1

The next morning Teresa dressed very carefully; she put on a lilac knitted gown, cut square and low at the neck, and a long necklace of jade.

She got down to breakfast to find Arnold, Jollypot, Rory, and Guy already settled.

Rory looked at her with unseeing eyes, and got her her tea and boiled egg with obviously perfunctory politeness.

He was clearly eager to get back to the conversation with Guy which she had interrupted by her arrival and needs.

“But you know, Guy, the only amusing relation we had was old Lionel Fane—he was a priceless old boy ... what was it he used to say again when he was introduced to a lady?”

“‘How d’ye do, how d’ye do, oh beautiful passionate body that never has ached with a heart!’ And then, do you remember how he used to turn down his sock and scratch his ankle, and then look round with a grin and say, ‘I don’t mean to be provocative.’ ...”

“He was priceless! And then....”

“For God’s sake stop talking about your beastly relations,” growled Arnold; but Guy went on, undaunted.

“But the person I should have liked to have been was my mother or yours when they were young—their portraits by Richmond hanging in the Academy with a special policeman and roped off from the crowd—and that in the days of the Jersey Lily, too! Oh, it would have been glorious to have been a beauty of the eighties.”

“Yes; but one might as well have gone the whole hog, you know—been the Prince of Wales’s mistress, and that sort of thing. Your mother, of course, didn’t make such a very bad match, but mine—a miserable younger son of a Scotch laird! I mean, I think they might have done a lot better for themselves.”

“Oh, Lord! Let’s start a conversation about our relations, Teresa. Edward Lane, now ...” said Arnold.

But he could not down the shrill scream of Guy, once more taking up the tale: “Well, they weren’t, of course, so cinemaish as the Sisters Gunning, for instance ... but still, it was all rather amusing ... and all these queer Victorian stunts they invented....”

“Kicking off their shoes in the middle of a reel, and that sort of thing? Uncle Jimmy says there was quite a little war in Dublin as to which was the belle of the Royal Hospital Ball, then afterwards, too, in Scotland at the Northern Meeting....”

“I should have liked to have seen them driving with Ouida in Florence—the Italians saying, bella, bella, when they passed them, and Ouida graciously bowing and taking it as a tribute to herself.”

“I know! And then they....”

Then Concha strolled in, and Rory immediately broke off his sentence, jumped up eagerly, and cried, “Grant and Cockburn, please—four buttons, lilac.”

“What’s all this about?” said Arnold.

“Oh! I bet her a pair of spats last night that I’d be down to breakfast before her. Tea or coffee? I say, I suddenly remembered in the middle of the night the name of that priceless book I was telling you about; it’s Strawberry Leaves, by A. Leaf—I’ll try to get it for you.”

Evidently the “angel Intimacy” had been very busy last night after Teresa had gone to bed.

Then the DoÑa appeared—to the surprise of her daughters, as she generally breakfasted in her room.

Her appearance was a protest. Dick had decided (most unnecessarily, she considered) to have a cold and a day in bed.

Her eye immediately fell on Teresa, and in a swift, humorous glance from top to toe she took in all the details of her toilette.

“Thank you very much, but I prefer helping myself,” she said curtly to Rory; his attentiveness seemed to her a direct reflection on Arnold, who never waited on any one. Nor did she encourage his attempts at conversation. “I have been telling Miss Concha....” “I do hope you’ll take me round the garden—I know all about that sort of thing, I do really.”

It was a superb day, and the sun was beating fiercely on the tightly-shut windows; the room smelt of sausages and bacon and tea and soap and hair-wash. Teresa felt that the sight of the pulpy eviscera of Arnold’s roll would soon make her sick.

“By the way, where’s the Scot?” said Concha. “Arnold, hadn’t you better go up and find him?”

A scuffling was heard behind the door, and in burst Anna and Jasper, having, in spite of Nanny, simply scrambled through their nursery breakfast, as thrilled as ’Snice himself by the smell of new people. Jasper was all wriggling and squeaking in his desire for attention; Anna, outwardly calmer, was wondering whether Rory had relations abroad, and whether they wrote to him, and what the stamps on the envelopes were like.

“Now then, gently, darlings, gently! Wait a minute; here you are, Jasper,” and the DoÑa held out to him a spoonful of honey.

“But where is our good Scot?” repeated Concha.

“The worst of going up to Cambridge is that one never goes down,” shouted Guy to Jollypot, for want of a better audience; whereupon, regardless of the fact that Guy was still talking, Jollypot began to repeat to herself in a low, emotional voice:

Jasper began to wriggle worse than ever, and, having first cast a furtive glance at his grandmother and aunts, said shrilly, “I dreamt of Mummie last night ... and she had ... she had ... such a funny nose....” and his voice tailed off in a little giggle, half proud, half guilty.

“Jasper!” exclaimed simultaneously the DoÑa, Teresa, Concha, and Anna, in tones of shocked reproval.

“Dear little man!” murmured Jollypot.

Shortly after her death, Jasper had genuinely dreamt that his mother was standing by his bed, and, on telling it next morning, had produced a most gratifying impression; but so often had he tried since to produce the same impression in the same way that to say he had “dreamt of Mummie” had become a recognised form of “naughtiness”; and, as one could attract attention by naughtiness as well as by pathos, he continued at intervals to announce that he had “dreamt of Mummie.”

“Concha, Teresa, Jollypot! We must hurry. The car will soon be here to take us to mass,” said the DoÑa.

Concha hesitated a moment—Teresa’s eye was on her—then said to herself, “I’ll not be downed by her,” and aloud, “I don’t think I’m coming this morning, DoÑa.”

The DoÑa raised her eyebrows; Teresa’s face was sphinx-like.

At that moment in walked David—looking a little embarrassed.

He gravely faced the friendly sallies; and then he said, with an evident effort:

“No; I didn’t sleep in, its ... I’ve been to early mass.”

“Walked?” exclaimed Arnold. “Lord!”

“Oh, Mr. Munroe, I’m so sorry!” cried the DoÑa, “you should have told me last night ... you see, I didn’t know you were a Catholic.”

“I bet you don’t know what ‘to sleep in’ means,” Rory whispered to Concha.

2

“Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Munroe was a Catholic?” said the DoÑa as she was putting on her things for mass.

“How could I have told you when I didn’t know myself?” answered Dick from his bed.

