Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but outworn
during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant phrase
which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to hundreds of thousands of
mourning men and women there has been nothing but its truth to bring
consolation. They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice and thereby
are ennobled. The cause in which they made it becomes more sacred. The
community of grief raises human dignity. In England, at any rate, there
are no widows of Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see
little black worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their
only son, the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their
grief was stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the
occasion of a tragedy that occurred the year before.
Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had
been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid,
useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no
dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it with a heroic word
that caught in the throat.
I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford
in order to weep over the pain of the world. God knows there is in it
an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day
unfolded before my eyes.
If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh
Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and blow
out my brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the earth has
ever since its creation pierced through the mist of tears in which at
times it has been shrouded. What has been will be. Nay, more, what has
been shall be. It is the Law of what I believe to be God.... As a
concrete instance, where do you find a fuller expression of the divine
gaiety of the human spirit than in the Houses of Pain, strewn the
length and breadth of the land, filled with maimed and shattered men
who have looked into the jaws of Hell? If it comes to that, I have
looked into them myself, and have heard the heroic jests of men who
looked with me.
For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all
so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I find
myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This, however, by the
way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that if I am to make this
story intelligible I must start from the darkness where its roots lie
hidden. And that darkness is the black depths of the canal by the lock
gates where Althea Fenimore's body was found.
It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one
picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of
tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea
Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern,
with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and
sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call "open-air";
yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I have seen her in
the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the
most passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the
evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and
muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say chiffon--anyhow, something white
and filmy and girlish--curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of
Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its
greasy brown paper cover, from the servants' hall. I confess that,
though to her as to her brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as
a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in
intellectual grasp, in emotional distinction. I should have said that
she was sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men.
She was forever laughing--just the spontaneous laughter of the gladness
of life.
On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me, bringing me
a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular bed. We had tea
in the garden, and with her young appetite she consumed half the fruit
she had brought. At the time I did not notice an unusual touch of
depression. I remember her holding by its stalk a great half-eaten
strawberry and asking me whether sometimes I didn't find life rather
rotten. I said idly:
"You can't expect the world to be a peach without a speck on it. Of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The wise person avoids the specks."
"But suppose you've bitten a specky bit by accident?"
"Spit it out," said I.
She laughed. "You think you're like the wise Uncle in the Sunday School
books, don't you?"
"I know I am," I said.
Whereupon she laughed again, finished the strawberry, and changed the
conversation.
There seemed to be no foreshadowing of tragedy in that. I had known her
(like many of her kind) to proclaim the rottenness of the Universe when
she was off her stroke at golf, or when a favourite young man did not
appear at a dance. I attributed no importance to it. But the next day I
remembered. What was she doing after half-past ten o'clock, when she
had bidden her father and mother goodnight, on the steep and lonely
bank of the canal, about a mile and a half away? No one had seen her
leave the house. No one, apparently, had seen her walking through the
town. Nothing was known of her until dawn when they found her body by
the lock gate. She had been dead some hours. It was a mysterious
affair, upon which no light was thrown at the inquest. No one save
myself had observed any sign of depression, and her half-bantering talk
with me was trivial enough. No one could adduce a reason for her
midnight walk on the tow-path. The obvious question arose. Whom had she
gone forth to meet? What man? There was not a man in the neighbourhood
with whom her name could be particularly associated. Generally, it
could be associated with a score or so. The modern young girl of her
position and upbringing has a drove of young male intimates. With one
she rides, with another she golfs, with another she dances a two-step,
with another she Bostons; she will let Tom read poetry to her,
although, as she expresses it, "he bores her stiff," because her sex
responds to the tribute; she plays lady patroness to Dick, and tries to
intrigue him into a soft job; and as for Harry she goes on telling him
month after month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly she
will visit him with her high displeasure. Meanwhile, most of these
satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable,
others not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as a
woman and a sister, they have the run of her father's house, and would
feel insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness of their
behaviour. Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where he is welcomed
on the same understanding. Of course, when one particular young man and
one particular young woman read lunatic things in each other's eyes,
then the rest of the respective quasi-sisters and quasi-brothers have
to go hang. (In parenthesis, I may state that the sisters are more
ruthlessly sacrificed than the brothers.) At any rate, frankness is the
saving quality of the modern note.
