"Major Boyce has gone, sir," said Marigold, the next morning, as I was tapping my breakfast egg.
"Gone?" I echoed. Boyce had made no reference the night before to so speedy a departure.
"By the 8.30 train, sir."
Every train known by a scheduled time at Wellingsford goes to London. There may be other trains proceeding from the station in the opposite direction but nobody heeds them. Boyce had taken train to London. I asked my omniscient sergeant:
"How did you find that out?"
It appeared it was the driver of the Railway Delivery Van. I smiled at Boyce's ostrich-like faith in the invisibility of his hinder bulk. What could occur in Wellingsford without it being known at once to vanmen and postmen and barbers and servants and masters and mistresses? How could a man hope to conceal his goings and comings and secret actions? He might just as well expect to take a secluded noontide bath in the fountain in Piccadilly Circus.
"Perhaps that's why the matter of those repairs was so pressing, sir," said Marigold.
"No doubt of it," said I.
Marigold hung about, his finger-tips pushing towards me mustard and apples and tulips and everything that one does not eat with egg. But it was no use. I had no desire to pursue the conversation. I continued my breakfast stolidly and read the newspaper propped up against the coffee-pot. So many circumstances connected with Boyce's visit were of a nature that precluded confidential discussion with Marigold,—that precluded, indeed, confidential discussion with anyone else. The suddenness of his departure I learned that afternoon from Mrs. Boyce, who sent me by hand a miserable letter characteristically rambling. From it I gathered certain facts. Leonard had come into her bedroom at seven o'clock, awakening her from the first half-hour's sleep she had enjoyed all night, with the news that he had been unexpectedly summoned back. When she came to think of it, she couldn't imagine how he got the news, for the post did not arrive till eight o'clock, and Mary said no telegram had been delivered and there had been no call on the telephone. But she supposed the War Office had secret ways of communicating with officers which it would not be well to make known. The whole of this war, with its killing off of the sons of the best families in the land, and the sleeping in the mud with one's boots on, to say nothing of not being able to change for dinner, and the way in which they knew when to shoot and when not to shoot, was all so mysterious that she had long ago given up hope of understanding any of its details. All she could do was to pray God that her dear boy should be spared. At any rate, she knew the duty of an English mother when the country was in danger; so she had sent him away with a brave face and her blessing, as she had done before. But, although English mothers could show themselves Spartans—(she spelt it "Spartians," dear lady, but no matter)—yet they were women and had to sit at home and weep. In the meanwhile, her palpitations had come on dreadfully bad, and so had her neuritis, and she had suffered dreadfully after eating some fish at dinner which she was sure Pennideath, the fishmonger—she always felt that man was an anarchist in disguise—had bought out of the condemned stock at Billingsgate, and none of the doctor's medicines were of the slightest good to her, and she was heartbroken at having to part so suddenly from Leonard, and would I spare half an hour to comfort an old woman who had sent her only son to die for his country and was ready, when it pleased God, if not sooner, to die in the same sacred cause?
So of course I went. The old lady, propped on pillows in an overheated room, gave me tea and poured into my ear all the anguish of her simple heart. In an abstracted, anxious way, she ate a couple of crumpets and a wedge of cake with almond icing, and was comforted.
We continued our discussion of the war—or rather Leonard, for with her Leonard seemed to be the war. She made some remark deliciously inept—I wish I could remember it. I made a sly rejoinder. She sat bolt upright and a flush came into her Dresden-china cheek and her old eyes flashed.
"You may think I'm a silly old woman, Duncan. I dare say I am. I can't take in things as I used to do when I was young. But if Leonard should be killed in the war—I think of it night and day—what I should like to do would be to drive to the Market Square of Wellingsford and wave a Union Jack round and round and fall down dead."
I made some sort of sympathetic gesture.
"And I certainly should," she added.
"My dear friend," said I, "if I could move from this confounded chair, I would kiss your brave hands."
And how many brave hands of English mothers, white and delicate, coarse and toil-worn, do not demand the wondering, heart-full homage of us all?
And hundreds of thousands of them don't know why we are fighting. Hundreds of thousands of them have never read a newspaper in their lives. I doubt whether they would understand one if they tried, I doubt whether all could read one in the literal sense of the word. We have had—we have still—the most expensive and rottenest system of primary education in the world, the worst that squabbling sectarians can devise. Arab children squatting round the courtyard of a Mosque and swaying backwards and forwards as they get by heart meaningless bits of the Koran, are not sent out into life more inadequately armed with elementary educational weapons than are English children. Our state of education has nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet now in our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early twenties who can neither read nor write. I have talked with them. I have read to them. I have written letters for them. Clean-cut, decent, brave, honourable Englishmen—not gutter-bred Hooligans dragged from the abyss by the recruiting sergeant, but men who have thrown up good employment because something noble inside them responded to the Great Call. And to the eternal disgrace of governments in this disastrously politician-ridden land such men have not been taught to read and write. It is of no use anyone saying to me that it is not so. I know of my own certain intimate knowledge that it is so.
Even among those who technically have "the Three R's," I have met scores of men in our Wellingsford Hospital who, bedridden for months, would give all they possess to be able to enjoy a novel—say a volume of W. W. Jacobs, the writer who above all others has conferred the precious boon of laughter on our wounded—but to whom the intellectual strain of following the significance of consecutive words is far too great. Thousands and thousands of men have lain in our hospitals deprived, by the criminal insanity of party politicians, of the infinite consolation of books.
Christ, whom all these politicians sanctimoniously pretend to make such a fuss of, once said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. And yet we regard this internecine conflict between our precious political parties as a sacred institution. By Allah, we are a funny people!
