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When William Came

by Saki · English · Gutenberg #14540 · 310,007 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: When William Came

Author: Saki


        
Release date: December 31, 2004 [eBook #14540]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14540

Credits: Transcribed from the 1914 John Lane edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN WILLIAM CAME ***




Transcribed from the 1914 John Lane edition by David Price,
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





WHEN WILLIAM CAME


CHAPTER I: THE SINGING-BIRD AND THE BAROMETER


Cicely Yeovil sat in a low swing chair, alternately looking at herself in
a mirror and at the other occupant of the room in the flesh.  Both
prospects gave her undisguised satisfaction.  Without being vain she was
duly appreciative of good looks, whether in herself or in another, and
the reflection that she saw in the mirror, and the young man whom she saw
seated at the piano, would have come with credit out of a more severely
critical inspection.  Probably she looked longer and with greater
appreciation at the piano player than at her own image; her good looks
were an inherited possession, that had been with her more or less all her
life, while Ronnie Storre was a comparatively new acquisition, discovered
and achieved, so to speak, by her own enterprise, selected by her own
good taste.  Fate had given her adorable eyelashes and an excellent
profile.  Ronnie was an indulgence she had bestowed on herself.

Cicely had long ago planned out for herself a complete philosophy of
life, and had resolutely set to work to carry her philosophy into
practice.  "When love is over how little of love even the lover
understands," she quoted to herself from one of her favourite poets, and
transposed the saying into "While life is with us how little of life even
the materialist understands."  Most people that she knew took endless
pains and precautions to preserve and prolong their lives and keep their
powers of enjoyment unimpaired; few, very few, seemed to make any
intelligent effort at understanding what they really wanted in the way of
enjoying their lives, or to ascertain what were the best means for
satisfying those wants.  Fewer still bent their whole energies to the one
paramount aim of getting what they wanted in the fullest possible
measure.  Her scheme of life was not a wholly selfish one; no one could
understand what she wanted as well as she did herself, therefore she felt
that she was the best person to pursue her own ends and cater for her own
wants.  To have others thinking and acting for one merely meant that one
had to be perpetually grateful for a lot of well-meant and usually
unsatisfactory services.  It was like the case of a rich man giving a
community a free library, when probably the community only wanted free
fishing or reduced tram-fares.  Cicely studied her own whims and wishes,
experimented in the best method of carrying them into effect, compared
the accumulated results of her experiments, and gradually arrived at a
very clear idea of what she wanted in life, and how best to achieve it.
She was not by disposition a self-centred soul, therefore she did not
make the mistake of supposing that one can live successfully and
gracefully in a crowded world without taking due notice of the other
human elements around one.  She was instinctively far more thoughtful for
others than many a person who is genuinely but unseeingly addicted to
unselfishness.

Also she kept in her armoury the weapon which can be so mightily
effective if used sparingly by a really sincere individual--the knowledge
of when to be a humbug.  Ambition entered to a certain extent into her
life, and governed it perhaps rather more than she knew.  She desired to
escape from the doom of being a nonentity, but the escape would have to
be effected in her own way and in her own time; to be governed by
ambition was only a shade or two better than being governed by
convention.

The drawing-room in which she and Ronnie were sitting was of such
proportions that one hardly knew whether it was intended to be one room
or several, and it had the merit of being moderately cool at two o'clock
on a particularly hot July afternoon.  In the coolest of its many alcoves
servants had noiselessly set out an improvised luncheon table: a tempting
array of caviare, crab and mushroom salads, cold asparagus, slender hock
bottles and high-stemmed wine goblets peeped out from amid a setting of
Charlotte Klemm roses.

Cicely rose from her seat and went over to the piano.

"Come," she said, touching the young man lightly with a finger-tip on the
top of his very sleek, copper-hued head, "we're going to have
picnic-lunch to-day up here; it's so much cooler than any of the
downstairs rooms, and we shan't be bothered with the servants trotting in
and out all the time.  Rather a good idea of mine, wasn't it?"

Ronnie, after looking anxiously to see that the word "picnic" did not
portend tongue sandwiches and biscuits, gave the idea his blessing.

"What is young Storre's profession?" some one had once asked concerning
him.

"He has a great many friends who have independent incomes," had been the
answer.

The meal was begun in an appreciative silence; a picnic in which three
kinds of red pepper were available for the caviare demanded a certain
amount of respectful attention.

"My heart ought to be like a singing-bird to-day, I suppose," said Cicely
presently.

"Because your good man is coming home?" asked Ronnie.

Cicely nodded.

"He's expected some time this afternoon, though I'm rather vague as to
which train he arrives by.  Rather a stifling day for railway
travelling."

"And is your heart doing the singing-bird business?" asked Ronnie.

"That depends," said Cicely, "if I may choose the bird.  A missel-thrush
would do, perhaps; it sings loudest in stormy weather, I believe."

Ronnie disposed of two or three stems of asparagus before making any
comment on this remark.

"Is there going to be stormy weather?" he asked.

"The domestic barometer is set rather that way," said Cicely.  "You see,
Murrey has been away for ever so long, and, of course, there will be lots
of things he won't be used to, and I'm afraid matters may be rather
strained and uncomfortable for a time."

"Do you mean that he will object to me?" asked Ronnie.

"Not in the least," said Cicely, "he's quite broad-minded on most
subjects, and he realises that this is an age in which sensible people
know thoroughly well what they want, and are determined to get what they
want.  It pleases me to see a lot of you, and to spoil you and pay you
extravagant compliments about your good looks and your music, and to
imagine at times that I'm in danger of getting fond of you; I don't see
any harm in it, and I don't suppose Murrey will either--in fact, I
shouldn't be surprised if he takes rather a liking to you.  No, it's the
general situation that will trouble and exasperate him; he's not had time
to get accustomed to the fait accompli like we have.  It will break on
him with horrible suddenness."

"He was somewhere in Russia when the war broke out, wasn't he?" said
Ronnie.

"Somewhere in the wilds of Eastern Siberia, shooting and bird collecting,
miles away from a railway or telegraph line, and it was all over before
he knew anything about it; it didn't last very long, when you come to
think of it.  He was due home somewhere about that time, and when the
weeks slipped by without my hearing from him, I quite thought he'd been
captured in the Baltic or somewhere on the way back.  It turned out that
he was down with marsh fever in some out-of-the-way spot, and everything
was over and finished with before he got back to civilisation and
newspapers."

"It must have been a bit of a shock," said Ronnie, busy with a
well-devised salad; "still, I don't see why there should be domestic
storms when he comes back.  You are hardly responsible for the
catastrophe that has happened."

"No," said Cicely, "but he'll come back naturally feeling sore and savage
with everything he sees around him, and he won't realise just at once
that we've been through all that ourselves, and have reached the stage of
sullen acquiescence in what can't be helped.  He won't understand, for
instance, how we can be enthusiastic and excited over Gorla Mustelford's
debut, and things of that sort; he'll think we are a set of callous
revellers, fiddling while Rome is burning."

"In this case," said Ronnie, "Rome isn't burning, it's burnt.  All that
remains to be done is to rebuild it--when possible."

"Exactly, and he'll say we're not doing much towards helping at that."

"But," protested Ronnie, "the whole thing has only just happened; 'Rome
wasn't built in a day,' and we can't rebuild our Rome in a day."

"I know," said Cicely, "but so many of our friends, and especially
Murrey's friends, have taken the thing in a tragical fashion, and cleared
off to the Colonies, or shut themselves up in their country houses, as
though there was a sort of moral leprosy infecting London."

"I don't see what good that does," said Ronnie.

"It doesn't do any good, but it's what a lot of them have done because
they felt like doing it, and Murrey will feel like doing it too.  That is
where I foresee trouble and disagreement."

Ronnie shrugged his shoulders.

"I would take things tragically if I saw the good of it," he said; "as
matters stand it's too late in the day and too early to be anything but
philosophical about what one can't help.  For the present we've just got
to make the best of things.  Besides, you can't very well turn down Gorla
at the last moment."

"I'm not going to turn down Gorla, or anybody," said Cicely with
decision.  "I think it would be silly, and silliness doesn't appeal to
me.  That is why I foresee storms on the domestic horizon.  After all,
Gorla has her career to think of.  Do you know," she added, with a change
of tone, "I rather wish you would fall in love with Gorla; it would make
me horribly jealous, and a little jealousy is such a good tonic for any
woman who knows how to dress well.  Also, Ronnie, it would prove that you
are capable of falling in love with some one, of which I've grave doubts
up to the present."

"Love is one of the few things in which the make-believe is superior to
the genuine," said Ronnie, "it lasts longer, and you get more fun out of
it, and it's easier to replace when you've done with it."

"Still, it's rather like playing with coloured paper instead of playing
with fire," objected Cicely.

A footman came round the corner with the trained silence that tactfully
contrives to make itself felt.

"Mr. Luton to see you, Madam," he announced, "shall I say you are in?"

"Mr. Luton?  Oh, yes," said Cicely, "he'll probably have something to
tell us about Gorla's concert," she added, turning to Ronnie.

Tony Luton was a young man who had sprung from the people, and had taken
care that there should be no recoil.  He was scarcely twenty years of
age, but a tightly packed chronicle of vicissitudes lay behind his
sprightly insouciant appearance.  Since his fifteenth year he had lived,
Heaven knew how, getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music-
hall, sometimes a temporary job as secretary-valet-companion to a roving
invalid, dining now and then on plovers' eggs and asparagus at one of the
smarter West End restaurants, at other times devouring a kipper or a
sausage in some stuffy Edgware Road eating-house; always seemingly amused
by life, and always amusing.  It is possible that somewhere in such heart
as he possessed there lurked a rankling bitterness against the hard
things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the one or two friends
who had helped him disinterestedly, but his most intimate associates
could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings.  Tony Luton was
just a merry-eyed dancing faun, whom Fate had surrounded with streets
instead of woods, and it would have been in the highest degree inartistic
to have sounded him for a heart or a heartache.

The dancing of the faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn,
the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed
suddenly over.  A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable
abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial
performance at an East End hall.  Dressed as a jockey, for no particular
reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay
bubbly in Eccleston Square" to an appreciative audience, which included
the manager of a famous West End theatre of varieties.  Tony and his song
won the managerial favour, and were immediately transplanted to the West
End house, where they scored a success of which the drooping music-hall
industry was at the moment badly in need.

It was just after the great catastrophe, and men of the London world were
in no humour to think; they had witnessed the inconceivable befall them,
they had nothing but political ruin to stare at, and they were anxious to
look the other way.  The words of Tony's song were more or less
meaningless, though he sang them remarkably well, but the tune, with its
air of slyness and furtive joyousness, appealed in some unaccountable
manner to people who were furtively unhappy, and who were trying to
appear stoically cheerful.

"What must be, must be," and "It's a poor heart that never rejoices,"
were the popular expressions of the London public at that moment, and the
men who had to cater for that public were thankful when they were able to
stumble across anything that fitted in with the prevailing mood.  For the
first time in his life Tony Luton discovered that agents and managers
were a leisured class, and that office boys had manners.

He entered Cicely's drawing-room with the air of one to whom assurance of
manner has become a sheathed weapon, a court accessory rather than a
trade implement.  He was more quietly dressed than the usual run of music-
hall successes; he had looked critically at life from too many angles not
to know that though clothes cannot make a man they can certainly damn
him.

"Thank you, I have lunched already," he said in answer to a question from
Cicely.  "Thank you," he said again in a cheerful affirmative, as the
question of hock in a tall ice-cold goblet was propounded to him.

"I've come to tell you the latest about the Gorla Mustelford evening," he
continued.  "Old Laurent is putting his back into it, and it's really
going to be rather a big affair.  She's going to out-Russian the
Russians.  Of course, she hasn't their technique nor a tenth of their
training, but she's having tons of advertisement.  The name Gorla is
almost an advertisement in itself, and then there's the fact that she's
the daughter of a peer."

"She has temperament," said Cicely, with the decision of one who makes a
vague statement in a good cause.

"So Laurent says," observed Tony.  "He discovers temperament in every one
that he intends to boom.  He told me that I had temperament to the finger-
tips, and I was too polite to contradict him.  But I haven't told you the
really important thing about the Mustelford debut.  It is a profound
secret, more or less, so you must promise not to breathe a word about it
till half-past four, when it will appear in all the six o'clock
newspapers."

Tony paused for dramatic effect, while he drained his goblet, and then
made his announcement.

"Majesty is going to be present.  Informally and unofficially, but still
present in the flesh.  A sort of casual dropping in, carefully heralded
by unconfirmed rumour a week ahead."

"Heavens!" exclaimed Cicely, in genuine excitement, "what a bold stroke.
Lady Shalem has worked that, I bet.  I suppose it will go down all
right."

"Trust Laurent to see to that," said Tony, "he knows how to fill his
house with the right sort of people, and he's not the one to risk a
fiasco.  He knows what he's about.  I tell you, it's going to be a big
evening."

"I say!" exclaimed Ronnie suddenly, "give a supper party here for Gorla
on the night, and ask the Shalem woman and all her crowd.  It will be
awful fun."

Cicely caught at the suggestion with some enthusiasm.  She did not
particularly care for Lady Shalem, but she thought it would be just as
well to care for her as far as outward appearances went.

Grace, Lady Shalem, was a woman who had blossomed into sudden importance
by constituting herself a sort of foster-mother to the fait accompli.  At
a moment when London was denuded of most of its aforetime social leaders
she had seen her opportunity, and made the most of it.  She had not
contented herself with bowing to the inevitable, she had stretched out
her hand to it, and forced herself to smile graciously at it, and her
polite attentions had been reciprocated.  Lady Shalem, without being a
beauty or a wit, or a grand lady in the traditional sense of the word,
was in a fair way to becoming a power in the land; others, more capable
and with stronger claims to social recognition, would doubtless
overshadow her and displace her in due course, but for the moment she was
a person whose good graces counted for something, and Cicely was quite
alive to the advantage of being in those good graces.

"It would be rather fun," she said, running over in her mind the
possibilities of the suggested supper-party.

"It would be jolly useful," put in Ronnie eagerly; "you could get all
sorts of interesting people together, and it would be an excellent
advertisement for Gorla."

Ronnie approved of supper-parties on principle, but he was also thinking
of the advantage which might accrue to the drawing-room concert which
Cicely had projected (with himself as the chief performer), if he could
be brought into contact with a wider circle of music patrons.

"I know it would be useful," said Cicely, "it would be almost historical;
there's no knowing who might not come to it--and things are dreadfully
slack in the entertaining line just now."

The ambitious note in her character was making itself felt at that
moment.

"Let's go down to the library, and work out a list of people to invite,"
said Ronnie.

A servant entered the room and made a brief announcement.

"Mr. Yeovil has arrived, madam."

"Bother," said Ronnie sulkily.  "Now you'll cool off about that supper
party, and turn down Gorla and the rest of us."

It was certainly true that the supper already seemed a more difficult
proposition in Cicely's eyes than it had a moment or two ago.

   "'You'll not forget my only daughter,
   E'en though Saphia has crossed the sea,'"

quoted Tony, with mocking laughter in his voice and eyes.

Cicely went down to greet her husband.  She felt that she was probably
very glad that he was home once more; she was angry with herself for not
feeling greater certainty on the point.  Even the well-beloved, however,
can select the wrong moment for return.  If Cicely Yeovil's heart was
like a singing-bird, it was of a kind that has frequent lapses into
silence.




CHAPTER II: THE HOMECOMING


Murrey Yeovil got out of the boat-train at Victoria Station, and stood
waiting, in an attitude something between listlessness and impatience,
while a porter dragged his light travelling kit out of the railway
carriage and went in search of his heavier baggage with a hand-truck.
Yeovil was a grey-faced young man, with restless eyes, and a rather
wistful mouth, and an air of lassitude that was evidently only a
temporary characteristic.  The hot dusty station, with its blended crowds
of dawdling and scurrying people, its little streams of suburban
passengers pouring out every now and then from this or that platform,
like ants swarming across a garden path, made a wearisome climax to what
had been a rather wearisome journey.  Yeovil glanced quickly, almost
furtively, around him in all directions, with the air of a man who is
constrained by morbid curiosity to look for things that he would rather
not see.  The announcements placed in German alternatively with English
over the booking office, left-luggage office, refreshment buffets, and so
forth, the crowned eagle and monogram displayed on the post boxes, caught
his eye in quick succession.

He turned to help the porter to shepherd his belongings on to the truck,
and followed him to the outer yard of the station, where a string of taxi-
cabs was being slowly absorbed by an outpouring crowd of travellers.

Portmanteaux, wraps, and a trunk or two, much be-labelled and
travel-worn, were stowed into a taxi, and Yeovil turned to give the
direction to the driver.

"Twenty-eight, Berkshire Street."

"Berkschirestrasse, acht-und-zwanzig," echoed the man, a bulky spectacled
individual of unmistakable Teuton type.

"Twenty-eight, Berkshire Street," repeated Yeovil, and got into the cab,
leaving the driver to re-translate the direction into his own language.

A succession of cabs leaving the station blocked the roadway for a moment
or two, and Yeovil had leisure to observe the fact that Viktoria Strasse
was lettered side by side with the familiar English name of the street.  A
notice directing the public to the neighbouring swimming baths was also
written up in both languages.  London had become a bi-lingual city, even
as Warsaw.

The cab threaded its way swiftly along Buckingham Palace Road towards the
Mall.  As they passed the long front of the Palace the traveller turned
his head resolutely away, that he might not see the alien uniforms at the
gates and the eagle standard flapping in the sunlight.  The taxi driver,
who seemed to have combative instincts, slowed down as he was turning
into the Mall, and pointed to the white pile of memorial statuary in
front of the palace gates.

"Grossmutter Denkmal, yes," he announced, and resumed his journey.

Arrived at his destination, Yeovil stood on the steps of his house and
pressed the bell with an odd sense of forlornness, as though he were a
stranger drifting from nowhere into a land that had no cognisance of him;
a moment later he was standing in his own hall, the object of respectful
solicitude and attention.  Sprucely garbed and groomed lackeys busied
themselves with his battered travel-soiled baggage; the door closed on
the guttural-voiced taxi driver, and the glaring July sunshine.  The
wearisome journey was over.

"Poor dear, how dreadfully pulled-down you look," said Cicely, when the
first greetings had been exchanged.

"It's been a slow business, getting well," said Yeovil.  "I'm only three-
quarter way there yet."

He looked at his reflection in a mirror and laughed ruefully.

"You should have seen what I looked like five or six weeks ago," he
added.

"You ought to have let me come out and nurse you," said Cicely; "you know
I wanted to."

"Oh, they nursed me well enough," said Yeovil, "and it would have been a
shame dragging you out there; a small Finnish health resort, out of the
season, is not a very amusing place, and it would have been worse for any
one who didn't talk Russian."

"You must have been buried alive there," said Cicely, with commiseration
in her voice.

"I wanted to be buried alive," said Yeovil.  "The news from the outer
world was not of a kind that helped a despondent invalid towards
convalescence.  They spoke to me as little as possible about what was
happening, and I was grateful for your letters because they also told me
very little.  When one is abroad, among foreigners, one's country's
misfortunes cause one an acuter, more personal distress, than they would
at home even."

"Well, you are at home now, anyway," said Cicely, "and you can jog along
the road to complete recovery at your own pace.  A little quiet shooting
this autumn and a little hunting, just enough to keep you fit and not to
overtire you; you mustn't overtax your strength."

"I'm getting my strength back all right," said Yeovil.  "This journey
hasn't tired me half as much as one might have expected.  It's the awful
drag of listlessness, mental and physical, that is the worst after-effect
of these marsh fevers; they drain the energy out of you in bucketfuls,
and it trickles back again in teaspoonfuls.  And just now untiring energy
is what I shall need, even more than strength; I don't want to degenerate
into a slacker."

