ALINE GURTNER had been more than pleased when she received Lady Grote’s telegram proposing a visit: she was entranced, for this was precisely the sort of person whom she most wanted in her house just now. During the past fortnight she had been trying to secure a gentle, cheerful trickle of visitors there, but refusals had come in rather disconcerting numbers. She could not get the tap to run. It was quite true, of course, that everyone was very busy, and that such an allegation as reason for regret might very likely be true, but she had begun to be vaguely uneasy that it was not going to be reserved for her to declare her sympathies and show an adoring England how intensely pro-English she was, but that her English friends were proceeding to demonstrate their own sympathies by omitting to flock to her biddings. As a matter of fact, her apprehensions were entirely ill-founded; such people as she had asked—they included members of the Government who really were not completely at leisure just now—had merely been too much occupied to spend perfectly idle days in the country. But the sequence of regrets had made her a little nervous. It was also unkind of people, who should have realized how beautifully she was behaving and how she felt{226} the war, not to crowd round her and comfort her and praise her and admire her.
She ran to announce to her husband this gratifying intelligence that Helen Grote proposed herself. Sir Hermann had successfully concluded the financial operations which he had planned on the night of Aline’s great party, when he gnawed his nails, while the drowsy world still slept to the imminence of war, and had netted even more than the half-million he had anticipated. Now, in the economical bouleversement that had occurred, when good businesses were tottering and sound credits upset, he was content to look serenely on, and wonder, as so often before, how it was that so many people seemed to make a point of being just too late when they decided on action. So many of his acquaintances, heads of firms in the city, had, on that Saturday when he was so busy, taken the day off as usual, put on knickerbockers and played golf. Now it was his turn for the knickerbockers, while they slaved all day in their offices trying to avert shipwreck, or if, as in so many cases, shipwreck had occurred, to pick up such bits of their cargoes as the storm washed ashore. Meantime the options in colliery shares and shipping which he had bought in England were maturing very satisfactorily, and he was quite happy to wait and observe this mellowing process with the same sense of well-earned leisure with which he had been strolling round the kitchen garden that morning, and observing the pears ripening on the red-brick walls. Some were ripe already, and he was eating one that he had picked when Aline came in.
“My dear, Helen Grote has proposed to come and stay with us,” she cried. “Is not that delightful of her?”
He did not care two straws whether Lady Grote{227} came or not, for when he was not at work he knew of no better mode of life than to be with Aline and the children. But the news evidently pleased Aline: she had not looked so radiant since the day when he had playfully come into her bedroom with all the sables on, and asked her if she liked his new suit. What a good joke that had been!
“I am very well satisfied to have my Aline and my imps,” said he, “but I am pleased that your friend will come.”
“Of course you are, darling,” said she. “It is just what I want. I will take care to send a little paragraph to the Morning Post. And I was writing only this morning to Mr. Boyton: I think I will telegraph instead, and ask him to come for the Sunday anyhow. I hope he will stop longer, and then you must take him out shooting. There is shooting in September, isn’t there?”
“And do you forget the fat partridges your Jaeger shot for you yesterday?” he asked.
As a matter of fact the keeper had shot them, but Sir Hermann had been out shooting, though without the success he so easily attained into other lines. He was dressed now in homespun and knickerbockers and stockings with a sort of frill round the tops which reminded the observer of the decoration of crackers.
“Are you going to shoot to-day?” she asked.
“No; cannot you see that I have my golfing clothes on? I have gaiters on when I shoot, and thick boots. I am going to see the bailiff now and after lunch I shall play golf. Upon my word, this English country life with plenty of exercise and good fruit like this from my own garden is just as beneficial to me as Marienbad. There is no longer a trace of acidity in all me! I am your sweet Hermann.{228}”
Mr. Boyton, whether or no owing to the information that Lady Grote would be a fellow-guest, was delighted to reply favourably on the prepaid form his hostess provided him with, and the two arrived that evening, in an express that Sir Hermann had stopped for them at Ashmore Fen station. This was a privilege appertaining to the owner of Ashmore House, and it gave him considerable pleasure to exercise it, for it conveyed a sense of territorial rights. Aline went to the station to meet them (in the negligent country costume of a cotton dress and a tam-o’-shanter in which she occasionally hit the turf with a golf club), with the sables lying handy to put on in case she was chilly. True to her English policy, she was very voluble about the war, and her sympathies with regard to it.