Of course your officials at the Board of Education—that beautiful timber-headed, timber-hearted, timber-souled structure—could come down on me with an avalanche of statistics. "Look at our results," they cry. I look. There are certain brains that even our educational system cannot benumb. A few clever ones, at the cost of enormously expensive machinery, are sent to the universities, where they learn how to teach others the important things whereby they achieved their own unimportant success. The shining lights are those whom we turn out as syndicalist leaders and other kinds of anti-patriotic demagogues. We systematically deny them the wine of thought, but give them the dregs. But in the past we did not care; they were vastly clever people, a credit to our national system. It gave them chances which they took. We were devilish proud of them.
On the other hand, the vast mass are sent away with the intellectual equipment of a public school-boy of twelve, and, as I have declared, a large remnant have not been taught even how to read and write. The storm of political controversy on educational matters has centred round such questions as whether the story of Joseph and his Brethren and the Parable of the Prodigal Son should be taught to little Baptists by a Church of England teacher, and what proportion of rates paid by Church of England ratepayers should go to giving little Baptists a Baptistical training. If there was a Christ who could come down among us, with what scorching sarcasm would he not shrivel up the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who in His Name have prevented the People from learning how to read and write.
Look through Hansard. There never has been a Debate in the House of Commons devoted to the question of Education itself. If the War can teach us any lessons, as a nation—and sometimes I doubt whether it will—it ought at least to teach us the essential vicious rottenness of our present educational system.
This tirade may seem a far cry from Mrs. Boyce and her sister mothers. It is not. I started by saying that there are hundreds of thousands of British mothers, with sons in the Army, who have never read a line of print dealing with the war, who have the haziest notion of what it is all about. All they know is that we are fighting Germans, who for some incomprehensible reason have declared themselves to be our enemies; that the Germans, by hearsay accounts, are dreadful people who stick babies on bayonets and drop bombs on women and children. They really know little more. But that is enough. They know that it is the part of a man to fight for his country. They would not have their sons be called cowards. They themselves have the blind, instinctive, and therefore sacred love of country, which is named patriotism—and they send forth their sons to fight.
I stand up to kiss the white and delicate hand of the gentlewoman who sends her boy to the war, for its owner knows as well as I do (or ought to) all that is involved in this colossal struggle. But to the toil-worn, coarse-handed mother I go on bended knees; nothing intellectual comes within the range of her ideas. Her boy is fighting for England. She would be ashamed if he were not. Were she a man she would fight too. He has gone "with a good 'eart"—the stereotyped phrase with which every English private soldier, tongue-tied, hides the expression of his unconquerable soul. How many times have I not heard it from wounded men healed of their wounds? I have never heard anything else. "The man who says he WANTS to go back is a liar. But if they send me, I'll go WITH A GOOD 'EART"—The phrase which ought to be immortalized on every grave in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia.
So, you see, I looked at this rather silly malade imaginaire of an old lady with whom I was taking tea, and suddenly conceived for her a vast respect—even veneration. I say "rather silly." I had many a time qualified the adjective much more forcibly. I took her to have the intellectual endowment of a hen. But then she flashed out suddenly before me an elderly Jeanne d'Arc. That to me Leonard Boyce was suspect did not enter at all into the question. To her—and that was all that mattered—he was Sir Galahad, Lancelot, King Arthur, Bayard, St. George, Hector, Lysander, Miltiades, all rolled into one. The passion of her life was spent on him. To do him justice, he had never failed to display to her the most tender affection. In her eyes he was perfection. His death would mean the wiping out of everything between Earth and Heaven. And yet, paramount in her envisagement of such a tragedy was the idea of a public proclamation of the cause of England in which he died.
In this war the women of England—the women of Great Britain and Ireland—the women of the far-flung regions of the British Empire, have their part.
Now and then mild business matters call me up to London. On these occasions Marigold gets himself up in a kind of yachting kit which he imagines will differentiate him from the ordinary chauffeur and at the same time proclaim the dignity of the Meredyth-Marigold establishment. He loves to swagger up the steps of my Service Club and announce my arrival to the Hall Porter, who already, warned by telephone of my advent, has my little wicker-work tricycle chair in readiness. I think he feels, dear fellow, that he and I are keeping our end up; that, although there are only bits of us left, we are there by inalienable right as part and parcel of the British Army—none of your Territorials or Kitcheners, but the old original British Army whose prestige and honour were those of his own straight soul. The Hall Porter is an ex-Sergeant-Major, and he and Marigold are old acquaintances, and the meeting of the two warriors is acknowledged by a wink and a military jerk of the head. I think it is Marigold that impresses Bunworthy with a respect for me, for that august functionary never fails to descend the steps and cross the pavement to my modest little two-seater; an act of graciousness which (so I am given to understand by my friends) he will only perform in the case of Royalty Itself. A mere Field-marshal has to mount the steps unattended like any subaltern.
These red-letter days when I drive through the familiar (and now exciting) hubbub of London, I love (strange taste!) every motor omnibus, every pretty woman, every sandwich-man, every fine young fellow in khaki, every car-load of men in blue hospital uniform. I love the smell of London, the cinematographic picture of London, the thrill of London. To understand what I mean you have only got to get rid of your legs and keep your heart and nerves and memories, and live in a little country town.
Yes, my visits to London are red-letter days. To get there with any enjoyment to myself involves such a fussification, and such an unauthorised claim on the services of other people, that my visits are few and far between.