“Well, he is, anyhow ... and what we’re going to do with him to-day with you in bed ... it’s very odd, every time you invite any one down who isn’t your precious Hugh Mallam or one of your other cronies you seem to catch a cold. Poor Dick, you won’t be able to play golf to-morrow!” and with this parting thrust the DoÑa left the room.

But Dick was too comfortable to be more than momentarily ruffled.

There he lay: bathed, shaved, and wrapped in an old padded dressing-jacket of the DoÑa’s (sky-blue, embroidered in pink flowers), which he had surreptitiously rescued from a jumble sale, against his own colds.

At the foot of the bed snored ’Snice, at his elbow stood a siphon and a long glass into which four or five oranges had been squeezed, and before him lay a delicious day—no Church (“I say, Dick! That’s the treat that never palls!” Hugh Mallam used to say), an excellent luncheon brought up on a tray, then a sleep, then tea, then, say, a game of BÉzique with little Anna ... but the best thing of all that awaited him was a romance of the Secret Service.

He put on his eyeglasses and glanced through the headings of the chapters: Mr. ?; A Little Dinner at the Savoy; The Freckled Gentleman Takes a Hand; Double Bluff.

Yes; it promised well. It was always a good sign if the chapters took their headings from the language of Poker.

With a little sigh of content he began to read. Had he but known it, it was a most suitable exercise for a Sunday morning; for, in the true sense of the word, it was a profoundly religious book.

On and on he read.

The bedroom, unused to denizens at midday, seemed, in its exquisite orderliness, frozen into a sedate reserve. The tide of life had left it very clean and glistening and still: not a breath rustled the pink cretonne curtains; the autumn roses in a bowl on the dressing-table might have been made of alabaster; the ornaments on the mantelpiece stood shoulder to shoulder without a smile at their own incongruity—a small plaster cast of MontaÑes’ JesÙs del Gran Poder beside a green china pig with a slit in its back, which had once held the savings of the little Lanes; with an equal lack of self-consciousness, an enlarged photograph of Arnold straddling in the pads of a wicket-keeper hung on the wall beside an engraving in which the Virgin, poised in mid-air, was squeezing from her breast a stream of luminous milk into the mouth of a kneeling monk; and everywhere—from among the scent-bottles on the dressing-table, beside a chromograph of Cadiz on the wall—everywhere smiled the lovely face of Pepa.

’Snice stirred at his feet, and, laying down his book, Dick dragged his smooth, brown, unresisting length to the top of the bed.

A member of his Club, who was an eminent physician was always talking about the importance of “relaxing.” “Pity he can’t see ’Snice,” thought Dick, as he lifted one of the limp paws, then, letting go, watched it heavily flop down on to the counterpane. “’Snice! ’Snice!” he repeated to himself; and then began to chuckle, as, for the thousandth time, he realised the humour of the name.

“’Snice,” meaning “it’s nice,” had been the catch-word at the Pantomime one year; and Arnold or Concha or some one had decided that that was what Fritz, as he was then called, was constantly trying to say; so, in time, ’Snice had become his name.

Yes, they certainly were very amusing, his children; he very much enjoyed their jokes. But recently it had been borne in upon him that they did not care so very much about his. He often felt de trop in the billiard-room—his own billiard-room; especially when Arnold was at home.

He suddenly remembered how bored he and Hugh Mallam used to be by his own father’s jokes—or, rather, puns; and those quotations of his! Certain words or situations would produce automatically certain quotations; for instance, if his austere and ill-favoured wife or daughter revoked at Whist, it would be, “When lovely woman stoops to folly!” And, unfortunately, his partner’s surname was Hope; unfortunately, because every time one of them said, “Mr. Hope told me so,” it would be, “Hope told a flattering tale.”

But surely he, Dick, wasn’t as tedious as that? He rarely made a pun, and never a quotation; nevertheless, he did not seem to amuse his children.

Good Lord! He would be fifty-seven his next birthday—the age his father was when he died. It seemed incredible that he, “Little Dickie,” should be the age of his own father.

Damn them! Damn them! He didn’t feel old—and that was the only thing that mattered.

He stuck out his chin obstinately, put on his eyeglasses again, and, returning to his novel, was very soon identified, once more, with the hero, and hence—inviolate, immortal, taboo. Whether hiding in the bracken, or lurking, disguised, in low taverns of Berlin, what had he to fear? For how could revolvers, Delilahs, aeroplanes, all the cunning of Hell or the Wilhelm Strasse, prevail against one who is knit from the indestructible stuff of shadows and the dreams of a million generations? He belonged to that shadowy Brotherhood who, before Sir Walter had given them names and clothed them in flesh, had hunted the red deer, and followed green ladies, in the Borderland—not of England and Scotland, but of myth and poetry. As Hercules, he had fought the elements; as Mithras, he had hidden among the signs of the Zodiac; as Osiris, he had risen from the dead.

No; the hero of these romances cannot fall, for if he fell the stars would fall with him, the corn would not grow, the vines would wither, and the race of man would become extinct.

3

Rory Dundas, being a capricious young man, devoted himself, that morning, not to Concha, but to Anna and Jasper.

After he had been taken to scratch the backs of the pigs, and to eat plums in the orchard, Anna proposed a game of clock-golf.

“Are you coming to play?” they called out from the lawn to Concha, Arnold, and David, who were sitting in the loggia.

“No, we’re not!” called back Arnold.

Concha would have liked very much to have gone; first, because it seemed a pity to have incurred for nothing Teresa’s stare and the DoÑa’s raised eyebrows; second, because she had been finding it uphill work to keep Arnold civil, and David in the conversation. But her childhood’s habit of docility to Arnold had become automatic, so she sat on in the loggia.

“I think, maybe, I’ll go and try my hand ... they seem nice wee kiddies,” said David, and he got up, in his slow, deliberate way, and strolled off towards the party on the lawn.

“Kiddies!” exclaimed Arnold in a voice of disgust, when he was out of ear-shot. “The Scotch always seem to use the wrong slang.”

“You’re getting as fussy as Teresa,” laughed Concha.

“Oh, if it comes to that, she needn’t think she’s the only person with a sense of language. What’s the matter with her? Each time I come down she seems more damned superior. Who does she think she is? She’s reached the point of being dumb with superiorness, next she’ll go blind with it, then she’ll die of it,” and, frowning heavily, he began to fill his pipe.

