What Not Part 19

"Not," he had returned, "that things had gone as far as this. I knew you were intimate, of course. There was that time in Italy.... But--well, honestly, I thought better of both your brains."

She gave up her momentary resentment, and slipped again into remorse.

"We thought better of them too--till we did it.... Have I spoilt his life, Vernon? I suppose so."

He shrugged his shoulders. "You've spoilt, and he's spoilt his own, career as Minister of Brains. There are other things, of course. Chester can't go under; he's too good a man to lose. They'll stick on to him somehow.... But ... well, what in heaven or earth or the other place possessed you both to do it, Kitty?"

To which she had no answer but "We just thought we would," and he left her in disgust.

Even in her hour of mortification and remorse, Kitty could still enjoy getting a rise out of Prideaux.

3

Pansy, who called often with showers of hot-house flowers, which Chester detested, was much more sympathetic. She was frankly delighted. She could not be allowed to see Chester; Kitty was afraid that her exuberance might send his temperature up.

"You won't mind my tellin' you now, darlin', but I've been thinkin' it was free love all this time. I didn't mind, you know. But this is more respectable. This family couldn't really properly afford another scandal; it might lose its good name, then what would Cyril say? It would come hard on the Cheeper, too. Now this is some marriage. So _sensible_ of you both, to throw over those silly laws and do the jolly thing and have a good time. As I said to Tony, what _is_ the good of making laws if you can't break them yourself? Now that your Nicky's set a good example, it really does seem as if all this foolishness was goin'

to dwine away and be forgotten.... I guess it's doin' what we like and havin' a good time that matters, in the long run, isn't it. Not keepin'

laws or improvin' the silly old world."

"Ask me another," said Kitty. "I haven't the slightest idea, Pansy, my love. You're usually right, so I daresay you're right about this. But you mustn't talk like that to Nicky, or he'll have a relapse."

"And fancy," Pansy mused, "me havin' got the great Minister of Brains for a brother-in-law! Or anyhow somethin' of the sort; as near as makes no difference. I shall never hear the last of it from the girls and boys.... Good-bye, old thing; I'm ever so pleased you're a happy wife now as well as me."

4

Chester handed Kitty a letter from his mother, the wife of a struggling bishop somewhere in the west country. It said, "Directly you are well enough, dear, you must bring Kitty to stay with us; She won't, I am sure, mind our simple ways.... My dear, we are so thankful you have found happiness. We are distressed about your accident, and about your loss of office, which I fear you will feel.... But, after all, love and happiness are so much more important than office, are they not?..."

"Important," Kitty repeated. "Queer word. Just what love and happiness aren't, you'd think. Comfortable--jolly--but not important.... Never you mind, Nicky, you'll be important always: Vernon is right about that.

They'll put you somewhere where 'domestick selvishenesse' doesn't matter: perhaps they'll make you a peer...."

Chester said he would not be at all surprised.

Kitty said, "Shall we go and see your people?" and he replied gloomily, "I suppose we must. It will be ... rather trying."

"Will they condole with you?" she suggested, and he returned, "No.

They'll congratulate me."

A fortnight later they went down to the west. Bishop Chester lived in a little old house in a slum behind his cathedral. Bishops' palaces were no longer bishops' homes; they had all been turned into community houses, clergy houses, retreat houses, alms houses, and so forth.

Celibate bishops could live in them, together with other clergy of their diocese, but bishops with families had to find quarters elsewhere. And, married or unmarried, their incomes were not enough to allow of any style of living but that apostolic simplicity which the Church, directly it was freed from the State and could arrange its own affairs, had decided was right and suitable.

Not all bishops took kindly to the new regime; some resigned, and had to be replaced by bishops of the new and sterner school. But, to give bishops their due, which is too seldom done, they are for the most part good Christian men, ready to do what they believe is for the good of the Church. Many of their detractors were surprised at the amount of good-will and self-sacrifice revealed in the episcopal ranks when they were put to the test. If some failed under it--well, bishops, if no worse than other men, are human.

