In due course Captain Connor's regiment went off to France; not with
drums beating and colours flying--I wish to Heaven it had; if there had
been more pomp and circumstance in England, the popular imagination
would not have remained untouched for so long a time--but in the cold
silent hours of the night, like a gang of marauders. Betty did not go
to bed after he had left, but sat by the fire till morning. Then she
dressed in uniform and resumed her duties at the hospital. Many a
soldier's bride was doing much the same. And her days went on just as
they did before her marriage. She presented a smiling face to the
world; she said:
"If I'm as happy as can be expected in the circumstances, I think it my
duty to look happier."
It was a valiant philosophy.
The falling of a chimney-stack brought me up against Daniel Gedge, who
before the war did all my little repairs. The chimney I put into the
hands of Day & Higgins, another firm of builders.
A day or two afterwards Hosea shied at something and I discovered it
was Gedge, who had advanced into the roadway expressing a desire to
have a word with me. I quieted the patriotic Hosea and drew up by the
kerb. Gedge was a lean foxy-faced man with a long, reddish nose and a
long blunt chin from which a grizzled beard sprouted aggressively
forwards. He had hard, stupid grey eyes.
"I hope you 'll excuse the liberty I take in stopping you, sir," he
said, civilly.
"That's all right," said I. "What's the matter?"
"I thought I had given you satisfaction these last twenty years."
I assented. "Quite correct," said I.
"Then, may I ask, sir, without offence, why you've called in Day &
Higgins?"
"You may," said I, "and, with or without offence, I'll answer your
question. I've called them in because they're good loyal people.
Higgins has joined the army, and so has Day's eldest boy, while you
have been going on like a confounded pro-German."
"You've no right to say that, Major Meredyth."
"Not when you go over to Godbury"--the surging metropolis of the County
some fifteen miles off--"and tell a pack of fools to strike because
this is a capitalists' war? Not when you go round the mills here, and
do your best to stop young fellows from fighting for their country? God
bless my soul, in whose interests are you acting, if not Germany's?"
He put on his best platform manner. "I'm acting in the best interests
of the people of this country. The war is wrong and incredibly foolish
and can bring no advantage to the working man. Why should he go and be
killed or maimed for life? Will it put an extra penny in his pocket or
his widow's? No. Oh!"--he checked my retort--"I know everything you
would say. I see the arguments every day in all your great newspapers.
But the fact remains that I don't see eye to eye with you, or those you
represent. You think one way, I think another. We agree to differ."
"We don't," said I. "I don't agree at all."
"At any rate," he said, "I can't see how a difference of political
opinion can affect my ability now to put a new chimney-stack in your
house, any more than it has done in the past."
"In the past," said I, "political differences were parochial squabbles
in comparison with things nowadays. You're either for England, or
against her."
He smiled wryly. "I'm for England. We both are. You think her salvation
lies one way. I think another. This is a free country in which every
man has a right to his own opinion."
"Exactly so," said I. "Therefore you'll admit that I've a right to the
opinion that you ought to be locked up either in a gaol or a lunatic
asylum as a danger to the state, and that, having that rightful
opinion, I'm justified in not entrusting the safety of my house to one
who, in my aforesaid opinion, is either a criminal or a lunatic."
Dialectically, I had him there. It afforded me keen enjoyment. Besides
being a John Bull Englishman, I am a cripple and therefore ever so
little malicious.
"It's all very well for you to talk, Major Meredyth," said he, "but
your opinions cost you nothing--mine are costing me my livelihood. It
isn't fair."
"You might as well say," I replied, "that I, who have never dared to
steal anything in my life, live in ease and comfort, whereas poor Bill
Sykes, who has devoted all his days to burglary, has seven years' penal
servitude. No, Gedge," said I, gathering up the reins, "it can't be
done. You can't have it both ways."
He put a detaining hand on Hosea's bridle and an evil flash came into
his hard grey eyes.
"I'll have it some other way, then," he said. "A way you've no idea of.