His bitterness against Teresa dated from the days before the War when he used to write poetry. He had once read her some of his poems, and she, being younger and more brutal than she was now, had exclaimed, “But, Arnold, they’re absolutely dead! They’re decomposing with deadness.” He had never forgiven her.

“I suppose she gives you a pretty thin time, doesn’t she? She does hate you!”

Concha blushed. An unexpected trait in Concha was an inordinate vanity—the idea that any one, child, dog, boring old woman, could possibly dislike her was too humiliating to be admitted—and though one part of her was fully aware that she irritated, nay, jarred Æsthetically upon Teresa, the other part of her obstinately, angrily, denied it.

“I don’t care if she does ... besides she doesn’t ... really,” she said hotly.

She then chose a cigarette, placed it in a very long amber holder, lit it, and began to smoke it with an air of intense sensuous enjoyment. Concha was still half playing at being grown up, and one of the things about her that irritated Teresa was that she was apt to walk and talk, to pour out tea, and smoke cigarettes, like an English actress in a drawing-room play, never quite losing her “stagyness.”

“Do you know where the shoe pinches?” asked Arnold. “It’s that you are six years younger than she is; if it were less or more it would be all right—but six years is jolly hard to forgive. You see, Teresa is still nominally a girl. By Jove!” and he gave a short, scornful laugh, “there she is, probably telling herself that you get on her nerves because you’re frivolous, and like rag-time, and all the rest of it, while all the time she, the immaculate, is just suffering from suppressed sex, like any other spinster.”

This explanation definitely jarred on Concha: she, too, suspected Teresa of being jealous of her, but deep down she hoped that this jealousy was based on something less fortuitous and more flattering to herself than six years’ juniority; nor did she like being thought of as a mere frivolous “fox-trotter.” She had the tremendous pride of generation of the post-War adolescent; she and her friends she felt as a brilliant, insolent triumphant sodality, free, wise, invincible, who, having tasted of the fruit of the seven symbolic trees of Paradise, and having found their flavour insipid, had chosen, with their bold, rather weary eyes wide open, to expend their magnificent talents on fox-trots, revues, and dalliance, to turn life and its treacherous possibilities into a Platonic kermis—oh, it was maddening of Teresa not to see this, to persist in thinking of them as frivolous, commonplace, rather vulgar young mediocrities! She should just hear some of the midnight talks between Concha and her friend, Elfrida Penn ... the passion, the satire, the profundity!

As a matter of fact, these talks were mainly of young men, chiffons, the doings of their other schoolfellows, what their head mistress had said to them on such and such an occasion at school, with an occasional interjection of, “Oh, it’s all beastly!” or a wondering whether twenty years hence they would be very dull and stout, and whether they would still be friends.

But midnight talks are apt to acquire in retrospect a great profundity and significance.

Also, the crudeness of Arnold’s words—“suppressed sex, like any other spinster”—shocked her in spite of herself. Her old, child’s veneration for Teresa lived on side by side with her new conviction that she was passÉe, out-of-date, pre-War, and it made her wince that she should be explained by nasty, Freudian theories.

“Oh, Lord! I’m sick of it all!” she cried with exaggerated vehemence.

“Sick of what?”

“This.”

“I suppose it’s pretty difficult at home now?”

“Oh, well, you know it’s never been the same since Pepa died.”

This time it was Arnold that winced; he could not yet bear to hear Pepa mentioned.

“It’s made the DoÑa a fanatic,” Concha continued, “and she never was that before, you know. Who was it? Teresa, or some one, said that English ivy had grown round Peter’s rock, and birds had made their nest in it ... before. But now she’s absolutely rampantly Catholic ... you know, she wants to dedicate the house to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and have little squares of stuff embroidered with it nailed on all the doors....”

“Good Lord!”

“But, of course, Dad won’t hear of it.”

“Well, I don’t quite see what it’s got to do with him—if it makes her happier,” and his voice became suddenly aggressive.

“And she’d do anything on earth to prevent either of us marrying a Protestant ... after all, what do-o-oes it all matter? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

And Concha, who, for a few moments, had been completely natural, once more turned into an English actress in a drawing-room play.

“Um ... yes ...” said Arnold meditatively, sighing, and knocking out the ashes of his pipe.

“Hulloa!” she suddenly drawled, as a plump, grinning, round-faced, young man made his appearance on the loggia.

It was Eben Moore, son of the vicar and senior “snotty” on one of His Majesty’s ships.

As to his name—it was short for Ebenezer, which, as Mrs. Moore continually told one, “has always been a name in my husband’s family.... My husband, you know, is the youngest son of a youngest son,” she would add with a humorously wry smile, as if there was something at once glorious and regrettable in belonging to the Tribe of Benjamin.

His face perceptibly fell as he caught sight of the two personable men playing clock-golf on the lawn.

“Aow lor’! You didn’t tell me as what there was company,” he said, imitating the local accent.

“Good God!” muttered Arnold, who found Eben’s humour nauseating; and he slouched off to join Guy, who was writing letters in the billiard-room.

“Got it?” said Concha, stretching out her hand and looking at him through her eyelashes.

Eben giggled. “I say! It’s pretty hot stuff, you know.”

“E-e-eben! Don’t be a fool; hand it over.”

Eben, grinning from ear to ear, took a sealed envelope out of his pocket and gave it to her, and having opened it, she began to read its contents with little squirts of laughter.

From time immemorial, young ladies have had a fancy for exercising their calligraphy and taste in copying elegant extracts into an album; for instance, there is a Chinese novel, translated by an abbÉ of the eighteenth century, which tells of ladies who, all day long, sat in pagodas, copying passages from the classics in hands like the flight of a dragon. Harriet Smith, too, had an album into which she and Emma copied acrostics.

Concha owned to the same harmless weakness; though the extracts copied into her album could perhaps scarcely be qualified as “elegant”: there was, among other things, an unpublished play by W. S. Gilbert—(“What I love about our English humour—Punch, and W. S. Gilbert—is that it never has anything ... well, questionable,” Mrs. Moore would sometimes exclaim to the DoÑa), Wilke’s Essay on Woman, and Poor but Honest.

One day, Teresa, happening to come into Concha’s room, had caught sight of the album, and asked if she might look at it.