“Dearest Helen,” she said, “it was too sweet of you to propose yourself; how-d’ye-do, Mr. Boyton, very pleased you were able to come. Have you brought a gun with you? No? Hermann will lend you one. And have you brought us the evening papers, Helen? We are so terribly out of the world here, just when one wants every moment to hear the latest possible news. I wish you had been able to bring Robin with you, but of course he is with his regiment now. How proud you must be of him. Sure you’ve got all your luggage out? because it will be whirled away to Lincoln if you haven’t, for the train doesn’t stop here unless Hermann sends an order. Oh, I must speak to the station master a moment. He had news yesterday that his son was killed, and I must tell him how sorry I am. Poor fellow, he was only eighteen! Is it not heart-breaking, though of course it’s wonderful to be young and fighting for your country.”
She bound up the broken-hearted with a few bright words, promised to send a brace of partridges to his{229} wife, thought how wonderful she was, and rejoined the others.
“Prepare yourself for a humdrum life, Helen,” she said—“oh, yes, just give me my fur coat, Mr. Boyton, for I have only got a cotton frock on; yes, nice aren’t they? Hermann gave me them the other day—for there’s no one here but Hermann and the children, and yet somehow I’m as busy as ever I was in town. One has to read every word of the papers now-a-days, and the news is a little more encouraging, isn’t it? You never saw anyone so depressed as Hermann and I were during the retreat: how thankful you must have been that Robin was not in that. Yes, now we’re in the avenue: there’s the house at the end. I declare I feel as if I had been born here, there’s such a sense of home about it. I long for the war to be over: do you think we shall all be happy again by Christmas? It was touch and go, was it not, whether Paris fell?”
This was not precisely the kind of diversion for which Helen Grote had sought refuge in the country, and she tried to stem this flow of patriotism.
“My dear, what wonderful sables!” she said. “You do have the most beautiful things. They’re Russian, I suppose.”
“Yes, and is it not wonderful the way the Russians are getting on? They’re pouring into Galicia, aren’t they? I see the papers call them the steam-roller pounding along to Berlin. Fancy seeing the Russian troops marching down the Unter den Linden. And what is your war-work being, Mr. Boyton?”
Mr. Boyton was, for the time being, much in the same state as Lady Grote, desiring merely, with such powers of purpose as were left in a stunned mind, to escape, as far as possible, from all thoughts and mention of the war. All his autumn plans had been upset:{230} his carefully arranged September and October with their succession of country-house parties had collapsed like a card-house, and instead he was obliged to spend those months at home in Hampstead.
London, it is true, was very full, but all his friends were busy, like Lady Massingberd, over funds and associations and societies for purposes of providing luxuries or necessities for soldiers and sailors, and were not thinking of him at all, or giving him those little luncheon-parties and dinner-parties which were the light and decoration of his life. His engagement-book, and therefore his existence, was empty, and this eternal monotony of war-talk was bringing him sensibly nearer melancholia. He had accepted this invitation to Lady Gurtner’s with enthusiasm, thinking that this house, with its conflicting interests of blood, would at least be an oasis in the sea of windy patriots, and here was his hostess quite unable to get off the subject of the war, and expecting him to go out shooting with her husband. He hated and distrusted fire-arms, never knowing what they would do next; but Lady Gurtner, more English than the English, was expecting every man to be employed in war-work, and if he was too old to shoot Germans at the front, to occupy his leisure in shooting birds in the turnips. He answered her as with a playful touch of a cat’s velvet paw, in which the claws are conjectured though not quite visible.
“Dear lady,” he said, “my war-work at the moment is to keep an English citizen sane, that citizen being myself. I thought it would be the best possible treatment for me to come down to your delicious and sequestered glades. May we forget for a little that there is anything in the world beyond this adorable domain of yours? I even shrink from the thought of shooting:{231} there is a hint of destruction and death connected with it. I should be exceedingly unlikely to destroy anything except perhaps a beater or two, but when, as I gather, we need men so badly, I should be sorry to do even that. Peace and plenty! Let us take that for our text.”
