Happiness

Dedicated to
Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs. Drury
by
A Grateful Guest

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St. George’s Day
1915

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Part I — Laffham Castle

Chapter I

Miss Smelt made a mental note of the illustrious names of the house party with a certain misgiving. The Bedford villa wherein dwelt the family of Smelt nourished a robust prejudice against titles, and in murmuring “Lord and Lady Rotherhurst, Sir John and Lady Glynde, Lady Theodora Glasford,” she would most undoubtedly expose herself to the accusation of having become a snob, much as one who cried Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah thrice in ordinary decent conversation would arouse condemnation as a canting hypocrite. Her host, Lord Rotherhurst, made a cult of a spirit of equality which all his entrenched prejudices agreed to entertain as an angel unawares, but recognised as a mere passing eccentricity. When James Wilson, the son and partner of the family solicitor, announced his engagement to Dorothy Smelt, the amiable Thomas said to his wife, “Let us have her here for the Hunt Ball,” and Adèle had protested languidly, “Well, really, whom will you expect me to invite next? I don’t suppose she has ever been to a Hunt Ball in her life!” but had finally yielded to his vehement retort, “Oh, she can hop like anything. Bedford hops all right, I expect. I bet you a fiver old James’s girl can beat you at the tango as soon as look at you.”

To the socially timid, an unwonted flight from the villa to the country seat has something positively ogreish about it, and when to this timidity is linked an aggressive British independence crudely developed in a High School and increased by a flimsy belittling criticism of all people of acknowledged importance, the unfortunate visitor is not only shy but hostile. Dorothy’s feet were icy with nervousness and her heart hot with mortification as she sat in the old hall and received her tea from young Lady Rotherhurst’s gracious hands, for it was clear to her piercing gaze that her betrothed was on his best behaviour, and bestowed a degree of painstaking attention upon any remark uttered by his noble host and hostess, or by their stout and formidable aunt, Lady Theodora, that was entirely absent from his free-and-easy manner in the drawing-room of Mrs. Smelt, wife of William Smelt, bank manager of the Bedford Branch of Blankly & Co. Try as she would, Dorothy could not picture him ‘ragging’ in those exalted spheres, and his reputation as the most delightfully audacious of ‘raggers’ was respectfully acknowledged at No. 1 Marlborough Terrace, and greatly cherished by herself. When at length the engaged pair found themselves somewhat isolated from the rest of the party and seated together in the depths of a capacious and venerably shabby leather sofa, Dorothy Smelt gave vent to her spirit of resistance in one carping sentence:

“They don’t make one feel very at home here, I must say.”

“Of course,” said the tactless James, “it is different from what you’ve been used to, but it was awfully nice of them to ask you.”

“They need not have done it if they had not wanted to,” retorted the sorely tried maiden. “It’s a pity Lady Rotherhurst makes up so much; it quite spoils her.”

“All these smart women do; you’ll like her when you get to know her,” was his far from satisfactory reply.

“I like him the best of the lot,” said Miss Smelt, without undue enthusiasm. “There is no side about him.”

“I don’t know,” said James, looking at his burly host with shrewd and affectionate eyes. “He has a pretty big idea of his own importance, has Rotherhurst. It is a pity he takes no interest in anything, for a man with his influence and wealth could do a lot if he chose. He is lazy, like Lady Glynde. Can’t be bothered with detail. And his wife is no use as a spur. A good time is all she cares about. It is ten thousand pities that Miss Broxmead was not the eldest son: she would have made us famous before she was done with us; you may bet your life as to that.”

“She is pretty famous as it is,” protested Bedford culture. “I simply love her poems.”

“I have never read them,” announced James, with pride. “She often chaffs me about it. She doesn’t go in for any pose or rot, and she hates people to talk to her about the things she writes.”

“Naturally one would have to be tactful,” said Dorothy, slightly resentful of this warning, “but celebrities must pay the price of being celebrities, and it is silly of them to expect to get off without some of the penalties of greatness.”

“She is not silly,” said Wilson, and into his commonplace voice there came a note of reverence that made his words impressive. “And those who expect to impose penalties upon her greatness find her will no easy one to tax. Freedom is the right of a spirit such as hers. She claims it, and the ordinary person cannot gainsay her. I never met anyone so vivid, or so—so irresistible.”

“She seems to fascinate you all right,” remarked Miss Smelt, very much depressed.

“Wait till she fascinates you too, then you’ll understand,” said James encouragingly.

“Oh, I expect I am too stupid,” murmured his betrothed darkly. “People who get a review a yard long in the Times are beyond me, of course. I quite acknowledge that.”

“Did she get that? When?” he asked eagerly. “I must read it.”

“It was in this morning’s paper,” she replied, “and I can’t see why you want to read the review when you don’t read the poems.”

“I hate poetry, but I like to know what the Press says about her,” replied the unregenerate Briton simply.

And as he spoke Pauline Broxmead arrived, and without effort made that arrival an event to each person assembled in the ancient hall of her fathers.

She was very tall and very slender, crowning the reed-like grace of her girlish height with a small head that was perfectly set upon firm and gallantly held shoulders. A lovely, eager face greeted the world, and won its own welcome. Her hair held golden lights and was many shades fairer than the brown lashes and brows that shadowed the deep brown eyes: the contrast in colouring was akin to the contrast between the brilliant leaves of the copper beech in spring flecked with sunlight, and the rich darkness of a fallen leaf lying in the shade and shine of some autumnal stream. So virginal and cool and sweet she was, and yet there was fire in her: it were as if some pale and fragrant primrose held a flame. To see her suffer were to suffer with her, but those who would pursue her spirit to question it must ascend up into the inhospitable mountains. There were possibilities in her—wife, mother, genius, dare-devil—to make you tremble, and as you quivered for her perhaps you would ask help from her, as was ever the way of her friends. Her speaking voice was fascinating; it expressed her will, her mind, and her heart—a very perfect instrument, and it swayed you like the pipes of Pan. Socially her bent was fastidious: but her own, be it understood, and not the pickings and choosings of any set, however exclusive. There was in her an impulse of adventure—a sword that fits but ill in the scabbard of womanhood. Perhaps mentally she was too prone to try and conquer you; yet she would forsake such an enterprise any day to win your affections. Her personality did not lend itself to description, and she was so intensely alive that she grew into something strange while you held the seed in your hand and prophesied.

She was a creator, and the fact laid heavy hands upon her sex. Very often the joy of her work uplifted her and its glad activity filled her with rapture. Sometimes she rested with the sweet peace that comes after fulfilment, lazy and quiet as a drowsy noon. Again she went in bitter need and search to find expression, the way all void and dark, the pursuit of mental pregnancy a torment. Times were when a mirage mocked her—phantoms of imagination dreaming through her brain but ever eluding capture, not to be tamed into words, harmonies, defined thoughts: visions these, never born as poems. Reactions came when the world ceased to be well lost for a verse, and art seemed but vainglory. She had always a tremendous admiration for labour and for those ingenious works of man’s hands that carved the world: the plough, the spade, the sword. She wrote and signed a cheque in payment with as grave a self-respect and sense of responsibility as when she signed ‘Gerald Gay’ to a poem that blazed or dimmed her renown. Her hate was courteous, and her love . . . ah, there was no telling what her love might be. No simple thing certainly, since, however fast you bound Pauline Broxmead in church, there was nothing in book or bell to bind ‘Gerald Gay,’ whose creations were wholly hers, and very surely their birth knew nothing of wedlock.

Be it understood that this young thing was admired very secretly indeed in her own family. As Pauline she was adored; as a poet she was ignored, when it could be managed without hurting her feelings. For her fame seemed to them an honourable possession, but really a trifle superfluous: coals to Newcastle. Her name was already famous; that great soldier William Broxmead, first Baron Rotherhurst, had dowered it thus, early in the seventeenth century. Her home was famous. Laffham Castle ranked as a show place, not to be forgotten by guest or tenant. And her beauty, recorded by Sargent, was famous for so long as the picture existed.

However, a review in the Times could not in civility be passed over in silence, and Lady Theodora sounded a strong bugle note.

“I had great pleasure in reading the Times this morning, Pauline. I congratulate you. And I like the title of the book so much—A Bird of Paradise.” Lady Theodora was great on titles.

“I should have called it A Lark myself. I prefer ’em,” said Lord Rotherhurst, and promptly gave way to so much chuckling that his family slowly perceived he had made a joke, and, being fondly indulgent to him, joined in his laughter and made a very merry business of it.

“I wonder what it feels like to see a column all about oneself in the paper,” piped Dorothy Smelt—and wondered indignantly as to why it was so difficult to force oneself to speak.

“It feels,” said Pauline, with a pretty manner of being very much interested in Miss Smelt, “as if you had been preached at, patronised, and promoted at the same moment. And,” she added, a little fiercely, “I always feel as if I had been spoken to without an introduction.”

“But you introduced yourself,” protested Adèle. “‘Here I am, Gerald Gay, and this is my card, A Bird of Paradise.’”

“Yes,” said Rotherhurst sagely. “You do ask for trouble, Paul.”

“Oh, well,” murmured the poet, munching cake, “Gerald Gay is my ‘Aunt Sally.’ Let them have a shy; I don’t care.” And thus the topic of her career was dismissed from the conversation, and did not reappear in it again for weeks.

Presently there seemed a friendly understanding that the betrothed pair would enjoy a tête-à-tête, and Wilson was given an opportunity to show his fiancée the picture gallery.

Once inside the long room, enriched by art and the proud care of many prosperous generations, Dorothy Smelt sat down squarely with her back to the pictures and wondered aloud once more.

“I do so wonder who she will marry,” she speculated ungrammatically.

“She ought to make a splendid match,” assented Wilson, with pride.

“Yes,” agreed Dorothy, “but you never know. Girls follow their fancies. I hate the worldly ones. So unnatural.”

“She won’t marry any ordinary man,” said the loyal James.

“God help her, then!” exclaimed Miss Smelt. “No freaks for me, thanks.” And something flattering in her pretty blue eyes made him kiss her at that in a very satisfactory manner.

But it was not only Dorothy Smelt and James Wilson who speculated as to the marriage of Pauline Broxmead. No less a personage than Lady Theodora pronounced an opinion on the subject to her nephew’s wife.

“Adèle,” she said weightily. “It is time Pauline married.”

“I don’t think there is anybody,” said Lady Rotherhurst vaguely, and with a faint note of complaint in her voice. “I have not noticed anything.”

“Very probably not,” snapped Lady Theodora, “but there ought to be somebody. I shall speak to Charlotte.”

“Oh, she won’t do anything,” said Lady Rotherhurst, as one who is resigned to a mother-in-law’s failings. “I don’t think she would mind if Pauline never married.”

“Pauline would mind—in the end,” Lady Theodora said darkly. “I know no young man myself, but many of my friends have sons. I must see what I can do.”

“Pauline meets heaps of young men,” said her sister-in-law.

“Which sounds like rubbish,” remarked the elderly tyrant severely.

“They might be,” retorted the other, with vivacity, “for all the interest Pauline takes in them, except to analyse them and dissect them.”

Lady Theodora rose. “If Pauline does not marry, she will lack balance. She is a clever and beautiful young woman, and she needs a man to guide her. I consider that it is our duty to throw her with someone suitable.”

“Everyone is so poor nowadays,” complained Lady Rotherhurst, “and Pauline would be miserable on tuppence a year.”

“I should not consider a tuppeny young man suitable,” replied Pauline’s aunt, with a grim smile.

Nor was it only the ladies of the family who would have Pauline a bride. Her brother Thomas, when plagued to give an opinion, expressed himself thus to his wife and aunt:

“Paul marry? Of course she will. Take to it like a duck to water, you’ll see. As for a duke, I’m all with you there, Aunt Theo. If a duke is a good fellow, I had as soon see him Paul’s husband as anybody else. As soon, and sooner. Oh, you were speaking figuratively? Well, that’s beyond me. She is not going to marry figuratively, you know. Marriage by proxy and all that has gone out—went out, in fact, centuries ago.”

“Do talk seriously,” fretted his wife.

“My dear girl!” He stared at her in all innocence.

“I am talking seriously.”

“But Aunt Theo means—don’t you, Aunt Theo?—that you and I are not doing enough; that we should invite suitable people to meet Pauline.”

“My dear Thomas,” said Lady Theodora cheerfully, “you have the means to entertain whom you will. You can throw desirable alliances in Pauline’s way. On the other hand, your mother seems perfectly content to let Pauline meet at long intervals the younger sons who, every now and then, return to their fathers’ places down there, and to give her no further opportunities at all. There is really nobody in that part of Hampshire that would be interesting as a match. I quite admit that Charlotte has no special excuse for inviting a desirable parti to her house. He cannot be expected to drive with her in her closed motor in the afternoon, or help Pauline make poetry and feed her chickens. Your mother has no shooting or hunting to offer—in fact, nothing except——”

“Pauline herself,” growled Rotherhurst. His aunt, he thought, did not put things tactfully.

“Oh, Tom!” Adèle rebuked him.

“Well?” he demanded, still ruffled. “It is Pauline herself? Just that. The Honourable Pauline Broxmead, aged twenty-three, plus five hundred pounds a year. That’s what Phyllis has, isn’t it? Five hundred?”

“John Glynde is a very rich man,” said Lady Theodora dryly. “Pauline’s five hundred will not go far towards obtaining the scope and opportunity I feel sure she needs, unless her husband is a man of means and position.”

“And,” put in Adèle, with point and vexation, “the men we have asked here for the Hunt Ball are not up to that standard. They are our friends, but Aunt Theo thinks they are not half good enough for Pauline. Freckles is a darling, but he can’t possibly afford to marry in the 100th Huzzars on his allowance; Jimmy Ayres is broke; and though young Goldstein’s awfully popular and, personally, I like him immensely, I suppose you and Aunt Theo would turn up your noses at him!”

“He is a good fellow,” said Rotherhurst easily, “but not quite what one wants as a brother-in-law.”

“That,” declared Adèle, “is Tom all over! He is great on equality, but draws the line at fraternity.”

“I am rejoiced,” said Lady Theodora, “that he shows so much good sense.”

Thus, in the cobweb of life, as the winds of opinion blew through it and the glitter of the world turned its delicate meshes to dazzling mazes, were the wings of Pauline’s virginity caught and entangled towards matrimony by all her environment. The thoughts, hopes, ambitions, of those who loved her, all turned to one goal—to set her about life’s business happily married. If she sang her poet’s song, they gravely prescribed wedded love as the safest inspiration for her genius; if she laughed, they were agreed that the wisest balance for a light heart was the responsibilities of married life; if she looked beautiful, they felt that the best mirror was a good husband’s eyes, and the most suitable setting wealth and a great social position. Very certainly the women not only thought these things but felt them. Felt them first in deep, abysmal growths of custom, habit, convention, and in bedrock of Mother Nature’s promptings; and thought them later shrewdly, kindly, in altruistic musings.

If they, projecting imagination’s visions into the future, saw her alone, unwedded to the end, they found her lot sad, disappointing, inadequate. The three Fates threatened her—to be a spinster, to be unhappily married, to be widowed. They watched the possibilities anxiously, as one might watch a young tree in spring lest it be barren of fruit, wrecked by storms, or struck by lightning. But ever they wove in their thoughts for her a fourth fate—to be a happy wife. And having pictured the ‘right’ husband, they fixed their attention upon the gifts he should bring. And all the wild beasts of the snows and jungles, all the treasures of earth and water, were slain and looted for tribute: furs and jewels, and gold and silver, as they are displayed in the shops of Bond Street.

In her great bedroom, by the glowing fire, Pauline Broxmead sat and dreamed. From white foot to sparkling hair she was one sweetly vivid sensation. When frost is intense, the contact of bare hand laid upon bare hand will strike a spark from softest flesh: there is a tingle in the blood and a response in every fibre. Another personality had touched Pauline’s and behold a sensation of ice and fire. The affairs of her world, rank and riches, were cold, dead cold. Her poems were but the tracings of frost upon the windows of her career. She, Pauline, the woman, now felt purest flame, and fight most vivid sprang from this moon fire and illumined the heaven of herself, dark to her till that moment. Soothing as languor, purposeful as activity, was this sense of revelation. She had never before felt purity as a consciousness, felt life as of divine inspiration. A phrase ran through her thoughts, as is the instinct of poets: over and over again it flashed and sparkled among her wordless musings—“The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Its fearful truth awed her: to be so fragile and so vast. And behold now to herself Pauline was new—enchanted, miraculous. Earth’s dust: she was it, came from it, went back to it. To her dust, as to the earth in spring, came a quickener, came an emotion and an impulse common to all creation. And to this spirit—Pauline Broxmead, woman-spirit—came a full, perfect, and sufficient realisation of another spirit—-came Love.

Very far was she that evening from the point of view of those who would arrange a marriage for her and give her opportunities for mutual and prosperous affection: by her own path, to her own goal, her heart had set forth on its difficult way, direct as the rains’ fall, responsive as the tides’ sway.

And so, confident in her girlhood’s eager hopes, sweet as the rose that has known no fading petal, with that phrase, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” making the lilt of song in her rejoicing brain, she recognised that she was in love, and called it happiness.

Chapter II

“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” said Freckles firmly to Miss Smelt. “You tell me when I go wrong, and that will be all right. I’ve not danced this before, but it is now or never. I’ll pick it up as we go along, and we’ll soon knock spots out of the rest.” And as the band rollicked forth a ragtime the youthful Reginald Curtis plunged gaily into the intricacies of the one-step, and by quick athletic skill of eye and limb mastered its difficulties with amazing swiftness. “I have got to become proficient in this art, because my next is with Miss Broxmead,” he informed his breathless partner artlessly. “She is dancing with Wendover now, and he seems a pretty useful performer. Look at them!”

Miss Smelt looked enviously. Pauline had assumed to her narrow nature the position of a standard by which the value of all things was tested: Miss Broxmead did not weave her hair into innumerable curls, she did not wear gloves that had been to the cleaner’s, and it was inconceivable that she should enter a ballroom tormented by a painful uncertainty as to whether she could fill her programme. Hence Dorothy’s curls and Dorothy’s gloves gave her a sense of personal inferiority, and the names which were written down upon her card were a mere list of Pauline’s friends and no tribute to the importance or charm of Miss Smelt. Further, the intimidatingly smart Freckles had used her as a stepping-stone to the desirable goal of a one-step danced correctly with Pauline; and worse—far worse—Miss Smelt knew that Miss Broxmead would never, never, never have accepted a proposal of marriage from James Wilson, and that the said James Wilson would never have dared to have made it.

Pauline, unconscious of envy, danced with all the gaiety of her nature, and then ascended the crowded stairway leading to a balcony which overlooked the ballroom. She was excited, elusive, spellbound, and the man beside her spoke little. Nevertheless was his pursuit open and direct, his demand straightforward and compelling. Under all their commonplace talk they spoke the speech of love. He found her beautiful, fascinating, mysterious. “Here’s a woman to take to church; a woman to go home to; a woman to wonder about,” said Wendover to himself; and a little later, “She would never bore me.” He suffered a great desire to protect her, but felt her a sovereign woman royally crowned. Months after, when he told her this, she nodded softly and murmured, “I know. A ‘For Mary Queen of Scots’ feeling. How lovely!” They recognised each other’s thoughts and emotions in a flash—those two, then and always. Sometimes as with vast clouds that meet the impact struck thunder. Telepathy linked them close and agitated.

“She is full of wire,” he thought, looking at the slender form, all vitality from the swift foot to the shining hair. “One could transmit anything. But she would still be herself.”

Pauline had looked at him with interest the first time she met him, and found him altogether splendid. A powerfully built man he yet gave the impression of great activity, and there was an air of pride and sternness in his face which lent character to its correct features. He was fair almost to a fault, but the wind and sun had tanned and lined him, and his blue eyes held a flash. There was nothing mild about him, and little that was merely jolly, but there was discipline and strong will. Not that he was a solemn fellow: far from it. There was gaiety in his keen grip on life: he was an enthusiast who yet knew toleration. He carved his own road, but he carved it to the horizon. There was one great quality in him, and Rudyard Kipling, addressing him, would have defined it thus: “All men count with you, and none too much.”

She, in her white velvet and pearls, touched shoulders with him as they leant over the balcony and watched the maze of figures below dancing. His eye caught Dorothy Smelt looking up at him.

“Miss Smelt is a minx,” he said, with a short laugh.

“What makes you think so?” asked Pauline. Her thoughts asked, “Why do you think of her at all?”

“She looks it,” he replied. Obviously it thoroughly amused him to encounter a feminine minx: his eyes twinkled, and his face was young and careless. “Very tiresome as a wife: mischief on a small scale; petty crime, and the lady flattering herself she is having the devil of a time, too. I could stand a woman I might wish to murder, but not a woman I might wish to snub.”

Oh! a very thrilling affair this talk of a wife. “And how would the woman in danger of being murdered stand you?” Pauline laughed.

There was something very attractive in the sincerity of his reply. “Oh, well, I suppose I always hope that my wife will make the best of a bad job.” No conceit here, most certainly.

Presently he asked a question. “Does a poet want a poetical fellow? Someone who could write, and express himself poetically? I am no good at that.”

Pauline turned, tall and gallant, to face him. She was no shy mouse of a thing. Gravely, a very gracious lady, she replied, “All that a poet needs is someone who inspires her.”

“Just as I want someone to fight for?” He looked his love.

“But you have England, always.”

“Yes. Oh, rather,” he nodded; “but an Englishwoman is a very special embodiment of England to her husband, I should think.”

They had fenced too long. “My dance, Miss Broxmead,” announced the inexorable Freckles.

Her fingers on Reginald’s arm, she still turned to Captain Wendover. “Would you care to spend the week-end with us at Laffham Castle?”

“Thank you very much. I should like to immensely.” He accepted the invitation promptly.

Pauline caught sight of her sister-in-law and made straight towards her, heedless of Curtis’s protests—“I say, you know! This is a one-step and not a game of Indian file”—and murmured into her ear, “Dearest, you know Captain Wendover? I introduced him, and you gave him a dance. I have asked him to Laffham for the week-end. You don’t mind, do you?”

“I wonder if there is anything in it! Does anybody know more about Captain Wendover than that he is in the 117th Huzzars?” Adèle piped to the family; and the family, pricking up ears, determined to know all that could be known immediately.

If Wendover objected to scrutiny, he did not show it. He had a hundred mutual friends, and he discussed them amusingly with his hostess during Saturday afternoon. He and Rotherhurst belonged to the same clubs and had known each other slightly for years. They sat some time together talking over their wine at dinner, and Rotherhurst gave it as his verdict that Wendover was a good fellow, a sound fellow, but a professional soldier. “He is at the Staff College now, and means to stick to his job. Has got the German invasion bee in his bonnet. I don’t know how Paul would like that sort of life. Always on the move, and her husband sweating away to be a General. I hate military women myself, and I don’t picture old Paul in India or Egypt. On the whole, I am not keen.”

But it was Lady Theodora who thoroughly mastered the subject. She sat by the fire, arrayed in silver-grey satin, and conversed with Keith Wendover after dinner, while the rest of the party played auction bridge. The room was vast and stately and very fragrant with flowers. In the neighbourhood of famous Romneys and Gainsboroughs the numerous photographs of Adèle’s friends were unnoticed indiscretions, and among the old brocades the latest fashions in black cushions with chiffon roses were but passing impertinences. Wendover appreciated the dignified room, and enjoyed the old lady as fine company. It would have bored him to talk for a couple of hours with any veteran who lacked fame or special knowledge, but conversation with this shrewd dowager was different. Her sex coloured every word. She looked like a very perfect miniature, with her pale ivory skin, her dark old eyes, her silver hair. And she dearly loved a man. For all that she questioned, she flattered, and she spoke honey to her niece that night.

“It is a great pleasure, my dear, to converse with an able man. I seldom wax enthusiastic, but I should be inclined to prophesy a remarkable career for Captain Wendover—and great opportunities for his wife. I remember his mother very many years ago, when his father was military attaché at St. Petersburg. She was half a Frenchwoman, and very charming. She had a considerable fortune, and I believe the marriage was not entirely happy. She left her money to her children. Captain Wendover has two brothers and a sister, he tells me. An income of four thousand a year is ample for a soldier. Colonel Wendover lives quite near your mother in a rather ugly stone house, if I remember right. But I was not particularly interested at the time. Good-night, my love”—here she put her soft wrinkled cheek against Pauline’s fair face. “Quite a charming man,” she murmured, and withdrew to sleep the sleep of the just.

A highly strung woman is acutely tortured by suspense. When Pauline woke on Sunday, she knew full well that at some moment during the day the spoken declaration of love would spring upon her. She waited for it, thrilled to it, started aside from it. And over and over again her imagination depicted it, endowed it with words, answered it. She had lived through it in a dozen different dramas before she was up and dressed, and so suffered exhaustion. She was like a wireless installation recording dreams for messages; she worked sixty seconds to the minute, yet ever awaited the hour when reality would rush upon her and write her fate.

Breakfast proved an ordeal: sausages and fantasies of the imagination aid but feebly an appetite of the most slender. Adèle was tiresome. She stamped her foot at her face after three-quarters of an hour spent in cultivating a complexion, and descended to the dining-room in a mood to carp at an archangel. Goldstein and Curtis vanished to the smoking-room, Rotherhurst ignored her as a hippopotamus may ignore a mosquito, and Wendover obviously enjoyed her. To see him with the pretty little shrew was to mark him high for his manners. Pauline, finding baked meats and friction a poor dawning for her day of days, was yet won to laughter by his mastery of Adèle’s small feminine tyrannies. He only addressed Pauline once: “Eve and the apple,” he remarked, as he handed her a dish of red pippins.

“You look as if you had something of the old Adam in you,” said his hostess, peevishly personal, but praising the young man with her eyes.

“I have,” he agreed contentedly. “I can work.”

“Work!” she cried, as one who cries “Suicide!”

“Yes, work—I love it,” he affirmed, and was not to be drawn further.

Have you ever played ‘Giants’ as a child? If so, you realise the exquisite excitement of knowing that you may open a door and have your heart flung up to the moon, caught, and dropped back, swift as skies fall. Pauline, of a sudden clutching at peace, went down to the old hall arrayed for church, all brown and rose and sable, and was met with reproaches.

“Not church!” growled an incredulous Freckles. “I say, Rotherhurst, she is going to church.”

Thomas looked up from the pile of illustrated papers that were to distract him during the least entertaining morning of the week, and pronounced an adverse opinion. “Paul,” he said, “you ought to watch yourself; you are becoming a dull woman.”

“Soo! soo! Go for him, Miss Broxmead,” invited Freckles, with gusto.

“Take that back, Tom,” she warned him, “or I will prove you to be wrong.”

“Prove away,” said her stolid brother.

She sat down on the edge of a big table (yes, she knew full well that she had the attention of Wendover from the depth of his arm-chair) and nodded at Rotherhurst in an emphatic way she had, a pretty way too.

“Tom, which, as a building, do you call the more interesting—this house or the old church?”

“This house—with Freckles and me in it,” he replied, seeking an ally.

“Hear! hear!” cried Freckles.

“This house,” said the fair daughter of it, “represents seven generations, a big income, some sporting tastes, and a few political opinions. That parish church holds all the vital records of the countryside since Mary’s reign—births, deaths, marriages, the life of the common people. It is the most human document in all this valley.”

“Sermons in stones,” Rotherhurst grinned. “I prefer that to old Jones’s preaching, anyway: he bores me stiff.”

“Old Jones is priest,” she challenged them all, and Wendover’s glance caught her clear gaze and held it. “I don’t listen to old Jones, but I see behind him all the generations upon generations of priests, since the first worship went up out of the woods of England—the legendary patron saints, the spiritual Apostolic succession. Think of all the vows they’ve heard in that church, the confessions they have listened to, the absolutions they have pronounced, and the dire excommunications. It is not the man, it is the idea of man as priest that interests me—that is not dull!”

“Well, I can’t go to church to make a hobby of Jones,” Rotherhurst said firmly. “You’ll be collecting stamps next and calling it an excitement.”

“It is an odd idea—priesthood. A fine idea. You are right there,” pronounced Wendover unexpectedly, and added again: “World-wide idea, too: curious.”

She spoke eagerly to him now. “Look at old Tom: he loves sport. Look at Freckles; he has travelled in the East——”

“I had to,” put in the subaltern, in self-defence.

“Well, they could get so much of the tale of that—the fierceness of man, the labour of his hands, the way of the world—in their ‘dull church’! Think of the poor hunted men that have panted down these country lanes to sanctuary! And listen to the descriptions of things.” She opened her Prayer Book at random. “Freckles, you know how hot it can be in the plains of the desert. Well, so did David. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ And listen to his prayer: ‘that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.’ Is it not beautiful? Oh, those stifling nights. . . . And, Tom, you like reading about animals—don’t you like this? ‘All the beasts of the valley are Mine and all the cattle upon a thousand hills. If I am hungry, I will not tell thee. . .’ Is not that magnificent? All creation clamouring for food, and that supreme pride and power—‘If I am hungry, I will not tell thee.’” She flipped the Sporting and Dramatic towards him. “The perfect literature you hear in church, Tom, is not dull.”

“The finest thing I know,” said Wendover unexpectedly, “is that bit, ‘Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?’ That came into my head once in a tight corner in Somaliland. Funny how one remembers things. I forget how it goes on.” He was intent to remember. He knew no self-consciousness. “Oh yes—‘Hast thou perceived the breath of the earth? Declare if thou knowest it. . . . By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? . . . Hath the rain a father, or who hath begotten the drops of dew? . . . Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?’ . . . Good word, Orion: it comes in well there.”

“Knocks your poetry into a cocked hat, Paul,” said Rotherhurst faintly. Wendover quoting Scripture positively embarrassed him. “He did it so naturally, too. Rum devil,” he remarked to Curtis later.

But Pauline was half-way to the great golden and brown leather screen that shut off the huge doors from the hall.

“It is you who are dull, Thomas!” she cried, and was gone. All across the windy park her heart was rejoicing—she had found a kindred spirit!

The old grey church was very empty, and the voices of the village youngsters were shrill as starlings. Seated directly under the stone pulpit, Pauline suffered the ancient vicar gladly in that she did not hear a word of his lengthy discourse, for her mind was wrapped in the blissful dreams of youthful love. To her nature, belief in the Deity was a stark necessity; without that faith, roads led no whither, mankind was mere vanity, words and thoughts and deeds were meaningless. In unbelief she found Bedlam, and shrank back with horror. “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen,” held serenity for Pauline, and she drew from her act of worship in dim St. Faith’s a stimulus that sent her out into the January wind and sun filled with sheer joy of life. And behold across the fields Wendover approaching her.

At first chatter entangled them: it was necessary to say something when they met, and the things they would fain have said were still unable to gain freedom in speech. For quite half a mile they were tiresomely trivial, and then, mercifully, they gained silence and a chance to start afresh. Wendover seized it and flung a thunderbolt. “A soldier ought never to marry,” he announced.

Pauline saw, spectre-like, a rival of the mind, and was no fool to ignore it. “There is nothing to be said about that except that the soldier should decide for himself,” she responded proudly.

“Not the woman?” he queried doubtfully.

“Certainly not,” she replied emphatically. “A man should know under what conditions he will work best. No other person can inform him.”

“But,” he argued, “it might be such rotten luck for the woman . . . if she came second. Would it be good enough?”

“‘Hitch your wagon to a star,’” said the dauntless Pauline. “If the man were a splendid soldier, the woman would have married the splendour that was in him.” Ah, how easy the poet in her cast glamour over a steep road!

They walked on in silence again, and still Wendover frowned. “I dare say I am a fool,” he admitted, “but I am really extraordinarily keen about soldiering. I mean that I simply do not think that I could chuck it under any conceivable circumstances.”

“But,” the woman at his side murmured, “is not being keen just the very thing that makes life worth having?”

He looked at her frankly, and spoke as one who still defends a position. “Yes, I think it is. The actual things most of us do are not very exciting, are they? Actions worth recording hardly occur to the ordinary fellow once in a lifetime. I have never done anything that amounts to a row of pins. But you can get a lot of men acting together, with an end in view—simple, if you like, but worth while—and there you have a live thing such as the Army that one cares about tremendously.”

“You are a fortunate man,” she trembled, “to join your enthusiasm to the work of other men for a sufficient purpose . . . that is the kindness of the gods indeed.”

“But I want something else,” Wendover told her strongly. “I want you.”

“Why?” she asked him softly; and the beating of her heart and pulses seemed like the soft breaking of little waves with a great tide flowing up unseen.

“Because you are different from any other woman I have ever met. I wanted you the first moment I first heard you speak. Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she answered simply, and swore a greater allegiance than she knew.

The rest of the day she spent in moments of rapture when to be so sensitively caressed was to gain dignity and charm in her own eyes and be wooed to delicious response and praise of her beloved. It has been very wisely written that “it is a mark of the barbarian to be affronted by the diversities of nature. To him a woman and a foreigner are both wrong because they are unlike himself”; and if the opposite holds good, Wendover proved himself a highly civilised being. For Pauline as woman enchanted him, and as a stranger—since who are such strangers as a man and a maid of three weeks’ acquaintance and conversation made in crowds—filled him with interest. When, for a while, they sat together in Adèle’s grey and white boudoir, softly talking there with the sanction of an acknowledged betrothal, they were wonderfully happy, eager, and peaceful. Pauline’s nature was an expressive one; for her the beauty of love lay in its signs and wonders. The urgency of romance gave her a sense of supreme confidence, as saints greet the call of a vocation. And the poet Gerald Gay drew inspiration from each exquisite experience and adventure of love, so that the creative gift was alert and active in her mind even while she dreamed she had found repose for her soul. To Pauline, as to most of us, to aim at happiness was an instinctive aim, but to reach it with all her being was a task that ever lacked fulfilment: sometimes her mental life, sometimes her spiritual life, sometimes her life of the senses touched it, but never yet the individual trinity.

Being a woman, Pauline knew less of that ingredient of happiness which can be termed satisfaction than men may. Wendover got that in his profession from a dozen sources. To be equipped for war tickles male pride, just as it sets the cock bird preening himself. “My hands to war and my fingers to fight” is a fine note of contentment in the sons of Adam condemned to labour or perish. The fellowship of the Army pleased him—that brother-in-arms comradeship which linked a field force, and that brother-officer relationship which knit a mess, that esprit de corps which made a clan of the regiment. Since companionship was necessary to him, as to all well-balanced men, he preferred it as prescribed by the laws and customs of his military calling. Man is the most mysterious of all mysteries, and he ever seeks the mystic: the soldier, as the sacrificial man, reverences his calling by words and worship, and yet would have you to believe he thinks nothing of it. On the parchment of Wendover’s commission ran the words, “By the Grace of God . . . Defender of the Faith . . . to our trusty and well-beloved Keith Abercrombie Wendover, gentleman. Greeting. We, reposing special trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and good conduct, do by these presents constitute and appoint you to be an officer . . .” and thus dragged into the iron business the whole vast emotion of belief. Though it were hard indeed to define the Grace of God and the Faith that the Sovereign, crowned and anointed in Westminster Abbey, defended, and harder to put your hand on those abstract qualities, loyalty and courage and goodness of conduct, there is clearly more here all through than mere food for powder and shot. Wendover as a youngster had affected to see nothing of man’s ideals dictating man’s words and had a keen consciousness of it all the time. The oath that enlisted the men was lost to mind behind the obvious fact of the pocketed shilling, but on every man-o’-war the vow’d marine, who has sworn by something higher than himself, sleeps between the naval officer and his bluejackets who have pledged themselves by no sacred word. Not all parades are for military instruction. Church parade sets warriors in sanctuary to worship. Arms reversed, muffled drums, the gun carriage and Union Jack for the coffin, the sword and helmet, the fired volley, the Last Post calling for everlasting rest: could there be plainer witness to the tenderness which that most impressive of all phenomena—man—expresses so emphatically and magnificently in his ceremonial at a comrade’s funeral? And at the very moment of this solemn recognition of death come the words of the spirit,—“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the true and blessed hope of the resurrection from the dead,”—with the battalion present to say Amen.

To all this fabric of dreams something in Wendover most certainly said Amen. He felt the earth beneath his feet and saw the stars above him, though he passed no condemnation on those who go by train through life, with their eyes on the Financial Times.

He was not in the least indifferent to women: their views on life, their nature, their appearance, interested him. He found Pauline intensely fascinating, and the way she chose for their lover’s path pleased something more enduring than his senses—his most fastidious pride. For she held their love high as an exalted thing, and all the exquisite refinement of her nature set it about with tender courtesies. When they were together the world was a court, and he was king and she was queen, and you gave no thought to milkmaids. Yet there were visions in her eyes of the great marching forces of vitality. Her maidenhood was an ignorant thing, but the poet in her achieved insight into the vastness of existence; for art is an act of the worship of life—mysterious, symbolical, seeking to create. He had knowledge, and the vivid personality beside him had understanding.

Now you cannot entertain a betrothed couple unawares; be you ever so good-natured, they will plague you. An Irish corpse were more easily ignored by those expectant of a wake than the approaching marriage of Pauline Broxmead and Keith Wendover by the feminine members of her family. The mother of the bride elect had much to say regarding her interview with Colonel Wendover, though to her listeners this momentous conversation appeared to have consisted of vain repetitions, both speakers avowing over and over again their unparalleled astonishment at the news of the engagement, as though an intention to wed were new in the annals of mankind. “What else do people do?” her daughter Phyllis demanded, and proceeded to speak of a number of matters that were of paramount importance in this great affair of marriage. Where was the trousseau to be purchased, and what would Pauline require? Merry, good-natured, supremely smart, Phyllis Glynde took charge of this overpoweringly important matter, and to enter her presence was to find existence a mere excuse for the weaving of fabrics, white chiffons as delicate as the petals of hawthorn in the spring, satins as glossy and vivid as the cups of tulips, silks that were as fine as rose leaves, and cloths more smooth than magnolia blossoms. And Lady Glynde would have naught but what was new: fashion lured her like any will o’ the wisp. Chattering, selecting, spending money as water, she made high revel among the goods and chattels of London’s mart. She was the last word in luxury, in change, in pleasure, and a more pleasing little rogue did not exist.

She liked Wendover at once, and never in this world did she doubt that she might fail to inspire a liking and admiration in every male breast. She was confident as any child of a welcome. The magic of life was simplicity itself to her: you had but to choose the right frock, put it on well, have your hair becomingly arranged, wear good pearls, and you needs must charm, unless your face be frightful. Spells were woven thus, according to Pauline’s sister.

She cuddled up to her big brother-in-law elect like a kitten and spoke her mind. “I am so glad it is you. One never knew whom it might be, with Pauline. You and I are bound to become tremendous pals. You will have to stay with us and hunt, and come up to town for the season to our house. Mine really is lovely. I do so hate a horrid house, don’t you? I have tremendous fun in the season; that is what makes Adèle so jealous. She doesn’t know many people really. She and Tom are what I call neither one thing nor the other: they don’t go in for the gay set, and yet they aren’t really in the intimate circle of what you might term the great people—the Court and all that—though Adèle makes wonderful pretensions of being exclusive and thinking all my friends too wicked for words! I don’t care; I simply enjoy myself, and that is the chief thing, isn’t it?”

“I expect it is for you,” Wendover chuckled. “But what about Glynde?”

“Oh, my nice fat John? I am awfully good to John. I get talked about, but every woman does who has a good time. John and I understand one another perfectly, and he gives me everything I want. Women need things, but lots of men don’t understand that. I think it is such a pity.”

Wendover smiled more broadly than ever. “You’d want too many sugar plums, I expect,” he said.

She gave a little bubble of laughter, and flew off to superintend the unpacking of wedding presents.

It was the bride’s mother and Lady Theodora who supervised the list of wedding guests with care and interest. They showed a curious mixture of respect for the most remote relationship of blood, accurate memory for friends and acquaintances of long standing but infrequent intercourse, sentiment over neighbours and intimate associates, and the most worldly and avaricious discernment as to the wealthy whose gifts should prove of price. With all due courtesy they asked for and accepted a list of the bridegroom’s relatives and friends, and the Dowager Lady Rotherhurst endorsed Lady Theodora’s concise, “Nothing very distinguished here, Charlotte,” with a resigned sigh. “Certainly Pauline is making a quite insignificant match,” she murmured.

James Wilson—employed in the making of settlements most heartily subscribed to this opinion. Neither title nor wealth for his honourable lady—it was preposterous. “I have done my best from the business point of view,” he wrote to his betrothed, “but it is not nearly good enough.”

Money and raiment and wedding guests, a maiden who cared not a jot for these things, so high she ranked the festival of love itself, a man to whom the captive state of betrothal was irksome and who longed to have all things in order and done with and himself back at his work with his wife by his fire, and as the day approached the fastidious pipe of Adèle, “I call it perfectly indecent myself, the publicity of it all. If I were a girl again, I should insist on nobody being present except parents. But to deck her out, and bring everybody one has ever known or heard of to look on, when one thinks what it all means . . . could anything be more indelicate?”

To which her husband, dryly: “It is not a hidden bird’s-nest business: it is a case of lawful wife and all that. You don’t want a hole-and-corner game, with Society peeping. Marriage is an affair of the State. Back ’em up in public. That’s quite sound.”

And when the day dawned Pauline the Bride was backed up by a crowd of some thousands outside St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and by a very splendid company within the church. Her brother whispered, “Take things easy,” at the door, and paced her slowly up the aisle; while the two little pages, Tommy Broxmead and Robin Glynde, carried her train, and all the hundreds of eyes stared at her beauty. No one save old Lady Theodora gave a thought to how meagre was the number of the new generation: only two little boys in the vast nurseries of Lord Rotherhurst and Sir John Glynde, whose ladies looked daintiness and radiance itself, close to the chancel rails, half hidden by the lilies of the annunciation. Never had love matches been so little in favour, or domestic life so little sought after, as in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirteen; but the bridegroom in the King’s uniform turned his strong face to the west and looked at his approaching wife as men look for peace, while the choir sang, as angels may:

“O perfect Life, be Thou their full assurance
Of tender charity and steadfast faith,
Of patient hope, and quiet, brave endurance,
With childlike trust that fears nor pain nor death.”

Chapter III

‘Pheasant Court,’ set among the pines at Camberley, was of commonplace red brick, with a black and white gable or two, and a meandering clematis scrawled around its lower windows. “It has perfect drains, central heating, electric light, and an excellent kitchen range,” wrote Pauline to her Aunt Theodora. “Is not that a terrible description of a house? Its temperament is practical, and mine is not. I have bestowed a rosy chintz upon its drawing-room, and it looks like a Fuller’s chocolate-box. Keith’s smoking den is pleasant, and is filled with his enthusiasms. He works hard in there, and does not invite invasions, whereas it is my duty to amuse myself in the drawing-room and receive visitors. The third ‘reception room’ is a billiard-room, which gives us an air of tremendous prosperity; but who could sit cosily by a billiard-table and scribble poems? Not I. The writing-table in that hostile drawing-room of mine is an ornamental atrocity with tiny drawers that stick and a miniature bookcase, presumably made for the accommodation of the sevenpenny editions of popular novels. In a word, I dwell in a villa, and it is a hireling and . . .” Having written thus far, Pauline pushed the half-sheet aside and turned to her guest, Doris Hind, who was curled up in the sunny window, the light shining on her flaxen hair.

“Doris,” she said, “this is a most objectionable room, and yet it is my home, so I love it.”

“Pauline,” said the other, with a slight American intonation in her drawling voice, “you love everything that is remotely connected with your married life: that’s what makes you such a rest to me. You are rooted; you have a creed and a country and a home. I feel vulgar without them, as if I had none of the best education. You are the most civilised woman I know.”

“And you are a little wild thing,” Pauline murmured.

“That is what is so attractive about you.”

“My!” said the other, with a fierce contempt. “Woman’s talk drives me crazy, it’s so silly. Fancy your husband and that Major man who dined here last night calling each other civilised and wild!”

“But they do label each other professionally,” Pauline affirmed. “Infantry officer and cavalry officer, Staff College officer and regimental officer, British Service and Indian Army. Keith has Distinguished Service Order after his name. Oh, they label and define, even if they don’t analyse.”

“Well, your analysis of me is wrong,” Doris Hind argued. “I am a train, tram, and office woman. You are a church, home, and garden woman: that’s why you think I’m wild. Wildness is outside our paths and dwellings. It is only inside our hearts. The adventures your heart has, Pauline! What marriage is to you . . . I have never seen anything like it. I suppose that is what comes of being a poet. Now a journalist like me, I’m different, I’m hard. If I were not hard, I could write a good novel, for I have seen things . . . over there in Paris. I have not felt them, though, as you would.”

Pauline rose and put her arms around the girl.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said. “You are so young.”

