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Amidst the ruin and desolation of Berlin a young officer named Captain Julian Inchbold had been using his good looks, and he was very good-looking, to fascinate a girl named Pamela Faraday who was in the secretariat of the Allied Control Commission. She was the secretary of his own chief, Major Briggs, whom he disliked intensely.

It had been an easy and pleasant game. Pamela’s eyes had fluttered when he had looked into them for the first time, and she had avoided any direct meeting of eyes as though afraid of the spell in his. That was at a dinner arranged by Major Briggs, that very conventional officer, in one of the few restaurants above-ground in Berlin. It was his birthday and he was celebrating it in this way with three of his assistants. The third guest was Elsie Venner who shared the same workman’s flat with Pamela.

It was the first time Pamela had sat at table with Julian Inchbold as he had only recently come to Berlin. Her first thought about him was slightly hostile.

‘That young man is too good-looking,’ she thought, ‘and he thinks he is very beautiful.’

Then she thought: ‘He is certainly very beautiful. He is like a beautiful animal. His brown eyes are like a deer’s. I seem to have seen him sculptured in marble with vine leaves in his hair. Apollo? More likely Dionysus, the god of wine. Or just a laughing satyr on a Greek vase! He’s a bit common I should say. He doesn’t seem quite sure of himself with Major Briggs and Elsie.’

He talked a little too much. He laughed a little too much. He was unnecessarily rude to one of the German waiters. Pamela Faraday noticed all that, but she also knew that when he could catch her eyes, when he smiled into them, something touched her blood and made her feel ‘queer’. He went out of his way to be polite and friendly to her. He made her laugh by one or two good stories about the War in Italy when he had been billeting officer of his battalion. He could imitate the Italian peasants very well and had picked up a smattering of their language and dialect.

‘He’s really very nice,’ she thought later in the evening. ‘He’s quite amusing and it isn’t fair to blame him for being so terribly good-looking.’

That night Elsie Venner, who had a tiny bedroom next to Pamela’s, had something to say about Julian Inchbold.

“A nasty bit of work, I should say.”

“Think so?” asked Pamela with a slight yawn. “I was rather attracted by him.”

Elsie Venner laughed a little maliciously.

“I could see that! He made a dead set at you. Perhaps I’m jealous. But watch your step, my child. That young man is dangerous.”

That young man showed no sign of being excessively dangerous for some time. At the week-ends he offered the use of his car to both Elsie and Pamela and took them for excursions into the woods around the Havelsee, a very attractive lake in early spring.

He divided his attentions fairly between Elsie and Pamela though by some instinct of womanhood Pamela knew that she was the favoured one. Something in his eyes told her that, a sudden quick smile, a turn of the head, an intonation of the voice. Perhaps Elsie knew that too. One day when an excursion had been arranged she jibbed and refused to go.

“I shan’t join you this afternoon, my child,” she told Pamela in their flat.

“Why not?” asked Pamela. “It’s glorious weather, warm enough for bathing.”

“I’m sick of playing gooseberry to you and young Inchbold. He only takes me as cover against gossip.”

“Oh, nonsense!” cried Pamela, but a sudden flame of colour touched her cheeks.

“In any case,” said Elsie, “I have a perfectly good invitation to a picnic with some of the others. Two Americans are going to join us. One of them is the son of a billionaire in Chicago. I might step from my typewriter to a marble palace with twenty bathrooms. Quite a chance!”

“But I promised Julian we would go,” protested Pamela. “We can’t let him down at the last moment. He’s providing the tea basket.”

Elsie Venner laughed in her faintly malicious way.

“He’ll be delighted to know that I’ve fallen out. It’s what he’s been waiting for. Take care of yourself, my little innocent one.”

It was the first time that Pamela went out alone with Julian. It was by no means the last time. They began to make a habit of it, a motor drive to the lake, a Sunday picnic in the woods away from places where they were likely to meet any of the Allied Commission. It was not quite wise. Pamela knew that. There was sure to be gossip and perhaps a little scandal. Not quite wise? No, but very pleasant to get away from the sight of ruins, to hear birds sing, to watch the sparkle of sunlight on broad waters, to lie on the grass with a young man who was certainly very good-looking and who took no liberties. He was amusing, boyish, and absurdly respectful. What could be wrong with that? Why be a coward of convention?

Absurdly respectful sometimes. He was unduly impressed by the fact that she was the daughter of Lord Bramley and alluded to it several times as though he could not get it out of his head.