“Oh, do, by all means,” Concha had drawled, partly from defiance, partly from curiosity.

Impassively, Teresa had read it through; and then had said, “I’d advise you to ask Arnold the next time he’s in Cambridge to find you an old copy of Law’s Call to a Devout Life—that man in the market-place might have one—beautifully bound, if possible. Then take out the pages and bind this in the cover.”

Concha had done so; and if she had been as relentless an observer of Teresa as Teresa was of her, she might have detected in what had just transpired a touch on Teresa’s part of under-stated, nevertheless unmistakable, cabotinage.

The contents of the sealed envelope, which was causing her so much amusement, was a copy of the song, Clergymen’s Daughters that on his last leave she had persuaded Eben on his return to his ship to make for her from the gun-room collection, and which he had not on their previous meeting had an opportunity of giving her.

But she was not aware that there are three current versions of this song, corresponding to the X, the double X, and triple X on the labels of whisky bottles, and that it was only the double X strength that Eben had given her.

4

After luncheon most of them played Snooker, to the accompaniment of the gramophone, Anna and Jasper taking turns in changing the records.

Eben had hurt his hand, so he sat and talked to Teresa on the sofa.

It was a fact that had always both puzzled and annoyed her that he evidently enjoyed talking to her.

“Have you read Compton Mackenzie’s last?” he asked.

Why would every one persist in talking to her about books? And why did he not say, “the last Compton Mackenzie?” She decided that his diction had been influenced by frequenting his mother’s Women’s Institute and hearing continually of “little Ernest, Mrs. Brown’s second,” or “Mrs. Kett’s last.”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“I’ll lend it to you—I’m not sure if it’s as good as the others, though ... it’s funny, but I’m very fastidious about novels; the only thing I really care about is style—I’m a regular sensualist about fine English.”

“Are you? Perhaps you will like this, then—‘I remember Father Benson saying with his fascinating little stutter: He has such a g-g-gorgeously multitudinous mind’?”

Eben stared at her, quite at a loss as to what she was talking about.

“It sounds ... it sounds topping. What is it from?”

“I don’t quite remember.”

But it wasn’t fair, she decided. Because she happened to date from the feeling of flatness and disgust aroused in her by this sentence, read in a magazine years ago, the awakening in her of the power of distinguishing between literature and journalism, it did not follow that it was exceptionally frightful or that other people ought to react to it in the same way that she had. And yet, “gorgeous palaces,” “multitudinous, seas incarnadine”—the words themselves were beautiful enough in all conscience. Anyhow, it was not Eben’s fault; though “a regular sensualist for fine English....” Good God!

“Do you want Hee—hee—Heeweeine Melodies, or Way Down in Georgia, or Abide With Me? Arnold! Do you want Hee-wee-ween Melodies, or Way Down in Georgia, or Abide With Me? Do say!” yelled Anna from the gramophone.

“People are inclined to think that sailors don’t go in for reading, and that sort of thing, but as a matter of fact ... our Commander, for instance, has a topping library, and all really good books—history mostly.”

Rows upon rows of those volumes, the paper of which is so good, the margins so wide, but out of which, if opened, one of the illustrations is certain to fall—Lady Hamilton, or Ninon de l’Enclos, or Madame RÉcamier; now Teresa knew who read these books.

“Silly Billy! Silly Billy! Silly Billy!” yelled Anna and Jasper in chorus as Rory missed a straight pot on the blue; it was their way of expressing genuine friendliness to their playmate of the morning.

On and on went Eben’s voice; scratch, grate, scratch, grate, went the gramophone.

The light began to grow colder and thinner.

“Snookered for a pint!”

“Be a sportsman now....”

“I say!... he’s done it!”

“I say, you’re a devil of a fellow, Munroe!”

The game ended and they put up their cues.

“Now then, you two, what are you up to? Anna, you’re a hard-hearted little thing; why aren’t you crying that I didn’t win?”

At which sally of Rory’s the children doubled up with delighted laughter.

They all seemed to be feeling the tedium of the period between luncheon and tea, and lolled listlessly in chairs, or sat on the edge of the billiard-table, swinging their legs.

“Anna, darling, put on one of the Hawaiian melodies—it’s among those there, I’m sure,” said Concha.

After several false starts, and some scratchings of the needle (it was Jasper’s turn to put on the record), the hot-scented tune began to pervade the room.

“That’s the sort of tune that on hot nights must have been played to Oberon by his little Indian catamite,” said Guy, sitting down on the sofa beside Teresa.

She smiled a little absently; the Hawaiian melody was like a frame, binding the room and its inmates into a picture. Concha, her eyes fixed and dreamy; Rory, intent on a puzzle—shaking little rolling pellets into holes or something; Arnold sitting on the edge of the billiard-table while Anna lit his pipe for him; Jasper motionless, for once, his eyes fixed intently on the needle of the gramophone; David standing by the door gazing gravely at Concha, looking not unlike a Spanish Knight who carries in his own veins more than a drop of the Moorish blood that it is his holy mission to spill; Eben standing by the fireplace, a broad grin on his face, his hands on his hips, swaying slightly, in time with the music ... what was it he was like? Teresa suddenly remembered that it was the principal boy in a little local pantomime they had all gone to one Christmas—she evidently could not sing, because during the choruses she would stand silent, grinning and swaying as Eben was doing now.

The view was painted on the windows—a pietÀ as nobly coloured as that of Avignon; for, in spite of flowers and fruits and sunshine, on the knees of the earth the year lay dying.

Teresa was thinking, “The present frozen into the past—that is art. At this moment things are looking as if they were the past. That is why I am feeling as if I were having an adventure—because the present and the past have become one.”

Squeak! Burr! Gurr! went the gramophone.

“Stop it, Jasper! Stop it!”

“Beastly noise! It reminds me of the dentist.”

The record was removed.

“TrÈs entraÎnant—as the deaf bourgeoise said after having listened to the Dead March in Saul,” said Guy; he had suddenly invented this Sam Wellerism in the middle of the tune, and had hardly been able to wait till the end to come out with it.

Then Anna put on a fox-trot, and Rory and Concha, Arnold and Guy, in the narrow space between the billiard-table and gramophone, hopped and wriggled and jumped—one could not call it dancing.