"Look here, Murrey," said Cicely, "after we've had dinner together to-
night, I'm going to do a seemingly unwifely thing.  I'm going to go out
and leave you alone with an old friend.  Doctor Holham is coming in to
drink coffee and smoke with you.  I arranged this because I knew it was
what you would like.  Men can talk these things over best by themselves,
and Holham can tell you everything that happened--since you went away.  It
will be a dreary story, I'm afraid, but you will want to hear it all.  It
was a nightmare time, but now one sees it in a calmer perspective."

"I feel in a nightmare still," said Yeovil.

"We all felt like that," said Cicely, rather with the air of an elder
person who tells a child that it will understand things better when it
grows up; "time is always something of a narcotic you know.  Things seem
absolutely unbearable, and then bit by bit we find out that we are
bearing them.  And now, dear, I'll fill up your notification paper and
leave you to superintend your unpacking.  Robert will give you any help
you want."

"What is the notification paper?" asked Yeovil.

"Oh, a stupid form to be filled up when any one arrives, to say where
they come from, and their business and nationality and religion, and all
that sort of thing.  We're rather more bureaucratic than we used to be,
you know."

Yeovil said nothing, but into the sallow greyness of his face there crept
a dark flush, that faded presently and left his colour more grey and
bloodless than before.

The journey seemed suddenly to have recommenced; he was under his own
roof, his servants were waiting on him, his familiar possessions were in
evidence around him, but the sense of being at home had vanished.  It was
as though he had arrived at some wayside hotel, and been asked to
register his name and status and destination.  Other things of disgust
and irritation he had foreseen in the London he was coming to--the
alterations on stamps and coinage, the intrusive Teuton element, the
alien uniforms cropping up everywhere, the new orientation of social
life; such things he was prepared for, but this personal evidence of his
subject state came on him unawares, at a moment when he had, so to speak,
laid his armour aside.  Cicely spoke lightly of the hateful formality
that had been forced on them; would he, too, come to regard things in the
same acquiescent spirit?




CHAPTER III: "THE METSKIE TSAR"


"I was in the early stages of my fever when I got the first inkling of
what was going on," said Yeovil to the doctor, as they sat over their
coffee in a recess of the big smoking-room; "just able to potter about a
bit in the daytime, fighting against depression and inertia, feverish as
evening came on, and delirious in the night.  My game tracker and my
attendant were both Buriats, and spoke very little Russian, and that was
the only language we had in common to converse in.  In matters concerning
food and sport we soon got to understand each other, but on other
subjects we were not easily able to exchange ideas.  One day my tracker
had been to a distant trading-store to get some things of which we were
in need; the store was eighty miles from the nearest point of railroad,
eighty miles of terribly bad roads, but it was in its way a centre and
transmitter of news from the outside world.  The tracker brought back
with him vague tidings of a conflict of some sort between the 'Metskie
Tsar' and the 'Angliskie Tsar,' and kept repeating the Russian word for
defeat.  The 'Angliskie Tsar' I recognised, of course, as the King of
England, but my brain was too sick and dull to read any further meaning
into the man's reiterated gabble.  I grew so ill just then that I had to
give up the struggle against fever, and make my way as best I could
towards the nearest point where nursing and doctoring could be had.  It
was one evening, in a lonely rest-hut on the edge of a huge forest, as I
was waiting for my boy to bring the meal for which I was feverishly
impatient, and which I knew I should loathe as soon as it was brought,
that the explanation of the word 'Metskie' flashed on me.  I had thought
of it as referring to some Oriental potentate, some rebellious rajah
perhaps, who was giving trouble, and whose followers had possibly
discomfited an isolated British force in some out-of-the-way corner of
our Empire.  And all of a sudden I knew that 'Nemetskie Tsar,' German
Emperor, had been the name that the man had been trying to convey to me.
I shouted for the tracker, and put him through a breathless
cross-examination; he confirmed what my fears had told me.  The 'Metskie
Tsar' was a big European ruler, he had been in conflict with the
'Angliskie Tsar,' and the latter had been defeated, swept away; the man
spoke the word that he used for ships, and made energetic pantomime to
express the sinking of a fleet.  Holham, there was nothing for it but to
hope that this was a false, groundless rumour, that had somehow crept to
the confines of civilisation.  In my saner balanced moments it was
possible to disbelieve it, but if you have ever suffered from delirium
you will know what raging torments of agony I went through in the nights,
how my brain fought and refought that rumoured disaster."

The doctor gave a murmur of sympathetic understanding.

"Then," continued Yeovil, "I reached the small Siberian town towards
which I had been struggling.  There was a little colony of Russians
there, traders, officials, a doctor or two, and some army officers.  I
put up at the primitive hotel-restaurant, which was the general gathering-
place of the community.  I knew quickly that the news was true.  Russians
are the most tactful of any European race that I have ever met; they did
not stare with insolent or pitying curiosity, but there was something
changed in their attitude which told me that the travelling Briton was no
longer in their eyes the interesting respect-commanding personality that
he had been in past days.  I went to my own room, where the samovar was
bubbling its familiar tune and a smiling red-shirted Russian boy was
helping my Buriat servant to unpack my wardrobe, and I asked for any back
numbers of newspapers that could be supplied at a moment's notice.  I was
given a bundle of well-thumbed sheets, odd pieces of the Novoe Vremya,
the Moskovskie Viedomosti, one or two complete numbers of local papers
published at Perm and Tobolsk.  I do not read Russian well, though I
speak it fairly readily, but from the fragments of disconnected telegrams
that I pieced together I gathered enough information to acquaint me with
the extent of the tragedy that had been worked out in a few crowded hours
in a corner of North-Western Europe.  I searched frantically for
telegrams of later dates that would put a better complexion on the
matter, that would retrieve something from the ruin; presently I came
across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novoe Vremya
publishes once a week.  There was a photograph of a long-fronted building
with a flag flying over it, labelled 'The new standard floating over
Buckingham Palace.'  The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the
flag, possibly touched up, was unmistakable.  It was the eagle of the
Nemetskie Tsar.  I have a vivid recollection of that plainly-furnished
little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar
hissing and gurgling on the table, and the thrumming music of a balalaika
orchestra coming up from the restaurant below; the next coherent thing I
can remember was weeks and weeks later, discussing in an impersonal
detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the fatigue of the
long railway journey to Finland.

"Since then, Holham, I have been encouraged to keep my mind as much off
the war and public affairs as possible, and I have been glad to do so.  I
knew the worst and there was no particular use in deepening my
despondency by dragging out the details.  But now I am more or less a
live man again, and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of what
happened.  You know how much I know, and how little; those fragments of
Russian newspapers were about all the information that I had.  I don't
even know clearly how the whole thing started."

Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has
done some necessary talking, and now assumes the role of listener.

"It started," said the doctor, "with a wholly unimportant disagreement
about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of
nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair
way towards being settled.  Then the negotiations over the affair began
to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter of nervousness in the
money world.  And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing
speech by one of the German Ministers, and the situation began to look
black indeed.  'He will be disavowed,' every one said over here, but in
less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew that the crisis
was on us--only their knowledge came too late.  'War between two such
civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,' one of our
leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by the following
Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility, because we could no
longer carry it on.  It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we
were just not enough, everywhere where the pressure came.  Our ships were
good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but
our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority
in aircraft.  Our trained men were good against their trained men, but
they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could.  Our
half-trained men and our untrained men could not master the science of
war at a moment's notice, and a moment's notice was all they got.  The
enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle
apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while.  There was
courage enough running loose in the land, but it was like unharnessed
electricity, it controlled no forces, it struck no blows.  There was no
time for the heroism and the devotion which a drawn-out struggle, however
hopeless, can produce; the war was over almost as soon as it had begun.
After the reverses which happened with lightning rapidity in the first
three days of warfare, the newspapers made no effort to pretend that the
situation could be retrieved; editors and public alike recognised that
these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moments
before we were counted out.  One might liken the whole affair to a snap
checkmate early in a game of chess; one side had thought out the moves,
and brought the requisite pieces into play, the other side was hampered
and helpless, with its resources unavailable, its strategy discounted in
advance.  That, in a nutshell, is the history of the war."

Yeovil was silent for a moment or two, then he asked:

"And the sequel, the peace?"

"The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly
prepared for the consequences of their victory.  No one had quite
realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation
with a closely packed population.  The conquerors were in a position to
dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their
ideas of aggrandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication.  There was
no European combination ready to say them nay, and certainly no one Power
was going to be rash enough to step in to contest the terms of the treaty
that they imposed on the conquered.  Annexation had probably never been a
dream before the war; after the war it suddenly became temptingly
practical.  Warum nicht? became the theme of leader-writers in the German
press; they pointed out that Britain, defeated and humiliated, but with
enormous powers of recuperation, would be a dangerous and inevitable
enemy for the Germany of to-morrow, while Britain incorporated within the
Hohenzollern Empire would merely be a disaffected province, without a
navy to make its disaffection a serious menace, and with great tax-paying
capabilities, which would be available for relieving the burdens of the
other Imperial States.  Wherefore, why not annex?  The warum nicht? party
prevailed.  Our King, as you know, retired with his Court to Delhi, as
Emperor in the East, with most of his overseas dominions still subject to
his sway.  The British Isles came under the German Crown as a Reichsland,
a sort of Alsace-Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead of the Rhine.
We still retain our Parliament, but it is a clipped and pruned-down
shadow of its former self, with most of its functions in abeyance; when
the elections were held it was difficult to get decent candidates to come
forward or to get people to vote.  It makes one smile bitterly to think
that a year or two ago we were seriously squabbling as to who should have
votes.  And, of course, the old party divisions have more or less
crumbled away.  The Liberals naturally are under the blackest of clouds,
for having steered the country to disaster, though to do them justice it
was no more their fault than the fault of any other party.  In a
democracy such as ours was the Government of the day must more or less
reflect the ideas and temperament of the nation in all vital matters, and
the British nation in those days could not have been persuaded of the
urgent need for military apprenticeship or of the deadly nature of its
danger.  It was willing now and then to be half-frightened and to have
half-measures, or, one might better say, quarter-measures taken to
reassure it, and the governments of the day were willing to take them,
but any political party or group of statesmen that had said 'the danger
is enormous and immediate, the sacrifices and burdens must be enormous
and immediate,' would have met with certain defeat at the polls.  Still,
of course, the Liberals, as the party that had held office for nearly a
decade, incurred the odium of a people maddened by defeat and
humiliation; one Minister, who had had less responsibility for military
organisation than perhaps any of them, was attacked and nearly killed at
Newcastle, another was hiding for three days on Exmoor, and escaped in
disguise."

"And the Conservatives?"

"They are also under eclipse, but it is more or less voluntary in their
case.  For generations they had taken their stand as supporters of Throne
and Constitution, and when they suddenly found the Constitution gone and
the Throne filled by an alien dynasty, their political orientation had
vanished.  They are in much the same position as the Jacobites occupied
after the Hanoverian accession.  Many of the leading Tory families have
emigrated to the British lands beyond the seas, others are shut up in
their country houses, retrenching their expenses, selling their acres,
and investing their money abroad.  The Labour faction, again, are almost
in as bad odour as the Liberals, because of having hob-nobbed too
effusively and ostentatiously with the German democratic parties on the
eve of the war, exploiting an evangel of universal brotherhood which did
not blunt a single Teuton bayonet when the hour came.  I suppose in time
party divisions will reassert themselves in some form or other; there
will be a Socialist Party, and the mercantile and manufacturing interests
will evolve a sort of bourgeoise party, and the different religious
bodies will try to get themselves represented--"

Yeovil made a movement of impatience.

"All these things that you forecast," he said, "must take time,
considerable time; is this nightmare, then, to go on for ever?"

"It is not a nightmare, unfortunately," said the doctor, "it is a
reality."

"But, surely--a nation such as ours, a virile, highly-civilised nation
with an age-long tradition of mastery behind it, cannot be held under for
ever by a few thousand bayonets and machine guns.  We must surely rise up
one day and drive them out."

"Dear man," said the doctor, "we might, of course, at some given moment
overpower the garrison that is maintained here, and seize the forts, and
perhaps we might be able to mine the harbours; what then?  In a fortnight
or so we could be starved into unconditional submission.  Remember, all
the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had
the sea dominion, tell against us now that the sea dominion is in other
hands.  The enemy would not need to mobilise a single army corps or to
bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and
destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our
food supplies."

"Are you trying to tell me that this is a final overthrow?" said Yeovil
in a shaking voice; "are we to remain a subject race like the Poles?"

"Let us hope for a better fate," said the doctor.  "Our opportunity may
come if the Master Power is ever involved in an unsuccessful naval war
with some other nation, or perhaps in some time of European crisis, when
everything hung in the balance, our latent hostility might have to be
squared by a concession of independence.  That is what we have to hope
for and watch for.  On the other hand, the conquerors have to count on
time and tact to weaken and finally obliterate the old feelings of
nationality; the middle-aged of to-day will grow old and acquiescent in
the changed state of things; the young generations will grow up never
having known anything different.  It's a far cry to Delhi, as the old
Indian proverb says, and the strange half-European, half-Asiatic Court
out there will seem more and more a thing exotic and unreal.  'The King
across the water' was a rallying-cry once upon a time in our history, but
a king on the further side of the Indian Ocean is a shadowy competitor
for one who alternates between Potsdam and Windsor."

"I want you to tell me everything," said Yeovil, after another pause;
"tell me, Holham, how far has this obliterating process of 'time and
tact' gone?  It seems to be pretty fairly started already.  I bought a
newspaper as soon as I landed, and I read it in the train coming up.  I
read things that puzzled and disgusted me.  There were announcements of
concerts and plays and first-nights and private views; there were even
small dances.  There were advertisements of house-boats and week-end
cottages and string bands for garden parties.  It struck me that it was
rather like merrymaking with a dead body lying in the house."

"Yeovil," said the doctor, "you must bear in mind two things.  First, the
necessity for the life of the country going on as if nothing had
happened.  It is true that many thousands of our working men and women
have emigrated and thousands of our upper and middle class too; they were
the people who were not tied down by business, or who could afford to cut
those ties.  But those represent comparatively a few out of the many.  The
great businesses and the small businesses must go on, people must be fed
and clothed and housed and medically treated, and their thousand-and-one
wants and necessities supplied.  Look at me, for instance; however much I
loathe coming under a foreign domination and paying taxes to an alien
government, I can't abandon my practice and my patients, and set up anew
in Toronto or Allahabad, and if I could, some other doctor would have to
take my place here.  I or that other doctor must have our servants and
motors and food and furniture and newspapers, even our sport.  The golf
links and the hunting field have been well-nigh deserted since the war,
but they are beginning to get back their votaries because out-door sport
has become a necessity, and a very rational necessity, with numbers of
men who have to work otherwise under unnatural and exacting conditions.
That is one factor of the situation.  The other affects London more
especially, but through London it influences the rest of the country to a
certain extent.  You will see around you here much that will strike you
as indications of heartless indifference to the calamity that has
befallen our nation.  Well, you must remember that many things in modern
life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international.
In the world of music and art and the drama, for instance, the foreign
names are legion, they confront you at every turn, and some of our
British devotees of such arts are more acclimatised to the ways of Munich
or Moscow than they are familiar with the life, say, of Stirling or York.
For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and
jargon of denationalised culture--even those of them who have never left
our shores.  They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the
domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and
gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and
cookery, while they would shudder at 'D'ye ken John Peel?' as a piece of
uncouth barbarity.  You cannot expect a world of that sort to be
permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of Charlemagne takes
its place now on the top of the Royal box in the theatres, or at the head
of programmes at State concerts.  And then there are the Jews."

"There are many in the land, or at least in London," said Yeovil.

"There are even more of them now than there used to be," said Holham.  "I
am to a great extent a disliker of Jews myself, but I will be fair to
them, and admit that those of them who were in any genuine sense British
have remained British and have stuck by us loyally in our misfortune; all
honour to them.  But of the others, the men who by temperament and
everything else were far more Teuton or Polish or Latin than they were
British, it was not to be expected that they would be heartbroken because
London had suddenly lost its place among the political capitals of the
world, and became a cosmopolitan city.  They had appreciated the free and
easy liberty of the old days, under British rule, but there was a stiff
insularity in the ruling race that they chafed against.  Now, putting
aside some petty Government restrictions that Teutonic bureaucracy has
brought in, there is really, in their eyes, more licence and social
adaptability in London than before.  It has taken on some of the aspects
of a No-Man's-Land, and the Jew, if he likes, may almost consider himself
as of the dominant race; at any rate he is ubiquitous.  Pleasure, of the
cafe and cabaret and boulevard kind, the sort of thing that gave Berlin
the aspect of the gayest capital in Europe within the last decade, that
is the insidious leaven that will help to denationalise London.  Berlin
will probably climb back to some of its old austerity and simplicity, a
world-ruling city with a great sense of its position and its
responsibilities, while London will become more and more the centre of
what these people understand by life."

Yeovil made a movement of impatience and disgust.

"I know, I know," said the doctor, sympathetically; "life and enjoyment
mean to you the howl of a wolf in a forest, the call of a wild swan on
the frozen tundras, the smell of a wood fire in some little inn among the
mountains.  There is more music to you in the quick thud, thud of hoofs
on desert mud as a free-stepping horse is led up to your tent door than
in all the dronings and flourishes that a highly-paid orchestra can reel
out to an expensively fed audience.  But the tastes of modern London, as
we see them crystallised around us, lie in a very different direction.
People of the world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the
present moment, herd together as closely packed to the square yard as
possible, doing nothing worth doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but
doing it and saying it over and over again, listening to the same
melodies, watching the same artistes, echoing the same catchwords,
ordering the same dishes in the same restaurants, suffering each other's
cigarette smoke and perfumes and conversation, feverishly, anxiously
making arrangements to meet each other again to-morrow, next week, and
the week after next, and repeat the same gregarious experience.  If they
were not herded together in a corner of western London, watching each
other with restless intelligent eyes, they would be herded together at
Brighton or Dieppe, doing the same thing.  Well, you will find that life
of that sort goes forward just as usual, only it is even more prominent
and noticeable now because there is less public life of other kinds."

Yeovil said something which was possibly the Buriat word for the nether
world.  Outside in the neighbouring square a band had been playing at
intervals during the evening.  Now it struck up an air that Yeovil had
already heard whistled several times since his landing, an air with a
captivating suggestion of slyness and furtive joyousness running through
it.

He rose and walked across to the window, opening it a little wider.  He
listened till the last notes had died away.

"What is that tune they have just played?" he asked.

"You'll hear it often enough," said the doctor.  "A Frenchman writing in
the Matin the other day called it the 'National Anthem of the fait
accompli.'"




CHAPTER IV: "ES IST VERBOTEN"


Yeovil wakened next morning to the pleasant sensation of being in a
household where elaborate machinery for the smooth achievement of one's
daily life was noiselessly and unceasingly at work.  Fever and the long
weariness of convalescence in indifferently comfortable surroundings had
given luxury a new value in his eyes.  Money had not always been
plentiful with him in his younger days; in his twenty-eighth year he had
inherited a fairly substantial fortune, and he had married a wealthy
woman a few months later.  It was characteristic of the man and his breed
that the chief use to which he had put his newly-acquired wealth had been
in seizing the opportunity which it gave him for indulging in unlimited
travel in wild, out-of-the-way regions, where the comforts of life were
meagrely represented.  Cicely occasionally accompanied him to the
threshold of his expeditions, such as Cairo or St. Petersburg or
Constantinople, but her own tastes in the matter of roving were more or
less condensed within an area that comprised Cannes, Homburg, the
Scottish Highlands, and the Norwegian Fiords.  Things outlandish and
barbaric appealed to her chiefly when presented under artistic but highly
civilised stage management on the boards of Covent Garden, and if she
wanted to look at wolves or sand grouse, she preferred doing so in the
company of an intelligent Fellow of the Zoological Society on some fine
Sunday afternoon in Regent's Park.  It was one of the bonds of union and
good-fellowship between her husband and herself that each understood and
sympathised with the other's tastes without in the least wanting to share
them; they went their own ways and were pleased and comrade-like when the
ways happened to run together for a span, without self-reproach or heart-
searching when the ways diverged.  Moreover, they had separate and
adequate banking accounts, which constitute, if not the keys of the
matrimonial Heaven, at least the oil that lubricates them.

