## CHAPTER I.

1.

### Manchester.

Ernest looked up from the label he had written to see
in his imagination a model city made of cotton reels. He
had never been there. He knew nothing about it. The
first association that came into his mind was a story heard
in childhood that between the washtub and the window, soot
turned the white curtains black.

For the first time in years, he wondered what to pack.
There was no need to hide soap in shoes, or to crumple up new
socks. He was a free born British citizen about to visit
the second capital of his country and there were neither
customs to consider nor the possibility of alien eyes staring
into his suitcase. He did not even need a passport. Only
he could still see the incredulous eye of Miss Tiptaft,
"I am so glad sir, to hear that you are taking a holiday at
last but do tell me where are you going?" and her shocked
face when he had mumbled Manchester, hoping she would think
he meant Margate. He knew that she thought he was making
fun of her; people teased her frequently.

### Life was often very difficult.

The north was black and cold and possible, Norwegian.
He packed a box of typing paper and over it, his thickest
vests. That at least was a slogan he could believe in,

(at least in England) always wear woollens next the skin.
He was just measuring some machine oil for the typewriter
into a tiny bottle when the telephone bell rang.

"I'm just leaving, Edward," he recognised his friend's
voice, "I am going away for a week."

"But you can spare a minute," Edward was evidently
worried, "you know how I hate meddling with anyone's private
affairs, but before you leave, do seal up the leak in your
office."

"The leak in my office? But it was all right when I
left. I had the roof mended only last week. It's these
incompetent workmen...."

"I don't mean the roof. I mean the staff."

"I may have definite political opinions but I never
hang out flags, it's far too risky."

"Don't be purposely stupid. Your clerk has been talking
far more than she should."

"Can I help it if Miss Tiptaft will read the popular
press? She is always getting scared about something. Only
the other day she told me that Russia wanted a trade agreement
with us in order to buy up black shirts cheaply. It is quite
useless trying to make her class conscious."

"I'm not thinking about her politics. And you know that
I dislike speaking of important matters on the telephone."

3.

But we have been friends long enough, I hope, for you to
realise that I should not have called up without due grounds
for my assertion," the voice paused ominously. "I heard to-
day in the City about Manchester."

"What? What did you hear? I am just going there.
Is there a strike on or an epidemic?"

"You need not deny it. I know about it..."

"About what?"

"Well, about your being there with Pryce."

"But I haven't been in Manchester. I'm just going.
And I didn't know Pryce was there. Where is he? After all,
he never acknowledged my pamphlet. I shall look him up and
ask him if he liked it."

"Whether you deny it or not, Ernest, think what it means
to the City. They know that Pryce is up there about one of
those wild deals of his and you are going to meet him just
one week after that absurd article of yours is printed on air-
liners for all. It can only mean that the rumour about a new
line being started is correct. Unless you want your secret
blue prints given away, you had better change your staff."

"Where do you think I am going to find the capital for
an air line, when I cannot even afford a Moth? And I am not
going to Manchester on business anyway, I am going for a
holiday."

4.

Edward's laughter was so prolonged and unbelieving that he slammed down the receiver. His flying projects meant a great deal to him but no one had ever taken them seriously except his bookseller, a little man in glasses, who had spent thirty years in the same shop. Ernest's work was so fantastic that he clung to the realism of flying like a parachute; there was something steadying about clouds and wind velocity, they were there and there was nothing imaginative about them.

Thanks to a vocabulary of several hundred words in three or four languages, an intimate acquaintance with half Europe and an insatiable curiosity, he had accidently acquired the job of checking English details in foreign film scripts. He had to see for example that Swiss shutters did not block out storms from a Welsh cottage and that the handles on the doors were the right shape. He had spent some years among the chaos and insecurity of the post-war middle continent, sharing emotionally in the fortunes of his friends, but shielded from active contact with upheaval by his race. "To come back to England," he said always, "is to step into another world. Only ostriches are a little alarming as insurance for the future."

Actually he had waited six months for this moment. Not that he expected tangible result from the adventure. "If you come up for the first night," Cordelia had said, "I shall never speak to you again." And she would probably keep her promise.

5.

He had given up trying to make her understand; it was now a
subterranean process. Sometimes it seemed that she had need of
a security he offered. At other meetings every word he said,
phrases that anyone else among his circle would have comprehended
almost before he spoke them, made her irritated and angry.

Yet it was not a barrier of language. They met together
where emotion started, where unconsciousness passed into per-
ception. On other layers there was misunderstanding and on
Cordelia's part mistrust. Her life was the obstacle between them.
What right had an obscure stranger (so they said he knew) to a
private moment of Cordelia's voice? He was not writing a play
for her, he did not even send her flowers. Who was he? What
did he do? Why did she see him at all?

He could have told them but they would not have believed
him. He was the exotic flower of everyday life, the one being
that was shut by circumstance from Cordelia's horizon. He had
his breakfast regularly at eight, he went to his office, he
wrote letters. People sat down beside him in trains without
a start of recognition. He said what he liked about the ques-
tions of the day; there was no publicity agent to frighten him.
A crane pecking at the doorbell would have been less astonishing
than a reporter. He would stroll into a room filled with the
roses that she never looked at, in an old overcoat that he was
too lazy to replace, to become with his casual talk of taking

6.

the underground or buying a newspaper, the audacious explorer
of uncharted wastes. He knew perfectly well why Cordelia saw
him sometimes. It was not excuse enough however in either of
their groups, for this wild goose chase to Manchester.

But it would be life again, a few moments of the old
gone world. Something that he could never explain to
Cordelia, (to-day, Ernest, you are more silly than a child,)
really a strip of film left from that primitive age when they
might have met as equals, when furry catkins in a February
wind seemed quite naturally the spear points of Cymbeline's
soldiers and what they were now had begun to grow out of the
nebulous landscape that was childhood.

"In England people are ashamed of art," he had warned
her in the clearest, simplest words that he could find. "You
exaggerate always," she would shake her hair when she was
angry till he saw only the October day she had come with bent
head under the golden poplars, stirring the leaves a little,
instantly recognised and yet so unexpected that he had not
known what to say to her. "They surrender everything for a
sense of humor; that was why I liked being abroad. Sometimes people were serious."

"You are *quite* wrong." (He liked the emphasis she gave
to unexpected words.) Then of course the telephone had rung,

7.

they were never five minutes together without interruption, and
she had stood up to answer it. It was always a shock to see her
move across a room; so perfectly what one remembered that he
feared he might answer her in Elizabethan phrases. Behold
diviness, no elder than a boy. It would be very difficult if
he said that suddenly when she handed him his coat. Or if
instead of repeating "but of course you are going to be all right
on Tuesday", he let her tighten into a hunch of gloom under her
blue rug, "'tis not a life, 'tis but a piece of childhood thrown
away." Fourteen was the Illyrian age and she woke as well all
of those early startling moments when a word for the first time
became greater than a fact. The things one had forgotten.
And yet she linked as well to a later time, to the winter life had
changed not into a love affair or a book, but into a unit of
complete experience.

For it to have happened, of all places, in Zurich.

It went back really to a winter night. To escape from
snow he had pushed his way into a tiny kino, through boys in
shiny leather jackets and girls whose berets dripped water over
striped scarves of green and orange wool. A little bored, a
little cold, he had sat there thinking of the black cylindrical
firs that were almost the colour of the sky, trying to shake off
the curious frustration that held a fog about him, so that every-
thing seemed to sink into an irritated stillness. If we were

8.

let alone to do the work we really wanted, he had thought, an-
xiety and disillusionment would become words in an old book,
we should look up their meanings in a dictionary; why is to
mean well so often to destroy? But in this grim present world
(he had hardly glanced at the screen in front of him) is it
worth while trying to preserve the particular arrogance of
thought that scratches like a Moth at the skies? And is never
swift enough. To keep the imagination so remote was probably
sheer foolishness. He had looked up at that precise second to
see not a girl nor an aeroplane but just the picture he had
always had of what the kind of thought he wanted would be.
He had stared at a figure standing by a stream, as long ago
Imogen had stood by rushes, "and for two nights together have
made the ground my bed," and as he shifted in his seat for
there were caps in front of him, and many heads, Cordelia
had grinned.

At first he had been very annoyed.

He had no belief in the cinema except as a weapon of
education, propaganda and abstract art. He detested the smeared
lips and the woolly faces of the commercial film. In a land-
scape of a future day he saw the human element banished from
instruction. "Robots are so much <u>kinder</u>," he said always,
remembering his own schooldays. That was the mission of the
film, for with machines there could be neither sneers nor

9.

undermining of perception but a direct approach without a filter
between, of the child to thought.

Even to remember the name of a star was he felt, slightly
peculiar. He had been very firm with himself; I will think
about propellers and not about Cordelia's eyes. All might have
been well had he not seen her Juliet, in another city and another
land, while he was trying to discover if Leonardo's theories of
flight, had ever influenced Shakespeare.

He had marched round the Zoo, saying to the seals, at my
age I am too old to be romantic. Recklessly he had bought a
bag of herrings, hoping as he threw them, to memorise the air
routes across the Arctic. He had even made timid enquiry for
by that time he had got his job checking scripts. "Cordelia,"
they had sniffed, "wouldn't you like to fly across the Atlantic?
It would be a million times easier."

He did not really want to meet Cordelia. The whole cir-
cumstance perturbed him. It was only that the mischievous
way she grinned above a cold seriousness connected the electric
wire in him; he became alive not in himself but in the metallic
point of his mind so that the brain itself felt, and he saw
things in another way, a twentieth century stegosaurus with a
second row of brain cells at the junction of the tail.

He had always objected to desiring the impossible.

And then she had sent for him, herself, quite suddenly.

10.

He had raced to a telephone and had given the number as distinctly
as he could, not expecting to be connected at once, for he pre-
sumed that however legitimate his business might be, he would
have to pass the message to a secretary, even to a maid. He
was trying to think of the most concise way of saying "I have
received your letter, when do you wish to see me?" when an
unforgettable voice had said, not "It was the nightingale, and
not the lark," but "you are there, yes, what is your name?"

Instead of answering "North speaking, in reply to your
letter of the eighteenth inst." he had dropped the receiver
from sheer fright, had picked it up hurriedly and stammered
"wrong number, I am so sorry." And he had been so disgusted
at his own stupidity that he had memorised a page of wing
tip measurements before getting the hotel porter to arrange an
interview for the following day.

It was very historical, very poetical and it was to
culminate in Manchester. Come to me for the weekend she had
said, but if you arrive before Thursday I shall not see you and
I shall never forgive you. But he would be the round Numidian
shield of an outpost never to be known to her, waiting behind
her audience, in case anything should happen. It was only
perturbing that he could not, it appeared, mention the name of

11.

the city without someone beginning to laugh.

He sat impatiently in a block, though there was plenty
of time. Looking out from the taxi window, Ernest wondered
why people spoke so often of the beauty of fog, of the quality
of being submerged in London and lost. It tickled the throat,
it got into the eyes. It was like walking perpetually under
a thick yellow blanket. And above it, for he had had the
experience flying once from Paris, the air was free and clear.
They had flown along clouds that had seemed a waste of snow,
exactly as if they had been riding on a sledge, to descend in
a spiral through layers of actually visible soot to a beacon
lit Croydon field. One could have counted the grains of
dirt as they swooped downwards. Yet phrases his friends had
used came into his mind, "figures moving through a mist to
vanish in dark doorways." And London, they said again, had
the slow dark beauty of a coral fish trapped in a crack of
rocks.

But to him it was only blur and confusion. He felt like
a growing leaf caught between sheets of blotting paper. The
clear electric quality of the long streets, the speeded rhythm
that was America and Europe mingled, all of that other far

12.

off city he had loved so, was gone, was dead, could never
again be his, any more than he could catch the leaves
streaked with poplar gold of his first foreign winter and
tie them to the trees again. It was better everyone said,
to forget it completely. Whereas the fog held. It was
steady and it obscured. Only he did not like fog.

People here he decided, watching a traffic signal
feverishly, did not care whether they were alive or dead.
The lamp switched to amber, the taxi battled with readiness
to start. He himself cared extremely that all his actions
mattered. Not to others always, but abstractly. But then
he had, as he was fond of assuring everybody, "fundamental
moral principles."

In Manchester he would regain for a fraction of one
autumn evening, something of the otherworld that he had once
and then lost. His city was obliterated, it existed no
longer. He must not even speak of it. He began to wish
that he had not promised to travel north with Dora Wilkins.
It was true that she was going to hold Penelope's hand, the
Penelope Bush that had written Cordelia's play, and that they
would meet inevitably in the hotel. But nothing more English
that Dora ever had existed and it would be quite impossible to
explain to her what the journey meant to him or why that one
winter had been lifted in color and mood, so above other years.

13.

"If it had been a love affair I could understand it," he could hear her saying, "but why should a philosophical idea, a window of another shape, wild squirrels and a primrose bus make such a difference?" There was nothing that he could reply that would not make him seem either conceited or ridiculous.

Yet he was going back to something that moved, profoundly full of discovery, under his conscious mind.

14.

CHAPTER II.

Miss Tiptaft unlocked the office door and peeped timorously about. It was five minutes after ten and her principles permitted her to wait no longer on the stairs, though she had hoped to hear Laura Marshall, from the office below, bang the front door first.

It was at these moments that she missed Tubbs and Barrow's most; the other employees, all the crowded whispered instants of diversion before the day's work started. A reputable firm would not require her to remain alone she thought, as she examined the window and the fire escape, in a couple of rooms where errand boys came, messengers or even foreigners. Some day she would be murdered or - but she could not phrase the alternative even to herself. She hung up her mackintosh, looked at the rent in the sleeve to see that the sticking plaster held, took off her rubber boots (what people called internal chills were so often a matter of wet feet) and put on her dusting mittens.

The owners of adjacent offices surmised that these must be issued to her by her employer for it was rumoured that the only orders ever booked, came from curious strangers who mounted the stairs to see them. Perhaps she got paid for wearing them people suggested, five shillings extra a week, or

15.

a special mitten bonus at Christmas. No one had ever seen her hands unclad except for the flashing of a moment when she slipped her fingers from three-year old brown leather gauntlets to the grey pair she wore for dusting or from these again to the fingerless black ribbed pair she reserved for daily work.

She emptied the letters out on to the table, and put the key of the petty cash under the carpet. Steps came up the stairs and she jumped, but it was only Laura Marshall after all.

"Good morning, Hope, how's business?

"Well, it's a bit early yet for it to be brisk," No orders meant insecurity again and it was one of her rigid principles to pretend trade flourished. That was why she enjoyed a boom so much; it was the only moment she could permit herself pessimism.

"The post's in," Laura looked at the letters and counted them over to herself. It was singularly appropriate she felt, that Miss Tiptaft's Christian name was Hope.

"Our's of course is such a personal affair. Contact with customers means so much."

Why after four months does the old woman pretend, Laura wondered angrily, looking out at the angular dirty chimneys, everyone knows in the building exactly how business is. Nobody is getting orders and it seems to be nobody's fault.

16.

And the old fool goes on prattling foolish little sentences
she learnt thirty years ago about the duties of employees.
"I wonder you're not afraid to be alone," she said, "right at
the top of the house: You know, I believe if somebody tried
to murder you, downstairs I should never even hear you scream."

It was wrong of her to poke fun at Hope's pet fear, but
the woman irritated her so with her helplessness, and her
pretence and the nervous little habit she had of dancing backwards from one, that she simply could not help it.

"I have told Mr. North that there ought to be two up
here. But I think Providence looks after us. When I see
some of these women with their bags and their powder sticks,
and their conversation, I tell you I'm thankful to work up
here by myself. Just because they can tap a typewriter, they
think they can boss everything. Tubbs and Barrow never would
have had them on the premises. But there, nothing's been the
same since the war."

"Trouble with women is, they simply won't stick together.
A girl who is going to lick a man's boots has no business to
practise it out in an office licking stamps."

"I've had my lesson, Laura, you needn't talk to me.
Eighteen years in the same department and who did Mr. Jones get
a job for? A slovenly vulgar little cat who was never punctual
two mornings in succession. You won't believe me perhaps but

17.

sometimes I feel it worst that she belongs, and we can't do
anything about it, to the same sex as the dear Queen."

"I think men like to have someone really inefficient
under them," Laura suggested hastily, trying to prevent Hope
from beginning again the story of her dismissal. "It makes
them feel important."

"It's an ill wind of course that blows nobody any good,
and I must say I appreciate the extra half hour in the mornings.
Mr. North simply won't have the office opened before ten. But
it's a wrench all the same, after eighteen years, do you know I
still can't get used to changing at Oxford Circus, twice last
week I went on to Tottenham Court Road."

"Of course even an union isn't much use if the store
closes down." Hope was a problem, Laura thought dismally, and
it was useless trying to make her understand. You explained
and explained, and she came back always to her "Providence will
take care of you but you must trust Providence." Still the
old fool had to be warned.

"Bit of a worry for you, isn't it, the boss being in
Manchester?" It was a quarter past ten, really she must get
down to her work. The telephone might go or someone come in
unexpectedly.

"It is a responsibility in a way. But I have the 'phone
number in case there is anything urgent."

18.

"They say in the City you know," really she must warn
the old fool, "that his work here is just a blind. That what
North wants to do is to run an airline to Portugal. Pryce,
of Pryce and White, went to Manchester two days ago. He's
in all the transport deals and could get any capital required."

"I'm sure you're misinformed. Mr. North has never said
a word to me about Portugal."

"But he had an article out in something or other, only
a week ago, about sunbathing for city workers in the winter.
Said it was a matter of quick transportation to Portugal. It
was unexploited, cheap, and a fleet of air liners could take
hundreds there for weekends. On top of this Pryce goes to
Manchester, and within two days your boss goes up too. They
wouldn't go to Manchester for nothing."

"He said he was going for a holiday."

"Don't make me laugh. It doesn't matter whether he
starts a service or not, so long as he doesn't close down here
suddenly and throw you out of a job. Make him promise to take
you on in the new concern. Only if you can, get transferred
to Pryce. I don't trust North myself, with all these silly
schemes."

"Mr. North, I am sure, is a perfect gentleman."

19.

"I must fly now, I'm twenty minutes late. See you at lunch." Laura ran down the steps wearily, it was no use trying to batter anything into Hope's head, all she seemed to be aware of were class distinctions and not class consciousness. But if the poor old thing lost this job, didn't she realise it, she would never get another. Not at her age. Besides she had lost all flexibility. She would irritate the small shop that might employ her by her airs and graces. She was just so much dead weight on the wave of either reaction or progress.

Hope listened to the door click one floor down and then, as was her habit, flicked the duster over the calendar. Laura's greatest trouble she reflected, had always been her tongue. Probably there was nothing in the story. She herself had made it part of her belief in Providence never to pay much attention to the rumours about her. She had not listened to her sister when she had heard on the bus the tale of old Mr. Barrow's impending resignation (and that when it had happened had been the beginning of her misfortunes); she had never gossiped with neighbours about the weakness of Stanley's chest. Yet she could not exercise with her "everything is for the best" sentence, the memory of that awful morning when like an unexpected electric shock, Mr. Jones had handed her her dismissal.

20.

Now the morning lived in her mind as if it were doomed to go on happening for ever. The more she tried not to think of it, the more it acted itself out in something more than reality. It had been a cold day she remembered, but she had intended to spend part of her lunch hour looking for a calendar. (She was rather noted for her taste in cards). She had two in mind, one had the picture of a cottage on it, with an apple tree in front, a thatched roof and five little white ducks waddling down to a pond. It was just like Mrs. Higgley's where she had once spent two summer holidays, before Ada had married. The other had simply a ship and "To wish you a good voyage" under it in plain gold letters. Mr. Abbott liked travel. It's a funny thing, Miss Tiptaft," he had said to her only the previous Sunday, "but you know when I was a boy I wanted to go to sea." The ship cost a penny more and was not she felt, nearly such value for the money but if one gave a gift, and especially to a man like Mr. Abbott, one must not think of cost. There were times when it was right to be extravagant. Some Christians, she felt, were apt to forget this. Perhaps the ship was a little more discreet. Mr. Abbott of course couldn't harbour an ugly thought if he tried, of that she was certain. But you never knew what others would say, you had to be careful, especially nowadays when people talked so freely. And perhaps the cottage did

21.

suggest, well, home life for example, whereas nobody could
associate a domestic situation with waves.

The bus had been a little late and she had looked at her
watch twice. That was the advantage she had reflected, of
catching the 8.5 instead of the 8.10. It was the extra five
minutes that just made all the difference. In two and a half
years she had never been late and had never missed a day ex-
cept the week she had had influenza. If there was anything in
the reports that had been current since Mr. Barrow's resigna-
tion, and she tried not to listen to them, Providence would
look after her, but only of course if she trusted Providence
and did not attract trouble; with her record really she need
not worry. If anyone had to go, Amy would be the first,
stupid girl, giggling and idling about instead of doing her
job and being fined twice in one week for being late.

Unemployment, she held, had little terror for the skilled
employee. Sift down workless stories to the bottom and you
would always find negligence somewhere. Put your work and
your employer first, had always been her motto. Then there
was nothing to fear. It was harder for the beginner, this
she would concede, now that there were no apprenticeships.
It was impossible to find out how her nephew Stanley could be
started, particularly as he was so handicapped. But on the
whole, apart from boys and girls, a woman who had no ailments

and a good record, ought to find a job anywhere. She had
unfolded her paper, she remembered with those thoughts in mind
and had read over the headlines while they moved heavily through
traffic.