Oddly enough, the moment that he uttered sentiments which were so completely in accord with Helen Grote’s purpose in coming here, she felt herself disowning them as regards her own part, and disdaining them as regards his. It was really awful that a man should speak like that. Imagine Robin or her husband, who worked all day in the censor’s office, uttering these bloodless, boudoir sentiments! On the other hand, Aline’s war-talk was not a whit preferable, and it had been Aline’s war-talk that had provoked this polished little tirade. But whatever its demerits, it had the one merit of sincerity, whereas she had experienced a slight difficulty in accepting the complete genuineness of Aline’s rapture at the thought of the Russians marching down the avenues of Berlin. But there was no need for the moment of steering a fresh course, for they drew up at the great red-brick portico of the house. A big climbing-rose sprawled over it: bees hummed in the flower-beds, it basked in the serene afternoon sun.
The place, when the mortgage was foreclosed by Sir Hermann, had belonged to some cousins of Helen’s: there were early memories connected with its shabby distinction: the fragrance of long-forgotten things was wafted out of its cool portals.
“Ah, how delicious,” she said. “I quite share your feeling of being at home here, Aline. And here is Sir Hermann.”
He came out of the hall to meet them, dressed in his{232} golfing clothes which Aline had so mistakenly supposed to be a shooting-suit. He carried a golf club over his shoulder in the manner of a gun, and his homespun pockets bulged with balls. He looked like a biting caricature of an English squire as seen on the stage of a Parisian music-hall. From the hall inside came the cries and laughter of the children, who were seated on a rug which Freddy pulled across the slippery marble floor. Bertie, who when excited always talked German, was starting him with an “Ein, zwei, drei”....
“Come and say how-do-you-do at once to Lady Grote,” called their mother, and the three jolly little boys ran out into the porch.
“Ah, my chicks,” said Lady Gurtner, “have you been having a nice game? And did I hear you talking German? For shame! Yes, the right hand, Jackie, and shake hands with Mr. Boyton, too. Let us go straight out through the house, Helen, and have tea in the garden, where it will be ready.”
“And you have brought fresh news and good, I hope, Lady Grote?” asked Sir Hermann, who was ignorant of Mr. Boyton’s pursuit of sanity. “What was the report from France this morning?”
Aline took his arm in hers.
“Now, Hermann,” she said, “we’ve settled to leave the war alone and pretend there’s nothing going on. Won’t that be nice? Look, Helen, I told you we had made an Italian hall. Does it not look deliciously cool on this hot day?”
“Cool, yes: cooling room,” said Boyton below his breath. The powerful resemblance to a Turkish bath could scarcely be missed.
Helen looked round, was stunned, and recovered.
“How perfectly gorgeous, dear Aline,” she said.{233} “Perfectly gorgeous! I never saw anything so magnificent.”
This was quite true, it also convinced, and as it was no good getting anyone to sit down on the cunning hot-water pipes, since the central heating was not on, they went on past the cunning lift and through the most velvety drawing-room on to the lawn, where in a tent that flew a flag emblazoned with the Gurtner arms lately discovered by the Heralds’ College, tea was waiting.
There was a good deal of admiration that must be expended over the tidiness with which Freddy ate his bread and jam, and the neatness with which Bertie tucked his napkin in, and the propriety with which Jackie said his grace, but anyhow these were subjects right away from the war-zone. Gradually, thanks to the unconscious youth of the children, and the mellow stability of the house, the three hundred years old lawn, the ordered and secure serenity of trees and stretch of sun-hazed pastures, something of the peaceful outlook made feint of returning, and Mr. Boyton felt that the treatment suited the British citizen of whom he was in charge....
“And you will shoot with me to-morrow?” asked Sir Hermann suddenly, not knowing that sport as well as war was abhorrent to his guest’s mind. “I can show you some good sport among my turnips.”
For a moment Aline forgot her Englishness and spoke in German.
“Dearest, Mr. Boyton does not care for sport,” she said. “We will eat your partridges when you have killed them.”
