“Quick!  You shall catch your train.  The clock is wrong—­the clock is too soon.”

She implored him with positive desperation.  She shook him and dragged him, energised in an instant by the overwhelming idea that for him to miss his train would be fatal to him—­and to her also.  She could and did believe in the efficacy of mascots against bullets and shrapnel and bayonets.  But the traditions of a country of conscripts were ingrained in her childhood and youth, and she had not the slightest faith in the efficacy of no matter what mascot to protect from the consequences of indiscipline.  And already during her short career in London she had had good reason to learn the sacredness of the leave-train.  Fantastic tales she had heard of capital executions for what seemed trifling laxities—­tales whispered half proudly by the army in the rooms of horrified courtesans—­tales in which the remote and ruthless imagined figure of the Grand Provost-Marshal rivalled that of God himself.  And, moreover, if this man fell into misfortune through her, she would eternally lose the grace of the most clement Virgin who had confided him to her and who was capable of terrible revenges.  She secretly called on the Virgin.  Nay, she became the Virgin.  She found a miraculous strength, and furiously pulled the poor sot out of bed.  The fibres of his character had been soaked away, and she mystically replaced them with her own.  Intimidated and, as it were, mesmerised, he began to dress.  She rushed as she was to the door.

“Marthe!  Marthe!”

“Madame?” replied the fat woman in alarm.

“Run for a taxi.”

“But, madame, it is raining terribly.”

“Je m’en fous!  Run for a taxi.”

Turning back into the room she repeated; “The clock is too soon.”  But she knew that it was not.  Nearly nude, she put on a hat.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Do not worry.  I come with you.”

She took a skirt and a jersey and then threw a cloak over everything.  He was very slow; he could find nothing; he could button nothing.  She helped him.  But when he began to finger his leggings with the endless laces and the innumerable eyelets she snatched them from him.

“Those—­in the taxi,” she said.

“But there is no taxi.”

“There will be a taxi.  I have sent the maid.”

At the last moment, as she was hurrying him on to the staircase, she grasped her handbag.  They stumbled one after the other down the dark stairs.  He had now caught the infection of her tremendous anxiety.  She opened the front door.  The glistening street was absolutely empty; the rain pelted on the pavements and the roadway, each drop falling like a missile and raising a separate splash, so that it seemed as if the flood on the earth was leaping up to meet the flood from the sky.

“Come!” she said with hysterical impatience.  “We cannot wait.  There will be a taxi in Piccadilly, I know.”