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By Root 542 0

house in a remote part of England likely to be free from bombing. There she could accommodate up to eighteen children between the ages of two and seven. The children came not only from poor homes but also from unfortunate ones. They were orphans, or illegitimate children whose mothers had no intention of being evacuated with them and who were bored with looking after them. Children from homes where they had been ill-treated and neglected. Three or four of the children were cripples. For orthopaedic treatment she engaged as well as a staff of domestic workers, a Swedish masseuse and two fully trained hospital nurses. The whole thing was done not only on a comfortable but on a luxurious basis. Once he remonstrated with her.

“You mustn’t forget, Rachel, these children will have to go back to the background from which we took them. You mustn’t make it too difficult for them.”

She had replied warmly:

“Nothing’s too good for these poor mites. Nothing!”

He had urged, “Yes, but they’ve got to go back, remember.”

But she had waved that aside. “It mayn’t be necessary. It may—we’ll have to see in the future.”

The exigencies of war had soon brought changes. The hospital nurses, restive at looking after perfectly healthy children when there was real nursing work to be done, had frequently to be replaced. In the end one elderly hospital nurse and Kirsten Lindstrom were the only two left. The domestic help failed and Kirsten Lindstrom had come to the rescue there also. She had worked with great devotion and selflessness.

And Rachel Argyle had been busy and happy. There had been, Leo remembered, moments of occasional bewilderment. The day when Rachel, puzzled at the way one small boy, Micky, was slowly losing weight, his appetite failing, had called in the doctor. The doctor could find nothing wrong but had suggested to Mrs. Argyle that the child might be homesick. Quickly she’d rebuffed the idea.

“That’s impossible! You don’t know the home he has come from. He was knocked about, ill-treated. It must have been hell for him.”

“All the same,” Dr. MacMaster had said, “all the same, I shouldn’t be surprised, The thing is to get him to talk.”

And one day Micky had talked. Sobbing in his bed, he cried out, pushing Rachel away with his fists:

“I want to go home. I want to go home to our Mom and our Ernie.”

Rachel was upset, almost incredulous.

“He can’t want his mother. She didn’t care tuppence for him. She knocked him about whenever she was drunk.”

And he had said gently: “But you’re up against nature, Rachel. She is his mother and he loves her.”

“She was no kind of a mother!”

“He is her own flesh and blood. That’s what he feels. That’s what nothing can replace.”

And she had answered: “But by now, surely he ought to look on me as his mother.”

Poor Rachel, thought Leo. Poor Rachel, who could buy so many things … Not selfish things, not things for herself; who could give to unwanted children love, care, a home. All these things she could buy for them, but not their love for her.

Then the war had ended. The children had begun to drift back to London, claimed by parents or relatives. But not all of them. Some of them had remained unwanted and it was then that Rachel had said:

“You know, Leo, they’re like our own children now. This is the moment when we can have a real family of our own. Four—five of these children can stay with us. We’ll adopt them, provide for them and they’ll really be our children.”

He had felt a vague uneasiness, why he did not quite know. It was not that he objected to the children, but he had felt instinctively the falseness of it. The assumption that it was easy to make a family of one’s own by artificial means.

“Don’t you think,” he had said, “that it’s rather a risk?”

But she had replied:

“A risk? What does it matter if it is a risk? It’s worth doing.”

Yes, he supposed it was worth doing, only he was not quite as sure as she was. By now he had grown so far away, so aloof in some cold misty region of his own, that it was not in him to object. He said as he had said so many times:

“You must do as