XXIV
Inthe evening of the same day the vicar dined at Longwood. Edith accompanied him. Mr. Murdwell had the forethought to send a car for his guests, so that a mile journey on a wet night was madeen prince.
Mr. Perry-Hennington was not in a mood for dining out. A certain matter was still in abeyance, and it seemed to hang over him like a cloud. He felt it was weak and illogical to allow such an affair, which was one of simple duty, to disturb him. But somehow he was far more upset by it than he cared to own.
Fortunately, the evening made no great demand upon the guests. Indeed, it proved to be an agreeable relaxation. There was nothing in the nature of a party, a fact of which the vicar had been expressly apprised beforehand; five people, to wit; Mr. Murdwell, his wife and daughter, Edith and himself.
Mr. Perry-Hennington was well able to appreciate a good dinner. And in spite of his present rather disgruntled state, he did not remember ever to havehad a better in the course of many years of dining out. The perfection of Parisian cooking allied to dry champagne was without a suspicion of war time economy; and though the lavishness of the menu did not march with the vicar’s recent pronouncements, it was hardly possible to rebuke it in the present case. Besides, these people were American; their wealth was said to be beyond the dreams of avarice; and to judge by the frame in which they were set, there seemed to be little need for them to economize in anything.
The vicar confided to Edith afterward that he had found their new neighbors “most entertaining.” And this was strictly true. Intellectually he was not quite so ossified as his theological outfit made him appear. Behind the arrogance, the dogmatism, the closed mind, was a certain shrewd man-of-the-worldliness, conceived on broad and genial lines, which is seldom lacking in the English upper class. And of that class Mr. Perry-Hennington was not an unworthy specimen. He could tell a story with anyone; he knew, had known, and was connected with many persons whom the world regards as interesting; he was traveled, sociable, distinguished in manner, and the impression he made upon his host and upon his hostess more particularly—which after all was the more important matter—was decidedly favorable.
Mr. Murdwell was a man of international reputation, though sprung from quite small beginnings in his native Ohio. And behind the sophisticated naïveté of Jooly his wife, and Bud his daughter, was a well-marked tendency to think in dukes and duchesses. They had known them on the Riviera, had studied them in hotels and country houses in divers lands, and there was little doubt that sooner or later Bud would burgeon into a princess.
ThefamilleMurdwell had traveled far in a very short time. Its rise had been one of the romances of scientific and social America. The genius of Murdwellpère, to which the whole world was now paying tribute, had, among many other things, raised a palace on Fifth Avenue, acquired property on Long Island, and a villa in Italy. To these was now added an English country house “for the duration of the war.”
This was the first appearance of the Murdwell ladies in the United Kingdom, and they were immensely interested in it. They had only been three months in the country and everything was new. Hitherto their knowledge of it had been based on the Englishman abroad, the reports of travelers, and the national output of fiction. As a consequence, they frankly owned that they had rather underrated it. So far they had been agreeably surprised to find it not altogether aone-horse affair. It is true they had arrived in the island at an exceptional time, but somehow it was more a going concern than they had been led to expect.
For instance, when they were told that the local parson and his daughter were coming to dinner, they had good-humoredly resigned themselves to an evening of acute boredom. But one of the social peculiarities of England, as far as they had seen it at present, was that things are always just a bit better than you look for—the evening, when it came, was really so much more entertaining than a similar function would have been in Kentucky, which they took as the equivalent for Sussex.
On sight, the meager, high-shouldered, rather frumpish, rather myopic Miss Thing, with the double-barreled name and the tortoise-shell spectacles, which she wore with effect, promised to be all that the lawless fancy of Bud and Jooly had painted her. But that was a first view. By the time dinner was over they had found things in common with her, and before the evening was out they were more inclined to sit at her feet than she was to sit at theirs. Their wonderful food and wine, their clothes and their surroundings, Bud’s pearls and Jooly’s diamonds, and their talk of Prince This and the Marquis So-and-So seemed to have not the slightest effect upon her. Shetook everything, Bud and Jooly included, so very much for granted, that their curiosity was piqued. Her dress was worth about a shilling a yard, her hair was done anyhow, her features did not conform to their idea of the beautiful, yet she was not in the least parochial, and both ladies agreed, that had you searched America from the east coast to the west it would have been hard to find anything quite like her.
The vicar puzzled them even more. They were not able to range him at all. Perhaps the thing which impressed them most was “that he didn’t show his goods in the window.”
Indeed, this fact may have struck Mr. Murdwell himself. For as soon as the meal was under way he began to discuss, with a frankness and a humor to which his guests didn’t in the least object, the English custom of “not showing their goods in the window.”
“And a very bad one, too,” said Mr. Murdwell, raising his glass. “To my mind it’s one of the reasons that’s brought this war about.”
The vicar asked for enlightenment.
