Suddenly the forehead was withdrawn, the eyes opened. She saw – the face of Wilfrid. Could he see in – see her peering out from the darkened room? Quivering all over, she let the curtains fall to. Beckon? Let him in? Go out to him? Wave him away? Her heart beat furiously. How long had he been out there – like a ghost? What did he want of her? She dropped Ting-a-ling with a flump, and pressed her hands to her forehead, trying to clear confusion from her brain. And suddenly she stepped forward and flung the curtains apart. No face! Nothing! He was gone! The dark, draughty square – not a soul in it! Had he ever been – or was the face her fancy? But Ting-a-ling! Dogs had no fancies. He had gone back to the fire and settled down again.
‘It’s not my fault,’ she thought passionately. ‘It’s not! I didn’t want him to love me. I only wanted his – his –!’ Again she sank down before the fire. ‘Oh! Ting, have a feeling heart!’ But the Chinese dog, mindful of the flump, made no response.…
Chapter Eleven
COCKED HAT
AFTER missing his vocation with the young man Butterfield, Michael had hesitated in the hall. At last he had not gone upstairs again, but quietly out. He walked past the Houses of Parliament and up Whitehall. In Trafalgar Square, it occurred to him that he had a father. Bart might be at ‘Snooks’, The Coffee House, The Aeroplane; and, with the thought, ‘He’d be restful,’ he sought the most modern of the three.
‘Yes, Sir Lawrence Mont is in the lounge, sir.’
He was sitting with knees crossed, and a cigar between his fingertips, waiting for someone to talk to.
‘Ah! Michael! Can you tell me why I come here?’
‘To wait for the end of the world, sir?’
Sir Lawrence sniggered. ‘An idea,’ he said. ‘When the skies are wrecking civilization, this will be the best-informed tape in London. The wish to be in at the death is perhaps the strongest of our passions, Michael. I should very much dislike being blown up, especially after dinner; but I should still more dislike missing the next show if it’s to be a really good one. The airraids were great fun, after all.’
Michael sighed.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the war got us used to thinking of the millennium, and then it went and stopped, and left the millennium hanging over us. Now we shall never be happy till we get it. Can I take one of your cigars, sir?’
‘My dear fellow! I’ve been reading Frazer again. Extraordinary how remote all superstition seems, now that we’ve reached the ultimate truth: That enlightenment never can prevail.’
Michael stopped the lighting of his cigar.
‘Do you really think that, sir?’
‘What else can one think? Who can have any reasonable doubt now that with the aid of mechanics the head-strong part of man must do him in? It’s an unavoidable conclusion from all recent facts. “Per ardua ad astra,” “Through hard knocks we shall see stars.”’
‘But it’s always been like that, sir, and here we are alive?’
‘They say so, but I doubt it. I fancy we’re really dead, Michael. I fancy we’re only living in the past. I don’t think – no, I don’t think we can be said to expect a future. We talk of it, but I hardly think we hope for one. Underneath our protestations we subconsciously deduce. From the mess we’ve made of it these last ten years, we can feel the far greater mess we shall make of it in the next thirty. Human nature can argue the hind legs off a donkey, but the donkey will be four-legged at the end of the discussion.’
Michael sat down suddenly and said:
‘You’re a bad, bold Bart.’
Sir Lawrence smiled.
‘I should be glad to think that men really believed in humanity, and all that, but you know they don’t – they believe in novelty and getting their own way. With rare exceptions they’re still monkeys, especially the scientific variety; and when you put gunpowder and a lighted match into the paws of monkeys, they blow themselves up to see the fun. Monkeys are only safe when deprived of means to be otherwise.’
‘Lively, that!’ said Michael.
‘Not livelier than the occasion warrants, my dear boy. I’ve been thinking. We’ve got a member here who knows a trick worth twenty of any played in the war – an extraordinarily valuable fellow. The Government have got their eye on him. He’ll help the other valuable fellows in France and Germany and America and Russia to make history. Between them, they’ll do something really proud – something that’ll knock all the other achievements of man into a cocked hat. By the way, Michael, new device of “Homo sapiens” – the cocked hat.’