“At first, while I was nursery governess to the Phripps, I saw nothing but the babies’ bibs and the back stairs. Oh, what a life! Then, when I was teaching the English language on the system of cram, I saw more than I wanted to. Porters from the Gare du Nord came to learn a smattering of English, and so did commercial travellers, and the foreign correspondents of big business firms. I used to work eight hours a day giving lessons, and I was paid 150 francs a month. I lived in the sort of big, clean, wholesome place they have in Paris for girls like me—something like the Girls’ Friendly, only for a better-born class. I paid 25 francs a week there, which is cheap, but I could not save.”

Pauline’s eyes were pitiful. “Were any of your pupils impertinent?”

Doris gave a short laugh. “Yes, the kept women were, sometimes. I used to give a few of them lessons in their flats. Oh, they had such lovely appartements—such luxury! And they were beautiful women.”

Pauline moved restlessly. “I hate to think of it. A girl such as you to enter an establishment of that kind.”

“Oh, the doors one goes in at . . .” the other said. “In and out. What does it matter? They were silly fools, those kept women, they never took a lesson in earnest.”

“What did they learn?” Pauline persisted.

“They learnt to say, ‘I love you’ and ‘Give me a kiss,’ that is about all,” replied Doris shortly. She stood up suddenly and faced the window, with her two hands thrust deep into the pockets of her blue serge suit. “And now I don’t teach English. I try to write it. Doris Hind, American orphan. Born in New York, educated in a Belgian convent. Father born in America, mother born in Scotland. No brothers and sisters, thank the Lord. Now of Fleet Street, and the Writers’ Club where I met you. And I don’t one little bit belong to your brother’s world, or your husband’s world. I just hate the idea of war and soldiers, and of peers and rich people. So do most of my little lot. We think they despise us, and so we despise them. I believe we small fry intoxicate ourselves with ink. Sometimes, when I see you all on fire with enthusiasm over the Army, and as full of aristocratic traditions and prejudices as you can be, I say to myself, ‘She is as narrow-minded as the rest of her class,’ but then I read one of your poems and I just adore you!”

Pauline looked wistfully at her. “We scribblers put too great value on expression,” she said.

“Oh, Pauline!” remonstrated the other. “What is all creation but an expression of will, of thought, of intention? What the mind conceives must be born in due time. What are you and I but a manifestation of the imagination of a Creator? What is beauty but a magnificent proof of intelligence in creation?”

Pauline did not seem to heed her. “What is the value of it all?” she murmured. “Words, words, words. The strongest use of words lies in repetition. Advertisement proves that. And words appeal to the mind’s imagination and reason, and to the ear. They are not beautiful to the eye. Thought without speech or language seems impossible to me, and yet it is there. Inspiration, that is above all words.”

“Well,” affirmed Doris, “I have the greatest respect for words: they define thought. They move millions. The power of the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, the teachings of Confucius, is almost supreme power.”

“China rotted from literature,” Pauline declared. “Nothing matters so much as the thought that inspires action. I would rather have a thought that led me to perform a good action, than a thought that led me to make a good poem.”

Doris suddenly laughed. “One of these days you’ll get into a great muddle between being and doing, Pauline,” she said. “But just remember you are a poet.”

“I know one thing,” said Pauline steadily. “I mean to be happy.”

“But don’t forget,” the other retorted, “that you can’t be Happiness, and that Happiness will only dwell in you by fits and starts.”

“There is one thing I am,” Gerald Gay told her defiantly. “I am wife and mother.”

“Mother! Oh, Pauline!” Doris looked at her with wonder, with disappointment, with positive consternation. “You should have left that to the other women!”

“What, to bear my husband’s children?” Pauline blazed. “To be a poet is to be an illness if I cannot be a woman too.”

“Is that how you feel about it?” the other asked slowly. And, when Pauline made an emphatic gesture of assent, Doris exclaimed, with something of bitterness, “Then I don’t believe you will ever be a really great poet!”

“I don’t care,” cried defiant Pauline, denying the truth.

Doris scrutinised her expressive face again. “You are so hard to understand,” she complained. “Tell me, are you ambitious for your husband’s career?”

“Of course,” said Pauline simply.

“An ambitious woman plays the game of life to win, and not for the pleasure of the game,” pondered Doris. “But if her ambition were truly altruistic. . . . What do you desire for him, Pauline?”

“Power,” she replied briefly.

“Well,” said Doris dryly, “I personally would like to see women with a little more and men with a little less. I call you quite a primitive wife, Pauline.”

And that night at dinner she devoted herself to the contemplation of Pauline with her husband. She noted the luxury that both took for granted. They assumed a position rather than a pose, these two people, and they staged that position with a quiet appreciation of such things as lent it any advantage. It has been quaintly but truly written that any profoundly natural conversation is a duel of ostentation: all of us would fain convey a good impression of ourselves. In their personal appearance, and in the appointments of their house, the Wendovers gave heed to this matter. She was never unbecomingly dressed, he was never badly mounted. In their intercourse with their world they had the pleasing gift of a natural and charming manner. You met Keith and Pauline Wendover, and not Keith and Pauline Wendover in some assumed part, disguised and cultivated out of all likeness to their real selves. And when you met them together, you had the interest of contrast, for they differed greatly.

Doris noted it all afresh. The round table was of polished mahogany with embroidered slips of fine linen, the glass was gold Venetian, and the only decoration some golden oranges in porcelain fruit dishes and two slender branches of young copper beech in tall vases. Pauline presided in soft splendour of deep cream brocade, and her dark brown eyes and bronzed hair held the light of wood and leaves and golden fruit. There were delicate shadows under her eyes, and her little hands were terribly thin. Opposite sat Wendover, with an air of extraordinarily good health. Pauline adored this in him. He knew nothing of the peevish ways of illness, nothing of the nerves and moods which her coming motherhood imposed upon her. He was free to be what he would, and she had become what nature intended. In her mind Doris’s words still dragged: “You will never be a great poet now, Pauline!” Well, at least her imagination saw more than Doris’s stern young eyes. She saw her home as a world within a world, and many worlds beyond. She recognised the national importance of Sandhurst and the Staff College. She discerned the prestige which certain achievements carried with them in the Army. She perceived the vital relation of the service to the country. She noted the very human contentions in the military life—the importance attributed to birth and wealth, the social renown of certain corps. She admitted the great power wielded by those who held high commands. And outside Wendover’s world she was conscious of the indifference of the Rotherhursts’ world towards it; and the ignorance of the Glyndes’ world, who saw the display of the soldier’s life as a vast social tournament without ever realising its compulsions and labours; and the hostility of Doris Hind’s world, which belittled its intellectual standard, begrudged its special popularity and rewards, and was bitterly jealous of its power and social privileges. And into her personal relation to her husband across this table she put all the charm and seduction that her own personality could set forth. Doris, watching her ‘ways,’ her soft, swift utterance, her pretty, expressive gestures, her quick responses, and her feminine demands, remarked to herself in some wonder, “Why, you are a coquette, Pauline!”

Now Wendover did not like Miss Hind. He detested her. Nothing but the concessions which, as a man of the world, he was prepared to make to his wife’s preferences, enabled him to endure the transports of wrath which her decisive and critical remarks provoked in him. He labelled her. ‘Suffragette,’ and ‘one of those people who are always writing for the papers,’ nor wished to see an inch farther into her existence. Almost any man of his acquaintance who was her age would have had the sense to hold his tongue about matters of which he was hopelessly ignorant, Wendover said to himself, while he looked at her in the direct way his gaze always fixed a speaker.

“War is utterly uncivilised,” Doris announced, her flat back held very erect, her trim head as fair as a duckling’s.

“Define civilisation,” suggested Wendover.

“Well, I am a civilised woman,” she declared.

“That maybe an illustration but it is not a definition,” he growled.

“It’s—it’s—art is civilised!” triumphantly.

“Art is an expression of the appreciation of beauty in a civilised state,” Pauline suggested. “And science is civilised knowledge, and . . . Oh dear, why did you start it? Religion is . . .”

“Religion is a search after truth,” Wendover cut in, “and discipline is a necessary condition of any real state of civilisation. Peace is not synonymous with civilisation, so war is not necessarily barbarous, and I am not a brave barbarian because I am a soldier—which is what you are trying to tell me, Miss Hind,” and he chuckled.

Doris dropped her eyes and dropped the subject, but set out to provoke him again. “This house does amuse me,” she declared.

“Why?” he demanded instantly.

“Because you have a room to eat in, and a room to bang balls around a green table, and a room for your acquaintances, and a room for your precious maps and military text-books, and no quiet place in the whole house for Pauline to write in!”

“That is the best of my wife’s hobby—she only needs a pen and a writing-pad,” said Wendover comfortably; and at that Pauline broke into the most deliciously amused laughter.

“Hobby,” she crowed to herself as she made the move. She appeared irresistibly tickled.

Wendover held the door open for them to pass, and he laid an affectionate and possessive hand upon her bare arm. “I shan’t join you,” he said. “I must do some work.”

And curiously enough, Doris had sufficient insight to perceive that any criticism of Wendover’s description of his wife’s authorship would arouse something fierce in the slender woman who sat by a bowl of daffodils which filled the drawing-room with the tide of spring.

On the following day Doris Hind departed to London and dived back into her hurrying Strand happily rebellious against all the customs and conventions of Camberley. “They don’t know life, those people,” she informed Mr. Rose, when they sat side by side in the dress circle and revelled in a play by Bernard Shaw. “I assure you, if I were to talk to Captain Wendover about literary agents, it would be the first time he so much as heard that you existed; and as for the Authors’ Society, or publishers’ contracts, or royalties, or copyright, he is as ignorant as an unborn babe.”

“Lucky man,” said little Mr. Rose bitterly.

“I suppose she does make money with her poems?” Doris suggested, with unconcealed curiosity, as she dug into a box of cheap chocolates.

“One of the very few that do, then,” the agent told her darkly. “There is no sale for poetry. Big firms will publish it occasionally for the sake of their own literary standing, so to speak, but there is no profit in it. ‘Gerald Gay’ could get a long price for a poem, I’ve no doubt, as prices go, but the demand for volumes of poetry from booksellers amounts to a mere nothing. If it were not for Christmas, and schoolgirls’ birthdays, and a few people who like to buy good books for the sake of the binding and the excellence of the letterpress, no publisher would touch poetry, not as business.”

“Extraordinary,” declared the young American. “There she is, famous—and yet hardly a penny in it. It doesn’t matter to her, but suppose it were you or I?”

“Ah! that’s true.” Mr. Rose shook his head. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?—the bad market there is for a certain kind of brains. Look at novelists! How many do you suppose can get a hundred pounds down in advance of royalties? Precious few, let me tell you. Uncommonly few. And a novel is a year’s work to most writers.”

“But some make a lot of money in the long-run?” the girl insisted.

“Some,” he admitted. “But more make thirty or fifty pounds all told.”

“Threepence a copy on the Colonial edition, thirteen copies to be reckoned as twelve. I know!” sighed Doris. “I have worked it all out. Five thousand copies would bring me in sixty-seven pounds odd.”

“And how many sell five thousand copies in the Colonies?” He shook his head despondently. “How many sell five hundred?”

“Well, but look what I make now!” she urged. “I very seldom get more than a guinea a thousand words. And it is not as if there were a regular demand, or a big demand, for my stuff.”

“That is the drawback of not having a name as an authority on some special subject,” he told her.

“If I could get three guineas a thousand, I should be perfectly happy,” Doris announced, and sat tense for a moment as one who contemplated unalloyed bliss.

Rose was a short, sandy man, with a good-natured round face and anxious lines between his eyebrows. He was in love with the bright, hard girl beside him, but it was utterly impossible for him to marry on the bare living that he made in a literary agent’s office. He knew that Doris Hind was ambitious as a journalist and intellectually arrogant, and he winced again and again over his own failure to attain any standing in literature. When he wrote he went fanatic, and editors rejected his manuscripts as pepper without meat. Put a pen in his hand and he had no inner consciousness dictating to him matter which the world is desirous of reading, but he was sympathetic and shrewd as a critic, and exceptionally successful in placing the work of his clients. He was narrow-chested and insignificant, badly nourished and highly strung. Doris gave him a cool friendship, with eyes fastened on the main chance: he might prove useful to her professionally one day, she thought. William Rose, on his side, snatched at her gift of friendship, and possessed himself of it in a peevishly tyrannical manner. She continually received weak little notes from him, full of claims to have his sensitive feelings considered, and of upbraiding for a failure to satisfy his exorbitant demands. Had she been less hard, less self-centred, she would either have treated his outbursts with tenderness, or else have wrenched herself free from the absurdities they sought to enforce; but Doris merely ridiculed them a little, and yet submitted to them, because they flattered her vanity. She accepted Rose’s hospitality as one of the few meagre pleasures which came her way, and it can be truthfully said that she knew hot rebellion as his champion when she realised the social position he held in comparison with Captain Wendover. She drank in every word of the brilliant play, and exclaimed enthusiastically, “I call it as good as champagne, don’t you? I feel thoroughly stimulated.”

Rose assented in some doubt; and presently they jogged together down the crowded Strand, and the girl cried again, “Well, give me life and art, and not stupid military society.”

“Give me bread and butter, and I’d as soon handle a rifle as a violin,” the man declared in a wholly unexpected manner.

The girl flamed at him. “What a thing to say! Why, music makes vocal all that is too high and infinite for man’s words to articulate . . . whereas a rifle just kills or wounds another man. Come to that, you could spit all that a rifle means, only you would not be so deadly.”

“Violins and rifles are just so much wood till you get a man’s hand in touch with them. It is my belief the virtue lies in the man. Don’t you forget Nero fiddled when Rome burnt.” He stopped and put up her umbrella for her while rain began to fall.

She shared the umbrella fairly, bobbing along under it close to his side. “Well, if you don’t believe in art as the best thing in the world, you and I disagree, that’s all. It is one of the things which makes me so thankful I am not married. I am free to give myself entirely to my work.”

“She never thinks of my feelings!” he grieved to himself; and aloud, “I dare say the fact that you are getting your feet wet would matter more to your husband than any thousand words you might write and receive a guinea for.”

“He’d drive me wild, then,” she retorted firmly. “I wish you could see how Gerald Gay is handicapped.”

“I dare say she is perfectly happy, if she and her husband are in love,” complained the tormented little man.

“Well, if that’s so, she and I must have very different ideas of happiness,” Doris persisted, and wheeled to the edge of the wet pavement. “Here’s my bus. Good-night, many thanks.” She was engulfed by the bus, and he stood staring after her.

“She does not know what life is either,” he cried, affronted. “And she never will till her own heart tells her. Writing articles on dress, and suffrage, and the housing problem, and occasionally on spring in the suburbs . . . grumbling over the price she gets for it . . . letting me take her to the theatre to listen to a play that ignores the soul . . . calling it life!” He turned up his wet collar and hurried to the nearest underground station. “God! what a lonely man I am,” he muttered.

Chapter IV

No, she had not captured Happiness. She was not even vividly happy. She was depressed, full of moods and whims; with an easily fatigued voice, restless hands, and eyes that quickly shed tears. The doctors spoke of nerves. Keith, hearing their verdict, accepted it as final, and resigned himself as squarely as though his wife had a temper. He was vastly pleased with his little daughter, Elizabeth Mary, and said cheerfully that there was plenty of time for boys. A nursery being foreign land to him, he explored his own in deadly earnest, and liked the clutch of infant fingers round his big digit. He was generous in his view of the small thing’s claims, and pondered his last will and testament. Now and then he pushed his wife’s youth into the dark ages by jumping headlong into his child’s career as a grown-up person. “It will be interesting,” he prophesied enthusiastically. His home gave him absolute content, and he turned from it to his military career as a well-nourished man turns to exercise. Love of variety was deep seated in his character, and this development of Pauline from betrothed to bride, and from bride to wife, had satisfied that love. The advent of the babe had changed the character of their home: that too was acceptable.

He had astonished his regiment by his decision to compete for the Staff College, for he had been exceptionally keen as a regimental officer. More profound analysis might have recognised in his decision his instinct towards pastures new. And now in a less praiseworthy aspect he went a-roving. A pretty, insouciant little person, named Muriel Grant, the wife of an officer at the Staff College, fired him with enthusiasm for her society, and his manner showed it as plainly as a weathercock indicates the way the wind blows. In her presence he was keen, alert, considerate over trifles, interested by mere nothings.

Pauline pondered this new and unwelcome aspect of her husband, chin on hand. She reviewed the past phases of their intercourse. Yes, to her the courtship had been thrilling: no other word was adequate or accurate. But in a thrill there is a tingle that is not emotion’s pain, but is most certainly akin to it. Love had been a revelation, in its dawning and in its fulfilment: life had been transfigured before her. There was consciousness of a shock in realisation. Motherhood had enraptured her: yet in looking back she was aware of burdens laid, not only on her physical self, but upon her delicate nerves, her very mind. Truly this sensitive feminine thing had been swept by visions, transports, storms; had been made use of by nature; while the soul of her ranged free, but perturbed, like some lark that hovers on quivering wings in the blue ether above her nest. Baby Elizabeth Mary had a vital hold upon her heart-strings: she loved the child broodingly. But she found Keith’s notion that her nursery offered her companionship profoundly ridiculous. It occupied her thoughts, but little of her time. She knew clearly now that she was strenuously and almost fiercely a mother; that the relationship between her and her daughter was sacred with sacrificial anguish in her eyes; that the bond between them was something beautifully mysterious, joyously terrible, part of the mighty incarnation of souls. But looking ahead she saw the fire of it quenched within her if accentuated by repetition, as the burning sun’s rays may extinguish a flame upon a hearth. She was a mother now in every fibre of her consciousness—but if there were to be numerous little Wendovers, she realised she would become merely anxiously maternal. Nevertheless, something within her demanded a son . . . some day. Decidedly not yet. Her immediate problem was how to recapture this husband of hers, now captivated by a second-rate little woman.

Pray understand that it was the poet in the wife that objected so fiercely to the element of deterioration in Keith’s love for her. The society woman recognised the whole affair as part of the contemporary attitude of mind, pleasure-seeking, unconscientious, deeming the ideal an impossibility. Possessing a creative genius, her whole urgent demand was for perfection: analysis and criticism were part of the mental equipment, and none that she loved could escape her searchlight. Lucky for all that it was something of a magic lantern. Your globe of electric light is without vision, but the fireflies see the wonders of God in the dark. Even while she scorched at the trivial betrayal of Keith’s loyalty to their love, she discerned the energy and enterprise and enthusiasm in him that set him ranging after possibilities and experiences. She paid a visit to her dressmaker, and refused to consider the cost of looking attractive. She sat in front of her mirror and bade her maid catch the last whim of fashion. And all the while her mental life was restless and disturbed because no poem was born of her emotions. Her thoughts were like clouds heavy and oppressive with unshed rain. Baby had a rash, the cook had given notice, Keith was troublesome—so Pauline faced her domestic problem squarely, and left poetry to such beings as dwelt in stars.

To entertain Lady Theodora when aware that your culinary department was in an uproar, required nerve. Pauline took her courage in her hands, but felt the strain. However, it pleased her aunt to be gracious on her visit, and when the commandant of the Staff College brought his wife to dine she appreciated their importance in the career of Keith Wendover to a nicety. She treated him as a Personage, and summed up the situation concisely to her nephew and niece on the departure of their guests. “Keith is perfectly right, Pauline. The man holds a position. It is ridiculous to ignore such facts, ridiculous because un-English. We have always respected rank invested in any office. Remember the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes, I agree Adèle would ignore Mrs. What’s-her-name’s existence if she bored her, but that is why Rotherhurst has never aimed at making his mark in political life: he knows his silly wife would be uncivil to half his party.” She withdrew to bed with the blessing of her host, who closed the door after her and turned, as the recently reinforced may, to assault another’s point of view.

“The old lady hit the nail on the head,” he said hopefully. “You see it now, don’t you? I tell you any social friction is bad for my career, and they were offended at your refusing their invitations three times running.”

“She was. I am sure a clever man like that must be too big to care. It is all so petty.”

Keith lounged across the room and stood with his big shoulders against the mantel-shelf. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A man’s wife can generally rub him up against people if she wants to. You can with me. I positively loathe that fellow now.”

“Keith! “ she gasped. “Why? I don’t even dislike him.”

“No, probably not. But it created friction between us.” He repeated “between us” again, as one who reveals a yawning chasm on the hearthrug. It touched her strangely.

“Oh, my darling,” she said tenderly. “A mere nothing. I never gave it a second thought.”

“You didn’t,” he said grimly; and then he broke out, “Oh, of course, I know you are brilliant, a first-class poet. It is not easy for you to fit in with a commonplace woman like Mrs. Molesworth. But she does not see that. She is keen to know you. And you were feeling seedy; and then—the second time—you were in the mood to write; and the third time it was something else. Anyhow, I know they thought we were snobs.”

She brushed further speech aside by a quick movement, leaning forward, her slender arms resting along her knees, her folded hands drooping, her face raised to him. “But it drags everything down so. . . . You and he are pledged to serve the country; his professional opinion of you as an officer is what affects your career. How can he, how can he, let that be altered or swayed, or influenced one jot by what I do or am?”

Keith looked very large and masculine, towering above her while he answered, “Quite, it ought not to affect the matter. But it does. You are very much part of me. A wife gets into a man’s thoughts. And Mrs. Molesworth probably counts for more than you imagine in her own home.”

She left it at that, admitting to herself that the next invitation to her must be accepted, even if a poem were stifled in its first impulse towards utterance. And as she moved towards the door she turned to him and questioned, as one who realises for the first time a power and weighs responsibilities: “And I have really made you dislike that nice man, Keith?”

“Yes. But of course I can’t show it.”

“Why do you dislike him exactly?”

“Oh . . . well, it has been such a d——d nuisance all the friction about a trifle, and it has been rather trying for you—eh?”

Not half so trying, she thought to herself, as the tendency of her lord to be fascinated by Mrs. Grant. But she maintained a discreet silence as to that. What if more friction were to spring from her influence there? His career must be helped, not hindered, by her. He was so lovably keen, she thought.

When Adèle came to visit the Wendovers shortly after this very emphatic conversation, Pauline dutifully observed her ways as one from whose mistakes she might profit. To her dismay, Adèle pointed a moral that turned the young wife’s thoughts willy nilly to the peril of fascinations to which Keith seemed prone. It was the married life of the Glyndes that adorned her tale.

Thus Adèle, her face as sharply keen as any squirrel’s: “Of course no one talked to you about it when you were a girl, Pauline, but John Glynde always has been like that. Phyllis makes the best of it, but I would not stand it—would you? And she is so indiscreet herself that she really furnished him with a ready-made excuse often. What men see in those common actresses! I suppose they flatter their vanity.”

Pauline’s heart was hot and sore within her. Sisters cling close if they love, and Phyllis was dearness itself to her: she had pictured her as a treasured butterfly.

That merry, childish voice, that glittering vivacity—like pine needles that sparkle and toss in windy sunshine—was it all sheer pride that hid agony? She sat perplexed on the little lawn, and looked wistfully at her sister-in-law’s hard, pretty face.

“Adèle, do you think it is breaking Phyllis’s heart all this time?”

“Oh no. Wives have to put up with things, and no man is perfect. My dear girl!” in amazed expostulation, for Pauline’s tears were brimming over.

To make the little situation more tiresome for the guest, Keith was swinging off his charger at the hall door. She jumped up, made some excuse as to her packing, and in passing him murmured, “I’m afraid Pauline is upset.” Her tone suggested that the reason was insufficient.

“What’s upset you?” Keith asked his wife, reaching her side quickly.

“Adèle has been telling me about John—— Oh, how can he!”

He surveyed her gravely. “John is a very average fellow,” he remarked. “And Phyllis struck me as enjoying herself uncommonly well.”

To his amazement, Pauline stormed. For the moment her vivid imagination was possessed by a vision of her sister tormented by a married life that degraded her pride and starved her love. She was horrified at her husband’s attitude: “To defend a man whose affairs insult my sister and spoil her life! Is marriage so low an ideal to you that you don’t condemn unfaithfulness in my brother-in-law? Do you think I have no family pride? I tell you marriage is horrible in my eyes—horrible—if people are not absolutely loyal. How can I endure it if you take the opposite view? In whom can I trust? If you don’t think John’s behaviour wrong and odious, what is to keep you from doing what he does?”

“You can keep me,” he told her, so directly and promptly that he gave her pause.

She regarded him with instantly softened eyes. “I . . . but what of John?”

“Glynde does not care for Phyllis in the same way I do for you, and she is not the kind of woman you are,” he answered simply.

She was gentleness itself again.

“But you think him wrong?” she pleaded. “You resent it for my sister?”

“Glynde is a good sort, take it all round. I don’t say he has not got his faults, like everyone else. I think he is a weak fellow about women.” She could not persuade him or fire him to admit more.

Life was perplexing. She had his word for it that the trifling vexation the Molesworths had caused her had prejudiced him against Colonel Molesworth; but the sense of family outrage that shook her when she made outcry against John Glynde did not inflame him, seemingly. Did a fellow-feeling make him wondrous kind? The thought stayed with her, and rendered her adamant against her husband’s protests when she announced her intention of dashing up to London to see if she could not comfort her poor sister. “Now that I understand,” she added bitterly.

She met with a warm welcome from Phyllis; but her three days’ visit proved to her that she had been very far from understanding.

Phyllis pouted and protested. “I see quite well what you are driving at, Paul. I felt sure Adèle would talk to you about it some day. She thoroughly enjoys the subject. In fact, she made such a hobby of it to mother and Tom that poor Tom was goaded into speaking to John. Then, of course, I flew at him. I will not have interference.”

“I expect I have an exaggerated idea about it, darling,” murmured Pauline.

“You take an exaggerated view of everything, you silly thing,” Phyllis declared. “Early Victorian people would have called you ‘intense.’”

“Don’t you mind, Phil?” Her sister could not resist the question.

“What is the use of minding?” the lovely little creature retorted irritably. “Men are not like us. John is very good to me in most ways.” She looked out of the big window on to the moving life of the street and the green gaiety of the Park beyond, twisting her hand in and out of her rope of wondrous pearls.

“I could not endure it!” Pauline exclaimed passionately.

“I certainly shouldn’t advise Keith to try it,” Phyllis remarked, with a little laugh. “Paul dear, you never will see things as other people do. You stick your nose in the air, and imagine that clothes, and jewels, and a house like this, and heaps of money to entertain with, are so much dross to me as compared with John’s flawless affection. You are wrong. I am greedy. I love a good time. I care for John about as much as he does for me—a comfortable, reliable feeling. I am awfully fond of John, and he trusts me. Adèle does not: she thinks it is six of one and half a dozen of the other—which shows she has a low mind. I am a perfectly honest woman, and I don’t do what John does because I am a woman: I merely flirt.”

Pauline rose, and her critical sister noted with admiration her personal distinction, her grace and originality. She looked so different from the herd, with her peculiar colouring, her extreme height and fragility, her expressive voice and carriage. “I give it up, Phil,” she declared, with a sweet energy. “I could not endure married life if I did not love my husband and he did not love me—nobly!”

“You are as good as a play, Paul, you really are!” Phyllis Glynde declared indulgently. “I expect it is a mercy for yourself, and your Keith, and everybody else, that you can let off steam writing poetry. For in some ways you are very like me, you know, only I am a mute, inglorious—Byron!”

Pauline withdrew into herself, there to question her ideal somewhat bitterly. Did she expect, demand, insist, too much? At least she would be exacting with herself by way of justice, and so she left the charms of a really tempting frivol with Phyllis and several kindred spirits to speed in a taxi towards the purposeful City at the urgent invitation of Doris Hind.

She passed vast Somerset House, with its air of official discretion, and turned from the spacious Embankment into one of the eager streets that hurry into the Strand. Offices towered above her, and she was in the world of news agencies, press-cutting agencies, literary and dramatic agents. Here you could realise the demand for words. One magazine that found its perch among these crowded buildings produced specific business articles, another reviewed commerce and industry, a third dealt with investments, a fourth with engineering; undoubtedly the street was not at home to poets.

Pauline overpaid her taxi, and descended to the bowels of the earth, where, in a clubland of tea and intelligence, Doris gave her a hawk-eyed greeting. How Pauline would look, what Pauline would wear, were always speculations of interest to her; and the feminine crowd in the room were presently acutely conscious that Gerald Gay was among them, all glorious in white and gold.

“Mr. Rose—Mrs. Wendover,” said Doris. “Have one of those pink cakes, Pauline, and tell me whether you have been writing any more poetry; and if not, why not?”

“Not a line,” Pauline told her; and Doris threw a meaning glance at Mr. Rose.

“Is not that very unkind to the poor world?” inquired the little man politely.

Pauline’s great brown eyes looked at him gravely out of her soft face. “The world has Shakespeare and the Psalms,” she murmured lightly. “So we need hardly pity it, do you think?”

Mr. Rose stirred his tea energetically. “We want something vital, modern, stimulating, from our own wonderful generation,” he said in his thin voice that lacked decision.

Mrs. Wendover threw back her head a little. “I cannot write to order,” she said, with reserve; and her companions assented hastily, “No, of course not,” very much as careful nurses might confirm a patient’s prejudices against a draught. The professional tone, the professional atmosphere, jarred upon Pauline.

Yet she sought to charm here as elsewhere—not of set purpose but instinctively. The very poverty of her hostess and fellow-guest made her bountiful with her gifts of gracious comradeship, so that soon Mr. Rose found himself counting on her help. If she should speak enthusiastically of him to Doris Hind it would work miracles for him, he thought, and he made haste to afford her the opportunity by a premature departure.

Pauline, relieved from the oppression’ of his politeness, said vaguely, “What a kind little man he seems, dear,” to Doris, who responded somewhat mysteriously, “He is useful to me in my career, but otherwise rather a trial,” and plunged headlong into the tragedy of a coat and skirt that did not fit.

Pauline, moved by the pitiful fact of four guineas that had been spent in vain, urged fiery consolation. “Doris dear, clothes don’t matter in the least. People value you for yourself.”

But Doris coolly brushed this aside. “What is myself? The pack of tricks you would call the real me is a mystery even to Doris Hind, I assure you. I don’t even know the Thing by sight. It is shut up in an envelope, and that has to be done up in a parcel. As long as flesh and bone matter to Doris Hind and have to be covered, chiffon and serge matter to her, and she hates being done up in a parcel that makes her look a fright.”

Pauline laid an impulsive hand on the other’s arm. “Dearest girl, let me give you another coat and skirt. Do! What difference will it make to me? I should simply love to.”

But the refusal was as rigid as the tense arm. “Not for anything in the world. I only told you because I wanted your sympathy.”

“Something I could not send you in a parcel!” And she returned to Camberley the next day rather beset with her efforts to construct, to bestow, to hold fast, things not made with hands, the while her world struck bargains.

Chapter V

“Now don’t fly out at me,” Wendover said.

“Keith! Why should I? Do I ever?” she expostulated.

“You did,” he reminded her, to her surprise. “Over Glynde. And I dare say you will disagree with me about this.”

Already her nerves were at fever heat. The Irish crisis had strung them high, and the atmosphere of examinations was trying. His words of warning flung her to panic. With an effort she appeared calm, watching him in his khaki uniform, obviously exultant and excited. “Tell me quickly what you mean, dear.”

He shut the drawing-room door deliberately, and advanced towards her writing-table, drew out the chair and sat down, his arms folded on the top of its back. “You have read to-day’s paper?”

“Of course. Oh, Keith, you are certain it is war?” She leapt to his meaning.

Her spring disconcerted him, cut short his preamble. He drew in his breath, looking at her doubtfully. “Yes,” he said, “positive.”

She locked her hands, but her response came like lightning. “And I shall be so proud when you are fighting, Keith.”

A slow smile dawned on his face. “So that’s the way you take it?” he said, with satisfaction.

“Yes, of course,” she answered. All the dramatic element in her seized upon the gay, swift manner of the valiant. Her eyes shone like stars.

“I wonder if you realise what it means?” he said slowly.

“To us? Why, it means everything.”

“Everything,” he agreed, and shot a keen glance at her, “to millions and millions. Nothing will be the same.”

“Except our love,” she whispered; and tears came to her eyes, but she forced them back unshed.

“That won’t be the same,” he told her, and flung out a hand to stop her interruption. “Just as great, of course. That is what I want you to get into your head. Always as great. But up to now we have enjoyed it—we have been happy, haven’t we?”

“Absolutely happy,” she assured him, making denial of much.

“Now we are going to suffer because we are married. You’ll be anxious.”

“Every moment of the twenty-four hours.”

He paused at that. “You must keep as cool as you can,” he told her, and then went on deliberately: “I want you to understand that once I’m in it I shan’t have time for you. I’ll write when I can and if I can. But it must always be my job first, whatever that job is. You can’t be my first thought.”

“I see,” she murmured assent. But she was troubled.

“You can’t even be my first feeling. My fast feeling must be war.” He gave a sudden laugh, which she could not echo. Her face was vividly distressed now.

“But you will think of me?” she urged.

“As the thing that makes coming back worth while—if I come back,” he said.

There was a silence: then she spoke very softly, as if to reassure him that she would not fly out—on broken wing. “Keith, I feel as though you were renouncing me.”

He appeared struck by that.

“Yes,” he said, but doubtfully.

“And is that necessary?” Her young face grew almost stern.

It softened strangely, however, when he gave his answer without hesitation. “Yes, quite. One must be willing to renounce everything—home, sight, limbs, life itself.”

“And what do you keep, Keith?” she questioned gently.

“Personally? A few principles, and my rank as an officer.”

“How simple,” she said wonderingly. “And how magnificent.”

He looked queerly at that. “Don’t exalt the thing too much,” he warned her. “It is going to be a brutal business.”

He took a restless turn up and down the room. “We are lucky,” he declared. “Before we’ve seen this show through every married man in England under forty will be weighing his wife’s claims on him. Devilish difficult to see straight then. It is England first, of course, but—well, they won’t see that at once. Providing for your wife—supporting her—isn’t the same as defending her. It will be cruel hard to impoverish her—but a man’s a fighting animal. And labour will have to back us up hard with munitions of war. A troublesome job that. There is a price to a man’s work, and he’ll sulk for it: there’s no price to a man’s life; he’ll gamble with it like a sportsman. The Army’s all right—and so will the country be when it has looked on at the war long enough and close enough.” He broke off, and going to Pauline sat down beside her and gripped her hand. “It is all decided for you and me. There is no choice,” he said. “And I can’t help being tremendously keen—you understand, don’t you?”

She put her pretty head on to his great shoulder. “I am glad you are keen, my darling,” she said gravely.

“I warned you that I was, didn’t I?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she reassured him, and found herself taken into his arms and held there passionately as though the moment of parting was upon them.

When he left her she sat stunned and dazed, and presently was amazed to hear him going about the house whistling cheerily. His poignant interview with her had been part of his preparations for the war, then, and this—this normal calm morale—was the sign of the prepared man.

On the third of August a bicycle wheeled up the circular drive, and Pauline, coming in from the little garden, was face to face with an unwelcome visitor, Muriel Grant.

“May I come in? I felt I must come and talk to you.”

Pauline, her heart rebellious, led the way into the cool drawing-room, which her guest looked at with undisguised envy. “You have got a nice house! Oh dear, I am so hot. It was baking in Gordon Road. Now, do tell me, Mrs. Wendover, what are you going to do?”

“Do?” queried Pauline.

“Well, war is a certainty now, my husband says, and the College is sure to close. Shall you stay here when your husband goes? It is such an upset, isn’t it?”

“When Keith goes,” Pauline said slowly and unwillingly, “I think Baby and I will live in London for a while.”

“I should like to nurse, only my husband says they will want trained nurses, and all the Smart Set are sure to rush into it, like they did in South Africa. I expect I shall go to my people. It will be the cheapest thing. Won’t it be awful till the big naval engagement takes place? I suppose Captain Wendover thinks that is bound to be the first huge show, doesn’t he? My husband says Russia may be in Berlin in three or four weeks. How long does your husband think the war will last?”

Pauline felt bewildered by the pattering questions, and the pretty chatterer’s presence was distasteful to her. But, in view of the great fact that they were both soldiers’ wives with their all at stake, she answered sympathetically.

“I have hardly thought of plans, and Keith has not prophesied much. There are such immensities to face that I realise nothing as yet. I simply feel my heart beating like a steam hammer.”

“Yes, you do look pale. It will be splendid for your husband’s career, and he is so ambitious. Mine is awfully keen too. He talks of the war all day long. He always said it was sure to come. I should think we’ll all be as poor as church mice after this, it will cost such millions. I wonder if they will take your motor?”

“I wonder?” murmured Pauline. Mrs. Grant reminded her of nothing so much as some little sparrow with bright eyes pecking for tiny grains amid the mighty surging of London’s traffic.

“I can’t think what the Browns will do about their German governess. Everybody says the whole place is infested with spies. Do you believe it? I have a sister in India, and really I feel quite jumpy about her till one knows what the natives mean to do. One doesn’t hear a word about the Irish trouble now, does one? I am so puzzled what to decide about groceries, for people tell me everything will rush up to famine prices; and yet, if my husband goes off almost at once, and I stay with my people, I shan’t want a lot of jam and bacon and stuff on my hands for nothing. It really is very difficult to decide for the best.”

“It is indeed,” Pauline agreed, as with each trivial word the moving pictures formed within her mind—vast vistas. And yet she realised that there was nothing for her and this woman to do except speed their husbands with courage, administer their households with economy, lend helping hands to those threatened or overtaken by disaster; never be pessimistic, and never an alarmist. She saw herself for a moment as one condemned to continue in the same routine of life, dressing, dining, playing with Elizabeth Mary, denied any expression through her acts of her inward anguish of anxiety. What an existence! More appropriate far if she might devote herself to nursing the wounded, or pass the hours in one long effort of intercession, secluded from all pointless occupations. How was she to live with her soul? How was she to live with her mind? While her body moved down the accustomed protected ways, terribly alone.

Keith came in at that moment, and his face instantly showed its usual alert amusement at the sight of Mrs. Grant. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said, advancing.

“Your wife and I have been mingling our tears, and now I must go.” She stood up and smiled at him.

He threw a keen glance at his wife. “What’s Pauline been weeping about?”

“Listen to him! As if it were not simply awful for us wives!” She joined him on the white hearthrug, her shoulder rubbing against him. “You are hard-hearted.”

“I am not nearly hard-hearted enough,” he announced in tones of profound conviction, which puzzled both women.

“I suppose you are frightfully pleased to be going to your beloved war!” their guest continued, her very blue eyes lifted to his.

“Who said I loved war? I’m in the most appalling funk, I can tell you that.”

Mrs. Grant gave a little scream of incredulity. “You ridiculous man! I don’t believe you know the meaning of the word. Well, I really must be off.” He saw her to the gate, and the wife could hear him tossing words and laughter to her as she wheeled away.

Curious how such jarring episodes as these tore at Pauline Wendover’s nerves, to the overthrow of the courageous greeting which her patriotism bade her give to the terrible events of impending war. Gone was the calm control of manner, gone the Spartan cheerfulness: there was exasperation in her will, as though her happiness could only be relinquished after a bitter strife to retain it. She turned with something of fury to the man she loved. “What you can see in that little fool!” she greeted him in accusation.

But he pushed through her anger, took her unwilling face with its indignant eyes between his hands, and kissed it. “I see something that amuses me,” he answered her stoutly. “She is such a quaint sort of creature. Women like that always tickle me. There they are, perfectly absurdly ridiculous, and yet quite a power, just because they have a sort of feminine way about them: pretty, too. It’s the kind of power no man has.”

She was rather remote and stately. “It fascinates you?”

He gloomed a moment, his eyes on the ground. “Yes, superficially.” And then he looked at his wife boyishly. “Pauline, I do wish you would not fly out at me. Not now.”

She broke at his appeal, her arms stretched out to him. “Then make me understand I am everything to you—everything!”

“My God!” he responded passionately. “If you only knew how much you are! Perhaps too much!”

“That is not possible,” she cried, her face pressed against his shoulder, her whole soul idealising their love.

The room seemed dominated by the influence of woman—her magic enchantment, her divine appeal, her vital strength. But the man, with some inflexible will dawning in his eyes, knew full well that he must be beyond her spells though filled with her inspiration, and so withdrew part of himself from his wife’s sway even while his big arm tightened around her, and his voice said, “No single living soul counts with me as you do. I swear it.”

From that moment, through the poignant hours, Pauline walked the path of love as thrillingly as she had trod it in the fresh morning of her betrothal. The fierceness of man that daily increased in Keith attracted her mysteriously, and he, in a hundred simple ways, devoid of introspection or analysis on his part, demanded her love exorbitantly. She needed him, he needed her. And throughout the Isles the same thing was astir: woman turned to her protector, and man sought life’s sweetness. Romance of heroes’ deeds, romance of lovers’ impetuous wooings, romance of sacrifice of self most perfect and superb, spread wireless messages from heart to heart across an Empire, and in every pulse there beat a hammer which warned the human world that blood is the price of sovereignty. Englishwomen set man in his old place again, and knew that because of that knightly multitude of soldiers, mothers as yet unborn should bear worthier sons, brides of far distant generations find worthier spouses, and that no blood should be shed save in redemption of some idea that men hold it honourable to die for, and women ponder in their hearts and give again to babies at the breast. Churches were filled and lonely woman was on her knees once more, all England a shrine to be defended from fearful sacrilege. The nation cried to her as in the earth’s spring-tide to be fruitful; the nursery was her kingdom come again.

In this rushing tide of great and fierce emotions, Pauline must needs keep her head. For, while compassion’s appeal for the wounded and the mourners turned her heart sick with sympathy, that same heart had to be steeled against any shrinking for herself or the beloved from sharing the very fates that filled her with terrible pity. All the proportions of life were being changed till the brain reeled, and when Lady Theodora exclaimed, Spartan-wise, “The parlour-maid is a fool, dear, and I miss James dreadfully, but what does unburnished silver matter in war-time?” Pauline was fain to retort, “Surely as much as it ever did! A trifle: no more. It is the value of great things that is changing;” yet failed to convince her ladyship, who had not a young, active husband going forth to war, none of his engagements important now save that rendezvous with the enemy at the gate.

Keith left his wife on the 19th of August for a staff billet at the front. On the 18th he went upstairs to the Camberley nursery alone, and kissed his little four-months-old daughter with a curious sense of relief that he had someone to come after him. Then he ran down the stairs gaily and out to the motor where Pauline sat waiting, took the wheel, and left his home behind him. “It is a lovely day. I do enjoy a run up to London when it is as perfect as this,” quoth she.

He turned his face to her and spoke in the voice which he could make extraordinarily caressing when he liked. “You are simply ripping, Paul.”

To her, with her dramatic instinct, the manner of their parting, the fashion in which they faced the war, mattered vitally. Many men challenge death daily in ways as quietly courageous as angels could wish for, yet the passing of souls in a hospital year in year out will never thrill the world as does hot-blooded death in battle. There is deep truth in Stevenson’s verdict on the soldiers of the Birkenhead, who went down in line: “Mark you, undemonstrative men would have spoilt the situation;” and to Keith Wendover’s wife it was stimulant or poison to her spirit according as he should offer her the commonplace demeanour of a passenger to Calais, the gravity of a patient before a serious operation, or the keenness of a fighter gay for his high gamble.

He did not fail her. All the way up to London town there was a radiant fierceness in his mood which communicated itself to her and helped her to hold herself as if they set forth to some splendid tournament. In the quiet bedroom of the hotel in Half Moon Street, a jerk of realisation caught her once or twice and half strangled her, but she fought free, and when he looked at her profile against the taxi window it was pale but vividly alert, as though she drank in all the excitement and magnificent challenge of their destiny.

They dined alone in the Cavalry Club with the hot August night pressing heavily upon London. There were a fair number of soldiers dining there, and they knew Wendover and drifted over to his table one by one, the war the only topic on their lips. The note of comradeship between them all was very strong. Liége had fallen, but the grave voices were utterly hopeful.

Few turned from that table without a deep impression of the young wife’s white face, with the black lashes emphasising the great brown eyes, and the light shining in the brilliant halo of her hair. A very, very lovely face it was that night.

Wendover’s personality was well known among them. His magnetism was acknowledged, yet it was hard to find its secret. Very certainly he was a man of moods. There were days when it was best to leave him alone. Not that he lost his temper, but he had the power of inflicting his mood on you: if it were stormy, you were exposed to ill weather. By some grossly unfair distribution of Nature’s gifts it was imposed upon most men and women to seek his liking, even while not a few withheld their own, so put about were they by this gift or trick of personality which in a woman would have been termed fascination. When he was charming it was undoubtedly charm itself that overcame you, and not some mere polished code of delightful manner that he assumed for the purpose of winning you. On the contrary, people feared his indifference and sought to overcome it. Many criticised him, but most preferred to be able to preface their words by the assertion: “Wendover is a great friend of mine.” He was of interest to other men.

“Pauline,” he said suddenly, “let us go for a walk. “

“I should love that,” she said; and as they went out together, she looked very tall and delicate, wrapped close in a black satin cloak.

“Let us go down Whitehall,” she suggested.

“Not too far? Shoes all right?” he asked; and when she nodded, he said for the second time that day, “You are simply ripping, Paul.”

