Chapter XVI.

Detsch.

The home of Johanna’s parents was not in Frankfort, but in Detsch, a small but important military city where her father, Wilhelm Freiherr von Hebenitz, held a moderately important office under government.

In Frankfort the family assembled, and moved on to Detsch: at least the Baron and Baroness and their daughter Johanna arrived in the home city shortly after the events related in the last chapter. Johanna was scolded and spoiled, and all the delicacies of south Germany — whose name was legion — were set on the table for her.

Detsch was much warmer than Munich. So Johanna sunned herself, and flirted with her old friend Rudolf von Daumling, a rather wistful cavalry officer with a decided wife. Rudolf was thin and pleasant-looking, and still, at the age of thirty- eight, wrote little poems for his own delectation. Johanna had a certain fondness for him: der gute Rudolf. He was one of the men who didn’t fit the army. Now he is dead: killed in action the first month of the war.

We mention him gently. He was not happy with his wife, who wounded his over-sensitive spirit. Therefore, though he lived under the same roof as she, he did not live with her actually. He was sad and wistful, and did not know what he lived for.

Johanna, of course, who took her sex as a religion, felt herself bound to administer the cup of consolation to him. He had thought his days of love and love-making were over.

“Ah, you!” cried Johanna to him — but not in his wife’s hearing. “You are a young man, and awfully good-looking.

You might give any woman a good time. Why do you sit moping?”

So he told her, and she pooh-poohed him. And so the fires began to beat up in Rudolf’s breast, the sun came out on his brow, faintly.

“But you don’t love me, Johanna,” he said.

“Yes, I do; why not?”

Which is one way of putting it. Why not?

But in Detsch Johanna was well known, and Captain von Daumling even better. Moreover there was his unhappy, lynx- eyed wife, with whom he lived and did not live. But Johanna sailed bravely on. She found occasion to draw her old Rudolf to her breast, and even further.

“Ja du!” she said to him, teasing. “Du! You! You, to say you can’t love any more.”

And he laughed, and blushed, and was restored in his manliness. For, in spite of Tolstoi and chastity, he had found his own impotent purity unmanly, and a sense of humiliation ate into him like a canker. Now that Johanna had demonstrated his almost splendid capabilities, he felt he had been rather a fool. And he was rather pleased with himself.

But — ! But — ! He wanted love. And Johanna only loved him because — why not? Well, and why not?

It ought to be a sufficient reason. But alas, Rudolf, although a cavalry officer, belonged to the wistful of this world. And why-not? wasn’t enough. He wanted flaming affirmation. Therefore he blew this little why-not fire faint-heartedly.

And so on for a week. Oh, things go quickly! On the seventh day Johanna was waiting in the station at Detsch, all agog. In whizzed the train for Paris, out stepped Mr Noon, in a new suit and with a gladstone bag.

“I was awfully afraid you wouldn’t come,” said Johanna.

“Here I am,” said Gilbert.

After which Johanna felt a perhaps even purer compassion for her poor Rudolf. And he, to his credit, found compassion even more humiliating than impotence. Whereupon he wrote quite long poems, in which Gilbert all-unwitting fluttered as a dark Ungliicksrabe, raven of woe.

Now my latest critic complains that my heroines show no spark of nobility: never did show any spark of nobility, and never do: perchance never will. Speriamo.

But I ask you, especially you, gentle reader, whether it is not a noble deed to give to a poor self-mistrustful Rudolf substantial proof of his own virility. We say substantial advisedly. Nothing ideal and in the air. Substantial proof of his own abundantly adequate virility. Would it have been more noble, under the circumstances, to give him the baby’s dummy-teat of ideal sympathy and a kind breast? Should she have said: “Dear Rudolf, our two spirits, divested of this earthy dross of physicality, shall fly untrammelled.” Should she once more have done the pure and pitiful touch? Should she have proceeded to embrace the dear depressed Captain of the fifth regiment in the spirit, to whoosh with him in unison of pure love through the blue empyrean, as poor Paolo and Francesca were forced to whoosh on the black winds of hell? Would this have been noble? Is the baby’s dummy-teat really the patent of true female spirituality and nobility, or is it just a fourpence- halfpenny fraud? Gentle reader, I know your answer. But unfortunately my critics are usually of the sterner sex, which sex by now is so used to the dummy, that its gentle lips flutter if the indiarubber gag of female spiritual nobility is taken away for one moment.

That is why I am continually addressing myself to you, gende reader, and not to the sterner sex. The sterner sex either sucks away at its dummy with such perfect innocent complacency, or else howls with such perfectly pitiful abandon after the lost dummy, that I won’t really address the darling any more.

Gende reader, gentille lecteuse, gentilissima lettrice, don’t you agree with me that Magdalen had only one fall, and that was when she fell to feet-washing. What a pity, what a thousand pities! However, it can’t be helped. Fall she did, and spilt her spikenard. No use crying over spilt spikenard either. But let me help you up, dear Magdalen, and let everybody wash his own feet. That’s sound logic, I believe.

The poor Hauptmann Rudolf von Daumling, however, was crying. He was crying for a dummy, and to have his not- particularly-beautiful feet washed with spikenard and long hair. Poor Johanna — how we throw that little adjective of condolence from side to side: poor Johanna had gone to the wrong shop with her wares. The above-mentioned substantial proof only proved a larger thorn in the flesh of the poetic captain, a thorn which had ceased to rankle, and now rankled again. Therefore his poetry, like pus, flowed from the wound. We are sorry to be distasteful, but so it strikes us. Fortunately the war came in time, and allowed him to fling his dross of flesh disdainfully down the winds of death, so that now he probably flies in all kinds of comforted glory. I hope really he’s not flying in our common air, for I shouldn’t like to breathe him. That is really my greatest trouble with disembodied spirits. I am so afraid of breathing them in, mixed up with air, and getting bronchitis from them.

Well, my dear Johanna has so far showed no spark of nobility, and if I can help it, she never shall. Therefore, oh sterner sex, bend your agitated brows away from this page, and suck your dummy of sympathy in peace. Far be it from me to disturb you. I am only too thankful if you’ll keep the indiarubber gag between your quivering, innocent lips. So, darling, don’t look at the nasty book any more: don’t you then: there, there, don’t cry, my pretty.

No one really takes more trouble soothing and patting his critics on the back than I do. But alas, all my critics are troubled with wind.

Now Mr Noon had a new suit on, grey with a brown thread in it: and a new grey hat: and he looked quite laa-di-dah.

Johanna eyed him with approval. This is still in Detsch station, with a porter standing holding the bag.

“Where am I going to put up?” asked Gilbert.

“Will you go to the Wolkenhof? They know us there. We always put friends up there. It’s a sort of family hotel place, not expensive.”

“It had better not be,” said Gilbert; “for I’ve got just a hundred and twenty Marks — just six pounds sterling.”

“In the world?” said Johanna.

“In the universe, till my father dies — and probably even then.”

“Well,” said Johanna, “I can give you some. Everard sent me a hundred dollars.”

“Wait a bit,” said Gilbert.

They drove to the Wolkenhof, a big, dull, brown place. Gilbert had a big attic under the roof, and looked down on streets and soldiers and drill-yards.

“I shan’t have to know you very well,” said Johanna. “You’re only just an acquaintance — or a friend, but not very intimate, you know.”

“All right,” said Gilbert.

Whereupon she left him.

He wandered about the old town. It was full of soldiers and officers: an endless parade of blue, waspy officers with swords and cloaks, who put his back up. They seemed to have favorite restaurants, and our Gilbert was always wonderstruck, when by accident he found himself in one of these restaurants and sat eating his asparagus — very good asparagus — and heard the clash of spurs in the doorway, saw the martial and supercilious salute. It did not occur to his north-country innocence that they were despising him and being in some way offensive. But he felt uncomfortable, and rather angry with everything. Up and down his spine went a creepy uncomfortableness and unease. But still, to him the brilliant blue officers were only wonder-figures, he had no human connection with them. Their heel-clicking, their super-martial salutes, their silver sword-points and their flowing cloaks — all this was a sort of spectacle to him, upon which he looked with curious wondering detachment. If they eyed him down their noses, from under the brim of their super-martial caps, well, he thought, this is only correct military deportment. He was himself so remote and civilian that the officers might have put fingers to their noses at him, with both hands, and he would only have found it some novel correctness in military deportment. If they had flourished naked swords before his blinking eyes, he would have smiled and bowed, thinking it all an essential part of the military mystery. Those were days of unblemished civilian innocence.

Yet he was uncomfortable in Detsch. The German language seemed to strangle in his throat. He couldn’t get it out. And he seemed not to be in his own skin. Which is a nasty feeling.

Johanna met him in the cathedral square and took him to the Wilhelmgarten, where her mother was waiting. The Baroness von Hebenitz was pleasant and curious about him. She kept glancing at him, as women of fifty-five will glance. She knew he was Johanna’s latest gallant, and wondered what to make of him. She summoned all her English, and asked him to take coffee there in the gardens.

