 CHAPTER 10 I HAVEN'T THAT UNIVERSAL SYMPATHY, WHICH IS THE MOST IRRITATING ATTRIBUTE OF SAINTS AND OTHER PASSIFISTS, WHEN, FOR INSTANT, ANY ONE OF THE FRITURNITY ARGUING FROM THE CERMAN ON THE MOUNT, TELLS ME THAT I Ought TO LOVE GERMANS. Either I admit the obligation and declare that, as I am a miserable sinner, I have no compunction in breaking it, or if he is a very sanctimonious saint, I remind him that such creatures as modern Germans not having been invented on or about the year AD 30, the rule about loving your enemies could not possibly apply. At least I imagine I do one of these two things. Sometimes indeed I dream gloatfully over acts of physical violence. When I read the pronouncements of such a person, for I have to my great good fortune never met him in the flesh. If there are any saintly pacifists in Wellingsford, they keep sedulously out of my way, and they certainly do not haunt my service club, and these are the only two places in which I have my being. Even Gedge doesn't talk of loving Germans, he just lumps all the bellagurance together in one conglomerate hatred for upsetting his comfortable social scheme. As I say, I lack the universal sympathy of the saint. I can't like people I don't like. Some people I love very deeply, others being of a kindly disposition I tolerate, others again I simply detest. Now Wellingsford, like every little country town in England, is drab with elderly gentle women. As I am a funny old tabby myself, I have to mix with them. If I refuse invitations to take tea with them, they invite themselves to tea with me. The poor major, they say, is so lonely. And they beat their little hooks an angle for gossip of which I am supposed, heaven knows why, to be a sort of stocked pond. They don't carry home much of a catch, I assure you. Well of some of them I am quite fond. Mrs. Boyce, for all her shortcomings, is an old crony for whom I entertain a sincere affection. Towards Betty's aunt, Miss Fairfax, a harmless lady with a passion for ecclesiastical embroidery, I maintain an attitude of benevolent neutrality. But Mrs. Holmes, Randall's mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung at him by Carlyle, George Eliot, Louis, Moncton Milne's, and is now doubtless recording their toe prints on the banks of Acheron I never could and never can abide. My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she loved the tiny Randall of whom I too was fond. So for her sake I always treated them with courtesy and kindness. Also for Randall's father's sake. He was a bluff, honest, stock-broken Briton who fancied pigeons and bred greyhounds for coursing, and cared less for literature and art than does the equally honest Mrs. Marigold in my kitchen. But his wife and her sisters led what they called the intellectual life. They regarded it as a heritage from their pompous ass of a father. Of course they were not 1860 or even 1880. They prided themselves on developing the hereditary tradition of culture to its extreme modern expression. They were of the semi-intellectual type of idiot, and if it destroys it the Great War will have some justification, which professes to find in the dull analysis of the drab adultery and suicide of a German or Scandinavian rabbit-picker a supreme expression of human existence. All their talk was of Hauptmann and Sudermann. They dropped them patriotically, I must say, as outrageous fellows on the outbreak of war. Grinberg, Dostoevsky, though I found they had never read either crime and punishment or the Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy, whom they didn't understand, and in art God saved the mark, the Cubist school, that is how my poor young friend Randall was trained to get the worst of the frothy scum of intelligent Oxford. But even he sometimes winced at the pretentiousness of his mother in his aunts. He was a clever fellow, and his knowledge was based on sound foundations. He did not say that the ladies were rather feared than loved in Wellingsford. All this to explain why it was that when Marigold woke me from an afternoon nap with the information that Mrs. Holmes desired to see me, I scowled on him. Why didn't you say I was dead? I told Mrs. Holmes you were asleep, sir, and she said, Will you be so kind as to wake him? So what could I do, sir? I have never met with an idiot so helpless in the presence of a woman. He would have defended my slumbers before a charge of cavalry, but one elderly lady shooed him aside like a chicken. Mrs. Holmes was shown in, a tall, dark, thin, nervous woman wearing pince-nay and an austere, sad-coloured garment. She apologised for disturbing me. But, she said, sitting down on the couch, I am in such great trouble and I could think of no one but you to advise me. What's the matter? I asked. It's Randall. He left the house the day before yesterday without telling any of us good-bye, and he hasn't written, and I don't know what on earth has become of him. Did he take any luggage? Just a small suitcase. He even packed it himself, a thing he has never done at home in his life before. This was news. The proceedings were unlike Randall, who in his goings and comings loved the domestic brass band. To leave his home without valedictory music and vanish into the unknown be tokened some unusual perturbation of mind. I asked whether she knew of any reason for such perturbation. He was greatly upset, she replied, by the stoppage of the Alba Marl review for which he did such fine work. I strove politely to hide my inability to condole and wagged my head sadly. I'm afraid there was no room for it in a be-bombed and be-shrapneled world. I suppose the still small voice of reason would not be heard amid the din, she sighed, and no other papers, except the impossible ones, would print Randall's poems and articles. More news. This time excellent news. A publicist denied publicity is as useful as a German field marshal on a desert island. I asked what the Alba Marl died of. Practically all the staff deserted what Randall called the cause, and dribbled away into the army, she replied mournfully. As to what this precious cause meant I did not inquire, having no wish to enter into an argument with the good lady, which might have become exacerbated. And she would only have parroted Randall. I had never yet detected her in the expression of an original idea. Perhaps he is dribbled away too, I suggested grimly. She was silent, I bent forward. Wouldn't you like him to dribble into the great flood? She lifted her lean shoulders despairingly. He's the only son of a widow. Even in France and Germany they're not expected to fight. But if he were different I would let him go gladly. I'm not selfish and unpatriotic major, she said with an unaccustomed little catch in her throat. And for the very first time I found in her something sympathetic. But, she continued, it seems so foolish to sacrifice all his intellectual brilliance to such crudities as fighting, when it might be employed so much more advantageously elsewhere. But good God, my dear lady, I cried. Where are your wits? Where's your education? Where's your intelligent understanding of the daily papers? Where's your common sense? I'm afraid I was brutally rude. Can't you give a minute's thought to the situation? If there's one institution on earth that's shrieking aloud for intellectual brilliance, it's the British Army. Do you think it's a refuge for fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German headquarters staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men, and perhaps the fate of thousands, can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamoring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for, simply yelling for, I repeated, bringing my hand down on the arm of my chair. Two little red spots showed on each side of her thin face. I've never looked at it in that light before, she admitted. Of course I agree with you, I said diplomatically, that Randall would be more or less wasted as a private soldier. The heroic stuff of which Thomas Atkins has made is, thank God, illimitable. But intellect is rare, especially in the ranks of God's own chosen, the British officer. And Randall is of the kind we want as officers. As for a commission, he could get one any day. I could get one for him myself. I still have a few friends. He's a good-looking chap, and would carry off a uniform. Wouldn't you be proud to see him? A tear rolled down her cheek. I patted myself on the back for an artful fellow, but I had underrated her wit. To my chagrin she did not fall into my trap. It's the uncertainty that's killing me, she said. And then she burst out disconcertingly. Do you think he has gone off with that dreadful little gedge-girl? Phyllis. I was a myriad miles from Phyllis. I was talking about real things. The mother, however, from her point of view, was talking of real things also. But how did she come to know about her son's amours? I thought it useless to inquire. Randall must have advertised his passion pretty widely. I replied, it's extremely improbable. In the first place Phyllis' gedge isn't dreadful, but a remarkably sweet and modest young woman. And in the second place she won't have anything to do with him. That's nonsense, she said, bridling. Why? Because— A gesture and a smile completed the sentence— that a common young person should decline to have dealings with her paragon was incredible. I can find out in a minute, I smiled, whether she is still in Wellingsford. I wheeled myself to the telephone on my writing-table and rang up Betty at the hospital. Do you know where Phyllis' gedge is? Betty's voice came, yes, she's here. I've just left her to come to speak to you. Why do you want to know? Never mind so long as she is safe and sound. There's no likelihood of her running away or eloping. Betty's laughter rang over the wires. What lunacy are you talking? You might as well ask me whether I'm going to elope with you. I don't think you're respectful, Betty, I replied. Goodbye. I rang off and reported Betty's side of the conversation to my visitor. On that score, said I, you can make your mind quite easy. Where can the boy have gone? She cried. Into the world somewhere to learn wisdom, I said, and in order to show that I did not speak ironically, I wheeled myself to her side and touched her hand. I think his swift brain has realized at last that all his smart knowledge hasn't brought him a little bit of wisdom worth a cent. I shouldn't worry, he's working out his salvation somehow, although he may not know it. Do you really think so? I do, said I. If he finds that the path of wisdom leads to the German trenches, will you be glad or sorry? She grappled with the question in silence for a moment or two. Then she broke down, and to my dismay began to cry. Do you suppose there's a woman in England that in her heart of hearts doesn't want her menfolk to fight? I only allow the earlier part of this chapter to stand in order to show how a man quite well meaning, although a trifle or assable, may be wanting and Christian charity an ordinary understanding, and of how many tangled knots of human motive, impulse and emotion this war is a solvent. You see, she defended her son to the last, adopting his own specious line of argument, but at the last came the breaking point. The rest of our interview was of no great matter. I did my best to reassure her and comfort her, and when I next saw Marigold I said affably, you did quite well to wake me. I thought I was acting rightly, sir. Mr. Randall, having bolted, so to speak, it seemed only natural that Mrs. Holmes should come to see you. You knew that Mr. Randall had bolted and you never told me? I glared indignantly. Marigold stiffened himself. The degree of stiffness beyond his ordinary inflexibility of attitude could only have been ascertained by a vernier, but that degree imparted an appreciable dignity to his demeanor. I beg pardon, sir, but lately I've noticed that my little bits of local news haven't seemed to be welcome. Marigold, said I, don't be an ass. Very good, sir. My mind, said I, is in an awful muddle about all sorts of things that are going on in this town, so I should esteem it a favour if you would tell me at once any odds and ends of gossip you may pick up. It may possibly be important. And if I have any inferences to draw from what I hear, he said gravely, fixing me with his clear eye. May I take the liberty of acquainting you with them? Certainly. Very good, sir, said Marigold. Now, what was Marigold going to draw inferences about? That was another puzzle. I felt myself being drawn into a fog-filled labyrinth of intrigue in which already groping were most of the people I knew. What with the mysterious relations between Betty and Boyce and Gedge? What with young Dacre's full exoneration of Boyce? What with the young Randall split with Gedge and his impeccable attitude towards Phyllis? Things were complicated enough. Sir Anthony's revelations regarding poor Althea and his dark surmises concerning Randall complicated them still more. And now comes Mrs. Holmes to tell me of Randall's mysterious disappearance. A plague on the whole lot, I exclaimed wrathfully. I dined that evening with the Fenimors. My dear Betty was there too, the only other guest, looking very proud and radiant. A letter that morning from Willie Conner informed her that the regiment, by holding a trench against an overwhelming German attack, had achieved a glorious renown. The Brigadier General had specially congratulated the Colonel, and the Colonel had specially complimented Willie on the magnificent work of his company. Of course there was a heavy price in casualties, poor young Etherington, whom we all knew, for instance, blown to atoms. But Willie, thank God, was safe. I wonder what would happen to me if Willie were to get the VC. I think I should go mad with pride, she exclaimed with flushed cheeks, forgetful of poor young Etherington, a laughter-loving boy of twenty who had been blown to atoms. It is strange how apparently callous this universal carnage has made the noblest and the tenderest of men and women. We cling passionately to the lives of those near and dear to us, but as to those near and dear