The Ladybird

could rise to the height for the time, the incandescent,

  transcendent, moon-fierce womanhood. But alas, she could not stay

  intensified and resplendent in her white, womanly powers, her

  female mystery. She relaxed, she lost her glory, and became

  fretful. Fretful and ill and never to be soothed. And then

  naturally her man became ashy and somewhat acrid, while she ached

  with nerves, and could not eat.

  Of course she began to dream about Count Dionys: to yearn wistfully

  for him. And it was absolutely a fatal thought to her that he was

  going away. When she thought that--that he was leaving England

  soon--going away into the dark for ever--then the last spark seemed

  to die in her. She felt her soul perish, whilst she herself was

  worn and soulless like a prostitute. A prostitute goddess. And

  her husband, the gaunt, white, intensified priest of her, who never

  ceased from being before her like a lust.

  'Tomorrow,' she said to him, gathering her last courage and looking

  at him with a side look, 'I want to go to Voynich Hall.'

  'What, to see Count Psanek? Oh, good! Yes, very good! I'll come

  along as well. I should like very much to see him. I suppose

  he'll be getting sent back before long.'

  It was a fortnight before Christmas, very dark weather. Her

  husband was in khaki. She wore her black furs and a black lace

  veil over her face, so that she seemed mysterious. But she lifted

  the veil and looped it behind, so that it made a frame for her

  face. She looked very lovely like that--her face pure like the

  most white hellebore flower, touched with winter pink, amid the

  blackness of her drapery and furs. Only she was rather too much

  like the picture of a modern beauty: too much the actual thing.

  She had half an idea that Dionys would hate her for her effective

  loveliness. He would see it and hate it. The thought was like a

  bitter balm to her. For herself, she loved her loveliness almost

  with obsession.

  The Count came cautiously forward, glancing from the lovely figure

  of Lady Daphne to the gaunt well-bred Major at her side. Daphne

  was so beautiful in her dark furs, the black lace of her veil

  thrown back over her close-fitting, dull-gold-threaded hat, and her

  face fair like a winter flower in a cranny of darkness. But on her

  face, that was smiling with a slow self-satisfaction of beauty and

  of knowledge that she was dangling the two men, and setting all the

  imprisoned officers wildly on the alert, the Count could read that

  acridity of dissatisfaction and of inefficiency. And he looked

  away to the livid scar on the Major's cheek.

  'Count Dionys, I wanted to bring my husband to see you. May I

  introduce him to you? Major Apsley--Count Dionys Psanek.'

  The two men shook hands rather stiffly.

  'I can sympathize with you being fastened up in this place,' said

  Basil in his slow, easy fashion. 'I hated it, I assure you, out

  there in the East.'

  'But your conditions were much worse than mine,' smiled the Count.

  'Well, perhaps they were. But prison is prison, even if it were

  heaven itself.'

  'Lady Apsley has been the one angel of my heaven,' smiled the

  Count.

  'I'm afraid I was as inefficient as most angels,' said she.

  The small smile never left the Count's dark face. It was true as

  she said, he was low-browed, the black hair growing low on his

  brow, and his eyebrows making a thick bow above his dark eyes,

  which had again long black lashes. So that the upper part of his

  face seemed very dusky-black. His nose was small and somewhat

  translucent. There was a touch of mockery about him, which was

  intensified even by his small, energetic stature. He was still

  carefully dressed in the dark-blue uniform, whose shabbiness could

  not hinder the dark flame of life which seemed to glow through the

  cloth from his body. He was not thin--but still had a curious

  swarthy translucency of skin in his low-browed face.

  'What would you have been more?' he laughed, making equivocal dark

  eyes at her.

  'Oh, of course, a delivering angel--a cinema heroine,' she replied,

  closing her eyes and turning her face aside.

  All the while the white-faced, tall Major watched the little man

  with a fixed, half-smiling scrutiny. The Count seemed to notice.

  He turned to the Englishman.

