“What do you think of that statement?” Ashenden, smiling, asked Caypor who was standing near.
“I confess its truth. The little I know of music my wife taught me. I wish you could hear her play when she is in practice.” He put his fat hand, with its square, stumpy fingers, on her shoulder. “She can wring your heartstrings with pure beauty.”
“Dummer Kerl,” she said, in a soft voice, “Stupid fellow,” and Ashenden saw her mouth for a moment quiver, but she quickly recovered. “You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write music.”
“Some of us can at times write pleasing verses,” said Ashenden, with good humour, for it was not his business to be put out, and, he did not know why, two lines occurring to him he said them:
“Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Caypor, with a strange gesture, “you can write poetry. I wonder why.”
And to Ashenden’s surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted.
“Come, Grantley, Mittagessen is ready, let us go into the dining-room.”
They left Ashenden reflective.
Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness. People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them, and even in the few to whom he was attached his eyes saw with equal clearness the merits and the defects. When he liked people it was not because he was blind to their faults; he did not mind their faults, but accepted them with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders, or because he ascribed to them excellencies that they did not possess; and since he judged his friends with candour they never disappointed him and so he seldom lost one. He asked from none more than he could give. He was able to pursue his study of the Caypors without prejudice and without passion. Mrs. Caypor seemed to him more of a piece and therefore the easier of the two to understand; she obviously detested him; though it was so necessary for her to be civil to him her antipathy was strong enough to wring from her now and then an expression of rudeness; and had she been safely able to do so she would have killed him without a qualm. But in the pressure of Caypor’s chubby hand on his wife’s shoulder and in the fugitive trembling of her lips Ashenden had divined that this unprepossessing woman and that mean fat man were joined together by a deep and sincere love. It was touching. Ashenden assembled the observations that he had been making for the past few days and little things that he had noticed but to which he had attached no significance returned to him. It seemed to him that Mrs. Caypor loved her husband because she was of a stronger character than he and because she felt his dependence on her; she loved him for his admiration of her, and you might guess that till she met him this dumpy, plain woman with her dullness, good sense and want of humour could not have much enjoyed the admiration of men; she enjoyed his heartiness and his noisy jokes, and his high spirits stirred her sluggish blood; he was a great big bouncing boy and he would never be anything else and she felt like a mother towards him; she had made him what he was, and he was her man and she was his woman, and she loved him, notwithstanding his weakness (for with her clear head she must always have been conscious of that), she loved him—ach! was—as Isolde loved Tristan. But then there was the espionage. Even Ashenden with all his tolerance for human frailty could not but feel that to betray your country for money is not a very pretty proceeding. Of course she knew of it, indeed it was probably through her that Caypor had first been approached; he would never have undertaken such work if she had not urged him to it. She loved him and she was an honest and an upright woman. By what devious means had she persuaded herself to force her husband to adopt so base and dishonourable a calling? Ashenden lost himself in a labyrinth of conjecture as he tried to piece together the actions of her mind.
Grantley Caypor was another story. There was little to admire in him, but at that moment Ashenden was not looking for an object of admiration; but there was much that was singular and much that was unexpected in that gross and vulgar fellow. Ashenden watched with entertainment the suave manner in which the spy tried to inveigle him in his toils. It was a couple of days after his first lesson that Caypor, after dinner, his wife having gone upstairs, threw himself heavily into a chair by Ashenden’s side. His faithful Fritzi came up to him and put his long muzzle with its black nose on his knee.
“He has no brain,” said Caypor, “but a heart of gold. Look at those little pink eyes. Did you ever see anything so stupid? And what an ugly face, but what incredible charm!”
“Have you had him long?” asked Ashenden.
“I got him in 1914, just before the outbreak of war. By the way, what do you think of the news today? Of course my wife and I never discuss the war. You can’t think what a relief to me it is to find a fellow-countryman to whom I can open my heart.”
He handed Ashenden a cheap Swiss cigar and Ashenden, making a rueful sacrifice to duty, accepted it.
“Of course they haven’t got a chance, the Germans,” said Caypor, “not a dog’s chance. I knew they were beaten the moment we came in.”
His manner was earnest, sincere and
