GIVE up the stage!” echoed Mr. Chown, assuming an appearance of thunderstruck amazement.

“Don’t act at me, my friend,” said Mary. “You must have had the probability in mind ever since I told you I was married.”

He had; that was the worst of women; an agent sweated blood to make a woman into a star, and the thankless creature manned and retired. But Mary had not immediately retired and he thought he had reasonable grounds for hoping that she would continue to pay him his commission for many years; a woman who married well and yet remained on the stage could surely be acting only because she liked it, and Mr. Chown had a lure to dangle before her which could hardly fail of its effect upon any actress who cared two straws for her profession.

He remembered the day when he had rung up Rossiter and had said, “Mary’s married,” and Rossiter had replied, “Right, I’ll watch her,” and, a little later, had told him “Mary will do. She can play Sans-GÊne.”

That was the bait he had for Mary. When (if ever), London tired of “Granada the Gay,” she was to play Sans-GÊne. She was to stand absolutely at the head of her profession. He reviewed musical comedy and could think of no woman’s part in all its repertoire which was so signally the blue riband of the lighter stage; and Rossiter destined it for the wear of Mary Arden!

“Listen to this, Mary. Do you know what Rossiter is doing next?”

“I’ll see it from the stalls,” she said.

“No. You’ll be it. You’ll be Sans-GÊne in ‘The Duchess of Dantzig.’ ”

“I didn’t tell you I’m retiring from the stage, did I? All I said was that it’s possible.”

“Ah!” said Chown, watching his bait at work.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re wrong.”

He put his hand on hers. “Am I, Mary? Absolutely?”

“No,” she confessed, “and I’m grateful. You’ve done many things for me and this is the biggest of them all. If I stay on the stage, I’ll play it and I’ll... I’ll not make a failure. But you haven’t tempted me to stay. I’m getting mixed. I mean I’m tempted, horribly. I’ve a megaphone in my brain that’s shouting at me to damn everything and just jolly well show them what I can do with that part. But I won’t damn everything. I won’t forget the things that make it doubtful whether I’ll stay on the stage or not. I’ll give up Sans-GÊne rather than forget them, and I know as well as you do what Rossiter means by casting me for that part. He means that Mary’s right there.”

“Yes,” said Chown, “he means that.”

“It’s decent of him. We’ll be decent, too, please. We’ll tell him there’s a doubt.”

“Look here, Mary, I know you well enough to ask. Is it a baby?”

She shook her head. “Not that sort of baby,” she said, and puzzled him.

It was Rupert. In Mary’s opinion, Rupert was in danger of becoming the husband of Mary Arden, one of those deplorable hangers-on of the theater who assert a busy self-importance because they are married to somebody who is famous. He hadn’t, quite, come to that yet, but it was difficult to see what else he could assert of himself beyond his emphatic negative against going to Staithley; and she proposed very definitely that he should not come to it, either. He should not, even if she had to leave the stage, even if she must sacrifice so great, so climactic a part as Sans-GÊne.

She had not come painlessly to that opinion of him. She had not watched him since his demobilization and she had not come to her profound conviction that something was very wrong with Rupert, without feeling shame at her scrutiny and distrust of this love of hers which could disparage. At first, while he was still at the Front, she went on acting simply to drug anxiety. She acted on the stage by night and for the films by day, and later it was to see if she could not, by setting an example, persuade him that work was a sound diet; and now she was afraid that the example had miscarried and that her associations with the stage were doing him a mischief. To work in the Galaxy was one thing, to loaf in it another, and he, who had no work to do there, was in it a good deal.

If Rupert was developing anything, it was listlessness. He had an animal content in Mary, and was allowing a honeymoon to become a routine. Perhaps because she was a certainty and because the war had sated him with hazards, he could not bear to be away from her. She had suggested Cambridge and, though it was flat, was ready to go there with him. He went and looked at Cambridge, found it overcrowded and returned to London. Through the summer he played some cricket, in minor M. C. C. matches, and did not find his form. He thought of golf for the winter, found that the good clubs had long waiting lists, and, though friends offered to rush him in, refused to have strings pulled for him.

