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The Red Planet

by William John Locke · English · Gutenberg #4287 · 579,964 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Red Planet

Author: William John Locke


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4287]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RED PLANET ***




Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.











THE RED PLANET


BY

WILLIAM J. LOCKE



AUTHOR OF "THE WONDERFUL YEAR," "JAFFERY," "THE BELOVED VAGABOND," ETC.



   Not only over death strewn plains,
      Fierce mid the cold white stars,
   But over sheltered vales of home,
      Hides the Red Planet Mars.





THE RED PLANET




CHAPTER I


"Lady Fenimore's compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to step
round to Sir Anthony at once?"

Heaven knows that never another step shall I take in this world again;
but Sergeant Marigold has always ignored the fact. That is one of the
many things I admire about Marigold. He does not throw my poor
paralysed legs, so to speak, in my face. He accepts them as the normal
equipment of an employer. I don't know what I should do without
Marigold.... You see we were old comrades in the South African War,
where we both got badly knocked to pieces. He was Sergeant in my
battery, and the same Boer shell did for both of us. At times we join
in cursing that shell heartily, but I am not sure that we do not hold
it in sneaking affection. It initiated us into the brotherhood of
death. Shortly afterwards when we had crossed the border-line back into
life, we exchanged, as tokens, bits of the shrapnel which they had
extracted from our respective carcases. I have not enquired what he did
with his bit; but I keep mine in a certain locked drawer.... There were
only the two of us left on the gun when we were knocked out.... I
should like to tell you the whole story, but you wouldn't listen to me.
And no wonder. In comparison with the present world convulsion in which
the slaughtered are reckoned by millions, the Boer War seems a trumpery
affair of bows and arrows. I am a back-number. Still, back-numbers have
their feelings--and their memories.

I sometimes wonder, as I sit in this wheel-chair, with my abominable
legs dangling down helplessly, what Sergeant Marigold thinks of me. I
know what I think of Marigold. I think him the ugliest devil that God
ever created and further marred after creating him. He is a long, bony
creature like a knobbly ram-rod, and his face is about the colour and
shape of a damp, mildewed walnut. To hide a bald head into which a
silver plate has been fixed, he wears a luxuriant curly brown wig, like
those that used to adorn waxen gentlemen in hair-dressing windows. His
is one of those unhappy moustaches that stick out straight and scanty
like a cat's. He has the slit of a letter-box mouth of the Irishman in
caricature, and only half a dozen teeth spaced like a skeleton company.
Nothing will induce him to procure false ones. It is a matter of
principle. Between the wearing of false hair and the wearing of false
teeth he makes a distinction of unfathomable subtlety. He is an
obstinate beast. If he wasn't he would not, with four fingers of his
right hand shot away, have remained with me on that gun. In the same
way, neither tears nor entreaties nor abuse have induced him to wear a
glass eye. On high days and holidays, whenever he desires to look smart
and dashing, he covers the unpleasing orifice with a black shade. In
ordinary workaday life he cares not how much he offends the aesthetic
sense. But the other eye, the sound left eye, is a wonder--the precious
jewel set in the head of the ugly toad. It is large, of ultra-marine
blue, steady, fearless, humorous, tender--everything heroic and
beautiful and romantic you can imagine about eyes. Let him clap a hand
over that eye and you will hold him the most dreadful ogre that ever
escaped out of a fairy tale. Let him clap a hand over the other eye and
look full at you out of the good one and you will think him the
Knightliest man that ever was--and in my poor opinion, you would not be
far wrong.

So, out of this nightmare of a face, the one beautiful eye of Sergeant
Marigold was bent on me, as he delivered his message.

I thrust back my chair from the writing-table.

"Is Sir Anthony ill?"

"He rode by the gate an hour ago looking as well as either you or me,
sir."

"That's not very reassuring," said I.

Marigold did not take up the argument. "They've sent the car for you,
sir."

"In that case," said I, "I'll start immediately."

Marigold wheeled my chair out of the room and down the passage to the
hall, where he fitted me with greatcoat and hat. Then, having trundled
me to the front gate, he picked me up--luckily I have always been a
small spare man--and deposited me in the car. I am always nervous of
anyone but Marigold trying to carry me. They seem to stagger and fumble
and bungle. Marigold's arms close round me like an iron clamp and they
lift me with the mechanical certainty of a crane.

He jumped up beside the chauffeur and we drove off.

Perhaps when I get on a little further I may acquire the trick of
telling a story. At present I am baffled by the many things that
clamour for prior record. Before bringing Sir Anthony on the scene, I
feel I ought to say something more about myself, to explain why Lady
Fenimore should have sent for me in so peremptory a fashion. Following
the model of my favourite author Balzac--you need the awful leisure
that has been mine to appreciate him--I ought to describe the house in
which I live, my establishment--well, I have begun with Sergeant
Marigold--and the little country town which is practically the scene of
the drama in which were involved so many bound to me by close ties of
friendship and affection.

I ought to explain how I come to be writing this at all.

Well, to fill in my time, I first started by a diary--a sort of War
Diary of Wellingsford, the little country town in question. Then things
happened with which my diary was inadequate to cope. Everyone came and
told me his or her side of the story. All through, I found thrust upon
me the parts of father-confessor, intermediary, judge, advocate, and
conspirator.... For look you, what kind of a life can a man lead
situated as I am? The crowning glory of my days, my wife, is dead. I
have neither chick nor child. No brothers or sisters, dead or alive.
The Bon Dieu and Sergeant Marigold (the latter assisted by his wife and
a maid or two) look after my creature comforts. What have I in the
world to do that is worth doing save concern myself with my country and
my friends?

With regard to my country, in these days of war, I do what I can. Until
finally flattened out by the War Office, I pestered them for such
employment as a cripple might undertake. As an instance of what a
paralytic was capable I quoted Couthon, member of the National
Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. You can see his chair,
not very unlike mine, in the Musee Carnavalet in Paris. Perhaps that is
where I blundered. The idea of a shrieking revolutionary in Whitehall
must have sent a cold shiver down their spines. In the meanwhile, I
serve on as many War Committees in Wellingsford as is physically
possible for Sergeant Marigold to get me into. I address recruiting
meetings. I have taken earnest young Territorial artillery officers in
courses of gunnery. You know they work with my own beloved old fifteen
pounders, brought up to date with new breeches, recoils, shields, and
limbers. For months there was a brigade in Wellings Park, and I used to
watch their drill. I was like an old actor coming once again before the
footlights.... Of course it was only in the mathematics of the business
that I could be of any help, and doubtless if the War Office had heard
of the goings on in my study, they would have dropped severely on all
of us. Still, I taught them lots of things about parabolas that they
did not know and did not know were to be known--things that,
considering the shells they fired went in parabolas, ought certainly to
be known by artillery officers; so I think, in this way, I have done a
little bit for my country.

With regard to my friends, God has given me many in this quiet market
town--once a Sleepy Hollow awakened only on Thursdays by bleating sheep
and lowing cattle and red-faced men in gaiters and hard felt hats; its
life flowing on drowsily as the gaudily painted barges that are towed
on the canal towards which, in scattered buildings, it drifts
aimlessly; a Sleepy Hollow with one broad High Street, melting
gradually at each end through shops, villas, cottages, into the King's
Highway, yet boasting in its central heart a hundred yards or so of
splendour, where the truculent new red brick Post Office sneers across
the flagged market square at the new Portland-stone Town Hall, while
the old thatched corn-market sleeps in the middle and the Early English
spire of the Norman church dreams calmly above them. Once, I say, a
Sleepy Hollow, but now alive with the tramp of soldiers and the rumble
of artillery and transport; for Wellingsford is the centre of a
district occupied by a division, which means twenty thousand men of all
arms, and the streets and roads swarm with men in khaki, and troops are
billeted in all the houses. The War has changed many aspects, but not
my old friendships. I had made a home here during my soldiering days,
long before the South African War, my wife being a kinswoman of Sir
Anthony, and so I have grown into the intimacy of many folks around.
And, as they have been more than good to me, surely I must give them of
my best in the way of sympathy and counsel. So it is in no spirit of
curiosity that I have pried into my friends' affairs. They have become
my own, very vitally my own; and this book is a record of things as I
know them to have happened.

My name is Meredyth, with a "Y," as my poor mother used proudly to say,
though what advantage a "Y" has over an "I," save that of a swaggering
tail, I have always been at a loss to determine; Major Duncan Meredyth,
late R.F.A., aged forty-seven; and I live in a comfortable little house
at the extreme north end of the High Street, standing some way back
from the road; so that in fine weather I can sit in my front garden and
watch everybody going into the town. And whenever any of my friends
pass by, it is their kindly habit to cast an eye towards my gate, and,
if I am visible, to pass the time of day with me for such time as they
can spare.

Years ago, when first I realised what would be my fate for the rest of
my life, I nearly broke my heart. But afterwards, whether owing to the
power of human adaptability or to the theory of compensation, I grew to
disregard my infirmity. By building a series of two or three rooms on
to the ground floor of the house, so that I could live in it without
the need of being carried up and down stairs, and by acquiring skill in
the manipulation of my tricycle chair, I can get about the place pretty
much as I choose. And Marigold is my second self. So, in spite of the
sorrow and grief incident to humanity of which God has given me my
share, I feel that my lot is cast in pleasant places and I am thankful.

The High Street, towards its southern extremity, takes a sudden bend,
forming what the French stage directions call a pan coupe. On the inner
angle are the gates of Wellings Park, the residence of Sir Anthony
Fenimore, third baronet, and the most considerable man in our little
community. Through these gates the car took me and down the long avenue
of chestnut trees, the pride of a district braggart of its chestnuts
and its beeches, but now leafless and dreary, spreading out an infinite
tracery of branch and twig against a grey February sky. Thence we
emerged into the open of rolling pasture and meadow on the highest
ground of which the white Georgian house was situated. As we neared the
house I shivered, not only with the cold, but with a premonition of
disaster. For why should Lady Fenimore have sent for me to see Sir
Anthony, when he, strong and hearty, could have sent for me himself,
or, for the matter of that, could have visited me at my own home? The
house looked stark and desolate. And when we drew up at the front door
and Pardoe, the elderly butler, appeared, his face too looked stark and
desolate.

Marigold lifted me out and carried me up the steps and put me into a
chair like my own which the Fenimores have the goodness to keep in a
hall cupboard for my use.

"What's the matter, Pardoe?" I asked.

"Sir Anthony and her ladyship will tell you, sir. They're in the
morning room."

So I was shewn into the morning room--a noble square room with French
windows, looking on to the wintry garden, and with a log fire roaring
up a great chimney. On one side of the fire sat Sir Anthony, and on the
other, Lady Fenimore. And both were crying. He rose as he saw me--a
short, crop-haired, clean-shaven, ruddy, jockey-faced man of
fifty-five, the corners of his thin lips, usually curled up in a cheery
smile, now piteously drawn down, and his bright little eyes now dim
like those of a dead bird. She, buxom, dark, without a grey hair in her
head, a fine woman defying her years, buried her face in her hands and
sobbed afresh.

"It's good of you to come, old man," said Sir Anthony, "but you're in
it with us."

He handed me a telegram. I knew, before reading it, what message it
contained. I had known, all along, but dared not confess it to myself.

"I deeply regret to inform you that your son, Lieutenant Oswald
Fenimore, was killed in action yesterday while leading his men with the
utmost gallantry."

I had known him since he was a child. By reason of my wife's kinship, I
was "Uncle Duncan." He was just one and twenty, but a couple of years
out of Sandhurst. Only a week before I had received an exuberant letter
from him extolling his men as "super-devil-angels," and imploring me if
I loved him and desired to establish the supremacy of British arms, to
send him some of Mrs. Marigold's potted shrimp.

And now, there he was dead; and, if lucky, buried with a little wooden
cross with his name rudely inscribed, marking his grave.

I reached out my hand.

"My poor old Anthony!"

He jerked his head and glance towards his wife and wheeled me to her
side, so that I could put my hand on her shoulder.

"It's bitter hard, Edith, but--"

"I know, I know. But all the same--"

"Well, damn it all!" cried Sir Anthony, in a quavering voice, "he died
like a man and there's nothing more to be said."

Presently he looked at his watch.

"By George," said he, "I've only just time to get to my Committee."

"What Committee?" I asked.

"The Lord Lieutenant's. I promised to take the chair."

For the first time Lady Fenimore lifted her stricken face.

"Are you going, Anthony?"

"The boy didn't shirk his duty. Why should I?"

She looked at him squarely and the most poignant simulacrum of a smile
I have ever seen flitted over her lips.

"Why not, darling? Duncan will keep me company till you come back."

He kissed his wife, a trifle more demonstratively than he had ever done
in alien presence, and with a nod at me, went out of the room.

And suddenly she burst into sobbing again.

"I know it's wrong and wicked and foolish," she said brokenly. "But I
can't help it. Oh, God! I can't help it."

Then, like an ass, I began to cry, too; for I loved the boy, and that
perhaps helped her on a bit.




CHAPTER II


Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but outworn
during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant phrase
which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to hundreds of thousands of
mourning men and women there has been nothing but its truth to bring
consolation. They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice and thereby
are ennobled. The cause in which they made it becomes more sacred. The
community of grief raises human dignity. In England, at any rate, there
are no widows of Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see
little black worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their
only son, the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their
grief was stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the
occasion of a tragedy that occurred the year before.

Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had
been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid,
useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no
dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it with a heroic word
that caught in the throat.

I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford
in order to weep over the pain of the world. God knows there is in it
an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day
unfolded before my eyes.

If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh
Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and blow
out my brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the earth has
ever since its creation pierced through the mist of tears in which at
times it has been shrouded. What has been will be. Nay, more, what has
been shall be. It is the Law of what I believe to be God.... As a
concrete instance, where do you find a fuller expression of the divine
gaiety of the human spirit than in the Houses of Pain, strewn the
length and breadth of the land, filled with maimed and shattered men
who have looked into the jaws of Hell? If it comes to that, I have
looked into them myself, and have heard the heroic jests of men who
looked with me.

For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all
so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I find
myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This, however, by the
way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that if I am to make this
story intelligible I must start from the darkness where its roots lie
hidden. And that darkness is the black depths of the canal by the lock
gates where Althea Fenimore's body was found.

It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one
picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of
tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea
Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern,
with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and
sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call "open-air";
yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I have seen her in
the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the
most passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the
evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and
muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say chiffon--anyhow, something white
and filmy and girlish--curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of
Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its
greasy brown paper cover, from the servants' hall. I confess that,
though to her as to her brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as
a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in
intellectual grasp, in emotional distinction. I should have said that
she was sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men.
She was forever laughing--just the spontaneous laughter of the gladness
of life.

On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me, bringing me
a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular bed. We had tea
in the garden, and with her young appetite she consumed half the fruit
she had brought. At the time I did not notice an unusual touch of
depression. I remember her holding by its stalk a great half-eaten
strawberry and asking me whether sometimes I didn't find life rather
rotten. I said idly:

"You can't expect the world to be a peach without a speck on it. Of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The wise person avoids the specks."

"But suppose you've bitten a specky bit by accident?"

"Spit it out," said I.

She laughed. "You think you're like the wise Uncle in the Sunday School
books, don't you?"

"I know I am," I said.

Whereupon she laughed again, finished the strawberry, and changed the
conversation.

There seemed to be no foreshadowing of tragedy in that. I had known her
(like many of her kind) to proclaim the rottenness of the Universe when
she was off her stroke at golf, or when a favourite young man did not
appear at a dance. I attributed no importance to it. But the next day I
remembered. What was she doing after half-past ten o'clock, when she
had bidden her father and mother goodnight, on the steep and lonely
bank of the canal, about a mile and a half away? No one had seen her
leave the house. No one, apparently, had seen her walking through the
town. Nothing was known of her until dawn when they found her body by
the lock gate. She had been dead some hours. It was a mysterious
affair, upon which no light was thrown at the inquest. No one save
myself had observed any sign of depression, and her half-bantering talk
with me was trivial enough. No one could adduce a reason for her
midnight walk on the tow-path. The obvious question arose. Whom had she
gone forth to meet? What man? There was not a man in the neighbourhood
with whom her name could be particularly associated. Generally, it
could be associated with a score or so. The modern young girl of her
position and upbringing has a drove of young male intimates. With one
she rides, with another she golfs, with another she dances a two-step,
with another she Bostons; she will let Tom read poetry to her,
although, as she expresses it, "he bores her stiff," because her sex
responds to the tribute; she plays lady patroness to Dick, and tries to
intrigue him into a soft job; and as for Harry she goes on telling him
month after month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly she
will visit him with her high displeasure. Meanwhile, most of these
satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable,
others not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as a
woman and a sister, they have the run of her father's house, and would
feel insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness of their
behaviour. Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where he is welcomed
on the same understanding. Of course, when one particular young man and
one particular young woman read lunatic things in each other's eyes,
then the rest of the respective quasi-sisters and quasi-brothers have
to go hang. (In parenthesis, I may state that the sisters are more
ruthlessly sacrificed than the brothers.) At any rate, frankness is the
saving quality of the modern note.

In the case of Althea, there had been no sign of such specialisation.
She could not have gone forth, poor child, to meet the twenty with whom
she was known to be on terms of careless comradeship. She had gone from
her home, driven by God knows what impulse, to walk in the
starlight--there was no moon--along the banks of the canal. In the
darkness, had she missed her footing and stepped into nothingness and
the black water? The Coroner's Jury decided the question in the
affirmative. They brought in a verdict of death by misadventure. And up
to the date on which I begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford,
namely that of the summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death
of young Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter.

Throughout July my friends were like dead people. There was nothing
that could be said to them by way of consolation. The sun had gone out
of their heaven. There was no light in the world. Having known Death as
a familiar foe, and having fought against its terrors; having only by
the grace of God been able to lift up a man's voice in my hour of awful
bereavement, and cry, "O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, thy
Victory?" I could suffer with them and fear for their reason. They
lived in a state of coma, unaware of life, performing, like automata,
their daily tasks.

Then, in the early days of August, came the Trumpet of War, and they
awakened. In my life have I seen nothing so marvellous. No broken spell
of enchantment in an Arabian tale when dead warriors spring into life
was ever more instant and complete. They arose in their full vigour;
the colour came back to their cheeks and the purpose into their eyes.
They laughed once more. Their days were filled with work and
cheerfulness. In November Sir Anthony was elected Mayor. Being a
practical, hard-headed little man, loved and respected by everybody, he
drove a hitherto contentious Town Council into paths of high patriotism
like a flock of sheep. And no less energy did Lady Fenimore exhibit in
the sphere of her own activities.

A few days after the tidings came of Oswald's death, Sir Anthony was
riding through the town and pulled up before Perkins' the fishmonger's.
Perkins emerged from his shop and crossed the pavement.

"I hear you've had bad news."

"Yes, indeed, Sir Anthony."

"I'm sorry. He was a fine fellow. So was my boy. We're in the same
boat, Perkins."

Perkins assented. "It sort of knocks one's life to bits, doesn't it?"
said he. "We've nothing left."

"We have our country."

"Our country isn't our only son," said the other dully.

"No. She's our mother," said Sir Anthony.

"Isn't that a kind of abstraction?"

"Abstraction!" cried Sir Anthony, indignantly. "You must be imbibing
the notions of that poisonous beast Gedge."

Gedge was a smug, socialistic, pacifist builder who did not hold with
war--and with this one least of all, which he maintained was being
waged for the exclusive benefit of the capitalist classes. In the eyes
of the stalwarts of Wellingsford, he was a horrible fellow, capable of
any stratagem or treason.

Perkins flushed. "I've always voted conservative, like my father before
me, Sir Anthony, and like yourself I've given my boy to my country.
I've no dealings with unpatriotic people like Gedge, as you know very
well."

"Of course I do," cried Sir Anthony. "And that's why I ask you what the
devil you mean by calling England an abstraction. For us, she's the
only thing in the world. We're elderly chaps, you and I, Perkins, and
the only thing we can do to help her is to keep our heads high. If
people like you and me crumple up, the British Empire will crumple up."

"That's quite true," said Perkins.

Sir Anthony bent down and held out his hand.

"It's damned hard lines for us, and for the women. But we must keep our
end up. It's doing our bit."

Perkins wrung his hand. "I wish to God," said he, "I was young enough--"

"By God! so do I!" said Sir Anthony.

This little conversation (which I afterwards verified) was reported to
me by my arch-gossip, Sergeant Marigold.

"And I tell you what, sir," said he after the conclusion, "I'm of the
same way of thinking and feeling."

"So am I."

"Besides, I'm not so old, sir. I'm only forty-two."