to others who are killed, well, we pay them the passing tribute not even of a tear, but only of a sign. They died gloriously for their country. What can we say more? If we, we survivors, not only invalids and women and other stay-at-homes, but also comrades on the field, were driven to our souls by the piteous tragedy of splendid youth destroyed in its flower, we could not stand the strain. We should weep hysterically. We should be broken folk. But a merciful providence steps in and steals our hearts. The loyal hearts are there, beating truly, and in order that they should be truly and stoutly, they are given this God-sent armor. So when we raised our glasses and drank gladly to the success of Willie Connor the Living, and put from our thoughts Frank Etherington the Dead, you must not account it to us as a lack of human pity. You must be lenient in your judgment of those who are thrown into the furnace of a great war. Lady Fenimore smiled on Betty. We should all be proud, my dear, if Captain Connor won the Victoria Cross. But you mustn't set your heart on it. That would be foolish. Hundreds of thousands of men deserve the VC ten times a day, and they can't all be rewarded. Betty laughed gaily at good Lady Fenimore's somewhat didactic reproof. You know I'm not an absolute idiot. I see the poor dear coming home all over bandages and sticking plaster. Where's your VC? I haven't got it. Then go back at once and get it, or I shan't love you. Poor darling. Suddenly the laughter in her eyes quickened into something very bright and beautiful. There's not a woman in England prouder of her husband than I am. No VC could possibly reward him for what he has done. But I want it for myself. I'd like my babies to cut their teeth on it. When I went out to the Boer War, the most wonderful woman on earth said to me on parting, Wherever you are, dear, remember that I am always with you in spirit and soul and heart and almost in body. And God knows she was. And when I returned to helpless cripple, she gathered me in her brave arms on the open key at Southampton, and after a moment or two of foolishness she said, Do you know when I die what you'll find in graven on my heart? No, said I, your DSO ribbon. So when Betty talked about her babies and the little bronze cross, my eyes grew moist, and I felt ridiculously sentimental. Not a word, of course, was spoken before Betty of the new light, or the new darkness, which soever you will, that had been cast on the tragedy of Althea. I could not do otherwise than agree with the direct spoken old lady who had at once correlated the adventure in Carlisle with the plunge into the Wellingsford Canal. And so did Sir Anthony. They were very brave, however, the little man and Edith in their dinner talk with Betty, but I saw that the past fortnight had aged them both by a year or more. They had been stabbed in their honour, their trust, and their faith. It was a secret terror that stalked at their side by day, and lay stark at their side by night. It was only when the ladies had left us that Sir Anthony referred to the subject. I suppose you know that young Randall Holmes has bolted. So his mother informed me today. He pricked his ears. Does she know where he's gone to? No, said I. What did I tell you? said Sir Anthony. I held up my glass of port to the light and looked through it. A lot of damn foolishness, my dear old friend, said I. He grew angry. A man doesn't like to be coldly called a damn fool at his own table. He rose on his spurs in his little red bentum way. Was I too much of an idiot to see the connection? As soon as the Carlisle business became known, this young scoundrel flies the country. Couldn't I see an inch before my blind nose? Before bearing to question this remarkable figure of speech, I asked him how so confidential a matter could have become known. Everything gets known in this infernal little town, he retorted. That's where you're mistaken, said I. Half everything gets known, the unimportant half. The rest is supplied by malicious or prejudiced invention. We discussed the question after the futile way of men until we went into the drawing-room, where Betty played and sang to us until it was time to go home. Gold was about to lift me into the two-seater when Betty, who had been lurking at her car a little way off, ran forward. Would it bore you if I came in for a quarter of an hour? Bore me, my dear? said I. Of course not. So a short while afterwards we were comfortably established in my library. You rang me up today about Phyllis Gage. I did, said I. She lit a cigarette and seeded herself on the fender-stool. She has an unconscious knack of getting into easy, loose limbed attitudes. I said admiringly, do you know you're a remarkably well-favored young person? And as soon as I said it, I realized what a tremendous factor Betty was in my circumscribed life. What could I do without her sweet intimacy? If Willie Connors' territorial regiment, like so many others, had been ordered out to India, and she had gone with him, how blank would be the days and weeks and months? I thanked God for granting me her graciousness. She smiled and blew me a kiss. That's very gratifying to know, she said. But it has nothing to do with Phyllis. Well, what about Phyllis? I'll tell you, she replied. And she told me. Her story was not a world-shaking moment, but it interested me. I have since learned its substantial correctness and am able to add some supplementary details. You see, things were like this. In order to start I must go back some years. I have always had a warm corner in my heart for little Phyllis Gage, ever since she was a blue-eyed child. My wife had a great deal to do with it. She was a woman of dauntless courage and clear vision into the heart of things. I find many a reflection of her in Betty. Perhaps that is why I love Betty so dearly. Some strange, sweet, full feminine of gentle birth and deplorable upbringing fell in love with a vehemently socialistic young artisan by the name of Gage and married him. Her casual but proud-minded family wiped her off the proud family slate. She brought Phyllis into the world and five years afterwards found herself begedged out of existence. They were struggling people in those days, and before her death my wife used to employ her when she could for household sewing and whatnot. And tiny Phyllis in a childless home became a petted darling. When my great loneliness came upon me, it was a solace to have the little dainty, prattling thing to spend an occasional hour in my company. Gage, an excellent workman, set up as a contractor. He took my modest home under his charge, a leaky tap, a broken pane, a new set of bookshelves, a faulty drainpipe. All were matters for Gage. I abhorred his politics, but I admired his work, and I continued with Mrs. Marigold's motherly aid to make much of Phyllis. Gage, for a queer motive of his own, sent her to as good a school as he could afford, as a matter of fact an excellent school, one where she met girls of a superior social class and learned educated speech and graceful manners. Her holiday's poor child were somewhat dreary, for her father, an antisocial creature, had scarce a friend in the town. Save for here and there an invitation to tea from Betty or myself, she did not cross the threshold of a house in Wellingsford. But to my house, all through her school days and afterwards Phyllis came, and on such occasions Mrs. Marigold prepared teas of the organic lusciousness dear to the heart of a healthy girl. Now here comes the point of all this palaver. Young Master Randall used to also to come to my house. Now and then, by chance, they met there. They were good boy and girlfriends. I want to make it absolutely clear that her acquaintance with Randall was not any vulgar picking up in the street affair. When she left school, her father made her his bookkeeper, secretary, confidential clerk. Anybody turning into the office to summon Gage to repair a roof or a burst boiler had a preliminary interview with Phyllis. Young Randall, taking over the business of the upkeep of his mother's house, gradually acquired the habit of such preliminary interviews. The whole Umbrolia was very simple, very natural. They had first met at my own rich cake and jam-puff bespread tea-table. When Randall went into the office to speak, presumably about a defective draft in the kitchen range, and really about things quite different, the ethics of the matter depended entirely on Randall's point of view. Their meetings had been contrived by no unmaidenly subterfuge on the part of Phyllis. She knew him to be above her in social station. She kept him off as long as she could. But que vous les vœux? Randall was a very good-looking, brilliant, and fascinating fellow. Phyllis was a dear little human girl. And it is the human way of such girls to fall in love with such fascinating, brilliant fellows. I not only hold a brief for Phyllis, but I am the judge, too. And having heard all the evidence, I deliver a verdict overwhelmingly in her favour. Given the circumstances as I have stated them, she was bound to fall in love with Randall, and in doing so committed not the little tiniest speck of a peccadillo. My first intimation of tender relations between them came from my sight of them in February in Wellings Park. Since then, of course, I have much which I will tell you as best I may. So now, for Betty's story, confirmed and supplemented by what I have learned later. But before plunging into the matter, I must say that when Betty had ended I took up my little parable and told her of all that Randall had told me concerning his repudiation of Gedge, and Betty listened with a curiously stony face and said nothing. When Betty puts on that face of granite I am quite unhappy. That is why I have always hated the statures of Egypt. There is something beneath their cold faces that you can't get at. End of CHAPTER X Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his business and her criminal folly, in abandoning it so as to help mend the shattered bodies of fools and knaves, who by joining the forces of militarism have betrayed the sacred cause of the industrial solidarity of labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely tenable. With his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled to a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance, but that she could throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less than an outrage. I suppose in a kind of craved way the craved fellow was fond of Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She flitted an agreeable vision about his house. He liked to hear her play the piano, not because he had any ear for music, but because it tickled his vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural labourer's son and apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor of a Broadway grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned to play on it. Like most of his political type he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery, but if anything like companionship between father and daughter there existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle class, his instinctive desire to shine above his poor associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school. Now Gage had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence. Phyllis, inheriting the intellectual equipment of her sentimental fool of a mother, had none. Oh, she had a vast fund of ordinary common sense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard brain fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in the maternal heritage, and she had come back from school a very ladylike little person. If pressed she could reel off all kinds of artificial scraps of knowledge, like a dear little parrot, but she had never heard of Karl Marx and didn't want to hear. She had a vague notion that international socialism was of movement in favour of throwing bombs at monarchs and of seizing the wealth of the rich in order to divide it among the poor, and she regarded it as abominable. When her father gave her Fabian society tracts to read, he might just as well, for all her understanding of the argument, set her down to a treatise on the infinitesimal calculus. Her brains stood blank before such abstract disquisitions. She loved easily comprehended poetry and novels that made her laugh or cry and set her mind dancing round the glowing possibilities of life, all disastrous stuff abhorred by the international socialist, to whom the essential problems of existence are of no interest whatever. So, after a few futile attempts to darken her mind, Gedge put her down as a mere fool woman and ceased to bother his head about her intellectual development. That came to him quite naturally. There is no Turk nor contemptuous of his woman-kind's political ideas than the Geges of our enlightened England. But on other counts she was a distinct asset. He regarded her with immense pride, as a more ornamental adjunct to his house than any other county-builder and contractor could display. And recognizing that she was possessed of some low feminine cunning in the way of adding up figures and writing letters made Yusuf in his office as general clerical factitum. When the war broke out, he discovered, to his horror, that Phyllis actually had political ideas, unshakable, obstinate ideas opposed to his own, and that he had been nourishing in his bosom of viperous patriot. Phyllis, for her part, realized with equal horror the practical significance of her father's windy theories. When Randall, who had stolen her heart, took to visiting the house in order, as far as she could make out, to talk treason with her father, the strain of the situation grew more than she could bear. She fled to Betty for advice. Betty promptly stepped in and whisked her off to the hospital. It was on the morning on which Randall interviewed me in the garden. The morning after he had broken with Gedge that Phyllis, having a little off-time, went home. She found her father in the office making out a few bills. He thrust forward his long chin and aggressive beard and scowled at her. Oh! It's you, is it? Come