Mufti Part 26

She raised her eyebrows. "Pride of place belongs to women as much as to men," she answered simply. "Why, Derek, don't try to pretend that you don't understand that." She gave a little tired laugh. "Besides, it's Dad--and Gordon. . . ."

"And you'd sacrifice yourself for them," he cried. "Not to keep them from want, don't forget--but to keep them at Blandford!" She made no answer, and after a while he went on. "I said I'd come to-morrow, Joan, and ask you to decide; but this letter alters things a bit, my dear. I guess we've got to have things out now. . . ."

The girl moved restlessly and rested her head on her hand.

"You've said it once, lady; I want to hear you say it again. 'Do you love me?'"

"Yes; I love you," she said without the slightest hesitation.

"And would you marry me if there was no Blandford?"

"To-morrow," she answered simply, "if you wanted it."

With a sudden ungovernable rush of feeling Vane swept her out of the chair into his arms, and she clung to him panting and breathless.

"My dear," he said exultantly, "do you suppose that after that I'd let you go? Not for fifty Blandfords. Don't you understand, my grey girl?

You've got your sense of proportion all wrong. You're mine--and nothing else on G.o.d's green earth matters."

So for a while they stood there, while he smoothed her hair with hands that trembled a little and murmured incoherent words of love. And then at last they died away, and he fell silent--while she looked at him with tired eyes. The madness was past, and with almost a groan Vane let his arms fall to his side.

"Dear man," she said, "I want you to go; I can't think when you're with me. I've just got to worry this thing out for myself. I don't want you to come and see me, Derek, until I send for you; I don't want you even to write to me. I don't know how long it will take. . . . but I'll let you know, as soon as I know myself."

For a while he argued with her--but it was useless. In the bottom of his heart he knew it would be even as he pleaded and stormed. And, because he recognised what lay behind her decision, he loved her all the more for her refusal. There was a certain sweet wistfulness on her face that tore at his heart, and at last he realised that he was failing her, and failing her badly. It was a monstrous thing from one point of view that such a sacrifice should be possible--but it came to Vane with cynical abruptness that life abounds in monstrous things.

And so, very gently, he kissed her. "It shall be as you say, dear," he said gravely. "But try not to make it too long. . . ."

At the door he stopped and looked back. She was standing as he had left her, staring out into the darkness, and as he paused she turned and looked at him. And her eyes were very bright with unshed tears. . . .

Mechanically he picked up his hat and gloves, and drove back to his rooms. He helped himself to a whisky and soda of such strength that Binks looked at him with an apprehensive eye, and then he laughed.

"h.e.l.l, Binks," he remarked savagely--"just h.e.l.l!"

CHAPTER XIV

During the weeks that followed Vane did his best to put Joan out of his mind. He had given her his promise not to write, and as far as in him lay he tried his hardest not to think. A Medical Board pa.s.sed him fit for light duty, and he joined up at the regimental depot in the cathedral city of Murchester. Once before he had been there, on a course, before he went overseas for the first time, and the night he arrived he could not help contrasting the two occasions. On the first he, and everyone else, had had but one thought--the overmastering desire to get across the water. The glamour of the unknown was calling them--the glory which the ignorant a.s.sociate with war. Shop was discussed openly and without shame. They were just a band of wild enthusiasts, only longing to make good.

And then they had found what war really was--had sampled the reality of the thing. One by one the band had dwindled, and the gaps had been filled by strangers. Vane was sitting that night in the chair where Jimmy Benton had always sat. . . . He remembered Jimmy lying across the road near d.i.c.kebush staring up at him with sightless eyes. So had they gone, one after another, and now, how many were left? And the ones that had paid the big price--did they think it had been worth while . . . now? . . . They had been so willing to give their all without counting the cost. With the Englishman's horror of sentimentality or blatant patriotism, they would have regarded with the deepest mistrust anyone who had told them so. But deep down in each man's heart--it was England--his England--that held him, and the glory of it. Did they think their sacrifice had been worth while . . . now?

Or did they, as they pa.s.sed by on the night wind, look down at the seething bitterness in the country they had died for, and whisper sadly, "It was in vain--You are pulling to pieces what we fought to keep standing; you have nothing but envy and strife to put in its place. . . . Have you not found the truth--yet? . . ."

