Anthony would not have admitted that he had a creed, because he thought
creeds unscientific; but if you habitually act up to certain unspoken
principles, they become dogmas. Anthony’s creed ran as follows:
“Play your best whether you are likely to win or not. Never let any one
down for the sake of your own convenience; never lie; face disaster
readily, even if you could by exercising a little ingenuity evade your
share of it. Back whatever you believe in except your own mistakes; own
up to a blunder instantly without the emphasis of egoism. Do not involve
other people in your actions, and do not be involved by them, and let
the end of your work have the same quality as its beginning.”
It was an excellent creed, full of self-respect and armed at all points
against the inroads of reality; the kind of creed that gives a man peace
at the last, unless he has had too bad a time in the interval. It had no
mercy in it either for himself or for others. Prison shook it to its
foundation. Anthony had not allowed for a life that was a hideous
nightmare beneath the plane of self-control, or for a moral chaos
without rules. There was nothing he could act upon; he simply suffered
as those under the harrow of acute physical pain suffer, without
horizon.
Incidents in Anthony’s hospital career flashed into his mind with a new
meaning. He remembered a woman dying in child-birth who had told her
agonized husband with unfaltering mendacity that it wasn’t nearly so bad
as she had expected. Anthony had admired her then, but he had not
thought her superhuman; he had believed that people could always bear
pain properly.
The last words of a boy of nineteen crushed in a street accident came
back to him: “I don’t want to live; it’s too cruel to care about.” At
the time Anthony had believed this remark to be a proof of the lack of
discipline in the lower classes.
He knew now that there are moments in which it is a miracle to behave
properly, when life becomes simply too cruel to care about. He felt that
there was a power which sometimes saved people at these moments, but
that it was not a virtue inherent in themselves; and he lost a little of
his self-respect.
The other prisoners taught Anthony that kindness was more necessary than
skill. It wasn’t enough to do things for them; many of them were beyond
the more direct aids of science, and even if they had not been, Anthony
had not the proper means for assisting them.
What was necessary, if he was to be of any use to his fellow-prisoners,
was for him to involve himself in their sufferings. It was precisely
what Anthony had made a point of avoiding throughout his career. He had
to put aside his personal fastidiousnesses and to overcome his love of
independence.
At first the other men were afraid of Anthony’s self-control, and they
had left him alone in consequence, and Anthony had to destroy this
salutary fear to which he owed his privacy. Nothing but the fact that he
hated being useless gave him the courage to persevere. He wanted to
work. He did not love his fellow-prisoners; they maddened him. They had
had codes, too, once, but either they had not taken their codes so
seriously as Anthony had taken his, or their power of control was
slighter. They grumbled without ceasing, quarreled readily, and were
often disgusting.
Only one or two of them were really complaining, quarrelsome, or
disgusting men; these were the things that happened to them from
outside, through the gigantic pressure of adverse circumstance playing
upon their unnourished bodies. They could not help themselves.
In time Anthony realized the power of adversity, and it made it much
easier to get on with his fellow-prisoners; he saw that their temper was
no more to blame than their indigestion. Even their vices, or their
endless references to vice, were merely like the outbreak of a tedious
delusion. The difference between them and Anthony was that Anthony
_could_ help himself. It ceased to be their self-control that mattered;
his became vital. If that went, he could be of no use to anybody.
Anthony guarded his self-control as if it were the elixir of life. He
measured it out by inches; when he felt it menaced, he retired into
absolute silence. It was the only thing he could retire into; there was
no space for solitude except in his own soul.
It was a long and difficult task, and Anthony never got to the end of
it; but long before he realized that he was succeeding, every one in the
camp came to him with their troubles. They saw that he had a margin of
strength to deal with the affairs of other people, and most of them had
become men without margins.
There were plenty of damaged bodies for Anthony to treat, and added to
these were the more complicated cases, broken hearts, bad habits, and
the deadly collapse of the will. These attacked Anthony’s inner citadel,
and found him at a loss for supplies. He tried hard to evolve comfort
for his patient from his scanty spiritual stores, because he had
discovered that very unhappy men cannot live without spiritual comfort
even when they are being half-starved. Men were going to pieces because
they missed religion just as much as because they missed bread. It was
even more disintegrating. The religion that they missed had no definite
form; it was that of human ties, traditions, and the obligations of
love. The prison rules did not take the place of these obligations, nor
did quinine act as a substitute for love.
There was no give and take between their former existence and their
present one. They could not send anything home except their hopes, and
after a time these were broken by the endless monotony of expectation.
Anthony fought against despair as if it were the German Empire. It
became part of his profession. He had always fought death as if it were
despair, and now he fought despair as if it were death. But his methods
had to be more empirical.
“You’ll have a hell of a time if you don’t keep straight,” he reminded
his menaced patients, “a much worse hell than if you do.” But he soon
found that this was not a successful argument. Self-preservation has to
be an instantaneous need before it can resist despair.