The newspaper in fact was something of a torment to her.
She grudged the penny it cost, and she could have got what news
she wanted from the posters. But in bus or restaurant she
had to have some protection from molestation. If a lady
kept her eyes on her paper she could not be asked the time so
easily, or the way to Regent Street. Sometimes she repro-
mised by buying a paper every second day; an evening paper
that made it natural for her to continue reading it the next
morning. Often a Sunday journal could be made to last into
the middle of the week. She had turned the pages over only
for her eyes to fall on the photograph of a bread line in the
States and an article "four years looking for a job."

It was really the American films she supposed, that had
brought this unrest into the world, the films and the war.
How could people retain a belief in Providence if they laughed at
Mickey Mouse? Those fragments of a tail, or whiskers, dis-
uniting, cavorting, never being what nature intended them to
be, a tail or a whisker, it must do something to the mind.
There was something vulgar about daisies forming designs that

23.

they could not form in nature. And once, positively she could
swear to it, the whole cinema had reeked of cheese.

The bus had stopped and she had got off, precisely as
she had got down for eighteen years. Why, the first year or
two that she had been in business, it had been an old horse
omnibus that had carried her to work. She had seen that sup-
planted by an open top scarlet bus, and that again had changed
to the modern type. But the bus had never stopped running and
the shop always had stood in an angle against the corner.

She popped into the side door and to the cloakroom, one
of the first as usual. She had always taken off her things in
the same precise way. First she hung up her umbrella and
her hat, then she took off her coat, shook it out and put it on
her hanger, marked in large black ink letters (Stanley had done
it for her) H.T. Finally she sat down and removed her goloshes,
patted the bun of hair at the back of her head into position
and felt that she was ready for duty. Amy, early to her sur-
prise, had run down the steps and told her that she was wanted
in the office.

Even then she had not been anxious. Mr. Jones often saw
her about re-orders, around the Christmas season. She had gone
up the private stairs and knocked at the door. There was a
great mark (strange how perfectly she seemed to see it even now)
where some packing case had hit the wall. Mr. Jones was at his

desk, playing nervously with some papers in his hand. And then,
odd as it seemed to her when she spoke of it to Ada, she could
not remember a thing that had happened or exactly what he had
said to her, but she could recall only being in the cloakroom
again, with an envelope in her hand, feeling for her hat.

Eighteen years of service, a week's money in place of
notice and a testimonial to say Miss Tiptaft had always carried
out her duties in a satisfactory manner.

Somebody was crying. Others muttered, all were frightened.
"It isn't as if we had been dismissed for inefficiency," she
heard herself saying. "It is only because they are closing
down the shop." Then she had realised that she would never
see her department again or strip off the brown holland covers
in the morning. What a mercy it was she hadn't taken away that
sheet to mend, the one that had the rip in it, as she had intended.
They might have thought she had stolen it. "What does it matter
whether we've been dismissed or not? Don't fool yourself
it counts how you are out of a job. All we have to think about
is have we work or haven't we." The faces were suspicious.
Her little authority had gone and the eyes about her were glad
of it. Voices rose angrily, there were no customers upstairs.
"Oh speculation, that's what did it. The old fool has been
gambling like mad." Worse things suggested themselves.

25.

"Mr. Barrow was always a gentleman," she had rebuked them with a last attempt at loyalty and then (you can imagine Ada, how upset I was) she had picked up her umbrella and gone out, forgetting her goloshes.

It was the cold wind at the corner that had reminded her something was wrong. She had walked back, pushing her way through clamour and crowding girls. By the time she had got back, one of her boots had been kicked right under the lockers and she had been minutes finding it. "How about a deputation?" some girl had suggested. Nobody replied. There was no supervision, only noise. Mr. Jones had left. She went up the steps again and it was rather like Christmas; farewells, plans in sentences, voices and confusion. Mr. Barrow had always walked round the departments, shaken everyone's hand and wished them a happy New Year. It was that sort of thing that made one glad to work for him. Ever since he retired, the shop had seemed to go wrong. "Stop in or go out but don't block the doorway," she found herself on the pavement again, it was not Christmas, and strange vans were drawn up the length of the pavement. The shutters were down in the big windows. She looked at them and got on the bus at ten o'clock in the morning. Tubbs and Barrow, and her own life, no longer existed.

"And you know, Ada, I don't know how I got home."

Her sister had been excited but not altogether sympathetic.
"I told you Hope, weeks ago, that something was wrong and
you ought to have looked out for another position then, before
the market got crowded. And when a reference from Tubbs and
Barrow would still have counted," she added unnecessarily.
Of course, the desuetion of her husband and Stanley having
trouble with his lungs, was enough to make her sour, but she
would never understand, having had no experience of business
herself, (she lived on letting the top part of her house to
lodgers) that when one had been head saleswoman of a department
at a firm like Tubb and Barrow, it was impossible to sell
stationery in a little corner shop where half the stock was
more than three years old. What Ada feared and she might as
well come straight out with it was that Hope might not be able
to pay her the pound weekly for the room. "You must not
worry, with my record I shall be able to choose where I go, it
will only be the matter of a few days," she had said, taking
off her hat, "but it will be a wrench working for another firm."
She would probably have to take a cut in salary all the same,
she had reflected. "You may be glad to take a job at Wool-
worth's before you've finished," Ada had grumbled and then,
conscious of her agitation, had gone off to make a cup of
tea.

27.

Nobody came. Hardly anyone except the postman and an occasional bookseller's boy, tramped up the steps. Hope darted up to the corner cupboard and opened it. But it was absurd to dust it again, she had cleaned it out only the week before. If only someone would come, if it were just to make an enquiry. Then she might not have to think over again those awful four months before Mr. North had engaged her in the spring.

It had been too much, as she had said to Laura Marshall once, over lunch. Too much for any human being to suffer. Her whole world had been turned upside down. And for nothing. She was not conscious of having committed any sin. Not that that would have justified such wholesale punishment. What of course had been the hardest for her to bear had been Ada's attitude. "My own sister." But she had paid Ada a pound week in and week out for a room that was smaller than the cramped fitting cubicles at Tubbs & Barrow's, without a proper cupboard, and with only rods behind a curtain.

"And you know, Laura, how London dust simply ruins clothes. We business girls have got to be presentable." Then the room had no view. The front of the house looked out on to a strip of garden. There was a lilac bush by the railings and sometimes in the summer Stanley planted a few geraniums. And people passed. But she looked out on her neighbour's washing:

28.

a back yard hung interminably with white underclothes. Sometimes when they hung out a blue and white checked table cloth she felt as if she had seen the almond bough on the first spring day. It was warm, that she had had to admit, and the dressing table being against the window she had not to look out often. But apart from having the bed made in the morning, she had had to choose between Ada pawing over her clothes and doing out the room herself. And as she objected to unnecessary work on the Sabbath, it meant cleaning evenings after she got back from business. Still anything was better than having to tell Ada how much her mackintosh had cost.

And yet, just because she had wanted Ada to wait rent for a few weeks, "a person of my experience can't take the first little poky job that comes along" there had been trouble.

"Would you believe it, Laura, your own flesh and blood."

There had never been a word about the five pounds she had given her for Stanley when he had had to go away that summer to the sea. Nor about the holiday she had taken him herself.

Nothing but spiteful words, with hardly a shimmer of politeness left to them. She had not believed Ada's story of the caller who had wanted to take the room. No man would be fool enough to pay her a pound for a back attic. And she was almost certain, though she carried the key on a black ribbon round her neck, that someone had gone through her trunk in her absence.

It was not as if she had had the warm comforting
environment of Tubbs and Barrow's during the day. She had
always been conscious of the movement of the store, the
light and the shreds of gossip and the customers had all made
a patchwork so much brighter and wider than poor Ada's gloomy
catalogue of wrongs and ailments. But the name had become
a handicap rather than a help to employment. She had often
thought of the rather fussy girl who had said "when ladies
stop buying trimmings depend upon it something is going to
happen." It had been in the war and they had thought her,
well, almost unpatriotic. But it showed what the times were
like, a woman had even whispered at the agency, "don't tell
them you were the head of the department, say you had a
temporary job." But of course she had not believed her,
not till the terrible day when she had heard that Mr. Jones
had not only got a job for himself but had taken Amy with him.

Still as they said, it was always darkest before dawn.
She had come back one blustering, icy evening to find that
Ada had taken her own hot water bottle to put in Stanley's
bed. And she had not been able to say a word, with five
weeks' rent overdue. Up to that moment she had never doubted
fate. It might rain, she might sit half a day on an un-
comfortable chair to hear at the end sometimes politely but
more often quite brutally, that they had no use for anyone over

30.

thirty five, but always she had seen a future of a new store,
new holland covers, new orders and refills and rushes before
Christmas. She had sat in the dark, with the years of her
orderly, conscientious service slipping by, great wooden
beads that seemed to fill her whole head so that she could
not understand what had happened. And then she had looked
up from this memory or the other, to face a perfectly black
cold room, for Ada grudged her more than a minimum of light
and the knowledge that in nearly four months she had not been
offered even a job in a kiosk.

At first she had tried to re-live something of the old
existence. "Do you remember, Ada," she would say, "the
time Mr. Jones forgot to order the re-fills for the diary?
I shall never forget how he came to me..." but Ada had banged
the teapot angrily down on the table, "do stop talking about
that horrid shop. A lot of good you got out of it.
If you had gone into a little business you might have been a
partner by this time, instead of being thrown out on the
street after eighteen years service with a testimonial that
you can't even show." Of course she had not been thrown on
the street, she was only temporarily out of employment, but
there was a streak of definite meanness in Ada. Only if the
rent was overdue you lost even the right to speech.

And then the following morning, "you see, Laura, you

31.

must _trust_ Providence" she had had the interview with Mr. North. Of course it was not work that she would have chosen but to have the security of three pounds a week again made one careless of principles. It was not that she could prove anything against her employer but there must be something wrong. He seemed to understand trade very little. There were hundreds of pamphlets on aeroplanes stored in a cupboard for which orders seldom or never came. And he often said very strange things. "You know Laura, sometimes I think he is almost a Socialist." She had breathed the words over a steak-and-kidney pudding in a low whisper, it might be "actionable" to call a person that, you never knew. "Well, there's no harm if he is," Laura had answered, she was brisk and rough, quite the modern type, but you had to talk to someone. "I will say that I understand temptation more since my experience," Hope had turned to watch the waitress who was inclined to stint them of their proper portion of cheese. There was always the troubling thought at the back of her mind that that particular morning she might have accepted any work, even if it had been illegal.

Mr. North had given her a week's money in advance. Yet the days had not resumed their untroubled previous course. There had been sleep, there had been nightmares, now she was awake as it were in a warm temporary bed, but

at any moment she might have to tumble out into a bleak un-
heated world. She could not save for she was still paying
back arrears of rent. When once this was finished she toyed
with the idea of leaving Ada, it would serve her sister right
for the cruel remarks she had made the winter through about
the high cost of bacon. When she had known that the doctor
had told Hope that she had to have nourishment if she wanted
to avoid lumbago. Only, and this was like the dreaded bug
of an alarm clock in January, if she did lose her job again
and it was another four months' before she got another, at
least Ada would not turn her out. She would make her life
a hell but she would not fling her, she supposed, on to the
street.

She wondered suddenly, it was like a sharp attack of
pain, what Mr. North was doing up in Manchester.

CHAPTER III.

Ten twenty. Ernest looked at the clock. He hated having to run for a train; it seemed so untravelled. Or perhaps it was inferiority complex due to inability to move quickly. (So often he thought he was walking and discovered that he was standing still.) But if Dora did not come in five minutes, and the fog in her district might be a good deal worse than it was here, he was not going to wait for her. After all he must think sometimes of himself.

What made platforms such uneasy places, he wondered?
Stations could suggest re-union and holiday. But everyone ran
past, shouted agitated questions and waited for no answers.
Sometimes the porters seemed more disturbed than were the
passengers themselves.

People disappeared into the train bound for Scotland.
Officials shouted at each other and hurried by. He was conscious
of standing in everybody's way. Already it was ten twenty five
and he could wait no longer, "can I leave the extra ticket with
you," he asked the collector, "in case my friend comes?"

"Against the regulations. You must leave it at the book-
ing office."

Would he have time to pass through and leave it with the
clerk? He looked up despairingly at the clock, "you have still
got four minutes." Three or four people came down the

34.

passage in a rush and at the back mercifully he recognised
Dora's beret, "oh my dear, how too dreadful of me to keep you
waiting all this time, have you been here ages?" She almost
dropped her handbag and three newspapers as she hurried through
the barriers. "How sweet of you to get my ticket. Oh, where
is my suitcase? Yes, Manchester, no, not Edinburgh, you have
got seats, haven't you, Ernest darling? My dear, it was
frightfully sweet of you to wait like this, but do you know, I
forgot to lock the flat and I had to go back when I was half way
to Euston."

"I thought it was the fog," Ernest had imagined that Dora
might be an alarming fellow traveller.

"No, I had locked one door and not the other. And do you
know, I'd left the electric light on in the bathroom. Think
of it, if it had been on for three whole days. But what a way,
wherever are the seats?"

Since he had put his luggage there, two elderly gentlemen
had taken the opposite corners. Ernest tipped the porter,
the bright blue dressing case was stowed away on the rack. A
new red label dangled, with Miss Theodora Wilkins, Manchester,
written on it in Dora's uneven script. It was like her somehow
to tie so startling a label to so obviously new a bag.

Ernest settled into his seat, wondering for a moment if
it would have been wiser to have travelled up alone. When he had

35.

first known Dora, she had been a schoolgirl with ambitions, who
was never to be found without a diary, a prayerbook, and envelopes
full of manuscript. She had been all the adjectives in R,
religious, royalist, and romantic. She had stood in line to
see a prince go by, had made a Jacobite pilgrimage. People
had laughed at her and called her crazy, but through persistence
or perhaps the inability to perceive any other re-action to mood
than her own, she had hurled herself into her present position
as a novelist. In ten years she had substituted Theodora
and a bright poise, for the untidy and rather unhappy enthusiasms
of her childhood. Otherwise she appeared to be completely
unchanged.

She powdered her nose, he was sure in the wrong place.
No one was less Byzantine, he could not help thinking and Theodora
(it embarrassed him to use the name) must be the result of her
early empress fantasies. It reflected the serials she wrote
secretly, of which she was both proud and ashamed. Her coat
as ever, had a great slit down the seam, but she saw herself
with slaves, sprinkling gold dust in her hair. Leaning forward
she took, but did not open, the newspaper he offered. "Darling,
it was sweet of you to wait. Are you sure we are in the right
compartment?"

"Well, two porters and one notice said so. I was terrified
that you would be held up by the fog."

36.

"Wasn't it frightful? You know I do think it was a
good thing we caught this early train. We should never have
got down by the next one, I am sure, it is going to be just
black by the middle of the day. It is quite pea-soup now.
And we must get down. Poor Penelope is frantic."

"Why, what's happened?"

"They have cut out a quarter of her dialogue."

"Manchester is not Hollywood, probably she'll recognise
the story," Ernest suggested. It was no new lament to him.
If Penelope kept her name on the programme and a few lines in
the script she would be lucky.

Theodora sat up, even straighter than usual, and her
eyes blazed. "I should take the play away from them. If they
changed one tiny little word. It would be like a child to me.
And I couldn't bear to have a -- single -- syllable -- altered."

The old gentleman next her dropped his *Times* and looked
a little scared. The other man was smiling.

"I agree with you in theory. But in practice it would
mean that your stuff was left in a drawer for life."

"But it would be -- inviolate."

"Oh, certainly." It was only stupid, Ernest realised,
to try and alter Theodora's point of view. Her absolute
belief in the slogans of 1900 had insured her success. She
wrote incredible serials well because she believed in them.

37.

Girls were born only to fall in love with handsome young men. Hairs could be split over the slightest variation in class. A factory girl or a divorced woman were in her tales, equally "untouchable". It was a sphere where unemployment was only a device; where there were no cold crowded journeys by train nor problems of sickness and insurance. But hundreds of people read and enjoyed her stories very much.

"I think this venture north is very, very brave. Penelope and your Cordelia, ought to be very proud of us."

Ernest wondered whether either Cordelia or Penelope could possibly appreciate such a point of view at this moment. Both, no doubt, were hysterical. He could see Cordelia only as a tiny aeroplane in a storm, shaken between rage and tears until to-morrow night were over. It was a nerve wrecking occasion, Experience only made it conscious and more sharp. The end should be a triumph but it were idle to pretend that there was not the risk of failure. He doubted that there was ever the safety that the initiate supposed. He himself felt ill whenever he thought about the next evening. He knew too much about psychology, Cordelia, the theatre and what might happen. These were the moments that made one wish one had specialised in cabbages. Penelope too, she could not be anything but anxious. "I expect they both feel at this minute," he suggested, "that they would like to die."

38.

"Come, come, aren't you exaggerating? Must be the influence of the wilds. I thought a lot of things might happen to me but never that I should have to go to Manchester."

Ernest felt uneasily that both old gentlemen were probably eminent citizens. He remembered having heard that there was some hostility between Lancashire and the City but it linked in his mind with the Bank of England and the gold standard; "it's the capital of the Industrial North," he reminded her, quoting from a forgotten geography book or a newspaper, "where should we be if it were not for our manufacturers?"

"Oh, business," Theodora was too contemptuous, "what has that got to do with the first night of Penelope's play?"

If he argued it would sound simply as if he spoke for the benefit of the men in the corner. In a way Theodora's life was a negation of her outlook. She was courageous, extremely competent and with a clear head, as her contracts proved, for organisation. But anything her slogans excluded, did not exist, and Manchester offered her, commercially, nothing. Her tales had to be set against a background of social functions. He remembered an argument several years before, when Cannes was still unfashionable in summer. (Yes, yes, Ernest, I know as well as you do that October is the loveliest month on the Coast. But my readers don't know that: they expect mimosa and orange blossom. It would be far too original to make the

39.

heroine hide there before December. I doubt if my editor knows
what an aloe is, and it makes such a bad impression if he has
to look things up.) So he had better try to change the subject
and persuade her that they were discussing art. "All the
same, I am sure Penelope must be worried. There are so many
things that can go wrong." And where their amusements were
concerned people accepted no excuses.

"She ought to be used to it. She had had first nights
before. And all of them successes. Still she must be
terribly neurotic. Only a woman who had lost her head com-
pletely, could have let them meddle with her play."

"But I think a third time must be so much worse than a
first. At the beginning you know so little what is going to
happen." Development had its penalties; the terror of being
knocked to the bottom increased as writing itself became less
important than the effect the play or volume could produce.

"Of course nobody can answer for the result if they have
started chopping her dialogue about," Theodora's voice was both
ominous and triumphant, "can't you warn your Cordelia to be
careful? Penelope has got a name remember, and she has nothing
but the rumour of a reputation."

"She doesn't know, I told you, that I am going to be in
Manchester." If Theodora could only realise it, the personal
had long since passed from preparation. By this time every

40.

weakness in the script would show like cracks in a cement wall.
Experiments would be made, one section blaming the fault on
another, and someone who had never heard of Penelope was
probably patching in dialogue only to be answered by a desper-
ate voice, more full of tragedy than she had ever acted,
"but it would not be right for me to say such a sentence.
Can't you hear? It's not the character at all."

Things altered so if you were ever on the inside of them.
There were always people waiting by and looking in, and people
looking out. Those on the outside were more free and could
judge better, they could walk away if they liked. But if you
were inside you knew more, you had protection. To have worked
at anything, (as he had once done in a shop) even if only for a
few days, deepened consciousness. Another understanding be-
came part of you, you understood the very colours of the sky in
a different way, but it fixed a gulf between you and the non-
workers for ever.

"However did you manage to get yourself involved in this
kind of thing," Theodora enquired mistrustfully, "you look the
supreme type of solid business man."

"I know. A hippotamus. I have always loved them so
much." One man had gone to sleep in his corner, but the other
was still smiling behind his newspaper. "But it wasn't
theatre, it was cinema. I neither asked for it nor looked for

41.

it. It was sheer accident. I happened at a given moment to be the only person within a hundred miles to be able to translate a bit of script into English. I had a telephone call, I answered, half an hour later I found myself on a studio floor, I have often been surprised since, but I wasn't at the time, it seemed quite ordinary and I had no time to think anyhow. No, it was just inevitable, and funny."

"Why funny? I suppose they paid you well."

"Yes. But eight out of ten people want to get into the movies and I had never even thought about it. The older I grow the more I find that the world has a terrible hunger for art. It is like scurvy and sailors before they gave them orange juice. We shall have quite a different world when they discover that the brain needs food just as much as the body. Not theories about forms but something alive. For everyone, not just the few. Do you know that a film company once posted a notice in a tiny village that they would consider employing a few people for a crowd scene? Everyone in the place reported from the mayor to a baby in arms, only the bedridden and the postman stayed away."

"You can't call that art, they wanted excitement."

"It's a form of the same thing. They wanted to create something and if some other form of self expression had been

open, they would not have snatched at this one opportunity so eagerly, to combine their fantasy world with an actual day."

"Now Ernest, don't say you want to go round the country organising folk dramas, I just couldn't bear it."

"Could anything be more horrible? No, it is the deliberate campaign of the middlemen I want to break, to impose fake poetry and fake art on people. We can do nothing till the stagnant ideas of the old schools are swept away. But truth is likely to disturb existing institutions."

"Oh, Ernest, stop getting political. Leave the masses alone. They like their happy endings and where should I come in if I had to write about factories? They want to read about color and beauty, and why shouldn't they, poor things. Why take one of their few joys away from them?"