Privately, he had self-criticism and tried to stifle it. There was a miasma of disillusionment everywhere; there was the Peace that was mislaid by French pawnbrokers instead of being made by gentlemen; there was the impulse to forget the war on the part of the civilian population who now seemed so brutally in possession; there was the treatment of disbanded soldiery which, this time, was to have belied history, and didn’t. He strained to believe the current dicta of the minority mind and to find in them excuse for his lethargy.

He was, no doubt, tired; but whatever subtle infections of the soul might be distressing him, materially at any rate he was immune from the common aggravation of high prices. He made that explicitly one of his excuses. It wasn’t fair that he, who had all the money he needed, should take a job from a man who needed money. “There’s unpaid work,” thought Mary, but she did not say it. She thought he must sooner or later see it for himself.

He did see it and tried to blink at it. He was of the Hepplestalls, of a race who weren’t acclimatized to leisure, who found happiness in setting their teeth in work. He was born with a conscience and couldn’t damp it down. He was aware, at the back of behind, that it was hurting him to turn a deaf ear to the call of Staithley. He had done worse things than Staithley implied in the necessity of war, and there was also a necessity of peace. He felt nobly moral to let such sentiments find lodgment in his mind.

His father’s diffident comparison of the Hepplestalls with the Samurai came back to him. Yes, one ought to serve, but it wasn’t necessary to go to Staithley to be a Samurai. One could be a Samurai in London. He, decisively, was forced to be a Samurai in London because he had married Mary Arden and to wrench her from her vocation, to take her away from London, was unthinkable.

There was no hurry to set about discovering the place of a Samurai in modern London. Like everybody else he had, with superlative reason, promised himself a good time after the war, and if the good time had its unforeseen drawbacks, that was no ground for refusing to enjoy all the good there was. Mary was not the whole of the good time, but she was its center. He supposed he couldn’t—certainly he couldn’t; there were other things in life than a wife—concentrate indefinitely on Mary, but this world of the theater to which she belonged was so jolly, so strange to him, so unaccountably enthralling. He became expert in its politics and its gossip. He was obsessed by it through her who had never been obsessed. He was duped, as she had never been since Hugh Darley applied his corrective to her childish errors, by the terribly false perspective of the theater. He saw the theater, indeed, in terms of Mary; several times a week he sat through her scenes in a stall at the Galaxy, and when she scoffed at the idiotic pride he took in gleaning inside information, in knowing what so and so was going to do before the announcement appeared in the papers, and at being privileged to go to some dress-rehearsals, it was, he thought, only because she was used to it all while he came freshly to it. He might even find that a Samurai was needed in the theater. Would Mary like him to put up a play for her? He thought her reply hardly fair to the excellence of his intentions. But if she refused, incisively, to let him be a Samurai of the theater, she was troubled to see him continue his education of an initiate.

