Part 19 (2/2)

”Lennox? I haven't an idea.”

”I mean your father.”

”In a great hurry, thank you. The war has gone to his head.”

”At his age? Surely----”

”He wants me to go,” said Paliser, who had no intention of it whatever and whom subsequent events completely exempted. ”He is in a hurry for me to enlist and in a greater hurry to have me marry.”

Austerely, this pleasant woman grabbed it. ”It is your duty!”

That was too much for Paliser, who, knowing as well as she did what she was driving at, wanted to laugh. Like the yawn, he suppressed it.

The priestess's austerity faded. A very fair mimic of exaltation replaced it. ”Whoever she is, how proud she will be! A war-bride!”

But Paliser, who had his fill, was rising and, abandoning histrionics, she resumed: ”The 24th at eight; don't forget!” Then as he pa.s.sed from the portal, the priestess lifted her hands. ”What a fis.h.!.+ Fast or loose, what a fis.h.!.+”

Above her Mammon glowed, behind her leered Priapus.

Through the sunny streets, Paliser drove to the Athenaeum, where everybody was talking war. The general consensus of ignorance was quite normal.

Lennox, seated with Jones at a window, was summarising his own point of view. ”In a day or two I shall run down to Mineola, Perhaps they will take me on at the aviation field. Anyway I can try.”

Jones crossed himself. He is signing his death-warrant, he thought. But he said: ”Take you, Icarus. They will fly away with you. You will become a cavalier of the clouds, a toreador of the aerial arena, an archangel soaring among the Eolian melodies of shrapnel. I envy, I applaud, but I cannot emulate. The upper circles are reserved for youth and over musty tomes I have squandered mine. I am thirty-two by the clock and I should hie me to the grave-digger that he may take my measure. And yet if I could--if I could!--I would like to be one of the liaison chaps and fall if I must in a shroud of white swords.”

Sombrely Lennox considered his friend. ”Your shroud of white swords is ridiculous.”

Jones agreed with him. To change the subject, he rattled a paper. ”Have you seen this? There is an account here of a man who shot his girl. He thought her untrue. Probably she was.”

”Reason enough then,” said Lennox, who latterly had become very murderous.

”I wonder! Anyway, though the paper does not say so, that was not his reason. The poor devil killed her not because she had been untrue, but because he loved her. He killed the thing he loved the best out of sheer affection. Unfortunately, for his virtues, he loved her innocently, ignorantly, as most men do love, without any idea that the one affection worth giving is a love that nothing can alter, a love that can not only forgive but console.”

”Is that what you call originality?” Lennox severely enquired. ”If so, I have never run across any of it in your books.”

”Heaven forbid that you should, dear boy. I live by the sweat of my pen.

Originality never has, and never will make a best-seller.”

It was while Jones was airing these plat.i.tudes that Paliser entered the room. He approached the two men. Lennox at once got up, turned his back, marched away.

A few days later, Jones, in reviewing the incident, wondered whether Lennox could, even then, have suspected. But, at the moment, in apology for him, he merely lied.

”I frightened him off with shop-talk.”

Paliser took the vacant seat ”What are you writing?”

”Cheques. There is nothing simpler and, except cash, nothing so easily understood. To keep my hand in I will write one now.”

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