In the case of Althea, there had been no sign of such specialisation.
She could not have gone forth, poor child, to meet the twenty with whom
she was known to be on terms of careless comradeship. She had gone from
her home, driven by God knows what impulse, to walk in the
starlight--there was no moon--along the banks of the canal. In the
darkness, had she missed her footing and stepped into nothingness and
the black water? The Coroner's Jury decided the question in the
affirmative. They brought in a verdict of death by misadventure. And up
to the date on which I begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford,
namely that of the summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death
of young Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter.
Throughout July my friends were like dead people. There was nothing
that could be said to them by way of consolation. The sun had gone out
of their heaven. There was no light in the world. Having known Death as
a familiar foe, and having fought against its terrors; having only by
the grace of God been able to lift up a man's voice in my hour of awful
bereavement, and cry, "O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, thy
Victory?" I could suffer with them and fear for their reason. They
lived in a state of coma, unaware of life, performing, like automata,
their daily tasks.
Then, in the early days of August, came the Trumpet of War, and they
awakened. In my life have I seen nothing so marvellous. No broken spell
of enchantment in an Arabian tale when dead warriors spring into life
was ever more instant and complete. They arose in their full vigour;
the colour came back to their cheeks and the purpose into their eyes.
They laughed once more. Their days were filled with work and
cheerfulness. In November Sir Anthony was elected Mayor. Being a
practical, hard-headed little man, loved and respected by everybody, he
drove a hitherto contentious Town Council into paths of high patriotism
like a flock of sheep. And no less energy did Lady Fenimore exhibit in
the sphere of her own activities.
A few days after the tidings came of Oswald's death, Sir Anthony was
riding through the town and pulled up before Perkins' the fishmonger's.
Perkins emerged from his shop and crossed the pavement.
"I hear you've had bad news."
"Yes, indeed, Sir Anthony."
"I'm sorry. He was a fine fellow. So was my boy. We're in the same
boat, Perkins."
Perkins assented. "It sort of knocks one's life to bits, doesn't it?"
said he. "We've nothing left."
"We have our country."
"Our country isn't our only son," said the other dully.
"No. She's our mother," said Sir Anthony.
"Isn't that a kind of abstraction?"
"Abstraction!" cried Sir Anthony, indignantly. "You must be imbibing
the notions of that poisonous beast Gedge."
Gedge was a smug, socialistic, pacifist builder who did not hold with
war--and with this one least of all, which he maintained was being
waged for the exclusive benefit of the capitalist classes. In the eyes
of the stalwarts of Wellingsford, he was a horrible fellow, capable of
any stratagem or treason.
Perkins flushed. "I've always voted conservative, like my father before
me, Sir Anthony, and like yourself I've given my boy to my country.
I've no dealings with unpatriotic people like Gedge, as you know very
well."
"Of course I do," cried Sir Anthony. "And that's why I ask you what the
devil you mean by calling England an abstraction. For us, she's the
only thing in the world. We're elderly chaps, you and I, Perkins, and
the only thing we can do to help her is to keep our heads high. If
people like you and me crumple up, the British Empire will crumple up."
"That's quite true," said Perkins.
Sir Anthony bent down and held out his hand.
"It's damned hard lines for us, and for the women. But we must keep our
end up. It's doing our bit."
Perkins wrung his hand. "I wish to God," said he, "I was young enough--"
"By God! so do I!" said Sir Anthony.
This little conversation (which I afterwards verified) was reported to
me by my arch-gossip, Sergeant Marigold.
"And I tell you what, sir," said he after the conclusion, "I'm of the
same way of thinking and feeling."
"So am I."
"Besides, I'm not so old, sir. I'm only forty-two."
"The prime of life," said I.
"Then why won't they take me, sir?"
If there had been no age limit and no medical examination Marigold
would have re-enlisted as John Smith, on the outbreak of war, without a
moment's consideration of the position of his wife and myself. And Mrs.
