Hallowe'en Party

He replaced the receiver and sat looking thoughtfully down at the document in front of him. He was still not reading it.

His mind was going over events of the past. Two years close on two years ago and that strange little man this morning with his patent leather shoes and his big moustaches, had brought it back to him, asking all those questions.

Now he was going over in his own mind a conversation of nearly two years ago.

He saw again, sitting in the chair opposite him, a girl, a short, stocky figure the olive brown skin, the dark red generous mouth, the heavy cheekbones and the fierceness of the blue eyes that looked into his beneath the heavy, beetling brows. A passionate face, a face full of vitality, a face that had known suffering would probably always know suffering but would never learn to accept suffering. The kind of woman who would fight and protest until the end. Where was she now, he wondered?

Somehow or other she had managed what had she managed exactly? Who had helped her? Had anyone helped her? Somebody must have done so.

She was back again, he supposed, in some trouble-stricken spot in Central Europe where she had come from, where she belonged, where she had had to go back to because there was no other course for her to take unless she was content to lose her liberty.

Jeremy Fullerton was an upholder of the law. He believed in the law, he was contemptuous of many of the magistrates of to-day with their weak sentences, their acceptance of scholastic needs. The students who stole books, the young married women who denuded the supermarkets, the girls who filched money from their employers, the boys who wrecked telephone boxes, none of them in real need, none of them desperate, most of them had known nothing but overindulgence in bringing-up and a fervent belief that anything they could not afford to buy was theirs to take. Yet along with his intrinsic belief in the administration of the law justly, Mr. Fullerton was a man who had compassion. He could be sorry for people. He could be sorry, and was sorry, for Olga Seminoff though he was quite unaffected by the passionate arguments she advanced for herself.

"I came to you for help. I thought you would help me. You were kind last year.

You helped me with forms so that I could remain another year in England. So they say to me: "You need not answer any questions you do not wish to. You can be represented by a lawyer.9 So I come to you."

"The circumstances you have instanced-" and Mr. Fullerton remembered how dryly and coldly he had said that, all the more dryly and coldly because of the pity that lay behind the dryness of the statement "-do not apply. In this case I am not at liberty to act for you legally. I am representing already the Drake family. As you know, I was Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe's solicitor."

"But she is dead. She does not want a solicitor when she is dead."

"She was fond of you," said Mr.

Fullerton.

"Yes, she was fond of me. That is what I am telling you. That is why she wanted to give me the money."

"All her money?"

"Why not? Why not? She did not like her relations."

"You are wrong. She was very fond of her niece and nephew."

"Well, then, she may have liked Mr.

Drake but she did not like Mrs. Drake.

She found her very tiresome. Mrs. Drake interfered. She would not let Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe do always what she liked. She would not let her eat the food she liked."

"She is a very conscientious woman, and she tried to get her aunt to obey the doctor's orders as to diet and not too much exercise and many other things."

"People do not always want to obey a doctor's orders. They do not want to be interfered with by relations. They like living their own lives and doing what they want and having what they want. She had plenty of money. She could have what she wanted! She could have as much as she liked of everything. She was rich rich rich, and she could do what she liked with her money. They have already quite enough money, Mr. and Mrs. Drake.

They have a fine house and clothes and two cars. They are very well-to-do. Why should they have any more?"

"They were her only living relations."

"She wanted me to have the money. She was sorry for me. She knew what I had been through. She knew about my father, arrested by the police and taken away. We never saw him again, my mother and I. And then my mother and how she died.

All my family died. It is terrible, what I have endured. You do not know what it is like to live in a police state, as I have lived in it.

No, no. You are on the side of the police. You are not on my side."

"No," Mr. Fullerton said, "I am not on your side. I am very sorry for what has happened to you, but you've brought this trouble about yourself."

"That is not true! It is not true that I have done anything I should not do. What have I done? I was kind to her, I was nice to her. I brought her in lots of things that she was not supposed to eat.