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EORGE was fixing the beds, and making an extra-special crashing and clanging about it for Phyllis's benefit, so she would realize how irritating a job it was. I wonder (he was thinking) if any other man ever had to move furniture about so much? Phyllis has a passion for shifting beds. These springs don't fit the frames. The result is that every time any one turns over there's a loud bang, the corner of the spring comes down clank on the iron side-bar. I fixed it—not perfectly, but well enough—with a pad of newspaper and a length of clothesline, when we moved in. Good enough for the children. But of course for Ben and Ruth. . ..

These can't be the right springs for these beds. It stands to reason no manufacturer would be fool enough to send out a bed that couldn't possibly be put together. There must be some trick of arrangement. Human reason can figure out anything, if concentrated on the problem. Now, let's see. This goes here, and this here. Think of having to fiddle over these picayune trifles when

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 the whole of life and destiny is thrilling in the balance. He was lying under the bed now, among curly grey rolls of dust, holding up the spring with one hand while the other reached for the hammer.

Phyllis came in, to empty some of the bureau drawers for Ben and Ruth. She was taking away neat armfuls of the children's crisp clean garments. The whole room was full of their innocent little affairs. There, in the corner, was the collapsible doll house he had made last Christmas, and which had to go everywhere with them. Sitting against the door of the doll house was a tiny china puppet with a face of perpetual simper and that attitude of pelvic dislocation peculiar to small china dolls. Around the house was a careful pattern of shells, diligently brought from the beach. Why did all this make his heart ache? He remembered one evening when he had been working late, he passed gently by the children's door about midnight and heard a quiet little cough. Janet was awake. That small sound had suddenly, appallingly, reminded him that these poor creatures too were human. She must be lying there, thinking. What does a child think, alone at night? He went in, in the darkness, put his arms round the surprised child, and whispered encouragements to her. Jay, he said, Daddy's own smallest duckling frog,

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 Daddy loves you, don't ever forget Daddy loves you. The little figure sat up in bed, threw her arms round his neck and gripped him wildly in furious affection. "I won't forget, Daddy," cried her soft voice in the warm dark room. Though she was only eight years old her accent was strangely mature: the eternal voice of woman calling man back from agonies and follies to her savage and pitying breast.

Mother love? Pooh (he thought, in a glow of bitterness), what was mother love! A form of selfishness, most of the time. Of course they love their children, having borne them, suffered for them. Children are their biological passport, their excuse for not having minds. And if they're girls, how mothers hurry to drill and denature those bright dreaming wits. They love them chiefly because they make so pretty a vignette in the margin of their own self-portrait—like a remarque in an engraving. But for fathers to love their children—the poor accidental urchins that come between them and the work they love—that really means something!

He gave the bed frame several resounding bangs with the hammer: quite uselessly, merely to express his sense of irritation at seeing Phyllis's pretty ankles and the hem of her green dress mov-

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 ing so purposefully about the room. Then, looking out angrily from under the bed, he saw her picking up the shells. Instead of bending over from the hips, as a man would, she was crouching on her heels, deliciously folded down upon her haunches. This annoyed him. And how heartless to clear away the shells that had been laboriously arranged in a border round the doll house.

"Why don't you leave them there?" he shouted. Then he realized how impossible it would be to explain his feeling about the shells. They represented innocence, poetry, the hopeful imaginings of childhood.

Phyllis scooped them up relentlessly.

"Don't be a fool," she said. "You wanted these people here for the Picnic, didn't you? All right, we have to make the room decent."

He felt that, as usual, he had picked up the argument by the wrong end. Arguments are like cats: if you take them up by the tail they twist and scratch you.

"And another thing," she added. "You simply must mend that broken railing on the sleeping porch. If the children are going to be out there it isn't safe."

"I can't fix both these beds," he growled. "There's a bolt missing. Tell me which one Ben

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 will sleep in, I'll fix that. Ruth's won't matter, she's a skinny little thing, doesn't weigh much more than Janet."

I wouldn't mind so much fixing Ruth's bed, he was thinking; there'd be a kind of vague satisfaction in that. I rather like to think of her lying there, she's rather attractive even if she is such a numbskull. But Ben, that solid meaty citizen. . . he probably snores. . . I'll tell Ben to take this one; this is the one most likely to come down.

"How do I know which will take which?" she said. "They'll arrange that to suit themselves, no matter what we say."

He had carefully lashed the spring to the frame with a piece of rope six weeks before. But it had worked loose and now must be done all over again. The deuce of a job: the spring was precariously balanced at one end only; he was holding the loose end with one hand, trying to rewind the cord with the other. The thought of doing all this for Ben was too silly. No, let Ruth have this one and he would try to make a good job of it. Perspiration rolled from him. He supported the spring with his left elbow, so that he could take the end of the cord with his left hand while tightening it with his right. A fuzz of dust was sticking to his moist

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 cheek. This was too insanely comic: grunting under a bed on a hot electrical afternoon. He could see Phyl's feet standing motionless by the window. How lovely she was, how he wanted her, wanted to slough away all these senseless tensions and stupidities. . . . She was always right because she merely acted on instinct; he, usually wrong, because he tried to think things out and act reasonably. . . if she knew how heroic he really was, would she understand? He must get her to understand before it was too late. For this—this crisis that was hanging over them, was his deliberately desired trial of strength. And now, if they weren't careful, they would fritter away all their stamina in preliminary scuffle and nonsense; and when the moment came. . . soon, appallingly soon. . . there would be no vitality left to meet it.

He was terrified. He had planned all this, grimly; now things were moving too fast for him. A long soft murmur of thunder jarred across the sky. Would the storm pass over without breaking? No, by God, it must break, if they were ever to find peace. He must send up a kite, like old Ben Franklin (that first of modern advertising men) to bring down a sample of lightning. He must find out whether lightning was the kind of

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 thing you can live with. He must tell her why he was terrified. He must tell her quickly. These were the last moments they would have together before. . . already the colour of the light had changed. Here, on the side of the house away from the water, there was a darkening sparkle in the air.

Her feet were ominously still. She must be thinking, and this always worried him. Suppose she too became aware of this secret insolubility of life? It was only her divine certainty about little things that kept him going. What business have biological units thinking about things? Let them obey their laws and not question.

Shifting the weight of the spring to his shoulder he turned over and put his head out from under the foot of the bed.

"Phyl," he said, "why don't you go and lie down a bit, have a rest before the folks get here."

She looked down at him. Even in the warm listless dream that seemed to have mastered her, she was touched by the foolish appeal in his red, dust-streaked face. Where the light caught the turn of his jaw shone a coppery stubble.

"You need a shave," she said; and then regretted her insistent tidying instinct. She was holding three large shabby dolls, unconsciously


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 pressing them against her like an armful of real babies. One flopped forward over her arm, uttering an absurd bleating squawk. Maaa-maa!

"The children," she exclaimed breathlessly. "The storm's coming. Hurry up with those beds; get the children back from the beach."

"They're all right," he said sulkily. "Mr. Martin'll take care of 'em."

His large flushed face, mouth open, gazed up from the floor. He looked pitiably silly, like a frightened dog. He was thinking, all I want to tell her is that I love her; no matter what happens I love her. But how can I say it? If she weren't my wife I suppose it would be so much easier. Why do we always show our worst side to the people we love?

She was thinking: The absurd idiot, writhing about under that bed like a roach, telling me to go and lie down when there are a hundred things to be done, beds to be made, towels and linen got out, silver counted, instructions to Lizzie. . . . Certainly she had tried to warn him. . ..

"Damn Mr. Martin!" she cried. "Don't trust him. You fool, you fool. Can't you see he's crazy? We're all crazy. Stop sprawling there like a mud turtle, do something."

"Listen, Phyl," he said heavily. "I want to


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 was no man. Ahmille tonnerres!do you not see the cleverness of it all? Whose word have we for it that there ever was a man there? Only Ada Mason's. And we believe in Ada Mason because of Knighton's evidence that she was left behind in Paris."

"But Ruth herself told the conductor that she had left her maid behind there," demurred Van Aldin.

"Ah! I am coming to that. We have Mrs. Kettering's own evidence there, but, on the other hand, we have not really got her evidence, because. Monsieur Van Aldin, a dead woman cannot give evidence. It is not her evidence, but the evidence of the conductor of the traina very different affair altogether."

"So you think the man was lying?"

"No, no, not at all. He spoke what he thought to be the truth. But the woman who told him that she had left her maid in Paris was not Mrs. Kettering."

Van Aldin stared at him.

"Monsieur Van Aldin, Ruth Kettering was dead before the train arrived at the Gare de Lyon. It was Ada Mason, dressed in her mistress's very distinctive clothing, who purchased a dinner basket and who made that very necessary statement to the conductor."

"Impossible!"

"No, no, Monsieur Van Aldin; not impossible. Les femmes, they look so much alike nowadays that one identifies them more by their clothing than by their faces. Ada Mason was the same height as your daughter. Dressed in that very sumptuous fur coat and the little red lacquer hat jammed down over her eyes, with just a bunch of auburn curls showing over each ear, it was no wonder that the conductor was deceived. He had not


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 tell you something. Now, listen, you've got to help me."

With a pang of alarm he knew that now it was too late to go back. He had begun to speak. Now he must try to explain the pillar of smoke and fire that had moved so long before the lonely track of his mind. Greatly as he feared her rigid spirit, he must divide the weight of this heavy fragile burden, like a crystal globe that might contain either ecstasy or horror. He could not know which until it lay broken about him in shining scraps and curves. But oh, why was she so difficult to tell things to?