Yeovil found Cicely and breakfast waiting for him in the cool breakfast-
room, and enjoyed, with the appreciation of a recent invalid, the comfort
and resources of a meal that had not to be ordered or thought about in
advance, but seemed as though it were there, fore-ordained from the
beginning of time in its smallest detail.  Each desire of the
breakfasting mind seemed to have its realisation in some dish, lurking
unobtrusively in hidden corners until asked for.  Did one want grilled
mushrooms, English fashion, they were there, black and moist and
sizzling, and extremely edible; did one desire mushrooms a la Russe, they
appeared, blanched and cool and toothsome under their white blanketing of
sauce.  At one's bidding was a service of coffee, prepared with rather
more forethought and circumspection than would go to the preparation of a
revolution in a South American Republic.

The exotic blooms that reigned in profusion over the other parts of the
house were scrupulously banished from the breakfast-room; bowls of wild
thyme and other flowering weeds of the meadow and hedgerow gave it an
atmosphere of country freshness that was in keeping with the morning
meal.

"You look dreadfully tired still," said Cicely critically, "otherwise I
would recommend a ride in the Park, before it gets too hot.  There is a
new cob in the stable that you will just love, but he is rather lively,
and you had better content yourself for the present with some more sedate
exercise than he is likely to give you.  He is apt to try and jump out of
his skin when the flies tease him.  The Park is rather jolly for a walk
just now."

"I think that will be about my form after my long journey," said Yeovil,
"an hour's stroll before lunch under the trees.  That ought not to
fatigue me unduly.  In the afternoon I'll look up one or two people."

"Don't count on finding too many of your old set," said Cicely rather
hurriedly.  "I dare say some of them will find their way back some time,
but at present there's been rather an exodus."

"The Bredes," said Yeovil, "are they here?"

"No, the Bredes are in Scotland, at their place in Sutherlandshire; they
don't come south now, and the Ricardes are farming somewhere in East
Africa, the whole lot of them.  Valham has got an appointment of some
sort in the Straits Settlement, and has taken his family with him.  The
Collards are down at their mother's place in Norfolk; a German banker has
bought their house in Manchester Square."

"And the Hebways?" asked Yeovil.

"Dick Hebway is in India," said Cicely, "but his mother lives in Paris;
poor Hugo, you know, was killed in the war.  My friends the Allinsons are
in Paris too.  It's rather a clearance, isn't it?  However, there are
some left, and I expect others will come back in time.  Pitherby is here;
he's one of those who are trying to make the best of things under the new
regime."

"He would be," said Yeovil, shortly.

"It's a difficult question," said Cicely, "whether one should stay at
home and face the music or go away and live a transplanted life under the
British flag.  Either attitude might be dictated by patriotism."

"It is one thing to face the music, it is another thing to dance to it,"
said Yeovil.

Cicely poured out some more coffee for herself and changed the
conversation.

"You'll be in to lunch, I suppose?  The Clubs are not very attractive
just now, I believe, and the restaurants are mostly hot in the middle of
the day.  Ronnie Storre is coming in; he's here pretty often these days.
A rather good-looking young animal with something mid-way between talent
and genius in the piano-playing line."

"Not long-haired and Semetic or Tcheque or anything of that sort, I
suppose?" asked Yeovil.

Cicely laughed at the vision of Ronnie conjured up by her husband's
words.

"No, beautifully groomed and clipped and Anglo-Saxon.  I expect you'll
like him.  He plays bridge almost as well as he plays the piano.  I
suppose you wonder at any one who can play bridge well wanting to play
the piano."

"I'm not quite so intolerant as all that," said Yeovil; "anyhow I promise
to like Ronnie.  Is any one else coming to lunch?"

"Joan Mardle will probably drop in, in fact I'm afraid she's a certainty.
She invited herself in that way of hers that brooks of no refusal.  On
the other hand, as a mitigating circumstance, there will be a point
d'asperge omelette such as few kitchens could turn out, so don't be
late."

Yeovil set out for his morning walk with the curious sensation of one who
starts on a voyage of discovery in a land that is well known to him.  He
turned into the Park at Hyde Park corner and made his way along the
familiar paths and alleys that bordered the Row.  The familiarity
vanished when he left the region of fenced-in lawns and rhododendron
bushes and came to the open space that stretched away beyond the
bandstand.  The bandstand was still there, and a military band, in sky-
blue Saxon uniform, was executing the first item in the forenoon
programme of music.  Around it, instead of the serried rows of green
chairs that Yeovil remembered, was spread out an acre or so of small
round tables, most of which had their quota of customers, engaged in a
steady consumption of lager beer, coffee, lemonade and syrups.  Further
in the background, but well within earshot of the band, a gaily painted
pagoda-restaurant sheltered a number of more commodious tables under its
awnings, and gave a hint of convenient indoor accommodation for wet or
windy weather.  Movable screens of trellis-trained foliage and climbing
roses formed little hedges by means of which any particular table could
be shut off from its neighbours if semi-privacy were desired.  One or two
decorative advertisements of popularised brands of champagne and Rhine
wines adorned the outside walls of the building, and under the central
gable of its upper story was a flamboyant portrait of a stern-faced man,
whose image and superscription might also be found on the newer coinage
of the land.  A mass of bunting hung in folds round the flag-pole on the
gable, and blew out now and then on a favouring breeze, a long
three-coloured strip, black, white, and scarlet, and over the whole scene
the elm trees towered with an absurd sardonic air of nothing having
changed around their roots.

Yeovil stood for a minute or two, taking in every detail of the
unfamiliar spectacle.

"They have certainly accomplished something that we never attempted," he
muttered to himself.  Then he turned on his heel and made his way back to
the shady walk that ran alongside the Row.  At first sight little was
changed in the aspect of the well-known exercising ground.  One or two
riding masters cantered up and down as of yore, with their attendant
broods of anxious-faced young girls and awkwardly bumping women pupils,
while horsey-looking men put marketable animals through their paces or
drew up to the rails for long conversations with horsey-looking friends
on foot.  Sportingly attired young women, sitting astride of their
horses, careered by at intervals as though an extremely game fox were
leading hounds a merry chase a short way ahead of them; it all seemed
much as usual.

Presently, from the middle distance a bright patch of colour set in a
whirl of dust drew rapidly nearer and resolved itself into a group of
cavalry officers extending their chargers in a smart gallop.  They were
well mounted and sat their horses to perfection, and they made a brave
show as they raced past Yeovil with a clink and clatter and rhythmic
thud, thud, of hoofs, and became once more a patch of colour in a whirl
of dust.  An answering glow of colour seemed to have burned itself into
the grey face of the young man, who had seen them pass without appearing
to look at them, a stinging rush of blood, accompanied by a choking catch
in the throat and a hot white blindness across the eyes.  The weakness of
fever broke down at times the rampart of outward indifference that a man
of Yeovil's temperament builds coldly round his heartstrings.

The Row and its riders had become suddenly detestable to the wanderer; he
would not run the risk of seeing that insolently joyous cavalcade come
galloping past again.  Beyond a narrow stretch of tree-shaded grass lay
the placid sunlit water of the Serpentine, and Yeovil made a short cut
across the turf to reach its gravelled bank.

"Can't you read either English or German?" asked a policeman who
confronted him as he stepped off the turf.

Yeovil stared at the man and then turned to look at the small
neatly-printed notice to which the official was imperiously pointing; in
two languages it was made known that it was forbidden and verboten,
punishable and straffbar, to walk on the grass.

"Three shilling fine," said the policeman, extending his hand for the
money.

"Do I pay you?" asked Yeovil, feeling almost inclined to laugh; "I'm
rather a stranger to the new order of things."

"You pay me," said the policeman, "and you receive a quittance for the
sum paid," and he proceeded to tear a counterfoil receipt for a three
shilling fine from a small pocket book.

"May I ask," said Yeovil, as he handed over the sum demanded and received
his quittance, "what the red and white band on your sleeve stands for?"

"Bi-lingual," said the constable, with an air of importance.  "Preference
is given to members of the Force who qualify in both languages.  Nearly
all the police engaged on Park duty are bi-lingual.  About as many
foreigners as English use the parks nowadays; in fact, on a fine Sunday
afternoon, you'll find three foreigners to every two English.  The park
habit is more Continental than British, I take it."

"And are there many Germans in the police Force?" asked Yeovil.

"Well, yes, a good few; there had to be," said the constable; "there were
such a lot of resignations when the change came, and they had to be
filled up somehow.  Lots of men what used to be in the Force emigrated or
found work of some other kind, but everybody couldn't take that line;
wives and children had to be thought of.  'Tisn't every head of a family
that can chuck up a job on the chance of finding another.  Starvation's
been the lot of a good many what went out.  Those of us that stayed on
got better pay than we did before, but then of course the duties are much
more multitudinous."

"They must be," said Yeovil, fingering his three shilling State document;
"by the way," he asked, "are all the grass plots in the Park out of
bounds for human feet?"

"Everywhere where you see the notices," said the policeman, "and that's
about three-fourths of the whole grass space; there's been a lot of new
gravel walks opened up in all directions.  People don't want to walk on
the grass when they've got clean paths to walk on."

And with this parting reproof the bi-lingual constable strode heavily
away, his loss of consideration and self-esteem as a unit of a sometime
ruling race evidently compensated for to some extent by his enhanced
importance as an official.

"The women and children," thought Yeovil, as he looked after the
retreating figure; "yes, that is one side of the problem.  The children
that have to be fed and schooled, the women folk that have to be cared
for, an old mother, perhaps, in the home that cannot be broken up.  The
old case of giving hostages."

He followed the path alongside the Serpentine, passing under the archway
of the bridge and continuing his walk into Kensington Gardens.  In
another moment he was within view of the Peter Pan statue and at once
observed that it had companions.  On one side was a group representing a
scene from one of the Grimm fairy stories, on the other was Alice in
conversation with Gryphon and Mockturtle, the episode looking
distressingly stiff and meaningless in its sculptured form.  Two other
spaces had been cleared in the neighbouring turf, evidently for the
reception of further statue groups, which Yeovil mentally assigned to
Struwelpeter and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

"German middle-class taste," he commented, "but in this matter we
certainly gave them a lead.  I suppose the idea is that childish fancy is
dead and that it is only decent to erect some sort of memorial to it."

The day was growing hotter, and the Park had ceased to seem a desirable
place to loiter in.  Yeovil turned his steps homeward, passing on his way
the bandstand with its surrounding acreage of tables.  It was now nearly
one o'clock, and luncheon parties were beginning to assemble under the
awnings of the restaurant.  Lighter refreshments, in the shape of
sausages and potato salads, were being carried out by scurrying waiters
to the drinkers of lager beer at the small tables.  A park orchestra, in
brilliant trappings, had taken the place of the military band.  As Yeovil
passed the musicians launched out into the tune which the doctor had
truly predicted he would hear to repletion before he had been many days
in London; the "National Anthem of the fait accompli."




CHAPTER V: L'ART D'ETRE COUSINE


Joan Mardle had reached forty in the leisurely untroubled fashion of a
woman who intends to be comely and attractive at fifty.  She cultivated a
jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good will and
good nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting
to know her better they hastily re-armed themselves.  Some one had once
aptly described her as a hedgehog with the protective mimicry of a
puffball.  If there was an awkward remark to be made at an inconvenient
moment before undesired listeners, Joan invariably made it, and when the
occasion did not present itself she was usually capable of creating it.
She was not without a certain popularity, the sort of popularity that a
dashing highwayman sometimes achieved among those who were not in the
habit of travelling on his particular highway.  A great-aunt on her
mother's side of the family had married so often that Joan imagined
herself justified in claiming cousin-ship with a large circle of
disconnected houses, and treating them all on a relationship footing,
which theoretical kinship enabled her to exact luncheons and other
accommodations under the plea of keeping the lamp of family life aglow.

"I felt I simply had to come to-day," she chuckled at Yeovil; "I was just
dying to see the returned traveller.  Of course, I know perfectly well
that neither of you want me, when you haven't seen each other for so long
and must have heaps and heaps to say to one another, but I thought I
would risk the odium of being the third person on an occasion when two
are company and three are a nuisance.  Wasn't it brave of me?"

She spoke in full knowledge of the fact that the luncheon party would not
in any case have been restricted to Yeovil and his wife, having seen
Ronnie arrive in the hall as she was being shown upstairs.

"Ronnie Storre is coming, I believe," said Cicely, "so you're not
breaking into a tete-a-tete."

"Ronnie, oh I don't count him," said Joan gaily; "he's just a boy who
looks nice and eats asparagus.  I hear he's getting to play the piano
really well.  Such a pity.  He will grow fat; musicians always do, and it
will ruin him.  I speak feelingly because I'm gravitating towards
plumpness myself.  The Divine Architect turns us out fearfully and
wonderfully built, and the result is charming to the eye, and then He
adds another chin and two or three extra inches round the waist, and the
effect is ruined.  Fortunately you can always find another Ronnie when
this one grows fat and uninteresting; the supply of boys who look nice
and eat asparagus is unlimited.  Hullo, Mr. Storre, we were all talking
about you."

"Nothing very damaging, I hope?" said Ronnie, who had just entered the
room.

"No, we were merely deciding that, whatever you may do with your life,
your chin must remain single.  When one's chin begins to lead a double
life one's own opportunities for depravity are insensibly narrowed.  You
needn't tell me that you haven't any hankerings after depravity; people
with your coloured eyes and hair are always depraved."

"Let me introduce you to my husband, Ronnie," said Cicely, "and then
let's go and begin lunch."

"You two must almost feel as if you were honeymooning again," said Joan
as they sat down; "you must have quite forgotten each other's tastes and
peculiarities since you last met.  Old Emily Fronding was talking about
you yesterday, when I mentioned that Murrey was expected home; 'curious
sort of marriage tie,' she said, in that stupid staring way of hers,
'when husband and wife spend most of their time in different continents.
I don't call it marriage at all.'  'Nonsense,' I said, 'it's the best way
of doing things.  The Yeovils will be a united and devoted couple long
after heaps of their married contemporaries have trundled through the
Divorce Court.'  I forgot at the moment that her youngest girl had
divorced her husband last year, and that her second girl is rumoured to
be contemplating a similar step.  One can't remember everything."

Joan Mardle was remarkable for being able to remember the smallest
details in the family lives of two or three hundred acquaintances.

From personal matters she went with a bound to the political small talk
of the moment.

"The Official Declaration as to the House of Lords is out at last," she
said; "I bought a paper just before coming here, but I left it in the
Tube.  All existing titles are to lapse if three successive holders,
including the present ones, fail to take the oath of allegiance."

"Have any taken it up to the present?" asked Yeovil.

"Only about nineteen, so far, and none of them representing very leading
families; of course others will come in gradually, as the change of
Dynasty becomes more and more an accepted fact, and of course there will
be lots of new creations to fill up the gaps.  I hear for certain that
Pitherby is to get a title of some sort, in recognition of his literary
labours.  He has written a short history of the House of Hohenzollern,
for use in schools you know, and he's bringing out a popular Life of
Frederick the Great--at least he hopes it will be popular."

"I didn't know that writing was much in his line," said Yeovil, "beyond
the occasional editing of a company prospectus."

"I understand his historical researches have given every satisfaction in
exalted quarters," said Joan; "something may be lacking in the style,
perhaps, but the august approval can make good that defect with the style
of Baron.  Pitherby has such a kind heart; 'kind hearts are more than
coronets,' we all know, but the two go quite well together.  And the dear
man is not content with his services to literature, he's blossoming forth
as a liberal patron of the arts.  He's taken quite a lot of tickets for
dear Gorla's debut; half the second row of the dress-circle."

"Do you mean Gorla Mustelford?" asked Yeovil, catching at the name; "what
on earth is she having a debut about?"

"What?" cried Joan, in loud-voiced amazement; "haven't you heard?  Hasn't
Cicely told you?  How funny that you shouldn't have heard.  Why, it's
going to be one of the events of the season.  Everybody's talking about
it.  She's going to do suggestion dancing at the Caravansery Theatre."

"Good Heavens, what is suggestion dancing?" asked Yeovil.

"Oh, something quite new," explained Joan; "at any rate the name is quite
new and Gorla is new as far as the public are concerned, and that is
enough to establish the novelty of the thing.  Among other things she
does a dance suggesting the life of a fern; I saw one of the rehearsals,
and to me it would have equally well suggested the life of John Wesley.
However, that is probably the fault of my imagination--I've either got
too much or too little.  Anyhow it is an understood thing that she is to
take London by storm."

"When I last saw Gorla Mustelford," observed Yeovil, "she was a rather
serious flapper who thought the world was in urgent need of regeneration
and was not certain whether she would regenerate it or take up miniature
painting.  I forget which she attempted ultimately."

"She is quite serious about her art," put in Cicely; "she's studied a
good deal abroad and worked hard at mastering the technique of her
profession.  She's not a mere amateur with a hankering after the
footlights.  I fancy she will do well."

"But what do her people say about it?" asked Yeovil.

"Oh, they're simply furious about it," answered Joan; "the idea of a
daughter of the house of Mustelford prancing and twisting about the stage
for Prussian officers and Hamburg Jews to gaze at is a dreadful cup of
humiliation for them.  It's unfortunate, of course, that they should feel
so acutely about it, but still one can understand their point of view."

"I don't see what other point of view they could possibly take," said
Yeovil sharply; "if Gorla thinks that the necessities of art, or her own
inclinations, demand that she should dance in public, why can't she do it
in Paris or even Vienna?  Anywhere would be better, one would think, than
in London under present conditions."

He had given Joan the indication that she was looking for as to his
attitude towards the fait accompli.  Without asking a question she had
discovered that husband and wife were divided on the fundamental issue
that underlay all others at the present moment.  Cicely was weaving
social schemes for the future, Yeovil had come home in a frame of mind
that threatened the destruction of those schemes, or at any rate a
serious hindrance to their execution.  The situation presented itself to
Joan's mind with an alluring piquancy.

"You are giving a grand supper-party for Gorla on the night of her debut,
aren't you?" she asked Cicely; "several people spoke to me about it, so I
suppose it must be true."

Tony Luton and young Storre had taken care to spread the news of the
projected supper function, in order to ensure against a change of plans
on Cicely's part.

"Gorla is a great friend of mine," said Cicely, trying to talk as if the
conversation had taken a perfectly indifferent turn; "also I think she
deserves a little encouragement after the hard work she has been through.
I thought it would be doing her a kindness to arrange a supper party for
her on her first night."

There was a moment's silence.  Yeovil said nothing, and Joan understood
the value of being occasionally tongue-tied.

"The whole question is," continued Cicely, as the silence became
oppressive, "whether one is to mope and hold aloof from the national
life, or take our share in it; the life has got to go on whether we
participate in it or not.  It seems to me to be more patriotic to come
down into the dust of the marketplace than to withdraw oneself behind
walls or beyond the seas."

"Of course the industrial life of the country has to go on," said Yeovil;
"no one could criticise Gorla if she interested herself in organising
cottage industries or anything of that sort, in which she would be
helping her own people.  That one could understand, but I don't think a
cosmopolitan concern like the music-hall business calls for personal
sacrifices from young women of good family at a moment like the present."

"It is just at a moment like the present that the people want something
to interest them and take them out of themselves," said Cicely
argumentatively; "what has happened, has happened, and we can't undo it
or escape the consequences.  What we can do, or attempt to do, is to make
things less dreary, and make people less unhappy."

