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The Rough Road

by William John Locke · English · Gutenberg #27786 · 568,884 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Rough Road

Author: William John Locke


        
Release date: January 12, 2009 [eBook #27786]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27786

Credits: E-text prepared by David Clarke, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team http://www.pgdp.net)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROUGH ROAD ***


E-text prepared by David Clarke, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team http://www.pgdp.net)



THE ROUGH ROAD

by

WILLIAM J. LOCKE







First Edition ... September 1918

John Lane
The Bodley Head Ltd




TO
SHEILA

THIS LITTLE TALE OF
THE GREAT WAR
AS A MEMORY FOR AFTER YEARS




THE ROUGH ROAD




CHAPTER I


This is the story of Doggie Trevor. It tells of his doings and of a
girl in England and a girl in France. Chiefly it is concerned with the
influences that enabled him to win through the war. Doggie Trevor did
not get the Victoria Cross. He got no cross or distinction whatever.
He did not even attain the sorrowful glory of a little white cross
above his grave on the Western Front. Doggie was no hero of romance,
ancient or modern. But he went through with it and is alive to tell
the tale.

The brutal of his acquaintance gave him the name of "Doggie" years
before the war was ever thought of, because he had been brought up
from babyhood like a toy Pom. The almost freak offspring of elderly
parents, he had the rough world against him from birth. His father
died before he had cut a tooth. His mother was old enough to be his
grandmother. She had the intense maternal instinct and the brain, such
as it is, of an earwig. She wrapped Doggie--his real name was James
Marmaduke--in cotton-wool, and kept him so until he was almost a grown
man. Doggie had never a chance. She brought him up like a toy Pom
until he was twenty-one--and then she died. Doggie being comfortably
off, continued the maternal tradition and kept on bringing himself up
like a toy Pom. He did not know what else to do. Then, when he was
five-and-twenty, he found himself at the edge of the world gazing in
timorous starkness down into the abyss of the Great War. Something
kicked him over the brink and sent him sprawling into the thick of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

That the world knows little of its greatest men is a commonplace among
silly aphorisms. With far more justice it may be stated that of its
least men the world knows nothing and cares less. Yet the Doggies of
the War, who on the cry of "Havoc!" have been let loose, much to their
own and everybody else's stupefaction, deserve the passing tribute
sometimes, poor fellows, of a sigh, sometimes of a smile, often of a
cheer. Very few of them--very few, at any rate, of the English
Doggies--have tucked their little tails between their legs and run
away. Once a brawny humorist wrote to Doggie Trevor "_Sursum cauda._"
Doggie happened to be at the time in a water-logged front trench in
Flanders and the writer basking in the mild sunshine of Simla with his
Territorial regiment. Doggie, bidden by the Hedonist of circumstance
to up with his tail, felt like a scorpion.

Such feelings, however, will be more adequately dealt with hereafter.
For the moment, it is only essential to obtain a general view of the
type to which Trevor belonged.

       *       *       *       *       *

If there is one spot in England where the present is the past, where
the future is still more of the past, where the past wraps you and
enfolds you in the dreamy mist of Gothic beauty, where the lazy
meadows sloping riverward deny the passage of the centuries, where the
very clouds are secular, it is the cathedral town of Durdlebury. No
factory chimneys defile with their smoke its calm air, or defy its
august and heaven-searching spires. No rabble of factory hands shocks
its few and sedate streets. Divine Providence, according to the
devout, and the crass stupidity of the local authorities seventy years
ago, according to progressive minds, turned the main line of railway
twenty miles from the sacred spot. So that to this year of grace it is
the very devil of a business to find out, from Bradshaw, how to get to
Durdlebury, and, having found, to get there. As for getting away, God
help you! But whoever wanted to get away from Durdlebury, except the
Bishop? In pre-motor days he used to grumble tremendously and threaten
the House of Lords with Railway Bills and try to blackmail the
Government with dark hints of resignation, and so he lived and
threatened and made his wearisome diocesan round of visits and died.
But now he has his episcopal motor-car, which has deprived him of his
grievances.

In the Close of Durdlebury, greenswarded, silent, sentinelled by
immemorial elms that guard the dignified Gothic dwellings of the
cathedral dignitaries, was James Marmaduke Trevor born. His father, a
man of private fortune, was Canon of Durdlebury. For many years he
lived in the most commodious canonical house in the Close with his
sisters Sophia and Sarah. In the course of time a new Dean, Dr.
Conover, was appointed to Durdlebury, and, restless innovator that he
was, underpinned the North Transept and split up Canon Trevor's home
by marrying Sophia. Then Sarah, bitten by the madness, committed
abrupt matrimony with the Rev. Vernon Manningtree, Rector of
Durdlebury. Canon Trevor, many years older than his sisters, remained
for some months in bewildered loneliness, until one day he found
himself standing in front of the cathedral altar with Miss Mathilda
Jessup, while the Bishop pronounced over them words diabolically
strange yet ecclesiastically familiar. Miss Jessup, thus transformed
into Mrs. Trevor, was a mature and comfortable maiden lady of ample
means, the only and orphan daughter of a late Bishop of Durdlebury.
Never had there been such a marrying and giving in marriage in the
cathedral circle. Children were born in Decanal, Rectorial and
Canonical homes. First a son to the Manningtrees, whom they named
Oliver. Then a daughter to the Conovers. Then a son, named James
Marmaduke, after the late Bishop Jessup, was born to the Trevors. The
profane say that Canon Trevor, a profound patristic theologian and an
enthusiastic palaeontologist, couldn't make head or tail of it all,
and, unable to decide whether James Marmaduke should be attributed to
Tertullian or the Neolithic period, expired in an agony of dubiety. At
any rate, the poor man died. The widow, of necessity, moved from the
Close, in order to make way for the new Canon, and betook herself with
her babe to Denby Hall, the comfortable house on the outskirts of the
town in which she had dwelt before her marriage.

The saturated essence of Durdlebury ran in Marmaduke's blood: an
honourable essence, a proud essence; an essence of all that is
statically beautiful and dignified in English life; but an essence
which, without admixture of wilder and more fluid elements, is apt to
run thick and clog the arteries. Marmaduke was coddled from his birth.
The Dean, then a breezy, energetic man, protested. Sarah Manningtree
protested. But when the Dean's eldest born died of diphtheria, Mrs.
Trevor, in her heart, set down the death as a judgment on Sophia for
criminal carelessness; and when young Oliver Manningtree grew up to be
an intolerable young Turk and savage, she looked on Marmaduke and,
thanking heaven that he was not as other boys were, enfolded him more
than ever beneath her motherly wing. When Oliver went to school in the
town and tore his clothes, and rolled in mud and punched other boys'
heads, Marmaduke remained at home under the educational charge of a
governess. Oliver, lean and lanky and swift-eyed, swaggered through
the streets unattended from the first day they sent him to a
neighbouring kindergarten. As the months and years of his childish
life passed, he grew more and more independent and vagabond. He swore
blood brotherhood with a butcher-boy and, unknown to his pious
parents, became the leader of a ferocious gang of pirates. Marmaduke,
on the other hand, was never allowed to cross the road without
feminine escort. Oliver had the profoundest contempt for Marmaduke.
Being two years older, he kicked him whenever he had a chance.
Marmaduke loathed him. Marmaduke shrank into Miss Gunter, the
governess's, skirts whenever he saw him. Mrs. Trevor therefore
regarded Oliver as the youthful incarnation of Beelzebub, and
quarrelled bitterly with her sister-in-law.

One day, Oliver, with three or four of his piratical friends, met
Marmaduke and Miss Gunter and a little toy terrier in the High Street.
The toy terrier was attached by a lead to Miss Gunter on the one side,
Marmaduke by a hand on the other. Oliver straddled rudely across the
path.

"Hallo! Look at thet two little doggies!" he cried. He snapped his
fingers at the terrier. "Come along, Tiny!" The terrier yapped. Oliver
grinned and turned to Marmaduke. "Come along, Fido, dear little
doggie."

"You're a nasty, rude, horrid boy, and I shall tell your mother,"
declared Miss Gunter indignantly.

But Oliver and his pirates laughed with the truculence befitting their
vocation, and bowing with ironical politeness, let their victim depart
to the parody of a popular song: "Good-bye, Doggie, we shall miss
you."

From that day onwards Marmaduke was known as "Doggie" throughout all
Durdlebury, save to his mother and Miss Gunter. The Dean himself grew
to think of him as "Doggie." People to this day call him Doggie,
without any notion of the origin of the name.

To preserve him from persecution, Mrs. Trevor jealously guarded him
from association with other boys. He neither learned nor played any
boyish games. In defiance of the doctor, whom she regarded as a member
of the brutal anti-Marmaduke League, Mrs. Trevor proclaimed
Marmaduke's delicacy of constitution. He must not go out into the
rain, lest he should get damp, nor into the hot sunshine, lest he
should perspire. She kept him like a precious plant in a carefully
warmed conservatory. Doggie, used to it from birth, looked on it as
his natural environment. Under feminine guidance and tuition he
embroidered and painted screens and played the piano and the mandolin,
and read Miss Charlotte Yonge and learned history from the late Mrs.
Markham. Without doubt his life was a happy one. All that he asked for
was sequestration from Oliver and his associates.

Now and then the cousins were forced to meet--at occasional children's
parties, for instance. A little daughter, Peggy, had been born in the
Deanery, replacing the lost firstborn, and festivals--to which came
the extreme youth of Durdlebury--were given in her honour. She liked
Marmaduke, who was five years her senior, because he was gentle and
clean and wore such beautiful clothes and brushed his hair so nicely;
whereas she detested Oliver, who, even at an afternoon party, looked
as if he had just come out of a rabbit-hole. Besides, Marmaduke danced
beautifully; Oliver couldn't and wouldn't, disdaining such effeminate
sports. His great joy was to put out a sly leg and send Doggie and his
partner sprawling. Once the Dean caught him at it, and called him a
horrid little beast, and threatened him with neck and crop expulsion
if he ever did it again. Doggie, who had picked himself up and
listened to the rebuke, said:

"I'm very glad to hear you talk to him like that, Uncle. I think his
behaviour is perfectly detestable."

The Dean's lips twitched and he turned away abruptly. Oliver glared at
Doggie.

"Oh, my holy aunt!" he whispered hoarsely. "Just you wait till I get
you alone!"

Oliver got him alone, an hour later, in a passage, having lain in
ambush for him, and after a few busy moments, contemplated a bruised
and bleeding Doggie blubbering in a corner.

"Do you think my behaviour is detestable now?"

"Yes," whimpered Doggie.

"I've a good mind to go on licking you until you say 'no,'" said
Oliver.

"You're a great big bully," said Doggie.

Oliver reflected. He did not like to be called a bully. "Look here,"
said he, "I'll stick my right arm down inside the back of my trousers
and fight you with my left."

"I don't want to fight. I can't fight," cried Doggie.

Oliver put his hands in his pockets.

"Will you come and play Kiss-in-the-Ring, then?" he asked
sarcastically.

"No," replied Doggie.

"Well, don't say I haven't made you generous offers," said Oliver, and
stalked away.

It was all very well for the Rev. Vernon Manningtree, when discussing
this incident with the Dean, to dismiss Doggie with a contemptuous
shrug and call him a little worm without any spirit. The unfortunate
Doggie remained a human soul with a human destiny before him. As to
his lack of spirit----

"Where," said the Dean, a man of wider sympathies, "do you suppose he
could get any from? Look at his parentage. Look at his upbringing by
that idiot woman."

"If he belonged to me, I'd drown him," said the Rector.

"If I had my way with Oliver," said the Dean, "I'd skin him alive."

"I'm afraid he's a young devil," said the Rector, not without paternal
pride. "But he has the makings of a man."

"So has Marmaduke," replied the Dean.

"Bosh!" said Mr. Manningtree.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Oliver went to Rugby, happier days than ever dawned for
Marmaduke. There were only the holidays to fear. But as time went on,
the haughty contempt of Oliver, the public-school boy, for the
home-bred Doggie, forbade him to notice the little creature's
existence; so that even the holidays lost their gloomy menace and
became like the normal halcyontide. Meanwhile Doggie grew up. When he
reached the age of fourteen, the Dean, by strenuous endeavour, rescued
him from the unavailing tuition of Miss Gunter. But school for
Marmaduke Mrs. Trevor would not hear of. It was brutal of Edward--the
Dean--to suggest such a thing. Marmaduke--so sensitive and
delicate--school would kill him. It would undo all the results of her
unceasing care. It would make him coarse and vulgar, like other horrid
boys. She would sooner see him dead at her feet than at a public
school. It was true that he ought to have the education of a
gentleman. She did not need Edward to point out her duty. She would
engage a private tutor.

"All right. I'll get you one," said the Dean.

The Master of his old college at Cambridge sent him an excellent
youth, who had just taken his degree--a second class in the Classical
Tripos--an all-round athlete and a gentleman. The first thing he did
was to take Marmaduke on the lazy river that flowed through the
Durdlebury meadows, thereby endangering his life, woefully blistering
his hands, and making him ache all over his poor little body. After a
quarter of an hour's interview with Mrs. Trevor, the indignant young
man threw up his post and departed.

Mrs. Trevor determined to select a tutor herself. A scholastic agency
sent her a dozen candidates. She went to London and interviewed them
all. A woman, even of the most limited intelligence, invariably knows
what she wants, and invariably gets it. Mrs. Trevor got Phineas
McPhail, M.A. Glasgow, B.A. Cambridge (Third Class Mathematical
Greats), reading for Holy Orders.

"I was training for the ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland," said
he, "when I gradually became aware of the error of my ways, and saw
that there could only be salvation in the episcopal form of Church
government. As the daughter of a bishop, Mrs. Trevor, you will
appreciate my conscientious position. An open scholarship and the
remainder of my little patrimony enabled me to get my Oxford degree.
You would have no objection to my continuing my theological studies
while I undertake the education of your son?"

Phineas McPhail pleased Mrs. Trevor. He had what she called a rugged,
honest Scotch face, with a very big nose in the middle of it, and
little grey eyes overhung by brown and shaggy eyebrows. He spoke with
the mere captivating suggestion of an accent. The son of decayed,
proud, and now extinct gentlefolk, he presented personal testimonials
of an unexceptionable quality.

Phineas McPhail took to Doggie and Durdlebury as a duck to water. He
read for Holy Orders for seven years. When the question of his
ordination arose, he would declare impressively that his sacred duty
was the making of Marmaduke into a scholar and a Christian. That duty
accomplished, he would begin to think of himself. Mrs. Trevor
accounted him the most devoted and selfless friend that woman ever
had. He saw eye to eye with her in every detail of Marmaduke's
upbringing. He certainly taught the boy, who was naturally
intelligent, a great deal, and repaired the terrible gaps in Miss
Gunter's system of education. McPhail had started life with many eager
curiosities, under the impulse of which he had amassed considerable
knowledge of a superficial kind which, lolling in an arm-chair, with a
pipe in his mouth, he found easy to impart. To the credit side of Mrs.
Trevor's queer account it may be put that she did not object to
smoking. The late Canon smoked incessantly. Perhaps the odour of
tobacco was the only keen memory of her honeymoon and brief married
life.

During his seven years of soft living, Phineas McPhail scientifically
developed an original taste for whisky. He seethed himself in it as
the ancients seethed a kid in its mother's milk. He had the art to do
himself to perfection. Mrs. Trevor beheld in him the mellowest and
blandest of men. Never had she the slightest suspicion of evil
courses. To such a pitch of cunning in the observance of the
proprieties had he arrived, that the very servants knew not of his
doings. It was only later--after Mrs. Trevor's death--when a surveyor
was called in by Marmaduke to put the old house in order, that a
disused well at the back of the house was found to be half filled with
hundreds of whisky bottles secretly thrown in by Phineas McPhail.

The Dean and Mr. Manningtree, although ignorant of McPhail's habits,
agreed in calling him a lazy hound and a parasite on their fond
sister-in-law. And they were right. But Mrs. Trevor turned a deaf ear
to their slanders. They were unworthy to be called Christian men, let
alone ministers of the Gospel. Were it not for the sacred associations
of her father and her husband, she would never enter the cathedral
again. Mr. McPhail was exactly the kind of tutor that Marmaduke
needed. Mr. McPhail did not encourage him to play rough games, or take
long walks, or row on the river, because he appreciated his
constitutional delicacy. He was the only man in the world during her
unhappy widowhood who understood Marmaduke. He was a treasure beyond
price.

When Doggie was sixteen, fate, fortune, chance, or whatever you like
to call it, did him a good turn. It made his mother ill, and sent him
away with her to foreign health resorts. Doggie and McPhail travelled
luxuriously, lived in luxurious hotels and visited in luxurious ease
various picture galleries and monuments of historic or aesthetic
interest. The boy, artistically inclined and guided by the idle yet
well-informed Phineas, profited greatly. Phineas sought profit to them
both in other ways.

"Mrs. Trevor," said he, "don't you think it a sinful shame for
Marmaduke to waste his time over Latin and mathematics, and such
things as he can learn at home, instead of taking advantage of his
residence in a foreign country to perfect himself in the idiomatic and
conversational use of the language?"

Mrs. Trevor, as usual, agreed. So thenceforward, whenever they were
abroad, which was for three or four months of each year, Phineas
revelled in sheer idleness, nicotine, and the skilful consumption of
alcohol, while highly paid professors taught Marmaduke--and,
incidentally, himself--French and Italian.

Of the world, however, and of the facts, grim or seductive, of life,
Doggie learned little. Whether by force of some streak of honesty,
whether through sheer laziness, whether through canny self-interest,
Phineas McPhail conspired with Mrs. Trevor to keep Doggie in darkest
ignorance. His reading was selected like that of a young girl in a
convent: he was taken only to the most innocent of plays: foreign
theatres, casinos, and such-like wells of delectable depravity,
existed almost beyond his ken. Until he was twenty it never occurred
to him to sit up after his mother had gone to bed. Of strange
goddesses he knew nothing. His mother saw to that. He had a mild
affection for his cousin Peggy, which his mother encouraged. She
allowed him to smoke cigarettes, drink fine claret, the remains of the
cellar of her father, the bishop, a connoisseur, and _creme de
menthe_. And, until she died, that was all poor Doggie knew of the
lustiness of life.

Mrs. Trevor died, and Doggie, as soon as he had recovered from the
intensity of his grief, looked out upon a lonely world. Phineas, like
Mrs. Micawber, swore he would never desert him. In the perils of Polar
exploration or the comforts of Denby Hall, he would find Phineas
McPhail ever by his side. The first half-dozen or so of these
declarations consoled Doggie tremendously. He dreaded the Church
swallowing up his only protector and leaving him defenceless.
Conscientiously, however, he said:

"I don't want your affection for me to stand in your way, sir."

"'Sir'?" cried Phineas, "is it not practicable for us to do away with
the old relations of master and pupil, and become as brothers? You are
now a man, and independent. Let us be Pylades and Orestes. Let us
share and share alike. Let us be Marmaduke and Phineas."

Doggie was touched by such devotion. "But your ambitions to take Holy
Orders, which you have sacrificed for my sake?"

"I think it may be argued," said Phineas, "that the really beautiful
life is delight in continued sacrifice. Besides, my dear boy, I am not
quite so sure as I was when I was young, that by confining oneself
within the narrow limits of a sacerdotal profession, one can retain
all one's wider sympathies both with human infirmity and the gladder
things of existence."

"You're a true friend, Phineas," said Doggie.

"I am," replied Phineas.

It was just after this that Doggie wrote him a cheque for a thousand
pounds on account of a vaguely indicated year's salary.

If Phineas had maintained the wily caution which he had exercised for
the past seven years, all might have been well. But there came a time
when unneedfully he declared once more that he would never desert
Marmaduke, and declaring it, hiccoughed so horribly and stared so
glassily, that Doggie feared he might be ill. He had just lurched into
Doggie's own peacock-blue and ivory sitting-room when he was
mournfully playing the piano.

"You're unwell, Phineas. Let me get you something."

"You're right, laddie," Phineas agreed, his legs giving way
alarmingly, so that he collapsed on a brocade-covered couch. "It's a
touch of the sun, which I would give you to understand," he continued
with a self-preservatory flash, for it was an overcast day in June,
"is often magnified in power when it is behind a cloud. A wee drop of
whisky is what I require for a complete recovery."

Doggie ran into the dining-room and returned with a decanter of
whisky, glass and siphon--an adjunct to the sideboard since Mrs.
Trevor's death. Phineas filled half the tumbler with spirit, tossed it
off, smiled fantastically, tried to rise, and rolled upon the carpet.
Doggie, frightened, rang the bell. Peddle, the old butler, appeared.

"Mr. McPhail is ill. I can't think what can be the matter with him."

Peddle looked at the happy Phineas with the eyes of experience.

"If you will allow me to say so, sir," said he, "the gentleman is dead
drunk."

And that was the beginning of the end of Phineas. He lost grip of
himself. He became the scarlet scandal of Durdlebury and the terror of
Doggie's life. The Dean came to the rescue of a grateful nephew. A
swift attack of delirium tremens crowned and ended Phineas McPhail's
Durdlebury career.

"My boy," said the Dean on the day of Phineas's expulsion, "I don't
want to rub it in unduly, but I've warned your poor mother for years,
and you for months, against this bone-idle, worthless fellow. Neither
of you would listen to me. But you see that I was right. Perhaps now
you may be more inclined to take my advice."