"Don't laugh," he mumbled. "It's terribly"

He wriggled forward earnestly. The other end of the metal spring slid from its joist, the head and foot of the bed toppled inward. With a clanking brassy crash the whole thing collapsed about him.

He lay there, covered with bed, in a furious silence which was merely the final expression of his disgust. For an instant, in the stillness following that ridiculous clamour, she thought he was hurt. She bent down, dropping the dolls, and one of these again shrilled its whining protest. His angry face reassured her, and she burst into a peal of laughter.


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 He crawled out from under the wreck. He was thinking savagely, yet with relief also, how close he had been to telling her. But that was his fate. Even noble tragedy, if it came near him, would be marred by titters. He didn't blame her for laughing. Even in an agony he could never be more than grotesque.

"I was just thinking," she said, "how awful if the bed did that when Ben's in it."

"Don't worry. It probably will."

Sultry blue air pressed close about the house, air heavy with uncertain energies. He knew now how frail are carpentered walls and doors, how brittle a box to guard and fortify weak things he held dear. A poor cardboard doll house, and his own schemes just a ring of shells about it. Here, in a home not even his own, among alien furnitures, he must meet the sorceries of life, treacheries both without and within. Strong walls, strong walls, defend this rebel heart! he whispered to himself—startled and shamed to find himself so poetical. Strange, he thought (hastily reëdifying the bed), that people spend such anguish on decisions that don't really matter. But in this house he was at a disadvantage. He had no memories in it. For Phyllis it had old associations and meanings. It went back into her childhood, into that strange


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 time when he had never known her; when she must have been so cunningly caught unawares and machined into rigidity. So even the house was against him. In that charged air, one spark surely would sheet all heaven with flame. It would be queer to split open the world's old shingled roofs and rusty-screened windows, scatter the million people with little pig-eyes of suspicion, explode love and merriment over the land. God help us, he thought, people can't even sin without finding dusty little moral justifications for it. This is what civilization has brought us to!—But what a way for a man to be thinking, with a half-written booklet on Summer Tranquillity lying on his desk.

He stepped onto the sleeping porch, where two cots had been put for Janet and Sylvia, to look at the broken railing. Projecting above the veranda, it overlooked the garden and the pale sickle of beach, distinct in glassy light. He could see Martin and the children, tiny figures frolicking on the sand. The sky was piled steeply with swollen bales of storm, scrolls of gentian-coloured vapour. But it looked now as though the gust would pass overhead. Phyllis was busy at the linen closet by the corner of the passage, getting out clean towels and napkins. He envied her the sedative trifles that keep wives sane. And after all, perhaps the


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 well-drilled discipline of human beings would get them past this eddy. People—and especially guests—know so well what can be done and what can't. They know how to "behave." The world, brave prudent old world, is so sagely adjusted to avert or ignore any casual expression of what men really feel: terror and mockery, pity and desire. Oh, surely, by careful management, they could all shuffle through a couple of days without committing themselves and then safely relapse into the customary drugged routine. Ben and Ruth, accomplished students of petty demeanour, would be a great help. Even Joyce, poor bewitched rebel with frightened eyes, even Joyce must have some powers of concealment. But he would not think of Joyce for a little while.

"I think maybe the storm'll blow over," he called. He felt he must speak to Phyllis again, to calm his own nervousness.

There was no answer. Going to the end of the passage he saw her standing at the big bay window in the spare room. She was looking down toward the beach, one hand nervously plucking at a strip of wallpaper that had come loose along the frame of the window. He crossed the room quietly and kissed the back of her neck, with a vague idea that this would help to keep her from thinking. It was


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 so enormously important that she should be calm and humorous just now.

He was prepared for silent indifference, or even an outburst of anger; but not for what happened. She turned silently and flung her arms madly about his neck. "Love me, love me, love me," she cried. "Love me, before it's too late."

He was horrified. "There, there," he said, embarrassed. "Go and rest a while, little frog."


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HE beach was a different world. Under the plum-glossed wall of storm the bay was level, dusky, and still, crumbling in low parallels of surf. The waves collapsed in short flat crashes. The children flashed in the warm dull water: they wore three tight little green bathing suits: their legs so tanned it seemed as though long brown stockings were snugly drawn above their polished knees. They tumbled with the soft clumsy grace of young animals and were happy without knowing it. Janet could swim; Sylvia still used water-wings to buoy her up; Rose preferred not to go beyond knee-depth and squatted in the curl of the small breakers. When the backwash scoured the sand from under her insteps, leaving a hard mound beneath her tickling heels, she squeaked with ecstatic fright. "The ocean's pulling me!" she cried, and squattered to safety. Sylvia, paddling splashily a little farther out, with a white rubber cap and the bulbous wings behind her shoulders, was like a lame butterfly that had dropped from the dunes above. She put a foot


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 down and couldn't touch bottom. This alarmed her and she hastily flapped herself shoreward. A wave broke on her nape, shot her sprawling into the creamy shallows. The wings spilled off, she rolled sideways and under with legs flying, her nose rubbed along soft ridges of sand. Her face, emerging, was a comic medallion of anxious surprise. Another spread of lacy green water slid round her chin. She was relieved to find herself laughing.

"A wave went right over me and I didn't mind," she exclaimed. "I'm a little laughing girl, and laughing girls are different."

It was all different. In this width of sky and sea and sand nothing was reproached. Nounou was off for the afternoon and could not forbid them to play with the stranger. Farther along the bay were other cottages, other children; but here they were alone. "Do you see those houses?" said four-year-old Rose to Martin, pointing to the bungalows that stood on a bluff, sharp upon naked air. "People live there, with beds and food."

Yet they did not even know they were alone. Merely they existed, they were. They were part of the ocean, which does not think but only fulfils its laws. Tides curve and bubble in, earth receives them, earth lets them ebb. Soft shells pulverize, hard shells polish, sand hills slither, sea-


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 weeds dry and blacken: the bay takes the sea in its great arms and is content: and inland the farmyard dogs, those spotted moralists, are scandalized by the moon. The moon—chaste herself, bright persuasion of unchastity in others. For life is all one piece, of endless pattern. No stitch in the vast fabric can be unravelled without risking the whole tapestry. It is the garment woven without seams.

Here was beauty; and they, not knowing it, were part of it unawares. Here was no thinking, merely the great rhythm of ordered accident, gulls' wings white against thunder, the electric circuits of law broken by the clear crystal of fancy. And the sea, the silly sea, meaningless, prolific, greatest of lovers, brawling over the cold pumice reefs of dead volcanoes, groping tenderly up slants of thirsty sand. The sea that breeds life and the land that breeds thought, destined lovers and enemies, made to meet and destroy, to mingle and deny, marking earth with strangeness wherever they embrace. The sea, the bitter sea, that makes man suspect he is homeless and has no roof but dreams.

Janet, who was big enough to go beyond the low surf and grapple the White Whale in his own element, liked Mr. Martin because he did not talk much and understood the game at once. When she harpooned him he rolled and thrashed in foam,


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User:SnowyCinema/Reprint editions

The following are some reprint editions that will need to be fixed according to future rulings on how to handle facsimile pages:

 * Index:The Star in the Window (Grosset & Dunlap).pdf
 * Index:Thunder on the left (IA thunderonleft0000morl).pdf

title: User:SnowyCinema/Reprint editions


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 churning with his flukes as a wounded whale should; and came floating in so they could haul him to land and cut him up for blubber. This, she explained, is the flensing stage, marking out a flat area of moist sand. Then they burned the blubber in a great bonfire, a beacon that glared tawnily in the night, to guide the relief ship to their perilous coast. Martin found it ticklish to be flensed, so they lay and made tunnels. The tide was going, the flat belt of wet beach was like a mirror, reflecting the rich sword-blade colour of the West.

But Martin was a little puzzled.

"What did you say your names are?" he asked again.

"Janet and Sylvia and Rose," they said, delighted at his stupidity. For it is always thrilling to tell people your name: it proves that you too belong to this important world.

Still, this didn't account for the other, the fourth one. He had seen her watching them from the beach, and then she had been playing with them in the tumbling water. He had thought the children just a little bit rude not to greet her when she joined them. She was not as brown as they, so perhaps she was a stranger who had newly arrived. But now, when that heavy thunder rolled like


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 wagon wheels across a dark bridge of clouds, and the other three ran off to the bath house to dress, she was sitting there beside him.

She was older, but he knew her now. Her face was wet; but of course, for she had been wriggling in the surf like a mermaid. He felt a trifle angry with her: she had got ahead of him, then. He was opening his mouth to speak when she asked him exactly the same thing:

"How did you get here?"

He must be careful: if he told her too much she might give him away. She never could keep a secret.

"I've always been here," he said. "It isn't fair for you to tag along. Go home."

Then he realized it was no use to talk to her like that. Why, she seemed older than he: she had even begun to get soft and bulgy, like ladies. But she looked so frightened, he took her hand.

"We can't both do it," he said. "They'll find out. Bunny, you're not playing fair."

"I am, I am!" she cried. "I'm not playing at all. You go away. You'll be sorry."

It was awful to see her look so anxious.

"You used to be a laughing girl," he said, "and laughing girls are different. What's happened to you anyway?"


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 She gazed at him strangely, with so much love in her face he felt she must be ill.

"This is no place for you," he said firmly. "Here among strangers. You'll be lonely. I can't look after you."

"They aren't strangers. Oh, please go back before you find out."

This was all senseless and annoying; yet he was sorry for her too. I know what's the matter with her, he thought. He accused her of it.