A couple of hours in a club smoking-room—to the normal man a mere putting in of time, a vain surcease from boredom, a vacuous habit—is to me, a strange wonder and delight. After Wellingsford the place is resonant with actualities. I hear all sorts of things; mostly lies, I know; but what matter? When a man tells me that his cousin knows a man attached as liaison officer to the staff of General Joffre, who has given out confidentially that such and such a thing is going to happen I am all ears. I feel that I am sucked into the great whirlpool of Vast Events. I don't care a bit about being disillusioned afterwards. The experience has done me good, made a man of me and sent me back to Wellingsford as an oracle. And if you bring me a man who declares that he does not like being an oracle, I will say to his face that he is an unblushing liar.
All this is by way of preface to the statement that on the third of May (vide diary) I went to the club. It was just after lunch and the great smoking-room was full of men in khaki and men in blue and gold, with a sprinkling of men, mostly elderly, in mufti; and from their gilt frames the full-length portraits of departed men of war in gorgeous uniforms looked down superciliously on their more sadly attired descendants. I got into a corner by the door, so as to be out of the way, for I knew by experience that should there be in the room a choleric general, he would inevitably trip over the casually extended front wheel of my chair, greatly to the scandal of modest ears and to my own physical discomfiture.
Various seniors came up and passed the time of the day with me—one or two were bald-headed retired colonels of sixty, dressed in khaki, with belts like equators on a terrestrial globe and with a captain's three stars on their sleeves. Gallant old boys, full of gout and softness, they had sunk their rank and taken whatever dull jobs, such as guarding internment camps or railway bridges, the War Office condescendingly thought fit to give them. They listened sympathetically to my grievances, for they had grievances of their own. When soldiers have no grievances the Army will perish of smug content.
"Why can't they give me a billet in the Army Pay and let me release a man sounder of wind and limb?" I asked. "What's the good of legs to a man who sits on his hunkers all day in an office and fills up Army forms? I hate seeing you lucky fellows in uniform."
"We're not a pretty sight," said the most rotund, who was a wag in his way.
Then we discussed what we knew and what we didn't know of the Battle of Ypres, and the withdrawal of our Second Army, and shook our heads dolorously over the casualty lists, every one of which in those days contained the names of old comrades and of old comrades' boys. And when they had finished their coffee and mild cigars they went off well contented to their dull jobs and the room began to thin. Other acquaintances on their way out paused for a handshake and a word, and I gathered scraps of information that had come "straight from Kitchener," and felt wonderfully wise and cheerful.
I had been sitting alone for a few minutes when a man rose from a far corner, a tall soldierly figure, his arm in a sling, and came straight towards me with that supple, easy stride that only years of confident command can give. He had keen blue eyes and a pleasant bronzed face which I knew that I had seem somewhere before. I noticed on his sleeve the crown and star of a lieutenant-colonel. He said pleasantly:
"You're Major Meredyth, aren't you?"
"Yes," said I.
"You don't remember me. No reason why you should. But my name's Dacre—Reggie Dacre, brother of Johnnie Dacre in your battery. We met in Cape Town."
I held out my hand.
"Of course," said I. "You took me to a hospital. Do sit down for a bit. You a member here?"
"No. I belong to the Naval and Military. Lunching with old General Donovan, a sort of god-father of mine. He told me who you were. I haven't seen you since that day in South Africa."
I asked for news of Johnnie, who had been lost to my ken for years. Johnnie had been in India, and was now doing splendidly with his battery somewhere near La Bassee. I pointed to the sling. Badly hurt? No, a bit of flesh torn by shrapnel. Bone, thank God, not touched. It was only horny-headed idiots like the British R. A. M. C. that would send a man home for such a trifle. It was devilish hard lines to be hoofed away from the regiment practically just after he had got his command. However, he would be back in a week or two. He laughed.
"Lucky to be alive at all."
"Or not done in for ever like myself," said I.
"I didn't like to ask—" he said. Men would rather die than commit the indelicacy of appearing to notice my infirmity.
"You haven't been out there?"
"No such luck," said I. "I got this little lot about a fortnight after I saw you. Johnnie was still on sick leave and so was out of that scrap."
He commiserated with me on my ill-fortune, and handed me his cigarette case. We smoked.
"You've been on my mind for months," he said abruptly.
"I?"
He nodded. "I thought I recognised you. I asked the General who you were. He said 'Meredyth of the Gunners.' So I knew I was right and made a bee line for you. Do you remember the story of that man in the hospital?"
"Perfectly," said I.
"About Boyce of the King's Watch?"
"Yes," said I. "I saw Boyce, home on leave, about a fortnight ago. I suppose you saw his D.S.O. gazetted?"
"I did. And he deserves a jolly sight more," he exclaimed heartily. "I've come to the conclusion that that fellow in the hospital—I forget the brute's name—"
"Somers," said I.
"Yes, Somers. I've come to the conclusion that he was the damn'dest, filthiest, lyingest hound that ever was pupped."
"I'm glad to hear it," said I. "It was a horrible story. I remember making your brother and yourself vow eternal secrecy."
"You can take it from me that we haven't breathed a word to anybody. As a matter of fact, the whole damn thing had gone out of my head for years. Then I begin to hear of a fellow called Boyce of the Rifles doing the most crazy magnificent things. I make enquiries and find it's the same Leonard Boyce of the Vilboek Farm story. We're in the same Brigade.
"You don't often hear of individual men out there—your mind's too jolly well concentrated on your own tiny show. But Boyce has sort of burst out beyond his own regiment and, with just one or two others, is beginning to be legendary. He has done the maddest things and won the V.C. twenty times over. So that blighter Somers, accusing him of cowardice, was a ghastly liar. And then I remembered taking you up to hear that damnable slander, and I felt that I had a share in it, as far as you were concerned, and I longed to get at you somehow and tell you about it. I wanted to get it off my chest. And now," said he with a breath of relief, "thank God, I've been able to do so."
"I wish you would tell me of an incident or two," said I.
