Dr. Traherne waited for Agnew to speak.
“I almost wish,” the older man said slowly, after a time, “that his wife
knew—what you’ve just told me.”
Traherne nodded. “But we can’t tell her, sir. And Major Crespin never
will. And probably no one in India knows but you and me and him—perhaps
no one else living now, knows or remembers. But his Colonel _knows_ now,
sir,” he added rising and going to the man at the window.
Agnew swung round on him. “What do you want me to do, doctor? What the
blue blazes can I do? Guest night! Damn!”
“I ask you to pass it over, sir—this once more—to give Major Crespin a
goodish long leave—not too long—and leave the rest to me—let me try
out my plan.”
“Two generals—one from the U. S. A.!” Colonel Agnew almost bleated.
“Yes—awkward,” Traherne admitted.
“Damned awkward,” the Colonel said curtly.
“But they’ll not say a word, sir. They were eating your salt. Let me
tackle them. General Harland is awkward, I’ll admit. I wish he hadn’t
been there.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” the Colonel said miserably.
“Yes! But General Harland is not in command of your district, sir. You
can’t ask him to wink at your not reporting it. But I can. I think I can
get him to _ask_ you not to report it. And you are in command here,
sir.”
“You think you can do a lot, don’t you?” Agnew snorted.
“I can speak as a _physician_, sir,” Traherne said persuasively. “And
the General is no end of a good fellow—every one says so. And then I’ll
tackle the Bishop—”
“Oh, damn the Bishop!” the Colonel said. “No—I’ll consult General
Harland myself, Traherne. It’s up to me. I don’t give a damn which of us
tackles the Bishop. But General Tyler—our American guest—that’s what
_hurts_, Traherne—that an officer of another service saw—one of
mine—what General Tyler saw last night!”
“Yes, I know, sir. But he _was_ your guest. He’s one of the best too.
It’s safe forever with him.”
“Oh, Lord,” the Colonel chuckled wretchedly, “and America’s just gone
dry!”
“General Tyler hasn’t gone particularly dry, sir,” Dr. Traherne reminded
him. “He took claret at dinner. And His Majesty’s health went down him
in fizz. And he had a stiff peg with me at two o’clock this morning.”
“Good Lord, Traherne! Where?”
“At my digs, sir. General Tyler and I took Major Crespin home—to my
bungalow, and saw to him, both of us. General Tyler was no end sorry
about it. He was sorry for you, sir. He was sorrier for Crespin. Said
so. He’s all-wool-and-a-yard-wide—a saying of his own countrymen’s,
sir.”
There was a pause.
Colonel Agnew went back to the writing-table, and took up the dispatch,
and tore it into very small bits before he threw it into the big
waste-paper basket. Then he kicked the basket.
“Boy!” he bellowed.
“Topee,” he snapped when the bearer appeared. “You go prescribe for the
Bishop, if you like,” he said to Traherne. “I’m off to eat humble pie to
the General—General Harland. After tiffin, I’ll call on General Tyler,
and ask him to come to the Club and lick me at poker.”
“He will, sir,” Traherne laughed.
“By God, he shall,” Colonel Agnew said.
* * * * *
And a few days later Traherne and Crespin went off after game.
Sometimes Traherne thought he was winning, or, as he put it, that
Crespin was. At others he thought he was losing.
Crespin came back to his regiment, and back to old failures and stumbles
sometimes. But neither man ever quite gave it up. Colonel Agnew looked
the other way more than once. He grumbled and threatened a great deal.
And he prayed—but that he kept strictly to himself.
Lucilla Crespin grew whiter and colder. Iris and Ronald grew bonnier and
chubbier—and their mother loved them more and more, gay and tender
always with them, their beloved saint and tireless playmate. And
Traherne, as he watched her with them, had almost more in his heart, and
his strong tingling man’s blood, than his resolve and endurance could
match. But they held. He often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what he
felt—guessed it at all, any of it—but the woman, if she did, gave no
sign.
Crespin recovered and lapsed—lapsed and recovered. And the regiment,
watching, wondered how long the “old man” was going to put up with
it—and so did the entire station.
And the Colonel wondered himself, and told Dr. Traherne so, more than
once. And always the physician pleaded, “A little longer, sir!”
