She poured out two cups, sweetened them, handed Dinny one and a paper packet of cigarettes, then pointed to one of the armchairs and sat down in the other.
“You got my message, then? I’m glad you’ve come—saves my making up a parcel. I hate making parcels, don’t you?”
Her coolness and unharassed expression seemed to Dinny miraculous.
“Have you seen Hubert since?”
“Yes. He’s fairly comfortable. It’s not a bad cell, he says, and they’ve given him books and writing paper. He can have food in, too; but he’s not allowed to smoke. Someone ought to move about that. According to English law Hubert’s still as innocent as the Home Secretary; there’s no law to prevent the Home Secretary smoking, is there? I shan’t be seeing him again, but you’ll be going, Dinny—so give him my special love, and take him some cigarettes in case they let him.”
Dinny stared at her.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Well, I wanted to see you about that. This is all strictly for your ear only. Promise to lie absolutely doggo, Dinny, or I shan’t say anything.”
Dinny said, resolutely: “Cross my heart as they say. Go on.”
“I’m going to Brussels tomorrow. Alan went today; he’s got extension of leave for urgent family affairs. We’re simply going to prepare for the worst, that’s all. I’m to learn flying in double quick time. If I go up three times a day, three weeks will be quite enough. Our lawyer has guaranteed us three weeks, at least. Of course, he knows nothing. Nobody is to know anything, except you. I want you to do something for me.” She reached forward and took out of her vanity bag a tissue-papered packet.
“I’ve got to have five hundred pounds. We can get a good second-hand machine over there for very little, they say, but we shall want all the rest. Now, look here Dinny, this is an old family thing. It’s worth a lot. I want you to pop it for five hundred; if you can’t get as much as that by popping, you’ll have to sell it. Pop, or sell, in your name, and change the English notes into Belgian money and send it to me registered to the G.P.O. Brussels. You ought to be able to send me the money within three days.” She undid the paper, and disclosed an old-fashioned but very beautiful emerald pendant.
“Oh!”
“Yes,” said Jean, “it really is good. You can afford to take a high line. Somebody will give you five hundred on it, I’m sure. Emeralds are up.”
“But why don’t you ‘pop’ it yourself before you go?”
Jean shook her head.
“No, nothing whatever that awakens suspicion. It doesn’t matter what you do, Dinny, because you’re not going to break the law. We possibly are, but we’re not going to be copped.”
“I think,” said Dinny, “you ought to tell me more.”
Again Jean shook her head.
“Not necessary, and not possible; we don’t know enough yet ourselves. But make your mind easy, they’re not going to get away with Hubert. You’ll take this, then?” And she wrapped up the pendant.
Dinny took the little packet, and, having brought no bag, slipped it down her dress. She leaned forward and said earnestly:
“Promise you won’t do anything, Jean, till everything else has failed.”
Jean nodded. “Nothing till the very last minute. It wouldn’t be good enough.”
Dinny grasped her hand. “I oughtn’t to have let you in for this, Jean, it was I who brought the young things together, you know.”
“My dear, I’d never have forgiven you if you hadn’t. I’m in love.”
“But it’s so ghastly for you.”
Jean looked into the distance so that Dinny could almost feel the cub coming round the corner.
“No! I like to think it’s up to me to pull him out of it. I’ve never felt so alive as I feel now.”
“Is there much risk for Alan?”
“Not if we work things properly. We’ve several schemes, according as things shape.”
Dinny sighed.
“I hope to God they’ll none of them be necessary.”
“So do I, but it’s impossible to leave things to chance, with a ‘just beast’ like ‘Walter’.”
“Well, good-bye, Jean, and good luck!”
They kissed, and Dinny went down into the street with the emerald pendant weighing like lead on her heart. It was drizzling now and she took a cab back to Mount Street. Her father and Sir Lawrence had just come in. Their news was inconsiderable. Hubert, it seemed, did not wish for bail again. ‘Jean,’ thought Dinny, ‘has to do with that.’ The Home Secretary was in Scotland and would not be back till Parliament sat, in about a fortnight’s time. The warrant could not be issued till after that. In expert opinion they had three weeks at least in which to move heaven and earth. Ah! but it was easier for heaven and earth to pass than for one tittle of the Law to fail. And yet was it quite nonsense when people talked of ‘interest’ and ‘influence’ and ‘wangling’ and ‘getting things through’? Was there not some talismanic way of which they were all ignorant?
