 CHAPTER I This is the story of Doggie Trevor. It tells of his doings, and of a girl in England and a girl in France. See it is concerned with the influences that enable him to win through the war. Doggie Trevor did not get the Victoria Cross. He got no cross or distinction whatever. He did not even attain the sorrowful glory of a little white cross above his grave on the western front. Doggie was no hero of romance, ancient or modern. But he went through with it, and is alive to tell the tale. The brutal of his acquaintance gave him the name of Doggie years before the war was ever thought of, because he had been brought up from babyhood like a toy-pom. The almost freak offspring of elderly parents, he had the rough world against him from birth. His father died before he had cut a tooth. His mother was old enough to be his grandmother. She had the intense maternal instinct and the brain, such as it is, of an ear-week. He wrapped Doggie—his real name was James a Marmaduke—in cotton wool, and kept him so until he was almost a grown man. Doggie had never a chance. She brought him up like a toy-pom until he was twenty-one, and then she died. Doggie, being comfortably off, continued to the maternal tradition, and kept Tom bringing himself up like a toy-pom. He did not know what else to do. Even when he was five and twenty he found himself at the edge of the world, gazing in timorous darkness down into the abyss of the Great War. Something kicked him over the brink and sent him sprawling into the thick of it. That the world knows little of its greatest men is a commonplace among silly aphorisms. With far more just it it may be stated that of its least men the world knows nothing and cares less. Yet the doggies of the war, who on the cry of Havoc have been let loose, much to their own and everybody else's super-faction, deserve the passing tribute sometimes, poor fellows, of a sigh, sometimes of a smile, often of a cheer. Very few of them, very few at any rate of the English doggies, have tucked their little tails between their legs and run away. Once a brawny humorist wrote to Doggie Trevor, Dursum Gorda. Doggie happened to be at the time in a waterlogged front trenched in Flanders and the writer basking in the mild sunshine of Simla with his territorial regiment. Doggie, bitten by the headiness of circumstance to up with his tail, felt like a scorpion. For the moment it is only essential to obtain a general view of the type to which Trevor belonged. Whether is one spot in England where the present is the past, where the future is still more of the past, where the past wraps you and enfolds you in the dreamy mist of gothic beauty, where the lazy meadows slipping riverwards deny the passage of the centuries, where the varied clouds are secular, it is the cathedral town of Dirtlebury. No factory chimneys defile with their smoky calm air, or defy its august and heaven-searching spires. No rabble of factory hands shocks its few and sedate streets. Divine providence, according to the devote, and the crass stupidity of the local authorities seventy years ago, according to Progressive Minds, turned the main line of railway twenty miles from the sacred spot, so that to this year of grace it is the very devil of a business to find out from Bradshaw how to get to Dirtlebury, and having found to get there. As for getting away, God help you. But whoever wanted to get away from Dirtlebury except the Bishop. In pre-motor days he used to grumble tremendously and threaten the House of Lords with railway bills, and to try to blackmail the government with dark hints of resignation, and so he lived and threatened and made his wearisome dialysis and round of visits, and died. But now he has his episcopal motor-car, which has deprived him of his grievances. In the close of Dirtlebury, green-swarded, silent, sent inelde by immemorial elms that guard the dignified gothic dwellings of the cathedral dignitaries, was James Marmaduke Trevor Bourne. His father, a man of private fortune, was cannon of Dirtlebury. For many years he lived in the most commodious canonical House in the close with his sisters Sophia and Sarah. For the cause of time a new dean, Dr. Conover, was appointed to Dirtlebury, and restless innovator that he was, underpinned the North's transept and split up Cannon Trevor's home by marrying Sophia. Then Sarah, bitten by the madness, committed abrupt matrimony with the reverent Werner Manningtree, rector of Dirtlebury. Cannon Trevor, many years older than his sisters, remained for some months in bewildered loneliness, until one day he found himself standing in front of the cathedral altar with Miss Matilda Jessup, while the bishop pronounced over them words darbotically strange, yet ecclesiastically familiar. Miss Jessup, thus transformed into Mrs. Trevor, was a mature, uncomfortable maiden lady of ample means, the only and orphaned daughter of a late bishop of Dirtlebury. Never had there been such a marrying and giving him marriage in the cathedral circle. Some were born in decanal, rectorial and canonical homes. First a son to the Manningtrees, whom they named Oliver, then a daughter to the connovers. Then a son named James Marmaduke, after the late Bishop Jessup, was born to the Trevor's. The profane say that Cannon Trevor, a profound patristic theologian and an enthusiastical paleontologist, could make head or tail of it at all, and unable to decide whether James Marmaduke should be attributed to Tertillian or the Neolithic period, expired in an agony of duberty. At any rate the poor man died. The widow of necessity moved from the close in order to make way for the new Cannon, and betook herself with her babe to Denby Hall, the comfortable house on the outskirts of the town in which she had dwelt before her marriage. The saturated essence of Dirtlebury ran in Marmaduke's blood. An honourable essence, a proud essence, an essence of all that is tactically beautiful and dignified in English life, but an essence which, without a mixture of wilder and more fluid elements, is apt to run thick and clog the arteries. Marmaduke was coddled from his birth. The Dean, then a breezy energetic man, protested. There a manning-tree protested, but when the Dean's eldest born died of diphtheria, Mrs. Trevor, in her heart, set down the death as a judgment on Sophia for criminable carelessness. And when young Oliver Manning-tree grew up to be an intolerable young Turk and savage, she looked on Marmaduke, and, thanking heaven that he was not as other boys were, enfolded him more than ever beneath her motherly wing. When Oliver went to school in the town and tore his clothes and rolled in mud and punched other boys' heads, Marmaduke remained at home under the educational charge of a governess. Oliver, lean and lanky and swift-eyed, swaggered through the streets unattended from the first day they sent him to a neighbouring kindergarten. As the months and years of his childish life passed he grew more and more independent and vagabond. He swore blood brotherhood with a butcher-boy, and, unknown to his pious parents, became the leader of a ferocious gang of pirates. Marmaduke, on the other hand, was never allowed to cross the road without feminine escort. Oliver had the profoundest contempt for Marmaduke. Being two years older he kicked him whenever he had a chance. Marmaduke loathed him. Marmaduke shrank into misgunt of the governess's escorts whenever he saw him. Mrs. Trevor, therefore, regarded Oliver as the youthful incarnation of Beelzebub, cobbled bitterly with her sister-in-law. One day Oliver, with three or four of his piratical friends, met Marmaduke a misgunter and a little toy-terrier in the High Street. The toy-terrier was attached by a lead to misgunter on the one side, Marmaduke by hand on the other. Oliver straddled rudely across the path. "'Hello! Look at that two little doggies!' he cried. He snapped his fingers to the terrier. "'Come along, tiny!' the terrier yapped. Oliver grinned and turned to Marmaduke. "'Come along! Find out, dear little doggie!' "'You're a nasty, rude, horrid boy, and I shall tell your mother!' did layered misgunter indignantly. But Oliver and his parents laughed with the truckinence befitting their vocation, and, bowing with ironical politeness, let their victim depart to the parody of a potpillar song. "'Goodbye, doggie! We shall miss you!' On that day onward Marmaduke was known as Doggie throughout all Dirtlebury, saved to his mother and misgunter. The dean himself grew to think of him as Doggie. People to this day called him Doggie without any notion of the origin of the name. To preserve him from persecution Mrs. Trevor jealously guarded him from association with other boys. He neither learned nor played any boyish games, in defiance of the doctor whom she regarded as a member of the brutal anti-Marmaduke league, Mrs. Trevor proclaimed Marmaduke's delicacy of constitution. He must not go out into the rain lest he should get damp, nor into the hot sunshine lest he should perspire. She kept him like a precious plant in a carefully warmed conservatory. Doggie, used to it from birth, looked on it as his natural environment. Under feminine guidance and tuition he embroidered and painted screens and played the piano and the mandolin, and read Miss Charlotte Yong and learned history from the late Mrs. Markham. Without doubt his life was a happy one. All that he asked for was sequestration from Oliver and his assesutes. Now and then the cousins were forced to meet at occasional children's parties, for instance. A little daughter, Peggy, had been born in the denary replacing the lost firstborn, and festivals to which came the extreme youth of Dirtlebury were given in her honour. She liked Marmaduke, who was five years her senior, because he was gentle and clean and wore such beautiful clothes and brushed his hair so nicely, whereas she detested Oliver, who even at an afternoon party looked as if he had just come out of a rabbit hole. Besides, Marmaduke danced beautifully. Oliver couldn't and wouldn't disdaining such effeminate sports. His great joy was to put out a sly leg and send Doggie and his partner sprawling. Once the dean caught him at it and called him a horrid little beast, and threatened him with neck-and-crop expulsion if he ever did it again. Doggie, who picked himself up and listened to the review, said, I'm very glad to hear you talk to him like that, uncle. I think his behaviour is perfectly detestable." The dean's lips twitched, and he turned away abruptly. Oliver glared at Doggie. Oh, my, I only aren't," he whispered hoarsely, as you wait till I get you alone. Oliver got him alone, an hour later, in a passage having lain in ambush for him, and after a few busy moments, contemplated at bruised and bleeding Doggie, blubbering in a corner. Do you think my behaviour is detestable now? Yes, remember, Doggie, I've a good of mind to go on licking you until you say no, said Oliver. You're a great big bully, cried Doggie. Well, they were reflected, he did not like to be called a bully. Look here, said he, I'll stick my right arm down inside the back of my trousers and fight you with my left. I don't want to fight, I can't fight, cried Doggie. Oliver put his hands in his pockets. Would you come and play kiss in the ring, then? He asked sarcastically. No, replied Doggie. Well, don't say I haven't made you generous offers, said Oliver, and stalked away. He was all very well for the Reverend Vernon Manningtree when discussing this incident with the Dean, to dismiss Doggie with a contemptuous shrug and call him a little worm without any spirit. The unfortunate Doggie remained a human soul with a human destiny before him, as to his lack of spirit. Well, said the Dean, a man of wider sympathies, do you suppose he could get any from? Look at his parentage, look at his upbringing by that idiot woman. If it belonged to me, I'd drown him, said the Rector. If I had my way with Oliver, said the Dean, I'd skin him alive. I'm afraid his