Lord Raingo

Fifty-five. Tallish--but stoutish. Dressed like the country gentleman which he was not and never would be. Not by taking any amount of thought can you become a country gentleman. From the lower part of his large and somewhat neglected gardens he looked down Moze slope and over Mozewater. Six miles off Eelpie Sand gleamed dangerously in the March afternoon sun. The tide was rising, creeping with stealth into all the inlets that bordered the Spanish Main of Mozewater. The explosives factory in the middle distance stood now on a tongue of land; in two hours it would be a solitary chimney sticking up forlorn out of the Spanish Main. The tide was never still. Four times a day it punctually changed the face of sixty square miles of earth, omnipotently heedless of air-raids, gun-fire, rumours of invasion. You might go to bed with the moon pouring silver on to an ocean, and get up to see the sun enlighten a sinister marsh intersected by creeks and. rivulets. Every aspect of Mozewater enchanted Mr. Raingo, drew him out of his own melancholy and futility into a melancholy and futility greater, grander, and far more beautiful. There was a speechless poet hidden somewhere in Mr. Raingo, that died often and came back to life, and was authentic.

He opened the wicket and strolled slowly down Moze slope, and in half an hour was level with the vast, semicircular dyke.

Two Thames barges, each manned by two men and a dog, were manoeuvring gingerly up the shallow channels towards the ancient quays and wharves of Flittering--last outpost of solidity against the North Sea. He walked through the village, nodding benevolently here and there to humble persons who saluted him with deference as the richest man in the peninsula and perhaps in the county. As he reached Miss Osyth Drine's cottage--last outpost of the last outpost--and the road dwindled into a green track, a man rather like himself in age and build emerged from the cottage, jumped with enviable agility on to a bicycle and, having perceived Mr. Raingo, at once jumped off again.

"Mr. Raingo?" said the cyclist. "I thought I couldn't be mistaken. I wonder if you'd be so very kind as to give a message to Mrs. Raingo from my wife, and say how sorry she was not to be in when Mrs. Raingo called."

"I certainly will," answered Raingo, urgently asking his memory to identify this slightly too deferential khaki gentleman with the stars of a captain on his tunic.

"I'm Heddle," said the cyclist.

"Of course you are," Raingo agreed with quick urbanity, offering his hand. It was the doctor who had come newly to Hoe village two years earlier and had almost immediately afterwards joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and vanished into distant fields of war. "You've been in Palestine, I think?"

"Yes. Invalided home. I may get charge of a hospital, and in the meantime I'm doing a bit to my own practice." A short, dry laugh.

They walked along together, the bicycle between them.

"Too eager to know me," thought Raingo, with all the suspiciousness natural to his wealth. "Too much kowtow. Too pleased to be talking to me. Not a snob. Only simple. Roughing it and God knows what in Palestine. It wou1d have killed me. And now he's an invalid dashing about on a bike. And my age if he's a day!"

And Raingo, in his secret humiliation, admired the fellow, and had a wild, absurd desire to justify his own inactivity to the simpleton. And Mrs. Raingo had neglected to pay her formal call for two years or more, and even now had probably only called because the husband was at home again. Disgusting. Intolerable. He considered that if a woman believed in the propriety of the astounding country ritual of calls, she ought at least to perform it conscientiously and not insult her neighbours by negligence. Two years! And more!

Raingo mentioned the war news.

"Yes. Serious!" said Captain Heddle. It was his sole and sufficient comment on the great German push.

"I think we shall hold them," said Raingo.

"You do?"

"I do."

"Well, I'm immensely relieved to hear you say so," said Captain Heddle, with obvious sincerity. He was immensely relieved, because Mr. Raingo, being a millionaire, must have information, and must possess judgment, denied to simple soldiers.

"I know nothing--nothing," said Raingo.

But Captain Heddle refused to credit that; he put it down to the modesty of the great, and remained firmly in a state of immense relief.

"I should like to consult you," Raingo burst out surprisingly.

Captain Heddle was raised into bliss.

"One of these days," said Raingo.

"Any time. Now. I'm at your service. An honour, I assure you." (Why did people always go on in this style?) "I could call round to-morrow, if that would suit you."

"I won't trouble you to call. I'll come to you. Later this afternoon, say."

Raingo was very urbane, winning, determined if possible to cure the simpleton of his subservience. They walked side by side slowly up the acclivity to Hoe, the inland metropolis of the peninsula, noting camouflaged block-houses, barbed wire, and other preparations to resist invasion. Captain Heddle said that in any case he should not have ridden up the hill. "I have to keep an eye on my heart," he said.

"Heart!" said Raingo. "That's my trouble, that's just what I wanted to see you about."

They were immediately brothers.

The front door and the garden door of the doctor's house behind Hoe church were both open, and the wind blew through the sunlight-flecked house. The doctor led his august patient into the drawing-room. A poor little room, yet it had the same essentials as the drawing-room at Moze Hall: piano, flowers, photographs. What more could you want?

"My wife isn't in apparently," said Captain Heddle, disappointed; he had clearly taken Mr. Raingo to the drawing-room in order to display the captive to Mrs. Heddle. They passed through a corner of the unkempt garden into the "surgery," which was very small and very shabby, and Raingo began to feel a thrill of expectation. But the doctor was talking about gardens, the Jordan valley, troopships, the popular press, universities.

"That's it," thought Raingo. "He can't concentrate. That's why he's where he is, at his age. Every chance--education, connections, strong, cheerful, and he's a village doctor! When the deuce does he intend to start?"

Then, still chatting, the doctor found a stethoscope, and said:

"Now shall we examine the unruly member?"

Raingo lay down on a high and singularly lumpy sofa, and unbuttoned everything over his chest, and yielded himself like a child to his brother in age bending above him. And for Raingo the grey-haired simpleton was instantly transformed into a medicineman, a magician, an arch-priest endowed with recondite knowledge and unquestionable judgment. Raingo had consulted nearly all the greatest specialists in London and had got no help, no encouragement. His wife had accused him of a mania for doctors; and it was her attitude that had made him see this doctor in his surgery instead of asking him up to the Hall. Fifty times he had lost faith in doctors, but at every fresh doctor he mysteriously found faith again. Heddle was a simpleton, but simpletons had a knack on occasion of being deeply wise, of being seers. He could not concentrate--but he was concentrating now. And might not the state of his own heart have given him a special interest in hearts and therefore a special perception? Did not genius sometimes hide unappreciated in villages?

"The hour of my salvation may be at hand. This simpleton may be my deliverer," thought Raingo. And if it was to be so, the Germans might take Bailleul and drive the Allies into the Channel--he would have such a basis of happiness as no misfortune exterior to himself could shake. He knew then, and admitted, what really mattered to him and what didn't.

The doctor sounded him with an almost exasperating thoroughness. Then the patient had to sit up, and his back also was listened to and overheard.

"Well, this is a long-standing affair," said the doctor at last, gently.

"Yes, yes." Raingo grew garrulous, and related all that all sorts of doctors had told him. The doctor said nothing.

"How long do you give me?" Raingo demanded wistfully, like a defenceless victim. For twelve months past no doctor had given him more than five years--he wanted ten; he longed for ten; he would be content with ten.

"Pooh!" exclaimed the doctor breezily. "You might live any time. Five, ten, twenty years. I knew a case, not exactly the same as yours, but very similar--it was a dozen years ago, and I do believe the cove is still alive."

"Really!"

"Of course you must take care, as I do myself. You don't want to go and catch pneumonia, you know. That might be--er--serious."

Raingo's eyes were moist with gratitude. He was a boy, he was nearly a girl. The war was a skirmish without importance.

"What's this? I can't take this, my dear Mr. Raingo. I really can't!" said the doctor, staring at a five pound note and two half-crowns which Raingo had laid on the surgery desk.

Picking up his hat, Raingo heartily shook the doctor's hand.

"Try!" said he, with a glance suddenly impish. "Try to take it. Do your best. And if you fail, let me know."

He was permitting himself a rich man's freedom. The doctor laughed awkwardly, but his dignity was reassured by the warm, grateful pressure of the patient's fingers.

Moze Hall was incommensurate with the wealth of Raingo. It stood only about forty yards back from the Harwich road (but was well screened therefrom by trees), and comprised about twenty-five rooms, of which only three were bath-rooms. Nevertheless the entrance-hall and the reception-rooms on either side of it were imposing, and there was one large bed-room--his wife's. He had bought the place in 1915 from the executors of his wife's father, and had modernized it, though not thoroughly. However, it sufficed him; and Adela, who had lived in it as a child, loved it--after her fashion of loving. Architecturally it was without style or charm, having been built in 1820. The terraced gardens at the back of the house, with wondrous views over sea and land, were beautiful--except in war time.

Raingo now entered his domain from the road. Weeds had effectively colonized the front garden; the paint was peeling off the gate and off the woodwork of the façade; but these things were excusable and even laudable in the long national ordeal, and they did not offend Raingo. He rang the front-door bell, opened the door, and went in. When he wanted immediate attention on coming home he would ring from outside--it saved time. He drew a chair to the edge of the mat and sat down with his feet on the mat. His intention was to send Skinner, the old butler, for a pair of pumps and to change his very dirty boots on the mat--he had a strong objection to making a mess in the house and an equally strong objection to the labour of cleaning muddy boots on scrapers and mats. His boots were vile with Essex clay, because, out of regard for Wrenkin, he had paid a visit to the great byre, where a few pedigree cattle were huddled.

Wrenkin, aged forty-seven, was the factotum of the estate. An all-round, efficient, honest, industrious, shabby and disagreeable man! He maintained the radiators and the hot-water supply, manufactured the electric current, kept Raingo's car in order, grew vegetables and fruit, fought rear-guard actions against weeds, the cook, and his mistress, and wangled coal and coke from Harwich. All for two pounds a week.

He believed himself to be, and not without some justification, the most remarkable man that ever lived. Everybody hated him except his master. These two understood one another and conversed together on the plane of masculine realism.

No one answered the bell. Raingo opened the door again and rang a second time furiously. There were two telegrams and a circular on the hall table. He opened the telegrams. For his own sake and for the sake of the village he subscribed to the Central News service of war-telegrams. One of the messages read: "Official. Germans broke through West Quentin we retiring good order to prepared positions elsewhere enemy held." The other: "Official. Fighting whole front until late last night we continue hold enemy whose losses exceedingly heavy."

"And what about our losses, you ostriches?" murmured Raingo. Still no one answered the bell. He took off his boots and padded farther into the main hall, crying: "Skinner! Skinner!" Not a sound in the house! What a house! A nice thing, that with five servants in the place, and him a millionaire, he should be reduced to padding about in his socks! He heard a movement above, went towards the stairs and had a glimpse of a print skirt behind the banisters of the landing.

"Edith!" A scurry, and silence.

"Edith!" he roared, with compelling command in his exasperated voice.

A girl appeared, flushed. Yes, it happened to be Edith, one of the housemaids. She was a disgraceful sight, and knew it. Half-past five and she was still in her morning blue print, dirty apron, cap awry!

"Where's Skinner?"

"He's lying down, sir--not very well."

"Your mistress out?"

"Yes, sir."

"When will she be back?"

"She didn't say, sir."

"Well, if Skinner is unwell somebody else ought to be ready to answer the door. Supposing it had been a visitor." Edith's lower lip fell. "There's no excuse for any disorganization inside the house. Tell the cook from me. And here! Take these boots away and bring me some pumps--bottom of my wardrobe, left hand."

What a house! She was a pretty girl, probably about seventeen, with a grimy, perfectly exquisite complexion. And he had scared all the blood into her head.

"Not her fault!" he reflected. "She thinks she's guilty because she can't think straight. She isn't guilty. It's somebody's business to be looking after her and somebody isn't doing it."

He felt the sinister charm of beauty victimized. When she got back (with her apron turned)--he said benevolently:

"Thank you, Edith."

She gave a shy glint of a smile, and hurried from his presence. It was nothing, the veriest insignificant trifle, an infinitesimal fraction of an incident, but two beings had come emotionally together for an instant who probably never would so come together again.