A way that'll knock all you great people of Wellingsford off your high
horses. If you drive me to it, you'll see. I'll bide my time and I
don't care whether it breaks me."
He stamped his foot and tugged at the bridle. Two or three passers-by
halted wonderingly and Prettilove, the hairdresser, moved across the
pavement from his shop door where he had been taking the air.
"My good fellow," said I, "you have lost your temper and are talking
drivel. Kindly unhand my donkey."
Prettilove, who has a sycophantic sense of humour, burst into a loud
guffaw. Gedge swung angrily away, and Hosea and I continued our
interrupted progress down the High Street. Although I had called his
dark menaces drivel, I could not help wondering what it meant. Was he
going to guide a German Army to Wellingsford? Was he, a modern Guy
Fawkes, plotting to blow up the Town Hall while Mayor and Corporation
sat in council? He was not the man to utter purely idle threats. What
the dickens was he going to do? Something mean and dirty and underhand.
I knew his ways, He was always getting the better of somebody. The wise
never let him put in a pane of glass without a specification and
estimate, and if he had not been by far the most competent builder in
the town--perhaps the only one who thoroughly knew his business in all
its branches--no one would have employed him.
When I next saw Betty, it was in one of the corridors of the hospital,
after a committee meeting; she stopped by my chair to pass the time of
day. Through the open doorway of a ward I perceived a well-known figure
in nurse's uniform.
"Why," said I, "there's Phyllis Gedge."
Betty nodded. "She has just come in as a probationer."
"I thought her father wouldn't let her. I've heard--Heaven knows
whether it's true, but it sounds likely--that he said if men were such
fools as to get shot he didn't see why his daughter should help to mend
them."
"He has consented now," said Betty, "and Phyllis is delighted."
"No doubt it's a bid for popular favour," said I. And I told her of his
dwindling business and of my encounter with him. When I came to his
threat Betty's brows darkened.
"I don't like that at all," she said.
"Why? What do you think he means?"
"Mischief." She lowered her voice, for, it being visiting day at the
hospital, people were passing up and down the corridor. "Suppose he has
some of the people here in his power?"
"Blackmail--?" I glanced up at her sharply. "What do you know about it?"
"Nothing," she replied abruptly. Then she looked down and fingered her
wedding-ring. "I only said 'suppose.'"
A Sister appeared at the door of the ward and seeing us together paused
hoveringly.
"I rather think you're wanted," said I.
I left the hospital somewhat disturbed in mind. Summons to duty had cut
our conversation short; but I knew that no matter how long I had
cross-questioned Betty I should have got nothing further out of her.
She was a remarkably outspoken young woman. What she said she meant,
and what she didn't want to say all the cripples in the British Army
could not have dragged out of her.
I tried her again a few days later. A slight cold, aided and abetted by
a dear exaggerating idiot of a tyrannical doctor, confined me to the
house and she came flying in, expecting to find me in extremis. When
she saw me clothed and in my right mind and smoking a big cigar, she
called me a fraud.
"Look here," said I, after a while. "About Gedge--" again her brow
darkened and her lips set stiffly--"do you think he has his knife into
young Randall Holmes?"
I had worried about the boy. Naturally, if Gedge found the relations
between his daughter and Randall unsatisfactory, no one could blame him
for any outbreak of parental indignation. But he ought to break out
openly, while there was yet time--before any harm was done--not nurse
some diabolical scheme of subterraneous vengeance. Betty's brow
cleared, and she laughed. I saw at once that I was on a wrong track.
"Why should he have his knife into Randall? I suppose you've got
Phyllis in your mind."
"I have. How did you guess?"
She laughed again.
"What other reason could he have? But how did you come to hear of
Randall and Phyllis?"
"Never mind," said I, "I did. And if Gedge is angry, I can to some
extent sympathize with him."
"But he's not. Not the least little bit in the world," she declared,
lighting a cigarette. "Gedge and Randall are as thick as thieves, and
Phyllis won't have anything to do with either of them."
"Now, my dear," said I. "Now that you're married, become a real womanly
woman and fill my empty soul with gossip."