"No, no!" she said piteously. "No, Martin. Not that. I nearly did, but not really."

"I dare say it wasn't your fault," he said; and then, remembering a useful phrase, "You'll have to excuse me now." He saw Mr. Granville approaching down the sandy ravine. "Here's one of them coming."

"Tell me," she said quickly. "Do you like them?"

"Why, yes, they're nice. They're a bit queer. They seem to worry about things.—They like me," he added proudly.

He could see Mr. Granville waving to them to take shelter in the cabin. The bay was already scarred with the onset of the squall.

"Hurry!" Martin said. "Come on, we'll wait in the bath house until the storm's over." They


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 ran together, stumbling up the heavy sand, she lightly, not dragging behind as she usually did. When he reached the door, pulling it open against the first volley of the rain, it was not her hand that he held, but a cold smooth shell.


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NE drawback about Pullmans (Ruth was thinking) is that the separate chairs make it difficult to talk. And she was getting restless: if she didn't say something pretty soon she would begin to feel uncertain of herself. The long melancholy howl of the engine, the gritty boxed-up air (still smelling of the vaults under the Grand Central Station), the hot plushy feel of the cushion prickling under her knees, the roll and swing of the car, the dark ridges of hills, everything was depressing and tedious. Ben was still absorbed in the morning paper—already stale, she thought, for the afternoon sheets were out by now. She had skimmed the magazines, a little irritated by the pictures of interiors of wealthy country houses. She wished that such articles would also include photographs of the number of servants necessary to keep things so perfect. Of course it was easy enough for people like that to have a Home in Good Taste: they just call in a decorator and he fixes everything. But you yourself: how are you going to know what is really Good Taste?


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 Styles change so. As for the fiction, it sounded as though it was written by people with adenoids. You could hear the author biting his nails and snuffling. She had cleaned out her vanity box, thrown away some old clippings and a dusty peppermint and stubs of theatre tickets. And still Ben was lurking behind a screen of print. Certainly he was the most stay-put of men: place him anywhere and there he would remain until it was time for the next thing to happen.

She began filing briskly at her nails. Presently the newspaper rustled uneasily. She leaned forward and rasped sharply, her soft hand moving as capably as a violinist's. The little sickening buzz continued, and Ben folded the paper lengthwise and looked round it like a man at a half-open door. His brown eyes were large and clear behind tortoise-shell glasses. His eyebrows were delicately poised, ready to rise, like guests preparing to get up from their chairs. In his waistcoat pocket were two fountain pens, one black and one with silver filigree on it. He looked faintly annoyed. Whatever he looked, he always looked it faintly: dimly, sluggishly, somewhat. He was a little bit stout, a little bit bald, a little bit tired, a little bit prosperous. Littlebit had been his nickname when she fell in love with him and thought


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 previously spoken to Mrs. Kettering, you remember. True, he had seen the maid just for a moment when she handed him the tickets, but his impression had been merely that of a gaunt, black-clad female. If he had been an unusually intelligent man, he might have gone so far as to say that mistress and maid were not unlike, but it is extremely unlikely that he would even think that. And remember, Ada Mason, or Kitty Kidd, was an actress, able to change her appearance and tone of voice at a moment's notice. No, no; there was no danger of his recognizing the maid in the mistress's clothing, but there was the danger that when he came to discover the body he might realize it was not the woman he had talked to the night before. And now we see the reason for the disfigured face. The chief danger that Ada Mason ran was that Katherine Grey might visit her compartment after the train left Paris, and she provided against that difficulty by ordering a dinner basket and by locking herself in her compartment."

"But who killed Ruthand when?"

"First, bear it in mind that the crime was planned and undertaken by the two of themKnighton and Ada Mason, working together. Knighton was in Paris that day on your business. He boarded the train somewhere on its way round the ceinture. Mrs. Kettering would be surprised, but she would be quite unsuspicious. Perhaps he draws her attention to something out the window, and as she turns to look he slips the cord round her neckand the whole thing is over in a second or two. The door of the compartment is locked, and he and Ada Mason set to work. They strip off the dead woman's outer clothes. Mason and Knighton roll the


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 him such a passionate fellow. She used to like the name, but had put it out of her mind when she found it too true. Everything about him was rather, except only his eyes. They were quite. In them, sometimes, you saw a far-off defiance. Something that had always retreated, slipped behind corners, stood warily at half-open doors, but by caution and prudence, not by timidity. Something that went while the going was good.

"Ben," she said. "Did you see that girl sitting at the next table in the diner? The one in the black hat. She came in just before we left."

He thought a moment. "No," he said. "I was looking at the bill."

"She went through here a while ago. She's in the day coaches, I guess, because this is the last of the Pullmans."

No, thought Ben, this isn't the last of the Pullmans, there's another one ahead of it. I noticed it specially when we got on: it's called Godiva and reminded me to ask Ruth if she'd brought her bathing suit.—But he refrained from correcting her, waiting patiently to hear what was coming.

"Of course, I'm not sure, it's so long since I've seen her, ages and ages, but I think it was Joyce Clyde."

Ben made a polite murmur of interested surprise,


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 allowing his eyebrows to stretch themselves a little and pursing his lips gently to show attention. But the name meant nothing to him.

"I shouldn't wonder if she's on her way to the Island too. You remember, she was there one summer when we were all children. I wouldn't have known her, but I saw her picture in a magazine not long ago. She's some kind of artist, I think. She always was a queer kid."

Ben's recollection of old days on the Island was mostly limited to a strip of yellow shore. He remembered catboats and knife-edged grasses, a dock with barnacled piles, learning to make a half-hitch in wet ropes, and the freckled, gap-toothed faces of some other small boys. He remembered splintery plank walks among masses of poison ivy, the puckered white feet of a man who had been drowned, the sour stink of his aquarium of hermit crabs, dead because he forgot to change their water. He remembered an older boy who taught the small fry obscene rhymes. The cheerful disgusting hazards of being young were now safely over, thank goodness. The orderly exacting routine of business was enough to keep a man amused. Twenty-one years is a long time: yet turning the focus of memory a little more sharply he caught an unexpected glimpse of a friendly fat waitress at


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 the old wooden hotel who used to bring him bowls of clam chowder; and some of the grown-ups were still visible. But the small girls seemed to have evaporated, fogged out. Even Ruth herself. He could only recall a distant shrilling of hide-and-seek played after dusk among the sand hills, the running flutter of pink cotton dresses. Why don't little girls wear pink nowadays, he wondered.

"Did she wear a pink dress?"

"Gracious, I don't know. She had green eyes and was awfully shy. If that was her, she's turned out more attractive than I would have thought. Funny, she hasn't bobbed her hair: I thought all artists were supposed to do that."

Ben wasn't greatly interested. His private conviction was that the party would be a bore anyhow: but he couldn't very well return to the newspaper while Ruth was talking. He took off his glasses and polished them.

"What does her husband do?"

"Her husband? She hasn't got one. I suppose she's wedded to her art. I don't think she's the type that's attractive to men."

Ruth regretted this when she had said it, because obviously a little deduction on Ben's part would have led him to her real thread of thought. But he showed no sign of animation, patted her knee


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 in a soothing, proprietory way, and settled his coat round him like a dog coiling for another nap.

"We'll soon be there," he said.

"I hope so. I'd forgotten it was such a long ride. It'll be strange to see the Island again. What a queer thing, George getting hold of the old Richmond place. It's been empty a long time, the family never went back to it after the little girl (what was her name?) died."

As though plunging into a tunnel the train drummed into a squall. Grey slants of rain thrashed the windows, there were heavy explosions of sound. Ruth was usually afraid of storms, but this one seemed to make the long green car comfortable. The smooth hum of the train softened the jagged edges of thunder. She would have liked a woman there to talk to about Joyce. She had been cheerful in the certainty that her own hat was the smartest on the train until Joyce (for certainly it was she) entered the dining car. That curly black felt, with what an air she carried it. There was something gipsyish about her: something finely unconscious in her way of enjoying her lunch while every other woman was watching her. Women run in a pack and hasten to ally themselves against any other who seems to have secret funds of certainty. Those who live from hand to mouth


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 are always indignant at a private income. Ruth knew Joyce at once as one of the lonely kind. While she had been sitting there, apparently idle and half asleep, she had turned her chair to command the aisle and was waiting intently to see her come back through their car.

The delicious resentment that some women at once rouse in others! By deep specialized instinct every woman in the car looked up as the girl went by. Sitting there for several hours they had tacitly constituted themselves a microcosm of Society, and now with professional shrewdness took stock of the alien. No sculptor, no practised sensualist, could have itemized her more fiercely. She was not "pretty," but in some strangely dangerous way she was foreign to their comfortable cowardice. She was still untamed, unbroken. It was not fair, thought the plumper ladies (though unaware they were thinking it), that a woman of nubile age should still combine nymphlike grace with the gay insouciance of a boy. She was carrying her hat in her hand, and the dark twist of her uncropped hair annoyed them as much as, not long before, it would have annoyed them to see it short. They marked the flexile straightness of her figure, the hang and stuff of the skirt, the bend of foot and ankle; exactly appraised, by the small visible slope


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 of stocking, the upper curves unseen. They noted the unbroken fall of her dark suit from armpit to hem as she was swung sideways by a swerve of the train and threw up one elbow to keep her balance. The ruddy young brakeman, meeting her just then, steadied her politely with his hand. She smiled as frankly as a lad. She didn't even seem humiliated, Ruth thought, at having to pass through all these Pullmans on her way to the day coaches.