For no very sound reason the “language of song” came as a slight shock to Helen Grote. She was perfectly well aware that the Gurtners spoke German to{234} each other as often as English, but she did not expect to hear it just now. It rather altered the values of the setting. She covered it up, not too hurriedly, but did not fail to see the frown of admonition which Sir Hermann gave his wife.
“Yes, Mr. Boyton is one of those who does not want to kill something just because it is a fine day,” she said.
That would not do: there was the mention of killing again.
“And how are your partridges doing, Sir Hermann?” she added.
The two men presently strolled away, for though Mr. Boyton would not shoot, Sir Hermann was quite determined that he should appreciate the pursuits of an English country gentleman like himself to the extent at any rate of looking at his Jersey cows and poking a pig in the back, and when he was gone, Aline supposed that the embargo on war-talk was removed and began again.
“It seems so odd to me,” she said, “that any Englishman can bear to be doing nothing at a time like this. I am delighted that Mr. Boyton could come, of course, but I fully expected to find that he was immersed in work of some sort. Hermann has been splendid. He gave fifty thousand pounds only yesterday to the Red Cross, and his subscriptions to the county funds—well, there is simply no counting them. I tell him he will reduce us all to beggary, but he says, ‘Well, so much the better. Who wants to be rich, when there is so great a need for money?’ And he’s going to change our name to Gardner, which is so English, is it not, and so much better represents all we feel!”
Somehow to Helen Grote these very proper sentiments{235} were worse than the war-talk she had come here to avoid. It was not exactly that she doubted the sincerity of Aline’s protestations, though she certainly protested rather too much; indeed she more felt the callousness of Aline, so largely German both by birth and association, being able to cut clean away from German sympathies. She could have understood her being torn in two by conflicting strains, she could have felt for her in a situation which surely must have been almost intolerable, but what she could not comprehend was the apparent absence of any such situation at all. She ought to have been miserable: instead she was a happy savage John Bull.
Aline’s big blue eyes filled with the tears that lay less deep even than her words.
“And to think how happy and secure we all felt such a few weeks ago,” she said. “Do you remember that little party I gave with the German and French Ambassadors and Princess Eleanor, when Saalfeld conducted and Kuhlmann sang? How little any of us dreamed of the trouble that was coming.”
At that moment there suddenly leaped into Helen Grote’s mind, with a sense of significance, the sentence in Kuhlmann’s letter, “I need but say that I trust the hospitable Sir Gurtner’s judgment more than that of the German Ambassador.” It had never before occurred to her to correlate it, to feel any curiosity as to its place. But when Aline, referring to the night of the party so few hours before Kuhlmann’s departure, said that no one had dreamed of coming trouble she wondered to what this referred. Kuhlmann had certainly learned Sir Hermann’s view of the situation before he wrote that letter.
“But your husband guessed what was coming, didn’t he?” she asked. “He took a different view from{236} that abominable old Ambassador, who thought we were going to let treaties be torn up, just as Germany chose, without stirring a finger?”
Aline remembered the interview she had had with her husband late that night, and his general injunction as to secrecy. By his private information with the aid of his own foresight he had sown a golden harvest while the world still slept, but surely it was impossible that this was matter of common knowledge. She saw she must be careful, a precaution that usually ends in being too careful.
“Ah, no, it came like a thunderclap to Hermann,” she said. “He was simply knocked down by it.”
Helen had not the slightest reason to make a mystery of her information.
“Yes, dear Aline,” she said. “All I meant was, when did the thunderclap come? Your party—how well I remember it—was on a Thursday, and Kuhlmann left for Germany on the Saturday, while we were still all drowsy and comfortable. But he left me a little note of adieu, and said in it that he had gone because he trusted Sir Hermann’s judgment more than the Ambassador’s.”
Aline in her desire to be careful was full of protestations.
“I had no idea of it at all,” she said volubly. “Hermann hadn’t given me the slightest clue that he was uneasy till we all knew that war was inevitable. How proud I was of being English when that splendid ultimatum went out that England would not tolerate the breaking of the treaty. But are you sure he said anything to Kuhlmann? I expect somebody else spoke to him: probably he got it mixed up and meant to say that he trusted the German Ambassador’s judgment more than Hermann’s.{237}”
Instantly she saw that would not do, since now everyone was aware that the Ambassador had clung to the belief that England would not intervene, and from carefulness made things a shade worse.