It was useless to argue that they called different things by the same names. Theodora depended upon her novels and it was the system that was to blame; it had flung her out equipped with half knowledge and a set of chemically dyed emotions that experience, like sunlight, faded. The beauty that he saw would have made her feel as uneasy as a well-bred lady asked to dine by the curator of a zoo and placed beside a gibbon. She would pretend that the little ape was not there but it would be in her own phraseology, "such an awkward predicament my dear."

The flat green fields stretched away from the rails.

43.

Fog had changed to a white mist that lifted occasionally to
show a hedge of bramble or holly, outlining a deep hedge.
Instinctively he felt the north to be trustworthy and adventur-
ous; atavism no doubt for he hardly knew the region. All of
England now seemed a little foreign to him. Infancy and age
were the realities here. Five year old footprints on wet brack-
en merged with old fingers picking blackberries. Between was a
nebulous time that counted for nothing in this land. Birth
began in myth and cowlslips, but the fog soon did its work, eating
away the brain so that one sailed away if one wanted to live,
only to return when obscurity built a harbour among the conceal-
ing scarlet dahlias, so that the end and the beginning might
join, seven with seventy in identical environment.

He stared out of the window at the fallen leaves. For
all his English childhood it was nearly as strange to him now, he
thought in surprise, as it must have been to Cordelia, looking
out the day before on these same autumn roads, with no memory
to guide her, as he had, of wet feet, a pecked scarlet berry
dropped by some startled bird and a pocketful of blackberries.

He felt for his note book and looked at the last page.
Miss Tiptaft worried him. The office had fulfilled its purpose
and would have to close in a month's time, when the lease ex-
pired. How people had laughed at him for taking it, yet in
usefulness the tiny rent had been covered several times, for it

44.

had served as clearing house when he had been abroad, where
translations were checked, scripts stored, and even a few
pamphlets had been available, on widely different subjects.
A glossary of cinema terms in different languages had almost
paid expenses though his own articles upon the importance of
cheap flying seemed to interest no one; they remained in
thick brown paper parcels imposingly on the shelves.

He hoped the poor old thing would not be alarmed while
he was away. She hated, he knew, being left alone at the top
of the attic-like stairs. He had tried everywhere to find
other work for her. But the employment offices, even if he
dropped ten years from her age, would not even take her name.
She had entered "business" at sixteen, now she was sixty-four,
between was a stretch of continuous work broken only by her
annual fortnight's holiday and a couple of illnesses. But she
had no savings, she had not bought a dress or a coat in the
last three years, every penny surplus had gone towards the
education of her nephew. Now the boy was tubercular and would
probably never earn; even his own keep. Ernest wondered
how anyone dare consider Miss Tiptaft's fate and profess him-
self content with the present social system. She had been a
model of the supposedly perfect citizen; she had worked, she
had helped her family and had squandered neither time nor pen-
nies and her reward would be, he supposed, to die a charity
patient in a hospital, made to feel at every turn her complete

45.

dependence upon the fugitive kindness of a stranger.

But she was lamentably ignorant of politics. He was her
Boss, therefore he must be right. "I think I ought to tell
you, Mr. North," she had said the day before, dancing backwards
and flapping a duster, "a man was here about your pamphlets."
"Did he buy one?" What Ernest hoped was his life work never
sold whereas he was quite successful with scripts that meant
absolutely nothing to him. "I was at my wit's end but he had
his shilling, ready in his hand and we had a packet open on the
table, as you told me, so I couldn't tell him that they were out
of print. I couldn't refuse to let him have one, could I?"
"But why, what...." Ernest had said bewildered, that made nine
sold and twenty given away out of a total of a hundred. "My
friend downstairs knew all about him, he, well, he had done time."
Her voice sank to an apologetic whisper. "Whatever for?" Had
he forged a paper, Ernest had enquired or broken open a safe.
The faded eyes had blinked behind the cheap glasses as if she had
been ordered to watch a kidnapping: "he was a communist, Mr.
North, but I kept your name out of it. I felt it was only right,
especially as you had a different signature for the pamphlet."

The staunchest upholders of a system seemed to be those
whom it oppressed the most. She can't expect you to look after
her, people argued, if he spoke about the situation. She has
not even been with you a year. All he could persuade Hope to

46.

say with a bright relief was "we must trust in Providence and
everything will come out right." He was shaken by her always
into a mixture of indignation and pity; she despised him he
knew for his opinions, he did not read the cricket news and he
was friendly with foreigners; when he did not lose his temper
she attributed it to slackness. But the blame for her pre-
carious position, without pension or prospect, she put, if she
spoke of it at all, on to some fictitious unrest of youth,
"I don't know what the young people are coming to these days, it's
all the dreadful things they see at the pictures."

Even a pension would not meet the case he thought. It
might be different in the future but Hope had no life outside
the office. She had never had any leisure. And she was perfectly
capable of doing her work, just as efficiently as someone twenty
years younger. "People over a certain age ought to be allowed
to die painlessly if they wish," he said, so suddenly that the
old gentleman opposite lowered his paper. Under any system now
Hope Tiptaft would have to go. She was a serf of an era struggling
in its own old age and there was nothing for her in the new.
As perhaps there was nothing for him. A sympathiser who was not
fanatically sure of dogma, was worse, they considered, than an
enemy.

Theodora shook her head, "nobody would take advantage of
it when the times came. Though I wish that old secretary who
out my call off, yesterday morning, could be slipped into the

47.

lethal chamber. I think I forgot to tell you, I am not going
to Manchester just to see Penelope. I am combining business
with pleasure."

Another serial, Ernest thought, had she been swept so
far into the current of the time that she was going to set her
new novel against a background of docks or a strike, "a new
contract?" he suggested

"No, this time it is for the library." One of Theodora's
amazing by-paths was that she had organised an excellent scheme
for providing children, convicted of petty offences, with books.
"I am invited to lunch to-morrow to discuss the founding of
one in connection with the Juvenile Courts in Manchester.
Isn't it thrilling? I go to the Post Office and get in by a
secret door."

Perhaps the defences people build were their most indi-
vidual creation. The monotonous level of Hope's year had been
lifted to a golden haze of Providence that would never fail to
snatch her from the gorgon up to safety. It was less religion
with her than an envelope, a kind of safety balloon. Theo-
dora saw herself bending over a little runaway slave. With
Cordelia the process was reversed: she was her imagination,
her ordinary life instead revolved to nightmare. Her bed
folded into a prehistoric monster to torment her, the messenger
who brought her roses through a mere knock on the door set her
shivering from insecurity. Even the blowing curtains were a

48.

threat.

Very ordinary cows grazed on very ordinary fields. The
two old gentlemen were peacefully asleep after their lunch.
Theodora at last condescended to read her paper. I am sitting
in a train, Ernest thought, as I have sat so many times in the
last years. Can it be the notices in English that make it all
so terribly unfamiliar? There had been so much change about
him he had developed some illusion of being himself static.
He should have flown up, he thought, he was regretfully so air-
sick that it would have held him to reality. It was a little
like the first time he had flown. Excitement and then he had
shut his eyes, beyond even the hope of landing. It was strange
motion should affect one so much. Some people said it was the
ears. He yawned and wrote down in his notebook: "a satisfactory
preventitive of nausea will be found to be the essential problem
confronting us in awakening the public to the advantage of
flight."

CHAPTER IV.

The hotel was a skyscraper in all but color. It loomed
out of fog, a strip of negative rather than the positive print.
It was gigantic and pillared: looking up, chimneys and atmosphere
and sky merged into a curious blanket overprinted with outlines,
puffed out with humps. Inside the entrance, lines of page boys
added perspective to the palms except that they began at normal
size and went on backwards, getting smaller and smaller.
Ernest was miserably conscious as he paid off the taxi that he
had no right to be there. Suppose he met Cordelia in the lift?
Suppose she saw him? What explanation of his presence could
he possibly give? "It must be desperately hard," he whispered,
"hiding from the police. I am afraid I shall never be any good
at political work." "Don't say such things so loudly," Theodora
reproved, taking her place in the line already forming in front
of the reception clerk, "people will misunderstand you."

The ordeal of waiting in an unprotected place seemed as
if it would never end. The hotel was quite as vast as the
station and even more crowded. "Penelope is coming incog
too, she thought it would be better. I wonder if she has
arrived already?" Theodora (oblivious of the lifts that faced
them and by which Cordelia would descend) got out a mirror from

50.

her handbag. It was not very likely, Ernest thought, that he
would be discovered so early in the afternoon.

"Yes, Miss Wilkins," the clerk turned over papers, "you
are booked. One single and a bath, until Wednesday morning.
Will you enter your address in the register, please."

"Theodora wrote her name out very carefully, "Has my friend
Mrs. Watt, arrived yet?"

"Mrs. Watt, oh, you mean Miss Bush. No, but she is
coming up for the new play. We expect her to-day on the 4-20."

"That disguise hasn't worked," Ernest said mournfully,
"I wonder if she told them or if the hotel found out." He
took Theodora's place in the line. "I wrote for a room also.
The name is North."

"That's right, sir. Another single. We can give you
229 if you can be out by ten o'clock Wednesday morning."

"But I may have to stay here till Sunday!"

"Very sorry, sir, but you said a couple of days and it's
race week. We haven't a free room in the hotel from midday
Wednesday."

"But can race week make such a difference?" Ernest had
never encountered a race horse in his life, in or out of a
stable. "Don't be an idiot," Theodora interrupted, "I had
forgotten it myself but it has been in all the papers." He
could feel her stiffen into the traditional British ideas about

51.

the horse, and thought of Osbert Sitwell's *Happy Endings*.
"But do you mean to say that you have <u>no</u> rooms in the whole of
this hotel?"

"None at present, sir, after Wednesday. We will do what
we can if there are cancellations, but we cannot promise you
anything. It is the great week of our year," the clerk was
both reproachful and surprised. The irony of the situation
overmastered Ernest. "Think of travelling over all Europe only
to get turned out of Manchester just because there are races," he
groaned, realising that he could not even write to Cordelia till
Thursday. He stared so long at the register with a pen in his
hand that Theodora misinterpreted his unwillingness to sign it.
"Mettre ton autre nom, cheri," she whispered so loudly that he
felt the entire staff must surmise that they had come up together
for a week-end and in sheer dismay scribbled down E.Flyer, the
name he signed to all his aviation articles. Fortunately he
found that their rooms were on different floors.

He noticed that there were double windows and that the
rooms were excellently heated. But there was of course, no
available space for the typewriter: after some fitting he
managed to instal it on the dressing table. Outside he looked
into a solid mass of grey, too thick for fog, that was not sky
but air. Where walls were visible, they were veined with soot

52

and again of an impenetrable smokiness. He hung up his coat and put out paper and carbons. He was about to unlock his suitcase when the telephone rang.

"Is that room ~~229~~ ?" Theodora sounded agitated.

"Yes, Theodora, is anything wrong? Haven't they sent up your bags?"

"It's not my bags, it's the taps. Are yours all right?"

"I don't know. I'll try. No, the hot water runs and is boiling, but the cold doesn't."

"Neither of mine nor.....nor any of the conveniences if you understand, work....." Her voice wailed miserably and he remembered that Theodora had a habit of disappearing into a hot bath on all occasions. "Well, I should think that the best plan would be to telephone the reception office, perhaps they turn off the water when the rooms are not being used."

"But I have. And they told me to write to the Manchester Corporation."

"There must be some misunderstanding," what a nuisance the woman was. It flashed across his mind that having signed the register as Flyer, he would never get his letters. Probably Theodora had antagonised the girl at the switchboard and she had been rude in consequence. "We'll ring off," he suggested, "and I will make enquiries."

"Oh, how angelic of you. Don't forget that we meet for tea at four. I know Penelope will be desperate." It was so like Theodora to drop the receiver instead of putting it down gently. If anyone saw that he was here under another name, they would believe the absurd rumour about his flying deal with Pryce. He waited a moment, thinking over possibilities and then asked for "Receptions". Why couldn't Theodora have a little common sense?

"The cold water in my basin does not run," he began in a dignified manner," and Miss Wilkins telephones me that her taps are out of order also," somehow he felt himself more compromised with every word. Of course they would assume now that he had gone straight to Theodora's room on their arrival.

"Very sorry, sir, but you must write to the Manchester Corporation about it," the girl answered.

"I must what?"

"You must write to the Corporation and complain," he could hear her switch him off, very impatiently.

"But ...." It was clearly useless to speak further. First they had not a room in this barn that must take five hundred people, then he was becoming more involved with the Wilkins girl every minute, there was no water in the basins and all they could say was "write to the Corporation." And how long did any authority in any country take even to acknowledge a letter?

54.

At least a month. Perhaps this was the independence of the North
about which he had heard so often. The only possible relief for
his feelings he felt, would be to write a letter.

Not to the _Times_ nor to the _Manchester Guardian_, but to any
one of his correspondence list that stretched from Stockholm to
Florence, from Los Angeles to London. It was his sublimation
for an air line. He posted impressions where he would like to
have sent planes. People locked themselves so oddly into a cage
of pre-conceived opinions. They would assert for example that the
art of letter writing had declined because of the introduction of
typewriters. When his first impulse now, simply because he had a
machine that set his thoughts down almost as swiftly as he could
think them, was to write his friends if he met with an adventure.
There would never be time for a pen to describe the journey. He
would get so far ahead of his hands that he would be bored before
he had, in writing, left the station. But tapping out letters,
almost without looking at the paper, he could make others share
in the events nearly as well as if they had been there together.
He would begin with Edward, and headed the paper, Stop Press
Manchester, 3.45.

"You were right when you told me that I should find this town
surprising. I am sitting in a bedroom papered with black Chinese
characters on a buff ground. Between them are sprigs of wisteria
and red and white daisies. Perhaps the daisies are meant to

55

represent chrysanthemums but there is no real resemblance.

It is a study in fantastic creation. There is a scarlet door
on one side, futurism of 1913; but the other, immediately oppo-
site, is of Victorian mahogany. It is highly polished and in the
niche above it, there is a palm tree made in plasticine, facing
a barred gate. Do you think it could be a British agricultural
symbol? A sort of answer to the Chinese letters? Above the
gate there is a tiny pot of pink and violet flowers, they ought
to be sugar from the color, but I think it is plasticine, and
this is suspended for no apparent reason, in mid-air."

At this moment, a knock on the door (the mahogany one)
broke above the tapping of the machine. Greatly annoyed, why
was it that just as one got into the middle of a letter one was
always disturbed, Ernest walked over and opened it. At first
he could distinguish nothing but a large felt hat; it reminded
him of something seen a great many years before, then he dis-
covered that it belonged to a little man in dark clothes with a
bag in his hand, who began to speak very apologetically.
"The Manchester Corporation sent me about the water," he began,
"how long is it since the taps have ceased to function?"

"I can't tell you. I have only just arrived," Feeling
suddenly a steward upon his long desired air liner, Ernest led
him over to the basin.

56.

It was impossible to continue the letter for the moment. He walked to the window, still puzzled about the hat. What did it remind him of? An early impressionist drawing he decided, suburban Paris on holiday. But why should this exotic effect exist in Manchester? It added to the submerged undersea atmosphere he had felt since they had walked out of the station. Only why was it all so wildly improbable? He turned round and tried to focus upon the life of a corporation plumber in its most realistic aspects. It was useless. The more the man joggled with strange tools, the more he thought of Beckford or of Byron. Sentences beat in his head, "I am about to depart on the Grand Tour." On the mountain stages he remembered it was a trick not to wake the travellers at the inns so that they overslept and forfeited a fare. Afraid lest he should ask out loud when the next diligence started, he stared at the opposite walls.

A sound like a factory whistle came out of the tap and the man jumped, or perhaps was knocked, backwards by a stream of soot, dead flies and perfectly black water.

Ernest snatched the typewriter out of harm and looked at the mess on the carpet. The plumber was silent. He merely pressed the bell. It seemed the fantastic interruption of a nightmare. "Sewer" Ernest said firmly to himself and tried to concentrate upon pipes and hours of work. Instead the room seemed to swim into a Rousseau jungle, he expected the counterpane to move into

57.

a gigantic black and orange beetle, or banana leaves to leap suddenly from the walls. By the time the maids had come and mopped, the little man had adjusted screws and wiped off some of the flies. "I think you will find it satisfactory now, sir," he remarked and left, stepping carefully over wet cloths and puddles.

Ernest built up his desk again, trying to keep away from the dampest parts of the floor. He put the letter back in the machine, perhaps there would be just time to finish it.

"The worst things have happened that possibly could happen. I signed the wrong name on the hotel register, through amnesia caused by driving up from the station in a taxi that must have been licensed before the war, and through being told that I had to leave on Wednesday because a horse or a jockey or some harness needs my room. Presumably therefore I shall neither get my letters nor see Cordelia."

"I dare not go out because I am not supposed to be here. So I have decided to begin a novel. It is about a boy who was born in Manchester thirty years ago and whose family, exhausted by continual dreams, smuggled him at birth to Paris. They had always heard that the French were a logical people. But heredity was too potent. He grew up a Frenchman and invented *sur-realisme*"

He did not sign the letter. More might happen before

58.

the evening post left. It was four o'clock. He turned on
the water carefully and found that at least he could wash, though
it flowed sea-weed brown and the cold was as scalding as the hot;
a geyser or a sulphur spring that matched the outside air. He
put the cover on his typewriter and the key in his pocket.
London, even the train, were so remote that he could hardly re-
member them, instead the scarlet door was a page from his first
nursery scrap book, made out of red baize. He stood in front of
it wondering what memory he should cut out, to paste on its
slippery surface.

These undersea sensations might be induced by the lamps,
he decided as he began to switch them off. They were out to
resemble the flutes of a shell, rather the shape of a compressed
cockle but transparent with the crude crystal effect some shells
had, flung too far up from the sea. He locked the door and
started towards the lift. Where was Cordelia he wondered, was
she thinking against the racing minutes or was she asleep?
Perhaps that was her suite behind the glass door at the end of
the corridor? If she would see him now, he could persuade
her not to be afraid. "There is no need to worry," he would
say, taking her hand. "Nothing here is real. No one
will think about you to-morrow night. They will not hear the
name of the play. For there is a ship loading in the Adriatic
and she has to pass the Algiers pirates," I have got a Dutch

59.

painter to draw patterns, which I'll have sent to your factors,
as in Italy, at Florence and Ragusa, where these stuffs are woven,
you remember Middleton? Or they are seeing the Chinese paper in
the boardroom, talking of a cargo captured by the French. What-
ever you say to them they are a hundred years away. You are
only another dream to make them forget head winds and winter
gales a little longer. You must not be afraid. They will be
kind. They will only half hear you. Only if something in you
is so great that you break through their dream to awaken their
reality, then in success may be apparent failure. It never is
certain, never with genius." She had broken through once he
remembered but could she do it a second time in a strange city
with the trivial phrases of a made-to-order tale? "If I could
give you what I know, to-morrow night would pass in an instant
of consciousness, neither they nor you would be aware of one
another, it would be a film projected on to a white and silent
wall."

Ernest shook himself suddenly, horrified at his thoughts.
He would not like to face what might happen to him if he told
Cordelia that no one would hear what she said. And Manchester
had been founded comparatively late in history; what right had
he to impute sentences from old plays and this strange hypnosis
that had seized him, to perfectly respectable citizens fully
aware of world markets and cotton prices? There was Cordelia

facing an extremely actual crisis and he was adrift in a half
conscious region, where were madness and genius, indecisiveness
and sleep.

It would be perfectly possible with the right smoke pro-
tection laws (he must keep to facts, repeat statistics over and
over) to eliminate half this fog. There were too the experiments
to dissolve it chemically. It damaged buildings to say nothing
of people's tempers. The sum of money needed to instal the
proper machinery would be a tenth perhaps of what they spent
now on bronchitis and maladjustment. Or there should be fleets
of air liners with sixpenny fares, to take people to the sun-
shine after work. He must collect more information, write a
paper on the subject. "Acts are more important than words,"
he said, he must keep his imagination muzzled, (even if he were
on holiday) and take it only for a walk at the proper time.
"It is essential to concentrate upon the present," he repeated
very slowly with a pause between each word.

At that moment he caught sight of an aspidistra made of
rubber.

Seriously alarmed, he jumped into the lift.

61.

CHAPTER V.

Theodora had changed her dress and unpacked another,
smaller handbag. She was waiting by the lifts, a little
impatiently, although by the clock in the hall it was only
five minutes past four. Ernest realised as he stepped out
that he had forgotten to ask the plumber about her basin.
"Oh, there you are. I thought you were never coming. And,"
she looked over her shoulder significantly, "this is no place to
wait alone."

There were only three women in the lounge. One was
elderly and had both hands in her lap, gripping firmly a worn
brown bag. Both the others knitted. There were also two
small bell hops. None of them appeared dangerous. "I am so
sorry but the plumber came about my taps. Did he come to your
room as well? I couldn't get a word out of him."

"Fortunately, yes. It was most awkward. I was just
changing. But I left him to deal with them for I cannot face
going dirty to bed. I think it was all right, the chambermaid
was about."

The lift doors swung wide again and a party came out with
rugs and suitcases. Above the reception desk a large poster
announced the play. "Shall we go and have tea," Ernest suggested,
"or do you want to wait for your friend's arrival?"

62.

"No. I am not certain that she will come on the 2.30 and anyhow, she will want to unpack. But we must be very careful where we sit down."

"Why? Does the roof leak as well as the taps? Oh, I see what you mean. She might miss us, but we could leave word at the desk."

"It's not that. It's the Sun-roof Lounge. I dare not risk a breath on my reputation," she giggled, "even with you as escort. I cannot risk being compromised, not just now. Didn't you know it was the worst place in the north of England? And that's the trouble with the provinces, they are so crude."