“If your diplomacy had said: ‘Now look here, Fritz, old friend, if you don’t try to be a little gentleman and keep that torch away from the powder keg you’ll find big trouble,’ you wouldn’t have hadto send for me to put the Central Empires out of business.”
“Nothing could have prevented this war,” said the vicar in a deep tone. “It was inevitable.”
“I am not sure that we shall agree about that,” said Mr. Murdwell coolly. “If you had let them know the strength of your hand they would never have dared to raise you.”
The vicar shook his head in strong dissent.
“This trouble goes back some way,” said Mr. Murdwell. “It was in the sixties that you first took to giving people the impression that they could make doormats of you. And then came the Alabama arbitration business in which you curled up at our big talk. We said, ‘England’s a dud,’ and we’ve been saying it ever since. And why? Because like friend Fritz and all the rest of the push, in diplomacy we take moderation for weakness.”
“Would you have our diplomacy always in shining armor?” said the vicar.
“No I wouldn’t. But there’s the golden mean. Think of the way you let Bismarck put his thumb to his nose.”
“But that’s an old story.”
“The historian of the future will have to tell it, though. It seems to me that the world has a prettystrong complaint against you. You’ve underplayed your hand a bit too much. If you had been the Kingpin of Europe, as you ought to have been, and kept the other scholars in their places, things might have been different.”
This airy dogmatism amused the vicar. But in most other people it would have annoyed him extremely.
“Of course I can’t agree,” he said mildly. “I am glad to say we don’t regard this war as a material issue. For us it is a conflict between right and wrong.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Murdwell. “And I’ve already figured that out for myself and that’s why I am here. If I criticize it’s in the spirit of friendship. In this war you’ve gone big. The fact is, you are a bigger proposition than outsiders thought. And the longer I stay here the sharper it bites me. Nobody knows what your resources are. Take our neighbor at Hart’s Ghyll. When I went the other day to make friends with him, it took my breath away to think of a man like that volunteering as a tommy to be frizzled in Gallipoli.”
“But why shouldn’t he,” said the vicar, “if he felt it to be his duty?”
“As you say, why not? But it’s large—for a man like that.”
“Surely not more so for him than for anyone else.”
“There we shan’t agree. There’s a kind of man who can’t keep out of a scrap wherever one happens to be going. And in these islands you’ve got more of that sort to the square mile than anywhere else I’ve visited, although I’ve not yet seen the Basutos. But Gervase Brandon is not of that type. War is against every instinct that man’s got. He hates it with every fiber of his nature.”
“There are many thousands like him,” said the vicar; “many thousands who have simply given their lives—and more than their lives—in a just quarrel.”
“I know. But the quarrel was not his, and he didn’t make it. And it was not as if, like the Belgians, the French, and the Russians, he had the Hun on his doorstep. It would have been quite easy for a man like that to say: ‘Leave it to the British Navy. Sooner or later they are bound to clear up the mess.’”
“He was too honest to do that,” said the vicar. “He saw that a test case had arisen between right and wrong, between God and Antichrist, and he simply went and did his duty.”
“Well, I can only say,” Mr. Murdwell rejoined, “that when I saw him the other day he seemed to believe in neither.”
“That’s because you don’t really know him. Just now, it is true, he is in rather a disturbed statementally. He has always had a skeptical mind, and there have been times when I’ve been tempted to think that he gave it too much latitude. And just now he is suffering a bad reaction after the horrors he’s been through. And of course he has had to give up the hope of ever walking again. But whatever the opinions of such a man may be, it is only right and fair to judge him by his actions.”
“Yes, he’s made a big sacrifice. And the tragedy of it is he feels now that he’s made it in vain.”
“His mental health is not what it might be just now, poor fellow. He has said things to me about Prussia winning, even if she loses and so on, which I know he cannot really believe.”
“Why not?”
“Because Gervase Brandon is too true an Englishman ever to doubt the spirit of the race. He is depressed just now about a very trivial matter. He has magnified it out of all proportion, whereas had he been fit and well he would not have given it a second thought. No, Gervase Brandon is not the man to despair of the Republic. He is part and parcel of England herself, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone.”
“I see he’s all that. In fact he belongs to one of your first families, with the most beautiful place on the countryside, and themanesof his ancestors, whowent to the Crusades, all around him. No, I suppose he couldn’t help doing as he did, if you come to figure it out.”
“He was without a choice in the matter as he freely admits.”
“And yet that man’s a highbrow of highbrows. His knowledge amazed me—not on his own subject, of which he didn’t speak, and I didn’t either, because I know nothing about it, but on my own—on which I claim to know just a little more than anyone else.”
“On the subject of Murdwell’s Law?” said the vicar with an air of keen interest.
But dinner was now at an end, and as the inexhaustible subject of Murdwell’s Law was at all times a little too much for the ladies of the house, they made good their escape before its discoverer could hoist himself upon a theme which promised to revolutionize the world of physical science.