During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous
things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time;
which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change
into the Close of Durdlebury. Folks of strange habit and speech walked
in it, and, gazing at the Gothic splendour of the place, saw through
the mist of autumn and the mist of tears not Durdlebury but Louvain.
More than one of those grey houses flanking the cathedral and sharing
with it the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning;
not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny
as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation--but for
loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it
but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and
dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and
glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one of those houses
but was linked with a battlefield. Beyond the memory of man the reader
of the Litany had droned the accustomed invocation on behalf of the
Sovereign and the Royal Family, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, the
Lords of the Council and all prisoners and captives, and the
congregation had lumped them all together in their responses with an
undifferentiating convention of fervour. What had prisoners and
captives, any more than the Lords of the Council, to do with their
lives, their hearts, their personal emotions? But now--Durdlebury men
were known to be prisoners in German hands, and after "all prisoners
and captives" there was a long and pregnant silence, in which was felt
the reverberation of war against pier and vaulted arch and groined
roof of the cathedral, which was broken too, now and then, by the
stifled sob of a woman, before the choir came in with the response so
new and significant in its appeal--"We beseech thee to hear us, O
Lord!"
And in every home the knitting-needles of women clicked, as they did
throughout the length and breadth of the land. And the young men left
shop and trade and counting-house. And young parsons fretted, and some
obtained the Bishop's permission to become Army chaplains, and others,
snapping their fingers (figuratively) under the Bishop's nose, threw
their cassocks to the nettles and put on the full (though in modern
times not very splendiferous) panoply of war. And in course of time
the brigade of artillery rolled away and new troops took their place;
and Marmaduke Trevor, Esquire, of Denby Hall, was called upon to
billet a couple of officers and twenty men.
Doggie was both patriotic and polite. Having a fragment of the British
Army in his house, he did his best to make them comfortable. By
January he had no doubt that the Empire was in peril, that it was
every man's duty to do his bit. He welcomed the new-comers with open
arms, having unconsciously abandoned his attitude of superiority over
mere brawn. Doggie saw the necessity of brawn. The more the better. It
was every patriotic Englishman's duty to encourage brawn. If the two
officers had allowed him, he would have fed his billeted men every two
hours on prime beefsteaks and burgundy. He threw himself heart and
soul into the reorganization of his household. Officers and men found
themselves in clover. The officers had champagne every night for
dinner. They thought Doggie a capital fellow.
"My dear chap," they would say, "you're spoiling us. I don't say we
don't like it and aren't grateful. We jolly well are. But we're
supposed to rough it--to lead the simple life--what? You're doing us
too well."
"Impossible!" Doggie would reply, filling up the speaker's glass.
"Don't I know what we owe to you fellows? In what other way can a
helpless, delicate crock like myself show his gratitude and in some
sort of little way serve his country?"
When the sympathetic and wine-filled guest would ask what was the
nature of his malady, he would tap his chest vaguely and reply:
"Constitutional. I've never been able to do things like other fellows.
The least thing bowls me out."
"Dam hard lines--especially just now."
"Yes, isn't it?" Doggie would answer. And once he found himself
adding, "I'm fed up with doing nothing."
Here can be noted a distinct stage in Doggie's development. He
realized the brutality of fact. When great German guns were yawning
open-mouthed at you, it was no use saying, "Take the nasty, horrid
things away, I don't like them." They wouldn't go unless you took
other big guns and fired at them. And more guns were required than
could be manned by the peculiarly constituted fellows who made up the
artillery of the original British Army. New fellows not at all
warlike, peaceful citizens who had never killed a cat in anger, were
being driven by patriotism and by conscience to man them. Against
Blood and Iron now supreme, the superior, aesthetic and artistic being
was of no avail. You might lament the fall in relative values of
collections of wall-papers and little china dogs, as much as you
liked; but you could not deny the fall; they had gone down with
something of an ignoble "wallop." Doggie began to set a high value on
guns and rifles and such-like deadly engines, and to inquire
petulantly why the Government were not providing them at greater
numbers and at greater speed. On his periodic visits to London he
wandered round by Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, to see for himself
how the recruiting was going on. At the Deanery he joined in ardent
discussions of the campaign in Flanders. On the walls of his peacock
and ivory room were maps stuck all over with little pins. When he told
the young officer that he was wearied of inaction, he spoke the truth.