young devil, said the Rector, not without paternal pride. But he has the makings of a man. Serves Marmaduke, replied the Dean, a bosh, said Mr. Manningtree. When Oliver went to Rugby, happier days than ever dawned for Marmaduke, there were only the holidays to fear. But as time went on, the haughty contempt of Oliver, the public schoolboy, for the home-bred Doggie, forbade him to notice the little creatures at distance, so that even the holidays lost their gloomy menace and became like the normal Halcyon tide. Meanwhile Doggie grew up. When he reached the age of fourteen, the Dean, by strenuous endeavour, rescued him from the unnervading tuition of Miskanta. But school for Marmaduke Mrs. Trevor would not hear of. It was brutal of Edward, the Dean, to suggest such a thing. Marmaduke was so sensitive and delicate, school would kill him. He would undo all the results of her unceasing care. It would make him coarse and valga, like other horrid boys. She would soon as see him dead at her feet than at her public school. It was true that he ought to have the education of a gentleman. She did not need Edward to point out her duty. She would engage a private tutor. All right, I'll get you one, said the Dean. The master of his old college at Cambridge sent him an excellent youth who had just taken his degree, a second class in the classical tripos, an all-round athlete and a gentleman. The first thing he did was to take Marmaduke on the lazy river that flows through the Dirtlebury meadows, thereby endangering his life, woefully blistering his hands, and making him ache all over his poor little body. After a quarter of an hour's interview with Mrs. Trevor, the indignant young man threw up his post and departed. Mrs. Trevor determined to select a tutor herself. The scholastic agency sent her a dozen candidates. She went to London and interviewed them all. A woman, even of the most limited intelligence, invariably knows what she wants and invariably gets it. Mrs. Trevor got Phineas McPhail MA Glasgow, BA Cambridge, third-class mathematical grades, reading for holy orders. I was training for the ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland, said he, when I gradually became aware of the error of my ways, and saw that there could only be salvation in the episcopal form of church government. As the daughter of a bishop, Mrs. Trevor, you will appreciate my conscientious position, an open scholarship, and the remainder of my little patrimony enabled me to get my Oxford degree. You would have no objection to my continuing my theological studies while I undertake the education of your son? Phineas McPhail pleased Mrs. Trevor. He had what she called a rugged, honest scotch face, with a very big nose in the middle of it, and little grey eyes overhung by brown and shaggy eyebrows. He spoke with the mere captivating suggestion of an accent. The son of decayed, proud, and now extinct gentlefolk, he presented personal testimonials of an unexceptionable quality. Phineas McPhail took to Doggy and Dirtlebury as a duck to water. He read for holy orders for seven years. When the question of his ordination arose he would declare impressively that his sacred duty was the making of Marmaduke into a scholar and a Christian. That duty accomplished he would begin to think of himself. Mrs. Trevor accounted to him the most devoted and selfless friend that woman ever had. He saw eye to eye with her in every detail of Marmaduke's upbringing. He certainly taught the boy, who was naturally intelligent, a great deal, and repaired the terrible gaps in Miss Gunter's system of education. McPhail had started life with many eager curiosities, under the impulse of which he had smashed considerable knowledge of a superficial kind, which, lolling in an armchair with a pipe in his mouth, he found easy to impart. To the credit side of Mrs. Trevor's queer account, it may be put that she did not object to smoking. The late Cameron smoked incessantly. Since the odour of tobacco was the only key memory of her honeymoon and brief married life, during his seven years of soft living, Phineas McPhail scientifically did develop an original taste for whisky. He seetheed himself in it as the ancients seetheed a kid in its mother's milk. He had the art to do himself to perfection. Mrs. Trevor beheld to him the mellowest and blandest of men. Never had she the slightest suspicion of evil courses. As such a pitch of cunning in the observance of the priorities had he arrived, that the very servants knew not of his doings. It was any later, after Mrs. Trevor's death, when a surveyor was called in by Marmaduke to put the old house in order, that a disused well at the back of the house was found to be half filled with hundreds of whisky-bottles, secretly thrown in by Phineas McPhail. The dean and Mrs. Manning-tree, although ignorant of McPhail's habits, agreed in calling him a lazy hound and a parasite on their faun sister-in-law, and they were right. But Mrs. Trevor turned a deaf ear to their slanders. They were unworthy typical Christian men, let alone ministers of the gospel. Were it not for the sacred associations of her father and her husband, she would never enter the cathedral again. Mr. McPhail was exactly the kind of tutor that Marmaduke needed. Mr. McPhail did not encourage him to play rough games or take long walks or row on the river, because he appreciated his constitutional delicacy. He was the only man in the world during her unhappy widowhood who understood Marmaduke he was a treasure beyond price. When Doggie was sixteen, fate, fortune, chance, or whatever you like to call it, did him a good turn. It made his mother ill, and sent him away with her to foreign health resorts. Doggie and McPhail travelled luxuriously, lived in luxurious hotels, and visited in luxuries, various picture galleries and monuments of historic or aesthetic interest. The boy, artistically inclined and guided by the idol yet well-informed Phineas, profited greatly. Phineas sought profit to them both in other ways. Mrs. Trevor said he, don't rethink it a sinful shame for Marmaduke to waste his time over Latin and mathematics and such thing as he can learn at home, instead of taking advantage of his residence in a foreign country to perfect himself in the idiomatic and conversational use of the language. Mrs. Trevor, as usual, agreed. So thanks-forward whenever they were abroad, which was for three or four months of each year, Phineas reveled in sheer idleness, nicotine, and the skillful consumption of alcohol, while highly-paid professors taught Marmaduke and incidentally himself French and Italian. Of the world, however, and of the facts, grim or seductive of life, Doggie learned little. Whether by force of some streak of honesty, whether through sheer laziness, whether through canny self-interest, Phineas McPhail conspired with Mrs. Trevor to keep Doggie in darkest ignorance. His reading was selected like that of a young girl in a convent. He was taken only to the most innocent of plays. Foreign theatres, casinos, and such like wells of delectable depravity existed almost beyond his ken. Until it was twenty it never occurred to him to sit up after his mother had gone to bed. Of strange goddesses he knew nothing. His mother sorted that. He had a mild affection for his cousin Peggy, which his mother encouraged. She allowed him to smoke cigarettes, drink fine merit, the remains of the cellar of her father, the bishop, her connoisseur, and creme de morth. And until she died, that was all poor Doggie knew of the lustiness of life. Mrs. Trevor died, and Doggie, as soon as he had recovered from the intensity of his grief, looked out upon a lonely world. Phineas, like Mrs. McCorba, swore he would never desert him. In the perils of perler exploration or the comforts of Demby Hall, he would find Phineas McFail ever by his side. The first half-dozen or so of these declarations consoled Doggie tremendously. He dreaded the church swallowing up his only protector and leaving him defenseless. Conscientiously, however, he said, I don't want your affection for me to stand in your way, sir. Sir! cried Phineas. Is it not practicable for us to be away with the old relations of master and pupil and becomeers' brothers? You are an hour man and independent. Let us be Phileides and Orestes. Let us share and share alike. Let us be Mamadouk and Phineas." Doggie was touched by such devotion. Put your ambitions to take holy orders which you have sacrificed for my sake. I think it may be argued, sir Phineas, that the really beautiful life is delight in continued sacrifice. Besides my dear boy, I'm not quite so sure as I was when I was young that by confining oneself within the narrow limits of a saccadotal profession one can retain all one's wider sympathies both with human infirmity and the latter things of existence. You are a true friend, Phineas, said Doggie. I am," replied Phineas. It was just after this that Doggie wrote him a check for a thousand pounds on account of a vaguely indicated year's salary. If Phineas had maintained the widely caution which he had exercised for the past seven years, all might have been well. But there came a time when, unneedfully, he declared once more that he would never desert Mamadouk, and declared it hiccups so horribly and stared so lastly that Doggie feared he might be ill. He had just lurched into Doggie's own peacock-blue and ivory sitting-room when he was mournfully playing the piano. You are unwell, Phineas. Let me get you something. You are right, laddie," Phineas agreed, his legs giving way alarmingly, so that he collapsed on a brocade covered of couch. It's a touch of the sun which I would give you to understand," he continued with a self-preservatory flash for what was an overcast today in June, is often magnified in power when it is behind a cloud. A weedrop of whiskey is what I require for a complete recovery. Doggie ran into the dining-room and returned with a recanter of whiskey, glass, and siphon, and adjunct to the side-board since Mrs. Trevor's death. Phineas filled half the tumbler with spirit, tossed it off, smiled fantastically, tried to rise, and rolled upon the carpet. Doggie frightened, rang the bell. Peddle, the ill-butler, appeared. Mr. McFailey's ill. I can't think what could be the matter with him. Peddle looked at the happy Phineas with the eyes of experience. If you will allow me to say so, sir," said he, the gentleman is dead drunk. And that was the beginning of the end of Phineas. He lost grip of himself. He became the scarlet scandal of Dirtlebury and the terror of Doggie's life. The dean came to the rescue of a greatful nephew, a swift attack of delirium entremens, crowned, and ended Phineas McFail's Dirtlebury career. "'My boy,' said the dean, on the day of Phineas's expulsion, "'I don't want to rub it in unduly, but I've warned your poor mother for years, and you for months against this bone-idle, worthless fellow. Neither of you would listen to me. But you see that I was right. Perhaps now you may be more inclined to take my advice.' "'Yes, uncle,' replied Doggie, submissively. The dean, a comfortable, florid man in the early sixties, took up his parable and expounded it for three quarters of an hour. If every young man heard that which was earnestly meant for his welfare, Doggie heard it from his very reverent uncle's lips. "'And now, my dear boy,' said the dean, by way of peroration, "'you cannot but understand that it is your bounden duty to apply yourself to some serious purpose in life.' "'I do,' said Doggie. "'I've been thinking over it for a long time. I'm going to gather material for a history of wallpapers.'" CHAPTER II Thenceforward Doggie, like the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's fellow-millions, lived alone. He did not complain. There was little to complain about. He owned a pleasant old house set in fifteen acres of grounds. He had an income of three thousand pounds a year. Old pedal, the butler, and his wife, the