"The prime of life," said I.

"Then why won't they take me, sir?"

If there had been no age limit and no medical examination Marigold
would have re-enlisted as John Smith, on the outbreak of war, without a
moment's consideration of the position of his wife and myself. And Mrs.
Marigold, a soldier's wife of twenty years' standing, would have taken
it, just like myself, as a matter of course. But as he could not
re-enlist, he pestered the War Office (just as I did) and I pestered
for him to give him military employment. And all in vain.

"Why don't they take me, sir? When I see these fellows with three
stripes on their arms, and looking at them and wondering at them as if
they were struck three stripes by lightning, and calling themselves
Sergeants and swanking about and letting their men waddle up to their
gun like cows--and when I see them, as I've done with your eyes--watch
one of their men pass by an officer in the street without saluting, and
don't kick the blighter to--to--to barracks--it fairly makes me sick.
And I ask myself, sir, what I've done that I should be loafing here
instead of serving my country."

"You've somehow mislaid an eye and a hand and gone and got a tin head.
That's what you've done," said I. "And the War Office has a mark
against you as a damned careless fellow."

"Tin head or no tin head," he grumbled, "I could teach those mother's
darlings up there the difference between a battery of artillery and a
skittle-ally."

"I believe you've mentioned the matter to them already," I observed
softly.

Marigold met my eye for a second and then looked rather sheepish. I had
heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a Territorial Sergeant
whom he had set out to teach. Marigold encountered a cannonade of
blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date, scientific, against which the
time-worn expletives in use during his service days were ineffectual.
He was routed with heavy loss.

"This is a war of the young," I continued. "New men, new guns, new
notions. Even a new language," I insinuated.

"I wish 'em joy of their language," said Marigold. Then seeing that I
was mildly amusing myself at his expense, he asked me stiffly if there
was anything more that he could do for me, and on my saying no, he
replied "Thank you, sir," most correctly and left the room.

On the 3d of March Betty Fairfax came to tea.

Of all the young women of Wellingsford she was my particular favourite.
She was so tall and straight, with a certain Rosalind boyishness about
her that made for charm. I am not yet, thank goodness, one of the
fossils who hold up horror-stricken hands at the independent ways of
the modern young woman. If it were not for those same independent ways
the mighty work that English women are doing in this war would be left
undone. Betty Fairfax was breezily independent. She had a little money
of her own and lived, when it suited her, with a well-to-do and
comfortable aunt. She was two and twenty. I shall try to tell you more
about her, as I go on.

As I have said, and as my diary tells me, she came to tea on the 3d of
March. She was looking particularly attractive that afternoon. Shaded
lamps and the firelight of a cosy room, with all their soft shadows,
give a touch of mysterious charm to a pretty girl. Her jacket had a
high sort of Medici collar edged with fur, which set off her shapely
throat. The hair below her hat was soft and brown. Her brows were wide,
her eyes brown and steady, nose and lips sensitive. She had a way of
throwing back her head and pointing her chin fearlessly, as though in
perpetual declaration that she cared not a hang either for
black-beetles or Germans. And she was straight as a dart, with the
figure of a young Diana--Diana before she began to worry her head about
beauty competitions. A kind of dark hat stuck at a considerable angle
on her head gave her the prettiest little swaggering air in the
world.... Well, there was I, a small, brown, withered, grizzled,
elderly, mustachioed monkey, chained to my wheel-chair; there were the
brave logs blazing up the wide chimney; there was the tea table on my
right with its array of silver and old china; and there, on the other
side of it, attending to my wants, sat as brave and sweet a type of
young English womanhood as you could find throughout the length and
breadth of the land. Had I not been happy, I should have been an
ungrateful dog.

We talked of the war, of local news, of the wounded at the hospital.

And here I must say that we are very proud of our Wellingsford
Hospital. It is the largest and the wealthiest in the county. We owe it
to the uneasy conscience of a Wellingsford man, a railway speculator in
the forties, who, having robbed widows and orphans and, after trial at
the Old Bailey, having escaped penal servitude by the skin of his
teeth, died in the odour of sanctity, and the possessor of a colossal
fortune in the year eighteen sixty-three. This worthy gentleman built
the hospital and endowed it so generously that a wing of it has been
turned into a military hospital with forty beds. I have the honour to
serve on the Committee. Betty Fairfax entered as a Probationer early in
September, and has worked there night and day ever since. That is why
we chatted about the wounded. Having a day off, she had indulged in the
luxury of pretty clothes. Of these I had duly expressed my admiration.

Tea over, she lit a cigarette for me and one for herself and drew her
chair a trifle nearer the fire. After a little knitting of the brow,
she said:--

"You haven't asked me why I invited myself to tea."

"I thought," said I, "it was for my beaux yeux."

"Not this time. I rather wanted you to be the first to receive a
certain piece of information."

I glanced at her sharply. "You don't mean to say you're going to be
married at last?"

In some astonishment she retorted:--

"How did you guess?"

"Holy simplicity!" said I. "You told me so yourself."

She laughed. Suddenly, on reflection, her face changed.

"Why did you say 'at last'?"

"Well--" said I, with a significant gesture.

She made a defiant announcement:--

"I am going to marry Willie Connor."

It was my turn to be astonished. "Captain Connor?" I echoed.

"Yes. What have you to say against him?"

"Nothing, my dear, nothing."

And I hadn't. He was an exemplary young fellow, a Captain in a
Territorial regiment that had been in hard training in the
neighbourhood since August. He was of decent family and upbringing, a
barrister by profession, and a comely pink-faced boy with a fair
moustache. He brought a letter or two of introduction, was billeted on
Mrs. Fairfax, together with one of his subs, and was made welcome at
various houses. Living under the same roof as Betty, it was natural
that he should fall in love with her. But it was not at all natural
that she should fall in love with him. She was not one of the kind that
suffer fools gladly.... No; I had nothing against Willie Connor. He was
merely a common-place, negative young man; patriotic, keen in his work,
an excellent soldier, and, as far as I knew, of blameless life; but
having met him two or three times in general company, I had found him a
dull dog, a terribly dull dog,--the last man in the world for Betty
Fairfax.

And then there was Leonard Boyce. I naturally had him in my head, when
I used the words "at last."

"You don't seem very enthusiastic," said Betty.

"You've taken me by surprise," said I. "I'm not young enough to be
familiar with these sudden jerks."

"You thought it was Major Boyce."

"I did, Betty. True, you've said nothing about it to me for ever so
long, and when I have asked you for news of him your answers have
shewed me that all was not well. But you've never told me, or anyone,
that the engagement was broken off."

Her young face was set sternly as she looked into the fire.

"It's not broken off--in the formal sense. Leonard thought fit to let
it dwindle, and it has dwindled until it has perished of inanition."
She flashed round. "I'm not the sort to ask any man for explanations."

"Boyce went out with the first lot in August," I said. "He has had
seven awful months. Mons and all the rest of it. You must excuse a man
in the circumstances for not being aux petits soins des dames. And he
seems to be doing magnificently--twice mentioned in dispatches."

"I know all that," she said. "I'm not a fool. But the war has nothing
to do with it. It started a month before the war broke out. Don't let
us talk of it."

She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire and lit a fresh one. I
accepted the action as symbolical. I dismissed Boyce, and said:--

"And so you're engaged to Captain Connor?"

"More than that," she laughed. "I'm going to marry him. He's going out
next week. It's idiotic to have an engagement. So I'm going to marry
him the day after to-morrow."

Now here was a piece of news, all flung at my head in a couple of
minutes. The day after to-morrow! I asked for the reason of this
disconcerting suddenness.

"He's going out next week."

"My dear," said I, "I have known you for a very long time--and I
suppose it's because I'm such a very old friend that you've come to
tell me all about it. So I can talk to you frankly. Have you considered
the terrible chances of this war? Heaven knows what may happen. He may
be killed."

"That's why I'm marrying him," she said.

There was a little pause. For the moment I had nothing to say, as I was
busily searching for her point of view. Then, with pauses between each
sentence, she went on:--

"He asked me two months ago, and again a month ago. I told him to put
such ideas out of his head. Yesterday he told me they were off to the
front and said what a wonderful help it would be to him if he could
carry away some hope of my love. So I gave it to him."--She threw back
her head and looked at me, with flushed cheeks. "The love, not the
hope."

"I don't think it was right of him to press for an immediate marriage,"
said I, in a grandfatherly way--though God knows if I had been mad for
a girl I should have done the same myself when I was young.

"He didn't" said Betty, coolly. "It was all my doing. I fixed it up
there and then. Looked up Whitaker's Almanack for the necessary
information, and sent him off to get a special license."

I nodded a non-committal head. It all seemed rather mad. Betty rose and
from her graceful height gazed down on me.

"If you don't look more cheerful, Major, I shall cry. I've never done
so yet, but I'm sure I've got it in me."

I stretched out my hand. She took it, and, still holding it, seated
herself on a footstool close to my chair.

"There are such a lot of things that occur to me," I said. "Things that
your poor mother, if she were alive, would be more fitted to touch on
than myself."

"Such as--"

She knelt by me and gave me both her hands. It was a pretty way she
had. She had begun it soon after her head overtopped mine in my eternal
wheelbarrow. There was a little mockery in her eyes.

"Well--" said I. "You know what marriage means. There is the question
of children."

She broke into frank laughter.

"My darling Majy--" That is the penalty one pays for admitting
irresponsible modern young people into one's intimacy. They miscall one
abominably. I thought she had outgrown this childish, though
affectionate appellation of disrespect. "My darling Majy!" she said.
"Children! How many do you think I'm going to have?"

I was taken aback. There was this pure, proud, laughing young face a
foot away from me. I said in desperation:--

"You know very well what I mean, young woman. I want to put things
clearly before you--" It is the most difficult thing in the world for a
man--even without legs--to talk straight about the facts of life to a
young girl. He has no idea how much she knows about them and how much
she doesn't. To tear away veils and reveal frightening starkness is an
act from which he shrinks with all the modesty of a (perhaps) deluded
sex. I took courage. "I want," I repeated, "to put things clearly
before you. You are marrying this young man. You will have a week's
married life. He goes away like a gallant fellow to fight for his
country. He may be killed in the course of the next few weeks. Like a
brave girl you've got to face it. In the course of time a child may be
born--without a father to look after him. It's a terrific
responsibility."

She knelt upright and put both her hands on my shoulders, almost
embracing me, and the laughter died away from her eyes, giving place to
something which awakened memories of what I had seen once or twice in
the eyes of the dearest of all women. She put her face very close to
mine and whispered:

"Don't you see, dear, it's in some sort of way because of that? Don't
you think it would be awful for a strong, clean, brave English life
like his to go out without leaving behind him someone to--well, you
know what I mean--to carry on the same traditions--to be the same clean
brave Englishman in the future?"

I smiled and nodded. Quite a different kind of nod from the previous
one.

"Thousands of girls are doing it, you dear old Early Victorian, and
aren't ashamed to say so to those who really love and can understand
them. And you do love and understand, don't you?"

She set me off at arm's length, and held me with her bright unflinching
eyes.

"I do, my dear," said I. "But there's only one thing that troubles me.
Marriage is a lifelong business. Captain Connor may win through to a
green old age. I hope to God the gallant fellow will. Your present
motives are beautiful and heroic. But do you care for him sufficiently
to pass a lifetime with him--after the war--an ordinary, commonplace
lifetime?"

With the same clear gaze full on me she said:--

"Didn't I tell you that I had given him my love?"

"You did."

"Then," she retorted with a smile, "my dear Major Didymus, what more do
you want?"

"Nothing, my dear Betty."

I kissed her. She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me again.
Sergeant Marigold entered on the sentimental scene and preserved a face
of wood. Betty rose to her feet slowly and serenely and smiled at
Marigold.

"Miss Fairfax's car," he announced.

"Marigold," said I, "Miss Fairfax is going to be married the day after
to-morrow to Captain Connor of the--"

"I know, sir," interrupted my one-eyed ramrod. "I'm very glad, if I may
be permitted to say so, Miss. I've made it my duty to inspect all the
troops that have been quartered hereabouts during the last eight
months. And Captain Connor is one of the few that really know their
business. I shouldn't at all mind to serve under him. I can't say more,
Miss. I wish you happiness."

She flushed and laughed and looked adorable, and held out her hand,
which he enclosed in his great left fist.

"And you'll come to my wedding, Sergeant?"

"I will, Miss," said he. "With considerable pleasure."




CHAPTER III


When I want to shew how independent I am of everybody, I drive abroad
in my donkey carriage. I am rather proud of my donkey, a lithe-limbed
pathetically eager little beast, deep bay with white tips to his ears.
Marigold bought him for me last spring, from some gipsies, when his
predecessor, Dan, who had served me faithfully for some years, struck
work and insisted on an old-age pension. He is called Hosea, a name
bestowed on him, by way of clerical joke, and I am sure with a profane
reminiscence of Jorrocks, by the Vicar, because he "came after Daniel."
At first I thought it rather silly; but when I tried to pull him up I
found that "Whoa-Ho-sea!" came in rather pat; so Hosea he has remained.
He has quite a fast, stylish little trot, and I can square my elbows
and cock my head on one side as I did in the days of my youth when the
brief ownership of a tandem and a couple of thoroughbreds would have
landed me in the bankruptcy court, had it not mercifully first landed
me in the hospital.

The afternoon after Betty's visit, I took Hosea to Wellings Park. The
Fenimores shewed me a letter they had received from Oswald's Colonel,
full of praise of the gallant boy, and after discussing it, which they
did with brave eyes and voices, Sir Anthony said:--

"I want your advice, Duncan, on a matter that has been worrying us
both. Briefly it is this. When Oswald came of age I promised to allow
him a thousand a year till I should be wiped out and he should come in.
Now I'm only fifty-five and as strong as a horse. I can reasonably
expect to live, say, another twenty years. If Oswald were alive I
should owe him, in prospectu, twenty thousand pounds. He has given his
life for his country. His country, therefore, is his heir, comes in for
his assets, his twenty years' allowance--"

"And the whole of your estate at your death?" I interposed.

"No. Not at all," said he. "At my death, it would have been his to
dispose of as he pleased. Up to my death, he would have had no more
claim to deal with it than you have. Look at things from my point of
view, and don't be idiotic. I am considering my debt to Oswald, and
therefore, logically, my debt to the country. It is twenty thousand
pounds. I'm going to pay it. The only question is--and the question has
kept Edith and myself awake the last two nights--is what's the best
thing to do with it? Of course I could give it to some fund,--or
several funds,--but it's a lot of money and I should like it to be used
to the best advantage. Now what do you say?"

"I say," said I, "that you Croesuses make a half-pay Major of
Artillery's head reel. If I were like you, I should go into a shop and
buy a super-dreadnought, and stick a card on it with a drawing pin, and
send it to the Admiralty with my compliments."

"Duncan," said Lady Fenimore, severely, "don't be flippant."

Heaven knows I was in no flippant mood; but it was worth a foolish jest
to bring a smile to Sir Anthony's face. Also this grave, conscientious
proposition had its humorous side. It was so British. It reminded me of
the story of Swift, who, when Gay and Pope visited him and refused to
sup, totted up the cost of the meal and insisted on their accepting
half-a-crown apiece. It reminded me too of the rugged old Lancashire
commercial blood that was in him--blood that only shewed itself on the
rarest and greatest of occasions--the blood of his grandfather, the
Manchester cotton-spinner, who founded the fortunes of his house. Sir
Anthony knew less about cotton than he did about ballistics and had
never sat at a desk in a business office for an hour in his life; but
now and again the inherited instinct to put high impulses on a
scrupulously honest commercial basis asserted itself in the quaintest
of fashions.

"There's some sense in what he says, Edith," remarked Sir Anthony.
"It's only vanity that prompted us to ear-mark this sum for something
special."

"Vanity!" cried Lady Fenimore. "You weren't by any chance thinking of
advertising our gift or contribution or whatever you like to call it in
the Daily Mail?"

"Heaven forbid, my dear," Sir Anthony replied warmly; and he stood, his
hands under his coat-tails and his gaitered legs apart, regarding her
with the air of a cock-sparrow accused of murdering his young, or a
sensitive jockey repudiating a suggestion of crooked riding. "Heaven
forbid!" he repeated. "Such an idea never entered my head."

"Then where does the vanity come in?" asked Lady Fenimore.

They had their little argument. I lit a cigarette and let them argue.
In such cases, every married couple has its own queer and private and
particular and idiosyncratic way of coming to an agreement. The third
party who tries to foist on it his own suggestion of a way is an
imbecile. The dispute on the point of vanity, charmingly conducted,
ended by Sir Anthony saying triumphantly:--

"Well, my dear, don't you see I'm right?" and by his wife replying with
a smile:--

"No, darling, I don't see at all. But since you feel like that, there's
nothing more to be said."

I was mildly enjoying myself. Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic. I broke in.

"I don't think it's vanity to see that you get your money's worth.
There's lots of legitimate fun in spending twenty thousand pounds
properly. It's too big to let other people manage or mis-manage.
Suppose you decided on motor-ambulances or hospital trains, for
instance, it would be your duty to see that you got the best and most
up-to-date ambulances or trains, with the least possible profits, to
contractors and middle-men."

"As far as that goes, I think I know my way about," said Sir Anthony.

"Of course. And as for publicity--or the reverse, hiding your light
under a bushel--any fool can remain anonymous."

Sir Anthony nodded at me, rubbed his hands, and turned to his wife.

"That's just what I was saying, Edith."

"My dear, that is just what I was trying to make you understand."

Neither of the two dear things had said, or given the other to
understand, anything of the kind. But you see they had come in their
own quaint married way to an agreement and were now receptive of
commonsense.

"The motor ambulance is a sound idea," said Sir Anthony, rubbing his
chin between thumb and forefinger.

"So is the hospital train," said Lady Fenimore.

What an idiot I was to suggest these alternatives! I looked at my
watch. It was getting late. Hosea, like a silly child, is afraid of the
dark. He just stands still and shivers at the night, and the more he is
belaboured the more he shivers, standing stock-still with ears thrown
back and front legs thrown forward. As I can't get out and pull, I'm at
the mercy of Hosea. And he knows it. Since the mount of Balaam, there
was never such an intelligent idiot of an ass.

"What do you say?" asked Sir Anthony. "Ambulance or train?"

"Donkey carriage," said I. "This very moment minute."

I left them and trotted away homewards.

Just as I had turned a bend of the chestnut avenue near the Park gates,
I came upon a couple of familiar figures--familiar, that is to say,
individually, but startlingly unfamiliar in conjunction. They were a
young man and girl, Randall Holmes and Phyllis Gedge. Randall had
concluded a distinguished undergraduate career at Oxford last summer.
He was a man of birth, position, and, to a certain extent, of fortune.
Phyllis Gedge was the daughter, the pretty and attractive daughter, of
Daniel Gedge, the socialistic builder who did not hold with war. What
did young Randall mean by walking in the dark with his arm round
Phyllis's waist? Of course as soon as he heard the click-clack of
Hosea's hoofs he whipped his arm away; but I had already caught him.
They tried to look mighty unconcerned as I pulled up. I took off my hat
politely to the lady and held out my hand to the young man.

"Good evening, Randall," said I. "I haven't seen you for ages."

He was a tall, clean-limbed, clear-featured boy, with black hair, which
though not long, yet lacked the military trimness befitting the heads
of young men at the present moment. He murmured something about being
busy.

"It will do you good to take a night off," I said; "drop in after
dinner and smoke a pipe with an old friend."

I smiled, bowed again politely, whipped up Hosea and trotted off. I
wondered whether he would come. He had said: "Delighted, I'm sure," but
he had not looked delighted. Very possibly he regarded me as a
meddlesome, gossiping old tom-cat. Perhaps for that reason he would
deem it wise to adopt a propitiatory attitude. Perhaps also he retained
a certain affectionate respect for me, seeing that I had known him as a
tiny boy in a sailor suit, and had fed him at Harrow (as I did poor
Oswald Fenimore at Wellington) with Mrs. Marigold's famous potted
shrimp and other comestibles, and had put him up, during here and there
holidays and later a vacation, when his mother and aunts, with whom he
lived, had gone abroad to take inefficacious cures for the tedium of a
futile life. Oxford, however, had set him a bit off my plane.

As an ordinary soldierman, trained in the elementary virtues of
plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the sacredness
of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I haven't the
remotest notion what his jargon means. From Aristotle to William James,
I have dipped into quite a lot of them--Descartes, Berkeley, Kant,
Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted Teutonic ass who said that women
weren't beautiful), for I hate to be thought an ignorant duffer--and I
have never come across in them anything worth knowing, thinking, or
doing that I was not taught at my mother's knee. And as for her, dear,
simple soul, if you had asked her what was the Categorical Imperative
(having explained beforehand the meaning of the words), she would have
said, "The Sermon on the Mount."