The transient thought of the young mysterious girl living, pulsating, under the same roof with his gross, ageing self, yet millions of miles away, refined his gloom. For he was now all gloom. The buoyancy induced by the doctor's pronouncement had left him. The doctor had good reason to speak smoothly, and no reason whatever to tell the truth. The doctor was a simpleton, and how should a simpleton's views override those of the wisest men in Harley Street? And in what manner could a weak heart make the doctor into a heart-specialist? Absurd! Absurd! Mr. Raingo, the realist, had been womanish enough to believe something for a few minutes because he wanted to believe it!

He went to his room and lay under the eiderdown and without intention slept.

When he awoke it was quite dark. His bedside timepiece blazed forth the hour in the blackness--seven twenty-five. He heard his wife moving about in her bedroom, which was next to his own, with an open door between them.

"That you, Adela?" he called plaintively.

"Yes, dear." Her high, bland, unconcerned voice!

"I was getting a little rest."

"I thought you were."

"The light from your room shows here and my blinds aren't drawn. There's bound to be trouble."

"All right, dear! All right! If it worries you. But really what can it matter? I do think the police are--" She shut the door.

How like her, that speech! Full of misperceptions and inconsequences! He arose, drew down his blinds, turned on the light, brushed his hair, and arranged the wide ends of his blue-and-white checked bow necktie. No more toilet than that, because an important article of his religion was never to be late; he would make any sacrifice to the pride of punctuality. He went into her room. She was fiddling about as usual, doing several things at once; cursed with a mind that darted to and fro and crossways like a minnow; could never do one thing at a time.

"What time is it?" she inquired indifferently.

"Your clock's stopped."

"Has it? They generally manage to stop it, dusting in the morning. I'm just ready."

She was not just ready. She was half dressed, at most.

Daily she had this extraordinary illusion of being ready when she was by no means ready.

"The car broke down outside Frinton. So in the end I borrowed a bicycle."

Her car was continually breaking down; she would drive it and clean it herself--one of her contributions to war economy in labour. He said nothing. She had quite forgotten the time-question. He gazed at the enigma of his existence. She was nearing fifty and slim; she did not look her age; in fact to him she had scarcely changed in twenty-three years. A face not uncomely, but uninteresting. Pale grey eyes that saw through you and through everything into distances. Self-absorbed, placid, tepid, vague. Above all, tepid and vague. Neither kind nor unkind. Unobservant. Untidy and disorderly. No interest nor taste in dress. Her lingerie was about as attractive as a cotton sheet. Instead of her watching over his clothes, he watched over hers. But herself, she had style and dignity and carriage. She was rarely at a loss. She talked adequately and easily--whether to a servant or to a General Officer Commanding. She had race. He hadn't. He did not quite know why she had married him, unless through nonchalance; certainly she had not married him for his money; nor from passion; for she carried nonchalance into love, and in moments of intimacy would emit such remarks as "I wonder where I left my umbrella this afternoon." She played bridge, tennis, and golf, in moderation and moderately well, and sometimes she hunted. Their son Geoffrey had been made a prisoner in 1916, and since then her war-work had been confined to British prisoners' aid. The country-side was dotted with German prisoners employed on farms, but she never even mentioned them.

"It's seven thirty-two," he said at length, determined that she should know the time, whether or not she wanted to know it. The dinner-hour in these years was 7.30.

"Aren't you going to change?"

"No."

He left her. Half-way down the stairs, he noticed that the blinds of the back windows of the hall had not been drawn.

And he noticed the thick dust on the tops of the door-frames--dust which he had pointed out a fortnight ago. Her two Pomeranians were yapping querulously on the oak bench in the hail; the hair of both was caked with mud. He drew the blinds, too exasperated and exhausted to do the right thing and summon a servant. What a house! He inspected the dining-room. Skinner, who needed a bath, had scarcely begun to lay the table. But Raingo said naught; he was resigned, beaten. Then he noticed that the room was very cold, and he felt the radiators, all four of them. Stone cold!

"Why are these radiators turned off?" he demanded, roused to revolt.

"Turned off, sir?"

"Turned off."

"Madam turned them off at lunch, sir, if you remember, and someone must have forgotten to turn them on again."

"Someone"! What a house! No comfort in it. What good was his house to him, his gardens, his cattle? He did not own them--they owned him. He recalled patting the flanks of the cattle--a purely mechanical gesture. They were not his; he had paid for them, but had failed to buy interest in them. His mouth was full of ashes. Ennui! Ennui! And the shadow of death! He always left London for Essex as for an arctic and windy hell. The service-flat in Berkeley Street was far, far better. He saw Skinner anxiously turning on radiators, and quitted the room. In the hall he absently picked up the circular from the table. A telegram lay underneath it. Good God! How futile, in that house, his reiterated ruling that telegrams must be put to the left and letters to the right! More war news. Perhaps a complete break-through by the Germans. But the telegram said "Prime Minister would be grateful if you could breakfast with him to-morrow nine thirty o'clock Poppleham."

Adela was coming down the stairs. Occasionally she seemed to dress with magical rapidity. He let her enter the dining-room while he was collecting his wits; then he followed her. She was seated at the table, now fully set. He smacked the telegram down in front of her.

"Read that. It's been lying under a circular on the hail table for over three hours. I only discovered it by accident."

She read the telegram, and looked through him.

"Who's Poppleham?" she asked.

Adela to the life! "Who's Poppleham?" She rendered him speechless. He did not answer. Presently, surmising vaguely that she had not been tactful, she said: "What do you suppose it is?"

"God knows. Some circus tomfoolery, you bet."

He spoke with a bitterness that was half assumed. He had known the Prime Minister for fifty years, and detested him. After a pause he added:

"But I shall have to go. A P.M.'s a P.M., you know."

"Skinner," he said sharply, when the soup approached. Is Wrenkin anywhere about?"

"Yes, sir, he's doing the boilers."

"Tell him to come to me at once."

"Here, sir?"

"Here. At once. Run."

Wrenkin, ash-stained, shabby, cap in hand, arrived at once, scowling and efficient. He was a nervous and sensitive man, with a woman's intuitiveness; and he had divined some inconvenient urgency of the master's own.

"I say, Wrenkin, can you drive me to Colchester?" Raingo inquired benevolently.

"Yes, sir."

"How soon?"

"Any time, sir."

"In ten minutes?"

"Yes, sir. I must just see she's filled up."

"Say a quarter of an hour, then. Thanks," said Raingo, having glanced at the clock and at his watch.

Wrenkin departed.

"But there's no train to Liverpool Street to-night," said Adela.

"Bring the next dish, Skinner," said Raingo. "There's the Ipswich express, I suppose."

"But it doesn't stop."

The train service had been cut to bits.

"It'll stop all right when I show this telegram to the station-master," said Raingo grimly.

In ten minutes the big car was shaking on the gravel outside.

"Get my light overcoat and my big one, Skinner. But bring me some boots first."

Chewing meat, Raingo put on both coats, and stuffed a couple of apples into the pockets. At the door Adela kissed him blandly. She did not ask whether he needed anything. But he did not. He kept duplicates of all necessaries whatsoever at the service-flat. The car went ahead, curved, and threw the dimmed lights on to the gates. And then Raingo yielded himself to an almost wild elation.

That same night in darkened London, Raingo went by bus to Pall Mall (there being no taxis at Liverpool Street), and visited first his club, which was apparently quite empty of members and had the air of awaiting with grim and solemn fortitude the sound of the last trump. Escaping intimidated from its twilit vastness, he walked a few hundred yards to Orange Street, and, drawing in advance a bunch of keys from his pocket, opened a door upon which shone faintly a small brass plate: "Imperial Re-investment Company." He looked about, as though for spies. Not a soul in the narrow, mysterious street. Not a slit of a gleam from any curtained window. Only the shafts of searchlights moving restlessly overhead. He vanished within.

The sea of London had closed over him. He was safe, undiscoverable. In the blackness his accustomed finger found instantly an electric switch, and a naked lamp shone at the head of a narrow staircase facing the door. An office staircase, rather shabby with worn linoleum. He climbed it, slowly. At the top on the left was a small landing with heavy blue curtains hiding a second staircase, and a glazed door on the right: "Imperial Re-investment Company." He tried the door.

"Oh! She doesn't keep this locked. But of course there's no need to."

He entered and lit the office. It had all the apparatus of an office, including several shelves of Amberg files, and it was so orderly, unsoiled and shining that it might have been a model office in some Business Exhibition. The blotting paper on the principal desk bore traces of writing. He tore off the top sheet and, examining it in the mirror of the overmantel, deciphered "Samuel Raingo, Esq." in a feminine hand. He tore up the blotting paper into small pieces, dropped them into the new waste-paper basket, left the office, and pulled aside the blue curtains on the landing.

Another lamp was burning at the head of the second staircase. The character of this staircase was very different from that of the first. The stairs were thickly carpeted in blue, with bright stair-rods, and on glistening walls hung pictures in rich frames. The lamp was veiled in a large silk shade of Chinese design. Now was business giving way to a luxurious domesticity. Sam Raingo ascended towards the bower with eager anticipation of balm and solace. He was vitalised, young. He felt adventurous and romantic. He was about to enter into his refuge from the comfortless and unsatisfying, desolate world, and to taste the reward which he had conceived and created for himself. He thought boyishly: "In another moment I shall surprise her," and he made more noise than he need have made, so as not to produce alarm in addition to surprise. At the same time he had a qualm of apprehension, thinking: "Surprise visits may be dangerous. Suppose--" The qualm was gone again.

There were two doors on the landing. He pushed a switch controlling all three staircase lights and simultaneously opened the nearest door, into a drawing-room. As he did so, a door on the right within the room swung towards him, and a young woman appeared, pale and agitated. She softly shut the door behind her and softly turned the key in the lock.

"Oh, Sam, how you startled me!"

"Did I?" he said, disturbed and at a loss. A difficult pause. "I had to come up to town on business," he said. "And I thought I'd look in. No time to let you know."

He took off his hat and dropped into an easy chair by the embers of a fire. The girl knelt at the fire and quickly tended it and persuaded it into flames. Then she rose and stood over him, bending. She was a big girl, beautiful in features and figure, not stout, but plump and tremendously developed; very dark, with black hair, large black eyes, olive skin and a faint dark down on her upper lip.

"Then you love me," she murmured, smiling.

She kissed and clasped him and bore against him, pressing him back into the great chair.

He was buried under her, lost. He ought to have been, he at his age, happy in her abandoned, enveloping youthfulness which squandered itself so generously upon him. But death was in his heart. His body made no response to hers. Surprise visits were indeed dangerous. They were fatal. He knew that when he left that room he would leave behind the one thing that rendered earth habitable, his romance. The Prime Minister's summons had suddenly become of no account whatever. Even the German attack had lost the acuteness of its menace. No wonder she had been an actress! What an actress she was! What actresses they all were!

"Why are you wearing those things?" he asked nicely, for at acting he was at least her equal.

"What things? These?" She touched her bosom. She was certainly nervous. "Oh, darling, when you aren't here . . . what does it matter? . . . If I'd known of course . . "

She was wearing a very old and plain night-dress, and over it a tattered, slatternly dressing-gown. Nothing on her feet. He glanced round the room and missed various pieces of fairly expensive bric-à-brac , some costly cushions, and a Chinese rug. A formidable, a revolting thought, that in the next room, on the other side of the door there, a man--a young man--was awaiting, in bravado or terror, the upshot of her adroit acting! And he, Sam, was the old man, deceived, exploited--and humiliated. He divined all the truth. She had lied to the young man also. She had persuaded him that she was pure and therefore poor. That was why she was wearing the rags of her pre-Samuel days, and why she had hidden away the more glittering evidences of prosperity. She was full of common sense and cleverness. Folly! Frightful and ridiculous folly of an old man--no, not really old, but old in her eyes!--to believe in the rectitude of her affections! Amazing duplicity on her part! And yet was it amazing? Was it not rather the usual thing in such cases, was it not common form? All young mistresses of old men were unfaithful. All! To have imagined that his was the one exception merely proved him a simpleton.