He began to feel mightily aggrieved against Providence for keeping him
outside this tremendous national league of youth. He never questioned
his physical incapacity. It was as real a fact as the German guns. He
went about pitying himself and seeking pity.
The months passed. The regiment moved away from Durdlebury, and Doggie
was left alone in Denby Hall.
He felt solitary and restless. News came from Oliver that he had been
offered and had accepted an infantry commission, and that Chipmunk,
having none of the special qualities of a "'oss soldier," had, by
certain skilful wire-pullings, been transferred to his regiment, and
had once more become his devoted servant. "A month of this sort of
thing," he wrote, "would make our dear old Doggie sit up." Doggie
sighed. If only he had been blessed with Oliver's constitution!
One morning Briggins, his chauffeur, announced that he could stick it
no longer and was going to join up. Then Doggie remembered a talk he
had had with one of the young officers who had expressed astonishment
at his not being able to drive a car. "I shouldn't have the nerve," he
had replied. "My nerves are all wrong--and I shouldn't have the
strength to change tyres and things."... If his chauffeur went, he
would find it very difficult to get another. Who would drive the
Rolls-Royce?
"Why not learn to drive yourself, sir?" said Briggins. "Not the
Rolls-Royce. I would put it up or get rid of it, if I were you. If you
engage a second-rate man, as you'll have to, who isn't used to this
make of car, he'll do it in for you pretty quick. Get a smaller one in
its place and drive it yourself. I'll undertake to teach you enough
before I go."
So Doggie, following Briggins' advice, took lessons and, to his
amazement, found that he did not die of nervous collapse when a dog
crossed the road in front of the car and that the fitting of
detachable wheels did not require the strength of a Hercules. The
first time he took Peggy out in the two-seater he swelled with pride.
"I'm so glad to see you can do something!" she said.
Although she was kind and as mildly affectionate as ever, he had
noticed of late a curious reserve in her manner. Conversation did not
flow easily. There seemed to be something at the back of her mind. She
had fits of abstraction from which, when rallied, she roused herself
with an effort.
"It's the war," she would declare. "It's affecting everybody that
way."
Gradually Doggie began to realize that she spoke truly. Most people of
his acquaintance, when he was by, seemed to be thus afflicted. The
lack of interest they manifested in his delicacy of constitution was
almost impolite. At last he received an anonymous letter, "For little
Doggie Trevor, from the girls of Durdlebury," enclosing a white
feather.
The cruelty of it broke Doggie down. He sat in his peacock and ivory
room and nearly wept. Then he plucked up courage and went to Peggy.
She was rather white about the lips as she listened.
"I'm sorry," she said, "but I expected something of the sort to
happen."
"It's brutal and unjust."
"Yes, it's brutal," she admitted coldly.
"I thought you, at any rate, would sympathize with me," he cried.
She turned on him. "And what about me? Who sympathizes with me? Do you
ever give a moment's thought to what I've had to go through the last
few months?"
"I don't quite know what you mean," he stammered.
"I should have thought it was obvious. You can't be such an innocent
babe as to suppose people don't talk about you. They don't talk to you
because they don't like to be rude. They send you white feathers
instead. But they talk to me. 'Why isn't Marmaduke in khaki?' 'Why
isn't Doggie fighting?' 'I wonder how you can allow him to slack about
like that!'--I've had a pretty rough time fighting your battles, I can
tell you, and I deserve some credit. I want sympathy just as much as
you do."
"My dear," said Doggie, feeling very much humiliated, "I never knew. I
never thought. I do see now the unpleasant position you've been in.
People are brutes. But," he added eagerly, "you told them the real
reason?"
"What's that?" she asked, looking at him with cold eyes.
Then Doggie knew that the wide world was against him. "I'm not fit.
I've no constitution. I'm an impossibility."
"You thought you had nerves until you learned to drive the car. Then
you discovered that you hadn't. You fancy you've a weak heart. Perhaps
if you learned to walk thirty miles a day you would discover you
hadn't that either. And so with the rest of it."
"This is very painful," he said, going to the window and staring out.
"Very painful. You are of the same opinion as the young women who sent
me that abominable thing."
She had been on the strain for a long while and something inside her
had snapped. At his woebegone attitude she relented however, and came
up and touched his shoulder.
"A girl wants to feel some pride in the man she's going to marry. It's
horrible to have to be always defending him--especially when she's not
sure she's telling the truth in his defence."