The Wilhelmgarten was lovely with masses of lilac and laburnum in full bloom. The cathedral with its many spines, like a hedgehog pricking its ears, was in the background. Away down on the left wound the river, through the ancient houses of the old town. It was sunny and lovely and four- o’clock. But Gilbert was somewhat bewildered. He ate apple- cake and rich cream, and drank his cafe au lait there with the two women in the open air, whilst a military band played not far off, and elegant waspy officers paraded with super-elegant ladies in enormous Paris hats and glove-fitting dresses of lace or silk.

It was all so strange — the sunshine was so strong, the lilacs were like wonderful cathedrals of blossom, so full and massively in flower, the officers glittered and clicked in their pale blue and silver and scarlet. The Baroness talked in English and German, catching her breath oddly between the words. Johanna, in a dress of dull, smoke-coloured gauze stuff, with a delicate black hat, looked somehow strange to him. She was so shining, so assured, so super. There was no getting away from that curious German exaggeration.

Gilbert had noticed, at the entrance to the gardens, a board which said that it was forbidden to speak French in the Wilhelmgarten. There was a strange sense of unreality: intense, marvellous sunshine, massive, amazing flowers, and people all gleaming and assertive as if they sent out little flashes. It was uncomfortable and intensified, as if everything were focussed here under a burning-glass. The German language seemed to sparkle and crackle like fireworks going off. The women — it was so near to France — all looked so French and yet not French, so curiously definite. Everything was assertive — so assertive that Gilbert, with his sensitive musician’s tissue, felt often that he could not breathe.

He let the Baroness pay for the tea, and wondered afterwards if that was wrong. Johanna seemed assertive and self- brilliant like everybody else. She left him, saying she would call at the Wolkenhof next morning at ten.

So he roamed round the old, debated town, which all the time glittered with the military as with pale-blue glass. He was at a hopeless loose end, and not himself, not in his own skin. At nine o’clock he was thankful to climb upstairs to his big attic. And then he stood for a long time at the window, looking down at the strange, tiny marionette threading of people in the street below, far below, the lights glittering, and listening to the bugles and strange sounds from the barracks opposite.

The next day was Sunday. He would not see Johanna till after lunch. So he watched the amazing military parade of pale-blue officers and dazzling women, hard-souled, strange, either inhuman, or super-human men, not like men at all — all showing themselves off like splinters of bright-coloured opaque glass, there in the open place before the ancient, dark-grey cathedral. It was after mass, so Gilbert went in and looked at the shadowy, incense-perfumed interior — tall and gothic, tall like a forest of stupendously tall trees, from the low-stranded floor. It was all rather too much for him.

Johanna met him, and they walked into the country: flat, fortified, depressing country. They walked along a canal, and saw squadron after squadron of blue infantry thresh heavily, with that awful German rhythm of march, along the white road coming in from the country.

Johanna was important with news. She had a cable from Everard. “Believe you have gone with Berry. Wire ganz richtig or nicht wahr.”

Gilbert looked a little pale. To be sure he wasn’t Berry, but he feared that Noon would smell no sweeter.

“Have you answered?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Why should I hurry!”

“Shall you wire ganz richtig?”

“How can I?”

Now ganz richtig means quite right, and nicht wahr means not true. Poor Everard was not quite right.

Gilbert asked about Berry: and Johanna told him all about the American: a fair, pleasant young business man, in the same matrimonial situation and of the same age as Rudolf, but of the mercurial rather than the despondent form of idealism.

“We were always motoring away into the country — but he’s the kind of irresponsible, all-above-board man people don’t talk about. He’s awfully nice, really. I hope you’ll meet him one day. We did awfully nice things. One day, deep in the forest, I took all my things off and ran naked through the trees. He said I was Daphne. I believe he loved it. But I was too much for him, really: though he laved me as a friend, he loved me quite wildly as a friend. But I was too much for him otherwise.”

“So you’ve not come away with Berry!”

“No I haven’t, have I,” she laughed.

“Why don’t you wire — Nicht Beere aber Mittag? — Not Berry but Noon?”

“Yes. It would be all up,” she said.

“Let it be all up. Don’t you want to?”

“I’m not so sure,” she said.

“Cable halb richtig — half right,” he said.

“Oh, I can’t,” she said.

She decided she would not cable till the morrow. Louise, her school-sister, was coming from Munich, arriving that evening: and Lotte, Johanna’s own sister, was arriving from Vienna next day.

Gilbert was now becoming rather depressed. He could see it was impossible for Johanna to go back to Boston: and it seemed to him inevitable that she should stay with him. And it depressed him — the tangle and nastiness of it all. He felt in a shabby and questionable position, hanging on there unacknowledged in that unnatural military town. And whether he would or not, he suffered from the peculiar assertive German callousness, he felt he was always being bumped. He rather blankly hung on, being of the bulldog breed.

The next morning Johanna came to his room at the Wolkenhof at ten in the morning. He heard a tap — opened — and there she was, radiant on the doorstep. They felt remote in that high attic. He locked the door.

Later on, talking almost to herself as she tidied her hair before his mirror, she said:

“Do you know, I was rather frightened that you weren’t a good lover. But it isn’t every man who can love a woman three times in a quarter of an hour — so well — is it — ?” and she looked round at him with a radiant and triumphant face, holding his comb in one hand. He almost blushed.

“How should I know?” he muttered, turning aside.

“I assure you it isn’t,” she said.

Vaguely through his mind went the thought — That’s the price she takes me at. Which thought was followed by a second: Yes, and I’d rather.

And yes, gentle reader — I hope to heaven the sterner sex has left off reading before now, so that I may address you alone — Yes, gentle reader, and at what better price can a woman take a man for good? A woman may have the most marvellous pure esteem for a man: but is that any reason why she should sleep with him? She may feel her soul carried away to mid-heaven by him: but does it therefore follow that she should unfasten her garters? They may behold in each other all sorts of spiritual, aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual miracles: but will this undo one single unrelenting button? It won’t. Then why on earth urge people to marry in Tolstoyan spiritual rapture, when as far as marriage goes, spirits, like angels, n ‘ont pas de quoi.

I can see absolutely no sounder ground for a permanent marriage than Johanna’s — three times in a quarter of an hour, and so well. Then you know what you’re in for. Then you’re down at the bed-rock of marriage. And why, gentle reader, the sterner sex — I won’t accuse you yourself; — why the sterner sex should have such a craving for the wings the wings of a dove, far away, far away from the bed-rock of marriage to fly, I really don’t know. Why he wants to soar in mid-heaven with a dummy in his enraptured lips, I cannot tell. It is one of the many mysteries.

“Bing — bang — bump goes the hammer on the anvil.”

Well, and life is a thing which is hammered out between the hammer and the anvil, it isn’t a feather wafted downwards from the flight of some soothing, sanctified dove. Man is a smith, and it behoves him to smite while the iron is hot, if ever he is to get any shape into life, or any sharpness on his plough-share.

Johanna and Gilbert went downstairs a little timorously. The Wolkenhof, where Baron von Hebenitz put all his guests, was quite famous as a semi-religious kind of family hotel — a tiny touch of the Y.M.C.A. about it. Johanna did not want to meet on the stairs the old Countess Kippenkegel, a chronic family friend and bygone lady-in-waiting of the Saxon court.

However, she met no one worse than the rather severe Swiss manageress, whom she greeted in her most innocent, naive, disarming fashion.

Johanna had agreed to meet Louise at the cathedral. The three were to talk-it-over.

Louise in the sunshine of the cathedral square, wearing a dress of fine, pale-purple cloth, was evidently about to rob Athena to pay Aphrodite.

“How do you do?” she smiled to Mr Noon. “I had not expected to meet you here in soch circumstances! Yes?”

Her manner was decidedly ironic.

“Hardly,” said Gilbert.

“Hardly, you say!” laughed Louise, knitting her brows in a cogitating way she had. “That is very nice. I like your hardly! Now, where shall we go to have a quiet talk. Shall we have chocolate at Beltrand’s — yes?”

“Nein,” said Johanna. “Kein chocolat, Louise.”

“No! Oh very well. Then let us go into the French park.”

So they went into the old, deserted, rather depressing park, and Louise took matters into her own hands. That is, first she took from her bag the cablegram.

“Now then,” she said, “we must settle this difficolty. — Believe you have gone with Berry. Wire ganz richtig or nicht wahr. — Well — ”

And she looked up at Gilbert and smiled her odd, wicked, sisterly smile.

“Well — ” she repeated, with all the irony of Athena cum Aphrodite — ”I think you are not this Berry — this black berry, whoever he may be — ”

“Nein Louise — er war nicht schwarz,” said Johanna. “He wasn’t black. He was beautiful like ripe wheat.”

“Ach, you simple soul, you! Ach, ripe wheat! What next! Ach — this cran-berry. — But we are very wicked, to joke over this serious business. Ach — poor Everard. I am sure it is very dreadful for him.”

