itli M i! nun THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE TORTOISE BOOKS BY MARY BORDEN THE ROMANTIC WOMAN THE TORTOISE THE TORTOISE A NOVEL BY MARY BORDEN NEW YORK ALFRED A KNOPF 1921 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEXICA PART ONE 641524 THE man and the woman were dreadfully still in the joyous rustling garden. Through the early rippling light of lovely morning they showed like desolate statues mo- tionless, soundless, pallid. It was as if the dark night had turned them to stone, and left upon them its darkness. The man was at a distance from the woman. The long emerald lawn still silvery with dew, and the shining space above it, where the birds darted and twittered, separated them, but something invisible, taut as a strong wire held them together. The man was bigger than most men. He loomed huge and heavy before the rose-laden gable of the small doorway, his great back and hunched shoul- ders turned to the long low house that seemed too small for him. A weary Colossus, his feet planted on the brick walk between the beds of wallflowers and pansies, he waited, immensely still. His atten- tion was fixed on the distant woman, who sat rigid on the edge of a garden seat, in the centre of the lawn, her long body tilted forward, her bosom lifted, her pale head averted and thrown back so that her face received the full light of the sun. Her pose was that of a figure nailed to the prow of a ship. Her arms hung down, slanting backward. The powerful gesture of her hands, if she had 9 io THE TORTOISE moved, would have been that of a swimmer, but she made no gesture. Her figure was tense with the dangerous stillness of fear. She looked to him like one who would commit suicide by drowning in the sunlight if she could. It was clear that this man was capable of great physical effort, but now all his effort and all his power was concentrated in looking at her. In the large white mask of his expressionless face, his eyes were like small lighted openings through which es- caped, toward her, all the life that was in him. His looking at her was desperate. He looked because he could not help looking. And while he looked his strength ebbed away from him. Looking weak- ened him as if a vein had been opened in his wrist, but it was impossible to take his eyes from her. He thought: " Tomorrow she may be gone. It is im- possible that I shall never see her again." He dared go no nearer. She was small and white in the centre of the lawn. High birch trees towered above her shaping the sky to a canopy over her head. Beyond her gleamed the lily pond framed in its round basin. He saw her as the mysterious and incalculable, and uncertain centre of the beautiful unsafe world. So he had always seen her. Never had he felt safe with her. Keeping her had been his gamble with fate. He had played high, he had played constantly, higher and higher, and he had believed he would win. His faith had been profound, but now he was no longer sure. He saw her in a new and terrible posture. THE TORTOISE n She had told him, without speech, not to believe any more. Yet he would not give up hope and how could he stop believing? She had acted. She had taken the issue out of his hands and yet he counted still on one chance. If he left her completely alone there was a chance. He could do nothing but leave her alone. Yet he could not help watching her. He could not help looking. He felt sure that up to that moment she had not seen him looking. He believed that never had she seen him looking at her as he had actually always looked. And although it might possibly be that even now his face expressed nothing, he felt that it must at last be the ordinary man's face of self-be- trayal. She had once said what a pity it was that he had not a face of his own. Now he was glad of that, but was nevertheless afraid to trust the blankness of the mask God had lent him. He would have lived over again all the many dumb hours of hatred of that vast pale disc that said nothing to her to be sure now that it was quite as usual, a smooth round slit surface that made people stare curiously and told no tales of its owner. His stillness was not dramatic as was her stillness. It was not a wild arrested movement. His was a far greater stillness than hers. It conveyed no pos- sibility of relief. He was so still that he looked as though never again could any ripple of movement pass over his bulk, neither over his heavy shoulders, his huge torso, his massive legs, nor his feet. One i2 THE TORTOISE felt that his present stillness was a thing acquired long ago and was only the culmination and the tre- mendous result of his old habitual quiet. The effort he now made was only the gathered concentrated expression of the effort he had always made. He had always willed not to alarm her, and he had never enjoyed making her laugh. So he had always willed to be quiet in her presence. It was only when he was quiet that he neither alarmed people nor made them laugh. His effect of alarm or amusement on other people was indifferent to him, but nothing that concerned her was indifferent to him. Now he knew that there was the greatest danger of alarming her and the pathos of her fear that had always hurt him, hurt him anew in the midst of other new things. It seemed to him at this moment that with all his stillness, if he moved towards her, he was bound to frighten her to death. Just as it seemed to him that to her, his restrained regard for her must seem like a curse. Yet he could not help his regard for her. Ages ago, he had known that all he could do for her was to restrain it, so that it might not alarm her. The restraint that he put upon himself was so great that it made the sweat stand in beads on his fore- head, but it was only a greater degree of the same restraint that he had practised for years. Everything that had to do with him and with her, seemed to him to have been for ages. Everything that concerned them together seemed to him to be forever. She had willed to destroy it, but it could THE TORTOISE 13 not be destroyed, so it seemed to him. He watched fixedly the fixed gesture of her destroying despair. The hurt that it caused him was so great that he found it difficult to breathe, but the pain that had plunged into him the night before and had stayed there had destroyed nothing. He would have set her free to destroy if he could, but he could not. He would have freed her from that terrible posture at any risk, if he could, but he could not. He saw that she would kill herself to save herself if she could. And he would have killed him- self to save her if he could, but he saw that she could not and that he could not. There would be no kill- ing and no ending, yet there must be something. He did not know yet what it must be, but he knew that there must be something. He became aware as he watched her that her beauty interfered with his seeing of her. It had always been so, more or less. Now it was more so. In his great desire to understand her, he was hin- dered by the fact of her beauty. Her beauty dis- guised her, and made her mysterious in a less impor- tant way than she was actually mysterious. Her beauty used up a part of his mind and his will, and the strength that he would have turned to her serv- ice. He found himself now dwelling upon the per- fect round of her head that was like a smooth gold coin glinting in the sun. He was disturbed to find that he could not keep even now from looking with absorption at that golden head. His keen exclusive delight in the look of that object confused him. He 14 THE TORTOISE could not distinguish at such a distance the line of her profile, her high nose and the curve of her fine pointed lips, but he imagined them for himself and he pondered again upon the strange quality of her face that made her look a foreigner in every coun- try. It was neither Scandinavian nor Slav. There were days when she even looked what she was, an Englishwoman, but her wide smooth lidded eyes with the sweeping eyebrows that dipped down the sides of her forehead and the thin cheeks that came up high under them gave her a strange distinction. Often she looked to him when she moved in an open space like some strange Goddess come to earth to escape boredom. She moved as if she had wings to her feet, and were refraining from soaring out of kindness for heavy people. Now, he perceived so much energy in her stillness that he felt if the thing that held her gave way, she would shoot like a rocket into the distance, disappear above the tree tops and go back perhaps to Olympus where there was the freedom he could not make for her, the immense monotonous freedom of irresponsible per- fection. Her grandeur was not perfection. There was not that finality to her. He had never found any fault in her, nor had he ever been disappointed. On the other hand, never, and that was the strangeness, never had he been content with her. The moments of most complete possession had been the moments of deepest longing, but it was not only because of his own limited capacity for receiving, it was also THE TORTOISE 15 that his mind went beyond what she so wonderfully was and beheld breathlessly what she could be. He was doing that now. He was doing it as he had never done it. The pain she had dealt him had sent his imagination tearing through vistas of herself he had never dreamt of. He admitted with an anguish made up of shame and anger, that another man's interference had brought this about. One thing was certain, he refused to divide her. But he knew that his refusal to share her with that one or with any other was not a claim to owning. He had never so much as thought of her in terms of owning. It was rather that he could not conceive a modification of their juxtaposition. Either he or she must cease to exist to make room for another. And if he and she persisted, then the other must cease to be. And one thing bewildered him. He was not sure that she saw it as he did. He was almost sure that she did not. If she did, why had she come back with the impression of the other man so deep upon her? She had not left that other one. She had brought him with her. The face she had turned to him on her arrival was marked with his mark. It had become a luminous sharp face. The stranger's hatred of him had looked at him out of her eyes. He had watched for the compassionate sweetness her eyes usually offered him, but when the stranger's hatred faded it had given place to her own appre- hension. Her movements too were not her own. 1 6 THE TORTOISE She had moved swifty, darting here and there in little rushes. Her body had been a tormented thing in his presence. Yet she had come back to him. And she had given no explanation. It was clear that she had not yet decided to leave him. Something had driven her back. Another thing was pulling her away. Maybe she had come back to decide. Maybe she was deciding now. He understood that she was spell bound by the tor- ment of her indecision. All that he could do was to leave her alone. If she had come back wanting to know how he would take it, she knew now. Actually she must have known all along. She had wanted perhaps merely to do him the justice of having there before her his enormous dumb refusal. Silence was their one safety. He put his trust in it. More than their dignity depended on it. Any sound of words would be fatal. He knew that if he approached her and spoke, his voice would terrify her into action. The thing needed understanding. Speech would destroy comprehension. Also, she must face it alone. He had lost her, either for the time being or for eternity, he did not know which. She must go or come back to him. It must be her doing. He was helpless. If she were intending to go, no word of his would keep her. If she went she would go without speaking; he would find her gone. So with one final draught of her beauty, that he THE TORTOISE 17 took from his distance, panting slightly as a man exhausted with pain and with thirst, he turned from her and stumbled his way up the stairs. In his room he took off the clothes he had had on all night, put on some others and ordered his motor. She from her seat in the garden, heard the sound of his car and turned her head startled, listened to the grinding of its brakes and the powerful whirr of its engines and then as it burred smoothly away, carrying him up to the city, the thing that held her snapped suddenly, and with her hands up to her face she flung herself back in her chair. II THOUGH she had not seen him standing un- der the porch she had felt him somewhere in the background and his presence had ex- ercised on her nerves an intolerable pressure. Her physical fear of him had kept her rigid. She had drawn herself in tight, to combat it, but his going did not give her the kind of relief she had expected. While there, he had filled the place to suffocation but his absence was a positive thing too, a vacuum which refused to be filled. There was no comfort in it. Instead of a definite menace confronting her, there was now closing about her a confined and strained emptiness with her thoughts let loose in it to buzz like a lot of flies under a glass jar. There was no longer, at least for the moment, any probability of his hurting her, there was only the horror of the certainty of her hurting him. It would have been much easier for her, had he hit her. For a time she had been so convinced that he would kill her, that she had forgotten his pain. What she hated most of all was the idea of making him suffer. She would have preferred his killing her. Now she was left to imagine what depths of complicated suf- fering had made him refrain from doing so. It was like him not to do the inevitable thing. 18 THE TORTOISE 19 He was a violent giant who had never cracked a tea- cup in her presence. Her mind zig-zagged suddenly. How sea-sick she had been yesterday. It was yesterday that she had come home. She remem- bered the green chopping waves of the Channel and the nausea that had absorbed all thought and all torment. Sea sickness, wonderful and annihilating, had come to her rescue. What a relief. She had solved every problem by wanting violently to die and end the horrid sensation. If one were often sea- sick one would have no emotions and no conscience. No man's attraction was strong enough to counteract nausea. She would have turned from Jocelyn de St. Christe with a groan. Very well then. Her mind wavered. William was always very gentle when one was ill. He knew what to do. She remembered him in a darkened room sitting beside her bed in the night, hour after hour, watching, keeping her alive by the closeness of his watching willing her to live moment by moment, never let- ting go. She jerked her mind back from that mem- ory. It hurt her too much. Her husband had saved her life, so that now she could leave him and break his heart. That was just a phrase. She imagined his actual heart under ribs in his enormous chest, bursting, being torn in two there inside him, shreds of blood and naked flesh. Ugh ludicrous. People didn't suffer as much as one thought. They couldn't. There was a 20 THE TORTOISE limit to any suffering. She was in pain now. There was a vivid, throbbing pain in her side and a dull sick pain all through her. It was because of Wil- liam. She was imagining what he would feel. If only she could forget him, she would be happy. She could then give herself up to enjoying her ro- mance. It was more than a romance. It was a deep, elemental, fearful thing. It was like a story of cave-dwellers of a prehistoric man and woman, a great instinctive passion surging up through the glit- tering artificial layer of social life. Jocelyn was beautiful. She herself was beautiful. They were two beautiful animals. That was import- ant Surely that was important. The mating of two beautiful creatures was glorious. She was not vain, she knew what she was made for she was a primitive woman, and she knew at last what she wanted. She had seen it and recognized it and then had run away from it. Why? Because of William. William her husband was in the way. He was not her mate. The other was that but but William was something something enormous, something strong and wistful and innocent. Could one hurt a child? She thanked God now that she had no children, but could one strike a child in the face that looked at one with believing eyes that drew one's hurting compassion out of one ? William was a power. His brain was immense. He ex- isted publicly, filling much space. Sometimes he ex- ulted over mobs of men silently without show- ing it, enjoying his power. Then in those moments, THE TORTOISE 21 she could turn against him, but with her he was never like that, he was timid a child. It was unfair. Always, always she had been sorry for William. It was exhausting being sorry for a man in that way. . Or was she deluding herself, did it only seem to her like that now? If she were honest, she would have to admit that she had had other feelings for William than compassion. Fear she was afraid of him sometimes. Confidence . It was a habit to count on him and other feelings. But she wanted Jocelyn. She wanted his joy, his humor, his fantastic whimsical mind. He was happy. His happiness was contagious. He was full of "joie-de-vivre ". One could not imagine him suffering very much. He knew what things were worth; he never asked for the impossible. He un- derstood the limits of pleasure. He knew how to drain the cup of life he had drunk deep of it. She had not even tasted. She would drink with him, she would drink deep, deep. His voice made her Understand. It promised wonderful things. His voice quick and staccato ; clever, caressing voice, expressing things she had never dreamed of. It had affected her strangely. The mocking poetry in his voice, passion laughing at its own savageness, sensuality of the intellect, delicate fire. Ah yes, he was a proficient lover Where had he learned it all? She was jealous. Never mind. She had never wanted anyone be- fore. She would never want anyone again never. She was like that. She had recognized him at once, 22 THE TORTOISE the unique man. It had not been the same with him. He had only realized gradually. Men were differ- ent. Frenchmen. Jocelyn was French. He was not primitive, on the contrary. He knew everything. His youth seemed a miracle, for he might have lived a hundred years, so his voice said, sometimes. His knowledge had troubled her at first. His eyes had travelled over her terribly wise, divining everything. Horrid, if one was not brave enough to strip one's soul to his gaze. Shameful or wonderful. He would laugh if she talked like that. She must never use exalted language with him, he would only make fun of her. He had no illusions no dreams all the more reason to believe in the tribute of his earnestness. And he was in earnest she knew he admitted the deep elemental thing drawing them one to the other. Nothing else mattered nothing in the world mattered but that. William was romantic but dumb. Poor Wil- liam ! Certainly his love for her was sublime but how it bored her now. Why had she refused Jocelyn what he wanted, what they both wanted? She might have had it. She was conscious of a swooning sensation. Closing her eyes she invoked his physical presence, the odor of his face, his dark skin, his hair, the touch of his coat and his intangible personal essence so real in her imagination produced in her body a run- ning fiery sweetness as if she were sipping a strong intoxicating liquor. She had been unable to escape William without THE TORTOISE 23 first coming back to face him. It had been neces- sary to confront him with her secret. Her faith in the miracle had been so great that she had not be- gun to be afraid till the train drew into Charing Cross station. She had actually until then expected him to shrivel up at the sight of it. On the con- trary, he had swelled to even greater proportions. He had loomed upon her through the dark hurry- ing crowd, and she had thought: "Either he will kill me or I shall see him lying at my feet hideously undone by what I've to tell him." He had remained impassive, and she had been forced to admit that his impassivity had partaken of grandeur. Yet Jocelyn had remained beautiful. She still saw him as she had always seen him, slim, swift, electric, full of light, shining and drawing her to him. Lying there, limp and flabby in the garden chair, she felt him drawing her, just as the sun was drawing up the dew from the grass. She felt like a soft, sticky substance that was oozing away, being soaked up b^ a distant longing. She lay in a stupor of emotion. Suddenly it seemed to her that she was in danger. Her position on that solid wooden seat in the centre of the compact expanse of emerald turf, became per- ilous. She lifted her head and looked about her, breathing hurriedly, and conscious of her heart thumping. There was the garden, closing round her in all its comfortable luxuriance. The staunch trees spread wide their crisp branches, shutting out dis- 24 THE TORTOISE tance, refusing mystery. The hedges were solid walls of deep green. Where brick walls cut them, pleasant vistas of sunny tangles led one's eye just a little kindly way, but the seclusion of the place did not assure or comfort her. All about it, beyond those neat and charming confines she seemed to perceive a surging waste, something as wide and terribly empty as a desert. She had a vision of herself in a garden, as of a solitary figure on an island that was cut loose from its foundation and set a-floating on the vast expanse of desolate and eternal uncertainty. She shook herself. The garden was safe, but she hated its safety. Beyond it the dangerous future summoned her. She gripped the arms of her chair and looking down into the grass, saw little creatures there. Tiny ants were scurrying across a bare patch of ground where the legs of a chair had scraped away the turf. One was dragging a crumb of bread. He was busy. His occupation was of vast importance. His com- panions too were all busy. The sight of their mi- nute self-sufficiency annoyed her. She realized now that she had hoped William would do something terrible. If he had, she would be free now and running toward the fulfillment of her joy. It was for this that she had come back. She had wanted him to help her destroy the thing that bound them. Some obscure instinct had impelled her. She wanted perfect happiness and she had known deeply that she would never obtain it unless William annihilated her memory, her respect, and THE TORTOISE 25 her admiration, by some ugliness. He had not done what she wanted. His refusal to set her free had been mute and mysterious and complete. He had kept his dignity. His identity remained intact. He appeared to her just as he always had done, only more so. He had not struck her nor insulted her. He had merely walked up and down the garden all night. She had heard his step under her window at regular intervals. The sound of it had made her want to scream, but when it ceased she had listened for it with longing. It took a long time for him to go to the bottom of the garden and come back. Her mind had followed him in the dark, keenly aware of him, of his tenacity, of his weight, of his power. Toward morning she had listened in vain for his step, and had gone out on the balcony hoping to find him beneath her. She would have spoken, or thrown herself down, or summoned him up to do violence to her secret, but he was nowhere to be seen and the mysterious trees emerging above the low streamers of white mist had diminished her sense of herself to a pin point. She felt dizzy and slightly sick. Her chair seemed to sway under her. Looking apprehensively over her shoulder she got upon unsteady feet. The place was empty and its safety was false and the sun- light pouring down did not warm her. She shivered. Jocelyn de St Christe was there waiting. She could see his eyes. They drew her to him. She could feel his hands. Hers throbbed within them. Closer she leant. Closer. She had only to close 26 THE TORTOISE her eyelids and fall into the embrace that waited to engulf her. Something was holding her back. She did not know what William would do if she left him, and it was important to know this. She asked herself plainly the question, forming the words distinctly. " What would William do if I left him ? " Then she listened within herself for the answer, her head bent and turned slightly sideways as though actually she expected to hear a reply, from within that region of her body where her heart was beating, but while she waited an obscure feeling of terror, like a spread- ing voluminous presence, seemed to envelop her and a sense of desolate suffocation fell upon her, as if a gigantic curtain of dust were falling upon her out of the sky. Instinctively drawing herself together she clasped her arms with her hands across her chest where there was so much hurting. Her expression was be- wildered. Could it be that a question asked so dis- tinctly in words could be answered by such a shape- less sensation? That was not what she wanted. She was suffering enough as it was. She wanted some precise knowledge, some literal certainty; any fact that would fix her in regard to the man she was bound to. She must know what he would do before she did anything herself. See walked across to the lily pond and looked down THE TORTOISE 27 into the water. There she saw her reflection and little gold fishes swimming across it. " What would he do? What would he do? " The round stone basin held a pool of infinity cap- tive. Looking down beyond her own image she dis- cerned the sky. She looked down and down into the blue. There was the sandy bottom, and there was the depthless azure, there was too, a white cloud floating and the round leaves of the water lilies cut- ting discs out of its whiteness. What would he do, the man to whom she was married? The crisp leaves of the ivy growing over the stone rim of the basin, made a dark border for the mysterious round of water. The sunlight glanced off from the hard little leaves. They absorbed no light. They were dark and glinting. It occurred to her that it would be easier to tell what Jocelyn would do, if he were the one in her husband's place. He would take a pistol, a sword or a horsewhip. He would probably choose a sword. He had done it before, that sort of thing, so they said, laughing in Paris. He was not very modern. He liked to do things as his grandfather did them under Napoleon. She could see him bow and then run the other man through and turn away slightly pale. But it was not William he killed. It was just some imaginary being. No one could kill William or hurt him. No one but herself. 