The great press of talent in search of occupation which had thronged the Ministry during its first weeks had now dropped to a mere handful; the door-keeper was schooled to detect and deter the job seekers. No one wanted another reorganization for some time to come. Mr. Bentley’s office became an enclave of culture in a barbaric world. It was here that the Ivory Tower was first discussed.
“Art for Art’s sake, Geoffrey. Back to the lily and the lotus, away from these dusty young immortelles, these dandelions sprouting on the vacant lot.”
“A kind of Yellow Book,” suggested Mr. Bentley sympathetically.
Ambrose turned sharply from his contemplation of Mrs. Siddons. “Geoffrey. How can you be so unkind?”
“My dear Ambrose…”
“That’s just what they’ll call it.”
“Who will?”
“Parsnip,” said Ambrose with venom, “Pimpernell, Poppet and Tom. They’ll say we’re deserting the workers’ cause.”
“I’m not aware that I ever joined it,” said Mr. Bentley. “I claim to be one of the very few living liberals.”
“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by economists.”
“I haven’t.”
“For years now we’ve allowed ourselves to think of nothing but concrete mixers and tractors.”
“I haven’t,” said Mr. Bentley crossly. “I’ve thought a great deal about Nollekens.”
“Well,” said Ambrose, “I’ve had enough. Il faut en finir,” and added, “nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts.”
Later he said, “I was never a party member.”
“Party?”
“Communist party. I was what they call in their horrible jargon, a fellow traveler.”
“Ah.”
“Geoffrey, they do the most brutal things, don’t they, to communists who try to leave the party?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Geoffrey, you don’t think they’d do that to fellow travelers, do you?”
“I don’t expect so.”
“But they might?”
“Oh yes, they might.”
“Oh dear.”
Later he said, “You know, Geoffrey, even in fascist countries they have underground organizations. Do you think the underground organizations would get hold of us?”
“Who?”
“The fellow travelers.”
“Really it’s too ridiculous to talk like this of fellow travelers and the underground. It sounds like strap hangers on the Bakerloo railway.”
“It’s all very well for you to laugh. You were never one of them.”
“But my dear Ambrose, why should these political friends of yours mind so very much if you produce a purely artistic paper.”
“I heard of a ’cellist in America. He’d been a member of the party and he accepted an invitation to play at an anniversary breakfast of the Colonial Dames. It was during the Scottsboro trials when feeling was running high. They tied him to a lamp-post and covered him with tar and set him on fire.”
“The Colonial Dames did?”
“No, no, the communists.”
After a long pause he said, “But Russia’s doing very badly in Finland.”
“Yes.”
“If only we knew what was going to happen.”
He returned pensively to the religious department.
“This is more in your line than mine,” said the Catholic representative, handing him a cutting from a Swiss paper.
It said that Storm Troopers had attended a requiem mass in Salzburg. Ambrose clipped it to a piece of paper and wrote “Copies to Free Thought, the Atheist Advertiser and to Godless Sunday at Home”; then he placed it in his basket marked OUT. Two yards distant the Nonconformist minister was checking statistics about the popularity of beer-gardens among Nazi officials. The Church of England clergyman was making the most of some rather scrappy Dutch information about cruelty to animals in Bremen. There was no foundation here for an ivory tower, thought Ambrose, no cloud to garland its summit, and his thoughts began to soar lark-like into a tempera, fourteenth-century sky; into a heaven of flat blank, blue and white clouds cross-hatched with gold leaf on their sunward edges; a vast altitude painted with shaving soap on a panel of lapis lazuli; he stood on a high, sugary pinnacle, on a new Tower of Babel; like a muezzin calling his message to a world of domes and clouds; beneath him, between him and the absurd little figures bobbing and bending on their striped praying mats, lay fathoms of clear air where doves sported with the butterflies.
VII
Most of Mrs. Sothill’s Garden-Party-Only list were people of late middle age who, on retirement from work in the cities or abroad, had bought the smaller manor houses and the larger rectories; houses that once had been supported on the rent of a thousand acres and a dozen cottages, now went with a paddock and a walled garden and their life subsisted on pensions and savings. To these modest landholders the rural character of the neighborhood was a matter of particular jealousy; magnates like Freddy would eagerly sell off outlying farms for development. It was the G.P.O. list who suffered and protested. A narrow corner could not be widened or a tree lopped to clear the telegraph wires without its being noted and regretted in those sunny morning-rooms. These were benevolent, companionable people; their carefully limited families were “out in the world” and came to them only for occasional visits. Their daughters had flats and jobs and lives 0f their own in London; their s0ns were self-supporting in the services and in business. The tribute of Empire flowed gently into the agricultural countryside, tithe barns were converted into village halls, the boy scouts had a new bell tent and the district nurse a motor-car; the old box pews were taken out of the churches, the galleries demolished, the Royal Arms and the ten commandments moved from behind the altar and replaced with screens of blue damask supported at the four corners with gilt Sarum angels; the lawns were close mown, fertilized and weeded, and from their splendid surface rose clumps of pampas grass and yucca; year in, year out, gloved hands grubbed in the rockeries, gloved hands snipped in the herbaceous border; baskets of bass stood beside trays of visiting, cards on the hall tables. Now in the dead depths of winter when ice stood thick on the lily ponds, and the kitchen gardens at night were a litter of sacking, these good people fed the birds daily with the crumbs from the dining-room table and saw to it that no old person in the village went short of coal.