housekeeper, saved him from domestic cares. Rising late and retiring early, like the good king of Yivetot, he cheated the hours that might have proved weary. His meals, his toilets, his music, his wallpapers, his drawing, and embroidering, specimens of the last he exhibited with great success at various shows held by arts and craftskills, in such-like high and artistic fellowships. His sweet peas, his chrysanthemums, his postage stamps, his dilettante reading, and his mild social engagements filled most satisfyingly the hours not claimed by Slumber. Now and then appointments with his tailor summoned him to London. He stayed at the same mildewed old family hotel in the neighbourhood of Bond Street, of which his mother and his grandfather, the bishop, had stayed for uncountable years. Here he would lunch and dine stodgily in musty state. In the evenings he would go to the plays discussed in the less giddy of Dirtlebury ecclesiastical circles. The play over, it never occurred to him to do otherwise than drive decorously back to Sturrocks' hotel. Suppers at the Carlton or the Savoy were outside his sphere of thought or opportunity. His only acquaintance in London were vague, elderly, female friends of his mother, who invited him to Chile's semi-suburban teas and entertained him with tippid reminiscence and criticism of their diverse places of worship. The days in London thus passed drearily, and Doggy was always glad to get home again. In Dirtlebury he began to feel himself appreciated. The sleepy society of the play accepted him as a young man of unquestionable birth and irreproachable morals. He could play the harp, the piano, the viola, the flute, and the clarinet and sing a very true mild tenor. As secretary of the Dirtlebury Musical Association he filled an important position in the town. Dr. Flint, Joshua Flint, and was a doc, organist of the cathedral, scattered broadcast golden opinions of Doggy. There was once a concert of old English music which the dramatic critics of the great newspapers attended, and one of them mentioned Doggy, Mr. Mambukut Trevor, who played the viola to Gamber, as to the manor-born. Doggy cut out the notice, framed it, and stuck it up in his peacock and ivory sitting-room. Besides music, Doggy had other social accomplishments. He could dance. He could escort young ladies home of nights. Not a dragon in Dirtlebury would not have trusted Doggy with untold daughters. With women, old and young, he had no shynesses. He had been bred among them, understood their purely feminine interests, and instinctively took their point of view. On his visits to London he could be entrusted with commissions. He could choose the exact shade of silk for a drawing-room sofa-cushion, and had an airy taste in the selection of wedding-presence. Young men, other than budding the ecclesiastical dignitaries, were rare in Dirtlebury, and Doggy had little to fear from the competition of Corsa masculine natures. In a word, Doggy was popular. Although of no mean or revengeful nature, he was human enough to feel a little malicious satisfaction when it was proved to Dirtlebury that Oliver had gone to the devil. His aunt Sarah, Mrs. Manningtree, had died midway in the Phineas Macphail period. Mr. Manningtree, a year or so later, had accepted a living in the north of England, and died when Doggy was about four and twenty. Meanwhile Oliver, who had been withdrawn young from Rugby, where he had been a thorn in the side of the authorities, and had been pinned like a cock-chaffer to a desk in a family counting-house in Lothbury, E.C., had broken loose, quarrelled with his father, gone off with paternal malediction and a maternal heritage of a thousand pounds, to California, and was lost to the family Ken. When a man does not write to his family, what explanation can there be saved that he is ashamed to do so? Oliver was ashamed of himself. He had taken to desperate courses. He was an outlaw. He had gone to the devil. His name was rarely mentioned in Dirtlebury, to Mama Biggie Trevor's very great and cat-like satisfaction. Only to the deems' ripe and kindly wisdom was his name not utterly anathema. "'My dear,' said he, once to his wife, who was deploring her nephew's character and face, "'I have hopes of Oliver even yet. A man must have something of the devil in him if he wants to drive the devil out.' Mrs. Conover was shocked. "'My dear, Edward,' she cried. "'My dear Sophia,' said he, with a twinkle in his mild-blue eyes, that had puzzled her from the day when he first put a decorous arm round her waist, "'My dear Sophia, if you knew what a ding-dong scrap of fiends went on inside me before I could bring myself to vow to be a virtuous milk-and-water person, your hair, which is as long and beautiful as ever, would stand up straight on end.' "'Mrs. Conover sighed. "'I give you up. It's too late,' said the dean. The manning-trees, father and mother and son were gone. Doggy bore the triple loss with equanimity. Then Peggy Conover, hitherto under the tips of boarding schools, finishing schools, and foreign travel, swam at the age of twenty within his orbit. When first they met, after a year's absence, she very gracefully withered the symptoms of the cousinly kiss to which they had been accustomed all their lives, by stretching out a long, frank, and defensive arm. Perhaps if she had allowed the salute there would have been an end of the matter. But there came the phenomenon which, unless she was a minx of craft and subtlety, she did not anticipate. For the first time in his life he was possessed of a crazy desire to kiss her. Doggy fell in love. It was not a wild, consuming passion. He slept well, he ate well, and he played the flute without a sign causing him to blow discordantly into the holes of the instrument. Peggy, vying that she would not marry a parson, he had no rivals. He knew not even the pinpricks of jealousy. Peggy liked him. But first she delighted in him as in a new and animated toy. She could pull strings and the figure worked amazingly and amusingly. He proved himself to be a useful toy, too. He was at her beck all day long. He ran on errands, he fetched, and carried. Peggy realized blissfully that she owned him. He haunted the deanery. One evening after dinner the dean said, I'm going to play the heavy father. How are things between you and Peggy? Marmaduke had taken unawares, reddened violently. He murmured, but he didn't know. You ought to, said the dean, when a young man converts himself into a girl's shadow, even though he is her cousin and has been brought up with her from childhood, people begin to gossip. They gossip even within the august precincts of a stately cathedral. I'm very sorry, said Marmaduke. I've had the very best intentions. The dean smiled. What were they? To make her like me a little, replied Marmaduke. Then, feeling that the dean was kindly disposed, he blurted out awkwardly, I hope that one day I might ask her to marry me. That's what I wanted to know, said the dean. You haven't done it yet? No, said Marmaduke. Why don't you? It seems taking such a liberty, replied Marmaduke. The dean laughed. Well, I'm not going to do it for you. My chief desire is to regularise the present situation. I can't have you two running about together all day and every day. If you like to ask Peggy, you have my permission and her mother's. Thank you, Uncle Edward, said Marmaduke. Let us join the ladies, said the dean. In the drawing-room the dean exchanged glances with his wife. She saw that he'd done as he'd been bitten. Marmaduke was not an ideal husband for a brisk, pleasure-loving, modern young woman. But where was another husband to come from? Peggy had banned the church. Marmaduke was wealthy, sound in health, and free from vice. It was obvious to maternalise that he was in love with Peggy. According to the dean, if he wasn't, he oughtn't to be forever at her heels. The young woman herself seemed to take considerable pleasure in his company. If she cared nothing for him, she was acting in a reprehensible manner. So the dean had been deputed to sound Marmaduke. Half an hour later the young people were left alone. First the dean went to his study. Then Mrs. Conover departed to write letters. Marmaduke, advancing across the room from the door which he'd opened, met Peggy's mocking eyes as she stood on the path-rug with her hands behind her back. Doggy felt very uncomfortable. Never had he said a word to her in betrayal of his feelings. He had a vague idea that propriety required a young man to get through some wooing before asking a girl to marry him. To ask first and woo afterwards seemed putting the cart before the horse. But how to woo that remarkably cool and collected young person standing there past his wit? Well, she said, the dear old bird seemed very fussy tonight. What's the matter? As he said nothing but stood confused with his hands in his pockets, she went on, you too seem rather ruffled. Look at your hair! Doggy, turning to a mirror, perceived that an agitated hand had disturbed the symmetry of his sleek black hair, brushed without a parting away from the forehead over his head. Hacently he smoothed down the cockatoo-like crest. I've been talking to your father, Peggy. Have you really?" she said with a laugh. Robert, who summoned his courage. He told me I might ask you to marry me, he said. Do you want to? Of course I do, he did say. Then why not do it? But before he could answer, she clapped her hands on his shoulders and shook him and laughed out loud. Oh, you dear silly old thing, what a way to propose to a girl. I've never done such a thing before," said Doggy, as soon as he was released. She resumed her attitude on the hearth-rug. I've been no great hurry to be married, are you? He said, I don't know. I've never thought of it, just whenever you like. All right, she returned calmly. Let it be a year hence. Meanwhile we can be engaged. It'll please the dear old birds. I know all the tabbies in the town have been mewing about us. Now they can mew about somebody else. That's awfully good of you, Piggy, said Marmaduke. I'll go up to town tomorrow and get you the jolliest ring you ever saw." She sketched him a curtsy. That's one thing at any rate. I can trust you in your taste in jewellery. He moved nearer to her. I suppose you know, Piggy dear, I've been awfully fond of you for quite a long time. The feeling is more or less reciprocated, she replied slightly. Then you can kiss me if you like. I'll show you, it's quite usual." He kissed her somewhat shyly on the lips. She whispered, I do think I care for you, old thing. Marmaduke replied sententiously, You have made me a very happy man. Then they sat down side by side on the sofa, and for all Piggy's mocking audacity they could find nothing in particular to say to each other. Let us play patience, she said at last. And when Mrs. Conover appeared a while later, she found them pouring over the car to a state of unruffled calm. Piggy looked up, smiled, and nodded. We fixed it up, Mummy, but were not going to be married for a year. Doggy went home that evening in a tepid glow. It contented him. He thought himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as it had such a frost in the cool, ironical atmosphere which the girl had created around her. But Doggy was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity to doubt him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading Manon Lescours. He bought a cheap copy haphazard. And taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it. It's like reading about a lunatic, replied the bewildered Doggy. Do such people as degrue exist? I, laddie, replied McPhail, greatly relieved. Your acumen has pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It's just a silly, rotten book. I'm glad you're of the same opinion as myself, said Doggy, and thought no more of the absurd but deathless pair of lovers. The unprincipled McPhail, not without porky humour, immediately gave him Paul Averginie, which Doggy, after