She knew Everard well: he and she detested one another. They understood one another too well. They had worked together at Heidelberg.

Louise smoothed the telegram once more on her knee, with her well-gloved hand.

“Ganz richtig oder nicht wahr,” she repeated musingly. “But it is certainly not true: you are not this Berry. Ach, best cable not true. Best cable not true. Think of the life that is coming. Think of Johanna’s children. Ach, all the years which are before you. Best cable nicht wahr — much better — much better.”

“No,” said Gilbert. “She can’t go back. There’d be a catastrophe.”

“But why! But why! Why should there? Ach, he does not want to be told anything except nicht wahr. He does not want the truth. He wants only to be — to be assured, made sure. And for this he does not want the truth — not all the truth — only just the little bit which is komfortable — ha — !” and she laughed an odd, half bitter, half pathetic laugh. “You are so young, Mr Noon. When you are older you will not ask for the wolf’s head. You will not wish it — ha! You will want only three little hairs from his tail, to prove to you that he is a dead wolf. — Ja, Johanna, das ist wirklich so — ” and again she laughed her brief, hot, tired, cynical little laugh.

“Yes, I believe it,” said Johanna. “He wants to be told the comforting lie. But what about me?”

“Eben!’ cried Louise. “He wants the comfortable lie — and with that you are caught.”

“Wire,” said Gilbert, “wire not quite true, name wrong — ”

“Yes,” laughed Louise. “That is very nice. Wrong name — wrong Berry — not bil-berry but cran-berry. That is very nice — ”

She mused to a moment’s silence, then resumed:

“But we must not joke. It is not a laughing matter. Ach, you poor Johanna, how can I think of your years in front. Ach, it is so difficolt. There are the children — there is money — there is everything.”

“Oh,” cried Johanna, “there is quite as much on the other side.”

But there was a dismal silence in the park, whilst Gilbert looked at a massive horse-chestnut tree in full flower. What was life but a complication of artificial difficulties.

“I think,” said Louise, “it is best to cable nicht wahr, and wait for a time. Later — later — ”

“Yes perhaps — ” said Johanna.

“Don’t you think, Mr Noon?” said Louise.

“No,” said Gilbert. “It’s not a bit of good going on that way any further. Best make a clean cut. Best wire ganz richtig — it will save a calamity. There will only be a calamity later on.”

“Yes — yes — you think — ” mused Louise.

“But it isn’t quite right” said Johanna. “There isn’t any Berry.”

“There is me,” said Gilbert.

“Yes, there is you,” said Louise, with doubtful intonation. Gilbert flushed, and went pale.

“Wire that it is another man,” said he, with his immovable, pale-faced obstinacy.

“But think — think what it means!” cried Johanna.

“I know without thinking. There’s nothing else to do. Say another man.”

“Shall I?” wavered Johanna.

“Ach — but you don’t know what you are doing!” cried Louise. “You are so young — you are so young, Mr Noon. You are younger than Johanna. Think what will happen — ach — I can’t think of it. You have no work — no money. Let there be time. Let Johanna have time. You must not hurry her in such a thing. Let her take time.”

There was silence. Gilbert became paler and paler. He hated the park, and the morning sunshine, and the chestnut- trees in flower. They all looked to him like cardboard.

“Yes, is it not better so?” persisted Louise.

“No,” said Gilbert. “She must wire the truth.”

“Ach must — must. There can be no must,” said Louise, rather cuttingly. “And the truth is nicht wahr. It is so simple.” She laughed cynically.

“Yes,” said Gilbert. “The truth isn’t true.”

“The truth isn’t true,” repeated Louise. “No — the truth is never true, Mr Noon. You are so young, you do not know what it means.” She laughed hollowly.

It is a stagey thing to say. But then Louise had a queer, tired, devilish hollow little laugh of her own.

“Wire another man,” said Gilbert to Johanna.

“Must I?” she said.

“Ach Hannele, du bist so dumm!” cried Louise. “There can be no must.”

She seemed to be brooding a bitter end of meditation, as she sat with her knee crossed, her veil loose on her brow, looking across the park.

“I think you must,” said Gilbert to Johanna.

“And shall I do as you tell me? What shall I say?” asked Johanna.

“Say another man — ” said Gilbert.

Louise had listened in silence to this little dialogue, almost as if she did not hear. Now she put in.

“Another man!” she laughed. “Oh, it sounds so nice. I like it very much. Another man.’“

“Shall I say that?” said Johanna.

“Yes, say that,” said Gilbert.

“Must I?” said Johanna.

“Yes.”

Louise rose to her feet.

“Oh you young people!” she said. “Come, I must go. Mr Noon, I must take Johanna away to our mother.”

“You will telegraph before you go home?” said Gilbert to Johanna.

“Yes — yes — ” said Johanna nervously.

“And you’ll say what I told you?”

He looked into her eyes.

“Yes, I promise,” she said, still waveringly.

“Come! Come!” said Louise. “Ach what are you doing? You do not know.”

They walked across the hateful park, into which wild horses would not have dragged Mr Gilbert again. He loathed everything he was in for. And yet he was in for it, so there was nothing to be done.

Louise got a taxi, and drove off with Johanna. Both had lowered their veils. Both waved to him triumphantly as they drove off between the avenue of trees. And if anything can be more hateful to a man than to have two females driving triumphantly off in a taxi, and waving to him as they leave him stranded in uncertainty, hanging at a loose end, then tell me what it is.

He rambled round the attractive but to him hateful old town of Detsch, and in perfect misery had his hair cut. The barber was French, and talked anti-German.

With a trimmed head Gilbert looked for luncheon — found a little place where working men ate, and where he had Frankfurter sausages and sauerkraut and felt horribly conspicuous. Then he went home and lay down on the bed.

Johanna was coming some time during the afternoon. And he felt wretched, and not in his own skin. He felt thoroughly humiliated, and now knew he was embarking on a new little sea of ignominy. He writhed under all the ignominy.

There was a tap at the door. It was Johanna. She entered in silence, looking worried.

“Did you wire?” he said.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I said Nicht Berry — Schreibe — Not Berry, am writing.”

“You sent that?”

“Yes, I sent it before I got home — from the Friedrichstrasse post office. — Oh, Mama is in such a state. She wants to see you too.”

“And have you written?”

“No — but I’m going to today.”

“What is the address? I’ll write too.”

“Will you? To Everard?” she said doubtfully.

“Yes. What is the address?”

“What will you say?” she asked.

“Exactly what is.”

“And what is? Tell me what you’ll say.”

“That you will stay with me — that you are living with me now — and that you won’t go back.”

He was anything but happy and assured. But a strange, pale fixity was on him. He said what he had to say, without giving it thought. In a process of strange abstraction his mind had decided without thinking. And this seemed to mesmerise Johanna.

“Will you say that?” she said wistfully.

“Yes — what is the address?”

He went to the table and took a piece of paper. He stood there in his shirtsleeves. Johanna, in a lovely dress of dull reddish cashmere, wearing a close toque made all of darkish bird’s breast-feathers, stood in the light of the window, wondering and half wistful like a child. He looked at her, from his pallid, gloomy face.

“What is the address?” he repeated.

“Dr Everard “ and she answered automatically, whilst he wrote what she said.

“I shall write to him tonight,” he said, laying down the pencil.

“Shall you?” she said wonderingly.

He looked at her, then he locked the door.

“Do you want me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you want me always?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t say it very brightly.”

“No.”

“My love — ”

She could see the sombre fire of passion in his eyes and his clouded brow. He resented so bitterly all the complication and humiliation. No man felt the sting of humiliation more keenly than he, or resented it more deeply and lastingly. He resented the rising tide of black, sewer-like ignominy that was just going to envelop him. He was heavy with deep, sullen resentment. And yet, like fate, his soul was fixed. Johanna was going to stay with him. She was with him now. In the midst of it all he was to enjoy her, she him.

She was quite ready to enjoy him — far more ready than he was to enjoy her. She could soon abandon herself to passion and delicious pleasure. But he came dense and crude.

None the less she admired him.

“What a wonderful shape you are here!” she said, running her fingertips over the front contour of the big hip bone. He was rather bony. He wondered over her appreciation of him:

something very unexpected in it. But he liked it, and his desire spread new wings.

The course of true love is said never to run true. But never did the course of any love run so jagged as that of Johanna and Mr Noon. The wonder is, it ever got there at all.

And yet, perhaps, a jagged, twisty, water-fally, harassed stream is the most fascinating to follow. It has a thousand unexpected thrills and adventures in it. Let those who love peace seek peace and pursue it. We are not so keen on peace. To be a fat cow in a fat pasture is not our ideal. Away with your stodgy and suety peace. Let us have a continual risk and tumble and the unceasing spur of jeopardy on our flank to make us jump and fly down the wind. None of your fat grazing-grounds for us. If we are to have yon tasty tuft of grass, or yon patch of sweet-herb, we’ve got to hop perilously down a precipice for it. And that is what we prefer. God, I don’t want to sup life with a spoon. I’d rather go lean-bellied till I’d caught my bird.