He was self-persuaded that his fussy loafing had importance, when it was, at most, a turbid retort to conscience. He was feeling his way, he was learning the ropes, he was meditating his plans, and there was no lack of flattering council offered to the husband of Mary Arden who was, besides, rich.=

````Big fleas have little fleas ````Upon their backs to bite ’em. ````These fleas have other fleas ````And so, ad infinitum.=

Morally, he was the little flea on Mary’s back, and he was collecting parasites on his own. Then William’s letter came, offering a clean cut from Staithley and an annihilating reply to his conscience.

He didn’t need Gertrude’s letter to show him exactly what William’s and William’s enclosure meant. He read clearly between the lines that William wobbled. “He’s on the fence,” he thought, “he doesn’t need a push to shove him over,—he needs a touch.” Then Rupert and William, acting together, must face a hostile Board of conservative Hepplestalls, and a nasty encounter he expected it to be. They wouldn’t spare words about his father’s son.

But that was a small price to pay for freedom; Rupert and William had the whip hand and the rest of the Hepplestalls could howl, they could—they would; he could hear them—shriek “Treachery” and “Blasphemy” at him, but it was only a case of keeping a stiff upper lip through an unpleasant quarter of an hour, and he was quit of the Service for ever. There would no longer be a Service.

That was a tremendous thought, breath-catching like—oh, like half a hundred things which had happened to him in France. Yes, that was the true perspective. The war had played the deuce with tradition, it had finished bigger things than the service of the Hepplestalls. They would have to see, these Hepplestalls, that he was a man of the new era, a realist, not to be bamboozled by their antique sentimentalities. If they wanted still to serve, it could be arranged, as part of the conditions of the purchase, that they should serve the incoming owner. He was disobliging nobody.

He looked up to find Mary studying his face. “Sorry, old thing,” he said, “but these are rather important. Letters from Staithley.”

“Staithley!”

“Yes. I expect you’d forgotten there is such a place. I haven’t spoken of it, but Staithley has been in my mind a good deal lately. I’ve found myself wondering if I was altogether right in giving it the go-by. I’ve wondered if I quite played the game.” It didn’t hurt to say these things now that the means to abolish the Service were in his hands; he could admit aloud to Mary what he hadn’t cared, before, to admit to himself. And he was too interested in his point of view to note the quick thankfulness in Mary’s face, and her joy at his confession. Complacently he went on, “That’s putting it too strongly, but... ancestors. It’s absurd, but I’ve been in the street and I’ve had the idea that one of those musty old fellows who are hung up on the walls in Hepplestall’s office was following me about, going to trip me up or knock me on the head or something. I’ve looked over my shoulder. I’ve jumped into a taxi. Nerves, of course, and you’d have thought my nerves were tough enough at this time of day. I’m telling you this so that you’ll rejoice with me in these letters. They’re the answer to it all. There’s no question about playing the game when the game’s no longer there to play.”

He gave her the letters. She hadn’t known how much she had continued to be hopeful of the Staithley idea, not for herself, not for a Bradshaw who might live in Staithley Hall, but for him; and his admission that Staithley had been in his mind was evidence that he knew occultly the root cause of his derangement. These letters, he told her, were the answer to it all, and they could be nothing but the call to Staithley, an ultimatum which he meant to obey, of which he had the charming grace to admit that he was glad. Indeed, indeed, she would rejoice with him. He was going to Staithley, to work, to be cured by work and the tonic air of the moors of the poison London had dropped into his system.

“This will finish off that old bogey,” he exulted and she exulted with him as she bent her eyes to read the letters. She read and saw with what disastrous optimism she had misunderstood. And he stood there aglow with happiness, expectant of her congratulations when this was not the beginning of new life but the death of hope! “Well?” he asked. “Well?”

“It does seem to depend on you,” she hedged.

“Uncle William would if he dared, eh? He’s as good as asking me to dare for him, and I’ll dare all right. I’ll wire that I’ll see him to-morrow afternoon. That’s soon enough. I’ll go by car. It’s a beastly railway journey.”

“Aren’t you deciding very quickly, Rupert?”

“I thought for a solid five minutes before I handed the letters across to you.” He was most indignant at her imputation of hastiness.

“I was watching you. Five minutes! Not long to give to the consideration of a death sentence.”

“A—what?”

“Staithley. Staithley Mills without the Hepplestalls!”