reading it, thought the truest and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his intelligence had ripened and his fear of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Apollo as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery. But having no more relation to real life as is lived by human beings than the blood last of the half-man, half-bull minotaur or the uncomfortable riding conversation of the Valkyrie. So Doggy Trevor went home, perfectly contented with himself, with Peggy Conover, with his uncle and aunt of whom hitherto have been just a little bit afraid, with fortune, with fate, with his house, with his peacock and ivory room, with a great clump of type-script and a mass of coloured proof-prints which represented a third of his projected history of wall-papers, with his feather-bed, with Goliath, his almost microscopic Belgian griffon, with a set of Nile-green silk underwear that had just come from his outfitters in London, with his new Rolls-Royce car and his new chauffeur, Briggins. Paranthetically it may be remarked that a seven-hour excursion in this vehicle, youth in the back seat and Briggins at the helm, all ordained by Peggy, have been the final cause of the evening's explanations. Both of the starry heavens above, with the well-ordered earth beneath him, and with all human beings on the earth, including Germans, Turks, Infidels and heretics, all save one. And that, as he learned from a letter delivered by the last post, was a callous, heartless, London manicurist who, giving no reasons, regretted that she would be unable to pay her usual weekly visit to Dirtlebury on the morrow. Of all days in the year, just when it was essential that he should look his best. What the deuce am I going to do? he cried, pitching the letter into the waste-paper-masket. He sat down to the piano in the peacock and ivory-rub, and tried to play the nasty crumpled rose-leaf of a manicurist out of his mind. Suddenly he remembered, with a kind of shock, that he pledged himself to go up to London the next day to buy an engagement-ring. So after all the manicurist's affection did not matter. All was again well with the world. Then he went to bed, and slept the sleep of the just and perfect man, living the just and perfect life in a just and perfect universe. And the date of this happening was the fifteenth day of July, and the year of grace one thousand nine hundred and fourteen. End of chapter two. Chapter three of The Rough Road by William John Locke. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers. Chapter three. The shadow cast by the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the end of the denary garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the afternoon sun, and divided the old red brick wall into a vivid contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No outside convulsions could ever cause a flutter of her calm wings. As it was thirty years ago, when the dean first came to Dirtlebury, as it was three hundred, six hundred years ago, so it was now, and so it would be hundreds of years hence, as long as that majestic pile housing the spirit of God should last. Thus thought, thus in some such words proclaimed the dean, sitting in the shade with his hands clasped behind his head. The tea was over. Mrs. Conover, thin and faded, still sat by the little table, wondering whether she might now blow out the lamp beneath the silver kettle. Sir Archibald Bruce, a neighbouring land-owner, and his wife had come, bringing their daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already started on the court some little distance off, the players being Dorothy, Peggy, and a couple of athletic flannel-clad Parsons. Armaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey shirt, socks and tie, and grey suede shoes. He had a weak, good-looking little face, and a little black moustache turned up at the ends. He was just crossing to his neighbour on Palestrina. The dean's proclamation had been elicited by some remark of Sir Archibald. "'Abanda, you've stuck it for so long,' said the latter. He'd been a soldier in his youth, and an explorer, and had shot a bigger game. "'I haven't your genius, my dear Bruce, for making myself uncomfortable,' replied the dean. "'You were energetic enough when you first came here,' said Sir Archibald. "'We all thought you a desperate fellow who was going to rebuild the cathedral, turn that close into industrial dwellings, and generally play the juice.' The dean sighed, pleasantly. He had a snowy hair, and a genial, florid, clean shave and face. "'I was appointed very young, six and thirty, and I thought I could fight against the centuries. As the years went on, I found I couldn't. The grey changelessness of things got hold of me, incorporated me into them. When I die, for I hope I shan't have to resign through doddering synodity, my body will be buried there,' he joked his head slightly towards the cathedral, and my dust will become part and parcel of the fabric, like that of many of my predecessors. "'That's all very well,' said Sir Archibald, but the ought to have caught you before this petrification set in and made you a bishop.' It was somewhat of an old argument, for the two were intimates.' The dean smiled and shook his head. "'You know I declined.' "'After you had become petrified.' "'Perhaps, though, it is not a place where ambitions can attain a ratas' growth.' "'I called it a rotten place,' said the elderly worldling. "'I wouldn't live in it myself for twenty thousand a year.' "'Lots like you said the same in crusading times. It's a guide of chevony, for instance, who was the lord, perhaps, of your very manner, and an amazing fire-eater. But see the gentle irony of it. There his bones lie, at peace for ever, in the rotten place, with the effigy over them crossed-legged and his dog at his feet and his wife by his side. I think he must sometimes look out of heaven's gate down on the cathedral and feel glad, grateful, perhaps a bit wistful, in the attribution of wistfulness, which implies regret to a spirit in paradise doesn't savor of heresy.' "'I'm going to be cremated,' interrupted Sir Archibald, twirling his white moustache. The dean smiled and did not take up the cue. The talk died. It was a drowsy day. The dean went off into a little reverie. Perhaps his old friend's reproach was just. Dean of a gate for the cathedral at thirty-six. He had the world of dioceses at his feet. Had he used to the fool the brilliant talents with which he started? He'd been a good dean, a capable business-like dean. There was not a stone of the cathedral that he did not know and cherish. Under his care the stability of every part of the precious fabric had been assured for a hundred years. Its financial position, desperate on his appointment, was now sound. He had come into a scene of petty discords and jealuses. For many years there had been a no more united chapter in any cathedral close in England. As an administrator he'd been a success. The devotion of his life to the cathedral had its roots deep in spiritual things. For the greater glory of God had the vast edifice been erected, and for the greater glory of God had he its guardian reverently seen to its preservation and perfect appointment. Would he have served God better by pursuing the ambitions of youth? He could have had his bishopric, but he knew that the choice played between him and Chanways, a flaming spirit eager for power, who hadn't the sacred charge of a cathedral, and he declined. And now Chanways was a force in the church and the country and was making things hum. If he, conover, after fifteen years of Dirtlebury had accepted, he would have lost the power to make things hum. He would have made a very ordinary, painstaking bishop, and his successor at Dirtlebury might possibly have regarded that time-worn wonder of spiritual beauty merely as a stepping-stone to hire sacerdotal things. Such a man he considered, having once come under the holy glamour of the cathedral, would have been guilty of the unforgivable sin. He therefore saved two unfortunate situations. "'You are quite an intelligent man, Bruce,' he said, with a sudden whimsy-carity. But I don't think you would ever understand.' Rushed into the party in the shade. "'Mr. Petheridge and I have won six-three,' she announced. The old gentleman smiled, and murmured their congratulations. She swung to the tea-table some paces away, and plucked a marmaduke by the sleeve, interrupting him in the middle of an argument. He rose politely. "'Come and play.' "'My dear,' he said, "'I'm such a duffer at games. Never mind, you'll learn in time.' He drew out a grey silk handkerchief, as if ready to perspire out of the first thought of it. "'Tennis makes one so dreadfully hot,' said he. Peggy tapped the point of her foot irritably. But she laughed as she turned to Lady Bruce. "'What's so good of being engaged to a man if you can't play tennis with you? "'There are other things in life besides tennis, my dear,' replied Lady Bruce. "'But being aware that a pert answer turned it away pleasant invitations,' said nothing. She nodded and went off to her game, and, informing Mr. Petheridge that Lady Bruce was a platitude in his old tally, flirted with him up to the nice limits of his personical dignity. But marmaduke did not mind. "'Games are childish and somewhat barbaric. Don't you think so, Lady Bruce?' "'Most young people seem fond of them,' replied the lady. "'Exercise keeps them in health.' "'It all depends,' he argued. "'Often they get exceedingly hot, then they sit about and catch their death of cold.' "'That's very true,' said Lady Bruce. "'It's what I'm always telling Sir Archibald about golf. Early last week he caught a severe chill in that very way. I had to rub his chest with camphorated oil. "'Just as my poor dear mother used to do to me,' said marmaduke. They followed a conversation on ailments and their treatment in which Mrs. Conover joined. Marmaduke was quite happy. He knew that the two elderly ladies marred the soundness of his views and talked to him as to one of themselves. "'I'm sure, my dear marmaduke, you're very wise to take care of yourself,' said Lady Bruce, "'especially now when you have the responsibilities of married life before you.'" Marmaduke curled himself up comfortably in his chair. If he had been a cat he would have purred. The old butler, grown as grey in the service of the denary as the cathedral itself, he'd been a page and footman to Dr. Conover's predecessor, removed the tea-things and brought out a tray of glasses and lemonade, with ice clinking refreshingly against the sides of the jug. When the game was over the players came and drank and sat about the lawn. The shadow of the apps had spread over the garden to the steps of the porch. Anyone looking over the garden wall would have beheld a scene typical of the heart of England, a scene of peace, ease, and perfectly ordered comfort. The two well-built young men, one a minor canon, the other a curate, lounging in their flandels, clever-faced, honest-eyed, could have been bred nowhere but in English public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge. The two elderly ladies were of the fine flower of provincial England. The two old men, so different outwardly, one burly, florid, exquisitely ecclesiastical, the other thin, nervous, solidly, each was an expression of high English tradition. The two young girls, unerringly correct and dainty, for all their modern abandonment of attitude, pretty, flushed of cheek, frank of glance, were two of a hundred thousand flowers of girlhood that could have been picked that afternoon in lazy English gardens. And Marmaduke's impeccable grey costume struck a harmonising English note of Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade. The scent of the roses massed in delicate splendour against the wall, and breathing now that the cool shade had fallen on them, crept through the still air to the flying buttresses and the window-mullions