It was this unfamiliar world that Basil contemplated in the leather-bound pages of Mrs. Sothill’s address book. He contemplated it as a marauder might look down from the hills into the fat pastures below; as Hannibal’s infantry had looked down from the snow-line as the first elephants tried the etched footholds which led to the Lombardy plains below them and went lurching and trumpeting over the edge.
After the successful engagement at North Grappling, Basil took Doris into the nearest town and fed her liberally on fried fish and chipped potatoes; afterwards he took her to the cinema, allowed her to hold his hand in a fierce and sticky grasp throughout the length of two deeply sentimental films and brought her back to Malfrey in a state of entranced docility.
“You don’t like blondes, do you?” she asked anxiously in the car.
“Yes, very much.”
“More than brunettes?”
“I’m not particular.”
“They say like goes to like. She’s dark.”
“Who?”
“Her you call your sister.”
“Doris, you must get this idea out of your head. Mrs. Sothill is my sister.”
“You aren’t sweet on her.”
“Certainly not.”
“Then you do like blondes,” said Doris sadly.
Next day she disappeared alone into the village, returned mysteriously with a small parcel, and remained hidden all the morning in the bachelors’ wing. Just before luncheon she appeared in the orangery with her head in a towel.
“I wanted you to see,” she said, and uncovered a damp mop of hair which was in part pale yellow, in par
t its original black, and in part mottled in every intervening shade.
“Good heavens, child,” said Barbara. “What have you done?”
Doris looked only at Basil. “D’you like it? I’ll give it another go this afternoon.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Basil. “I’d leave it just as it is.”
“You like it?”
“I think it’s fine.”
“Not too streaky?”
“Not a bit too streaky.”
If anything had been needed to complete the horror of Doris’s appearance, that morning’s work had done it.
Basil studied the address book with care. “Finding a new home for the Connollies,” he said.
“Basil, we must do something to that poor child’s head before we pass her on.”
“Not a bit of it. It suits her. What d’you know of the Graces of the Old Rectory, Adderford?”
“It’s a pretty little house. He’s a painter.”
“Bohemian?”
“Not the least. Very refined. Portraits of children in water-color and pastel.”
“Pastel? He sounds suitable.”
“She’s rather delicate I believe.”
“Perfect.”
The Connollies stayed two days at the Old Rectory and earned twenty pounds.
VIII
London was full again. Those who had left in a hurry returned; those who had made arrangements to go after the first air raid remained. Margot Metroland shut her home and moved to the Ritz; opened her home and moved back; decided that after all she really preferred the Ritz and shut her home, this time, though she did not know it, forever. No servant ever folded back the shutters from the long windows; they remained barred until late in the year when they were blown into Curzon Street; the furniture was still under dust sheets when it was splintered and burned.
Sir Joseph Mainwaring was appointed to a position of trust and dignity. He was often to be seen with Generals now and sometimes with an Admiral. “Our first war aim,” he said, “is to keep Italy out of the war until she is strong enough to come in on our side.” He summed up the situation at home by saying, “One takes one’s gas-mask to one’s office but not to one’s club.”
Lady Seal had not troubled him again about Basil. “He’s at Malfrey, helping Barbara with her evacuees,” she said. “The army is very full just at present. Things will be much easier when we have had some casualties.”
Sir Joseph nodded but at heart he was skeptical. There were not going to be many casualties. Why, he had been talking to a very interesting fellow at the Beefsteak who knew a German Professor of History; this Professor was now in England; they thought a great deal of him at the Foreign Office; he said there were fifty million Germans ready to declare peace to-morrow on our own terms. It was just a question of outing those fellows in the government. Sir Joseph had seen many governments outed. It was quite easy in war time—they had outed Asquith quite easily and he was a far better fellow than Lloyd George who succeeded him. Then they outed Lloyd George and then they outed MacDonald. Christopher Seal knew how to do it. He’d soon out Hitler if he were alive and a German.