Marigold, a soldier's wife of twenty years' standing, would have taken
it, just like myself, as a matter of course. But as he could not
re-enlist, he pestered the War Office (just as I did) and I pestered
for him to give him military employment. And all in vain.
"Why don't they take me, sir? When I see these fellows with three
stripes on their arms, and looking at them and wondering at them as if
they were struck three stripes by lightning, and calling themselves
Sergeants and swanking about and letting their men waddle up to their
gun like cows--and when I see them, as I've done with your eyes--watch
one of their men pass by an officer in the street without saluting, and
don't kick the blighter to--to--to barracks--it fairly makes me sick.
And I ask myself, sir, what I've done that I should be loafing here
instead of serving my country."
"You've somehow mislaid an eye and a hand and gone and got a tin head.
That's what you've done," said I. "And the War Office has a mark
against you as a damned careless fellow."
"Tin head or no tin head," he grumbled, "I could teach those mother's
darlings up there the difference between a battery of artillery and a
skittle-ally."
"I believe you've mentioned the matter to them already," I observed
softly.
Marigold met my eye for a second and then looked rather sheepish. I had
heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a Territorial Sergeant
whom he had set out to teach. Marigold encountered a cannonade of
blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date, scientific, against which the
time-worn expletives in use during his service days were ineffectual.
He was routed with heavy loss.
"This is a war of the young," I continued. "New men, new guns, new
notions. Even a new language," I insinuated.
"I wish 'em joy of their language," said Marigold. Then seeing that I
was mildly amusing myself at his expense, he asked me stiffly if there
was anything more that he could do for me, and on my saying no, he
replied "Thank you, sir," most correctly and left the room.
On the 3d of March Betty Fairfax came to tea.
Of all the young women of Wellingsford she was my particular favourite.
She was so tall and straight, with a certain Rosalind boyishness about
her that made for charm. I am not yet, thank goodness, one of the
fossils who hold up horror-stricken hands at the independent ways of
the modern young woman. If it were not for those same independent ways
the mighty work that English women are doing in this war would be left
undone. Betty Fairfax was breezily independent. She had a little money
of her own and lived, when it suited her, with a well-to-do and
comfortable aunt. She was two and twenty. I shall try to tell you more
about her, as I go on.
As I have said, and as my diary tells me, she came to tea on the 3d of
March. She was looking particularly attractive that afternoon. Shaded
lamps and the firelight of a cosy room, with all their soft shadows,
give a touch of mysterious charm to a pretty girl. Her jacket had a
high sort of Medici collar edged with fur, which set off her shapely
throat. The hair below her hat was soft and brown. Her brows were wide,
her eyes brown and steady, nose and lips sensitive. She had a way of
throwing back her head and pointing her chin fearlessly, as though in
perpetual declaration that she cared not a hang either for
black-beetles or Germans. And she was straight as a dart, with the
figure of a young Diana--Diana before she began to worry her head about
beauty competitions. A kind of dark hat stuck at a considerable angle
on her head gave her the prettiest little swaggering air in the
world.... Well, there was I, a small, brown, withered, grizzled,
elderly, mustachioed monkey, chained to my wheel-chair; there were the
brave logs blazing up the wide chimney; there was the tea table on my
right with its array of silver and old china; and there, on the other
side of it, attending to my wants, sat as brave and sweet a type of
young English womanhood as you could find throughout the length and
breadth of the land. Had I not been happy, I should have been an
ungrateful dog.
We talked of the war, of local news, of the wounded at the hospital.
And here I must say that we are very proud of our Wellingsford
Hospital. It is the largest and the wealthiest in the county. We owe it
to the uneasy conscience of a Wellingsford man, a railway speculator in
the forties, who, having robbed widows and orphans and, after trial at
the Old Bailey, having escaped penal servitude by the skin of his
teeth, died in the odour of sanctity, and the possessor of a colossal
fortune in the year eighteen sixty-three. This worthy gentleman built
the hospital and endowed it so generously that a wing of it has been
turned into a military hospital with forty beds. I have the honour to
serve on the Committee. Betty Fairfax entered as a Probationer early in
September, and has worked there night and day ever since. That is why
we chatted about the wounded. Having a day off, she had indulged in the
luxury of pretty clothes. Of these I had duly expressed my admiration.