"In a word, more contented," said Yeovil; "if I were a German statesman,
that is the end I would labour for and encourage others to labour for, to
make the people forget that they were discontented.  All this work of
regalvanising the social side of London life may be summed up in the
phrase 'travailler pour le roi de Prusse.'"

"I don't think there is any use in discussing the matter further," said
Cicely.

"I can see that grand supper-party not coming off," said Joan
provocatively.

Ronnie looked anxiously at Cicely.

"You can see it coming on, if you're gifted with prophetic vision of a
reliable kind," said Cicely; "of course as Murrey doesn't take kindly to
the idea of Gorla's enterprise I won't have the party here.  I'll give it
at a restaurant, that's all.  I can see Murrey's point of view, and
sympathise with it, but I'm not going to throw Gorla over."

There was another pause of uncomfortably protracted duration.

"I say, this is a top-hole omelette," said Ronnie.

It was his only contribution to the conversation, but it was a valuable
one.




CHAPTER VI: HERR VON KWARL


Herr Von Kwarl sat at his favourite table in the Brandenburg Cafe, the
new building that made such an imposing show (and did such thriving
business) at the lower end of what most of its patrons called the
Regentstrasse.  Though the establishment was new it had already achieved
its unwritten code of customs, and the sanctity of Herr von Kwarl's
specially reserved table had acquired the authority of a tradition.  A
set of chessmen, a copy of the Kreuz Zeitung and the Times, and a slim-
necked bottle of Rhenish wine, ice-cool from the cellar, were always to
be found there early in the forenoon, and the honoured guest for whom
these preparations were made usually arrived on the scene shortly after
eleven o'clock.  For an hour or so he would read and silently digest the
contents of his two newspapers, and then at the first sign of flagging
interest on his part, another of the cafe's regular customers would march
across the floor, exchange a word or two on the affairs of the day, and
be bidden with a wave of the hand into the opposite seat.  A waiter would
instantly place the chessboard with its marshalled ranks of combatants in
the required position, and the contest would begin.

Herr von Kwarl was a heavily built man of mature middle-age, of the blond
North-German type, with a facial aspect that suggested stupidity and
brutality.  The stupidity of his mien masked an ability and shrewdness
that was distinctly above the average, and the suggestion of brutality
was belied by the fact that von Kwarl was as kind-hearted a man as one
could meet with in a day's journey.  Early in life, almost before he was
in his teens, Fritz von Kwarl had made up his mind to accept the world as
it was, and to that philosophical resolution, steadfastly adhered to, he
attributed his excellent digestion and his unruffled happiness.  Perhaps
he confused cause and effect; the excellent digestion may have been
responsible for at least some of the philosophical serenity.

He was a bachelor of the type that is called confirmed, and which might
better be labelled consecrated; from his early youth onward to his
present age he had never had the faintest flickering intention of
marriage.  Children and animals he adored, women and plants he accounted
somewhat of a nuisance.  A world without women and roses and asparagus
would, he admitted, be robbed of much of its charm, but with all their
charm these things were tiresome and thorny and capricious, always
wanting to climb or creep in places where they were not wanted, and
resolutely drooping and fading away when they were desired to flourish.
Animals, on the other hand, accepted the world as it was and made the
best of it, and children, at least nice children, uncontaminated by grown-
up influences, lived in worlds of their own making.

Von Kwarl held no acknowledged official position in the country of his
residence, but it was an open secret that those responsible for the real
direction of affairs sought his counsel on nearly every step that they
meditated, and that his counsel was very rarely disregarded.  Some of the
shrewdest and most successful enactments of the ruling power were
believed to have originated in the brain-cells of the bovine-fronted
Stammgast of the Brandenburg Cafe.

Around the wood-panelled walls of the Cafe were set at intervals well-
mounted heads of boar, elk, stag, roe-buck, and other game-beasts of a
northern forest, while in between were carved armorial escutcheons of the
principal cities of the lately expanded realm, Magdeburg, Manchester,
Hamburg, Bremen, Bristol, and so forth.  Below these came shelves on
which stood a wonderful array of stone beer-mugs, each decorated with
some fantastic device or motto, and most of them pertaining individually
and sacredly to some regular and unfailing customer.  In one particular
corner of the highest shelf, greatly at his ease and in nowise to be
disturbed, slept Wotan, the huge grey house-cat, dreaming doubtless of
certain nimble and audacious mice down in the cellar three floors below,
whose nimbleness and audacity were as precious to him as the forwardness
of the birds is to a skilled gun on a grouse moor.  Once every day Wotan
came marching in stately fashion across the polished floor, halted mid-
way to resume an unfinished toilet operation, and then proceeded to pay
his leisurely respects to his friend von Kwarl.  The latter was said to
be prouder of this daily demonstration of esteem than of his many coveted
orders of merit.  Several of his friends and acquaintances shared with
him the distinction of having achieved the Black Eagle, but not one of
them had ever succeeded in obtaining the slightest recognition of their
existence from Wotan.

The daily greeting had been exchanged and the proud grey beast had
marched away to the music of a slumberous purr.  The Kreuz Zeitung and
the Times underwent a final scrutiny and were pushed aside, and von Kwarl
glanced aimlessly out at the July sunshine bathing the walls and windows
of the Piccadilly Hotel.  Herr Rebinok, the plump little Pomeranian
banker, stepped across the floor, almost as noiselessly as Wotan had
done, though with considerably less grace, and some half-minute later was
engaged in sliding pawns and knights and bishops to and fro on the chess-
board in a series of lightning moves bewildering to look on.  Neither he
nor his opponent played with the skill that they severally brought to
bear on banking and statecraft, nor did they conduct their game with the
politeness that they punctiliously observed in other affairs of life.  A
running fire of contemptuous remarks and aggressive satire accompanied
each move, and the mere record of the conversation would have given an
uninitiated onlooker the puzzling impression that an easy and crushing
victory was assured to both the players.

"Aha, he is puzzled.  Poor man, he doesn't know what to do . . .  Oho, he
thinks he will move there, does he?  Much good that will do him. . . .
Never have I seen such a mess as he is in . . . he cannot do anything, he
is absolutely helpless, helpless."

"Ah, you take my bishop, do you?  Much I care for that.  Nothing.  See, I
give you check.  Ah, now he is in a fright!  He doesn't know where to go.
What a mess he is in . . . "

So the game proceeded, with a brisk exchange of pieces and incivilities
and a fluctuation of fortunes, till the little banker lost his queen as
the result of an incautious move, and, after several woebegone
contortions of his shoulders and hands, declined further contest.  A
sleek-headed piccolo rushed forward to remove the board, and the
erstwhile combatants resumed the courteous dignity that they discarded in
their chess-playing moments.

"Have you seen the Germania to-day?" asked Herr Rebinok, as soon as the
boy had receded to a respectful distance.

"No," said von Kwarl, "I never see the Germania.  I count on you to tell
me if there is anything noteworthy in it."

"It has an article to-day headed, 'Occupation or Assimilation,'" said the
banker.  "It is of some importance, and well written.  It is very
pessimistic."

"Catholic papers are always pessimistic about the things of this world,"
said von Kwarl, "just as they are unduly optimistic about the things of
the next world.  What line does it take?"

"It says that our conquest of Britain can only result in a temporary
occupation, with a 'notice to quit' always hanging over our heads; that
we can never hope to assimilate the people of these islands in our Empire
as a sort of maritime Saxony or Bavaria, all the teaching of history is
against it; Saxony and Bavaria are part of the Empire because of their
past history.  England is being bound into the Empire in spite of her
past history; and so forth."

"The writer of the article has not studied history very deeply," said von
Kwarl.  "The impossible thing that he speaks of has been done before, and
done in these very islands, too.  The Norman Conquest became an
assimilation in comparatively few generations."

"Ah, in those days, yes," said the banker, "but the conditions were
altogether different.  There was not the rapid transmission of news and
the means of keeping the public mind instructed in what was happening; in
fact, one can scarcely say that the public mind was there to instruct.
There was not the same strong bond of brotherhood between men of the same
nation that exists now.  Northumberland was almost as foreign to Devon or
Kent as Normandy was.  And the Church in those days was a great
international factor, and the Crusades bound men together fighting under
one leader for a common cause.  Also there was not a great national past
to be forgotten as there is in this case."

"There are many factors, certainly, that are against us," conceded the
statesman, "but you must also take into account those that will help us.
In most cases in recent history where the conquered have stood out
against all attempts at assimilation, there has been a religious
difference to add to the racial one--take Poland, for instance, and the
Catholic parts of Ireland.  If the Bretons ever seriously begin to assert
their nationality as against the French, it will be because they have
remained more Catholic in practice and sentiment than their neighbours.
Here there is no such complication; we are in the bulk a Protestant
nation with a Catholic minority, and the same may be said of the British.
Then in modern days there is the alchemy of Sport and the Drama to bring
men of different races amicably together.  One or two sportsmanlike
Germans in a London football team will do more to break down racial
antagonism than anything that Governments or Councils can effect.  As for
the Stage, it has long been international in its tendencies.  You can see
that every day."

The banker nodded his head.

"London is not our greatest difficulty," continued von Kwarl.  "You must
remember the steady influx of Germans since the war; whole districts are
changing the complexion of their inhabitants, and in some streets you
might almost fancy yourself in a German town.  We can scarcely hope to
make much impression on the country districts and the provincial towns at
present, but you must remember that thousands and thousands of the more
virile and restless-souled men have emigrated, and thousands more will
follow their example.  We shall fill up their places with our own surplus
population, as the Teuton races colonised England in the old
pre-Christian days.  That is better, is it not, to people the fat meadows
of the Thames valley and the healthy downs and uplands of Sussex and
Berkshire than to go hunting for elbow-room among the flies and fevers of
the tropics?  We have somewhere to go to, now, better than the scrub and
the veldt and the thorn-jungles."

"Of course, of course," assented Herr Rebinok, "but while this desirable
process of infiltration and assimilation goes on, how are you going to
provide against the hostility of the conquered nation?  A people with a
great tradition behind them and the ruling instinct strongly developed,
won't sit with their eyes closed and their hands folded while you carry
on the process of Germanisation.  What will keep them quiet?"

"The hopelessness of the situation.  For centuries Britain has ruled the
seas, and been able to dictate to half the world in consequence; then she
let slip the mastery of the seas, as something too costly and onerous to
keep up, something which aroused too much jealousy and uneasiness in
others, and now the seas rule her.  Every wave that breaks on her shore
rattles the keys of her prison.  I am no fire-eater, Herr Rebinok, but I
confess that when I am at Dover, say, or Southampton, and see those dark
blots on the sea and those grey specks in the sky, our battleships and
cruisers and aircraft, and realise what they mean to us my heart beats
just a little quicker.  If every German was flung out of England
to-morrow, in three weeks' time we should be coming in again on our own
terms.  With our sea scouts and air scouts spread in organised network
around, not a shipload of foodstuff could reach the country.  They know
that; they can calculate how many days of independence and starvation
they could endure, and they will make no attempt to bring about such a
certain fiasco.  Brave men fight for a forlorn hope, but the bravest do
not fight for an issue they know to be hopeless."

"That is so," said Herr Rebinok, "as things are at present they can do
nothing from within, absolutely nothing.  We have weighed all that
beforehand.  But, as the Germania points out, there is another Britain
beyond the seas.  Supposing the Court at Delhi were to engineer a
league--"

"A league?  A league with whom?" interrupted the statesman.  "Russia we
can watch and hold.  We are rather nearer to its western frontier than
Delhi is, and we could throttle its Baltic trade at five hours' notice.
France and Holland are not inclined to provoke our hostility; they would
have everything to lose by such a course."

"There are other forces in the world that might be arrayed against us,"
argued the banker; "the United States, Japan, Italy, they all have
navies."

"Does the teaching of history show you that it is the strong Power, armed
and ready, that has to suffer from the hostility of the world?" asked von
Kwarl.  "As far as sentiment goes, perhaps, but not in practice.  The
danger has always been for the weak, dismembered nation.  Think you a
moment, has the enfeebled scattered British Empire overseas no undefended
territories that are a temptation to her neighbours?  Has Japan nothing
to glean where we have harvested?  Are there no North American
possessions which might slip into other keeping?  Has Russia herself no
traditional temptations beyond the Oxus?  Mind you, we are not making the
mistake Napoleon made, when he forced all Europe to be for him or against
him.  We threaten no world aggressions, we are satiated where he was
insatiable.  We have cast down one overshadowing Power from the face of
the world, because it stood in our way, but we have made no attempt to
spread our branches over all the space that it covered.  We have not
tried to set up a tributary Canadian republic or to partition South
Africa; we have dreamed no dream of making ourselves Lords of Hindostan.
On the contrary, we have given proof of our friendly intentions towards
our neighbours.  We backed France up the other day in her squabble with
Spain over the Moroccan boundaries, and proclaimed our opinion that the
Republic had as indisputable a mission on the North Africa coast as we
have in the North Sea.  That is not the action or the language of
aggression.  No," continued von Kwarl, after a moment's silence, "the
world may fear us and dislike us, but, for the present at any rate, there
will be no leagues against us.  No, there is one rock on which our
attempt at assimilation will founder or find firm anchorage."

"And that is--?"

"The youth of the country, the generation that is at the threshold now.
It is them that we must capture.  We must teach them to learn, and coax
them to forget.  In course of time Anglo-Saxon may blend with German, as
the Elbe Saxons and the Bavarians and Swabians have blended with the
Prussians into a loyal united people under the sceptre of the
Hohenzollerns.  Then we should be doubly strong, Rome and Carthage rolled
into one, an Empire of the West greater than Charlemagne ever knew.  Then
we could look Slav and Latin and Asiatic in the face and keep our place
as the central dominant force of the civilised world."

The speaker paused for a moment and drank a deep draught of wine, as
though he were invoking the prosperity of that future world-power.  Then
he resumed in a more level tone:

"On the other hand, the younger generation of Britons may grow up in
hereditary hatred, repulsing all our overtures, forgetting nothing and
forgiving nothing, waiting and watching for the time when some weakness
assails us, when some crisis entangles us, when we cannot be everywhere
at once.  Then our work will be imperilled, perhaps undone.  There lies
the danger, there lies the hope, the younger generation."

"There is another danger," said the banker, after he had pondered over
von Kwarl's remarks for a moment or two amid the incense-clouds of a fat
cigar; "a danger that I foresee in the immediate future; perhaps not so
much a danger as an element of exasperation which may ultimately defeat
your plans.  The law as to military service will have to be promulgated
shortly, and that cannot fail to be bitterly unpopular.  The people of
these islands will have to be brought into line with the rest of the
Empire in the matter of military training and military service, and how
will they like that?  Will not the enforcing of such a measure enfuriate
them against us?  Remember, they have made great sacrifices to avoid the
burden of military service."

"Dear God," exclaimed Herr von Kwarl, "as you say, they have made
sacrifices on that altar!"




CHAPTER VII: THE LURE


Cicely had successfully insisted on having her own way concerning the
projected supper-party; Yeovil had said nothing further in opposition to
it, whatever his feelings on the subject might be.  Having gained her
point, however, she was anxious to give her husband the impression of
having been consulted, and to put her victory as far as possible on the
footing of a compromise.  It was also rather a relief to be able to
discuss the matter out of range of Joan's disconcerting tongue and
observant eyes.

"I hope you are not really annoyed about this silly supper-party," she
said on the morning before the much-talked-of first night.  "I had
pledged myself to give it, so I couldn't back out without seeming mean to
Gorla, and in any case it would have been impolitic to cry off."

"Why impolitic?" asked Yeovil coldly.

"It would give offence in quarters where I don't want to give offence,"
said Cicely.

"In quarters where the fait accompli is an object of solicitude," said
Yeovil.

"Look here," said Cicely in her most disarming manner, "it's just as well
to be perfectly frank about the whole matter.  If one wants to live in
the London of the present day one must make up one's mind to accept the
fait accompli with as good a grace as possible.  I do want to live in
London, and I don't want to change my way of living and start under
different conditions in some other place.  I can't face the prospect of
tearing up my life by the roots; I feel certain that I shouldn't bear
transplanting.  I can't imagine myself recreating my circle of interests
in some foreign town or colonial centre or even in a country town in
England.  India I couldn't stand.  London is not merely a home to me, it
is a world, and it happens to be just the world that suits me and that I
am suited to.  The German occupation, or whatever one likes to call it,
is a calamity, but it's not like a molten deluge from Vesuvius that need
send us all scuttling away from another Pompeii.  Of course," she added,
"there are things that jar horribly on one, even when one has got more or
less accustomed to them, but one must just learn to be philosophical and
bear them."

"Supposing they are not bearable?" said Yeovil; "during the few days that
I've been in the land I've seen things that I cannot imagine will ever be
bearable."

"That is because they're new to you," said Cicely.

"I don't wish that they should ever come to seem bearable," retorted
Yeovil.  "I've been bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race; I don't
want to find myself settling down resignedly as a member of an enslaved
one."

"There's no need to make things out worse than they are," protested
Cicely.  "We've had a military disaster on a big scale, and there's been
a great political dislocation in consequence.  But there's no reason why
everything shouldn't right itself in time, as it has done after other
similar disasters in the history of nations.  We are not scattered to the
winds or wiped off the face of the earth, we are still an important
racial unit."

"A racial unit in a foreign Empire," commented Yeovil.

"We may arrive at the position of being the dominant factor in that
Empire," said Cicely, "impressing our national characteristics on it, and
perhaps dictating its dynastic future and the whole trend of its policy.
Such things have happened in history.  Or we may become strong enough to
throw off the foreign connection at a moment when it can be done
effectually and advantageously.  But meanwhile it is necessary to
preserve our industrial life and our social life, and for that reason we
must accommodate ourselves to present circumstances, however distasteful
they may be.  Emigration to some colonial wilderness, or holding
ourselves rigidly aloof from the life of the capital, won't help matters.
Really, Murrey, if you will think things over a bit, you will see that
the course I am following is the one dictated by sane patriotism."

"Whom the gods wish to render harmless they first afflict with sanity,"
said Yeovil bitterly.  "You may be content to wait for a hundred years or
so, for this national revival to creep and crawl us back into a semblance
of independence and world-importance.  I'm afraid I haven't the patience
or the philosophy to sit down comfortably and wait for a change of
fortune that won't come in my time--if it comes at all."

Cicely changed the drift of the conversation; she had only introduced the
argument for the purpose of defining her point of view and accustoming
Yeovil to it, as one leads a nervous horse up to an unfamiliar barrier
that he is required eventually to jump.

"In any case," she said, "from the immediately practical standpoint
England is the best place for you till you have shaken off all traces of
that fever.  Pass the time away somehow till the hunting begins, and then
go down to the East Wessex country; they are looking out for a new master
after this season, and if you were strong enough you might take it on for
a while.  You could go to Norway for fishing in the summer and hunt the
East Wessex in the winter.  I'll come down and do a bit of hunting too,
and we'll have house-parties, and get a little golf in between whiles.  It
will be like old times."

Yeovil looked at his wife and laughed.

"Who was that old fellow who used to hunt his hounds regularly through
the fiercest times of the great Civil War?  There is a picture of him, by
Caton Woodville, I think, leading his pack between King Charles's army
and the Parliament forces just as some battle was going to begin.  I have
often thought that the King must have disliked him rather more than he
disliked the men who were in arms against him; they at least cared, one
way or the other.  I fancy that old chap would have a great many
imitators nowadays, though, when it came to be a question of sport
against soldiering.  I don't know whether anyone has said it, but one
might almost assert that the German victory was won on the golf-links of
Britain."

"I don't see why you should saddle one particular form of sport with a
special responsibility," protested Cicely.

