XXXVII.

A PAIR OF BARE LEGS

Baby, who had been sent out by her cousin to ascertain the local conditions in the Austrian Alps, having only reported, after a lapse of two weeks, that dogs were not allowed in the public parks of Innsbruck and that persons doing damage to the flower beds would be prosecuted, Frank, the next candidate scheduled by Eva for salvation, was despatched in Baby’s wake.

He found her at the top of a mountain towering above the Inn valley, playing chess with a handsome young bank clerk from Vienna, on his annual holiday in the Tyrol. Neither knew a word of the other’s language, and made love with the aid of a dictionary. He found the words and passed her the dictionary. Love. Bliss. Desire. She read the English equivalent and purred. It was exquisite.

Frank deemed the _pension_ and the hill in every way an adequate _pied à terre_, worthy of preservation and, so far as he could judge, eminently suitable for isolation from the atomic disintegration about to overtake the world; and he gave Eva all the available information as to victuals, trains, etc, warning her, among other things, not to pull the communication cord while the train was in motion unless there was genuine need for it; and even gave the Italian of it: “_Tirare lamaniglia solo in caso di pericolo. Ogni abuso verrà punito!_”

The Pension Kogl stood alone on the mountain-top, and gazing down from his balcony in the morning Frank saw an old Habsburg Schloss stretched out beneath him, which looked like the Regent Palace Hotel, London. Breakfast, perhaps, was a little on the short side, and on the bedside-table on which it was laid there was a little tablecloth with the words: “_Wenig aber von Herzen_” embroidered in red Gothic letters. Below, under Frank’s windows, the proprietress’ husband, the Wirt, looking very like Gogol’s Taras Boulba, paced the yard in a skull cap as early as five-thirty. He was a bad sleeper, and thus was essentially fitted to see to it that the sleepy servant girls did not oversleep themselves. He was up and on the look-out for defaulters, like a sergeant-major waiting in the barrack yard. In a bungalow annex across lived an old apoplectic little baron who, early each morning, about the time of mine host’s appearance, popped out his head through the window, whereon the ensuing conversation could be overheard:

“Good morning, Herr Baron! Have you slept well? The weather--well, I think--or at least, it seems to me--that the sky might clear up, in which case it is possible--I say, it is _possible_--possible that we may have good weather to-day. Yes, yes, I am hopeful, Herr Baron.”

Herr Kogl stood close to the Baron’s window and spat on the ground. The Herr Baron, out of a feeling of fellowship, spat out of the window: “Kh-kh-kh--Kh-hhrrr--Khhh!” they spat.

“Hey! Where you off to!” the host would suddenly yell to the young farm hand, who was setting out for town in the milk cart.

“To town.”

“Off you go at once!” he would shout after him angrily. “Hurry up! You’ve overslept yourself again, you lazy bounder! Off you go, young scoundrel, you!---- Youth,” he would add tenderly, turning back to the Baron.

Thus till nine o’clock in the morning he would stroll up and down the yard, his hands behind his back, and then serve himself his first Schnaps.

Herr Kogl’s distinction was that he was supposed to have a particularly strong will. Frau Kogl’s mother, who had bought the present _pension_ on her Alsacian savings, had had just such a man in view for her daughter, whom she did not consult in the matter, though once, in an unusually tender and communicative mood, she did ask her: “What sort of a man would you like for a husband, Anny?” Anny had lowered her lashes and said: “With a strong will.” Herr Kogl was chosen without hesitation as the sort of man with a strong will who would take care of his wife’s property; and now, living up to his reputation, he would bawl at her from time to time: “Hey, there! Anna!--I have called: ‘_Anna_!’”--and she obeyed.

Their son, who had a smooth voice, quiet manners, and a cast in one of his eyes, knew on which side his bread was buttered, and though a little fearful of his father, clung to his moneyed mother, and disdained his Pa’s assumed authority, who, to bear out his own reputation, bawled at him occasionally: “Hey, there! Herbert! I said: ‘_Herbert_!’” when his son half turned a reluctant ear to him. Frau Kogl herself had moods when she liked to assert her authority; but they were intermittent and brief. She could never decide anything. Her mother was right in choosing for her a husband who bawled at her. Frau Kogl had no illusions about his utility, and secretly thought him a vagabond. But she needed someone to bawl at her. When he bawled, his authority in her eyes was restored; and she loved him.

The briskness in the air of an early mountain spring morning! Old forgotten feelings flooded his heart. As Frank went down the stairs, he passed the bare-legged scullery maid who was washing the steps. He looked round, and she smiled. And when later in the morning she helped carry up his large trunk, he could not take away his gaze from those healthy white legs.

“Good morning, Herr Dickin,” the host greeted him. “I am hoping that if the clouds disperse--I am hoping, I say, that if they disperse, we may be having--we may be having, I say--having fine weather to--day. But I regret to say it is Saint Peter”--he pointed to the skies--“who is in charge of the winds, and our petition--our petition, I say, must be addressed to him up there in the heavens, oh yes.”

Dickin laughed amiably, and on passing the bar he heard Frau Kogl upbraiding her husband:

“You shouldn’t tell such silly jokes to the foreign guests; they will think you’re quite silly.”

“It may be a silly joke,” Herr Kogl agreed, “or it may not be a silly joke, but he laughs; so anything seems good enough for him.”

“Why, no, he is a clever man, a poet,” retorted Frau Kogl.

“I am a poet myself,” answered Herr Kogl.

“You’re a fat dotty old man, that’s what you are,” said Frau Kogl. “What have you done with the glasses? Don’t stand there like that....”

“Shut up, will you!” he bawled, and banged his fist on the counter.

She quailed before the man with the strong will.

From his balcony, Frank could see the scullery girl swish with her bare legs through the wet grass, and come back with a basket full of fruit. He cut across to meet her. He had a terrible longing to speak to her, but he could not find words to say to her. Because she was desirable, though her face was objectionable, she seemed to him (as women do seem when they are desirable) to be endowed with a critical and sensitive intelligence which might resent a clumsy overture, or an approach that was not plausible. And so he walked towards her with a casual and indifferent air. But when she smiled at him his shyness left him suddenly and he asked her what the joke was.