28 THE TORTOISE Then what was the use of thinking of things that were not to be. Thinking of her lover, gave her no clue to her husband. It was growing warm in the garden. The morn- ing had deepened. The flowers glowed. They meant nothing to her. Her eyes skimmed over their colours impatiently. There was the house beyond at the end of the long lawn. Maybe the house would tell her what she wanted to know. Shaded by towering beeches, it rested cool and serene, its many deep windows open. She imagined that she could see from where she stood, into the pale dim rooms. Those enclosed spaces, so calm and so still, summoned her to them. If she went in and walked through them, they would tell her some- thing. Among all the memories that filled them, surely she would find her answer. But possibly she would find more than she wanted to know, and pos- sibly something different. It was more than likely that the actual question she asked would remain un- answered, but that other questions, endless questions would there annoy her. They owned her in a measure, those rooms. They would reflect her too much to herself. All her ges- tures were caught there as if in a hundred mirrors with William towering beside her, filling her back- ground, wherever she turned, a silent significant pres- ence. She saw him now looking over her shoulder into those imagined mirrors of her plaguing memory. His face wore its white mask of comedy, but he bent his head down toward her in a gesture of reverent THE TORTOISE 29 attention, and she saw his hands hover toward her, as if he would lay them friendly, reverently on her shoulders. She dared not go into the house. It would be dangerous to submit to or to invoke its influence. The appeal of a place one had made to fit round oneself was deadly. Because she had been quiet there, and safe, was no reason for want- ing to stay. A maid came out onto the balcony before her bed- room window. Her crisp white cap and apron were blindingly white in the sun. She had a pink gar- ment over her arm. She shaded her eyes with her hand but on seeing her mistress disappeared quickly. She must be unpacking. Should she be told to pack up again? Once more the grey suffocating curtain fluttered round her. She flung out her arms, and dropped them. " What would her husband do if she left him?" Would he follow her? No. Would he just let her go? No. Would he then force her to stay? No. What then? Would he go himself first? Had he perhaps actually gone? The house was hers, not his. He had left two hours ago. Maybe, he would not come back? Maybe. Could that possibly be? Good God, had he done it al- ready? She found herself running. At the door she bumped into a footman. He had a green parasol in his hands. " Is it this you wanted, madam? " 30 THE TORTOISE " No yes thank you. " He opened the parasol and handed it to her. ' Where is your master? " " He took the Panhard up to town at nine o'clock, ma'am. " " Did he leave any instructions?" " No, ma'am." " Did he say what time to expect him? " " No, ma'am." " Please get me a glass of water. " She thought while she waited. " If he intended to go he would not necessarily have taken anything with him. He has a set of things in town. If I order the Renaud at once I can be there by one o'clock. " She twirled her parasol nervously. It caught in one of the trailing creepers that hung from the low porch. Pulling at it, she realized that she was stupid and ridiculous. She loosened the parasol with a jerk. What did it mean, this frantic behaviour? Why had she run like that in a panic? If he had gone, he had gone and there she had her solution. She had intended leaving him and had almost promised in Paris. At least there had been an undersanding, but it occurred to her now that perhaps the word understanding was ill-chosen. She was not sure of what she had given Jocelyn to understand because she was never quite sure of what meaning he attached to words, and she was not really certain that he expected her to come back. There was even something more. As the servant appeared THE TORTOISE 31 in the doorway with a glass on a tray, she found herself formulating the phrase: " I don't quite be- lieve in him. " The thought startled her with its ugliness as if a toad had dropped on her shoulder instead of a rose from that tiresome creeper. Her outstretched hand trembled. She spilled some of the water out of the glass that she lifted to her lips. The china blue eyes of the groom were fixed on her in an idiotic stare. His face was brick-red and he moved his lips nervously. The water was cool and good. She drank it all and turned back wearily into the garden. If she didn't trust Jocelyn, what was there left her to do? It was eleven o'clock by the sundial. A blue jay flashed from one tree to another. A pearly haze hung above the river beyond the fields. She took the path that led to the orchard. Sweetbriar made a frail green tunnel for her to pass through. In the direction of the stables she heard the sound of splashing water. Hens were clucking near by. The grass in the orchard was deep and the crooked apple trees dipped their branches down into it. There was a singing of insects in the air. Everywhere birds twittered. The air was heavy with warm sweetness. She walked through it feel- ing herself a cold dead thing in the midst of all this murmuring life. Following the little backwater that bounded the orchard, she went on down across the deep bosomed fields to the river. She was a ghost abroad in the sunshine. 32 THE TORTOISE She knew now that William would come back. The thought sent her flying. She could not face William, and as if pursued, by him, yet wanting to hide from the smiling country her panic, she hurried smoothly, in a running walk. There was so little time. She had meant to de- cide something. Yet without a decision to present to him, she could not meet him, and how was she to decide ? Whatever she did or said would be horrible. If only she could get away by herself quite alone for a little, or better still, forever. She must dis- appear where he could not follow her, that is, where the great image of the harm she had done him could not pursue her. Oblivion was her necessity. In order to obtain this, she must get rid of Jocelyn too and her want of him. To be free from her horror she must be free from her longing. " But as long as I live I shall be the victim of both," she said to herself. Why live any longer? She remembered now the body of a woman that her farm hands had fished out of the river under the bank. It had been washed down by the cur- rent and had caught in some bushes. Actually hun- dreds of people had been drowned in the river. Drowning was a blank unexpressive form of death. One was sucked down into death in a meaningless vague way. The water washed all significance away from drowned faces. THE TORTOISE 33 The river was deep at the bottom of the field. Its black current slid by swiftly. She stood with her back against the trunk of a tree and looked down into the water. Ill THE Countess of Sidlington said: " My poor Brandon, I've come to lunch, but you don't look at all yourself. " And droop- ing there before the grey butler, she gave him the smallest of smiles, her little head on its very long throat bent down to him under a phenomenally dipping hat. She was even taller than he, but her height was not imposing. It was just an extreme lengthening out of her childlike delicacy and it gave her in her excessive thinness an exaggerated charm. Her appearance was not merely a fact, it was an apparition, not because there was anything sur- prising in her being there, but because she herself was surprising. Serenely, she gathered to her all the light there was in the dim hall. Her outline was a little too strange to be true. Without waist, without hips, with sloping disquieting shoulders, there seemed to be scarce any corporal connection between the small head on the wavy neck and the long feet that were so far distant, scarcely anything to hold them together save a frothy cascade of mus- lin and an intangible grace. Two white hands, with cool gestures, were there to point out that she was nevertheless, all of a piece. " Where is your mistress? You are not ill, are 34 THE TORTOISE 35 you, Brandon?" The old man blushed under her blue shining gaze. " Oh no, my Lady, thank you, not at all ill. Mrs. Chudd is in the garden. " His rigid face became suffused with a glow of pleasure, and as she floated away from him into the sunlight murmuring that she would find his mistress herself, his pale eyes followed her. " Thank God, her Ladyship's come! " he said to himself." Things aren't as they should be in this house, and that's the truth. " The merest glimpse of a small chin under a droop- ing hat, the lightest note of sympathy in a cool voice and the thing was done. Brandon was a happier man. A spell had been cast upon him. "A very naughty lady" Mayfair said of her in- dulgently. " A magic lady weaving spells," some one had called her, but the mass of her friends did not ask themselves why they loved her, or worry about forgiving her. She was just Peggy Sidlington and they found no fault with her. She did not look at all like a person admired over half a dozen continents. For the moment she looked just a nice country girl. Going into the sunlight she became at once a part of the garden. It wel- comed her. Her freshness was uncorrupted. It sweetly mocked the flowers. She took off her hat, baring her narrow little curly head to the sun. The blue larkspur along the hedge vied with her eyes in blueness. A gardener sent her down the path to the river. 36 THE TORTOISE He had seen Mrs. Chudd go that way an hour be- fore. She gave him her hat to take back to the house and swept away from him across the grass with a long free movement, lifting her head to the sweet sky where lazy little white clouds floated. She was happy. She was thinking of the nicest man in the world who was coming to fetch her that afternoon. But she was troubled about Helen. Something out of the ordinary she knew had hap- pened in Paris. Helen had written just one strange little note during the month she had been away. From across the wide field that dipped to the river she spied the white figure crouching on the bank. She waved. There was no responsive movement. Lady Sidlington had erratic perceptions. She was ignorant of a great many things from choice. Things that bored her were blandly ignored. She had a way of slipping through experiences untouched, but she had a flaire for the dangers and troubles of people she liked. Helen, she knew, was not like herself. Anything that happened to Helen would be something big, because she would take it that way. Brandon's worried old face had impressed her. She now connected its harrassed look with a certain queerness in Helen's distant posture. She sent out a strong note across the field, halloo-ing through the funnel of her hands. She saw Helen lurch forward then sideways, and backward, and then holding her breath she saw with immense re- lief that the white figure was still there. She knew THE TORTOISE 37 that she had expected for one horrid instant to see it disappear. She exclaimed: "Merciful God!" and ran. She ran well. There was nothing of the languid attenu- ated doll about her as she ran. " You needn't have run, Peggy dear," said Helen without so much as lifting her eyes from the stream that swirled under the bank. " I may if I like, I suppose, darling. " " Certainly, but it's so hot this morning. " Lady Sidlington looked closely at the back of the golden head on the strong broad shoulders. She was convinced that her friend had been about to throw herself into the river. She was conscious of a mute and terrible struggle going on in that strong crouching body with its long bowed back and tense arms. Her own heart was beating painfully. There being however no further need for action and every reason for calmness, she became languid again, and drooped beside the great tree, superla- tively quiet. " Aren't you glad to see me? " she asked sweetly. " The back of your head looks strangely savage. " " Don't be absurd. " Helen turned abruptly. They stared at each other. The eyes of the woman on the ground defended her secret from the gaze of the woman standing above her. " I came to lunch, " said Peggy's voice. " I'll go away if you like, though it would be rather unkind of you to pack me off. " Her eyes said: "Give it up. You can't get away from me. I'm that curious 38 THE TORTOISE thing called your best friend and I'm making the most of all my privileges. I'm interfering with your life at a crucial moment and I mean to do so." Presently, it looked as if an unseen hand had taken Helen by the scalp and was shaking her. A violent jerking travelled down her body. Dry scraping sounds came through her, choking their way out of her throat into the drowsy air. " Not you, Oh my dear, not you of all people ! " groaned Peggy, swooping down and gathering the sobbing body into her arms. Her legs crossed under her, she held the violent creature, one arm tight round the shoulders, the other round the leaping waist, and against the quaking turmoil of her burden she opposed her own rigid quiet, and to the hurting noises, her pointed, determined silence. For a long time, she sat there. The golden mo- ments of the humming noon slipped by one by one over her head. Gradually she compressed those sobbings and shakings, little by little, she imposed 'quiet. The warm field drowsed behind her. A fisherman on the far bank of the river flicked a mi- nute silvery fish out of the water. Helen at last lay still. Her hair clung in a damp mass to her head. Her body was hot with the perspiration of anguish. Peggy Sidlington marvelled at the force that had spent itself in her arms. She spoke mildly, caress- ingly, coaxingly. " Poor child. Poor darling. There you mustn't, you know. He's not worth it. " And then, after a pause : THE TORTOISE 39 " Men are brutes," she announced; " but I never thought that William " Helen freed herself. " William has done noth- ing, " she said angrily. Again they stared at each other. From each a thought travelled through the eyes to meet the other, glanced off at contact and darted back into hiding. Helen said, without speaking: " I refuse to con- fide in you. If I did, you would have the upper hand. You wouldn't betray me, but I should hate you afterwards. " They sat side by side now and their parallel gaze travelled across to the fisherman. " I got quite dizzy looking into the water, " said Helen aloud and laughed, whereupon Peggy said to herself : " Helen never laughed like that before. She's different. Something has done her harm, she's the worse for it. Her laugh gives her away; it is ugly. " Then they both felt tired and became aware that they were glad to be together. They remembered that they had been together as children. A maze of memories, all blurred into a composite thing with a colour and substance of its own, like a web held them together. Their minds fluttered toward one another and brushed each other, softly. They did not want to hurt each other. However strange they might seem each to the other, they could never be strangers and they were comforted by this realiza- tion. 40 THE TORTOISE They leaned nearer, and feeling the warmth of the nearness they obscurely exulted in spite of the anguish of one and the pity of the other. " After all, " they thought," we are still young. We are fortunate. People love us. Our power is un- limited. Most important of all, we are inevitable, we are women. Whatever we do, we are bound to do. Nothing can stop us. " And above the harmonious rumble of their sub- consciousness, Peggy's sweet voice mumured: " Paris must have been delicious. Who did you see?" And Helen's voice answered: " Oh, lots of peo- ple, quite amusing." " Did you do any racing? " " Yes, some, " "Who is doing what?" " Oh, I don't know. Yvonne de Cibourg is get- ting an annulation. She had just been to Rome. Robert de Beauvallon, the blackeyed one, was badly wounded in a duel with that little white faced Jew, you remember the man I mean. I saw something of the old fashioned people, and was taken into their fine dingy old houses. Dear stiff creatures who look half frozen on the sunniest days. Lunched with the Princess of Narbonne. I believe she had been ex- humed by her daughter to preside at the meal. A famous beauty of fifty years ago or perhaps less. A very proud old lady, not over-kind. She didn't like me." " You mean Jocelyn de St. Christe's mother? " THE TORTOISE 41 The name fell like a dart through the web of their sympathy. " Yes. " " Is he as attractive as ever?" " I don't know, I had never known him before. " They drew apart. A cord of suspicion shivered between them, was stretched taut and sang warn- ingly in their ears. " He is really almost too seductive, " mused Peggy, aloud. " He adores you, " responded Helen hurriedly. " Oh, no, my dear, he doesn't, and never did, for- tunately. " " Why fortunately? " " Because he would have reduced me to a little pulp and I don't like any one having the upper hand but myself in these matters. He's too good at it by far. " Helen quaked, her secret leaping to her mouth for exit, strangled her. Stiffening her mouth, she ar- ticulated: " So you found him dangerous? " Peggy eyed her sideways and announced in a dis- tinct dry voice : " I am convinced that he is heartless. " Helen felt the word sink into her like a drop of poison that found its way to and mingled with the doubt of her own mind's distilling. She crouched lower, hugging her sides miserably. From under down-drawn eyebrows she looked at the serene creature beside her. 42 THE TORTOISE " I know what you're thinking," said the object of her glare. " Just that I am the most so of any- body, but you are wrong, I never willed to do any one any harm; I hate doing it. The gravest accusa- tion against me is that I am too willing to make people happy. " She turned her pure face sweetly round to be scrutinized and spoke aloud. " You know exactly what I am. Everybody knows. I'm a simple harm- less abandoned creature and I envy you " "Why?" " Because you have the energy to take it so hard. " "What?" " Why, falling in love, you goose, and breaking the seventh commandment. " " I've not broken it. " " Then do it quickly, for pity's sake, and feel bet- ter, unless of course, you you. " She paused. A shadow slipped over her face like a veil. " Go on, " muttered Helen. " Unless you've really got the stuff in you to stick to William," burst out the exquisite person rudely. The coarse phrase startled neither of them. It had its uses. It saved words. Helen took it calmly. She liked it better than the honeyed tones that had evoked between them the man she wanted to possess in her mind quite alone. Anything was better than that they should both think at the same moment of Jocelyn. It terrified her to feel that his image was lodged in both their heads simultaneously. Hers THE TORTOISE 43 had been on the point of cracking, to reveal him there, to those great disquieting eyes. " At bottom I'm furious with you, " Peggy was saying. " You and William have always been my miracle, my only one. I used your happiness, to ex- orcise my own calamities and the thought of your goodness to offset my own failures in that line. You were unique, I depended on you. " " Well, I'm afraid I'm not unique any longer. " " Then let's go to lunch, I'm hungry. " They started back to the house, wearily, dragging behind them over the grass the weight of their un- spoken thoughts. Helen felt that she had perhaps left a great failure, there on the bank of the river. The chair that she had been nailed to early that morning, was waiting for them, in the middle of the lawn. They stopped by it. " But you can't hurt William, you simply can't do it, " burst out Peggy. Helen stared at the house without answering. A man's figure appeared under the porch. Startled, she held out an uncertain pointing hand. But it was only Brandon, waiting to announce lunch. So they went toward him, arm linked in arm, dark head and golden head glinting in the sun. People often said that they went about together be- cause they set each other off to such excellent ad- vantage. " As for me, " Peggy was saying lightly, " I be- lieve I shall settle down. I have found the very nicest man in the world. " IV A GROUP of men shut up in a room in Lon- don with the harassing news from Eastern Europe were waiting for William Chudd. He entered the roaring hum of the city at eleven o'clock. June sunshine was tickling the monster. The crowds were happy. A million windows glit- tered. The bright frocks of the women were like petals floating loose from the flower stalks in the squares. The lazy people in the sleek motors and the brisk pedestrians on the pavement smiled at each other. Balloons bobbed above children's heads in the park. No one noticed the long grey car that made like a needle following a magnet for the grim spot in Whitehall where frightened men sat round a table. The men in the room knew something that they were hiding from the crowd in the streets. Their knowledge gave them the look of nervous prisoners. They were condemned men, responsible for the ex- ulting mass of free human beings outside. Together, they turned to Chudd as he entered, expecting help from his presence. Collectively they tossed to him with a gesture of irritable appeal the news from Austria that was but the serious confirmation of their fear of the day before. They were greeted by a weary blink of his eyes and a scarcely audible yet gigantic sigh. 44 THE TORTOISE 45 Then, while they waited for him to speak and help them, he lowered himself in a chair, put his hands on his knees and seemed to go to sleep staring at their exasperated faces as if they were so many sheep, he was counting in a dream. They knew they were not sheep, The country had called them its leaders. Portions of the country named them statesmen. On ordinary mornings they were accustomed to consider themselves more than ordinary men, but today, the immense menace of the extraordinary had diminished their sense of them- selves and they were uncomfortable at being looked at as sheep by those formidable eyes. Eastern Europe was large enough to swallow up a hundred thousand two-legged creatures like them- selves and show no sign of difference. They were a dozen and they felt the hot glare of such a place in conflagration and cowered before the distant heat. If each one threw on the blaze a bucket of water, the result would be scarcely remarkable. W. B. Chudd was bigger than any of them. He could carry an enormous bucket. They had superstitiously hoped that he would do something gigantic. He appeared unaware of their misery or their superstitions. At the word " war ", he raised his hand to his forehead that was beaded with perspira- tion, fumbled for his handkerchief, did not find it, gave up the idea of mopping his head and assumed an even greater immobility. When asked a point-blank question he answered in a monosyllable or cited a few figures in a small voice 46 THE TORTOISE that echoed uncannily through the empty spaces of their undocumented subject. The murdered Arch Duke, rising among them in all his ghostliness, would have given them more satisfaction. They became annoyed with Chudd. They knew that he could not be drunk. If this were softening of the brain, then, he ought to have warned them long ago. Brains don't soften overnight. He had been unscrupulous in allowing them to depend on him, if he knew his was giving way. Some of them, those who knew him best, were made particularly uneasy by his sleepiness. They remembered other days when he had dozed in their midst refusing to speak, his face as expressionless as a plate. The Government calendar bore a red mark on each one of those days. His silence had preceded his thunderbolts. Now they wondered whether they were to understand his great positive stillness as a guarantee of security; or a menace of even greater danger than they imagined. Did he really feel safe or was his brutal indifference his way of meeting the earthquake that was about to engulf them? The telegrams they kept opening, the tele- phones that squealed in their ears, the harassed secre- taries who came and went with bundles of papers, produced on his surface no flicker of interest. The tears of a dusky little ambassador drew no word from his wide closed lips. Did he know something that none of them knew? They buttonholed each other in corners of the dismal chamber, before separating for the enticing THE TORTOISE 47 relief of lunch and asked one another what was up. One of them at last approached him where he still sat like a lonely Buddha before the littered table. " Look here, W. B. C. do you know something in- teresting or are you really sleepy?" The big man gave the slightest sign of recogniz- ing the other's presence, a faint flutter of the eye- lids. " Leave me alone till tomorrow," he replied. " You mean you'll have no opinion till to- morrow? " " Exactly. " And that was all anyone got out of him. He re- fused to lunch. They were obliged to leave him seated there. No one knew how long he stayed, but he was gone when they came back. Downing Street did not see him. He did not stop there; it was a hundred yards out of his way. His way led him back now to the place where he had left Helen. He had made a wide loop away from the place in order to leave her alone. For her sake he had travelled all day in empty space, like an aviator looping in a blank sky. He had started slowly, he was ending his circle swiftly. The most difficult part had been when he had poised motion- less, and had been annoyed by the semblance of men and the illusion of voices calling at him the word war. From the hard height of his solitude he had heard and seen them, nervous pigmies agitating hor- rified hands that would have dragged him into their midst, if they could have reached them. 48 THE TORTOISE He knew that tomorrow he would find himself down among them, weighted to the earth that was quaking. Tomorrow Austria and Serbia would stare at him out of the map and he would have to consider the relative solidity of the British Isles anchored off the edge of a shaking Europe, but to- day he remained in the void that Helen had created. He neared the ground. Approaching the spot from which he had leaped, his senses registered defi- nite jolts of pain. He realized that he would in a few moments find her actually there, or actually gone. His eyes and his nerves would prove her presence or touch the substance of her absence. Pos- itive knowledge was rushing to meet him. The leaping of the motor car under him, the taut desperate leaping ahead of that thing of steel that he was urging into incredible speed, seemed but a mild straining compared to the bursting strain of his heart valves. He saw the world stream past in ribbons. He was aware of the country as a thing of tattered streamers. He tore through it, scattering it behind him. Would she be there? Had she gone? Was he already alone forever? The scratching shriek of his klaxon sounded to him like the voice of his own torment. He felt sure that if he opened his mouth a sound would spring out of it, quite equally hideous. Her physical being flew beside him, crowding close, a thing with wings that kept pace with the headlong motor. He saw her there in the air, her head out THE TORTOISE 49 to the wind, her hair streaming behind her like a golden flame. He marvelled at the vitality of her hair that seemed to send off sparks in the sunlight, and that as he remembered shone in the dimness of her room with a light of its own. Her hair in whose meshes she had once or twice allowed him to bury his face, he felt it now shading his cheeks. Her strong body clove the air with him, the aroma of her flesh was in his nostrils. She was a mermaid of the air, swimming swiftly without moving her cold arms that were laid back along her sides, or her white feet that pointed back to the rushing space they left be- hind them. She was outdistancing him. He quickened his speed. Their headlong course became a race, then a pursuit. A long hill rose before him, the white road like a pole perpendicular to his eyes. He mounted it, losing ground. She shot ahead of him. He saw her disappear like a silver flying fish, across the skyline. Reaching the top he found himself alone under white clouds on wide sunstreaked downs. Plunging again into the next familiar valley, chil- dren in a pony cart shrieked with fright as he grazed past them. Their shrill voices punctured his obsession, bring- ing him down to the reality of a twisting road and