’t approve, though.”
“You’ve been talkin’, then. Blore, go away!”
When he had gone, she added: “I’m thinkin’ of your father, Dinny.”
“So am I.”
“I used to get over him. But daughters! Still, he must.”
“Em!” said Sir Lawrence, warningly, as Blore came back.
“Well,” said Lady Mont, “beliefs and that — too fatiguin’. I never liked christenin’s — so unfeelin’ to the baby; and puttin’ it upon other people; only they don’t bother, except for cups and Bibles. Why do they put fern-leaves on cups? Or is that archery? Uncle Cuffs won a cup at archery when he was a curate. They used. It’s all very agitatin’.”
“Aunt Em,” said Dinny, “all I hope and want is that no one will agitate themselves over me and my small affair. If people won’t agitate we can be happy.”
“So wise! Lawrence, tell Michael that. Blore! Give Miss Dinny some sherry.”
Dinny, putting her lips to the sherry, looked across at her aunt’s face. It was comforting — slightly raised in the eyebrows, drooped in the lids, curved in the nose, and as if powdered in the hair above the comely neck, shoulders and bust.
In the taxi for Paddington she had such a vivid vision of Wilfrid, alone, with this hanging over him, that she very nearly leaned out to say: “Cork Street.” The cab turned a corner. Praed Street? Yes, it would be! All the worry in the world came from the conflict of love against love. If only her people didn’t love her, and she them, how simple things would be!
A porter was saying: “Any luggage, Miss?”
“None, thank you.” As a little girl she had always meant to marry a porter! That was before her music master came from Oxford. He had gone off to the war when she was ten. She bought a magazine and took her seat in the train. But she was very tired and lay back in her corner of the third-class carriage; railway travelling was a severe tax on her always slender purse. With head tilted, she went to sleep.
When she alighted from the train there was a nearly full moon, and the night was blowy and sweet-smelling. She would have to walk. It was light enough to take the short cut, and she climbed the first stile into the field path. She thought of the night, nearly two years ago, when she came back by this train with the news of Hubert’s release and found her father sitting up, grey and worn, in his study, and how years had seemed to drop off him when she told him the good news. And now she had news that must grieve him. It was her father she really dreaded facing. Her mother, yes! Mother, though gentle, was stubborn; but women had not the same hard-and-fast convictions about what was not ‘done’ as men. Hubert? In old days she would have minded him most. Curious how lost he was to her! Hubert would be dreadfully upset. He was rigid in his views of what was ‘the game.’ Well! she could bear his disapproval. But Father! It seemed so unfair to him, after his forty years of hard service!
A brown owl floated from the hedge over to some stacks. These moony nights were owl-nights, and there would be the screams of captured victims, so dreadful in the night-time. Yet who could help liking owls, their blunt soft floating flight, their measured stirring calls? The next stile led her on to their own land. There was a linhay in this field where her father’s old charger sheltered at night. Was it Plutarch or Pliny who had said: ‘For my part I would not sell even an old ox who had laboured for me’? Nice man! Now that the sound of the train had died away it was very quiet: only the brushing of a little wind on young leaves, and the stamp of old Kismet’s foot in the linhay. She crossed a second field and came to the narrow tree-trunk bridge. The night’s sweetness was like the feeling always within her now. She crossed the plank and slipped in among the apple-trees. They seemed to live brightly between her and the moving, moonlit, wind-brushed sky. They seemed to breathe, almost to be singing in praise at the unfolding of their blossoms. They were lit in a thousand shapes of whitened branches, and all beautiful, as if someone had made each with a rapt and moonstruck pleasure and brightened it with starshine. And this had been done in here each spring for a hundred years and more. The whole world seemed miraculous on a night like this, but always the yearly miracle of the apple blooming was to Dinny most moving of all. The many miracles of England thronged her memory, while she stood among the old trunks inhaling the lichen-bark-dusted air. Upland grass with larks singing; the stilly drip in coverts when sun came after rain; gorse on wind-blown commons; horses turning and turning at the end of the long mole-coloured furrows; river waters now bright, now green-tinged beneath the willows; thatch and its wood smoke; swathed hay meadows, tawnied cornfields; the bluish distances beyond; and the ever-changing sky — all these were as jewels in her mind, but the chief was this white magic of the spring. She became conscious that the long grass was drenched and her shoes and stockings wet through; there was light enough to see in that grass the stars of jonquil, grape hyacinth and the pale cast-out tulips; there would be polyanthus, too, bluebells and cowslips — a few. She slipped on upward, cleared the trees, and stood a moment to look back at the whiteness of the whole. ‘It might have dropped from the moon,’ she thought: ‘My best stockings, too!’
