TOC SiOGiOG ' CftPTiVeS CB.C. jooes THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER THE SINGING CAPTIVES By the same author QUIET INTERIOR "She has a beautiful visual gift . . . a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching." The New Statesman. "The whole novel is carried beyond the bounds of commonplace by its distinction of style." The Athenaeum. THE SINGING CAPTIVES BY E. B. C. JONES (Mrs. F. L. Lucas) "We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry." WEBSTER: The White Devil. BONI AND LIVEEIGHT Publishers New York Copyright, 1922, by BONI AND LlVERIGHT, INC. Printed in 'the United States of America. TO MY MOTHER PAET ONE " RODEN, dear, you're so perverse." "Roden is so perverse. " "Of course, when Roden 's in one of his per- verse moods! . . . " When Lady Peel rang the changes thus upon her favourite word of the moment not only her eldest son, Roden, but her husband, Sir Harold, her nephew, Evelyn Cashel, and her daughters, Caroline and Stella, sat in a silence which was neither alert nor embarrassed nor partisan, but merely profoundly indifferent. Last autumn her word had been "highbrow" ; shortly before that, "snobby"; earlier yet, "precious." Whatever it was, Lady Peel worked it to death, and long before it died it ceased to make the faintest impression on her auditors, whether they were involved in the in- dictment or merely spectators. The speaker was a small, brown, restless, simian woman with a young, wrinkled face and eyes whose pathos was perhaps misleading. She fidgeted continually with knives and forks and 9 THE SINGING CAPTIVES glasses; flicked her diamond earrings with a forefinger ; shifted a heavy chain of variegated stones that seemed to chafe her neck. She was not brilliant in her restlessness ; in spite of the luminous dark eyes there was a dimness about her face. Nor was her voice arresting ; v in spite of its odd sudden drops into a murmur, its gusty increase of volume, which bore no relation to the purport of the words, its effect was monotonous. The whole impression was one of rather meaningless and empty commo- tion. Yet Lady Peel was not wholly insignifi- cant. None of the company assembled at dinner was altogether negligible, to judge by a first appearance. How much of their distinction was due to their juxtaposition and to their rich, dark, gilded puce-and-umber background, it is hard to say; they certainly presented a picture of pleasing symmetry; and the Lon- don dining-room enclosed their composite per- sonality as it were an essence. Upon its brightly-lit sombreness, their faces, necks, shirtfronts and hands detached themselves with a sort of gay, careless emphasis, at once theatrical and intimate. They scarcely spoke; only Lady Peel's complaints dribbled 10 THE SINGING CAPTIVES and clicked like billiard balls knocked about in an idle moment with monotonous vivacity. At her left hand, her elder son, Roden, glowered and lowered more openly than is usual in polite society. His indifference to his mother 's opinion of him was profound; but to be baited in public is always odious. He was remarkably pale, with a large, arrogant, sensi- tive nose, whose nostrils were nearly vertical, and opaque brown eyes. He had a child-like look, due partly to his sulky mouth and wavy brown hair; and this look took the mind back further than adolescence, further than grubby schooldays and the schoolboy's frown, into the remoter period of infancy the period of splendid projects, undiluted romance, un- imagined obstacles, vast despairs; the period, too, of absolute faith. His face, to the sister who watched him covertly, was the type and symbol of a childhood lost but not regretted; it was Roden 's strength and singularity that he had never quite grown up ; he never looked back; his face was set always, childlike, to the future. He was childlike both in his sulky silences, as now, and in his loquacity, as when alone with Caroline. He lacked moderation, the fruit of self -consciousness, self-criticism; 11 THE SINGING CAPTIVES he had not the intelligent adult's fear of being a bore; he was anecdotal; he related his dreams. Yet Caroline, the self-conscious and self- critical, was aware of something beyond and above his moodiness and triviality, or perhaps a part of it a promise and a power. He was unhampered by the diffidence, the humour, the ironical self-suspicion which shackles the in- trospective and the analytical. His sister pinned half her faith to him; she saw him as a potential conqueror. Lady Peel, Stella, her cousin, Evelyn Cashel, she herself, might tor- ment him like mosquitoes; if there were a noble beast in her home, it was not her large blond, handsome father, but the mute, pale, lowering Roden. She gave him her unspoken support; the glance she dropped upon her mother was scornful in its cool indifference; Lady Peel was not worthy of her hostility. There was none there, save Roden, in Caro- line's opinion, worthy of any sharp or pro- found emotion. Her mother, her sister, her cousin, she frankly despised; her calm, fair father, the embodiment of a Frenchman's idea of an English lord, she regarded with mild affection: at least he kept quiet. Lady Peel's 12 THE SINGING CAPTIVES and Stella 's restlessness were irksome; the lat- ter 's femininity insistent; it addressed itself both to Sir Harold and to Evelyn Cashel, drawing them into a little circle of intimate al- lusiveness. Caroline wondered if Evelyn relished his position; for he was fastidious in many ways. Caroline's fastidiousness revolted against the situation which his presence created ; a rivalry between mother and daugh- ter. She did, on this account, spare him a morsel of admiration: his manner was perfect not insolent, nor proprietary, nor humble. Judging by his ease, and an occasional side- long smile, he enjoyed his role; at which judg- ment, Caroline's scorn over-rode her admira- tion. Evelyn Cashel was a slender, fair, carefully- groomed young man, who sat with his smooth head and aquiline profile gracefully tilted, his hand curled round his wine glass. In middle age he would be dried up, bird-like; but at thirty he retained his clear complexion, elas- ticity and bloom. He spoke slowly with a slight lisp, and with considerable emphasis, and avoided with consummate skill any serious aspect of whatever topic was under discussion. So perfect, consistent and invulnerable was 13 THE SINGING CAPTIVES his insincerity