and traceries and the pinnacles of the great English cathedral. And in the midst of the shaven lawn gleamed the old cut-glass jug on its silver tray. Someone did look over the wall and survey the scene. A man, apparent as porting himself with tense, straightened arms on the coping, a man with a lean, bronzed, clean shaven face, wearing an old soft felt hat at a swaggering angle, a man with a smile on his face and a humorous twinkle in his eyes. By chance he had leisure to survey the scene for some time unobserved. At last he shouted, Hello! Have none of you ever moved for the last ten years? At the summons everyone was startled. The young men scrambled to their feet. The dean rose and layered at the intruder, who sprang over the wall, recklessly broke through the rose-bushes and advanced with outstretched hands to meet him. Hello, Uncle Edward! Goodness gracious me, grothered dean, it's Oliver! Right first time, said the young man, gripping him by the head, you're not looking a day older. And Aunt Sophia! He straight up to Mrs. Conover and Kista. Do you know who he went on, holding her at arm's length and looking round at the astonished company? The last time I saw you all, you were doing just the same. I peeped over the wall just before I went away, just such a summer afternoon as this, and you were all sitting round, taking the same old lemonade out of the same old jug. And Lady Brute, you were here, and you, Sir Archibald. He shook hands with them rapidly. You haven't changed a bit, and you. Good Lord, is this Peggy? He put his hand on the dean's shoulder and pointed at the girl. That's Peggy, said the dean. You're the only thing that's grown. I used to get up with you on my shoulders all round the lawn. I suppose you remember. How do you do? Waiting for an answer, he kissed her soundly. He was all done with whirlwind suddenness, that Impestuous Young Man had scattered everyone's wits. All stared at him. Releasing Peggy. My holy aunt, he cried, there's another of them. It's Doggy. You were in the old picture, and I'm blessed if you weren't wearing the same beautiful gray suit. How do, Doggy? He gripped Doggy's hand. Doggy's lips grew white. I'm glad to welcome you back, Oliver, he said, but I would have you to know that my name is Marmaduke. It's going to be called Doggy myself, old chap, said Oliver. He stepped back, smiling at them all. A handsome devil may care for a tall, tough, and supple. His hands are the pockets of a sun-stained double-breasted blue-jacket. We're indeed glad to see you, my dear boy, said the dean, recovering equanimity. But what have you been doing all this time? Where on earth have you come from? I've just come from the South Seas, arrived in London last evening. This morning I thought I'd come and look you up. But if you had let us know you were coming, we should have met you at the station with the car. Where's your luggage? He jacked her hand. In the road, a man sitting on it. Oh, don't worry about him. He cried airily to the protesting dean. He's well-trained. He'll go on sitting on it all night. You've brought a man, a valet, asked Peggy. It seems so. Then you must be getting on. I don't think he's turned you out very well, said Doggy. You must really let one of the servants see about your things, Oliver, said Mrs. Conover, moving towards the porch. What will people say? He strode after her. I'm kissed her. Oh, you dear old Dirtle-Briant. Now I know I'm in England again. I haven't heard those words for years. Mrs. Conover's hospitable intentions were anticipated by the old butler, who advanced to meet them with the news that Sir Archibald's car had been brought round. As soon as he recognised Oliver, he started back. Matha Gap. Yes, it's me all right, Burford, laughed Oliver. How did I get here? I dropped from the moon. He shook hands with Burford of whose life he'd been the plague at your and his childhood, proclaimed him as hardy and unchanging as a gargoyle, and instructed him where to find man and luggage. The bruises and the two clerical tennis-players departed. Marbu Duke was for taking his leave, too. All his old loathing of Oliver had suddenly returned. His cousins took for everything he detested, swagger, arrogance, self-assurance. He hated the shabby rakishness of his attire, the self-assertive acrylime beak of a nose which he'd inherited from his father, the rector. He dreaded his aggressive masculinity. He'd come back with the same insulting speech on his lips. His fingernails were dreadful. Marbu Duke desired as little as possible of his odious company. But his aunt Sophia cried out, You'll surely dine with us tonight, Marbu Duke, to celebrate Oliver's return? And Oliver chimed in, Do, and don't worry about changing. As the doggy began to murmur excuses, I can't, I have no evening dogs. My old ones felt a bit when I was trying to put them on, on board the steamer, and I had to chuck them overboard. They turned up a shark who went for them. Now, don't you worry, you doggy old chap. You look as pretty as paint as you are, doesn't he, Peggy? Peggy, with a slight flush on her cheek, came to the rescue and linked her arm in Marbu Duke's. You haven't had time to learn everything yet, Oliver, but I think you ought to know that we are engaged. Holy jeez, that's so! My compliments! You swept them a low bow. God bless you, my children! Of course you'll take a dinner, said Peggy, and she looked at Oliver as who should say, Touch him at your peril, he belongs to me. So doggie had to yield. Mrs. Conniff went into the house to arrange for Oliver's comfort, and the others strolled round the garden. Oh, well, my boy, said the dean, so you're back in the old country? Turn up again like a bag-penny. The dean's kindly face glided. I hope you'll soon be able to find something to do. It's money I won't not work, said Oliver. Ah, said the dean, in a tone so thoughtful as just to suggest a lack of sympathy. Oliver looked over his shoulder. The dean and himself were preceding Marmaduke and Peggy on the trim gravel path. Do you care to lend me a few thousand, doggie? Certainly not, replied Marmaduke. There's family affection for you, Uncle Edward. I've come half-way round the earth to see him, and say, would you lend me a fiver? If you need it, said Marmaduke, in a dignified way, I should be very happy to advance you five pounds. Oliver brought the little party to a halt and burst into laughter. I believe you good people think I've come back broke to the world. The black sheep returning like a wolf to the fold. Only Peggy drew correct inference from the valet. Wait till you see him. As Peggy said, I've been getting on. He laid a light hand on the dean's shoulder. While all you folks in Dirtlebury, especially my dear doggie, for the last ten years have been dirtling, I've been doing. I've not come all this way to tap relations for five pound-eights. I'm swaggering into the city of London for capital, with a great big sea. Marmaduke twirled his little mustache. You've taken to company promoting, you marked acidly. I have. And a dam—I beg your pardon, Uncle Edward. We poor Pacific Islanders, lisp in dams for want of deans to hold us up. And a jolly good company, too. We—that's I and another man. That's all the company is yet. Newest company, you know—own a trading fleet. You own ships, cried Peggy. Rather, earn them, sell them, navigate them, stake them, clean out the boilers, sit on the safety vows when we want to make speed, do every old thing. And what did you trade in? asked the dean. Copper, vegetable, mother of pearl. Mother of pearl, how awfully romantic, cried Peggy. We've got a fishery—well, I didn't rate the concession. To work it properly, we require capital. That's why I'm here, to turn the concern into a limited company. And where is this wonderful place, asked the dean? Hohene. What a beautiful word. Isn't it, said Oliver, like the sigh of a girl in her sleep? The old dean shot a swift glance at his nephew, then took his arm and walked on, and looked at the vast mass of the cathedral and of the quiet English garden in its evening shadow. Copper, vegetable, mother of pearl, who are Hohene, he murmured. And these strange foreign things are the common places of your life. Peggy, a momma, do you lag behind a little? she pressed his arm. I'm so glad you're staying for dinner. I shouldn't like to think you were running away from him. I was only afraid of losing my temper and making a scene, replied Doggy with dignity. His man is our odious, said Peggy. You leave him to me. Suddenly the dean, taking a turn that brought him into the view of the port, stopped short. Goodness gracious! he cried. Who in the world is that? He pointed to a curious object slouching across the lawn, a short, hirsute man wearing a sailor's jersey and smoking a stump of a blackened pipe. His tuzzled head was bare. He had very long arms and great, powerful hands protruded at the end of long, sinewy wrists from inadequate sleeves. A pair of bright eyes shone out of his dark, shaggy face like a dandy dimmence. His nose was large and red. He rolled as he walked. Such a sight had never been seen before in the deanery garden. Oh, that's my man. Peggy's valet, said Oliver Herrely. His name is Chipmunk, beauty his name. Like master, like man, murmured Doggy. Oliver's quick ears caught the words intended only for Peggy. He smiled brightly. If you didn't want a compliment, you would pay me, Doggy. You wouldn't have said such a thing. The man, seeing the company's stare at him, halted, took his pipe out of his mouth and scratched his head. But forgive me, my dear Oliver, said the dean. No doubt he is an excellent fellow, but don't you think he might smoke his pipe somewhere else? Of course he might, said Oliver, and he jolly well shall. He put his hand to his mouth, sea fashion. There about thirty yards apart, and shouted, Here you, what the eternal blaze is you doing here? Please don't hurt the poor man's feelings, said the kindly dean. Oliver turned a blank look on his uncle. His what? Hey, got any? Not that kind of feelings. He proceeded. Now then, look lively, clear out, skidoo. The valet touched his forehead and salute, and Where am I to go to, Captain? Go to— Oliver checked himself in time, and turned to the dean. Where shall I tell him to go? He asked sweetly. The kitchen garden would be the best place, replied the dean. I think I better go and fix him up myself, said Oliver. A little conversation in his own language might be beneficial. But isn't he English? asked Peggy. Born and bred in whopping, said Oliver. He marched off across the lawn, and could they have heard it, the friendly talk that he had had with Chipmunk would have made the saint and the devines, and even the crusaders, a guide of chevony, who were buried in the cathedral, turn in their tombs. Doggy, watching the disappearing Chipmunk, Oliver's knuckles in his neck, said, I think it monstrous of Oliver to bring such a disreptable creature down here, said the dean. At any rate, it brings a certain excitement into our quiet surroundings. They must be having the time of their lives in the servants' hall, said Peggy. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 After breakfast the next morning, Doggy attired in a green shot silk dressing gown, entered his own particular room, and sat down to think. In its way it was a very beautiful room, high, spacious, well proportioned, facing southeast. The wallpaper which he had designed himself was ivory-white, with veinings of peacock blue. Into the ivory silk curtains were woven peacocks in full pride. The cushions were ivory and peacock blue. The chairs, the writing table, the couch, the bookcases, were pure chariton and hepple-white. Vellum bound books filled the cases. Doggy was very particular about his bindings. Delicate watercolours alone adorned the walls. On his neatly arranged writing table lay an ivory set, ink stand, pen tray, plotter, and calendar. Bits of old embroidery, harmonising with the peacock shades, were spread here and there. A pretty collection of 18th-century Italian ivory statuettes were grouped about the room. A spinette, inlaid with ebony and ivory, formed a centre for the arrangement of many other musical instruments, a vial, mandolin's gay with rubens, a theobo, flutes, and clarinets. Through the curtains, draped across an alcove, could be guessed the modern monstrosity of a grand piano. One tall closed cabinet was devoted to his collection of wallpapers. Another, open, two collection of little dogs in China, porcelain, flayancy, thousands of them. He got them through dealers from all over the world. He had the finest collection in existence, and maintained a friendly and learned correspondence with the other collector, an elderly, disillusioned Russian prince, who lived somewhere near Nijinshin of a Korod. On the spinette, and on the writing table, were great bowls of golden rayon d'or roses. Doggy sat down to think, and unwanted frown creased his brow. Several problems distracted him. The morning sun streaming into the room disclosed beyond doubt discolorations, stains, and streaks on the wallpaper. It would have to be renewed. Already he had decided to design something to take its place. But last night Peggy had declared her intention to turn this abode of bachelor comfort into the drawing-room, and to hand over to his personal use some other apartment, possibly the present drawing-room, which received all the blaze and glare of the afternoon sun. What should he do? Live in the soreness of discoloured wallpaper for another year, or go through the anxiety of artistic effort and manufacturer's stupidity and delay, to say nothing of the expense, only to have the whole thing scrapped before the wedding? Doggy had a foretaste of the dilemmas of matrimony. He had annoying suspicion that the trim and perfect life was difficult of attainment. Then, beandering through the swilderness of dubiety, ran thoughts of Oliver. Everyone seemed to have gone crazy over him. Uncle Edward and Aunt Sophia had hung on his lips while he lied unblushingly about his adventures. Even Peggy had listened open-eyed and open-mouthed when he had told a tale of shipwreck in the South Seas, how the schooner had been caught in some beastly wind, and the masts had been torn out of the rudder carried away, and how it had struck a reef, and how something had hit him on the head, and he knew no more till he woke up on a beach and found that the unspeakable chipmunk had swum with him for a week, or whatever the time was, until they got to land. If hulking, brainless adults like Oliver, thought Doggy, liked to fool around in schooners and typhoons, they must take the consequence of his. There was nothing to brag about. The higherman was the intellectual, the aesthetic, the artistic being. What did Oliver know of Lydian Modes, or Louis Therese's decoration, or Aztec's clay dogs? Nothing. He couldn't even keep his socks from sloughing about over his shoes. And there was Peggy all over the fellow, although before dinner she had said she couldn't bear the sight of him. Doggy was perturbed. On Biddy M. Good-night she had kissed him in the most perfunctory manner, merely the cousinly peck of a dozen years ago, and had given no thought to the fact that he was driving home in an open car without an overcoat. He'd felt distinctly chilly on his arrival, and had taken dose of ammoniated quinine. Was Peggy's indifference a sign that she'd ceased to care for him, that she was attracted by the buccaneering Oliver? Now, I suppose the engagement was broken off. He would be free to do as he chose with the redecoration of the room. But suppose, as he sincerely and devoutly hoped, it wasn't. Dilemma on Dilemma. Added to all this, Goliath, the miniature Belgian griffin, having probably overeaten himself, had complicated pains inside, and the callous vet could or would not come round till the evening. In the meantime, Goliath might die. He was at this point of his reflections went to his horror he heard a familiar voice outside the door. All right, pedal, don't worry, I'll show myself in. Look after that man of mine. Quite easy, give him some beer in a bucket and leave him to it. Then the door burst open, and Oliver, piping mouth and hat on one side, came into the room. Hello, Doggy, thought I'd look you up. Hope I'm not disturbing you. Not at all, said Doggy. Do sit down. But Oliver walked about and looked at things. I like your watercolours. Did you go let them be yourself? Yes. I congratulate you on your taste. This is a beauty. Who's it by? The appreciation brought Doggy at once to his side. Oliver, the connoisseur, was showing himself in a new and agreeable light. Doggy took him delightfully round the pictures, expounding their merits and their little histories. He found that Oliver, although unlearned, had a true sense of light and colour and tone. He was just beginning to like him when the tactless fellow, stopping before the collection of little dogs, spoiled everything. My, holy aunt! he cried, an obdication which Doggy had abhorred from boyhood, and he doubled with laughter in his horrid schoolboy fashion. My dear Doggy, is that your family? How many litters? It's the finest collection of the kind in the world, replied Doggy stiffly, and is worth several thousand pounds. Oliver heaved himself into a chair. That was Doggy's impression of his method of sitting down, a Sheraton chair with delicate arms and legs. Forgive me, he said, but you're such a funny devil. Doggy gaped. The conception of himself as a funny devil was new. Pictures and music, I can understand, but Puth juices the point of these damn little dogs. But Doggy was hurt. It would be useless to try to explain, said he. Oliver took off his hat and said it's skimming onto the couch. Look here, old chap, he said, I seem to put my foot into it again. I didn't mean to, really. Peggy gave me hell this morning for not treating you as a man and a brother, and I came round to try to put things right. It's very considerate of Peggy, I'm sure, said Marmaduke. Now, look here, old Doggy. I told you when we first met yesterday that I vehemently objected to being called Doggy. But why? asked Oliver. I made inquiries, and find that all your pals—I haven't any pals, as you call them. Well, all our male contemporaries in the place who have the honour of your acquaintance, they all call you Doggy and you don't seem to mind. I do mind, replied Marmaduke angrily, but as I avoid their company as much as possible it doesn't very much matter. Oliver stretched out his legs and put his hands behind his back, then wriggled to his feast. What a beast of a chair! Anyhow, he went on puffing at his pipe. Don't let us quarrel. I'll call you Marmaduke if you like when I can remember. It's a beast of a name, like the chair. I'm a rough sort of chap. I've had ten years, pretty rough training. I've slept on boards, I've slept in the open without a cent to hire a board. I've gone cold, and I've gone hungry, and men have knocked me about, I've not men about, and I've lost the dirtlebury sense of social values. In the wilds, if a man once gets the name, say, of Duck Eye Joe, it sticks to him, and he accepts it, and answers for it, and signs Duck Eye Joe on an IAU, and honours the signature. But I'm not in the wilds, says Marmaduke, and haven't the slightest intention of ever leading the unnatural and frightful life you describe. So what you say doesn't apply to me. Right so replied Oliver. That wasn't the moral of my discourse. The habit of mind ingested in the wilds applies to me. Just as I could never think of Duck Eye Joe as George Wilkinson, so you, James Marmaduke Trevor, will live imperishably in my mind as doggy. I was making a sort of apology old chap for my habit of mind. If it is an apology, said Marmaduke. Oliver, laughing, clapped him boisterously on the shoulder. Oh, you solemn comic cuss! He strode to a rose-bowl and knocked the ashes of his pipe into the water. Doggy trembled as he might next squirt tobacco juice over the ivory curtains. You don't give a fellow a chance. Look here. Tell me, as man to man, what are you going to do with your life? I don't mean it in the hybrid sense of people who live in unsuccessful plays and garden cities, but in the ordinary common sense way of the world. Here you are, young, strong, educated, intelligent. Oh, shucks! A month's exercise would make you as strong as a mule. Here you are. What the blazes are you going to do with yourself? I don't admit that you have any right to question me, said Doggy, lighting a cigarette. Peggy has given it to me. We had a heart-to-heart talk this morning, I assure you. She called me a swaggering, hectoring barbarian. So I told her what I'd do. I said I'd come here and squeak like a little mouse and eat out of your hand. I also said I'd take you out with me to the islands and give you a taste for fresh air and saltwater and exercise. I'll teach you how to sail a schooner and how to go about barefoot and swab decks. It's a life for a man out there, I tell you. If you've nothing better to do than living here snug like a flea on a log's back until you get married, you'd better come. Doggy smiled pittingly, but said politely, Your offer is very kind, Oliver, but I don't think that kind of life would suit me. Oh, yes it would, said Oliver, who would make you healthy, wealthy, if you took a fancy to put some money into the palfishery, and wise. I'd show you the world, make a man of you, for Peggy's sake, and teach you how men talk to each other in a gale of wind. The door opened, and Peddle appeared. I beg your pardon, Mr. Oliver, but your man. Yes, what about him? Is he misbehaving himself, kissing the maids? No, sir, said Peddle, but none of them could get on with their work. He has drunk two quart jugs of beer and wants a third. Well, give it to him. I shouldn't like to see the man intoxicated, sir, said Peddle. You couldn't, no one has, or ever will. He's also, uh, standing on his head, sir, in the middle of the kitchen table. You just try to do it, Peddle, especially after two quarts of beer. He's showing his gratitude, Portia, just like the juggler of Notre Dame in the story. And I'm sure of what he's enjoying themselves. The maids are nearly in hysterics, sir. But they're quite happy. Too happy, sir. Lord, cried Oliver, what a lot of stuffy owls you are! What do you want me to do? What would you like me to do, doggie? Is your eyes? I don't know, said doggie. I've had nothing to do with such people. Perhaps you might go and speak to him? No, I won't do that. I'll tell you what, Peddle, said Oliver Brightley. You lure him out into the stable yard with a great hunk of pie. He abdores pie, and then into sit there and eat it till I come. Tell him I said so. I'll see what can be done, sir, said Peddle. I don't mean to be inhospitable, said doggie, after the butler had gone. But why do you take this extraordinary person about with you? I wanted him to see Dirtlebury, and Dirtlebury to see him. Do it good, replied Oliver. Now, what about my proposition? Out there, of course, you'll be my guest. Put yourself in charge of Chipmunk and me for eight months, and you'll never regret it. What Chipmunk doesn't know about ships and drink and hard living isn't knowledge. We'll let you down easy, treat you kindly, word of honour. Doggie, being a man of intelligence, realised that Oliver's offer arose from a genuine desire to do him some kind of service. But if a friendly bull out of the fullness of its affection invited you to accompany him to the meadow and eat grass, what could you do but curtest it incline the invitation? This is what doggie did. After a further attempt of persuasion, Oliver grew impatient, and, picking up his hat, stuck it on the side of his head. He was a simple-natured, impassive man. Peggy's spirited attack caused him to realise that he had treated doggie with unprovoked rudeness, but then doggie was such a little worm. Suddenly the great scheme for