The Willing Horse: A Novel
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Title: The Willing Horse: A Novel
Creator: Ian Hay
Release date: August 9, 2014 [eBook #46549]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46549
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILLING HORSE: A NOVEL ***
Produced by Al Haines.
THE WILLING HORSE
_A Novel_
BY
IAN HAY
AUTHOR OF "A MAN'S MAN," "A SAFETY MATCH," "THE RIGHT STUFF,"
"THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND," ETC.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY IAN HAY BEITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
H. M. B.
*TO THE READER*
One is informed that novels touching upon the war are no longer read.
This, if true, reduces the novelist to the following alternatives:
(1) Writing a novel of some period of the world's history antecedent to
the year nineteen-fourteen. This is undoubtedly a wide field--the
Christian era alone covers twenty centuries--but it has been cultivated
by several writers already.
(2) Writing a post-war novel in which it is assumed that the war never
happened. This would make it rather difficult to know what to do with
the graves of our dead.
(3) Writing a post-war novel about people who took no part in the war.
This would restrict one's choice of hero, heroine, and characters
generally to Certified Lunatics, Convicts in residence, and
Conscientious Objectors.
I have therefore decided to take a chance. The tale which follows is
based:
(_a_) Upon a frank admission that there has been a war.
(_b_) Upon a humble belief that the people chiefly worth writing about
in these days are those who gave body, soul--everything--to win that
war.
That explains my choice of title.
*CONTENTS*
I. The Valleys Stand so Thick with Corn
II. Rebellious Marjorie
III. Der Tag
IV. A Tryst
V. The Inevitable
VI. Solo
VII. Duet
VIII. Chorus
IX. The Book of the Words
X. Discipline! Discipline! Discipline!
XI. Enfin!
XII. Tom Birnie
XIII. Albert Clegg
XIV. Two Sparrows
XV. The Explorer
XVI. The Great Pretend
XVII. The Undefeated
XVIII. The Old Order
XIX. The Last Throw
XX. Fountain Keep
XXI. Identities
XXII. The Mills of God
XXIII. The Soul of Eric Bethune
XXIV. Through
*THE WILLING HORSE*
*CHAPTER I*
*THE VALLEYS STAND SO THICK WITH CORN*
*I*
A Sunday at Baronrigg is a chastening experience. It is not exactly a
day of wrath--though one feels that it might easily become one--but it
is a time of tribulation for people who do not want to go to church--or,
if the worst happens, prefer their religious exercises to be brief and
dilute.
But neither brevity nor dilution makes any appeal to my friend Tom
Birnie.
"I am a member," he announces, as soon as a quorum has assembled at
Sunday breakfast, "of the old Kirk of Scotland; and I propose to attend
service at Doctor Chirnside's at eleven o'clock. If any of you would
care"--he addresses a suddenly presented perspective of immaculate
partings, bald spots and permanent waves--"to accompany me, a conveyance
will leave here at ten-forty."
"Well, we can't _all_ get in, that's plain," chirps Miss Joan Dexter
hopefully. (The table is laid for fourteen.)
"The conveyance," continues the inexorable Tom, "holds twelve inside and
four out, not counting the coachman."
"It's no good, Joan, old fruit," observes Master Roy Birnie. "We keep a
pantechnicon!"
"I suppose there's not a Church of England service within reach?" asks
little Mrs. Pomeroy, rather ingeniously. "One's own Church makes an
appeal to one which no other denomination
cannot--can--adequately--doesn't it?" she concludes, a little uncertain
both of her syntax and her host. This is her first visit to Baronrigg.
"Now she's done for herself!" whispers Master Roy into my left ear.
"I agree with you. There is an Episcopal Church--Scottish Episcopal, of
course--at Fiddrie, three miles from here. I shall be happy to send you
over there this evening at half-past six. This morning, I know, you
will put up with our barbaric Northern rites!" replies Tom, with what he
imagines to be an indulgent smile. "I like to see the Baronrigg pew
full."
And full it is.
The longer I know Tom Birnie, the more I marvel that Diana Carrick
married him. That sentiment is shared by a good many people, but on
more abstract grounds than mine. Tom is a just and considerate
landlord, an adequate sportsman, and a good specimen of that class by
whose voluntary service this country gets most of its local government
done, admirably, for nothing. But there are certain things against Tom.
In the first place--to quote old Lady Christina Bethune, of
Buckholm--"no one knows who the creature is, or where he came from."
This implies nothing worse than that since Tom represents the first
generation of Birnies born in this county, his forbears must have been
born somewhere else. In other words--still quoting the same
distinguished authority--"they never existed at all." As a matter of
fact and common knowledge, Tom's grandfather was a minister of the Kirk,
somewhere in Perthshire, and his father an enormously successful member
of the Scottish Bar, who bought the derelict little estate of Strawick,
hard by here, and settled there in the late sixties with the
presumptuous, but, I think, excusable, intention of founding a family.
Naturally a family which has resided in our county for only forty-seven
years can hardly be expected to have drifted, as yet, within the range
of Lady Christina's lorgnette.
Secondly, Tom is a Radical. We are broad-minded people in this county,
and are quite indulgent to persons who disapprove of the leasehold
system (which does not obtain in Scotland), or who make excuses for the
late Mr. Gladstone, or who are inclined to criticise pheasant
preserving. That is the kind of Radicalism which we understand, and are
prepared to tolerate. That was the sort of person Tom's father was.
That is how Tom began. But of late, it must be confessed, Tom has been
going it. He supports the present Government; he is for reducing the
Army and Navy; he has recently helped to abolish our Second Chamber.
(That was no great calamity; but he and his friends have omitted to
provide us with a substitute.) He has openly applauded the efforts of a
person named George to break up the foundations of our well-tried Social
System; while the courses which he advocates with regard to the taxation
of Land Values and the treatment of loyal Ulster, surpass belief. That
is what the county has against Tom.
But I am neither a laird nor a farmer, and my indictment against Tom is
based on more personal and less venial grounds. Firstly, he is not
human. He is a calculating machine, with about as much passion as a
parish pump. Secondly, he is absolutely destitute of all sense of
humour. And yet Diana married him! Her own beautiful person exhaled
humanity and humour in equal proportions. In all her short life I never
knew her fail to understand a fellow-creature, or miss a humorous
situation. Yet she married Tom Birnie. She married Tom Birnie, and she
broke off her engagement with Eric Bethune to do it. I am a
humble-minded person, and I never professed to understand any woman--not
even my own wife, Diana's sister--but I wonder, even now, how any girl
could have resisted Eric Bethune as he was twenty years ago, or, having
got him, have relinquished him in favour of Tom Birnie. There was
something pretty big and tragic behind that broken-off engagement. My
Eve knew what it was--I suppose Diana told her about it--but when I
asked for the explanation I was tersely instructed not to be an
inquisitive old busybody. As for Eric, he never mentioned the matter to
me. He simply informed me that my services as best man would not be
required after all, and that he would be gratified if I would refrain
from asking damn silly questions. (Not that I had asked any.) Also,
that he looked to me to prevent other persons from doing so.
And now Tom Birnie is a baronet and a widower, with a son eighteen years
old, and Eric Bethune is still an eligible bachelor of forty-three. And
how he hates Tom Birnie! However, I will introduce Eric presently.
First of all, I must get our party to church.
*II*
The ancestral hereditary omnibus of the house of Baronrigg deposited us
at the kirk door at ten fifty-five precisely, and by the time that the
Reverend Doctor Chirnside's Bible and hymn-book had been set out upon
the red velvet cushion of the pulpit by a bulbous old friend of mine
named James Dunshie--an octogenarian of austere piety, an infallible
authority on dry-fly fishing, and a methodical but impervious
drinker--we were all boxed into our places in the private gallery of
Baronrigg. It is less of a gallery than a balcony, and juts out
curiously from the side of the little church, with the public gallery
running across the end wall on its right, and the minister on its left.
It recedes into a deep alcove, and at the back is a fireplace, in which
a fire is always kept burning upon wintry Sundays. The Baronrigg
pew--and, indeed, Baronrigg itself--came into the family from Diana's
side of the house: she brought them to Tom on her marriage. The pew is
rich in Carrick associations. It is reported of old Neil Carrick, the
grandfather of Diana and my Eve, that whenever he found himself
dissatisfied--a not infrequent occurrence--with the discourse of Doctor
Chirnside's predecessor, it was his habit to rise from his red rep chair
in the forefront of the gallery, retire to the back, make up the fire
with much clatter of fire-irons, and slumber peacefully before the
resulting blaze with his back to the rest of the congregation. But no
such licence was permitted to us. We sat austerely in two rows, gazing
solemnly at the blank wall opposite us, while Doctor Chirnside worked
his will upon his flock. Doctor Chirnside is a tall, silver-haired, and
pugnacious old gentleman of about seventy. He fears God, and exhibits
considerable deference towards Tom Birnie; but he regards the rest of
his congregation as dirt. (At least, that is how we feel in his
presence.) This morning he entered the pulpit precisely on the stroke
of eleven, in deference to the Laird's well-known prejudices on the
subject of punctuality--besides, I happened to know that he was coming
on to lunch at Baronrigg after service--and, having been securely locked
in by James Dunshie, adjusted his spectacles and gazed fiercely at some
late comers. Then he gave out the opening psalm.
In Craigfoot Parish Church we always sing the opening psalm
unaccompanied. It is true that we possess a small organ, but that
instrument is still regarded with such deep suspicion by some of the
older members of the congregation that we only employ it to accompany
hymns--which, as is well known, have little effect one way or the other
upon one's ultimate salvation. But we take no risks with the Psalms of
David. These are offered without meretricious trimmings of any kind,
save that furnished by the tuning-fork of Andrew Kilninver, our esteemed
auctioneer, estate agent, and precentor.
Accordingly, when Doctor Chirnside took up his psalter, the young lady
at the organ leaned back nonchalantly; Andrew Kilninver stirred
importantly in his seat, tuning-fork in hand; and the choir--highly
scented shop-girls and farmers' daughters, assisted by overheated young
men in Sunday "blacks" and choker collars--braced themselves with the
air of people upon whose shoulders the credit, and maybe redemption, of
a whole parish rests.
There is something peculiarly majestic about the manner in which Doctor
Chirnside opens his morning service. I believe that, in his view, the
unaccompanied psalm is the one relic of pure orthodoxy preserved by him
against the modern passion for hymns, organs, printed prayers, anthems,
and "brighter worship" generally. That graceless young ruffian, Roy
Birnie, gives an imitation of his performance which is celebrated
throughout the parish. It runs something like this:
"Ha-humm! Brethren, we will commence the public worrship of God, this
Lord's Day, by singing to His praise part of the Seven Hundred and
Forty-Ninth Psalm. Psalm Seven Hundred and Forty-Nine. Ha-humm! The
Church is full cold. Will Mr. John Buncle, of Sandpits, kindly rise in
his pew and adjust the open window west of him? (_Imitation of Mr. John
Buncle, petrified with confusion, adjusting the window._) We will
commence at verrse One Hundred and Seventy-Nine:
_I, like a bottle, have been_
_With Thy great maircy filled,_
_Oh, hold me up, hold Thou me up,_
_That I may not be spilled!_
And so on until the end of the Psalm. Psalm Seven Hundred and
Forty-Nine. The Seven Hundred and Forty-Ninth Psalm. _Ping_! _Ping_!
_Ping_! (_The last is supposed to be Kilninver getting to work with his
tuning-fork._) Tune, Winchester, '_I, like a bottle..._'"
I am a devout person, but I am afraid it does sound something like that.
However, one feels less inclined to smile when the actual singing of the
psalm commences. The Metrical Psalms, sung in unison, without
accompaniment, and with strong, rugged voices predominating, are
Scottish history. They bring back the days when people did not sing
them in churches, but on hillsides in remote fastnesses, at services
conducted by a man with a price on his head, guarded by sentries lying
prone upon the skyline, on the look-out for Claverhouse and his
troopers. That is why I, coming of the stock I do, like to hear the
opening psalm at Craigfoot.
The start, as a rule, is not all what it might be, for the Scots are a
slow-moving race; and naturally it takes a little time to catch up with
Andrew Kilninver and his comparatively nimble crew. But about the middle
of the second verse we draw together, and the unsophisticated rhymes,
firmly welded now with the grand old melody, go rolling upwards and
outwards through the open door and windows, over one of the fairest and
richest farming districts in the world:
_They drop upon the pastures wide,_
_That do in deserts lie;_
_The little hills on every side_
_Rejoice right pleasantly._
_With flocks the pastures clothed be,_
_The vales with corn are clad;_
_And now they shout and sing to Thee,_
_For Thou hast made them glad._
I am a soldier, and have been a soldier all my life, so when I encounter
an assemblage of my fellow countrymen, I naturally scrutinise them from
a recruiting sergeant's point of view. (At least, Eve always said I
did.) And what a sight that congregation presented! I have encountered
many types in the course of my duty. I know our own Highlanders; I know
the French Zouave regiments; a year or two ago--in nineteen-eleven I
think it was--I saw the Prussian Guard march past the Emperor during
Grand Manoeuvres; I have ridden with the Canadian North-West Mounted
Police; I have seen a Zulu impi on the move in South Africa. All have
their own particular incomparabilities--dash, endurance, resource,
initiative--but for sheer physical solidity and fighting possibilities,
commend me to the peaceful yeoman-farming stock of the Lowlands of
Scotland. My own regiment is mainly recruited from this district, so
perhaps I am prejudiced. Still, if ever the present era of
international restlessness crystallises into something definite; if ever
The Day, about which we hear so much and know so little, really
arrives--well, I fancy that that heavily-built, round-shouldered throng
down there, with their shy, self-conscious faces and their uncomfortable
Sunday clothes, will give an account of themselves of which their sonsy,
red-cheeked wives and daughters will have no cause to feel ashamed.
*III*
After the psalm we settle down to the Doctor's first prayer. There are
two of these, separated by an entire chapter of the Old Testament--a
fairly heavy sandwich, sometimes. The first prayer lasts a quarter of
an hour, the second, eight minutes. The first prayer takes the form of
an interview between Doctor Chirnside and his Maker--an interview so
confidential in character and of a theological atmosphere so rarefied
that few of us are able to attain to it. So our attention occasionally
drops to lower altitudes. The second prayer is more adapted to humble
intellects. The Doctor refers to it as the Prayer of Intercession. In it
he prays for everything and everybody, beginning with the British Empire
and ending with the Dorcas Society. Under the cloak of Intercession,
too, he is accustomed, very ingeniously, to introduce, and comment upon,
topics of current interest. Occasionally he springs upon us a genuine
and delightful surprise. The parish still remembers the Sunday morning
in eighteen-ninety-four upon which the Doctor, in his customary
intercession for the Royal Family, got in twenty-four hours ahead of
Monday's _Scotsman_ by concluding his orison: "And we invoke Thy special
blessing, O Lord, upon the infant son (and ultimate heir to the Throne
of this country) born, _as Thou knowest, Lord_, to Her Majesty's
grandchildren, the Duke and Duchess of York, at an early hour this
morning!"
But the first prayer, as already indicated, holds no surprises. I am
therefore accustomed to devote this period to a detailed inspection of
the congregation below--an occupation which has the special merit of
being compatible with an attitude of profound devotion.
Perhaps I ought to explain how it is that I, a mere visitor, should take
such a deep interest in Craigfoot and its associations. The fact is, I
am no visitor. I was born here, not ten miles away, at The Heughs, a
little manor among the foothills, where my brother Walter and his lusty
family still flourish. As a younger son I was destined from birth for
the Army; but by the time I had passed into Sandhurst, and on to the
lordly exile of our Army in India, I knew every acre of the district. I
had tumbled into burns and been kicked off ponies all over the county.
I knew everybody who lived there, from our local overlord, the Earl of
Eskerley, down to Bob Reid, the signal porter at the railway
station--who, being well aware that I went fishing every Wednesday at
Burling, two stations up the line, was accustomed on those occasions to
refuse right of way to the morning train, palpitating for its connection
with the junction ten miles distant, until my tardy bicycle swept round
the curve of the road and deposited me panting on the platform.
Inevitably, the day came when I fell in love--with Eve. That was no
novelty for Eve; for she and her elder sister, Diana, had most of us on
a string in those days. Baronrigg was the lodestone of every young
spark in the county, except during those dismal months in summer when
our twin divinities were spirited away to London for the season. Some
were able to follow them there; but I was not. Neither was Eric
Bethune. Regimental duty forbade, though we did what we could with the
generous leave available in the early nineties.
Ultimately, I was taken and Eric was left. Why Eve took me I have never
known. I was only an infantry subaltern, and a younger son into the
bargain. But she picked me out from the crowd, and waited for me, bless
her! for seven years. My theory was, and is, that a woman only marries
a man for one of two reasons--either because he gives her "a thrill," or
because she thinks he requires taking care of. There was no doubting
Eve's reason for marrying me. She took care of me for one rapturous
year; and then she left me, and took her baby with her. To-day both lie
in the private burial-ground of Baronrigg. That is why I always accept
Tom's annual invitation to stay there at Easter, rather than go to my
brother Walter's cheery but distracting establishment at The Heughs.
That is enough about me. Now let us get back to the congregation.
It was a representative throng, yet not entirely representative. For
one thing, our chief territorial and social luminary, Lord Eskerley, is
a member of the Church of England; and when he goes to church at
all--which is usually just after a heart-attack, or just before a
General Election--he goes to Fiddrie. For another, no Scottish
assemblage can be counted truly representative which takes no account of
the adherents of Holy Church--as a peep into Father Kirkpatrick's
tightly-packed conventicle on the other side of the glen would tell us.
But when all is said, the parish church is still the focus of Scottish
rural life, and I was well content with the selection of friends who
filled the pews below me.
There was old General Bothwell, of Springburn, a Mutiny and Crimean
veteran--altogether quite a celebrity among a generation which knows
nothing of actual warfare. (After all, the South African affair touched
our civil community very lightly.) Beside the General sits his son
Jack, home on leave from India. He commands a company in a Pathan
regiment. The General is trying hard not to look proud of Jack.
Just behind the Bothwells sit the Graemes, of Burling--Sir Alistair, his
Lady, and their three tall daughters, known and celebrated throughout
the county as "The Three Grenadiers." Across the aisle sits old Couper,
of Abbottrigg--the largest farmer in the district, and one of the best
curlers in Scotland--with his wife. The old couple are alone now, for
all their sons and daughters are married. However, a good many of them
are present in other parts of the church, holding a fidgety third
generation down in its seat.
Just in front of the Coupers I observe Mr. Gillespie, manager of our
branch of the Bank of Scotland, a man of immense discretion and many
secrets. With him, Mrs. Gillespie. Also the two Misses Gillespie,
locally and affectionately renowned as "Spot" and "Plain." I notice
that their son, Robert, who is studying for the Ministry in distant
Edinburgh, is with them for the week-end.
Farther back, at the end of a long pew, just under the public gallery,
sits Galbraith, our chemist and druggist, a small man with a heavy
cavalry moustache and--the not uncommon accompaniment of a small man--a
large wife and twelve children. The children fall into two groups,
separated by an interval of seven years. The first group--four in
number, and somewhat wizened in appearance--were born and reared upon
the slender profits of a retail business in tooth-brushes, patent
medicines, and dog-soap. The other eight--fat and well-liking--began to
appear serially after Mr. Galbraith had amassed a sudden and unexpected
fortune out of a patent sheep-dip of his own invention, which has made
the name of Galbraith celebrated as far away as Australia.
Over the way from Galbraith, in a side pew, sits Shanks, the joiner. He
is a poor creature, lacking in ability either to ply his trade or invent
reasons for not doing so. Eve used to say that Shanks never by any
chance acceded to a professional summons, and that his excuses were
three in number, and were employed in monotonous rotation--firstly, that
he had swallowed some tacks; secondly, that he had had to bury "a
relation of the wife's"; thirdly, that one of his numerous offspring had
been overtaken by a fit.
Behind Shanks sit the Misses Peabody. They are the daughters of a
retired merchant of Leith, who died many years ago. They inhabit a
villa on the outskirts of our little town, live on an annuity, and exist
precariously in that narrow social borderland which divides town-folk
from gentry.
Passing on, I note that Mr. Menzies, Lord Eskerley's factor, has at last
provided himself with a wife--a stranger to me. Well, Menzies is well
connected and has an excellent house; so, doubtless, the lady will be
comfortable. But I wish he had not gone so far afield. There is
nothing wrong with the girls in this district, Menzies! _Experto
crede_!
My eye wanders on over the bowed heads. Finally it reaches the third pew
from the front, and I am aware of the handsome presence of my friend
Eric Bethune, of Buckholm. Beside him, bolt upright, with a critical
eye fixed upon Doctor Chirnside, sits his eccentric lady mother. Eric's
attitude is more devout, but I observe that his head is turned sideways,
and that he is grinning sympathetically at Tommy Milroy over the way,
whose little nose is being relentlessly pressed to the book-board by an
iron maternal hand encased in a hot black kid glove.