But there was something deeper than that—something she couldn't profitably discuss with Ben. With the clairvoyance of woman she saw, and resented, a creature somehow more detached and more determined than herself. In a vague way, for which no words were possible, she recognized a spirit not more happy but more finely unhappy; a spirit concerned with those impassioned curiosities of life which Ruth knew existed and yet knew not how to approach. She felt the shamed envy and anger that some bitter listener in the audience always feels toward the performer. There was something in that dark childish face and alert reckless figure that made Ruth feel soft and frilly and powdered with sugar. The girl was possessed by some essence, had some fatal current passing through her—something which, if generally admitted, would demand extensive revision of the


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 comfortable world. That was it, perhaps: she looked as though she knew that things most women had agreed to regard as important, didn't really matter. The Pullman microcosm resented this, as an anthology of prose would resent a poem that got into it by mistake. The only satisfaction it could have, and the explanation of its pitiless appraisal, was the knowledge that this poor creature too was mocked and fettered with a body, subject also to the dear horrors of flesh.

With a sense of weariness and self-pity Ruth turned to the window and saw, far off, the hard blue line of sea. They were emerging from the storm, the train hummed and rocketed over marshes and beside reedy lagoons still prickled by the rain. On that horizon lay the memory of childhood to which she was now returning. The chief satisfaction of revisiting juvenile surroundings is to feel superior to that pitiable era: to appear, before one's old companions, more prosperous, circumstantial, handsome, and enviable than they might have expected. But now even her gay little woollen sports hat seemed to have lost its assurance. What right had a mere illustrator (and riding in a day coach) with something proud and eager in her face, to start all these troublesome thoughts? She remembered that even as a child


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 Joyce never really joined in their games but watched apart with a shy unwillingness: a shyness which, if rubbed too hard, could turn into bewildered rebellion. Ruth was always so intensely conscious of the existence of other people that a merely random speculation as to what her friends were doing could prevent her all day long from concentrating on her own affairs. Others were more real to her than herself. Now she was painfully haunted by that look of conviction and fulfilment on the girl's face. Joyce looked unhappy (she consoled herself a little with that); but it was a thrilling kind of unhappiness: an unhappiness scarcely to be distinguished from ecstasy.

She pondered about this, wondering if she had ever looked like that? One of her secret anxieties was that she herself was not passionate. Was that, she sometimes wondered, why she and Ben had never had children? In her absorption she practised an expression on her face. . . "rapt" was the word that occurred to her to describe it. Ben, reappearing from behind the paper, was alarmed by her appearance and offered her a soda-mint tablet from the little bottle in his waistcoat pocket.

The dense air of the car began to be alive. After the barrens of pinewood and long upgrades over


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 stony pasture, now the train careered gloriously in the salty northern air, along beaches crusted with stale foam. It cried aloud, its savage despairing chord: as though the fierce engine knew that after all its furious burning labours, the flashing uproar of its toil, its human employers would descend at their destinations unfreed, unaltered, facing there as elsewhere the clumsy comedies of life. Angrily it exulted along the bright dwindle of rails which spread wide under the great wheels and narrowed again before and behind. The telegraph poles came racing toward it, leaping up like tall threatening men; one by one they were struck down and fled away. With swift elbowing pistons and jets of silver steam the engine roared, glorious in its task; glorious in its blind fidelity and passion, caring nothing that all must be retraced in the opposite direction to-morrow.

Joyce was standing in the vestibule of Godiva, smoking a cigarette. She had been there a great part of the journey; fast trains always made her mind too busy for sitting still. She had pacified the at first disapproving young brakeman by getting out her sketchbook and making a quick cartoon of him.

Not for many weeks had she been so unconsideringly


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 happy. She never thought of trains as hurrying toward something but rather fleeing wildly from. Those great eloquent machines (she hated to have to board a train without seeing the engine first) crouched ready for flight like huge beasts breathing panic. They were symbols of the universal terror; she trembled with excitement to feel the thrill of escape—escape from anything. Escape, for the moment, from Time and Space. She wondered how any one could ever sleep or be bored in a train. You'd think their faces would be transfigured when they got out. She hummed to herself as she stood alone in the vestibule. Life seemed to be beginning all over again: her mind was freshly sensitized to the oddity of human faces, to the colour and vitality of the country, the strong swelling curves of the hills. I am flying, flying, she chanted; I am flying from a dream. I am a little mad. My mind is fuller than it'll hold: all sorts of thoughts are slopping over the brim, getting lost because there isn't room for them. I must let them flow faster so I can be aware of them all. What happens to the thoughts that get spilt before you can quite seize them? I must ask George. . . . I wonder which George it will be?

Once she had startled him by giving him a book


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 she found in a second-hand store, The Four Georges. For it amused her to insist that there were four of him: George the Husband, George the Father, George the Publicity Man, and then George the Fourth—her George, the troubled and groping dreamer, framed in an open window. . ..

Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He's getting up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor, looking for his number.

It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on the glass panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had mistaken her for someone he knew.

"Look here," he said, "I want to show you something."


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 She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned there in his shirt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as easily as though they were old friends.

"See those tall lance-headed openings in the piers of the Bridge? Did you ever notice they look just like great cathedral windows? And that pearl-blue light hanging in them, better than any stained glass."

She was too surprised, too anxious about showing him her drawings, to do more than murmur assent.

"I can tell you about it," he said, "because I don't know you. It isn't safe to tell people you know about beautiful things. Those are the windows of my private cathedral."

How often she had lived again that first encounter. The ring of feet along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite


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 sane? God pity the man (George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart.

I have a cathedral too, I have a cathedral too, she was repeating to herself, but too excited to say it. With bungling fingers she untied the portfolio, rummaged through the drawings, found the one of an aisle of trees in Central Park where the wintry branches lace themselves into an oriel.

He went through all the pictures. He only spoke twice.

"Who did these? You?" and then presently, "Here, this isn't fair. You've been trespassing in my city."

Then suddenly he paused, flushed, and became embarrassed. He became—as she would have said afterward—George the Third. He spoke of the Elevated Railroad's limited appropriation for promotion, of the peculiar problems of transportation publicity, asked what was her usual price for art work, took her name and address. . . . Perhaps George the Fourth would have died then and there, perished of cholera infantum at the age of half an hour, never been heard of again except on a tablet in the imaginary cathedral on Brooklyn Bridge. . . but as she left the office she shook so with purely nervous elation she had to stop by the brass-rimmed letter chute in


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 body up in a rug and put it on the seat in the adjoining compartment amongst the bags and suitcases. Knighton drops off the train, taking the jewel-case containing the rubies with him. Since the crime is not supposed to have been committed until nearly twelve hours later he is perfectly safe, and his evidence and the supposed Mrs. Ketterings' words to the conductor will provide a perfect alibi for his accomplice.

"At the Gare de Lyon Ada Mason gets a dinner basket, and shutting herself into the toilet compartment she quickly changes into her mistress's clothes, adjusts two false bunches of auburn curls, and generally makes up to resemble her as closely as possible. When the conductor comes to make up the bed, she tells him the prepared story about having left her maid behind in Pans; and whilst he is making up the berth, she stands looking out of the window, so that her back is towards the corridor and people passing along there. That was a wise precaution, because, as we know, Miss Grey was one of those passing, and she among others, was willing to swear that Mrs. Kettering was still alive at that hour."

"Go on," said Van Aldin.

"Before getting to Lyons, Ada Mason arranged her mistress's body in the bunk, folded up the dead woman's clothes neatly on the end of it, and herself changed into a man's clothes and prepared to leave the train. When Derek Kettering entered his wife's compartment, and, as he thought, saw her asleep in her berth, the scene had been set, and Ada Mason was hidden in the next compartment waiting for the moment to leave the train unobserved. As soon as the conductor had swung himself down on to the platform at Lyons, she follows, slouch


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 the hall. She was wishing she had the courage to go back and ask him how soon the check could come through (Will he mail it here? she thought. Oh, blessed chute!). . . and then he came hurrying round the corner after her.

"Look here," he said, with pink-browed uncertainty, "I can't let you go away like this. The family's off in the country. I'm devilish lonely. Will you have dinner with me and we can talk about New York?"

She was too amused and exultant to answer promptly. But George the Fourth, looking anxiously from his bassinette, need not have been so afraid she was going to refuse. Do artists who have just made their first real sale decline a square meal?

"We'll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate," he pleaded. "There's a bit where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on the front platform it's corking. And I know a place where we can get a bottle of asti spumante. . . ."

The lighted candles of the Italian basement where they dined. At first his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free. His


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 mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.

"You know," he said, "I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing. How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?"

Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people's chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe's beach.

There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday.

"The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone" (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of


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 saying stone), "the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren't the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit."

The figure of speech wasn't quite limpid. There was perhaps a little asti spumante in it, and a few gassy bubbles of exaggeration. But she understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young he seemed.

He paused a while, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift of smoke.

"You must meet Phyllis," he said.

Then he had found, later, that it wasn't necessary, for she had known Phyllis as a child. How small the world is, he said sadly. "Phyllis and I were small, too," she replied.

She wondered if there were four Phyllises also?

