CHAPTER II
"Armageddon!" said Gareth several times aloud to himself. "Armageddon...." And then, with a proud upward jerk of the head: "Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet!" After a pause: "... 'And the shores of Ireland will be defended by her armed sons, North and South together!'" ... He broke off, once more to rumble, with a curious slow relish: "Armageddon."
For he was not yet muted to the thrill of this thing that the summer of nineteen-fourteen had brought along with it; and which had made of him a nervous responsive instrument for all the unwonted word-fragments swarming about haphazard, as men fumbled to express the new conditions, to find a language significant of their new emotions:
"The making of history—the war that will end war—violation of neutral territory—the Allied Armies—crush the menace of Prussianism—mobilization—transport—commissariat—Press Bureau—moratorium——"
So quickly they poured in, these coins of the new mintage, that Gareth had scarcely time to let his fancy handle them lovingly:
"The mad dog of Europe—defence of the Realm—wait till the Cossacks get to Berlin" savouring the ominous implication: "Kitchener wants five hundred thousand men——"
"Casualty list...."
There was a different note to the saying of that; a curt rather harsh inflection, where in other cases one might slide the syllables lingeringly. But—"Casualty list"—No, one was dry and businesslike over that.
"Efficiency!" muttered Gareth in the same tone.
A newspaper boy scampered past him in the hot stale sunshine, creaking: "Off-i-shul! six-thirty off-i-shul! 'Eavy fighting at...." the name was blurred. "Off-i-shul!"
Official!... Of course one had heard it at the time of the Boer War; a little while after he and Kathleen——He remembered bringing her home the evening papers, and her fierce incisive comments upon the situation. Well—now he brought the late editions home to Patricia. The strain between them of the things unmentionable had been blown to bits by the eruption of the war; now there was always news, real news, off-i-shul news, for their discussion; general discussion, which as yet had not dwindled to the personal question.
He glanced at the stop-press column. No longer any doubt about it: Paris was saved. The German hordes had been rolled back at the eleventh hour. Gareth swung down the Strand, with the Marseillaise crashing exultantly through his brain, temporarily displacing his other orchestral selection of phrases. The French, as a nation, appealed to him tremendously; and he was glad we were concerned, in howsoever a minor degree, with the salvation of the City of Light. His eye caught a glimpse of a portrait of the Belgian King in the window of a picture-shop; the handsome, fair, somewhat stolid face had lately become familiar as the hitherto unknown strains of Belgium's anthem; his ear was arrested by a passerby exclaiming excitedly: "Why did the Russian steam-roller——" the rest was lost in a surge of human traffic outside the recruiting-office. "Why did the steam-roller?" Gareth asked himself absurdly; and went on with the question for quite a long time before he realized that there was no prescribed answer to it.
A detachment of bluejackets marched past, their red faces grinning cheerfully ... one globular patch of red after another, with a curious rhythmical effect of repetition.
A patriotic shopkeeper had decorated his frontage with the intertwined flags of the Allies ... "Intertwined...."
"... And the shores of Ireland will be defended by her armed sons, North and South together!"
Perhaps more than by anything else, had Gareth's impressions of this first month of war been dented by the peroration of Redmond's third of August speech in the House of Commons. And the sequence of great and small events served but to heighten this prevalent effect of cohesion, of all stray units gathered up and knit together for a joint purpose: North and South Ireland; Great Britain and her colonies; the regular army with the raw recruits; the suffragette with the spoilt débutante; Liberal and Conservative and Labour; France and Russia and Servia and Belgium, rhapsody of concentration on one issue, one ideal ... no single person left out who wanted to be in.... Here was the old dream which for Gareth had previously been symbolized in the absorbed fraternity of "Campbell's Young Men," repeated now on an immeasurably larger scale. One of Them. The glamour of belonging.
Gareth had always been slightly appalled by the burden of each individual responsible for himself; and his visions had naturally taken the trend of mankind serving in a common cause; one need for the scattered energies; one will pushing these along. The world as a sort of club, excluding a few just to strengthen the privilege of membership. In this case it was the Germans who had wantonly put themselves outside the Crusade for Humanity....Somebodyhas to be the enemy ... he recollected childhood's difficulty of finding the offensive party in the game of French-and-English——
"I suppose that game will have to go now; and the Berlin polka; and German measles; and Prussian binding; and—and Dresden china—and music—and eau de Cologne—and the dachshund——" he pondered over possible additions to this list of articles that were of obstreperously enemy manufacture.