"There's no gossip at all about it," she replied serenely. "It's all
sordid and romantic fact. The two men hold long discussions together at
Gedge's house, Gedge talking anti-patriotism and Randall talking rot
which he calls philosophy. You can hear them, can't you? Their
meeting-ground is the absurdity of Randall joining the army."
"And Phyllis?"
"She is a loyal little soul and as miserable as can be. She's
deplorably in love with Randall. She has told me so. And because she's
in love with a man whom she knows to be a slacker she's eaten up with
shame. Now she won't speak to him. To avoid meeting him she lives
entirely at the hospital--a paying probationer."
"That must be since the last Committee Meeting," I said.
"Yes."
"And Daniel Gedge pays a guinea a week?"
"He doesn't," said Betty. "I do."
I accepted the information with a motion of the head. She went on after
a minute or so. "I have always been fond of the child"--there were only
three or four years difference between them!--"and so I want to protect
her. The time may come when she'll need protection. She has told me
things--not now--but long ago--which frightened her. She came to me for
advice. Since then I've kept an eye on her--as far as I could. Her
coming into the hospital helps me considerably."
"When you say 'things which frightened her,' do you mean in connection
with her father?"
Again the dark look in Betty's eyes.
"Yes," she said. "He's an evil, dangerous man."
That was all I could get out of her. If she had meant me to know the
character of Gedge's turpitude, she would have told me of her own
accord. But in our talk at the hospital she had hinted at
blackmail--and blackmailers are evil, dangerous men.
I went to see Sir Anthony about it. Beyond calling him a damned
scoundrel, a term which he applied to all pro-Germans, pacifists and
half the Cabinet, he did not concern himself about Gedge. Young Randall
Holmes's intimacy with the scoundrel seemed to him a matter of far
greater importance. He strode up and down his library, choleric and
gesticulating.
"A gentleman and a scholar to hob-nob with a traitorous beast like
that! I know that he writes for a filthy weekly paper. Somebody sent me
a copy a few days ago. It's rot--but not actually poisonous like that
he must hear from Gedge. That's the reason, I suppose, he's not in the
King's uniform. I've had my eye on him for some time. That's why I've
not asked him to the house."
I told Sir Anthony of my interview with the young man. He waxed wroth.
In a country with a backbone every Randall Holmes in the land would
have been chucked willy-nilly into the army. But the country had spinal
disorders. It had locomotor ataxy. The result of sloth and
self-indulgence. We had the Government we deserved ... I need not quote
further. You can imagine a fine old fox-hunting Tory gentleman, with
England filling all the spaces of his soul, blowing off the steam of
his indignation.
When he had ended, "What," said I, "is to be done?"
"I'll lay my horsewhip across the young beggar's shoulders the next
time I meet him."
"Capital," said I. "If I were you I should never ride abroad except in
my mayor's gown and chain, so that you can give an official character
to the thrashing."
He glanced swiftly at me in his bird-like fashion, his brow creased
into a thousand tiny horizontal lines--it always took him a fraction of
a second to get clear of the literal significance of words--and then he
laughed. Personal violence was out of the question. Why, the young
beggar might summon him for assault. No; he had a better idea. He would
put in a word at the proper quarter, so that every recruiting sergeant
in the district should have orders to stop him at every opportunity.
"I shouldn't do that," said I.
"Then, I don't know what the deuce I can do," said Sir Anthony.
As I didn't know, either, our colloquy was fruitless. Eventually Sir
Anthony said:
"Perhaps it's likely, after all, that Gedge may offend young Oxford's
fastidiousness. It can't be long before he discovers Gedge to be
nothing but a vulgar, blatant wind-bag; and then he may undergo some
reaction."
I agreed. It seemed to be the most sensible thing he had said. Give
Gedge enough rope and he would hang himself. So we parted.
I have said before that when I want to shew how independent I am of
everybody I drive abroad in my donkey carriage. But there are times
when I have to be dependent on Marigold for carrying me into the houses
I enter; on these helpless occasions I am driven about by Marigold in a
little two-seater car. That is how I visited Wellings Park and that is
how I set off a day or two later to call on Mrs. Boyce.
