of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, was suppressed, in spite of what should have been the reassuring fact that Dora, like Pauline and Elaine before her, triumphantly worsted all her foes in the end, and emerged smiling and safe on the last page. Publishers were known to demand the alteration of a title if the name Dora occurred in it, such wholesome respect did the Censor's methods inspire.
It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments had to go warily in this matter.
The Minister of Brains held pamphlet propaganda to be of the greatest importance. A week ago the workers in the propaganda section had been sent for and interviewed by the Minister in person. This personal contact had, for the time being, oddly weighted Miss Grammont's too irresponsible levity, kindled her rather cynical coolness, given her something almost like zeal. That was one thing about the Minister—he set other people on fire. Another was that his manners were bad but unexpected, and a third that he looked like a cross between M. Kerensky, a member of the Geddes family, and Mr. Nelson Keys.
Thus Miss Grammont, thoughtfully smoking a Cyprus cigarette, summed up the Minister of Brains.
CHAPTER II
LITTLE CHANTREYS
1
Ivy Delmer went home to Little Chantreys on the following Saturday afternoon, after a matinée and tea in town, in the same train, though not the same carriage as Kitty Grammont and Vernon Prideaux, who were presumably spending the week-end at the End House. Ivy travelled home every evening of the week. Miss Grammont had a flat in town, but spent the week-ends when she was not otherwise engaged, with her brother in Little Chantreys, which was embarrassing to Ivy.
As Ivy got out of the train she saw Miss Grammont's brother and the lady who could scarcely be called her sister-in-law, on the platform, accompanied by a queer-looking man of about forty, with ears rather like a faun's. Anyone, thought Ivy, could have guessed which house in Little Chantreys he was staying at. The week-end people who came to the End House differed widely one from another in body and soul; some looked clever, or handsome, others did not, some were over-dressed, some under, some, like Miss Grammont and her brothers, just right; there were musical people, sporting people, literary or artistic people, stagy people (these last were the friends of Miss Pansy Ponsonby, who was not Miss Grammont's sister-in-law), uncommon people, and common people; but they all, thought Ivy Delmer, had two looks in common—they looked as if they wouldn't get on very well with her father and mother, and they looked as if they didn't read the Bible.
This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Some of them (like this man to-day) looked as if he didn't read it because it had become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and an impossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont and her brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because they already knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to; others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once given it a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until such time as she lay dying and might want to do something about her future state. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was a Protestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as if they had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted to again.
Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End House wouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, with an unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whether or not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicion that it stayed to mock.
2
"Hullo, old dear," said Miss Pansy Ponsonby, in her rich and resonant drawl, as Kitty and her companion came out of the station. "Here we all are again. And the Cheeper. He's a growin' boy, our Cheeper: he puts on weight. Takes after me: I put on weight when I forget my exercises and don't keep an eye on myself. Don't I, Tony? Mr. Prideaux, isn't it? How do, Mr. Prideaux? Vurry pleased you've come. You know Mr. Amherst, don't you? You clever folks all know each other." Miss Ponsonby, who was not an American, had once performed in the same company as Miss Lee White, and had caught an inflexion or two. She looked with the satisfaction of the hospitable hostess at the little group, and added, "So here we all are. And vurry nice too."
It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she had been doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long and lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.
Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay the Cheeper, aged four months (he had no Christian name, having so far evaded both the registrar and the font, and presumably no surname, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his parents). The Cheeper's father, Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young man of seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if he shared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engaging enjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners of France through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored and unambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, and determined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energy and health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped, remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professional life was passed on the Stock Exchange.
Mr. Leslie Amherst, the man like a faun, who was staying with him, was an old friend of the Grammont family. He wrote, and was on the staff of a weekly journal. He was engaged just now on a series of articles on the Forces of Darkness in Darkest Europe. So far he had produced 1. The Legislature, 2. Capitalism, 3. Industrialism, 4. Nationalism, 5. Militarism, 6. The Press, and this week he was writing 7. Organised Religion. (It will no doubt shock some readers to learn that these forces had not all, in spite of the earnest hopes entertained for so long for their overthrowal, yet been overthrown; but truth compels me to state that they had not.) Though Amherst talked like a cynic, and had his affectations, he was an earnest thinker, and sometimes tired his host, who was not, and who had been left by his years of difficult continental sojourn with a supreme distaste for any further probing into the problems of Darkest Europe. Amherst had the advantage, in this matter, of having been a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, so the war had not tired him, and he retained for home use the freshness and vigour of attack which had, in the case of many of his fellow-countrymen, been all used up abroad.
The End House party was completed by Kitty Grammont, with her round, long-lashed eyes and her air of the ingenuous rake, and Vernon Prideaux, brisk and neat and clever. So there they all were; and very nice, too.
Kitty kissed her brother and Miss Ponsonby and dug the Cheeper in the ribs in the manner he preferred. She was very fond of them all, and found Miss Ponsonby immeasurably entertaining. Little had she thought, when of old she used joyfully to watch Miss Pansy Ponsonby twist and kick and curl herself about the stage and sing fascinating inanities in her lazy contralto, that they would ever be linked by no common bond. Of course she had known that her brother Anthony was showering flowers, chocolates, suppers, week-ends and air-trips at Miss Ponsonby's nimble feet (the toes of which could bend right back at the joints) but Anthony had been known to shower these things at the feet of others. Certainly Kitty had never