cottages. But he was by this time seized with panic. He felt sure that she had gone. His hallucination seemed to him a message. He recognized the iron gates of the Sidlington's place. Through the bars he imagined Peggy's baby 5o THE TORTOISE face mocking him. Five miles further on the gates of his home waited to introduce him to the haunted abandoned place that he knew best on the earth. He settled down to the prospect of a deserted house. In order to make the reality less horrible, he summoned it to meet him. " Her room, " he said to himself. " will be bare of her little things, her toilet set will be gone from the dressing table by the window. The gold slippers with green heels will not be beside the ' chaise-longue '. The miniatures of her father and mother will not be on the table. The bed will remain, with its smooth lace coverlet, and the chairs and the cushions and the white bear skin on the floor. The perfume she uses will still float there in the room, but, she will be gone. If I seal up the doors and windows the place will keep its scent perhaps for a long time, but she will be gone and will never come back. " He asked himself then why he had let her escape. He felt obscurely that he was to blame. He had won her after a struggle. With a blaze of trumpets and to the flash of lightning he had carried her off. He had captured her in a storm of his own making. Now he wondered whether he had committed a crime in so doing. He had a picture of himself running through a tempest with her in his arms, cold as a stone. In those days he had not been afraid. He had grown gradually afraid. Now he knew why. Their companionship that he had thought a wonderful thing dwindled now in his memory to a mean makeshift. He realized that he had been THE TORTOISE 51 waiting all that time for something better. Her kindness had made it possible for him to deceive himself. He had done so. He had been stupid. He had continued to hope. He had refused to admit that he was incapable of winning her completely. He had been guilty of laying siege to the self she had closed from him. Because she had been interested in his career he had resisted the longing to concentrate all his at- tention upon her. Because he had thought that she admired power, he had gained greater power. He had succeeded in translating political ideas into national acts. England as it is today, owed something of its personality to him, but he had done it for her and he had failed to touch her imagination. She had destroyed in him the passion of work for its own sake. What he had dreamt of doing he had done, and this, without joy, because it gave him no added nobility in her eyes. His effort had been for nothing. Everything had been for nothing. He might better have followed his inclination. If he had stayed beside her constantly, done nothing but accompany her, watch her, enjoy her, he would have lost her no more completely and he would have had more hours with her to remember. She might have left him sooner, a little sooner perhaps that was all. But if he had never let her out of his sight, how could she have gone? No one could have ap- proached her. 52 THE TORTOISE He ought to have put her in chains. He ought to have taken her to the wilderness and have lashed her to a rock and have spent his life at her feet mo- tionless. He had done none of these things because he had cared so much for her happiness. Day after day, year after year he had continued to hope that she would be happy. He had worked for this. His efforts had been futile. Yet sometimes, he had thought she was happy. He remembered days when her face was alight. He remembered hours when But he must have been mistaken. He remembered now what a rare thing it was for her to laugh. He did not remember her ever hav- ing laughed when with him alone. The very in- tensity of his will to make her happy must have blighted her gaiety. He imagined now that she had always been subdued and restrained in his presence. He had weighed on her. He had depressed her. It was possible that he was repulsive to her. The strength went suddenly out of his hands. The car swerved. He could no longer feel the wheel in his fingers. Flinging himself forward with numb arms hugging the thing, he brought it back in- to the centre of the road. Shame Ah the shame, the humiliation, the self-disgust, the loathing! It seemed to him that he was swallowing dust mixed with grease. His eyes smarted horribly. He could scarcely see the road and the trees on either side. Fool that he was. THE TORTOISE 53 Why had he not thought of that before, why had he not known? He was fat, he was white, he was clumsy. He was a buffoon. He was fashioned by God to make a nation stare and a government trem- ble. He was a mountain of unpleasant flesh. Why had he never seen himself as she must have always seen him? He had never once looked at himself. He had been far too intent upon her, yet, if she had shuddered, if the shadow of his ugliness had passed over her, would he not have seen it there? Was his own desire such a blind and stupid thing that it made him insensible to her distaste. Surely that could not be. He had studied her. He had studied her breathing, the lifting of her eyelids, the dilation of her nostrils, the changing curves of her lips, the infinite variety of her sensitive hands. How could he not have noticed he who knew what all these things meant? When he kissed her hands, could he have been unaware, had a shudder gone through her? No, no! He must have known unless - Ah, yes unless she had matched his exquisite scru- tiny with as exquisite a deceit. He cowered in his seat, wanting to hide ashamed as if he had discovered himself driving naked through the country. Shame was new to him. He could not cope with the sickening feeling. His face streamed with sweat. He felt it sticky and tight. Waves of nausea rose to his mouth. The children of his own village waved to him. They did not know. They did not see that he was a changed and humiliated man. He crossed the 54 THE TORTOISE bridge beyond the post office. A white swan floated on the slow stream where golden clouds were mir- rored. His gate was open. In another moment he was past the lodge, with the sun in his eyes. Then the house came serenely into view its long facade in shadow and a golden sky glowing behind its rosy gables. His dogs rushed to meet him. Neither the fox, nor the skye, nor the hound had his tail between his legs. They knew no shame. They would never realize. The distance between the step of the motor and the front door was very great. It was a difficult distance. He was not sure that he could cross it. It was the last lap of the region of uncertainty that seemed to him after all, a blessed region. The door of the house threatened him. It was about to open and let out the truth and like a deadly oracle it would condemn him. He quailed, he half turned to go back, the door opened. " Mrs. Chudd is in the garden, sir," said Brandon at the door. THE sound that crashed out of him had frightened Brandon. It was nothing more than the sound of his relief, but it had con- vinced the butler that his master was drunk. The incident had been to Chudd just another proof of the fact that whenever he made a sound or gesture without holding down on it beforehand, he fright- ened some one. It was more important than ever not to frighten Helen now, so he tiptoed up to his room to prepare to meet her. He washed timidly, afraid of smash- ing glass bottles in his nervous hands. He must be calm when he went to her. As the horrid sweat disappeared from his face, he whispered. " She's not gone she's not gone." He told himself that everything he had thought on his way from town had been idiotic. If she had hated him, she would not have stayed. Her being there was a proof of his own foolishness. He imagined her, as he had left her. She was waiting for him to release her from her suspense. He would do it, oh so gently. He would bow down to her from a distance, in silence. She should not be frightened. 55 56 THE TORTOISE Brushing his hair, he muttered that it was a lucky thing for the country. Tomorrow he would throw himself into the national difficulty. He would tell them to prepare for war and make them act. Helen would never know how near she had been to helping on the ruin of her people. It now remained to separate truth from night- mare. She was there waiting in the garden, but she was not the same. He must wait to appreciate the dif- ference. Somehow they must work it out between them. He still hoped for her happiness. The afternoon sun gave the garden an unreal splendour. The leaves on the trees showed trans- lucent against the golden rays, like slivers of precious metal. The flowers glinted, and the people in the distance were ethereal beings whose garments were clouds of rainbow light. He had believed she would be gone, he had even thought he might find her dead. It had not occurred to him that he would come on her giving tea to a lot of people by the lily pond. He stood, fascinated, slowly taking in the mean- ing of the charming abhorrent group. The magic light showed them to him, as if the group were embedded in a crystal globe and he were outside looking into it. If he took a hammer he could smash it to shivers. He had a vision of the actual possible destruction of them all and of the place they decorated. Their safety seemed to him the thinnest covering of glass. He remembered the THE TORTOISE 57 word war that he had heard so often that morning. But all of this only annoyed the surface of his mind. War, spreading like a prairie fire over Europe and the flames of it leaping across to lick at the greenness of England, this he could and had envisaged without difficulty. He hadn't strangled over it, he had fast- ened on to it. It was there now in his brain a con- viction to be acted upon later, but it must wait. It was not half so incredible as this other thing that loomed before him, and God forgive him, not half so terrible. If his reason were rocking, it was be- cause the little innermost spring of his being had been set whirling backwards. A white finger had poked its way in and had set it buzzing backward, and the immediate result in sensation was a giddi- ness that distorted his eyesight. He felt that he must have become suddenly crosseyed, for the gar- den danced and zigzagged before him and he had a feeling of wanting to look at it sideways to keep it in focus. It would be horrid to see Helen jiggling about before him. What postures might she not make. Yet it was necessary to look, it was necessary to scrutinize. There she was surrounded by figures in draperies, cloudy petticoats, filmy sleeves, shiny parasols, dip- ping hats, white flannelled legs, tweed jackets. There she was, she was not dead, she had not gone, no, she was pouring tea. Her long arm in its white sleeve was lifting a silver tea kettle. Her round golden head was bent slightly. He believed that 58 THE TORTOISE even at this distance he could detect a smile curving her lips. She was unaware of his presence and at ease among her submissive friends. Had he dreamt it all? There was a mauve girl at the tea table drinking lemonade through a straw. A pink creature was on the grass leaning against a tree trunk. Some one was holding a cherry coloured parasol against the sun. A bull harassed by picadors with their nasty coloured rags could feel no more frantic than he at those colours. Vaguely and irritably he waved his hands before his face, as if to brush them away, out of sight. How could he see her, how could he find out anything about her with all those things round her? A wave of heat engulfed him, as if the door of a furnace had been suddenly opened in his face, but the furnace he knew was inside him and the furious hot sensation was merely the sign to him of his own anger. He waited for it to subside. He had left her to make up her mind. What had she decided? Was this her reply to the question he would never put to her? If so, what did it mean? How could he be supposed to interpret it? Was he never to know what she thought? Would she never face him? Why should she barricade herself behind fools? What was the use of his years of self denial if his respect for her in- violate and sacred solitude was not enough to con- vince her of her safety with him? Was it all wasted, the terrible continued restraint THE TORTOISE 59 that had cost him more energy than all his public activity? Was the manhood in him that he had burned up and consumed within himself for years, was all that precious power that he had gone on pouring into the abyss of his longing, was that not even enough to command her respect? She was making fun of him as truly as if she had told them all about it and was laughing at him with them. She had no inkling of what it all meant. She had no memory. She was perhaps after all not a human being. If she had had any inkling of what it all meant she would not have insulted them both by the presence of outsiders. If she had had any memory, she would have remembered that never once had he approached her, except at her bidding, or with her permission. If she were human, she would have taken pity on his ugly anguish. She seemed to expect him to endure his loneliness with the sight of her before his eyes to mock him. No, he could not endure it. No, he would not. He would rather wring the necks of each one of those women. He would rather break the backs of each one of those men. He must know. He must have her secret, her soul, herself. He would have it, if he had to horsewhip her. He would strip her naked and beat her he His mind stopped short. He saw her rise to her feet. Her white figure with its golden crown was straight as a taper against the green distance. He gazed upon her spellbound a moment, gasping, va- 60 THE TORTOISE cant, then with a groan went toward her. She was the same, good God. She had the same power. Her beauty meant the same thing to him. 11 Here's W. B. at last." " Hello, Bill, what's the news? " " Billy dear, come here beside me on the grass, it's safer than a chair." ' We've been talking geography. No one knows quite where Serbia is." " It's so beastly far, you know." " You tell us, W. B., we're ready to learn." Their voices buzzed round his ears like bothering insects but with a sensation of plunging through them, his head down, he made straight for Helen, and there, within a foot of her, he came to a stand- still, abruptly, making an effort not to fall on her and crush her, astonished at the coolness of her face that received what he felt was his onrush. She looked him in the eyes, without speaking. The sun met her gaze, turning her eyes to amber, and dimin- ishing their black pupils to pin points. They dazzled him. He seemed to be looking into wells of fire. He blinked. " You've seen her before, you know, Billy," said a sly female voice. " She's your wife." He wheeled as if stung, and felt the light waves of their laughter roaring and beating in his ears. He must keep still, very still, so as not to hurt any of them. He half closed his eyes. " You're too big, William, you shut out all the breeze," said Peggy from the grass. THE TORTOISE 61 " You're an impertinent little thing," he heard himself reply. He had always liked Peggy, why had she come to torment him? If she knew she would go away. It occurred to him a moment later as he loomed there in their midst, that they were friends, his as well as Helen's. This fact was astonishing some- how. His first view of them had refused them any individuality or humanity. Now he saw them fa- miliarly and their familiarity frightened him, for he remembered that they knew him only a little less well than he knew them, and he wanted no one to know him any more. If they turned their easy ban- ter upon him and Helen he would pull the sky down onto their heads and bury them alive, every one of them Millicent with her amethyst earrings dan- gling above her mauve frock, Mary Bridge with her cherry parasol, Peggy with her big baby eyes, he'd spare none of them if they showed the least sign of suspecting anything. Let them not suppose be- cause they'd no secrets and no shame, that he would allow them to let their curiosity play upon Helen. As for the men they were easier to deal with. The men were after all men, more or less like himself. It had never been necessary to point out to them the difference between Helen and the other women they loved so gaily. He had been willing for them to look at her from a distance and no one of them had ever infringed on the liberty granted him. For ten years they had respected his attitude toward his wife. It had, he realized now, been one of his fixed 62 THE TORTOISE ideas, that their world, his and hers should admit their uniqueness. Happy and healthy, changing loves with the seasons, taking no trouble to dissimu- late their passions and their raptures, they were pleasant beings, who still had enough sense to recog- nize that his house was different from their caravan- saries. He had liked them for respecting his idea. They were gentlemen and that gave one something to go on, but he would sacrifice all and each one of them if he gave the flicker of a sign of comprehending a difference between today and yesterday. Even Jimmy Gower, the faithful, never tiresome, always appreciative, would walk out of that house for ever did he seem to begin to see anything. After all, it was only Jimmy who would be likely to see, the others were too stupid or too absorbed in Peggy to notice. Suspiciously, he looked from one to another, and he found their eyes fixed on him. Was it possible that they were innocent? Could it be that his rolls of fat concealed his quaking nerves from their gaze? How was one to tell in the midst of such well bred creatures? Their faces were disciplined to betray nothing. To flaunt their own caprices in the face of the world and to turn a blank stare back on all things disagreeable, that was their way. He became aware of her hand holding out to him a cup of tea and he took the cup carefully, conscious of the dangerous fleeting proximity of those brown tapering fingers that curled nervously round the THE TORTOISE 63 saucer. They realized it and vanished from his line of vision leaving him staring at his own great flabby paw that he loathed. Truly the marriage of those two hands was an outrage. The image of his, wide white and soft beside her slim palm revolted him. " Other men who are ugly," he thought to him- self, " are ugly in moderation, but there is so much of me, so much, too much." He had a feeling of lurching as he turned off with his cup. " Tell us something," said some one. " About Ireland." " Or about Servia." " Isn't it bounded on the north by the Danube? " "What was said in Downing Street?" There was a pause. They waited for an answer to that. " I don't know," he muttered. "What?" " I didn't go to Downing Street." " Bill darling, you mustn't tell lies," breathed Millicent. Why in God's name wouldn't they leave him alone? He did not want to talk. He wanted to stare at Helen and find out from her face what had hap- pened since he had left her. If he kept his eyes on her, he would be sure to catch something. Sooner or later she would betray herself. Her face looked the same. Its outline was as clear as ever and the firm clear features maintained their strange har- mony. It would take a long time for that face to 64 THE TORTOISE change. Its surface would not willingly betray her, neither would it easily take on the imprint of time. After all, it was hopeless looking at her. Looking always blinded him. The curious contrast between the pale crinkled gold of her hair and the darker, almost copper, tint of her face was distracting his attention from his search. In that darkly glowing oval, her teeth were like pointed diamonds. She was not sallow, but she was brown, and her cheeks were smooth and firm and all one perfect tint; an indescribably close, fine surface. Her jaw was strong, her forehead low. It was the lifted arch in the upper lip that made him think of them as pointed lips. Her eyelids were shaped like eyelids in Egyptian drawings. There was something an- cient about the drawing of her eye-brows and nose. " We're panting for news, Billy, while you stand there like a blinking mountain." " You ought to know that I wouldn't tell you any- thing, if I had anything to tell." "Why, Billy dear?" " You're not to be trusted with secrets." "Oh Oh Oh!" They were very foolish. Was Helen never go- ing to speak? He heard Jimmy say to her in a low aside : " You're very quiet, Helen." Her murmured reply was scarcely audible, but he saw her smile. Why should she smile at Jimmy? It was hypocritical of her to smile at any one. He wondered if she would smile at him if he asked her THE TORTOISE 65 a question. He spoke straight at her in a loud voice : "What have you been doing all day? " " Nothing." Her face stiffened. It became rigid. Her eyes dilated. It was true then that she was afraid ot him. He felt no pity for her now. The sight of her fear tempted him. He had a voluptuous feeling. He wanted her to be more afraid. To bring this about it was not necessary to do anything. He had only to will it. " You are going to let us go home without one little crumb of news? " wailed Millicent. "Yes." He didn't like Millicent. She was anaemic and whining. " If you won't tell, then I shall make something up." " Do." " W. B., you're not a bit like yourself." " On the contrary, I'm always uninteresting." He spoke very softly. He wanted Helen to be more and more afraid. " No, you look as if you were going to explode. It's a clue. That shall be my news. William Chudd is excited. They'll be impressed by that, for if you W. B. are excited, what must the rest of them be?" " Pooh," said Mary Bridge. " I don't see what the murder of an Arch Duke in Servia has got to do with us." " Hear, hear! We're an island." 66 THE TORTOISE " Let's be happy." " We are." " No one more so." " But rather stupid," put in Peggy. " I wish my husband were a great mysterious man." "Peggy dear!" " Well really, no one could call Arthur great or mysterious could they? He's so very short I've begged him to wear high heels, but it's no use. Poor darling! He'll be wondering where I am, I've not seen him for a week though we've both been home several times since last Sunday." " He said he lost you at Ascot." " He loses things so easily." Peggy put on her hat wistfully. Her pure little face was turned sweetly to them all. She smiled lazily, and her eyes said as they always did : " Yes, love me, all of you. I'm incorrigible and though their name is legion, I'm a kind old thing." She bent over Helen. " Good-bye, darling. I forgive you for forgetting the lingerie but I needed the things badly." William watching, saw Helen clutch at the two little hands. The group was breaking up about him. " Come, William, put me into my car," said Peggy's voice. She had disengaged her hands. He followed her. They all came along, making a noise. If Peggy knew anything, she would never tell. Her sweetness was unruffled. She took Mary Bridge with her and Jimmy, and a new quiet man with a THE TORTOISE 67 brown face and lazy voice whom she seemed to like. Jim looked at him anxiously, Peggy waved a gay little hand. There was a great fuss getting the rest of them off. He kept saying to himself: " She's alone at last." He anticipated her terror greedily. There was no one to protect her now. She would be obliged to reveal herself. There was no sun in the garden when he got away from the last spirting motor. Helen stood like a figure of snow in the distance. The blue shadow of the trees was like cold water all around her. He drew nearer and saw that her eyes were fixed on him in a motionless widening stare. Her stare drew him on swiftly. His strides carried him through the cold space that separated them, in an instant, but the instant was too long for him to reach her. He had stretched out an arm and suddenly, just as if shot by a soundless bullet, she fell forward on her face, at his feet. He had still another wide step to go before bending down. PART TWO PART II PARIS held its breath. The pulse of a nation's life seemed to have stopped its beating. It was as if the day, the incredible last day of July were not a day at all, but an absolute unlimited interval cut out of time. Beneath the little black numbers of a thousand calendars were written the invisible words "The end"; and between the era that was ended and the era that was to begin on the morrow, the day existed a thin impassible slice of nothingness. In innumerable frightened houses, on strange si- lent streets the people waited. They waited for a word. As if petrified by the sight of some enormous medusa hanging in the hot summer sky the face of the city was turned to stone. The word " War " hovered beyond the confines of the empty day. It was there hidden in the piled up stuff of tomorrow, like a flash of lightning hidden in layers of cloud that loomed tremendous against the edges of the horizon. The oppressed people listened to the great clocks that were ticking out the time instant by instant, and each instant removed them a little further from the shore of the world they knew. They saw their occupations and their comfortable homes and their friends and their serenity of mind, like objects on 71 72 THE TORTOISE a receding land, fade into the distance; but they could not see what was ahead. Ahead was the steep wall of the precipice of war. It was a blank unscal- able surface upon the face of which each one beheld the reflection of his own disturbed soul. Nevertheless there were a great many people in Paris who had never been there before at the end of July. From across every section of the country they had come hurrying. The map of France had been covered with myriads of tiny scurrying specks con- verging from the seashore and the lakes and the mountains to the hot cities. No one wanted to be alone and no one wanted to be far away. Each had hurried to the centre of his interest. Each looked for the person to whom he belonged, and clung to the one who had shared with him the life that was ended; only the children were left by the seaside and the women who belonged to the children. As if by magic all the men in the world had dis- appeared from holiday places and the women who belonged to the men had gone with them. The Princess of Narbonne had Accompanied her son to Paris. He had left a yacht full of friends on the coast and had gone to fetch her in the grey chateau where she was dozing. There had been no question for either of them but of her going with him. She had taken her jewel-case in one hand and her stick in the other and had led the way, her head up and a mask on her wasted face. She sat alone now in her sultry Paris garden sur- rounded by other gardens and the high white walls THE TORTOISE 73 of other shuttered houses. With one hand on the knob of her stick, she sat leaning slightly forward, staring at a bit of dusty ivy-covered wall and before her red rimmed eyes passed a succession of men, in strange uniforms, with clanking swords and proud faces, all the men of her family that she had seen go off to other wars. Her son Jocelyn was in his room in the left wing, packing. If she lifted her head she could see the windows of his rooms that gave on to the garden, but she did not look that way. She was measuring her strength against the suffering ahead of her. Carefully, she would mete it out. She would not allow herself the luxury of any sudden pang, or any sweeping emotion. Her attitude was one of defiance. She refused to acknowledge the fact that tomorrow her son's rooms would be empty; she would not admit that