Of course, please regard this as a criticism not of the metaphysicians
and the philosophers, but of myself. All these great thinkers have
their niches in the Temple of Fame, and I'm quite aware that the
consensus of human judgment does not immortalise even such an ass as
Schopenhauer, without sufficient reason. All I want to convey to you is
that I am only a plain, ordinary God-fearing, law-abiding Englishman,
and that when young Randall Holmes brought down from Oxford all sorts
of highfalutin theories about everything, not only in God's Universe,
but in the super-Universe that wasn't God's, and of every one of which
he was cocksure, I found my homely self very considerably out of it.

Then--young Randall was a poet. He had won the Newdigate. The subject
was Andrea del Sarto, one of my favourite painters--il pittore senza
errore--and his prize poem--it had, of course, to be academic in
form--was excellent. It said just the things about him which Browning
somehow missed, and which I had always been impotently wanting to say.
And a year or so afterwards--when I praised his poem--he would shrink
in a more than deprecating attitude: I might just as well have extolled
him for seducing the wife of his dearest friend. His later poems, of
which he was immodestly proud--"Sensations Captured on the Wing," he
defined them--left me cold and unsympathetic. So, for these reasons,
the boy and I had drifted apart. Until I had caught him in flagrante
delicto of walking with his arm round the waist of pretty Phyllis
Gedge, I had not seen him to speak to for a couple of months.

He came, however, after dinner, looking very sleek and handsome and
intellectual, and wearing a velvet dinner jacket which I did not like.
After we had gossiped awhile:--

"You said you were very busy?" I remarked.

He flicked off his cigarette ash and nodded.

"What at?"

"War poetry," he replied. "I am trying to supply the real note. It is
badly wanted. There are all kinds of stuff being written, but all
indifferent and valueless. If it has a swing, it's merely vulgar, and
what isn't vulgar is academic, commonplace. There's a crying need for
the high level poetry that shall interpret with dignity and nobility
the meaning of the war."

"Have you written much?"

"I have an ode every week in the Albemarle Review. I also write the
political article. Didn't you know? Haven't you seen them?"

"I don't take in that periodical," said I. "The omniscience of the last
copy I saw dismayed me. I couldn't understand why the Government were
such insensate fools as not to move from Downing Street to their
Editorial offices."

Randall, with a humouring smile, defended the Albemarle Review.

"It is run," said he, "by a little set of intellectuals--some men up
with me at Oxford--who must naturally have a clearer vision than men
who have been living for years in the yellow fog of party politics."

He expounded the godlike wisdom of young Oxford at some length,
replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my part.
After a while I began to grow irritated. His talk, like his verse,
seemed to deal with unrealities. It was a negation of everything, save
the intellectual. If he and his friends had been in power, there would
never have been a war; there never would have been a German menace; the
lamb would have lain down in peace, outside the lion. He had an airy
way of dismissing the ruder and more human aspects of the war. Said I:--

"Anyone can talk of what might have been. But that's all over and done
with. We're up against the tough proposition of the present. What are
you doing for it?"

He waved a hand. "That's just the point. The present doesn't
matter--not in the wide conception of things. It is the past and the
future that count. The present is mere fluidity."

"The poor devils up to their waists in water in the trenches would
agree with you," said I.

"They would also agree with me," he retorted, "if they had time to go
into the reconstruction of the future that we are contemplating."

At this juncture Marigold came in with the decanters and syphons. I
noticed his one eye harden on the velvet dinner-jacket. He fidgeted
about the room, threw a log on the fire, drew the curtains closer,
always with an occasional malevolent glance at the jacket. Then
Randall, like a silly young ass, said, from the depths of his easy
chair, a very silly thing.

"I see you've not managed to get into khaki yet, Sergeant."

Marigold took a tactical pace or two to the door.

"Neither have you, sir," he said in a respectful tone, and went out.

Randall laughed, though I saw his dark cheek flush. "If Marigold had
his way he would have us all in a barrack square."

"Preferably in those fluid trenches of the present," said I. "And he
wouldn't be far wrong."

My eyes rested on him somewhat stonily. People have complained
sometimes--defaulters, say, in the old days--that there can be a
beastly, nasty look in them.

"What do you mean, Major?" he asked.

"Sergeant Marigold," said I, "is a brave, patriotic Englishman who has
given his country all he can spare from the necessary physical
equipment to carry on existence; and it's making him hang-dog miserable
that he's not allowed to give the rest to-morrow. You must forgive his
plain speaking," I continued, gathering warmth as I went on, "but he
can't understand healthy young fellows like you not wanting to do the
same. And, for the matter of that, my dear Randall, neither do I. Why
aren't you serving your country?"

He started forward in his chair and threw out his arms, and his dark
eyes flashed and a smile of conscious rectitude overspread his
clear-cut features.

"My dear Major--serving my country? Why, I'm working night and day for
it. You don't understand."

"I've already told you I don't."

The boy was my guest. I had not intended to hold a pistol to his head
in one hand and dangle a suit of khaki before his eyes in the other. I
had been ill at ease concerning him for months, but I had proposed to
regain his confidence in a tactful, fatherly way. Instead of which I
found myself regarding him with my beastly defaulter glare. The blood
sometimes flies to one's head.

He condescended to explain.

"There are millions of what the Germans call 'cannon fodder' about. But
there are few intellects--few men, shall I say?--of genius, scarcely a
poet. And men like myself who can express--that's the whole vital
point--who can EXPRESS the higher philosophy of the Empire, and can
point the way to its realisation are surely more valuable than the
yokel or factory hand, who, as the sum-total of his capabilities, can
be trained merely into a sort of shooting machine. Just look at it, my
dear Major, from a commonsense point of view--" He forgot, the amazing
young idiot, that he was talking not to a maiden aunt, but to a
hard-bitten old soldier. "What good would it serve to stick the
comparatively rare man--I say it in all modesty--the comparatively rare
man like myself in the trenches? It would be foolish waste. I assure
you I'm putting all my talents at the disposal of the country." Seeing,
I suppose, in my eyes, the maintained stoniness of non-conviction, he
went on, "But, my dear sir, be reasonable." ... Reasonable! I nearly
choked. If I could have stood once more on my useless legs, I should
have swung my left arm round and clouted him on the side of the head.
Reasonable indeed! This well-fed, able-bodied, young Oxford prig to
tell me, an honourable English officer and gentleman, to be reasonable,
when the British Empire, in peril of its existence, was calling on all
its manhood to defend it in arms! I glared at him. He continued:--

"Yes, be reasonable. Everyone has his place in this World conflict. We
can't all be practical fighters. You wouldn't set Kitchener or Grey or
Lord Crewe to bayonet Germans--"

"By God, sir," I cried, smiting one palm with the fist of the other
hand. "By God, sir, I would, if they were three and twenty." I had
completely lost my temper. "And if I saw them doing nothing, while the
country was asking for MEN, but writing rotten doggerel and messing
about with girls far beneath them in station, I should call them the
damnedest skunks unskinned!"

He had the decency to rise. "Major Meredyth," said he, "you're under a
terrible misapprehension. You're a military man and must look at
everything from a military point of view. It would be useless to
discuss the philosophy of the situation with you. We're on different
planes."

Just what I said.

"You," said I, "seem to be hovering near Tophet and the Abyss."

"No, no," he answered with an indulgent smile. "You are quoting
Carlyle. You must give him up."

"Damned pro-German, I should think I do," I cried. I had forgotten
where my phrase came from.

"I'm glad to hear it. He's a back-number. I'm a modern. I represent
equilibrium--" He made a little rocking gesture with his graceful hand.
"I am out for Eternal Truth, which I think I perceive."

"In poor little Phyllis Gedge, I suppose?"

"Why not? Look. I am the son, grandson, great-grandson, of English
Tories. She is the daughter of socialism, syndicalism, pacifism,
internationalism--everything that is most apart from my traditions. But
she brings to me beauty, innocence, the feminine solution of all
intellectual concepts. She, the woman, is the soul of conflicting
England. She is torn both ways. But as she has to breed men, some day,
she is instinctively on our side. She is invaluable to me. She inspires
my poems. You may not believe it, but she is at the back of my
political articles. You must really be a little more broad-minded,
Major, and look at these things from the right point of view. From the
point of view of my work, she is merely a symbol."

"And you?" said I, wrathfully. "What are you to her? Do you suppose she
takes you for a symbol? I wish to Heaven she did. A round cipher of
naught, the symbol of inanity. She takes you for an honourable
gentleman. I've known the child since she was born. As good a little
girl as you could wish to meet."

He drew himself up. "That's the opinion of her I am endeavouring to
express."

"Quite so. You win a good decent girl's affection,--if you hadn't, she
would never have let you walk about with her at nightfall, with your
arm round her waist,--and you have the cynical audacity to say that
she's only a symbol."

"When you asked me to come in this evening," said he, "I naturally
concluded you would broach this subject. I came prepared to give you a
complete explanation of what I am ready to admit was a compromising
situation."

"There is only one explanation," said I angrily. "What are your
intentions regarding the girl?"

He smiled. "Quite honourable."

"You mean marriage?"

"Oh, no," said he, emphatically.

"Then the other thing? That's not honourable."

"Of course not. Certainly not the other thing. I'm not a blackguard."

"Then what on earth are you playing at?"

He sighed. "I'm afraid you will never understand."

"I'm afraid I won't," said I. "By your own confession you are neither a
lusty blackguard nor an honourable gentleman. You're a sort of
philanderer, somewhere in between. You neither mean to fight like a man
nor love like a man. I'm sorry to say it, but I've no use for you. As I
can't do it myself, will you kindly ring the bell?"

"Certainly," said he, white with anger, which I was glad to see, and
pressed the electric button beside the mantelpiece. He turned on me,
his head high. There was still some breeding left in him.

"I'm sorry we're at such cross-purposes, Major. All my life long I've
owed you kindnesses I can't ever repay. But at present we're hopelessly
out of sympathy!"

"It seems so," said I. "I had hoped your father's son would be a better
man!"

"My father," said he, "was a successful stockbroker, without any ideas
in his head save the making of money. I don't see what he has got to do
with my well-considered attitude towards life."

"Your callow attitude towards life, my poor boy," said I, "is a matter
of profound indifference to me. But I shall give orders that you are no
longer admitted to this house except in uniform."

"That's absurd," said he.

"Not at all," said I.

In obedience to the summons of the bell Sergeant Marigold appeared and
stood in his ramrod fashion by the door.

Randall came forward to my wheel-chair, with hand outstretched.

"I'm desperately sorry, Major, for this disastrous misunderstanding."

I thrust my hands beneath the light shawl that covered my legs.

"Don't be such a self-sufficient fool, Randall," I said, "as to think I
don't understand. In the present position there are no subtleties and
no complications. Good-night."

Marigold, with a wooden face, opened wide the door, and Randall, with a
shrug of the shoulders, went out.

I stayed awake the whole of that livelong night.

When I learned the death of young Oswald Fenimore, whom I loved far
more dearly than Randall Holmes, I went to bed and slept peacefully. A
gallant lad died in battle; there is nothing more to be said, nothing
more to be thought. The finality, heroically sublime, overwhelms the
poor workings of the brain. But in the case of a fellow like Randall
Holmes--well, as I have said, I did not get a wink of sleep the whole
night long.

Someone, a few months ago, told me of a young university man--Oxford or
Cambridge, I forget--who, when asked why he was not fighting, replied;
"What has the war to do with me? I disapprove of this brawling."

Was that the attitude of Randall, whom I had known all his life long? I
shivered, like a fool, all night. The only consolation I had was to
bring commonsense to my aid and to meditate on the statistical fact
that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were practically empty.

But my soul was sick for young Randall Holmes.




CHAPTER IV


On the wedding eve Betty brought the happy young man to dine with me.
He was in that state of unaccustomed and somewhat embarrassed bliss in
which a man would have dined happily with Beelzebub. A fresh-coloured
boy, with fair crisply set hair and a little moustache a shade or two
fairer, he kept on blushing radiantly, as if apologising in a gallant
sort of fashion for his existence in the sphere of Betty's affection.
As I had known him but casually and desired to make his closer
acquaintance, I had asked no one to meet them, save Betty's aunt, whom
a providential cold had prevented from facing the night air. So, in the
comfortable little oak-panelled dining-room, hung round with my beloved
collection of Delft, I had the pair all to myself, one on each side;
and in this way I was able to read exchanges of glances whence I might
form sage conclusions. Bella, spruce parlour-maid, waited deftly.
Sergeant Marigold, when not occupied in the mild labour of filling
glasses, stood like a guardian ramrod behind my chair--a self-assigned
post to which he stuck grimly like a sentinel. As I always sat with my
back to the fire there must have been times when, the blaze roaring
more fiercely than usual up the chimney, he must have suffered
martyrdom in his hinder parts.

As I talked--for the first time on such intimate footing--with young
Connor, I revised my opinion of him and mentally took back much that I
had said in his disparagement. He was by no means the dull dog that I
had labelled him. By diligent and sympathetic enquiry I learned that he
had been a Natural Science scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he had taken a first-class degree--specialising in geology; that by
profession (his father's) he was a mining-engineer, and, in pursuit of
his vocation, had travelled in Galicia, Mexico and Japan; furthermore,
that he had been one of the ardent little band who of recent years had
made the Cambridge Officers Training Corps an effective school.
Hitherto, when I had met him he had sat so agreeably smiling and
modestly mumchance that I had accepted him at his face value.

I was amused to see how Betty, in order to bring confusion on me, led
him to proclaim himself. And I loved the manner in which he did so. To
hear him, one would have thought that he owed everything in the world
to Betty--from his entrance scholarship at the University to the word
of special commendation which his company had received from the General
of his Division at last week's inspection. Yes, he was the modest,
clean-bred, simple English gentleman who, without self-consciousness or
self-seeking, does his daily task as well as it can be done, just
because it is the thing that is set before him to do. And he was over
head and ears in love with Betty.

I took it upon myself to dismiss her with a nod after she had smoked a
cigarette over her coffee. Mrs. Marigold, as a soldier's wife, I
announced, had a world of invaluable advice to give her. Willie Connor
opened the door. On the threshold she said very prettily:

"Don't drink too much of Major Meredyth's old port. It has been known
before now to separate husbands and wives for years and years."

He looked after her for a few seconds before he closed the door.

Oh, my God! I've looked like that, in my time, after one dear woman....
Humanity is very simple, after all. Every generation does exactly the
same beautiful, foolish things as its forerunner. As he approached the
table, I said with a smile:--

"You're only copying your great-great-grandfather."

"In what way, sir?" he asked, resuming his place.

I pushed the decanter of port. "He watched the disappearing skirt of
your great-great-grandmother."

"She was doubtless a very venerable old lady," said he, flushing and
helping himself to wine. "I never knew her, but she wasn't a patch on
Betty!"

"But," said I, "when your great-great-grandfather opened the door for
her to pass out, she wasn't venerable at all, but gloriously young."

"I suppose he was satisfied, poor old chap." He took a sip. "But those
days did not produce Betty Fairfaxes." He laughed. "I'm jolly sorry for
my ancestors."

Well--that is the way I like to hear a young man talk. It was the
modern expression of the perfect gentle knight. In so far as went his
heart's intention and his soul's strength to assure it, I had no fear
for Betty's happiness. He gave it to her fully into her own hands;
whether she would throw it away or otherwise misuse it was another
matter.

Though I have ever loved women, en tout bien et tout honneur, their
ways have never ceased from causing me mystification. I think I can
size up a man, especially given such an opportunity as I had in the
case of Willie Connor--I have been more or less trained in the business
all my man's life; but Betty Fairfax, whom I had known intimately for
as many years as she could remember, puzzled me exceedingly. I defy
anyone to have picked a single fault in her demeanour towards her
husband of to-morrow. She lit a cigarette for him in the most charming
way in the world, and when he guided the hand that held the match, she
touched his crisp hair lightly with the fingers of the other. She was
all smiles. When we met in the drawing-room, she retailed with a spice
of mischief much of Mrs. Marigold's advice. She had seated herself on
the music stool. Swinging round, she quoted:

"'Even the best husband,' she said, 'will go on swelling himself up
with vanity just because he's a man. A sensible woman, Miss, lets him
go on priding of himself, poor creature. It sort of helps his dignity
when the time comes for him to eat out of your hand, and makes him
think he's doing you a favour.'"

"When are you going to eat out of my hand, Willie?" she asked.

"Haven't I been doing it for the past week?"

"Oh, they always do that before they're married--so Mrs. Marigold
informed me. I mean afterwards."

"Don't you think, my dear," I interposed, "it depends on what your
hands hold out for him to eat?"

Her eyes wavered a bit under mine.

"If he's good," she answered, "they'll be always full of nice things."

She sat, flushed, happy, triumphant, her arms straight down, her
knuckles resting on the leathern seat, her silver-brocaded, slender
feet, clear of the floor, peeping close together beneath her white
frock.

"And if he isn't good?"

"They'll be full of nasty medicine."

She laughed and pivoted round and, after running over the keys of the
piano for a second or two, began to play Gounod's "Death March of a
Marionette." She played it remarkably well. When she had ended, Connor
walked from the hearth, where he had been standing, to her side. I
noticed a little puzzled look in his eyes.

"Delightful," said he. "But, Betty, what put that thing suddenly into
your head?"

"We had been talking nonsense," she replied, picking out a chord or
two, without looking at him. "And I thought we ought to give all past
vanities and frivolities and lunacies a decent burial."

He put both hands very tenderly on her shoulders.

"Requiescat," said he.

She spread out her fingers and struck the two resonant chords of an
"Amen," and then glanced up at him, laughing.

After a while, Marigold announced her car, or, rather, her aunt's car.
They took their leave. I gave them my benediction. Presently, Betty,
fur-coated, came running in alone. She flung herself down, in her
impetuous way, beside my wheel-chair. No visit of Betty's would have
been complete without this performance.

"I haven't had a word with you all the evening, Majy, dear. I've told
Willie to discuss strategy with Sergeant Marigold in the hall, till I
come. Well--you thought I was a damn little fool the other day, didn't
you? What do you think now?"

"I think, my dear," said I, with a hand on her forehead, "that you are
marrying a very gallant English gentleman of whose love any woman in
the land might be proud."

She clutched me round the neck and brought her young face near
mine--and looked at me--I hesitate to say it,--but so it
seemed,--somewhat haggardly.

"I love to hear you say that, it means so much to me. Don't think I
haven't a sense of proportion. I have. In all this universal slaughter
and massacre, a woman's life counts as much as that of a mosquito." She
freed an arm and snapped her fingers. "But to the woman herself, her
own life can't help being of some value. Such as it is, I want to give
it all, every bit of it, to Willie. He shall have everything,
everything, everything that I can give him."

I looked into the young, drawn, pleading face long and earnestly. No
longer was I mystified. I remembered her talk with me a couple of days
before, and I read her riddle.

She had struck gold. She knew it. Gold of a man's love. Gold of a man's
strength. Gold of a man's honour. Gold of a man's stainless past. Gold
of a man's radiant future. And though she wore the mocking face and
talked the mocking words of the woman who expected such a man to "eat
out of her hand," she knew that never out of her hand would he eat save
that which she should give him in honourable and wifely service. She
knew that. She was exquisitely anxious that I should know it too.
Floodgates of relief were expressed when she saw that I knew it. Not
that I, personally, counted a scrap. What she craved was a decent human
soul's justification of her doings. She craved recognition of her
action in casting away base metal forever and taking the pure gold to
her heart.

"Tell me that I am doing the right thing, dear," she said, "and
to-morrow I'll be the happiest woman in the world."

And I told her, in the most fervent manner in my power.

"You quite understand?" she said, standing up, looking very young and
princess-like, her white throat gleaming between her furs and up-turned
chin.

"You will find, my dear," said I, "that the significance of your Dead
March of a Marionette will increase every day of your married life."

She stiffened in a sudden stroke of passion, looking, for the instant,
electrically beautiful.

"I wish," she cried, "someone had written the Dead March of a Devil."

She bent down, kissed me, and went out in a whirr of furs and draperies.

Of course, all I could do was to scratch my thin iron-grey hair and
light a cigar and meditate in front of the fire. I knew all about
it--or at any rate I thought I did, which, as far as my meditation in
front of the fire is concerned, comes to the same thing.