doggie's regeneration had entered his head, and generously he had rushed to begin to put it into execution. The pair were his blood relations after all. He saw his way to doing them a good turn. Peggy, with all her go, exempted by the man whom she had gone for him, was worth the trouble he proposed to take with doggie. It really was a handsome offer. Most fellows would have jumped at the prospect of being shown round the islands with an old hand who knew the whole thing backwards from company promoting to beach-coming. He had not expected such a point-blank, bland refusal. It made him angry. I'm really most obliged to you, Oliver, said doggie, finally. But our ideals are so entirely different. You're primitive, you know. You seem to find your happiness in defying the elements, whereas I find mine in adopting the resources of civilisation to circumvent them. He smiled, pleased with his little epigram. Which means, said Oliver, that you're afraid to roughen your hands and spoil your complexion. If you put it in that way, symbolically— Oh, symbolically be hanged! cried Oliver, losing his temper. You're an effeminate little rotter, and I'm through with you. Go on and wag your tail and sit up and beg for biscuits. A stop! shouted doggie, with sudden anger which shook him from head to foot. He marched to the door, his green silk dressing-gown flapping round his legs, and threw it wide open. This is my house. I'm sorry to have to ask you to get out of it. Oliver looked intently for a few seconds into the flaming little dark eyes. Then he said gravely. I'm a beast who said that. I take it all back. Goodbye. Good day to you, the doggie. When the door was shut, he went and threw himself shaken on the couch, hating Oliver on all his works more than ever. Go about barefoot and swabbed decks. It was bedlam madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at such martyrdom, it was intolerable. Doggie stayed away from the denery all that day. On the morrow he heard, to his relief, that Oliver had returned to London with the unedifying chipmunk. He took Peggy for a drive in the Warhol's Royce, and told her of Oliver's high-handed methods. She sympathised. She said, however, Oliver's a rough diamond. He's one of nature's non-gentlemen, said Doggie. She laughed and patted his arm. Clever lad, she said. So Doggie's wounded vanity was healed. He confided to her some of his difficulties as to the peacock and ivory room. Bear with the old paper for my sake, she said. It's something you can do for me. In the meanwhile, you and I can put our heads together, and design a topping scheme of decoration. It's not too early to start in right now, but it'll take months and months to get the house just as we want. You're the best girl in the world, said Doggie, and the way you understand me is simply wonderful. Dear old thing, smile, Peggy, you're no great conundrum. Happiness once more settled on Doggie Trevor. For the next two or three days, he and Peggy tackled the serious problem of the reorganisation of Denby Hall. Peggy had the large ideas of a limited, though acute, brain stimulated by social ambitions. When she became mistress of Denby Hall, she intended to reverse the invisible boundary that included it in Dirtlebury, and he excluded it from the county. It was to be county, of the fine inner arcanum of county, and only Dirtlebury by the grace of Peggy Trevor. No Dirtling, as Oliver called it, for her. Denby Hall was going to be the very latest thing of September 1915, when she proposed, the honeymoon concluded, to take smart and startling possession. Lots of Mrs. Trevor's rotten old stuffy furniture would have to go. Marmaduke would have to revolutionise his habits. As she would have all kinds of jolly people down to stay, additions must be made to the house. Within a week after her engagement, she devised all the improvements. Marmaduke's room, with a great bay thrown out, would be the drawing-room. The present drawing-room, nucleus of a new wing, would be a dancing-room with parquet flooring. When not used for tangos and the fashionable negroid dances, it would be called the morning-room. Beyond that, there would be a billiard-room. Above this first floor, there could easily be built a series of guest chambers. As for Marmaduke's library or study or den, any old room would do. There were a couple of bedrooms overlooking the stable yard, which, thrown into one, would do beautifully. With feminine tact, she dangled these splendours before Doggie's infatuated eyes, instinctively choosing the opportunity of his gratitude for soothing treatment. Doggie telegraphed for Sir Owen Julius R.A. Surveyor to the Cathedral, the only architect of his acquaintance. The great man sent his partner, Plain John Fox, who undertook to prepare a design. Mr. Fox came down to Durlebury on the 28th of July. There had been a lot of silly talk in the newspapers about Austria and Serbia, to which Doggie had given little heed. There was always trouble in the Balkan State. Recently they had gone to war. It had left Doggie quite cold. They were all merry widow irresponsible people. They dressed in queer uniforms and picturesque costumes, and thought themselves tremendously important, and were always squabbling among themselves, and would go on doing it till the day of doom. Now there was Morfas. He read in the morning-posts that Sir Herbert Gray had proposed a conference of the great powers. Only sensible thing to do, thought Doggie. He dismissed the trivial matter from his mind. On the morning of the 29th he learned that Austria had to declare war on Serbia. Still, what did it matter? Doggie had held aloof from politics. He regarded them as somewhat vulgar. Conservative by caste, he had once, when the opportunity was almost forced on him, voted for the Conservative candidate of the constituency. European politics on the grand scale did not arouse his interest at all. England, save as the wise mentor, had nothing to do with them. Still, if Russia fought, France would have to join her ally. It was not till he went to the denary that he began to contemplate the possibility of a general European war. For the next day or two he read his newspapers very carefully. On Saturday, the 1st of August, Oliver suddenly reappeared, proposing to stay over the bank holiday. He brought news and rumours of war from the great city. He had found money very tight, capital with a big sea impossible to obtain. Everyone told him to come back when the present European cloud had blown over. In the opinion of the dutritious, it would not blow over. There was going to be war, and England could not stay out of it. The Sunday morning papers confirmed all he said. Germany had declared war on Russia. France was involved. Would Great Britain come in, or forever lose her honour? That warm, beautiful Sunday afternoon, they sat on the peaceful lawn under the shadow of the great cathedral. Burford brought out the tea-tree, and Mrs. Conover poured out tea. Sir Archibald and Lady Bruce and their daughter Dorothy were there. Doggy, impeccable in dark purple. Nothing clouded the centuries-old serenity of the place. Yet they asked the question that was asked on every quiet lawn, every little scrap of shaded garden throughout the land that day. Would England go to war? And if she came in, as come in she must, what would be the result? All had premonitions of strange shifting of destinies. As it was yesterday, so it was today in that gracious shrine of immutability. But everyone knew in his heart that, as it was today, so would it not be tomorrow. The very word, war, seemed of out of place as a suggestion of hell in paradise. Yet the throb of the war-drum came over the broad land of France, and over the sea, and half over England, and its echo fell upon the denary garden, flung by the flying buttresses and piers and towers of the great cathedral. On the morning of Wednesday, the fifth of August, it thundered all over the close. The ultimatum to Germany as to Belgium had expired the night before. We were at war. Thank God! said the dean of breakfast. We needn't cast down our eyes and slink by when we meet a Frenchman. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of The Rough Road by William John Locke This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers Chapter 5 The first thing that brought the seriousness of the war home to Doggie was a letter from John Fox. John Fox, a major in a territorial regiment, was mobilized. He regretted that he could not give his personal attention to the proposed alterations at Denby Hall. Should the plans be preceded with in his absence from the office, or would Mr. Travacare to wait till the end of the war, which from the nature of things could not last very long? Doggie trotted off to Peggy. She was greatly annoyed. What awful rot! she cried. Fox, a major of artillery! I just as soon trust you with a gun. Why doesn't he stick to his architecture? He'd be shot or something if he refused to go, said Doggie. But why can't we turn it over to Sir Owen Julius? That old archaeological fossil! Peggy, womanlike, forgot that they'd approached him in the first place. He'd never begin to understand what we want. Fox hinted as much. Now Fox is modern and up-to-date and sympathetic. If I can't have Fox, I won't have Sir Owen. Why, he's older than Dad, he's decrepit. Can't we get another architect? Do you think, dear, said Doggie, that in the circumstances it would be a nice thing to do? She flashed and lanced at him. She had woven no young girl's romantic illusions around Marmaduke. Should necessity have arisen, she could have furnished you with a merciless analysis of his character, but in that analysis she would have frankly included a very fine sense of honour. If you said a thing wasn't quite nice, well, it wasn't quite nice. I suppose it wouldn't, she admitted. We shall have to wait, but it's a rotten nuisance all the same. Hundreds of thousands of not very intelligent, but at the same times by no means unpatriotic people, like Peggy, at the beginning of the war thought trivial disappointments. Rotten nuisances. We had all waxed two fats during the opening years of the twentieth century, and, not having a spiritual ideal in God's universe, we were in danger of perishing from fatty degeneration of the soul. As it was, it took a year or more of your war to cure us. It took Peggy quite a month to appreciate the meaning of the mobilisation of Major Fox, RFA, a brigade of territorial artillery flowed over Dodaboury, and the sacred and sleepy meadows became a mass of guns and horse-lines and men in khaki and wagons and dingy canvas tents, and the old quiet streets were thick with unaccustomed soldiery. The dean called on the colonel and officers, and soon the house was full of eager young men holding the King's commission. Doggy admired their patriotism, but disliked their whole-hearted embodiment of the military spirit. They seemed to have no ideas beyond their new trade. The way they clanked about in their great boots and spurs got on his nerves. He dreaded also lest Peggy should be affected by the merititious attraction of a uniform. There were fine hefty fellows among the visitors at the deanery, on whom Peggy looked with natural admiration. Doggy bitterly confided to Goliath that it was the Dlamma of Browne. It never entered his head during those early days that all the brawn of all the manhood of the nation would be needed. We had our well-organised army and navy composed of peculiarly constituted men whose duty it was to fight. Just as we had our well-organised national church also composed of peculiarly constituted men whose duty it was to preach. He regarded himself as remote from one as from the other. Oliver, who had made a sort of peace with Doggy and remained at the deanery, very quickly grew restless. One day, walking with Peggy and Marmaduke in the garden, he said, I wish I could get hold of that confounding fellow Chipmunk. Partly through deference to the good dean's delicately