any harm could come to him; she defied the Heavens to break her heart. " I will have prayers said for him every day," she muttered to herself grimly. She would burn innumerable candles and neglect no courtesy to the celestial powers, but she would not be frightened. It was impossible to admit that her youngest son, the one person in the world who had ever called out of the languor of her heart an unquenchable passion of affection, should be taken from her in her old age. It was not for this that she had loved him. Nevertheless, she felt that she knew the meaning of war. She remembered the horror of war spread- ing like a pestilence over the elegant society in which 74 THE TORTOISE she had reigned. Her husband had lost an arm in 1870. Her lover of that year had been killed. She remembered the feverish excitement of the salons of Paris, the arrival of the bad news in the middle of a ball. She had worn pale blue satin with silver slippers that night. Some women had fainted one had had hysterics. In those days men had fought for the emperor; there had been a certain elegance about war. To- day one fought for a France shorn of glory, clothed in the dull abhorrent garment of the Republic. One went to war, with the sons of the butcher, the baker, and the maire of one's village. Some fat trades- men in a black coat had signed the papers for Jocelyn's mobilization. The Government was despicable but it was right for her son to fight for his country. France be- longed to such as he, the others were interlopers. Behind the Princess, in the deep-shrouded rooms of the house, a bell tinkled. Slippered feet moved; shuffling across polished floors. Doors opened and closed. " Pierre," she called. There was no answer. " Pierre," she repeated in a loud shrill tone and pounded with her stick on the stone floor of the terrasse. An old man, in carpet slippers and a blue holland apron appeared blinking in one of the open windows behind her. " Yes, Princess." " What is it? " she demanded without turning. THE TORTOISE 75 " It is a note for Monsieur le Comte." "A note?" " Yes, Princess." "What kind of a note?" " A blue note, Princess." " Don't be foolish, bring it here." The old man advanced distressfully. His watery eyes wavered. The pale sunlight reflected from the white walls of the house made his bald pate shine like a polished globe. He handed the envelope to his mistress and began rubbing his knotted hands on his apron. " I don't know the writing," she muttered. " No, Princess." "Who brought it?" " A messenger boy, Princess." "What kind of a boy?" " An impudent rascal of a boy." " Well, take it to the count." " Yes, Princess." " And then fetch your wife. I must talk to her about cooking us something for dinner." " Very well, Princess." The old man turned away. He was half across the terrace when she called after him: " Was the boy in livery? " " Yes, Princess. Hotel livery. The Meurice, I think." " The hotel Meurice," she repeated shrilly, " where's that?" Pierre threw out his hands in a gesture of exas- 76 THE TORTOISE perated surprise, but his voice remained respectful. " The Princess does not know the Hotel Meurice? It is in the rue de Rivoli." " How should I know? Do I ever cross the river? Well, well, go along." Pierre disappeared into the house. The old lady crossed her two yellow hands on her stick and leaned further forward. Her long back did not bend; it looked as if it could not do so, without snapping, but she slanted forward toward those emaciated out- stretched hands with their heavy diamond rings and her rigid white head under its folds of black lace quivered. She stared at the ground muttering. The note with its unfamiliar bold writing had dis- turbed her. She had always resented being dis- turbed. All her life, she had economized her emo- tions and had opposed her will to any menace to her calm. Her business for forty years had been to remain beautiful. She had achieved this with unceasing pains. No unpleasant expression had been tolerated upon her features. No trouble had been allowed to mark her serenity. No person had been suffered who worried her. Jocelyn alone had penetrated beneath the perfect enamel of her worldly surface. He had weakened her, for him she was vulnerable. When suddenly, fifteen years ago, she had at the age of fifty on the death of her husband given up the world, and had stepped down from her throne there, she had continued in her seclusion the habits of her grandeur. Buried in her self-imposed solitude, she held court among the ghosts of her THE TORTOISE 77 brilliant past. Jocelyn alone of all living beings had entered the secret place of her mind's retirement. Her other sons and her daughter and her grand- children had been relegated to the edges of her life. Their respectful devotion she accepted as a matter of course, but she took only a mild sceptical interest in their doings. Her grandchildren bored her; her eldest son annoyed her with eternal questions of the sale of forests and fields. Her daughter seemed to her much too undiscriminating in her tastes, she received artists and journalists and foreigners. Jocelyn alone amused her and tickled her fancy, and satisfied her pride. From him she demanded con- fidence, coming year by year to depend more and more upon the recital of his experiences for enter- tainment. His amusements she understood, and from her seclusion she participated in his capricious triumphs. She had in mind a series of definite images of the women who had taken his fancy. With a kind of vindictive pleasure she had watched their coming and going, the rising of their stars and their waning. She flattered herself that she was acquainted with them all, without knowing any of them. Of some she had mildly disapproved, but of none had she been jealous. Only one had troubled her peace of mind, a strange foreign woman that her son had once brought bodily into her pres- ence. She had been obliged to give lunch to the great anglo-saxon creature, the first foreigner who had been invited to a meal in her house since the day that the present Czar had dined there. 78 THE TORTOISE She remembered the Englishwoman now with her great yellow eyes and broad shoulders. There had been something dangerous about her. She had not dared express to Jocelyn her feeling of antipathy, nor had Jocelyn confided in her on that occasion. She had been glad when Yvonne her daughter had told her that the woman had left Paris. She could not understand Yvonne's interest in foreigners. It occurred to her now that there was something foreign about the handwriting on the envelope. Suppose that this woman or some other from her cold savage country were to make an appearance at this moment. It would be more than she could bear. She had summoned all her energy to meet the hour of separation. Moment by moment she was letting it approach her. Lower and lower she crouched to meet it, so that it might not overturn her when it came. She had commanded her will to uphold her, but to succeed she must be undis- turbed. Keeping still was now an effort that needed the concentration of all her powers. She felt that if she let go of herself for one moment she would crumble to pieces. If a stranger should come upon her now, the shock would knock her down. " Dust to dust " the words stared at her from the ground. Her bones were brittle. One blow and they would go to the dust they were made of. She was conscious of a sharp stabbing pain in her side. Jocelyn was her son. He was her own. She was about to send him away to the war. . . . THE TORTOISE 79 A feeling of faintness came over her. She seemed to be falling forward toward the stone flags of the terrace, and a voice seemed to whisper to her out of the sultry air. " You are old. You cannot fight against fate any longer. You are about to be left alone. Your child is being taken away from you. What will be left to you ? What have you done for your son to fit him for life or for death? You have lived for fetishes always. Shams have been your treas- ures. Now you will be punished. He will be killed." Convent bells were ringing. Their notes came floating across the surrounding labyrinth of streets and gardens. The princess straightened herself with a jerk. Was she a weak woman fool, to be tormented now by her conscience? That was all very well for peas- ants and superstitious people. The church urged repentance, but she, what had she to regret? She had been the greatest lady of her time. Her black eyes under their shrivelled reddened lids flashed, like brilliant stones in a dilapidated setting. The thin loose layer of worn yellow flesh that covered the proud bones of her face worked erratically. The shaking of her head was plainly visible against the white wall behind her. Toward her quivering figure the pealing notes of the convent bells came rolling. They were waves of silvery sound that broke against her black decrepi- tude. Her brittle body shook under the undulating 8o THE TORTOISE pressure of their contact. She was weak, she was old; her beautiful being had long ago turned to wreckage. No blood in the long pale veins of her body mounted to her face to meet the living air. No breath of life in her dry heart went out to meet the mystery of the beauty of the dying day. The sweet light of the heavens hovering above the hushed and fearful city, found her eyes glaring above a thin column of dead bones and flesh, while once again she opposed to the menace of truth the skele- ton of her indomitable pride. She thought: " Jocelyn will not be killed. No harm will come to him, but I would rather he were killed than caught in the toils of that woman. He would want to marry her. The men of his family do not marry divorced middle class women. His forefathers knew how to live and how to die. They knew what was permitted." When the pealing of the bells ceased her head was no longer shaking. She sat erect in the deep- ening shadow, a black effigy on a throne passing in review the elegant ghosts of her memory. Pierre, the concierge, had darted into the house, scurrying through the dim salons where marble columns and shrouded sofas were reflected in the great mirrors and gleaming parquets, down a dark corridor and up three steps, to a door at which he knocked. "Entrez!" He entered a place of confusion. Two flushed THE TORTOISE 81 young men in their shirt sleeves looked up at him from a quite extraordinary disorder. In the middle of the floor was the regulation iron trunk of the French officer and around this spreading over rugs, tables, chairs and sofas, was a litter of objects: boots, boot-jacks, breeches, coats, leather cases, sponges, bottles, piles of linen, revolvers, soap, letter paper. Jocelyn de St. Christe was on his knees before the trunk, a pair of scarlet cavalry breeches in his hands. Behind him, in the window, his friend, Guy de Bris- sac, was polishing a sword with the tail of a flannel shirt. " A note for Monsieur le Comte," quavered Pierre. " Well, give it here. It's nothing to be emotional about, my poor old one." " I beg your pardon, Monsieur Jocelyn, it's not the note." " I know, I know. But what will you ? Don't take on." " But will Monsieur le Comte ever arrive? Does Monsieur le Comte propose to put all that in that box?" " No, no, not all, a half, a quarter. Here The note, it came? " " By messenger." " Ah, I see. " St. Christe stood up. He fin- gered the note as if it were ever so slightly unpleas- ant to the touch. His glance at the address had 82 THE TORTOISE slanted off out of the window. He seemed to be pursuing there in the treetops a fugitive and annoy- ing idea. Pierre waited. His waiting was ignored. The note in the fastidious fingers was ignored. The disorderly present was ignored. Pierre was too old to be patient. " At your service, Monsieur le Comte," he mut- tered fretfully. Receiving no answer he screwed his pale eyes toward the silent young gentleman in the window and withdrew, but outside the door he stopped and stuck his bald head once more into the room. " Monsieur le Comte dines this evening with Madame la Princesse? It is because of the fowl." " Yes, yes." His old head was gone. Jocelyn de St. Christe opened the letter delicately. It took an instant to read, and was tossed to his friend. " The beautiful Madame Chudd, who falls from heaven," he enunciated concisely. His lips clipped off the words neatly. His fine eyes under lifted arching eyebrows watched the slip of paper undergo the scrutiny of his friend. It took an instant to read, a second time, and was laid on the table. There were only a dozen words to it. They stared up from the paper at the ceiling. " Dear friend, I have come. You will find me at the Hotel Meurice at any hour of the day. Faithfully yours, Helen." THE TORTOISE 83 The two men, so many times larger, so very much more important than that thin sheet of paper, looked at each other across it. Their look conveyed a perfect understanding of such a fine discriminating quality as to make conversation almost unnecessary. " At this moment," murmured Brissac. " You will admit that it is not the moment." The letter became for an instant the object of their converging unfriendly glances. Then the two pairs of eyes looked at each other with sympathy. St. Christe lifted his shoulders and pushed his hands into his pockets. " I understand nothing, but nothing at all," he brought out after turning his back and then facing round again. It was impossible to walk up and down on the crowded floor. "As for that Does one ever understand?" ' Tomorrow I leave for Rheims." " Just so." " After that, God knows where." " Exactly." ' Tomorrow, the depot; the next day war." " Well, perhaps not the next day." " There remains tonight," announced Jocelyn. Brissac had begun again the polishing of the sword hilt. He did not lift his eyes. ' There remains, as you say, tonight," he echoed. His attitude suggested that he had no opinions and no ideas on this or any other subject. His sleek head, his square shoulders, his fine well kept hands, conveyed an impression of exquisite and ele- 84 THE TORTOISE gant discretion. One felt certain to look at him, that none of those closely knit nicely modelled limbs of his could ever make a false movement. Never would either of his smartly shod feet take a mis- step. One could trust them to the most difficult and intricate paths. Their way, at the moment, their owner was say- ing to himself, was out of the door. Silence had followed his last phrase. He laid the sword beside the letter on the table and began putting on his coat. It was a beautifully fitting coat. He was buttoning it up when St. Christe rapped out sharply through tight lips. " But it's not done. One simply doesn't do it." Brissac looked at the fine lean face of his friend through narrowed eyes. The flutter of his eyelids expressed the faintest shade of surprise, but the sound that his neat mouth emitted was a grunt with a definite intonation of sympathy and it drew from the other the sudden nervous query : "What shall I do?" to which Brissac re- torted: "What does she expect you to do?" whereupon St. Christe followed up quickly with a kind of exasperated hiss: " That's just it; I don't know." The surprise on Brissac's face betrayed an obvious incredulity, but it passed unnoticed. " You see, I don't even know why she left. She disappeared at the moment of my highest expecta- tions without explanation, without warning. I went THE TORTOISE 85 round one day and found her gone. No word since then. Not a word all this time. Two months; my letters unanswered, and now, suddenly she arrives, on the eve of the war." " Perhaps she knows nothing of the danger." " Then why has she come? " " A whim, a remorse." " But she must know. Her husband I am told is one of the confidential advisers of his Government." " Then she has come to say good-bye." " Ah, there you are. She may have come to say good-bye." " In which case?" queried Brissac. " In which case," cried St. Christe, " she is mad." He threw up his hands and flung himself forward on the open window-sill and began drum- ming on the stone ledge with his fingers. He thought. " It is impossible, what she has done. She puts me in an impossible position. I cannot go to her. It is too dangerous. If I went I would stay; she is not wise. We would both be seriously com- promised. Beside, I have other things to think of now. This is no moment for a love affair. In a week I may be dead. I have hundreds of things to do before tomorrow. And there is my mother." He could see his mother down below on the ter- race. Her black solitary figure seemed to him very small and pitiful beneath the broad facade of the house with its rows of high shuttered windows. She 86 THE TORTOISE did not look up at him. Her head was bent over her hands that were clasped on her stick. She looked as if she were praying. "You don't want to see her then?" Brissac asked behind him. " No, I don't want to see her. I have only to- night. I must spend tonight with my mother." The words were spoken slowly and with a certain solemnity. Brissac moved toward the door. He thought that a groan floated back to him from the head be- yond the window. He hesitated. On his part there was timidity now, to meet the solemnity of his friend. " Shall I go to the Meurice and tell her that you have left?" "Yes, do that. Ugh! this is most painful." " It won't seem important a month from now." " No, I suppose not, but she is proud, the proud- est woman I've ever known." " You forget that she will never know that you know." " Yes, yes. And there is my mother. She has a right; she has every right." " I'm off then unless you will go yourself for half an hour." Jocelyn turned. He shook his head. " Too dangerous," he muttered. " She would keep me. I'm afraid of her; you see her, you tell her; I leave it to you. It's better so. There's no time. Good God man, the Germans may cross the frontier tomorrow. How can one begin a love THE TORTOISE 87 affair at such a moment? End one? Yes, perhaps, but begin. No. Take a new mistress the night of the end of the world? No, truly, it's not worth while ; one doesn't do it." " Good-bye then till tomorrow." " Good-bye." II JOCELYN DE ST. CHRISTE was thirty-five years old and for thirty-five years he had en- joyed himself. His nature was on the whole a happy one. Circumstances had conspired to please him. If he had inherited any of the austere intolerance of his parents, the trait had been buried beneath a charming layer of softness. Life had always caressed him. Its caresses had given him a genial brilliance. He carried light with him into the dimmest salon. People hovered about him like moths round a candle. He had become an artist in the enjoyment of life: giving pleasure and receiving it in the most attrac- tive way possible had been his occupation since his tutor had proclaimed him a man. He was in harmony with his world. Its limita- tions seemed to him pleasant, it's prejudices honour- able. His people had, at the birth of the Republic, cut themselves off from all public activity. They considered themselves bound in honour to love France and loathe the Government and do nothing about it. It had never occurred to him to consider their attitude as unfortunate. The world had pre- sented itself to him as a treasure house wherein he could let his taste gratify itself. His taste was con- sidered infallible. He had been too busy, exercis- THE TORTOISE 89 ing the faculty of choice, to consider any of his vi- tality as wasted. Selection, comparison, minute ob- servation of beautiful objects, this had occupied him, and if women had become for him the most engross- ing of objects, taking up more of his time than rare bibelots or old bindings, it was because they, rather than he, wanted it to be so. Women loved him. He was grateful to them for being so nice to him. Scarce any of them had caused him a pang. His occasional duels had not been concerned with them. He cultivated certain prejudices in order, as he put it, not to get too lazy. Israelites were to him an abomination. He laughed at them and occasionally picked a quarrel with one, just to prove that his sustained contempt was dangerous. Secretly, he was proud of being considered the best swordsman in Paris. An obscure instinct impelled him, now and then to run after danger. He called it amuse- ment, but it was deeper than that. At bottom he felt life to be too easy. His gratitude to the women who were kind to him would have been greater had they been less easily kind. Of late years, he had even begun to feel that he would enjoy suffering for a change. Being incapable of inflicting it upon him- self, he had gently experimented in it with others, but to humiliate a woman and tease a man to exaspera- tion was not on the whole worth while. He was beginning to wonder whether some day he might not after all be dreadfully bored, when Helen Chudd stepped across his horizon. She had been admirably difficult. Her coldness had been just the tonic he 90 THE TORTOISE wanted. The aspect of her splendid struggle against him, had thrilled him. He had been moved, as he had never been moved before and had been on the verge of adoring her, when she had disap- peared. For a month afterwards he had been angry. The experience was peculiar. Resuming once again the pleasures of habit he had discovered that the boredom he had dreaded as a distant peril, was now suddenly upon him. The summons of the country calling him to pre- pare for war had been an immense relief. He had left his agreeable rather tiresome friends in a state of exalted excitement. The sight of his mother's valiant horror had been to him the first sign of monstrous disaster. On her stricken face he had read the message of fear. Be- cause he had always feared her, and had never quite lost his child's feeling of awed belief in her tyrannical power, the sudden realization of her helplessness had made him understand the immense catastrophy. He saw her, minute and frail, in a desolate world. She appeared to him, suddenly, just a helpless old woman in danger. The fact had disturbed him pro- foundly. Their trip to Paris, which should have taken four hours, had been interminable. The train had been twelve hours late. They had spent the night in a compartment with six other people. He had been unable to get her any food. In the stuffy dark of the carriage, he had discerned her sitting upright in her corner, a grim, tortured figure. She had 1 THE TORTOISE 91 scarcely spoken a word. Leaning over her, at in- tervals during the night, he had stroked her hand. The lights of passing trains had shown him her face, dry and gray with wide open eyes. He had been afraid the fatigue would kill her. The thought kept recurring that in a few hours, he would no longer be near to protect her. They had arrived in Paris at nine o'clock in the morning. There was no one to meet them at the station. He had managed to find a fiacre to drive them home. The coachman and the groom and the two footmen had already gone. The butler they had left in the country. There was no one in the house but the concierge and his wife, who had not received the telegram announcing their arrival. The house had welcomed them like a familiar tomb. He had opened the windows and had helped old Jeannette make his mother's bed but she had re- fused to lie down on it. All day she had been sitting in the garden. He had been obliged to leave her alone there. Without his valet, packing had assumed hideous difficulties. Guy de Brissac had turned up and had tried to help him. They had been interrupted by the apparition of Helen Chudd. Everything remained to be done. It was getting late. He left at seven o'clock the next morning. The aspect of his disordered room dismayed him. It showed him the upheaval of the world. With his well-ordered tasteful life torn to pieces, he felt him- self a nonentity, a naked two-legged creature, in- significant and impotent. He was starting out to 92 THE TORTOISE war, with a crowd of men naked and ugly all ex- actly like himself. There would be no one he knew there in that vast and horrid confusion; there would be no one to help him. He would be alone. He was going to flounder out there and die in some horrid dirty way. His head throbbed. It was full of annoying and troublesome ideas that he could not sort out. Ob- viously, his first task was to finish packing. He hung idly over his box. What was he to take with him to the war? A lot of little objects, a bottle of hair wash, a shaving stick and a confusion of pleasant memories. It occurred to him that the very pleasantness of those memories was a source of weakness to him now. Out of the fabric of the past, he must make himself an armour for the future. From what was fine and strong and durable in his experience, he must supply himself with a defensive covering for his naked soul. He searched about in his mind for the stern stuff of resistance. For the life of him he could think of nothing that would bear the weight of half a dozen good blows of the hammer of danger except the image of his mother's tyrannical idolatry. Out of his mother's love he could make himself a shield. For the rest, he saw himself going off tp war, in an armoured suit made of tinsel. He said to himself: " Suppose that I were to be afraid. What should I do then?" but he could not answer the question and he knew that he could never answer it until the war was over. It would THE TORTOISE 93 always be there, hanging over him. He would never be sure that he was not going to turn coward tomorrow. The idea of disgracing his name made him feel sick. He fell to packing desperately, throwing things into his box and pounding them down. Certain kinds of danger he felt confident that he could meet with success. Anything in the nature of a hand to hand fight with swords for instance, or a sudden spectacular attack, anything in fact that ap- pealed to his dramatic sense but what he was not sure of was the stealthy thing that crawled at you from behind, or the great slow enveloping thing that covered you with the desolate conviction of death. Suppose he were left alone with a handful of men somewhere in a wood, in a field, behind a hill and the regiment went off and forgot them, and there was nothing to do but wait and no one to communi- cate with and the growing conviction upon one that they were cut off. Could he stand it? Was he sure that something wouldn't snap? and that he wouldn't just turn tail and run like hell? What was it that kept men solid on a quaking earth ? Pride, Faith. A deep affection that they could not betray. His only affection, he came back to it again, was his affection for his mother. Would that help him? Faith? In what? The good God was waiting for one to die and the saints with him were waiting to welcome one. They would hinder rather than help. Pride? He had always believed he had 94 THE TORTOISE enough of that for anything, but what was he proud of? His name, the record of his family, the brave deeds of his ancestors? Certainly he was not proud of anything that he himself had done. It had never occurred to him as necessary to earn self-esteem. Suppose he was killed at once before he could do something admirable. He would not have one thing to his credit on the other side of death and would leave no monument behind him. The saints would look at him and say: " What has he got to show for his life? " And some one would answer: " A collection of old Sevres, some of the finest ' Rose de Barry ' in existence and a chest full of women's letters." He gave a loud laugh. His desk was crammed with letters. He must destroy them. Why under heaven had he kept them all? He had kept them out of vanity. Some day he had actually intended reading them over. Crossing to his secretaire, he opened one of its drawers with a key. There they were, neatly ar- ranged in packets. They inspired him with disgust. He saw himself at that table, idiotic, sentimental, eternally answering the notes of amourous ladies. What good would such a man do in a battle? His eyes falling on his sword became fascinated. That was to be his best friend now. He pulled it out of its sheath. How was it that he had been taught to manipulate it? There would be no rules in this duelling. Suppose he were on his horse, and the German on the ground, he could then bring it down THE TORTOISE 95 so, on the back of the fellow's neck. Suppose he missed and the man lunged upward, got his horse in the belly, brought him down. On his feet in the melee, he must slash out. They would be on all sides of him. He lunged, right and left. A bit of china fell to the floor, and lay in pieces. Ah, to kill, to kill, to rip them open. Once one was in it, it would not be so bad. He would account for his man anyway, the man that was destined to bar his way. But suppose he failed. Suppose his nerve gave way, suppose he were seized with panic, and scrambled on a horse, and turned tail, and ran This was nonsense. Here he was like a clown, brandishing his sword about and nothing was done. He must anyhow tear up these letters. It would not be safe to leave them there. One never knew. He might not come back. And there was that affair of the farm that he had decided to sell. He must, positively, write to those people and have the hundred thousand francs by next month. Next month he might be dead. His brother would get the money. He began tearing up envelopes. Not one of these women meant anything to him now. No woman in the world had left with him, even a feeling of loss, except Helen Chudd, and now Helen was here and he was not in the mood to see her. There were bills to be paid in that small upper drawer. He would write the cheques and leave them with his mother. " Votre folle Jacqueline." He looked absently at those words on the mauve sheet of note paper. 