“Ach, to-day,” she said, “I must laugh, because I look so funny in these boots.” How ugly her face was! And yet how desirable that body!

Herr Kogl, at the door, found words to say to him. Herr Kogl always found words to say to everybody. It was his only occupation. When he wasn’t either eating or drinking, he stood in the yard and exchanged remarks with visitors and casual passers-by. No one had ever seen him take a drop of wine in public, and he affected to disdain it, though he had blood-shot, oily eyes which betrayed him. “Wine? Why, there’s nothing in it,” he would say. “I--never--have--any.” But every time he went down into the cellar to fill the decanter, he first filled himself and then the decanter.

Now he stood in the doorway, red and obese, and addressed a small, fluffy old dog of a nondescript breed and an incredible filthiness. “Rags has been and had a puppy--a little ragamuffin like herself, what! Rags, you bad thing! Rags, you dirty tyke! Rags, you immoral old bitch! For shame! I shouldn’t have thought it of you, at your age!” And he dug his crooked forefinger into Dickin’s chest, as he was wont to do when emphasising a point; especially in moments of hilarious recollection, as when, for instance, he might say: “Oh _that_ thing! Well, of course!” At such moments he would dig even a little lower than the ribs, because the joke addressed itself to a more central part of you--the abdominal part, wherein all jokes are seated; or so at least we must suppose, because when men laugh too heartily they protect and support these, their boilers, from bursting.

Again, as he stood there, Frank caught a glimpse of the scullery maid’s bare legs, as she went out to hang out some linen. “What are you smiling for?” he asked, overtaking her, Herr Kogl now having turned in.

“Ach! Herr Dickin,” she said, “when you speak to me I must always laugh. I don’t know why.”

He looked round. There was no one about. “When do you finish your work?”

“I go to bed at half-past ten.”

“Won’t you come and see me before going to bed?”

“Where?” she asked.

“In my room.”

“What shall I do in your room?”

His blood coursed feverishly through his veins; his brain was on fire at the thought of what they could not do in his room. “Keep me company,” he said.

She nodded assent and went in with the dry linen. Returning, he ran into Herr Kogl, who came out of the cellar with the decanter, licking and smacking his thick ruby lips. “Herr Kogl, will you have a glass of wine with me?”

Herr Kogl shook his head slowly, closing his eyes. “I--never--have--wine. I--consider--that--there--is--nothing--in--it. Oh, yes.” His diction was distinct, correct, precise, deliberate, and slow.

“Well, you are certainly setting an edifying example to your boy, aren’t you, Herr Kogl?”

“My boy,” said Herr Kogl, “is all right.”

With a mystic, an unearthly, look Herr Kogl retired to the safe behind the counter, and came back with a large sheet of parchment in his big shaking red hands. “His college certificate,” he said, turning away to hide his emotion and to give the visitor the opportunity of ascertaining for himself the high standard of Herbert’s scholastic achievements:

Calligraphy--proficient; Arithmetic--good; Cooking--very satisfactory; Slaughtering--praiseworthy; Waiting at table--very good; Deportment--excellent; General conduct--excellent.

“Eminently satisfactory,” said Dickin, returning the document.

“He is at the Hotel and Restaurant Institute in Vienna,” the father said proudly, “and I afford him practical opportunities for perfecting his studies when he is here for his summer vacation by allowing him to wait at table. Of course, under my supervision,” he added.

“You ought to be very proud of him.”

“Proud? Why?”

“Of course you ought to be! You _are_ proud!”

“Well, of course--proud--why not? You wouldn’t think, would you, eh? A Tyrolese poodle like he, now would you?... attain such distinction in Vienna itself!...” And two large beads stood in Herr Kogl’s jaundiced blood-shot eyes.

At lunch, in the large panelled room looking out on the old archducal Schloss beneath, steeped in the foliage of its enormous and forsaken park, Frank found himself seated facing a Lutheran pastor from Germany, who had large sad eyes, a quiet, melancholy voice, and helped himself without cease to the _Kalter Aufschnitt_. He thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing. Among the guests was a Russian Grand Duke who turned out to be the cousin of Frank’s one-time opponent who had hit him on the ear with an umbrella at the Kiss-Lick Club. The Grand Duke’s cousin was killed in a motor smash in Poland. His own brother was assassinated elsewhere. An uncle died in mysterious circumstances. It seemed, of the old guard, there remained only Frank and he, and over a decanter of Tyrolese wine consumed together, they relinquished their claim to the throne of Russia in each other’s favour.

“Ah! you are a writer!” the Grand Duke exclaimed happily. “You write in English? Ah, well! I’ve my own theories about English literature. I am obstinate in the belief that in the portrayal of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde did not mean to depict his own personality, so to speak.”

Frank sounded the Grand Duke as to his further opinions. Wordsworth? No, he hadn’t heard of Wordsworth. Keats?--No: who was he? No, he preferred the moderns. There was one modern writer--German, he believed--who amused him. Bernhard Schau.... Oh, he was British? How interesting! He had bought quite a number of his works in Berlin, and enjoyed dipping into them--he liked him for the wit salted with cynicism. Did his Highness read any other English authors? The Grand Duke considered for a moment, wrinkling his brow.--Of course--Byron! Who did not love that stupendous genius, the greatest the world has yet produced? _Childe Harold_.... Ah! The Grand Duke thought he himself was a little like that--like Byron and Lermontov--romantic, rebellious, seeking something (he made a gesture to the heavens)--dissatisfied with his surroundings--that’s it, and seeking a meaning in life. Yes, he was a lover of literature--though he preferred sport--riding and hunting, drinking, too, he was not averse to. He considered, as if struck by a sudden idea. “Have a drink,” he said.

They passed into the lounge, into which Herr Kogl burst periodically, to explain the working of the electric stove, which could be switched on at will but must not be, he cautioned, switched off without a preliminary intimation to Herbert, in charge of the electric supply station, because a sudden superfluity of electricity sent the dynamo into commotion. Here Frank perceived a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman looking like a gipsy. “Frau König!” he exclaimed. “By heaven! this is unexpected!”

