‘What would you have been more?’ he laughed, making equivocal dark eyes at her.

  ‘Oh, of course, a delivering angel — a cinema heroine,’ she replied, closing her eyes and turning her face aside.

  All the while the white-faced, tall Major watched the little man with a fixed, half-smiling scrutiny. The Count seemed to notice. He turned to the Englishman.

  ‘I am glad that I can congratulate you, Major Apsley, on your safe and happy return to your home.’

  ‘Thanks. I hope I may be able to congratulate you in the same way before long.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Count. ‘Before long I shall be shipped back.’

  ‘Have you any news of your family?’ interrupted Daphne.

  ‘No news,’ he replied briefly, with sudden gravity.

  ‘It seems you’ll find a fairish mess out in Austria,’ said Basil.

  ‘Yes, probably. It is what we had to expect,’ replied the Count.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Sometimes things do turn out for the best. I feel that’s as good as true in my case,’ said the Major.

  ‘Things have turned out for the best?’ said the Count, with an intonation of polite inquiry.

  ‘Yes. Just for me personally, I mean — to put it quite selfishly. After all, what we’ve learned is that a man can only speak for himself. And I feel it’s been dreadful, but it’s not been lost. It was like an ordeal one had to go through,’ said Basil.

  ‘You mean the war?’

  ‘The war and everything that went with it.’

  ‘And when you’ve been through the ordeal?’ politely inquired the Count.

  ‘Why, you arrive at a higher state of consciousness, and therefore of life. And so, of course, at a higher plane of love. A surprisingly higher plane of love, that you had never suspected the existence of before.’

  The Count looked from Basil to Daphne, who was posing her head a little self-consciously.

  ‘Then indeed the war has been a valuable thing,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Basil. ‘I am another man.’

  ‘And Lady Apsley?’ queried the Count.

  ‘Oh’ — her husband faced round to her — ’she is absolutely another woman — and much more wonderful, more marvellous.’

  The Count smiled and bowed slightly.

  ‘When we knew her ten years ago, we should have said then that it was impossible,’ said he, ‘for her to be more wonderful.’

  ‘Oh, quite!’ returned the husband. ‘It always seems impossible. And the impossible is always happening. As a matter of fact, I think the war has opened another circle of life to us — a wider ring.’

  ‘It may be so,’ said the Count.

  ‘You don’t feel it so yourself?’ The Major looked with his keen, white attention into the dark, low-browed face of the other man. The Count looked smiling at Daphne.

  ‘I am only a prisoner still, Major, therefore I feel my ring quite small.’

  ‘Yes, of course you do. Of course. Well, I do hope you won’t be a prisoner much longer. You must be dying to get back into your own country.’

  ‘Yes, I shall be glad to be free. Also,’ he smiled. ‘I shall miss my prison and my visits from the angels.’

  Even Daphne could not be sure he was mocking her. It was evident the visit was unpleasant to him. She could see he did not like Basil. Nay, more, she could feel that the presence of her tall, gaunt, idealistic husband was hateful to the little swarthy man. But he passed it all off in smiles and polite speeches.

  On the other hand, Basil was as if fascinated by the Count. He watched him absorbedly all the time, quite forgetting Daphne. She knew this. She knew that she was quite gone out of her husband’s consciousness, like a lamp that has been carried away into another room. There he stood completely in the dark, as far as she was concerned, and all his attention focused on the other man. On his pale, gaunt face was a fixed smile of amused attention.

  ‘But don’t you get awfully bored,’ he said, ‘between the visits?’

  The Count looked up with an affection of frankness.

  ‘No, I do not,’ he said. ‘I can brood, you see, on the things that come to pass.’

  ‘I think that’s where the harm comes in,’ replied the Major. ‘One sits and broods, and is cut off from everything, and one loses one’s contact with reality. That’s the effect it had on me, being a prisoner.’

  ‘Contact with reality — what is that?’

  ‘Well — contact with anybody, really — or anything.’

