Tatterdemalion | Page 8

the
police and Mrs. Grundy, must not quite deceive others as to her
business in life. She had only " been at it " long enough to have
acquired a nervous dread of almost everything not long enough to have
passed through that dread to callousness. Some women take so much
longer than others. And even for a woman " of a certain type " her
position was exceptionally nerveracking in war-time, going as she did
by a false name. Indeed, in all England there could hardly be a greater
pariah than was this German woman of the night.
She idled outside a book-shop humming a little, pretending to read the
titles of the books by moonlight, taking off and putting on one of her
stained yellow gloves. Now and again she would move up as far as the
posters outside the hall, scrutinising them as if interested in the future,
then stroll back again. In her worn and discreet dark dress, and her
small hat, she had nothing about her to rouse suspicion, unless it were
the trail of violet powder she left on the moonlight.
For the moonlight this evening was almost solid, seeming with its cool
still vibration to replace the very air; in it the war-time precautions

against light seemed fantastic, like shading candles in a room still full
of daylight. What lights there were had the effect of strokes and stipples
of dim colour laid by a painter's brush on a background of ghostly
whitish-blue. The dreamlike quality of the town was perhaps enhanced
for her eyes by the veil she was wearing in daytime no longer white. As
the music died out of her, elation also ebbed. Somebody had passed her,
speaking German, and she was overwhelmed by a rush of nostalgia. On
this moonlit night by the banks of the Rhine whence she came the
orchards would be heavy with apples; there would be murmurs and
sweet scents; the old castle would stand out clear, high over the woods
and the chalkywhite river. There would be singing far away, and the
churning of a distant steamer's screw; and perhaps on the water a log
raft still drifting down in the blue light. There would be German voices
talking. And suddenly tears oozed up in her eyes, and crept down
through the powder on her cheeks. She raised her veil and dabbed at
her face with a little, not-too-clean handkerchief, screwed up in her
yellow-gloved hand. But the more she dabbed the more those
treacherous tears ran. Then she became aware that a tall young man in
khaki was also standing before the shop-window, not looking at the
titles of the books, but eyeing her askance.
His face was fresh and open, with a sort of kindly eagerness in his blue
eyes. Mechanically she drooped her wet lashes, raised them obliquely,
drooped them again, and uttered a little sob. . . .
This young man, captain in a certain regiment, and discharged from
hospital at six o'clock that evening, had entered Queen's Hall at
half-past seven. Still rather brittle and sore from his wound, he had
treated himself to a seat in the grand circle, and there had sat, very still
and dreamy, the whole concert through. It had been like eating after a
long fast something of the sensation Polar explorers must experience
when they return to their first full meal. For he was of the New Army,
and before the war had actually believed in music, art, and all that sort
of thing. With a month's leave before him, he could afford to feel that
life was extraordinarily joyful, his own experiences particularly
wonderful; and, coming out into the moonlight, he had taken what can
only be described as a great gulp of it, for he was a young man with a

sense of beauty. When one has been long in the trenches, lain out
wounded in a shell-hole twenty-four hours, and spent three months in
hospital, beauty has such an edge of novelty, such a sharp sweetness,
that it almost gives pain. And London at night is very beautiful. He
strolled slowly toward the Circus, still drawing the moonlight deep into
his lungs, his cap tilted up a little on his forehead in that moment of
unmilitary abandonment; and whether he stopped before the book-shop
window because the girl's figure was in some sort a part of beauty, or
because he saw that she was crying, he could not have made clear to
any one.
Then something perhaps the scent of powder, perhaps the yellow glove,
or the oblique flutter of the eyelids told him that he was making what
he would have called "a blooming error," unless he wished for
company, which had not been in his thoughts. But her sob affected