That walk was a dream to her. They descended St. James’s, and passed the battlemented shadows of the old castle. Something of the philosophical wisdom of forgotten wars lurked there, as if the stones muttered in their quiet vigil, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” They left it behind, and to their right a crowd waited beneath the vast stare of the windows of Buckingham Palace for a glimpse of the King. Here and there among the thousands that moved restlessly under the hot depressing sky were his soldiers and his sailors, striking a note of great significance among the incoherent murmur of suddenly perturbed multitudes. In the midst of the Park the noises of London seemed remote from the heart of it, and the placid daisies shone all starlike among the shadows. There was a new, good-natured impulse of helpfulness among the sauntering crowds, and every Jack had his Jill, since the best way to lend a hand is to clasp another’s. In Whitehall the great and valiant history of a mighty Power breathed deep, and the Admiralty and War Office stood sentries over the future of a race. Its broad spaces took them to the door of the ancient shrine of monarchs and great men, and Keith, looking up at it, said, “Well, that’s worth a bit of a scrap,” with a certain grimness. Beneath Big Ben they watched the river, all silver and black, in a silence that seemed to seek tidings from its murmur of that great and stormy trench dug about England’s cliffs, the sea.

Pauline laid her hand upon her husband’s arm. “What an adventure it all is!” she murmured. “You’ll soon be with them.” ‘Them’ could be none other than the army in Flanders.

“By this time to-morrow,” he said. There was something he greatly wished to say to her. “If I don’t have the luck to come back——” he began in a voice which held no trace or hint of sadness.

She cut him short, her hand still steady on his arm, her face turned to the Abbey.

“The kings of England, lifting up their swords,
Shall gather at the gate of Paradise,”

she quoted, as one who dreams of rapture.

Presently he said quietly, “It is time to return now;” and they retraced their steps.

Next day, when it was time, he left her.

Chapter VI

The house in Curzon Street dripped with rain, and the doorstep glistened darkly. A family party, assembled in the drawing-room upstairs, was a disjointed affair: they gave and received news in fragments, as it is given and received by post. Pauline, very fragile and fatigued, lay listlessly in an arm-chair; her mother sat opposite her, with an air of mild protest; Phyllis Glynde stood upon the hearthrug, and Adèle existed somewhat perversely in the depths of a sofa.

“It is not as if Keith were a regimental officer; the Staff are ever so much safer—aren’t they, mother?” urged Phyllis, with the air of one who considers her companions require bracing.

“Yes, dear, we should be very thankful; but it is all so sad,” said the quiet little Dowager vaguely.

“If people are going to be killed, they can be killed by being run over in London,” Phyllis expounded, and turned briskly on Adèle. “Tom is pretty safe with his yeomanry. A little rain won’t hurt him.”

“It is easy for you to be optimistic, Phyllis, with John over age for the Army, and his business flourishing; but at any moment Tom may go anywhere, and meanwhile where the money is to come from to keep Laffham up I don’t know. Nothing is paying, it seems to me.”

“All one’s friends in such trouble,” murmured her mother-in-law. “Poor dear Lady Nuttall’s son killed, and the place goes to a distant cousin.”

“And look at all the young widows,” continued Phyllis, with vivacity, “and all the girls who will never have the chance of marrying now. Adèle and Paul have been awfully lucky so far.”

Pauline raised her heavy lids. She seemed to have heard just this very conversation repeat itself over and over again since August. The March wind lashed the window panes.

“James Wilson is mentioned in dispatches,” she said.

“There will be no holding that wife of his!” declared Adèle, with a sharp laugh. “It is most amusing to hear her refer to ‘my husband in the Rifle Brigade.’ He is in the 100th Battalion, but of course she takes care not to mention that. And the solicitor’s office is quite forgotten!”

“She has reason to be proud,” said Pauline quickly. “Is not ‘my husband in the war—-my husband in dispatches’ good enough, Adèle?”

“Oh, quite,” said the other dryly. There was no use rousing Pauline.

“I always thought him an admirable young man,” said the Dowager soothingly, “and an excellent head for business. So reliable.”

“He and his wife are coming in presently. He has a few days’ leave,” Pauline informed her mother.

“Well, I’d give something to see our James in khaki, but I really must fly to my young man,” pretty Phyllis said lightly, gathering up her furs.

“Dear child, I am sure your hospital will wear you out,” murmured her mother.

“Another new coat and skirt, I see,” Adèle remarked tartly. “If the war has to continue till Phyllis practises economy, it will never end.”

“Splendid for trade,” said Lady Glynde good-naturedly, “and excellent for my health. When I’m badly dressed I feel ill immediately. Well, good-bye for the present, Paul darling. What with my work for officers’ families, and the concert for those poor devils of actresses, and the bazaar for the blind, and the special matinées in aid of the Red Cross, and, my hospital, I shan’t have much time for you.” She embraced them all rapidly and took her departure, the very embodiment of youthful energy and high spirits.

“How Phyllis enjoys the war!” Adèle exclaimed as the door shut.

Old Lady Rotherhurst and her daughter exchanged despairing glances, but for Rotherhurst’s sake they must needs endure his wife graciously. It went hard with Pauline to hold her peace, and she remained rigidly silent while Adèle and the Dowager spoke of the failings of those in power, of political intrigue, of bewilderingly contradictory statements, of a tangle of false rumours. Suddenly she leant forward till the firelight caught her hair and wreathed it round her small vivid face in a halo of gold.

“Mother,” she said, “when we talk like this I always think of those words in the Book which declare that angels do not bring railing accusations against dignitaries. I don’t imagine angels are snobs: I fancy it must be that they appreciate and compassionate the awful burden of responsibility which rulers bear.”

“Perhaps,” retorted Adèle, “it is merely that angels are not governed by our Cabinet. If they were, I dare say they might criticise like I venture to do.”

“It would make a poem—that theme. A marvellous poem,” Pauline dreamed aloud. “The angels who understand.”

“Very likely. But even a Shakespeare would not be as useful just now as a man who could stop strikes.”

“I wonder,” mused Pauline; and her mother said gently, “You were always so interested as a little child, my dear, when I used to teach you about your guardian angel.”

“Was I?” said Pauline quickly. “That is a wonderful tale, the story of the legion of angels that interposed between the Germans and our troops. Do you believe it, mother?”

She was conscious as she spoke of the spiritual relationship between herself and the sweetly vague old lady who sat opposite her. All that she had of such faith as was knit into her mind and conventions and customs and formulas of speech she had received from her mother. In her rich black silk, with her heavy Victorian jewels and her softly distant manners, she had been the earliest mouthpiece, the first and deepest source of Christianity to her daughter—of Christianity with its huge humanities, its terrific force of love, its unhesitating righteous indignation, its tenderness of imagination, its vastness of conception. Moving through life among drawing-rooms and rose gardens, her lips, that had never parted in a cry, had murmured a creed which first called to the world from bitter wildernesses and parched deserts, where an ancient nation of intriguing warriors had sunk into a most tragic subjection. Pauline fixed her shadowy eyes upon her wonderingly, and asked again, “Do you believe it, mother?”

For what profound reason do all picture witches as ancient dames? Some trick of the leaping firelight, some dramatic association of the nursery with legendary seers, seemed to transform the Dowager’s handsome old wrinkled face into something momentarily awful as she answered, “We are not fighting against flesh and blood, but against the spirits of evil things “

Through the Isles, perhaps throughout the world, old women, the mothers in Israel of the soldier hosts, were making that same assertion to incredulous youth.

Adèle gave an impatient movement. “All the fortune-tellers are pretty busy, I hear,” she remarked in unsympathetic tones. “And Lady Curtis spends her time with a medium, trying to get into conversation with poor Freckles. I should think he had had enough of shouting into an ear trumpet when he was alive. Somebody told me the other day that a woman, who did not know what she was saying, gave long descriptions of the next world! Personally, I prefer people to know what they are about!” She rose from her chair, and, stooping, gave her sister-in-law a cold little peck. “I hope you will get a letter from Keith to-morrow; but, after all, you heard four days ago. It would be far worse if he were in Persia. Good-bye, mamma.”

“All the Beaulys are like that,” her mother-in-law remarked, as the door closed.

“Adèle is a frost-bite, but I suppose she cannot help it,” Pauline agreed listlessly, and the door opened again to admit Elizabeth Mary. She toddled across the room, clutching a finger of her dignified nurse. She was cut off by scarce a hundred miles from the storm of war, and enabled to exist in an atmosphere of unlimited clean frocks, warm flannels, clockwork nursery meals. Grannie folded her in her arms.

“How well the darling looks, Ann.”

“Yes, thank you, my lady.” Then, to her mistress “ Really, m’m, the way the new laundry tears the lace you’d hardly believe. Susan and I spent two hours mending it yesterday, and it is not as if she had an elder child’s things. It is all new, and hand-made.”

“Yes,” said Pauline indifferently. “Both of you might have been better employed knitting, I expect.”

“Well, I do like to see a child kept properly,” the nurse bridled, offended.

“Have you any of your people in the war, Ann?” Lady Rotherhurst interposed. Pauline seemed in a difficult mood.

“Two nephews, my lady. It seems a great change. Soldiers used to be looked down on.”

“You’d much better have looked down on footmen,” her mistress remarked, a little fiercely. She went to her child and kissed her. “Baby must go to the nursery again; I have more visitors coming. Take her away, nurse. Ta-ta, my little bird!” When the door closed, she turned to her mother. “Nurse is far better for Betty than I am in a mood like this. I don’t think nurse realises there is a war; at any rate, in her life it is of secondary importance to Betty’s frocks and Betty’s little tummy and the nursery-maid’s delinquencies. If the second housemaid did not bring her up the third course at dinner quite hot, I think the domestic skies would fall . . . and at this very moment Keith may be buried alive in some explosion, or screaming his life away, or be kicked as a prisoner by a German!” Her voice broke.

“My dear, don’t! It is so bad for you,” the Dowager protested.

“I am cursed by my imagination. What I would give to have limited vision! Some wives don’t really love—what do they know of torture? Anyone can endure pain, but who can endure torture?” She caught her breath, and her rapid utterance ceased. “I must not,” she said, quelling her own storm, while her face blanched.

“I do hope the child will be a boy, after all you are going through,” her mother murmured.

“I would give my body so willingly,” Pauline cried, “so willingly—for Keith, for my country, for the baby. But it is hard to think the right thoughts now for Keith’s child! If I could only work mechanically, as such thousands of women are doing . . .” She broke off again.

“I hoped, perhaps, there was comfort in this, poor child.”

“So there is, in some moods—the sweetest, most intimate comfort. This is a reaction. Don’t worry about me, mother. I’m a coward, that’s all.”

“A coward you never were, nor shall be, Pauline,” the Dowager said, with unwonted decision. “Always fire and steel, my child, even when a little girl.” When she departed she left a sense of comfort behind her, as if her own vital motherhood of bygone years still distilled something of strength and sustenance, as the perfume of the rose lives in the dried pot-pourri.

“Miss Hind,” the parlour-maid announced; and Pauline greeted her friend warmly, saying, “How becoming the nurse’s uniform is, Doris.”

“I’m mostly dead, I’m so tired,” Doris responded. “I’ll sit right here, Pauline, and look at you. It is a great comfort to look at a whole person, and not just the poor bits of things they are trying to mend at the hospital. I’m allowed to do more for them now. It’s a relief after all the scrubbing. I hate the smell of soapsuds, and all the blessed disinfectants, good and strong. War is a bad, brutal thing, and I don’t know one man in a hundred that really wants to go back to it. All the honour and the glory . . .”

“Don’t, Doris,” said Pauline, a trifle peremptorily. “My husband is at stake—leave me the vision splendid, please! Other people may be able to get through this war by dint of hard work and interesting controversy, but to us, who give our hearts, there is only one line to take—for King and Country, and the glamour of heroic deeds! We are such stuff as dreams are made of . . . I do not want theories, or stances, or philosophies; I want the wild, high thing—the valiant, the dauntless!”

“Well, this ought to suit you, then,” said Doris indulgently, drawing a letter from her pocket. “It is from Mr. Rose.”

“I did not like his last letter which you sent me to read,” interposed Pauline. “He cannot lose his journalistic training: he makes an artistic selection of what he sees; a poor dead body is something to be effectively described. He won’t let actions speak for themselves; he interprets. And he has not grown into touch with the real military spirit yet. But I admire him for enlisting.”

“I expect the others don’t like him much. He is such a fussy little man,” Doris Hind agreed, “and he takes all the criticism of this and that senior officer so seriously, he can’t trust anybody; he just wears himself out finding fault. But do listen to this bit: it is enthusiastic enough to please even you.” She settled herself more comfortably among the cushions and rustled the sheets. “‘I wish you had known Waller. He was at Dulwich with me; and he actually condescended to remember the fact, though he is an officer and your humble servant is merely Thomas Atkins. Just like Waller. He was an airman, and his spirit belonged to things aerial. He had all the gifts of beings with wings: he could whistle to you till the sunbeams danced, and he was shy and wild as a bird. Never was man less grossly bound to the body: I could not say earth to earth of Waller, though he lay dead at my feet. If was most true of him that he went star-gazing through life: the sky called him even as a small boy flying kites. He was so strong, so free of caste, so little moulded by convention, I think while he slept his mind must have slipped away to fairyland o’ nights. Last Tuesday he stopped and spoke awhile to me: always hopeful with a vast hope, and not the depressing petty cheerfulness of the secure. Half an hour later I heard a mighty noise, and up above the soaring of a lark I saw his aeroplane hovering like some dark bat in the limitless blue. Up and up he went, and then he swooped down as do sea-gulls over the sea. Then up again and up, with the frightful wings roaring. Into a cloud he passed, and I saw him no more. There among the heaped-up sunset clouds he died. Not on earth. They shot him from the earth. He had finished his observation, the others told me, and written, the last word, before his spirit continued its flight, away from the unseemly horror of the bloody ground. Tell that to your Indian doctor friend, whose family think a man must lie on mother earth to pass in peace. Tell him an Englishman died as no Indian has yet, unsoiled by clay and very near the shadow of His wings!’ Do you like that, Pauline?”

“Yes,” said Pauline, very low.

“The last bit is so like him; tantalising himself about my Indian friend,” Doris lamented, with a little note of self-consciousness in her voice.

Pauline had no pricked ear. She let the remark pass.

“To die in the sky—how wonderfully men live,” she murmured.

“Mr. Rose was wounded the very day after he wrote that,” Doris continued. “A splinter of shell got him. I had hoped he would be more or less safe in the Army Service Corps.”

“Wounded? I never saw his name. Poor little man.”

“I don’t suppose you’d wade through the list of privates’ names,” Doris remarked pointedly. “And if he hasn’t got the spirit of your military class, he has been baptized into its brotherhood all right.”

“Yes, indeed,” Pauline admitted humbly. “Tell me about him.”

“I have not seen him,” Doris told her unwillingly. “He won’t see anybody. He has been horribly disfigured, and he has only written to me once since he arrived in the hospital, and then he simply said: ‘I am monstrous to look upon. I pray you may never see my face again. If you have any friendship for me, avoid me.’ He always goes to extremes. But I ’phoned to the matron, and she said his face was about as bad as could be. His nerves are done for too, so he has been invalided out of the service. And a private’s pension is so small. How much is it?”

“I do not know,” Pauline confessed.

“I can’t think what he will do,” Doris said anxiously. “I should like to help him, for he was very much in love with me, you know.”

“And you with him? Oh, Doris!” her friend cried pitifully.

“Not one scrap,” responded the determined Doris. “But he was useful in my literary career. He can’t get that job back, however.”

“Why not?” Pauline challenged.

“Pauline, how you do fire up! Because his work was to interview authors and editors and publishers. He spent half his time seeing folk on business. Well, his face would put people off. He must know that right enough himself. You can’t change the old world by war. She’s too used to it. The five senses remain just where they were.”

“I shall go to see him,” said Pauline, a wealth of tenderness in her deep eyes.

Doris’s criticism of this announcement was a silence which, as the clock ticked the moments, revealed her meaning to the other with a shock of realisation. No, she might not visit this wounded man. Very certainly the five senses were unchanged and unchanging, and for the sake of that child which should be born of her, her eyes must not behold the horror of one miserable devil’s countenance lest the awful picture be transmitted by her to the life within her. The silence in the room held very terrible thoughts now. What an unspeakable fate was this by which man, the creative force, must become veiled, cut off, purdah, in dread that the sight of his poor face should impair the perfection of life which a woman held as the chalice holds the Sacrament. What humiliation such a victim reaped from the glories of war—stinging, scourging, branding, till the kind heaped earth hid him well at last. How awfully, too, in vital mental regions, where dwells and labours the immortal spirit of humanity, womanhood in receiving a thought and an impression conceives it for her three-in-one impersonification—her eternal motherhood. Brooding there above the fire on her hearth, Pauline was in touch, by the sympathetic response to life that is woman, with the disfigurement of that wounded soldier. Had not the lithe grace of her own youthful body disappeared hideously under nature’s burden? Nevertheless, more than any artist, she was in touch with perfection of form, since she lived to reproduce it. She quivered through every mental fibre to the human pain and the human misery, and yet wrenched her mind away from its comradeship with woe to set it on its task of gathering thoughts of peace and joy and a disposition of happiness for the inward spiritual grace of her offspring. Thus, the mother in war.

“No, I cannot visit him,” said Pauline gravely. “Let us talk of something happy, Doris dear.”

*  *  *

April.

Now of all the sounds in the street, only one sound mattered to Pauline; of all the folk travelling in this world and out of it only one traveller counted to Pauline; of all the incalculable sum of intricate pleasure and pain, only one sensation was recognised by Pauline. She expected Keith momentarily. And before her heart had fled to her lips and fallen in terrible throes back to her breast he was with her, in her arms, in her sight, in her hearing. Home again. All the world outside at its murdering and its plundering remote as the moon. For long months imagination, visualising faces and words, and paper and ink that conveyed a moment’s handiwork and scribed their minds, had represented this pair to each other in shadow, as ghosts talk and gesticulate. But this was reality: this, snatched from the war, was Happiness. This was good luck triumphing over menacing destiny. Here, by her side, as fit as a fiddle, was her husband, and not once nor twice but ten thousand times she had shuddered at the fear that she would never see his face again save in a photograph, nor gather his words to her heart save from some silent page. And from all man’s walks abroad, from all his voyages of discovery, from all his wanderings after high jinks, is there any return like unto this—back from the war? Keith thought not.

“We’ve been very far apart,” she mused presently. “Me here—you there. Such a trouble there.”

“Great blessing for me to know you were here. Comfortable room this.” He announced his supreme satisfaction, munching the cakes.

“Are things going well?” she asked.

“All’s well,” he answered, and she met his reserve as a child meets the carefully guarded knowledge of the grown-ups.

“Is it Bluebeard’s cupboard? Am I not to know what you know?” she asked gently.

“You can’t know unless you are there,” he answered her. “Thank God, my wife wasn’t there.”

“I’m to lose that bit of your life? You can’t show me what it was like and what you felt like?”

He looked at her eager face—the pure eyes, the sensitive sweet mouth.

“Great Scott, Pauline!” he said, with a growl of grim satisfaction. “The whole point of the show is to damn well prevent the Germans from enlightening you as to what war is like.” He kissed her eyes as if to shut her ignorance safely within their lids. “What do you suppose invasion means to a woman’s father, and brother, and son, and husband?”

“We won’t think of it,” she told him suddenly, to his content. “We’ll just live in the present and be happy. You must have rest and peace, my darling. Here comes Baby Betty!”

There she was: blue ribbons and frills, a gurgling laugh, and bewitching curls.

“My word, she has changed!” Keith announced. “Come on, miss; none of your airs and graces. I’m your father, so give me a kiss. I call her awfully pretty, Paul, don’t you?”

Certainly they were very happy. A fig for your horrors of war!

But the father no less than the baby daughter was changed. Pauline studied him, enthralled by her heart’s question, Was all well?

He seldom read the papers: a brief glance at the official news, and a study of Punch, that was all. He had no liking for inquiries after those who had lost their lives and limbs and sight, and the painful manner of it: he answered to the point, but as one who, having opened a door, shuts it again as soon as may be. He did not sit musing over the fire, but read fiction of an entirely trivial value in the lighter magazines. During the day he sought the bright movement of the streets, enjoyed the spring flowers in the park, the shops, the whole passing show: regiments that held back the traffic for a moment, parties of convalescent wounded in motors, some old Chelsea pensioner, a naval officer, men in khaki shopping in the Army and Navy Stores by dozens, posters calling for more recruits—all these signs of a new world in arms which stood out from all the rest to Pauline as live actors stand out from painted scenery, were ignored by Keith in favour of things familiar in the old days of bygone peace. He liked the restaurants, and preferred to spend his evenings at some amusing play, tired Pauline merely stipulating for the seclusion of a box. “He is seeking for a mental bromide; he must have it,” she told herself. He was irritable at times: once he got up from his chair sharply with an exasperated exclamation, “How you watch me, Pauline!” but almost instantly turned to her again, and rubbed his hand against her cheek in a mute apology. He talked in agitated snatches in his sleep, which broke her heart.

*  *  *

Two weeks later. The nurse was with her, the doctor had been telephoned for, her mother and sister waited downstairs. Once or twice a shriek rang through the quiet house.

The doctor came. Two doctors came. A consultation. No danger as yet, but cause for anxiety. A long, long business. Tears of sympathy on Phyllis’s lashes, and murmurs from the Dowager, “She could not be in better hands. Sir James is so clever.” To which her lovely, luxurious daughter retorted passionately, “Not clever enough to invent another way for us poor devils of women!” No, very certainly there was no other way.

The evening paper gave further tidings of the sinking of the Lusitania, on the previous morning. “Children, too, so many!” moaned Lady Rotherhurst. “How can people be so cruel! “

“If it were only people—but who is to blame for that?” A last cry of pain snapped Phyllis’s control, and made her fling her puny challenge to a Supreme Being. “Who is to blame for that?”

Then in half an hour an end to the torture and the suspense, an atmosphere of congratulation through the house. Sir James’s announcement, “A son. Both should do well now—a great relief!” While Lady Glynde, her undimmed self once more, scribbled a telegram to Keith.

And in the bedroom, from Pauline’s pale lips, the faint happy murmur, “Thank God.”

*  *  *

Dew had fallen, as the tears of watchful stars; scarlet poppies proclaimed the blood-stained secrets of the indifferent earth. A thrush sang. The dawn broke over sand dune and dyke and trench, and a little breeze shivered among the poplars. An old hen scratched busily for her brood of chicks close to a desolate little farmhouse, where a broken wheel and a jar of Bruges pottery in fragments lay beside a closed door. A window opened, and Wendover leant out for a brief moment, his strong chest showing white where his unbuttoned shirt disclosed it below the brick-red sunburn of his face and throat. A very tired, strained face.

The door was pushed open presently, and an older man than Wendover sauntered out and looked up at the scudding clouds.

“Wind against us,” he observed to Keith, who followed him out. Both wore the red tabs of the staff officer.

Wendover looked up too at a lark carolling in the sky. “Doesn’t care a blow for gas, the blighter,” he remarked. “Above that sort of thing. This hot day ought to do the old man’s cold good.”

“I heard him coughing away all night,” the other said.

Wendover scrutinised his companion’s face quickly. “Didn’t sleep yourself, eh!” he thought.

An orderly joined them carrying papers, and the three set off down the dusty road. The Major presented rather a shabby appearance, even his clothes looked harassed. Wendover’s figure was smartness itself, and in the alertness of his bearing there was no trace left of the expression his face had worn at the window. “Cheery bloke,” the orderly dubbed him, and liked the air he whistled.

The road bent and entered a village, which bestirred itself to receive a regiment that went into billets from the trenches. The second in command, a great stout man, Blanes by name, stood at the entrance to a cobbled courtyard, and the Major greeted him with inquiries.

“What’s left of us,” he said, in answer to a question.

“The men were splendid. They always are.”

“Poor Rawdon, too. I was sorry about that. He’ll be a great loss, I am sure,” the Major said, with melancholy sympathy. “I took a great fancy to Rawdon.”

The regimental officer turned his eyes, which were bloodshot from smoke and dust and sunk in his head with fatigue, morosely upon the other. “Couldn’t get bombs along to him quick enough,” he said. There was an air of antagonism about him, and the two staff officers went on.

“Evidently feels the strain very much,” the Major said irritably, as though he had been rubbed the wrong way by the other’s manner.

“Regimental officers over forty have the devil of a physical test,” Wendover remarked equably. “First-rate man Blanes; he should go far if he lives.”

The road took a little dip, and where a stream bubbled beneath a culvert, and a few pollard willows and golden buttercups grew, some score of graves marked an event of bygone months. There had been attention and care bestowed upon them recently. “Looks better now,” the Major said, with approval; but Wendover’s ear was invited by the orderly. “Beg pardon, sir, a telegram for you.” A cyclist had overtaken them with it.

Wendover read the wire and then tore it up. The little fragments were strewn across the graves by a puff of wind.

“I have a son and heir,” he informed the Major.

“I congratulate you,” said the other, with polite indifference. “A future field-marshal—what? Looks better now,” he repeated once more to the orderly, who was surveying the graves with interest.

“Yes, sir,” the orderly responded. “That’s new since yesterday, that one is. Over there on the left, sir.”

The Major stepped fussily across the intervening mounds to where a wooden cross showed some lettering and peered at it. “Ah,” he remarked. “‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.’ Rather morbid, eh?”

“We haven’t any too much time, Major,” Wendover urged. If he were impatient—and the glint in his eyes was far from placid—his imperturbable manner betrayed nothing.

*  *  *

Many months after. Pauline sat in the same upstairs drawing-room and scrutinised the daily papers. Speeches, speeches, speeches. A veritable crusade of mental suggestion and mental attack against selfishness and sloth and love of money. A moral war in which the pessimists declared that they could hear the grinding of axes. With a shock the woman realised from time to time that duels were being fought out bitterly enough, regardless of the titanic war across the sea: press duels, political duels, personal duels, labour and capital. Very discouraging, deeply disconcerting: Pauline turned the pages slowly. She ran her eyes down the Agony Column—earning its name now grimly. Here a woman searching for a sixpence—“Lost a Pekinese dog”—and here a woman seeking to find where they had laid him: “Missing—Will anyone who saw Lieut. A. Brown, 200th Northumberland Fusiliers, reported missing 29th June, kindly communicate with his mother, Mrs. G. Brown, The Laurels, Surbiton.” Farther down the column—“Mrs. Rae is collecting comforts for her husband’s regiment in the Dardanelles, and will be grateful for any fly-papers, mosquito-nets, socks, cigarettes, or money to buy them.” Pauline looked at the comforts of her room, costly luxuries, artistic accessaries: nothing here to arm you against Life at its fiercest. Then, printed in large type on the editorial page, her poem, “The Angels who Understand.” Out of the warfare of words and thoughts a triumph for her, a victory: she had achieved something not far short of perfection as a poet. The long lashes swept her pale cheeks; the delicate lips showed concentration; the whole face grew absorbed while she read, as a flower grows toward the light. Not a regret or a grudge thrown backward now to the effort, the acute sensitiveness to impressions, the highly-strung nervous energy that created the poem—if self were the price, no matter; in her image the thing was created, and in that it was good the artist knew for the moment a supreme happiness. For the moment only: on the opposite page the Roll of Honour wrote of other aspirations, and Pauline received, as by wireless, a warning from another poet mind:

“If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim——”

She laid aside the paper, and took up a scarf she was knitting for the comforts of the soldiers.

Master Keith Wendover forbade any wanderings after other gods, and chained her fast to domestic life, since he had left her without physical strength for aught else. And his father wrote again and again from Flanders, “Mind you take care of yourself!” Soft life, sofa life, wrapped her close in spite of war.

Pauline had leisure for other people. In her crowded life human beings were never crowded out. When she bought hairpins and tapes across a counter, she took cognizance of the shopwoman who served her; when she was handed a letter on a tray, she noticed the bearer of it; when she tried on a new frock, she received a definite impression of the skirt hand who knelt beside her with her mouth full of pins. Thus, in a brief half-hour at a committee meeting, Pauline had acquired a friend, Cynthia Oswald, the wife of an officer in the Indian Army. A woman with dignity and initiative. A handsome woman, very quietly dressed. A woman who gave the impression of having seen Life itself, and lived her life largely. Pauline welcomed her that afternoon with a feeling of relief. Here was a real human being.

“Your poem is a big thing,” she said, her elbow on the white enamel mantel-shelf, one large well-shaped foot on the brass fender. “You have touched the vital point—spirit. A fine spirit in the troops, a public spirit at home, approaching a thing in the wrong spirit; we say all that every day and lose the meaning. The fantasy of witches and bad angels touches the truth in fiction. And truth vanishes like all spiritual things: apparitions, transfigurations. I saw it for one moment this morning when I read your poem; I lost it coming here this afternoon on a motor bus. I felt merely mortal in that bus, with a peremptory order not to spit staring me in the face all the way from Kensington.”

“I hate a bus,” said Pauline fastidiously; “don’t you?”

The other smiled, showing strong white teeth. “A tonga, or a dandy, or a hill pony, or a bus—one gets about, you know,” she replied indifferently. “I have been from Kashmir to London since the war began. Wonderful powers and little contrivances the whole way. A piece of string that held the traces together for a hundred miles took one along. I stood in the Residency garden in Gulmerg last August, where the great hills fell sheer to the valley and the world was supremely beautiful, and read Reuter’s telegrams that were only dispatched from London a few hours before. And yesterday I sat in the ward of an Indian hospital at Brighton by the bedside of a hillman—not a Kashmiri but a Dogra, who had had no word of news from India during all his long ten months of war. The arrangement for the mail for Indian troops is a magnificent bit of work, but in his village the letter-writer misdirects the letters perhaps, or the dâk-wallah purloins the stamps and destroys the letters, or his people mourn him as one dead and do not write. Some detail fails him.”

“Tell me about the Indian troops,” Pauline urged. “One hears so many conflicting rumours.”

“Oh, rumours?” responded the other, with a shrug of her broad shoulders. “Yes, one did not hear more in the bazaars of the East. A fact may be true and yet not a representative fact. The Indian soldier is the stranger within our camps, and the Indian wounded is the stranger within our gates. But he is our brother-in-arms in our fight for existence. What can you make of that? England’s strange foster-child. No, I can’t put it into words. I can’t define it. A poet might, but there is nothing of that in me!” She laughed her jolly laugh again.

Pauline propped her chin on her hand. “It fascinates me,” she said, “the idea of France and England as they are to-day. Through all their centuries no Eastern thoughts have gone up from our lands, no Mohammedan beliefs breathed among our towns and villages, no Hindu prayers risen from our camps and fields. And now all day and all night among our Western and Christian millions their strange thoughts take their place among our thoughts—their souls take flight from French and English earth with our atmosphere touching them till the last. What does it mean for the world?”

Mrs. Oswald looked at Pauline with frank curiosity. “You might understand India a little,” she said, “being a poet and a dreamer. A Gradgrind would live and die there and learn no more than a Whitaker’s Annual and a vernacular dictionary could teach him in Fleet Street.”

“I saw some of the Indian wounded at Brighton last week,” Pauline told the other. “Parties of convalescents were walking about with a British soldier.”

Mrs. Oswald drove her eyebrows together in a quick frown. “Flowers stuck in their buttonholes, and all the women gazing at them, I suppose. That’s not the sepoy and sowar as I know him.”

“How do you know him?” Pauline queried. She saw that this wife of a British officer of the Indian Army was jarred and irritated by something that went amiss with professional traditions.

“I know him as a soldier who is familiar with no woman, who keeps his own women, if present in the married quarters, in the deepest seclusion, unseen by the officers or the rank and file; who ignores in my compound the presence of the low-caste Indian woman—the ayah, the syce’s wives, the dhobi’s wives. I know him as utterly respectful in manners and very ceremonious to all Englishwomen. This is required of him, and he acts up to it. His ideal of a woman is a veiled wife and mother. The white of our skin veils our sex to him, perhaps, as the snow veils the earth of the inaccessible mountain; but here, in England, the manner of the women has been misleading: the snow has melted, their dignity has come down. And, as the ruling race, we women should carry our heads so high—so high!”

“Mutual ignorance breeds bad mistakes;” Pauline murmured sympathetically. “But I felt a great respect for those Indian wounded.”

“I pity them so,” Cynthia Oswald said; and in the deep intensity of her mood Pauline saw an embodiment of all that huge spiritual force of mercy which under the Red Cross was ministering to the wounds of the world. “Think of their terrible mental isolation . . . pain, and cold, and dread in exile. I shall remember as long as I live that huge circular ward in the Regent’s Palace—tier after tier of stricken, uneducated men under the great swinging candelabra. I saw a dying Sikh stretch up his two bones of arms and cry aloud his dismay at that condemned wretch who was himself. I heard another praying his last raucous snatch of prayer for mercy; while the Mohammedans, and I the Christian, were so near and yet so far. I watched a little snub-nosed, cockney-faced English orderly bend over a dying Pathan, his red hand with its sandy hair laid upon the brown parchment of the other, and heard him say over and over again, ‘Cheer up, ole man,’ to uncomprehending ears.” She stopped abruptly, the quick blood mantling to her cheeks in a very rage of pity. “When I spoke to him in his own tongue, he murmured his courteous recognition, ‘Huzoor!’ I don’t suppose he spoke again.”

“I thought that they disregarded death, those people,” Pauline exclaimed, aghast.

“They are brave men, they disregard danger,” the other replied; “but nothing that lives ignores death. They think of it differently from us, but do you doubt that their spirit recognises it?” She gloomed a moment, her brows heavy, then lifted her head on its firm round pillar of white throat. “There was a Dogra there, a young soldier who was very keen to go back to Flanders and die. He had had his hour of destiny, he said, and taken the opportunity offered him and done an heroic deed. His Colonel saw it, and told him he should get a reward. Half an hour afterwards the officer was shot. In that Dogra’s village, as far as he knows, not one sepoy remains alive who went forth to this war, save only himself, and the way he looks on the situation is peculiar to himself and to his own people. He put it to me like this: ‘ Of what use, Sahib,¹ to say I did what I did? The Colonel Sahib is dead, and all men will say, “He lies.” If I return to my village, all people will say, “Every sepoy is dead save only you, therefore you cannot be a brave man.” If I had a bahadouri,² they would believe, but the Colonel Sahib was killed, and how then should I receive a bahadouri? It is better that I go back to the fighting and die.’ Only a decoration, you see, would have gained sanction for an honourable soldier to live when all others perished, and to a remote village ‘all’ means perhaps half a dozen. Can I, can he, carry conviction to that little, little corner of the world? Never. So he longs to go back to where your husband is, and mine, and meet death there.”

“You break my heart,” said Pauline.

“How many hearts will even ache for them, once this war is ended?” the other challenged. “Are hearts big enough to carry the helpless, or will they simply let pockets do the business?”

“Money is the most practical help, surely?” Pauline interposed; but Cynthia Oswald gave rather a hopeless smile.

“Pensions? Picture the blind man in a Punjab June and the deadly snake he cannot see. Picture the paralysed man when the sun falls upon his head and the people of his house have forgotten to move his bed. Picture the man without legs when, in the mountains of Nepal, his wooden limbs crack and split and warp in the fierce rains hundreds of difficult miles from the English. Picture the man without a tongue who cannot read and write, when his heart agonises to make some urgent request, some pitiful appeal. Kindly, ignorant, easily tired of an unending guardianship, their own folk will give them something very different from the magnificent championship that they deserve. Their neighbours will move their landmarks, their children will let the flies settle on the paralysed’s dirty eyes. . . . Oh, what’s the use of talking! I am not saying this in blame; they will act according to their lights. But, my God! I would be England to the Indian wounded—their champion, their protector!”

And there was that in the strong face which made Pauline say, with apparent inconsequence, “Did you see the red roses heaped around the statue of Florence Nightingale? The sword must have pierced her heart also, but it was worth while!”

“People say,” Cynthia Oswald mused, “that this is the crucifixion of the world. Shall we ever be happy again?”

Pauline spoke with a confidence which greatly impressed the stronger woman. “We are sometimes happy now,” she cried. “I have borne worse physical pain than Keith,—touch wood!—and I was happy when they said to me, ‘It is a boy.’ The fighters are happy when they win, and we are happy when we glory in them. Lovers are happy if they meet, and sometimes thoughts make us happy.”

The telephone bell sounded an interruption, and with a quick apology Pauline went to it and put the receiver to her ear. “Are you there? Yes. What did you say? I am Mrs. Wendover. Yes. I’ll tell her. . . . It is someone to speak to you, Mrs. Oswald. Oh, one moment!” She had caught a remonstrance from the faintly heard voice and listened again. “Yes, what did you say?”

Prick, prick went the voice, and there was a whir and a buzz in the instrument. Someone among the countless voices of London was interrupting the communication. Presently the words came again, highly strung with impatient nerves: “Are you there, Mrs. Wendover? Something is wrong with this fiendish thing! Can you hear now? Please listen. I am Mrs. Oswald’s sister. A telegram has just reached me from Major Oswald’s Colonel to say he has been killed. I am waiting here to break the news to her. The official intimation may be here for her at any moment. Please just tell her that her sister is in her rooms, and ask her to come to me—say I have a letter I want to show her—say anything, only don’t let her delay, for I am due back in the Hospital in three-quarters of an hour.”

“Yes, I’ll tell her,” said Pauline in a frozen voice, terribly conscious of the woman who stood behind her.

“Thank you.”

Pauline put back the receiver and turned to her guest with a manner that kept the secret of the telephone perfectly. “My dear, your sister tells me I am to turn you out without a moment’s delay. She has a letter she wants to show you, and she is due back in the Hospital in less than an hour.”

Cynthia Oswald put on her gloves leisurely. “I must have gone in any case, for I have not written my daily letter to Richard yet.”

Pauline stretched her hand to the bell. “You’ll have a taxi.”

“Not I, these hard times. A man doesn’t make money serving his country!” She laughed. “I’ll catch the No. 24 bus.”

“But you’ll take ages, and your sister will blame me. She was in such a hurry for you. Do go in a taxi this once. I think you’d better! “

But the big calm creature was not to be hastened or swayed. “Oh, Emily is always in a fuss over something. A bus will do me very well. If one took a taxi every time one was in a hurry in London, one would soon be ruined. Good-bye, Mrs. Wendover. Do come and see me soon, and we’ll exchange news from our men at the front.” She was surprised that Pauline kissed her, but felt the charm of her—-the faint perfume, the dainty lawn and lace, the smooth cool skin, and that quick sympathetic magnetism which made her personal beauty an unforgettable thing. “I expect my letter to my husband will be full of you,” she said. “You haunt one’s thoughts somehow. Good-bye.”

With eyes that were filled with sorrowful comradeship, Pauline watched the widow go—down the stairs, then across the street, and round the corner out of sight—to the dire knowledge that awaited her in her Kensington lodgings.

*  *  *

Pauline and Phyllis sat together in the Glyndes’ house. The beautiful drawing-room was filled with chrysanthemums, and Pauline noted her sister’s luxurious surroundings with new eyes, for in her pocket Keith’s last letter muttered to her uneasily. “I wish I could get a few days’ leave to run over to talk to Glynde about business matters. Do you think you could go a bit slow for a while? Could you take the children down to your mother’s or to my father’s, and give up the house in town at the end of this quarter? My investments are paying very badly, glad to hear yours seem to be going strong. All the same, I think it might be as well to avoid any unnecessary expenditure. I wish I could have a talk with you, instead of this infernal writing. No time for more.”

Here was a change of theme from the love letters and from the story of war’s adventures which lay in treasured piles on her writing-table. Here was the sinister shadow of restriction and loss on her threshold, yet something widely human within her bade her meet it with what indifference she could. Only less sunshine for her—but at how many doors the gaunt wolf itself, in how many fields no seed except the dead bodies of strong men, and how many homes were mere heaps of cold ashes! It was a very, very small misfortune by comparison that touched her daily life—and yet she winced at it.

Both Lady Glynde and Pauline wore slight mourning, for the Rotherhursts’ little son had died of pneumonia. Phyllis was speaking of it now.

“It is extraordinary to see mother’s wrath—I did not know she had it in her. She positively seems to be without sympathy with Adèle, from sheer resentment. She kept on saying to me, ‘Only one child all those years! What if anything happens to Tom now in the Dardanelles? Oh, the havoc a selfish, spoilt woman can bring upon a house!’ I kept on assuring her that Tom would come home safe and sound at the end of the war, but it was no good.” Phyllis made a little grimace. “I don’t know if she was talking at me! You ought to be in great favour, Paul, with your enormous family of two!”

“Poor Adèle,” Pauline said, “and poor wee Tommy. It seems only the other day that he was my little page.”

“Your wedding was ages ago,” Phyllis remarked. “Perfectly prehistoric, and so commonplace when one looks at the marvellous marriages since this war! Ten days’ acquaintance, two days’ honeymoon, and what their married lives will be like when they do meet again is the question! Half of them have married on nothing.”

“I think it has all been rather beautiful,” Pauline declared.

“I have no doubt you do,” remarked her sister dryly. “You would. But look here, Paulie, this is what I call an interesting affair, young Brentwood’s—do you know about it?”

“No. Except that I heard he and Lady Violet were to be married at once.”

Phyllis sat up straight, and for a moment appeared to hesitate; then, with immense vivacity and laughing eyes, began her tale. “Well, he was here, you know, wounded, for ages. And he used to talk to me a lot. That boy had everything before him—a marquisate, one of the finest places in England, and such wealth! Well, my dear, it is no joke to turn your back on all that, twice, and face death. His younger brother is married and has a boy; but his wife was that actress, Bessy Dainty, and young Brentwood can’t endure her. So he used to sit here and talk and talk of how he wanted to marry himself before his arm was well enough for him to return to the front again. But a man can’t fall in love to order.” Phyllis suddenly appeared lost in thought. “Especially if . . .” She shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, Phyllis!” Pauline regarded the pretty creature with amusement.

Phyllis bubbled. “I can’t help it! Anyway, I was perfectly angelic, and asked every nice girl I could think of to tea with him in this room. I assure you I was quite struck with all that his family seemed to mean to him, for he is so young—only twenty-two. To marry a girl who would adorn the position of Marchioness of Perth, and carry on the line, was of real importance to him. He felt the responsibility of his personal inheritance. You might think that existence in those awful trenches, where every man possesses his life and no more, would have knocked the value of being his father’s heir out of him. But it had not.”

“I hope they’ll be happy,” said Pauline.

“They are to be married on Wednesday,” Phyllis remarked to this. “But happy? Oh, I don’t know.” She regarded her sister queerly. “Think what it means to that girl. He is really just marrying her now because he wants an heir, you know. I wonder if she realises that? I expect she does. You were such a visionary as a bride, Pauline!”

“This war lays bare the bones of things,” Pauline cried fiercely, “but it does not injure the soul of things. Romance is not dead because men need heirs . . .”

“Hush!” said Phyllis hastily—and the door opened to admit Lord Brentwood. A nice, fair, clean-looking subaltern he was, with the simplest and most unassuming manner in the world.

When Pauline left she carried with her the cadence of their voices, the boy’s saying, “It is a good thing your husband is over forty. It is no joke for wives when their husbands are in this show;” and Phyllis’s light rejoinder, “Picture John in winter trenches! Why, the only physical hardship he has ever endured is tapping the barometer and seeing it go down!” Nothing in the words, but in their eyes when they spoke an agitation and a response.

*  *  *

On her way through the streets she noticed a new poster. The apparition of a soldier, slain in battle, stood ghostlike before a young civilian, and, pointing to a slim figure in widow’s weeds, cried, “Won’t you defend her now?” The appeal of the dead, the appeal of woman, it grew and grew. Thousands and thousands of people gathered the same thoughts from the picture with their eyes as they passed by. For those great legions and multitudes of human bodies across the sea held the world’s attention breathless: since where danger is there will gather all the palpitating suspense of mankind. Eyes, blindfold by sightless miles which separated them from the terrific scenes of combat, saw by imagination’s imagery the living rush across the open to the trenches, the living burrowing through dim and wormy ways to the minefield, the living struggling and stabbing in the bloody passages and rooms of chaotic villages, the living hovering on deadly wings of air-craft in the teeth of mighty winds. Saw too the writhings of the wounded, heard the speechless cries of those tormented, beheld the slow horror of the long unburied dead. But, and here agonised civilisation was flung back again to its normal standpoint, the watching world—the world out of sight that yet never ceased to visualise the war—could picture with certainty no more of the dead’s fate than the lot of the mortal body. Up to that point, up to the very moment of swift or horrible death, the waiting millions bore mental comradeship—and then nothing. Nothing but a few more women wearing the shadows of the night, and the storm of the Dead March in Saul beating against cathedral walls. Yet, as the slaughter grew and grew, though the existence of the many million dead whom the living had touched and loved remained an unpenetrated mystery, there was undoubtedly a thinning of the veil, a stirring of the spirit. Superstitions awoke round firesides, and prayers for the dead broke from the living, while impalpable, indefinable, an instinctive faith in a life everlasting forbade a mortally bereaved generation to relinquish its comradeship with the dead army lying east and west beneath its terrible acres. If ever the dead walked, if ever the curse of man’s hate was paid for in doomed families, if ever the angels of the Lord appeared to man, if ever the supernatural held communion with living flesh and blood, these things happened in nineteen hundred and fifteen.