  ‘Why must one have contact?’

  ‘Well, because one must,’ said Basil.

  The Count smiled slowly.

  ‘But I can sit and watch fate flowing, like black water, deep down in my own soul,’ he said. ‘I feel that there, in the dark of my own soul, things are happening.’

  ‘That may be. But whatever happens, it is only one thing, really. It is a contact between your own soul and the soul of one other being, or of many other beings. Nothing else can happen to man. That’s how I figured it out for myself. I may be wrong. But that’s how I figured it out when I was wounded and a prisoner.’

  The Count’s face had gone dark and serious.

  ‘But is this contact an aim in itself?’ he asked.

  ‘Well’ — said the Major — he had taken his degree in philosophy — ’it seems to me it is. It results inevitably in some form of activity. But the cause and the origin and the life-impetus of all action, activity, whether constructive or destructive, seems to me to be in the dynamic contact between human beings. You bring to pass a certain dynamic contact between men, and you get war. Another sort of dynamic contact, and you get them all building a cathedral, as they did in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘But was not the war, or the cathedral, the real aim, and the emotional contact just the means?’ said the Count.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the Major, his curious white passion beginning to glow through his face. The three were seated in a little card-room, left alone by courtesy by the other men. Daphne was still draped in her dark, too-becoming drapery. But alas, she sat now ignored by both men. She might just as well have been an ugly little nobody, for all the notice that was taken of her. She sat in the window-seat of the dreary small room with a look of discontent on her exotic, rare face, that was like a delicate white and pink hot-house flower. From time to time she glanced with long, slow looks from man to man: from her husband, whose pallid, intense, white glowing face was pressed forward across the table to the Count, who sat back in his chair, as if in opposition, and whose dark face seemed clubbed together in a dark, unwilling stare. Her husband was quite unaware of anything but his own white identity. But the Count still had a grain of secondary consciousness which hovered round and remained aware of the woman in the window-seat. The whole of his face, and his forward-looking attention was concentrated on Basil. But somewhere at the back of him he kept track of Daphne. She sat uneasy, in discontent, as women always do sit when men are locked together in a combustion of words. At the same time, she followed the argument. It was curious that, while her sympathy at this moment was with the Count, it was her husband whose words she believed to be true. The contact, the emotional contact was the real thing, the so-called ‘aim’ was only a by-product. Even wars and cathedrals, in her mind, were only by-products. The real thing was what the warriors and cathedral-builders had had in common, as a great uniting feeling: the thing they felt for one another, and for their women in particular, of course.

  ‘There are a great many kinds of contact, nevertheless,’ said Dionys.

  ‘Well, do you know,’ said the Major, ‘it seems to me there is really only one supreme contact, the contact of love. Mind you, the love may take on an infinite variety of forms. And in my opinion, no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multiform, else it is just tyranny, just death.’

  ‘But why call it all love?’ said the Count.

  ‘Because it seems to me it is love: the great power that draws human beings together, no matter what the result of the contact may be. Of course there is hate, but hate is only the recoil of love.’

  ‘Do you think the old Egypt was established on love?’ asked Dionys.

  ‘Why, of course! And perhaps the most multiform, the most comprehensive love that the world has seen. All that we suffer from now is that our way of love is narrow, exclusive, and therefore not love at all; more like death and tyranny.’

  The Count slowly shook his head, smiling slowly and as if sadly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. It is no good. You must use another word than love.’

  ‘I don’t agree at all,’ said Basil.

  ‘What word then?’ blurted Daphne.

  The Count looked at her.

  ‘Obedience, submission, faith, belief, responsibility, power,’ he said slowly, picking out the words slowly, as if searching for what he wanted, and never quite finding it. He looked with his quiet dark eyes into her eyes. It was curious, she disliked his words intensely, but she liked him. On the other hand, she believed absolutely what her husband said, yet her physical sympathy was against him.

  ‘Do you agree, Daphne?’ asked Basil.