“Now then, Munroe,” cried Rory, when it was over, “You’re such hot stuff at billiards—let’s see what you can do on the light fantastic.”

“Yes, do, Mr. Munroe,” and Concha stood swaying before him, flushed and provocative.

“I’m afraid ... I don’t ... well, if you’ve got a tango here ... I used to try my hand at it in Africa.”

“Let’s see ... put on the Tango de RÊve, Anna. Got it?”

David hesitated a moment; then, as if coming to a sudden resolution, he clasped her, and stood waiting for the bar to end; then they began to dance, and their souls seemed to leave their bodies, leaving them empty to the tune, which gradually informed them till they and it were one; a few short steps, then a breathless halt, a few more steps, another halt ... then letting themselves go a little, then another halt; their faces tense and mask-like ... truly a strange dance, the Tango, speaking the broken, taciturn, language of passion:

Grrr ... went the gramophone—the spell was snapt.

“Bravo!” cried the audience, clapping; while ’Snice began to bark, and the children to jump up and down and squeal.

“You dance divinely!” cried Concha, flushed and laughing.

David blushed, frowned, muttered something inaudible, and left the room.

They exchanged looks of surprise.

“Hot stuff!” said Rory; and they settled down to desultory, frivolous, Anglo-Saxon chatter—not unlike fox-trots, thought Teresa.

She shut her eyes, half mesmerised by the din of all the voices talking together.

The talk, like a flight of birds, squeezed itself out into a long thin line, compressed itself into a compact phalanx, was now diagonal, now round, now square, now all three at once, according to the relative position of the talkers.

“Don’t you love Owen Nares? I love his English so—I love the way he says, ‘I’m so jolly glad to meet you.’” “I knew Middlesex would be first—it was only poetic justice to Plum Warner.” “I don’t care a damn what the Nation or what the New Statesman says—I happen to know....” “Of course, with Jimmy Wilde it’s all grit and science—he ought to do him in every time.” “Is it true that Leslie Henson wears spectacles off the stage?” “How much do you think I gave for it? Thirty bob. A jeweller I showed it to in town said it was the very finest Baltic amber—you see, I got it out there.” “I know! My cousin, Guy’s brother, when he was going out to Tin-Sin thought it would be nice to brighten up China, so he took out an assortment of the merriest socks you ever saw in your life, and when he was killed my aunt handed them over to me, and I had ’em dyed black....” “Very nayce, too!” “What are you saying about socks? I wish to God some one would mend mine!” “Well, I got a bit of amber in an old shop in Norwich....” “He’s a priceless little man ... he came out and amused us at the front.”

“Tea time!” said Arnold, looking at his watch and yawning.

“Tea time!” the others echoed; and they all got up.

“But look here, Miss Concha,” said Rory, “if you love Owen Nares so much, why not come up and see him? It’s quite a good show ... you’ll look at him and I’ll look at the lady—though you’ll probably have the best of it. What do you think, Arnold? We could dine first at the Berkeley or somewhere ... well, look here, that’s settled; we must fix up a night.”

Teresa felt a sudden and, to her, most unusual craving for the life that smells of lip-salve and powder, where in bright, noisy restaurants “every shepherd tells his tale ...” where “the beautiful Miss Brabazons” laugh and dance and triumph eternally.

5

After tea they decided to go a walk, and escort Eben part of his way home—a delightful plan, it seemed to Anna, Jasper, and ’Snice; but to Anna and Jasper the DoÑa said firmly, “No, my darlings; I want you.”

Their faces fell; they knew it meant what Nanny, who was a Protestant, called “a Bible lesson from kind Granny.”

Needless to say, the fact that these lessons were opposed to the wishes—nay, to the express command—of Dr. Sinclair, was powerless in deterring the DoÑa from attempting to save her grandchildren’s souls; and, even if she failed in the attempt, they should at any rate not be found in the condition of criminal ignorance of the children of one of Pepa’s friends who had asked why there were always “big plus-signs” on the tops of churches.

The DoÑa was not merely a Catholic; she was also a Christian—that is to say, though she did not always follow his precepts, she had an intense personal love of Christ.

Besides the shadowy figure struggling towards “projection” through the ritual of the Church’s year, there are more concrete representations on which the Catholic can feed his longings.

The DoÑa’s love of Christ dated from the first Seville Holy Week that she could remember.

She had sat with her mother and her little brother, Juanito, watching the pasos carried past on the shoulders of the cofradias ... many a beautiful Virgin, velvet-clad, pearl-hung, like Isabella the Catholic. Then had come a group of more than life-sized figures—a young, bearded man, his face as white as death and flecked with blood, the veins of his hands as knotted as the cords that bound them, surrounded by half a dozen fiendish-looking men, fists clenched as if about to strike him, some clutching stones in their upraised hands, all with faces contorted with hatred.

“Look! Look! Who are these wicked men?” cried Juanito.

“These are the Jews,” answered their mother.

“And who is the poor man?” asked the DoÑa.

“JÉsus Christos.”

Juanito, his little fists clenched, was all for flying at the plaster bullies; but the DoÑa was howling for pity of the pobre caballero.

Then, at Christmas time in every church there was a crÈche in which lay the Infant Jesus, his small, waxen hands stretched out in welcome, his face angelically sweet.

Also; at different times, for instance, when the Gospel was read in Spanish, during her preparation for her first Communion, the abstract presentation of the Liturgy had been supplemented with stories from His life on earth, and quotations from His own words.

Indeed, the sources and nature of the DoÑa’s knowledge of Jesus was not unlike that of some old peasant woman of Palestine. The old woman, say, would, from time to time, ride into Nazareth on her donkey, carrying a basket of grapes and olives to sell in the market: and perhaps, if the basket should have fallen and scattered the fruit, or if she had a pitcher to fill at the fountain, she may have received a helping hand or a kindly word from the gentlest and strangest-spoken young man that had ever crossed her path.

Then one day she may have paid her first visit to Jerusalem—perhaps a lawsuit over a boundary taking her there, or the need to present her orphaned grandchild in the Temple—and have seen this same young man led through the streets, bound with cords, while the populace shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and have returned to her remote little farm with an ache in her heart.