"Yes, Uncle," replied Doggie submissively.

The Dean, a comfortable florid man in the early sixties, took up his
parable and expounded it for three-quarters of an hour. If ever young
man heard that which was earnestly meant for his welfare, Doggie heard
it from his Very Reverend Uncle's lips.

"And now, my dear boy," said the Dean by way of peroration, "you
cannot but understand that it is your bounden duty to apply yourself
to some serious purpose in life."

"I do," said Doggie. "I've been thinking over it for a long time. I'm
going to gather material for a history of wall-papers."




CHAPTER  II


Thenceforward Doggie, like the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's
fellow-millions, lived alone. He did not complain. There was little to
complain about. He owned a pleasant old house set in fifteen acres of
grounds. He had an income of three thousand pounds a year. Old Peddle,
the butler, and his wife, the housekeeper, saved him from domestic
cares. Rising late and retiring early, like the good King of Yvetot, he
cheated the hours that might have proved weary. His meals, his toilet,
his music, his wall-papers, his drawing and embroidering--specimens of
the last he exhibited with great success at various shows held by Arts
and Crafts Guilds, and such-like high and artistic fellowships--his
sweet-peas, his chrysanthemums, his postage stamps, his dilettante
reading and his mild social engagements, filled most satisfyingly the
hours not claimed by slumber. Now and then appointments with his
tailor summoned him to London. He stayed at the same mildewed old
family hotel in the neighbourhood of Bond Street at which his mother
and his grandfather, the bishop, had stayed for uncountable years.
There he would lunch and dine stodgily in musty state. In the evenings
he would go to the plays discussed in the less giddy of Durdlebury
ecclesiastical circles. The play over, it never occurred to him to do
otherwise than drive decorously back to Sturrocks's Hotel. Suppers at
the Carlton or the Savoy were outside his sphere of thought or
opportunity. His only acquaintance in London were vague elderly female
friends of his mother, who invited him to chilly semi-suburban teas
and entertained him with tepid reminiscence and criticism of their
divers places of worship. The days in London thus passed drearily, and
Doggie was always glad to get home again.

In Durdlebury he began to feel himself appreciated. The sleepy society
of the place accepted him as a young man of unquestionable birth and
irreproachable morals. He could play the piano, the harp, the viola,
the flute, and the clarinet, and sing a very true mild tenor. As
secretary of the Durdlebury Musical Association, he filled an
important position in the town. Dr. Flint--Joshua Flint, Mus.
Doc.--organist of the cathedral, scattered broadcast golden opinions
of Doggie. There was once a concert of old English music, which the
dramatic critics of the great newspapers attended--and one of them
mentioned Doggie--"Mr. Marmaduke Trevor, who played the viol da gamba
as to the manner born." Doggie cut out the notice, framed it, and
stuck it up in his peacock and ivory sitting-room.

Besides music, Doggie had other social accomplishments. He could
dance. He could escort young ladies home of nights. Not a dragon in
Durdlebury would not have trusted Doggie with untold daughters. With
women, old and young, he had no shynesses. He had been bred among
them, understood their purely feminine interests, and instinctively
took their point of view. On his visits to London, he could be
entrusted with commissions. He could choose the exact shade of silk
for a drawing-room sofa cushion, and had an unerring taste in the
selection of wedding presents. Young men, other than budding
ecclesiastical dignitaries, were rare in Durdlebury, and Doggie had
little to fear from the competition of coarser masculine natures. In a
word, Doggie was popular.

Although of no mean or revengeful nature, he was human enough to feel
a little malicious satisfaction when it was proved to Durdlebury that
Oliver had gone to the devil. His Aunt Sarah, Mrs. Manningtree, had
died midway in the Phineas McPhail period; Mr. Manningtree a year or
so later had accepted a living in the North of England, and died when
Doggie was about four-and-twenty. Meanwhile Oliver, who had been
withdrawn young from Rugby, where he had been a thorn in the side of
the authorities, and had been pinned like a cockchafer to a desk in a
family counting-house in Lothbury, E.C., had broken loose, quarrelled
with his father, gone off with paternal malediction and a maternal
heritage of a thousand pounds to California, and was lost to the
family ken. When a man does not write to his family, what explanation
can there be save that he is ashamed to do so? Oliver was ashamed of
himself. He had taken to desperate courses. He was an outlaw. He had
gone to the devil. His name was rarely mentioned in Durdlebury--to
Marmaduke Trevor's very great and catlike satisfaction. Only to the
Dean's ripe and kindly wisdom was his name not utterly anathema.

"My dear," said he once to his wife, who was deploring her nephew's
character and fate--"I have hopes of Oliver even yet. A man must have
something of the devil in him if he wants to drive the devil out."

Mrs. Conover was shocked. "My dear Edward!" she cried.

"My dear Sophia," said he, with a twinkle in his mild blue eyes that
had puzzled her from the day when he first put a decorous arm round
her waist. "My dear Sophia, if you knew what a ding-dong scrap of
fiends went on inside me before I could bring myself to vow to be a
virtuous milk-and-water parson, your hair, which is as long and
beautiful as ever, would stand up straight on end."

Mrs. Conover sighed.

"I give you up."

"It's too late," said the Dean.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Manningtrees, father and mother and son, were gone. Doggie bore
the triple loss with equanimity. Then Peggy Conover, hitherto under
the eclipse of boarding-schools, finishing schools and foreign travel,
swam, at the age of twenty, within his orbit. When first they met,
after a year's absence, she very gracefully withered the symptoms of
the cousinly kiss, to which they had been accustomed all their lives,
by stretching out a long, frank, and defensive arm. Perhaps if she had
allowed the salute, there would have been an end of the matter. But
there came the phenomenon which, unless she was a minx of craft and
subtlety, she did not anticipate; for the first time in his life he
was possessed of a crazy desire to kiss her. Doggie fell in love. It
was not a wild consuming passion. He slept well, he ate well, and he
played the flute without a sigh causing him to blow discordantly into
the holes of the instrument. Peggy vowing that she would not marry a
parson, he had no rivals. He knew not even the pinpricks of jealousy.
Peggy liked him. At first she delighted in him as in a new and
animated toy. She could pull strings and the figure worked amazingly
and amusingly. He proved himself to be a useful toy, too. He was at
her beck all day long. He ran on errands, he fetched and carried.
Peggy realized blissfully that she owned him. He haunted the Deanery.

One evening after dinner the Dean said:

"I am going to play the heavy father. How are things between you and
Peggy?"

Marmaduke, taken unawares, reddened violently. He murmured that he
didn't know.

"You ought to," said the Dean. "When a young man converts himself into
a girl's shadow, even although he is her cousin and has been brought
up with her from childhood, people begin to gossip. They gossip even
within the august precincts of a stately cathedral."

"I'm very sorry," said Marmaduke. "I've had the very best intentions."

The Dean smiled.

"What were they?"

"To make her like me a little," replied Marmaduke. Then, feeling that
the Dean was kindly disposed, he blurted out awkwardly: "I hoped that
one day I might ask her to marry me."

"That's what I wanted to know," said the Dean.

"You haven't done it yet?"

"No," said Marmaduke.

"Why don't you?"

"It seems taking such a liberty," replied Marmaduke.

The Dean laughed. "Well, I'm not going to do it for you. My chief
desire is to regularize the present situation. I can't have you two
running about together all day and every day. If you like to ask
Peggy, you have my permission and her mother's."

"Thank you, Uncle Edward," said Marmaduke.

"Let us join the ladies," said the Dean.

In the drawing-room the Dean exchanged glances with his wife. She saw
that he had done as he had been bidden. Marmaduke was not an ideal
husband for a brisk, pleasure-loving modern young woman. But where was
another husband to come from? Peggy had banned the Church. Marmaduke
was wealthy, sound in health and free from vice. It was obvious to
maternal eyes that he was in love with Peggy. According to the Dean,
if he wasn't, he oughtn't to be for ever at her heels. The young woman
herself seemed to take considerable pleasure in his company. If she
cared nothing for him, she was acting in a reprehensible manner. So
the Dean had been deputed to sound Marmaduke.

Half an hour later the young people were left alone. First the Dean
went to his study. Then Mrs. Conover departed to write letters.
Marmaduke advancing across the room from the door which he had opened,
met Peggy's mocking eyes as she stood on the hearthrug with her hands
behind her back. Doggie felt very uncomfortable. Never had he said a
word to her in betrayal of his feelings. He had a vague idea that
propriety required a young man to get through some wooing before
asking a girl to marry him. To ask first and woo afterwards seemed
putting the cart before the horse. But how to woo that remarkably cool
and collected young person standing there, passed his wit.

"Well," she said, "the dear old birds seem very fussy to-night. What's
the matter?" And as he said nothing, but stood confused with his hands
in his pockets, she went on. "You, too, seem rather ruffled. Look at
your hair."

Doggie, turning to a mirror, perceived that an agitated hand had
disturbed the symmetry of his sleek black hair, brushed without a
parting away from the forehead over his head. Hastily he smoothed down
the cockatoo-like crest.

"I've been talking to your father, Peggy."

"Have you really?" she said with a laugh.

Marmaduke summoned his courage.

"He told me I might ask you to marry me," he said.

"Do you want to?"

"Of course I do," he declared.

"Then why not do it?"

But before he could answer, she clapped her hands on his shoulders,
and shook him, and laughed out loud.

"Oh, you dear silly old thing! What a way to propose to a girl!"

"I've never done such a thing before," said Doggie, as soon as he was
released.

She resumed her attitude on the hearthrug.

"I'm in no great hurry to be married. Are you?"

He said: "I don't know. I've never thought of it. Just whenever you
like."

"All right," she returned calmly. "Let it be a year hence. Meanwhile,
we can be engaged. It'll please the dear old birds. I know all the
tabbies in the town have been mewing about us. Now they can mew about
somebody else."

"That's awfully good of you, Peggy," said Marmaduke. "I'll go up to
town to-morrow and get you the jolliest ring you ever saw."

She sketched him a curtsy. "That's one thing, at any rate, I can trust
you in--your taste in jewellery."

He moved nearer to her. "I suppose you know, Peggy dear, I've been
awfully fond of you for quite a long time."

"The feeling is more or less reciprocated," she replied lightly. Then,
"You can kiss me if you like. I assure you it's quite usual."

He kissed her somewhat shyly on the lips.

She whispered: "I do think I care for you, old thing." Marmaduke
replied sententiously: "You have made me a very happy man." Then they
sat down side by side on the sofa, and for all Peggy's mocking
audacity, they could find nothing in particular to say to each other.

"Let us play patience," she said at last.

And when Mrs. Conover appeared awhile later, she found them poring
over the cards in a state of unruffled calm. Peggy looked up, smiled,
and nodded.

"We've fixed it up, Mummy; but we're not going to be married for a
year."

Doggie went home that evening in a tepid glow. It contented him. He
thought himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion
or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the
betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more
shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The
finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as
at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl
had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such
passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by
training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once,
somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading _Manon
Lescaut_--he had bought a cheap copy haphazard--and taking the
delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it.

"It's like reading about a lunatic," replied the bewildered Doggie.
"Do such people as Des Grieux exist?"

"Ay, laddie," replied McPhail, greatly relieved. "Your acumen has
pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put
them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the
psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It's just a silly,
rotten book."

"I'm glad you're of the same opinion as myself," said Doggie, and
thought no more of the absurd but deathless pair of lovers. The
unprincipled McPhail, not without pawky humour, immediately gave him
_Paul et Virginie_, which Doggie, after reading it, thought the truest
and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his
intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked
upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on
which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real
life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the
half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation
of the Valkyrie.

So Doggie Trevor went home perfectly contented with himself, with
Peggy Conover, with his Uncle and Aunt, of whom hitherto he had been
just a little bit afraid, with Fortune, with Fate, with his house,
with his peacock and ivory room, with a great clump of typescript and
a mass of coloured proof-prints, which represented a third of his
projected history of wall-papers, with his feather-bed, with Goliath,
his almost microscopic Belgian griffon, with a set of Nile-green silk
underwear that had just come from his outfitters in London, with his
new Rolls-Royce car and his new chauffeur Briggins (parenthetically it
may be remarked that a seven-hour excursion in this vehicle, youth in
the back seat and Briggins at the helm, all ordained by Peggy, had
been the final cause of the evening's explanations), with the starry
heavens above, with the well-ordered earth beneath them, and with all
human beings on the earth, including Germans, Turks, Infidels, and
Hereticks--all save one: and that, as he learned from a letter
delivered by the last post, was a callous, heartless London manicurist
who, giving no reasons, regretted that she would be unable to pay her
usual weekly visit to Durdlebury on the morrow. Of all days in the
year: just when it was essential that he should look his best!

"What the deuce am I going to do?" he cried, pitching the letter into
the waste-paper basket.

He sat down to the piano in the peacock and ivory room and tried to
play the nasty crumpled rose-leaf of a manicurist out of his mind.

Suddenly he remembered, with a kind of shock, that he had pledged
himself to go up to London the next day to buy an engagement-ring. So
after all the manicurist's defection did not matter. All was again
well with the world.

Then he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just and perfect man
living the just and perfect life in a just and perfect universe.

And the date of this happening was the fifteenth day of July in the
year of grace one thousand nine hundred and fourteen.




CHAPTER III


The shadow cast by the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the
end of the Deanery garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the
afternoon sun, and divided the old red-brick wall into a vivid
contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No
outside convulsions could ever cause a flutter of her calm wings. As
it was thirty years ago, when the Dean first came to Durdlebury, as it
was three hundred, six hundred years ago, so it was now; and so it
would be hundreds of years hence as long as that majestic pile housing
the Spirit of God should last.

Thus thought, thus, in some such words, proclaimed the Dean, sitting
in the shade, with his hands clasped behind his head. Tea was over.
Mrs. Conover, thin and faded, still sat by the little table, wondering
whether she might now blow out the lamp beneath the silver kettle. Sir
Archibald Bruce, a neighbouring landowner, and his wife had come,
bringing their daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already
started on the court some little distance off--the players being
Dorothy, Peggy and a couple of athletic, flannel-clad parsons.
Marmaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He
looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey
shirt, socks and tie, and grey _suede_ shoes. He had a weak,
good-looking little face and a little black moustache turned up at the
ends. He was discoursing to his neighbour on Palestrina.

The Dean's proclamation had been elicited by some remark of Sir
Archibald.

"I wonder how you have stuck it for so long," said the latter. He had
been a soldier in his youth and an explorer, and had shot big game.

"I haven't your genius, my dear Bruce, for making myself
uncomfortable," replied the Dean.

"You were energetic enough when you first came here," said Sir
Archibald. "We all thought you a desperate fellow who was going to
rebuild the cathedral, turn the Close into industrial dwellings, and
generally play the deuce."

The Dean sighed pleasantly. He had snowy hair and a genial, florid,
clean-shaven face.

"I was appointed very young--six-and-thirty--and I thought I could
fight against the centuries. As the years went on I found I couldn't.
The grey changelessness of things got hold of me, incorporated me into
them. When I die--for I hope I shan't have to resign through doddering
senility--my body will be buried there"--he jerked his head slightly
towards the cathedral--"and my dust will become part and parcel of the
fabric--like that of many of my predecessors."

"That's all very well," said Sir Archibald, "but they ought to have
caught you before this petrification set in, and made you a bishop."

It was somewhat of an old argument, for the two were intimates. The
Dean smiled and shook his head.

"You know I declined----"

"After you had become petrified."

"Perhaps so. It is not a place where ambitions can attain a riotous
growth."

"I call it a rotten place," said the elderly worldling. "I wouldn't
live in it myself for twenty thousand a year."

"Lots like you said the same in crusading times--Sir Guy de Chevenix,
for instance, who was the Lord, perhaps, of your very Manor, and an
amazing fire-eater--but--see the gentle irony of it--there his bones
lie, at peace for ever, in the rotten place, with his effigy over them
cross-legged and his dog at his feet, and his wife by his side. I
think he must sometimes look out of Heaven's gate down on the
cathedral and feel glad, grateful--perhaps a bit wistful--if the
attribution of wistfulness, which implies regret, to a spirit in
Paradise doesn't savour of heresy----"

"I'm going to be cremated," interrupted Sir Archibald, twirling his
white moustache.

The Dean smiled and did not take up the cue. The talk died. It was a
drowsy day. The Dean went off into a little reverie. Perhaps his old
friend's reproach was just. Dean of a great cathedral at thirty-six,
he had the world of dioceses at his feet. Had he used to the full the
brilliant talents with which he started? He had been a good Dean, a
capable, business-like Dean. There was not a stone of the cathedral
that he did not know and cherish. Under his care the stability of
every part of the precious fabric had been assured for a hundred
years. Its financial position, desperate on his appointment, was now
sound. He had come into a scene of petty discords and jealousies; for
many years there had been a no more united chapter in any cathedral
close in England. As an administrator he had been a success. The
devotion of his life to the cathedral had its roots deep in spiritual
things. For the greater glory of God had the vast edifice been
erected, and for the greater glory of God had he, its guardian,
reverently seen to its preservation and perfect appointment. Would he
have served God better by pursuing the ambitions of youth? He could
have had his bishopric; but he knew that the choice lay between him
and Chanways, a flaming spirit, eager for power, who hadn't the sacred
charge of a cathedral, and he declined. And now Chanways was a force
in the Church and the country, and was making things hum. If he,
Conover, after fifteen years of Durdlebury, had accepted, he would
have lost the power to make things hum. He would have made a very
ordinary, painstaking bishop, and his successor at Durdlebury might
possibly have regarded that time-worn wonder of spiritual beauty
merely as a stepping-stone to higher sacerdotal things. Such a man, he
considered, having once come under the holy glamour of the cathedral,
would have been guilty of the Unforgivable Sin. He had therefore saved
two unfortunate situations.

"You are quite an intelligent man, Bruce," he said, with a sudden
whimsicality, "but I don't think you would ever understand."

The set of tennis being over, Peggy, flushed and triumphant, rushed
into the party in the shade.

"Mr. Petherbridge and I have won--six--three," she announced. The old
gentlemen smiled and murmured their congratulations. She swung to the
tea-table some paces away, and plucked Marmaduke by the sleeve,
interrupting him in the middle of an argument. He rose politely.

"Come and play."

"My dear," he said, "I'm such a duffer at games."

"Never mind; you'll learn in time."

He drew out a grey silk handkerchief as if ready to perspire at the
first thought of it. "Tennis makes one so dreadfully hot," said he.

Peggy tapped the point of her foot irritably, but she laughed as she
turned to Lady Bruce.

"What's the good of being engaged to a man if he can't play tennis
with you?"

"There are other things in life besides tennis, my dear," replied Lady
Bruce.

The girl flushed, but being aware that a pert answer turneth away
pleasant invitations, said nothing. She nodded and went off to her
game, and informing Mr. Petherbridge that Lady Bruce was a
platitudinous old tabby, flirted with him up to the nice limits of his
parsonical dignity. But Marmaduke did not mind.

"Games are childish and somewhat barbaric. Don't you think so, Lady
Bruce?"

"Most young people seem fond of them," replied the lady. "Exercise
keeps them in health."

"It all depends," he argued. "Often they get exceedingly hot, then
they sit about and catch their death of cold."

"That's very true," said Lady Bruce. "It's what I'm always telling Sir
Archibald about golf. Only last week he caught a severe chill in that
very way. I had to rub his chest with camphorated oil."

"Just as my poor dear mother used to do to me," said Marmaduke.

There followed a conversation on ailments and their treatment, in
which Mrs. Conover joined. Marmaduke was quite happy. He knew that the
two elderly ladies admired the soundness of his views and talked to
him as to one of themselves.

"I'm sure, my dear Marmaduke, you're very wise to take care of
yourself," said Lady Bruce, "especially now, when you have the
responsibilities of married life before you."

Marmaduke curled himself up comfortably in his chair. If he had been a
cat, he would have purred. The old butler, grown as grey in the
service of the Deanery as the cathedral itself--he had been page and
footman to Dr. Conover's predecessor--removed the tea-things and
brought out a tray of glasses and lemonade with ice clinking
refreshingly against the sides of the jug. When the game was over, the
players came and drank and sat about the lawn. The shadow of the apse
had spread over the garden to the steps of the porch. Anyone looking
over the garden wall would have beheld a scene typical of the heart of
England--a scene of peace, ease and perfectly ordered comfort. The two
well-built young men, one a minor canon, the other a curate, lounging
in their flannels, clever-faced, honest-eyed, could have been bred
nowhere but in English public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge. The
two elderly ladies were of the fine flower of provincial England; the
two old men, so different outwardly, one burly, florid, exquisitely
ecclesiastical, the other thin, nervous, soldierly, each was an
expression of high English tradition. The two young girls, unerringly
correct and dainty, for all their modern abandonment of attitude,
pretty, flushed of cheek, frank of glance, were two of a hundred
thousand flowers of girlhood that could have been picked that
afternoon in lazy English gardens. And Marmaduke's impeccable grey
costume struck a harmonizing English note of Bond Street and the
Burlington Arcade. The scent of the roses massed in delicate splendour
against the wall, and breathing now that the cool shade had fallen on
them, crept through the still air to the flying buttresses and the
window mullions and traceries and the pinnacles of the great English
cathedral. And in the midst of the shaven lawn gleamed the old
cut-glass jug on its silver tray.

