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By Root 5668 0

being gentle, purely sorry for her As it was, he got up briskly, and not only got up but put. back his chair where it came from, flat with some inches of wall, to show that this conversation was closed for good. And the effect this cost him, the final end of something, made his firm action seem more callous than sad. To stop any weakening pause, he kept on moving—picked up his two brushes, absently but competently started to brush his hair. So that Portia, watching him, had all in that moment a view of his untouched masculine privacy, of that grave abstractedness with which each part of his toilet would go on being performed. Unconscious, he could not have made plainer his determination always to live alone. Clapping the brushes together, he put them down with a clatter that made them both start. "I'm sure you will cook," he said, "I'm all in favour of it. But not for some years yet, and not, I'm afraid, for me."

"I suppose I should not have asked you," Portia said—not confusedly but in a considering tone.

"I feel pleased," he admitted. "In fact, it set me up no end. But you think too much of me, and not enough of what I'm trying to say. And, at the finish of this, what I still ask you to do, is: forget this and go home." He dared hardly look at the eiderdown, under which he still heard no stir. "It's not a question of doing the best youcan do, it's a question of doing the only thing possible."

Portia, by folding her arms over it tightly, locked the eiderdown, her last shelter, to her chest. "That will do no good, Major Brutt. They will not know what to say."

"Well, let's hear what they do say. Why not give them a chance?" He paused, bit his upper lip under his moustache, and added: "I'll come with you, of course."

"I can see you don't really want to. Why?"

"I don't like to spring this on them—your just turning up with me, I mean, when they've had hours to worry. I've got to telephone—Why, you know," he added, "they'll be calling out the police, the fire brigade."

"Well, if you so much want to, you may tell them I'm with you. But, please, you are not to tell them I'm going back. That will all have to depend."

"Oh, it will, will it? On what?"

"On what they do then."

"Well, let me tell them you're safe."

Without any further comment, she turned over and put her hand under her cheek. Her detachment made her seem to abandon being a woman—she was like one of those children in an Elizabethan play who are led on, led off, hardly speak and are known to be bound for some tragic fate which will be told in a line; they do not appear again; their existence, their point of view has had, throughout, an unreality. At the same time, her body looked like some drifting object that has been lodged for a moment, by some trick of the current, under a bank, but must be dislodged again and go on twirling down the implacable stream. He picked up her hat and hung it on the end of the bed: as he did this, she said: "You'll come back when you've telephoned?"

"You will wait, like a good girl?"

"If you'll come back, I will wait."

"And I'll tell them that you are here."

"And you'll tell me what they do then."

He took one more look round the darkening room with her in it, then went out, shut the door, started down to go to the telephone—his somnambulist's walk a little bit speeded up, as though by some bad dream from which he still must not wake. As he went down flight after flight he saw her face on the pillow, and saw in a sleep-bound way how specious wisdom was. One's sentiments—call them that—one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realise their power. That betrayal is the end of an inner life, without which the everyday becomes threatening or meaningless. At the back of the spirit a mysterious landscape, whose perspective used to be infinite, suddenly perishes: this is like being cut off from the country for ever, not even meeting its breath down the city street.

Major Brutt had a mind that did not articulate: he felt, simply,