This Is the End | Page 5

of the Round Pond, so loud
was his voice. "That's what I can't make out. She used to be such a
human sort, and anybody with half an ear could hear the decisions
bubbling about under the lid for weeks before they boiled over."
Everybody--even Cousin Gustus--knew that he was talking of Jay. Kew
said so much that he might be excused for forgetting occasionally what
he had not said. Besides, he had talked of little else but Jay since he
rejoined his Family two days before.

"She used to be a good girl," sighed Cousin Gustus. "So few girls are
good."
Cousin Gustus is an expert pessimist. Vice, accidents, and terrible ends
are his speciality. All virtue is to him an exception, and by him is
immediately forgotten. In sudden deaths you cannot catch him out. If
you were tossed from the horns of a bull into the jaws of a crocodile,
and died of pneumonia contracted during the flight, you would not
surprise Cousin Gustus. He is never at a loss for a precedent. The only
way you could really astonish him would be by living a blameless life
without adventure, and dying of old age in your bed.
"There were warnings," said Anonyma. "Little disagreements with
Gustus."
"She wanted to bring vermin into the house," mourned Cousin Gustus.
Kew suggested: "White mice?"
"Not vermin unattended," Anonyma explained. "She wanted to adopt
Brown Borough babies. She had been working desultorily in the Brown
Borough since War broke out."
"That might explain the peculiar and un-Jay-like remark in her letter to
you--that she would settle in no home except the Perfect Home. I hate
things in capital letters."
"Why didn't she get married?" grumbled Cousin Gustus. "She was
engaged for nearly three weeks to young William Morgan, a most
respectable young man. So few young men--"
"She wrote to me that she couldn't keep up that engagement," said Kew.
"Not even by looking upon it as War Work. She called him a 'Surface
young man,' and that again seemed unlike her. She usen't to mind
surfaceness. The War seems to have turned her upside down. But then,
of course, the War has turned us all upside down, and in that position
you generally get a rush of brains to the head. We're all feverish, that's
what's the matter with us. When I was in hospital I lived for three
weeks on the top of a high temperature, laughing. I want to laugh
now.... It's a damn funny world."
"I once knew a man who died of apoplexy while swearing," sniffed
Cousin Gustus.
"You have been damned unlucky in your friends, Cousin Gustus," said
Kew. He paused, and then added: "Besides, I hardly ever say Damn
without saying Un-damn to myself afterwards. It seems a pity to waste

a precious word on an inadequate cause, and I always retrieve it if I
can."
"Before you came down to breakfast this morning, Kew," said
Anonyma, "we had an idea."
"Only one between you in all that time?" said Kew. "I was half an hour
late."
"Now, Kew, be an angel and agree with the idea. I've set my heart on
it," said Mrs. Gustus.
When Mrs. Gustus talked in a womanly way like this, the change was
always unmistakable. She was naturally an unnatural talker, and when
she mentioned such natural things as angels, you knew she was
resorting deliberately to womanly charm in order to attain her end.
There was something very cold-blooded about Anonyma's womanly
charm.
"Good Lord," said Kew, "I wish angels had never been invented. I
never am one, only people always tell me to be one. I never get
officially recognised in heaven. What is the plan?"
"There is Russell's car doing nothing," began Mrs. Gustus.
"Do you mean Christina?" interrupted Kew, shocked at such formality.
"Don't call her Russell's car, it sounds so cold."
"There is Russell's Christina doing nothing," compromised Anonyma.
"And petrol isn't so bad as it will be. And it's a beautiful time of year.
And you are not strong yet, really. And we want Jay back."
"A procession of facts doesn't make a plan," objected Kew.
"It may lead to one, eventually," said Mrs. Gustus. "Oh, Kew, I want to
go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear
the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a
wave of bluebells. I want to forget blood and Belgians and kiss
Nature."
"Take a twenty-eight 'bus, and kiss Hampstead Heath," suggested Kew.
"The Spring has got there all right."
Anonyma, behind the coffee-pot, was jotting down in a notebook the
salient points in her outburst. She always placed her literary calling first.
And anyway, I should be rather proud if I