Which all goes to prove that the critic who says I am on the search for beauty rather than truth may be right. He can read this book and make certain. He says I am Aubrey Beardsley rather than Swift. So that all you have to fear, gentle reader, is some exquisite tail-piece to Salome. I’ll do my best for you. If you have misgivings, leave off now.

“Quick, sharp, on the alert Let every gentleman put on his shirt!

And, oh, quick if you please Let every lady get on her chemise!”

Never was such a pair of unfortunate interrupted lovers. As in Macbeth, there came a knocking at the door. Johanna, in the arms of Gilbert, gave an awful start. He sat up and listened, with visions of husbands, police, incensed official Barons and what-not coursing through his mind.

“Bang-bang-bang-bang!” came the double knock. Whoever it was, they would have heard the voices of the guilty pair. The door-handle gave a little squeak of protest as the unknown horror tried it from outside. Luckily the door was locked.

“Bang-bang-bang!” came the officious knock. And still dead silence in the room, where the guilty pair lay on the bed with beating hearts.

“See who it is,” whispered Johanna, pushing him from her.

And then he saw her, in puris naturalibus, flee swiftly, white and naked, behind a curtain which hung across a corner, huddling there with her feet, and the tip of her shoulder, and then, as she stooped, that exquisite finale of Salome showing round and white behind the curtain, before the dazed eyes of Gilbert.

He was in no better plight than she: not a rag, not a stitch on him, and there he stood in the middle of the room listening to that diabolical knocking and vacantly watching the come and go of the exquisite tail-piece to Johanna, as she stooped to unravel her stockings.

And why, under such circumstances, should she be putting on her grey silk stockings, and routing for her garters with rosebuds on them. Why oh why, in the shipwreck of nudity, cling to the straw of a grey silk stocking.

Rap-rap-rap! This was not to be borne. The vacant Gilbert was man enough upon necessity: necessity it had to be, however: and necessity it now was. Therefore he reached down his double-breasted brown overcoat, and wrapped it round him as far as possible. It went round him well enough, but it left his bare neck sticking out at the top, and half a yard of bare shins sticking out at the bottom. No help for it. He unlocked and opened the door, holding it and barring the entrance of — that damned Swiss manageress. His hair was ruffled and on end, he looked at the precise female with his vacant, unassailable eye.

“Die gnadige Frau ist da? — Is the lady there?”

“Wie? — What?”

“Die Frau Doktor is da? — The Mrs Doctor is there?”

“Wie? — What?”

“Madame, est-elle ici? — Is Madam here?”

Gilbert shook his head solemnly.

“Non, elle n’est pas ici.”

Heaven knows why he chose to answer the French and not the German.

The Swiss woman looked at him: he looked at her.

“Elle n’est pas ici?” she repeated.

“Non. Non!” and Gilbert looked into the room behind him, vacantly. He saw Johanna’s now stockinged ankles behind the linen curtain.

“Non! Elle n’est pas ici,” he said with the innocent “pipe of half awakened bird.” He looked into the hard black eyes of the venomous manageress mildly.

The manageress looked various volumes and daggers back at him, but as she did not proceed to throw them he let her look.

“Merci,” she said reluctantly: very reluctantly. She had lost the battle. And she turned away.

And as he saw her back, Gilbert became aware of his own hairy shins, and agonies of confusion went over him. He locked the door stupefied with confusion.

“Oh God, I must get out of this!” cried Johanna, springing from behind the curtain in her grey silk stockings, rose-bud garters, and cambric chemise. Gilbert, still clasped in his brown overcoat, watched her as she flew into her lacey-white knickers, her pretty, open work French stays, her grey silk petty and her reddish dress. She tied the tapes and snapped the press-studs like lightning. In a moment she was tying her shoe-laces. And then she had only to poke her hair more or less under the dusky-lustrous feather toque, and fling the lace scarf over her shoulders, and she was ready.

“Goodbye!” she said, looking at him with wide scared eyes. “I hope before God she won’t make a row. — I’ll go down.”

She was much more scared than Gilbert would have thought. But in a moment she was gone — her red dress and white scarf and soft-feathered head flashed across the landing and was gone.

He proceeded to dress himself, feeling a new rage at his new mess. But there was nothing for it but just to go on. And when there is nothing for it but just to go on, why, one goes on.

So he went downstairs — without mishap. And at the bottom he heard loud laughing talking voices from the lounge. Johanna for certain. Yes, there was Johanna talking to a handsome, ultra-fashionable woman who had daring dark eyes and looked like a cocotte.

This was Johanna’s sister Lotte, descended from the chic of Vienna.

“Ja Lotte — le voila — le faux Monsieur Berry.”

“Bonjour M’sieur,” said Lotte, holding out an elegant white-kid-gloved hand. “Vous n’etes pas Berry, alors!”

Gilbert bowed, and his eye caught a spark from Lotte’s.

“Safe — safe!” cried Johanna to him in English. “Oh, I had the fright of my life.”

“Ai-da!” said Lotte. “I doan spik English. Je vous ai fait un mauvais tour, hein? Mille pardons! I did you a bad turn. I asked the woman if Johanna was here, and she said she thought she was upstairs. So I said Tell her please. Of course, if I had known — ” Lotte made dark, wicked eyes at Gilbert — ”I should have said Pray don’t disturb her.” She put on an engaged look, and smoothed her gloves like a woman just going out, and arched her eyebrows in a rather becoming pantomime. “But I have made a serious faux pas.”

And she bridled, displeased with herself.

“However,” she continued, “all can be finished in the next chapter. I am going.”

She once more made eyes at Gilbert, and held out her hand.

“I come with you, Lotte,” said Johanna.

And once more Gilbert watched two women sail off in a taxi-cab, whilst he was left stranded in that accursed, blaring, military town. And what was worse, he had lost another of his skins now, and felt more raw than he cared to admit even to himself. He loathed the black-eyed Swiss manageress, with her face like a pair of scissors. And he hated her hotel: family indeed!

The twilight of the same day saw Johanna walking sentimentally with Captain von Daumling, who was sparkling in his blue and pink uniform, but whose heart was veiled in a grey chiffon of tears. They strayed unconsciously to the spiney cathedral.

“Let us go,” said Rudolf, “and light a candle to our love, on the altar of the Virgin.”

“Yes, do let us,” cried Johanna, thrilled to her soul.

Now that the candle of Rudolfs brief passion was drooping and almost spent, its ruddy light dwindling to the smallest pale wick-glow, Johanna was thrilled to her marrow to stick up a good stout candle of wax to burn on the altar of the Virgin. In the dusk of the tall, forested cathedral, with the gorgeous windows glowing but shedding no light, they crept on the low strand of the floor, and the captain’s spurs tinkled melancholy, a tiny sound low on the floor of the vast, branching shadow of the interior. Johanna was not a catholic, but she loved her cathedral. Its slender, shafted upsoaring affected her deliriously. She crept across the forlorn floor to the flickering altar of the Virgin, whilst the Captain of the Fifth trod softly, holding the stout wax candle between his fingers, at her side.

It was a hushed moment. He lighted the wick of his new pale candle at one of the candles already burning, and then stuck it, like a new pale tree, a new wasting column of life, on one of the expiring sockets. After which he came and kneeled at Johanna’s side, and they knew a perfect unison.

Oh white, oh waxen candle of purified love, how still, how golden the flame of the spirit hovers upon you, while the wax lasts. Oh beautiful tall erect candle of chastened aspiration, how soothing is the sight of you to a soul perplexed and suffering. Nay, quench the dusky, crimson-burning torch of unhallowed passion, scatter its lurid blood-flame, crush it down to next to nothingness, put it in your pocket and forget it. And light a six-franc waxen candle upon the altar of uplifted aspiration, and pray a little prayer to the Virgin and the Unbegotten.

And prepare to consume this six-francs-worth of material wax, this mundane flesh: prepare, oh prepare to struggle as a guttering flame struggles with the wick, for release. For release into the infinite. Rudolf watched the sunken, flapping flame of somebody else’s candle beating its wings to escape into the boundless eternity, and he pressed his hands to his breast. To escape — ah, to escape from the limitations of this five-franc mould of a corpus!

Johanna meanwhile watched the same sunk flame flapping and fighting for life, fighting, sipping, sipping avidly at the spent wax, and yet, in spite of all its struggles forced to go, forced to leave the lovely warm place of presence, to be driven over the threshold of existence into the howling wilderness of infinite chaos, where the world is void and dark. So there she knelt with luxurious tears in her eyes. I say luxurious. For after all it wasn’t her candle, it was only the cavalry captain’s. And he was no longer indispensable.

They were both sad, but for different reasons. They both saw the candle-flame shuddering in its frail mortality, and felt the vast shadow of eternity branching overhead. And they both had pangs: widely differing pangs.