Betty had cast out the base metal of her love for Leonard Boyce in
order to accept the pure gold of the love of Willie Connor. So she
thought, poor girl. She had been in love with Boyce. She had been
engaged to Boyce. Boyce, for some reason or the other, had turned her
down. Spretae injuria formae--she had cast Boyce aside. But for all her
splendid surrender of her womanhood to Willie Connor, for the sake of
her country, she still loved Leonard Boyce. Or, if she wasn't in love
with him, she couldn't get him out of her head or her senses. Something
like that, anyhow. I don't pretend to know exactly what goes on in the
soul or nature, or whatever it is, of a young girl, who has given her
heart to a man. I can only use the crude old phrase: she was still in
love (in some sort of fashion) with Leonard Boyce, and she was going to
marry, for the highest motives, somebody else.

"Confound the fellow," said I, with an irritable gesture and covered
myself with cigar ash.

She had called Boyce a devil and implied a wish that he were dead. For
myself I did not know what to make of him, for reasons which I will
state. I never approved of the engagement. As a matter of fact, I
knew--and was one of the very few who knew--of a black mark against
him--the very blackest mark that could be put against a soldier's name.
It was a puzzling business. And when I say I knew of the mark, I must
be candid and confess that its awful justification lies in the
conscience of one man living in the world to-day--if indeed he be still
alive.

Boyce was a great bronzed, bull-necked man, with an overpowering
personality. People called him the very model of a soldier. He was
always admired and feared by his men. His fierce eye and deep, resonant
voice, and a suggestion of hidden strength, even of brutality,
commanded implicit obedience. But both glance and voice would soften
caressingly and his manner convey a charm which made him popular with
men--brother officers and private soldiers alike--and with women. With
regard to the latter--to put things crudely--they saw in him the
essential, elemental male. Of that I am convinced. It was the open
secret of his many successes. And he had a buoyant, boyish, disarming,
chivalrous way with him. If he desired a woman's lips he would always
begin by kissing the hem of her skirt.

Had I not known what I did, I, an easy-going sort of Christian
temperamentally inclined to see the best in my fellow-creatures, and,
as I boastingly said a little while ago, a trained judge of men, should
doubtless have fallen, like most other people, under the spell of his
fascination. But whenever I met him, I used to look at him and say to
myself: "What's at the back of you anyway? What about that business at
Vilboek's Farm?"

Now this is what I knew--with the reservation I have made above--and to
this day he is not aware of my knowledge.

It was towards the end of the Boer War. Boyce had come out rather late;
for which, of course, he was not responsible. A soldier has to go when
he is told. After a period of humdrum service he was sent off with a
section of mounted infantry to round up a certain farm-house suspected
of harbouring Boer combatants. The excursion was a mere matter of
routine--of humdrum commonplace. As usual it was made at night, but
this was a night of full dazzling moon. The farm lay in a hollow of the
veldt, first seen from the crest of a kopje. There it lay below,
ramshackle and desolate, a rough wall around; flanked by
outbuildings--barn and cowsheds. The section rode down. The stoep led
to a shuttered front. There was no sign of life. The moonlight blazed
full on it. They dismounted, tethered their horses behind the wall, and
entered the yard. The place was deserted, derelict--not even a cat.

Suddenly a shot rang out from somewhere in the main building, and the
Sergeant, the next man to Boyce, fell dead, shot through the brain. The
men looked at Boyce for command and saw a hulking idiot paralysed by
fear.

"His mouth hung open and his eyes were like a silly servant girl's
looking at a ghost." So said my informant.

Two more shots and two men fell. Boyce still stood white and gasping,
unable to move a muscle or utter a sound. His face looked ghastly in
the moonlight. A shot pierced his helmet, and the shock caused him to
stagger and lose his legs. A corporal rushed up, thinking he was hit,
and, finding him whole, rose, in order to leave him there, and, in
rising, got a bullet through the neck. Thus there were four men killed,
and the Commanding Officer, of his own accord, put out of action. It
all happened in a few confused moments. Then the remaining men did what
Boyce should have commanded as soon as the first shot was fired--they
rushed the house.

It contained one solitary inmate, an old man with a couple of Mauser
rifles, whom they had to shoot in self-defence.

Meanwhile Boyce, white and haggard-eyed, had picked himself up;
revolver in hand he stood on the stoep. His men came out, cursed him to
his face while giving him their contemptuous report brought the dead
bodies of their comrades into the house and laid them out decently,
together with the body of the white-bearded Boer. After that they
mounted their horses without a word to him and rode off. And he let
them ride; for his authority was gone; and he knew that they justly
laid the deaths of their comrades at the door of his cowardice.

What he did during the next few awful hours is known only to God and to
Boyce himself. The four dead men, his companions, have told no tales.
But at last, one of his men--Somers was his name--came riding back at
break-neck speed. When he had left the moon rode high in the heavens;
when he returned it was dawn--and he had a bloody tunic and the face of
a man who had escaped from hell. He threw himself from his horse and
found Boyce, sitting on the stoep with his head in his hands. He shook
him by the shoulder. Boyce started to his feet. At first he did not
recognise Somers. Then he did and read black tidings in the man's eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"They're all wiped out, sir. The whole blooming lot."

He told a tale of heroic disaster. The remnant of the section had
ridden off in hot indignation and had missed their way. They had gone
in a direction opposite to safety, and after a couple of hours had
fallen in with a straggling portion of a Boer Commando. Refusing to
surrender, they had all been killed save Somers, who, with a bullet
through his shoulder, had prudently turned bridle and fled hell for
leather.

Boyce put his hands up to his head and walked about the yard for a few
moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the scared
survivor--a tough, wizened little Cockney of five foot six.

"Well, what's going to happen now?" he asked, in his soft, dangerous
voice.

Somers replied, "I must leave that to you, sir."

Boyce regarded him glitteringly for a long time. A scheme of salvation
was taking vivid shape in his mind....

"My report of this occurrence will be that as soon as, say, three men
dropped here, the rest of the troop got into a panic and made a bolt of
it. Say the Sergeant and myself remained. We broke into the house and
did for the old Boer, who, however, unfortunately did for the Sergeant.
Then I alone went out in search of my men and following their track
found they had gone in a wrong direction, and eventually scented
danger, which was confirmed by my meeting you, with your bloody tunic
and your bloody tale."

"But good God! sir," cried the man, "You'd be having me shot for
running away. I could tell a damned different story, Captain Boyce."

"Who would believe you?"

The Cockney intelligence immediately appreciated the situation. It also
was ready for the alternative it guessed at the back of Boyce's mind.

"I know it's a mess, sir," he replied, with a straight look at Boyce.
"A mess for both of us, and, as I have said, I'll leave it to you, sir."

"Very well," said Boyce. "It's the simplest thing in the world. There
were four killed at once, including Sergeant Oldham. You remained
faithful when the others bolted. You and I tackled the old Boer and you
got wounded. You and I went on trek for the rest of the troop. We got
within breathing distance of the Commando--how many strong?"

"About a couple of hundred, sir."

"And of course we bolted back without knowing anything about the troop,
except that we are sure that, dead or alive, the Boers have accounted
for them. If you'll agree to this report, we can ride back to
Headquarters and I think I can promise you sergeant's stripes in a very
short time!"

"I agree to the report, sir," said Somers, "because I don't see that I
can do anything else. But to hell with the stripes under false
pretences and don't you try playing that sort of thing off on me."

"As you like," replied Boyce, unruffled. "Provided we understand each
other on the main point."

So they left the farm and rode to Headquarters and Boyce made his
report, and as all save one of his troop were dead, there were none,
save that one, to gainsay him. On his story no doubt was cast; but an
officer who loses his whole troop in the military operation of storming
a farm-house garrisoned by one old man does not find peculiar favour in
the eyes of his Colonel. Boyce took a speedy opportunity of
transference, and got into the thick of some fighting. Then he served
with distinction and actually got mentioned in dispatches for pluckily
rescuing a wounded man under fire.

For a long time Somers kept his mouth shut; but at last he began to
talk. The ugly rumour spread. It even reached my battery which was a
hundred miles away; for Johnny Dacre, one of my subs, had a brother in
Boyce's old regiment. For my own part I scouted the story as soon as I
heard it, and I withered up young Dacre for daring to bring such
abominable slander within my Rhadamanthine sphere. I dismissed the
calumny from my mind. Providentially, (as I heard later), the news came
of Boyce's "mention," and Somers was set down as a liar. The poor devil
was had up before the Colonel and being an imaginative and nervous man
denied the truth of the rumour and by dexterous wriggling managed to
exculpate himself from the charge of being its originator.

I must, parenthetically, crave indulgence for these apparently
irrelevant details. But as, in this chronicle, I am mainly concerned
with the career of Leonard Boyce, I have no option but to give them.
They are necessary for a conception of the character of a remarkable
man to whom I have every reason and every honourable desire to render
justice. It is necessary, too, that I should state clearly the manner
in which I happened to learn the facts of the affair at Vilboek's Farm,
for I should not like you to think that I have given a credulous ear to
idle slander.

It was in Cape Town, whither I had been despatched, on a false alarm of
enteric. I was walking with Johnny Dacre up Adderley Street, dun with
kahki, when he met his brother Reginald, who was promptly introduced to
Johnny's second in command. Reggie was off to hospital to see one of
his men who had been badly hurt.

"It's the chap," he said to his brother, "who was with Boyce through
that shady affair at Vilboek's Farm."

"I don't know why you call it a shady affair," said I, somewhat acidly.
"I know Captain Boyce--he is a near neighbour of mine at home--and he
has proved himself to be a gallant officer and a brave man."

The young fellow reddened. "I'm awfully sorry, sir. I withdraw the word
'shady.' But this poor chap has something on his mind, and everyone has
a down on him. He led a dog's life till he was knocked out, and he has
been leading a worse one since. I don't call it fair." He looked at me
squarely out of his young blue eyes--the lucky devil, he is commanding
his regiment now in Flanders, with the D.S.O. ribbon on his tunic.
"Will you come with me and see him, sir?"

"Certainly," said I, for I had nothing to do, and the boy's earnestness
impressed me.

On our way he told me of such mixture of rumour and fact as he was
acquainted with. It was then that I heard the man Somers's name for the
first time. We entered the hospital, sat by the side of the man's bed,
and he told us the story of Vilboek's Farm which I have, in bald terms,
just related. Shortly afterwards I returned to the front, where the
famous shell knocked me out of the Army forever.

What has happened to Somers I don't know. He was, I learned, soon
afterwards discharged from the Army. He either died or disappeared in
the full current of English life. Perhaps he is with our armies now. It
does not matter. What matters is my memory of his nervous, sallow,
Cockney face, its earnestness, its imprint of veracity, and the damning
lucidity of his narrative.

I exacted from my young friends a promise to keep the unsavoury tale to
themselves. No good would arise from a publicity which would stain the
honour of the army. Besides, Boyce had made good. They have kept their
promise like honest gentlemen. I have never, personally, heard further
reference to the affair, and of course I have never mentioned it to
anyone.

Now, it is right for me to mention that, for many years, I lived in a
horrible state of dubiety with regard to Boyce. There is no doubt that,
after the Vilboek business, he acted in an exemplary manner; there is
no doubt that he performed the gallant deed for which he got his
mention. But what about Somers's story? I tried to disbelieve it as
incredible. That an English officer--not a nervous wisp of a man like
Somers, but a great, hulking, bull-necked gladiator--should have been
paralysed with fear by one shot coming out of a Boer farm, and thereby
demoralised and incapacitated from taking command of a handful of men;
that, instead of blowing his brains out, he should have imposed his
Mephistophelian compact upon the unhappy Somers and carried off the
knavish business successfully--I could not believe it. On the other
hand, there was the British private. I have known him all my life, God
bless him! Thank God, it is my privilege to know him now, as he lies
knocked to bits, cheerily, in our hospital. It was inconceivable that
out of sheer funk he could abandon a popular officer. And his was not
even a scratch crowd, but a hard-bitten regiment with all sorts of
glorious names embroidered on its colours....

I hope you see my difficulty in regard to my Betty's love affairs. I
had nothing against Boyce, save this ghastly story, which might or
might not be true. Officially, he had made an unholy mess of such a
simple military operation as rounding up a Boer farm, and the prize of
one dead old Boer had covered him with ridicule; but officially, also,
he had retrieved his position by distinguished service. After all, it
was not his fault that his men had run away. On the other hand...well,
you cannot but appreciate the vicious circle of my thoughts, when
Betty, in her frank way, came and told me of her engagement to him.
What could I say? It would have been damnable of me to hint at scandal
of years gone by. I received them both and gave them my paralytic
blessing, and Leonard Boyce accepted it with the air of a man who might
have been blessed, without a qualm of conscience, by the Third Person
of the Trinity in Person.

This was in April, 1914. He had retired from the Army some years before
with the rank of Major, and lived with his mother--he was a man of
means--in Wellingsford. In the June of that year he went off salmon
fishing in Norway. On the outbreak of war he returned to England and
luckily got his job at once. He did not come back to Wellingsford. His
mother went to London and stayed there until he was ordered out to the
front. I had not seen him since that June. And, as far as I am aware,
my dear Betty had not seen him either.

Marigold entered.

"Well?" said I.

"I thought you rang, sir."

"You didn't," I said. "You thought I ought to have rung, But you were
mistaken."

I have on my mantelpiece a tiny, corroded, wooden Egyptian bust, of so
little value that Mr. Hatoun of Cairo (and every visitor to Cairo knows
Hatoun) gave it me as Baksheesh; it is, however, a genuine bit from a
poor humble devil's tomb of about five thousand years ago. And it has
only one positive eye and no expression.

Marigold was the living replica of it--with his absurd wig.

"In a quarter of an hour," said I, "I shall have rung."

"Very good, sir," said Marigold.

But he had disturbed the harmonical progression of my reflections. They
all went anyhow. When he returned, all I could say was:

"It's Miss Betty's wedding to-morrow. I suppose I've got a morning coat
and a top hat."

"You have a morning coat, sir," said Marigold. "But your last silk hat
you gave to Miss Althea, sir, to make a work-bag out of the outside."

"So I did," said I.

It was an unpleasant reminiscence. A hat is about as symbolical a
garment as you may be pleased to imagine. I wanted to wear at the live
Betty's wedding the ceremonious thing which I had given, for purposes
of vanity, to the dead Althea. I was cross with Marigold.

"Why did you let me do such a silly thing? You might have known that I
should want it some day or other. Why didn't you foresee such a
contingency?"

"Why," asked Marigold woodenly, "didn't you or I, sir, or many wiser
than us, foresee the war?"

"Because we were all damned fools," said I.

Marigold approached my chair with his great inexorable tentacles of
arms. It was bed time.

"I'm sorry about the hat, sir," said he.




CHAPTER V


In due course Captain Connor's regiment went off to France; not with
drums beating and colours flying--I wish to Heaven it had; if there had
been more pomp and circumstance in England, the popular imagination
would not have remained untouched for so long a time--but in the cold
silent hours of the night, like a gang of marauders. Betty did not go
to bed after he had left, but sat by the fire till morning. Then she
dressed in uniform and resumed her duties at the hospital. Many a
soldier's bride was doing much the same. And her days went on just as
they did before her marriage. She presented a smiling face to the
world; she said:

"If I'm as happy as can be expected in the circumstances, I think it my
duty to look happier."

It was a valiant philosophy.

The falling of a chimney-stack brought me up against Daniel Gedge, who
before the war did all my little repairs. The chimney I put into the
hands of Day & Higgins, another firm of builders.

A day or two afterwards Hosea shied at something and I discovered it
was Gedge, who had advanced into the roadway expressing a desire to
have a word with me. I quieted the patriotic Hosea and drew up by the
kerb. Gedge was a lean foxy-faced man with a long, reddish nose and a
long blunt chin from which a grizzled beard sprouted aggressively
forwards. He had hard, stupid grey eyes.

"I hope you 'll excuse the liberty I take in stopping you, sir," he
said, civilly.

"That's all right," said I. "What's the matter?"

"I thought I had given you satisfaction these last twenty years."

I assented. "Quite correct," said I.

"Then, may I ask, sir, without offence, why you've called in Day &
Higgins?"

"You may," said I, "and, with or without offence, I'll answer your
question. I've called them in because they're good loyal people.
Higgins has joined the army, and so has Day's eldest boy, while you
have been going on like a confounded pro-German."

"You've no right to say that, Major Meredyth."

"Not when you go over to Godbury"--the surging metropolis of the County
some fifteen miles off--"and tell a pack of fools to strike because
this is a capitalists' war? Not when you go round the mills here, and
do your best to stop young fellows from fighting for their country? God
bless my soul, in whose interests are you acting, if not Germany's?"

He put on his best platform manner. "I'm acting in the best interests
of the people of this country. The war is wrong and incredibly foolish
and can bring no advantage to the working man. Why should he go and be
killed or maimed for life? Will it put an extra penny in his pocket or
his widow's? No. Oh!"--he checked my retort--"I know everything you
would say. I see the arguments every day in all your great newspapers.
But the fact remains that I don't see eye to eye with you, or those you
represent. You think one way, I think another. We agree to differ."

"We don't," said I. "I don't agree at all."

"At any rate," he said, "I can't see how a difference of political
opinion can affect my ability now to put a new chimney-stack in your
house, any more than it has done in the past."

"In the past," said I, "political differences were parochial squabbles
in comparison with things nowadays. You're either for England, or
against her."

He smiled wryly. "I'm for England. We both are. You think her salvation
lies one way. I think another. This is a free country in which every
man has a right to his own opinion."

"Exactly so," said I. "Therefore you'll admit that I've a right to the
opinion that you ought to be locked up either in a gaol or a lunatic
asylum as a danger to the state, and that, having that rightful
opinion, I'm justified in not entrusting the safety of my house to one
who, in my aforesaid opinion, is either a criminal or a lunatic."

Dialectically, I had him there. It afforded me keen enjoyment. Besides
being a John Bull Englishman, I am a cripple and therefore ever so
little malicious.

"It's all very well for you to talk, Major Meredyth," said he, "but
your opinions cost you nothing--mine are costing me my livelihood. It
isn't fair."

"You might as well say," I replied, "that I, who have never dared to
steal anything in my life, live in ease and comfort, whereas poor Bill
Sykes, who has devoted all his days to burglary, has seven years' penal
servitude. No, Gedge," said I, gathering up the reins, "it can't be
done. You can't have it both ways."

He put a detaining hand on Hosea's bridle and an evil flash came into
his hard grey eyes.

"I'll have it some other way, then," he said. "A way you've no idea of.
A way that'll knock all you great people of Wellingsford off your high
horses. If you drive me to it, you'll see. I'll bide my time and I
don't care whether it breaks me."

He stamped his foot and tugged at the bridle. Two or three passers-by
halted wonderingly and Prettilove, the hairdresser, moved across the
pavement from his shop door where he had been taking the air.

"My good fellow," said I, "you have lost your temper and are talking
drivel. Kindly unhand my donkey."

Prettilove, who has a sycophantic sense of humour, burst into a loud
guffaw. Gedge swung angrily away, and Hosea and I continued our
interrupted progress down the High Street. Although I had called his
dark menaces drivel, I could not help wondering what it meant. Was he
going to guide a German Army to Wellingsford? Was he, a modern Guy
Fawkes, plotting to blow up the Town Hall while Mayor and Corporation
sat in council? He was not the man to utter purely idle threats. What
the dickens was he going to do? Something mean and dirty and underhand.
I knew his ways, He was always getting the better of somebody. The wise
never let him put in a pane of glass without a specification and
estimate, and if he had not been by far the most competent builder in
the town--perhaps the only one who thoroughly knew his business in all
its branches--no one would have employed him.

When I next saw Betty, it was in one of the corridors of the hospital,
after a committee meeting; she stopped by my chair to pass the time of
day. Through the open doorway of a ward I perceived a well-known figure
in nurse's uniform.

"Why," said I, "there's Phyllis Gedge."

Betty nodded. "She has just come in as a probationer."

"I thought her father wouldn't let her. I've heard--Heaven knows
whether it's true, but it sounds likely--that he said if men were such
fools as to get shot he didn't see why his daughter should help to mend
them."

"He has consented now," said Betty, "and Phyllis is delighted."

"No doubt it's a bid for popular favour," said I. And I told her of his
dwindling business and of my encounter with him. When I came to his
threat Betty's brows darkened.

"I don't like that at all," she said.

"Why? What do you think he means?"

"Mischief." She lowered her voice, for, it being visiting day at the
hospital, people were passing up and down the corridor. "Suppose he has
some of the people here in his power?"

"Blackmail--?" I glanced up at her sharply. "What do you know about it?"

