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By Root 5684 0

Thomas had come through the foyer, spoken about the taxi, put his hand under Anna's elbow with a possessing smile. That was the shock (though she had first said she was married), and it was a shock still. That one great evening—hers, Pidgeon's, his own—had made one continuous thread through his own uncertain days. He would recall it at times when he felt low. Anna's marriage to Pidgeon had been one great thing he had to look forward to. When Pidgeon kept saying nothing, and still said nothing, Major Brutt only thought they were waiting a long time. There is no fidelity like the fidelity of the vicarious lover who has once seen a kiss. By being married to Thomas, for having been married to Thomas for eight London years, Anna annihilated a great part of Major Brutt. He thought, from her unhappily calm smile in the Empire foyer, that she must see what she had done to him; he had taken some of her kindness for penitence. When later, back in her home, she with her woman's good manners had led him to talk of Pidgeon, their sole mutual friend, she had laid waste still more. He had not known how to bear it when she spoke of Pidgeon and the plate and the orange. Only Portia's presence made him bear it at all.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do. It is the emotion to which we remain faithful, after all: we are taught to recover it in some other place. Major Brutt, brought that first night to Windsor Terrace at the height of his inner anguish on Pidgeon's account, already began to attach himself to that warm room. For hospitality, and that little girl on the rug, he began to abandon Pidgeon already. Even he had a ruthlessness in his sentiments—and he had been living alone in a Cromwell Road hotel. The glow on the rug, Anna on the sofa with her pretty feet up, Thomas nosing so kindly round for cigars, Portia nursing her elbows as though they had been a couple of loved cats—here was the focus of the necessary dream. All the same it was Thomas he, still, could not quite away with. He hoped, by taking Thomas's cigarette, by being a little further in debt to him, to feel more naturally to him, as man to man.

He looked on Thomas as someone who held the prize. But in this darkening light of Saturday afternoon, loneliness lay on his study like a cloud. The tumbled papers, the ash, the empty coffee-cup made Pidgeon's successor look untriumphant, as though he had never held any prize. Even the fire only grinned, like a fire in an advertisement. Major Brutt, whose thought could puzzle out nothing, had, in regard to people, a sort of sense of the weather. He was aware of the tension behind Thomas's manners, of the uneasy and driven turnings of his head. Without nerves, Major Brutt had those apprehensions that will make an animal suddenly leave, or refuse to enter, a room. Was Pidgeon in here with them, overtowering Thomas, while Thomas did the honours to Pidgeon's friend? He had decided to smoke, so he pulled at his cigarette, reflecting the fire in his fixed, pebble-grey eyes. He saw that he ought to go soon—but not yet.

Thomas, meanwhile, gave a finished representation of a man happily settling into a deep chair. He gave, inadvertently, one overstated yawn, then had to say, to excuse this: "It's too bad, Anna's not in."

"Oh well, of course I chanced that. Just dropping in."

"It's too bad Portia's not in. I've no idea where she's gone."

"I daresay she goes about quite a bit?"

"No, not really. Not yet. She's a bit young."

"There's something sweet about her, if I may say so," said Major Brutt, lighting up.

"Yes, there is, rather.... She's my sister, you know."

"That's awfully nice."

"Or rather, my half sister."

"Comes to much the same thing."

"Does it?" said Thomas. "Yes, I suppose