at last where your duty calls you, eh? I always come when I can, father, she replied. She bent down and kissed his cheek. He caught her roughly round the way, Stan, leaning back in his chair, looked up at her sourly. How long are you going on defying me like this? She tried to disengage herself, but his arm was too strong. Oh, father, she said rather wearily, don't let us go over this old argument again. But suppose I find some new argument, suppose I send you packing all together, refuse to contribute further to your support? What then? She started at the threat, but replied valiantly. I should have to earn my own living. How are you going to do it? There are heaps of ways. He laughed. There ain't, as you'd soon find out. They don't even pay for you being scullery-made to a lot of common soldiers. She protested against that view of her avocation. In the perfectly appointed Wellingsford Hospital she had no scullery work. She was a probationer, in training as a nurse. He still gripped her. The particular kind of time-fullery you are up to doesn't matter. We didn't quarrel. I have another proposition to put before you. Much more to your fancy, I think. You like this Mr. Randall Holmes, don't you? She shivered a little and flushed deep red. Her father had never touched on the matter before. She said, straining away. I don't want to talk about Mr. Holmes. But I do, come my dear. In this life there must always be a certain amount of give and take. I'm not the man to drive a one-sided bargain. I'll make you a fair offer, as between father and daughter. I'll wipe out all that's past. In leaving me like this, when misfortune has come upon me, you've been guilty of unfealial conduct. No one can deny it. But I'll overlook everything, forgive you fully, and take it to my heart again, and leave you free to do whatever you like without interfering with your opinions. If you'll promise me one thing. I know what you're going to say, she twisted round on him swiftly. I'll promise at once. I'll never marry Mr. Holmes. I've already told him I won't marry him. Surprise relaxed his grip. She took swift advantage and sheered away to the other side of the table. He rose and brought down his hand with a thump. You refused him? Why you silly little baggage! My condition is that you should marry him. You're sweet on him, aren't you? I detest him, cried Phyllis. Why should I marry him? Her eyes, young and pure, divine some sordid horror behind eyes crafty and ignoble. Once before she had had such a fleeting, uncomprehended vision into the murky depths of the man's soul. This was some time ago. In the routine of her secretarial duty she had, one morning, opened and read a letter, not marked private or personal, whose tenor she could scarcely understand. When she handed it to her father, he smiled. Vouch saved a specious explanation, and looked at her in just the same crafty and ignoble fashion, and she shrank away frightened. The matter kept her awake for a couple of nights. Then, for sheer easing of her heart, she went to her adored Betty Fairfax, her lady patroness and mother confessor, who, being wise and strong, and possessing the power of making her kind eyes unfathomable, laughed, bade her believe her father's explanation and sent her away comforted. The incident passed out of her mind, but now a memory smote her as she shrank from her father's gaze and the insincere smile on his thin lips. For one thing, he replied after a pause, pulling his scraggly beard, your poor dear mother was a lady, and if she had lived she would have wanted you to marry a gentleman. It's for her sake I've given you an education that fits you to consort with gentlefolk, just for her sake. Don't make any mistake about it, for I've always hated the breed. If I violated my principles in order to meet her wishes, I think you ought to meet them too. You wouldn't like to marry a small tradesman or a working man, would you? I'm not going to marry anybody, cried Phyllis. She was only a pink and white, very ordinary little girl. I have no idealizations or illusions concerning Phyllis, but she had a little fine steel of character running through her. It flashed on Gedge. I don't want to marry anybody, she declared, but I'd sooner marry a bricklayer who was fighting for his country than a fine gentleman like Mr. Holmes who wasn't. I'd sooner die, she cried passionately. Then go and die and be damned to you, snarled Gedge, planting himself noisily in his chair. I've no use for khaki-struck, driveling idiots. I've no use for patriots. Bah! Damn patriots! The upper classes are out for all they can get, and they befowl the poor, imbecile working man with all their high,falutin phrases to get it for them at the cost of his blood. I've no use for them, I tell you, and I have no use either for undutiful daughters. I've no use for young women who blow hot and cold. Haven't I seen you with the fellow? Do you think I'm a blind doddler? Do you think I haven't kept an eye on you? Haven't I seen you blowing as hot as you please? And now, because he refuses to be a blinkin' idiot and have his guts blown out in this war of fools and knaves and capitalists, you blast him like a three-farling iceberg. Everything in her that was tender, maidenly, English, shrank, lacerated, but the steel held her. She put both her hands on the table and bent over towards him. But, Father, except that he's a gentleman, you haven't told me why you want me to marry Mr. Holmes. He fidgeted with his fingers. Haven't you a spark of affection for me left? She said dutifully, yes, Father. I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the one bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because you love me? One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to marry, said Phyllis. But you do love him, cried Gedge. Either you're just a wanton little hussy, or you must care for the fellow. I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do with him. The tears came. He's a pro-German, and I won't have anything to do with pro-Germans. She fled precipitously from the office, into the street, and made a blind course to the hospital, feeling in dumb misery that she had committed the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time, that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith. If ever a good, loyal little heart was torn to piteous shreds, that little heart was Phyllis's. In the bare x-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant, Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins and sought absolution. Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise diplomatic, tactful person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on the subject of matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the business in quite a different way. But what could you expect from an anarchical Turk like Gedge? Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not, found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner, guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life. But Phyllis was nonetheless profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness. You can't attend to a poor, brave devil grinning with pain while a surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of bones or shrapnel and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny, half-penny little miseries. Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the houses of pain. Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford had an avenue of secular chestnuts, of which it is inordinately proud. Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers. Carven thereon are the presentments, and often interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat. Only hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children. Initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet, run manned. Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested, a pathetically lonely little gray, uniformed figure on one of the benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the line of an army service train, with mules and wagons, and here in their tent. In front of her, beyond the row of trees, was the towing path, an old horse in charge of a boy jogged by, pulling something of which only a moving stovepipe like a periscope was visible above the bank. Overhead the chestnuts rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom, showing starry bits of blue sky, and emitting arrow shafts of spring sunshine. A dirty white mongrel dog, belonging to the barge, came up to her, sniffed and made friends. Then at last, obeying a series of whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted off. Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human, dear dog, and with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties in his deep, topaz eyes. After that she had, as companions, a couple of butterflies and a bumblebee, and a perky, portly robin, who hopped within an inch of her feet and looked up at her sideways out of his hard little eye, so different from the dogs, with the expression of one who would say, The most beauteous and delectable worm I have ever encountered. If I were a bit bigger, say, the size of the rock of the Arabian knights, what a dainty morsel you would make. In the meantime, can't you shed something of yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser of your species? She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature, just as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumblebee. She surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment. It was good to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the pale, suffering faces and the eternal faint odor of disinfectants into all this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts unconscious of war. She remembered that once, in the pocket of her cloak, there had been a biscuit or two. Very slowly and carefully, her mind fixed on the robin. She fished for crumbs, and very carefully and gently she fed the impudent, stomach-centered fellow. She had attracted him to the end of the seat, when, whiz and clatter, came a motorcycle down the avenue, and off in a terrible scare flew the robin. The idol of tree and beast and birds suffered instant disruption, and Randall Holmes in his canvas stood before her. She said, Good morning, Phyllis. She said, with cold politeness, Good morning. But she asked the spring morning in dumb piteousness, Oh, why has he come? Why has he come to spoil it all? He sat down by her side. This is the luckiest chance I've ever had, finding you here, he said. You've had all my letters, haven't you? Yes, she answered, and I've torn them all up. Why? Because I didn't want them, she flashed on him. I've destroyed them without reading them. He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that the literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case, sincere, should have been destroyed, unread, was an antisocial outrage. If it didn't please a woman to believe in God, he said, and God came in person and stood in front of her. She would run out of the room and call upon somebody to come and shoot him for a burglar, just to prove she was right. Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross literalness of his rhetorical figure. I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible, she exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench, putting yourself in the position of the Almighty. Oh! And she flung out her hand. Don't speak to me. In spite of the atheistical gage, Phyllis believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Ten Commandments. She also believed in a host of other simple things, such as goodness and truth, virtue and patriotism. The arguments and theories and glosses that her father and Randall wove about them appeared to her candid mind as meaningless arabesques. She could not see how all the complications concerning the elementary canons of faith and conduct could arise. She appreciated Randall's intellectual gifts. This power of weaving magical words into rhyme fascinated her. She was childlike in her wonder at his command of the printed page. When he revealed to her the beauty of things, as the rogue had a pretty knack of doing, her nature thrilled responsive. He gave her a thousand glimpses into a new world and she loved him for it. But when he talked lightly of sacred matters, such as God and duty, he ran daggers into her heart. She almost hated him. He had to expend much eloquence and persuasion to induce her to listen to him. He had no wish to break any of the commandments, especially the third. He professed penitence. But didn't she see that her treatment of him was driving him to a desperate unbelief in God and man? When a woman accepted a man's love, she accepted many responsibilities. Phyllis stonely denied acceptance. I've refused it. You asked me to marry you, and I told you I wouldn't, and I won't. You're mixing up two things, he said with a smile, love and marriage. Many people love and don't marry, just as many people marry and don't love. Now once you did tell me that you loved me, and so you accepted my love, there's no getting out of it. I've given you everything I've got, and you can't throw it away. The question is, what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with me? His sophistries frightened her, but she cut through them. Isn't it rather a question of what you're going to do with yourself? If you give me up, I don't care a hang what becomes of me. He became very near, and his voice was dangerously soft. Phyllis dear, I do love you with all my heart. Why won't you marry me? But a hateful scene rushed to her memory. She drew herself up. Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you? Your father, he interrupted in astonishment. When? She named the day, Wednesday of last week. In desperation, she told him what had happened. The poor child was fighting for her soul against great odds. It's a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking. You want me to be pro-German like yourselves, and I won't be a pro-German. And I think it's wicked to even talk to pro-Germans. She rose, all sobs, flustered her in heroism, and walked away. He strode a step or two, and stood in front of her with his hands on her shoulders. I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never. Not a word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word of honor. On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go there again. I told him so. She writhed out of his grasp, and spread the palms of her hands against him. Please don't, she said. And seeing that she stood her ground, he made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity of her gray nurse's uniform gave a touch of pathos to her childish, blue-eyed comeliness and her pretty attitude of defiance. I suppose, she said, he was too pro-German even for you. He looked at her for a long time, disconcertingly, so disconcertingly, and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in his eyes, as to set even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering, and to make her emphasize it in her report of the matter to Betty, as extraordinary and frightening. It seemed, so she explained in her innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her father, which he shrank from telling her. But if they had quarreled so bitterly, why had her father the next day urged her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash. She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement. If she married Randall, his lips would be closed against her father. That is what her father had meant. The vague, disquieting suspicion of years, that he might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained an awful certainty. She remembered the incident of the private letter and the look in her father's eyes. Finally she revolted. Her soul grew sick. She took no heed of Randall's protest. She only saw that she was to be the cloak to cover up something unclean between them. At a moment like this no woman pretends to have a sense of justice. Randall had equal share with her father in an unknown baseness. She hated him, as he stood there so strong and handsome, and she hated herself for having loved him. At last he said with a smile. Yes, that's just it. What? She had forgotten the purport of her last remark. He was a bit too, well, not too pro-German, but a bit too anti-English for me. You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time, Villes-Dear. I'm no more pro-German than you are. Perhaps I see things more clearly than you do. I've been trained to an intellectual view of human phenomena. Her little pink and white face hardened until it looked almost ugly. The un-precipitant young man continued. And so I take my stand on a position that you must accept on trust. I am English to the backbone. You can't possibly dream that I am not. Come, dear, let me try to explain. His arm curved as if to encircle her waist. She sprang away. Don't touch me. I couldn't bear it. There's something about you I can't understand. In her attitude, too, he found a touch of the incomprehensible. He said, however, with a sneer. If I were swaggering about in a cheap uniform, you'd find me simplicity itself. She caught at his opening desperately. Yes, at any rate I'd find a man, a man who isn't afraid to fight for his country. Afraid. Yes, she cried, and her blue eyes blazed. Afraid. That's why I can't marry you. I'd rather die than marry you. I've never told you. I thought you'd guess. I'm an English girl, and I can't marry a coward. A coward. A coward. A coward. Her voice ended on a foolish high note and Randall, very white, had seized her by the wrist. You little fool, he cried. You'll live to repent what you've said. He released her, mounted his motorbike, and rode away. Phyllis watched him disappear up the avenue. Then she walked rather blindly back to the bench and sat down among the ruins of a black and abominable world. After a while the friendly Robin, seeing her so still, perched first on the back of the bench and then hopped on the seat by her side, and cocking his head, looked at her inquiringly out of his little hard eye, as though he would say, my dear child, what are you making all this fuss about? Isn't it early June? Isn't the sun shining? Aren't the chestnuts in flower? Don't you see that bank of dark blue cloud over there, which means a nice softening rain in the night and a jolly good breakfast of worms in the morning? What's wrong with this exquisitely perfect universe? And Phyllis, on her own confession, with an angry gesture, sent him scattering up among the cool, broad leaves and cried, get away, you hateful little beast. And, having no use for robins and trees in spring and sunshine and such like intolerable ironies, a white little wisp of a nurse left them all to their complacent riot and went back to the hospital. End of chapter 11. Chapter 12 of The Red Planet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Ann. The Red Planet by William J. Locke. Chapter 12. A few days after this, Mrs. Holmes sent me under cover a telegram which she had received from her son. It was dispatched from Aberdeen and ran. Perfectly well, don't worry about me. Love, Randall. And that was all I heard of him for some considerable time. What he was doing in Aberdeen, a city remote from his sphere of intellectual, political and social activities, heaven and himself alone knew. I must confess that I cared very little. He was alive, he was well, and his mother had no cause for anxiety. Phyllis had definitely sent him packing. There was no reason for me to allow speculation concerning him to keep me awake of nights. I had plenty to think about besides Randall. They made me honorary treasurer of the local volunteer training corps which had just been formed. The members not in uniform were a red brassard with G.R. in black. The facetious all over the country called them gorgeous wrecks. I must confess that on their first few parades they did not look very military. Their composite ponchiness, beardedness, scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me unfavorably when, from my Hosea carriage, I first beheld them. Mayor Gold, who was one of the first to join and to leap into the gray uniform, tried to swagger about as an instructor. But as the little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang like a little child on the lips of the official sergeant instructor of the corps. In the evenings he and I mugged up the textbooks together and with the aid of the books I put him through all the new physical exercises. I was a privileged person. I could take my own malicious pleasure out of Mayor Gold's enforced humility, but I would be hanged if anybody else should. Sergeant Mayor Gold should instruct those volunteers as he once instructed the recruits of his own battery. So I worked with him like a nigger until there was nothing in the various drills of a modern platoon that he didn't know and nothing that he could not do with the mathematical precision of his splendid old training. One night during the thick of it, Betty came in. I waved her into a corner of the library out of the way and she smoked cigarettes and looked on the performance. Now I come to think of it, we must have afforded an interesting spectacle. There was the gaunt, one-eyed, preposterously-wigged image clad in undervest and shrunken yellow flannel trousers which must have dated from his gym instructor days in the 90s, violently darting down on his heels springing up, kicking out his legs, shooting out his arms, like an inspired marionette. All at the words of command shouted in fervent earnest by a shriveled-up little cripple in a wheelchair. When it was over, the weather was warm. He passed a curved forefinger over his dripping forehead, cut himself short in an instinctive action and politely dried his hand on the seat of his trousers. Then his one eye gleamed homage at Betty and he drew himself up to attention. Do you mind, sir, if I send in Ellen with the drinks? I nodded, you'll do very well with a drink yourself, Marigold. It's thirsty work and weather, sir. He made a queer movement of his hand. It would have been idiotic of him to salute, but he had just been dismissed from military drill so his hand went up to the level of his breast and, right about turn, he marched out of the room. Betty rose from her corner and threw herself in her usual impetuous way on the ground by my chair. Do you know, she cried, you too, dear old things, were too funny for words. But as I saw that her eyes were foolishly moist, I was not as offended as I might have been by her perceptions of the ludicrous. When I said that I had plenty to think about besides Randall, I meant to string off a list. My prolixity over the volunteer training corps came upon me unawares. I wanted to show you that my time was fairly well occupied. I was chairman of our town Belgium Relief Committee. I was a member of our County Territorial Association and took over a great deal of special work connected with one of our battalions that was covering itself with glory and little mounds topped with white crosses at the front. If you think I lived a Tom Tabby tea party sort of life, you are quite mistaken. If the war office could have its way, it would have lashed me in red tape, gagged me with regulations, and ceiling waxed me up in my bedroom. And there are thousands of us who have shaken our fists under the nose of the war office and shouted, all your blighting man with the mud-drake officialdom shan't prevent us from serving our country. And it hasn't. The very government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. Such non-combatant fronctiers in England have done a power of good work. And then, of course, there was the hospital which, in one way or another, took up a good deal of my time. I was reposing in the front garden one late afternoon in mid-June, after a well-filled day, when a car pulled up the gate, in which were Betty at the wheel, and a wounded soldier in khaki, his cap perched on top of a bandaged head. I don't know whether it is usual for young women in nurses' uniform to career about the country driving wounded men in motor-cars, but Betty did it. She carried very little for the usual. She came in, leaving the man in the car, and crossed the lawn, flushed and bright-eyed, a refreshing picture for a tired man. We're in a fix up at the hospital, she announced, as soon as she was in reasonable speaking distance. And I want you to get us out of it. Sitting on the grass, she told me the difficulty. A wounded soldier, discharged from some distant hospital, and home now on sick furlough before rejoining his depot, had been brought into the hospital with a broken head. The modern improvements on vinegar and brown paper having been applied, the man was now ready to leave. I interrupted with the obvious question. Why couldn't he go to his own home? It appeared that the prospect terrified him. On his arrival, at midday, after eight months' absence in France, he found that his wife had sold or pawned practically everything in the place, and that the lady herself was in the violent phase of intoxication. His natural remonstrances not being received with due meekness, a quarrel arose from which the lady emerged victorious. She laid her poor husband out with a poker. They could not keep him in hospital. He shied at an immediate renewal of conjugal life. He had no relations or intimate friends in Wellingsford. Where was the poor devil to go? I thought I might bring him along here and let the marigolds look after him for a week or two. Indeed, said I, I admire your airy ways. I know you do, she replied, and that's why I brought him. Is that the fellow? She laughed. You're right the first time. How did you guess? She scrambled to her feet. I'll fetch him in. She fetched him in, a haggard, broad-shouldered man with a back like a sloping plank of wood. He wore corporal stripes. He saluted and stood at rigid attention. This is Tuftin, said Betty. I dispatched her in search of marigold. To Tuftin, I said, regarding him with what, without vanity, I may term an expert eye. You're an old soldier. Yes, sir. Guards? His eyes brightened. Yes, sir. Seven years in the grenadiers, then two years out, rejoined on outbreak of war, sir. I rubbed my hands together in satisfaction. I'm an old soldier, too, said I. So sister told me, sir. A delicate shade in the man's tone and manner at my heart. Perhaps it was the remotest fraction of a glance at my old rug-covered legs, the pleased recognition of my recognition, perhaps some queer freemasonry of the old army. You seem to be in trouble, boy, said I. Tell me about it, and I'll do what I can to help you. So he told his story. After his discharge from the army, he had looked about for a job and found one in the mills of Wellingsford, where he had met the woman, a mill-hand, older than himself, whom he had married. She had been a bit extravagant in bond for glass, but when he left her to rejoin the regiment, he had had no anxieties. She did not write often, not being very well educated, and finding difficult the composition of letters. A machine gun bullet had gone through his chest, just missing his lung. He had been two months in hospital. He had written her announcing his arrival. She had not met him at the station. He had tramped home with his kit-bag on his back, and the cracked head was his reception. He supposed that she had had a lot of easy money and had given way to temptation, and... And what's a man to do, sir? I'm sure I don't know, Corporal, said I. It's damned hard lines on you, but at any rate, you can look upon this as your home for as long as you'd like to stay. Thank you kindly, sir, said he. I turned and beckoned to Betty and Marigold, who had been hovering out of earshot by the house door. They approached. I want to have a word with Marigold, I said. Tufton saluted and went off with Betty. Sergeant Marigold stood stiff as a ramrod on the spot which Tufton had occupied. I suppose Mrs. Connor, said I, has told you all about this poor chap? Yes, sir, said Marigold. We must put him up comfortably. That's quite simple. The only thing that worries me is this. Supposing his wife comes around here raising cane, Marigold held me with his