"Nothing," she replied abruptly. Then she looked down and fingered her
wedding-ring. "I only said 'suppose.'"

A Sister appeared at the door of the ward and seeing us together paused
hoveringly.

"I rather think you're wanted," said I.

I left the hospital somewhat disturbed in mind. Summons to duty had cut
our conversation short; but I knew that no matter how long I had
cross-questioned Betty I should have got nothing further out of her.
She was a remarkably outspoken young woman. What she said she meant,
and what she didn't want to say all the cripples in the British Army
could not have dragged out of her.

I tried her again a few days later. A slight cold, aided and abetted by
a dear exaggerating idiot of a tyrannical doctor, confined me to the
house and she came flying in, expecting to find me in extremis. When
she saw me clothed and in my right mind and smoking a big cigar, she
called me a fraud.

"Look here," said I, after a while. "About Gedge--" again her brow
darkened and her lips set stiffly--"do you think he has his knife into
young Randall Holmes?"

I had worried about the boy. Naturally, if Gedge found the relations
between his daughter and Randall unsatisfactory, no one could blame him
for any outbreak of parental indignation. But he ought to break out
openly, while there was yet time--before any harm was done--not nurse
some diabolical scheme of subterraneous vengeance. Betty's brow
cleared, and she laughed. I saw at once that I was on a wrong track.

"Why should he have his knife into Randall? I suppose you've got
Phyllis in your mind."

"I have. How did you guess?"

She laughed again.

"What other reason could he have? But how did you come to hear of
Randall and Phyllis?"

"Never mind," said I, "I did. And if Gedge is angry, I can to some
extent sympathize with him."

"But he's not. Not the least little bit in the world," she declared,
lighting a cigarette. "Gedge and Randall are as thick as thieves, and
Phyllis won't have anything to do with either of them."

"Now, my dear," said I. "Now that you're married, become a real womanly
woman and fill my empty soul with gossip."

"There's no gossip at all about it," she replied serenely. "It's all
sordid and romantic fact. The two men hold long discussions together at
Gedge's house, Gedge talking anti-patriotism and Randall talking rot
which he calls philosophy. You can hear them, can't you? Their
meeting-ground is the absurdity of Randall joining the army."

"And Phyllis?"

"She is a loyal little soul and as miserable as can be. She's
deplorably in love with Randall. She has told me so. And because she's
in love with a man whom she knows to be a slacker she's eaten up with
shame. Now she won't speak to him. To avoid meeting him she lives
entirely at the hospital--a paying probationer."

"That must be since the last Committee Meeting," I said.

"Yes."

"And Daniel Gedge pays a guinea a week?"

"He doesn't," said Betty. "I do."

I accepted the information with a motion of the head. She went on after
a minute or so. "I have always been fond of the child"--there were only
three or four years difference between them!--"and so I want to protect
her. The time may come when she'll need protection. She has told me
things--not now--but long ago--which frightened her. She came to me for
advice. Since then I've kept an eye on her--as far as I could. Her
coming into the hospital helps me considerably."

"When you say 'things which frightened her,' do you mean in connection
with her father?"

Again the dark look in Betty's eyes.

"Yes," she said. "He's an evil, dangerous man."

That was all I could get out of her. If she had meant me to know the
character of Gedge's turpitude, she would have told me of her own
accord. But in our talk at the hospital she had hinted at
blackmail--and blackmailers are evil, dangerous men.

I went to see Sir Anthony about it. Beyond calling him a damned
scoundrel, a term which he applied to all pro-Germans, pacifists and
half the Cabinet, he did not concern himself about Gedge. Young Randall
Holmes's intimacy with the scoundrel seemed to him a matter of far
greater importance. He strode up and down his library, choleric and
gesticulating.

"A gentleman and a scholar to hob-nob with a traitorous beast like
that! I know that he writes for a filthy weekly paper. Somebody sent me
a copy a few days ago. It's rot--but not actually poisonous like that
he must hear from Gedge. That's the reason, I suppose, he's not in the
King's uniform. I've had my eye on him for some time. That's why I've
not asked him to the house."

I told Sir Anthony of my interview with the young man. He waxed wroth.
In a country with a backbone every Randall Holmes in the land would
have been chucked willy-nilly into the army. But the country had spinal
disorders. It had locomotor ataxy. The result of sloth and
self-indulgence. We had the Government we deserved ... I need not quote
further. You can imagine a fine old fox-hunting Tory gentleman, with
England filling all the spaces of his soul, blowing off the steam of
his indignation.

When he had ended, "What," said I, "is to be done?"

"I'll lay my horsewhip across the young beggar's shoulders the next
time I meet him."

"Capital," said I. "If I were you I should never ride abroad except in
my mayor's gown and chain, so that you can give an official character
to the thrashing."

He glanced swiftly at me in his bird-like fashion, his brow creased
into a thousand tiny horizontal lines--it always took him a fraction of
a second to get clear of the literal significance of words--and then he
laughed. Personal violence was out of the question. Why, the young
beggar might summon him for assault. No; he had a better idea. He would
put in a word at the proper quarter, so that every recruiting sergeant
in the district should have orders to stop him at every opportunity.

"I shouldn't do that," said I.

"Then, I don't know what the deuce I can do," said Sir Anthony.

As I didn't know, either, our colloquy was fruitless. Eventually Sir
Anthony said:

"Perhaps it's likely, after all, that Gedge may offend young Oxford's
fastidiousness. It can't be long before he discovers Gedge to be
nothing but a vulgar, blatant wind-bag; and then he may undergo some
reaction."

I agreed. It seemed to be the most sensible thing he had said. Give
Gedge enough rope and he would hang himself. So we parted.

I have said before that when I want to shew how independent I am of
everybody I drive abroad in my donkey carriage. But there are times
when I have to be dependent on Marigold for carrying me into the houses
I enter; on these helpless occasions I am driven about by Marigold in a
little two-seater car. That is how I visited Wellings Park and that is
how I set off a day or two later to call on Mrs. Boyce.

As she took little interest in anything foreign to her own inside, she
was not to most people an exhilarating companion. She even discussed
the war in terms of her digestion. But we were old friends. Being a bit
of a practical philosopher I could always derive some entertainment
from her serial romance of a Gastric Juice, and besides, she was the
only person in Wellingsford whom I did not shrink from boring with the
song of my own ailments. Rather than worry the Fenimores or Betty or
Mrs. Holmes with my aches and pains I would have hung on, like the
idiot boy of Sparta with the fox, until my vitals were gnawed
out--parenthetically, it has always worried me to conjecture why a boy
should steal a fox, why it should have been so valuable to the owner,
and to what use he put it. In the case of all my other friends I
regarded myself as too much of an obvious nuisance, as it was, for me
to work on their sympathy for infirmities that I could hide; but with
Mrs. Boyce it was different. The more I chanted antistrophe to her
strophe of lamentation the more was I welcome in her drawing-room. I
had not seen her for some weeks. Perhaps I had been feeling remarkably
well with nothing in the world to complain about, and therefore
unequipped with a topic of conversation. However, hearty or not, it was
time for me to pay her a visit. So I ordered the car.

Mrs. Boyce lived in a comfortable old house half a mile or so beyond
the other end of the town, standing in half a dozen well-wooded acres.
It was a fair April afternoon, all pale sunshine and tenderness. A
dream of fairy green and delicate pink and shy blue sky melting into
pearl. The air smelt sweet. It was good to be in it, among the trees
and the flowers and the birds.

Others must have also felt the calls of the spring, for as we were
driving up to the house, I caught a glimpse of the lawn and of two
figures strolling in affectionate attitude. One was that of Mrs. Boyce;
the other, khaki-clad and towering above her, had his arm round her
waist. The car pulled up at the front door. Before we had time to ring,
a trim parlour-maid appeared.

"Mrs. Boyce is not at home, sir."

Marigold, who, when my convenience was in question, swept away social
conventions like cobwebs, fixed her with his one eye, and before I
could interfere, said:

"I'm afraid you're mistaken. I've just seen Major Boyce and Madam on
the lawn."

The maid reddened and looked at me appealingly.

"My orders were to say not at home, sir."

"I quite understand, Mary," said I. "Major Boyce is home on short
leave, and they don't want to be disturbed. Isn't that it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Marigold," said I. "Right about turn."

Marigold, who had stopped the car, got out unwillingly and went to the
starting-handle. That I should be refused admittance to a house which I
had deigned to honour with my presence he regarded as an intolerable
insult. He also loved to have tea, as a pampered guest, in other folks'
houses. When he got home Mrs. Marigold, as like as not, would give him
plain slabs of bread buttered by her economical self. I knew my
Marigold. He gave a vicious and ineffectual turn or two and then stuck
his head in the bonnet.

The situation was saved by the appearance from the garden of Mrs. Boyce
herself, a handsome, erect, elegantly dressed old lady in the late
sixties, pink and white like a Dresden figure and in her usual
condition of resplendent health. She held out her hand.

"I couldn't let you go without telling you that Leonard is back. I
don't want the whole town to know. If it did, I should see nothing of
him, his leave is so short. That's why I told Mary to say 'not at
home.' But an old friend like you--Would you like to see him?"

Marigold closed the bonnet and stood up with a grimace which passed for
a happy smile.

"I should, of course," said I, politely. "But I quite understand. You
have everything to say to each other. No. I won't stay"--Marigold's
smile faded into woodenness--"I only turned in idly to see how you were
getting on. But just tell me. How is Leonard? Fit, I hope?"

"He's wonderful," she said.

I motioned Marigold to start the car.

"Give him my kind regards," said I. "No, indeed. He doesn't want to see
an old crock like me." The engine rattled. "I hope he's pleased at
finding his mother looking so bonny."

"It's only excitement at having Leonard," she explained earnestly. "In
reality I'm far from well. But I wouldn't tell him for worlds."

"What's that you wouldn't tell, mother?" cried a soft, cheery voice,
and Leonard, the fine flower of English soldiery, turned the corner of
the house.

There he stood, tall, deep-chested, clear-eyed, bronzed, his heavy chin
in the air, his bull-neck not detracting from his physical
handsomeness, but giving it a seal of enormous strength.

"My dear fellow," he cried, grasping my hand heartily, "how glad I am
to see you. Come along in and let mother give you some tea. Nonsense!"
he waved away my protest. "Marigold, stop that engine and bring in the
Major. I've got lots of things to tell you. That's right."

He strode boyishly to the front door, which he threw open wide to admit
Marigold and myself and followed us with Mrs. Boyce into the
drawing-room, talking all the while. I must confess that I was just a
little puzzled by his exuberant welcome. And, to judge by the blank
expression that flitted momentarily over her face, so was his mother.
If he were so delighted by my visit, why had he not crossed the lawn at
once as soon as he saw the car? Why had he sent his mother on ahead? I
was haunted by an exchange of words overheard in imagination:

"Confound the fellow! What has he come here for?"

"Mary will say 'not at home.'"

"But he has spotted us. Do go and get rid of him."

"Such an old friend, dear."

"We haven't time for old fossils. Tell him to go and bury himself."

And (in my sensitive fancy) she had delivered the import of the
message. I had gathered that my visit was ill-timed. I was preparing to
cut it short, when Leonard himself came up and whisked me against my
will to the tea-table. If my hypothesis were correct he had evidently
changed his mind as to the desirability of getting rid, in so summary a
fashion, of what he may have considered to be an impertinent and
malicious little factor in Wellingsford gossip.

At any rate, if he was playing a part, he played it very well. It was
not in the power of man to be more cordial and gracious. He gave me a
vivid account of the campaign. He had been through everything, the
retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Aisne, the great rush north, and
the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on the 17th of March. I listened,
fascinated, to his tale, which he told with a true soldier's impersonal
modesty.

"I was glad," said I, after a while, "to see you twice mentioned in
dispatches."

Mrs. Boyce turned on me triumphantly. "He is going to get his D. S. O."

"By Jove!" said I.

Leonard laughed, threw one gaitered leg over the other and held up his
hands at her.

"Oh, you feminine person!" He smiled at me. "I told my dear old mother
as a dead and solemn secret."

"But it will be gazetted in a few days, dear."

"One can never be absolutely sure of these things until they're in
black and white. A pretty ass I'd look if there was a hitch--say
through some fool of a copying clerk--and I didn't get it after all.
It's only dear, silly understanding things like mothers that would
understand. Other people wouldn't. Don't you think I'm right, Meredyth?"

Of course he was. I have known, in my time, of many disappointments. It
is not every recommendation for honours that becomes effective. I
congratulated him, however, and swore to secrecy.

"It's all luck," said he. "Just because a man happens to be spotted. If
my regiment got its deserts, every Jack man would walk about in a suit
of armour made of Victoria Crosses. Give me some more tea, mother."

"The thing I shall never understand, dear," she said, artlessly,
looking up at him, while she handed him his cup, "is when you see a lot
of murderous Germans rushing at you with guns and shells and bayonets,
how you are not afraid."

He threw back his head and laughed in his debonair fashion; but I
watched him narrowly and I saw the corners of his mouth twitch for the
infinitesimal fraction of a second.

"Oh, sometimes we're in an awful funk, I assure you," he replied gaily.
"Ask Meredyth."

"We may be," said I, "but we daren't shew it--I'm speaking of officers.
If an officer funks he's generally responsible for the death of
goodness knows how many men. And if the men funk they're liable to be
shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy."

"And what happens to officers who are afraid?"

"If it's known, they get broke," said I.

Boyce swallowed his tea at a gulp, set down the cup, and strode to the
window. There was a short pause. Presently he turned.

"Physical fear is a very curious thing," he said in a voice
unnecessarily loud. "I've seen it take hold of men of proved courage
and paralyse them. It's just like an epileptic fit--beyond a man's
control. I've known a fellow--the most reckless, hare-brained daredevil
you can imagine--to stand petrified with fear on the bank of a river,
and let a wounded comrade drown before his eyes. And he was a good
swimmer too."

"What happened to him?" I asked.

He met my gaze for a moment, looked away, and then met it again--it
seemed defiantly.

"What happened to him? Well--" there was the tiniest possible pause--a
pause that only an uneasy, suspicious repository of the abominable
story of Vilboek's Farm could have noticed--"Well, as he stood there he
got plugged--and that was the end of him. But what I--"

"Was he an officer, dear?"

"No, no, mother, a sergeant," he answered abruptly, and in the same
breath continued. "What I was going to say is this. No one as far as I
know has ever bothered to work out the psychology of fear. Especially
the sudden thing that hits a man's heart and makes him stand
stock-still like a living corpse--unable to move a muscle--all his
willpower out of gear--just as a motor is out of gear. I've seen a lot
of it. Those men oughtn't to be called cowards. It's as much a fit,
say, as epilepsy. Allowances ought to made for them."

It was a warm day, the windows were closed, my valetudinarian hostess
having a horror of draughts, and a cheery fire was blazing up the
chimney. Boyce took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

"Dear old mother," said he, "you keep this room like an oven."

"It is you who have got so excited talking, dear," said Mrs. Boyce.
"I'm sure it can't be good for your heart. It is just the same with me.
I remember I had to speak quite severely to Mary a week--no, to-day's
Tuesday--ten days ago, and I had dreadful palpitations afterwards and
broke out into a profuse perspiration and had to send for Doctor Miles."

"Now, that's funny," said I. "When I'm excited about anything I grow
quite cold."

Boyce lit a cigarette and laughed. "I don't see where the excitement in
the present case comes in. Mother started an interesting hare, and I
followed it up. Anyhow--" he threw himself on the sofa, blew a kiss to
his mother in the most charming way in the world, and smiled on
me--"anyhow, to see you two in this dearest bit of dear old England is
like a dream. And I'm not going to think of the waking up. I want all
the cushions and the lavender and the neat maid's caps and aprons--I
said to Mary this morning when she drew my curtains: 'Stay just there
and let me look at you so that I can realise I'm at home and not in my
little grey trench in West Flanders'--she got red and no doubt thought
me a lunatic and felt inclined to squawk--but she stayed and looked
jolly pretty and refreshing--only for a minute or two, after which I
dismissed her--yes, my dears, I want everything that the old life
means, the white table linen, the spring flowers, the scent of the air
which has never known the taint of death, and all that this beautiful
mother of England, with her knitting needles, stands for. I want to
have a debauch of sweet and beautiful things."

"As far as I can give them you shall have them. My dear--" she dropped
her knitting in her lap and looked over at him tragically--"I quite
forgot to ask. Did Mary put bath-salts, as I ordered, into your bath
this morning?"

Leonard threw away his cigarette and slapped his leg.

"By George!" he cried. "That explains it. I was wondering where the
Dickens that smell of ammonia came from."

"If you use it every day it makes your skin so nice and soft," remarked
Mrs. Boyce.

He laughed, and made the obvious jest on the use of bath-salts in the
trenches.

"I wonder, mother, whether you have any idea of what trenches and
dug-outs look like."

He told her, very picturesquely, and went on to a general sketch of
life at the front. He entertained me with interesting talk for the rest
of my visit. I have already said that he was a man of great personal
charm.

He accompanied me to the car and saw me comfortably tucked in.

"You won't give me away, will you?" he said, shaking hands.

"How?" I asked.

"By telling any one I'm here."

I promised and drove off. Marigold, full of the tea that is given to a
guest, strove cheerfully to engage me in conversation. I hate to snub
Marigold, excellent and devoted fellow, so I let him talk; but my mind
was occupied with worrying problems.




CHAPTER VI


Leonard Boyce had received me on sufferance. I had come upon him while
he was imprudently exposing himself to view. There had been no way out
of it. But he made it clear that he desired no other Wellingsfordian to
invade his privacy. Secretly he had come to see his mother and secretly
he intended to go. I remembered that before he went to the front he had
not come home, but his mother had met him in London. He had asked me
for no local news. He had inquired after the welfare of none of his old
friends. Never an allusion to poor Oswald Fenimore's gallant death--he
used to run in and out of Wellings Park as if it were his own house.
What had he against the place which for so many years had been his home?

With regard to Betty Fairfax, he had loved and ridden away, it is true,
leaving her disconsolate. But though everyone knew of the engagement,
no one had suspected the defection. Betty was a young woman who could
keep her own counsel and baffle any curiosity-monger or purveyor of
gossip in the country. So when she married Captain Connor, a little
gasp went round the neighbourhood, which for the first time remembered
Leonard Boyce. There were some who blamed her for callous treatment of
Boyce, away and forgotten at the front. The majority, however, took the
matter calmly, as we have had to take far more amazing social
convulsions. The fact remained that Betty was married, and there was no
reason whatever, on the score of the old engagement, for Boyce to
manifest such exaggerated shyness with regard to Wellingsford society.

If it had been any other man than Boyce, I should not have worried
about the matter at all. Save that I was deeply attached to Betty, what
had her discarded lover's attitude to do with me? But Boyce was Boyce,
the man of the damnable story of Vilboek's Farm. And he, of his own
accord, had revived in my mind that story in all its intensity. A
chance foolish question, such as thousands of gentle, sheltered women
have put to their suddenly uncomprehended, suddenly deified sons and
husbands, had obviously disturbed his nervous equilibrium. That little
reflex twitch at the corner of his lips--I have seen it often in the
old times. I should like to have had him stripped to the waist so that
I could have seen his heart--the infallible test. At moments of mighty
moral strain men can keep steady eyes and nostrils and mouth and
speech; but they cannot control that tell-tale diaphragm of flesh over
the heart. I have known it to cause the death of many a Kaffir spy....
But, at any rate, there was the twitch of the lips ... I deliberately
threw weight into the scale of Mrs. Boyce's foolish question. If he had
not lost his balance, why should he have launched into an almost
passionate defence of the physical coward?

My memory went back to the narrative of the poor devil in the Cape Town
hospital. Boyce's description of the general phenomenon was a deadly
corroboration of Somers's account of the individual case. They had used
the same word--"paralysed." Boyce had made a fierce and definite
apologia for the very act of which Somers had accused him. He put it
down to the sudden epilepsy of fear for which a man was irresponsible.
Somers's story had never seemed so convincing--the first part of it, at
least--the part relating to the paralysis of terror. But the second
part--the account of the diabolical ingenuity by means of which Boyce
rehabilitated himself--instead of blowing his brains out like a
gentleman--still hammered at the gates of my credulity.

Well--granted the whole thing was true--why revive it after fifteen
years' dead silence, and all of a sudden, just on account of an idle
question? Even in South Africa, his "mention" had proved his courage.
Now, with the D. S. O. a mere matter of gazetting, it was established
beyond dispute.