As she took little interest in anything foreign to her own inside, she
was not to most people an exhilarating companion. She even discussed
the war in terms of her digestion. But we were old friends. Being a bit
of a practical philosopher I could always derive some entertainment
from her serial romance of a Gastric Juice, and besides, she was the
only person in Wellingsford whom I did not shrink from boring with the
song of my own ailments. Rather than worry the Fenimores or Betty or
Mrs. Holmes with my aches and pains I would have hung on, like the
idiot boy of Sparta with the fox, until my vitals were gnawed
out--parenthetically, it has always worried me to conjecture why a boy
should steal a fox, why it should have been so valuable to the owner,
and to what use he put it. In the case of all my other friends I
regarded myself as too much of an obvious nuisance, as it was, for me
to work on their sympathy for infirmities that I could hide; but with
Mrs. Boyce it was different. The more I chanted antistrophe to her
strophe of lamentation the more was I welcome in her drawing-room. I
had not seen her for some weeks. Perhaps I had been feeling remarkably
well with nothing in the world to complain about, and therefore
unequipped with a topic of conversation. However, hearty or not, it was
time for me to pay her a visit. So I ordered the car.
Mrs. Boyce lived in a comfortable old house half a mile or so beyond
the other end of the town, standing in half a dozen well-wooded acres.
It was a fair April afternoon, all pale sunshine and tenderness. A
dream of fairy green and delicate pink and shy blue sky melting into
pearl. The air smelt sweet. It was good to be in it, among the trees
and the flowers and the birds.
Others must have also felt the calls of the spring, for as we were
driving up to the house, I caught a glimpse of the lawn and of two
figures strolling in affectionate attitude. One was that of Mrs. Boyce;
the other, khaki-clad and towering above her, had his arm round her
waist. The car pulled up at the front door. Before we had time to ring,
a trim parlour-maid appeared.
"Mrs. Boyce is not at home, sir."
Marigold, who, when my convenience was in question, swept away social
conventions like cobwebs, fixed her with his one eye, and before I
could interfere, said:
"I'm afraid you're mistaken. I've just seen Major Boyce and Madam on
the lawn."
The maid reddened and looked at me appealingly.
"My orders were to say not at home, sir."
"I quite understand, Mary," said I. "Major Boyce is home on short
leave, and they don't want to be disturbed. Isn't that it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Marigold," said I. "Right about turn."
Marigold, who had stopped the car, got out unwillingly and went to the
starting-handle. That I should be refused admittance to a house which I
had deigned to honour with my presence he regarded as an intolerable
insult. He also loved to have tea, as a pampered guest, in other folks'
houses. When he got home Mrs. Marigold, as like as not, would give him
plain slabs of bread buttered by her economical self. I knew my
Marigold. He gave a vicious and ineffectual turn or two and then stuck
his head in the bonnet.
The situation was saved by the appearance from the garden of Mrs. Boyce
herself, a handsome, erect, elegantly dressed old lady in the late
sixties, pink and white like a Dresden figure and in her usual
condition of resplendent health. She held out her hand.
"I couldn't let you go without telling you that Leonard is back. I
don't want the whole town to know. If it did, I should see nothing of
him, his leave is so short. That's why I told Mary to say 'not at
home.' But an old friend like you--Would you like to see him?"
Marigold closed the bonnet and stood up with a grimace which passed for
a happy smile.
"I should, of course," said I, politely. "But I quite understand. You
have everything to say to each other. No. I won't stay"--Marigold's
smile faded into woodenness--"I only turned in idly to see how you were
getting on. But just tell me. How is Leonard? Fit, I hope?"
"He's wonderful," she said.
I motioned Marigold to start the car.
"Give him my kind regards," said I. "No, indeed. He doesn't want to see
an old crock like me." The engine rattled. "I hope he's pleased at
finding his mother looking so bonny."
