CHAPTER IV
He did not go back to Leslie Campbell's after two or three days. He went back after a fortnight....
For one tensely expectant week, he waited for England to become aware of the fact that he was now definitely free to take up any war work it might have been holding in reserve for him. A phrase in poster use became part of his mental equipment—he was ready to do his bit—eager to do his bit—surely to the nation might be left the minor responsibility of finding him the bit to do. Most people, he conjectured hazily, "dropped into something" by invitation; a friend "in the swim"; a chance encounter with another friend who "tipped them the wink." And thus, by slang and by haphazard, the great ship Organization was manned, and launched, to be tested in strange and stormy seas.
Pending his new official appointment, Gareth made of his nights a feverish inferno by conjuring up a series of horror-stricken predicaments in which he might find himself involved in every fresh employment that his fancy selected as probable to materialize on the following day. Suppose he were given a job for which he was totally incapable, and they did not believe his protestations, and he bungled it—with disastrous public consequences. Or suppose, misled by the quiet strength of his personality, they put him in a position of authority—he who could never master the secret of dealing with subordinates ... and suppose these noticed his lack of confidence, mocked his waverings, flouted his commands; suppose he were told to perform some important mission, and it were taken for granted that he knew more than he did, and he did not fully understand his instructions, and dared not ask further questions; suppose....
He had been too long in the sheltered routine of Leslie Campbell's, not to torment himself with the dread of exposure to the awful unknown.
But still, there was a thrill and a sweetness in the daylight thought that he was doing war-work at last!
And at last the long droning summer days of idleness and boredom convinced him that he was doing nothing of the sort. There was really and actually not much open to a man of forty-three, well over age for the Conscription Act, both shy and contemptuous of home service or the special constable badge, and not sufficiently One of Them, in the generic sense of the phrase, to be swung aloft by the crane of influence and lowered into exactly the right place.
He discovered there were Labour Bureaux, where one might put down one's marketable assets. What were his marketable assets? Gareth spent a whole night chasing these elusive qualities and trying to reduce them to a clear statement.
"I should like a job in the Censorship," he decided finally. And left it at that.
He had put down his name on the Civil Service list, and was told that he would hear from them in due course. But though the rumour was current that men were badly wanted to replace those who had been called up, yet beyond sending him a paper to fill up with details of age, citizenship, etc., the administration seemed to have successfully pigeon-holed his application. He was glad of their forgetfulness; having stood for a moment outside one of the big offices, quailing from the prospect of being absorbed and lost among these hundreds of drab little men scurrying out of the building for their hour of lunch and relaxation. Too humble to deem himself fit for anything more splendid than this, he was still too much the dreamer to accept the belief that symbolically to bear a banner in the great Crusade could be reduced actually to such humdrum insignificance.
And he missed the world of books. Ever more and more he missed it. That, after all, was the atmosphere he best understood, where words stood for deeds, and the importance of words for the importance of deeds; where all life was imprisoned by language, translated into style, shut between covers.... For nineteen years he had been a reader ... two weeks astray on the hustling pavements were enough to make him regard the dim little offices off Covent Garden as precious sanctuary.
So he went back.
Leslie Campbell readily accepted his stumbling explanations of his odd behaviour a fortnight ago. He had not been well—the strain of the war—nerves out of order; and then the culminating anxiety of his wife's departure that night for Flanders.... "It seems worse when they return, and then go out again, doesn't it, sir?"
Campbell quite understood. He was only too glad of this reinstallation of a person on whom he could rely; eager as he was to devote most of his own time to his labours on the Commissariat. Alexander was dead; and Guy Burnett not yet well enough to take up the partnership.... Gareth's departure from the firm had been a definite nuisance. "He's no' indeespensable," reflected Campbell, "but time meks of a man a vary useful habit!"
