.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 49090
   :PG.Title: Love in a Muddle
   :PG.Released: 2015-05-30
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Christine Jope Slade
   :DC.Title: Love in a Muddle
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1920
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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LOVE IN A MUDDLE
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      LOVE IN A
      MUDDLE

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      BY

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      CHRISTINE JOPE SLADE

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      AUTHOR OF
      "BREAD AND BUTTER MARRIAGE"

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      HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED
      LONDON
      1920

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      *BY THE SAME AUTHOR*

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      THE KEYS OF HEAVEN
      LOVE IN A MUDDLE
      BREAD AND BUTTER MARRIAGE
      WEDDING RINGS FOR THREE

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      HODDER & STOUGHTON, LTD.
      PUBLISHERS LONDON

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.. _`I`:

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   \I

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I can't sleep.

I should go simply potty lying down and
trying to get quiet and peaceful.

I'm going to write down all the absolutely
mad, freakish things that have happened to-night,
and hope that in doing so I shall perceive
some sane and feasible method of escape.

Diaries are useful sometimes; they keep your
nerves from going absolutely to pieces with the
sheer unexpectedness of life.

Dad and mater were in a particularly horrid
mood this evening.  The C.O. had complained
about the Y.M.C.A. hut in the camp, or
something, and dinner was filthy, so the usual mutual
recriminations took place.  Rows always make
me feel so frightfully sick.  I've never enjoyed
a really proper one, because I've always had to
run away in the middle and be ill, and then of
course I never feel equal to coming back and
finishing it.

I don't think any of the shabby Tommies'
wives who come over on the paddle steamer on
Sundays to visit their husbands at the camp
live such a petty, sordid life as we do in our
diggings.

I hate dad when he gets red and shouts—I
simply have to beat a retreat.  I can quite
understand why the men are in such a fearful
funk of him.  I have been terrified and appalled
by him all my life, such is his effect on my
temperament that I could do or say anything
when he loses control and goes for me, tell any
childish lies or make any excuses.  My moral
sense positively ceases to exist.

I crept from them to-night and went for a
walk by the sea.

I am not afraid of the dark.  I enjoy it.  You
can think so awfully well when there is nothing
to distract your eyes, and the world feels so
spacious after our digs.

All my life I have felt there was never quite
enough room for the three of us, dad, and the
mater, and myself.  I believe if we lived in
St. Paul's together I should still feel
overcrowded.

I walked for a long time.  It was a topping
night, the air was as soft and warm as
cotton-wool and the moon was on the sea.  It was the
sort of night that makes you want to do a
frightful lot of good in the world, mother a lot
of orphans or marry a man from St. Dunstan's.
I could have cried because there was such a lot
of sorrow and unhappiness in the world.  You
do feel like that sometimes out of doors.

I went along keeping close to the cliff and not
thinking, and then I suddenly realised that I
was right under the lee of the big guns, and
facing the big guns of the fort just across the
water; and the searchlights over there suddenly
started playing and picked me out.

I got frightened, absolutely scared.

I could have screamed.

Every minute I expected to see those big
guns fire; only the month before a German spy
in woman's clothes had been found wandering
just where I stood.

I knew the marines behind the searchlights
could see me quite clearly, probably even my
white mackintosh.  I had asked father to let me
go to the fort.  He wasn't keen.  I'm twenty-three,
but he pretends to himself that I'm not
"out"—it saves dresses, so I never go anywhere.

I was in an absolute panic, and I felt as if all
the muscles of my knees had suddenly turned
to water, which wibble-wobbled every time I
moved them.

I turned back; and those searchlights never
left me alone, one steady bar of brilliant,
dazzling light kept me focussed the whole time,
and I could not see to walk in it.  I felt as
though every step might be a drop into space.

It was a perfectly beastly experience, and
every minute I expected the guns to belch out
at me.

I suppose I must have been crying.  I
seemed to have noticed myself making a funny
little bleaty noise; I know I screamed when a
very curt voice said: "What the devil are
you doing here?  You know perfectly well you
aren't allowed!"

"The searchlights!" I stammered.  "The
searchlights!"

"Well, they probably think you're up to no
good here."

"I am Major Burbridge's daughter," I
stammered; "and they'll fire!"

"Probably," he said casually, "if they
think you're spying."

"But they mustn't!"

"It would be a bore," the voice admitted
lazily, "especially as I should be included in
the result of their energies."  It sounded as
if he didn't care a hang whether he was or not.

He came and stood in the dazzling white path
of light the searchlight made, and I saw he was
an officer.  I had never seen him before, but
there were dozens of officers I did not know.  I
only met those who came to the house to play
auction with father and mother.

"Please, please—make them go away," I
pleaded, just like a kid surrounded by sheep or
something.

"To signal," he said thoughtfully, "would
be to invoke the wrath of the gods at once.  We
are nearly out of the boundary.  They can see
I am an officer, they can probably see also who
I am."  The light remained unwaveringly upon
us the whole time he was speaking.  "If the
gentleman behind them could be persuaded to
believe we are but a couple of harmless lovers!
I dare not wave or anything, because, although
I am attached to the joy-spot, they might not
recognise me; the sparkling intelligence behind
the guns would immediately take it for the
arranged signal to a sporty submarine.  Would it
annoy you fearfully if I made an effort, by
exhibition, to show that we are harmless lovers who
shun the light of publicity now being shed upon
us?  It is the only thing I can think of to
persuade them to transfer their attentions."  His
voice sounded bored and mocking, and I
thought he must be an elderly man.

"Please," I said, "please make them go away."

He moved to my other side and put his arm
round me, then he turned for a minute so that
his embracing arm must have been visible
against my white mack to the men behind the
searchlights.

"Forgive me," he said perfunctorily.  "I
think the pantomime will have the desired effect
on our friends yonder, and whether they know
me or not they know they'll have a hot time
to-morrow for playing the dickens with an
amorous officer—the main thing is to get them
to switch the light off us, isn't it?"

I thrilled.  I had always wondered, as every
girl born wonders, what it was like to feel a
man's arm round you.

I *liked* it.

I liked the cool, rather insolent, devil-may-care
voice.

I am always honest with myself, so I write
these things quite honestly and frankly.

I love reading, but I have never thought of
love or romance as being even remotely
connected with me.  I have always been very
interested in engaged couples and newly married
people, but I think it is rather squashing to be
the plain daughter of a pretty mother and a
father who can't afford to give you nice clothes.
I mean, it doesn't give you much chance.
Suddenly, when I felt those arms round me—very
limp and casual, it is true—I would have
given the world to have been attractive and had
an attractive personality and attractive frocks.
I have tried very, very hard to be nice and
useful and kind in my life, because I know I
could never have the more alluring virtues; but
it has been very, very dull.  I do think clothes
matter, and hair-waving, especially when your
hair is straight like mine; and I do understand
the girl who, when she was asked, "Which
would you rather be, beautiful or good?"
answered, "I would like to be born beautiful
and grow good."  I feel she must have been a
relation of mine.

The lights swished round.

"That," said the officer, "has done the
trick, Miss Burbridge, and here we are at the
boundary."

He removed his arms from me, and out of
the darkness suddenly came my father's voice.

"I had no idea you were in the habit of
taking my daughter for walks, Captain Cromer.
Your mother sent me to search for you, Pam.
I am awaiting an explanation."

"Oh—Captain Cromer—just—just——"

"Yes," said my father, "I perceived it.  I
presume you have an explanation to make, sir?
I have had the pleasure of watching you for the
last ten minutes."

"Yes," said my companion, "Miss Burbridge
unfortunately got picked out by the
searchlights, and we thought the guns——"

"Pamela," said my father, "have you anything
to say?  If not——"

"Yes," I said desperately.  "Oh yes——"
then the old sickening fear of my father, the
terror that made me deceive and even lie in a
sort of blind panic, rushed over me.

"I presume there is some understanding, an
engagement between you and Captain——"

"Hullo!  Major.  Hullo!  Captain Cromer.
We've had a most entertaining time.  We've
been watching you through our glasses.  If you
will stand in the limelight——" came an
unexpected voice behind father.

It was the C.O. and his wife.

"It brings back my own young days," said
the C.O. with his jolly laugh.

"I suppose we are the first to congratulate
you young people," the C.O.'s wife said
charmingly.  "I couldn't help overhearing the
word 'engagement.'"

I looked at father.

"Yes," I answered desperately.  "You
are—thank you very much."

.. vspace:: 2

*Later*.

I threw this on the top of the chest of drawers
because mother came in to say "good night!"

She has never done such a thing before.

"What a dreadfully old-fashioned nighty you
are wearing, Pam," she said.

"It was one of yours," I answered.  "I
always have yours when you have done with them."

"You must have some pretty new things
now, dear," she said.  She stayed and chatted
for a few minutes, and then strayed out again,
leaving an atmosphere of elegance and jasmine
scent.

I really am numbed mentally.  My brain
keeps taking records to-night, like a camera.
It's a sort of human sensitised plate, but I don't
feel anything, not even that it is really
happening to me.

When the C.O. and his wife made their
appearance, we all turned and walked up the hill
together; father and the Colonel and his wife
walked on in front, and the man and I walked
behind.

The man bent his head quite close to my head
and laughed.  It was rather a beastly laugh,
not villainy, just as if he didn't care whether
an earthquake or the millennium started next
minute.

"Well," he said, "you seem to have had
your innings, Miss Burbridge.  Now I want mine."

"I'll tell dad when I get home," I babbled
foolishly.  "I'll explain fully all about the
searchlights and everything."

I felt absolutely the same as I did when I sat
down at my "maths." paper when I tried to
matric., after having been awake all night with
raging toothache.  I felt I couldn't be decisive
or adequate or even sensible, I couldn't deal
efficiently with a fly that settled on my own nose.

"The inopportune arrival of the Colonel and
his wife have made it rather difficult to explain,"
he hazarded.  "Don't you remember
gracefully acknowledging our tender regard for each
other, and equally gracefully accepting
congratulations on existence of same?"  He
sounded all the time frightfully amused in a
bored sort of manner.  He had the most
delightful kind of voice, frightfully deep and
soft, and he drawled in a fascinating way.

We walked, unconsciously, slower and
slower, far behind the others, in the scent of
the heather that clothed the hill.

It was a wonderful night.  It sort of caught
you by the throat and made you ache for all the
things you could never, never have; crave the
deep friendships and wonderful love that would
never come your way.

"I am afraid I have been very stupid," I
said.  "I often am.  You see, I am afraid of
father."

"He's a bully, a rotten bully," he said; and
then: "I beg your pardon, Miss Burbridge—I
shouldn't have said that."

"It's just that he shouts, and I can't think
when he shouts.  I just say something that will
make him stop shouting—anything."

"It's funny my not meeting you before," he
said.  "I've met your mother scores of times.
Of course, I've heard of you."  He paused
thoughtfully, as if he were trying to remember
what he had heard.

"I don't go about much," I put in.

It seemed unnecessary to tell him I had no
"glad rags."

"Have you ever had a good time?" he
demanded abruptly.

"I don't think so," I answered, then sudden
loyalty to my parents made me add: "I—I
don't care for the sort of good time some girls
have."

"Rubbish!" he interrupted rudely.  "Every
girl likes a good time, and every girl will use a
fellow to get one—his money, his influence, his
friends, his admiration, his love—anything that
adds to her rotten vanity and flatters her.
There is no honour among women, they are all
the same; there isn't a sport among them—not
one; and the prettier a girl is the less of a sport
she is."

"I am plain enough to be a sport," I put in.

"Yes," he acquiesced indifferently; then
he suddenly swung round on me.  "The real
explanation of to-night is going to be damned
awkward," he said curtly.  "Do you realise
that?"

"Yes."

"Then why explain?  It suits me jolly well
if you don't."

"I must."

"Why?"

"Oh—because I must."

"A fool reason."

"We can't pretend to be engaged."

"Why not?  I think it would be rather a
piquant relationship.  It appeals to my debased
sense of humour.  It would at least have this
Stirling advantage over the average engagement.
We needn't be a couple of confounded
hypocrites the whole time with each other.  We
have no mutual regard—we could at least
reserve our self-respect by being honest; or
perhaps the prospect of explaining to the
inflammable Major, his Colonel, and the Colonel's
lady, the circumstances that necessitated the
loving embrace in which they found us to-night
appeals to your sense of humour?"

"Don't be a beast," I flashed out.

"You perceive how charmingly natural we
are already.  I find it refreshing—and I intend
to continue to refresh myself.  Own honestly
that you simply daren't explain.  The Colonel
is going back to the mess for bridge.  When I
arrive the entire mess will be in a position to
congratulate me.  Those officers who have
charming wives in billets will carry back the
glad tidings of our betrothal."

"You must stop him!" I said.  "Oh—please—please—do
something!  Where are
they?"  I searched the hill for the three
figures.

"They have considerately left us to our
lovers' lingering.  Your father is swollen with
pride to-night."

"Why?"

"Because I am an excessively eligible young
man—the sort of young man no one expected
you to noose."

"You are a horrible young man—perfectly
beastly!"

Yet I did not hate him, he was so frightfully
exciting.  I can't quite explain to myself what
I felt about him.  I could breakfast every morning
in his company for a year and not know
what I was eating once.  I am quite sure of
that.

"I am not going to let you go," he said
suddenly.  "I have made up my mind about
that.  You are a present from the devil to the
worst side of my nature.  There, aren't you
*thrilled*?  Doesn't your foolish female heart
flip-flap?"

"No," I said stormily; "and I think you
are talking like an idiot."

"Delightful creature!  Now, listen here,
young spitfire, I'm going to give you a good
time——"

"I won't take it!"

"You'll lap it up as a kitten laps up
milk—that's all girls are for."

"I am going back to explain to father and
mother."

"The thought of 'father' explaining to the
C.O. and the mess fills me with pleasurable
anticipation.  Your own conduct alone will
require all his ingenuity to explain; the natural
and charming and quite unblushing way in
which you accepted the very nice congratulations
of Mrs. Walters and the Colonel requires
quite a——"

"I didn't know what I was doing."

"That merely denotes you an idiot."

"Where are we going?" I said, suddenly
realising the pleasant wiry spring of the heather
was gone from beneath my feet.

He gripped my arm and laughed.  "I am
taking you to pay a little call," he said.





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   \II

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"It's Brennon House!" I protested.  "You
aren't going in here!"

For answer he swung open the gate of the
largest house in the neighbourhood, still
keeping tight hold of my arm.

"Why not?" he demanded coolly.  "I have
a book to return."

"But it must be nearly ten."

"Better late than never."

"Besides—I don't know them—and I have
my old mack on."

I knew who lived there well enough.

Mother had called.

"It is an honour to know the Gilpins," he
assured me.

I knew that. I knew they were frightfully
rich and aristocratic, and that half the officers
were crazy about Grace Gilpin. All the most
attractive ones used to live up at Brennon
House playing tennis and boating on the
artificial lake in the grounds; and they used to give
weekly dances and have a coon orchestra from
London, and they had amateur theatricals and
no end of fun.

Grace Gilpin had always seemed sort of
unreal to me, like the princess in a fairy story.
I had never seen her.

"Please!  Please!" I protested.  "This is madness!"

"It is delicious madness," he said softly.

In the moonlight I could see the heavy,
colourless heads of flowers; the scent of them,
sweet and strange and all different, seemed to
wave over us for a minute as we passed.

"They'll be on the veranda," he said.
"We'll go round."

"You're not going in!" I said desperately.

He stopped and looked down at me.

"In six weeks I go to the front with my
draft," he said.  "And I hope to be killed.
To-night has placed us both in the most
extraordinary position.  It's practically impossible
for us, at the moment, to extricate ourselves.
It just happens that fate has played into my
hands in the rummiest way.  I don't want to
extricate myself.  Six weeks is a very short
time.  I'm awfully rich.  I'll give you a topping
time, a time you'll remember all your life—if
you won't try to extricate yourself for six
weeks."

"Pretend to be engaged to you?"

"Why not?  You've no one else in view at
the moment.  Everyone will envy you, and say
sweet things to your face and nasty things
behind your back.  If you won't—I leave you
to explain things to your people and the
regiment and the wives of the regiment."

"I can't!"

"Precisely!  Then why worry?  What does
our engagement demand of us?  Civility and
excessive courtesy in our bearing towards
each other before people.  And please"—he
caught his breath sharply—"when we are
alone we will have no horrible hypocrisy, no
feminine flim-flam, no playing up and pretty
lies and coquetries and deceits; nothing but the
plain unvarnished truth and bare honesty; as
we have no interest in each other, we can at
least pay each other the compliment of
behaving as if we were two men."

"But," I began, dazed.  He absolutely
carries you off your feet.

"Come on," he said curtly.

We went through a sort of old-fashioned
honeysuckle and jasmine pergola and came
opposite a broad stoep, all hung with baskets
of pink geraniums and ferns and pink Japanese
lanterns with electric lights inside, and white
wicker armchairs and big pink silk cushions and
white tables.