that Caroline often wondered if indeed he did dissemble anything; if indeed the highly-finished exterior were not the whole man. A footman handed fruit. " Can't we have canary bananas, Mother?" Stella asked. "I do hate these great yellow Zeppelins." "You should go and live in the Canary Isl- ands, my dear," said Evelyn, "and wear a grass skirt, and behave like the young person in Rupert Brooke's later poems and Gauguin's pictures with a beautiful, innocent licence." "Cabs is more in that line," Sir Harold re- marked, glancing at his elder daughter's slender brownness. "Ah, but the point of my idea, Hal," his nephew protested, "is that Stella would be so delightfully . . . perverse ... in those cir- cumstances like Ninon de 1'Enclos wrecked on a desert island at the age of sixteen." Stella, small and fair, with a pointed equivo- cal face of wavering outline, laughed; and Lady Peel cried, jangling her bracelets: ' ' What ideas you do get hold of, Evelyn ! It 's as bad as a French novel." "You know, Aunt Leila, I believe you'd like 14 THE SINGING CAPTIVES me to be rather wicked and loose for the sake of the vicarious thrill : sin at second hand. ' ' "I know nothing of the sort, you ridiculous boy," his aunt retorted. "It's quite loose- sounding enough for you to be mixed up with aniline dyes. . . . By the way, Hal, Mr. Crack- ham or is it Packham? called to-day . . . Evelyn, he said you were an ornament to the firm." "He must have a sense of humour," said Caroline softly. There passed then between her and her cousin a long look, neither hostile nor amic- able one of cool, amused, mutual measure- ment and comprehension. "I'm glad you realise how decorative I am," he replied at last, smiling faintly. "Of course," said Caroline gravely, dipping her fingers into a bowl of water. "Hal!" Stella suddenly exclaimed, "it's April, and I must have a new hat. I owe ten pounds." After a pause her father inquired: "And what about Cabs?" "Oh, Cabs is never in debtl It's Evelyn and I who are extravagant." 15 THE SINGING CAPTIVES "I disclaim this fellowship of vice," "You! Who daren't go down Savile Bow for fear of duns?" "I'll pay for a new hat," Sir Harold an- nounced, "in exchange for a sight of your ac- counts. ' ' "Hal, you're a mean pig! Cabs, be a dear and lend me your accounts to show Hal. ' ' "Certainly," said Caroline. "You see," Stella informed them, "I'm lunching at the Carlton to-morrow, with Geof- frey. . . . Can't we go upstairs, now? I've something to show you, Evelyn." In the vast drawing-room, rose-coloured cur- tains hid the blue night, crystal drops shrouded the lights, and the walls were covered, incon- gruously, with seascapes. The ocean in paint was Lady Peel's one constant artistic passion, although she declared that the sea in reality gave her a sick headache at a distance of five miles. Released from the dining-room, the group's composite personality evaporated. Contrasts between them seemed less sharp, and at the same time each individual was more himself. As though to symbolise this independence Sir Harold prepared, almost at once, to leave the 16 THE SINGING CAPTIVES house. His younger daughter, following him from the room, returned after an interval, holding two cheques, one of which she gave to Caroline. They were grouped round the hearth, Roden at Caroline's feet, Evelyn in a deep chair on whose arm Stella perched herself. She showed the young man a pill-box, bidding him guess the contents. " Cocaine?" "No. Patches. Are they made of sticking plaster?" Together they examined the con- tents of the box. Then, glancing provocatively at her mother and sister, the girl held a patch to her cheek, and said "Where shall I wear it?" Caroline watched her, coolly critical. Lady Peel seemed not to have heard or seen; but suddenly she spoke: "One gets so sick of 'em! They're all right for a day or two." "Oh, mother, how you do take the gilt off the gingerbread! They'll suit me, won't they, Evelyn?" "Yes, my dear." He surveyed her, while she leaned away from him, her odd little face, not modern, yet bespeaking an infinite self-as- surance, tilted daintily. "Come here," Evelyn 17 THE SINGING CAPTIVES finally resumed ; ' * one here ; and another there, when you wear your pink faille frock. ' ' "According to mother, there'll only be one occasion." "One can do a lot in that time," said Caro- line. Roden handed her his cigarette case, and she took one, bending towards him her sloping shoulders, her long neck, her fine, light-boned head, capped with dense brown hair. Her brows were darkly marked, like Roden 's; but her eyes, unlike his, were hazel, lucent, lucid, scrutinising everyone and everything; more of- ten critical than soft. From her brow her hair sprang away in a definite curve, though art had flattened it over her ears; and from her teeth her upper lip sprang away with a similar movement, while her under lip came up, it seemed with deliberation, to cover them. She smoked very slowly, husbanding the ash on the cigarette-end, and finally flicking it off with a sure, quick gesture. She had these sudden, yet certain, movements, which might have been taken for signs of impulsiveness, but which could be seen germinating in her mind, in her poise. That, too, was how she spoke unhesi- tating, sudden, soft and sure and clear. 18 THE SINGING CAPTIVES "Do you remember, Evelyn," Lady Peel asked, "the Victorian Ball in 1914?" "Of course I do." "You and Stella were in Paris, then, weren't you, Cabs? Did I ever tell you about it?" "No; the war intervened," the girl an- swered. "Eoden, you went with us, didn't you?" Her son grunted: "Yes. That Victorian coat was tight in the arm-holes." "We went in the Vesey's box," his mother resumed. "In those days there was a motion that Roden and Babs were ..." "Lies," Evelyn supplied. "I thought it was you, Evelyn, who was so devoted to Babs Vesey!" cried Stella. "Yes indeed, now; but not then," her cousin retorted. There was a pause while the various inter- pretations of which this answer was capable hovered in the air. Evelyn Cashel's voice was peculiarly suited to innuendo ; nor did he shirk the silences which follow remarks full of im- plication indeed, he seemed to savour them. He sat in perfect ease, while two thin streams of smoke issued from his nostrils; and finally, went on: "Babs in those days was impossibly 19 THE SINGING CAPTIVES ingenuous. Now-a-days, there's nothing she doesn't know, which