hinted distaste for that upsetter of decorous households, and partly to allow his follower to attend to his own domestic affairs, he had left Chipmunk in London. Fifteen years ago Chipmunk had parted from a wife somewhere in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks. Both being illiterate, neither had since communicated with the other. As he had left her earning good money in a factory, his fifteen-year separation had been relieved from anxiety as to her material welfare. A prudent, although a beer-loving man, he had amassed considerable savings, and it was the due motive of sharing these with his wife and of protecting his patron from the ever-lurking perils of London that had brought him across the seas. When Oliver had set him free in town, he was going in quest of his wife. But as he had forgotten the name of the street near the East India Docks where his wife lived, and the name of the factory in which she worked, the successful issue of the quest, in Oliver's opinion, seemed problematical. The simple Chipmunk, however, was quite sanguine. He would run into her all right. As soon as he had found her, he would let the captain know. Up to the present he had not communicated with her, he had not communicated with the captain. He could give the captain no definite address, so the captain could not communicate with him. Chipmunk had disappeared into the unknown. Isn't he quite capable of taking care of himself? Asked Peggy. Ah, I'm not so sure, replied Oliver. Besides, he's hanging me up. I'm kind of responsible for him, and I've got sixty pounds of his money. It's all I could do to persuade him not to stow the lot in his pocket, so as to divide it with Mrs. Chipmunk as soon as he saw her. I must find out what has become of the beggar before I move. I suppose, said Doggy, you're anxious now to get back to the South Seas? Oliver stared at him. No, sonny, not till the war's over. Why, you wouldn't be in any great danger out there, would you? Oliver laughed. You're the funniest duck that ever was, Doggy. I'll never get to the end of you. And he strolled away. Oh, what does he mean? asked the bewildered Doggy. I think, replied Peggy, smiling, that he means he's going to fight. Oh, said Doggy. Then after a pause he outed, he's just the sort of chap for a soldier, isn't he? The next day Oliver's anxiety as to Chipmunk was relieved by the appearance of the man himself, incredibly dirty and dusty and thirsty. Having found no trace of his wife, and having been robbed of the money he carried about him, he tramped to Dirtlebury, where he reported himself to his master, as if nothing out of the way had happened. You silly blighter, said Oliver. Suppose I'd let you go with your other sixty pounds. You'd have been pretty well in the soup, wouldn't you? Yes, Cuppan, said Chipmunk, and you're not going on any blithering idiot, wild goose chases after wives and such like truck again, are you? No, Cuppan, said Chipmunk. This was in the stable yard, after Chipmunk had shaken some of the dust out of his hair and clothes, and had eaten and drunk voraciously. He was now sitting on an upturned bucket and smoking his clay pipe with an air of solid content. Oliver, lean and supple, his hands in his pockets, looked humorously down upon him. And he got a stick to me for the future like a rosy-eyed leech. Yes, Cuppan? You're going to ride a horse? A what? Old Chipmunk? A thing on four legs that kicks like hell. Whatever for? I ain't never ridden no horses. You're going to learn you are a military-looking, worm-eaten scab. You've got to be a ruddy soldier. Go blimey, said Chipmunk, as the first I heard of it. Oh, soldier, you're not kidding, are you, Cuppan? Certainly not. Go blimey. Who would have thought of it? Then he spat lustily and sucked at his pipe. You've nothing to say against it, have you? Oh, no, Cuppan. All right, and look here. When we're in the army, you must chuck, calling me Captain. What shall I have to call you? General, Chipmunk asked simply, mates, Bill, Joe, any old name. Corrised, said Chipmunk. Do you know why we're going to enlist? Oh, can't say as how I does, Cuppan. You chuckle-headed swab. Don't you know we're at war? I did hear some talk about it in a pub one night, Chipmunk admitted. Who are we fighting? Dutchman or Dagoes? Dutchman. Chipmunk spat on his holy hands, rubbed them together, and smiled. As each individual hair on his face seemed to enter into the smile, the result was sinister. Do you remember that, Dutchman at Somalo, Cuppan? Oliver smiled back. He remembered the hulking trucker and German merchant, whom Chipmunk, having half strangled, threw into the sea. He also remembered the amount of accomplished lying he had to practice in order to save Chipmunk from the touches of the law and get away with the schooner. We leave here to-morrow, said Oliver. In the meanwhile, you'll have to shave your ugly face. For the first time, Chipmunk was really staggered. He gaped at Oliver's retiring figure. Even his limited and time-warm vocabulary failed him. The desperate meaning of the war had flashed suddenly on millions of men in millions of different ways. This is the way in which it flashed on Chipmunk. He sat on his bucket, pondering over the awfulness of it, and sucking his pipe long after it had been smoked out. The dean's car drove into the yard, and the chauffeur stripping off his coat, prepared to clean it down. Say, Governor, said Chipmunk, all say, What do you think of this year's war? Say, I'm as nice people, replied the chauffeur, tersely. He shared in the general disapproval of Chipmunk. Well, see here. The company tells me I must shave my face and be an osse, soldier. I never shave my face in midlife, and I don't know how to do it, just as I don't know how to ride an osse. I'm a sailor-man, I am, and sailor-men don't shave their faces and ride osses. That's why I ask you what you thought of this year's war. The chauffeur struggled into his jeans and adjusted them before replying. If you were a sailor, the place for you is the navy, you remarked, in a superior manner. As for the cavalry, the captain, as you call him, ought to have more sense. Chipmunk rose and swung his long arm, threateningly. Look here, young fellow, do you want to have your blinking head knocked off? Where the captain goes, I goes, and don't you make any mistake about it? I didn't say anything, the chauffeur exposted it. Then don't say. Say, keep your blinking head shut, mind your own business. And scowling furiously and thrusting his empty pipe into his trousers pocket, Chipmunk rolled away. A few hours later, Oliver, entering his room to dress for dinner, found him standing on the light of the window, laboriously fitting studs into a shirt. The devoted fellow, having gone to report to his master, had found Berford engaged in his accustomed task of laying out his master's evening clothes. Oliver, during his stay in London, had provided himself with these necessaries. A jealous snarl had sent Berford flying. So intent was he on his work, that he did not hear Oliver enter. Oliver stood and watched him. Chipmunk was swearing wholesomely under his breath. Oliver saw him take up the tail of the shirt, spit on it, and begin to rub something. Caroist! said Chipmunk. What are the thundering blazes are you doing there? cried Oliver. Chipmunk turned. Oh, my God! said Oliver. Then he sank on a chair and laughed and laughed. And the more he looked at Chipmunk, the more he laughed. And Chipmunk stood stolid, holding the shirt at the awful wet thumb-marked front. But it was not on the shirt that Oliver laughed. Good God! he cried! Were you born like that? For Chipmunk, having gone to the barbers, was clean-shaven, and revealed himself as one of the most comically ugly of the sons of men. Oh, never mind, said Oliver, after a while. You've made the sacrifice for your country. And what if I get the faceache? I get something that looked like a face before I talk of it. At the family dinner table, doggy being present, he announced his intentions. It was the duty of every able-bodied man to fight for the empire, had not half a million just been called for. We should want a jolly sight more than that before we got through with it. Anyway, he was off to-morrow. To-morrow, echoed the dean. Burford, whose handing of potatoes, arched his eyebrows and alarm. He was fond of Oliver. With Chipmunk, Burford uttered an unheard sigh of relief. We're going to enlist in King Edward's horse. There are kind, overseas men. Lots of them what you dear good people would call bad eggs. There you made the mistake. Perhaps they may be fresh enough raw for a dainty palate, but for cooking, good-heart cooking. My gosh, nothing can touch them. You talk of enlisting, dear, says Mrs. Conover. Does that mean as a private soldier? Yes, a trooper. Why not? If you're a gentleman, dear, and gentlemen in the army are officers. Not now, my dear Sophia, said the doctor. Gentlemen are crowding into the ranks. They are setting a noble example. They argued it out in their gentle, old-fashioned way. The dean quoted examples of sons of families who had served as privates in the South African War. And that to this, said he, is but an eddy to a maelstrom. Come and join us, James Marmiteux, said Oliver, across the table. Chipmunk and me. Three swarm brothers to France. Doggy smiled easily. I'm afraid I can't undertake to swear a fraternal affection for Chipmunk. He and I wouldn't have neither habits nor ideals in common. Oliver turned to Peggy. I wish, said he, with rare restraint, he wouldn't talk like a book on deportment. Marmiteux talks the language of civilisation, laughs Peggy. He's not a savage like you. Don't you jolly well wish he was? said Oliver. Peggy flushed. No, I don't, she declared. The dean being called away on business immediately after dinner, the young men were left alone in the dining-room where the ladies had departed. Oliver poured himself out at last of port and filled his pipe, an inelegant proceeding of which Doggy disapproved. A pipe alone was barbaric, a pipe with old port was criminal. He held his peace, however. James Marmaduke, said Oliver after a while, what are you going to do? What does Marmaduke dislike the name of Doggy? He winced under the irony of the new appellation. I don't see that I'm called upon to do anything, he replied. Oliver smoked and sipped his port. I don't want to hurt your feelings any more, said he gravely, though sometimes I'd like to scrag you, I suppose because you're so different from me. It was so when we were children together. Now I've grown very fond of Peggy. Put on the right track, she might turn into a very fine woman. I don't think we need to discuss Peggy, Oliver, said Marmaduke. I do, she's sticking to you very loyally. Oliver was a bit of an idealist. The time may come when she'll be up the devil's own tree. She'll develop a patriotic conscience. If she sticks to you while you do nothing, she'll be miserable. If she chucks you, as she probably will, she'll be no happier. It's all up to you, James Doggy Marmaduke, old son. You'll have to gut up your loins and take sword and buckler and march away like the rest. I don't want Peggy to be unhappy. I want her to marry a man. That's why I propose to take you out with me to Hugh Hain and try to make you one. But that's over. Now here's the real chance. Better take it sooner than later. You'll have to be a soldier, Doggy. His pipe not drawing. He's preparing to dig it with the point of a dessert knife, when Doggy interposed hurriedly. For can he say don't do that? It makes cold shivers run down my back. Oliver looked at him oddly. Put the distinct pipe in his dinner-jacket pocket and rose. A floor in the dainty and divine ordering of things makes you shiver now, old Doggy. What would you do when you see a pharaoh digging out another pharaoh's intestines with the point of a bayonet? A bigger floor there somehow. Don't talk like that. You make me sick, said Doggy. End of Chapter Five