He swung round horrified. "Do you think I'm shamming, so as to get out
of serving in the Army?"
"Not consciously. Unconsciously, I think you are. What does your
doctor say?"
Doggie was taken aback. He had no doctor. He had not consulted one for
years, having no cause for medical advice. The old family physician
who had attended his mother in her last illness and had prescribed
Gregory powders for him as a child, had retired from Durdlebury long
ago. There was only one person living familiar with his constitution,
and that was himself. He made confession of the surprising fact. Peggy
made a little gesture.
"That proves it. I don't believe you have anything wrong with you. The
nerves business made me sceptical. This is straight talking. It's
horrid, I know. But it's best to get through with it once and for
all."
Some men would have taken deep offence and, consigning Peggy to the
devil, have walked out of the room. But Doggie, a conscientious, even
though a futile human being, was gnawed for the first time by the
suspicion that Peggy might possibly be right. He desired to act
honourably.
"I'll do," said he, "whatever you think proper."
Peggy was swift to smite the malleable iron. To use the conventional
phrase might give an incorrect impression of red-hot martial ardour on
the part of Doggie.
"Good," she said, with the first smile of the day. "I'll hold you to
it. But it will be an honourable bargain. Get Dr. Murdoch to overhaul
you thoroughly, with a view to the Army. If he passes you, take a
commission. Dad says he can easily get you one through his old friend
General Gadsby at the War Office. If he doesn't, and you're unfit,
I'll stick to you through thick and thin, and make the young women of
Durdlebury wish they'd never been born."
She put out her hand. Doggie took it.
"Very well," said he, "I agree."
She laughed, and ran to the door.
"Where are you going?"
"To the telephone--to ring up Dr. Murdoch for an appointment."
"You're flabby," said Dr. Murdoch the next morning to an anxious
Doggie in pink pyjamas; "but that's merely a matter of unused muscles.
Physical training will set it right in no time. Otherwise, my dear
Trevor, you're in splendid health. I was afraid your family history
might be against you--the child of elderly parents, and so forth. But
nothing of the sort. Not only are you a first-class life for an
insurance company, but you're a first-class life for the Army--and
that's saying a good deal. There's not a flaw in your whole
constitution."
He put away his stethoscope and smiled at Doggie, who regarded him
blankly as the pronouncer of a doom. He went on to prescribe a course
of physical exercises, so many miles a day walking, such and such
back-breaking and contortional performances in his bathroom; if
possible, a skilfully graduated career in a gymnasium, but his words
fell on the ears of a Doggie in a dream; and when he had ended, Doggie
said:
"I'm afraid, Doctor, you'll have to write all that out for me."
"With pleasure," smiled the doctor, and gripped him by the hand. And
seeing Doggie wince, he said heartily: "Ah! I'll soon set that right
for you. I'll get you something--an india-rubber contrivance to
practise with for half an hour a day, and you'll develop a hand like a
gorilla's."
Dr. Murdoch grinned his way, in his little car, to his next patient.
Here was this young slacker, coddled from birth, absolutely
horse-strong and utterly confounded at being told so. He grinned and
chuckled so much that he nearly killed his most valuable old lady
patient, who was crossing the High Street.
But Doggie crept out of bed and put on a violet dressing-gown that
clashed horribly with his pink pyjamas, and wandered like a man in a
nightmare to his breakfast. But he could not eat. He swallowed a cup
of coffee and sought refuge in his own room. He was frightened.
Horribly frightened, caught in a net from which there was no
escape--not the tiniest break of a mesh. He had given his word--and in
justice to Doggie, be it said that he held his word sacred--he had
given his word to join the Army if he should be passed by Murdoch. He
had been passed--more than passed. He would have to join. He would
have to fight. He would have to live in a muddy trench, sleep in mud,
eat in mud, plough through mud, in the midst of falling shells and
other instruments of death. And he would be an officer, with all kinds
of strange and vulgar men under him, men like Chipmunk, for instance,
whom he would never understand. He was almost physically sick with
apprehension. He realized that he had never commanded a man in his
life. He had been mortally afraid of Briggins, his late chauffeur. He
had heard that men at the front lived on some solid horror called
bully-beef dug out of tins, and some liquid horror called cocoa, also
drunk out of tins; that men kept on their clothes, even their boots,
for weeks at a time; that rats ran over them while they tried to
sleep; that lice, hitherto associated in his mind with the most
revolting type of tramp, out there made no distinction of persons.