Eric, although he is as old as myself, is still very much of a boy--or
perhaps I ought, in strict candour, to say a child. He was a child at
school--in his exuberant vitality, his sudden friendships, his
petulance. He was a child at Sandhurst; he was a child as a
subaltern--at times, almost a baby. But he has been my friend all my
life, and I admire him more than any man I know; perhaps because he
possesses all the qualities which I lack. He is tall and debonair; I
am--well, neither. He is impulsive, frank, and popular; I am cautious,
reticent and regarded as a little difficult. (This is not true really,
only there is no Eve now to tell me what to say to people.)
But, above all, Eric is a soldier. In the South African War he was
Adjutant of our Second Battalion. They were sent out rather late, and
only got to work after Paardeburg. I was with the other battalion, and
saw nothing of Eric, but his Colonel considered him the smartest
Adjutant in the Division, and recommended him for the D.S.O. He got it,
but always declared that he had had no chance to earn it, except by
instructing the men very thoroughly in what is vulgarly known as the art
of "Spit and Polish." Certainly they were the best turned-out crowd I
have ever seen, when they marched through the streets of Edinburgh on
their return.
Directly after that we both went back to India. We were anxious to go.
Eve had died just before I sailed for South Africa; Diana had broken off
her engagement with Eric and married Tom Birnie three years earlier.
But I did not stay in India very long. I was restless for home again;
and, having decided that the Regular Army could now get along without my
services, I sent in my papers and settled in London. When Roy was nine
years old his mother followed her sister. She had survived Eve only six
years, for the same lung trouble had marked them down long ago. After
that Eric felt that he could come back to Buckholm. So he came, and
they gave him command of the Regimental Depot, with the rank of Major.
The Depot is not far away from here, and he is able to join his mother
at Buckholm for much of the time. He is quite his old self now, and he
has made the Third Battalion a marvel of smartness and efficiency. But
there is one house which he never visits--Baronrigg. I do not blame
him. His memories there are not like mine. Moreover, besides hating
Tom Birnie, he dislikes Roy. I am surprised at this, because the boy is
the image of his mother. Still, I suppose a man may be forgiven for
disliking a boy who should have been his own son, but is not. Anyhow, I
know I shall not meet Eric during my stay at Baronrigg, so I have
arranged to lunch at Buckholm after church to-day.
That covers the congregation, I think. (Doctor Chirnside is working up
to his peroration, and in a few minutes we shall be erect again.) I
look over them once more. Altogether, a sturdy, satisfactory
assemblage, from laird to ploughman. We have not changed much in the
last two hundred years, nor will during the next two hundred, so far as
I can see. We are Conservatives of Conservatives, although we return a
Liberal. We shall go on tilling the fat soil, and raising fat cattle,
and marrying young, and having big families, and sending a few of the
boys into the Army, and a few to the Colonies, and keep the rest at home
to marry strapping girls and have more big families, until the end of
time.
We are a little disturbed, to be sure, at the present state of the world
outside. A street-bred Government, with both eyes on the industrial
vote, has recently compelled us, even us, to disburse our hard-earned
pennies upon stamps, to be stuck at frequent intervals upon an
objectionable card. We are informed that this wasteful and uncongenial
exercise is designed to bestow upon us the benefits of insurance against
sickness--upon us, who are never either sick or sorry; and if ever we
are, are taken care of (under an unwritten compact of immemorial
antiquity) by the employers who have known us and ours for generations
back. Other political upheavals are agitating the country, but they
leave us cold in comparison with this superfluous imposition of
benevolence.
But still, politicians are always with us, and must be endured; so what
matter? Our valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing,
and even with Income Tax at one and twopence in the pound, things might
be worse. After all, we have our health, and perhaps it is our duty to
contribute to the insurance of those sickly city folk. A few stamps are
not a very high price to pay for peace and prosperity and sleepy
contentment in the heart of the British Empire.
*IV.*
... I think I must have begun to nod a little. It was a warm morning,
and the sunshine and the songs of the birds without, and the
confidential rumblings of Doctor Chirnside within, had exercised a
soporific effect. But I opened my eyes with a jerk, and observed that
the Netherby pew was occupied.
Netherby has stood empty so long that it is quite a shock to see its pew
inhabited at all. It is a conspicuous pew, in the corner of the church,
to the left of the pulpit, and my unregenerate nephews and nieces call
it "The Loose Box." It is built in the form of a hollow square, and is
surrounded by dingy red rep curtains, which enable its occupants to gaze
upon the officiating clergy without themselves being gazed upon by the
congregation. However, the pew is overlooked by the Baronrigg gallery.
This morning the Netherby pew contained seven occupants, humped devoutly
round the square table in the centre. Upon the table reposed a
gentleman's silk hat, or topper. Now, in this part of the country,
gentlemen do not wear silk hats on Sunday. They wear bowlers, or
Homburg hats, or even motoring caps. Neither do they wear frock-coats,
like the obvious proprietor of "The Loose Box." He was a squarely-built
man, and from what I could see of his face, he wore mutton-chop
whiskers. There was also a middle-aged lady in a rather unsuitable hat.
There were two boys of nineteen or twenty. There were two or three small
children, constrained and restless. There was an elderly man with a
beard like a goat's, gazing upwards at Doctor Chirnside with an air
which struck me as critical. One felt that he would have taken the
Doctor's place without any pressing whatsoever. I put him down for a
visitor of some kind.
And there was a girl. At least, there was a hat--a big black tulle
hat--and I assumed that there was a girl underneath it. I could see her
frock, which was white. So were her gloves, which extended above her
elbows. Her hands were long and slim. I began to feel curious to see
her face.
Suddenly I realised that I was not alone in this ambition. On my left,
that young rascal Roy was hanging outward and downward at a dangerous
and indecorous angle, in a characteristically thorough attempt to look
under the brim of the black tulle hat. Needless to say, in romantic
enterprises of this kind, competition, especially with the young, makes
one feel merely foolish, so I resumed my normal position and closed my
eyes with an air of severe reproof.
Almost directly afterwards the First Prayer came to a conclusion, and we
all sat up. Simultaneously the girl in the hat lifted her head. The
Parish Church is small and the range was comparatively short. For a
moment her face was upturned in our direction. I heard Roy give a gasp
of admiration.
"Let us read together," suggested the indefatigable Doctor Chirnside,
"in the Fifty-Fifth Chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. Chapter
Fifty-Five. The first verse. _Ho, every one that thirsteth..._"
But I am afraid I was not listening. I was watching the girl's face--as
well I might, for it was the face of a flower. She leaned back in her
seat against the wall, and composed herself for the Fifty-Fifth Chapter
of Isaiah. Suddenly, for some reason, she lifted her head again. This
time her eyes encountered Master Roy's honest and rapturous gaze. They
fell immediately, but up from the open throat of her white Sunday frock,
over her face, and right into the roots of her abundant fair hair, ran a
vivid burning blush.
I looked at Roy. He was crimson too.
Spring! Spring! Spring!
*CHAPTER II*
*REBELLIOUS MARJORIE*
*I*
While Sunday at Baronrigg was a day of mild tribulation, Sunday at
Netherby was a day of wrath. It was a direct survival of the darkest
period of the Victorian era.
Albert Clegg--or, rather, Mr. Albert Clegg--believed in taking no risks
with his immortal soul, or with those of his family. He also believed
in being master in his own house. Accordingly, when he bade his
household remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, the household, as
they say in the Navy, "made it so." The necessary standard of sanctity
was attained, firstly, by the removal on Saturday night to locked
cupboards of everything in the shape of frivolous or worldly literature;
in place of which there appeared a few "Sunday" books--the latest
record, mayhap, of missionary endeavour, together with one or two godly
romances of a rather distressing character. Periodical literature was
represented by _The Sunday at Home_, while unsecular comment on current
events was furnished by that brilliantly ingenious combination of broad
religion and literary entertainment, _The British Weekly_.
The necessary atmosphere having been duly created, those two powerful
engines, Prayer and Fasting, were now set in motion. The latter, to be
just, was of little account: its operation merely involved the omission
of afternoon tea and the substitution of cold supper for ordinary
dinner. But the devotional programme of the Clegg Sunday was an exacting
business. It opened with family prayers at eight-thirty a.m., including
an extemporary supplication by the master of the house. Catechism came
at nine-thirty, Church at eleven o'clock. The household were conveyed
thither in the Rolls-Royce. In the course of time, as the glory of that
extremely new vehicle faded, and the task of making an impression upon
the neighbourhood accomplished itself, the young Cleggs gloomily foresaw
a still further extension of Sabbath observance, in the direction of
pedestrian exercise. Meanwhile, they covered the three miles to church
in the car, and were thankful for small mercies.
After one o'clock dinner, the family sang hymns. Marjorie
accompanied--not very convincingly, owing to the presence of a
surreptitious novel or volume of poetry propped upon the music-rest
beside the hymn-book. You cannot engage in psalmody and mental culture
simultaneously with any degree of plausibility. The younger children
sang a shrill soprano; brothers Amos and Joe growled self-consciously an
octave--sometimes two octaves--lower. Sister Amy--a plain but intensely
pious child of fourteen--offered a windy and unmelodious contribution
which she termed "seconds." Mrs. Clegg sang--as she did everything
else--dutifully, and slightly apologetically. Mr. Clegg sang what he
had imagined for more than thirty years to be tenor, inciting his
fellow-choristers to continued effort by beating time with his
hymn-book, until post-prandial drowsiness intervened, and he retired to
bed, with all his clothes on, for his Sabbath nap. During this interval
the family enjoyed a slight respite from Sabbath observance--all, that
is, but the younger members, who received instructions in Biblical
history from two small and not uninteresting manuals, entitled _Peep of
Day_ and _Line Upon Line_, with maternal additions and elucidations of a
somewhat surprising character.
At six o'clock the chauffeur was once more called upon to observe the
Sabbath by conveying the family to evening service at the parish church.
The small fry, in consideration of _Peep of Day_ and _Line Upon Line_,
were permitted to go to bed.
After cold supper at eight-thirty, the devotional exercises of the day
petered out with a second instalment of family prayers, including what
brother Joe (Marjorie's accomplice and pet) was wont to describe as "a
final solo from Pa." After that, the exhausted household retired to
rest, leaving the master to relax himself from the spiritual tension of
the day with weak whisky-and-water.
Albert Clegg had bought Netherby a year previously. He came from the
North of England, and was deeply interested in Tyneside shipping. His
father had been a small tradesman in Gateshead. Albert's initial
opportunities had not been too great, but he possessed two priceless
natural assets--superb business capacity and a sincere dislike for
recreation or amusement of any kind. At twenty-one he was a clerk in a
rather moribund shipping business. At twenty-five he was managing
clerk. In that capacity he took it upon himself, unofficially, to
investigate the books of the firm--he was the sort of young man who
would joyfully devote a series of fine Saturday afternoons to such an
enterprise--and was ultimately able to expose a leakage of profits which
had kept the venerable and esteemed cashier of the office in
considerably greater comfort than his employers for the past ten years.
Needless to say, Albert was the next cashier. At thirty he was junior
partner and practically dictator. A few years later his exhausted
seniors gave up the struggle, and allowed themselves to be bought out.
Albert promptly called in his younger brother Fred, who, up to date, had
been dividing his undoubted talents fairly evenly between jerry-building
and revivalist preaching--a combination of occupations which enabled him
to
_Compound for sins he was inclined to,_
_By damning those he had no mind to--_
thus marking himself down as an ultimate and inevitable ornament of our
National Legislature. Fred was taken into partnership. From that day
the firm of Clegg Brothers went from strength to strength.
Albert Clegg's first wife was what Lady Christina would have described
as "a young person of his own station in life." She had died a few
years after the birth of Master Amos. The present Mrs. Clegg was a
member of an aristocratic but impoverished family named Higgie, of
Tynemouth, and she came to Albert just at a time when his rising
fortunes called for a helpmeet possessed of the social accomplishments
which he himself so entirely lacked. On his second marriage, he removed
from Gateshead to a large house in the pleasant suburb of Jesmond, and
lived there for twenty years, while the Clegg firm prospered and the
Clegg family multiplied. As already foreshadowed, brother Fred's
combined reputations as a captain of industry and a silver-tongued
orator presently wafted him into Parliament, where he established a
reputation for verbosity and irrelevance remarkable even in that
eclectic assembly.
That is all that need be said about Mr. Albert Clegg for the present.
The main purpose of this brief summary of his character and achievements
is to provide the reader with some sort of key--in so far as keys are of
any use at all where feminine locks are concerned--to the character of
that rather unexpected young person, his daughter Marjorie. For it was
from her father, most undoubtedly, that Marjorie derived her initiative
and determination. From her mother she seemed to have inherited
nothing, except her Christian name and her naturally waved hair.
Everything else--her superb body, her absolute honesty, her lively sense
of humour, her critical attitude towards certain existing things, and,
above all, her warm, impulsive young heart--came from that one supreme
gift of God which is entirely our own--set high out of reach of those
twin busybodies, Heredity and Environment--Personality.
*II*
On the particular spring morning with which we are already concerned,
Marjorie made a bad start. She missed prayers altogether, and was late
for breakfast into the bargain. To crown her iniquity, she entered the
dining-room whistling a secular air, with her arms full of daffodils.
Whistling is at all times an unladylike accomplishment, even though one
whistle like a mavis. Moreover, it was Sunday. Furthermore, Uncle Fred
was present on a visit, and one has to keep up appearances before
relations, however despicable.
"I am not at all satisfied with Doctor Chirnside," Mr. Clegg was
remarking. "But we must employ such instruments as lie to our hands."
"That is very true," remarked Uncle Fred, making a mental note of this
apt expression. Uncle Fred was an industrious gleaner of other people's
impromptus, with a view to parliamentary requirements.
"As you know," continued Mr. Clegg, "our own Body is not represented in
this county. The nearest United Free Church--which conforms most closely
to our own beliefs--is fifteen miles away. In any case, I consider that
a household should, as far as possible, worship in its own district."
"Quite right," said Uncle Fred. "Like a constituency."
"Besides, we would not get to know people any other way," interposed
Mrs. Clegg timidly.
"My dear," said Mr. Clegg severely, "we cannot worship God and Mammon.
And I will thank you for another cup of tea. John, my boy, eat up that
crust; I know of many a poor lad that would be glad of it. The only
other places of worship within easy reach," he continued, "besides the
parish church (Established, of course), are a Papist Chapel, Burling
way, which I do not go to very often"--Mr. Clegg paused and assumed a
wintry smile, to indicate that he spoke sarcastically--"and the English
Episcopal Church at Fiddrie--where I would as soon see any belongings of
mine trying to disport themselves as in the Church of Rome itself."
Mr. Clegg paused, and Uncle Fred laughed sardonically. Mrs. Clegg, who
all her life had hankered after the comfortable consolations of Anglican
ritual and the social cachet of an Anglican connection, smothered a
sigh, for she knew to what address her husband's remark was directed.
At this moment, as related, Marjorie tramped in, whistling, with her
daffodils.
"Hallo! am I late?" she inquired. "I am so sorry: I was out gathering
these. Good morning, everybody!"
She sat down amid a deathly silence.
"What were you all talking about?" Marjorie rattled on. "Church, wasn't
it? I wonder how many hours old Chirnside will preach to-day? Oh, that
awful children's sermon! I don't think it's sportsmanlike to make you
listen to two sermons in one morning. My idea is that during the
grown-ups' sermon the children should be allowed to go out and play, and
that during the children's sermon the grown-ups should have their choice
of going out too, or lying right down in the pews and having a nap!"
She gazed out of the window, over the sunny landscape. "I know which I
should choose!"
"My girl," interposed Mr. Clegg, "if you talk in that strain I shall
regret more than ever that I allowed your mother to send you to that
school in Paris."
Marjorie had been "finished"--which means "begun"--at Neuilly. It is
difficult to understand why her father had sent her there, except that
it was expensive. Mr. Clegg had long transferred the blame for this
lapse of judgment to his wife.
During those two quickening years, Marjorie, though hedged about by
every preventive device known to the scholastic hierarchy, had fairly
wallowed in Life--Life as opposed to Existence. She had sucked in Life
through her pores; she had scrutinised Life through her shrewd blue
eyes; she had masticated Life with her vigorous young teeth. Life in
Paris, even as viewed from the ranks of a governess-guided "crocodile"
in the Bois de Boulogne, or a processional excursion to the Tuileries,
is a stimulating and disturbing compound, especially to unemancipated
seventeen. At any rate, Marjorie had returned to her home possessing
certain characteristics which had not been apparent when she left it.
These were, roughly, three in number:
Firstly, a passionate interest in the world and its contents. She was
ablaze with enthusiasm for all mankind. She wanted to do something--to
be a hospital nurse, a journalist, a chorus girl, a barmaid--anything,
in fact, that would bring her into contact with her fellow-creatures
and, if possible, enable her to make herself uncomfortable on their
behalf. She was a Giver, through and through.
Secondly, an entire lack of sentimentality. Young men made no appeal to
her. She had never flirted in her life: she did not know how. She made
friendships at a rush--many of them with boys of her own age--but if any
young man flattered himself that he had made a tender impression, he was
soon woefully undeceived. Marjorie was purely maternal. If she was kind
to a young man it was because she felt sorry for him--sorry for his
adorable clumsiness, his transparency, his helplessness, his lack of
finesse. Young men, as a class, never gave her a thrill. She loved her
own sex too, especially the self-conscious and foolish. Marjorie's main
instinct at that time, and indeed through all her life, was to interpose
her own beautiful and vigorous young personality between the weaker
vessels of her acquaintance and the hard knocks of this world.
Thirdly, a strongly critical attitude towards the theory that children
owe a debt of gratitude to their parents for the mere fact of having
been brought by them into existence. Loyal she was, because it was her
nature. Dutiful she was prepared to be. She was impulsively
affectionate always; but her inborn sense of equity was strong.
Moreover, for two years she had associated with new companions--members
of another world than her own--either young girls of the English upper
class, who were accustomed to regard their parents as amiable but
unsophisticated accomplices in misdemeanour, or maidens from New York
and Philadelphia, who appeared to entertain no opinion of their parents,
as such, at all. This association had shaken to its foundation the law
of her childhood--that children existed entirely for the convenience of
their parents, and must expect no consideration, no indulgence, and,
above all, no _camaraderie_ from those aloof and exalted beings. In the
spring of nineteen-fourteen Youth had not yet been called in to rescue
Age from extinction.
Such was Marjorie at eighteen--a dangerous mixture, particularly liable
to explode under compression.
She had risen early this Sunday morning in order to ramble through the
woods and compose her turbulent spirit. The previous evening had
witnessed a sleep-destroying interview between her father and herself.
After prayers, while Mr. Clegg, according to his custom, was setting the
markers in the great family Bible for the following morning's devotions,
Marjorie had seated herself beside him at the head of the library table,
with the air of one determined upon a plunge. She waited until the
servants had filed out and the rest of the family were dispersed. Then
she came to the attack with characteristic promptness.
"Father," she said, "may I go and be trained as a hospital nurse?"
"No," replied Mr. Clegg, without hesitation or heat; "you may not."
"May I learn shorthand and typewriting, then?"
"No."
"May I go and take training in some profession? Any kind," she added
eagerly, "as long as it is useful."
"No," said Mr. Clegg for the third time. Then with the air of a just
person patient under importunity:
"Why?"
"For two reasons," said the girl. "I want to be useful, and I want to
be independent."
For answer, Mr. Clegg reopened the Bible, and with the accuracy of long
practice came almost immediately upon what he wanted--certain
illuminated manuscript pages occurring between the Old and New
Testaments. There were six of these pages. Two were allotted to the
Births, two to the Marriages, and two to the Deaths of the house of
Clegg. Albert Clegg turned to the Births, and ran his finger down the
list. There were quite a number of names, for the Bible was a family
inheritance.
Presently he found what he wanted. A line in red ink had been drawn
right across the page under the name of his youngest brother, Uncle
Fred, to indicate the end of a generation. Below this line was written,
in his own neat business hand:
_Children of Albert and Mary Clegg._
This title-heading had erred on the side of plurality, for beneath it
came but one entry--that of the birth of Albert's eldest son, Amos, at
Gateshead, upon the tenth of March, Eighteen Ninety-two. A second
heading followed immediately:
_Children of Albert and Marjorie Clegg._
After this came quite a satisfying list. First, Joe's name--it proved
to be Joshua, in full--recorded upon the twelfth of August, Eighteen
Ninety-four. Then came the entry he was seeking:
_Marjorie; born at "The Laburnums," Jesmond, April twenty-fourth,
Eighteen Ninety-Six_.
Albert Clegg surveyed his daughter over the top of his spectacles, which
had been assumed for purposes of perusal, and performed a small exercise
in mental arithmetic.
"That makes you eighteen," he observed.
Marjorie nodded. At this point, to her intense annoyance, the egregious
Uncle Fred re-entered the room and joined the Board.
"Girls of eighteen--" began her father.