makes conversation not only possible but pleasant." Caroline smiled at the fire. "All girls know everything now," said Lady Peel, "but it doesn't seem to give 'em any satisfaction. They are so glum and solemn " "I'm not," Stella protested. "And so are the young men," her mother added. "I'm not," said Evelyn. "Roden is. Cabs and Roden are a very typi- cally modern pair, in my opinion," their mother pursued, kicking away a footstool which! hit the fender and caused the fire-irons to fall with a clatter. When the din had subsided she completed her sentence: "You do and say all you want, and still you aren't pleased." "It was rather hard to feel pleased during war," Caroline remarked. "But that's over now. Why can't you en- joy life? You have everything you want, haven't you?" "It's hard, I suppose, to shed things just like that," the girl replied slowly, marvelling yet again at her mother's crudity. Were three years to be counted an age, during which even 20 THE SINGING CAPTIVES the loss of one's betrothed must be forgotten? Lady Peel's crudity amounted in her next speech to cruelty the , trivial, unconscious cruelty of a child tearing a flower to pieces. "To shed things," she echoed, moving her chin quickly from side to side, while she loosened her jewelled chain. "To shed what? What do you mean, I wonder? You young things are solemn and mysterious to a pitch! "To shed the war." "Oh, Cabs," cried Stella irritably, "don't go on repeating 'the war' over and over again. We've all been in it." "My dear Stella, I'm not proprietary about it." "Yes. Evelyn and Stella were in it, too, especially Evelyn; and Francis was, just as much as any one who didn't fight. He isn't gloomy," said Lady Peel. Francis was her absent schoolboy son. "Francis and Stella are younger than Roden and I," Caroline answered. "They can be- gin again. It's hard for us, nearer (thirty than twenty, to begin again." She spoke coolly, reasonably, in the way Stella hated: she felt her sister hating her now. 21 THE SINGING CAPTIVES "What about Evelyn?" the latter asked with hostility. "Evelyn's the complete epicure. As long as good food and hot water are available he re- tains his equanimity." "I hope you feel crushed," said Stella to her cousin. "But I admire her, while she dissects me," he answered. "Dissect! Dissect! That's exactly what they do now-a-days. Evelyn has the word," cried Lady Peel. "Now, Aunt Leila, don't you appropriate it. It's my copyright; you've got quite enough words already." "I don't mind your teasing me, Evelyn, be- cause at least you're gay." "I'm gay, I'm gay, too," gurgled her younger daughter, swinging one leg violently, while she supported herself with a hand on the young man's shoulder. "I want a smoke." Her cousin opened his case ; it was empty. "Oh dear! Roden, give me a cigarette," she commanded. Her brother handed her his case in silence. "Old glum-face, why don't you speak?" 22 THE SINGING CAPTIVES "Because I've no words to waste," said Roden gruffly. "Oh, oh, oh, the ogre! Oh, the sage, the philosopher!" cried Stella, still swinging her leg. Her brother made no answer; and pres- ently, her cigarette alight between her fingers, she sat still and mute regarding him. His silence, his remoteness piqued and puzzled her, when she noticed him; and this occurred more frequently than, to judge by the number of times she addressed him, one would have thought likely. He was indocile to the process of capture by femininity, quite unsusceptible. The thought of him, further, was indocile to Stella's particular method of dealing with ideas that failed to fit in her scheme of exis- tence. The queer, the mysterious, the alien, the intractable, the incomprehensible, were simply, by her, put by. The thought of Roden would not be put by; it continually cropped up; she could not finally dismiss him from her mind. She even sometimes missed him from the din- ner-table. She liked to feel the gaze of his opaque eyes fixed on her, on the rare occasions when he noticed her; she liked to elicit from him a response, however grudging. She longed now to prick him into consciousness of her. 23 THE SINGING CAPTIVES His oblivion as he stared at the fire seemed a challenge. Then Evelyn touched her hand, and her thoughts slid away to him, to herself adorned with a beauty-spot, to a vision of her- self in a pink faille frock, walking into a res- taurant in front of Evelyn. . . . Caroline, unaware of Stella's interest in their brother, although she compared her sister's attacks on his reserve to Lady Peel's, marvelled at the strange house-fellows which blood and convention make. She herself felt separated from her family by a gulf; but how much further even than she was Eoden spirit- ually removed. She had bracketed him with herself in speech just now; but were he and she, in fact, any closer than she and Stella? "Roden can begin again; just like Stella and Francis can," she said to herself. "He's not too old at twenty-seven, too war-worn, too heart-broken. He'll live and grow intensely. He's like a tree; one feels the sap strong inside the bark; it'll break out in leaves and fruit. Is it only I that feel half-dead, empty, and pur- poseless?" She glanced down at Roden, as she put her- self the question, and saw his head drop for- ward with a jerk, then raise itself; his whole 24 THE SINGING CAPTIVES body swayed back towards her, and his head came to rest, warm and solid, against her knee. She bent with a protective movement over him and found that he had fallen asleep. 