They were the common lot of the lowest Tommy and the finest gentleman.
And then the fighting. The noise of the horrid guns. The disgusting
sights of men shattered to bloody bits. The horrible stench. The
terror of having one's face shot half away and being an object of
revolt and horror to all beholders for the rest of life. Death.
Feverishly he ruffled his comely hair. Death. He was surprised that
the contemplation of it did not freeze the blood in his veins. Yes. He
put it clearly before him. He had given his word to Peggy that he
would go and expose himself to Death. Death. What did it mean? He had
been brought up in orthodox Church of England Christianity. His
flaccid mind had never questioned the truth of its dogmas. He
believed, in a general sort of way, that good people went to Heaven
and bad people went to Hell. His conscience was clear. He had never
done any harm to anybody. As far as he knew, he had broken none of the
Ten Commandments. In a technical sense he was a miserable sinner, and
so proclaimed himself once a week. But though, perhaps, he had done
nothing in his life to merit eternal bliss in Paradise, yet, on the
other hand, he had committed no action which would justify a kindly
and just Creator in consigning him to the eternal flames of Hell.
Somehow the thought of Death did not worry him. It faded from his
mind, being far less terrible than life under prospective conditions.
Discomfort, hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, pain; above all the terror
of his fellows--these were the soul-racking anticipations of this new
life into which it was a matter of honour for him to plunge. And to an
essential gentleman like Doggie a matter of honour was a matter of
life. And so, dressed in his pink pyjamas and violet dressing-gown,
amid the peacock-blue and ivory hangings of his boudoir room, and
stared at by the countless unsympathetic eyes of his little china
dogs, Doggie Trevor passed through his first Gethsemane.
* * * * *
His decision was greeted with joy at the Deanery. Peggy threw her arms
round his neck and gave him the very first real kiss he had ever
received. It revived him considerably. His Aunt Sophia also embraced
him. The Dean shook him warmly by the hand, and talked eloquent
patriotism. Doggie already felt a hero. He left the house in a glow,
but the drive home in the two-seater was cold and the pitch-dark night
presaged other nights of mercilessness in the future; and when Doggie
sat alone by his fire, sipping the hot milk which Peddle presented him
on a silver tray, the doubts and fears of the morning racked him
again. An ignoble possibility occurred to him. Murdoch might be wrong.
Murdoch might be prejudiced by local gossip. Would it not be better to
go up to London and obtain the opinion of a first-class man to whom he
was unknown? There was also another alternative. Flight. He might go
to America, and do nothing. To the South of France, and help in some
sort of way with hospitals for French wounded. He caught himself up
short as these thoughts passed through his mind, and he shuddered. He
took up the glass of hot milk and put it down again. Milk? He needed
something stronger. A glance in a mirror showed him his sleek hair
tousled into an upstanding wig. In a kind of horror of himself he went
to the dining-room and for the first time in his life drank a stiff
whisky and soda for the sake of the stimulant. Reaction came. He felt
a man once more. Rather suicide at once than such damnable dishonour.
According to the directions which the Dean, a man of affairs, had
given him, he sat down and wrote his application to the War Office for
a commission. Then--unique adventure!--he stole out of the barred and
bolted house, without thought of hat and overcoat (let the traducers
of alcohol mark it well), ran down the drive and posted the letter in
the box some few yards beyond his entrance gates.
The Dean had already posted his letter to his old friend General
Gadsby at the War Office.
So the die was cast. The Rubicon was crossed. The bridges were burnt.
The irrevocable step was taken. Dr. Murdoch turned up the next morning
with his prescription for physical training. And then Doggie trained
assiduously, monotonously, wearily. He grew appalled by the
senselessness of this apparently unnecessary exertion. Now and then
Peggy accompanied him on his prescribed walks; but the charm of her
company was discounted by the glaring superiority of her powers of
endurance. While he ached with fatigue, she pressed along as fresh as
Atalanta at the beginning of her race. When they parted by the Deanery
door, she would stand flushed, radiant in her youth and health, and
say:
"We've had a topping walk, old dear. Now isn't it a glorious thing to
feel oneself alive?"
But poor Doggie of the flabby muscles felt half dead.