"Of course not," said Yeovil, "except that it absorbed perhaps more of
the energy and attention of the leisured class than other sports did, and
in this country the leisured class was the only bulwark we had against
official indifference.  The working classes had a big share of the
apathy, and, indirectly, a greater share of the responsibility, because
the voting power was in their hands.  They had not the leisure, however,
to sit down and think clearly what the danger was; their own industrial
warfare was more real to them than anything that was threatening from the
nation that they only knew from samples of German clerks and German
waiters."

"In any case," said Cicely, "as regards the hunting, there is no Civil
War or national war raging just now, and there is no immediate likelihood
of one.  A good many hunting seasons will have to come and go before we
can think of a war of independence as even a distant possibility, and in
the meantime hunting and horse-breeding and country sports generally are
the things most likely to keep Englishmen together on the land.  That is
why so many men who hate the German occupation are trying to keep field
sports alive, and in the right hands.  However, I won't go on arguing.
You and I always think things out for ourselves and decide for ourselves,
which is much the best way in the long run."

Cicely slipped away to her writing-room to make final arrangements over
the telephone for the all-important supper-party, leaving Yeovil to turn
over in his mind the suggestion that she had thrown out.  It was an
obvious lure, a lure to draw him away from the fret and fury that
possessed him so inconveniently, but its obvious nature did not detract
from its effectiveness.  Yeovil had pleasant recollections of the East
Wessex, a cheery little hunt that afforded good sport in an unpretentious
manner, a joyous thread of life running through a rather sleepy
countryside, like a merry brook careering through a placid valley.  For a
man coming slowly and yet eagerly back to the activities of life from the
weariness of a long fever, the prospect of a leisurely season with the
East Wessex was singularly attractive, and side by side with its
attractiveness there was a tempting argument in favour of yielding to its
attractions.  Among the small squires and yeoman farmers, doctors,
country tradesmen, auctioneers and so forth who would gather at the
covert-side and at the hunt breakfasts, there might be a local nucleus of
revolt against the enslavement of the land, a discouraged and leaderless
band waiting for some one to mould their resistance into effective shape
and keep their loyalty to the old dynasty and the old national cause
steadily burning.  Yeovil could see himself taking up that position,
stimulating the spirit of hostility to the fait accompli, organising
stubborn opposition to every Germanising influence that was brought into
play, schooling the youth of the countryside to look steadily Delhiward.
That was the bait that Yeovil threw out to his conscience, while slowly
considering the other bait that was appealing so strongly to his senses.
The dry warm scent of the stable, the nip of the morning air, the
pleasant squelch-squelch of the saddle leather, the moist earthy
fragrance of the autumn woods and wet fallows, the cold white mists of
winter days, the whimper of hounds and the hot restless pushing of the
pack through ditch and hedgerow and undergrowth, the birds that flew up
and clucked and chattered as you passed, the hearty greeting and pleasant
gossip in farmhouse kitchens and market-day bar-parlours--all these
remembered delights of the chase marshalled themselves in the brain, and
made a cumulative appeal that came with special intensity to a man who
was a little tired of his wanderings, more than a little drawn away from
the jarring centres of life.  The hot London sunshine baking the soot-
grimed walls and the ugly incessant hoot and grunt of the motor traffic
gave an added charm to the vision of hill and hollow and copse that
flickered in Yeovil's mind.  Slowly, with a sensuous lingering over
detail, his imagination carried him down to a small, sleepy, yet withal
pleasantly bustling market town, and placed him unerringly in a wide
straw-littered yard, half-full of men and quarter-full of horses, with a
bob-tailed sheep-dog or two trying not to get in everybody's way, but
insisting on being in the thick of things.  The horses gradually detached
themselves from the crowd of unimportant men and came one by one into
momentary prominence, to be discussed and appraised for their good points
and bad points, and finally to be bid for.  And always there was one
horse that detached itself conspicuously from the rest, the ideal hunter,
or at any rate, Yeovil's ideal of the ideal hunter.  Mentally it was put
through its paces before him, its pedigree and brief history recounted to
him; mentally he saw a stable lad put it over a jump or two, with credit
to all concerned, and inevitably he saw himself outbidding less
discerning rivals and securing the desired piece of horseflesh, to be the
chief glory and mainstay of his hunting stable, to carry him well and
truly and cleverly through many a joyous long-to-be-remembered run.  That
scene had been one of the recurring half-waking dreams of his long days
of weakness in the far-away Finnish nursing-home, a dream sometimes of
tantalising mockery, sometimes of pleasure in the foretaste of a joy to
come.  And now it need scarcely be a dream any longer, he had only to go
down at the right moment and take an actual part in his oft-rehearsed
vision.  Everything would be there, exactly as his imagination had placed
it, even down to the bob-tailed sheep-dogs; the horse of his imagining
would be there waiting for him, or if not absolutely the ideal animal,
something very like it.  He might even go beyond the limits of his dream
and pick up a couple of desirable animals--there would probably be fewer
purchasers for good class hunters in these days than of yore.  And with
the coming of this reflection his dream faded suddenly and his mind came
back with a throb of pain to the things he had for the moment forgotten,
the weary, hateful things that were symbolised for him by the standard
that floated yellow and black over the frontage of Buckingham Palace.

Yeovil wandered down to his snuggery, a mood of listless dejection
possessing him.  He fidgetted aimlessly with one or two books and papers,
filled a pipe, and half filled a waste-paper basket with torn circulars
and accumulated writing-table litter.  Then he lit the pipe and settled
down in his most comfortable armchair with an old note-book in his hand.
It was a sort of disjointed diary, running fitfully through the winter
months of some past years, and recording noteworthy days with the East
Wessex.

And over the telephone Cicely talked and arranged and consulted with men
and women to whom the joys of a good gallop or the love of a stricken
fatherland were as letters in an unknown alphabet.




CHAPTER VIII: THE FIRST-NIGHT


Huge posters outside the Caravansery Theatre of Varieties announced the
first performance of the uniquely interesting Suggestion Dances,
interpreted by the Hon. Gorla Mustelford.  An impressionist portrait of a
rather severe-looking young woman gave the public some idea of what the
danseuse might be like in appearance, and the further information was
added that her performance was the greatest dramatic event of the season.
Yet another piece of information was conveyed to the public a few minutes
after the doors had opened, in the shape of large notices bearing the
brief announcement, "house full."  For the first-night function most of
the seats had been reserved for specially-invited guests or else bespoken
by those who considered it due to their own importance to be visible on
such an occasion.

Even at the commencement of the ordinary programme of the evening (Gorla
was not due to appear till late in the list) the theatre was crowded with
a throng of chattering, expectant human beings; it seemed as though every
one had come early to see every one else arrive.  As a matter of fact it
was the rumour-heralded arrival of one personage in particular that had
drawn people early to their seats and given a double edge to the
expectancy of the moment.

At first sight and first hearing the bulk of the audience seemed to
comprise representatives of the chief European races in well-distributed
proportions, but if one gave it closer consideration it could be seen
that the distribution was geographically rather than ethnographically
diversified.  Men and women there were from Paris, Munich, Rome, Moscow
and Vienna, from Sweden and Holland and divers other cities and
countries, but in the majority of cases the Jordan Valley had supplied
their forefathers with a common cradle-ground.  The lack of a fire
burning on a national altar seemed to have drawn them by universal
impulse to the congenial flare of the footlights, whether as artists,
producers, impresarios, critics, agents, go-betweens, or merely as highly
intelligent and fearsomely well-informed spectators.  They were prominent
in the chief seats, they were represented, more sparsely but still in
fair numbers, in the cheaper places, and everywhere they were voluble,
emphatic, sanguine or sceptical, prodigal of word and gesture, with eyes
that seemed to miss nothing and acknowledge nothing, and a general
restless dread of not being seen and noticed.  Of the theatre-going
London public there was also a fair muster, more particularly centred in
the less expensive parts of the house, while in boxes, stalls and circles
a sprinkling of military uniforms gave an unfamiliar tone to the scene in
the eyes of those who had not previously witnessed a first-night
performance under the new conditions.

Yeovil, while standing aloof from his wife's participation in this social
event, had made private arrangements for being a personal spectator of
the scene; as one of the ticket-buying public he had secured a seat in
the back row of a low-priced gallery, whence he might watch, observant
and unobserved, the much talked-of debut of Gorla Mustelford, and the
writing of a new chapter in the history of the fait accompli.  Around him
he noticed an incessant undercurrent of jangling laughter, an unending
give-and-take of meaningless mirthless jest and catchword.  He had
noticed the same thing in streets and public places since his arrival in
London, a noisy, empty interchange of chaff and laughter that he had been
at a loss to account for.  The Londoner is not well adapted for the
irresponsible noisiness of jesting tongue that bubbles up naturally in a
Southern race, and the effort to be volatile was the more noticeable
because it so obviously was an effort.  Turning over the pages of a book
that told the story of Bulgarian social life in the days of Turkish rule,
Yeovil had that morning come across a passage that seemed to throw some
light on the thing that had puzzled him:

"Bondage has this one advantage: it makes a nation merry.  Where
far-reaching ambition has no scope for its development the community
squanders its energy on the trivial and personal cares of its daily life,
and seeks relief and recreation in simple and easily obtained material
enjoyment."  The writer was a man who had known bondage, so he spoke at
any rate with authority.  Of the London of the moment it could not,
however, be said with any truth that it was merry, but merely that its
inhabitants made desperate endeavour not to appear crushed under their
catastrophe.  Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues and
shrill mechanical repartee, Yeovil's mind went back to the book and its
account of a theatre audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its
light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators.  Bulgaria!  The
thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense
of irony.  There was a people who had not thought it beneath the dignity
of their manhood to learn the trade and discipline of arms.  They had
their reward; torn and exhausted and debt-encumbered from their
campaigns, they were masters in their own house, the Bulgarian flag flew
over the Bulgarian mountains.  And Yeovil stole a glance at the crown of
Charlemagne set over the Royal box.

In a capacious box immediately opposite the one set aside for royalty the
Lady Shalem sat in well-considered prominence, confident that every press
critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or two of them
would describe, or misdescribe, her toilet.  Already quite a considerable
section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which
she graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the
presence of a great many personal acquaintances.  She had attained to
that desirable feminine altitude of purse and position when people who go
about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your dress
before.

Lady Shalem was a woman of commanding presence, of that type which
suggests a consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed;
she had observant eyes and a well-managed voice.  Her successes in life
had been worked for, but they were also to some considerable extent the
result of accident.  Her public history went back to the time when, in
the person of her husband, Mr. Conrad Dort, she had contested two
hopeless and very expensive Parliamentary elections on behalf of her
party; on each occasion the declaration of the poll had shown a heavy
though reduced majority on the wrong side, but she might have perpetrated
an apt misquotation of the French monarch's traditional message after the
defeat of Pavia, and assured the world "all is lost save honours."  The
forthcoming Honours List had duly proclaimed the fact that Conrad Dort,
Esquire, had entered Parliament by another door as Baron Shalem, of
Wireskiln, in the county of Suffolk.  Success had crowned the lady's
efforts as far as the achievement of the title went, but her social
ambitions seemed unlikely to make further headway.  The new Baron and his
wife, their title and money notwithstanding, did not "go down" in their
particular segment of county society, and in London there were other
titles and incomes to compete with.  People were willing to worship the
Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars.  No one could
justly say that the Shalems were either oppressively vulgar or
insufferably bumptious; probably the chief reason for their lack of
popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular.  They kept
open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social
draught.  The people who accepted their invitations for the second or
third time were not the sort of people whose names gave importance to a
dinner party or a house gathering.  Failure, in a thinly-disguised form,
attended the assiduous efforts of the Shalems to play a leading role in
the world that they had climbed into.  The Baron began to observe to his
acquaintances that "gadding about" and entertaining on a big scale was
not much in his line; a quiet after-dinner pipe and talk with some
brother legislator was his ideal way of spending an evening.

Then came the great catastrophe, involving the old order of society in
the national overthrow.  Lady Shalem, after a decent interval of
patriotic mourning, began to look around her and take stock of her
chances and opportunities under the new regime.  It was easier to achieve
distinction as a titled oasis in the social desert that London had become
than it had been to obtain recognition as a new growth in a rather
overcrowded field.  The observant eyes and agile brain quickly noted this
circumstance, and her ladyship set to work to adapt herself to the
altered conditions that governed her world.  Lord Shalem was one of the
few Peers who kissed the hand of the new Sovereign, his wife was one of
the few hostesses who attempted to throw a semblance of gaiety and lavish
elegance over the travesty of a London season following the year of
disaster.  The world of tradesmen and purveyors and caterers, and the
thousands who were dependent on them for employment, privately blessed
the example set by Shalem House, whatever their feelings might be towards
the fait accompli, and the august newcomer who had added an old Saxon
kingdom and some of its accretions to the Teutonic realm of Charlemagne
was duly beholden to an acquired subject who was willing to forget the
bitterness of defeat and to help others to forget it also.  Among other
acts of Imperial recognition an earldom was being held in readiness for
the Baron who had known how to accept accomplished facts with a good
grace.  One of the wits of the Cockatrice Club had asserted that the new
earl would take as supporters for his coat of arms a lion and a unicorn
oublie.

In the box with Lady Shalem was the Grafin von Tolb, a well-dressed woman
of some fifty-six years, comfortable and placid in appearance, yet alert
withal, rather suggesting a thoroughly wide-awake dormouse.  Rich,
amiable and intelligent were the adjectives which would best have
described her character and her life-story.  In her own rather difficult
social circle at Paderborn she had earned for herself the reputation of
being one of the most tactful and discerning hostesses in Germany, and it
was generally suspected that she had come over and taken up her residence
in London in response to a wish expressed in high quarters; the lavish
hospitality which she dispensed at her house in Berkeley Square was a
considerable reinforcement to the stricken social life of the metropolis.

In a neighbouring box Cicely Yeovil presided over a large and lively
party, which of course included Ronnie Storre, who was for once in a way
in a chattering mood, and also included an American dowager, who had
never been known to be in anything else.  A tone of literary distinction
was imparted to the group by the presence of Augusta Smith, better known
under her pen-name of Rhapsodic Pantril, author of a play that had had a
limited but well-advertised success in Sheffield and the United States of
America, author also of a book of reminiscences, entitled "Things I
Cannot Forget."  She had beautiful eyes, a knowledge of how to dress, and
a pleasant disposition, cankered just a little by a perpetual dread of
the non-recognition of her genius.  As the woman, Augusta Smith, she
probably would have been unreservedly happy; as the super-woman,
Rhapsodic Pantril, she lived within the border-line of discontent.  Her
most ordinary remarks were framed with the view of arresting attention;
some one once said of her that she ordered a sack of potatoes with the
air of one who is making enquiry for a love-philtre.

"Do you see what colour the curtain is?" she asked Cicely, throwing a
note of intense meaning into her question.

Cicely turned quickly and looked at the drop-curtain.

"Rather a nice blue," she said.

"Alexandrine blue--my colour--the colour of hope," said Rhapsodie
impressively.

"It goes well with the general colour-scheme," said Cicely, feeling that
she was hardly rising to the occasion.

"Say, is it really true that His Majesty is coming?" asked the lively
American dowager.  "I've put on my nooest frock and my best diamonds on
purpose, and I shall be mortified to death if he doesn't see them."

"There!" pouted Ronnie, "I felt certain you'd put them on for me."

"Why no, I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you.  People
with our colour of hair always like barbaric display--"

"They don't," said Ronnie, "they have chaste cold tastes.  You are
absolutely mistaken."

"Well, I think I ought to know!" protested the dowager; "I've lived
longer in the world than you have, anyway."

"Yes," said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness, "but my hair has been
this colour longer than yours has."

Peace was restored by the opportune arrival of a middle-aged man of blond
North-German type, with an expression of brutality on his rather stupid
face, who sat in the front of the box for a few minutes on a visit of
ceremony to Cicely.  His appearance caused a slight buzz of recognition
among the audience, and if Yeovil had cared to make enquiry of his
neighbours he might have learned that this decorated and obviously
important personage was the redoubtable von Kwarl, artificer and shaper
of much of the statecraft for which other men got the public credit.

The orchestra played a selection from the "Gondola Girl," which was the
leading musical-comedy of the moment.  Most of the audience, those in the
more expensive seats at any rate, heard the same airs two or three times
daily, at restaurant lunches, teas, dinners and suppers, and occasionally
in the Park; they were justified therefore in treating the music as a
background to slightly louder conversation than they had hitherto
indulged in.  The music came to an end, episode number two in the
evening's entertainment was signalled, the curtain of Alexandrine blue
rolled heavily upward, and a troupe of performing wolves was presented to
the public.  Yeovil had encountered wolves in North Africa deserts and in
Siberian forest and wold, he had seen them at twilight stealing like dark
shadows across the snow, and heard their long whimpering howl in the
darkness amid the pines; he could well understand how a magic lore had
grown up round them through the ages among the peoples of four
continents, how their name had passed into a hundred strange sayings and
inspired a hundred traditions.  And now he saw them ride round the stage
on tricycles, with grotesque ruffles round their necks and clown caps on
their heads, their eyes blinking miserably in the blaze of the
footlights.  In response to the applause of the house a stout,
atrociously smiling man in evening dress came forward and bowed; he had
had nothing to do either with the capture or the training of the animals,
having bought them ready for use from a continental emporium where wild
beasts were prepared for the music-hall market, but he continued bowing
and smiling till the curtain fell.

Two American musicians with comic tendencies (denoted by the elaborate
rags and tatters of their costumes) succeeded the wolves.  Their musical
performance was not without merit, but their comic "business" seemed to
have been invented long ago by some man who had patented a monopoly of
all music-hall humour and forthwith retired from the trade.  Some day,
Yeovil reflected, the rights of the monopoly might expire and new
"business" become available for the knockabout profession.

The audience brightened considerably when item number five of the
programme was signalled.  The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure
and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause.  He
was dressed as an errand-boy of some West End shop, with a livery and box-
tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand-boy could
see himself in his most ambitious dreams.  His song was a lively and very
audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes of a big retail
establishment, and sparkled with allusions which might fitly have been
described as suggestive--at any rate they appeared to suggest meanings to
the audience quite as clearly as Gorla Mustelford's dances were likely to
do, even with the aid, in her case, of long explanations on the
programmes.  When the final verse seemed about to reach an unpardonable
climax a stage policeman opportunely appeared and moved the lively
songster on for obstructing the imaginary traffic of an imaginary Bond
Street.  The house received the new number with genial enthusiasm, and
mingled its applause with demands for an earlier favourite.  The
orchestra struck up the familiar air, and in a few moments the smart
errand-boy, transformed now into a smart jockey, was singing "They quaff
the gay bubbly in Eccleston Square" to an audience that hummed and nodded
its unstinted approval.

The next number but one was the Gorla Mustelford debut, and the house
settled itself down to yawn and fidget and chatter for ten or twelve
minutes while a troupe of talented Japanese jugglers performed some
artistic and quite uninteresting marvels with fans and butterflies and
lacquer boxes.  The interval of waiting was not destined, however, to be
without its interest; in its way it provided the one really important and
dramatic moment of the evening.  One or two uniforms and evening
toilettes had already made their appearance in the Imperial box; now
there was observable in that quarter a slight commotion, an unobtrusive
reshuffling and reseating, and then every eye in the suddenly quiet semi-
darkened house focussed itself on one figure.  There was no public
demonstration from the newly-loyal, it had been particularly wished that
there should be none, but a ripple of whisper went through the vast
audience from end to end.  Majesty had arrived.  The Japanese
marvel-workers went through their display with even less attention than
before.  Lady Shalem, sitting well in the front of her box, lowered her
observant eyes to her programme and her massive bangles.  The evidence of
her triumph did not need staring at.