Some one did look over the wall and survey the scene: a man,
apparently supporting himself with tense, straightened arms on the
coping; a man with a lean, bronzed, clean-shaven face, wearing an old
soft felt hat at a swaggering angle; a man with a smile on his face
and a humorous twinkle in his eyes. By chance he had leisure to survey
the scene for some time unobserved. At last he shouted:

"Hello! Have none of you ever moved for the last ten years?"

At the summons every one was startled. The young men scrambled to
their feet. The Dean rose and glared at the intruder, who sprang over
the wall, recklessly broke through the rose-bushes and advanced with
outstretched hand to meet him.

"Hello, Uncle Edward!"

"Goodness gracious me!" cried the Dean. "It's Oliver!"

"Right first time," said the young man, gripping him by the hand.
"You're not looking a day older. And Aunt Sophia----" He strode up to
Mrs. Conover and kissed her. "Do you know," he went on, holding her at
arm's length and looking round at the astonished company, "the last
time I saw you all you were doing just the same! I peeped over the
wall just before I went away, just such a summer afternoon as this,
and you were all sitting round drinking the same old lemonade out of
the same old jug--and, Lady Bruce, you were here, and you, Sir
Archibald"--he shook hands with them rapidly. "You haven't changed a
bit. And you--good Lord! Is this Peggy?" He put his hand on the Dean's
shoulder and pointed at the girl.

"That's Peggy," said the Dean.

"You're the only thing that's grown. I used to gallop with you on my
shoulders all round the lawn. I suppose you remember? How do you do?"

And without waiting for an answer he kissed her soundly. It was all
done with whirlwind suddenness. The tempestuous young man had
scattered every one's wits. All stared at him. Releasing Peggy----

"My holy aunt!" he cried, "there's another of 'em. It's Doggie! You
were in the old picture, and I'm blessed if you weren't wearing the
same beautiful grey suit. How do, Doggie?"

He gripped Doggie's hand. Doggie's lips grew white.

"I'm glad to welcome you back, Oliver," he said. "But I would have you
to know that my name is Marmaduke."

"Sooner be called Doggie myself, old chap," said Oliver.

He stepped back, smiling at them all--a handsome devil-may-care
fellow, tall, tough and supple, his hands in the pockets of a
sun-stained double-breasted blue jacket.

"We're indeed glad to see you, my dear boy," said the Dean, recovering
equanimity; "but what have you been doing all this time? And where on
earth have you come from?"

"I've just come from the South Seas. Arrived in London last evening.
This morning I thought I'd come and look you up."

"But if you had let us know you were coming, we should have met you at
the station with the car. Where's your luggage?"

He jerked a hand. "In the road. My man's sitting on it. Oh, don't
worry about him," he cried airily to the protesting Dean. "He's well
trained. He'll go on sitting on it all night."

"You've brought a man--a valet?" asked Peggy.

"It seems so."

"Then you must be getting on."

"I don't think he turns you out very well," said Doggie.

"You must really let one of the servants see about your things,
Oliver," said Mrs. Conover, moving towards the porch. "What will
people say?"

He strode after her, and kissed her. "Oh, you dear old Durdlebury
Aunt! Now I know I'm in England again. I haven't heard those words for
years!"

Mrs. Conover's hospitable intentions were anticipated by the old
butler, who advanced to meet them with the news that Sir Archibald's
car had been brought round. As soon as he recognized Oliver he started
back, mouth agape.

"Yes, it's me all right, Burford," laughed Oliver. "How did I get
here? I dropped from the moon."

He shook hands with Burford, of whose life he had been the plague
during his childhood, proclaimed him as hardy and unchanging as a
gargoyle, and instructed him where to find man and luggage.

The Bruces and the two clerical tennis players departed. Marmaduke was
for taking his leave too. All his old loathing of Oliver had suddenly
returned. His cousin stood for everything he detested--swagger,
arrogance, self-assurance. He hated the shabby rakishness of his
attire, the self-assertive aquiline beak of a nose which he had
inherited from his father, the Rector. He dreaded his aggressive
masculinity. He had come back with the same insulting speech on his
lips. His finger-nails were dreadful. Marmaduke desired as little as
possible of his odious company. But his Aunt Sophia cried out:

"You'll surely dine with us to-night, Marmaduke, to celebrate Oliver's
return?"

And Oliver chimed in, "Do! And don't worry about changing," as Doggie
began to murmur excuses, "I can't. I've no evening togs. My old ones
fell to bits when I was trying to put them on, on board the steamer,
and I had to chuck 'em overboard. They turned up a shark, who went for
'em. So don't you worry, Doggie, old chap. You look as pretty as paint
as you are. Doesn't he, Peggy?"

Peggy, with a slight flush on her cheek, came to the rescue and linked
her arm in Marmaduke's.

"You haven't had time to learn everything yet, Oliver; but I think you
ought to know that we are engaged."

"Holy Gee! Is that so? My compliments." He swept them a low bow. "God
bless you, my children!"

"Of course he'll stay to dinner," said Peggy; and she looked at Oliver
as who should say, "Touch him at your peril: he belongs to me."

So Doggie had to yield. Mrs. Conover went into the house to arrange
for Oliver's comfort, and the others strolled round the garden.

"Well, my boy," said the Dean, "so you're back in the old country?"

"Turned up again like a bad penny."

The Dean's kindly face clouded. "I hope you'll soon be able to find
something to do."

"It's money I want, not work," said Oliver.

"Ah!" said the Dean, in a tone so thoughtful as just to suggest a lack
of sympathy.

Oliver looked over his shoulder--the Dean and himself were preceding
Marmaduke and Peggy on the trim gravel path. "Do you care to lend me a
few thousands, Doggie?"

"Certainly not," replied Marmaduke.

"There's family affection for you, Uncle Edward! I've come half-way
round the earth to see him, and--say, will you lend me a fiver?"

"If you need it," said Marmaduke in a dignified way, "I shall be very
happy to advance you five pounds."

Oliver brought the little party to a halt and burst into laughter.

"I believe you good people think I've come back broke to the world.
The black sheep returned like a wolf to the fold. Only Peggy drew a
correct inference from the valet--wait till you see him! As Peggy
said, I've been getting on." He laid a light hand on the Dean's
shoulder. "While all you folks in Durdlebury, especially my dear
Doggie, for the last ten years have been durdling, I've been doing.
I've not come all this way to tap relations for five-pound notes. I'm
swaggering into the City of London for Capital--with a great big C."

Marmaduke twirled his little moustache. "You've taken to company
promoting," he remarked acidly.

"I have. And a damn--I beg your pardon, Uncle Edward--we poor Pacific
Islanders lisp in damns for want of deans to hold us up--and a jolly
good company too. We--that's I and another man--that's all the company
as yet--two's company, you know--own a trading fleet."

"You own ships?" cried Peggy.

"Rather. Own 'em, sail 'em, navigate 'em, stoke 'em, clean out the
boilers, sit on the safety valves when we want to make speed, do every
old thing----"

"And what do you trade in?" asked the Dean.

"Copra, beche-de-mer, mother-of-pearl----"

"Mother-of-pearl! How awfully romantic!" cried Peggy.

"We've got a fishery. At any rate, the concession. To work it properly
we require capital. That's why I'm here--to turn the concern into a
limited company."

"And where is this wonderful place?" asked the Dean.

"Huaheine."

"What a beautiful word!"

"Isn't it?" said Oliver. "Like the sigh of a girl in her sleep."

The old Dean shot a swift glance at his nephew; then took his arm and
walked on, and looked at the vast mass of the cathedral and at the
quiet English garden in its evening shadow.

"Copra, beche-de-mer, mother-of-pearl, Huaheine," he murmured. "And
these strange foreign things are the commonplaces of your life!"

Peggy and Marmaduke lagged behind a little. She pressed his arm.

"I'm so glad you're staying for dinner. I shouldn't like to think you
were running away from him."

"I was only afraid of losing my temper and making a scene," replied
Doggie with dignity.

"His manners are odious," said Peggy. "You leave him to me."

Suddenly the Dean, taking a turn that brought him into view of the
porch, stopped short.

"Goodness gracious!" he cried. "Who in the world is that?"

He pointed to a curious object slouching across the lawn; a short
hirsute man wearing a sailor's jersey and smoking a stump of a
blackened pipe. His tousled head was bare; he had very long arms and
great powerful hands protruded at the end of long sinewy wrists from
inadequate sleeves. A pair of bright eyes shone out of his dark shaggy
face, like a Dandy Dinmont's. His nose was large and red. He rolled as
he walked. Such a sight had never been seen before in the Deanery
garden.

"That's my man. Peggy's valet," said Oliver airily. "His name is
Chipmunk. A beauty, isn't he?"

"Like master, like man," murmured Doggie.

Oliver's quick ears caught the words intended only for Peggy. He
smiled brightly.

"If you knew what a compliment you were paying me, Doggie, you
wouldn't have said such a thing."

The man seeing the company stare at him, halted, took his pipe out of
his mouth, and scratched his head.

"But--er--forgive me, my dear Oliver," said the Dean. "No doubt he is
an excellent fellow--but don't you think he might smoke his pipe
somewhere else?"

"Of course he might," said Oliver. "And he jolly well shall." He put
his hand to his mouth, sea-fashion--they were about thirty yards
apart--and shouted: "Here, you! What the eternal blazes are you doing
here?"

"Please don't hurt the poor man's feelings," said the kindly Dean.

Oliver turned a blank look on his Uncle. "His what? Ain't got any. Not
that kind of feelings." He proceeded: "Now then, look lively! Clear
out! Skidoo!"

The valet touched his forehead in salute, and--"Where am I to go to,
Cap'en?"

"Go to----"

Oliver checked himself in time, and turned to the Dean.

"Where shall I tell him to go?" he asked sweetly.

"The kitchen garden would be the best place," replied the Dean.

"I think I'd better go and fix him up myself," said Oliver. "A little
conversation in his own language might be beneficial."

"But isn't he English?" asked Peggy.

"Born and bred in Wapping," said Oliver.

He marched off across the lawn; and, could they have heard it, the
friendly talk that he had with Chipmunk would have made the Saint and
the Divines, and even the Crusader, Sir Guy de Chevenix, who were
buried in the cathedral, turn in their tombs.

Doggie, watching the disappearing Chipmunk, Oliver's knuckles in his
neck, said:

"I think it monstrous of Oliver to bring such a disreputable creature
down here."

Said the Dean: "At any rate, it brings a certain excitement into our
quiet surroundings."

"They must be having the time of their lives in the Servants' Hall,"
said Peggy.




CHAPTER IV


After breakfast the next morning Doggie, attired in a green shot-silk
dressing-gown, entered his own particular room and sat down to think.
In its way it was a very beautiful room--high, spacious,
well-proportioned, facing south-east. The wall-paper, which he had
designed himself, was ivory-white with veinings of peacock-blue. Into
the ivory-silk curtains were woven peacocks in full pride. The
cushions were ivory and peacock-blue. The chairs, the writing-table,
the couch, the bookcases, were pure Sheraton and Hepplewhite.
Vellum-bound books filled the cases--Doggie was very particular about
his bindings. Delicate water-colours alone adorned the walls. On his
neatly arranged writing-table lay an ivory set--inkstand, pen-tray,
blotter and calendar. Bits of old embroidery harmonizing with the
peacock shades were spread here and there. A pretty collection of
eighteenth-century Italian ivory statuettes were grouped about the
room. A spinet, inlaid with ebony and ivory, formed a centre for the
arrangement of many other musical instruments--a viol, mandolins gay
with ribbons, a theorbo, flutes and clarinets. Through the curtains,
draped across an alcove, could be guessed the modern monstrosity of a
grand piano. One tall closed cabinet was devoted to his collection of
wall-papers. Another, open, to a collection of little dogs in china,
porcelain, faience; thousands of them; he got them through dealers
from all over the world. He had the finest collection in existence,
and maintained a friendly and learned correspondence with the other
collector--an elderly, disillusioned Russian prince, who lived
somewhere near Nijni-Novgorod. On the spinet and on the writing-table
were great bowls of golden _rayon d'or_ roses.

Doggie sat down to think. An unwonted frown creased his brow. Several
problems distracted him. The morning sun streaming into the room
disclosed, beyond doubt, discolorations, stains and streaks on the
wall-paper. It would have to be renewed. Already he had decided to
design something to take its place. But last night Peggy had declared
her intention to turn this abode of bachelor comfort into the
drawing-room, and to hand over to his personal use some other
apartment, possibly the present drawing-room, which received all the
blaze and glare of the afternoon sun. What should he do? Live in the
sordidness of discoloured wall-paper for another year, or go through
the anxiety of artistic effort and manufacturers' stupidity and delay,
to say nothing of the expense, only to have the whole thing scrapped
before the wedding? Doggie had a foretaste of the dilemmas of
matrimony. He had a gnawing suspicion that the trim and perfect life
was difficult of attainment.

Then, meandering through this wilderness of dubiety, ran thoughts of
Oliver. Every one seemed to have gone crazy over him. Uncle Edward and
Aunt Sophia had hung on his lips while he lied unblushingly about his
adventures. Even Peggy had listened open-eyed and open-mouthed when he
had told a tale of shipwreck in the South Seas: how the schooner had
been caught in some beastly wind and the masts had been torn out and
the rudder carried away, and how it had struck a reef, and how
something had hit him on the head, and he knew no more till he woke up
on a beach and found that the unspeakable Chipmunk had swum with him
for a week--or whatever the time was--until they got to land. If
hulking, brainless dolts like Oliver, thought Doggie, like to fool
around in schooners and typhoons, they must take the consequences.
There was nothing to brag about. The higher man was the intellectual,
the aesthetic, the artistic being. What did Oliver know of Lydian modes
or Louis Treize decoration or Astec clay dogs? Nothing. He couldn't
even keep his socks from slopping about over his shoes. And there was
Peggy all over the fellow, although before dinner she had said she
couldn't bear the sight of him. Doggie was perturbed. On bidding him
good night, she had kissed him in the most perfunctory manner--merely
the cousinly peck of a dozen years ago--and had given no thought to
the fact that he was driving home in an open car without an overcoat.
He had felt distinctly chilly on his arrival, and had taken a dose of
ammoniated quinine. Was Peggy's indifference a sign that she had
ceased to care for him? That she was attracted by the buccaneering
Oliver?

Now suppose the engagement was broken off, he would be free to do as
he chose with the redecoration of the room. But suppose, as he
sincerely and devoutly hoped, it wasn't? Dilemma on dilemma. Added to
all this, Goliath, the miniature Belgian griffon, having probably
overeaten himself, had complicated pains inside, and the callous vet.
could or would not come round till the evening. In the meantime,
Goliath might die.

He was at this point of his reflections, when to his horror he
heard a familiar voice outside the door.

"All right, Peddle. Don't worry. I'll show myself in. Look after that
man of mine. Quite easy. Give him some beer in a bucket and leave him
to it."

Then the door burst open and Oliver, pipe in mouth and hat on one
side, came into the room.

"Hallo, Doggie! Thought I'd look you up. Hope I'm not disturbing you."

"Not at all," said Doggie. "Do sit down."

But Oliver walked about and looked at things.

"I like your water-colours. Did you collect them yourself?"

"Yes."

"I congratulate you on your taste. This is a beauty. Who is it by?"

The appreciation brought Doggie at once to his side. Oliver, the
connoisseur, was showing himself in a new and agreeable light. Doggie
took him delightedly round the pictures, expounding their merits and
their little histories. He found that Oliver, although unlearned, had
a true sense of light and colour and tone. He was just beginning to
like him, when the tactless fellow, stopping before the collection of
little dogs, spoiled everything.

"My holy aunt!" he cried--an objurgation which Doggie had abhorred
from boyhood--and he doubled with laughter in his horrid schoolboy
fashion--"My dear Doggie--is that your family? How many litters?"

"It's the finest collection of the kind in the world," replied Doggie
stiffly, "and is worth several thousand pounds."

Oliver heaved himself into a chair--that was Doggie's impression of
his method of sitting down--a Sheraton chair with delicate arms and
legs.

"Forgive me," he said, "but you're such a funny devil."--Doggie gaped.
The conception of himself as a funny devil was new.--"Pictures and
music I can understand. But what the deuce is the point of these dam
little dogs?"

But Doggie was hurt. "It would be useless to try to explain," said he.

Oliver took off his hat and sent it skimming on to the couch.

"Look here, old chap," he said, "I seem to have put my foot into it
again. I didn't mean to, really. Peggy gave me hell this morning for
not treating you as a man and a brother, and I came round to try to
put things right."

"It's very considerate of Peggy, I'm sure," said Marmaduke.

"Now look here, old Doggie----"

"I told you when we first met yesterday that I vehemently object to
being called Doggie."

"But why?" asked Oliver. "I've made inquiries, and find that all your
pals----"

"I haven't any pals, as you call them."

"Well, all our male contemporaries in the place who have the honour of
your acquaintance--they all call you Doggie, and you don't seem to
mind."

"I do mind," replied Marmaduke angrily, "but as I avoid their company
as much as possible, it doesn't very much matter."

Oliver stretched out his legs and put his hands behind his back--then
wriggled to his feet. "What a beast of a chair! Anyhow," he went on,
puffing at his pipe, "don't let us quarrel. I'll call you Marmaduke,
if you like, when I can remember--it's a beast of a name--like the
chair. I'm a rough sort of chap. I've had ten years' pretty rough
training. I've slept on boards. I've slept in the open without a cent
to hire a board. I've gone cold and I've gone hungry, and men have
knocked me about and I've knocked men about--and I've lost the
Durdlebury sense of social values. In the wilds if a man once gets the
name, say, of Duck-Eyed Joe, it sticks to him, and he accepts it and
answers to it, and signs 'Duck-Eyed Joe' on an IOU and honours the
signature."

"But I'm not in the wilds," said Marmaduke, "and haven't the slightest
intention of ever leading the unnatural and frightful life you
describe. So what you say doesn't apply to me."

"Quite so," replied Oliver. "That wasn't the moral of my discourse.
The habit of mind engendered in the wilds applies to me. Just as I
could never think of Duck-Eyed Joe as George Wilkinson, so you, James
Marmaduke Trevor, will live imperishably in my mind as Doggie. I was
making a sort of apology, old chap, for my habit of mind."

"If it is an apology----" said Marmaduke.

Oliver, laughing, clapped him boisterously on the shoulder. "Oh, you
solemn comic cuss!" He strode to a rose-bowl and knocked the ashes of
his pipe into the water--Doggie trembled lest he might next squirt
tobacco juice over the ivory curtains. "You don't give a fellow a
chance. Look here, tell me, as man to man, what are you going to do
with your life? I don't mean it in the high-brow sense of people who
live in unsuccessful plays and garden cities, but in the ordinary
common-sense way of the world. Here you are, young, strong, educated,
intelligent----"

"I'm not strong," said Doggie.

"Oh, shucks! A month's exercise would make you as strong as a mule.
Here you are--what the blazes are you going to do with yourself?"

"I don't admit that you have any right to question me," said Doggie,
lighting a cigarette.

"Peggy has given it to me. We had a heart to heart talk this morning,
I assure you. She called me a swaggering, hectoring barbarian. So I
told her what I'd do. I said I'd come here and squeak like a little
mouse and eat out of your hand. I also said I'd take you out with me
to the Islands and give you a taste for fresh air and salt water and
exercise. I'll teach you how to sail a schooner and how to go about
barefoot and swab decks. It's a life for a man out there, I tell you.
If you've nothing better to do than living here snug like a flea on a
dog's back, until you get married, you'd better come."

Doggie smiled pityingly, but said politely:

"Your offer is very kind, Oliver; but I don't think that kind of life
would suit me."

"Oh yes it would," said Oliver. "It would make you healthy,
wealthy--if you took a fancy to put some money into the pearl
fishery--and wise. I'd show you the world, make a man of you, for
Peggy's sake, and teach you how men talk to one another in a gale of
wind."

The door opened and Peddle appeared.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Oliver--but your man----"

"Yes? What about him? Is he misbehaving himself? Kissing the maids?"

"No, sir," said Peddle--"but none of them can get on with their work.
He has drunk two quart jugs of beer and wants a third."

"Well, give it to him."

"I shouldn't like to see the man intoxicated, sir," said Peddle.

"You couldn't. No one has or ever will."

"He is also standing on his head, sir, in the middle of the kitchen
table."

"It's his great parlour-trick. You just try to do it,
Peddle--especially after two quarts of beer. He's showing his
gratitude, poor chap--just like the juggler of Notre-Dame in the
story. And I'm sure everybody's enjoying themselves?"

"The maids are nearly in hysterics, sir."

"But they're quite happy?"

"Too happy, sir."

"Lord!" cried Oliver, "what a lot of stuffy owls you are! What do you
want me to do? What would you like me to do, Doggie? It's your house."

"I don't know," said Doggie. "I've had nothing to do with such people.
Perhaps you might go and speak to him."

"No, I won't do that. I tell you what, Peddle," said Oliver brightly.
"You lure him out into the stable yard with a great hunk of pie--he
adores pie--and tell him to sit there and eat it till I come. Tell him
I said so."