Chapter VII

Pauline turned over the pages of the proofs of her new book of poems, very intent upon the work. The war was ended, and rising all round her and within her were the old habits, the old ways, the old interests, dominant as ever, but hampered by restricted means. Conservative to her very core, she sought to constrain each change as a wayward thing, unfaithful. By every means in her power she tried to locate and define the subtle alteration in her husband. He sat in the room with her now, and his voice broke in upon her work.

“Pauline, I want a talk.”

“I have nearly finished,” she replied, endeavouring to preserve her labours from interruption. But his silent impatience made itself felt, and she pushed the papers from her with a little gesture of despair. When she stood before him in her white velvet dinner gown she was as splendidly lovely as when she had first met him, but there was a difference. She carried herself with more certainty, spoke with greater decision. She was the mother of two children, a poet of acknowledged achievement, a soldier’s wife who had endured through the ordeal of the great war. The sprite Pauline was gone, the elfin maiden had vanished, but there was magic still. She had it in the allure of her face, the magnetism of her voice, the fascination of her temperament.

“You are abominable, Keith,” she declared, fire in her eyes, but a smile on her exquisite lips. “I care for my work! And you are its worst enemy. Your profession, our children, the war—how am I to write?”

His head was thrown back against the leather chair, his legs were crossed, and he held one of his slim silk-clad ankles with both his big hands. “Has your mother gone to bed yet?” was all he said.

“Yes, ages ago. It is late. What do you want to talk about, Keith? If it is economy again, I won’t listen.”

“Why not?” he inquired, with a broad smile. Rebellious, she amused him and attracted him, and well she knew it. “Must be economical, unfortunately.”

“Up to a certain point. I am not going to dress in rags.”

“You are very like Phyllis,” he commented.

In the most devoted families it is seldom well to point out the smallest family resemblance. “If that be so, it is fortunate for you that the sums we expend on personal adornment are so different!” she flashed.

“Are they?” he said in a downcast tone. “But you turn out well, don’t you?”

“Very,” she assured him promptly.

“Well,” he remarked, obviously relieved, “I did not intend to discuss finances. I wanted to tell you something. Why don’t you sit down?”

“Because I feel I may have to rise to an occasion,” she told him.

“I wonder how you guessed,” he said slowly. “Poor old Paul!”

“Why ‘poor’?” she challenged. “Don’t be mysterious.”

“Well, look here—” he lifted his keen blue eyes to her brown ones. “I will own up. I have three months’ leave, but as a matter of fact I intend to chuck soldiering.”

“Keith!” Her utter amazement filled the room with a sense of shock. It conveyed itself very powerfully to him. His whole face became suffused to a dark brick-red.

“I am myself,” he retorted. “Can’t you see me out of uniform, Pauline?”

“Don’t!” she cried, her two hands flying up to her ears. “Don’t say what every village is ringing with, ‘I’ve done my bit.’”

“I have.” His face grew obstinate. “I went through that infernal war.”

“And did splendidly——” she cried.

“Lots of fellows did better,” he declared frankly. “But—yes, I think I have it in me to do all right as a soldier, if that’s what you mean.”

She sat down on a huge rose stool and put her hand on his knee. “Keith, it is the reaction. Don’t make up your mind now.” Into every note of her perfect voice she threw an almost irresistible appeal.

“My mind is made up, unfortunately,” he told her gently.

Her great eyes stared her woe. “I cannot understand you!” she wailed. “I thought you were a born soldier.”

“I have been a soldier,” he commented. “Men change as they grow older.”

Something struggled within her for utterance. To his distress, she bent her head till the radiance of her glorious hair lay upon his knee. She disengaged one of his hands and put it caressingly to her lips. She loved him most wonderfully. “Have you lost your nerve?” she asked him very low.

“No. Not as far as I know,” he replied promptly.

She flung up her head, and dropped his hand. She conveyed an impression of remoteness.

“I am utterly at sea,” she declared. “I do not understand you, Keith. I could no more say, ‘Henceforth I will cease to be a poet,’ than I could say, ‘Henceforth I will cease to breathe,’—and still live!”

“The two cases have no resemblance,” he replied patiently. “At present you are at the very height of your enthusiasm, and your power to express yourself in terms of poetry is as forcibly natural and compelling to you as it is to a bad-tempered man to express himself with wrath. To be a soldier is one way of working and living. It is a way I have learnt and liked. I gave myself to it and belonged to it. I belong to it still. But I have a good many more years to live with luck, and I want to do something different. We shall not see as big a business as this war again till I am too old to be of much use. I am not a military genius. If I were, I should stick to the Army, I suppose.”

“Keith—are you disappointed personally? Has your ambition been bruised?” she flashed.

But he replied, No, he had been very well treated, and had met with ample recognition. “I had better luck in that way than a great many fellows.”

“Do you wish to become a politician?” she suggested, after a moment’s thought; and this time he almost shouted his surprised denial, “Good Lord, no!”

“I can’t picture you unemployed,” she said wistfully. “There is so much force in you.”

“I don’t intend to be unemployed,” he retorted cheerfully. He lit a cigarette, and as he put his box of matches back into his right-hand pocket, his long slim length stretched out, his weight thrown on to his left elbow, he looked at his wife in half-comical mischief. “Guess——” he urged.

“Farm?” she suggested.

“I should like it,” he agreed. “But it is not that.”

“What is it, then?” she demanded, with sudden irritation; and at the first sign of a clash he stiffened, and the reply came with a finality that staggered her:

“I am going to take holy orders.”

Pauline remained silent. It was incomparably the most artistic thing to do, and she was artist to her finger tips. Then, very simply, she used her beauty, letting its potent power prepare her attack. The white velvet of her robe fell in heavy folds over the rose stool, over the rose carpet. The cream and gold and brown of her transparent skin and waving hair and limpid eyes made her a wondrous individuality, made her the most influential embodiment of her sex that Keith knew. And, through her silent antagonism, her thoughts raced. Here was her soldier-man dedicating himself as Crusaders had done of old; here was the spirit of self-sacrifice emerging in pure flame from the cauldron of that burning war; here was the aristocratic, fastidious choice of a rare being who exchanged royal commands for holy orders, the King’s service for the Almighty’s. Dare she withstand him? A pang of insight warned her that for her unhappiness loomed dark above this choice of his. Sincere, indomitable, right or wrong, she protested.

“I think you are mistaking your vocation.” A mistress of words, she struck an appropriate note in speech, using terms she would not have applied to any other choice.

Her ear listened for the phrase, “You mean I am not a good enough man?”—the ordinary curate-like phrase, though her perceptions told her that Wendover would not utter it. Nor did he. What he said was: “I am tremendously keen.”

The old statement! It stung her heart now. To what heights had it not conjured her before! “You said that about your soldiering,” she remarked, with deadly quiet.

“And I acted up to it.”

“Now?” For all her courtesy, she taunted him with unfaithfulness.

“To-morrow, if my leave were cancelled. I should not be a slacker.”

“But to-morrow, if it were possible, you’d renounce the Army and all its works.”

“I should part from it. Can’t you realise, Paul, that a man ceases to be a soldier in nine cases out of ten at fifty-two? I cease prematurely of my own choice, because there is something else I want to do. I am not a deserter.” A slow smile, greeting some memory, stole over his face. “I did not find it as hard as a great many men did to stick out the war till the last day.”

Her hands, loosely locked, hung over her knees; she pondered awhile, and at length raised her pretty head. “Your aim . . .” she murmured vaguely; and then, with outspoken decision, “The goal of a soldier is to be a hero, the goal of a priest is to be a saint.”

“And I am neither,” he admitted promptly.

“You are every inch a man!” Pauline declared with conviction.

It exercised a charm over his wife that Wendover was ever susceptible to her as woman: at her flattery the red of embarrassment darkened his face, and he lit another cigarette while he mumbled, “Pretty human.”

“Temperament is such a strong thing, dearest,” she continued gently. “I know you perhaps better than you know yourself. I do not think that you have the ecclesiastical temperament.”

“I don’t know what you mean exactly,” he retorted.

“You like to do things in a—a dazzling sort of way. Big, bold things. You are gay, and you are independent. Oh, I admit there is discipline in the Army, and you liked it—liked the rules of a fine game worth a man’s effort and a man’s skill. But those rules hardly interfered with your private life. You occupied yourself as you pleased, you expressed yourself as you pleased, when not on duty. You liked a mess with men of the world as comrades—their pursuits, their outlook on life, their ways. You enjoyed a roomful of pretty women—their amusements, their mischief, their flirtations. You are at home and content in a worldly world, Keith, though you ride hard for the far horizon, and you care for things that matter.”

“Yes,” he conceded, his eyes fastened on her intently. “Well?”

She made a quick gesticulation with her hands. “Remember the little hampering restrictions the world—the great strong world—builds up around a clergyman. He must even express himself so as to give no offence. He may not say ‘damn,’ Keith!” She threw him a little deprecating smile, as if the trivial absurdity of the thing made it irksome to contemplate. “His relations with other men are so uncomfortable, his relations with women so conventional.”

“Yes, I know,” he agreed. “Well?”

Was she gaining her point? Excitement quickened her breath. “Oh, Keith!” she cried, look at it this way—contemplate the things you do as a soldier, and the things you would do as a clergyman. Hunting, polo, race meetings, dances, shooting parties, guest nights—can’t you see yourself? You are in your element doing such things. None of those amusements is considered quite appropriate for clergymen, you know. Very broad-minded people don’t object to a hunting parson, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I cannot picture you teaching in a Sunday school, or preparing a girl for confirmation, or christening a baby, or attending a choir practice!”

Obviously the picture that her low and eager voice flashed into sight had perturbed him. He got up and took a turn or two down the length of the long room. When at last he spoke, his strength of conviction as opposed to hers struck her as formidable indeed.

“The things one does as a soldier,” he flung out, “are not all racing and flirting and swearing. That’s absurd.”

“Keith,” she cried, “I never said that! You are quoting some third-rate journalist, raving against so-called ‘militarism’!”

“One does things, one sees things done, in war,” he continued, heedless of her interruption, “that I cannot and will not describe to you. But they drove one on to think differently and feel differently. If you see and smell corruption day in, day out . . .” He restrained himself with an effort. “One had plenty of time to think now and then. All through bleak nights. There is a whole history of physical pain that the greater part of humanity never learns—it is a book of revelation. I shouldn’t half mind being a doctor: extraordinarily interesting.”

“What next?” breathed his wife, intent upon him in his dark memories.

“The flesh,” he gloomed, and wheeled upon her. “You don’t know what it means—lovely though you are.”

“And mother though I am?” she challenged back, and gave him pause.

“Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think you know. . . . Not what I know. It was simple enough in a way. Just life or death.”

“So vast,” she agreed.

“Yes, vast. Tremendous. And, Paul, if in this world only we have hope . . .”

She felt awe at that. He had arrived at a point where her imagination compelled her to see his vision and yield sympathy.

“Did you make a vow, then, Keith?” she asked. As Abraham of old, as pilgrims throughout the world, as devotees and disciples and lovers—had he too made a vow?

But the negative came pat and with emphasis. “No. When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be—eh? Not I.”

She let his indignation pass, and as always he softened to her immediately. No man took offence at a woman: she was privileged, though temper knew provocation. If resentment were permanent, let a parting be final. That was roughly his code of manners to the other sex.

“You know what you said just now?” he reminded her in the intimate tone he kept for her alone. “That I rode to the horizon? Well, I’m riding to the next world. See?”

“It seems to me, Keith,” she murmured very softly, “that it was not the flesh you saw during the war, but the spirit.” She thought how many must have been near him . . . the power of the thousands dying touching his inmost soul. She felt helpless to resist, but she cried one more protest that night. “Dear, you can ride straight and hard for the next world as brevet major. Why must you mount afresh as the reverend? Be splendid,—I want you to be splendid,—but I dread professional goodness for you—the cramp of it!”

He turned his strongly cut face to her, and despite her agitation her clear mind marked that enthusiasm and singleness of purpose which moves fanatics. But Keith Wendover was no fanatic: all such have something of the miser in them, hoarding existence for one thought, grudging all existence save for one aim, whereas he was prodigal of life.

“Horses and soldiers are my friends for good and all,” he told her. “You may take your oath of that. But soldiering is only one idea of a man. Priesthood is just one idea of a man too. Don’t you remember talking about priests the day we became engaged at Laffham?”

“Yes,” she said, “the day I became engaged to a soldier.”

“Well,” he concluded, with an air of finality, “I’m tremendously bitten with that idea now.”

Recognition came to her at that. “If you are in love with the idea, argument is useless. The whole world might as well try to argue me out of love with you.” She went swiftly to the door and closed it silently behind her.

He stared at it for some time, with a baffled expression on his handsome face.

Chapter VIII

Pauline’s literary temperament knew always a great leap towards big ideas, fine ideals. So far she impulsively flung her sympathy to Wendover’s decision. He had known discipline of the body; he pressed onward now to discipline of the soul. It was her own mind that found the retort to her own words, “Those rules hardly interfered with your private life.” She recognised that he was seeking now just that very vital interference. To the uttermost horror during interminable months he had offered his person for his country; now he offered his soul. In no egotistical spirit had either sacrifice been made: as a soldier he had been incorporate in an army, as a priest he sought co-operation with that gigantic body, the Church militant. There was historic precedent enough; hundreds of thousands of men had fought in religious wars. That Keith should wear the King’s uniform and then elect to serve him as Defender of the Faith was all in nature’s well-trodden mental paths. But it was not the custom of her people. It smacked of ‘ratting.’ However sincere the change in conviction, he stood convicted of changeableness. All that was not poet in her, all that was sister to poor young Lord Rotherhurst, now lying paralysed at Laffham, and sister to gay Phyllis Glynde, detested Keith’s choice, and continued to detest it while she watched him burn his boats behind him; watched him make the final break with the Army; watched him set himself, with a singleness of purpose which roused her envy, to pass the Bishop’s examination; watched him with energy and ambition overcome difficulties of custom and tradition, and triumphantly obtain exemption from much that would have delayed his ordination in the conventional days before the war. And she watched him in silence. Thus much the poet-spirit imposed upon her; no further words of hers must hamper this gay pilgrim in his search after the vision splendid.

“He is the Happy Warrior indeed,” the Bishop remarked to her, and something in her said Amen to that.

“The last fellow I should have imagined chucking the Army and turning parson,” declared his Colonel, and something in her cried “Hear! Hear!” to that.

She was most disagreeably torn in two.

The Dowager, with whom they spent four months in the interests of quiet and economy, had accepted the announcement of her son-in-law’s decision with undisturbed calm.

“How wonderful, Pauline! Now you will never have to dread any more cruel wars. And dear Keith is so good. I am sure he will be a great example. If only poor Mr. Jones dies before very long, Tom can present Keith with the Laffham living, and how nice that would be for you all. The Rectory is most comfortable—delightful day and night nurseries for the children.”

“Perish the thought!” cried Pauline to herself.

She preserved her inscrutable silence with even greater difficulty than hitherto after these words of her mother’s, and the thought of Wendover in stuffy old Jones’s place, ministering to the needs of the quiet little country village, drove her to restless indignation. “It would be sleeping sickness,” she told herself; and in her ceaseless reading found verses of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which expressed the present drama of her life and Keith’s, she thought. Looking up from the page to where her husband occupied himself in studying at the big writing-desk in the window of the smoking-room, she said, “Keith, do attend to me a moment. I want to read something to you.”

“Something of yours?”

“No, but listen. I think it is about you and me.” Without waiting for his consent or protest, she read on:

“But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell
And there has been thy bane; there is a fire
And motion of the soul that will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,
Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of ought but rest; a fever at the core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

“This makes the madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion! Conquerors and kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things,
Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to those they fool,
Envied yet how unenviable! What stings
Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school
Which should unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule.

“Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife,
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast
With sorrow and supineness and so die;
Even as flame unfed which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by
Which eats into itself and rusts ingloriously.”

Wendover stretched his long legs under the writing-table. “Not very cheerful,” he remarked. “But you’re a bard, all right. Do you feel like that?”

“I know full well what he means,” she made answer.

“I am in part what he describes. And so are you.”

“I’ll be hanged if I am. Poets are very isolated individuals: you don’t accomplish more in the way of poetry by banding together as poets. I expect that is why you always find professional claims so irksome.”

“I certainly am not attracted by professional goodness!” she declared.

“I know. You said that when I first told you of my decision. But I wish you would get rid of that idea. All men’s professions act an argument, as it were. Soldiers act one aspect of a big question. Priests act another aspect. You can’t answer the riddle of life till you die, but you can follow up whatever possible solution strikes you as the most important and the most interesting. That’s what I want to do now.”

She put her hand on his broad shoulder and looked down on the books he studied. “Are you very interested in all that theology?”

“No. It is rather dry. But I can concentrate my mind on any subject I have to tackle for an examination. I could when I was up at Oxford—I was a University candidate, remember—though it bored me a good deal. And I had to master some pretty stiff work when I went up for the Staff College.” His shoulder grew restless under her hand, and he looked up at her with a twinkle. “I could get on better with this if you were not in the room, you know. You don’t like interruption yourself when you are working.”

As she closed the door of his study softly behind her she took with her a mental picture of Keith Wendover as cardinal. The thought remained and grew, and such truth as it contained threatened her happiness and his.

Wendover desired to be in London for awhile, to see what could be done with regard to his investments, which had in no wise recovered from the war, so the two babies were left with their grandmother, and their parents spent a week with the Glyndes.

Pauline’s vivid imagination was ever acutely sensitive to the society in which she found herself, and the Glyndes’ house was foreign land to priesthood. She observed her brother-in-law with a certain amount of latent antagonism, for she had never been in sympathy with him. His attitude towards married life gave her offence; his prosperity, which had increased owing to the war, and his immunity from all that war’s personal dangers and bereavements, had estranged her. Now his attitude towards Wendover’s decision provoked her afresh.

“Rum move, this of Keith’s,” he remarked to her the evening of their arrival.

“Very rum,” she drawled, noting his broad congested face, his big loose limbs, his great hearty voice. “Not the sort of thing you will ever do, John.” It seemed to her a very noble thing to do.

“No, I shan’t ever turn parson,” he agreed, and laughed a fat chuckle. “Not in my line. But it is less expensive than being a cavalry officer, I dare say.”

Wendover came into the room then, and a few moments were spent in selecting a very choice and costly cigar from John’s ample store. Pauline watched under heavy eyelids, her expressive mouth a-droop. The entrance of Phyllis gave her a sense of relief. Here was a being who would express much that Pauline suppressed.

“Well, John,” demanded Lady Glynde, a picture of dainty vivacity, cigarette in hand. “Has your sage advice made my beloved Keith a rich man?”

“Afraid not,” said Glynde cheerfully. “But that’s all right now. A parson has nothing to spend money on.”

Wendover laughed. Lazily at ease by the fire, he appeared perfectly content.

“But Pauline has,” retorted Phyllis.

“Bless my soul, isn’t she a poet? She can coin money—what?”

“Poof! There is no pounds, shillings, and pence in poetry, you old stupid!” cried his wife.

“When you’ve quite finished discussing us——” interposed Pauline.

“But I haven’t! “ pouted her sister. “I’ve quite finished talking to you, though, John. I am dreadfully disappointed in you. I wish you would toddle away to the smoking-room and leave me alone to talk to these two darlings.” She stood on tiptoe and puffed a little cloud of smoke at him. “Do go away!”

“I don’t object.” Indeed, easy-going Glynde seldom raised difficulties. “Keith, you come along with me. She means to worry you, I’ll be bound.”

“I know how to manage her,” Wendover growled lazily; and with great trampling and chuckling and a general trumpeting Glynde took a heavy departure.

Phyllis whirled round to Keith. “Oh, you look so beautifully smart in your London clothes, I simply can’t bear it!”

“Bear what?” He was alert and amused.

“The idea of your being such a dowdy creature for the rest of your life. Those round collars! I shall never look at you again.”

“You wait. I shall make a splendid, silver-haired bishop one of these days, and you will be rather an ugly old lady, I am very much afraid. A nut-cracker, you know, and lots of rings on a gouty claw. Poor Phil!”

Lady Glynde gave a little peal of laughter. “I adore you, Keith! But I think you are perfectly mad.”

“That is because you entirely lack imagination.”

“I have enough imagination to picture you as a highly successful Roman Catholic priest. You might easily be a very powerful ecclesiastic with that nose and chin of yours, once you have shaved your moustache. I can see you in my mind’s eye as an English cardinal in Rome, with all the smart set kissing your hand; but as a deacon at a mothers’ meeting—never!”

Pauline stirred restlessly: here was Phyllis giving voice to her own sleepless thought.

On went the gay, caressing little creature. “I should make my confession to you, you know! You would thrill me. You would understand as a man of the world, and yet you are good, Keith.”

“I am good-natured,” he replied, in a voice that commanded attention. “But if you were not a woman, I don’t think I should stand your dissecting me to my face.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Rather a liberty, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you don’t really mind me, you darling thing.”

“Exactly. You are, as I said, a woman.”

Pauline rose and rustled quietly out of the room. The conversation was getting on her nerves.

Phyllis turned her head and watched her sister depart; then she spoke in a really serious voice. “Don’t be cross! Surely, Keith, you must see how unhappy this is making Pauline.”

He deliberated before answering. “She does not like it, for some reason. She protested when I told her, but lately she has said very little.”

“You know how Pauline idealises everything, how fervent she is! She threw herself completely into your soldiering—she would have made any personal sacrifice for your career. And the war was torture to her.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I know. I fear I am disappointing her horribly. Don’t talk of it.”

“Just this once!” she coaxed. “For you are a bold man to take on this job, Keith.”

“Why?”

“Because of Pauline. She will demand that you should be a saint. Oh, she won’t say much! But she has a compelling mind. Remember, I lived with her all my childhood. I know how difficult she can be, poor dearest. It is having a poetical soul, I suppose. Her manners are so charming, one does not always realise that it is there; but it is.”

“Pauline is splendid,” Wendover affirmed; and for a moment a wistful expression came into Lady Glynde’s turquoise eyes. Wendover was a man who attracted and impressed her: his tribute to his wife was a tremendous homage. Glynde’s offering to her could never attain the same value and had none of the same high quality.

“Do you know what she said to me last night?” went on Pauline’s sister. “She said, ‘Keith dealt death and braved death, and now he fights for immortality.’”

“That’s true,” he remarked. There was a happy, shy look on his face. He was obviously much interested.

“But fancy living up to it! You’d better be warned in time by a worldly creature like me, dear old boy! I tell you Pauline detests all these financial conversations with John. She can’t endure to see you seeking prosperity now. It is always neck or nothing with Paul. She idealises marriage, she idealised soldiering; now she will idealise your present choice till woe betide your halo if you grumble over a mundane thing like overdone beef or cold soup. She loves the brilliant world, but she will demand now that it should be the world well lost. You will have to save souls with a vengeance, young man!” She ended with an expressive shrug of her shoulders.

“And you don’t think I can do it?”

“Upon my word, Keith, I believe you might,” she declared, with a wholly disarming softness. “But I tell you frankly that in all my married difficulties”—she met his eyes steadily—“the last person I have ever thought of turning to for help is a clergyman, though I know dozens.”

“I know,” he responded. “They aren’t much in touch with you and your friends.”

“Well?” she demanded. “From your new point of view do you consider me a very wicked female and all that?” She tried to put him to the test with a certain audacious curiosity.

He flicked off his cigar ash. “You would be all right, Phil, if you were not so conventional,” was his unexpected reply.

“Heavens!” said his startled sister-in-law.

“Extraordinarily conventional,” he continued. “You commit all the socially correct and obvious indiscretions; you cling for dear life to every standard of your set. You are as fashionable in your idea of marriage as in your ideas of dress. You can’t think of a man doing as I intend to do except in terms of convention—the typical soldier, the typical parson. You judge only by what you see—the kit and the moustache. And where you see it—at a race meeting or in a pulpit. You don’t suppose the greatest efforts of mankind have been directed to produce the luxuries of a room like this, or the attractions of a woman like you? Real life is a fierce thing. The soul is a fierce, struggling, frantic thing. But its spirit is all that matters. The rest is detail, more or less important. If you gave your spirit half a chance, Phil, with your advantages of personality and power you’d be great.”

“And what would my priceless spirit do to my faithless John?” she inquired flippantly.

“Inspire him,” he retorted.

Phyllis sighed very sincerely. “I see.” She nodded. “I see exactly what you mean, but I cannot make the effort. I might make a spasmodic one now and again, but not a grind of that sort for a lifetime! And please remember that I have not enjoyed the advantage of having all conventions banished while I sent someone I disliked to kingdom come with a bomb or a bayonet. Nor has my poor old John.”

“I am very fond of John,” Wendover announced; and Phyllis looked immensely pleased.

She patted his well-brushed head. “I shan’t plague you any more. But, Keith, have you read Pauline’s new volume of verse?”

“No. She hates me to read the proofs. I saw ‘The Angels who Understand’ when it appeared in the paper. Extraordinarily fine. The best thing she has ever done.”

“Well . . . I have read them. They are not quite the sort of thing you would expect a clergyman’s wife to publish. They aren’t hymns, you know. They remind me of Lawrence Hope’s poems . . . in a way. But they are different from hers too. They are Pauline.”

“Pauline is a bit of a genius,” Wendover said philosophically. “She must go her own line. I am not a genius, and so I carry on what other men have begun in the Army and in the Church.”

“Her particular genius will make things a little complicated.”

“Possibly.”

“You don’t mind? But she will. You forget her social training: her wings never carried her away from society except when in poetic flight. She’ll feel the social rub of being inappropriate.”

“I never knew such a family for fussing over non-essentials! Of course Paul is going to have difficulties. Everybody does. But you and she count each stone on the road.”

“How like a man!” commented Phyllis darkly, and so ended the conversation.

On the day before the Wendovers left the Glyndes for Gloucestershire, where Keith’s widowed sister had lately taken a house, Pauline’s demeanour when she came in to breakfast was agitated in the extreme. Pauline excited and moved was a curiously expressive creature even when silent. “I can feel her mind tingling,” Phyllis once declared. In her eyes, in the delicate curves of her lips, in her fluent hands, you could discern the activity and the force of her thoughts at full steam.

“What’s up?” Wendover demanded.

“Doris is going to do something perfectly dreadful.”

“I knew she would,” murmured Phyllis.

“I must prevent her.”

Wendover looked doubtful. “If you take my advice, you will let that young woman alone. She is not susceptible to influence.”

“I cannot fail to make an attempt to stop her. She tells me she means to marry an Indian.”

“Just the sort of thing I thought she would do!” exclaimed Lady Glynde, with prejudice and without truth. She bent her pretty head to blow out the flame that hissed under the silver urn. “I don’t love all your queer literary friends, my dear.”

“You don’t understand Doris!” cried Pauline. “Why should she observe all our social restrictions, when she has so few of our social privileges? You and Keith are narrow-minded about her, but do remember the fight she has had to make single-handed to earn her living. She is extraordinarily plucky and as truthful as the day. She is loyal and strong and original.”

“She is a wrong-headed fool, or she would not be making this marriage,” Wendover asserted, as he left the room.

“Good old Keith,” Phyllis murmured, with a little chuckle, looking at her sister out of the corner of her eye. “He knows how to ban and bane all right.”

Pauline, very daintily arrayed and vehemently fastidious in mood, encountered James Wilson and his wife as she turned into Park Lane.

“We are only up for a few days,” Mrs. Wilson said. “It was rather trying saying good-bye to everyone down there.”

“Good-bye?” queried Pauline.

“It was no use,” Wilson explained. “I had to stick to the Army. I found the legal bent of my mind was entirely destroyed by the argument of war.” He laughed happily. “The regiment is in South Africa, and we sail on Wednesday. I am afraid my mother is rather upset, and Lady Rotherhurst regards me in the light of a deserter; but fond though I am of Laffham, it seemed uncommonly small.”

Pauline held out her hand. “The Army is worth sticking to, isn’t it?” she said sweetly. “Good luck to you. How is Tom?”

“Poor Lord Rotherhurst,” murmured Mrs. Wilson. “He seems to have lost all interest in life.”

“It will come back. Give him time,” Wilson asserted.

Pauline had received several impressions. The most painful was that the Wilsons spoke of her paralysed brother in the past tense, though verbally they employed the present. Their voices had been lowered, as is the custom when speaking of the dead. There was an utter absence, too, of speculation. Obviously it was impossible to be much interested in what a man would do who was condemned for the rest of his life to do nothing. Her pleasanter impressions were that James had lost the touch of provincialism that had diminished his personal prestige in the old days, and that Dorothy was a very presentable wife, both smart and pretty. Vaguely she realised that their attitude towards herself was changed; she was no longer the most absorbing and important social personage on their horizon. She perceived with shrewd amusement that Mrs. Wilson’s hair and Mrs. Wilson’s hat and Mrs. Wilson’s tailor-made were faithful and admiring copies of the hair, hat, and tailor-made of little Lady Mabel Rae, whose husband was in Wilson’s regiment.

Pauline found her friend Doris lodged in an estimable house which provided private bedrooms, a few private sitting-rooms, and chilly public reception-rooms for such respectable gentlewomen as could afford modest prices and were vouched for by not less than two irreproachable references. Mrs. Wendover gave a little shiver of depression, but the girl who greeted her in the clean and scrupulously tidy bedroom was a radiant being.

“Doris!” she quivered. “Have you thought this thing out?”

“I am going to marry him, Pauline,” Doris replied triumphantly. “If every prejudice in the whole of the British Isles argues with me in turn, I am still going to marry him.”

“And if all the prejudices of India argue with you in turn after you have married him, what then?” Pauline questioned.

“Why, then, I’ll be very interested. But I guess Rahman Khan and I will be the best proof that we’ve the right of the question on our side. We mean to make a success of our marriage.”

“Where did you meet him, dear?” the older girl asked, after a moment’s pause.

“He is a friend of Nurse Lake’s brother. I met him at the Lakes’ at tea. He did very well in France, and he is a better educated person than I am, and a more intellectual one. I am marrying an equal; and when an American admits that, you may bet your life it is true. He is a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, and when I am Mrs. Rahman Khan we shall go out to India at the end of his leave, and he will join the Indian regiment to which he is attached. It will be a most interesting life. I shall see India from within. If English officials and their wives are so utterly narrow-minded as to turn the cold shoulder, it won’t upset me much, I assure you.” She tossed her fair head. “Rahman has no social fetishes and neither have I. It is life I want, my own life, and all the drama of India for its setting. My fiancé is very much interested in literature, and we intend to write a book together.”

“A book? What is his religion?”

“Very much the same as mine. We don’t believe in creeds and dogmas.”

“Faith is the breath of the spirit. If it does not manifest itself in your book, then you will have held the mirror up to a corpse, and not to what is immortal!” the poet cried.

“Right O,” Doris retorted glibly. “He is a scientific man, and I am free from all social superstitions. I dare say we shall get as near to the truth as most folk do.”

Pauline fell doubtfully silent. What attraction held her in bonds of friendship to this girl? Their opinions clashed invariably, but their interest was often caught by the same problems. In the slim, straight blonde, with her daintily correct features, her fearless blue eyes, there dwelt much of the charm of a bold child. Her adventures into life were as fresh and original as the attempts of that child to walk and talk. She embodied the absence of tradition of a young people, vividly alive. She caught Pauline’s imagination captive, a happy rebel.

“Doris, surely if this war has taught us anything, it has warned us of the risks that attend mixed marriages?”

“For you old Europeans, yes. But what are the United States but one vast mixed marriage?” The girl laughed.

“But all white,” very quietly.

Doris winced. “Europe is not. Have the Moors left no trace in Portugal and Spain, the Turks no trace in the Balkan Peninsula? Is Russia all of the West and nothing of the East? You English are hopelessly insular.”

Pauline shrugged her shoulders. “Drops of blood, traces, stains—call them what you will—are nothing to the great rushing tide of race. I would cry beware to Captain Rahman Khan as I cry beware to you, Doris.”

“It is not much use calling warnings when people are in love,” Doris smiled; and in the sunshine of that gay smile Pauline left her. Race imposes discipline, and this girl and her young lover sought individual liberty to flout that discipline. Pauline, in whose veins the war had started the pulse of race throbbing so tensely that while she lived she knew she must live consciously English, wondered what isolation was theirs that set these two beings adrift from their own mighty peoples. Travelling down to Gloucestershire with her husband and the proofs of her book of poems, her face was so pensive that Wendover twice offered her a penny for her thoughts, and in the end bet her half a sovereign that he could divine them.

“Done!” said Pauline.

“You are afraid Katherine will bore you to death with church-going!” he declared.

“Wrong,” said she. “I am sure Katherine will not bore me.” Nor did she. None of the Wendovers were bores. Katherine Playdell, in her long black widow’s weeds, had the air of a religieuse, but just as Keith prompted the thought of a cardinal so his sister conjured up the picture of the head of an order. Handsome, stately, neither meek nor very gentle, having a swift wit and a keen sense of humour, she was both an attractive and a formidable personality. She was wealthy, and the house lacked no comfort or adornment that money could buy; yet the atmosphere was rather that of a Vatican than a court. The household was trained to serve its mistress, and there was no question that, though she may have held catholic views as to their souls, she held strict views as to their respectful attitude towards herself. An elderly widow, Mrs. Vine, lived with her, and was of the same school of thought in regard to doctrine. Pauline felt that she could not well have lived with her else. She was a good-looking old lady, with fine manners and a great love of gossip. The private chapel in the house was a dream of beauty. To have sanctuary so close undoubtedly imparted a discipline to the household. Father Bowers had taken vows of celibacy. He had a kindly, humorous face, grey hair, and a healthy, ruddy complexion.

“Katherine,” Pauline exclaimed one day, when the Wendovers had been Mrs. Playdell’s guests for a week, “there is one thing that plagues me. In the Christian churches there are millions of souls who believe that a priest should be celibate—and I am married to Keith.”

Katherine lifted her eyes to her sister-in-law frankly, and yet her mouth was inscrutable. “The Church of England has no such rule, Pauline. I should not worry, if I were you,” she answered.

“Yet I think your own mental attitude is that Keith’s marriage is irretrievable, but—he would be more priest to you if he were celibate,” Pauline persisted.

“That is only a matter of feeling,” Katherine rejoined.

“Only!” the wife exclaimed. “I do believe it is the most difficult task in the world to be married to a man in holy orders. I feel as if I represented his earthly side!” Her proudly sensitive face paled, the dark eyes flashed.

“Safeguard it,” Katherine said swiftly. “I am sure you safeguard it.” Then she gave the pretty laugh and the wonderful smile which won her friends. “It amuses me to see you with Keith, you fascinate him so.”

Mrs. Vine too, over her eternal knitting, smiled one day upon our disconsolate poet dressed for dinner in palest gold and pearls. “You won’t look like a clergyman’s wife, Mrs. Wendover. What a beautiful frock!”

“Unsuitable?” Pauline lifted her eyebrows.

“I don’t see why good people should be dowdy,” said the amiable lady approvingly.

“Ah, but am I good?” questioned perverse Pauline. She looked very like her sister Phyllis for the moment.

“I am sure Major Wendover’s wife must be: there are so few men like him. Father Bowers has taken such a fancy to him.”

Pauline leant against a heavy brocaded cushion wearily. “Tell me,” she asked slowly, “who was that Sister of Mercy in the chapel this morning?”

“Sister Monica. You know she had gone to stay with her mother, who was ill in Bruges, when the war broke out.” Mrs. Vine lowered her voice. “It is the most tragic story. She is gradually recovering her health. Katherine has done everything possible for her during her convalescence here. She belongs to an Anglican community, of course. A perfect saint.”

The literary spirit knows an almost cruel curiosity. Pauline was intensely conscious of the veiled figure in chapel next day, and by a lucky chance she bounced against her in turning a corner of one of the many winding passages. The Sister uttered a startled scream, and leant against the wall, her eyes wide and staring, for an instant; then recovered herself, and answered Pauline’s apology with a quick reassurance, and so made to pass on.

“Are you stronger, Sister?” asked Pauline’s detaining voice gently.

“Yes, thank you, I am quite well.” The eyelids were lowered, the tone thin and expressionless.

Pauline perforce made way for her and left her. This woman had gone through the inexpressible. Even sympathy might not offer itself to her without taint of insult.

“Have you seen Sister Monica, Keith?” Pauline asked her husband later that day, and noted the strong indignation that showed itself in his face at once.

“Yes. Did you speak to her?”

She told him; and he commented, “The child lived.”

They never spoke of this again, but to Pauline it ever represented the last extremity of anguish, even though at evensong a few days later she caught a glimpse of the nun’s face raised in a rapture of prayer.

Atmosphere is a difficult thing to define; undoubtedly it is begotten of the mental preoccupations and enthusiasms of personalities: the stronger the personalities, the more definite the atmosphere. Pauline reacted quickly to the mental life of other people. Here, in her sister-in-law’s house, she was acutely and vividly conscious of the spirit of worship and religious discipline. The constant ceremonial enacted over and over again in the lovely little chapel laid emphasis on spiritual thought, and also exacted an outward obedience to creed and code. There was something in all this that Pauline loved: the beautiful words of the Bible and liturgy cast a strong spell, her faith took wings from sight and sound and held her buoyant above things mundane. But uniformity was intensely difficult to Pauline—individual in her genius and isolated by it.

Expression was her very breath, and one evening she grew conscious that for weeks, nay months, nay years, she had been greatly denied it. Marriage, with all it had involved of adaptability to the rights and wishes of a dearly loved husband, motherhood with its compulsions, had forced her to gasp out her poems with difficulty, so swift they had made the pace, so steep the physical path. The war in its omnipotence had overwhelmed her with its requirements. “Do this” had been its grim order, and to it perforce was subordinated all instinct to do otherwise. Set free by peace, she yet bore upon spirit and mind the image and superscription of that war’s stern sovereignty, was still impelled to render tribute where it had proclaimed that tribute was due. Discipline was a force that she might never more disregard, and yet defiant of this very fact her songs sprang lawless into being.

Physically most frail, but full of the vitality of youth, highly strung to a pitch of mental activity and tense emotion, exhausted by the exactions of her own will, Pauline in the mood which I have described was calm only so long as she remained inactive among the cushions of the sofa. Conjure her spirit into action and you let loose the whirlwind. Father Bowers, all kindness, spoke the word.

“Mrs. Wendover, I know that you artists are creatures of moods, but if you would not greatly dislike to do so, you could grant a wonderful privilege to four people by reading aloud your poems to them. I think Mrs. Vine told me you have finished correcting the proofs and intend dispatching them to your publisher to-morrow.”

“That would be lovely! Do, my dear. Major Wendover, persuade your wife!” chimed in Mrs. Vine.

Don’t tire yourself, Pauline,” Katherine Playdell added. “But it would be extraordinarily interesting for us.”

“Buck up, Paul,” urged Wendover.

Pauline tossed the cushions aside. All her dramatic instinct was called into play: she was asked to represent her artistic self, to mean something definite and individual, and every fibre responded. “Bring me the proofs, Keith, please,” she said graciously, and submitted with a smile to Mrs. Vine’s attentions as to the disposal of the chairs and the electric reading lamp.

“Will it fidget you if I continue knitting?” the good lady inquired anxiously; and the two men offered to sacrifice their cigarettes.

She answered patiently the inevitable questions as to how long it had taken her to write “all that,” and whether she composed pen in hand, or thought it all out first; but she was eased by Katherine’s interference. “I don’t want to see how the wheels go round, I want to hear the poems.”

It was emphatically Pauline who created the atmosphere now, her person the central figure, her voice the only sound, her thoughts the mental suggestion. She made seductive music with her words and her elocution, and they were beautiful and brave the songs she sang. Recklessness and will and passion pulsed in them, and read in the intimacy of that formal room to a priest, to widows, to her lover and husband, they flashed into sound with startling unreserve. She waited for no murmur at the end of any poem, but sprang straightway to the next, and to each the personal touch of her expressive voice gave the impression of an opinion, a profession of faith, or a confidence. Her authorship stood in the confessional, proclaiming—that was the effect.

For an hour she gave forth her magic; then she closed the last page, and looked at her little audience. “That is all,” she said, in a suddenly tired voice.

It was very difficult for them. Katherine spoke first. “Thank you so much. Keith, ring for something; she must be hoarse. What will you have, Pauline dear?”

“Nothing, thank you,” said Pauline, and turned her head from them, looking into the November fire.

“You have a great gift indeed, Mrs. Wendover,” said Father Bowers, the tips of his eight fingers pressed together. “A most wonderful gift.”

“‘The Angels who Understand’ is the one I like best,” Mrs. Vine declared, with an obvious desire to strike a safe and sound note of applause. “Is it your favourite, Major Wendover?”

“I am not sure which is my favourite,” he answered. Indeed, he felt somewhat as though he had been kissed in public, and again as though his wife had ardently embraced a dozen others before his very face.

“Do you like any of them, Keith?” Pauline’s voice rang out.

“I like them all,” he maintained stoutly.

“Father Bowers does not approve of them,” she challenged, but with a courteous charm of manner. Katherine discerned, however, that she was overwrought.

The good priest rose to his feet as he replied, “There is much in them for which I feel great reverence, Mrs. Wendover. Perhaps another time I may have the privilege of discussing with you some expressions of thought which are not wholly worthy of the rest, I think. But I carry one line away with me that is very precious—the line which describes how the soldier ‘left Earth a grateful guest, met Death a welcome friend.’ Most beautiful.” He turned to Mrs. Playdell and Mrs. Vine, and made his departure.

As the door closed on him Pauline claimed further audience from those who remained. “I have shocked Father Bowers,” she declared.

“I am sure, my dear, that he was most sincere in the admiration he expressed,” soothed Mrs. Vine.

“And in the approval he withheld?”

“People cannot all see alike, Pauline,” Katherine urged, with an ill-judged note of restraint.

“Old Bowers is not the only person in the world,” Wendover remarked promptly.

Pauline shrugged her shoulders. “I wish you three would be honest,” she said.

“We are,” her husband affirmed. “What’s wrong?”

“She is tired,” explained Katherine.

“I simply want to know this,” Pauline continued, standing tense but quiet by the fire: “do you three consider that the majority of people would think some of these poems unsuitable for a clergyman’s wife?”

“The majority of people won’t know or care whose wife you are,” Wendover said hastily. “They will care for the poems themselves.”

“What do you say, Mrs. Vine?” Pauline persisted.

“I think they are all wonderfully clever, but if you ask me, my dear, there are a few that I would rather you had not written. They are so unlike my idea of you,” replied Mrs. Vine desperately, impelled to speak the truth by Katherine’s presence.

“Your idea of me as a clergyman’s wife?”

“My idea of you in your personal setting.”

Pauline’s face had paled. By her intenseness she forced the others to condemnation or surrender. She turned to Keith, who looked ill at ease. He was resentful of criticism of his wife, and at the same time he could not and would not play mere echo to her voice. “Keith, tell me on your honour, are there any poems among these that you would rather I had not written for publication?”

“I think you have a perfect right to publish what you choose, and I am uncommonly proud of your gift,” he declared.

“You are not answering my very simple question,” she affirmed.

“Very well, then, if you want to know, I found it rather embarrassing sitting there and listening to some of them. That is a personal feeling. As poetry I am no critic, but I am certain they are A 1.” He gave his answer pat to her request, but with a delightful manner.

What followed was an affair of temperament and nerves. Pauline stood quiet for some thirty seconds, saying slowly in a moved voice, “I cannot dissociate myself as poet from myself as Pauline Wendover. A man can separate his work and his marriage—I cannot! Nothing I have said here matters very much. There is no commandment, no law, no revelation. Only my way of saying things. If that jars on you, I jar.” She turned swiftly, and threw the loose pages into the midst of the hungry fire, which leapt upon them in flames. Then, with a sudden tempestuous rush, she was at the door and had vanished.

Mrs. Vine flung herself upon the tongs and rescued ashes with frenzy. Wendover shouted after his wife. Katherine kept her head. Laying a detaining hand on his arm, she spoke rapidly: “Keith, leave her alone one moment, and then go to her. Her publisher has the manuscript all right. She has only burnt the proofs. She forgot that, but she will be glad presently. We four are not susceptible people to poetry: not one of us reads it for pleasure. She piped unto us, and we did not dance. It will be all right to-morrow.” She removed her hand. “Go and soothe her,” she said.

“Dash it all!” breathed Wendover very heartily, and went.

Mrs. Vine, rustling heavily, rose from her knees and resumed her seat. “What a scene!” she exclaimed. “What an astonishing scene! How terribly these artistic people resent criticism! I had no idea we should upset Mrs. Wendover. I am sure I uttered nothing but praise! I never imagined for one instant that she would ever behave like this. She seemed so different in ordinary life.”