"It's only excitement at having Leonard," she explained earnestly. "In
reality I'm far from well. But I wouldn't tell him for worlds."
"What's that you wouldn't tell, mother?" cried a soft, cheery voice,
and Leonard, the fine flower of English soldiery, turned the corner of
the house.
There he stood, tall, deep-chested, clear-eyed, bronzed, his heavy chin
in the air, his bull-neck not detracting from his physical
handsomeness, but giving it a seal of enormous strength.
"My dear fellow," he cried, grasping my hand heartily, "how glad I am
to see you. Come along in and let mother give you some tea. Nonsense!"
he waved away my protest. "Marigold, stop that engine and bring in the
Major. I've got lots of things to tell you. That's right."
He strode boyishly to the front door, which he threw open wide to admit
Marigold and myself and followed us with Mrs. Boyce into the
drawing-room, talking all the while. I must confess that I was just a
little puzzled by his exuberant welcome. And, to judge by the blank
expression that flitted momentarily over her face, so was his mother.
If he were so delighted by my visit, why had he not crossed the lawn at
once as soon as he saw the car? Why had he sent his mother on ahead? I
was haunted by an exchange of words overheard in imagination:
"Confound the fellow! What has he come here for?"
"Mary will say 'not at home.'"
"But he has spotted us. Do go and get rid of him."
"Such an old friend, dear."
"We haven't time for old fossils. Tell him to go and bury himself."
And (in my sensitive fancy) she had delivered the import of the
message. I had gathered that my visit was ill-timed. I was preparing to
cut it short, when Leonard himself came up and whisked me against my
will to the tea-table. If my hypothesis were correct he had evidently
changed his mind as to the desirability of getting rid, in so summary a
fashion, of what he may have considered to be an impertinent and
malicious little factor in Wellingsford gossip.
At any rate, if he was playing a part, he played it very well. It was
not in the power of man to be more cordial and gracious. He gave me a
vivid account of the campaign. He had been through everything, the
retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Aisne, the great rush north, and
the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on the 17th of March. I listened,
fascinated, to his tale, which he told with a true soldier's impersonal
modesty.
"I was glad," said I, after a while, "to see you twice mentioned in
dispatches."
Mrs. Boyce turned on me triumphantly. "He is going to get his D. S. O."
"By Jove!" said I.
Leonard laughed, threw one gaitered leg over the other and held up his
hands at her.
"Oh, you feminine person!" He smiled at me. "I told my dear old mother
as a dead and solemn secret."
"But it will be gazetted in a few days, dear."
"One can never be absolutely sure of these things until they're in
black and white. A pretty ass I'd look if there was a hitch--say
through some fool of a copying clerk--and I didn't get it after all.
It's only dear, silly understanding things like mothers that would
understand. Other people wouldn't. Don't you think I'm right, Meredyth?"
Of course he was. I have known, in my time, of many disappointments. It
is not every recommendation for honours that becomes effective. I
congratulated him, however, and swore to secrecy.
"It's all luck," said he. "Just because a man happens to be spotted. If
my regiment got its deserts, every Jack man would walk about in a suit
of armour made of Victoria Crosses. Give me some more tea, mother."
"The thing I shall never understand, dear," she said, artlessly,
looking up at him, while she handed him his cup, "is when you see a lot
of murderous Germans rushing at you with guns and shells and bayonets,
how you are not afraid."
He threw back his head and laughed in his debonair fashion; but I
watched him narrowly and I saw the corners of his mouth twitch for the
infinitesimal fraction of a second.
"Oh, sometimes we're in an awful funk, I assure you," he replied gaily.
"Ask Meredyth."
"We may be," said I, "but we daren't shew it--I'm speaking of officers.
If an officer funks he's generally responsible for the death of
goodness knows how many men. And if the men funk they're liable to be
shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy."
"And what happens to officers who are afraid?"
"If it's known, they get broke," said I.
Boyce swallowed his tea at a gulp, set down the cup, and strode to the
window. There was a short pause. Presently he turned.