25 n. IN 1917, Caroline's fiance, Gerald Sexton, had been killed in Mesopotamia. Introduced to the Peels by Roden, whom he knew at Cambridge, Gerald the gay, the gallant, the candid and chivalrous, had conquered 'the/ whole family; he was, to them, a hero before he put on khaki, before he was decorated, before he lost his life in battle. The Caroline Peel of those days was a differ- ent person from the Caroline Peel of 1920. Her family's united affection for Gerald had positively recommended him to her; not that her feeling for the young man was in the least spurious ; it was, on both sides, a genuine pas- sion. It flowered slowly from seeds sown in pre-war days; it was to have been crowned in the autuntn of the year in which Gerald was killed. In the shock of that event, Caroline, disorientated, amazed, with the world crumbl- ing about her, the earth trembling under her feet, life crouching like an assassin scarcely less hideous than death, had closed the gates 26 THE SINGING CAPTIVES of herself against existence, had prepared for a long siege, determined to eat her heart out rather than surrender. There was no one in those days to help her, to persuade her to keep open one postern, one wicket, so that communi- cation with life should not be utterly pre- vented. Her family, in pity and awe, had stood away> from her; had, in their phrase,, " re- spected her grief. " Her girl friends were too young, or too much occupied with their own affairs, to take an intimate interest in hers. She faced tragedy alone. She looked at life, saw that it was evil, and swore herself its enemy. Her own loss brought about her first sharp intense realisation of the war a general realisation of which her class, her family, her upbringing, made extraordinarily difficult. Not till Gerald's death did she come to visualise however inadequately the meaning of war; and when she did, it overwhelmed her. She looked at her surroundings and searched the faces of her family and friends for some an- swering recognition of the immensity of the catastrophe in which they were involved; she perceived trivial excitement, boredom, self- satisfaction, and sometimes the ravages of grief ; but never the message of comprehension 27 THE SINGING CAPTIVES which would have called out the answering dignity in her. She did not even know her own plight, bewildered by longing, sickness and woe. She hugged for comfort the catchwords concerning England, the patriot's death, the struggle for liberty, the eternal glory of the noble dead, and found that she was treasuring pinchbeck jewels. No one in whom these phrases were a faith turned them for her into fine gold ; and so she began to suspect that the fine gold did not exist. Nor had she any help from the knowledge that Gerald had died for a faith. She knew that he had been unselfish and courageous; hitherto, this had been enough; they had never dis- cussed the ethics of patriotism; Gerald was not an introspective or even a thoughtful per- son. The instinctive quality of his response to a national need began to trouble her ; she could not even leave her lover's nobility unques- tioned. She became a walking den of unfor- mulated suspicions and uneasy speculations, tinged with a hatred of herself for her dis- loyalty. This sudden quick growth and de- velopment of character affected her as with a malady. The family doctor treated her for anaemia. 28 THE SINGING CAPTIVES After several months of such a state, Caro- line had the good fortune to find herself placed in close relation to Gerald's brother, Hugh, re- turned from France, where gas had incapaci- tated him. Hugh Sexton had also been at Cambridge with Roden, whose contemporary he was, but owing to his brother's attractive personality he had been rather overlooked by the Peels. In her new state of mind Caroline, from her fortress, scanned the faces of all comers for a reflection of her own dismay and disillusion. She had not yet quite given up hope, for the very reason that her hope was not formulated. She perceived in Hugh something which dif- ferentiated him from her surroundings; she found that he was willing to talk, and that he was capable of expressing for her much that had seethed unspoken in her mind. Tenta- tively, he touched on Gerald's death, boldly on the war, bitterly on the attitude towards it of persons such as Lady Peel. She found that Hugh had no spring of patriotism, only a dis- like of letting others suffer for him; and yet she could not think him quite ignoble; he left on her an impression of fineness and sincerity. 29 THE SINGING CAPTIVES Could it then be that there was nobility and self-sacrifice without that inspiration? For three years now, Hugh's and Caroline's friendship had endured and grown. To him only was she fully articulate, perfectly candid. In his presence, the reserve which appeared so complete in the midst of her family, melted, and she exposed herself without fear, without after-thought, almost without restraint. Her silence at home was largely due to an irritable expectation amounting to certainty that she would be misunderstood; or have to repeat her words ; and to a complacent convic- tion that most of what she had to say was too interesting to be of interest to such persons as her parents, Stella, Francis, Evelyn. The lat- ter could, she knew, if he so desired, perfectly comprehend any utterance of hers; but he shrank and shielded himself consistently from anything dark, deep or intricate, preferring the polished subleties and obscurities of Henry James' novels to the sombre intricacies of actual experience. Caroline, as a graceful, silent, occasionally ironical presence^ he ap- preciated; but in moments of expansion, she reminded him too sharply of "horrid realities" which he preferred to forget. 30 THE SINGING CAPTIVES Koden, for very different reasons, con- demned his sister no less straitly than did Evelyn to a role of auditor. He had been dis- mayed, once, at her taking up the cudgels for him against Lady Peel, using in his defence the weapons he most distrusted: pointed fluency, light-handed wit what he mentally condemned, without using the word, as facile. But this was not all. Even alone with him he feared Caroline's tongue. He valued her as a listener, occasionally even as a confidante and critic; but as a party to discussion he almost hated her; she was tainted with the passion for analysis and wit-sharpening which he re- garded as inimical to action and creation. Several times after his return from Prance he had gruffly silenced her and she had not re- sumed her efforts at self-expression. In the circles where the propensities con- demned by Roden would have found full play Caroline was scarcely more talkative; though for a different reason. If at home, she felt or imagined her own intellectual and spiritual superiority; among her literary acquaintances she was correspondingly conscious of theirs. Her family's conventionality, superficiality and obtuseness compared with her, set, as it were, 31 THE SINGING CAPTIVES the measure of her own compared with her clever, queer, critical and creative friends. She was cautious about exposing herself before them; yet even here she nursed an especial complacency suspecting these persons no less than her family of coldness, of an absence of the deepest, wildest, most far-reaching emo- tions. How