Katherine laughed. “You are always so surprised when human beings are violent, Mary. I take it that ideas are very forcible things in Pauline, that they invade her in a way they cannot invade you and me. We are not receptive of them after her fashion.”

“But surely gentleness goes with strength, my dear,” chimed Mrs. Vine.

“Oh, you mean the soldier playing with the child? How you love sentiment! But the soldier fighting is a violent animal.”

“I may be old-fashioned,” the other declared, “but I do like to see people exercise self-control.”

Katherine made an eloquent shrug of her shoulders. “Anybody can control the trickling of a water tap; it is a different thing to control a Niagara. Pauline has more to control than most people. She aims at a tremendous government of her thoughts and deeds and words. Occasionally, as to-night, there is a very pretty rebellion.”

“The artistic temperament,” Mrs. Vine murmured vaguely. “And of course she does not look very strong. I should think she was highly strung.”

“Yes, Mary, you observe all that—her fragility, her nerves; and yet you are utterly surprised when those facts come into action. You might as well anticipate that someone will suffer from a cough without coughing. All you ever expect anyone to produce in life is manner.”

Mrs. Vine said no more. Katherine was not a person to be argued with, but on this occasion her companion summed her up as difficult.

After unreason and wrath how comforting the balm of love. Pauline, tear-stained, exhausted, self-accusing, lay upon her bed with her head on Wendover’s shoulder, and heard herself called the wisest and most wonderful of women. For those two still shared something that the earth holds and the sun, the waters hold and the moon, the flesh holds and the spirit—a mutual need and an attraction that is the miracle and mystery of life.

Next morning Pauline waxed emphatic. “No more visits for us. We must have a place of our own.”

Wendover was doubtful. “We ought to be rather careful. My income has not recovered yet. And even Glynde did not take a rosy view of my investments.”

“Then we will live in a small way. But a home of our own we must have. Oh, I know mother likes our staying with her; but I am sick and weary of other people’s houses. After I left Curzon Street I had more than enough of visits during the war. It is all very well for you, Keith, but you little know what relations’ servants represent to me. When mother’s table napkins get lost, she feels it is because her laundry has been overworked by the babies’ frocks. Nurse complains wherever we go and makes friction. Even here I have to adapt myself. I am determined by last night’s scene. If I must make a fool of myself, do let it be in private!” Her sensitive mouth quivered.

“Right O,” Wendover replied easily. “But I don’t see any objection to being with Phyllis and John, myself. They don’t care a tinker’s farthing about domestic arrangements. And I ought to be in London now.”

“Keith!” She exclaimed her astonishment. “Do you mean to tell me you could prepare for your ordination in that house?”

“Of course.” He stopped his vigorous brushing of his hair and looked at his wife with a frank stare. “Do you think I am a hothouse plant? I don’t believe you have got the hang of this thing at all. It is not wrapped in cotton wool.”

She flung her hands above her golden-brown head on the pillow.

“What is your aim?” she said.

“Worship,” he answered, and then looked suddenly embarrassed.

“You could do that as a layman.”

“Of course. But don’t you see that is not my bent? I am a professional man by preference. I want to work at a thing when I am keen on it. I like rules. Lack of imagination, I dare say. It no more worries me to be with the Glyndes, who don’t share my present enthusiasm, than it would have worried me to be billeted on a Quaker.”

Pauline gave a little soft laugh. “Yes, you like rules—you and Katherine—because it makes life more interesting to have them. Discipline appeals to you. It prevents the steam of enthusiasm escaping and being dissipated in space. But you both have personalities that are immune from the hampering effect of regulations and formulas and ceremonies. I wonder how you do it.”

In due time they went house-hunting and discussed ways and means. The upshot was that they took an expensive house in Cowley Street because Pauline fell in love with it. It was an old house, wood-panelled, and painted cream throughout. Its staircase was full of character and was neither a ladder nor a corkscrew. The furniture held history rather than fashion. There were many pictures and many books. The word ‘home’ sprang to women’s lips on the doorstep, and the thought of hotels and restaurants never crossed the threshold. The rooms were filled with sunshine and with shade; they invited activities and dreams. It was secluded and unpretentious, but in charm not unworthy of its illustrious neighbours, the Houses of Parliament, the Abbey, and Dean’s Yard.

Pauline, blissfully admiring her dwelling, remarked with some compunction, “The war crusaded against luxury, but it did not uproot taste and preference—so here I am, and vastly extravagant too!”

While the Wendovers lived there Pauline’s book of poems was published, and she saw with a sigh her husband’s uniform and his layman’s clothes set aside, not to be worn again by him any more than she would ever again don her wedding dress as a bride. She saw him admitted to be a deacon. She heard the old, old words . . . From all evil and mischief, from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil, from Thy wrath and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord deliver us. . . . Then let them use the office of a Deacon, being found blameless. Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.” And she breathed a difficult Amen.

But months later, when the late autumn’s wind was fighting and roaring and rain lashed the earth, her spirit caught fire in mighty St. Paul’s, where she had knelt time and again during the great war to commemorate the death of heroes. She stood and sat and knelt now, her eyes fastened upon the white-robed deacons, among whom Keith bulked broad. She was acutely conscious of the impressiveness of a body of men gathered together for a solemn purpose: they meant so profoundly much. A gathering of the same number of women could scarcely stir you so, she thought. Fifty mothers might touch you, but they would represent the fate of all generations past and to come, undifferentiated from the incoherent mass of life. A handful of novices dedicating their lives might win your sympathy by their withdrawal from the secular world to their own nun-like dreams and works and prayers. But not in the same way as these men did when coming here to be made priests; impressive to the imagination because they were to receive authority and power. To receive grace also in the eyes of all believers—but manifestly they gained the other. Heirs and successors of an order nearly two thousand years old, of an ideal incalculably older: claiming not to be ministers of any crown but ministers of God. State there was, and pomp, and ceremonial, and a great and beautiful setting for the same. Music spoke through the vast spaces in the Veni Creator Spiritus, and Pauline found that her eyes were suddenly wet. Gold thread glittered on the altar cloth and in the Bishop’s cope, and she felt for a moment the awe of this great man’s tremendous vocation, to whom at his consecration had been given the mandate: “Hold up the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost.” For the first time in her life she realised fully the deep significance of these three very ordinary words: a man’s profession. The open declaration of a man’s sentiments or belief. A man’s manner of living. How high a standard men had set in this calling: not only to do but to be. Wendover’s soul was to-day adopting a profession, she thought, and the limitless symbolism of touch rushed in upon her mind as she watched her husband kneel before the Bishop, and saw the prelate and the priests stretch out their arms and touch him, and heard the office and work of a priest in the Church of God committed to him by the imposition of hands. The sound of the words they spoke to Wendover, “Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained,” swept over her bowed head and were lost in the echoes of the vast dome.

Part II — Dera Ismail Khan

Chapter IX

Autumn touched the green frontier heights and breathed wintry among its passes where the kirries wended their way by thousands towards the markets of India. A bare road ran from the cantonment of Dera Ismail Khan, past the city walls and gates and through the featureless desert to Tank city and military posts. The cantonment roads were lit by lamps, and light shone from the bungalows and messes and the Club. Sentries were stationed on the mall, and there was a guard at the General’s house. Officers and their wives walked, rode, or drove in motors and buggies, all converging towards the Club. Servants bicycled here and there on errands. Several orderlies tramped to and fro carrying messages. In the dim light the gardens were gardens of shadows, and yet so compact as to size, so restricted as to population, were all habitations, so named and labelled and defined was every inhabitant and person, that each bungalow and garden was a familiar outline, a familiar shadow. But beyond the cantonment boundary lay mystery. The city hid and held its secrets. Tortuous streets, crazy dwellings, windows that peeped but disclosed nothing, doors that opened on to blind alleys but shut in their own dark courtyards and hives of small rooms with sinister reserve. Those narrow channels of streets ran a hundred ways like thin veins in a congested face; eye and memory alike refused to map them, receiving an impression of intricacy and horror. One broad thoroughfare, lined on either side by booths and shops, stretched from gate to gate, and a crowd thronged it from end to end. Here a man rode a Waziri pony, and there a great gaunt camel lurched after a shaggy powindah. Small schoolboys shrilled by sweetshops, and groups of sepoys shouldered their way. Through this street drove the General’s motor the day England declared war on Turkey, and the city conned the news: a procession of Sikhs from a Sikh regiment at the Fort, bent upon the religious observance of a Sikh festival, had recognised the British officer, and frightened the myriad pigeons off the jumbled housetops by the rousing cheer they flung to him. That cheer’s echo, together with all the echoes of long intriguing years,—echoes of hawkers crying the auctioned goods of sahibs who had fallen by frontier murder, echoes of rumour from the border and rumours from the cantonment,—lay pent for ever in the atmosphere of the subtle city’s unknown life. Beyond the city again stretched deeper mystery. For the desert spoke to no man. Birds of prey soared and pounced, grazing camels wandered, solitary villages breathed and toiled in unutterable isolation. Time and space reigned alone. Civilisation stuck to the road, for hunger and thirst haunted the trackless waste. Backwards and forwards on this highway jostled the Afghan merchants and their laden camels during spring and autumn, marched the regiments wending their way to the outposts of Khajuri Kach, Jandola, and other lonely forts, jingled the country carts with ragged wayfarers, and galloped the mail tongas on His Majesty’s service. Here too grimly plied armoured motors what time the world was at war. But the endless song of that road is the sound of men’s feet toiling, toiling. Forty miles from Dera Ismail Khan lies Tank, and Tank is an affair of revolvers: there the hand must guard the head though sweet-peas be grown in the gardens and roses and hollyhocks, and men go Home in due season by P. & O. or swiftly by a death-blow. On and on plunges the road, a thought less fashionable now,—being even less frequented,—to Murtaza, where the world ends for the civilian and exists for the raider and the man of war. Beyond travel goes by escort and convoy; its armed routine a commonplace of the frontier, its sudden events breathless when the rifles ring out from barren rock and dusty scrub. Stately in its defiance, the Dead’s guard once bore a slain sahib from the fatal scene to a last home in the sunlit plains where the regiment mourned, threading those formidable defiles and bitter passes. Through the night, through the day, swinging in to the armed posts for brief halts, the Burden upon a camel, that lone march of the Dead was a very majesty of military power and sentiment. And by this terrifying road, careless of the lack of protection, regardless of exhaustion, alone, hell for leather, to the rescue of a wounded friend rode a doctor man from Wano unto Tank without rest and without pause one hot April night. Thus, year by year, such tales and memories accumulate thick about the desert road and mountain gorges. Another highway pushes out from Dera Ismail Khan to Pezu, from which footpaths climb up to the bleak hilltop of Sheikh Budin, and in summer the heat is such that those English who encounter it carry seared thoughts for life. Close by a threatening pass gives mild daylight welcome to Englishwomen, who occasionally motor out from the cantonment en route to its stout neighbour Bannu eighty miles distant, and one fierce night of 1914 gave challenge to an Indian regiment and took the worst of its stern retort. Throughout all this region men look to the hills when they look for trouble, look to the regiments when they look for armed peace, and look to quarters in the militia outpost of Wano, to a bungalow in Tank, and a big house set in a shady garden in Dera Ismail Khan when they look for government.

A strange world. Beyond the border the weird fantasy of barbaric drama—robbers, farmers, headmen, mullahs, and the young bloods of the tribes. Territory of Waziris and Mahsuds, ever restless, ever defiant. The militia headquarters and posts; the British commandant, British officers, Indian officers and men, horse and foot: fierce, active, swift. The forts held in turn by detachments of Indian infantry regiments, with regimental headquarters at Tank. One British officer or at most two in each isolated post, where summer burns and winter freezes, and fever creeps into the veins. A brigade at Dera Ismail Khan, another at Kohat, a third at Bannu. Mountain batteries, Indian cavalry, Indian infantry. And, for majesty of law, British political officers, a British resident for Waziristan with headquarters in the cantonment, a British deputy commissioner for Dera Ismail Khan, a British sessions judge. As individuals they come and go, as official appointments they abide through months and years, from the old days of Nicholson and Edwards and Durand till now. The flag flies from the General’s flagstaff, and occasionally the salute of guns announces the coming of the Chief Commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province. In the city, in scattered villages, in various posts, are the wasps of the border police—whose British officers are ever on the move. Throughout the length of the roads are the mail-runners, the mail tonga-drivers, the city dâk-wallahs, the babus at the post offices; and a British post-office official, travelling here and there on tours of inspection.

It is a region which perforce takes great heed of water: of rain there falls but little. The season of the rains, so regular in the mountains of northern and eastern India and in the central and southern plains, is unknown to this land of sand and rock and scrub. The Zhob and the Gumal rivers are formidable or feeble; the hills crumble in the terrible dry heat or race with angry streams after a thunder shower; wells are deeply sunk and far to seek; in the villages of the Kutcha the women walk seven miles to fetch water, and the water supply for the summer community at Sheikh Budin climbs four thousand feet on the backs of mules every day at dawn. And always the great Indus absorbs attention: if she increase, if she dwindle, if she flood or fail in her journey from the Himalayas to the ocean, the whole Derajat knows it, feels it. By launch in summer, by bridge of boats in winter, and by a track where no permanent road may abide the moods of the river, the city and cantonment, the posts and villages, the desert and frontier hills, maintain their communication with the railhead at Darya Khan, which is a small platform and a dirty bazaar, a noise and confusion of pariah dogs and beggars, of flies and dust. From thence it is the journey of a day, or a day and night, to the port of Karachi, to the capitals of the Frontier Province and the Punjab, and to the foot of the Murree Hills.

Just as the millions of soldiers throughout the Great War were acutely conscious of the configuration of the ground, of the stupendous climatic conditions of the seasons, of the morale and the activities of encompassing and opposing hosts, so in this remote corner of the world there abides always a realisation of a few distinct and powerful facts—the distant railway, the passage of the untameable river, the offensive and defensive force maintained in the cantonment, the incoherent multitude of human beings in the city, the vast space of the desert, the traffic on the roads and the guarding of those roads, the outposts across the border, the uncivilised denizens of hostile mountains. Further, there remains sleeplessly a realisation of great challenges to thought and sentiment: here the Mohammedans of the border breed fanaticism in lonely mountain lairs, here Hindus crowd only in the cities, here education dwells cheek by jowl with the utterly uneducated. From the cantonment the idea of rule and force can never absent itself; it is unforgotten and unforgettable. It is poignant in the minds of the rulers—those few Britishers who represent the civil power, those eighty or a hundred Britishers who hold military command. They are exiles, and on them falls the terrific attack of the climatic conditions: the fearful heat, the chill which quickens malaria in poisoned blood. They give military words of command in English, and all other orders in strange languages. Their women are the only women in all the Derajat who have no barter to dread, no co-wife to dread, no imprisonment behind the purdah to dread. The thought of England is never obliterated: it exists as a self-consciousness, a self-realisation, among them.

Such sahibs and their womenfolk as arrive at Dera Ismail Khan at the beginning of the cold weather are conscious first of the long galloping tonga journey between the swaying tufts of silver-tipped pampas grass, of the icy breath of the broken desert ground, of the slow unveiling of dim hills against the distant sky, of the swift spreading of light and heat from the rising sun, of the rattle across the gleaming river by the bridge of boats. Along the bank shift and sway a crowd of camels, delayed in their passage till the passing of the tonga leaves the sole way free. Quaint river-craft lie where the swirling waters eat into the crumbling earth. These, and the powindahs, are the tourists of the district; city and cantonment mere landmarks passed on their way. A new-comer receives an impression that the hundred or so English people in Dera Ismail Khan have been there indefinitely, firmly established, authoritative but stagnating in a backwater of the world. Quite erroneous. In the year this book depicts the oldest inhabitants were the officers and men of the regiment at the Fort who had arrived in the cantonment from Lucknow eighteen months before. A subaltern who sauntered to the Club swinging his tennis racket had only one year’s experience of India. Of the forty Englishwomen, some were brides who had landed at Bombay or Karachi for the first time within the last three weeks; the remainder had been in England or in the Hills for the summer, only five among them had spent all told more than half a dozen years in the East. Of the three infantry regiments, one had lately arrived from China, where it had been quartered during the Great War. The cavalry regiment had taken part in the campaign in France, and the regiment at the Fort had been in France also. British, Sikh, Pathan, Dogra, Punjabi Mohammedan, all were men who had travelled far afield, gathered many experiences, seen much contrast, adventured greatly. The war, that still haunted taxes and empty chairs in English towns, lived in the lives of the Derajat Brigade—its influence no mere memory but a growth.

Unprofessional interests in Dera Ismail Khan are what the mind makes at pleasure. There is no music save the music of the Indian infantry bands, and the music of the amateur on pianos hired at vast expense from Lahore, or on banjos beloved by young officers. Pictures must be those on a man’s own walls or his neighbour’s. The only plays to see are plays enacted by enterprising members of the small community. At sundown men and women drift to the Club, and a few may be found in its library day after day seeking hidden treasure, and complaining that they find boredom.

In this library stood Doris, discontentedly turning over the leaves of the book in which the babu had entered the choice of various officers and their wives. Apparently a percentage of the men read nothing that was to be found on the laden shelves, while a handful borrowed half a dozen books at a time, gleaning a page here and a page there from old memoirs, histories of long-forgotten frontier campaigns, ancient Blackwoods and Spectators. A larger number snatched at tales of adventure, detective stories, humorous narratives, caring little or nothing for literary merit, but attracted by some obvious human interest, some imaginative pleasure to be obtained through receiving creeps of horror, moments of suspense, provocations to laughter. Then about half a dozen men read all the new and much reviewed publications directly they made their appearance—biographies, histories, novels, whatever came under the heading of books of the day. Most of the women’s entries affirmed that they shared this last preference. But still Doris’s cold short upper lip showed contemptuous: there was little to prove that the words, minted by the million in her old haunts of the Strand and in and round Fleet Street, held sway here: though they penetrated in many volumes and light magazines, they never crossed the threshold with London daily papers and reviews; their influence was weak indeed. And this thought was icy to Doris, the wife of Captain Rahman Khan, I.M.S., attached as medical officer to the 1st Punjabis, whose lines lay to the left of the Club, with their dusty parade-ground stretching out towards the Club’s flowering garden. The novel, which she wrote daily, and which she read aloud evening after evening to her husband, drew its bitter breath from her life in Dera Ismail Khan—her curious, interesting, deadly life. If the book proved but an insignificant influence, then she, her very self, shrank into insignificance, into a woman who had made a meaningless mistake in life. And to her own mental vision Doris the American loomed gigantic against this frontier background, among this powerful little community of Englishmen and their much protected wives, wedded to an Indian of the great land which spread its deserts, tangled its jungles, built high its hills, spilt far its rivers for three hundred million people’s feet. So daring was her challenge, so singular her difficulties, that Doris felt the very stars must stoop to listen when she spoke.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Rahman Khan.” The boy who had sauntered down the mall entered from the verandah, tennis racket in hand, and removed his cap. He put down a book by Kipling on the babu’s table, and left hastily by the other door. Guy Farqueharson of the 1st Punjabis liked Captain Rahman Khan, but a problem such as his American wife presented was too much for him. He never pondered it. Cheerfully, pleasantly, courteously, he avoided it and the lady.

On his heels came Colonel Deering, who commanded the 10th Punjabis at the Fort. Between the 10th, who had served in France, and the 1st, who had stood still in China during the Great War, there was no friction whatever. But the 1st were bitterly, bitterly jealous. And this despite the fact that man for man as many British officers of the 1st had seen big fighting as survived in the 10th. For the second in command had been with a link battalion in France, and two majors had served there with British regiments of the New Army, while a captain had been attached to a regiment in Gallipoli, and a subaltern had gone straight from Sandhurst to France, and thence after being wounded to Serbia. Now only five of the British officers who served with the 10th Punjabis in France lived to tell the tale. Yet the 10th Punjabis—that immortal name which survived its dead—wore the laurels of the Great War, and the 1st Punjabis envied them, and criticised freely. The 10th Punjabis bore itself becomingly, but it would not have been in the boots of the other regiment for untold loot or love, and there is scant logic in these things, yet they are so after the very human fashion of the Army.

Colonel Deering had a clip to his mouth that spelt command. Command had come to him gloriously early, and he carried C.B. after his name. Against all history the deeds of such regimental officers as he measured big. He knew it, valued it, and fixed a standard by it that the last joined from Sandhurst found pantingly high, and the Indian officers and sepoys found grim as winter trenches in a fighting land. Nevertheless, the Colonel Sahib was as greatly worshipped as feared, and in far-flung Punjab villages the wounded pensioners of the 10th Punjabis wove fable and legend round his exploits in France that passed from mouth to mouth, and drew striplings to enlist as though a spell compelled them.

This man was to be numbered among the readers of all contemporary fiction, and he greeted Doris with the words: “Got me in the book yet, Mrs. Rahman Khan?”

Doris was not one of those who hide their light under a bushel. She was American enough, and had enough of the jostling Strand in her, to advertise and push. All the cantonment heard daily of that forthcoming book.

“I don’t want to be had up for libel,” she remarked tersely.

His intensely blue eyes under short black lashes glinted at her pale fairness in keen amusement. “I won’t sue you. What have I done?”

“You are a tyrant. And I am too good an American to tolerate tyrants.”

His deeply lined face went into a network of cracks; out of them emerged an expression of careless scrutiny. Breeding was written on every inch of his body and over his small dark head and clear-cut features. A wiry, smart, dauntless fellow of forty-one, and the man or woman who challenged him had nerve. Doris never lacked that, and in his eyes twinkled a recognition of the fact.

“Who has been complaining?” he asked. All might take an oath that his questions would be startling and his replies as bold and bad as he pleased to make them.

“You English never complain of an order in this little place. Seems to me you all pretend you like being cramped! But I have invited two of your subalterns to dine with me this Thursday, and they told me they were not allowed to dine out on regimental guest nights! I asked them if they had guests themselves, and they said ‘ No.’ If that’s so, it seems to me they might be free to dine where they please, if this is a free land.”

“You’re wrong,” Deering replied in his strikingly pleasant voice. “You’re wrong, if I may say so. It is a question of regimental custom and regimental manners.”

“And who decides the question?” Her American intonation grew very pronounced, and a slight colour suffused her cheeks.

“I do! If a decision is required.”

“And you can’t be wrong?”

“Nothing more likely. But I’m not in doubt.”

She turned from him to the bookshelf, and then suddenly flashed round again, her back as straight as an arrow, her cheeks pink. “I have asked several of the young officers of the 10th to dine on nights that were not guest nights. They have not accepted my invitations. Not once.”

“We are not social successes, I fear,” he answered easily.

“Will they ever accept my invitations?” Her voice was suddenly hoarse. Obviously she was intensely moved, and intensely furious.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But if you will be kind enough to ask me, Mrs. Rahman Khan, I will accept with pleasure.”

She was at a loss now. But she pushed him hard again. “As an example to your young officers?”

He was aware that she fought him. “Oh, I never aspire to be that. I serve as their awful warning, I expect.”

No, she could not accuse him of personal rudeness. But she was still breathless, as one who scents unutterable social offence. “I don’t think I will ask any of the 10th Punjabis to dinner until I know where I am. I like to understand whether people are intentionally or unintentionally rude, Colonel Deering.”

“Give the poor devils the benefit of the doubt,” he said lightly.

“And ask them again?”

“I call that spoiling them. Put them in the corner and leave them there to repent.”

“Will they accept if I ask them?” Undoubtedly she panted now.

“I am no prophet.”

She made a gesture of great exasperation. “You have an opinion, I suppose? I tell you, Colonel Deering, I do not understand you, and I do not understand your regiment. I ask you for an explanation.”

He tapped the palm of one hand with the end of a cigarette some dozen times before answering, then he said, “May I smoke?” and when she murmured an assent and sat down on the one dusty wicker chair, he sat down too on the edge of the office table, and said to her half unwillingly, “You force me to be an absolute brute.”

“Perhaps you don’t mind that much,” she retorted.

He gave a short laugh. “If it comes to a struggle, one has to hurt people. People’s feelings too. In war it hurts a man’s feelings to be defeated, Mrs. Rahman Khan, more than it hurts a victor to, be physically wounded.”

“You can go right ahead,” Doris said proudly.

“Right. You are in an extraordinarily difficult position, aren’t you?”

“No,” said Doris.

“I think so. I call it, for the sake of argument, an extraordinarily difficult position. Well, is it not better to isolate those difficulties? Keep ’em personal and private to your own life. I am sure you are equal to them.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

For a second the blue eyes glared at her. Then he laughed. “You are giving me a bad time of it, aren’t you?” He looked at her whimsically for fully half a minute, then he dropped his glance, and his voice was grave once more. “You married an Indian. We get on very well with Captain Rahman Khan—very well indeed. Friction is a bad thing in a cantonment. As far as I can prevent friction I shall do so. I have made a mess of it this time. So I may as well make a clean breast of matters. You think I have told my junior officers not to accept your kind invitations?—It was very kind of you to ask them to dine. I appreciate it, and so do they.—Well, I did not do what you imagine. I merely asked my adjutant to give them a hint that—I really forget how I put it—but it was to the effect that intimacies were best avoided where complications might arise. We seem to have bungled matters. The last thing intended was to hurt your feelings.”

“Intimacies?” she said hoarsely. “I am not aware that any man can flatter himself that I will allow him to become an intimate friend because I ask him to dinner.”

“Quite,” he rejoined. “But you know how things begin. Women are very kind to young officers out here—very kind and hospitable. Mrs. Fleming’s bungalow is a second home for our fellows.”

She jumped at the opening he gave her. “Kindly explain why you draw a distinction between my bungalow and Mrs. Fleming’s?”

“I draw none. Absolutely none. I draw the distinction between Major Fleming’s bungalow and Captain Rahman Khan’s. Between the Englishman’s and the Indian’s home. It is a distinction all India draws.”

“Ah!” she said tensely. “Now I am getting at the truth at last. It is your narrow-minded official prejudice, your insular British ideas. When I was eighteen, Colonel Deering, I dined with whom I pleased. I would not care to be an officer in the 10th Punjabis—- no, I would not—if I had to be chaperoned like a schoolgirl.”

He leant forward, elbow on knee, and he spoke so crisply and emphatically that he held her silent, rebellious and furious though she were. “I am sure at eighteen you kept out of mischief. Nice women do. Men don’t. When night clubs were the subject of Government measures in war-time, was it because England was fussing over her daughters? Not she. She was schooling her sons. Valuable material getting into mischief, deteriorating. That’s loss. When my regiment landed in Marseilles the women threw flowers at the men—at the line sweepers. Meant well. But they were ignorant and they were misleading. As a consequence, when we went to the front one of our sepoys entered a farm and insulted a woman. He got the cat for that. In a civilised army you must stop that sort of devilment. The young knave died an extraordinarily gallant death four months later. My orderly was a Brahman. When I had fever one night in a dug-out, I cursed the confounded mice that whisked about; and he thought that alarmingly bad luck, and besought me to salaam to them—to the spark of divinity in all life—just to right matters again. He was badly wounded bayoneting a German to death next day. Do you think logic governs men’s acts? A Pathan saved my life at Neuve Chapelle. Do you think he would let me see his wife? Not he: though, mind you, he’d die for me. Our fellows have their own way of regarding women. It was never an easy matter to handle, and European service has not made it easier. Best to avoid trouble over women when possible.” He paused for a moment, and lowered his voice. “One of our Punjabi Mohammedan havildars is a relation of your husband.”

“I should say that one of your Punjabi Mohammedan havildars is a liar,” she retorted. “My husband comes of a good family.”

“So does my havildar. He will be an Indian officer one day. There is as good blood in our rank and file as in our commissioned officers—the same blood, in fact. This man, Ghulam Mahomed, married a niece of your husband—a sister’s daughter. I was told this the other day by our Subadar Major. Do you know your husband’s family?”

“He has a brother who is a barrister. I know him. His father is dead, and the old mother does not count,” she replied defiantly.

“Not educated, perhaps, and very orthodox? I bet she counts. But we are getting off the track. My sepoys accept the customs of the English officers as regards their English wives, but they do not know what to think of your husband’s attitude. Hence there is no white woman in all India who should be more carefully conventional than the white wife of an Indian gentleman. When that wife is interesting and attractive, it is better that the British officers of an Indian regiment should not get into the habit of dropping into her husband’s house, more especially when he is away, as he was last month. Nine-tenths of the sepoys would not call your husband in to see their purdah wives, if those wives were dying. If you won’t think me a brute—but of course you do—I may as well tell you frankly that they would be more likely to let an English doctor attend them. Your husband has no entrée, no privilege as regards the women of India, because he is an educated man and has an American wife.”

“That may be so,” she admitted, somewhat at a loss, but unflinching. “Yet the fact that he is an educated man makes all the difference.”

“To you personally, as his wife; to us men individually, as his companions; to the sepoys of my regiment, not one jot. I was with ’em six months on the banks of the Suez Canal. There are plenty of educated Mohammedan gentlemen in Egypt, but their wives were secluded. There are exceptions, of course, but people ignore exceptions unless they are confronted by them; then they speculate endlessly about them. Your marriage with an Indian is such an exception to the rule that in a cantonment of this size it assumes undue importance, if I may say so. To the sepoys it is a case of an Indian having an unveiled wife, who receives men in a fashion foreign to Indian custom.”

“They can see I am one of the Sahib-log, can’t they?” she demanded.

“Quite so. And that is where it affects us.” He paused. Obviously he left much unsaid.

Suddenly she stood up. “What an absurd conversation!” she exclaimed. “I don’t know what makes a civilised man such as you try to induce a woman such as I to regulate her existence to suit the ignorance of some peasant soldiers! The world is progressing, and those sepoys’ sons will hold different views from their fathers. I dare say Rahman and I are ahead of our time.” She lowered her voice quickly as a tall woman entered the library from the ladies’ sitting-room. It was Cynthia Oswald, now the wife of Captain Drew of the 1st Punjabis.

Mrs. Drew greeted them both pleasantly. She turned to Doris with a very kind manner. “I have great news for you! The Wendovers are coming here. I received a telegram from Mrs. Wendover today. She wired from Bombay. I am so glad that her husband is appointed to Dera Ismail Khan, though I suppose we shall see very little of him. The chaplain here has to travel so much—to Kohat, to Bannu, and to the outposts!”

“Well, I can do without him very contentedly,” Doris rejoined. “He thinks the world is born at Eton and lives in crack regiments. But it will be like a breath of life to have Pauline here. That is the best news I have heard for many a long day. Pauline! My, that’s good!” She turned to cry to a man who appeared at the verandah entrance. “Rahman, what do you think—my friend Pauline Wendover is coming here with her husband who turned parson. He is to be chaplain here!”

Captain Rahman Khan came forward. “That is very nice indeed for you, my dear,” he responded. “Good-evening, Colonel. Good-evening, Mrs. Drew. The Honourable Mrs. Wendover, isn’t she? Is that the one you mean?”

“It is the only one I know,” Doris replied. “Well, I shall go home now and gloat over this news.”

“My wife is so excited, she will tire herself out before her friends arrive!” Rahman Khan said, with obvious pride; and the four people left the Club together and strolled towards the garden gate at the end of the short drive.

The Indian doctor was a small dapper man, dressed in European clothes. He had an olive skin, very white teeth, a small moustache, a well-cut nose, mild brown eyes, and flexible, dexterous hands, with which he gesticulated a good deal—now spreading the fingers wide apart, now turning them back from the palm, which was deeply engraved and paler than the back of the hand. His utterance of English was slightly staccato. He had a careful manner, that gave an impression of a correct copy.

“The Honourable Mrs. Wendover. Is that-t the one?” Deering quoted softly in Mrs. Drew’s ear.

Cynthia smiled, but she took a quicker step and caught up the married pair. Captain Rahman Khan dropped behind with her, and they conversed in courteous commonplace. Deering and Doris walked ahead in a stubborn silence. Suddenly a sound of singing broke gaily from the Club. A few of the younger people had gathered round the drawing-room piano, and were shouting a chorus from the last musical comedy:

“If you could see yourself as I can see you,
I wonder would you cry or fly, or simply sit and smile;
But you can’t see yourself as I can see you,
And so you glare because I stare, and call my manners vile.”

The rollick of the song drove the sad silence of an Indian evening into stronger prominence. The wail of a distant Persian wheel seemed to voice the encompassing desert. Jackals in the copse that fringed the river bank broke into a ghastly howling. The air vibrated with contrasting sounds. A light twinkled from a bicycle lamp as a mess servant sped past, and a light shone low from the corner of a compound where a Mohammedan lay buried. The smell of cookery fires rose pungent from the lines and the servants’ quarters. With a rumble and rattle, a native cart staggered past the gate on two loose wheels, drawn by an active little rat of a pony. A ragged countryman drove the conveyance, which was hooded and had a great sheet thrown over it, denoting the presence of a purdah woman, who was thus hidden from the outer world as she jogged on her journey. The cart took the road to the Fort. Beside the driver sat a big loose-limbed Punjabi Mohammedan, blue-turbaned and well turned out. He saluted as he passed the gate, his eyes on Deering.

“By Jove,” the Colonel remarked quietly, “it is Ghulam Mahomed, back from his leave to fetch his wife from Allahabad. Look, Mrs. Rahman Khan—see that sheet? Under it goes your niece by marriage. This is between you and me.” He turned his dare-devil, commanding face to Doris: indifferent to her save as a difficult element within his present sphere of action, interested in her as a troublesome problem—slightly sorry for her. “Make friends among your own women. Mrs. Drew is the very person for you.”

She vouchsafed him no reply, but stood staring after the tonga as it lurched out of sight. In the dim light her rigid, slender fairness was pale as moonbeams and more cold. “Rahman, come on home,” she said.

Chapter X

Into this world of sword and city, of desert and mountain, into this complex community of white and brown faces, came Pauline Wendover, and found herself enveloped by strange and compelling circumstances. The law of the seasons enforced cruel mandates: no European might lightly disregard the winter sunshine at noon, and from April to October every man, woman, and child shrank from its burning rays, and the English wives and babies were banished to the Hills. Husbands and wives suffered constant arbitrary separations, and comfort as the housekeeper understands the word was far to seek. The morning after her arrival Pauline stood in the glare of her bare compound of putt, devoid of one green blade of grass, and looked at the whitewashed bungalow, with its French windows filled with inferior glass and smeared with poor brown paint, and veiled by bamboo blinds. The roof held a forbidding scaffolding from which a punkah swung on stifling summer nights. Into one of the compound gates—mere gaps in the low mud wall—rumbled a bullock-cart laden with firewood, for the November evenings were chilly. Behind it shuffled the old khansamah, his hair dyed bright scarlet, carrying vegetables and meat. On the verandah were three palms in pots and a couple of shabby wicker chairs. Two cupboards and a wash hand-stand of rakish and mean appearance were standing in the dust waiting for the bearer and bhisti to finish their roti-khana and help the bearer carry them into Keith’s dressing-room. A sowar orderly rode past on a camel of the 100th Lancers, swaying aloft against a brazen sky of ardent blue. In an open space across the dusty road some little turbaned schoolboys were cheating each other at a game of cricket.

“Here I am!” cried Cynthia Drew, strolling into the compound. “Can I help you? Do you hate it dreadfully, you poor dear?”

“I am fascinated,” Pauline told her. “Delighted to be among soldiering folk again, and intrigued by all this pale bare earth and sky of blue flame, the camels and the jackals and the brown people.” A green parrot flared across the garden. “Look—no cage! That is what I feel most, there is no cage anywhere.” She stood tall and beautiful, her perfect skin defying the searching glare of the tremendous light, her hair tangling the sunshine, her deep mysterious eyes greeting this strange world eagerly. An extraordinary sweetness and character dwelt in the elusive lines of her lips. “She is lovelier than ever,” Cynthia said to herself.

“You wanted to come to India?” she inquired.

“I wished to get Keith away from a prosperous London parish,” Pauline told her, leading the way into a big drawing-room. “He hankered to be among soldiers once more, I think. I was not a success in Kensington.” She made an impatient movement with her eloquent little hands. “I began all wrong. The vicar’s wife disapproved of my poems and my frocks. I ought to have written hymns and have cut my coat according to Keith’s cloth. But I did not. I was not suitable. Neither was Keith, though he was a tremendous worker. I thought him wonderfully patient. We went on with life as if there had never been a war. Everything was as comfortable and as complicated as ever. The price of sugar never went down, and it was a blessing to find something had a memory! It was as though one had gone through purgatory merely to be received into the second-best society of some hydropathic establishment, where we all recovered together in a mildly convalescent manner.”

“I know,” Mrs. Drew murmured. “I remember. I could not stand it. I had rooms. No one to make a home for. No big interests. No career to share. I always prided myself on my pluck, but it broke me in a year—one year. Were you shocked when you heard I had married again?”

Pauline propped her chin on her hand and a perplexed little frown puckered her forehead. “Yes,” she answered frankly. “You see, you began for me as a wife who was suffering the same anxious agony as I, and you were most vivid to me when I heard that awful news down the telephone and saw you go home to your fate. You rather ended for me there—except by letters. And now you’ve begun again here. How curious life is!”

Cynthia nodded. “I could not stand it alone,” she continued. “I could not. It was so dull. His regimen —the Peshawur Horse—went off to Mesopotamia from France that autumn: even his brother-officers’ letters ceased. I just faded out of my old life—I withered out of it!”

Pauline was quite absorbed in Cynthia’s revelations: the half-finished room cried for completion in vain. Sticks and stones laid no compulsion upon Pauline, her heart went out to tales of life. “And then?” she asked.

“Sure you are not too busy? . . . Oh, well . . . it is a relief to talk to someone who understands. I starved for the old life, the old interests. I did not seem to fit in anywhere at home among the women workers. I could not keep my nose to their grindstones and shut out all those huge horizons. It is certain aspects and interests in life that attract me more than individuals, I believe. I married the old interests and aspects again.”

Pauline marvelled at her. “It is always the person with me,” she said. “I think you should have been a man, with your enthusiasms for governments and lands and peoples and regiments.”

The big handsome creature laughed. “Yes, I should have been a man,” she agreed; and then asked abruptly, “What do you think of the Rahman Khan marriage?”

“I think it dreadfully uncomfortable,” Pauline sighed. “How does she get on here?”

“In a sense we are all a family in this community,” Mrs. Drew replied slowly. “But she is outside that family. We don’t even bicker with her and her husband as we do with each other; we don’t confide in them, or turn to them for help. We are scrupulously polite and careful. Instinctively we disapprove. But we make the best of it.”

When Cynthia Drew left, Pauline retained the impression of a gallant soul, whose happiness was won by sheer spirited interest in life. How differently her own drew its inspiration!—it drank only from the well of love. Her husband and, less vitally, her children—indeed, all who found a place in her heart. From these relationships sprang her joys and griefs. Yet so mysterious is the magic of our existence—her impulse of song could work a miracle and, defiant of her heart’s good or ill, fling her spellbound into a realm of imagination, so vivid and so real to her that its experiences made half her history.

She came to Dera Ismail Khan an intensely loving and most terribly lovable person. Her heart went out swiftly and intuitively to the small but interesting community, her imagination arrived with astonishing quickness at a realisation of the exiled homes, the armed discipline, the city, the desert, and the barren hills. She felt the passions and the problems, she felt the miles and miles of hot dry earth, the wild bird life, the slinking jackal packs, the Eastern atmosphere. She did not linger on the surface of Dera Ismail Khan; she went to its heart. And in its heart she found tides as strong as the laden floods, emotions hot as the burning noonday. All unconsciously she herself made an object of magnetic force round which the eddies swirled and broke, and upon which ardour concentrated its rays. Like all that is in itself vital and lovable, she brought not peace but a sword. And the manner of it was after the following fashion.

Both Wendover and Pauline came to the frontier cantonment with a prestige that made them notable. Wendover’s career had a history, and his personality provoked further interest. He stood to that community, moreover, as their only priest within hundreds of miles. For the first time the soldier-men encountered a man in holy orders who had been one of themselves. The advent of the Padre, as he was instantly called, was heralded by sufficient anecdote and discussion to fill the little cantonment church, standing in its wide shady garden, the very first Sunday he officiated. And there the congregation beheld his wife, the poet. Her appearance had a charm hard to describe—the charm of breeding and grace and individuality, the charm of colouring so potent in animal and vegetable life, the charm of beauty seductive to imagination. And beside her, cuddling close, a soft dimpled snowball of a thing was Elizabeth Mary. The atmosphere of vital womanhood was poignantly created by Pauline and her child. Baby Keith in nurse’s arms completed the vivid suggestion of an ample home-life. To the exiles there was something truly lovable in this. Parents and children, there you had the race—the race which the men who had fought in Africa, Asia, and Europe never forgot as the great purpose of all their struggles.

In the front seat sat the General—a tall, stooping man about to retire under the age regulations. He had done sufficiently well in the German East African campaign to entitle him to a brigade, but his career had only a short space to run before he should obliterate himself for ever in clubland in England. He was an officially minded man; very exact, very rigid. He commanded respect, but inspired little popularity. Behind him sat one of his two staff officers, Major David Sykes, who had distinguished himself greatly with a Gurkha regiment in the Dardanelles. A smart, well-set-up man of average height, grey eyes, sandy moustache. A clever fellow, constantly struggling against the irritability aroused in him by slow wits in others. In all things a sane, shrewd man, keen to appraise the value of his fellow-soldiers, and finding amusement that bordered on mischief in the social comedy of the women among them. He was exasperated by his General, but served him right well. Pauline’s eyes lingered on him, attracted by his air of a man of the world.

Old-fashioned, rugged, weary but indomitable, Colonel Brand of the 12th Sikhs bared his close-cropped head under the golden light of the oil lamp. A bachelor and a lonely man, he looked every inch the hard frontier soldier that he was. His regiment had taken part in the gallant border contests of 1914 and 1915, but had not served overseas during the Great War. A laughing face disclosed itself beside him: Pauline thought she had never seen more light-hearted high spirits in any countenance. The merry youngster was Lawrence Fisher of the 10th Punjabis, she learnt afterwards. A glimpse of Captain Drew beside his wife gave her a momentary pang of disappointment; he was fair, well-featured, indefinite. There was a little stir as the Deputy Commissioner, Reeves, came in late with some friends. He looked rather like a barrister, Pauline remarked. A broad, vigorous frame, an intellectual head, and a curt, clean-shaven face. He was preceded by an emphatic little person endowed with a reckless gipsy beauty and gay clothes. She was deliciously young, and her husband, Frank Thompson of the 1st Punjabis, was but six-and-twenty. Miss Miles, the missionary lady doctor, a small spruce woman with spectacles, presided at the organ. The rest of the congregation made no impression on Pauline, though she was aware of a preponderance of young, well-groomed soldiers, and conscious that the women for the most part were quietly insignificant in appearance. Not many interesting people, she thought.

Her hands were cold with nervousness when Wendover began his sermon. As a preacher he had been a failure in Kensington: his voice had not carried, and he seemed uneasy and out of touch with his congregation. “I feel as if I ought to be a patent hair restorer or a milliner,” he had growled to Pauline. “All I see are bald pates and remarkable female hats. I don’t know what any of the people are like.” Her agonised criticism of his sermons had led to lively differences, and finally he had exacted a promise from her to quit the church if he entered the pulpit. Distracted by nerves, she had escaped from the ordeal thankfully. In the small building in Dera Ismail Khan it was impossible for her to beat a retreat. She sat quietly tense, and the sense of her nearness, her personality, and her relationship to the preacher, stirred Reeves and David Sykes to quickened interest.

“Keith!” Pauline exclaimed, as they followed a lantern which glowed through the dark path between oleander bushes that led from the church to their bungalow. “Keith, I never heard you preach like that before.”

“Didn’t you indeed!” came his deep voice, well pleased. “I know what to say to men, you see.”

“This is better than Kensington,” she declared happily.

“Do you like it? Interesting, isn’t it? The survivors and the result of the ordeal we all went through. I wish I could speak to the Indians, but that’s not my job. Look here, I am going to play polo. Sykes—do you remember Sykes at the Staff College?—knows of a couple of ponies.” He was plunging back with enormous zest into the old life. No poor to visit, no classes for boys and girls, no parochial teas, and an enemy across the hills.

The best for him, the splendour of life in spirit and action—this was her ceaseless demand. Nor could she float idly down some pleasant stream, soothed by its smoothness. Aspiration was the breath of her soul, an eager desire after something high. The songful poet sought wings for her whole world. Poor little poet. Yet a spontaneous gaiety within her leaped to the jollity of a blue day and a swift game for her strong man. Nerve and muscle and hand and eye bent to win. She enjoyed the polo at Dera Ismail Khan exceedingly.