"Young ladies of eighteen," amended the Member of Parliament.
"--have no call to be independent," continued Albert Clegg; "and if they
want to be of some use they can stay at home and help their mothers, as
God meant them to."
"Mother," riposted Marjorie, "has more servants than she knows what to
do with, and she hates interference with her house management, anyway.
I have been home now for three months, honestly trying to help, and
there isn't a single thing for me to do. There are hundreds of things I
can do away from here. I do not ask to go out and do them now, but I do
ask to be trained in something useful, so that when the time comes--"
"When what time comes?" asked her father quickly.
"The time when it will be a living impossibility for me to stick it out
any longer," said Marjorie frankly. "Do you think I can sit here for
ever"--with one comprehensive gesture she summarised Netherby, with its
stodgy gentility, its squirrel-cage routine, and its cast-iron
piety--"twiddling my thumbs? Every girl has a _right_ to make herself
efficient, nowadays."
"What comes before our rights," said Albert Clegg, "is our duty--our
grateful duty to the parents that brought us up."
"_Honour thy father and thy mother_," chaunted the apposite Uncle Fred,
"_that thy days--_"
Marjorie sat up.
"I hope I do honour my father and mother," she said. "I am fond of them
both: they have been kind to me all my life. But I do not see why I
should be particularly grateful to them for bringing me up. After
all"--turning to her father--"you _had_ to, hadn't you? You were
responsible for my being here, weren't you? It seems to me that parents
owe a debt to their children--not children to their parents!"
This amazingly audacious deliverance--and one had to be familiar with
the Clegg tradition to realise how audacious it was--produced a stunning
silence. Uncle Fred, fumbling in his repertoire for something really
commensurate, breathed alarmingly. Presently Albert Clegg's heavy voice
broke in:
"A debt? You mean I owe _you_ a--a debt of gratitude?"
"Not gratitude," replied Marjorie. "Something bigger--honour. I think
that parents owe it to their children, having brought them into the
world--and all that sort of thing," she added a little shyly, "to give
them a chance to live the sort of life that appeals to them."
Uncle Fred was ready now.
"The French," he announced, "are a giddy and godless race!"
But neither Albert Clegg nor his daughter took any notice. Wide apart
as their natures lay, they had one point in common--inflexible
determination. Clegg surveyed Marjorie's curving lips and hot blue eyes
for a moment, and asked:
"So you want to live your own life, eh?"
Marjorie nodded.
"Yes," she said. "At least, I don't want to rush off and live it right
away; but I do think I ought to be given sufficient--" she hesitated for
a word.
"Equipment?" suggested her father.
"Rope?" amended Uncle Fred.
Marjorie nodded to her father again.
"Yes," she said, "sufficient equipment. A girl ought to be capable of
doing something. I have told you some of the things a girl might learn
to do, but there are lots of others. Even if she could support herself
on the Stage it would be something."
"_The Stage?_"
Marjorie had exploded a bombshell this time. Uncle Fred's goat-beard
dropped upon his shirt front, and waggled helplessly. Albert Clegg
gazed at his daughter long and fixedly. Then he pulled the Bible
towards him again, and turned back a page or two in the family record.
He twisted the great volume round, and pushed it in his daughter's
direction and pointed.
"Look at that," he said.
Marjorie looked. Upon the page of births, near the bottom of the list
of her father's brothers and sisters, she saw a horizontal black
strip--perhaps a quarter of an inch high--extending the full width of
the page, where an entry in the record had been crossed out again, and
again, and again, by a thick quill pen. She had seen it before, and had
asked what it meant--without success. Now apparently she was to know.
"That," said Albert Clegg, "was my youngest sister."
"Your Aunt Eliza," added Uncle Fred.
"When she was nineteen," continued Clegg, "she ran away from home--to go
on the Stage."
"Hoo! Where?" asked Marjorie, intensely interested.
"London, my father thought; but he never enquired."
"He never--? You mean--?"
"He blotted her name out of the Book, and it was never mentioned in our
home again."
"And not one of you ever tried to find what had become of her?"
"Certainly not."
Marjorie looked up at her father and drew a long and indignant breath.
"Well--!" she began.
"And now," explained Uncle Fred, "it's coming out in you, my girl."
What was coming out Marjorie did not trouble him to explain. It is
doubtful if she heard him at all.
"You mean to say," she said hotly to her father, "that your father let
his own daughter go right out of sight and mind, just like that?"
"He did. And I want to say to you, my daughter, that I think he was
right. This life is a preparation for the next. As we live now, so
shall we be rewarded hereafter. A few years' empty pleasure and
excitement are a poor exchange for an eternity of punishment."
"That's right! Take no risks!" recommended the sage at the other end of
the table. "Safety first!"
"The wisest life," concluded Mr. Clegg, "is the safe life. The safe
life is the Christian life, and the sure foundation of the Christian
life is family life--united, wisely controlled, family life. So you
will stay at home and live that life; and some day you will be grateful.
Now go to bed. I appreciate your honesty in telling me what is in your
mind, but my advice to you is forget all about it. Good-night!"
"Don't forget your prayers!" added Uncle Fred.
*III*
Marjorie finished her breakfast without further flippancy, and in due
course the family set out for church in the Rolls-Royce. That is to
say, Mr. and Mrs. Clegg, Uncle Fred, Marjorie, and the younger
children--Miss Amy, already mentioned, and Masters James and John, aged
ten and eight--were packed into that spacious vehicle and driven into
Craigfoot, with meticulous observation of the speed limit and all the
windows up. Amos and Joe followed in the two-seater. The servants had
the waggonette.
The parish kirk at Craigfoot has already been described in some detail,
but it may be worth while to record a few observations made from a
different angle.
From her seat against the wall in the high-curtained Netherby pew
Marjorie could see nothing but the last few rows of the public gallery
and the Baronrigg balcony. The latter fascinated her, for it was always
full--usually of interesting, and always of different, people. Sir
Thomas Birnie himself was a permanent figure. He sat in the left-hand
corner of the balcony, at the end nearest the pulpit. Consequently, his
severe gaze, concentrated upon the preacher, was averted from the other
occupants of the pew--a circumstance particularly agreeable to some of
the younger members of his numerous house parties. What fun they seemed
to have among themselves! How they giggled and whispered! Marjorie
longed and longed to be with them and of them, especially the girls of
her own age. They were so pretty, so overflowing with life, and dressed
so exactly right. For three months, ever since she came back from Paris
to find her family at Netherby, and the comfortable hospitality of a
Newcastle suburb exchanged for the frigid waiting-list of a county
society where one knew either everybody or nobody, she had taken weekly
notes of the ever-changing kaleidoscope in the Baronrigg pew--studying
faces, studying frocks, studying characters, and weaving histories round
each.
Some of the faces were quite familiar. This morning, for instance, in
the right-hand corner of the front row, sat Major Laing. He was a
frequent visitor at Baronrigg, and was a widower. Marjorie knew that his
wife had been a twin-sister of the late Lady Birnie. Then there were
Captain and Mrs. Roper. Captain Roper owned horses, and was here--in
fact, the whole house-party was here--for the Castleton Races, the
largest meeting on this side of the Border. They were constant
visitors. Then there was a pretty little woman in a big hat--Mrs.
Pomeroy, really--of which Marjorie took mental and quite unsabbatical
note. There was Arthur Langley, one of the best-known gentlemen riders
in England. There was a tall girl with fair hair--not unlike Marjorie
herself. Marjorie decided that this girl was dressed not quite right.
She would have been better placed in a fashionable West-end church in
London than in this grey, prim, Presbyterian conventicle. Probably her
first visit, Marjorie decided. She would know better next time.
Her shrewd gaze passed on.
And then, for the first time in her life, she saw Roy Birnie, home after
four months of toil and tribulation at an army crammer's. He had been
plucked out of Eton at Christmas to that end, Eton having decided that
it was a case for desperate measures. Three months of intensive
brain-culture had not affected his appearance, which was healthy, nor
his snub nose, nor his cheerful grin, nor the slight curl in his hair,
of which his mother had once been so proud and of which he was still so
ashamed. He sat on the left of Major Laing, his chin resting on the pew
ledge, his grey eyes devoutly closed, and his ebullient spirits
throttled down until it should please Doctor Chirnside to conclude the
first prayer. He was exactly like hundreds of other clean-run Public
School boys of eighteen. Marjorie had observed a dozen such in that
very pew during the past three months. But, as already noted, she had
never seen Roy.
That usually dependable organ, her heart, missed a couple of beats, and
she lowered her head quickly.
Presently, impelled by a power greater than herself (or, indeed, than
any of us), she lifted her head and looked up--only to find that Roy was
gazing straight down upon her.
For the moment her eyes were interlocked with his. Then suddenly she
became aware of the expression upon his face. The result has already
been described.
That evening, after prayers, her father motioned to her to stay behind.
When they were alone, he said:
"I hope you have given up that idea of yours about going away."
"Well," replied his daughter pleasantly, "I have postponed it, anyhow,
father."
"You have decided wisely for yourself," said Mr. Clegg.
Marjorie felt inclined to agree. But it is just possible that the
matter had been decided for her.
*CHAPTER III*
*DER TAG*
*I*
I suppose I may be forgiven for having felt a trifle preoccupied upon
the first of August, nineteen-fourteen. Most people did. But the
European situation, desperate though it was, was not sufficiently
desperate to excuse me for forgetting that the first Saturday in August
is the inexorable date of Lady Christina's annual garden party at
Buckholm. So I blundered right into it.
I am a methodical person, and I like to do the same things at the same
seasons. When it comes to revisiting the place of my birth, marriage
and, I hope, interment, I make a practice of going to Baronrigg for
Easter, Buckholm for the August cricket week, and The Heughs for the
woodcock. On this particular occasion I had travelled from King's Cross
by the early morning express--it leaves at five o'clock, and is the best
train in the day, if only people knew about it--with the result that by
four o'clock in the afternoon I found myself rumbling along in the
Craigfoot station fly, in lovely, summer weather, _en route_ for the
Buckholm cricket week. Lady Christina, whose foes--and their name is
legion, for they are many--accuse her of parsimony, does not usually
send the motor to the station to meet unencumbered males. She expects
such guests to cover the last stage of the journey at their own charges
and, in addition, to share the conveyance with such parcels and oddments
as may be lying in the station office consigned to Buckholm.
On this occasion Mr. Turnbull, the station master, apologetically packed
me into the fly in company with half a sheep and three bright new zinc
buckets, freshly arrived from the stores in Edinburgh.
In addition to my personal luggage, I was laden with a limp, damp
package, smelling to heaven of fish, which had borne me noisome company
all the way from my flat in Jermyn Street, having been delivered there
by an accomplice of Lady Christina's the night before my departure, with
the information that her ladyship had signified my willingness to convey
it to Buckholm.
But things might have been worse. Lady Christina had played this fish
trick upon me last year as well. (It is one of her most cherished
economies.) On that occasion the fish was delivered at my flat five
minutes after I had left for Scotland. It was marked "Very Important";
so the lift boy, a conscientious but unimaginative youth, sent for the
pass-key and carefully deposited the package in my hall cupboard. I
found it there, quite safe, when I returned from Scotland, three weeks
later.
The first warning that all was not well came to me when my equipage drew
up, to a symphonic accompaniment of rattling buckets, at the lodge gates
of Buckholm. These were held, like the bridge across the Tiber upon a
famous occasion, by a resolute trio composed of Mackellar, the
under-gardener, and Mesdames Elspeth and Maggie Mackellar, Mackellar's
daughters, aged about fourteen. Horatius Codes (Mackellar) informed me
that by her ladyship's orders it was "hauf-a-croon to get in," adding
(quite incomprehensibly at the moment) that it was "on account of the
Feet for Charity."
My contention that, as a guest, I was entitled to exemption, or, at
least, abatement of entrance fee, was overruled by a dour but respectful
majority of three to one. I handed Horatius Codes a reluctant
half-crown; Herminius and Spurius Lartius threw open the gates, and the
experienced animal between the shafts, unusually braced by the eerie
combination of sounds and smells conveyed to his senses by a following
breeze, delivered me at the front door, with much spurting of gravel,
four minutes later.
My worst fears were realised. Dotted about the wide lawns stood
bazaar-stalls, under striped awnings. The band of our Third Battalion
from the Depot was making music on the terrace, and fair women and brave
men drifted here and there, shying nervously at the stalls. Too late, I
understood Mackellar's reference to the "Feet for Charity." I had heard
from afar of the existence of this recurrent and gruesome festival for
many years. No one knew why it was held, or to what charity Lady
Christina devoted the proceeds. I once asked Lord Eskerley if he could
tell me. He replied that so far as he was aware it was a charity which
was not puffed up, and began at home. But Lord Eskerley is a cynical
old gentleman, and has been at war with Lady Christina for forty years.
A sympathetic butler received me and showed me my room. The ceremony
was purely formal: I knew the room almost as well as I knew him.
"It will go on until ten o'clock, sir," he announced mournfully, in
reply to my anxious query. "The present company will leave about seven;
but the townspeople begin to arrive then, when the admission fee is
reduced to sixpence. Are we going to have a flare-up, sir?"
"No. What's the use? We shall take it lying down, Bates, as usual.
You know Lady Christina!"
"I was referring, sir, to the European situation."
"Oh, sorry! Yes, it looks like it. If Germany joins Austria against
Russia, France is bound to come in on the side of Russia; and if France
comes in I fancy we shall all come in. And then God knows what will
happen! Is there much excitement down here?"
"Very little at present, sir--less than when the South African War was
imminent. But I understand that all the officers at the Depot are being
recalled from leave. You will find several of them here, sir."
"Mr. Eric is here, of course?"
"For the afternoon, sir, yes. But he sleeps at the Depot now. He is
very busy. You will change into flannels, I suppose?"
"Yes."
"It will fill out the time a bit, sir, before you need go outside. Her
Ladyship is not aware of your arrival. Shall I bring you a whisky and
soda?"
"Please."
By judicious dawdling I staved off the moment of my entrance into the
"Feet" for another half-hour. Then, fortified by Bates's timely
refreshment, I went downstairs to search for my hostess.
The garden was full of people--sirens in lace caps proffering useless
articles of merchandise; officers from the Depot; boys and girls just
home for the holidays; local dames talking scandal in deck-chairs. Upon
the distant croquet lawn I beheld my hostess engaged in battle. I could
hear her quite easily, shouting: "Now then--no treachery, no treachery!"
to her partner, a nervous subaltern who was furtively offering advice to
a pretty opponent. I remembered Bates's hint, also a maxim to the
effect that what is not missed is not mourned. Perhaps it would be
wiser--
"Yes, I would if I were you," remarked a raven's voice at my elbow.
"She hasn't seen you yet!"
Lord Eskerley is a very remarkable old gentleman, with certain
pronounced and rather alarming characteristics. In the first place, he
has an uncanny knack of reading one's thoughts, which enables him to
begin a conversation without wasting time over preliminaries, which he
hates. Secondly, he has a peculiar habit of side-tracking a subject
right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes because he is overtaken by
a reverie, sometimes because another subject occurs to him--to return
sooner or later, but always without warning, to the original topic--like
brackets in algebra. I once met him coming out of Brooks's Club, and
accompanied him down St. James's Street.
"Just been to a funeral," he announced; and forthwith subsided into a
brown study.
I offered a few appropriate observations regarding the uncertainty of
human life, and then proceeded to the political situation. He replied
with his usual incisiveness. Ten minutes later, as we passed through
the Horse Guards into Whitehall, he stopped abruptly, shook me by the
hand, and said:
"Good-bye! At Woking. We cremated him. Very interesting!"--and set off
at a brisk walk in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.
These conversational acrobatics call for considerable agility on the
part of the listener. The strain is increased by the circumstance that,
owing to his uncanny powers of memory, Lord Eskerley is able (and
usually proceeds) to take up a conversation with you exactly where he
left it off, sometimes after an interval of months. I was once walking
in the Park on Sunday morning with Lady Christina, whom I had
encountered for my sins after church. Near the Achilles statue I was
aware of Lord Eskerley, plunged in profound meditation. Suddenly he
looked up and saw me. He hurried forward and shook hands, utterly
ignoring Lady Christina.
"Courvoisier," he said, "not Martell!"--and departed towards Stanhope
Gate.
"What does the demented creature mean?" inquired Lady Christina.
I was able to explain that His Lordship had merely been unburdening
himself of a name which he had been unable to recall at the time of our
last conversation. Criminology is one of his numerous hobbies, and on
this occasion he had been trying to tell me the name of one of the last
murderers publicly hanged in England. (Thackeray went to see it.) All
he could recall, however, was that the murderer had been a valet in Park
Lane, and that his name had suggested liqueur brandy.
Decidedly he is a character. But he is a Pillar of State for all that,
and, unlike some Pillars of State, he has done the State some service.
He likes me, because I catch his references more quickly than most
people.
"Well," I rejoined, "suppose you assist me to find cover?"
"Certainly!" he replied. "By the way"--extending a hand--"how do you
do? Wonderful day! Now come and find a seat, and we will smoke."
We doubled a promontory of rhododendrons and sat down on a rustic bench,
somewhat apart from the turmoil. The only person in sight was a girl,
with very good ankles. (Eve always reproved me for beginning at that
end.) She was standing fifty yards away from us, under the dappled
shade of a copper-beech, surveying the scene--a little disconsolately, I
thought. My companion, as usual, was ready with an appropriate but
elliptic comment.
"Doesn't know he's here!" he observed.
"Why don't you tell her?" I asked.
"No need. They'll find one another all right."
"Who is she? And he?"
The question partly answered itself, for at that moment the girl turned
in our direction, and I recognised her as the unexpected young beauty of
the Netherby pew. Aware that two inquisitive dotards were leering at
her, she withdrew out of sight. Lord Eskerley did not answer the rest
of my question, because his thoughts had run ahead of the situation.
"There is something particularly cruel and brutal," he said, "about
British snobbery. If this had been America, her hostess would have
introduced her to every one in sight. (If she had not been prepared to
do so, she would not have invited her at all.) On the Continent, young
men would have led one another up, and clicked their heels together, and
announced their names, with a view to a fair exchange. But here--well,
she knows nobody, and every woman in the county will see to it that she
continues to know nobody. Practically, that was why she was invited
here. Tantalus, and so on!"
"I have often wondered," I said, "why we never go in for introducing.
It would save much discomfort to rustic persons like myself."
"I'll tell you. Roughly, our attitude is this. There are only a certain
number of people in this world who are anybody--Us, in fact. You are
either one of Us, or you are not. If you are, obviously there is no
need to introduce you. If you are not--well, an introduction would
imply that you are not one of Us! So it is almost more insulting to
introduce people than to ignore them. Very ingenious system: I wonder
what woman invented it! Still, _she's_ all right." (Apparently His
Lordship had switched back to the girl again.) "She and her mother only
get invited to Gather-'em-Alls and Charity Sales-of-Work, but most of
the boys have managed to scrape acquaintance with her by this time. She
fairly bowled them over at the Third Battalion Gymkhana a few weeks ago.
Looked a picture; won first prize for the motor obstacle race; and
fairly had to keep subalterns off with a stick! _And_ at least one
field officer!"
"You seem to have taken considerable notice of her," I observed.
"I take considerable notice of most things," replied the old gentleman
complacently, "even pretty girls. By the way, we are going to fight
them."
"The girls?"
"God forbid! Germany!"
"Oh!"
"Yes. I go back to town to-night. There seems little doubt now that we
shall come in. We can't leave France in the lurch. For one thing, we
should be skunks if we did"--Pillars of State can be surprisingly
colloquial in private life--"and for another, Germany means to gobble
the whole of Europe this time, including this pacific little island of
ours. It would be playing Germany's game to allow her to take us on one
after another, instead of all together. Of course, the
peace-at-any-price crowd are yowling; but--if we don't back our friends
on this occasion, we can never hold up our heads again. It is just
possible that the Germans may be fools enough to invade Belgium, in
which case even the Cocoa Eaters and the Intellectuals will have to stop
supporting them. But I think we shall fight anyhow. It will be a short
war, but it will be the bloodiest war ever fought."
"Why do you think it will be short?"
"Because it will be so expensive in money and men that no country will
be able to stand the racket for longer than a few months. Modern
weapons are so destructive, and modern warfare costs so much, that
before we know where we are one side will all be dead and the other side
bankrupt; so we shall _have_ to stop! The South African affair cost us
a quarter of a million a day, while it lasted. This enterprise may run
us into two, or even three millions. Think of that! Twenty millions a
week! A thousand millions a year! We can't do it! Neither can France!
Neither can Germany! No, it will be a short war. I am bound to admit
K. of K. doesn't agree with me. He puts it at three years. I lunched
with him two days ago. He was getting ready to go back to Egypt
then--sorely against the grain, naturally; but it did not seem to have
occurred to anybody to tell him to hold back for a week or two. We
can't allow him to go out of the country at present; the thing's
preposterous! Let me see, where was I?"
"Lunching with K."