Unconsciously, perhaps, but no less certainly for that, Vane was drifting back into the same mood that had swayed him when he left France. If what Ramage had said to him was the truth; if, at the bottom of all the ceaseless bickering around, there was, indeed, a vital conflict between two fundamentally opposite ideas, on the settlement of which depended the final issue--it seemed to him that nothing could avert the catastrophe sooner or later. It was against human nature for any cla.s.s to commit suicide--least of all the cla.s.s which for generations had regarded itself and been regarded as the leading one. And yet, unless this thing did happen; unless voluntarily, the men of property agreed to relinquish their private rights, and sink their own interests for the good of the others, Ramage had quite calmly and straightforwardly prophesied force. Apparently the choice lay between suicide and murder. . . .

It all seemed so hopelessly futile to Vane. He began to feel that only over the water lay Reality; that here, at home, he had discovered a Land of Wild Imaginings. . . .

Though he refused to admit it to himself, there was another, even more potent, factor to account for his restlessness. Like most Englishmen, however black the outlook, however delirious the Imagining, he had, deep down in his mind, the ingrained conviction that the country would muddle through somehow. But the other factor--the personal factor--Joan, was very different. Try as he would he could not dismiss her from his mind entirely. Again and again the thought of her came back to torment him, and he began to chafe more and more at his forced inaction. Where large numbers of officers are continually pa.s.sing through a depot, doing light duty while recovering from wounds, there can be nothing much for the majority to do. Twice he had begun a letter to Margaret, to tell her that after all she had been right--that it had been nervous tension--that it wasn't her after all. And twice he had torn it up after the first few lines. It wasn't fair, he pacified his conscience, to worry her when she was so busy. He could break it far more easily by degrees--when he saw her. And so the restlessness grew, and the disinclination to do anything but sit in the mess and read the papers. His arm was still too stiff for tennis, and the majority of the local people bored him to extinction. Occasionally he managed to get ten minutes' work to do that was of some use to somebody; after that his time was his own.

One day he tried his hand at an essay, but he found that the old easy style which had been his princ.i.p.al a.s.set had deserted him. It was stiff and pedantic, and what was worse--bitter; and he tore it up savagely after he had read it through. He tried desperately to recover some of his old time optimism--and he failed. He told himself again and again that it was up to him to see big, to believe in the future, and he cursed himself savagely for not being able to.

There was a woman whom he had met at lunch on one of his periodical visits to London. She was a war widow, and a phrase she had used to him rang in his brain for many days after. It seemed to him to express so wonderfully the right feeling, the feeling which in another form he was groping after.

"It wouldn't do," she had said very simply, "for the Germans to get a 'double casualty.'" It was the sort of remark, he thought, that he would have expected Margaret to make. With all the horror of genteel pauperism staring her in the face, that woman was thinking big, and was keeping her head up. With all the bitterness of loss behind her, she had, that very day, so she told him, been helping another more fortunate one to choose frocks for her husband's next leave. . . .

Try as he might, he could not rid himself of the mocking question "Cui bono?" What was the use of this individual heroism to the country at large? As far as the woman herself was concerned it kept her human, but to the big community . . .? Would even the soldiers when they came back be strong enough, and collected enough, to do any good? And how many of them really thought . . .?

Surely there must be some big, and yet very simple, message which the war could teach. Big because the result had been so wonderful; simple because the most stupid had learned it. And if they had learned it over the water, surely they could remember it afterwards. . . . pa.s.s it on to others. It might even be taught in the schools for future generations to profit by.

It was not discipline or so-called militarism; they were merely the necessary adjuncts to a life where unhesitating obedience is the only thing which prevents a catastrophe. It was not even tradition and playing the game, though it seemed to him he was getting nearer the answer. But these were not fundamental things; they were to a certain extent acquired. He wanted something simpler than that--something which came right at the beginning, a message from the bedrock of the world; something which was present in France--something which seemed to be conspicuous by its absence in England.

"We've caught these fellows," he said one evening after dinner to a regular Major whose life had taken him all over the world, "and we've altered 'em. Their brothers are here at home; they themselves were here a short while ago--will be back in the future. They are the same breed; they come from the same stock. What is this thing that has done it? What gospel has been preached to 'em to turn them into the salt of the earth, while at home here the others are unchanged, except for the worse?"

The Major s.h.i.+fted his pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"The gospel that was preached two thousand odd years ago," he answered shortly. Vane looked at him curiously. "I admit I hardly expected that answer, Major," he said.