On the other hand, if the Vilboek story, more especially the second
part, was true, what reparation could he make in the eyes of honourable
men?--in his own eyes, if he himself had succeeded to the status of an
honourable man? Would not any decent soldier smite him across the face
instead of grasping him by the hand? I was profoundly worried.

Moreover Betty, level-headed Betty, had called him a devil. Why?

If the second part of Somers's story were true, he had acted like a
devil. There is no other word for it. Now, what concrete diabolical
facts did Betty know? Or had her instinctive feminine insight pierced
through the man's outer charm and merely perceived horns, tail, and
cloven hoof cast like a shadow over his soul?

How was I to know?

She came to dine with me the next evening: a dear way she had of coming
uninvited, and God knows how a lonely cripple valued it. She was in
uniform, being too busy to change, and looked remarkably pretty. She
brought with her a cheery letter from her husband, received that
morning, and read me such bits as the profane might hear, her eyes
brightening as she glanced over the sections that she skipped. Beyond
doubt her marriage had brought her pleasure and pride. The pride she
would have felt to some extent, I think, if she had married a grampus;
for when a woman has a husband at the front she feels that she is
taking her part in the campaign and exposing herself vicariously to
hardship and shrapnel; and in the eyes of the world she gains thereby a
little in stature, a thing dear to every right-minded woman. But
Betty's husband was not a grampus, but a very fine fellow, a mate to be
wholly proud of: and he loved her devotedly and expressed his love
beautifully loverwise, as her tell-tale face informed me. Gratefully
and sturdily she had set herself out to be happy. She was
succeeding.... Lord bless you! Millions of women who have married, not
the wretch they loved, but the other man, have lived happy ever after.
No: I had no fear for Betty now. I could not see that she had any fear
for herself.

After dinner she sat on the floor by my side and smoked cigarettes in
great content. She had done a hard day's work at the hospital; her
husband had done a hard day's work--probably was still doing it--in
Flanders. Both deserved well of their country and their consciences.
She was giving a poor lonely paralytic, who had given his legs years
ago to the aforesaid country, a delightful evening. ... No, I'm quite
sure such a patronising thought never entered my Betty's head. After
all, my upper half is sound, and I can talk sense or nonsense with
anybody. What have one's legs to do with a pleasant after-dinner
conversation? Years ago I swore a great oath that I would see them
damned before they got in the way of my intelligence.

We were getting on famously. We had put both war and Wellingsford
behind us, and talked of books. I found to my dismay that this fair and
fearless high product of modernity had far less acquaintance with
Matthew Arnold than with the Evangelist of the same praenomen. She had
never heard of "The Forsaken Merman," one of the most haunting romantic
poems in the English language. I pointed to a bookcase and bade her
fetch the volume. She brought it and settled down again by my chair,
and, as a punishment of ignorance, and for the good of her soul, I
began to read aloud. She is an impressionable young person and yet one
of remarkable candour. If she had not been held by the sea-music of the
poem, she would not have kept her deep, steady brown eyes fixed on me.
I have no hesitation in repeating that we were getting on famously and
enjoying ourselves immensely. I got nearly to the end:

"... Here came a mortal, But faithless was she, And alone dwell forever
The Kings of the sea. But, children at midnight--"

The door opened wide. Topping his long stiff body, Marigold's ugly
one-eyed head appeared, and, as if he was tremendously proud of
himself, he announced:

"Major Boyce."

Boyce strode quickly past him and, suddenly aware of Betty by my side,
stopped short, like a private suddenly summoned to attention. Marigold,
unconscious of the blackest curses that had ever fallen upon him during
his long and blundering life, made a perfect and self-satisfied exit.
Betty sprang to her feet, held her tall figure very erect, and faced
the untimely visitor, her cheeks flushing deep red. For an appreciable
time, say, thirty seconds, Boyce stood stock still, looking at her from
under heavy contracted brows. Then he recovered himself, smiled, and
advanced to her with outstretched hand, But, on his movement, she had
been quick to turn and bend down in order to pick up the book that had
fallen from my fingers on the further side of my chair. So, swiftly he
wheeled to me with his handshake. It was very deft manoeuvring on both
sides.

"The faithful Marigold didn't tell me that you weren't alone,
Meredyth," he said in his cordial, charming way. "Otherwise I shouldn't
have intruded. But my dear old mother had an attack of something and
went to bed immediately after dinner, and I thought I'd come round and
have a smoke and a drink in your company."

Betty, who had occupied herself by replacing Matthew Arnold's poems in
the bookcase, caught up the box of cigars that lay on the brass tray
table by my side, and offered it to him.

"Here is the smoke," she said.

And when, after a swift, covert glance at her, he had selected a cigar,
she went to the bell-push by the mantelpiece.

"The drinks will be here in a minute."

In order to do something to save this absurd situation, I drew from my
waistcoat pocket a little cigar-cutter attached to my watch-chain, and
clipped the end of his cigar. I also lit a match from my box and handed
it up to him. When he had finished with the match he threw it into the
fireplace and turned to Betty.

"My congratulations are a bit late, but I hope I may offer them."

She said, "Thank you." Waved a hand. "Won't you sit down?"

"Wasn't it rather sudden?" he asked.

"Everything in war time is sudden--except the action of the British
Government. Your own appearance to-night is sudden."

He laughed at her jest and explained, much as he had done to me, his
reasons for wishing to keep his visit to Wellingsford a secret.
Meanwhile Marigold had brought in decanters and syphons. Betty attended
to Boyce's needs with a provoking air of nonchalance. If a notorious
German imbrued in the blood of babes had chanced to be in her hospital,
she would have given him his medicine with just the same air. Although
no one could have specified a lack of courtesy towards a guest--for in
my house she played hostess--there was an indefinable touch of cold
contumely in her attitude. Whether he felt the hostility as acutely as
I did, I cannot say; but he carried it off with a swaggering grace. He
bowed to her over his glass.

"Here's to the fortunate and gallant fellow over there."

I saw her knuckles whiten as, with an inclination of the head, she
acknowledged the toast.

"By the way," said he, "what's his regiment? My good mother told me his
name. Captain Connor, isn't it? But for the rest she is vague. She's
the vaguest old dear in the world. I found out to-day that she thought
there was a long row of cannons, hundreds of them, all in a line, in
front of the English Army, and a long row in front of the German Army,
and, when there was a battle, that they all blazed away. So when I
asked her whether your husband was in the Life Guards or the Army
Service Corps, she said cheerfully that it was either one or the other
but she wasn't quite sure. So do give me some reliable information."

"My husband is in the 10th Wessex Fusiliers, a Territorial battalion,"
she replied coldly.

"I hope some day to have the pleasure of making his acquaintance."

"Stranger things have happened," said Betty. She glanced at the clock
and rose abruptly. "It's time I was getting back to the hospital."

Boyce rose too. "How are you going?" he asked.

"I'm walking."

He advanced a step towards her. "Won't you let me run you round in the
car?"

"I prefer to walk."

Her tone was final. She took affectionate leave of me and went to the
door, which Boyce held open.

"Good-night," she said, without proffering her hand.

He followed her out into the hall.

"Betty," he said in a low voice, "won't you ever forgive me?"

"I have no feelings towards you either of forgiveness or resentment,"
she replied.

They did not mean to be overheard, but my hearing is unusually acute,
and I could not help catching their conversation.

"I know I seem to have behaved badly to you."

"You have behaved worse to others," said Betty. "I don't wonder at your
shrinking from showing your face here." Then, louder, for my benefit.
"Good-night, Major Boyce. I really can walk up to the hospital by
myself."

Evidently she walked away and Boyce after her, for I heard him say:

"You shan't go till you've told me what you mean."

What she replied I don't know. To judge by the slam of the front door
it must have been something defiant. Presently he entered debonair,
with a smile on his lips.

"I'm afraid I've left you in a draught," he said, shutting the door. "I
couldn't resist having a word with her and wishing her happiness and
the rest of it. We were engaged once upon a time."

"I know," said I.

"I hope you don't think I did wrong in releasing her from the
engagement. I don't consider a man has a right to go on active
service--especially on such service as the present war--and keep a girl
bound at home. Still less has he a right to marry her. What happens in
so many cases? A fortnight's married life. The man goes to the front.
Then ping! or whizz-bang! and that's the end of him, and so the girl is
left."

"On the other hand," said I, "you must remember that the girl may hold
very strong opinions and take pings and whizz-bangs very deliberately
into account."

Boyce helped himself to another whisky and soda. "It's a matter for the
individual conscience. I decided one way. Connor obviously decided
another, and, like a lucky fellow, found Betty of his way of thinking.
Perhaps I have old-fashioned notions." He took a long pull at his
drink. "Well, it can't be helped," he said with a smile. "The other
fellow has won, and I must take it gracefully. ... By George! wasn't
she looking stunning to-night--in that kit? ... I hope you didn't mind
my bursting in on you--"

"Of course not," said I, politely.

He drained his glass. "The fact is," said he, "this war is a
nerve-racking business. I never dreamed I was so jumpy until I came
home. I hate being by myself. I've kept my poor devoted mother up till
one o'clock in the morning. To-night she struck, small blame to her;
but, after five minutes on my lones, I felt as if I should go off my
head. So I routed out the car and came along. But of course I didn't
expect to see Betty. The sight of Betty in the flesh as a married woman
nearly bowled me over. May I help myself again?" He poured out a very
much stiffer drink than before, and poured half of it down his throat.
"It's not a joyous thing to see the woman one has been crazy over the
wife of another fellow."

"I suppose it isn't," said I.

Of course I might have made some subtle and cunning remark, suavely put
a leading question which would have led him on, in his unbalanced mood,
to confidential revelations. But the man was a distinguished soldier
and my guest. To what he chose to tell me voluntarily I could listen. I
could do no more. He did not reply to my last unimportant remark, but
lay back in his armchair watching the blue spirals of smoke from the
end of his cigar. There was a fairly long silence.

I was worried by the talk I had overheard through the open door. "You
have behaved worse to others. I don't wonder at your shrinking from
showing your face here." Betty had, weeks ago, called him a devil. She
had treated him to-night in a manner which, if not justified, was
abominable. I was forced to the conclusion that Betty was fully aware
of some discreditable chapter in the man's life which had nothing to do
with the affair at Vilboek's Farm, which, indeed, had to do with
another woman and this humdrum little town of Wellingsford. Otherwise
why did she taunt him with hiding from the light of Wellingsfordian day?

Now, please don't think me little-minded. Or, if you do think so,
please remember the conditions under which I have lived for so many
years and grant me your kind indulgence for a confession I have to
make. Besides being worried, I felt annoyed. Wellingsford was my little
world. I knew everybody in it. I had grown to regard myself as the
repository of all its gossip. The fraction of it that I retailed was a
matter of calculated discretion. I made a little hobby--it was a
foible, a vanity, what you will--of my omniscience. I knew months ahead
the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of
pain and plenitude. I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who
were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of
wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court. When young
Trexham, the son of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, married a minor
light of musical comedy at a registrar's office, I was the first person
in the place to be told; and I flatter myself that I was instrumental
in inducing a pig-headed old idiot to receive an exceedingly charming
daughter-in-law. I loved to look upon Wellingsford as an open book. Can
you blame me for my resentment at coming across, so to speak, a couple
of pages glued together? The only logical inference from Betty's remark
was that Boyce had behaved abominably and even notoriously to a woman
in Wellingsford. To do him justice, I declare I had never heard his
name associated with any woman or girl in the place save Betty herself.
I felt that, in some crooked fashion, or the other, I had been done out
of my rights.

And there, placidly smoking his cigar and watching the wreaths of blue
smoke with the air of an idle seraph contemplating a wisp of cirrus in
Heaven's firmament, sat the man who could have given me the word of the
enigma.

He broke the silence by saying:

"Have you ever seriously considered the real problems of the Balkans?"

Now what on earth had the Balkans to do with the thoughts that must
have been rolling at the back of the man's mind? I was both
disappointed and relieved. I expected him to resume the personal talk,
and I dreaded lest he should entrust me with embarrassing confidences.
After three strong whiskies and sodas a man is apt to relax hold of his
discretion.... Anyhow, he jerked me back to my position of host. I made
some sort of polite reply. He smiled.

"You, my dear Meredyth, like the rest of the country, are half asleep.
In a few months' time you'll get the awakening of your life."

He began to discourse on the diplomatic situation. Months afterwards I
remembered what he had said that night and how accurate had been his
forecast. He talked brilliantly for over an hour, during which, keenly
interested in his arguments, I lost the puzzle of the man in admiration
of the fine soldier and clear and daring thinker. It was only when he
had gone that I began to worry again.

And before I went to sleep I had fresh cause for anxious speculation.

"Marigold," said I, when he came in as usual to carry me to bed,
"didn't I tell you that Major Boyce particularly wanted no one to know
that he was in the town?"

"Yes, sir," said Marigold. "I've told nobody."

"And yet you showed him in without informing him that Mrs. Connor was
here. Really you ought to have had more tact."

Marigold received his reprimand with the stolidity of the old soldier.
I have known men who have been informed that they would be
court-martialled and most certainly shot, make the same reply.

"Very good, sir," said he.

I softened. I was not Marigold's commanding officer, but his very
grateful friend. "You see," said I, "they were engaged before Mrs.
Connor married--I needn't tell you that; it was common knowledge--and
so their sudden meeting was awkward."

"Mrs. Marigold has already explained, sir," said he.

I chuckled inwardly all the way to my bedroom.

"All the same, sir," said he, aiding me in my toilet, which he did with
stiff military precision, "I don't think the Major is as incognighto"
(the spelling is phonetic) "as he would like. Prettilove was shaving me
this morning and told me the Major was here. As I considered it my
duty, I told him he was a liar, and he was so upset that he nicked my
Adam's apple and I was that covered with blood that I accused him of
trying to cut my throat, and I went out and finished shaving myself at
home, which is unsatisfactory when you only have a thumb on your right
hand to work the razor."

I laughed, picturing the scene. Prettilove is an inoffensive little
rabbit of a man. Marigold might sit for the model of a war-scarred
mercenary of the middle ages, and when he called a man a liar he did it
with accentuaton and vehemence. No wonder Prettilove jumped.

"And then again this evening, sir," continued Marigold, slipping me
into my pyjama jacket, "as I was starting the Major's car, who should
be waiting there for him but Mr. Gedge."

"Gedge?" I cried.

"Yes, sir. Waiting by the side of the car. 'Can I have a word with you,
Major Boyce?' says he. 'No, you can't,' says the Major. 'I think it's
advisable,' says he. 'Those repairs are very pressing.' 'All right,'
says the Major, 'jump in.' Then he says: 'That'll do, Marigold.
Good-night.' And he drives off with Mr. Gedge. Well, if Mr. Gedge and
Prettilove know he's here, then everyone knows it."

"Was Gedge inside the drive?" I asked. The drive was a small
semicircular sort of affair, between gate and gate.

"He was standing by the car waiting," said Marigold. "Now, sir." He
lifted me with his usual cast-iron tenderness into bed and pulled the
coverings over me. "It's a funny time to talk about house repairs at
eleven o'clock, at night," he remarked.

"Nothing is funny in war-time," said I.

"Either nothing or everything," said Marigold. He fussed methodically
about the room, picked up an armful of clothes, and paused by the door,
his hand on the switch.

"Anything more, sir?"

"Nothing, thank you, Marigold."

"Good-night, sir."

The room was in darkness. Marigold shut the door. I was alone.

What the deuce was the meaning of this waylaying of Boyce by Daniel
Gedge?




CHAPTER VII


"Major Boyce has gone, sir," said Marigold, the next morning, as I was
tapping my breakfast egg.

"Gone?" I echoed. Boyce had made no reference the night before to so
speedy a departure.

"By the 8.30 train, sir."

Every train known by a scheduled time at Wellingsford goes to London.
There may be other trains proceeding from the station in the opposite
direction but nobody heeds them. Boyce had taken train to London. I
asked my omniscient sergeant:

"How did you find that out?"

It appeared it was the driver of the Railway Delivery Van. I smiled at
Boyce's ostrich-like faith in the invisibility of his hinder bulk. What
could occur in Wellingsford without it being known at once to vanmen
and postmen and barbers and servants and masters and mistresses? How
could a man hope to conceal his goings and comings and secret actions?
He might just as well expect to take a secluded noontide bath in the
fountain in Piccadilly Circus.

"Perhaps that's why the matter of those repairs was so pressing, sir,"
said Marigold.

"No doubt of it," said I.

Marigold hung about, his finger-tips pushing towards me mustard and
apples and tulips and everything that one does not eat with egg. But it
was no use. I had no desire to pursue the conversation. I continued my
breakfast stolidly and read the newspaper propped up against the
coffee-pot. So many circumstances connected with Boyce's visit were of
a nature that precluded confidential discussion with Marigold,--that
precluded, indeed, confidential discussion with anyone else. The
suddenness of his departure I learned that afternoon from Mrs. Boyce,
who sent me by hand a miserable letter characteristically rambling.
From it I gathered certain facts. Leonard had come into her bedroom at
seven o'clock, awakening her from the first half-hour's sleep she had
enjoyed all night, with the news that he had been unexpectedly summoned
back. When she came to think of it, she couldn't imagine how he got the
news, for the post did not arrive till eight o'clock, and Mary said no
telegram had been delivered and there had been no call on the
telephone. But she supposed the War Office had secret ways of
communicating with officers which it would not be well to make known.
The whole of this war, with its killing off of the sons of the best
families in the land, and the sleeping in the mud with one's boots on,
to say nothing of not being able to change for dinner, and the way in
which they knew when to shoot and when not to shoot, was all so
mysterious that she had long ago given up hope of understanding any of
its details. All she could do was to pray God that her dear boy should
be spared. At any rate, she knew the duty of an English mother when the
country was in danger; so she had sent him away with a brave face and
her blessing, as she had done before. But, although English mothers
could show themselves Spartans--(she spelt it "Spartians," dear lady,
but no matter)--yet they were women and had to sit at home and weep. In
the meanwhile, her palpitations had come on dreadfully bad, and so had
her neuritis, and she had suffered dreadfully after eating some fish at
dinner which she was sure Pennideath, the fishmonger--she always felt
that man was an anarchist in disguise--had bought out of the condemned
stock at Billingsgate, and none of the doctor's medicines were of the
slightest good to her, and she was heartbroken at having to part so
suddenly from Leonard, and would I spare half an hour to comfort an old
woman who had sent her only son to die for his country and was ready,
when it pleased God, if not sooner, to die in the same sacred cause?

So of course I went. The old lady, propped on pillows in an overheated
room, gave me tea and poured into my ear all the anguish of her simple
heart. In an abstracted, anxious way, she ate a couple of crumpets and
a wedge of cake with almond icing, and was comforted.

We continued our discussion of the war--or rather Leonard, for with her
Leonard seemed to be the war. She made some remark deliciously inept--I
wish I could remember it. I made a sly rejoinder. She sat bolt upright
and a flush came into her Dresden-china cheek and her old eyes flashed.

"You may think I'm a silly old woman, Duncan. I dare say I am. I can't
take in things as I used to do when I was young. But if Leonard should
be killed in the war--I think of it night and day--what I should like
to do would be to drive to the Market Square of Wellingsford and wave a
Union Jack round and round and fall down dead."

I made some sort of sympathetic gesture.

"And I certainly should," she added.

"My dear friend," said I, "if I could move from this confounded chair,
I would kiss your brave hands."

And how many brave hands of English mothers, white and delicate, coarse
and toil-worn, do not demand the wondering, heart-full homage of us all?

And hundreds of thousands of them don't know why we are fighting.
Hundreds of thousands of them have never read a newspaper in their
lives. I doubt whether they would understand one if they tried, I doubt
whether all could read one in the literal sense of the word. We have
had--we have still--the most expensive and rottenest system of primary
education in the world, the worst that squabbling sectarians can
devise. Arab children squatting round the courtyard of a Mosque and
swaying backwards and forwards as they get by heart meaningless bits of
the Koran, are not sent out into life more inadequately armed with
elementary educational weapons than are English children. Our state of
education has nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet
now in our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early
twenties who can neither read nor write. I have talked with them. I
have read to them. I have written letters for them. Clean-cut, decent,
brave, honourable Englishmen--not gutter-bred Hooligans dragged from
the abyss by the recruiting sergeant, but men who have thrown up good
employment because something noble inside them responded to the Great
Call. And to the eternal disgrace of governments in this disastrously
politician-ridden land such men have not been taught to read and write.
It is of no use anyone saying to me that it is not so. I know of my own
certain intimate knowledge that it is so.