So, gentle reader, before you light your next candle to the Virgin, make up your mind which emotion you’re going to get out of it: whether you’re going to see the immortal soul escaping at last into freedom and bliss, on a strong draught of uplift; or whether you’re going to lament “Alas, gone out, gone out!”

Let us invoke the great spirit of Uplift. Oh Uplift, Uplift, that which carries us beyond ourselves, how much bigger we are than ever we were intended to be when we whirl with thy wind in our skirts, heavenwards. Oh mighty rushing wind, oh universal Uplift, carry us above our own high-water-mark and make us boundless. Blow us into the mid-heaven’s zenith till this poor earth is no more than a speck of dust in our eye, and we are so god-almighty elevated that there’s nothing either here nor in kingdom come but we can look down on it. Dear draughty uplift, bellow out our skirts and trouser-legs like zeppelin balloons, till we whirl straddling up into the sky, whence we can look down on our fellow-men. Oh holy uplift, let us look down on our fellow-men: in love of course! Let us look down on our fellow-men, as pathetic, tearful Gods look down on mankind, pitiful, all pitiful and all benign. Oh, as we straddle in mid-heaven with the sanctified wind of Uplift bellowing up our trouser-legs and ballooning our trouser-seat so that we float butt-end uppermost, oh then, then oh then we spread our arms to mankind away below there, we gather humanity like a tray of silk-worm cocoons to our beneficent bosom, and we fairly reel in mid-air with charitable feeling. Of course our trousers are sound, so we are safe. We are none of your arse-patched mundane sitters. We are the uplift- wooshers, who dribble the Pluto-drizzle of charity over the world. It’s a risky thing to do, of course, if your trouser-seat is worn a little thin. The balloon of the spiritual inflatus might then burst and let you down flop on that same pathetic mankind, which will not welcome you at all if you come cropping down like a brick-bat. In fact, in these days of risky tailors, it isn’t half such a safe thing as it used to be, to go wooshing up in the air on the draught of sanctified Uplift. In fact I should warn people to beware of entertaining charitable and benevolent feelings just now, till they are quite sure their material gas-envelope is quite sound. Let them rub and feel their trouser-seat and their backside carefully, to make sure it is a sound vacuum, and that it will act as a trustworthy float when it is filled with the spirit of uplift, most vacuous of all vacuosities. I say the trouser-seat, because of course that is the obvious pouch or inflatus-bladder of Uplift. Ah humanity, humanity, let your posterior forever not exist, save as a vacuum. Queens of Spain have no legs, but all lofty mankind has no backside: not a bit of it. Nothing there. Nothing twin- protuberant and kickable. Only the float-void.

But dear me, we become lyrical. Let us return to our muttons; Johanna of the golden fleece, and poor dear shorn lamb of a Gilbert, who lost another skin in his encounter yesterday with the Swiss Manageress. I think that Swiss Manageress ought not easily to be forgiven: for sure she was an upliftress.

But it was yesterday. And now surely, surely the wind is going to be tempered to the shorn lamb. Tempered indeed. Damned ill-tempered.

In Detsch at that moment the May fair was being held, the Maimesse. It had great attraction for Gilbert. He went and stared long at the booths, the woman in red satin with six monkeys; the prize-fighter who had such horrible bulk of arm-flesh in his shapeless, folded arms, and such a rudiment of a face, and no back to his head, a sickly object; at the dancers in sequins and the pictures of La Belle Turque and the family of jugglers; and the rather old-fashioned roundabouts. It was not like an English fair: nothing of our mechanical spick-and-spanness and superior vulgarity. There was here a deeper, more suggestive, more physical vulgarity, something ancient and coarse. The language was either French patois — which was more frequent — or crude German.

Since Monsieur Gilbert was uneasy, wretched inside his remaining skin in this town of Detsch, all on edge and bored, at a loose end, and semi-stupefied, he found this fair a sort of god-send. He could stand staring like any boor, for hours: not really attentive, but at any rate not so acutely burdened with himself. And the ancient pagan grossness, something Mediaeval and Roman even, in the brutality of the fair, interested him. It was as if the modern squeamishness had hardly affected this last remnant of coarse old Europe.

So he stared and strolled, and felt for some reason less of a stranger here than in the town itself. Some sort of Latin or Gallic crudity in the fair gave him a sense of familiarity, old blood-association, whereas the purely Germanic influence seemed always to put him outside his own skin, and make him so ill at ease he could not remain still for a minute.

As he strolled, behold, Johanna and Lotte coming brilliant and laughing and elegant through the fair. He rushed up.

“This is all right,” he said. “Are you going to any of the shows?”

And he put himself at their side.

Lotte gave him her hand and said Guten Morgen in her deep, nonchalant voice. But Johanna said fiercely, in a half whispering voice:

“Go away! Go away, Papa is just behind! Go away, he is not to see you! Go away, you don’t know us.”

Gilbert went pale and looked at Johanna.

“Allez! Allez done!” said Lotte, in her deep, sardonic voice. “Et au revoir. Mauvaise occasion!” And she nodded her head, and made eyes at him.

Fumbling with his hat, he stepped back. And glancing round he saw Louise with a smallish man in a German crush- hat and upturned moustaches. Louise made frightened eyes at him that he should withdraw. The Baron had not noticed him.

He left the fair-ground at once, and walked straight out, and out over the bridge, and up the hill, and away from the town, through the vineyards where peasants were working, through the deep lane, uphill, uphill towards a village.

On a sort of platform or wide terrace on the brow of the hill he sat down. Below lay the town and the canals and the fortifications and the plain. He did not look out. Black rage was in his heart.

The wide level place on the brow of the slope was the real centre of the village. Horse-chestnut trees, deep in new leaf and flower, made flat shade. A blue soldier was exercising a bright brown horse in and out of the horizontal shade. Other greyish soldiers stood near the parapet, looking out. Down on the high-road below, where they were looking, some artillery was rattling along far away, a cavalcade.

Gilbert felt it was all strange — just strange. In the old vineyards on the slope out here in the country there was a strong sense of Rome — old Rome. This was old Roman territory. But in the school beyond the chestnut trees he could hear the children saying their lessons in German — a queer sound to him.

The soldiers made him feel uneasy. He went across the place into the village — an old, French seeming village, where still he felt the old Roman influence. He went into a clean, old-fashioned inn. A tall, black-eyed man, peasant-farmer and inn-keeper, brought him wine and bread and sausage. And they talked in slow French. And in the black eyes of the inn-keeper was a sort of slow, implacable malice. He had a son — in France, and a daughter — in France. With his laconic, malicious smile he said that they spoke no German. His children were educated in France: if they were educated here, they would be forced to speak German. He did not intend that they should speak German. He smiled slowly and maliciously.

And Gilbert sympathised sincerely. This rampant Germanism of Detsch was beginning to gall him: a hateful, insulting militarism that made a man’s blood turn to poison. It was so force, unnatural too. It wasn’t like the quiet lovely German villages of the Black Forest, or the beery roisterousness of Munich. It was an insulting display of militaristic insolence and parvenu imperialism. The whole thing was a presumption, a deliberate, insolent, Germanistic insult to everybody, even to the simpler Germans themselves. The spirit was detestably ill-bred, such a mechanical heel-clicking assumption of haughtiness without any deep, real human pride. When men of a great nation go a bit beyond themselves, and foster a cock-a- doodling haughtiness and a supercilious insolence in their own breasts, well, then they are asking for it, whoever they may be. There is such a thing as passional violence, and that is natural: there is such a thing as profound, deep-rooted human pride, even haughtiness. But that self-conscious conceit and insolence of Detsch had nothing to be said for it, it was all worked up deliberately.

In a temper Gilbert went back to town. Far from having had the wind tempered to him, the wind had taken a bit more skin off. He was angry, and rawer than ever. But at evening he sat in his room, so remote and still, and gradually he recovered somewhat. And then, on a large sheet of paper, he wrote a letter to Johanna’s husband.

“Dear Doctor X, I hope you will not mind if I write to you direct.

I am here in Detsch with Johanna, and I have asked her to tell you everything openly. I love her. It is no use making a calamity of things. What is done is done, and there remains only to make the best of it. Johanna is in a queer state, mentally and nervously. I know it would be fatal for her to come back to America. You must know yourself that her state is not normal. One day you will be perhaps grateful to me for saving you from something worse than this “

So Mr Gilbert ran himself down his sheet of foolscap, saying what he actually thought and felt, without imagining the husband at the other end of the communication. He did not talk about love and tears: only that this was something which had come to pass, and which, given Johanna’s state of mind, was bound to come to pass, and which coming to pass might have taken a far more painful form, bringing far more nastiness and misery than at present. Therefore it remained for him, Everard, and for himself, Gilbert Noon, to work for the best solution of the difficulty, and to try not to make further disaster.

Which screed of half-innocent earnestness Gilbert signed, and sealed, and addressed, and went out into the night and posted. Which was another finality secured. It is just as well to have a faculty for intense abstraction and impersonality, but it is very dangerous to use it. However, Gilbert poured out this private effusion from his abstracting soul, and committed it to fate and the international post.