It was just like a theatrical scene.

There was an awfully handsome middle-aged
woman sitting at a table playing bridge with
three elderly men, and someone inside the inner
room was playing "Iolanthe."

Everybody yelled, "Hello, Cromer!" and
"Cheerio, Cromer!"

A girl suddenly appeared from behind a huge
flowering Dorothy Perkins in a white tub, and
two or three officers and another girl in a bunchy
mauve and silver gown fluttered up from a low
pink divan.

They stared at me, in my old mack, with
well-bred curiosity, and I thought I looked like
someone from the pit wandered on to a musical
comedy scene.

The music stopped, and a girl suddenly
appeared at the french-windows.

She was perfectly wonderful.

She was awfully fair and tall and slender,
and she had blue eyes the exact colour of her
georgette gown.

You could have cried over her, she was so
lovely; and she had the sort of mouth that
made you feel you simply couldn't go away
until you had seen it smile.

"Hullo! Cap.," she said; her voice was
light and high and sweet, almost as if she were
laughing at something.

"I've brought your book back, Grace," he
said; and then he took my hand.  "Oh, Pam
dear," he said—then to the handsome lady at
the bridge table, "May I introduce my little
fiancée—Miss Burbridge."

I knew then; I just knew by the look in those
very blue eyes.  I quite understood why
Captain Cromer was bitter, why he wanted a
fiancée.

He wanted to hit back.

A sort of buzz of talk and teasing broke out
all round me, and through it all I detected a
vein of surprise.

Grace Gilpin came down the veranda to
shake hands.  She walked wonderfully—just
like an actress on the stage.

"Why, you poor souls!" she said, lightly
and gaily, "so it's raining"—and she looked
at my old mack; then *everybody* looked at it.

I felt suddenly as if I wanted to cry.

"I made her put it on," I heard Captain
Cromer say.  "She is such a foolish little
person.  She doesn't take half enough care of
herself"—and I knew that I could learn to love
that man, that I was doing a crazy thing, and
I was going to go on with it.





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   \III

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When I am with people I feel as if I am a fairy
princess taking part in a fairy play, a wonderful
and desirable and adorable person.  It is a
perfectly marvellous feeling; and when I am
alone with Cheneston I feel as if he switched
the limelight off with an impatient hand, and I
was just a plain, shabby, silly kid.

He has bought me an engagement ring—for
the six weeks before he goes to the front.

"Let us be as beastly orthodox as possible,"
he said as he popped it on.  "Why don't
you look after your nails—you've got decent
hands."

"What shall I do with it when——"

"When you write and break off the engagement!
Oh! keep it if you like."

It is a platinum set with one glorious ruby,
an enormous stone.  You could almost warm
yourself by the red there is in it.

I love warm things, and glows and twinkles
and brightness.

I am waking up.  I feel as if I were as
covered with shutters as an old anchor with
barnacles, and every morning when I wake up
I find more shutters opened.

I think Cheneston must be perfectly appallingly
rich.  He has a villa in Italy, and a little
hut in Norway where he stays for the ski-ing
season, and the white yacht *Mellow Hours* in
the harbour is his.

It's more fairy tale-y than ever.

Mother and father are delighted at my
engagement; but their surprise is rather
humiliating, it does make me realise how awfully
plain and dull I am.

I haven't any parlour tricks or conversation,
my tennis is rotten, I'm sick on the yacht, I
swim like a mechanical toy, I haven't the
foggiest idea how to play golf, and I'm never
sure of my twinkle in jazzing—and Grace Gilpin
does all these things absolutely toppingly.
She's been trained to do them from quite a
little kid.

We seem to do everything in fours—I and
Cheneston, and Grace Gilpin and a man called
Markham, Walter Markham, who adores her.

Cheneston is sweet to me when we're all
together, but when he and I leave the others
and are alone sometimes he hardly speaks.

I imagine he is bored.

I do love him so much, every day I seem to
love him more and more and more.

I suppose I ought to be ashamed and
humiliated to write that down, because I simply
bore him to tears; but I'm not, mine isn't a
silly love—he's my very, very dear, the most
wonderful man I have ever seen or known.

Sometimes people say things that simply
wring my heart.

"I suppose you'll get married directly after
the war?" the C.O.'s wife said.  "Will you
live in England?"

"I—I don't know," I answered.

"We shall winter in the South," said
Cheneston; he glanced at Grace Gilpin and I
knew she was listening.  "We shall probably
go to Norway for the sports, and spend the rest
of the time in England."

"It sounds like a fairy tale," said the
C.O.'s wife.

"I think it is," I broke in unexpectedly.

Grace Gilpin turned in her chair and glanced
at me.  She was lovely; she wore cornflower
blue crêpe and white collar and cuffs.

"I think Cheneston would be quite wonderful
in the rôle of a fairy prince," she said.

He laughed, rose, and walked away.

Going home he looked at me gravely.

"I hope you're not getting romantic about
our engagement.  I don't mean anything
rotten, child—but all that silly rubbish about
fairy tales and fairy princes.  I have only five
weeks more—then I go to the front."

"Did you care for Grace most frightfully?"
I asked boldly.

He looked down at me with slightly puzzled
eyes.  I can't describe his eyes exactly, they
are hazel, and when he is going to laugh they
laugh first; and they are hard and honest and
straight.

"I thought," he said.  "I gave my very
soul into her hands, to play with and laugh
at—but I don't know.  It doesn't hurt so much—as
it did.  Pam—I gave her everything that was
best in me; and she encouraged me, she let me
give, and when I had beggared myself—when I
cared like hell—she flung my gifts back in my
face and laughed.  I wanted to humiliate her as
she had humiliated me.  I'm not a great man,
Pam; she ground my pride and my love and my
manhood under her heel—and I wanted to hit back."

"And I afforded you the opportunity," I
said very quietly.

He looked out over the downs, his eyes were
worried and troubled and his face was white.

"I wouldn't hurt you for the world, Pam;
I have been thinking over this make-believe
engagement of ours, wondering if it could
possibly hurt you in any single way.  The only
thing I can see is that it might keep off another
man who might want to marry you—and there
isn't one about.  It simply amounts to this: I
give you a good time, and you wear a ring I
gave you.  I wouldn't hurt you, Pam.  Sometimes
I could almost fancy you're not like other
women—you're not a beastly little actress.  I
suppose I seem an awful cad sometimes.  We
can't cry off just now, kid; the Service makes
prisoners of us all.  I can't leave here, whatever
happens, until I go to France with my battery
in five weeks' time; and if we pretended things
were broken off now our position would be
intolerable.  We've got to carry on.  I'll make
the next five weeks as pleasant as ever I can
for you."

Mother came out as we reached our gate,
and Cheneston said good-bye.

She looked at me curiously as we went
inside.

"You funny cold little thing," she said,
"never a kiss."

One of the things that makes me feel
frightfully sick is the amount mother and father are
spending on clothes for me.

It's rather like an Arabian Nights dream to
have a wardrobe full of perfectly adorable
frocks, but I feel it's so unfair to let them spend
all this money to get me settled when being
settled is as remote as it ever has been.

I try to accept the light and airy "take what
the good gods give" philosophy, but I am too
aware that it isn't the good gods, it's mother
and father who give, on a Major's pay, fully
believing their reward will be made concrete in
"The Voice that breathed o'er Eden," and the
disposing of a singularly plain and unexciting
daughter to a handsome young man with pots
of money.

I would so like to be angry with someone for
being plain, but I did it absolutely on my own,
because mother is quite a beautiful person and
father is frightfully aristocratic and romanish—they
are both rather splendidly beaky, but mine
is a pure and unadulterated snub.

I suppose I have a petty, shallow nature, but
I pine to be romantic and wonderful like Grace
Gilpin, and simply draw people to me; no one
but deaf old ladies who think I look kind and
good ever ask to be introduced to me; and only
chivalrous men who think I look tired and
anæmic and work for my living ever offer me
seats in buses or tubes.

Grace Gilpin takes her surroundings and uses
them as a background—she is always to the
fore.  I sink into the background and become
part of them.

Yesterday we took out lunch on the links,
caviare sandwiches and stuff, and Grace sat
down by a flaming gorse-bush in a grey frock
and a grey jersey.  She just used that glorious
bit of flame as an "effect."  I sat on the other
side, and they all nearly forgot me and went off
without me.

"I didn't see you," Walter Markham said.

It's true; there are heaps of people in this life
you don't see because of the more ornamental
people.

I would have given almost anything to have
been born showy, so that people would look at
me.  I want Cheneston to look at me as he,
and other men, look at Grace, as if she were a
splendid vision vouchsafed to them for five
minutes.

I do love that man, and love isn't one bit what
I thought it was.  I always imagined it was a
mixture of bubble and scorch, but it isn't—it's
so sweet to love.  I could be good!  It makes
me feel good right to my finger-nails, and
full of that after-church-on-a-summer-Sunday
evening-in-peace-time feeling; that's why I
think that my love for the man isn't anything
to be ashamed of or humiliated about.  He
doesn't love me, I know; but I have a
conviction you can't grow unless you love, and I
feel so much more use in the world since I've
started growing.

Loving Cheneston has made life perfectly
wonderful for me.  He doesn't know it and he
never will, but he's shown me all the dear
beauty of the world—and it is beautiful.

Walter Markham is awfully nice to me;
sometimes he leaves Grace Gilpin to Cheneston
and walks with me, and he is teaching me tennis
in the mornings before breakfast.  He is much
older than Cheneston, Grace, or I—he must be
forty—and he is very rich.

I wonder if Grace will marry him—or if she
will marry Cheneston.  Sometimes I think he
will forget he is angry with her, and he will tell
her how the mistaken idea of our "engagement"
arose, and why he let it prosper—there
is a frightful lot of the open-hearted, impetuous
schoolboy about Cheneston.

I don't think he is happy.

If he made a clean breast of it to Grace
we should have to break off our supposed
"engagement," and mother would have to
take me away—father couldn't leave.

I can imagine what my life would be!

I think they would pack me off as governess
or companion to someone.

I know if I don't marry by a certain age that
will be my fate.  Mother was perfectly honest
about it—before Cheneston came along; now
I am her dear little daughter, she looks at
me in pleased bewilderment sometimes, as if
wondering how so homely a hunter could have
achieved such a sensational capture.

They have never tried to equip me in any
way.  I was never given the opportunity to
acquire any accomplishments.  Old Giovanni
taught me to sing—for love of his art.

Mother laughed when she heard he was
teaching me—she laughed because he was a
funny, broken-down old Italian singer, and the
boys used to pay him five shillings a night out
of mess funds to come up and play to them in
the evening when the regiment was stationed
at Gilesworth and there was nothing on earth to do.

Giovanni was a great teacher, and to him I
owe to-night.

I don't think I'll ever forget to-night.

It was lovely!

I wish I could tell Giovanni all about it, he
would so understand.  Once he was furious;
he told mother I had an extraordinary voice,
and mother laughed and said she did not
doubt it.

Cheneston used the words at the Gilpins' to-night.

"You have an extraordinary voice, Pam!"
he said, "amazing."

Grace sings.  Cheterton and Pouiluex of the
Paris Conservatoire trained her voice.

To-night we all went over to the Gilpins'
for coffee—mother, father, Cheneston, and
I—and when we arrived Grace was singing
"Jeunesse," that funny little song about
"taking your picture out of its frame, and
out of my heart I have taken your name"—it
wasn't very effective.  It needs a lot of sorrow
in the voice, and Grace's voice is full of light
laughter; it was rather like a tom-tit trying to
dance a minuet.

I was feeling stirred up and rebellious.  It
seemed so hard that I had only a funny little
face and homely little ways in which to express
all the beautiful big, swishy feelings that were
eating me up inside, and Grace was so lovely
that she could express things she didn't really
feel at all.

It seemed so awfully unfair and rotten, just
as if we were both trying to touch Cheneston's
heart with the same melody, and she had a
glorious grand to work on, and I just a little
boarding-house upright.

They had blue chinese lanterns with apple-blossom
pattern on the stoep, and great copper
bowls of larkspurs and pale pink carnations
everywhere, and black cushions on all the white
wicker chairs; and Grace wore black with an
enormous blue sash.

She was singing in the drawing-room, with
Walter Markham turning over her music, and
when she came out on to the stoep she said:

"Surely, Pam, you play or something?"

"I sing a little," I said.

"Then do try," said she—you know the
sort of woman who always asks another woman
to "try" to sing.

I went straight to the piano and I sang
"Melisande in the Wood," accompanying myself.

I think my voice has a funny register, it
seems to surprise people.  It's terrifically deep
and strong and soft—almost "furry."

It's rather disconcerting, because it doesn't
sound as if it belonged to me at all; I am like
a doll's house fitted with a church organ.

I don't think I have *ever* sung as I did that
night.  I was pealing and ringing and chanting
inside before ever I started, and all that was
there in my heart seemed to rush into my voice.

It was like some great big longing, hoping,
sad she-spirit singing.

When the last "sleep" had sort of slid
away, I turned round; they were all in the
room staring—just staring.

Walter Markham came over to see me.

"You are wonderful!" he said.  "Pam—you
are wonderful!"

I looked at Cheneston, suddenly I felt as if I
had taken control of my background.

Cheneston's face was white.

His face was the face of a discoverer.

He bent over me.

"You have an extraordinary voice, Pam,"
he said, "amazing——  But of course it
lies—women use their singing voices to tell
lies—wonderful, beautiful, sweet-sounding lies."

"Sing again," Grace said.

But I would not sing again; I had made my
effect—I own it quite, quite honestly—I could
have shrieked with triumph.

So Grace sang.

She sang "Rose in the Bud"—and it was
like the trickling after the pour had ceased.

I think they all felt it.

They began to talk.

Cheneston did not talk; he leant back against
the black cushions and stared into the garden
with a white face.





.. vspace:: 4

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   \IV

.. vspace:: 2

I do love life.

It's a perfectly priceless possession, sometimes
I'm quite sorry to go to sleep and forget
what has happened and what is going to
happen.  I suppose I am childish.

Cheneston makes everything so smooth and
easy and charming.  I never realised the
enchanted atmosphere that money and good
breeding creates.  You feel as if you were
continually being fêted.  All the women in the
set in which I live now are treated the same
way.  I cannot understand why they ever grow
old or have to have their wrinkles massaged and
their hair hennaed; none of the sort of things
that make a woman grow old are allowed to
come near them.

All the things, and the sights, and the feelings
that are stale to Grace Gilpin and her chic
friends are new to me—I sort of rush at them
and mop them up.  I can't help being thrilled
and happy.

"You'll wear yourself out," Grace Gilpin says.

Yet the men seem to like my enthusiasm.  I
couldn't be blasé if I tried.

I love, love, love every bit of every single
day—that's the honest truth.

I don't think it's rained once since the night
Cheneston and I met in the glare of the searchlights.
I suppose that seems a frightfully little
thing, but it isn't—it's an awfully big thing.

And the battery is nearly due to leave for
France.

Cheneston is so sweet and gentle with me,
just like an elder brother to his little sister.

I never knew a man could understand in the
way he does.  I always thought a man had a
totally different type of brain.

We went up to Town to the opera last week,
and we dined at the Carlton and I wore a rather
clever dress mother selected for me—brown and
amber tulle the colour of my hair, with just a
huge bunch of tea-roses at my breast.

A man Cheneston used to be at Oxford with,
and his sister, and Cheneston's aunt and uncle,
made up the party; and I seemed to make them
laugh an awful lot, and I heard the aunt tell
Cheneston I was the most original child she had
ever met.

Oh! but the music!

I didn't know I could feel as I did.  It seemed
to pluck at my heart with little red-hot fingers.
One minute it picked me up and swung me into
a state of dizzy gladness, and the next I seemed
to see nothing but Grace Gilpin and Cheneston,
and the battery leaving for France!  One
minute I felt good—so good that I could have
got up and walked straight into a convent for
the rest of my life.  And the next I wanted to
fight Grace Gilpin for Cheneston and start that
very minute; me, the funny little thing with the
snub nose who made people laugh!

Why did Heaven make me a funny little thing
with a snub nose?  It wasn't sporting; and I
do think it handicaps one.  One doesn't
somehow expect a snub nose to be a Joan of Arc, or
Florence Nightingale, or Mrs. Pankhurst, or
anything thrilling and earnest and vital and
glowing.

I think it's rotten to be born a quaint little
thing that nobody takes seriously.

It was awfully weird the way Cheneston
looked at me, and the boy who was at Oxford,
and the uncle, and the father—just as though
I was something they had never really seen
properly before.

Cheneston sat behind me, and I could feel
him trying to read things in my brain through
the back of my neck—it made me all tingly.

He is a strange man—you could wonder what
he was really like for hours.

"Did you like it?" he said when it was
all over and he helped me on with my coat.

I nodded.  I couldn't speak.

We were staying the night at the Savoy, and
Cheneston and I drove there together, mother
and father preceding us in another taxi.

