Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his
business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help mend the
shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the forces of
militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International
Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely
tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled
into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is
not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from
Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could
throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less
than an outrage.
I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond of
Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She flitted,
an agreeable vision, about his house. He liked to hear her play the
piano, not because he had any ear for music, but because it tickled his
vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural labourer's son and
apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway
Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned
to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own
peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father
and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he
found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid
shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to
shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle
class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political
intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her
sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of
ordinary commonsense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard brain
fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in
the maternal heritage. And she came back from school a very ladylike
little person. If pressed, she could reel off all kinds of artificial
scraps of knowledge, like a dear little parrot. But she had never heard
of Karl Marx and didn't want to hear. She had a vague notion that
International Socialism was a movement in favour of throwing bombs at
monarchs and of seizing the wealth of the rich in order to divide it
among the poor--and she regarded it as abominable. When her father gave
her Fabian Society tracts to read, he might just as well, for all her
understanding of the argument, set her down to a Treatise on the
Infinitesimal Calculus. Her brain stood blank before such abstract
disquisitions. She loved easily comprehended poetry and novels that
made her laugh or cry and set her mind dancing round the glowing
possibilities of life; all disastrous stuff abhorred by the
International Socialist, to whom the essential problems of existence
are of no interest whatever. So, after a few futile attempts to darken
her mind, Gedge put her down as a mere fool woman, and ceased to bother
his head about her intellectual development. That came to him quite
naturally. There is no Turk more contemptuous of his womankind's
political ideas than the Gedges of our enlightened England. But on
other counts she was a distinct asset. He regarded her with immense
pride, as a more ornamental adjunct to his house than any other county
builder and contractor could display, and, recognising that she was
possessed of some low feminine cunning in the way of adding up figures
and writing letters, made use of her in his office as general clerical
factotum.
When the war broke out, he discovered, to his horror, that Phyllis
actually had political ideas--unshakable, obstinate ideas opposed to
his own--and that he had been nourishing in his bosom a viperous
patriot. Phyllis, for her part, realised with equal horror the
practical significance of her father's windy theories. When Randall,
who had stolen her heart, took to visiting the house, in order, as far
as she could make out, to talk treason with her father, the strain of
the situation grew more than she could bear. She fled to Betty for
advice. Betty promptly stepped in and whisked her off to the hospital.
It was on the morning on which Randall interviewed me in the garden,
the morning after he had broken with Gedge, that Phyllis, having a
little off-time, went home. She found her father in the office making
out a few bills. He thrust forward his long chin and aggressive beard
and scowled at her.
"Oh, it's you, is it? Come at last where your duty calls you, eh?"
"I always come when I can, father," she replied.
She bent down and kissed his cheek. He caught her roughly round the
waist and, leaning back in his chair, looked up at her sourly.
"How long are you going on defying me like this?"
She tried to disengage herself, but his arm was too strong. "Oh,
father," she said, rather wearily, "don't let us go over this old
argument again."
"But suppose I find some new argument? Suppose I send you packing
altogether, refuse to contribute further to your support. What then?"
She started at the threat but replied valiantly: "I should have to earn
my own living."
"How are you going to do it?"
"There are heaps of ways."
He laughed. "There ain't; as you'd soon find out. They don't even pay
you for being scullery-maid to a lot of common soldiers."
She protested against that view of her avocation. In the perfectly
appointed Wellingsford Hospital she had no scullery work. She was a
probationer, in training as a nurse. He still gripped her.
"The particular kind of tomfoolery you are up to doesn't matter. We
needn't quarrel. I've another proposition to put before you--much more
to your fancy, I think. You like this Mr. Randall Holmes, don't you?"
She shivered a little and flushed deep red. Her father had never
touched on the matter before. She said, straining away:
"I don't want to talk about Mr. Holmes."
"But I do. Come, my dear. In this life there must be always a certain
amount of give and take. I'm not the man to drive a one-sided bargain.
I'll make you a fair offer--as between father and daughter. I'll wipe
out all that's past. In leaving me like this, when misfortune has come
upon me, you've been guilty of unfilial conduct--no one can deny it. But
I'll overlook everything, forgive you fully and take you to my heart
again and leave you free to do whatever you like without interfering
with your opinions, if you'll promise me one thing--"
"I know what you're going to say." She twisted round on him swiftly.