  'I am glad that I can congratulate you, Major Apsley, on your safe

  and happy return to your home.'

  'Thanks. I hope I may be able to congratulate you in the same way

  before long.'

  'Oh yes,' said the Count. 'Before long I shall be shipped back.'

  'Have you any news of your family?' interrupted Daphne.

  'No news,' he replied briefly, with sudden gravity.

  'It seems you'll find a fairish mess out in Austria,' said Basil.

  'Yes, probably. It is what we had to expect,' replied the Count.

  'Well, I don't know. Sometimes things do turn out for the best. I

  feel that's as good as true in my case,' said the Major.

  'Things have turned out for the best?' said the Count, with an

  intonation of polite inquiry.

  'Yes. Just for me personally, I mean--to put it quite selfishly.

  After all, what we've learned is that a man can only speak for

  himself. And I feel it's been dreadful, but it's not been lost.

  It was like an ordeal one had to go through,' said Basil.

  'You mean the war?'

  'The war and everything that went with it.'

  'And when you've been through the ordeal?' politely inquired the

  Count.

  'Why, you arrive at a higher state of consciousness, and therefore

  of life. And so, of course, at a higher plane of love. A

  surprisingly higher plane of love, that you had never suspected the

  existence of before.'

  The Count looked from Basil to Daphne, who was posing her head a

  little self-consciously.

  'Then indeed the war has been a valuable thing,' he said.

  'Exactly!' cried Basil. 'I am another man.'

  'And Lady Apsley?' queried the Count.

  'Oh'--her husband faced round to her--'she is ABSOLUTELY another

  woman--and MUCH more wonderful, more marvellous.'

  The Count smiled and bowed slightly.

  'When we knew her ten years ago, we should have said then that it

  was impossible,' said he, 'for her to be more wonderful.'

  'Oh, quite!' returned the husband. 'It always seems impossible.

  And the impossible is always happening. As a matter of fact, I

  think the war has opened another circle of life to us--a wider

  ring.'

  'It may be so,' said the Count.

  'You don't feel it so yourself?' The Major looked with his keen,

  white attention into the dark, low-browed face of the other man.

  The Count looked smiling at Daphne.

  'I am only a prisoner still, Major, therefore I feel my ring quite

  small.'

  'Yes, of course you do. Of course. Well, I do hope you won't be a

  prisoner much longer. You must be dying to get back into your own

  country.'

  'Yes, I shall be glad to be free. Also,' he smiled. 'I shall miss r />
  my prison and my visits from the angels.'

  Even Daphne could not be sure he was mocking her. It was evident

  the visit was unpleasant to him. She could see he did not like

  Basil. Nay, more, she could feel that the presence of her tall,

  gaunt, idealistic husband was hateful to the little swarthy man.

  But he passed it all off in smiles and polite speeches.

  On the other hand, Basil was as if fascinated by the Count. He

  watched him absorbedly all the time, quite forgetting Daphne. She

  knew this. She knew that she was quite gone out of her husband's

  consciousness, like a lamp that has been carried away into another

  room. There he stood completely in the dark, as far as she was

  concerned, and all his attention focused on the other man. On his

  pale, gaunt face was a fixed smile of amused attention.

  'But don't you get awfully bored,' he said, 'between the visits?'

  The Count looked up with an affection of frankness.

  'No, I do not,' he said. 'I can brood, you see, on the things that

  come to pass.'

  'I think that's where the harm comes in,' replied the Major. 'One

  sits and broods, and is cut off from everything, and one loses

  one's contact with reality. That's the effect it had on me, being

  a prisoner.'

  'Contact with reality--what is that?'

  'Well--contact with anybody, really--or anything.'

  'Why must one have contact?'

  'Well, because one must,' said Basil.

  The Count smiled slowly.

  'But I can sit and watch fate flowing, like black water, deep down

  in my own soul,' he said. 'I feel that there, in the dark of my

  own soul, things are happening.'