"Didn't you?" returned the other. "Well, I'm not an authority on the subject; and I haven't seen the inside of a church for business purposes since before the South African War. But to my mind, when you've shorn it of its trappings and removed ninety per cent. of its official performers into oblivion, you'll find your answer in what, after all, the Church stands for." He hesitated for a moment, and glanced at Vane, for he was by nature a man not given to speech. "Take a good battalion in France," he continued slowly. "You know as well as I do what's at the bottom of it--good officers. Good leaders. . . .

What makes a good leader? What's the difference between a good officer and a dud? Why, one has sympathy and the other hasn't: one will sacrifice himself, the other won't. . . . There's your gospel. . . ."

He relapsed into silence, and Vane looked at him thoughtfully.

"Sympathy and sacrifice," he repeated slowly. "Is that your summing up of Christianity?

"Isn't it?" returned the other. "But whether it is or whether it isn't, it's the only thing that will keep any show going. d.a.m.n it, man, it's not religion--it's common horse sense." The Major thumped his knee. "What the deuce do you do if you find things are going wrong in your company? You don't snow yourself in with reports in triplicate and bark. You go and see for yourself. Then you go and talk for yourself; and you find that it is either a justifiable grievance which you can put right, or an error or a misunderstanding which you can explain. You get into touch with them. . . . Sympathy. Sacrifice.

Have a drink?" He pressed the bell and sank back exhausted. As has been said, he was not addicted to speech.

Neither of them spoke until the waiter had carried out the order, and then suddenly the Major started again. Like many reserved men, once the barrier was broken down, he could let himself go with the best.

And Vane, with his eyes fixed on the quiet face and steady eyes of the elder man, listened in silence.

"I'm a fool," he jerked out. "Every Regular officer is a fool.

Numbers of novelists have said so. Of course one bows to their superior knowledge. But what strikes me in my foolishness is this. . . . You've got to have leaders and you've got to have led, because the Almighty has decreed that none of us have the same amount of ability. Perhaps they think He's a fool too; but even they can't alter that. . . . If ability varies so must the reward--money; and some will have more than others. Capital and Labour; leader and led; officer and man. . . . In the old days we thought that the best leader for the Army was the sahib; and with the old army we were right.

Tommy . . . poor, down-trodden Tommy, as the intellectuals used to call him, was deuced particular. He was also mighty quick on the uptake at spotting the manner of man he followed. Now things have changed; but the principle remains. And it answers. . . . You'll always have an aristocracy of ability who will be the civilian leaders, you'll always have the rank and file who will be led by them. The same rules will hold as you apply in the army. . . . You'll have good shows and bad shows, according to whether the leader has or has not got sympathy. A good many now should have it; they've learned the lesson over the water. And on their shoulders rests the future. . . ."

"You put the future on the leaders, too," said Vane a little curiously.

"Why, naturally," returned the other. "What else fits a man to lead?"

"But your broad doctrine of sympathy"--pursued Vane. "Don't you think it's one of those things that sounds very nice in a pulpit, but the practical application is not quite so easy. . . ."

"Of course it isn't easy," cried the other. "Who the deuce said it was? Is it easy to be a good regimental officer? Sympathy is merely the--the spiritual sense which underlies all the work. And the work is ceaseless if the show is going to be a good one. You know that as well as I do. You take an officer who never talks to his men, practically never sees 'em--treats 'em as automatons to do a job. Never sacrifices his own comfort. What sort of a show are you going to have?"

"d.a.m.n bad," said Vane, nodding his head.

"And you take a fellow who talks to 'em, knows 'em well, is a friend to 'em, and explains things--that's the vital point--explains things; listens to what they have to say--even makes some small amendments if he thinks they're right. . . . A fellow who makes them take a pride in their show. . . . What then?"

"But could you apply it to civil life?" queried Vane.

"Don't know," returned the other, "because I'm a fool. Everybody says so; so I must be. But it seems to me that if you take a concern, and every week the boss sends for his men, or some chosen representative of theirs, and explains things to 'em, it won't do much harm. Shows 'em how the money is going--what it's being spent on, why he's putting in fresh plant, why his dividends ain't going to be as big this year as they were last--all that sort of thing. Don't play the fool with them. . . . Dividends may be bigger, and he'll have to stump up. . . .

A good many of the bosses will have to alter their ways, incidentally.

No man is going to sweat himself in order that someone else up the road can keep a second motor car, when the man himself hasn't even a donkey cart. You wouldn't yourself--nor would I. Up to a point it's got to be share and share alike. Over the water the men didn't object to the C.O. having a bedroom to himself; but what would they have said if he'd gone on to battalion parade in a waterproof one bad day, while they were uncloaked?"