they would probe, finger, handle the most intimate topics, with never a tremor, it seemed, of sentiment or modesty, never a moment of awe ! And yet, at least, they could hate. They were languid, perhaps, over their loves, their joys; their malice was a little weary ; but hatred of tyranny, hypocrisy, mawk- ishness, cruelty, woke them to bitter alert- ness; and this hatred seemed a less ignoble, personal and petty thing than the emotions of Stella and Lady Peel. It was Roden, oddly enough, who had intro- duced her to this circle of men and women from which he had since quite removed him- self. Shortly before the war he had published a book of poems, and these had brought him into prominence, though not into popularity, with those who watch for young talent and foster it. It had not taken him very long to become disgusted with his patrons, whom he 32 THE SINGING CAPTIVES regarded as the most anaemic of dilettantes, the flimsiest of ''intellectuals." Their ideals were repellent to him; and on the outbreak of the war he had definitely quarrelled with some members of the group. Affection for one par- ticular woman, had, however, drawn him back into the hated circle whenever he returned to London on leave ; and on one of these occasions Caroline, recently emerged from the first agonised period of grief, had accompanied him thither. Since then, she had gone without Roden; and doubtless the frank, cynical disil- lusionment from which the members of the group suffered played its part in her reaction to her loss ; but so conscious was she of poverty of brain, culture, education and experience in comparison with these /companions jthaii she made no advances, and received none; remain- ing thus unfriended, although in friendly re- lation, just where she was most likely to find understanding, if not sympathy. In Hugh Sexton, however, she found both. He had the advantage over her other acquaint- ances of being Gerald's brother, and of having witnessed from its conception her's and Ger- ald's love. He had known it, he remembered it, in all its stages. She had scarcely noticed 33 THE SINGING CAPTIVES him, but he had noticed her; and she was as- tonished and touched to find how carefully he had followed her emotional history. They both wondered,, she with deep gratitude, he with proud humility, what would have become of her sanity had the young man remained in France instead of being invalided out of the army a few months after his brother's death. He had given her untiring companionship, never obtruding his own very real grief on her. He had acted as the young seldom do, with complete selflessness. It was no wonder that she admired, loved, trusted him. He was all that Eoden was not; he gave, he did not take. Only rarely did he make demands on her. Once he had come distraught to Kensington soon after breakfast. It was the day after the signing of the Armistice. Eoden being still in France, she took Hugh up to her brother's room, where there was a gas-fire. She lit it, and crouched before it, while he sheltered his ravaged face in his hands, leaning on the mantel-piece. "You haven't slept, Hugh." "Oh, Cabs, how could I? Ever since London went mad yesterday I've been thinking how 34 THE SINGING CAPTIVES typically damnable it was of fate to kill Gerald and to leave me. If he'd been merely gassed you and he would have lived happily ever after. It seemed to me last night that I could never face you again. Then, when it got light, I couldn't rest till I'd seen you. It seemed to me as if it was, in some fiendish way, my fault." Caroline heard the wave of nervous emotion climbing the steep breakwater of his control. She began quickly to speak. "You'll see by noon how foolish you've been. Even in Lon- doners there's something which knows what time it is. Something in me knows when it's noon and when it's midnight, although I my- self don't. When you wake feeling low and cold and deserted in the night it's almost cer- tain to be two or three o'clock. One's often a little mad in the night. At noon one is matter- of-fact." She paused, and the young man shifted his position and faced her, his shoulders character- istically a little hunched, his mouth crinkled at the corners with the effort of restraint, the mauve stains of insomnia under his slow- moving eyes grey meditative eyes in a fair, keen Danish face. She looked at him compassionately; and 35 THE SINGING CAPTIVES under her scrutiny he smiled, and brought out : " 'Poete, prends ton luth.' Go on; you're not eloquent, yet you're poetical . . . Cabs, is liv- ing worth all this trouble? What care and energy we waste on the effort to earn our liv- ings and not to cry in public ! ' ' He felt for his pipe. But Caroline pursued her theme: " Haven't you often made the most wonderful plans in the night, which make you blush in the morn- ing, for their idiocy, or what is itf grandilo- quence?" "Oh, yes." "That's what makes Eoden different from us, you know. He doesn't blush in the morn- ing; they seem just as good as they did in bed . . . Your feelings last night, Hugh I quite understand them. They were simply dis- torted." "So Roden, then, is perpetually distorted?" "No, no. He has the horrors sometimes, of course. I can't explain him. But those very conceited ideas of oneself and one's ability that you and I only have at night and in soli- tude aren't destroyed for Roden by daylight and the world." Although she had led the talk round to her 36 THE SINGING CAPTIVES brother, Caroline had not dismissed from her mind Hugh's first fantastic speech. It con- tinued to occupy her long after he had left her. It raised, not for the first time, the question of how Gerald's and her life would have fallen out had they been married. This speculation, fruitless and idle as it was, inevitably employed her at times ; but for some reason unknown to herself, she never spoke of it to Hugh except in passing not from any fear of disloyalty, nor from a sense of the sacredness of the topic, for she intuitively knew that what has never been, and can never be, cannot be held sacred. This was her one reserve from Hugh; and not till much later did she break the silence. 