“It’s cheek of me to be talking to you like this,” he said one day when they were sitting together on the edge of the Havelsee. It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and the sun was warm upon them and the lake was like burnished gold and the woods around them were exquisite in their first glory of green—each leaf like a little green flame.

“Why cheek?” she asked, laughing at him. “It’s very nice of you to be talking to me.”

“You’re the daughter of Lord Bramley,” he answered. “One of the Elder Statesmen, one of the Big Bugs. Gosh!”

“He’s very simple and human,” she told him. “There’s nothing alarming about him.”

“You must be a rich young woman,” he said. “I can’t think why you’re out here earning a meagre wage as a secretary-typist in the Allied Control.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she assured him. “My father finds it hard to make both ends meet. He’s living on capital and not too much of that. Besides, I want to do an honest job of work; and I want to get behind the scenes of history. I find all this vastly interesting, though very tragic.”

“Tragic?”

“All this ruin,” she answered, looking away from the lake in the direction of Berlin which she could see only in her mind’s eye—that great capital with its skeleton houses, bomb-shattered streets, masses of broken stone and twisted iron.

“I’m sorry for the German people—all those women and girls prowling about the ruins, coming up from damp cellars and beginning to get really hungry. The children make my heart ache, poor little ones!”

Julian laughed lightly.

“They asked for it, didn’t they? I don’t feel a twinge of pity for them.”

They had an argument about that. She accused him of being heartless. He retaliated by calling her a sentimentalist.

She had questioned him about his own family, but he had been very vague about that. Once he told her that they had lived in Rugby. He had been to school at Rugby.

“Oh, then you must know Billy Arkwright. He was there. A friend of my brother Timothy.”

“Oh, I expect he was in another form,” answered Julian carelessly. “One didn’t know all the fellows.”

“But he was captain of the First Eleven,” said Pamela.

“Oh lord, yes. That chap. Yes, of course.”

Julian always seemed to have plenty of money. He was particular about German wine which was not cheap. He had bought his car which took them on each pleasant excursion. Once she accused him of being extravagant.

“You can’t possibly do this on your pay, Julian. I hope you’re not getting into debt or anything foolish like that. Do your people give you a handsome allowance?”

“Not a bean,” he told her. “But I’m making quite a bit on the Black Market. Cigarettes for German marks. German marks for English quids until they stopped it. It’s as easy as falling off a log.”

He could see that he had shocked her. There was a look of doubt in her eyes, and in her voice, when she spoke.

“Is that quite honourable, Julian? Isn’t it rather a low-down game?”

“Low down? On the contrary. It’s high finance and everybody’s doing it. I should’ve been a fool if I didn’t.... Cripes! Look at that German girl just about to dive. She has the figure of the Venus of Milo.”

They bathed that afternoon again, and shyly she looked at his figure. Yes, he was like a Greek faun, his brown limbs with a faint glint of golden hair on them. That afternoon he made love to her, and she could not resist him. His kisses were warm on her lips. During that early summer they wandered hand in hand through German woods on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and hand in hand sometimes by night in the ruins of Berlin on their way to a cabaret or an underground restaurant. In the day-time German girls smiled at him and looked enviously at her. There was some magic about him—she knew its lure and its power—which made all girls smile at him with softness in their eyes. He would only have to crook one finger and any girl, almost, would come to him.

“You’re a Don Juan!” she told him once. “I’m afraid you have had many love affairs before you met me.”

“A few,” he admitted light-heartedly. “But they were nothing except passing episodes. You’re the first girl I’ve loved seriously and I love you as Adam loved Eve in the beginning of time. I love the look of you and the mind of you and the body of you, and the beauty that shines in your eyes. But I’m a bit afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me? No, I can’t believe that!”

“You’re on such a high pedestal of honour and virtue, and you’re the daughter of the Right Hon. Lord Bramley. I shan’t be able to live up to you.”

She had been abashed by this exaggerated homage to her virtue in which she had no great confidence and in this humility and self abasement by Julian.

“I hope there won’t be any living up to or living down to,” she answered, laughing at him. “Let’s start on the level with equality of love, my dear. Let’s make it a high level, as high as heaven.”