We shall notice a few little gusts of uplift. Our young mathematical friend could not be English without being a bit of a St. George. Behold, Johanna posing as the fair Sabra, with a huge dragon of nerves and theories and unscrupulous German theorisers just about to devour her, all unbeknown to her fatherly husband, when up rides St. George in the shape of Mr Noon, and proceeds to settle the brute. How very agreeable! Yes, he saved his own moral bacon when he waved that red-cross flag of greater disaster under Everard’s far-off nose. And yet, he was right. The fair Johanna was in the dragon’s mouth, and the brave Saint Gilbert hadn’t half settled the reptile yet. In fact he hadn’t begun. But he spoke as heroes speak before the fight: as if it was finished.

The next morning he met Johanna — and what did they do? Ah friends, you would perhaps expect them to go into the cathedral and light a still fatter ghostly candle. No, Gilbert was not in a candle-lighting mood. The dark red torch of his wicked passion was feeling a bit quenched for the moment, but he was prepared to blow on the spark. Therefore he drifted with Johanna away from the town, down across the river. There at the side of the high-road were green thick trees, and narrow paths into the seeming wood. It looked very and parvenu imperialism. The whole thing was a presumption, a deliberate, insolent, Germanistic insult to everybody, even to the simpler Germans themselves. The spirit was detestably ill-bred, such a mechanical heel-clicking assumption of haughtiness without any deep, real human pride. When men of a great nation go a bit beyond themselves, and foster a cock-a- doodling haughtiness and a supercilious insolence in their own breasts, well, then they are asking for it, whoever they may be. There is such a thing as passional violence, and that is natural: there is such a thing as profound, deep-rooted human pride, even haughtiness. But that self-conscious conceit and insolence of Detsch had nothing to be said for it, it was all worked up deliberately.

In a temper Gilbert went back to town. Far from having had the wind tempered to him, the wind had taken a bit more skin off. He was angry, and rawer than ever. But at evening he sat in his room, so remote and still, and gradually he recovered somewhat. And then, on a large sheet of paper, he wrote a letter to Johanna’s husband.

“Dear Doctor X, I hope you will not mind if I write to you direct.

I am here in Detsch with Johanna, and I have asked her to tell you everything openly. I love her. It is no use making a calamity of things. What is done is done, and there remains only to make the best of it. Johanna is in a queer state, mentally and nervously. I know it would be fatal for her to come back to America. You must know yourself that her state is not normal. One day you will be perhaps grateful to me for saving you from something worse than this “

So Mr Gilbert ran himself down his sheet of foolscap, saying what he actually thought and felt, without imagining the husband at the other end of the communication. He did not talk about love and tears: only that this was something which had come to pass, and which, given Johanna’s state of mind, was bound to come to pass, and which coming to pass might have taken a far more painful form, bringing far more nastiness and misery than at present. Therefore it remained for him, Everard, and for himself, Gilbert Noon, to work for the best solution of the difficulty, and to try not to make further disaster.

Which screed of half-innocent earnestness Gilbert signed, and sealed, and addressed, and went out into the night and posted. Which was another finality secured. It is just as well to have a faculty for intense abstraction and impersonality, but it is very dangerous to use it. However, Gilbert poured out this private effusion from his abstracting soul, and committed it to fate and the international post.

We shall notice a few little gusts of uplift. Our young mathematical friend could not be English without being a bit of a St. George. Behold, Johanna posing as the fair Sabra, with a huge dragon of nerves and theories and unscrupulous German theorisers just about to devour her, all unbeknown to her fatherly husband, when up rides St. George in the shape of Mr Noon, and proceeds to settle the brute. How very agreeable! Yes, he saved his own moral bacon when he waved that red-cross flag of greater disaster under Everard’s far-off nose. And yet, he was right. The fair Johanna was in the dragon’s mouth, and the brave Saint Gilbert hadn’t half setded the reptile yet. In fact he hadn’t begun. But he spoke as heroes speak before the fight: as if it was finished.

The next morning he met Johanna — and what did they do? Ah friends, you would perhaps expect them to go into the cathedral and light a still fatter ghostly candle. No, Gilbert was not in a candle-lighting mood. The dark red torch of his wicked passion was feeling a bit quenched for the moment, but he was prepared to blow on the spark. Therefore he drifted with Johanna away from the town, down across the river. There at the side of the high-road were green thick trees, and narrow paths into the seeming wood. It looked very quiet and still, even forbidding, this dark bit of close woodland almost in the town itself.

“Shall we go down there?” said Gilbert, pointing to the path that went straight from the high-road rather sombrely under the trees and into the unknown. To be sure there was some sort of not-very-new-looking notice-board: but why notice notice-boards.

“Yes,” said Johanna. “It looks nice.”

So they strayed down the narrow, tree-crowded, sombre path, on and on till they came to an opening. It was rather romantic. There was a smooth greensward bank, very square and correct, and a sort of greensward dry moat, and a high greensward bastion opposite, all soft and still and lovely, with a spot of sunshine shining on it, and the trees around. So in this green seclusion the two sat down, looking at the romantic velvety slopes and moated formality of their quiet nook, and feeling very remote and nice, like Hansel and Gretel, or the Babes in the Wood.

Johanna put her hand in his as they sat side by side in the spot of sunshine, and musingly, gently he turned the jewelled rings on her soft finger.

“I wrote to Everard,” he said.

“Did you! What did you say?”

Gilbert told her.

“I wrote to him too,” she said.

“And what did you say?”

“I said I didn’t think I could ever go back.”

“You should have said you were sure,” said Gilbert.

“Oh, but one must go gently.”

“Do you call this going gently?” he asked.

“With Everard. I mustn’t give him too great a shock.”

“But you won’t go back.”

“No,” she said, rather indefinitely. “Don’t you want me “You know all about that. What are we going to do?” He seemed indefinite now.

“Why — shall we go somewhere — later?” she said.

“Where?”

“I thought to Munich. We might go to Louise. I love the Isar valley — don’t you?”

“I do,” he said. “Go there as man and wife?”

“Dare we?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But they know I’ve got a husband in America.”

“Let them know. I can be he.”

“It would be rather fun,” she said.

“And we could find some little place, and live cheap.”

“Oh, cheap as dirt in Bavaria. I don’t mind what we do so long as I can get away from all that awful Boston business. Oh, you don’t know how I suffered being a correct, highly- thought-of doctor’s wife among all those good middle-class people. Ah the agony, when I think of standing on deck and seeing that town again — seeing Everard waiting for me there! No, I couldn’t do it. It is real agony.”

“Weren’t they nice with you?”

“Oh, they were! They were awfully nice. That made it all the more horrible. I never felt I could breathe among them. I never felt I could breathe — never — not till I was on board the ship and coming to Germany. All the rest of the time I simply couldn’t get a deep breath — I don’t know why.”

She put her hand on her breast and breathed to the depths of her magnificent chest.

“Oh, you don’t know what I suffered. Because they were all so nice to me. I used to think — Oh, if they knew, if they knew about me! — That was after Eberhard. I’m sure I wonder I’m not mad. I got into such a state of terror. I am terrified. I’m so terrified I know I shall go mad if ever I set foot on Boston dock again. I’m not the sort that gets ill, I’m the sort that goes mad. Everard says so himself.”

Gilbert looked at her. Fortunately for him he simply could not understand it. He could not understand her terror — her almost criminal terror, that would drive her to unknown lengths and horrors.

“Well, you needn’t go back,” he said.

“No, I don’t think I can.”

“But we shall have no money.”

“Ah, I don’t mind about money. I don’t care. I’d rather live in a cave than in one of those houses. Yet I loved my house. It was called Marvell. It was so sunny, and I loved the garden. I loved making it all myself. — But the terrors, the horrors I’ve felt in that house are indescribable. — I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to live like the middle classes. I’d rather live in a cave. If we have no money, let’s find a cave and live there.”

“We can’t,” said Gilbert.

“Why not. People used to. Why are you so damned civilised. I should love it.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he said.

“How do you know? I should love it. Anything to get out of that horror.”

“You might negatively love it: but you wouldn’t positively. No, if we’ve got to live, we’ve got to be moderately comfortable, moderately decent.”

“What an old stager you are! What a conventional civilised creature! Ha, I could fling it all away. I could live in a cave.”

“I couldn’t — not in this climate,” said Gilbert.

“Why not? It could have a door. — But oh, if we do go right away together, let us be like tramps. I feel such an outcast, such an outcast. And oh, how I hate them for making me feel it. I hate them. They like to make you feel a pariah.”

“Then why give in to their likings. They’ll never make me feel a pariah,” said Gilbert.

“You wait. Wait till you’ve been as I have been — all of them loving you and admiring you, and you knowing what they’d do to you if they found out.”

“What would they do?”

“What wouldn’t they! — And they were so nice on the other hand. His parents — they are such dear old people, in England. I love them really. I do hope they’ll never know, it would break their hearts.”