Tradition was a better specific.
“After all, we’re Englishmen,” Anthony urged. “We don’t want them to
think they’ve reduced us to behaving like pigs or sinking into idiots.
We’ve got to keep our end up.”
But this stimulant wore out in time. There was nothing fundamental in
it; there is a greater need of letting go under great pressure than in
preserving appearances. Men ceased to care what anybody thought of them;
they even ceased to care what they thought of themselves.
Anthony was more successful when he appealed to their feeling for their
people at home.
“We mustn’t go back spoiled,” he pleaded; “we must pull ourselves
together so that there will be something to take back worth taking. One
couldn’t let one’s people down.”
Anthony often laughed at himself over his own methods, they were so
rough and ready, and reminded him so often of the attempts at religious
reformations, which he had always despised.
“It takes more,” he said to himself, grimly, “to make a good Salvation
Army lass than I should have thought possible.”
And, after all, nothing answered for long, nothing that Anthony could
find to say. He had no idea that what kept the tone of the camp
considerably higher than it would otherwise have been was the quiet
persistency of his own example. Anthony planned his advice, and it was
good as far as it went; but his example was spontaneous, and it went
very much further.
For two years Anthony fought in the dark the battle of the soul in which
he did not believe, and now he told himself the battle could stop. There
was nothing else to fight against except a few strained nerves. He could
go back to his proper work, the study of how to heal the human body, a
much more reasonable and satisfactory adventure than how to keep alive
the human soul. He was still nervous, and he did not feel happy yet; but
that was because he had the meeting with his people before him, and the
memory of Tom’s death standing like a shadow across his return to
Pannell. The first few minutes would be difficult, especially with his
father.
Pannell meant Tom to Mr. Arden; the rest of his family was only a
pleasant and expensive annex. He had built all his future, and the
future of his race, upon his eldest son. Mr. Arden had never understood
Anthony; he did not see why any son of his should wish to be a doctor.
There was the army, the navy, the civil service, the church, and the
bar, ample professions for any one with brains to find a career in.
Ardens _had_ doctors; they didn’t expect to _be_ them.
Mr. Arden told Anthony plainly that a surgeon’s was not a gentleman’s
profession. Quite good fellows went into it sometimes when they couldn’t
afford better, but the squire was prepared to do something better than
that even for his second son.
But Anthony had been obstinate about this low taste for science. He had
clung to it as if it had been a barmaid, and there were moments when the
squire would have preferred a barmaid; for it is easier to get rid of a
woman than of an idea. Anthony knew that he had a painful struggle to
face with his father, for he had no intention of giving up his
profession for the sake of Pannell, and if science was a blunder in a
younger son, it would be considered a crime in the eldest.
He thought perhaps it was because of this impending struggle that he
could not enjoy the approach to Pannell. The velvety green fields did
not move him, nor the wide expanse of the barebacked downs. He was
nervously aware of the passing stations, as if he wished to retain them
between himself and Boscott. Daphne wouldn’t be there now; he had left
her with her husband. His first meeting with this new brother-in-law had
hurt him intensely. Anthony had immediately liked Jim Wynne, but he
hadn’t got over the fact of the marriage; it made him feel absurdly
lonely, and as if his return to his profession wouldn’t be the final
satisfaction he had expected. Of course going to Pannell would make it
all right if he could overcome being afraid of rows. He’d always rather
liked rows before. His father used to get hot over them, and Anthony
used to get cold. They said outrageous things to each other, and neither
of them ever came within range of the other one’s arguments; but there
had been no fear on either side, and no favor. Anthony was aware of fear
now. He did not want to hurt his father.
Boscott came, after all, with a rush. Anthony saw his father’s face as
the train drew up at the tiny station before he recognized the two tall
young sisters who had shot up into women during his absence. He
reflected that his sisters had grown, but they had not changed. His
father had changed.
The squire shook Anthony’s hand with welcoming vigor, and looked him
between the eyes.
“I’m glad to have you back, my boy,” he said heartily; then he looked
away suddenly, as if he were seeing some one else.
The squire had determined to be cordial. He had prepared the words all
the way down to the station, but he had not known what it would cost him
to meet the wrong son. And then Anthony refused to drive Vixen.
“Please yourself, of course,” said Mr. Arden, gruffly. “She’s a fine
little mare, goes like silk. You won’t have seen such a horse anywhere
where you’ve been.” The squire did not wish to say the word “Germany.”
He considered the bare existence of such a country indecent.
Anthony kissed his sisters’ cool, firm cheeks. They were pink with
excitement and extremely shy. They wondered if Anthony noticed how grown
up they were, and why he was so terribly thin despite all their parcels.
“We didn’t bring the dogs,” Ursula explained—“we thought they would be
too excited—but Max is quite well.”