Gareth walked slowly down the Strand, haunted by a queer echo of his own voice as it had recently spoken, only transposed to a higher shriller key. "The strain of the war ... my nerves are out of order ... and then my husband off to-night for the Front." So might a woman have offered excuse for an outburst of hysteria. So might a woman be placed, with the man she loved on the eve of departure. So might a woman feel about the war, as he had been feeling all the while ... his vague half-splendid, half-pitiful dreams; his stifled longing to have the right, right of sex, maybe—to play the passive sacrificial part unquestioned and unashamed....
He butted full into a figure standing stock-still, engrossed in the open flapping sheets of an evening paper. At the force of the impact she turned—and he broke off his apologies.
"Kathleen!"
She showed no surprise at the encounter. And indeed, it was curious that this should be their first accidental meeting since she had bidden him a curt good-bye in the dining-room of Pacific Villa.
"Have you seen this?" she asked directly, pointing to a column in the paper, that dealt with a brilliant and successful feat on the part of two British airmen in France, in combat with a number of enemy aeroplanes sent up to prevent them from obtaining photographs of a very important section of trench. Both pilot and observer were recommended for the D.S.O.: Lieutenant Frank Morton and Captain Napier Kirby....
Gareth looked at Kathleen; her eyes were soft and shining; her mouth tremulous.
"Only very slightly wounded, they say. But he was always a reckless idiot!" with a half-laugh of tenderness that held a sheer girlish quality. Then suddenly she seemed to realize Gareth, and her face altered to its remembered harshness.
"Why didn't you let me go with him, that time? If you had ... he would be mine now—now that...."
Gareth replied: "Yes, but I was too unhappy; somebody had got in first with the theme of my book."
"Somebody? Who?"
"Patricia."
"Before you met her?"
"Yes."
She brooded a moment on this. The passers-by jostled their standing figures impatiently.
"I read a novel of yours; in 1914, wasn't it? But hers——"
"She gave it up for mine."
"Oh.... Yes, she would. I daresay hers was a good deal better."
He repeated: "A good deal better."
"Where is your wife now?"
"In Flanders. With the Ambulance Corps. She has been out since the beginning."
Kathleen's ironic smile comprehended and epitomized his entire married life, its failure and the causes for its failure; nay, went still further back, and assumed a triumphant intention on her own part that he should have undergone this second and more poignant disillusion.
"We're in the way here. Good-bye."
He overtook her, and walked by her side towards Trafalgar Square.
"One minute. You've told me nothing about yourself."
"Touching display of interest!"
"Pat might have said that," he mused dispassionately.
She slightly lifted her brows. "Surely there can be no resemblance between Patricia and myself?"
"You are being a little bit ungenerous," said the man, gently enough. "Lulu Collins told me you held a very responsible post in a high-explosive factory; do you like the work?"
"Yes. It's all-absorbing, which is the main thing. I was meant for tough employment, I think; it strengthens my sinews. I'm only in London for the day, sent down to interview the Minister of Munitions. What are you doing? Still stuck with Leslie Campbell?"
"I gave him notice a fortnight ago," carefully adhering to the truth. Then: "I'm going out to Flanders in a few days, as a free-lance journalist."
"Is that allowed?"
"There are ways and means of squaring people—influence ..." said Gareth Temple.
"You'll meet with difficulties."
"I shall be killed."
The quiet certainty of his tones attracted her notice. "Do you want to die?"
He answered with seeming inconsequence: "This war wasn't made for the little people. It's absurd to suppose that a big thing can inflate our natures to correspond. We remain little people hopelessly out of scale with the big thing, instead of little people comfortably tucked up with little things. It's rather unfair—if the war hadn't happened, we need never have been found out. Millions of little people have lived honoured, respected, admired even, because their luck has never sent a European conflict to test them."