Across the low-walled fruit garden and lawn she came to the terrace. Past eleven! Only her father’s study window lighted on the ground floor! How like that other night!
‘Shan’t tell him,’ she thought, and tapped on it.
He let her in.
“Hallo, Dinny, you didn’t stop the night at Mount Street, then?”
“No, Dad, there’s a limit to my powers of borrowing nightgowns.”
“Sit down and have some tea. I was just going to make some.”
“Darling, I came through the orchard, and I’m wet to the knees.”
“Take off your stockings; here’s an old pair of slippers.”
Dinny stripped off the stockings and sat contemplating her legs in the lamplight, while the General lit the etna. He liked to do things for himself. She watched him bending over the tea-things, and thought how trim he still was, and how quick and precise his movements. His browned hands, with little dark hairs on them, had long, clever fingers. He stood up, motionless, watching the flame.
“Want’s a new wick,” he said. “There’s going to be bad trouble in India, I’m afraid.”
“India seems to be getting almost more trouble than it’s worth to us.”
The General turned his face with its high but small cheekbones; his eyes rested on her, and his thin lips beneath the close little grey moustache smiled.
“That often happens with trusts, Dinny. You’ve got very nice legs.”
“So I ought, dear, considering you and mother.”
“Mine are all right for a boot — stringy. Did you ask Mr. Desert down?”
“No, not today.”
The General put his hands into his side-pockets. He had taken off his dinner jacket and was wearing an old snuff-coloured shooting coat; Dinny noticed that the cuffs were slightly frayed, and one leather button missing. His dark, high-shaped eyebrows contracted till there were three ridges right in the centre of his forehead; he said gently:
“I don’t understand that change of religion, you know, Dinny. Milk or lemon?”
“Lemon, please.”
She was thinking: ‘Now is the moment, after all. Courage!’
“Two lumps?”
“Three, with lemon, Dad.”
The General took up the tongs. He dropped three lumps into the cup, then a slice of lemon, put back the tongs, and bent down to the kettle.
“Boiling,” he said, and filled up the cup; he put a covered spoonful of tea into it, withdrew the spoon and handed the cup to his daughter.
Dinny sat stirring the thin golden liquid. She took a sip, rested the cup on her lap, and turned her face up to him.
“I can explain it, Dad,” she said, and thought: ‘It will only make him understand even less.’
The General filled his own cup, and sat down. Dinny clutched her spoon.
“You see, when Wilfrid was far out in Darfur he ran into a nest of fanatical Arabs, remaining from the Mahdi times. The chief of them had him brought into his tent and offered him his life if he would embrace Islam.”
She saw her father make a little convulsive movement, so that some of the tea was spilled into his saucer. He raised the cup and poured it back. Dinny went on:
“Wilfrid is like most of us nowadays about belief, only a great deal more so. It isn’t only that he doesn’t believe in Christianity, he actually hates any set forms of religion, he thinks they divide mankind and do more harm and bring more suffering than anything else. And then, you know — or you would if you’d read his poetry, Dad — the war left him very bitter about the way lives are thrown away, simply spilled out like water at the orders of people who don’t know what they’re about.”
Again the General made that slight convulsive movement.