"I'll see what can be done, sir," said Peddle.

"I don't mean to be inhospitable," said Doggie, after the butler had
gone, "but why do you take this extraordinary person about with you?"

"I wanted him to see Durdlebury and Durdlebury to see him. Do it
good," replied Oliver. "Now, what about my proposition? Out there of
course you'll be my guest. Put yourself in charge of Chipmunk and me
for eight months, and you'll never regret it. What Chipmunk doesn't
know about ships and drink and hard living isn't knowledge. We'll let
you down easy--treat you kindly--word of honour."

Doggie being a man of intelligence realized that Oliver's offer arose
from a genuine desire to do him some kind of service. But if a
friendly bull out of the fullness of its affection invited you to
accompany him to the meadow and eat grass, what could you do but
courteously decline the invitation? This is what Doggie did. After a
further attempt at persuasion, Oliver grew impatient, and picking up
his hat stuck it on the side of his head. He was a simple-natured,
impulsive man. Peggy's spirited attack had caused him to realize that
he had treated Doggie with unprovoked rudeness; but then, Doggie was
such a little worm. Suddenly the great scheme for Doggie's
regeneration had entered his head, and generously he had rushed to
begin to put it into execution. The pair were his blood relations
after all. He saw his way to doing them a good turn. Peggy, with all
her go--exemplified by the manner in which she had gone for him--was
worth the trouble he proposed to take with Doggie. It really was a
handsome offer. Most fellows would have jumped at the prospect of
being shown round the Islands with an old hand who knew the whole
thing backwards, from company promoting to beach-combing. He had not
expected such a point-blank, bland refusal. It made him angry.

"I'm really most obliged to you, Oliver," said Doggie finally. "But
our ideals are so entirely different. You're primitive, you know. You
seem to find your happiness in defying the elements, whereas I find
mine in adopting the resources of civilization to circumvent them."

He smiled, pleased with his little epigram.

"Which means," said Oliver, "that you're afraid to roughen your hands
and spoil your complexion."

"If you like to put it that way--symbolically."

"Symbolically be hanged!" cried Oliver, losing his temper. "You're an
effeminate little rotter, and I'm through with you. Go on and wag your
tail and sit up and beg for biscuits----"

"Stop!" shouted Doggie, white with sudden anger which shook him from
head to foot. He marched to the door, his green silk dressing-gown
flapping round his legs, and threw it wide open. "This is my house.
I'm sorry to have to ask you to get out of it."

Oliver looked intently for a few seconds into the flaming little dark
eyes. Then he said gravely:

"I'm a beast to have said that. I take it all back. Good-bye!"

"Good day to you," said Doggie; and when the door was shut he went and
threw himself, shaken, on the couch, hating Oliver and all his works
more than ever. Go about barefoot and swab decks! It was Bedlam
madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating
discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at such martyrdom. It
was intolerable.

Doggie stayed away from the Deanery all that day. On the morrow he
heard, to his relief, that Oliver had returned to London with the
unedifying Chipmunk. He took Peggy for a drive in the Rolls-Royce, and
told her of Oliver's high-handed methods. She sympathized. She said,
however:

"Oliver's a rough diamond."

"He's one of Nature's non-gentlemen," said Doggie.

She laughed and patted his arm. "Clever lad!" she said.

So Doggie's wounded vanity was healed. He confided to her some of his
difficulties as to the peacock and ivory room.

"Bear with the old paper for my sake," she said. "It's something you
can do for me. In the meanwhile, you and I can put our heads together
and design a topping scheme of decoration. It's not too early to start
in right now, for it'll take months and months to get the house just
as we want."

"You're the best girl in the world," said Doggie; "and the way you
understand me is simply wonderful."

"Dear old thing," smiled Peggy; "you're no great conundrum."

Happiness once more settled on Doggie Trevor. For the next two or
three days he and Peggy tackled the serious problem of the
reorganization of Denby Hall. Peggy had the large ideas of a limited
though acute brain, stimulated by social ambitions. When she became
mistress of Denby Hall, she intended to reverse the invisible boundary
that included it in Durdlebury and excluded it from the County. It was
to be County--of the fine inner Arcanum of County--and only Durdlebury
by the grace of Peggy Trevor. No "durdling," as Oliver called it, for
her. Denby Hall was going to be the very latest thing of September,
1915, when she proposed, the honeymoon concluded, to take smart and
startling possession. Lots of Mrs. Trevor's rotten old stuffy
furniture would have to go. Marmaduke would have to revolutionize his
habits. As she would have all kinds of jolly people down to stay,
additions must be made to the house. Within a week after her
engagement she had devised all the improvements. Marmaduke's room,
with a great bay thrown out, would be the drawing-room. The present
drawing-room, nucleus of a new wing, would be a dancing-room, with
parquet flooring; when not used for tangos and the fashionable negroid
dances, it would be called the morning-room; beyond that there would
be a billiard-room. Above this first floor there could easily be built
a series of guest chambers. As for Marmaduke's library, or study, or
den, any old room would do. There were a couple of bedrooms
overlooking the stable yard which thrown into one would do
beautifully.

With feminine tact she dangled these splendours before Doggie's
infatuated eyes, instinctively choosing the opportunity of his
gratitude for soothing treatment. Doggie telegraphed for Sir Owen
Julius, R.A., Surveyor to the Cathedral, the only architect of his
acquaintance. The great man sent his partner, plain John Fox, who
undertook to prepare a design.

Mr. Fox came down to Durdlebury on the 28th of July. There had been a
lot of silly talk in the newspapers about Austria and Serbia, to which
Doggie had given little heed. There was always trouble in the Balkan
States. Recently they had gone to war. It had left Doggie quite cold.
They were all "Merry Widow," irresponsible people. They dressed in
queer uniforms and picturesque costumes, and thought themselves
tremendously important, and were always squabbling among themselves
and would go on doing it till the day of Doom. Now there was more
fuss. He had read in the _Morning Post_ that Sir Edward Grey had
proposed a Conference of the Great Powers. Only sensible thing to do,
thought Doggie. He dismissed the trivial matter from his mind. On the
morning of the 29th he learned that Austria had declared war on
Serbia. Still, what did it matter?

Doggie had held aloof from politics. He regarded them as somewhat
vulgar. Conservative by caste, he had once, when the opportunity was
almost forced on him, voted for the Conservative candidate of the
constituency. European politics on the grand scale did not arouse his
interest at all. England, save as the wise Mentor, had nothing to do
with them. Still, if Russia fought, France would have to join her
ally. It was not till he went to the Deanery that he began to
contemplate the possibility of a general European war. For the next
day or two he read his newspapers very carefully.

On Saturday, the 1st of August, Oliver suddenly reappeared, proposing
to stay over the Bank Holiday. He brought news and rumours of war from
the great city. He had found money very tight, Capital with a big C
impossible to obtain. Every one told him to come back when the present
European cloud had blown over. In the opinion of the judicious, it
would not blow over. There was going to be war, and England could not
stay out of it. The Sunday morning papers confirmed all he said.
Germany had declared war on Russia. France was involved. Would Great
Britain come in, or for ever lose her honour?

That warm beautiful Sunday afternoon they sat on the peaceful lawn
under the shadow of the great cathedral. Burford brought out the
tea-tray and Mrs. Conover poured out tea. Sir Archibald and Lady Bruce
and their daughter Dorothy were there. Doggie, impeccable in dark
purple. Nothing clouded the centuries-old serenity of the place. Yet
they asked the question that was asked on every quiet lawn, every
little scrap of shaded garden throughout the land that day: Would
England go to war?

And if she came in, as come in she must, what would be the result? All
had premonitions of strange shifting of destinies. As it was yesterday
so it was to-day in that gracious shrine of immutability. But every
one knew in his heart that as it was to-day so would it not be
to-morrow. The very word "war" seemed as out of place as the
suggestion of Hell in Paradise. Yet the throb of the War Drum came
over the broad land of France and over the sea and half over England,
and its echo fell upon the Deanery garden, flung by the flying
buttresses and piers and towers of the grey cathedral.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the morning of Wednesday, the 5th of August, it thundered all over
the Close. The ultimatum to Germany as to Belgium had expired the
night before. We were at war.

"Thank God," said the Dean at breakfast, "we needn't cast down our
eyes and slink by when we meet a Frenchman."




CHAPTER V


The first thing that brought the seriousness of the war home to Doggie
was a letter from John Fox. John Fox, a major in a Territorial
regiment, was mobilized. He regretted that he could not give his
personal attention to the proposed alterations at Denby Hall. Should
the plans be proceeded with in his absence from the office, or would
Mr. Trevor care to wait till the end of the war, which, from the
nature of things, could not last very long? Doggie trotted off to
Peggy. She was greatly annoyed.

"What awful rot!" she cried. "Fox, a major of artillery! I'd just as
soon trust you with a gun. Why doesn't he stick to his architecture?"

"He'd be shot or something if he refused to go," said Doggie. "But why
can't we turn it over to Sir Owen Julius?"

"That old archaeological fossil?"

Peggy, womanlike, forgot that they had approached him in the first
place.

"He'd never begin to understand what we want. Fox hinted as much. Now
Fox is modern and up to date and sympathetic. If I can't have Fox, I
won't have Sir Owen. Why, he's older than Dad! He's decrepit. Can't we
get another architect?"

"Do you think, dear," said Doggie, "that, in the circumstances, it
would be a nice thing to do?"

She flashed a glance at him. She had woven no young girl's romantic
illusions around Marmaduke. Should necessity have arisen, she could
have furnished you with a merciless analysis of his character. But in
that analysis she would have frankly included a very fine sense of
honour. If he said a thing wasn't quite nice--well, it wasn't quite
nice.

"I suppose it wouldn't," she admitted. "We shall have to wait. But
it's a rotten nuisance all the same."

Hundreds of thousands of not very intelligent, but at the same time by
no means unpatriotic, people, like Peggy, at the beginning of the war
thought trivial disappointments rotten nuisances. We had all waxed too
fat during the opening years of the twentieth century, and, not having
a spiritual ideal in God's universe, we were in danger of perishing
from Fatty Degeneration of the Soul. As it was, it took a year or more
of war to cure us.

It took Peggy quite a month to appreciate the meaning of the
mobilization of Major Fox, R.F.A. A brigade of Territorial artillery
flowed over Durdlebury, and the sacred and sleepy meadows became a
mass of guns and horse-lines and men in khaki, and waggons and dingy
canvas tents--and the old quiet streets were thick with unaccustomed
soldiery. The Dean called on the Colonel and officers, and soon the
house was full of eager young men holding the King's commission.
Doggie admired their patriotism, but disliked their whole-hearted
embodiment of the military spirit. They seemed to have no ideas beyond
their new trade. The way they clanked about in their great boots and
spurs got on his nerves. He dreaded also lest Peggy should be affected
by the meretricious attraction of a uniform. There were fine hefty
fellows among the visitors at the Deanery, on whom Peggy looked with
natural admiration. Doggie bitterly confided to Goliath that it was
the "glamour of brawn." It never entered his head during those early
days that all the brawn of all the manhood of the nation would be
needed. We had our well-organized Army and Navy, composed of
peculiarly constituted men whose duty it was to fight; just as we had
our well-organized National Church, also composed of peculiarly
constituted men whose duty it was to preach. He regarded himself as
remote from one as from the other.

Oliver, who had made a sort of peace with Doggie and remained at the
Deanery, very quickly grew restless.

One day, walking with Peggy and Marmaduke in the garden, he said: "I
wish I could get hold of that confounded fellow, Chipmunk!"

Partly through deference to the good Dean's delicately hinted distaste
for that upsetter of decorous households, and partly to allow his
follower to attend to his own domestic affairs, he had left Chipmunk
in London. Fifteen years ago Chipmunk had parted from a wife somewhere
in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks. Both being illiterate,
neither had since communicated with the other. As he had left her
earning good money in a factory, his fifteen years' separation had
been relieved from anxiety as to her material welfare. A prudent,
although a beer-loving man, he had amassed considerable savings, and
it was the dual motive of sharing these with his wife and of
protecting his patron from the ever-lurking perils of London, that had
brought him across the seas. When Oliver had set him free in town, he
was going in quest of his wife. But as he had forgotten the name of
the street near the East India Docks where his wife lived, and the
name of the factory in which she worked, the successful issue of the
quest, in Oliver's opinion, seemed problematical. The simple Chipmunk,
however, was quite sanguine. He would run into her all right. As soon
as he had found her he would let the Captain know. Up to the present
he had not communicated with the Captain. He could give the Captain no
definite address, so the Captain could not communicate with him.
Chipmunk had disappeared into the unknown.

"Isn't he quite capable of taking care of himself?" asked Peggy.

"I'm not so sure," replied Oliver. "Besides, he's hanging me up. I'm
kind of responsible for him, and I've got sixty pounds of his money.
It's all I could do to persuade him not to stow the lot in his pocket,
so as to divide it with Mrs. Chipmunk as soon as he saw her. I must
find out what has become of the beggar before I move."

"I suppose," said Doggie, "you're anxious now to get back to the South
Seas?"

Oliver stared at him. "No, sonny, not till the war's over."

"Why, you wouldn't be in any great danger out there, would you?"

Oliver laughed. "You're the funniest duck that ever was, Doggie. I'll
never get to the end of you." And he strolled away.

"What does he mean?" asked the bewildered Doggie.

"I think," replied Peggy, smiling, "that he means he's going to
fight."

"Oh," said Doggie. Then after a pause he added, "He's just the sort of
chap for a soldier, isn't he?"

The next day Oliver's anxiety as to Chipmunk was relieved by the
appearance of the man himself, incredibly dirty and dusty and thirsty.
Having found no trace of his wife, and having been robbed of the money
he carried about him, he had tramped to Durdlebury, where he reported
himself to his master as if nothing out of the way had happened.

"You silly blighter," said Oliver. "Suppose I had let you go with your
other sixty pounds, you would have been pretty well in the soup,
wouldn't you?"

"Yes, Cap'en," said Chipmunk.

"And you're not going on any blethering idiot wild-goose chases after
wives and such-like truck again, are you?"

"No, Cap'en," said Chipmunk.

This was in the stable-yard, after Chipmunk had shaken some of the
dust out of his hair and clothes and had eaten and drunk voraciously.
He was now sitting on an upturned bucket and smoking his clay pipe
with an air of solid content. Oliver, lean and supple, his hands in
his pockets, looked humorously down upon him.

"And you've got to stick to me for the future, like a roseate leech."

"Yes, Cap'en."

"You're going to ride a horse."

"A wot?" roared Chipmunk.

"A thing on four legs, that kicks like hell."

"Wotever for? I ain't never ridden no 'osses."

"You're going to learn, you unmilitary-looking, worm-eaten scab.
You've got to be a ruddy soldier."

"Gorblime!" said Chipmunk, "that's the first I 'eard of it. A 'oss
soldier? You're not kiddin', are you, Cap'en?"

"Certainly not."

"Gorblime! Who would ha' thought it?" Then he spat lustily and sucked
at his pipe.

"You've nothing to say against it, have you?"

"No, Cap'en."

"All right. And look here, when we're in the army you must chuck
calling me Cap'en."

"What shall I have to call yer? Gineral?" Chipmunk asked simply.

"Mate, Bill, Joe--any old name."

"Ker-ist!" said Chipmunk.

"Do you know why we're going to enlist?"

"Can't say as 'ow I does, Cap'en."

"You chuckle-headed swab! Don't you know we're at war?"

"I did 'ear some talk about it in a pub one night," Chipmunk admitted.
"'Oo are we fighting? Dutchmen or Dagoes?"

"Dutchmen."

Chipmunk spat in his horny hands, rubbed them together and smiled. As
each individual hair on his face seemed to enter into the smile, the
result was sinister.

"Do you remember that Dutchman at Samoa, Cap'en?"

Oliver smiled back. He remembered the hulking, truculent German
merchant whom Chipmunk, having half strangled, threw into the sea. He
also remembered the amount of accomplished lying he had to practise in
order to save Chipmunk from the clutches of the law and get away with
the schooner.

"We leave here to-morrow," said Oliver. "In the meanwhile you'll have
to shave your ugly face."

For the first time Chipmunk was really staggered. He gaped at Oliver's
retiring figure. Even his limited and time-worn vocabulary failed him.
The desperate meaning of the war has flashed suddenly on millions of
men in millions of different ways. This is the way in which it flashed
on Chipmunk.

He sat on his bucket pondering over the awfulness of it and sucking
his pipe long after it had been smoked out. The Dean's car drove into
the yard and the chauffeur, stripping off his coat, prepared to clean
it down.

"Say, guv'nor," said Chipmunk hoarsely, "what do you think of this
'ere war?"

"Same as most people," replied the chauffeur tersely. He shared in the
general disapproval of Chipmunk.

"But see 'ere. Cap'en he tells me I must shave me face and be a 'oss
soldier. I never shaved me face in me life, and I dunno 'ow to do it,
just as I dunno 'ow to ride a 'oss. I'm a sailorman, I am, and
sailormen don't shave their faces and ride 'osses. That's why I arsked
yer what yer thought of this 'ere war."

The chauffeur struggled into his jeans and adjusted them before
replying.

"If you're a sailor, the place for you is the navy," he remarked in a
superior manner. "As for the cavalry, the Cap'en, as you call him,
ought to have more sense----"

Chipmunk rose and swung his long arms threateningly.

"Look 'ere, young feller, do you want to have your blinkin' 'ead
knocked orf? Where the Cap'en goes, I goes, and don't you make any
mistake about it!"

"I didn't say anything," the chauffeur expostulated.

"Then don't say it. See? Keep your blinkin' 'ead shut and mind your
own business."

And, scowling fiercely and thrusting his empty pipe into his trousers
pocket, Chipmunk rolled away.

A few hours later Oliver, entering his room to dress for dinner, found
him standing in the light of the window laboriously fitting studs into
a shirt. The devoted fellow having gone to report to his master, had
found Burford engaged in his accustomed task of laying out his
master's evening clothes--Oliver during his stay in London had
provided himself with these necessaries. A jealous snarl had sent
Burford flying. So intent was he on his work, that he did not hear
Oliver enter. Oliver stood and watched him. Chipmunk was swearing
wholesomely under his breath. Oliver saw him take up the tail of the
shirt, spit on it and begin to rub something.

"Ker-ist!" said Chipmunk.

"What in the thundering blazes are you doing there?" cried Oliver.

Chipmunk turned.

"Oh, my God!" said Oliver.

Then he sank on a chair and laughed and laughed, and the more he
looked at Chipmunk the more he laughed. And Chipmunk stood stolid,
holding the shirt of the awful, wet, thumb-marked front. But it was
not at the shirt that Oliver laughed.

"Good God!" he cried, "were you born like that?"

For Chipmunk, having gone to the barber's, was clean-shaven, and
revealed himself as one of the most comically ugly of the sons of men.

"Never mind," said Oliver, after a while, "you've made the sacrifice
for your country."

"And wot if I get the face-ache?"

"I'd get something that looked like a face before I'd talk of it,"
grinned Oliver.

At the family dinner-table, Doggie being present, he announced his
intentions. It was the duty of every able-bodied man to fight for the
Empire. Had not half a million just been called for? We should want a
jolly sight more than that before we got through with it. Anyway, he
was off to-morrow.

"To-morrow?" echoed the Dean.

Burford, who was handing him potatoes, arched his eyebrows in alarm.
He was fond of Oliver.

"With Chipmunk."

Burford uttered an unheard sigh of relief.

"We're going to enlist in King Edward's Horse. They're our kind.
Overseas men. Lots of 'em what you dear good people would call bad
eggs. There you make the mistake. Perhaps they mayn't be fresh enough
raw for a dainty palate--but for cooking, good hard cooking, by gosh!
nothing can touch 'em."

"You talk of enlisting, dear," said Mrs. Conover. "Does that mean as a
private soldier?"

"Yes--a trooper. Why not?"

"You're a gentleman, dear. And gentlemen in the Army are officers."

"Not now, my dear Sophia," said the Dean. "Gentlemen are crowding into
the ranks. They are setting a noble example."

They argued it out in their gentle old-fashioned way. The Dean quoted
examples of sons of family who had served as privates in the South
African War.

"And that to this," said he, "is but an eddy to a maelstrom."

"Come and join us, James Marmaduke," said Oliver across the table.
"Chipmunk and me. Three 'sworn brothers to France.'"

Doggie smiled easily. "I'm afraid I can't undertake to swear a
fraternal affection for Chipmunk. He and I would have neither habits
nor ideals in common."

Oliver turned to Peggy. "I wish," said he, with rare restraint, "he
wouldn't talk like a book on deportment."

"Marmaduke talks the language of civilization," laughed Peggy. "He's
not a savage like you."

"Don't you jolly well wish he was!" said Oliver.

Peggy flushed. "No, I don't!" she declared.

The Dean being called away on business immediately after dinner, the
young men were left alone in the dining-room when the ladies had
departed. Oliver poured himself out a glass of port and filled his
pipe--an inelegant proceeding of which Doggie disapproved. A pipe
alone was barbaric, a pipe with old port was criminal. He held his
peace however.

"James Marmaduke," said Oliver, after a while, "what are you going to
do?" Much as Marmaduke disliked the name of "Doggie," he winced under
the irony of the new appellation.