“Pah,” said Gilbert. “Nice people have the toughest hearts as a rule.”

“Why? Why do you say that? — But it is all so horrible! The awful things I’ve done — how I’ve lied. It has nearly sent me mad. I am a bit mad.”

“Well, then make an end of it. Break it clean off — and we’ll go right away together.”

He was holding her hand between his.

“Ah, it would be lovely!” she sighed. “It would be lovely. — Let us go right away — let us disappear. And never, never let us have a house and live among people again — never, never. Never let us be among people as if we were one of them — never. I couldn’t bear it all over again.”

“Don’t bother about them — they don’t matter,” said he soothingly, kissing her soft fingers.

“Ah but they do. How they matter when one is penned in among them. Think of it, I’ve been married and penned in with them for twelve years. And it’s four years since Eberhard. He showed me one could be free. But he didn’t take me away — he didn’t take me away. And how I waited — ah God, how I waited for him. — And then I really believed that one shouldn’t wait for one man. That is the mistake. I believe he is right there. One should love all men: all men are loveable somewhere.”

“But why love all men? You are only one person. You aren’t a universal. You’re just a specific unit.”

“Why aren’t I universal? I’ve got two hands and two feet, like all women. And I do understand something in every man I meet — I do. And in nice men I understand such a lot that I feel forced to love them — I feel forced.”

“Oh Good God!” he said. “Do you love for what you can understand?”

“Yes!” she cried. “Why not?”

“I usually hate what I understand. If I love it must be something I can’t understand.”

“Well,” she said, “and there’s something in everybody. In every man there’s something I can understand — sometimes so deeply. And that makes me love him. And there’s something I can’t understand. And that makes me go on loving him till I do understand it.”

“My sacred God!” exclaimed Gilbert irreverently. “Your love is a blooming understood affair. I’d rather have mathematics.”

“It is something like mathematics — except that it’s life. Something to know in every man — and something to solve. One can do an awful lot for a man through love.”

“You might as well call youself Panacea — ,” he said sarcastically.

“Well — why not? I am something of a Panacea — I know I am. And I know love is the only panacea — and where we make a mistake is that we don’t use it or let it be used.”

“A damned patent medicine that poisons more than it cures.”

“Don’t you believe in love?” she cried, snatching away her hand.

“Not in general love.”

“What in then?”

“In particular love I may believe.”

“Oh may you!” she mocked. “And what do you mean by particular love? Just keeping one person all for yourself! Ah, I know the horrors of that. It is all based on jealousy. I think the noblest thing is to overcome jealousy.”

“I don’t,” said Gilbert. “Jealousy is as natural as love or laughter. You might as well overcome everything and have done with it all straight off.”

“No! No!” she said. “Jealousy is mean and horrible — and marriage is vile and possessive. I do believe in love: in all love. And I believe one should love as much as ever one can. I do. Eberhard taught me a great deal. He was wonderful!”

“Do you believe you can be here and in Boston at one and the same time?” asked Gilbert.

“In a way, I am.”

“In a way! In a way! Damn your ways. Damn your spirit. You may be here and in Boston in the spirit, all at once. But I can’t do with spirit. Can your body be here and in Boston at one and the same minute? Can it?”

“No — that’s its limitation.”

“Ah! Then I’m all for limitation.”

“You would be: like the rest of men.”

“All excepting the wonderful Eberhard! — You can’t be here and in America, physically, at once. Limitation or not, you’ve got to abide by it. And it’s the same with physical love. You can’t be physically in love with more than one man at the same time. It can’t be done. You can be spiritually in love with everybody at once, and take all men under your skirts in the same instant, like a Watts picture. But that’s not physical. That’s merely spiritual. And there’s a difference.”

“There isn’t a difference unless we make it.”

“Can you be physically in Boston and Detsch at the same moment? Can you physically take two men at once? If there is physical love, it is exclusive. It is exclusive. It’s only spiritual love that is all-embracing. And I’m off spiritual love. I don’t want it. It stinks. I want exclusive physical love. — There may be aberrations. But the real fact in physical love is the exclusiveness: once the love is really there.”

“But I thought I loved Everard — ”

“Thought! Thought! You’ve thought too much. I should leave off thinking, if I were you.”

“Yes, you’re just like all men. You’d like me to.”

But at this point a brutal interruption.

Ah, gentle reader, however you may disapprove of Johanna and Mr Noon, be a little gentle with them, they have known so many brutal interruptions.

A fellow in a blue uniform and a peaked cap and carrying a gun, creeping forward with the loathsome exultant officious- ness of all police or soldier individuals on duty, and of German specimens in particular.

“Was machen Sie hier?”

Imagine the foul sound of the German officious insolence the lump of a police-soldier put in these words, as he looked down his nose at the offending couple. They had jumped to their feet seeing him creep on them.

“What are you doing here?” said the sergeant.

“What are we doing here!” said Johanna, her pride of birth and authority springing like flame to her eyes. “And who are you, to come asking. What do you want?”

Gilbert was staggered by the sudden authoritative fury with which Johanna towered and flared at the lump of a sergeant. But he, in all the majesty of his duty, was not to be abashed.

“Ja, was machen Sie hier!” he repeated with calm insolence. “You know these are the fortifications.” He spoke as if he had two culprits in his power.

“Fortifications! What fortifications indeed.” cried Johanna. “We walked here two minutes from the high-road.”

“You are two foreigners. I have heard you for the last quarter of an hour.”

“What a beast!”

“Foreigners! Take care what you say. I am German, and my father is Baron von Hebenitz — ”

“And the gentleman — ?” sneered the sergeant, a cunning, solid lump of a fellow.

“The gentleman is English,” said Johanna.

“So! — Have you any papers?” — he turned now to Gilbert.

But Gilbert was looking with such a pale face and such dark round eyes that he did not understand.

“He wants to know if you have any papers,” said Johanna.

“Papers — ” said Gilbert, feeling in the pocket of his new suit. “No — I’ve only this — ” and he took out a letter addressed to a friend of his in the Rhine province.

The soldier or police individual, whatever he was, took the letter and scrutinised the address.

“It is forbidden to enter the fortifications,” he said, looking up with his impertinent officiousness. “You saw the notice. And since you are foreigners — ”

“Do you know that I am no foreigner!” cried Johanna in a flame of fury — the sergeant almost cowered — almost. His sacred duty saved him. “Have I not said my father is the Baron von Hebenitz. Do you know the Baron von Hebenitz? Have you never heard of him?”

She lapsed now into jeering sarcasm.

“Yes, I have heard of him,” said the creature. — ”And the Herre is Englishman?”

“Yes — and what does it matter!” She proceeded to swallow some of her fury. — ”Cannot one sit and talk. What harm does it do?”

She was breaking into a flirtatious, cajoling laugh, after having been white at the nose with fury.

“Yes — how does one know,” said the sergeant. “I have my orders to arrest anyone within the fortifications.”

“Oh, how stupid!” said Johanna. “We didn’t know at all that we were in any fortifications — ”

“There is the sign-board — ”

“Ach, why don’t you paint it orange and violet, so that one could see it!” — She was smiling a little tenderly at him. He was not really such a bad-looking young fellow, apart from his dummified duty.

“Ja, that is not my affair — ” he said. “It is my duty to arrest you both — ”

“Oh yea!” cried Johanna. “And we are still so young. — But it is absurd — we have done nothing but walk six yards and sit down and talk. — You can refer to my father — and to Captain von Daumling — they will give you guarantees.” She was rather frightened.

“Yes,” said the sergeant. “Your address?”

And he drew forth a paper and pencil, and wrote Johanna’s address.

“And the address of the gentleman?”

This also he wrote down.

“And inquiries will be made from the Herr Baron,” he said — rather mollified, and a little pleasanter, but still duty- bound like a brass-bound time-piece.

Johanna and Gilbert took themselves off, whilst the dutiful soldier followed them down the little path.

Once free in the high-road Johanna began to exclaim:

“What fools! What fools we are! Of course I ought to have known. Now there’ll be a hell of a fuss, and they will go to Papa.”

“But there is nothing to make a fuss about,” said Gilbert. His English innocence still seemed to him unassailable. Alas, he has learnt better — or worse.

“Ha — you know what fussers they are, with their damned fortifications. Why do they leave them open to the public! Why don’t they put some notice! Oh what a curse! — You will have to meet Papa.”

To Gilbert it all seemed rather a mountainous mole-hill. But he had a’ creepy feeling down his spine that anything uncomfortable might happen in this beasdy Detsch. The grating sound of officious, aggressive militarism was getting on his nerves and making him feel almost guilty of something — perhaps of being a mere civilian. He began to look behind him, as if he really were going to be arrested. He was half afraid to go to his room for fear it might be under military seal. He felt suspect, and whoever feels suspect feels infect, as if he were infected with some mysterious indefinable disease.

However, his room was all quiet. Johanna called for him in the afternoon to take him to call on her mother and father. Very stiff, badly at a disadvantage, he climbed the stairs.