The hall itself was a Sahara. Potted palms towered to the glass roof and wicker chairs suggested tea hour on a liner. Vistas between great arches ended in different cities, a French café, an English moor and a strange fantastic landscape of lino-leum and white tiles. It was exactly like the floor of an immense studio, with a suggestion of tree ferns in the foreground and a gay red and cornflower kiosk at the corner full of newspapers. "Choose where you would like to sit," Ernest said, "I am lost in this maze. All I can do is to stare."

At that moment they almost knocked down a very old lady, asleep over a teapot. She had left her stick immediately in the path between two columns. Three little boys near her

63.

disputed about a plate of iced cakes. There were many tables,
but it was yet too early for them to be full. An elderly
gentleman looked up for a moment, bit slowly into a muffin and
vanished again behind his evening paper. "This seems to be
all right," Theodora said, "sliding into an arm chair,
"everybody except ourselves is over sixty or under ten."

Ernest was so astonished that he could hardly find
the words to order tea. London might have been seven weeks
or a hundred years away. It was definitely not Victorian,
for it seemed to ante-date railways. There ought to have
been parrots he felt, swinging on bars. "I know," it came to
him suddenly, "it's a setting for Captain Marryat. How slow
progress really is!"

"What are you talking about?" Even Theodora looked
awed as she slid her powder box back into her bag, "I cannot
feel that there is any connection between sea stories and this
vast barn."

"I never knew such an atmosphere existed still in England.
It is not as if it were simply old-fashioned, it belongs quite
definitely to another period of time. I expect to see sailors
with pigtails and merchants with chests of tea. Or hear
somebody tell us if a favourable wind is blowing. I refuse
to believe it is only a hotel."

Looking up, Ernest could not see the ceiling. Only

64.

here and there he caught a reflection of glass and painted
ironwork between branches. Why it brought back the day he
had first gone into a studio, several years before on just
such a November afternoon. They had walked for half a mile
through pine woods where rabbits scourried timorously between
soft leaves and crushed twigs, to arrive at a white gate.
Their papers had been inspected and the door had opened.
He had found himself in a vast tunnel between Mercury vapor
lamps swinging like gigantic raf diators overhead. In front
of him more bulbs had glared down a small avenue between two
cameras. He had been hustled with unwanted people on to a
platform with chairs next to an old lady in a gold wig whose
face was perfectly familiar to him from innumerable comics.
A girl in a long white coat had darted up and back, with a
clothes brush in one hand and a powder puff in the other.
A whistle had sounded, cameras had turned and through it and
above it all had come the incessant beat of hammers. "You
are interested in films, yes?" his guide had asked and he
had answered involuntarily, for he never was able to react
quickly to emotions, "sur-realisme then is just a record of
what actually happens."

It was fitting that he had never known the name of the
film that was being made. Later he had walked out through

65.

a small door between carpenters on to a vast field, full of weeds, and a rubble of broken wire and bits of plaster. There had been narrow tracks everywhere of rusted rails, crossing and winding for no apparent purpose. "Trolley lines," someone had said, "for the *moving* shots." Looking up, a tower and a half built street, that having been photographed, were literally ruins, crumbled away in the wind. And in a hollow of the sandy soil, there had been tiny unexpected violets growing between notched scraps of torn ivory negative.

Neither Theodora nor, he suspected, Penelope, had been through his initiation. They had never changed carbons on an old arc lamp nor crouched in a garage to see experiments made from waste ends of film, projected on a wall. It was altered now, he had lived through a bit of cinema history forgotten even in the studios, for time was too hurried for archives to be collected. Felt hung walls and silence had taken the adventure out of filming; sound was making it into a rather fussy and pretentious trade.

Theodora started pouring out the tea, she looked rather anxiously at her watch. He ought, Ernest supposed, to try to explain his silence. "This place reminds me of the first time someone gave me a manuscript and told me to snap up the script. I sat on a bench against a plaster dungeon and was terrified an

66.

arc lamp was going to drop on me. It was such an entirely
different world," he remembered the offices where he usually
spent his hours, prosperous halls with leather and steel tables,
or tiny rooms with worn seats, a map on the wall and the inevit-
able girl with blonde hair sitting at a typewriter, "only if it
had not been for the movies I should never have met Cordelia at
all."

This was not important, Theodora seemed to think. "I
should have taken the play away from them at the first rehear-
sal," she continued, decisively biting a muffin, "I doubt if
one of them has had any adequate education and Penelope would
have made a fine scholar. Anyhow the dramatist's wishes ought
to be obeyed. But she was always absurdly nervous, poor
darling, though a school nowadays might know better how to cope
with her maladjustment. I am terribly afraid that she may
have missed the train."

Music, was it an orchestra or a radio, came from somewhere.
The old lady continued to doze. Ernest felt worried that he
could see no parrots. He could almost persuade himself turquoise
feathers flashed between the branches, a canary ruff or a green
breast. But it was hallucination, there were no caws from the
opposite palms. Food was soothing at this moment and he took
a second muffin. "I am not aggressive by nature," Theodora

67.

declared, "but in the world of art it does not do to make one's
self cheap." She knocked a knife on to the floor and giggled
brightly as the waiter picked it up. "And that is where....
Penelope!" she screamed, jumping to her feet, and this time
almost overturning the table, "my dear, I am glad to see you."
The two figures met in a wrestle of embroidered bags and furs.

Penelope sank into a chair. Introduced, Ernest felt him-
self being eyed suspiciously. He wondered for a moment if he
should make some excuse to leave. It might look more like
espionage than if he stayed he decided, as if he had run off at
once with news to the opposite camp. "You are a friend then
of Cordelia," he heard Penelope saying. "Yes, but I am not
supposed to be here, I was strictly forbidden to come up before
Thursday. Only I had promised Theodora to join her and I
supposed, till I saw the hotel, that I could hide."

They all laughed. "It is a peculiar place," Penelope said,
"but I believe it is all right, provided we avoid the Sun-roof
Lounge. Had you heard that as well, Mr. North?"

Ernest confessed to an ignorance of Manchester. "Perhaps
just the word sun here seems a little shocking," he suggested
"do you suppose it is a bathing pool with lamps?"

The old lady behind them gave a slight snore. "You must
be simply dying for a cup of tea. And what is the news,"

68.

Theodora leaned forward tragically, "of the play?" She dropped her voice on the word play so that it sounded as if she were mentioning a new and contraband drug. "My dear, I have not heard a word since they ordered me out of rehearsals. When I have got over this appalling trip, was it very draughty on your train, I shall go and find out."

"I wonder you put up with it, I really do. Why didn't you withdraw at once and give the piece to another manager?"

"Oh, they all cling together. It might have meant that the play did not come on at all, or that there was a year's delay."

"Would that have mattered?" Theodora clasped her hands, she contrived to look exactly like an illustration for one of her own serials, a tense moment, to use her own vocabulary.

"Yes, I think it would. I don't really care what happens to the play. If I thought they would improve it I would let them alter it gladly though I doubt if even the producer has read the script straight through, but I desperately need the money from a success."

"Pe-nel-o-pe!" Actually Theodora's mind was in complete agreement but she was genuinely hurt to hear an author say outright that any work was written for dollars.

"It's all very well for you, Theo, you have a steady job. But this play business is such tricky stuff and I need hard cash, in my hands or at my bank, at this moment."

69.

"But you're the least extravagant of people. What have you done now? Surely you have not bought another house?"

"It's the black paper mulch."

"The what? "You don't mean you have tried it?" Theodora andy Ernest both spoke together. "Oh, you know about it then," Penelope said, turning to look for the first time at Ernest.

Her eyes were very grey. She suggested a rainy and a
wind-swept land with clouds moving away above low village
roofs and wild shrub hedges. "I read about it in the New
York Times,"/answered, "it is the only way to keep up with
events, to read the American papers. They do give you a bit
of the real news. European ones are not only local in their
geography but in their politics. I wonder sometimes that they
find anything to print at all."

"And you read there about the mulch?"

"Yes, a most enthusiastic article, but does it work really?"

"I wish I knew. They swear you get a fifty per cent increase on vegetable marrows and no weeding, so I risked it."

"Black definitely makes things warmer," Ernest felt in
his pocket for his note book, wondering if he had some clippings
on the subject. "It is so funny that makers go on painting frames
white.

"But they look nicer, Ernest, black is so depressing, except in a very well cut-dress." Theodora tried desperately to

70.

swing back into the conversation, "even then I think it has an
exaggerated vogue."

"But we are not talking about clothes, we are talking
about vegetables."

"The whole subject is a mystery to me." Theodora shrugged
her shoulders and began to refill the cups with tea.

"Theo, it's like this. I've ordered yards and yards of
paper. You roll it along the beds in spring like a strip of
linoleum. It is supposed to keep heat in the soil and to
prevent weeds but it is dreadfully expensive. I am relying on
the play to cover the bill."

"Are you using the slit method for the seedlings," Ernest
asked, feeling professional, "or the wedge?"

"They told me to make four holes in a sort of star.
Oh dear, I cannot help wondering if they have changed the
first entrance in the second act, I thought it was so good, but
Cordelia never liked it."

Then it would probably be out, Ernest decided. "In my
article it said the mulch particularly suited pineapples but
perhaps it will be just as good for peas? Are the rolls very
expensive?"

"One needs so much," Penelope turned mournfully to her
tea. "Has Theo told you we keep a market garden."

"I wish you would call it a farm!"

71.

"But technically it isn't one. We only grow vegetables. There is never much margin, that is why I depend on the play. Do you know Cordelia well, what does she say about it?"

"I don't know." Ernest was truthful. "The bargain has always been that I never mention her work. I met her years ago and we talk about dogs or hills or occasionally Shakespeare, never of what she is doing. I cannot imagine otherwise that she would want to see me. I am change to her, funny as it sounds, adventure. She said if I came up for the first night she would never forgive me and I tremble to think what might happen if she saw me here."

"Yes," Penelope meditated a scene, "I can imagine. They turned me out of rehearsals."

"If only you were not such a masochist," Theodora snapped her handbag shut with a gesture that proclaimed no interference would be tolerated," they would pay more attention to your wishes."

"It's the paper I am worried about," Penelope finished her tea hastily. "I think I had better go across to the theatre and find out the news."

"I hope we can all meet for dinner," Ernest suggested, he was very interested in the mulch. The old sleeping lady stirred, opened her eyes drowsily, and shut them again. He noticed that her knitting had slipped behind the chair. The

72.

children tramped out, covered with crumbs. "The question is,
where to meet," Theodora set her beret slightly more on one side,
"one has to be so careful in this hotel."

He left them to argue, wondering whether a play were worth
such an expenditure of torment and pre-anxiety. To hope for
success was like planning an English picnic and trusting that
the weather would be fine. They were in an encampment among
palm trees, the white tablecloths were tents. Until he had
seen a parrot, he could not move. How did a parrot fly?
How little one knew about important things. But it must be slow
he felt, deliberate and at tree level. He looked up, climbing
from branch to branch until he saw panes of sliding glass and sun,
or was it a searchlight? His eyes dropped again, to the desert-
ed oblong of the room and the man behind his newspaper. He felt
his cushion, it was made in the shape of a life belt and bore the
letters, S.L. "I am so sorry," he said, looking at Theodora,
"I am afraid, after all our care, this is the Sun-roof Lounge."

73.

CHAPTER VI.

Penelope waited at the lift door, pacing up and down.
"I have been to the theatre," she wailed, "and I can find out
nothing. Only that the last act has been changed."

"But it is inexcusable," Theodora's lips formed into a
thin line as if she had one of her delinquents in front of her,
with just the atmosphere of a welfare office desk. "You
ought to cancel your contract with them at once."

"If only I knew what they had done to it. I've often
wondered why they think they improve things, mauling them about.
It was a whole, a unit, when I gave it to them. I dare not
think what it is like now."

"I know," Ernest was trying to be helpful. "Often when
I was a child and had to see plays," (he realised too late that
this was hardly tactful) "there used to be a mysterious process
called tightening up. But if one saw the play a second
time and had a good memory, there was at most a phrase or two
altered
~~altered~~
"

"You will feel better when you have had dinner," Theodora looked from one poster to the other. Restaurants opened from the immense hall in different styles and at different prices. They began with the English and mounted through different European countries to swing doors that said France. "I don't want to be seen," Penelope was suddenly firm, "now I don't want

them to know that I am here."

"Rubbish, you must eat and this is not the time when anyone will be about," Theo had recovered from her temporary astonishment and was unmoved by any quality of atmosphere. Penelope on the other hand was obviously more nervous. Ernest made no pretence; he was quietly terrified, particularly in the lounge.

"I can't face any fuss this evening," Penelope decided, "let's go to the cheapest place, we shall be less likely there to meet any of the cast," she swept through a door into what appeared to be a station restaurant.

They sat down at a table in the midst of a hall. It was tiled with linoleum, brackets of light reflected the greasy, polished surface of the blue and cream slabs. Timid old ladies, always with knitting, peeped out from columns and men ate hurriedly with papers in front of them. The waiters rushed by with trays, so fast that one expected trains to be announced and porters to pick up bags. The whole place jerked as if it were a strip of slow motion film.

"It's the atmosphere of Chicago station with the decoration of a pseudo-antique exhibition building," Ernest could not conquer his amazement; "I feel myself perturbed."

"Now why doesn't Cordelia come down here and learn what human nature is like," Penelope was staring at the frieze,

75.

"instead of hiding away upstairs."

"But...how could she?" Was it jealousy or sheer in-
perviousness to emotion? A quick glance at Penelope suggested
that she had assumed a must-not-show-that-we-are-hurt British-
ness that refused to permit the evening to be other than the
ordinary end of a day's excursion to some neighbouring town.
"They would recognise her." Something had wrecked Cordelia
far too early, she needed no experience of crowds. Beyond the
terror that was in part her fantasy lay the real core of a
primeval shock. You do not know what it is like he thought,
looking at his two companions, to have people shout at you
and be compelled to remain silent. There was the sound and
there was the open sea. It was the queer insecurity that
taught so much, being frightened without its mattering to any-
one. But Penelope would not leave harbour. She clung to an
anchor of safe and traditional opinion.

"Not here and not yet." Theodora was final.

"Yes, some waiter would slip the word round." After all
he wanted to shout at them, this is not a school play for ad-
miring parents. Do you know what the end is for Cordelia
if she fails to-morrow? I do. It is death. Perhaps not
consciously, under all her turmoil she is too proud to attempt
any silly kind of suicide. Only I know her rather well.
Something would happen in her, the worst kind of dying. Aloud

76.

he said, "I imagine her only possible course is to keep hidden.
To-morrow night is going to be tough."

"Do you think that there is any chance she will get too
temperamental to play? I've heard she does that sometimes."

"Yes, I do." Cordelia shook herself into such hurri-
canes that she lost herself in the storm. Not only was one
not able to run away but one had to dash back to look for her
under her own upheaval and perhaps drag her out. Still if
people wanted her to act and not pretend to be a character
with a label, emotion must be expected. For the brain was
tricky. It was probably a question of being adjusted to another
wave-length. To-morrow night is so uncertain he was going to
say, that anything may happen, but he saw Penelope's pose of
British stolidness webbling as she crumbled a roll into tiny
fragments over her plate, "on the other hand she may decide it is
better to get the ordeal over rather than postpone it."

"The whole trouble with her is," Penelope fidgetted with
crumbs, "she does not go in for sport."

ironically

Ernest froze; he resisted the impulse to say, *she has the*
perfect figure for a hockey player. He fixed his eyes on the
crochet hook of the old woman opposite. Could he sit still and
finish out the meal? What art could any country expect that
considered damp grass and open mouths the serious prelude to a
play? "Do you really think she would act better if she spent

77.

her days chasing a ball about?" he asked too quietly.

"Well, it must be better to run about a field than to lie moping on a sofa," was the cheerful answer.

"Perhaps it depends on temperament," demand of a brain to concentrate into a kind of radium, to be a sun-lamp to the world's emotion, it cannot be dissipated then on a bag of balls.

"I admit," Penelope answered seriously, "she is not really very strong."

"Shall you stay up after Wednesday," Theodora was averse to conflict and felt herself the evening's hostess. "I've booked a place myself on the nine thirty train."

"When the glass doors swung back they could see the palms. The architects had had a horror of the straight line; frames broke into scrolls or lozenges, colors into crescents. To add to the air of fantasy there were several bonnets and a wine red tippet; the mackintoshes on the backs of chairs suggested a train in 1840 rather than the taxis that waited at the entrance."

"I am going on from here to interview a man who has really used the paper mulch. Lots of people have heard of it," Penelope looked at Ernest, "but I have not seen a man yet who has really put it down. So, whatever happens to the play," she tried to laugh, "my trip won't have been entirely wasted."

"There are black paper pots too for seedlings, shall you try them?"

78.

"Not till I see what happens to the lettuces." The waiters snatched the soup plates away, and served the second course. Suppose Ernest thought, somebody sees me and tells Cordelia I am here. She will think I have come to spy on her for Penelope. And she never listens to explanations. She will never believe that we only discussed mulch. She would never see me again and it would not be my fault. If I say I have a headache Theodora will insist on sitting with me. He was trapped. And so ridiculously frightened that he could not make up his mind either to sit there quietly or to leave.

At that moment Penelope in sheer nervousness upset her plate of whitebait. They slid across the table in an empire poster of tiny, silver scales, down folds of the table cloth or under the rim of plates. The waiters were too rushed even to notice the accident. Ernest grinned and got to work with a spoon trying to prevent fish from slipping over the floor. Penelope smiled back. But Theodora, a lady never laughs at an accident, kept up a flow of conversation, her eyes fixed brightly on the ceiling.

"I went down to a charming cottage last weekend."

"Yes, dear. I seem to have upset my fish, so careless of me."

"And so apt to happen with whitebait," Ernest was determined to be helpful, "it's like," he couldn't think what it was

79.

like, "well, eating grapefruit that has been only half cut."
There was no connection between them but he wanted to be con-
soling.

"And I thought of you at once, Penelope, it had such in-
triguing rafters, the genuine black and white; now if you would
give up the farm and move there I am sure you would find com-
pletely new inspiration."

"They were worm-eaten, Theo, I expect. There's one over
there Mr. North, just under the flower vase," Ernest recovered
a net full at one swoop, "and the windows in those old places
never fasten properly. They seemed to get burned down too
if you put in any comforts."

"You are so unromantic, darling," Theodora glanced at
herself hastily in a pocket mirror, "I simply adore sleeping
high up in a tiny attic full of lavender and cobwebs and having
the birds wake me in the morning."

"But Theo, you never do. And lavender doesn't grow on
roofs. Please don't trouble any more," she smiled at Ernest,
"let the waiter do it. What a pity there isn't a cat."
Greasy lines crossed the table cloth in a sort of check.
"Oh dear, it's that first entrance in the second act that worries
me so much. I wonder if they altered it."

"It would be much better for you if you stopped thinking
about it."

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As if one could, Ernest thought, eating his own fish very carefully. He must get across to Penelope in some way that he understood what she felt like. Actually their worlds did not meet. The essential freedom of the mind had been his always. Very uncomfortable, often painful, but it had its compensating excitements. It might express itself in art, Cordelia had it, or it might work on, a beautiful and powerful engine, in the head of a man who bred pigs or built bridges. You could not buy it or inherit it or give it to a friend. It surprised one, there was first nothing, then it was suddenly there. He would live probably an even more conventional life than Penelope but one day something would happen and they would find themselves because of it on opposite sides of the wall. He could not outline an example, we are different because you believe running in the open air is virtuous and I think it merely stupid, because every action was colored by its circumstance and for him there could be no rigid rule; yet he wanted to ease the moment for her, knowing too well how often the structure of anticipated success crumbled into uneasy disappointment.

"I think you need not worry. They have been very careful, so much depends on it. Whether it will be what you originally wrote, remains a question. But does it matter, if you get the money."

81.

It was kinder to say this he thought, for it did matter.
He was sure that her apparent pre-occupation with the farm was a
cloak lest she showed how much she would mind if the play were
to fail. Of the three of them she would suffer most, for no
play Theodora wrote would be unsuccessful, if it closed after a
single night it would be "a conspiracy against me because they
were so jealous," and Ernest himself would not care. But Pene-
lope was an artist, the evening was banging on her nerves till
her cutlet threatened to follow the whitebait across the table-
cloth, only she was just not free of the exterior world, its
applause mattered because she was uncertain, she was successful
because so near to what they wanted, yet she could not set her
mind winging across space, free from the comments, if anything
happened.

"Ernest has worked with films," Theodora explained. "I suppose they are responsible for his mercenary attitude."

"With films? But I adore films. Now I suppose you are
much too highbrow to go to a Harold Lloyd?"

"Oh no, it is only when they get serious that I have no
use for Hollywood," he hated with particular intensity the pain-
ted black and white masks they substituted for faces," they are
good on comic stuff."

"He makes me laugh."

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"Penelope! I can never understand," Theodora looked worried and stole another glance at her mirror, "how anyone can be so childish as to sit through men meeting tame lions on roofs."

"But Theo, once in a while I do love to see a slapstick where the man falls down with a bang after the custard pie has hit him. Be honest with yourself, doesn't it give you a real thrill?"

"Of course it doesn't," she had her empress air of saying charioteers only, and then from fashion, not inclination. "No, I can seldom enjoy the cinema. It's so inane as a rule, and they prolong their kisses too much."

"I'm talking about thrills, not kisses," Penelope screamed, relieved to find something at last that did not tap her phobia, "doesn't it make you sit up in your seat when a custard pie hits a man on the nose?"