37 m. IT was past ten o'clock of a fine April morn- ing, but still Roden Peel lay in bed, tossing from side to side and groaning: "0 God, God! There's no use in trying to have friends. " This was a favourite, an attractive, a tor- menting topic: it occupied a great deal of Roden 's time. To the question of what he called Caroline and Ann Davies and Joe Tucker if not friends, Roden had no answer, save that one of his most outstanding and constant sen- sations was that of friendlessness. He had returned from the war full of hopes and projects. Nothing seemed too simple, too splendid, too humble, too difficult for him to do. He pictured a gay, crowded, childlike, active existence in the midst of an appreciative family and a circle of kind, enthusiastic, hard-work- ing friends. He would have no dealings with the super-subtle, the hypercritical, the chatter- ing, back-boneless persons who had tried to 1 'take him up" after the publication of his 38 THE SINGING CAPTIVES poems. Cleverness he did not demand in people ; all that he had to express was compre- hensible to the least intellectual of minds. All the large, the real, the fundamental things were capable of comprehension by anybody, if lucidly expressed. He, Eoden, would write the real democrat for everyone. Concerning his own part in these schemes, he had not been disappointed; soon after his return to England he had begun to write, and had completed ' ' Swedenborg : A Drama." It was the desired friends of whose existence he began to doubt. To begin with, his family hardly seemed to notice him. Stella, newly grown-up, looked at him as at a curious animal; his father, after a few mild vain ef- forts at setting up a current of sympathy, ignored him; and Lady Peel, whose period of enthusiasm about the stage happened to co- incide with the completion of Roden's play, showed one brief flare of interest only. Roden recalled the conversation: "Mother, I've finished my play." "Roden, how wonderful! Is it typed? If it's typed I'll show it to Miss What 's-her-name she's a power in the S. S. S. "What is it about?" 39 THE SINGING CAPTIVES " Swedenborg. " "Oh . . . Is it like Ibsen? Of course, Roden, dear, I know that Norway and Sweden are very tragic and interesting and advanced; but I don't think they're very popular just now. Couldn't it take place in in the Potteries, say? Look how Arnold Bennett goes down." Since Roden 's failure to respond adequately to this suggestion, Lady Peel had seemed un- able to focus her gaze on him. Besides, her passion for the stage had soon subsided. Sir Harold, after one attempt to interest his son in a commercial opening which would have provided him with a salary and later a partner- ship, had let the young man alone. The vacancy was filled by Evelyn Cashel. When announcing to his family that aniline dyes had absorbed their cousin's daily energy, Sir Har- old had thrown out one question to Roden: "What do you think of doing?" "I shall write," was the reply, received in silence. His family, then, with the exception of the fond though critical Caroline, did not provide the nucleus of sympathy which Roden needed. Caroline herself was sure that he would find the necessary friends, in spite of difficulties at 40 THE SINGING CAPTIVES the outset. Roden, tossing in bed, remembered fragments of conversation with her: ''You don't try to make people like you not even Hal and mother and Stella." "If I do try, they don't. They must take me as I am, or leave me." "Well, don't grouse if they leave you; and anyway, 7 take you." "You're no good. You're a pessimist. I want some one who'll love life as I do, and do all the things there are to be done." "Such asf" "For instance, I enjoy everyday, ordinary things and people. You only like them in books." "That's art, isn't it? I like them transub- stantiated." "Damn long words! We shall never under- stand each other." "Well, Eoden, at least we shall always care for each other." "Shall we? I'm not so sure." "Why? Do you sometimes hate me?" "IVe been pretty near it, Cabs, when you sneer. You despise* every one you despise life, I believe." He remembered vividly her long thoughtful 41 THE SINGING CAPTIVES look, fixed on him, yet in reality seaching her own mind for the truth. He remembered her accent as she replied: "I don't despise life, I fear it. It's stronger and cunninger than I it comes along behind me and tries to push me under motor-buses.'* "Turn on it, and you'll find it's on your side. It's good to be part of life . . . Oh, you'll never agree, so we can't be friends." "But we are friends. I have you here." She had touched her breast-bone. "You and I are like Cathy and Heathcliffe: Cathy is half Stella, half me." It had not occurred to Roden that this was an odd speech for a sister to make to a brother. Instead he had answered quickly: "Your Brontes weren't afraid of melodrama as you call it nor of ordinaries. Nothing's wasted, or to be despised nothing and nobody. Every one is of equal value and interest." "Ah, no." "The only people I despise," the young man had added in sudden anger, "are pessimists, because pessimism is a denial of life : it's nega- tive. They are on the down-grade." "Am I?" "Yes. It's they who fail," he had re- 42 THE SINGING CAPTIVES affirmed, his thoughts passing from her to in- clude the hated intelligentsia. Caroline, with one of her moments of in- tuition, had followed his thoughts. He re- membered her accusing him. of being taken in by the talk of cultured people, of believing them to be ineffectual because they were fluent ; and his reply: "It's enough for me that they are snobs. They despise me because I don't speak their beastly jargon." His sister, in spite of these differences, had done her best to bring him into contact with sympathetic acquaintances. Boden went over in memory his first encounter with Ann Davies, a gay, robust, blue-eyed young woman with whom Caroline left him to deal alone. Roden's first question: "What do you do?" elicited from Ann that she did anything, or rather nothing. "Isn't London enough? except when one's in the country, and that's better still." "Yes, indeed. Let's go," he had cried im- pulsively, "to the Graf ton Galleries. No, it's dark, damn it. Let's go to a cinema." With eyes closed, lying in bed, he recalled how Ann had written on the back of an en- 43 THE SINGING CAPTIVES velope: " We've gone to a cinema," which mes- sage was propped against his mother's draw- ing-room clock for Caroline to find on her return. But the promise of this meeting had been too hopeful. He read Ann Davies " Sweden- bo rg : A Drama, ' ' and, calling Caroline into his room in the evening, he had broken out: 1 ' Damn that girl, Cabs! She