"Oh, yes. He said three years. I asked why, and he replied that before
this war finished every single able-bodied man of the combatant nations
would be fighting in a national army, and it would take three years for
this country to put its full strength into the field. But of course K.
doesn't understand economic conditions. He's our greatest soldier, but
not an economist. Still, that's K.'s view. I don't agree with it, but
it's K.'s view. And if we go to war, K. will probably lead us; so we
must expect to provide for war on K.'s scale."
All this was sufficiently stunning and bewildering in its suddenness and
immensity; but it aroused my professional instincts.
"How is K. going to set about creating such an army?" I asked. "Raise
supplementary Regular battalions; expand the Territorial establishment;
or what?"
"I don't think he knows himself. In fact, he said so, quite frankly.
In the first place, he hasn't been invited to help, as yet. In the
second, he has been absent from England for the best part of fourteen
years, and has not been able to keep himself conversant with the recent
orgy of Army reform. He knew that the old Militia had been scrapped,
but I found he was not sure whether its place had been taken by the
Special Reserve or the National Reserve. And, of course, like all
Regulars, he regards the Territorials with the utmost distrust. I think
he shares the general soldier-man's opinion that the 'Terriers' are the
old Saturday afternoon crowd with a new label. His idea seems to be to
take no risks with amateur organisations, but to create a _pukka_ new
professional army on regular lines. He's wrong. He should take the
present Territorial Army as a nucleus, and expand from that. The
Territorial Associations are a most capable lot, and would build up big
units for him in no time. Still, whatever way he does it, he will do it
well; he's our great man. And he will need all his greatness. Germany
means to smash us this time. She has been calling up her reservists, on
the quiet, for the last six months. Her intelligence people have told
her that we are all so tied up with the Suffragettes and Ireland that we
_can't_ come in, and that if we do, we cannot put up anything of a
fight. I am almost tempted to believe Germany is right. I don't
suppose we have a thousand spare rifles in the country. As for
artillery--it takes three _years_ to make a gunner! How on earth--"
"Now, then, what are you two absurd creatures conspiring about?" Our
hostess was upon us brandishing a croquet-mallet. We rose hurriedly.
"Alan Laing, how do you do? Why didn't you come and tell me you had
arrived? As for you, Eskerley, I think you are getting into your second
childhood. What's all this nonsense I hear about war with Germany?
Why, I have a signed photograph of the Emperor in my drawing-room! How
can one make war on people like that? And yet there you sit, talking
about the thing as if it were really possible, and disorganising my
_fete champetre_ by mobilising all my young men! Come and play
croquet!"
Croquet with Lady Christina resembles nothing so much as croquet with
the Queen in "Alice in Wonderland." It is true that she does not order
our heads to be chopped off, but one sometimes wishes she would, and be
done with it. Her success at the game--and she is invariably
successful--is due partly to the nervous paralysis of her opponents, and
partly to the uncanny property possessed by her ball of removing itself,
while its owner is engaged in altercation, to a position exactly
opposite its hoop. I bent my steps dutifully towards the lawn, leaving
Lord Eskerley, who fears no one, not even Lady Christina, to fight a
spirited rearguard action with that worthy opponent.
On the way I encountered Eric Bethune, my friend. It always thrills me,
even at my sober age, to encounter Eric suddenly. I have never got over
my boyish tendency to hero-worship. We shook hands.
"Come along the Green Walk with me," he said. "My car is waiting at the
West Lodge; I have to fly back to my orderly room."
"We seem to be fairly for it, this time," I said, as we strode along the
avenue of grass.
Eric threw up his handsome head exultantly. The sloping sunlight caught
his clean-cut profile and sinewy throat.
"Yes," he said; "we're for it! The Fleet has been ordered not to
disperse after Manoeuvres. The Army is mobilising. We are going to have
at them at last! It's 'Der Tag,' all right! You are coming back to us,
I suppose, Alan?"
"If they will have me," I said.
"Have you? They'll jump at you! They'll give you a battalion! We
shall all get battalions! Brigades, perhaps!" He laughed joyfully, like
a schoolboy who sees his first eleven colours ahead. "There will be
promotions all round--"
"In a month or two," I said soberly, "there will be a lot more."
"Oh, I don't know," replied Eric. "We may finish Fritz off in one big
battle. The German soldier is a machine: so is his officer. The whole
German Army is a machine."
"A damned efficient machine, too!" I observed.
"Yes, boy; but cumbrous, cumbrous! If we let it get into its swing, it
will be hard to stop. But we won't. The little British Army--and mind
you, as a result of its South African lessons, it is the best trained,
the best led, and the finest body of men that we have ever put into the
field in all our history--will get the first move on, and it will chuck
itself, like a flinty little pebble, plumb in the middle of the German
machinery, and put all its gadgets out of gear! After that, the German,
with his entire lack of initiative, will go to pieces, and we'll eat him
up!"
Eric's old Scottish nurse was accustomed to say of him that he was "aye
up in the cloods or doon in the midden." There was no mistaking his
whereabouts to-day. I began to feel the thrill too.
"Are you going back to the First Battalion?" I asked.
"No word of it as yet. My orders are to stay here and perfect
mobilisation arrangements. The moment the word goes out from the jolly
old War Office, we shall be swamped with reservists: we may have to
start a recruiting station as well. Great work! Great work! So long,
old son! Run home and polish your buttons!"
He leaped into his car, and disappeared in a cloud of dust--a most
characteristic embodiment of the spirit that was flaming in the hearts
of all the youth of England and Scotland during that hectic,
unforgettable, blissfully ignorant week.
I walked slowly back down the Green Walk, prepared to serve my sentence
on the croquet lawn. It was a perfect summer evening. Not a leaf
stirred: not a bird chirruped. The shadow of my somewhat square and
stocky person preceded me, flatteringly elongated and attenuated by the
rays of the setting sun. Deep and abiding peace seemed to brood upon
the land. Yet all the land, I knew, was making ready for battle. Well,
for my part, I was satisfied. I was a soldier, a widow man, and a
childless man. I had no farewells to make, no last embraces--
From among the trees on my right I was conscious of a flutter of white,
and a murmur of voices. A man and a woman--no, no, in those days one
still talked of boys and girls--were seated side by side on a fallen
tree-trunk, with their backs to me. They did not appear to be
concerning themselves with war, or strife, or hostilities of any kind.
Their present relation, though decorous enough, appeared to be one of
most cordial agreement. I recognised them both, and passed on
discreetly, silently acknowledging the prescience of that aged but
perspicacious student of humanity, my Lord of Eskerley.
"They appear to have found one another all right!" I said to myself.
*CHAPTER IV*
*A TRYST*
*I*
Marjorie lay prone among the bracken in Craigfoot Wood, with her chin
resting on her hands, and her insteps drumming restlessly upon the cool
earth. Below her ran the road. To her left, beyond the wooded ridge
which gave its name to Baronrigg, lay Craigfoot, nestling, like most
small Lowland townships, in its own private valley. To her right, out
of sight a mile away, ran the branch line of the railway which served
that district, and which had furnished material to local humourists for
a generation.
By the roadside, on the edge of the wood, stood the two-seater car which
was accustomed to carry the overflow of the Clegg family to church on
Sundays, and which Marjorie liked to pretend was her own special
property. She was never so happy as when her arms were up to the elbows
in gear-box grease. There was a good deal of the elemental small boy
about Miss Marjorie.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and the month was once more
August. The war which was to have been over in a few furious weeks had
now been in progress for twelve months. The memory of the nightmare
campaign of the first winter in Flanders had crystallised into a
national epic. And now Kitchener's Army, having characteristically
survived that chaotic but inevitable experiment in improvisation, its
preliminary training at home during one of the worst and wettest winters
ever known in England, had gone abroad. Here it had graduated, with
first class honours in endurance and cheerfulness, during a season of
trench warfare on the Western Front; and was now bracing itself, with
incorrigible optimism, for that heroic mess afterwards known as the
Battle of Loos. Everywhere the war was consolidating its position. On
land the Boche, in a determined effort to recoup himself for his losses
on the Western swings by a profitable exploitation of the Eastern
roundabouts, had just captured Warsaw; and Hindenburg and Ludendorff
were gloriously smashing their way through Russian armies in which
perhaps one man in ten possessed a rifle. At sea, the battles of the
Falkland Islands and the Dogger Bank had confirmed the German High Seas
Fleet in a policy of watchful waiting--not to be broken, save for the
disconcerting experiment of Jutland, until the final abject excursion of
surrender more than three years later. Submarines and Zeppelins were
beginning to function. Yarmouth and Lowestoft had been bombed, with
_eclat_. The _Lusitania_ had gone down, with eleven hundred souls; and
a certain giant in the Far West was beginning to come out of the ether
administered by Teutonic anaesthetists.
At home, the country had settled into its stride; and everyone, in camp,
tube, train, and tram, argued--Heavens! how they did argue!--by a simple
exercise in simple proportion, that if a mere handful of British
soldiers could hold back overwhelmingly superior numbers for a whole
winter, what wouldn't we do to Germany when the new British Army found
their feet and got busy with the big push which everybody--friend and
foe, be it said--knew was coming in September? (The possibility that
the enemy might have been unsportsmanlike enough to raise a few new
armies of his own did not appear to have occurred to anybody in
particular.) The life of the citizen was still fairly normal. Taxicabs
were plentiful: theatrical business was booming. One could still buy
practically all that the heart desired, provided one had the price. The
days when everybody would have money, but there would be nothing to buy,
were yet to come.
Marjorie's predominant emotion during the first six months of the war
had been that of fierce resentment against having been born a girl. She
felt helpless; and whenever Marjorie felt helpless it made her angry.
(That was why she was so frequently angry with her father.) All round
her the youth of her country were on fire, both boys and girls. Yet the
boys were able to stream away to fight, while Marjorie, who was quite as
brave, quite as vigorous, and infinitely more capable of leadership than
many young men, was debarred by the accident of her sex from doing
anything at all. In the year nineteen-fifteen the great conflict was
still regarded as a man's war: the inevitability of mobilised womanhood
had not yet been recognised. The accepted theory was that men must work
and women must weep--for the duration.
The countryside was full of soldiers, in all stages of growth. Marjorie
used to encounter whole columns of them, route marching--strange
creatures, clothed in apparel which by no stretch of imagination could
be described as uniform. But for all their fantastic blends of khaki and
tweed, glengarry and billycock, Marjorie's heart warmed to them. They
were so boisterous, so childlike, so absolutely certain of what was
going to happen to the Boche when they got "oot there."
At their head, as often as not, rode Major Bethune. He and Marjorie had
become acquainted under circumstances which will be recorded hereafter,
and his punctilious salute never failed to thrill her. He was an
inspiring figure, and conspicuously solitary in his present _entourage_.
He alone was left of all the cheery, careless brotherhood who had
pursued the unexacting peace-time existence of a regular soldier at the
depot of the Royal Covenanters--the prop and mainstay of every
covert-shoot and tennis-party in the county. They were all in France
now. Many of them would never come back. But Eric Bethune remained, to
lick recruits into shape--with astonishing speed and efficiency, be it
said--and send them out, draft after draft, to stiffen the ever-thinning
ranks of the First and Second Battalions. He hated being kept at home,
and said so. Marjorie sympathised with him deeply, for she knew exactly
how he felt. One day she told him so. After that, Eric took
considerable notice of her. He had the simple vanity of a spoiled
child, and reacted promptly to all those who took especially deferential
notice of him.
The pair met here and there--at Buckholm, whither Marjorie was sometimes
bidden with her mother to war relief committee meetings; at
entertainments organised for the recruits; at crossroads, where
Marjorie's two-seater was frequently hung up by columns of marching men.
On these occasions they exchanged greetings--even confidences. Eric was
more than twenty years Marjorie's senior--a circumstance which, if
anything, heightened their attraction for one another. It gratified
Eric hugely to find himself frankly admired by a young girl; while
Marjorie, born hero-worshipper that she was, felt pleasantly thrilled at
attracting the appreciative attention of a man so distinguished in his
record and so much more important than herself. Also, Eric's great
age--and to twenty, forty-three and infinity are very much the same
thing--made him "safe." Fortunately for Eric's self-esteem, he did not
know this.
They had small chance to become really intimate. There were few
opportunities for social amenity in those days, and such as survived
hardly covered Netherby at all. In that bleak household itself opinion
on the war was sharply divided. Albert Clegg came of a stock which had
been educated to regard war as a luxury of the upper classes. He
believed that all wars were started by collusion between the "military
oligarchy" and the armament firms. He maintained that no war had ever
been fought which could not have been avoided. The sight of a uniform
filled him with horror. He was eloquent--though not quite so fluent as
Uncle Fred--upon the iniquity of placing what he called a "musket" upon
the shoulder of a growing boy, and setting him for a period of three
years to strengthen his body by martial exercises, when he might have
been earning dividends for somebody. Finally, he said that the Germans
were an industrious, peace-loving, musical nation, and that it was
sinful to attack--by which it is to be presumed he meant resist--an army
which was merely the involuntary instrument of despotism.
So when the British nation declined, by acclamation, to break faith with
France and Belgium, Albert Clegg was sincerely depressed. Moreover,
being deeply interested in shipping, he foresaw ruin for the overseas
trade of the country. Even when the unforeseen happened; when, as the
submarines began to take toll, the market value of tramp steamers shot
up a thousand per cent., and freights soared out of sight altogether, he
was not entirely comforted. According to his lights he was an honest
man, and it was with a twinge of conscience that he found the war
accumulating for him profits on a scale which not even a swelling
income-tax could altogether moderate. But he compounded with his
conscience in the end. He drew his profits, but he drew them under
formal protest every time. As Pooh Bah once explained, "It revolts me,
but I do it!"
Of the rest of the household, Mrs. Clegg for her part found the war
almost pleasantly exhilarating. None of her kith and kin were
participating in hostilities, which relieved her from such trifling
cares as beset old Mrs. Couper, who was interested in the matter to the
extent of five sons and fourteen grandsons; or Mrs. Gillespie, the
banker's wife, who had contributed all she had, the _ci-devant_ student
of divinity, to the cause; or General Bothwell, whose son Jack had
arrived in Flanders from India with his Pathans in early December, and
had already met the almost inevitable end of a white officer who
undertakes the conspicuous task of leading dusky troops into action
under modern conditions; or Lord Eskerley, both of whose sons had died
at Le Cateau. Bobby Laing, of The Heughs, nephew of our
autobiographical Major, had been killed in the landing of the King's Own
Scottish Borderers at Gallipoli. Neither of Mrs. Clegg's sons had
exhibited any leaning towards what their father described as "this
fashionable military nonsense," so Mrs. Clegg's mind was at rest. She
left everything, quite cheerfully--like too many of her kind--to the
Willing Horse.
Of course, she admitted, there was little going on socially. Still, it
was gratifying to roll bandages or pack comfort-bags in company with
countesses; and though there were flies in the ointment--in the shape of
common persons like Mrs. Galbraith, the chemist's wife, and the Misses
Peabody, included in the same gathering by the caste-destroying
processes of wartime--there were consolations. Netherby itself, with
its spacious accommodation for meetings and committees, was a card which
only great social strongholds like Buckholm and Baronrigg could
overtrump.
It has been noted that Amos and Joshua Clegg had betrayed no disposition
to join up. But while Amos in this matter followed his undoubted
inclinations, Joe was restrained only by the bonds of parental
discipline. For one thing, Joe was a Public-School boy, and Amos was
not. Joe's school had only been a small establishment in the North of
England, but in nineteen-fourteen its little Officers' Training Corps
had contributed its full quota of young men. To Amos, Public Schools
(to quote his father) were places where boys learned "to take care of
their H's and despise their parents": to his younger brother the
Public-School tradition was the ark and covenant, not to be lightly
profaned by parental sneers or fraternal failure to understand. So Joe
kept his own counsel, and ate his dour young Northumbrian heart out for
twelve sickening months.
The climax had come that very morning, with the arrival, for Joe, of a
circular from his old school, requesting that he would "be so kind as to
fill up the enclosed form" with certain specific information regarding
his military service, for inclusion in the School Roll of Honour--his
rank, his unit, mentions in dispatches, and the like. There was no
alternative column to fill in; no comfortable loophole labelled
"Civilian war work of national importance"--nothing of that kind at all:
nothing but a stark request for poor Joe's military status and record.
It had not occurred to the editors that any Old Boy could, in these
days, be elsewhere than in khaki.
Consequently, Marjorie had found Joe after breakfast, with his head in
his arms, crying like a child in a corner of the unfrequented and
cheerless Netherby smoking-room. (Albert Clegg did not smoke.) After
comforting him in the only fashion she knew--and a very acceptable
fashion any young man but a brother would have considered it--she made
up her mind on the spot to accept a certain sentimental invitation
somewhat shyly offered by Roy Birnie, and laughingly refused by herself,
two days previously. That was why she was now lying in the bracken on
the edge of Craigfoot Wood, gazing up the road to Baronrigg.
*II*
It was Roy's last day at home. At the outbreak of war, to his own
intense indignation, he had been refused a commission. Many of his
young friends, common civilians no older than himself, had been endowed
with what they described as 'one pip' and set to command platoons all
over the country. But Roy, as a prospective regular, had been
despatched--the victim of a conspiracy in which he traced the hand of
every person but the right one--to Sandhurst, where he was compelled to
undergo an intensive education in the science of warfare, speculating
grimly meanwhile as to the kind of mess his amateur supplanters were
making of the British Expeditionary Force. Sometimes he woke at night in
a cold sweat, having dreamed, as he had sometimes dreamed before a house
match, that the war had come to an end before he had had his innings.
Now, at last, he was emancipated. He was a second lieutenant. He could
wear a Sam Browne belt and look an A.P.M. right in the face--instead of
hurriedly plunging down side streets to avoid that suspicious official's
eye, as he had frequently done when up in London on leave with a crony,
the pair of them decked in borrowed trappings to which a cadet's rank
did not entitle them. He was an officer, holding the King's Commission;
and, best of all, had been gazetted to the Second Battalion of the old
regiment, of which his uncle, "Leathery Laing," was now
second-in-command. He had completed his draft leave, and was to report
at the Depot at six o'clock this Sunday evening, to take charge of a
contingent bound overseas to reenforce the battalion at a point on the
Western Front as yet unrevealed.
He had made his farewells--in the offhand, jocular fashion affected by
our race in cases where the probability of return is more than doubtful.
His father had shaken hands with him, and shaken his own head at the
same time. Tom Birnie's heart was not in the war: he persisted in his
belief that it was started by the Jingoes.
His friends--and Roy had friends in every walk of life--had loaded him
with messages to fathers, brothers and sweethearts who were gone before
into the pillar of cloud. Mr. Gillespie, the bank manager, entrusted
him with a small package (on behalf of Mesdames Spot and Plain),
containing mysterious comforts for son Robert. Jamie Leslie, the
organ-blower of the parish church, buttonholed him in the street.
"Mr. Roy," he said wistfully, "you'll tell the boys oot there that I
have tried, and _tried_, for to get ower; but they winna hae me! It's
because I'm no quite richt in the heid," he added, with a candour which
might well have been imitated by others occupying more exalted official
positions than his own. "You'll tell them? I wouldna like them for tae
think--"
Roy supplied the necessary assurance, and passed on to receive a message
from old Mrs. Rorison, whose son John, a giant of six feet four inches,
had abandoned the service of the post office in order to join the Scots
Guards.
"Tell oor John," said the old lady--it was universally assumed that Roy
would encounter the entire Craigfoot contingent, regardless of rank or
unit, immediately upon landing--"tae keep his heid doon in they
trenches. I ken him! And dinna go keeking ower the top yourself, Mr.
Roy!" This, on the whole, was the most practical valediction that Roy
received.
Lord Eskerley's farewell was quite characteristic.
"Good-bye! Don't give away any military news when you write to her. It
has done a lot of harm already."
There was no one left now to say good-bye to but Marjorie. Like the
young sentimentalist that he was, Roy was reserving her for the last.
He wanted to bid her farewell at the very final moment--and, if
possible, clandestinely. There existed no obstacle whatever to his
driving openly to Netherby and delivering his farewell speech on the
hearthrug in the library, or among the raspberry-canes in the kitchen
garden. But war sharpens our romantic appetites to a surprising degree.
At the most ordinary times lovers are accustomed to bid one another good
night with an expenditure of time and intensity which takes no account
of the fact that they are going to meet again directly after breakfast
to-morrow morning. How much more pardonable and ecstatic, then, must
that exercise be when it really is good night--when it is more than
probable that before the time for reunion comes round again, one of the
participants may have blown out his little candle for good.
Roy's preference for surreptitious love-making was natural enough, for
another reason. He was a member of the shyest and most self-conscious
brotherhood in the world--the tribe of the less-than-twenty-one's. By
rights he should not have been in love--matrimonially--at all. A
healthy English Public-School boy of nineteen is not entitled to such
emotions as inspired Master Roy and his friends in the year of grace
nineteen-fifteen. His mind should be set--and in normal times almost
invariably is set--upon his biceps muscle, or his first salmon, or his
college rowing colours, or (at moments of periodic festivity) the
acquisition of souvenirs, like policemen's helmets or door-knockers.