one glittering eye, an eye glittering with the pride of the gunner and the pride, more chastened, of the husband. You can leave all that, sir, to Mrs. Marigold. If she isn't more than a match for any Grenadier guardsman's wife, then I haven't been married to her for the last 20 years. Nothing more was to be said. Marigold marched the man off, leaving me alone with Betty. I'm going to get in before Mrs. Marigold, she remarked with a smile. I'm off now to interview Madam Tufton and bring back her husband's kit. In some ways it is a pity Betty isn't a man. She would make a splendid soldier. I don't think such a thing as fear, physical, moral, or spiritual lurks in any recess of Betty's nature. Not every young woman would brave, without trepidation, a virgo who had cracked a hard-bitten warrior's head with a poker. Marigold and I will come with you, I said. She protested. It was nonsense. Suppose Mrs. Tufton went for Marigold and spoiled his beauty. No, it was too dangerous. No place for men, we argued. At last I blew the police whistle, which I wear on the end of my watch chain. Marigold came hurrying out of the house. Mrs. Conner is going to take us for a run, said I. Very good, sir. Your blood will be on your own heads, said Betty. We talked for a while of what had happened. Vague stories of the demoralization of wives left alone with a far greater weekly income than they had ever handled before had reached our ears. We had read them in the newspapers, but till now we had never come across an example. The woman in question belonged to a bad type. Various dregs from large cities drift into the mills around little country towns and are the despair of mayors, curates, and other local authorities. We gentile folk regarded them as a plague spot in the midst of us. I remember the scandal when the troops first came in August 1914 to Wellingsford. A scandal put a summary end to after a fortnight's grinning amazement at our country morals by the troops themselves. Tufton had married into an undesirable community. We're wasting time, said Betty. So Marigold put me in the back of the car and mounted into the front seat by Betty and we started. Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of Red Bear houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her colleagues at the mills. To get to it, you turn off the high street by the post office, turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue and then to the left. There you find Flowery End and, 50 yards further on, the made road to Godbury crosses it at right angles. Betty, who lived on the Godbury road, was quite familiar with Flowery End. Mid June did its best to justify the name. Here and there, in the tiny patches of front garden, a tenant tried to help Mid June by cultivating wallflowers and geraniums and snapdragon and a rose or two. But the majority cared as much for the beauty of Mid June as for the cleanliness of their children and unsightly brood with any unslovenly rags about their bodies and the circular crust last week's tracal on their cheeks. In his abominable speeches before the war, Gedg used to point out these children to unsympathetic Wellings Forteans as the infant martyrs of an accursed capitalism. Betty pulled up the car at number seven. Marigold Springout helped her down and would have walked up the narrow-flagged path to knock at the door, but she declined his aid and he stood sentry by the gap where the wicked gate of the garden should have been. I saw the door open on Betty's summons and a brawny, tousled, red-faced woman appear, a most horrible and forbidding female, although bearing traces of a once blousy beauty. As in most cottages hereabouts, you enter straight from garden plot into the principal living room. On each side of the two figures I obtained a glance of stark emptiness. Betty said, "'Are you Mrs. Tufton? "'I've come to talk to you about your husband. "'Let me come in.'" The air was so debonair, so unquestioning, that the woman withdrew a pace or two and Betty, following up her advantage, entered and shut the door behind her. I could not have done what Betty did if I had as many legs as a centipede. Marigold turned to me anxiously. Do you think she's safe, sir? I nodded. Anyway, stand by. The neighbors came out of adjoining houses, slateringly in women with babies, more unwashed children, and elderly, vacant male or two. The young men and maidens had not yet been released from the mills. As far as I could gather, there was amused discussion among the gossips concerning the salient features of Sergeant Marigold's physical appearance. I heard one lady bid another to look at his wicked old eye and receive the humors rejoinder, which one. I should have liked to burn them as witches, but Marigold stood his ground, imperturbable. Presently the door opened and Betty came sailing down the path with a red spot on each cheek, followed by Mrs. Tufton, both syphiris. Sergeant Marigold, cried Betty, will you kindly go into that house and fetch out Corporal Tufton's kit bag? Very good, madam, said Marigold. Sergeant or no sergeant, cried Mrs. Tufton, squaring her elbows and barring his way. Nobody's coming into my house to touch any of my husband's property. Really what she said I cannot record. The British Tommy I know upside down, inside out. I could talk to you about him for the week together. The ordinary soldier's wife, good, straight, heroic soul, I know as well, and profoundly admire as I do the ordinary wife of a brother officer. And I could tell you what she thinks and feels in her own language. But the class whence Mrs. Tufton proceeded is out of my social ken. She was stale, drunk. She had, doubtless, a vile headache. Probably she felt twinges of remorse and apprehension of possible police interference. As a counter-irritant to this, she had worked herself into an astounding temper. She would give up none of her husband's belongings. She would have the law on them if they tried. Bad enough it was for her husband to come home after a year's desertion, leaving her penniless, and the moment he set eyes on her began to knock her about. But for sergeants suffering under a blight and characterless females masquerading as hospital nurses to come and ride roughshod over an honest working woman was past endurance. Thus I paraphrase my memory of the lady's torrential speech. Lay your hand on me, she cried, and I'll summon you for assault. As Marigold could not pass her without laying hands on her and as the laying of hands on her, no matter how lightly, what would indudibly have constituted an assault in the eyes of the law, Marigold stiffly confronted her and tried to argue. The neighbors listened in sardonic amusement. Betty stood by with the spots burning on her cheek, clenching her slender, capable fingers, furious at defeat. I was condemned to sit in the car a few yards off an anxious spectator. In a moment's lull of the argument, Betty interposed. Every woman here knows what you have done. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mrs. Tufton retorted, taking an honest woman's husband away from her. It was time to interfere, I called out. Betty, let us get back. I'll fix the man up with everything he wants. At the moment of returning to me, a telegraph boy hopped from his bicycle on the offside of the car and touched his cap. I have a telegram from Mrs. Connors, sir. I recognized the car, and I think that's the lady, so instead of going on to the house, I cut him short. Yes, that was Mrs. Connors of Telford Lodge. He dodged around the car and, entering the garden path, handed the orange-colored envelope to Betty. She took it from him absentmindedly. Her heart and soul engaged in the battle with Mrs. Tufton. The boys took patient for a second or two. Any answer, ma'am? She turned so that I could see her face in profile and impatiently opened the envelope and glanced at the message. Then she stiffened, seeming in a curious way to become many inches taller and grow deadly white. The paper dropped from her hand. Marigold picked it up. The diversion of the telegraph boy had checked Mrs. Tufton's eloquence and compelled the idle interest of the neighbors. I cried out from the car, what's the matter? But I don't think Betty heard me. She recovered herself, took the telegram from Marigold and showed it to the woman. Read it, said Betty, in a strange, hard voice. This is to tell me that my husband was killed yesterday in France. Go on your knees and thank God that you have a brave husband, still alive, and pray that you may be worthy of him. She went into the house and in a moment reappeared like a ghost of steel, carrying the disputed canvas kitbag over her shoulder. The woman stared open-mouthed and said nothing. Marigold came forward to relieve Betty of her burden, but she waved him imperiously away, past him and opening the car door through the bag at my feet. Not one of the rough crowd moved a foot, or uttered a sound, save a baby in arms two doors off, who cut the silence with a sickly wail and was immediately hushed by its mother. Betty churned to the attendant, Marigold. You can drive me home. She sat by my side. Marigold took the wheel in front and drove us. She sought for my hand, held it in an iron grip and said not a word. It was but five minutes run at the pace which Marigold, time-worn master of crises of life and death, put the car. Betty held herself rigid, staring straight in front of her and striving in vain to stifle horrible little sounds that would break through her tightly closed lips. When we pulled up at her door, she said clearly, "'Forgive me, I'm a damned little coward,' and she bolted from the car into the house." End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of The Red Planet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Sean Michael Hogan. The Red Planet, by William J. Locke, Chapter 13. Thus over the sequestered veil of Wellingsford, far away from the sound of shells, even off the track of marauding zeppelins, rode the fiery planet, Mars. There is not a homestead in Great Britain that in one form or another has not caught a reflection of its blood-red ray. No matter how we may seek distraction in work or amusement, the angry glow is ever before our eyes, coloring our vision, coloring our thoughts, coloring our emotions for good or for ill, we cannot escape it. Our personal destinies are inextricably interwoven with the fate directing the death grapple of the thousand miles or so of battle-line and arbitrating on the doom of colossal battleships. Our local newspaper prints week by week its ever-lengthening roll of honor. The shells that burst and slew these brave fellows spread their devastation into our little sheltered town in a thundering crash tearing off from the very trunk of life here a friend, there a son, there a father, there a husband. And I repeat at the risk of wearisome insistence that our sheltered homeland shares the calm, awful fatalism of the battlefield. We have to share it because every root of our country is spiritually as much a battlefield as the narrow, blood-sodden wastes of Flanders in France. Willie Conner, fine, brave gentleman, was dead. My beloved Betty was a widow. No Victoria Cross for Betty, even if there had been one, no children to be bred from birth on its glorious legend. The German shell left Betty stripped and maimed. With her passionate generosity she had given her all, even as his all had been nobly given by her husband. And then all of both had been swept ruthlessly away down the gory draft of sacrifice. Poor Betty. I'm a damned little coward, she said as she bolted into the house. The brave, foolish words rang in my ears all that night. In the early morning I wondered what I should do. A commonplace message written or telephoned would be inept. I shrank from touching her, although I knew she would feel my touch to be gentle. You have seen, I hope, that Betty was dearer to me than anyone else in the world. And I knew that apart from the stirring emotions in her own young life, Betty held me in the closest affection. When she needed me, she would fly the signal. Of that I felt assured. Still. While I was in this state of perplexity, Marigold came in to rouse me and get me ready for the day. I've taken the liberty, sir, said he, to telephone to Telford Lodge to inquire after Mrs. Conner. The maid said she had Mrs. Conner's instructions to reply that she was quite well. The good admirable fellow, I thanked him. While I was shaving, he said in his usual wooden way. Begging your pardon, sir, I thought you might like to send Mrs. Conner a few flowers, so I took upon myself to cut some roses. First thing this morning with a dew on them. Of course I cut myself, and the blood flowed profusely. Why, the Dickens do you spring things like that on people while they're shaving, I cried. Very sorry, sir, said he, solicitous with sponge and towel. All the same, Marigold, said I. You've solved a puzzle that has kept me awake since early dawn. We'll go out as soon as I'm dressed and we'll centre every rose in the garden. I have an acre or so of garden behind the house, of which I have not yet spoken, save incidentally. For it was there that just a year ago poor Althea Fenimore ate her giant strawberries in the last afternoon of her young life. And a cross-grained old misanthropist called Timms attends to it and lavishes on the flowers the love which, owing, I suspect, to blighted early affection he denies to mankind. I am very fond of my garden, and I'm especially interested in my roses. Do you know an exquisitely pink rose, the only true pink, named Mrs. George Norwood? I bring myself up with a jerk. I'm not writing a book on roses. When the war is over, perhaps I shall devote my old age to telling you what I feel and know and think about them. I had a battle with Timms. Timms was about sixty. He had shaggy, bushy eyebrows over hard little eyes, a shaggy gray beard, and a long, clean-shaven obstinate upper lip. Stick him in an ill-fitting frock coat and an antiquated silk hat, and he would be the stage model of a Scottish elder. As a matter of fact, he was Hampshire-born under devout Roman Catholic. But he was as crabbed and old wretch