96 THE TORTOISE Who was Jacqueline? He could not remember. He could remember no one, but Helen Chudd. She was there, just across the river, separated from him by a few streets. He remembered her precisely and he saw her suddenly in her room at the Meurice, waiting for him. He could recall his own feeling on seeing her for the first time. He had said to himself in a flash: "There she is," just as if he had been expecting her all his life. His inward ex- clamation had been a note of triumph. He had recognized her as the person for whom all his time of selecting and scrutinizing had been a preparation. After that he had seen her in countless attitudes, in innumerable settings. For a week he had re- frained from asking to be presented to her and had gone to every place where she was, just to look at her. He remembered the quality of his inward glow during that week. It resembled nothing so much as the golden glow of the collector who has discovered some priceless perfect object and is so lost in ecstatic contemplation that he does not even covet its possession. She had resented his behaviour. He remembered her glaring at him magnificently. Subsequently he had found himself confronted so often by her long back and disdainful averted head that he had been forced to bring his blissful detachment to an end. She had acknowledged his presence icily and had conveyed to him the most perfect sense of his own impertinence. That had stung .him. He had been near losing his head. Artifice had been thrown THE TORTOISE 97 aside. He had plunged deep, with one leap into the dark well of her seduction. He had had at mo- ments the feeling of drowning. Her magnetism was immense. She had remained for him an enigma. Her cold- ness had conveyed the promise of immeasurable won- ders. Then suddenly, she had disappeared. Now, again, she was there. He imagined her standing in the ugly hotel room, looking down out across the Rue de Rivoli and the Tuileries gardens. Her gaze was directed straight to the spot where he was sit- ting. It travelled across the dusty trees, the white street, the slate roofs. He could see her lifted head, her slightly dilated nostrils, her pointed upper lip. " Helene," he muttered to himself. " Helene." He buried his head in his hands. Through the open windows, the bells of the Benedictine Chapel came pealing. His room with its silken hangings and gleaming furniture, all covered over with the confu- sion of his packing, was filled with the sound of the bells. His head throbbed. He imagined Helen's voice speaking to him as it had sometimes spoken. Its richness had a slight roughness that had always been to him inexpressibly disturbing. It vibrated now in his ears: " Come to me. I have come to fulfil my promise. Come to me before it is too late." Suddenly, he knew that all he wanted in life was to see her once more. He had been mad to send Guy to her. It was inevitable that he himself should see her. She had willed it. 98 THE TORTOISE But Guy had gone. He was already with her. The thing was settled. He groaned aloud. It seemed to him that could he see her she would do him some marvellous good. He saw that he had missed something divine in her that he might have found. He thought of her soul and believed that he might have known it. He recognized the beauty of her coming. She had come to give him herself in a superb and final gesture of farewell, that would protect him long after when he was alone. Why had he not understood an hour ago? Why had he never understood her? If he had, he would not be lonely now. Guy would have told her the lies they had arranged between them. It was indecent to lie to her. Why not go to her anyhow, make a clean breast of it, tell her the truth? And find with her in his hour of imminent peril the wonder of wonders in which he had never believed. He should have been truthful. He could still be. There was a knock at the door. " What what is it? " he shouted. " Come in. What do you want? " " The Princess sends word that dinner will be served in her boudoir in half an hour," said old Pierre, sticking in his head. " Dinner? Half an hour? What time is it?" " It is a quarter to eight." "No Very well. Very well. Tell the Princess I'll be down presently." He swept the last scraps of paper into the grate. So much for old love letters. There they were all THE TORTOISE 99 of them, a mass of little scented scraps of paper. He touched a match to them remembering too late that Helen's note was among the lot. She had never written him before. He had nothing of hers, not a souvenir of any kind. His hands were very dirty. This annoyed him. He had always taken great care of his hands. He remembered while cleaning his fingernails (one was torn) that he must show Pierre after dinner about oiling the motor he was leaving in the garage and must give him instructions about the two ponies that were to go to the country. He could do this and be at the Meurice by nine-thirty. There would still be time. Ill HE did not at first see his mother on entering her boudoir. Candles were lighted on the chimney piece and a small table was laid for their evening meal. Her favourite chair was drawn up to the window, its high silken back half turned to the door. It was a stiff, but commodious armchair of the Louis XVI period with rounded side- pieces curving out to enclose its occupant, and round the edge of one of these his mother invariably turned with a bobbing duck of her head to greet him when he opened the door. Now with a slight tremor of apprehension he noticed the absence of the familiar amusing gesture. She was there, he ascertained a moment later, but she had fallen asleep and had slid down into a crumpled heap against the stiff brocaded back of her chair. Her head had fallen to one side, and rested against the worn golden wood of one of its curved wings. The relaxation of her usual rigid pose appeared to have dislocated her body. Her thin limbs lay together lifeless and dis- jointed under the black covering of her merciful clothes. He had the feeling that if he lifted her up in his arms, she would fall to pieces. He leaned over her; fearfully approaching his lips to her white hair. There were tears in his eyes. Never had he seen her so exposed in all the defence- 100 THE TORTOISE 101 less unattractiveness of her old age. Sleep had stolen from her the disguise of her dignity. She was a pitiful old woman. His heart ached for her. Under the pressure of his lips, she started, quiver- ing. Her eyes opened. She turned her head, look- ing up from the black depths of her dreams, in terror. " Oh oh ! " she cried softly and made little quick whimpering sounds. Her shaking hands clutched him. " C'est toi," she whimpered; " c'est toi." He kissed her forehead and she leaned it against his coat for a moment. Never had he seen her like this. She was like a little frightened child, and yet how old she was! Her lean old fingers travelled round his head like the fingers of a blind woman. " Yes, little mother. I have come for dinner." She sat up, half pushing him away. " I have been dreaming, such dreadful dreams." Her voice had hardened suddenly. She dismissed him and them and her weakness with a wave of the hand. Her hand was transformed. It had im- plored his comfort like a blind frightened thing a minute before; it was now an imperious hand accus- tomed to being obeyed. He obeyed it and moved away, taking his stand in front of the chimney be- tween the two lighted candelabras, on the other side of the room. The moment of his walking three steps with his back to her had been enough. Look- ing again he observed that a miracle was accom- plished. She sat bolt upright and her black eyes gleaming out at him challenged him to an admission io2 THE TORTOISE of weakness, either his, or hers. Her will working like the invisible artist behind the scene of the guignol had pulled the necessary strings. Her fea- tures and her limbs were in place again. He felt like applauding. The word " Bravo " sounded within him. She pointed a long finger. " Ring for dinner to be served," she commanded; and actually, as she said the words, her long arm outstretched, the shadow of the ghost of her beauty fell upon her. " How she must have ruled them," he thought as he did her bidding, and he looked round the crowded walls of the faded shining room as if ap- pealing to all those silent witnesses of her glory that looked out from their little golden frames. The pale silken panels of the room were studded with miniatures, so many of them, so close together on the lustrous surface, that the place had the air of a jewelled casket. He knew them all. They had been named to him in his childhood. Some of them he had seen in the flesh, but not those by whom he had been the most impressed. For years during his boyhood he had had personal relations with the little exquisite people. He had had feelings of reverence for the proud-nosed men in white wigs ; he had been sentimental about some of the pretty la- dies. When during his studies he came upon their names in the history of his country, he had often had a glow of pride or of friendliness, or sometimes of mortification. It had been noticeable and sometimes confusing that the facts concerning them as told by THE TORTOISE 103 his mother and as recounted by historians did not always corroborate each other. His great great- uncle, a cardinal, had had his ears cut off during the Revolution. The fact was nowhere denied, but its causes and the motive attributed to it were va- rious and contradictory. On the whole he had gath- ered the impression that his innumerable ancestors and relations had been almost constantly getting into trouble, and that between them, what with their scope of influence in the Church and with the Crown and among the embassies of foreign countries, they had found a wide field for making it. They seemed to have been arrogant, restless people, with now and then flashes of extraordinary brilliance. The women, some of them beautiful, had not always been circumspect. Several had died violent deaths. One, the prettiest, had been given poison, it was alleged, by her own husband, who had refused to allow her to accept the favours of the king. They now looked bland enough in their minute and pol- ished elegance. Their portraits on ivory, some of them in oval frames studded with pearls, repre- sented a large sum of money. His mother had had very generous offers for the collection; she would leave it, the collection, to him and he was to leave it in turn to the museum of the Louvre. He thought vaguely of all these people, while he waited for dinner. On the whole, the soldiers in his family had the best record. The churchmen had amassed fortunes, and the diplomats had spent them. The men who had gone to war had won 104 THE TORTOISE glory. He was going to war the next morning. He would take a ticket and get on the train " Henriette came to see me," his mother was say- ing. "Henriette? Who is Henriette?" " Your cousin, Henriette de Vaumont." " The ugly old maid with the crooked face? " " Yes, if you must be unkind about the excellent creature. She leaves for Alsace tomorrow. She belongs to a group of nurses who go to the army at once." " But Alsace is in the hands of the Germans." " It has been for some time, but they don't think it will be for much longer." " I see, Henriette de Vaumont is going to occupy Alsace. Well, she's nearly big enough to do it. If she put out one foot and stepped " " You're not nice. She has a heart of gold." " I've no doubt." " And I wish I were going with her." He gaped: "What?" " Yes, and I'm thinking of doing something like it. I see no reason why I shouldn't organize a hos- pital. One must have an occupation," she added grimly. "Seriously?" " Seriously." "Where?" " Here, I shall turn all the ground floor into wards for the wounded." " But you have had no experience in such things." THE TORTOISE 105 " I shall learn." " You will fatigue yourself terribly." " Yes, perhaps; I expect that." He continued to gape at her. She was surprising, she was admirable, she was obstinate, she was in- credibly pathetic. u But you are no longer young, dear mother, and you have never done anything like this," he ven- tured. " As I say, one must find new occupations," she rejoined irritably. " One must begin again." " But I hope your life will not be so very different, after all." She silenced him: "You will not be there," she said shortly. He was glad of the grimness in her voice. His feeling was one of immense relief. He knew that he could rely upon her to protest with all her being against his annihilation and her own fear for him. She appeared to him powerfully real. She was not only splendid and touching, she was also a guarantee and a protection. He saw her rising up in her gaunt old age, to protect him, to dispute him with death, to exorcise from his path the powers of dark- ness. " You, my child, will worry yourself less about me if you know I am occupied," he heard her say. He understood that her effort was for him, more than for herself, and something sublime in her love for him touched him now, for the first time. Old Pierre bringing in a fried sole on a platter io6 THE TORTOISE and a dusty bottle of Burgundy announced that the Princess was served. They sat down opposite one another at the small table. He touched her hand across it and watched the fleeting sweetness of her answering smile play hide and seek through the bit- ter wrinkles of her withered face. Beyond the long window, the sultry day died slowly, reluctantly, as if sickening to death with fore- boding. Above the treetops of the breathless en- closed garden that was like a well, the sky was aglow with the lights of the city, that seemed far distant. The occasional hoot of a far away motor was the only sound that broke the stillness. Confronted by food St. Christe had a feeling of suffocation. It was impossible to eat. He thought to himself: "This house is like a prison on an island." He wanted suddenly to get out on the boulevards and feel the crowd jostling him. He thought of Helen waiting. Maybe she was no longer waiting. She seemed very far away. He wondered how he could get to her without alarming his mother. He must invent some imperative er- rand. "You had no disturbing news this afternoon?" asked the princess. " No, nothing; a note from a friend, of no im- portance. " He felt himself flushing. He im- agined that her eyes were reading his thoughts. Their burning gaze penetrated him uncomfortably, but his mind dodged her idea and continued its dan- gerous imaginings. THE TORTOISE 107 If Helen had been free, he would have married her. Strange that he had never thought of that be- fore. He had never wanted to marry. Wives had always been connected in his mind with settle- ments and the ordered business of founding a family. Marriage he had thought tiresome and he had chosen not to be tired. To his mother's argument in favour of the institution he had always replied that as he was not the head of the family and she had already four grandchildren and as he knew that she liked to have him to herself just as he was, he could not take her too seriously. She had not in- sisted; she had even admitted that another daughter- in-law would add nothing to her happiness. But if he had a wife and children now, he would feel less lonely. Had he been given a son to survive him, death would not be final. He would not be so soon forgotten. Another Jocelyn de St. Christe, the image of himself, made of the stuff of his own life, would continue to live on the earth. He looked at his mother with the words on his lips: " I ought to have married, " but he saw that she was agitated and refrained. " What is it, my mother? " he asked caressingly. " Nothing, nothing. " " But yes, there is something, tell me." " Well, it is that note. Pierre brought it to me, and I feel you are hiding something from me. " His heart sank. He realized that long ago he had prepared by his minute confidences this little un- welcome moment. Her jealousy had in the past io8 THE TORTOISE amused him. He had pampered it. Tonight was no time for taking a stand against it. " Foolish mother. It was a note from a friend who has arrived from London, and who wanted to see me. You have met her, Madame Chudd. " "Ah, the Englishwoman." He was startled by the fierce shuddering breath that carried the words. " Yes, she is English." " You thought her beautiful." " She is indeed very beautiful." " I did not, as I remember, agree with you about her beauty." " No? I thought you rather admired her." " On the contrary." He hesitated. His mother had been speaking with what seemed to him unnecessary energy. He felt the need of being cautious. " As for that," he resumed mildly after a mo- ment, " our respective tastes in beauty have not al- ways coincided. It has amused us to differ." "On this occasion I was not amused; I disliked the English woman intensely." " That," he replied quickly, " you never told me." Under the sting of her remark he had flushed again, but this time hotly. " No," she went on, rapping out her words as if with a hammer. " I saw that you were very ab- sorbed; you chose to go so far as to bring her to this house. I understood that any advice from me would have been useless." THE TORTOISE 109 " You mean that you would have warned me against her? " " Yes, she is dangerous." They were both silent. He was confused and dis- turbed. What disturbed him most was that his mother had voiced with conviction just the same fear that he himself had had. Helen was dan- gerous; he agreed, but he had had no idea that his mother thought about her or even remembered her. Her prejudice and her awakened suspicions seemed to him formidable things with which to have to deal. She was terribly strong at all times, and now she had the added weapon of her imminent loss of him. He was too sorry for her to dare to hurt her, and he thought : " Tomorrow morning she will wake up, again, frightened, like a little child, as she did an hour ago. And I will be gone." His face was clouded over and she watched his face with the eyes of a hawk, her waxen cheeks growing more waxen, the lines about her withered mouth deepening. Strange, that she did not leave him alone, she who knew him so well, and every ex- pressive line and every tell-tale hue of his flushing sensitive skin. She might have trusted him to be good to her as he had never failed to be, but she was impelled to go on prodding him. "It was so surprising your bringing her to lunch. It seems to me that I was very civil. As for that, she assumed my cordiality; I but followed her lead." He winced. She saw him wince and her eyes gleamed. no THE TORTOISE " Her manner," she began again. But he was by now exasperated. " Her manner," he broke in, " was perfect." And then more lamely he added : " Yvonne admired her." " As much as one can admire any one so much un- like oneself." " You think her so very unlike us? " " Enormously." " Well," he cried in a new burst of courage, " she is unlike any one and every one. Put it that there is no one like her and I'll agree with you." At the fervour of this declaration the Princess shuddered and closed her eyes. She seemed to shrink in size, her features trembled and appeared about to decompose. "My poor child," she whispered; "my poor child." He took her hands, both of them, in his own across the table, bringing his face close to hers. He was not sure that this last weakness was genuine. He suspected her of acting a part. He felt that she was playing on him too cleverly. " I loved her," he said with a slow deliberate dis- tinctness. " She is wonderful, I still love her." Her eyelids flickered and were lifted above her near staring eyes, that met his defiantly. " She would have ruined you." "How?" " She would have made a scandal. Unheard of things would have happened." THE TORTOISE in " What things? " " Her husband would have divorced her." They stared at each other. It was after all his eyes that wavered. " You mean? " he hesitated " you think " " I know," she announced with finality. He left her at that abruptly and began walking up and down the room, feeling nervously all the while that her triumphant eyes followed him. He had a sense of defeat and extreme depression. Old Pierre came and went, dismally, clearing the table. His jerky disconsolate movements, his shaking head and wheezing lungs, were annoying. At last he brought in the coffee and went away closing the door after him. There was no longer any shimmer of twilight be- yond the window. The dreadful breathless day had been swallowed up forever and the swift rolling blackness of night was hurrying the world to disaster. The little shining room was close as an air tight box. All about it was the oppression of darkness, and war; beyond and above the dark, was looming higher and higher, a vast and terrific cloud that would burst on the morrow. St. Christe shuddered. He had a vision of the thing crashing upon that room like an unnatural tempest, a monstrous bolt of de- struction that would crush the frail treasures to pow- der. His mind struggled under the weight of his apprehension. Each thought was a thin streamer, weighted with lead, that fell like a plummet into the depths of his hopelessness. What good would it do ii2 THE TORTOISE to struggle against the dreadful old tyranny of his mother, when the morning waited to consume him? Of what use fighting for an hour's freedom when to- morrow he would be a slave of a power a thousand times more imperious than her own? He felt something precious slipping from him. Was it his soul that was escaping him? He did not know, but he dared not look at his mother, lest he look at her with anger, and he dared not think of Helen, for fear of being ashamed. The crisis had come and had passed, and he had scarcely recognized it, but he knew vaguely and obscurely and deeply that he had missed something sublime that life had of- fered him on the evening of death. As if across an infinite distance he heard his mother's voice speaking. It sounded to him like the mimical echoing voice of a malicious ghost. " Your father liked England, but he liked it so to speak in the open. He used to say that in a country where duelling was prohibited and divorce accepted, drawing room manners were bound to be bad." And he heard himself answering absurdly and peevishly, as if indeed there were any need to say any more. " You actually thought then that Helen Chudd had bad manners?" and heard again the faint voice remonstrate: " Must you be so personal, my son?" Then, suddenly when it was too late, he broke through the unreality, the subterfuge, the make-be- lieve. He cried out and heard himself shouting and he knew that it would be no good: THE TORTOISE 113 " But this is a personal matter to me." " Then all I can say is that it had better cease being so." She was invincible. He could not even frighten her. He turned to her now in despair. Let her see then, that she had won. She saw. His face was one of defeat and his eyes had a look of boyish suffering that implored her compassion. " This is no moment for personal matters," she said more softly. And then with one of her beauti- ful gestures: "What of my personal need of you? My son, my son! Am I not giving you up for ever?" She held out her two long hands. Her face was working strangely. He saw her eyes blurr over. The sight of her tears was ugly and terrible. He went to her swiftly and knelt beside her. This time, he was certain that she was not acting. He felt weak and ashamed. He knew that she had tyrannized over him finally and completely, but his compassion for her made him forgive her. He buried his face in her lap. Late that night, his packing finished, his uniform laid out for the morrow, his last letters written and his instructions given, he sat by her bedside stroking her hand and watching her deathlike face on the pil- low, yellow as wax, in the candlelight. And as he waited for her to go to sleep, he thought of Helen as a phenomenal apparition of beauty that had very nearly led him into disgrace and ruin. The spas- modic clutch of the thin fingers round his hand told ii4 THE TORTOISE him this, and the disdainful arch of the high nose on the pillow seemed to mock his regrets. He was go- ing to the war to fulfil the pride of that battered queenly head. The future was no more than this to him now, but he said to himself that this must be and would be enough. IV GUY DE BRISSAC was accomplished in dif- ficult situations. His friends often sent him on delicate missions to their ladies. He was reputed, never to bungle anything. His tact was equal to his loyalty and when trusted with the re- sponsibility of a cunning fib he could be counted upon to transmit the falsehood with perfect faithfulness and with a tender sincerity that could not so much as bruise the finest, most sensitive skin of feminine vanity. He nevertheless approached the Hotel Meurice with far less than his usual self-confidence. His memory of Mrs. Chudd, met a dozen times at lunch- eons and dinners, was vivid enough to warn him that in her case, vanity would play no part, and that he had a bigger thing to deal with than the petulance of a lady's pique. He was not sure what she would do, and he liked always to know beforehand how people would behave. It caused him a feeling of acute discomfort to see any one give themselves away. It was possible that this haughty Englishwoman would shock him by some unnecessary display of emotion. He had admired her less than had St. Christe. Brissac liked above all things to be amused and he had not found her