“In any case you’re adorable,” he told her and she liked being told, especially when he had his arms round her and she nestled close to him and felt safe and wonderfully happy with her love, except that it made her feel a little selfish and unduly favoured among women. In the background of her love was this frightful city of ruin, the ruin not only of stones and marble, of palaces and churches and monuments, but the ruin of human lives without any chance of health or happiness. These Berliners looked gaunt and pallid, and in their eyes was a kind of deadness of despair. She shirked looking into their eyes. It is not amusing to look into dead eyes, and tortured eyes. During the War she had had no love for Germans. As a nation they had done terrible and frightful things, unbelievable in their cruelty until one had to believe. But now in their downfall and misery she pitied them, especially the young mothers with their children and the pretty girls still putting up an outward show of style, who came up from the underground shelters and cellars under piles of rubble where they were herded together. So many of these girls were willing to sell themselves to any British or American soldier for a few cigarettes or a meal somewhere. Julian told that with a laugh and she had shivered.

“Don’t laugh, Julian. It’s too awful. I can’t bear to think of it.”

“You’re too sensitive, Pam,” he answered. “Life is like that. Life on the whole, especially now, is a dirty business.”

“Let’s keep clean,” she cried. “Oh, Julian, how thankful I am for our love in the midst of all this evil and misery!”

She was warned off Julian by some of her friends but it made no dent in her mind or heart.

“If I were you, Miss Faraday,” said Major Briggs one day, “I wouldn’t go about too much with that fellow Inchbold. He’s not quite sound. You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean,” she had answered angrily.

“I’m talking to you as a friend,” said Major Briggs quietly. “He’s not quite out of the top drawer. See what I mean? Not up to your mark, young woman. Your father’s daughter——”

“Please leave my father’s name out of this conversation,” she had said a little heatedly. “I am here as Pamela Faraday, typist on the Allied Control. Because my father happens to be a public figure——”

“Well, I’ve had my little say,” answered Major Briggs good-naturedly. “Strictly between ourselves, of course. Don’t report back to young Inchbold.”

She had ignored this warning and others. Elsie Venner had been one of the backbiters. Things were difficult after a painful scene one night when Elsie had called Julian a ‘quirk’ and a ‘spiv’.

“Those are new words to me,” Pamela had said, “but I’ve no doubt you mean them to be offensive and for that reason I shall slap your face.”

She had gone over to Elsie and slapped her across the face with the back of her hand in a sudden rage and passion, utterly unlike herself, contrary to everything in her upbringing and family tradition—like some street girl who had been drinking and quarrelling. Was it because even then she had some secret doubt about Julian? Was it some little devil doubt within herself which made her so furious when Elsie flung beastly names at him?

Elsie had been frightened by this physical attack, and was utterly taken aback and dismayed. She began to whimper.

“Oh, Pam! How could you do such a thing? It’s only because I love you that I want to warn you off Julian. Nobody trusts him. He’s too beautiful to be true. And he doesn’t tell the truth. Half his stories are just made up. Peter has checked up on some of them. I don’t want you to get caught, Pam. You’re too good to go dancing off to the pipes of Pan with a young satyr who has goat’s feet in his boots.”

It was an extraordinary thing to say. Pamela had turned quite white when she heard those words, remembering her first impression of Julian as a Greek faun, as a young satyr with vine leaves in his hair. Dionysus.

“I’m going to marry Julian,” she said presently, “I shan’t invite you to the wedding.”

She was a little conscience-stricken about Christopher Harington who wrote to her regularly, nice, chatty, affectionate letters. Always looking forward to her return. He had made up his mind, poor dear, that she was going to marry him one day, and if it hadn’t been for this passion which had caught hold of her, this physical emotion which came to her at the sight and touch of Julian, she would perhaps have married him. She had been hand-in-glove with Kit for a time. She still liked him immensely. They had played golf together, never very seriously. They had indulged in verbal battles—‘back chat’ as he called it—vastly enjoying themselves. But that was before the War. Now they were eight years older and Kit was a Conservative M.P. who had already made a name on the back benches though she couldn’t take him very seriously as a politician. Anyhow he was taking too much for granted as far as she was concerned. She had never promised to marry him. There was no formal or informal engagement. As she had told him, she regarded herself as a free woman. Still, poor Kit, dear Kit! She would hate to hurt him, and he would be hurt, dreadfully hurt perhaps, when she told him about Julian, her Dionysus.

She spoke to Julian about Kit one day. It was the day he first kissed her on the strand of the Havelsee.

“I ought not to let you make love to me like this, Julian.”

He raised his fair eyebrows.

