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Title: Grand Canyon
Author: Sackville-West, Vita [Victoria Mary] (1892-1962)
Date of first publication: 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Michael Joseph, 1942
Date first posted: 21 May 2013
Date last updated: 21 May 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1076

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






  V. SACKVILLE-WEST


  GRAND
  CANYON



  MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
  26 _Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C_ 1




  FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1942



  BOOK
  PRODUCTION
  WAR ECONOMY
  STANDARD

  THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE
  CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED
  ECONOMY STANDARDS



  _Set and printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers Ltd.,
  at the Gresham Press, Woking, in Baskerville type,
  eleven point, leaded, and bound by James Burn._




CONTENTS

*


PART ONE

The Hotel



PART TWO

The Canyon




AUTHOR'S NOTE

_In_ Grand Canyon _I have intended a cautionary tale.  In it I have
contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an
unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain
in the present war.  Peace terms have been offered on the basis of the
status quo of 1939 and the Germans have made a plausible appeal to the
United States Government (who have meanwhile satisfactorily concluded
their own war with Japan) to mediate in the name of humanity to prevent
a prolongation of human suffering.  For the purposes of my story I have
allowed the United States Government to fall into the Nazi trap and to
be deluded into making this intervention as "the nation which, in its
hour of victory, brought peace to the world."  The terrible
consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed
by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown._

_Such a supposition is by no means intended as a prophecy and indeed
bears no relation at all to my own views as to the outcome of the
present war._

_V. S.-W._




Part One

*

THE HOTEL

Mr. Dale had seen Mrs. Temple daily, including her among the other
hotel guests.  There were as usual a number of people staying in the
hotel on the edge of the canyon, even more than usual this year, owing
to the manoeuvres.  This time he really saw her for the first time,
talking to an Indian boy with a pony, out in the desert.  She talked
earnestly and quickly, having orders to give and he orders to fulfil,
and both of them some consultation to take with one another.  The boy
standing beside his pony nodded rapidly, ready to be off.  They made a
contrast with one another under the strong sunlight of the desert, she
the European, he the Indian, she light, he dark, she in her flowery
muslin, he in his red shirt and fringed trousers of tanned hide, she
with a sunshade like a bubble above her head, he with his black hair
bound by a scarlet band.

Then he was gone, in the instant he bestrode his pony.  He became part
of the desert, a Centaur speck of boy and horse, he crouching low over
the mane, native, going off on the unknown mission given to him by the
European woman.

So she has a life of her own?  She talks with Indian boys and gives
them their instructions.  She is not just a hotel guest among other
hotel guests?  What then is she?  Who is Sylvia, what is she?

  "Fairer than Isaac's lover at the well,
  She that in chains of pearl and unicorn
  Leads at her train the ancient golden world." ...


The climate of his mind was composed of such small scraps of beauty,
though he carefully concealed the fact from everyone and even instantly
corrected the weakness in his private heart.  Thus, although this
sudden vision of Mrs. Temple had given him so intense a pleasure that
it had caused him to whisper the lines to himself, a trick he had
acquired during many years spent in solitude with no one else to speak
to, he immediately came back to realism with the reflection that she
was not especially fair, nor even especially young.  She is a woman in
her middle years, staying as inexplicably as any other person in an
hotel; a woman who, perhaps, has no fixed home.  Every evening she
dines alone at a little table, reading a book propped open by a fork.
There is nothing to mark her out as different from any other tourist.
Why then does she come out into the desert with her sunshade and speak
so urgently to an Indian boy?  She has a private existence which has no
connexion with the hotel.  Her name, as may be discovered from the
visitors' book, is Mrs. Temple, first name, Helen.  Her address is
given as London.  London was large once, and vague as an address.  Her
occupation she has left blank.  She has no occupation.  There is
nothing more to be learnt about her.

There she goes, returning towards the hotel.  She returns at a
leisurely pace--and, indeed, the sun is hot and the day made for
leisure; she returns, having disposed of her business with the Indian
boy and despatched him off on his mission into the Painted Desert.  She
returns towards the hotel, following the winding path which will lead
her under the pine-trees along the edge of the canyon.  It is a
fantastic place to watch any woman, to eavesdrop on any woman unaware
that she is under observation.  The human figure is dwarfed here by the
extravagance of nature.  It is easy to observe a woman gleaning in a
cornfield, throwing out her rake and drawing it back in a gesture older
than the Bible; but what is one to make of a woman wandering between
the desert and the canyon?  She seems to have come out of nothing and
to belong to nothing.

The boy was gone; Mrs. Temple alone returned, tranquil, having given
her orders.  She returned, to resume her life as an hotel-guest.
Lester Dale watched her go.  He was not particularly interested in Mrs.
Temple, not more interested in her, except for the moment, than in
anyone else, for he was not particularly interested in anyone, man or
woman; not even in himself.  A vague speculation was the most that ever
tickled his fancy.  Indifference ruled his life.  Places interested him
more than people; but when he met with the combination of place and
person, as he did now watching Mrs. Temple strolling along the edge of
the canyon, his amusement was aroused.  He liked to spin a tale,
however little it might approach the truth.  And any number of tales
could be spun with the canyon as their background; the Indians
themselves had turned it into the abode of legend: the spirits of the
living came from it, they said, and the spirits of the dead descended
into it as the entrance to the underworld, not to mention the race of
little horses which were said to live at the bottom.

But Mrs. Temple--what was _she_ doing there?  She was a woman of
culture and sophistication; an elegant woman.  Not fashionable; nothing
so shallow; but truly elegant of mind as of body.  All her movements
showed that, as well as her smile.  Moreover, she was alone.  No
husband or lover kept her company.  She was more than alone, she was
extremely detached, as isolated as a figure living within a globe of
glass.  He had an idea that no real sound ever reached her from
outside.  She smiled, she laid aside her book to talk to the college
girls who pestered her with adoration, she was charming, amiable, she
had a friendly word, always for the little waitress who had come here
to Arizona because she was consumptive and loved the flowers of the
desert; she could be civil even to the smart manager and his acolyte
the urbane reception-clerk who inspired Lester Dale with nothing but a
mild desire to push them both over the edge of the canyon.  Yes, Mrs.
Temple could be amiable, friendly, civil to all without ever impairing
her real detachment, without ever making herself cheap and easy in the
usual manner of most amiable, friendly, and civil people.  That, in his
eyes, was an achievement.

He had been leaning with his back against a pine-tree; now, having lost
Mrs. Temple from sight, he shoved himself away from the trunk and idly
followed her along the path soft with pine-needles.  He could see her
sunshade swelling on that narrow path above the edge of the canyon.  A
false step, and she would go over.  Her elegance was poised
precariously between the path laid by a considerate civilization and
the chasm cut by inconsiderate nature.

He preferred the chasm to the path.  He had seen many strange places on
earth, but none so strange as this.  Every year, in the course of a
desultory life, he came back to it, knowing it in all seasons and by
all lights.  Like the Indians, he could believe that the canyon held
the secrets of life and death.

It amused him to observe the various people who strayed to its rim in
order to gape and wonder and exclaim.  The spectacle of human
vulgarity, confronted with that majesty, provoked him to a grim
entertainment.  Unlike Mrs. Temple, so friendly with the college girls,
so benevolent towards the young lovers, he could establish no contact
with them, nor was he aware of any desire to do so; and that, possibly,
provided part of the pleasure he had in watching Mrs. Temple at her
game of skilful management between personal immunity and human
friendliness, for, like many another, he appreciated to the point of
over-estimation the gifts he did not himself possess.  This inability
to establish ordinary contact, however, this lack of desire to do so,
could not rob him of his pleasure in the spectacle of his fellow-beings
at their antics.  Their antics appeared especially diverting on the rim
of a chasm ten miles wide and one mile deep.

He could always count on finding a parade worthy to divert him.  The
characters might vary in detail, but in essence they were always very
much the same: muddled, inconsequent, and incomplete.  Lester Dale
liked his specimens to be muddled, inconsequent, and incomplete.  He
had persuaded himself that he successfully avoided being any of those
things.

They always performed their antics very comprehensively at the hotel.
This time there were the young lovers, anonymous, free French, who
might as well have been at the North Pole for all they noticed of the
world outside themselves.  There was the baby stumbling out for a walk
every morning along that precarious path.  There was the blind man who
had to be led.  There was the deaf man whose world of silence was
impenetrable.  There was the consumptive waitress whose hours of
freedom were few.  There was the young poet whose appreciation of the
external world was manifestly nil--why then had he come here to the
canyon, where the external world was more overwhelming than anywhere
else?--but whose preoccupation with the sufferings of his fellow-men
caused him an intense, a continuous pain.  There was the Polish woman.
Mr. Dale disliked and mistrusted the Polish woman.  There was the
rabble of travellers arriving every morning and departing every night.
A mixed bag.  There were the college girls, going out daily with
knapsacks as though they carried all the promises of life parcelled
upon their backs.  And there was Mrs. Temple, who belonged nowhere, yet
who could send an Indian boy at full gallop out into the Painted Desert.

She worried Lester Dale.  Without knowing her at all or anything about
her beyond her name, she had managed to make him feel that she
understood life better than he did, and in quite as detached a way.

Having nothing better to do, he followed her at a distance.  She walked
slowly, in fact she strolled, as though the urgency of the message she
had despatched into the desert were now a thing of the past, completed
and dismissed from her mind.  He admired her power of dismissal, a
masculine trait estimable in so feminine a woman.  She knew better than
to fidget; most women were born fidgeters, one reason why he found them
beyond his short patience.  She strolled as though she were now given
up entirely to quiet enjoyment and contemplation.  He had no scruples
in thus observing a woman unaware that she was under observation.  It
never occurred to him that some people might call him indiscreet and
inquisitive.  On the contrary (he would have explained), my interest is
shot with admiration.  He remembered a legend of the Empress Eugnie
walking across the Piazzetta at Venice; how nothing could be seen of
her person because of the crowds surrounding her; nothing could be seen
but the bubble of her sunshade preserving its steady unvarying level
above the dipping bobbing bubbles of other women's less Imperial gait.
Helen Temple walks like that.  Here on the rim of the canyon she walks
alone, but in a crowd she would walk with the same serenity.  In any
circumstance of pomp or danger she would still walk with the same
serenity.

How do I know these things about her?  I know them, now that I have
perceived her for the first time.  I am watching her now and I suddenly
know more about her than if she had been my wife, my sister or my
mistress for twenty years.

He continued to follow her.  She wandered on, leaving the pine-trees
behind her and the soft path of pine-needles, passing the hotel and
wandering on towards the stark splendour of the canyon.  She paused
there for a lonely moment, but then the college boys and girls appeared
riding up on a string of mules.  Lester Dale watched them meeting Mrs.
Temple at the head of Bright Angel Trail.  He and Mrs. Temple were both
English.  It amused him to watch his compatriot meeting American youth
at the head of the trail.

He wondered what had happened to all of them down there.  It must be a
strange experience to go a mile down into the earth.  What had they
learnt there, all those youths and girls?  Adolescent youth.  Had they
learnt something about life and possibly sex down there?  Bright Angel
Trail--splendid words.  The trail of the bright deceptive angel.  Had
they learnt something unforgettable down there, something important yet
unimportant, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame?  Lester Dale
had a realistic mind.  Sex had never bothered him much; but that lucky
escape did not prevent him from speculating on the sex life of other
people.  Those adolescents.  Co-ed.  Fraternity; sorority.
Phi-Kappa-delta.  Boys and girls.  Animal nature, human nature.  What
use had they made of it at the bottom of the canyon, that dangerous
place?  Adonis' gardens, that one day bloomed and fruitful were the
next.  What was Mrs. Temple saying to the college boys and girls now
that she had met them at the head of Bright Angel Trail?

He stopped behind a pine-tree to watch her intercepted by the gay train
of boys and girls.

The boys came up out of the canyon and rode away at once, to get away
alone by themselves from women.  They had got themselves up in cowboy
dress, open shirt necks, big hats and fringed chaps, because it was the
romantic thing to do.  The touch of the dude ranch had laid itself on
their shoulders.  But they had had enough of romance and women for the
day and were relieved to leave their girls in the charge of Mrs.
Temple, a woman in charge of women.  Later, after dinner, they would
join up again and then there would be dancing and flirtation as usual,
when they had all had their baths and changed their clothes and got
themselves into the evening mood.

Meanwhile they were all dusty and tired and excited.  Over-excited.
Mr. Dale could not hear what the college girls were saying to Mrs.
Temple.  What they were saying evidently counted for little; she was
observing them with an eye that skidded away from the ear.  He was
amused by the difference between her manner towards them and their
manner towards her.  They were still under the excitement of their
descent into the chasm; she, who had not ridden down with them, was
cool; richer than they by some experience not gained solely by a
descent a mile deep into the earth.  A mile deep into the earth was
nothing to her whose fifty years deep into life must count for
something, as life goes.

Mrs. Temple, he judged, must be quite half a century old.

He watched the college girls getting stiffly off their mules; they
chattered round her, very young.  She listened to them all seriously,
making remarks where remarks were needed as though, youthfully eager
and uncertain of themselves beneath their self-sufficiency and scorn,
they divined in her someone having something to give them, some value
to impart; so that, although so manifestly a being from an order other
than their own, they could still without apology or mockery divert a
portion of their time on their gay progress and consecrate it to her,
not for _her_ pleasure indeed, in a courteous gesture of youth towards
an older person, but for their own pleasure, as a right presumed by the
arrogance of their unlicked egoism.  Lester Dale, bored man, amused
himself by speculating on Mrs. Temple's probable attitude towards them.
She must be well aware that nothing but their own inclinations dictated
their own actions.  At the first moment of boredom or at the first hint
of something more inviting, they would have risen like the flock of
birds to which she must compare them; risen, as from an exhausted
feeding-ground, a field from which the last grains of profit had been
pecked, scattering in their inconsequent way on their flight towards
the new attraction.  But until such a diversion should present itself,
she certainly held some kind of appeal for them in their idle moments;
some kind of appeal not easy to analyse, since what gift could she
bestow on them, he wondered?  They could not prize such wisdom and
experience as she might be able to share out, for their own experience
was--and rightly--dearer to them than any second-hand tested knowledge;
perhaps it was because, in their easy way, they knew that she would not
sit in critical judgment; would merely enjoy them, amused, older;
perhaps also because in no sense could she be regarded as a competitor.
They might touch briefly; but never, never could her life threaten an
infringement on theirs.

They seemed to take it for granted that she would welcome their company
whenever they felt inclined to accord it.  No matter if she sat reading
a book after dinner; the book that during dinner at her solitary table
she had kept propped open by a fork; they arrived like a lot of
puppies, and, throwing themselves down on the floor beside her chair,
engaged her attention without a thought of being importunate.  He had
already observed this evening comedy.  She lays down her book with a
smile.  They are right, he thought: this boisterous, arrogant arrival
of the group cannot fail to flatter her, though she keeps her sense of
flattery always in the right proportion.  Their physical presence is in
itself a source of pleasure to her.  She loves their soft loose limbs
and soft warm faces, though I can't decide whether she prefers them in
the daytime, in their bright woollen sweaters and bright caps, or in
the evening when they have changed into their silks for dinner.  In the
evening she can see their glossy heads, glossy not only with health but
with the constant care of the hairdresser--but far from censuring them
for their vanity she must surely commend them for the care of their
persons, seeing the ripples of light on the brown, the black, and the
fair waves; she must admire the poise of the head on the young
shoulders, and the quick turn, the quick toss, the impatience, all the
pretty movement, for she is surely hedonistic enough to be grateful for
physical beauty even when she cannot match it with mental.

All these things he had noted with detached interest for the past
fortnight while he ate his dinner at a table as solitary as Mrs.
Temple's; now, seeing her for the first time as a real person, he
languidly decided to increase their slight acquaintance.  There was an
hour to be put away before sunset and he thought he might spend it in
her company if she would have him.  At the first hint of disinclination
on her part he would make an excuse and leave her.  He had sufficient
regard for his own independence to respect the independence of other
people.

He had already decided not to mention the Indian boy.  That interview
must represent something very private.  He would not allude to that.
Already he had begun to feel that he should not have I-spied it.

She was standing, looking at the canyon in the evening light.  He
approached her, conventionally raising his hat.

"Lovely evening, Mrs. Temple."

He instantly disliked himself for saying it and hoped only that she did
not dislike him as much as he disliked himself.

  "You came and quacked beside me in the wood,
  You said, It's nice to be alone a bit.
  You said, The sunset's pretty, isn't it?
  By God!  I wish, I wish that you were dead!"


As these lines occurred to him, he hoped that they would not occur to
her also.

They evidently hadn't, judging by the smile with which she received
him.  She was either a polite humbug or was really pleased to welcome
him.  By that smile she had managed to make him feel not unwanted.  He
knew himself to be a fat squat man, unattractive to women, therefore he
was grateful for her courtesy.  Kind woman, clever woman!  Experience
had taught him to distrust woman's wiles, but somehow he could not
believe that Helen Temple ever practised woman's wiles; she had no need
to do so.  Here was a woman with whom he could talk with no nonsense of
sex or chivalry; a woman with whom he could meet on equal terms; a
woman who was likely to get bored with him as quickly as he was likely
to get bored with her; a woman, in short, with whom he could link a
brief contact as easily as with another man.

"I can't imagine," he said, "how you manage to put up with all those
chattering children.  Your patience amazes me--especially with the
girls.  Minxes not sphinxes--donkeys and monkeys.  They cluster round
you, but don't they bore you to death?"

He was glad that he had started to talk to her in this real way.  He
hoped she would respond in equal terms.  She did.  Their ideas met.

"No, they don't bore or bother me," she said.  "They interest me.  I
like knowing something about them, and making up stories about their
backgrounds.  I like knowing about people," she said, cutting her
sentence short to stare along the rift of the canyon at that moment of
the sinking sun.  The sun was still strong though slanting over the
desert, but the shadows it cast were deep and fantastic, building the
mountains of the canyon into temples and pyramids strongly shadowed
with emerging peaks of light.

"No," said Mrs. Temple, after they had both looked for a while, "you
make a mistake in thinking that I could ever allow myself to get bored
by those children or by anyone here."

"Well," he said, liking her more, "do tell me please what interest
enables you to bear the gabble of those children, boys and girls whom
you met at the head of the trail just now?"

She looked at him with a new curiosity, seeing him for the first time.
She saw a very unattractive man, pallid, pasty, rather too fat; lonely.

She put down her sunshade as the sun was no longer hot enough to make
it necessary.

"Let's sit down," she said.

"I am not detaining you?"

"You are not detaining me."

How punctilious he is, she thought.

How gravely well-mannered she is, he thought.

They sat down on a bench.  He was grateful to her for not making any
comment on the canyon, which was approaching the peak of its sunset
magnificence, and she was equally grateful to him.

"So you wonder why I take an interest in my young friends, do you?" she
said at last, feeling that if this conversation were going to begin it
had better begin quickly.  She almost trusted him not to remark on the
canyon, but not quite.  Not yet.

He was glad she had spoken.  He almost trusted her not to remark on the
canyon, but not quite.  Not yet.

"They all seem to me to be cut very much on a pattern," he began.  "Of
course I can't tell.  You may know them or some of them at home;
otherwise, your kindness towards them must be purely impersonal."

"It is, it is," said Mrs. Temple earnestly, "if you can call it
kindness.  I had never set eyes on any of them before I came here.
Naturally I prefer some of them to the others.  One of them, for
instance, always seems to stand a little apart.  I don't know if you
will understand me if I say that she seems one of those people for whom
a terrible fate is in store.  There are people who give one that
impression, you know, irrespective of their youth or innocence.  Now
you will probably set me down as one of those tiresome women who
believe themselves to be occult, but I assure you that I am nothing of
the sort.  I do not have 'feelings,' I do not believe in numerology, or
the prophecy of the Pyramids, nor do I tell fortunes by tea-leaves or
endeavour to interpret dreams.  So don't misjudge me.  I am purely
matter of fact, but I cannot look at that child without becoming
conscious of some very anxious desire to protect her, yet knowing that
neither I nor anybody else is capable of doing so."

"I won't ask you what that terrible fate is likely to be, for I am sure
you have no idea.  You mean, simply, that although the child may be
quite commonplace in herself, no different from any other girl of her
age though possibly a little more vulnerable, something is coming to
her which she cannot escape."

"Thank you for understanding," said Mrs. Temple.  "Vulnerable, yes,
that is the right word.  Mind, this is all mere speculation on my part.
I have no inside information.  I know nothing whatever about Loraine
Driscoll, save that her home is in Massachusetts.  I can imagine it
pretty clearly and can create a picture of her parents...."

"Please create it for me."

Mrs. Temple changed; she had been speaking seriously, now her eyes
twinkled.

"I think I can do that for you if you really want me to.  They are an
elderly couple, for Loraine is the child of their later years, and her
brother is ten years older than herself.  They are decent people--so
decent that one wonders how they ever brought themselves to commit the
grotesque act necessary to beget children.  They live in a neat New
England town, in a white clap-boarded house with green shutters, set
back a few yards from the main road which runs through the village
under an avenue of elms.  Rather pretty, in a smug way; pleasant enough
in summer, when the trees are green and shady.  In winter bleak and
bare; the roads muddy underfoot, and for months on end there may be
snow upon the ground.  But such seasonal severity is a good corrective
for the character.  The Driscolls' house resembles all the other houses
set along that road.  They would not like it to differ in any way.
They have lived in it for thirty years and are satisfied with it,
though I would not say that they have ever thought about it otherwise
than as a convenient and suitable residence.  It stands exposed to the
glances of passers-by on the road, and to the gaze of their neighbours
on either side, but it has never occurred to the Driscolls any more
than it has occurred to anyone else in the village that privacy might
be secured by the planting of a hedge or the erection of a fence.  Such
things are not done, nor have the Driscolls any wish to do them.  Life
is pure and open and democratic, so pure as to be almost meaningless,
so democratic as to be almost communal; so pure and open that neither
the Driscolls nor their neighbours trouble to draw their curtains when
evening falls and the lights are lit.  Any evening you may see them
sitting there, under the lamp with the pink shade, Mr. Driscoll reading
the evening paper, Mrs. Driscoll knitting.--Shall I go on?"

"Please go on."

"Mr. Driscoll is a spare man with a brown bony face and grey hair.  He
wears rimless glasses, cut square.  Not a harsh man,--he can rub the
dog behind its ears in quite a kindly way,--obviously a man of the
utmost rectitude and probity.  In business, of course, he would not
hesitate to get the better of a weaker rival, would not hesitate to
take advantage of someone else's mistake, but in no way would he
consider this a departure from the high moral standards of his private
life.  Possibly this is because he has never thought about it; possibly
because in business, as in private life, he accepts other people's
standards as he finds them, ready-made.  He holds certain views which
admit of no argument or modification, but those, again, have been
transmitted to him; he has not worked them out for himself.  In this,
as in everything else, he and Mrs. Driscoll are in perfect tacit
harmony.  Tacit, because their reserve and decency shun any discussion
or examination of things which are better taken for granted.  Such
examination would be unnecessary and distressing, and the thing they
dread most in life is any crisis involving exposure.  Safety and
orderliness is the rule which they have agreed to maintain.  Firmly,
quietly, they have achieved their ideal.  Rather grimly, perhaps, but
if it satisfies them let us wish for both their sakes that nothing ever
happens to disturb it."

"Very benevolent of you.  I suspect it is only because you believe them
to be incorrigible,--no good upsetting them, you know,--and also
because you are not really interested."

"On the contrary, having plenty of leisure and nothing better to do I
am very much interested.  I like thinking about the Driscolls.  I like
thinking about any family--strange little unit.  I like thinking about
them in their little box of a house, so exposed in one sense, so
isolated in another.  The parents, and then the children, so closely
held at first, but getting ready all the time to break off into little
separate pieces on their own."

"Tell me more about Mrs. Driscoll."

"Surely you know Mrs. Driscoll already?  If not, I have done my sketch
very badly.  She is about five years younger than her husband,
somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, rather short and plump and
busy, white hair very beautifully waved; she wears a brooch with a
miniature of her son as a little boy.  If you admire it, she will take
it off and turning it over will show you how fair the lock of his hair
was then, although it is now so dark, an alteration she appears to
consider remarkable, if not unique.  The son is her heart's joy and
pride; you have seen him here for yourself, Robert Driscoll, handsome
beyond reason; he ought to be a film star instead of a pilot in the Air
Force.  I dislike him myself extremely though I am sure his mother
prefers him to poor Loraine.  But I was telling you about his mother,
wasn't I? and not about that offensively handsome young man.  She has a
certain voluble animation and ready laughter which make her husband
glance tenderly at her, and lead one to suspect that this is what
attracted him to her when they were both young, added to his intention
of settling down in marriage with a girl of approved family.  This
animation and energy render Mrs. Driscoll a valuable as well as a
respected member of the community.  Indeed, the local Women's Club does
not know how it would get on without her.  Mrs. Driscoll would not be
happy without plenty of occupation, so apart from ordering her own
house most efficiently she really orders the entire village.  She likes
to wake every morning with the knowledge that she has a full day before
her.  She goes to her desk and consults her engagement-block with
satisfaction.  Only on Saturday evenings does she allow herself some
relaxation, when she reads a novel instead of knitting between dinner
and bed.  She has approved authors who never disturb or disappoint, for
their values are similar to her own, morally, sentimentally, and in
their rules of conduct; never an unorthodox suggestion or uncomfortable
idea.  The same is true of her friends.  She has friends, you must
know, who all admire her greatly,--'A really fine woman, Mrs.
Driscoll,' though I wonder if they could say very precisely in what her
fineness consists, except for the certainty that she would instantly
dismiss a servant-girl who bore a child in love and not in wedlock.
The Driscolls entertain their friends to dinner once a week, and once a
week they go out to dinner at one house or another, like Visiting
Partners in the old dance: Bow, curtsey, waltz, take hands, revolve in
a circle, return to place, bow.  I suppose that they get some pleasure
out of these entertainments, though more likely it is the reassuring
habit of solidarity which chases them out to dinner under rain or snow
in mufflers and overshoes.  And although they call themselves friends,
and would tell you that they have visited pleasantly for the last
twenty-five years or more, I doubt whether their conversation or their
current of feeling has ever gone deeper below the surface than the
works of Mrs. Driscoll's favourite authors.  No electric moments,
leaping like sparks on a frosty night!  Decorum will blanket the
electric moments, the dangerous moments, and as for conversation there
are so many topics, not so much inexhaustible as recurrent--politics
for the men, local affairs and gossip of one kind and another for the
women.  In principle Mrs. Driscoll disapproves of gossip, and would
tell you that she always discourages it, but in practice nothing can
happen in the village without reaching her ears and incurring her
judgement.  Curiously enough, she is equally interested in tales of the
great and famous whom she has never known and is never likely to know,
but here she does not censure: she merely marvels.  Hollywood and the
princes of Europe may do as they please, and the more extravagant their
personal behaviour the better Mrs. Driscoll likes it."

"Her husband, I imagine, does not share this taste?"

"On the contrary, the patience with which he listens to her is really a
concealed pleasure.  Not only does he like to feel superior to a
woman's weakness, but although he would never admit it he also enjoys a
vicarious titillation through the recital of other people's follies.
Especially when they are follies which are never likely to touch his
own household.--There is an eagle flying above our heads," said Mrs.
Temple without looking up.

"How did you know?"

She showed him the outstretched shadow stationary upon the desert.  The
lowering sun distorted it, making it twice its natural size.

"I should feel sorry for the Driscolls," she went on, "if such a shadow
ever fell across their lawn.  I believe you are right about not wanting
to upset them.  Only a very _mauvais esprit_ wants to startle people
whom it is hopeless to change.  It would be no more amusing than
bursting a paper bag behind their ears.  Only, perhaps, for the sake of
someone else might one wish to sacrifice them."

"Well, they have two children, as you know.  The young man will take
care of himself, only too well.  Mr. Driscoll will lend Mrs. Driscoll
his handkerchief to dry her tears and will murmur something about boys
being boys, trying to keep the chuckle out of his voice.  Robert will
be forgiven all his errors.  His parents will even turn them into a
source of pride, saying that all healthy young men ought to be like
that.  They will not see that Robert has nothing to recommend him
except his good looks, which are no merit of his.  They will not see
that he is as cheap as the daily newspaper.  But I do wonder what will
happen to Loraine.  Perhaps I exaggerate my dread on her behalf.
Fortunately for her she is no rebel by nature, so perhaps she will be
quite content to marry in the ordinary way and continue to accept her
mother's advice in everything.  Mrs. Driscoll will remark that instead
of losing a daughter she has gained another son and will forget all the
anxieties she has already endured on Loraine's account."

"But what anxieties can that docile child already have given her?"

"Educational so far, not personal.  Mrs. Driscoll discovered that all
Loraine's friends were going to college and that discovery gave her
food for very serious thought.  Mrs. Driscoll does not approve of
colleges for women, yet if Mrs. Ephraim P. Heffer and Mrs. Cyrus J.
Hinks can send their daughters to Vassar or Wellesley, there seemed no
valid reason why Mrs. Driscoll should not do likewise, especially in
face of Loraine's own rather wistful desire.  Besides she is more than
a little afraid of Mrs. Heffer's and Mrs. Hinks' criticism; she does
not mind being thought old-fashioned, which gives a certain
distinction, but she cannot endure to be thought economical."

Mr. Dale laughed politely.  Mrs. Temple amused him.  He liked her
thumb-nail sketch and thought that there was something in her voice
which made her words sound less shallow than they might appear if they
were written down.  There was something in her voice which deepened her
words beyond the chatter of a witty woman trying to entertain and
possibly attract a bored man.  There was a mixture of humanity,
tolerance and apartness which pleased him.

"Are you a novelist?" he asked her.

He had never known a novelist but had heard of their cynical ways and
became suddenly suspicious lest a woman he liked might be using life in
the hotel as Copy.  Her portrait of the Driscolls suggested all too
glibly the setting provided for the accomplished novelist for a family
tragedy.  He was relieved when she frankly laughed.

"No, I'm not a novelist," she said.  "Sink your suspicions into a
grave.  I've never written a word of fiction in my life and am not
likely to begin now.  In spite of that, or perhaps because of that, I
am a punctual woman.  Do you not think that we should now return to the
hotel in time for dinner?  I like to have a little time to myself
before dinner and I expect you do, too.  So shall we go?" she said,
rising, and floating away along the path.

He accompanied her, not feeling at all that he had been dismissed but
merely that she had brought their conversation to an end at the exact
point where it demanded to be brought to an end.  As they walked
together towards the hotel he wondered whether he ought to fill up the
gap in their talk by asking her some topical question as "Do you know
when the manoeuvres are due to take place?"

He took no real interest in the manoeuvres and it was apparent from the
vagueness of her reply that she took no interest in them either.
To-morrow, she thought, or perhaps next week: she wasn't sure.  They
pursued their path in a comfortable silence.





Mrs. Temple gained the solitude of her own room, but was not long
allowed to enjoy it.  A knock at her door roused her.  She saw Loraine
Driscoll carrying a sheaf of poinsettias.

"I thought maybe you would wear one of these, Mrs. Temple."  She
glanced round the room, discovering a white dress laid out on the bed.
"On your white dress," she added, associating the white and the red
with her vision.

The child was shy; she laid the flowers on the bed humbly, as one who
begs not to be repulsed.  She gave Mrs. Temple a soft sideways look; I
know I should not have followed you to your room, but let me in, admit
me, let me stay.

Again that look as of an unfinished drawing in the soft contours and
limpid eyes.  The unwritten page.  She lingered; there was an
uneasiness somewhere; she fingered the silver on the dressing-table;
touched the high-lights with the tip of her finger, as though it were a
game she absently played, thinking of something else as she played it.

The room was quiet and cool, the windows bare to the sunset.  So Mrs.
Temple lets the last rays into her room, does she, unwilling to lose
one last moment of beauty?  Does she also let in the moonlight, leaning
at her window for a last look down into the canyon, transformed by that
strange illumination into the colourless semblance of a landscape which
might be on the moon itself?  Might I perhaps one night join her at her
window in silence, creeping away as the moon sinks without a word
spoken?

Mrs. Temple meanwhile, having recovered herself from her annoyance at
the intrusion, discovered with amusement her own surprise at seeing one
of the gang away from the others.  So accustomed was she to accepting
them as a band, a gang, that she could with difficulty accommodate
herself to the idea of their separate existence.  Yet, as she had told
Mr. Dale, Loraine had always seemed apart, tenderer than the others,
trailed in their wake, tolerated, but more secretive, as though she had
a more particularized life than they with their freemasonry and their
air of initiation to things of which they could know little.

She wants to talk to me; she is in distress; she wants to tell me
something.

"Wait a moment," she said to gain time, and taking up her dress she
went into the bathroom next door.  Loraine waited, looking at
everything.  Mrs. Temple returned, all in sleek ivory now and fastened
a flower against her shoulder, bending forward to see it in the mirror
under the light.  The red of the flower struck like fresh blood.
Loraine watched her, one woman watching another adorn herself.

"What a grand flower, Loraine.  How kind of you.  But where did you
find them?  They don't grow here, they're not indigenous.  Not even at
the bottom of the canyon."

"They came up from Mexico," said Loraine.  "There was a man with a big
basket, selling them in the hall as we came in."

All this seemed irrelevant, and now that her thanks had been expressed
Mrs. Temple hoped that the girl would go.  The girl showed no signs of
going, but lingered by the dressing-table with the touching lack of
_savoir-faire_ of the young.  In this again she differed from her
companions who gave the impression of being able to deal with any
social situation.  It became necessary to make some further remark.

"Have you had a nice day, Loraine?"

"You met us coming back.  We went riding."

"That was nice."

"I didn't much want to go."

How easy to ask why not.  What was the sudden obstinacy which prevented
one from saying the thing one was intended to say?  Perhaps merely
because she shrank from inviting a confidence.  She noticed that
Loraine avoided saying where they had been: that might mean nothing or
everything.  Mrs. Temple had acquired the habit of noticing such
things.  But for the moment she was intent only on dismissing Loraine
as gently as possible.

"Well, you have been more than thoughtful in bringing me these superb
flowers.  I suppose you should go down to dinner now?  Your friends
will blame me if you keep them waiting.  Your nice Miss Carlisle may
even be cross."

She will shut me out of her room, she will exclude me.  Perhaps she is
even angry at my having crept in.  She does not know I came because I
was afraid.  Yet how could she not know? she is grown-up, she knows
everything.  I am here now; I shall perhaps never be here again.  I
will force myself to speak.

"Mrs. Temple."

"Yes?"

"What would one do,--what do people do, I mean,--if something terrible
were to happen?  Would one find courage for it, anywhere?"

"What put that into your head?  Are you worried about anything?"

I can't tell her, now that she asks; I can't.

"Oh no, Mrs. Temple; I just wondered."

"I expect one finds courage, somewhere," said Helen, looking at her.

"Some people do, perhaps; not all.  Surely it depends on how one is
made?  Surely some people find it very difficult to resist?"

"To resist the something terrible?"

"No, to resist other people.  To resist getting crushed."

"To know what one really wants, do you mean, Loraine?  If one had to
take an important decision?"

Is it possible that the child wants to adopt a profession and that her
parents want to oppose it?  Stiff Puritanical folks; quite likely.

"No, not exactly.  Sometimes people make terrible mistakes, don't they,
Mrs. Temple?  Mistakes they can't undo?"

"It does happen," said Helen, smiling.  But she felt lazy, unwilling to
make the effort to meet this innocent perplexity.  Perhaps a little
unkindness, too, prompted her to thwart the confidence.  Unexpected
unkindnesses rose up, sometimes, in the kindest hearts.  An
unaccountable reluctance to take responsibility, or an unrealized
desire for power?  Power over another being, however young, however
vulnerable?  She knew that if she withheld her advice now, Loraine
would return to seek it again.

"It does happen," said Helen; "but I am sure you would never make such
a mistake, Loraine.  You strike me as a very well-balanced young
woman."  How untrue!  "That's what strikes me most about all American
girls," she continued, trying to generalize; "you do know how to manage
your own lives, far better than our English girls ever did, while they
had the chance.  You seem to grow up at an earlier age, thus losing
less time in attaining maturity."  What nonsense I am talking, I don't
believe a word of all this.  Americans never grow up at all, they
remain permanently adolescent, that's their charm if they only knew it,
though they don't like being told so.  They pretend to be adult, but it
will take them centuries before they become as adult as Europe.  They
are neither war-worn nor out-worn and that makes the whole difference.
I hope they may escape being war-worn for some centuries, and as for
being out-worn they have centuries ahead of them before one can
possibly begin to use the word decadent.  It will take them centuries
to become out-worn; I prefer that word to decadent.  Dear me, she
thought, what platitudes! but my observation of America makes them
true, and meanwhile I must go on talking to this poor child who is
waiting for my answer.  "Dear Loraine," she said, "don't worry
overmuch.  One always has problems to meet and believe me one always
meets them as they come.  If ever I can really help you, I hope you'll
let me try.  But you know it is very difficult to help another person.
I'll do my best.  Now don't you think you ought to go down to dinner?"

Dinner!  Dinner!  It sounded like a dog being coaxed to its meal.  Mrs.
Temple felt the implication.  It was the phrase by which, tactfully and
recently, she had disposed of Mr. Dale.  It now became the phrase by
which she hoped to dispose of Loraine.  She had been very careful not
to sit down while talking to Loraine, since when one sits down it makes
one's uprising more marked when one wishes to dismiss a guest.  She had
wandered about the room, taking things up and setting things down as
she moved.  It was thus easy for her to stray towards the door; open it
politely; shoo Loraine out on to the corridor; and close the door
behind her.

She closed it gently, not to hurt the child's feelings.  She closed it
firmly, to be sure that the child wouldn't come back.  Click went the
catch; the child was now safely pushed out onto the corridor.  She must
now be on her way down to dinner.