"He has got a life-preserver that looks like an ordinary cane—had it specially made. It's quite famous. Men tell me that the knob is a rich, deep, polished vermilion. He'll take on any number of Boches with it single-handed. If there's any sign of wire-cutting, he'll not let the men fire, but will take it on himself, and creep like a Gurkha and do the devils in. One night he got a whole listening post like that. He does a lot of things a second in command hasn't any business to do, but his men would follow him anywhere. He bears a charmed life. I could tell you lots of things—but I see my old General's getting restive." He rose, stretched out his hand. "At any rate, take my word for it—if there's a man in the British Army who doesn't know what fear is, that man is Leonard Boyce."
He nodded in his frank way and rejoined his old General. As I had had enough exciting information for one visit to town, I motored back to Wellingsford.
My house, as I have already mentioned, is situated at the extreme end of the town on the main road, already called the Rowdon Road, which is an extension of the High Street. It stands a little way back to allow room for a semicircular drive, at each end of which is a broad gate. The semicircle encloses a smooth-shaven lawn of which I am vastly proud. In the spandrels by the side of the house are laburnums and lilacs and laurels. From gate to gate stretch iron railings, planted in a low stone parapet and unencumbered with vegetation, so that the view from road to lawn and from lawn to road is unrestricted. Thus I can take up my position on my lawn near the railings and greet all passers-by.
It was a lovely May morning. My laburnums and lilacs were in flower. On the other side of the way the hedge of white-thorn screening the grounds of a large preparatory school was in flower also, and deliciously scented the air. I sat in my accustomed spot, a table with writing materials, tobacco, and books by my side, and a mass of newspapers at my feet. There was going to be a coalition Government. Great statesmen were going to forget that there was such a thing as party politics, except in the distribution of minor offices, when the claims of good and faithful jackals on either side would have to be considered. And my heart grew sick within me, and I longed for a Man to arise who, with a snap of his strong fingers, would snuff out the Little Parish-Pump Folk who have misruled England this many a year with their limited vision and sordid aspirations, and would take the great, unshakable, triumphant command of a mighty Empire passionately yearning to do his bidding... I could read no more newspapers. They disgusted me. One faction seemed doggedly opposed to any proposition for the amelioration of the present disastrous state of affairs. The salvation of wrecked political theories loomed far more important in their darkened minds than the salvation, by hook or crook, of the British Empire. The other faction, more patriotic in theory, cried aloud stinking fish, and by scurrilous over-statement defeated their own ends. In the general ignoble screech the pronouncements of the one or two dignified and thoughtful London newspapers passed unheeded....
I drew what comfort I could from the sight of the continually passing troops; a platoon off to musketry training; a battalion, brown and dusty, on a route march with full equipment, whistling "Tipperary"; sections of an Army Service train cursing good-humouredly at their mules; a battery of artillery thundering along at a clean, rhythmical trot which, considering what they were like in their slovenly jogging and bumping three months ago, afforded me prodigious pleasure. On the passing of these last-mentioned I felt inclined to clap my hands and generally proclaim my appreciation. Indeed, I did arrest a fresh-faced subaltern bringing up the rear of the battery who, having acquaintance with me, saluted, and I shouted:
"They're magnificent!"
He reared up his horse and flushed with pleasure.
"We've done our best, sir," said he. "We had news last week that we should be sent out quite soon, and that has bucked them up enormously."
He saluted again and rode off, and my heart went with him. What a joy it would be to clatter down a road once again with the guns!
And other people passed. Townsfolk who gave me a kindly "Morning, Major!" and went on, and others who paused awhile and gave me the gossip of the day. And presently young Randall Holmes went by on a motor bicycle. He caught sight of me, disappeared, and then suddenly reappeared, wheeling his machine. He rested it by the kerb of the sidewalk and approached the railings. He was within a yard of me.
"Would you let me speak to you for half a minute, Major?"
"Certainly," said I. "Come in."
He swung through the gate and crossed the lawn.
"You said very hard things to me some time ago."
"I did," said I, "and I don't think they were undeserved."
"Up to a certain point I agree with you," he replied.
He looked extraordinarily robust and athletic in his canvas kit. Why should he be tearing about aimlessly on a motor bicycle this May morning when he ought to be in France?
"I wish you agreed with me all along the line," said I.
He found a little iron garden seat and sat down by my side.
"I don't want to enter into controversial questions," he said.
Confound him! He might have been fifty instead of four-and-twenty. Controversial questions! His assured young Oxford voice irritated me.
"What do you want to enter into?" I asked.
"A question of honour," he answered calmly. "I have been wanting to speak to you, but I didn't like to. Passing you by, just now, I made a sudden resolution. You have thought badly of me on account of my attitude towards Phyllis Gedge. I want to tell you that you were quite right. My attitude was illogical and absurd."
"You have discovered," said I, "that she is not the inspiration you thought she was, and like an honest man have decided to let her alone."
"On the contrary," said he. "I'd give the eyes out of my head to marry her."
"Why?"
He met my gaze very frankly. "For the simple reason, Major Meredyth, that I love her."
All this natural, matter-of-fact simplicity coming from so artificial a product of Balliol as Randall Holmes, was a bit upsetting. After a pause, I said:
"If that is so, why don't you marry her?"
"She'll have nothing to do with me."
"Have you asked her?"
"I have, in writing. There's no mistake about it. I'm in earnest."
"I'm exceedingly glad to hear it," said I.
And I was. An honest lover I can understand, and a Don Juan I can understand. But the tepid philanderer has always made my toes tingle. And I was glad, too, to hear that little Phyllis Gedge had so much dignity and commonsense. Not many small builders' daughters would have sent packing a brilliant young gentleman like Randall Holmes, especially if they happened to be in love with him. As I did not particularly wish to be the confidant of this love-lorn shepherd, I said nothing more. Randall lit a cigarette.