Permanent association with one of the softer sex should be to him, for
several years yet, a delightful unattainability. He matures late, does
our young Briton, and premature responsibility as husband and father
usually prevents him from ever developing into the man he was meant to
be. But wise old Nature is always ready to modify her own laws in an
emergency. In nineteen-fifteen people, especially young people, found
their perspectives considerably foreshortened. It is no use taking long
views about life at a time when life promises to be more than usually
short. There is just one thing to do, and that is to reach out with
both hands after such of life's gifts as are normally reserved,
especially in this country of ours, for those of riper years.
So, engaged couples who in nineteen-fourteen had taken it as a matter of
course that their wedding must be postponed until after the war,
suddenly realised that there might be no after the war for one of them,
and incontinently got married. Boys and girls whose sentimental
exercises in normal times would have been limited to sitting out dances
behind a screen in the Christmas holidays not only became engaged, but
usually plunged into matrimony a few weeks later. They were governed by
forces which they did not entirely comprehend, and which few of them
would have been capable of resisting if they had. They had no idea how
they were going to live after the war; but they married all the same.
It was essentially a case where the morrow must take thought for itself.
They capitalised all their stock, both of money and of youth, these
happy young gamblers, and lived ecstatically on that capital, stoically
resigned to the probability that before it was exhausted their little
partnership would have been dissolved. And in too many cases, poor
souls, they were justified in their expectations. But who shall say
that they were wrong, or improvident, to do as they did? Prudence,
perhaps; commonsense, possibly. But not nature, nor patriotism, nor
romance, nor the spirit of adventure.
It is not to be supposed that our impetuous Roy had reasoned out these
matters with any degree of profundity. All he knew was that he had
loved that glorious girl, Marjorie Clegg, from the moment he had first
seen her in Craigfoot parish church a year and a half ago; and that now
he was called upon to go away and relinquish even his present scanty
opportunities of seeing her. Moreover, his battalion had got through
twenty-three second lieutenants in the last ten months. One, obvious,
course was indicated; but it was a big step for a reserved schoolboy of
nineteen. To tell Marjorie, _tout court_, that he loved her frightened
him--far more than any statistics about second lieutenants. If it had
been peace-time he would have followed the natural path of a boy who
falls in love with a girl of his own age. He would have decided to grow
up, and become an eligible _parti_ at the earliest possible moment. He
might, possibly, have declared himself, and invited his beloved to "wait
for him." It is within the bounds of probability that the damsel would
have promised to do so. The _affaire_ would then have proceeded on its
innocuous course--spasmodically enough, owing to the interposition of
such things as University terms, regimental duties, or vulgar office
hours--to its normal end. That is to say, the girl would probably have
met and married some one really eligible a few years older than herself,
leaving it to the hand of Time to heal the wounds of her late cavalier
and unite him in due course to another really eligible girl some years
younger than himself, recently the property of a shaveling of nineteen.
But this was not peace-time. The country was at war, and for reasons
already indicated waiting and seeing had gone out of fashion. The
watchword of the moment, whether applied to munitions or matrimony, was,
"Do It Now!" No wonder that Roy felt his heart leap to his throat as
the Baronrigg car, conveying him to the Depot seven miles away,
surmounted the last crest on the undulating road, and revealed to him
Marjorie's two-seater standing in the hollow below, under the lee of
Craigfoot Wood. For all her preliminary refusal and offhand acceptance,
Marjorie had kept tryst.
*CHAPTER V*
*THE INEVITABLE*
Marjorie stood on the bank above the road, knee-deep in bracken. The
Baronrigg chauffeur, an elderly gentleman with that perfect repose of
manner which is given only to such members of the tribe as are promoted
coachmen, drew up beside the two-seater. Roy jumped out and saluted
with great smartness. He was in uniform, and was hung about with that
warlike paraphernalia professionally known as "the whole Christmas
Tree." Having disencumbered himself of this, he threw it into the car,
climbed the bank, and joined his lady. His heart bumped.
"You do look nice," said Marjorie. "But what is the matter with your
buttons?"
"I have painted them with some black stuff," replied Roy. "Quite the
thing--not swank! It is always done on active service: otherwise my
twinkling little buttons might attract the eye of vigilant Boche." He
took her arm, a little feverishly. "What about a stroll in the shades of
the forest? What about it, what?"
This was not the way in which Roy had intended to begin the interview.
Upon such occasions of stress no man knows what humiliating tricks
self-consciousness may not play upon him. But Marjorie, of the superior
sex, appeared quite unruffled.
"All right," she said cheerfully; "come along! I am so glad you are
here."
"Are you, Marjorie?" exclaimed Roy, much encouraged.
"Yes. I want to consult you about something."
Roy drew back an overhanging branch.
"Step inside the consulting room!" he suggested.
Marjorie seated herself upon a ledge of rock in the snug nook which the
branch had concealed. Roy lay down on the grass at her feet. There was
silence. At last Marjorie said:
"When must you be at the Depot?"
"Six." Roy glanced at his new, luminous, dust-proof, non-breakable
wrist-watch. "That gives me twenty minutes. What did you want to talk
to me about, Marjorie?"
"About Joe."
"Oh!" There was a certain lack of enthusiasm about the interjection,
but Marjorie did not notice it. Roy looked up at her. Her brow was
puckered, and her eyes were troubled. She was very fond of brother Joe.
Roy, resolutely disengaging his attention from the high lights in her
hair, said gently:
"Tell me."
Marjorie blazed out suddenly.
"He can't stand it any longer! He has done his best to be patient, and
obedient to father, and all that; but it's breaking his heart. Why,
only this morning--"
She related the pitiful incident of the school circular and the Roll of
Honour. There were tears in her eyes when she had finished.
"So," she concluded, "he has made up his mind to join up."
"Good egg!" observed Roy. "Is he going to apply for a commission, or
what?"
"That was what I wanted to consult you about," said Marjorie. "You are
so clever about these things, Roy."
"Fire away!" replied Roy, much inflated.
"Commissions," asked Marjorie--"can you get them easily?"
"Not so easily now. The authorities are beginning to sit up and take
notice. The first lot of officers in the new armies were mostly all
right. They didn't know much, but they were sahibs, who played the game
and handled their men properly. Now they are getting used up, and some
pretty strange fish have been given commissions lately. The voice of
the T.G. is heard in the land. Here is a letter from my uncle, Alan
Laing--our second-in-command. You know him?"
"No, but I have seen him."
Roy chuckled.
"Yes," he said, "and he has seen you; and you fairly knocked him flat!
But never mind Uncle Alan now. He's a wicked old man, anyhow. About
this T.G. business. Uncle Alan wrote to me the other day. He said that
some of the officers lately sent out were about the stickiest crowd he
had yet handled. Here's the letter."
_Of course, among ourselves in the Mess, he read, we make allowances,
and try to get the best out of them; for after all, most of them are
plucky enough and efficient enough. Unfortunately, the rank-and-file,
with the true British passion for inequality, do not share our
democratic sentiments. They say, in effect: "This blankety blighter is
no better than we are. Why should we salute him, or obey him, or follow
him?" The T.G. too often confirms his own sentence; I caught one of my
subalterns trying to stand a corporal a drink the other day. I hear
they are going to start officers' schools soon. The sooner the better!_
"Of course," said Marjorie, flying, woman-like, to the personal
application of the subject, "Joe wouldn't behave like that."
"Good Lord, no! Of course he wouldn't," said Roy.
"Amos probably would, though," added honest Marjorie. "He has never
been to a proper school, so he has had no chance to have his Clegg
manners improved. But we aren't troubling about Amos: it's Joe. Would
they take him into a Cadet Officers' School, do you think?"
"I am sure they would," said Roy confidently. "Only, it might require a
little time, you know."
"That's a drawback," replied Marjorie. "Once father knows what Joe is
trying to do, his life at home won't be worth living. It'll be a fight
all day long: he will be lectured, and badgered, and prayed over. I
shouldn't wonder if they sent for Uncle Fred!"
A thought struck Roy.
"I say," he enquired, "how old is Joe?"
"Twenty."
"That hangs the crape on Joseph!" announced Roy--"for a year, at any
rate. They won't give a commission to a minor without his father's
consent." He wriggled. "Don't I know it! If they did, I'd have been
in the show a year ago."
"In that case," said Marjorie, "we must fall back on our second plan."
"We?"
"I mean Joe and I."
"Oh, sorry. I was hoping you meant you and me! What is the plan?"
"It's a secret just now," said Marjorie. "Perhaps I'll tell you about
it, when I write."
Roy looked up eagerly.
"You _will_ write to me?" he said. "Often?"
"Of course I will!" said the girl. "It will be wonderful!"
What she meant was that it would be wonderful to have, in future, a
personal interest in the British Expeditionary Force. As already
indicated, the circle in which Marjorie had been born and bred was not
very heavily represented in France--nor would be until conscription
came. But now Roy would be there. She would have a personal outlet for
her imagination, and a peg to hang her prayers on. Women hate abstract
patriotism, as they hate all abstractions. Roy would supply the human,
personal element, upon which a woman's visions must always be founded.
Male orators might volley and thunder about the common cause and the
redemption of civilization; but to most women the Great War and its
issues were usually embodied in the person of a single undistinguished
individual in a tin bowler.
Roy, of course, did not understand.
"How glorious of you to say that, Marjorie!" he exclaimed.
"You do not know," continued Marjorie rapturously, "how I have longed
and longed to have some one to write to, and send parcels to, and
everything--some one I really knew!--instead of a bundle of things to be
distributed among a whole platoon!"
"And you are going to make me that particular person?" said Roy,
joyfully.
"Rather! You see," explained Marjorie with fatal frankness, "I don't
know anyone else. At least, I shan't, until Joe--"
Roy's face fell. "I thought there was a catch about it!" he said
woefully.
"About what?"
"About what you said. I didn't understand that all you wanted was some
one to write to; and any old thing would do--even me! I did hope, for a
minute--"
Marjorie was all repentance at once.
"Oh!" she cried. "How hateful of me! Roy, I didn't mean it! What must
you think of me? I must seem like a common little war-flapper. But I'm
not, am I? Roy, you _know_ I'm not! Will you forgive me?" She extended
a hand impetuously.
It fired the train. Next moment Roy had caught it in both of his, and
was kissing it rapturously.
"Marjorie--dear!" he murmured. He was kneeling before her now, with his
arms crossed upon her knees. He looked up into her face, and suddenly
realised what he was leaving behind. A great sob shook him. Perhaps the
thought of the twenty-three second lieutenants had something to do with
it. After all, he was only nineteen, and love and life were very sweet.
His head sank on to his arms; his shoulders heaved.
There followed a brief interval of silence--perhaps three minutes. But
within that interval something happened to Marjorie.
Presently a slim hand removed Roy's glengarry bonnet, and began to
stroke his obstinately curly hair. Next, Roy was conscious of a warm
splash, somewhere behind his right ear--followed by another, and
another. Marjorie was shaking now. Roy looked up at her again, and the
sight of her wet face suddenly braced him against his own weakness. He
sprang up.
"You poor, poor, poor!" he said. "Let me--"
He produced a khaki handkerchief from his sleeve, and dried her eyes,
Marjorie meekly submitting. After that, inevitably, he kissed her. It
was not a very successful kiss: first kisses seldom are. Then he sat
down upon the grass again with his head against her knee, and her hand
against his cheek. He sighed, long and rapturously. Marjorie stroked
his hair with her free hand. Children both, they were living through a
moment for which others, less fortunate, have sometimes waited a
lifetime, and which in no case ever comes to man or maid a second time.
Presently they began to talk, employing the two inevitable topics of the
newly-betrothed--"When did it begin?" and, "Do you remember?"
They recalled their first glimpse of one another--that May morning in
church, more than a year ago.
"Uncle Alan was very witty on the subject," said Master Roy. "Oh, most
diverting! It's my belief the old ruffian was having a good
one-time-look-see at you himself, and that was why he caught me at it.
Well, I can't say I blame him!"
They wandered on to the second subject. Here they had much ground to
cover.
They had not actually met until three weeks after the glimpse. During
those weeks Roy religiously attended dances, tea-parties, political
meetings, even a church soiree, in the hope of encountering his
divinity; but in vain. Once he bought three numbered and reserved seats
for an amateur theatrical entertainment in the Town Hall, and sent two
of these to Netherby, "With the compliments of the committee." But Mrs.
Clegg, knowing that her husband did not hold with theatrical
entertainments, and that under no circumstances would she or the family
be permitted to attend this one, had passed the tickets on to a more
emancipated quarter, with the result that Roy witnessed the performance
in the giggling company of two Netherby housemaids. He told the story
to Marjorie now, and was rewarded with tears and laughter.
But they had met at last--at the local Hunt Steeplechases. Marjorie was
present, privily, in the two-seater, with brother Joe. Roy had spied
the pair from the regimental enclosure. He was due back at his
crammer's in two days' time, and was a desperate man. Summoning his
entire stock of audacity--it was considerable, but he needed it all--he
left the enclosure, pushed his way through the crowd, and addressed
himself to the male member of the rather forlorn couple standing by the
rails.
"I say, sir, aren't you Mr. Clegg, of Netherby?"
Joe, quite unequal to the situation, murmured something inarticulate;
but Marjorie came to the rescue.
"How do you do?" she said. "You are Mr. Birnie, aren't you?"
"Yes. We are your next-door neighbours--your nearest little playmates,
in fact," replied Master Roy. (Netherby is some four or five miles from
Baronrigg; but no matter.) "My father has been meaning to shoot cards
on you for a long time. Meanwhile, would you care to come into the
enclosure? Bracing air! Gravel soil! Commands a distant prospect of
the Cheviot Hills, and so on! Highly recommended! Do come!" He waited
breathlessly for her reply, fearful of having gone too far. But the
invitation was accepted.
"What a moment!" he said. "_What_ a moment!" He looked up at Marjorie
again. "I was afraid you would turn me down, for cheek. You hesitated a
bit, didn't you?"
Marjorie laughed, joyously.
"My dear, that was for manners! I wouldn't have let you go at that
moment for anything in the world!" She played a gentle arpeggio on the
brown cheek under her hand.
"By gum, I wish I had known that!" observed Roy, with sincerity.
Once inside the enclosure Marjorie created a profound sensation. It is
true that not many of her own sex addressed themselves to her, but this
omission was more than balanced by the _empressement_ of the gentlemen.
First of all, naturally, she was introduced to the senior officer
present--Major Eric Bethune, who, in the secret view of his
subordinates, proceeded to take an unsportsmanlike and unduly prolonged
advantage of his superior rank. Duty called him at last to the side of
a lady of riper years. Thereafter, Marjorie, almost invisible for
second lieutenants, was escorted about the course, shown the jumps,
plied with tea, and invited to back horses at other people's expense.
She had driven home in a dream, with her exhausted relative slumbering
beside her.
After that a few mothers and sisters, hounded thereto by clamorous
menkind, had left cards at Netherby. The calls had been duly returned,
with the result that some of the sisters added themselves, quite
voluntarily, to the ranks of the brothers. Marjorie possessed the
supreme quality in a woman of being attractive to her own sex. Mrs.
Clegg and her daughter began to be seen at subscription balls and the
more comprehensive garden parties; presently at more intimate
entertainments. In the end, Netherby usually received a card for any
function that was going, always excepting such--formal dinner parties
and the like--as necessitated inviting Albert Clegg.
"The girl is a peach," was the local verdict, "and mother does her best;
but the old man merely suggests eternal punishment!"
And wherever Marjorie appeared--at ball, function, fete, bazaar,
gymkhana, or tea-fight, Master Roy Birnie, home for good from the
crammer's, was usually visible in respectful attendance.
Not that she had not other adherents. Even Major Bethune himself, the
handsomest man and the most eligible _parti_ in the county, did not
consider it beneath his dignity to sit out a dance or two with the
daughter of Albert Clegg. But Roy's devotion was marked by its
unflagging and conscientious continuity. He was a regular visitor at
Netherby. It was his habit to ride over every morning--usually about
eleven, when the master of the house was engaged in transacting business
in the library, mostly over the telephone to Newcastle--where he would
play tennis, perform tricks on the billiard table, give the children
riding-lessons, pick roses for Mrs. Clegg--do anything, in fact, which
afforded him a reasonable excuse for remaining on the premises. Being
British, and only eighteen, his passion had not declared itself in
words; nor would have for many a day, but for the quickening influences
already indicated. Even when the coming of war suddenly laid a man's
responsibilities upon his young shoulders, and removed most of his
rivals, real and imaginary, _en masse_, to the other side of the
Channel, he did not look higher, for the present, than the foot of
Marjorie's pedestal. His intention was to leave his lady perched upon
the summit thereof for the duration; and then, if and when he returned
safe and whole from castigating the Boche, to invite her to step down to
earth and start, under his escort, upon the adventure of life. To do
more at present struck him as unsportsmanlike. He would be forcing her
hand unfairly; he would be taking a sentimental advantage of the
military situation. But the last ten minutes had entirely upset his
plan of operations. He had kissed Marjorie; Marjorie had indubitably
kissed him back; and now they were sitting side by side in Craigfoot
Wood, in an attitude which twelve months ago would have outraged both
his susceptibilities and his sense of humour, facing the prospect of
indefinite separation. What was the next step? What about it, what?
Pending a decision, he saluted his lady afresh.
From the road below them came a respectful toot from the horn of the
Craigfoot motor, suggestive of a faithful attendant coughing a discreet
reminder behind his hand. Roy glanced at his watch, and rose to his
feet with a heartrending sigh.
"Time to go!" he groaned.
He held out his hands to Marjorie, and raised her up. For a moment
those two young people looked one another bravely in the face--for the
last time, for aught they knew. They were very much of a height; Roy
had the advantage of perhaps an inch. Then that direct young maiden,
Marjorie, put both arms round Roy's neck.
"Good-bye, dear," she said. "Take care of yourself, and come back safe
to me!"
"I'll come back," replied Roy stoutly, forgetting all about the
twenty-three second lieutenants. He had no doubts about anything now.
Then:
"Marjorie," he asked, "when will you marry me? As soon as the war is
over?" He waited, expectant.
Marjorie's answer took the rather puzzling form of a little choking
laugh, accompanied by two large tears.
"As soon as that?" she asked.
The young of the male species possesses no intuition.
"Yes," replied Roy earnestly, "just as soon! Or"--with the air of one
conceding a point--"pretty soon after." He came closer.
"Marjorie--will you?"
This time Marjorie smiled without any tears at all--a purely maternal
smile.
"Leave it to me, little man!" she said.
Then she kissed him again, and sent him off to fight for her.
That night Joe Clegg crept downstairs, out of the house, and thence (per
two-seater) to the railway junction twelve miles away. Here he caught
the early morning train to London, where it was his intention to enlist.
He was accompanied by his sister Marjorie, who, after a final and
tempestuous debate with her father upon the subject of filial duty and
feminine usefulness in war-time, had decided to burn her boats too, and
enlist in the gallant sisterhood of those who were Really Trying to
Help.
*CHAPTER VI*
*SOLO*
The lights sank low again, and a flickering announcement appeared upon
the screen, to the effect that the next picture would be a further
instalment of that absorbing serial, _The Marvels of Natural
History_--upon this occasion, _Still Life in the Frog Pond_. The
majority of the audience took the hint, rose to their feet, and shuffled
out. But Marjorie stayed on. Some of us go to the pictures to see
pictures, others to hold hands, others to sit down and rest. Marjorie
belonged to the third class. Not even the prospect of a
quarter-of-an-hour in a frog pond could induce her to concede to the
management the chance of selling her seat once more before closing time.
She sat on, in a tired reverie.
Marjorie had arrived in London three months ago, to find that
overcrowded metropolis fairly evenly divided between two classes--the
people who had taken up war work, and the people who were doing it. The
chief difficulty of the latter was to push their way through the
unyielding ranks of the former. Things righted themselves later, under
the unsentimental _regime_ of necessity; but in November,
nineteen-fifteen, the road to victory was blocked with good intentions.
Having invaded London, Marjorie and Joe devoted two days to exploration.
Marjorie had been in London twice before--going to and returning from
school in Paris--her stay upon each occasion being limited to a single
extremely domestic evening at Uncle Fred's house in Dulwich. This
experience naturally qualified Marjorie (being Marjorie) for the role of
guide and courier to that unsophisticated yokel, brother Joe. They put
up at the Grand Hotel, because Marjorie considered Trafalgar Square a
good _point d'appui_, and a difficult place to lose altogether even in
the howling wilderness of Central London. They pooled their money.
Marjorie had drawn the whole of the savings of her dress
allowance--about one hundred pounds--from the custody of Mr. Gillespie
shortly before the day of her departure, and Joe had a quarter's salary
intact. They dined, went to the play, sat in the Park, lunched at the
Carlton, and generally had their fling (but not of) a world composed
entirely of elegantly dressed females and uniformed officers of every
grade.