The corridor was deserted as Loraine came out of Mrs. Temple's room.
Mrs. Temple had shut the door so quietly behind her that Loraine stood
for a moment, aware of the stillness and of the depth of the pile
carpet under her feet.  Why was it that just when one felt most
frightened and forlorn, one gained such extraordinary consciousness of
inanimate objects, as though they stood in a life of their own, mute
and very static?  Were they friendly or hostile?  Certainly they were
not indifferent; they watched with some sort of an eye.  The only
question was whether that eye was friendly or baleful.

She wished she were back in Mrs. Temple's room.  The grace of the older
woman gave her comfort.  Mrs. Temple's possessions seemed to share her
gracefulness.  The silver looked so serene, and some of the highlights
had been pink and amethyst where the sunset reflected in them.  Loraine
wished she could stay and bathe for an hour in that assurance; she
would not have asked to be allowed to talk, only to sit and heal.

Voices came up from below.  She began slowly to descend the stairs.

On the landing a door opened and someone looked out.  Loraine knew her,
it was Madame de Retz, the Polish woman.  She felt instantly that
Madame de Retz spent quite a lot of time behind that door waiting for
someone to pass so that she might creep out on them.

"Ah, Miss Driscoll, my dear.  So you are back from your ride?  And
changed already!  Won't you come in for a little chat?  I show you my
Grigori, he has learnt some new words."

"That's kind of you, madame, thank you so much, but I think perhaps I
ought to go down to dinner."

"The bell has not yet sounded," said Madame de Retz inexorably.

She made Loraine precede her into the room.  Unlike Mrs. Temple's room,
it was darkened, the curtains were drawn, the sunset excluded; only one
pink lamp stood beside the divan, and it was hot, airless, secretive.

Madame de Retz sank on to the divan and patted it for Loraine to sit
near her.

"Now come and tell me all you have been doing.  You young people, what
a good time you have, riding, dancing, playing, perhaps flirting.
Those handsome boys! but none so handsome as your brother.  Ah, if I
were twenty years younger how your brother would attract me!"

The parrot gave a sudden inhuman shriek, and flying up to the
picture-rail he perched there, eyeing Loraine with his head on one side.

"Grigori, you naughty boy, you quite startled Miss Driscoll.  Come here
at once and tell her how clever you become."

Madame de Retz held out her hand, clicking her fingers towards the
bird, which flew down and settled on her shoulder.  He was a beautiful
jade-green little bird, with a plum-coloured necklet and a wicked red
eye.  Loraine noticed the brilliance of his plumage against the square
black hair and sallow complexion of his mistress.  He nibbled at her
ear as though he were telling her a secret.

"I bring him from India," said Madame de Retz.  "Is he not exquisite,
so neat, so sleek, so well-groomed?  He loves fruit and jewels, and if
I mislay a ring I know where to look for it.  Now Grigori, you tell
Miss Driscoll where she has been to-day."

Grigori, unwilling to speak, hopped down on to a bowl of fruit, and in
the harsh squeak of a marionette uttered the words, "Bright Angel
Trail."

Loraine found it extremely disagreeable that Madame de Retz and even
her bird should know what she had been doing.  It suggested an interest
in other people's affairs which displeased and disquieted her.  Now
Mrs. Temple had either not known or not cared; all she had done was to
enquire casually if Loraine had had a nice day.

"How does he know?" said Loraine trying to be polite.

"One has eyes, one has ears, one has windows," cried Madame de Retz
mischievously.  "But it is for the young, Bright Angel Trail.  It is
too dangerous for the old, those precipices, those sliding stones,
those changes of climate, those legends which tell that anything might
happen there.  We older people are safer to remain on the Rim.  But for
the young it is good to have adventures, all kinds of adventures.
Perhaps you have already been told that by your friend the so charming
Mrs. Temple?"

"I'm afraid I can't claim Mrs. Temple as my friend," said Loraine; "I
scarcely know her.  She is very kind to all of us, but I doubt if she
knows one of us from the other."

"At any rate, she calls _you_ by your Christian name," said Madame de
Retz in her shrewd way.  "Of course," she added as an after-thought,
"your parents are very rich?"

"Not very," said Loraine.  She had heard people say that her father was
a millionaire but she never believed such rumours on hearsay.  "Not
very rich," she said, and then stopped because she felt that Madame de
Retz was trying to get information.

The parrot shrieked again, suddenly as before.  He was holding a peach
in his claw, tearing wounds with his beak in its flesh.  He and the
peach looked very decorative together.  Between each stab of attack he
looked up and shrieked.

"Gri-gor-i!" said Madame de Retz in the indulgent reproachful tone of
an unwise mother.  "Do not scream like that.  You startle my guest.
Say your word nicely, your new words.  Speak, Grigori, my little boy,"
and she added some words which Loraine recognized as Polish but could
not understand.  "Speak, Grigori, my little boy," and added some other
words in a language Loraine could not identify.  "You see," said Madame
de Retz with a little laugh, "I tell him in Hindustani.  I tell him to
speak his new words.  I tell him now in English: Grigori, speak your
new words.  You see, he will obey."

"Bright Angel Trail," screamed the bird, and plunged its beak into the
soft peach again.

"You are white, my dear," said Madame de Retz; "you have grown pale.
Does my Grigori frighten you, with his Bright Angel Trail?  What a
silly bird he is, and what a silly woman I am to let you be frightened
by a bird just when you were on your way to dinner.  Too bad!  Shall we
go down to dinner together now we have been having this little
interlude?  But no," she added as an after-thought, "you have told me
nothing about you yet.  Stop for a little more.  This is an intimate
hour, isn't it?  You must have lots of secrets, my dear, the small
intimate secrets of a young girl.  Trust me, my dear.  I am an old
woman in your eyes, but I know how to be a friend to the young.  I love
humanity, especially young humanity.  See," she said, pointing to a row
of ledgers standing in a book-case, "that is all to do with humanity,
all which is written in those big books."

"You have managed to arrange your room very nicely," said Loraine, who
did not wish to talk about herself.  "It does not look like an hotel
room at all."

"You think so?  Ah, if you were a poor lonely woman like me, with no
home, moving from hotel to hotel, you would also make your room not
like an hotel room.  I take my poor possessions with me, and in every
place I go to I say to the proprietor please may I set up my divan, my
cushions, my bits of silk on the walls, and may I get my bookshelves
made to take my books, to make my room like home."

"But you haven't many books, madame," said Loraine looking round; "only
those two shelves full of ledgers that look like a counting-house."

"Ah, you mean I am not a great reader," cried Madame de Retz with her
shrill laugh that reminded Loraine of the parrot's scream.  "What a
clever child, to put her finger on my weakness.  No, I cannot read.
Life fascinates me, not books.  That is why I say my ledgers as you
call them contain all humanity.  That is why I ask you to tell me about
yourself.  Love of life, my child, that is what inspires me.  Life
represented by children like you and your handsome brother.  The young
generation.  Your ambitions, your difficulties, your loves.  Of course
one does not wish to be indiscreet.  The secrets of a young girl, as I
said.  One does not wish to intrude on them.  Yet when one becomes an
old woman one hopes to help the young a little.  Experience, you know;
helpful, perhaps.  Of course I know the young disregard it.  A little
boy said to me once, 'You told me the path was slippery but I never
really believed you till I came down crack on my head.'"

Madame de Retz is very friendly, thought Loraine, and very sympathetic.
Why is it that I don't like her better and that she frightens me?  I
don't like her hands, they are too thin, like claws.  I don't like her
square black hair and her sallow face.  I don't like her frowsty room
and her horrid beautiful bird.  She wants something from me, but what
is it?  Is she trying to pry into my own life or is it money she wants?
She did ask me if my parents were very rich.  I don't know if they are
or not.  I believe they are.  I don't think my father is Big Business
but I think he is a sort of first cousin to it.  He says mysterious
things sometimes which sound as though he had something to do with Wall
Street.  Perhaps he is just trying to impress us at home.  Anyhow we
have always lived as though there were no need to bother about money.
Robert and I have always had everything we wanted, look at Robert's
car, and Mother gets a new string of pearls on our birthdays.  Pearls
cost dollars; every pearl is a shining coin.  I wish we had coins
instead of dollar-bills.  Silver looks real, paper looks pretence.
Silver and gold have a beauty; paper might be an advertisement you tear
up and throw into the wastepaper basket.  Token wealth; yet I suppose
it means something.  How odd not to know if your father is really rich
or just half-rich.  Why do parents conceal such things from their
children?  Why is there always such secrecy about money?  Either people
boast or else they conceal; they don't seem ever to get it right.  If I
had money, or if I hadn't money, if I were rich or if I were poor, I
wouldn't mind anybody knowing about it one way or the other.  I just
don't understand the pretence that goes on about it either way.  It
doesn't seem to matter.  If some people have too much money they should
share it out with people who haven't enough; that's how I see it.
Robert says so, too, but although he talks far better than I do I don't
believe he means half of what he says.  He is like our father, with a
difference.  Neither of them says what he means.  I would like to say
what I mean but something stops me.  Just now, I couldn't tell Mrs.
Temple anything of what I really meant.  How could I?  It was mad of me
to think I could.  I hoped she would guess and help me.  She didn't
guess, or did she?  I don't know.  I wish she could guess and help.  I
like her.  I don't like Madame de Retz.  Madame de Retz is much more
friendly towards me than Mrs. Temple is; I think that is because Madame
de Retz is curious to discover whether my father is very rich or not;
Mrs. Temple wouldn't care.  Madame de Retz is talking now; I haven't
been listening; I don't know what she has been saying.  She is asking
me if I need pocket-money.  She is not trying to get money from me, she
is offering me money instead.  How surprising!  What is she saying?

"You have a princess at your college, yes, no?  Not a real princess, of
course, not a Royal Highness or Imperial, but still a princess.  A
Balkan princess!  Poor but pretty.  She has a complexion she could sell
to American ladies for thousands of dollars, if one could sell one's
complexion."  The parrot squawked as he speared a cherry with his beak.
He held it up in his claw and pecked at it delicately.  It matched his
red beak and his red eye.  He held it up, aware of his decorative
value, pecking once and then looking round for approval.  He pecked
again, a quick, sharp, vicious peck.  He was right in his estimation of
himself: he and the cherry made a beautiful composition.  Design and
colour blended into perfection.  "Grigori!" Madame de Retz said
lovingly, and then returned to her theme about the complexion of the
Balkan princess.

She means Irma, thought Loraine.  A dull girl whose only merit is the
complexion Madame de Retz refers to and her title.  Those are the
things that have value in the eyes of Madame de Retz.  Those are the
things that have value in the eyes of everybody here; in the eyes of
everybody I know.  Mrs. Temple is the only exception.  Mrs. Temple
doesn't give a damn for complexions or titles.  I don't know what Mrs.
Temple does give a damn for, but it certainly isn't for anything that
appeals to Madame de Retz.

"You are friends, yes, you and Princess Irma?  You have the intimacy of
young girls?  The hair-brushing, the bedroom confidences?  Ah, the
grace of those hours!  The ease of the nglig, the little bare toes
wriggling inside soft slippers, the shaded lights, the bed turned down,
the clock ticking on telling you to go to bed, but you don't go to bed,
for there is always something more to say!  But one thing is lacking in
these days: the firelight.  Now, when I was a girl in Poland we had
beautiful fires of wood that were real fires, not like these electric
fires which are cold although they are hot; you could poke our fires
and make a fresh flame and then our talk made a fresh flame too.  There
were my cousins and I, all girls together when the boys were away;
girls together like you and the Princess Irma, so close in the
freemasonry of all the little secrets."

"I think electric fires are very nice," said Loraine.  "So little
trouble, so convenient."

"Bad girl, you try to--what is it?--put me off.  But I am interested in
your friend.  So sad, I think, these exiles.  No throne, no Court, no
country, no money.  Wanderers.  She shall find it very difficult, poor
Irma, to be among you American girls all so rich.  Now would you like
to do your friend a good turn if I tell you how?"

"She isn't a friend of mine, madame, really she isn't.  Not a
particular friend."

"Bad girl again, first you say Mrs. Temple is not a friend and now
Irma.  Soon you will tell me you have no friends in the world.  But
even if she is not a friend, not a particular friend, you would like to
do a poor college-mate a good turn.  Ah, I see you look curious.  You
wonder, do you not, how this lonely stranger can help to benefit your
princess.  Well, the secret lies in those big books.  Come, shall I
show you?"

"Another time, perhaps, madame," said Loraine, who now thought that
Madame de Retz must be mad, "but you must excuse me now, I hear the
bell ringing and Miss Carlisle does not like us to be late for dinner."

"Ah, yes, your Miss Carlisle," said Madame de Retz who knew when it was
inopportune to insist.  "Of course she has charge of all you young
ladies and must keep discipline.  She does not look like the principal
of a college, ("She isn't the principal," began Loraine, but was waved
aside,) but she knows her duty.  Shall I tell you what her duty is?  It
is first to see that you do not get into trouble and then to see that
you do get into marriage."

"Into marriage?" said Loraine, really surprised.

Madame de Retz gave her shrill laugh, faithfully echoed by Grigori.
She was so much pleased with the success of her remark that she reached
forward and patted Loraine's knee.

"Dear child, do you think all your parents send you here for what you
call fun?  This little happy holiday-party to the Grand Canyon, a
treat?  All those nice college boys are here of course by collaboration
("Our college happens to be co-ed," said Loraine stoutly), and all
those young officers, the airmen, the lieutenants, the young captains,
is it coincidence that you come where they are assembled?  Have you not
all already your flirts, your beaux amongst them?"

"Do you know, madame, I don't believe American boys and girls think
that way so much as perhaps you Europeans do.  You see, we are used to
growing up together."

"Pooh," said Madame de Retz.  "You shuffle, (she pronounced it
sherffle) you pretend.  All boys and girls think that way.  Americans,
Europeans, and Chinese.  It is just all this necking and petting makes
you believe different.  At the back may not be Love in your minds, but
always Marriage in the mind of your parents.  An arm round the neck may
lead to a ring round the finger."

"I really must go, madame," said Loraine, getting up.  "Go then, go
then," said Madame de Retz in a soothing voice, "and you will come
back, yes?  Or, look, I open the door again just as you come down the
stairs and call you for another little talk?  That will be nice.  Go
now, find your friends and your Miss Carlisle at your merry table, and
I wave to you across the saloon from my lonely table.  I wave to you
with the smile of understanding, you return the smile and that is
enough: we are friends, _n'est ce pas_?"

She smiled bravely and brightly now, the smile of a martyr.  Loraine
escaped, but not without a sense of guilt.  Had she been sympathetic
enough?  Had she misjudged Madame de Retz?





The dining-saloon filled up with people and chatter as the hour for
feeding approached.  The animals must be fed.  Animals in the Grand
Canyon Zoo couldn't be allowed to go hungry.  The hotel was doing well;
never since its inception had it enjoyed such a season as this, when
the published announcement of the manoeuvres attracted holiday-makers
from all parts of the continent as well as the faithful habitus and
the unusual come-and-go of soldiers old and young who, bored with
living in tents in the constant company of their mess-mates, sought
distraction by straying into the hotel for cocktails and then remaining
for dinner.  The hotel, in fact, scarcely knew how to cope with all the
people wanting to use it.  Its resources were strained; the employs
had never anticipated such a demand; they got flustered, ran about
unnecessarily, lost their heads when visitors strolled up to the
reception bureau asking questions, tried to remain polite and helpful
according to the tradition in which they had been trained.  ("Never let
a guest see that you think him a nuisance; that you are at a loss for a
reply; that you cannot furnish the information required; that you are
tired, irritable, overworked; that there are other guests who need
attention and who are waiting their turn; remember that guests are
always impatient, never patient; that they all think they pay enough
for their money to buy politeness and immediate competent service; keep
your head, satisfy everyone, be amiable, helpful, sympathetic; never
show that you have any human feelings or failings at all.")  Hard
demands were now made on them; demands which had never been made on
their first engagement.  On their first engagement they had merely been
told that they should serve in the Grand Canyon hotel, an ordinary
hotel service in an extraordinary place; but the extraordinary place
didn't affect them, since one hotel was very much the same as another
hotel wherever it was, and they didn't take much notice of the canyon
outside.  Taking service in an hotel meant taking service in an hotel,
and that was that.  It meant the usual routine and the usual things one
had been trained to do.  Just an hotel, a tiny world sporadically
invaded and inhabited by strangers, come to-day and gone to-morrow,
strangers who had to be treated with deference, however much one liked
or disliked them.  Cooks must cook; waitresses wait; managers manage;
porters be portative; the reception bureau be receptive.  All must be
amiable, welcoming, helpful.  Merciful Mother of God, what a task.

The only person who seemed completely unshaken was the Manager.  He
seemed to be enjoying himself, a happy cork bobbing on the waves of
this sudden excessive business.  He was here, he was there, he popped
up everywhere he was wanted.  He bobbed and popped.  He was at the
bureau, at the cocktail bar, in the lounge, in the kitchen.  A deft
touch, leaving everyone soothed and satisfied.  A man of genius in his
own way.  He had the required touch of tact.  He soothed the guests, he
soothed the staff, he soothed the central management from New York
whenever they got hold of him over the telephone.  He always knew the
right word to say.  Whenever his central management got him on a
long-distance call, he was able to convince them quietly that he was
quite able to deal with the rush of business due to people arriving at
that lone outpost the Grand Canyon Hotel in Arizona where the forces of
the United States were concentrating for their manoeuvres.

The central management was a nuisance to him with their long-distance
calls.  Why could they not trust him to manage things locally for them,
without bothering a man perpetually, interrupting him even while he was
eating his dinner?  He was working hard enough for them from morning to
night, and working sideways for his own purposes too, a full-time job
for any man; it was not fair to interrupt a man sitting down to snatch
a mouthful of mutton at the very moment he expected to have a moment to
himself and to be able to think about a man's personal life.  It was
hard to be perpetually on tap; never to be able to shut himself into
his little office behind the bureau and give orders that he was not to
be disturbed.  Not even half an hour to himself for a nap.  Always
ready to emerge smiling, when the discreet tap came on his door from
his clerk and a whisper informed him that Mister or Missis or Miss
Blank was waiting to speak to him.  Inwardly hurling the mister,
missis, or miss to the bottom of the canyon, he must emerge bland,
urbane.  "Now just what can I do for you, sir, madame?"  Be of service;
always be of service.  You had a toothache, had you?  Pooh.  Managers
don't have toothaches.

So he smiled.  As he had a squashed-up face, triangular, rather
Mongolian, rather like a cat, he could smile effectively.  His face
broadened out sideways as he smiled.  It was not a pleasant smile, for
those who could notice; it suggested that he would knife you in the
back for a buck or even for the sheer pleasure of doing it; but
fortunately for his flock of guests few people did notice.  To most of
them he was just a smile poised above a black morning-coat, with
pin-stripe trousers.  The Manager was very particular about the
correctness of his clothes.  His predecessor had sloped round in
corduroy slacks and a khaki shirt open at the neck; the new manager had
altered all that.  He believed in local colour and exploited it freely,
but he also believed in the metropolitan touch for himself and his
reception clerk.  They were the only black-coats in the hotel and he
had contrived to persuade the central management that it paid.  Let
everybody else be as picturesque as you like; let them go about in
fancy dress, those dude-ranch boys; encourage them, indeed, to do so;
but let the reception bureau suggest the Waldorf-Astoria.  He believed
in the value of contrast.  He was an artist after his own fashion.

That was why he called his clients sir or madame, instead of by their
names in the friendly familiar American way.  It gave a touch of old
London; a touch of old Paris; it startled them, made them notice him.
It was deliberate.  Everything he did was deliberate.

This time it was Mrs. Temple waiting to speak to him.  He did not like
Mrs. Temple, knowing that he failed to impress her.  He noted, however,
that she wore one of his poinsettias pinned against her shoulder.  It
had been clever of him to arrange for those poinsettias to come up from
Mexico; little surprises like that amused the guests, and he usually
managed to provide at least one surprise a day.  Besides he had been
glad of the opportunity to exchange a few quiet words with the man from
Mexico.  The poinsettias had given him a good excuse.

Mrs. Temple wanted to know if a note awaited her.

The Manager, swirling neatly on his heel, whisked it out of her
pigeon-hole and flicked it down on the desk before her with the air of
one who deals out the fourth ace.  The trim little typed envelope
caught his attention, and although Mrs. Temple was not a person at whom
one winked he permitted himself a slight raising of the eyebrows
accompanied by a slight jerk of the thumb over his shoulder in the
direction of the Painted Desert.  It all indicated very subtly and
respectfully that he and Mrs. Temple might be sharing an innocent
secret.  Mrs. Temple did not respond.  Too much of the English lady, he
thought, stung to vexation; too much of the English lady to share a
joke however innocent with an American manager.  He put down another
mark against Mrs. Temple's name.  She had snubbed him again.

Still he could not stop himself from admiring what he called her poise
as she crossed the lounge on her way towards the dining-saloon.  She
had a manner about her, that woman; a grand manner.  She was different
from the other tourists whom he despised.

A cheerful noise was coming from the dining-saloon.  In a few moments
he must make his appearance there, stopping at each table, bending down
to enquire whether everyone was perfectly satisfied.  Nothing would
have induced him to neglect this piece of routine.  But that could wait
for a little, until the diners were further under way.  He had found by
experience that a man is better disposed halfway through his dinner
than at the beginning of it, and although he was always prepared to
rectify complaints he preferred to avoid receiving them.  Meanwhile,
very well contented with himself, he remained standing behind his
bureau, delicately propping himself by the tips of his fingers on the
polished surface, swaying slightly on his toes, and permitted himself
the luxury, of surveying the empty lounge.  Quite soon, he knew, his
two bell-hops would come running in to their evening task of putting
everything tidy, shaking up the cushions, pulling the chairs into
position, emptying the ash-trays, taking away the cocktail glasses
(and, he suspected, finishing off the dregs as soon as they got out of
the room.  He must see to that).  Their arrival would be the signal for
his own progress into the dining-saloon, but such was the precision and
severity of his organization that they would not arrive an instant
before the appointed hour.  He could count on having the lounge to
himself for another five minutes.  He was pleased with the lounge.  It
was his creation, a very different affair from the ramshackle hall he
had taken over from his predecessor.  He had persuaded a sum of money
out of the central management and had expended it in the furnishings
and decorations he judged best suited to the expectation of his guests.
Very full of local colour it was.  Navajo blankets lay on the floor,
Mexican serapes were flung carelessly over the armchairs.  (He had
hesitated for some time between these and some very modernistic Fifth
Avenue chintzes.) The effect, he thought, was colourful.  Shelves
ranged with Hopi pottery ran round the walls.  The waste-paper baskets
were of the plaited Papago make.  The mats under the cocktail glasses
were Pima make.  Similar objects were purchasable by the
souvenir-minded tourist at the Indian shop opposite, but the tourist
was advised to come to the Manager's office first to be told exactly
how to proceed.  He would be invited into the office as a special
favour and in a locked-door condition of secrecy would be told how very
difficult it was to get the Indians to sell their wares at any price;
Indians were queer people; nobody could understand them unless they had
lived amongst them for years and then not even then; the queerest
things happened amongst Indians; they twirled sticks to make a noise
like falling rain; they used the yucca fibre to make their baskets;
they used the agave leaves and the reed and a rush which grows by the
Gila River; for their pottery, they used vessels of clay mixed with
cedar bark or corn-husks; they danced seasonal dances which no white
man or woman might see.

The Manager knew nothing about any of these things, but he contrived to
put up quite a good show of pretence when his tourists came into his
room behind the scenes.  Above all, he knew how to stimulate custom for
the shop opposite.  He had become quite glib about the Indians and
their legends.  In the very first week of his appointment he had
recognized them as Local Colour.  After two years of his job at the
canyon he had learnt how to exploit the material he had at hand.  He
exploited it perfectly.  He had mugged up all the necessary information
and could now put it across without making a single blunder.

He had taped his clientele.

Leaning his finger-tips on the bureau he wondered whether he might not
now ask the central management for a rise of salary.

On the whole he was pleased with life.

The only thing that bothered him, the seed in his tooth, was the
uncertainty of the moment when his instructions would arrive.  Every
time the telephone shrilled, he lifted the receiver in a cold
anticipation of hearing the prearranged code phrase: "We hope you are
finding the new bathroom installation satisfactory," the distant voice
would say.  "Perfectly satisfactory, O.K."  he would have to reply, and
then he would replace the receiver and hurry off to set the hotel on
fire.  His dear hotel, his pet, his creation, his pride, his triumph.
He would have to sacrifice it all to the Cause; he would have to see
his Local Colour going up into flames.  The Manager was a man torn in
half.  One half of him wanted to advance the Nazi cause; the supreme
domination of Germany over the world; the other half wanted to keep his
creation intact since he had made it and felt about it as a mother
feels about her child; it was his child, and he felt a savage sense of
possession; but, committed as he was to the Nazi bribery, he had to
destroy the very thing he loved, a hard thing for any man to do, so no
wonder that he struck harshly at Sadie when he saw her coming out from
the dining-saloon.  He vented on her the worry that was in his heart,
an oblique relief of ill-temper such as we all indulge in when
something else goes wrong.

He did not like Sadie from any point of view; he found her physically
repellent with her meagre body unsatisfying to a man of his tastes; he
deplored her ill-health, and was irritated by the solicitude she evoked
in Mrs. Temple.  Sadie was over-worked; Mrs. Temple thought so and said
so.  The Manager of course agreed and would see what could be done
about it; then as soon as Mrs. Temple's back was turned he would invent
some unnecessary extra job for the girl to perform.  And now...

"Sadie!  What you doing here at this time of day?"

She withdrew her handkerchief an inch from her lips to answer in a
whisper, "I'll be down again in a moment."

"Can't hear what you say.  Speak up, can't you?"

"You heard me.  D'you want to make me cough?"

"Oh, if that's it....  Not shamming, are you?"

She silently showed him the handkerchief, stained with blood.

"Ugh, take it away.  And take yourself away, disgracing the hotel;
visitors don't like squalors like you.  Come back as soon as you get
yourself presentable again.  There'll be a lot of folk in to-night and
plenty to do for all.  Be off with you," he added sharply, hearing
voices and laughter just outside.





The diners from the camps were beginning to arrive.  They drifted in
through the open door, in little lumps of twos and threes, laughing and
making more noise than they need.  They swaggered a bit, all very
manly.  Young officers handing their caps carelessly to the bell-hops;
young airmen very handsome in their slim blue.  The airmen came from
the other side of the canyon, from the North Rim where the aerodrome
was.  They came in auto-gyro troop-carrying planes, fluttering down
with twirling blades, settling safely and comfortably from the air,
landing twenty or thirty young men for a good time for one evening.
The planes waited to take them back; to fly them back over the ten-mile
gash of the canyon.  A ten-mile gash meant nothing to a plane flying at
six hundred miles an hour.  It meant no more than a leap taken by a boy
with a pole across a brook.

There were a few senior officers, too, and when these came in the young
men stepped smartly aside in deference.  It all gave an air of life to
the place, pleasing the Manager who had once resented being tucked away
to run what he considered a one-horse show.  In fact, but for a certain
bait held out to him, he would never have accepted the job at all.

It was all very bright and cheery now in the hotel.  Riding boots
tramped on the parquet floor.  Presently those boots would be dancing,
and the dancing floor outside would be full of masculine boots and
feminine slippers moving in rhythm.  Several romances had already been
observed and the atmosphere after dinner was always love and festivity.
This was quite as it should be, with the bright camps outside and the
roar of the night-bombers taking off in practice from the other side of
the canyon.  Daring, Danger, and Dancing,--the Manager thought he might
hang that up as a slogan over the cocktail bar.  Slogans were always
useful.  They caught the eye and the mind.  They meant nothing.  Or did
they mean something?  Daring, danger....  The Manager shrank for
himself from either; he preferred to take his risks on the ground, not
in the air, secretly in sub-rosa ways, an expression he had picked up
in some lecture given somewhere in Brooklyn.

These young men who were coming in to get cocktails or dinner at his
hotel gave not a damn for danger or daring.  They were not cowards, as
the Manager knew himself to be a coward in his morning-coat and
pin-stripe trousers.  They were full of daring, which he lacked.  He
hated them for that reason.  He loved them for that reason.  He was
prepared to betray them for that reason.

He had his favourites, and as they passed through the door into the
lounge they saluted him cheerfully, calling him by name as a crony.  He
responded; it was part of his job to respond, so he did it heartily,
always keeping that touch of the Waldorf-Astoria, that touch of London,
New York, and Paris, in his deferential manner set between himself and
his clients.  They chaffed him, and he entered into the joke, but
always at the back of his vindictive mind was the idea that soon the
joke might be on his side.  His feelings as he watched them throwing
away their money were complex: on the one hand the more they spent the
more his pride in his hotel and its receipts was gratified, on the
other hand he snarled as he reflected that the price of one man's
drinks would cover one week's salary.

It was almost time for him to start on his rounds in the dining-saloon.
His reception-clerk had already joined him, ready to take his place, a
suppressed youth who acted also as the accountant and who apparently
possessed no character at all beyond an astounding facility for adding
up figures.  But before he could leave his bureau for the saloon the
Manager had a decision to take, a decision he had to take every night.
Was it warm enough for dancing out of doors?

"Tim."

"Yes, Mr. Royer."

"Take over now.  I'm going out to have a look at the night."

"Yes, Mr. Royer."

The same dialogue took place every evening at this hour.  It was part
of the beautifully organized routine of the hotel.  Everything happened
on the tick.  The bell-hops were there, putting everything straight.
Smart little boys they were, well trained.  He had dressed them up in
Indian clothes to give some additional local colour.  Very picturesque
they looked, those smart little boys dressed up as little Indians.
They didn't look very convincing, since they hadn't the right type of
face; but still, they would do, and they carried conviction among the
hotel guests and the tourists who knew no better.

Anything would do for the tourists who invaded the hotel or for any of
those other people for whom the Manager had a justified contempt.

They meant nothing more to him than the negro orchestra which had just
arrived.  He knew that they would play throughout dinner and then would
go to take their place out of doors.  Three niggers he had there: a
xylophone, a piano, and a trumpet.  They would strike up a gay noise
and would keep it up for as long as it was wanted.

  "I love you, ba-aby,
  I'll love you as long as can be.
  I love you, baby,
  There's only you and me."

He went over to them.

"Hello, boys."

"Hello, boss."

"All fixed up, are you?"

"All fixed up O.K."

"Ready to carry on?"

"O.K. boss, all ready."

"Carry on then.  Strike up."

They struck up, three jolly negroes in white jackets as white as their
teeth.  They played incessantly, as though they really enjoyed playing.
They played so well and so insistently, that the young men in the
dining-saloon got up and asked the girls to dance.

The Manager started on his rounds.  He could estimate the accurate
moment when his clients had begun to go gay.  That was the moment when
he could safely make his appearance between the dinner-tables, asking
if the _cuisine_ had been to their liking, and perhaps pressing another
bottle of champagne on those who had already had enough.

That was the way a skilful manager managed his hotel.





After dinner, all went to his satisfaction.  With a great tramping of
boots, accompanied by the tock-tock of high heels, boys and girls made
their way out to the dancing-floor.  The Manager was proud of this
dancing-floor.  It was his own idea and with some difficulty he had
persuaded the central management in New York to supply the necessary
dollars.  He had been justified in his insistence.  The dancing-floor
had proved a continuous success.  It had turned his hotel into a night
club, which was just what he wanted.  It gave the young officers a
place to dance on, a perfect dancing-floor laid down on the floor of
the desert, on the edge of the canyon.  The Manager thought with pride
that no better dancing-floor existed in the whole continent.  He had
obtained the flooring from California; and as for the scenery, that was
a thing that Hollywood itself could not have supplied.

He had got it all flood-lit.  If Niagara could be flood-lit, then why
not the canyon?  As a natural phenomenon the canyon scored over Niagara
in his opinion.  Waterfalls were always waterfalls, and the fact that
Niagara happened to be bigger than others only meant that Niagara was
more bigly boring.  The canyon on the other hand was a thing on its
own.  There was nothing like it anywhere else.  The Manager knew that.
He did not care much for natural phenomena, they alarmed him, they were
too closely related to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and other
natural events with which the civilized world was still unable to cope.
But as a scenic effect they could be pressed into value.

The central management had boggled for a bit over the cost of
installation (the current of course cost nothing, ever since Tellussen
had discovered how to tap the electricity in the air).  The big
reflectors were still expensive to buy and the management in New York
had hesitated.  But the Manager in Arizona had convinced them.  He had
been persuasive, even violent, on the telephone.  They had supplied the
money and here were the reflectors now, the huge vari-coloured
searchlights that swept over the dancing-floor and shot down into the
canyon as they revolved and swivelled round.





The General Commanding All Troops came ceremoniously to ask Mrs. Temple
for a dance.  She had been sitting apart, quietly amused, feeling very
separate from all these young people having their fun.  Her dancing
days were over long ago.  It tickled her fancy to be asked now for a
dance by a General with a bulgy stomach like a ripe gooseberry which
would certainly get in the way as they danced.  If she dug a knitting
needle into it, would it pop?  Instead of doing anything of the sort,
she rose gracefully and graciously, allowed herself to dissolve into
the arms of the General, (she was a slim woman,) and got carried round
the dancing-floor four-and-twenty times.  There was a certain advantage
in dancing with the General: it meant that all the gay young officers
and their partners kept out of the way.  So she and the General had the
floor almost to themselves.  He danced badly and his stomach did get in
the way, but he danced with great enthusiasm and conducted her back to
her chair when it was all over.  He delivered her back to her chair
with as much gallantry as any Victorian partner restoring an innocent
girl to her chaperone.

"I hope you'll be all right, Mrs. Temple?"

"I'm sure I shall be all right, General, thank you so much."

"You understand I have to go and look after my boys?  Wouldn't leave
you otherwise.  Never like to leave a pretty woman alone."

"Dear General, I am sure you needn't worry; I am quite capable of
looking after myself."

"Ah, you Englishwomen!  Marvellous, marvellous.  So competent, so
responsible.  Well, we all know what you women did during the war.  We
take off our hats to you; salute you; that's what we do.  Must go now.
Sure you're all right?"

"Quite sure, General.  Thank you for the dance.  I enjoyed it."

"Did you now?  It's a long time since a pretty woman told me she
enjoyed a dance with me.  Satisfactory for an old man."

"You're not an old man, General," said Mrs. Temple, seeing him off with
thankfulness.

She returned to her chair with a sigh of relief.  She liked the
General, but it was a relief to be rid of him and to be alone again.

The next person to come and occupy the chair beside her was Mr. Dale.
He slumped himself down with a grunt of civility.

"Hope you don't mind my sitting down next to you."

"The General has left the chair warm for you."

"Yes, I saw you dancing with him.  I suppose I ought to ask you to
dance with me."

"Please don't.  There is no need.  My dancing days are over."

"So are mine.  It is more amusing to watch the young.  How decorative
they are, like animals.  How greatly one prefers the human race when it
is content to emulate the grace of animals without bothering to think.
Look at those children.  Like gazelles, the girls; like young tigers,
the boys.  The perfect expression of what they ought to be.  Fulfilling
their functions, severally.  The tiger preparing to leap on the
gazelle."....

"Now watch.  The light is going to turn away from the dancing-floor on
to the canyon.  Your gazelles and tigers will be left in darkness for
two minutes.  How do I know?  Because I know the mind of the manager,
clever, horrid little man.  Watch.  What did I tell you?"

The light left the dancers and streamed up the canyon as she had said.
A shout of joy went up from the dancers, vulgar and cheap.  The canyon
appeared, looking astonished in the sudden illumination more violent
than sunlight or the moon.

"What do you think of all that?"

"It is difficult to say what one thinks," said Mrs. Temple.  "It is of
course very beautiful.  Theatrical if you like.  But why should one
despise the theatrical when it increases beauty?  Such an objection is
merely old-fashioned, surely?  Why not make use of modern invention
with an open mind?"

"I didn't expect you to say that, somehow," said Lester Dale; "I
thought you would condemn it out of hand.  I thought you would say they
were vulgarizing the canyon."

"It is impossible to vulgarize the canyon."

"Yes, it doesn't lend itself to vulgarization."

They sat in silence and watched.  The whizz band played on.  The
dancers continued to dance in the darkness.  The darkness provided an
extra excitement for them: it was thrilling for them to be on the
dancing-floor not knowing exactly where they were.  The lights would
swivel round again at any moment and they would all be lit up.  The
kiss would be caught at the moment of giving and receiving.  The music
took the place of light, and suggested the jollity that was going on
unseen.

Meanwhile the flood-lighting poured along the canyon, making the red
rocks redder and the purple rocks more purple; the shadows deeper and
more distorted, the profundities more full of mystery, the shapes more
imaginative.

"If Satan is anything of an architect," said Mr. Dale, "that is how he
has built his Hell."

"On the designs of Gustave Dor?"

"Dor never thought of anything like that," said Mr. Dale, and Mrs.
Temple felt rebuked.  "No one but God or Satan could ever have invented
anything like that."

"You speak as though God and Satan occupied a level position in your
mind."

"Well, don't they in yours?  Great lords.  The lord of good and the
lord of evil.  What grander position could anyone hope to occupy in the
universe?  Positively Miltonic.  A conception as impressive as the
spectacle we are now contemplating."

"You put it in such a way that I don't know whether to take you
seriously or not," said Mrs. Temple.  "Positively Miltonic sounds to me
a very undergraduate phrase.  We are both English, you know."

"No, I meant it seriously," said Mr. Dale.  Mrs. Temple could not see
him, or only as a dim fat lump and that gave more dignity to his voice
in the darkness.  He went on, "Has it ever occurred to you that by the
elimination of one letter and the addition of another letter you can
get the attributes of those two supreme persons perfectly expressed?"