... The Strand and London and the British Isles—crowded with little people, who in a crisis had proved big enough to be lifted above their petty domestic squabbles, and belligerent beat-your-neighbour-out-of-doors attitude. And he was one of them—One of Them.... More recruits going by, in attire a grotesque mixture of civilian and khaki. Here, there, and wherever one looked, evidences of some personal sacrifice.—That was at once the clarion-call and the march-rhythm of nineteen-fourteen. To participate, to fall in step, one must sacrifice as well....
Suddenly he was conscious of a keen desire once more to live in complete harmony with Patricia. After all, what stood between them but the fact of her book suppressed that his might appear? Viewed in the clearer colder searchlight which recent events had streamed into his flinching soul, it seemed infinitely mean and selfish that he should smugly have acquiesced in this arrangement.
For Pat's was the worthier book of the two. He admitted it now. He would admit it presently to her. It was splendidly generous that she should have aided him in dissembling the fact. But if Gareth Temple were to be identified with the Crusade—and he did not mean to be left out this time—he could straightway make a beginning by stripping himself of the illusion that had hitherto been so pampered—illusion that his book was in the very slightest degree important to anyone but himself. Patricia's should be published instead of his; or—since it was indeed too late except at an enormous expense to withdraw a novel of which he had already received the page-proofs—Patricia's should be published as well as his—and kill it.
Locker and Swyn could well afford a failure.
Gareth hurried home, flushed and exalted by this definite solution of a vague desire; and not at all abashed by the thought that Pat had already once anticipated him, by use of their accidentally overlapping themes, to give herself a spiritual adventure. It stimulated satisfaction in him to remember that it was no valueless contribution he intended to make to the prevailing Fund for Remorseful Egoists. For the first fortnight or so following the outbreak of hostilities, it had seemed doubtful if literature and art were not doomed to be carried away in a waste-paper basket, emptied irrespective of contents. But since the news from the Front had been more hopeful, intellect and civilization had begun to collect themselves; metaphorically, to look round and discover how much of themselves remained after the shock. And John Forrester had only yesterday written to announce that, barring unforeseen complications, they intended to adhere to their original resolution to publish "The Round Adventure" in October. So that by this genuine offering of what was immediately precious, Gareth would not only be subordinating himself fitly to the exactions of a great impersonal Cause; but would also be witness of Patricia's impulsive tumult of gratitude and happiness. Henceforth would exist no reason, no reason at all, why their life together might not be all he had ever pictured it.... He sprang off the step of the omnibus, and walked rapidly up the road to number seventeen.
"Pat! Pat! Where are you?"—impatience was eager to act red-hot upon resolve. "Pat!"
"Here!" her voice came distantly from the very top of the house.
"In the box-room? Why?" He vaulted up the two flights of stairs; and then up another steep little flight.
Patricia was rummaging among a disorderly chaos of trunks and sacks and broken packing-cases that had disgorged half their contents over the bare uneven floor: picture-frames; torn books; a pair of ski; the spring-mattress of a bed ... general litter of tools ... remnants of fancy-dress, and old boots, and brown-paper, and a battered bird-cage ... he wondered how all these inconsequent articles had managed to accumulate during their seven months of marriage?—he could not recall that they had ever had a bird.... Then speculation was split asunder by lightning memory of his errand:
"Pat," breathless from mingled excitement and his quick passage up the stairs, "Pat—I want your book to be published as well as mine; or instead of mine. Yours is the better book. I've made up my mind——"
"Books?"—she looked up from her squatting position in front of an old belabelled portmanteau; her arms still plunged elbow-deep in search of some article. "Heavens above, my good man, who cares about books now!"
... "They've stopped mattering," she added, an instant later, with less of vehement scorn in her voice, seeing his expression of slapped bewilderment.
He sat down on a dusty roll of carpet. It was not much good explaining to her how his apparently irrelevant decision was indeed closely linked up with the war ... a sort of readjustment of soul and spring-cleaning of motive which in its ultimate working-out would at least infinitesimally contribute towards his dreaming conception of a nation massed to loftier aim than before August the fourth. He had trusted to Patricia's understanding of this, since like impulses of her own had always resolved themselves quickly into deed. But Pat, with strangely shallow interpretation, said that books did not matter.... He was six weeks too late to impress her by open admission of his literary inferiority. Another failure——Why could he never once succeed in pulling off anything with full staging and effects?