Naturally he sprang from the state of being a simpleton to the state of being a cynic. He laughed mortally in his heart. He would clear up the situation before he departed, at any cost. Either she should confess fully on his demand, or he would go into the bedroom and face the poacher. Dangerous, but he would do it; he must do it; to do it was a necessity of his nature, for he was not the sort of person who would walk out, dissembling, and spy from the street, and, having obtained his evidence, go home and write a stinging letter of dismissal. There might in fact be a row, the police, a scandal. Instead of being with the Prime Minister to-morrow morning he might be at Vine Street. And he was an adulterer . . . his wife . . . So much the worse, but in spite of every risk he would clear up the situation. Folly! Folly! An old fool! Never mind! He had his ruinous pride.

To perfect his dissimulation he squeezed the girl with his hand. And all the while he was reflecting upon the best method of opening the attack. Should he talk quietly, or should he fly at her in an overwhelming outburst of just anger. She responded to his pressure; she kissed him.

"Sam," she breathed. "I'd better tell you. I can't keep anything from you. I've got my little sister in there, Gwen. She was in a hole and she rang me up, and so I told her she could sleep here to-night. That's really why I'm wearing these rags. And why I've hidden a lot of things. Haven't you noticed?" He nodded, non-committal. "I don't want her to think--you know. I told her I was secretary to the Company and only up here temporarily in charge. You don't mind, do you?"

"I don't mind," said he, kindly, but in a tone that gave nothing away.

Ingenious liar she was! Sister indeed! He vaguely remembered that she had once mentioned a sister or half-sister, but no more than that. And no doubt he was expected to go silently away, in order not to disturb the poor tired little sister who was in a hole--and leave a man in the bedroom! Pleasing idea! What next? She had locked the door. Why had she locked the door? To protect her little sister?

"She was bus-conducting, you know. They told her to go--said she wasn't strong enough, but it was really because she was too pretty, and too young for that job. Seems a shame, doesn't it?"

"It does," said Sam, still non-committal: but he was dumbfounded.

Then she crept towards the bedroom door; turned the key with infinite precaution, very gently opened the door and peeped in. And with a smile she beckoned to Sam, and put her finger to her lips, and Sam, mesmerised, scarcely conscious, followed her and peeped into the bedroom over her shoulder, and saw in one half of the bed a young fair girl, not unlike Delphine in feature, her blonde hair spread across the pillow. She was wearing a common little chemise; one small hand lay on the eiderdown--and it was the worn, grimy hand of a bus conductor that could not be restored in fifty washings to its rightful tints. The girl was in a deep, calm sleep. As Delphine pushed him from the doorway he had time to notice on a chair a pile of shabby clothes and a pair of deplorable boots under the chair. Delphine re-locked the door, saying:

"In case she wakes, and gets up to look for me."

For a few moments Sam dared not attempt to speak, lest he should sob--yes, sob--and he averted his eyes that Delphine might not see the wet shine on them. He made a diversion by taking off his overcoat. It was not remorse for his suspicion that moved him, but the touching sad beauty of the scene in the other room. Delphine, the maternal sister, half proud, half shamed, wholly protective! The younger girl, fragile, exhausted from the hard, responsible labour of conducting a motor-bus, pathetically sunk in sleep! He simply dismissed his suspicions as silly, as unworthy of his common sense and of his insight into character. He owed her no apology, for fortunately she had suffered nothing through his silliness. But she rose in his esteem. He had been right from the very first about that girl.

At his city office, where he managed his estate, she had survived, among others the selective sieve of his head clerk, Swetnam, in a crowd of applicants for a typewriting situation.

She had been shown into his private room. He glanced at her, she at him. In two seconds the magic was begun. "You aren't quite the sort," he said. "But I might have something else for you. Call this afternoon at four." At four, he said: "Very sorry, I must go out. Walk along with me a little, will you?" Then he took her into a tea-shop. She was obviously very poor. He asked her if she was Jewish. She said she didn't know, had never heard that she was. Her name was Leeder. Her parents were dead; her father had been a head bill-clerk in a large department store. She had tried the stage and had called herself an actress, but had never got further than the chorus. Yes, she had. She had once had one line to speak every night for twelve nights. Then she had learnt typewriting. "I only asked you about being Jewish because Jews generally have an instinct for finance and that might be useful if what I have in mind comes to anything." Thus had Sam spoken, having only one thing in his mind. She was a restful companion at tea, and Sam had been living desolating days in the domestic aridity of Moze Hall. She seemed to him to have just the qualities which he needed in a woman. Next they were dining together at the Savoy Café. She wore a new hat and kept her nerve; but he saw that she had had little experience of the ritual of luxury; he had years earlier had to learn the ritual himself and he had an eye for the slightest signs of ignorance.

The affair was begun. He told her his age and circumstances. He used his money dazzlingly. He did not tell her that he was in love with her; but she discovered that for herself. What helped him with her was the plain fact that he was a tyro--he had never wandered from his nonchalant wife; it had never till then seriously occurred to him to do so. Delphine resisted him. She fought him on equal terms. Her youth and beauty and his passion for her, against his money. She fought illogically, and when according to all rules and precedents she ought to have yielded, she grew stiffer and stiffer. He won his victory only after a really terrible, ugly, messy affray. But her surrender was complete. She adored him without reserve. She worshipped him. She was acquiescence incarnate. They were in heaven. This happened in 1917. He installed her, or rather she installed herself unaided, save by his money, in Orange Street. The office, and the imaginary company (one of his elfish fancies or inventions), were a cover, but they enabled her on a tiny scale to play at finance, for which he convinced himself that she had some natural gift.

"We must see if we can't do something for this sleeping sister," he said benevolently.

She shut his mouth with a tender kiss.

"Darling, I won't have you troubling about Gwen. I can look after her myself, and my relations are not going to be a nuisance to you. Now tell me about yourself. I want to know. Why have you had to come up to London to-night so suddenly?"

He told her in a few words. She sat up straight.

"And they stopped the express for you at Colchester!"

"They did. And believe me, my dear, it was a wonderful moment. The train came in at such a rate that I didn't think it would stop, though the signals were against it all right. Then I could hear the wheels grinding, and be blowed if the thing didn't come to a standstill! People opened the carriage doors to see what was happening--they daren't pull up the window-blinds. The station master put me into the train himself."

"How thrilling!"

"Yes, it was."

"And what do you suppose he wants with you?"

"Who? The P.M.? Something he can't get from anyone else--you may be sure of that!"

"But what?" Delphine insisted.

"Give it up."

"I believe he wants to make you a minister," said the girl proudly.

"Him! He'd lose the war first. I've known him for fifty years. And he's always had his knife into me. I was in the House eight years, and I never even got the chairmanship of a Committee. All thanks to him. And that was one reason why I chucked the House. Didn't like me. Some folks said afraid of me, but I doubt that. He's physically afraid, but never morally. I'll say that for him, because I know it. I know him through and through."

As he spoke Sam had a sense of pride too; pride in his long, hostile connection with the exalted P.M.; pride in his having been important enough for the P.M. to dislike possibly to fear; pride in so casually showing to the lowly Delphine that her Sam was something more than a mere millionaire. He added:

"Besides, what minister would he want to make me?"

"Well, what was that Sir somebody or other who retired the other day--illness or something?"

"Oh! Ministry of Records, eh, you think? No, my child. No! And you may bet the P.M. wants me to do something for nothing--no kudos, no anything. That's him. And of course I shall have to do it. . . . But a minister! I smile. I just smile an imperceptible, genial smile. Oh, not cynical! I wouldn't be cynical for anything."

"You are funny, you old silly," she breathed, smiling to herself. "And so's your silly old bow." She lovingly patted into symmetry his checked bow-necktie. "Sometimes after you've gone and I think of the funny things you've said, I almost burst out laughing. I do. But you'll see, about being a minister. You'll see."

He was exceedingly happy. Of course it was absurd about his being a minister--still, stranger things than that had happened. But it was not the off-chance of being a minister that caused him to be happy. It was their intimacy, which the episode of Gwen had somehow rendered closer and lifted to a higher plane. He liked to know about her sister; the knowledge broadened their relationship, humanised it, made her more than a mistress. He even liked her now to be wearing a shabby night-dress and dressing-gown; the shabbiness gave her some resemblance to a wife; and--astounding medley of contradictory emotions--he enjoyed the illusion of her wifehood. And the affair was not folly; it was wisdom itself. After all, a liaison was no more an exception than a rule. She was young, but he was not too old for her. They did like men much older than themselves; they said so; he had often heard it from men and from women too; and it was true. In girls there was something morbid to which age in a man appealed both spiritually and sensually.

She was ideal--or almost ideal. She lived in him and for him. She loved him with the extreme passionateness of her temperament. She was beautiful, and so lissom; so full of life even in her passivity. She had sleepy eyes in which love dreamed for ever. She had a quiet voice, which never talked of herself but always of him. Her affectionate curiosities about him were insatiable. She strove everlastingly to please him. A word of praise thrilled her. She was neat; she was punctual,; her rooms were impeccably clean and tidy. She did not yearn restlessly for pleasure, or change, or companionship. She said that she had no friends and wanted none. At night there was not even a servant in her rooms. (And except at night he never entered her rooms.) Withal she was no odalisque. She tried to improve herself, to make herself interesting to him. Did she not keep an eye on politics? She had no faults.

If she had a fault, it was a tendency towards melancholy. The war made her gloomy and pessimistic. The casualty rolls reduced her to the very depths of blank, prostrate despondency. He had to lie to her in his interpretations of military events. And her grievous anxiety as to his health was touching, sometimes to the point of painfulness. When, thinking to gladden her, he related the bright verdict of the village doctor, she pretended to be relieved, but the pretence was not very convincing. However, as he made progress in the study of her character, he was gradually learning how to deal with this tendency of hers. And perhaps also it was a fault in her that she allowed all her other interests to wither away in subservience to himself and her affection for him. She seemed to have completely lost interest in the stage; her canteen work, on three days a week, had become chiefly a tiresome task to be got through; her operations in the office below were a trifling diversion. What apparently she desired was to be utterly free till at night he arrived and she could kiss and adore him with her spirit and body fresh and unfatigued. Of course he liked her to be thus absorbed in him. But the responsibility of being her whole source of life irked and even frightened him. He would have desired her both to be and not to be what she was.

"You must go home now, dearest," she said.

"No."

"Are they expecting you at the flat to-night?"

"No."

"You must have a good night's rest. To-morrow. The strain. There's no knowing what's in store for you. Oh, darling, I do want you to do big things; but I'm afraid for your heart. And I'm afraid all this will mean I shan't see so much of you."

"Yes, you will."

"Not if it's going to tire you, I shan't."

She stood up and took the telephone from the mantelpiece.

"What are you doing?"

"'Phone for you to the flat."

She spoke with firm decision. She was marvellously modest, having regard to her youth and beauty and his attachment to her. She accepted his ukases. She asked for nothing. She was content to lie hidden as his mistress, with no position and no hope of one, never a plain gold ring on her finger. And yet sometimes she ruled him, blandly self-reliant, in the unconscious exercise of the power of her youth and beauty.

Telephone in hand she sank back on him, supporting her shoulders against his chest. Her hair was in his eyes. He was her couch. An exquisite fancy! She said a number.

"Is that the Berkeley Mansion? . . . Speaking for Mr. Samuel Raingo . . ."

When she had given orders about his bedroom, she clicked the receiver on to its hook, and still lay where she was, and sighed, and moved her head and offered her lips. Then she arose and gently pushed him out of the easy chair and helped him with his overcoat. And she stood at the top of the stairs and watched him slowly descend. She had dismissed the great Raingo. Yes, she ruled him; and he loved it. What remained in his mind, apart from the memory of the delicious weight of her soft body and the scent of her hair on his face, was her extraordinary ready assumption that he would be given a ministry. They were all alike in love, self-convinced that the potentialities of the beloved were boundless.