"Ten minutes to Dark Harbour," said Godiva's porter, coming into the vestibule with his whisk brush. She hardly noticed him dusting her, she was thinking of George the Fourth, the perplexing phantom she had accidentally startled into life. She felt for him a strange, almost maternal ten-


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 derness; an amusement at some of his scruples, an admiration at the natural grace of his mind when he allowed himself to be imaginative. But behind these, a kind of fear: for George the Fourth had grown gigantic in her dreams; sometimes, in panic, she realized how much she thought about him. He was so completely hers because he was hidden in the securest of hiding places—inside a person who belonged to someone else. So she couldn't resist the invitation to go down to the Island, to renew memories of childhood. . . and the most interesting of those ghostly children, she thought, would be George the Fourth, only twelve months old. She had had to remind herself, sometimes, that the first three Georges did belong to others. . . but if you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so. For the amazement had been mutual. She had awakened George the Fourth, but he had awakened someone too. . . . And frightened by these thoughts (it had been her lonely pride to stand so securely on her own feet) she was flying from the dream of George to George himself—and Phyllis.

Over the wide sea meadows the train sounded its deep bluster of warning: a voice of triumph, a voice of pain, announcing reunions that can-


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 not unite, separations that cannot divide. And George Granville—all four of him, at that moment—driving over the long trestle to the mainland, heard it from afar, and in sheer bravado echoed the cry with his horn.


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N THE bathtub Phyllis wondered, for the first time in her life, whether she was "literary." She sat soaping her knees and revelling in coolness that came about her waist in a perfection of liquid embrace. She found herself—perhaps because her eye had fallen on the volume in the den, while she and George were bickering—thinking about Shakespeare. Now, in an intimate understanding that many an erudite scholar has never attained, she perceived what the man with a beard was driving at. The plays, which she had always politely respected as well-bred women do respect serious institutions, were something more than gusts of fantastic tinsel interspersed with foul jokes—jokes she knew were foul without understanding them. They were parables of the High Cost of Living—the cost to brain and heart and spirit of this wildly embarrassing barter called life. The tormented obstreperous behaviour of his people was genuine, after all: they were creatures in a dream, like herself; a dream more true than reality. She could have walked on in any


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 of the plays and taken a part without sense of incongruity. She felt as if she were a phantom in one of the pieces: a creature in the mind of some unguessable dramatist who had mysteriously decided to make a change in the plot. She thought how she and her friends had sometimes sat through Shakespeare matinées, subconsciously comforting themselves with the notion that real people don't behave that way.

Why, Bill, you poor old devil (she said to him), how you must have suffered to be able to write like that. It made her feel quite tranquil by comparison. But of course her own particular absurdities had special kinks in them that were unique: even He would have been surprised. But he would have understood.

A soft flow of air had begun to move after the storm. The big maple tree, just outside the bathroom window, was gold-plated in the dropping sun. The window was above the bath and the ripple of those gilded leaves reflected a gentle shimmer into the porcelain tub. Her shiny knees were glossed with pale green light. Shakespeare would have liked that. She fished for the soap, which slipped round behind her like a young thought.

I suppose that as long as I was 99 and $44⁄100$ pure


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 I never could appreciate him. But I don't know whether I altogether enjoy people who understand so well. That's the trouble about George: he's getting weirdly acute, poor soul. Now, Mr. Martin: he looks divinely sympathetic, but I don't think he quite. . . . People wonder why one always confides in those who don't understand. But of course! To confide in people who do is too terrible. Giving yourself away—yes, exactly: you no longer are keeper of your own gruesome self. That's why the Catholic notion is so sound: confession to God is nothing at all, you know He doesn't care. But to confess to a priest. . . golly, that must take courage.

She lay down for one last lustral wallow, closing her eyes with a calm sensation of new dignity and refreshment. The cool water held her in peaceful lightness, lifting away whatever was agitated and strange. For a moment body and spirit were harmoniously one, floating in a pure eddy of Time. I feel like a nun, she thought. She rose, trickling, threw the big towel round her shoulders, and studied herself in the long mirror. Really, I'm not much more than a child, she mused happily, admiring the slender, short-haired figure in the glass. Or perhaps I feel like a harlot. . . a courtesan, nicer-sounding word. Discarding the


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 towel she struck a humorous parody of the Venus Aphrodite attitude, and then felt a little shocked. She could feel her cheeks warming. She remembered George's coarse remark when they saw the statue. "It's no use," he said. "Two hands can't do it. Any one as timid as that needs three." She sang a little refrain, trying different tunes for it. She couldn't remember whether she had heard it, or just made it up:

The soft flutter of maple leaves outside the window was like a soothing whisper. From the other side of the house she could hear the click of croquet mallets and balls. Time for the children to have their supper, or they won't be finished before the others get here. Thank goodness it was cooler, Lizzie wouldn't be so harassed. Wrapping her silk kimono round her, she looked out of the window. Lizzie's flag was still flying. With a rough delicacy of her own, the cook did not like to run out her private washing on the family line, so she had strung a cord from the kitchen door to a branch of the maple tree. There, floating like a hoist of signal buntings, were Lizzie's personalia: all the more conspicuous for her mis-


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 taken modesty. They were indeed (it was George who had said it) like a string of code flags: a blue apron, a yellow shirt, a pair of appalling red breeches. George always wanted to know to whom Lizzie might be signalling with these homely pennants. They are a kind of signal, Phyllis thought. A signal that life goes on, notifying any other household within eyeshot that here too the humble routine of kitchen and washtub and ironing board, of roof and meat and sleep, triumphs in the end over the wildest poet's dream. Shakespeare would have relished them, and been pleased to see these bright ensigns hoisted so frankly in the yellow air.

Dressed in a gauzy drift of white and silver, she paused at the cushioned bay windows by the head of the stair. Her body enjoyed that mixed feeling of snug enclosure and airy freedom which is the triumph of feminine costume. Even her inward self shared something of this sensation: within the softly sparkling raiment of thought she was aware of her compact kernel of identity—tranquil for the moment, but privately apprehensive and alert. On the oval grass plot Martin was playing croquet with the children. Janet, nicely adjusting two tangent balls with a bare brown foot, gave them a well-aimed swipe. Phyllis heard the


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 sharp wooden impact and Martin's cry of good-humoured dismay as his globe went spinning across the turf, leaving a darker stripe on the wet lawn. It bounded over the gravel and into the bushes, right by the corner where she had first seen him. She watched him chase it, lay it on the edge of the turf, and drive it back. How graceful he was! He raised his head with a little unconscious lift of satisfaction as he watched the ball roll where he wanted it to lie.

A film seemed to have been skimmed from her eyes. Perhaps it was that level stream of evening light: the figures moved in a godlike element of lustre: every motion was perfect, expressed the loveliness for which life was intended, was unconscious and exact as the movements of animals. They were immersed in their game as though there were no past, no future: she felt she could watch them for ever. Martin's face, gravely intent, bent over his ball. She saw the straight slope of his back against the screen of shrubs. The mallet clicked, there was a sharp tinkle as the ball went through the middle hoop, touching the little bell that hung there. How can any one look so charming and yet be so hard to talk to?

Through the scooped hollow of the dunes, catching tawny sparks from the sand, violet dazzles from


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 the sea, the cleansed radiance of sunset came pouring in. The children's bare legs splashed in brightness as though they were paddling; honey-coloured light parted and closed again about their ankles, the wet shadows dripped and trailed under their feet. The house, growing dusky, was a dyke stemmed in the onset of that pure flood. It caught and held as much darkness as it could; the rest went whirling out. As if in answer to the little croquet bell, the old clock in the hall whirred and jangled six hoarse clanking strokes. They eddied a moment and then were whiffed away by the strong, impalpable current that seemed to be sweeping through. You could tell, by the dull sound, that the gong was rusty. No wonder, a house by the seashore, empty so long.

After the cough of the clock silence came up the shaft of the stairway. Not themselves alone, but the house too, had its part in everything. She could feel its whole fabric attentive and watchful, and wondered how she could have been heedless of this before. A house of ugly pattern, with yellow wainscots and fretsawed mantels and panes of gaudy glass: but she guessed now, what one can only learn under strange roofs, how precious houses are. And how wary they have to be, fortresses


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 against fierce powers, sunshine, darkness, gale. Life has flowed through them: clocks have chimed, logs crumbled, stairs creaked under happy feet. These whispers are all they have to treasure: if you leave them alone too long they get morbid, full of sullen fancies. She remembered herself, visiting that house as a child, once seated at this same window, watching others play croquet. . . was it memory, or only the trick of the mind that splits the passing instant and makes one live it twice?

"Come, children!" she called from the window. "Time for your supper."

She went slowly down the stairs. Be calm, be calm, she said to herself; this too will pass; this isn't Shakespeare but only the children's supper time. But the flow of her blood warmed and quickened as water grows hot while you wait with your hand under the bathroom faucet. On the landing, where a shot of sunlight came arrowing through from the sitting-room window, she waited to adjust a slipper. She could hear them on the gravel outside. If he came in now he would find her just so, gilded and silvered like a Christmas card. But their voices remained on the veranda where the children's meal was laid. She could not


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 afford to wait long. Now, now, were a few precious moments. This was a dream: and dreams must be recorded at once or they vanish for ever.

She heard one of them sneeze. It was Janet: she knew all their sneezes and coughs by ear. Yes, they probably have caught cold, bathing in that storm. And they have to sleep outdoors to-night, too: on the porch, because of this infernal Picnic. It's much colder; the thermometer must have dropped twenty degrees. She hurried to get the sweaters from the cupboard under the stairs.

They were sitting at the veranda table, with milk and bread and jam. Mr. Martin was in the fourth chair. He looked as though he too was ready for supper.

"Well, chickabiddies, did you have a good bathe? I hope you didn't catch cold. Here, put on your sweaters."