"Explain."

"Well, if you take one o away from good you get God; you add one d to
evil and you get devil.  Q.E.D."

"Is that your own joke?"

"I hope so.  I should hate to adopt somebody else's joke and pass it
off as my own."

"It sounds to me very much like the sort of joke the hermit once used
to make in his novels," said Mrs. Temple, trying to find out discreetly
if Mr. Dale knew anything about the hermit or who he was.

"The hermit?"  Mr. Dale's voice sounded puzzled.

"No matter.  If you don't know about him, you don't.  And I won't be
the one to tell you.  Please go back now to your conception of good and
evil, God and the devil.  Do you really believe that two such sharp
divisions exist?  It is difficult for us to hear each other through all
this racket of the Manager's whizz band.  Whizz, quite apart from the
actual noise it makes, does interrupt consecutive thought and
conversation.  It staggers ideas; staggers them in the sense that you
are switched now on to one idea, now on to another.  You cannot ever
have anything on a plain level.  Whizz makes you feel rhythm,
sentiment, romance, youthfulness, cynicism, disgust and excitement all
in one.  I almost prefer the good old-fashioned jazz.  It does not seem
to disturb these young creatures in the same way."

"That is because there is nothing in them to be disturbed.  They are
shells.  Shells and semblances.  Not an idea among the lot of them,
unless you call sex an idea."

"You are rather hard on them, aren't you?  What about the young men?
They have skill and nerve."

"Oh, you mean with their machines," said Mr. Dale with great contempt.
"It has become second-nature to the young.  They can no longer help it,
any more than the fledgeling can help spreading his wings the first
time he is pushed out of the nest.  Their skill has become almost a
reflex action, in a generation born air-minded.  All they can think of
is the next war."

"Or of how to prevent it," said Mrs. Temple.

"Don't you believe it.  Nothing would please them better than to hear
that an enemy force had taken off from Central Mexico.  As it may at
any moment.  Remember Pearl Harbour.  Danger is their only
justification for existence.  So long as they have nothing to fight
against they are thwarted, incomplete.  Like a woman who has never
borne children.  They have not fulfilled their function."

"You seem to take a very biological view of human nature.  How do you
reconcile your philosophy of the purely functional with your ideas of
good and evil?  If men and women are what you say they are, surely they
are helpless, fated from birth merely to follow their instincts, with
no design about their lives save the pattern already traced for them.
Yet you seem to regard good and evil as positive forces."

"I certainly do.  Very positive.  I never could agree with the view
that evil is merely negation, merely the absence of good, as darkness
is the absence of light."

At this moment the light swept round in a great blade of gold and
flooded the dancing-floor.  The dancers waved and cheered.

"Whether you think them shells or not," said Mrs. Temple, "you must
admit that they are very decorative."

"Handsome young animals.  And so prosperous.  Everyone in this place
seems so sleek, so well-fed.  Don't you get the impression that those
people have never known and scarcely imagined disaster?"

"They are not Europeans, you see.  That makes all the difference."

Both were silent, thinking about Europe.

"They are living on the edge of a chasm, though," said Mr. Dale with
satisfaction.  He looked round towards the canyon, which was now no
more than a black rift in the blackness.

"Prosperous, as you say," said Mrs. Temple.  "Neither good nor evil,
these beautiful young empty-heads of yours.  Just bent upon enjoying
themselves and taking what life sends.  Harmless, ornamental, material,
shallow."

"They have their discussion-centres, remember.  Phi-Kappa-delta."

"You enjoy exercising your sarcasm on them, Mr. Dale.  I daresay you
mocked at their counterparts in England during the twenties and
thirties before the war.  I daresay you thought them equally worthless
and shallow, determined only to have a good time.  Well, that is
perhaps proper to their age, and you must remember that those young
creatures of ours had grown up under the shadow of war, their
adolesence was darkened even though they only half realized it, but
after 1918 they thought the sun came out, the sunshine of peace
coinciding with their own youth.  I expect you scorned their frivolity
then, even as you scorn the frivolity of these American children now.
Should we not be more tolerant?  After all, those merry ornamental
fribbles did change their character in a day once they got startled
into seeing that some things are serious.  They loved life so much that
they died for it.  You deride these boys and girls because they have
not yet had a chance of behaving in the same way.  Wait until they do
get that chance and then see how they react."

"You rebuke me severely but deservedly.  I expect I criticize them out
of bitterness.  You see, I do not like looking back on the thousands of
my own young compatriots who gave their lives when they were just
coming into flower.  I mind, and my resentment makes me ill-tempered.
It makes me vent my spleen on these poor young innocent American
citizens.  It is most unfair.  You are right to rebuke me.  My head is
bloody but still I like to analyse these things.  So I will say then,
that I exercise my sarcasm on them, as you put it in your phrase,
because they have experienced too little in their generation whereas we
ourselves have experienced too much in ours.  We suffered so much that
it remains difficult for us to forgive those who didn't suffer.  Wrong
of us, I know; but one is human.  You say we should be more tolerant.
It is difficult to be tolerant sometimes; but still I agree with you
that one ought to make an effort.  I think the reason I am so
disagreeable about these boys and girls is that they experienced our
tragedies only by proxy.  They didn't live in Europe, did they?  They
didn't see their homes bombed; they didn't hear daily about their
villages being shaken down by land-mines.  That makes a difference, you
know.  It is human nature not to mind very much about what happens
three thousand miles away from where you are yourself.  Even we British
never minded, not inside our hearts, not in a passionate driven-home
way, about what was happening in China during the Sino-Japanese war; we
listened to the wireless rather vaguely, and heard about air-raids on
Chungking, but it never came home to us, not in the same way as attacks
on our own country, our own towns, our own villages came home to us.
China was thousands of miles away; so how could you expect the
Americans to realize what was going on in Europe, also thousands of
miles away?  It all seemed so unreal and so remote.  Even their own
disasters didn't take place in their own country.  They had Pearl
Harbour, and the fighting in the Pacific; their ships were sunk, and
their men went overseas; they had scares, when the sirens went in San
Francisco and Los Angeles and Hollywood, and they had the dim-out in
New York and the New England cities, but what was that?  Just a
try-out.  They never knew what a blitz meant.  They never saw street
after street blown down; they never saw their farmhouses ruined, or
craters appearing in the middle of their corn.  Lucky, they were, not
to live in Europe, not to live in Poland, in Rotterdam, or even in
England.  They read about it all, yes, they read, but reading in the
newspapers isn't the same thing as living and dying through it.  Oh,
they helped, I know; they helped grandly, they stinted nothing.  They
came angrily into the war, attacked and insulted.  Then, then they came
in as a roused animal with fangs and claws all sharp and tearing, angry
about Pearl Harbour, angry about the Philippines, angry about the
affront to the American flag.  It wasn't their fault, God knows, any
more than it was ours; it was that invention of the devil which made us
powerless....  Of course it can never be used again; we have the
antidote now; its success lay in surprise.  But that doesn't alter the
fact that America, quite rightly, signed the Pacific Charter or the
fact that you and I perch now in Arizona and watch them dance on.
To-morrow we may be elsewhere.  The one place we can never be is in our
own country."

"You take the personal aspect," said Mrs. Temple.

"What other aspect do you expect me to take?  Surely we all have talked
and thought the thing out until there is nothing more to be said or
thought?  Such enormous calamities end by tiring the mind.  There is
nothing left for us but to finish our existence as best we may.  We are
destroyed; there is nothing creative left for us to attempt.  Our
chance of constructive days is over.  Isn't that enough to make anyone
caustic at times?"

Mrs. Temple was not surprised.  She had come across other Englishmen
who were emptied and bitter, who seemed to have no capacity left for
anything but dragging out the rest of their existence.

"It is certainly not pleasant to live in exile," she said.

"Pooh, I don't mind a bit about exile; I always lived in it, so to
speak.  But then it was voluntary which makes all the difference.
Other places always seemed more varied and exciting than England.  Even
this place, this Arizona with its incredible violence of scenery and
this absurd sort of life in contrast, the dancing and the illuminations
and what-not, amused me and drew me back for a couple of weeks each
year.  Then there was China and Africa, oh, and other places I went to.
England never saw much of me, even when I was able to go."

"And now that you can't go to England, you want to?"

Instead of answering her question, Mr. Dale leant forward, his hands
between his fat knees dangling.

"Look," he said, "the nightly inevitable is happening.  The Indians are
going to dance."

Mrs. Temple glanced across towards the place where the Indians had
their huts, so near to the edge of the dancing-floor that the lights
played over them.  A little group of them were lounging against their
wall, apparently diverted only by the spectacle of the white race
dancing, without any thought of dancing themselves.

"Don't worry," she said comfortably to Mr. Dale.  "We have both been
here long enough to know that it takes some time before they can be set
in motion.  They have been trained to make as much fuss as a prima
donna being persuaded to sing.  The greater the reluctance, the bigger
the receipts when the hat goes round."

"_Il faut se faire prier_, in fact."

"_Il faut toujours se faire prier pour se faire valoir_, surely?"

Then they both suddenly laughed.  It had come as a sort of relief and
release to them both to speak a few words in French reminding
themselves (even with a pang) of that lost civilization.  It brought
them closer than any number of words exchanged in English.

"Well, what about these Indians?" said Mrs. Temple who knew when not to
insist on the moment.  "I suppose they will dance for us in their good
time."

"Nothing would stop them," he replied.  "That contemptible family which
squats permanently over there makes a very good living out of us and
out of all the people who buy souvenirs at their wretched shop.  Much
as I dislike our Manager I must admit that he's good at his job.  Do
you notice how he has induced the Indians to sell nothing but their own
goods?  You can buy as many coloured post cards and panoramas and Kodak
films as you please in the hotel itself, but there's only native stuff
in the Hopi shop, and, at that, he has taught them to make a favour of
selling it at all.  Why, all new arrivals here are going about in
fringed gloves within a couple of hours, slapping their boots with
cow-hide whips, and wearing shirts of cheap red satin.  Then think of
the bedrooms cluttered with rugs and blankets and baskets all in
faithful reproduction of the lounge downstairs, and God knows what
other junk gets packed into suitcases for friends in New York."

"It always seems odd to me," said Mrs. Temple, "that there should be
such an inexhaustible supply, if the Indians are really as reluctant as
the Manager says to part with their treasures.  But that doesn't appear
to strike any of their customers."

"Oh, the Manager has a very good answer to that question," said Mr.
Dale.  "Haven't you ever heard him dealing with it?  First the Indians
put on an obstinate look and become silent; this thrills the client,
who describes it afterwards as 'so characteristic.'  The mystery of the
Indian pleases them as much as what travellers in the opposite
direction used to call the mystery of the East.  Then finally they
suggest that the client should take himself off and get Mr. Royer to
confirm what they have said about the unreasonableness of the demand
and the impossibility of satisfying it.  Mr. Royer is always helpful.
He always has time to spare.  He asks you into his office.  He listens.
He smiles with a knowing air which includes both the proud Indian and
the urgent customer in his sympathy.  He ends by saying that if the
matter is left to him he will fix it all."

"And he always does?"

"Yes.  But there is a little explanation to be given first.  It will be
necessary to send a special messenger to a distant encampment of the
tribe in order to procure the twin of the rare rug, the special
pottery.  Naturally, though regrettably, the price will be a trifle
higher after a man has had to ride all through the night....  Few
visitors boggle at this.  They are quite prepared to pay a little more
for the satisfaction of letting their friends know about that headlong
ride, the arrival at the camp fire, the hasty argument, the gallop back
with the prize secured.  Oh, Royer knows well enough how to provide the
story."

"And what happens in reality?"

"In reality, a coffer is dragged out from behind a curtain after the
shop has been safely shut up for the night, the selection is made, and
by midday the required object is produced.  It may be earlier than
midday, if the visitor is leaving earlier; very much later if he is
making a stay of several days.  The greater the delay, and the more
prolonged the argument, the greater the value."

"You haven't much opinion of your fellows, have you?" said Mrs. Temple,
not disagreeably.

There was a great shout of laughter and chaff.  A group of young men
and girls had gone over to the Indians, and, taking hold of their
hands, were trying to tug them into the centre of the dancing-floor.
The resistance was good-humoured and perfunctory; the two Indian women
shrieked as they knew they were expected to shriek; the children
pattered round in their little moccasins, getting into everybody's way.
The patriarchal old Indian stood by, gravely moving his head in feigned
disapproval.  He had been well coached by the Manager.  The
flood-lights changed from blue to red, and with the coming of the lurid
light a thrum of drums began, beating an insistent time.  Feet began to
stamp and hands to clap.  The American girls threw themselves down,
forming a half-circle round the dancing-floor; the college boys and the
young officers stood behind them, joining in the rhythm.  "With falling
oars they beat the time," murmured Mr. Dale in quotation.  The Indians
themselves were losing their impassivity and were beginning to sway
uneasily and to utter hoarse cries,--"They're allowing themselves to
get worked up," said Mr. Dale.  At that moment the blind man was led up
by his attendant and deposited into the vacant chair on the other side
of Mrs. Temple.  She put out a helpful hand and touched his as it
quivered on the crook of his stick.  "Mrs. Temple?" he said instantly.
"May I sit here for a little? do you mind?  Not displacing anyone else,
am I?"  The attendant retired into the darkness; he was a man with a
sour, somewhat Mongolian face, not unlike the Manager.  "It makes quite
a change, listening to this odd music before one goes to bed," said the
blind man.  He spoke always with great simplicity, and although his
words were sometimes humble his manner suggested only that he was too
proud to seek intrusion.  He gave the impression of being
self-sufficient within his own strange world, touching his
fellow-beings only for the brief instant he judged they could endure
the embarrassment of his infirmity.  Very small were the sips he took
at the beaker of life.

"It is becoming a little difficult to hear oneself speak," said Mrs.
Temple.

The Indians were indeed fairly launched.  Springing into the air, or
crouched upon their haunches, or creeping round in circles after one
another, their exclamations became more frequent as the drums increased
in intensity and rapidity.  One could almost believe the savage ritual
to be genuine, and the participators to be persuaded of its sacred
character.  Perhaps like an actor who nightly plays the same part yet
always finds a new element in it according to the temper of his
audience, this debased and prostituted group of Indians nightly caught
some whiff from the outer air, beyond the periphery of lights, and for
the moment forgot the semi-imprisonment to which they had sold
themselves in the interests of greed.

  "Restore my feet for me.
  Restore my legs for me.
  Restore my body for me.
  Restore my mind for me.
  Restore my voice for me.
  Happily with abundant dark clouds may I walk.
  Happily with abundant showers may I walk.
  Happily with abundant plants may I walk.
  Happily may I walk."


The first dance came to an end and the performers, who had apparently
worked themselves into a frenzy, suddenly relapsed into their ordinary
state of indifference.  They just went back to lean against their
_adobe_ wall like so many workmen knocking off for the dinner-hour.
They had appeared to be extraordinarily moved, and on the instant were
moved no longer.  The man who worked the lights knew his cue: the red
light ran rapidly through the rainbow as the last note was struck and
came to rest in a pale yellow which had no more dramatic quality in it
than a simple electric bulb.  The Indians did not even trouble to pass
the back of their hand across their brow to show their exhaustion; by
their utter boredom and indifference they suggested that their
performance had required no effort either physical or mental.  But they
had left most of their audience under the spell.  Even the youngest and
most irreverent murmured amongst themselves.

"Gee! wish I could creep about like that."

"Say, wouldn't we do a spirit-dance in and out among the planes?"

"See, Roy, I know something you don't know."  This was a girl speaking.
"See those colours they wear?  the four boys, I mean?  Yellow, green,
red, white.  Those ribbons round their heads.  Well, that's the four
quarters of the world.  It's a very secret symbol."

"Who told you then, if it's so secret?"

"Never mind who told me; I _was_ told, and it's true."

"Well, if it's true, which is which?"

"Just let me think; red is east, yellow is north, green is ... no, wait
a minute, that isn't right; red isn't east though you might think it;
green is east...."

"Aw, cut it, Mamie; you don't know and it's no good pretending you do;
besides, if it's so secret you shouldn't give it away; why, you might
bring bad luck on any of us next time we take off, mixing up all the
colours of the compass like that.  Ain't you glad we have navigation
instruments to check Mamie's directions, Roy?"

"You bet.  We'd fly into the canyon instead of over it."

"Who's your wise friend, Mamie?  Tell us some more."

"Well, I'll tell you some more since you're so keen.  The Earth
Magician was floating on darkness..."

"Aw, I know that one.  Sounds awfully like the Book of Genesis.  That
the one about making the earth with the help of the white ants?  You
got that one off Royer.  I got it too."

"Bet you she got the one about the quarters of the world off Royer too.
He's a gem-quarry, that man."

So they chaffed.  Then the drums began again and the Indians crept
stealthily out, like cats, to prowl round one another, slowly at first
and then with quickening pace.

"You don't usually come to watch this performance, do you?" asked Mrs.
Temple.

"No, I don't," said Mr. Dale.  "I find these Indians boring.  I never
did care for Fennimore Cooper, even as a boy.  One might perhaps find
some interest in the genuine ceremonies; I believe some of the snake
dances are very curious."

"Oh, I shouldn't care for that at all," said Mrs. Temple quickly, "even
if I were given the chance to go.  If these people want to keep their
celebrations private one has no right to intrude out of crass
curiosity.  You may think me priggish, but that is how I feel about it."

"On the contrary," he said, "I don't think you priggish.  I think few
women would be so scrupulous.  Your feeling does you honour."  It was a
queer little compliment, very unlike his usual manner of speaking.
Embarrassed, he got up, and, taking a man by the arm, drew him towards
the chair he had just left and made him sit down.  The man started
politely to protest, but Mr. Dale silenced him with a gesture.  Mrs.
Temple looked to see who her new neighbour was, and recognized the deaf
man.  It was no good speaking to him, so she smiled.  "Do you mind if I
sit here?" he asked, much as the blind man had asked.  "Mr. Dale seems
to insist on it, I don't know why."  He had a lonely, patient face, and
he kept his voice so deliberately low that it was sometimes difficult
to hear what he said.  He had read somewhere that deaf people always
spoke too loud.

Mrs. Temple was much amused.  She guessed enough of Lester Dale to know
that it tickled him to see her sitting between two men, one of whom
could not see the violence of the light, and the other not hear the
violence of the music.  You would need to put them together to make a
complete man, and even then would not each one of them lose something
of the peculiar world in which they each must live?  If she took enough
trouble with the blind man she might get on to such terms with him that
he would talk to her about his perpetual night.  Was it imageless?  Did
colour exist for him, in some strangely transmuted form?  Did sound
take the place of colour, so that he might call a harsh sound scarlet
and a soft sound brown?  She knew that he had been blind from birth.
No recollections of a visible world could linger in his mind.

With the deaf man she could never hope to communicate.  He wore a
pitiable little slate dangling round his neck, and this he would
present when he required an answer to a question or perceived that
someone was endeavouring to address him, but Mrs. Temple could not feel
that this method would take her very far towards intimacy.  Not that
she desired intimacy with him or with anyone; the warmth had died too
thoroughly in her heart long ago, and it was only by a long and painful
climb that she had struggled out into her present indifference; but she
did wonder what this soundless world could be like and what its
compensations were.  Perhaps the memory of sounds once heard survived;
for, she reflected idly, he can't have been born stone-deaf or he
wouldn't be able to speak intelligibly now, only grunts and
token-noises.  He's lucky in some ways, she thought, as the yowling of
the Indians became more discordant.

There was a little stir in the ring of spectators and a bell-hop from
the hotel pushed his way through, monotonously chanting "Ge-ne-ral
A-dam-son, Ge-ne-ral A-dam-son."  "A telephone call," said somebody.
The stout General emerged from the ring and was led away, a large
vessel taken in tow by a tug.  The Indians stopped dancing in their
usual abrupt fashion and began going round the circle with a sort of
tambourine, jingling a few suggestive coins.  People dropped dimes and
nickels.  The deaf man and Lester Dale both exclaimed "_Please_, Mrs.
Temple!" as they saw her about to search in her handbag; and the blind
man also exclaimed "_Please_, Mrs. Temple!" as he realized what was
going on.  "I wonder what Loraine thinks of my three beaux?" she
thought, catching sight of the girl who waved back at her.

The General reappeared, accompanied now by a busy young aide-de-camp
who ran off and was lost among the pine-trees.  The General strolled
across with unconvincing nonchalance; he stopped to speak to several
people, who agreed afterwards that he did it in order to convince them
that he was in no hurry rather than from any desire to exchange remarks
with them.  Then he saw Mrs. Temple and came to take his leave with his
rather ponderous courtesy.  "Must be going home now," he said; "late
hours don't suit old gentlemen."  He puffed a little.  Poof-poof.
"Hope you enjoyed the show," he added vaguely.  Mrs. Temple realized
that his mind wasn't on what he was saying and that his pre-occupation
was centred on taking his leave as quickly as possible, without drawing
public attention to the fact.  "My dear General, how right you are, how
wise you are.  One does need one's sleep.  Eight hours at least.
Goodnight, General, goodnight."

Tactful woman; charming woman; she doesn't keep on talking when one
wants to be off.  Thank you.  Grateful.  She lets me go, doesn't try to
detain me; doesn't try to pretend she's got the General at her side.
Many women would boast of that.  Not Mrs. Temple.  She doesn't care.
That's why I like talking to her; I know she won't keep me a moment
longer than I want to be kept; won't try to get information out of me,
information I can't give.  Goodnight Mrs. Temple.  You're the sort of
woman I should like to marry.  Men like to marry women, but seldom like
them unless they happen to love them.  Women bore men, generally
speaking, except in bed.  You wouldn't bore or bother me, Mrs. Temple,
any time, even at breakfast.  You would know when to stay quiet.
Goodnight, Mrs. Temple, goodnight.

The General's gyro-plane took off with a roar of propellers and soared
away across the canyon.  They saw it go, with its little red and green
lights showing the way it went.  It travelled the ten miles across the
canyon, from the South Rim to the North Rim.  They liked to suppose
that the General had gone because he was middle-aged and tired and
needed his night's rest; they did not like to suppose that he had gone
because he was called away on an urgent message.  That was a
disquieting idea, the sort of idea that American youth did not welcome;
disquieting ideas that did not fit in to the formula they favoured at
the moment.  Like young England a generation behind them, young America
still tried to believe that something might be salvaged out of the
wreck of the world.

"It's pathetic, isn't it," said Mr. Dale's soft voice, "to see people
making such fools of themselves?  That General, for example, such a
decent man yet how misguided.  Such a poor General commanding troops,
yet such a good husband in private life, a fond father probably,
devoted, faithful, hard-working, and all the virtues.  Why is it that
one finds such virtues so dull?  There must be something wrong with our
conception of social being.  In the old days we used to call it human
nature, but to-day we demand a greater awareness.  It isn't enough to
be merely inoffensive.  We've learnt that lesson.  Vigour, Mrs. Temple.
Nothing but the vigour of the mind can fight our battle."

"If anything can fight it."

"We are like people living in darkness in the cellars under a ruined
house."

"Forgive me," said the blind man, "I couldn't help overhearing your
conversation.  I am a Czech; perhaps you know.  Technically, I suppose,
I was your enemy.  In actual fact I suffered as much as you can have
suffered.  I was in a concentration camp for my insubordinate opinions,
and it was not until our conquerors had nothing more to fear that I was
released.  You remember how contemptuously they let most of us go.  I
was such small fry, and blind into the bargain, that I was accorded my
pass to America without much difficulty.  They even provided me with
that man whom you have seen leading me about, a fellow-countryman of my
own.  To make up for the imprisonment I had endured, so they said, he
would be subsidized by the Reich.  They had taken all my possessions
from me; I was quite a rich man once, but now I could not pay an
attendant without the assistance of the Reich.  It was generous of
them, so generous that I have not yet recovered from my surprise."

"Generous indeed," said Mr. Dale, "and very unlike them.  May I ask
what brought you to Arizona?  Was it your own choice?"

"As a matter of fact my attendant suggested it.  All places are alike
to me, you see, and when he told me how fine the air was and how great
his own desire to see the canyon, I readily agreed.  He seems contented
here, so I suppose we shall be making a prolonged stay.  Why move?  He
describes the beauties of the place to me so vividly that I can almost
behold it.  He is an artist in his own way, a man of notable
sensibilities."

"I seem to remember a remark of Churchill's," said Mr. Dale, "about
German tourists admiring the beauties of the Bulgarian landscape in
winter."

"I beg your pardon?  I fear I do not quite catch the allusion."

"Oh, it doesn't matter.  It wasn't very important.  Just a thought that
crossed my mind.  If I may be allowed to say so, sir, your English is
remarkably perfect."

"It is good of you to say so," said the blind man.  "I was Professor of
English Literature in the University of Prague.  My accent was my only
trouble.  Apart from my accent I think I may say that I know the tongue
of Shakespeare well, but my accent, I fear, would always betray me for
a foreigner."

"It is very slight, and very charming," said Mrs. Temple.  "A sort of
lisp.  We always think a lisp charming in English."

"You are too courteous, too indulgent, madame."

"She is always courteous and indulgent," said Mr. Dale unexpectedly.
"If I knew her better I should take the liberty of telling her that she
ought to be more critical."

"You are telling me now," said Mrs. Temple, amused again.

"If you knew her better?" said the blind man, surprised.  "From the way
I have heard you speaking together I thought you were old friends."

His remark created a short embarrassment, but Mrs. Temple dealt with it.

"We are old friends only since this afternoon."

There is no flirtatiousness in her answer, thought Lester Dale, though
on paper or on the lips of another woman it might sound flirtatious.
But I already know her well enough to know that her intention is merely
kindly, a desire to put both the blind man and myself at our ease.

"Being of the same nation in a foreign land makes friendship quickly,"
said the blind man.  He had a gift for little aphorisms.  Perhaps that
was the result of having been a professor of English literature?  Mrs.
Temple liked him, Lester Dale liked him too.  They were all three quite
happy and comfortable together, no strain, no falsity, no pretence.
They did not forget the deaf man on the other side; they did not want
him to feel left out.  Mrs. Temple was careful about this; she turned
towards him every now and then, attracted his attention by tapping on
his knee, and pointed towards the Indians who had resumed their dance.
"Good Lord," said Mr. Dale, "you can't think he wants to watch that
hocus-pocus?"  "I daresay he doesn't,'" said Mrs. Temple, "but as I
can't talk to him I am doing the best I can."  The deaf man seemed
grateful; he expressed his gratitude by making some irrelevant remarks.
"Yes, it certainly is a very warm evening," he said, "very pleasant to
be able to sit out of doors so late.  H-r-r-m.  H-r-r-m."

"Ask him if he's English," said Mr. Dale.

"Poor man, how can I? he wouldn't hear."

"Write it on his slate."

Mrs. Temple took the slate and wrote, "We think you must be a
countryman of ours.  English.  Are you?"

The deaf man turned the slate the right way up for himself, read the
words, and turned towards Mrs. Temple with a pleased look on his face.

"Yes, I'm English," he said in his natural voice, rather loud, then
remembering again that deaf men always speak too loud he added very
low, "I knew you were both English, you and Mr. Dale.  I saw your
entries in the hotel register.  I saw you had both put London.  I
supposed that we had all come here for the same reason.  One has to go
somewhere, hasn't one?  A lot of us have come to America, the lucky
ones, those that got away in time."  He seemed as though he would say
more, but with the sudden diffidence of the deaf he desisted and fell
back into silence.  His silence was the more remarkable after his
outburst of speech.

Mrs. Temple took the slate and wrote, "I am glad you are English.  I
thought you were."

"Oh Lord," said Mr. Dale, "look at those Indians.  Dancing round in the
search-me-lights.  I suppose they'll pass the hat round once again.
More dimes, more nickels, more dollars.  That tambourine thing passed
round for the second time.  I wish I could make as good a living.  'Lo,
the poor Indian!'  Low indeed."

"Don't be so scornful," said Mrs. Temple.  "You have admitted that you
seldom watch this performance.  So you don't know how it ends.  I
advise you to wait and see.  It is worth watching, just once.  Listen.
The drums are dying down, they are less insistent.  The dancers are
getting tired, or pretending to get tired.  Soon they will stop.  The
moment they stop the lights will change.  You know how well these
things are arranged here, like in a well-ordered theatre.  Royer has
his electricians waiting for the signal of command.  He has all his
people well trained.  Look now: I won't talk to you any more."

As the dance came to an end, and nothing remained but the last tattoo
on the drums, the lights travelled suddenly round and their beams
struck across the canyon.  All eyes followed them.  There, poised upon
the edge of a cliff half-way across, lit up as though by the flames of
Hell, stood a wild and solitary figure.  His great head-dress of eagle
feathers fluttered in the breeze; his arms were raised as though in a
gesture of invocation.  As this apparition leapt into sight, the drums
increased their volume and the Indians took up an ullulating chant, the
stranger because the singers were now buried in darkness.  Even those
onlookers who were accustomed to the sound and the spectacle could not
repress a shudder of excitement as the rhythm quickened; there was
something peculiarly suggestive about this combination of the savage
music, the primeval scenery, and the ingenuity of modern artifice.  The
Manager had come out from the hotel and was looking on, because he knew
that the theatrical effect was tremendous.  He never got tired of this
theatrical effect he had arranged.  It was his masterpiece.  It had
cost the central management quite a lot of money, but in the end he had
got them to agree that it was worth while.

It was indeed worth while.  That savage figure wavering on the cliff's
edge, about to plunge, was worth at least ten thousand dollars a year
to the central management board.  People came from all over the United
States to see the canyon and this daimon added something to the
canyon's value.  What's the good of having a canyon if you don't
exploit it?

The Manager exploited it for all it was worth.

The suspense was not too greatly prolonged.  It could not be.  So
breathless an instant could not be sustained for long.  With a final
yell and a final despairing gesture the coloured figure dived from his
height into the depths of the canyon.

"Very effective," said Mr. Dale, yawning and stretching himself.  "How
is it done? a system of pulleys and wires, I suppose, like fairies in a
pantomime, and an invisible net to catch him.  Very effective indeed.
I quite imagined myself back as a boy at Drury Lane."

With the culmination of the entertainment, a sigh went up from the
audience, and after a pause they began to move about; the band played,
and there was some renewed dancing.  But the party was over, as they
thought.  At this stage the party was apt to break up and disperse;
there was usually some strolling off into the pine-woods where the
budding romances could enjoy a little fairly innocent fun.  This
evening however things were turning out differently.  Word had gone
round in a mysterious way, or perhaps it was the General's A.D.C. who
had passed it, with a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear.
Nobody took it very seriously, or took it only that the manoeuvres were
to have an earlier start than usual on the following morning.  With
such big manoeuvres going on it was impossible to tell what
dispositions would be made next, and of course everybody concerned was
supposed to be very discreet.  One might ask questions, without any
hope of getting an informative answer.

The college girls coaxed their boy friends.

"Now, Dick, you might tell me ... it won't go any further ... people
say a hundred thousand troops are around here, and ten thousand planes
over on the North Rim ... you might tell me if that's anywhere near the
truth."

"I might."

"Yes, but, Dick, you will?  Tell just me.  No one else.  It won't go
any further, but anyhow what does it matter?  It's nothing but
play-acting, our manoeuvres.  The war's over.  They've fixed Europe
now.  They'll leave us in peace."

"There was a time," said the young man called Dick, "when the English
used to print U.S.; then they took to printing it _us_."

"I don't get you, Dick."

"No?  Well, perhaps you will some day.--Look, pet, I shall be going.
See you again before long."  He kissed her.

"But, Dick, you haven't answered my question."

"That so?  Perhaps I don't know the answer."

He ran off, remembering to blow her another meaningless kiss as he
went, but in very much of a hurry to get to the parking place.
Inquisitive little bitches they all are, he thought as he went; just
anxious to get the low-down on everything, that's all.

He swung his leg over into the cockpit, glad to get away.  He felt in a
closer communion with his machine than with his girl.

"Contact!" he called out to the groundsmen.  "Contact!"

He had never known any such real contact with his girl.





Another girl asked questions of her lover, in a different way.  They
were true lovers, just married; Free French.  She had come across to
Arizona with him when his orders came to take part in these manoeuvres.
They were the lovers whom Lester Dale had noted as taking no more
notice of this world than if they had been at the North Pole.  They
lived in a world of their own, as privately as the blind man or the
deaf man lived in their own worlds; only their world was a golden cell,
not a cell of darkness or of silence.  Love, their love, was a room lit
by the golden light of closeness and intimacy.  It excluded all others.
It did not matter whether they were enclosed by four walls or out in
the desert.  They were always shut in.

"Louis, tell me, why do you have to go?  Why do you have to go so
suddenly?  Is it a sudden order or is it just in the routine?  Louis,
you _must_ tell me.  Don't tell me if you aren't allowed to.  You know
I never ask, but tell me if you can and save me from being frightened.
Frightened about your safety.--I am not really frightened; we are both
French and we are fortunate enough to be both in America.--America is a
safe country, isn't it?  The Nazis will never dare to attack America?
Louis, look, I am talking now as we used to talk in Europe, years ago.
Germany will never dare to attack America, we used to say.  Germany
will remain satisfied with the conquest of Europe.  So we used to say.
Am I talking sense?  But Louis, Louis, don't you see that the only
thing I care about now is the idea that you, my darling, may be going
into danger?  And you are being taken away from me!  So unexpectedly!
I had looked forward to another night with you, to-night.  Why do you
have to go?  Oh why, oh why?"

He tried to soothe her.  "_Calme-toi, mon choux, mon petit_; it's just
the ordinary manoeuvres, nothing else."

"Louis, listen, I love you.  Remember that.  Remember last night.
Nights differ, you know.  One loves, always, when one truly loves; but
some nights of love transcend even other nights.  Last night was a
special night.  There was the moment when you came into my bed and took
me into your arms.  I lay in your arms and, afterwards, fell asleep
there.  Don't forget that.  I hoped it would happen again to-night.
Now go.  If you must go, go.  Leave me.  Take off in that strong
machine of yours, which I believe you love as much as you love France,
and fly away across that horrible beautiful canyon.  Horrible because
it separates me from you, beautiful because it is as beautiful as love
or danger and courage.  Darling, you will be back here to-morrow
evening, won't you?"

"Sure," he said, in English, having picked up the American idiom.  He
kissed her and ran off, in a hurry to get to the parking place.  God,
how I love her, he thought as he went.

He swung his leg over into the cockpit, sorry to go.

His plane roared off.  They were all going.





Other planes took off and departed with the same familiar roar.  Soon
it could be observed that none of the young airmen remained; the blue
uniform was missing from the dancing-floor.  At the same time the
spread of whisper and rumour could be observed, that starts from a
spark and runs as rapidly as a prairie fire.  No one has seen the spark
fall, but in a matter of minutes the blaze is a strong violent fact.
"Did you see ... did you hear ... someone told me ... it is said ... I
got it on good authority ... the aide told me ... the General himself
told me ... the General has been sent for ... did the General tell you
that? ... not exactly, he indicated it though ... Robert says the
General told him he had been sent for ... the General got an urgent
message calling him back....  What's it all about, anyway? ... It must
mean something, the planes have gone, the boys have gone, there's no
uniforms left, only college blazers ... it must mean something, what
does it mean? ... there's something brewing down in Mexico....  I
thought it was the air fields in Brazil that the Germans had occupied?
... yes, Brazil not Mexico ... in Argentina too ... well, I don't know
rightly ... it is all very confusing ... what about that man who came
up from Mexico this morning with those scarlet flowers? ... look, Mrs.
Temple is wearing one of them ... oh, don't you know?  Loraine Driscoll
gave it her, Loraine has a crush on Mrs. Temple ... well, you never
know, perhaps Loraine is a Quisling and Mrs. Temple too ... one never
knows ... in war-time one ought to suspect everybody ... we never ought
to have let the Germans get those aerodromes down in Brazil....  Did
the General tell her that? ... no, I think it was the Manager told her
that, I'm not sure ... the Manager says the Germans have seized the
'dromes down in Mexico ... what does it all mean? it must mean
something...."

The two English people and the blind Czech and the deaf man alone took
no part in this flutter.  Mrs. Temple looked once at Mr. Dale, and then
they both looked at the blind man who was listening quietly without
making any comment.  The deaf man took no notice at all.  He was
unaware, inside the silent globe of his private world.

But so far the whispering was only an under-current.  The young people
continued to dance in a desultory way, though now owing to the dearth
of officers some of the girls were reduced to dancing with one another.
Mrs. Temple suddenly caught sight of Loraine Driscoll dancing with her
own brother.  The expression on the girl's face appalled her.  Loraine
looked like a drugged person; her head was thrown back, her eyes
closed, the make-up on her lips was startling across the pallor of her
face; she lay helplessly in the arms of her brother.  Mrs. Temple, a
woman of wide experience, had seldom been more horrified than by this
exhibition of mingled terror and sensuality on the face of innocent
youth.  An unfinished drawing, she had called that face in her private
mind: she thought now that she could never feel kindly towards Loraine
again, yet the manifest terror of the girl softened her towards the
other inexplicable side: should she blame Loraine any more than she
would blame the rabbit held by the blood-sucking stoat?  She had always
disliked Robert Driscoll, Loraine's brother; if she, Helen Temple, had
had a daughter she would have travelled a thousand miles to remove her
from his neighbourhood.  "Dear me," she thought, "the day will come
when I shall have to feel sorry for the Driscoll parents if they are
really as I described them to Mr. Dale this afternoon."

A bell-hop came out to fetch the Manager.  The telephone had been
ringing.  The staff had answered the insistent bell, offering to take a
message, but the voice at the other end demanded to speak to the
Manager himself.  Royer came in to obey the call, rather crossly, since
he didn't like being interrupted when he was on his hotel business.  He
picked up the receiver as he had picked it up many times only to hear
that a party of six or eight was arriving by car at midnight and would
require supper, a good supper, an extravagant supper with champagne to
wash it down.  He was accustomed to these sudden requirements because
he always had a lot of reserves in his store and could meet them, but
this long-distance call was a different thing.  The voice at the other
end of the wire said, "We hope you are finding the new bathroom
installation satisfactory?"