"I don't see that I'm called upon to do anything," he replied.

Oliver smoked and sipped his port. "I don't want to hurt your feelings
any more," said he gravely, "though sometimes I'd like to scrag you--I
suppose because you're so different from me. It was so when we were
children together. Now I've grown very fond of Peggy. Put on the right
track, she might turn into a very fine woman."

"I don't think we need discuss Peggy, Oliver," said Marmaduke.

"I do. She is sticking to you very loyally." Oliver was a bit of an
idealist. "The time may come when she'll be up the devil's own tree.
She'll develop a patriotic conscience. If she sticks to you while you
do nothing she'll be miserable. If she chucks you, as she probably
will, she'll be no happier. It's all up to you, James Doggie
Marmaduke, old son. You'll have to gird up your loins and take sword
and buckler and march away like the rest. I don't want Peggy to be
unhappy. I want her to marry a man. That's why I proposed to take you
out with me to Huaheine and try to make you one. But that's over. Now,
here's the real chance. Better take it sooner than later. You'll have
to be a soldier, Doggie."

His pipe not drawing, he was preparing to dig it with the point of a
dessert-knife, when Doggie interposed hurriedly.

"For goodness' sake, don't do that! It makes cold shivers run down my
back!"

Oliver looked at him oddly, put the extinct pipe in his dinner-jacket
pocket and rose.

"A flaw in the dainty and divine ordering of things makes you shiver
now, old Doggie. What will you do when you see a fellow digging out
another fellow's intestines with the point of a bayonet? A bigger flaw
there somehow!"

"Don't talk like that. You make me sick," said Doggie.




CHAPTER VI


During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous
things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time;
which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change
into the Close of Durdlebury. Folks of strange habit and speech walked
in it, and, gazing at the Gothic splendour of the place, saw through
the mist of autumn and the mist of tears not Durdlebury but Louvain.
More than one of those grey houses flanking the cathedral and sharing
with it the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning;
not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny
as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation--but for
loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it
but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and
dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and
glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one of those houses
but was linked with a battlefield. Beyond the memory of man the reader
of the Litany had droned the accustomed invocation on behalf of the
Sovereign and the Royal Family, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, the
Lords of the Council and all prisoners and captives, and the
congregation had lumped them all together in their responses with an
undifferentiating convention of fervour. What had prisoners and
captives, any more than the Lords of the Council, to do with their
lives, their hearts, their personal emotions? But now--Durdlebury men
were known to be prisoners in German hands, and after "all prisoners
and captives" there was a long and pregnant silence, in which was felt
the reverberation of war against pier and vaulted arch and groined
roof of the cathedral, which was broken too, now and then, by the
stifled sob of a woman, before the choir came in with the response so
new and significant in its appeal--"We beseech thee to hear us, O
Lord!"

And in every home the knitting-needles of women clicked, as they did
throughout the length and breadth of the land. And the young men left
shop and trade and counting-house. And young parsons fretted, and some
obtained the Bishop's permission to become Army chaplains, and others,
snapping their fingers (figuratively) under the Bishop's nose, threw
their cassocks to the nettles and put on the full (though in modern
times not very splendiferous) panoply of war. And in course of time
the brigade of artillery rolled away and new troops took their place;
and Marmaduke Trevor, Esquire, of Denby Hall, was called upon to
billet a couple of officers and twenty men.

Doggie was both patriotic and polite. Having a fragment of the British
Army in his house, he did his best to make them comfortable. By
January he had no doubt that the Empire was in peril, that it was
every man's duty to do his bit. He welcomed the new-comers with open
arms, having unconsciously abandoned his attitude of superiority over
mere brawn. Doggie saw the necessity of brawn. The more the better. It
was every patriotic Englishman's duty to encourage brawn. If the two
officers had allowed him, he would have fed his billeted men every two
hours on prime beefsteaks and burgundy. He threw himself heart and
soul into the reorganization of his household. Officers and men found
themselves in clover. The officers had champagne every night for
dinner. They thought Doggie a capital fellow.

"My dear chap," they would say, "you're spoiling us. I don't say we
don't like it and aren't grateful. We jolly well are. But we're
supposed to rough it--to lead the simple life--what? You're doing us
too well."

"Impossible!" Doggie would reply, filling up the speaker's glass.
"Don't I know what we owe to you fellows? In what other way can a
helpless, delicate crock like myself show his gratitude and in some
sort of little way serve his country?"

When the sympathetic and wine-filled guest would ask what was the
nature of his malady, he would tap his chest vaguely and reply:

"Constitutional. I've never been able to do things like other fellows.
The least thing bowls me out."

"Dam hard lines--especially just now."

"Yes, isn't it?" Doggie would answer. And once he found himself
adding, "I'm fed up with doing nothing."

Here can be noted a distinct stage in Doggie's development. He
realized the brutality of fact. When great German guns were yawning
open-mouthed at you, it was no use saying, "Take the nasty, horrid
things away, I don't like them." They wouldn't go unless you took
other big guns and fired at them. And more guns were required than
could be manned by the peculiarly constituted fellows who made up the
artillery of the original British Army. New fellows not at all
warlike, peaceful citizens who had never killed a cat in anger, were
being driven by patriotism and by conscience to man them. Against
Blood and Iron now supreme, the superior, aesthetic and artistic being
was of no avail. You might lament the fall in relative values of
collections of wall-papers and little china dogs, as much as you
liked; but you could not deny the fall; they had gone down with
something of an ignoble "wallop." Doggie began to set a high value on
guns and rifles and such-like deadly engines, and to inquire
petulantly why the Government were not providing them at greater
numbers and at greater speed. On his periodic visits to London he
wandered round by Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, to see for himself
how the recruiting was going on. At the Deanery he joined in ardent
discussions of the campaign in Flanders. On the walls of his peacock
and ivory room were maps stuck all over with little pins. When he told
the young officer that he was wearied of inaction, he spoke the truth.
He began to feel mightily aggrieved against Providence for keeping him
outside this tremendous national league of youth. He never questioned
his physical incapacity. It was as real a fact as the German guns. He
went about pitying himself and seeking pity.

The months passed. The regiment moved away from Durdlebury, and Doggie
was left alone in Denby Hall.

He felt solitary and restless. News came from Oliver that he had been
offered and had accepted an infantry commission, and that Chipmunk,
having none of the special qualities of a "'oss soldier," had, by
certain skilful wire-pullings, been transferred to his regiment, and
had once more become his devoted servant. "A month of this sort of
thing," he wrote, "would make our dear old Doggie sit up." Doggie
sighed. If only he had been blessed with Oliver's constitution!

One morning Briggins, his chauffeur, announced that he could stick it
no longer and was going to join up. Then Doggie remembered a talk he
had had with one of the young officers who had expressed astonishment
at his not being able to drive a car. "I shouldn't have the nerve," he
had replied. "My nerves are all wrong--and I shouldn't have the
strength to change tyres and things."... If his chauffeur went, he
would find it very difficult to get another. Who would drive the
Rolls-Royce?

"Why not learn to drive yourself, sir?" said Briggins. "Not the
Rolls-Royce. I would put it up or get rid of it, if I were you. If you
engage a second-rate man, as you'll have to, who isn't used to this
make of car, he'll do it in for you pretty quick. Get a smaller one in
its place and drive it yourself. I'll undertake to teach you enough
before I go."

So Doggie, following Briggins' advice, took lessons and, to his
amazement, found that he did not die of nervous collapse when a dog
crossed the road in front of the car and that the fitting of
detachable wheels did not require the strength of a Hercules. The
first time he took Peggy out in the two-seater he swelled with pride.

"I'm so glad to see you can do something!" she said.

Although she was kind and as mildly affectionate as ever, he had
noticed of late a curious reserve in her manner. Conversation did not
flow easily. There seemed to be something at the back of her mind. She
had fits of abstraction from which, when rallied, she roused herself
with an effort.

"It's the war," she would declare. "It's affecting everybody that
way."

Gradually Doggie began to realize that she spoke truly. Most people of
his acquaintance, when he was by, seemed to be thus afflicted. The
lack of interest they manifested in his delicacy of constitution was
almost impolite. At last he received an anonymous letter, "For little
Doggie Trevor, from the girls of Durdlebury," enclosing a white
feather.

The cruelty of it broke Doggie down. He sat in his peacock and ivory
room and nearly wept. Then he plucked up courage and went to Peggy.
She was rather white about the lips as she listened.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I expected something of the sort to
happen."

"It's brutal and unjust."

"Yes, it's brutal," she admitted coldly.

"I thought you, at any rate, would sympathize with me," he cried.

She turned on him. "And what about me? Who sympathizes with me? Do you
ever give a moment's thought to what I've had to go through the last
few months?"

"I don't quite know what you mean," he stammered.

"I should have thought it was obvious. You can't be such an innocent
babe as to suppose people don't talk about you. They don't talk to you
because they don't like to be rude. They send you white feathers
instead. But they talk to me. 'Why isn't Marmaduke in khaki?' 'Why
isn't Doggie fighting?' 'I wonder how you can allow him to slack about
like that!'--I've had a pretty rough time fighting your battles, I can
tell you, and I deserve some credit. I want sympathy just as much as
you do."

"My dear," said Doggie, feeling very much humiliated, "I never knew. I
never thought. I do see now the unpleasant position you've been in.
People are brutes. But," he added eagerly, "you told them the real
reason?"

"What's that?" she asked, looking at him with cold eyes.

Then Doggie knew that the wide world was against him. "I'm not fit.
I've no constitution. I'm an impossibility."

"You thought you had nerves until you learned to drive the car. Then
you discovered that you hadn't. You fancy you've a weak heart. Perhaps
if you learned to walk thirty miles a day you would discover you
hadn't that either. And so with the rest of it."

"This is very painful," he said, going to the window and staring out.
"Very painful. You are of the same opinion as the young women who sent
me that abominable thing."

She had been on the strain for a long while and something inside her
had snapped. At his woebegone attitude she relented however, and came
up and touched his shoulder.

"A girl wants to feel some pride in the man she's going to marry. It's
horrible to have to be always defending him--especially when she's not
sure she's telling the truth in his defence."

He swung round horrified. "Do you think I'm shamming, so as to get out
of serving in the Army?"

"Not consciously. Unconsciously, I think you are. What does your
doctor say?"

Doggie was taken aback. He had no doctor. He had not consulted one for
years, having no cause for medical advice. The old family physician
who had attended his mother in her last illness and had prescribed
Gregory powders for him as a child, had retired from Durdlebury long
ago. There was only one person living familiar with his constitution,
and that was himself. He made confession of the surprising fact. Peggy
made a little gesture.

"That proves it. I don't believe you have anything wrong with you. The
nerves business made me sceptical. This is straight talking. It's
horrid, I know. But it's best to get through with it once and for
all."

Some men would have taken deep offence and, consigning Peggy to the
devil, have walked out of the room. But Doggie, a conscientious, even
though a futile human being, was gnawed for the first time by the
suspicion that Peggy might possibly be right. He desired to act
honourably.

"I'll do," said he, "whatever you think proper."

Peggy was swift to smite the malleable iron. To use the conventional
phrase might give an incorrect impression of red-hot martial ardour on
the part of Doggie.

"Good," she said, with the first smile of the day. "I'll hold you to
it. But it will be an honourable bargain. Get Dr. Murdoch to overhaul
you thoroughly, with a view to the Army. If he passes you, take a
commission. Dad says he can easily get you one through his old friend
General Gadsby at the War Office. If he doesn't, and you're unfit,
I'll stick to you through thick and thin, and make the young women of
Durdlebury wish they'd never been born."

She put out her hand. Doggie took it.

"Very well," said he, "I agree."

She laughed, and ran to the door.

"Where are you going?"

"To the telephone--to ring up Dr. Murdoch for an appointment."

"You're flabby," said Dr. Murdoch the next morning to an anxious
Doggie in pink pyjamas; "but that's merely a matter of unused muscles.
Physical training will set it right in no time. Otherwise, my dear
Trevor, you're in splendid health. I was afraid your family history
might be against you--the child of elderly parents, and so forth. But
nothing of the sort. Not only are you a first-class life for an
insurance company, but you're a first-class life for the Army--and
that's saying a good deal. There's not a flaw in your whole
constitution."

He put away his stethoscope and smiled at Doggie, who regarded him
blankly as the pronouncer of a doom. He went on to prescribe a course
of physical exercises, so many miles a day walking, such and such
back-breaking and contortional performances in his bathroom; if
possible, a skilfully graduated career in a gymnasium, but his words
fell on the ears of a Doggie in a dream; and when he had ended, Doggie
said:

"I'm afraid, Doctor, you'll have to write all that out for me."

"With pleasure," smiled the doctor, and gripped him by the hand. And
seeing Doggie wince, he said heartily: "Ah! I'll soon set that right
for you. I'll get you something--an india-rubber contrivance to
practise with for half an hour a day, and you'll develop a hand like a
gorilla's."

Dr. Murdoch grinned his way, in his little car, to his next patient.
Here was this young slacker, coddled from birth, absolutely
horse-strong and utterly confounded at being told so. He grinned and
chuckled so much that he nearly killed his most valuable old lady
patient, who was crossing the High Street.

But Doggie crept out of bed and put on a violet dressing-gown that
clashed horribly with his pink pyjamas, and wandered like a man in a
nightmare to his breakfast. But he could not eat. He swallowed a cup
of coffee and sought refuge in his own room. He was frightened.
Horribly frightened, caught in a net from which there was no
escape--not the tiniest break of a mesh. He had given his word--and in
justice to Doggie, be it said that he held his word sacred--he had
given his word to join the Army if he should be passed by Murdoch. He
had been passed--more than passed. He would have to join. He would
have to fight. He would have to live in a muddy trench, sleep in mud,
eat in mud, plough through mud, in the midst of falling shells and
other instruments of death. And he would be an officer, with all kinds
of strange and vulgar men under him, men like Chipmunk, for instance,
whom he would never understand. He was almost physically sick with
apprehension. He realized that he had never commanded a man in his
life. He had been mortally afraid of Briggins, his late chauffeur. He
had heard that men at the front lived on some solid horror called
bully-beef dug out of tins, and some liquid horror called cocoa, also
drunk out of tins; that men kept on their clothes, even their boots,
for weeks at a time; that rats ran over them while they tried to
sleep; that lice, hitherto associated in his mind with the most
revolting type of tramp, out there made no distinction of persons.
They were the common lot of the lowest Tommy and the finest gentleman.
And then the fighting. The noise of the horrid guns. The disgusting
sights of men shattered to bloody bits. The horrible stench. The
terror of having one's face shot half away and being an object of
revolt and horror to all beholders for the rest of life. Death.
Feverishly he ruffled his comely hair. Death. He was surprised that
the contemplation of it did not freeze the blood in his veins. Yes. He
put it clearly before him. He had given his word to Peggy that he
would go and expose himself to Death. Death. What did it mean? He had
been brought up in orthodox Church of England Christianity. His
flaccid mind had never questioned the truth of its dogmas. He
believed, in a general sort of way, that good people went to Heaven
and bad people went to Hell. His conscience was clear. He had never
done any harm to anybody. As far as he knew, he had broken none of the
Ten Commandments. In a technical sense he was a miserable sinner, and
so proclaimed himself once a week. But though, perhaps, he had done
nothing in his life to merit eternal bliss in Paradise, yet, on the
other hand, he had committed no action which would justify a kindly
and just Creator in consigning him to the eternal flames of Hell.
Somehow the thought of Death did not worry him. It faded from his
mind, being far less terrible than life under prospective conditions.
Discomfort, hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, pain; above all the terror
of his fellows--these were the soul-racking anticipations of this new
life into which it was a matter of honour for him to plunge. And to an
essential gentleman like Doggie a matter of honour was a matter of
life. And so, dressed in his pink pyjamas and violet dressing-gown,
amid the peacock-blue and ivory hangings of his boudoir room, and
stared at by the countless unsympathetic eyes of his little china
dogs, Doggie Trevor passed through his first Gethsemane.

       *       *       *       *       *

His decision was greeted with joy at the Deanery. Peggy threw her arms
round his neck and gave him the very first real kiss he had ever
received. It revived him considerably. His Aunt Sophia also embraced
him. The Dean shook him warmly by the hand, and talked eloquent
patriotism. Doggie already felt a hero. He left the house in a glow,
but the drive home in the two-seater was cold and the pitch-dark night
presaged other nights of mercilessness in the future; and when Doggie
sat alone by his fire, sipping the hot milk which Peddle presented him
on a silver tray, the doubts and fears of the morning racked him
again. An ignoble possibility occurred to him. Murdoch might be wrong.
Murdoch might be prejudiced by local gossip. Would it not be better to
go up to London and obtain the opinion of a first-class man to whom he
was unknown? There was also another alternative. Flight. He might go
to America, and do nothing. To the South of France, and help in some
sort of way with hospitals for French wounded. He caught himself up
short as these thoughts passed through his mind, and he shuddered. He
took up the glass of hot milk and put it down again. Milk? He needed
something stronger. A glance in a mirror showed him his sleek hair
tousled into an upstanding wig. In a kind of horror of himself he went
to the dining-room and for the first time in his life drank a stiff
whisky and soda for the sake of the stimulant. Reaction came. He felt
a man once more. Rather suicide at once than such damnable dishonour.
According to the directions which the Dean, a man of affairs, had
given him, he sat down and wrote his application to the War Office for
a commission. Then--unique adventure!--he stole out of the barred and
bolted house, without thought of hat and overcoat (let the traducers
of alcohol mark it well), ran down the drive and posted the letter in
the box some few yards beyond his entrance gates.

The Dean had already posted his letter to his old friend General
Gadsby at the War Office.

So the die was cast. The Rubicon was crossed. The bridges were burnt.
The irrevocable step was taken. Dr. Murdoch turned up the next morning
with his prescription for physical training. And then Doggie trained
assiduously, monotonously, wearily. He grew appalled by the
senselessness of this apparently unnecessary exertion. Now and then
Peggy accompanied him on his prescribed walks; but the charm of her
company was discounted by the glaring superiority of her powers of
endurance. While he ached with fatigue, she pressed along as fresh as
Atalanta at the beginning of her race. When they parted by the Deanery
door, she would stand flushed, radiant in her youth and health, and
say:

"We've had a topping walk, old dear. Now isn't it a glorious thing to
feel oneself alive?"

But poor Doggie of the flabby muscles felt half dead.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fateful letter burdening Doggie with the King's commission arrived
a few weeks later: a second lieutenancy in a Fusilier battalion of the
New Army. Dates and instructions were given. The impress of the Royal
Arms at the head of the paper, with its grotesque perky lion and
unicorn, conveyed to Doggie a sense of the grip of some uncanny power.
The typewritten words scarcely mattered. The impress fascinated him.
There was no getting away from it. Those two pawing beasts held him in
their clutch. They headed a Death Warrant, from which there was no
appeal.

Doggie put his house in order, dismissed with bounty those of his
servants who would be no longer needed, and kept the Peddles, husband
and wife, to look after his interests. On his last night at home he
went wistfully through the familiar place, the drawing-room sacred to
his mother's memory, the dining-room so solid in its half-century of
comfort, his own peacock and ivory room so intensely himself, so
expressive of his every taste, every mood, every emotion. Those
strange old-world musical instruments--he could play them all with the
touch or breath of a master and a lover. The old Italian theorbo. He
took it up. How few to-day knew its melodious secret! He looked
around. All these daintinesses and prettinesses had a meaning. They
signified the magical little beauties of life--things which asserted a
range of spiritual truths, none the less real and consolatory because
vice and crime and ugliness and misery and war co-existed in ghastly
fact on other facets of the planet Earth. The sweetness here expressed
was as essential to the world's spiritual life as the sweet elements
of foodstuffs to its physical life. To the getting together of all
these articles of beauty he had devoted the years of his youth....
And--another point of view--was he not the guardian by inheritance--in
other words, by Divine Providence--of this beautiful English home, the
trustee of English comfort, of the sacred traditions of sweet English
life that had made England the only country, the only country, he
thought, that could call itself a Country and not a Compromise, in the
world?

And he was going to leave it all. All that it meant in beauty and
dignity and ease of life. For what?

For horror and filthiness and ugliness, for everything against which
his beautiful peacock and ivory room protested. Doggie's last night at
Denby Hall was a troubled one.

Aunt Sophia and Peggy accompanied him to London and stayed with him at
his stuffy little hotel off Bond Street, while Doggie got his kit
together. They bought everything in every West End shop that any
salesman assured them was essential for active service. Swords,
revolvers, field-glasses, pocket-knives (for gigantic pockets),
compasses, mess-tins, cooking-batteries, sleeping-bags, waterproofs,
boots innumerable, toilet accessories, drinking-cups, thermos flasks,
field stationery cases, periscopes, tinted glasses, Gieve waistcoats,
cholera belts, portable medicine cases, earplugs, tin-openers,
corkscrews, notebooks, pencils, luminous watches, electric torches,
pins, housewives, patent seat walking-sticks--everything that the man
of commercial instincts had devised for the prosecution of the war.

The amount of warlike equipment with which Doggie, with the aid of his
Aunt Sophia and Peggy, encumbered the narrow little passages of
Sturrocks's Hotel, must have weighed about a ton.