Frau König, on the other hand, did not appear to regard this meeting as unexpected, but at once proceeded to recount her life at the point at which his knowledge of it had been interrupted. “My fiancé, alas, has failed again in his examinations at the University, and that has put us back for another couple of years and deferred our hope of establishing the knitting factory. He says the Paris professors have been prejudiced against him on account of his Russian nationality and vented on him their bitterness over the Russian State Bonds they had acquired and lost in the Revolution, and agreed to plough him.” And she introduced him to Frau Professor Koch who occupied the room next to his own and owned a dachshund, on whose account she felt concerned and diffident, for, “He has inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and his cough is terrible.”

It rained. By the electric stove, Baby played chess with the bank clerk, whose holiday was up and who that night was going back to Vienna. During lunch, when Baby had anxiously eyed him, he had talked to the table at large, explaining how the new divorce law was operating in Vienna--he talked of divorce, while she wanted to be united to him for the rest of existence! She had better, now that time was getting short, try and talk to him--difficult though it was--in French. What had she better say to him? How draw him? How tell him? She thought hard.

“Do you ski in Austria with a horse?” she asked at last.

He did not understand.

The rain poured down straightly and beautifully, shooting through those myriad trees on the mountain sides. The bank clerk saw in Frank his natural successor, and hated him. The company constrained him.

But a quarter of an hour before he was driven down to the station in the little red car, they ran away hand in hand into the Schloss park, and came back dripping with wet. She stood at the window and waved to him shyly: “Good-bye,” as the little red motor buzzed off.

Good-bye! Good-bye!

How grey, how monotonous mountain scenery looked in the rain! “Well, Baby, how do you like this place?” Frank asked.

She loved it, she said, but complained that there were fleas in her bed. Frau Kogl, to whom the complaint was made, said that it was “ausgeschlossen”--quite out of the question. “Das gibt es nicht”--it isn’t done. But the “boots” with the green apron was philosophical. Fleas--well, what about it? They existed. There were fleas in the carpet--fleas everywhere--between bedclothes--in a word, in nature. Fleas, he implied, were in the scheme of things. God had so ordained it. The “boots’” attitude, like that of the modern philosophers’, was one of acceptance; he accepted all evil and all good in life with equal grace. Herr Kogl ordered him to go to the chemist and buy a preparation notoriously fatal to fleas, and the “boots” came back carefully carrying a small bottle, in whose efficacy he did not believe.

At dinner, Frank found himself seated among a group of German tourists. Herr Nikulitsch, despite his Czech name, was a German--corpulent, spectacled, with a large, square, short-cropped blond head; in fact so typical a German that had he had the luck to be in England between the years 1914 to 1918, he would have been arrested without provocation. His wife had eyes which were so queerly adjusted that when she talked to you she seemed to be looking at someone else. Frank was faced by this cow of a woman who could only understand the German point of view about the war; and two Scottish old maids who could only understand the British point of view about the war; neither of whom could understand each other. The Scottish old maids complained derisively about the _Kalter Aufschnitt_: “The idea of giving you cheese without biscuits! Ha!” They shook their heads and smiled malignantly. They marvelled at these foreigners! The more they saw of them, the more they marvelled!

“The Germans,” said Frau Nikulitsch, “are good people. We are good people at heart. Any one of good will will admit that we are good people. But the French are a nation of sadists.”

“Yes,” said the Frau Pastor, “we are a thoroughly good people, devoid of all guile. We haven’t an ungracious thought.”

Baby listened politely. It was not what she had read in _The Daily Mail_. “Tricking Huns. Once a German, always a German. Blond beasts,” were phrases that occurred to her. Frank was talking to the Frau Pastor now, and because he wanted to be sympathetic, and to show off his own broadmindedness and the tolerant, liberal spirit of his countrymen, he told her, with a smile (as if making light of it) that our own royalty was mostly German; and he felt that it was strange that she thought nothing of it, a little churlish of her even--it was as though she made light of his kindness and that of his countrymen who bore this alien taint with good grace. The Frau Pastor seemed to think England was rather lucky.

And why, she asked, was England supporting the Russian claim to Eastern Prussia, and simultaneously supporting the Finnish claim to Northern Russia?

It was, said Frank, in pursuance of an ideal to keep alive the feeble flame of patriotism in the face of a growing international revolution. Men were losing interest in their countries, so you had to tread on their toes to keep up their national pride.

“And the English,” said the Frau Pastor (living up to the ideal), “behaved worst of all in the last war.”

Frank thought of showing her a 1920 copy of _The Daily Mail_ (Continental edition), in which was set forth what Poincaré thought of the German evasion of the Allied (just) demand for reparations. The extremity of the shock brought him back to sanity. When he listened to one German after another who told him that if Germany had been arming it was because the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances (to whom he had said that if the Entente Cordiale _was_ stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances it was because Germany had been arming), who were convinced that we had started the war as we were convinced that they had provoked it, the thought struck him: “Of course they must be convinced. When A is roused to a pitch where he will do B in, and face the risk of being done in by B in the doing, he is sincere in believing B to be in the wrong. This is the shady side of faith. Frank looked to the Pastor to display some soothing impartiality, and gave him a lead. “All nations are very much alike and equally unjust to foreigners,” Frank said. But to all such overtures the pastor, who thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing, replied: “We Germans are well known to be over-indulgent to foreigners. Germany is too idealistic a people.”

“Patriotism,” said Frank, “is like wine--a good thing when you haven’t had too much of it.”

“You don’t understand,” said the Frau Pastor. “Only a German can understand what we feel about these things, only a German who has gone through what we have gone through and who knows what we know.”

There is a limit to an intelligent man’s enjoyment of the irony of being regarded as an imbecile by fools. And it is soon reached. A new war was starting before the discords of the old have had time to resolve themselves, and, identifying a nation of sixty million people with the two who had displeased him, Frank felt that they deserved it and hoped that they would be beaten!

“And what ridiculous names these foreigners have!” remarked one of the Scottish old maids, when the Germans had left the table. “That Viennese lady opposite--Frau von Endte! I don’t know much German, but I know that much: that Ente means duck! It’s as if she called herself: ‘Mrs. de Ducke’!”