This was his cue, his signal.  He had always foreseen this, but it hurt
his heart when the order came.  The orders, the code-phrase had come at
last.  Damn, he thought, it has come.  He gave the reply he was
expected to give over the telephone: "Perfectly satisfactory," he said,
"O.K."

This reply meant that he had understood the code message and would fire
the hotel at the pre-arranged hour.  He minded having to fire his
hotel, but the central management didn't know that.  They didn't know
that he had any sentimental pride about it; they just regarded him as a
manager put in to carry out their wishes, an agent well-paid, a
convinced Nazi ready to advance the Cause.  They were right in assuming
that he would carry out his orders; they were wrong in assuming (if
they gave the matter any consideration at all, which was unlikely) that
he would carry his orders out in cold blood, in cold unfeeling blood,
without a touch of human feeling anywhere within his vile base heart.
Yet he did mind.  He minded, not only in his own cowardly personal way,
knowing that he might be suspected of Fifth Column activities and might
get lynched in revenge by those fierce young men to whom he had been
serving cocktails at the bar two hours ago, all those cheery and matey
clients who might turn nasty at any moment and turn against him,
crucifying him with nails driven through his hands and feet; there was
no revenge too horrible for them to take if they once recognized him as
a traitor; they would cease to be amiable young men; they would turn
into cruel revengeful young men; they would cease to be the young men
who came gaily up to the cocktail bar saying "Gin and It, please Royer,
and make it a triple."  All that happy time was over, finished, done
with, and now nothing was left except his own fear and the burning of
the dear hotel.

He must carry it off gaily.  He must not let them think that anything
was going wrong.  He must not let them think that anything very
dramatic or important was happening.  He must play up.  He was heavily
paid to do so.  He came out from the hotel waving a piece of paper over
his head.  The lights swivelled across and lit him up as he came: the
neat little Waldorf-Astoria figure in his black coat.  The lights
streamed across him; the hotel electrician was well trained, and the
bell-hop had run out quickly to advise the electrician to light up the
Manager as he emerged from the hotel on to the dancing-floor.  The
whole staff had been well trained and their performance was
satisfactory.  The sensational effect was well organized.  The Germans
had always been good at organizing dramatic as well as factual effects.
And, since the Manager was in German pay, he produced his effect
theatrically and as though it were entirely in the interest of the
American nation:

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "mesdames, mesdemoiselles, messieurs,
I have to announce to you that military orders have come, decreeing a
complete blackout over the whole Grand Canyon area."





Blackout....  The few Europeans there knew what it meant.  The
Americans knew only by hearsay, which is a very different thing.  To
the Europeans the announcement came with a greater reality.  To them it
meant something they had lived through: the necessity of obscuring
windows because if you didn't obscure windows it meant that a bomb
whistled or a land-mine floated down, destroying homes and cottages or
villages or towns or cities and citizens.  It was necessary to put out
the lights.  To the blind man it meant nothing because the whole of his
life was blacked-out.

The Europeans knew this.  They knew it in their bones and in their
blood.  The Americans knew it only at secondhand.  They had heard of
the blackout as a banner headline, but they had never experienced for
themselves what a blackout meant.  They had never known the time when
there was no light except in Eire between Siberia and New York.  They
had never had to bother about putting curtains up for themselves in
every little home all over the United States.  Least of all had they
ever thought of danger from the air threatening them in the refuge of
Arizona.  All had been gay and pleasurable, and now suddenly this.

Of course everything had been in readiness for years all over the more
vulnerable points of the United States.  The authorities knew all about
it, even if the usual American didn't.  The authorities had arranged
for a blackout at a moment's notice, and thus it could quickly be put
into operation at the Grand Canyon hotel, which was a vulnerable point.
It stood right in the centre of the vast aerodromes on the North and
South Rims, and of the camps where the army in conjunction with the air
force was doing its annual training.  If any point in the United States
was likely to be attacked, it was the aerodromes on the North and South
Rims, with the camps arranged on either side of the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado.  Why, it was only a couple of hours' flight from the
airfields of Brazil.

Some of the National Park rangers had appeared by now, and in their
quick competent way were giving assistance.  Mrs. Temple could see one
of them moving rapidly amongst the floodlight reflectors, bending down,
removing the big bulbs, disconnecting the flexes.  It was clear that
each one had his allotted job.  The Park Superintendent, his rifle
slung across his back, was talking to the Indians.  She wondered what
the Indians were making of it all; they seemed unperturbed, but perhaps
that was because they did not understand.  The American girls were all
jabbering in little groups, ignoring the efforts of their Miss Carlisle
to get them rounded up and shepherded into the hotel.  To them the
whole thing was a great excitement, a new show arranged for their
benefit.  They had not yet had time to grow a belief in it; they
wouldn't begin to believe in it, thought Mrs. Temple, until they had
seen a few people killed.

She thought back over some of the things that had happened during the
Second German War.  She remembered some bits of the advice she had been
given in First Aid handbooks:


    "If an elderly man has the side of his face blown away, including
    an eye, the top part of his nose and part of the lower jaw, and
    blood, flooding into his throat, is asphyxiating him..."


The Second German War had brought these things; it had been bad enough;
epic, tragic, none of the big words was big enough to match it; but,
huge and murderous as it had been, it was going to appear almost
old-fashionable compared with war as it would now be fought.

Everything had gone forward as it were by arithmetical progression.
There was an old story of a Sultan desirous of rewarding a subject.
The subject asked with apparent modesty if he might be allowed to place
one penny on the first square of a chess-board and then to go on
doubling it until he reached the last square.  The Sultan agreed amid
the laughter and derision of his courtiers.  How could the foolish man
exact so poor a bargain?  But when the foolish man had arrived at the
end of the chess-board squares, it was found that he had reached a sum
the Sultan with all his wealth was unable to pay.

So, speed had gone ahead, doubling itself from square to square.  It
had gone ahead so fast, that it had outrun prophetic imagination.  That
men should fly at four hundred miles an hour had surprised the
unprepared mind once; but now that they flew at six hundred and some
even at a thousand, no one seemed surprised any longer; it was taken
for granted and any further advance would be taken for granted too.
The capacity for wonder is soon lost.  So in the same way did people
accept the increased carrying charges of the warplanes.  There was no
difficulty in accepting that the heaviest bombers could now take off
from Dakar, Honolulu, or Rio, arrive within a few hours, unload their
bombs on American cities, and get back to their flying bases without
refuelling.  This meant that any point on the American sea-boards could
be attacked by air at any moment, and many points in the interior of
the continent as well.

Neither the Government nor the population of the United States relished
this idea.  They had accepted it in theory, but in practice they had
had small experience of either the threat or the performance.  They had
agreed with the mind, without feeling through the body or the heart.
They both resembled and disresembled the inhabitants of Britain in this
respect.  Britons had lived through certain experiences in the past.
They had known the Roman occupation and the Norman conquest, but these
events had occurred some considerable time ago, long enough for their
effect to have faded out of the popular consciousness.  Since then, the
moat defensive to their isle had worked well enough.  Philip of Spain
had threatened it with his Armada; Buonaparte had threatened it again
from closer quarters; and in each case, at two centuries difference in
time, the invader had been frustrated for different reasons though not
without giving a scare to the islanders.  An echo of these scares
survived in popular phrases: Drake could finish a game, (God bless
Drake, we're all right with _him_,) God blew with His wind, (God bless
God, we're all right with _Him_;) Elizabeth announced that she thought
foul scorn that any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders
of her realm; (God bless the Queen, we're all right with _her_;) and
these assurances, oddly justified by events, continued to satisfy the
English.

Then after two hundred safe years came Boney.  Boney....  The English
with their traditional gift for turning the terrible into the familiar,
diminished the huge small figure of Buonaparte into a nickname of fun.
They were frightened of him, so they sought to lessen him.  Yet in
spite of this lessening, they still kept him as a bogey to menace their
children into obedience.  The Bogey-man, the Boney man; the Bogey-man
will get you; Boney will come and fetch you out of your bed if you
aren't good....  English children were dutifully alarmed by this
threat, and so were English men watching along the shores of Britain
for the French fleet from Boulogne to arrive.  Boney might come.  Boney
would come and fetch you all out of your beds as you slept smugly in
England on the other side of your moat.  The Channel your moat was not
so wide as you English might think.  To you in your English arrogance
it seems impassable.  Yet it is only twenty miles wide at its narrowest
point; a step, a single stride for the giant Boney in his Continental
boots.

Boney was never able to take that step and the English went on in their
own way.  They had grown well accustomed to the periodic idea of an
invasion which never got beyond the other side of their Channel.

Then after more than a hundred years came a change in the menace.  It
was an important change, but a slight nymph-like figure rose between
the surf and the cliffs to meet it, an emanation enriching mythology by
a new shape, a twin of Echo, not repeating the exact syllables but
speaking new words in the old tone.  She did not repeat "We will think
foul scorn," but when she said "We will fight upon the beaches" the
tone stirred the listener into believing that the words were the same.

It sounded well and the response was gallant.  It worked well for a
time, but in the end the spirit had been overcome by the gross
materialism of armoured force and diabolical invention.  Spirit was not
enough.  Echo was not enough.  Echo was out of date.  Even the modern
twin of Echo was out of date.  The twentieth century demanded a more
adult nymph to match the century in its forties.  The nymph had to grow
up and change her character.  To be generous and young and Elizabethan
no longer sufficed; the brave body had to oppose itself, not to a lance
or to a clumsily-directed cannon-ball, but to the extreme and nicely
calculated danger of modern science.

Still, death and gallantry remained the same.  That could not alter,
though the method might alter.  Death, thought Mrs. Temple as she
hesitated between staying downstairs in the saloon and going upstairs
to her own bedroom, death as an event is not really very interesting.
It is interesting only as marking the moment of transition between one
form of life and another.  Indeed it may be argued that life itself, or
what we are pleased to call life, is not very interesting either in
this world as we know it or in another world where we do not know it
but as we suppose it to be.  Going further, it is reasonable to suppose
that both life and death are of our own invention, framed to fit a
continuous state of being which we are incapable of understanding from
first to last, from the first painful emergence from the womb to the
last painful break.  There may be no first and no last, no birth and no
death, no life in between, only a continuity which we intersect in a
segment like tying two knots in a length of string.

But as these thoughts came into her mind in the confusion of thoughts
too large to hold, Mrs. Temple decided that there was no point in
remaining downstairs where the chatter made it impossible for her to
listen to the silence.  She would prefer the solitude of her own
bedroom.  But she was intercepted several times on the way.  Madame de
Retz came up to her, frightened.  "What is it, do you think, Mrs.
Temple?  Is it war?  Will it be like Warsaw all over again?  I was in
Warsaw, you know, and then there was Rotterdam, and Belgrade, and
London.  Will it be like that here?  Is it war?  Is it?  Is it?  Can it
be so?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," said Mrs. Temple, disengaging her wrist from
the woman's clutching fingers.  She disliked hysteria.  "It may be just
a try-out, a test, a practice.  I know no more than you do.  You heard
the evening radio going on in the saloon, and you know it was just as
usual.  No declaration of war or any hint of it."

"So you think ... you really think..."

"I think nothing," said Mrs. Temple, who had been thinking a great
deal, "and if you will take my advice you will go quietly to bed now
and sleep while you can without trying to upset anybody else."

"Sleep while I can!  You are not serious?  You said just now it might
be a practice, a test.  The American army is on its manoeuvres and they
must have a practice alarm, no?  And you said there had been no word on
the radio."

Mrs. Temple was not a cruel woman, but she was badly tempted to remind
Madame de Retz that invasion on countries without warning had not been
unknown in Hitler's wars.  The anxiety in the shrivelled face, however,
touched her pity even while it aroused her contempt.

"Of course," she said soothingly, "I expect that by breakfast-time
to-morrow we shall all be laughing at the scare they have tried to give
us.  Goodnight, madame; sleep well."

"Mrs. Temple."

Helen turned patiently.

"Mrs. Temple, if we hear things in the night, may I ... would you like
me to come to your room?  I know where it is.  There are people, you
know, who do not like to be alone.  You may be one of them."

I really can't have this, thought Helen; and aloud she said, "I promise
to come and look for you if it seems in the least necessary."

She escaped at last, leaving Madame de Retz standing there with her
hands clasped over her mouth, staring.  Poor little wretch, thought
Helen, so she was in Warsaw, was she?  I see that I shall have to look
after her if anything really does happen.

In her bedroom she found Sadie, carefully reaching up to close the last
chink in the heavy curtains.

"How tired you look, Sadie; you ought to have been in bed hours ago."

"Is it true, Mrs. Temple, do you think?  Is it war?"

"What does Mr. Royer say?"  She had met Mr. Royer downstairs and knew
very well what he said.

"Oh, Mr. Royer!  What does it matter what he says?  What he says will
not be the truth.  I should not speak so of my boss, but the time has
come when all must speak out.  For me that time has always been, but
now I share it with all."

Helen looked at this girl, who had so often been touched by the wing of
death which brings the truth.

"So you have already made up your mind that it is war, have you?"

"Surely."

"But, Sadie, you asked me just now if I thought it meant war, as though
you doubted.  Now you say 'surely,' as though you had no doubt at all."

"Ah, Mrs. Temple, dear, you know well enough that one asks questions
when one wants to be contradicted."

"You don't want me to contradict you if I don't believe in my
contradiction?"

"Surely not.  There are times when truth must be spoken.  This is a
time.  Tell me what you think."

"Well, Sadie, I don't know.  I know no more than you do.  But I think
it is war."

"Yes, so do I.  I should leave you now, madame.  I have taken up too
much of your time already.  You have always been good to me.  Thank
you, madame."

"Sadie, stop a moment.  Mr. Royer has taught you to call me madam,
hasn't he?  Just now you called me Mrs. Temple, dear.  I prefer that
way of speaking."

"I see what you mean, madame.  You mean we are all likely to die now.
That is true.  We are all the same.  Death makes us all the same.  I
have always known that, because I have always known about death.  Death
has never been a far-off thing to me, and so one gets used to the idea.
The idea comes as a startling thing to people who aren't used to it.
People like me who are used to it don't mind.  I don't mind being
killed.  I know I must die soon.  I am used to that idea.  Death is
nothing, once you get used to the idea of losing your life.  It is not
death one fears; it is life one feels sorry for leaving.  It is the
only life one has, and one knows nothing else, does one?  One knows
only what one knows."

"Religious people believe that one has a further life, Sadie."

"Lucky them, then.  Yes, I know.  I have known good religious people.
I have known bad religious people.  I have known good people without
any religion at all.  It has often seemed to me that goodness did not
have anything to do with religion or religion with goodness.  You are
good, madame, though you are without religion.  You must not take this
as impertinence.  It is not the thing that one person should say to
another except when life and death come to the meeting-point.  Your
curtains are rightly drawn now, I think.  Goodnight to you, Mrs.
Temple, dear, a goodnight."

Helen stood alone in the middle of her room and pressed her finger-tips
against her eyeballs.  She had sometimes read in novels of people doing
this but had never done it herself, except once when a handsome German
boy had stuck his bayonet for fun into the entrails of Harlequin her
Dalmatian dog.  He was a boy who reminded her very much of her own son,
the one who had been killed flying; he had the same fresh look and
straight eyes; very young.  She had said to him quietly, "Why did you
do that?" and he had given her a look she had never forgotten.  It was
meant to be a bold defiant look, but there had been a sudden query in
it, as though he wondered why indeed he had committed that wanton piece
of cruelty.

Then she had gone away by herself and covered her eyes to shut out the
sight as she remembered it and had found the total darkness so simply
obtained though not the darkness of memory she desired.  A physical
blackout, not a mental obliteration, and was now surprised again to
find how completely it worked.  She had only to apply the lightest
pressure and the blackness became total.  Everyone, she thought, can
try it for themselves.  But what they cannot try, she thought, is the
whole process which to her was so dreadfully familiar.  One has to live
through that before it can become part of one's consciousness.  "Don't
show a light, will you, Mrs. Temple?  Government order, you know."
Yes, I know.  I know better than you know.  I've known what it meant.
I've lived under these conditions.  For years I lived under them.  Then
I got away, when we saw the war was lost.  I was a useless mouth to
feed, so I came to America.  But I went through the war, Europe's war.
I left England only when we were all asked to leave as quickly as
possible, not to encumber England when the Peace of Berlin was signed.
Useless mouths; useless women; useless men.  We all came away.  Here we
are.

Was that danger ever real? she thought.  It seemed extraordinarily
unreal now; yet, throwing back her curtains after first carefully
putting out the light--so strong was the habit in her--it all became
real again.  At any moment, she thought, the siren may go off and the
familiar drone of bombers follow it.  I got accustomed to that in
England, she thought, but here in Arizona I must say I didn't expect
it.  The blackout is ordered ... here she gave the curtain a nervous
twitch ... this hotel has had its blackout prepared for months past,
yet none of us thought it would have to be put into use.  We thought we
were safe here in America.  "Don't show a light, will you, Mrs. Temple?
Government order, you know."  "No, I won't show a light; I've been well
trained in that sort of thing.  Trust me, Mr. Royer; I know well enough
what bombs mean."

"Bombs!  I don't know why you talk of bombs.  I, Royer, tell you that I
do not know what bombs mean.  It is all a myth in the middle of this
jolly life.  We are having fun here at the Grand Canyon Hotel, aren't
we?  We are enjoying life.  Our young people go down the Bright Angel
Trail and enjoy life there.  They enjoy it perhaps more than you know."
He said this with a horrid leer.  "Dear madam, perhaps there are things
in life which in your nice innocence you do not suspect.  But to come
back to this order about putting up the blackout, it is a silly order,
isn't it, Mrs. Temple?  It is an alarmist order.  The capitals of
Europe observed it and some of them got destroyed in spite of it.  I do
not believe in this alarm.  Let us all sleep in peace but obey the
Government order all the same."





Now she stood at the window looking out, the darkened room behind her.
All was extraordinarily still.  After the noise of the saxophones, and
the laughter, and the chatter, the hush seemed as thick and soft as
black velvet.  She could not see the canyon, but felt it to be very
much there.  Some smart head-liner had called it the 100 per cent
Maginot line, or America's Last Trench.  A trench indeed, some trench!
but although no tank could cross it, aeroplanes could fly it.  Tanks
seemed very out of date now that the battle of America was engaged;
tanks which had once seemed to be the armoured answer to all
land-fighting in France and Poland, Egypt and Russia.  Tanks couldn't
cross the canyon, no tank ever constructed could cross that
ten-mile-wide-mile-deep mountainous chasm, not unless the Nazis threw a
bridge across it, and even the Nazis with all their slave labour
couldn't do that quickly enough, not even if they got all the peons of
Mexico (which they now controlled) to come up and work for them as the
Egyptians were once compelled to build the Pyramids of the Pharaohs.

She wondered in an impersonal way what was most likely to happen.  Her
mind floated like a little speck above the vision of happenings too
appalling for it to grasp.  She remembered the same feeling in the last
war--already she was calling it the last war!--the feeling that it was
useless trying to embrace more than a corner of the huge affair; a
sense that the ear-drums would be split and the eye-balls riven by too
close an approach to the thunder and the lightning.  War might be let
loose by human agency, but when it reached such proportions it went
beyond control and took its place beside such elemental manifestations
as earthquakes and cyclones, where reason and the rational mind ceased
to be of value.  Only by floating away or else by concentrating on the
immediate corner was it possible for the mind to retain its serenity,
and with such accustomed familiarity did this system of
self-preservation return to her after all these years that she
recognized it much as a scent or a touch recalls a familiarity of one's
childhood.  Precisely these feelings had she known from September the
third 1939 onwards.  But with a difference.  _Then_ she had had to
learn every step of the way, the progressive stages, the very phrases
that would be used, the alternations between the dreadful troughs and
the tiny crests, the muted anguish with which one met bad news, the
piteous optimism with which one greeted good, trying not to be cast
down, trying not to be lifted up, not daring to hope, still less daring
to despair.  Was all this to be endured again?  Could it be endured? or
did the soul reach a point of suffering where nothing registered any
longer and a numbness like death supervened?  True, this time it would
not concern her own country, but that did not seem to make much
difference: it was humanity just the same and the huge stupidity was
the same, the heart-breaking distortion, the abeyance of truths that
seemed so plain.  For her own part she had no fear; she had no longer
anything to lose except her life.  Still she could not help speculating
on how the attacks would come; from all quarters, she imagined, and as
though she beheld a great warning poster she had a vision of the flying
fortresses swooping between the skyscrapers of New York, Detroit and
Chicago.  Perhaps even at this moment....  It was strange not to know,
but there was no means of knowing: Royer had told her that all radio
stations had gone off the air.  An expression from the last war came
into her mind: Directional beams.  She supposed that it would take some
little time before the necessary adjustments could be made,--her ideas
on the subject were extremely vague,--and before news would again begin
to come through.

The confusion in her thoughts was beginning to settle as the first
bewilderment passed.  She wondered how great the disorganization would
be; how well or ill prepared the Americans were for resistance.  The
vastness of the continent made it seem probable that attacks would be
localized and that there would be little fighting on land.  But she
couldn't visualize at all what form this war would take, apart from the
air onslaughts that were bound to be delivered on the American cities.
Flying the Atlantic was of course nothing to the Germans with modern
machines; it was well known that they had constructed aerodromes in the
West of Ireland, in Iceland, and in the Azores.  The Pacific coast and
the Middle West were within easy reach of Mexico.  Mrs. Temple smiled
grimly as she wondered whether evacuation had already begun and whether
the well-to-do citizens were already making for the safe areas.
Another last-war expression!  It was a shock to find how readily they
came back.

There seemed very little doubt that the canyon country would at once
become a centre.  Obviously the Nazis would lose no time in attacking
the air-force so conveniently assembled there, and the
troop-concentrations working in conjunction.  She supposed that they
could scarcely fly the air-force away, leaving the troops exposed
without any protection.  Besides this, the South-Western command must
remain for the defence of the Mexican border.  It must be admitted that
she had never given much thought to the American dispositions for
defence, such things did not interest her, but from stray conversations
one inevitably picked up a few scraps of information which might be
correct or otherwise.  From all that she had heard she was surprised
that the raiders had not yet come over.

Would the civilians perhaps be told to leave the hotel?  It seemed
likely.  Closing the curtains again she turned on the light and looked
round the room which was the only home she had, the only place on earth
where she was even lightly rooted.  She never made plans now, what was
the good? but she had vaguely intended to stay here until some
restlessness should urge her to move.  As well be here as anywhere; she
had no craving for the life of towns, and the inhuman magnificence of
the canyon suited her denuded spirit.  She could not have lived in a
sentimental landscape; she must have something completely indifferent
to human ills.

But now she might have to go.  She opened a little jewel-case and took
out a small bottle which lay inside.  Yes, they were safe, the tablets
which anybody else might have mistaken for aspirin.  She had often
wondered why, in spite of everything, she had not swallowed them
instead of troubling to leave England.  They would have sent her on a
longer journey certainly, but would that have mattered?  She had no
religious scruples, she was not a coward, and she had nothing to live
for.  Then why?  She could only suppose that the love of life had
prevented her and perhaps also the difficulty of deciding when the
exact moment had come.  "For use in an emergency" the bottle was
labelled, but in a series of emergencies one did not seem to be more
outstanding than the other.  She had kept two things always in mind.
In the event of capture she would prefer to die, or in the event of a
maiming personal injury.

She put the bottle now into her hand-bag.

She wondered what the hermit would do.  He had not been well and she
had been worried about him; she couldn't persuade him to come to the
hotel and let her look after him; but the message the Indian boy had
brought back told her that he was better.  She had intended to ride out
to him the next day and see for herself, but she supposed that that
would now be forbidden.  Yet apart from her anxiety about his health
she would have given much for a talk with him.  He was, after all, the
only friend she had in the world, if someone so withdrawn, so separate,
could be called a friend.  It was rather like saying No, I haven't got
a dog but I do know an old lion that lives in a cave.

It was almost true to say that the hermit lived in a cave, though it
was not the kind of cave usually associated with hermits.  It was one
of the many cliff-palaces scattered along that extraordinary region,
and for sheer spaciousness and rude grandeur dwarfed even the palace of
the Popes at Avignon.  (Alas, Avignon!)  Considered as an air-raid
shelter he would be safe in it; but supposing a party of Nazis, knowing
it to be his dwelling, stormed into his echoing galleries and drove him
finally to bay against the last wall-face, deep within the earth?  She
could imagine him meeting them with his utter cynicism.  She could
imagine him giving them a brief lecture in the last fifteen minutes of
his life; Germans, like Americans, enjoyed lectures, and so would
probably squat willingly on the floor in a semi-circle before him while
he with his back propped against the wall would discourse in his
leisurely scholarly way, moving his fine hands in illustration as he
had moved them in the lecture halls of Oxford and Cambridge, Bonn and
Heidelberg, Harvard and Yale.  He had always known how to fascinate the
young.  The fascination had never depended on the elegance of his
person but on the elegance and the semi-humorous gravity of his mind;
indeed, his personal appearance, which had always been singular and had
now become even more remarkable since his long retreat into the Painted
Desert with no devoted woman to tidy him up, would add to the towering
spectacle of this once famous philosopher, stylist and novelist
addressing his last audience.

"Gentlemen," he would say, or "Meine Herren," for he knew German as
well as he knew English and would address them in their own language,
"I ask you for a quarter of an hour only.  A quarter of an hour may be
spared even from a Blitzkreig or War in a Hurry.  I should be sorry to
see the representatives of modern Germany take their departure from
this interesting and ancient abode of man (now mine) without the
benefit of a few comments from me.  Those comments may possibly lead
some of you or your brothers or cousins to return to a study of these
cliff-dwellings inhabited perhaps by a pre-Indian race and certainly by
a race of men living here before the North American Continent had the
misfortune to be discovered by the Europeans,--or should I say before
the Europeans had the misfortune to discover the North American
Continent--not by Christopher Columbus, I may remark, since Columbus,
contrary to popular belief, never landed in North America at all.  I
regret this apparent denigration of Columbus since as a sailor of Genoa
you must regard him as an Axis partner, but my respect for the truth
must not be allowed to desert me in this my last quarter of an hour of
life.

"I fear that I am digressing, gentlemen; you should recall me to my
task more abruptly instead of encouraging me by your courteous laughter.

"I was saying, was I not, that these cliff dwellings were of the
highest interest both to the antiquarian and the geologist; I need only
invite your attention to some of the flint chips you will find lying
within your reach upon the floor, to secure your agreement with J. W.
Powell that these caves were once the home of some old arrow maker.
Concerned as you are with weapons of a different type, primitive
toxophily doubtless makes but a limited appeal to you, nor would I
desire to waste the time of busy men with a philosophical discourse on
comparisons which could lead only to the most trite reflections.  I
cannot refrain however from pointing out the traces of primitive art
which you will already have observed upon my walls.  You have a torch?
Yes.  If you would kindly flash it across the wall.  Just over here;
thank you.  The design is very spirited, is it not?  To my mind it
recalls certain miniatures of the Mughal school of the early
seventeenth century, but I must not waste your time or mine over such
comparisons; I would only ask you to notice the mountain lion or cougar
crouching to leap on the spotted fawn of the Kaibab mule deer,
_Odocileus hemionus macrotis_, while a squirrel chatters in the
branches of a tree overhead.  You will not fail to recognize the tree
as the Ironwood, _Ostrya Knowltoni_, which as you are doubtless aware
was presumed to be extinct until 1889 when F. H. Knowlton discovered a
specimen near the end of the Hance Trail.  The squirrel, as you will
also have remarked, bears a strong resemblance to our local
white-tailed species _Sciurus Kaibabensis_.  It is possible that in
your somewhat precipitate journeyings over, not through, the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado you have had little opportunity for observing
the characteristics and pleasing antics of this unique little creature.
You will appreciate that I use the word unique advisedly.  I have
always in my life been careful to use words according to their proper
meaning.  Therefore when I say unique I mean unique, and now especially
in relation to this squirrel.  The fact is that owing to the cutting of
the Canyon on one side and to the deserts on the other three sides the
white-tailed squirrel of the North Rim and its relation the Abert
squirrel of the South Rim find themselves isolated from the rest of the
world.  They exist nowhere else.

"But, gentlemen, you must not allow me to run away with these accounts
of facts which for many years have entertained the leisure of a
recluse.  You must allow me only to remind you that the botanist also
may pursue his studies here to his advantage; in fact, should any of
you number a botanist among his acquaintance I would beseech you to
remind him of the seeds of the giant lima bean which, discovered among
the pots and shards in a dwelling on Bright Angel Creek, were persuaded
to germinate and come to life after centuries of an apparent death.  I
mention this because I have a notion that other forms of plant life,
now lost, may yet be restored to cultivation by a determined searcher.
Your nation, gentlemen, if you will permit me to say so, includes
traits of character which do not find favour among the European or the
American peoples.  Yet as an observer leading my chosen way of
existence, an existence so soon about to terminate at your hands, I
must also pay tribute to the extreme thoroughness which you are
accustomed to bring to your scientific as well as to your military
undertakings.  It is for this reason that I should wish you not to
neglect the possibilities of dormant-seed investigation in the Colorado
region when the conclusion of the present war allows you to turn
towards such interesting matters.

"It will scarcely be necessary for me to remind you either of the
existence of those caves or of the extravagant proportions they
sometimes attain.  You, meine Herren, who are accustomed to creating
the works of man on so imposing a scale are perhaps less apt to be
impressed by the works of Nature.  You may feel that by your
engineering ingenuity you might produce caves such as the one you are
now sitting in.  Dynamite would do it.  Yet let me remind you that the
processes of Nature, slower than yours it is true, work more
exquisitely.  Let me, for example, remind you of the cliff-dwelling on
the Mesa Verde, which is sheltered by a cave over four hundred feet
long.  Here, also, you will find mural paintings which I would
recommend to the attention of your photographers.

"Meine Herren, war bores me.  Like all rational men I have always
preferred ideas to bombs.  Although I have never regarded myself as a
man of science and have never been regarded as one by any of my more
serious contemporaries,--ah, I notice your derisive applause,--I can
assure you that in my amateurish way the advance of scientific
discovery always interested me but that I invariably found myself in
sympathy with the constructive rather than with the destructive type.
It seemed to me far more useful far more interesting, to expend several
millions of money on medical research than on the exploitation of
engines of war.  You may possibly regard me as old-fashionable, you
young men to whom war is an excitement and an adventure.  I should not
blame you; indeed, I have not the time at my disposal to expound my
reasons for blaming you or for explaining my reasons for finding you
completely at fault.  You, as one of our English poets remarked some
time ago, have the gun and I have not.  Besides, I am for the moment
your host; and one of the first duties of a host is not to delay his
guests beyond the term when they would wish to remain.  Even at this
hour I should not wish to be found lacking in courtesy.

"I will not detain you much longer.  I was remarking, I think, that I
had always preferred ideas to bombs.  That was one of the reasons which
induced me to leave my own country, England, for America when the last
war started.  My country-men blamed me.  They called me a rat leaving
the ship that didn't intend to sink.  No worse name could be given,
even to a rat.  I accepted that reproach.  I preferred to carry
civilization into its last retreat, which I took to be the United
States of America.  In my vanity I believed that my mind was of more
value to the world than my mangled body under a heap of debris.  It was
not physical cowardice, believe me, which induced me and some of my
friends to abandon our threatened island for the greater safety of
Arizona; it was the conviction that if civilization was to be carried
on at all, we were the people to do it.  A mistaken idea perhaps, and
your arrival here now demonstrates the fallacy.  There is no escaping
you; like locusts you invade every corner of the earth.  Ah, you growl
at that; you become threatening.  Bear with me one moment longer.  That
which I have to say in conclusion cannot fail to afford you a certain
satisfaction, since it is the last pronouncement of a man who despite
his nationality and his pacific temperament did genuinely and without
prejudice endeavour to consider your point of view and to appreciate it
on such merits as it might be found to possess.  And what did he find?
He found a fanaticism which might almost qualify as religious, since it
is possible to argue that the blindness of belief in a creed may be
applied equally to the principle of good and to the principle of evil.
You may argue moreover that the passionate desire for the glory and
aggrandisement of your nation cannot be considered as a principle of
evil and that it all depends upon the point of view.  This argument may
have been tenable once; but it is no longer tenable in days which
should be, even if they are not, more enlightened.  The pity about your
fanaticism, meine Herren, is that its vigour and efficiency engendered
not only the healthy constructive principles but also the dark passions
of rapacity, brutality and mendacity in your own country and the dark
unwelcome passions of hatred and revenge in others.  This was the pity
and the evil you brought upon the world.  You used, not black magic,
but black competence, and let me pay you the tribute of saying that you
did your job well.

"I admire you, representatives of young Germany.  I admire your Fhrer
who has taught you how to act.--No, you need not cheer at the mention
of his name.  You need not make these caves resound with your Heil.
The tribute I render to your Fhrer is the tribute I might render to
the mediaeval Devil if I believed in him: a prince of darkness who
might have been a prince of light.

"My young friends, no, I suppose I mean my young enemies, one last
word.  I promise you that this shall really be the last.  Recently an
English lady of my acquaintance who occasionally has the kindness to
visit me in this somewhat remote retreat, brought with her a copy of
one of my own works.  As a rule I dislike being reminded of anything I
have written, since I find that less than a year later I have revised
my ideas to the extent of not believing in them any longer, if, indeed,
I ever believed in them at all.  On this occasion, however, I could
feel no resentment since I can trust the lady to whom I have referred
not to remind me of anything I should prefer to forget.  I will read
the passage to you.  I had written it in 1937, some years before you
ever started the second German war, the Naziwar, and before I had ever
found my personal refuge in these cave dwellings which you have now in
your ever-increasing tide invaded.

"The passage, I think, is apposite.  I suggest that you might consider
it as a signpost for your future conduct.  Ideologically the passage
still seems to me to be sound.  This is what I wrote:


    "'The inhabitants of the high-lands of Arizona are cut off from one
    another by the mile-deep abyss of the Grand Canyon.  But if they
    follow the Colorado River down towards its mouth they find
    themselves at last in the plains, at a point where the stream can
    be conveniently bridged.  Something analogous is true in the
    psychological world.  Human beings may be separated by differences
    of intellectual ability as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon, may
    peer at one another, uncomprehending, across great gulfs of
    temperamental dissimilarity.  But it is always in their power to
    move away from the territories in which these divisions exist; it
    is always possible for them, if they so desire, to find in the
    common world of action, the site for a broad and substantial bridge
    connecting even the most completely incommensurable of
    psychological universes.'


"Those phrases written in 1937 hold good to-day.  Wide as is the gash
between our mentality and yours, between the captive peoples and the
Nazi swollen with conquest and vainglory, I must persist in my belief
that the day will come when we travel on our opposite rims down the
canyon of misunderstanding to meet at last on those plains where the
river can be conveniently bridged."

Some applause broke out, as at the end of a lecture.  These fierce
youths had been students once, and as students had been regimented into
expressing approval of a lecturer they had enjoyed.  Habit and training
were strong in them, even in such peculiar circumstances.  But the
hermit gravely bowed, and in his bow he managed to convey all the
scornful courtesy of a vanished Europe:

"_Den Dank, meine Herren, begehr ich nicht._"





Mrs. Temple had got herself completely carried away on this imaginary
picture of the hermit faced by a gang of young Nazis.  She was already
beginning to feel sorry about his being shot, when the siren went off.

It was just like an English siren.  Just the same wailing cry.  She had
somehow expected it to have an American accent but it was the same note
as she had heard rising and falling across London, across Sussex,
across Cumberland, across Wales.  Why, oh, why, she thought with an
sudden anguish of anger and pain, why couldn't these ingenious
Americans have devised a siren of their own?  Not reproduced exactly
the same sound that we endured during all those years?  They had copied
us,--they who had known nothing of our suffering or our temper or our
fear, nothing of our destroyed cities and villages, nothing of our
cratered pastures, nothing of our crops and forests set alight, nothing
of our men and women who went out night after night fire-beating to
save our harvest, nothing of our men and women driving madly through
walls of fire in our cities to save streets of flame when the
water-supply had given out.  What did the Americans know of this?  They
knew nothing; they had never experienced it.  They had helped us, yes,
with material, with bombers, with their Lease-and-Lend Act; they had
been fine allies; yes, splendid, helpful; but, in the last resort, they
had never had the real thing in their own country, not the real thing
poked home at them; not this real thing that was now coming at them and
which they now encountered by an imitation of the English
siren-blast--Whoo-oo-oo Whoo-oo-oo Whoo-oo-oo, dying away gradually
like the cry of an owl, a fading-out, and then a waiting for death to
descend.





There they were.  Vroom, Vroom,--the desynchronized sound of bombers.
Distant, high-up.  It would continue for what would seem an
interminable time, and she remembered how before the beginning of the
last war one had tried to comfort apprehensive people by saying that an
aeroplane flew very fast and would be gone almost before one knew that
it was arriving.  The Americans at least would not make that mistake;
they would know that one caught the sound from miles away; they would
know also that when one wave had passed another wave would follow it
and that the sky would be a gigantic hive throughout the night.

What ought she to do?  It was so wearisome to have to start the whole
thing all over again!  She must be active, now that it had really come.
They were in the very centre of the obvious objectives; there might be
casualties in the hotel itself; she must do what she could.  She
thought back on the life she had led during the last war.  First
aid....  Had any provision been made for that?  She must go down and
see what was going on.

