Part 14 (1/2)

The telephone was in the bedroom, not by the bedside--for such a situation had its inconveniences--but in the farthest corner, between the window and the washstand. As she went to the telephone she was preoccupied by one of the major worries of her vocation, the worry of keeping clients out of each other's sight. She wondered who could be telephoning to her on Sunday evening. Not Gilbert, for Gilbert never telephoned on Sunday except in the morning. She insisted, of course, on his telephoning to her daily, or almost daily. She did this to several of her more reliable friends, for there was no surer way of convincing them of the genuineness of her regard for them than to vituperate them when they failed to keep her informed of their health, their spirits, and their doings. In the case of Gilbert, however, her insistence had entirely ceased to be a professional device; she adored him violently.

The telephoner was Gilbert. He made an amazing suggestion; he asked her to come across to his flat, where she had never been and where he had never asked her to go. It had been tacitly and quite amiably understood between them that he was not one who invited young ladies to his own apartments.

Christine cautiously answered that she was not sure whether she could come.

”Are you alone?” he asked pleasantly.

”Yes, quite.”

”Well, I will come and fetch you.”

She decided exactly what she would do.

”No, no. I will come. I will come now. I shall be enchanted.”

Purposely she spoke without conviction, maintaining a mysterious reserve.

She returned to the sitting-room and the other man. Fortunately the conversation on the telephone had been in French.

”See!” she said, speaking and feeling as though they were intimates.

”I have a lady friend who is ill. I am called to see her. I shall not be long. I swear to you I shall not be long. Wait. Will you wait?”

”Yes,” he replied, gazing at her.

”Put yourself at your ease.”

She was relieved to find that she could so easily reconcile her desire to please Gilbert with her pleasurable duty towards the protege of the very clement Virgin.

Chapter 19

THE VISIT

In the doorway of his flat Christine kissed G.J. vehemently, but with a certain preoccupation; she was looking about her, very curious. The way in which she raised her veil and raised her face, mysteriously glanced at him, puckered her kind brow--these things thrilled him.

She said:

”You are quite alone, of course.”

She said it nicely, even benevolently; nevertheless he seemed to hear her saying: ”You are quite alone, or, of course, you wouldn't have let me come.”

”I suppose it's through here,” she murmured; and without waiting for an invitation she pa.s.sed direct into the lighted drawing-room and stood there, observant.

He followed her. They were both nervous in the midst of the interior which he was showing her for the first time, and which she was silently estimating. For him she made an exquisite figure in the drawing-room. She was so correct in her church-dress, so modest, prim and demure. And her appearance clashed excitingly with his absolute knowledge of her secret temperament. He had often hesitated in his judgment of her. Was she good enough or was she not? But now he thought more highly of her than ever. She was ideal, divine, the realisation of a dream. And he felt extraordinarily pleased with himself because, after much cautious indecision, he had invited her to visit him. By heaven, she was young physically, and yet she knew everything! Her miraculous youthfulness rejuvenated him.

As a fact he was essentially younger than he had been for years. Not only she, but his war work, had re-vitalised him. He had developed into a considerable personage on the Lechford Committee; he was chairman of a sub-committee; he bore responsibilities and had worries.

And for a climax the committee had sent him out to France to report on the accountancy of the hospitals; he had received a special pa.s.sport; he had had glimpses of the immense and growing military organisation behind the Front; he had chatted in his fluent and idiomatic French with authorities military and civil; he had been ceremoniously complimented on behalf of his committee and country by high officials of the Service de Sante. A wondrous experience, from which he had returned to England with a greatly increased self-respect and a sharper apprehension of the significance of the war.

Life in London was proceeding much as usual. If on the one hand the Treasury had startlingly put an embargo upon capital issues, on the other hand the King had resumed his patronage of the theatre, and the town talked of a new Lady Teazle, and a British dye-industry had been inaugurated. But behind the thin gauze of social phenomena G.J. now more and more realistically perceived and conceived the dark shape of the war as a vast moving ent.i.ty. He kept concurrently in his mind, each in its place, the most diverse factors and events: not merely the Flemish and the French battles, but the hoped-for intervention of Roumania, the defeat of the Austrians by Servia, the menace of a new Austrian attack on Servia, the rise in prices, the Russian move north of the Vistula, the raid on Yarmouth, the divulgence of the German axioms about frightfulness, the rumour of a definite German submarine policy, the terrible storm that had disorganised the entire English railway-system, and the dim distant Italian earthquake whose death-roll of thousands had produced no emotion whatever on a globe monopolised by one sole interest.