Poor Theodora was not sure by this time whether she were being teased or if they were both serious. She realised that the conversation was partly defence against nerves but could not forego asserting her mental superiority to such pleasures. "I stopped being six years old when I left the nursery," she said primly. Ernest tried to intervene. "I like the speed in films and you can always think of something else if you get bored."

Another train was definitely in for the swing doors opened and shut constantly. An old lady took her seat at the opposite

83.

table and removed her shawl. Her knot of white hair twirled upward in a coil that was the exact match of the mouldings on the pillar. With her lace and bright smile she suggested fountains in a French garden full of stone seats supported by cupids, with leaves arranged carefully to be rustled by her skirt. Her companion, an elderly gentleman, appeared to be a little deaf for she had to shout at him above the din of passing trays.

"Were you able to get your walk to-day, dear?"

"Yes, yes."

"I do feel lost if I cannot get my exercise."

"What's that you say?"

"There's no exercise like walking," She shouted each word carefully with a pause between.

"Yes, yes."

They must have expressed these opinions so regularly, Ernest decided, that the phrases had become a magic formula that had to be repeated during meals. "At least," Penelope said, watching their neighbours with fascinated interest, "nobody from the theatre is here." She had scarcely finished her sentence when a girl stopped at their table. Except for a white blouse cascaded with frills she looked the model for a golfing champion, in grey tweed with enormous shoulders.

"Oh, Miss Bush, how are you? We have missed you at hearings. You are coming over this evening, I expect (she was

84.

determined to be ingratiating) I am just on my way over."

Penelope's prudence was mastered by her curiosity. "Do you happen to know if they changed that entrance...?"

"To the second act?"

"Yes." She tried so hard to appear indifferent that she became instead threatening.

"Well, you know they have re-arranged the script a little during the week (she balanced uneasily intent upon keeping on good terms with both sides) but I think you will find that very little has been altered," she glanced at her watch. "I must fly but I do want to give you my best wishes for to-morrow night, Miss Bush, it is such a privilege" (she can't dare Ernest thought, to clasp her hands) to be acting in your play." Her fingers came together as her voice dropped.

"Thank you, thank you!" Penelope was not unduly taken in by the homage; all of them, a little shattered, watched the girl walk into the palm court as if she marched alone into the jungle.

"The worst has happened!" Penelope leaned forward with her elbows on the table. "They have shifted that entrance, I knew it, and it wrecks the play."

"My dear child," Theodora decided to be competent, "you have had a long journey and a worrying time. Come right up-stairs to bed and relax...."

"I don't want to relax, I want to go to the pictures..."

85.

"I've got such a thrilling novel I can lend you and you can
curl up and be ever so comfortable."

"You don't suppose I could sleep? Penelope's voice was
ominous; the noise and confusion must be intolerable Ernest
thought, paying the bill hurriedly, so that they could leave.

"How would you like," Theodora continued patiently, "to go
for a little walk? It will be too dark to see the shops."

"We must get a paper," Penelope dropped her bag under the
table as she stood up. She grabbed at it fiercely and a waiter
swept a tray of coffee cups high over their heads to avoid
overturning them on her. "If only there were a ~~Mickey Mouse I~~
could bear it. I could stand the evening if I could see a
Mickey Mouse."

CHAPTER VII.

A fine drizzling rain fell on Hope's shoulders as she came
out from lunch. The road sloped into a rainbow of red and
metallic green, partly from the petrol mixed with mud and partly
from the lights. Yet she walked slowly, much as she had feared
getting wet, for she dreaded the afternoon, alone in the office
without an atom of work.

People said knit but wool cost money and her wrists were
so rheumatic. The needle clicking irritated her, it reminded
her of Ada. And really she could buy a coat just as cheaply
in the stores and it would be far better made. She stopped
to look at a shop window from sheer habit.

"Bit of a worry for you, the boss being up in Manchester."
Why couldn't Laura Marshall keep her tongue quiet in her head?
Spiteful, suggestive sentences like that were very different from
a pleasant word of gossip exchanged during lunch hour over a cup
of coffee. Then Laura had not even waited for her at midday.
She had gone off without a word, probably with that young clerk
who asked so many questions. It had quite spoiled Hope's own
meal. She had sat with her eyes on the door instead of looking
at her food. Fortunately the waitress had had a pleasant chat
with her, they had not been very busy, and she had sat as long
as she had dared, almost a full hour.

87.

She needed a bit of cheerful conversation badly. Ada was getting more morose than ever for the boy would have to go to a sanatorium but the weekly payments were almost beyond her sister's income. They would have to be made, on them and the rent there was no economy possible. And the boy wanted so many extra things. She had even hinted to Hope that there were lodgers who would pay her twenty five shillings for the room. But Hope had been firm, "no, Ada, employment these days is too uncertain. When I have paid my arrears," (she still owed her two pounds) "I am going to save." And suddenly the repressed longing of the awful previous months had broken cautiousness down, "I saw a nice room quite near my work, the other day, for fifteen shillings, and I should save another two shillings a week you know, on fares." Ada had been silent for the other lodgers existed only in her mind, but now they hardly spoke to one another and to save light, went to bed immediately after supper.

With a hot water bottle and her old down quilt, Hope was soon warm and as comfortable as she had ever known herself to be. But her thoughts, in the dark, bothered her so much. She was alone so during the day. Mr. North came in, but he rarely stayed for more than half an hour. "This is my clearing house," he used to say but she did not understand what he meant by it. She could only wonder half the night, listening in her mind to

88.

footsteps coming up the stairs to give her suddenly her dismissal.

She couldn't blame Mr. North if he did, because he had warned her that the position would be temporary. And for the life of her she could not think what he was doing with an office at all.

Nothing seemed to happen there except the arrival of an occasional messenger boy who tramped up the stairs with an enormous packet of papers. Really it was amazing, how those delivery boys could bear to go round with such filthy hands; she always kept a pencil handy for it made her quite sick to think of using the stubs dangling by a string from their smudged untidy books. Yet North could not be, as Laura hinted, a spy. He was not nervous or hunted, but plump and comfortable looking. The way he spoke and the rather strange things he sometimes said, wouldn't they come from living abroad? People judged too hastily, spoke too quickly. They only forgot their speed when it came to trusting Providence, the one thing that really mattered.

A queer cold fear had gone right through her the day that Mr. North had told her where he was going. He needed a holiday she was sure, for in spite of the office being quiet he came in always with a heap of letters that had to be posted to places half over Europe. But nobody would go to Manchester for pleasure.

He is coming back to shut the office. It was a premonition, brakes screeched as the amber lights went on, she knew what was going to happen. And nobody can call me superstitious she

89.-90

thought, remembering how the girls had laughed or even scolded,
because she had had no faith in their prophecies or tea leaves.
It was odd, for this was a new idea to her, that perception
should come with all the symptoms, the shivering and the wretched-
ness, of a chill

"I don't really know what I shall do," she said to herself,
as if she had read the news in a letter, as if it were final
and not a fixed and torturing idea. She walked up the street
very slowly for the lights had turned to green again. She had
thought that if everything failed she could have tried domestic
work but even that it appeared was not for her, a charwoman had
to have strong arms to scrub, "why you wouldn't last an after-
noon" they had said refusing even to take her name down. "You
ought to dye your hair," another woman had advised, sitting
beside her an an employment office, but that cost money and it
would feel at her age, so unseemly.

There was a raw wind at the corners and her coat seemed to
have no warmth left in it. It was getting as old as she was
and as useless. But no, she must not think anything so foolish.
She could do her former work as well as ever if it were there
to be done. It was only the weather, this was one of her bad
days and her lumbago was coming on; it was so tiring, pulling
herself together.

91.

And suddenly (never in her life had she done anything so stupid) she stepped off the curb almost into a bus. The driver shouted at her and she dodged in a kind of leap, right into the arms of a little man with an umbrella waiting on a refuge. She saw his surprised face, "but madam," he began to say and then they recognised each other, "why, Miss Tiptaft, what has to happened/you? You always were so cautious."

"Do you know, Mr. Waite," He was from the carpets adjoining her department, "I never saw that bus. I must be getting аб-sented-minded."

Poor thing, I wonder if her sight is going? Mr. Waite took her arm and they crossed, quietly this time, to the opposite pavement. "I am glad you were near enough to earth to recognise an old friend. It seems years ago that the firm shut down!"

"It does indeed. And how are you, did you have much difficulty in getting settled?" He looked so prosperous in a thick new overcoat that she felt she could risk the question.

"Well, it's an ill wind. I had a brother in quite a big way of lampshades and he had been worrying me to leave for some time. But I do miss the old routine. Funny how one got ad-justed to it. Nothing seems the same nowadays."

A century might have passed instead of less than a year; she caught him looking at the worn collar on her coat, and guessed that he was afraid to ask her for her history. "I was out four

92.

months" she said, "I'm working in an office at the moment but we never know for how long, do we?" she smiled brightly, trying to make the sentence sound less ominous.

"Dear me, that's bad. I'm sorry to hear it." He blinked, holding his umbrella over her, while she danced backward a step or two and fidgetted with her bag, in just the way he remembered.

They hesitated, wanting to talk but the crowd bumped into them. It began to rain more heavily. "It's funny," Mr. Waite said, "but I came up to see a man and he is out till five. I thought I would drop into a cinema for an hour. I wonder if you would care to come with me?"

The office in Hope's mind was poisoned with fear. Just to walk up the steps made her feel odd; she stood there with drops from the umbrella falling in a little puddle around her, and thought of the morose anxiety-ridden hours that ended only in Ada's wrinkled face in the dim kitchen light. "What a coincidence, Mr. Waite, I had my lunch at the office, things were a bit quiet there to-day, just on purpose to leave my hour free for shopping. I am sure it is very kind of you, if you can really spare the time."

Hope could hardly believe her invention or her own ears. It showed how demoralising unemployment was, she had never before in her business life deliberately stolen an afternoon.

93.

She had always prided herself upon being faithful to her em-
ployers to the exact minute of the exact hour, never snatching
the moments here or there that the "new generation" took with-
out a twinge of conscience. "Nothing is the same nowadays,"
she said as if she were a prophetess, as they turned together
briskly up the street. She could tell Mr. North about it of
course when he came back. Not that she had gone to the pic-
tures but just vaguely, "I'm afraid the other day that I ex-
ceeded my lunch hour a little, but coming back I met an old
friend...." he would understand she was sure, if she put it to
him casually.

"What depresses me is the way they are pulling down all
our old landmarks."

"Yes, I always ask why doesn't Parliament do something
about it?"

"Well, I don't know, they do say it's the taxation."

"Short-sighted policy, I must say. In my opinion that's
what caused the ruin of Tubbs and Barrow's; nobody wants to
buy the things they used to order."

"Or if they do, there is no room for them in these modern
flats. They have simply forgotten what a chandelier is like."

It was hard, he thought, that after a lifetime of ex-
perience there should be no more spacious rooms to decorate
but only ugly little boxes. "If they demolish many more

94.

houses, there won't be a street left that we can remember.
They have just pulled down the place where I did my best work.
I spent weeks there as a young man and you should have seen the
shades on the drawing room reading lamps, pink satin that stood
up by itself and old ivory lace, you can't get the materials
nowadays. And then I matched up every rosebud in the embroidery
to the colored globes of the chandelier. Dark pink shaded to
cream that took up the tone of the lace. They were worth a
small fortune." And what had become of them? He had asked
the workmen but of course they had not known. Sold in an odd
lot or thrown away. Just because people nowadays had no sense
of values, and had neglected to have them cleaned. "The lady
wanted forgetmenot buds but I persuaded her to keep to roses.
It was a real work of art if I have to say so myself."

"Tastes have changed so." Girls dashed by in caps and
mackintoshes accepting rain as casually as sunshine. It was
so different from Hope's first days in business when a long
skirt meant sitting a whole day with damp, uncomfortable legs.

"It's these flats." Mr. Waite had usually to keep his
views to himself for his brother was devoid of artistic sensi-
bility. Twenty flats means twenty prospective customers he would
shout, and the tenants change. Much better for business than one
house and one family doing the rooms up once in twenty years.
But good materials were made to last and this demand for change

95.

and cheapness meant that first quality materials were no longer
manufactured. People were crazy, Mr. Waite reflected, and an
artist's life was hell, he could phrase it no other way. "You
know, I had to take a lamp to a place the other week and there
was not even a table in the room, only a sort of tin can arrange-
ment, they can call it metal if they like, but I shall call it
by its proper name, an ash bin, and they had it filled with
thistles."

"Thistles!"

"Well they were long and prickly and without a flower.
There must be something unhealthy in the minds of people who
can have such truck about. Something morbid."

"I expect it was a cactus." One must keep up with the
times, Hope thought, the world moved normally and whatever the
force of gravitation might be, people couldn't be expected
to remain completely still. "We did have them in the flower
department the last year and I must say they seemed popular.
Not that I care about them myself. What I like in a flower is
scent."

"People simply don't buy roses any more," he turned up his
collar for he was gallantly holding the one umbrella over Miss
Tiptaft's decrepid felt hat. "It's this modern craze for speed."

"Yes. But you know Mr. Waite, I have often thought how
delightful a little car must be. When I was younger than I am

now," she giggled and straightened the hat that was continually catching in the umbrella spikes, "I often used to take a bus ride of a Sunday. It seemed to change one's thoughts."

"I think the days when people stayed at home were infinitely happier," there was nothing in the world that Mr. Waite disliked more than change or eating in the open air. When Tubbs and Barrow's had found out the best materials and the best arrangements for different rooms, that deep green for the library for instance or the nursery baby-blue, what did people want to come along for, disturbing orders and workmen, with a demand for concealed lighting or new shapes? "And is your present position satisfactory?" he enquired, while cars streamed by so endlessly that it seemed impossible for them ever to cross the road.

"Well, I must say I am fortunate. Though I've had rather a bad time with my lumbago lately, still so long as one can get about I suppose one ought not to complain. But it seems almost lonely just the two of us after being a member of such a big family, I might say, for so many years. It's a funny thing, I'll tell you when I missed it most. The rush days before Christmas and that was something I was positive I would never do, not in my whole life."

It had been nightmare for so many seasons. No, dear, we can't repeat those calendars, I told the lady so last week, the

97.

extra hands muddling up the envelopes so you didn't know where to put your hands on them, sorry madam, but I couldn't get to you before, the heat in the day and the bus rides on wet even-ings, were a haze now in her mind that the excitement of ex-perience colored as brightly as a Christmas window. She remembered as the traffic was held up and they dashed across the road in the middle of a crowd, that she ought to be at the office. Suppose just this very afternoon somebody came in to buy a pamphlet? But she could always say she had popped along to the printer's and she forgot remorse listening to the sparse news that was all Mr. Waite knew now of the other hundreds scattered that same morning as themselves. They were two survivors from a shipwreck come ashore at different points. The wind sweeping along the road added to the illusion that the bright entrance as they stepped inside the cinema was the warm shelter of a lifeboat. It was the wrong time of the afternoon for the place to be crowded; fortunately for Hope they had missed the cartoon and had arrived in the middle of the news.

She waited ready to close both eyes if there were any horrors. We have enough in real life, she always said, without paying good money to watch them on the screen. Nobody could call her a film-goer. She went occasionally for company with Ada but she had little patience with romantic stories. Things never happened as they were supposed to happen; people who

98.

made pictures seemed abysmally ignorant of life. But it was
nice to watch a procession quietly from a warm seat or to see
the interior of a palace. Or with luck there was a short
topical of men blowing glass, crystal and flame spurting
against a shadowy background, or chocolates being packed me-
chanically into boxes.

A football match, the opening of a bridge and a review
of foreign troops flashed by, in what had become the news con-
vention. Teams ran out on to a field, there was a panorama
of the spectators, soldiers saluted, a child offered a bunch
of flowers. Photographs now were no more original than the
newspapers. They were turned out by routine like thousands
of pots of jam.

The lights went up for a moment. A few people walked
out. "And how are you really getting on?" Mr. Waite enquired.
He ought to give her his address but suppose she were really
out of work how could he help her? She was simply too old
for employment. And it was difficult enough as it was for
him to manage, with an invalid wife and no chance of a pension.
He could give her a shilling or two, that was all.

"Well, it was hard being out those four months. And then
I had rather a nasty turn. It was my sister Ada, you see, she
was ill. And really, when it's your own flesh and blood you
can't leave them to strangers, can you?" Pale blue eyes

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stared anxiously into Mr. Waite's glasses. "But I was inexperienced with the heart. Stooped too much and would you believe it, not a word of thanks did I get. But I've had my warning. If you don't look out for your own health, nobody is going to do it for you. Now I do nothing for anyone, only the little things."

"Fancy that!" Mr. Waite clasped his hands and leaned back in his chair; it was a familiar gesture from the days when an inexperienced client had rejected tassels on a lampshade. "It is funny how some people take everything just like that for granted." A bit like the wife he thought, not that he must judge her, always being so ill, but was it necessary to wait till he had come downstairs after a busy day and opened his paper, before asking him to fetch down her workbox?

The cinema darkened again and the title of the main picture was projected on to the screen. Some love story no doubt but the main thing Mr. Waite thought, was that it was dim and comfortable and dry. He liked to watch details in a set and to imagine how Tubbs and Barrow's would have decorated a similar room. For that reason he avoided Westerns if he could or costume pictures. He had no interest in men galloping over a sandy hill or pikemen guarding a wall. What he liked was a drama set if possible in an expensive flat or in country houses. "If they have color," he almost said aloud, "I shall stop coming to the pictures." For it would be agony to see a shade done in lavender

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when it ought to be conifer-green.

Cordelia, Hope remembered, seeing the names, Cordelia..., but that must be the star who had called up Mr. North once on the telephone. He had seized the receiver so quickly that she had thought it must be a deal, she could see him now, sitting on the window ledge and rubbing the back of his head with a more and more bewildered face. "Yes, Cordelia," and "no, but I'll find out," he had said, pulling at his hair and frowning.

"Cordelia wants a parrot," he seemed to be speaking to himself when he rang off, "dear me, they are very dangerous animals."

"Hardly an animal, Mr. North," she had ventured to giggle.

"They bite" he had answered a little mournfully, "they are not birds, they resemble pterodactyls." He had looked at his address book.

"I may be able to get it in time but I refuse to take the beast down to her." He picked up his overcoat and she had noticed that the sleeve lining was half torn out.

"If only she wanted a wallaby I know a man who breeds them." He had looked rather wistfully over the adjoining roof tops.

"And the letters, Mr. North?" for she had seen that he was about to rush down the stairs. "She wants a parrot, if I am alive I shall be in to-morrow morning." He had shut the door with a determined bang.

Probably Hope thought, they wanted a performing one for the film. She stared at the screen but there was no sign of

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a macaw. Only a man and you could not call her a woman, you
had to think of her as a child. There was a sweep of hair,
moving so swiftly that you could not tell if it were fair or
dark, and a figure that looked as if the people and the room
and the fur collar on her coat were all too heavy; rather as if
(and Hope was pleased she had discovered this idea) a wind-
flower were caught in a galloping north east gale.

It was all so quick that it made her feel too sleepy to
follow the story. She began to confuse the husband with the
lover, both looked alike. People spoke of marriage but there
was her sister Ada, what had she got from it? Not a stroke
of work had her husband ever done to the day he had deserted
her while the boy was young. And fools wrote to the papers
about women having work at all! Well, it had been life at
Tubbs and Barrow's even if she had no savings to show now.
There had been no spectacle like it, she thought, looking at
the screen, particularly at Christmas when they had strung
the main hall with red globes and white oyystal balls with
immense raspberry hearts. Frost and cotton wool had shaken
down over the furs and mackintoshes of the crowd, and there had
been a scent of oranges and old pine branches through the duck-
blue beads and swaying primrose bells. And no story and no
picture could compete with the separate groups, the hands under
her, the buyers, to whom she was polite in exact degree of pre-

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cedence, or the customers with their peculiarities of speech and
dress and choice. No, she was too experienced, Hope decided,
for the films. It was all very well for Ada who had to have
something to dream about, but it could never come up for her
to the jumbled gossip of the lunch room or on the buses going
home. She felt a twinge of lumbago again and closed her eyes.
They said she was too old but the worst of it was that she felt
herself less than fifty. Things had changed but she seemed
to have stopped; it was all so bewildering, so hard, as if a
new language had sprung up overnight.

Mr. Waite leaned forward, with his eyes fixed on Cordelia's
shoulders. The poor child, she could/be more than sixteen.
He wished he had had a daughter like that, so detached from the
men and from the room where she was sitting that she was, yes,
you had to say it, not of this world. She lifted her eyes
looking for something, not her lover, no, the poor child had no
realisation he could swear of what that lout wanted from her.
But when the wind blew the hair back from her forehead and she
looked out at the trees like a despairing baby, he wanted to
rush from his seat and put his own arms round her and lead her
into the finest room Tubbs and Barrow's had ever decorated. He
would take her to the sofa under the rosebud shades and say, now
you are never, never to be frightened any more. She came down
steps in a trance and stood wondering a little at her own despair.

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This is art, this is poetry, he wanted to shout (happily he had not noticed that Hope, with both hands clasping her umbrella, was asleep) and he alone perhaps of the hundreds in the cinema, realised how beautiful it was. He understood, yet he had no family to toot with him to the gate, only an invalid wife, who nagged almost vulgarly, "sometimes Harry, I think you never realise your blessings. I'd like to see you walking up and down all night long with a kid, just/because it had eaten itself sick."

And then the screen shadowed into darkness.