Frank strolled away into the hills. The night was calm and benignant; the stars whispered; and all this rocky waste listened, moonlit and silent, to God. At every corner, a crucifix. Green lights and blue lights and red lights illumining the twisted naked body of Christ, with red blood flowing from the wounds. Yet curiously enough, Christ’s message had not been understood, he thought, and looking back at the bloody centuries which followed on the crucifixion and at Christ’s tortured body, so shamelessly paraded, it occurred to Frank that Christians generally may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick from the beginning, inferring that it was blood-letting that He meant and advocated to us. On consideration, Frank thought the world was well ripe for destruction.

Above and beyond, what peace! All desire abated, in the soft ablution of the moon. O Lust, where is thy sting, and Satiety thy victory?

A figure in the dark. “Hello, is that you? Oh, Frau König! All my homages.”

Frau König, with a preoccupied air, took him down the mountain track into the thicket, the while saying: “I don’t deny. I don’t deny how hard it is for a woman who had contracted certain habits in marriage suddenly to find herself without a man. Well, here I am. Here I am, I say! Here I am; you may have what you wish. But my condition”--she touched his wrist--“is that you are to take me out into society.”

“I do not wish it. I mean I do not wish what you wish me to wish. You make me feel good, Frau König, and that’s the truth.”

“I do not understand you. I have gone as far as I can.”

“That’s the truth. Do not go further.”

“But--”

How could he explain? How could he tell her that where unattractive women were concerned he was a prude and a puritan? For all sexual morality, if we examine it more closely, is founded on aversion. It pleased him to recall to her an ideal of womanhood which she was in no mood to follow; of reticence and chastity, which he counselled her to practise. “Not in abandon, but in restraint and self-discipline, Frau König,” he said, leading her out of the thicket into the open road, “lies the hope of a sane and healthy mankind.”

“If,” she said, “my fiancé does not come soon, I shall go mad.”

As they turned into the _pension_ courtyard, they passed the apoplectic Baron’s bungalow, who peeped through the window and, though it was evening, wished them: “Good morning.” The Baron’s knowledge of English must have been very slight, because every time Frank passed him in the morning, the Baron touched his cap and said: “Good evening.” In the big barn, an automatic barrel organ played excruciating music, and Herr Kogl explained that it had been a first-class barrel organ till the Italians--a nation, as all knew, of organ grinders--spoilt it during their occupation of the town in the war by over-taxing its musical capacity.

“How very inconsiderate!”

Several couples were dancing. Herbert, removing his waistcoat, danced in his braces and shirt sleeves with Lina, the bare-legged scullery maid, at a considerably accelerated pace, as if to show them all what he could do. “Our Herbert,” Herr Kogl, pointed with his chin towards him, “once he starts dancing, outstrips them all.” Frank stood and watched till it would be time for Lina to go up to bed. Heavens of ecstasy, oceans of rapture awaited him. The Kogls sat there as always: Herr Kogl; Herr Spatz, a fat, rough man of the same proportions as the host himself; the policeman; the policeman’s wife, who was a waitress; and drank wine. The policeman’s little boy slipped in and out between their legs and ran about all day long, and they christened him “Quicksilver.” Herr Kogl alone did not drink. The cook, a bewildered-looking old woman, who was never seen about during the week, drank, after good takings, on a Sunday night with Frau Kogl. Herr Kogl watched them drink, but refused to participate. His maudlin eyes were fixed on the dog to whom he would talk for hours at a stretch: “Rags, you wretch! Rags, you immoral little bitch!”

“Nice old doggie, what?” Frau Kogl would remark.

Herr Kogl would shake his head. “It’s not a dog--kein Hund, sondern ein Skandal!”

The dog was very old, toothless, and refused all food but chocolate. The Frau Wachmann, the policeman’s wife, a young shrew, shouted and cursed at her husband, a shy middle-aged upright man, because he would not go to bed immediately, but preferred to play cards with the others of a Sunday evening. Herr Spatz thundered forth as he played: “Two aces! Bang! Ha-a-a!--Queen of Clubs! Bang! Bang!” with his fist, so that all the glasses on the table jingled nervously. He had once spent nine months in Turkey, and he looked, with his clean-shaven head and his mouthful of glittering white teeth himself like a Turk, and behaved like one, or at least, as you would imagine “The Turk” to behave in his more lustful moments. Frau Kogl, drunk, attempted to sing, but it came out very badly and dismally and she stopped, ashamed of herself.

“To hell with Czecho-Slovakia!” Herr Spatz was saying to a relative who, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, has become Czecho-Slovakian and now said he was proud of the great country. “Great country!” roared Herr Spatz. “I’ve lived nine months in Turkey: who can talk Czecho-Slovakian there? Answer me that!”

“Who will drive the van to town to-morrow morning, that is what I wish to know?” Herr Kogl interjected.

“Willy.”

“Hm!--Hm!” distrustfully from Herr Kogl.

“Why?” from Herr Spatz, whose son Willy happened to be.

Herr Kogl looked on the ground. “Willy! Willy is not Herbert, that’s why!”

At long last the clock on the Schloss tower struck half-past ten, and Herr Kogl was locking up. Frank paced his room up and down; every moment the door might open and Lina come in, and then--.

From time to time, unable to stand the suspense, he would go out and wait for her in the corridor. Simultaneously, the door opposite would open, and the Pastor and Frau Pastor peep out, again and again, as if to put out their boots: but surely, Frank thought, they could not have so many boots to put out. Then, as he stood in the corridor, the adjacent door opened, and the Frau Professor peeped out to ask if her dachshund’s coughing had not, perchance, disturbed his sleep. “He has acute inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and I am very anxious to know what the specialist will say to-morrow morning.”

“I am very sorry,” Frank said, “for you both.” And while he stood there assuring Frau Professor Koch of his complete sympathy, and the Frau Pastor peeped out of her room to put out another pair of boots, the bare-legged Lina slipped into his room.

He forgot everything, looked at her intently, grasped her eagerly, savagely, asked: “Yes?”

“Why?” she parried.

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because--because we’re young, and because life isn’t for ever.”

