Paul arrived from Blackstone late one afternoon in early autumn with two warders and six other long-sentence prisoners. The journey had been spent in an ordinary third-class railway carriage, where the two warders smoked black tobacco in cheap little wooden pipes and were inclined towards conversation.
“You’ll find a lot of improvements since you were here last,” said one of them. “There’s two coloured-glass windows in the chapel, presented by the last Governor’s widow. Lovely they are, St. Peter and St. Paul in prison being released by an angel. Some of the Low Church prisoners don’t like them, though.
“We had a lecture last week, too, but it wasn’t very popular—‘The Work of the League of Nations,’ given by a young chap of the name of Potts. Still, it makes a change. I hear you’ve been having a lot of changes at Blackstone.”
“I should just about think we have,” said one of the convicts, and proceeded to give a somewhat exaggerated account of the death of Mr. Prendergast.
Presently one of the warders, observing that Paul seemed shy of joining in the conversation, handed him a daily paper. “Like to look at this, sonny?” he said. “It’s the last you’ll see for some time.”
There was very little in it to interest Paul, whose only information from the outside world during the last six weeks had come from Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery’s weekly bulletins (for one of the first discoveries of his captivity was that interest in “news” does not spring from genuine curiosity, but from the desire for completeness. During his long years of freedom he had scarcely allowed a day to pass without reading fairly fully from at least two newspapers, always pressing on with a series of events which never came to an end. Once the series was broken, he had little desire to resume it), but he was deeply moved to discover on one of the middle pages an obscure but recognizable photograph of Margot and Peter. “The Honourable Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde,” it said below, “and her son Peter, who succeeds his uncle as Earl of Pastmaster.” In the next column was an announcement of the death of Lord Pastmaster and a brief survey of his uneventful life. At the end it said, “It is understood that Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde and the young Earl, who have been spending the last few months at their villa in Corfu, will return to England in a few days. Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde has for many years been a prominent hostess in the fashionable world and is regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Society. Her son’s succession to the earldom recalls the sensation caused in May of this year by the announcement of her engagement to Mr. Paul Pennyfeather and the dramatic arrest of the bridegroom at a leading West End hotel a few hours before the wedding ceremony. The new Lord Pastmaster is sixteen years old, and has up till now been educated privately.”
Paul sat back in the carriage for a long time looking at the photograph, while his companions played several hands of poker in reckless disregard of Standing Orders. In his six weeks of solitude and grave consideration he had failed to make up his mind about Margot Beste-Chetwynde; it was torn and distracted by two conflicting methods of thought. On one side was the dead weight of precept, inherited from generations of schoolmasters and divines. According to these, the problem was difficult but not insoluble. He had “done the right thing” in shielding the woman: so much was clear, but Margot had not quite filled the place assigned to her, for in this case she was grossly culpable, and he was shielding her, not from misfortune nor injustice, but from the consequence of her crimes; he felt a flush about his knees as Boy Scout honour whispered that Margot had got him into a row and ought jolly well to own up and face the music. As he sat over his postbags he had wrestled with this argument without achieving any satisfactory result except a growing conviction that there was something radically inapplicable about this whole code of ready-made honour that is the still small voice, trained to command, of the Englishman all the world over. On the other hand was the undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s “You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?” The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived it to be the statement of a natural law. He appreciated the assumption of comprehension with which Peter had delivered it. As he studied Margot’s photograph, dubiously transmitted as it was, he was strengthened in his belief that there was, in fact, and should be, one law for her and another for himself, and that the raw little exertions of nineteenth-century Radicals were essentially base and trivial and misdirected. It was not simply that Margot had been very rich or that he had been in love with her. It was just that he saw the impossibility of Margot in prison, the bare connection of vocables associating the ideas was obscene. Margot