"I'll promise at once. I'll never marry Mr. Holmes. I've already told him
I won't marry him."
Surprise relaxed his grip. She took swift advantage and sheered away to
the other side of the table. He rose and brought down his hand with a
thump.
"You refused him? Why, you silly little baggage, my condition is that
you should marry him. You're sweet on him aren't you?"
"I detest him," cried Phyllis. "Why should I marry him?"
Her eyes, young and pure, divined some sordid horror behind eyes crafty
and ignoble. Once before she had had such a fleeting, uncomprehended
vision into the murky depths of the man's soul. This was some time ago.
In the routine of her secretarial duties she had, one morning, opened
and read a letter, not marked "Private" or "Personal," whose tenor she
could scarcely understand. When she handed it to her father, he smiled,
vouchsafed a specious explanation, and looked at her in just the same
crafty and ignoble fashion, and she shrank away frightened. The matter
kept her awake for a couple of nights. Then, for sheer easing of her
heart, she went to her adored Betty Fairfax, her Lady Patroness and
Mother Confessor, who, being wise and strong, and possessing the power
of making her kind eyes unfathomable, laughed, bade her believe her
father's explanation, and sent her away comforted. The incident passed
out of her mind. But now memory smote her, as she shrank from her
father's gaze and the insincere smile on his thin lips.
"For one thing," he replied after a pause, pulling his straggly beard,
"your poor dear mother was a lady, and if she had lived she would have
wanted you to marry a gentleman. It's for her sake I've given you an
education that fits you to consort with gentlefolk--just for her
sake--don't make any mistake about it, for I've always hated the breed.
If I've violated my principles in order to meet her wishes, I think you
ought to meet them too. You wouldn't like to marry a small tradesman or
a working man, would you?"
"I'm not going to marry anybody," cried Phyllis. She was only a pink
and white, very ordinary little girl. I have no idealisations or
illusions concerning Phyllis. But she had a little fine steel of
character running through her. It flashed on Gedge.
"I don't want to marry anybody," she declared. "But I'd sooner marry a
bricklayer who was fighting for his country than a fine gentleman like
Mr. Holmes who wasn't. I'd sooner die," she cried passionately.
"Then go and die and be damned to you!" snarled Gedge, planting himself
noisily in his chair. "I've no use for khaki-struck drivelling idiots.
I've no use for patriots. Bah! Damn patriots! The upper classes are out
for all they can get, and they befool the poor imbecile working man
with all their highfalutin phrases to get it for them at the cost of
his blood. I've no use for them, I tell you. And I've no use either for
undutiful daughters. I've no use for young women who blow hot and cold.
Haven't I seen you with the fellow? Do you think I'm a blind dodderer?
Do you think I haven't kept an eye on you? Haven't I seen you blowing
as hot as you please? And now because he refuses to be a blinking idiot
and have his guts blown out in this war of fools and knaves and
capitalists, you blast him like a three-farthing iceberg."
Everything in her that was tender, maidenly, English, shrank lacerated.
But the steel held her. She put both her hands on the table and bent
over towards him.
"But, father, except that he's a gentleman, you haven't told me why you
want me to marry Mr. Holmes."
He fidgeted with his fingers. "Haven't you a spark of affection for me
left?"
She said dutifully, "Yes, father."
"I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the one
bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because you love
me?"
"One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to marry,"
said Phyllis.
"But you do love him," cried Gedge. "Either you're just a wanton little
hussy or you must care for the fellow."
"I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do with
him." The tears came. "He's a pro-German and I won't have anything to
do with pro-Germans."
She fled precipitately from the office into the street and made a blind
course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she had committed
the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time,
that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith. If ever a good,
loyal little heart was torn into piteous shreds, that little heart was
Phyllis's.
In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant,
Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping
damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins
and sought absolution.
Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful
person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on
the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the
business in quite a different way. But what could you expect from an
anarchical Turk like Gedge?
Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not,
found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner,
guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life.
But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole
convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness. You can't attend to a
poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch
probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be
acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries.
Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.
Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven
from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and
exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common
by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of
secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud. Dispersed here and
there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers. Carven
thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have
long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in
all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the
parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record
of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.
Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested,
a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the
benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines
of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and here and there a
tent. In front of her, beyond the row of trees, was the towing-path; an
old horse in charge of a boy jogged by, pulling something of which only
a moving stove pipe like a periscope was visible above the bank.
Overhead the chestnuts rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom,
showing starry bits of blue sky and admitting arrow shafts of spring
sunshine. A dirty white mongrel dog belonging to the barge came up to
her, sniffed, and made friends; then, at last obeying a series of
whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted off.
Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human dear dog, and
with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties in his deep
topaz eyes. After that she had as companions a couple of butterflies
and a bumble-bee and a perky, portly robin who hopped within an inch of
her feet and looked up at her sideways out of his hard little eye (so
different from the dog's) with the expression of one who would say:
"The most beauteous and delectable worm I have ever encountered. If I
were a bit bigger, say the size of the roc of the Arabian Nights, what
a dainty morsel you would make! In the meantime can't you shed
something of yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser,
of your species?" She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature,
just as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumble-bee. She
surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment. It was good
to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the pale
suffering faces and the eternal faint odour of disinfectants, into all
this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts unconscious of
war. She remembered that once, in the pocket of her cloak, there had
been a biscuit or two. Very slowly and carefully, her mind fixed on the
robin, she fished for crumbs and very carefully and gently she fed the
impudent, stomach-centred fellow. She had attracted him to the end of
the seat, when, whizz and clatter, came a motor cycle down the avenue,
and off in a terrible scare flew the robin; the idyll of tree and beast
and birds suffered instant disruption and Randall Holmes, in his canvas
suit, stood before her.
He said:
"Good morning, Phyllis."
She said, with cold politeness: "Good morning." But she asked the
spring morning in dumb piteousness, "Oh, why has he come? Why has he
come to spoil it all?"
He sat down by her side. "This is the luckiest chance I've ever
had--finding you here," he said. "You've had all my letters, haven't
you?"
"Yes," she answered, "and I've torn them all up."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want them," she flashed on him: "I've destroyed them
without reading them."
He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that the
literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case, sincere,
should have been destroyed, unread, was an anti-social outrage.
"If it didn't please a woman to believe in God," he said, "and God came
in Person and stood in front of her, she would run out of the room and
call upon somebody to come and shoot Him for a burglar, just to prove
she was right."
Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross literalness
of his rhetorical figure.
"I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible," she
exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench. "Putting yourself in the
position of the Almighty! Oh!" she flung out her hand. "Don't speak to
me."
In spite of the atheistical Gedge, Phyllis believed in God and Jesus
Christ and the Ten Commandments. She also believed in a host of other
simple things, such as Goodness and Truth, Virtue and Patriotism. The
arguments and theories and glosses that her father and Randall wove
about them appeared to her candid mind as meaningless arabesques. She
could not see how all the complications concerning the elementary
canons of faith and conduct could arise. She appreciated Randall's
intellectual gifts; his power of weaving magical words into rhyme
fascinated her; she was childlike in her wonder at his command of the
printed page; when he revealed to her the beauty of things, as the
rogue had a pretty knack of doing, her nature thrilled responsive. He
gave her a thousand glimpses into a new world, and she loved him for
it. But when he talked lightly of sacred matters, such as God and Duty,
he ran daggers into her heart. She almost hated him.
He had to expend much eloquence and persuasion to induce her to listen
to him. He had no wish to break any of the Commandments, especially the
Third. He professed penitence. But didn't she see that her treatment of
him was driving him into a desperate unbelief in God and man? When a
woman accepted a man's love she accepted many responsibilities.
Phyllis stonily denied acceptance.
"I've refused it. You've asked me to marry you and I told you I
wouldn't. And I won't."
"You're mixing up two things," he said, with a smile. "Love and
marriage. Many people love and don't marry, just as many marry and
don't love. Now once you did tell me that you loved me, and so you
accepted my love. There's no getting out of it. I've given you
everything I've got, and you can't throw it away. The question is--what
are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with me?"
His sophistries frightened her; but she cut through them.
"Isn't it rather a question of what you're going to do with yourself?"