See that young man walking down Whitehall the next morning--a bright, auspicious morning! Walking not quickly, because of his heart, and because he wished to arrive fresh and cool; but with his shoulders thrown energetically back, and his knee-joints straightened out at every firm step. No sign on his ordinary face that he was not the ordinary successful middle-aged man pretending to himself to be young; the common husband who left his wife at home on Saturdays in order by means of golf to reinforce salts and tonics in the great fight against uric acid. Nevertheless he was a youth. His youthful nostrils sniffed the air eagerly, adventurously, and his grey eyes had a glint of challenge. His brain was a whirlpool lighted by electricity. Excitement was growing in him and engendering defiance. He almost panted to come to grips with the Prime Minister and fate. The fact that through the seething night he had scarcely slept did not apparently affect him--save to heighten his pugnacious self-confidence. He had not felt so creative and so intensely alert since the morning of the day, years earlier, when, after terrible suspense, he had made a million and a quarter in one interview over a deal in ships. All his wits were marshalled and brilliant and straining for the word "Attack."

He did not get into Downing Street without being halted by a policeman, but his demeanour was naturally such as to inspire trust in policemen. Several young men were 1oafing round the door of No.10, mean but made august by tradition. He rang, and while he waited one of the young men said to him in a tone ingratiating and brazen:

"Excuse me, sir, but are you Mr. Raingo?"

"Raingo! Raingo? Do I look like him?"

" Sorry, sir."

"Why not, after all?" he asked himself. He turned, smiling quizzically at the loafers as the door opened, and said aloud: "Well, perhaps I am, but I won't answer for it."

All the young men laughed, and four press-cameras clicked.

He entered No. 10 for the first time, he who had sat on the Government benches for eight years and who had known the Prime Minister from youth up.

"This clock right?" he asked the butler in the hall.

"Yes, sir."

The clock showed twenty-eight minutes past nine.

"The clocks here have to be right, sir," the butler added with pride and a respectful humour, on the stairs.

"Well," said Sam. "There's nothing like discipline for clocks and dogs."

"No, sir."

He was introduced into a nondescript room set with a youngish plump lady and a breakfast table laid for three.

"Mr. Raingo," said the butler to the lady.

"Miss Packer?" said Raingo interrogatively, when she had greeted him and they had shaken hands.

She nodded twice, smiling with a contented, contemplative expression, as though saying: "Yes, I am that celebrated woman, whom everybody governmental, of any country, has to deal with if he wants to deal with the Prime Minister. I am the Prime Minister's personal secretary; and Mr. Poppleham, M.P., is my washpot. And there are some who say that I rule the Empire."

She was austerely dressed in dark blue, with thin borders of white at the neck and wrists. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and the soft, downy complexion of a peach. But she was older than her marvellous complexion; she might have been thirty four or five; the realism of a birth certificate might have run to thirty-six. She was bright as the morning, efficiently and continuously bright, bright when she spoke and bright when she listened or reflected. And her glance and carriage indicated that, unlike many personal secretaries dedicated to the comfort and convenience of great men, she was not suffering from suppressed desires. She had the air of being familiar with every variety of human character and experience and knowledge, and of mysteriously hiding a thousand secrets and a thousand personal opinions. Her brightness was a veil, a camouflage. Withal, the splendid role of efficiency and brightness seemed to lie a little heavy upon her.

"Now, Mr. Raingo, do you take tea or coffee? It saves time, I find, if one can get these important things settled before the Prime Minister comes in."

Raingo laughed to himself at the histrionics of the affair. He said that he took tea, with milk and no sugar.

"Milk first? Or tea first? . . . Porridge? Fish? Bacon?" She was at the sideboard, conducting it with spoons and forks as with a baton.

Raingo would have a little fish--only a little.

"You aren't a great breakfast-eater?"

"No."

"The Prime Minister will be disappointed at you not joining him in porridge."

"It may suit him," Raingo shrugged his shoulders, moving restlessly on the hearthrug, and regarding this as the first blow in the affray. "Let him be disappointed!" he thought.

As a fact he had already eaten a plenteous breakfast at the service flat. He wanted no stomachic preoccupations while breakfasting with Apollyon.

Miss Packer was pouring out tea for herself when Andrew Clyth came into the room.

"Prime Minister," Raingo greeted him, rising.

The Prime Minister returned the greeting:

"How do, Sam?" he opened, with extreme geniality.

"You're beginning this wrong," thought Raingo, and replied casually:

"How do, Andy?"

Miss Packer maintained admirably her self-control.

There he was, the offspring of the Scotch father and the Irish mother; the boy upon whose front teeth Sam had once bruised his knuckles in Eccles, Manchester; the man who for years had treated him with such curt, negligent, offensive condescension at their chance meetings in and about the House! Why had Andy always, since their rise in the world, behaved so to him? Partly from envy and partly from fear, Sam had long ago decided. Envy of his riches! Andy was poor. He had no profession, and about a thousand a year or less from the estate of his cotton-broking father. He was dependent upon office for a livelihood--humiliating situation for a politician. How he must hate the legend of Sam's vast income, thought Sam gleefully! . . . And fear lest Sam, the other mightiness of Eccles, might rival and even surpass him in renown. That fear must now be over, for Andy, intimidating foreign statesmen, bullying War Offices, and shoving his finger into every pie of strategy and diplomacy and industry, he was at the head of the greatest empire and directing the greatest empire and directing the greatest war in earth's history. He could rise no higher. He could only fall. And there he was--Andy!--in a black velvet jacket that wonderfully set off his smooth grey hair, silver-tongued, urbane, jolly, charming, persuasive, with a background of command, of power; completely equal to the part he had to play.

And Sam could see clearly in him the Eccles schoolboy, the same lanky, scraggy, slim figure, the same big ears, the same cruel teeth that displayed themselves formidably when he laughed or smiled, the same darting yellowish eyes, the same covert glance, continually inquiring as it were apprehensively what sort of impression he was making on his company. And he wanted something from Sam that only Sam could give! And it would be something considerable, for Sam was the sole guest. Sam was having a Downing Street breakfast all to himself.

They sat down immediately. Miss Packer pushed away the brass tea-tray a little, to make room for her plate of porridge. The battle was joined. Sam was alive again, after years of coma. The blood seemed to tingle in his veins.

"Well, Sam, how's things? You look pretty fit."

Andrew Clyth seemed to have decided that the years should roll back to their boyhood. He dropped easily, and even with exaggeration, into the full accent of the past--Lancashire grafted on to his father's Lowland Scotch: an accent which the political world of London had ameliorated but never cured.

"I'm all right, lad. So are you by the look of ye."

"I suppose I am, considering. But I woke up in the middle of the night, Miss Packer."

"I'm sorry to hear that, sir."

"I must have been awake at least five minutes. A glass and a half instead of a glass, Sam. Claret, that was it. Shows how sensitive the machine is, doesn't it? You know I never wake up, and I always have to be called. You sleep well?"

"Very well," lied Sam.

"That's good. What I say is, the first duty of a statesman is to sleep well. Look at Napoleon. Gladstone. My wife says I'm the greatest sleeper she ever knew. But I'm not what I call the perfect expert in sleep, because I can't sleep in the daytime."

"Oh, sir!" Miss Packer protested against this belittlement.

"What?"

"Have you forgotten last week but one already?"

"Oh, yes, of course. I oughtn't to forget one of my finest achievements." His eyes twinkled at Sam. "You know we've had one or two lively nights round this way lately. Seemed to be touch and go once or twice with the old B.E. Well, I went to bed at seven one morning and gave orders I wasn't to be awakened. Cabinet meeting at eleven. They postponed it till the afternoon. And it didn't happen in the afternoon either. I woke at eight in the evening, much to the relief of the surrounding population. I went to bed again at twelve-thirty and had quite a good night. It's the only way. The only way. Bacon please."

Miss Packer, smiling proudly at Sam, as if to say "What a man!" went to the sideboard with the sleeper's porridge-plate in her hand.

"Tell me," said Sam, showing no enthusiasm whatever for the unique feat of sleeping, "how do ye do for beds, you prime ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer that have to live in these furnished houses? Do you bring your own, or are you satisfied with the mattresses of Gladstone and Salisbury?"

"Dashed if I know! I could sleep on a rail," Andy laughed heartily.

"Do you like it?"

"Like what?"

"This living in other people's houses. Same as a Wesleyan itinerant minister, eh? Change every three years." And Sam laughed.

But the Prime Minister grinned coldly, disclosing even more of his teeth than when he laughed. He had a passion for the Scottish Presbyterian Church and looked askance at any bantering at any sect that, like the Scottish Presbyterian, differed from the Church of England. In England he was a staunch nonconformist. Awaiting his bacon, he abruptly shifted without apology to another topic.

"Seen the communiqués this morning, Sam?"

Sam nodded shortly.

"Dull, eh? I've tried to get some colour into 'em, but those fellows at G.H.Q. don't seem to know what you're talking about if you mention colour."

"I don't believe in colour in official reports," said Sam stiffly, resolute to repay Andrew for the recent snub.

"No?" Andrew exclaimed charmingly, winningly, gratefully, as though Sam had opened up to him a new vista of ideas.

"No. Colour's a snare. Look at yesterday's paper. I reckon the fellow was trying to give you a bit of colour when he mentioned those hundred prisoners."

"A hundred and forty in all."

"Well, a hundred and forty. That's worse. And then he brought in a few more in his afternoon screed."

"And why not?" Andrew's tone was the naïve tone of asking for information.

"Why not? When the Boche has just been taking tens of thousands of ours. And we have to mention a paltry hundred or so! Makes the thing ridiculous in the eyes of every Englishman who reads it. I don't think those G.H.Q. fellows have the faintest notion what an Englishman is!"

"You're right, Sam. You're right." The Prime Minister yielded the point with grace, with admiration.

Sam momentarily softened towards him. A fair-minded chap, after all, open to conviction! Andy had evidently learnt a bit since Eccles. Never, at Eccles, would he have said, either to Sam or to anybody else who had contradicted him, "You're right." Then Sam hardened again, relentless. Andy was not going to come the Prime Minister over him. Besides, he had often heard of Andy's damnable wizardry of demeanour and tone when he was after something. To look at the chap now one would think from his confidential, intimate, benevolent air that he and Sammy had been as thick as thieves all their lives, and that Sammy had no greater admirer than Andy. Was the chap such a simpleton as to believe that he, Sam, had forgotten all those sterile years in the House? No! He could not be such a simpleton. He was merely relying upon the average weakness of human nature. He merely did not know his Sammy.

And yet, in that very moment, Sam felt naïvely proud of being thus situated with the illustrious and powerful Prime Minister, and of Miss Packer's imperfectly hidden uneasiness as she saw her Titan so audaciously and grimly withstood.

He went on to defend the writer of the communiqués, who had to try to please everyone, and whose task was complicated by indirect influences from London, such as Andy's.

Impossible that the communiqués should ever be satisfactory to common sense, that they should ever be other than psychologically stupid. It was part of the comprehensive stupidity of the military mind.

"What d'ye think of our propaganda, Sam?" Andy stopped him suddenly, and pushed his cup along the cloth for more tea.

A warning bell sounded in Sam's brain. The breakfast-table was a collection of remains; the interview was maturing; the crisis was approaching; drama was at hand.

"I don't know anything about it," said Sam carelessly, to conceal his excitement. The thought of Delphine shot through his brain. Women! Their devilish intuitions! No! It couldn't be a ministry; it could only be a demand for help in some special channel.

"Yes, you do. You know what everyone knows. You have international interests. You've got material for judgment, and you can judge."

"What particular propaganda?"

"Well, say in the United States."

"Well, it's obvious what's wrong there. You're directing it all from the Atlantic coast. You're giving the same stuff to the Middle West and California as you're giving to New York. No sense to it. There are three different mentalities, outlooks, whatever you like to call it, in the States, and what suits one may be absolute poison to the others. If there must be a central direction it ought to be in Chicago."

The Prime Minister tapped his teeth.

"Something in that."

Said Miss Packer in her fluting voice:

"You haven't forgotten, sir, that you yourself said much the same thing last year?"