amusing. Her wit, if she had any, could not deal with the light in- ns n6 THE TORTOISE tricacies of the French tongue. Her beauty, he had of course appreciated, but it had left him cold. She had the finest shoulders in the world and for an Englishwoman her hands and feet were good. As for her colouring it was startling enough with its clear coppery skin and golden hair. Indeed it was too startling. To Jocelyn's enthusiasm he had re- plied that he liked soft shades and elusive lines and the beauty that escaped the vulgar eye ; that he liked being charmed without knowing why and did not en- joy being knocked on the head by any dazzling bolt. His remarks had, he admitted to himself now, been even more critical than his thoughts. Jocelyn's in- fatuation had annoyed him and made him uncom- fortable. It had gone too far. He had been obliged to give himself infinite pains to keep the two of them from becoming the talk of the town. If their names were not fatally coupled together, it was due to his own untiring efforts, nothing else. Joce- lyn toward the end had behaved like a child. He had done all those things that are not permitted, and none, it appeared, that were. Instead of taking tea in her drawing-room from five to seven, he had spent whole days alone with her in the country, rid- ing blandly out through the Meudon Wood, the two of them on a couple of horses, at ten o'clock in the morning and riding back again at seven. To tell the truth, he, de Brissac, had not believed in her ignorance of conventions. He had suspected her of a deliberate plan, or at least of a desperate daring. Her husband was probably a brute who THE TORTOISE 117 had driven her crazy. Maybe he had turned her out of the house. Englishmen did these things. If so, the scene awaiting him would be nothing less than horrible. He was told at the desk that she was in her apartment and that he could mount. Halfway up in the lift he realized with a heightening of his nerv- ousness that the sleek gentleman behind the counter had murmured something about his being expected. He knocked at the door, with a feeling of intense distaste, straining his ears as if about to surprise some painful secret sound, and it came; nothing secret or tragic in its audible joyous note for one who did not know of the trick that was being played upon her, but to him the culprit, more horrible in its me- lodious ring of exultant command, than any whimper or wail. " Entrez ! " came the strong ecstatic voice; and then as he opened the door, during the seconds he took to round the edge of the protecting screen, he heard her swift feet running toward him across the carpet, and the swish of silken clothes and the intake of hurried breath. He thought: " In one second she will be in my arms." He rounded the obstruction. She was all but upon him, close, oh terribly close, yet not too close to stop dead, her hands outstretched, her body slanting forward. He held his breath, and holding it, he had time to see it all, her glorious blighted movement of welcome exposed there before his eyes, and the light on her face before it died out, n8 THE TORTOISE leaving in its place a stony astonishment that made him quail. He felt the blood of shame on his face, and as he watched her miserably fascinated, he realized that he had committed an outrage. He had caught her waving her beautiful passion like a sunlit banner be- fore him and he saw her draw together those lumin- ous folds and wind herself in them as if in a shroud. He could not speak. He watched her blanch, and quiver. Her nostrils dilated. Her eyes stared, wider and deeper than eyes should be permitted to stare. He believed in her now. She said, dropping her arms to her sides, as if a spring in her shoulders had snapped and swung 1 them down : " Oh, I thought it was some one else." And then frankly with a lift of the head daring him to mock her, disdaining the confusion of subterfuge, she added abruptly: " I was expecting Monsieur de St. Christe, I sent him a note." " Yes, I know. It was for that, that I came." "He sent you?" " No. I received the note. St. Christe has gone." He had not intended any abrupt speech of this kind, certainly never in his worst nightmares had he imagined himself an assassin or a butcher, but her question had precipitated the bold lie, and the loath- ing of his task that had seized him in her presence THE TORTOISE 119 had urged him to make short work of the nasty business and get himself away. She echoed the word " gone " and looked at him, and he felt under that look as if he were literally and visibly breaking out into a cold perspiration. " Gone? " " When? " she asked strangely. " An hour ago," he blurted out with a sense of imbecile clumsiness. " You mean that I'm too late? " He shuddered for her, and manoeuvred to shield her, from his own indelicate knowledge of what she was feeling. " If you mean too late to see him? Yes." She took it in silence, staring and he perceived all at once that she had ceased to see him. She simply forgot him there as he (at least so he felt) cringed before her. She might have been made of bronze, so motionless was she. Nothing about her moved, not a fold of her brown silk garments, not a finger in her still hands that pointed down to the floor. Her eyes remained wide open, the eyelids fixed. He found the sight unbearable and began : " I had just been to see him off at the station and went back to attend to his things and I found your note. He had asked me to answer any letters. Things had been left in confusion; I thought it best to come. I dared to present myself. Pray accept my excuses. I understood at the desk downstairs that they had announced me." " It is most kind of you," she murmured. THE TORTOISE He moved toward the door, but she stopped him with a gesture that hooked him like a wriggling fish. " Please give me the note, mine." He stammered: "I I am afraid I did not bring it with me." " You read it and threw it away? " she asked quietly, oh very quietly. ' Yes, I read it and threw it away, or rather I should say, I left it there on his table." " And came straight here? " " And came straight here." " It was most kind of you." she repeated. This time she allowed him to move two steps across the carpet. It was his own nervousness that stopped him. " Jocelyn will be chagrined," he mumbled. " Ah ! " She lifted again her curious eyes. " You mean when he knows? " " Yes, when he hears." " You will be seeing him perhaps? " " But surely; tomorrow." " You join him? " she asked quietly. " We are in the same cavalry regiment." " I see." She pondered. And suddenly he saw his blunder. Did she suspect, he asked himself mis- erably. He had a sense of panic but she gave no sign. Her manner expressed nothing as she lifted her eyes again, but this time she scrutinized him coldly and he felt her gaze penetrate him icily. " I see," she repeated. " You are in the same regiment, but he went ahead." THE TORTOISE 121 " A different company," he articulated, writhing as if pierced through by the icicle of her stare. " I see," she said again and he was sure now that he caught a new glitter in her strange eyes. She re- mained silent, and he, half hypnotized by that pro- foundly pondering face, waited, and as he waited he realized that though she had not moved, her atti- tude and the hue of her attitude had changed. She seemed to him like some proud stricken animal of the wilds, some fleet and beautiful creature of the woods or prairies terrified and transfixed and helpless, wait- ing for the wound that would kill it. He saw now that this had been an illusion. He detected flashes, signs that suggested anger magnificently held; he felt that if she were actually a deer or some antlered creature, instead of a human being in brown dra- peries, he would be in danger of his life. She would roll him at her feet and trample on him with her beautiful hoofs and transfix him with her horns. Yet she had not moved and all his terror and foolish imagery was gathered from her eyes, that were blazing upon him, glittering, freezing. Then all at once she let him go. Deliberately she turned away and over her shoulder said casually: " It was most good of you to come. Tell him how sorry I was to miss him." He gained the door. " I will certainly do so," and then idiotically as it seemed to him he added. " Jocelyn will be grateful for a message." " Give him my very best wishes of course. May 122 THE TORTOISE you both be spared to do the brave deeds that be- come you so well." He could only mumble inarticulately as he got him- self out, but beyond the closed door, his escape as- sured, he thought that he heard her laugh. He was not sure of that sound and knew as he ran to the lift that not for anything in the world would he have made sure. It was done. He was safe. He wanted to know nothing, nothing. The exigencies of friendship were great indeed. Later, when he could think the matter over calmly, he was amazed at the impression she had made on him. He had thought her inexpressive, before, and she had expressed to him with a total absence of gesture, innumerable things. He had been very stupid. He had wondered whether she would know how to behave. The result had been that he him- self had behaved like a clown. Weighing the pros and cons in his mind, he decided against giving Jocelyn a faithful account of the interview. It would be better for the latter not to know that she had detected the ruse. PART THREE JIMMY GOWER had no great opinion of him- self but he loved his friends and his friends were many, too many some people thought. Women were constantly saying to him: " Oh, but you like everybody, Jimmy, and everybody likes you," and he had come to feel that this meant that he had no character. He admired character. He looked at stern old men wistfully and sighed at the admirable sight of young men fighting to get on in the world of public affaris. " Men of character," he would ruminate trying to look wise as he lathered his face of a morning, " men of character have enemies. I'm afraid, old chap, that you're not much use." He would heave a sigh and run to answer the telephone and forget to be dismal at the sound of a sweet voice saying: " Jimmy dear, you must come. We can't get on without you." Jimmy did not know whether he had more men friends than women friends or which he liked best, though of course they were vastly different, oh, un- deniably different. He never deceived himself into thinking that they were similar, or that he felt the same about them. Women were women, the dears, and thank God they were. Women liked you to make love to them and thank God they did. Jimmy 125 i26 THE TORTOISE was never tired of making love. He was always ready to begin again. On the other hand, he was always ready to retire from the field if he seemed to be spoiling another man's game. He never poached. He never disputed a prize. After all it didn't much matter to him. He would tell himself that he wasn't serious and other people were, and he had a profound respect for those others so different who took things hard and grew thin nursing a hopeless passion. When he saw what he solemnly termed the real thing, he would withdraw to a wistful distance and confide mournfully to some one that he had never been in love in his life, and the someone would say: " Jimmy you are an incorrigible liar." He had never admitted to himself that this was true and that his favorite lament was a lie. It would have spoilt his disposition to have stopped to think about it, and so he kept it,way down, some- where out of sight, and no one imagined that he, dear old Jimmy of the ready laugh and the untiring en- thusiasm, had a secret. Sometimes, on the very rare occasions when he was obliged to have a meal alone and when, conse- quently, he was gloomy, his secret would begin to take shape and threaten his peace of mind. He would reason with himself and say: " Look here, my dear fellow, you can't be in love. If you were you'd look it. You wouldn't sleep, you wouldn't eat. And as for eating, you know, there aren't many people who think as much, or more about it than you do, not in England anyhow." He would cock an THE TORTOISE 127 eyebrow and send his fancy across the channel to seat itself at a small table before a savory dish, and if this flight to the city of fine cookery did not suc- ceed in laying the ghost, he would resume, in a more impatient tone, to his image: ' You look what you are, and you are what you look, a good-natured ass. There's no heart about you, and no romance. You've no damask cheek and no concealment like a worm in the bud ever ate into it, and besides, good God! if it were true now, then it must have been always true, oh for years and years, ever since you were a kid, and you needn't suppose that it's possible you've loved her all that time. It's impossible, therefore you see, it's not so." This usually finished the shaking he gave himself and he would come out of it brisk and merry as ever. Monologues of the kind occurred three or four times a year, not more. One had to be alone for a longish time to begin to talk to oneself and he was never alone. It was perhaps for this reason that he had never found out that the truth of the matter lay in the fact William Chudd was his best friend and that his enormous enthusiasm for the man would suffer no breath of even secret disloyalty, for W. B. C. was his idol and the rock of his belief, and the anchor that kept him in England. " If it were not for W. B.," he had said, " I'd give up all this funny fagging I do for the Government and end my days eating in Paris." His fidelity to the big man had become a legend. He had told so many people for so many years that William Chudd was the greatest man in 128 THE TORTOISE England that when W. B. really did loom at last, enormous and solid behind the shifting scene of poli- tics, the world of politics smiled at Jimmy and made use of him. He became a kind of intermediary and was to be seen running comically between the staid portals of Whitehall and Chudd's obscure den in the city. His sporting air, his somewhat startling waistcoats, his noticeable spats, usually white, and his refractory eyeglass came to stand for something unique. " An uncommonly useful chap," he was called. " Never out of sorts, and he's got the ear of the Mandarin." Of all of this, Jimmy was un- aware. He had a poor opinion of himself, as has been said, but he loved his friends, and most of all he loved William Chudd. How was it possible for him to admit that he was in love with Chudd's wife? To have been brought to admit this to himself, he would have had to be alone with himself for a long time indeed, or to have been tremendously and ter- ribly startled into sudden self knowledge. Poor Jimmy Gower, he expected no such shock as he rushed through Paris on the 2nd of August at seven o'clock in the morning. Himself was the last thing he dreamt of thinking about. William Chudd had been at the bottom of his being sent to Rome on a piece of business of oppressive importance, and he was returning with a precious diplomacy and the feel- ing of having muddled things down there as a worm like himself was sure to do. He was racing along an empty boulevard behind a grim chauffeur who was driving as if the Germans were already at the THE TORTOISE 129 gates of Paris, and he was defying all the powers of Heaven to unravel what those Italians had meant from what they had said, when he saw Helen stand- ing in the middle of the Boulevard St. Germain on one of those raised rounds of pavement where one hails tramcars. That she was the last person in the world whom he expected to see in Paris, on that day and at that uncannily early hour, explained to him very inadequately the horrid thumping that began under his ribs at the sight of her. Any one might have been anywhere and it would have seemed just mildly curious and in keeping with the general un- naturalness of things. It was the look on her face as he dashed past that arrested him and made him pound on the glass of the motor. Europe was sending shudders across half its surface, continents were crouching ready to leap from their anchorage. No- thing less than that look on that face could have stopped him, for Jimmy was aware of the horror of events and overpowered with the seriousness of his own fragment of responsibility. No face but the one face in the world, and that face touched with mad- ness, could have stopped him. He realized this afterwards, but at this moment of the swerving round of the car as it turned and swept back to her, where she stood, staring up at the sky, so strangely, he real- ized only that there was something terribly wrong with Helen and that the ghastly hue of her face had flashed out and hurt him as if she had thrown a knife and hit him as he passed. He drew alongside, opening the door of the lim- 130 THE TORTOISE ousine and was abreast of her before she could move. Something told him that if he had given her one instant's time she would have fled, but he was there on to her before she saw him and as she started back, glaring at him in a way that he would have termed " dotty " had he named it, he grabbed her arm, "Good God, Helen, what's the matter?" She struggled to free her arm, gasping as if for breath. Her face was damp like the face of a sick person in an agony of pain. Beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead and round her mouth. Her pallor had a greenish gleam. " Let me go," she muttered; " what do you stop for? I was waiting" She looked at him, knit her brows, seemed to try to think or rather seemed as if in spite of herself to recognize him: "It's you, Jimmy? I didn't know you I mean " " Come, get in." " Get in what for? Oh no, I don't want to get in." " Come quick, I'm in a hurry." " Why? " she mumured vaguely. " What for? Where are you going? " " To the Embassy. I'll give you a lift." He had by this time pulled her into the car and she had let herself be pulled heavily, in a dazed way as if not knowing what he was doing. Once there beside him, she let her head drop forward; it hung loosely downward. Her chin almost touched her breast. She might have fallen suddenly into a profound sleep, so limp had she become. The sight THE TORTOISE 131 of her made him feel ill. He realized that he was trembling. He was afraid. He thought to him- self: " She has gone mad, and it's true, I have loved her all my life." Was she mad, or ill ? What could he do ? His brain told him nothing. His instinct said: " Rouse her." " What are you doing in Paris, Helen? " he brought out in a loud matter of fact voice. She looked up heavily. " What did you say? " " I asked, what are you doing in Paris? " She stared at him: " I'm waiting," she announced. "To get back?" " No, oh no." "What for?" "I don't know exactly that is I'm waiting to find out what I'm waiting for." His heart sank. His round fresh face grew red. His eyes began to smart, to fill; he had a gulping sen- sation. " My poor Helen poor dear! " He took her hand and stroked it. " There, don't bother to talk. It's all right. Don't look so worried. It's all right; you poor darling." She stiffened suddenly. " Ah, you think I'm ill?" He nodded. "You think I'm mad?" He shuddered. "Jimmy, look at me, look into my eyes." He did 132 THE TORTOISE so and saw with immense relief that although blood shot and shrivelled to half their size they were sane. " I am not mad, nor ill. Jimmy, do you hear? It's not that." He stammered: " I didn't say so." ' You thought so; you're not sure now. You be- lieve I'm not responsible for what I'm doing. I won't let you get out of this car unless you swear to me that you'll not mention at the Embassy that you've seen me." " But, Helen " "Swear it!" " I can't leave you like this." " Swear it." ' Will you wait then outside if I promise? " She hesitated. At last she said: " Yes, I'll wait." He was told in the Embassy that he could share a car to Bologne, but that the man who was going would not be ready for two hours. Would he come back at that time? No, the passenger trains were not running, or at least if they were, they were go- ing backward. Helen was waiting. She lay back in the corner of the motor, her eyes closed. He was grateful at finding her like that: anything was better than that terrible posture when her head had hung loose, drooping forward and down like a drunken woman. She opened her eyes as he joined her but did not move. It seemed to him now that she was merely exhausted. Her eyes were sunken. The corners of her mouth were drawn. Her nose seemed pinched. THE TORTOISE She had the look of some one who is suffering from deadly cold. " I have more than an hour to wait. Will you give me some breakfast?" She signified her assent, scarcely audibly. Watching her in silence, he wondered what she would do when they reached the hotel, but his fears on that point were groundless. She walked natur- ally enough, though slowly, dragging her feet one after the other through the hall to the lift, and he realized, as they passed worried women and hag- gard women in veils, that no tragedy or horror would seem strange to any one now and that the look on her face would pass unnoticed anywhere. In her sitting-room he made a great to do about his breakfast. He would like coffee and two soft boiled eggs and some jam, if it wasn't too much trouble, and it seemed to him that she grew more natural and less afraid of him for his fussing. If that was what she needed he could do any amount of that. He began to chatter. He said that Italy was a long way off and that they had been held up in- terminably at the frontier. He said that it was hot in Rome and that the hotter it was the more people talked. He described a baby in the train who ate bananas, one after another, countless bananas. The recollection of those bananas disappearing into that baby was, he insisted, most awfully funny. It made him laugh to think of it. And he actually achieved the laugh. He knew then why he had been born in the guise of a court fool, it was so that now at this 134 THE TORTOISE moment, he would not frighten Helen. She would think him a harmless idiot and the presence of a harmless idiot was evidently what she needed. The waiter brought in the breakfast tray and he pounced upon it with a roar of hunger, wondering how under Heaven he would choke any of it down. He flourished his napkin and poured out coffee with gurgles of delight. " Ass," he said to himself, " go ahead. Be it. It's your one chance." He felt her behind him, hanging away, distractedly moving this way and that. He heard the swish of her skirts, and a little sound like a groan. It was as if some poor little wild animal were suffering there behind him. Looking into the mirror, he saw her staring at him, her eyes fixed, while her hands twisted together. He took a gulp, wiped his moustache and burst out: "Jove, that's good!" He felt her come nearer shyly. He held his breath. She took off her hat and laid it on the chimney piece. He dared not look up. Then she said, standing before him, and her voice had a quivering sweetness: " You're a dear soul, Jimmy." Like a starving man, he attacked an egg, broke open a roll and applied to it a wealth of butter. He gave no sign of his immense joy at her tone. He was enormously and busily hungry. " It's lucky you met me," she murmured. " Yes, wasn't it? " he said brightly, fatuously grin- ning up at her. Her face had relaxed. She drooped wearily before him. He noticed that her THE TORTOISE 135 hair was matted and damp. It clung in wet tendrils to her temples. How glad he was now of his comic appearance, and what people termed his frolicking- puppy-features. Trusting to these and eyeing her closely he added mildly: " W.B. will worry; I can reassure him." She started. He groaned inwardly. "Reassure him?" she breathed with a strange tremor. Her eyes widened and fixed on something beyond him. " Tell him I saw you and say you're alright." " Oh God, now I've messed it," he wailed to him- self, for he saw that once again she was quivering. A shudder, plainly visible to him, travelled down her as if some invisible power had seized her and were exerting a horrid vibrating pressure. He saw her try to master that shaking. He saw that she couldn't and then he saw in her eyes that she saw that he saw. He thought in one second more her teeth will begin to chatter, but with an effort that made her grimace strangely, twisting her mouth awry, she was still, then she took a step away and turned her back on him. Miserably bound to his chair, he watched her lift her hands to her face, drop them again, and then she said coldly as if from a great distance : " Yes, of course, certainly; you have seen me, and I'm alright." " I'll tell him too, that you'll be home as soon as you can get across." She whirled, facing him again. 