Poppet Green was in London with her friends.
“Ambrose has turned fascist,” she said.
“Not really?”
“He’s working for the Government in the Ministry of Information and they’ve bribed him to start a new paper.”
“Is it a fascist paper?”
“You bet it is.”
“I heard it was to be called the Ivory Tower.”
“That’s fascist if you like.”
“Escapist.”
“Trotskyist.”
“Ambrose never had the proletarian outlook. I can’t think why we put up with him as we did. Parsnip always said…”
Peter Pastmaster came into Bratt’s wearing battledress and, on his shoulder, the name of a regiment to which he had not formerly belonged.
“Hullo. Why on earth are you dressed like that?”
Peter smirked as only a soldier can when he knows a secret. “Oh, no particular reason.”
“Have they thrown you out of the regiment?”
“I’m seconded, temporarily, for special duty.”
“You’re the sixth chap I’ve seen in disguise this morning.”
“That’s the idea—security, you know.”
“What’s it all about?”
“You’ll hear in time, I expect,” said Peter with boundless smugness.
They went to the bar.
“Good morning, my lord,” said MacDougal, the barman. “I see you’re off to Finland too. Quite a number of our gentlemen are going to-night.”
Angela Lyne was back in London; the affairs of the hospital were in order, her son was at his private school, transported at the outbreak of war from the East coast to the middle of Dartmoor. She sat at the place she called “home” listening to wireless news from Germany.
This place was a service flat and as smart and non-committal as herself, a set of five large rooms high up in the mansard floor of a brand new block in Grosvenor Square. The decorators had been at work there while she was in France; the style was what passes for Empire in the fashionable world. Next year, had there been no war, she would have had it done over again during August.
That morning she had spent an hour with her brokers giving precise, prudent directions for the disposition of her fortune; she had lunched alone, listening to the radio from Europe, after luncheon she had gone alone to the cinema in Curzon Street. It was darkening when she left the cinema and quite dark now outside, beyond the heavy crimson draperies which hung in a dozen opulent loops and folds, girded with gold cord, fringed with gold at the hem, over the new black shutters. Soon she would go out to dine with Margot at the Ritz. Peter was off somewhere and Margot was trying to get a party together for him.
She mixed herself a large cocktail, the principal ingredients were vodka and calvados; the decorators had left an electric shaker on the Pompeian side table. It was their habit to litter the houses where they worked with expensive trifles of this sort; parsimonious clients sent them back; the vaguer sort believed them to be presents for which they had forgotten to thank anyone, used them, broke them and paid for them a year later when the bills came in. Angela liked gadgets. She switched on the electric shaker and, when her drink was mixed, took the glass with her to the bathroom and drank it slowly in her bath.
Angela never drank cocktails except in private; there was something about them which bore, so faintly as to be discernible to no one but herself, a suggestion of good fellowship and good cheer; an infinitely small invitation to familiarity, derived perhaps from the days of prohibition when gin had ceased to be Hogarthian and had become chic; an aura of naughtiness, of felony compounded; a memory of her father’s friends who sometimes had raised their glasses to her, of a man in a ship who had said “à tes beaux yeux.” And so Angela, who hated human contact on any but her own terms, never drank cocktails except in solitude. Lately all her days seemed to be spent alone.
Steam from the bath formed in a mist, and later in great beads of water, on the side of the glass. She finished her cocktail and felt the fumes rise inside her. She lay for a long time in the water, scarcely thinking, scarcely feeling anything except the warm water round her and the spirit within her. She called for her maid, from next door, to bring her a cigarette, smoked it slowly to the end, called for an ash tray and then for a towel. Presently she was ready to face the darkness, and the intense cold, and Margot Metroland’s dinner party. She noticed in the last intense scrutiny before her mirrors that her mouth was beginning to droop a little at the corners. It was not the disappointed pout that she knew in so many of her friends; it was as the droop you sometimes saw in death masks, when the jaw had been set and the face had stiffened in lines which told those waiting round the bed that the will to live was gone.
At dinner she drank Vichy water and talked like a man. She said that France was no good anymore and Peter used a phrase that
was just coming into vogue, accusing her of being “fifth column.” They went on to dance at the Suivi. She danced and drank her Vichy water and talked sharply and well like a very clever man. She was wearing a new pair of ear-rings—an arrow set with a ruby point, the shaft a thin bar of emerald that seemed to transfix the lobe; she had designed them for herself and had called for them that morning on her way home from seeing her man of business. The girls in the party noticed Angela’s ear-rings; they noticed everything about her clothes; she was the best-dressed woman there, as she usually was wherever she went.