What a tragedy, Mr. Waite thought, as people began to fumble for their coats and leave. Perhaps it was as well that he had not a daughter. The world was too perilous for a girl. No matter how careful you were how could you expect them to realise its dangers? It would destroy that phosphorescent quality of bewilderment they had. And the men you met now, especially on Saturdays, cycling out into the country in open shirts and horrid khaki shorts, what would it feel like to have one of them banging into one's front door? There was no leisure any longer, that was the trouble; he coughed a little and Hope woke up.

"I'm afraid I must be getting on," he said, picking up his hat. Oh, the office, Hope thought guiltily, but it was too dark to see the time. They pushed their way through damp

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overcoats and people crowding in from the day outside. The rain beat now in a steady sweep over the road. They both hesitated at the entrance. "Thank you, Mr. Waite, I don't know when I have spent such a pleasant afternoon." She unrolled her umbrella and glanced round to see if her number bus were in sight. "Well, Miss Tiptaft, some of us say this and some of us say that but I feel the cinema is a blessing for people like ourselves. You have got to be a bit particular in your choice of film these days, I grant you, but take this afternoon, a person of feeling must come out uplifted by what we have seen. That was art, Miss Tiptaft, art, though there are few enough to appreciate it."

"Yes, indeed, but did you happen to notice a parrot?"

"A parrot, Miss Tiptaft," he shook his head, she was older than he had thought. And how very thin her face had gone.

"No, I didn't either yet I thought I had heard there was one in that film," she was not going to tell him about Mr. North. She could blame nobody in the City for being a little suspicious about an office connected with the films. "It must have been my mistake," she smiled brightly, keeping her secret. It was after five and her own bus was coming, to stop outside the cinema door. She would go home she decided, gripping her bag, there was sure to be nothing at the office. "I can only say again that it has been a very great pleasure meeting you, Mr. Waite."

105.

"A pleasure I hope will be repeated," he bowed, wondering if he ought to give her his address. To his relief her bus drew up and she cut short the farewells. "So kind of you," she called, hurrying to the curb, then the difficulty of getting on to a greasy step prevented her from looking round. By the time she had settled herself on a vacant seat it was useless to wave, for she could see only the rim of Mr. Waite's bowler, and the back of his neck between the crowd. Forgetful of his five o'clock appointment, he had stepped back inside the doorway, to stare at the picture of Cordelia's head.

120.

CHAPTER IX.

Ernest leaned back in his chair and looked up at
the wall paper. He thought of China and the Ship Canal at
the same moment. Only genius could have selected the friezes;
a paper doll sentinel under the arched bridge watched over
stretches of sluggish fog-coloured water. "Factory site,"
he thought, "rail and canal facilities at hand". Was it
some craftsman's dream of an industrialised China? Sprung
from the moment when a child's focus turned the flat surface
of a picture into a map of coloured cities in bright sand.
Into the suspended quality of some provincial Sunday of the
eighties, east wind had brought coughs and for compensation
had slid back the slats of wooden sided blocks, so that heavily
branched trees pushed up from the floor with a smoke of black-
eyed monkeys, swinging by their tails (so long as no finger
touched) from match stick branches. Some such memory
must have come into the heads bent over long factory tables.
The design, from the fisherman with a bamboo pole to the girl
with an outstretched aster repeated twice precisely, came
straight from a region where play stops bewildered, unsure if
the boulder that it touches, be real stone or created island.

It was strange, he thought, how life built up from
accidental things in those far off days when one played with

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moods and not with bricks, in the midst of black petticoats
and hibernation. Something that lifted to flight. The
Aroanic snow thawed out a kayak length for a bear to wake or
a gull to cry, while outside this circle winter held the sea
in silence and the seals in sleep. There had been no mis-
taking the reality of one's sensations, but they had remained
unread by the surrounding world; for whom a clean curtain or
a mis-timed tea blotted out television of Persepolis.

With Cordelia it was different. Away from her what he remembered most was inconsistency. When he was with her, coming fretted with anger into the hotel room, dropping his hat on the first convenient chair, to count the freckles of her disappearing summer while she teased him, something happened that was the reverse of either hypnosis or dream. Ice cracked; the sun shone. Circulation surged again in a long-forgotten self; growth began, vibrations full with unexpected nerves. Perhaps that was why she always complained of sleeplessness. Irradiation was in her, but she gave life and never sleep. Trying to crowd the sensations of twenty years of this stifled self into as many minutes, he would forget to speak until she said, "now I must send you away", with a wrinkle of her nose. People could be proof against eyes, even if the glint of a lion's mane flashed in them under branches, but the vulnerable forehead of a mountain boy bewilderingly lifted in the lamplight, surprised one to obedience.

122.

"I lead a dog's life," her hands had clasped her knees in the stiff way she might have sat on a slope with gentians in a hat beside her, "hotels, dressing rooms, trains, New York, London, what does it matter where I am, I see the same things," would her voice in any play ever be quite so mournful? "If once only there were rest."

"I could give you sleep," he had said, "if you would let me help you. Quite abstract help, I should ask nothing from you afterwards..." gold nor a part in your next play do not touch my world, he thought, you are safe, even if you wish I shall forget the mysteries; the mysteries I must know if I am to quiet you, the shock at three years old you never have remembered but that is in your eyes staring at the Verona night, the rough words at five, that colour the way you lean against a door... but he saw it was no use. What she herself called her bad mood flared into her face, "you, impossible" and she had dismissed him, with the same head shake of defiance that had, for a thousand evenings had swept her to the climax of her middle act.

He decided against going down to lunch. Not that Cordelia were likely to stir from her room before evening, but her maid might see him. It was now two o'clock. Or was it later? He hoped for her own sake that she was asleep. "It will be the Marco Polo of your moods," he thought, "I will write a play for you." Though her play had been written three

123.

centuries ago, when just her hands had twisted stalks by
mountain water, as nervously as she had held his arm, seventy
two hours ago, at the moment of turning from the protection of
her silence, to face the too dangerous experience of this night.

A telephone bell rang furiously, breaking off the dream.

Had she found he was here? Was she going to speak to
him, send him away? He waited to take up the receiver.
In an instant fate would be irrevocable but this moment was
eternity of promise. It blotted waiting out and all uncertainty.
Would she be very angry? He realised suddenly that he was
far more frightened that he had thought.

But the ringing continued: "Hullo," he said, sitting on the
bed to answer it more easily, probably it would be the maid.

"Ernest, are you there?" In a flash of disappointment
he recognised Theodora's voice. Had the silly idiot forgot-
ten her bag?

"Yes, what is it?" Hope was better, he supposed, than to
know fate's ultimate decision but it flung him back to listening
for a signal. (You sound worried.)
"Has anything happened?"

"Ernest darling, you will help me out, won't you? Miss
Peek is due in the West Lounge at three. Have you got the
name? It is Peck, without an e. Now I want you to meet her
and explain about our Meeting. Tell her that I am with a
Committee and that I shall be back just as soon as I am able."

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"But Theodora, I know nothing about it. I'll talk to her for a few minutes but when are you going to be here?"

"Keep her talking, memorise one of my pamphlets, they are lying around on my dressing table......"

"I can't get to your dressing table," what a compromising fool the woman was. "Of course you can't," the telephone magnified Theodora's giggle and across it he heard the gruff tones of an irritated male voice saying some just not to be heard sentence. "But flatter her, talk to her, only keep her till I arrive. She is very influential."

"But when are you coming? Can I send you a taxi?"

"No. You see, Ernest, I told you I had to come in by a secret door!"

"Yes," for a second he wondered if Theodora who never drank at all, had accepted a cocktail with disastrous consequences.

"Somehow I touched the wrong switch and we can't get out."

"What?"

"I touched the wrong switch and we're shut in. We can't get out till the man comes back from lunch who knows the combination!"

"But, Theodora...."

"Darling, I'll explain everything later. We have rung up the Fire Brigade but they can't help. All we can do is wait

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until the chief engineer gets back but he seems to have left
just as it happened. Keep Miss Peck till I come. Her support
may mean everything." Lest Ernest begin to excuse himself,
she slammed down the receiver.

Furiously he walked to the window and stood, staring, at
the fog. By this time he was so nervous that even to walk
through the hall that evening seemed a nightmare. Now he would
have to go down, bracing a lift and coldly efficiet clerks at the
reception desk, to find an old woman and talk to her
about welfare work. His very appearance would arouse her
suspicions. Whatever else he looked like, and most people
thought he was a commercial traveller, he had neither the voice
nor turn of sentence that marked the lay helper in the ritual
of charity.

not

He would go down. He wanted to lose himself again in this
unconscious-become-conscious of dream and fog. Thoughts turned
themselves inside out and he stared, amazed at their colors,
for they were not faded as the habitual outside surfaces were,
exposed to air and the disillusioning daily friction of disap-
pointment. Why should he let Theodora tyrannise? He wanted
to say to her, I have worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day
for five years, most of it was deadening, much of what I believed
was good has been wasted. Day in day out, work and despair and
trying to get jobs for people in a world that doesn't want them,

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afraid sometimes to notice the dark way clover lifts under a
rainy sky, with death and torture and starvation waiting around
the corner, and now fate has given me a week, one week to forget,
and you ask me to break it talking about dreary little schemes to
an old woman when none of you, not one of your committees on
commissions, dare face the ultimate issue. I can't do it, can't
even you Theodora, see that I can't do it? He would be firm for
once. He would refuse to go down.

He looked at the telephone again, knowing that it would not
ring this afternoon except with idle messages. Until he were
officially here he could make no excuse that he had waited in
to be called up. Yet this was the single bridge between
Cordelia's world and his own. Sooner or later summons must come
along the wire, a scolding or dismissal. The air that had
eddied with surprise and a little fear at the sudden bell,
steadied itself. His watch said ten to three.

Miss Peck. Where was the key of his room? She would
be aged and in back he thought, with ruffle upon ruffle of
white collar. Dressmakers were so fond of clipping them on with
invisible fasteners just where old fingers found them hard to
manage. She would come in from the country, from a garden full
of blue asters, preparing the journey several days ahead. He
could see her speaking to her maid, both equally anxious of the
traffic, the draught in the train and the hall of the hotel.
"If there is time I shall combine it with the hairdresser's",

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for white hair was so difficult to keep really nice at home.
She might have a little dark silk bag or perhaps a patent leather
one, and certainly an umbrella. And be rather thin and not
very tall.

He supposed he must see her. He could obliterate Theodora
and not mind her reproaches. But an old lady, could one let
her wait alone perhaps an hour, in this somewhat alarming hotel?
He found the key and his hat and banged the door angrily, tempted
to open it again and lose himself till his mood wore out and he
had to wake to the alarming reality of evening. Perhaps it was
cowardice, the hope that when he was old people would be kind to
him; the more he felt absorbed into himself the less easy action
was; just because the moments of his freedom were so vivid he
could not abandon Miss Peck to her fate.

The corridor was empty; it was dark. There was a lull
between the arrival of the early trains and tea. It was heavy
and gold with lights shining through glass reflectors above doors,
he could count the pollen grains or was it dust, that made the air
It was so heavy that he walked slowly, pushing against it as if
into a dome, gate to some Saracenic courtyard, hill hidden in
grey landscape. The caravans of visitors would pass he knew,
oblivious of a flashof green between two stones; it needed
eyes familiar with the map to pause and turn, upward from dusty
roads to unexpected shade.

128.

He would hold back this minute, time should wait for him,
he would turn the lock on it, go back fifteen, twenty years to the
sharp moment he had wakened to the over-consciousness of beauty.
If he could let the under self sweep in a wave over the rubble of
his thinking mind, something that had never happened would happen.
He would find what he had lost and emerge, confident and other,
to lift from dream into new life. "They say, you are a deep
sea, with small lands," he thought, "you break and thunder under
brain and day," the cautious logical labour of so many years was
threatened; he knew it and could not care.

Cordelia was asleep. Perhaps beyond that door. In a
dreamless sleep he hoped, and not as his, where a thousand spines
of a stiff and prickly tree, rustled against the surface of his
will. His feet hardly moved him along the corridor. He was a
sleepwalker conscious of his trance, unwilling or unable to break
from it. He could thrust barriers down, he was so brave.
Brave......

He bumped with his unseeing eyes, straight into Cordelia's
maid, hurrying down the passage with a bunch of roses.

Instinotively he pretended to sneeze, making so odd a
noise that she stared at him in complete amazement, whereas he
had passed unobserved before in the darkness of the passage.
He spluttered again and coughed, keeping a handkerchief right
across his face, then almost knocking over a surprised young
man, he bolted into the lift.

CHAPTER X.

Ernest waited nervously with his eyes on two palms.
He had been clever enough to choose the chairs opposite the
reception desk where Theodora could not possibly miss him.
A wicker table with magazines protected him from the lift.
Isolated from visitors, in spite of the position, so long as
he did not move, he felt like a herdsman on some hayrick,
surveying a flock of sheep. He tried to read the newspaper
he had bought without unfolding it; unfortunately to turn
back a corner with the sheet still a convenient size, meant
that he saw advertisements chiefly and no news.

Jumbo jangles junction. Returning from a circus to its
quarters, a tired elephant had sat down upon the traffic control
at a cross roads and blocked the line for half an hour. The
Geneva conference had been postponed till Thursday. Gentle-
woman (maid kept) seeks lady with congenial tastes to share
cottage forty miles from London; must be dog lover. Items
like these could not be studied indefinitely although he decided
to cut out the elephant paragraph to add to his collection,
"the World through Animal Eyes". In five years this had become
a thick volume, wolves clear ballroom and scheme to electrocute
bugs, being perhaps favourites. There was of course the
story of the old dame who had gone to fetch water from the well

130.

and had returned to find a lion in her kitchen. It was so charming an interlude to contemplate in the otherwise uneventful tally stick of the Shropshire seasons. But the tale introduced a human element almost as important as the lion. It was a novel at least, almost a philosophy, though slightly Victorian (surely she had worn a sun-bonnet?) in which free will and pre-destination if not fought out, might be endlessly discussed.

Why had the lion chosen just that moment and just that kitchen, what would have been his reception of her, had he found a Sunday roast of beef instead of a vegetarian larder? Again, was her choice of fare due to the perusal of advertisements in the daily paper or to some pre-determinate force that to save her life in the twitter light of a summer evening, she must suffer an inward conviction at fourteen that to chew meat were sinful? But it might equally be argued, suppose that the lion had discovered a sirloin rather than two cabbages and an egg, might he not have quelled his appetite and warned the dame with a growl, did she not run more risk by stumbling over a wiry tail, (as the newspapers related) in the dark? Why assume at once that the beast would have been unfriendly, could there not be evolution among lions? Still the story depended upon the interplay of human thoughts, it was a drama essentially of civilisation.

131.

Wolves clear ballroom on the other hand, was perfectly
direct and lyrical. The people had fled, leaping through
windows, ridiculous skirts caught up on hooks, in a René Clair
long shot of disliked customs meeting for once with just reward.
Precedence was no force to oppose to a wolf's jaw. That the curls
of the functionary's wife should slip from their pins and catch in
a balustrade, or that the passport officer should find himself
beyond dominance, stuck into a garret opening, evoked neither pity
nor resentment. It was the sweep from the north that was victor,
(one thought of Swedish forests though the journal mentioned Poland)
more from some hypnosis sprung from earlier deeds than from any
force; actually the pack was able to do little more than slide on
the parquet and nibble at iced oakes and dropped ribbons.

The bug scheme again was in the best modern tradition.
Insect bites, seriously considered, destroyed more homes than the
often quoted "influence of the films". They made too, motoring
in France so difficult. What a biography was in the making, if
there were a man who fought with wires, and calculated currents,
instead of dreaming of a uniform, to give the world immunity from
bugs. A martyr however from the beginning: they would have to
find some euphism to describe his work on a memorial tablet.
It fitted perhaps the nineteenth century, better than this age.

It was almost five to three. Either Miss Peck were not

132.

coming or Theodora must have mistaken the hour. He began to
repeat slogans, always buy space the right hand side of a paper,
keep your lettering clear, until he caught sight of a new notice
of the play and Cordelia's face on a poster, recognisable in
spite of the grained background, by the defiant tilt of her
head. You are a page from a Gozzoli procession he had said,
looking up suddenly from spears and the led horses. But
need you be quite so forlorn because you see the sky? Then
Cordelia had stopped him, with one of her swift suspicious
glances, she was not quite sure whether she liked the comparison
or not. Not ~~six hours now, he looked at his watch.~~
Perhaps any kind of work, even to plead about the institute,
was better than to sit and wait.

A young man came in, obviously not Miss Peck. He booked
a room. It seemed more hopeful when two elderly ladies stopped
at the desk, but they wanted only their keys. Ernest came to
hope that she would not come; underneath this wish he knew it was
certain that she would. He put down his newspaper in desperation;
every time that the lift went up, he tried to keep in front of him
the image of a neat dark coat, perhaps with a black fur fox. So
many old ladies wore nothing but long-haired furs round their
necks, perhaps it was a tradition of their youth. She would be
thin probably and too nervous, with a quiet unrecognisable
courage, ailing and terrified of doctors, but silent about it

133.

all, keeping to a set of rules with tenacity, where a real
sense of justice jostled against superstitions that socks
were immodest, and were believed in, with an equal and un-
questioning faith.

Several men hurried up the steps with bags, they must
be part of the conference due, according to a blackboard,
in room 109. A porter yawned, the hall was empty, except for
an immense figure who waddled by the six little bell hops so
ponderously that she reminded Ernest of a peasant woman
driving poultry, yes, he thought, there should be five or six
white ducks cackling along the road in front of her. She wore
an old and faded mackintosh and was no doubt, a farmer's wife
come in with a five pound note in her pocket, to see the races.
The hotel did not intimidate her in the least. She ambled
up to the desk and stated, eyeing them all as if she were
Manchester's dictator, "my name is Peck, Miss Peck, and I have
an appointment with Miss Wilkins in the West Lounge at three
o'clock."

The clerk pulled out a register but from a long way
off Ernest heard his own voice saying, "good afternoon, Miss
Peck, I am here to meet you in Miss Wilkins' place, as she
has been unexpectedly delayed at a Committee meeting. She
will be coming now at any minute, shall we sit down here?"

134.

Whatever the inclinations of Miss Peck were, she had certainly no use for males. He looked into determined blue eyes above a mouth drawn down into a curve of wrinkles. She had not, he saw, the wind-beaten skin of the peasant that he had at first imagined; contempt for almost everything that made the world was in her face, while her hair, her forehead and her hands seemed dried to an ash of paper.

"Young man, Miss Wilkins said three o'clock. My parents taught me that punctuality was the indispensable among virtues." To underline the words, the clock struck three, loudly and officiously.

"But you have no idea how upset Miss Wilkins is," it would be impossible to he saw, to explain the actual predicament, secret buttons and respectability were not citizens of the same land, "she went early this morning to the meeting and she cannot leave until after they have voted. She rang me up an hour ago and told me that she had a taxi waiting to dash here as soon as possible. Really, she is most worried."

The black hat, perched upon a knob of grey hair, had plumes looped over it to seem a crown. Unbuttoning her coat, Miss Peck sat down on an upright seat, leaving Ernest to take his choice of the two armchairs and to feel a fool in the one selected. "If she is unpunctual she need not add to it," the lady remarked stiffly, "by being hysterical. And surely

you cannot mean that she has been guilty of the wanton extra-
vagance of keeping a taxi for an hour? Manchester is ade-
quately provided with cabs and there are telephones. And what
is this institute of hers, anyway?"

Ernest felt the complete helplessness of the amateur
invade him, forced to pretence of skill before a professional's
eyes. He knew so little about Theodora's aims, and cared
less. And instead of presenting the case he was fascinated
by the flannel blouse in front of him, modelled on those worn
by schoolgirls in the early nineteen hundreds, except that
instead of having a high collar and a tie, it was drawn into a
yoke and tied with a knot of baby-blue ribbon, so old and
so fingered that it seemed like string. Such a figure, he
realised, would know welfare organisations from A. to Z.
"It is," he began, fumbling for a sentence because he was sink-
ing into trance again, "a scheme for issuing books to first
offenders in the juvenile courts."

"Books, what sort of books, Bibles?"

"Well, we felt it was better not to emphasise the re-
ligious aspect too much at the beginning," he was thankful
that Theodora was not there to listen, (my dear, she would say,
the old cabs are so suspicious that we must stress the
Christian aims of the movement) but this was a world where he
did not know the formulas, "later of course it would be

introduced...." he felt all words wither under an extremely
disagreeable stare. Miss Peck, he knew, saw to the very
bone of his incompetency.

"Rubbish. Pauperising people with Bibles won't make them Christians. Let them save up for the Scriptures if they want to read them. I am no believer in giving unless there is need, not even in religious matters. What people don't buy, they don't value." She untied and tied firmly again, the baby-blue bow.

Where was Theodora, Ernest wondered, he was afraid to
look at the clock. "We are trying to help children when
there have been home difficulties," he began again, "once
they have been convicted they cannot get books out of the
Public libraries. Yet books are such an important element
in their re-adaptation to their surroundings and the school."

"So you propose to give these young criminals story
books?"

"But they are hardly criminals." He saw that it was useless to argue over words. There were no shades to the perception of Miss Peck. "The books would be most carefully selected," he added hurriedly, "with a definite educational bias. There is a clergyman on the committee...." in spite of the disbelieving eyes in front of him, he could think only of the hundreds for whom there never would be a miracle,

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either of books or of ordinary human understanding; of the
many doomed to be prison or hospital fodder from the day
that they were born.