  'That may be. But whatever happens, it is only one thing, really.

  It is a contact between your own soul and the soul of one other

  being, or of many other beings. Nothing else can happen to man.

  That's how I figured it out for myself. I may be wrong. But

  that's how I figured it out when I was wounded and a prisoner.'

  The Count's face had gone dark and serious.

  'But is this contact an aim in itself?' he asked.

  'Well'--said the Major--he had taken his degree in philosophy--'it

  seems to me it is. It results inevitably in some form of activity.

  But the cause and the origin and the life-impetus of all action,

  activity, whether constructive or destructive, seems to me to be in

  the dynamic contact between human beings. You bring to pass a

  certain dynamic contact between men, and you get war. Another sort

  of dynamic contact, and you get them all building a cathedral, as

  they did in the Middle Ages.'

  'But was not the war, or the cathedral, the real aim, and the

  emotional contact just the means?' said the Count.

  'I don't think so,' said the Major, his curious white passion

  beginning to glow through his face. The three were seated in a

  little card-room, left alone by courtesy by the other men. Daphne

  was still draped in her dark, too-becoming drapery. But alas, she

  sat now ignored by both men. She might just as well have been an

  ugly little nobody, for all the notice that was taken of her. She

  sat in the window-seat of the dreary small room with a look of

  discontent on her exotic, rare face, that was like a delicate white

  and pink hot-house flower. From time to time she glanced with

  long, slow looks from man to man: from her husband, whose pallid,

  intense, white glowing face was pressed forward across the table to

  the Count, who sat back in his chair, as if in opposition, and

  whose dark face seemed clubbed together in a dark, unwilling stare.

  Her husband was QUITE unaware of anything but his own white

  identity. But the Count still had a grain of secondary

  consciousness which hovered round and remained aware of the woman

  in the window-seat. The whole of his face, and his forward-looking

  attention was concentrated on Basil. But somewhere at the back of

  him he kept track of Daphne. She sat uneasy, in discontent, as

  women always do sit when men are locked together in a combustion of

  words. At the same time, she followed the argument. It was

  curious that, while her sympathy at this moment was with the Count,

  it was her husband whose words she believed to be true. The

  contact, the emotional contact was the real thing, the so-called

  'aim' was only a by-product. Even wars and cathedrals, in her

  mind, were only by-products. The real thing was what the warriors

  and cathedral-builders had had in common, as a great uniting

  feeling: the thing they felt for one another, and for their women

  in particular, of course.

  'There are a great many kinds of contact, nevertheless,' said

  Dionys.

  'Well, do you know,' said the Major, 'it seems to me there is

  really only one supreme contact, the contact of love. Mind you,

  the love may take on an infinite variety of forms. And in my

  opinion, no form of love is wrong, so long as it IS love, and you

  yourself HONOUR what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary

  variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems

  to me. But I grant you, if you deny the VARIETY of love you deny

  love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of

  accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love MUST be

  multiform, else it is just tyranny, just death.'

  'But why call it all LOVE?' said the Count.

  'Because it seems to me it IS love: the great power that draws

  human beings together, no matter what the result of the contact may

  be. Of course there is hate, but hate is only the recoil of love.'

  'Do you think the old Egypt was established on love?' asked Dionys.

  'Why, of course! And perhaps the most multiform, the most

  comprehensive love that the world has seen. All that we suffer

  from now is that our way of love is narrow, exclusive, and

  therefore not love at all; more like death and tyranny.'

  The Count slowly shook his head, smiling slowly and as if sadly.

  'No,' he said. 'No. It is no good. You must use another word

  than love.'

  'I don't agree at all,' said Basil.

  'What word then?' blurted Daphne.

  The Count looked at her.

  'Obedience, submission, faith, belief, responsibility, power,' he

  said slowly, picking out the words slowly, as if searching for what

  he wanted, and never quite finding it. He looked with his quiet

  dark eyes into her eyes. It was curious, she disliked his words

  intensely, but she liked him. On the other hand, she believed

  absolutely what her husband said, yet her physical sympathy was

  against him.