And, as the years would go by, from the tales of wayfarers, from rumours blown from afar, she might come to believe that somehow or other the young man had died for the poor—for her; had died and risen again. And gradually, as with the years his legend grew, she would come to look upon him as a fairy-being, akin to the old sanctities of the countryside, swelling her grapes, plumping her olives, and keeping away locusts and blight. But, towards the end of her life, business may have taken her again to Nazareth, where, hearing that the young man’s mother was still alive, something may have compelled her to go and visit her. And in the little room behind the carpenter’s shop, where the other sons and grandsons were planing and sawing, and singing to ancient melodies of the desert songs of plenty and vengeance and the Messiah, the two old women would talk together in hushed tones of Him who so many years ago had been crucified and buried. And through the mother’s anecdotes of His childhood and tearful encomiums, “He was ever a good kind son to me,”—the fairy-being would once more become human and ponderable—the gentlest young man that had ever crossed her path.

So far, the DoÑa had not been very successful in bringing Anna and Jasper to their Lord.

For instance, when she had told them the story of Christ among the doctors, Anna had merely remarked coldly and reprovingly, “He must have been a very goody-goody, grown-uppish sort of boy.”

This particular evening the DoÑa had decided to consecrate to an exegesis of the doctrine of Transsubstantiation.

When the DoÑa said that at a certain point of the mass the bread turned to the actual flesh and blood and bones of Jesus, Anna’s face assumed an expression of dogged scepticism, and having decided that she must ask Teresa about it, continued her own thoughts: Mamselle, who gave her French lessons in Cambridge, had fired her imagination with accounts of the bouktis they used to have in the Surbiton family where she was once governess—“vraiment, c’Était passionant; je me demande pourquoi Dr. Sinclair n’organise pas des bouktis À TrinitÉ—Ça serait trÈs amusant pour les jeunes gens....” It was a good idea! All the people with buried names of books, and having to guess. Oh, yes!... one could go with a lot of little lambs’ tails sewed on one’s frock ... yes, but how was one going to get in the “of Shakespeare”.... Of course ... what a goose she was not to have realised it before ... bouktis was Mamselle’s way of saying “book-teas” ... that’s what the parties were called—“book-teas.”

Thus Anna; as to Jasper—if one could reduce the instantaneous and fantastic picture produced on his mind to a definite consecutive statement, it would read something like this: By the powerful spells of a clergyman, who was also a magician, pieces of bread were turned into tiny men—long-robed, bearded, and wearing golden straw hats of which nothing but the brim could be seen from in front. Then the clergyman distributed to every one at the party one of the tiny men, to be their very own. They each, forthwith, swallowed their tiny man, and he made himself a little nest in their stomachs, whence he could be summoned to be played with whenever they liked.

He began jumping up and down, his body trembling like that of an excited terrier.

“Oh, I want, I want, I want some of that bread,” he cried. “Oh, when can I have it, DoÑa? Oh, I can’t wait!”

Needless to say, the DoÑa was not in the least taken in—she did not take it for a sign of Grace, nor did it seem to her in the least touching; but she knew it would strike Jollypot as being both, and the picture she foresaw that the incident would produce on her—that of the innocent little pagan calling aloud to God for the spiritual food that was his birthright—was one that the DoÑa felt would be both soothing, and expressive of the way in which she would have liked the incident to have appeared to herself.

A perfect household of slaves would include a sentimentalist and a cynic by means of whom the lord, whatever his own temperament, could express vicariously whatever interpretation of events was the one that harmonised with his plans or mood of the moment.

It was as she expected; Jollypot’s eyes filled with tears, and she murmured, “Poor little man! poor little man!”

And she was long haunted by the starving cry of the innocent, “I want that bread! I want that bread!”

6

The walkers set out in the direction of the view, strolling in a bunch down the grass path between the border.

“You know, I don’t really like these herbaceous things—they aren’t tame. I like flowers you can make a pet of, roses and violets and that sort of thing,” said Rory, looking towards Teresa.

She did not meet his eye, feeling in no mood to feed his vanity by sympathising with his fancies.

From the village to their right rang out the chimes for evensong.

“Would Mrs. Moore mind if you missed church, Eben?” asked Concha.

“She would be grieved,” grinned Eben. “You see, Lady Norton wasn’t there this morning, but she always comes in the evening, and the mater wants her to see my manly beauty.”

This remark, thought Teresa, showed a certain acuteness and humour; but all Concha’s contemporaries seemed to have these qualities, and yet, it meant so little, existed side by side with such an absence of serious emotion, such an ignoring of intellectual beauty, such a—such a—such an un-Platonic turn of mind. Probably every one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—country parsons, grocers’ apprentices, aldermen, fine ladies—had only to take up a goose’s quill and write as they talked to produce the most exquisite prose: witness the translation of the Bible by a body of obscure, and (considering the fatuity of some of their mistranslations) half-witted, old divines. Perhaps the collective consciousness of humanity was silently capturing, one after the other, the outposts of the intelligence, so that some day we should all share in a flat and savourless communism of apprehension.

But then the English, as a whole, had lost the power of writing automatically fine prose ... oh, it was not worth bothering about!

When they got out of the grounds of Plasencia, they broke up into couples and trios—Rory moving to one side of Concha, David, his back looking rather dogged, to the other. Arnold had forgotten his distaste for Eben in a heated discussion of the battle of Jutland. Teresa found herself walking with Guy.

To the right lay a field of stubble, ruddled with poppies, and to the right of that a little belt of trees. Teresa had long noticed how in autumn scarlet is the oriflamme of the spectrum; for round it the other colours rally at their gayest and most gallant. For instance, the dull red roofs of the cluster of barns to the right glowed like rubies, if one’s glance, before resting on them, travelled through the poppy-shot stubble; and, following the same route, her eye could detect autumnal tints in the belt of trees, which otherwise would have been imperceptible.

“How lovely poppies would be if they weren’t so ubiquitous,” said Guy. “I always think of poppies when I see all the Renoirs in the Rue de la BoÉtie in Paris—every second shop’s a picture dealer, and they all have at least two Renoirs in their window—dreams of beauty if there weren’t so many of ’em. And yet, I don’t know—that very exuberance, the feeling of an exquisite, delicate, yet unexigeant flower springing up in profusion in the lightest and poorest soil may be a quality of their charm.”

Teresa said nothing; but her brows slightly contracted.