136 THE TORTOISE " Coming home? No! " she cried out as if he had struck her, and then at the sight of his round flushed troubled face : " Oh, it doesn't matter what you say; say whatever you like. Only don't ever as long as you live tell any one how you found me, or what I was like. You wouldn't, you couldn't " She was imploring him now "You won't tell, will you, Jimmy; you'll say I looked well and happy. No, you needn't say that. I forgot War is de- clared. No one need be happy now. Isn't it strange ? It's so hard for me to think, I can't think clearly." " You look most awfully fagged." " Yes, that's it, I'm worn out. I've not slept for three nights. When you've not slept at all for three nights, you're bound to be tired, aren't you? " " Of course. There's nothing so bad for one." " Dear Jimmy, you see, I'm alright. I only want a little sleep." " That's why you went out so early this morning I suppose." " Yes, I couldn't sleep, so I got up at five. I'd been walking since then. I went to the Luxembourg gardens. They were locked, so I walked through the Latin quarter, and then I found myself in the Faubourg St. Germain. All the houses in the Fau- bourg St. Germain were closed. Every one is away. Or so they say so it seemed. Perhaps they were there, who knows? The shutters were closed. How could one tell? It was so early. I had no one there, no one I wanted to see. I did not mean THE TORTOISE 137 to go. My feet took me. I hate the Faubourg, all those proud, old deceitful houses." Her voice quivered, trailed away. " I am so tired," she added in the tone of a child. " I believe I could sleep now." She smiled. " Seeing you eating your eggs has made me sleepy." He suggested casually: " stretch out on the couch." " I believe I will; do you mind? " She dragged her feet across the floor, swaying, uncertainly, then dropped, crumpled up, clung to the couch, pulled herself further on to it and sank down with a long sigh, her eyes closed. When he rose a moment or two later and crossed to look at her, she was sound asleep. And then Jimmy fell on his knees. He wasn't praying, or if he was, did not know it. He was just wishing, willing, trying, trying to help, trying to un- derstand, trying to know what to do, feeling him- self a worm, wondering what W. B. C. would have him to do. " If you were Bill Chudd, what would you have a man do for your wife, now here, like this?" he asked himself. Poor Jimmy, he didn't know; he could think of nothing to do. He had to take a bag to London. England would be at war in another twenty-four hours. The Italians had given him messages, which might or might not be sincere. He was bound to go. He was bound to leave her. He had promised her not to tell them at the Embassy of her presence. All he could do was to tell W. B. to send for her to come back. He 138 THE TORTOISE was of no use to any one. He was unable to help her. He could do nothing for her. He could only go away on tiptoe, leaving her asleep and remem- bering her smile, the most pitiful thing he had ever seen in all his life. And he knew now that he couldn't any more get the best of his secret with monologues about food or anything else. There it was, staring at him, and William Chudd was his best friend. II PARIS on the third of August had seemed to Gower supernaturally calm. Its intense pre- occupied quiet showed him a light-hearted nation, transformed by terrible knowledge. Alive grimly to its history, remembering with awful clarity the tragedy of other wars, Paris was terribly wise. He found London in the throes of a savage and ignorant excitement. The placards of the afternoon papers were having it all their own way; Piccadilly was a chattering flood of fantastic conjecture; the crowd was aggressive and noisy. Under the stimulus of a tremendous and unreal danger the Anglo-Saxon felt himself a giant; Europe, he knew, was in upheaval, but his British Islands were solid, anchored firmly forever to the bottom of the sea and the sea belonged to him. He saw it dotted over with the hulls of his warships. He swelled out his chest, squared his shoulders and strode abroad, his fighting instinct exalted; his fingers itched for a gun; he demanded a part in the business. If his Govern- ment kept him out of it, he would consider himself cheated and disgraced. He thought of Belgium as a very plucky little country and France as a vague continent full of weaklings who would be no match for the Germans whom he hated. He was bound in honour to go over there and lend them a hand. 139 140 THE TORTOISE Gower delivered his precious bag to a haggard friend at the foreign Office and was told that the Chief Secretary would like to see him if he had anything very particular to say about the situation in Rome, but that if he had not, he the haggard friend who had not slept for five periods of twenty- four hours, advised him to go home and leave the minister alone. Gower was certain that nothing he could have to say was worth five minutes of the great man's time. His friend agreed with him and follow- ing him stiffly to the door, breathed in a languid tone that it was too late for any power on earth to do anything now. The Prime Minister had returned from Buckingham Palace half an hour ago. The thing was done. The sepulchral undertone had the sound of the still voice of Heaven. Jimmy took himself out into the sunshine feeling a little as if he had had a blow in the stomach. He believed as much as any man in the street in those warships with their guns pointing across the seas; it did not for an instant occur to him that England, and his home and his mother and sisters and cousins and friends were in danger, but he knew Germany and he hated the Germans positively and personally, and he realized that not later than tomorrow morn- ing he must join the army that would go out to kill them, and he felt himself very unfit to kill Germans. He was convinced that he wouldn't be any good as a soldier. His regiment had let him go five years be- fore, because of a blow on the head at polo. His eye sight was bad, and he had a feeling that this was THE TORTOISE 141 particularly unfortunate, for surely one needed a good pair of eyes to shoot Germans. On the other hand no one would miss him at home. He was not a useful member of the community. His mother, when he said good-bye, would give him her weather- beaten cheek to kiss and go on with her game of bridge. His father would perhaps go so far as to settle his bills for him. Mentally calculating the sum of his debts he found that they made a con- siderable total but he felt fairly certain that under the circumstances his father would pay them, being convinced that this time was positively the last. The phrase, " for the last time," seemed to him the refrain of his walk up Whitehall. He felt in a great hurry but did not take a taxi. The still small voice in the Foreign Office had paralyzed his power of decision. There were a lot of things he would like to do for the last time, but the day was too short to hold them. He would leave them undone. He must find Chudd and then take the five o'clock train to the country. The Government had determined on war and W. B. had had something to do with that determination. He must find him and tell him that Helen was all right. He would go to the club and telephone to W. B.'s office and have a drink. Some one there would tell him what to do to join up in a hurry. He felt very tired. It was hot. The streets stewed and sent up strong odours. The crowds were as violent as ever. He moved through them wearily. " God help 'em," he muttered. Human- 142 THE TORTOISE ity swirled at street corners. Piccadilly Circus was a whirlpool where motor buses navigated like en- raged walruses. An old woman in a shawl was sell- ing flowers, just as she had always sold flowers in Piccadilly Circus. She knew nothing, observed noth- ing, feared nothing. He bought a red carnation for his buttonhole, for the last time I Helen was anything but all right. Something dreadful had happened to her. It was none of his business to wonder what it was. She was alone in Paris, and war had cut off France from England as if the Channel had become an impassable torrent. He wondered if he had seen Helen for the last time. " We'll all lose each other in the beastly confusion," he said to himself. It seemed only too immediately true, for he could not find W. B. Half an hour in the suffocating enclosure of a telephone booth produced no result. There was no trace of Chudd anywhere. The only information he obtained was negative. No, he was not in his office; no, his secre- tary did not believe he was in Downing Street; no, the caretaker of the house in Mayfair had not seen him since eight o'clock the morning before, and did not know whether to expect him or not that night. He had disappeared like a wraith, a man of no sub- stance who leaves no track behind him. The fact was disturbing. If a person of such height and such social bulk could be lost so completely, then the world had indeed become a horrid mystery. Gower had no desire to join the groups of worried men in the bar or the smoking room. They were THE TORTOISE H3 talking with the animation of women at a tea party. It was extraordinary how many ideas they had. They were talking of Belgium and its invasion and the indomitable little Belgian army; they said that the war couldn't last more than three months because Germany would be ruined financially in that time; they believed that Russia would march straight to Berlin; they agreed solemnly that for the sake of Belgium they themselves must enter the war. They talked of " scraps of paper " and violated neutrality and the probable movement of the stock markets; they prophesied, they laid wagers, they blustered one to another. Jimmy had no ears for their words. He had heard the voice of the being who exists above all Gods and all worlds. Through the thin lips of a tired man at a desk it had spoken to him and had said: "Let there be death, let darkness swallow the earth." It sounded now in his head. He could not hear what the excited men in the bar were say- ing. They were like men gesticulating behind a thick pane of glass that shut in the sound of their voices. He left his drink undrunk, and started to go, but he did not know where to go to find Chudd. He hesitated miserably in the doorway at the top of the front steps of the club, mopping his head and screwing up his eyes at the sunlight outside. " Hello Jimmy, what's the matter? You look as if you were going to cry." " Well, you don't." It was Stump Arkwright, recently become private secretary to the Prime Min- ister, cool, immaculate, imperturbable, in a silk hat 144 THE TORTOISE and grey gloves. He lit a cigarette, flicking an imaginary speck off his perfect coat, and turned a handsome blue eye on Jimmy. " Come with me," he said blandly. "Where?" " To Downing street. The P. M. wants to see you." " Don't be funny, little darling; I'm busy." " Ass, I'm not funny, neither are you. He asked me to send or bring you." " Why? " Jimmy was being propelled down the steps and into the waiting car. " It's about W. B. C," said Arkwright once they were inside the car. " What do you mean? " " It appears that he has refused his support." " I don't understand." " The P. M. wants him in the Government. At a moment like this, you understand " " Of course, of course." " Well, W. B. won't hear of it. We've all been after him. He just blinks at us and says nothing. Won't give his reasons." " What's the matter? " " That's what we want you to find out. The P. M. is willing to make concessions. If there's any- thing that Chudd doesn't like it may be possible to to arrange things." " It can't be that, he wouldn't quibble." " Ah, you imagine a different sort of thing? A private reason? " THE TORTOISE 14$ Jimmy jumped. "Why do you say that?" he blurted out. Arkwright smiled: "Why? Oh, for no reason at all I assure you. I was merely wondering; one hears things." " Peggy's been giving lots of people tea lately," murmured Arkwright. " Peggy isn't nasty, she couldn't be." " No one suggests it of the dear child, but she has a flaire, she says his brain is ill." " Humph." " And well you know it is singular, it is re- markable " "What the devil are you driving at? Singu- lar? What's singular? " " Helen's absence is singular, if you will be so ill tempered." "Well, that's all rot; she's held up in Paris; I saw her; she's crossing as soon as she can get on a train." " I see." Jimmy grunted: "You're just like an old woman," he said peevishly. " Why don't you take care of the country and leave people's private affairs alone?" " W. B. hasn't any private affairs now. We're going to war with Germany. He knows as well as any one that his support is invaluable. I confess I don't understand him and never did. What's he been working for all these years, if he throws over the whole thing now? Putting aside the question 146 THE TORTOISE of his obligation, it's at the same time his chance his great opportunity. He could and would soon be running the country. No one else has such weight with Labour. He could bring them all in. He re- fuses. Naturally his refusal arouses suspicions. What's his game? He's a mine of information; what's he going to do with it, use it against us? Here we are. Come along in, the P. M. will give you his ideas." " Oh, God! " groaned Jimmy. He didn't want to go in at that door. The house that he knew so well, and where he lunched three days in the week, seemed to him a strange and for- bidding house, and the man who was the father of one of his friends and the host of a hundred others and who had now sent for him on business of impor- tance seemed to him a strange and sinister man. Nevertheless he went in, and a quarter of an hour later he came out. He did not look very different; often and often he had come out of that house, a round little figure with a rosy face and a carnation in his button hole and white spats on his shiny boots and with laughter bubbling out of him. The carna- tion and the white spats were still there, the face was still rosy and comically sweet, for no amount of worry could make it look anything else, but the laughter was gone, forever he would have told you. He was a forlorn little jester shorn of his jester's cap and his reason for being. Things were beyond him, things great and important and depressing had been told him, and they were beyond him. THE TORTOISE 147 He ordered Arkwright's car to take him to Lady Sidlington. If any one could help him to find W. B. she could. And he sat very still and plump and solemn against its cushions and he felt that he was crushed, but inside his crushed bruised person he held to his idea ; he still believed in William Chudd. Three solemn members of the Government had combined to crush him with the evidence of his friend's faithlessness to his country. The word treachery had not sounded in the stiff atmosphere, but its place had marked a definite hiatus in the smooth damning sentences. Had W. B. absconded with the funds of the Bank of England the reproach cast upon him could not have been much greater. " They take themselves too damn seriously," he muttered to himself. " God, a man's soul is his own I s'pose; " but his anger with those cold masters of diction who held the reins of the country in their accomplished fingers, was feeble. The pressure and weight of authority directed upon him at such close quarters had impressed him; and the great need of his country was heavy on his heart. He remembered the silent white roads of France with the dusty troops plodding along them in the sun. He saw those col- umns of men, coming up from every village and ham- let and city, to the frontier where the Germans were massing. Already perhaps the enemy had poured over. Already, France was invaded. " We'll be too late," he groaned inwardly. There was no time. Did no one realize how little time there was? Those three men, sitting still in 148 THE TORTOISE a room, weren't they going to do something? He would miss his train to the country. Well then, he'd join up in the morning and go down after- wards. Impossible to put off joining another twenty-four hours. Suppose the Germans beat the French before he could get there. The Prime Minister's wife had come out into the hall and had asked him about Helen. "Why doesn't the wretched girl come home?" she had said. He felt sure now that Helen would never come home, she wouldn't be able to. He believed defi- nitely that he had seen her for the last time. The world was black, black, black. He loved Helen and W. B. and they had both abandoned him. Some tragic circumstance that was none of his business had cut him off from them for- ever. He had been told by the P. M. to go and bring W. B. to his senses. The idea was grotesque. If W. B. had gone mad, his madness would be colossal. He saw him in his mind's eye, pulling down his house with his hands and strewing the bricks over the green grass, and he heard him say- ing: " Helen has gone, so I'm pulling it down." He started guiltily. The door of Peggy's house was open before him and she was in it, hatted and gloved. " Oh," she said, " it's you? Come in." And she turned back beckoning him to follow. Ill SHE took him through the hall that was full of packing cases and parcels into the dining room. From behind the double doors of the library came the sound of voices and the clicking of typewriters. " For the French Red Cross," she explained briefly. Her face was serious. She had on a limp linen dress and a small straw hat that came down over her head like a bowl. He noticed vaguely a difference in her. She was business-like and tired and strong. Closing the door after them she laid a bulging leather hand-bag with her gloves and parasol on the bare table and faced him. They spoke then simultaneously: " Have you seen, Helen? " " Have you seen W. B.?" And they both nodded assent, keeping still for a moment after, because neither wanted to begin a revelation that perhaps did not sufficiently concern the other to justify its telling. They weren't there to discuss the affairs of their friends for their own amusement. Their exchanged look conveyed each to the other an admonition: " Don't think that I'm going to talk to you unless it's really worth while." " Have a cigarette," said Peggy, offering her case. 149 150 THE TORTOISE " I haven't much time." 11 Neither have I." " It's just this, then. I can't find W. B. Do you know where he is? " " What do you want him for? " " The P. M. has given me a message for him." " I see. " She leaned against the dining-room table, her hands on it behind her, her eyes in a level concentrated gaze turned to the window. Her at- tractive appearance seemed a mistake. She had the manner of a severe school-mistress. " Well," she said deliberately after thinking a mo- ment, " I can tell you where to find him, but," and she nipped off his sigh of relief with a frown, " I don't know whether I will or not." "And why on earth not? Isn't he? Ain't I? Aren't we friends for Heaven's sake? " " Don't get fussed, Jimmy. Of course you are his friend, but perhaps that's just the reason I mean if he wanted to see you, he would have left word, wouldn't he?" ' You mean he is deliberately avoiding me?" " I don't know; it is possible, he didn't say so; he didn't say anything about you." She gave it to him straight like a challenge. He flushed. She seemed to him antagonistic and somehow disagreeable. " Well, why should he? " To this she answered nothing, so he added irritably: "What the devil did he say? " " Ah, that I can't tell you." THE TORTOISE 151 He turned away then to hide his annoyance. He was jealous: why should W. B. have confided in her? He kept his back to her and lowered his head be- tween his shoulders. The idea that perhaps he would be forced to go off to the war without seeing W. B., and never perhaps see him again, and never perhaps come back, filled him with a great envelop- ing hurting fear. He was conscious of a sense of enormous loss, as if a huge and fatal theft had been perpetrated upon him. He had known for some time, all that day anyhow, that he would go out and get killed, but he had not known what it meant. Now he knew. This was one of the things it meant. He was aware now that he would leave them forever, W. B. and Helen. Never again would he look at their faces, or feel the warm good comfort of their companionship. He would be alone; he would be done in. He would cease to be. He would not even remember. If only he could see W. B. just once more, he felt that it would all be bearable. This was childlike, he knew, but he felt like a child, and a wronged child who had been cheated, betrayed, and who had been left alone in the dark. He was afraid. Ah, how dark it was, the sunny dreary square beyond the window, with the green trees be- hind the black iron railing. How many times he had driven into that square with W. B. to pick up Helen, and take her down to the country. She used to wave from the window and W. B. would look up and smile and stand waiting to hand her into the car, and then they would carry her off the two of them. W. B. 152 THE TORTOISE would drive with Helen beside him and he, Jimmy, behind. They had tolerated him always. Always they had been kind to him and he had been happy, because they were happy. Now they were unhappy and they had no use for him; he had lost them, W. B. had thrown him over. He was too disturbed to hide his feelings. " But I want to see him," he blurted out. I'm joining up tomorrow; I can't go without seeing W. B. He felt Peggy's arm slip through his own. " Dear Jimmy, I'm so glad, and I'm so sorry." Her voice was sweet now and kind. " Come, sit down. I'll tell you what I can, and you tell me; I swore to W. B. that I would put no one on his track. It's no use going to him with a message from the P. M. He knows all that; it's no good interfering with him now; we can't do anything any of us, he is determined. " Determined to do what? " " Determined to give it all up." " But he can't, not now. He can't just chuck everything and he won't, I don't believe it, he's not a coward." " No." Peggy took off her hat and leaned her head in her hands. She had drawn up a chair to the table and faced Jimmy across a corner of it. " No," she repeated, " he'll go out to France and get killed." " But he's not a soldier." " He'll become one." "Good God! I don't understand. He's no THE TORTOISE 153 right to do it. The Government needs him." Peggy sniffed: " Government! " and twirled her fingers, but her face was serious. " Well, that's all very well, but if no one stays by the Government " She eyed him wisely : " They've been getting at you," she announced, "I know them." " I admit " but she interrupted him. "They're stupid. Of course it's his duty to help them. They needn't think we don't understand; W. B. understands perfectly, but he's not going to do it, he can't, he doesn't care. He can't care; he he is like a dead man walking round watching. His eyes his eyes " Her voice became a whisper; then stopped; her mouth twisted. Gower watching her with appalled attention felt that he must dash from the house, if she cried. Peggy in tears was just the final stroke that his nerves could not stand. He would rather know nothing, and go away for- ever and get himself done in as quickly as possible. But she did not cry; she was made of fine hard stuff and her face stiffened. He waited a moment, then, timidly, afraid of that white little face beginning again to twist and quiver, he asked: " Where did you see him? " " Here. He came here two days ago, three days after she left. She had been here before; he had guessed that. He asked me if she had looked happy: I told him the truth." "Which was?" 154 THE TORTOISE " That she was transfigured." " Then God help them both, for she's not happy now." She seemed not to hear him. " I never saw any- thing like her. She frightened me. Her face was a blaze of light. She went off with her head up, as if she were going to fly, to soar straight to Heaven. It takes us all a little like that, but with her it was more so than with any one I'd ever seen. It was terribly beautiful." "What was terribly beautiful?" " Her joy, her passion, visible passionate joy. It showed, so that I hated to let her go out in the street, it seemed indecent to show her, to the street. I would have kept her back if I could, but what could I do? Nothing I could have said would have had any effect. ;She was invulnerable, supernatural; I wanted to shout at her that he wasn't worth it, that he was worth nothing." "Who? Worth what? Who?" " Jocelyn de St. Christe, worth her love." " Do you mean? " whispered Jimmy faintly; " do you mean?" He felt deathly ill. " Yes, I do, yes, yes, it's incredible, it's monstrous, but that's how it takes us. She couldn't fight it; she tried, I saw her. She gave him up, she stuck to William, and then, at the first breath of war, at the first threat, she broke loose to go to him. Don't you see? Don't you see? " Jimmy huddled in his chair white as a sheet, his plump arms on the table, his blue eyes staring, saw THE TORTOISE 155 indeed; he saw so much that he wanted to die. "And William knows?" he asked dully, at last. "Yes, he knows. She must have told him; she would you know. She is brutally honest. He knew that she had meant to go for good. He came to leave a message, in case she came back to England. He was like a great heavy clown made in white chalk and his eyes were the strangest things in Heaven and Earth. He said : ' Don't look at me, Peggy; it might make you laugh or it might make you cry. Don't look; just listen.' Then he left his message and went away. He was like a giant clown with a face of white chalk and tragic eyes. It's only once in a hundred years that a man cares for a woman as much as he cared for Helen. Why didn't Helen understand?" " God forgive her; she's paying for it now." "What do you mean?" " She was ghastly." Peggy shook her head: "That's nothing. St. Christe has gone off to the war. That's nothing." " I don't know; it seemed as if something horrid had happened to her, something humiliating, shame- ful. I may be wrong; I thought she was crazy, in- sane, I mean. She hung her head as if she had been whipped, cuffed, like a dog, or something worse. I don't know what I'm saying; I'm sorry, it's not my business, is it? There is nothing to do, is there? " " No, nothing, unless somehow one got her home, unless some miracle happened before he went." 156 THE TORTOISE " Have you wired? " " Yes, three times; no answer." " Telegrams are all held up." " I know." " Trains aren't running." " I suppose not." " And if she came, would he? " "How could he?" They stared at it, in silence. And at last, Jimmy got up, very wearily, and took up his hat and stick and turned to the door. The carnation in his buttonhole was crumpled, but not more crumpled than he himself. " I would have accepted to burn in hell for W. B.," he said solemnly and his mild blue eyes fixed on Lady Sidlington had the look of a child whose heart has been broken. She nodded back at him gravely. " Perhaps William will want to see you after all," she said. " I'd stay in town tonight, if I were you." She went with him to the door. He had dined alone at his club when the message came. He was asked by Lady Sidlington to call that evening at a boarding house in Bloomsbury, No. 32, Tottenham Court Road. He was at the house by nine o'clock. A respect- able person told him to go to the top up two flights and knock at the door opposite the stairs. It oc- curred to him while he climbed the narrow stair that he had never been in such a house before. It con- veyed nothing to him. The stairs went up between THE TORTOISE 157 dark blank walls. On each landing was a gas jet turned low. People presumably lived there, a kind of people that he did not know. He thought : " If one wanted to be lost, no qne could find one here. There are thousands of houses just like this. If one went in to any one of these, one would find the same steep stairs covered with the same oilcloth, the same dark enclosing walls, the same pale jets of gas. One could spend one's life knocking at doors, one after another all alike." He felt the uncomfortable thumping of his heart as he stopped on the top landing. He did not really believe that W. B. was there under that dismal roof. He was walking in his sleep;. he would wake up in a moment and find himself at home, in the country, in bed, with his valet telling him firm things about getting up. His hand was on the door knob of a blank inimical door, beyond which was some dread revelation, or nothing. He knocked with the knuckles of his other hand, holding his ear close to the door. No sound came from within. He lis- tened, his hand of itself turned the door knob, and he entered the room. It was large and dark and silent. It reminded him of a garret or box room, but there was a shaded lamp on a table, and beside the table William Chudd was seated. IV THE great bulk did not stir at the opening of the door. One would have believed it in- capable of movement. Its mass was inani- mate; it seemed scarce, human and terribly heavy, and its heaviness betrayed no inner power that could conceivably summon it to move. So, a great heap of wreckage, so, a giant lump of stuff or a water- logged bale might appear after sinking through a great depth of water, so it would settle at the bot- tom, and be anchored there forever by its own iner- tion, its invincible weight. No tides would move it ever; no strange creatures swimming about it, would work upon it any change. It was there to stay because it was a dead enormous weight, and the resistance of its lifelessness was greater than the energy of life. Of such an aspect was the bulk in the cavernous room. Gower overwhelmed by this impression said to himself. " He is dead," but a voice thin as a string, that seemed to draw itself out from the mass in the armchair said, as if in answer: "I'm not dead, Jimmy. Don't look so fright- ened." Gower approached the figure. He saw then in the light of the solitary lamp the white face and the strange eyes that Peggy had told him about. The 158 THE TORTOISE 159 eyes were very small. They might have been points burnt into that white surface leaving a red spark to linger in each one, and those tiny glaring sparks were the only living things in the mass of the man. The thin voice that made the soft whirring sound like the singing of a taut cord, seemed not to belong to the man at all. It might have come from a ghost, or a practical joker behind a