Mufti Part 9

"They are not," he said, holding out his case. "I am quite ready for the second question."

She looked at him thoughtfully through a cloud of smoke. "Somehow I don't think I will proceed along the regular lines," she remarked at length. "Your standard seems higher."

"Higher than whose?" Vane asked.

"Than most of the others." Her smile was a trifle enigmatic. "There is a cavalryman here and one or two others--but . . . well! you know what I mean."

"I do know what you mean--exactly," he remarked quietly. "And, Joan, it's all wrong."

"It's all natural, anyway. Their ways are not our ways; their thoughts are not our thoughts. . . . I can't help whether I'm being a poisonous sn.o.b or not; it's what I feel. Take Sir John. Why, the man's an offence to the eye. He's a complete outsider. What right has he got to be at Rumfold?"

"The right of having invented a patent plate. And if one looks at it from an unbia.s.sed point of view it seems almost as good a claim as that of the descendant of a really successful brigand chief."

"Are you a Socialist?" she demanded suddenly.

"G.o.d knows what I am," he answered cynically. "I'm trying to find out.

You see something has happened over the water which alters one's point of view. It hasn't happened over here. And just at the moment I feel rather like a stranger in a strange land." He stared thoughtfully at a thrush which was dealing with a large and fat worm. Then he continued--"You were talking about outsiders. Lord! my dear girl, don't think I don't know what you mean. I had a peerless one in my company--one of the first and purest water--judged by our standards. He was addicted to cleaning his nails, amongst other things, with a p.r.o.ng of his fork at meals. . . . But one morning down in the Hulluch sector--it was stand to. Dawn was just spreading over the sky--grey and sombre; and lying at the bottom of the trench just where a boyau joined the front line, was this officer. His face was whiter than the chalk around him, but every now and then he grinned feebly. What was left of his body had been covered with his coat: because you see a bit of a flying pig had taken away most of his stomach."

The girl bit her lip--but her eyes did not leave Vane's face.

"He died, still lying in the wet chalky sludge, still grinning, and thanking the stretcher bearers who had carried him." He paused for a moment--his mind back in the Land over the Water. "There are thousands like him," he went on thoughtfully, "and over there, you see, nothing much matters. A man, whether he's a duke or a dustman, is judged on his merits in the regimental family. Everyone is equally happy, or equally unhappy--because everyone's goal is the same."

"And over here," put in the girl, "everyone's goal is different. How could it be otherwise? It's when you get a man trying to kick the ball through the wrong goal--and succeeding--that the trouble comes."

"Quite right," agreed Vane. "Personally I'm trying to find out what my own goal is."

"What was it before the war?"

"Soda water syphons and flour; hunting, cricket and making love."

"And you don't think that would still fill the bill?"

"The Lord knows!" laughed Vane. "In the fulness of time probably I shall too."

"And how do you propose to find out?" persisted the girl.

Once again Vane laughed. "By the simple process of doing nothing," he answered. "I shall--as far as my arduous military duties allow me--carry on. . . . I believe everyone is carrying on. . . . It's the phase, isn't it? And in the process, as far as it progresses before I have to return to France--I may get some idea as to whether I am really a p.r.o.nounced Pacifist or a Last Ditcher."

For a while she looked at him curiously without speaking. "You're somewhat different from most of my patients," she announced at last.

He bowed ironically. "I trust that in spite of that, I may find favour in your sight. It's something, at any rate, not to be labelled G.S., as we say in the Army."

"Frankly and honestly, you despise me a little?"

Vane considered her dispa.s.sionately. "Frankly and honestly, I do. And yet . . . I don't know. Don't you see, lady, that I'm looking at your life through my spectacles; you look at it through your own. For all I know you may be right, and I may be wrong. In fact," he continued after a short pause, "it's more than likely it is so. You at any rate have not been qualifying for a lunatic asylum during the past four years."

She rose from her chair, and together they strolled towards the lawn.

Tennis was still in full swing, and for a time they watched the game in silence.