“Why not? Am I repulsive to you?”

“There’s a man in England who loves me very much. I shall hurt him frightfully if I tell him about this.”

“Curse the fellow! Who is he?”

“It’s Kit Harington. One of the young Conservatives in the House of Commons.”

Julian took the news lightly.

“Quite a lad! Gets off some rather good stuff now and then and asks amusing things at question time to the annoyance of the Labour Ministers. Well, don’t worry about him. Let’s forget him.”

“I shall never do that,” said Pamela quickly. “I don’t forget those who love me.”

“How many?” asked Julian, grinning at her. “Tell me about your love affairs.”

“Nothing to tell. Only boy-and-girl flirtations.”

“Incredible!” he answered teasingly.

In her letters to Kit she mentioned Julian a good many times. It was deliberately done to give him a little warning. And then at last she wrote that letter which made him break a Queen Anne mirror and risk seven years’ bad luck.

There was one incident which distressed her because it showed that Julian was not always truthful with her, and to her truth was the first condition of friendship and of all human relationships and above all a fundamental point of confidence and trust between two lovers. There could be no love built upon deceit or any falsity.

It was only a trivial affair and perhaps she made too much of it. It happened one evening when she and Julian were at a cocktail party given by a young man named Peter Lampson who was sweet on Elsie Venner, and was a very amusing person, violent in his opinions and political prejudices, but otherwise harmless.

“Anybody want to hear the six o’clock bulletin from that power house of doctored news and Left Wing propaganda, commonly called the B.B.C.?”

So he had asked after a glance at a little German clock on his mantelshelf.

Two of the company desired to hear the news which was a catalogue of gloom and tragedy. More shootings in Palestine; another massacre in the Punjab; guerilla fighting in Greece; more austerities in England outlined by Sir Stafford Cripps; another strike threatened in the coal-mines; opposition to the Marshall Plan in Congress; a speech by Molotov abusing England and the United States. After a few minutes of this Peter Lampson’s friends began to chatter again.

“Not very cheerful all that!” said Pamela. “More sacrifice for English housewives, poor dears. Fewer clothing coupons. Less fats. Oh, dear, oh dear!”

“What can we expect, dear lady?” asked Peter Lampson. “As long as we have a Labour Government we shall advance steadily like sleepwalkers to the edge of the black pit of ruin. Those dreadful people! I’m leaning towards a belief in tyranniside. I’m in favour of a revolt by the Middle Classes on behalf of liberty and private enterprise. Barricades in Pall Mall. An attack on the House of Commons, by an Army Corps of housewives armed with brooms and mops.”

“You know you’re talking nonsense, Peter,” said Pamela, laughing at him.

“I hope I don’t offend the susceptibilities of anybody here,” answered Peter with mock courtesy. “I mean if we have any crypto-Communists among us——”

He glanced at Julian Inchbold with a faintly suspicious smile.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Julian, rather heatedly. “I’m a true blue Conservative. I detest Labour.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I’m glad to hear it. I thought you might be related to that dreadful man Inchbold on the Labour benches of the House of Commons. Drops all his ‘h’s’. One of the bosses of the T.U.C. which dictates the Government policy behind the scenes. Are you, by the way?”

Pamela saw Julian’s face flush suddenly.

“I didn’t come here to be insulted,” he said.

Peter waved his hand and spilt a drop of gin as he did so.

“My dear fellow, no offence meant! We all have regrettable relatives. I have an aunt who is a secret drinker. Drinks like a fish and throws table-knives about. Very unfortunate for the family!”

It was a week or so later when Julian had come round to Pamela’s room that there was a sequel to the incident at Peter Lampson’s party—when Julian had got so hot under the collar at the suggestion that he was related to the Labour member Stephen Inchbold. He took out an envelope from his pocket and used the letter in it as a spill to light a cigarette from the electric fire. He dropped the envelope and presently Pamela picked it up to put in the wastepaper-basket. Her eyes caught some words written on the back.

From Stephen Inchbold, M.P.

“That’s funny,” she exclaimed.

“What’s funny?” asked Julian, carelessly.

“Your letter is from that Labour man. Julian, why does he write to you?”

For a moment Julian hesitated. Then he laughed and coloured up slightly.

“As a matter of fact he’s my father.”

“Your father?”

Pamela was astounded by these words and she felt herself becoming a little pale.

“But, Julian, you denied all relationship with him when Peter questioned you the other night.”

