letter which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed) mattered for ever.
'He is,' she mused, 'like that man in Moliere.'
She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she could deceive him.
'Or could I not?' she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the bookcase. 'Jacob,' she went on, going to the window and looking over the spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under beech trees, 'Jacob would be shocked.'
The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.
'HE'S a small boy,' she said, thinking of Jacob.
And yet- Alceste?
'What a nuisance you are!' Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair ticket.
'I expect the sheep have eaten it,' he said. 'Why do you keep sheep?'
'Sorry to disturb you, sir,' said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in the enormous pouch of pence.
'Well, I hope they pay you for it,' said Jacob. 'There you are. No. You can stick to it. Go and get drunk.'
He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with considerable contempt for his species.
Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs. Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by the schoolmaster.
Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's presence, enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote now- poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had loved too; and been a fool.
'One's godmothers ought to have told one,' said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand-told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.
'This is life. This is life,' said Fanny.
'A very hard face,' thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be served. 'Girls look old so soon nowadays.'
The equator swam behind tears.
'Piccadilly?' Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her.
But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.
The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the gold letters of their creed.
The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered -far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street; and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster.
Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some far- away communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of work-people, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand- coloured, and bones lie unburied.
The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of typewritten sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase.
His head- bald, red-veined, hollow-looking-represented all the heads in the building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came equally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control the course of events.
Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some were troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow to-morrow; altogether they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with the course of history.
Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a Blue book, stopped for a moment by the window and observed the placard tied round the lamp-post.
Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet was going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety.
Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a little knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though one of them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?
Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by the Treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled a letter on a skewer.
Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and walked away.
'Such a sunset,' wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer at
Singapore. 'One couldn't make up one's mind to come indoors,' she wrote.
'It seemed wicked to waste even a moment.'
The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked away; a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees were stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently.
'Jacob,' wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, 'is hard at work after his delightful journey...'
'The Kaiser,' the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, 'received me in audience.'
'Now I know that face-' said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of
Carter's shop in Piccadilly, 'but who the dickens-?' and he watched
Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure-
'Oh, Jacob Flanders!' he remembered in a flash.
But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.
'I gave him Byron's works,' Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as Jacob crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost the opportunity.
Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with dowagers in amethyst and