"Pam," he said, "what were you thinking
of to-night?"

"Just dreaming," I answered.

"I was thinking that in another week I shall
be—out there."

"Yes," I said; and all the happiness that
the music had brought me ebbed from my heart,
and left it cold and dark, like a little cellar when
the lamps had been extinguished.

.. vspace:: 2

To-morrow at six the battery entrains.

I heard father giving orders for the band to
play them off.

He is to go too, of course, but mother seems
quite philosophic about it.  I wonder if when
people grow older they lose that sort of sick,
gnawing fear that attacks you when you think
of someone you care for very much going into
danger.

If you do I hope I grow old very quickly,
because at the present moment I feel dreadful.

To-morrow Cheneston goes—and I mustn't
show him I care the least little bit.  I've got to
keep the flag wagging.

I suppose everyone will turn out to see the
battery off.  I know a lot of the men's wives
came over in the old paddle boat last night to
say good-bye.  Poor souls!—their eyes were
red, and some of them had little kiddies in their
arms; but they had the right to grieve.  I
haven't any.

I think having the right to break your heart
makes the breaking an easier affair.

I'm sorry about father, but I'm not as sorry
as I ought to be.  I have always felt uneasy
when he was around, like Pomp and Circumstance,
his wire-haired fox-terriers, on the alert
to move out of the way quickly and hide if
necessary.

I don't think he realises the dreadful effect
his red-faced shouting has on people—it's like
being scolded by a lion.

The atmosphere of the house is almost as if
a raid were just over when he is gone.

The Gilpins had announced their intention of
seeing the battery off, and they were calling for
us in their motor.

I dread that little station at six o'clock in the
morning, and all the men, and the crowd of
women beyond the barrier, and the mess band
shouting "The Long, Long Trail," and the
chilly greyness; it sort of nibbles your heart
before ever the good-byes are started.

Cheneston has been up to say good-bye to
the Gilpins.

He is whistling outside for me to go down.
Oh!  I wish I were wonderful like Grace, and
I could make him care, ever such a little bit,
before he went away!

.. vspace:: 2

*Later*.

The moors, and the stars, and the leaves
of the aspens shivering in the moonlight like
spangles on a dancer's dress, and the scent of
the heather, and of gorse, and the tingling,
exhilarating pungency of the unseen sea—could
anything hurt more?

And me, longing to belong to the night—to
capture just a scrap of its mystic, thrilling
beauty—walking beside the one man in the
world an unromantic, bunchy little thing with
a snub nose.

He was very pale and constrained.  I suppose
it was his good-byes with Grace.  I kept
on wondering what they had said to each other,
wishing I knew!

"Let's sit down, kid," he said abruptly.
"I've a lot to say."

We sat down.

We seemed to have the whole, beautiful,
wonderful world to ourselves—only it was
an empty old eggshell of a thing, because he
didn't care.

"Pam," he said, "I want to thank you for
being a fine little pal to me.  I—I must have
seemed a pretty rotten sort of swine often."

Now, as I write him down and the things he
says, he doesn't cut a very gallant figure, and
yet he is.  He's a *big* man—his eyes, his laugh,
his voice, the funny way he says things.  He
makes all other men seem little and very
young.

"Oh no!" I said.  I shut my eyes because
I could concentrate on getting carelessness into
my voice, and it all hurt so horribly.

He seems little and ordinary—I can pop the
atmosphere on paper—but he wasn't; he was
*big*, and splendid, and very, very far away from
me.  I seemed to look at him through glass
and hear him through space.  He isn't the type
that could share himself with two women—I
expect I got that feeling because he'd given
everything to Grace.

"Pam," he said, "I'm so afraid—it's
tortured me!  You had a rotten dull life before
I came.  Will—will it seem very dreadful going
back?"

"I always knew I should have to," I said
steadily.

"Yes," he said, "I know!"  I had never
heard his voice like that.  "Pam—be honest!
I didn't know how absolutely splendid you were!
I thought you were just like other women!"

I rose and stuck my hands in my pockets.

"I'm all right," I answered brusquely.
"I've had a top-hole time, and I'm frightfully
bucked about it.  Let's have a tramp."

He rose too, he looked ill and worried.

"Pam," he said, "things may happen—out
there.  They do.  I don't think it's necessary
to break off our supposed engagement at
once.  It—it would be so much easier for you
if you didn't.  Pam—I wish to God I could
undo things."

"Why?" I queried starkly.

"If you should ever pay for these six
weeks—in any way—I'd never forgive myself."

I tried to reach him.  I wish I were big that
I could tuck an arm in his and tell him not to
be an idiot, but I dare not touch him.  I knew
that I should cry and cling to him.

I do not believe there ever was a more
wonderful night, so full to the brim of scents
and moonlight and velvet shadowed mystery.

"I—I want to go home," I said suddenly.
"I'm tired."

We hardly spoke again until we reached our
garden gate.  I had the feeling that he, too,
was surging with the things he wanted to say.

At the gate he put his hands on my shoulders,
he was breathing like a man who had run far.

"Pam," he said, "Walter Markham and I
were talking about you to-night—and I told
him the truth, child—that we weren't engaged,
and hadn't any feeling for each other."

"Why?"

"A man knows when another man—cares.
I'm glad I'm off to-morrow.  Pam, I was just
an incident, kid—an incident."

"Did—did Mr. Markham say—he cared?"

"He's too loyal a pal for that.  Besides,
until I told him, he thought——"

"What did he say when you told him?"

"I—I don't know.  I just walked out of his
hut and came to you.  He's not going with us
to-morrow, you know—he's going to take on
the new draft.  I—I'm glad.  Pam, say that
I'm just an incident.  I shall feel better about
things, kid!  I feel awful!"

"You're just an incident!" I said quietly.

I couldn't send him away with that look on
his face.

He bent and kissed my hand.

His lips seemed hot.

Then he turned, and I heard him running
swiftly down the little lane.

I wanted to have a sort of bright and shining
appearance the next day, but nothing helped
me, neither the sleepless night nor the hot
coffee.

I climbed into the Gilpins' car with a white
face.

It was the beginning of a gorgeous blue and
gold September morning, but everything was
misty and silvery and shiny with dew and mist.

"Cheer up, little thing!" Mrs. Gilpin said
as I got in.

"Everyone is turning out to give them a
send-off," Grace said.  "I suppose the Major
has been gone hours?"

"Yes," I answered, "his orderly called for
him at four.  Mother never goes to see him off.
She hates it."

Mrs. Gilpin made sympathetic noises.

"Walter Markham is the most fed-up thing
on earth.  He hates new recruits.  He wishes
he was going," said Grace.

"Perhaps the war will soon be over; the
papers say the *morale* of the German troops is
deteriorating," said Mrs. Gilpin hopefully;
conversation languished until we arrived.

All the coldness and greyness of the morning
seemed concentrated in that little station.  It
was heart-breaking; and the mess band blaring
out "Soldiers of the King" seemed to
accentuate the dreariness.

The battery had answered the roll-call; when
we arrived they stood in little groups, some of
them sitting on their kit-bags, the tin bullet-proof
helmets that had been served out the
previous day hanging from their haversacks.

"There's Captain Markham," said Grace.
"There's Mr. Wood and Connel; there's
Colonel and Mrs. Walters, and there's your
father.  I don't see Captain Cromer, Pam."

"I—I expect he'll be here," I answered
foolishly.

We passed through the gate on to the
platform; the little group of women outside the
barrier watched us enviously.

I was shivering and my teeth were chattering—the
silence was so uncanny.  It was as if all
those women outside and the men on the platform
were waiting for a miracle to happen and
deliver them from the necessity to face the
immediate future.

Father was much in evidence.  He came up
and spoke to us, and then bustled off again.

I turned to see Cheneston and his orderly
beside me.

"Morning," he said; he, too, was pale,
but smiling.  He turned aside to speak to
Grace.

I saw an A.S.C. man push through the crowd
to Colonel Walters; he looked very hot; in his
hand he had a telegram.

The men were beginning to get into the
train; a cheer, a very feeble cheer that
somehow seemed wet, came from beyond the barrier.

Walter Markham joined us, and another
man, a cheery boy called Withers.

"I wish I was going too," Walter Markham
said.  "I applied for a transfer months ago.
I want to get into a Scotch regiment."

I thought he avoided looking at me, and I
felt uncomfortable.

"I shouldn't have to train," he said, "and
my majority is due.  Yes, sir?" this to Colonel
Walters, who had hurried up looking amazingly
agitated.

"The War Office is mad!" he said.
"Stark, staring mad!  Markham, you have
been transferred with a majority to the Cameron
10th Battalion of the Leal Argyllshires.  You
will report to the C.O. at the headquarters on
Wednesday."

"Yes, sir."

"You, Captain Cromer, will remain on home
service to train the new battery which occupies
the barracks under Colonel Prosser, taking
Markham's place.  Johnstone is promoted to
Captain at my discretion, and I am to go
with one subaltern lacking and an inadequate
battery.  Stark, staring mad!"

"I—I am to stay?" Cheneston said.  "I—I can't."

"Headquarters' orders," said the Colonel
curtly.  "Now, boys, all serene?"

The band blazed out "Tipperary."





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   \V

.. vspace:: 2

Fortunately a climax is like a raid or a
storm—it has a definite duration.

In the days before the curtain went up on
life, I used to think how ripping it would be to
live through great situations and climax and
tragic happenings, like the heroines in the
novels I used to devour.  Now I know you do
not know they are happening to you at the
time; sometimes it's months before you say to
yourself with sudden understanding, "That
was a terrible day!" or, "It was a great
moment!" or, "It was the happiest day of
my life!"

Undoubtedly the biggest moment in my
whole life was when Colonel Walters told
Cheneston he was not to go to the front with
his battery—and yet I didn't know it at the
time.

Mrs. Gilpin said, "Oh! isn't that splendid!
Aren't you glad, Pam?" and I said, "I'm
awfully glad!"

Grace Gilpin was white as death.

I think Cheneston was even whiter.

"I'm to stay behind and take Markham's
place, and train a lot of fool boys to form fours
and dig trenches!  It's infamous!"

"Surely you are glad for Pam's sake, Mr. Cromer,"
the Colonel's wife interrupted reproachfully.

I think Cheneston had utterly and completely
forgotten me until that moment.  He turned
and looked at me in bewilderment; I suppose
he suddenly realised that his enforced stay in
the town would necessitate the continuation of
our supposed engagement.

He drew a long breath.

"Of course," he said, quite quietly, "of
course, Mrs. Walters."

You would imagine that when Fate calmly
picked up two people, shook them, and then
placed them in a position alien to anything they
had ever planned or dreamed of, they would
remain in a state of scared chaos; but it
isn't so.

When we had seen the train off, Cheneston
and I walked back to the camp, quite quietly.

"Poor little kid!" he said.  "One never
anticipated this, did one?"

"No," I answered.  I was thinking that
God had made the morning for lovers to walk
in—the mist had not lifted, the sun shimmered
golden through it.  It seemed to encase us
in soft amber radiance.  I had that
only-two-people-in-the-whole-wide-world-to-day feeling,
which must be so absolutely wonderful when
you want to be quite, quite alone with a man
and he wants to be quite, quite alone with you.
I was watching a cobweb sewn with dewdrops;
there was a sweet and foolish peace in my heart.
I could only remember that Cheneston was
going to stay.

"What are you going to do about it, Pam?"

"Oh—carry on," I said.  I tried to speak
lightly.

"You feel like that about it?"

"Well—we can't break the engagement at
once.  It would be perfectly awful for both of
us—especially me.  People would say I was
only waiting for you to go to France to—to rot."

"You funny little soul!  Pam—I—I blame
myself for all this.  You seem only a kid to
me—until you sing."

"And then?"  The golden mist seemed to
dance towards me.

"And then I know you are a woman—with
all a woman's rotten wiles, the little feline habit
of plucking at a chap's heart-strings in order to
amuse yourself.  There's only one good woman
in the world—my mother."

"I—I had no idea you had a mother!"

"Why should you have?" he demanded
curtly.  "She is a great invalid, she lives at
Cromer Court near Totnes, in Devon."

"Does she know about—us?"

"She knows nothing," he said briefly.
"There is nothing for her to know.  My God! look!"

I looked.  We had walked down to the
sea, near Brennon House bathing-tents.  The
Gilpins had built a little diving platform, and
on it, her hands above her head, stood Grace
Gilpin.

Half mermaid, half angel, she looked.  She
wore a black bathing-dress, and a beach gown
of brilliant violet lay behind her, a little pool of
exquisite colour.

No pen can do justice to her, only the brush
of a Sargeant or one of those people who have
things on the Academy walls that make
everybody else's work look dud.  I think if I had
been an artist I would have burst into a passion
of tears—something rose in my throat because
she was so lovely; perched there, gold and
black, between the misty blue sea and the misty
blue sky, all the colour in the morning seemed
to be enmeshed in her hair and her beach gown,
and the next minute she had dived into the
water.

I looked at Cheneston—and I looked away.

If only I might gleam and shine, if only I
might palpitate with youth and beauty and
stand twixt sky and earth a thing of loveliness!
But I knew that no one would stand and stare if
I stood where Grace Gilpin had stood a moment
before; they would only say: "There's a girl
bathing—but she'll find it pretty fresh."

Cheneston was speaking.

"Life isn't fair.  One does a thing in pique
or temper, or because one's pride is hurt; one
thinks the effects will only last a minute, and
they last for months and years—they are
far-reaching, they involve other people, till
sometimes it seems one cannot light a match or
perform the most trivial office without
involving other destinies and lives.  Kid—I never
guessed, that night, that all this would
happen."

"In a way we're sort of pawns," I said.
"It isn't any good fussing, is it?  You'll be
sent out with this battery for sure, and then
things will settle themselves—won't they?  I
ought to go home to mother and tell her that
father went off quite cheerily.  She knows,
because Mrs. Gilpin went back to her."

I went home.  It seems all singularly lacking
in tenseness and emotion, it seems common-place—it
seems as if I had skipped the great
moment and hurried on with the "afterwards";
but there was no great moment, it
was all afterwards-ish.

Things went on the same as usual, Cheneston,
Grace Gilpin, and I went about together;
she had a new man in place of Mr. Markham, a
man called Dickie Wontner.  The only change
I find is in myself.

Oh!  I get so angry when people talk of the
"peace of love"—there is no peace in it.
Maybe there is when you are married, I don't
know and probably I never shall; but love is
revolutionary, it robs you of your power of
concentration—it may only be that you dust the
same thing twice, or you put things down and
can't remember where you put them, or you
forget to take an interest in your friends and
lose them without knowing it; but the fact
remains that you are only living with half of
yourself, the other and more vital half is
continually padding round after the beloved like a
little invisible dog.

I love Cheneston.  I write it honestly.  It is
almost the only thing in my life I am proud of.
Sometimes I feel that my love is compounded
of blue sky and sunshine, and everything that is
big and honest and glittering in nature.

He does not care one little scrap for me.

He loves Grace Gilpin.

I want them to be happy together, but I do
not wish to sit in the front pew at their wedding,
or watch them fashion life together afterwards—I
want to run right away then, to the utter-most
corner of the earth.

I don't believe the world is round; I believe
that somewhere there are little corners for lovers
who are not loved, and there neither moonshine,
nor sunshine, nor star shine shall worry them,
neither the scent of flowers nor the dear, shrill,
heart-plucking songs of birds; there shall be no
memory of the quivering, glowing *beauty* and
*wonder* of life, which is not for them, but there
shall be work—useful, honest work—in which
to find forgetfulness and fresh courage.

I am hunting for a corner to run away to
when my time comes.





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.. _`VI`:

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   \VI

.. vspace:: 2

No one has heard from Walter Markham.

He has no relations here, it is true—but it's
funny he hasn't written.

He is in Mesopotamia; perhaps the mails
have been sunk or he has dysentery or something.

Grace is always asking Cheneston if he has
heard, and whenever Cheneston answers he
avoids looking at me.

Sometimes I honestly think Cheneston thinks
I might have cared for Mr. Markham, perhaps
did care for him, and my supposed engagement
to himself spoilt and prevented things ever
coming to a head.

I know Cheneston is horribly unhappy.

I know Grace is equally wretched.

Neither of them knows how miserable I am,
or that I suspect they are.

Sometimes life seems so strange to me,
peopled by a lot of actors and actresses all
living little lies.

I know Cheneston will never tell Grace that
his engagement to me is only a farce.  He has
a fierce sense of honour, it makes him regard
all sorts of things that other men do every day
as utterly and absolutely impossible.

Sometimes I have thought of going to Grace
and telling her the whole story of the mistake
from beginning to end; but it might make
things even more impossible for Grace, because
it isn't the sort of story a woman should tell a
woman.

I wish I could learn to care for one of
the boys and they for me, it would simplify
matters; but not one of them is a bit keen.
Their eyes shine when I sing—but they shine
because of the memories I bring of other girls.

I am just "a nice little thing" and "a
perfect sport"—and it is as safe as being the
mother of sons too old for the Army.