“Not at all,” answered Julian, “I said I hadn’t come there to be insulted. He was jeering at my father because he dropped his ‘h’s’, which as a matter of fact he doesn’t often do.”

“But, Julian, it was a denial of relationship. It was like Peter—the other Peter who denied Christ.”

“My dear child!” said Julian, laughing rather uneasily. “Don’t exaggerate a trivial affair. I was slightly irritated by that snob Peter——”

“But you deceived me,” said Pamela. “You have never told me that your father was a Labour member. Why not, Julian? Why not tell me everything? Surely I have a right to know. Unless there is truth between us——”

Julian refused to take the matter seriously.

“I was keeping it up my sleeve for a little while. I thought it might shock you to know that my father was on the Labour side. As the daughter of Lord Bramley, one of the Tory leaders, you might have held it up against me. I was going to tell you, of course, in due time.”

She was sitting on the floor between his knees in front of the little electric fire, and she did not answer for a moment or two.

“Julian, I don’t like it,” she said, very gravely. “You aren’t frank with me. You’ve always avoided my questions when I asked about your family. Are you ashamed of them?”

“They’re all right,” he answered lightly. “Poor but honest! I don’t see eye to eye with my honoured sire. I’ve switched over to the other side of the political game. It’s all a racket, this Labour stuff.”

Pamela was silent again for a few moments. Then she asked a question.

“Julian, did you really go to Rugby? You didn’t know Billy Arkwright.”

Julian laughed again rather loudly in a forced way.

“Certainly I went to Rugby but not to the snob school. I went to Rugby Grammar School where doubtless I was better educated.”

Pamela withdrew herself from her position between his knees. She stood up and went to the window but could not see into the darkness outside.

“Peeved with me, O lovely lady?” asked Julian presently.

She turned upon him and spoke angrily.

“More than peeved. Bewildered and deeply hurt.”

“Oh, come now,” said Julian, “you’re making a mountain out of a molehill!”

“I hate falsity and pretence,” said Pamela.

Julian went over to her and took hold of her arms.

“What a tragedy queen you are!” he exclaimed. “I wasn’t in the least degree untruthful but I dislike people prying into my private affairs. Not that there’s anything to hide. Apart from a touch of shyness in a simple and open-hearted guy. Haven’t you found that out by now?”

He looked at her with laughing eyes which seemed to her very frank and very boyish. How could she resist that irresistible smile? Perhaps she had misjudged him. Perhaps she had made too much fuss about all this. Perhaps she had thought he was untruthful when he was only shy and reticent. So she thought, under the spell of his attraction, giving him the benefit of the doubt, or at least crushing the doubt down into her subconscious mind from which sometimes, especially in a wakeful night, it reappeared.

Now that Julian had told her about his family he seemed bothered about the political gulf between his father and hers.

“Won’t it lead to trouble?” he asked her once.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Every kind of trouble like that which happened to Romeo and Juliet. You know, the Montagues and the Capulets! ‘A plague on both your houses.’ I played the part of Juliet as a boy of fifteen at Rugby—Grammar School I mean—I made quite a hit.”

He gave her a sideways smile at this reference to Rugby.

“I dare say Mother may be a little violent when she hears,” admitted Pamela. “She is not exactly tolerant of the Labour Government. In some of her letters she calls them all sorts of names.”

“I agree with her,” said Julian. “A bunch of crooks—mostly. But I don’t want to take poison—like Romeo—in Westminster Abbey or St. Martin’s crypt because your father and mother object to your marriage with the son of a Labour member, who drops his ‘h’s’ now and then.”

Pamela laughed at this apprehension.

“My father is very wise and tolerant. Mother may make a spot of trouble.”

“Seriously,” said Julian—it was not often he said ‘seriously’—“I’m a trifle timid when I come to think of it. After all, your father is a Peer of the Realm, and after all, my father was foreman in the railway yards at Rugby. There’s a bit of difference, isn’t there? I shall have to eat humble pie at her ladyship’s table, if I ever get a seat there.”

Pamela dismissed all that as a fantasy.

“There’s no such thing as caste nowadays, thank goodness. All that has gone with the wind.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Julian, doubtfully. “I tremble in every limb at the thought of making my bow to your lady mother.”

He did not tremble in any limb at the thought of it. He was a young man of great self assurance though he had claimed that he was shy. At least he was a good actor and could adopt the right pose in any company.