"Did I? Where?"

"To the deputation that you sent over to inquire, just before it started."

"Well, I had forgotten. Are you sure?"

"Quite, sir."

"Anyhow if I did, I'm not the only person who forgot. Because nothing's been done." Again the Prime Minister laughed heartily, as at a joke against himself.

Miss Packer rose and put cigars and cigarettes on the table. Sam negligently took a cigar. Andy also.

"If I may be excused, sir--"

"What time's that munitions affair fixed for?"

"Ten-thirty, sir."

Miss Packer departed, without a glance at Sam. Why had she been present? There had been no trace of secretarial apparatus anywhere. Nor had she received any instructions. Andy must have given her some secret sign to leave.

The two men lighted their cigars, from the same match.

"And France?"

"Well," said Sam. "I'm only a business man. What do you want me to tell you about your propaganda in France--especially as I don't know a thing."

"Go on, Sam. Go on. I can see you've got an idea. Out with it."

"Even if I had got an idea, it would be no use to your people."

"Why not?"

"Because all these mushroom ministries of yours are just as sodden with the beautiful British Civil Service tradition as the Foreign Office itself. There isn't a big daily paper in Paris that can't be bought, somehow--I've proved that more than once in my little flotations--but you're too damned gentlemanly to buy 'em. Quite as cheap in the end, much simpler, and much quicker."

"Quite. Just so. But is it so simple as all that?"

"No!" said Sam, almost savagely. "It isn't. I realize that well enough, and you know I realize it. But the attitude's all wrong and wants altering--that's what I say. Look at the results up to date. The business of your propaganda in France is to make us popular in France. Are we popular in France? Why, we're more popular in Germany than in France. If you spent a paltry half-million in direct bribery you'd do wonders--especially if besides that you hired a gang to do to one or two of their leading Anglophobe journalists what the French did themselves to Jaures."

"Sam," said the Prime Minister, smiling, "I see you've got the hang of the thing--as usual. Supposing I gave you half a million to play with, would you guarantee results?"

"You wouldn't give it to me to play with, for a start. Immediately I began to play with it I should have the Ministry of Records against me in a body, and not only them but the Treasury, and not only them but the entire Cabinet. But I admit it wouldn't be simple even if you all agreed. Still, there's a lot in what I say. The principle's right, anyhow." Sam gazed at his cigar, which he was smoking with the greatest care, in order to prove to himself, and to everybody who cared to look, that he was in calm possession of all his wits. Andy's cigar, he noticed with satisfaction, was in process of being masticated.

The Prime Minister answered:

"The principle's right. And I was right."

"What do you mean, you were right?"

"It's like this, my son. The Portfolio of Records is vacant--you know that. As you are aware the name is only a camouflage." Sam nodded impatiently. "Its sole work is to boost this country all over the world. Now, I know you. You know me. I'll talk straight. I want you to take on this job. I said you were the man for it. I've always considered you one of the finest publicity experts in England. You yourself admit you've had experience of publicity in Paris. You've owned newspapers here. In short, thou art the man, Sammy. And none other. Now!"

As he spoke, an expression of splendidly conferring a tremendous favour grew on the Prime Minister's features. He could not hide it, and had no desire to hide it. Why indeed should he? Was he not, with a single grandiose gesture, raising Sam to a giddy and unhoped-for pinnacle, picking him out of the dust of political failure and setting him on high? A Prime Minister alone could do such a mighty deed. Sam would owe everything to Andy, be in his debt for evermore. The moment was terrific. Andy had to walk about.

In a hundred financial deals, in some of which millions of money and triumph and ruin had hung in the balance for days of protracted and intricate negotiations, Sam had learnt how to wear a mask falsifying all his wishes and emotions. He prepared it and wore it now. The Prime Minister, unsurpassed for force, enterprise, originality of resource, courage and chicane, was not Sam's equal in the manipulation of masks. And Sam had suddenly been visited by a marvellous scheme. In an instant he saw the scheme complete. Triumph exceeding all hopes was his in exchange for the mere acceptance. But he had perceived the chance of doubling the triumph. The gambler in him took charge. He nodded, as if to himself, and put his lips together.

"I was afraid you were going to ask me that," he said sadly, as one who would have liked to confer an immense favour, but was prevented from doing so by circumstances over which he had no control. At high tension he thought of the phrase, "the great game," for the first time in his life fully realizing the truth of it, and feeling in his bowels that the present was a far greater game than any finance. There was no finance in it at all--there was only glory, prestige, power; chiefly power.

"What?" said Andy, obviously nonplussed, and then uneasily suspecting that depths existed in Sam deeper than he had ever guessed.

"I couldn't take it on. I can't." Despair and blank disappointment were in Sam's voice.

"But what's the matter, Sam?" The Prime Minister bent towards Sam, and almost over him; and in his rich, world-renowned voice was a tone of strong, masterful, slightly superior persuasiveness, as of one of the "saved" at a revival meeting of Sam's youth, wrestling with the obstinacy of a sinner whom the devil would not release. "This is a united call from the Cabinet. The King approves. The country needs you. . .We've got our backs to the wall. . . . You can't refuse."

Sam was thrilled by the words. He looked up gravely, appreciatively, reproachfully.

"I see all that. I needn't tell you, Andy, I'm as anxious as anyone to do anything I can to help. I'd jump at the chance."

He no longer thought of the thing as the great game or as any game. At the suggestive magic of Andy's tone he saw the horrors of the Front, the slaughter of youth, the weeping of bereaved homes, the abstract grief of sensitive Delphines, the celebrated menace to civilization. His response to the mood of the Prime Minister was histrionic in origin, yet it convinced his soul and he became for the moment a genuine martyr to circumstance. He felt himself capable of a supreme sacrifice if only the sacrifice were not to be rendered futile.

"Then what is it?"

Sam explained in a few bold, effective words about his heart.

"But damn it, man, lots of us have weak hearts! You can carry on your own affairs. You can surely help to carry on the affairs of the country." The Prime Minister was now enheartening a child, a hypochondriac, mildly reproving a milksop.

"No doctor will give me more than five years--at least no London specialist will. And only that on condition that I avoid all strain. I've been particularly warned against the strain of public speaking." This was an exaggeration of a single remark to the effect that lengthy speechifying in a large hall could have no beneficent influence on a weak heart; but Sam now honestly, if temporarily, believed that he would drop down dead in the middle of any speech.

"But, my dear fellow," the Prime Minister expostulated, using a form of address unknown in Eccles, which he had picked up in converse with members of the real old official class, "But, my dear fellow, there's no question of public speaking. There can't be. Your ministry is practically the same as Secret Service. Curiosity not encouraged. Just a question now and then in the House of Commons."

Sam replied impressively:

"And how am I to get into the House?"

The Prime Minister named an industrial constituency in the north where a vacancy had just occurred.

"No contest," said he. "You won't be opposed--especially at such a crisis. The Government has the right--"

"No contest?" Sam snorted. "Cready would oppose me--you can lay your shirt on it. He swore to. Ever since that Federation shindy in 1913 he's had his knife into me."

"You'd beat him."

"Perhaps I should. But I should have to carry on a regular campaign, and I couldn't stand it." He spoke with feeling as he imagined to himself all that Cready would say that he would have to answer and couldn't answer, effectively. . . . The Cready hecklers! He saw himself a corpse on the platform, or catching pneumonia--with a heart too feeble to withstand it. "It isn't that I'm a bit afraid of the risks. 'Risks,' I say; ought to say 'certainty.' Not a bit afraid--if any good could come out of it. If men have to die in the trenches, I'm ready enough to die on a platform for the same cause." His voice quavered with genuine patriotism.

"I'm sure of it, Sammy," said Andy, with genuine emotional sympathy. . . . The old Eccles grit!

"But it wouldn't help you much if your candidate kicked the bucket under one of Cready's onslaughts. Now would it?"

The Prime Minister took to walking again. His cigar had vanished.

"I'm very sorry," he murmured thoughtfully, and Sam might have supposed that the great man's sympathy was continuing, had he not added: "Upsets my plans."

"Look here," said Sam. "Why are you set on me? There are others."

"First because you're the best man. And second because you're my colour. You see I have to run a coalition, and the balance has been going against me for a year past. I want somebody of my own party." (The great game!) "Yes, I'm sorry. I don't quite know what to do. I'm being quite frank with you."

"There's one thing you could do."

"What's that?"

"No, you couldn't. It wouldn't be worth while."

"What is it?"

"You might shove me into the Lords. No election. A nice homely sort of place! Club! No oratory! Just conversational. But no! I quite see all the objections to that."

This was Sam's first downright lie in the interview. He saw no sort of objection to it. He stood impartially outside himself and judged the tone in which he had offered the grand suggestion. He could find no fault with it. Indeed, the delivery had been perfect. The Prime Minister was looking through the window at the Horse Guards Parade.

"Yes," mused the Prime Minister under his breath, and then turned round abruptly. "Well, Sam," he said, as it were with stoic resignation. "You know best. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry for both of us. And I hope your case is a bittock less desperate than you think it is. Thanks very much for coming . . . . I say, you won't mind giving us some advice, will you? Come to lunch to-morrow at one forty-five. I want you to back me against the Munitions Secretary, Tom Hogarth, you know him of course! I'm sure you will back me. Of course this is absolutely Masonic." He used a tone of candid, trustful intimacy.

The scene was over.

"I've won," said Sam to himself. "A peerage. Without paying a cent for it. No worry. And I can work just as well for the old country. Better! . . . Have I won?" He was uplifted high. Yes, and women were mere dots on the landscape.

Having walked all the way along the Embankment, and then having found an empty taxi, Sam entered his offices in Bucklersbury, E.C. They were on the first-floor of a typical office-building, massive and granitic as to façade, illustrating the eternal, grim solidity of British business, with twilit, narrow stairs and small rooms inside. Every foot of space was quietly busy with various efforts to do business--each separate, self-regarding, and loftily indifferent to the rest. Forty worlds under one roof. Women passed in and out. Women had risen in the City like a flood, and no compartment was watertight against the flood; they had changed the City, in their humility, their devotion, and their disconcerting critical faculty.

At the pavement stood a handcart of the City Clean Towel Company, which had rendered housekeeping wholesale, and deprived towels of individuality, and sweetened the lives of tens of thousands of clerks, bandits, and plutocrats before lunch. No woman who set eyes on the handcarts of the City Clean Towel Company but was outraged by the horrible, insensitive practicalness of men when left to themselves. Fancy not being able to recognize in a towel an old acquaintance! Fancy using a towel and never seeing it again!

There was no name on the outer door of Raingo's offices. No inhabitant of any of the other offices in the building had ever been in them. They constituted one of the mysteries of the building; but by reason of Sam Raingo's legendary fame they were a source of pride to the building. The clerks' outer room was empty. One typewriter was open with a sheet of paper in it. Three others were in their covers, and had been for years. A forlorn room, festering in its own past. The clerks' inner room, seen through a doorway, was also empty, and had been for years.

The door of Swetnam's room opened, and a tall, thin, sad woman of about thirty-five emerged. She was quite new to Sam, doubtless one of Swetnam's enlistments; old Swetnam seldom kept a clerk for long, and lately Sam had been leaving the control of the office more and more to Swetnam.

"Good morning," said Sam bluffly. "Who are you? The new clerk?" She recognized her employer by his demeanour, and started:

"Yes, sir," she answered timidly.

"What name?"

"Blacklow, sir."

"Well, Miss Blacklow--" He stopped. "Or Mrs.?"

"Mrs., sir."

Probably a war-widow. He must not take the risk of inquiring.

"Well, Mrs. Blacklow, I want you to run out and buy all the French newspapers you can lay your hands on, at once."

"French newspapers," she murmured, puzzled, as though she had never till then realized that the French had newspapers like other folks. "Where shall I get them, sir?"

Sam raised his eyebrows, with conscious desire to make an effect.

"How should I know?" he demanded, acting amazement at such a question. Then he smiled. "All I know is I want all the French newspapers to be had in this city, and I want them immediately. The rest is your affair, surely."