Mother is getting a trifle impatient.  She
twitters about weddings sometimes, and comes
and sits on my bed and shows me pictures of
bridal gowns from sixpenny illustrated weeklies.
Poor mother! it's going to be a bitter blow.
Sometimes I feel a little criminal about it.
I read a book the other day in which the
heroine finds herself in "a ridiculous position,
unbelievable and unsurpassed in fiction"—I
laughed until I cried.  She had only got to
use a pennyworth of honesty and a pinch of
common sense to get out of her position; I am
wedged tight in mine.

Fantastic problems often demand fantastic solutions.

Meanwhile, winter is coming on, frost is
crisping the leaves, this morning the dahlias in
our little garden were black and sodden.

.. vspace:: 2

*Later the same day*.

I have found the solution—and it is even
more fantastic than I had dreamed of.

I know that Mrs. Gilpin, Grace, young
Wontner, Cheneston, and one or two other men
who were at Gilpin's to-night, think I am in
love with Walter Markham in Mesopotamia and
he with me—in spite of the fact that I was
engaged to Cheneston when he went out.

I saw the Way Out for Cheneston quite
suddenly, and grabbed it before it was too late.

I am sure that to-morrow Cheneston will
come to me and ask me outright if I love
Markham, and then he will release me——  Oh,
I don't know what will happen!  There
will be a horrible row with mother, and I am
sure Grace will marry Cheneston before he
goes out.

They were all talking about Markham, and
saying how weird it was that no one had heard
a single word since he left England.

"He's not the sort of man to drop his
friends, either," Mrs. Gilpin said; then she
turned to me, laughing.  "Come now, Pam,
you were in his confidence—haven't you heard?"

"Yes," I lied suddenly, "I've heard."

Everyone exclaimed.

Grace Gilpin was wearing pearl grey crêpe
de Chine and old Mechlin lace; she leant
forward in her low chair and stared at me; her
face was very pale, her wonderful eyes wide.

"You didn't tell us, Pam!" she said, her
voice thrilled, that queer silver voice that
always seemed to laugh.  "Why ever didn't
you tell us?"

Cheneston was staring at Grace.  He was
white too.  I had a queer idea that a minute
before Grace had seemed very far away from
him and I had brought her near.

One or two of the men were looking at
Cheneston furtively, to see how he took it.

"Yes, why didn't you tell us, Pam?"
Cheneston said.

Suddenly I realised that they were all
thinking what I meant them to think—that Walter
and I were unconfessed lovers.

I had achieved my effect.

"I—I didn't wish to," I said, and burst into
tears.

And now I am wondering what is going to
happen, what everyone will say and do,
particularly Cheneston and mother.

I wish I could find a corner of the earth now
to crouch in, and I want it to be dark and
utterly silent, so that I may think and find out
where I stand.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VII`:

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   \VII

.. vspace:: 2

Sometimes I wonder what humans are fitted
with imaginations for; they are a great nuisance
and utterly unreliable.  I was fitted with a
high-power imagination—it overbalances me
sometimes, swings me down to misery and nearer to
the face of ecstasy than I was ever meant to go.
I spent a sleepless night wondering what
would happen after my confession that I had
heard from the renegade Captain Markham,
and my inexplicable tears; by the time I rose
I had all the results planned out, beginning with
the interview with Cheneston, in which I implied
my love for Walter Markham, and ending in a
sort of grand finale scene with mother, in which
elegance and reproaches and jasmine scent
mingled, and my clothes, all I had cost, and my
obvious lack of chic and charm were hurled at
my head.

None of these things happened.

Grace Gilpin and her mother drove by in the
high dog-cart as I was taking Pomp and
Circumstance for their morning run; they stopped
and chatted, but neither of them referred to
Walter Markham, or Cheneston, or the little
scene I had enacted in their drawing-room the
previous night.

I am one of the people who never "click"
in their effects.

I had meant to be so frightfully subtle over
Walter Markham when the idea first flashed
into my mind.  I meant to leave my little
audience with the vague impression that there
might be something in it, that I might have
found in Walter Markham's society I had
made a mistake in getting engaged so quickly
to Cheneston Cromer—I just wanted to
make it easy for Cheneston to break off the
engagement.

I was so sure he would come to me and ask
me if his first suspicions were correct and
Walter and I cared for each other; then I
would be delicate and subtle again, and hint at
devotion, nothing settled, nothing sure.

I had wanted the delicacy of a butterfly, and
I had trodden as earnestly and thoroughly as
an elephant—a whole herd of them.

I had tried to be subtle and I had achieved
blatancy.

I'm more schoolgirl than woman of the
world; sometimes I get so mad with myself I
wish I could be another person, and meet
myself out, and be fearfully subtle and
humiliating.

All the morning I was strung up to concert
pitch waiting for things to happen, and nothing
happened.  I had a feeling that the end of my
little interlude with Cheneston was nearly over.
I tried so hard to be philosophic about it.

We were going for the last picnic of the
season with the Gilpins and Morrisons.  We
were going to motor out to the White Woman's
Cave and have lunch there.  Cheneston was
coming too; the new battery was not in camp
yet, and he was at a loose end.  Several of the
officers had been invited, and I had looked
forward to it.

"You'll wear your lemon linen coat and skirt
and your big black sailor, won't you, Pam?"
mother said, wandering into my room as I was
changing.  "Dear, dear! how ragged the
garden looks!  Winter will soon be here, and
then we shall have to see about coats and skirts
and things for you.  Pam, there isn't any hitch,
is there?"

I slipped on my exquisitely cut linen jacket.

"Hitch?" I repeated.

"You've not been doing anything stupid—because,
remember, your father and I have had
considerable expense in——"

"What have you heard?" I said hardily.

"That you had a certain friendliness for
Walter Markham, and that, although no one
else has had the honour of being reminded of
his existence, you have been hearing from him."

"Well!" I said, my voice sounded like
reinforced ice.  "Who has been gossiping?"

"I heard it," said mother uncomfortably.
"I—I should wear that quaint little collar with
the quaint spotted border, Pam."

So already the idea was gaining ground, the
little rumour was gleaning strength as it floated
along.  Pam Burbridge was in love with Walter
Markham, they wrote; perhaps they were
waiting till he came back to break it off.  The
Burbridge-Cromer engagement had been too
sudden to be lasting.  Rather hard on Cromer;
still, it was pretty obvious where he would
console himself, and a far more suitable match
in every way.  I could hear them.

I looked at the successor chosen by popular
opinion when she and her mother came to call
for me.  She wore a curious sea-green
hand-woven linen; instantly I knew why—it was the
colour of the water in the White Woman's
Cave.  She wanted to make another exquisite
picture for Cheneston and the subalterns to
gaze at.

"Carver is following with the lunch in the
dog-cart," she said.  "Melon and salmon
mayonnaise and pineapple, and cold pheasant
and quail, and all sorts of lusciousness.  Climb
in, Pam.  Captain Cromer and the boys are
motoring over.  Isn't it a ripping morning?  I
heard from Walter Markham this morning.  He
says it's the first letter he's been able to write
since he got out there.  They seem to have had
a ghastly time."

"Yes," I said, "they have."

"Oh—of course," Grace said, "you heard.
You said so last night, didn't you?  I forgot.
Do you like Walter Markham?"

"I like him awfully," I said earnestly.  I
tried to bring all sorts of things into my voice,
but I only sounded, as usual, like a guileless but
honest schoolgirl.

"So do I," said Grace Gilpin.  Her face
was half turned away, exquisite tendrils of gold
fluffed about her face and hat—there were
cherries on her hat, they seemed no redder than
the curve of her wonderful mouth.

"If I were a man I should want to eat you,"
I said suddenly.  "Grace—what does it feel
like to be able to make any man you meet feel
like that?"

"Are you being catty?" Grace said.  She
looked at me with surprise in her beautiful eyes.

"I—I don't know," I said miserably.  "I
think I'm trying to be."

Grace turned.

"Pam, have you really been hearing from
Walter Markham?" she said quietly.

I looked beyond her, up at the great bunch
of blackberries gleaming like black diamonds in
the sun.  They seemed like a bunch of eyes
watching me.

Suddenly I felt good; I felt as if my silly
little soul were enlarging and bubbling to the
surface.  I knew why Grace asked—she asked
for herself and Cheneston, she wanted to think
I cared for Walter Markham.

"Yes," I said, "I have."

"Does—Captain Cromer know?" she said.

"You heard me say I had heard from him
last night in your drawing-room."

"I know, and then you burst into tears.  I
was so glad you did."

"Why?" I asked, startled.

"You saved me from doing the same thing,
you did it first."

We went into the White Woman's Cave
while the maids laid the lunch on the smooth,
springy grass.  More guests had been invited
than I expected, but Cheneston had not yet
turned up.

The walls of the White Woman's Cave are
smooth and dark, and the sea purrs through it
and licks the smoothness with a little kiss, and
the light comes through the roof and lights the
water so that it gleams like pale green fire.

It was wonderful and a little uncanny, like a
theatrical scene, and it was cold in there, and
the daylight and the sunshine seemed far away.

"And to think a woman lived here for
years," one of the girls said.

"Her lover died and she wanted to get away
from the world."

"How romantic!" said another girl.
"Look, here's Major Morrison and Captain
Cromer."

I think she thought that much more
romantic.  As she spoke Grace Gilpin moved.
I don't know whether she did it purposely;
perhaps the instinct to frame her beauty is
implanted in her.  She stood so that the green
light from the water, fairylike and
phosphorescent, held her in a shimmering glow of
opalescent fire.  She had taken off her hat;
her coronet of fluffy, tendrilly gold hair shone
like a halo, and her dress gleamed like a
mermaid's sheath; she seemed neither of heaven
nor earth, a betwixt and between creature made
for man's undoing.

"I wish I were an artist, Grace!" Cheneston said.

Her pretty silver laughter floated out.

"Oh!  Why?"

"He would paint you as a spirit of the
cave," Major Morrison said.

As we came out into the sunshine I saw that
Cheneston was very white.  He gripped my arm.

"Pam," he said, "I must talk to you, child.
I'm nearly off my head!"

"Lunch," I said feebly.  I was suddenly
inexplicably scared.  I seemed to have brought
the atmosphere of the cave into the sunshine
with me.

"Confound the lunch!" he said violently.
He turned to Grace.  "I must talk to Pam,"
he said.  "May we have a quarter of an hour's
grace?"

"Oh—certainly."

"Begin without us if we don't come."

"Very well," she acquiesced.

"Come," said Cheneston curtly.

So he had been thinking things over, and he
was going to ask me about Walter Markham,
and tell me that he and Grace had discovered
they cared for each other.

I wondered if I could manage to look merry
as a marriage-bell with a funeral going on in my
own heart.  I discovered that to be a quaint
little thing with a snubby nose has its
advantages: you're not expected to furnish a big
display of facial emotion.

"I can't walk any more," I said.  My knees
were trembling; I felt horribly, unromantically
sick.  It was my great hour, the hour of my
renunciation, and I had no great feelings, only
little squeamish, physical ones.

"Sit down, then," he said.

I sat down with a flop, under a crab-apple
tree that was like a flame, and there was blue
sky above us and golden bracken all around us,
and when it swayed we could see the sea, like
slits of turquoise through golden fretwork, and
it seemed to me the stillest place in all the
world.

"Pam," he said, "my mother is very ill—dying,"
and he turned from me and buried his
head in his hands.

I sat very still.  It was so absolutely
unexpected, and by-and-by I clutched the bracken
on either side of me and I prayed inside myself:
"Don't let me go on feeling so dreadfully
like his mother—or I shall put my arms round
him and cuddle him!"

And I knew then that I loved Cheneston with
the only sort of love that is real and lasting—I
loved him as if he were my little, little boy.  I
loved him when he was my strong, decisive
young knight.  I loved the mystery in him, and
the strength of him that I didn't understand;
but I loved him best of all, most sweetly and
dearly of all, when he was just my hurt boy.

I don't think I see things romantically.  I
suppose it's in keeping with my appearance.
I never see love as something that is remote and
cold and miles away.  I would go to the ends
of the earth with Cheneston, and I would love
to nurse him when he's got a cold.  I would
love to go to his house in Norway, but I would
also adore to make toast in front of the kitchen
fire with him if the maid was out.  I suppose
my love is homely like myself, but it seems to
me that once you've got love you can't tuck it
up with the stars when you order dinner and
help make the beds—you don't even want to,
it makes you absolutely enjoy ordering dinner
and making the beds, that's the splendid part
about it.

Love makes ordinary every-days, full of
ordinary every-day tasks, into high-days and
festivals full of little sacred services and
missions.

"Pam," he said.  He lifted his head and
looked at me.  "I'm sorrier than ever, my
poor little soul—since last night.  You see, I
always thought that Walter Markham cared,
but I didn't know that you did.  Kiddie, you're
such a splendid little sport, and I'll help you all
I can; but if you can't stick it, dear, I'll understand."

"Stick what?" I said.

He put his hand over mine, and I felt it
tremble, and somehow the trembling made me
very strong.

"I'm an only son," he said.  "I think I've
been rather a bad egg, debts and cards, wandering
over the face of the earth, a sort of rolling
stone, running away from my niche.  It's
worried the poor old mater.  You see, Cromer
Court is rather a topping old place, family for
generations and all that.  She wanted me to
settle and marry and all that.  Grief of her life
that I didn't."

"Yes," I said.

"She's splendid, absolutely fine.  Pam,
somebody has told her—about us.  She wrote
me a wonderful letter this morning—it broke
me up—about us."

"About us?" I said idiotically.

"Someone wrote to her and told her I was
engaged to you.  She wants to see my future
wife.  She's dying.  I had a telegram from my
cousin down there.  Her letter was so
wonderful.  She said she would die happy knowing.
Pam—is it too much?"  His eyes were full of tears.

"It's nothing," I said.  "I understand."

"Pam!" he said.  "Best woman in all the
world!  Pam, there's something about you—it
upsets all my theories; I seem just a pretty
helpless sort of rotter."

I tried to find the right words to say.

The bracken swayed, a delicate, golden
trellis broken here and there into turquoise
like a mosaic; the birches shook their golden
spangles; and the little harebells, their stems
invisible in the welter of gold, swayed like jewels
on invisible chains: all the world was wonderful,
wonderful, wonderful, and its wonder was
throbbing in me, and all I could say was:

"When is the next train?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VIII

.. vspace:: 2

I am writing this in my bedroom at Cromer
Court, at a Queen Anne desk, and by-and-by
I am going to climb in a Queen Anne bed to
watch the firelight flicker on the white panelled
walls, on the quaintest chintz I have ever seen
covering the chairs and the great divan, and
fluttering like restless wings over open
windows—pale green linen, the colour of young leaves,
with bunches of white-heart cherries scattered
over it.

I feel simple as a milkmaid and good as a
nun in this dear old house, and I have never
felt so happy.  It is a precarious happiness.
I should think the wives of the husbands home
on leave feel it the last two days.  It is a sort
of happiness that freezes you while you are
hugging it to you because of its warmth, and
turns and rends you while you are caressing
it—painful and beautiful at the same time.

I saw Cheneston's mother to-night for a few
moments.

She is like one of those exquisite miniatures
in the Academy that no one but miniaturists
ever stay long enough to examine; her skin is
like a child's, her eyes are Cheneston's eyes
grown infinitely gentle—those queer hazel eyes
that look, in a miniature, as if the paint had
never dried.

"So this is Pam," she said, looking up at
me, and her voice is like Cheneston's, grown
faint and gentle; it has the same curious quality
that makes you feel thrilled, and causes all the
little nerves in your spine to "ping" as they
do at an exciting play.  "My son," she said,
"I am so proud—such a vain old woman!—proud
that you should have won such a woman—the
only sort of woman that could ever have
held you, son."

They have no gas or electric light here, only
candles in silver sconces.  I looked up suddenly
and saw the perspiration glistening in beads on
Cheneston's forehead.  She took my hands.

"Pam," she said, "you're a wonderful
little person—half gallant boy, half elf, and the
other part sheer mother.  The gallant boy in
you will be his pal, the elf will keep him your
eternal lover, and the mother—will keep him
on his knees to you."  She looked up at me
whimsically, tenderly.  "The Cromers are a
woman's life-work—they run away for years
and leave you to break your heart, and they
come back and fill the hall with tusks and
elephant-leg umbrella-stands, and expect you
to go mad with them over the trophies.  The
elf in you will still the call of the wild in
Cheneston, he will not dare to leave you, and
the mother that broods in your quiet eyes."  She
turned to Cheneston.  "You mustn't lose
her—she's the one woman in the world for
you—the only woman."

Then the nurse came back and signed to us
to go.

Old Mrs. Cromer gave me a wonderful smile,
and in that smile I suddenly realised how
beautiful, how magnetic she had been.  It was a
smile of the most extraordinary and amazing
happiness.