as you can please. He flatly refused to execute my order. I dismissed him on the spot. He countered with the statement that he was an old man who had served me faithfully for many years. I bade him go on serving me faithfully and not be a damned fool. The roses were to be cut. If he didn't cut them, Marigold would. He's been a-cutting them already, he growled, before I came. Timms loathed Marigold, why I could never discover, and Marigold had the lowest opinion of Timms. It was an offence for Marigold to desecrate the garden by his mere footsteps, to touch a plant or a flower constituted a damnable outrage. On the other side, Timms could not approach my person for the purpose of rendering me any necessary physical assistance without incurring Marigold's violent resentment. He'll go on cutting them, said I, unless you start in at once. He began. I sent off Marigold in search of a wheelbarrow. Then having Timms to myself, I summoned him to my side. Do you hold with a man sacrificing his life for his country? He looked at me for a moment or two in his doer-crabbed way. I've got a couple of sons in France trying their best to do it, he replied. That was the first I had ever heard of it. I had always regarded him as a gnarled old bachelor without human ties. Where he kept the sons and the necessary mother, I had not the remotest notion. You're proud of them? I am. And if one was killed, would you grudge his grave a few roses? For the sake of him, wouldn't you sacrifice a world of roses? His manner changed. I don't understand, sir. Has anybody killed? Didn't I say that all these roses were from Mrs. Connor? He dropped his succoteer. Good God, sir, is it Captain Connor? The block-headed idiot of a marigold had not told him. Marigold is a very fine fellow, but occasionally he manifests human frailties that are truly abominable. We are going to sacrifice all our roses, Timms, said I, for the sake of a very gallant Englishman. It's about all we can do. Of course I ought to have entered upon all this explanation when I first came on the scene, but I took it for granted that Timms knew of the tragedy. Need we cut those blooms of the rayon door, asked Timms, alluding to certain roses under conical paper shades which he'd been breathlessly tending for our local flower show? We'll cut them first, said I. Looking back through the correcting prism of time, I fancy the slaughter of the innocents may have been foolishly sentimental, but I had a great desire to lay all that I could by way of tribute of consolation at Betty's feet, and this little sacrifice of all my roses seemed as symbolical an expression of my feelings as anything that my unimaginative brain could devise. During the forenoon I superintended the packing of the baskets of roses and pawling the florist's cart, which I was successful in engaging for the occasion, neither wheel-barrow nor donkey carriage, nor two-seater, the only vehicles at my disposal being adequate. And when I saw it start for its destination, I wheeled myself by way of discipline through my bereaved garden. It looked a mighty desolate, but though all the blooms had gone, there were a myriad buds which next week would burst into happy flower, and the sacrifice seemed trivial, almost ironical, for in Betty's heart there were no buds left. After lunch I went to the hospital for the weekly committee meeting. To my amazement, the first person I met in the corridor was Betty. Betty, white as wax with black rings round unnaturally shining eyes. She waited for me to wheel myself up to her. I said severely, what on earth are you doing here? Go home to bed at once. She put her hand on the back of my chair and bent down. I'm better here, and so are the dear roses. Come and see them. I followed her into one of the military wards on the ground floor, and the place was a feast of roses. I had no idea so many could have come from my little garden. And the ward upstairs, she told me, was similarly beflowered. By the side of each man's bed stood bowl or vase, and the tables and the window sills were bright with blooms. It was the ward for serious cases, men with faces livid from gas poisoning, men with the accursed trench nephritis, men with faces swathed in bandages hiding God knows what distortions, men with cradles over them betokening mangled limbs, men recovering from operations, chiefly the picking of bits of shrapnel and splinters of bone from shattered arms and legs, men with pale faces, patient eyes, and with cheery smiles round their lips when we passed by. A gramophone at the end of the room was grinding out a sentimental tune to which all were listening with a rapt enjoyment. I asked one man, among others, how he was faring. He was getting on fine. With the death rattle in his throat, the wounded British soldier invariably tells you that he is getting on fine. And ain't these roses lovely? Makes the place look like a garden, and that music seems appropriate, don't it, sir? I asked what the gramophone was playing. He looked respectfully shocked. Why, it's the rosary, sir. And after we had left him, Betty said, that's the third time they've asked for it today. They've got mixed up with the name, you see. They're beautiful children, aren't they? I should have called them sentimental idiots. But Betty saw it much clearer than I did. She accompanied me back to the corridor and to the committee room door. I was a quarter of an hour late. I've kept the precious ray on the door for myself, she said. How could you have the heart to cut them? I would have cut out my heart itself for the matter of that, said I, if it would have done any good. She smiled in a forlorn kind of way. Don't do that, for I shall want it inside you more than ever now. Tell me, how is Tufton? Tufton? Yes, Tufton. I must confess that my mind, being so full of Betty, I had clean forgotten Tufton. But Betty remembered. I smiled. He's getting on fine, said I. I reached out my hand and held her cold, slim fingers. Promise me one thing, my dear. All right, she said. Don't overdo things. There's a limit to the power of bearing strain. As soon as you feel you're likely to go FUT, throw it all up and come and see me and let us lay our heads together. I despise people who go FUT, said Betty. I don't, said I. We nodded a mutual farewell. She opened the committee room door for me and walked down the corridor with a swinging step, as though she would show me how fully she had made herself mistress of circumstance. Some evenings later, she came in, as usual, unheralded and established herself by my chair. The sense of midsummer came in through the open windows and there was a great full moon staring in at us from a cloudless sky. Letters from the War Office, from Brother Officers, from the Colonel, from the Brigadier General himself had broken her down. She gave me the letters to read. Everyone loved him, admired him, trusted him. As brave as a lion, wrote one. Perhaps the most brilliant company officer in my brigade, wrote the General. And his death, a tragic common story, a trench, a high explosive shell, the fate of young Etherington, and no possible little wooden cross to mark his grave. And Betty on the floor by my side gave way. The proud will bent, she surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow. She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital where I learned she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge. I shrank from sending her home to the tactless comforting of her aunts. They were excellent, God-fearing ladies, but they had never understood Betty. All her life they had worried her with gentile admonitions. They had regarded her marriage with disfavor as an act of foolhardiness. I even think they looked on her attitude as unmaidingly, and now in her frozen widowhood they fretted her past endurance. On the night when the news came they sent for the vicar of their parish, not my good friend who Christentosia, a very worthy, very serious, very evangelistically religious fellow to administer spiritual consolation. If Betty had sat devoutly under him on Sundays there might have been some reason in the summons, but Betty, holding her own religious views, had only once been inside the church on the occasion of her wedding and had but the most formal acquaintance with the good man. No, I could not send Betty home unexpectedly to have her wounds mauled about by unskilled fingers. Nothing remained but to telephone to the hospital and put her in Mrs. Marigold's charge for the night. So broken was my dear Betty that she allowed herself to be carried off without a word. Once before, years ago, she had behaved with the same piteous facility, and that was when a short-frocked hoiden she had fallen from an apple tree and badly hurt herself, and Marigold had carried her into the house and Mrs. Marigold had put her to bed. In the morning I found her calm and sedate at the breakfast table. We've been and gone and done for both of us, Magi-dear, she remarked, pouring out tea. What do you mean? Our reputations? What a scandal in Wellingsford! She looked me clearly in the eyes and smiled, and her hand did not shake as she held my cup, and by these signs I knew that she had taken herself again in grip and forbade reference to the agony through which she had passed. Quickly she turned the conversation to the Tuftins. What had happened? I told her meagerly. She insisted on fuller details. So, flogged by her, I related what I had gleaned from Marigold's wooden reports. He always conveyed personal information as though he were giving evidence against the defaulter. I had to start all over again. Apparently this had happened. Mrs. Tuftin had arrayed herself, not in sackcloth and ashes, for that was apparently her normal attire, but in an equivalent, as far as a symbol of humility was concerned. Namely, indecent raiment, and had sought her husband's forgiveness. There had been a touching scene in the scullery which Mrs. Marigold had given up to them for the sake of privacy, in which the lady had made tearful promises of reform, and the corporal had magnanimously passed the sponge over the terrible reckoning on her slate. Would he then go home to his penitent wife? But the gallant fellow with the sturdy common sense for which the British soldiers renowned contrasted the clover in which he was living here with the aridness of flowery end and declined to budge. High sentiment was one thing. Snug lying was another. Next time he came back, if she had re-established the house in its former comfort, he didn't say as how he wouldn't. But she cried, and this bit I didn't tell Betty. The next time you may come home dead! Then replied Tuftin, let me see what a nice respectable coffin with brass handles and lots of slap-up brass nails and a brass plate, you can get ready for me. Since the first interview I informed Betty, there had been others daily. Most decorous. They were excellent friends. Others seemed to perceive anything absurd in the situation. Even Marigold looked on it as a matter of course. I have an idea, said Betty. You know we want some help in the servant staff of the hospital. I did. The matron had informed the committee who had empowered her to act. Why not let me tackle Mrs. Tuftin while she is in this beautifully chastened and devotional mood? In this way we can get her out of the mills, out of flowery end, fill her up with noble and patriotic emotions instead of whiskey, and when Tuftin returns, present her to him as a model wife, sanctified by suffering and ennobled by the consciousness of duty done, it would be splendid. For the first time since the black day there came a gleam of fun into Betty's eyes and a touch of color into her cheeks. It would indeed, said I. The only question is whether Tuftin would really like this red cross saint you'll have provided for him. In case he does not, said Betty, you can provide him with a refuge as you are doing now. She rose from the table, announcing her intention of going straight to the hospital. I realized with a pang that breakfast was over, that I had enjoyed a delectable meal, that by some sort of dainty miracle she had bemused me into eating and drinking twice my ordinary ration, that she had unveiled me into talking a thing I have never done during breakfast for years. It is as much as Marigold's ugly head is worth to address a remark to me during the unsympathetic duty. Why if my poached egg regards me with too aggressive a pinkiness, I want to slap it. And into talking about those confounded Tuftins with a gusto only provoked by a glass or two of impeccable port after a good dinner. One would have thought, considering the anguished scene of the night before, that it would have been one of the most miserably impossible tet-a-tet breakfasts in the whole range of such notoriously ghastly meals. But here was Betty, serene and smiling, as though she had been accustomed to breakfast with me every morning of her life. Off to the hospital, with a hard little idea in her humorous head concerning Mrs. Tuftins' conversion. The only sign she gave of last night's storm was when, by way of good-bye, she bent down and kissed my cheek. You know, she said, I love you too much to thank you. And she went off with her brave little head in the air. In the afternoon I went to Wellings Park. Sir Anthony was away, but Lady Fenimore was in. She showed me a letter she had received from Betty and replied to her letter of condolence. My dears, it is good to realize one has such rocks to lean on. You long to help and comfort me. Well, I'll tell you how to do it. You just forget. Leave it to me to do all the remembering. Yours, Betty. End of Chapter 13, recording by Sean Michael Hogan, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. Chapter 14 of The Red Planet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Sean Michael Hogan. The Red Planet by William J. Locke, Chapter 14. On the 1st of July, there was forwarded to me from the club a letter in an unknown handwriting. I had to turn to the signature to discover the identity of my correspondent. It was Reggie Daker, Colonel Daker, whom I had met in London a couple of months before. As it tells its own little story, I transcribe