And it was there that she first held her court, first came to her kingdom. She had been well accustomed to social consideration, to personal distinction. Birth, beauty, fame alike assured her of privilege. But of men companions, of male adulation, her life had not held full measure. Adèle’s and Lady Theodora’s strictures as to the exclusively feminine society of her girlhood had been true enough. Then her nursery had bordered her horizon. Then all men-folk left England to defend their land overseas. Then she entered a world of middle-aged couples and their daughters, wherein she strove sadly with visiting cards. Never before had she stood as she stood now with all her magic working upon those age-long victims of sirens, of beauty, of lovableness—men.

Within a fortnight of her arrival in Dera Ismail Khan she was a definite experience, a definite interest to its men-folk. Colonel Brand, in the few days he spent there on leave from Tank, pronounced his opinion that you did not meet a woman like that every day in the year; and Reeves, who caught her name when other talk drifted past him unheeded, remarked, “I have been a superstitious man all my life. During the war, I reckoned men and armies lucky or unlucky. Mrs. Wendover is an embodiment of a good fairy at a christening. She is one of the few perfectly delicious things that do happen. Stands to reason that the bad fairies will make their appearance before long. We shall all be tormented. I’ve a twinge of toothache this moment. Shouldn’t wonder if I have a twinge of conscience next.”

“Go into camp,” suggested the Colonel grimly.

“No, common sense won’t save us. Not against spells,” retorted the Deputy Commissioner. And to Pauline he exulted threateningly. “You will fall to my share at every dinner-party, unless the General is present. Peace to your forefathers’ ashes who endowed you with precedence that makes you our greatest lady! I am your social ogre, and you can’t escape me.”

Sykes frankly surrendered, and sought her good graces. “You are so big,” he declared, in quick sentences which he delivered lightly and swiftly. None took him seriously and all liked him. “After all, most of us fellows have knocked half round the world and been up against things, and small women give me cramp now. Look at Mrs. Dales and prim Mrs. Munnay; they have never been out of England till this year, and I’m hanged if they don’t go and bring all the silliest bits of her with them. Mrs. Dale’s talk puts a tea-cosy on top of me. No wonder Dale is bored. Mrs. Fleming is quite different: she belongs to the old life, the life when we all had our brother-officers alive and our regiments whole and full of old soldiers; the pre-massacre days. She knew most of the fellows of the Indian Army who lie beneath the sod in France and Gallipoli and all the other sepulchres. She knew my regiment in 1913, when we weren’t filled up with tea-planters and bank clerks and schoolmasters who speak the vernacular, and so replaced the officers we lost. Good fellows most of them and did their best, but not quite the same thing to me: couldn’t be. That’s why I, and others of the old brigade, drop in to the Flemings’ so often. They make a link with the past. But you—you open a sort of glorious future.”

“Do I indeed?” said Pauline, wide-eyed. “What future?”

“The romantic kind; and I do something perfectly tremendous for you, and die of a broken heart,” he replied, with immense cheerfulness.

The coming of Pauline made a difference in Doris’s position in Dera Ismail Khan. As a central attraction and influence, she drew all her circle together, and her circle included Doris. This reacted curiously upon the only other intimacy which the American had formed in her new life. Cynthia Drew, protective, watchful, was certainly not intimate with Rahman Khan and his wife, but the young Thompsons had demonstrated an impulsive friendship. Frank Thompson was a brave, vain fellow, susceptible to flattery, and Rahman Khan, who was both shy and ambitious, had tickled his vanity by means which the uneducated sepoys and unsophisticated Indian officers never used, and which was not recognised as sycophancy by the self-centred young officer. His wife was a girl endowed with a certain reckless dash that was undoubtedly attractive to many women and to not a few of the junior men. She had known her husband but a few days when she married him during the war, and she had then flung herself into impetuous nursing till she rejoined her bridegroom two years later in India. With little social experience, she clamoured for what she termed broad-minded toleration, and embraced Doris and her marriage with loud emphasis. Pussy Thompson was not slow to realise that her youth, her prettiness, her flare were eclipsed by the preciousness of Pauline’s quality, and with a very real jealousy she assumed possession of the Rahman Khans. Doris appeared indifferent, but as a matter of fact she was keenly alive to this rivalry for her friendship, and it accentuated her claims to homage as an author, and to interest as an exceptional individual. She was an observant woman; not a shade of the feeling which Pauline aroused in Dera Ismail Khan escaped her. She was completely conscious of the feelings of James Reeves and Major Sykes towards her friend, and she sought to hold a like sway herself. Colonel Deering had roused her antagonism and her pride. Pussy Thompson provoked her to daring. Pauline inspired her to feminine conquests. She met Lawrence Fisher of the 10th Punjabis frequently at the Wendovers’ house, and presently she invited him as frequently to her own. Thus, the good and bad fairies.

“I want to talk to you two about my book,” she said one day, confronting Pussy Thompson and Pauline, whom she had bidden to lunch. She stirred the sugar in her cup of very indifferent coffee and flipped the ash of her cigarette into a tarnished silver bonbon dish. An untidy khitmutgar, with a duster across his shoulder, placed some bananas on the table and vanished to the verandah, where he smoked his hookah. The Rahman Khans were poorly served by their household.

“I shall feel de trop,” pouted Mrs. Thompson. “You two literary people don’t want me here.” A rose ninon veil floated from her solar topee and proved a becoming setting to the glow of her cheeks, the dark masses of her hair, and the vivid red of her Ups.

“I always want you, Mrs. Tommy,” declared her hostess. “You must be my British public for the occasion, and Pauline will represent the higher criticism.”

“Wait a moment,” cried Pauline. “I once read my poems to some friends—charming, thoughtful people. The result was dreadful.”

“You make love to the world with your poems, Pauline. You get crossed in love that way. My book is something for sale. I have bought experience, now I sell it.”

“Wise woman,” said Mrs. Pussy. “I’d pay a good deal to know all you know.”

“This is the theme,” Doris announced. “A colonial girl comes to India as governess and companion to a rich Indian gentleman’s wife, and meets an Indian barrister, the bibi’s brother. She marries him. They go to Allahabad, where he practises and everybody cuts her, except an American globe-trotter, who becomes greatly interested. Her husband is hotly jealous. He is also extremely ambitious socially, and he had hoped his British wife would prove a winning card. He realised that, while the Bar and the official world were on good terms with him, European society, as represented by their womenfolk, held aloof. He conceded the reciprocal nature of this withdrawal in the case of Indians who kept their wives purdah and denied them the acquaintance of Englishmen. To obtain a passport to the Sahib-log’s social strongholds, he married a white wife.”

“Poor devil!” exclaimed Pussy—then, recovering her presence of mind, added, “Among all those narrow-minded women!”

Doris gave a little cool smile. “One of the judges’ wives gives a garden-party. Willy-nilly she feels constrained to include the Indian barrister and his wife among those invited. It is the crucial test. The wife has brought her husband no money, and he finds at the garden-party that she has brought him no social privileges. With the exception of her hostess, not a soul speaks to her. On the other hand, the American man never leaves her side. As a result the Indian, who is a Hindu of the Brahmo Somaj, practically cages his wife: keeps her without money, and denies her the prospect of the cool Hills in summer, or any return to her home climate. His women relations begin to make her life unbearable. She writes to the American. He returns to Allahabad, and in the end she goes off with him. . . . Now tell me honestly, what do you think of the idea?”

“Simply ripping. It ought to open people’s eyes and make them sit up,” cried Pussy.

“I’m going to challenge it, Doris,” said Pauline unwillingly.

“I thought as much,” Doris responded quietly. “Say right away all you feel.”

“First of all, Doris, the theme is in a sense autobiographical. You are married to an Indian.”

“The Indian in this book is unlike Rahman,” Doris replied. “I get my insight into the situation that way, of course.”

“Then I doubt any Englishwoman being treated in Allahabad, or anywhere else, in the way you describe. I think you misrepresent an official community.”

“Do you hear that, Mrs. Tommy? If it had not been for you, I should have had a lovely time here before Pauline came! That’s what she thinks. You and I know differently.”

Mrs. Thompson raised her big eyes to the remote and cobwebby ceiling. “Frigid politeness. Perfect idiots. But you can’t say you were cut, my dear.”

“Oh no, I was sliced and handed round on a plate, and people took the smallest bit and no second helping, thank you. But I am not writing an autobiography. I take a case of a shy colonial girl, with no special standing, who was cut.”

Pauline regarded her gravely. “You will make things difficult by such a book. Difficult for yourself among us in India. You will arouse prejudice. Can’t you make the girl an American?”

“The man is an American—a free man, who believes in freedom, and does not think his wife a bad lot because she has left an unhappy marriage for a true marriage. One of your Englishmen would be for ever remembering that he could not present her at St. James’s. I don’t want her to be an American too. Besides, what would be the point?”

Pauline hesitated. “You see,” she said slowly, “you can never overlook national sentiment. England rules India. An Englishwoman who marries an Indian abdicates as one of the sovereign race, and voluntarily places herself under the personal authority of one of the ruled. For her children, if she have any, she elects the status of an Indian. If, in India, we are a sovereign people, then such a marriage is a morganatic marriage. You, dear, as an American, have made a foreign marriage—that is, as far as your country is concerned. The least advisable of foreign marriages some people would think, but merely a personal matter. You run counter to our national sentiment if in your book you demand sympathy and approval for the marriage of a British girl with an Indian.”

“That is your opinion,” Doris returned hotly, “but my husband says——” she checked herself. “Unless I am much mistaken, the book will pay, and that is the public sentiment I wish to arouse—the desire to buy.”

“It will sell,” repeated Pussy with rapture, “like hot cakes.”

Pauline raised her eyebrows. “We have been torn and mauled by war,” she said. “I doubt that we want the cynical, harsh view of life. Marriages have been racked and rent, but the reaction is not in the direction of having them soiled. Your heroine does a very ugly thing, Doris. She comes to India unveiled and sunlit in the land of the veiled and shadowed. She is from Europe, where the aim is unity in marriage: one man, one woman. Her own government, her own law, hold a third, be it male or female, an offence—an injury to home and honour. She represents that standard in a vast country which cherishes other ways. She is Christian, if not by belief at least by inherited ideals. And, having deliberately crossed the boundary into a realm where her convictions carry no conviction, she does not attempt to maintain their dignity by clean dealing, but keeps no faith at all.”

“Except with herself,” defended Doris. “She was deceived in the Indian, and she is true to her highest possibilities by going away with a man who developed the best in her.”

“Is that the view your book suggests?”

“Why, yes. That’s my view. It’s American, I guess. You English go to sleep for centuries over a thing you call custom, and when anybody suffers for it you call it pins and needles and tell them it doesn’t matter, and go to sleep again. I like to wake folks up and keep them awake.”

Pauline held her in her arms very affectionately when she left. “Doris, I know our world is stern: we can’t write of it as a honeycomb, you and I. But we are a wounded generation: don’t write a cruel book! India has fought and bled side by side with us, we are drawn together now by a most glorious bond, we are beset by a thousand new problems—why do you tell a tale of antagonisms? There should be such strong impulses of sympathy in our hearts: why don’t you conjure them forth?”

Mrs. Tommy rose and stretched herself gracefully if unceremoniously. “Why take it so seriously? We readers want to be interested and amused. After all, the people in a novel are not really alive, Mrs. Wendover!” There was a mischievous little impertinence in her manner, as though she took it upon her worldly-wise self to rebuke the absurdities of the imaginative.

Both the poet and the author turned slightly startled faces towards her. To them, the created characters of fiction were real in the sense that they were the outcome of an intense realisation of fife. To them, truth was the aim of all except false art. Then their eyes met once more. “You are writing of an individualist,” Pauline murmured.

“Yes, I am one,” said Doris, with a shrug of her shoulders.

As Pauline sauntered back to her bungalow her heart ached. “Doris is not happy,” she sighed.

Not happy, perhaps; not content, most certainly. But for the moment triumphant. Pussy lingered all the afternoon in a drifting cloud of cigarette smoke, and presently young Fisher joined them, his sense of pleasure greatly stimulated by Mrs. Tommy’s knowing air of greeting him, and the unceremonious gaiety with which she threw a cushion at his head in response to a very mild word of chaff. Lawrence Fisher detested stiffness: the most carping critic could not have termed Mrs. Thompson stiff.

Like the majority of high-spirited men, Fisher did not lack brains. Mrs. Rahman Khan attracted the boy as a person with ideas. The discussion of her novel, which had continued between the two women, derived new energy from his obvious interest. He entertained the naive theory, so flattering to authors, that his command and power and experience as a soldier were as naught compared with her literary career.

“One is in such a backwater in Dera Ismail Khan,” he groaned.

“One is indeed,” echoed Doris. “If I were in London now . . .” She left her little bed-sitting-room in the retreat for estimable gentlewomen, her crowded bus drives to and fro the Strand, her visits to the agent’s office in eager search for work and recognition, extremely vague.

But she never let slip an opportunity. “My difficulty is this,” she announced. “I do not know any Indian women. How am I to describe those female relations of my Indian barrister, or the bibi, when I have spoken to no one but an ayah? I asked Mr. Reeves to tell me of some Indian ladies in the city on whom I could call, but he said he could not do so, as he was not acquainted with them. Do you know any, Mrs. Tommy?”

“Only a few emancipated women whom I have met in Calcutta and Lahore and Simla. None here. After all, I don’t think you need bother: you may not know the sort of woman you describe, but neither do your readers.”

Fisher, however, appreciated the difficulty. “I do not know how you are going to get over it,” he observed. “And they should be Hindus too, so probably your husband, being of a Mohammedan family, does not know much about their customs.”

“I can read about their customs,” Doris said, “but I want their personality. I must meet an uneducated Indian woman of good class.”

“Mrs. Fleming is the only Englishwoman I know who could tell you about them. She is acquainted with some of our Indian officers’ wives,” Reeves suggested.

“Mrs. Fleming’s recital would not stimulate my imagination much,” Doris retorted dryly.

“Heavens! I should think not,” cried Pussy scornfully.

Young Fisher looked from one to the other, puzzled.

“She is the best sort in the world,” he urged. Never was there a more easily satisfied acquaintance than Lawrence, and this time he announced a fact.

“So Colonel Deering brings you all up to think,” exclaimed Doris irately. “She is a good influence, so I hope you will go to tea with her to-morrow in order to counteract my baneful effect on you to-day.”

“Oh, I say, what nonsense!” retorted Fisher feebly. But something obstinate awoke in the boy at her taunt. He would be intimate in the Rahman Khans’ household an it pleased him. He stood in mighty awe of his Colonel, but having a spirit of his own was greatly tempted to defy him on this social point.

“Can you give me an opportunity of meeting your Indian officers’ wives?” Doris startled him by asking, when he rose to depart.

“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, I have never set eyes on one of them, and am never likely to. It isn’t done, you know.”

“Oh, well,” Doris sighed. “Come and see me again soon. Rahman is going into camp with the regiment, and I shall be so bored without him.”

“Rather!” he responded gaily.

“I’ll tell Colonel Deering if you do!” threatened Pussy roguishly, and the boy departed after a veritable battle of flying cushions, which he found famous fun.

When Frank Thompson and Rahman Khan entered the somewhat dishevelled drawing-room, they found Doris replacing the cushions thoughtfully. Her firm little face looked very determined, yet the youth in her was a trifle carried away by the infectious gaiety of Mrs. Thompson and Lawrence.

“I do love a good rag,” Pussy cried, setting her hat straight. “You two look as solemn as owls.”

“Everybody is solemn compared with Mrs. Thompson, who is the embodiment of mirth,” announced Captain Rahman Khan. “Have a drink, Thompson?”

“Thanks,” said Frank cheerfully; and presently, in obedience to his master’s summons, the khitmutgar entered with a tumbler, a decanter of whisky, and a bottle of soda water. Rahman Khan himself always observed the Mohammedan ban upon alcohol.

The khitmutgar was witness to a singular scene. Mrs. Tommy, still bubbling over with riotous fun, confiscated her husband’s cigarette-case until he should tell her the latest orders for the manoeuvres. He announced that he and Rahman Khan had just heard them at the Club.

“Oh, don’t be a robber, Pussy! Give me my cigarettes. Nothing will induce me to tell you now.”

“Tell me, Rahman,” laughed Doris.

“Certainly not, my dear. Ladies must not have so much curiosity in men’s affairs. Thompson and I are discreet officials,” replied the Indian, following a lead.

Frank was engaged in a series of rushes at his pretty wife, who eluded him swiftly. Two puppies playing in the sunshine might be as brimming with energy and unself-consciousness as they.

“Another word, and I’ll have your cigarette too!” threatened Pussy, hovering round, but not directly approaching, her host.

“Save me, Thompson!” cried Rahman Khan.

“He can’t!” interposed Doris, and nipped the cigarette from his fingers.

Though her lips were smiling her mind was intent. She meant to ignore the remoteness in Rahman Khan that contrasted with the joyous tumble of Frank Thompson after his wife and the push of his tweed-clad shoulder jostling against herself—an unnoticed movement save for his shout, “Sorry! Now, Pussy, see what you’ve done—you young ass. I’ve nearly had Mrs. Rahman Khan over. All your fault! Ah, I’ve got you!”

“Not a bit of it,” and the agile Pussy dodged to Doris’s side.

The two girls were laughing, the two men in a second were beside them, and for one swift moment there was a romp upon the hearth-rug in which Pussy became inextricably mixed. A very brief moment indeed, for Frank Thompson suddenly put forth actual force and, securing his cigarette-case, shook them all free. Rahman Khan’s eyes had never lost their gravity, and his cigarette remained in his wife’s hands.

“Catch!” she cried, in rather a flat voice, tossing it to him. He missed it, and her carefully careless exclamation, “Oh, you stupid idiot!” was not lost upon the departing servant.

They were all four grave now with the gravity of grown-up persons who have laughed too much at too little. “Come on, Frank; we must go to the Club and behave ourselves,” Pussy said.

As they walked there together her young husband expostulated.

“Don’t overdo it with Rahman Khan.”

“How was I to know he would join in?” she grumbled.

Doris, in her home, gazed into the fire thoughtfully. She knew Rahman Khan was feeling injured. She knew he was counting the cost of the whisky and a broken glass. She was impatient of his inability to jest in word and deed as they had jested. She was conscious that Frank Thompson, his friend, had put an end to that romp. She experienced an irritable desire to shake off these disheartening thoughts and set to work on her book, for she was despairingly anxious to make money—money that should be her own. The household and personal expenditure of a European wife was a point upon which Rahman Khan was extremely difficult. A good deal that she had suffered was going into that book, disguised but not impersonal.

What the wife did not gauge was the opinion of the household servants, now discussing the events of the day. What she did not guess was the gossip that ran from the compound to the mess servants of the 1st Punjabis, and from them to the mess havildar, and from him to the lines. What she did not know was that among the sepoys of the 1st Punjabis was a brother of Ghulam Mahomed of the 10th Punjabis who had married the daughter of her husband’s sister. What Doris did not even dream was that years ago this hidden and uneducated sister had made a poor marriage for lack of a dowry—which dowry was not forthcoming because of expenditure on the education of her brother the barrister and her brother the doctor. The purdah nashine wrote again and again to Rahman Khan urging him to send her and her widowed mother the sums which the family had always counted on receiving some day from his gloriously large stipend. Doris little thought that Ghulam Mahomed and his bride waited and watched for Rahman Khan to remit rupees to Allahabad, that the havildar and his bhais speculated endlessly upon the probabilities and possibilities of the situation. She could have no idea how heavily the family matter lay upon her Indian husband’s conscience—for Rahman Khan had a conscience. She failed to discern how his man’s pride winced at ‘familiarity’ and ‘abuse’ from his wife in the eyes of a servant of his race—for Rahman Khan had a man’s pride.

On two points only she was clear. She required to study an Indian purdah woman of good class, and she had a niece by marriage in the lines of the 10th Punjabis.

“Rahman, your sister has a daughter, has she not?”

“Yes; she has two sons and a daughter.”

“Is the daughter married?”

“Of course. She is no longer a child.”

There was a little pause; then, “Rahman, whom did she marry?”

“An Indian officer in Allahabad.” He rose abruptly and went towards his dressing-room, which served him as an office. “I must work now. I shall not require any dinner, if you will excuse me.”

“All right,” Doris responded, a little drearily. Not the truth. An inaccuracy. And she had detected the same thing so often; the same secrecy and false pride. Moreover, she was vexed by this abstention from food, which invariably followed upon any episode that displeased Rahman Khan. The fiction that on such occasions two intellectual beings immersed themselves in work of the highest importance was a little wearisome to keep up.

Rahman Khan had a meal of dal and rice brought to his room about ten o’clock, and his wife ate her solitary dinner of four courses with the Ladies’ Field propped open in front of her.

Chapter XI

“Do you still refer to your wife’s poems as her hobby?” Doris demanded. She was entertaining Pussy and Wendover in her big white drawing-room, and her blue eyes rested unsympathetically on Keith.

“No,” he replied ruefully, yet with something of amusement. “I call them her wild oats.”

Pussy repeated his words afterwards and spread them far and wide. They added not a little to the flavour of the situation. “There is plenty of ginger in the Padre,” one of the subalterns remarked. Seen against the background of the cantonment, Pauline showed ethereal, magnetic, fastidious, while her published poems burnt into men’s imaginations or set their senses throbbing. Very much a woman of the great world, she led society by the fringe of the desert. Women called her a dear, boys were shy with her, men grew absorbed. The two babies were never far from her, and there was rather too much of Keith in her conversation for masculine satisfaction. Presently it grew clear that she meant to interest herself elsewhere rather than on the tennis courts or in the Club. It was known that she intended to see the city under the auspices of Miss Miles; that she banished the Mohammedan orderly from the sanctuary and cleaned the altar vessels herself, and, with other women following her lead, polished the brasses and arranged the flowers. Outside the church the white marble tomb of Durand’s grave gleamed among jasmine bushes, the mali sent the trickling streams forth from the Persian Well to refresh the roses, the orderly squatted on his heels by the porch, the green parrots and the crows made raucous noise, and the seven sisters strutted silently. Within Pauline and other Mem-log flitted about their tender business.

“I wish I knew whether you have the wings of a dove or the voice of a siren,” the Deputy Commissioner told her one day, as he came riding past and encountered her leaving the church compound.

“Don’t waste your valuable time guessing,” she told him lightly.

“Yes, I am a valuable public servant,” he responded grimly. “I rub that into Simla all right. But you’re not merely valuable, you’re precious.”

These things became woven into Pauline’s impression of Dera Ismail Khan—these offerings of masculine homage, these speculations as to her real self. Once or twice she rode thoughtfully with her husband into the desert and found its sand all glass, a mirror wherein she met her own influence reflected in all her new acquaintances. She could not encounter these phantoms without seeing in them their conception of Pauline Wendover. Yet she was ever less preoccupied with visions of herself than with speculations as to Keith, who in this cantonment enjoyed existence so cheerily and lived so handsomely.

On one of their rides she said to him, “I think we ought to give a hundred rupees or so to the missionary hospital, Keith.”

“Can’t afford it, my dear girl,” he answered.

“You gave twelve hundred for that pony,” she remarked.

“Go on,” her husband, said instantly, his handsome strong face set into self-controlled lines that yet denoted resentment, “go on and say that I ought to sell all that I have and give it to the poor. What about you and Betty and the boy? One can’t be consistent in this world. But I mean to keep out of debt.”

They turned out of the copse known as Turton’s Folly and passed a saint’s tomb, a humble mud lump, by the side of which crouched a little hut made of dried palm branches. At the door stood a fakir, squalid, gaunt, wild-eyed. Gathered round him were three Afridis from the regimental lines across the rough high road. They all smoked tranquilly. In the background rose the four walls of a long disused European graveyard wherein lie buried some score of British soldiers. Rumour has it that the spirits of Mohammedans haunt the place, since affronted Mullahs were disturbed by such grim company. In the searching sunshine the place was free from mystery, yet there was something sinister about the fakir’s mien. He fastened his eyes boldly upon Wendover, who averted his as haughtily. Priest for priest, each gave as good as he got. But the Englishman scored: the Afridis rose and saluted a sahib.

Said Wendover, acknowledging the honour ceremoniously, “Very tangible influence there. I have not as much hold over the subalterns in cantonments as that fellow has over those young Mohammedans.” Nor did this fancy please him. His brows were gloomy.

They rode on to where the cross roads met, and a dhobi driving a heavy-laden donkey bent suddenly in deep obeisance to a stout but stately Brahman Subadar, who left the lines to take a stroll in the city. On encountering the Wendovers the Thrice-Born soldier saluted courteously.

“Salaam, Sahib.”

“Salaam, Subadar Sahib.”

Keith turned in his saddle to look back at him. “See that dhobi? Gad, this land is a bag of tricks. Think what the spiritual power of a Brahman is!”

“Think what our power is,” his wife rejoined.

Keith nodded. “I am glad I came to India,” he said. “There is something tremendous about this land.”

Pauline brightened to see satisfaction return to his face.

“The most interesting discovery about anyone is the discovery of what they hold sacred. Fifteen million sacred Brahmans—and who can count the revered crocodiles and peacocks and monkeys and cobras!”

“I don’t count for much here, not as a parson,” Wendover said abruptly; and she caught her breath lest he should declare a mistake in his decision to be a priest now that the die was so irrevocably cast.

“Oh, life is difficult!” she sighed.

He drew rein presently. “I am going to see Mrs. Rahman Khan,” he announced.

She looked her surprise. “You used to dislike her so much.”

“Phyllis told me that in all her difficulties no clergyman had ever been of any assistance to her. Your friend Doris will be in a tight place soon, if she doesn’t look out,” he remarked, to enlighten her.

She turned an eagerly interested face to him. “Oh, you see that too? But, Keith, would not I be the better person to help her? I mean . . . she is fond of me. Tell me all you know, and I will do my best.”

“You help in your way, and I’ll help in mine. I dare say I shall not be much use,” he rejoined; and she realised, after he had cantered off, that he had told her nothing.

Wendover’s manner with women underwent a subtle change when his wife was absent. If they were together, he gave her precedence in any approach to intimacy. By himself he took the initiative. He was conscious of criticism with Pauline as companion.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Pussy Thompson, peeping through the bamboo blind. “Here is the Padre again! What on earth does he want with us twice this week?”

“Perhaps he is visiting us in our affliction. Poor grass widows with their husbands in camp at Paniala,” Doris rejoined, while on the verandah the bearer gave his salaams to Wendover.

He was very soon comfortably established on the cheap hired sofa, smoking a cigarette. Pussy had an air of daring curiosity towards him, and the two girls rather posed as dazzlingly worldly. Nevertheless, they were fully alive to the force of his personality, and insensibly they began to think of him as someone to fall back on.

“We are getting up theatricals,” Mrs. Thompson informed him in a tone that conveyed an escape from conventional trammels.

“Problem play?”

“No-o-o. Problem play here, Doris! Can’t you picture it?”

“Quite right,” Wendover nodded. “That sort of stuff bores men.”

It was the last criticism Pussy had anticipated. To borrow a simile from the laundry, it took the starch out of her amazingly.

Doris turned her challenging little face to him. “They prefer laughter and legs,” she said scornfully.

“And what are they going to get here?” he inquired cheerfully.

“We shall act a light comedy,” Pussy told him. “Lawrence Fisher was in it at Simla last year, and he will take the chief part.”

“Very vivacious young man,” Keith remarked. “I can imagine him acting.”

“Pity you are a Padre, or you might have been in it too,” Mrs. Thompson said, with a little swagger of her cigarette.

“No,” said Wendover. “No—I’m not much of an actor, I fancy.” He laughed his unself-conscious roar of amusement, which shook even his long, lithe frame. His good-humour was indulgent, but Pussy felt snubbed.

“Good-bye, dearest,” she said, rising and kissing Doris. “If I stay any longer I’ll shock the Padre.”

“Oh, come,” interposed he lazily. “You aren’t as horribly young as all that, are you? Gave up trying to shock people when you left the schoolroom, didn’t you?”

Her small figure looked very flat and pinched in her thin blue serge. Her preposterously high heels dragged against the floor as she moved languidly to the door. Keith held back the chic for her. “Take care of yourself,” he admonished, with a sudden interest and gentleness in his voice.

She raised her vivid gipsy face to him. “You said that very nicely,” she remarked, and was swallowed up in a barking turmoil of her many undisciplined dogs whom the sweeper let loose on her approach. Her voice struck back sharply through the shadows of the garden. “Darlings, did they love their mother? Down, Nip! Come along, Jess! Sweeper, honko that pi-dog. Quick, you fool! Nip, Nip, Nip! Get away, you brute of a pi-dog! Honko, I say!”

“Pity that pack can’t all be poisoned. Good dogs spoilt,” Wendover said. “Mrs. Thompson looks very ill.”

“India,” Doris explained tersely.

“May I stay?” Wendover inquired. She nodded for answer. “Extraordinary thing these women go in for such bad manners,” was her guest’s impatient mental comment as he resumed his seat.

They remained silent for a while. Then Doris broke the constraint with a perfunctory inquiry: “How’s Pauline?”

“All right, thanks. And the children.”

A pause, then he said, “You’ve got none.”

“Observant man,” Doris retorted, with instant rudeness.

Wendover smiled broadly. “I wanted you to defend the position,” he confessed.

“Why should I—to you?”

“Because,” he told her, still with a manner which was persuasive in a forcible fashion that no words on paper can convey, “I am a champion of the marriage service. Bound to be.”

“I was not married in church. I do not belong to any church,” Doris declared.

“Then regard me as a missionary,” Wendover suggested, “trying to rope you in. You’d be safer.”

“I am not in danger,” she cried defiantly.

“Aren’t you? Aren’t you, though! Well, if you ask me, I think you are,” he responded firmly.

“You and Colonel Deering,” she said, half under her breath, “would scare any woman to death just because she is married to Rahman Khan.” Yet for all her defiance she was so conscious of her peril that she did not command that the subject should be dropped. Her book hung fire, there were but seventeen rupees in the house, and the servants clamoured. Rahman Khan answered none of her letters.

“Deering too? And he is a sound fellow.”

“I hate him!” cried Doris fiercely.

Wendover raised his eyebrows. “Look here,” he demanded, with a frank grace. “If you hate me, I’m off. If I can be of any earthly use to you, I’ll stay. What you say to me is professionally confidential, you know. And, through my profession, you have a right to confess difficulties if you care to make use of me—just as much right as you have to make use of a pillar box to post a letter in.” He paused a moment. “That’s all,” he added, with an air of finality, and rose to go.

“You would talk me over with Pauline,” she affirmed, hesitating.

He glared at her. “’Pon my soul, women don’t give men much credit for professional honour.”

“Sit down again,” she said tartly. “I will trust you.”

He sat down, but for some few moments she remained standing by the fireplace, fidgeting aimlessly with a little silver photo frame.

“Rahman does not answer any of my letters,” she burst out presently, and made a statement of the least of her anxieties. “We American women are not accustomed to be treated like that. No, we are not!”

“Doesn’t write chatty letters, or doesn’t answer questions?” Wendover inquired tersely.

“Does not do one or the other. Simply sulks.”

Wendover spoke leisurely, and his voice, his manner, the dominant note of his very presence, conveyed an impression of tolerant judgment no less than definite opinion. “Sulking after a quarrel, or from a sense of disappointment?”

“I don’t make scenes,” boasted Doris, as one who possesses unshaken self-control. “He imagines himself injured, I suppose.”

“Well,” said Wendover, looking up at her with a smile, “perhaps you have not been very nice to him.”

“Nice!” derided she. “I’ve been myself. He used to call that nice enough!”

“Might have been tyrannical. Said ‘I will’ at the registry office, and kept on saying it ever since. Becomes a habit that sort of thing. I take it, you’re a wilful woman.”

In the mental vision of both the difficulty of an obedience to be yielded by the white woman to an Indian loomed large.

“Yes. I have a will of my own,” she muttered; and then for the first time she turned her cold fair face to him: “But I have no money of my own.”

“H’m, that cramps your style. Very difficult to retain the power of choice without cash,” he threw in, and nodded sympathetically.

“Choice!” she cried. “I choose to live like an American; I can’t pay for it. I choose to act in these theatricals, and that means various little expenses. Again, I can’t pay. I am mistress of these servants—well, I can’t pay them.”

There was a long silence in which he gave her time to recover herself and, by rather piteous little efforts, to vanquish a rising storm of angry tears. His face looked stern and grave, the bold features and healthy ruddy colour denoting a man of energy. “It sounds as though Rahman Khan were not playing the game,” he remarked grimly.

“I am sick of it!” cried Doris, wrenching at her handkerchief with nervous hands.

“I do not know much about Indians,” Wendover said, “but, since I am a man, let me have a shot at approaching this from what may be his point of view. You will not gain ground, I am afraid, unless you admit that there are two sides to a question.”

Doris sat down. “I have a great deal of curiosity as to Rahman’s views. Seems to me they must be truly idealistic if they picture that I can exist by merely subscribing to them,” she said dryly.

“You choose to live like an American, you say. He belongs to Asia. Does he choose to live as a European in India?”

“He wants the privileges of a European, the privilege of all this”—she waved her hand impatiently to indicate the ugly room—“because he thinks that, as a highly educated and scientific man, he is entitled to it. But”—her brow darkened—“he would live in this bungalow and just pig it except on occasions of ceremony such as a dinner party. He would muddle on and never keep things nice. Decent writing-paper, and plentiful table linen, and well-polished silver he begrudges. He just hates using valuable possessions; he would like to shut them away in boxes. If I did not fuss round, nothing would ever be kept in repair, no broken plate would be replaced. He has no right to ask me to live as a bedraggled European, in a silly state of mess and neglect.”

“Very inconsiderate,” Wendover agreed. “Servants give you trouble?

“Yes,” she replied wearily. “They get round Rahman. Sometimes there is a tremendous fuss, and he simply storms at them; but it generally calms down, and they are obsequious and he is affable. Rather over-affable. In the end they come to me a few days later and say that Rahman promised them their pay by that date. As a rule I have only enough to give them something on account to go on with. Such a position undermines all my authority when I want to make them do their work thoroughly.”

When Wendover spoke she knew she had the sympathy of a strong character.

“An intolerable position. Quite inconsistent with dignity. If I were you, I should have this out with your husband. Get the situation defined, if you can. If possible, make him apportion his income: so much for your personal expenses and so much for the household expenses. Would he agree to that?”

“He would promise,” she cried indignantly, “but I could not depend on his fulfilling it. Of course I have asked him to do as you suggest a hundred times. Any practical person would advocate that method.”

“Yes,” Wendover admitted. “It was not a brilliant suggestion. As you say, any idiot would think of it. Frankly, it seems to me that you are without the sinews of war.”

Her young face took on a hopeless expression, into the blue eyes with their golden brown lashes crept a sudden terror. “I cannot stay here for the hot weather. I cannot!” she cried.

“And an Indian wife could,” he rejoined. “It is the devil for you both.” Persistently the suggestion of one course of action intruded itself, only to be rejected. The Padre was too British to utter the advice, “Get round him. Coax him. Appeal to his love for you,” when this implied a suppliant American wife and Rahman Khan.

The woman saw another picture—Lawrence Fisher, loyal, gallant, open-handed. Wendover’s voice broke in upon her wistful thoughts.

“If you aren’t equipped for war, you must try diplomacy. This acting business now—not very congenial to a Mohammedan, is it?”

She flashed defiance. “It is perfectly harmless. It is suitable for an American. The English do it out here. Some Indians get up theatricals, I believe——”

“It is not open to him in Dera Ismail Khan to take a part in this play,” Wendover persisted. “If he wanted a part, for instance——”

“Of course not,” Doris said, flushing. “He could not look like an Englishman even with the aid of my powder puff.” Suddenly, greatly to the Englishman’s surprise, she broke out laughing. “Picture Rahman!” she cried.

There was a quality in her laughter which filled Wendover with a quick sympathy for the absent Indian. This girl was lacking in sensitiveness for others. “You should not make a public appearance on the far side of a gulf that he may not cross,” he growled. “Just the kind of thing to get a man’s back up. Not right.”

Wendover’s social prestige gave weight in her angry eyes to this unwelcome remark. “I have promised to act in the play,” she replied obstinately.

During another silence both reflected on the undeniable fact that not one of the Englishwomen taking part in His Excellency the Governor would have been willing to represent love-making with her husband. The thought was a scourge to the wife’s pride. And once again the picture of debonair young Fisher in their scenes together attracted her dangerously.

“They would let you off your promise,” Wendover asserted.

“But I never go back on my word,” she retorted. “Rahman knows that,” she added proudly.

“Well, that’s an asset,” Keith rejoined quickly. “A good sound certainty like that makes an amazing difference in matrimony. Puts firm ground beneath your feet. Moral strength—that’s your morale, you know. Wins in the end, with any luck.” He rose and looked down at his riding boots, his feet wide apart, his breeches faultlessly cut. A well-groomed, perfectly shaped man, with at the moment an expression which some Doge of Venice might have claimed as kin. “And if you can believe in influence, mental concentration, thought transference, try prayer. I swear by it, naturally. Good-bye.” He held out his hand and engulfed hers for a moment, then took an abrupt pace towards the door, whence he flung at her, “Any promise you have made or implied to your husband—stick to it,” and strode out as young Fisher came gaily in.

Chapter XII

The bearer, Shabudin, was a good soul. According to his lights he did his duty to the Rahman Khans. His parents had died when he was a little brown fellow of five, round as to eyes and stomach, solemn and docile in disposition. His two elder brothers were good to him: no harsh voice or order disturbed his sunlit days in the General Sahib’s compound, where Kallu the burly served as khansamah. There was little play, but much rice and leisure, for the child, and, save for malaria, his life was happy. Never robust, he passed quiet hours squatting at a durzie’s shop in the suddar bazaar. The tailor addressed him courteously as ‘brother,’ and he called the old man ‘sir father’; he became an accepted member of the trio, a greybeard, a tame partridge, and a little boy. By and by he ceased to be an idle spectator, and with deft fingers and toes apprenticed himself to the work. The kindly old man, the crowded thoroughfare, the sheltered task, represented an ideal existence to Shabudin. But Oriental family life demanded sacrifice—though his soul yearned after the whir of a Singer’s sewing-machine, and yards of garish cotton from Manchester, and the pious conversation of a devout and ancient Mohammedan of the old school, he needs must bear the burden of matrimony and follow his brothers’ service. They married him to the pretty, delicate little widow of his second brother—an affair of finance. The girl was wilful, neurotic, and as delicate as her boy-husband. But he gave her his gentle heart, and to her and his pigeons, that strutted unbanished about the General’s compound in Sialkot by the grace of the General’s daughter, he showed a persistent devotion. For the rest, he cleaned a bicycle well, sat during sleepy noons upon the verandah with a silver salver awaiting visitors, and was that eccentric being—a chaukra who kept his hands from picking and stealing. There was one bad lapse: during two successive weeks he fell to the alluring temptation of the mother-of-pearl buttons on the night-dresses of the Miss Sahib, and tweaked them off ruthlessly while they lay on the ayah’s lap and that lady slept, peacefully dreaming of her past. He bestowed his ill-gotten gains upon his wife, who treasured them blissfully; but there was hue and cry in the dhobi’s house, and his timid soul quaked. That fear kept an honest youngster of him. As he rose to be khitmutgar he developed the fealty of the servant class from which he sprang. In all his dealings with his master he took a percentage, no more. The day came when the General retired, and Kallu, a man of many sons, retired also. Shabudin and his wife were childless: his nephews, foreseeing the day when they would have to support an aged uncle and aunt, clamoured for a divorce and a new marriage; but the frantic scenes with his wife wrung the quiet creature’s heart. The woman had twice his will and four times his temper: she fought her desperate fight with frantic energy, and the result was a sundering of the family ways. His nephews, imbued with the modern spirit of responsibility, flung him off, and he departed from the paths of those sahibs who knew him and his. Following a homesick instinct, he went to Dera Ismail Khan and sought service with the officers of the 1st Punjabis, which regiment had once been in the Brigade of his ‘General Sahib.’ He became bearer to young Moore, but the erratic ways of bachelors were not to his liking, profitable though their madness with money proved in the matter of percentages. He hankered for the well-ordered and sociable compounds of married officers, the yearly journey to the Hills with its familiar bustle and movement, the Simla bazaar among his fellows, the care-taking of the kindly Memsahib when fever was upon him. Moore went on a year’s leave to England, and Shabudin had no mind to leave faces and names and households grown consolingly familiar, so he took service with the Rahman Khans reluctantly, from sheer clinging to the only vacancy available among the households of a regiment which he knew. He went as a temporary measure, but all too soon his wages fell into arrears and, rather than lose the debt due to him, he stayed on in the discontented compound, in which there was but little izat as he had known it in the old days of his boyhood. And it behoved Shabudin to pay tribute to his brother, who had been as a father to him. That way duty lay, and in the intriguing, timid, kindly soul there was no faltering with duty and the sacrifices it demanded.

“What a tyranny is here!” he muttered, as for the third time in the month the payment of wages was postponed. The vender of sweets, wandering past the servants’ quarters with his tray upon his head, had refused further credit to the sweeper and the dhobi and the musolchi. The butcher’s man from the bazaar squatted behind the mud kitchen, where he and the khansamah conducted intricate financial transactions with the greatest affability. A trained eye could have detected at a glance that the household was insubordinate, and at this moment as insolent as it dared to be. The sweeper was prominent, standing in the drive which ran in a half-hoop past the hall-door from gate to gate. He talked with the bhisti, who scorned his low society save for the purpose of profitable intrigue. The dhobi smoked his hookah at the door of his house and made no move towards the dhobi-ghat. Only Shabudin, careworn, went about his business.

In the drawing-room Doris sat, chin on hand, biting her under lip. She had been sore beset. The cook had declared himself unable to obtain more supplies on credit from the bazaar. His accounts were preposterously high, and seven rupees of her tiny hoard of cash had apparently failed to content him. She had no sight of his cheerful countenance behind the kitchen to enlighten her as to the compensating power of interest on deferred payment, skilfully distributed through the daily accounts under the heading of extra annas for eggs that were never used in puddings, joints that weighed less than the pounds charged for, and the like. A ruthless pen drawn through the total amount, thereby mulcting Shah Baz of his delicately charged interest, had produced this clamour for payment on the part of the whole household. The sweeper had given notice, also the bhisti, and the sum charged for the chickens’ food was preposterous. Undoubtedly Shabudin used it for his pigeons. The fiat had gone forth that the pigeons must be banished, and the invaluable Shabudin had forthwith given notice also. What was she to do? She could not pay them in full till Rahman Khan sent money, and the bazaar, knowing this, would produce no servants to fill their places. Her spirited will had risen to the occasion: with energetic vehemence, she had railed at them, and been drawn to impotent rage by the fact that the sweeper raised his voice as she raised hers. She obtained the mastery in that she drove them from her presence and from ceaseless importuning on the verandah. She had cleared a private space for herself in which to breathe and plan, but well she knew that her compound intended to besiege her peace of mind throughout the day. She must pay her own way in the future. Her unfinished manuscript offered her the only means of liberty.

At this critical moment Lawrence Fisher dismounted at her door and announced himself. “I thought I’d look in and see whether you could spare the time to run through that scene of ours in the second act with me.” He paused abruptly. “By Jove, you do look rotten!” he exclaimed, with sincere concern.

Her highly-strung American voice told him piercingly that she felt ill, that she was worried to death, that she could not act, that the servants had driven her mad.

“The khansamah charged me six annas a pound for mutton, and Shabudin has been stealing the chickens’ food for his pigeons. I cut the khansamah’s accounts, and said I would not have the pigeons in the compound. They promptly gave notice. I found fault with the sweeper, and he was impertinent. He shouted at me.”

“Impertinent, was he?” cried young Fisher grimly. “The swine! What is your bearer’s name? Shabudin? May I call him? I’ll soon teach them.”

“No—no!” she expostulated nervously. She shrank from any financial revelations. Threadbare, shabby facts, where she would fain dazzle. It had been different confiding in the Padre. Vaguely, but emphatically, different.

But she had roused British blood that knows little of neutrality. In India Fisher’s services were unhesitatingly at the disposal of any white woman, and Doris was his lady fair. She hardly recognised his careless face and voice in the stern subaltern who shouted a summons to the bearer.

“I wish you’d just kill them all!” she murmured, fiercely peevish.

Said Lawrence Fisher, in the vernacular, to Shabudin, who salaamed at the door, “Look here, you—what is this? The Memsahib has received annoyance.”

“Huzoor,” came the gentle, weary voice, “without doubt the Memsahib has received annoyance, but what can I do? I ask leave to go.”

“What manner of faithless service is this, that you ask for dismissal when the Memsahib is alone? Your duty is to prevent the lesser servants from giving trouble.”

Doris rustled impatiently. Fisher was not sufficiently fiery for her satisfaction, and she wished him to refuse a hearing. Yet her interruption, “They are all budmashes! Tell him you’ll beat him,” fell upon unheeding ears. The subaltern was dealing sternly, but patiently, with one of a race that his race ruled. He neither blustered nor threatened.

“The Protector of the Poor speaks truth. Hear my petition! The Memsahib has given orders that I must let my pigeons go. Since I was a chaukra I have had pigeons. See how beautiful they are! Do they give trouble to the Memsahib? This is a tyranny.”