Dejectedly he asked: "What are you looking for?"
"My big waterproof boots. They ought to be here somewhere. I've found everything else——" She came to an abrupt halt, tugging a sturdy strap from the depths of the portmanteau. "Good; that'll come in useful. I'm off to Belgium on Thursday."
"What?" He was on his feet in a moment.
"With Hume Ferguson's Ambulance Corps."
"But—but you're not a nurse."
"No.... My official capacities wall be treasurer, secretary, courier, and emergency chauffeur. But between ourselves, the idea is that I should write up incidents of our daily round; and knock them into a book of which the enormous profits shall be devoted to the purchase of more ambulances. We've an awfully scratch lot at present."
"Just now you said books didn't matter."
She shrugged her shoulders. "I should have said fiction didn't matter. Campbell thinks that a volume of impressions jotted down on the spot ought to go well, before the market is choked up with them."
"Campbell——?"
"Yes. He was up at Ferguson's the other day; and he made a fairly generous advance offer."
Gareth sat down again, his hands propping his head, while his mind swam with dim pellucid shapes ... hardly as yet apprehended. Sick disappointment at his sacrifice so lightly spurned.... Sick fear that Patricia was going into danger, and that he would not be there to protect her.... Sick envy of the ease with which she had found a way into the very centre of action—ungetatable centre where he so longed to be.... But it was all wrong: she was a woman and he a man. In the Quest for the Grail, in the Crusades for Jerusalem, it was the knight who strode forth with mighty effect and clangour, the maiden who sat at home musing over his shield....
So her intention was indeed to write again!... Already to have arranged matters with Campbell—hischief;hisfirm—and he only to hear now, and how casually, of the step taken!... Things would never be right again between them—never! never! Although they were married; although he was the husband;—still that inversion of leadership. And after the war she would be able to say she had been in the thick of it; she would be One of Them.... The old horror re-threatening him.
Supposing she did not come back. The Prussians did queer things in Belgium; queer and ugly things to women—to Pat, who was beautiful and fearless ...his wife. Oh, he was proud of her; but he wished she had been confronted with sufficient difficulties that her desire, her excellent and gallant desire to achieve her share in the war, might have remained stuck fast in a bag of non-accomplishment. He would not have had it otherwise than that she should wish to participate.
Above all and again ... it was not quite fair. He had been touched to such an exalted mood during his walk down the Strand; exalted, yet humble; eager to renounce; sensitive to appreciate each subtle evidence of a nation quickened at last to nobility. The sort of mood one must really cherish. And then Pat had thoroughly upset him.
He endeavoured to recapture something of that transparent sunlit feeling, before it all filtered away....
"Listen, darling——"
"Yes?" She twisted round; and resting both her elbows upon his knees, gave him a sudden and disconcerting measure of her attention. Almost he was aware of his soul blinking nervously in a full flood of golden light.
"I'm glad you feel that you want to give yourself up to the war, Pat. Every man and every woman and every child in the kingdom ought to be feeling the same. No matter if war is right or wrong; no matter if this is the war that ends war, or else another of those beastly life-spilling limb-lopping campaigns that signify nothing in the end—still, any great upheaval is welcome when it means all eyes to the right-about, all eyes fixed steadily upon the same vision—instead of glancing askew; the shutting-down of obstinate lids; short sight pitted unfairly against long sight; sight that even in peace-time was bloodshot and distorted.—Oh, those little squinters at some little personal advantage to be gained——"
"Gareth, if everyone stopped to say all that before they got to work, it would waste a lot of the national energy, wouldn't it?"
He was silent, bitterly offended.
"I wasn't proposing to pour out my sentiments about the war at the street-corners," he remarked at last. "But in a man's own home——"
She kissed him. "I was rude. I'm sorry. But frankly—there isn't much time nowadays for 'sentiments about the war.'"
Gareth said simply: "I want to help as well. Both of us, Pat. That's what I was trying to say."
"Good! Loud and enthusiastic applause. There's a mighty lot to be done. Not for the old honour-and-glory business. This is just an overwhelming shake-up and shake-together; and ... I'd hate to feel we didn't stand shoulder-to-shoulder over the war, Gareth."