At last Doggie's uniforms--several suits--came home. He had devoted
enormous care to their fit. Attired in one he looked beautiful. Peggy
decreed a dinner at the Carlton. She and Doggie alone. Her mother
could get some stuffy old relation to spend the evening with her at
Sturrocks's. She wanted Doggie all to herself, so as to realize the
dream of many disgusting and humiliating months. And as she swept
through the palm court and up the broad stairs and wound through the
crowded tables of the restaurant with the khaki-clad Doggie by her
side, she felt proud and uplifted. Here was her soldier whom she had
made. Her very own man in khaki.

"Dear old thing," she whispered, pressing his arm as they trekked to
their table. "Don't you feel glorious? Don't you feel as if you could
face the universe?"

Peggy drank one glass of the quart of champagne. Doggie drank the
rest.

On getting into bed he wondered why this unprecedented quantity of
wine had not affected his sobriety. Its only effect had been to stifle
thought. He went to bed and slept happily, for Peggy's parting kiss
had been such as would conduce to any young man's felicity.

The next morning Aunt Sophia and Peggy saw him off to his depot, with
his ton of luggage. He leaned out of the carriage window and exchanged
hand kisses with Peggy until the curve of the line cut her off. Then
he settled down in his corner with the _Morning Post_. But he could
not concentrate his attention on the morning news. This strange
costume in which he was clothed seemed unreal, monstrous; no longer
the natty dress in which he had been proud to prink the night before,
but a nightmare, Nessus-like investiture, signifying some abominable
burning doom.

The train swept him into a world that was upside down.




CHAPTER VII


Those were proud days for Peggy. She went about Durdlebury with her
head in the air, and her step was as martial as though she herself
wore the King's uniform, and she regarded the other girls of the town
with a defiant eye. If only she could discover, she thought, the
sender of the abominable feather! In Timpany's drapery establishment
she raked the girls at the counter with a searching glance. At the
cathedral services she studied the demure faces of her contemporaries.
Now that Doggie was a soldier she held the anonymous exploit to be
cowardly and brutal. What did people know of the thousand and one
reasons that kept eligible young men out of the Army? What had they
known of Marmaduke? As soon as the illusion of his life had been
dispelled, he had marched away with as gallant a tread as anybody; and
though Doggie had kept to himself his shrinkings and his terrors, she
knew that what to the average hardily bred young man was a gay
adventure, was to him an ordeal of considerable difficulty. She longed
for his first leave, so that she could parade him before the town, in
the event of there being a lurking sceptic who still refused to
believe that he had joined the Army.

Conspicuous in the drawing-room, framed in silver, stood a large
full-length photograph of Doggie in his new uniform.

She wrote to him daily, chronicling the little doings of the town, at
times reviling it for its dullness. Dad, on numberless committees, was
scarcely ever in the house, except for hurried meals. Most of the
pleasant young clergy had gone. Many of the girls had gone too:
Dorothy Bruce to be a probationer in a V.A.D. hospital. If Durdlebury
were not such a rotten out-of-the-world place, the infirmary would be
full of wounded soldiers, and she could do her turn at nursing. As
things were, she could only knit socks for Tommies and a silk khaki
tie for her own boy. But when everybody was doing their bit, these
occupations were not enough to prevent her feeling a little slacker.
He would have to do the patriotic work for both of them, tell her all
about himself, and let her share everything with him in imagination.
She also expressed her affection for him in shy and slangy terms.

Doggie wrote regularly. His letters were as shy and conveyed less
information. The work was hard, the hours long, his accommodation
Spartan. They were in huts on Salisbury Plain. Sometimes he confessed
himself too tired to write more than a few lines. He had a bad cold in
the head. He was better. They had inoculated him against typhoid and
had allowed him two or three slack days. The first time he had
unaccountably fainted; but he had seen some of the men do the same,
and the doctor had assured him that it had nothing to do with
cowardice. He had gone for a route march and had returned a dusty lump
of fatigue. But after having shaken the dust out of his
moustache--Doggie had a playful turn of phrase now and then--and drunk
a quart of shandy-gaff, he had felt refreshed. Then it rained hard,
and they were all but washed out of the huts. It was a very strange
life--one which he never dreamed could have existed. "Fancy me," he
wrote, "glad to sleep on a drenched bed!" There was the riding-school.
Why hadn't he learned to ride as a boy? He had been told that the
horse was a noble animal and the friend of man. He was afraid he would
return to his dear Peggy with many of his young illusions shattered.
The horse was the most ignoble, malevolent beast that ever walked,
except the sergeant-major in the riding-school. Peggy was filled with
admiration for his philosophic endurance of hardships. It was real
courage. His letters contained simple statements of fact, but not a
word of complaint. On the other hand, they were not ebullient with
joy; but then, Peggy reflected, there was not much to be joyous about
in a ramshackle hut on Salisbury Plain. "Dear old thing," she would
write, "although you don't grouse, I know you must be having a pretty
thin time. But you're bucking up splendidly, and when you get your
leave I'll do a girl's very d----dest (don't be shocked; but I'm sure
you're learning far worse language in the Army) to make it up to you."
Her heart was very full of him.

Then there came a time when his letters grew rarer and shorter. At
last they ceased altogether. After a week's waiting she sent an
anxious telegram. The answer came back. "Quite well. Will write soon."
She waited. He did not write. One evening an unstamped envelope,
addressed to her in a feminine hand, which she recognized as that of
Marmaduke's anonymous correspondent, was found in the Deanery
letter-box. The envelope enclosed a copy of a cutting from the
"Gazette" of the morning paper, and a sentence was underlined and
adorned with exclamation marks at the sides.

    "R. Fusiliers. Tempy. 2nd Lieutenant J. Trevor resigns his
    commission."

The Colonel dealt with him as gently as he could in that final
interview. He put his hand in a fatherly way on Doggie's shoulder and
bade him not take it too much to heart. He had done his best; but he
was not cut out for an officer. These were merciless times. In matters
of life and death we could not afford weak links in the chain.
Soldiers in high command, with great reputations, had already been
scrapped. In Doggie's case there was no personal discredit. He had
always conducted himself like a gentleman and a man of honour, but he
had not the qualities necessary for the commanding of men. He must
send in his resignation.

"But what can I do, sir?" asked Doggie in a choking voice. "I am
disgraced for ever."

The Colonel reflected for a moment. He knew that Doggie's life had
been a little hell on earth from the first day he had joined. He was
very sorry for the poor little toy Pom in his pack of hounds. It was
scarcely the toy Pom's fault that he had failed. But the Great Hunt
could have no use for toy Poms. At last he took a sheet of regimental
notepaper and wrote:

    "DEAR TREVOR,--

    "I am full of admiration for the plucky way in which you have
    striven to overcome your physical disabilities, and I am only
    too sorry that they should have compelled the resignation of
    your commission and your severance from the regiment.

                                                 "Yours sincerely,
                                                     "L. G. CAIRD,
                                                         "Lt-Col."

He handed it to Doggie.

"That's all I can do for you, my poor boy," said he.

"Thank you, sir," said Doggie.

       *       *       *       *       *

Doggie took a room at the Savoy Hotel, and sat there most of the day,
the pulp of a man. He had gone to the Savoy, not daring to show his
face at the familiar Sturrocks's. At the Savoy he was but a number
unknown, unquestioned. He wore civilian clothes. Such of his uniforms
and martial paraphernalia as he had been allowed to retain in
camp--for one can't house a ton of kit in a hut--he had given to his
batman. His one desire now was to escape from the eyes of his
fellow-men. He felt that he bore upon him the stigma of his disgrace,
obvious to any casual glance. He was the man who had been turned out
of the army as a hopeless incompetent. Even worse than the
slacker--for the slacker might have latent the qualities that he
lacked. Even at the best and brightest, he could only be mistaken for
a slacker, once more the likely recipient of white feathers from any
damsel patriotically indiscreet. The Colonel's letter brought him
little consolation. It is true that he carried it about with him in
his pocket-book; but the gibing eyes of observers had not the X-ray
power to read it there. And he could not pin it on his hat. Besides,
he knew that the kindly Colonel had stretched a point of veracity. No
longer could he take refuge in his cherished delicacy of constitution.
It would be a lie.

Peggy, in her softest and most pitying mood, never guessed the nature
of Doggie's ordeal. Those letters so brave, sometimes so playful, had
been written with shaky hand, misty eyes, throbbing head, despairing
heart. Looking back, it seemed to him one blurred dream of pain. His
brother officers were no worse than those in any other Kitchener
regiment. Indeed, the Colonel was immensely proud of them and sang
their praises to any fellow-dugout who would listen to him at the
Naval and Military Club. But how were a crowd of young men, trained in
the rough and tumble of public schools, universities and sport, and
now throbbing under the stress of the new deadly game, to understand
poor Doggie Trevor? They had no time to take him seriously, save to
curse him when he did wrong, and in their leisure time he became
naturally a butt for their amusement.

"Surely I don't have to sleep in there?" he asked the subaltern who
was taking him round on the day of his arrival in camp, and showed him
his squalid little cubby-hole of a hut with its dirty boards, its
cheap table and chair, its narrow sleep-dispelling little bedstead.

"Yes, it's a beastly hole, isn't it? Until last month we were under
canvas."

"Sleeping on the bare ground?"

"Wallowing in the mud like pigs. Not one of us without a cold. Never
had a such filthy time in my life."

Doggie looked about him helplessly, while the comforter smiled grimly.
Already his disconsolate attitude towards the dingy hutments of the
camp and the layer of thick mud on his beautiful new boots had
diverted his companion.

"Couldn't I have this furnished at my own expense? A carpet and a
proper bed, and a few pictures----"

"I wouldn't try."

"Why not?"

"Some of it might get broken--not quite accidentally."

"But surely," gasped Doggie, "the soldiers would not be allowed to
come in here and touch my furniture?"

"It seems," said the subaltern, after a bewildered stare, "that you
have quite a lot to learn."

Doggie had. The subaltern reported a new kind of animal to the mess.
The mess saw to it that Doggie should be crammed with information--but
information wholly incorrect and misleading, which added to his many
difficulties. When his ton of kit arrived he held an unwilling
reception in the hut and found himself obliged to explain to gravely
curious men the use for which the various articles were designed.

"This, I suppose, is a new type of gas-mask?"

No. It was a patent cooker. Doggie politely showed how it worked. He
also demonstrated that a sleeping-bag was not a kit-sack of a size
unauthorized by the regulations, and that a huge steel-pointed
walking-stick had nothing to do with agriculture.

He was very weary of his visitors by the time they had gone. The next
day the Adjutant advised him to scrap the lot. So sorrowfully he sent
back most of his purchases to London.

Then the Imp of Mischance brought as a visitor to the mess, a
subaltern from another regiment who belonged to Doggie's part of the
country.

"Why--I'm blowed if it isn't Doggie Trevor!" he exclaimed carelessly.
"How d'ye do, Doggie?"

So thenceforward he was known in the regiment by the hated name.

There were rags in which, as he was often the victim, he was forced to
join. His fastidiousness loathed the coarse personal contact of arms
and legs and bodies. His undeveloped strength could not cope with the
muscle of his young brother barbarians. Aching with the day's fatigue,
he would plead, to no avail, to be left alone. Compared with these
feared and detested scraps, he considered, in after-times, battles to
be agreeable recreations.

Had he been otherwise competent, he might have won through the teasing
and the ragging of the mess. No one disliked him. He was
pleasant-mannered, good-natured, and appeared to bear no malice. True,
his ignorance not only of the ways of the army but of the ways of
their old hearty world, was colossal, his mode of expression rather
that of a precise old church dignitary than of a subaltern in a
regiment of Fusiliers, his habits, including a nervous shrinking from
untidiness and dirt, those of a dear old maid; but the mess thought,
honestly, that he could be knocked into their own social shape, and in
the process of knocking carried out their own traditions. They might
have succeeded if Doggie had discovered any reserve source of pride
from which to draw. But Doggie was hopeless at his work. The mechanism
of a rifle filled him with dismay. He could not help shutting his eyes
before he pulled the trigger. Inured all his life to lethargic action,
he found the smart crisp movements of drill almost impossible to
attain. The riding-school was a terror and a torture. Every second he
deemed himself in imminent peril of death. Said the sergeant-major:

"Now, Mr. Trevor, you're sitting on a 'orse and not a 'olly-bush."

And Doggie would wish the horse and the sergeant-major in hell.

Again, what notion could poor Doggie have of command? He had never
raised his mild tenor voice to damn anybody in his life. At first the
tone in which the officers ordered the men about shocked him. So
rough, so unmannerly, so unkind. He could not understand the cheery
lack of resentment with which the men obeyed. He could not get into
the way of military directness, could never check the polite "Do you
mind" that came instinctively to his lips. Now if you ask a private
soldier whether he minds doing a thing instead of telling him to do
it, his brain begins to get confused. As one defaulter, whose
confusion of brain had led him into trouble, observed to his mates:
"What can you do with a blighter who's a cross between a blinking
Archbishop and a ruddy dicky-bird?" What else, save show in divers and
ingenious ways that you mocked at his authority? Doggie had the
nervous dread of the men that he had anticipated. During his training
on parade, words of command stuck in his throat. When forced out, they
grotesquely mixed themselves together.

The Adjutant gave advice.

"Speak out, man. Bawl. You're dealing with soldiers at drill, not
saying sweet nothings to old ladies in a drawing-room."

And Doggie tried. Doggie tried very hard. He was mortified by his own
stupidity. Little points of drill and duty that the others of his own
standing seemed to pick up at once, almost by instinct, he could only
grasp after long and tedious toil. No one realized that his brain was
stupefied by the awful and unaccustomed physical fatigue.

And then came the inevitable end.

       *       *       *       *       *

So Doggie crept into the Savoy Hotel and hid himself there, wishing he
were dead. It was some time before he could write the terrible letter
to Peggy. He did so on the day when he saw that his resignation was
gazetted. He wrote after many anguished attempts:

    "DEAR PEGGY,--

    "I haven't written before about the dreadful thing that has
    happened, because I simply couldn't. I have resigned my
    commission. Not of my own free will, for, believe me, I would
    have gone through anything for your sake, to say nothing of the
    country and my own self-respect. To put it brutally, I have been
    thrown out for sheer incompetence.

    "I neither hope nor expect nor want you to continue your
    engagement to a disgraced man. I release you from every
    obligation your pity and generosity may think binding. I want
    you to forget me and marry a man who can do the work of this new
    world.

    "What I shall do I don't know. I have scarcely yet been able to
    think. Possibly I shall go abroad. At any rate I shan't return
    to Durdlebury. If women sent me white feathers before I joined,
    what would they send me now? It will always be my consolation to
    know that you once gave me your love, in spite of the pain of
    realizing that I have forfeited it by my unworthiness.

    "Please tell Uncle Edward that I feel keenly his position, for
    he was responsible for getting me the commission through General
    Gadsby. Give my love to my Aunt, if she will have it.

                                     "Yours always affectionately,
                                             J. MARMADUKE TREVOR."

By return of post came the answer:

    "DEAREST,--

    "We are all desperately disappointed. Perhaps we hurried on
    things too quickly and tried you too high all at once. I ought
    to have known. Oh, my poor dear boy, you must have had a
    dreadful time. Why didn't you tell me? The news in the 'Gazette'
    came upon me like a thunderbolt. I didn't know what to think.
    I'm afraid I thought the worst, the very horrid worst--that you
    had got tired of it and resigned of your own accord. How was one
    to know? Your letter was almost a relief.

    "In offering to release me from my engagement you are acting
    like the honourable gentleman you are. Of course, I can
    understand your feelings. But I should be a little beast to
    accept right away like that. If there are any feathers about, I
    should deserve to have them stuck on to me with tar. Don't think
    of going abroad or doing anything foolish, dear, like that, till
    you have seen me--that is to say, us, for Dad is bringing Mother
    and me up to town by the first train to-morrow. Dad feels sure
    that everything is not lost. He'll dig out General Gadsby and
    fix up something for you. In the meantime, get us rooms at the
    Savoy, though Mother is worried as to whether it's a respectable
    place for Deans to stay at. But I know you wouldn't like to meet
    us at Sturrocks's--otherwise you would have been there yourself.
    Meet our train. All love from

                                                          "PEGGY."

Doggie engaged the rooms, but he did not meet the train. He did not
even stay in the hotel to meet his relations. He could not meet them.
He could not meet the pity in their eyes. He read in Peggy's note a
desire to pet and soothe him and call him "Poor little Doggie," and he
writhed. He could not even take up an heroic attitude, and say to
Peggy: "When I have retrieved the past and can bring you an unsullied
reputation, I will return and claim you. Till then farewell." There
was no retrieving the past. Other men might fail at first, and then
make good; but he was not like them. His was the fall of Humpty
Dumpty. Final--irretrievable.

He packed up his things in a fright and, leaving no address at the
Savoy, drove to the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury. But he wrote Peggy a
letter "to await arrival." If time had permitted he would have sent a
telegram, stating that he was off for Tobolsk or Tierra del Fuego, and
thereby prevented their useless journey; but they had already started
when he received Peggy's message.

Nothing could be done, he wrote, in effect, to her, nothing in the way
of redemption. He would not put her father to the risk of any other
such humiliation. He had learned, by the most bitter experience, that
the men who counted now in the world's respect and in woman's love
were men of a type to which, with all the goodwill in the world, he
could not make himself belong--he did not say to which he wished he
could belong with all the agony and yearning of his soul. Peggy must
forget him. The only thing he could do was to act up to her generous
estimate of him as an honourable gentleman. As such it was his duty to
withdraw for ever from her life. His exact words, however, were: "You
know how I have always hated slang, how it has jarred upon me, often
to your amusement, when you have used it. But I have learned in the
past months how expressive it may be. Through slang I've learned what
I am. I am a born 'rotter.' A girl like you can't possibly love and
marry a rotter. So the rotter, having a lingering sense of decency,
makes his bow and exits--God knows where."

Peggy, red-eyed, adrift, rudderless on a frightening sea, called her
father into her bedroom at the Savoy and showed him the letter. He
drew out and adjusted his round tortoise-shell-rimmed reading-glasses
and read it.

"That's a miraculously new Doggie," said he.

Peggy clutched the edges of his coat.

"I've never heard you call him that before."

"It has never been worth while," said the Dean.




CHAPTER VIII


At the Savoy, during the first stupefaction of his misery, Doggie had
not noticed particularly the prevalence of khaki. At the Russell it
dwelt insistent, like the mud on Salisbury Plain. Men that might have
been the twin brethren of his late brother officers were everywhere,
free, careless, efficient. The sight of them added the gnaw of envy to
his heartache. Even in his bedroom he could hear the jingle of their
spurs and their cheery voices as they clanked along the corridor. On
the third day after his migration he took a bold step and moved into
lodgings in Woburn Place. Here at least he could find quiet,
untroubled by heart-rending sights and sounds. He spent most of his
time in dull reading and dispirited walking. For he could walk now--so
much had his training done for him--and walk for many miles without
fatigue. For all the enjoyment he got out of it, he might as well have
marched round a prison yard. Indeed there were some who tramped the
prison yards with keener zest. They were buoyed up with the hope of
freedom, they could look forward to the ever-approaching day when they
should be thrown once more into the glad whirl of life. But the
miraculously new Doggie had no hope. He felt for ever imprisoned in
his shame. His failure preyed on his mind.

He dallied with thoughts of suicide. Why hadn't he salved, at any
rate, his service revolver? Then he remembered the ugly habits of the
unmanageable thing--how it always kicked its muzzle up in the air.
Would he have been able even to shoot himself with it? And he smiled
in self-derision. Drowning was not so difficult. Any fool could throw
himself into the water. With a view to the inspection of a suitable
spot, Doggie wandered, idly, in the dusk of one evening, to Waterloo
Bridge, and turning his back to the ceaseless traffic, leaned his
elbows on the parapet and stared in front of him. A few lights already
gleamed from Somerset House and the more dimly seen buildings of the
Temple. The dome of St. Paul's loomed a dark shadow through the mist.
The river stretched below very peaceful, very inviting. The parapet
would be easy to climb. He did not know whether he could dive in the
approved manner--hands joined over head. He had never learned to swim,
let alone dive. At any rate, he could fall off. In that art the
riding-school had proved him a past master. But the spot had its
disadvantages. It was too public. Perhaps other bridges might afford
more privacy. He would inspect them all. It would be something to do.
There was no hurry. As he was not wanted in this world, so he had no
assurance of being welcome in the next. He had a morbid vision of
avatar after avatar being kicked from sphere to sphere.

At this point of his reflections he became aware of a presence by his
side. He turned his head and found a soldier, an ordinary private,
very close to him, also leaning on the parapet.

"I thought I wasn't mistaken in Mr. Marmaduke Trevor."

Doggie started away, on the point of flight, dreading the possible
insolence of one of the men of his late regiment. But the voice of the
speaker rang in his ears with a strange familiarity, and the great
fleshy nose, the high cheek-bones, and the little grey eyes in the
weather-beaten face suggested vaguely some one of the long ago. His
dawning recognition amused the soldier.

"Yes, laddie. Ye're right. It's your old Phineas--Phineas McPhail,
Esq., M.A., defunct. Now 33702 Private P. McPhail redivivus."

He warmly wrung the hand of the semi-bewildered Doggie, who murmured:
"Very glad to meet you, I'm sure."