Now they were walking past one of the few fields of barley that were still standing—all creamy and steaming ... oh, dear, that simile of Guy’s, in one of his poems, between a field of barley and a great bowl of some American patent cereal on a poster ... at any moment there might appear on the sky the gigantic, grinning face of the cereal-fiend, whose sole function was to grin with anticipative greed, and brandish a spoon on the point of being dipped into the foaming, smoking brew ... disgusting; and maddening that it should cling to her memory.

“Well, I suppose long ago the Danes and Saxons fought battles here; and the buried hatchet has turned the wild flowers red ... or does iron in the soil turn flowers blue?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Teresa coldly.

They walked on in silence for a few minutes.

“My wife and I ... fell out ... how does it go?”

“Not like that, Guy,” said Teresa, with a short laugh.

Guy blushed to the roots of his yellow hair; he had a secret handicap of which he was horribly ashamed—practically no ear for rhythm; and it was partly the lameness of his verses that had made him fall back on a poetry that had neither rhyme nor rhythm.

When he was absent from Teresa—even during a few hours—his idea of her would undergo a swift change; though remaining aloof, she would turn into a wonderfully sympathetic lady—remote, but not inaccessible; a lady eminently suited to moving gracefully among the Chippendale, coloured prints, and Queen Anne lacquer of his dining-room in St. James’s Street; quite at home, also, among the art nÈgre and modern French pictures of his drawing-room; receiving his mots with a whimsically affectionate smile; in society bringing out all that was most brilliant in him—existing, in short, merely for his own greater glory.

It took a very short absence from her—for instance, the interval between dinner and breakfast the next morning—for this idea of her to oust completely the real one. Then he would see her again, and would again be bruised and chilled by the haughty coldness masked by her low, gentle voice, her many silences; and the idea would be shattered; to come together again the minute he was out of her presence.

“Of course! You would be incapable of appreciating Tennyson,” he said angrily.

“Why? Because I venture to hint that your version doesn’t scan?”

“Oh, it’s not only that,” he almost screamed; “it’s really because you think it’s sentimental to quote Tennyson. Can’t you see that simple, trite words like these are the only ones suited to expressing the threadbare yet exquisite emotion that one feels when one walks through autumn fields on Sunday evening?”

“Yes; but why not make those simple, trite words scan?... and look here, Guy,” she added with unusual heat, “it seems to me perfectly absurd to admire Tennyson and crab Wordsworth. It makes one wonder if any of your literary tastes are sincere. Everything you dislike in Wordsworth is in Tennyson too—only in Tennyson the prosaicness and flatness, though it may be better expressed, is infinitely more ignoble. I simply don’t understand this attitude to Wordsworth—it makes me think that all you care about is verbal dexterity. I don’t believe you know what real poetry means.”

Poor Guy! How could he know that her irritation had really nothing to do with his attitude to Wordsworth, that, in fact, he and his poetics were merely a scapegoat?

Shattered and sick at heart, he felt that his fears of the previous evening about Oscar Wilde and brilliance had been ruthlessly confirmed.

She looked at him; he actually had tears in his eyes.

“I ... I seem to have lost my temper,” she said apologetically, “but it was only ... I’ve got rather a headache, as a matter of fact, and what you said yesterday about Wordsworth has rankled—he’s my favourite poet. And you know I belong in taste to an older generation; I simply don’t understand modern things. But, as a matter of fact, I often like your poetry very much.”

This mollified him for the moment.

“I say!” he exclaimed suddenly, walking more quickly, “other people seem to be quarrelling.”

Sure enough: the trio ahead was standing still; Concha’s lips were twitching and she was looking self-conscious; Rory’s eyebrows were arched in surprise; and David, glowering and thunderous, was standing with clenched fists. As Teresa and Guy came up to them he was saying fiercely: “... and I’m just sick to death of lairds and that ... and if you want to know, I’m heir-apparent to Munroe of Auchenballoch,” and he laughed angrily.

“You’re a lucky chap then ... Auchenballoch is a very fine place,” said Rory in an even voice.

“What’s up?” said Guy.

“I seem to have annoyed Mr. Munroe, quite unintentionally,” answered Rory.

Slowly, painfully, David blushed under his dark skin.

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured.

Teresa felt a sudden wave of intense sympathy for David, and of equally intense annoyance against Rory; he had, doubtless, been again babbling about his relations—“old Lionel Fane,” “the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” and the rest of them—that was boring enough, in all conscience; but if, as was probably the case, David had been left pointedly out of the conversation, it would become, into the bargain, insulting.

And under his easy manners, Rory was so maddeningly patronising—especially to David, with his, “I say! Dashing fellah!” and, “Now then, Munroe, let’s see what you can do.” But ... it was possible that David’s irritation was primarily caused by far more vital things. ’Snice there, lying on his back, his tongue lolling out, his eyes glassy, completely unconscious of the emotional storm raging above him, would probably, if they could have been translated into his own language, have understood David’s feelings better than Teresa and sympathised with them warmly.

“I’m rather tired—do take me home, Mr. Munroe,” said Teresa.

He looked at her gratefully.

For some minutes they walked in silence, both embarrassed, Teresa turning over in her mind possible conversational openings. “You have been in South Africa, haven’t you?” “Do you play golf?”

But she could not get them out.

What she said finally was, “What did you mean exactly last night when you said to my mother that in times like the War one sees the star?”

“I mean the Star of Bethlehem—they’re seasons of Epiphany,” he answered.

“But how do you mean exactly?”

“Just that ... the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” He said the words slowly, with gusto, as if to him they had not yet become threadbare. “There were a lot of chaps converted to Catholicism during the War,” he went on.

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

He paused, and again they were silent. Then he said, “I was brought up a Presbyterian, but I was never interested in that, I didn’t think of religion at all. But during the War there were several chaps that were Catholics in my regiment, and I used sometimes to go to mass with them, or benediction, because it was quieter in there than anywhere else. Then their padre began talking to me, and I saw that once you had taken the plunge it was all shipshape and logical. But the plunge was the thing—that seemed to me to take a lot of nerve and faith.”

Again he paused, then went on in a lower voice, “Well, it was a wee church, very old, in a village behind the lines, and one day mass was being celebrated there, and just after the Consecration the gas gong and klaxons sounded—that meant we had all to retire in double quick time behind the gas zone. The priest wrapped up the Host in the corporals and hurried off with the rest of us. When the scare was over and he went back to the church—the corporals were soaked in blood.”