"We do, dear. Only you put it in five words where I use five hundred. An overwhelming shake-up and shake-together!"
They were both erect; each looking at the other with a tremulous half-fearful stir of hope that there was yet salvage to be effected among the shipwreck of their joint adventure. Patricia, nimbler to reverse emotions than the man, was silently administering harsh rebuke to her own arbitrary judgment, that had allowed faith in his innate fineness to lapse into intolerance. Perhaps after all there was that in him—her divine failure—which would justify all her one-time beliefs. She had let instinct be misled by his little irritating surface faults....
Well—neither time nor place for private adjustments and reconciliations, while the Germans were barely turned back from the walls of Paris. She had little patience with those people who used the war, instead of being used by it. When the crisis was over ... then maybe she and Gareth, comparing their tiny shares in what was past, might thus discover a generous new comradeship in mutual respect. Or even the old glamour might break again, like luminous sunset between black stripes of cloud. Meanwhile, she would leave it to Gareth's awakened understanding, that for now silence between them was enough....
"There's a mighty lot to be done," she repeated in her most matter-of-fact tones; "you might make a creditable start by finding my waterproof boots."
"Pat—don't go to the Front on Thursday. Please don't. Let's do something together for the war."
"What?"
"Something...."
"Rather silly for me to give up a definite job, for the sake of something——"
"For the sake of doing it together."
"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité." She turned away from him, and with quick restless movements began to throw back the scattered articles into the portmanteau.
He affected not to notice the growing coldness in her replies. "Take me with you in the Ambulance Corps."
"You're neither soldier, doctor, nor mechanic."
"Neither are you."
"I happen to be fitted to a job. There are plenty that will fit you, without butting into the wrong place."
"I wanted us to work together," he reiterated stubbornly.
"Why encumber our separate usefulness by insisting on our private preference to be useful hand-in-hand?"
"If itwereyour private preference—it isn't! You're glad to be dashing off without me."
"I'm glad of this chance to go with the Corps!" Patricia sprang upright, and flung up her arms behind her head.... He could not refrain from the thought of how triumphantly nature had equipped her for any strenuous job she might care to undertake; how little likely that she would bungle it; how untiring her limbs; how swift to any adjustment the poised equilibrium of her mind. Nor would any hitch occur in the plans of Ferguson's Ambulance Corps, robbing her of the forthcoming rampant opportunities to—to show off. No hitch—where Pat was concerned. It was fate. She would go. And she would excel.
"You might have waited for me before you settled anything;" he spoke plaintively as a child who sees another child off to a party. "I suppose you think I'm not in earnest when I tell you I want to help. I've thought of nothing else."
"Your meditations do you credit, my lad."
"Is that meant for a taunt?" He flushed hotly. "I'd have enlisted, but I'm over age."
"I know."
"Well——"
She was making havoc in a trunk at the far end of the room now, half hidden by an enormous old arm-chair on three legs.... "Most people seem to have tumbled into some sort of war-job by now, that's all."
Patricia was deliberately behaving like a brute. His futile efforts to engage her promise that they should "do something together," had deadened her to a cold fury, all the chillier for her previous glow of reaction. For she perceived clearly, could not help perceiving, that his actual motive in thus pleading for combined effort was less affection for her than sudden panic of his inability to find himself a place anywhere on the crowded slow-turning machine. He hoped that her initiative might serve for two. And to this end, for the shielding of his own self-respect, he would have prevented accomplishment of her apportioned labours. Pat was not setting forth in any subjective mood of vainglory. Things had to be done, and the ego who did them mattered not at all save in efficiency. But Gareth Temple was totally incapable of submerging his morbid sense of Gareth Temple.... She determined that this time at least he should expose himself—if only to prevent all future errors of illusion on her part.
And nothing that she could have said would have increased to such an extent the terror to which he was naturally prone, as her last remark. Other people—other people's books—other people's wars——
Was he again to be the one left out?