Tea over, she lit a cigarette for me and one for herself and drew her
chair a trifle nearer the fire. After a little knitting of the brow,
she said:--
"You haven't asked me why I invited myself to tea."
"I thought," said I, "it was for my beaux yeux."
"Not this time. I rather wanted you to be the first to receive a
certain piece of information."
I glanced at her sharply. "You don't mean to say you're going to be
married at last?"
In some astonishment she retorted:--
"How did you guess?"
"Holy simplicity!" said I. "You told me so yourself."
She laughed. Suddenly, on reflection, her face changed.
"Why did you say 'at last'?"
"Well--" said I, with a significant gesture.
She made a defiant announcement:--
"I am going to marry Willie Connor."
It was my turn to be astonished. "Captain Connor?" I echoed.
"Yes. What have you to say against him?"
"Nothing, my dear, nothing."
And I hadn't. He was an exemplary young fellow, a Captain in a
Territorial regiment that had been in hard training in the
neighbourhood since August. He was of decent family and upbringing, a
barrister by profession, and a comely pink-faced boy with a fair
moustache. He brought a letter or two of introduction, was billeted on
Mrs. Fairfax, together with one of his subs, and was made welcome at
various houses. Living under the same roof as Betty, it was natural
that he should fall in love with her. But it was not at all natural
that she should fall in love with him. She was not one of the kind that
suffer fools gladly.... No; I had nothing against Willie Connor. He was
merely a common-place, negative young man; patriotic, keen in his work,
an excellent soldier, and, as far as I knew, of blameless life; but
having met him two or three times in general company, I had found him a
dull dog, a terribly dull dog,--the last man in the world for Betty
Fairfax.
And then there was Leonard Boyce. I naturally had him in my head, when
I used the words "at last."
"You don't seem very enthusiastic," said Betty.
"You've taken me by surprise," said I. "I'm not young enough to be
familiar with these sudden jerks."
"You thought it was Major Boyce."
"I did, Betty. True, you've said nothing about it to me for ever so
long, and when I have asked you for news of him your answers have
shewed me that all was not well. But you've never told me, or anyone,
that the engagement was broken off."
Her young face was set sternly as she looked into the fire.
"It's not broken off--in the formal sense. Leonard thought fit to let
it dwindle, and it has dwindled until it has perished of inanition."
She flashed round. "I'm not the sort to ask any man for explanations."
"Boyce went out with the first lot in August," I said. "He has had
seven awful months. Mons and all the rest of it. You must excuse a man
in the circumstances for not being aux petits soins des dames. And he
seems to be doing magnificently--twice mentioned in dispatches."
"I know all that," she said. "I'm not a fool. But the war has nothing
to do with it. It started a month before the war broke out. Don't let
us talk of it."
She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire and lit a fresh one. I
accepted the action as symbolical. I dismissed Boyce, and said:--
"And so you're engaged to Captain Connor?"
"More than that," she laughed. "I'm going to marry him. He's going out
next week. It's idiotic to have an engagement. So I'm going to marry
him the day after to-morrow."
Now here was a piece of news, all flung at my head in a couple of
minutes. The day after to-morrow! I asked for the reason of this
disconcerting suddenness.
"He's going out next week."
"My dear," said I, "I have known you for a very long time--and I
suppose it's because I'm such a very old friend that you've come to
tell me all about it. So I can talk to you frankly. Have you considered
the terrible chances of this war? Heaven knows what may happen. He may
be killed."
"That's why I'm marrying him," she said.
There was a little pause. For the moment I had nothing to say, as I was
busily searching for her point of view. Then, with pauses between each
sentence, she went on:--
"He asked me two months ago, and again a month ago. I told him to put
such ideas out of his head. Yesterday he told me they were off to the
front and said what a wonderful help it would be to him if he could
carry away some hope of my love. So I gave it to him."--She threw back
her head and looked at me, with flushed cheeks. "The love, not the
hope."
"I don't think it was right of him to press for an immediate marriage,"
said I, in a grandfatherly way--though God knows if I had been mad for
a girl I should have done the same myself when I was young.