Even among those who technically have "the Three R's," I have met
scores of men in our Wellingsford Hospital who, bedridden for months,
would give all they possess to be able to enjoy a novel--say a volume
of W. W. Jacobs, the writer who above all others has conferred the
precious boon of laughter on our wounded--but to whom the intellectual
strain of following the significance of consecutive words is far too
great. Thousands and thousands of men have lain in our hospitals
deprived, by the criminal insanity of party politicians, of the
infinite consolation of books.

Christ, whom all these politicians sanctimoniously pretend to make such
a fuss of, once said that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
And yet we regard this internecine conflict between our precious
political parties as a sacred institution. By Allah, we are a funny
people!

Of course your officials at the Board of Education--that beautiful
timber-headed, timber-hearted, timber-souled structure--could come down
on me with an avalanche of statistics. "Look at our results," they cry.
I look. There are certain brains that even our educational system
cannot benumb. A few clever ones, at the cost of enormously expensive
machinery, are sent to the universities, where they learn how to teach
others the important things whereby they achieved their own unimportant
success. The shining lights are those whom we turn out as syndicalist
leaders and other kinds of anti-patriotic demagogues. We systematically
deny them the wine of thought, but give them the dregs. But in the past
we did not care; they were vastly clever people, a credit to our
national system. It gave them chances which they took. We were devilish
proud of them.

On the other hand, the vast mass are sent away with the intellectual
equipment of a public school-boy of twelve, and, as I have declared, a
large remnant have not been taught even how to read and write. The
storm of political controversy on educational matters has centred round
such questions as whether the story of Joseph and his Brethren and the
Parable of the Prodigal Son should be taught to little Baptists by a
Church of England teacher, and what proportion of rates paid by Church
of England ratepayers should go to giving little Baptists a Baptistical
training. If there was a Christ who could come down among us, with what
scorching sarcasm would he not shrivel up the Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites, who in His Name have prevented the People from learning how
to read and write.

Look through Hansard. There never has been a Debate in the House of
Commons devoted to the question of Education itself. If the War can
teach us any lessons, as a nation--and sometimes I doubt whether it
will--it ought at least to teach us the essential vicious rottenness of
our present educational system.

This tirade may seem a far cry from Mrs. Boyce and her sister mothers.
It is not. I started by saying that there are hundreds of thousands of
British mothers, with sons in the Army, who have never read a line of
print dealing with the war, who have the haziest notion of what it is
all about. All they know is that we are fighting Germans, who for some
incomprehensible reason have declared themselves to be our enemies;
that the Germans, by hearsay accounts, are dreadful people who stick
babies on bayonets and drop bombs on women and children. They really
know little more. But that is enough. They know that it is the part of
a man to fight for his country. They would not have their sons be
called cowards. They themselves have the blind, instinctive, and
therefore sacred love of country, which is named patriotism--and they
send forth their sons to fight.

I stand up to kiss the white and delicate hand of the gentlewoman who
sends her boy to the war, for its owner knows as well as I do (or ought
to) all that is involved in this colossal struggle. But to the
toil-worn, coarse-handed mother I go on bended knees; nothing
intellectual comes within the range of her ideas. Her boy is fighting
for England. She would be ashamed if he were not. Were she a man she
would fight too. He has gone "with a good 'eart"--the stereotyped
phrase with which every English private soldier, tongue-tied, hides the
expression of his unconquerable soul. How many times have I not heard
it from wounded men healed of their wounds? I have never heard anything
else. "The man who says he WANTS to go back is a liar. But if they send
me, I'll go WITH A GOOD 'EART"--The phrase which ought to be
immortalized on every grave in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and
Mesopotamia.


  17735 P'V'TE THOMAS ATKINS 1ST GOD'S OWN REG'T
  HE DIED WITH A GOOD 'EART


So, you see, I looked at this rather silly malade imaginaire of an old
lady with whom I was taking tea, and suddenly conceived for her a vast
respect--even veneration. I say "rather silly." I had many a time
qualified the adjective much more forcibly. I took her to have the
intellectual endowment of a hen. But then she flashed out suddenly
before me an elderly Jeanne d'Arc. That to me Leonard Boyce was suspect
did not enter at all into the question. To her--and that was all that
mattered--he was Sir Galahad, Lancelot, King Arthur, Bayard, St.
George, Hector, Lysander, Miltiades, all rolled into one. The passion
of her life was spent on him. To do him justice, he had never failed to
display to her the most tender affection. In her eyes he was
perfection. His death would mean the wiping out of everything between
Earth and Heaven. And yet, paramount in her envisagement of such a
tragedy was the idea of a public proclamation of the cause of England
in which he died.

In this war the women of England--the women of Great Britain and
Ireland--the women of the far-flung regions of the British Empire, have
their part.

Now and then mild business matters call me up to London. On these
occasions Marigold gets himself up in a kind of yachting kit which he
imagines will differentiate him from the ordinary chauffeur and at the
same time proclaim the dignity of the Meredyth-Marigold establishment.
He loves to swagger up the steps of my Service Club and announce my
arrival to the Hall Porter, who already, warned by telephone of my
advent, has my little wicker-work tricycle chair in readiness. I think
he feels, dear fellow, that he and I are keeping our end up; that,
although there are only bits of us left, we are there by inalienable
right as part and parcel of the British Army--none of your Territorials
or Kitcheners, but the old original British Army whose prestige and
honour were those of his own straight soul. The Hall Porter is an
ex-Sergeant-Major, and he and Marigold are old acquaintances, and the
meeting of the two warriors is acknowledged by a wink and a military
jerk of the head. I think it is Marigold that impresses Bunworthy with
a respect for me, for that august functionary never fails to descend
the steps and cross the pavement to my modest little two-seater; an act
of graciousness which (so I am given to understand by my friends) he
will only perform in the case of Royalty Itself. A mere Field-marshal
has to mount the steps unattended like any subaltern.

These red-letter days when I drive through the familiar (and now
exciting) hubbub of London, I love (strange taste!) every motor
omnibus, every pretty woman, every sandwich-man, every fine young
fellow in khaki, every car-load of men in blue hospital uniform. I love
the smell of London, the cinematographic picture of London, the thrill
of London. To understand what I mean you have only got to get rid of
your legs and keep your heart and nerves and memories, and live in a
little country town.

Yes, my visits to London are red-letter days. To get there with any
enjoyment to myself involves such a fussification, and such an
unauthorised claim on the services of other people, that my visits are
few and far between.

A couple of hours in a club smoking-room--to the normal man a mere
putting in of time, a vain surcease from boredom, a vacuous habit--is
to me, a strange wonder and delight. After Wellingsford the place is
resonant with actualities. I hear all sorts of things; mostly lies, I
know; but what matter? When a man tells me that his cousin knows a man
attached as liaison officer to the staff of General Joffre, who has
given out confidentially that such and such a thing is going to happen
I am all ears. I feel that I am sucked into the great whirlpool of Vast
Events. I don't care a bit about being disillusioned afterwards. The
experience has done me good, made a man of me and sent me back to
Wellingsford as an oracle. And if you bring me a man who declares that
he does not like being an oracle, I will say to his face that he is an
unblushing liar.

All this is by way of preface to the statement that on the third of May
(vide diary) I went to the club. It was just after lunch and the great
smoking-room was full of men in khaki and men in blue and gold, with a
sprinkling of men, mostly elderly, in mufti; and from their gilt frames
the full-length portraits of departed men of war in gorgeous uniforms
looked down superciliously on their more sadly attired descendants. I
got into a corner by the door, so as to be out of the way, for I knew
by experience that should there be in the room a choleric general, he
would inevitably trip over the casually extended front wheel of my
chair, greatly to the scandal of modest ears and to my own physical
discomfiture.

Various seniors came up and passed the time of the day with me--one or
two were bald-headed retired colonels of sixty, dressed in khaki, with
belts like equators on a terrestrial globe and with a captain's three
stars on their sleeves. Gallant old boys, full of gout and softness,
they had sunk their rank and taken whatever dull jobs, such as guarding
internment camps or railway bridges, the War Office condescendingly
thought fit to give them. They listened sympathetically to my
grievances, for they had grievances of their own. When soldiers have no
grievances the Army will perish of smug content.

"Why can't they give me a billet in the Army Pay and let me release a
man sounder of wind and limb?" I asked. "What's the good of legs to a
man who sits on his hunkers all day in an office and fills up Army
forms? I hate seeing you lucky fellows in uniform."

"We're not a pretty sight," said the most rotund, who was a wag in his
way.

Then we discussed what we knew and what we didn't know of the Battle of
Ypres, and the withdrawal of our Second Army, and shook our heads
dolorously over the casualty lists, every one of which in those days
contained the names of old comrades and of old comrades' boys. And when
they had finished their coffee and mild cigars they went off well
contented to their dull jobs and the room began to thin. Other
acquaintances on their way out paused for a handshake and a word, and I
gathered scraps of information that had come "straight from Kitchener,"
and felt wonderfully wise and cheerful.

I had been sitting alone for a few minutes when a man rose from a far
corner, a tall soldierly figure, his arm in a sling, and came straight
towards me with that supple, easy stride that only years of confident
command can give. He had keen blue eyes and a pleasant bronzed face
which I knew that I had seem somewhere before. I noticed on his sleeve
the crown and star of a lieutenant-colonel. He said pleasantly:

"You're Major Meredyth, aren't you?"

"Yes," said I.

"You don't remember me. No reason why you should. But my name's
Dacre--Reggie Dacre, brother of Johnnie Dacre in your battery. We met
in Cape Town."

I held out my hand.

"Of course," said I. "You took me to a hospital. Do sit down for a bit.
You a member here?"

"No. I belong to the Naval and Military. Lunching with old General
Donovan, a sort of god-father of mine. He told me who you were. I
haven't seen you since that day in South Africa."

I asked for news of Johnnie, who had been lost to my ken for years.
Johnnie had been in India, and was now doing splendidly with his
battery somewhere near La Bassee. I pointed to the sling. Badly hurt?
No, a bit of flesh torn by shrapnel. Bone, thank God, not touched. It
was only horny-headed idiots like the British R. A. M. C. that would
send a man home for such a trifle. It was devilish hard lines to be
hoofed away from the regiment practically just after he had got his
command. However, he would be back in a week or two. He laughed.

"Lucky to be alive at all."

"Or not done in for ever like myself," said I.

"I didn't like to ask--" he said. Men would rather die than commit the
indelicacy of appearing to notice my infirmity.

"You haven't been out there?"

"No such luck," said I. "I got this little lot about a fortnight after
I saw you. Johnnie was still on sick leave and so was out of that
scrap."

He commiserated with me on my ill-fortune, and handed me his cigarette
case. We smoked.

"You've been on my mind for months," he said abruptly.

"I?"

He nodded. "I thought I recognised you. I asked the General who you
were. He said 'Meredyth of the Gunners.' So I knew I was right and made
a bee line for you. Do you remember the story of that man in the
hospital?"

"Perfectly," said I.

"About Boyce of the King's Watch?"

"Yes," said I. "I saw Boyce, home on leave, about a fortnight ago. I
suppose you saw his D.S.O. gazetted?"

"I did. And he deserves a jolly sight more," he exclaimed heartily.
"I've come to the conclusion that that fellow in the hospital--I forget
the brute's name--"

"Somers," said I.

"Yes, Somers. I've come to the conclusion that he was the damn'dest,
filthiest, lyingest hound that ever was pupped."

"I'm glad to hear it," said I. "It was a horrible story. I remember
making your brother and yourself vow eternal secrecy."

"You can take it from me that we haven't breathed a word to anybody. As
a matter of fact, the whole damn thing had gone out of my head for
years. Then I begin to hear of a fellow called Boyce of the Rifles
doing the most crazy magnificent things. I make enquiries and find it's
the same Leonard Boyce of the Vilboek Farm story. We're in the same
Brigade.

"You don't often hear of individual men out there--your mind's too
jolly well concentrated on your own tiny show. But Boyce has sort of
burst out beyond his own regiment and, with just one or two others, is
beginning to be legendary. He has done the maddest things and won the
V.C. twenty times over. So that blighter Somers, accusing him of
cowardice, was a ghastly liar. And then I remembered taking you up to
hear that damnable slander, and I felt that I had a share in it, as far
as you were concerned, and I longed to get at you somehow and tell you
about it. I wanted to get it off my chest. And now," said he with a
breath of relief, "thank God, I've been able to do so."

"I wish you would tell me of an incident or two," said I.

"He has got a life-preserver that looks like an ordinary cane--had it
specially made. It's quite famous. Men tell me that the knob is a rich,
deep, polished vermilion. He'll take on any number of Boches with it
single-handed. If there's any sign of wire-cutting, he'll not let the
men fire, but will take it on himself, and creep like a Gurkha and do
the devils in. One night he got a whole listening post like that. He
does a lot of things a second in command hasn't any business to do, but
his men would follow him anywhere. He bears a charmed life. I could
tell you lots of things--but I see my old General's getting restive."
He rose, stretched out his hand. "At any rate, take my word for it--if
there's a man in the British Army who doesn't know what fear is, that
man is Leonard Boyce."

He nodded in his frank way and rejoined his old General. As I had had
enough exciting information for one visit to town, I motored back to
Wellingsford.




CHAPTER VIII


My house, as I have already mentioned, is situated at the extreme end
of the town on the main road, already called the Rowdon Road, which is
an extension of the High Street. It stands a little way back to allow
room for a semicircular drive, at each end of which is a broad gate.
The semicircle encloses a smooth-shaven lawn of which I am vastly
proud. In the spandrels by the side of the house are laburnums and
lilacs and laurels. From gate to gate stretch iron railings, planted in
a low stone parapet and unencumbered with vegetation, so that the view
from road to lawn and from lawn to road is unrestricted. Thus I can
take up my position on my lawn near the railings and greet all
passers-by.

It was a lovely May morning. My laburnums and lilacs were in flower. On
the other side of the way the hedge of white-thorn screening the
grounds of a large preparatory school was in flower also, and
deliciously scented the air. I sat in my accustomed spot, a table with
writing materials, tobacco, and books by my side, and a mass of
newspapers at my feet. There was going to be a coalition Government.
Great statesmen were going to forget that there was such a thing as
party politics, except in the distribution of minor offices, when the
claims of good and faithful jackals on either side would have to be
considered. And my heart grew sick within me, and I longed for a Man to
arise who, with a snap of his strong fingers, would snuff out the
Little Parish-Pump Folk who have misruled England this many a year with
their limited vision and sordid aspirations, and would take the great,
unshakable, triumphant command of a mighty Empire passionately yearning
to do his bidding... I could read no more newspapers. They disgusted
me. One faction seemed doggedly opposed to any proposition for the
amelioration of the present disastrous state of affairs. The salvation
of wrecked political theories loomed far more important in their
darkened minds than the salvation, by hook or crook, of the British
Empire. The other faction, more patriotic in theory, cried aloud
stinking fish, and by scurrilous over-statement defeated their own
ends. In the general ignoble screech the pronouncements of the one or
two dignified and thoughtful London newspapers passed unheeded....

I drew what comfort I could from the sight of the continually passing
troops; a platoon off to musketry training; a battalion, brown and
dusty, on a route march with full equipment, whistling "Tipperary";
sections of an Army Service train cursing good-humouredly at their
mules; a battery of artillery thundering along at a clean, rhythmical
trot which, considering what they were like in their slovenly jogging
and bumping three months ago, afforded me prodigious pleasure. On the
passing of these last-mentioned I felt inclined to clap my hands and
generally proclaim my appreciation. Indeed, I did arrest a fresh-faced
subaltern bringing up the rear of the battery who, having acquaintance
with me, saluted, and I shouted:

"They're magnificent!"

He reared up his horse and flushed with pleasure.

"We've done our best, sir," said he. "We had news last week that we
should be sent out quite soon, and that has bucked them up enormously."

He saluted again and rode off, and my heart went with him. What a joy
it would be to clatter down a road once again with the guns!

And other people passed. Townsfolk who gave me a kindly "Morning,
Major!" and went on, and others who paused awhile and gave me the
gossip of the day. And presently young Randall Holmes went by on a
motor bicycle. He caught sight of me, disappeared, and then suddenly
reappeared, wheeling his machine. He rested it by the kerb of the
sidewalk and approached the railings. He was within a yard of me.

"Would you let me speak to you for half a minute, Major?"

"Certainly," said I. "Come in."

He swung through the gate and crossed the lawn.

"You said very hard things to me some time ago."

"I did," said I, "and I don't think they were undeserved."

"Up to a certain point I agree with you," he replied.

He looked extraordinarily robust and athletic in his canvas kit. Why
should he be tearing about aimlessly on a motor bicycle this May
morning when he ought to be in France?

"I wish you agreed with me all along the line," said I.

He found a little iron garden seat and sat down by my side.

"I don't want to enter into controversial questions," he said.

Confound him! He might have been fifty instead of four-and-twenty.
Controversial questions! His assured young Oxford voice irritated me.

"What do you want to enter into?" I asked.

"A question of honour," he answered calmly. "I have been wanting to
speak to you, but I didn't like to. Passing you by, just now, I made a
sudden resolution. You have thought badly of me on account of my
attitude towards Phyllis Gedge. I want to tell you that you were quite
right. My attitude was illogical and absurd."

"You have discovered," said I, "that she is not the inspiration you
thought she was, and like an honest man have decided to let her alone."

"On the contrary," said he. "I'd give the eyes out of my head to marry
her."

"Why?"

He met my gaze very frankly. "For the simple reason, Major Meredyth,
that I love her."

All this natural, matter-of-fact simplicity coming from so artificial a
product of Balliol as Randall Holmes, was a bit upsetting. After a
pause, I said:

"If that is so, why don't you marry her?"

"She'll have nothing to do with me."

"Have you asked her?"

"I have, in writing. There's no mistake about it. I'm in earnest."

"I'm exceedingly glad to hear it," said I.

And I was. An honest lover I can understand, and a Don Juan I can
understand. But the tepid philanderer has always made my toes tingle.
And I was glad, too, to hear that little Phyllis Gedge had so much
dignity and commonsense. Not many small builders' daughters would have
sent packing a brilliant young gentleman like Randall Holmes,
especially if they happened to be in love with him. As I did not
particularly wish to be the confidant of this love-lorn shepherd, I
said nothing more. Randall lit a cigarette.

"I hope I'm not boring you," he said.

"Not a bit."

"Well--what complicates the matter is that her father's the most
infernal swine unhung." I started, remembering what Betty had told me.

"I thought," said I, "that you were fast friends."

"Who told you so?" he asked.

"All the birds of Wellingsford."

"I did go to see him now and then," he admitted. "I thought he was much
maligned. A man with sincere opinions, even though they're wrong, is
deserving of some respect, especially when the expression of them
involves considerable courage and sacrifice. I wanted to get to the
bottom of his point of view."

"If you used such a metaphor in the Albemarle," I interrupted, "I'm
afraid you would be sacrificed by your friends."

He had the grace to laugh. "You know what I mean."

"And did you get to the bottom of it?"

"I think so."

"And what did you find?"

"Crass ignorance and malevolent hatred of everyone better born, better
educated, better off, better dressed, better spoken than himself."

"Still," said I, "a human being can have those disabilities and yet not
deserve to be qualified as the most infernal swine unhung."

"That's a different matter," said he, unbuttoning his canvas jacket,
for the morning was warm. "I can talk patiently to a fool--to be able
to do so is an elementary equipment for a life among men and women--"
Why the deuce, thought I, wasn't he expending this precious acquirement
on a platoon of agricultural recruits? The officer who suffers such
gladly has his name inscribed on the Golden Legend (unfortunately
unpublished) of the British Army--"but when it comes," he went on, "to
low-down lying knavery, then I'm done. I don't know how to tackle it.
All I can do is to get out of the knave's way. I've found Gedge to be a
beast, and I'm very honourably in love with Gedge's daughter, and I've
asked her to marry me. I attach some value, Major, to your opinion of
me, and I want you to know these two facts."

I again expressed my gratification at learning his honourable
intentions towards Phyllis, and I commended his discovery of Gedge's
fundamental turpitude. I cannot say that I was cordial. At this period,
the unmilitary youth of England were not affectionately coddled by
their friends. Still, I was curious to see whether Gedge's depravity
extended beyond a purely political scope. I questioned my young visitor.

"Oh, it's nothing to do with abstract opinions," said he, thinning away
the butt-end of his cigarette. "And nothing to do with treason, or
anything of that kind. He has got hold of a horrible story--told me all
about it when he was foully drunk--that in itself would have made me
break with him, for I loathe drunken men--and gloats over the fact that
he is holding it over somebody's head. Oh, a ghastly story!"

I bent my brows on him. "Anything to do with South Africa?"

"South Africa--? No. Why?"

