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Di
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Well, I wanted to see you about that. This is all strictly for your ear only. Promise to lie absolutely doggo, Di
Di
“I’m going to Brussels tomorrow. Alan went today; he’s got extension of leave for urgent family affairs. We’re simply going to prepare for the worst, that’s all. I’m to learn flying in double quick time. If I go up three times a day, three weeks will be quite enough. Our lawyer has guaranteed us three weeks, at least. Of course, he knows nothing. Nobody is to know anything, except you. I want you to do something for me.” She reached forward and took out of her vanity bag a tissue-papered packet.
“I’ve got to have five hundred pounds. We can get a good second-hand machine over there for very little, they say, but we shall want all the rest. Now, look here Di
“Oh!”
“Yes,” said Jean, “it really is good. You can afford to take a high line. Somebody will give you five hundred on it, I’m sure. Emeralds are up.”
“But why don’t you ‘pop’ it yourself before you go?”
Jean shook her head.
“No, nothing whatever that awakens suspicion. It doesn’t matter what you do, Di
“I think,” said Di
Again Jean shook her head.
“Not necessary, and not possible; we don’t know enough yet ourselves. But make your mind easy, they’re not going to get away with Hubert. You’ll take this, then?” And she wrapped up the pendant.
Di
“Promise you won’t do anything, Jean, till everything else has failed.”
Jean nodded. “Nothing till the very last minute. It wouldn’t be good enough.”
Di
“My dear, I’d never have forgiven you if you hadn’t. I’m in love.”
“But it’s so ghastly for you.”
Jean looked into the distance so that Di
“No! I like to think it’s up to me to pull him out of it. I’ve never felt so alive as I feel now.”
“Is there much risk for Alan?”
“Not if we work things properly. We’ve several schemes, according as things shape.”
Di
“I hope to God they’ll none of them be necessary.”
“So do I, but it’s impossible to leave things to chance, with a ‘just beast’ like ‘Walter’.”
“Well, good-bye, Jean, and good luck!”
They kissed, and Di
Her father kissed her and went dejectedly up to bed, and Di
“No bubble and squeak in the pair of us,” he said. “I sometimes think, Di
“Is he married?”
“Not even that, now,” said Sir Lawrence.
“But some men don’t even begin to be human, do they?”
“That’s not so bad; you know where you are, and can take a fire-shovel to them. No, it’s the blokes who get swelled head that make the trouble. By the way, I told my young man that you would sit for your miniature.”
“Oh! Uncle, I simply couldn’t sit with Hubert on my mind!”
“No, no! Of course not! But something must turn up.” He looked at her shrewdly and added: “By the way, Di
Di
“What about her?”
“She doesn’t look to me too easy to bite.”
“No, but what can she do, poor dear?”
“I wonder,” said Sir Lawrence, raising one eyebrow, “I just wonder. ‘They’re dear little i
Di
To go to bed with one’s whole soul in a state of upheaval! And yet how many other upheaved souls lay, cheek to pillow, unsleeping! The room seemed full of the world’s unreasoning misery. If one were talented, one would get up and relieve oneself in a poem about Azrael, or something! Alas! It was not so easy as all that. One lay, and was sore—sore and anxious and angry. She could remember still how she had felt, being thirteen, when Hubert, not quite eighteen, had gone off to the war. That had been horrid, but this was much worse; and she wondered why. Then he might have been killed at any minute; now he was safer than anybody who was not in prison. He would be preserved meticulously even while they sent him across the world and put him up for trial in a country not his own, before some judge of alien blood. He was safe enough for some months yet. Why, then, did this seem so much worse than all the risks through which he had passed since he first went soldiering, even than that long, bad time on the Hallorsen expedition? Why? If not that those old risks and hardships had been endured of his free will; while the present trouble was imposed on him. He was being held down, deprived of the two great boons of human existence, independence and private life, boons to secure which human beings in communities had directed all their efforts for thousands of years, until—until they went Bolshy! Boons to every human being, but especially to people like themselves, brought up under no kind of whip except that of their own consciences. And she lay there as if she were lying in his cell, gazing into his future, longing for Jean, hating the locked-in feeling, cramped and miserable and bitter. For what had he done, what in God’s name had he done that any other man of sensibility and spirit would not do!