Max was Anthony’s own dog, a brusque, unamiable, and fanatically loyal
Aberdeen.
“He simply hated your being away, you know. He sleeps in your room
regularly, because he won’t sleep anywhere else, and he bit Mary for
cleaning it last week—not badly—on the ankle.”
“A quarrelsome, bad-tempered, crotchety cur,” Mr. Arden asserted, with
restored good-humor; “but your mother thinks the world of him because he
refused to eat for three days after you left. The girls tempted him with
raw meat, and in the end he gave way to ’em. But he’s borne a grudge
against ’em ever since.”
“That was awfully nice of you,” Anthony said gratefully to his sisters.
He would have been ashamed to say how often he had thought of Max during
his captivity, and that he hadn’t liked to ask how he was for fear of
hearing he was dead.
“Your mother didn’t come to meet you,” Mr. Arden explained as they
seated themselves in the dog-cart, and Vixen, after a slight premonitory
shy at the gate-post, darted off down the long, white road like a
swallow. “I persuaded her not to. She’s not up to much excitement
nowadays, and of course we’re not giving any celebration in the village
for your return. You’ll understand all that.”
Anthony nodded.
It was too early for the trees to be out, but there was a misty look
over the budding boughs, and the tilled fields and woodlands had already
slipped from the hand of winter and lay open for the visiting spring.
The white road stretched between the Pannell woods and the Pannell
farms, and straight before them, as the road wound up toward the low,
soft skies, were the sloping shoulders of the downs. Pannell stood under
them, gray and weather-beaten, facing the shifting shadows with its
unchanging stone.
As they passed into the drive, Vixen, moving as if she ran on velvet
springs, the gray walls of Pannell rose up in front of them. First the
clock-tower in the massive stone stables, a stretch of open park, and
then the long, uneven lines of the roof. Anthony’s heart struck suddenly
against his side. He had not realized before what it would be to own
Pannell. The knowledge flooded him with a kind of awe. The ancient
trees, the mossy lawns were his, and his the evanescent spirit of the
changeless place.
Mr. Arden glanced sharply at him. Neither of them said anything, but
Anthony knew that his father divined his feeling and bitterly resented
it. Anthony flushed painfully. He wanted to explain how gladly he would
have given up that strange thrill of possession for the sight of Tom,
broad-shouldered and casual, strolling out of the stable door, a gun
over his shoulder and a dog at his heels. If his father could only have
guessed that deeper feeling, that stubborn sense of loss which had
become part of Anthony’s very being since Tom’s death, he would not have
been hurt at the momentary pride of place which had swept over him
without replacing or touching the deeper sense of his grief. But it was
Mr. Arden’s misfortune that he could not read deeply into the mind of
his younger son.
The last moments of the drive were intolerably long; even his sisters,
who had been pointing out all the changes of three years to Anthony,
ceased chattering.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the February light lay level
across the lawn, fugitive and without weight.
Vixen consented to draw up on the familiar gravel after a slight
pretense that she had never been there before and couldn’t be expected
to remain an instant in so strange a situation. A groom ran to her head
and out of a French window poured a torrent of dogs, a fox-terrier, two
white West Highlanders, and more gingerly, as a matter of form, came
Max.
For a moment he stood stock-still, his whole being centered in an
anxious, questioning sniff, and then three years, a third of his brief
lifetime, ceased to exist. He hurled the two white West Highlanders to
right and left of him, he passed straight over the back of Demon, the
ecstatic fox-terrier, he leaped at the thin, gray figure of Anthony
fiercely and without a sound. Three times he flung himself upward
silently at his master’s chest, weaving like a shuttle the pattern of
his desperate joy; then Anthony found a voice to say his name huskily,
and Max, the sober, the undemonstrative, that foe to emotion in
fox-terriers, sat down on the top of a flight of steps and proceeded to
have a fit of violent hysterics.
Anthony had to push him aside in order to hurry through the open French
windows to his mother’s arms.
As he caught her against his heart, he heard her whisper over and over
under her breath:
“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Tony? Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
She knew he had been in Holland and overnight in London, but she wanted
to hear him say he was not hungry. She had thought of nothing else for
two years.
Anthony felt quite happy at coming back to his mother, because he knew
she would not want him to be Tom.
Tom was not the race to Mrs. Arden as he had been to his father. He was
Tom, and the son she held in her frail arms was Anthony.
“You must have tea at once,” she whispered tremulously. “It’s quite
ready, and I hope you won’t mind eating a new-laid egg with it, it’s
more solid. Oh, you’re so thin, my darling!”
“I’m not nearly so thin as you are, Mother,” said Anthony, trying to see
her face through misty eyes. “By Jove! you’re like a little leaf!” His
mother shook her head smilingly at him.
“I’m not thin, Anthony,” she murmured; “I’m only old.”
And then Anthony saw that was what had happened while he was away; his
mother had grown old.