After keeping carnival for forty-eight hours, Marjorie conducted her
brother to a recruiting office, where the authorities were unfeignedly
glad to see him, business at that period being lamentably slack. There,
having kissed him, she left him and returned to the Grand Hotel. At the
end of half-an-hour she rose from her bed, dabbed her eyes with a cold
sponge, sent for her bill, paid it with a bright smile, and removed
herself and her effects to a self-contained flat near the Brompton Road.
There she sat down to make a plan. She had several sketched out, but
her choice depended, like so many other choices in this life, upon
sordid financial considerations. If her allowance were continued, she
could afford to do war work for love. If not, she must perforce do war
work for money. So she wrote to her father, telling him frankly why she
and Joe had left home, giving her new address, and concluding her
letter:
_So now you know where I am. If I don't hear from you I shall know that
you don't intend to have anything more to do with me. But I hope I
shall hear from you. Love. Marjorie._
Upon the question of her father's financial intentions she refrained
from inquiry, for she knew full well what the result of such directness
would be. Her intention was to hold on until the September quarter, and
then try the experiment of a cheque to her own order on Mr. Gillespie's
bank. Her hope was that the allowance would continue automatically, as
it might not occur to her father to stop it--presuming he wished to do
so.
"If he does," she said to herself, "I must just go and work in an
ammunition factory, or something--that's all! Still, I don't believe he
will. Father's a hard man, but he does try to be just. He can't punish
me for simply wanting to work now, of all times!"
In this she did her father no less, and as it ultimately proved, no more
than justice; for a _ballon d'essai_ despatched northward to Mr.
Gillespie at the end of September was received by him with the honour
due to a credit balance.
But September was a long way off. Marjorie methodically reviewed all
the avenues of occupation open to her. Nursing attracted her most; but
she knew herself to be pathetically ignorant of the elements of the
craft, and furthermore doubted (rightly) if her combative nature would
endure the complete subservience to the professional element inevitable
in the life of that plucky, much-enduring, self-effacing Cinderella, the
V.A.D. Stenography and typewriting were unknown to her.
Munition-making at this time was but an infant industry--as the
occupants of the trenches had continuous occasion to note, with
characteristic comment. There were a number of minor Red Cross
activities open to her--bandage-rolling, parcel-packing, and the
like--but these pursuits were too sedentary for ebullient Marjorie.
Other forms of war activity, such as selling programmes at charity
_matinees_, or pestering total strangers in 'buses and tube-trains to
purchase flags to relieve the contingent wants of hypothetical Allied
babies, were pushed contemptuously aside as war work _pour rire_. It
was not too easy, either, to know where to apply, with adequate results.
Upon the Olympus whence the country was being directed to victory, the
Organisation of Womanhood still lay in the tray--much the biggest tray
on Olympus--marked "Pending." Those quaint but proud expressions,
"Wren," "Waac," and "Wraf" had not yet been added to the English
language.
Marjorie finally decided to try canteen work. Vicarious service had no
attraction for her; to get as close as possible to the human side of an
enterprise was all her aim. At the canteen she would see and wait upon
the most human member of the human family, one Thomas Atkins. A single
fear made her hesitate. She wanted to spend herself utterly upon the
Cause. Might not this canteen business prove just a little too trivial;
a little too like playing at work?
She tried it for a week. After carrying tea-urns from the kitchen to
the counter for eight consecutive hours she decided, without any
hesitation whatever, that her apprehensions were groundless.
Month by month, Marjorie bent her giant's spirit and her straight young
back to her task. The Canteen, near Waterloo Station, was never closed,
and was full at practically every hour of the day and night. But,
day-shift or night-shift, fair weather or foul, good news or bad,
nothing made any difference to Marjorie. She was always on time, always
cheerful, always perfectly ready to perform tasks left undone by the
Undertakers of War Work. She set herself a standard of endurance and
privation approximately as nearly as possible to that which she
understood prevailed on the Western Front. This seemed to her the least
that a stay-at-home person like herself could do, in consideration of
the fact that no bodily risk attached to her duties. (As yet, Zeppelin
frightfulness was merely one of London's gratuitous entertainments.)
Consequently, after six months' unceasing drudgery, Marjorie was
beginning to feel very tired, and just a little despondent.
The spirit of despondency stalked abroad in those days: it was the
natural reaction from the wave of enthusiasm which had carried the
country so highheartedly through the anxieties and uncertainties of the
first twelve months. It was becoming increasingly obvious that "K" was
right; that the war was going to last for a term of years; and that the
country could not reach the goal on its first wind. Pending the arrival
of the second, a slump in martial enthusiasm was inevitable. Tubes and
omnibuses no longer carried men in uniform for nothing. Civilians no
longer offered their seats to soldiers and sailors. Patriotic flappers
no longer presented white feathers to wounded officers in mufti. It was
no longer considered _de rigueur_ for the orchestra in public
restaurants to bring a docile public to its feet by periodical
excursions into patriotic melody. The Battle of Loos had demonstrated
once more that the young British soldier never fights better than in his
first battle; also, alas! that when a nation goes to war free from the
taint of "militarism," soldiers must die that Staffs may learn.
Gallipoli had been evacuated, when with a little luck and good
management the evacuation might have taken place at the other end.
Bulgaria had recently joined our enemies, and it was felt that with more
skilful handling she would have come down upon our side of the hedge.
Early in December figures to date of British casualties in all theatres
of war were officially announced for the first time: they reached a
total more than five times as great as the numbers of the original
Expeditionary Force. A shortage of men was becoming apparent: although
nearly four million had joined the Colours, the cry was still for more.
The Voluntary system was at its last gasp. Despite the honest and
ingenious Derby scheme for a more even distribution of the burden, it
was plain that an intolerable and increasing weight was being borne by
The Willing Horse. Conscription, long overdue, was clearly on the way,
with the result that the voice of the Conscientious Objector was now
heard in the land. On the top of all this the No-Treating Order had come
into force, and another injustice was inflicted upon that section of the
community which preferred that its refreshment should be paid for, as
its battles were being fought, by some one else. Even Marjorie's spirits
sagged a little during that black winter. Her sense of oppression was
increased by two potent factors. In the first place, she was underfed.
It was entirely her own fault, or, rather, that of her first parent,
Eve. In their hearts, all women cherish a profound contempt for what men
call good food. Formal meals, consumed at leisure and with comfortable
ritual, are to them a mere pandering to gross male standards of
self-indulgence. A woman hates sitting at a dinner-table through a meal
of thoughtfully varied courses. To her the perfect repast is, was, and
always will be an egg on a tray, on a chair, in any room but the
dining-room.
Marjorie was not exempt from this failing. Too often her principal meal
of the day was eaten in a tea-shop, and consisted of food that satisfied
quickly and nourished not at all. The meals at Netherby had been
irksome, but they were at least wholesome. Furthermore, in her desire
to emulate the soldier's lot, she imposed upon herself a voluntary
rationing scheme--which if applied in military circles would have
undoubtedly produced a mutiny. She had the zealot spirit, too. After
the twelfth of October, the day upon which Edith Cavell died, Marjorie
ate neither butter nor jam for a fortnight. Less sincere tributes have
been paid to our great dead.
But, above all, she was desperately lonely. If it is not good for man
to be alone, it is far worse for woman. And Marjorie was very much
alone. It is surprising what a small acquaintance most of us really
possess. Such as are occupied every day in earning a living--and who is
not in these times?--are almost entirely dependent for human
companionship upon the people with whom they work and the people with
whom they share a home. Of course, there is a certain type which makes
sociability its life work; which is eternally busy with visiting-cards
and engagement-book; scraping acquaintance here, exchanging addresses
there--the type, in fact, which entertains a not altogether unreasonable
dread of being left alone with itself. But if you possess neither the
inclination nor the leisure for these amenities, and do not live at
home, and do not happen to work in company with a throng of your
fellow-creatures, you can be a very lonely individual indeed, especially
in a great city.
Marjorie, fortunately, had the canteen. She formed acquaintanceships
quickly, as all attractive people do. Some of these, owing to her
natural discrimination, were short-lived, and none made an abiding
impression. Marjorie was more interested in things than people in those
days. But the soldiers appreciated her. Sometimes their appreciation
took the form of tips. One Canadian presented her with half a crown,
and commanded her to buy "candy" with it; but the majority of her
patrons furtively thrust a penny or twopence--and twopence meant a good
deal to Tommy in those shilling-a-day times--under the saucer, adjusted
cap, and said awkwardly, "Well, so-long, miss!" hurrying out before the
delinquency was discovered. Many of them sent her post cards, from
Flanders, or Egypt, or India, addressed as often as not, if they had
lacked the courage to ask her name beforehand, to the "Young Lady with
the Tea Urns."
But Marjorie's leisure hours were not exhilarating. That moment at the
end of the day's work, when every member of the human family ought to be
provided by law with some one or something to go home to, was the worst.
Still, it was all part of the game, and she played up sturdily. She
invented amusements for herself--such as could be indulged in by one
person, gifted with imagination and a sense of humour. London itself was
her playground. Most of the picture galleries and museums were closed
by this time; but London's real attractions are ever in the street.
Walking home on a fine morning from night duty, Marjorie would
frequently look in at St. James's Palace to see that the Guard was
properly changed. Sometimes she trudged as far as Buckingham Palace
with the relief. She bought a little book which dealt with London
landmarks, and sought out for her own amusement the Old Curiosity Shop,
London Wall, the site of Tyburn Tree, and the birthplaces of numerous
historical celebrities. She acquired a store of useless but pleasant
knowledge: for instance, that the wooden slab with iron legs, which
stands by the railings of the Green Park in Piccadilly, was originally
set up to enable ticket-porters to rest their bundles for a moment
before breasting the gradient--more perceptible to a ticket-porter than
a modern taxi--that leads to Hyde Park Corner.
The great railway stations were a perpetual feast to her, especially
Victoria and Waterloo. Many an evening found her at the barrier at
Victoria as the leave train drew up at the platform, to disgorge a wave
of bronzed, boisterous, mud-caked, unshaven children into the arms of
demonstrative relatives. Sometimes, too, in the early morning, she
attended this same train's departure, upon the shortest run in the
world--the run in the opposite direction was the longest--the journey
between London and Folkestone. With swelling heart and tightening lips
she watched the crowd of returners to duty--all curiously silent, and
all smiling in the most unanimous and resolute manner for the benefit of
those who had come to see them off. The silence and the resolution
broke sometimes when the warning whistle sounded--perhaps for ten
seconds. As soon as the train began to move, Marjorie always turned and
walked rapidly away before the women came wandering aimlessly back from
the empty platform. She could bear most things, but not that.
There were few amusements upon which she could afford to spend money.
The theatre generally was beyond her reach, but the cinema was an
abiding boon to herself and countless others--a fact to which the
attention of intellectual despisers of common pleasures is respectfully
directed. The cinema was always open; one could go in when one had
time, and come out when one had had enough. One could go there alone
without looking or feeling conspicuously alone, which is not possible in
the ordinary theatre; there were no waits, and no noise; and the
darkened auditorium, whether one regarded the screen or not, was a
rest-cure in itself.
Then there was the recreation of correspondence. Marjorie wrote to Roy
every day, and Joe once a week. She had received no letter from
Netherby in answer to her own; so she decided to make no present attempt
to repair the rupture of diplomatic relations in that quarter. Joe was
now a private in the Royal Engineers, undergoing intensive training in
the north of England. She had not seen him since his enlistment, nor
expected to, for leave was difficult. Moreover, Joe referred frequently
and appreciatively in his letters to local hospitality. Marjorie
scented a romance, but Joe gave nothing away.
And there were Roy's letters. They arrived with amazing regularity--the
postal service of the British Expeditionary Force was one of the
unadvertised marvels of the war--written in pencil upon the thin
blue-squared sheets of a field dispatch-book, with the censor's
triangular stamp in one corner of the envelope and Roy's own name
scribbled on the other. They contained little military information, and
a surprising amount of irrelevant foolishness. Roy told Marjorie about
life in billets. He reported upon his progress with the French tongue.
He told her of Madame _la fermiere_, in whose loft he slept, and with
whom he practised elegant conversation, but who was unfortunately only
intelligible upon Sunday, that being the one day in the week when her
false teeth were in actual use. For the rest of the week they reposed
thriftily in a drawer. He told her how he visited a French Field
Hospital, and had committed the solecism of addressing the nurse--an
elderly Sister of Charity--as "Mademoiselle Nourrice." He wrote, as a
schoolboy might, of some extra good "blow-out" at an _estaminet_; of his
small amusements; of his small grievances. He wrote, as a lover does, of
his lady, and how much he loved and missed her, and how greatly the
thought of her inspired him. But of tactical operations, or the joy of
battle--and there is such a thing--or the privations and horrors of war,
there was nothing. The whole aim of the man in the trenches at this
time appears to have been to maintain the morale of the people at home.
It was during this very month that Forain, the French cartoonist,
epitomised the psychology of the entire war in a single drawing--two
gaunt, mud-caked _poilus_, crouching waist-deep in the water of a
devastated trench during an intensive bombardment, gasping anxiously to
one another: "_Si les civils tiennent!_"
Of Roy's whereabouts Marjorie knew little. He had come safely through
the Battle of Loos--more fortunate than the majority of his colleagues.
He had served in Belgium for a space; after that the Division had been
transferred to France again. He was fond of indicating his position on
the map by cryptograms insoluble by friend or foe, or codes which not
even their author could decipher the day after their invention. But
occasionally he succeeded:
_Of course we are not permitted to say where we are, but it would be
harmful to blub about it._
The latter half of this sentence sounded so more than usually idiotic
that Marjorie felt sure it conveyed some subtle message. But though she
applied every solution known to the amateur detective, she could make
nothing of it. It was not for many weeks that it occurred to her,
during the night watches, to cease probing for key-words or transposing
vowels, and to try paraphrasing the sense of the text. By this means
she reached the conclusion that there was "harm in tears"--and a "buried
town" immediately sprang to view. But more often she was trapped in the
pitfalls of ambiguity.
"_This is a pleasant old-world spot_," Roy had remarked in a recent
letter. "_You would love the Vicar._"
"The Vicar! The Vicar? The Vicar of what?" Marjorie spent half an
hour poring over the _Daily Mail_ map of the Western Front which
decorated the greater part of her bedroom wall, in a vain search for a
place called Wakefield, or anything like it. She wrote back:
_By the way, the Vicar you are so enthusiastic about is an entire
stranger to me._
To-night another letter had come, conveying enlightenment:
_Sorry you don't like the Vicar. He used to be a good chap. An
up-river man, and some singer in his day._
Two minutes later, Marjorie's pencil was on the map, underlining
Bray-sur-Somme. Dear Roy! She leaned back in her cheap little stall in
the darkness, and chuckled softly to herself. How wonderfully these
foolish trifles lubricated the grinding wheels. But oh--!
Spots and splashes appeared upon the film, and it began to rain ink--an
infallible sign in the world of moving-picture romance of the less
expensive kind that the end of the tale is approaching. Marjorie rose to
her feet, pulled on her hat, and felt her way out into the Earl's Court
Road. She was sufficiently well known to the asthmatic Admiral of the
Fleet--at least he looked like that--who guarded the portals of the
Electric Palace to receive from him a gracious good night.
"O reevoyer, miss! I 'ope to see you on Thursday. We shall 'ave a
fresh picture then--Charlie Chaplin, the new screen comedian.
Everybody's talking about 'im. Very comical, 'e is!"
Not far from Earl's Court Station, in the obscurity of the discreetly
darkened street, Marjorie came upon a motor-car. A girl chauffeur was
endeavouring to jack up the off-hind wheel. Marjorie ranged up alongside
at once.
"Let me help you," she said.
"Thanks," gasped the girl. Together they wrestled with the stiff jack.
"A puncture?" inquired Marjorie.
"Yes. Rotten luck! I am only a mile from home, and this old tyre has
gone on the blink. I must put on the spare rim."
"I know this kind," said Marjorie, fired with characteristic enthusiasm
at the prospect of a thoroughly irksome job. "Let me do it!"
"You're welcome!" said the girl, who was white with fatigue. "I don't
mind the driving and the long hours," she continued sociably, settling
down on the running board while Marjorie deftly removed the
unserviceable rim; "but changing tyres, and oiling the engine, and
filling up grease-cups, and all those messy things--that's what I can't
stick!"
"Is this your--your work during the war?" asked Marjorie, suddenly
interested.
"Yes--The Women's Legion. We haven't been started long. It's hard work
in all weathers; but it's helping--a bit. I'm trying to keep my
husband's job open for him."
Ten minutes later, utterly exhausted, Marjorie let herself into her tiny
flat in a by-street off the Brompton Road. It was half-past nine. She
set the alarm clock for half-past five, and went to bed with Roy's
letter under her pillow. She dreamed that Roy had been
promoted--suddenly, but not unexpectedly--to the rank of
Commander-in-Chief, and that it was her privilege to drive him to battle
every morning at five-thirty, in a motor-car with the off-hind tyre
punctured.
*CHAPTER VII*
*DUET*
*I*
In one respect her dream came true.
Shortly after nine o'clock next morning, as the breakfast rush eased
off, Marjorie was aware of the flushed features of the lady
superintendent of the canteen, Miss Penny--"The Mouldy Old Copper," in
the unregenerate language of the junior staff--angrily visible through a
mephitic fog to which steaming tea, frying bacon, and moist humanity had
all contributed. (Even in the crispest weather Tommy Atkins is a most
hygroscopic individual.)
"We are for it, my dear!" announced The Mouldy Old Copper.
"What--Zeppelins?" inquired Marjorie, setting her tenth urn in position.
"Worse! Inspection! They are coming at twelve. The Government have
suddenly decided to inquire into the feasibility of making the Canteen
Service an official affair--a branch of the A.S.C., or the R.A.M.C., or
the Q.M.G., or some other futility. So they are coming to inspect us,
as 'a typical example of a canteen maintained by voluntary effort and
service.' I got it over the telephone just now."
"It was decent of them to warn you," said Marjorie.
"That's just what they haven't done! I got the news by a side wind.
It's to be a surprise inspection. They want to see what a show run by
women is like when it's off its guard. I like their impudence! What do
they expect to catch us doing, I wonder--arranging the tea-cups in the
wrong formation; or not keeping accounts in triplicate; or flirting with
the men; or what!" The Mouldy Old Copper turned a bright bronze colour.
"I'll jolly well talk to them, if they start any of their old--!"
"Don't you think," suggested Marjorie, "that it would be a good plan to
telephone round at once to make sure that there are enough waitresses?
You know what a bear-garden this place is when the men can't get
served."
Miss Penny considered.
"Yes, you are right," she said. "At least, we will warn some of them.
Not all--oh dear no, not all! There are women connected with this place
who haven't allowed their so-called work here to interfere with a single
tea-fight or subaltern-hunt since they joined. Of course they would
sell their souls to crush in to-day. Well, they shan't! They shall
hear all about it to-morrow, instead! I shall love telling
them--especially the Toplis girl, and Lady Adeline, and Mrs. Napoleon
Jones--or whatever the name of that horror with the pekineses is! You
run along, dear, and telephone to about a dozen of the decent ones, and
tell them to be sure and turn up by ten-thirty."
The result was that at high noon, when the Olympians descended upon
Waterloo Road, they found the canteen crowded with happy warriors
partaking of nourishment from the hands of a bevy of attractive and
competent Hebes. The Committee of Inspection consisted of a
much-beribboned Major-General, two or three lesser luminaries
proportionately decorated, and an elderly civilian in a shocking hat.
The Mouldy Old Copper conducted the procession round the canteen. Here
and there a halt was called at a table, where the Major-General, having
made the diners thoroughly comfortable by commanding them straitly to
"sit at ease," inquired, in the voice of a Bengal tiger endeavouring to
coo like a dove, whether there were "any complaints." There were none,
which was most gratifying, but not altogether surprising.
Marjorie, greatly diverted by the _sotto voce_ remarks which reached her
from tables in her neighbourhood, rested her tired arms upon the
speckless counter and looked demurely down her nose. Upon her ear fell
a raven's croak:
"Very good--with such a short time for rehearsal! But these damsels
must come here _every_ day, you know! By the way, does he write to you
regularly? I told him to."
Marjorie turned, and gaped in the most unladylike manner. The elderly
civilian in the bad hat had strayed away from his escort, and now stood
at her elbow--revealed as Lord Eskerley, to whom she had once been
presented at a regimental gymkhana at Craigfoot. Apparently he was
aware that the Olympian deputation were being treated to a display of
"eyewash." Apparently, also; he knew Marjorie. Not only Marjorie, but
Marjorie's most private affairs. Altogether, he seemed to know too much.
"By the way," continued his lordship characteristically, "how do you do?
I forgot." They shook hands. "Lovely day, isn't it? You look
overworked. What are your hours here?"
Marjorie told him.
"What is your particular _metier_?"
Marjorie introduced the tea-urns.
"No woman, however young or muscular, should carry heavy things about,"
said Lord Eskerley. "Razors to cut grindstones; as usual! Would you
like a change of occupation?"