"He didn't" said Betty, coolly. "It was all my doing. I fixed it up
there and then. Looked up Whitaker's Almanack for the necessary
information, and sent him off to get a special license."
I nodded a non-committal head. It all seemed rather mad. Betty rose and
from her graceful height gazed down on me.
"If you don't look more cheerful, Major, I shall cry. I've never done
so yet, but I'm sure I've got it in me."
I stretched out my hand. She took it, and, still holding it, seated
herself on a footstool close to my chair.
"There are such a lot of things that occur to me," I said. "Things that
your poor mother, if she were alive, would be more fitted to touch on
than myself."
"Such as--"
She knelt by me and gave me both her hands. It was a pretty way she
had. She had begun it soon after her head overtopped mine in my eternal
wheelbarrow. There was a little mockery in her eyes.
"Well--" said I. "You know what marriage means. There is the question
of children."
She broke into frank laughter.
"My darling Majy--" That is the penalty one pays for admitting
irresponsible modern young people into one's intimacy. They miscall one
abominably. I thought she had outgrown this childish, though
affectionate appellation of disrespect. "My darling Majy!" she said.
"Children! How many do you think I'm going to have?"
I was taken aback. There was this pure, proud, laughing young face a
foot away from me. I said in desperation:--
"You know very well what I mean, young woman. I want to put things
clearly before you--" It is the most difficult thing in the world for a
man--even without legs--to talk straight about the facts of life to a
young girl. He has no idea how much she knows about them and how much
she doesn't. To tear away veils and reveal frightening starkness is an
act from which he shrinks with all the modesty of a (perhaps) deluded
sex. I took courage. "I want," I repeated, "to put things clearly
before you. You are marrying this young man. You will have a week's
married life. He goes away like a gallant fellow to fight for his
country. He may be killed in the course of the next few weeks. Like a
brave girl you've got to face it. In the course of time a child may be
born--without a father to look after him. It's a terrific
responsibility."
She knelt upright and put both her hands on my shoulders, almost
embracing me, and the laughter died away from her eyes, giving place to
something which awakened memories of what I had seen once or twice in
the eyes of the dearest of all women. She put her face very close to
mine and whispered:
"Don't you see, dear, it's in some sort of way because of that? Don't
you think it would be awful for a strong, clean, brave English life
like his to go out without leaving behind him someone to--well, you
know what I mean--to carry on the same traditions--to be the same clean
brave Englishman in the future?"
I smiled and nodded. Quite a different kind of nod from the previous
one.
"Thousands of girls are doing it, you dear old Early Victorian, and
aren't ashamed to say so to those who really love and can understand
them. And you do love and understand, don't you?"
She set me off at arm's length, and held me with her bright unflinching
eyes.
"I do, my dear," said I. "But there's only one thing that troubles me.
Marriage is a lifelong business. Captain Connor may win through to a
green old age. I hope to God the gallant fellow will. Your present
motives are beautiful and heroic. But do you care for him sufficiently
to pass a lifetime with him--after the war--an ordinary, commonplace
lifetime?"
With the same clear gaze full on me she said:--
"Didn't I tell you that I had given him my love?"
"You did."
"Then," she retorted with a smile, "my dear Major Didymus, what more do
you want?"
"Nothing, my dear Betty."
I kissed her. She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me again.
Sergeant Marigold entered on the sentimental scene and preserved a face
of wood. Betty rose to her feet slowly and serenely and smiled at
Marigold.
"Miss Fairfax's car," he announced.
"Marigold," said I, "Miss Fairfax is going to be married the day after
to-morrow to Captain Connor of the--"
"I know, sir," interrupted my one-eyed ramrod. "I'm very glad, if I may
be permitted to say so, Miss. I've made it my duty to inspect all the
troops that have been quartered hereabouts during the last eight
months. And Captain Connor is one of the few that really know their
business. I shouldn't at all mind to serve under him. I can't say more,
Miss. I wish you happiness."
She flushed and laughed and looked adorable, and held out her hand,
which he enclosed in his great left fist.
"And you'll come to my wedding, Sergeant?"
"I will, Miss," said he. "With considerable pleasure."