Phineas, gaunt and bony, took his arm.

"Would it not just be possible," he said, in his old half-pedantic,
half-ironic intonation, "to find a locality less exposed to the roar
of traffic and the rude jostling of pedestrians and the inclemency of
the elements, in which we can enjoy the amenities of a little refined
conversation?"

It was like a breath from the past. Doggie smiled.

"Which way are you going?"

"Your way, my dear Marmaduke, was ever mine, until I was swept, I
thought for ever, out of your path by a torrential spate of whisky."

He laughed, as though it had been a playful freak of destiny. Doggie
laughed, too. But for the words he had addressed to hotel and
lodging-house folk, he had spoken to no one for over a fortnight. The
instinctive craving for companionship made Phineas suddenly welcome.

"Yes. Let us have a talk," said he. "Come to my rooms, if you have the
time. There'll be some dinner."

"Will I come? Will I have dinner? Will I re-enter once more the
paradise of the affluent? Laddie, I will."

In the Strand they hailed a taxi and drove to Bloomsbury. On the way
Phineas asked:

"You mentioned your rooms. Are you residing permanently in London?"

"Yes," said Doggie.

"And Durdlebury?"

"I'm not going back."

"London's a place full of temptations for those without experience,"
Phineas observed sagely.

"I've not noticed any," Doggie replied. On which Phineas laughed and
slapped him on the knee.

"Man," said he, "when I first saw you I thought you had changed into a
disillusioned misanthropist. But I'm wrong. You haven't changed a
bit."

A few minutes later they reached Woburn Place. Doggie showed him into
the sitting-room on the drawing-room floor. A fire was burning in the
grate, for though it was only early autumn, the evening was cold. The
table was set for Doggie's dinner. Phineas looked round him in
surprise. The heterogeneous and tasteless furniture, the dreadful
Mid-Victorian prints on the walls--one was the "Return of the Guards
from the Crimea," representing the landing from the troop-ship,
repellent in its smug unreality, the coarse glass and well-used plate
on the table, the crumpled napkin in a ring (for Marmaduke who in his
mother's house had never been taught to dream that a napkin could
possibly be used for two consecutive meals!), the general air of
slipshod Philistinism--all came as a shock to Phineas, who had
expected to find in Marmaduke's "rooms" a replica of the fastidious
prettiness of the peacock and ivory room at Denby Hall. He scratched
his head, covered with a thick brown thatch.

"Laddie," said he gravely, "you must excuse me if I take a liberty;
but I canna fit you into this environment."

Doggie looked about him also. "Seems funny, doesn't it?"

"It cannot be that you've come down in the world?"

"To bed-rock," said Doggie.

"No?" said Phineas, with an air of concern. "Man, I'm awful sorry. I
know what the coming down feels like. And I, finding it not abhorrent
to a sophisticated and well-trained conscience, and thinking you could
well afford it, extracted a thousand pounds from your fortune. My dear
lad, if Phineas McPhail could return the money----"

Doggie broke in with a laugh. "Pray don't distress yourself, Phineas.
It's not a question of money. I've as much as ever I had. The last
thing in the world I've had to think of has been money."

"Then what in the holy names of Thunder and Beauty," cried Phineas,
throwing out one hand to an ancient saddle-bag sofa whose ends were
covered by flimsy rags, and the other to the decayed ormolu clock on
the mantelpiece, "what in the name of common sense are you doing in
this awful inelegant lodging-house?"

"I don't know," replied Doggie. "It's a fact," he continued after a
pause. "The scheme of decoration is revolting to every aesthetic sense
which I've spent my life in cultivating. Its futile pretentiousness is
the rasping irritation of every hour. Yet here I am. Quite
comfortable. And here I propose to stay."

Phineas McPhail, M.A., late of Glasgow and Cambridge, looked at Doggie
with his keen little grey eyes beneath bent and bristling eyebrows. In
the language of 33702 Private McPhail, he asked:

"What the blazes is it all about?"

"That's a long story," said Doggie, looking at his watch. "In the
meantime, I had better give some orders about dinner. And you would
like to wash."

He threw open a wing of the folding-doors, once in Georgian times
separating drawing-room from withdrawing-room, and now separating
living-room from bedroom, and switching on the light, invited McPhail
to follow.

"I think you'll find everything you want," said he.

Phineas McPhail, left alone to his ablutions, again looked round, and
he had more reason than ever to ask what it was all about. Marmaduke's
bedroom at Denby Hall had been a dream of satinwood and dull blue
silk. The furniture and hangings had been Mrs. Trevor's present to
Marmaduke on his sixteenth birthday. He remembered how he had been
bored to death by that stupendous ass of an old woman--for so he had
characterized her--during the process of selection and installation.
The present room, although far more luxurious than any that Phineas
McPhail had slept in for years, formed a striking contrast with that
remembered nest of effeminacy.

"I'll have to give it up," he said to himself. But just as he had put
the finishing touches to his hair an idea occurred to him. He flung
open the door.

"Laddie, I've got it. It's a woman."

But Doggie laughed and shook his head, and leaving McPhail, took his
turn in the bedroom. For the first time since his return to civil life
he ceased for a few moments to brood over his troubles. McPhail's
mystification amused him. McPhail's personality and address, viewed in
the light of the past, were full of interest. Obviously he was a man
who lived unashamed on low levels. Doggie wondered how he could have
regarded him for years with a respect almost amounting to veneration.
In a curious unformulated way Doggie felt that he had authority over
this man so much older than himself, who had once been his master. It
tickled into some kind of life his deadened self-esteem. Here at last
was a man with whom he could converse on sure ground. The khaki
uniform caused him no envy.

"The poet is not altogether incorrect," said McPhail, when they sat
down to dinner, "in pointing out the sweet uses of adversity. If it
had not been for the adversity of a wee bit operation, I should not
now be on sick furlough. And if I had not been on furlough I shouldn't
have the pleasure of this agreeable reconciliation. Here's to you,
laddie, and to our lasting friendship." He sipped his claret. "It's
not like the Lafitte in the old cellar--_Eheu fugaces anni et_--what
the plague is the Latin for vintages? But 'twill serve." He drank
again and smacked his lips. "It will even serve very satisfactorily.
Good wine at a perfect temperature is not the daily drink of the
British soldier."

"By the way," said Doggie, "you haven't told me why you became a
soldier."

"A series of vicissitudes dating from the hour I left your house,"
said Phineas, "vicissitudes the recital of which would wring your
heart, laddie, and make angels weep if their lachrymal glands were not
too busily engaged by the horrors of war, culminated four months ago
in an attack of fervid and penniless patriotism. No one seemed to want
me except my country. She clamoured for me on every hoarding and every
omnibus. A recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square tapped me on the
arm, and said: 'Young man, your country wants you.' Said I with my
Scottish caution, 'Can you take your affidavit that you got the
information straight from the War Office?' 'I can,' said he. Then I
threw myself on his bosom and bade him take me to her. That's how I
became 33702 Private Phineas McPhail, A Company, 10th Wessex Rangers,
at the remuneration of one shilling and twopence per diem."

"Do you like it?" asked Doggie.

Phineas rubbed the side of his thick nose thoughtfully.

"There you come to the metaphysical conception of human happiness," he
replied. "In itself it is a vile life. To a man of thirty-five----"

"Good lord!" cried Doggie, "I always thought you were about fifty!"

"Your mother caught me young, laddie. To a man of thirty-five, a
graduate of ancient and honourable universities and a whilom candidate
for holy orders, it is a life that would seem to have no attraction
whatever. The hours are absurd, the work distasteful, and the mode of
living repulsive. But strange to say, it fully contents me. The secret
of happiness lies in the supple adaptability to conditions. When I
found that it was necessary to perform ridiculous antics with my legs
and arms, I entered into the comicality of the idea and performed them
with an indulgent zest which soon won me the precious encomiums of my
superiors in rank. When I found that the language of the canteen was
not that of the pulpit or the drawing-room, I quickly acquired the new
vocabulary and won the pleasant esteem of my equals. By means of this
faculty of adaptability I can suck enjoyment out of everything. But,
at the same time, mind you, keeping in reserve a little secret fount
of pleasure."

"What do you call a little secret fount of pleasure?" asked Doggie.

"I'll give you an illustration--and, if you're the man I consider you
to be, you'll take a humorous view of my frankness. At present I adapt
myself to a rough atmosphere of coarseness and lustiness, in which
nothing coarse or lusty I could do would produce the slightest ripple
of a convulsion: but I have my store of a cultivated mind and cheap
editions of the classics, my little secret fount of Castaly to drink
from whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of
being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house
atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of
Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my
bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good Scots
distillery."

Whereupon he attacked his plateful of chicken with vehement gusto.

"You're a hedonist, Phineas," said Doggie, after a thoughtful pause.

"Man," said Phineas, laying down his knife and fork, "you've just hit
it. I am. I'm an accomplished hedonist. An early recognition of the
fact saved me from the Church."

"And the Church from you," said Doggie quietly.

Phineas shot a swift glance at him beneath his shaggy brown eyebrows.

"Ay," said he. "Though, mark you, if I had followed my original
vocation, the Bench of Bishops could not have surpassed me in the
unction in which I would have wallowed. If I had been born a bee in a
desert, laddie, I would have sucked honey out of a dead camel."

With easy and picturesque cynicism, and in a Glasgow accent which had
curiously broadened since his spell of Oriental ease at Denby Hall, he
developed his philosophy, illustrating it by incidents more or less
reputable in his later career. At first, possessor of the ill-gotten
thousand pounds and of considerable savings from a substantial salary,
he had enjoyed the short wild riot of the Prodigal's life. Paris saw
most of his money--the Paris which, under his auspices, Doggie never
knew. Plentiful claret set his tongue wagging in Rabelaisian
reminiscence. After Paris came husks. Not bad husks if you knew how to
cook them. Borrowed salt and pepper and a little stolen butter worked
wonders. But they were irritating to the stomach. He lay on the floor,
said he, and yelled for fatted calf; but there was no soft-headed
parent to supply it. Phineas McPhail must be a slave again and work
for his living. Then came private coaching, freelance journalism,
hunting for secretaryships: the commonplace story humorously told of
the wastrel's decline; then a gorgeous efflorescence in light green
and gold as the man outside a picture palace in Camberwell--and
lastly, the penniless patriot throwing himself into the arms of his
desirous country.

"Have you any whisky in the house, laddie?" he asked, after the dinner
things had been taken away.

"No," said Doggie, "but I could easily get you some."

"Pray don't," said McPhail. "If you had, I was going to ask you to be
kind enough not to let your excellent landlord, whom I recognize as a
butler of the old school, produce it. Butlers of the old school are
apt, like Peddle, to bring in a maddening tray of decanters, syphons,
and glasses. You may not believe me, but I haven't touched a drop of
whisky since I joined the army."

"Why?" asked Doggie.

McPhail looked at the long carefully preserved ash of one of Doggie's
excellent cigars.

"It's all a part of the doctrine of adaptability. In order to attain
happiness in the army, the first step is to avoid differences of
opinion with the civil and military police and non-commissioned
officers, and such-like sycophantic myrmidons of authority. Being a
man of academic education, it is with difficulty that I agree with
them when I'm sober. If I were drunk, my bonnie laddie"--he waved a
hand--"well--I don't get drunk. And as I have no use for whisky, as
merely an agreeable beverage, I have struck whisky out of my
hedonistic scheme of existence. But if you have any more of that
pleasant claret----"

Doggie rang the bell and gave the order. The landlord brought in
bottle and glasses.

"And now, my dear Marmaduke," said Phineas after an appreciative sip,
"now that I have told you the story of my life, may I, without
impertinent curiosity, again ask you what you meant when you said you
had come down to bed-rock?"

The sight of the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously
on the sofa, with his tunic unbuttoned, filled him with sudden fury:
such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him
during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost
pull it out by the roots.

"Yes, you may; and I'll tell you," he cried, starting to his feet.
"I've reached the bed-rock of myself--the bed-rock of humiliation and
disgrace. And it's all your fault. Instead of training me to be a man,
you pandered to my poor mother's weaknesses and brought me up like a
little toy dog--the infernal name still sticks to me wherever I go.
You made a helpless fool of me, and let me go out a helpless fool into
the world. And when you came across me I was thinking whether it
wouldn't be best to throw myself over the parapet. A month ago you
would have saluted me in the street and stood before me at attention
when I spoke to you----"

"Eh? What's that, laddie?" interrupted Phineas, sitting up. "You've
held a commission in the army?"

"Yes," said Doggie fiercely, "and I've been chucked. I've been thrown
out as a hopeless rotter. And who is most to blame--you or I? It's
you. You've brought me to this infernal place. I'm here in
hiding--hiding from my family and the decent folk I'm ashamed to meet.
And it's all your fault, and now you have it!"

"Laddie, laddie," said Phineas reproachfully, "the facts of my being a
guest beneath your roof and my humble military rank, render it
difficult for me to make an appropriate reply."

Doggie's rage had spent itself. These rare fits were short-lived and
left him somewhat unnerved.

"I'm sorry, Phineas. As you say, you're my guest. And as to your
uniform, God knows I honour every man who wears it."

"That's taking things in the right spirit," Phineas conceded graciously,
helping himself to another glass of wine. "And the right spirit is a
great healer of differences. I'll not go so far as to deny that there
is an element of justice in your apportionment of blame. There may, on
various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But
you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my
philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate
exaggeration."

Doggie lit a cigarette. His fingers were still shaking. "I'm glad you
own up. It's a sign of grace."

"Ay," said Phineas, "no man is altogether bad. In spite of everything,
I've always entertained a warm affection for you, laddie, and when I
saw you staring at bogies round about the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral
my heart went out to you. You didn't look over-happy."

Doggie, always responsive to human kindness, was touched. He felt a
note of sincerity in McPhail's tone. Perhaps he had judged him
harshly, overlooking the plea in extenuation which Phineas had set
up--that in every man there must be some saving remnant of goodness.

"I wasn't happy, Phineas," he said; "I was as miserable an outcast as
could be found in London, and when a fellow's down and out, you must
forgive him for speaking more bitterly than he ought."

"Don't I know, laddie? Don't I know?" said Phineas sympathetically. He
reached for the cigar-box. "Do you mind if I take another? Perhaps
two--one to smoke afterwards, in memory of this meeting. It is a long
time since my lips touched a thing so gracious as a real Havana."

"Take a lot," said Doggie generously, "I don't really like cigars. I
only bought them because I thought they might be stronger than
cigarettes."

Phineas filled his pockets. "You can pay no greater compliment to a
man's honesty of purpose," said he, "than by taking him at his word.
And now," he continued, when he had carefully lit the cigar he had
first chosen, "let us review the entire situation. What about our good
friends at Durdlebury? What about your uncle, the Very Reverend the
Dean, against whom I bear no ill-will, though I do not say that his
ultimate treatment of me was not over-hasty--what about him? If you
call upon me to put my almost fantastically variegated experience of
life at your disposal, and advise you in this crisis, so I must ask
you to let me know the exact conditions in which you find yourself."

Doggie smiled once again, finding something diverting and yet
stimulating in the calm assurance of Private McPhail.

"I'm not aware that I've asked you for advice, Phineas."

"The fact that you're not aware of many things that you do is no proof
that you don't do them--and do them in a manner perfectly obvious to
another party," replied Phineas sententiously. "You're asking for
advice and consolation from any friendly human creature to whom you're
not ashamed to speak. You've had an awful sorrowful time, laddie."

Doggie roamed about the room, with McPhail's little grey eyes fixed on
him. Yes, Phineas was right. He would have given most of his
possessions to be able, these later days, to pour out his tortured
soul into sympathetic ears. But shame had kept him, still kept him,
would always keep him, from the ears of those he loved. Yes, Phineas
had said the diabolically right thing. He could not be ashamed to
speak to Phineas. And there was something good in Phineas which he had
noticed with surprise. How easy for him, in response to bitter
accusation, to cast the blame on his mother? He himself had given the
opening. How easy for him to point to his predecessor's short tenure
of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor's
theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some
sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent.... Doggie
stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes dumbly questioning and
quivering lips.

Phineas rose and put his hands on the boy's shoulders, and said very
gently:

"Tell me all about it, laddie."

Then Doggie broke down, and with a gush of unminded tears found
expression for his stony despair. His story took a long time in the
telling; and Phineas interjecting an occasional sympathetic "Ay, ay,"
and a delicately hinted question, extracted from Doggie all there was
to tell, from the outbreak of war to their meeting on Waterloo Bridge.

"And now," cried he at last, a dismally tragic figure, his young face
distorted and reddened, his sleek hair ruffled from the back into
unsightly perpendicularities (an invariable sign of distracted
emotion) and his hands appealingly outstretched--"what the hell am I
going to do?"

"Laddie," said Phineas, standing on the hearthrug, his hands on his
hips, "if you had posed the question in the polite language of the
precincts of Durdlebury Cathedral, I might have been at a loss to
reply. But the manly invocation of hell shows me that your foot is
already on the upward path. If you had prefaced it by the adjective
that gives colour to all the aspirations of the British Army, it would
have been better. But I'm not reproaching you, laddie. _Poco a poco._
It is enough. It shows me you are not going to run away to a neutral
country and present the unedifying spectacle of a mangy little British
lion at the mercy of a menagerie of healthy hyenas and such-like
inferior though truculent beasties."

"My God!" cried Doggie, "haven't I thought of it till I'm half mad? It
would be just as you say--unendurable." He began to pace the room
again. "And I can't go to France. It would be just the same as
England. Every one would be looking white feathers at me. The only
thing I can do is to go out of the world. I'm not fit for it. Oh, I
don't mean suicide. I've not enough pluck. That's off. But I could go
and bury myself in the wilderness somewhere where no one would ever
find me."

"Laddie," said McPhail, "I misdoubt that you're going to settle down
in any wilderness. You haven't the faculty of adaptability of which I
have spoken to-night at some length. And your heart is young and not
coated with the holy varnish of callousness, which is a secret
preparation known only to those who have served a long apprenticeship
in a severe school of egotism."

"That's all very well," cried Doggie, "but what the----"

Phineas waved an interrupting hand. "You've got to go back, laddie.
You've got to whip all the moral courage in you and go back to
Durdlebury. The Dean, with his influence, and the letter you have
shown me from your Colonel, can easily get you some honourable
employment in either Service not so exacting as the one which you have
recently found yourself unable to perform."

Doggie threw a newly-lighted cigarette into the fire and turned
passionately on McPhail.

"I won't. You're talking drivelling rot. I can't. I'd sooner die than
go back there with my tail between my legs. I'd sooner enlist as a
private soldier."

"Enlist?" said Phineas, and he drew himself up straight and gaunt.
"Well, why not?"

"Enlist?" echoed Doggie in a dull tone.

"Have you never contemplated such a possibility?"

"Good God, no!" said Doggie.

"I have enlisted. And I am a man of ancient lineage as honourable, so
as not to enter into unproductive argument, as yours. And I am a
Master of Arts of the two Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Yet I
fail to find anything dishonourable in my present estate as 33702
Private Phineas McPhail in the British Army."

Doggie seemed not to hear him. He stared at him wildly.

"Enlist?" he repeated. "As a Tommy?"

"Even as a Tommy," said Phineas. He glanced at the ormolu clock. "It
is past one. The respectable widow woman near the Elephant and Castle
who has let me a bedroom will be worn by anxiety as to my non-return.
Marmaduke, my dear, dear laddie, I must leave you. If you will be
lunching here twelve hours hence, nothing will give me greater
pleasure than to join you. Laddie, do you think you could manage a
fried sole and a sweetbread?"

"Enlist?" said Doggie, following him out to the front door in a dream.

He opened the door. Phineas shook hands.

"Fried sole and a sweetbread at one-thirty?"

"Of course, with pleasure," said Doggie.

Phineas fumbled in his pockets.

"It's a long cry at this time of night from Bloomsbury to the Elephant
and Castle. You haven't the price of a taxi fare about you,
laddie--two or three pounds----?"

Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and
ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail's vulture
clutch.

"Good night, laddie!"

"Good night!"

Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and
put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his
fingers in his hair.

"Enlist? My God!"

He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He
stared at the alternatives.

Flight, which was craven--a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury,
which was impossible. Enlistment----?

Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though
disgraced, to do?

His landlord found him at seven o'clock in the morning asleep in an
arm-chair.




CHAPTER IX


After a bath and a change and breakfast, Doggie went out for one of
his solitary walks. At Durdlebury such a night as the last would have
kept him in bed in a darkened room for most of the following day. But
he had spent many far, far worse on Salisbury Plain, and the
inexorable reveille had dragged him out into the raw dreadful morning,
heedless of his headache and yearning for slumber, until at last the
process of hardening had begun. To-day Doggie was as unfatigued a
young man as walked the streets of London, a fact which his mind was
too confusedly occupied to appreciate. Once more was he beset less by
the perplexities of the future than by a sense of certain impending
doom. For to Phineas McPhail's "Why not?" he had been able to give no
answer. He could give no answer now, as he marched with swinging step,
automatically, down Oxford Street and the Bayswater Road in the
direction of Kensington Gardens. He could give no answer as he stood
sightlessly staring at the Peter Pan statue.