“Yes, Dad, but I’ve heard Hubert talk in much the same way about that. Anyway, it has left Wilfrid with a horror of wasting life, and the deepest distrust of all shibboleths and beliefs. He only had about five minutes to decide in. It wasn’t cowardice, it was just bitter scorn that men can waste each other’s lives for beliefs that to him seem equally futile. And he just shrugged and accepted. Having accepted, he had to keep his word and go through the forms. Of course, you don’t know him, so I suppose it’s useless.” She sighed and drank thirstily.
The General had put his own cup down; he rose, filled a pipe, lit it, and stood by the hearth. His face was lined and dark and grave. At last he said:
“I’m out of my depth. Is the religion of one’s fathers for hundreds of years to go for nothing, then? Is all that has made us the proudest people in the world to be chucked away at the bidding of an Arab? Have men like the Lawrences, John Nicholson, Chamberlayne, Sandeman, a thousand others, who spent and gave their lives to build up an idea of the English as brave men and true, to be knocked into a cocked hat by every Englishman who’s threatened with a pistol?”
Dinny’s cup clattered on its saucer.
“Yes, but if not by every Englishman, Dinny, why by one? Why by this one?”
Quivering all over, Dinny did not answer. Neither Adrian nor Sir Lawrence had made her feel like this — for the first time she had been reached and moved by the other side. Some agelong string had been pulled within her, or she was infected by the emotion of one whom she had always admired and loved, and whom she had hardly ever seen stirred to eloquence. She could not speak.
“I don’t know if I’m a religious man,” the General went on; “the faith of my fathers is enough for me”— and he made a gesture, as if adding, ‘I leave myself aside’—“but, Dinny, I could not take dictation of that sort; I could not, and I cannot understand how he could have.”
Dinny said, quietly: “I won’t try to make you, Dad; let’s take it that you can’t. Most people have done something in their lives that other people could not understand if it were known. The difference here is that this thing of Wilfrid’s IS known.”
“You mean the threat is known — the reason for the —?”
Dinny nodded.
“How?”
“A Mr. Yule brought the story back from Egypt; Uncle Lawrence thinks it can’t be scotched. I want you to know the worst.” She gathered her wet stockings and shoes in her hand. “Would you mind telling Mother and Hubert for me, Dad?” And she stood up.
The General drew deeply at his pipe, which emitted a gurgling sound.
“Your pipe wants cleaning, dear. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“He’ll be a pariah,” burst from the General, “he’ll be a pariah! Dinny, Dinny!”
No two words could have moved and disarmed her more. At one stroke they shifted his opposition from the personal to the altruistic.
She bit her lip and said:
“Dad, I shall pipe my eye if I stay down here with you. And my feet are very cold. Good-night, darling!”
She turned and went quickly to the door, whence she saw him standing like a horse that has just been harnessed.
She went up to her room and sat on her bed, rubbing her cold feet one against the other. It was done! Now she had only to confront the feeling that would henceforth surround her like a wall over which she must climb to the fulfilment of her love. And what surprised her most, while she rubbed and rubbed, was knowing that her father’s words had drawn from her a secret endorsement which had not made the slightest inroad on her feeling for Wilfrid. Was love, then, quite detached from judgment? Was the old image of a blind God true? Was it even true that defects in the loved one made him the dearer? That seemed borne out, at all events, by the dislike one had for the too good people in books; one’s revolt against the heroic figure; one’s impatience at the sight of virtue rewarded.
‘Is it that my family’s standard,’ she thought, ‘is higher than mine, or simply that I want him close to me and don’t care what he is or does so long as he comes?’ And she had a strange and sudden feeling of knowing Wilfrid to the very core, with all his faults and shortcomings, and with a something that redeemed and made up for them and would keep her love alive, for in that, in that only, was an element mysterious to her. And she thought with a rueful smile: ‘All evil I know by instinct; it’s goodness, truth, beauty that keep me guessing!’ And, almost too tired to undress, she got into bed.