"Indeed I should," replied Marjorie--"so long as it was helping things
along, you know."
"What can you do?"
Marjorie fingered the dimple on her chin dolefully.
"Not much, I'm afraid. I don't know anything about nursing, or
shorthand, or anything useful."
"You can drive a car, though."
"How do you know that?"
"How does the trembling fawn know that the wolf is not a vegetarian?"
The old gentleman glared at Marjorie over his spectacles.
"I expect its mother warns it," hazarded Marjorie, a little guiltily.
"Ah! Possibly. My mother, unfortunately, never saw you, though I am
sure that if she had she would have warned me. But there are other
ways--instinct, to a certain extent; also experience. You and your
two-seater once missed me by inches in the Craigfoot road. You were on
your way to keep an appointment, I thought: I forbore to speculate with
whom. But never mind that. Now--my chauffeur very properly joined the
army to-day. Would you care to step into his shoes? He wears large
fourteens, and your appointment would probably wreck my prospects as an
eligible widower; but I think those are the only two objections. Will
you give me a trial? Thank you very much! Report this evening."
*II*
Marjorie's labours henceforth were as arduous as ever, but were mainly
performed in the open air--which to her meant all the difference between
work and play. Each morning she drew up before Lord Eskerley's gloomy
mansion in that aristocratic slum, Curzon Street, at nine o'clock sharp,
and conveyed her employer upon his daily round. First to the Ministry
of Intelligence, an unobtrusive mansion in the purlieus of Whitehall
Gardens. Then, about eleven, to Downing Street. Then back to the
Ministry. About one, to Curzon Street, for a brief luncheon. In the
afternoon Marjorie ran errands: that is to say, she conveyed visitors to
the Ministry from all quarters of London--from other Ministries, from
the House of Commons, or from remote private addresses. At seven she
conveyed his lordship home to Curzon Street, where, day in, day out, in
victory or defeat, he dined at seven forty-five precisely.
"Give your digestion fair play," he once suddenly advised his
chauffeuse, as she tucked him into the car on a bitter January
afternoon, "and the world is yours!"
Marjorie promised to do so.
"Have a clear understanding with your stomach in early life," his
lordship resumed, the moment Marjorie reopened the door of the car
twenty minutes later. "Remember he _rules_ the rest of your internal
economy. Socially, we never meet him, or speak of him; but he is the
whole show! And--he is as sensitive as an upper servant! Give him the
consideration due to his position; don't ask him to work at unusual
times, or do things that are not part of his duty; and he will not only
serve you for a lifetime, but will keep your heart up to its work,
restrain your brain from more than usual foolishness, and put the fear
of death into the organs below stairs! But treat him casually, or give
him odd jobs to do--and he will let you down, as sure as fate! Call for
me at the usual time, please."
Marjorie's duties did not end at dinner-time; for war knows nothing of
the eight-hour day, or early closing, or Sabbath observance. Lord
Eskerley frequently went out about nine in the evening--sometimes to
Downing Street, occasionally to Buckingham Palace, not infrequently to
an unpretentious house in Dulwich, where he found it convenient to
interview persons whom it would have been undesirable to receive
officially at the Ministry or Curzon Street. The house stood in the
same road as Uncle Fred's. The fact gave Marjorie, gliding past in the
wintry darkness, a pleasant sensation of escape from futility.
One bleak and muddy day in February she drove Lord Eskerley down to
Bramshott Camp, to assist at a review of two new divisions. Somewhere
outside Godalming the gears began to burr and slip. Finally, Marjorie
pulled in at the side of the road and descended.
The window of the car was let down and Lord Eskerley's head appeared.
"How long will it take?" he inquired, avoiding superfluous questions, as
usual.
"About ten minutes. The lever has worked loose; I can't get my gears in
properly," replied Marjorie.
"Do you want any help? I have with me"--his lordship leaned back and
exhibited his fellow-passengers--"General Brough-Brough; his A.D.C.,
Captain Sparkes; and Mr. Meadows. The General and Captain Sparkes, as
you will observe, are all dressed up in review order, and I cannot have
them tarnished or made muddy, or I should be bringing contempt and
ridicule on the King's uniform; also rendering aid and comfort to the
enemy, which is not allowed in war time. So that disposes of them. I
shall not insult a lady of your capabilities by offering my assistance.
That leaves Meadows. Do you want him?"
"No, thank you," said Marjorie, swiftly removing the floor boards above
the gear box. The window was drawn up again, and Mr. Meadows, Lord
Eskerley's private secretary, a young man debarred from warlike
exercises by acute astigmatism and valvular murmurs, looked very much
relieved.
Ten minutes later, Marjorie, somewhat flushed and not a little oily,
resumed her place at the wheel, and deposited her passengers at the
stroke of the appointed hour at Divisional Headquarters at Bramshott.
Her employer, stepping out of the car, surveyed her grimy features
quizzically.
"Habakkuk!" he chuckled.
Six hours later, at the end of the return journey, he inquired:
"Do you read your Voltaire at all? Probably not: I'll send you his
'Life.'"
The volume reached her next morning. Therein Marjorie discovered a
marked passage, in which it was recorded that Voltaire found Habakkuk
"_capable de tout_." Thereafter, Lord Eskerley habitually addressed her
as Habakkuk.
*III*
Still, Marjorie was not entirely happy. As already stated, any form of
outdoor occupation was, in her view, play; and the present was
essentially a time for work. She belonged to that zealous breed which
is never really contented unless it is uncomfortable--to whom congenial
occupation is merely idleness under another name. She enjoyed her
present employment so much that she felt ashamed: she felt that she was
not pulling her weight in the war. Probably a short conversation with a
sensible person would have cured her of these illusions; but Marjorie
had no one with whom to converse. She might have confided in her
employer; but she argued, with some reason, that he would merely make an
apposite and caustic reference to the gentleman who is reputed to have
painted himself black all over in order to play Othello. It did not
occur to her to mention the matter to Roy in a letter. Roy, for the
present, belonged to his country, and was not to be diverted from his
duty by domestic or personal trifles. What Marjorie needed and longed
for at this time was a confidant.
If we desire a thing urgently enough we usually get it. Sometimes we
get more than we bargain for.
One day Lord Eskerley came down his front-door steps arm-in-arm with an
officer in uniform. His lordship's _chauffeuse_, who prided herself upon
her soldierly restraint, did not look round from her wheel as the pair
entered the car, but she heard her employer say:
"You can drop me at the office, Eric, and the car will take you on to
the club."
Eric Bethune's voice replied that this arrangement would suit its owner
top-hole.
When Lord Eskerley alighted at Whitehall Gardens he turned and addressed
Marjorie.
"Habakkuk," he announced, "inside the car I have left a D.S.O. on a
fortnight's leave. Please deposit him at the Army and Navy Club in Pall
Mall. He is a Scotsman, so there will be no gratuities."
"Very good, my lord," replied Marjorie, looking rigidly to her front.
She and the old gentleman made quite a speciality of these solemn little
pleasantries.
The portals of the Ministry had hardly closed upon the Minister when his
guest emerged from within the interior of the car and climbed into the
front seat beside Marjorie.
"May I come and sit here?" asked Eric, shaking hands. "I recognised
your back view through the front window-glass."
"It's against regulations," replied Marjorie, smiling, "but I can't
disobey a colonel. Besides, I want to hear all about the Western Front.
How are the Royal Covenanters?"
"I am commanding the Second Battalion now," replied Eric. "I have been
with them since October."
"Yes, I know," said Marjorie thoughtlessly.
"How did you know?" asked Eric, not altogether displeased.
Marjorie, carefully negotiating the cross-currents of Trafalgar Square,
bit her lip. She was beginning to give herself away already. But she
replied, looking steadily before her:
"I get letters sometimes."
"I hope your correspondents report favourably on me," said Eric lightly.
"Do you know many of my officers?"
"Not many--now. Let me see." Marjorie decided swiftly not to be
evasive, but to reply to Eric's naive inquisitiveness as naturally as
possible. "Major Laing--I have met him once or twice. Is he still with
you?"
"'Old Leathery'? Yes. He goes on for ever. Who else?"
"One hardly likes to ask these days, for fear--you know?"
"Yes, I know. But we've been lucky lately. We are in a quiet sector of
the line. We have had no officer casualties for two months. Wait while
I touch wood!" He tapped the mahogany dashboard. "Do you know
Kilbride, my adjutant?"
"I don't think so."
"He's a stout fellow. Let me see. Do you know young Birnie? He comes
from your part of the world, and mine."
"Yes, I know him," said Marjorie. "Is he quite well?" For the life of
her she could not help asking.
"Yes, he's all right." Eric gave Marjorie a sudden sidelong glance. He
possessed the curiosity of a child, and not a little of a child's
jealousy. He had certain things in mind--rumours, nods, innuendoes,
elephantine jests in the mess. Marjorie's eyes were fixed steadily upon
the road ahead of her, and her face expressed nothing more than polite
interest. But if Eric had been a really observant person--a woman, for
instance--he would have noticed that her hands were gripping the
steering-wheel until the nails were white.
"Whom else do you know?" he continued.
"Garry--Balfour--Carruthers--little Cowie?"
"No." Marjorie knew none of these. They were a later vintage.
"Laing and Birnie seem to be all of your friends that are left," said
Eric. "Which of them is your correspondent? Not old Leathery, surely?"
"No; Mr. Birnie. We are quite old acquaintances," said Marjorie,
thoroughly annoyed at the unfair tactics which had isolated Roy.
"Well, all that I can say is that I am thoroughly jealous of Master
Birnie!" announced Eric, smiling. "Now tell me all about yourself. What
are you doing here in London, driving a car?"
"Here is your club," said Marjorie, putting on her brake.
"Confound it!" Eric's annoyance was quite genuine. "We had so much to
discuss. Can't you lunch with me somewhere?"
"I never know when I shall lunch. It depends on Lord Eskerley."
"Well, can you dine? Surely you don't work all night as well!"
Marjorie hesitated. As it happened, she was free that evening, for she
knew that two cabinet ministers were dining and conferring with her
employer. There was no reason whatever why she should not accept Eric's
invitation. But for a moment some instinct held her back. Then she
thought of the eternal solitude of the flat.
"Thank you very much," she said. "I will."
They dined together and went to a play. Eric made a charming host and a
decorative escort. For the rest of the week--he was spending six days of
his leave with Lord Eskerley--Marjorie saw him constantly. She drove
him about London, and they went upon more than one exhilarating
excursion together. By the time that Eric departed to Scotland to visit
Buckholm she knew all about the regiment--its exploits, its smartness,
even its private jokes. Her general impression was that the regiment
had improved greatly since Colonel Bethune had taken command.
On the subject of Roy, both exhibited considerable reticence. When Eric
mentioned his name, he did so in a manner which jarred--"Your little
friend Birnie"; "Cowie, Douglas, Birnie, and other riff-raff of the
mess." Colonel Bethune might almost have been trying to belittle Roy
intentionally. So Marjorie, afraid of losing her temper and giving away
the position, carefully avoided Roy as a topic--an omission which Eric
may or may not have noted, but made no attempt to correct.
But the week was soon over, and Colonel Bethune and cheery nights out
were no more. Marjorie fell back into the old routine with an inevitable
sense of reaction. She realised next afternoon, as she sat waiting in
the rain at her wheel in Curzon Street, how improvident it is to accept
happiness or distraction from sources outside one's normal environment.
She knew now that the only permanent happiness is the happiness that
comes from common things. More than ever she yearned in her heart for a
regular companion--a crony, a confidant, a pal--as lively and as "safe"
as the companion she had just lost.
As noted above, it was raining--raining on a dismal afternoon in March.
It had been an anxious and busy week, for the Boche had fallen like an
avalanche upon Verdun, and the French resistance was in the preliminary
and uncertain stages of what was to prove one of the most heroic
defensive actions in history. Allied Councils of War had been frequent,
and Lord Eskerley's department had been heavily engaged.
Word had just been sent out to Marjorie that his lordship would be
detained another hour at least, and that Miss Clegg, if she pleased, was
at liberty to take the car back to the garage. But Miss Clegg was
pleased to remain where she was. She sat on, with the rain dripping off
her peaked cap and down the bridge of her nose, sedulously nursing a
theory that in so doing she was getting a little nearer to the Western
Front.
It never rains but it pours. Suddenly, from round the corner of Queen
Street, there came to Marjorie a new factor in her life--a humid but
quite alluring vision of attenuated skirt, black silk stockings, and
inadequate fur stole. The rain was working its will upon the vision:
she had not even an umbrella. But she pattered bravely along upon her
absurd heels, taking what shelter the lee of the houses afforded, and
keeping her head well down--presumably for reasons connected with her
dazzling complexion.
As she passed Marjorie she looked up, and Marjorie saw that she was
little more than a child, and a not very robust child at that. With
Marjorie, to think was to act.
"I say! Wait a minute!" she cried, and began to rummage under the
cushion of her seat, extracting ultimately a spare raincoat of her own.
"You must put this on," she announced to the girl: "you are soaking."
She bustled her new protegee into the garment without waiting for
permission. Then another thought occurred to her.
"I have half an hour to spare," she said. "May I take you anywhere?
Nobody"--indicating her employer's mausoleum-like residence--"will
mind."
Appealing blue eyes looked up at her. An enormous but attractive mouth
broke into a grateful smile.
"It's jolly decent of you," said a voice of incredible childishness.
"Are you sure?"
"Rather!" said Marjorie. "Will you get inside, or sit by me?"
"By you, please."
"All right! Come along!"
Marjorie cranked her engine, and took her place at the wheel. Her new
little friend snuggled down beside her.
"You _are_ strong!" she said admiringly. "And yet you don't look very
hefty. Your hands are lovely. How do you keep them so nice, doing this
kind of work?"
"They are my vanity!" laughed Marjorie. "I sit up half the night trying
to keep my nails in order. I wonder if it's worth while: I sometimes
feel inclined to let them rip--for the duration! Where can I take you?"
"The Imperial Theatre, if you don't mind. I have a rehearsal at three,
and it's after that now. I shall get a telling-off, as usual, I suppose.
Well, I'm not worrying: such is life!"
"Are you on the stage?" asked Marjorie, genuinely thrilled.
"Yes. We open in about a month, with a new musical show."
"What's it called?"
"I never can remember: they change the title about once a day. Not that
it really matters. 'Too Many Girls' is the latest; and pretty suitable,
too! My dear, you simply can't get men for the theatre nowadays! The
good ones have all joined up, and the rotters daren't walk on. You
ought to see our chorus men! They are all about seventy, or else they
have one lung, or one rib, or one ear, or something. Still, we carry on
somehow. Are you driving a car for war work?"
"Yes. I don't really feel that I ought to be doing it; it's too much
like fun. I was in a canteen at first, but I got rather run down and
hard up, and I was offered this job as a chauffeur, so I took it. I
think I should go back to the canteen if I could afford it. I never see
any soldiers now. At the canteen one could do something for them, poor
things."
"They're lambs!" agreed the passenger--"especially the young officers.
Are you engaged?"
Marjorie, very much occupied in negotiating Piccadilly Circus, nodded.
"An officer?"
Marjorie nodded again.
"My boy's an officer, too. What's your name, by the way?"
"Marjorie Clegg."
"Mine's Liss Lyle. (It's Elizabeth Leek really, but in the profession
one has to think of something better than that.) There's the Imperial
there. Just shake me off at the front entrance, and I'll slip round to
the stage door."
"Oh, but I want to drive you right up to the stage door!" said Marjorie
frankly. "It will be wonderful!"
The little woman of the world at her side smiled indulgently.
"Very well then, dear, you shall! Round that corner, and then round
again."
Marjorie set down her passenger with a genuine pang. She was certain
now what was wrong in her life. She had no one to gossip with.
The two girls shook hands.
"Thanks awfully!" said Liss. "Also for Little Willie Waterproof." She
took off the raincoat.
"Stick to it just now," said Marjorie: "it may be raining when you come
out."
"Can I? I love you for that. I'll come round and leave it for you
somewhere, shall I?"
Marjorie dived impulsively into the opening offered.
"Come to-night!" she said. "We might go and have some dinner somewhere.
I can always get off for an hour--sometimes for the whole evening. I
have a lot of evenings to myself," she added.
Ultimately the pair dined together, _chez_ Lyons, and Marjorie spent her
happiest hour since her invasion of London. She found her little friend
a characteristic medley of childishness and maturity--featherheaded,
affectionate, naive, with far more worldly wisdom than herself, yet with
all a child's dread of being laughed at for ignorance.
She came from Finchley--and apologised for doing so. She had no mother,
and her father, overburdened, it seemed, with daughters, had raised no
particular objection to Miss Elizabeth's theatrical predilections. She
was at present living at a boarding-house near Paddington. Did not like
it much. Said so--apparently to every one, including the other
boarders. But nothing troubled her long. Her thoughts, birdlike,
hopped to another twig, and her cheery little song of life was resumed.
She was not deeply concerned with how and why. She pecked carelessly
here and there at what fortune offered, without pausing to reason why or
count the cost; but so far appeared instinctively to have avoided what
was unwholesome. Her chief passions were dress, gossip, and expensive
confectionery. Her conversation was a blend of theatrical shop and
military slang--including many parrot-phrases which could have conveyed
no meaning to her whatever--and was chiefly remarkable for a certain
confiding frankness and a glorious contempt for what Mr. Mantalini would
have called "demnition details."
"You must meet my boy," she said to Marjorie, as they walked homeward.
"You'd love him. He's a _pukka sahib_!"
"What is his name?" asked Marjorie.
"I am not quite sure of his name," replied Miss Lyle, with
characteristic candour; "but I think he's in the Yeomanry. His
Christian name's Leonard. I met him with two other fellows at a party,
and I got all their surnames mixed up--I always do--and I can never
remember which of the three is his."
"You will find out before you marry him?" suggested Marjorie
respectfully.
"Oh, rather! But there's plenty of time for that. Besides, he's going
out soon, and then it won't matter."
"It won't _matter_?"
"No. We are not so potty about one another as all that. I could see
the lad wanted to be engaged--after all, poor things, they can't afford
to wait, these days--so I let him. He's nice, and clean, and it looks
well to be called for after rehearsal. I shall miss him awfully when he
goes. It's rotten to be by yourself in this world--isn't it?" A pair of
pathetic eyes were upturned to Marjorie's.
Next moment Marjorie's arm was round the waif's shoulders.
"Liss, you shall come and live with me!" she said impulsively.
"Righto!" replied Liss. "I was dying to be asked, but it seemed too
wonderful to be possible. I shall have to sponge on you for a bit,
though. I haven't a bean until the show opens."
"That's all right," said Marjorie.
"Now, where shall we have our dug-out?" asked Liss, becoming terribly
busy.
The pair spent a rapturous evening building castles in Kensington.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*CHORUS*
*I*
Finally they found an eyrie--a flat, somewhere in the sky at the back of
Victoria Street, consisting of a big bedroom, a tiny sitting-room, a gas
stove, and a surprisingly modern bath. They bought furniture at
unpretentious establishments in Tottenham Court Road, laying their own
carpets and hanging their own curtains. (The latter were the only
really essential articles of domestic furniture in those days of aerial
visitation.) Marjorie hung up a few reprints and photographs; Liss
contributed a portrait of her nebulous and anonymous fiance, together
with seventeen picture post cards of stage celebrities; and the ideal
home was opened.
Still, Marjorie's hunt for happiness was not yet complete. There were
two crumpled rose-leaves. Firstly, her implacable conscience continued
to inform her that her war work was too easy. Secondly, her evenings
were as lonely as ever. As soon as rehearsals finished, and "Too Many
Girls" started upon its nightly and tumultuous presentation, Liss
disappeared regularly every evening about half-past six; to return,
sometimes exhilarated, sometimes gloomy, sometimes affectionate,
sometimes quarrelsome, but invariably hungry and inexorably talkative,
about midnight. Supper was then served. The two ladies rarely ate at a
table: as already noted, the keynote of a feminine meal is its
passionate avoidance of anything in the shape of ceremonial routine. As
often as not Marjorie would take her supper to bed with her, while Liss,
munching and babbling, plied back and forth between the sitting-room and
bedroom, in progressive stages of disrobement, bearing fresh supplies
and relating the experiences of the day--continuing long after she had
shed her flimsy garments over two rooms and a vestibule, arrayed herself
in night attire, and crawled into bed.
"My dear, we had the most wonderful house to-night. Seven _legitimate_
calls after the first act! What an audience these boys on leave make!
(Here are a couple of sardines: the bloater paste is nah-poo.) They
gave Phyllis Lane such a reception! She had to do the dance after 'Pull
Up your Socks!' three times; (and if you want any more cocoa tell me,
because I am going to turn out the gas-ring.) Her husband has been
mentioned in dispatches. Leonard wasn't in front to-night--selfish pig!
I'll tell him off for that, to-morrow. (Oh, you darling, did you put
this hot-water-bottle in my bed? I must give you a kiss for that.