She bent down her look and was silent.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She had said it so quietly and convincingly that his soul was devastated by certitude. He was as certain of his reward as one is certain of money placed to the credit of one’s current account, once receipt of it has been acknowledged by the bank. It would take place all right. It was indeed as though it had already taken place; and she seemed to him like some tedious acquaintance; he asked her tedious questions, and asking them, had not the patience to concentrate upon her tedious replies. “Are both your parents alive?”

“Yes, both my parents are alive.”

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“Yes, two sisters and one brother.”

From outside came the sound of tears and choking. “I suppose,” said Frank, “that is the policeman’s wife, by the sound of it.”

“No, it’s he--the policeman.”

“What! Sobbing like that? Why?”

“She curses him dreadfully: that’s why. It’s the same every Sunday night because she wants him to go to bed at once, whereas he, poor chap, wants to sit out with the others and play cards. He’s an upright, decent, quiet man; it’s a shame the life she leads him!”

It did not interest him. The wind that bellied out his sails had suddenly ceased, and his soul flopped down like a flag on a flagstaff. He, she, and the world, seemed as flat as a pancake--as flat and as unprofitable.

“You--you--you!” she gasped. In this “you” was all her being, her illusory love, her reunion with him, the dissolution, the loss of her “I” in his “you.” But he thought he had squeezed her leg and said: “I beg your pardon? Did you say anything?”

She shook her head.

“That’s all right, then.”

She had begun to look forward, and he went to sleep at once. She waited awhile, scanning his face with hatred. Then shook him by the shoulder. “You _ninny_!” Then dressed herself and went out.

She was gone. Presently he sat up on the edge of the bed, his naked feet dangling down like a pendulum. He was drunk. It was significant that he was both spiritually and physically drunk at the same time, and he had just sufficient reason left him to comprehend and thoroughly appreciate the humour of this interesting coincidence.

Next morning he was woken by the conversation in the yard below his window. “You were born in eighteen sixty-four, Herr Baron; I was born in eighteen sixty-six. I take it that I am two years younger than you--yes!”

“Kh-kh-khrr-rrr-khrrr!”

“Kh-kh-kh-khr-khrrr!”

“The Herr Baron complains to me that he is damned and done for, mattering as he is all over. But I say, _aber wo_! Herr Baron: what does it matter if you matter in a world of matter: it is all matter--spirit, flesh, and all! Oh, yes!”

The Baron now was telling Herr Kogl of a brother who lived in Vienna and was professor of modern languages at Vienna University; and Herr Kogl at once retorted: “My son lives in Bizirk IX and has to go to his studies in Bizirk V.”

“What does he do?”

“Studies at the Institute.”

“What institute?”

“The Hotel and Restaurant Institute. Why, Herbert can do anything!--Drive a car--stick a pig--wait at table. Wonderful boy! This--all this--is to be his. Ah! he will go a long way, our Herbert will, he will, when he finishes his studies at the Institute. And I intend to send him abroad for a year or two to pick up foreign languages, so that he secures all the benefit that we old folks can afford to give him.”

“Of course. Why not?” said the Baron, “if you have the money to give him.”

“Ah, no!” exclaimed Herr Kogl. “He must earn the money himself. I don’t believe in extravagance, Herr Baron. ‘No,’ I tell Herbert: ‘you go abroad to France and England and serve your time there in the big hotels and earn every penny yourself as a waiter.’ That’s the way to bring them up--youth,” he added tenderly.

He looked at Frau Kogl, who was coming down the steps towards him. Here was this woman with all her money and property; he came along and made it his, and gave her a son and made it his son’s: more than ever his own. “I was telling the Herr Baron,” he said, “how when Herbert finishes his studies at the Institute and has been abroad in France and England he will on coming back devote himself to the development of the _pension_ and alpine tourism generally by making use of the ties and influence he has established in France and England. Oh, yes!”

“That’s all right,” said the old woman, “but what are we to do about Herr Dickin? All the ladies are leaving. I don’t know what to do. He will have to go, that’s all.”

“He--is a--good--man,” Herr Kogl replied.

“What are we to do?”

Herr Kogl did not reply.

“Come on!” she cried. “Don’t stand there like a--”

“Shut up, will you!” he shouted formidably, and banged his fist on the table.

She quailed before the man with the strong will.

“I never bother; it is none of my business,” Frau Kogl began as Frank came downstairs. “I attend to my own job, and what with the prices of everything going up, I’ve got my work cut out. Meat, as you know, has gone up 20 per cent., vegetables too. Fish is not to be had. To me it is all the same, you understand; I never bother about what other people do.” Her hands shot out awkwardly. In that gesture was all her weary dissatisfaction with people who make bother. “I don’t mind what you do upstairs. But I can’t lose all my clients, you understand. The season is a slack one, and where will I get other guests? Meat, as I say, has gone up; vegetables gone up. Fish is not to be had in the neighbourhood, and they are all complaining now about you. But what can I do?” She shot out her hands. She must have acquired these gestures in the French convent in Alsace where she had been put by her mother.

And indeed there was trouble ahead. Lina’s entry had been observed. The Frau Pastor had communicated it to the Frau Doktor Wirt, and the Frau Doktor Wirt, with the confirmation of the Frau Professor Koch, to the Frau Direktor Bödingen and Frau Nikulitsch, and the Frau Direktor Bödingen to the Frau Oberst von Kaisar, who complained to Frau von Endte. A commotion had been caused. Frank was suspect. Two elderly German women locked their doors at his approach and accused him of having tried to force his way into their bedrooms. When all complained and armed themselves against her, Frau Kogl could not decide. She scratched her head pensively. “Yes,” she said, “Yes, I don’t know what to do.” She looked old and ill with worry; even her housemaid’s knee had taken a turn for the worse. “I am afraid we must ask you to go.”

“With regret,” added Herr Kogl.

As for Lina, Herr Kogl made short shift of her. He merely bawled at her: “Out you go, you slut!”

“If,” Frank reflected, “I can’t be anything better, let me at least be a hero.”