doesn't know when to hold her tongue." "Who does!" "Don't enrage me with philosophy I'm nearly off my head as it is. What a family ! I thought Ann was sane and kind; but now I've lost her." "What exactly did she say?" " * Exactly!' She said a damned sight too much. Either my play's worthless, or she's a fool." He remembered his anger the anger of al- most a year ago; it burned in him again at the thought of Ann's careless, bruising words, and of Caroline's silence. Her silence seemed accusatory. ' ' Say it 's my play, say it : you think it ! " he had stormed. "I know you don't care, but I thought she did." 44 THE SINGING CAPTIVES He knew now, even as he tossed in his fevered mood of retrospect, that both these girls cared for himi Ann gaily, light-hearted- ly, and Caroline in her divided, baffled, critical, constant manner. She was sanguine on his behalf; it was, she said, only a matter of time. She knew that he would co-ordinate his dream with reality; she swore to that ability in him, which was not in her. Her own dream had gone by the board; it would not mingle with life. It was a guar- antee for him that he was so essentially dif- ferent from her. Meanwhile, it was hard for him. Almost every day his mother indirectly attacked what she considered his idleness, and by implica- tion praised Evelyn Cashel for his industry. Sir Harold was amiable, but made no ad- vances. Stella looked at him curiously. Evelyn mildly, subtly echoed Lady PeePs un- answerable questions not for the purpose of annoying Roden, not even solely for the pur- pose of pleasing his aunt; his motives were seldom so simple, as Roden intuitively and Caroline analytically knew. Evelyn's apparent criticism of his cousin, couched in a cunningly transformed version of Lady PeePs jerky 45 THE SINGING CAPTIVES speech, was at once a criticism of the speech and a flattery to the speaker. Evelyn knew, none better, which side his bread was but- tered; and it was his pastime and pride to act on this knowledge while giving rein to his taste for satire. Such obliquity infuriated Eoden, rousing all that was puritan in him. The very thought of Evelyn made him scowl. It was the thought of Evelyn that to-day made him roll himself over in bed, and mutter "Damn! Damnation!" as his elder sister entered the room. "Go away!" he adjured her. Nevertheless, she sat down by the win- dow, and said: "I'm lunching with Ann at Simpson's to- day. Will you come?" "No. I'm sick of Ann. Of everybody, in- cluding you. Why don't you go away?" "I will, for you. But I thought it was on my account you told me to go." "It was." He lay staring at her. "Have you had any breakfast?" "No. Give me a drink of water." As he drank, he glanced at her, and then said: "You are fond of me, Cabs. I wonder why you stand my tempers?" " 'Beareth all things'," the girl answered 46 THE SINGING CAPTIVES with a slight grimace, holding out her hand for the empty glass. Roden banged it on his bed-table so that it broke. ' * There ! Damn you, Caroline, go into an asylum; don't try to be a flesh-and-blood person. You can't be. You'd cut up Christ's own body with phrases " 1 'Saint Paul's, you mean." * * Oh, hell ! Your passion for tags is inhuman it's indecent." "Oh, no a lust, like another." 4 < Lust, then. But gross words are only a fashion. It's all a fashion. You're a spiritual dandy." Still standing, her eyes on his dark face, Caroline wondered, as often before, at its po- tential tragedy, which not even his present mood of childish fury obliterated. In spite of five years of war, the tragedy was still only potentially, not actually, there. She feared for him, on that account, at the same time as she confidently hoped. And yet it might fade, melt into a simple ability to enjoy. There was in him a power and a strength, which might turn to misery or to serenity. At present, it was a dark, driving force; but she thought that, used and treated aright, it might turn to a force for 47 THE SINGING CAPTIVES happiness. For she knew that behind his tor- mented moods, his discouragements and sense of frustration, burned a faith in life, a confi- dence in himself, which were the profoundest things in him. This faith had survived the huge despairs of childhood, the black moods of adolescence, the drawn-out ordeal of war, the death of his comrades, the coldness of his family ; and so it would survive the disillusion- ments of peace and of maturity. So strong was her sense of it in him, of it being the main- spring of his character, that she did not resent the blunt, even cruel indictment of her own pessimism which sprang from it. She recog- nised his revolt against her view of life as the revolt of the affirmative against the negative temperament. What puzzled her was the inability of his face to express his confidence in existence; the opacity of his features disconcerted her. Only his nose, large, arrogant, sensitive, though not finely cut, seemed to scent life out as if he were the hunter, it the prey seemed to challenge life, as though he met it as an equal, instead of suffering its abuses like a captive. Caroline had once or twice, laughing at her own sen- timentality, kissed her brother's nose; feeling 48 THE SINGING CAPTIVES herself thus in some way indentified with his capacity and courage; as women, who in old days embroidered and embraced the standard, felt, when it was carried into battle, that the glory and splendour of the struggle were not wholly denied them. She kissed it now, despite his motion of repulse, before she left the room. 49 IV. AT noon Roden roused himself, and sat up, tousled-headed, to stare out of the window and round the room. His room was full of himself and evidences of his activity. On a large deal table by the window lay a stack of papers the first draft of " Harriet Brown: A Melodrama." "Swedenborg" was in the hands of an agent. The table further bore paints, pencils, a draw- ing-board and a pot of murky water. Above the fireplace was a pastel portrait of the Deity, surrounded by somewhat homosexual angels with bobbed hair; this work of art, as well as Satan, who, dressed in American clothes with side whiskers and cloth-topped boots, leered in the shadow of the wardrobe, was of Roden 's own execution. By the gas-fire was one shelf of books, sup- ported by a chair. It contained: "Robinson Crusoe"; "Dr. Syntax's Tour," illustrated by Rowlandson; "War and Peace"; a Chaucer; a Swedish "Baedeker"; and