"If you give me up I don't care a hang what becomes of me." He came
very near and his voice was dangerously soft. "Phyllis dear, I do love
you with all my heart. Why won't you marry me?"
But a hateful scene rushed to her memory. She drew herself up.
"Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you?"
"Your father?" he interrupted, in astonishment. "When?"
She named the day, Wednesday of last week. In desperation she told him
what had happened. The poor child was fighting for her soul against
great odds.
"It's a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking. You want me
to be a pro-German like yourselves, and I won't be a pro-German, and I
think it wicked even to talk to pro-Germans!"
She rose, all sobs, fluster, and heroism, and walked away. He strode a
step or two and stood in front of her with his hands on her shoulders.
"I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never. Not a
word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word of honour.
On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go there again. I
told him so."
She writhed out of his grasp and spread the palms of her hands against
him. "Please don't," she said, and seeing that she stood her ground, he
made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity of her grey nurse's
uniform gave a touch of pathos to her childish, blue-eyed comeliness
and her pretty attitude of defiance.
"I suppose," she said, "he was too pro-German even for you."
He looked at her for a long time disconcertingly: so disconcertingly
and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in his eyes as to set
even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering and to make her emphasize it, in
her report of the matter to Betty, as extraordinary and frightening. It
seemed, so she explained, in her innocent way, that he had discovered
something horrible about her father which he shrank from telling her.
But if they had quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very
next day urged her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash.
She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement. If she married
Randall, his lips would be closed against her father. That is what her
father had meant. The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that he
might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained
an awful certainty. She remembered the incident of the private letter
and the look in her father's eyes.... Finally she revolted. Her soul
grew sick. She took no heed of Randall's protest. She only saw that she
was to be the cloak to cover up something unclean between them. At a
moment like this no woman pretends to have a sense of justice. Randall
had equal share with her father in an unknown baseness. She hated him
as he stood there so strong and handsome. And she hated herself for
having loved him.
At last he said with a smile:
"Yes, That's just it."
"What?"
She had forgotten the purport of her last remark.
"He was a bit too--well, not too pro-German--but too anti-English for
me. You have got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time,
Phyllis dear. I'm no more pro-German than you are. Perhaps I see things
more clearly than you do. I've been trained to an intellectual view of
human phenomena."
Her little pink and white face hardened until it looked almost ugly.
The unpercipient young man continued:
"And so I take my stand on a position that you must accept on trust. I
am English to the backbone. You can't possibly dream that I'm not.
Come, dear, let me try to explain."
His arm curved as if to encircle her waist. She sprang away.
"Don't touch me. I couldn't bear it. There's something about you I
can't understand."
In her attitude, too, he found a touch of the incomprehensible. He
said, however, with a sneer:
"If I were swaggering about in a cheap uniform, you'd find me
simplicity itself."
She caught at his opening, desperately.
"Yes. At any rate I'd find a man. A man who wasn't afraid to fight for
his country."
"Afraid!"
"Yes," she cried, and her blue eyes blazed. "Afraid. That's why I can't
marry you. I'd rather die than marry you. I've never told you. I
thought you'd guess. I'm an English girl and I can't marry a coward--a
coward--a coward--a coward."
Her voice ended on a foolish high note, for Randall, very white, had
seized her by the wrist.
"You little fool," he cried. "You'll live to repent what you've said."
He released her, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode away. Phyllis
watched him disappear up the avenue; then she walked rather blindly
back to the bench and sat down among the ruins of a black and
abominable world. After a while the friendly robin, seeing her so
still, perched first on the back of the bench and then hopped on the
seat by her side, and cocking his head, looked at her enquiringly out
of his little hard eye, as though he would say:
"My dear child, what are you making all this fuss about? Isn't it early
June? Isn't the sun shining? Aren't the chestnuts in flower? Don't you
see that bank of dark blue cloud over there which means a nice
softening rain in the night and a jolly good breakfast of worms in the
morning? What's wrong with this exquisitely perfect universe?"
And Phyllis--on her own confession--with an angry gesture sent him
scattering up among the cool broad leaves and cried:
"Get away, you hateful little beast!"
And having no use for robins and trees and spring and sunshine and such
like intolerable ironies, a white little wisp of a nurse left them all
to their complacent riot and went back to the hospital.