The little red car was prepared for him, and he got Lina to make a bundle of her things and get inside with him. It was a desultory morning and rain fell perfunctorily. “You ugly young thing!” he thought, surveying her from his seat in the corner, as the car turned out of the courtyard past the Baron’s bungalow (who peeped out of his window and, touching his cap, said: “Good evening!”), “What the deuce am I to do with you now?”

“What sort of wage did you get?” he asked aloud.

She told him; and, on taking thought, he decided to run her down to his old friend Frau von Kestner; who afterwards wrote to him:

“I have ordered her to put on a longer skirt and wear stockings. She was embarrassing the postman each time he called with letters, as well as the policeman in the square. Now, I need hardly say, nobody takes any notice of her, because she really is not one little bit pretty.”

XXXVIII

TOD UND GENESUNG

The tall lighted building, the abode of _The Daily_, _The Sunday_, _The Monday_, _The Evening_, _The Midday_, _The Pictorial_ and _The Illustrated Runner_, loomed in the fog. Lord de Jones looked up from the pavement at the large lighted windows over the roof, behind which, he knew, the big spider sat in the midst of his web; and Lord de Jones, entering, by appointment, did indeed feel as a fly might feel if it had an appointment with a great big spider who had expressed in unmistakable terms the wish to devour it. He went up in the historical lift and, arrived at the top, was ushered into the presence of Lord Ottercove.

“Now where is that crop?” asked Lord Ottercove, without greeting the visitor.

“Under the sod, I expect,” retorted de Jones.

“This mission of yours has cost me thousands in sealing wax alone, to enable you to seal up all the craters. Stationers have made fortunes out of me! And there is not a blade of grass anywhere; in fact, the termination of our mission has synchronised with an unprecedented famine in Russia. And, damn them, they’re blaming me for it!”

“There is always a famine in Russia at one time or another through causes, as is invariably urged, not connected with the political faith of the government of the day.”

Lord Ottercove ignored this retort. “The Foreign Secretary is ringing me up all day long, and I refuse to see him; refuse to see him, Chris, for, quite frankly, I wouldn’t know what to say to him. All that sealing wax--and nothing to show for it. Shame!”

Lord Ottercove walked over to the sideboard and poured himself some Perrier water into a glass. “And there’s that other fellow,” he said, drinking.

“I know, the Prime Minister.”

“Yes. Joe’s shouting himself hoarse about the bursting granaries, the wheat springing up all over the globe--increased crop--the end of international jealousies--the economic solution of national rivalries! And you with all your untried genius cannot raise a blade of grass anywhere to substantiate his speeches. He has to rely on the dog stunt entirely, which, I frankly tell you so--is not good enough. It’s not good enough, Chris. Read this.”

Lord Ottercove handed him a copy of _The Evening Ensign_ containing the report of Lord Evesham’s speech at the Carlton Club, the burden of which was that the election in which the Conservatives were defeated had been fought on an unreal issue, against the advice of the experienced members of the party.

“An unreal issue, he says!” exclaimed Lord Ottercove.

“No more unreal than Gladstone’s Turk.”

“An unreal issue! They’ve realised it at last and have decided to leave the dog stunt out of their party programme, and they are already winning all the by-elections, and we’ve not a friend anywhere except among sealing-wax manufacturers.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Rex.”

“Now, I believe in Joe. He is my friend, and if a man is my friend I’ll stick to him through thick and thin. But he must have increased crop if he is to go on shouting about it, and he’s shouted about it so much that he can’t go back on it now. You promised us two blades of grass to every one. Where are they? Where _are_ they, I ask?” He looked at his visitor with the unrestrained ill-humour of a man who, being completely accustomed to things going well with him, suddenly discovers that they are going badly. “You make my papers look ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. I will make amends--look into the matter--enquire. It may be that the sealing wax is defective. I promise to do what I can, Rex.”

“Promises! To hell with promises! It’s meat we want. Meat, not promises!”

“True, we want meat. But all we can give you is cat’s meat. Indeed, that is all you have ever had in the past.”

“Enough of your cynicism, Chris.”

“Now let me tell you, Rex, that I don’t care two tuppenny damns about your crop. What I care about is the world. And that is no more.”

Lord Ottercove rose and leaned heavily first on one leg, then on the other. “It’s still there, Chris,” he said.

“Only for a week. I’ve disintegrated the atom.”

“Well?”

“Which means that all other atoms, at first slowly, then faster and faster, will follow suit, till not a rack is left behind.”

“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself?”

“Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff--”

“I know: as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” He turned away and bit his lip. “Chris, I am vexed: bear with my weakness; my first-class brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity. If you will be pleased, retire to that sofa and there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk, to still my beating mind.”

“I wish you peace.”

When he came back Lord Ottercove’s face looked eager with hope. “I don’t believe you, Chris. You say you’ve done it?”

“A week ago. In Greece.”

“My Athens correspondent is silent about the matter.”

“Inevitably. He has disintegrated.”

“There is no sign of panic anywhere.”

“There is no panic because there is no way to communicate panic. No sound, no sight: a whole area vanishes invisibly, ceases to be there.”

“But what of the people in the adjoining area? Why don’t they communicate or run away?”

“The people next to those just vanished, vanish next. They do not know that anything has vanished till they themselves vanish.”

“I see. It’s a knowledge which is vouchsafed you at vanishing point, so to speak.”

“Exactly.”

“But they must know if they find that a familiar house or square has vanished.”

“No: if it is not where they expect to find it, they naturally suppose that they are in error: that what they are looking for is probably round the other corner.”

“H’m, I see.”

There was a pause.

“Well, what have you to say, Rex?”

“Chris: I advise you against it.”

“Too late, too late! The world is fast unravelling, like a laddered silk stocking.”

“Shame! And quite a new world, barely 200,000,000 years old. It will do you no good, Chris.”

“If an employee of yours, Rex, came to ask you for a rise, I verily believe you would not say No, but: ‘I advise you against your suggesting the idea to me.’ And should he ask for a reason, you’d say: ‘I don’t think it would do you any good.’”

“I don’t think this will. I don’t think it will do any of us any good. Disintegrate. Ha! What an idea!”

“Why?”

“Well, look here, Chris, do you think it’s considerate? Do you think it’s altogether kind?”