Bishop Chester had not failed. He had taken to plain living and plainer thinking (how often, alas, these two are to be found linked together!) with resignation, as a Christian duty. If it should bring any into the Church who had been kept outside it by his purple and fine linen, he would feel himself more than rewarded. If it should not, that was not his look-out. Which is to say that Bishop Chester was a good man, if not clever.

He and his wife were very kind to Chester and Kitty. Chester said he could not spare more than a day and night; he had to get back to town, where he had much business on hand, including the inst.i.tuting of an action for malicious libel against Mr. Percy Jenkins and the publishers and proprietors of the _Patriot_. Kitty was not surprised at the shortness of the visit, for it was a humiliating visit. The bishop and Mrs. Chester, as their son had known they would, approved of his contravention of his own principles. They thought them, had always thought them, monstrous and inhuman principles.

The bishop said, "My dear boy, I can't tell you how thankful I am that you have decided at last to let humanity have its way with you.

Humanity; the simple human things; love, birth, family life. They're the simple things, but, after all, the deep and grand things. No laws will ever supersede them."

And Mrs. Chester looked at Kitty with the indescribable look of mothers-in-law who hope that one day they may be grandmothers, and whispered to her when she said good-night, "And some day, dear...."

And they saw Chester's twin sister. She was harmless; she was even doing crochet work; and her face was the face of Chester uninformed by thought. Mrs. Chester said, "Nicky will have told you of our poor ailing girl...."

5

They came away next morning. They faced each other in the train, but they read the _Times_ (half each) and did not meet each other's eyes.

They could not. They felt as thieves who still have consciences must feel when congratulated on their crimes by other thieves, who have not.

Between them stood and jeered a Being with a vacant face and a phrase which it repeated with cynical reiteration. "You have let humanity have its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things.... No laws will ever supersede them...." And the Being's face was as the face of Chester's twin sister, the poor ailing girl.

To this they had come, then; to the first of the three simple human things mentioned by the bishop. What now, since they had started down the long slope of this green and easy hill, should arrest their progress, until they arrived, brakeless and unheld, into the valley where the other two waited, cynical, for all their simplicity, and grim?

Kitty, staring helplessly into the problematical future, saw, as if someone had turned a page and shown it to her, a domestic picture--herself and Chester (a peer, perhaps, why not?) facing one another not in a train but in a simple human home, surrounded by Family Life; two f.e.c.kless, fallen persons, who had made a holocaust of theories and principles, who had reverted to the hand-to-mouth shiftlessness and mental sloppiness of the primitive Briton. Kitty could hear Chester, in that future, vaguer, family, peer's voice that might then be his, saying, "We must just trust to luck and muddle through somehow."

Even to that they might come....

In the next Great War--and who should stay its advent if such as these failed?--their sons would fight, without talent, their daughters would perhaps nurse, without skill. And so on, and so on, and so on....

So turned the world around. Individual desire given way to, as usual, ruining principle and ideals by its soft pressure. What would ever get done in such a world? Nothing, ever.

Suddenly, as if both had seen the same picture, they met one another's eyes across the carriage, and laughed ruefully.

That, anyhow, they could always do, though sitting among the debris of ruined careers, ruined principles, ruined Ministries, ruined ideals. It was something; perhaps, in a sad and precarious world, it was much....

THE END

NEW FICTION

OH, MONEY! MONEY! By ELEANOR H. PORTER, Author of "Just David,"

"Pollyanna," etc.

"This tale of an elderly millionaire who goes incognito among his poor relations to discover to which of them he shall leave his fortune is extraordinarily soothing in these hara.s.sed times. The relations are most humorously studied."--_Westminster Gazette._

THE ANCHOR. By M. T. H. SADLER.

"All his people are interesting and all ring true." _Pall Mall Gazette._

ANNE'S HOUSE OF DREAMS. By L. M. MONTGOMERY, Author of "Anne of Green Gables."

"Miss Montgomery has a rare knack of making simple events and ordinary people both charming and moving; she can make her readers both laugh and weep."--_Westminster Gazette._