They looked up at her gaily. Their upper lips were wet and whitish.

"How pretty you look!" exclaimed Janet.

She had meant to toss him a brief, clear, friendly little gaze; an orderly hostess-to-pleasant-guest regard; but this from Janet startled her. She could see that he was holding her in his eye, meditating the accuracy of Janet's comment. She did not feel ready to face him.


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 ing along as though just taking a breath of air. At a moment when she is unobserved, she hurriedly crosses to the other platform, and takes the first train back to Paris and the Ritz Hotel. Her name has been registered there as taking a room the night before by one of Knighton's female accomplices. She has nothing to do but wait there placidly for your arrival. The jewels are not, and never have been, in her possession. No suspicion attaches to him, and, as your secretary, he brings them to Nice without the least fear of discovery. Their delivery there to Monsieur Papopolous is already arranged for and they are entrusted to Mason at the last moment to hand over to the Greek. Altogether a very neatly planned coup, as one would expect from a master of the game such as the Marquis."

"And you honestly mean that Richard Knighton is a well-known criminal, who has been at this business for years?"

Poirot nodded.

"One of the chief assets of the gentleman called the Marquis was his plausible, ingratiating manner. You fell a victim to his charm, Monsieur Van Aldin, when you engaged him as a secretary on such a slight acquaintanceship."

"I could have sworn that he never angled for the post," cried the millionaire.

"It was very astutely doneso astutely done that it deceived a man whose knowledge of other men is as great as yours is."

"I looked up his antecedents too. The fellow's record was excellent."

"Yes, yes; that was part of the game. As Richard


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 "Thank you," she said lightly. And added, "Wipe your mouths after drinking."

"He says that's a milk moustache," cried Rose, gesturing to the visitor. "It makes you healthy."

Phyllis made a clucking reproach with her tongue.

"You mustn't point. It's not polite to say he. Say 'Mr. Martin.' Jay dear, after supper run and put away the mallets. I've told you, I don't know how often, not to leave them lying on the lawn. . . . Oh, not you, Mr. Martin. Janet'll do it after her supper."

But he was up already and gone to get them. I suppose this perpetual correcting sounds silly to him, she thought. But how can I help it? George never disciplines them.

"It makes him hungry to watch us eat," said Sylvia. "He wants some supper."

"He's joking with you. We'll have ours by and by."

She followed him into the garden. As she put her crisp silver slipper on the tread of the veranda steps she saw how the foot widened slightly to carry her weight. How terribly I'm noticing things. Something flickered at the corner of her eye: she suspected it was Lizzie, at the pantry window, trying to attract her attention. A throng


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 of trifles jostled at the door of her mind, tapping for admission. Probably the ice has given out, after such heat. Well, then, they'll have to do without cocktails. I can fix the sandwiches to-night when everyone's in bed. If it turns chilly there won't be enough blankets. Nounou won't be back until late, I must get the children started to bed before. . . . I won't think of these things.

He had put away the croquet implements.

"Thank you. We've just time for a little stroll before the others get here.—I hope you'll like Mr. and Mrs. Brook. They're extremely nice, really, but a bit heavy."

"Perhaps they eat too much." He said it with the air of one courteously offering a helpful suggestion.

She had wanted, wanted so to be alone with him: she had a desperate feeling that there were urgent things to be said, and now she could utter nothing. Her mind ran zigzagging beside her, like a questing dog, while she tried to steer their talk into some channel of reality. Her thoughts kept crowding massively under her uneasy words, pushing them out before they were ready, cutting into her speech like italics in a page of swarthy Roman type.


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 "We all eat too much in hot weather, I dare say. Oh, if I could only write him a letter I could make him understand. He's so sophisticated, I suppose the quaint things he says are his way of making fun of me. Why did I suggest our walking like this? You can't see a person's face when you're walking side by side. And if we go round the path again, Lizzie will get me from the pantry. Let's sit down on the bench."

"It's wet, it'll spoil your pretty skirt."

Skirt! . . . What a word for this mist of silvery tissue she had put on specially for him. . ..

"So it is. Well, let's see what the storm has done to the roses."

The little walk under the trellis was flaked with wet petals.

"Poor darlings, there's not much left of them now. If Shakespeare was here I should feel the same way. Speechless. Why, he's like a god: lovely to think about, impossible to talk to. He doesn't give anything, just absorbs you: you feel like a drop of ink on a blotter. I have a horrid suspicion that the ice has given out, you mustn't mind if your cocktail is warm."

He kept looking at her in brief glances. Each time she met them it was like getting a letter in


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 some familiar handwriting but stamped with a strange postmark.

"Are they better cold?"

''I give up, I give up. It's no use. I can't even think. There's some sort of veil, mist, between us. He is a kind of god. He's brightness, beauty. Every movement he makes is a revelation and a question. How can I speak to him when all I want is to love him. There's nothing earthy, nothing gross about this. It's lovelier than anything I ever dreamed of. And if I tried to tell any one it would sound like tawdry farce. . . .''

Dimly she divined what lay between them, what always lies between men and gods, making them such embarrassed companions—the whole of life, the actual functions of living; the sense of absurdity (enemy of all tender beauty); trained necessities for silence, that darken the intuitions of the soul.

''It's as impossible as—as the New Testament. I feel like Christmas Eve: there's a new Me being born. You can't have a Nativity without pangs. And not even any one to bring me frankincense and myrrh. . . .''

She stopped, picked one of the late rosebuds, and put it in his lapel. She checked a frightened impulse to tell him that she named the baby Rose


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 because it was her favourite flower and she looked so like a rosebud when she was born. This was courage, because to say it would have carried on the doomed conversation one paragraph farther in safety. To any one else she would have said it. But now she spoke shakenly, from far within.

"You're not easy to talk to—Martin."

His face changed, he looked less anxious. He took her hand. She found herself not surprised: it seemed entirely natural. She felt his fingers lace into hers. Just as Janet does, she thought.

"I get frightened when people talk to me," he said.

She looked at him, worshipping. The bad spell was broken. Instantly she felt they could communicate. He was frightened too—the precious! Over his shoulder she caught sight of the little old-fashioned weather vane on the stable, a gilded galloping horse with flowing tail. Always racing in blue emptiness and never getting anywhere. Like Time itself; like this marvellous instant, so agonizingly reached, that could never come again. No one who knew her in her daily rote would quite have recognized her then as she looked into his eyes. She was completely herself, born again in innocence, in the instinctive yearning for what she knew was good. The unknown ripeness of


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 woman woke for an instant from its long drug of peevish days, small decisions, goaded nothings. Humbled, purified, bewildered, she saw the dark face of Love, the god too errant for heaven and who suffers on earth like a man.

"Martin, I love you."

"I love you too," he said politely.

Beyond the stable she heard the sound of the car.


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T WAS just adorable of you to come."

Ruth was getting out of the car. They kissed.

"Why, Phyllis! How sweet you look! Gracious: I thought this was a Picnic, and here you are in a dance frock. For Heaven's sake lead me to hot water. Those awful Pullmans; I'm simply speckled with cinders. I feel gritty all over."

That, of course, must be Miss Clyde, on the front seat.

"How do you do! After all these years! I don't suppose we'd have known each other. But we ought to, George admires your work so much."

They shook hands. It was a hard, capable little hand, calloused like a boy's. Phyllis knew now that she remembered the grey-green eyes: agates, gold-flecked, with light behind them. Eyes softly shadowed underneath, as though from too much eagerness to understand; eyes dipped in darkness. The small shy child of long ago, who stood apart from games. How many strange moments had both been through since last they met?


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 George was getting out the suitcases. He was afraid to watch Phyllis and Joyce greet. When a finely adjusted balance hovers in equilibrium you don't breathe on the scales.

"We were on the same train," cried Ruth, "and never recognized each other."

Ben felt the twinge of anxiety common to the husband who hears his wife tell an unnecessary fib. Ruth had said this once before already, in the car, so perhaps it was important. Her allusion to Pullmans, also, was based (he suspected) on the erroneous notion that Miss Clyde had ridden in a day coach. But he liked to back Ruth up, if he knew what she was heading for.

"I guess we've all changed," he said mildly. "The old house hasn't, it looks just the same."

"Miss Clyde's brought her paint box," George said. "She's going to do a picture."

"Oh, yes, and we have another—why, that's fine, Miss Clyde—we have another artist here too, Mr. Martin. You must all come in and meet him."

She stood holding the screen door aside, welcoming them in. George, coming last, saw how her cheerful smile faded to expressionless blank when the guests had passed. She had relapsed into automatic Hostess. How lonely she must be to look like that. I wish it was over, he thought.


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 His mind felt like a spider that has caught several large flies at once: the delicate web was in danger of breaking.

They entered the hall.

"It isn't changed a bit!" Ruth said. "Exactly as I remember it—except it seems smaller. That old table, for instance, that used to be just enormous. Well, hot water first. I can sentimentalize much better when I'm clean."

George was thinking: Ruth's probably the kind of woman who always twists the toothpaste tube crooked, but her babble will help us around corners.

"I hope Miss Clyde won't mind being in the little sitting room downstairs: you see we're just camping out here, you must all make yourselves at home."

Joyce tried to frame some appropriate reply to Phyllis's clear, faintly hostile voice. She was in the tranced uneasiness of revisit. Coming from the station she had been trying to realize the Island again: her mind was startled by the permanence of the physical world. Things she had not thought of for so long—things that she had apparently been carrying, unawares, in memory—were still there, unaltered, reproaching her own instability. The planks of the station platform, the old scow


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 rotting in the mud, the road of crushed oyster shells, the same vacancy of sand and sky.