“It’s the very milk of human kindness to spare us all the horrors of this new war. You, Rex, must see this, for you are good at heart.”

“Yes. I want, Chris, to do good. There is no greater pleasure in the world than doing good. If you destroy the world, I wouldn’t be able to go on doing good, now would I?”

“That, I admit, is hard on you.”

“It’s hard on us both, Chris. I wouldn’t be able to _do_ good, and you wouldn’t be able to _make_ good. You would remain for ever a Genius of the Untried.”

“What! now that I _have_ tried and succeeded?”

“I follow your argument. But believe me, Chris, it’s defective. To destroy the world is not what I might call constructive work. I am rather tempted, if you follow my line of thought, to relegate it to the category of the destructive. It’s negative, Chris. That’s the word: negative.”

“Negative? Why, it’s positively destroying itself with a vengeance, bolting away into nothing, overjoyed at the chance of release, bubbling over with sheer _joie de vivre_!”

“H’m.”

“And can you wonder? For millions of years the atom has been kept in harness. Round himself and round others like him, he was made to jump without cease or sense, as if to bite off his own tail. He hasn’t known a holiday since the world began. And what was it all for? To convince crass fools that matter was solid!”

“Since you came in this evening, Chris, everything seems less solid.”

“Glad you are beginning to see light. I am looking forward to the time, which is not distant, when what now serves, inadequately, to distinguish the outward form of Baron Ottercove, will be converted into the purest radiation. All matter, Rex, is a disease. It _is_ ‘matter.’ When pools stagnate, or tissues decay, life springs to the surface, a pestilential vermin. It’s a hitch somewhere in the atomic mechanism of the universe, a clotting of the blood, an imperfect interplay of atoms in the cosmic body which creates this fretting disease we call life. In the healthy regions of the universe the atoms change their make-up millions of times in a second and so are for ever dissociated and incapable of association and cannot degenerate into a condition in which decay breeds life. Unscientific people or unimaginative scientists would say that what I have done is to ‘explode’ the atom. Nonsense! Even ‘disintegrated’ is hardly the word for it, for it is apt to mislead us on a vital point. What I’ve done is no more than what a watchmaker might do to a clock which has got clogged and is losing time: I’ve speeded up its electrons to the pitch at which the degenerated matter we call life regenerates itself into radiation and, for us, ceases to be. A mere question of revolution.”

“Revolution!” cried Lord Ottercove. “I thought as much. You’ve let him loose, the atom! Relinquished your hold on him, when your betters were on the point of harnessing him to do all the world’s labour.” Lord Ottercove suddenly jumped to his feet, a flush of anger suffusing his cheeks. “Stop him, man!” he yelled. “Stop him, quick!”

“Can’t catch him now.”

“Run!” Lord Ottercove ran and opened the door.

“You’d need a greyhound to catch him: he has galloped off into not-being.”

“What’s that?”

“Death.”

“Sheer idleness!” said Lord Ottercove. “At a time when servants are scarce; when the human labourer has downed tools; when inertia like some horrible disease has laid low the human race; when all our hope was in the atom, you’ve released him, let him go to whirl senselessly in the void!”

“Far from it. There they have to dash round like fury to maintain a high standard of death. For the moment they slacken their speed, sickness sets in and life.”

“That,” said Lord Ottercove, “might frighten the bird-livered neurotics who are sick of life. I am sick with the healthy fear of death. I am all for keeping the atom in his place. All this talk of Beyond, a Future Life for the Atom--tell this to Dr. Conan Doyle or to Sir Oliver Lodge, don’t tell it to me! Sheer sabotage! Allow one atom to strike, and all the rest will follow suit. It’s not fair to the public. Next thing they’ll want the dole. The country, Chris--I mean the world--will not stand for it.”

“It’s not work, Rex, but unhealthy conditions of work that the atoms object to in life. Over there they work harder and quicker, yet freely and joyfully, that we may all remain in the balmed and blessed state of death.”

“I see. The struggle for non-existence.”

“Exactly.”

“You are, I take it, a sort of Official Receiver winding up the affairs of the visible world.”

“No, a doctor who has released the circulation of the world which these many centuries have clogged at our end: and the patient is speedily recovering. When you and I and other sufferers cease to be, it will mean that the patient is once again in the pink of condition. By healing one atom I have healed the wound of the world.”

“Who are the wound?”

“All that which feels.”

“I feel the coming death, feel it deeply and painfully, Chris.”

“You must not feel: you must dry up.”

“Dry up yourself!” said Ottercove, ruffled.

“We’re mere boils and pimples, Rex, who feel the hurt. When I have nursed the universe back to death, none of us shall feel any more.” De Jones was muttering something.

“What’s that?” asked Ottercove.

“Just words. A German title has suggested itself to me as a caption for what I mean--‘_Tod und Genesung_’ which, in our rotten tongue, might be translated into ‘Death and Recovery.’ Shakespeare says:

“‘_My long sickness_ _Of health and living now begins to mend,_ _And nothing brings me all things._’”

“Come, Chris. Don’t make us all look asses in the eyes of your Maker.”

“Asses?”

“Asses.”

“I’m going,” said de Jones, “not to my Maker--no: he is an usurper--but to my Unmaker! He is the true God.”

Lord Ottercove sat down dejectedly and stretched out his legs by the electric radiator. “The world,” he began, “is a heritage which has been committed into our keeping. It was not, I take it, put there to be unmade at will. It is not ours, Chris, to dispose of.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t, Chris.”

“Whose is it, then?”

“Well, a considerable portion of it, measured in terms of property and money, happens to be mine.”

“Ah!”

“You smile at my alleged materialism. Unnecessarily, Chris! For it is only in the banks and company offices that this wealth--and it is much--is recorded in my name. I hold it as it were in custody for ... Providence (call it the Deity, Fate, Destiny, the Supreme Being, or the First Cause). We are but the stewards, the servants, as in the Parable of the Talents, from whom account of stewardship will be exacted by the Master. I have increased my five talents by ... I can’t tell you how much. As for you, Chris, you’ve absconded with the one talent entrusted to you. Which is worse than in the parable. You wonder at my prosperity. It’s faith, Chris, faith. Faith in money. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Wish I was a preacher, like my father. I’d be the Archbishop of Canterbury now. For I like the sound of my own voice. The first condition of good preaching, Chris.” Lord Ottercove sat still, wrapped in thought.