"I hope I'm not boring you," he said.
"Not a bit."
"Well—what complicates the matter is that her father's the most infernal swine unhung." I started, remembering what Betty had told me.
"I thought," said I, "that you were fast friends."
"Who told you so?" he asked.
"All the birds of Wellingsford."
"I did go to see him now and then," he admitted. "I thought he was much maligned. A man with sincere opinions, even though they're wrong, is deserving of some respect, especially when the expression of them involves considerable courage and sacrifice. I wanted to get to the bottom of his point of view."
"If you used such a metaphor in the Albemarle," I interrupted, "I'm afraid you would be sacrificed by your friends."
He had the grace to laugh. "You know what I mean."
"And did you get to the bottom of it?"
"I think so."
"And what did you find?"
"Crass ignorance and malevolent hatred of everyone better born, better educated, better off, better dressed, better spoken than himself."
"Still," said I, "a human being can have those disabilities and yet not deserve to be qualified as the most infernal swine unhung."
"That's a different matter," said he, unbuttoning his canvas jacket, for the morning was warm. "I can talk patiently to a fool—to be able to do so is an elementary equipment for a life among men and women—" Why the deuce, thought I, wasn't he expending this precious acquirement on a platoon of agricultural recruits? The officer who suffers such gladly has his name inscribed on the Golden Legend (unfortunately unpublished) of the British Army—"but when it comes," he went on, "to low-down lying knavery, then I'm done. I don't know how to tackle it. All I can do is to get out of the knave's way. I've found Gedge to be a beast, and I'm very honourably in love with Gedge's daughter, and I've asked her to marry me. I attach some value, Major, to your opinion of me, and I want you to know these two facts."
I again expressed my gratification at learning his honourable intentions towards Phyllis, and I commended his discovery of Gedge's fundamental turpitude. I cannot say that I was cordial. At this period, the unmilitary youth of England were not affectionately coddled by their friends. Still, I was curious to see whether Gedge's depravity extended beyond a purely political scope. I questioned my young visitor.
"Oh, it's nothing to do with abstract opinions," said he, thinning away the butt-end of his cigarette. "And nothing to do with treason, or anything of that kind. He has got hold of a horrible story—told me all about it when he was foully drunk—that in itself would have made me break with him, for I loathe drunken men—and gloats over the fact that he is holding it over somebody's head. Oh, a ghastly story!"
I bent my brows on him. "Anything to do with South Africa?"
"South Africa—? No. Why?"
The puzzled look on his face showed that I was entirely on the wrong track. I was disappointed at the faultiness of my acumen. You see, I argued thus: Gedge goes off on a mysterious jaunt with Boyce. Boyce retreats precipitately to London. Gedge in his cups tells a horrible scandal with a suggestion of blackmail to Randall Holmes. What else could he have divulged save the Vilboek Farm affair? My nimble wit had led me a Jack o' Lantern dance to nowhere.
"Why South Africa?" he repeated.
I replied with Macchiavellian astuteness, so as to put him on a false scent: "A stupid slander about illicit diamond buying in connection with a man, now dead, who used to live here some years ago."
"Oh, no," said Randall, with a superior smile "Nothing of that sort."
"Well, what is it?" I asked.
He helped himself to another cigarette. "That," said he, "I can't tell you. In the first place I gave my word of honour as to secrecy before he told me, and, in the next, even if I hadn't given my word, I would not be a party to such a slander by repeating it to any living man." He bent forward and looked me straight in the eyes. "Even to you, Major, who have been a second father to me."
"A man," said I, "has a priceless possession that he should always keep—his own counsel."
"I've only told you as much as I have done," said Randall, "because I want to make clear to you my position with regard both to Phyllis and her father."
"May I ask," said I, "what is Phyllis's attitude towards her father?" I knew well enough from Betty; but I wanted to see how much Randall knew about it.
"She is so much out of sympathy with his opinions that she has gone to live at the hospital."
"Perhaps she thinks you share those opinions, and for that reason won't marry you?"
"That may have something to do with it, although I have done my best to convince her that I hold diametrically opposite views, But you can't expect a woman to reason."
"The unexpected sometimes happens," I remarked. "And then comes catastrophe; in this case not to the woman." I cannot say that my tone was sympathetic. I had cause for interest in his artless tale, but it was cold and dispassionate. "Tell me," I continued, "when did you discover the diabolical nature of the man Gedge?"
"Last night."
"And when did you ask Phyllis to marry you?"
"A week ago."
"What's going to happen now?" I asked.
"I'm hanged if I know," said he, gloomily.
I was in no mood to offer the young man any advice. The poor little wretch at the hospital—so Betty had told me—was crying her eyes out for him; but it was not for his soul's good that he should know it.
"In heroic days," said I, "a hopeless lover always found a sovereign remedy against an obdurate mistress."
He rose and buttoned up his canvas jacket.
"I know what you mean," he said. "And I didn't come to discuss it—if you'll excuse my apparent rudeness in saying so."
"Then things are as they were between us."
"Not quite, I hope," he replied in a dignified way. "When last you spoke to me about Phyllis Gedge, I really didn't know my own mind. I am not a cad and the thought of—of anything wrong never entered my head. On the other hand, marriage seemed out of the question."
"I remember," said I, "you talked some blithering rot about her being a symbol."
"I am quite willing to confess I was a fool," he admitted gracefully. "And I merited your strictures."
His reversion to artificiality annoyed me. I'm far from being of an angelic disposition.
"My dear boy," I cried. "Do, for God's sake, talk human English, and not the New Oxford Dictionary."