CHAPTER IX: AN EVENING "TO BE REMEMBERED"


To the uninitiated or unappreciative the dancing of Gorla Mustelford did
not seem widely different from much that had been exhibited aforetime by
exponents of the posturing school.  She was not naturally graceful of
movement, she had not undergone years of arduous tutelage, she had not
the instinct for sheer joyous energy of action that is stored in some
natures; out of these unpromising negative qualities she had produced a
style of dancing that might best be labelled a conscientious departure
from accepted methods.  The highly imaginative titles that she had
bestowed on her dances, the "Life of a fern," the "Soul-dream of a
topaz," and so forth, at least gave her audience and her critics
something to talk about.  In themselves they meant absolutely nothing,
but they induced discussion, and that to Gorla meant a great deal.  It
was a season of dearth and emptiness in the footlights and box-office
world, and her performance received a welcome that would scarcely have
befallen it in a more crowded and prosperous day.  Her success, indeed,
had been waiting for her, ready-made, as far as the managerial profession
was concerned, and nothing had been left undone in the way of
advertisement to secure for it the appearance, at any rate, of popular
favour.  And loud above the interested applause of those who had personal
or business motives for acclaiming a success swelled the exaggerated
enthusiasm of the fairly numerous art-satellites who are unstinted in
their praise of anything that they are certain they cannot understand.
Whatever might be the subsequent verdict of the theatre-filling public
the majority of the favoured first-night audience was determined to set
the seal of its approval on the suggestion dances, and a steady roll of
applause greeted the conclusion of each item.  The dancer gravely bowed
her thanks; in marked contradistinction to the gentleman who had
"presented" the performing wolves she did not permit herself the luxury
of a smile.

"It teaches us a great deal," said Rhapsodic Pantril vaguely, but
impressively, after the Fern dance had been given and applauded.

"At any rate we know now that a fern takes life very seriously," broke in
Joan Mardle, who had somehow wriggled herself into Cicely's box.

As Yeovil, from the back of his gallery, watched Gorla running and
ricochetting about the stage, looking rather like a wagtail in energetic
pursuit of invisible gnats and midges, he wondered how many of the middle-
aged women who were eagerly applauding her would have taken the least
notice of similar gymnastics on the part of their offspring in nursery or
garden, beyond perhaps asking them not to make so much noise.  And a
bitterer tinge came to his thoughts as he saw the bouquets being handed
up, thoughts of the brave old dowager down at Torywood, the woman who had
worked and wrought so hard and so unsparingly in her day for the well-
being of the State--the State that had fallen helpless into alien hands
before her tired eyes.  Her eldest son lived invalid-wise in the South of
France, her second son lay fathoms deep in the North Sea, with the hulk
of a broken battleship for a burial-vault; and now the grand-daughter was
standing here in the limelight, bowing her thanks for the patronage and
favour meted out to her by this cosmopolitan company, with its lavish
sprinkling of the uniforms of an alien army.

Prominent among the flowers at her feet was one large golden-petalled
bouquet of gorgeous blooms, tied with a broad streamer of golden riband,
the tribute rendered by Caesar to the things that were Caesar's.  The new
chapter of the fait accompli had been written that night and written
well.  The audience poured slowly out with the triumphant music of
Jancovius's Kaiser Wilhelm march, played by the orchestra as a happy
inspiration, pealing in its ears.

"It has been a great evening, a most successful evening," said Lady
Shalem to Herr von Kwarl, whom she was conveying in her electric brougham
to Cicely Yeovil's supper party; "an important evening," she added,
choosing her adjectives with deliberation.  "It should give pleasure in
high quarters, should it not?"

And she turned her observant eyes on the impassive face of her companion.

"Gracious lady," he replied with deliberation and meaning, "it has given
pleasure.  It is an evening to be remembered."

The gracious lady suppressed a sigh of satisfaction.  Memory in high
places was a thing fruitful and precious beyond computation.

Cicely's party at the Porphyry Restaurant had grown to imposing
dimensions.  Every one whom she had asked had come, and so had Joan
Mardle.  Lady Shalem had suggested several names at the last moment, and
there was quite a strong infusion of the Teutonic military and official
world.  It was just as well, Cicely reflected, that the supper was being
given at a restaurant and not in Berkshire Street.

"Quite like ole times," purred the beaming proprietor in Cicely's ear, as
the staircase and cloak-rooms filled up with a jostling, laughing throng.

The guests settled themselves at four tables, taking their places where
chance or fancy led them, late comers having to fit in wherever they
could find room.  A babel of tongues in various languages reigned round
the tables, amid which the rattle of knives and forks and plates and the
popping of corks made a subdued hubbub.  Gorla Mustelford, the motive for
all this sound and movement, this chatter of guests and scurrying of
waiters, sat motionless in the fatigued self-conscious silence of a great
artist who has delivered a great message.

"Do sit at Lady Peach's table, like a dear boy," Cicely begged of Tony
Luton, who had come in late; "she and Gerald Drowly have got together, in
spite of all my efforts, and they are both so dull.  Try and liven things
up a bit."

A loud barking sound, as of fur-seals calling across Arctic ice, came
from another table, where Mrs. Mentieth-Mendlesohnn (one of the
Mendlesohnns of Invergordon, as she was wont to describe herself) was
proclaiming the glories and subtleties of Gorla's achievement.

"It was a revelation," she shouted; "I sat there and saw a whole new
scheme of thought unfold itself before my eyes.  One could not define it,
it was thought translated into action--the best art cannot be defined.
One just sat there and knew that one was seeing something one had never
seen before, and yet one felt that one had seen it, in one's brain, all
one's life.  That was what was so wonderful--yes, please," she broke off
sharply as a fat quail in aspic was presented to her by a questioning
waiter.

The voice of Mr. Mauleverer Morle came across the table, like another
seal barking at a greater distance.

"Rostand," he observed with studied emphasis, "has been called le Prince
de l'adjectif Inopine; Miss Mustelford deserves to be described as the
Queen of Unexpected Movement."

"Oh, I say, do you hear that?" exclaimed Mrs. Mentieth-Mendlesohnn to as
wide an audience as she could achieve; "Rostand has been called--tell
them what you said, Mr. Morle," she broke off, suddenly mistrusting her
ability to handle a French sentence at the top of her voice.

Mr. Morle repeated his remark.

"Pass it on to the next table," commanded Mrs. Mentieth-Mendlesohnn.
"It's too good to be lost."

At the next table however, a grave impressive voice was dwelling at
length on a topic remote from the event of the evening.  Lady Peach
considered that all social gatherings, of whatever nature, were intended
for the recital of minor domestic tragedies.  She lost no time in
regaling the company around her with the detailed history of an
interrupted week-end in a Norfolk cottage.

"The most charming and delightful old-world spot that you could imagine,
clean and quite comfortable, just a nice distance from the sea and within
an easy walk of the Broads.  The very place for the children.  We'd
brought everything for a four days' stay and meant to have a really
delightful time.  And then on Sunday morning we found that some one had
left the springhead, where our only supply of drinking water came from,
uncovered, and a dead bird was floating in it; it had fallen in somehow
and got drowned.  Of course we couldn't use the water that a dead body
had been floating in, and there was no other supply for miles round, so
we had to come away then and there.  Now what do you say to that?"

"'Ah, that a linnet should die in the Spring,'" quoted Tony Luton with
intense feeling.

There was an immediate outburst of hilarity where Lady Peach had
confidently looked for expressions of concern and sympathy.

"Isn't Tony just perfectly cute?  Isn't he?" exclaimed a young American
woman, with an enthusiasm to which Lady Peach entirely failed to respond.
She had intended following up her story with the account of another
tragedy of a similar nature that had befallen her three years ago in
Argyllshire, and now the opportunity had gone.  She turned morosely to
the consolations of a tongue salad.

At the centre table the excellent von Tolb led a chorus of congratulation
and compliment, to which Gorla listened with an air of polite detachment,
much as the Sheikh Ul Islam might receive the homage of a Wesleyan
Conference.  To a close observer it would have seemed probable that her
attitude of fatigued indifference to the flattering remarks that were
showered on her had been as carefully studied and rehearsed as any of her
postures on the stage.

"It is something that one will appreciate more and more fully every time
one sees it . . . One cannot see it too often . . . I could have sat and
watched it for hours . . . Do you know, I am just looking forward to to-
morrow evening, when I can see it again. . . .  I knew it was going to be
good, but I had no idea--" so chimed the chorus, between mouthfuls of
quail and bites of asparagus.

"Weren't the performing wolves wonderful?" exclaimed Joan in her fresh
joyous voice, that rang round the room like laughter of the woodpecker.

If there is one thing that disturbs the complacency of a great artist of
the Halls it is the consciousness of sharing his or her triumphs with
performing birds and animals, but of course Joan was not to be expected
to know that.  She pursued her subject with the assurance of one who has
hit on a particularly acceptable topic.

"It must have taken them years of training and concentration to master
those tricycles," she continued in high-pitched soliloquy.  "The nice
thing about them is that they don't realise a bit how clever and
educational they are.  It would be dreadful to have them putting on airs,
wouldn't it?  And yet I suppose the knowledge of being able to jump
through a hoop better than any other wolf would justify a certain amount
of 'side.'"

Fortunately at this moment a young Italian journalist at another table
rose from his seat and delivered a two-minute oration in praise of the
heroine of the evening.  He spoke in rapid nervous French, with a North
Italian accent, but much of what he said could be understood by the
majority of those present, and the applause was unanimous.  At any rate
he had been brief and it was permissible to suppose that he had been
witty.

It was the opening for which Mr. Gerald Drowly had been watching and
waiting.  The moment that the Italian enthusiast had dropped back into
his seat amid a rattle of hand-clapping and rapping of forks and knives
on the tables, Drowly sprang to his feet, pushed his chair well away, as
for a long separation, and begged to endorse what had been so very aptly
and gracefully, and, might he add, truly said by the previous speaker.
This was only the prelude to the real burden of his message; with the
dexterity that comes of practice he managed, in a couple of hurried
sentences, to divert the course of his remarks to his own personality and
career, and to inform his listeners that he was an actor of some note and
experience, and had had the honour of acting under--and here followed a
string of names of eminent actor managers of the day.  He thought he
might be pardoned for mentioning the fact that his performance of
"Peterkin" in the "Broken Nutshell," had won the unstinted approval of
the dramatic critics of the Provincial press.  Towards the end of what
was a long speech, and which seemed even longer to its hearers, he
reverted to the subject of Gorla's dancing and bestowed on it such
laudatory remarks as he had left over.  Drawing his chair once again into
his immediate neighbourhood he sat down, aglow with the satisfied
consciousness of a good work worthily performed.

"I once acted a small part in some theatricals got up for a charity,"
announced Joan in a ringing, confidential voice; "the Clapham Courier
said that all the minor parts were very creditably sustained.  Those were
its very words.  I felt I must tell you that, and also say how much I
enjoyed Miss Mustelford's dancing."

Tony Luton cheered wildly.

"That's the cleverest speech so far," he proclaimed.  He had been asked
to liven things up at his table and was doing his best to achieve that
result, but Mr. Gerald Drowly joined Lady Peach in the unfavourable
opinion she had formed of that irrepressible youth.

Ronnie, on whom Cicely kept a solicitous eye, showed no sign of any
intention of falling in love with Gorla.  He was more profitably engaged
in paying court to the Grafin von Tolb, whose hospitable mansion in
Belgrave Square invested her with a special interest in his eyes.  As a
professional Prince Charming he had every inducement to encourage the
cult of Fairy Godmother.

"Yes, yes, agreed, I will come and hear you play, that is a promise,"
said the Grafin, "and you must come and dine with me one night and play
to me afterwards, that is a promise, also, yes?  That is very nice of
you, to come and see a tiresome old woman.  I am passionately fond of
music; if I were honest I would tell you also that I am very fond of good-
looking boys, but this is not the age of honesty, so I must leave you to
guess that.  Come on Thursday in next week, you can?  That is nice.  I
have a reigning Prince dining with me that night.  Poor man, he wants
cheering up; the art of being a reigning Prince is not a very pleasing
one nowadays.  He has made it a boast all his life that he is Liberal and
his subjects Conservative; now that is all changed--no, not all; he is
still Liberal, but his subjects unfortunately are become Socialists.  You
must play your best for him."

"Are there many Socialists over there, in Germany I mean?" asked Ronnie,
who was rather out of his depth where politics were concerned.

"Ueberall," said the Grafin with emphasis; "everywhere, I don't know what
it comes from; better education and worse digestions I suppose.  I am
sure digestion has a good deal to do with it.  In my husband's family for
example, his generation had excellent digestions, and there wasn't a case
of Socialism or suicide among them; the younger generation have no
digestions worth speaking of, and there have been two suicides and three
Socialists within the last six years.  And now I must really be going.  I
am not a Berliner and late hours don't suit my way of life."

Ronnie bent low over the Grafin's hand and kissed it, partly because she
was the kind of woman who naturally invoked such homage, but chiefly
because he knew that the gesture showed off his smooth burnished head to
advantage.

The observant eyes of Lady Shalem had noted the animated conversation
between the Grafin and Ronnie, and she had overheard fragments of the
invitation that had been accorded to the latter.

"Take us the little foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines," she
quoted to herself; "not that that music-boy would do much in the
destructive line, but the principle is good."




CHAPTER X: SOME REFLECTIONS AND A "TE DEUM"


Cicely awoke, on the morning after the "memorable evening," with the
satisfactory feeling of victory achieved, tempered by a troubled sense of
having achieved it in the face of a reasonably grounded opposition.  She
had burned her boats, and was glad of it, but the reek of their burning
drifted rather unpleasantly across the jubilant incense-swinging of her
Te Deum service.

Last night had marked an immense step forward in her social career;
without running after the patronage of influential personages she had
seen it quietly and tactfully put at her service.  People such as the
Grafin von Tolb were going to be a power in the London world for a very
long time to come.  Herr von Kwarl, with all his useful qualities of
brain and temperament, might conceivably fall out of favour in some
unexpected turn of the political wheel, and the Shalems would probably
have their little day and then a long afternoon of diminishing social
importance; the placid dormouse-like Grafin would outlast them all.  She
had the qualities which make either for contented mediocrity or else for
very durable success, according as circumstances may dictate.  She was
one of those characters that can neither thrust themselves to the front,
nor have any wish to do so, but being there, no ordinary power can thrust
them away.

With the Grafin as her friend Cicely found herself in altogether a
different position from that involved by the mere interested patronage of
Lady Shalem.  A vista of social success was opened up to her, and she did
not mean it to be just the ordinary success of a popular and influential
hostess moving in an important circle.  That people with naturally bad
manners should have to be polite and considerate in their dealings with
her, that people who usually held themselves aloof should have to be
gracious and amiable, that the self-assured should have to be just a
little humble and anxious where she was concerned, these things of course
she intended to happen; she was a woman.  But, she told herself, she
intended a great deal more than that when she traced the pattern for her
scheme of social influence.  In her heart she detested the German
occupation as a hateful necessity, but while her heart registered the
hatefulness the brain recognised the necessity.  The great
fighting-machines that the Germans had built up and maintained, on land,
on sea, and in air, were three solid crushing facts that demonstrated the
hopelessness of any immediate thought of revolt.  Twenty years hence,
when the present generation was older and greyer, the chances of armed
revolt would probably be equally hopeless, equally remote-seeming.  But
in the meantime something could have been effected in another way.  The
conquerors might partially Germanise London, but, on the other hand, if
the thing were skilfully managed, the British element within the Empire
might impress the mark of its influence on everything German.  The
fighting men might remain Prussian or Bavarian, but the thinking men, and
eventually the ruling men, could gradually come under British influence,
or even be of British blood.  An English Liberal-Conservative "Centre"
might stand as a bulwark against the Junkerdom and Socialism of
Continental Germany.  So Cicely reasoned with herself, in a fashion
induced perhaps by an earlier apprenticeship to the reading of Nineteenth
Century articles, in which the possible political and racial developments
of various countries were examined and discussed and put away in the
pigeon-holes of probable happenings.  She had sufficient knowledge of
political history to know that such a development might possibly come to
pass, she had not sufficient insight into actual conditions to know that
the possibility was as remote as that of armed resistance.  And the role
which she saw herself playing was that of a deft and courtly political
intriguer, rallying the British element and making herself agreeable to
the German element, a political inspiration to the one and a social
distraction to the other.  At the back of her mind there lurked an honest
confession that she was probably over-rating her powers of statecraft and
personality, that she was more likely to be carried along by the current
of events than to control or divert its direction; the political
day-dream remained, however, as day-dreams will, in spite of the clear
light of probability shining through them.  At any rate she knew, as
usual, what she wanted to do, and as usual she had taken steps to carry
out her intentions.  Last night remained in her mind a night of important
victory.  There also remained the anxious proceeding of finding out if
the victory had entailed any serious losses.

Cicely was not one of those ill-regulated people who treat the first meal
of the day as a convenient occasion for serving up any differences or
contentions that have been left over from the day before or overlooked in
the press of other matters.  She enjoyed her breakfast and gave Yeovil
unhindered opportunity for enjoying his; a discussion as to the right
cooking of a dish that he had first tasted among the Orenburg Tartars was
the prevailing topic on this particular morning, and blended well with
trout and toast and coffee.  In a cosy nook of the smoking-room, in
participation of the after-breakfast cigarettes, Cicely made her dash
into debatable ground.

"You haven't asked me how my supper-party went off," she said.

"There is a notice of it in two of the morning papers, with a list of
those present," said Yeovil; "the conquering race seems to have been very
well represented."

"Several races were represented," said Cicely; "a function of that sort,
celebrating a dramatic first-night, was bound to be cosmopolitan.  In
fact, blending of races and nationalities is the tendency of the age we
live in."

"The blending of races seems to have been consummated already in one of
the individuals at your party," said Yeovil drily; "the name Mentieth-
Mendlesohnn struck me as a particularly happy obliteration of racial
landmarks."

Cicely laughed.

"A noisy and very wearisome sort of woman," she commented; "she reminds
one of garlic that's been planted by mistake in a conservatory.  Still,
she's useful as an advertising agent to any one who rubs her the right
way.  She'll be invaluable in proclaiming the merits of Gorla's
performance to all and sundry; that's why I invited her.  She'll probably
lunch to-day at the Hotel Cecil, and every one sitting within a hundred
yards of her table will hear what an emotional education they can get by
going to see Gorla dance at the Caravansery."

"She seems to be like the Salvation Army," said Yeovil; "her noise
reaches a class of people who wouldn't trouble to read press notices."

"Exactly," said Cicely.  "Gorla gets quite good notices on the whole,
doesn't she?"

"The one that took my fancy most was the one in the Standard," said
Yeovil, picking up that paper from a table by his side and searching its
columns for the notice in question.  "'The wolves which appeared earlier
in the evening's entertainment are, the programme assures us, trained
entirely by kindness.  It would have been a further kindness, at any rate
to the audience, if some of the training, which the wolves doubtless do
not appreciate at its proper value, had been expended on Miss
Mustelford's efforts at stage dancing.  We are assured, again on the
authority of the programme, that the much-talked-of Suggestion Dances are
the last word in Posture dancing.  The last word belongs by immemorial
right to the sex which Miss Mustelford adorns, and it would be ungallant
to seek to deprive her of her privilege.  As far as the educational
aspect of her performance is concerned we must admit that the life of the
fern remains to us a private life still.  Miss Mustelford has abandoned
her own private life in an unavailing attempt to draw the fern into the
gaze of publicity.  And so it was with her other suggestions.  They
suggested many things, but nothing that was announced on the programme.
Chiefly they suggested one outstanding reflection, that stage-dancing is
not like those advertised breakfast foods that can be served up after
three minutes' preparation.  Half a life-time, or rather half a youth-
time is a much more satisfactory allowance.'"

"The Standard is prejudiced," said Cicely; "some of the other papers are
quite enthusiastic.  The Dawn gives her a column and a quarter of notice,
nearly all of it complimentary.  It says the report of her fame as a
dancer went before her, but that her performance last night caught it up
and outstripped it."