“Why did you give the chickens’ food to the pigeons?”

“God knows I never gave the food of the chickens to the pigeons. They would surely die. Never have I done this thing. The Memsahib desires fat chickens, and therefore they eat greatly. Am I a thief?” Shabudin had exchanged a portion of the fowls’ food for his beloved birds’ diet. This deal was regarded by him as lawful in view of his deferred wages. But respect for the izat of his employers, which in some mysterious manner included the izat of his service, kept him scrupulously silent as to the financial state of affairs in the household.

“Why do you want dismissal?”

“Because of the order for my pigeons to be removed. There is much trouble and no peace in this place. By the favour of the Presence, I shall have leave to go.”

Fisher turned to Doris. “He seems a decent fellow. Quite a good class of Mohammedan. Are you determined his pigeons must go?”

“Let him keep a thousand, as long as I have no more bother!” she ejaculated. “I am sick of the whole thing!”

Fisher addressed Shabudin peremptorily, but with good temper. “The Memsahib of her favour gives you permission to keep the pigeons. But take care, you, that the food of the chickens is not lacking. Give good service, and see to it that the other servant-people give no trouble.”

“Huzoor ke mihrbani,” murmured Shabudin, raising his thin hand to his narrow forehead and respectfully inclining his sleek head in its snowy pugaree. “I will do good work.” He had had no intention of departing until such time as he received payment in full, but this matter of the pigeons had required diplomacy. And the voice of British authority coming from the type of man Shabudin had obeyed since childhood was in a sense a loved voice. Just as to courtiers the atmosphere of courts grows dear.

“Good. It is enough.” Thus Shabudin’s case was closed. “Mehtar!”

At the thundered call a menial of the lowest caste of Hindu came forward cringingly. He had abandoned his prominent position on the drive with remarkable alacrity on Fisher’s approach. In his distant village, inhabited only by the sweeper caste, his folk were employed in agriculture, gave wondrous and expensive festivals at weddings, and indulged in saturnalia of medieval grossness on Hindu holy days. To them, the untouchable through generations, nothing was untouchable. They ate vermin unconcernedly. In domestic service they were employed only as scavengers and sweepers. In the social and religious laws of his country the youth’s position was that of an outcast. Fisher took him as he found him, a being who by tradition and inheritance was low. The sweeper himself considered his own touch, his own assumption of defiance, an insult to his betters. No less than Shabudin he held the Sahib’s angry and scornful tone socially appropriate to his offence. He was governed by it, unresentful. Anything different would have set him sniggering in derision at those gauche ruling people from the unexclusive West.

“Sour!” said Fisher. “When the Memsahib speaks you will remain silent, do you hear?”

“Huzoor,” said the sweeper submissively.

“If you give trouble to the Memsahib, the Cantonment Magistrate Sahib will send you from the cantonment. I will report to him. Is it fit that the sweeper-folk should make retort when the Sahib-log speak?”

“It is my wrong-doing. Have mercy, Protector of the Poor!” whined the man.

“Go,” said the subaltern. “But be careful, you.”

“Go,” echoed Shabudin; and as Fisher turned and went into the bungalow he set the young officer’s topi straight upon the bamboo hat-stand with little careful touches. This was a good Sahib, who gave no man that particular abuse by which the abused are defiled in Oriental eyes.

“That will be all right,” Fisher assured his hostess. “If not, let me know. It is abominable the way some Indian servants take advantage of a woman being alone. I don’t believe in knocking ’em about—not unless they are mere boys, and then, of course, a licking does them no harm. But it stands to reason a man, if he is a man, won’t take a beating. And I never fine my servants. If a fellow isn’t worth his wages, dismiss him.”

Doris smiled up at him. “Aren’t you clever, knowing all about how to manage servants—eh?”

“Have to, in India,” he assured her. “Mess servants and one’s own lot. One soon learns how to run the show.”

“When you are an old married man, living on your pension in England, you will be able to keep your wife’s maids in order!”

“Heaven forbid! I should be scared to death of them. Out here it is so different, the servants are part of our job. And I shall never marry——” The last sentence was vowed adoringly, and led very naturally to a commencement of their rehearsal.

The twilight gathered about the compound. The acrid smoke from the cow-dung fires melted into the sapphire dusk. Fisher’s syce, who had followed the regiment to Europe and back, squatted by the servants’ houses and talked with the sweeper and the dhobi and Rahman Khan’s syce. Now, dhobis are low-caste Hindus, and so was Fisher’s syce; the Rahman Khans’ syce was a low-class Mohammedan, and, at a slight distance from those lesser folk, the khansamah and Shabudin sat and smoked, and every now and then talk drifted from group to group. Two of the drawing-room windows looked west on to the servants’ quarters, and the bamboo blinds screened the Sahib-log from peeping eyes.

Presently came the shout of “Bearer!” and Shabudin donned his pugaree, shuffled off his shoes by the verandah, and obeyed his mistress’s summons to light the lamps, for the room had grown dark. As the standard lamp and the lamp on the big table and the two little silver lamps on the mantel-shelf sprang into flame, the room stood revealed to the compound, the slit bamboo blinds as transparent as a Parisienne’s black thread veil.

“Never mind the curtains. You can draw them afterwards,” Doris commanded, impatient of the interruption. The rehearsal had been suspended in the servant’s presence. She forgot that the light was now within, instead of without.

A cat may look at a king. The compound looked sleekly and obliquely, licking its lips.

The outer darkness enclosed the happy pair as in a wall, they could see nothing beyond the room. Doris stood opposite one of the windows and said with emphasis, “That first bit does not go quite right. You are too stiff.”

“I feel such a fool,” said the boy gaily.

“Forget yourself. When I act I cease to be Doris Rahman Khan, I am simply the woman in the play. I don’t feel embarrassed, so you need not feel shy.” Indeed, in the light comedy the love-making was of so trivial a character that there was little to alarm the most self-conscious amateur. Doris’s matter-of-fact tone and her business-like absorption were calculated to keep Fisher cool and level-headed, but to approach her dainty fairness so close, to touch her hand again and again, to utter and look words of love, to hold her in his arms for one brief moment, were powerful intoxicants to the subaltern.

The Oriental eyes watched the weaving of the two figures, now laughing apart, speaking unknown words, now drawing close, hand touching hand, and the woman at last clasped in the man’s arms. Then withdrawing out of sight, where only evil imagination beheld them. Presently coming level with the archways and the windows again, to repeat the movements. The khansamah muttered something of the absent Mohammedan husband. And once more Fisher held her in his arms. “That’s better,” said Doris’s cool voice.

Outside in the black evening the subaltern’s syce began to recount deep dark tales of the Germans’ rape of white women. Behind Shabudin’s bent and delicate figure fell a bamboo blind, and a curtain, concealing his wife from the eyes of all mankind.

Presently Pauline drove up in her little motor, and Shabudin hastened to admit her. This was the type of unself-consciously dignified Memsahib that he knew and served instinctively. She spoke but a few words of his language, and the millions of India were to her a bewilderment and confusion of castes and races, yet her manner was never at fault, and she impressed the compounds of Dera Ismail Khan. Shabudin fingered and exchanged gossip with the Indian chauffeur.

“How many rupees did the motor cost, brother?”

“Six thousand rupees,” he exaggerated promptly.

“Achacha! The Padre Sahib has many rupees.”

“The Sahib has some hundreds of rupees pay, but he has much land in England. The father of the Mem is dead, but he was as a Rajah among his own people—a Lord Sahib. The Padre Sahib was a Major Sahib and fought in the big war. Afterwards he changed his service.”

“Is there a son?”

“There is a son. The Memsahib goes daily to the church, and twice on Sunday. The khansamah gave a big account daily, and the Memsahib said nothing, but gave the rupees. One day the Sahib said, ‘The khansamah is a thief,’ and the khansamah greatly feared and now gives true accounts. The Sahib is a very good Sahib and is full of honour.”

In the drawing-room Pauline sat, book in hand, and heard Doris and Lawrence Fisher run through their parts for the fifth time, to the amazement of the watching household.

“Wah!” said the bhisti. “It is but a tamasha.”

The others murmured assent. It was one of the unaccountable tamashas of the Sahib-log, and not what they had thought.

“I wonder you don’t draw the curtains, Doris,” Pauline said frankly, as the American threw herself on to the sofa and declared she was tired to death. “I should think acting puzzles Indian servants, and they can see you perfectly.”

“By Jove, yes,” agreed Fisher. “I forgot.”

Doris fired up unexpectedly. “What my Indian husband can see me do, my Indian servants can see me do. People don’t respect you any the more for pretending to be other than your real self.”

It was Fisher who challenged her assertion. “I am not so sure about that. It is not wise to give a false impression out here.”

Doris flushed. She was excitable and highly strung that night. “What do you suppose they imagined? That you really kissed me?” Not less than the spectators her and Fisher’s thoughts leapt at that idea . . . if he had really kissed her . . . if some day he should really kiss her. . . . Great fun, thought he.

“We never know what they think,” he replied with assumed ease, just as there came a rattling and shouting at the gate, a starting of the motor’s engines, and a crunching of its wheels on the sand drive as it made room for a plunging tonga, piled high with dusty luggage, which swung up to the door by the light of two crazy oil-lamps.

“It is your husband!” cried Pauline; and in a moment the three were greeting the little figure, all muffled to the eyes against the northern cold.

“Why have you come back, Rahman? Why did you not wire?” asked his wife. She was contrasting his appearance with that of the young Englishman.

“I received a telegram from the Brigade ordering me to return. It seems your doctor has had to take leave, Fisher? His wife’s sister is ill, or something. I caught the dâk tonga, and here I am. You see the way we officials live at the end of a wire, Mrs. Wendover?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said, with courteous sympathy. “You never know where you will be to-morrow.”

“Never know, never know. That is verree true,” he repeated. “Well, my dear, and what is the latest news?”

“Nothing much,” Doris replied indifferently. “There never is any news in this place. We are getting up some theatricals. I am acting, and Pussy, and Mr. Fisher.”

“Oh, indeed. You will enjoy that,” he commented politely.

For the first time in his career Fisher felt embarrassed in the presence of an Indian. Manlike, he cut short the unwelcome experience and took his departure. Doris begged Pauline to remain longer, and she did so, much impressed by the memory and knowledge Captain Rahman Khan displayed in a long conversation on dramatic poetry. She looked at the pair with a hopeless interest. Doris’s little sulky face against a background of sapphire cushions. Rahman Khan’s khaki figure perched on the fire seat, a scarf wound round his throat, his sleek black hair very oily, his lips grape colour with cold, his brown hands gesticulating, while his voice quoted and argued eloquently, and his sad, sad eyes said nothing.

When she left, she kissed Doris, and shook hands with the husband, gently. It seemed to her that in this bungalow her search, her demand, her aspirations after happiness met with stern denial.

Chapter XIII

Deering was a busy man even on Sundays. It was on Sundays that he attended to his correspondence. He wrote weekly to his only and unmarried sister who lived in Upper Norwood, a couple of lengthy epistles to the late C.O. of the regiment who had lost both his eyes early in the war, and to a junior captain who had lost one leg and one arm and now eked out his slender pension by writing advertisements for a business firm. The captain’s income would have been sufficient for his own needs, but a younger brother had enlisted as a private in 1914 and been invalided after severe rheumatic fever. A weak heart and shattered constitution left him terribly handicapped in a struggle for a living, and his elder brother helped him financially. Deering wrote these letters from a fierce flame of sympathy. He had few soothing illusions. He knew what those two officers and that ex-private experienced. It was on Sundays that he wrote to the Dogra Subadar who had served with the regiment till a serious wound sent him growling to his home in the Kangra, and to the Pathan jemadar adjutant who lived, a blinded man, in Peshawar city—his last glance had seen the cold rain sweeping the trenches of Flanders. In the distant village, in the crowded bazaar, those weekly letters strengthened the prestige of the wounded as nothing else could have done.

After midday the Colonel was wont to give his attention grudgingly to social observances. Though he was prone to declare in private that the young married women in Dera Ismail Khan were “damned dull to a man of my age,” he kept in touch with them. On Sunday evenings he gave a very lavish dinner-party in his bungalow. He never lost sight of the fact that splendour impressed the Oriental mind quickly and directly, and that there was little evidence—as the native mind accepted evidence—that the Sahib-log were conquerors. Resplendent signs of triumphant victors were conspicuously lacking in a community of hard-up officers. On the North-West Frontier the ‘big money’ was obviously still in the hands of the civilian Sahibs, though it was well known that the Deputy Commissioners had not fought in the war of the world, whereas the Fauj-ke-sahib-log had won it. “Won what?” asked the city and the border. “Much honour,” came the stern reply from all ranks in the cantonment. But Deering looked to it that he helped the whole population to realise that magnetic illusion of honour. He spent every penny of his pay right royally, and entered into dire conflict with his ideal woman, Mrs. Fleming, who maintained that old habits and customs of ostentation, impressive though they were, had fallen like shackles from the European community when war pointed the finger of scorn at luxury. “India understands asceticism,” she pleaded.

“Subalterns don’t,” he retorted, with that ringing laugh of his. “Leave it to our missionaries and priests.”

This particular Sunday, about ten o’clock, he sat in his spacious smoking-room and entertained Buggat Singh, Subadar, who wore the Victoria Cross, and had retired after the declaration of peace, He was a handsome specimen of a burly Sikh officer, and made a fine figure in his snowy breeches and turban and tight-fitting coat. The two soldiers sat together at ease, in conversation or in silence. Active service had measured each to each, and they had a sincere mutual respect. Deering never lost the impulse of protection which is one essential element of rule and leadership in the East, and the Sikh, aware of it by instinct, responded by an answering sense of fealty. There was an air of high breeding about the man of the Punjab. It was not stamped upon him by the environment of his mud homestead in his village close to Jullundar, nor by his boyhood among lonely fields, nor yet by the elementary education he acquired painfully after enlisting, and which enabled him to read and write as a necessary qualification for a commission. If he were a gentleman, as certainly he was without fear and without reproach, it was due to the exclusive nature of the marriages of his forbears, back through turbulent generations. The soldier was carefully bred; his stock were yeomen, but his caste was high. By war and a history of persecution that caste gained rank among the elect; by religion, by custom, and by kinship it became a race; by tradition and a spirit of adventure it begot soldiers. The Sahib and the Sikh had been in Calcutta, Jullundar, Hong Kong, Peshawar, Egypt, France, and Mesopotamia together, to say nothing of a vivid week in London. They had sailed the sea in company, when the islander was humiliatingly sick, and the man of the inland plains stood somewhat astonished, but robust, to burning sheets of sunlit calm or the roaring gale of a winter sea. Now they talked of recruits and the affairs of the Sikh world, and Buggat Singh, as became a pension-wallah, was garrulous.

“Nay, Sahib, there is no izat for us old soldiers now. All people forget our service. In November the Deputy Commissioner Sahib came to within ten miles of my village, and I rode far to pay my respects. I waited a long time, Sahib, and then I was told the Sahib had no leisure. It was enough. Perhaps the Sahib did not know—how can I tell?”

“You know quite well that the Deputy Commissioner Sahib never gave you that answer. A babu gave it,” said Deering imperturbably.

“My understanding is that a babu gave it. But he is a servant and obeys.”

“You should have given him bucksheesh instead of hoarding the money,” the Colonel said. “You have to pay for being an Honorary Captain, you know.”

“True! Too true, Sahib. The Presence knows all things. All people take rupees from me, but I am not a rich man.”

“Your money is clean money. A service of the sword won it, and a King gives it. The money of baniars soils the hand. Don’t talk like a baniar, Subadar Major.”

The two pair of bold eyes met in complete understanding. “By the favour of the Presence, I have eaten the salt of the Raj and the King makes payment.” He saluted at the mention of the King.

“In the matter of the Deputy Commissioner Sahib—Williams Sahib, isn’t it?”

“It is Williams Sahib. A good Sahib. It was to me much shame that the Sahib gave that answer.”

“Which he never gave. I will write and report the babu to him, if you like?”

“Huzoor!”

“All right, I’ll write. You remember La Bassée?”

“In July or in September, Sahib?”

“In July—and the Gora-Paltan on our right?”

“I remember.” He named a regiment of the line.

“B Company did not do well that day,” the Colonel’s voice went on. B Company was composed of Sikhs. “And the British regiment did good work.”

“Very good work,” agreed Buggat Singh.

“Better than we did,” affirmed Deering.

“Sahib, it was their own climate. The Presence knows that the Sikhs can fight in the cold and in the heat and in the wet, but not so well as the English in the wet.”

“Yes, I know. If I do not know that the Sikhs can fight, who does?” The grey eyes were very friendly.

“The Presence is our father and mother.”

“If it had not been for that British regiment, B Company would have died, and we would have eaten shame; for they retired damned quickly, and the name of the regiment would have been bad. Just as”—he added calmly—“just as the name of that young Gora ke Paltan would have been bad at”—he gave name and date—“if we, the 10th Paltan, had not been there to help them.” He stopped, and then said emphatically, “The two sons of Williams Sahib were in that British regiment at La Bassée, and both died.”

“Both,” the Sikh growled deep in his beard. “Wah, wah! Both the sons of Williams Sahib. I had heard that they had died in the war, but the name of their regiment I had not heard.”

“Wherefore it is plain that Williams Sahib is not a Sahib who gives no honour to soldiers,” said the Colonel, and carried conviction.

“Without doubt it was the babu,” agreed the Subadar Major, and went on to indicate with disfavour the many changes which had taken place since the war.

Deering listened with scarce a comment to the indictment of neighbours who had availed themselves of the absence of the fighting men to remove landmarks; to the half-veiled allusions to the abducting of wives while husbands were afar off; to the emphatic assessment of losses due to the inexperience of striplings, perforce left in charge of family affairs, in the matter of the sale of cattle. The marriage of daughters was a problem hard to solve, it seemed, when the men of their caste had fallen by the thousand. Childless widows saddened village homes, and there were too few little staggering figures of tiny youngsters when the herds of buffaloes were driven forth in charge of the children and the silver dust rose knee-high in the dawn. The men who had been given grants of land were already deep in debt to the baniars. There were Sikh families whose names were bad owing to political misdoings—who would take their sons for the Army? They went to more profitable employment and waxed fat. Truly this question of recruits was no easy matter. Old veterans like himself disliked the new customs, but he would do what he could.

Deering’s experience showed him the Subadar Major as he was at home, living in a ramshackle earth-coloured dwelling, more imposing than those of his neighbours. The pi-dogs nosing round the village wall, the jackals howling afar off, the great vultures preying on the rubbish heaps, the inquisitive black crows, all contributing their familiar presence to the village life. The women at the well in the cold winter mornings, or in the brief respite of the summer dawn, when it was no shame to perform ablutions in public, but black shame to pry as peeping Tom once did in a Western city. The dhamsala and the grey-bearded guru. The smoke of funeral pyres by the burning ghat. The baptism of young Sikhs admitted to the khalsa. The rustling Indian corn rising in great waves, higher than a man’s head. The string beds where restless men lay beneath the sky on burning summer nights. And the old Subadar Major, pious, fierce, avaricious, and withal charitable, having as hangers-on and protegés the halt and the blind sepoys, returned like himself from the great and terrible war. Valorous and boastful, oppressor and protector, he was a potent influence in that hardy hamlet—so remote from rail and town—whence came recruits to the Sikh regiments and Sikh companies of the King-Emperor’s Indian Army.

When the deep voice rumbled at length to silence, Deering spoke of a projected ten days’ leave in March, and the Subadar Major, half bashful but wholly sincere, offered his hospitality. “If the Colonel Sahib would but bring his Presence under my roof?” And the Colonel Sahib accepted, as part of that vast game of soldiering in which the world has never ceased to find adventure.

“You have my leave to go.” A formula had brought the interview to a close; and, at parting, dust-coloured and ivory hand met for a moment in a clasp which, reserved for moments of social ceremony, had never grown familiar to either officer. Yet the mutual touch signified a real bond between those two lives in which the dedication of their hands to war and their fingers to fight had taught them both terrible things.

Buggat Singh swaggered forth down the drive, past the sprouting fronds of sweet-peas and the close-pruned rose-bushes and the flooded lawn, and was greeted by the adjutant on his bicycle with a cordial shout. The Scotchman sprinted on to the bungalow, and was admitted by a Pathan orderly to see the Colonel.

“You’re going to be put under arrest for striking an officer. I have a bit the size of that”—(he indicated a large hole with curved finger and thumb)—“out of my leg where you hit me at hockey yesterday,” he declared cheerfully, as he passed, and the Pathan smiled broadly at the mild jest.

“Kirpa, a Dogra in A Company——” M‘Lean began.

“Yes, I know the fellow,” Deering said.

“—Has had a fall from his bicycle and fractured the base of his skull badly. He’ll go out for a certainty. But his old father is on a visit to the lines—there are a lot of that family in the company, of course—and he is awfully upset. Doesn’t seem to put any faith in Rahman Khan as a doctor.”

“Is Rahman Khan there?”

“Yes, sir. He is doing all he can.”

“He is a better doctor than Smith,” the Colonel said, “but it is a pity Smith is not here. Well, I’ll go.”

“I think it would relieve the old boy’s mind awfully if you would, sir.”

“All right, I’ll go.”

The Colonel rode out of his compound five minutes later and dismounted at the verandah of the regimental hospital. A few convalescent sepoys rose and saluted. A murmur of “The Colonel Sahib has come” ran indescribably quickly round the wards.

The ward where Kirpa lay dying was a long whitewashed room, clean, orderly, bare. The crows on the verandah were making a great noise. The sun was splashing through the bamboo blinds. From one of the beds a patient dragged himself, stood unsteadily on his feet, and saluted as his commanding officer passed. From another bed came tremendous groans of a dramatic nature. A group at the end of the ward rose and stood awaiting the approach of the smart, alert figure in mufti with its swinging stride and eagle glance.

Kirpa the Dogra lay very still and wholly unconscious of this world. His ancient parent salaamed to Deering with tears pouring down his fine haughty face. Two bhais from his village and three nephews were gathered round the bed, and saluted their Colonel Sahib.

The old man’s voice cracked and quavered. “Two sons of mine were killed in the great fighting. They were of the 38th Dogras. One of them had a bahadouri. A third son fought in the 57th Rifles—he was a strong young man and without fear. He was ‘missing’ many days, and then the Sirkar said, ‘He is dead.’ I have the letter of his Colonel Sahib, who said also ‘He is dead.’ Sahib, I have four sons, and I did not wish all to die; but this one that remained said, ‘I shall have great shame if I do not go to the war,’ so I said, ‘It is well—go.’ But he was still a recruit at the Depot when peace came. Three days ago I came here to see my son, and to-day he fell from his bicycle. He fell but a little way. I have no other son. Is there a Doctor Sahib? For surely he will not die; he fell but a little way.”

“He is without sense,” said one of the Dogras, gazing at the still form. “It is my thought that he will surely die.”

Deering looked frankly at the worn, brave face, blinking away the slow tears of old age. “He is a sepoy of my regiment,” he said, in his strong, clear voice. “If it is possible that he can escape from this death, I will see to it that he escapes. Where is the Doctor Captain?”

“He has come,” the sepoys chorused, and Rahman Khan hurried into the ward. The Englishman and the Mohammedan stood one on either side of the high-caste hill Rajput, whose person neither must touch at the moment of the spirit’s departure.

“Is there any chance?” Deering inquired in English; and Rahman Khan, with a terse and scientific explanation, made plain the inevitable approach of death.

“I can do nothing, or I would not have left the patient,” the Indian said. There was a nervous air of apology about him. He had a mental certainty as to the nature of the case; professionally he neither doubted nor hesitated. But he was fully conscious of the lack of confidence in the group of Dogras. Officially he was submissive, even in the utterance of an opinion, to his superior officer, and socially he was ill at ease to the point of wringing his hands.

A hospital orderly brought Deering a chair. He sat down and ordered one to be brought for Rahman Khan. “Rough luck on the old father,” he commented in English. “We may as well stay if we can ease his mind.”

“I will certainlee stay,” said Rahman Khan, “but there is no need for you to trouble, sir.”

Deering made no reply. He was not a chatty person. He knew Rahman Khan was fully capable of dealing with this case. He also knew that he alone of the group round the dying youngster thoroughly trusted the doctor.

“Here is but a Doctor Babu—where is the Doctor Sahib?” remonstrated the old Dogra.

Rahman Khan’s face was inscrutable.

“Doctor Sahib hai,” the sepoys assured the old man patiently, but his voice quavered high and broke in an agony.

“For the sake of God bring a Doctor Sahib that my son may live!” What use an Indian without the caste and arts of a Hindu medicine man? Better the prayers of a Brahman than the ways of a Mohammedan babu. Knowledge and power belonged mysteriously but undeniably to the Sahib-log, and in his youth such Sahibs had dealt with sickness in the regiments of the Queen. Who was this babu who sat in the presence of the Colonel Sahib? Something of this fell in snatches from his quivering lips.

Not unmoved was the Englishman who had never had a son. He sat with one leg thrown over the other and arms folded, and now turned his head to the desolate father and spoke decisively.

“E-Smith Sahib is away on leave, because his sister at Rawalpindi is ill. There is no other doctor save this Captain Sahib, who has all the knowledge of E-Smith Sahib and does good work. If I were ill, this Captain Sahib would attend me.” He turned to Rahman Khan. “Could you do anything without disturbing the patient? Your sitting here doesn’t make the old fellow certain that his youngster is having every chance.”

“Anything I could do would disturb the patient to no purpose,” was the doctor’s answer.

Deering nodded. Undoubtedly Kirpa, sepoy, should be left in peace for the short hours that remained to him.

The hour and a half that passed so slowly was infinitely wearisome to the Englishman, more susceptible to boredom and depression than the Indians. The old Dogra relapsed into a silence only broken by snatches of prayer and entreaty. One of his nephews, failing in tenacity of purpose, drifted out on to the verandah and disappeared. Little brown lizards flicked along the wall. Bhais of the other patients came in and out to visit them, and at last, rejoicing wildly, Gipsy, the Colonel’s cocker spaniel, thrust her black head with its beautiful and adoring eyes round the edge of the chic, and, wriggling in, flung herself upon her master in a transport of excitement.

“She has found the Colonel Sahib,” smiled the group round the bed, released from tension.

Gipsy, still whisking about with a boundless vitality, was on the bed before restraining hands could stop her. In another instant Deering was dragging her to the door, and from the verandah his voice summoned his syce to hold her. The caress his hand bestowed on her head, that sought to snuggle its nose against him, was tenderness itself.

After the interruption he resumed his seat. “It did not disturb him,” he said reassuringly to the father of the dying.

“He knows nothing!” wailed the Dogra. “This morning he was very strong and he rode upon his bicycle to the city. He fell upon the road . . . and the Doctor Babu can do nothing.”

“They are verree ignorant, these people,” Rahman Khan said, with philosophical patience.

Deering stifled a yawn. Twenty-two years of military service had bred in him a love of the Army passing the love of women. For forgotten wars, forgotten dead, forgotten wounds, forgotten old soldiers, and the ‘missing’ who ceased to be missed, he had a memory that was stern and strong; for his regiment he had a passion. But his mind held few illusions. Change and oblivion hid past valour and past effort as surely as death would soon hide Kirpa in a transformation scene from which would emerge a handful of scattered ashes and a few bones to be consigned to the sacred water of the Ganges. Sacred rivers, holy water in Catholic churches, baptismal water—how the world had clung to that idea of cleansing floods. Anointing oil, sacramental wine, bread that men knelt to receive—manna in the wilderness. Wondrous search after nourishment for the life that would outlive death! The Colonel, who was not reckoned a devout man, had calmly recognised all these devotions of mankind East and West. He had never met men who loved death. In all their aspirations they courted immortality. Observant, just, tolerant of caste and custom, Deering spoke at last, his eyes on Kirpa the sepoy.

“How much longer, Rahman Khan?”

The doctor busied himself awhile. “Very soon now, sir,” he said, and told an orderly to bring a screen.

One of the Dogra’s kinsmen recognised this sign of the approaching end and left the ward. He returned presently with the Dogra Subadar.

Deering looked up. “I go now,” he said to the officer. “Send me word when he is dead.” He stood a moment beside the still figure. “He was a good man,” he said to the father, and through the father to the kinsmen, and through the kinsmen to the regiment, and through the regiment to the Kangra whence came recruits. His words were those of a king’s messenger. “He leaves a good name. His name will remain.” A gratified murmur greeted his speech. All had risen when he rose.

Now he spoke to the Subadar. “The Doctor Captain and I will go. We can do no more.” He knew well that for the next half-hour the presence of a Mohammedan would be little welcomed by these high-caste Hindus.

“Achacha, Sahib! The Presence has given himself much trouble. The favour of the Presence is great,” the Subadar replied.

Deering bent over the bed for a brief second. “Salaam, Kirpa!” he said in that voice of his which reached simple men’s hearts. Then in silence he left the ward.

Thinking that, as he was in the hospital, he might as well go through all the wards, he entered the Mohammedan ward. He spoke to Rahman Khan while he strode along, so that the latter was obliged to follow him. And at sight of one of the patients something of amused devilment lit up the keen eyes. “Hullo!” he said, coming to a halt. “There’s your nephew. What’s wrong with Ghulam Mahomed?”

A bombshell would have been as welcome to Rahman Khan as this unexpected knowledge of his family affairs, but he answered without delay. “He only came in this morning, sir. He has bronchitis, I think.”

“What’s this? Got a chill?” the Colonel said bluffly, in the vernacular, to the big havildar, who looked up at him with the same expression as Gipsy’s eyes had blazed with.

“Huzoor! I have taken cold. It is very severe. And here there is no bundabust such as there was in the hospital at Brighton in England. No one takes trouble.” The restless voice croaked, and the brown face, rough and gnarled like the bark of some weather-beaten tree bole, turned anxiously on the pillow.

“Lies,” said Deering cheerfully. “All lies, eh? You have good arrangements here. Are they better in your village? Do you want flowers on the table and electric light and twenty doctors here, eh?” Rahman Khan and the sick havildar both grinned.

“You’ve got your uncle to take care of you,” the Colonel went on. “Why are you afraid?”

“I fear nothing,” said the havildar.

“You are afraid of pneumonia,” his commanding officer affirmed. “All you people fear pneumonia. You have been saving money, and not eating enough, and thus you become ill.”

“I eat much, I eat much,” denied the hoarse voice.

“Then drink much.” He turned to the Indian doctor. “Stimulant is good in pneumonia cases. Give him wine.”

The Mohammedans smiled at the chaff. All three knew that the sick man would refuse life itself if offered to his body in the form of wine forbidden by the Prophet.

“You’ll get well,” Deering informed Ghulam Mahomed in a tone that carried conviction to the patient, and passing on, he left him better than he found him.

Behind the Colonel’s departing figure there droned a reiterated whisper urging the necessity of remitting rupees to Allahabad, while a soothing stream of easy promises poured from the doctor. Under ordinary circumstances the educated Indian, holding commissioned rank, would have known no chagrin that here lay a connection by marriage whose position was that of a non-commissioned officer, whose customs were the customs of the native infantry lines, whose social standing among the Sahib-log was the social standing of a be-medalled commissionaire outside a big shop in Regent Street—namely, that of an old and worthy soldier from the ranks. What Rahman Khan dreaded was the effect of any knowledge of this relationship on that cruel, strong, attractive mystery—his American wife.

Nothing of those backgrounds in Deering’s life—the retired Indian officer, the young sepoy, the havildar—showed in his conversation at the Wendovers’ lunch-party. It was his work, and therefore he sought to forget it when he took his leisure. He succeeded easily enough, thanks to the skill of his hostess. Pauline offered mankind the charm of novelty, variety, and the unexpected when she talked to them, and Deering never guessed that she was jealous of him. Painfully jealous, because his keenness and enthusiasm and success as a soldier were the things she had admired in her bridegroom and lost in her husband.

The other guests were the General, very intent on his excellent food, and Cynthia with her well-groomed young husband, who wrought upon them all like a spell, forcing them to realise their precise rank and position and relative importance, so accurately did he gauge it, and so superbly did he ignore all that was mere personality.

Half-way through lunch Doris walked in, announcing herself as an uninvited guest.

“Rahman Khan sent me a note to say he could not leave the hospital, so I thought I would come here, and not eat my own lunch in solitary glory,” she explained, as she took the place that was quickly prepared for her on Wendover’s left. “My! Pauline, you don’t mean to say that you are eating lettuce when you don’t grow it in your own garden! You’ll have enteric to-morrow, and Rahman will be your doctor and I’ll be your nurse, and we shall squabble over you, so that you’ll perish while we argue! “

“Sounds jolly,” Wendover snorted. And to everybody at the table came the stirring of a prejudice. Rahman Khan’s ancestry had bred in him a way of looking at sex which proved a stumbling-block to that professional feeling, utterly exclusive of sex, which prevails in the relationship between a European doctor and his women patients. Doris assumed what every other person in the room, including the Indian servants, would have strenuously denied, the welcomed presence of her husband at Pauline’s bedside should she require medical attendance.

And it was in a spirit of racial anger provoked by this racial tactlessness of Doris Rahman Khan that Deering murmured a piece of information into her ear after lunch. “I saw your husband this morning at the hospital. One of his patients was that relation by marriage I told you about—our havildar.”

“Indeed?” Doris queried coolly. “I hope our niece is not ill too?”

“History doesn’t relate,” Deering shrugged. “She is purdah nashine.”

His feeling of indifferent pity for this woman had been changed to active dislike by her conspicuous monopoly of his subaltern, Lawrence Fisher. She had flouted him very successfully in that matter, and he was not likely to forget the fact. Nor was he unaware of the influence which Pauline exercised in the cantonment.

“Why the devil does she take up this woman and make her of such importance? Much wiser to have left her in the background,” he growled to himself. And presently decided that the literary bond accounted for the intimacy, since the talk drifted into a discussion about literature which held his interest in spite of a feeling of intense irritability against the two women. He was one of the few men who were not subjugated by Pauline’s personal fascination. He infinitely preferred Wendover.

“Indefinite sort of work yours, isn’t it?” he asked him over their smoke. The General and the Drews had left.

“In what way?” Wendover retorted; but he was not nettled. He liked Deering as much as the soldier liked him.

“Well, except for the absolution, I can do your job for you here any Sunday. Morning and Evening Prayer, I mean. I have read the Burial Service a horrible number of times. And, unless I’m much mistaken, a doctor baptized me as a kid when I nearly snuffed out. A consul, or a fellow in a registry office, can tie the marriage knot all right. And I take it you don’t expect to convert the Mohammedan and Hindu to our way of thinking? Anyhow, that is the missionary’s line, not yours. You’ll agree with me that most men know more or less what they believe, and a hundred sermons don’t make a pennyworth of difference to that. What do you definitely accomplish?”

Wendover took a long pull at his pipe. “You can’t get sacramental grace except an ordained priest is there to consecrate the elements,” he said. “The Apostolic Succession provides for that first and foremost.”

Deering shook his head. “I don’t see it,” he said quietly. “I can’t. Not as ‘necessary to salvation.’ Long time since I learnt my Catechism. I’ve a feeling for all that . . . part of one’s boyhood . . . the chapel at Wellington College . . . memories associated with one’s mother. Out here one has a national sentiment for our way of looking at things: Christianity as against Mohammedan or Hindu contempt—see them damned first. Women go to pieces without religion, I grant you that. But there are thousands of decent fellows—I have known dozens, so have you—who could not tell you when they went to church last. As good fellows as you want. Nothing necessary to their salvation, I swear, but a fine death. It beats me why a man like you went in for that ordination business. Necessary to what? I don’t see it—never saw it in my life since I grew up. Not in France, nor in Mesopotamia. Least of all there. A belief of some kind—yes. Parsons—no.”

“Curious,” Wendover commented. “That’s just where I saw the other thing—my need to be a priest. Over there in France in 1915.”

“Well, I’m glad you came here,” Deering said cordially.

Meanwhile Pauline and Doris on the sofa in the drawing-room had drawn from each other’s enthusiasm a stimulant to energy as poet and author, and now Doris urged eagerly, “Surely there can’t be any harm, Pauline? I must have the type to study. The woman will be all wrong in my book if I make a portrait of my ayah! After all, she is my niece by marriage. Why should I ask Colonel Deering first?”

“It is difficult to know what a woman may do, and what she may not do, in India,” Pauline hesitated.

“But an author! I have my work to think of,” Doris cried. “And it means everything to me. Pauline, if my book is not a success I shall be too unhappy to live!”

“And you can’t ask your husband?”

Doris shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt his feelings by letting him know that Colonel Deering has told me.”

Pauline sat a moment debating the point. She was greatly moved by Doris’s sudden and dramatic declaration that she had an Indian relation in the lines of the 10th Punjabis. Her marriage was laid bare in all its strangeness by this revelation. And her quickly breathed suggestion that she should ask Mr. Fisher to guide her to the place where the Indian woman dwelt sounded nothing momentous to arouse opposition, save the mild opposition of doubts and hesitations.

Now came her claim of professional privilege ‘as an author,’ and her clamour for happiness.

“Yes, dearest, do go,” Pauline declared. “Why not?”

Chapter XIV

Events, small in themselves, but of importance to Dera Ismail Khan, began to move fast. Soldier, doctor, priest, author—the four professions jostled. And in a cantonment energised by men, a woman suddenly made her ambitions felt. On Monday morning a cavalry officer rode back from the regimental grass farm, his morning’s work that of a farmer, while the cantonment magistrate, a captain in the 1st Punjabis, finished his inspection of the high piled supply of timber which a party of stalwart sepoys were engaged in sawing into logs for cantonment fires. He had previously ridden down every road scrutinising the lamps. Sepoys took it in turn to act as lamplighters, and made but an indifferent job of it. Cantonment malis, bhistis, and sweepers tended the flowers on the mall, and watered and swept the roads. Presently the magistrate went into his office and attended to such cases as came under his jurisdiction. Among his pile of correspondence was a letter from Mrs. Thompson, inquiring whether he could send her a khitmutgar of good character, and reporting a butcher in the market for exorbitant charges and underweight. Another letter complained of the quality of the butter. The cantonment dairy was organised and supervised by a committee of officers, and sepoys were employed as dairymaids, bored but philosophical. The principal medical officer stood glaring into an inadequately scrubbed milk-pail at the moment that young Williams read Pussy’s indignant letter, and a bashfully guilty Pathan looked from the pail to the Burra Doctor Sahib and murmured, “What is to be done? Without doubt it is a little dirty. But I made it clean. There is much dust.” Later in the morning Williams gave sentence in the case of a dhobi who had laden a little lame donkey with cruel piles of wet linen. Correspondence passed to and fro from the brigade office to the regimental offices, the cantonment magistrate’s office, and the office of the supply and transport, and the office of the public works, and the Club secretary. Law and order, food and drink, bungalows and roads, Society itself, all under military sway. Military officers striving together for health and efficiency, and attaining their object, notwithstanding the fact that Williams had no previous training in the organising of a dairy and a servants’ registry office, or of magisterial work. “I came fresh to it,” he acknowledged cheerfully, and added with relief, “Someone will have to take it on soon, for I’m off to a musketry class.”

Doris, intent on her novel and the money and fame it should bring her, dispatched a note to Lawrence Fisher on Monday afternoon, and followed it in her buggy in the space of half an hour. Doris was truthful as a rule because she was courageous, but in the attainment of any mental desire she did not scruple to set forth facts in an artificial light. Fisher certainly had no knowledge of the true state of affairs when he read her note, which ran as follows: “My husband is attending a havildar in your regiment, Ghulam Mahomed, who is ill in hospital. His wife is somewhere in your lines, and I am to take her news of her husband at once. I shall be at your gate at four o’clock, and want you to escort me to her abode, as I can’t invade the lines alone.”

While he waited by the gate the boy looked worried. He was fully aware that Deering was not pleased with him. “He has a down on me,” he gloomed to himself. And he knew and resented the fact that the thought of Doris, her presence, her words, her strong and unsympathetic moods, had become an obsession with him. Gay and careless fellow though he might be, this tide that carried him beyond prudence and dignity in his dealings with an Indian’s wife inspired him with dread while he still drifted.

“Very good of you to bother to go and see this woman. I don’t suppose she cares much that her husband is ill. Perhaps she hates the sight of him,” he remarked, as he jumped into the buggy beside Doris.

“I dare say you think nobody could care for an Indian husband,” Doris dazed him by rejoining.

“You had better not ask me what I think,” he said, with youthful wrath. He looked very young and fair and smart.

“I mean to tell you what I think one of these days,” the astonishing lady continued. “But not yet. I am not quite sure yet.”

“I am perfectly certain that I know what you had better do—what you will have to do in the end,” Fisher declared. All the pent-up emotion of weeks swept him off his feet. “You will have to chuck the life you are leading and . . . and let somebody look after you.”

“Don’t say anything more now,” Doris commanded. “You are my one real friend, and I shall confide in you when the time comes. But if you say another word now it will end everything between us—everything.”

“All right,” Fisher agreed, much excited. “But I have your promise to confide in me. I shall keep you to that.” They drove into the Fort, and he felt sobered. A woman by his side was an unwonted experience to him in these surroundings. A mental picture of more rehearsals and all their repressions irked him. . . . “Fooling round . . .” he sighed to himself.

Aloud he summoned a Sikh sepoy. “Come here. Call a Punjabi Mohammedan, will you?”

The sepoy went on the message, and the pair sat in the buggy, and the men of the Far East took note.

“Huzoor!” One of D Company stood and saluted.

“This Memsahib wishes to speak with the House of Ghulam Mahomed, havildar. Ghulam Mahomed’s House is here?”

“I have no knowledge, Sahib. Perhaps she is here.”

“Go and ask.” Fisher felt uncomfortable. Wives of sepoys were not a subject of discussion between British officers and their men.

An elderly sepoy returned. “Ghulam Mahomed’s House is here. I am from the village of Ghulam Mahomed,” he said

“Take the Memsahib to her,” Fisher commanded. He helped Doris to alight, and all three walked in silence to the closed door in the married quarters.

“This is the door, Huzoor,” the sepoy said. “I may not enter.”

“Here you are,” Fisher told Doris. “I will wait for you.”

Doris knocked at the door, opened it without waiting for an answer, and then slipped inside.

“The havildar is very ill,” the sepoy said.

“Yes, pneumonia,” his Sahib replied, and, dismissing the subject, said he would like a look at the regimental mules, and the two strode off together. Within ten minutes all the Punjabi Mohammedan Company were aware that Rahman Khan’s wife had been brought to the lines by Fisher Sahib and was now with the wife of Ghulam Mahomed. Endless speculations growled and whispered. Presently, the mules inspected, Fisher strolled back to meet Doris.

Doris stood unnoticed in a little courtyard open to the sky. Except for a pile of firewood and two gurrahs of water, it was empty. The American pulled aside a torn chic that hung awry over a small doorway in the tiny quarter of the havildar. An exclamation startled her, and from beside a charpoy a woman, tall as herself, arose, disturbed at her simple meal of chuppattees. Greatly disturbed, since the act of eating was an act of privacy or of the most intimate communion in fellowship to this Oriental—and what fellowship had she with this amazing intruder? She, who had never spoken to a woman of the ruling race, and never beheld one save on her railway journey to Darya Khan. Confronted with a European stranger, she had no prescribed custom of courtesy to guide her. While India the man has established an accepted code of intercourse, India the woman, invisible as is the breath of life, has only her innate courtesy and sense of deference to instruct her, and Ghulam Mahomed’s wife could but give them such expression as was traditional with her in her social homage to older and more influential purdah women.

“Who are you?” she cried; and Doris stared at her in frank admiration. So beautifully liquid were her dark eyes, so even her white teeth, so wheat-coloured the softly curved, sensual face. A great upstanding wench, who had taken her fine physique from her father’s hardy stock. Clad in rough cloth and veiled by a graceful sari, while her heavy silver ornaments clanked and jingled, she gave an impression of something infinitely feminine, something mysterious, something passionate and intractable. Though little more than a child herself as the West counts years, she was an expectant mother.

“I am Rahman Khan’s Memsahib,” Doris said to Ghulam Mahomed’s House.

“Achacha!” murmured the House, and beheld this living scandal with a terrible curiosity.

“Why have you come?” the House demanded, and rustled to the ground, where she sat upon her heels in a queer huddle that yet left a picture of grace and attraction upon Doris’s mind, intently storing notes for her book.

The interview was not following the lines she had anticipated. She had expected to be treated as a royalty. She sat down firmly on the end of the charpoy.

“Ghulam Mahomed is ill, and your uncle is taking care of him,” she answered.

“He takes no care of him! The havildar is very ill,” the woman wailed, a quick terror in her eyes. She cracked all her finger joints.

“Rahman Khan is a very clever doctor. Do not fear. He will make Ghulam Mahomed well,” Doris reiterated. In mentioning her husband by name, she shocked the niece profoundly. “I am your aunt,” she added.