“Oh, they’ll survive it. This tiling’s a gift from God, and I’m not going to turn my back on the deity. It’s bad manners. Candidly, I’m surprised at you, Mary. You might be thinking there’s something to argue about. You might be sentimental for the Hepplestalls.”

“No,” she said. “For a Hepplestall. For you. Rupert, I’ll leave the stage to-morrow if you will go and do your work at Staithley.”

“Good Lord! Besides, aren’t you rather forgetting? Aren’t you forgetting you’re a Bradshaw?”

“It is quite safe to forget that. I’m Mary Arden. Nobody knows me. It’s too long since I was anything but that.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t do. Too risky altogether. Oh, never. Staithley’s the one place that’s absolutely barred.”

“Rupert, you’re making me responsible. You’re using me as your excuse.”

“Damn it, Mary, do you want us to live in Staithley?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sorry. We can’t. I do you the justice to tell you I’ve never found you a capricious woman before. But it’s plain that this is one of the times when a man has to put his foot down on... on sentimentality and all that sort of thing.”

“Your conscience was troubling you, Rupert.”

“It was, I’ve admitted it. And this letter is my quittance. It washes conscience out. It closes the account.”

“No. You’re still troubled.”

“I’ll be hanged! Do you keep my conscience?”

“I want us to go to Staithley, Rupert.”

“This time, I can’t give you what you want, Mary. I’m going to Staithley alone, for the purpose of cutting Staithley out of my life for ever. I’m sorry about your attitude. I’m completely fogged by it, but I’m not going to talk about it any more. This is the nearest we’ve ever come to quarreling and we’ll get no nearer. I’ll go along for the car now.”

“Just one moment first, though. You say you’re putting your foot down. I have a foot as well as you.”

“I adore your foot, Mary. If I were a sculptor—”

“Seriously, Rupert, I’m going to fight this. You’re doing wrong, you know you’re doing wrong—”

“Fight?” he said. “My dear Mary, perhaps you own half of Hepplestall’s shares? Now I’d an idea it was I.”

“Yes, it is you. It’s the man I love, and I won’t see you do this rotten thing and raise no hand to stop you.”

“There are two things that I deny. It isn’t rotten and you can’t stop me. So, won’t you just admit that you’re a woman and that you’re out of your depth? Let’s kiss and be friends.”

“When we’ve just declared war?” she smiled.

“Oh, that’s rubbish. You’ve no munitions, my dear.”

“I’ve love,” she said, “and love will find me weapons. Perhaps love won’t be particular what weapons it finds, either. If love finds poison-gas, you won’t forget there’s love behind the gas, will you? I want you to understand. You offered me something. You offered to put Mary Arden in a theater of her own. Well, it’s the dream of every actress and God knows it’s good enough for Mary Arden. To be in management, and in management where there’s lots of money to do exactly as I want!”

“And more money when this sale’s gone through,” he said eagerly.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s fine for Mary. It’s more than good enough for her. But it isn’t good enough for Mary’s Rupert. Don’t you see it? You must, you must. To be running an entertainment factory, when you might be running Hepplestall’s?”

“You know, you’re looking at the theater through the wrong end of the telescope, and at Hepplestall’s through the right. You haven’t a notion of the wonderful things I’d planned to do for you in the theater. You’ve never let me speak of them. And it isn’t running Hepplestall’s either. Not for a long time. If I just went up there and walked into the office as head of Hepplestall’s, there might be some sense in what you say, but I don’t do that. I go into the mills and spin and do all sorts of footling jobs for years. Years, I tell you,” he shouted and then it occurred to him that he was arguing and had said he would not argue. “The simple fact is that you don’t know what you’re talking about and that I do. We’ll let it rest at that, except that I’m now going for the car.”

“And except,” said Mary, “that I am fighting.”

“You darling,” he said contemptuously, and went out.

Advocacy has its perils for the advocate. In the heat of argument, she had felt confident of her weapon and now she doubted if it were a weapon or hers to use. In promising Rupert a fight she had Tom Bradshaw in mind; it had seemed to her that Labor had only to lift its voice in order to obtain anything it demanded, and wasn’t Tom member for Staithley? But now that Rupert had gone and she was able coolly to examine the weapon she proposed to enlist, she couldn’t imagine why she ever thought it would fight in her cause. Why should she, after so many years, have thought of Tom at all? He had nothing to thank her for; that much was certain, but she had instinctively thought of him as her true ally in her struggle for the soul of Rupert Hepplestall. So, though she saw no reason in it, she would carry out her intention, she would send for Tom Bradshaw. If he was nothing else, he was a Staithley man, and he was something else. He was a Bradshaw. So was she. That was reason enough to send for him.