it. Dear Major Meredith, I should like to confirm by the following anecdote, which is going the round of the brigade, what I recently told you about our friend, Boyce. I shouldn't worry you, but I feel that if one has cast an unjustifiable slur on a brother officer's honor, and I can't tell you how the thing has lain on my conscience, one shouldn't leave a stone unturned to rehabilitate him, even in the eyes of one person. There has been a good deal of scrapping around Eeper lately, that given away by the communiques, but for reasons which both the censor and yourself will appreciate, I can't be more explicit as to locality. Enough to say that somewhere in this region, or sector as we call it nowadays, there was a certain bit of ground that had been taken and retaken over and over again. B's regiment was in this fighting, and at one particular time we were holding a German front trench section. A short distance further on, the enemy held a little farm building, forming a sort of redoubt. They sniped all day long. They also had a machine gun. I can't give you accurate details, for I can only tell you what I've heard, but the essentials are true. Well, we got that farmhouse. We got it single-handed. Boyce put up the most amazing bluff that has ever happened in this war. He crawls out by himself without anybody knowing, it was a pitch black night. Gets through the barbed wire, heaven knows how, up to the house, lays a sentry out with his life preserver, gives a few commands to an imaginary company, and summons the occupants, two officers and 15 men to surrender. Thinking they are surrounded, they obey like lambs, come out unarmed with their hands up, officers in all, and are comfortably marched off in the dark as prisoners into our trenches. They say that when the German officers discovered how they had been done, they foamed so hard that we had to use empty sandbags as straight waistcoats. Now it's picturesque, of course, and being picturesque, it is flown from mouth to mouth, but it's true, verb set. Hoping some time or other to see you again, you are sincerely our Daker, Lieutenant Colonel. I quote this letter here for the sake of chronological sequence. It gave me a curious bit of news. No man could have performed such a feat without a cold brain, soundly beating hard and nerves of steel. It was not an act of red-hot heroism, it was done in cold blood, a deliberate gamble with death on a thousand to one chance. It was staggeringly brave. I told the story to Mrs. Boyce, her comment was characteristic, but surely they would have to surrender if called upon by a British officer. To the day of judgment, I don't think she will understand what Leonard did. Leonard himself, coming home slightly wounded to her three weeks afterwards, pooped the story as one of no account, and only further confused the dear lady's ill-conceived notions. In the meanwhile, life at Wellingsford flowed on eventfully. Now and again a regiment or a brigade, having finished its training, disappeared in a night, and the next day fresh troops arrived to fill its place. And this great silent movement of men went on all over the country. Sometimes our hearts sank. A reserve howitzer territorial brigade turned up in Wellings Park with dummy wooden guns. The officers told us they had been expecting proper guns daily for the past two months. Marigold shook a sad head. But all things, even six-inch howitzers, come to him who waits. Little More was heard of Randall Holmes. He corresponded with his mother through a firm of London solicitors, and his address and his doings remained a mystery. He was alive. He professed robust health, and in reply to Mrs. Holmes's frantically expressed hope that he was adopting no course that might discredit his father's name, he twitted her with intellectual volt fast to the views of Philistia. But at the same time assured her that he was doing nothing which the most self-righteous bourgeois would consider discreditable. But it is discreditable for him to go away like this, not let his own mother know where he is, cried the poor woman. And of course I agreed with her. I find it best always to agree with mothers, also with wives. After her own lapse from what Mrs. Boyce would have called sparsionism, Betty kept up her brave face. When Willie Conner's kit came home, she told me tearlessly about the heart-rending consignment. Now and then she spoke of him with a proud look in her eyes. She was one of the women of England who had the privilege of being the wife of a hero. In this world one must pay for everything worth having. Her widowhood was the price. All the tears of a lifetime could not bring him back. All the storms of fate could not destroy the glory of those few wonderful months. He was laughing so she heard when he met his death. So would she, in honor of him, go on laughing till she met hers. And that silly fool Philist is still crying her eyes out over Randall, she said. Don't I think she was wrong in sending him away? If she had married him, she might have influenced him, made him get a commission in the army. I've threatened to beat her if she talks such nonsense. Why can't people take a line and stick to it? This isn't a world of betties, my dear, said I. Rubbish, that outrageous Mrs. Tufton's doing it. Apparently she was. She followed Betty about as the lamb followed Mary. Tufton, after a week or two at Wellington Barracks, had been given sergeant stripes and sent off with a draft to the front. Betty's dramatic announcement of her widowhood seemed to have put the fear of death into the woman's soul. As soon as her husband landed in France, she went scrupulously through the closely printed casualty list of non-commissioned officers and men in the Daily Mail, in awful dread lest she should see her husband's name. Betty vainly assured her that in the first place, she would hear from the war office weeks before anything could appear in the papers. And that in the second, his name would occur under the heading Grenadier Guards and not under Royal Field Artillery, Royal Engineers, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, R.A.M.C., or Australian and Canadian Contingents. Mrs. Tufton went through the lot from start to finish. Once indeed, she came across the name in big print and made a beeline through the wards for Betty, an offence for which the matron nearly threw her there and then into the street. It was that of the gallant colonel of a New Zealand regiment at Gallipoli. Betty had to point to the brief biographical note to prove to the distracted woman that the late colonel Tufton of New Zealand could not be identical with Sergeant Tufton of the Grenadiers. She regarded Mrs. Tufton as a brand she had plucked from the burning and took a great deal of trouble with her. On the other hand, I imagine Mrs. Tufton looked upon herself as a very important person, a sergeant's wife, and the confidential intimate of a leading sister at the Wellingsford Hospital. In fact, Marigold mentioned her notorious vanity. What does it matter, cried Betty when I put this view before her? How swelled her head may be so long as it isn't swollen with drink. And I could find no adequate reply. Towards the end of the month comes boys to Wellingsford, this time not secretly. For the day after his arrival he drove his mother through the town and incidentally called on me. A neglected bullet graze on the neck had turned septic. An ugly temperature had sent him to hospital. The authorities, as soon as the fever had abated and left him on the high road to recovery, had sent him home. A khaki bandage around his bull throat alone be tokened anything amiss. He would be back, he said, as soon as the medical board at the war office would let him. On this occasion, for the first time since South African days, I met him without any mistrust. What had passed between Betty and himself, I did not know. Relations between man and woman are so subtle and complicated that unless you have the full pleadings on both sides in front of you, you cannot arbitrate. And as often as not, if you deliver the most soul-satisfying of judgments, you are hopelessly wrong because there are all important elusive factors of personality, temperament, sex, and whatnot, which all the legal acumen in the world could not set down in black and white. So, half unconsciously, I ruled out Betty from my contemplation of the man. I had been obsessed by the Villabook farm story and by that alone. Reggie Daker, to say nothing of personages in high command, had proved it to be a horrible lie. He had Marshall Nays deserve reputation, the brav de brav, and there is no more coldly critical conferrer of such repute than the British Army in the field. To win it, a man not only has to do something heroic once or twice, that is what he is there for, but he has to be doing it all the time. Boyce had piled up for himself an amazing record, one that overwhelmed the possibility of truth in old slanders. When I gripped him by the hand, I felt immeasurable relief at being able to do so without the old haunting suspicion and reservation. He spoke like thousands of others of his type, the type of the fine professional English soldier, with diffident modesty of such personal experiences as he deigned to recount. The anecdotes mostly had a humorous side and were evoked by allusion. Like all of us stay at homes, I cursed the censorship for leaving us so much in the dark. He laughed and cursed the censorship for the opposite reason. The damned fools, I beg your pardon, mother, but when a fool is too big a fool even for this world, he must be damned. The damned fools allow all sorts of things to be given away. They were nearly the death of me and were the death of half a dozen of my men. And he told the story. In a deserted brewery behind the lines, the vats were filled up as baths for men from the trenches, and the furnaces heated ovens in which horrible clothing was baked. This brewery had been immune from attack until an officially sanctioned newspaper article specified its exact position. A few days after the article appeared, in fact, as soon as a copy of the paper reached Germany, a thunderstorm of shells broke on the brewery. Out of it poured a helter-skelter stream of stark-naked men who ran wherever they could for cover. From one point of view, it was vastly comic. In the meanwhile, the building contained all their clothes, and all the spare clothing for a brigade was being scientifically destroyed. That was more comic still. The bather cut off from his garments is a worldwide joke. The German battery, having got the exact range, were having a systematic two-tonic afternoon's enjoyment. But from another point of view, the situation was desperate. There were these poor fellows, hoards of them, in nature's inadequate protection against the weather, shivering in the cold, with the nearest spare rag of clothing some miles away. Boyce got them together, paraded them instantly under the shell-fire, and led them at a rush into the blazing building to self-stores. Six never came out alive. Many were burned and wounded, but it had to be done if the whole crowd would have perished from exposure. Tommy is fairly tough, but he cannot live mother-naked through a march night of driving sleet. No, said Boyce, if you suffered daily from the low cunning of Brother Bosch, you wouldn't cry for things to be published in the newspapers. At the end of their visit, I accompanied my guests to the hall. Marigold escorted Mrs. Boyce to the car. Leonard picked up his cap and cane, and turned to shake hands. I noticed that the knob of the cane was neatly cased in washed leather. Idly, I inquired the reason. He smiled grimly as he slipped off the cover and exposed the polished, deep vermilion butt of the Life Preserver, which Reggie Daker had described. It's a sort of fetish I feel I must carry around with me, he explained. When I've got it in my hand, I don't seem to care a damn what I do. When I haven't, I miss it. Remember the story of Sir Walter Scott's boy with the butter? Something like that, you know. But in its bare state, it's not a pretty sight for the mother. You ought to have a name, said I. The poilu calls his bayonet Rosalie. He looked at it darkly for a moment before refitting the washed leather. I might call it the reminder, said he. Goodbye, and he turned quickly and strode out of the door. The reminder of what? He puzzled me. Why, in spite of all my open-heartedness, did he still contrive to leave me with a sense of the enigmatic? Although he showed himself openly about the town, he held himself aloof from social intercourse with the inhabitants. He called, I know, on Mrs. Holmes and on one or two others who have no place in this chronicle. But he refused all proposals of entertainment, notably an invitation to dinner from the Fenimors. Sir Anthony met him in the street, upgraded him in his genial manner for neglect of his old friends, and pressingly asked him to dine at Wellings Park, just a few old friends. The duties of a distinguished soldier said he did not begin and end on the field. He must uplift the hearts of those who had to stay at home. Sir Anthony had a nervous trick of rattling off many sentences before his interlocutor could get in a word. When he had finished, the boys politely declined the invitation. And with a damn chilly standoffish politeness, cried Sir Anthony furiously when telling me about it. Just as if I had been Perkins, the fishmonger, asking him to meet the pretty loves at High Tee. It's swelled head, my dear chap, that's what it is, just swelled head. None of us are good enough for him and his laurels. He's going to remain the modest, mossy violet of a hero blushing unseen. Oh, damn the fellow. I did my best to soothe my touchy and choleric friend. No soldier said I likes to be made a show of. Why had he suggested a dinner party? A few friends. Anyone in Boyce's position knew what that meant. It meant about 30 gawking, gaping people for whom he didn't care a hang. Why hadn't Anthony asked the boys to dine quietly with Edith and himself? With me throwing in, for instance, if they wanted exotic assistance. Let me try, I said, to fix matters up. So the