He flushed angrily, snapped an impatient finger and thumb, and marched away to the gravel path. I sang out sharply:
"Randall!"
He turned. I cried:
"Come here at once."
He came with sullen reluctance. Afterwards I was rather tickled at realizing that the lame old war-dog had so much authority left. If he had gone defiantly off, I should have felt rather a fool.
"My dear boy," I said, "I didn't mean to insult you. But can't a clever fellow like you understand that all the pretty frills and preciousness of a year ago are as dead as last year's Brussels sprouts? We're up against elemental things and can only get at them with elemental ideas expressed in elemental language."
"I'd have you to know," said Randall, "that I spoke classical English."
"Quite so," said I. "But the men of to-day speak Saxon English, Cockney English, slang English, any damned sort of English that is virile and spontaneous. As I say, you're a clever fellow. Can't you see my point? Speech is an index of mental attitude. I bet you what you like Phyllis Gedge would see it at once. Just imagine a subaltern at the front after a bad quarter of an hour with his Colonel—'I've merited your strictures, sir!' If there was a bomb handy, the Colonel would catch it up and slay him on the spot."
"But I don't happen to be at the front, Major," said Randall.
"Then you damned well ought to be," said I, in sudden wrath.
I couldn't help it. He asked for it. He got it.
He went away, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode off.
I was sorry. The boy evidently was in a chastened mood. If I had handled him gently and diplomatically, I might have done something with him. I suppose I'm an irritable, nasty-tempered beast. It is easy to lay the blame on my helpless legs. It isn't my legs. I've conquered my damned legs. It isn't my legs. Its ME.
I was ashamed of myself. And when, later, Marigold enquired whether the doors were still shut against Mr. Holmes, I asked him what the blazes he meant by not minding his own business. And Marigold said: "Very good, sir."
For a week or two the sluggish stream of Wellingsfordian life flowed on undisturbed. The chief incident was a recruiting meeting held on the Common. Sir Anthony Fenimore in his civic capacity, a staff-officer with red tabs, a wounded soldier, an elderly, eloquent gentleman from recruiting headquarters in London, and one or two nondescripts, including myself, were on the platform. A company of a County Territorial Battalion and the O.T.C. of the Godbury Grammar School gave a semblance of military display. The Town Band, in a sort of Hungarian uniform, discoursed martial music. Old men and maidens, mothers and children, and contented young fellows in khaki belonging to all kinds of arms, formed a most respectable crowd. The flower of Wellingsfordian youth was noticeably absent. They were having too excellent a time to be drawn into the temptation of a recruiting meeting, in spite of the band and the fine afternoon and the promiscuity of attractive damsels. They were making unheard-of money at the circumjacent factories; their mothers were waxing fat on billeting-money. They never had so much money to spend on moving-picture-palaces and cheap jewellery for their inamoratas in their lives. As our beautiful Educational system had most scrupulously excluded from their school curriculum any reference to patriotism, any rudimentary conception of England as their sacred heritage, and as they had been afforded no opportunity since they left school of thinking of anything save their material welfare and grosser material appetites, the vague talk of peril to the British Empire left them unmoved. They were quite content to let others go and fight. They had their own comfortable theories about it. Some fellows liked that sort of thing. They themselves didn't. In ordinary times, it amused that kind of fellow to belong to a Harriers Club, and clad in shorts and zephyrs, go on Sundays for twenty-mile runs. It didn't amuse them. A cigarette, a girl, and a stile formed their ideal of Sunday enjoyment. They had no quarrel with the harrier fellow or the soldier fellow for following his bent. They were most broad-minded. But they flattered themselves that they were fellows of a superior and more intelligent breed. They were making money and living warm, the only ideal of existence of which they had ever heard, and what did anything else matter?
If a man has never been taught that he has a country, how the deuce do you expect him to love her—still less to defend her with his blood? Our more than damnable governments for the last thirty years have done everything in their power to crush in English hearts the national spirit of England. God knows I have no quarrel with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. I speak in no disparagement of them. Quite the reverse. In this war they have given freely of their blood. I only speak as an Englishman of England, the great Mother of the Empire. Scot, Irishman, Welshman, Canadian, Australian are filled with the pride of their nationality. It is part of their being. Wisely they have been trained to it from infancy. England, who is far bigger, far more powerful than the whole lot of them put together—it's a statistical fact—has deliberately sunk herself in her own esteem, in her own pride. Only one great man has stood for England, as England, the great Mother, for the last thirty years. And that man is Rudyard Kipling. And the Little Folk in authority in England have spent their souls in rendering nugatory his inspired message.
This criminal self-effacement of England is at the root of the peril of the British Empire during this war.
I told you at the beginning that I did not know how to write a story. You must forgive me for being led away into divagations which seem to be irrelevant to the dramatic sequence. But when I remember that the result of all the pomp and circumstance of that meeting was seven recruits, of whom three were rejected as being physically unfit, my pen runs away with my discretion, and my conjecturing as to artistic fitness.
Yes, the Major spoke. Sir Anthony is a peppery little person and the audience enjoyed the cayenne piquancy of his remarks. The red-tabbed Lieutenant-Colonel spoke. He was a bit dull. The elderly orator from London roused enthusiastic cheers. The wounded sergeant, on crutches, displaying a foot like a bandaged mop, brought tears into the eyes of many women and evoked hoarse cheers from the old men. I spoke from my infernal chair, and I think I was quite a success with the good fellows in khaki. But the only men we wanted to appeal to had studiously refrained from being present. The whole affair was a fiasco.