The last words were said scarcely above a whisper.

Well, there was no Protestant nonsense here; this was the Holy Mother herself in all her crudity.

Teresa had not the slightest idea what to say; and decided that she had better say nothing at all.

Yes, but it was not the bleeding corporals, really, that had done it. She remembered a curious experience she had once had when waiting to be fetched home in the car by her father from some Chelsea lodgings where she had been spending a fortnight. Her box was packed, she was all ready dressed for the drive; she had nothing to do but to wait in a little valley sheltered from Time, out of the beat of the Recording Angel, her old activities switched off, her new activities not yet switched on. Then the practical relation between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped, and she looked at it with new eyes—the old basket-chair, the horse-hair sofa, the little table on which was an aspidistra in a pot—they were now merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such, startlingly significant. For the first time she was looking at them Æsthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a mystical experience. The Beatific Vision ... may it not be this Æsthetic vision turned on spiritual formula? A shabby threadbare creed suddenly seen as something simple, solid, monumental? Tolstoy must have been reared on the Gospels; but suddenly when he was already middle-aged he thought he had made a discovery which would revolutionise the world; and this was that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was merely that he had, so to speak for the first time seen the chairs and tables Æsthetically. Yes ... heliacal periods, when the star becomes visible. Mr. Munroe had said that he had never before thought about religion at all; and it was a mere chance that the room in which he first saw the tables and chairs should be hung with crucifixes and Catholic prints.

The bells had stopped ringing for evensong, the sun was very near setting. Caroline, the donkey, gave tongue from the paddock of Plasencia—a long, drawn-out wail prefacing a series of ee-aws.

“That means rain,” said David.

“Caroline sings nothing but Handel,” said Teresa, “a long recitative before the aria.”

For a few seconds David looked puzzled, and then threw back his head, and, for the first time since he had been at Plasencia, laughed aloud.

“That’s offly good,” he cried.

But Caroline was not the only singer of Handel. As they crossed the lawn, Jollypot could be heard singing to the cottage piano in the old schoolroom, For He shall feed His flock like a Shepherd.

Among the many traces of Protestantism that had clung to her was a craving for hymns at dusk on Sundays; but being debarred from Hymns Ancient and Modern she had to fall back upon Handel.

And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd.

Her small, sweet voice, like the silver hammer of a gnome, beat out the words of the prophet, to which Handel’s sturdy melody—so square, so steady on its feet—lent an almost insolent confidence.

And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd....

“Is that—is that the wee lady?” asked David, gently.

Teresa nodded.

They stood still and listened; Teresa was smiling, a little sadly: the old optimists, Isaiah and Handel, had certainly succeeded in cozening Jollypot’s papa; for on a living worth £200 a year and no private means he had begotten seven daughters. Nevertheless, the little voice went on unfalteringly.

And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd.

David glanced at the slim, graceful young woman standing beside him, looking gentler than she usually did, but still very remote.

She, and Jollypot’s singing, and the scent of roses, and the great stretch behind them of Sabbath-hushed English fields, brought back, somehow or other, one of the emotions of his boyhood. Not being introspective, he had never analysed it, but he knew that it was somehow connected with a vague dissatisfaction with his lot, and with a yearning for the “gentry,” and hence, because when he was a boy he thought they were the same thing, a yearning also for the English. He remembered how badly he had had it one Sunday morning when he had played truant from the service in his father’s church, and had slunk into the “wee Episcopalian chapel” in the grounds of the laird. The castle had been let that summer to an English judge and his family, and the judge’s “high-English” voice, monotonous, refined, reading the lessons in a sort of chant, pronouncing when as wen, and poor as paw, had thrilled him as the dramatic reading of his father had never done. Then some years later he had slipped into evensong, and the glossy netted “bun” at the nape of the neck of Miss Stewart (the laird’s daughter), and her graceful genuflections at the name of Jesus had thrilled him in the same way. Finally the emotion had crystallised into dreams of a tall, kind, exquisitely tidy lady, with a “high-English” voice and a rippling laugh, sitting in a tent during the whole of a June afternoon scoring at the English game of cricket ... or at a school treat, standing tall and smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of her twin pillar, warbling:

while under the roof of arms scampered the hot, excited children.

Anyway, it was an emotion that gave him a strange, sweet nausea.

As to Teresa; as if her mind had caught a reflection from his, she was pondering the line:

Wordsworth mourned it as a thing of the past; but had it ever been? Did Jollypot possess it? Who could say. Certainly none of the rest of them did.

7

David left early the next morning. Evidently from him, too, Concha had received an invitation to a dinner and a play, for as they said good-bye she said, “Well then, Thursday, 16th, at the Savoy—it will be divine.”

Rory did not leave till after tea.

Teresa’s offer of sleeping, owing to the shortage of rooms, in her father’s dressing-room during the week-end, had been accepted, and Rory had been put into her bedroom; when she went up to dress for dinner on Monday night she had noticed, on going near the bed, a smell which seemed familiar. Suddenly she realised that it was the smell of Rory’s hair-wash—the housemaid had actually forgotten to change the sheets.

Teresa had flushed, and her heart had begun to beat in an odd, fluttering way; but she went down to dinner without ringing for the housemaid.

When she came up for the night the smell was still there. She undressed, and stood for some seconds by the bed, her eyes shut, her hands clenched; and then, blushing crimson, all over her face and neck, and, flinging on her dressing-gown, driven by some strange instinct, she flew to Concha’s room.

Concha’s light was out. She walked up to the bed and gently shaking her said, “Concha! Concha! May I sleep with you? They’ve forgotten to change the sheets on my bed.”

“Sheets? What sheets?” said Concha in a sleepy voice.

“In my room ... you know Captain Dundas has been sleeping there.”

“Poor darling, how filthy! Get in,” and Concha, so as to leave room for her, rolled over to one side.

?? s???e??? t?? de????, close physical kinship is a mysterious thing; for, however much they may think they dislike each other, it nearly always entails what can only be called a bodily affection between the members it unites.

For instance, since Pepa’s death, Concha’s was the only plate Teresa would not have shrunk from eating off, Concha’s the only clothes she would not have shrunk from wearing.

That night they fell asleep holding each other’s hands.