“You are no aunt,” the other pronounced judicially. “Memsahib hai.”

“Yes, of course I am of the Sahib-log,” Doris agreed; “but I am the wife of Rahman Khan, and therefore I am your aunt.”

“I understand nothing,” the House declared obstinately; and then, with her young voice suddenly pitched high and aggressive, she demanded, “Why do you take all the rupees?”

Doris made her repeat the offensive question three times, and finally, bewildered but stirred to anger, said sternly, “What manner of talk is this? It is an honour for you that I come here, and you speak of rupees!”

Quickly, with extraordinary vividness, Asiya made reply. “Without doubt it is an honour. You are a Memsahib. Do not be angry. What do I know? I have only heard. The havildar has many times asked for the rupees, and the Doctor says always, ‘I will give, I will give.’ But he never gives. I have heard that all men say, ‘The Mem takes all the rupees.’ Why do you take them? My mother is poor, and she send many letters.” One little gesticulating hand fluttered like a brown autumn leaf blown by a gale. There was a suggestion of violent emotion in its movements.

“Ghulam Mahomed lies,” cried the American proudly. “Why should Rahman Khan give him money? Is he a beggar? Why should he give your mother money? She has money of her own. It is the same cry with all you people—money, money, money.”

“I do not understand,” the Eastern woman replied, truthfully enough. Doris’s pronunciation was so foreign to her ear that she caught but little of her meaning. But one fact she understood perfectly: this Scandal was refusing her money and was speaking scornfully of Ghulam Mahomed. And this bred enmity with the swiftness of lightning. To the Indian wife life was represented in all its aspects by the one word ‘family.’ Doris Hind, American and Christian, as the wife of her mother’s brother spelt invasion of blood and creed and soil, for to her pent-in womanhood home was territory. The Sirkar was to her something rumoured, but unseen. Something of prestige and power with which she had no personal link, and whose authority she had never personally experienced. It stood in her daily existence, where sex and motherhood and custom reigned supreme, for the ‘glory and the nothing of a Name.’

“I do not understand,” she repeated, and her antagonism declared itself in her tone and attitude.

Doris experienced an acute desire to force her to understand. Her literary ambition to dissect a veiled woman was submerged by her vigorous determination to establish a personal ascendancy. The arrogance of the educated is in direct contrast to the humility of the wise. “You understand nothing,” she affirmed, “because you know little. I am not purdah, and I know more than you, and more than Ghulam Mahomed. Rahman Khan also has great knowledge. You live always in a little house, and you see nobody but your family. I see all the world. I have much learning from books, and you cannot read or write. Therefore listen when I tell you that this demand for money is foolishness. Ghulam Mahomed has his pay, and you are given this house free, and have no servants, and can eat chuppattees and rice. Rahman Khan has big pay because he has been to Europe and acquired great learning in schools and hospitals in England. But we have to give large sums for a house, and are obliged to employ many servants, and require much food. We are not rich.”

With that persistence and that exclusion of all but the personal point of view which gives the Eastern woman so much domestic influence, the other made answer, “Wherefore does Rahman Khan say always that he will give? He never gives.”

Exasperation got the better of Doris. “It is Rahman Khan who always lets me down,” her heart wailed; and aloud she cried in an angry voice, that from sheer personal pride continued to defend her husband, “This is very bad talk. A havildar must not give a captain trouble. Tell Ghulam Mahomed that if he asks for money again he is a budmash.”

The result of this speech was utterly unexpected by the American. The House of Ghulam Mahomed had been disturbed at her food, had been rendered ill at ease by the first encounter of her life with a foreigner and unbeliever, and was highly strung by reason of her condition of health and her anxiety anent her husband’s absence in hospital. If she did not love that husband as the West knows love, she was the mother of his child, and fierce as a lioness for her mate and her unborn cub. This bold and barren intruder had uttered abuse of Ghulam Mahomed, therefore she was an ill-wisher. Perhaps she had the evil eye. Undoubtedly her influence was malign to the mother and the life that was quick within her. The very essence of the superstitious Eastern woman rose in wrath as steam hisses from boiling water. Rapid, declamatory, without control or reserve, her rage filled the dim room. Violent and reckless as is all frenzy inspired by fear, her storm of abuse attacked Doris and drove her before it, white and deadly quiet, into the courtyard and to the door that opened to the lines, where pride held her rigid, her hand upon the latch.

Outside, two feet from her, stood Fisher, and behind him the sepoy. Upon their ears fell the horror of the purdah woman’s voice uttering the drifting scandal that had been blown by the breath of a dozen servants’ and sepoys’ voices from the bungalow of Rahman Khan to the lines of the 10th Punjabis and the hidden woman within the lines. Of all the pulsing hours of Fisher’s life that was the most vivid moment of humiliation. Let those measure it who can.

And he was helpless. Two countries, England and India, forbade him to open that little frail rickety door. During tense seconds that whipped the blood to his face he assumed the attitude of one who sullenly ignores any possibility of insolence to a woman of his race. The thing could not be. And the strapping sepoy wore an air equally inscrutable.

But the climax stung both to interference. Asiya uttered a word of indescribable insult, and simultaneously the men flung an order over the featureless mud wall, “Be silent.”

To that veiled passion incarnate the thunder of their shout struck with the terror of another invasion. This time it was the invasion of Man the conqueror, irresistible. Her mother and mother’s mother—all the past generations of Houses—had held no communication with the forefathers of the male beings who stood without and crashed command from an unseen world. The very voice of Man addressed to her ear gave a sense of contact which influenced her instantly. The purdah nashine shuddered to silence, struck dumb.

Reinforced, Doris panted at her, all unconscious that she spoke in her mother tongue: “You are an impertinent, uncivilised creature, and I shall see to it that you don’t act like this to an American without suffering for it.” Then she slipped through the door—expelled.

And Ghulam Mahomed’s House, distraught by nervous excitement, wailed, “Without doubt she has put a curse upon me—the wicked, childless one!”

By the evening her premature pains were upon her.

Chapter XV

Pauline piled one card upon another with deft fingers, while Elizabeth Mary quivered with excitement.

“Now!” cried the mother.

Crash went the two dimpled baby hands, and the cards fell in showers.

“O’we gone!” said Baby Keith, from Pauline’s lap.

They were the happiest trio imaginable.

And upon the scene stalked Deering, raging.

“Dad, Dad!” quoth Baby encouragingly.

“Man—go ’way,” urged Elizabeth Mary, scenting banishment for her own lovely person.

“Not bad news!” cried Pauline; for Keith was absent, visiting the outposts.

“Nothing alarming,” the soldier assured her. “But I want to speak to you if I may.”

“Of course.” The two beautiful little beings were carried off by Nurse and the bearer.

“You looked very busy,” Deering began, almost apologetically.

Gathering up the children’s litter of toys, Pauline replied, with the sweetness that made her so very dangerously attractive, “Well, it is my job, isn’t it?”

“I wish all women would stick to that job,” he said wrathfully. “Look here, Mrs. Wendover, I am furious.”

“With me?”

She disarmed him. “With that friend of yours, Rahman Khan’s wife. She has been playing hell in my regiment.”

She seized the situation. “By going to see that niece of his?”

“You did know, then?” he glared.

“Yes. She asked my advice. I saw no harm in it—one woman meeting another woman. And an officer of your regiment took her there. I said, ‘Yes, go. Why not?’”

“Good God—‘why not?’ Do you know the result of her precious visit? Ghulam Mahomed’s wife quarrelled with her and labelled her everything vile—spoke to her as a veiled woman might speak to a woman of the bazaar if she were calling a spade a spade. Brought that damned fool Fisher’s name into it. He and a sepoy—a sepoy, mind you—overheard the whole disgraceful thing. So much for mixed marriages in India and a young fool hanging round.”

“But how awful!” cried Pauline. “Can’t the woman be made to apologise to Doris?”

Deering’s jaw hung open in sheer surprise. “So that’s your point of view!” He sat down. “Privilege. You women have that as part of existence. But, by Jove, you carry it rather far, don’t you? As the ruling race, you’d work it for all it is worth. How about that purdah nashine’s privileges? Privacy, seclusion. She did not want to be invaded. She did not care to hear Mrs. Rahman Khan’s opinion of Ghulam Mahomed. I don’t interfere with Indian women. An Indian’s home is his own. Gad, you wouldn’t leave them much freedom, would you?”

Pauline, depicted as tyrant, regarded herself in this new light with misgiving. “But surely you won’t tolerate Doris being insulted in your lines?” she said dubiously.

“I don’t tolerate her presence in my lines,” the Colonel replied grimly. “Not the place for troublesome women. And I don’t exactly encourage libels on British officers and European ladies being screamed aloud within my jurisdiction. Out that Indian female goes, off to her own village home, the moment she is fit to travel.”

“Is she ill?”

“She became ill last night. Ghulam Mahomed will not be the happy father he had expected to be.”

Pauline gave a little exclamation of horror. “Is there nothing we can do for her?”

“No. Not under the circumstances. Leave her to Indian ways. They may ruin her health so that it is an even chance that she will never have another child—but that is India’s business.”

Pauline moved restlessly. “This is awful for Doris,” she sighed.

Deering growled. “A wrong-headed, cold-blooded, self-centred woman. Do you think she’ll gauge what this affair means to that unfortunate havildar? Or what it may eventually mean to that young virago of his if he takes another wife in order to have children? Race and family are so much unintelligible sentiment to her.”

“I feel terribly to blame too,” Pauline sighed.

Deering did not contradict her. “She has done harm in my regiment,” he thundered. “What do you suppose Ghulam Mahomed felt in hospital when his bhai took him an account of all that had happened? I don’t pretend after twenty-two years to fathom the native, but I do know this, that that sepoy will never be on the right footing with Fisher again. And at this moment the Punjabi Mohammedan Company is agog. Ghulam Mahomed made his report to the Jemadar Adjutant, and he spoke to the Subadar Major. The only complaint he can make is that his British officer enabled a stranger to enter his home and speak to his wife in his absence. But that does not cover the whole of his grievance by a long shot. And the fellow is pretty ill into the bargain. The Subadar Major is a man in a thousand, and he talks to me more freely than to any other Englishman. He knows the regiment is perturbed, curious, uneasy. One of our women has been insulted by one of their women. The name of one of their British officers has been dragged in. ‘How will the Sahib-log get even with Ghulam Mahomed?’ That is their anticipation of results. So they try to get in first with an accusation that a violation of the privacy of the married quarters was permitted. Their feeling is nervous and irritable. Do you think that I find that to my liking? That I call it healthy in a regiment? And I have seen that regiment face death and the judgment of the world—with insufficient ammunition to back them up.”

“Great harm has been done,” Pauline declared unreservedly. “You are right to be indignant.”

“Better men than I have led the regiment and died for it,” Deering said, with seeming irrelevance. “I don’t forget them. I won’t have any more monkeying round with the 10th. But there will be wigs on the ground, you’ll see.”

Meanwhile his irritation against Pauline had evaporated, and his parting words were delivered in no unfriendly mood. “I came to you because you count for a good deal in this little place—our leading lady, in fact. It is a pity you did not leave Mrs. Rahman Khan where you found her: in the background. You made a mistake there. I don’t ask you to drop her now, because I’m not such a fool as to think you’d do that. But I do tell you plainly that in my opinion the less influence she possesses the better.” He stood for a moment brushing up his small moustache with his slight and sunburnt hand. “I would have written to her husband if he had been her fellow-countryman. As things are, I wrote to her direct. I don’t think I was particularly brutal. And if I know this frontier, we shall all have more important things to think about presently.”

Deering proved a true prophet. Pauline, within the next week, had ample opportunity to observe the storm of friction that sprang from Doris’s action. The person who was professionally affected was Lawrence Fisher. He had an unpleasant quarter of an hour with Deering, and left the next morning for Jullundar for reservist training in place of Captain Graham. Captain Smith, I.M.S., was recalled from Rawalpindi and found Ghulam Mahomed seriously ill. Rahman Khan relinquished his medical charge of the 10th Punjabis. So much for the men-folk. Mrs. Smith returned in a few days, loud in her condemnation of an order which had wrenched her husband from her sister’s bedside. Pussy Thompson inveighed furiously against a spiteful tyranny that banished young Fisher on the very eve of the much-rehearsed play, and so prevented its performance. Doris declared that she had received a very rude letter from Colonel Deering, and the Rahman Khans and Thompsons implied that he had stormed at Mrs. Wendover in a personal interview. There were a number of sympathisers, drawn for the most part from the younger officers and the women who had grouped themselves round Pussy Thompson. In opposition were Mrs. Fleming and Cynthia Drew. It was at the Club that Mrs. Fleming spoke her mind. She was seldom to be found among the chatterers in the ladies’ room, but she recognised the wavering attitude of the community, and made her presence felt one evening about six o’clock when everybody had deserted the tennis courts and gathered indoors. She was a little bit of a woman, soft of voice and plump of figure, but unyielding in will. She had a clear mind and an intensely clear face. She provoked Pussy by her aloofness. “She is so horribly superior,” that little mischief declared, and she looked up from her paper and remarked, apropos of the 10th Punjabis’ band—it was band night at the Club—“I wonder Colonel Deering allows his precious sepoys to play to us, as we are all in his black books.”

“Colonel Deering had every reason to be annoyed, Mrs. Thompson,” Mrs. Fleming interposed. “Personally, I am intensely indignant with Mrs. Rahman Khan, who by an impulsive act of curiosity laid herself open to a humiliating rebuff. For years and years I have endeavoured to foster the prestige of Englishwomen among the wives of Indian officers. I have offered the purdah women whose husbands hold commissions hospitality and friendship. They have accepted the one and never abused the other. In all my personal experience I have never received a petition for the furtherance of a husband’s career from one of them. That shows plainly that the Indian officers recognise their British officers’ disapproval of feminine influence in military affairs. The wives reflect the Indian officers’ attitude. I have found them a near and dear interest in this land of separations and divisions. The bond is there—their husbands and mine have fought together in the Great War. But do you think I could maintain even that vital bond without due ceremony, due tact and knowledge? Even now, though I have given these parties so often, I intimate to the senior Indian officer, with the greatest remoteness of reference to the purdah women, that I will receive them on such and such a day after dark. My husband absents himself from our bungalow, the servants are banished, and the women are escorted to and from the married quarters by their husbands. I have had to study custom and ceremony. I have had to study appearances and impressions. It has been a delicate, sensitive task. But to me a labour of love. And into this quiet atmosphere, where the women always showed the greatest courtesy and respect, and sometimes a quick and impulsive affection, comes one of ourselves—a woman who is already in a false position—and makes a talk, an exposure, a scandal!”

Pauline listened with interest. Here was the personal passion for a work—that had been mainly a work of diplomacy—which she had seen human beings display time and time again, but never more keenly than in little Dera Ismail Khan. Happiness in achievement and grief over failure made an ebb and flow of feeling. Before she set foot in India she had imagined flirtation to be the strongest element in the social atmosphere, and behold it was work.

Cynthia Drew came to her, haughtily indignant. “And the Thompsons are so tactless,” she cried. “They are treating that woman as though she were a martyr to our prejudices! Pauline, has it ever struck you what shadows we women are?”

“No,” Pauline replied, amused. Substantial Cynthia looked far from shadowy.

“Mere reflections of men,” the older woman murmured. “Don’t I know it? I am the same Cynthia, but when I was Mrs. Oswald, the prestige of the wife of a major, a cavalry officer, and a first-class polo player, was mine. You may laugh, but I am now a junior captain’s wife, and I sit watching hockey as one of an infantry kindergarten! There is a difference between Cynthia Oswald and Cynthia Drew, and now my heart is aching with disappointment because I have been frustrated in the one thing I long to do!”

“I should like to have just one definite wish,” Pauline sighed. “I long indefinitely for a thousand things to make one great happiness.”

But Cynthia was quite definite. “I want to visit the widows of the Indian officers and sowars of my first husband’s regiment. I could not visit them all, but I could cover a good deal of the ground. I should only need a couple of tents, my servants, and two orderlies. The retired Indian officers in the districts in which I camped would see that all went well with me, and the Deputy Commissioner would pass the word to the Indian civil authorities. I should like to take a lady doctor with me, for the purdah nashine is often delicate, and so are her precious babies.”

Pauline had now swayed to a degree of caution in dealing with India’s veiled womanhood that counselled a withdrawal from such a thorny frontier. She murmured that the Government paid good pensions, and that she advised her to leave well alone.

“But all is not well!” Cynthia cried. “Picture the fate of a Hindu widow—the widow of a Dogra, a Rajput, a Jat, a Sikh! Until their own death they are deprived of all ornaments, all food save one meal a day, all garments save one white winding sheet. They are denied the social intercourse of festivals and festivities. Why? Because they are dead while they live. They may never marry again. And some of them were merely children when their soldier husbands fell.”

“What could you do?” Pauline questioned. And her inner consciousness of creative activity told her that Cynthia had given her an idea for a poem.

For answer Mrs. Drew waved a crumpled letter at her hostess. “I could have done as Major Parker suggests in this letter,” she declared. “He is a scorching, energetic, enthusiastic man. He wrote this to me last week, and made me as keen as himself. He is in my first husband’s regiment, and we used to see him constantly. He was our most intimate friend. ‘I have lost men in France and Mesopotamia I would cut off my right hand for. Men who went through everything with me. Home-sick youngsters, too, who never saw home again. I remember a Dogra, when we had marched and marched and marched for water and found none . . . the last word he gasped was the watchword of his service, “Sahib!” I vowed to myself then, “By Heaven, if that is not your passport to our memories, I’m no white man.” Two hours after he was a handful of ashes in a far land while the regiment marched on. And that is what his widow is married to. She remains flesh of the flesh that knows corruption, bone of the bone that is dead. She is held to be physically and spiritually unfitted to exist among the quick. She is unlucky, and lives with the superstitious, not as a mascot but as an incarnate opal. Not one of us men can affect the fate of those Indian women. The Government has nothing to reproach itself with, but I am not writing of the Government. I am writing of the Army and its own people. We should not forget our dead and their legacy of broken women. And it is a woman like you who could touch those unhealed wounds of the war, who could give to the unfortunate and ill-omened the honour of a personal visit. Such a visit would bestow prestige upon the despised. The sati is holy, but the living Hindu widow is held in horror. You could ease that social problem. You could prove that we care and feel and know, just by taking to the widows of soldiers a message from the Army of honour and sympathy and remembrance. I cannot think why the devil you women don’t do that sort of thing out here. More interesting than gymkhanas, isn’t it?’”

Cynthia folded up the letter. “I was longing to do it,” she groaned.

“But you must go!” Pauline cried, her imagination fired.

“You forget,” Cynthia answered sombrely, “that I should go to them as Cyril Drew’s wife—as a widow who has married again. How can an embodiment of sacrilege take comfort to those who are sati in spirit? Let a woman go who is not a widow, or who is a widow that has not re-married. One must choose a perfectly suitable ambassadress when a sovereign race sends a representative behind the veil. Let another woman go. But I, I am the shadow of two men.”

She rose from her low wicker chair on the verandah and stood, tall and strong, looking out with dreaming eyes across the compound towards the crests of the frontier hills. “And I don’t care tuppence about men,” she added strangely, and took her departure.

All this Pauline recounted to Keith on his return from Wano, his face lined and his hair grey from the glare and dust of the journey. In her heart she questioned whether he brought help and healing to irritable Dera Ismail Khan in his office of chaplain.

He listened keenly, then said, “Deering did not annoy you, did he?”

“No,” Pauline replied. So it was the personal question first—‘my wife.’” I don’t exactly love being told that I have used any social influence I possess in a mistaken direction. But, on the whole, he was nice to me.”

Wendover growled something inarticulate which might have been interpreted to indicate that Deering had better be nice to her. As to Doris, he said little except that she was a woman with whom men did not fall deeply in love.

He had good warrant for his assertion, for in his pocket lay a letter from a much-alarmed subaltern. He was thinking grimly of this epistle when he presented himself at the Rahman Khans’ bungalow next day and saw Doris alone.

“I can’t get on with my book!” she wailed, after she had shaken hands and both of them were seated.

“Stuck, eh? Well, I don’t wonder; Things must have been pretty bad with you.”

“Bad! I don’t see how they could have been worse. Did you hear of the letter Colonel Deering wrote to me?”

“Yes, I heard. That is not precisely the same as reading the letter, you know.”

“Oh, you can read it.” She unlocked a drawer in her work-table and handed him the letter at arm’s length, then stood defiantly upon the hearthrug.

Wendover read it aloud, cigarette in hand.

“Dear Mrs. Rahman Khan,

“I am informed that you visited your niece by marriage in the married quarters of my regiment yesterday, and met with considerable rudeness. I regret this occurrence, and your hostess will be told to leave the lines as soon as her health allows of her departure. I understand, however, that you were not her guest by her own invitation, nor by the invitation of her husband. I must request you to discontinue any visits to the wives of Indian officers and sepoys while they are residing within the lines of the 10th Punjabis.

“Sincerely yours,
“George Deering.”

He folded up the letter and handed it back to her. “He is within his rights, and very much to the point, but it is not exactly an affable note.”

“I gave it to Rahman to read, and I said to him, ‘You are my husband! Answer that!’ And he would not,” she cried indignantly.

“Perhaps,” Wendover suggested dryly, “he could not.”

“Well,” Doris declaimed, “if he cannot defend me he cannot expect to keep me. I’m tired of this life. I have made a mistake.”

“Then don’t make another,” Wendover urged.

She turned to him with questioning eyes. It was two weeks since she had written to Jullundar in redemption of that promise to tell Lawrence Fisher what she thought . . . and every day that she had watched and waited in vain for a reply had taken heavy toll of her.

“What do you mean?” she demanded stridently.

“Look here,” he urged. “Don’t chuck Rahman Khan. The unveiled women of the West claim the power to be faithful however unrestricted their personal liberty. Prove that boast to be true. Prove it to the East, you who have claimed the right to Western intercourse with Fisher and others from an Eastern husband.”

Doris’s face flashed defiance. “Oh, you are a churchman. Tradition and authority and vows—you would bind me with them as so many chains to keep me from escaping from a mistake.”

Wendover retorted sombrely, “You would not go alone.”

She flushed her sense of insult, for all that he spoke the truth.

“You would want Fisher to take care of you. Naturally enough,” he suggested quietly.

The name once uttered, she confided in him with a sense of relief. “I am not sure if that is fair to him.” She could not bring herself to give utterance to her real misgiving. She was in truth doubtful whether he desired to dedicate his life to her. The long dragging days without a reply had inspired this uncertainty.

“It is not fair to him,” Wendover affirmed unhesitatingly.

“But if he cares for me?” she cried.

Wendover shook his head. “He is a youngster still. Men change. Protect him against himself now, and he will be a happier man and a more useful man than if he marries you.”

She walked to the window and looked out at the dreary dust-grey compound and the brazen sun scorching down so garishly. “And what about me?” she asked in a choked voice.

“Listen!” commanded Keith Wendover; and when she wheeled round she read upon his face a zeal and an asceticism that made it infinitely powerful.

Detached and critical, she heard him speak things that were strangely remote, she thought, from worldly wisdom. Difficult idealism, discipline of will, honour of so fine a point it drove you to extremes. Nothing of compromise, nothing of ease. Effort and sacrifice.

“All this,” she cried coldly, “for Rahman Khan?”

“No,” said Wendover the priest. “All this for the Almighty.”

She turned from him pettishly as Shabudin entered with the evening post. Again no letter from Fisher. “Oh, leave me to my book,” she exclaimed. “Men are utterly selfish. I shall live for my art.”

He met the little doctor coming out of the city gate. Did he lead another life within those walls? Wendover wondered, as he called out his recognition. Rahman Khan ranged about half a pace behind him and remarked, “I wish Mrs. Wendover would come to see my wife. She has been in bad spirits lately. I do not think that the climate of India agrees with her. I fear that she will have to go to England in April for the hot weather.”

“I should have said,” Wendover replied thoughtfully, “that America would have been the best place for you both. Permanently, I mean. I fancy you are out of touch with India. Ahead of the times, perhaps. Why not try lecturing in America?”

The Englishman was amazed at the effect of his words. All along the dusty road from the city gate, past the polo-ground, to the church door, Rahman Khan declaimed and elaborated the arguments for and against the suggestion. At the door they parted, and Wendover stood for a moment looking after him. “I believe he will do it,” he murmured. “Poor little devil!” Then he turned and went alone into the empty church.

That night he found Pauline busy at the big writing-table in her room when the clock struck eleven. Since her talk with Cynthia of those ill-omened women, the hidden Hindu widows, the poet in her had been aroused and active. Deep within herself her songs were rising, were coming and going with snatches of metre, vivid flashes of words and phrasings—solemn, swelling, and dirge-like. The heat and ardour and passion which he at the source of all creation had been awake and astir within her all day long, and to her in this mood had ridden Reeves, back from camp and infuriated to hear the rumour that she had been criticised and censured. At the moment when her harvest of mental ‘wild oats’ was ripest he brought her the stimulant of adoration. Her special delight in this worship was the dangerous and fateful delight of the artistic temperament. Well she knew that, should she lend herself to the magic of it, the experience would prove a mighty inspiration to the music within her, to whose rhythm her very will and conscience swayed. Reeves had left her in no dissatisfied mood. She had been sympathetic and responsive—altogether adorable.

And now Pauline wrote swiftly of widowed woman as the after-glow of man, fading and chilling in the darkening splendour of sorrow’s sky. Into the words she breathed the loves of sunburnt lands in earth-built homes. And throughout the poem she maintained the rapture and the fire of passion, till in the end she flung the sati’s soul into that flame from whence life comes and to which life goes—the Light of Light. She called it “Sunset Women.” When she had finished, she threw down her pen and looked round at Wendover, sitting quietly by the fire.

“Keith, I want to tell you something,” she said dreamily.

Two beds stood in the middle of the huge room, and clumsy, rough almirahs stood against the wall. There was space and comfort, but no luxury.

“Keith,” she said in her sweet voice, “I may as well tell you that I know Mr. Reeves is in love with me. And I enjoy it.”

She could not see how the red blood rushed to his face, how the strong jaw locked. What she did see, however, was the amused glint in his eyes, when at length he turned to her.

“Other people are so dull,” he remarked, “unless we love ’em or hate ’em. I know what that is, well. You attract a man and the element of boredom flies out of the window—what? You hate being bored like poison, Paul. And so do I.”

Memories of long obliterated Mrs. Grant awoke in Pauline, but only to make her acknowledge that Keith ‘was never like that now.’ She said nothing, and presently he remarked, “If Reeves thinks he can play the ass there will be a row.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He looked at a loss. “What are you thanking me for?”

“Oh, I suppose for taking care of me,” she answered, still in the same remote and dreary way.

“I try to,” he said half shyly. “You would hate any unpleasantness of that sort. Not your style at all.”

“It would be so unsuitable,” she commented in a peculiar tone, “for a clergyman’s wife.”

Wendover flared now. It had nothing to do with his being in holy orders, he asserted angrily.

“Oh, Keith,” she cried. “Don’t fail me!”

“How—fail you?” He was startled.

“As a priest,” she answered low and eager, and all her glittering hair, deep with colour, tossed and waved about her white shoulders. “Show me the use of all this magic, this influence, this imagination, these forces of attraction. To what purpose, to what end? Miracles of personality, spells of the senses. To what purpose, and what end, I say!”

“No one knows,” he replied steadily. “But, look here, Pauline. On this frontier there is a setting for such a drama of character and conduct—a handful of English, all these regiments of Indians—as makes any drawing-room philandering mere futile vivacity of the senses.”

“Yes?” she questioned softly.

“And it is no earthly use to split men up into factions with emotional intrigues; that only plays the mischief all round.” There was a note of deep satisfaction in his voice when he spoke again. “I do love an army, Pauline. There you have hundreds and thousands of men set to accomplish all that is possible. Not less. No smaller limit. You show them a mountain, you show them a river, you let torture loose on them with explosives, and you say, ‘Accomplish the possible.’ Nine times out of ten first-class troops won’t miss it. They’ll accomplish more than seemed possible.”

“‘All that is possible,’” Pauline murmured. “Yes, that is splendid; that is lovable.”

He flung the end of his cigarette into the cooling embers of the log fire. “We can’t go back to the slipshod ways before the Great War. And all I say of the spells and bewitchments you talk about is this: that you have got to discipline them if you are going to use them for any far-off end or purpose. In another life there must be fuller scope and higher evolution for all the elements which we call love. I don’t know any more about the other life than you do, Pauline, but I’ll stake my all—I have staked my all—on the conviction that it is a development of the life we know, and we shall not improvise an adaptability or aptitude for it at the last moment. It is a question of training. It must be.”

He had gripped her, dominated the vagabond curiosity that is the gipsy imp of imagination. Her heart came home again. Keith stooped to blow out the light, his face young in spite of his thirty-eight years, and there was something simple and boyish about him as he said, “You must not mind if I lost my hair just now. Men don’t feel mildly about you, remember.”

Pauline fell asleep, quieted, guarded. In cantonment and city the family life that is the nerve centre of India tossed its difficulties aside and dreamed in peace. And at early dawn Dera Ismail Khan awoke—not to friction, but to frontier war.

Chapter XVI

“Of course I am going too.” Thus Wendover, standing on the verandah. “Don’t disturb me now, there’s a darling. I must make this fellow understand what I want.” He turned again to his English-speaking bearer and gave his orders. A syce stood ready beside a polo pony, and Wendover handed him a sheet of paper upon which was written a notice that there would be a celebration of Holy Communion in the church at twelve o’clock noon. “Show it to all the Sahib-log,” he said imperatively, and then, turning on his heel, entered his dressing-room and began to sort out his kit.

He was extraordinarily happy. A pipe in the corner of his mouth, and working in his shirt-sleeves, he inspected his motor-bike and those few necessities which a man takes with him on an affair of life or death. He was quite undisturbed by wee Elizabeth playing some secret game of her own on the floor with the waste-paper basket. Reversing it over her golden head, she peeped through its wicker bars with an air of intense solemnity and mystery. He liked to have her there, and amid the litter of his packing left a space for her and her game. On Pauline—tall and slender in her white linen gown—he kept a wary eye, as one who dreads a crisis.

“War again!” she broke out at last. Does it not bring it all back to you, Keith? That awful time of carnage?”

“This is only a bit of a scrap,” he answered cheerfully. “Can’t have a thousand or so tribesmen suddenly attacking a frontier post, and just wink the other eye, you know. It is all the work of that Mullah, confound him. We shall be back in ten days. The powers that be won’t run to a big show.”

“But it is war to each one of you!” she cried. “Just the same bitter madness.”

“Madness?” he growled. “Fear of death—that’s madness, if you like, for immortal souls. Chuck me over those cigarettes, will you?”

The cantonment was humming. The cavalry were already on the move, and the regiment at the Fort was footing it towards Tank. Transport trailed its grim and purposeful shadows along the sun-scorched roads. Officers packing, officers in the saddle, officers in the lines, each in turn was proffered the sheet of paper which the syce held in his hand, and initialed it in the corner as ‘seen.’ In the bungalows, agitated women read it and consulted their watches. By three o’clock the last soldier to be flung across the border would have marched out of Dera Ismail Khan, and the wives of the Regular Army would be left to wait and watch till the tribesmen were beaten and the price of the victory paid in full. A very small affair to an Empire, but to Dera Ismail Khan it filled the horizon, and its earth awaited new-made graves.

When the March sun was high in the sky, a few women gathered in the little church, and Wendover stood at the altar. Pauline, kneeling, rested her forehead on her arm, and in the darkness of her closed lids saw pictures off the old partings of past years: when Keith had left her for the war, when he had returned to it again and again from brief days of leave. He had lived through it. That had been her reprieve from misery, her release from suspense, her renewal of all that made life worth living, her luck. And now, once more, War the Challenger was across the threshold of her life. And she must stake her winnings on this terrible gamble again just because in the heart of those purple hills, whose beauty had delighted her whenever she rode into the desert, a Mullah had been preaching Holy War. The other women thought very much the same thoughts as they stood and knelt. Presently one or two officers entered the church and left a few moments later. Their place was taken by others. None stayed long. There was an air of purpose and haste in their comings and goings.

The brass tablets that covered the walls bore witness to the great reaping of 1914, 1915, 1916. They caught Pauline’s eye as Keith was saying, “And we also bless Thy Holy Name for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear.” Cynthia slipped into the seat beside her for the confession and absolution, and was gone again into the glitter of the garden. The Thompsons knelt together on Pauline’s right at the altar, rails. “Preserve thy body and soul to everlasting life,” Wendover’s voice said low twice over to each in turn.

Young Graham, mounting his bicycle in hot haste and scorching down the drive, remarked to another subaltern, “The last Padre, old Brown, would never have thought of getting us all to a service before we started off.”

“Good Lord, no,” the other agreed. “Feels like a Sunday now, doesn’t it? Hullo! There goes Fielding. I shall have to do a sprint.”

Only Pauline and the wife of the P.M.O. and the police officer’s sister were present when Wendover pronounced the blessing: “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds . . .”

What was in her heart and mind, she questioned as she left the church, and the heavy scent of the roses that rioted in all the sun-swept gardens breathed their sensuous, languorous peace amid the stir of the armed cantonment. Anxiety, not happiness. Not all her published works could ensure her that. Nor her two babies. Nor her friends. Nor her possessions. Nor Keith. But, nevertheless, she felt that with every experience she more fully discerned the vast romance of hearts, the mysterious romance of souls. And in the busy happenings of a striving, struggling world, in the nightly panorama of the multitude of stars, when all else was confusion worse confounded, that realisation of God and Eternity, which the quiet church had held, helped her never to lose her faith in happiness.

“There is not the same hurry for me,” Wendover informed her when he returned from the vestry. “I shall just ride round and see if any of the women-folk need a man to do a job for them. If I get off by five o’clock on my motor-bike it will do perfectly.”

“Are you sure the Bishop and the General like your presence with the brigade, Keith?” she asked him gently.

“Rather. The Bishop is perfectly’ sound. I have wired him. And Sykes squared the General.”

He was off on his rounds directly after lunch, and Pauline wondered bitterly whether he had grown so used to her and to their marriage that he could see other women’s need of support and comfort and overlook his own wife’s. It had not been like that in Camberley, she told herself. And as she pondered the unwelcome thought Reeves flashed up to the bungalow in his motor.

“I hear the Padre is going too. Very sporting of him. But what about you?” Looking down on her in the cool drawing-room, his gaze and the tone of his voice made her intensely conscious of his devotion.

But to-day it jarred. Her manner, socially gracious though it was, showed him unmistakably that it jarred. He was loath to accept this fact, however, for he had a grievance of his own.

“Be nice to me,” he said. “Any fighting is a hair-shirt to me. Every civilian I know at home of my own age fought in the Great War. I was tied down to Kohat then.”

But for answer she said, with gentle indifference, “Oh, well, you are here to tell the tale—that is something. Do you think this will become a big show? Or shall we really have them back in ten days?”

She was a different woman, he decided, and he left her profoundly depressed. Practical and unimaginative himself, he could not understand the many moods of Pauline Wendover.

Not only the officers were summoned by this call to arms. Wendover found Doris too busy to receive him. She merely came out on to the verandah and spoke to him for a moment, shading her eyes from the glare of light with one thin hand. “Pussy Thompson and Mrs. Smith and I are to go to Tank to-morrow. You see we were all trained as nurses in the war. And Mrs. Drew is taking the staff of servants there and will act as housekeeper. The political officer’s bungalow is to be lent to us as an officers’ hospital. Even if there are not many casualties there may be dysentery, and there is sure to be fever.”

“Great scope for you,” Wendover responded cheerfully. “And for your doctor man.”

She looked him frankly in the eyes. “Rahman means to resign the Indian Medical Service after this show and take me to America.”

“Exile for him,” Wendover mused, “but better for you.”

“Yes, the saving of me,” she acknowledged; “and they exiled Rahman from India when they educated him in England. Good-bye. And—and, if you see Mr. Fisher, wish him luck from me, will you? And thank him for his letter.”

“You’ve heard from him?” Wendover raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, just a friendly note.”

“There is not much in Fisher, you know.”

“I hope there won’t be a bullet in him! He is my friend,” Doris declared quietly; and Wendover suddenly bent from the saddle and shook her warmly by the hand.

“For a perfectly selfish person she is a very good sort,” was his verdict.

The sun was less fiercely strong when Wendover prepared to follow the brigade. And he lingered over a cup of tea, his small son tucked between his legs and Elizabeth Mary on the arm of his chair.

“Drew is an ass,” he said suddenly, “but it would be extraordinarily bad luck if she lost both her husbands, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t!” cried Pauline sensitively.

“All right. But it has its funny side. Well, I must be off.”

She turned swiftly and went into his dressing-room. She could not endure to see him part from the children. When he joined her, he put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t fret, Paul. I don’t run as many risks as the soldiers do, you know.”

“There are no non-combatants across the border!” she argued. “Oh, Keith, come back to me again!”

Her arms were around him, and he pressed his cheek to hers. They had kept it fervent and faithful, that love of theirs.

A moment later, her hand took up a revolver from the dressing-table.

“That thing? No, I’m not going to take it. I’ll leave it here. There will be a guard over this bungalow at night, you know, so don’t imagine you will have to use it.”

“But what will you take, Keith?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I am not a soldier in this show, you see.”

What he hid from her was his reluctance to leave the revolver behind him. Undoubtedly he would have preferred to have gone armed.

Five moments more and he had vanished. The hum of his motor grew fainter and fainter, the dust settled again upon the cantonment road. He had gone right gaily.

Was he more of soldier or of priest? The church and the desert and the hills gave her no answer.

Chapter XVII

The Rectory

June sunshine in Laffham. Early haymaking in the fields, rhododendrons among the pines, honeysuckle on the hedges, and in the Rectory garden sweet-scented cloves, the white mist of snow-in-summer, pale thrift, and pure elder blossom. Under the shade of a copper beech sat the Dowager with her grandchildren, Elizabeth Mary and Keith; and Lady Theodora knitted beside her.

“They like the curate,” the Dowager said.

“I suppose Keith will never be strong again?” her sister-in-law demanded a trifle fiercely. She expected strength.

“Not for some years. Dysentery—and the amputation of his leg—have made a wreck of him. He could not undertake anything more strenuous than Laffham.”

“And it was so unnecessary for a clergyman! I ask you, was it the way to convert those heathen Pathans?” Lady Theodora greatly disapproved of that frontier expedition.

“It is really a blessing that Mr. Jones died when he did,” the Dowager murmured mildly. “It was so obvious that the best thing for Keith and Pauline and the dear children was to come here, with a curate to help him. It is so nice for poor Tom to have them close at hand. Ah, Theodora, if little Keith were only Tom’s son! Perhaps Adèle would be more contented then.”

Lady Theodora took up the tempting theme. Adèle and her restless peevishness, Rotherhurst and his unending martyrdom, Phyllis and her incurable frivolity and extravagance, were the chief interests of the old ladies’ lives.

A mile away, Pauline walked swiftly through the woods. Bracken rose waist-high beneath the deep dark pines, its pale green plumes sending the sunshine waving through the glades. In all this lovely land little had altered since her childhood’s days. But it was not the sylvan beauty of the earth that held her thoughts. Her mind was absorbed in people. The gay throng of her girlhood, the agonised circle that drew round her during the titanic struggle of the war, prosperous Kensington, dramatic Dera Ismail Khan. All active, all absorbing. And now perforce this quiet backwater.

She pondered vividly on Keith. Keith as she had first met him, debonair, ambitious, bold in mind and soul. Keith as he became when the fanaticism and asceticism of war had inoculated his spirit with a new zeal to which the smart cavalry officer had been a stranger. Keith bored to death in a Kensington parish, and defiant of boredom and misgivings and regrets. Keith on the frontier, with dual interests struggling within him. Keith, dry-lipped, hollow-eyed, facing a life of physical inactivity and parish routine, rebellious in every nerve.

And what of her own life? The sluggish mentality of Laffham, its monotonous society. No adventures, no inspirations. Only vain repetitions. And, as the last dim thought struck home, her lovely face winced, then softened— “More children.”

Her long light strides brought her to the park. “Good afternoon, ma’am. The Rector left word as how you’d find him in the garden with Miss Moss,” ancient Mrs. East told her, as she swung open the great iron gates. “His lordship is out motoring,” she added in a tone of congratulation. It was not very often that Rotherhurst was well enough to pass through the miles of rolling country that he owned. He lay, dead to all sensation from neck to foot, on a specially upholstered motor.

Pauline found Keith limping along beside the Rotherhurst short, stout lady gardener. He looked better, she thought. Watching him quietly, she fell in behind the pair as they walked slowly down the narrow grass paths in the old walled-in garden. She noted signs of retrenchment everywhere. Snatches of Miss Moss’s words floated back to her: “The bees are all dead, wilted away in their hives from the Isle of Wight disease. That’s bad for gardens. . . . Yes, plenty of fruit and vegetables. Well, you mayn’t like black-currant jam, but black currants are precious for dye and medicine, I can tell you. Soon I’ll pick the first fruit of the beans: they are too near the ground for seed. Do you want to see the greenhouses?”

Pauline did not wish to see the greenhouses. She waited for them in the breeze and the sunshine, with the butterflies aflutter and a syringa drenching the air with sweetness.

When Wendover emerged again, Miss Moss was still holding forth. “Electricity will make even the double ones seed. What’s the lightning for, then, I ask you? Ah, we don’t know all about creation, and never shall. Those last that I showed you are very slow growing; the seed went in nine months ago.”

“Nine months of a life,” Pauline muttered.

Keith took off his hat. “Phew, it was muggy in there!” He lifted his eyes to the great oak tree that spread a welcome mantle of shade. “Fine old fellow,” he said contentedly.

“It took five thousand of those to make an English man-o’-war. Oh yes, they were part of England’s strength,” Miss Moss remarked, and then, pleading a press of work, took her departure.

Wendover was very silent as they walked home together.

That night, as they sat in the pleasant, chintz-covered Rectory drawing-room, surrounded by their household gods, he became restless. Quarrelled with his pipe, the evening paper, and his book. It was Doris Hind’s novel, of which not more than two thousand copies had been sold: people did not care to read about India, her publisher told her. He flung it listlessly upon a table and yawned. It was then that Pauline flashed out at him. “Keith, if we give way to discontent, we shall never be happy!”

“I am not exactly discontented,” he growled. “I am confoundedly disappointed.”

It seemed to Pauline a sad ending to the radiant promise of their youth. Nor could she find joy and refuge in poetry. Those physical handicaps which her condition imposed made her imagination sterile for the time.

A week later, Wendover spoke to her half shyly, while she lay upon a sofa and he lounged near in an armchair, cigarette in mouth, his crutches propped up against a table. “Paul, have you ever kept homing pigeons?”

“Never,” she answered, struck by something in his tone.

“Old Dear, the farmer, has some. I have been over to see them once or twice. Extraordinarily interesting things. Think what those birds must feel when they are exiled—taken far from their homes—to make them beat back hundreds of miles through wind and storm. What instinct and longing—eh? And they are individual, too. Dear tells me some come home best when they have young, and others when they are mating. You have to study their characteristics.” He went on smoking in silence for a while. “I saw one arrive yesterday. Great show. He dropped straight in by the trap door. It is all wrong if they linger on a tree or on the house, Dear tells me. You never saw anything as pleased as that bird—just as pleased as Punch. He preened and strutted. It reminded me in a way of those flying fellows of ours when they used to come back safe on their aeroplanes from a flight over the enemy.”

“I should like to see it,” Pauline said softly.

He looked down at his long limb, and the artificial leg beside it. “Thousands of men in the same plight as myself,” he said. “Half the friends I made are lying in France and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia and Salonika way. Deering too. That was a loss to the Service. And all the widows . . . poor little Pussy Thompson, the latest of them. Over a year ago now. Paul, it is good to come back and find the old Earth doing the same unchanging things, as strong as ever. Never mourning, never wasting.”

“Doesn’t it seem heartless?” she suggested; but he brushed that aside.

“There is love and fervour and energy in it. All the killings and the mendings, the beginnings and the endings, that we’ve seen—you and I—since 1914, the four seasons are at such work world without end. The Creator’s task—it’s tremendous, Paul.”

She waited now, hoping, yet half afraid to hope.

His tired eyes lit up, the lines that weakness had drawn knitted into resolution. “Sun worshippers, fire worshippers, they go a little way. But it is great to be a priest of the Creator.”

Something of the Madonna smiled in her eyes. “And to carry on the family tree. Strange that we should talk of that, and of the tree of life.”

“We are all gardeners, like Adam,” Wendover said.

And presently there came the words she had longed for. “I am mad keen on gardening and homing pigeons, on growing things and breeding things. And you must write again.” The wasted look had gone from his face. There was nothing self-centred about Keith Wendover.

And Pauline, the poet, leant towards him, all joy and tenderness, and quoted the words of a greater poet: “I do believe that there may be Words which are Things . . . that Goodness is no Name, and Happiness no Dream!”

The End