  ‘Not a bit,’ she replied, with a heavy look at her husband.

  ‘Nor I,’ said Basil. ‘It seems to me, if you love, there is no obedience nor submission, except to the soul of love. If you mean obedience, submission, and all the rest, to the soul of love itself, I quite agree. But if you mean obedience, submission of one person to another, and one man having power over others — I don’t agree, and never shall. It seems to me just there where we have gone wrong. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted power — ’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Count. ‘He was a mountebank. He had no conception of the sacredness of power.’

  ‘He proved himself very dangerous.’

  ‘Oh yes. But peace can be even more dangerous still.’

  ‘Tell me, then. Do you believe that you, as an aristocrat, should have feudal power over a few hundreds of other men, who happen to be born serfs, or not aristocrats?’

  ‘Not as a hereditary aristocrat, but as a man who is by nature an aristocrat,’ said the Count, ‘it is my sacred duty to hold the lives of other men in my hands, and to shape the issue. But I can never fulfil my destiny till men will willingly put their lives in my hands.’

  ‘You don’t expect them to, do you?’ smiled Basil.

  ‘At this moment, no.’

  ‘Or at any moment!’ The Major was sarcastic.

  ‘At a certain moment the men who are really living will come beseeching to put their lives into the hands of the greater men among them, beseeching the greater men to take the sacred responsibility of power.’

  ‘Do you think so? Perhaps you mean men will at last begin to choose leaders whom they will love,’ said Basil. ‘I wish they would.’

  ‘No, I mean that they will at last yield themselves before men who are greater than they: become vassals by choice.’

  ‘Vassals!’ exclaimed Basil, smiling. ‘You are still in the feudal ages, Count.’

  ‘Vassals. Not to any hereditary aristocrat — Hohenzollern or Hapsburg or Psanek,’ smiled the Count. ‘But to the man whose soul is born single, able to be alone, to choose and to command. At last the masses will come to such men and say: “You are greater than we. Be our lords. Take our life and our death in your hands, and dispose of us according to your will. Because we see a light in your face, and burning on your mouth.”‘

  The Major smiled for many moments, really piqued and amused, watching the Count, who did not turn a hair.

  ‘I say, you must be awfully naïve, Count, if you believe the modern masses are ever going to behave like that. I assure you, they never will.’

  ‘If they did,’ said the Count, ‘would you call it a new reign of love, or something else?’

  ‘Well, of course, it would contain an element of love. There would have to be an element of love in their feeling for their leaders.’

  ‘Do you think so? I thought that love assumed an equality in difference. I thought that love gave to every man the right to judge the acts of other men — ”This was not an act of love, therefore it was wrong.” Does not democracy, and love, give to every man this right?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Basil.

  ‘Ah, but my chosen aristocrat would say to those who chose him: “If you choose me, you give up forever your right to judge me. If you have truly chosen to follow me, you have thereby rejected all your right to criticize me. You can no longer either approve or disapprove of me. You have performed the sacred act of choice. Henceforth you can only obey.”‘

  ‘They wouldn’t be able to help criticizing, for all that,’ said Daphne, blurting in her say.

  He looked at her slowly, and for the first time in her life she was doubtful of what she was saying.

  ‘The day of Judas,’ he said, ‘ends with the day of love.’

  Basil woke up from a sort of trance.

  ‘I think, of course, Count,’ he said, ‘that it’s an awfully amusing idea. A retrogression slap back to the Dark Ages.’

  ‘Not so,’ said the Count. ‘Men — the mass of men — were never before free to perform the sacred act of choice. Today — soon — they may be free.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Many tribes chose their kings and chiefs.’

  ‘Men have never before been quite free to choose: and to know what they are doing.’

  ‘You mean they’ve only made themselves free in order voluntarily to saddle themselves with new lords and masters?’

  ‘I do mean that.’

  ‘In short, life is just a vicious circle?’

  ‘Not at all. An ever-widening circle, as you say. Always more wonderful.’