“How is it going to end?” Agnew demanded one day.
“Before long, in one of two ways,” Traherne said, “assuredly. He will
win out now, or he’ll die. He is very much better of his failing. But
his nerves are about frazzled, and his body won’t stand too much more.
Let him keep his uniform, sir. I’ll see that he doesn’t openly disgrace
it. I promise you that. Let him _fit_ it once more, or let him die in
it. That will mean a great deal to him. Take it from him, and I give you
my word his game is up.”
At which Colonel Agnew “damned” Dr. Traherne, and yielded to him.
Agnew, too, often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what Traherne felt
towards her. The Colonel had no doubt.
Whether Mrs. Crespin knew all, little or nothing, Major Crespin knew
now; and, knowing his own handicap and the other man’s worthiness, was
bitterly, blackly jealous.
That mended nothing, helped nothing, and retarded and impeded much.
The children and their ayah and bearer had been sent to Pahari about a
month before Major Crespin’s leave was due, nearly two years after the
American General had broken Colonel Agnew’s regiment’s bread, and
honored its salt. Dr. Traherne watching, without seeming to, thought he
saw a breakdown threatening. At such times to get Crespin away and out
of sight was always his first concern; it sometimes averted, and—the
next best thing—it always hid.
Traherne had a new “bus,” a costly, beautiful “flyer,” of which he was
boyishly proud. There was a good deal of boy still in Dr. Basil Traherne
in spite of his natural gravity and his thirty-five years. The boy
persists longest in the biggest men.
He urged the Crespins to let him fly them to Pahari, where they proposed
to spend their not long leave with Iris and Ronald in the cool of the
hills. Mrs. Crespin was eager to fall in with Traherne’s suggestion, and
Major Crespin, a little to their surprise, agreed to it placidly; for
the last two years scarcely had improved things between Crespin and
Traherne, and had distinctly made them worse between husband and wife.
And Major Crespin had almost as little flair for aircraft adventure as
his Colonel had.
It is said that the offender never forgives. Certainly it is quite
explicitly hard for the one in the wrong to do so. And it takes more
spiritual asset than continued alcohol often leaves. Antony Crespin was
not ungrateful to Dr. Traherne for the physician’s ministrations that
“next morning,” and on several others that had followed it. But the
memory rankled. And he made it harder and harder for the physician to
succor and brace him, or to keep up the show of a cordial friendship,
which in India Crespin never much had felt, and which Traherne on his
part found wearing steadily thin. The physician’s interest in his “case”
never slackened or wavered, but the man’s liking for the man very nearly
went. He stood to his merciful professional guns undauntedly—but he did
it not a little grimly.
The curly-cue thing that your doctor writes at the head (or if he’s a
“big man,” has printed there—to save him the trouble) of the
prescription he instructs you to have made up at the chemist’s, and take
inside you three times a day before meals, is a prayer to Apollo. “Grant
health, O Apollo!” It seems almost a scandal, a medical lapse and
neglect, that every physician does not write it himself, and put his
thought and heart into it as he does; and seems too a trifle surprising
in these piping days of spiritual-healing and
psycho-all-sorts-of-things. Every physician aims to give the same
professional devotion—of course!—to the patient who does not attract
his personal liking as to the patient who does. But, because doctors are
only human, even the most truly vocated rarely quite succeed. Dr.
Traherne tried determinedly to give Crespin the same care and help that
he had while his old affection for him still held—and the physician
succeeded as well as the man could. But Crespin’s continued, though
perhaps on the whole rarer and less, misconducts and his growing
surliness and peevishness, rasped Traherne’s patience and turned his
once sincere liking to a feeling very different. And his growing love
and longing for the woman whom Crespin’s name still claimed, and whose
coldness and aloofness towards her husband visibly grew from month to
month, made any real feeling of friendship for Crespin impossible now to
Basil Traherne. His memory of Tony Crespin, Harrow boy and fag-master,
was tender and beautiful still. But it grew faint, or, at least, more
remote, and even a little blurred—and rarely vividly associated with
the heavy, flushed, dulled-eyed Major Crespin whose wife Traherne pitied
and desired.
That is how it stood with them, as the new aeroplane imperceptibly rose
from the flat beyond the parade-ground, into the velvet-blue, and flew
towards the Himalayas.