"Your father," I said, when we got outside,
"your father went away from her?"  I wanted
to see if I had understood the significance of
the smile.

"He took her," he said hoarsely.  "She
was his star, his goddess."

To-night we dined alone downstairs.

I wore my grey taffeta with the tiny bunches
of pink apple-blossom and the little pink
georgette fichu.

I felt that nothing else in my wardrobe
was in keeping with the atmosphere of the Court.

Cheneston changed into ordinary evening
dress.  It was the first time I had seen him out
of khaki.  It sounds foolish and snobbish to
say he looked a very gallant gentleman, as if
I were trying to write an old-fashioned novel;
but it is the only phrase that exactly describes him.

I felt an extraordinary atmosphere of noble
sweetness, it seemed to throb through me.  I
was shiningly happy in the very inmost corner
of my soul.

Cheneston is a perfect host; so many men
leave off being the wives' hosts after they have
married them.  I had a feeling that Cheneston
never would.

We talked of books—funny, dear old-fashioned
authors like Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell
and Jane Austen.  When we rose he
looked at me.

"You, woman, are wonderful," he said
tersely: "you have only blown in here, and
yet you belong to it, you are of it."

"And to-morrow I shall blow away again," I said.

"And to-morrow you will blow away again,
he acquiesced.

"Can you imagine Grace Gilpin here?" I
said suddenly.  "Can you imagine her beauty
in this setting?"

"It is unimaginable," he said curtly.

"She is beautiful," I persisted.  I had an
idea that my words must come sobbingly,
because my heart was sobbing.

"She is the most beautiful thing I ever
saw," he agreed.  "They are bringing us
coffee in the drawing-room."

I think the drawing-room is the biggest room
I have ever been in; it is so long and narrow;
the walls are white panels, and the carpet pale
grey, and the chintz is the same grey with a
little fierce blue lobelia bobbing about on it, and
there is priceless blue Chinese porcelain everywhere,
and a wonderful and enormous grand
piano, and there were great bowls of white
jasmine everywhere.

I sat down at the piano and ran my
hands over the keys, and Cheneston spoke.

"Pam—please don't sing.  I—I beg you
not to sing."

"I won't if you don't wish it."

"Thank you."

But after they had brought in the coffee old
Mrs. Cromer's nurse came and begged me to
leave the door open and sing.  I looked at Cheneston.

"Yes," he said.  "Tell mother Miss Burbridge
will sing."  Then he looked at me; his
face was very white.  "Can I fetch you music,
Pam?" he said.

"No, I don't need it, thank you."

He opened the french-windows, and the air
that blew from the sea and the red fields of
Devon swept into the room in a cloud of jasmine
scent, and through the diamond panes I saw the
stars twinkling—and suddenly I lost Pam
Burbridge and the pretty room.  I became
something that had kinship with the stars and the
hot scent of jasmine, something that was
houseless and homeless and free; I walked
beside Cheneston through Elysian fields, I
talked to him and had no need of words.  We
were mates, we who had never been lovers.

I stopped.  I was quite alone, and someone
was rapping on the floor, and I heard the
nurse's voice over the stairs.  "Miss
Burbridge, will you come?"

I went slowly.  I was trembling and a little
afraid.

I found the old lady sitting up in bed, and
Cheneston with his arms round her supporting
her at the back.

"Pam," she said, "I was frightened, dear—so
frightened.  I had to send for you.  You
and Cheneston had lost each other—I heard
it in your wonderful voice, child, I saw it in
the boy's face when he came to me.  What
is it?  What is it?" she looked at us piteously.
"I feel something is there.  I know it!
Something that shouldn't be there!  I feel it!"

"Nonsense, dearest," Cheneston said.

"There is," she persisted.  "I am
frightened for you both.  Why do I fear you
losing each other?—you who were made for
her, and she who was made for you."

"You are nervous," he said.  "You are
worrying yourself unnecessarily."

She caught his hands.

"I am afraid for you, my dears," she said.
"Cheneston—let me see you married before I
go.  Let me be quite sure you have not missed
the supreme happiness."

"We cannot do that, mother—there are
many things to be thought of."

"White satin and bridesmaids, wedding
bells and marriage settlements do not make
a marriage, children.  Pam, what is the
obstacle?"

"Nothing," I said desperately.  "Nothing."

She looked at Cheneston; Cheneston laid
her down very gently.

"You are worn out, dearest," he said.
"You must rest now."

She did not refer to it when I saw her the
next morning.  She looked frailer than ever
by day, a wraith woman with jewelled eyes.

I breakfasted alone; a thin, fine rain drove
against the windows like sea-spray.  In the
garden I could see the michaelmas daisies
bowed, great clumps of amethyst, the
chrysanthemums gleamed tawny red.  Autumn was
later here, but in the rain gold leaves kept
falling, and the pearly white of the jasmine
from the front of the house strewed the path,
and here and there the petal of a passion-flower,
like an exotic beetle's wing.

I put on my little rainproof coat and
sou'-wester and went out.

I walked through the orchards, where wet
apples gleamed like jewelled fruit wrought in
ruby and emerald, where yellow plums hung
like waxen fruit, and the late pears like amber
ornaments.  I walked through little spinneys
where the wet gold made your eyes ache.  I
saw the red fields waiting for ploughing and
fields heavy with the late crops through the
rain like a soft coloured map: and I saw the
sea, queer and grey as an aged woman,
through the trees—and as far as I could see
it all belonged to the Cromers, and the words
of an old poem came to me, something about
"a goodly heritage, bound by the sea and
netted by the skies."

I stopped to speak to a little child, and it
answered me in the soft up-and-down of the
Devonshire dialect; and I knew I could have
been happy with Cheneston here—not with the
satisfied happiness of those who possess a
chippendale drawing-room suite, a parlourmaid,
and a car, but happy as those who inherit
the earth.  I could have been happy with a
glorious, keen, swelling happiness.

I turned home.  It smelt as fresh as if all
the earth had been newly turned that morning,
and as I turned a sunbeam struggled through
and flickered uncertainly.

I found a letter waiting for me—two
letters, one from mother and one from Grace
Gil pin.

Mother's was characteristic.  She hoped
Mrs. Cromer was a nice woman and approved
of me.  Were the estates extensive?  Had
Cheneston a big rent roll?  The end was
typical.  "I cannot see what you gain by
postponing your marriage.  It cannot enhance
your value in Cheneston's eyes.  It is always
as well to remember that the world is full of
girls, and an engaged man is not regarded in
the same light as an engaged girl.  I shall be
very glad to hear that you have come to some
sensible decision.  Your father writes that he
has struck an expensive mess, and that he has
not been lucky at bridge lately.  He is playing
"pirate"—it has superseded auction; try to
learn it if you can, social assets are never to
be despised."

Pirate at Cromer Court!  I smiled.

I sat down on an old oak chest in the tiled
hall and opened Grace Gilpin's letter.  The
sun was shining brilliantly now; the twinkling
raindrops that fringed the windows and hung
glistening on the strands of jasmine were
reflected on the red tiles in wriggling little
shadows, like tadpole ghosts.  I took off my
wet mackintosh and my little sou'wester, and
fluffed up my hair with my fingers.

Grace's letter was very much to the point.

.. vspace:: 2

"Walter Markham is home wounded.  He is at
Lynn Lytton Hospital, Long Woodstock, Near
Manchester.  What are you going to do about
it, Pam?"

.. vspace:: 2

Well, what was I going to do about it?

What *could* I do about it—except pray that
Cheneston didn't get to know until he didn't
want me any more.

I sat down stupidly and stared at the letter.

I had a sudden vision of Grace writing, her
golden head bent, seeing in the missive and
Walter Markham's presence in England the
chance of freedom for herself and Cheneston;
believing Cheneston loved her and I loved
Walter Markham; believing that our
engagement was just an emotional mistake, never
guessing it wasn't an engagement at all!

A great many engagements are emotional
mistakes.  Why not ours?

Cheneston came out of the door on the right,
I suppose it was his study.  He held a letter
in his hand.  He was in khaki again, and he
looked ill and worried.

"Good-morning," I said.  I noticed he had
his Burberry over his arm, and his service cap
and a small dispatch case under his arm.

"You've heard?" he said.

"What?" I said stupidly, and my heart
began to beat very rapidly.

"That Markham is in England—wounded.
Oh!  Pam—you shan't suffer, because you've
been so splendid and wonderful.  You ought to
be with him; but he'll spare you, and
understand when he knows."

"Where are you going?" I said desperately.

"Up to Lynn Lytton to tell him I understand
that you care for each other, that you've told
me all about it, and that we're not engaged to
each other.  To tell him how absolutely superb
you've been, and why you're here.  My God!
Pam, do you think I'd ever forgive myself if
I mucked up your life, dear!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \IX

.. vspace:: 2

"You—you mustn't go to Walter," I pleaded
desperately.  "I—I want to go myself."

I had one thought; it was so vivid that it
seemed like something dressed in scarlet
floating on a grey sea of little thoughts and fears
all inextricably mixed—it was that I must get
to Walter Markham first and *explain*.

"Pam," Cheneston said gravely, "are you
afraid of my being clumsy and not making
things clear to him?"

I nodded.  I couldn't speak.  The idea of
Cheneston being clumsy, Cheneston with his
fine, fierce, almost uncanny insight into things,
had me by the throat.

"I see," Cheneston said slowly.  "Little
Pam, I hate to think I have made you afraid
for your happiness even for one minute.  You
are so worthy of happiness—so absolutely
great!  He'll understand, dear, how simply
priceless you've been to—come here.  He's
bound to understand."  He looked down at
me with fierce anxiety in his hazel eyes, he
seemed desperately questioning his own belief in
Walter Markham's broad-mindedness.

"I'll make him understand," I said.
"Don't worry, I'll make him understand."

A sudden flood of fierce protective love swept
over me.  I wished for the hundredth time that
I might be big and Cheneston little—ever so
little—that I might take him in my arms roughly
and tell him not to look like that.  I felt I could
go to Walter Markham and explain everything,
I could sit by his bedside and skin my very
soul—but I couldn't help feeling, even then, it
would be easier to do something bigger and less
painful, something more actually physical than
soul-skinning.

I never found it very easy to show my feelings
to people; the bigger they are the more tightly
corked they seem.  I often wished for, and
sometimes I've cried because I haven't, little
frothy feelings that bubble over into little easy
caresses and kind words and pretty compliments
and easy things like that.  It rather hurts me
to get to the surface, I seem to have to tug
from such a long way down.

"I'll drive you to the station," Cheneston
said.  "I shall tell mater you've got to go up
to Town on business."

"I'll tell her," I answered hastily.

I knew she would sense Cheneston's disquiet;
women lie to women better than men to women.
She took my departure more quietly than I
had anticipated.  There was a lovely expression
on her dear face—it was as if her soul was
smiling to itself while she was grave.  She
patted me with her lovely soft hands.

"And you will be back early to-morrow,
dear, funny little girl?  It's odd," she said,
"I see a cloud between you and Cheneston.
When I first saw it I was frightened, but now
I know it is not made by your hearts—it is
only a cloud your silly brains have made, child,
and it will go.  You are going to dissipate some
of it to-day."

"Yes," I said, "I am."

It was true.  In that at least I didn't lie.
I was going to explain the truth to Walter
Markham, and I was going to make it easy
for Cheneston to marry Grace Gilpin.

She held my hand against her face.  The
charm of her was like a beautiful, strong
current—I can't explain; all the things I long to
express and cannot, the things I suffer so for
my inability to voice and demonstrate, seemed
gloriously easy.  I put my arms round her and
pressed her face to mine.  I loved her with a
dear and full love.

"My little Pam!" she said.  "My dear,
funny little soul!"  Then she said sharply and
fiercely: "Oh, Pam, it's cruel if we women
who are sent into the world with out-size hearts
and feelings meet the wrong men!  I met the
right one!"  A note of triumph crept into her
voice.  "And Cheneston will understand that
in your dear tiny body is a soul and a heart
too big and strong.  People call it the artistic
temperament—it isn't really that, it means that
something that is shut up and sealed with other
people until they get to heaven where nothing
can hurt is left open—maybe it's left open
accidentally, maybe it's meant—and those
people suffer more than the rest of the world,
and are more gloriously glad, and out of the
glory and the travail of their souls they give
to the world wonderful music, or wonderful
pictures, or wonderful books.  *And they are
not like other people*, Pam!  They are very
great and very little at the same time, and not
one in a thousand can understand how life hurts,
and how glorious it is when it is glorious.
Cheneston will understand; that is why you and
he must never, never run away from each
other—you dear, funny little soul!"

Then I heard Cheneston calling.

We drove to the station almost in silence.
He took the high dog-cart, and we could see
over the hedges; they sparkled with thousands
of raindrops, and the late dog-roses seemed like
phantasies wrought in vivid coral, and blackberries
like black diamonds and rubies jewelled
the world, and every bird seemed singing and
every cricket chirping for sheer gladness of the
newly washed day.

He told me he had had an extension of leave.

I was so happy.  I have never had a feeling
that I did not want to share—I can't explain.
I just want to pass on every bit of loveliness
that comes into my life.  We passed lots of
children picking blackberries, and I could have
cried because I wanted to kiss them so, or give
them something, or just tell them I thought
they'd get the loveliest lot of blackberries I had
ever seen—because I was up in the world,
sitting above the hedges with Cheneston.

We passed a little girl who had spilt all her
blackberries and was crying, and I took off a
little gold bracelet I had on and flung it to her.

I shall never forget the ecstatic look in her
small, grimy face.

"You see," I said quickly, "I'm sorry if
you think I'm mad, but—but she was crying,
and now she is happy.  She will be awfully
happy all day."

I'm never sorry for the impulsive things I
do, but I am nearly always sorry because people
don't understand.  It seems to me like rubbing
all the lovely bloom off a butterfly's wing just
to demonstrate that it is a butterfly.

"I don't think you're mad," he said, smiling.

If I had had anklets as well as bracelets I
could have given them away this morning.
He helped me down at the station; he was just
a little constrained, so I knew he was feeling
tremendously full of feeling, just as I was.

"Modern life doesn't give a fellow much of
a chance.  I have rather absurd notions about
you at this minute—I should like to be Sir
Walter Raleigh, and put my cloak down for
you to walk on.  You don't know how humble
you make me feel, Pamela Burbridge."

I felt myself sort of melting towards him.

"What can I do to show you how splendid
I think you are?" he said.  "You wonderful
small person!"

And something inside me wanted to say,
"Exchange all this chivalrous gratitude for
just a tiny bit of love"; but I sat on the
something's head *hard*, like a good girl, and I said:

"Why, you can get me my ticket; the
booking-office is open now."

There is nothing more cheerless and depressing
than going to a place you don't know and
arriving all alone.  If only there is a pillar-box
in the vicinity where you have once posted a
letter, or a tea-shop where you bought chocolates,
it establishes a feeling of intimacy.  At
Long Woodstock I felt an alien of aliens, an
Englishwoman in a foreign country.

I swallowed a cup of tea and had a wash on
the cheerless northern station; then I took a
mouldy old fly that smelt of innumerable
weddings and funerals, and set out for Lynn
Lytton Hospital, and as I travelled past the
rows of grey stone houses I felt myself shedding
my high-flown courage of the morning feather
by feather, until I became the reserved, nervous
little coward I had always been.  Furthermore,
I began to feel very sick.

I feel with intense earnestness that Charlotte
Corday and Nurse Cavell and Christobel
Pankhurst, and those wonderful women who fought
in the Russian Army, could never have felt sick
as I can feel sick, or they would have stopped
in the middle of their heroic deeds and gone
home to bed.

I can think of nothing more unheroic than to
feel sick on all the great and emotional occasions
of your life.

We seemed to climb Lynn Lytton, it was
high up on a hill, and by the time we reached
it the birds were twittering their benedictions
and the first stars were netted in the tree-tops.

I told the cabman to wait, and climbed some
steps—they seemed like the steps of the Monument.

I am glad the door opened at once, or I would
have turned and bolted down them like a rabbit.

I must have been feeling pretty bad, because
there was some late clematis clinging to one of
the pillars of the portico, and they seemed to
me in the twilight like large and particularly
meaty spiders.

I want so badly to write of the heroic
sentiments and thoughts I had, but I was sick, and
the clematis looked like fat spiders, and I
wanted to run away.  That is the honest truth.

"I want to see Captain Markham," I told
the sister who came to the door.

"It is after visiting hours," said the sister
gently.  "Are you his wife?"

"No—he hasn't a wife."

"His sister?"

"No—just—just——"

"I see," said the sister very gently.
"Please come in," and I saw that she did not
see—she thought that Walter Markham and I
had sentimental relations.

She took me into a little grey distempered
room hung with orange curtains, and sent the
matron to me.  She reminded me of snow, so
deep that it could never, never melt—kind
snow, deep enough to be soft.

"Are you Pam?" she said.

I looked up, startled and taken unawares.

"Yes," I said briefly, and stared.

She sat down; she was a large woman, and
there was a soothing placidity about all her
movements.