"I should not like to suggest that the Dawn is prejudiced," said Yeovil,
"but Shalem is a managing director on it, and one of its biggest
shareholders.  Gorla's dancing is an event of the social season, and
Shalem is one of those most interested in keeping up the appearance, at
any rate, of a London social season.  Besides, her debut gave the
opportunity for an Imperial visit to the theatre--the first appearance at
a festive public function of the Conqueror among the conquered.
Apparently the experiment passed off well; Shalem has every reason to
feel pleased with himself and well-disposed towards Gorla.  By the way,"
added Yeovil, "talking of Gorla, I'm going down to Torywood one day next
week."

"To Torywood?" exclaimed Cicely.  The tone of her exclamation gave the
impression that the announcement was not very acceptable to her.

"I promised the old lady that I would go and have a talk with her when I
came back from my Siberian trip; she travelled in eastern Russia, you
know, long before the Trans-Siberian railway was built, and she's
enormously interested in those parts.  In any case I should like to see
her again."

"She does not see many people nowadays," said Cicely; "I fancy she is
breaking up rather.  She was very fond of the son who went down, you
know."

"She has seen a great many of the things she cared for go down," said
Yeovil; "it is a sad old life that is left to her, when one thinks of all
that the past has been to her, of the part she used to play in the world,
the work she used to get through.  It used to seem as though she could
never grow old, as if she would die standing up, with some unfinished
command on her lips.  And now I suppose her tragedy is that she has grown
old, bitterly old, and cannot die."

Cicely was silent for a moment, and seemed about to leave the room.  Then
she turned back and said:

"I don't think I would say anything about Gorla to her if I were you."

"It would not have occurred to me to drag her name into our
conversation," said Yeovil coldly, "but in any case the accounts of her
dancing performance will have reached Torywood through the
newspapers--also the record of your racially-blended supper-party."

Cicely said nothing.  She knew that by last night's affair she had
definitely identified herself in public opinion with the Shalem clique,
and that many of her old friends would look on her with distrust and
suspicion on that account.  It was unfortunate, but she reckoned it a
lesser evil than tearing herself away from her London life, its successes
and pleasures and possibilities.  These social dislocations and severing
of friendships were to be looked for after any great and violent change
in State affairs.  It was Yeovil's attitude that really troubled her; she
would not give way to his prejudices and accept his point of view, but
she knew that a victory that involved estrangement from him would only
bring a mockery of happiness.  She still hoped that he would come round
to an acceptance of established facts and deaden his political malaise in
the absorbing distraction of field sports.  The visit to Torywood was a
misfortune; it might just turn the balance in the undesired direction.
Only a few weeks of late summer and early autumn remained before the
hunting season, and its preparations would be at hand, and Yeovil might
be caught in the meshes of an old enthusiasm; in those few weeks,
however, he might be fired by another sort of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm
which would sooner or later mean voluntary or enforced exile for his
part, and the probable breaking up of her own social plans and ambitions.

But Cicely knew something of the futility of improvising objections where
no real obstacle exists.  The visit to Torywood was a graceful attention
on Yeovil's part to an old friend; there was no decent ground on which it
could be opposed.  If the influence of that visit came athwart Yeovil's
life and hers with disastrous effect, that was "Kismet."

And once again the reek from her burned and smouldering boats mingled
threateningly with the incense fumes of her Te Deum for victory.  She
left the room, and Yeovil turned once more to an item of news in the
morning's papers that had already arrested his attention.  The Imperial
Aufklarung on the subject of military service was to be made public in
the course of the day.




CHAPTER XI: THE TEA SHOP


Yeovil wandered down Piccadilly that afternoon in a spirit of
restlessness and expectancy.  The long-awaited Aufklarung dealing with
the new law of military service had not yet appeared; at any moment he
might meet the hoarse-throated newsboys running along with their papers,
announcing the special edition which would give the terms of the edict to
the public.  Every sound or movement that detached itself with isolated
significance from the general whirr and scurry of the streets seemed to
Yeovil to herald the oncoming clamour and rush that he was looking for.
But the long endless succession of motors and 'buses and vans went by,
hooting and grunting, and such newsboys as were to be seen hung about
listlessly, bearing no more attractive bait on their posters than the
announcement of an "earthquake shock in Hungary: feared loss of life."

The Green Park end of Piccadilly was a changed, and in some respects a
livelier thoroughfare to that which Yeovil remembered with affectionate
regret.  A great political club had migrated from its palatial home to a
shrunken habitation in a less prosperous quarter; its place was filled by
the flamboyant frontage of the Hotel Konstantinopel.  Gorgeous Turkey
carpets were spread over the wide entrance steps, and boys in Circassian
and Anatolian costumes hung around the doors, or dashed forth in
un-Oriental haste to carry such messages as the telephone was unable to
transmit.  Picturesque sellers of Turkish delight, attar-of-roses, and
brass-work coffee services, squatted under the portico, on terms of
obvious good understanding with the hotel management.  A few doors
further down a service club that had long been a Piccadilly landmark was
a landmark still, as the home of the Army Aeronaut Club, and there was a
constant coming and going of gay-hued uniforms, Saxon, Prussian,
Bavarian, Hessian, and so forth, through its portals.  The mastering of
the air and the creation of a scientific aerial war fleet, second to none
in the world, was an achievement of which the conquering race was
pardonably proud, and for which it had good reason to be duly thankful.
Over the gateways was blazoned the badge of the club, an elephant, whale,
and eagle, typifying the three armed forces of the State, by land and sea
and air; the eagle bore in its beak a scroll with the proud legend: "The
last am I, but not the least."

To the eastward of this gaily-humming hive the long shuttered front of a
deserted ducal mansion struck a note of protest and mourning amid the
noise and whirl and colour of a seemingly uncaring city.  On the other
side of the roadway, on the gravelled paths of the Green Park, small
ragged children from the back streets of Westminster looked wistfully at
the smooth trim stretches of grass on which it was now forbidden, in two
languages, to set foot.  Only the pigeons, disregarding the changes of
political geography, walked about as usual, wondering perhaps, if they
ever wondered at anything, at the sudden change in the distribution of
park humans.

Yeovil turned his steps out of the hot sunlight into the shade of the
Burlington Arcade, familiarly known to many of its newer frequenters as
the Passage.  Here the change that new conditions and requirements had
wrought was more immediately noticeable than anywhere else in the West
End.  Most of the shops on the western side had been cleared away, and in
their place had been installed an "open-air" cafe, converting the long
alley into a sort of promenade tea-garden, flanked on one side by a line
of haberdashers', perfumers', and jewellers' show windows.  The patrons
of the cafe could sit at the little round tables, drinking their coffee
and syrups and aperitifs, and gazing, if they were so minded, at the
pyjamas and cravats and Brazilian diamonds spread out for inspection
before them.  A string orchestra, hidden away somewhere in a gallery, was
alternating grand opera with the Gondola Girl and the latest gems of
Transatlantic melody.  From around the tightly-packed tables arose a
babble of tongues, made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering
of Spanish, and a North American rendering of English, with here and
there the sharp shaken-out staccato of Japanese.  A sleepy-looking boy,
in a nondescript uniform, was wandering to and fro among the customers,
offering for sale the Matin, New York Herald, Berliner Tageblatt, and a
host of crudely coloured illustrated papers, embodying the hard-worked
wit of a world-legion of comic artists.  Yeovil hurried through the
Arcade; it was not here, in this atmosphere of staring alien eyes and
jangling tongues, that he wanted to read the news of the Imperial
Aufklarung.

By a succession of by-ways he reached Hanover Square, and thence made his
way into Oxford Street.  There was no commotion of activity to be noticed
yet among the newsboys; the posters still concerned themselves with the
earthquake in Hungary, varied with references to the health of the King
of Roumania, and a motor accident in South London.  Yeovil wandered
aimlessly along the street for a few dozen yards, and then turned down
into the smoking-room of a cheap tea-shop, where he judged that the
flourishing foreign element would be less conspicuously represented.
Quiet-voiced, smooth-headed youths, from neighbouring shops and wholesale
houses, sat drinking tea and munching pastry, some of them reading,
others making a fitful rattle with dominoes on the marble-topped tables.
A clean, wholesome smell of tea and coffee made itself felt through the
clouds of cigarette smoke; cleanliness and listlessness seemed to be the
dominant notes of the place, a cleanliness that was commendable, and a
listlessness that seemed unnatural and undesirable where so much youth
was gathered together for refreshment and recreation.  Yeovil seated
himself at a table already occupied by a young clergyman who was smoking
a cigarette over the remains of a plateful of buttered toast.  He had a
keen, clever, hard-lined face, the face of a man who, in an earlier stage
of European history, might have been a warlike prior, awkward to tackle
at the council-board, greatly to be avoided where blows were being
exchanged.  A pale, silent damsel drifted up to Yeovil and took his order
with an air of being mentally some hundreds of miles away, and utterly
indifferent to the requirements of those whom she served; if she had
brought calf's-foot jelly instead of the pot of China tea he had asked
for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised.  However, the tea duly
arrived on the table, and the pale damsel scribbled a figure on a slip of
paper, put it silently by the side of the teapot, and drifted silently
away.  Yeovil had seen the same sort of thing done on the musical-comedy
stage, and done rather differently.

"Can you tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet?" asked the
young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbour.

"No, I have been waiting about for the last half-hour on the look-out for
it," said Yeovil; "the special editions ought to be out by now."  Then he
added: "I have only just lately come from abroad.  I know scarcely
anything of London as it is now.  You may imagine that a good deal of it
is very strange to me.  Your profession must take you a good deal among
all classes of people.  I have seen something of what one may call the
upper, or, at any rate, the richer classes, since I came back; do tell me
something about the poorer classes of the community.  How do they take
the new order of things?"

"Badly," said the young cleric, "badly, in more senses than one.  They
are helpless and they are bitter--bitter in the useless kind of way that
produces no great resolutions.  They look round for some one to blame for
what has happened; they blame the politicians, they blame the leisured
classes; in an indirect way I believe they blame the Church.  Certainly,
the national disaster has not drawn them towards religion in any form.
One thing you may be sure of, they do not blame themselves.  No true
Londoner ever admits that fault lies at his door.  'No, I never!' is an
exclamation that is on his lips from earliest childhood, whenever he is
charged with anything blameworthy or punishable.  That is why school
discipline was ever a thing repugnant to the schoolboard child and its
parents; no schoolboard scholar ever deserved punishment.  However
obvious the fault might seem to a disciplinarian, 'No, I never'
exonerated it as something that had not happened.  Public schoolboys and
private schoolboys of the upper and middle class had their fling and took
their thrashings, when they were found out, as a piece of bad luck, but
'our Bert' and 'our Sid' were of those for whom there is no condemnation;
if they were punished it was for faults that 'no, they never' committed.
Naturally the grown-up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and
householders, do not realise, still less admit, that it was they who
called the tune to which the politicians danced.  They had to choose
between the vote-mongers and the so-called 'scare-mongers,' and their
verdict was for the vote-mongers all the time.  And now they are bitter;
they are being punished, and punishment is not a thing that they have
been schooled to bear.  The taxes that are falling on them are a grievous
source of discontent, and the military service that will be imposed on
them, for the first time in their lives, will be another.  There is a
more lovable side to their character under misfortune, though," added the
young clergyman.  "Deep down in their hearts there was a very real
affection for the old dynasty.  Future historians will perhaps be able to
explain how and why the Royal Family of Great Britain captured the
imaginations of its subjects in so genuine and lasting a fashion.  Among
the poorest and the most matter-of-fact, for whom the name of no public
man, politician or philanthropist, stands out with any especial
significance, the old Queen, and the dead King, the dethroned monarch and
the young prince live in a sort of domestic Pantheon, a recollection that
is a proud and wistful personal possession when so little remains to be
proud of or to possess.  There is no favour that I am so often asked for
among my poorer parishioners as the gift of the picture of this or that
member of the old dynasty.  'I have got all of them, only except Princess
Mary,' an old woman said to me last week, and she nearly cried with
pleasure when I brought her an old Bystander portrait that filled the gap
in her collection.  And on Queen Alexandra's day they bring out and wear
the faded wild-rose favours that they bought with their pennies in days
gone by."

"The tragedy of the enactment that is about to enforce military service
on these people is that it comes when they've no longer a country to
fight for," said Yeovil.

The young clergyman gave an exclamation of bitter impatience.

"That is the cruel mockery of the whole thing.  Every now and then in the
course of my work I have come across lads who were really drifting to the
bad through the good qualities in them.  A clean combative strain in
their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary anaemic
routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them.  What
splendid little soldiers they would have made, and how grandly the
discipline of a military training would have steadied them in after-life
when steadiness was wanted.  The only adventure that their surroundings
offered them has been the adventure of practising mildly criminal
misdeeds without getting landed in reformatories and prisons; those of
them that have not been successful in keeping clear of detection are
walking round and round prison yards, experiencing the operation of a
discipline that breaks and does not build.  They were merry-hearted boys
once, with nothing of the criminal or ne'er-do-weel in their natures, and
now--have you ever seen a prison yard, with that walk round and round and
round between grey walls under a blue sky?"

Yeovil nodded.

"It's good enough for criminals and imbeciles," said the parson, "but
think of it for those boys, who might have been marching along to the tap
of the drum, with a laugh on their lips instead of Hell in their hearts.
I have had Hell in my heart sometimes, when I have come in touch with
cases like those.  I suppose you are thinking that I am a strange sort of
parson."

"I was just defining you in my mind," said Yeovil, "as a man of God, with
an infinite tenderness for little devils."

The clergyman flushed.

"Rather a fine epitaph to have on one's tombstone," he said, "especially
if the tombstone were in some crowded city graveyard.  I suppose I am a
man of God, but I don't think I could be called a man of peace."

Looking at the strong young face, with its suggestion of a fighting prior
of bygone days more marked than ever, Yeovil mentally agreed that he
could not.

"I have learned one thing in life," continued the young man, "and that is
that peace is not for this world.  Peace is what God gives us when He
takes us into His rest.  Beat your sword into a ploughshare if you like,
but beat your enemy into smithereens first."

A long-drawn cry, repeated again and again, detached itself from the
throb and hoot and whir of the street traffic.

"Speshul!  Military service, spesh-ul!"

The young clergyman sprang from his seat and went up the staircase in a
succession of bounds, causing the domino players and novelette readers to
look up for a moment in mild astonishment.  In a few seconds he was back
again, with a copy of an afternoon paper.  The Imperial Rescript was set
forth in heavy type, in parallel columns of English and German.  As the
young man read a deep burning flush spread over his face, then ebbed away
into a chalky whiteness.  He read the announcement to the end, then
handed the paper to Yeovil, and left without a word.

Beneath the courtly politeness and benignant phraseology of the document
ran a trenchant searing irony.  The British born subjects of the Germanic
Crown, inhabiting the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, had
habituated themselves as a people to the disuse of arms, and resolutely
excluded military service and national training from their political
system and daily life.  Their judgment that they were unsuited as a race
to bear arms and conform to military discipline was not to be set aside.
Their new Overlord did not propose to do violence to their feelings and
customs by requiring from them the personal military sacrifices and
services which were rendered by his subjects German-born.  The British
subjects of the Crown were to remain a people consecrated to peaceful
pursuits, to commerce and trade and husbandry.  The defence of their
coasts and shipping and the maintenance of order and general safety would
be guaranteed by a garrison of German troops, with the co-operation of
the Imperial war fleet.  German-born subjects residing temporarily or
permanently in the British Isles would come under the same laws
respecting compulsory military service as their fellow-subjects of German
blood in the other parts of the Empire, and special enactments would be
drawn up to ensure that their interests did not suffer from a periodical
withdrawal on training or other military calls.  Necessarily a heavily
differentiated scale of war taxation would fall on British taxpayers, to
provide for the upkeep of the garrison and to equalise the services and
sacrifices rendered by the two branches of his Majesty's subjects.  As
military service was not henceforth open to any subject of British birth
no further necessity for any training or exercise of a military nature
existed, therefore all rifle clubs, drill associations, cadet corps and
similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal.  No weapons other
than guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered
and open to inspection when required, could be owned, purchased, or
carried.  The science of arms was to be eliminated altogether from the
life of a people who had shown such marked repugnance to its study and
practice.

The cold irony of the measure struck home with the greater force because
its nature was so utterly unexpected.  Public anticipation had guessed at
various forms of military service, aggressively irksome or tactfully
lightened as the case might be, in any event certain to be bitterly
unpopular, and now there had come this contemptuous boon, which had
removed, at one stroke, the bogey of compulsory military service from the
troubled imaginings of the British people, and fastened on them the cruel
distinction of being in actual fact what an enemy had called them in
splenetic scorn long years ago--a nation of shopkeepers.  Aye, something
even below that level, a race of shopkeepers who were no longer a nation.

Yeovil crumpled the paper in his hand and went out into the sunlit
street.  A sudden roll of drums and crash of brass music filled the air.
A company of Bavarian infantry went by, in all the pomp and circumstance
of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement.  The
street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman's ears with the exultant
pulse of youth and mastery set to loud Pagan music.  A group of lads from
the tea-shop clustered on the pavement and watched the troops go by,
staring at a phase of life in which they had no share.  The martial
trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and
barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long
sentry watches, the trench digging, forced marches, wounds, cold, hunger,
makeshift hospitals, and the blood-wet laurels--these were not for them.
Such things they might only guess at, or see on a cinema film, darkly;
they belonged to the civilian nation.

The function of afternoon tea was still being languidly observed in the
big drawing-room when Yeovil returned to Berkshire Street.  Cicely was
playing the part of hostess to a man of perhaps forty-one years of age,
who looked slightly older from his palpable attempts to look very much
younger.  Percival Plarsey was a plump, pale-faced, short-legged
individual, with puffy cheeks, over-prominent nose, and thin colourless
hair.  His mother, with nothing more than maternal prejudice to excuse
her, had discovered some twenty odd years ago that he was a well-favoured
young man, and had easily imbued her son with the same opinion.  The
slipping away of years and the natural transition of the unathletic boy
into the podgy unhealthy-looking man did little to weaken the tradition;
Plarsey had never been able to relinquish the idea that a youthful charm
and comeliness still centred in his person, and laboured daily at his
toilet with the devotion that a hopelessly lost cause is so often able to
inspire.  He babbled incessantly about himself and the accessory
futilities of his life in short, neat, complacent sentences, and in a
voice that Ronald Storre said reminded one of a fat bishop blessing a
butter-making competition.  While he babbled he kept his eyes fastened on
his listeners to observe the impression which his important little
announcements and pronouncements were making.  On the present occasion he
was pattering forth a detailed description of the upholstery and fittings
of his new music-room.

"All the hangings, violette de Parme, all the furniture, rosewood.  The
only ornament in the room is a replica of the Mozart statue in Vienna.
Nothing but Mozart is to be played in the room.  Absolutely, nothing but
Mozart."

"You will get rather tired of that, won't you?" said Cicely, feeling that
she was expected to comment on this tremendous announcement.

"One gets tired of everything," said Plarsey, with a fat little sigh of
resignation. "I can't tell you how tired I am of Rubenstein, and one day
I suppose I shall be tired of Mozart, and violette de Parme and rosewood.
I never thought it possible that I could ever tire of jonquils, and now I
simply won't have one in the house.  Oh, the scene the other day because
some one brought some jonquils into the house!  I'm afraid I was
dreadfully rude, but I really couldn't help it."

He could talk like this through a long summer day or a long winter
evening.

Yeovil belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms.  At the moment he would
gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had
endowed him, if he might have kicked and pommelled the abhorrent specimen
of male humanity whom he saw before him.

Instead he broke into the conversation with an inspired flash of
malicious untruthfulness.

"It is wonderful," he observed carelessly, "how popular that Viennese
statue of Mozart has become.  A friend who inspects County Council Art
Schools tells me you find a copy of it in every class-room you go into."