  'Do you agree, Daphne?' asked Basil.

  'Not a bit,' she replied, with a heavy look at her husband.

  'Nor I,' said Basil. 'It seems to me, if you love, there is no

  obedience nor submission, except to the soul of love. If you mean

  obedience, submission, and all the rest, to the soul of love

  itself, I quite agree. But if you mean obedience, submission of

  one person to another, and one man having power over others--I

  don't agree, and never shall. It seems to
me just there where we

  have gone wrong. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted power--'

  'No, no,' said the Count. 'He was a mountebank. He had no

  conception of the sacredness of power.'

  'He proved himself very dangerous.'

  'Oh yes. But peace can be even more dangerous still.'

  'Tell me, then. Do you believe that you, as an aristocrat, should

  have feudal power over a few hundreds of other men, who happen to

  be born serfs, or not aristocrats?'

  'Not as a hereditary aristocrat, but as a MAN who is by nature an

  aristocrat,' said the Count, 'it is my sacred duty to hold the

  lives of other men in my hands, and to shape the issue. But I can

  never fulfil my destiny till men will willingly put their lives in

  my hands.'

  'You don't expect them to, do you?' smiled Basil.

  'At this moment, no.'

  'Or at any moment!' The Major was sarcastic.

  'At a certain moment the men who are really living will come

  beseeching to put their lives into the hands of the greater men

  among them, beseeching the greater men to take the sacred

  responsibility of power.'

  'Do you think so? Perhaps you mean men will at last begin to

  choose leaders whom they will LOVE,' said Basil. 'I wish they

  would.'

  'No, I mean that they will at last yield themselves before men who

  are greater than they: become vassals by choice.'

  'Vassals!' exclaimed Basil, smiling. 'You are still in the feudal

  ages, Count.'

  'Vassals. Not to any hereditary aristocrat--Hohenzollern or

  Hapsburg or Psanek,' smiled the Count. 'But to the man whose soul

  is born single, able to be alone, to choose and to command. At

  last the masses will come to such men and say: "You are greater

  than we. Be our lords. Take our life and our death in your hands,

  and dispose of us according to your will. Because we see a light

  in your face, and burning on your mouth."'

  The Major smiled for many moments, really piqued and amused,

  watching the Count, who did not turn a hair.

  'I say, you must be awfully naive, Count, if you believe the modern

  masses are ever going to behave like that. I assure you, they

  never will.'

  'If they did,' said the Count, 'would you call it a new reign of

  love, or something else?'

  'Well, of course, it would contain an element of love. There would

  have to be an element of love in their feeling for their leaders.'

  'Do you think so? I thought that love assumed an equality in

  difference. I thought that love gave to every man the right to

  judge the acts of other men--"This was not an act of love,

  therefore it was wrong." Does not democracy, and love, give to

  every man this right?'

  'Certainly,' said Basil.

  'Ah, but my chosen aristocrat would say to those who chose him:

  "If you choose me, you give up forever your right to judge me. If

  you have truly chosen to follow me, you have thereby rejected all

  your right to criticize me. You can no longer either approve or

  disapprove of me. You have performed the sacred act of choice.

  Henceforth you can only obey."'

  'They wouldn't be able to help criticizing, for all that,' said

  Daphne, blurting in her say.

  He looked at her slowly, and for the first time in her life she was

  doubtful of what she was saying.

  'The day of Judas,' he said, 'ends with the day of love.'

  Basil woke up from a sort of trance.

  'I think, of course, Count,' he said, 'that it's an awfully amusing

  idea. A retrogression slap back to the Dark Ages.'

  'Not so,' said the Count. 'Men--the mass of men--were never before

  free to perform the sacred act of choice. Today--soon--they may be

  free.'

  'Oh, I don't know. Many tribes chose their kings and chiefs.'