Mufti Part 35

"Doctor," he went on as the door closed behind her. "I've got to go--at once."

"My dear fellow," began the other, but Vane silenced him with a wave of his hand.

"I may have had concussion; I may have been nearly drowned. I may be the fool emperor for wanting to get up," he continued quietly. "But it's got to be done. You see, I'm having a bit of a tussle with . . ."

he paused for a moment as if at a loss for a word, and then added whimsically, "with the Powers that run things. And," savagely, "I'll be d.a.m.ned if they're going to have a walk over. . . ."

The doctor eyed him gravely for a few moments without replying.

"You oughtn't to get up yet," he said at length.

"But you'll let me," cried Vane.

"There's a good train in two hours," replied the other briefly. "And the result be upon your own head. . . ."

Vane opened the remainder of his letters on the way up to London. He felt a little dazed and weak, though otherwise perfectly fit, and when he had glanced through them, he stared out of the window at the landscape flas.h.i.+ng past. They were pa.s.sing through the Black Country, and it seemed to him to be in keeping with his thoughts--dour, relentless, grim. The smouldering blast-furnaces, the tall, blackened chimneys, the miles of dingy, squalid houses, all mocked the efforts of their makers to escape.

"You fas.h.i.+oned us," they jeered; "out of your brains we were born, and now you shall serve us evermore. . . . You cannot--you shall not escape. . . ."

To Vane it was all the voice of Fate. "You cannot--you shall not escape. What is to be--is to be; and your puny efforts will not alter a single letter in the book. . . ."

And yet of his own free will he had left Joan; he had brought it on himself.

"What if I had done as she wished?" he demanded aloud. "What would you have done then, you swine?"

But there is no answer in this world to the Might-have-been; only silence and imagination, which, at times, is very merciless.

He stepped out of the train at Euston and drove straight to his rooms.

For the first time in his life he took no notice of Binks, and that worthy, knowing that something was wrong, just sat in his basket and waited. Perhaps later he'd be able to help somehow. . . .

"The young lady who came to tea was round here four or five days ago, Mr. Vane," said Mrs. Green, when she had set a match to the fire.

Vane sat very still. "And what did she want, Mrs. Green?"

"To see you, sir. She said that she had rung up the depot, and the man who answered said you were on leave. . . ."

"He would," said Vane, grimly.

"So she came here," Mrs. Green paused, and watched him with a motherly eye; then she busied herself needlessly over the fire. "I found her with Binks in her arms--and she seemed just miserable. 'Oh! can't you tell me where he is, Mrs. Green?' she said. 'I can't, my dear,' said I, 'for I don't know myself . . . .' And then she picked up a piece of paper and wrote a few words on it, and sealed it up, and addressed it to you at Murchester. . . ."

"Ah!" said Vane quietly. "She wrote it here, did she?" He laughed a short, bitter laugh. "She was right, Mrs. Green. I had the game in my hands, and I chucked it away." He rose and stared grimly at the houses opposite. "Did she say by any chance where she was staying?"

"Ashley Gardens, she said; and if you came in, I was to let you know."

"Thank you, Mrs. Green." He turned round at length, and took up the telephone book. "You might let me have some tea. . . ."

The worthy woman bustled out of the room, shaking her head. Like Binks, she knew that something was very wrong; but the consolation of sitting in a basket and waiting for the clouds to roll by was denied her. For the Humans have to plot and contrive and worry, whatever happens. . . .

"Is that Lady Auldfearn's?" Vane took the telephone off the table.

"Oh! Lady Auldfearn speaking? I'm Captain Vane. . . . Is Miss Devereux stopping with you? Just left yesterday, you say. . . .

Yes--I rather wanted to see her. Going to be where? At the Mainwarings' dance to-night. Thank you. But you don't know where she is at present. . . ."

He hung up the receiver, and sat back in his chair, with a frown. Then suddenly a thought struck him, and he pulled the letters he had received that morning out of his pocket. He extracted one in Nancy Smallwood's sprawling handwriting, and glanced through it again to make sure.

"Dine 8 o'clock--and go on to Mainwarings' dance afterwards. . . . Do come, if you can. . . ."

Vane, placing it on the table in front of him, bowed to it profoundly.

"We might," he remarked to Binks, "almost have it framed."

And Binks' quivering tail a.s.sented, with a series of thumps against his basket.

"I hope you won't find your dinner partner too dreadful." Nancy Smallwood was shooting little bird-like glances round the room as she greeted Vane that evening. "She has a mission . . . or two. Keeps soldiers from drinking too much and getting into bad hands.

Personally, anything--_anything_ would be better than getting into hers."

"I seem," murmured Vane, "to have fallen on my feet. She isn't that gargantuan woman in purple, is she?"

"My dear boy! That's George's mother. You know my husband. No, there she is--the wizened up one in black. . . . And she's going on to the Mainwarings' too--so you'll have to dance with her."

At any other time Vane might have extracted some humour from his neighbour, but to-night, in the mood he was, she seemed typical of all that was utterly futile. She jarred his nerves till it was all he could do to reply politely to her ceaseless "We are doing this, and we decided that." To her the war had given an opportunity for self-expression which she had hitherto been denied. Dreadful as she undoubtedly thought it with one side of her nature, with another it made her almost happy. It had enabled her to force herself into the scheme of things; from being a nonent.i.ty, she had made herself a person with a mission. . . .

True, the doings and the decisions on which she harped continually were for the benefit of the men he had led. But to this woman it was not the men that counted most. They had to fit into the decisions; not the decisions into them. . . .

They were inexorable, even as the laws of the Medes and Persians. And who was this wretched woman, to lay down the law? What did she know; what did she understand?

"And so we decided that we must really stop it. People were beginning to complain; and we had one or two--er--regrettable scandals."

With a start Vane woke up from his reverie and realised he had no idea what she was talking about.

"Indeed," he murmured. "Have a salted almond?"

"Don't you think we were right, Captain Vane?" she pursued inexorably.

"The men are exposed to so many temptations that the least we can do is to remove those we can."

"But are they exposed to any more now than they were before?" he remarked wearily. "Why not let 'em alone, dear lady, let 'em alone?

They deserve it."

At length the ladies rose, and with a sigh of relief Vane sat down next a lawyer whom he knew well.

"You're looking pretty rotten, Derek," he said, looking at Vane critically.

"I've been dining next a woman with a mission," he answered. "And I was nearly drowned in the 'Connaught.'"

The lawyer looked at him keenly. "And the two combined have finished you off."

"Oh! no. I'm reserving my final effort for the third. I'll get that at the Mainwarings'." He lifted his gla.s.s and let the ruby light glint through his port. "Why do we struggle, Jimmy? Why, in Heaven's name, does anybody ever do anything but drift? Look at that d.a.m.ned foolishness over the water. . . . The most t.i.tanic struggle of the world. And look at the result. . . . Anarchy, rebellion, strife.

What's the use; tell me that, my friend, what's the use? And the little struggles--the personal human struggles--are just as futile. . . ."

The lawyer thoughtfully lit a cigarette. "It's not only you fellows out there, Derek," he said, "who are feeling that way. We're all of us on the jump, and we're all of us bottling it up. The result is a trial such as we had the other day, with witnesses and judge screaming at each other, and dignity trampled in the mud. Every soul in England read the case--generally twice--before anything else. You could see 'em all in the train--coming up to business--with the sheet on which it was reported carefully taken out of its proper place and put in the centre of the paper so that they could pretend they were reading the war news."