* * * * *
The fateful letter burdening Doggie with the King's commission arrived
a few weeks later: a second lieutenancy in a Fusilier battalion of the
New Army. Dates and instructions were given. The impress of the Royal
Arms at the head of the paper, with its grotesque perky lion and
unicorn, conveyed to Doggie a sense of the grip of some uncanny power.
The typewritten words scarcely mattered. The impress fascinated him.
There was no getting away from it. Those two pawing beasts held him in
their clutch. They headed a Death Warrant, from which there was no
appeal.
Doggie put his house in order, dismissed with bounty those of his
servants who would be no longer needed, and kept the Peddles, husband
and wife, to look after his interests. On his last night at home he
went wistfully through the familiar place, the drawing-room sacred to
his mother's memory, the dining-room so solid in its half-century of
comfort, his own peacock and ivory room so intensely himself, so
expressive of his every taste, every mood, every emotion. Those
strange old-world musical instruments--he could play them all with the
touch or breath of a master and a lover. The old Italian theorbo. He
took it up. How few to-day knew its melodious secret! He looked
around. All these daintinesses and prettinesses had a meaning. They
signified the magical little beauties of life--things which asserted a
range of spiritual truths, none the less real and consolatory because
vice and crime and ugliness and misery and war co-existed in ghastly
fact on other facets of the planet Earth. The sweetness here expressed
was as essential to the world's spiritual life as the sweet elements
of foodstuffs to its physical life. To the getting together of all
these articles of beauty he had devoted the years of his youth....
And--another point of view--was he not the guardian by inheritance--in
other words, by Divine Providence--of this beautiful English home, the
trustee of English comfort, of the sacred traditions of sweet English
life that had made England the only country, the only country, he
thought, that could call itself a Country and not a Compromise, in the
world?
And he was going to leave it all. All that it meant in beauty and
dignity and ease of life. For what?
For horror and filthiness and ugliness, for everything against which
his beautiful peacock and ivory room protested. Doggie's last night at
Denby Hall was a troubled one.
Aunt Sophia and Peggy accompanied him to London and stayed with him at
his stuffy little hotel off Bond Street, while Doggie got his kit
together. They bought everything in every West End shop that any
salesman assured them was essential for active service. Swords,
revolvers, field-glasses, pocket-knives (for gigantic pockets),
compasses, mess-tins, cooking-batteries, sleeping-bags, waterproofs,
boots innumerable, toilet accessories, drinking-cups, thermos flasks,
field stationery cases, periscopes, tinted glasses, Gieve waistcoats,
cholera belts, portable medicine cases, earplugs, tin-openers,
corkscrews, notebooks, pencils, luminous watches, electric torches,
pins, housewives, patent seat walking-sticks--everything that the man
of commercial instincts had devised for the prosecution of the war.
The amount of warlike equipment with which Doggie, with the aid of his
Aunt Sophia and Peggy, encumbered the narrow little passages of
Sturrocks's Hotel, must have weighed about a ton.
At last Doggie's uniforms--several suits--came home. He had devoted
enormous care to their fit. Attired in one he looked beautiful. Peggy
decreed a dinner at the Carlton. She and Doggie alone. Her mother
could get some stuffy old relation to spend the evening with her at
Sturrocks's. She wanted Doggie all to herself, so as to realize the
dream of many disgusting and humiliating months. And as she swept
through the palm court and up the broad stairs and wound through the
crowded tables of the restaurant with the khaki-clad Doggie by her
side, she felt proud and uplifted. Here was her soldier whom she had
made. Her very own man in khaki.
"Dear old thing," she whispered, pressing his arm as they trekked to
their table. "Don't you feel glorious? Don't you feel as if you could
face the universe?"
Peggy drank one glass of the quart of champagne. Doggie drank the
rest.
On getting into bed he wondered why this unprecedented quantity of
wine had not affected his sobriety. Its only effect had been to stifle
thought. He went to bed and slept happily, for Peggy's parting kiss
had been such as would conduce to any young man's felicity.
The next morning Aunt Sophia and Peggy saw him off to his depot, with
his ton of luggage. He leaned out of the carriage window and exchanged
hand kisses with Peggy until the curve of the line cut her off. Then
he settled down in his corner with the _Morning Post_. But he could
not concentrate his attention on the morning news. This strange
costume in which he was clothed seemed unreal, monstrous; no longer
the natty dress in which he had been proud to prink the night before,
but a nightmare, Nessus-like investiture, signifying some abominable
burning doom.
The train swept him into a world that was upside down.