Time was against her and she didn’t know how to set about finding his address, but the paper informed her—she didn’t as a rule take stock of the fact—that the House was sitting. A phrase caught her eye. “Labor members absented themselves from the debate.” Suppose he were absent to-day? She could only try. She wrote—

Dear Mr. Bradshaw:

I am writing in ease I do not find you at the House. I want to see you urgently. You may possibly have noticed that Sir Rupert Hepplestall married Mary Arden of the Galaxy Theatre. I enclose tickets for both this afternoon and to-night. I must see you, please. If I am on the stage when you come, have a look at me, but come round behind the moment I am off. They will bring you to me at once. Failing that, telephone me here. It is really important.

Yours sincerely,

Mary Hepplestall.

She meant to have written that Mary Arden was Mary Ellen Bradshaw, but she couldn’t resist, even in her anxiety, springing that surprise upon him when he heard her speaking the tongue of Staithley on the stage. He might know already, he might have seen the piece. She wasn’t unsophisticated enough to suppose that Labor members were any more austere in their recreations than other people, but Tom wasn’t likely to frequent musical comedy. He liked music.

She went to the theater for the tickets, enclosed them with her letter and took it to the House of Commons, where she was assured that Tom would certainly receive it during the day. That was comforting as far as it went, and what went further was that both policemen of whom she enquired in the precincts of the House addressed her as “Miss Arden.” There are people who do not gain confidence by finding themselves known to the police. Mary was helped just then to be reminded that she was famous.

She had conquered London; surely she could conquer Rupert Hepplestall.

Reading her letter, Tom couldn’t imagine what need she had of him in that galley, but the Coalition could coalesce without his opposition for an hour or two that afternoon, and he might as well go and see what was perturbing her play-acting Ladyship.

He followed instructions, went to the front of the house and asked Rossiter’s impressive attendant if Miss Arden was at that moment on the stage. “Mr. Bradshaw, Sir?” He was, and a surprised and flattered Mr. Bradshaw by the time the Galaxy staff had ushered him to his stall with the superlative deference shown to those about whom they had special instructions. He was not royalty, and he was not received by Mr. Rossiter, but he was Miss Arden’s guest and the technique of his welcome was based accurately on that of Hubert Rossiter receiving royalty.

As a Labor Member he ought, properly, to have scowled at flunkeydom; he ought to have bristled at the full house, at the sight of so many people idle in the afternoon; and he did neither of these reasonable things. He was in the Galaxy, and, besides, he was looking at the stage and on a bit of authentic Lancashire on the stage. “Yon wench is the reet stuff,” he thought, slipping mentally back into the vernacular. “By gum, she is.” She was remarkably the right stuff; if his ear went for anything, she was Staithley stuff. That must be why she seemed familiar to him as if he had met her, or somebody very like her. But he decided that he hadn’t met her; he had only met typical Lancashire women, and this was the sublimation of the type. She finished her scene and left the stage. An attendant was murmuring softly to him. Would he go round and see Miss Arden now?

Tom pulled himself together. A queer place, the theater, making a man forget so completely that he was there on business. It dawned upon him that this Lancashire witch he had gazed at with such absorbed appreciation was Mary Arden, Lady Hepplestall. “If she wants anything of me that’s mine to give, it’s hers for the asking,” he thought, as he followed his guide, still chuckling intimately at the racy flavor of her; no bad compliment to an actress who was thinking that day of anything but acting.

She awaited him in her room unchanged, in the clogs and shawl of the first act, which were not very different, except in cleanliness, from the clothes Mrs. Butterworth had burned.

“Well, Mr. Bradshaw,” she greeted him, “and who am I?”

“Who are you? Why, Lady Hepplestall.”

“You’ve seen me from the front, haven’t you? And you didn’t know me? I’m safer than I thought I was. Will it help you if I mention Walter Pate?”

It didn’t; he saw nothing in this splendid woman to take him back to the starveling waif whom Pate and he adopted or to the crude, if physically more developed, girl he had seen on one or two later occasions at Staithley. Mary relished his bewilderment: if Rupert made seriously the point against going to Staithley that she was Bradshaw, here was apt confirmation of her reply that nobody would know her. Tom Bradshaw saw her in clogs and shawl and did not know her. She hummed a bar or two of “Lead Kindly Light.”

“Mary Ellen!” he cried. “Yes, I ought to have seen it. But Lady Hepplestall to Mary Ellen Bradshaw. It’s a long way to look.”

“And you don’t much care to look? Not at that thankless girl who bolted.”