When we got home, Marigold, who had stood behind my chair during the proceedings, said to me:
"I think I know personally about thirty slackers in this town, sir, and I'm more than a match for any three of them put together. Suppose I was to go the rounds, so to speak, and say to each of them, 'You young blighter, if you don't come with me and enlist, I 'll knock hell out of you!'—and, if he didn't come, I did knock hell out of him—what exactly would happen, sir?"
"You would be summoned," said I, "for thirty separate cases of assault and battery. Reckoning the penalty at six months each, you would have to go to prison for fifteen years."
Marigold's one eye grew pensive and sad.
"And they call this," said he, "a free country!"
I began this chapter by remarking that for a week or two after my second interview with Randall Holmes, nothing particular happened. Then one afternoon came Sir Anthony Fenimore to see me, and with a view to obtaining either my advice or my sympathy, reopened the story of his daughter Althea found drowned in the canal eleven months before.
What he considered a most disconcerting light had just been cast on the tragedy by Maria Beccles. This lady was Lady Fenimore's sister. A deadly feud, entirely of Miss Beccles' initiating and nourishing, had existed between them for years. They had been neither on speaking nor on writing terms. Miss Beccles, ten years Lady Fenimore's senior, was, from all I had heard, a most disagreeable and ill-conditioned person, as different from my charming friend Edith Fenimore as the ugly old sisters were from Cinderella. Although she belonged to a good old South of England family, she had joined, for reasons known only to herself, the old Free Kirk of Scotland, found a congenial Calvinistic centre in Galloway, and after insulting her English relations and friends in the most unconscionable way, cut herself adrift from them for ever. "Mad as a hatter," Sir Anthony used to say, and, never having met the lady, I agreed with him. She loathed her sister, she detested Anthony, and she appeared to be coldly indifferent to the fact of the existence of her nephew Oswald. But for Althea, and for Althea alone, she entertained a curious, indulgent affection, and every now and then Althea went to spend a week or so in Galloway, where she contrived to obtain considerable amusement. Aunt Maria did both herself and her visitors very well, said Althea, who had an appreciative eye for the material blessings of life. Althea walked over the moors and fished and took Aunt Maria's cars out for exercise and, except whistle on the Sabbath, seemed to do exactly what she liked.
Now, in January 1914, Althea announced to her parents that Aunt Maria had summoned her for a week to Galloway. Sir Anthony stuffed her handbag with five-pound notes, and at an early hour of the morning sent her up in the car to London in charge of the chauffeur. The chauffeur returned saying that he had bought Miss Althea's ticket at Euston and seen her start off comfortably on her journey. A letter or two had been received by the Fenimores from Galloway, and letters they had written to Galloway had been acknowledged by Althea. She returned to Wellingsford in due course, with bonny cheeks and wind-swept eyes, and told us all funny little stories about Aunt Maria. No one thought anything more about it until one fine afternoon in May, 1915, when Maria Beccles walked unexpectedly into the drawing-room of Wellings Park, while Sir Anthony and Lady Fenimore were at tea.
"My dear Edith," she said to her astounded hostess, who had not seen her for fifteen years. "In this orgy of hatred and strife that is going on in the world, it seems ridiculous to go on hating and fighting one's own family. We must combine against the Germans and hate them. Let us be friends."
"Mad as Crazy Jane," said Sir Anthony, telling me the story. But I, who had never heard Aunt Maria's side of the dispute, thought it very high-spirited of the old lady to come and hold out the olive-branch in so uncompromising a fashion.
Lady Fenimore then said that she had never wished to quarrel with Maria, and Sir Anthony declared that her patriotic sentiments did her credit, and that he was proud to receive her under his roof, and in a few minutes Maria was drinking tea and discussing the war in the most contented way in the world.
"I didn't write to you on the occasion of the death of your two children because you knew I didn't like you," said this outspoken lady. "I hate hypocrisy. Also I thought that tribulation might chasten you in the eyes of the Lord. I've discussed it with our Minister, a poor body, but a courageous man. He told me I was unchristian. Now, what with all this universal massacre going on and my unregenerate longing, old woman as I am, to wade knee-deep in German blood, I don't know what the devil I am."
The more Anthony told me of Aunt Maria, the more I liked her.
"Can't I come round and make her acquaintance?" I cried. "She's the sort of knotty, solid human thing that I should love. No wonder Althea was fond of her."
"This happened a week ago. She only stayed a night," replied Sir Anthony. "I wish to God we had never seen her or heard of her."
And then the good, heart-wrung little man, who had been beating about the bush for half an hour, came straight to the point.
"You remember Althea's visit to Scotland in January last year?"
"Perfectly," said I.
He rose from his chair and looked at me in wrinkled anguish.
"She never went there," he said.
That was what he had come to tell me. A natural reference to the last visit of Althea to her aunt had established the stupefying fact.
"Althea's last visit was in October, 1913," said Miss Beccles.
"But we have letters from your house to prove she was with you in January," said Sir Anthony.
Most methodical and correspondence-docketing of men, he went to his library and returned with a couple of letters.
The old lady looked them through grimly.
"Pretty vague. No details. Read 'em again, Anthony."
When he had done so, she said: "Well?"
Lady Fenimore objected: "But Althea did stay with you. She must have stayed with you."
"All right, Edith," said Maria, sitting bolt upright. "Call me a liar, and have done with it. I've come here at considerable dislocation of myself and my principles, to bury the hatchet for the sake of unity against the enemy, and this is how I'm treated. I can only go back to Scotland at once."
Sir Anthony succeeded in pacifying her. The letters were evidence that Edith and himself believed that Althea was in Galloway at the time. Maria's denial had come upon them like a thunderclap, bewildering, stunning. If Althea was not in Galloway, where was she?
Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question. Then she took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.
"Yes, Maria," said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, "we don't doubt your word—but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn't with you, where was she?"
