“They’ll destroy London. What shall I do?” asked Poppet plaintively. “Where can I go? It’s the end of my painting. I’ve a good mind to follow Parsnip and Pimpernell” (two great poets of her acquaintance who had recently gone to New York).
“You’ll be in more danger crossing the Atlantic than staying in London,” said Basil. “There won’t be any air raids on London.”
“For God’s sake don’t say that.” Even as she spoke the sirens wailed. Poppet stood paralyzed with horror. “Oh God,” she said. “You’ve done it. They’ve come.”
“Faultless timing,” said Basil cheerfully. ‘That’s always been Hitler’s strong point.”
Poppet began to dress in an ineffectual fever of reproach. “You said there wouldn’t be a war. You said the bombers would never come. Now we shall all be killed and you just sit there talking and talking.”
“You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surrealiste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions ? limbs and things lying about in odd places you know.”
“I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d been to church. I was brought up in a convent. I wanted to be a nun once. I wish I was a nun. I’m going to be killed. Oh, I wish I was a nun. Where’s my gas-mask? I shall go mad if I don’t find my gas-mask.”
Basil lay back on the divan and watched her with fascination. This is how he liked to see women behave in moments of alarm. He rejoiced, always, in the spectacle of women at a disadvantage: thus he would watch, in the asparagus season, a dribble of melted butter on a woman’s chin, marring her beauty and making her ridiculous, while she would still talk and smile and turn her head, not knowing how she appeared to him.
“Now do make up your mind what you’re frightened of,” he urged. “If you’re going to be bombed with high explosive run down to the shelter; if you’re going to be gassed, shut the skylight and stay up here. In any case I shouldn’t bother about that respirator. If they use anything it’ll be arsenical smoke and it’s no use against that. You’ll find arsenical smoke quite painless at first. You won’t know you’ve been gassed for a couple of days; then it’ll be too late. In fact for all we know we’re being gassed at this moment. If they fly high enough and let the wind carry the stuff they may be twenty miles away. The symptoms when they do appear are rather revolting…”
But Poppet was gone, helter-skelter, downstairs, making little moaning noises as she went.
Basil dressed and, only pausing to paint in a ginger moustache across Poppet’s head of Aphrodite, strolled out into the streets.
The normal emptiness of Sunday in South Kensington was made complete that morning by the air raid scare. A man in a tin helmet shouted at Basil from the opposite pavement, “Take cover, there. Yes, it’s you I’m talking to.”
Basil crossed over to him and said in a low tone, “M.I.9.”
“Eh?”
“M.I.9.”
“I don’t quite twig.”
“But you ought to twig,” said Basil severely. “Surely you realize that members of M.I.9 are free to go everywhere at all times?”
“Sorry, I’m sure,” said the warden. “I was only took on yesterday. What a lark getting a raid second time on!” As he spoke the sirens sounded the All Clear. “What a sell!” said the warden.
It seemed to Basil that this fellow was altogether too cheerful for a public servant in the first hours of war; the gas scare had been wasted on Poppet; in her panic she had barely listened; it was worthy of a more receptive audience. “Cheer up,” he said. “You may be breathing arsenical smoke at this moment. Watch your urine in a couple of days’ time.”
“Coo. I say, what did you say you was?”
“M.I.9.”
“Is that to do with gas?”
“It’s to do with almost everything. Good morning.”
He turned to walk on but the warden followed. “Wouldn’t we smell it or nothing?”
“No.”
“Or cough or anything?”
“No.”
“And you think they’ve dropped it, just in that minute, and gone away leaving us all for dead?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t think so. It’s your job as a warden to find out.”
“Coo.”
That’ll teach him to shout at me in the street, thought Basil.
After the All Clear various friends of Poppet’s came together in her studio.
“I wasn’t the least frightened. I was so surprised at my own courage I felt quite giddy.”
“I wasn’t frightened, I just felt glum.”
“I felt positively glad. After all we’ve all said for years that the present order of things was doomed, haven’t we? I mean it’s always been the choice for us between concentration camp and being blown up, hasn’t it? I just sat thinking how much I preferred being blown up to being beaten with rubber truncheons.”
“I was frightened,” said Poppet.
“Dear Poppet, you always have the healthiest reactions. Erchman really did wonders for you.”