In the car she and George were both achingly mute. There seemed to be a sheet of glass between them. The Brooks emitted cheerful chatter from the back seat, George replied with bustling geniality, his only mask. How wonderful if they could just have made this ride in silence; she had a feeling that all sorts of lovely meanings were escaping her. There was the notch of blue light where the road slipped over a prickling horizon of pines. How just right were the slopes of the puppy-coloured sand hills, the tasselled trees against the pure lazy air, the coloured veining of the fields. Now, now; here, here; I'm here and now, she had to remind herself. It's God's world, whatever that can mean. Golly, you must be careful how you make fun of religion: it's a form of art. She imagined a painting of that aisle of sandy road, climbing through the tall resiny grove. Religion would be a good name for it.—George had never seemed so far away as now when she sat beside him. Would it always be like that? Oh, teach yourself not to love things, she thought. Be indifferent. It's love that causes suffering, it's tenderness that weighs heavy on the heart. How ridiculous to say that God loves the world.


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 He doesn't give a damn about it, really. That's why He's so cheerful. . . such a competent artist. His hand doesn't shake. Still, I don't think I want to meet Him. It's a mistake to meet artists you admire; they're always disappointing.

"I shouldn't have come here," she said. "I love it too much. Those trees. They look so surprised. I have a guilty passion for pine trees."

Driving the faithful car had strengthened George. Even the paltriest has an encouraged sense of competence with that steady tattoo underneath his feet. The artist that lay printed like a fossil in George's close-packed heart—the artist that only Joyce had ever relished—always responded to the drum of the engine. He adored the car; when he drove alone to the Island (sending the family by train) he sang to her most of the way. This was his guilty passion. Now it was the car's rhyming vitality that came to his rescue. He broke the glass. He cut himself, but he got through.

"Any kind of love is too much," he said.

Then he was grieved to find himself uttering such a cheap oracle; but it comforted Joyce because she saw it was a symptom. It showed that he was trying to tell the truth. She did not dare


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 look at him: she was too conscious of the others behind them, who seemed as massively attentive as an audience in a theatre. Then in a wave of annoyance, Surely I have a right to look where I want? She did so. She could see the confidential tilt of his eyebrow so plainly, she knew he was hers for the taking. Nothing but themselves could stand between them.

"How queer: that's just what I was thinking," she told the eyebrow.

"Oh, do you believe in telepathy?" chirped Ruth. "Ben sometimes knows exactly what I'm thinking without my saying a word."

It can't happen often, George thought.

"What were you laughing at?" he found time to ask her, as the others were descending from the car.

"I was just thinking, there's not much danger of my meeting God, because I'm not pure in heart."

"Oh, I shall be perfectly comfortable anywhere," she said.

The single swathe of sunshine carved the hall, dividing it into two dusks as the word Now divides one's mind. All, all unchanged: the series of hemispherical bronze gongs at the dining-room


text:
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 Knighton his life was quite free from reproach. He was well born, well connected, did honourable service in the War, and seemed altogether above suspicion; but when I came to glean information about the mysterious Marquis, I found many points of similarity. Knighton spoke French like a Frenchman, he had been in America, France, and England at much the same time as the Marquis was operating. The Marquis was last heard of as engineering various jewel robberies in Switzerland, and it was in Switzerland that you had come across Major Knighton; and it was at precisely that time that the first rumours were going round of your being in treaty for the famous rubies."

"But why murder?" murmured Van Aldin brokenly.

"Surely a clever thief could have stolen the jewels without running his head into a noose."

Poirot shook his head. "This is not the first murder that lies to the Marquis's charge. He is a killer by instinct; he believes, too, in leaving no evidence behind him. Dead men and women tell no tales.

"The Marquis had an intense passion for famous and historical jewels. He laid his plans far beforehand by installing himself as your secretary and getting his accomplice to obtain the situation of maid with your daughter, for whom he guessed the jewels were destined. And, though this was his matured and carefully thought-out plan, he did not scruple to attempt a shortcut by hiring a couple of Apaches to waylay you in Paris on the night you bought the jewels. That plan failed, which hardly surprised him, I think. This plan was, so he thought, completely safe. No possible suspicion could attach to Richard Knighton. But like all


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 door, the wakeful asthma of the tall clock, the wide banistered stairway with its air of waiting to creak. The soft, gold-sliced shadow trembled with small sounds, and light voices of children drifted down from above. If this was still real, then what was her life of to-day? Why pretend any longer to make the world seem reasonable? It was all a delightful ironic farce with an audience applauding the wrong moments and the Author gritting his teeth in the wings. What use was Time if it availed so little?

The broad stream of sunlight flowed through the house like a steady ripple of Lethe, washing away the sandy shelves of trivial Now, dissolving little edges of past and future into its current, drawing all Time together in one clear onward sluice. What are we waiting for, she wondered. What is everyone waiting for, always? She was painfully aware of George standing near her. It was not silence that sundered them, but their grotesque desire to speak.

"George," Phyllis was saying, "you give Ben a drink or something while I take the ladies"

In the shadow beyond the table there was a clicking sound. Through the wide opening of the dining-room double doors two figures crawled, on all fours, with a toy train. Janet was in her


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 pyjamas, ready for bed. Martin's hand moved the engine across the floor. They came into the stripe of sunset.

"Wait a minute!" cried Janet. "Here's one of the passengers."

"Put him in," said Martin. "And then the train goes round a sharp curve and smashes into a lot of people, bing!"

"Quick, I'll telephone for a nambulance. You adbretized Perfect Safety on this railroad. It said so in your booklet."

"Well, if people will sit down for a Picnic right on the main line"

"Goodness, what a nasinine thing to do."

"They were using the hot rails to fry their bacon on."

"Here's the doctor. Are there any children hurt?"

"Children all safe," said Martin, looking carefully through the wreckage. "A lot of grown-ups badly damaged."

"Here's the pistol. Put them out of their misery."

"Bang-bang-bang!"

"They didn't suffer much. I'll go for the wrecking train."


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 "Janet!" exclaimed Phyllis. "What are you doing, running about the house in your pyjamas. And you've got sniffles already."

The two players looked up; but they could see nothing outside their tunnel of brightness. The voice seemed like imagination.

"Of course the railroad company will have to pay money for those valuable lives," said Martin regretfully.

"I'll get the blocks, we can build a norphan asylum for the surveyors."

"Not surveyors, survivors."

"Janet! Say good-night to Mr. Martin and run upstairs."

This time the command was unmistakable. Janet became aware of tall ominous figures emerging from the surrounding dusk.

"Good-night!" she cried hastily, and ran.

"I'm afraid Janet's manners are terrible," Phyllis said. "She ought to have shaken hands, but I don't like to call her back now, she'll catch more cold."

Two other forms appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Is to-morrow the Picnic?" they called anxiously.


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 Martin was still sitting on the floor, musing over the disaster. Janet halted halfway up and shouted. "He says you said Damn the Picnic."

Sylvia and Rose burst into snivels. There was a moment of difficult pause. Martin realized that something was happening and began collecting the train.

"You promised the Picnic for to-morrow," he said, looking up from where he was kneeling.

"Yes, yes, to-morrow, don't worry," George shouted to the children.

"Mr. Martin's been awfully kind at keeping them amused," said Phyllis. "Mr. Martin, Mr. and Mrs. Brook, Miss Clyde.—George, turn on the light, Mr. Martin can't see us."

The button clicked, the bulbs jumped to attention, mere loops of pale wire beside the orange shaft of sun. Martin scrambled suddenly to his feet.

"How do you do," he said.

"What stunning towels," Ruth remarked as Phyllis was pointing out the hot-water tap. The embroidery of Phyllis's maiden initials was luxuriously illegible, in some sort of Old High German character. "Surely those didn't come with the house?"


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 "No; they're mine; all that's left of my trousseau. What George calls my pre-war towels."

But Ruth was too busy in her own thoughts to pursue little jokes.

"Your artist man is rather extraordinary," she said. "Why should any one so attractive need to be so bashful?"

"He's not really bashful.—There, I think you'll find everything you need."

The light twinkled on a tray of yellowish glasses on the sideboard. George unlocked the cupboard, took out a bottle, and split open a new box of cigarettes with his thumbnail. There's a consolation in having these small things to do, he thought. Meanwhile, what am I really thinking of? I suppose she's washing her hands. It's awkward having her downstairs. She'll want to change. . . . I don't believe she's got a mirror in there. We can hardly expect her to use the bookcase panes.

"Excuse me a moment," he said. "Ben, pour the tonic. It's good stuff." Mr. Martin was still standing by the door uncertainly, holding the toy engine. Heavens, does the fellow have to be moved round like a chess man? He's so difficult to talk to, somehow. George made a cordial


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 gesture, indicating that Mr. Martin might as well join Ben at the sideboard. Martin crossed the room obediently.

The anxious host glanced into the sitting room. Yes: Phyllis, with her usual skill, had turned the desk into a dressing table: there was a fresh doily on it, a vase of flowers, and the mirror from his own bureau upstairs. Already, though she hadn't entered it yet, the room was no longer his but Joyce's. It had become private, precious, and strange. Here, in the very centre of his own muddled affairs, was suddenly a kernel of unattainable magic. Why in God's name had Phyllis put her in his room? It was too savagely ironic. In my heart, in my mind, in my very bed, and I can't even speak to her. It's too farcical. If I didn't have to keep it secret we could all laugh about it. Secrecy is the only poison.