Her father kissed her and went dejectedly up to bed, and Dinny was left alone with Sir Lawrence. Even he was in heavy mood.
“No bubble and squeak in the pair of us,” he said. “I sometimes think, Dinny, that the Law is overrated. It’s really a rough-and-ready system, with about as much accuracy in adjusting penalty to performance as there is to a doctor’s diagnosis of a patient he sees for the first time; and yet for some mysterious reason we give it the sanctity of the Holy Grail and treat its dicta as if they were the broadcastings of God. If ever there was a case where a Home Secretary might let himself go and be human, this is one. And yet I don’t see him doing it. I don’t, Dinny, and Bobbie Ferrar doesn’t. It seems that some wrongly-inspired idiot, not long ago, called Walter ‘the very spirit of integrity,’ and Bobbie says that instead of turning up his stomach, it went to his head, and he hasn’t reprieved anybody since. I’ve been wondering whether I couldn’t write to the ‘Times’ and say: ‘This pose of inexorable incorruptibility in certain quarters is more dangerous to justice than the methods of Chicago.’ Chicago ought to fetch him. He’s been there, I believe. It’s an awful thing for a man to cease to be human.”
“Is he married?”
“Not even that, now,” said Sir Lawrence.
“But some men don’t even begin to be human, do they?”
“That’s not so bad; you know where you are, and can take a fire-shovel to them. No, it’s the blokes who get swelled head that make the trouble. By the way, I told my young man that you would sit for your miniature.”
“Oh! Uncle, I simply couldn’t sit with Hubert on my mind!”
“No, no! Of course not! But something must turn up.” He looked at her shrewdly and added: “By the way, Dinny, young Jean?”
Dinny lifted a wide and simple gaze:
“What about her?”
“She doesn’t look to me too easy to bite.”
“No, but what can she do, poor dear?”
“I wonder,” said Sir Lawrence, raising one eyebrow, “I just wonder. ‘They’re dear little innocent things, they are, they’re angels without any wings, they are. That’s ‘Punch’ before your time, Dinny. And it will continue to be ‘Punch’ after your time, except that wings are growing on you all so fast.”
Dinny, still looking at him innocently, thought: ‘He’s rather uncanny, Uncle Lawrence!’ And soon after she went up to bed.
To go to bed with one’s whole soul in a state of upheaval! And yet how many other upheaved souls lay, cheek to pillow, unsleeping! The room seemed full of the world’s unreasoning misery. If one were talented, one would get up and relieve oneself in a poem about Azrael, or something! Alas! It was not so easy as all that. One lay, and was sore—sore and anxious and angry. She could remember still how she had felt, being thirteen, when Hubert, not quite eighteen, had gone off to the war. That had been horrid, but this was much worse; and she wondered why. Then he might have been killed at any minute; now he was safer than anybody who was not in prison. He would be preserved meticulously even while they sent him across the world and put him up for trial in a country not his own, before some judge of alien blood. He was safe enough for some months yet. Why, then, did this seem so much worse than all the risks through which he had passed since he first went soldiering, even than that long, bad time on the Hallorsen expedition? Why? If not that those old risks and hardships had been endured of his free will; while the present trouble was imposed on him. He was being held down, deprived of the two great boons of human existence, independence and private life, boons to secure which human beings in communities had directed all their efforts for thousands of years, until—until they went Bolshy! Boons to every human being, but especially to people like themselves, brought up under no kind of whip except that of their own consciences. And she lay there as if she were lying in his cell, gazing into his future, longing for Jean, hating the locked-in feeling, cramped and miserable and bitter. For what had he done, what in God’s name had he done that any other man of sensibility and spirit would not do!