She found the lounge downstairs full of people.  Some of them were
still in their evening clothes, others in dressing-gowns.  She noticed
that they were all standing up and moving about, a sure sign of
nervousness.  There was a crowd round the cocktail bar, and such was
the pressure of business that Royer himself was helping to serve
drinks.  But his hands were shaking and he had to keep mopping up the
counter.

Mrs. Temple slipped out of the front door, which had been shrouded now
by a heavy curtain.

It was pitch-dark outside, or so it seemed to her until her eyes became
adjusted and she saw that the enormous Arizona stars were giving a
little light.  She walked to the edge of the canyon and stood there
until its sculptures began to detach themselves and the great darkness
of its profundity was scooped into the night.  The vrooming of the
bombers was unmistakable.  There were two Presences in the night: the
certainty overhead and the mystery at her feet.  She listened to them
both; absorbed them both; and then crept into the hotel again, pushing
the curtain aside as she had often pushed a curtain aside, entering a
Roman Catholic cathedral somewhere in Europe.

The lights of the hotel lounge met her.  The talk of the people grouped
there met her.  They were all trying to be gay and brave.  She could
see that they were all puzzled and frightened, pretending not to be.
Vroom, vroom, vroom, went the bombers.  Madame de Retz saw her and came
up to her.

"You hear them?"

"Well, madame, of course I hear them.  We all hear them.  We have heard
them hundreds of times, you and I.  We are accustomed to these sounds.
You and I, who are experienced, must make ourselves useful to those who
are not accustomed.  I shall rely on you to help me."

"Mrs. Temple, I cannot.  I cannot help you.  I am a broken woman.  I
have seen too much horror in Warsaw and other places.  I am broken, I
tell you, I cannot help.  You English, you are tough, you have no
imagination.  You stand things, you do not become haunted as we Slavs
become haunted.  We Slavs, we will fight to the death; but if we do not
have the good fortune to die, we live on in a mystical life it is
impossible for you English to understand...."

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Temple; "I understand your mystical life quite as
well as you do.  But I do know that there are times when the mystical
life has to give way to the practical life.  I regret it, but there it
is.  So, now, do allow me to rely on you for help if I need it.  I know
you won't fail me."

She knew that Madame de Retz would fail her, at once, and in the
slightest emergency; but this brisk way of treating Madame de Retz
seemed to be the only way of saving her from immediate hysteria.

"You have brought your parrot down with you, I see."

The bird was perched on her shoulder, attached to a bracelet on her
wrist by a long slim silver chain.

"Grigori?  Yes, I could not leave him.  He is my pet, my little boy.  I
could not leave him to be frightened alone in my bedroom.  Have you
children, Mrs. Temple?"

"No," said Helen, having lost her only son.

"Ah, then you would not understand.  The anxiety one feels.  The need
to give all the comfort possible.  I know a bird is not quite the same
as a child, but he is all I have.  You have not even that, my poor Mrs.
Temple."

Grigori screamed.

"No," said Helen, "I haven't even that, thank goodness."

Grigori screamed again.

"Bright Angel Trail," he shrieked this time, so distinctly that many
heads turned towards him.

"Listen, listen!" cried Madame de Retz, once more clutching Mrs. Temple
by the wrist in the gesture that Mrs. Temple so particularly disliked.
"He is a prophet, listen.  He warns us.  He says 'Bright Angel Trail'
always when there is danger.  He knows.  Grigori knows.  I know.  I
told you we Slavs had a mystical life.  You said you understood it but
you don't.  English people don't.  You have no mysticism, no religion.
You have common sense only.  Useful, yes.  But dull, dull, dull.  The
only time when you have religion is when you are Roman Catholic, and
then you are Irish: and when you have mysticism you are Scotch."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Temple, "that's rather sweeping, isn't it? and
Grigori isn't a Slav, anyhow."

She wanted to get away from the Polish woman and the beautiful
disagreeable bird on her shoulder.  She had a great respect for the
Poles, but Madame de Retz did not seem to represent them as she should.
She was a bad specimen; a poor representative.

Mr. Dale came up, attracted by the noise the bird was making.  Mrs.
Temple wondered if he had come to her rescue.

"Well, madame, is the proverb true of your parrot: 'He says nothing,
but thinks the more'?"

Madame de Retz replied seriously, "I do not know what he thinks.  He
says much.  He says 'Bright Angel Trail.'"

"Is that saying much, madame?"

"It is saying much for those who wish to hear."





"Lord," said Mr. Dale moving Mrs. Temple away into a corner of the
lounge, "what a bore that woman is.  So intense.  And her horrid bird."

"Yes, but now look here," said Helen hurriedly, "don't bother any more
about Madame de Retz, let us think instead about what we ought to do.
I don't want to be officious, but there are planes overhead and we may
get bombs at any moment.  We must ask Royer what arrangements he has
made."

"I don't trust Royer."

"Nor I, but there is no one else, unless we could find the Park
Superintendent."

"I have already looked for him.  He has gone out to the aerodrome.
After all, that is what matters; we are only a handful of civilians
here; we don't count."

"Only to ourselves."

An explosion came; it was very muffled, but everything in the lounge
rattled.  Women grabbed at each other, and waited expectantly for the
next bump.

"That was a long way off," said Mrs. Temple.

"On the other side of the canyon, I should say,--ten or twelve miles at
least."

"What will happen if they drop bombs into the canyon itself?"

"It will wake some fine echoes," said Mr. Dale, "and some fine pieces
of rock will go flying about.  With any luck we may be there to see it.
If things get too lively up here, or if the hotel gets destroyed, we
may all have to take refuge in that dug-out provided by Nature.  I
think I should pack a little suitcase if I were you, Mrs. Temple.
Meanwhile shall we go outside and see what is going on?"

The planes were louder and searchlights were fingering the sky.
Suddenly a large yellow square of light appeared in the blackness of
the hotel, and another, and another, and another.

"Good God," said Mr. Dale, "it's the landing-window and the windows of
the corridor, look, the whole row of them.  They must have forgotten to
draw the curtains and someone has switched on the lights."

"The curtains _were_ drawn," said Mrs. Temple, "and the lights were on
as I came downstairs.  This is deliberate.  It's a signal.  Come!"

She pushed the curtain back and let it fall behind them.

There was an uproar in the lounge, a crowd of people gathered round one
gesticulating figure in the centre.  Royer it was, shouting at the top
of his voice while the crowd of his guests surged round him.  The man
was in a frenzy and the only people who appeared to be trying to
protect him were the three white-coated negroes from the dance
whizz-band.  Blows had been struck already and there was blood on their
coats.  Two of the Park rangers were there, struggling to get at Royer.

"Aha!" the Manager was screaming, "I hold you, enemies of my Fhrer.  I
die with you but you die too.  I show our boys the way.  My lights show
the way.  Then comes the bigger light, the beacon, the column of light,
the fifth column.  It roars up, red, tall."

"What on earth does he mean?" whispered Mrs. Temple.  They were
standing near the door, away from the hurly-burly.

"The man's possessed," said Dale, "and he's going to get lynched if his
niggers can't save him.  The little worm, I wonder where he ever found
the courage.  I think you had better go to your room, Mrs. Temple; you
can do nothing here and it is not going to be a pleasant sight.  If you
like, you can help me to darken that landing and the corridor.  That
ought to be done and done quickly if no one else has thought of it.
Come."

They skirted the stormy crowd and reached the stairs.  Fat little Dale
went up so quickly that Helen in her long frock could only just keep up
with him.  She tripped over her frock, following him.  She was grateful
to him for taking no further notice of her at all.  He had coaxed her
away from the lounge and now she must look out for herself.  She was
grateful to him for respecting her independence now that he had done
all that a man should do; getting her away from the unpleasant sight of
Royer being lynched.

On the stairs Dale collided with the attendant of the blind man.  He
came tearing down the stairs at so wild a pace that he might have been
blind himself.

"Here, steady," said Mr. Dale, holding him up, "where are you off to?
What about those lights along the landings?  Why haven't you put them
out?  Why aren't you looking after your employer?  Surely he needs you?
He's blind, isn't he?  Hadn't you better go and look after him?  Well,
go then," and to Helen's astonishment Mr. Dale gave him a push which
sent the man rolling in somersaults down the stairs, ending up with a
groan at the bottom.

"Mr. Dale, you may have broken his leg."

"What is a leg, when violence is loose?  There is a man down there
being killed, Mrs. Temple: Royer our Manager is being killed now.  He
is being pulled to pieces by our civilized crowd.  The young men have
got hold of him.  The young women have got hold of him too.  They are
not separate young men or women; they are a mob: mass-hatred has seized
them.  They are wilder than those Indians we saw dancing after supper
to-night.  They are as ruthless as those young German men flying the
'planes we hear overhead.  Come, Mrs. Temple; don't stop to think about
the traitor whose leg I may have broken; that traitor, that creature of
Royer's, that Quisling, that wriggling worm in the fine land of
Arizona; don't think of him; don't listen to those appalling cries
rising up from below; only come with me, and shut out the lights which
may give guidance to the enemy."

He was already on the landing, twitching the curtains into place, when
Sadie came.

"Mr. Dale, Mrs. Temple, we're on fire."

"On fire?"

"The hotel's on fire.  Royer's friend, the blind man's attendant,
started it.  I saw him doing it.  Get out quickly, both of you; it's
all wood; it'll go quickly.  I think he's Royer's brother.  He looks so
like him.  Come; run."

They ran downstairs, the three of them together.  At the bottom of the
stairs the blind man's attendant lay tumbled in a heap, moaning.  In
the centre of the lounge Royer lay dying, while his murderers stood
round, appalled now that they had accomplished that which they had
wished to accomplish.  The three negroes of the band were there, still
alive, still standing over the body of their fallen boss; their white
coats were patched with blood, they were swaying on their feet, but
they were calling out in a sort of incantation:

  "He said we'd get our rights,
  He said we'd get our rights,
  He said we were good Americans,
  Good as any other Americans;
  He said we'd all be good Americans
  If only Hitler came in."


"The negro fifth-column too," said Mr. Dale, pausing to look at this
drunken body-guard; "no wonder Royer could make an appeal to them.
Poor devils.  Look at their rolling eyes.  They look so mad now, that
you might think the whole future of America lay in their keeping.  God
knows whose hands it does lie in, but certainly not in theirs.  Come
along, Mrs. Temple.  You can't do anything for Royer; he's dead by now.
And there goes another bomb, nearer this time.  Come away from this
place."

"Where to?"

"Into the canyon.  Where else?  But we must take the others."

Helen saw him scramble up on to the cocktail bar, an astonishing sight.
It reminded her of the orange-box preachers near the Marble Arch.  The
fat little man dominated the lounge from that ridiculous elevation, and
as he raised his hand demanding silence, silence fell.  They were all
so distraught and leaderless that they would have listened to anybody
choosing to take command.

Even so, she marvelled at the way he got them all to obey him.  He had
to tell them that the place was on fire and that he could allow none of
them to go upstairs to rescue any of their possessions.  "Take the rugs
and the cushions from here," he said, making a gesture round the
lounge; "take what you can for your comfort.  Look here," he said,
turning round to the back-dresser of the bar and handing out bottles to
the men, "stuff these into your pockets,--help yourselves,--take the
brandy and the whisky for choice,--leave the liqueurs."  The men made a
rush and stripped the bar in an instant.  "Take cigarettes too," said
Mr. Dale, flinging the packets in handfuls on to the floor.  "And
matches," he added, hurling matches after them.  "No torches," he said
angrily, but then discovered a whole drawerful and distributed them to
the hands stretched out to receive them.  "Save those batteries," he
said, "you'll need them later.  Economize them.--Mrs. Temple!" he said
sharply, "take all the women into the larder, scullery or whatever you
call it, and collect all the foodstuffs there, tinned, canned, and what
not.  Get the women away and meet me outside this place within fifteen
minutes with everything packed into baskets ready to carry.  There are
heaps of native baskets stacked in the Indian huts.  Get the Indians to
bring their baskets out; get the Indians to help.  Frighten them into
obedience, only get them to work for us.  Frighten them with something
more immediate than a bomb or the fire breaking out on the hotel."

Mrs. Temple listened to all this; she was standing near the cocktail
bar with Royer lying dead and messy at her feet.  She was ready to obey
Mr. Dale, but responsibility for the blind man worried her.  She took
the blind man by the hand and said very gently "Will you come with me?"
He recognized her by her touch and came willingly, trusting himself to
her.  She said, "I cannot lead you down into the canyon myself, because
I have something else to do, but I am going to put you into the charge
of another person whom you can trust as you would trust me."

He showed no surprise at the suggestion that she should lead him down
into the canyon, nor did he ask where his attendant was.  War, to him,
was a thing which brought such strange disjunctions about.  He was used
to it.  He accepted it.

"That's all right, Mrs. Temple; if you say I can trust somebody I'll
trust them."

Mrs. Temple beckoned to Sadie.

"Sadie, I want you to take charge of this man."

"Mrs. Temple, sure I will."

"Take him outside the door, then, and wait with him there till I come."

"On to the dancing-floor?"

"That is right; on to the dancing-floor.  Let him sit down on a bench
and sit down with him yourself.  Don't leave him.  And if bombs should
fall..."

"English lady," said the blind man, interrupting, "if bombs should
fall, I know what to do.  Remember, I have been in Prague.  Throw
yourself flat, put your handkerchief between your teeth, raise your
chest from the ground, so that your lungs don't burst and your teeth
don't break ... it sounds horribly familiar, doesn't it?  We both know
about it.  _Quo res cunque cadent, unum et commune periclum, una salus
ambobus erit_.  However things may happen, there shall be to us both
one common danger and one source of safety.  I will take charge of my
guide as she will take charge of me.  We will trust each other, as we
both trust you.  Come, my guide, let us go as the lady tells us to go."

Mrs. Temple waited just long enough to see the professor and the
waitress making their way out hand in hand towards the dancing-floor
where they would throw themselves flat if bombs should fall.

The hotel caught properly alight shortly after this and blazed as only
well-dried pine-log timber can blaze.  Poor, dead, cowardly Royer,
being rapidly cremated with the floor of the lounge he had been so
proud of, could not have been better pleased at the success of his laid
scheme.  "I can't help feeling sorry that Royer isn't here to watch his
bonfire," said Mr. Dale to Mrs. Temple as he helped to guide their
fellow-guests by the glow-worm light of torches towards the head of
Bright Angel Trail.  "He would really have enjoyed it so much.  Though,
of course, he would have hated it in a way.  All his precious hotel
destroyed.  He was an artist in his own way, that man.  Let us respect
him, Mrs. Temple.  _De mortuis_."

The hotel then shot flame into the air.  It was very fine and grand in
its death, far finer and grander then it had ever been in its life.
The procession of hotel guests making their way towards the refuge of
the canyon turned their heads over their shoulders to look at this
funeral pyre which represented not only the last thing they might ever
see of what they called civilization but also the last of their own
personal possessions.  Each of them began to think of things left
behind....  None of them had any luggage at all, not even a parcel;
they were all stripped bare.





The flaring light from the hotel fire made the torch light unnecessary,
and Mr. Dale shouted back over his shoulder that all torches should be
switched off.  "Save those batteries," he said as he had said before;
"you'll need them later."  They obeyed him and marched on behind him
like a regiment following its commanding officer.

The red light of the blazing hotel lit the night into a hellish
resemblance to daylight.  It lit up the night into a redness as bright
as the yellow sunlight of day.  Extraordinary shadow-depths appeared in
the canyon, and the colours of the canyon rocks were called into being
also, as though they had been asleep and were now in the middle of the
night suddenly startled back into the colours they always held.  Yet
these colours and shadows were intensified by the fire to a degree they
never knew beneath the diffused light of the sun.  The architectural
shapes became more like architecture designed by man, intentional; the
colours more like a painter's colours, but with a strange and
particular violence of violet and vermilion, cobalt and saffron.  The
blazing hotel was dramatic enough in its own way but the magnificence
of the canyon cheapened it into a mere little bonfire.  The quick
disaster of man showed up cheaply against the slow carving of Nature.

It was an odd train of people that began to descend slowly into those
depths, though no odder probably than any assortment thrown together
haphazard.





A big crash occurred just as they reached the head of the trail.  It
seemed as though all the rocks of the canyon must have been thrown
sky-high, to fall shattered into place again with a reverberation that
echoed from Arizona into Utah.  The echoes went on, bounding from
temple to temple, from cliff to cliff.  The air shuddered; the sound
rolled up and down those hundreds of miles cleft in the earth.  Madame
de Retz gave a little cry of distress: Grigori, whom she was carrying
perched on her shoulder, toppled off.  He was dead.  He fell in a small
soft heap at her feet, killed by blast.  She picked him up; she
expected to find him warm and feathered still.  Then she discovered
that his little body was completely naked, stripped by blast of the
feathers that had made him so beautiful.  No longer green and red and
plum-coloured, but just a pink naked body, pathetically plain and light
in the hands.  She turned him over and over in her hands, trying to
find something of the beauty that had once been Grigori.  Nothing was
left of that beauty.  Nothing but a stripped ugliness was left.

She carried his poor little naked corpse carefully down into Bright
Angel Trail.  A bird's body is very light.  What Madame de Retz did not
realize and what the others did not realize, was that they had all been
killed on their way to the head of the trail.  Grigori had died
outright because he had no soul.

The others went on.  They had to go on.  They had to complete their
fate in spite of their apparent death.




Part Two

*

THE CANYON

Mrs. Temple went forward and overtook the leader and walked beside him.

"Mr. Dale," she said, "where are we making for?  Phantom Ranch?"

"Phantom Ranch," he said, marching steadily on.  The path was very
steep now, and he shouted back over his shoulder that the torches might
be switched on again.  The long crocodile of marchers switched on their
tiny lights, making little circles of yellow round their feet.  They
wound down steadily, making towards the bottom of the canyon.  The
temperature rose as they went downwards.  It became warmer with every
step; they passed from a moderate temperature into a semi-tropical.  It
was odd to drop a mile in altitude more quickly than you would travel
eight hundred miles in latitude; odd to fall so quickly on foot, when
it would take you so many hours to travel so many horizontal miles,
unless, indeed, you travelled in a 'plane.

By the small light of their torches they could see only the path at
their feet; they could not see the horrific cliffs around them.  This
was just as well.  The great cliffs might have alarmed them; the path
was a path, a safe thing to follow.  Most people prefer safe paths to
the large unknown.  The torches made little rounds of light at their
feet.  They could see where their footsteps were going.  They could not
see the larger and more alarming heights above their heads.

They went down; steadily down.

Down into safety.

"Do you remember," said Mrs. Temple, walking beside Mr. Dale, "how
people use to take refuge in the Tube stations during the last war?"

Mr. Dale seemed amused by this reminiscence and remarked that he
wondered the Americans hadn't run a scenic railway the whole length of
the canyon.  "Almost as good as a trip through Dante's Inferno," he
said.

"Have you thought of the future at all?  How long do you suppose we
shall remain down here?"

"Does it matter?" he said in a faraway voice.  "No, I confess I haven't
thought about it yet.  One does not know what form this war will take.
It may sweep right away from Arizona within a few days.  It may rage
over our heads for months.  It will surely be localized for a time,
since much of the American army is here and a great part of their
air-force.  On the other hand they may fly their air-force away to the
defence of their cities; one can't tell."

"The enemy will attack all the cities in turn."

"No: as many as possible at the same time.  New York, Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, Des Moines, Washington, Pittsburg....  The American
continent never does things by halves; everything is always on the
grand scale, whether it is cyclones, earthquakes, railway accidents, or
the crashes of big business.  The works of God or the works of man.
Geographical magnitude seems to affect everything, all through.  This
war will be no exception.  Just you wait and see."

"You make me shudder when you talk about 'this war' in that way.  As
though you were looking at it through a microscope; as though you had
got germs on a slide, crawling about."

"They are not germs," said Mr. Dale; "they are Germans.  You do mean a
microscope, by the way, don't you, and not a magnifying glass?  People
are so apt to confuse the two things."

"I do mean a microscope."

"I thought so.  I do not know you very well, in fact I have never had
any real contact with you until this afternoon, but somehow you struck
me at once as a woman who would not make so foolish and inaccurate a
confusion.  That is meant as a compliment."

"Thank you."

"You are grave, yet humorous.  I am glad we are leading this train of
people together.  It seems strange, does it not, that you and I should
have taken control in this way?  You must manage the women and I will
manage the men."

"I don't know why or how we have arrogated this position to ourselves."

"No.  But look.  You are walking beside me at the head of this
fantastic column.  They follow us.  They obey us.  Why?  Simply because
we have taken control.  People will always obey when they are
sufficiently frightened and find somebody to take charge, and since
people are so pathetically like children or like sheep, you and I have
put ourselves into the position of a nannie or a sheep-dog."

"It sounds a shameful thing to say," said Helen, "when we are on the
eve of yet another world-catastrophe, and I will beg you to believe
that I am not speaking in any irresponsible spirit.  I feel
extraordinarily exhilarated.  I feel airy, as though I were planing
over this war at a great height, almost a stratospheric height, getting
those tiny crawlings into a proper perspective.  I think this must be
the equivalent of your feeling that you are looking through a
microscope.  A certain unreality lifts me up; my head swims; I realize
all the deathly gravity yet I cannot feel cast down.  Is it due, do you
think, to the vision of courage and self-sacrifice that war brings?
The obverse of the medal stamped with horror?  The forgetfulness of
self in the need to serve a cause?  Heroism not heroics."

"I never did set much store by heroism," he said, "if by heroism you
mean physical courage.  You were speaking of a feeling of exhilaration.
Do you not believe that every young airman who takes off for what may
be his last flight, his last battle, shares that feeling?  Fear is
drowned by excitement.  There is the sporting instinct, the instinct
that makes the racing motorist drive as no man reasonably need, jump
horses over fences which could quite easily be passed through a gate,
cross waterfalls on tight-ropes, and climb mountain peaks which are
useless to you when you do get there.  No, give me the man who, like
the Prince of Cond, I think it was Cond, looks at himself in the
glass on the morning of the battle and says '_Tu trembles, vile
carcasse; tu tremblerais bien davantage si tu savais oje vais te
mener._'"

"'Give me a spirit,'" said Mrs. Temple,

  "'Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
  Loves t' have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
  Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
  And his rapt ship run on her side so low
  That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.'"


"I'll cap that for you," said Mr. Dale, who was enjoying himself,

  "'Give me that man that dares bestride
  The active sea-horse, and with pride
  Through that huge field of waters ride;

  'Who with his looks too can appease
  The ruffling winds and raging seas
  In midst of all their outrages.

  'This, this a virtuous man can do,
  Sail against rocks and split them too,
  Ay! and a world of pikes pass through.'"





By now it had become very warm, though the party seemed to be strangely
unaffected by the change in temperature.  They marched quietly and
without complaint, in a silence broken only by the shuffling of their
feet and an occasional suppressed sob from Madame de Retz.  The first
wave of the air attack overhead had passed; but, looking up the ravine,
a red glow from the burning hotel could be seen in the sky.

"Does that remind you of London?  The sky was red then."

"The sky used to be pink over London, even before London finally caught
fire.  There used to be evenings when the lights of peace blushed the
whole heaven.  Do you remember?  What nostalgia!  As one looked levelly
at twilight across St. James's Park the distance was powder-blue
between the trees, but overhead the sky used to be lit with the light
of millions.  Six millions, wasn't it? or eight, if you included
Greater London.  About as many human bodies as Russia and Germany threw
in slaughter against each other."

"Do not think of Russia and Germany now.  That tragedy is over and
finished.  Do not lament over the dead.  But if you are thinking of
London, think now of New York.  When first I saw New York I thought it
the most beautiful and original city in the world.  In its own way.
Paris had her beauty, but it was of a recognized sort, supremely well
organized and composed, an example to all other cities, a triumph of
planning and of traditional architectural elegance.  It was possible to
compare her against other capitals to their disadvantage, against
London and even Vienna.  Paris stood out as the example of what all
European capitals should be, and were not.  Think of that vista down
the Champs-Elyses from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la
Concorde; think of the Rue Royale running up to the Madeleine; think of
the Rue de Rivoli with its straight mile of arcades, finer than the
street called Straight in Damascus.  Think of the Place Vendme; think
of the Louvre and the Tuileries; think of the bridges and the Seine....
All so fine and exquisitely composed.  Paris represented the peak of
European town-planning in the old style.  But New York was something
different; something new.  It was something one had never seen before.
Coming to New York for the first time was more like arriving on another
planet than arriving in another hemisphere when one was accustomed to
western methods and systems.  It was startling, this first sight of a
city going up high instead of spreading about.  You said just now that
one looked levelly across St. James's Park.  Looking levelly would not
apply to New York.  In New York one had to look upwards always."

"Yes.  I used to wonder what had inspired the architecture of New York.
Necessity of course, and the need for providing the maximum of
accommodation on the minimum of space.  That was obvious.  One always
accepts the obvious explanation at first, but after I had come to
Arizona I began to wonder whether the tremendous geography of this
continent hadn't had its influence and suggested these strange upright
ideas to the builders of American cities.  Streets like canyons,--as
near as men could ever get in the reproduction in steel and concrete of
the ravine we are descending now.--You were saying just now that
geographical magnitude seemed to affect everything all through.  Big,
bigger, and biggest must be the slogan.  That is putting it onto a very
material plane.  Will you not agree with me that the American mind is
constructed in terms of the continent it inhabits? and that the
grandeurs and errors of the American mind are commensurate with the
area it has had to arrange?"

"I will agree.  Americans have to think grandly because they live
grandly.  Everything here is on a grand scale.  The mistake they made,
as you say, is to put everything on to the material plane."

"A vital mistake, but as we all make it let us get back to the
discussion we were having.  Let us think of coming out of Central Park
at twilight, and tell me what you have felt about it."

"One was compelled to look up.  One saw oneself faced with a great
cliff-face of buildings, open with little rectangles of yellow lights.
They are the lights of offices or of flats.  They are all lit up.  They
put the rectangle of their windows into the night like a drop-scene.
But it is not in a theatre; it is life.  People are living there,
working there; one does not know what their lives are, but one can
guess.  One can make a shot at the common denominator of most lives:
the outline is the same, though the details may vary.  Anxiety,
struggle, competition always; happiness sometimes; discouragement
sometimes, then a lift of the spirit, a mood of optimism; a cynical
mood, a generous mood; a swaying forwards and backwards like the tide
filling and emptying the creeks.  The little rock-pools get filled and
emptied; their lovely shells of generosity and kindliness get lifted on
the swell, then left dry and colourless again.  They lie there, exposed
to misjudgement, uncharitableness, and to their own failure to fulfil
their own beauty."

"But the tide comes in again, according to your belief: flux and
reflux."

"If it were not for that belief I should have put myself out of this
world long ago, when everything one cared for seemed to be finished."

"And why didn't you?  I often thought of doing so myself.  In fact I
had provided myself with the means.  I was prepared to use them if
necessary.  I didn't use them.  What stopped _you_ from doing so?  I do
not credit or discredit you with what are usually called religious
scruples."

Mrs. Temple laughed.  "Sadie said very much the same thing to me a few
hours ago."

"Sadie?"

"The waitress at the hotel.  I don't suppose you ever realized her
existence.  One of the hotel staff to you.  Yet she is, or was, a very
real person.  She is following us now down the trail.  She is taking
care of the blind man.  I have put him in her charge."

"Well, never mind about Sadie--we can leave her to another time.  Tell
me why you never used your means of putting yourself out of this world,
this life.  You had no religious faith, you say; no dread that you
would lose your immortal soul by rushing it out into another world.  So
why didn't you use your bare bodkin to your quietus take?  What made
you shirk the last stab at the last moment?"

"I suppose because the last moment never really arrived.  I was an
insignificant person, you see, and as a woman past the age of
child-bearing I was of no interest to the Germans.  After the invasion
of England they put me onto a ship with other useless mouths and sent
me off.  I must say that they had the decency to give me the choice
between Australasia, Canada, and America, but I chose the United
States.  I already knew the States,--I had lived there,--I knew and
loved Arizona,--I had travelled over much of the world and had come to
the conclusion that Arizona was one of the most beautiful regions I had
ever seen--even as you were saying just now that New York was one of
the most beautiful of cities.  So I came here to Arizona.  As well here
as anywhere else."

"And decided to go on living."

"May I turn the tables on you?  You're English too; you must have had
the same decision to take; you evidently took the same decision as I
did.  Why?"

"Well, it seemed a very curious and interesting thing, to take the
other decision,--the decision to die.  In desperation, yes, but in cold
blood?  Think of it in detail.  One would lay oneself down in an
orderly way on a couch or a bed, having attired oneself suitably first,
if one had the time to do so,--pyjamas or a nightshirt or a silken
nightgown,--it seems more proper to die in night attire, I can't think
why.  That is not the point.  The point is that it should be an
interesting decision to take, to kill oneself.  Why should it be so
interesting? or, indeed, interesting at all?  Philosophically, it
should be a small fact to step over from this life into another one.
Every fisherman knows that you put your foot onto a stepping-stone and
jump the stream on to the other bank.  Then why do we hesitate?  Why
did we hesitate, you and I?  It wasn't cowardice surely? not cowardice
in the accepted sense?  No.  It was something deeper than that.  It was
the reluctance to leave the life we knew for the life we did not know;
the old story.  Old stories have a way of being true stories.  There is
a thing which might be known as the reluctance to die by one's own
hand.  I will admit to you, Mrs. Temple, that I hesitated too long to
take those little tablets out of their little bottle.  I knew they
would kill me, swiftly and painlessly.  I hated the idea of pain but I
thought I did not mind the idea of death.  I found, when it came to the
point of decision, that I minded the idea of death also.  I found that
I couldn't put myself out of this life by my own volition."

"The point of decision was too sharp for you?  It was too like running
yourself onto the tip of a bayonet?  Bayonets are very sharp.  I had to
watch my dog being stuck by a bayonet during the last war.  That was
worse than taking painless tablets for myself.--I do not know why I
tell you things like these.  A candour has come over me which I cannot
explain.  I have never told these things to any living person before.
I do not know why I tell you these things now."

"I do not know either.  Usually, people tell these things only when
they love.  Lover reveals to lover; and that is the supreme egotistical
indulgence of love.  But you and I, Mrs. Temple, are not lovers; never
have been; and never will be."

"We have never been even acquaintances until to-day."

"Such things grow rapidly when war comes.  As it happens, I started to
watch you this afternoon, some hours before this trouble began.  I had
no idea then that another war was about to break over us.  I was
amusing myself by observing you as a fellow-guest.  I had no idea,
then, that we should see the hotel in flames, Royer killed, and
ourselves taking refuge in the canyon.  You didn't know I was watching
you this afternoon.  You were talking to one of the Indian boys; you
were sending him off on a message.  You were sending him off into the
Painted Desert--to whom?  To the hermit?"

"And what made you imagine that I should be sending a message to the
hermit?  A short time ago you seemed never to have heard of him."

"True.  I had not.  I know now."

"Someone spoke to you of him?"

"No.  I _know_.  I cannot tell you how I know.  I just know."

"I have no friends, Mr. Dale.  The hermit was a mere acquaintance left
over from the old Europe.  I liked and enjoyed the strength of his mind
and I think he tolerated me here in Arizona because I never bothered
him.  I left him to himself.  Certain persons like the hermit prefer
being left to themselves.  He stayed alone in his cave, and
occasionally he allowed me to visit him there.  He was always very
courteous and entertaining, but I think he welcomed me only because he
knew I should not stay too long."

"It is rather ironical that he and some others should have abandoned
England so early in the belief that America offered the only hope of a
surviving civilization.  I wonder what they think now?"

Mrs. Temple made no reply.  No reply seemed necessary.





They trudged on.  They went downwards and downwards.  The climate
became warmer and even warmer, but it still did not seem to affect
those who were going down into it.

They trudged on.

"Are you tired?"

"No, oddly enough, I am not.  I feel as though I should never be tired
again."

"Or ill?"

"Or ill."

"Have you ever been very ill?"

"Well, I have had operations."

"And suffered?"

"One can't have operations without suffering, can one?"

"So you know what pain is?"

"I think I may say that I know what pain is.  But I don't like to speak
of it.  One doesn't like to speak of so private a thing; one keeps that
sort of thing to oneself, after it is over."

"Of course.  But we are living in such a reality now that I had no
hesitation in forcing you to speak.  We spend far too much of our lives
trying not to reveal ourselves to one another.  Why?  Such a waste of
time.  As you were saying just now, one can make a shot at the common
denominator of most lives, which really means that we all know the
essential things about one another although we take so much trouble to
conceal them.  Even dictators, my dear Mrs. Temple, must sometimes lie
in their baths contemplating their white vulnerable bodies, grotesque
and absurd.  Does Hitler, when he lies soaking in his bath, ever wonder
about the bullet piercing his own belly?  The belly of Hitler, that
container of digestive organs, coils of intestines, that sack of
complicated contraptions, that bag of guts, as readily burst and
exuding as the belly of any poor old cab-horse lifted on the horns in a
bull-fight; that target of every assassin, that symbol of collective
revenge....  Does Hitler think on these things, as he lies in his bath,
stripped, naked, and alone?"





They reached the bottom of the trail and arrived at Phantom Ranch.
Here the whole procession halted.  The neat little encampment loomed
before them, but no one seemed inclined to take advantage of its
hospitality.  No one seemed inclined to open the door and go inside, to
throw themselves down in exhaustion on the couches: they all seemed
content to remain outside in the warm night air, strolling vaguely and
happily in the softness of the bottom of the canyon.  The river rushed
and echoed among its rocks.  They thought about Echo Cave; Echo Cave
reverberated with strange sounds, but no stranger than the sounds that
Mr. Dale now switched on from the radio set of Phantom Ranch.  America
had come onto the air again.  But in an unusual fashion.  It was only
after much twisting of the pointer that the voice came through with any
clarity:


    "... in successive waves sweeping down from the Canadian
    border.--Telephonic communication with New York has been
    interrupted and it is impossible at present to discover what is
    happening in the city.--Radio service will be maintained
    continuously for as long as possible on wave-length G7563 and
    emergency wave-length F8970 (G for Georgia, F for Florida); we
    regret that our usual transmitting stations are temporarily out of
    action.--  Stand by.  Stand by.  Another bulletin is just coming
    through.  Stand by.  Hold on.  In one minute's time we will give
    you the new bulletin.--Are you there?  This is the National
    Broadcasting Company calling on wavelength G7563 and also on
    emergency wave-length F8970.  This is the N.B.C. calling the United
    States of America.  A state of national emergency has been declared
    from the White House, but all communication with the White House
    has now been interrupted.  We are at present unable to explain why
    communication with Washington should have been interrupted.  We
    hope to resume contact later on.--Telephonic communication is
    interrupted all over the country.--Sabotage is suspected.--Do not
    attempt to contact your friends and relations by telephone.  You
    will be doing a bad service to your country.  Keep quiet wherever
    you are.  Do not panic.  Stay where you are.  Remember the crowded
    roads of Europe.  Crowded by refugees.  Do not repeat that
    mistake.--Stand by again; Stand by.  Two minutes' delay."


The whole miscellaneous party wandered vaguely round the buildings of
Phantom Ranch, waiting for the voice to come again through the opened
windows and the opened door.  Mr. Dale had thrown everything open, so
that the voice might come out into the night.  The little party was at
the very bottom of the Canyon now.  They listened, but only with half
their minds; the other half was floating away on ideas of their own.
The realism of what was happening in the outside other world affected
them only at a second remove.

The radio voice came through again.


    "Here is America calling the United States of America.  Hallo,
    America.  We are glad to inform you that the N.B.C. has now been
    able to arrange with the still friendly Republic of the Argentine
    for the N.B.C. programmes to be transmitted from Buenos Aires.  All
    N.B.C. stations except G7563 and F8970 are now off the air, and we
    cannot guarantee that those stations will not also be off the air
    during the next twenty-four hours.  So if you cannot get our
    programme, tune in to Buenos Aires.--Stand by again; stand by.
    America calling.  N.B.C. America calling.  Stand by; stand by.  One
    moment, please."

    "We have to report that during the past three hours enemy attacks
    have been launched in many parts of the continent.  So far as can
    be ascertained no enemy land-troops have crossed either the
    Canadian or the Mexican frontiers, but air-borne troops are
    reported to have been landed at various points in the Middle West,
    notably at St. Louis, Missouri; Des Moines, Iowa; Indianapolis,
    Indiana; Springfield, Illinois.  It is not possible at present to
    determine what is taking place in these areas.  It is known however
    that German warships have appeared off the coast of Maine and it is
    believed that a naval action is now in progress.  It is known also
    that large enemy air detachments have appeared over Detroit,
    Chicago, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (not Pittsburgh, Kansas, or
    Pittsburg, Kentucky, or Pittsburg, Texas), and it is feared also
    over Washington, D.C., and New York.  This may explain why
    communication with the capital and with New York is temporarily
    interrupted.  We trust that the interruption may be temporary only
    and will be presently resumed.--Now to fill the pause before our
    next bulletin here is a gramophone record.  _Land of Hope and
    Glory_."


"They don't know about _us_, evidently," said Mr. Dale.  "Not a word
about poor Arizona.  When do you suppose the air-borne troops will
arrive here?"

"They are almost bound to arrive, unless you think they intend to
destroy all this section of the American army by air-attack first."

"That is probably their idea; but remember that all this section of the
American Air Force will go up to meet them and such a battle will be
fought over the Painted Desert as the desert has never seen before.  It
will be enough to draw the fossils from their rocks."

"It seems rash, doesn't it, to have brought so much of the air-force
and the army for their manoeuvres so near to Mexico where the Nazis
were known to be in control?"

Mr. Dale laughed.  He laughed as though he really enjoyed the joke.

"My dear lady, you forget that after the assassination of the late
President Roosevelt, a Treaty of Agreement and Co-operation was entered
into between the Government of the United States and the Government of
the Third Reich.  I am quite prepared to believe that the present
President was acting according to his best beliefs when he affixed his
signature at the bottom of that disastrous document.

  Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
  Had stolen his heart away.

That wouldn't have mattered.  By all means let his heart be stolen by
two dormant Mexican volcanoes.  No one would have minded that.  What
did matter was that the Nazis stole away with his aerodromes in Sonora
and Chihuahua.  That is what we are paying for in Arizona now.  They
are only just over the border and we have already had some cause to
realize it."

"It does not seem to matter to us down here.  Selfishly it does not
seem to matter.  Is it because we have arrived at Phantom Ranch?  Is it
because we are safe at the bottom of the canyon removed from all
material danger?"

The whole party was humming _Land of Hope and Glory_ now, a subdued and
singularly harmonious choir.  It was surprising to find that that
heterogeneous company had so much music in its collective soul.





Overhead the bombers came again.  Fighters came with them, and the
needle of machine-guns threaded the pauses between the explosions of
the big bombs.  They were trying to hit the camp, guided by the flames
from the hotel.

"Royer has done his work well," said Dale grimly.  "That funeral pyre
of our Manager will mean the death of thousands as well as the loss of
his own miserable life.  The camp is a small concentrated town of huts
and tents, a grand target for to-night.  Our beautiful desert, a
Persian carpet stained with the colours of Nature and strewn with the
rocks of ages, will be stained with the blood of men and strewn with
the bones of men when the sun next rises over it.  _El desierto
pintado_, the Spaniards called it with remarkable felicity.--I wonder
how long it will be before the N.B.C. tells us what is happening here
in the south-west.  _Land of Hope and Glory_, indeed!  Land of despair
and shame."

"Sunrise cannot be far off.  Look up.  What is that light in the sky?
Is it the light of the sun or the light of fires, the light of life or
the incandescence of death?"

"Both, I think.  In a few minutes the sun will be up over the horizon,
making the fires pale.  The colours of the desert will come to life
again, with the staining meres of blood added to them.  Do you think
they will be squelchy underfoot, those patches of good American blood?
If you walked across them, would your feet sink in and your shoes fill
with a pink and slimy soup, or would the rock be too hard underneath
them?"

"Look up again.  The sky is no longer only black and red; there are
streaks of lemon; I think sunrise must be coming."

"It will take some time before the light reaches us down here; we shall
have to wait until the sun is directly overhead.  There is warmth at
the bottom of the canyon, but there is darkness too.  Light will stream
over America, but it will be a light revealing things that America will
not like.  It will show ruin and a distraught people; things that
America has never known.  She will have to get used to them.  She will
not enjoy the process.  She will now have to learn to endure the things
that Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Belgium, France, Holland, Russia,
Britain endured.  She will see her cities destroyed and her little
villages too.  She will see not only New York, Washington, Boston and
'Frisco destroyed, but also Shenandoah in Virginia, Pigeonroost in
Kentucky, Rome, Athens and Vienna in Georgia.  Small homesteads in
Texas and Nebraska will be attacked, even as Ipswich, Canterbury and
Sutton Valence were attacked and taken in the last war, and little
farmsteads seized in Essex and Devon,--all over England in that
surprising way.  We in England began to understand war when the
war-communiqus began to record familiar humble names.  We had never
understood it until then.  Perhaps it is only now that the Americans
will begin to understand it.  They will be surprised when the planes
swoop down, spraying the roofs of their barns with machine-gun bullets,
and the air-borne troops come down on the little harmless farms.
European farmers got themselves accustomed to that, but American
farmers have not accustomed themselves to it; not yet.  I daresay they
will adapt themselves to it in time.  One adapts oneself in due time to
every exaction of war.  One's standards alter very quickly, once war
comes.  One very soon adapts oneself to living in a ditch instead of in
a house.  This is a truth which we have learnt but which the Americans
have yet to learn."





Daylight began overhead.  Looking up, they saw pale yellow bars across
the sky.  The shadows in the canyon deepened, although no light came
down there yet.  It was very beautiful down there, looking upwards at
that hour of dawn.  The level sun sent horizontal shadows along the
rocks and startled the tips into colour; the tips of the rocks in that
early sunlight were as rosy, as delicate, as the nipples of a woman's
breast.  They stood up, mountain high.  Gradually as the sun rose
higher, streaks of sunlight like the sticks of an inverted fan began to
descend into the ravine, touching the lower strata of the rocks with
colour until the colour grew and grew, swarming over all the rocks,
swarming, creeping, growing into a symphony of colour which seemed to
combine with music and with truth.





"Dear me," said Mr. Dale, "the radio is coming on again.  I suppose
we'd better listen."

They listened.


    "This is America calling from Buenos Aires.  This is America
    calling the United States from Buenos Aires.  We have to announce
    that enemy attacks are developing all over the North-American
    continent.  We regret to announce that two cruisers and two
    destroyers have been sunk in the naval engagement off the coast of
    Maine, previously reported.  The next-of-kin will be informed as
    soon as possible.  Two destroyers of the enemy fleet are known to
    have been sunk; two cruisers are believed to have been
    damaged.--This is America calling the United States of North
    America from Buenos Aires.  We have information now that a serious
    air-attack has developed over the Grand Canyon of the Colorado
    region in Arizona where heavy bombing is taking place over
    troop-concentration camps and air-drome hangars in this region.  We
    have no exact information as to what is taking place in this region
    but hope to report later in further detail.--Hold on, please.  One
    moment, please."


The voice paused.

The voice resumed:


    "We regret also to announce that a more serious air-attack has
    recently developed over New York City.  We are at present unable to
    state what the damage to New York may be.  Enemy submarines also
    appear to have made their way into the harbour off Manhattan and it
    seems likely that one of them has exploded a mine, doing
    considerable damage which may possibly involve the destruction of
    the Statue of Liberty.  This is not certain yet; we hope for later
    reports contradicting so regrettable an incident."






The dawn grew.  The shadows deepened and blackened as the sunlight came
down.  Finally morning came.  The air-battles overhead had ceased.  The
wickedness of the night gave place to the loveliness of day.  The blind
man came towards Mrs. Temple, walking freely.

She put out her hand towards him, to help him on his way.  She thought
he might stumble, but he did not stumble.

"Good morning, Mrs. Temple.  What a lovely morning it is.  How
beautiful the rocks are, when one looks up at them from this angle.
The early sunlight on them....  How it slopes down gradually, putting
huge shadows on some places and then bright light on other places.
What a gift of God, to see light and shadows like that."

"I thought you were blind," she said.

"I was."





Sadie came to her later in the morning.

"Mrs. Temple, dear.  You told me to call you that way."

"Yes, Sadie, what?"

"You know you put me in charge of that blind man?"

"Yes, Sadie, so I did."

"Well, he sees now."

"Yes, I know he does."

"Odd, isn't it?  I can't think why.  It seems a miracle.  Very odd it
seems to me."

"Very odd.  Odd things do happen down here."

"He sees now.  He sees as well as you or I do.  So I don't need to lead
him about any more, do I?"

"No, Sadie, you don't; but thank you for having led him down so far."

"Mrs. Temple, dear, there is another thing I want to tell you."

"Yes, Sadie, what?"

"I've lost my cough."

"Lost your cough?"

"Yes, I used to spit blood, you know.  I used to cough my chest out,
every morning, and cough blood up with it.  I used to stain three
handkerchiefs a day.  I used to wash them out in the sink so that
nobody else should see them.  I was afraid of getting sent away."

"Sent away?"

"Yes.  Mr. Royer,--I don't like to say anything against him now.  He's
dead, isn't he?  He died up there, in the hotel, last night.  Was it
only last night?  It seems ages ago.  Anyhow, I was saying, I was
afraid of getting sent away by Mr. Royer.  It would have given a bad
name to the hotel if anybody knew there was a consumptive waitress
there.  He was kind to me in a way, he kept me on when he might have
fired me.  It's true he did cut my wages down because he said I wasn't
worth the money I was getting,--you see I did have to take a few hours
off sometimes when I got that cough,--but still he did keep me on, and
I was grateful for that.  But all that is past and now I feel as though
I had never been ill.  I suppose the climate down here suits me.  I
suppose I ought to feel that the things that are happening now are far
more terrible than anything which could ever have happened to me, but
somehow nothing seems real, only very exciting and magnificent.  I
daresay it is just because I can't take it all in."

Helen looked at the girl.  Her cheeks had lost their pallor; the
anxious careworn expression had left her eyes; she no longer looked
like a dog that expects to be beaten.  She stood upright, happy with
confidence, an altered being.





The sun was up now.  He was riding high.  The people down at Phantom
Ranch felt the warmth of his beams.  He seemed to have sent the evil of
the night attack away, and to have restored some sanity with daylight
to a civilized world.  Yet that was a delusion.  Insanity was still
travelling about.


    "Here is America calling from Buenos Aires by courtesy of the
    Argentine Republic.  Calling the United States of America.  Calling
    all Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.  Calling the world.  Enemy
    attacks have continued throughout the night and it now seems fairly
    certain that at some points the air-borne troops of the enemy are
    established in temporary possession.  It is confidently expected,
    however, that these occupying forces will be disposed of before
    many days have elapsed.  It is feared that destruction on several
    cities has been extensive and that a heavy casualty list must be
    anticipated.  We record these reports, not in order to spread
    alarm, but in pursuance of a request from the White House before
    communication was interrupted that radio reporting should be as
    accurate as possible.  This request was telephonically promulgated
    to the N.B.C. by the President's Private Secretary, but we are
    unable to state whether he was acting on his own initiative or on
    the President's orders.  It was found impossible to discover the
    whereabouts of the President; it is believed that he took off from
    Washington by plane during the earlier part of yesterday afternoon,
    piloting himself, for an unknown destination.  The naval action
    earlier reported off the coast of Maine..."


Here the voice faded out.

Everybody seemed relieved that the obligation to listen should be
removed.  They dispersed vaguely but happily to make some stray
arrangements for themselves in the little encampment of Phantom Ranch.
Their requirements were few and it seemed to matter little to them
whether they spent the day and the following nights in shelter or in
the open.  Some of them lay down on a ledge of rock and slept like
animals in the shade away from the sun.  Others went and amused
themselves with the echoes; it was said that you could get eight
repeated echoes from a single rifle-shot; it was said that you could
hear an Indian singing on the other rim of the canyon and yet be unable
to make yourself heard by a person a few yards off.  This mode of
existence suited the company down at the bottom of the canyon.

Towards midday when the sun was high an Indian boy came and perched
himself on the Rim and called down into the deeps.  He knew exactly how
to manage the echoes and how to send his voice.  The radio from Buenos
Aires was still silent, but the primitive science of the Indian was
independent of scientific contraptions.  Putting his hands to his mouth
he called down to Mrs. Temple:

"Madam!  Madam!  Mrs. Temple!  Message from Mr. Hermit: Message from
Mr. Alden.  He alive still.  He sends love.  He all right.  He say not
trouble about war.  He say not trouble about him.  He say not trouble
about anything.  He say everything all right in the end.  He sends
love."

The last word wandered round and round the gorges: Love, love, love,
love....  The echoes gradually faded out as the radio of war-news had
faded out; but as the last echo died away a rifle-shot was heard on the
Rim and the body fell bouncing from cliff to cliff, to land broken at
Mrs. Temple's feet.

She bent over him.

"Poor boy, he has carried his last message for the hermit.  He was a
good boy and faithful.  They must have snipers up there on the Rim."

The boy opened his eyes and smiled up at her.

"Mr. Hermit all right."

"Yes," she said; "don't worry; we are all perfectly all right."





"Do you know," said Mr. Dale, coming up to her some hours later, "the
first time I saw you talking to that Indian boy I thought what a
romantic couple you made.  It was, dear me, only yesterday afternoon.
It seems much longer ago, but with a curious telescoping of time or an
equally curious inversion of time it might be a thousand years ago or
it might not be going to happen until to-morrow.  That sounds rather
like Alice-through-the-looking-glass, but it is the kind of thing that
has always interested me in my amateurish way.  Living down here seems
to upset one's sense of time.  I do not think that any of us have quite
adjusted our sense of time down here yet.  I do not think that any of
us have quite adjusted our sense of anything that we used to regard as
important in the old life up on the Rim.  There are snipers up on the
Rim.  There are no snipers down here.  There are bombers up over the
Painted Desert.  Bombs cannot reach us down here.  Hunger does not seem
to trouble us, nor thirst.  If I were a sentimentalist, which I never
was and shall not now become, I should remark that Phantom Ranch seems
made of flowers and running water and goodwill."

Madame de Retz joined them, smiling broadly.

"I bring something to entertain you.  It is all that I have left of my
possessions; I ran upstairs for my bird last night when the fire
started and I snatch this at the same time.  It represented my
livelihood, you understand.  I had many of them, but only two could I
carry.  The other one I dropped on my flight and even this one--see--is
charred."  She showed them the big ledger, with the cover half torn off
and some pages blackened.  "Look and read," she said handing it to Mrs.
Temple.  "It was my bible once; my fortune.  It seems foolish now."

"But this is fascinating," Helen exclaimed.  "Look, Mr. Dale.  Here is
the index, so neatly written out; it seems to contain the names of
every celebrity you have ever heard of ("and a great many more you have
not," Madame de Retz interjected with pride).  See, here are the
cross-references: Theatre, films, race-going, royalty, beauty, divorce,
social, political ... what on earth does it all mean, madame?"

"I explain.  It is my life-work as well as my livelihood.  I am proud.
You wonder why it is not in Polish.  I have to keep it in English
because my employers are American and I send a duplicate always to New
York.  It is very secret, very secret indeed.  If the New York office
is not bombed, then my duplicate will still exist and my life-work will
not be lost.  Twenty volumes I had, a real encyclopaedia cosmopolitan,
and they blow now all over the Painted Desert."

The two English people were sure by now that they had come on an
elaborate plot which Madame de Retz was revealing to them, impelled by
some strange bravado.  They were interested to observe the methods by
which the Nazi agents had worked, although it was unfortunately too
late to do anything about it and although they were shocked by the fact
that Madame de Retz whose own country had suffered so violently under
the German attack should sell herself in the cause of German
propaganda.  They felt quite detached about it, however, and even had a
certain sympathy with a poor woman who had her living to earn: the
instinct of personal preservation has always been strong.  Who could
tell? perhaps she had been blackmailed into this treachery.

They sat side by side on a boulder and peered obediently into the big
pages as Madame de Retz pointed with her finger at the various entries.

"You see, here you have the name in the first column.  Alphabetical, of
course.  Surname and first name,--what you English call Christian name.
Block letters.  Neat! yes?  Then next column: Occupation.  Next column:
Special Qualifications.  Next column: Value in dollars.  You notice,
divorce ranks high.  Every divorce adds a possible thousand dollars to
the price, because every re-marriage means extra sex-appeal of course.
Titled-divorce and celebrity-divorce come separate.  Titles were good
once, then a slump in title-value, then they came up again.  It is
difficult to explain the reason for these things.  Once," she said with
a chuckle of real pleasure, "I got a Brazilian with eight divorces and
seven re-marriages.  That was my record.  Oh, I was proud.  My
committee congratulated me.  They thought me a very good agent.  But
Royalty was always better than divorce, perhaps because more difficult
to persuade.  You do not know how haughty Royalty can be, turning up
its nose.  I had a nice little scheme prepared here.  I had begun to
approach your little friend Miss Driscoll for her colleague Princess
Irma; the child seemed shy, but I knew how to manage that, and in a few
days, a very few days, I think I should win her round.  The young are
very easy to twist round the little finger.  Now I suppose it is too
late, and although the time for my work seems to be past I am still a
little sorry.  Ah well, I must not regret.  She was not a real Royal
Highness, it is true, but only a Balkan one, and the Balkan ones were
never first-class in value."

"But I still don't quite understand," Mrs. Temple began.  "What would
this ... this miscellaneous collection of people do for you?  I notice
that most of them are women.  The men are nearly all actors ... or film
stars...."

"Ah, that is for the make-up," cried Madame de Retz excitedly.  "That
is high value and the men were very good-natured always.  Very easy to
obtain.  'Anything to oblige you, madame,' they would say, 'anything to
do you a good turn,' and although I always thanked them and said how
kind you are to a poor woman, I knew they thought of the publicity
value to them.  Publicity never comes amiss, was a slogan of my
committee.  But never mind about the men; I snap my fingers at them
really.  No, I will confide to you my greatest ambition.  Ah, it was my
mad, my secret dream; it was so mad, so secret, I told not even my
committee.  I dreamt one day I would present my committee with a _fait
accompli_.  I would travel to New York in person; I would demand to be
received at a board meeting; I would appear before all those gentlemen;
I would throw the document on the table before the Chairman; I would
not speak; I would let the document speak for me."

She drew herself up and threw her hand out in a dramatic gesture.
Helen and Mr. Dale gazed at her; they were more puzzled than ever and
wondered whether the woman was dangerous, inspired, or merely insane.

"I show you," she whispered, and bending down she turned over the pages
of the index, running her fingers down the column until she came to the
letter E.  "Look, I put it in pencil for myself only," she said; "I do
not copy this entry into the duplicate for my committee.  Only when I
have achieved my ambition will I reveal it."  She pointed.  "ENGLAND,
QUEEN OF.  What do you say to that?"

"Good God," said Mr. Dale, who was not easily startled.  "You didn't
seriously suppose that you could inveigle the Queen into your Quisling
intrigues,--the _Queen_?  I don't think we ought to listen to this,
Mrs. Temple.  It seems almost treasonable.  Let us leave this mad woman
to her ravings."

Madame de Retz stared at him; she looked dismayed and as though she
were about to cry.

"Quisling?" she repeated.  "Treasonable?  Oh no!  Foolish perhaps, and
indeed it all looks foolish now to me, but believe me I have the
highest respect for Her Majesty,--it was a foolish dream,--I should not
have told you,--but we all have our ambitions and you must not mock me.
This was mine.  If I could secure your Queen...."

Mrs. Temple saw that there was some misunderstanding.

"Tell me," she said gently, as one speaks to a frightened child, "what
exactly did you want of the Queen?"

"Only her name, I promise you; I would not ask her to use the stuff;
only ask her to allow me to say she used it.  Our fortune would be
made,--my fortune would be made."

"Stuff?  What stuff?"

"Our face-cream, Mrs. Temple; our beauty preparation.  World famous.
All film-stars, all professional beauties use it.  One application
overnight and the result is magical.  We pay good prices, I promise
you, for the advertisement.  My committee, for instance, would pay five
hundred dollars, one hundred pounds sterling, to your little friend
Miss Driscoll if she got Princess Irma's signature; and then fifteen
hundred dollars, five hundred pounds to Princess Irma herself.  You
see?  Commission!  What would we pay to the person who secured the
Queen of England for us?  Any fortune, any day! and a little fortune to
this poor Polish agent, Wilmushka de Retz, your humble servant."

She made a funny facetious yet graceful little curtsey as she ended her
speech; she curtsied to Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale as they sat on their
boulder studying her large ledger, her life work, her dossier; and Mr.
Dale, after peering first into the pages and then looking up at Madame
de Retz, was inclined to break into laughter, but there was something
so serious and touching in her aspect that he could not laugh at her
but said, "Do go on, madame.  Tell us more.  I never knew until now how
these things were worked."

Madame de Retz brightened; she was sensitive enough to have felt the
chill of their disapproval, but now that she had regained their
sympathy and interest she was eager to tell them anything she could.

"I planned to offer Her Majesty a little outfit, a box containing all
the preparations from A to Z.  The box should have the Royal Arms
engraved on it, very pretty, ivory with black engraving and black
hinges, I designed it myself, very compact and convenient for
travelling...."

"I thought you said you didn't want her to use the stuff; only to lend
her name to it."

"It was good stuff," said Madame de Retz earnestly, "it would do no
harm, but I would be content for the little outfit to be put on Her
Majesty's dressing-table.  Now I tell you about A to Z, shall I?"

"Please do."

She was delighted; she clapped her hands together, the hands that
Loraine Driscoll had compared to claws.

"It was my own idea.  A clever idea, I think; my committee
congratulated me again.  We had twenty-six preparations, so I made an
alphabet, one letter to each."  She started to rattle it off by heart,
checking on her fingers.  "A--Apple Cheek, B--Beauty cream,
C--Carnation, D--Debutante, E--Eternal love, F--Fidelity, G--Good luck,
H--Here we are again!  I--It's me!  J--Jolly girl, K--Kiss me, L--Love
me, M--Miss me, N--Night of love, O--Open door, P--Please don't!
O--Queen of Hearts, R--Royal approval, S--Sovereign Solution,
T--_Toujours  toi_, U--Useful always, V--...--(she tapped it out) V
Victory, W--Woo me, win me, X--Excellent, Y--Youthful blush, Z--z was
difficult."

"And what did you find for Z?  Zebra and zig-zag would both be too
stripy for any woman's complexion; zeitgist would be unpopular as a
German word in occupied Europe; zebu..."

"Mr. Dale, I fear you laugh at me.  What did I find?  I found Zephyr.
I thought that was pretty.  It suggests the breeze blowing colour into
a woman's cheeks.  Very rural, very country tint, popular in England
specially.  It came well at the end of the list after Y--Youthful
blush.  Z--Zephyr."

"Madame, you are an artist, I see."

"You flatter me, Mr. Dale.  My committee think so too, 'An artist at
your job,' they say, 'and practical as well.'  That was their letter.
I was proud."

"I don't wonder," said Mrs. Temple, who was rather touched by this
mixture of absurdity and enthusiasm.  "I can't imagine how you devise
these things.  You must have a very lively mind.  I am sure your
committee must regard you as invaluable."

Madame de Retz began suddenly to giggle.  Under the warmth of their
approval she became coy.  "Oh, you are both too kind.  Your kindness
encourages me to confide in you something about my alphabet.  Not only
Z was difficult.  All the letters were difficult.  They suggest things
called improper.  It is a pity, because they are things that suit
beauty preparations.  Great scope for risky joke.  Perhaps you English
do not understand.  I see my confidence does not go well with you.  I
will go away from you now, and you will say that Polish woman has a
nasty mind.  You will condemn me, but I will go away alone by myself up
the creek and leave you to condemn me.  I go without my Grigori."

She went, a lonely little figure, wandering away.

"May God forgive me," said Mr. Dale, "after our experience of Royer I
had begun to think her ledger might have something to do with the
Gestapo.  Poor innocent!  Poor silly innocent!  How one does misjudge
people, to be sure.  Let us hope that we may learn some wisdom, down
here."





It had never fallen to the lot of any member of the party to wander
untrammelled in the mysterious depths of the canyon as they wandered
now during the days that followed.  Although many of them had made the
descent, and had even spent a couple of nights at Phantom Ranch, they
had always been accompanied by guides whom it was impossible to shake
off and whose raucous descriptions and explanations had pursued them
into creeks and caverns where no sound should have been allowed to
penetrate but the roar of the rapids or the brushing of the wings of a
bird.  Now they were free to come and go as they pleased, with a chosen
companion or alone if the desire for solitude took them.  Disaster
after disaster was recorded from the outside world, but down here dwelt
the peace and beauty of the Elysian Fields, and a harmony of sight and
sound to which was matched an incomparable fantasy of Nature.  Intimacy
came with the prolonged acquaintance, yet no true intimacy was possible
with the moods successively imposed.  Was it storm? then the cliffs
darkened above the abyss and their shapes were lost in sombrous masses
overhead.  Was it rain? then all the waterfalls fell like treble voices
into the bass of the river and rainbows stood from pinnacle to
pinnacle, not only rainbows which bridged the chasm from rim to rim,
but miniature iridescences also which danced over the spray of every
falling splash.  Was it a day of clouds? then they rolled from peak to
peak, some crags so sharp that it seemed their spikes must pierce the
roundness of the cloud and explode it into a revelation of the blue
heaven beyond.  Was it sunset? then the rocks became as fossilized
wine, claret hardened into cathedrals, great ships breasting forward,
with the shadows like the trough of the wave and these edifices riding
still sunlit above them.  No comparison could be too extravagant, for
the scale was so huge it seemed made to match the scale of catastrophe
going on in the outside world, with the difference that here was the
exaggeration of natural splendour in contrast to the small ingenious
folly of twentieth-century man.

  House made of the dawn,
  House made of evening light,
  House made of the dark cloud,
  House made of male rain,
  House made of dark mist,
  House made of female rain,
  House made of pollen,
  House made of grasshoppers.
  Dark cloud is at the door.
  The trail of it is dark cloud,
  The zigzag lightning stands high up on it.

  Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk,
  May it be happy before me,
  May it be beautiful behind me,
  May it be beautiful below me,
  May it be beautiful above me,
  May it be beautiful, all around me,
  In beauty it is finished.


Man the inheritor of such a planet....  Those who wandered at their
leisure about the Grand Canyon of the Colorado during those days of
battle between the Reich-controlled States of Europe and the Federated
States of North America, went back in their imagination to the men who
had first come upon that region.--There was a time when the canyon had
never been seen by the white man.  Don Lopez de Cardeas, travelling
with twelve other Spaniards in 1540 in search of "seven cities of
gold," came upon it without any warning.  They were the most astonished
men on earth that day.  It is surprising enough to stand for the first
time upon the Rim when you know more or less what to expect, an
experience for which no description can be a sufficient preparation,
but to ride for days across the desert with no idea of what lies ahead,
and then to come to a halt so sudden that it throws your horse back on
his haunches as the earth splits into that gash,--there, _there_ would
be a moment of history worth attending.

The Spanish adventurers tried to find a way down to the river but the
trackless cliffs defeated them, and for another two hundred years the
canyon returned to its solitude.  Indians prowled fearfully along the
rims; blue jays flashed like kingfishers between the rocks; the
cascades fell with every rain; but no white man came to look at that
place again until two Franciscan friars crossed the river at a ford
thereafter called _El vado de los Padres_.

A hundred years later a man with only one arm went down the river by
boat.  It was the first time that either the red man or the white had
travelled that river; the first time that any human eye had
contemplated those appalling steeps from the bottom.  Men had looked
down upon them from the top, seeing them as inverted mountains, seeing
the peak instead of the base; but this man and his companions saw the
Colorado and the canyon it had cut, from the bottom instead of from the
top.  They had no idea where they were going or what lay ahead.  They
woke echoes in caves that had never given back the human voice, and
sang or spoke to one another, scarcely able to believe that their own
words were returning to them, so transformed were the tones by some
soft resonance of the rock.  They gave names to unnamed places,--Music
Temple, Marble Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs, Flaming Gorge, Split Mountain,
Bright Angel River,--leaving behind them this trail of imaginative
names which, far from exceeding, could scarcely represent the reality.
That was all behind them; but as they let down their boats over rapid
after rapid, happy if they could make a few miles in calmer waters
during the day and find a camping place as darkness fell, they still
knew nothing of what they were coming to.  The future lay unknown as
the future of life with its only certainty of death, and indeed it
seemed probable that this journey would end in the same way.  For
hundreds of miles they had surmounted dangers, but there might be
hundreds of miles ahead with insurmountable dangers; they could not
estimate how many miles or what dangers; rapids they could not descend,
impassable passages, mountain sides closing in on them in too narrow a
fissure: from such difficulties there would be no return.  They might
just succeed in making their way down the stream, but they could never
come back against it.  You can shoot your boat down a rapid, but you
cannot retrace.  Still the man with one arm went on and came eventually
at midday into a calm valley he could geographically recognize.  The
relief from danger, he wrote, and the joy of success were great, and
his joy was almost ecstasy.


    "We have looked back unnumbered centuries into the past, and seen
    the time when the schists in the depths of the Grand Canon were
    first formed as sedimentary beds beneath the sea; we have seen this
    long period followed by another of dry land--so long that even
    hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of feet of beds were washed away by
    the rains; and, in turn, followed by another period of ocean
    triumph, so long, that at least ten thousand feet of sandstones
    were accumulated as sediments, when the sea yielded dominion to the
    powers of the air, and the region was again dry land.  But aerial
    forces carried away the ten thousand feet of rocks, by a process
    slow yet unrelenting, until the sea again rolled over the land, and
    more than ten thousand feet of rocky beds were built over the
    bottom of the sea; and then again the restless sea retired, and the
    golden, purple, and black hosts of heaven made missiles of their
    own misty bodies--balls of hail, flakes of snow, and drops of
    rain--and when the storm of war came, the new rocks fled to the
    sea.  Now we have caon gorges and deeply eroded valleys, and still
    the hills are disappearing, the mountains themselves are wasting
    away, the plateaus are dissolving and the geologist, in the light
    of the past history of the earth, makes prophecy of a time when
    this desolate land of Titanic rocks shall become a valley of many
    valleys, and yet again the sea will invade the land, and the coral
    animals build their reefs in the infinitesimal laboratories of
    life, and lowly beings shall weave nacre-lined shrouds for
    themselves, and the shrouds shall remain entombed in the bottom of
    the sea; when the people shall be changed, by the chemistry of
    life, into new forms; monsters of the deep shall live and die, and
    their bones be buried in the coral sands.  Then other mountains and
    other hills shall be washed into the Colorado Sea, and coral reefs,
    and shales, and bones, and disintegrated mountains, shall be made
    into beds of rock, for a new land, where new rivers shall flow."






On the fifth day a young man fell into the Canyon with his plane.  He
fell as the Indian boy had fallen, crashing from rock to rock; but it
was not only his own soft body that crashed, it was the fabric of the
plane, the wings, the fuselage, the cabin, all smashing and splintering
with the noise that a plane makes when it breaks up, a noise
disproportionate to so dragon-fly a thing.  Only those who had already
heard it happen could recognize so particular a noise, but even they
had heard it only in open country or at most in the streets of a town;
they had never heard so strange a reverberation as that which woke
those stony echoes and ran up the ravines and returned to break again
upon opposite walls and die away in further recesses until silence was
left to be filled by the roaring river once more.

The fall had been as beautiful as the fall of a shot bird; sudden as a
plummet from the sky, the plane had hit the Rim and bounded out to
strike the first crag and then to drop with one shattered wing between
hundreds of feet of precipice, then struck again, and bounded again,
and struck again, till, crumpled and broken and no longer recognizable,
it came to rest on a sandy bay beside the river.  A tiara of flames,
pale in the daylight, rose through black smoke near Phantom Ranch.  The
body of the pilot lay apart, arms outstretched in the attitude of
crucifixion.  There was no sign of injury, only the eyes were closed
and the grace of youth was lapped in sleep.

It was Louis.

In this strange place no one seemed distressed; they stood gravely
looking on while Louis' young wife went forward and knelt by the body,
slipping her arm beneath the shoulders and lifting him into a sitting
position propped against her thigh.  He was limp, his head rolled
sideways, she stroked the hair back from his temples.

They made such a tender group that the blind man murmured "_Piet_" as
he watched them.

"Listen how she whispers to him," said the deaf man.

The others could scarcely catch the whisper, but the deaf man caught it.

The Indian boy came up and looked on.  "He all right, missy," he said;
"he all right soon."  Jacqueline looked up with an expression of such
radiance that they all felt themselves to be in the presence of some
miraculous transfiguration.  "He's all right _now_," she said, "look,
he opens his eyes," and again she bent down to whisper, while the
figure stirred slightly in her arms.  He stirred as he might have
stirred in their bed, slenderly waking at dawn and turning voluptuously
towards her with whom he had shared the early passion of the darkened
hours.  Her finger-tips ran over his brows in the tenderness of a
caress which held all the delicacy of tired-out physical love and all
the closeness of other kinds of love as well.  The gesture of her
fingers running over his hair expressed the painful tenderness that one
may feel for the physical body of another person, but the radiance of
her face expressed the spiritual closeness between them, when they
could imagine that neither life nor death nor sex had anything to do
with their bond.

It was pleasant to watch him coming gradually to life again after his
temporary death, and pleasant above all to reflect that the anguish of
anxiety she had endured in her mortal days was now resolved into its
solution.  She had lived, seeing him fly away towards danger, pain, and
destruction; for days she had known nothing of his fate; and she
herself, hovering between her living and her dying (for the transition
had not been so very rapid as they marched from the Rim down into the
canyon and it had taken them all several days to adjust themselves to
the new arrangement), she herself had undergone all mortal anxieties
for the fate of the loved body.  She had known the suffering that that
uncertainty can bring.  Are the bones protruding from limbs that once I
loved?  Is that dear head smashed in?  _Tam cari capitis_, the poet
said; that dear, dear head; that darling head; that anguish of
protective love aroused by the threat of damage; those curls matted
with the blood and brains that I have never seen?  Nurses in hospitals
(she had thought to herself during those days) are accustomed to those
sights; they take them for granted; their point of view is the
practical point of view; a broken limb is a thing to be mended, jointed
together again as a carpenter splices two jaggy bits of wood; a
fractured skull may be a more delicate operation; mending and grafting
a shattered face may be an even more delicate operation; but how little
these nurses and carving surgeons know of what goes on in the minds of
the poor ignorant unprofessional people, stuck down in the
waiting-room, waiting for news, getting very sparse information, being
soothed by a professional voice they do not believe in although they
would like to believe.

Jacqueline had been thinking all these things to herself, in the
muddled turmoil that the brain gets into under exceptional stress.

Now here was Louis, dead yet alive.  He moved gently in her arms.
"Louis," she said, "my love, my darling."

"Jacqueline," he said, recognizing her as his eyes opened.

"You are not hurt?" she asked.

"I am all right," he replied.





He got up gradually on to his feet.  He stood upright again and stood,
a tall young man looking with surprise at Phantom Ranch and his young
wife.

"Jacqueline?" he said, puzzled.

"Louis," she replied, confident.

There seemed nothing left for the other people but to go away.  They
drifted off, leaving Louis and Jacqueline to each other.  There is
nothing else to do when love comes in and excludes everyone else as
unnecessary and a hindrance.  They were able to observe the pair from a
distance, wandering vaguely among the rocks.  It seemed that they
played like children, devising little games and bumping their heads
together as they stooped too eagerly over their inventions.  The others
were constantly coming on their traces.  They had had water and stones
and flowers to play with.  Here they had built a miniature castle of
sand buttressed by coloured fragments and had scooped a complicated
system of moats and canals around it, with little dams and lakes and
bridges,--Louis seemed still to remember that he had once been an
engineer--and tiny roads beautifully paved with shards leading away as
though in a whisper towards the immensities of the canyons.  In another
place they had left a wreath, made of flowers the others could not find
growing anywhere; they had jettisoned it on their way.  In yet another
place they had left a water-mill, its green sails cut from the leaves
of a yucca; they had set it to be turned by a minute waterfall and it
flung rainbow drops in spray, imitating in miniature the wide rainbows
that straddled the rocks.  A gentle poetry about all their movements
redeemed them from a silly childishness; a simplicity of grace and love
hung round their complete unselfconsciousness.  At night they never
came with the others into the ranch huts, but slept somewhere in the
open, and then it was possible, nay, inevitable to imagine without
impertinence their young limbs interlaced and the breath delicately
ruffling the soft hair.  Mr. Dale, who was too much touched to be
caustic, called them Paolo and Francesca.  "They don't need to recall
the happiness of times past," he said, "for those times are with them
for ever."





Louis was however still sufficiently attached to the outside world to
be able to give his companions some account of it.  His degree of
attachment seemed slight, no stronger than a few threads ready to snap
if he chose to float away, but at moments he seemed quite willing and
even eager to talk.  He had always been a very masculine young man, and
neither the passionate love which he had enjoyed before nor the
idealized love he was enjoying now could entirely absorb him.
Jacqueline sat patient while he talked.  She was not interested in what
he was saying, but she was prepared to wait for the moment when she
could get him back to herself if in the meantime she might listen to
the tones of his voice without paying attention to his words and could
let her eyes rove over the appreciative expressions of his hearers.
She thought that they admired him, and that sufficed her.  It was
fitting that they should do so.

The wireless had kept them informed of the major events, but there were
details which Louis was able to fill in.  He began by speaking
dispassionately but with sorrow.  It appeared that the lessons of the
last war had been unavailing and that the American leaders with
incredible trustfulness had once more been taken by surprise.  "Of
course this time they had but little choice," he exclaimed, while
Jacqueline thought how beautiful he looked when he frowned, "after the
treaties imposed by _force majeure_.  For what else was it but _force
majeure_, my friends?  It was all very well for this great nation to
declare that in the interests of humanity peace must be restored to the
earth, but the fact was that after the total subjugation of Europe and
Great Britain the United States were reluctant to go on fighting alone.
An alliance with the greatest power the world had ever seen appeared to
be the safer policy.  The offer that Germany put forward then had all
the semblance of expediency and reason.  Mutual destruction is absurd,
they said; absurd and unnecessary; co-operation is the only hope,
humanly and economically; let us co-operate now, and save what is left
in order to re-build.  Leave us the Old World and we will leave you the
New, or at any rate a good part of it.  You shall have all your own
continent to yourselves, North America, that is, including Canada which
we could easily retain but which in our generosity and desire for a
fair understanding we will allot to you; the republics of Latin America
of course must decide for themselves.  You, my friends, will remember
these pronouncements as though they had been uttered this morning.  You
will remember also the conflict of argument that they provoked.  A
crueller test had never been applied to human judgement.  We know now
that human judgement decided wrong, and some of us may be proud to
recall that we protested at the time.  Our protests were vain, and the
agreement so ironically known to us as the Pacific Charter was duly
ratified in Berlin.  Our leaders still believed in the pledging of a
word that no schoolboy would have credited."

He spoke quietly but deeply.  It was manifest that he had both thought
and felt.  He had suffered, but he had not been content to suffer
blindly; he had also examined the causes of his suffering for himself.