He carried in Joyce's suitcase and paint box, put them on the couch, and fled.

"Well, Ben, I saved my last bottle for this party. It'll help us live through the Picnic. Mr. Martin, aren't you drinking?"

"What is it?" asked Martin.

"Try it and see. You don't need to worry. It's real."

Ben held up his glass, prolonging anticipation.


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 The fine vatted aroma of the rye cheered his nostrils. Here at least was one trifle which helps assuage the immense tedium of life.

"Funny to see the old place again," he said. "How well I remember those coloured panes. Well . . ."

"Never drink without a sentiment," said George.

"All right: stained glass windows."

"Good enough. Stained glass windows."

"Is this your first visit?" Ben began politely; but the other guest was still coughing and gagging. His eyes were full of tears.

Not used to good stuff, George thought. You don't get much of this genuine rye nowadays. He and Ben waited, rather embarrassed, until the other had stopped patting his chest. Ben lit a cigarette and blew a ring.

Martin's face brightened. He put out his finger and hooked the floating twirl.

"That's lovely!" he said. "How do you do it?"

Ben was pleased at this tribute to his only social accomplishment.

"Why, it's quite easy. Get a big mouthful of smoke, purse your lips in a circle, like the hole in a doughnut, and raise your tongue suddenly to push the smoke out."


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 "Do it again."

Ben looked so comic, shaping his mouth, Martin couldn't help laughing.

"You look like a catfish. Can you do it too?"

"Not so well as Ben. Gosh, didn't you ever see any one blow smoke rings before?"

"No. My father doesn't smoke."

Ben looked a little perplexed. He had an uneasy feeling that perhaps the artist was making fun of them in some obscure way.

Phyllis called from the stairs. "George, will you come up and speak to the children? They want to be reassured about the Picnic."

"Do I have to finish this medicine?" Martin asked.

George grinned at him, rather tickled by this drollery.

"You must do as you think best. Make yourselves at home, you fellows. I'll be back in a minute."

"Don't you like it?" said Ben.

"No."

"Well, I can help you."

"It was nice of you to blow a smoke ring to amuse me."

There was silence, which Ben concluded by taking the other glass of whisky.


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 "Happy days," he said.

"To-morrow will be a happy day," Martin said. "We're going to be reassured by a Picnic."

"Have a cigarette," was all that Ben could think of.

"Who were the ladies you brought with you?"

"Well, one of them's my wife."

"Which, the pretty one?"

Ben poured himself another slug. He felt he needed it. He had a strong desire to laugh, but there was sincere inquiry in Mr. Martin's eyes. He really wanted to know.

"Ask them," he said.

Phyllis came into the room.

"It'll soon be dinner time. You people all ready?"

Martin held out his arms. It was so nearly the substance of her dream, she moved forward to enter his embrace. Ben's face of surprise checked her in time. She took Martin's hands.

"Mr. Martin is my guest of honour," she explained lightly.

"He seems to be," said Ben, and finished his glass.

They stood a moment. Then Martin said, "You didn't look at them."

"At what?"

"My hands. I mean, are they clean enough?"


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 Janet and Sylvia were already in the two cots on the balcony; but their eyes were waiting for George, with that look of entreating expectancy worn by those who look upward from bed. In the lustrous garden air crickets were beginning to wheedle. The rickety old porch seemed an alcove of simpleness divided from the absurd tangled emotions of the house. But even here was passion: the little white trousered figures sprang up, their strenuous arms clutched him, their eyes were dark with anxiety. With horror he saw how they appealed to him as omnipotent all-arranging arbiter. Him, the poor futile bungler! They crushed him with the impossible burden of their faith.

"Yes, we'll have the Picnic to-morrow. Now you go to sleep and get a good rest."

"Mother forgot to hear our prayers."

He stood impatient as they lengthily rehearsed, one after the other, their confident innocent petitions. The clear voices chirruped, but he shut their words from his mind, as regardless as God. Would they never finish? To hear these dear meaningless desiderations was too tender a torment. He tried to think of other things—of anything—of the sea; of washing his hands and putting on a clean collar; of the striped brown and


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Page:Dido and Aeneas (1689).pdf/8

Grief Encreaſing, by Concealing,

Mine admits of no Revealing.

Then let me Speak the Trajan gueſt,

Into your tender Thoughts has preſt.

The greateſt Bleſſing Fate can give, Our Carthage to ſecure, and Troy revive.

VVhen Monarchs unite how happy their State,

They Triumph at once on their Foes and their Fate.

VVhence could ſo much Virtue Spring,

VVhat Stormes, what Battels did he Sing.

Anchiſes Valour mixt with Venus’s Charmes,

How ſoft in Peace, and yet how fierce in Armes.

A Tale ſo ſtrong and full of wo,

Might melt the Rocks as well as you.

VVhat ſtubborn Heart unmoved could ſee,

Such Diſtreſs, ſuch pity.

Mine with Stormes of Care oppreſt,

Is Taught to pity the Diſtreſt.

Mean wretches grief can Touch,

So ſoft ſo ſenſible my Breaſt,

But Ah! I fear, I pity his too much.

Fear no danger to Enſue,

The Hero Loves as well as you.

Ever Gentle, ever Smiling,

And the Cares of Life beguiling.

Cupid Strew your path with Flowers,

Gathered from Elizian Bowers.

See your Royal Gueſt appears,

How God like is the Form he bears.

VVhen Royal Fair ſhall I be bleſt,

VVith cares of Love, and State diſtreſt.

Fate forbids what you Enſue,

Æneas has no Fate but you.

Let Dido Smile, and I’le defie,

The Feeble ſtroke of Deſtiny.

Cupid

title: Page:Dido and Aeneas (1689).pdf/8


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 silver tie that he intended to wear to-morrow (Joyce had never seen it); and what on earth are we going to do to amuse these people after dinner?

". . . and Mother and Daddy and all friends kind and dear; and let to-morrow be a nice day for the Picnic. . . ."

Poor little devils, he thought; they seem as far away from me as if they were kittens or puppies. People pretend that children are just human beings of a smaller size, but I think they're something quite different. They live in a world with only three dimensions, a physical world immersed in the moment, a reasonable world, a world without that awful sorcery of a fourth measurement that makes us ill at ease. What is it their world lacks? Is it self-consciousness, is it beauty, is it sex? (Three names for the same thing, perhaps.) Little Sylvia with her full wet eyes, what torments of desire she would arouse some day in some deluded stripling.

Strange world of theirs: a world that has no awareness of good and evil; a world merely pretty, whereas ours is beautiful. A world that knows what it wants; whereas we are never quite sure. . ..

He looked at them with amazement. Where did they come from, how did they get there?


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 They were more genuine than himself, they would still be in this incredible life long after he had been shovelled out of it. How soon would they begin to see through the furious pettiness of parents? See that we do everything we punish them for attempting, that we torture them for our own weakness, set their teeth on edge for the taste of our own green grapes?

He tucked them in, gave each rounded hill of blanket a consoling pat, and left them. Joyce was standing in the passage. She had changed her clothes and was wearing a plain grey linen dress. He wanted to tell her that she was one of the unbelievably rare women who never have a pink strap of ribbon running loose across one shoulder. There must be some solution of that problem? A man would have abolished it long ago. But she's on her way to the bathroom, I suppose; it'll be more polite if I just stand aside and let her pass without saying anything. Besides, we can't talk here, right outside Ruth's door.

But she did not move. Evidently she had been watching his little scene with the children. In a flicker of the mind he wondered whether his part in it had looked creditable. He was afraid it had. For now, to her at any rate, he hankered to be known as the troubled imbecile he really was.


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 "And you wonder why I envy you," she said.

He didn't answer. He was busy reminding himself that that was what her eyes were like. It is only a few times that any man has the chance or the will to search the innermost bravery of other human faces. He had thought much about her eyes, had imagined the fine glory of telling them about themselves. Foreigners, he would call them; bright aliens not quite at home in the daily disasters of earth's commonplace. Foreigners, but he was on the pier waiting for them. They seemed to know that life is a precious thing and that we are always in danger of marring it. He imagined them as they would be if their shadow of questioning were skimmed away; if they were flooded with the light of complete surrender, of reckless trust. But how can these things be said? There is no code, he thought: so perhaps the wise presently abandon attempt to communicate. The gulf surrounds us all; only here and there on the horizon a reversed ensign shows where some stout spirit founders in silence. Or now and then, in the casual palaver of the day, slips out some fantastic phrase to show how man rises from clay to potter, can even applaud the nice malice of his own comedy.

He had got beyond the point where he could talk


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 to her in trivialities. He must say all or nothing.

"Lucky children," she said. "I wish I had someone to hear my prayers.—If I had, I might say some."

"I didn't hear them. I wasn't listening; I couldn't. Oh, Joyce, Joyce, there's so much I want to say, and your eyes keep interrupting me."

He thrilled a little at himself, and felt better. For he had his Moments: unforeseen felicities when he said the humorous and necessary word: and when his Moments came he could not help gloating over them. She gloated too, for she relished that innocent glee when he congratulated his own mind. When himself was his own guest of honour, and he stood genially at the front door.

So she smiled. What other woman could ever reward a lucky phrase with such magic of wistful applause?

"I apologize for them. They didn't mean to be rude."

She was so young and straight in her plain frock, so blessedly unconscious of herself. He thought of her fine strong body, the ungiven body that was so much her own, near him again after all the miracles of life that divide flesh from flesh and then bring it again within grasp; her sweet uncommanded beauty, irrelevant perhaps, yet so