"I thought so," she said.  "Captain
Markham has been calling for you night and
day—if we could have ascertained your other
name we should have sent for you, but when
he was conscious he said there was no Pam."  She
looked at me thoughtfully.  "So you are
Pam," she said.

I nodded.  "But it couldn't have been me
he was calling for.  I—I—why?"

"He is very ill," she said, "that is why
I am going to let you see him to-night.  I do
not think he will live till morning."

I saw that she told me purposely without
preamble.

I sat numbed.  I could only repeat stupidly:
"But it couldn't be me he wanted."

I felt as if she were passing to me some
imitations of her aloof snowiness.  I, too, felt
a little unreal.

"I think you have turned up at the right
moment," she said.  "Please come, and
don't be surprised if he doesn't know
you."  She put her hand on my shoulder.  "Don't
give up hope," she said; "nothing is
certain—not even in science and surgery."

I think it is in one of Tennyson's things
there comes the phrase "into the jaws of
Hell"; it crept into my mind when I saw
Walter Markham.

I have never seen anything so terrible or so
pathetic.  He was conscious.

"Why, it's Pam!" he said weakly.
"Dear little, funny little Pam."  Then
earnestly, with a terrible effort to concentrate.
"Are you real?"  He took my hand and felt
it tremblingly.  "You're real," he said.

The matron left us alone.

He was in a tiny room by himself, the blind
was up and the big window looked on to a
great hill, like the hunched shoulder of a giant.

"Why did you come?" he said.  "Why did you come?"

I knelt beside the bed.  I was trembling and
I felt sicker than ever.

Above the titanic shoulder of the hill the
tiny bare white shoulder of the moon shrugged
itself into view.

"I can't!" I pleaded.  "Not now."

"My dear, you must.  If I go out to-night
I go out—wondering."

I began to tell him.  I told him all about
meeting Cheneston in the searchlight, and how
the mistake about our being engaged had
started.  I told him that Grace Gilpin and
Cheneston loved each other.  I told him all
about somebody writing to Cheneston's mother
and telling her that Cheneston was engaged
to me.  I told him how fearfully ill she was,
and that I had gone to Cromer Court because
she so passionately wanted to see her son's
future wife.

"But why did you come to me?" he said.

The moonlight was sweeping down the hill
to us now, an incoming tide of limpid silver.
I looked out of the window desperately.

"I told Cheneston you and I cared—I
wanted him to feel free to marry Grace.  This
morning he—he was coming to you—Cheneston
was—he was so afraid you would
misunderstand my being at Cromer Court, and
think I had ceased to care for you.  Also this
morning I had a note from Grace Gilpin telling
me you were here, asking me what I was going
to do about it."

"And they—Grace and Cromer—believe
there is some understanding between us, that
we grew to care for each other when the four
of us went about together?"

"Yes," I said desperately; the hill suddenly
seemed to tip towards me, it seemed to carry
with it the smell of iodoform and disinfectant.

And then the amazing and paralysing thing
happened: Captain Markham suddenly put his
arm round me.

"Well," he said, "isn't it true, Pam!
My God! child, isn't it *true*?  Don't I love
you?—you ridiculous child, you wonderful,
wonderful thing with your strange crooked little
mouth and your great eyes!  Oh!  Pam, my
little, little girl—didn't you know I cared!"

The hill tipped back into place like a giant
sitting back on its haunches, and the silver
tide seemed to ripple down it to ultimately
engulf us.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`X`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \X

.. vspace:: 2

Love is a cloak and is made in different
styles; some people wrap themselves tightly
in it, and there is only just enough to go round
them: it is their cloak, and if Cupid himself,
dimpled and in his birthday suit, came and sat
beside them on the top of a motor-bus in the
rain, they wouldn't go shares.  For other
people Love is a large cloak, voluminous and
overlapping, and capable of sheltering, warming,
and comforting quite a lot of people round
the hem.

My heart ached for him as I sat beside him.
He held my hand very tightly with his thin
fingers, almost like a frightened child, and I
had a feeling that he feared to drift out and I
was his anchor, and I wished that I could drift
out with him.

"Pam," he said once or twice, and I had
a feeling as if he were saying "Mother," and
I answered, "Yes, dear," and by-and-by he
smiled and whispered again, "Pam."

The matron kept coming in and out.  Once
or twice she fed Walter Markham with a
teaspoonful of brandy, once she brought me a
cup of bovril; she seemed just the same as
when I first met her hours ago, like warm snow
immeasurably deep.

"Human vitality is at its lowest in the small
hours," she whispered.  She looked down at
Walter Markham.  I looked at her.  "I don't
know," she said.  "I don't know."

I sat on.  It was so quiet in there—the world
seemed like a very young baby asleep, the
moonlight flooding over the hill to diffuse a
sort of white holiness, an effortless tranquillity.

They had said that Walter Markham could
not live through the night, and yet I was not
sorry for him.  I only wanted to be immensely
good to him while he lived, to send him out
happy.

"Pam," he said, "I sort of hear you
singing—are you singing?"

"Perhaps my heart is."

"What songs, Pam?"

"Lullabies, dear, lovely, gentle lullabies."

"Not love-songs, Pam?"

"No."

"Love-songs suit you best," he said.

I tried to see the future, sitting there.  I
thought the peace and the moonlight might
help me, it seemed to make things so beautifully
abstract and impersonal that the planning
hardly hurt at all.  In all my plans I never
contemplated Walter Markham living and
loving me, and believing I had come to him
because I loved him.  I saw myself leaving
the hospital and going back to Cromer Court.
I knew that Cheneston's sympathy and gratitude
would be my particular Garden of Gethsemane.

I wondered a little why Life and Love should
always peck and beat and burn me, and I
wondered for the first time without resentment.

The house surgeon came in; he wore a long
white linen coat over pink and white pyjamas,
and apologised for his costume, and I went
and walked in the moonlit corridor with the
matron.

"It will be a triumph if we save him," she
said—"but it will be your triumph."

I looked at her, startled and perplexed.

"Then you think?" I said.

"Six hours ago the chances were a hundred
to one against; they aren't now."

"Doesn't anything ever hurt you?" I said
suddenly.  "Don't you ever feel all twisted
up with the beauty or the honour of things?
Don't you find things cruelly lovely or
hideously bad?  Don't people and their ways
make you writhe?"

"I haven't time," she answered tranquilly.
"I'm always doing things or else I'm sleeping
hard."

The house surgeon came out.

"Everything is extraordinarily satisfactory,"
he said.  "I've tried a very small dose of
scopolamin-morphine."

I went back and resumed my vigil.  I did
not feel at all tired.  I felt a little aloof, as if
I were sitting apart and critically watching
myself.

I heard a bird twitter, and then the stillness
settled down tighter than ever, and then the
bird twittered again and a tinge of light, pallid
and uncertain, crept up behind the hill.

The dawn was coming, the little bird voice
had heralded it.

The little tinge became pink; the stars
seemed to blink baldly, like eyes without eyelashes.

The bird world stirred, a blackbird trilled a
few delicious notes.  I saw that a few trees
fringed the hill; the dawn peeped behind them,
rosy and fresh, like a child peering from behind
its fingers.

The hospital was waking up, too; I saw a
woman cross the dewy orchard to a cowhouse in
the corner carrying milk-pails and stool.

The scene, which had been changing and
intensifying every second, suddenly remained
stationary; it was as if Nature suddenly
stepped back to view her work—she had
fashioned a golden world with the help of the
sun, gloriously, dazzlingly gold, golden apples
and golden trees, golden thatched roofs; it
blazed beyond my window.

Walter Markham opened his eyes.

"Topping day," he said weakly.  "Hullo,
doc!—I didn't go out, you see."

"Go out!  Havers!  man, I'll be dancing
at your wedding before the week is out!"  The
gruff Scotch doctor, shaved, and clad in
khaki and alert, laughed.  "You're doing fine!"

"Wedding," Walter Markham said weakly.
"I shall be all right?  My arm?
There—there isn't any reason why I shouldn't
marry?"

"None on earth."

He looked at me.  There was a radiancy
in his eyes, a sort of throbbing happiness.

"O God!" he said, "I'm so happy!"

The house surgeon took me away; he was
babbling foolishly, and he looked like an
excited rocking-horse; he had a long narrow
face and wide nostrils.

"Splendid!" he kept saying.  "Absolutely
top-hole!  Splendid!  Good chap,
yours!  Splendid!"

"He's going to live?" I said.  Suddenly
I felt very tired, as if my eyelids had been
pressed back.

"Of course!  The hospital must have
some of your wedding-cake.  Oh, splendid!"

The matron came down the long corridor.

"Will you take her down to the visitors'
room, doctor?" she said.  "I'm just going
off duty.  I didn't tell you before, Miss
Burbridge, but your mother is here—she's been
here nearly an hour."

Mother was sitting with her back to the
orange curtains.  As I entered the room I
became conscious of the faint scent of jasmine
with which I always associated her.

"How did you know I was here?" I said
involuntarily.

"I wired to Cromer Court that I must see
you, and Cheneston wired back that you were
away in the North for a few days.  I was
puzzled.  I showed the letter to Grace Gilpin,
and she suggested that you had come to see
Captain Markham.  Why did Cheneston let
you come, and why did you come?"

"I wanted to and he wanted me to," I said.

I thought it very clever of Grace Gilpin to
guess and send mother here, it made it so
much easier for Cheneston and her if I could
be caught with the man I was supposed to be
in love with.

"I knew that you knew no one in the North;
but for Grace I should never have thought.
I didn't believe I should find you here."

"But you have," I said wearily.  "What
do you want?"

"Pam," mother said baldly, "are you in
love with Walter Markham?"

I wish I didn't feel so horribly tired and
done.  I knew I could never be subtle and
evasive with mother, somehow she always
knocked over my defences and surprised the
truth in me.  She had a way of taking my
deepest and most secret feelings by the scruff
of the neck and dragging them ruthlessly into
the light—almost as if she wanted to see if
their ears were clean.

"No," I said, "I'm not in love with him."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"He wanted me."

"Did he send for you?"

"No."

"Pam," said mother, "you are hiding
things.  Are you?"

"Yes," I said.

"I am going to find them out, there's
something here I don't understand at all.
Why did Cheneston let you come to see
another man?"

"He thought I wanted to."

"You did not want to," mother said.
"You are crazily, madly in love with Cheneston,
that is obvious to anyone who knows you."

"Is it?" I said.  "I hoped it wasn't.  I
did it for that purpose, you see, because I
am crazily, madly in love with Cheneston,
and he is crazily, madly in love with Grace
Gilpin."

"He used to be before he met you,"
mother put in.  "I did not know——" she
paused and looked at me.  "I think you'd
better explain right from the beginning," she
said decisively.

"Do you?" I countered quickly.  "I am
afraid it will be rather a shock—you see, I'd
never met Cheneston until that night father
came home and told you I was engaged to
him.  He has never for one minute intended
to marry me."

"But you are staying with his mother as
his future wife."

"We could neither of us help that.  It was Fate."

"Look Here, Pam, cease to talk like a penny
novelette!  Explain things."

"Very well," I acquiesced.  I sat down
and explained things from the very beginning,
fully.

"And so you're engaged to neither
of them?" mother said when I had finished.

I felt as if my very soul had been dragged
out for public inspection.  I was busy packing
it back again.

"No," I said.  "Now please tell me why
you came?"

"I came because I have to get five hundred
pounds from somewhere at once."

"I haven't fifteen shillings, mother; why
come to me? and what is it for?"

"Your father," answered mother; her lips
were compressed.  "He must have it
immediately.  He owes to his C.O.—and there
are complications.  He—" she paused and
frowned—"he was always a vile bridge-player.
His declarations were crimes."

"Yes," I said.  "But why come to me?"

"You must borrow it from Captain Markham
or Cheneston."

I stared at her!  This morning she seemed
no longer handsome, her elegance was the only
thing left to her—and that seemed just a
physical and social mark.

"It is impossible," I said, "absolutely!
Captain Markham is desperately ill!"

"Then there is Cheneston."

"Absolutely impossible!"

"He would give it to you in gratitude for
the way you've played the game.  If you don't
you force me to take it with my own hands—you
see, we should have had the money but
for the amount we have spent on you lately."

"What would you do?" I said hoarsely.

"I should just tell Cheneston that you
adored and worshipped him, and if he didn't
marry you he would utterly spoil your life.  I
should say you were too proud and noble to
come yourself."

"You wouldn't do that," I said.  "Mother—at
least play the game!"

"Two can't do that," she said.  "Your
father does that.  I pay the price."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XI

.. vspace:: 2

I used to wonder, in the days when love and
marriage seemed very beautiful and interesting
and tremendous food for speculation, but
utterly removed from reality and *me*, what the
woman felt like when the question of money
first cropped up, whether it spoilt the idealism
and romance a little, upset the atmosphere like
a Ransome lawn-mower introduced into the
Garden of Eden.

I used to wonder how I would like asking
Cheneston for a new hat, and I always came
to the conclusion that I would sooner wear the
brim like a halo when the crown fell to pieces
from old age than ask him.

I suppose if men love you frightfully they
make the question of finance easy; but I think
my experience with mother and father has
rather terrified me, they made the mutual
finance discussion so utterly degrading—and
I think listening to them has given me a nervous
distaste, a sort of hyper-sensitive shrinking
from the discussion of ways and means.

It has always seemed so infinitely easier to
go without things.

When I sat in the train and thought of
asking Cheneston for five hundred pounds to
pay father's card debts I felt sick, and I felt
the real me starting to close up tight, like a
sea-anemone when you poke it with your toe.

Mother travelled to Town with me.

She questioned me about my farewells to
Walter Markham—she has a serene way of
questioning.  I think she would have made a
mark in the Spanish Inquisition.

"Did he show much distress at your leaving
him, Pam?"

"I don't know whether he quite realised.
He had a sort of relapse, and he was only
partially conscious.  The doctors thought me
callous.  The one like a rocking-horse told me
I had no right to leave him.  I said it was
essential I should return.  If he could have
kept me there by force he would."

"I understand from the sister that this
sudden relapse makes it more unlikely than
ever that he will pull through, apparently the
next twenty-four hours are the test."

"Yes."

"Your nails are not very carefully
manicured," said mother.

I laughed; it was so like mother to obtrude
utterly unimportant trivialities, to bring you
crashing to earth with some ridiculous trifle.

"You will send the money as soon as
possible, Pam."

"I absolutely can't do it, mother!" I said
desperately.  I had a sudden vision of myself
asking Cheneston for money.

"You must," mother returned hardily; she
spoke casually, as if she were reminding me to
send a postcard to notify her of my safe
arrival.  "I shall not hesitate to go to
Cheneston and tell him you are frantically and
desperately in love with him, and what may
have been jest to him is grim reality to you,
and unless he marries you he'll ruin your
happiness.  I shall be able to say it sincerely
because I know it to be true.  You are going
to tell Cheneston that Walter Markham quite
understands why you are staying at Cromer
Court, that you have unlocked your lovers'
hearts to each other."

I spoke rudely to mother for the first time
in my life, my fear of her was swept away by
a sudden passion of rebellion.

"Oh, shut up!" I said furiously.  "Shut
up!  Shut up!  Shut up!"

She looked at me curiously, her lips a little
compressed.

"We should have trained you for the
stage," she said.  "There is an abandon
about you at times that would do better for
the theatre than real life—where it is merely
crude and bad form."

"It seems to me that everything real and
vital and honest, all forms of emotion and
feeling, are bad form!"

"Nearly all."

"Except borrowing from your friends and
threatening your daughter."

Mother shrugged and looked out of the window.

"Unless your father can produce five
hundred pounds within the week he will be
forced to resign his commission, in which case
he would get no pension, and as he has no
influence and no brains the prospect of our
future does not intrigue me."

I, too, looked out of the window; a light
frost had crisped the leaves, and though there
was no sun the landscape was so full of gold
that it glowed and vibrated with apparent
sunshine.  The fields were full of workers,
women in coloured linen overalls guiding
ploughs, and allotment-workers on their
patches, and the little cottage gardens were
gay with autumn flowers; and I wondered if
there were undercurrents in all these apparently
simple lives, if the men and women out
there in the brilliant golden world had
furtive motives and social masks like mother
and I.

It is never safe to wonder for more than
three seconds whether everything is what it
seems unless you are over fifty—when you are
under fifty it hurts, but when you are over
fifty you know that you can never alter other
people, only yourself, and you know that your
disillusionment is half your own fault.

I felt a sort of strangling bitterness.  I was
very grateful for it, because I knew that out
of it you can grow a sort of hothouse don't-care-ness
that makes it possible for you to do
horrid things and not feel horrid until long after
they are done.

I caught a train to Cromer Court almost at once.

Mother saw me off.

She stood at the window and chatted
charmingly.  I am sure that all the people in the
carriage were enchanted with her personality.
Mother is so fastidiously, almost contemptuously
refined and cultured.  Had she lived
in the time of the French Revolution she would
have been gloatingly guillotined by the
revolutionists for the very way she breathes.