curtain. " Sit down," it whirred: " I've one or two things to ask you and one or two things to say. You will excuse my not getting up. I can't. I am too fat, I shall not get up until tomorrow morning and then I shall never sit down again." It did not occur to Jimmy until afterwards, walk- ing the hot night streets in a fever of misery, that the words William Chudd uttered during that hour were strange. It was as if the impression of his complete annihilation had been so immense and in- disputable that anything he might say was perforce logical and reasonable. If one were listening to a man talking from the other side of the grave one would not be surprised if he talked differently from men at the club. Ghosts have, presumably, a lan- guage of their own. Condemned men in cells are allowed differences of tone and phrase. Who knows what may have been the utterances of victims near- ing the end of their agony on the rack. Jimmy knew nothing of these things. Neither history, nor mediumistic seances, furnished his mind with images, nor did he think of Chudd as a man about to die; nevertheless he was not surprised at the words that 160 THE TORTOISE came from behind that deathly mask. The desola- tion of a human being loomed enormously before him and commanded his reverent and minute atten- tion. He had no will left with which to analyse and no heart with which to lament. His faculties were paralyzed by the knowledge of what was before him; he could only listen. "I am too fat for anything but butcher's meat," the voice went on. " Helen is not a cannibal, Helen is a lady. If she were nothing more than that, that in itself would be enough to explain. The only thing that is not explicable is why she waited so long, and why she ever came. " Olympus is a long way from the swamp in which monsters wallow. What made her descend? She floated down. I did not drag her. How could I have done so, had I dared attempt it. My paw had not a great enough reach to attain her, up there. Be- sides, I saw her coming, I watched her, floating, sink- ing down on the wings of the morning, golden in the light of Heaven, I, wallowing in my swamp, looked up and saw her. That was long ago, oh very long ago, I would put it as a few aeons before the Myce- naean Age. And as she only stayed a little while, ten years, or ten days, it must have been a long time ago, that she went away, but on that point I am not very clear. I do not remember her actual going, I did not see her go. She slipped away when I was asleep, sunk deep in disgusting sleep and I only knew that she was gone when I found she was gone." The voice stopped. A sound like a shudder of THE TORTOISE 161 wind followed its high small chant. A sigh of un- utterable weariness breathed up from the wide chest and was lost in the still suffocating gloom of the room, then the voice began again, its falsetto notes were spun smoothly from the colourless,, motionless lips. " In the meantime Europe was moving toward war. One observed upon the face of Europe spots, like fever sores, angry chafed places. One observed the growing restlessness of nations. The sore places seemed infected, the fever spread, the pulse grew rapid, one could feel its heightened beating. A day came when the pulse of Europe throbbing un- der your hand, leaped like a mad thing. Some of us felt it, some of us watched, knowing what was brew- ing beyond the horizon. We saw the nations crouching, eyeing one another ready to spring. Then a voice over there said the word war, and they sprang. They were at each other's throats. Pre- sumably, they do not know what it means, this death grapple. It is possible that each one believes he will emerge intact from the struggle. They do not know how difficult it will be to let go. "Life as we have heretofore understood it, is at an end forever. The chief business of life will from now on be the business of extermination. It is good to understand that at the beginning and make one's preparations. I have made mine; my life has ceased, I am prepared to lend a hand in this mat- ter of extermination, and this brings me to certain practical questions, in which I wish to trust you with 1 62 THE TORTOISE my confidence. You are my friend, you are honest, I used to love you, and if I cannot remember quite what that means it is because it was so long ago that I ceased to be a human being. I am a private in His Majesty's army, nothing more. I will not tell you the name of the regiment I belong to, and I ask you not to endeavour to find out. All business and government affairs in which I was concerned, I have put aside. Everything is in order, even to the dis- posal of my personal belongings. There remain certain things that belonged to Helen. There is the house Red Gables. Lewis & Osborne are charged to keep it open and in repair, and to keep up the garden in so far as that is possible. Her jewels are at Barclay's Bank, the Westminster Branch. Her two hunters were taken by the Re- mount people, the chestnut hack is at Tattersalls. The Renaud limousine is in her garage in the coun- try. In regard to her banking arrangements, no special changes had to be made. Her income will fluctuate less than most people's, but, as I remember, she had never any definite idea as to its extent or lim- itations. I have therefore asked her solicitor to keep her informed and advised each month as to the amount available for spending. She never liked making out cheques, and in fact could not seem to grasp the use of stubs in a cheques book; however, I I presume she will manage somehow." His voice cracked. It stopped in a kind of squeak. He remained silent a moment and the lids fell over his small burning eyes. When he spoke again it was THE TORTOISE 163 in a different tone, scarcely louder than a whisper and his words were blurred, running one into the other so that it was difficult to understand what he said. " The most superb women have often something very childish about them. Helen could not do sums ; she used to bite her fingers; the knuckles of the fore- finger of her left hand until it bled, and sometimes she would cry. You would not believe that she could cry like a little girl and want to have her hair stroked and be soothed, would you? Just because arithmetic was so beastly, and her accounts came out wrong? I have seen her like that. I have stroked her hair, she let me, I it was, who soothed! her. She ran to me when she was in trouble with those figures. Why did I not understand then in those moments that she was just a child? Her ap- pearance deceived me; she looked a Goddess. Her beauty always bewildered me. If I had been blind, I would have known how to make her happy. When- ever I was away from her I made plans and thought over my mistakes and worked out new ways of joy for her. I used to lay deep schemes to make her laugh, but when I came back into her presence, I was afraid to try. She was too beautiful, I lost confidence in myself, I hung before her dumb, quak- ing, stupid, afraid to move a finger lest she run away and hide from me. One day she fainted at the sight of me coming towards her. That was the day when I knew about the war and about her going. Both inevit- 164 THE TORTOISE able It is terrible to know, and to wait, I suppose. I hoped. It seems to me now that I was struggling all that time. I remember hours of exhaustion, such weariness as is unknown to most men, exhaus- tion produced by the struggling of my hope that found it so hard to die. That hope kept me breath- ing, praying, watching, wanting, waiting." He paused, then went on: " When she was here, I did not understand her; now that she is dead, I understand. Her heart was just a child's heart, a little, holy, ardent thing throb- bing pitifully in a queenly bosom. Poor little heart, it needed beauty and tenderness, and it had in me a monster of ugliness and clumsiness. How could a hippopotamus convey tenderness? Conceive of the grotesque gesture meant to convey the finest and most frail of all the emotions of the soul; suppose the ugly beast wanted to smile, even to smile. The result would be appalling and the lift of its paw that willed to caress would hideously crush. " When I think of the inrush of joy that the sight of her gave me, how through my eyes that beheld her I seemed to penetrate to the heart of all lovely mystery, I realise how my presence must have blocked the way of her soul, I, I, enormous and fat, shut her in and hid the romantic horizon where the fairies of love and high fancy dance and beckon and throw kisses to the yearning hearts of mortals. I was her jailor, her giant, her curse. " Once she was ill, then in her weakness she clung to me. In those days, my arms cradled her. She THE TORTOISE 16$ would ask to be carried, and I would walk with her fevered head on my shoulder; then, with her eyes closed, she drew comfort from my strength, and trusting it, would fall asleep, and I would be allowed to watch her as she slept. " Now that she is gone I remember her weakness and I see that when she was most strong, even then she was weak. " Now that she is dead I understand. Beauty is an illusion, but I loved her beyond and in spite of her beauty. Life is a curious dream, bounded by the mirage of the world, but all about it and under it and beyond it, is death. Death is the only reality, and sorrow is its voice in the world. We struggle to be happy and we fight to live, knowing that life leads to death and that we are born so that we may know what it means to die. " I took a more active part in the gigantic farce than most men. I dealt in large pretences and ma- nipulated the scenery and puppets on a stage that was quaking. Now that is finished, for me there remains the only reality, death. They, the puppets, wanted to keep me behind the scenes. They said that they wanted my advice about Germany, Russia, the Bal- kans, about harvests, mines and oil wells; of what good would my opinion be now, when it is all summed up in the word "destruction? " It is better for me to follow the lead of death and go out and kill. " Tomorrow the army owns me ; I shall go with it, to kill the Germans who are certainly those who should be exterminated if any one else is to survive, 1 66 THE TORTOISE and if children are ever to be born to joy in the world. For humanity is destined to pursue its illu- sions through the centuries, and it is perhaps worth while trying to clear the scene of brutes and cow- ards. Tomorrow, the army owns me and takes me away from the places that I used to know and where I am known as a first-rate scene-shifter. " Ah yes, I remember, it was for that I asked you to come." His eyelids lifted. The burnt spots stared out of the wide white face, the massive fore- head, with its finely modelled temples, caught the full light of the lamp, and the light seemed to reveal under that shining surface, the wonderful work- manship of some power that had formed a great brain: William Chudd's forehead dominated his face, at last, for the cheeks were sunken, and the fullness of it had perceptibly withered. " People may ask for me," he said. " Some may try to find me. I wish you to defeat them in their efforts. It is necessary that I be left alone. Make it clear that no power on earth can bring me back to live among them. Convince them of the finality of the thing. Convey to them the sense of what I am at this moment conveying to you and what I see re- flected in your face, my annihilation, my extinction. Tell those that ask out of kindness that the only kindness they can do me, is to behave as if I were dead. " Death, you see, is the one complete solution for such problems as mine. Death with nothing beyond it. Oblivion soaking me up, not only my conscious- THE TORTOISE 167 ness, but also the memory of me in the minds of men. Such shall be and must be my freedom. And if at any time, for some time, who knows, she may come back to her home, if Helen should come to you and ask, tell her what I tell you now. Tell her that it is her freedom and my own that I want and will obtain, freedom from all clinging clutch of memory and from all horrors of the imagination. You see I must con- sider her as dead. Anything else would be too ter- rible. If it is an illusion that I allow myself, it is only in anticipating the day when it will be literally true. She will die, some day. I had thought to be with her until then and watch the kind lines of time on her face. I imagined that she would grow more and more lovely as she grew old. I believed that she would be beside me, white haired, erect and lovely, and that we would leave the earth together in one bound, but now she is gone. The end is now, and I am as lonely as if I were the only human being left on the earth. Loneliness is another reality. Loneliness ; we are all afraid of it, I am afraid of it." His voice faltered; it seemed to scrape against an obstruction in his throat. He spoke again, more loudly and with difficulty. " If in the meantime it is actual legal freedom she wants, tell her that it will soon be hers. The War Office will inform her on the day that this monstrous carcass no longer bulges upon the surface of the earth. That is all, I think. I do not seem to have said to you what I meant to say. There were things, 1 68 THE TORTOISE I cannot remember what they were. I told you about Helen's money matters, did I not? Yes, I told you, and how she could not look after them. Child, little child, wild thing; it was for her I did all the things that I can't remember. They called it serving one's country; I did it for her, and I was wrong. It did not make me more pleasant in her eyes; I remained as fat as ever, I am so fat I cannot move. Pounds and pounds of flesh, monstrous flesh, ugly. Ugliness and loneliness, these two things I keep by me, the rest is gone. Loneliness!" The voice stopped, the lips closed, the pale eyelids drop- ped and with the completion of that infinitesimal ripple of movement the man was still. Jimmy Gower was afraid to speak. And what indeed had he to say? It was clear that no word of his could penetrate the fastness of that immobility. He waited in the suffocating gloom of the room un- til he could bear it no longer. Tiptoeing to the door, he looked back at the great pale head with its strange dead mask, then he went out, leaving Wil- liam Chudd alone, like some giant image of extinct humanity presiding over eternal solitude. V DURING the days that followed, when first the men in khaki marched through London to the strains of Tipperary, camped in Hyde Park and drilled in Regents Park, and said good-bye in thousands to white faced women at Victoria sta- tion; in those days when Kitchener's army rose up out of the smoking cities and the smiling fields of England and crowds of men hung outside recruiting offices, the fate of Lady Peggy hung in the balance. For Lady Peggy was determined to take part in the war and had set her lovely face toward France. Her appearance and her record were against her, her millions and her persuasive tongue were for her ; oh, very much so. She was, so they said at the War Office and at Devonshire House, wagging their wise old heads, far too pretty in that uniform, to be turned loose upon an army, French or English. On the other hand, she wanted to give ! there you were. What she was prepared to give made them lift their hands. The hands remained lifted; no one knew whether they would come down in a sign of accept- ance and benediction, or whether after all Mrs. Grundy would work the strings that controlled them and produce a gesture of dismissal. Perceiving Mrs. Grundy, in the background and annoyed with her, as she had thought she would never have occas- 169 170 THE TORTOISE ion to be, Peggy began to talk. She talked in English and she talked in French. Strange potent words fell from her lips; technical terms, in all their magic played upon the hearing of stern officials. Fracture beds, extensions, water pillows, sterilizing drums, X-ray apparatus, operating tables, ether masques, hypodermic needles, the principles of asepsis, she was lost in none of these things and dealt in dozens, and in prices with a liberal exactness. The principles of asepsis, was one of her favourite phrases. She made of it the text of her sermon, and shuddered at the horrid vision of infected wounds that might be cleansed were she allowed to cross that churning channel. To ensure perfect asepsis, and fine surgery, and that close to the line of battle, to provide the most perfect surgical equipment in the smallest possible compass, easily transported, magically light, this was her formula. It would ring out bravely, then her voice would drop; " And, " she would add, " to save the lives of those heroes, our tommies or the French poilus, to bring them comfort and peace and the hope of life, that is what I would do. How can you refuse me? A small effort, nat- urally it must seem so to you, but if out of the thous- and, only a hundred come to us and are saved, will it not be worth while ? How dare you say no to me ? What right," and she would smile, " has your horrid red tape to interfere with saving men? " How indeed could they refuse? For themselves yes, the War Office was stubborn, it wanted no vol- THE TORTOISE 171 untary effort; its medical corps was fully competent, but for France, they would allow the unit to be formed. The gesture was one of benediction and the French authorities smiled on Peggy, thanking her in terms that filled her eyes with tears. " We've the worst manners in the world," she sighed when the final verdict was given. " You'd think the only gentlemen in London were the French." She did not realize that she was an ob- ject of fear to those old Anglo-Saxons, nor would she believe it, even when Mary Bridge told her to tuck her curls under her cap. Lady Sidlington saw no connection between tango parties and a field ambulance. It did not occur to her that because she had once patronized the former, she could not undertake the latter. Making ban- dages came easily to her fingers. If she could not hunt five days a week, she could work seven, and if no chauffeurs were forthcoming, she would drive herself, in Belgium, France, or along the road to Berlin; the chauffeurs were forthcoming quickly enough, however. Doctors and surgeons, and nurses thronged the big house in Eaton Square and Peggy in dark blue serge with no curls showing under her veil, or per- haps just one over her ear, received them sweetly, her lips stained from much chewing of a blue pencil. She greeted them all with her loveliest smile topped by just the smallest most business-like frown, and said: 172 THE TORTOISE " It is really too sweet of you to help us. Please talk to Miss Bridge about details; you'll find her in the library." And Mary Bridge with professional grimness sorted them out. A stenographer at her elbow and a bell under her hand, and a boy scout at the library door, she interviewed, dictated, telephoned. She had insisted that Peggy should leave her alone and never enter the room unless she rang the bell three times. " You're a darling, Peggy, but you've no practical sense, and if you want me to organize the thing you mustn't bother me. Beside you'll have quite enough to do getting round all the old men, so just leave me alone unless I send for you." And Peggy obeyed, she went forth, she smiled, she persuaded, she melted hearts of stone. Obedient to the library bell she would appear in the door and listen. " P e ggy tne transport people are being very nasty. They object to half of all our staff; you'll have to go and see a Colonel named Stratham. Ex- plain to him that the motors aren't touring cars, or only one of them, and that the operating tables aren't sofas and that we're not taking one thing more than absolutely necessary." Peggy would go, the colonel would begin by being cross, and end by being gallant and remain an ardent friend. Stump Arkwright began talking of Peggy's army and Peggy's war. Bond Street stared sympatheti- cally at the red crosses on the doors of her limousine THE TORTOISE 173 and many a man in khaki smiled at the sweet face in the blue veil behind the glass window. Peggy was foolish, and Peggy was wise. She knew her limitations and sat meekly at the feet of her surgeons, and let her matron discard al- most all her pet things and listened with angelic pa- tience to Mary scolding about prices. " Peggy > these Turkish towels are twice the price of the others." " But, dear, they're nicer, they're pretty, they have a blue stripe." " Who wants bath towels to be pretty? They're no better in quality; you can't have them. It's mad extravagance." " Very well, dear," and Peggy would acquiesce wistfully. In the bottom of her heart she had hoped everything might be pretty, but she knew she was foolish. Sometimes when Mary did not war>t her, she would go shopping. The result was as a rule con- sidered lamentable. She could not resist blue enamel, and jugs and basins of minute size, but of that heavenly blue, began to arrive in hundreds. " They are not suitable, we must send them back." " But, Mary, the enamel's just as good even if it is blue." " I'm not objecting to the colour, darling, it's the size." " Oh, are they so small? " " Absurdly. Think of scrubbing a whole man, in that much water." 174 THE TORTOISE " I didn't think of that. I'm so sorry." " I know you didn't; you never scrubbed a sol- dier." " But the people at Harrods will be so disap- pointed if I send them back." Peggy's brow was puckered; then it lightened. " I'll give them to the children's hospital, may I ? " " You dear, but of course you may." Peggy's friends were amazed at her. A feeling of awe took possession of her many admirers. " By Jove, she's an angel, she's a saint. Fancy her going out there to rough it ! Have you seen her boots? Field boots, old man, the real thing, and on those feet, and a camp bed, X pattern. She says she's going to live in a tent." In the matter of personal wardrobe, Peggy was certainly reasonable. " We must have warm un- derclothes, they say: flannel combinations, ugh, and weary dark blue pyjamas and high woollen boots, so that if we're called suddenly in the night, we'll be decent." But her greatest proof of good faith was shown in the fact that she put away the dear little red cross in rubies that the very nicest man in the world had given her, and pinned her collar with the regulation brooch, the result of all of which was that Mary Bridge a week after the ceremony of benedic- tion announced that the unit was ready to start as soon as the War Office gave the word. It consisted of two surgeons, one medical man, three dressers and twelve fully trained nurses, tons of material, four ambulances, two motor lorries, and one touring car. THE TORTOISE 175 Portable huts or tents were to be sent on demand, if no building were found to house them. It was at this point in the proceedings that old B'randon turned up from the country and begged her ladyship for a moment alone. " Mrs. Chudd is at home, your ladyship. I've been hoping you'd come, but when I saw how things were turning out, I made up my mind to let you know. It's not my place I know, and Mrs. Chudd would be very angry if she knew, but I felt it my duty, Mr. Chudd being away at the war and there being no one but me to look after her now." " You were quite right, Brandon. When did she get back?" " A week ago, my Lady. She arrived in a taxi, in the middle of the night with all her bags round her and her face as white as a sheet. She said she had found the home in Curzon Street closed, not even a caretaker there and so she had motored down, straight away that evening. She was in a very strange state, my Lady, so cold, we couldn't get her warm and that on an August evening with the air as soft and not a breath of wind. We put her to bed and gave her a drink of hot milk. She wouldn't eat anything whatever, not so much as an egg, and she's been like that ever since." "Cold, you mean ill?" " No, not ill, at least not exactly, but she won't eat and she won't speak, scarcely a word all the day; she just sits in the library, with her hands crossed, not even a book in them. Whenever we go in, any 1 76 THE TORTOISE of us, the maids or myself, we find her like that sit- ting and looking at nothing. She doesn't so much as notice us coming and going. All day she sits in the house, it's not natural, she was always so active, my lady, on a horse, or on the river, or motoring some- where, or with people about. Not a living soul has been near her, except one day Mr. Gower came, I should say Captain, and since then she's been even worse, my Lady. She walks up and down for hours in the room, and she's given orders to admit no one. I don't know as one ought to observe such orders, my Lady, seeing as how she can't be quite herself." " No, Brandon, one shouldn't. I'll motor down tomorrow." ' Thank you, my Lady." The old man hesitated : ' You'll perhaps not say that it was me as told you, my Lady. I've been with Mrs. Chudd for ten years and I wouldn't like to leave her now with the war on, and she all alone." ' You can trust me, Brandon." ' You'll find her very strange, my Lady. Some- times she quite frightens one. It's a great pity Mr. Chudd should have gone off to the war so sudden." Lady Sidlington was not sentimental. She hated people who sat about mooning over things that were finished and settled. William Chudd had gone to the army and Helen had come home too late to see him. She had no sympathy with Helen. When one took the reins in one's hands one was supposed to know how to drive. Helen had had her hour, she had been to see her lover, and her lover like every THE TORTOISE 177 other man in the world had gone to the war. She was no more unfortunate than hundreds of other people. All the women she knew were living on the rack of suspense. Every one loved some one out there. They didn't whine about it; they kept their fears to themselves. If they had good news they shared it, if they had bad news they hid them- selves from sight; if they had no news at all, they kept a stiff upper lip. Lady Sidlington admired a stiff upper lip, more than most things. And she ad- mired William Chudd more than most men. She regarded his resignation from public life as an admir- able act of extreme simplicity. The war fever had seized her and had diminished for her the sense of personal issues. She no longer saw William's chalk white face and tragic eyes. She' saw him brown and enormous, clad in khaki, fighting the Germans. What difference did it make that he was an officer or a tommy? The great thing was that he was a soldier and no one had a right to criticise his will to be one. She had quarrelled with several people about him and had been rude to the Prime Minister's wife. Stump Arkwright had worried her to exas- peration. He had given her to understand that the Government considered William's act one of simple disloyalty and would exercise no influence on his be- half, and she had told him to mind his own business, that she was bored with politicians and politics and that he needn't come to see her again until he had gone out and won a Military Cross or lost a leg. There was far too much talk in London about 178 THE TORTOISE Helen's mysterious absence. Now that she, Helen, was back, she must show herself and put an end to their miserable tongues. She, Peggy, had an angry feeling of responsibility for Helen and admitted the obligation of protecting her. Her brain worked rapidly during her drive to the country, the morning after Brandon's visit. She saw what she had to do. She had to make Helen come with her to France and work. Arriving at Red Gables, she made straight for the library and walked in without knocking. He