"Do those men think as you think?" she asked him suddenly. "Are they all asking the why and the wherefore--or is it enough for them to be just out of it?"

"It's enough for us all for the time," he answered gravely. "And then it tugs and it pulls and we go back to it again. . . . It's made everyone a bit more thoughtful; it's made everyone ask the why and the wherefore, insistently or casually, according to the manner of the brute. But h.e.l.l will come if we don't--as a whole--find the same answer. . . ."

She idly twisted her parasol, and at that moment the cavalryman lounged up. "Thought you'd deserted us, Miss Devereux." He glanced at Vane and grinned. "I appeal to you," he cried, "as an infantry soldier to state publicly whether you have ever seen a more masterly bit of scouting than mine when the old man b.u.t.tonholed you. Jove! you should have seen it.

Purple face caught him by the rhododendron bush, where he'd been inflicting himself on me for a quarter of an hour; and in one minute by the clock I'd got to ground in the parsley bed."

They all laughed, and for a few minutes the two men chatted with her; then Vane disappeared into the house to write letters. It was a slow and laborious process, and, as a rule, he wrote as few as possible. But there was one he had to get off his conscience, though he dreaded doing so. A promise to a dead pal is sacred. . . .

At length the scrawl was finished, and looking up from the writing table he saw Joan Devereux pa.s.sing through the hall. He got up and hurried after her. "Would you mind addressing this for me?" He held out the envelope. "I've managed to spoil the paper inside, but I don't want to tax the postman too highly."

With a smile she took the letter from him, and picked up a pen. "Well,"

she said after a moment, "I'm waiting."

She looked up into his face as he stood beside her at the table, and a glint of mischief came into her eyes as they met his. He was staring at her with a thoughtful expression, and, at any rate for the moment he seemed to find it a pleasant occupation.

"And what may the seeker after truth be thinking of now?" she remarked flippantly. "Condemning me a second time just as I'm trying to be useful as well as ornamental?"

"I was thinking. . . ." he began slowly, and then he seemed to change his mind. "I don't think it matters exactly what I was thinking," he continued, "except that it concerned you. Indirectly, perhaps--possibly even directly . . . you and another. . . ."

"So you belong to the second of my two cla.s.ses, do you?" said the girl.

"Somehow I thought you were in the first. . . ."

"The cla.s.s you embrace?" asked Vane drily.

With a quick frown she turned once more to the table. "Supposing you give me the address."

"I beg your pardon," said Vane quietly. "The remark was vulgar, and quite uncalled for. After four years in the Army, one should be able to differentiate between official and unofficial conversation."

"May I ask what on earth you mean?" said the girl coldly.

"I take it that your preliminary remarks to me in the garden were in the nature of official patter--used in your professional capacity. . . .

When off duty, so to speak, you're quite a normal individual. . . .

Possibly even proper to the point of dulness." He was staring idly out of the window. "In the States, you know, they carry it even further. . . . I believe there one can hire a professional female co-respondent--a woman of una.s.sailable virtue and repulsive aspect--who will keep the man company in compromising circ.u.mstances long enough for the wife to establish her case."

The girl sprang up and confronted him with her eyes blazing, but Vane continued dreamily. "There was one I heard of who was the wife of the Dissenting Minister, and did it to bolster up her husband's charities. . . ."

"I think," she said in a low, furious voice, "that you are the most loathsome man I ever met."

Vane looked at her in surprise. "But I thought we were getting on so nicely. I was just going to ask you to have lunch with me one day in town--in your official capacity, of course. . . ."

"If you were the last man in the world, and I was starving, I wouldn't lunch with you in any capacity." Her breast was rising and falling stormily.

"At any rate, it's something to know where we stand," said Vane pleasantly.

"If I'd realised that you were merely a cad--and an outsider of the worst type--do you suppose that I would have talked--would have allowed. . . ."

The words died away in her throat, and her shoulders shook. She turned away, biting furiously at her handkerchief with her teeth. "Go away--oh!

go away; I hate you."