A one-armed man in a khaki cap and hospital blue came and stood by his
side and looked in a pleased yet puzzled way at the exquisite poem in
marble. At last he spoke--in a rich Irish accent.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but could you be telling me the meaning of
it, at all?"

Doggie awoke and smiled.

"Do you like it?"

"I do," said the soldier.

"It is about Peter Pan. A kind of Fairy Tale. You can see the 'little
people' peeping out--I think you call them so in Ireland."

"We do that," said the soldier.

So Doggie sketched the outline of the immortal story of the Boy Who
Will Never Grow Old, and the Irishman listened with deep interest.

"Indeed," said he after a time, "it is good to come back to the true
things after the things out there." He waved his one arm in the vague
direction of the war.

"Why do you call them true things?" Doggie asked quickly.

They turned away, and Doggie found himself sitting on a bench by the
man's side.

"It's not me that can tell you that," said he, "and my wife and
children in Galway."

"Were you there at the outbreak of war?"

He was. A reservist called back to the colours after some years of
retirement from the army. He had served in India and South Africa, a
hard-bitten soldier, proud of the traditions of his old regiment.
There were scarcely any of them left--and that was all that was left
of him. He smiled cheerily. Doggie condoled with him on the loss of
his arm.

"Ah sure," he replied, "and it might keep me out of a fight when I go
into Ballinasloe."

"Who would you want to fight?" asked Doggie.

"The dirty Sinn Feiners that do be always shouting 'Freedom for
Ireland and to hell with freedom for the rest of the world.' If I
haven't lost my arm in a glorious cause, what have I lost it for? Can
you tell me that?"

Doggie agreed that he had fought for the greater freedom of humanity
and gave him a cigarette, and they went on talking. The Irishman had
been in the retreat from Mons, the first battle of Ypres, and he had
lost his arm in no battle at all; just a stray shell over the road as
they were marching back to billets. They discussed the war, the ethics
of it. Doggie still wanted to know why the realities of blood and mud
and destruction were not the true things. Gradually he found that the
Irishman meant that the true things were the spiritual, undying
things; that the grim realities would pass away; that from these dead
realities would arise the noble ideals of the future, which would be
symbolized in song and marble; that all he had endured and sacrificed
was but a part of the Great Sacrifice we were making for the Freedom
of the World. Being a man roughly educated on a Galway farm and in an
infantry regiment, he had great difficulty in co-ordinating his ideas;
but he had a curious power of vision that enabled him to pierce to the
heart of things, which he interpreted according to his untrained sense
of beauty.

They parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Doggie struck across
the Gardens with a view to returning home by Knightsbridge, Piccadilly
and Shaftesbury Avenue. He strode along, his thoughts filled with the
Irish soldier. Here was a man, maimed for life and quite content that
it should be so, who had reckoned all the horrors through which he had
passed as externals unworthy of the consideration of his unconquerable
soul; a man simple, unassuming, expansive only through his Celtic
temperament, which allowed him to talk easily to a stranger before
whom his English or Scotch comrade would have been dumb and gaping as
an oyster; obviously brave, sincere and loyal. Perhaps something even
higher. Perhaps, in essence, the very highest. The Poet-Warrior. The
term struck Doggie's brain with a thud, like the explosive fusion of
two elements.

During his walk to Kensington Gardens a poisonous current had run at
the back of his mind. Drifting on it, might he not escape? Was he not
of too fine a porcelain to mingle with the coarse and common pottery
of the ranks? Was it necessary to go into the thick of the coarse clay
vessels, just to be shattered? It was easy for Phineas to proclaim
that he found no derogation to his dignity as a man of birth and a
university graduate in identifying himself with his fellow privates.
Phineas had systematically brutalized himself into fitness for the
position. He had armed himself in brass--_aes triplex_. He smiled at
his own wit. But he, James Marmaduke Trevor, who had lived his life as
a clean gentleman, was in a category apart.

Now, he found that his talk with the Irishman had been an antidote to
the poison. He felt ashamed. Did he dare set himself up to be finer
clay than that common soldier? Spiritually, was he even of clay as
fine? In a Great Judgment of Souls which of the twain would be among
the Elect? The ultra-refined Mr. Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, or
the ignorant poet-warrior of Ballinasloe? "Not Doggie Trevor," he said
between his teeth. And he went home in a chastened spirit.

Phineas McPhail appeared punctually at half-past one, and feasted
succulently on fried sole and sweetbread.

"Laddie," said he, "the man that can provide such viands is a Thing of
Beauty which, as the poet says, is a Joy for Ever. The light in his
window is a beacon to the hungry Tommy dragging himself through the
viscous wilderness of regulation stew."

"I'm afraid it won't be a beacon for very long," said Doggie.

"Eh?" queried Phineas sharply. "You'd surely not be thinking of
refusing an old friend a stray meal?"

Doggie coloured at the coarseness of the misunderstanding.

"How could I be such a brute? There won't be a light in the window
because I shan't be there. I'm going to enlist."

Phineas put his elbows on the table and regarded him earnestly.

"I would not take too seriously words spoken in the heat of midnight
revelry, even though the revel was conducted on the genteelest
principles. Have you thought of the matter in the cool and sober hours
of the morning?"

"Yes."

"It's an unco' hard life, laddie."

"The one I'm leading is a harder," said Doggie. "I've made up my
mind."

"Then I've one piece of advice to give you," said McPhail. "Sink the
name of Marmaduke, which would only stimulate the ignorant ribaldry of
the canteen, and adopt the name of James, which your godfathers and
godmothers, with miraculous foresight, considering their limitations
in the matter of common sense, have given you."

"That's a good idea," said Doggie.

"Also it would tend to the obliteration of class prejudices if you
gave up smoking Turkish cigarettes at ten shillings a hundred and
arrived in your platoon as an amateur of 'fags.'"

"I can't stand 'fags,'" said Doggie.

"You can. The human organism is so constituted that it can stand the
sweepings of the elephants' house in the Zoological Gardens. Try. This
time it's only 'fags.'"

Doggie took one from the crumpled paper packet which was handed to
him, and lit it. He made a wry face, never before having smoked
American tobacco.

"How do you like the flavour?" asked Phineas.

"I think I'd prefer the elephants' house," said Doggie, eyeing the
thing with disgust.

"You'll find it the flavour of the whole British Army," said McPhail.

       *       *       *       *       *

A few days later the Dean received a letter bearing the pencilled
address of a camp on the south coast, and written by 35792 Pvte. James
M. Trevor, A Company, 2-10th Wessex Rangers. It ran:

    "I hope you won't think me heartless for having left you so long
    without news of me; but until lately I had the same reasons for
    remaining in seclusion as when I last wrote. Even now I'm not
    asking for sympathy or reconsideration of my failure or desire
    in any way to take advantage of the generosity of you all.

    "I have enlisted in the 10th Wessex. Phineas McPhail, whom I met
    in London and whose character for good or evil I can better
    gauge now than formerly, is a private in the same battalion. I
    don't pretend to enjoy the life any more than I could enjoy
    living in a kraal of savages in Central Africa. But that is a
    matter of no account. I don't propose to return to Durdlebury
    till the end of the war. I left it as an officer and I'm not
    coming back as a private soldier. I enclose a cheque for L500.
    Perhaps Aunt Sophia will be so kind as to use the money--it
    ought to last some time--for the general upkeep, wages, etc., of
    Denby Hall. I feel sure she will not refuse me this favour. Give
    Peggy my love and tell her I hope she will accept the two-seater
    as a parting gift. It will make me happier to know that she is
    driving it.

    "I am keeping on as a _pied a terre_ in London the Bloomsbury
    rooms in which I have been living, and I've written to Peddle to
    see about making them more comfortable. Please ask anybody who
    might care to write to address me as 'James M.' and not as
    'Marmaduke.'"

The Dean read the letter--the family were at breakfast; then he took
off his tortoise-shell spectacles and wiped them.

"It's from Marmaduke at last," said he. "He has carried out my
prophecy and enlisted."

Peggy caught at her breath and shot out her hand for the letter, which
she read eagerly and then passed over to her mother. Mrs. Conover
began to cry.

"Oh, the poor boy! It will be worse than ever for him."

"It will," said Peggy. "But I think it splendid of him to try. How did
he bring himself to do it?"

"Breed tells," said the Dean. "That's what every one seems to have
forgotten. He's a thoroughbred Doggie. There's the old French proverb:
_Bon chien chasse de race._"

Peggy looked at him gratefully. "You're very comforting," she said.

"We must knit him some socks," observed Mrs. Conover. "I hear those
supplied to the army are very rough and ready."

"My dear," smiled the Dean, "Marmaduke's considerable income does not
cease because his pay in the army is one and twopence a day; and I
should think he would have the sense to provide himself with adequate
underclothing. Also, judging from the account of your shopping orgy in
London, he has already laid in a stock that would last out several
Antarctic winters."

The Dean tapped his egg gently.

"Then what can we do for the poor boy?" asked his wife.

The Dean scooped the top of his egg off with a vicious thrust.

"We can cut out slanderous tongues," said he.

There had been much calumniating cackle in the little town; nay, more:
cackle is of geese; there had been venom of the snakiest kind. The
Deanery, father and mother and daughter, each in their several ways,
had suffered greatly. It is hard to stand up against poisoned
ridicule.

"My dear," continued the Dean, "it will be our business to smite the
Philistines, hip and thigh. The reasons which guided Marmaduke in the
resignation of his commission are the concern of nobody. The fact
remains that Mr. Marmaduke Trevor resigned his commission in order
to----"

Peggy interrupted with a smile. "'In order to'--isn't that a bit
Jesuitical, daddy?"

"I have a great respect for the Jesuits, my dear," said the Dean,
holding out an impressive egg-spoon. "The fact remains, in the eyes of
the world, as I remarked, that Mr. Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, a
man of fortune and high position in the county, resigned his
commission in order, for reasons best known to himself, to serve his
country more effectively in the humbler ranks of the army, and--my
dear, this egg is far too full for war time"--with a hazardous plunge
of his spoon he had made a yellow yelky horror of the egg-shell--"and
I'm going to proclaim the fact far and wide, and--indeed--rub it in."

"That'll be jolly decent of you, daddy," said his daughter. "It will
help a lot."

In the failure of Marmaduke to retain his commission the family honour
had not been concerned. The boy had done his best. They blamed not him
but the disastrous training that had unfitted him for the command of
men. They reproached themselves for their haste in throwing him
headlong into the fiercest element of the national struggle towards
efficiency. They could have found an easier school, in which he could
have learned to do his share creditably in the national work. Many
young men of their acquaintance, far more capable than Marmaduke, were
wearing the uniform of a less strenuous branch of the service. It had
been a blunder, a failure, but without loss of honour. But when
slanderous tongues attacked poor Doggie for running away with a yelp
from a little hardship; when a story or two of Doggie's career in the
regiment arrived in Durdlebury, highly flavoured in transit and more
and more poisoned as it went from mouth to mouth; when a legend was
spread abroad that he had bolted from Salisbury Plain and was run to
earth in a Turkish Bath in London, and was only saved from
court-martial by family influence, then the family honour of the
Conovers was wounded to its proud English depths. And they could say
nothing. They had only Doggie's word to go upon; they accepted it
unquestioningly, but they knew no details. Doggie had disappeared.
Naturally, they contradicted these evil rumours. The good folks of
Durdlebury expected them to do so, and listened with well-bred
incredulity. To the question, "Where is he now and what is he going to
do?" they could only answer, "We don't know." They were helpless.

Peggy had a bitter quarrel with one of her intimates, Nancy Murdoch,
daughter of the doctor who had proclaimed the soundness of Marmaduke's
constitution.

"He may have told you so, dear," said Nancy, "but how do you know?"

"Because whatever else he may be, he's not a liar," retorted Peggy.

Nancy gave the most delicate suspicion of a shrug to her pretty
shoulders.

That was the beginning of it. Peggy, naturally combative, armed for
the fight and defended Marmaduke.

"You talk as though you were still engaged to him," said Nancy.

"So I am," declared Peggy rashly.

"Then where's your engagement ring?"

"Where I choose to keep it."

The retort lacked originality and conviction.

"You can't send it back to him, because you don't know where he is.
And what did Mrs. Conover mean by telling mother that Mr. Trevor had
broken off the engagement?"

"She never told her any such thing," cried Peggy mendaciously. For
Mrs. Conover had committed the indiscretion under assurance of
silence.

"Pardon me," said Nancy, much on her dignity. "Of course I understand
your denying it. It isn't pleasant to be thrown over by any man--but
by a man like Doggie Trevor----"

"You're a spiteful beast, Nancy, and I'll never speak to you again.
You've neither womanly decency nor Christian feeling." And Peggy
marched out of the doctor's house.

As a result of the quarrel, however, she resumed the wearing of the
ring, which she flaunted defiantly with left hand deliberately
ungloved. Hitherto she had not been certain of the continuance of the
engagement. Marmaduke's repudiation was definite enough; but it had
been dictated by his sensitive honour. It lay with her to agree or
decline. She had passed through wearisome days of doubt. A physically
sound fighting man sent about his business as being unfit for war does
not appear a romantic figure in a girl's eyes. She was bitterly
disappointed with Doggie for the sudden withering of her hopes. Had he
fulfilled them she could have loved him wholeheartedly, after the
simple way of women; for her sex, exhilarated by the barbaric
convulsion of the land, clamoured for something heroic, something at
least intensely masculine, in which she could find feminine
exultation. She also felt resentment at his flight from the Savoy, his
silence and practical disappearance. Although not blaming him
unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his
plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the
young women of the gentler classes, at any rate, from the abyss of
sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of
the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended
animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's
taunts had goaded her to a more heroic attitude. The first person to
whom she showed the newly-ringed hand was her mother.

"The engagement isn't off until I declare it's off. I'm going to play
the game."

"You know best, dear," said the gentle Mrs. Conover. "But it's all
very upsetting."

Then Doggie's letter brought comfort and gladness to the Deanery. It
reassured them as to his fate. It healed the wounded family honour. It
justified Peggy in playing the game.

She took the letter round to Dr. Murdoch's and thrust it into the hand
of an astonished Nancy, with whom since the quarrel she had not been
on speaking terms.

"This is in Marmaduke's handwriting. You recognize it. Just read the
top line when I've folded it. 'I have enlisted in the 10th Wessex.'
See?" She withdrew the letter. "Now, what could a man, let alone an
honourable gentleman, do more? Say you're sorry for having said
beastly things about him."

Nancy, who had regretted the loss of a lifelong friendship, professed
her sorrow.

"The least you can do then, is to go round and spread the news, and
say you've seen the letter with your own eyes."

To several others, on a triumphant round of visits, did she show the
vindicating sentence. Any soft young fool, she asserted, with the
directness and not unattractive truculence of her generation, can get
a commission and muddle through, but it took a man to enlist as a
private soldier.

"Everybody recognizes now, darling," said the reconciled Nancy a few
days later, "that Doggie is a top-hole, splendid chap. But I think I
ought to tell you that you're boring Durdlebury stiff."

Peggy laughed. It was good to be engaged to a man no longer under a
cloud.

"It will all come right, dear old thing," she wrote to Doggie. "It's a
cinch, as the Americans say. You'll soon get used to it--especially if
you can realize what it means to me. 'Saving face' has been an awful
business. Now it's all over. Of course, I'll accept the two-seater.
I've had lessons in driving since you went away--I had thoughts of
going out to France to drive Y.M.C.A. cars, but that's off for the
present. I'll love the two-seater. Swank won't be the word. But 'a
parting gift' is all rot. The engagement stands and all Durdlebury
knows it..." and so on, and so on. She set herself out, honestly,
loyally, to be the kindest girl in the world to Doggie. Mrs. Conover
happened to come into the drawing-room just as she was licking the
stamp. She thumped it on the envelope with her palm and, looking round
from the writing-desk against the wall, showed her mother a flushed
and smiling face.

"If anybody says I'm not good--the goodest thing the cathedral has
turned out for half a dozen centuries--I'll tear her horrid eyes out
from their sockets!"

"My dear!" cried her horrified mother.

       *       *       *       *       *

Doggie kept the letter unopened in his tunic pocket until he could
find solitude in which to read it. After morning parade he wandered to
the deserted trench at the end of the camp, where the stuffed sacks,
representing German defenders, were hung for bayonet practice. It was
a noon of grey mist through which the alignments of huts and tents
were barely visible. Instinctively avoiding the wet earth of the
parados, he went round, and, tired after the recent spell of physical
drill, sat down on the equally wet sandbags of the model parapet, a
pathetic, lonely little khaki figure isolated for the moment by the
kindly mist from an uncomprehending world.

He read Peggy's letter several times. He recognized her goodness, her
loyalty. The grateful tears even came to his eyes and he brushed them
away hurriedly with a swift look round. But his heart beat none the
faster. A long-faded memory of childhood came back to him in regained
colour. Some quarrel with Peggy. What it was all about he had entirely
forgotten; but he remembered her little flushed face and her angry
words: "Well, I'm a sport and you ain't!" He remembered also rebuking
her priggishly for unintelligible language and mincing away. He read
the letter again in the light of this flash of memory. The only
difference between it and the childish speech lay in the fact that
instead of a declaration of contrasts, she now uttered a declaration
of similitudes. They were both "sports." There she was wrong. Doggie
shook his head. In her sense of the word he was not a "sport." A sport
takes chances, plays the game with a smile on his lips. There was no
smile on his. He loathed the game with a sickening, shivering
loathing. He was engaged in it because a conglomeration of
irresistible forces had driven him into the _melee_. It never
occurred to Doggie that he was under orders of his own soul. This
simple yet stupendous fact never occurred to Peggy.

He sat on the wet sandbags and thought and thought. Though he
reproached himself for base ingratitude, the letter did not satisfy
him. It left his heart cold. What he sought in it he did not know. It
was something he could not find, something that was not there. The
sea-mist thickened around him. Peggy seemed very far away.... He was
still engaged to her--for it would be monstrous to persist in his
withdrawal. He must accept the situation which she decreed. He owed
that to her loyalty. But how to continue the correspondence? It was
hard enough to write from Salisbury Plain; from here it was well-nigh
impossible.

Thus was Doggie brought up against a New Problem. He struggled
desperately to defer its solution.




CHAPTER X


The regiments of the new armies have gathered into their rank and file
a mixed crowd transcending the dreams of Democracy. At one end of the
social scale are men of refined minds and gentle nurture, at the other
creatures from the slums, with slum minds and morals, and between them
the whole social gamut is run. Experience seems to show that neither
of the extreme elements tend, in the one case to elevate, or in the
other to debase the battalion. Leading the common life, sharing the
common hardships, striving towards common ideals, they inevitably,
irresistibly tend to merge themselves in the average. The highest in
the scale sink, the lowest rise. The process, as far as the change of
soul state is concerned, is infinitely more to the amelioration of the
lowest than to the degradation of the highest. The one, also, is more
real, the other more apparent. In the one case, it is merely the
shuffling-off of manners, of habits, of prejudices, and the assuming
of others horribly distasteful or humorously accepted, according to
temperament; in the other case, it is an enforced education. And all
the congeries of human atoms that make up the battalion, learn new and
precious lessons and acquire new virtues--patience, obedience,
courage, endurance.... But from the point of view of a decorous
tea-party in a cathedral town, the tone--or the standard of manners,
or whatever you would like by way of definition of that vague and
comforting word--the tone of the average is deplorably low. The
hooligan may be kicked for excessive foulness; but the rider of the
high horse is brutally dragged down into the mire. The curious part of
it all is that, the gutter element being eliminated altogether, the
corporate standard of the remaining majority is lower than the
standard of each individual.

By developing a philosophical disquisition on some such lines did
Phineas McPhail seek to initiate Doggie into the weird mysteries of
the new social life. Doggie heard with his ears, but thought in terms
of Durdlebury tea-parties. Nowhere in the mass could he find the
spiritual outlook of his Irish poet-warrior. The individuals that may
have had it kept it preciously to themselves. The outlook, as conveyed
in speech, was grossly materialistic. From the language of the canteen
he recoiled in disgust. He could not reconcile it with the nobler
attributes of the users. It was in vain for Phineas to plead that he
must accept the _lingua franca_ of the British Army like all other
things appertaining thereto. Doggie's stomach revolted against most of
the other things. The disregard (from his point of view) of personal
cleanliness universal in the ranks, filled him with dismay. Even on
Salisbury Plain he had managed to get a little hot water for his
morning tub. Here, save in the officers' quarters--curiously remote,
inaccessible paradise!--there was not such a thing as a tub in the
place, let alone hot water to fill it. The men never dreamed of such a
thing as a tub. As a matter of fact, they were scrupulously clean
according to the lights of the British Tommy; but the lights were not
those of Marmaduke Trevor. He had learned the supreme wisdom of
keeping lips closed on such matters and did not complain, but all his
fastidiousness rebelled. He hated the sluice of head and shoulders
with water from a bucket in the raw open air. His hands swelled,
blistered and cracked; and his nails, once so beautifully manicured,
grew rich black rims, and all the icy water in the buckets would not
remove the grime.

Now and then he went into the town and had a hot bath; but very few of
the others ever seemed to think of such a thing. The habit of the
British Army of going to bed in its day-shirt was peculiarly
repellent. Yet Doggie knew that to vary from the sacred ways of his
fellow-men was to bri

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