Then he roused himself from his reverie. “Chris,” he said, “how much do you want for it?”

“What for?”

“The visible world. I will buy it from you at your own price.”

“Do you care for it so much?”

“Not a damn!”

“What do you want it for?”

“For my friend Vernon Sprott. Like Gautier, he is one for whom the visible world exists. I take it that you could ensure its existence.”

“I might. I don’t know.”

“How, Chris?”

“By reversing the process. By crippling the mechanism of the atom and reducing the electronic revolutions to a condition of slow decay in which alone life for us is possible.”

“Name your price.”

De Jones considered. “It will be,” he said in the tone of a solicitor calculating costs, “including all dues and charges, eighty million pounds sterling. Guineas, I mean.”

“Nothing doing. Good-bye to you.”

Lord de Jones turned round on the threshold. “What will you do about it, Rex?”

“Have you arrested.”

“On what charge? There is no law against introducing the Kingdom of God into this country.”

“Sedition. Instigation of atoms to mutiny. Under Dora.”

“But why, Rex? Tell me why.”

Lord Ottercove was a long time in replying.

“I will not have humanity let down,” he said at last.

“You and your humanity!” Anger had made de Jones inarticulate. “Running your secretaries off their feet. Putting the fear of God into your butlers. That last man you had has taken to drink, and is now in the last stage of _delirium tremens_. Gilbert has developed the St. Vitus’ dance, waiting on you and your follies. What respect have you ever shown to the atom? When you look at a man you make all the atoms in him jump the wrong way. Then about this war. You’ve gone right back on your pacific scheme. Oh, these business brains! Oh, these strong, silent men! Curse and damn your breed!”

Lord Ottercove had walked over to the sideboard and was pouring himself some Perrier water into a glass. “When you have done, please tell me,” he said, drinking.

De Jones was foaming at the mouth. “You and your confrère across the road--newspaper proprietors! Bags of money! That’s all you are!”

“And you’re an empty bag of money!”

“Give the public what it wants. That’s your line--the line of least resistance. But to write regeneratively is beyond your scope.”

“Regenerative degenerates!” bawled Ottercove. He bawled so loud that Gilbert came in to ask if his lordship wanted anything.

“Nothing from you.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Leave us alone.”

“Yes, m’lord.” Gilbert’s eyes danced. His face twitched. His hands trembled.

“Get out! I mean both of you. I’ve had enough of you all! Twitching drivelling imbeciles! Atom mongers! Flea trainers!” Lord Ottercove seized one of the eight chairs placed round the octangular table and flung it at Viscount de Jones. When the Editor of _The Evening Ensign_ came in a moment later, Lord Ottercove flung the second chair at him. Outside his door a queue of secretaries, marshalled by Mrs. Hannibal and each nervously scanning at her file of papers, awaited the Chief’s summons. Time was when Mrs. Hannibal alone centralised all Lord Ottercove’s activities. The traffick proved too much for a single channel, and was accordingly decentralised, carried by a dozen streams. A dozen secretarial maidens were always in attendance in the ante-room, waiting for the signal to appear before the Chief, who shouted from his chair: “Forward, Miss Davis!” and hurried her: “Come on, come on!” And Miss Davis reported in a flutter: “We purchased 16 bottles of Apollinaris, of which you drank 3; that leaves us 13.”

“Carry them forward. Forward, Miss Badmington!”

“The franc account shows a balance of 7 francs which I have changed into pounds at the rate of 126 francs to the pound, making a total of 1s. 3d.”

“Forward, Miss Harrison!” And so forth.

And now as they appeared in the doorway, Lord Ottercove flung a chair at them, and they retired in disorder. This left him with five chairs, including the one he was sitting on. He flung the fourth chair at a literary aspirant whose dream was to contribute humorous articles to _The Daily Runner_, and the fifth chair at a lady who wished to sell him tickets for a charity concert in the Albert Hall, and, having flung the sixth and the seventh chair at some nondescripts who peeped through the door to see what was happening, he remained seated in the eighth and only chair in the room. Mrs. Hannibal came in with a fearless smile on her face, the practised smile of a lion trainer whose first rule is to show no fear of the lion for fear of encouraging the lion to behave in a manner compatible with his nature.

Lord Ottercove looked at her affectionately. “Do you admire my moderation?”

She admired him, and this physical symbolism of his political power, and the sincerity of his self-expression, and his freedom from sham convention.

Lord Ottercove seized the receiver--Mrs. Hannibal thought, to speak to Scotland Yard. She was wrong. Lord Ottercove was telephoning to his editors. Here was real news! The end of all things: something not to be missed.

News, he thought, such as Lord Northcliffe would have appreciated at its true value! There was no jealousy in Lord Ottercove. He admired Lord Northcliffe, and though secretly he thought he himself had no peers among living newspaper proprietors, he suffered from an inferiority complex in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook. And so he was glad of the exclusive news. In the beginning there was the Word. And in the end, too. He was proud that it befell to _The Daily Runner_ to write the Omega. “I, Baron Ottercove of Ottercove, hereby announce the end of the world.”

His principal editor, he was informed, was dining out. “As ever! Just like him!” he muttered. “Dining, while the paper--not to say the world--can go to hell.” For some minutes he sat alone in his vast roof office, full of a strange wonder at the imminence of the fate which confronted mankind. At last, he had to believe it. He sat very still, while below the printing presses, with accustomed celerity, manufactured the tidings. Then a sudden foreboding overcame him. It was not so much that he feared the end for himself and his race: it was the uncertainty of it that gnawed at his nerves. The uncertainty of when and under what circumstances he might disintegrate. He stood by the enormous window with a wide view of London roofs, including that of St. Paul’s, and sadness filled his soul. An indescribable sorrow for all mankind descended upon him. But as the minutes passed, the need for action braced his nerves. Hatless he stepped into the lift, and passing the solitary commissionaire, dashed into the busy streets.