He was not brutal nor unkind; he meant only to vitalize and inspire her. She would have to learn in whose office she was, and the sooner the better. But what was the mentality which, having received an order from the supreme giver of orders, could dream of asking how it was to be executed? In similar circumstances would Miss Packer have sought guidance from Andy? He envied Andy his bright, calm, breakfast-dispensing Miss Packer, and the inferiority of Mrs. Blacklow to Miss Packer made him uncomfortably feel inferior to Andy.

He went smartly into his own rather spacious room. Not a letter, not a document, on the huge, clean, neat desk; desk of an absentee employer who was always expected and never expected. He realized that he had been asleep for five years, and indeed near death from inanition. Once those offices had been filled with clerks often working overtime. Then he had retired in disgust from politics, and the retirement had influenced all his financial activities. He had lost, unknown to almost everyone save Swetnam, considerable sums of money, so that his fortune, though very large, was less than the public imagination credited him with. And, what was more grave, he had lost the touch, the flair, for big buyings, big sellings, mergers, monopolies, spectacular flotations. He had lost it through fear, due to shaken self-confidence. He had been miserable at home. His heart had dismayed him. He had suffered from ennui everywhere.

He was on the way to being an invalid, a disappointed man and a failure in life when the war began. The war hid his failure and did nothing to help him morally or physically. He withdrew from nearly all risks, shut his eyes to all opportunities, and transferred the bulk of his resources to trustee securities, especially British war loan. He behaved nobly in the matter of subscriptions to British war loans. The City admired his behaviour; but nobody in the City could induce him to patronize French loans in London. He turned down all Swetnam's clever proposals for making an honest penny out of the necessities of war. He could, for example, have amassed millions by manipulating shipping interests--and did not. He was like a sick man refusing medicine. Clerk after clerk joined the army or was dismissed. Typewriter after typewriter was covered over; chair after chair was deserted and stood empty. And at length only Swetnam and a woman-clerk remained, and even their duties were a routine.

And first Delphine had stirred his coma, and now Andy Clyth had quickened him suddenly into eager life, and he had found out that his mental faculties, though they had been dormant, were as good as ever, better than ever. Marvellous fine fortune had offered itself, and he had shown the initiative, the enterprise, and the energy to exploit it to the full, to double it, to expand it to bursting. He would put the whole of himself into the Ministry of Records, whether as peer or only as commoner. He would work for the country at war as nobody had, worked. His heart could not affright him. He was ravenous for endeavour. He stretched his limbs symbolically. He was buoyant, exultant, and he rang for Swetnam with gusto.

The bell was no sooner rung than answered. Although "Thos" (as he always signed himself) Swetnam had been shut up in his own room, he had known, by magic, of his employer's arrival on the premises. He carried in his hand some cheques for endorsement, some cheques to sign, and a choice selection of letters for perusal all of which must have been ready waiting in case of the advent of Caesar. Sam gave him a sort of Masonic nod, expressive at once of secret ties, comprehension, and friendliness.

"Good morning, sir," said Swetnam, cheerfully responding to the cheerfulness which he instantly read on Sam's face, but speaking as casually as though Sam came thus to the office every morning, and at the same hour.

"Who's this new woman you've got?"

Swetnam furnished some particulars.

"Widow?"

"I can't say, sir."

"Not a war-widow?"

"I really can't say, sir. But I'm afraid she won't do."

"Now why not?"

"Well, sir, I see she's gone out without telling me."

"I sent her out."

"Yes, sir. But you'd have thought she'd have told me, so that I could have my door open and keep an eye on the outer office." Hostility, nascent but already vigorous, was shown. "I can't have the outer office left empty--especially when you're here."

"Thos, either you're very hard to please, or you're a very bad judge of women. You're always changing 'em."

"I don't know so much about that, sir," said Swetnam, with respectful but uncompromising firmness. "But they aren't so easy to get. And since you've been leaving it to me . . ."

He sat down, exercising a privilege made prescriptive by years of custom. The source of Swetnam's authority was his tremendous, absorbing loyalty to the great institution known as Samuel Raingo. He was somewhat older than Sam, and Sam had inherited him from Raingo Senior. Short, stocky, plump, he looked neat and shabby, and had no distinction either of carriage, voice or speech. He was a common little Cockney, who carefully managed most of his h's, mispronounced nearly all his vowels, put in superfluous r's whenever he saw an opening for them, licked his lips, scratched his head, and walked with a marine roll. His reading was confined to The Daily Mail, The Evening News, The Financial Times, and The Weekly Dispatch. He knew most things about the City, and apparently few things about aught else. When, rarely, he went to the theatre, he "liked a good laugh." He had never heard of Thomas Hardy, Shelley, Beethoven, Wagner, Fielding, Dell, nor Reynolds. But he was acquainted with the names of Shaw, Wells, and Dean Inge, and by a sure instinct disliked them all.

He appeared from nowhere at 9.45 a.m. daily, and disappeared into nowhere at any time from 6 to 8 p.m.--1 to 2 on Saturdays. Between these hours his devotion to the institution was complete. During some of them he actually was the institution. There were people who said that the institution owed everything to him. But, though he had certainly from time to time put very fruitful ideas into Sam's head, and chased some very dangerous ideas out of Sam's head, both he and Sam were well aware that this theory was false. He was worth a thousand a year to the institution, and thought himself well paid with four hundred, to which were added the trifling emoluments of a few secretaryships of small limited companies. It would have been absurd to pay a thousand a year to such a shabby, neat, narrow, and undistinguished man as Tom Swetnam. He could not have carried the salary with dignity.

Withal Tom lived a double life. He was the most steady, uxorious male ever born, had been married twice, and kept the second wife and two strings of children--one still lengthening--in a tiny house and garden at Raynes Park. The wife and the two strings of children and the garden were all perfect, and the most successful of their kind. His youngest son had gained eight ounces and a tooth in the same week as his eldest daughter had won a scholarship at Bedford College. His Glaw dee Deejun roses now and then arrived in the City in Tom's buttonhole, and provided occasions for the expression of Sam's benevolent interest concerning the crowded, remote, and invisible background of Tom's Raingo career.

"How am I for ready money?" Sam asked absently while examining Swetnam's little assortment of papers. "Enough for all purposes?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sure?"

Swetnam offered no reply to this casual insult; both of them knew that he never made an unqualified statement without being sure; he might once a year or so be wrong, but he was always sure.

"Sent that money to Clacton for Mrs. Raingo, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir. I had the acknowledgment of it from the Bank this morning."

Sam, not looking up, held out his right hand. Swetnam rose quickly, unscrewed a fountain-pen, and held it towards the hand, which took it and began to sign Sam's name.

"That's the cheque for--"

"All right! All right! Doesn't matter," Sam said, briskly impatient.

There were mornings, and this was one of them, when he would refuse all attention to detail; when he would sign anything at any cost, or say "Yes" or "No" impulsively, or say "I leave it to you"; when he had to feel free, disburdened, in the shortest possible time. But whereas on other mornings his aim was to be fully idle, to-day he was ardent to concentrate his brain on a new and intoxicating task.

"One moment, sir. You're signing the renunciation form. Aren't you going to take up the new shares you're entitled to?" Sam's hand, holding Swetnam's pen, was over a blue document headed: "Rubber Fields Limited. Issue of new ordinary shares."

"No, I'm not. I shall sell my rights. They ought to be worth--let me see, fifteen or sixteen thousand."

"You might make thirty thousand if you take them up and hold them for a year."

"Possibly. But I won't take them up, Thos. I'm off all risks for the present. Sell the rights."

He signed the renunciation as though breaking a chain. His position was logically untenable, but he maintained it. Swetnam, in silence, watched the wilful casting away of the equivalent of nearly forty years' salary, the price of houses and gardens, the starting in life of dozens of children; and such was the force of tradition and habitual servitude that he did not rebel, nor curse even in his heart.

In a few minutes Sam had dealt with everything and handed the papers and the pen back to his employee.

"Show me the list of companies I'm a director of."

"It's in your 'A' drawer, sir."

"Oh!"

Sam unlocked a drawer, and, extracting a paper therefrom, glanced hastily down the catalogue of the eight or ten minor enterprises from which for some reason or other he had not been able to withdraw his semi-active interest. He scarcely troubled to read their names.

"I shall resign from all of them," he said curtly. "Prepare the letters, will you?" Swetnam said not a word, and moved to leave.

"I say," Sam called him back. "I'm going into the Government."

Swetnam's clumsy, veined face showed no change for a moment. His mental processes were slow; he always read everything through twice; and he admired his employer for nothing more than the ability to grasp the elements of a problem in a single flash. Then he smiled, partly from vicarious pride and partly from relief at finding the key to the enigma of Sam's strange mood; after all, Caesar was not developing insanity.

"A minister, sir?"

"A minister. Records. The Prime Minister sent for me. It'll be no secret after to-morrow."

He spoke just as positively as if the affair had been definitely settled. And of course it had been settled. For if Andy should refuse the peerage, Sam could still--and would--give his weak heart on a charger to Andy and offer, out of patriotism and a determination to help the Government at any cost, to accept the perils of a contested election and all other perils whatsoever. His whole attitude, his intentions, his exhilaration assumed that the affair was definitely settled.

It was not Sam's ambition that was to be fulfilled, but Swetnam's. The thick, little, common old man was more exhilarated than Sam himself. To-morrow--the tremendous news in that house at Raynes Park! Swetnam was too happy to live. But Swetnam, in addition to being a worshipper, was a realist. He had the gift of seeing Caesar as Caesar actually was. He worshipped him, while taking account of all his clearly-seen defects and limitations.

"Will there have to be much public speaking, sir?"

Sam was startled and had to recover himself. He knew that Swetnam was not hinting at anxiety for the ministerial heart. The worshipper's concern had to do with Sam's extremely mediocre talent for public speaking. Sam was excellently fluent and effective in conversation; he could be admirable at a directors' meeting; but at a meeting of shareholders he was a quite different man, and a worse. He had sometimes made himself wonderfully ridiculous in public. For he could not stand and talk loud and keep his wits. Swetnam's tone helped Sam to realise clearly for the first time that in trying for a peerage he had been thinking at least as much of this disability as of his heart.

"There will not," Sam snapped bravely, and with finality.

But he was disturbed and temporarily thrown down from his self-complacency. He had a spasm of alarm.

"Oh! It's you!" said Swetnam as he opened the door to leave the presence. Mrs. Blacklow was just coming in. Swetnam paused, as if to take charge of the woman himself.

"That'll be all, thank you, Mr. Swetnam," Sam said. He was not going to have this taking charge of anybody or anything in his room.

"Thank you, sir." Thos departed with a grand dignity intended to overpower his enemy the clerk, who, however, through negligence or nervousness missed it all.

"Well?" Sam began.

The woman's shabbily-gloved hands were empty.

"I thought of going to Dax's, sir," she said in her weak, uninteresting voice, and then stopped; she had evidently been hurrying and was a little out of breath.

"Well, Dax's wasn't a bad scheme. So you went to Dax's. Well, you went to Dax's. And what happened at Dax's?"

He had been ready to show severity at the sight of her empty hands. But her demeanour proved her to be a hopeless case of incompetence, and moreover he had obviously inspired her with fright; so that he was content to banter.

"They hadn't got any French papers. They had Italian and Spanish, but they said no French papers had arrived since the day before yesterday. They had one old one."

"Which was it?"

"I didn't ask, sir."

"Why didn't you? I told you I wanted all the French papers."

"I thought--"

"That's just what you didn't do. Did you try anywhere else?"

"No, sir. I thought as Dax's said that, it wouldn't be any use me--"

"You go and make a fresh start. And remember exactly what I said--'all the French newspapers in this city.'"

She had no capability, no style, no attraction, no energy. Swetnam was right; she would have to seek another situation. Why did such women exist? They weren't even worth being sorry for. He hated her being afraid of him; and yet he liked it.