"After all that had happened!" he said.  "After all the betrayals, the
broken assurances, the secret scheming!  Is it impossible for humanity
to learn?  Or is it impossible for us to connect any given event with
its predecessors and probable successors? to observe any given event,
not as an isolated adventure, but as a drop in the stream of causality?
It seems so.  We cannot learn.  Experience means nothing.  Oh," he
passionately said, "how foolish, foolish, and foolish again we are!
How impossible to express the foolishness and wrongness of this human
race, how impossible to express their striving after their highest
aspirations and their fall down into the lowest trough.  Poor us! poor
fallible us!  How pitiable we are!  Whenever we feel tempted to judge
and condemn one another, we should return to the realization of our
pitifulness, which seems to be the beginning and end of all judgement."

Mr. Dale glanced at Mrs. Temple.  He remembered that she had scolded
him for being scornful and intolerant.  Her words had bitten him deeply
enough for him to remember them.  He was not accustomed to being
scolded since he had no friends intimate enough to criticize him; yet
Mrs. Temple, who was only an acquaintance not a friend, had taken it
upon herself to reprove him in her gentle way.

He glanced across at her, but she was not looking in his direction.
She was sitting propped against a boulder, her hands clasped round her
knees.  She scarcely seemed to be listening to Louis, but to be
following some train of thought of her own.  He supposed that she had
heard and read remarks such as Louis' too often, for, after all, in
spite of Jacqueline's admiration, he was really saying no more than any
moderately intelligent young man had said some millions of times since
1939.

Yet for all her abstraction he noticed that she preserved the peculiar
quality of awareness which was hers.  She was always there, although
she might seem to be "not there."  Queer woman, he thought; and
discovered in himself a desire to know her better.  In their present
circumstances it seemed likely that he would have every opportunity for
doing so.

Louis looked round, fearing that he had talked too much, but seeing
that he held his audience he went on.

"We are an adequately representative collection here," he said,
"American, English, Polish, Czech, French....  We all lived through
that strange time with its fears and confusions and hatreds.  Some of
us saw our countries blasted, some of us kept our lives and nothing
else.  There were moments when we were threatened with a suspension of
all rational standards and turned into an animal snapping in defence,
grabbing at its food.  The rational being should never be reduced to
such a state.  It is a vilification that humanity should never be asked
to undergo; a grotesque distortion, a twisting of the heroic qualities.
That those qualities should still have shown themselves remains to our
credit I suppose, if we must insist on looking round for one good thing
to say of war.  But if we felt hatred also and the desire for revenge,
shall that be blamed upon us?  Hatred that loathly passion!  With a
remnant of shame we tried to call it justifiable moral indignation.
But to be truthful not hypocritical let's admit that in the confusion
few of us could spare time to estimate war itself through the soul.
The material bewilderment was too great for that.  The physical and
emotional turbulence were too urgently in the foreground.  Our bodies,
our hearts, our needs, in what order were we to arrange them?  We had
no leisure to survey the dreadful landscape we had created for
ourselves; we lived for the moment, since the future held no
probability.  We had begun recently to believe that the world was in
process of readjustment,--I do not say that it was an adjustment to our
liking, but at least the planet seemed to be steadying itself on its
axis,--and now with another push it rocks again and we ourselves return
to the brink of madness."

Mrs. Temple gently intervened.

"You promised, M. Louis, to tell us something of what you had been able
to observe."

"Forgive me, I got carried away.  My wife will tell you that it is my
bad habit.  What I myself have been able to observe?  So little!  You
see, I became a unit once more, no longer an independent creature.
Mentally I returned to the dullness of being a machine waiting to
receive orders; physically I returned to the sharpness of being a
machine trained to execute them.  That is an exhilaration!  Nerve,
skill, decision, all at their finest pitch,--the bravura of the air ...
but I get carried away again.  You ask for facts.  Alas, I had so short
a while, not a week.  The big items of the news you know from the
radio, you know as much as I.  Rumour says that the air-borne troop
landings are far greater and more continuous than the radio admits; it
cannot conceal their occurrence but it is not allowed to reveal their
magnitude.  It seems, in fact, that swarms of ants are crawling over
the prairies; I have flown some way on reconnaissance and I have seen
for myself.  America puts a big boot down on one cluster of them, but
next hour there are more, always more.  Destroying them is like
throwing pebbles into the sea in the hope that the beach will
disappear."

"But what can they hope to accomplish?"

"Madame, how often did we say that in the last war: what can they hope
to accomplish?"

No one answered his question.

"There have been some fine battles, though," he said, looking very
young and excitable again.  He turned towards Loraine.  "These
countrymen of yours, Miss Driscoll, these American flyers, my, they
know their job!  We always used to talk of the New World; well, if
taking to the air was a symptom of a new world, those boys live up to
it: they must have been born with wings.  Their mothers pushed them
over the edge of a nest instead of sending them off in nice warm
underwear on their walk to school.  The swooping fights I've seen!
Your country was planned for such things.  Your plains now crawl with
armies while your squadrons wheel above them.  That is how it should
be.  Forgive me for saying so, I do not forget that it is your country
which is now at war; but you see although with my soul I hate war, with
my body I am a fighting man, and when I see such a battlefield and such
forces so magnificently set I must respond with my blood.  It leaps, it
applauds.  I forget that I should think it terrible, and see only that
it is superb."

"Aren't you rather lapsing into the confusion of thought you spoke of
just now?" said Mr. Dale mildly.

"Sir, I am.  But if you had seen what I have seen you would share the
confusion with me.  Not for long, perhaps, but in the momentary
recollection.  Everything was on so grand a scale, the sky and the
earth so empty until they filled with those murderous men, and then
there were hordes above and hordes below, and it was difficult to know
which were the angels of light and which were the angels of darkness
flying in the heavens, but it was easy enough to know that the masses
creeping on the ground were the imps of an evil to be destroyed."

Mr. Dale looked dubious but refrained from argument.

"I saw your brother, Miss Driscoll," said Louis turning again to
Loraine.  "You remember how he used to pretend that it bored him to
become a qualified pilot?  He used to say he did it only in order to
please your father; he told me his allowance would be cut down if he
didn't agree.  _Quel blagueur_!  I never believed him.  His nerve was
in the Air really all the time; he wasn't much interested in anything
else and that was why he could pretend so successfully to be interested
in nothing at all.  Well, he was splendid.  You've seen him in his
flying helmet, looking like a god about to soar into his natural
element.  That's how he looked every time before he went into battle,
only then there was something in his face which you have never seen
there.  You have seen him only when he was going off on an ordinary
flight, never when he was going to kill or be killed.  He couldn't help
being beautiful; he couldn't alter the sculpture of his features, and
he was quite well aware of their advantages, but he was unaware of the
change that came over him whenever orders arrived.  He ceased to be
Hollywood's ideal then and became something real.  To watch him
standing beside his plane was like hearing music.  It was beautiful and
alarming.  No one dared speak to him except the mechanics and the
groundsmen.  He looked like a saint inviting death.  And he didn't know
it; for the first time in his life he wasn't thinking of his looks or
of their effect on other people.  Then he would take off and be gone
for as many hours as his fuel would last him, and when he returned the
control-room would get only the barest report from him.  So many of the
enemy shot down, so many damaged; but never any extra account of how he
had done it.  He always flew a single-seater plane, so nobody could
check up exactly on what he had done.  I think he was a lone bird by
nature.  They offered him a double-plane with a gunner, but he wouldn't
have it.  He liked to be on his own.  Perhaps you knew that, Miss
Driscoll?"

"I certainly knew he didn't care much for anything but himself and what
he wanted and what he foresaw."

The others thought that this remark was made with normal sisterly
acerbity.  Mrs. Temple alone saw that Loraine was so agitated that she
had hardly brought herself to answer.  She was just about to dash in
and help the girl when Louis himself went on gravely.

"You cheapen him, Miss Driscoll.  You say that he cared for nothing but
himself and what he wanted.  That's true.  I daresay your parents
suffered from his egotism in their home.  I daresay you suffered from
it yourself.  You saw his egotism only in the sense that it was a
nuisance and an inconvenience and an exasperation.  The spoilt son, the
privileged brother, and all those things which mean much to you
Driscolls, inside the family circle.  To the women to whom he made a
pretence of love he appears as a different character; he appears as the
charmer, the gay, the rich, the dashing young man; they don't care what
he is like at home so long as he makes love skilfully and gives them a
good time all round.  But to us who saw him on the North or the South
Rim,--on the edge of life or of death,--he seemed different again.  I
don't know which you will think was the true Robert Driscoll; I daresay
he couldn't have told us himself."

No one seemed to notice that he had dropped into the past tense.  Mrs.
Temple was sure Loraine had not noticed although her agitation was
still to be read in her twisting fingers and bitten lip.  This evident
emotion on the part of a sister seemed excessive, but then there had
always been some riddle about Loraine which the older woman had never
resolved.





The next time she came upon Louis and Jacqueline alone she asked him
outright.  The two were sitting by themselves near the river, playing
one of their innocent games.  They looked so young and carefree that
Mrs. Temple hesitated to interrupt them with what might be the
introduction of tragedy, but then she reflected that tragedy in the
human sense of the word had no existence in this place.  She approached
them, they looked up with their friendly smiles.

"M. Louis," she said, coming straight to the point, "I wanted to ask
you, has Robert Driscoll been killed?"

"He was killed on the third day, Mrs. Temple, out over the Painted
Desert."

"Why didn't you tell his sister yesterday when you were talking to her
about him?"

"Well, you see, I wasn't sure how she would take it.  I haven't been
here long enough to know.  I consulted Jacqueline and she wasn't sure
either.  So I thought I would begin by preparing her mind."

"That was very considerate of you.  You seem to be a young man of some
imagination."

"Are you ironical or serious, Mrs. Temple?  It is all rather confusing
and one's values are disturbed.  Or perhaps I should say that one's
values are coming right for the first time and that it is the
readjustment which is puzzling.  Anyway, we could not decide.  Then we
thought of asking you to tell her."

"Why me?  Why not Miss Carlisle, who is in charge of Loraine and all
those young girls?"

Louis and Jacqueline both went off into peals of the gayest French
laughter.

"The good Miss Carlisle?  That poor worried English stick, who for all
the years she has spent in America has never mentally moved a mile away
from the playing-fields of a girls' school?  No, dear Mrs. Temple.
Miss Carlisle just succeeded in getting her charges punctually in to
dinner at the hotel,--did you ever know that Royer terrorized her?--but
beyond these few scraps of discipline she had with them a contact less
intimate than a shepherd has with his sheep.  How much do you think she
has ever known of those high-spirited rebellious girls?  No, no.  It is
for you, and not for Miss Carlisle, to tell Loraine that the bones of
her brother will bleach upon the Painted Desert."

"Thank you very much," said Mrs. Temple; "but if you exact this not
agreeable task of me you must tell me the manner of Robert Driscoll's
death.  His sister will ask.  I must warn you that I did not take to
Robert Driscoll; he did not take my fancy in the least.  Yet from the
way you spoke of him yesterday I think you saw something in him which I
overlooked.  I should have guessed it; I blame myself for judging too
superficially.  It is a mistake I have not yet learned to correct."

"He was inspired," said Louis.  "Men have two natures, and one of them
they keep concealed.  It may be either the finer or the baser nature;
in Robert's case it was the finer.  I did not like to say in the
hearing of all those people yesterday and especially not in the hearing
of that young girl his sister, but what I thought in my own mind was
that anyone seeing him stand beside his plane ready in his flying
helmet would have understood the meaning of the classic _pdrastie
hroque_.  He was young, he was dedicated, he was to be worshipped.
The very shape of his plane made a wholeness with him: together they
were the winged victory, the _Nike apteros_."

"In modern terms."

"In modern terms.  And what added a significance of modernity to it,
Mrs. Temple, was the invisible speed of the propellor-blades once they
had started to revolve.  It was like a curious development of
sculpture, again in modern terms; almost a new form of art.  The
character of sculpture is that it should be static, is it not? that it
should be at rest; that it should catch and immobilize an attitude, a
gesture.  The seized moment is complete in itself; there can be no
necessity or possibility of change consequent upon it.  The most that
sculpture has hitherto attempted to do is to suggest movement, and it
might be argued that even the suggestion of movement is 'impure' in the
sculptor's art, since it is contrary to the static principle.  Thus, if
you wished to split hairs of argument, you might contend that the
Victory of Samothrace was an 'impure' example of the sculptor's art,
since she seemed ready to fly off her stand at the top of the stairs in
the Louvre, but that the Charioteer of Delphi was 'pure' in his
rigidity.  He could not move, although he might be carried along in his
chariot.  Now Robert Driscoll, seated in his cockpit, was as austere
and as motionless, though far more beautiful.  The wings of his plane,
stretched out in their eternal span, were motionless too; and only the
propeller-blades revolving so fast that they appeared as a solid disc
to the eye, supplied the velocity to this composition which so oddly
combined the static and the active."

"So this young man," said Mrs. Temple, "whom we all set down as a
rotter and a cad..."

"Was possibly both.  But he was a brave man too.  I think he knew he
would not last long.  I saw him that last day; he was flying alone,
separated from his squadron, I think he had separated himself on
purpose, and I saw him fly straight at a shoal of enemy planes, bombers
with their fighter escort.  What lunatic is this? I asked myself, for
no single fighter could have lived in the heart of that wasps' nest.
But he went in amongst them, and never in my life have I seen such a
display of virtuosity crammed into five minutes.  He was very fast;
faster than any of their machines, I should say; and he dived and
swooped and soared and came down on them again, till they must have
blinked their eyes trying to follow which way he had gone.  I blinked
myself, for he was between me and the sun, flashing like a silver fish
as the sun twisted on his wings.  They got him, of course, but not
before he had shot six of them in flames to the ground, and then his
own turn came and he went down headlong and his plane lay still.  I
went back later in the day and landed close beside the wreck to have a
look.  There was nobody about at the time either in the sky or on the
ground; it was right out in a very lonely part of the desert; there was
nothing but this smashed-up thing and the six other things scattered
all round him as though he had arranged them there to humiliate them
into doing him honour.  It was awfully silent out there.  I had meant
to bring back his body if there was anything left of it."

He stopped.

"Go on," said Mrs. Temple.  "Tell me everything."

"You will not tell his sister this part," said Louis.  "It is better
that she should think of him beautiful as she knew him.  He was burnt,
Mrs. Temple.  I do not know if you have ever seen a man who has been
burnt like that.  It is unrecognizable, and this thing like a charred
black log lay out on the colours of the Painted Desert.  I rolled big
stones up to his body, and covered the pile over with a slab of rock
flat as a table, so that no animal or scavenger bird should touch him.
It was the best I could do before I flew away and left him there."

"You did not bring his wrist-watch or anything that I could give his
sister?"

"Mrs. Temple, I perceive that indeed you have never seen a man burnt
like that.  His wrist-watch?  There was no wrist to bring it from."





She wondered how she had best set about the task of informing Loraine,
and wished rather ruefully that people throughout her life had not
always assumed that her shoulders were strong enough to carry anything.
Here was Louis, never dreaming of sparing her the full cruelty of his
picture.  Of course he could not know that her own son had been lost
flying, and that the words had stirred up all the anguish of
speculation over the unknown details of his fate.  She could not blame
Louis, but she did wish sometimes that people would remember that she
also was a human being with possible troubles of her own, instead of
accepting her as an automaton for helping them with theirs.  She
wondered why it was.  She always kept very quietly to her own corner,
never seeking people out or inviting their confidences, yet they always
ended by coming her way.

She was glad now to be alone, sitting on a boulder in that place of
flowers and spray.  The canyon was not forbidding here; the river was
wide and the light streamed down unimpeded; the red cliffs rose in
their enchanted architecture, in such variety that the gaze could
wander over them all day without exhausting their noble fancifulness.
She could never cease to marvel at the fabulous place, which seemed to
have been conceived and created in one gigantic effort of an
unimaginable imagination, rather than carved grain by grain in the
natural process of aeons.  It was easier to believe in the spontaneous
freak of a deity, than in the slow sequence of coincidences which had
at length produced this unity.

Helen Temple was one of those people to whom the silence or the sounds
of nature come as a relief after the human voice.  There were times
when the human voice made her want to put her hands over her ears, and
during the whole of her adult life it had been her practice to escape
for several hours each day.  Sometimes it had been into the
inhospitability of her bedroom; of late, it had been into the enormous
silence of the Painted Desert; now it was into the no less enormous
concert-hall of the canyon that she made her way alone.  She had never
decided whether the orchestration of the canyon was thunderous or
subdued.  Sometimes it seemed her ear was filled as though she held a
sea-shell against it; sometimes the whisper of the finest flute came
through, the note of a bird, the chirrup of a little animal or insect,
the spirtle from a spring, the drip of water from an overhanging rock
on to a stone beneath.  Through the strong continuous roar of the
river, to which one became accustomed as to the roar of traffic, the
treble of these minute sounds became more acute, more precious.
Delicacy contrasted with power.  Which did she prefer?  When one
considered this question the world split itself into halves like
cutting an apple.  Was it impossible ever to keep the apple whole? a
globe to hold entire in the hand?

Yet at the same time it seemed to her living at the bottom of the
canyon that all things mixed and mingled themselves into a rounded
globe such as she had always desired to find.  Thus all the senses came
into play, and she found herself less and less able to distinguish
between sound and sight, the aural and the visual; and even the sense
of touch became confused, so that as she ran her fingers down the leaf
of an aloe pricking herself deliberately on a spike the slight pain of
the prick made her remember some note of music, some line of poetry,
some physical or mental pain she had once endured, and mixed itself
also with the steep grandeurs of the canyon and the flat coloured
emptinesses of the Painted Desert, and the little bright drop of blood
on her finger-tip had also its significance.

She remembered Louis' words about sculpture, "almost a new form of
art," and now sitting alone she understood fully what he had meant:
that everything was really one thing, if only we had the sense to
apprehend it.  It seemed a deep truth, simply expressed.  It comprised
all the different facets of truth, scientific, philosophical,
religious, astronomical, human.  They all must meet at some perspective
point, but until one could reach that perspective point of meeting,
confusion must continue within the concept of the limited human mind.

We are all, she thought, at the stage of the early draughtsmen who had
not discovered the simple secret of the vanishing-point and who thereby
were compelled to represent every thing as on almost the same plane.
They had some sort of idea that one object came behind or in front of
another object but could not express the idea on a two-dimensional
surface.  Once discovered, the secret seemed simple even to a child.

She was humble enough to suppose that the same might apply to many
other apparent mysteries.

In her past life she had made an effort to read books about relativity.
It had been a pleasurable effort, since she never undertook such
studies unless she wanted to; she was not the sort of woman to
undertake them just because they happened to be fashionable.  On the
contrary, she had felt humble and ashamed at even attempting to
understand such things so far beyond the power of her own thought; she
would never have boasted in public about her tiny corner of conquered
knowledge; she would have receded, rather, into a pretence of
ignorance.  She knew well that she was incapable of grasping the
enormous truths that she was trying with her tiny brain to surround.

When she read these books about relativity an occasional streak of
comprehension had crossed her mind.  She had thought she just began to
understand; she had tried to catch the flash of understanding as it lit
her dark sky; then it was gone, burning her as it passed, but leaving
nothing behind: an instant of illumination, a rocket soaring into the
black sky, smashing itself high up into a few ephemeral falling stars;
no more.  They fell not to earth, one knew not where; they went out,
extinguished in the empyrean; only the stick fell to earth, dead,
exhausted; the rocket-stick that came down somewhere on the ground long
after the idea, the ideology, had gone up into the heavens to fail, to
fall, because the ideology of man was insufficient in its support.

It was pleasant to be able to sit alone and think vaguely about such
things with no responsibility attached.  There was a pleasure and a
luxury in such solitude; a sense of having indeterminate hours ahead,
with no engagements, no appointments, no obligations, no likelihood of
any impingement from the exterior world.  The planes passed overhead
from time to time, but they were impersonal; they went on their swift
way leaving her to her reposeful way a mile within the earth, and even
the planes in this new comprehension that seemed to be dawning over her
mixed not incompatibly with her thoughts and with the canyon in its
sights and sounds.





"Helen."

She looked round.  There was Mr. Dale, and she had the impression that
he had been watching her for some time.  She was not pleased.  Moreover
she was surprised by his use of her Christian name.  He had always been
most correct in his mode of address and she had liked him for not
taking advantage of the prevalent fashion.

She must have looked at him coldly, for he moved a few paces away as
though aware of his double trespass.

"I fear I interrupt you, Mrs. Temple."

"You startled me, I admit.  I thought I was alone.  The river makes so
much sound that anyone can approach without his footsteps being
audible."

"So I disturb you?"

"You did, but it doesn't matter."

"What a truthful person you appear to be," he said comfortably.  "You
make no bones about admitting that I disturbed your meditations, but
since you add that it now doesn't matter, I feel that I may take you at
your word, having done the damage for which you so rightly reprove me,
and may continue to impose my company upon you for a while.  I observe
that you have recently been enjoying a company more romantic than mine,
that of Paul and Virginia," and he pointed to the interlaced monogram
of L and J which Louis and Jacqueline had left drawn in flower-petals
on the strand.

"Paul and Virginia,--they were Paolo and Francesca last time you
mentioned them."

"Well, they are pretty creatures, by whatever name they go.  I
sometimes think him rather a sententious young prig, but then I am
immediately disarmed by his sincerity and by her pathetic admiration.
He suffers from the fault of the generous young, which is to indulge
too much in generalizations."

"I do not think you would have found him sententious had you heard him
talking just now.  He was telling me about the death of Robert
Driscoll."

"What, has he been scuppered; that ineffable..."

"Hush.  I know.  But you must not say it.  Yes, he was shot down, and
Louis has charged me with the task of telling his sister."

"You will not enjoy doing that.  I remember you always had a peculiar
feeling about that attractive but very ordinary girl.  You seemed to
think she was marked out for tragedy in some undefined way.  Perhaps
the brother's death was the explanation."

"Oh no, I do not believe that.  It was something much more personal,
much more unusual.  Moreover I have an idea that the tragedy, whatever
it was, has already taken place, although I have noticed a change in
Loraine lately, since we have been down here.  I mean: a change in her
expression, a sort of liberation, as though the thing (whatever it was)
no longer mattered."

"Rape, probably," said Mr. Dale rudely.  "That would have been personal
enough, though not so very unusual.  She is a pretty girl, pretty in a
sleek subtle way like a line-drawing on vellum, and damned into the
bargain by an elusive purity which is the most dangerous form of
sex-appeal and makes the brutal male want to capture and conquer.  You
must not romanticize these things too much, Mrs. Temple.  They are,
believe me, entirely a matter of the way the flesh is arranged over the
bone; they bear no relation to the soul within."

"When you speak like that you tempt me to believe that your own
experience has been bad.  Unfortunate, I mean; not wicked.  Bad and
sad.--Please don't imagine that I am trying to discover anything about
your private life in the past.  I know nothing of it, and I don't want
to know."

"Oh, shy pigeon!" he said, laughing with a heartier amusement than he
usually betrayed.  I didn't suspect you of trying to pry.  I didn't
suspect you of trying to play the role of the sympathetic woman meeting
the lonely man.  I am readily bored by women, Helen.  I have never had
any intimate friend in my life, but on the whole I have preferred the
companionship of men to the cloying, prying self-sacrificing love of
women.  Not that any woman ever loved me.  I am too unattractive for
that.  Nature did not arrange my flesh over my bones in the right way,
a serious omission on the part of Nature which I rather resent since I
flatter myself that I might have proved quite a skilful lover and an
admirable father, proud of my sons, interested in my daughters,
companionable to my wife.  But that was not to be my fate.  Do I bore
you?"

"I think I have heard that question from you several times before now,
and I have always truthfully replied 'No'."

"All right then, I will go on.  You are honest enough to send me
packing when you want to.  It has never been my habit to talk about
myself or even to think much about myself.  An uninteresting subject.
I am a selfish man, I suppose, if it is selfish to want your existence
to yourself and never to allow it to be disturbed by anyone else.  I
made up my mind to this singleness on my twenty-second birthday.  My
father, may his spirit rest in peace, gave a coming-of-age party for me
and as I passed along the restaurant corridor I caught sight of myself
in a full-length mirror and saw how irremediably plain, plump and pasty
I already was.  I cut my wisdom teeth with a rush that night.
Suet-face, pudding-face, I said to my reflection, the love of women is
not for you.  It was an unkind moment, which I celebrated by putting
out my tongue at my own image in the crude rude gesture of the
street-urchin.  Churlish, captious character, I said, going on to
address the inner not the outer man, the friendship of men is not for
you either."

He paused, waiting to see whether she would make the obvious comforting
comment that most women would have made.  To his relief she did not.
She only said "What you have just been telling me explains why you were
so waspish about the good looks and sexual charm of the boys and girls
up at the hotel."

"Suppressed envy.  Yes, of course.  Thank you for clarifying something
I had never analysed for myself.  Anyway, I determined from that
evening of my birthday-party to live my life, keeping my speculations
purely objective.  The bundle of flesh known as Lester Dale was to have
no existence beyond the label of a name tied on to it.  I never desired
a friend nor had one, disliking intimacy and disliking obligations even
more.  Independence was what I wanted and what I got.  I've known other
men of course; travelled with them even, sat by camp fires with them at
night, but they were always men on whom I could depend for silence.  At
the end of six weeks or six months we could part with a nod and a
'well, good luck to you,' nothing more.  All that had mattered was that
we could both keep our tempers when the tent blew away."

He glared at her as though expecting to be challenged.

"As for women," he went on, "I took myself off whenever they threatened
to interfere with me.  If a woman began to attract me, even if the poor
soul remained quite unaware of it, it constituted interference.  It was
all part of my settled policy.--You smile?"

"Only because I cannot help finding you most entertaining, Mr. Dale.
Are you sure that your settled policy shouldn't rather be called pride?
One of the seven deadly sins, you know."

"Pride is a Janus," he said, "whose other head is called humility.
Remember that before you condemn me; not that you ever condemn.--As a
matter of fact, it wasn't entirely pride.  There was a good pinch of
common sense mixed in with it.  I had noticed early in life that men
had their values and that women had theirs, but that generally speaking
those values were so different that the only common meeting-ground was
either in the dance-hall or the bed.  From both those rallying-points I
felt myself to be by nature debarred.  So, guided by a gleam of
self-protective sagacity, I kept away.  Do you blame me?"

"Of course I don't blame you, but did you never regret your settled
policy?"

His comically round face suddenly looked sad.  She had always thought
of his face as a hollowed turnip into which a child had stuck candles
for eyes.  Now something had blown out the candles and the little flame
of mischief had gone.

"Did I regret?  You must know as well as I do that to any person of too
intense a sensibility life is one long process of switching over from
one mood to another.  Traffic lights!" he said, regaining his sense of
fun.  "They switch from red to green along one's street and one ought
to be thankful if one can arrange for the warning transition of the
amber."

"But if you gave up so much," said Mrs. Temple, who knew better than to
be taken in by his jokes and meant to press him down on to the point
now that he had perched himself there, "if you gave up so much, what
did you really esteem in the old life?  Not riches, not luxury, not
self-indulgence, not comfort even; not material comfort or the very
ordinary demands of mankind, human affection, home, roots, ties....
Public affairs do not seem to have claimed you either.  What then?"

"I floated," he said; "floated.  In a warm private sea of useless
out-of-date ideas.  In theory I thought myself a liberal.  In practice
I did nothing to encourage the ideas in which I believed.  I think I
knew them to be so dead that no little breath of mine could blow them
back into a flame.  They were as remote from modern life as the
eighteenth century in which I should have liked to live.  Violence and
competition were distasteful to me.  The furniture of my mind, though I
never owned a house to match it, was Sheraton and egg-shell china, with
a grandfather clock ticking in the corner."

"Courtesy, gentleness and the humanities," said Mrs. Temple.  "Burgundy
rather than beer; conversation rather than the telephone."

"It sounds very mild, does it not?  But please do not think that I was
egotistically indifferent to the lot of unfortunate mortals.  It
worried me very much indeed to reflect that all men were not equally
situated; that owing to our social system equality of opportunity was
denied; that the most deserving were not necessarily the most
prosperous.  The gifts dispensed by Nature we could not control; we
could no more alter the child's mental outfit than we could remodel his
physical; we could bestow neither aptitude nor beauty.  But there were
other things we could have adjusted, and I assure you that it
distressed me considerably to observe how very little we were doing to
adjust them."

"Yet you yourself didn't take any practical steps...."

"Ah, you put your finger on my weakness.  I dare say you will set it
down to pride again, though personally I prefer to set it down to
humility: I felt I could do so little that it wasn't worth doing at
all.  How readily one makes excuses for one's own failures.  So I
contented myself with theorizing, I dare say because it suited my
disdainful nature better.  Have you ever observed the habits of the
marmot?"

"Please inform me."

"Well, the marmot is a paunchy little animal who digs himself a hole
and stuffs the entrance with a wad of chewed grass, congealed by his
own saliva.  He stays inside, secure from enemies and winter weather.
In summer days he comes out and suns himself on the pleasant slopes.
That was me.  My theories took the place of the saliva."

"The war must have fitted very badly into your scheme of things."

"Very badly indeed.  I cannot tell you how comical I looked in
battle-dress.  My company sergeant-major was a professional
caricaturist of genius and I think I may say that he found me
invaluable as a model."

"So you went into the army, did you?" said Mrs. Temple, scrutinizing
him closely.  "I should have expected a man of your ... enlightenment
to be a pacifist."

"Oh, I was, I was.  I still am.  But there seemed no alternative then
between running away from the damned thing and helping to stop it.  You
see, unlike some people, I had no justification for persuading myself
that I could be of more value in another sphere--or another hemisphere.
I wished I had.  Some people seem to enjoy war, or some aspects of it.
I daresay that playboy Robert Driscoll did, but personally I was aware
of nothing but a great distaste.  Also I was frightened.  Oh yes, I
assure you.  I suppose I was born into the sort of timidity that
suffers from apprehensions.  I always felt that I could bear any
certainty however unpleasant; that if one knew a disaster was scheduled
to overtake one at a specified time one would be prepared for it; but
that the supreme uncertainty of war was the last thing I ought to be
called upon to bear.  So you see how gladly I should have welcomed a
conviction of my own importance, a persuasion that I should be
advancing the cause of civilization much better by removing myself as
far from the scene of peril as possible."

"The sensations of fear were so erratic, weren't they?" said Mrs.
Temple.  "Sometimes one felt completely indifferent, or even rather
interested to see what was going to happen next; then an uncontrollable
dread would shake one physically and morally....  But what I minded
most, and most consistently, was the inability to grasp the total
picture.  The thing was too enormous, both in its events and its
implications; one's brain seemed the size of a bullet.  One felt that
there ought to be some comprehensive formula somewhere if only it
wouldn't elude one; some formula which would embrace such mighty
passions, such convulsions of order, such miniatures of heroism, such
hatred and such devotion....  I express myself in platitudes, but the
exasperation of my insufficiency was a red-hot iron in my soul, a very
real thing and no phrase."

"You come nearer now," he said very gravely, "to the centre which is
related to your bewilderment in those days,--the appalling sorrow one
experienced, the grief which I compare in all reverence to the grief of
Mary contemplating the dying Christ upon the cross; a sorrow not human,
not personal, though it embraced all humanity, an anguish I cannot
speak of, even to you."

She was so much surprised by the change in his tone that she scarcely
noticed the "even" which had slipped into his last three words.

"So that was how you felt about the war, was it?"

For the first time, she saw agony come over the careful mask of his
face.  His voice, usually pleasant, tore like ripped calico.

"All that, Helen, and more.  It was the torture, at first, of not
knowing where right lay, or wrong; the torture, next, of seeing that
wrong could only be controlled by another wrong, by an imitation of the
same folly; the seismic overthrow of principles and ethics; the
condoning, through imitation, of the argument of force.  Seeing
ourselves compelled to behave in such and such a fashion because other
men chose to set the example of that fashion....  I have wondered,
since, in bad hours, whether the path we chose was the right path, the
best one.  It seemed plain enough at the time, whilst we were in the
middle of it, but now..."

"Oh, never doubt!" she said.  "That is perhaps the bitterest aftermath
of all, to allow such a question to creep in.  It is not to be
admitted.  There was no question of choosing our path; we had no
choice.  We hated fighting but we had to fight.  In order to overcome a
thing we hated even worse."

"That is your sincere conviction?" he said, staring at her.

"It is perhaps the most sincere conviction I hold.  I think you hold it
also?"

"Yes," he said, "I hold it also.  We did right.  We had no choice.
Standing away from it now, at a distance, I see what we were unable to
see at the time, and what the people up there above the Rim are no
doubt unable to see now whilst they are in the midst of it.  I see that
it never matters who the enemy is.  We became so hypnotized by the
spectral words Nazi and Fhrer that we forgot the real enemy is always
Evil and Folly.  The Fhrer might be a symbol; but he was not a
comprehensive symbol.  Evil is greater even than he.  Hitler must
acknowledge that one suzerain.  Unlike Christ who, taken also as a
symbol, need not acknowledge love's perfection as greater than himself,
for they are co-equal.  It was darkness that we were fighting; darkness
which is eternal, and which depends for its existence on no one man,
nor for its annihilation upon his overthrow."





They saw the deaf man coming along towards them.  Ever since the day
when he had thrown his ear-trumpet down on a rock and had stood
listening with incredulous delight to its clatter, he had walked about
with a pocket wireless-set as though he could not be parted from the
world of sound.  He laid it down now beside them, a neat little case no
bigger than a kodak.

"News," he said.  He stood gazing down at it as though the fact that it
could talk and that he could hear was far more remarkable than what it
was about to say.


    "Listeners have already heard that an important battle has been
    joined between enemy forces and the forces of the United States in
    the Californian desert.  Some further details have just come to
    hand though the confusion is necessarily considerable.  It would
    appear that some thousands of war-planes arrived over the city of
    San Francisco at an early hour this morning and were immediately
    engaged in combat by our fighters, but that owing to their
    superiority in numbers and speed a proportion of them were able to
    pass inland convoying troop-carrying planes which in their turn ..."


The voice petered out.

"It will begin again," said the deaf man hopefully.  "I listened to the
first part of it.  It seems that they have brought a mixed force this
time, with a lot of Japs amongst them.  Their warships are shelling the
city too; they got right up the coast under cover of night though
nobody seems very clear as to where they came from."

"It all sounds dreadfully familiar," said Mr. Dale.  "It's not only
part of the tactics they used against Britain, but the phraseology is
the same."

The little set came to life again with some hurried mutterings in
Spanish.  Then the announcer in English:


    "We apologize for a technical hitch.  I will repeat the last words.
    Convoying troop-carrying planes which in their turn appear to have
    made successful landings in the Californian desert, notably around
    Palm Springs where according to the latest reports the main
    engagement is taking place.  As previously reported a number of
    Japanese troops is included, though it is impossible to state the
    proportion or even the total of the enemy force which has gained
    this footing, we hope only temporarily, on the territory of the
    United States.  It must however be announced that hostile
    reinforcements are arriving hourly and that although equivalent
    reinforcements of American troops are likewise being rushed to the
    scene, a decision must not be expected with too great an
    impatience."


"That sounds bad," said Mr. Dale.  "We shall next hear that American
troops are withdrawing to more favourable positions.  But why the devil
do they want to go to Palm Springs?  Is it a diversion?  Are they
intending to make a number of such diversions all over the States?
After all, the American army can't be everywhere at once and it has got
a large country to defend.  The enemy has the advantage of surprise: he
knows where he means to arrive next and we don't.  It was inconvenient
enough in our tiny Britain when they turned up in places where they
were least expected.  Well, it's no good wondering, but it sounds as
though they meant business and I suppose we shall have to listen to the
next bulletins."





The next bulletins were not re-assuring and it began to look as though
Mr. Dale's conjecture might be right.  The earlier landings had been on
a much smaller scale, almost in the nature of reconnaissance, but it
became increasingly evident that this attack was the real thing.
Indifferent to their own losses, German and Japanese divisions
descended from the skies in their thousands, and, since the whole of
that vast land could not be covered everywhere by defensive units, it
usually happened that they had ample time to assemble their tanks and
set their artillery in position before the Americans could embarrass
them with anything more than aircraft--and against that form of
hindrance the enemy was naturally well protected.  The enemy moreover
appeared to be excellently informed as to the whereabouts of American
troops and thus contrived to descend hundreds of miles away from the
nearest concentration.  It was even more bewildering than the sudden
assault of the Japanese in December 1941, for it had come out of what
seemed to be a peaceful sky.

Those who were dwelling at the bottom of the canyon listened dutifully
to the reports coming through from Buenos Aires or any other station
they could get, friendly or hostile.  (The North American stations
remained silent, and no official explanation was given, but it was
hinted several times that they had all been put out of working order by
traitorous activities.)  They listened dutifully, but rather as though
the whole thing were as unreal as a happening on another planet; rather
as though they had brought the listening habit with them from another
life.  It was indeed curious to observe how some of these habits
persisted, and also certain characteristics in each one, things which
could not be dropped at once although they might be undergoing a
noticeable modification day by day.  Thus though Madame de Retz had
become fully aware of the absurdity of her former profession and could
even extract a lot of good fun from her surviving ledger, she still
could never catch sight of Princess Irma without a sigh for the wasted
possibilities of that perfect complexion.  Mr. Dale said that at last
he was beginning to believe in Purgatory, that reputedly transitional
state.  But the person whom Mrs. Temple noticed with the greatest
interest was Loraine Driscoll.  In the old days, which had ceased ten
days ago, the girl's face had been her constant study, with the
contrast between its remarkable smoothness of outline and the torment
of anxiety in the eyes in repose.  With such smoothness and youth a
lovely serenity should have resulted; not gaiety, no, that face could
never have been gay; but there should have been an untroubled
emptiness, with no more mystery than the sweet mystery of innocence.
Of late it had seemed to Mrs. Temple that the haunted look was fading,
to be replaced by a look of liberation which in its turn brought, not
the insipid loveliness of maidenhood, but the greater beauty of an
experience suffered and vanquished.