It was queer to be confiding thus in Kathleen. But she stimulated him ... as she had always done; she and her like. The sudden startling resolve of the past few moments, startling even to himself, startlingly clear and formulated, was entirely resultant upon her presence; the keen ring of her voice, her aloof walk, sombre hawk's face, and thin eyebrows like curved black scimitars. Spiritually and actually she was worn by her own tempestuous impatience to the finest possible edge. Patricia would one day be like this. He continued to walk beside Kathleen, because of the acute thrill of those moments when she reminded him of Patricia.... And he continued word-spinning in a dizzy triumphant exultation at the ease with which the whole theme of his life was unrolling itself into a final pageantry of speech. He supposed there must be an uncanny finality about this indulgence accorded him in his favourite pastime, since never before had he been able to express himself unhindered by the drag of self-deception. No doubt but that Kathleen was amazed to silence at his power to exhibit himself so stripped of all illusion; he who had always been supremely a figure of illusions. He would amaze her yet more. Tingling with a strange excitement, he went on:
"You were my first love, Kathleen; and Patricia my last. And you were the overture to Patricia, as she was the echo to you. No one in between. Except a dream of the girl I would love to have loved ... weaker than myself, frail and peaceful, a cool shadow-world ... and she would have relied on my strength ... the typical maiden to a knight.... I dreamt of her when I was a boy, reading the 'Idylls of the King,' on the hearthrug in the parlour above the shop.... Well—I dream of her still. And I daresay if we met she could not awaken a single throb in me. Just because I'm a woman-soul myself, Kathleen, I was fated to be magnetically attracted again and again by the bolder and more vital nature in your sex; the strong nature that could not fail to make me miserable directly on finding me out. That other girl—my ideal—she would have admired me. You never admired me, did you, Kathleen?" a fleeting whimsicality in the smile he bestowed on her. "Nor did Patricia ... Patricia....
"I've never been able to impress Patricia. That's why I'm setting off for Flanders now. It was just an impulse that you inspired.... I believe the right one at last. Usually I play about too long with the pretty word-rhythms and word-patterns, and the act comes too late for effect. But not this time. This time I'm leaving out the talk. I shall meet her somewhere in the chaos over there—one does meet people strangely; why, you were only in London for one day! And I shall meet my death, too, somehow, in the chaos over there ... because it's the inevitable end of my round adventure."
There was a slight tinge of weariness in his companion's tone, as she asked: "Dopeople meet with their inevitable ends? Surely life is haphazard and death inconsequent?"
He shook his head. "You say you have read my book? I believe every life is formed as a complete wheel, of which the end closes up with the start, and the axis is some special adventure. Only so few are conscious of the shape ... they assume that adventure must of necessity be joyous adventure—loud clarion-calls—the D.S.O.... My round adventure was to be superfluous—the onlooker at other people's adventures—never One of Them.... I've felt it, always. Now I can see it—and give in. The Great War ... there's no room for superfluous people in the Great War. The best way they can fulfil themselves is by self-effacement ... self-removal. I haven't the pluck for suicide, Kathleen; but I have faith in my round adventure—and I'm going to Flanders, to Patricia, where my faith will prove itself ... some significant completion of the whole. Perhaps even I may be allowed in death what wasn't part of the scheme of life: to make an impression on the woman I love. Childish, I know—but ... yes, I think the Draughtsman will allow that. He has an excellent gift for irony."
"I must leave you here," said Kathleen abruptly.
They stood at the corner of Whitehall. She held out her hand.
"Good-bye."
Her inner thought was: "And I stood this sort of thing for sixteen years...."
"Good-bye," he said absently; "when shall I see you again?"... and let fall her hand and strolled away, his eyes still misty with visions.
About fifty seconds after he had left her side, a shattering explosion was heard in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square. An apparently friendly aeroplane had dropped a couple of random bombs; and then, soaring from the swoop, disappeared among the clouds. One of the bombs rolled harmlessly off the slate roof of an outhouse and did no mischief. The other wounded a cat, damaged an outjutting iron balcony, and killed Gareth Temple. A newspaper paragraph, reporting the incident the following day, remarked that the machine must have been one of our own which had fallen into German hands. "After releasing the bombs, the enemy was able to effect an escape. Fortunately the casualties were insignificant."
THE END
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