Instead of going forth and making a fresh start, she sat down on a chair, Swetnam's chair. At this unparalleled breach of office decorum Mr. Raingo really did begin to think that something strange and disastrous had happened to the very structure of society. Never before had a clerk sat in his presence without being asked to do so; he had had women stenographers who even took shorthand-notes while standing.

He did not know how to act for the best. Then he noticed that Mrs. Blacklow had turned pale, and it was suddenly he, not she, who was afraid. He glanced aside uneasily to see if the carafe of water was in its place on the mantelpiece.

"I'm all right," she murmured, reading his thought with disturbing insight. But he poured out some water for her.

The scene between them was now transformed. The structure of society was made whole again. And Mr. Raingo perceived by a revelation that Mrs. Blacklow had charm after all. She had the charm of weakness, of inefficiency, of passivity. She was made not to do, but to be done unto; to receive, and to give nothing in return; for she had not beauty--she had only an appealing, pathetic weakness. And her youthfulness was but relative; a man would have to be twenty years older than herself to regard her as young. She put the glass down on the desk, spilling some of the water on the green leather. She seemed to have blossomed feebly under his ministration; she was taking her place in the world.

"Have you ever been a clerk before?" he asked mildly, in the way of reassuring conversation.

"Oh, yes, sir. Before I got married, I had a lot of situations." He smiled to himself. She was just the sort of clerk who would naturally have a lot of situations, possessing no ability to keep any situation.

"Your husband--where is he?"

"He's all right, sir. He was taken prisoner in 1916."

Mr. Raingo thought of Geoffrey. Geoffrey would be a bond between them.

"My son is a prisoner too--since 1916 too," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Safe, anyway."

"Yes, sir."

"Any children?"

"No, sir. But I'm going to have one." She spoke quite evenly and calmly in her flaccid voice.

"But I thought you said--1916."

She raised her eyes and gazed steadily at him, and his own gaze shifted away from her candour.

Faithless woman! Light woman! Wicked woman! Her husband fights and suffers for his country, and she--Mr. Raingo's reflections, however, did not in the least run on these lines. He was thinking with wonder, and also with soft pleasure, that some man had found her desirable, had courted her, kissed her into surrender. She would surrender simply, from a talent for acquiescence and witlessness, not from passion or carnality.

He was flattered that she had told him. There must be something in his manner, something unconscious and profound that she liked and trusted, and that had triumphed over her fear of him. He had suspected the existence of such a quality before. Never would she have confessed to Swetnam. .

She had a child within her as she sat there in front of him. Millions and millions of expectant mothers on earth, and yet each one was separately miraculous, imposing, confounding, majestic.

"What sort of a father?"

"I only know his name, sir. He was a lodger in the house on ten days' leave. . . . He went back."

"How--er--soon will it be?"

"About six months, sir."

Good God! Only three months ago and she was the prize, the prey, the ravished, the bride, all soft and yielding. And now she was sitting gloved and hatted in front of him. And he had been harrying her about newspapers. . . . And he had never spoken to her in his life before. He realized overwhelmingly the meaning of war, and felt that he was realizing it for the first time. This was the meaning of war. The meaning of war was within her . . . . One man fast in the arid routine of a prison-camp; the other in a trench under fire. She had no home, only a lodging. The child ruthlessly, implacably growing, growing. And at the end of the war she would have to face the released prisoner, with the child. If the child did not die. Another woman, desperate, might kill the child or herself. But Mrs. Blacklow would be incapable of any such deed. She must wish that the war would last for ever. And he, Samuel Raingo, was making the war into politics and intrigue. He was not aghast at his conduct, for he perfectly understood that politics and intrigue are the inevitable accompaniment, as well as in part the cause, of war. But he was deeply affected by the contrast between the two aspects of war, as shown in himself and in her. He became a speechless poet for a few minutes.

"Have you got any money?"

"Only what I earn, sir."

"But you can't stay either here or anywhere else for very long."

"No, sir."

"Well, I think you'd better leave at the end of next month. Give me your address. I'll see you through--so far as money's concerned, I mean." The money would be the tribute of politics to tragedy.

She did not speak; she scarcely wept, but she did weep a little. Then the officious, inquisitive, restless Swetnam poked his nose in at the door. Of course he was wondering what the new clerk might be doing so long in the boss's room, without a notebook. The fellow was as jealous as a woman in love. But Swetnam said:

"Mrs. Raingo is here, sir."

Sam controlled himself. Only two days earlier Adela had said and repeated that nothing would induce her to come to London in the spring. And here she was! Always incalculable, unpredictable! Unless of course you went by the rule that if she had said she would not do a thing she would do it, and vice versa. She had a trick of "turning up" like a terrier. Sam loved to have a clear, definite programme for himself, and to keep to it; and he loved those with whom he was regularly in contact to have a clear, definite programme also, and to keep to it. He wanted always "to know where he was." But he could never know where he was with Adela. No doubt she had been wondering what could be the result of the Prime Minister's telegram, and the casual notion of strolling up to London to find out had occurred to her. He rose from the chair rather violently. He had the sensation of being wrenched violently out of one world into a very different world. Not surprising that he had to control himself and collect his wits

Mrs. Blacklow, leaving, deferentially stood aside for Mrs. Raingo in the doorway--and then vanished. What was the difference between those two women? Adela was nearly as badly dressed and just as inefficient as the clerk, and perhaps just as unreliable. Nor had she more charm than the clerk; he was inclined to think that she had less charm. Yet the difference was enormous; for Adela was active, and she had authority. She was not entitled, by anything she had done, to possess authority, but she had it. He felt her authority. Put her in sacking, with rope for a waistband, and she would still have authority--and look, too, as if she had it.

"Hello, Adela!" he greeted her, and waited for the impact.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"A new clerk."

"Wears gloves, does she, at work?"

Odd remark, and how characteristic! There was no innuendo in it, for Adela was very straightforward; but it disturbed and slightly offended him; it showed an instinctive, hard antipathy to the poor creature. Should he tell her the poor creature's story? Emphatically no! She would not understand, or she would refuse to understand; she would say something dry and odious; she would tarnish the story. He would keep the story strictly to himself; it should be his alone.

Adela came close to him and kissed him. Her kiss had a new quality, faintly emotional. Ah! She was excited about his prospects! The snob in her was anticipating a brilliant rise--for both of them, was awaiting the moment when she would be able to say to her friends with a new pride: "My husband!" He accepted her arrival with forced resignation, but his spirit withdrew from her into the recesses of his being.

"What train did you come by?" he inquired, looking at his watch.

"I motored, dear."

"Oh! I thought your car was out of order."

"I came in yours--I knew you wouldn't mind."

"Who drove you? You surely haven't brought Wrenkin--"

"I drove myself. I'm a much better driver than Wrenkin."

"Good heavens!" He sat down. He was silenced. She was always ramming her own car into gate-posts and trees and things.

"Do you mean to say you drove all through the East End and into the City?"

"Why not? The car's outside now. I thought it might be handy for you if you should happen to want it in London."

The woman was unique. In another moment she would be saying that she had brought the car to London solely in his interests and that he ought to be glad he had such a thoughtful wife! She went on eagerly in her high voice, and her grey eyes for once were looking at him and not through him.

"Oh, Sam, it's about Geoffrey--I had a letter this morning from--"

"Geoffrey!" An absolutely new vista of conjecture opened before him. She was going to be right again, to justify her caprice in some quite unforeseen manner. He even had a feeling of guilt towards her.

"I had a letter from Jim Hylton's sister-in-law--"

"Who's Jim Hylton?" He sharply pulled her up a second time.

"You know Jim Hylton."

"I don't."

"He was taken prisoner with Geoffrey and they've been together."

"Oh, that fellow!"

"Bertha says Jim's escaped and he's just reached London.

"He and Geoffrey escaped together. They separated because it was safer. That's why we haven't been hearing from Geoffrey. So we may expect him any time." She stood over Sam, sparkling with vitality.

"If he's got clear away," said he glumly. He was startled, thrilled, but determined not openly to share his wife's eager excitement.

"I'm sure if Jim Hylton could get clear away Geoffrey would."

What an argument! How like a woman! How like a mother!

"You've never met Hylton. Neither have I." He knew that he was behaving like a curmudgeon and that there was no excuse for such behaviour. But she exasperated him.

"I know I haven't. But I know all about him, dearest." She was unruffled, marvellously nice. Most annoyingly she had set him an example in good manners, but she was always doing that. He scorned her for assuming that what Jim Hylton had done Geoffrey could do. Yet he himself was aware of a secret, deep, illogical conviction to the same effect.

"Better," said he thoughtfully, with a calculated, disingenuous air of solemn warning. "Better if the boy hasn't got away. He'd only be punished then. But if he's got away he'll have to fight again, and you never know what may happen." Cruel! True! But nevertheless very cruel, at such a moment! Horribly brutal!

"Oh, Sam! You oughtn't to talk like that," she remonstrated bravely, throwing back her head with resilient dignity. But she was not dashed. Nothing could lower her expectant joy at the impending sight of her son.

Sam gazed doggedly at blotting-paper.

"Why am I behaving like this?" he reflected. Adela was the mother all afresh, just as she had been long ago when she was desirable, desired. Hanged if she wasn't the wife afresh also. Their old friendly intimacy! He recalled it, but he could not rekindle the spent ashes of it.

"Well, perhaps I oughtn't," he said, relenting a little, in shame.

They talked and arranged a lunch.

"Well, I'm going on to Bertha Hylton's now, but of course I had to tell you first."

"Now do for God's sake take care of yourself in the traffic," he enjoined her as she was leaving.

She savoured his interest in her safety. She was gone. Not a word from her as to the meaning of the Prime Minister's telegram! She had completely forgotten it. And yet in a week she might, through no virtue of her own, be a baroness. How she would gloat over a title!

Sam said to himself, in a sudden whirl of emotion:

"If the kid does get back safe, damned if I don't wangle him out of the active service list and into my Ministry! Damned if I don't! Unless I'm mistaken there are one or two jobs there he could do jolly well."

The next day Miss Packer waylaid Mr. Raingo on the stairs of the Prime Minister's official residence. In appearance, mood, and demeanour she was exactly the same as on the previous morning. She seemed to be immune from all the influences which hourly cause subtle changes in the functioning of the human organism; she was a woman, but above womanhood; and her baffling blandness made an invisible adamantine wall between herself and the world.

"The Prime Minister will see you privately after lunch in my room," said she. "It's along here."

She took him along a corridor, into a small room full of books orderly on shelves and books disorderly on the floor.

"I see," said Sam. "Straight through and first on the right. And am I supposed to slip out and come here on my own?" He added, moved by her uncompromisingly unhumorous nice smile to correct the colloquialism: "Initiative?" You might use such a locution as "on my own" to the Prime Minister, but not to a Miss Packer--at any rate not to a Miss Packer on duty.

"Please."

"And then wait here?"

"Please."

He wanted to say: "And shall you be here to keep me company?" But her inflexible decorum had cowed him. To trifle might be to alienate her, and he had not yet gauged the extent of her power.

"It shall be done," he said, with earnest gravity.

"They are all here," she said. "The Cabinet meeting finished earlier than was expected."

"The hell it did!" he thought coarsely. "I wonder if anything would happen if one fell at her feet in a limousine and offered her enough pearls and a flat in Park Lane. But the Queen of Spain has no legs." The ribald result, no doubt, of mere nervousness on his part.

"Mr. Samuel Raingo," announced his friend the butler at the dining-room door, to reach which he had been ushered through an ante-room and a small drawing-room. Six men, including Andrew Clyth, were standing on or near the hearth-rug, between the fire and the table. They turned to look at him, with the frank curiosity of schoolboys. He knew them all except one.

"Permit me, Prime Minister," said the Earl of Ockleford, tall, white, obese, stately (his was the only frock-coat in the room), putting an ash-tray neatly under the perilous long ash of Andy's cigarette.

This tiny incident saved Sam from a mistake of deportment. He had meant boldly to address Andy as "Andy." But he now perceived in an instant that, whatever Andy might be at breakfast, at lunch he was a great personage, one of the greatest in the world, the old sinner!