“I remember he talked to us that night,” she said, “and was terribly pessimistic about the whole situation.”
Helen could not help remembering that only just now Aline had said that on that night nobody dreamed of trouble. There was clearly some little confusion somewhere, though not probably Kuhlmann’s, and she had not the smallest desire to investigate it. People get muddled over dates—she always did herself—and she attempted to slide off the topic. Little as she wanted to talk about the war at all, she thought she would make some violently anti-German remark, such as Aline would appreciate, in order to put the muddle away.
“It’s odd how little Germans can appreciate the psychology of honourable and civilized people,” she said. “The Ambassador, for instance, as I said, thought we were going to see a treaty torn up and not stir a finger.”
Now Aline was quite capable in the pursuit of her Englishness of making that identical remark herself, but when she heard it made by an Englishwoman she revolted against it.
“But it was life and death to Germany,” she said. “She had to invade Belgium! Her promise couldn’t be held to bind her. And they say that France really invaded Belgium first.”
The two were now thoroughly at cross-purposes. Helen Grote, in her private reflections that morning, had been equally loose in her conception of a promise, seeing therein only a temporary obligation to suit certain circumstances. But now when she heard{238} that doctrine stated she saw its abominable falsity. Even though the outcome of that for her intimately was that Robin must soon go out to uphold the sacredness of a promise, she repudiated with scorning her own conclusion of the morning. She got up.
“My dear Aline,” she said, “that is the sort of thing one is tempted to think, and is ashamed of having thought. Why the whole English case, which you and I feel in our bones, is based on the negative of that. As for people saying that France invaded Belgium first, that is what Berlin says to Potsdam, and Potsdam to Berlin. And how unspeakable those accounts of German atrocities in Belgium are. But don’t let us talk about it: I so longed in London to get away from it all. May we have a stroll round your delicious garden? How well I remember it.”
In spite of Helen Grote’s expressed desire to get away from the thought of the war, Aline could not let that remark about German atrocities pass unchallenged. Once again, as on the Sunday at Cambridge with Robin, she spoke before she knew she had spoken.
“Oh, those infamous lies,” she said. “The Germans are incapable of such brutality. It is wicked of the English papers to publish such things.”
“Anyhow, do not let us think about them,” said Helen. “Surely we can forget it all for a little in this home of peace. The rose-garden: do let me see your new rose-garden.”
The rose-garden served its purpose for a while, but as they came back, in the gathering dusk across the lawn, once again the topic intruded itself.
“I must go up and see the children,” said Aline, “before they go to bed. Every night they all sing a verse of ‘God save the King.’ Isn’t that darling of them?{239}”
She omitted to state that this was a very recent practice, and perhaps she had better not have alluded to it at all, for the nursery windows were thrown wide open just above them, and, on the moment, the first few bars of the “Watch by the Rhine” came floating out in shrill childish trebles. It stopped quite suddenly and howls succeeded.
“I must run in,” said Aline. “Yes, darlings, Mummie is coming to you now,” she called out.
She hurried off; presently the howlings ceased, and the more orthodox strains were uplifted. It was ludicrous enough, but Helen felt it was just a shade uncomfortable also. She would have liked a clearer view of what was going on in poor Aline’s breast. She could have understood so well the frank admission of torn and shredded sympathies: what was harder to comprehend was this intense desire to appear wholly English. And Aline’s subsequent appearance and explanation did not really elucidate matters. As usual, when everything was not going precisely as she wished it, her eyes were bright and brimming.
“I must really get rid of the children’s nurse,” she said. “She scolded them for singing the ‘Watch by the Rhine,’ and called them horrid little Huns. You cannot expect children to know all that is going on.”
But again Helen found herself in some little perplexity of mind. Was Aline’s indignation with her children’s nurse entirely due to the fact of her having called them Huns? Or did the fact that she had, by implication, called the Germans “horrid Huns” have anything to do with it? She began to feel rather more interested in the analysis of Aline’s state of mind.
Though the party at dinner only consisted of the four of them, with the ............