  ‘Well, it’s all frightfully interesting and amusing — don’t you think so, Daphne? By the way, Count, where would women be? Would they be allowed to criticize their husbands?’

  ‘Only before marriage,’ smiled the Count. ‘Not after.’

  ‘Splendid!’ said Basil. ‘I’m all for that bit of your scheme, Count. I hope you’re listening, Daphne.’

  ‘Oh yes. But then I’ve only married you, I’ve got my right to criticize all the other men,’ she said in a dull, angry voice.

  ‘Exactly. Clever of you! So the Count won’t get off! Well now, what do you think of the Count’s aristocratic scheme for the future, Daphne? Do you approve?’

  ‘Not at all. But then little men have always wanted power,’ she said cruelly.

  ‘Oh, big men as well, for that matter,’ said Basil, conciliatory.

  ‘I have been told before,’ smiled the Count, ‘little men are always bossy. I am afraid I have offended Lady Daphne?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really. I’m amused, really. But I always dislike any suggestion of bullying.’

  ‘Indeed, so do I,’ said he.

  ‘The Count didn’t mean bullying, Daphne,’ said Basil. ‘Come, there is really an allowable distinction between responsible power and bullying.’

  ‘When men put their heads together about it,’ said she.

  She was haughty and angry, as if she were afraid of losing something. The Count smiled mischievously at her.

  ‘You are offended, Lady Daphne? But why? You are safe from any spark of my dangerous and extensive authority.’

  Basil burst into a roar of laughter.

  ‘It is rather funny, you to be talking of power and of not being criticized,’ he said. ‘But I should like to hear more: I would like to hear more.’

  As they drove home, he said to his wife:

  ‘You know I like that little man. He’s a quaint little bantam. And he sets one thinking.’

  Lady Daphne froze to four degrees below zero, under the north wind of this statement, and not another word was to be thawed out of her.

  Curiously enough, it was now Basil who was attracted by the Count, and Daphne who was repelled. Not that she was so bound up in her husband. Not at all. She was feeling rather sore against men altogether. But as so often happens, in this life based on the wicked triangle, Basil could only follow his enthusiasm for the Count in his wife’s presence. When the two men were alone together, they were awkward, resistant, they could hardly get out a dozen words to one another. When Daphne was there, however, to complete the circuit of the opposing currents, things went like a house on fire.

  This, however, was not much consolation to Lady Daphne. Merely to sit as a passive medium between two men who are squibbing philosophical nonsense to one another: no, it was not good enough! She almost hated the Count: low-browed little fellow, belonging to the race of prehistoric slaves. But her grudge against her white-faced, spiritually intense husband was sharp as vinegar. Let down: she was let down between the pair of them.

  What next? Well, what followed was entirely Basil’s fault. The winter was passing: it was obvious the war was really over, that Germany was finished. The Hohenzollern had fizzled out like a very poor squib, the Hapsburg was popping feebly in obscurity, the Romanov was smudged out without a sputter. So much for imperial royalty. Henceforth democratic peace.

  The Count, of course, would be shipped back now like returned goods that had no market any more. There was a world peace ahead. A week or two, and Voynich Hall would be empty.

  Basil, however, could not let matters follow their simple course. He was awfully intrigued by the Count. He wanted to entertain him as a guest before he went. And Major Apsley could get anything in reason, at this moment. So he obtained permission for the poor little Count to stay a fortnight at Thoresway, before being shipped back to Austria. Earl Beveridge, whose soul was black as ink since the war, would never have allowed the little alien enemy to enter his house, had it not been for the hatred which had been aroused in him, during the last two years, by the degrading spectacle of the so-called patriots who had been howling their mongrel indecency in the public face. These mongrels had held the Press and the British public in abeyance for almost two years. Their one aim was to degrade and humiliate anything that was proud or dignified remaining in England. It was almost the worst nightmare of all, this coming to the top of a lot of public filth which was determined to suffocate the souls of all dignified men.