It was natural that she should observe Loraine, since the task of
telling the girl about her brother's death still lay before her.  It
would not be the first time she had broken such a piece of news but she
was relieved when Loraine herself took the matter out of her hands.

"Mrs. Temple, do you remember once I came to your room at the hotel?  I
didn't know how I had the courage.  I brought you some poinsettias, as
a pretext for coming."

"I remember very well.  I thought it was very kind of you."

"You thought more than that, I know you did.  You saw that I wanted to
stay in your room and talk to you.  You were quite right.  For some
reason you wouldn't let me.  Perhaps you had heard some of my friends
teasing me and saying that I had a crush on you?"

Helen laughed.  "I promise you, Loraine, such an idea never once
entered my head.  I probably thought you wanted to ask my advice about
something and that it wasn't my business.  What would your parents have
said to a strange Englishwoman trying to influence their daughter?"

"You couldn't have influenced me, because no one, not even you, can
undo what has been done.  In any case I should probably have told you
nothing.  I just wanted to get away from the others and their chatter
which I was finding unbearable.  I hadn't even a bedroom to myself
where I could be sure of being left alone.  Besides, I found a peculiar
comfort in your presence; I had only to look at you to feel that
nothing mattered so much as I thought it did.  You seemed to restore my
sanity."

"I am very sorry," said Helen, "very sorry indeed."  She was wondering
more than ever how she could add her bad news to the burden which this
child already carried.

"It doesn't matter now."  Again that liberated look crossed her face.
"Things have changed so much, and one's point of view.  One exaggerated
so ludicrously the things which had no importance at all.  I used to
get glimmerings of understanding this, even _then_, whenever I looked
at you, Mrs. Temple, but of course the understanding comes more
frequently now and before very long I think it will be permanent."

"Dear child, you are being rather cryptic.  Don't think I want you to
tell me anything you would rather not tell me...."

"I am sure you don't; that would not be like you.  And for your part,
don't think either that I want to hold any secret against you.  There
is no secret of my life that I would not willingly tell you, but any
confidence I could make would sound so small and crude in words now
that the terror has gone.  I suppose it is the terror one puts into
things that gives them their significance; nothing exists, but thinking
makes it so.  I was miserable and frightened, but even through my
wretchedness I used to sense a certain ...  splendour that made the
horror almost beautiful.  Oh, I don't know if you can understand what I
mean.  Reading Euripides used to give me the same sensation,--and it
really was a sensation, rather than a thought,--like a shiver running
over me, very transient,--and I always felt that if only I could seize
it, hold it, look at it, I should learn and understand.  Then to apply
such ... such intimations to myself was overwhelming; and I did so
through no vainglory, believe me, but because that curious sensation
caught me again and again in all its familiarity; I couldn't refuse to
recognize it, but this time it was _me_, not Orestes, not Electra."

Mrs. Temple wondered slightly at the choice of characters.  Brother and
sister, she thought; brother and sister? ...

"I might compare it," Loraine went on, "to someone who wasn't thinking
about ghosts, someone in broad daylight, busy with quite ordinary
things, who suddenly looks up and sees the well-known figure standing
there, but only for a second; no sooner seen, than it is gone.  The
only difference was that I saw nothing; I only felt."

"And you were quite unable to define this sensation as you call it?"

"I often tried to.  Then a queer thing happened.  I seemed to enter on
to a third stage.  It had begun with Euripides and then it had
transferred itself to myself, and finally it seemed to comprise
everyone in the whole world.  That was when I began to be afraid of
losing my sanity.  I could understand being moved by the Greek stories,
I could even understand being ... upset about myself after ... a
certain thing which had happened to me; but it scared me when I began
to have the same feeling, quite as definitely, on this gigantic scale.
I haven't much of a brain, Mrs. Temple, and it scared me to feel that
some appalling responsibility was being put upon me and that I wasn't
equipped to meet it."

"Responsibility?"

"I can only put it like this," said Loraine.  "I felt that some piece
of knowledge was being dangled before me and kept only just out of my
reach.  I felt that it was of major importance that I should seize it
and yet I couldn't; my brain hadn't the swiftness or the strength.
There were other times when I thought it wasn't a question of brain at
all but of some other faculty, and I didn't seem to possess that
either."

"I think you are probably right there," said Mrs. Temple, who had been
following with great attention; "it wasn't a question of brain."

"The nearest I ever got to a definition," said Loraine, "was when I
thought I must have an over developed sense of jynx--oh, you look
startled.  Perhaps I shouldn't have used that word.  But really it was
like that.  You see, I had had bad luck myself, and it seemed I had
always known something bad was coming to me, and then when I began to
feel the same way about all the millions on earth, well, I worried it
round to the least alarming word I could find.  You know how one does
try to diminish anything one is frightened of."

"Tell me," said Mrs. Temple, "did you ever talk to anyone about things?
To your brother, for instance?"

She had wanted to see the effect of this, and she saw it.  Loraine
could not turn pale since she was so pale by nature already, but she
stood quite motionless and stared as though momentarily in the grip of
her old experience.  Her beauty was surprising, her pallor framed in
the pale gold satin hair falling like a short wimple to her shoulders.

"To Robert?" she said.  "Never.  It is strange that you should ask, for
I often wondered whether Robert was not made the same.  You know what
he was like.  I suppose you all thought him the typical spoilt young
American, too good-looking and too rich.  So he was.  And yet I wonder."

"Did you love your brother, Loraine?"

"Love him?  I hated him as no one has ever been hated.  It was a hatred
that was very like love.  Now I will tell you part of the truth, Mrs.
Temple.  Robert fascinated me as I fascinated him; we couldn't escape
from one another; there was this dreadful, dreadful affinity which
makes me believe that inside his damned spirit he was the same as I
was.  Curst.  I sometimes thought we both were; and whenever I thought
that, the same funny feeling overcame me; I told you I always
recognized it when it came; there was no mistaking it.  It came over me
always when I thought of Robert in relation to myself."

"I don't quite understand," said Mrs. Temple, who was beginning to
understand only too well.

"I don't understand either.  I know only that it filled me with hatred
and dread and poison.  You see, it wasn't as though Robert had been the
only loved pet at home always, or that our father and mother had spoilt
him more than they spoilt me.  They loved us both equally and they
spoilt us both.  They were rich, you see, and so they could afford to
spoil us; there was no question of the boy getting the advantage over
the girl in our family.--You've never met our parents, Mrs. Temple."

"No, but I have often thought about them.  I have even made up stories
about them in my mind, as I imagined them to be."

Loraine laughed.  She had an attractive way of laughing; she threw her
head back and the heavy gold hair fell back and the white throat came
forward; but it was seldom that she had laughed at all.

"Oh, dear Mrs. Temple, I wonder what picture you have made about our
parents in your mind?  Some day you must tell me.  But now, I am
thinking only about Robert and me.  He was my brother.  It is the
orthodox thing for a brother and sister to have a certain affection for
one another, is it not?  In spite of squabbles and nursery jealousies;
when you are very young you throw toys at each other's heads and you
compete for the place on your mother's lap; but between Robert and me
it was never so simple.  We never quarrelled in the nursery when we
were small; we were as close and as loving as twins, although we
weren't twins; it was only when we began to grow up that the tug began.
Just now I said to you that I hated my brother.  I used big words.  I
said hatred and dread and poison.  All those words were true.  It may
seem odd to you to hear a girl using those words against a brother,
when her relationship towards him ought to be a simple relationship, a
natural relationship made up of the nursery and all the things they
have in common, their home, their uncles and aunts, their cousins,
their family jokes, the way the handle always comes off the
tea-pot,--why, they ought to be able to meet after a separation of
twenty years and still join up with such remembered links,--but instead
of that, Mrs. Temple, when I talk to you about my brother I use such
terrible words as hatred, dread, and poison, and I mean them all as I
speak them in their syllables one by one.  I hated my brother, I
dreaded him and he poisoned me.  I hated him as I hope I shall never
hate again; I loved him as I hope I shall never love again.--I loved
him, you see, because I knew there was something fine in him underneath
the evil.--Oh yes, Mrs. Temple, don't wince when I say evil.  No one
knows it better than I.  There was a streak of real evil in Robert, a
streak of the real cruel devil that hurts himself in order to hurt
someone else; he was a fallen angel.  Poetic justice fulfilled its
mission when Robert like a falling angel got shot down from the sky."

With all her worldly wisdom Mrs. Temple found it difficult to answer
this tirade.  So many things had been packed into it, she would need
some time to sort them out.  But the more immediate thing remained:
Loraine already knew that Robert was dead.  It might be relatively easy
though distressing to tell a sister that her brother had lost his life
heroically in the defence of his country, but with these extraordinary
complications the task had loomed more onerous even as it became more
urgent.  Now Loraine had relieved her of it.





When Loraine had gone, Mrs. Temple sat thinking over the curious story
she had heard.  It was not the kind of story she usually welcomed,
because it was the kind of story that usually proceeded from
self-conscious half-informed people who wished to appear more
interesting than their fellows.  She had heard many such, and
experience had taught her to discount them.  But Loraine was different.
Loraine was uninformed, she was puzzled, she was artless; she had no
idea of what she was really saying although she was groping all the
time after the comprehension that eluded her; her very phraseology was
touching in its mixture of polysyllables and colloquialisms.  Jynx, she
had said; and the little slang word coming instead of Destiny or
Nemesis had been both convincing and pathetic.  An over-developed sense
of jynx....  It was not quite Cassandra's language perhaps ("Again upon
me come the horrid pangs"), but the suffering seemed very much the same.

Mrs. Temple was perplexed.  She was out of her depth.  She wished that
she might share the story and her perplexity with someone, for choice
with Mr. Dale.  She switched her thoughts away from Loraine to wonder
why she should wish to share the story with anyone, and why in
particular with that funny fat little man whom she had known for little
more than a week.  It was not her habit to want to share anything with
anybody.  She supposed it was because she could depend on him not to
misunderstand anything she might say.  She could in fact imagine
exactly the conversation they would have and the remarks he would make.
It startled her to discover how accurately she could estimate their
conversation; it seemed that she already knew all his reactions
instinctively.  He would listen to her very gravely, without
interrupting.  Then a horrid suspicion would cross his mind, and he
would say "You aren't going to tell me that you believe in
reincarnation?" and she would remind him that at a very early stage of
their acquaintance she had assured him that she believed neither in
numerology, nor in the prophecy of the Pyramids.  She had assured him
definitely that she was not that sort of woman.  Then he would look
relieved and would say, "But ... Electra and Orestes and all that?  You
aren't going to tell me next that Loraine and Robert Driscoll have
murdered their mother?  Dear me, I remember you drawing me an imaginary
portrait of Mrs. Driscoll some days ago, and she didn't seem at all the
sort of person to get herself murdered by her son and daughter.  There
was nothing of Clytemnestra about Mrs. Driscoll as you portrayed her."

She knew Mr. Dale well in this mood, but she knew also that a moment
later he would be taking the thing seriously, with no jokes.  "I see,"
he would say, rubbing his fingers over his chin in a familiar gesture
as though to ascertain whether he had shaved properly that morning; "I
see.  You aren't trying to palm off any reincarnation stuff on me, but
you are trying to suggest that mythology may repeat itself.  You are
telling me that Loraine and Robert were fated siblings, even as Electra
and Orestes were fated.  You are telling me that your pretty Loraine
has had the curse of Cassandra put upon her, with this difference, that
Cassandra prophesied and wasn't believed, but Loraine has all the
intimations of prophecy and can't express it because she doesn't know
clearly enough what she is intended to foresee.  An uncomfortable
position for a prophet.--Still, I see no inherent impossibility in your
theory.  I cannot see why an ancient legend should not repeat itself in
these days.  There is not much to be said for these days, perhaps, but
at least we can say that they are on the heroic scale.  We may not like
the times we live in, but they do compare very favourably with that
potty little affair they had at Troy.  It is flattering to reflect that
we are privileged to live in an age where everything is over life-size."

Then, Mrs. Temple thought, he would go in in his characteristic way to
develop his argument.  "You remember the legend," he would say, "the
legend that a serpent wreathed itself round the body of Cassandra as
she lay one night in the temple of Apollo, and by licking her ears gave
her a knowledge of futurity.  If I am not mistaken, her brother was
involved in the same adventure.  Brothers and sisters seem to have been
particularly favoured in classical times, so why not now?  There may
indeed be something strange about this ordinary little Driscoll pair.
The only classical damnation they seem to have escaped is incest..."
and so he would ramble on, and Mrs. Temple found herself sitting quite
lost in her imaginings about Mr. Dale.  She could not see her own face,
but in fact she was wearing a smile of vague but very real affection.
It was odd, how fond she had become of that fat little man.  Odd, and
rather touching.  She had gone through half a century of life without
meeting anybody whose mind pleased her own mind so closely.  It revived
her belief in the potential happiness of life to discover that after
half a century of loneliness and of human relationships going wrong,
one could still unexpectedly find a person whose mental atmosphere
exactly matched one's own.  That was a pleasant discovery to make, so
no wonder that Mrs. Temple sat with the Colorado river rushing past her
feet, smiling rather sentimentally over the thought of Mr. Dale.

But suddenly another thought stung her, as though she had been bitten
by a rattlesnake.  In the imagined conversation she had had with Mr.
Dale, she had made him say, "The only classical damnation they have
escaped is incest...."

She was a morally brave and unconventional woman, but that idea made
her get up and walk quickly back towards Phantom Ranch.  "Oh Lord," she
thought to herself as she hurried towards the security of human
habitation, "Oh Lord, I do hope he is right.  I wonder?  I wonder?  Are
there things in Loraine's life that she has never told me about?
Things that no girl would say?"





This was a suspicion too horrible to be shared even with Mr. Dale, but
she managed to thrust it out of her mind, and to enjoy her friendship
with him untroubled.  It sometimes seemed to her that it was becoming
almost as idyllic, though in a very different way, as the wandering
companionship between Louis and Jacqueline, for whenever she perceived
him strolling towards her for the first time in the morning her whole
nature warmed to the thought that she could now be with him again and
that the livelong day would be lit by the renewal of such meetings.
His company gave her a curious sense of completion, and when he was not
there she felt that something was lacking, that something had gone cold
and grey and would return to life only when he reappeared.  They did
not always talk much.  Their conversation came in bursts which might
last for hours, since there seemed to be so much they could talk about,
and so many by-ways of communication down which they wanted to stray,
so that their talk was always inconsistent, rich and variegated, as
though they never finished one subject before they were darting off on
another; but equally they could sit silent for hours, or meander
together through the incredible kingdom they had been given to explore,
roving without fatigue or effort in a contentment that neither of them
had ever known.  This exploration of the canyon, at leisure, was a
marvellous privilege to have been given: it was _their_ territory,
_their_ domain, in its inexhaustible beauty and surprise.  Loraine had
said that she used big words about her brother; but no words, no
superlatives were big enough to interpret the canyon or to embrace its
significance in a phrase.  How little those tourists could know, who
descended the trail to spend a few cheap hours at the bottom!  It was
necessary to spend days, weeks, months, seasons, years, for its
magnitude and beauty fully to enlarge and enrich the soul.  This
opportunity was theirs now, Helen's and Mr. Dale's, with no pressure of
life ahead of them, no rush, no obligations, no term set to their long
contemplation.  The luxury of eternal rest, eternal happiness, seemed
to be offered to them as their portion.

He quoted a clerihew one day as they were sitting alone in a new place
they had found, a ledge perched above the river.  They had been sitting
there in silence for a long time--but time did not count there, or
then.  "A lot of sense can be expressed in nonsense," he suddenly said,
as though he had been following his own train of thought along its own
rails without any regard for his companion or for what she herself
might be thinking of.  She liked him the better for this occasional
indifference when he took no notice of her or of what she might be
thinking.  It meant that he was not subservient to her in any way and
preserved his independence of thought and being.  That was how she
liked people to be, being made in the same mould herself.  "A lot of
sense expressed in terms of nonsense," he said.  "Cammaerts once
remarked that the English had a peculiarly well-developed talent for
nonsense.  He instanced Lewis Carroll and Lear as the supreme masters
in this field.  He might well have quoted Bentley as a successor to
Lear and Lewis Carroll:

  "What I like about Lord Clive
  Is that he's no longer alive.
  There's a lot to be said
  For being dead."


It was the first time that either of them had alluded to the fact of
their both being dead.  They both felt so remarkably alive, more alive
than they had ever felt in their ordinary lives before, that it was
difficult to realize that they both had been killed by blast some ten
days ago.

There was indeed a great deal to be said for being dead.  It was much
more pleasant to be dead than alive, if being dead meant that one
gained this new angle of proportion on life.  Any reasonable person
would prefer to be dead than alive.  So, Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale
wandered among the immensities of the canyon with the peace and
certainty of being dead in their bodies.  Their souls were not dead; no
soul could die.  No soul could be killed.  So, it was their souls that
met, not their bodies; it was their spirit that met in the unfolding of
such gradual beauty as they shared together, but from time to time
their eyes met in a long look, a long silent gaze of understanding,
which in the course of time they came to recognize as a union between
them and called it their drollery.

It was Helen who invented this phrase.  The first two or three times
this odd phenomenon happened between them, she said nothing; he said
nothing either; but the fourth time it occurred, after they had gazed
at one another in silence and had felt a current running between them,
she said "Look here, this is very odd.  It is a very definite thing, so
definite that we must have a word for it.  Let us call it our drollery,
for it really is so very droll that such a thing should come to such
staid people as you and me."

They did so call it, henceforward, as a joke, whenever it occurred
between them.  They said nothing, they needed not to say anything, but
needed only to smile in an understanding way.  A glance was enough.
They both knew what had taken place.

It was not easily definable, and although it seemed comparable to
certain other states of human experience Helen hesitated to draw the
comparison, even to herself, such was her dread of anything approaching
the high-falutin.  Yet she was tempted to believe that a similar almost
trance-like mood possessed the artist in moments of creative
inspiration, the visionary on the brink of revelation, the mystic in
the hour of Union, with this difference, that those experiences were
passionately lonely, whereas hers was shared.  It was like a very
prolonged, very quiet orgasm of the understanding instead of the quick
and quickly-forgotten orgasm of the senses; and it was an understanding
which comprised not only their two selves, but every mystery latent in
the invisible universe.

She thought also that it came to them as definitely and as regularly as
Loraine's sense of futurity had come to her.  But, as she had still
said nothing of this to Mr. Dale, it being too private a thing, she
said nothing of it now.  She was content to keep it to herself as a
sort of double secret which she might share with him did she choose to
do so.  She would save that up for a later day.  It made love richer to
have something saved up for a later day.  One did not give everything
out at once.  An essential of love was to keep something in reserve
always.

Love, she thought, as the word crawled for the first time into her
mind?  Love?  Oh no, not love for me, something far older, far more
veiled in the twilight than that; not love, not that rash reckless
thing, not that young thing, not that thing enjoyed by Louis and
Jacqueline, not that ecstasy, that dashing of young body against young
body, not that, not that for me.  For me, only the quiet thing; only
friendship, companionship; and God knows that is all one can reasonably
expect from life at our age and after all the things we have both gone
through.  It might be an unusual form of love, if love it could be
called at all, but why should love be so stereotyped, so orthodox
always?  Why not have some diversion, some fugue on the perpetual theme?

There was no sentimentality between them.  They were even rude to one
another sometimes, and told one another their faults bluntly.  "You are
a bore sometimes, you know," said Mrs. Temple; "you think you know
about life, when you really don't know the ABC of it."  "And you," he
would retort, "you set yourself up as the wise woman when you don't
know the ABC either."  Then they would both laugh and would both agree
that the other was right.  It did not seem to matter whether they
understood the alphabet of life or not; what mattered was that they
understood each other and could share the life-after-death as they were
sharing it now.





Meanwhile, external life was tearing itself to pieces round them and
reached them by the unreal sort of communication conveyed by the radio.
There was a great contrast between the private life of beauty they were
leading and the public hideous life that was going on outside.  Men
were fighting and murdering each other again as they had fought and
murdered in the first World War.  Neither Mr. Dale nor Mrs. Temple
could see why.  It seemed inexplicable to them why millions of men
should wish to fight other millions of men when the obvious solution
for all those millions of men sharing the same planet lay in
co-operation, both economic and geographical.  A fair distribution
would give room to everybody.  The planet wasn't so overcrowded surely?
In certain areas there might be too many human beings crushed into the
square mile; there might be crops wasted in one country while another
country went short; but surely both those problems might be adjusted by
a little intelligent agreement?  Men couldn't be so foolish as to fail
over so simple, so elementary a thing, after all the centuries they had
been granted for development since they first crept out from the mouth
of their cave.  Yet it did seem that men so failed.

Man had shown himself ingenious in his inventions.  He had discovered
that the earth went round the sun, not the sun round the earth.  By a
series of complicated mathematical calculations he had discovered the
planet Neptune and had also enabled himself to predict the precise
moment in which the sun or the moon would enter into an eclipse.  He
had discovered more things than these.  He had found out the
composition of the atom and had formulated certain theories about
thermo-dynamics.  He had made up an idea about the distribution of the
known universe.  All those were very difficult things to find out.  The
one thing he had never found out was how to deal with himself or with
others of his kind.

He had invented a thing called "his enemies," and many means of
destroying them.  His enemies on their part had invented an equal
number of means for destroying him.  Planes and bombs grew swifter and
more enormous; and every new invention was quickly capped by a newer
invention which went one better.  Yet, in spite of all this, man that
clever creature, cleverer far cleverer than the ape, failed entirely
over the one faculty that mattered, the faculty of being able to
arrange his life in accordance with his fellows.

Could the world never be at peace?  It seemed not.

It was not easy to grasp exactly what was going on in the world.  The
Buenos Aires wireless news seemed to be fairly reliable, but it had
always to be checked by the broadcasts from the Axis powers.  Berlin
and Tokio were jubilant, and Rome of course followed their lead meekly.
(It was more evident than ever that Italy had shrunk to a mere province
of Germany.)  The three stations talked freely about the anticipated
end of the war, and boasted that owing to the complete surprise they
had been able to spring on her, America would very soon be in a
position where nothing would remain for her but to plead for peace.
There were no exhortations this time to the people to keep up their
courage and determination in spite of temporary reverses: no reverses
were admitted, and indeed it appeared that none had been suffered.  The
Axis had simply swept down on the United States and had done precisely
as they chose there.  There was retaliation, of course.  The American
air-arm claimed tremendous damage on Tokio and Yokohama, which were
more vulnerable to high explosive and incendiary bombs than the
steel-and-concrete of American cities.  But these were minor successes.
The fact remained that many thousands of square miles of American
territory were in the occupation of the enemy and that there seemed no
possibility of arresting the flood of reinforcements which came pouring
down from the sky.

Meanwhile what was happening in New York?  They had known for some days
that a tremendous air and sea battle was taking place, evidently as a
development of the naval action which had been previously reported off
the coast of Maine, in which, it may be remembered, two American
destroyers and two cruisers had been lost and an equal number had been
claimed against the enemy.  This, it now became apparent, had been
nothing more than a preliminary skirmish.  The few German ships engaged
had been but the reconnoitering vanguard of their entire Atlantic
fleet, which, "on manoeuvres" in mid-ocean when war broke out, had now
appeared in full force off Manhattan.  (How they had got safely through
the hastily sown mine-field nobody knew, nobody stopped to enquire, but
it was pretty obvious that they had their informers ready on the spot.)
The population was appalled, those who were left and who could not
start trekking along the roads towards the relative safety of the
Alleghanies or the Berkshire hills.  They were appalled when the great
shells from the naval guns came sailing over in a trajectory which
cleared the roofs of the highest sky-scraper and fell to their
explosion in the fissure of the streets, naval guns whose reputation
had preceded them but whose existence had never quite been believed in,
even by the American Navy Department.  The reverberations of the shells
produced more effect than the actual damage they caused.  The noise was
almost more than human nerves or ear-drums could endure, and made the
population feel as though the whole of their city was going up, to
descend after a slow-motion mid-air turnover of masonry immediately
again upon their heads.  They took it, even as other cities had taken
it; but it was a particularly high trial.

This was bad enough, when you added in the heavy air-bombing going on
continuously all day and all night, on a scale that had never been
known before, not even in the blitzes on the European cities.  This war
made the other war look like little boys playing at soldiers, as Mr.
Dale had foreseen some days ago.  The horrible strides in all
mechanized objects had not altered, but only accelerated and
intensified the character of everything all round.  Machines went
faster; explosions fell heavier; noise grew louder; bigger and better
had been the slogan of mankind, and now mankind was cashing the
dividends of the investment it had made.  Bigger, yes, but better?  The
citizens of proud New York doubted it as they covered their ears with
their hands to shut out the din; and sat wondering whether it was
preferable to be on the ground-floor or on the fifty-second.





This was battle indeed, in the modern sense of the term: a mixture of
madness and organization.  It seemed that the combat of civilization
could go no further, could reach no higher peak of dread than in this
whirling screaming vortex of warplanes over and between the skyscrapers
of the towering city, where the defenders dashed among the attackers
and both fell hurtling after the incessant bombs, and the bombers in
the stratosphere rained explosives down too, regardless of what plane
they might chance to hit below, and the guns of the two fleets and the
shore-batteries crashed salvo after salvo in one undistinguishable
roar, until there was no sanity left in the din and the speed and the
destruction.

It was no longer possible even for the commanders to keep track of the
casualties among their units.  Nothing was a unit any more, but just
one element in the vast confusion.  Machines could no longer be
estimated in squadrons; it was impossible to collate information; had a
hundred planes been lost, or two hundred, or five?  Had another
battle-cruiser been sunk?  The _Nuremberg_?  The _Wisconsin_?  The
_Lohengrin_?  The _Lincoln_?  The _Nippon-maru_?  The _Vittorio
Emanuele_?  No one had time to know.  The curious fact, in all this
murderous chaos, was the comparatively small loss of life.  Airmen
perished, and a number of sailors, but owing to the peculiar
construction of buildings (which seemed now as though they had been
designed expressly to resist such an attack) the civil population
scarcely took harm.  They speedily realized that no bomb ever made
would go through more than thirty storeys, so, New York being what it
was, the cowering civilians could keep their limbs though they might
lose their reason.

The city presented a strange sight after the first day of battle.
Fires had broken out on the top reaches, and Rockfeller Centre
especially was a tiara of pointed flame, though the Empire State
Building remained tall, black, and entire.  London had burnt, but poor
ancient London had been more inflammable than New York, and there had
been nothing in London to give that diabolical effect of ringing flames
so high up in the air.

Something of all this came through on the radio, though the accounts
reflected something of the confusion also.  But it was not until the
battle had been going on for twenty-four hours that the first
indication came of something even more seriously wrong.  It seemed
unbelievable that an even higher peak of terror could be reached but in
spite of a caution of censorship imposed abruptly upon the radio the
listeners at the bottom of the canyon realized that rumours improbable
and wild beyond the nature of Rumour were flying as swiftly as the
killer-planes.  Buenos Aires gave out a hint; and, oddly enough,
Berlin, Tokio and Rome also gave out hints within the hour: it was the
first time that all these stations had ever struck the same note, as
though something stronger than their own warring interests had taken
charge and was forcing them into collaboration.  "Something very odd
indeed has happened or is happening," said Mr. Dale, who had been
listening to the broadcast with more interest than he usually
displayed.  "Come along, Helen, let us go for a walk.  We can either
think about it or else dismiss it from our minds.  The deaf man isn't
here, he has gone to look for squirrels, so I shall put his neat little
set into my pocket.  Come along."





It was thus that they heard the first full account of the most
extraordinary battle so far recorded in terrestrial history.  It was as
though the radio stations had independently decided to save it up until
a full account could be given; as though they had all shrunk from
imposing anything so awesome upon humanity before complete confirmation
had been received.  Even then the announcement began cautiously, the
announcement coming with the voice of the still sober world beyond the
mad focus of New York.


    "For some days now," the voice began, "any communication with New
    York has been hard to establish, and only the daring of a few
    war-correspondents who ventured in chartered planes to dash round
    that inferno has provided us with any news that we could regard as
    reliable.  Now, however, survivors of the incredible catastrophe
    have begun to arrive at various points of refuge, and it is from
    their verbal accounts that we are at last able to construct some
    kind of picture.  It has been our policy to refuse credence to the
    rumours which had begun to filter through, but it is now no longer
    possible to preserve our reticence in view of the evidence which is
    now overwhelming and agrees in a remarkable degree with such
    details as had been hitherto available.  This agreement is all the
    more impressive considering the mental distress from which the
    witnesses are naturally suffering.--One moment, please.  Stand by."


"I wish he would come to the point," said Mr. Dale.  "I do not believe
it was in the least necessary to ask us to stand by just then.  He does
it partly to annoy and partly because he is enjoying himself
thoroughly, licking his chops somewhere in the safety of the Argentine.
He realizes that this is one of the high-light moments of his little
second-hand form of life and he has every intention of making it go as
far as he can."

"Oh, _do_ be quiet," said Mrs. Temple.

"Like all women," said Mr. Dale, "you have no sense of occasion.  You
evidently have no artistry in your soul.  You do not appreciate the
value of suspense.  That announcer in Buenos Aires does.  He is an
artist in his peddling way even as Royer was an artist in his.  I
respect that unknown man for making us wait.  I marvel only that he
doesn't fill up the interval with a gramophone record, Adelina Patti
singing "Home, Sweet Home" for instance.  Homes are so sweet these
days, aren't they, so secure, so invulnerable from outside attack, that
our announcer should surely celebrate them by that little ditty.  All
the same, I confess to some curiosity concerning what he is going to
say when he is so obliging as to begin speaking again.  I dislike his
style in his use of the English language, but that no doubt is to be
blamed on someone else, not on him.  Never mind about that.  I daresay
that my criticism is irrelevant and that such niceties should be
shelved to await a more propitious time.  It is relevant, however, to
remind you during this pause to which we are both listening, if one may
properly be said to be listening to a pause, that during the last war
some philosophically minded wits suggested that nothing but the
approach of a disorderly star involving the total destruction of this
planet or, failing that, a terrestrial invasion by the inhabitants of
some other planet revolving within our own small solar system, would
bring the warring inhabitants of earth to their senses.  Both those
solutions were suggested, so, as I remarked just now, it may not be
irrelevant to remind you of them when something of the sort may be
occurring...."

"Mr. Dale, once already I have asked you to keep quiet.  There are
moments when I find you intolerable, and this is one of them.  So will
you please stop playing games with your imagination and your irony?
That tiny invention which is lying on the rock between us is about to
start talking again.  The buzz is coming through and I want to listen
if you will kindly allow me to do so."


    "We apologize for the delay.  We were saying when transmission was
    temporarily interrupted that the agreement between witnesses was
    most impressive.  We can no longer refuse the facts.

    "Here they are.

    "New York City as listeners already know was heavily attacked by
    hostile air-fleets three days ago, a naval battle raging in
    conjunction.  We will not repeat the description of either of those
    battles.  We have an even more serious eventuality to report.  It
    has long been known to geologists that New York City and indeed the
    whole strip of the eastern sea-board stood upon a seismic zone; in
    plain English, an earthquake zone, a geological fault.  The rocks
    upon which New York was constructed were known to be shallow, but
    no recorded earth-tremor of any importance had occurred since the
    New England earthquake of 1874.  It has occurred now.  In the midst
    of the man-made battle raging overhead, Nature as though outraged
    has bestirred herself to take her part.  An earthquake of
    unparalleled violence has shaken the eastern coasts of the United
    States from New Haven to Cape May, and its centre of disturbance
    was located under the heart of New York City itself.

    "The consequences have yet to be fully estimated.  It is already
    known however that owing to the subsidence of the rocky strata, the
    tall buildings have toppled sideways and are now leaning against
    one another at varying angles.  It is said for example that the
    Chrysler Building is propping itself against the opposite side of
    the street.

    "It is of course due to the method of construction of the tall
    buildings that they have not entirely collapsed but have merely
    swayed and finally come to rest against one another.  Steel and
    concrete have a certain elasticity.  The effect as described by one
    observer from the air must be grotesque in the extreme.

    "It is reported also that a rift has appeared in the earth running
    the whole length of what was once Fifth Avenue.  The observer who
    reported this fact (which we accept with reservation) commented
    that the gash thus created reminded him of a section of the Grand
    Canyon of the Colorado.  He said that he seemed to look as deep
    into the earth, and that the tumbled masonry of the buildings
    suggested the natural rock formation of that region.

    "It seems certain that a tidal wave of unprecedented dimensions
    followed upon the catastrophe, and that a number of the warships
    which were engaged in combat off the coast were lifted by the wall
    of water and dashed upon the shore, irrespective of their
    nationality.

    "It is not known for certain what has happened to the legions of
    air-craft which at the moment when the catastrophe occurred were
    engaged in combat over the city.  We are unable to state whether
    they have landed in order to take part in rescue-work or whether
    they are pursuing their task of destroying one another.

    "That is the end of the present bulletin."






When the voice had ceased, and the deafening chords had died away,
Helen and Mr. Dale looked at each other in silence.  They could not
immediately take in the thing they had heard; it lay too far outside
experience, and they both knew well that the human heart could accept
manifold suffering only in the measure of its own unit.  Physical
events, however terrible, however multiple, were neither larger nor
smaller than the capacity of the heart to interpret them.  That was
what dwarfed the physical event and made it meaningless.  It had, in
itself, no significance; the significance lay only in what it
symbolized.

As though they recognized their incapacity, they made no attempt to
encircle the facts as facts.  They had heard with their ears, and now
they were looking at each other with their eyes, but neither their
senses nor their intelligence seemed to have any connexion with what
was going on in a more important region of their inner selves.  They
stared themselves into a daze, so that they became as people
mesmerized, yet at the same time an awareness came to them, as valid
and unequivocal as a great spiritual experience.  They felt, they saw,
and they understood.  Very gradually the thing they called their
drollery came to them.  It came stealing over them like a thing
arriving in slow motion.  It came like a stillness creeping across the
clangour of the outside world, a stillness which yet contained some
quality of music.  They said nothing, but held each other's souls in
that long deep look which had nothing to do with ordinary love, though
love was included in it as indeed all things were included.

When they did begin to return to consciousness, when their drollery
slowly receded, as it always did after the few intense seconds of its
domination, they began to speak again in lowered voices.  The lowering
had nothing to do with the occurrence of their curious communion.  They
did not even refer to any personal event between them.  Their few
remarks were not concerned with personal matters, but were cast more in
the soft chords of a final requiem.  Mr. Dale had quite abandoned his
bantering tone; he spoke with extreme gentleness and gravity.

"How beautiful the cliffs are in this evening light," he said; "how
beautiful, and how different from the broken tops of those shattered
cities.--So Nature has taken a hand at last, to help on the destruction
imagined by man to wreak on his brothers.  It will be called the
intervention of Providence, but even the Churches will be hard put to
it to say on whose behalf Providence intended to intervene, since those
ships were flung indiscriminately ashore and along the beaches lie the
drowned seamen of many nations.  Providence has given only a further
proof of her grand impartiality.  She might as easily have submerged
the entire Japanese archipelago.  And what will be the effect on the
mind of man?  My friend, it will take more than a mere earthquake to
bring about a change of heart.  The battle is not yet over, for the
battle rages between darker forces than the warplane and the gun.
Terrible in their execution, they are no more than the machine obedient
to the far more terrible dementia of their masters.  Earth will have
shaken her locks in vain, and not until she has shaken this whole race
off into the void will peace return.  Or do I mistrust too much?  Just
now I saw so clearly.  Is it after all possible that some vision of
sanity may come through the clouds, not in a miraculous blinding, but
in a pervasive dawning that will bring understanding between soul and
soul and peace between nation and nation?  Helen, you and I, since we
have passed the frontier of death and are now immortal, will see that
day.  It is for those who will not see it that I sorrow; those who will
continue to live in the conviction that their present folly is
permanent and irremediable."

"Do not forget," she said, "that to them also an hour will come when
they have to cross the frontier of death, and that then, like us, they
may live on to see that other day."

"Meanwhile," he said, "let us go, Helen; let us walk in this place
where there is no misunderstanding.  Where there is nothing but beauty
and comprehension, those two smothered elements which hide in all souls
and are so seldom allowed to find their way to the surface.  Here we
are purified.  Is it indeed necessary that man should die, in order to
uncover the meaning of life?  It seems so.--Let us go, Helen.  Shall we
stroll up the river towards its source, or down the river towards the
sea?  Whichever direction we choose, we shall not get very far, for the
source is many hundreds of miles away and so is the sea, and in either
direction the route is stopped by rocks and rapids.  We shall not get
very far.  We know that other mountains and other hills shall in time
be washed into the sea, and coral reefs and shales and bones and
disintegrated mountains shall be made into beds of rock, for a new land
where new rivers shall flow.  But in the meantime let us enjoy the
strip of beauty that has been granted to us."

They trusted one another, and in serenity and confidence they went.




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  POETRY

  THE LAND                     Heinemann
  KING'S DAUGHTER              Hogarth Press
  COLLECTED POEMS                 "      "
  SOLITUDE                        "      "


  TRAVEL

  PASSENGER TO TEHERAN            "      "
  TWELVE DAYS                     "      "


  FICTION

  THE EDWARDIANS                  "      "
  ALL PASSION SPENT               "      "
  THE DARK ISLAND                 "      "
  FAMILY HISTORY                  "      "


  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  PEPITA                       Hogarth Press
  ST. JOAN OF ARC              Cobden Sanderson
  ANDREW MARVELL               Faber & Faber
  APHRA BEHN                   Gerald Howe, Ltd.


  MISCELLANEOUS

  SOME FLOWERS                 Cobden Sanderson
  COUNTRY NOTES                Michael Joseph
  COUNTRY NOTES IN WARTIME     Hogarth Press
  KNOLE AND THE SACKVILLES     Heinemann






[End of Grand Canyon, by V. Sackville-West]