"And you won't forget?" she said lightly.

"I won't forget," I answered.

One of the most disappointing things in life
is that you never go back to a place—even if
you have only been away twenty-four
hours—feeling exactly the same as when you left it.
You can recover your old poise, but the going
away has altered you, you make a dozen little
mental readjustments on your return—you see
things with the aid of the new experience you
have gained during your absence.  Life is one
continual process of readjustment with people,
places, and things, and ourselves.

We marvel at the chameleon—his feats are
nothing to the feats of a perfectly normal
human.

I went back to Cromer Court a different person.

I met Cheneston as a different person.

I know that he was different.

Nothing stands still.

"How is he?" he said at once; and I answered:

"They think he will pull through."

"Oh, Pam!" he said; and then "Thank God!"

"Mother came to the hospital," I told him
as I climbed into the dog-cart.  "Grace
Gilpin seemed to think I would be there.  It
was rather funny her thinking that."

"I told her—I wrote," he said.

I smiled; the don't-care mood was flourishing.
I could feel it steadily swallowing up my
little qualms and pitiful sense of honour and
dignity, they were vanishing in it like débris
thrown on thoroughly efficient quicksands.

"How is your mother?"

"Longing for your return.  Oh!  Pam—the
tremendously strong feeling she has for you
makes it doubly hard for both of us.  You
explained to Markham—everything?"

I nodded.

"And they will telegraph news of him here?"

"Yes."

He lifted me out of the dog-cart at the door
of Cromer Court; his face looked grey.

"God bless you," he said, "for coming
back to us!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XII

.. vspace:: 2

We dined in Mrs. Cromer's room.

She insisted and would take no denial.

I thought she seemed stronger and more
lovely than ever; she was full of whims and
loveliness.  She seemed to sparkle with
happiness.  She sent us away, she wanted a
consultation with the cook.

"It is to be a very special dinner," she
told us.  "And Pam is to go and lie down.
Sweetheart, have you a white frock?"

"No," I said, "only pink, dear, pink and grey."

"You must wear white," she said.  "I am
bubbling with schemes for my dinner of dinners.
I have a frock for you, Pam.  Nurse shall
bring it—you'll look like a funny little Dutch
princess in it, stepped out of an old Dutch
fairy-tale book.  Now run away, Honey."

Nurse was perturbed when she brought the
frock; it was of softest ivory white satin, made
in Empire style with a wealth of real point de
rose lace.

"She will insist," she said, "and the
doctor said she was to have her own way as
much as possible—but I don't know.  I don't
know, I'm sure.  She says you are to wear
this pearl comb in your hair, and these little
white satin shoes studded with pearls.  Aren't
they ducks?  Are you going to pile your hair
on the top of your head like those funny old
pictures downstairs?  I wish the doctor would
call again.  I think he'd veto this dinner idea,
but I'm not sure it wouldn't upset her more to
be thwarted than to give it.  She's wonderful."

There are moments in everyone's life when
you feel as if you're taking part in an unreal
play; there comes a sudden feeling of panic,
as if you did not know your part.  I got it
that night when I was dressing—and yet there
was a dreadful thrilling, electric sweetness
about it all.

I was excited, my fingers and my toes
tingled and my spine felt creepy; and when
I brushed my hair it cracked with electricity,
and a funny little nerve near my ear that always
betrays itself when I am excited began to
wriggle.

I suppose there is something of the joy of
forbidden fruit in it—but it is *wonderful* and
gorgeous to have Cheneston look at me like
a lover, even though I know it is only to satisfy
his mother.

I think it is awful the way we women can
kid ourselves about love, drench ourselves in
a sweetness that isn't really there, get
intoxicated with a joy that exists only in our own
imaginations.

If I had been going to the altar with
Cheneston I couldn't have been more thrilled
than I was when I entered Mrs. Cromer's room.

Cheneston rose.  He was looking very white
and bewildered; and suddenly the fact that he
was nonplussed made me feel almost cruelly
gay and confident.

"Pam!" Mrs. Cromer said.  "Oh, boy! boy! isn't
she the very sweetest thing that
ever happened?"

"Surely," he said.

There was a round table laid for two, with
a white linen tablecloth with a border of real
lace eight inches wide, and in the centre stood
a huge white and gold Venetian glass basket
filled with lilies of the valley and maidenhair
fern.

"I am going to have a little white love-feast
all to myself for my two children," she said.

I caught my breath—somehow I had not
quite expected just that.

For a dizzy moment I wondered what she
would say and do if she knew the truth—that
Cheneston and I had never been engaged and
would never marry.

Everything we had was white, from the
artichoke soup to the iced pudding.  It was
a wonderful meal, exquisitely served; it tasted
like straw to me—and it would have fascinated
an epicure.  There was champagne, the only
note of colour on the table; and Cheneston
and I talked at high tension.

To me it had a peculiar and appealing joy;
I could say to Cheneston some of the things
I felt, and he accepted them as part of my
rôle in the astonishing little farce; and from
her bed the old lady watched us, an indescribably
happy expression on her face.

And Cheneston said things to me—things
to remember and hoard in myself, and not the
knowledge that they were just "part of the
game" could rob them of their wonder for me.

The atmosphere was extraordinary—to me
it felt rather as if we were all being charming
and polite, and listening for an explosion at
the same time; and there were moments when
the explosion seemed inevitable.  It seemed
as though it *must* come.

At last she let us go—and yet I was loath to.

As I was crossing the hall a maid came to me.

"The boy brought it nearly ten minutes
ago—so I kept him.  I didn't like to disturb
you, miss."

I took it.  It was from the matron of the
hospital.  "Patient doing well.  Out of danger."

"No answer," I said.

So Walter Markham was going to live, and
I had promised——

"Good news?" Cheneston said.

I handed him the telegram, and he followed
me into the drawing-room.

"Oh, Pam!" he said.  "Then you can
marry him and be happy!  I wish I could do
something just to show my enormous gratitude
to you."

"Do you really mean that?" I said.  I
swung round on the music-stool, on which I
had seated myself, and smiled up at him.

"Of course I do."

"Then give me five hundred pounds," I said.

Cheneston lit a cigarette.

I do think the girl who has been brought
up among a pack of brothers and a crowd of
male cousins misses something.  When you
start knowing men for the first time in your
twenties—when your critical faculties are at
their very keenest—you do get a fearful amount
of astonishment and thrills out of the appalling
difference there is between their ways and the
ways of your own sex.  It's a never-ceasing
source of wonder to you.

I had startled Cheneston by a totally
unexpected demand for five hundred pounds—and
he lit a cigarette.

A woman would have played with something,
probably the blind-tassel—Cheneston was
standing near the window—repeated my
question, and tried to read my face; the man did
none of these things.  I think cigarettes are
to men what dangly things about dresses, and
bracelets, and hairpins are to women—something
they can play with and readjust when
something has robbed them of their poise and
sang-froid.  I notice that nervy women and
shy women often have scarves and bead necklaces
and things they can finger in stressful
moments.

"Would you like it in notes, or will a cheque
do?" Cheneston asked quietly.  "If you will
take a cheque I will give it to you now; if
you want notes I am afraid you must wait until
I can drive in to the bank."

"I want it in notes," I said.

I wanted him to ask questions, to show
enormous astonishment and interest.  I was
furious with him for being so calm.

"I think you owe me something for coming
here," I said crudely.

I wanted to rouse him at any price.  I
don't know quite what there is in feminine
make-up that makes you suddenly want to
hurt the man you love—and somehow the more
aloof and patient and wonderful they are, the
more you want to scratch.  It's only when
they get a bit peevish and earthly that you
suddenly leave off and feel repentant.  If a
man, especially a husband, ever patted me on
the head, I should *bite* him; and I don't know
why, but terribly gentlemanly men always make
me feel horribly unladylike.

I don't think I'm a nice character—but I
don't think people who feel things terribly, and
get themselves all sort of churned up with
intensity, are very nice—not what ordinary
people call "nice," anyway.  I think ordinary
people like to feel "sure" of you because it's
a great compliment when it is said of you,
"She's always just the same."  They advance
on you with the same trustful confidence that
a kitten does on its saucerful of milk.  I own
it's bad luck to find a saucerful of dead
sea, or a minute proportion of fire and
brimstone.

"I owe you more than five hundred
pounds," Cheneston said quietly; then he
looked at me for the first time.  "Pam," he
said, "you've altered so lately.  Are you
happy?"

"I'm a twittering bunch of sunshine," I said.

I felt black inside with bitterness and
rebellion.

"I'm glad," he answered quietly, "you
didn't just strike me that way."

I wanted to cry like a silly kid, and yet I
wanted to be a woman of the world and sting
and say clever, lashing things full of prettily
covered up spite.

I wanted to feel old and hard and bad, and
I could only feel young and inadequate and
tearful and sniffy, and I hadn't even got a
handkerchief.

I opened the piano.  I was thinking how
horrid it is to have our parents thrust upon
us, and have to do humiliating things for them
that put you in a false position with the people
you love best.  My brain was a tangled bunch
of rebellious "whys?" all squirming like blind
kittens.

"Do you mind if I strum?" I asked.

"Please do," Cheneston answered
courteously.  "Will my smoking worry you?"

"Oh no," I said carelessly, and what I
wanted to say was, "Don't you even care
enough to ask me why I want that five hundred
pounds from you?  It's positively insulting of
you just to give it to me without a single query
as to its destination.  How dare you—dare
you—dare you think I am the sort of young
woman who calmly asks for five hundred pounds
for pin-money!  Your silence implies that you
*think* I am."

The long narrow drawing-room looked so
beautiful, so dainty, so fresh.  The candle-light
was reflected softly on the white panelled
walls; the fierce little blue lobelia on the quaint
grey chintz seemed to stand out, and the
moonlight coming through the french diamond-paned
windows lay in pools on the grey carpet
like stagnant water—the room was so big
that the mellow candlelight never spread to
there.

It was all so big and grave and stately that
I felt like an angry mosquito—and yet fate
had behaved rottenly to me, assigned to me
an ignoble part.

I chose the wonderful love-song from
"Samson and Delilah," and I forgot
Cheneston, I forgot the room, and the blue
dragon-pots of late madonna lilies.  I forgot
myself—only the scent of the lilies stayed
and drenched me with indescribable
sweetness, and I seemed to struggle down into
the soul of Delilah and understand why
she hated and yet loved Samson for his
strength, as I hated and loved Cheneston
for his.

Cheneston was sitting in the arm-chair,
gripping the sides, and when I stopped he lit
another cigarette.

I could have smacked him.

"Thanks," he said, "it's a wonderful thing."

I played the opening bars of "Thank God
for a Garden."

I felt like a worn-out mosquito.

"I'm afraid you're tired, Pam," he said
when I had finished.  "You look awfully
tired."

"I think I'll go to bed," I said.  "My
head is rather rotten."

"I'll ask nurse to bring you an aspirin."

"No thanks—it's just sleep I want.  I shall
be all right to-morrow."

"I'm sorry your head is bad."

"I often get headaches."

He held open the door for me.

I wondered if he were going to refer to the
five hundred pounds.

"Good-night," I said slowly.

"Good-night," he answered gravely.  "I
hope your head will be better in the morning."

Outside the door of old Mrs. Cromer's
room I paused.  I had a passionate and
overwhelming desire to go and tell her the truth.
I was in need of counsel.  I craved advice.
I felt that nothing in the whole world could
ever be right again.  The future terrified me,
and all the people in it—Walter Markham,
mother, father.

I felt I would give anything to go and lay
my burden on someone else's shoulder.

If I felt like a mosquito at all, it was when
it feels and fears the approach of winter.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIII

.. vspace:: 2

I woke at midnight with an extraordinary
feeling that I was the last person left alive on
earth, a consciousness of desolation and
isolation terrifying and indescribable.  I used to
get it when I was a child, and I would have
gone into a lion's cage for company.  I believe
it is some form of nerve pressure medical men
can't explain.

I got up shivering and put on my little silk
kimona.

I felt I had to go to Mrs. Cromer—I had
to tell her all about Walter Markham, who was
getting better and who thought I loved him
and wanted to marry me, and Cheneston who
did not love me.  I felt I had to tell her about
Grace Gilpin—the very lovely person Cheneston cared for.

The impossibility of struggling through the
immediate future alone and unadvised appalled
me; chiefly I was terrified about Walter
Markham, the man to whom I had been so
horribly unkind in my kindness, the man who
believed I had gone to the hospital to see him
because I cared.  I had fostered the belief
because he was dying—and he had lived, and
all the hopes I had raised and the delusions I
had tenderly fostered lived with him.

My life had been the life of a little child
until my meeting on the shore with Cheneston
that day, all things ordered and planned for
me, and now I was suddenly called upon to
play a rôle almost verging on drama, requiring
subtlety of which I was quite incapable, finesse
of which I could have no knowledge.

I crept, shivering, along the panelled
landing, past Cheneston's door.  I knew the nurse
was sleeping in the little dressing-room attached
to Mrs. Cromer's.

I prayed Heaven she was asleep as I
cautiously opened the door.

The night-light on the washhand-stand
burned steadily; it was reflected in little spots
of primrose light on the mahogany furniture.

I crept to the bed.

The old lady was lying very still.  She
looked extraordinarily lovely and fragile, and
a tiny smile curved the corners of her sweet
old mouth, as if she had fallen asleep in a
network of happy thoughts.

She seemed so small in the big room full
of furniture.

I realised as I knelt beside her how much
I loved her, what an ideal she would always
be in my life.

I softly kissed her hand, kneeling there, and
then I realised it held a letter, and I caught
sight of the words.



"I fall asleep happily because I leave you to
another mother—little mother Pam of the big
eyes and the big heart.  The child loves you,
Cheneston——"

.. vspace:: 2

I touched her face; it was cold as ice.
touched her hand.

Cheneston's mother had fallen asleep happily.

"Oh, my dear!" I whispered.  "And I
came to tell you—and now you'll never know
that I wanted to be his mother, and he wanted
another sort."

I don't know how long I stayed there.
I seemed very close to her.  She was so
beautiful, the loveliest old thing with that little
tender smile curving her lips; the peace of
her, like the loveliness, was indescribable.

I wondered if in heaven there were things
to mother and love.  I hoped so; her life
had been so full of warmth, so radiant with
humanity.  I thought of her extraordinary
quaintness, the delicious way she put
things—I heard again her laughter.

I looked at the letter.

"The child loves you, Cheneston."

He mustn't see that; last words have a
tremendous significance, and we credit those
who are near heaven with super-insight; just
those few words might set him questioning and
wondering, might get between him and Grace
Gilpin.

Had I right to rob him of her last message?

To leave it there would be to give myself
a chance; to take it would be to destroy my last.

I took it very gently from her fingers.

I would not destroy it, it was not mine to
destroy; I would cherish it very carefully,
and after a while I would send it to him
anonymously.

I realised that the need for my presence at
Cromer Court was over; I was free to go,
my part was played and the curtain was down.

Exit Pamela Burbridge from Cheneston
Cromer's life.

I staggered to my feet.

It is easy to do dramatic things, to make
your exit; but to slip away when you want to
stay, when your whole heart is aching to stay,
to make exits so silently and unostentatiously
that the ones you long to miss you hardly
know that you are gone—that is the hardest
of all.

I knew before I left Mrs. Cromer's side that
I was going to run away—away from Cheneston
and Walter Markham and mother and father.

I had to.  I couldn't stay and face things out.

To begin somewhere else all over again.

It was the explanation I was afraid of,
explanations to mother, to father, to Cheneston,
to Walter Markham.

I was running away from Explanations.

I wrote a little note and pushed it under
Cheneston's door, where he would find it in
the morning.

.. vspace:: 2

"Please send the five hundred pounds to
mother.—P.B."

.. vspace:: 2

I packed a few of my serviceable clothes in
a handbag.

I had five pounds in notes and fifteen shillings
in silver.

The dawn was just breaking when I left the Court.

The world was wet and cold.

I looked back at the house from the other
side of the wrought-iron gate; its shuttered
windows seemed like hostile eyes.

I felt a little like Eve expelled from the
Garden of Eden—I wondered if her expulsion
had taken place on a wet morning before the
sun was up.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIV

.. vspace:: 2

I had read "Alone in London" stories,
rather wonderful, poignant things.  I
remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by
Peggy Webling.  They had gripped me at the
time.  I had been so lonely in my real life
that I always found it easy to get inside the
skin of the heroines I was reading about, and
for days my lonely walks with Pomp and
Circumstance across the wet moors and through
leafless lanes were no longer lonely or
desolate—they had become the streets of the greatest
capital in the world.

If you have sufficient imagination and a
cheap lending library near you your world is
never unpeopled.  I often think that the library
is the one thing that prevents prisoners going
mad—you couldn't go mad if you were allowed
O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to
read yourself to sleep with.

Two things I hadn't expected about London
happened: it was radiant with sunshine when
I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice
of me.