But she was Lady Hepplestall and she was the artist, yes, by God, the artist, who had gripped him magically five minutes ago. He could not see her as a Bradshaw. “You’ve traveled far since then,” he said ungrudgingly. “I’m proud I was in at the start.”

“I wrote to you,” she said, “because I wanted help. I don’t know why it came to me that you were the one person who could help and even when I wrote I saw no reason in it. No reason at all. Instinct, perhaps. We’re both Bradshaws, and he’s a Hepplestall, but I’m not pretending that I care about this thing except as it concerns my husband. I do think it concerns a lot of other people, but I don’t care for them. I don’t care if it’s good or bad for them, and this is just a matter between my husband and myself. You see how little reason I have to suppose that you’ll do anything.”

“The way you’re putting it is that I’m to interfere between man and wife. That’s a mug’s game. But you can go on. I’m here to hear.”

“If I knew that mine was just a war marriage, I think I’d kill myself. It isn’t yet, but he’s in danger, and he can be saved. It’ll save him if he’ll go to Staithley and take up his work.”

“Hasn’t he yet?”

“No: he’s killing time in London.”

He looked at her, wondering if he could accuse her of playing the Syren. If Mary Ellen piped, a man would dance to her tune and small blame to him either; but he couldn’t assume that she was holding Rupert in London when it was she who saw salvation for him in Staithley. If he had to take a side, he took hers so far as to say, “A work-shy Hepplestall is something new.”

“You’re thinking that it’s my fault,” she said. “You’re thinking of me that first time you met Mary Ellen. You’re thinking of her ‘’A ’ate th’ ’Epplestalls.’”

“I did think of it,” he admitted. “Then I thought again. He ought to be in Staithley.”

“And he’s on his way there now to sell Hepplestall’s.”

“What!” said Tom, rising to his feet, with his hand tugging at his collar as a flush, almost apoplectic, discolored his neck. “What! Sell Hepplestall’s!”

She told him of the letters. “And you thought it was no business of mine?” he said. “You saw no reason in sending for me? Instinct, eh! Well, thank God for instinct then. Sell Hepplestall’s! By God, they won’t. Who to? To a damned syndicate, that offers through a London accountant? Londoners! outsiders! Know-nothing grab-alls that have the same idea of Trades Unions as they have of Ireland. There’s been too much of this selling of Lancashire to pirates, and happen Labor’s been dull about it, and all. But Hepplestall’s. I didn’t think they’d go for Hepplestall’s. That’s big business, if you like; that’s swallowing the camel but they’re not to do it, Mary, and if you want to know who’ll stop them, I will.” He was racing up and down her room, not like a caged tiger which only paces, but like an angry man who tries to move his legs in time with rushing thought. “Ugh! you don’t know what you’ve done, letting this cat out of the bag. I’ll be careful for your sake, but I tell you I’m tempted to be careless. Would you like to know what they called me in the Times the other day? An Elder Statesman of the Labor Party. That means I’ve gone to sleep, with toothless jaws that couldn’t bite a millionaire if I caught his hand in my pocket. It means I’m a harmless fossil and you can bet your young life the bright lads of the advanced movement that think Tom Bradshaw lives by selling passes are on to that damned phrase. If I go down to Staithley and call the young crowd together and tell them this, I could blossom into an idol of the lads. They’re ready for any lead, but it ’ud let hell loose in Lancashire and I’ll not do it if I can find another way. I’ll be an elder statesman, but if the Hepplestalls don’t like my British statesmanship, by God, I’ll give ’em Russian. I’ll show them there’s to be an end of this buying and selling Labor like cattle.”

Mary sat overwhelmed by the spate she had provoked; she hadn’t dreamed that she would so strangely touch him on the raw, and he, too, sat, shaken, hiding his face in his hands on her dressing-table. Presently he looked up, and she saw that the storm had passed. “I’m an old fool,” he said, “ranting like a boy. But I’m upset. I didn’t think it of the Hepplestalls. This lad of yours... what would Sir Philip have thought of him?”

She was fighting Rupert, and Tom Bradshaw was the ally she had called to help her, but she was stung to seek defense for him. “Sir Philip did not go through the war, as Rupert did,” she said. “All that’s the matter with Rupert is that he is still—still rather demobilized.”

“Post-war,” groaned Tom. “I know. It’s the word for everything that’s deteriorated: but Hepplestall’s shan’t go post-war.”

She spoke of William, and, “Aye,” he agreed. “I know William. William’s weak—for a Hepplestall. Well, it’s those two then. Your spark and William. I think I can do it. Mary. They meet to-morrow, eh? Well, it won’t be the duet they think it will. It will be a trio and I’ll be singing to a tune of my own.”

“If,” said Mary, “it isn’t a quartette. I’m coming with you. It’ll make my understudy grateful, anyhow.”