"Morning, Prime Minister," he began deferentially.

Andy, tossing a gracious nod of thanks to the Earl, stepped forward and greeted him with warm, urbane patronage.

"You know everybody here, I expect." And looking round: "You all know my old friend Sam Raingo."

Sam shook hands with Tom Hogarth, in a lounge suit, short, bald, blond, and challenging, Minister of Munitions; Hasper Clews in a morning-coat, tall, dark, iron-grey, melancholy, shy, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sid Jenkin, black, broad, shabby, canny, easily genial, Labour M.P. and Minister without Portfolio; and the magnificent Lord Ockleford, Lord President of the Council. The sixth man, to whom Sam had to be presented, was a Colonial Premier in military uniform, whose greeting was as punctilious as the Earl's and as genial as Sid Jenkin's.

Raingo was nervous; and, after the manner of nervous people at a party in a strange environment, he seemed to examine the sombre ill-lit room with interest and in detail, though he was not interested in it at all and scarcely saw what he was looking at. He noticed vaguely the collection of portraits, sadly mediocre, of former Prime Ministers, on the walls, and a view of a courtyard through the windows, and no more. The party sat down to meat. The Prime Minister took one end of the huge table, without giving directions to his guests. Sid Jenkin planted himself at the other end of the table, opposite the Prime Minister. Hogarth, the Munitions Minister, and gloomy Clews, the Chancellor, sat on the side to the right of the Prime Minister, and the Colonial Premier and the fine old Earl on the side to the left. One chair remained between Sid Jenkin and the Earl, and Sam modestly slipped into it.

The service was terribly slow. Sam felt his nervousness increasing. He knew that he was there to be inspected, vetted, and. probably put through his paces. Or was it really, after all, that they only wanted his advice, as Andy had said? In any case he must bear himself in a style to demonstrate that he was an eminently suitable candidate for the red benches of the House of Lords. The chat drooped, and Sam suddenly comprehended that if he was nervous, his presence was making the others nervous. This conclusion stiffened him and gave him heart.

"What a pack!" he thought, knowing that the derogatory appellation was unfair to some of them. "What a pack!"

He remembered each occasion in the past when two or three of them, by the arrogance of curt nods and supercilious greetings, had made him humiliatingly feel the great gulf that separates a minister, any minister, from a private member of the House. Quite possibly that very morning they had been discussing him at length, freely, cruelly, with jibes. Let them. There was not one among them who did not envy him his wealth, reckoning it doubtless three times greater than it in fact was. (But this was a common thought with him, and a continual source of satisfaction and inspiration.)

And as for the peerage, well, he admitted that a peerage would give him immense pleasure. And why not? The prestige of lordship was still enormous. Here and there one among the pack would disdainfully smile at the notion of taking a peerage: such as Andy and Tom Hogarth: but only because it would mean banishment from the Commons, where careers lay. In old age, however, when the Commons had got beyond their dwindling powers to dominate it, they would accept a peerage fast enough, and a peerage of the higher orders, on some self-justifying political pretext or other. They always did. He knew that he was again being unfair to some of them. But all judgments with a tang in them have to be a little unfair. He caught Andy's eye.

"Prime Minister," he said clearly, inspired, and contradicting the deference of tone with an Eccles glance, "is there anybody among our friends who has specialized about prisoners?"

"Jenkin," Tom Hogarth flashed out, his face a large smile. "He's done time."

A general hearty laugh.

"And proud of it, Tommy! And 'ere I'm sitting at this table at No. 10 to-day!"

Nothing pleased Sid Jenkin better than a reference to the weeks he had spent in prison, in his fiery youth, apropos of some petty defiance of the police in a strike.

"I meant prisoners-of-war," Sam explained.

"That'll still be Jenkin," said the Prime Minister. "Jenkin is our leading authority on the Swiss organization for the welfare of prisoners-of-war."

"Yes, I'm your man," Sid agreed invitingly.

"I've a son who's escaped, and I'm very anxious to find out what's happened to him," Sam said gravely. "I haven't heard. He may have been caught, but I know he got clear away." Sam of course was genuinely anxious about Geoffrey's fate, but at the same time he joyously realized that he had made good capital politically out of Geoffrey.

The table appeared interested, impressed, and sympathetic to the father and appreciative of the son. To the glamour of the father's riches had been added the distinction of being the only man there with a son who had had the grit and the resource to escape out of the hands of the Boche. Also the whole table was delivered from its nervous constraint.

"Good for your boy!" cried Tom Hogarth, smacking the cloth. "No, I'll have beer," he said loudly to the butler.

Sid Jenkin at once assumed possession of Sam in a private duologue, wrote down details of regiment, dates, places, swore he would set the cable to work that afternoon, stated again and again that he 'ad the entire organization at 'is finger-ends; was exceedingly amiable.

(" I am going to be a minister and a peer," thought Sam.)

With his right ear Sam heard Tom Hogarth, at the distant other end of the table, describing at length to the Prime Minister and the Colonial Premier and whoever might care to listen how in 1899 he too had been a prisoner-of-war and how he too had escaped; he was excited and dramatic, and throughout the tale he ate plenteously in big gulps and quaffed beer.

Then the Colonial Premier quietly reminded people that he too in the same year 1899 had been taken prisoner and had escaped--from the British. He spoke very smoothly, very benevolently, understating and using no gestures. Tom Hogarth challenged him, across the attentive, enigmatic Prime Minister, on a point of the treatment of prisoners-of-war in those barbaric days. Tom grew more strenuous; the Colonial Premier grew more gentle. The argument went on and on.

"I'll lay you a hundred guineas, sir," cried Tom. The "sir" was addressed to the general in the Colonial Premier.

"Tom," laughed the Prime Minister, "you know that the general never bets--neither do I. We leave gambling to the upper and lower classes, don't we, Christian?"

"But, really, sir . . . Ockleford shall decide. He knows everything, so he must know this."

"What precisely is the question, my dear boy?" asked the Earl, who was Tom's father's cousin.

By this time Sid Jenkin had obtained all his particulars and made all his promises, and the topic of Geoffrey was closed.

"Wonderful 'ow Tommy hates Colonials," murmured Sid very low. "'E's given our friend the name of 'stroking Jesus.'"

"Why?" asked Sam. And then: "I see."

The general, speaking to the Earl, was tenderly stroking the Earl's arm.

"Jealousy," continued Sid. "That's what it is. Jealousy. And Tom's got no use either for any of us ministers without portfolios. He told me so last night when 'e'd had a drop. 'Sid,' 'e said, 'all you fellows'--there's three of us, Hempton ain't 'ere-'ye're only passengers, dust in the eyes of the public,' 'e says. 'I don't mind you,' 'e says and 'e doesn't. 'But we don't need any of those backwoods dagos to teach us 'ow to run a war,' 'e says. But what rings the bell with me--it isn't as I'm in the War Cabinet, though that's something as'll be remembered in the history of the Labour movement; it's that the Secretary for War isn't, and the First Lord of the Admiralty isn't, in the War Cabinet." He laughed inaudibly and winked. "Of course they says there's six of us in the War Cabinet; but really there's only two, Tommy Hogarth and the P.M. They're as jealous of one another as two cornet players in a brass band, but the P.M. can't do without Tommy. Some say," he went on murmuring into Sam's ear. "Some say if there's two members of the War Cabinet, it isn't Andrew Clyth and Tom Hogarth--it's Andrew Clyth and Andrew Clyth." He grinned. "But that isn't so. Tom's on the map all right."

"Well, at any rate, you all seem very cheerful together," Sam breathed, thinking of Flanders, Amiens, the Channel coast, German prison camps, and adulterous expectant mothers.

"Well, things are better. It's not generally known yet, but things are better. We know that Foch is satisfied. At least 'e isn't satisfied yet, but 'e expects to be in a day or two. All this man-power business--the Bill and so on--gallery stuff! We started it in a panic and now we've got to go on with it. Biggest piece of political camouflage ever attempted, the Man-Power Bill is. Still, it'll give the Boche something to think about."

"Quite," Sam concurred; his spirits were much raised; but he was wondering whether to feel flattered by Sid Jenkin's confidences or to condemn Sid for a general chatterer. He knew that Sid always chattered--sometimes in a most misleading manner. Still, it would be a nice thing if you couldn't chatter to a guest of what was practically a confidential meeting of the War Cabinet. . . . On the whole he would defend Sid's reassuring loquacity. He spoke, louder, of the morning bulletin--the Prime Minister was eyeing them. Sid, too, had noticed that suspecting, uneasy glance.

"I fear I must decide against you, my dear boy." Lord Ockleford had delivered judgment, whereat the Colonial Premier bowed his thanks.

A general laugh, in which Hogarth himself was a principal performer; but Hogarth's mirth had something savage in it.

"I suppose cheerfulness is a virtue," said the taciturn and hypochondriacal Hasper Clews in his plaintive, rather quavering tone, full of implications, mild rebuke, and sinister irony.

He was eight years younger than the Prime Minister and looked a couple of years older. Except Sid Jenkin and Hogarth, he was the youngest man present, but his unconscious attitude to the table was that of an uncle to nephews. The table waited for him to continue; he said no more; he had obtained his effect.

Raingo noticed that thereupon everybody, even the Prime Minister, seemed to brace himself, to recall the sense of terrific responsibilities, and to realize the nature of the consequences, personal and general, of failure to do the job set by fate. Each face grew sterner, more authoritative, more intelligent, a worthier mirror of the national reputation of the man behind it. And Sam's mind was suddenly filled with visions of the dazzling, dramatic annals of the careers around him. Clews had risen from the son of a Nonconformist professor of theology in a minor college to be the getter and the dispenser of millions of money per day. Sid Jenkin had worked in a coalmine, fought in sanguinary riots, quelled multitudes of his fellow-men with nothing but oratory for a weapon, and was now the head of his party and a right honourable. The Colonial Premier in his youth had commanded armies in the field against desperate odds, and then made a nation out of defeat. Lord Ockleford had been the vice-regal centre and most splendid figure in Oriental pageants of sovereignty surpassing everything else in Asiatic history. Tom Hogarth had reigned in seven departments of State, fought, written, and fought; he was the most brilliant advocate in the House, and one of the finest polemical and descriptive writers in the country; he had every gift except common sense, and he could rise victorious even from the disasters imposed upon him by an incurable foolishness.

As for Andy, Sam had known him too well in youth ever to judge him impartially in middle-age. He was as great a prizefighter as Hogarth himself, but his method was that of infighting. He mystified Sam, who could not divine how he came to be where he was. A miraculous adroitness, a unique genius for chicane, beneath a nervous and apparently trustful and candid manner! That was what it must be.

Sam considered himself the equal of any of them. He had done wonderful things. But after all he was only a millionaire and a man of business, whereas the others had the incomparable prestige which in Britain attaches to politics alone. In politics he had failed--no doubt chiefly because he could not move multitudes by word of mouth. But now he was going to succeed in politics. Once again he had the feeling of intense exhilaration.

"I don't see much reason for optimism myself," Hasper Clews at last proceeded.

"Great Heavens!" Tom Hogarth burst out. "Haven't we heard this morning that Guatemala is about to declare war on Germany! What do you want?" Pleased with himself, Tom chuckled, looking round the table. But the smiles were restrained.

Clews pecked at the starch-free bread which he always carried with him, and went on in bland gloom:

"Of course I know the generals are optimistic. But so far as I remember the generals always have been optimistic. I should like a few sound civilians to be optimistic."

"There are some who are," Lord Ockleford put in.

"Well, that's the best news I've heard for a long time," said Clews with a grim smile. "The Paris press doesn't strike me as very optimistic, really! . . . My daughter's been teaching me to read French in the evenings."

"Stout fellow!" exclaimed the irrepressible Tom. "I suppose you thought somebody here besides Ockleford ought to know a bit of French, eh?"

"The French press from what I 'ear--" Sid Jenkin began.

"Raingo's got a new way for dealing with the Paris press," said the Prime Minister. "But perhaps we oughtn't to speak of it out lou