It was a poor substitute for physical violence, but it was all that
civilisation allowed him in the way of relieving his feelings; it had,
moreover, the effect of making Plarsey profoundly miserable.




CHAPTER XII: THE TRAVELLING COMPANIONS


The train bearing Yeovil on his visit to Torywood slid and rattled
westward through the hazy dreamland of an English summer landscape.  Seen
from the train windows the stark bare ugliness of the metalled line was
forgotten, and the eye rested only on the green solitude that unfolded
itself as the miles went slipping by.  Tall grasses and meadow-weeds
stood in deep shocks, field after field, between the leafy boundaries of
hedge or coppice, thrusting themselves higher and higher till they
touched the low sweeping branches of the trees that here and there
overshadowed them.  Broad streams, bordered with a heavy fringe of reed
and sedge, went winding away into a green distance where woodland and
meadowland seemed indefinitely prolonged; narrow streamlets, lost to view
in the growth that they fostered, disclosed their presence merely by the
water-weed that showed in a riband of rank verdure threading the mellower
green of the fields.  On the stream banks moorhens walked with jerky
confident steps, in the easy boldness of those who had a couple of other
elements at their disposal in an emergency; more timorous partridges
raced away from the apparition of the train, looking all leg and neck,
like little forest elves fleeing from human encounter.  And in the
distance, over the tree line, a heron or two flapped with slow measured
wing-beats and an air of being bent on an immeasurably longer journey
than the train that hurtled so frantically along the rails.  Now and then
the meadowland changed itself suddenly into orchard, with close-growing
trees already showing the measure of their coming harvest, and then
strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view; heavy dairy cattle,
roan and skewbald and dappled, stood near the gates, drowsily resentful
of insect stings, and bunched-up companies of ducks halted in seeming
irresolution between the charms of the horse-pond and the alluring
neighbourhood of the farm kitchen.  Away by the banks of some rushing
mill-stream, in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might be
guessed at, just a hint of red roof, grey wreathed chimney and old church
tower as seen from the windows of the passing train, and over it all
brooded a happy, settled calm, like the dreaming murmur of a trout-stream
and the far-away cawing of rooks.

It was a land where it seemed as if it must be always summer and
generally afternoon, a land where bees hummed among the wild thyme and in
the flower beds of cottage gardens, where the harvest-mice rustled amid
the corn and nettles, and the mill-race flowed cool and silent through
water-weeds and dark tunnelled sluices, and made soft droning music with
the wooden mill-wheel.  And the music carried with it the wording of old
undying rhymes, and sang of the jolly, uncaring, uncared-for miller, of
the farmer who went riding upon his grey mare, of the mouse who lived
beneath the merry mill-pin, of the sweet music on yonder green hill and
the dancers all in yellow--the songs and fancies of a lingering olden
time, when men took life as children take a long summer day, and went to
bed at last with a simple trust in something they could not have
explained.

Yeovil watched the passing landscape with the intent hungry eyes of a man
who revisits a scene that holds high place in his affections.  His
imagination raced even quicker than the train, following winding roads
and twisting valleys into unseen distances, picturing farms and hamlets,
hills and hollows, clattering inn yards and sleepy woodlands.

"A beautiful country," said his only fellow-traveller, who was also
gazing at the fleeting landscape; "surely a country worth fighting for."

He spoke in fairly correct English, but he was unmistakably a foreigner;
one could have allotted him with some certainty to the Eastern half of
Europe.

"A beautiful country, as you say," replied Yeovil; then he added the
question, "Are you German?"

"No, Hungarian," said the other; "and you, you are English?" he asked.

"I have been much in England, but I am from Russia," said Yeovil,
purposely misleading his companion on the subject of his nationality in
order to induce him to talk with greater freedom on a delicate topic.
While living among foreigners in a foreign land he had shrunk from
hearing his country's disaster discussed, or even alluded to; now he was
anxious to learn what unprejudiced foreigners thought of the catastrophe
and the causes which had led up to it.

"It is a strange spectacle, a wonder, is it not so?" resumed the other,
"a great nation such as this was, one of the greatest nations in modern
times, or of any time, carrying its flag and its language into all parts
of the world, and now, after one short campaign, it is--"

And he shrugged his shoulders many times and made clucking noises at the
roof of his voice, like a hen calling to a brood of roving chickens.

"They grew soft," he resumed; "great world-commerce brings great luxury,
and luxury brings softness.  They had everything to warn them, things
happening in their own time and before their eyes, and they would not be
warned.  They had seen, in one generation, the rise of the military and
naval power of the Japanese, a brown-skinned race living in some island
rice fields in a tropical sea, a people one thought of in connection with
paper fans and flowers and pretty tea-gardens, who suddenly marched and
sailed into the world's gaze as a Great Power; they had seen, too, the
rise of the Bulgars, a poor herd of zaptieh-ridden peasants, with a few
students scattered in exile in Bukarest and Odessa, who shot up in one
generation to be an armed and aggressive nation with history in its
hands.  The English saw these things happening around them, and with a
war-cloud growing blacker and bigger and always more threatening on their
own threshold they sat down to grow soft and peaceful.  They grew soft
and accommodating in all things in religion--"

"In religion?" said Yeovil.

"In religion, yes," said his companion emphatically; "they had come to
look on the Christ as a sort of amiable elder Brother, whose letters from
abroad were worth reading.  Then, when they had emptied all the divine
mystery and wonder out of their faith naturally they grew tired of it,
oh, but dreadfully tired of it.  I know many English of the country
parts, and always they tell me they go to church once in each week to set
the good example to the servants.  They were tired of their faith, but
they were not virile enough to become real Pagans; their dancing fauns
were good young men who tripped Morris dances and ate health foods and
believed in a sort of Socialism which made for the greatest dulness of
the greatest number.  You will find plenty of them still if you go into
what remains of social London."

Yeovil gave a grunt of acquiescence.

"They grew soft in their political ideas," continued the unsparing
critic; "for the old insular belief that all foreigners were devils and
rogues they substituted another belief, equally grounded on insular lack
of knowledge, that most foreigners were amiable, good fellows, who only
needed to be talked to and patted on the back to become your friends and
benefactors.  They began to believe that a foreign Minister would
relinquish long-cherished schemes of national policy and hostile
expansion if he came over on a holiday and was asked down to country
houses and shown the tennis court and the rock-garden and the younger
children.  Listen.  I once heard it solemnly stated at an after-dinner
debate in some literary club that a certain very prominent German
statesman had a daughter at school in England, and that future friendly
relations between the two countries were improved in prospect, if not
assured, by that circumstance.  You think I am laughing; I am recording a
fact, and the men present were politicians and statesmen as well as
literary dilettanti.  It was an insular lack of insight that worked the
mischief, or some of the mischief.  We, in Hungary, we live too much
cheek by jowl with our racial neighbours to have many illusions about
them.  Austrians, Roumanians, Serbs, Italians, Czechs, we know what they
think of us, and we know what to think of them, we know what we want in
the world, and we know what they want; that knowledge does not send us
flying at each other's throats, but it does keep us from growing soft.
Ah, the British lion was in a hurry to inaugurate the Millennium and to
lie down gracefully with the lamb.  He made two mistakes, only two, but
they were very bad ones; the Millennium hadn't arrived, and it was not a
lamb that he was lying down with."

"You do not like the English, I gather," said Yeovil, as the Hungarian
went off into a short burst of satirical laughter.

"I have always liked them," he answered, "but now I am angry with them
for being soft.  Here is my station," he added, as the train slowed down,
and he commenced to gather his belongings together.  "I am angry with
them," he continued, as a final word on the subject, "because I hate the
Germans."

He raised his hat punctiliously in a parting salute and stepped out on to
the platform.  His place was taken by a large, loose-limbed man, with
florid face and big staring eyes, and an immense array of fishing-basket,
rod, fly-cases, and so forth.  He was of the type that one could
instinctively locate as a loud-voiced, self-constituted authority on
whatever topic might happen to be discussed in the bars of small hotels.

"Are you English?" he asked, after a preliminary stare at Yeovil.

This time Yeovil did not trouble to disguise his nationality; he nodded
curtly to his questioner.

"Glad of that," said the fisherman; "I don't like travelling with
Germans."

"Unfortunately," said Yeovil, "we have to travel with them, as partners
in the same State concern, and not by any means the predominant partner
either."

"Oh, that will soon right itself," said the other with loud
assertiveness, "that will right itself damn soon."

"Nothing in politics rights itself," said Yeovil; "things have to be
righted, which is a different matter."

"What d'y'mean?" said the fisherman, who did not like to have his
assertions taken up and shaken into shape.

"We have given a clever and domineering people a chance to plant
themselves down as masters in our land; I don't imagine that they are
going to give us an easy chance to push them out.  To do that we shall
have to be a little cleverer than they are, a little harder, a little
fiercer, and a good deal more self-sacrificing than we have been in my
lifetime or in yours."

"We'll be that, right enough," said the fisherman; "we mean business this
time.  The last war wasn't a war, it was a snap.  We weren't prepared and
they were.  That won't happen again, bless you.  I know what I'm talking
about.  I go up and down the country, and I hear what people are saying."

Yeovil privately doubted if he ever heard anything but his own opinions.

"It stands to reason," continued the fisherman, "that a highly civilised
race like ours, with the record that we've had for leading the whole
world, is not going to be held under for long by a lot of damned sausage-
eating Germans.  Don't you believe it!  I know what I'm talking about.
I've travelled about the world a bit."

Yeovil shrewdly suspected that the world travels amounted to nothing more
than a trip to the United States and perhaps the Channel Islands, with,
possibly, a week or fortnight in Paris.

"It isn't the past we've got to think of, it's the future," said Yeovil.
"Other maritime Powers had pasts to look back on; Spain and Holland, for
instance.  The past didn't help them when they let their sea-sovereignty
slip from them.  That is a matter of history and not very distant history
either."

"Ah, that's where you make a mistake," said the other; "our
sea-sovereignty hasn't slipped from us, and won't do, neither.  There's
the British Empire beyond the seas; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, East
Africa."

He rolled the names round his tongue with obvious relish.

"If it was a list of first-class battleships, and armoured cruisers and
destroyers and airships that you were reeling off, there would be some
comfort and hope in the situation," said Yeovil; "the loyalty of the
colonies is a splendid thing, but it is only pathetically splendid
because it can do so little to recover for us what we've lost.  Against
the Zeppelin air fleet, and the Dreadnought sea squadrons and the new
Gelberhaus cruisers, the last word in maritime mobility, of what avail is
loyal devotion plus half-a-dozen warships, one keel to ten, scattered
over one or two ocean coasts?"

"Ah, but they'll build," said the fisherman confidently; "they'll build.
They're only waiting to enlarge their dockyard accommodation and get the
right class of artificers and engineers and workmen together.  The money
will be forthcoming somehow, and they'll start in and build."

"And do you suppose," asked Yeovil in slow bitter contempt, "that the
victorious nation is going to sit and watch and wait till the defeated
foe has created a new war fleet, big enough to drive it from the seas?  Do
you suppose it is going to watch keel added to keel, gun to gun, airship
to airship, till its preponderance has been wiped out or even threatened?
That sort of thing is done once in a generation, not twice.  Who is going
to protect Australia or New Zealand while they enlarge their dockyards
and hangars and build their dreadnoughts and their airships?"

"Here's my station and I'm not sorry," said the fisherman, gathering his
tackle together and rising to depart; "I've listened to you long enough.
You and me wouldn't agree, not if we was to talk all day.  Fact is, I'm
an out-and-out patriot and you're only a half-hearted one.  That's what
you are, half-hearted."

And with that parting shot he left the carriage and lounged heavily down
the platform, a patriot who had never handled a rifle or mounted a horse
or pulled an oar, but who had never flinched from demolishing his
country's enemies with his tongue.

"England has never had any lack of patriots of that type," thought Yeovil
sadly; "so many patriots and so little patriotism."




CHAPTER XIII: TORYWOOD


Yeovil got out of the train at a small, clean, wayside station, and
rapidly formed the conclusion that neatness, abundant leisure, and a
devotion to the cultivation of wallflowers and wyandottes were the
prevailing influences of the station-master's life.  The train slid away
into the hazy distance of trees and meadows, and left the traveller
standing in a world that seemed to be made up in equal parts of rock
garden, chicken coops, and whiskey advertisements.  The station-master,
who appeared also to act as emergency porter, took Yeovil's ticket with
the gesture of a kind-hearted person brushing away a troublesome wasp,
and returned to a study of the Poultry Chronicle, which was giving its
readers sage counsel concerning the ailments of belated July chickens.
Yeovil called to mind the station-master of a tiny railway town in
Siberia, who had held him in long and rather intelligent converse on the
poetical merits and demerits of Shelley, and he wondered what the result
would be if he were to engage the English official in a discussion on
Lermontoff--or for the matter of that, on Shelley.  The temptation to
experiment was, however, removed by the arrival of a young groom, with
brown eyes and a friendly smile, who hurried into the station and took
Yeovil once more into a world where he was of fleeting importance.

In the roadway outside was a four-wheeled dogcart with a pair of the
famous Torywood blue roans.  It was an agreeable variation in modern
locomotion to be met at a station with high-class horseflesh instead of
the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one
wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust.  After a quick spin
of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedge-girt country roads,
the roans turned in at a wide gateway, and went with dancing, rhythmic
step along the park drive.  The screen of oak-crowned upland suddenly
fell away and a grey sharp-cornered building came into view in a setting
of low growing beeches and dark pines.  Torywood was not a stately,
reposeful-looking house; it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched
watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes.  Built somewhere about the
last years of Dutch William's reign, it had been a centre, ever since,
for the political life of the countryside; a storm centre of discontent
or a rallying ground for the well affected, as the circumstances of the
day might entail.  On the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house,
with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound-pressed stag,
successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their
friends, watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon or the
shifting shadows on the sundial of political favour, tapping the
political barometer for indications of change, working out a party
campaign or arranging for the support of some national movement.  To and
fro they had gone in their respective generations, men with the passion
for statecraft and political combat strong in their veins, and many oft-
recurring names had echoed under those wakeful-looking casements, names
spoken in anger or exultation, or murmured in fear and anxiety:
Bolingbroke, Charles Edward, Walpole, the Farmer King, Bonaparte, Pitt,
Wellington, Peel, Gladstone--echo and Time might have graven those names
on the stone flags and grey walls.  And now one tired old woman walked
there, with names on her lips that she never uttered.

A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage,
leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as
though horses and coachman and groom were comrades who had been absent
for long months instead of half an hour.  An indiscriminately
affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at Yeovil's feet, sending up
little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail, while two of the
terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as though to
show the blue roans what speed really was.  The laughing-eyed young groom
disentangled the puppy from between Yeovil's legs, and then he was
ushered into the grey silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and
noise and the stir of life behind him.

"Her ladyship will see you in her writing room," he was told, and he
followed a servant along the dark passages to the well-remembered room.

There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigour and
youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallised in those
dancing, high-stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean-limbed
young men-servants, and the age-frail woman who came forward to meet him.

Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, had for more than half a century been
the ruling spirit at Torywood.  The affairs of the county had not
sufficed for her untiring activities of mind and body; in the wider field
of national and Imperial service she had worked and schemed and fought
with an energy and a far-sightedness that came probably from the blend of
caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood.  For many educated
minds the arena of politics and public life is a weariness of dust and
disgust, to others it is a fascinating study, to be watched from the
comfortable seat of a spectator.  To her it was a home.  In her town
house or down at Torywood, with her writing-pad on her knee and the
telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted
colleague or persuasive argument with a halting adherent or
half-convinced opponent, she had laboured on behalf of the poor and the
ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, and above all, for
the safety and sanity of her Fatherland.  Spadework when necessary and
leadership when called for, came alike within the scope of her
activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly
realised it, was the force of her example, a lone, indomitable fighter
calling to the half-caring and the half-discouraged, to the laggard and
the slow-moving.

And now she came across the room with "the tired step of a tired king,"
and that look which the French so expressively called l'air defait.  The
charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies, reserving its highest gift to
the end, had always seemed in her case to be lost sight of in the dignity
and interest of a great dame who was still in the full prime of her
fighting and ruling powers.  Now, in Yeovil's eyes, she had suddenly come
to be very old, stricken with the forlorn languor of one who knows that
death will be weary to wait for.  She had spared herself nothing in the
long labour, the ceaseless building, the watch and ward, and in one short
autumn week she had seen the overthrow of all that she had built, the
falling asunder of the world in which she had laboured.  Her life's end
was like a harvest home when blight and storm have laid waste the fruit
of long toil and unsparing outlay.  Victory had been her goal, the death
or victory of old heroic challenge, for she had always dreamed to die
fighting to the last; death or victory--and the gods had given her
neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that could not be measured in
words, and the weariness of a life that had outlived happiness or hope.
Such was Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, a shadow amid the young red-
blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that was too real to die, a shadow
that was stronger than the substance that surrounded it.

Yeovil talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the vast
Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes
where the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer
fields and the winter ice-mantle of Russia's northern sea.  He talked as
a man talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind, and in
the mind of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity
that is too cruel to be taken notice of.

Tea was served in a long oak-panelled gallery, where generations of
Mustelfords had romped and played as children, and remained yet in
effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits.  After tea
Yeovil was taken by his hostess to the aviaries, which constituted the
sole claim which Torywood possessed to being considered a show place.  The
third Earl of Greymarten had collected rare and interesting birds,
somewhere about the time when Gilbert White was penning the last of his
deathless letters, and his successors in the title had perpetuated the
hobby.  Little lawns and ponds and shrubberies were partitioned off for
the various ground-loving species, and higher cages with interlacing
perches and rockwork shelves accommodated the birds whose natural
expression of movement was on the wing.  Quails and francolins scurried
about under low-growing shrubs, peacock-pheasants strutted and sunned
themselves, pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles, from force
of habit now that the rivalry of the mating season was over; choughs,
ravens, and loud-throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and
bright-hued Chinese pond-herons and delicately stepping egrets waded
among the waterlilies of a marble-terraced tank.  One or two dusky shapes
seen dimly in the recesses of a large cage built round a hollow tree
would be lively owls when evening came on.

In the course of his many wanderings Yeovil had himself contributed three
or four inhabitants to this little feathered town, and he went round the
enclosures, renewing old acquaintances and examining new additions.

"The falcon cage is empty," said Lady Greymarten, pointing to a large
wired dome that towered high above the other enclosures, "I let the
lanner fly free one day.  The other birds may be reconciled to their
comfortable quarters and abundant food and absence of dangers, but I
don't think all those things could make up to a falcon for the wild range
of cliff and desert.  When one has lost one's own liberty one feels a
quicker sympathy for other caged things, I suppose."

There was silence for a moment, and then the Dowager went on, in a
wistful, passionate voice:

"I am an old woman now, Murrey, I must die in my cage.  I haven't the
strength to fight.  Age is a very real and very cruel thing, though we
may shut our eyes to it and pretend it is not there.  I thought at one
time that I should never really know what it meant, what it brought to
one.  I thought of it as a messenger that one could keep waiting out in
the yard till the very last moment.  I know now what it means. . . .  But
you, Murrey, you are young, you can fight.  Are you going to be a
fighter, or the very humble servant of the fait accompli?"

"I shall never be the servant of the fait accompli," said Yeovil.  "I
loathe it.  As to fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use,
and how to use it effectively.  One must watch and wait."

"One must not wait too long," said the old woman.  "Time is on their
side, not ours.  It is the young people we must fight for now, if they
are ever to fight for us.  A new generation will spring up, a weaker
memory of old glories will survive, the eclat of the ruling race will
capture young imaginations.  If I had your youth, Murrey, and your sex, I
would become a commercial traveller."

"A commercial traveller!" exclaimed Yeovil.

"Yes, one whose business took him up and 

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