The Baron and Baroness were both in the drawing-room.

“Oh, you are so seelly, to go there,” said the Baroness, in her fragmentary English.

The Baron bowed stiffly, military fashion, and shook hands. Gilbert never had a bow in him. And as for kissing the Baroness’ hand — you might as well have asked him to kiss her toe and have done with it. Hence a little added stiffness in the Baron’s salute.

“Sie sprechen Deutsch — oder franzozisch? — Vous parlez franqais?”

“Oui,” said Gilbert, monosyllabic.

The Baron put him down as an ill-mannered lout with no breeding. Gilbert, tongue-tied, and everything-else-tied, felt that these grating German good manners were apish showing- off. But alas, he was at a disadvantage.

The Baroness called him to take his tea, to ask if he would have meelk. He said he wouldn’t, and went with his cup to the window. There the Baron, who scorned tea, joined him.

“Vous fumez?” said the little gentleman, offering a cigarette- case.

“Merci,” said Gilbert, taking a cigarette and getting most hopelessly entangled with it and his tea-cup. The Baron gave him a match, and with tea-cup shivering nervously in his left hand our young friend lit his cigarette.

“Vous etes longtemps en Allemagne?” asked the Baron.

Poor Gilbert stumbled with his French. The two men eyed one another. The Baron was rather elegant and comme il faut, with his hair and his moustaches on end. He was small, but carried himself as if he were big. His manners had that precise assertiveness of a German who is sure of himself and feels himself slightly superior. These manners always petrified Gilbert into rigidity. Only his eye remained clear and candid. He looked at the Baron with this curious indomitable candour, and the Baron glanced back at him rather fierily and irritably. So, like two very strange dogs, they stood in the window and eyed one another, and Gilbert stuttered hopeless French. He sounded a hopeless fool: he behaved like an unmitigated clown: only the insuperable candid stillness of his dark-blue eye saved him at all. But the Baron was impatient.

“Vous etes a Munich, ma fille m’a dit. La Baviere vous plait?”

“Oui! Oui! Beaucoup. Et la peuple est tres interessante.”

“Le peuple — oui,” said the Baron.

And that put the stopper on it. Our friend stood corrected, and not another sound would come out of him. — Oh these weary dreary banalities in a foreign language!

Johanna came to the rescue, and ended the ridiculous interview as soon as possible. And now Gilbert was carted off to interview dear Rudolf. He felt like an image of the Virgin being wheeled round.

Rudolf was in undress uniform, smoking a cigarette — a fresh-faced, ingenuous fellow gone somewhat bald in front, prematurely, and, thank goodness, wearing his moustaches quite short and unassuming. Altogether he was unassuming. Johanna, in her bright flirtatious way — gentle reader, do forgive words like flirtatious, they are so apt — told the story with laughter, and once more the ceillades, or fusillade of glances went on between the two gentlemen. Rudolf had large blue eyes — really rather nice. But he eyed his supplanter and said nothing. It seemed to Gilbert that neither himself nor Rudolf said one single word during the interview. Probably that was an illusion. But certain it was that Johanna was almost ignored, whilst the two males exchanged this series of looks.

Now Gilbert had this one saving advantage. He went so stiff and absent in wrong company that he seemed an absolute imbecile. No one can blame the Baron for calling him, when affairs grew hot, later on, an ungebildeter Simpel, a gewohnlicher Lump: very nasty things to be called: uneducated simpleton, and common lout. Common lout is especially nasty; yet it was not, from one point of view, unapt. And still, though in every other bit of him the young gentleman became a semi- imbecile, still, in the middle of his eye remained a certain impregnable self-possession, candour, and naturalness. Now the Baron had long lost his own candour and naturalness, therefore when he saw it so quiet in the middle of Gilbert’s dark-blue eye, like the evening star showing on a stormy sky, he was unsettled, he felt he must call names. And poor Rudolf had so absolutely lost his self-possession, that he saw in Gilbert a strange menace: this thin, this silent individual, this raven of woe, as the poem later on put it.

Well, the raven of woe said Guten Abend to the blue-eyed, bald-fronted young captain, and took his departure. A solitary and hopping raven, he went through the Frenchy, raspingly- Germanised streets of the city till he found a restaurant where he could go in and eat. And even then, when at the end of the meal the waiter said Fruit ou fromage? — he only answered with a troubled stare.

“Fruit ou fromage?” repeated the waiter, raising his voice.

A troubled, anxious stare from friend Gilbert.

“Obst oder Kase?” snapped the waiter.

A look of greater bewilderment.

“Obst oder Kase? Fruit ou fromage? Obst oder Kase?” shouted the waiter in exasperation.

Two consternated blue eyes and a slightly open, pouting mouth, and a brow of agony, for answer.

“Imbecile!” muttered the waiter, and flounced away.

Gilbert understood this.

Back came the waiter, and bounced a piece of gorgonzola uncompromisingly under imbecile’s nose. And then Gilbert heard it all — Fruit ou fromage — Obst oder Kase — He heard it all, and he recognised the appalling sounds as perfectly familiar words. But something had gone wrong with his works, and he only just had enough wits to remember that the word cafe meant a black substance, usually liquid, in a small cup.

He hurried away from the restaurant, feeling that he was really going beyond himself in the direction of idiocy. Detsch was really taking off a skin too many.

So he wandered through the horrible, wide, new desert avenues or boulevards which the Germans had made round the old town, and felt like a lost soul. And then if an old woman with a huge bundle didn’t stop him and ask him something.

To his infinite relief, he realised that she wanted the railway station. He pointed and said:

“Darunten — links.”

“Danke sehr,” said the old woman, and off she lugged with her bundle.

Gilbert faced his hotel. His room, thank heaven, was untouched. He stood at the window and looked at the lights of the great barracks, and at the tiny officers in cloaks, far away under the street-lamps below. It was raining. Tiny umbrellas swam like black unicellular organisms through the zones of lamp-light, taxi-cabs jarred their brakes almost like a Prussian officer speaking.

Next morning came Johanna with that infallible diplomat, Louise.

“Yes — !” Louise’s cogitating, brow-wrinkled manner. “It would be best if you should leave Detsch. You will not go far. We think Trier. We think if you go to Trier, then Johanna can join you in a few days. It is only two hours in the train. Johanna will come to you. She will come.”

Gilbert looked at Johanna.

“I shall come. On Tuesday I shall come,” she said.

“And stay?” said Gilbert.

“Yes,” said Johanna. “I shall come and stay.”

“Ach! Hannele!” exclaimed Louise, putting her hand to her brow. “It is so difficolt. You see, it is such a peety that you had to go to her father — ” Louise turned to Gilbert. “Now he asks so many questions, and it is difficult to make him quiet. And then the military authorities! Ach yes! Ach yes! It is better you go to Trier, much better. It is not far, and Johanna will come. You will go? Yes? Tomorrow morning?”

“Yes,” said Gilbert.

“That is good. That is good. Better that you are alone also for a few days, to know your mind. Ach, you will see things all so much clearer. — And we, we shall decide something.”

“You will come on Tuesday?” said Gilbert to Johanna.

“Yes, on Tuesday. I shall come to you on Tuesday.”

“Yes! Yes! On Tuesday,” said Louise. “And we must all do what we can to find the right way. Ach, it is so difficult. There are so many things to consider — ach, so many, many things. We must take time. — And you will go by the half- past-ten train in the morning? Yes?”

“Yes,” said Gilbert.

“I shall come and see you off,” said Johanna.

“Ach, it is such a peety that Johanna’s father had to be told of you. Now he suspects so much, and he will not be made quiet. He is afraid that Johanna leaves her husband. He is very much against such a thing. So you will see we have a great deal of trouble at home. Yes! You understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” said Gilbert stubbornly.

Louise smiled at him from narrowed eyes. She could be queer and winsome and sympathetic: sisterly, so close and sisterly. But his face was still too stiff to relax. He felt he was on toast. They had got him on toast. Perhaps Louise loved to torture him — and loved him because she could torture him.

Next morning Johanna was at the station. She gave him seventy Marks — seventy shillings. Lotte, who was rich, had given her a hundred Mark note. Gilbert took the money, since he hadn’t enough, and he knew it would be merely futile to make more fuss. So he took the money: and again Johanna promised to come on Tuesday — the day was then Friday.

And so he sat in the third-class carriage and drew out of the station, watching Johanna’s face retreat into the distance. She seemed isolated in the world — as he knew himself to be isolated in the world. And he loved her. And destiny seemed inevitably to unite him to her. It was so inevitable that he did not question it. It was so. Only it was all taking place rather jaggedly. But then destiny was like that: rather a jagged unpleasant business: even love. He accepted it as such, and sat still with his fate, whilst the train ran on through the wonderful, so Roman regions of the Moselle valley, which gave him a keener sense of the Roman Empire of great days than ever Italy could do. And he was leaving Detsch: which place he hated with so deep a hatred, with all its uniforms and its verbotens.