I was a little nonplussed; then I found
a boarding-house, not in Bloomsbury, where
the wallpaper was not flowered and the
atmosphere was not cabbagey; the landlady
neither stared at me nor asked questions, and
the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and
there was a parrot in the basement who said
"change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing
could have been less sinister or more normal
and cheery.

I cried myself to sleep the first night—it
seemed the right thing to do; but I left off
in the middle because I couldn't think of
anything more to cry about.

I had a dear old lady in the room next to
mine.  She knocked at my door just as I was
falling to sleep.

"My dear," she piped, "if you should
hear a raid warning, if you would just tap the
wall.  We all go down into the cellar—and one
likes to prepare a little."

"Prepare?" I said.

"Hindes," she whispered apologetically,
"curlers—you know—one doesn't like——"

I fell asleep smiling on my first night in
darkest, dreadfulest, naughtiest London.

The next day I started to hunt for work.
I was paying forty shillings a week, and had
only four pounds ten left of my money.

I found it at once.  I took the money in a
cinema booking-office.  It was dull, and I got
thirty shillings a week; I took it because it
gave me the entire morning to hunt for more
remunerative work.

I met with no adventures in my hutch.  I
was sworn at several times for giving the
wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in
Prussian blue and silver uniform, who waved
the people to their seats inside, gave me a
packet of butterscotch.  But the more
remunerative work did not present itself.  I was
untrained.  I could not type or do shorthand,
and I had no previous experience.  The men
who interviewed me were most civil, they
suggested Clark's College or Pitman's.  I was no
good to them.

I had to change my boarding-house.  I went
to one near Kentish Town, it was very clean,
and the landlady had been a professional cook.
I boarded with the family, and a Polish Jewess
also lived there, a skirt hand in a big West
End tailor's.  She used to press my skirts.

I wondered if anybody was advertising for
me, or if there was any fussation going on.  I
did not think I was worth a whole detective
for one minute.  I did not attempt to hide.
I had read somewhere that to live an ordinary
life was the surest way to escape detection.

I wondered, as the months slipped by, if
Cheneston had married Grace Gilpin.

I did not lose Cheneston.  I could always
step right back in memory into the days I had
spent with him, days of infinite and dear
delight.

I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted
passionately to be his wife; that if he were to
ask me to marry him I would marry him
rapturously and thankfully, even though I knew
he didn't care two straws about me and would
need a photograph to remember the way I did
my hair.

I believe the "if she be not fair for me,
what care I how fair she be" sort of people
are very, very jelly-fishy.

If you care for a man you care for him, and
that's all there is to it; the fact that he cares
for someone else or doesn't care for you
doesn't alter your feelings, it only makes the
pain and hurt of it an artistic success.

I wish I was jelly-fishy in my feelings for
people.  If I were I could say of Cheneston,
"I can't stick here!  I'll float on."  But I'm
a barnacle creature where I love.  I shall be
Cheneston's girl even if I never see him again.
My heart went from me when I first met him,
and the doors closed after it and left a little
hole.  It will always ache, and I shall always
know there is a hole where a heart should
be—especially when I listen to wonderful music or
see sunsets or little children at play.

I shall never, never have another heart to
give away; some women have theirs on bits
of elastic so that they can always pull them
back and give them away again; a man sort
of holds it until somebody else wins it, like a
challenge shield or a football cup.

I gave mine entirely and unconditionally; I
believe that time will cocaine the hole.

I look to time to do a lot for me in the
healing and dulling line—all that the poets and
the proverbs say it will.  Time never fails
you—when all else fails, you can always kid
yourself you haven't given it long enough to perform
the miracle.

I don't ever want to see anyone I knew in
the old life.  I feel that the Pamela Burbridge
of those days is dead, poor thing! but she
has a more exciting time than most defunct
people, because every night I shake her up
and make her live over again her enchanted
halcyon days by the sea and at Cromer Court.

She lives in sunshine and happiness for an
hour or two of memory every night, even if
she has to die off while I go and do my day's
work.

Life is really awfully funny and un-understandable.
Why are we given feelings we've
got to squash?

Are we big if we squash them and little if
we let them grow?

I wouldn't squash my feelings about Cheneston.

I simply love them.

I couldn't squash them even if I knew I
would grow such a huge and splendid national
character, and such a power for good, that
they would give me a gold-leaf Pamela
Memorial in Kensington Gardens with a
lightning conductor, and ten lines in the
*London Guide Book* all to myself.





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I have lost my job, and the little Russian
tailoress presses my skirt every day and has
lent me a pound.

Russia doesn't seem a lucky country for me;
the cinema proprietor was a young Russian
Jew, and when the August orders about
Russians serving came up he got five months'
exemption, and now he's joined up and the
cinema has been turned into a Y.M.C.A. canteen.
I help them two nights a week.

It was funny; the other day there were a
lot of men expected in.  It's just outside the
station, and often we get officers, and an
officer in Walter Markham's regiment came in.
I knew it was his battalion.  The officer was
just home on leave.  I asked him if he knew
Captain Markham.

"Used to be under him," he said.  "Went
West, poor chap!  Died in a hospital
somewhere up North."

"Are you sure he died?" I said.

"Positive.  He had a sudden relapse.
Ballyntine, one of our senior officers, was
pipped at the same time and got sent to the
same hospital.  He was there when Markham
died.  He's rejoined since; he's out there now.
Why?  Did you know Markham?"

"He was a great friend of a friend of mine."

"Jolly decent chap," the young officer said.

I thought it such an accurate epitaph.  He
was a jolly decent chap.  I turned away
because my eyes were so full of tears.

If he had recovered and I had married him
I could never, never have made him happy.
I should have been one of those wives who
suddenly look at their husbands with vacant
eyes, and have thoughts they cannot tell when
they are asked—you see, Cheneston Cromer
is with me for keeps, the memory of him will
never go, and I know that often I should
wander away from Walter with Cheneston, and
be sorry to come back, and Walter was too
great a dear to treat like that, a very gallant
and honest English gentleman.

Regina Merolovitch has found me a "job"
at twenty-five shillings a week.  She says it is
only temporary, and soon I shall find
something better; but I don't know.  I am only
"honest and willing," and the world seems
overcrowded with honesty and willingness unadorned.

I "do anything" for Madame Cherry, who
has a little cherry-coloured shop with grey
fittings and purple hangings in the West End.
Sometimes I am in the showroom, sometimes
I make tea for the girls, sometimes I pick pins
off the showroom floor, sometimes I "match"
things at the big London stores, sometimes I
take things home to customers.

I marvel at the prices people pay for clothes.
The people who fluff in and say, "I must
have some little cheap thing, madame," seem
to pay most and buy most.

Madame made a wonderful "little cheap
thing" the other day—black tulle over blue
tulle, and all of it edged with blue beetles'
wings, and blue tissue round the waist to
match.

It was done in a violent hurry because "he"
was coming home on leave; "he" was staying
at the Savoy with her for a few days, and
then they were going down to their country
seat when he had seen about his kit.

She paid for the girl's "hurry."

Madame never breaks her promises.

She had promised it by seven, and I was
to deliver it at the Savoy.

"And wear your best coat and skirt; and
if it is fine you can wear that blue velour hat
that has just come in, but don't put any pins
in it," said Madame.  "I can't have people
carrying my boxes and going to the Savoy
looking anyhow."

Madame's boxes are French grey with
bunches of cherries on them, tied with gay
cherry ribbons, and "Cherry" written
across.  They are a part of her general
scheme.

I had one of them on my arm when I went
to the Savoy.

I like the Savoy; it never smells foody, and
the orchestra chats to itself instead of shouting
at you.  I like an orchestra that chats to
itself, and then you can talk without feeling
you oughtn't to.

I was very, very tired, and I did feel an
awful alien in that place.  It's not personality
or breeding that makes you feel at home in
big restaurants and hotels—it's just clothes.
It doesn't matter if you've given your twelve
country seats to the country for hospitals, and
you've got the newest thing in Rolls Royce's
nestling on the kerb outside; if you've got
the wrong clothes on you feel as out-of-place
and insignificant as a flapper at a silver
wedding.

I found the right suite and delivered the
box; an ecstatic young woman rushed out in
a violet kimona with black storks on it.  I
think my appearance rather nonplussed her,
it's horribly embarrassing to wear decently cut
clothes sometimes.

"Are you Madame Cherry's daughter?"
she said.  "Well—it's frightfully decent of
you to bring it—er—will you have a cocktail
or anything?"

I went down the lift with a huge box
of Fuller's chocolates tucked under my
arm.

I adore Fuller's chocolates.

As I stepped out of the lift at the bottom
someone grasped my arm and said:

"Pam!  Pamela Burbridge!"

It was Grace Gilpin.

She looked simply gorgeous.

She wore a cloak of dull velvet the exact
colour of her hair, with a great skunk collar.
There was a sort of laughing radiancy about
her, as if she were bubbling and dancing with
happiness.

I wondered if she knew that my people
didn't know where I was.  I thought I could
trust mother for that.  I was right.

"I met Mrs. Burbridge not so very long
ago," she said.  "She was most mysterious
and injured about you, Pam.  What have
you been doing?  She seemed quite martyred.
I couldn't get anything out of her.  Have
you got married, or gone on the stage, or
what?  Won't Cheneston be surprised!  You
must stay and have dinner with us and tell us
all your misdeeds."

"Cheneston?" I said.

People were drinking their coffee and
staring at Grace, just as they always did.

"Yes, he's home on leave and staying
here.  Pam—didn't you know I was married?"

"Yes," I lied swiftly.

I knew that Cheneston was behind me.  I
knew it without turning.  I felt it; once more
the old thrilling excitement, the tension of
expectancy, stirred in me—for another woman's
husband.

"Where is that husband of mine?" Grace
said in her familiar, high, sweet, laughing
voice.  "I do want you to meet."

I wanted to say, "He's behind me.  You
don't know it, but *I* do.  I can feel it all down
my neck and spine.  He belongs to you, but
you can't feel it.  I'm glad you can't feel it.
Glad!  Glad!  Glad!"

Instead I said:

"Good heavens!  I was forgetting!  I'm
going on to dinner, and my husband's outside
in the car.  I went up to see some friends,
and said I wouldn't be a second."

"You married, Pam!  I never knew that!"

"I must absolutely fly!" I said.

"But, Pam—I'm so interested.  Who did
you marry, Pam?  Hang it all!  I'm thrilled
to the core—you can't run away like this!
Besides, Cheneston's here, and——  Pam,
*why did you break off your engagement to
Cheneston?*"

"Must fly!" I said.

I caught sight of Cheneston.  He had not
recognised my back, he was waiting to come
forward and join his wife.

That queer, quizzical, bored look was on
his face.  He's the only man whose thoughts
I ever pined to know.

I would have given the world to have been
able to stop and say:

"What *are* you thinking about?"

I heard Grace say in that queer, lilting
voice of hers:

"Oh, bother!  Cheneston, you're just too
late!  That was Pam Burbridge—only she
isn't any more, she's married, and her husband
is outside in a car."

And as I hurried out into the courtyard a
woman getting out of a car said:

"Look at that woman; isn't she wonderful!"

Of course it was Grace; if it had been me
she would have said:

"Look at that funny little moth-eaten
rabbit of a girl hurrying away as if there was
a stoat after her.  You really do see the
queerest people everywhere nowadays."





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There is a street that leads round the back
of the Savoy Theatre.  I ran down that.  I
don't know what it was like.  There were
great inky splotches of shadow, they seemed
almost glistening wet in their impenetrable
blackness.  As a rule I mind these pools of
darkness.  I cross roads to avoid them, and
if I must needs pass through them I hurry
very quickly and my heart seems to beat in
my throat.

This night I did not care; mad kaffirs,
Landrus, the denizens of Soho, might nestle
in their dozens in the shadows of London—I
didn't care.

You can get so absolutely don't-carish that
the things that normally terrify and appal you
fail even to rouse a flicker.

I reached the Embankment.

I love the Thames Embankment.  To me
it seems a thousand times more romantic and
wonderful than the canals of Venice or the
crocodile-y charms of the Nile.  The water
is so sad and so wicked—the wisest, wickedest
thing in England, flowing greyly between the
great palaces of commerce; floating little
ships and dirty hulks; holding up to the sunset,
in places, a tangled mass of sails, a veritable
fretwork; the humbler and less ostentatious
commerce of the world flows through its
veins, dear furtive, dirty, splendid, muddy old
river!

I looked over the parapet.  Once in my
dim, funny little far-away youth, when
impressions sort of bedded themselves down on
your mind, I had driven in a hansom with
mother and father from Blackfriars to
Waterloo; and all the electric signs over the
warehouses on the bank had streaked the water
with colour, and all the Embankment had been
fringed with electric lights, and I had cried
with the beauty of it, and mother and father
had been curious as to the cause of my
emotion, and then angry because I wouldn't
tell them—but how could I tell them I was
crying because somebody's whisky advertisement
looked so lovely on the water.

I remembered as I looked in the water and
thought how jolly it is to be able to feel sad
and romantically melancholy about abstract
things, and let yourself go, when the real
sorrows come there is always something to
prevent you from letting yourself go.

I wondered why I wasn't feeling more
awful about Cheneston's marriage to Grace.

I wasn't feeling at all.  I was numbed.  The
pain hadn't begun to work.

An old gentleman passed me and then came
back.  Instantly the remembrance of London
novels I had read flashed into my mind.  Was
he going to offer to adopt me, or help me
save my soul, or thrust five pounds into my
hand.

"You're not thinking of—popping in?" he said.

"It hadn't occurred to me," I answered.

"Good," he said, relieved.  "It's cold,
and damn silly.  It just occurred to me.  You
seem interested.  I can't swim."

"Neither can I," I said.

"Then it *would* be damn silly," he said.
"Good-night."

And then I heard Cheneston's voice.

"Where is your husband?"

"Ah," murmured the old gentleman, "now I see."

"Oh," I said stupidly, "he—he didn't wait."

"I followed you," Cheneston said.  "I
had to know things."

"What things?" I said feebly.  I was
beginning to feel the pain now, the numbness
was passing off; and I knew that I was going
to suffer.

"I want to know when you married, and
if you are happy—and why you ran away like
that, and if you loved Walter Markham.
Pam—I'll be content if you'll only answer
me one thing, is he good to you?  Have you
married the right man?  Pam, I've got to
know."

I knew then how much it hurt; my throat
felt like a funny little unoiled, unused machine
when I spoke.

"Tell me if you are happily married?"

"I?"

"Yes."

"I'm not married at all."

"Grace," I said, "Grace said——"

"She's married.  She married Clay Rendle.
She was always in love with him."

"She was in love with you."

"Never!  I was in her confidence, that
was all.  Clay Rendle's wife was a homicidal
maniac.  She died a week after mother.  But,
Pam—I'll go away, I'll go straight back to
the Savoy now, if you'll just answer 'Yes' or
'No.'  Pam, are you happily married?"

"No," I said.

He looked down at me, he was very white
there was a queer look on his face, as if
his feelings were bunched up inside him and
he was sitting hard on the lid.

I wanted the lid up.

"I'm not married," I said.

The lid flew up.

I did not know a kiss *could* feel like that.
The Embankment sort of slid away from under
it and us.  I think it lasted for hours.

We looked at each other blankly.

"Pam," he said shakily, queerly, "you
kissed me—did you know you kissed me?"

I nodded.  I felt as if half of me stood
there and the other half was slowly unwrapping
itself from the kiss.

"You kissed me as if—as if——"

"I know," I said.

"I didn't think that any woman in the
world could kiss like that," he said.  "My
God!  I didn't think it!  Pam, are we both
crazy?"

"Yes," I said.

His eyes began to flicker and twinkle, those
curious hazel eyes, not brown, not yellow, and
not readable.

"I want things explained," he said, "and
yet I don't want them explained.  You are
sure you aren't married?"

"Quite," I said.

"Then, Pam, will you marry me?  Oh,
Pam!—listen to it—you funny, exquisite little
person!  Listen to it!—doesn't it sound
gorgeous!—Heaven!—*you* married to *me*!
Did you ever like anything in the world as
much as the sound of that, my sweet?"

"No," I whispered.

He put his face down to mine.  I was
trembling and crying; his face was wet.

"I love you so!" he whispered.  "I love
you so's I could eat you, and yet I'm scared
to touch you—that's *how* I love you, you
exquisite baby thing!"  He laughed and
kissed my hands.  "I'm plum crazy with
happiness," he confessed.  "You'll have to
be sane for the two of us.  What shall we
do, sweetheart, what shall we do?"

"Walk on—and I'll explain things."

"And every time we come to a shadow I'll
kiss you."

"Only big ones, then.  Which way shall
we go?"

"Towards the Houses of Parliament."

"Why?"

"I see a shadow," he said.

I have always been scared of shadows, but
if all the murderers and thieves in the world
nestled in the shadows that night, I did not
know.  I did not care.

*I did not see*.

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