I was not a good social servant, got on only indifferently well with fierce young adolescents from the slums and thoroughly disliked every moment I spent in the Mission. But it was precisely for that reason that I stuck to the job. Once or twice, even, I consented to join in the morris dancing in my mother’s garden. I was making myself worthy—for what? I hardly know. The possibility of marriage seemed almost infinitely remote; and somehow I hardly desired it. I was fitting myself to go on loving and loving, and incidentally to do great things.
Then came the war. From France I wrote her a letter, in which I told her all the things I had lacked the power to say in her presence. I sent the letter to the only address I knew—she had left it years before—not expecting, not even hoping very much, that she would receive it. I wrote it for my own satisfaction, in order to make explicit all that I felt. I had no doubt that I should soon be dead. It was a letter addressed not so much to a woman as to God, a letter of explanation and apology posted to the universe.
In the winter of 1916 I was wounded. At the end of my spell in hospital I was reported unfit for further active service and appointed to a post in the contracts department of the Air Board. I was put in charge of chemicals, celluloid, rubber tubing, castor oil, linen and balloon fabrics. I spent my time haggling with German Jews over the price of chemicals and celluloid, with Greek brokers over the castor oil, with Ulstermen over the linen. Spectacled Japanese came to visit me with samples of crêpe de Chine which they tried to persuade me—and they offered choice cigars—would be both better and cheaper than cotton for the manufacture of balloons. Of every one of the letters I dictated first eleven, then seventeen, and finally, when the department had flowered to the height of its prosperity, twenty-two copies were made, to be noted and filed by the various sub-sections of the ministry concerned.
The Hotel Cecil was filled with clerks. In basements two stories down beneath the surface of the ground, in attics above the level of the surrounding chimney-pots, hundreds of young women tapped away at typewriters. In a subterranean ball-room, that looked like the setting for Belshazzar’s feast, a thousand cheap lunches were daily consumed. In the hotel’s best bedrooms overlooking the Thames sat the professional civil servants of long standing with letters after their names, the big business men who were helping to win the war, the staff officers. A fleet of very large motor cars waited for them in the courtyard. Sometimes, when I entered the office of a morning, I used to imagine myself a visitor from Mars. . . .
One morning—it was after I had been at the Air Board for several months—I found myself faced with a problem which could only be solved after consultation with an expert in the Naval Department. The naval people lived in the range of buildings on the opposite side of the courtyard from that in which our offices were housed. It was only after ten minutes of labyrinthine wanderings that I at last managed to find the man I was looking for. He was a genial fellow, I remember; asked me how I liked Bolo House (which was the nickname among the knowing of our precious Air Board office), gave me an East Indian cheroot and even offered whiskey and soda. After that we settled down to a technical chat about non-inflammable celluloid. I left him at last, much enlightened.
‘So long,’ he called after me. ‘And if ever you want to know any mortal thing about acetone or any other kind of bloody dope, come to me and I’ll tell you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And if by any chance you should happen to want to know about Apollonius Rhodius, shall we say, or Chaucer, or the history of the three-pronged fork . . .’
He roared very heartily. ‘I’ll come to you,’ he concluded.
Still laughing, I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the corridor. A young woman was hurrying past with a thick bundle of papers in her hand, humming softly as she went. Startled by my sudden emergence, she turned and looked at me. As though with fear, my heart gave a sudden thump, then seemed to stop for a moment altogether, seemed to drop down within me.
‘Barbara!’
At the sound of the name she halted and looked at me with that steady unwavering gaze between the narrowed eyelids that I knew so well. A little frown appeared on her forehead; puzzled, she pursed her lips. Then all at once her face brightened, she laughed; the light in the dark eyes joyously quivered and danced.
‘Why, it’s Francis Chelifer,’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know you for the first minute. You’ve changed.’
‘You haven’t,’ I said. ‘You’re just the same.’
She said nothing, but smiled, close-lipped, and from between her lashes looked at me as though from an ambush. In her young maturity she was more beautiful than ever. Whether I was glad or sorry to see her again, I hardly know. But I do know that I was moved, profoundly; I was shaken and troubled out of whatever equanimity I possessed. That memory of a kind of symbolic loveliness for which and by which I had been living all these years was now reincarnated and stood before me, no longer a symbol, but an individual; it was enough to make one feel afraid.
‘I thought you were in South Africa,’ I went on. ‘Which is almost the same as saying I thought you didn’t exist.’
‘I came home a year ago.’
‘And you’ve been working here ever since?’
Barbara nodded.
‘And you’re working in Bolo House too?’ she asked.
‘For the last six months.’
‘Well I never! And to think we never met before! But how small the world is—how absurdly small.’
We met for luncheon.
‘Did you get my letter?’ I summoned up courage to ask her over the coffee.
Barbara nodded. ‘It was months and months on its way,’ she said; and I did not know whether she made the remark deliberately, in order to stave off for a moment the inevitable discussion of the letter, or if she made it quite spontaneously and without afterthought, because she found it interesting that the letter should have been so long on its way. ‘It went to South Africa and back again,’ she explained.
‘Did you read it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you understand what I meant?’ As I asked the question I wished that I had kept silence. I was afraid of what the answer might be.
She nodded and said nothing, looking at me mysteriously, as though she had a secret and profound comprehension of everything.
‘It was something almost inexpressible,’ I said. Her look encouraged me to go on. ‘Something so deep and so vast that there were no words to describe it. You understood? You really understood?’
Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said: ‘Men are always silly about me. I don’t know why.’
I looked at her. Could she really have uttered those words? She was still smiling as life itself might smile. And at that moment I had a horrible premonition of what I was going to suffer. Nevertheless I asked how soon I might see her again. To-night? Could she dine with me to-night? Barbara shook her head; this evening she was engaged. What about lunch to-morrow? ‘I must think.’ And she frowned, she pursed her lips. No, she remembered in the end, to-morrow was no good. Her first moment of liberty was at dinner-time two days later.
I returned to my work that afternoon feeling particularly Martian. Eight thick files relating to the Imperial Cellulose Company lay on my desk. My secretary showed me the experts’ report on proprietary brands of castor oil, which had just come in. A rubber tubing man was particularly anxious to see me. And did I still want her to get a trunk call through to Belfast about that linen business? Pensively I listened to what she was saying. What was it all for?
‘Are men often silly about you, Miss Masson?’ it suddenly occurred to me to ask. I looked up at my secretary, who was waiting for me to answer her questions and tell her what to do.
Miss Masson became surprisingly red and laughed in an embarrassed, unnatural way. ‘Why, no,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m an ugly duckling.’ And she added: ‘It’s rather a relief. But what makes you ask?’
She had reddish hair, bobbed and curly, a very white skin and brown eyes. About twenty-three, I supposed; and she wasn’t an ugly duckling at all. I had never talked to her except about business, and seldom looked at her closely, contenting myself with being merely aware that she was there—a secretary, most efficient.
‘What makes you ask?’ A strange expression that was like a look of terror came into Miss Masson’s eyes.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Curiosity. Perhaps you’ll see if you can get me through to Belfast some time in the afternoon. And tell the rubber tubing man that I can’t possibly see him.’
Miss Masson’s manner changed. She smiled at me efficiently, secretarially. Her eyes became quite