"How do I know?"
Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger—she was a dark and shrivelled, gipsy-like creature. "You might as well ask the canal in which she drowned herself."
"But, my God, Anthony!" I cried, when he had got thus far, "What did you think? What did you say?"
I realised that the old lady had her social disqualifications. Plain-dealing is undoubtedly a virtue. But there are several virtues which the better class of angel keeps chained up in a dog-kennel. Of course she was acute. A mind trained in the acrobatics of Calvinistic Theology is, within a narrow compass, surprisingly agile. It jumped at one bound from the missing week in Althea's life into the black water of the canal. It was incapable, however, of appreciating the awful horror in the minds of the beholders.
"I don't know what I said," replied Sir Anthony, walking restlessly about my library. "We were struck all of a heap. As you know, we never had reason to think that the poor dear child's death was anything but an accident. We were not narrow-minded old idiots. She was a dear good girl. In a modern way she claimed her little independence. We let her have it. We trusted her. We took it for granted—you know it, Duncan, as well as I do—that, a hot night in June—not able to sleep—she had stuck on a hat and wandered about the grounds, as she had often done before, and a spirit of childish adventure had tempted her, that night, to walk round the back of the town and—and—well, until in the dark, she stepped off the tow-path by the lock gates, into nothing—and found the canal. It was an accident," he continued, with a hand on my shoulder, looking down on me in my chair. "The inquest proved that. I accepted it, as you know, as a visitation of God. Edith and I sorrowed for her like cowards. It took the war to bring us to our senses. But, now, this damned old woman comes and upsets the whole thing."
"But," said I, "after all, it was only a bow at a venture on the part of the old lady."
"I wish it were," said he, and he handed me a letter which Maria had written to him the day after her return to Scotland.
The letter contained a pretty piece of information. She had summarily discharged Elspeth Macrae, her confidential maid of five-and-twenty years' standing. Elspeth Macrae, on her own confession, had, out of love for Althea, performed the time-honoured jugglery with correspondence. She had posted in Galloway letters which she had received, under cover, from Althea, and had forwarded letters that had arrived addressed to Althea to an accommodation address in Carlisle. So have sentimental serving-maids done since the world began.
"What do you make of it?" asked Sir Anthony.
What else could I make of it but the one sorry theory? What woman employs all this subterfuge in order to obtain a weeks liberty for any other purpose than the one elementary purpose of young humanity?
We read the inevitable conclusion in each other's eyes.
"Who is the man, Duncan?"
"I suppose you have searched her desk and things?"
"Last year. Everything most carefully. It was awful—but we had to. Not a scrap of paper that wasn't innocence itself."
"It can't be anyone here," said I. "You know what the place is. The slightest spark sends gossip aflame like the fumes of petrol."
He sat down by my side and rubbed his close-cropped grey head.
"It couldn't have been young Holmes?"
The little man had a brave directness that sometimes disconcerted me. I knew the ghastly stab that every word cost him.
"She used to make mock of Randall," said I. "Don't you remember she used to call him 'the gilded poet'? Once she said he was the most lady-like young man of her acquaintance. I don't admire our young friend, but I think you're on the wrong track, Anthony."
"I don't see it," said he. "That sort of flippancy goes for nothing. Women use it as a sort of quickset hedge of protection." He bent forward and tapped me on my senseless knee. "Young Holmes always used to be in and out of the house. They had known each other from childhood. He had a distinguished Oxford career. When he won the Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch. I gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember."
"I remember," said I.
I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish—dear old fox-hunting ignoramus—he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave! I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a conversation for light allusion.
"The poor dear child—Edith and I have sized it up—was all over him that evening."
"What more youthfully natural," said I, "than that she should carry off the hero of the occasion—her childhood's playfellow?"
"All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken together—especially if they fit in—very often make up a whole case for prosecution."
"You're a Chairman of Quarter Sessions," I admitted, "and so you ought to know."
"I know this," said he, "that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in January." I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement. To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling. Yes. I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London. I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.
"Yet," I said, "I don't think he had anything to do with it."
"Why?"
"It would have been far too much moral exertion—"
"You call it moral?" Sir Anthony burst out angrily.
I pacified him with an analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I dissertated on his amours with Phyllis Gedge.
"No, my dear old friend," said I, in conclusion, "I don't think it was Randall Holmes."
Sir Anthony rose and shook his fist in my face. As I knew he meant me no bodily harm, I did not blench.
"Who was it, then?"
"Althea," said I, "often used to stay in town with your sister. Lady Greatorex has a wide circle of acquaintances. Do you know anything of the men Althea used to meet at her house?"
"Of course I don't," replied Sir Anthony. Then he sat down again with a gesture of despair. "After all, what does it matter? Perhaps it's as well I don't know who the man was, for if I did, I'd kill him!"
He set his teeth and glowered at nothing and smote his left palm with his right fist, and there was a long silence. Presently he repeated:
"I'd kill him!"
We fell to discussing the whole matter over again. Why, I asked, should we assume that the poor child was led astray by a villain? Might there not have been a romantic marriage which, for some reason we could not guess, she desired to keep secret for a time? Had she not been bright and happy from January to June? And that night of tragedy... What more likely than that she had gone forth to keep tryst with her husband and accidentally met her death? "He arrives," said I, "waits for her. She never comes. He goes away. The next day he learns from local gossip or from newspapers what has happened. He thinks it best to keep silent and let her fair name be untouched...What have you to say against that theory?"
"Possible," he replied. "Anything conceivable within the limits of physical possibility is possible. But it isn't probable. I have an intuitive feeling that there was villainy about—and if ever I get hold of that man—God help him!"
So there was nothing more to be said.