Nietzsche's "Thus 50 THE SINGING CAPTIVES Spake Zarathustra," on which once- treasured but now unloved volume Roden had experi- mented with his notions of bookbinding. In Roden 's nebulous cloud of angry thoughts one became clearer than the rest : hatred of his frescoes. He would colour-wash them lover to-morrow, disgusting things. Nevertheless, he remarked for the hundreth time the skill, if not the inspiration, with which he had grouped the heavenly attendants; one in par- ticular was masterfully drawn. He dressed quickly, in dark grey clothes; and, without definite intention, with only the feeblest impulse, went out and turned east- wards. It was a beautiful day. The streets were already emptying for the lunch hour. In Knightsbridge, he stopped to gaze in the shop windows, for he took a deep interest in women 's dress. He had not yet/ however, thrown off his troubled mood. In the bright clamour of the streets there still clung to his brain, his hands, his heart, a drab fog, a sensation of muffled, haunted irritability. As though flying from it, he started resolutely for Green Park. When he entered it, it seemed quite empty. After a few paoes he noticed a girl sitting on 51 THE SINGING CAPTIVES a seat, eating out of a paper packet. There was something so familiar in her attitude that he slackened his pace to watch her. She was dainty, squirrel-like, alert, He could not clearly see her face, but he was sure that she kept a wary, bright eye open for strangers and dis- turbances. Approaching, Roden became aware of what she reminded him; not only of a squirrel, but also of the slightly squirreline Stella. This girl belonged to the same type of woman as his sister and his mother the type which suggests the smaller animals: cat, rab- bit, monkey, rodent. She was not simian, as was Lady Peel; she was too neatly finished; her outline was too definite, her poise too alert. Now that she knew that a young man was watching her the natural daintiness of her actions was accentuated became an affecta- tion. Roden sat down beside her. After one quick, sharp look at him, she turned a trifle more away. ''It's lovely," Roden calmly remarked, as to the air. "D'you know, I can smell the hya- cinths in Hyde Park right across the tar and the petrol? Sometimes, I think I shall be ill with London's smells." 52 THE SINGING CAPTIVES After ^ moment an answer came primly: "They say the smells one doesn't smell are the worst. ' ' "As for the din!" the young man pursued, not noticing her, "of course I used to think it ruddy. I used to think my ear-drums would split, before I went to France. Now I can stand anything from the trump of doom downwards. ' ' "I suppose you can," said the.girL "I must say I used to think my ears would split when first I went to Gay's. Of course, as soon as you start making a noise yourself, you don't notice the others." "On the other hand, I seem to have de- veloped my nose in France," Roden went on, "you wouldn't think there could be so many smells, all bad ones." "No, you wouldn't, would you?" She had been turning herself gradually towards him, and her profile was now square to his. "Smells!" she echoed reminiscently; and added: "But the cloak-room at Gay's beats all." "What's Gay's?" "It's where I work Gay's Pantechnicon Corner . . .I'm second for speed now. I be- 53 THE SINGING CAPTIVES gan as office girl in 1917, and then I learnt my shorthand." "You're a typist. " "Yes; but my shorthand's better than my typing, Mr. Leslie that's my boss says. 'Miss Draper,' he says, 'you'll never learn, not ever, where to begin a new paragraph, not unless I tell you.' But I'm second for speed now, so I don't mind what Mr. Leslie says." Roden who, without apparently listening, had taken in all the essentials of this speech, announced that he wrote plays. Miss Draper was suitably awed; and, at her silence, he at last turned his face to her, and said: "Would you like to type a play for me?" "I haven't a machine of my own." "You could hire one if I paid." "Oh yes." She offered him a bag: "Have an acid drop?" and then, reassembling her errant formality, added primly: "If you'll excuse me." "No, thanks. I'll smoke. Have one?" "I don't smoke, thank you. Lots of the girls smoke; in fact almost all of them do; but I don't see the good of it. It runs away with money. How is one to put by for a rainy day if one's for ever buying cigarettes?" 54 THE SINGING CAPTIVES "Did you say your name was Draper?" She hesitated. Rita's moving story of an innocent girl led astray by a licentious artist came to her mind; these writers were just the same as artists, "sort of Bohemian." How- ever, when the young man said: "My name is Roden Peel," her good sense made her reply: "Mine is Grace Draper." "As I came along," said Roden, "I thought you looked like a squirrel eating nuts." A return of gentility made her voice arti- ficial as she answered: "I bring my lunch out whenever it's fine. The air's good for one. How's a girl to keep herself fit and her complexion good, if she's for ever cooped up in a typing-room 1 ?" At the end of her little speech, her garrulity having banished primness, she looked with open in- terest at her companion, who gravely agreed. His worries had mysteriously vanished; the drab fog had lifted from his brain, had melted from his hands and heart. The smells of hya- cinths and Piccadilly, the sounds of London and this girl's voice had banished care. ( He rose and produced a card, saying: "Here's my 55 THE SINGING CAPTIVES address. I'll send you the play or could you meet me here to-mjorrow? " "I shan't have got the machine by to- morrow. ' ' There was a pause. Roden's thoughts had flown away on the word " machine". Puzzled, she rose from the seat, and stood watching him side-long. Then, reminding herself that no girl gets on who is too nervous, she decided to be "foward," and added: "I might call for your play. Is it far? Of course, if it was Putney or Cricklewood. . . ." "T'other side of the Albert Hall." "Oh, is that all! Well, I like a stroll in my lunch hour, so I'll call for it on Tuesday if that suits you." "Thank you awfully. Ask for me." He raised his hat, nodded and turned away. She stopped him with an exclamation, and he turned back. "Mr. Peel, I don't know what they'll charge for the machine." "That doesn't matter." "I shall have to charge you a shilling a thousand words the usual charge." "That's all right." 56 THE SINGING CAPTIVES '