next day I called on Boyce and told him, with such tact as I have at command, of Sir Anthony's wounded feelings. My dear Meredith said he, I can only say to you what I tried to explain to the irascible little man. If I accepted one invitation, I should have to accept all invitations or give terrible offence all over the place. I'm here a sick man and my mother's an indolid, and I merely want to be saved from my friends and have a quiet time with the old lady. Of course if Sir Anthony has offended, I'm only too sorry, and I beg you to assure him that I never intended the slightest discourtesy, the mere idea of it distresses me. The explanation was reasonable, the apology frank. Sir Anthony received them both grumpily. He had his foibles. He set his invitations to dinner in a separate category from those of the ragtag and bobtail of welling-served society. So for the sake of principle, he continued to dam the fellow. On the other hand, for the sake of principle, reparation for injustice, I continued to like the fellow and found pleasure in his company. For one thing I hankered after the smoke and smell and din of the front, and Boyce succeeded more than anyone else in satisfying my appetite. While he talked as he did freely with me alone, I got near to the grim essence of things. Also with the aid of rough military maps, he made actions and strategical movements of which newspaper accounts had given me but a confused notion, as clear as if I had been a chief of staff. Often he went to considerable trouble in obtaining special information. He appeared to set himself out to win my esteem. Now a cripple is very sensitive to kindness. I could not reject his overtures. What interested motive could he have in seeking out a useless hulk like me? On the first opportunity I told Betty of the new friendship, having a twinger to have conscious lest it might appear to her disloyal. But why in the world shouldn't you see him, dear? She said open-eyed. He brings the breath of battle to you and gives you fresh life. You're looking ever so much better the last few days. The only thing is, she added, turning her head away, that I don't want to run the risk of meeting him again. Naturally I took precautions against such an occurrence. The circumstances of their last meeting at my house lingered unpleasantly in my mind. Perhaps for Betty's sake, I ought to have turned a cold shoulder on boys. But when you have done a man of foul injustice for years, you must make him some kind of secret reparation. So by making him welcome, I did what I could. Now I don't know whether I ought to set down a trivial incident mentioned in my diary under the date of the 15th August, the day before Boyce left Wellingsford to join his regiment in France. In writing an account of other people's lives, it's difficult to know what to put in and what to leave out. If you bring in your own predilections or prejudices or speculations concerning them, you must convey a distorted impression. You lie about them unconsciously. A fact is a fact, and if it is important, ought to be recorded. But when you are not sure whether it is a fact or not, what are you to do? Perhaps I had better narrate what happened and tell you afterwards why I hesitate. Marigold had driven me over to Godbury where I had business connected with the County Territorial Association and we were returning home. It was a moist, horrible, depressing August day, a slimy, sticky day. Clouds hung low over the reeking earth. The honest rain had ceased, but wet drops dribbled from the leaves of the trees and the branches and trunks exuded moisture. The thatched roofs of cottages were dank. In front gardens, roses and hollyhocks drooped sodden. The very droves of steers coming from markets sweated in the muggy air. The good slush of the once dusty road, broken to bits by military traffic, had stiffened into black grease. Round a bend of the road we skidded alarmingly. Marigold has a theory that in summertime, a shirt next to the skin is the only wear for humans and square tread tires the only wear for motorcars. With some acerbity, I pointed out the futility of his proposition, that the blandness of superior wisdom he assured me that we were perfectly safe. You can't knock into the head of an artilleryman who's been trained to hang on to a limber by the friction of his trousers, that there can be any danger in the luxurious seat of a motor car. There is a good straight half mile of the Godbury Road, which is known in the locality as the gut. It is sunken and very narrow, being flanked on one side by the railway embankment and on the other by the grounds of Godbury Chase. A most desolate bit of road, half overhung by trees and oozing with all the moisture of the countryside. On this day, it was the wettest, slimmiest bit of road in England. We had almost reached the end of it when it entered the head of a stray puppy dog to pause in the act of crossing and sit down in the middle and hunt for fleas. To spare the abominable mongrel, Marigold made a sudden swerve. Of course, the car skidded. It skidded all over the place as if it were drunk, and aided by Marigold, described a series of ghastly half-circles. At last he performed various convulsive feats of jugglery with the result of the car, which was nosing steadily for the ditch came to a standstill. Then Marigold informed me in unemotional tones that the steering gear had gone. It's all the fault of that there dog, said he, twisting his head so as to glare at the little beast, who after a yelp and a bound, had calmly recaptured his position and resumed his interrupted occupation. It's all the fault of that there Marigold, I retorted, who can't see the sense of using stuttered tires on a greasy surface. What's to be done now? Marigold thrust his hand beneath his wig and scratched his head. He didn't exactly know. He got out and stared intently at the car. If mind could have triumphed over a matter, the steering gear would have become disfractured. But the good Marigold's mind was not powerful enough. He gave up the contest and looked at me and the situation. There we were, broadside on to the narrow road, and only manhandling could bring us round to a position of safety by the side. He was for trying it there and then, but I objected, having no desire to be slithered into the ditch. I would just as soon, said I, ride a giraffe shod with roller skates. He didn't even smile. He turned his one reproachful eye on me. What was to be done? I told him we must wait for assistance. When I had been transferred into the vehicle of a passing Samaritan, it was time enough for the manhandling. Fate brought the Samaritan very quickly. A car coming from Godbury, too did violently, then slowed down, stopped, and from it jumped Leonard Boyce. As he was to rescue me from a position of peculiar helplessness, I regarded his great khaki-clad figures that of a ministering angel. I beamed on him. Hello, what's the matter? He asked cheerily. I explained. Being merciful, I spared Marigold and threw the blame on the dog and on the county council for allowing the roads to get into such a filthy condition. That's all right, said Boyce. We'll soon fix you up. First we'll get you into my car. Then Marigold and I will slew this one round and then we'll send him a tow. Marigold nodded and approached to lift me out. Then what happened next happened in the flash of a few breathless seconds. There was the dull thud of hooves, a scared bay thoroughbred coming from Godbury, galloping hell for leather with a disheveled boy and khaki on his back. The boy had lost his stirrups, he had lost his reins, he had lost his head. He hung half over the saddle and had a death grip on the horse's mane and the uncontrolled brute was thundering down on us. There was my infernal car barring the narrow road. I remember bracing myself to meet the shock and Anne thought I of Duncan Meredith. I saw Boyce leap aside like a flash and appear to stand stock still. The next second I saw Marigold's semaphore a few yards in front of the car and then swing sickeningly at the horse's bit and then the whole lot of them, Marigold, horse and rider, come down in a convulsive heap on the greasy road. To my intense relief I saw Marigold pick himself up and go to the head of the plunging prostrate horse. In a moment or two he had got the beast on his feet where he stood quivering. It was a fine, smart piece of work on the part of the old artilleryman. I was so intent on his danger that I forgot all about Boyce. But as soon as the three crashed down I saw him run to assist the young subaltern who had rolled himself clear. By Jove, that was a narrow shave. He cried cordially, getting him a hand. It was indeed, sir, said the young man, scraping the mud off his face. That's the second time the brute has done it. He shies and bucks and kicks like a regular devil. This time he shied at esteem, Lori, and bucked my feet out of the stirrups. Everybody in the squadron has turned him down, and I'm the junior. I've had to take him. He eyed the animal resentfully. I'd just like to get him on some grass and knock hell out of him. I'm glad to see you're not hurt, said Boyce with a smile. Oh, not a bit, sir, said the boy. He turned to Marigold. I don't know how to thank you. It was a jolly plucky thing to do. You've saved my life and that of the gentleman in the car. If we had busted into it there would have been pie. He came to the side of the car. I think you're Major Meredith, sir. I must have given you an awful fright. I'm so sorry. My name is Brown. I'm in the South Scottish horse. He had a courteous charm of manner in spite of his boyish desire to appear unshaken by the accident. A little bravado was an excellent thing. I laughed and held out my hand. I'm glad to meet you, although our meeting might have been contrived less precipitously. This is Sergeant Marigold, late RFA, who does me the honour of looking after me, and this is Major Boyce. Observe the little devil of malice that made me put Marigold first. Of the rifles? A quick gleam of admiration showed in the boy's eyes as he saluted. No soldier could be stationed at Wellingsford without hearing of the hero of the neighbourhood. A great hay wagon came lumbering down the road and pulled up, there being no room for it to pass. This put an end to social amenities. Brown mounted his detested charger and trotted off. Marigold transferred me to Boyce's car. Several pairs of brawny arms right at the two-seater and Boyce and I drove off, leaving Marigold waiting with his usual stony patience for the promised tow. On the way, Boyce talked gaily of Marigold's gallantry, of the boy's spirit, of the idiotic way in which impossible horses were being foisted on newly formed cavalry units. When we drew up at my front door, it occurred to me that there was no Marigold in attendance. How the deuce that I am I going to get out? Boyce laughed, I don't think I'll drop you. His great arms picked me up with ease, but while he was carrying me, I experienced a singular physical revolt. I loathed his grip. I loathed the enforced personal contact. Even after he had deposited me, very skillfully and gently, in my wheelchair in the hall, I hated the lingering sense of his touch. He owed his whiskey and soda to the most elementary instinct of hospitality. Besides, he was off the next day, back to the trenches and the hell of battle, and I had to bid him goodbye and got speed. But when he went, I felt glad, very glad, as though relieved of some dreadful presence. My old distrust and dislike returned, increased a thousandfold. It was only when he got my frail body in his arms, which I realized were twice as strong as my good marigolds, that I felt the ghastly and irrational revulsion. The only thing to which I can liken it, although it seems ludicrous, is what I imagine to be the instinctive recoil of a woman who feels on her body the touch of antipathetic hands. I know that my malady has made me a bit super sensitive, but my vanity has prided itself on keeping up a rugged spirit in the fool of a body, so I hated myself for giving way to morbid sensations. All the same, I felt that if I were alone in a burning house, and there was no one but Leonard Boyce to save me, I should prefer incineration to rescue. And now I will tell you why I have hesitated to give a place in this chronicle to the incident of the broken-down car and the runaway horse. It all happened so quickly, my mind was so taken up with a sudden peril, but for the life of me I cannot swear to the part played by Leonard Boyce. I saw him leap aside, and had the fragment of an impression of him standing motionless between the radiator of his car and the tail of mine, which was at right angles. The next time he thrust himself on my consciousness was when he was lugging young brown at a reach of the convulsive hoofs. In the meanwhile, Marigold, single-handed, had rushed into the jaws of death and stopped the horse. But as it was a matter of seconds, I had no reason for believing that, for adventitious relative positions on the road, Boyce would not have done the same. And yet out of the corner of my eye I got an instantaneous photograph of him standing bolt upright between the two cars, while the abominable Babe Ruth with distended red nostrils and wild eyes was thundering down on us. On the other hand, the swift pleasure in the boy's eyes when he realized that he was in the presence of the popular hero proved him free of doubts such as mine. And when Marigold, having put the car in a hospital, came to make his report and lingered in order to discuss the whole affair, he said in wooden deprecation of my eulogy. If Major Boyce hadn't jumped in, sir, young Mr. Brown's head would have been kicked into pumpkin squash. Well, I have known from long experience that there are no more untrustworthy witnesses than a man's own eyes, especially in the lightning dramas of life. I was kept awake all night, and towards the dawn I came into thorough agreement with Sir Anthony, and I heartily damned the fellow. What had I to do with him that he should rob me of my sleep? End of chapter 14, recording by Sean Michael Hogan, St. John's Newfoundland, Canada.