A rapid mental survey among his friends; thence to casual acquaintances.... He could not find a single companion for his isolation. Guy Burnett had obtained his commission in the London Scottish; Alexander, surprisingly, had enlisted in the ranks; Ran Wyman was war correspondent in Russia; Graham Carr had departed on a secret service commission; Leslie Campbell neglected publishing, for an important post connected with the Commissariat, for which he had revealed an unexpected fund of expert knowledge. Jim Collins was head of a branch of motor transport; and Lulu did canteen work with the Y.M.C.A.; and Mr. Golding, from next door, was a Special Constable, and dug trenches in Hyde Park on Sundays. Fred Worley went every night to Victoria or Charing Cross to fetch the wounded; while Trixie sat all day long romantically in the Tower, mending soldiers' socks. And Mrs. O'Neill and Anne organized sewing and knitting classes in great multitude. Everybody busy; everybody rushing about with portentous faces, and bits of uniform—letters or buttons or badges—stuck about them to signify they were a certified part of the new-erected slow-grinding hardly tested machinery of war. Yes ... and via Collins he had learnt of Napier Kirby among the first to pass brilliantly the examination for the Royal Flying Corps; of Grace, training to be a nurse; of Bobby, a strenuous member of the Motor-Cycle Cadets. From Jim, too, had come news of Kathleen as superintendent in a large munition factory....
While he had been obsessed with misty and beautiful visions of a people linked by a common stress and a common sorrow to finding place in a common cause....Howdid one find place? How had all these cogs slipped into movement? Gareth wished passionately that he had been of military age, that he might have enlisted, and been quit of the necessity for initiative. And even then enlistment was voluntary. What his temperament demanded was to be hauled into action, with no other option but to submit. He was lost and confused amid this pell-mell scurry, this upset of tradition and habit and circumstance.... If he could have begun when the others began, to perceive exactly by what process of single steps they separately attained to their goal; as far as possible to imitate them, to get carried on with the impetus of the rush.... He was resentful now at being confronted by the necessity of making his own rush.
Above all, resentful of Patricia. She stood as epitome of the entire faction of persons who had so annoyed him by obtaining before himself an assured position in the scheme of war. She, at least, might not have confronted him with the climax of insult. She was his wife ... a traitor in the very camp. "I'm off to Belgium on Thursday." The easy announcement had mocked his impotence. She had meant it in mockery....
"I don't know that I'm so keen on doing war-work, if we're not to do it together," he said; and he said it hating this evil humour she had thrust upon him; recurrent humour that when it came clung with leech-like obduracy on to his ashamed consciousness; spirit of idiotic perversity which caused him to represent himself in such a false light, to say such foolish untrue things. This mood that stuck and stuck——
"The German menace seems to present itself to you as a merry little dinner-party, to which we get our invitations in pairs!" Pat flicked at him.
"It's you, not I, who are scrambling for a seat. I shall look round quietly to see where I can be useful...."
"And in what direction did you think of exercising your talents?"—Yes, he should be made to own his loose helpless incompetence, even if it were ... a disgusting exhibition. For wavering before her mental vision was a bald newspaper announcement of five weeks ago:—Captain Dacres Upton—Died of Wounds. And now the pity of it smote her, as it had not done at the time.... Died of wounds—God! why did that sound in print as though it had been so terribly slow.... Within a week of the outbreak of war he had already been on the soil of Flanders; below it, within little more than a week. And Gareth had at last to meet with the inevitable comparison. He threw up a shield of desperate bravado:
"I don't see that I need confide my intentions to you. You told me nothing beforehand of this ambulance business of yours."
"But what do you mean to do, Gareth? Tell me. Say you start 'looking round quietly' to-morrow ... where will you go? To whom will you apply? I'm interested in the process."
She had thrown away all pretence, and was openly goading him.... He recognized the tone and the attitude—as he recognized the answering sullen lethargy they awakened in himself. In these dual positions he and Kathleen had hated one another during sixteen years. And from Kathleen he had rebounded to this younger and yet more vital Kathleen. He recognized her at last; and at the same hour as her final wrenching asunder of the man he was from the man he thought himself.
And Patricia realized suddenly that it was just as well she should be going away from him, and going at once. For she had found that in him which she could not forbear from tormenting ... again and again she would be forcing him to lay bare that stupid helpless twitching little nerve ... she knew now exactly where it cowered, beneath the deceptive layers of quiet strength and picturesque sadness ... and it tempted a certain cruelty foreign to her nature.... It was just as well she should be going away.
He sat hunched on the packing-case, head moodily supported between his hands. Over in the far corner, in noisy challenging fashion, she emptied the tin trunk of its contents....