"No," Miss Peck said firmly, "you are on the wrong track. I believe in discipline. What is the modern world suffering from? Laxity. Why do we have all this unrest? Because you young people do not fear your parents any longer. You dare to have your own opinions." (Ernest wondered if he should be flattered at being included among the young; he was certainly intimidated by her manner.) "If boys and girls do wrong, they ought to be punished. Why should you give a young thief a book, when his schoolfellow has nothing to show for his honesty? All this sentimentality about criminals nauseates me. Young man, when I was twenty if I had been late for dinner, my father would have knocked me down. What is more, I should have respected him for doing so. I am a firm believer in severity myself."

"Of course, Miss Peck." He felt compelled to argue, although he knew it was stupid. Miss Peck was a woman of exceptional character, bullied as a child she had only one wish now, to bully in return. And as so often happens, she had found unlimited scope for this in social work. "But I do feel that circumstances arise occasionally, when a child's fault is due entirely to his environment. In such cases good

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results have been obtained through encouragement and books.
I am sure you will not find Miss Wikkins lacking in discipline
whenever it is necessary." He must remember that he was for the
moment, representing Theodora and not his own views.

"Oh, I am sure she means well. I had a very favourable
letter about her. Young, isn't she? Yes, I thought so.
It would never do to discourage the idealism of youth but we must
divert it into proper channels. Now I want her to drop this
foolish idea about a library. Even if it a religious one.
I must say that I have found very few of clergy up to their
duties; all they think about are their services, not their parishioners' souls. I want Miss Wilkins to come instead to our Home."

"Your Home?"

"Yes, we have one and it is very much needed. I will
credit you with not knowing how necessary it is."

"Is it for....orphan?" Ernest enquired.

"No. It is for girls. Unfortunate girls. For those,
shall I say, whose experiences have deviated from the desirable."

"Yes." He was too surprised to say more.

"It should be the aim of educated women to protect their
less fortunate sisters from the brutality -" blue eyes stared
haughtily at Ernest, "of some men. You agree, I hope."

"Of course," he assured her hastily, knowing however that
unconsciously, she would have liked to classify all males together.

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together. What Victorian nursery, he wondered, had so stifled
an originally fine independence that now all impulses were
inside out, dipped in the wrong dye, become grotesque instead
of valuable? He leaned back uncomfortably and wished she
had taken the other armchair. No doubt it was imagination
or was it the rain on visitors' coats, but he could smell
distinctly damp scarlet flannel drying before a fire. It
awoke a memory in his mind of his nurse pulling him by the
hand from wet garden leaves while her long print skirts made
a trail along the tiles; the grown up world had seemed to him
at first, he remembered, a place only of shadow and of struggle,
against twisting petticoats and pricking rules.

"I think I can explain better the purpose of our Home if
I illustrate it with a little story. Case X, we will call
the girl, for it is one of our rules and we adhere to it very
strictly, never to mention names."

"Naturally." Even Theodora could scarcely have a
formula for this situation. He suspected, as she did not come,
that she had been persuaded into accepting an early cup of
tea, to help her recover from the shock of her imprisonment.
But he must not let his attention wander, he fixed his eyes
on the plumes of the opposite hat, hoping that at least he
looked interested.

age

"Well, X. was a vill/ girl, brought up on the moors not

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far from here but right in the depths of the country. I
doubt if you realise how remote from the world some of these
districts are. The silly child quarrelled with her parents.
And agreed with some friend, whom we have not been able to
trace, to come here and try for a job. As you can imagine,
by the time X. got on the train, the friend was too scared
to leave or at any rate they could not find one another. You
must picture to yourself that this girl had never been away
from home before and was naturally very frightened. She
should of course, have turned straight round and gone back
home. But youth is headstrong these days. She got to the
station and asked a porter where she could get a cheap room.
She said he talked to her a little, she was quite pretty and
no doubt she told him her story, perhaps she had an idea that
he might help her to find work. We have not been able to
trace the porter, you will understand why in a moment," Miss
Peck paused significantly and blew her nose. "He sent the
child to an address he gave her. She knew nothing of the
city but happily for herself she had some common sense.
Five minutes later she was back in the street again, with her
jacket torn half off, almost out of her wits. All that day
and half the night she wandered up and down, not knowing what
to do or where to go. A policeman found her and brought her
to us. The police know us of course and they are very good

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that way. The girls are supposed to pay fourpence for a
bed. But if they really have no money, we take them free, to
the limit of our space. We give them cocoa at night, and
breakfast in the morning. And we don't question them at once;
that would never do. Sister waits her opportunity, it always
comes, just as we have prayers but no rules about attendance.
Well, in the morning the story tumbled out, she had no money
and she wouldn't go home again. We kept her bed for her, said
nothing, and let her look for work. After three days she got
completely discouraged, and Sister had a word with her again.
The end of the story was that she wrote to her family. As soon
as they replied, we put her on the train and paid her fare,
communicated with the clergyman of her parish and now she is
doing well in service in her own district. What would have hap-
pened to that girl if our Home had not been there to take her
in?

"You must do splendid work." Ernest was divided, as so
often, between his knowledge that such a place was necessary
and distrust of the essential harshness of its outlook. Un-
doubtedly they had saved the girl's life: against this must
be set the many wrecked innocent moments in the experience of
others. He could imagine, for example, the reaction of Miss
Peck to sun bathing, even to the wearing of socks.

"Unfortunately we have never been able to trace the
porter."

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"That part of the story is extraordinary. Porters always look to me such respectable fathers of families," so many were pale and elderly, with drooping whiskers; and they seemed to heave trunks on and off taxis interminably to muttered commentaries on the weather. "Don't you think of them as a frieze along a platform, to celebrate bureaucracy in triumph? But I shall see them as quite other in the future." Miss Peck looked at him sharply, as if she feared that he was making fun of her, so he added quickly, "do you have much trouble in carrying on your work?"

"Financially you mean? No, not so far as our present accommodation goes. But we could double our cases nightly if we had the cubicles. Some of our girls are perfectly respectable. We took one maid for instance straight from hospital and kept her till she found a place. She had lost her job and her savings through illness. Others of course come for the night and leave. We ask no questions and they tell us nothing. You must ask Miss Wilkins to come and see us."

"And have you been interested in this work long?" There was no sign of Theodora although visitors were coming in from the first London train and it was after half past three. Just a day since they had themselves arrived, he thought, wondering whether the feathers opposite were the natural colors of some

143.

bird or were dyed by the soot in the air.

"Ever since I visited the Yoshiwara disguised as a male
missionary."

Ernest was too surprised to reply or even to want to laugh.

"Yes, I went to Japan a great many years ago, before they
began to hush things up. I had been to see my doctor and he
had said to me, "Miss Peck, you've got to take a rest. I want
you to get away as far as you can and stop when you are there
for as long as possible." I had had rather a difficult year
you see, nursing a sick relative. And the next day we met by
accident at the station. "Doctor," I said, "I have taken your
advice," and I showed him my ticket to Tokyo. Whenever I think
of his face, I have to laugh. People didn't go to Japan in
those days without a great deal of preparation." Why it must
have been in the eighties, Ernest thought, trying to calculate
rapidly, contemporary with those odd, so non-adventurous il-
lustrations in a French Jules Verne. He seemed to remember a
lady in a crinoline backing away from an elephant's trunk.

"I was out there for two years. I had friends in the
Legation so I saw everything, but after a time I had to find
something to do. And in my day, young man, we approached
social problems through the missions."

"Of course." This mixture of a nursery ethics with
the clear logical quality at moments of an almost future mind,

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astounded him more than any previous encounter. It was raw
material of the emancipation of women, and he had it in front
of him, a footnote to the eighties, preserved not in amber but
in flannel.

"Not that I am entirely in favour of them. Some do ex-
cellent work of course but we have no right to undermine over
night the traditions of a race. But my friends in Tokyo were
exceptional and one, he had been a missionary there for years,
took his wife and myself to see those unfortunate creatures.
We wanted first hand information. Japanese dress is non-
revealing and quite decent, and I must say that it was an
interesting experience. I have often thought about it since.
Some of the girls were mere children, just curious little
butterflies. Our own Home has only been open for five years.
But tell me, do you keep dogs?"

"Dogs!" Ernest was gazing at the mackintosh, desperately
trying not to imagine Miss Peck in trousers and a robe.

"Yes, dogs. Or have friends who have a kennel?"

"Why, no, I am very fond of them but I am abroad so much
and I cannot risk the quarantine," perhaps she was trying to
find out where he lived, and what he was. Had she possibly
mistaken him for a farmer?

"That is how I help to keep the Home open. I paint
portraits of doggies; I prefer to do them from life, but I

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have drawn several from photographs. I thought you might be able
to commission one, a miniature keeps us in cocoa for a week."
He felt her eyes estimating the cost of his obviously new suit.

"How wonderful of you," he looked at Miss Peck now with
genuine admiration, "do tell me about them. What kind of dogs
do you like to paint most?"

"I do any type of course, miniatures or oils, but I love
terriers best. They are such sentimental and lovable crea-
tures. I have two myself, never taught them tricks or any-
thing, we should not expect our four-footed friends to possess
the self control of man, but they are such dear, clever little
friends." She smiled quietly and very happily up at him.

"Perhaps you have a picture of them with you?" Dogs
were such a safe subject of conversation, possibly that was
why they were so popular in England. Miss Peck fumbled with
another bit of ribbon, white this time, and handed him a slip
of ivory that had been hidden under a fold of the blouse. As
Ernest had expected, it was rather like the photograph of a
terrier on a jig-saw puzzle, recognisable, with blurred edges and
quite without character. He tried to make the appropriate
noises of admiration, "what a splendid head," he said politely,
"have you ever shown him?"

"No. But they are sturdy, both of them. I reared them

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from puppies. On the Truby King method, you know, food every
two hours. I used to get up every night at first, turn on the
light and there they were, each on his own little hot water
bottle. It was a lot of trouble, I had to heat the milk,
feed each one, clean him off with a duster and slap him down
again on his cushion. But they have got splendid coats,
though you can't get the wiry quality in a painting."

"Oh, but you can, I think," Ernest held up the miniature
to the light. The human qualities too rigorous a childhood
had crushed in Miss Peck emerged unconsciously in her praise
of the little terriers, "I love the expression this one has,
he is so alert and so mischievous."

"They are worse than children. Would you believe that I
only left my studio for five minutes when they were four months
old, and when I came back they had chewed a tube of paint in
pieces. Their poor little muzzles were a sort of purple.
I was terrified that they had poisoned themselves but they
only came out in pink spots." She held out her hand for
the ribbon.

Theodora dashed up to the palms, her hat on one side, as
usual she had knocked it against the taxi roof, and her hand-
bag open. She looked round, saw Miss Peck and her smile
altered into frozen horror; imperceptibly (he hoped) Ernest
jerked his head towards the lift. There were no points of

147.

contact possible. Theodora hated dogs. "How very frightened
you must have been," he said, giving back the miniature.

"I was." She hung the portrait round her neck again
and opened her bag. "Well, young man, I am afraid that I can-
not wait for Miss Wilkins any longer." (Theodora vanished into
the open door of the lift.) "I have an appointment at a ware-
house to look at blankets, for the Home. And I permit nothing
to upset appointments once made. But here is the address and
if you will ask Miss Wilkins to come down this evening we shall
be pleased to take her over and show her everything. And you
won't forget, if you know anyone who has a dog, I am always
ready for commissions. If I promise a likeness by a given
date, you can rely upon receiving it in time. I have never
disappointed anybody yet."

"You tempt me to go out now and buy a puppy so that you
can paint it," Ernest said, he hoped gallantly. "It is only
the quarantine and being abroad."

"I ask for no exaggerated actions," she condescended to
smile, "but if you can mention my work to any ladies, I shall
be grateful." She shook his hand firmly, gave a glance of
disapproval to the lounge and walked out of the door into the
sage green fog, glaring so fiercely at a bell hop who had dared
to giggle at the plumes, that he dashed away on an imaginary
errand. Ernest was curious enough to follow her to the door.

148.

Ignoring the porter, she looked the taxis up and down, subject-
ing them no doubt to some essential testing of her own. Then
she got in, not to the first, but to the second taxi on the
rank, and, oblivious of the traffic block that this unexpected
action caused, drove leisurely away.

CHAPTER XI.

"Darling, how can I thank you?" Theodora lifted a white
gloved arm in imperial gesture as Ernest stepped out of the
lift.

"We're late, I'm afraid," he said mournfully, "shall we
go straight in to dinner?" It was only half past six and
men looked up curiously from the headlines in the evening
papers to the emerald lace of Theodora's cloak; groups still
sat with empty tea cups in front of them and there was an
atmosphere of day and bustle, tweed and wool, about the hall.

"But Ernest, my lamb, what have you done to your hair?"

He felt his head to see if it were very wet. "That is
what delayed me," he grumbled. "I wanted to put some grease
on to keep it smooth and somehow I took the wrong bottle, it
was machine oil for the typewriter." Theodora giggled so
loudly that a passing bell hop smiled. "Don't laugh, it is
still sticky and I washed it three separate times." Tiny
single hairs stuck out in a sort of fringe. He slapped it
down, sighed and looked at the clock. "I can explain it
psychologically of course. I don't really want to go...
he saw his mistake too late. "Brute," Theodora slapped
him playfully, "why do you worry about the little cat so much,
you're not in love with her, are you?"

He knew sharply that they were looking at each other

150.

across a chasm. There was historical barrier between them.
Ernest could not say to her, I was once very happy living in a
street near Cordelia's house. And once, quite by chance, I saw
her Juliet. You know without my telling you how very Elizabethan
I myself was and how I often swore that I would never go to a
theatre again to hear some fat old dame in bursting breeches
mouth blank verse into a simpering Cockney. But Cordelia was
Juliet you see and as well, the girl page of my imagination.
Then you have to go further back, to an afternoon when I looked
out of the nursery window and caught Imogen bending a lath out
of the rushes. I saw her face in the stream, but it was really
only thought and iron railings. And you would have to take the
colours of the winter when Cordelia and I lived near to each other
without knowing it, there was a certain kind of hope, gold leaves
brushed into a basket by an old man under a steel blue sky, a
flying up to an unexpected world. Can you make an alphabet
for yourself out of all these things? Then there would be other
memories, the lining of the colour, my job and the way I feel
when Hope Tiptaft tells me how they dismissed her, there might
still come that puzzling division that I would not have, between
artist and not artist. There would be something not quite love,
there would be pity; you can call it love if you want, and
identification, the fact that Cordelia has done what I in another
art should have done and have not accomplished, because I was

151.

never as sure of myself as Cordelia's voice was when she called
Romeo, but beyond it all there is also something beyond love and
understanding and unhappiness, it is what my friend of that
winter called the "ultimate Schönheit." If you can take all
these colours, the mood that I had and the shadow of the mood,
then perhaps you can understand why to-night I am afraid as
Cordelia is afraid.

Instead Ernest said aloud, "I never care to be one of
thousands. So it all ends, in using machine oil instead of
hair grease."

He saw to his horror as they entered the restaurant that
Theodora had slipped her cloak off and that her white dress
was completely backless. A train swept to the floor giving
her somewhat the appearance of a mermaid. Two elderly ladies
sipping soup stared at them in undisguised alarm. From their
lips he could read a commentary on sin and in spite of popular
opinion, it was no delicious disgust but definite "what is the
city coming to?" "Evening clothes up here seem to me unnecessary,"
he grumbled, as he pulled out his chair. An opposite
mirror reflected several hairs sticking up on end from his
head.

"Rubbish. I never feel right in the evening unless I
change. But what a terrible woman the Peck female was, it
was sweet of you to wave me to the lift but you might have been

152.

more communicative on the telephone," Theodora slipped her
hands out of long white gloves and hesitated whether to choose
cutlets or chicken.

"I was washing my hair. And there was nothing I could say. This afternoon has been so preposterous that I could not even write to Edward about it, he wouldn't have believed me. Yes, I'll join you with cutlets, anything..." he was beginning to feel sick with apprehension. But Theodora was careful about her food and ordered two courses in detail.

"She's immensely wealthy they say, and she must be to dare to wear that hat. I suppose it really was Miss Peck you met?"

"Yes, and she supports a home for unfortunate women by painting people's spaniels. Oils are three guineas, and miniatures are two. It was so exquisite a fantasy that I almost went out and bought a puppy. One terrier keeps them in cocoa for a week."

"Ernest, are you mad?"

"Could anyone have imagined it. She got the taste for it exploring Japanese customs cross dressed as a missionary and she refuses to be interested in our books."

"Missionaries!" Theodora laughed as grimly as if she had found a hole in her pocket and her purse gone. "We all know what _that_ means." (Ernest was not sure that he did

153.

understand the sinister tone of Theodora's "that"). "But didn't you tell her about our work? I believe you just led the old dame on to make fun of her."

"I assure you I did not. I had imagined her all afternoon as being a frail old lady terrified of the city. Instead no one has ever frightened me quite so much. But I respect her. In spite of myself I respect her. She has never yielded an inch of principle and I suspect that she has done an enormous amount of harm. And some good as well. But I like a home that is supported by terriers."

Another large party, obviously also theatre bound, sat down next to them, and gazed with fascinated eyes at Theodora's bare shoulders. Impossible to explain to them that the white dress, the crystal straps, really proclaimed a respectability as firmly grained as was that of Miss Peck. Two generations in age, a language in speech divided them but in their fundamental principles Dora and the old lady were agreed. Ernest tried to swallow a cutlet with his eye on the clock. "But tell me, whatever happened to you?"

"Darling, it was too terrible. I went to the Secret Door, except it was not so very secret for I had to go through rows of commissionaires and boy scouts, you know the wriggly kind with badges, to get to it. It was behind the Post Office really and not inside it. Finally I got to the man who is to be our chairman, and he started to show me how the door worked.

154.

Just as we were going out to lunch. I said, "oh, isn't it
simple" and pressed the knob, only it was the wrong one."

"Dear me, what a perturbing situation!" Fortunately
Theodora had a far better sense of humour than her books would
imply.

"Yes, the poor dear couldn't get his lunch. I am sure
he overeats enormously. To-night I expect he is cursing about
women. But he shouldn't have begun to fool with the knobs
himself. We rang up the fire brigade and the superintendent
and then I got on to you about Miss Peck, wasn't it fortunate
that there was a telephone? It simply was the worst moment of
my life."

Of course she saw herself a futigive empress hiding in
Byzantine reservoirs, in a purple robe with a dagger in her
hand. Ernest hastened to add, as was expected of him, "I
do hope he was good looking."

"Darling, you should have seen him. Nothing for you to
be jealous about. He was quite bald. And with a sort of
stammer. Or perhaps he was very angry. And all he could
talk about was lupins. He shows them. I could not even
think what a lupin was."

"They are spiky and tall and blue and they are being
grown this year as rivals to delphimiums. But what local
colour, can't you make the father of your next heroine a
country gentleman with an estate of lupins?"

155.

"Ernest!" It was an understood rule that the serials were never mentioned. "But you know, I think I could. A very cross old gentleman with a red face."

"And a daughter with eyes the blue of the prize lupin in her father's garden."

"Silly. Lots of girls have brown eyes and you ought to know that the first rule is never to define the colour. Your reader wants to identify herself with the heroine. serials Writing is a highly technical job. But I do think that her father, or perhaps her guardian, might run a lupin farm, not described of course in such crude terms. Remind me to get a catalogue. It's essential that your details are correct."

She works so hard for these wretched children, Ernest thought, remembering the libraries, why is it that we are so far apart from each other? It is not exactly convention though that perhaps is the nearest explanation. Perhaps it would be truer to say that we believe in the exact opposites.

In all his life Ernest could not remember that class or race ever had existed for him but only the relationship of people to what he saw as truth. He could take no credit for he could not recall ever having felt otherwise. Penelope and Theodora reacted not to what was in front of their eyes but to a pattern they had studied, he suspected some-

156.

times that they wanted to be bound. One did not live in
Manchester, according to their code and therefore they could
not see the strange Arabian dream in front of them that was
both very English and entirely undiscovered.

"Her bones were green." It was impossible not to hear
the conversation at the next table. Theodora giggled. She
persisted in treating the hotel as if it were a Zoo.

"Dear, dear, so they think it was cracked already?" An
old lady leaned forward a little anxiously, in a kind of pink
tweed coat and skirt, with a frill of imitation pearls.

"Of course she has always been terribly delicate." The
companion looked at her fork mournfully and shook her head.
And this, Ernest thought, is probably Cordelia's audience.

"But the trouble is, she never lets anyone do anything
for her. Why when she was in bed last winter, just for a
month or so, her maid had a terrible time. She used to come
down in the middle of the night to change the water in the
flower vases."

"When people are made that way, well they are like that
and there is nothing to be done about it."

The pink shoulders wriggled a little sympathetically.
"Do you think," Theodora whispered, "that she wears that color
to match up with the fog?"

Fog. It reminded Ernest suddenly of the minutes. "I

157.

think," he said, trying to flatten his hair again, "that we
really ought to start." Either he was going to get into his
seat and hide well before the performance started, or he was
going to remain in the hotel. With the air of a mother hu-
moring a wilful child, Theodora condescended to pick up her
long white gloves and leave very slowly, for the main door
where the taxis waited.

158.

CHAPTER XII.

The arcade was film. Grey fog poured under the arches of
the entrance. It beat against the swinging golden apples of
the lamps, struck through the revolving door, made the eyes
smart. "Don't be so impatient," Theodora said, "you won't
miss a minute of it." Ernest had not noticed that outwardly
he had been even nervous. Only he missed the Neon lights
drawing outlines on an arctic sky in red or electric blue,
all the radium quality of a lost winter. It lived in him
still so vividly that it came back, burning through uncertainty,
to fade suddenly as if the radium had been slid into lead, when
they came out on the steps. How had Cordelia felt, he wondered,
driving just a little earlier through this street, in fog and
bewilderment to meet a new and unexpected initiation, probably
all day as incapable of hope as he was now of putting anything
of the lost life into words.

