Children of no Man's Land by G.B. Stern

I

But Cliffe Kennedy was indubitably to blame. No one could spend so much time with Cliffe as Deb had done of late, without echoing his tendency to achieve a climax at whatever cost. His sense of dramatic effect abhorred a vacuum. Deb had caught the trick, that was all. She was always impressionable. "I have treated you with the respect due to a good girl . " and then the pause-and, spoken almost mechanically, her curtain line.

"Well-he asked for it!"

The drawback to these histrionic displays in ordinary life, however, is lack of the aforesaid curtain. Certainly it should have fallen at that juncture: "You see, I have not been good. " and Act III a fortnight later. Meanwhile, Deb and Samson remained looking at one another, in Mrs Phillips' boudoir, her head proudly tilted, so that the little three-cornered face was fore-shortened to an upcurling of black eye-lashes, and mouth a mutinous half-crescent, the corners trembling to a smile sternly chidden back again-"This is serious! "-but the irrepressible desire persisted. Samson's expression was such a marvel of Pharisaic indignation and disgust.

"So much for the charity of a good man's love! Why, supposing it had been true and I wanted him to forgive me?"

In Samson Phillips' mind was no doubt of the statement which had shattered his rock-embedded belief in the immaculate chastity of a well brought up Jewish girl of his own set. The argument: "Why should she say such a thing if it weren't true? " was too obviously undeniable for admittance. And Deb could have explained to him neither the contagious peculiarity of Mr Cliffe Kennedy, nor the fact that the Phillips' family and the thrice persistent proposal had rendered her hysterical.

Well-now at least she was free. Samson would never again desire her for his wife. Mrs Phillips would never again invite her to dinner. Although Deb had chosen a drastic method of dealing with undesirable invitations to dinner or to the altar-"do they have altars in a Synagogue? I forget . but oh, I wish he would speak before I laugh!"

But Samson's principles, against which in sheer despair she had flung her falsehood, stood rigid and undamaged, like so many spear-tipped railings. Henceforth, Deb was to him an outcast. He looked at her. and then he went to the door and called his mother, and told her Deb was not feeling very well and wanted to return home at once.

Mrs Phillips gathered from his expression that "that girl" had flouted him again. Deb was sent home in a taximeter and an atmosphere of black disgrace. Samson's one look had reminded her of a Roundhead soldier-Oliver Cromwell himself. What a fate to have escaped-Cromwell's wife, Cromwell's family. And a Jewish Cromwell into the bargain!

"But will he tell-anybody?"

"What does it matter!"

An impulse of sheer mischief-then swift contrition-intense relief-and the usual shoulder-shrug. This was the wheel of Deb's psychology. Several days later she told Antonia of the debâcle. Antonia had meanwhile been out of town, driving her Major-General.

"Samson would never have done for you, of course. But you encouraged him, Deb. Why?"

"I didn't," sunnily; "I just wanted to try if I could make myself good enough. And I pulled it off-for a fortnight."

"And then, in one well-chosen lie-Deb, I love you very dearly, but your creed is beyond all following. It seems to me to consist mainly of a lot of trouble for nothing."

"I just wanted to try," Deb repeated. "I _might_ have been good enough, you know. And if the clock had struck while I was pulling that face, I'd have stopped like that. So Nurse used to say."

"Meaning-if you had fallen in love with a good man at the psychological moment of trying to be good. You're too accommodating altogether, my child. Suppose it were a bad man, and the clock struck while you were pulling _that_ face?"

Deb went to the mirror, and tried on the two faces, one after another. "Which becomes me best? " she demanded anxiously, "Puritan or rogue? Oh, Antonia, it was such fun busting the Phillips' illusion. I shall never have such fun again."

II

Samson was sent to the Front shortly afterwards. And Beatrice confided in her mother-in-law, Trudchen Redbury, her amazement that any girl could so far lose her reason as thrice to refuse a match like Samson Phillips: "She must have said something to upset him badly, that last time-but he won't say what; he seemed heart-broken, poor fellow. and going off like that, too, without any hope. How _could_ she?"