The puzzled look on his face showed that I was entirely on the wrong
track. I was disappointed at the faultiness of my acumen. You see, I
argued thus: Gedge goes off on a mysterious jaunt with Boyce. Boyce
retreats precipitately to London. Gedge in his cups tells a horrible
scandal with a suggestion of blackmail to Randall Holmes. What else
could he have divulged save the Vilboek Farm affair? My nimble wit had
led me a Jack o' Lantern dance to nowhere.

"Why South Africa?" he repeated.

I replied with Macchiavellian astuteness, so as to put him on a false
scent: "A stupid slander about illicit diamond buying in connection
with a man, now dead, who used to live here some years ago."

"Oh, no," said Randall, with a superior smile "Nothing of that sort."

"Well, what is it?" I asked.

He helped himself to another cigarette. "That," said he, "I can't tell
you. In the first place I gave my word of honour as to secrecy before
he told me, and, in the next, even if I hadn't given my word, I would
not be a party to such a slander by repeating it to any living man." He
bent forward and looked me straight in the eyes. "Even to you, Major,
who have been a second father to me."

"A man," said I, "has a priceless possession that he should always
keep--his own counsel."

"I've only told you as much as I have done," said Randall, "because I
want to make clear to you my position with regard both to Phyllis and
her father."

"May I ask," said I, "what is Phyllis's attitude towards her father?" I
knew well enough from Betty; but I wanted to see how much Randall knew
about it.

"She is so much out of sympathy with his opinions that she has gone to
live at the hospital."

"Perhaps she thinks you share those opinions, and for that reason won't
marry you?"

"That may have something to do with it, although I have done my best to
convince her that I hold diametrically opposite views, But you can't
expect a woman to reason."

"The unexpected sometimes happens," I remarked. "And then comes
catastrophe; in this case not to the woman." I cannot say that my tone
was sympathetic. I had cause for interest in his artless tale, but it
was cold and dispassionate. "Tell me," I continued, "when did you
discover the diabolical nature of the man Gedge?"

"Last night."

"And when did you ask Phyllis to marry you?"

"A week ago."

"What's going to happen now?" I asked.

"I'm hanged if I know," said he, gloomily.

I was in no mood to offer the young man any advice. The poor little
wretch at the hospital--so Betty had told me--was crying her eyes out
for him; but it was not for his soul's good that he should know it.

"In heroic days," said I, "a hopeless lover always found a sovereign
remedy against an obdurate mistress."

He rose and buttoned up his canvas jacket.

"I know what you mean," he said. "And I didn't come to discuss it--if
you'll excuse my apparent rudeness in saying so."

"Then things are as they were between us."

"Not quite, I hope," he replied in a dignified way. "When last you
spoke to me about Phyllis Gedge, I really didn't know my own mind. I am
not a cad and the thought of--of anything wrong never entered my head.
On the other hand, marriage seemed out of the question."

"I remember," said I, "you talked some blithering rot about her being a
symbol."

"I am quite willing to confess I was a fool," he admitted gracefully.
"And I merited your strictures."

His reversion to artificiality annoyed me. I'm far from being of an
angelic disposition.

"My dear boy," I cried. "Do, for God's sake, talk human English, and
not the New Oxford Dictionary."

He flushed angrily, snapped an impatient finger and thumb, and marched
away to the gravel path. I sang out sharply:

"Randall!"

He turned. I cried:

"Come here at once."

He came with sullen reluctance. Afterwards I was rather tickled at
realizing that the lame old war-dog had so much authority left. If he
had gone defiantly off, I should have felt rather a fool.

"My dear boy," I said, "I didn't mean to insult you. But can't a clever
fellow like you understand that all the pretty frills and preciousness
of a year ago are as dead as last year's Brussels sprouts? We're up
against elemental things and can only get at them with elemental ideas
expressed in elemental language."

"I'd have you to know," said Randall, "that I spoke classical English."

"Quite so," said I. "But the men of to-day speak Saxon English, Cockney
English, slang English, any damned sort of English that is virile and
spontaneous. As I say, you're a clever fellow. Can't you see my point?
Speech is an index of mental attitude. I bet you what you like Phyllis
Gedge would see it at once. Just imagine a subaltern at the front after
a bad quarter of an hour with his Colonel--'I've merited your
strictures, sir!' If there was a bomb handy, the Colonel would catch it
up and slay him on the spot."

"But I don't happen to be at the front, Major," said Randall.

"Then you damned well ought to be," said I, in sudden wrath.

I couldn't help it. He asked for it. He got it.

He went away, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode off.

I was sorry. The boy evidently was in a chastened mood. If I had
handled him gently and diplomatically, I might have done something with
him. I suppose I'm an irritable, nasty-tempered beast. It is easy to
lay the blame on my helpless legs. It isn't my legs. I've conquered my
damned legs. It isn't my legs. Its ME.

I was ashamed of myself. And when, later, Marigold enquired whether the
doors were still shut against Mr. Holmes, I asked him what the blazes
he meant by not minding his own business. And Marigold said: "Very
good, sir."




CHAPTER IX


For a week or two the sluggish stream of Wellingsfordian life flowed on
undisturbed. The chief incident was a recruiting meeting held on the
Common. Sir Anthony Fenimore in his civic capacity, a staff-officer
with red tabs, a wounded soldier, an elderly, eloquent gentleman from
recruiting headquarters in London, and one or two nondescripts,
including myself, were on the platform. A company of a County
Territorial Battalion and the O.T.C. of the Godbury Grammar School gave
a semblance of military display. The Town Band, in a sort of Hungarian
uniform, discoursed martial music. Old men and maidens, mothers and
children, and contented young fellows in khaki belonging to all kinds
of arms, formed a most respectable crowd. The flower of Wellingsfordian
youth was noticeably absent. They were having too excellent a time to
be drawn into the temptation of a recruiting meeting, in spite of the
band and the fine afternoon and the promiscuity of attractive damsels.
They were making unheard-of money at the circumjacent factories; their
mothers were waxing fat on billeting-money. They never had so much
money to spend on moving-picture-palaces and cheap jewellery for their
inamoratas in their lives. As our beautiful Educational system had most
scrupulously excluded from their school curriculum any reference to
patriotism, any rudimentary conception of England as their sacred
heritage, and as they had been afforded no opportunity since they left
school of thinking of anything save their material welfare and grosser
material appetites, the vague talk of peril to the British Empire left
them unmoved. They were quite content to let others go and fight. They
had their own comfortable theories about it. Some fellows liked that
sort of thing. They themselves didn't. In ordinary times, it amused
that kind of fellow to belong to a Harriers Club, and clad in shorts
and zephyrs, go on Sundays for twenty-mile runs. It didn't amuse them.
A cigarette, a girl, and a stile formed their ideal of Sunday
enjoyment. They had no quarrel with the harrier fellow or the soldier
fellow for following his bent. They were most broad-minded. But they
flattered themselves that they were fellows of a superior and more
intelligent breed. They were making money and living warm, the only
ideal of existence of which they had ever heard, and what did anything
else matter?

If a man has never been taught that he has a country, how the deuce do
you expect him to love her--still less to defend her with his blood?
Our more than damnable governments for the last thirty years have done
everything in their power to crush in English hearts the national
spirit of England. God knows I have no quarrel with Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales. I speak in no disparagement of them. Quite the reverse. In
this war they have given freely of their blood. I only speak as an
Englishman of England, the great Mother of the Empire. Scot, Irishman,
Welshman, Canadian, Australian are filled with the pride of their
nationality. It is part of their being. Wisely they have been trained
to it from infancy. England, who is far bigger, far more powerful than
the whole lot of them put together--it's a statistical fact--has
deliberately sunk herself in her own esteem, in her own pride. Only one
great man has stood for England, as England, the great Mother, for the
last thirty years. And that man is Rudyard Kipling. And the Little Folk
in authority in England have spent their souls in rendering nugatory
his inspired message.

This criminal self-effacement of England is at the root of the peril of
the British Empire during this war.

I told you at the beginning that I did not know how to write a story.
You must forgive me for being led away into divagations which seem to
be irrelevant to the dramatic sequence. But when I remember that the
result of all the pomp and circumstance of that meeting was seven
recruits, of whom three were rejected as being physically unfit, my pen
runs away with my discretion, and my conjecturing as to artistic
fitness.

Yes, the Major spoke. Sir Anthony is a peppery little person and the
audience enjoyed the cayenne piquancy of his remarks. The red-tabbed
Lieutenant-Colonel spoke. He was a bit dull. The elderly orator from
London roused enthusiastic cheers. The wounded sergeant, on crutches,
displaying a foot like a bandaged mop, brought tears into the eyes of
many women and evoked hoarse cheers from the old men. I spoke from my
infernal chair, and I think I was quite a success with the good fellows
in khaki. But the only men we wanted to appeal to had studiously
refrained from being present. The whole affair was a fiasco.

When we got home, Marigold, who had stood behind my chair during the
proceedings, said to me:

"I think I know personally about thirty slackers in this town, sir, and
I'm more than a match for any three of them put together. Suppose I was
to go the rounds, so to speak, and say to each of them, 'You young
blighter, if you don't come with me and enlist, I 'll knock hell out of
you!'--and, if he didn't come, I did knock hell out of him--what
exactly would happen, sir?"

"You would be summoned," said I, "for thirty separate cases of assault
and battery. Reckoning the penalty at six months each, you would have
to go to prison for fifteen years."

Marigold's one eye grew pensive and sad.

"And they call this," said he, "a free country!"

I began this chapter by remarking that for a week or two after my
second interview with Randall Holmes, nothing particular happened. Then
one afternoon came Sir Anthony Fenimore to see me, and with a view to
obtaining either my advice or my sympathy, reopened the story of his
daughter Althea found drowned in the canal eleven months before.

What he considered a most disconcerting light had just been cast on the
tragedy by Maria Beccles. This lady was Lady Fenimore's sister. A
deadly feud, entirely of Miss Beccles' initiating and nourishing, had
existed between them for years. They had been neither on speaking nor
on writing terms. Miss Beccles, ten years Lady Fenimore's senior, was,
from all I had heard, a most disagreeable and ill-conditioned person,
as different from my charming friend Edith Fenimore as the ugly old
sisters were from Cinderella. Although she belonged to a good old South
of England family, she had joined, for reasons known only to herself,
the old Free Kirk of Scotland, found a congenial Calvinistic centre in
Galloway, and after insulting her English relations and friends in the
most unconscionable way, cut herself adrift from them for ever. "Mad as
a hatter," Sir Anthony used to say, and, never having met the lady, I
agreed with him. She loathed her sister, she detested Anthony, and she
appeared to be coldly indifferent to the fact of the existence of her
nephew Oswald. But for Althea, and for Althea alone, she entertained a
curious, indulgent affection, and every now and then Althea went to
spend a week or so in Galloway, where she contrived to obtain
considerable amusement. Aunt Maria did both herself and her visitors
very well, said Althea, who had an appreciative eye for the material
blessings of life. Althea walked over the moors and fished and took
Aunt Maria's cars out for exercise and, except whistle on the Sabbath,
seemed to do exactly what she liked.

Now, in January 1914, Althea announced to her parents that Aunt Maria
had summoned her for a week to Galloway. Sir Anthony stuffed her
handbag with five-pound notes, and at an early hour of the morning sent
her up in the car to London in charge of the chauffeur. The chauffeur
returned saying that he had bought Miss Althea's ticket at Euston and
seen her start off comfortably on her journey. A letter or two had been
received by the Fenimores from Galloway, and letters they had written
to Galloway had been acknowledged by Althea. She returned to
Wellingsford in due course, with bonny cheeks and wind-swept eyes, and
told us all funny little stories about Aunt Maria. No one thought
anything more about it until one fine afternoon in May, 1915, when
Maria Beccles walked unexpectedly into the drawing-room of Wellings
Park, while Sir Anthony and Lady Fenimore were at tea.

"My dear Edith," she said to her astounded hostess, who had not seen
her for fifteen years. "In this orgy of hatred and strife that is going
on in the world, it seems ridiculous to go on hating and fighting one's
own family. We must combine against the Germans and hate them. Let us
be friends."

"Mad as Crazy Jane," said Sir Anthony, telling me the story. But I, who
had never heard Aunt Maria's side of the dispute, thought it very
high-spirited of the old lady to come and hold out the olive-branch in
so uncompromising a fashion.

Lady Fenimore then said that she had never wished to quarrel with
Maria, and Sir Anthony declared that her patriotic sentiments did her
credit, and that he was proud to receive her under his roof, and in a
few minutes Maria was drinking tea and discussing the war in the most
contented way in the world.

"I didn't write to you on the occasion of the death of your two
children because you knew I didn't like you," said this outspoken lady.
"I hate hypocrisy. Also I thought that tribulation might chasten you in
the eyes of the Lord. I've discussed it with our Minister, a poor body,
but a courageous man. He told me I was unchristian. Now, what with all
this universal massacre going on and my unregenerate longing, old woman
as I am, to wade knee-deep in German blood, I don't know what the devil
I am."

The more Anthony told me of Aunt Maria, the more I liked her.

"Can't I come round and make her acquaintance?" I cried. "She's the
sort of knotty, solid human thing that I should love. No wonder Althea
was fond of her."

"This happened a week ago. She only stayed a night," replied Sir
Anthony. "I wish to God we had never seen her or heard of her."

And then the good, heart-wrung little man, who had been beating about
the bush for half an hour, came straight to the point.

"You remember Althea's visit to Scotland in January last year?"

"Perfectly," said I.

He rose from his chair and looked at me in wrinkled anguish.

"She never went there," he said.

That was what he had come to tell me. A natural reference to the last
visit of Althea to her aunt had established the stupefying fact.

"Althea's last visit was in October, 1913," said Miss Beccles.

"But we have letters from your house to prove she was with you in
January," said Sir Anthony.

Most methodical and correspondence-docketing of men, he went to his
library and returned with a couple of letters.

The old lady looked them through grimly.

"Pretty vague. No details. Read 'em again, Anthony."

When he had done so, she said: "Well?"

Lady Fenimore objected: "But Althea did stay with you. She must have
stayed with you."

"All right, Edith," said Maria, sitting bolt upright. "Call me a liar,
and have done with it. I've come here at considerable dislocation of
myself and my principles, to bury the hatchet for the sake of unity
against the enemy, and this is how I'm treated. I can only go back to
Scotland at once."

Sir Anthony succeeded in pacifying her. The letters were evidence that
Edith and himself believed that Althea was in Galloway at the time.
Maria's denial had come upon them like a thunderclap, bewildering,
stunning. If Althea was not in Galloway, where was she?

Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question. Then she
took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising
the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.

"Yes, Maria," said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, "we don't
doubt your word--but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn't with you,
where was she?"

"How do I know?"

Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger--she was a dark and shrivelled,
gipsy-like creature. "You might as well ask the canal in which she
drowned herself."

"But, my God, Anthony!" I cried, when he had got thus far, "What did
you think? What did you say?"

I realised that the old lady had her social disqualifications.
Plain-dealing is undoubtedly a virtue. But there are several virtues
which the better class of angel keeps chained up in a dog-kennel. Of
course she was acute. A mind trained in the acrobatics of Calvinistic
Theology is, within a narrow compass, surprisingly agile. It jumped at
one bound from the missing week in Althea's life into the black water
of the canal. It was incapable, however, of appreciating the awful
horror in the minds of the beholders.

"I don't know what I said," replied Sir Anthony, walking restlessly
about my library. "We were struck all of a heap. As you know, we never
had reason to think that the poor dear child's death was anything but
an accident. We were not narrow-minded old idiots. She was a dear good
girl. In a modern way she claimed her little independence. We let her
have it. We trusted her. We took it for granted--you know it, Duncan,
as well as I do--that, a hot night in June--not able to sleep--she had
stuck on a hat and wandered about the grounds, as she had often done
before, and a spirit of childish adventure had tempted her, that night,
to walk round the back of the town and--and--well, until in the dark,
she stepped off the tow-path by the lock gates, into nothing--and found
the canal. It was an accident," he continued, with a hand on my
shoulder, looking down on me in my chair. "The inquest proved that. I
accepted it, as you know, as a visitation of God. Edith and I sorrowed
for her like cowards. It took the war to bring us to our senses. But,
now, this damned old woman comes and upsets the whole thing."

"But," said I, "after all, it was only a bow at a venture on the part
of the old lady."

"I wish it were," said he, and he handed me a letter which Maria had
written to him the day after her return to Scotland.

The letter contained a pretty piece of information. She had summarily
discharged Elspeth Macrae, her confidential maid of five-and-twenty
years' standing. Elspeth Macrae, on her own confession, had, out of
love for Althea, performed the time-honoured jugglery with
correspondence. She had posted in Galloway letters which she had
received, under cover, from Althea, and had forwarded letters that had
arrived addressed to Althea to an accommodation address in Carlisle. So
have sentimental serving-maids done since the world began.

"What do you make of it?" asked Sir Anthony.

What else could I make of it but the one sorry theory? What woman
employs all this subterfuge in order to obtain a weeks liberty for any
other purpose than the one elementary purpose of young humanity?

We read the inevitable conclusion in each other's eyes.

"Who is the man, Duncan?"

"I suppose you have searched her desk and things?"

"Last year. Everything most carefully. It was awful--but we had to. Not
a scrap of paper that wasn't innocence itself."

"It can't be anyone here," said I. "You know what the place is. The
slightest spark sends gossip aflame like the fumes of petrol."

He sat down by my side and rubbed his close-cropped grey head.

"It couldn't have been young Holmes?"

The little man had a brave directness that sometimes disconcerted me. I
knew the ghastly stab that every word cost him.

"She used to make mock of Randall," said I. "Don't you remember she
used to call him 'the gilded poet'? Once she said he was the most
lady-like young man of her acquaintance. I don't admire our young
friend, but I think you're on the wrong track, Anthony."

"I don't see it," said he. "That sort of flippancy goes for nothing.
Women use it as a sort of quickset hedge of protection." He bent
forward and tapped me on my senseless knee. "Young Holmes always used
to be in and out of the house. They had known each other from
childhood. He had a distinguished Oxford career. When he won the
Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch. I
gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember."

"I remember," said I.

I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers
down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical
flourish--dear old fox-hunting ignoramus--he declared that the winner
of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that
Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his
neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave!
I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a
conversation for light allusion.

"The poor dear child--Edith and I have sized it up--was all over him
that evening."

"What more youthfully natural," said I, "than that she should carry off
the hero of the occasion--her childhood's playfellow?"

"All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken
together--especially if they fit in--very often make up a whole case
for prosecution."

"You're a Chairman of Quarter Sessions," I admitted, "and so you ought
to know."

"I know this," said he, "that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas
vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in
January." I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his
statement. To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of
cudgelling. Yes. I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me
that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an
intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his
mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of
London. I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.

"Yet," I said, "I don't think he had anything to do with it."

"Why?"

"It would have been far too much moral exertion--"

"You call it moral?" Sir Anthony burst out angrily.

I pacified him with an analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's
character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I
dissertated on his amours with Phyllis Gedge.

"No, my dear old friend," said I, in conclusion, "I don't think it was
Randall Holmes."

Sir Anthony rose and shook his fist in my face. As I knew he meant me
no bodily harm, I did not blench.

"Who was it, then?"

"Althea," said I, "often used to stay in town with your sister. Lady
Greatorex has a wide circle of acquaintances. Do you know anything of
the men Althea used to meet at her house?"

"Of course I don't," replied Sir Anthony. Then he sat down again with a
gesture of despair. "After all, what does it matter? Perhaps it's as
well I don't know who the man was, for if I did, I'd kill him!"

He set his teeth and glowered at nothing and smote his left palm with
his right fist, and there was a long silence. Presently he repeated:

"I'd kill him!"

We fell to discussing the whole matter over again. Why, I asked, should
we assume that the poor child was led astray by a villain? Might there
not have been a romantic marriage which, for some reason we could not
guess, she desired to keep secret for a time? Had she not been bright
and happy from January to June? And that night of tragedy... What more
likely than that she had gone forth to keep tryst with her husband and
accidentally met her death? "He arrives," said I, "waits for her. She
never comes. He goes away. The next day he learns from local gossip or
from newspapers what has happened. He thinks it best to keep silent and
let her fair name be untouched...What have you to say against that
theory?"

"Possible," he replied. "Anything conceivable within the limits of
physical possibility is possible. But it isn't probable. I have an
intuitive feeling that there was villainy about--and if ever I get hold
of that man--God help him!"

So there was nothing more to be said.




CHAPTER X


I haven't that universal sympathy which is the most irritating
attribute of saints and other pacif

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