There! No, it won't hurt you, it's only lip salve.) Mr. Lee came
behind to-night, and spoke to us all. Said the show was a credit to
everybody, and he was very pleased to hear how brave we all were during
the raid the other night. Yes, he's the managing director. (Have you
finished? Very well, then! Give me the tray. Here's a cigarette for
you.) By the way, I was talking to Uncle Ga-Ga to-night. Oh, didn't I
tell you about him? He's one of the chorus gentlemen--about a hundred
years old, and simply mad to get into the war. But they won't take him.
He keeps changing his name, and dyeing his hair a fresh colour, and
trying again; but they turn him down every time. Seems queer, doesn't
it, that when a man wants to go he can't, while there are so many who
should and won't? (Can I use your cold cream, dear? I can't find mine.)
Lee said they would probably put on a second edition about August: we
start rehearsing the new numbers next week. Why don't you come and get
a job in the chorus? It wouldn't interfere with your other work.
There's two or three other girls doing the same as you, and Lee lets
them off with one _matinee_ a week. He's very patriotic. A-a-a-h!
Oo-oo-oo! Ee-ee-ee! What a _lovely_ warm bed! Well, as I was
saying--Marjorie Clegg, what is the use of my wearing myself to a shadow
waiting on you at supper and then the moment I get into bed and begin to
chat for a couple of minutes before lights out you start snoring like a
grampus? Very well, have it your own way. Live and let live, _I_
say.... That's all.... As for that little toad Leonard--!..."
Miss Lyle's baby eyes closed, her small nose buried itself in the
pillow, and her little tongue was still for several hours.
But Marjorie was not asleep. She lay awake thinking, while outside
London, shrouded in the blackest obscurity, snatched such slumber as
that endless, flaring, muttering line of outposts in Flanders could
guarantee. For all her splendid vitality, Marjorie was a highly-strung
girl--with a conscience. That morning Colonel Bethune, passing through
London from Scotland on his way back to the Western Front, had invited
her to a "farewell luncheon." She had accepted, gladly--and had
repented ever since. For behold, over the coffee, Colonel Bethune had
asked her to marry him!
He had asked her very charmingly, and with obvious confidence--a
combination which made it an ungrateful and difficult business to say no
without offence. At first Marjorie had been too taken back to say
anything at all. When her answer came its sincerity was unmistakable;
and poor, vain Eric was obviously and deeply mortified. With a vague
idea of consoling him, she had mentioned that her affections were
already engaged. He had asked her for no name, but she knew that it had
been written in her face, and that Eric had read it there. Then a new
and disappointing characteristic of the man had cropped out. He had
turned and reproached her--had told her that she had flirted with him,
and led him on--which was a base lie. But for all that, she was filled
with remorse. In her selfish desire for a good time she had been
thoughtlessly inconsiderate of Colonel Bethune, and almost disloyal to
Roy.
She and her host had parted miserably ten minutes later, each having
learned a bitter lesson--Eric, that in the field of love, especially
under stress of war, callow youth can be more than a match for dazzling
maturity; Marjorie, that where a pretty girl is concerned no man can be
regarded as 'safe' until he is dead.
Well, she would expiate her fault in the only way she knew. This
decided, she fell asleep.
*II*
Next morning Marjorie, depositing her noble employer upon the steps of
the Ministry of Intelligence, inquired:
"May I speak to you for a moment, sometime, Lord Eskerley?"
"Twelve-twenty-five," was the prompt reply--"after Downing Street and
before signatures. But I will not exert my influence to have him made
Commander-in-Chief!"
At twelve-twenty Marjorie presented herself to Mr. Meadows, in the
secretary's room, and was passed through double doors into the presence
of the minister. His lordship looked up over his spectacles and
indicated a chair.
"Habakkuk! Good! Sit down. Four-and-a-half minutes! Well?"
"I want to say," announced Marjorie, plunging head foremost into her
confession, "that I can't stay here any longer."
"Why?"
"I am not happy in my mind. I must go away."
"Good gracious! Don't say Meadows has fallen in love with you! I will
not permit my subordinates to encroach upon my prerogatives! No--not
that? Proceed, then!"
"I think I ought to leave you," Marjorie continued, quite unmoved by her
employer's senile quips, "because I am having too good a time. I have
been feeling all along that I ought to be doing something else."
"So I have observed. Well?"
"The only trouble is that if I go back to the canteen work (where they
want my help very badly), I shan't get paid for it; and I can't afford
to work without pay of some kind. I have a small allowance from home,
but it doesn't go far, and the girl I share a flat with was pretty hard
up when I first picked--became acquainted with her."
"Oh! Ah! So you keep a foundling hospital, too?"
"Only one!" explained Marjorie. "She's a dear," she added warmly.
"She's on the stage. She was badly in debt before the new piece
started--they don't get paid during rehearsals, you see--and she is only
just beginning to get on her feet again; so I can't afford to work for
nothing during the day just now, unless--"
"Unless you go on the stage yourself at night? Is that it, O _Capable de
tout_?"
"I was thinking of it," confessed Marjorie; "but I don't know how you
guessed."
"It's the first thing every pretty girl thinks of when confronted with
the necessity of earning a living. Go on."
"And I want to ask you: Is it playing the game to be on the stage _at
all_ in war time? I mean, ought the men to be encouraged to go to
revues, and things like that, when they are on leave? Is it all wrong,
and demoralising, and unpatriotic, as some people say?"
Lord Eskerley sat up, and took off his spectacles.
"Unpatriotic fiddlesticks!" he remarked with great vigour. "In war time
there are just three things that matter. The first is morale. I have
forgotten the other two. The maintenance of purely military morale can
safely be left in military hands; but civilian morale--and that includes
the morale of the men on leave of course, rests mainly on the triple
foundation of the Church, the Press, and the Stage; and, as things are
to-day, I am not sure that the Stage doesn't have the biggest say in the
whole business. (Don't tell Doctor Chirnside I said that, will you?) So
you are thinking of joining your foundling behind the footlights.
Chorus, I presume?"
"Yes. They would give me three pounds a week."
"They would get you cheap! And you want me to satisfy your conscience
that the life of a galley-slave in a vitiated atmosphere all day,
followed by vocal and calisthenic exercises in an even more vitiated
atmosphere for three hours every night, is a sufficiently close approach
to hard work to exonerate you from all suspicion of lukewarmness with
regard to the war?" The old man stood up and shook hands. "Donna
Quixota Habakkuk, the certificate is granted! I suppose you will stay
on for a week or two, until I find a successor--I won't say a
substitute? Don't forget me, altogether. Come and see me sometimes. I
am less busy, and more solitary, than you suppose. You know when to
come: you are familiar with my goings out and comings in. And--good
luck, my dear!"
*III*
Life behind the scenes, as usual, falsified expectation. Marjorie's
first visit to the theatre was paid a few weeks after her interview with
Lord Eskerley. They entered by the stage-door, Liss explaining to a
taciturn but benevolently disposed person in a glass box, whose name
appeared to be "Mac," that her companion had an appointment with Mr.
Lee. Thereafter, Marjorie was conducted through an iron door, which
commanded the thoughtless, by stencilled legend, to close it gently;
through a mass of ghostly scenery, past whitewashed walls bearing
notices extolling the virtues of Silence; and out through another iron
door (marked, somewhat paradoxically, "_Not an exit_") into the
auditorium, rendered dimly visible by the overflow of light from an
economically-illuminated stage.
Liss turned back the holland covering from two stalls at the end of a
retired row.
"Sit there, dear," she said. "I will grab hold of old Lee some time,
and tell him you are here. I can sit with you for a bit. This rehearsal
is for principals; the chorus aren't called until twelve."
The rehearsal of the principals consisted, for the moment, of an
altercation between a fat man, standing in the middle of the stage, and
the musical director, sitting at his desk in the orchestra. It was a
most friendly--one might almost call it an affectionate--altercation.
No epithet ever fell to a lower level of mutual esteem than "Old Boy!"
or "Old Man!"--or, under extreme provocation, a "Dear Old Boy!" As is
not unusual in these cases, it was difficult for the casual outsider to
discover:
(_a_) What the argument was about.
(_b_) Which side of the argument was being sustained by whom.
In the front row of the stalls stood an ascetic-looking man in black
tortoise-shell spectacles, apparently acting as umpire. Seated upon a
partially dismantled throne beside a step-ladder, up stage, sat a pretty
girl in a pink tam-o'-shanter, placidly perusing a crumpled
brown-paper-covered manuscript. Other persons were dotted about the
auditorium--fat men, cadaverous men; men with tortoise-shell spectacles,
and men without; an occasional female. All were conferring in monotone.
Round the bare walls of the stage, at present destitute of scenery, sat
the ladies of the chorus, most of them wearing rehearsal dresses of
unpretentious design--knitting socks of khaki, and occasionally
exchanging a guarded confidence. Altogether the atmosphere struck
Marjorie as more domestic than theatrical--almost ecclesiastical in its
dullness and drowsiness.
"Who are these people sitting about in the stalls?" she asked Liss.
"Oh, just odds and ends! The author, and the lyric writers, and extra
lyric writers, and costumiers, and photographers, and people like
that--all waiting to catch Mr. Lee, and start an argument with him about
something. That's Tubby Ames on the stage. He's having a row with Phil
Kay; he has about two a week. I bet you he's trying to get Phyllis
Lane's song cut. (That's her, in the pink tam; she's sweet.) It's been
going too well lately. Tubby was kept waiting for his entrance in the
Second Act last night while she did her third encore dance. Trust Tubby
to step on other people's fat! Yes, I thought so."
The comedian's voice was heard again. The gist of the dispute was
emerging from a cloud of verbiage.
"Phil, dear old man," he exclaimed earnestly, "I should be the last
person in the world to interfere with a brother or sister artist; but
really, I am only saying what every one feels. After all, we must all
pull together in these days, and I feel instinctively that unless the
way is kept _ab-so-lute-ly_ clear for that entrance of mine, the action
will drop--and flop goes your Second Act! And where are you then?" He
leaned right over the footlights.
The conductor, apparently a man of peace, flinched visibly.
"Old boy," he began, "it's this way. I quite see your point--"
The comedian pressed his advantage swiftly.
"I thought you would," he said. "I have had a good many years'
experience in this sort of work--more than you, perhaps. For instance,
when I was with Charles Wyndham--"
"It's the Story of his Life!" whispered Liss despairingly. "We get it
about every second rehearsal. He's out of pantomime, really. It's only
because there's nobody else to be had that he's here at all. He has
varicose veins, and--"
But the ascetic referee in the stalls broke in upon the autobiographist.
"Mr. Ames," he commanded--his voice was strong and harsh, and was
obviously extensively employed in shouting down other discordant
noises--"talk sense!"
"That's Mr. Lancaster," whispered Liss excitedly. "He's the producer.
We are all frightened to death of him. He's a wonder!"
"Miss Lane's song cannot be cut," continued the wonder, "and it cannot
be transferred elsewhere; so you must lump it! Now, Miss St. Leger,
come on, please, and try your 'Plum and Apple' duet with Mr. Ames."
Miss St. Leger, the leading lady, was standing in the wings. Her face
was round and childish; her eyes were brown and pathetic; her whole
appearance suggested timidity and helplessness. Hearing her name called,
she walked obediently down to the footlights, favoured the producer with
a dazzling smile, and began:
"Say, listen, Mr. Lancaster! I got a kick coming too! That duet I am
putting over with Mr. Ames in the Second Act of the present show is
practically a solo! When we started in singing it, way back in last
fall, it was a duet, I'll allow. But somehow I got a kind of crowded
feeling, now. I don't seem to belong in that duet when Mr. Ames is
around. And I want to say right here that I am not going to stand for
that kind of rough stuff any more!"
By this time the languid chorus were sitting straight up on their
chairs. The scattered figures in the auditorium had ceased their
muttered incantations, and were leaning forward, all ears. The pacific
Phil Kay was squirming in his seat. Marjorie and Liss gripped hands
ecstatically; the ecclesiastical atmosphere had evaporated.
"I understand team work," continued the ethereal Miss St. Leger, "as
well as any artist; and you won't ever find me stepping on any other
folks' laughs or business. But one thing I will not do, and that is
feed fat to a dub comedian all the time--especially a guy that's too fat
already!"
There was a roar of laughter from stage and stalls. Even the austere
Lancaster grinned sardonically. Mr. Tubby Ames, gaping like a stranded
fish, surrendered abjectly, as was his invariable custom when firmly
handled.
"All right," he said, with a pathetic smile. "Carry on! Nobody loves a
fat man! Chord, please!"
_Said an Apple to a Plum;--_
_"Seeing how this War has come,_
_Join me in the stew-pan, do!"_
Miss St. Leger, flushed with victory, took her demoralised opponent in
an affectionate embrace, and replied:
_Said the Plum, "I guess I will!_
_I am fairly stony; still,_
_I will do my bit, like you!"_
"There's Mr. Lee now," said Liss--"just by the stalls entrance. Let's
catch him!"
Our two conspirators descended upon the great man. He proved to be much
less formidable than Marjorie had feared.
"We can make room for you, girlie," he announced paternally, "and"--with
a glance at Marjorie's face and figure--"a hundred more like you, _if_
they can be found, which I doubt!" He patted her shoulder. "Now--where
will you fit in? Let me think! You are too big to go prancing about
the stage with Baby Lyle, and the other little people. Your life's work
is to stand well down stage in a stunning frock, and fill the eye! Take
her along to Mr. Lancaster, Baby, and say I sent you. I must be off."
"I ought to tell you," said Marjorie, "that I may find matinees a
difficulty. I am working at a canteen. I have only one free afternoon
a week."
"That will do," said Mr. Lee. "I believe in helping girls who are doing
war work. I'm a special constable myself. Not bad for an old man of
fifty-four, eh? But we all try to do something here. Now, run along to
Lancaster, girls! I have to report for duty at Vine Street at three
o'clock."
With a gracious smile, Mr. Lee disappeared through the stalls entrance.
Liss squeezed Marjorie's hand excitedly.
"My dear, you have made a _tremendous_ hit with him! He can be horribly
grumpy when he likes. Come and be introduced to Lancaster."
The producer was found dismissing the rehearsal of principals. The plum
and apple had become jam in the last verse, so both romance and
patriotism were satisfied.
"Very good," he said. "It all goes all right now, except the dance.
Mr. Kosky will take care of that." He raised his voice. "Principals,
same time to-morrow! Good morning, Miss St. Leger! Good morning,
Tubby, old man!" His voice boomed louder. "Now then, chorus ladies and
chorus gentlemen, please!"
The damosels round the stage laid down their khaki socks, hitched up
their own stockings, and gathered in groups in the wings.
Simultaneously a procession of six gentlemen appeared from the direction
of the stage-door, extinguishing cigarettes.
Liss hurriedly introduced Marjorie. Lancaster shook hands.
"I think we can find a place for you in the show," he said, regarding
her with critical approval. "Can you sing?"
Marjorie, with a sudden and incongruous recollection of the harmonium at
Netherby on Sunday afternoons, smiled, and replied that she could sing a
little.
"Mr. Kay will try your voice after rehearsal. No previous experience, I
suppose?"
"No."
"It doesn't matter. You had better sit and watch this rehearsal this
morning, and try to learn our language. Baby, my dear, run along and
get into your place."
Liss, who appeared to be the _enfant gate_ of the establishment,
scampered away, and presently appeared among the chattering throng on
the prompt side. Mr. Lancaster clapped his hands. There was silence.
"Now, ladies and gentlemen," he explained, "we are going to try the
first new number in the Second Act--'Honolulu Lulu.' Places, please,
and try to put some ginger in it this time! You come on laughing and
chatting. Now--_commence_!" He clapped his hands again. "For pity's
sake, everybody, _desist_! Gentlemen, gentlemen, remember that you are
happy South Sea Islanders, without a care in the world--not welshers
coming back from a dirty day at Kempton! Again, please! And ladies,
don't come bolting on in that panic-stricken way. You aren't taking
shelter from an air raid; you are young village belles, come to
participate in the Annual Festival of the Sun! You are joyful! You are
glad! You are going to sing about it! For the Lord's sake, _smile_!
Phil, old man, the symphony once more, if you please! All come in at
the end of six bars. La-la! La-la! La-la! _Now_, all together! No!
no! no! _no_!" Mr. Lancaster clapped his hands and beat his breast
alternately. "Ladies, ladies, _ladies_! Let me tell you, for the last
time, that it is a human impossibility to sing with the mouth shut! It
can't be done! For generations and centuries people have been trying to
sing out of their noses, and their ears, and the back of their necks;
but no one has ever succeeded yet. Open your little mouths! Open them
wide! And _keep_ them open, for the love of Mike!"
And so on, until a standard of approximate harmony was attained.
*IV*
Next day Marjorie walked on at her first rehearsal, and practised the
new numbers with the rest. Mr. Lancaster's attitude towards her was the
same as Mr. Lee's. That is to say, he addressed her much as an old
gentleman of seventy might address a little girl of six.
"Now, dear, I know you are feeling nervous, and aren't going to do
yourself justice, just at first--"
"I am not a bit nervous, thank you," said Marjorie.
"Oh, yes, you are," said Mr. Lancaster. "But remember that I understand
about that, and am making allowances all the time. So don't be
frightened; but keep your head up, and sing out, that's a good girl!"
"He's a hard nut," remarked her next-door neighbour into her ear--"but
he never swears at you. At least, if he does, he always apologises
afterwards. He's quite a gentleman."
In a few days Marjorie was admitted an accepted member of the choral
sisterhood. She found her colleagues, for the most part, young,
friendly, talkative, excitable, and as improvident as grasshoppers.
Most of them possessed a "boy" of some kind--usually a callow subaltern
of the one-star brand, with a vocabulary largely composed of the
expressions "priceless" and "pathetic." Some of them were married. A
few had husbands actually out in France, or farther afield. One or two
had babies, and talked about them a good deal.
Of the principals, Miss St. Leger, with her magnetic personality and
tough little Chicago voice, was a prime favourite with everybody. Her
hold over the audience was wonderful: she could galvanise a Wednesday
matinee into enthusiasm. Compared with her, the second girl, Phyllis
Lane, was no more than an attractive amateur. But both were kind to
their humbler sisters. Indeed, nearly everybody was kind to everybody
in those days. The theatrical profession is conspicuous for its big
generosities and petty jealousies. In August, nineteen-sixteen, the
former had almost entirely obliterated the latter. A huge daily
casualty-list is a very levelling--indeed, binding--influence,
especially in such a community; there was not a girl in the chorus at
the Imperial who had not an interest, actual or prospective, in that
casualty-list.
The male members of the company, as was only natural at the time, were
remarkable neither for their youth nor their physical fitness. In
addition to the phlebitic Ames, there were--Jack Hopeleigh, a
well-preserved hero with a light baritone--he was registered under the
Derby Scheme in group forty-three; Hubert Hartshorn, a comic manservant,
who owed his irresistible wheezy laugh to the fact that he had been
badly gassed at Ypres more than twelve months previously, and was now
discharged permanently unfit; and one Valentine Rigg, a stage lawyer,
who for forty years had earned a modest but steady income by arriving in
the Third Act with a black bag, and clearing up all misunderstandings
just before the clock struck eleven.
To the student of humanity the chorus gentlemen were really more
interesting than the principals. There was a dismal individual named
Chivers, who now kept a stationer's shop in Brixton, but had once been
in grand opera--Carl Rosa's chorus. He contributed a reedy tenor to the
ensemble. There was a plump little man with a round face and little
tufts of white whisker, invaluable in scenes of revelry where guests of
the "jolly old uncle" type were required. This was his first theatrical
engagement for fifteen years. In the interim he had supported life with
invincible cheerfulness, as a bookmaker's clerk, a traveller in
hymn-books, and head-waiter in an old-fashioned Brighton hotel. There
was a discharged corporal of the Machine Gun Corps, with lungs of brass,
the D.C.M. ribbon on his waistcoat, and twenty-seven fragments of German
H.E. in his left leg. There was an unpleasant-looking youth named
Mervyn, with bobbed hair and a patronising manner--debarred from
volunteering his services to his country by reason of a susceptibility
to chills upon the liver. Popular rumour located these elsewhere.
And there was Alf Spender--"Uncle Ga-Ga." His age was a mystery. His
own estimate, for war purposes, was forty-one. The ladies of the chorus
put it among themselves at a hundred and fifty. It was possibly
fifty-four, or thereabouts. He was a frail creature, with a simple
soul, and what Americans call a "single-track" mind. He had been a
super or chorus man ever since he could remember; and until the year
nineteen fourteen had never relinquished a humble ambition to achieve a
speaking part. But now all that was cast to the winds. His single
track was carrying other traffic. Somewhere within his ill-nourished
frame burned the pure white flame of genuine patriotism. His one desire
was to be admitted to the privilege of khaki, and to do his humble part
in "teaching those dirty Germans a lesson." He never rested in his
efforts to qualify. He dyed his scanty locks; he endeavoured, by daily
study o
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