He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes, I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville, this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."

It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted darkness of her eyes.

"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation.

That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes, and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She joined the Army seven months ago."

"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.

Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."

"I don't object at all," Richard a.s.sured him amiably. "I only wondered what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"

"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."

"How long are you to be here?"

"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be able to see her every day."

"She won't turn you away."

There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that Richard was speaking not in rea.s.surance but in grimness, as one might speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully.

"She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."

"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the front door open and close a second ago."

Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor, and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum version of the emotion of embarra.s.sment was sucking and gnawing one of her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.

The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else, because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held in her hand.

There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."

She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh, Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the parlour."

He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I opened the door to Roger."

Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, and the bra.s.s studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman, and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters on the magenta ribbon.

"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that m.u.f.fled, indifferent tone.

"Yes," he murmured.

"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.

"Yes," he whispered.

She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked, again indifferently.

"Yes," he whispered.

She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.

"Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room, and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all soft, mothering curves to him.

Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a queer noise. Ahe ... ahe ... ahe.... It had an unmechanical sound, like the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the situation which was making her grieve--which must, she realised with a stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the far view of the river and the marshes.

"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.

"I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."

The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and abjectly: "I didn't want to come."

Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was behaving like an old mother in an advertis.e.m.e.nt, like the silver-haired old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's toffee or who reads the _Weekly Telegraph_ in plaques at railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the perfection with which she had a.s.sumed this bland and glossy personality at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she, too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all might be well with all of them.

"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble--I've had trouble--"

Roger was stammering.

Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."

Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and, over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of us. And we'll have it down here at the table."

She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation, which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors, were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body, taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of att.i.tude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.

"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward.

And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate Broadway--"

The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at _Margate_."

"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got, Poppy!"

Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided shoulders as she pa.s.sed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be very comfortable when one's tired."

Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coa.r.s.e hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was, perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking just like this; but it was gone immediately.

"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to pa.s.s it by--think of it, mother, I was going to pa.s.s it by!--when the band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy.

Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you know, mother, Poppy _is_ Spanish--half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very G.o.dless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."

After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."

The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.

"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden pale, febrile pa.s.sion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"

"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy--a husband that any woman would be proud of."

"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender att.i.tude which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well, to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of serving Jesus. I would really.

"But after that"--he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed deeply--"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple.

But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times."

He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the better for it. Even you"--he looked at Richard with a faint, malign joyfulness--"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to show people Gentle Jesus."

He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to those that work under him it's right he should be. G.o.d chasteneth whom He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's like to find Jesus! To know"--his voice whistled exultantly over the stricken tea-table--"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"