The taxi must have been fifteen years old. It was drab and
undersea, like everything in Manchester. They did not drive,
they swam. "My dear Ernest," Theodora said, putting her hand
on his knee, "what does the little cat matter? Do try and
pull yourself together."

Yet he was scarcely conscious at that minute of being at all
He was so alive in a past that having normally no talent to add
two figures together, at this second he comprehended with perfect

159.

clearness all that had ever been said to him about relativity.
Two harsh eyes staring at a child, a grim mouth saying "you
are too young to know what art means" faded into the helpless-
ness of a serf unable to run away.

Cobbles and black depths cut the road; it was actually
an aquarium. The red traffic signals went to stop and he
looked out to see where fishes were hidden. He was English
born but this was unfamiliar. Fog beat down on them, through
the roof, under the windows. The sky was heavier. He had the
sensation of holding his breath, of being under water. It
was not for a moment to be supposed that Cordelia had noticed
the landscape, but the surroundings were so fantastic, the
theatre so antiquated, that she must have been acutely aware
of the not to be fathomed quality of this strange audience.

For he himself did not understand it here. He liked the
sounds of the voices, the directness he had noticed but it was
as aloof as if he had been abroad. Perhaps intellectually they
would be more sensitive, he had heard people say that they were
often ahead of London. "My dear," Theodora continued, as if
reading his thoughts, "my idea of hell would be to be doomed
to live in a city like this, they are a whole generation behind
us."

But they had a quality. He wished he could dive below

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the surface of this sea, understand some of the subterranean
crannies of the world here. The taxi bumped on, rattling
oldness. If only the journey would prolong itself until the
evening were over. He wanted to run away, he felt he was
going to be sick. Yet the moment, because he was lifted
entirely from consciousness of the world, the moment was
perfect.

"I expect she will be all right, your Cordelia. I am
worried about Penelope. Do you know, not a single person
has been round to see her? I do think they ought to have
sent flowers."

Ernest felt a brief pity for her too. No art was easy
and this was the end of all that Penelope had seen, and so
otherwise, throughout dreary mornings of impatient typing.
It was worse a fourth time than the first. Knowing more, one
wanted a deeper, stronger taste of glory. They could have
been tactful he thought, and given her, not the multigraphed
phrases of good will but an active share in the dangers of
the evening. Probably they wanted to force her price down
for the additional rights, through a process of neglect.
'To repeat, Theodora, that is the worst of art in England.
It is all jealousy and spitefulness, never co-operation.'

And for that reason, (he knew Theodora would remind him)
England held. It was never united, not unless there were a

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crisis and then it merely moved in the same direction, it
was never a massed whole. It was cold and slow, but how safe.
"Once they love you, they will always be loyal to you," he had
told Cordelia. "Till you are eighty." She had simply stared
at him with dark, bewildered eyes and had not known what he
meant.

For the theatre in England was not an art, but a ritual;
it was a family affair. People went not to see something
new but to repeat an illustrated calendar of their youth when
each play marked another term, another holiday, gone.
It was the rare moment when they lost their stiff self con-
sciousness for sport/more personal, more rigorously hedged
with codes. A play was simply a dark but legitimate day-
dream that gained in power through force of repetition, so that
an actress was really taken to their hearts (though Cordelia
refused to let him explain this to her) only when the second
generation could be taken to watch what had been the initiation
of their parents. Then the player entered into the myth
of the land, into the unconscious of the epoch.

"I do not understand what you are trying to tell me,"
Cordelia's quick anger made him awkward with his words. He
knew so well and saw so clearly, but it was too hard an
English characteristic to explain. "I once saved an American

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four thousand pounds" he said, feeling her wrist jerk under
his hand, mistrustful of his intrusion into a world so definite-
ly her own. "He wanted to open a show here, it was new and
exciting but definitely not for a family. So I talked to
him for four hours. You are speaking about art, I told him,
but what you have to see is father and mother and two children.
They want something that they can call tuneful afterwards and
full of crude remarks that are known as clean English humor.
Or a sentimental little comedy that the children can imagine
is the love story of their parents. At first he was very an-
noyed, because he had some really good material. But he wrote
me afterwards that I had been the only person who had really
helped him because my advice had been disinterested. Only I
got nothing out of it, not even a box of cigars."

Without a word Cordelia had let him see that she
distrusted his intellectual quality. She need not be so
hedgehog he had thought, or was he perhaps to blame for sup-
posing friendship to be possible? He was used to working
with thoughts; Cordelia with emotions. She had used the
full force of the power that lifted an audience from its own
life on him, an individual in a little room, so that the air
seemed upside down and he himself swaying as in an earthquake.
He had looked for something to hold on to, gripped the sofa
and tried to smile, only to hear abstraction of fury in

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Cordelia's voice, "why do you laugh at me?"

"One is supposed in England to grin when one is beaten," he had said, making things much worse. She had looked at him (stop being Rosalind facing banishment, he had wanted to shout) till, not knowing what to do, he had taken her hand again, "don't get too scared about Tuesday. I always said that London would love you most. Will you remember that I told you first?"

He had been helplessly aware that he could do nothing for her, he was on a precipice, staring up at a mountain rose and unable to find a hold. She was alone in so savage and remote a world that he could find no way to her. She saw no one, then for an unfathomable reason, she had called him to her for a brief moment. But if he once stood between her and her conception of her art, he would be ruthlessly scrapped. To have met her once or to have known her years, would end the same way, if either jerked her from her ultimate will. Something sometime had hurt her so much that she wished no human contact. Only mastery over an elusive land. Perhaps that was why she acted often in so poor a play. Her voice brought sounds, her face brought moods, from the stratosphere of thought. She was incapable of dealing with words as such (that was his job) they were simply symbols of emotion. Anything she did became a letter in another language, one spelt out from it the

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hieroglyphics of the air. "I hate the theatre," he had said, for fear was crashing through the lit room like a wave, he could feel it pound and recede, in her heart and in her silences; "why do you have to do this? Why can't you paint or write?" He had put his arm round her shoulders for a moment, as if fear could be fought back with the bare hands. "You are right. You are right to hate the theatre." He saw in dark lifted eyes the same adventure that had driven men centuries before along the amber road between the Baltic and the south.

"Is there nothing I can do?" He had been furious at his helplessness, "would it help to feel that I was there?" For Manchester, things did not always happen as they should. Would this power of hers, it was a bird with no island under it, change the complexion of the solid faces, watching to see it fall? Failure was death. Perhaps he would not have it otherwise. For, this was no ordinary snatching at a leaf of fame, a little funny, a little dangerous, such as he might cope with, himself. It was the moment life could end far too easily on a strange sword. They had sat together, hardly breathing and all imagination had blown away again, he had known calmly and soberly and without hope that she was terribly afraid. Beauty for me has always been something more than I could bear, he had thought. Then he had got up, for the clock had struck and he had kissed her which he did so seldom and had

164.

gone toward the door without saying a word.

The drive broke in front of a door that might have been
a gap between the rocks. They moved through the chopped-off
section of a dream. Somehow they were inside the theatre.
People crowded the stairs in the usual cloaks, the usual
black and white. Usual dinners had preceded the usual going
to the theatre. Was anyone there beside himself who knew
(a startled face hearing a name, teased Romeo no longer) how
Cordelia was likely to play with them.

The door swung back and they stood at the end of their
row of stalls.

Ernest looked up. It was fatal. It was as bad as
being a mountain climber on a difficult gully and looking
suddenly down. The air lit with unbearable cruelty. Heads
cut a space about him into a curve of complete terror. White
faces, staring eyes, were ready not to accept but to unload
irritation and desire and dream on to what was merely
fable, *that might or might not, be* amusing.

But the people are alive, he wanted to say, only it would
be useless. "It would be like saying aloud "I can't bear
this any longer." It was felt so often and to shout it
merely made one a fool and altered none of the conditions.
Separate kinds of harshness beat through the air, fell towards
the still screened stage, he began to distinguish their

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different qualities (with a sense he had never had before) as
definitely as he had felt the fog through the arcade entrance.
This was worse than being near death in the air, with something
of the helpless consciousness of such adventures. Why should
Cordelia suppose that she could transform such hatred, such
indifference, into love? Why have the delusion that a page from
a picture book set out with people for toys, could bind the
scornful items of this crowd into even tolerance? How bear
anyhow the first, cold, difficult moments? This was perilously
close not to an art, but to the doomed impetuosity of the arena.

"Try to behave like a human being, I have spoken to you at
least a dozen times, and you have not answered once." Theodora
got up and nodded to Penelope, who sat a row in front of them at
their left. They were themselves in the third row and peri-
lously exposed, Ernest felt, in spite of the old lady in front
of him. He tried quickly to collect his scrappy knowledge
of the theatre; all he could remember was that a friend
had once told him that everything to the back of the stalls
was visible and another (more comforting at this moment) that
the footlights blinded out any possibility of recognition.
It had never occurred to him previously that he would need such
information and he could think of no test that might prove which
of the stories were correct. "I am so glad I never took up
mountain climbing," he managed to utter, "it would have been
disastrous."

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"Naturally, Ernest, but what a strange thing to say, Did the clothes make you think of it," Theodora was very proud of her own bare shoulders, "really they are peculiar. They must keep them in camphor and bring them out once a year."

"And she beat me for the record."

The voice was so loud that Ernest looked round nervously wondering what had happened. A youth with heavy almost yellow hair had a seat immediately behind him. "Women always are better for the long distances, I say it is because they are so used to face creams, that they don't mind the oil. But they can't speed." It was evidently a swimmer, his enormous arms had difficulty in finding enough space in the somewhat narrow rows.

"I am surprised," the girl beside him giggled, she had a bright pink blouse under a tweed coat, "but I never could stand the shock of cold water myself."

"A portly matron sat down beside Ernest in white satin that fell about her like a toga. The seats now were nearly full and there was less conversation. "I think," Ernest murmured, "in fact I am sure, that I am going to be sick."

"You can't be sick here," Theodora said firmly, "and you haven't anything to worry about. Look at poor Penelope, she is talking to everyone and being wonderfully brave. Now pull yourself together at once."

167.

But that was impossible. The lights went out and Ernest felt he must bolt for the door and leaves. He could walk round Manchester till its quality blurred out the hours, the insecurity and the painfulness. Somebody late that night could tell him what had happened. "I must go," he whispered, "I can't stand this." Theodora gripped him firmly by the sleeve. "And what do you think you are going to do? Walk about the streets until you get pneumonia or drown yourself in the Canal?"

At that moment the curtain went up and flight was forbidden. Now I know, he thought, how I should behave in a panic, I should lose my head. He fixed his eyes on the programme and found that this helped him. He knew that Cordelia had no early entrance so that there were some moments yet to live. But what a cheerless job it must be, he reflected gloomily, opening a play. Like sweeping up after Christmas or walking through a Zoo when the animals were asleep.

He felt cold now, perfectly calm. He had seen hundreds of plays. He had watched them succeed and he had watched them fail. And they had meant nothing more to him than lumber, than a set of postcards of foreign villages or the dreary waste of wasted an afternoon. He had always disliked the theatre, drama had seemed a compromise and beyond this he had transferred any allegiance that he had felt, entirely to the cinema.

He noted critically that the conversation was artificial,

the echo of so many opening scenes. He must try to concentrate
upon some element of the political situation, that was one way to
escape boredom. What a pity it was that one could not turn the
panel of the seat in front into an irradiated newspaper.

But to-night he could not manage to swing his mind from the
present moment. He was already vaguely irritated. It was going
to be another of those pseudo-romantic plays, with the Victorian
emphasis on sex in little daring sentences. How could people
go on listening to the same adolescent stories? Why couldn't
they write about what was vital, the fear of losing a job, the
defeat of maladjustment. There was the story he had hard about
the man who had been murdered or so they said, because he had
invented a way to cheapen electricity. There was a play in
Miss Tiptaft, dismissed after eighteen years in the same job.
There were hundreds of questions that you might like or that you
might hate, but that were there, in front of you, every day.
Instead a tea party had to be taken seriously, a flirtation, a
muslin dress and almost, hair ribbons. "The trouble with me is
that I have a sociological consciousness," he whispered to Theo-
dora. He seemed to be on a step between audience and stage and
outside the hypnosis of either.

And then he heard Cordelia's voice.

For a frantic second his legs unfroze and he glanced round
at a door. He tried to remember (it was the moment before

169.

avalanche) that recognition was impossible in that arena of
faces. But he was too near. The last London hours super-
imposed themselves on the play. He could feel in his own arms
the nerves that were now a voice and frightened sentences of
this projected fantasy came blurred through water, while in-
stead the same voice, the same terror, said to him (but it was
the Saturday before) "come and sit here."

And winter light had fallen through windows on grey cushions and she had moved her head, bright now under searchlights, on his shoulder. "What is going to happen" she/said, and they had been thinking, not of Manchester, not of any play in any theatre, but of the world. "I don't know. Something very soon." Flood came through chaos in a primitive memory; he saw their universe doomed, destroyed and yet eternal. How far would they realise its eternity at the end, he wondered? It was swept beyond them now, swifter than he could think. He must give illusion of strength but who would know after flood had passed whether one or the other would live, even if they would wish to wake on such a clean swept land. Lost winter, lost world, he had thought, and had brushed the hair back from her eyes (just as she did now in front of him, the other side of this absurd but quite visible barrier) and all he had been able to say was "you will feel better after Tuesday." Considering that his business was both with words and with the air, these phrases

170.

struck him as particularly inadequate. But a quarter of a
century had placed effective muzzle upon expression. The
more he had wanted to tell her, the more silent he had become.
"I wish you would let me come up north with you" he had managed
to utter, rather as if he had choked over a cough drop. For
he had been suddenly afraid for her, the sound of spoken words
was terrifying; he had wondered how she could be sure that she
could project what she wanted of herself on to quite alien ears.
It was rather like taking off in a fog, he supposed, with bright
air round one and underneath houses or a mountain or the sea,
one would not know, because there would be only cloud. One
might land safely or the plane might crash. And if something
happened (he was coldly aware he could do nothing) he wanted
to be near. He had turned, expecting inevitable denial, but
she had looked away with the same uncertain frightened movement
that the child now in front of him had, "if you come don't
tell me that you are there." Then he had known that she was
very scared. But he knew no way to comfort her; his mind had
soared into a tangle of wind currents and skies.

"Her dress is all wrong." Ernest looked up puzzled
to find that the curtain was down and that Theodora was powdering
a disapproving nose. "Couldn't she have asked Penelope?

171.

Penelope could have put her right to the tiniest detail. It
is a trifle like that at the beginning that upsets people and
puts them off a play. After all Penelope knows the local dress
and she doesn't." Theodora made a note professionally on a
miniature engagement list and looked about her regally. "I ex-
pect they arranged it weeks ago," Ernest did not want to start
an argument. One at least of the three tormenting acts was
over. "Indeed no," Theodora stiffened with indignation, "it
must have happened after they turned Penelope out. She would
never have allowed anything so crassly wrong to happen." It is
a great pity if we must have theatre that we do not rever to
the Elizabethan habit of hanging labels up for scenery, Ernest
checked himself from saying. Then perhaps they could have put
up a notice "this is acting" and not an advertisement for native
costumes. But he wanted only to be let alone and not to have
to talk.

"Why do they choose somebody so lame for the old father?"
the girl behind him asked in a high, shrill voice. "The man is
supposed to have rheumatism, I think" her long distance swimmer
friend replied. "Oh, is he, but I should have thought that
with all this unemployment they could have found some actor
without a limp."

Could people really lose their consciousness so completely?
Ernest shifted in his seat to try to hear more of the conversation.
The primitive identification of the savage must exist then far
more frequently than was imagined and was untapped by the average

172.

artist. But at that moment the theatre darkened again for the
beginning of the second act.

I am more apart than I supposed, he thought, fixing his
eyes upon the back of the chair in front of him. For Cordelia
began to sweep the colors of the audience about him into a
picture. If he watched her only, he could be so swept. But
not if he listened. "There is no reason why a line of these
sentences should ever have been written." It was less that
the characters were psychologically untrue, he suspected Penelope
of depicting her own emotions sincerely, ~~but~~ *thou gh I did*
she had ignored the
motives behind their actions. She believes in them at surface
value, he reflected dismally and as long as people so believe,
Hope and thousand like her will face the workhouse, there will
be wars, we shall be brought up on lies. Justice was so
illusionary a word and yet truth was less cruel in the end.

But for this one evening, couldn't he sink his mind, form
part of this semi-circle bending like rushes to Cordelia's will?
Was he wrecking her pattern perhaps, holding it back, he who so
willingly would be a shield, who alone in the theatre knew what
she really was, become instead the single arrow that she could
not reach? "I saw her Juliet" he remembered stubbornly. And
an elderly matron a few seats away choked into a handkerchief,
murmuring "she is so sweet."

Now that the evening was half over he himself became less
nervous. He wanted to turn and look at the faces, their
intentness astonished him, for he felt them held by the play.

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He was always more conscious of his individuality in a crowd
than when alone. He could stun himself into oblivion only
with a book. With a start he remembered sitting at Cordelia's
side, (it must have been at second meeting) to recognize their
improbable alikeness when she had said "I lost life when I gave
up books to what they call, live." He had no idea what her
library would be, classic and a little cold, he suspected, there
would be no contact between the grim tough world of his reading
and her own. But the roots were the same.

He dared look up a moment as the second act ended at a
very strange Cordelia. The lady beside him was dabbing her
eyes. "Oh, the poor little thing," she wept, to the bullied
unhappy looking daughter sitting beside her, "it is wicked to
allow a child like that to say such dreadful things." Ernest
felt in his pocket for a sheet of paper and hoped that his pencil
scribble would be legible. He always got cramp when he had to
write by hand.

"I expect you are happy, for you have certainly got your
own way. An old dame beside me has been in tears for some time.
So now you are quite safe. I am a little annoyed myself that
I spent so many hours this week wondering how the evening would
go. Why were you ever afraid? You almost made me forget
that I was watching a play that belongs properly to 1900.

I suppose you will be furious that I am here. But if it
were not for the ironical circumstance that having gone safely
to Spitzbergen in a fog, I arrived in Manchester to find that a

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horse wants my room by midday tomorrow, you would never have known. I cannot stay in the hotel so please" (he underlined the word three times) "let your maid ring me up so that I can arrange where to telephone you on Thursday. I expect I shall have to go back to London tomorrow and return the next day. But never tell me again that people may not like you."

He slipped the note into an envelope that he had addressed in his room as the lights went out once more. "I am a little dubious," Theodora whispered, "as to the result. A lot will depend upon the final curtain."

But he was not afraid any more. Now Cordelia was doing something that numbed the mind. The words or scene were becoming unimportant. They were symbols to her, she was working where there were no barriers between the arts, but all arts met. She was making even his ears not listen, his eyes not see; in spite of his critical perception being at work she drove the mind back into its sheath. This was the imagination of loneliness, the abstraction of strength. She was a magnet for the unconscious where no words mattered.

It was her triumph that he forgot that she was there. He could feel creation at work, the gathering up of so many sensations into a script; the lost thought, gentian in stubborn ground, these were not in the spoken words but in something that she was making, high in air, remote from these characters moving stiffly in a room.

"Well, your little friend is over all right," Theodora sniffed. People who usually were far too cold to applaud were shouting for Cordelia. The lady in white satin was still crying

175.

quietly. "But I hope she will remember that it was Penelope's
play that did it. And how disgracefully she has been treated.
Nobody shouted for the author."

"It's a triumph for British agriculture," Ernest looked back at the applauding hands, trying to calculate royalties.

"If it is as enthusiastic every night she ought to be able to
pot out every seedling in black paper." Penelope disappeared
through the doorway, surrounded by friends. People blocked
their own row, getting into the inevitable English layers of
coats. Theodora swept out like Britannia in front of him, her
cloak as she struggled into it, held out trident fashion; the
royal blue bow of her sash had come untied. "I suppose you are
going straight round to Cordelia," she enquired as they pushed
their way step by step, towards the main entrance. "Certainly
not. I expect she is being sick. She usually is, you know.
Fear does such extraordinary things to the circulation."

Though it could not account for air-sickness, he reflected,
since he felt safer in a plane than when he crossed a street.
Adventures are worthwhile but only in retrospect, "I wrote her
a note which I will send round." At least Ernest, he could
hear her saying, you have the good taste never to try to see me
in the theatre.

It was some time before they could get a primitive ark
on wheels that jolted them towards the hotel. But the journey
back passed in a second of time. It had not lost its atmosphere,
it was simply foggy and conscious. He felt, coming in to the
lounge of the hotel, that they had arrived from London on a

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business journey and that Cordelia and the evening, were three
years away.

He looked towards the lift but Theodora loosened her cloak.
"Well, Ernest, I came up here to be with Penelope and she has
disappeared. If I were in her place I should be crying my eyes
out or raising hell at that theatre. Your conversation if you
have spoken at all, has been completely extraordinary. And now
after seeing your friend have her little triumph, you have not
even gone to congratulate her. Do you feel ill? Or are you
out of your mind? I know I have had a completely unsatisfactory
evening and it is up to you to enliven it a little. It must
be living abroad that has made you so dull. I have always said
it is only the English who can make whoopee satisfactorily. Will
you please get me immediately a glass of warm milk."