"Physical fear is a very curious thing," he said in a voice
unnecessarily loud. "I've seen it take hold of men of proved courage
and paralyse them. It's just like an epileptic fit--beyond a man's
control. I've known a fellow--the most reckless, hare-brained daredevil
you can imagine--to stand petrified with fear on the bank of a river,
and let a wounded comrade drown before his eyes. And he was a good
swimmer too."
"What happened to him?" I asked.
He met my gaze for a moment, looked away, and then met it again--it
seemed defiantly.
"What happened to him? Well--" there was the tiniest possible pause--a
pause that only an uneasy, suspicious repository of the abominable
story of Vilboek's Farm could have noticed--"Well, as he stood there he
got plugged--and that was the end of him. But what I--"
"Was he an officer, dear?"
"No, no, mother, a sergeant," he answered abruptly, and in the same
breath continued. "What I was going to say is this. No one as far as I
know has ever bothered to work out the psychology of fear. Especially
the sudden thing that hits a man's heart and makes him stand
stock-still like a living corpse--unable to move a muscle--all his
willpower out of gear--just as a motor is out of gear. I've seen a lot
of it. Those men oughtn't to be called cowards. It's as much a fit,
say, as epilepsy. Allowances ought to made for them."
It was a warm day, the windows were closed, my valetudinarian hostess
having a horror of draughts, and a cheery fire was blazing up the
chimney. Boyce took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.
"Dear old mother," said he, "you keep this room like an oven."
"It is you who have got so excited talking, dear," said Mrs. Boyce.
"I'm sure it can't be good for your heart. It is just the same with me.
I remember I had to speak quite severely to Mary a week--no, to-day's
Tuesday--ten days ago, and I had dreadful palpitations afterwards and
broke out into a profuse perspiration and had to send for Doctor Miles."
"Now, that's funny," said I. "When I'm excited about anything I grow
quite cold."
Boyce lit a cigarette and laughed. "I don't see where the excitement in
the present case comes in. Mother started an interesting hare, and I
followed it up. Anyhow--" he threw himself on the sofa, blew a kiss to
his mother in the most charming way in the world, and smiled on
me--"anyhow, to see you two in this dearest bit of dear old England is
like a dream. And I'm not going to think of the waking up. I want all
the cushions and the lavender and the neat maid's caps and aprons--I
said to Mary this morning when she drew my curtains: 'Stay just there
and let me look at you so that I can realise I'm at home and not in my
little grey trench in West Flanders'--she got red and no doubt thought
me a lunatic and felt inclined to squawk--but she stayed and looked
jolly pretty and refreshing--only for a minute or two, after which I
dismissed her--yes, my dears, I want everything that the old life
means, the white table linen, the spring flowers, the scent of the air
which has never known the taint of death, and all that this beautiful
mother of England, with her knitting needles, stands for. I want to
have a debauch of sweet and beautiful things."
"As far as I can give them you shall have them. My dear--" she dropped
her knitting in her lap and looked over at him tragically--"I quite
forgot to ask. Did Mary put bath-salts, as I ordered, into your bath
this morning?"
Leonard threw away his cigarette and slapped his leg.
"By George!" he cried. "That explains it. I was wondering where the
Dickens that smell of ammonia came from."
"If you use it every day it makes your skin so nice and soft," remarked
Mrs. Boyce.
He laughed, and made the obvious jest on the use of bath-salts in the
trenches.
"I wonder, mother, whether you have any idea of what trenches and
dug-outs look like."
He told her, very picturesquely, and went on to a general sketch of
life at the front. He entertained me with interesting talk for the rest
of my visit. I have already said that he was a man of great personal
charm.
He accompanied me to the car and saw me comfortably tucked in.
"You won't give me away, will you?" he said, shaking hands.
"How?" I asked.
"By telling any one I'm here."
I promised and drove off. Marigold, full of the tea that is given to a
guest, strove cheerfully to engage me in conversation. I hate to snub
Marigold, excellent and devoted fellow, so I let him talk; but my mind
was occupied with worrying problems.